{"q_id": "30kwoj", "title": "What were different decades in the 1800s like?", "selftext": "Every decade of the 20th century can be loosely quantified in a general theme (the roaring 20s, the flower power 60s, the weird clothing styles/music of the 80s) and each one is so different from the last. What kinds of themes were common between decades in the 19th century, and were they as distinctively different from each other as those in the 20th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30kwoj/what_were_different_decades_in_the_1800s_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptgoks", "cpti0mx", "cpti4kz", "cptic6l", "cptiit2", "cptj6yu", "cptjel8", "cptk7m3", "cptkt9k", "cptndq5", "cpufm7q"], "score": [211, 74, 241, 58, 468, 21, 25, 143, 10, 16, 3], "text": ["In the early 1800\u00b4s there was a radical change of fashion and lifestyle for men. The high breeches, stockings and tricorne hats one associates with the era of the French and American revolutions disappeared with the genesis of modern fashion which emphasised modesty in clothing, eloquence in speech and the most refined manners and hygiene. This was the birth of the [\"dandy\"](_URL_0_) culture which still thrives and is very much predominant today. I\u00b4m sure someone more rehearsed with this material will provide much better content than I.", "In German-speaking Europe, the decades between 1815 (The Congress of Vienna) and 1848 (the year of the great Liberal revolutions in Europe) are known as [Vorm\u00e4rz](_URL_1_) in political history, and [Biedermeier](_URL_0_) in art history, respectively. \n\nThey are commonly seen as periods of political quietism (due to an ever-present system of censorship and oppression of dissent) and simmering tensions, but they were also a period of economic upheaval. The First Industrial Revolution took place during that time period, and some areas (particularly the Prussian-ruled Rhineland provinces and Austrian-ruled Bohemia) were rapidly industrializing and starting to eclipse the traditional economic centres of pre-industrial eras, but were also attracting a growing industrial labor class that would have an increasing influence on politics in the decades to come.", "The 1890s were variably referred to as \"the mauve decade,\" \"the naughty nineties,\" and \"the gay nineties\" (but this last term wasn't coined until the 1920s).\n\nThe Gilded Age also referred to the 1870s through the 1890s. Mark Twain originally used it to denote an era of social problems which were thinly veiled by wealth.", "In America the 1800's and 1810's were a great national binge, where Alcohol consumption reached its highest per capita levels in our history. And the per capita consumption -understates- how much adult free men drank, because much of the population was enslaved, half was female and a large portion was children, and all those groups drank less than adult free men.  The original temperance movement was a response to this national binge.\n\nSources - Howe, What hath God Wrought\nLarkin, the Reshaping of Everyday Life", "Well, pop culture is a big definer for a time period in my opinion, and Gothic fiction was a bit of pet hobby of mine. So..\n\nThe first Gothic novels were published in the mid-1700s, and the genre exploded. And with that explosion of popularity came a lot of repetitive derivative works, trying to capture that supernatural vibe. This is furthered because we have penny presses like *Penny Dreadful* shoot out, which are really cheaply published serial literature. Some of these were just reprints of previously published works. \n\nHowever, the more memorable works of Gothic fiction are really from the 1800s. In the early 1800s, we can start getting published works that are parodies of Gothic literature. An example of a famous parody work would be Jane Austen's novel *Northanger Abby* (published 1818, written 1799-1800), which is hilarious by the way.\n\n*Frankenstein,* 1818, a novel about reanimating the dead by Mary Shelly  \n*The Vampyre,* 1819, first published vampire short story by John Polidori.  \n\nAt this same time period there is a lot of Gothic fiction with an Orientalism theme. I can't think of good example right now, but the villains will be from the East, the Orient, Africa. Scarabs will be mentioned or they own a monkey and do some magic. The occult is a massive topic of interest. Not all Gothic fiction is defined by this, as this sort of fixation on the \"other\" seems to just stretch into a lot of the genre at the same time, but a lot of the early 1800s from what I can remember had this. A lot of Chinese goods were being imported at the time. Remember, the massive trade imbalance was a main reason behind push to sell opium to China and the Opium Wars (1st: 1839-42; 2nd: 1856-60). \n\nBy the 1830s Edgar Allen Poe is publishing some poetry and his first short stories, but his more famous works that you read in high school show up later, like *\"The Pit and the Pendulum\"*, published in 1842, and *The Raven* published in 1845. His work really pushed forward the horror and suspense element of the Gothic genre.\n\nPoe sadly dies, and the Bronte sisters are in the publishing Gothic literature scene, publishing in 1847 Charlotte's *Jane Eyre,* Emily's *Wurthering Heights* and Anne's much less famously known *Cathy.*\n \nBy 1872 we have sexy vampires in Joseph Le Fanu's *Carmilla.* If I remember correctly this is the first sexualized usage of vampires, but it's been awhile, so don't quote me there. However, it was over twenty years before Dracula (1897), which was heavily inspired by this novella. \n\nTherefore, by the 1880s the Gothic genre was not only well established, but it wasn't considered with as much mockery as it had been in the early 1800s in its parodies. It became a vehicle for discussing a lot of social issues and urban fears. (Especially that previously mention Orient fear, in my opinion.) And even though Charles Dickens isn't really known as a Gothic author, his works were inspired by that kind of gloom. Think *Great Expectations* (1861). So not only did Gothic literature really develop, it infected other literary genres of the time. Cool stuff, right?\n\nThe Gothic genre starts to die off by the end of the century, turning in the 20th century pulp magazines with Lovecraft. A lot of the fiction of the 1800s really helped create dark fantasy, horror, etc. \n\nAlthough I couldn't divide it all up smoothly into decades, I hope this made sense. (; \n", "That last decade of the 1800s had variable names, Fin de si\u00e8cle, Turn of the Century, The Mauve Decade, Gay 90s (coined later), and was encompassed by the longer Gilded Age as well. \n\nTwo interesting art movements out of the this period were [Art Nouveau](_URL_1_) AKA \"Modern Style\" which reached its peak around this time and  [The Arts and Crafts movement](_URL_4_) in Europe and the US (~1880-1910) which eventually emerged in Japan (~1910-20) was a pro-artisan, anti-industrial movement that praised craftsmanship and honored [old forms of folk art,](_URL_2_) [nature](_URL_6_) and Medieval revival. Think back-to-land hipsters. \n\nArt Nouveau emerged out of this movement and was similarly pro-nature and using nature inspired [designs and curves](_URL_3_), pro-simplicity, [anti-industrial/manufacturing](_URL_0_) but sometimes at odds with Arts and Crafts over the cultural touchstone of shitty folk art designs. \"Industrial production was, at that point, widespread, and yet the decorative arts were increasingly dominated by [poorly made objects imitating earlier periods.](_URL_5_) The practitioners of Art Nouveau sought to revive good workmanship, raise the status of craft, and produce genuinely modern design....The academic system, which dominated art education from the 17th to the 19th century, underpinned the widespread belief that media such as painting and sculpture were superior to crafts such as furniture design and silver-smithing. The consequence, many believed, was the neglect of good craftsmanship.\"\n\nETA: Pictures", "I'd like to point out that the decades from the 20th century aren't all that different from each other. The main differences are technology and pop culture. Both were radically different from decade to decade (pop culture is the most wide spread and accessible window into the past). Underlying values and culture, however, mostly stayed the same or changed as slowly as it usually does.\n\nObviously I'm simplifying - I feel like it sounds like I'm suggesting that technological change has a minor effect on people's lives. I am not. What I am suggesting is that the \"theme\" of each decade is just an illusion caused by how we perceive the past (or the impression that pop-culture relics give us).", "One important issue I would like to point out here is that the 20th century was a period of globalization not matched by anything before it. Hence, in the 20th century \"movements\" like flower power or the \"roaring twenties\" would actually be a thing in large parts of the world (mostly the western world, I guess).  But for the 19th century and earlier, this wouldn't be really the case with different countries having wildly different experiences. For instance the westerward expansion of the US and pioneer culture would be a big part of the 19th century American experience, but for Africa, India and China it would be a period when they came under western domination. Whereas for South America it was time when it broke free from Europe politically. Japan experienced the Meiji restoration in the later part of the 19th century.", "I'm not sure how to put this any other way, but time simply moves faster these days. Culture fluctuates so rapidly in our modern world that we can see a very distinct shift every decade, and even quicker sometimes. In the past, events and changes in culture moved at a slower pace. That could be why there aren't as easy categorizations for the 19th century as there appear to be for the 20th. \n\nBelow are two big changes I haven't seen mentioned yet, which may not seem obvious, but affected American culture in a big way in the 19th century.\n\n* The [Second and Third Great Awakening](_URL_0_) took place in America all throughout the 1800's; this was a Protestant revival of traditional religious values and was a reaction against the scientific and skeptical nature of the Enlightenment in the previous century.\n\n* Synthetic dyes were invented in the late 1850's and were in popular use by the 1860's. The introduction of hues such as mauve, fuchsia, and safrin revolutionized the fashion world. In 1859, there was a [ball in Washington](_URL_2_) which was the highlight of the social season; it was a farewell party for the British ambassador and his wife, Mrs. Napier. Mrs. Napier made quite a splash when she appeared at the ball in pure white. As all of the other ladies were wearing dresses with the newly popular bright synthetic dyes in garish styles, she stood out from them with her daring simplicity. (source: [A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War](_URL_1_))", "In America, a musical revolution happened in the last half of the 1890s, with the commercialization of the syncopated music style called \"ragtime.\"\n\nCompare this 1864 song, [\"Beautiful Dreamer\"](_URL_2_) by Stephen Foster against the first piece published with the word \"Rag\" in the title, WH Krell's 1897 [\"Mississippi Rag\"](_URL_0_). Perhaps the most famous ragtime piano piece is Scott Joplin's [\"Maple Leaf Rag\"](_URL_1_).\n\nRagtime leverages the use of accented melody notes on weak beats, which imparts a powerful forward drive into the music. The effect was so startling to listeners at the time that some feared that listening to the music could cause heart palpitations.\n\nAll popular music today features extensive use of syncopation.\n\nIn the first couple of decades of the 20th century, ragtime morphed into novelty, stride, blues, and other early jazz forms, which in turn led to more recent genres like rock.", "(As someone who researches this extensively)\n\nThe decades of 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s saw an explosion in popular culture (fiction, news, even early illustrated magazines) about **imperialism**, particularly in **Africa**.\n  \nNoted landmarks:\nlate 1850s explorer/missionary David Livingstone becomes hugely famous in England and on the continent, kicks of this culture of exploration/adventure in Africa\n\n1871  media hound/explorer H.M. Stanley publishes (in newspapers) how he \"found\" the \"missing\" Livingstone, coining the most popular phrase of the late 19th and early 20th. c.:   \"Dr. Livingstone, I presume\"? \n\n1884 gold rush in southern Africa; Berlin Conference; Scramble for Africa\n\n1885  Rider Haggard publishes \"King Solomon's Mines\"  (the basis for Indian Jones, etc. etc.) \n\n1883 Colonial exposition in Amsterdam sets off a string of colonial and imperial exhibitions (a major entertainment of the 19th c.), with the 1886  Colonial and Empire Exhibition in UK; and the 1896 Colonial exhibition in Berlin\n\n1885:  Death of Gordon becomes a media sensation (Gordon is \"avenged\" in 1898 at Omdurman)\n\n1880s:  traveling \"people shows\" of Dahomey Amazons, Sudanese, etc. in all European cities\n\n1890s:  lots of imperial-themed advertisements (for soap, etc.) in Britain, France, and Germany;  journalists in England and Germany writing about the \"Africa craze\" \n\n1899:  Kipling urges the US to \"Take Up the White Man's Burden\" in an (in)famous poem \n\nThe Primitivism in modern art circles in the 1920s is in actually drawing from this earlier era of imperialist-adventure-heroic Africa-obsession.\n\nEDIT:  formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy#Beau_Brummell_and_early_British_dandyism"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biedermeier", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorm%C3%A4rz"], [], [], [], ["https://michellegoetz.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/victorhortastaircase.jpg", "http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/a/art-nouveau/", "http://www.artscrafts.org.uk/sites/default/files/images/hhh1.jpg", "http://uploads4.wikiart.org/images/alphonse-mucha/dance-1898.jpg", "http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-arts-and-crafts-movement/", "http://www.theartstory.org/movement-art-nouveau.htm", "http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/williammorris-goldenlilyminor.jpg"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening", "http://www.amazon.com/World-Fire-Britains-Crucial-American/dp/0375756965", "http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006679501/"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ns9b_57hUY", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reI43yUCaUI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U1l5y2rkzA"], []]}
{"q_id": "1itq5w", "title": "What made medieval England prone to rebellion and civil war?", "selftext": "When comparing England to France, I've noticed England has a lot more rebellion and civil war. The English deposed Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI (twice), Edward V (a minor but still counts) and Richard III between 1300 and 1500. In this period, no French monarchs were deposed. What are the socio-economic and political factors that lead to this proclivity fro civil strife?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1itq5w/what_made_medieval_england_prone_to_rebellion_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb8lbgl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Civil wars such as the Anarchy and the Wars of the Roses in English history mostly came about as a result of succession crises rather than socio-economic factors. To put it bluntly a lot of it was down to chance: the availability of a direct male heir. \n\nFor instance, the Anarchy (1136-54) occurred because the Henry I's son drowned in 1127 leaving him with a daughter, Matilda, and a nephew, Stephen who fought for the throne. Regarding usurpation, Richard II and Henry VI were deposed because they were seen as ineffective rulers in the eyes of the political community: Richard II was not good at listening to others and did not take counsel; Henry VI had always been viewed negatively (when his magnates were defending the English lands in France, he was more interested in founding religious institutions) but the emergence of a strong Yorkist faction and his mental collapse in 1453 made civil war inevitable. He was deposed again in 1461 because the Lancastrians had become weakened: military defeat, lack of leadership and the death of Henry's son meant that the Yorkist Edward IV was in a stronger position to take back the throne.\n\nI've read other historians argue that there were long-term structural problems with the English political system that made the English monarchy more prone to usurpation and civil war. I however think that short-term political factors were more important, fundamentally regarding the line of succession.\n\nAnother thing to take into account is that the usurpation of Richard II in 1399 by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, set a very important precedent. The political community had seen that deposing a king could actually work, and if necessary they were willing to enforce it again. \n\nSorry that was a bit long-winded, hope it answers your question :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "drjsps", "title": "What drove Europe's modern re-forestation?", "selftext": "I am under the impression that a lot land formerly dedicated to pasture or grassland in Europe, especially in and around the Alps, Upper Germany, and the central massif in France, has only been re-forested in the last seventy or so years. Is this the case?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/drjsps/what_drove_europes_modern_reforestation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6j8yjy"], "score": [9], "text": ["Yes, its true of Europe, also true of the United States.  The topic is more the domain of agronomists, ecoomists and geoscientists than historians, but we can say a few things:\n\nThere have been intentional reforestation programs, for example the *Patrimonio  Forestal del Estado* in Franco's Spain, but these are less significant than the abandonment of low yielding agricultural uses.\n\nMany low productivity fields that had once been worked, sometimes briefly as in North America, sometimes for centuries as in Europe, were abandoned when dramatic increases in agronomy in the 20th century made less productive farmlands economically obsolete and the rural population moved to more urban areas.\n\nIf you look at rural France for example,  the population has fallen dramatically; this is a process that has been going on for more than a century. The same is true in many other European nations-- there simply aren't people in many formerly agricultural communities to work fields. Mechanization enables high productivity agriculture in fields with amenable terrain-- but rocky and hilly fields are often not worth the trouble.\n\nOn a similar note, in Eastern Europe many farms were abandoned after the collapse of communism. A number of factors were involved-- the farms themselves may not have been that productive, and the farm labor had better opportunities in the cities.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSee:\n\nFuchs, R. , Herold, M. , Verburg, P. H., Clevers, J. G. and Eberle, J. (2015), Gross changes in reconstructions of historic land cover/use for Europe between 1900 and 2010. Glob Change Biol, 21: 299-313. doi:[10.1111/gcb.12714](_URL_0_)\n\nBauer, Rainer Lutz. \u201cEconomic Differentiation and the Divided Responses of Spanish Galician Farmers to Reforestation of the Commons under Franco.\u201d *Social Science History*, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 175\u2013205.\n\nBriner S, Elkin C, Huber R. 2013. Evaluating the relative impact of climate and economic changes on forest and agricultural ecosystem services in mountain regions. J. Environ. Manage. **129**: 414-422\n\nThompson, John G. \u201cUrbanization and Rural Depopulation in France.\u201d *Journal of Farm Economics*, vol. 7, no. 1, 1925, pp. 145\u2013151. \\[note the date, 1925 -- this issue was being discussed a century ago\\]\n\nKuemmerle, Tobias, et al. \u201cCross-Border Comparison of Postsocialist Farmland Abandonment in the Carpathians.\u201d *Ecosystems*, vol. 11, no. 4, 2008, pp. 614\u2013628."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12714"]]}
{"q_id": "6td7kb", "title": "Did westerners ever migrate/defect to the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "And by westerners I mean Americans and citizens of NATO countries.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6td7kb/did_westerners_ever_migratedefect_to_the_soviet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlknuh8"], "score": [19], "text": ["Indeed, this did take place, and not just to the Soviet Union - Westerners defected to many of the other countries in the Eastern Bloc (mostly East Germany), as well as the People's Republic of China, and, at times, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam. Some defected to non-aligned and ostensibly neutral states, such as Switzerland and [Sweden](_URL_3_). \n\nWikipedia does have a relatively comprehensive list of (most of the) defectors from Western states [here](_URL_1_), but I can provide some additional context to the list. \n\nWestern defection and migration, especially from the United States to Soviet Union, took place before the Cold War, and, historically, was largely ideologically motivated. After the establishment of the Soviet state and the end of the Russian Civil War a number of Western Communist or Socialist sympathizers saw the Soviet regime as the manifestation of the revolutionary socialist government of the workers, the kind that many yearned for at home. Some of the Western socialists traveled to the Soviet Union both to document the transformation, and, in some cases, to hopefully facilitate it. \n\nPerhaps the most famous example of such pre-WWII Western socialists is John Reed, the author of the famous book documenting the course of the establishment of the Soviet state \"Ten Days that Shook the World\". He died in Moscow in 1920, and is one of only three Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.\n\nAt roughly the same time the Soviet government embarked on a program of rapid industrialization, and as part of that program invited large numbers of Western engineers, some of whom elected to stay in the Soviet Union. Later on, during the Stalin purges many of those people would end up being tried for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government and were either shot or imprisoned. Among those Westerners that came to the Soviet Union at the time were also some African-Americans, some of whom chose to stay in Soviet Union due to the racial discrimination they experienced at home (some of their [children](_URL_0_) lived their entire lives in Soviet Union as a result).\n\nDuring and after the Second World War this trend continued, with the people who either migrated (before the Cold War) or defected to the Soviet Union being either life-long Socialists or Communist sympathizers, or becoming enamored with the Soviet system [during their travels or work](_URL_2_). Some of the high-profile examples of Western defectors to the Soviet Union of that period include people like Bruno Pontecorvo and George Koval, both of whom were nuclear physicists and were involved in the Manhattan Project. Koval in particular turned Soviet sleeper agent, having officially received his Soviet citizenship prior to the war, and is credited for giving the Soviets crucial information that facilitated the development of Soviet nuclear weapons program. \n\nThe other high-profile case is that of the Cambridge Five, a ring of 4+1 (we are pretty sure about the identities of the first 4 agents, but not the fifth) British-born Soviet spies operating within various British security services during and after WWII. All of the known members were recruited as young men, playing off of either communist sympathies, or their opposition to the Third Reich (which was seen by many as the natural enemy of the Communist system), and later defected to the Soviet Union proper. Kim Philby, thought to be the initial member of the Cambridge Five, died in Moscow in 1988 at the age of 76, and has voiced his disappointment with the quality of life in the Soviet Union (especially with the way the state treated its WWII veterans), but allegedly never considered going back to the West.  \n\nAnother extremely high-profile (in retrospect at least) case of defection is that of Lee-Harvey Oswald, who professed sympathies to the Soviet regime, and claimed to have been disillusioned with the life in the United States. That said, the Soviets were reluctant to accept him at first, and only relented after he attempted to kill himself, having been refused asylum initially. Oswald, like many other defectors, was able to enjoy a lifestyle that was considered extremely luxurious by Soviet standards, and yet paled in comparison to what you'd expect in the United States, so he, like many others, regretted his choice, and returned to the United States (a non-insignificant number of defectors couldn't bring themselves to go back and committed suicide instead).   \n\nAs has been said, a lot of the later defections followed the same basic trends - people who were initially sympathetic to the Soviet regime or were Socialist activists (or members of the Communist Party of the United States), with a background in applied sciences. Most seemed to have had little actual knowledge of the situation in the Soviet Union at the time - or, rather, they held romantic views of the Soviet system, and either didn't know about, or outright dismissed the reports of state oppression, corruption, and low quality of life in the Soviet Union, even though some of them worked in intelligence agencies like the NSA. Accordingly, many ended up regretting their decision to defect later on. Anecdotally, a lot of the Soviet sympathizers, as well as some of the actual defectors, were referred to as the \"useful idiots\" in Soviet Union. The ones that seemed to have led relatively successful lives in the Soviet Union (and they seemed to have been in the minority) were mostly high-profile Soviet spies that were recruited by the Soviet intelligence agencies and were stationed in the West prior to their defections - career spies if you will. The Cohens, a husband-wife pair of American-born Soviet spies, were convicted for espionage in the States, but later exchanged for an MI-5 agent. Both remained active within the Soviet intelligence apparatus until their deaths, and their allegiance was never in doubt, which allowed them to find high-profile employment in the East (which was not the case with the majority of defectors to the Soviet Union). \n\nBy the end of the Cold War the defections from the West almost dried up, as the political climate in the United States became more tolerant, and the economic situation in the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lloydovich_Patterson", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Western_Bloc_defectors", "https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19480228&id=C9kKAAAAIBAJ&sjid=C08DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5178,29029", "https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=A1RQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=d1cDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4925,5944014&dq=richard+bailey&hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "7h7z13", "title": "The Irish were known for potato agriculture, such as the Irish potato famine. With potatoes being native to the new world, what did they grow and eat before that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7h7z13/the_irish_were_known_for_potato_agriculture_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqpkum8"], "score": [3], "text": ["U/foldweg and u/gothwalk gave some good comprehensive answers in this previous thread: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zehd4/ireland_before_potatoes/"]]}
{"q_id": "yk0ap", "title": "Cartoonists in WWII", "selftext": "Other than Bill Mauldin, who where some of the more well-know (for the time) cartoonists during World War II.  Also, who were some of the cartoonists for the other powers (both Allies and Axis) that were popular?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yk0ap/cartoonists_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5wa85n", "c5weeut"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Dr. Seuss did quite a bit of cartoons and was a strong advocate in actual politics instead of just making Hirohito having buck teeth and slanted eyes. I actually have a book of his completely devoted to his WWII comics and it was fascinating, not to mention hilarious seeing the same style animation being applied to Stalin's advancement on Berlin.", "Although also an American, [Charles H. Alston](_URL_2_) is one of my personal favorites.  He was tapped by the OWI early on [to produce cartoons to help appeal to African Americans in the war effort](_URL_0_).  He also made some cartoons that publicized their battlefield contributions (as well as contributions by other people of African descent like Felix Eboue).  \n\nEdit:  Wow, the Archives of American Art have (has?) actually [digitized nearly all of Alston's surviving manuscript collection](_URL_1_).  It's only about one linear foot, but wow.  The internet is awesome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.aacvr-germany.org/AACVR.ORG/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=90&Itemid=60", "http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/charles-henry-alston-papers-5643/more#inventory", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Alston"]]}
{"q_id": "crejt8", "title": "Why was the Clinton\u2013Lewinsky scandal such a big deal when JFK is well known for his extreme sexcapades? What differentiates the two presidents and why is a president getting a blowjob in the Oval Office a big deal versus JFK having sex often twice daily when everyone seemingly knew about it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/crejt8/why_was_the_clintonlewinsky_scandal_such_a_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ex6i7j5"], "score": [227], "text": ["In Clinton\u2019s case, there was a specific legal issue at hand- whether he committed perjury and obstruction of justice in trying to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky.\n\nDuring the time his relationship with Lewinsky was active, Lewinsky confided the details of their relationship to a friend, Linda Tripp.\n\nAt the same time, the President was involved in 2 legal matters. The first was a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, accusing him of sexual harassment while he was governor of Arkansas. The second was the Whitewater investigation, which was a special counsel investigation (run by Kenneth Starr) into a financial transaction the Clinton\u2019s had been involved in- but grew in scope to investigate a variety of scandals.\n\nLinda Tripp provided the information she had gotten from Lewinsky to Paula Jones\u2019 lawyers, who then put Lewinsky on their witness list. In response, Clinton took a number of illegal actions to try and cover up the relationship.\n\nKnowing that this obstruction was occurring, Tripp then informed Starr, who broadened his scope to include the coverup of the Lewinsky affair.\n\nWhen the Starr report came out, it showed that Clinton had had an affair, had lied about it under oath, and had encouraged others to lie under oath.\n\nThis formed the basis for the Articles of Impeachment, as Congress at that time felt the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice were an impeachable offense. Ultimately, the House voted to impeach on 2 of the 4 charges brought forth- that Clinton had lied to the grand jury, and that he had obstructed justice in the Jones case. In the Senate a trial was held, but neither charge received a 2/3 vote finding Clinton guilty.\n\nI provide the above context to say this- in this case, the tawdry details of Clinton\u2019s sexual behavior were made public record through the Starr Report, and brought up significant legal, constitutional issues to be wrangled with by Congress and in the public sphere, which is why the Clinton-Lewinsky affair attracted so much attention in American popular culture. Clinton\u2019s impeachment by the House was also the first impeachment in modern times.\n\nSources:\n\n- [House Report 105-830 - Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton](_URL_0_)\n\n- [Starr Report](_URL_2_)\n\n- [CNN 12/19/1998 - House impeaches Clinton](_URL_3_)\n\n- [CNN 2/12/1999 - How the senators voted on impeachment](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/105th-congress/house-report/830/", "https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/02/12/senate.vote/", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/icreport.htm?noredirect=on", "https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/19/impeachment.01/"]]}
{"q_id": "2zb6i1", "title": "Does Oliver Cromwell really deserve his popular reputation as \"butcher of Ireland\"?", "selftext": "The title says it all.  There's this notion in popular culture that Oliver Cromwell was a genocidal monster that tried to murder half the population of Ireland.  This idea doesn't really stand up to even a cursory glance at the actual casualty figures or the events of the British Civil War(s).  Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland, while admittedly bloody, were not substantially different from the conduct of similar Continental military leaders of the same era, like Albrecht von Wallenstein, Count Tilly, or Johann Baner.  Additonally, Cromwell's campaign in Ireland only lasted a year or two in 1649-50.  The English conquest and economic and political colonization Ireland was an ongoing process that began in Tudor times and continuned, arguably, right up into the 20th century.  Pinning the full range of English misdeeds in Ireland, true or otherwise, on the personage of Oliver Cromwell, is to ignore the geopolitical interests and motivations of the English government both before and after the English Civil War.\n\nWhile Cromwell may have been, even by the standards of his own time, a religious and political radical, I don't think claims by either English or Irish historians that paint Cromwell and the Puritans as a bunch of bigoted fanatics are really entirely fair.  This isn't to say that the English Puritans *weren't* a bunch of religious whackos by modern standards, but to judge them that way ignores the political and cultural context in which they existed. \n\nWhat's the consensus of scholarly historians, as distinct from popular culture?  I have this argument nearly every year around St. Patrick's day.\n\nTL;DR: Oliver Cromwell -- misguided radical, or histories greatest monster?\n\nEDIT: Just to forestall any claims otherwise, I'm not saying that any of what Cromwell did was right by modern standards (it wasn't!) -- rather I'm making a plea to try to understand the past on it's own terms, rather than through the lens of modern nationalist rhetoric.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zb6i1/does_oliver_cromwell_really_deserve_his_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cphioaa", "cpj02o6"], "score": [27, 5], "text": ["A follow-on question, if I may?\n\nI have heard that Cromwell'd reconquest of Ireland was a last Death blow for the old Irish clan system (which had been under assault for a long time) and that in the fighting, most of the Irish elite or nobility was killed or exiled, meaning that English and protestant landowners replaced native Irish and catholic ones. Are there any thruth to this?", "I would argue that it's a little bit of both. Clearly, the Cromwellian conquest was an incredibly bloody affair. When [Drogheda](_URL_3_) fell, about 2800 soldiers died and 700-800 civilians. When [Wexford](_URL_2_) fell, about 2000 soldiers were killed and 1500 civilians. Roughly 500 soldiers and 5000 civilians died at [Limerick](_URL_5_). As to the population drop, the estimates vary wildly. Some claim half of the population was executed. Podraig Lenihan's estimate of about 25% (Of a pre-war population of roughly 1,400,000) is probably the most accurate (mostly because while we do see severely diminished output, we don't see the societal collapse that would be expected from the higher figures).  \n\nWhether this was considerably crueler than the other wars of the day is a big question. In the 30 years war, at the sack of [Magdeburg](_URL_1_) ended in the death of roughly 20,000 of its inhabitants. Now one big difference that's to be noted here is that at Magdeburg the executions were not supervised as the Cromwellian ones were, but were the result of an army allowed to run roughshod over a population. On the other hand, concept of *murum ares attigit* was practiced at the time. Meaning, that if a town resisted, once it fell the conqueror could do with the inhabitants as he pleases. Also, a notable concept of the time is that in order for a surrender to be valid, it must both be offered and accepted. This is how executions of prisoners such as occurred at the battle of [Dungan Hill](_URL_6_) could happen. That being said, I am unaware of any of Cromwell's contemporaries that felt it necessary to order the slaughter of multiple towns and cities.\n\nHowever, I don't think it was necessarily Cromwell's conduct in battle that earned him his reputation. In order to make it more difficult for gurrilla forces he instituted a policy of burning crops, which led to a famine, which accounted for [the majority of the war's casualties](_URL_8_). There's also the matter of land confiscation at the end of the war. Though Cromwell Act's plantation was neither the first nor last, it was the most severe. Catholic land ownership was reduced from [60% to 9%](_URL_0_). Now it is certainly not the sole factor, but it was a major contributor to the potato famine. This is because the smaller amounts of land that was allowed to the population favored the potato, and the population had little to no say in where the food produced on plantation land went. This is why Ireland was still a [major exporter of food](_URL_7_) during the famine. However, the act that probably sets Cromwell apart from his contemporaries was the rejuvenation and expansion of the indenture of Irish (which already existed, to a lesser degree). He send somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 Irish into indenture in [Barbados](_URL_4_) that were typically not prisoners of war, but rather those that took issue with the plantation.\n\nEssentially, Cromwell probably was more cruel than his contemporaries. That being said, in the context of 17th century warfare, his actions were much more justifiable than they would be today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland#Cromwellian_land_confiscation_.281652.29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Wexford", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Drogheda", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/135hja/were_there_irish_slaves_that_were_legitimate/c71h2y8", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Limerick_\\(1650%E2%80%9351\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dungan%27s_Hill", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29#Irish_food_exports_during_Famine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland#Guerrilla_warfare.2C_famine_and_plague"]]}
{"q_id": "1bsxek", "title": "How much history is there left to be found? What is your educated guess as to how many books and documents are as yet undiscovered? Dusty shelves in old libraries? Lost scrolls in caves? Tablets in the sand? How often does new material from primary sources turn up?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bsxek/how_much_history_is_there_left_to_be_found_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c99qw2q", "c99rgei", "c99rhc6", "c99rl5k", "c99sn0e", "c9a2jop", "c9a4ifj", "c9a5itl"], "score": [2, 2, 28, 11, 17, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Don't worry about running out of history -- we make more daily.", "A lot is left, but history in the future will moe forward not only because of better sources and discovries, but because of better scientific methods. For example who would have imagined 100 years ago that we would have radiocarbon dating?", "As for \"Tablets in the sand\", we've probably only discovered about half of all the scholarly texts of Mesopotamia, complete or fragmentary, and I'm sure not even a fraction of the remaining non-scholarly texts (business records, letters, stuff like that). \nThere's so much material excavation left to be done, as it's largely been hindered by political instability in the region and lack of archaeological access for most of the last hundred years. \n\nEven more significantly, with all the texts we *do* have there's still a great amount of work to be done. The majority of the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets we possess have yet to be studied in any significant way outside of highly specialized and academically isolated philological analyses, and much of value would be obtained by having more interest in relating these sources to non-philological disciplines and to a more general picture of history. ", "There are a few known unknowns, that could be tremendous. \nThe first is the Villa of the Papyri. in Herculaneum. There is a possibility that in the unexcavated portion exist more papyrus scrolls. The mind can boggle at the possibilities. Lost poems of Sappho, Greek tragedies that have disappeared in time. With new imaging technologies we are able to see more and more from these charred scrolls.\n\nThe second is the Qin Emperor's tomb, where the famous terracotta armies were found. Apparently there was a fire in its history, but most remains unexcavated. The Chinese are biding their time on this, but at some time, with good modern techniques, they will go in.", "In my own field, there's an almost stupid amount of material left to be found.  We're not sure it exists, but in the colonial 19th century a lot of magistrates and other officials kept records at their homes.  When they died, or war destabilized government, their families kept those records.  Sometimes a satchel would be lost, or thrown out, or simply misfiled; at times some got \"left\" along the way and sit in forgotten offices at old magisterial posts.  Then there was the fire at the old Archives, which led to a lot of salvaged material being refiled incorrectly.  In South Africa, this kind of material has been trickling into the archives for a hundred years now.  We have no idea what material is still out there in private hands--and that's just the \"official\" stuff.  Personal records, diaries, and the like are probably beyond counting.  If \"Antiques Roadshow\" taught us anything, it's that human beings hide an awful lot of amazing stuff in the name of heritage.  That extends to documents, but it also includes orally transmitted knowledge.  For example, a friend of mine is a descendant of a major figure from the early Witwatersrand.  She has his diaries from his time in government as well as his company records--a total of some 40 volumes.  She doesn't trust the current archival order in SA with them, and I can't exactly blame her.\n\nArchaeologically it's true too; even in South Africa, where archaeology is relatively well developed, we don't know half of half of half of what we could with more time and more hands (not to mention more money).  The efflorescence of study on the Bokoni community complex, and the rediscovery of transcultural dynamism on the western Highveld among Bantu-speakers, means that places which were mere curiosities now have archaeological value.  So where we look, and what we look for, has also grown faster than our ability to go find it.\n\nIn short I think that in the sense of \"official histories\"--political histories of state in the old model--much has been found.  But even around the edges of that, a lot of grey areas exist and a lot of records are scattered or in private hands.  When you get to subalterns or non-European societies, the matter gets even less certain; in areas where little material archaeology has been done, that means even less is available.  But even for books and documents, in keeping with the OP's categorization, I think we are missing far more than we realize.", "I asked a [related question](_URL_0_) recently about documents we know to exist but are unavailable to historians. One thing that I didn't realize was the recalcitrance of private collectors when it comes to the question of allowing historians access to a collection (of documents, weapons, etc.)\n\nSo to answer your question, there are many items of historical significance in private collections that are unavailable to historians.\n\nEdit: URL formatting", "Well, there are vast troves of information awaiting scholarly attention; who knows what will be re-discovered in the efforts to digitize the Vatican Library. In one of my own areas of interest- historical European martial arts- there has been an incredible amount discovered in just the last ten years, but there is still much work to be done to hopefully find the sources that we are aware of. \n\n  It should be clear that text is not the only source material yet to pore through- archaeological finds also contribute material to our study of history, as evidenced by the  recent discovery of  Richard III in Leicester and the large Roman bath tile in pristine condition in Turkey. A good friend of mine took a tour of an ancient Roman room, discovered in 2008 in downtown Rome. I think that we have plenty to find and study to keep us busy for many generations.", "This is a sideways method of answering the question, but someone has pointed out ot me that with the advent of digital archives, for example EEBO (Early English Books Online) historians and students have access to combinations of materials that would have previously been quite laborious to acquire-- perhaps requriing significant travel, expense, and care, or the copies being reprints thus having publishing and design choices that may have eroded important facets of the originals.\n\nThere is, for example, a huge Darwin archive online-- letters for a good chunk of his life both to and from, unreadable research notes etc. \n\nThese combinations of materials, which I can have sitting open on my computer, mean I can do a side-by-side comparison of two 16th century texts which exist-- in originals-- in different libraries. I can come back to a text over and over without having to take photos of the pages I think I might need. \n\nRare books are much less rare and it's going to change the way people do scholarship, enabling many more people to find many more connections and interesting points and threads between texts, pictures, notes, scribblings. \n\nAnd has been pointed out, there are an awful lot of texts nobody's really studied-- or not for decades, when (again, has been pointed out) history was quite different. Seeing them in combination with newly available scholarship or discovered texts can throw open a whole new avenue.\n\nOften, of course, these avenues are quite narrow, but historians haven't often let that stop them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18bhy0/are_there_any_historical_documents_that_we_know/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1b2mfd", "title": "What examples are there throughout history of socialist/collectivist societies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b2mfd/what_examples_are_there_throughout_history_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c935845"], "score": [2], "text": ["Today i had to do a review of Evgenniy Anismov's \"Russian Revolution\" and he states that Peter the Great was the First Bolshevik, after a tiny bit of research, Peter the Great's greatest critic, Nikolai Berdyaev, drew a direct parallel between Peter and the destructive impact of the communist experiment. \n\n\"The resemblance between the radicalism of the Petrine transformation and the Bolshevik methods of social engineering has been noted by the poet Maximilian Voloshin who in one if his poems has described Peter as \u2018the first Bolshevik\u2019.\"  \n\nSources:\n\"Russian History\" - by Anismov \n\"Barbarian or Transformer?\" - Anonymous ... not completely legit but does not make wild claims.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63t0cw", "title": "Why parts or even the whole medieval Northern Italy did not become a confederalized polity like early incarnations of would-be Switzerland?", "selftext": "Hello there,\n\nWhat I know is that Italy, being urbanized since antiquity, had plenty of cities, towns and villages and North-Central Italy excelled in that matter. Being, that geographical region, also economically thriving quickly cities became more and more indipendent from the Empire firstly becoming Comuni, forming alliances with the purpose to fight and repel Barbarossa, then ending in Signorie. That said: I read recently that early rural Cantons and Cities of Switzerland that federalized experienced similar struggles with Asburgs. These \"Swiss\" polities were extremly inter-dependent regarding pastures, economy and this was one of the factors that lead them to form a bond and mantain sovereignity after seeing part of Austria conquered. They infact become a footmen powerhouse and conquered in turn. Why Northern Italy neved tried to federate or forming more loose but stable confederations or alliances. Does Comuni's various magistrates that eventually become Lord of Signorie opposed it? Correct me if I'm wrong: I guess N.Italy was more culturally diverse than, at least, first federalized Swiss (rural) Cantons and Cities, and Italy was less centralized but more spot-like and with several influneces bubbles. Does early urbanization and middle class rise somewhat stopped the process?\nI'm quite confused about timeframes, I believe when Comuni started to crumble and Signore rised, Swiss confederalized.\n\nThanks in advance for the reply.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63t0cw/why_parts_or_even_the_whole_medieval_northern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfx49yw"], "score": [5], "text": ["The Swiss polities were poorer. The fundamental \"problem\" with Italy is that it was so agriculturally productive and economically vibrant that it could sustain multiple equally balanced, heavily urbanized, polities.  \n\nThe Swiss, on the other hand, were pushed together by necessity; whereas the Italian polities were fiercely competitive and suspicious towards each other, the Swiss cantons saw interdependence as a means of survival. A peculiar case of maintaining autonomy by compromising sovereignty to each other! Their ability to actively organize military expeditions did not go beyond the repulsion of enemies, and their fearsomeness as soldiers was more a consequence of the fact that the Swiss confederation was for most os its history a series of poor mountainous communities populated by rugged men who knew how to fight, and consequentially became a prime recruiting ground for Italian and French rulers. \n\nContrast Italy, where only some polities would consider compromising sovereignty; in the twelfth century it took decades to organize Lombard cities into a defensive league, principally because most small cities were perfectly willing to submit from the emperor if it meant they didn't have to submit to Milan. There were also attempts to forcibly unite Italian states; the Scaligeri dynasty built a powerful state centered on the city of Verona, however, the Milanese and Venetians teamed up to defeat them. Then, when it looked like the Sforza dynasty of Milan could become powerful enough to unite Italy in the fifteenth century, Venice hatched a plot with the French to destroy the Duchy of Milan. The Venetians, for their part, saw little point in going through the arduous process of expanding their state beyond Northeast Italy. Italy was just a cauldron of variables that were nearly impossible to align. \n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mmq7h", "title": "What were the Sumerians' views on incest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mmq7h/what_were_the_sumerians_views_on_incest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccapybx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Poor. To paraphrase the translation of an ancient Sumerian Tablet of Law. Sexual relations were strictly regulated as well. Husbands, but not wives, were permitted sexual activity outside marriage. A wife caught committing adultery was pitched into the river. Incest was strictly forbidden. If a father committed incestuous relations with his daughter, he would be banished. Incest between a son and his mother resulted in both being burned.\"\n\n[Sauce? Sauce.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://genesis.allenaustin.net/sumer.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2k5ybz", "title": "I heard that recently that all reading used to be done out loud and silent reading was a sign of idiocy or genius. Is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "And perhaps this could explain why its much easier to understand older texts(19th century and earlier, when a single sentence could take up half a page) when they are read out loud? In other words, maybe they were designed to be read out loud?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k5ybz/i_heard_that_recently_that_all_reading_used_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cli9ek1"], "score": [3], "text": ["It used to be the accepted view that *in Greco-Roman antiquity* reading was normally aloud -- I've never heard this view applied to any society in the modern era, so I'm guessing this is what your source was referring to.\n\nBut it's not true for Greco-Roman antiquity either. Almost the whole of the argument that reading *was* always aloud in antiquity depends on a single late passage, in Augustine's *Confessions* 6.3, where Augustine describes intruding on Ambrose's reading and sitting in silence, and pondering Ambrose's motives for sitting in silence so long and wondering why he was reading to himself. This is not only a misreading of the Augustine passage, it also neglects literally dozens of much older pieces of evidence on the subject. \n\nHowever, the counter-argument wasn't put together until 1997, so if you found this in a source written before that point, the author shouldn't be censured for being wrong -- just out-of-date. [Here's part of an old thread](_URL_0_) that goes into details. As far back as we can look, there are many more references to reading that imply silent reading than those that imply reading aloud. Some of them are as explicit as the Augustine passage. The problem that has kept Augustine at the top of the citation list for so long is that the Greeks in particular routinely used metaphors of \"speaking\" and \"hearing\" for what texts say.\n\nHere are the earliest relevant references, all from the fifth century BCE:\n\n* [Euripides, *Hippolytos* 856ff.](_URL_2_) - Theseus opens a letter to \"see\" what it \"speaks\" to him; a few lines later (and there's no evidence that he leaves the stage) he cries out at its horrible contents, stating -- using the aural metaphor -- \"it shouts, it shouts\". At 882 he cries, \"I will no longer keep this unspeakable story within my mouth's gate\".\n* [Euripides, *Iphigeneia at Aulis* 34ff. and 107-108](_URL_4_) - Agamemnon reads and edits a letter repeatedly, but a slave standing next to him still doesn't know its contents.\n* [Herodotos 1.123-125](_URL_3_) - Cyrus is alone, so the references to the letter \"saying\" things and Cyrus \"hearing\" them are the aural metaphor again; cf. an inscription \"speaking\" in Hdt. 8.22.\n* [Aristophanes, *Knights* 115ff.](_URL_1_) - Nikias gives Demosthenes a bundle of oracles to read, and Demosthenes is so absorbed in reading them that when Nikias asks him what they say, he says \"pour me another cup of wine\". A few lines later he paraphrases what's in the text without quoting it directly."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10f13m/shift_from_reading_out_loud_to_reading_silently/c6cwrim", "http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/knightsweb.htm", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/eurip/hippol.htm", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/hh1120.htm", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/eurip/iphi_aul.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3p491t", "title": "When did the Byzantines stop thinking of Islam as a heresy, and start thinking of it as a religion?", "selftext": "John of Damascus refers to Islam as the \"heresy of the Ishmaelites\", and many scholars of Islam argue that Islam, as a well-defined creed and set of practices, took time to evolve and take form. Before Islam, did the Byzantines make a differentiation between heretics (e.g. Copts, Arians) and other religions (e.g. Jews and Zoroastrians) or were they all lumped as non-believers? When, if ever, do the Byzantines start talking about Islam as its own religion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p491t/when_did_the_byzantines_stop_thinking_of_islam_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw3ejow", "cw3ga7i", "cw3hjx6", "cw3i0jh"], "score": [28, 14, 330, 19], "text": ["A follow up question, how did the  Byzantines view of Catholics change/differ after the Great Schism?\nEdit: meant Catholics - sorry!", "Hey there,\n\nI'm a graduate student in the academic study of religion, and while my focus isn't on the era you're inquiring about specifically, I can offer a few insights and resources which might help answer your questions.\n\n'Religion' as an anthropological category didn't arise until relatively recently and as such it's difficult to talk about 'religion' or 'religious' people in the past when they'd have never thought of their 'religion' in such terms. A good source for a primer on this discussion is Talal Assad in his text *[The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category](_URL_0_)*. \n\nIn his far too lengthy book, *A Secular Age*, Charles Taylor makes light of this fact by pointing out that a medieval Catholic would never have stopped to consider the philosophical, moral, or personal ramifications of her or his 'religion' and then considered an alternative 'religion'. Being Catholic (or, perhaps, more accurately being a more or less *pious* Christian was just a part of daily life. Unfortunately I don't have that doorstop of a book available to give you a direct citation, but if you're interested in further context I can look for it when I get home. \n\nBased on my own research and reading, I would argue that it is unlikely that there was much if any delineation between the nature of Islam and other 'heresies' existing at that time, and that the emergence of a categorical differentiation between 'religions' as such didn't emerge until the modern era. As for how I might arrive to this preliminary hypothesis, well, hopefully this helps:\n \nThere are a number of respected scholars in the field who handle this particular issue and its implications, the most important among them (at least as far as my research and work is concerned) are Jonathan Z. Smith and Russell T. McCutcheon. Both write with a very strong theoretical foundation, and both have dealt with various manifestations of the questions you raise throughout their respective careers. \n\nThe texts I would recommend reading from Jonathan Z. Smith are: *A Twice Told Tale: A History of the History of Religions' History* (an article from 2001), and *A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion* (an article from 1996). From Russell T. McCutcheon I would recommend reading *Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion*. While none of these texts perfectly handle the questions you're asking, they do offer excellent insight into the study of religion, the emergence of the idea of 'religion' as a way to describe supernatural/faith/ritualized belief systems, or however we want to attempt to describe the category 'religion', and so forth. Plus, they both cite a significant number of sources which might lead you closer to an author dealing directly with your question.\n\nThe last resource I would recommend is a very recent book by Jason Ananda Josephson titled *The Invention of Religion in Japan*. He's a younger scholar, but this book was absolutely incredible, and stands out to me as the best book on the subject of religion that I've read in the past year. So much of this text would dovetail perfectly with the question you ask, and I think would be very insightful for how to approach finding a compelling answer to the questions you have. A significant portion of what he demonstrates is that when the US forced Japan to develop a constitution which included provisions for religious freedom, they had no way of understanding what this concept (religious freedom) entailed, and ultimately by sending scholars abroad, unexpected translation decisions, and political maneuvering, crafted a way of thinking about 'religion' which still confounds people attempting to understand the religious landscape of Japan today. In doing this, he draws on nearly every scholar who has taken up these questions at different times and in different regions around the world. And if nothing else, it's really a fascinating book to read. \n\nHopefully that helps, and if you want copies of any of the texts I cited, I may be able to find them for you!\n", "Alright, I'll give this a try, but note that this is by no means definitive and I won't even attempt to go beyond the seventh century; from the way I interpret the evidence, the situation in the first century of Islam was complicated enough, so I don't feel that my limited knowledge of the eighth century will add anything to the discussion. If anyone who does know about the later period is around, please do comment and add to this answer! My range of expertise is unfortunately very limited :(\n\nFirst of all, I think it is important to first qualify who a 'Byzantine' was. In fact, I personally don't use that term at all, but only 'Roman'. However, being Roman in this period meant different things to different people. Despite the 'fall' of the Roman empire that allegedly occurred in 476, the empire in the seventh century was as diverse as ever. Transcaucasian princes, Arab frontiersmen, Egyptian peasants, Berber chiefs, Roman popes, and more were all still subjects of the emperor, so I find it difficult to generalise about their beliefs. Then there is the problem of sources, since the seventh century is a particularly source-poor period - the Greek history-writing tradition literally disappeared around 630, so we have to rely on fragmentary Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic histories for the political narrative, which can occasionally be supplemented by various ecclesiastical sources, such as letters, sermons, and conciliar records. Trying to draw a coherent picture of Roman attitudes to Islam is therefore quite difficult, something that I've already pointed out in my survey of the available evidence [here](_URL_0_). This is however a fascinating question, so I'll do my best to tease out what is significant from we know currently. \n\nAs you probably know, there is a rather fierce debate on what the nature of Islam was in this period. You have already alluded to the view that Islam only took shape later, but there are many views out there and I don't think there is a consensus yet. My own view is that Islam began as an ecumenical apocalyptic movement that seized the contemporary *Zeitgeist* and, due to the complex geopolitical situation of the time, was able to achieve territorial conquest with surprising ease in the 630s and 640s; this movement then changed and solidified its stance over time, sometime between the reign of Mu'awiyah and Abd al-Malik in the late seventh century. This is however not a universal view, as others would argue that Islam already took the form we all know today by the time of Muhammad's death. Indeed, details such as when Muhammad died or when certain conquests occurred are equally debatable. This isn't strictly relevant, but I think it is important to remember that it is difficult to construct an argument when there are so many divergent views around. What follows is my interpretation, but do continue to explore this fascinating topic beyond this answer, as I am no doubt wrong about many of the things I will talk about.\n\nOne of the first deliberate mentions of Islam is found in a Roman propaganda pamphlet from North Africa written in the 630s. It was aimed at Jews living within the Roman empire and warned of a dark threat in the empire's eastern provinces:\n\n >  Justus answered and said, \u201cIndeed you speak the truth, and this is the great salvation: to believe in Christ. For I confess to you, master Jacob, the complete truth. My brother Abraham wrote to me that a false prophet has appeared. Abraham writes, \u2018When [Sergius] the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was in Caesarea, and I went by ship to Sykamina. And they were saying, \u201cThe candidatus has been killed,\u201d and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying, \u201cA prophet has appeared, coming with the Saracens and he is preaching the arrival of the anointed one who is to come, the Messiah.\u201d\n\n >  And when I arrived in Sykamina, I visited an old man who was learned in the scriptures, and I said to him, \u201cWhat can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?\u201d And he said to me, groaning loudly, \u201cHe is false, for prophets do not come with a sword and a war-chariot. Truly the things set in motion today are deeds of anarchy, and I fear that somehow the first Christ that came, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God, and instead of him we will receive the Antichrist. Truly, Isaiah said that we Jews will have a deceived and hardened heart until the entire earth is destroyed. But go, master Abraham, and find out about this prophet who has appeared.\u201d And when I, Abraham, investigated thoroughly, I heard from those who had met him that one will find no truth in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of human blood. In fact, he says that he has the keys of paradise, which is impossible.\u2019 These things my brother Abraham has written from the East.\u201d\n\nThis is evidently an anti-Semitic account that tried to link Judaism to this new danger and aimed to reaffirm the Jews' loyalty to the weakened empire (naturally through conversion to Christianity rather than through reasoned arguments). There is a danger in trusting this source too much, but there are too many incidental and deliberate references to the Arabs' links to Judaism to dismiss this view entirely. A good example of this is the detailed account of pseudo-Sebeos the Armenian historian from the 660s (quoted in the my link above), who wasn't *that* anti-Semitic; he even portrayed a Jewish governor of Jerusalem in a rather positive way! More generally, many Jews in this period had legitimate grievances against the empire - discrimination against Jews were common in late antiquity (to call someone \u2018the Jew\u2019 was an insult, as evident in the nickname given by miaphysite Christians to a sixth-century Chalcedonian bishop, Paul \u2018the Jew\u2019), something that escalated in the seventh century. In 614 Jerusalem fell to the Persians, a crisis of faith for many that also partially emboldened some local Jews to seize the initiative. Massacres of Christians were recorded, many of which were no doubt much exaggerated by outraged Christian authors, but they probably happened, especially as the Persians were quite adroit at using the 'divide and conquer' strategy to control their new subjects. \n\nSoon however the Persians realised that they needed to reconcile with the majority of the population they now ruled, so Christianity was once again favoured and non-resident Jews banned from moving into Jerusalem. This brief moment of relative freedom was however I think rather important, as when Roman forces moved back into the region after 628 some communities were not inclined to give in quietly, such as the Jewish community in the city of Edessa. Nor were imperial forces particularly inclined to be tolerant, as emperor Heraclius ordered the forced conversion of all Jews within the empire around 632. This was a quite influential decree, since it was even recorded in a Frankish chronicle c.660, where it was remarked that the Frankish king Dagobert loyally followed the emperor\u2019s lead and did the same for Jews in his kingdom as well. To what extent this actually happened is debatable, but we are talking about perceptions here, so this at least reflected in part contemporary attitudes towards the Jews.\n\nThis also illustrates why some Jews might be angry at the empire and why the North African leaflet had to be written at a Jewish audience, if only to reassure them that Christianity was still the best thing out there and that they really should obey imperial orders to convert. But there is another angle to this, as in Arabic sources it is also attested that Islam was, at least initially, inclusive of Jews, most famously in the *Constitution of Medina*, a document preserved in later texts but is probably an original document from Muhammad\u2019s time in Medina. The Qur\u2019an is also somewhat iffy on the issue, as it criticised Christians and Jews for their beliefs in some suras but was more positive to them in others. I don\u2019t think I can untangle this conundrum, but there is at least enough evidence to argue that it is possible that Jews (and Christians) were part of the early Arab conquests. As such, a jittery Roman administration was willing to seize upon what was familiar to them, conventional rhetoric against Jews, and construct a response to the Arab conquests by framing them as something deeply connected with Judaism. Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes not from Roman sources, but from writers in the west - the *Chronicle* of pseudo-Fredegar in Gaul (c.660) and the *Chronicle to 754* in Spain. Pseudo-Fredegar recorded that: \n\n >  Being well-read he [emperor Heraclius] practised astrology, by which art he discovered, God helping him, that his empire would be laid waste by circumcised races.\n\nThis naturally led to Heraclius deciding that he must convert the circumcised people he knew about, the Jews, to prevent this. This story is of course a later literary construction created to explain what happened in the 630s, but as we are discussing attitudes rather than reality, this fabrication is incredibly useful. A similar account, though truncated, can be found in the *Chronicle to 754*, and we can assume that both stories had a Roman origin given the two writers\u2019 familiarity with eastern affairs. From these sources, I would say that the Romans were aware that Islam was somewhat linked to Judaism, but also that it was something different, since they never explicitly described it as Judaism (the Romans definitely knew about how to differentiate between different beliefs). This is why some historians would prefer to see Islam as a movement originating from Judaism or, more likely in my opinion, to be originally a movement fully inclusive of Jews, which allowed Romans to reimagine it as something that was instead fundamentally based around Judaism, the traditional bogeyman within the empire.\n\n*To be continued...*", " >  When, if ever, do the Byzantines start talking about Islam as its own religion?\n\nIt's not a straightforward progression. Throughout the Middle Ages, both Greek and Latin/vernacular sources variously imagine Islam as Christian heresy or as pagan idolatry (and those two are not mutually exclusive, just to make things even *less* clear). Oh, and they are also usually punishment for Christians' sin and the forerunners of Antichrist, of course.\n\nIn Constantinople, in fact, whether Islam was seen as heresy or paganism could be as much a matter of Byzantine politics as actual understanding. Twelfth century Emperor Manuel I wanted to make a change to the oath that Muslims officially converting to Christianity had to swear. He wanted to strike the passage that referred to Muhammad as an idolater, the hope being that would eliminate a stumbling block to conversion. He argued (to the Greek Church) that Muhammad was not an idolator because the God of the Muslims *was* the Christian God--Muslims were simply heretics. Of course the patriarch and bishops were having none of this, and excommunicated the emperor.\n\nThe eventual compromise struck the contentious clause from the oath.\n\n >  Before Islam, did the Byzantines make a differentiation between heretics (e.g. Copts, Arians) and other religions (e.g. Jews and Zoroastrians) or were they all lumped as non-believers?\n\nYes, they made a distinction. Christian heresy (or \"heresy\") was a particular blot on Christendom and on the orthodox Church. Greek responses to Islam often cast it as God's punishment specifically for monophysite heresy. (Oh, and for their part, Syrian and Coptic writers saw the rise of Islam as God's punishment for *duophysite* heresy.)\n\n(The theologian in me needs to specify that monophysite and duophysite do not actually reflect the beliefs of the respective branches of Christianity, but that's more or less how they viewed each other.)\n\nSources: John Tolan, *Saracens*; Hanson, \u201cManuel I and the \u2018God of Muhammad\u2019: A Study in Byzantine Ecclesiastical Politics\" in Tolan, ed., *Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://genealogyreligion.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Construction-Religion-Asad.pdf&ved=0CCMQFjAAahUKEwix1ua40MrIAhUU7GMKHQnFB1M&usg=AFQjCNGSKtBb0rfHgIjSO44Y_xRZjv0BsA&sig2=So913DXHhRAAaKbneiMkTg"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/305ahf/what_did_the_byzantines_think_about_islam_when/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1c2p60", "title": "How did the legal system in ancient Rome (the city) work?", "selftext": "Hi. \n\nI read a book a while back, titled \"Roman Blood\". It's about a private detective during ancient Rome. Anyway, what i found interesting was the way the trials (\"trials\") worked. The book described them basically as:\n\n1. Prosecutor tries to convince the jury/judges/the crowd that has inevitably gathered that the suspect is guilty. Almost no facts are used, it's just trying to win the jury by being a good speaker.\n2. The suspects defender then does exactly the same thing, except this time he tries to convince the jury his client isn't guilty.\n\nQuestions :\n\n1. Were roman trials really as chaotic as this, with few actual facts/proof being used?\n2. Were they held for all kinds of crimes or were they reserved for special ones? In the book the suspect has allegedly murdered his own father.\n3. For whom did the judges/jury work for? The emperor himself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c2p60/how_did_the_legal_system_in_ancient_rome_the_city/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9cl9rl"], "score": [2], "text": ["To get the ball rolling, I'll say that I've read the book and the speeches in them are actually parts of Cicero's speech at that exact trial with some parts paraphrased and some taken out for the sake of brevity (these speeches were often times VERY long). These speeches would have contained alot of facts, though presented in a way to appeal to the judge. Here [are a few](_URL_1_) of Cicero's trial speeches if you're interested. There was a set process which a trial went through, so it was not as chaotic as it appeared; there was [method](_URL_0_) to the maddness.\n\nTrials could be held for any crime, from petty theft to, as in the book, murder. Unlike today there were no \"Public Prosecutors\" so if you commited a crime (yes, even murder) you could, if no one cared to accuse you and bring you to court, get away with it. Cicero had another trial where he prosecuted a Governor of Sicily (Verres) for his attrocities the Sicilian people (forcibly taking their lands, excesive taxation, etc.)- Verres was not brought to trial by the government, the people of Sicily had to ask Cicero to do it!\n\nDuring the Republic (I don't know much about the Empire) the Praetor would give the two parties a list of judges to chose from and they had to agree on one. The Praetor was an elected official, and the judges were (I think) men who volunteered, normally as a stepping stone to getting involved in politics. None of these would be paid by the government; If you wanted to be in politics in Rome, you would normally have needed ALOT of money.\n\nEdit: Typed too fast, mispelled a word"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulary_system#Formulary_system", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0018"]]}
{"q_id": "1p8vos", "title": "What was the American (and international) reaction/response to the Tsar Bomb?", "selftext": "You know the one. [This one.](_URL_1_) The one that could [easily destroy the entire state of Rhode Island.](_URL_0_) It seems like it was significantly more powerful than America's largest tested bomb. I would imagine that a bomb with this much terrifying power would cause some sort of major reaction/retaliation, especially during the heightened anxiety of the Cold War. What actually happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p8vos/what_was_the_american_and_international/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczyaz3", "cd06t69"], "score": [7, 12], "text": ["It was not all that relevant.\n\nThe problem was that the bomb was extremely impractical and had no delivery system aside from bomber planes. But the U.S. had the ability to shoot down Soviet bombers pretty easily, should they have tried to attack the U.S.\n\nMuch more dangerous was the ICBM: the intercontinental ballistic missile. The Soviets had their R-7, developed in 1957, and the U.S. had the Atlas, developed in 1958. These were much harder to shoot down, since they essentially go up to space and then come back down at incredible speed, making conventional interception impossible.\n\nThese missiles were the whole cause of the \"space race\". Yuri Gagarin rode an R-7 to space, and Alan Shepard rode an Atlas (with slight modifications of these missiles to hold humans instead of nuclear warheads). The U.S. was so afraid of the Soviets winning the space race because they knew that if the Russians could put a man in space, they could just as easily put a nuke in New York City. Thus, there was a contest to build bigger and better rockets that could launch bigger and heavier nuclear warheads.\n\nBy 1961, huge plane-dropped bombs were pretty outdated compared to this new field of endeavor. The Tsar Bomba was more of a PR move than any real practical weapon for attacking the U.S. It a) could not get to the U.S., it was b) too large to be effectively tested because of the danger, and c) was useless for anything less than Armageddon due to its inability to target a localized area.", "Ha! So I'm actually giving a paper on exactly this question (\"'There is no Mystery about Producing a 50 Megaton Bomb': Very high-yield nuclear weapons  and the Limited Test Ban Treaty,\") at the [next History of Science Society annual meeting](_URL_0_), this November. (I'm also the guy who made the NUKEMAP that you took the screen shot of, but that's just an aside.)\n\nI have not drawn up all of my sources of this, but here's the basic gist of what I've found so far:\n\n* Khrushchev announced the bomb well before it was going to be detonated, so it was no surprise. The press was all over it. They did the standard thing they did when nuclear weapons yields were discussed and [drew lots](_URL_4_) of [pictures](_URL_3_) of what the destruction would be in comparison to other bombs.\n\n* Publicly, many experts said that it was merely a propaganda threat. They pointed out that nuclear weapons damage doesn't scale linearly with yield \u2014 it scales according to a power-to-the-third relationship (that is, the radius of any given effect roughly a number times _W_^1/3 , where _W_ is the yield). In practice this means, for example, that while the fireball of a 10 megaton weapon has a radius of 1.5 miles, the radius of the 100 megaton weapon only has a radius of 3.8 miles. So an increase of 10X in yield only resulted in an increase of 2.5X in damage. As a result, you'd be able to damage much more of an area with lots of smaller weapons than you would with one big weapon, and the physical size of the big weapons would preclude their effective use.\n\n* The press was not universally convinced by this, as an aside. My favorite response is from the [New York-Herald Tribune](_URL_1_): \"Military experts are saying that a 100-megaton bomb such as the one Mr. Khrushchev talked about\u2014one with a wallop equal to 100 million tons of TNT\u2014would be too big to be efficient. That's nice.\"\n\n* Internationally and domestically, the test series was condemned as releasing a lot of fission products and being kind of a jerky thing to do. No surprise there. \n\n* _Privately_ there were different considerations. The Kennedy Administration was not entirely sure how they wanted to respond to the bomb. They thought about condemning the fallout very harshly but were reminded that if they did that they might put themselves in a bad position the next time they wanted to test a bunch of bombs. They also were in the process of negotiating the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and Kennedy's experts were concerned that _if_ the United States wanted its own weapons in this yield class, they might not be able to make them without atmospheric testing. There was considerable anxiety that the Soviets were \"ahead\" in the area of \"very high yield\" (their term) weapons. The Atomic Energy Commission scientists assured the administration that, if they wanted to, they could make a big bomb like the Soviets did without much effort (ergo the quote in the title of my paper), and that they could probably make weapons in that range that were much more efficient and smaller _if_ they were allowed to do atmospheric testing. \n\n* The CIA and the military were not so sure that these bombs were just propaganda efforts. Until about 1965 they were worried that the Soviets were trying to make launch vehicles big enough to use them, or might use them in some kind of ABM or EMP style weapon. Around 1965 or so they came to the conclusion that the Soviets weren't pursuing them after all.\n\n* As an aside, in 1962 the US held its last atmospheric test series. Several of those tests were of radical new H-bomb designs (test [Pamlico](_URL_2_) in particular was cited as this) that allowed brand new ways forward for weapons design. Specifically, it allowed the USA to make very compact H-bombs that could be fitted onto MIRVs and SLBMs without too much difficulty. (Exactly what these innovations consisted of is still classified, but the term they liked to use was \"radiation engineering\" \u2014 so probably the use of non-spherical primaries and spherical secondaries in very efficient configurations.) Anyway, this inaugurated a completely new approach to the design of the US strategic arsenal which was implemented over the course of the 1960s through the 1980s \u2014 one that emphasized smaller warheads on more numerous delivery vehicles, a very different direction from the kinds of very-big-bombs they had been pursuing in the 1950s. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/lVeANlC.png", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKu23Xgdsi4"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hssonline.org/Meeting/2013HSSMeeting/2013_Preliminary_Program.pdf", "https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/386605797590835201/photo/1", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Operation_Dominic_-_Pamlico_-_Detonation.ogv", "https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/304720888559972352/photo/1", "https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/386247450966515712/photo/1"]]}
{"q_id": "493zpg", "title": "What was Japanese culture like prior to Chines influence?", "selftext": "Specifically, prior to the influx of Chinese cultural influence during the Sui and Tang dynasties. So pre-600-700s.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/493zpg/what_was_japanese_culture_like_prior_to_chines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0oyhch"], "score": [5], "text": ["There really is not that much known of pre-Chinese culture in Japan, simply because the earliest written records of Japan are from Chinese sources beginning in 57 CE. Known as Wa (a Japanese pronunciation of an early Chinese name for Japan), it was described by early historians as being a land of hundreds of scattered tribal communities. Third-century Chinese sources reported that the Wa people lived on raw vegetables, rice, and fish served on bamboo and wooden trays, had vassal-master relations, collected taxes, had provincial granaries and markets, clapped their hands in worship (something still done in Shinto shrines), had violent succession struggles, built earthen grave mounds, and observed mourning. \n\nThe Kofun period (ca. 250-ca. 600 CE) takes its name, which means old tomb, from the culture's rich funerary rituals and distinctive earthen mounds. The mounds contained large stone burial chambers, many of which were shaped like keyholes and some of which were surrounded by moats. By the late Kofun period, the distinctive burial chambers, originally used by the ruling elite, also were built for commoners.\n\nDuring the Kofun period, a highly aristocratic society with militaristic rulers developed. Its horse-riding warriors wore armor, carried swords and other weapons, and used advanced military methods like those of Northeast Asia. Evidence of these advances is seen in funerary figures (called haniwa; literally, clay rings), found in thousands of kofun scattered throughout Japan. The most important of the haniwa were found in southern Honshu--especially the Kinai Region around Nara--and northern Kyushu. Haniwa grave offerings were made in numerous forms, such as horses, chickens, birds, fans, fish, houses, weapons, shields, sunshades, pillows, and male and female humans. Another funerary piece, the magatama, became one of the symbols of the power of the imperial house.\n\nThe Kofun period was a critical stage in Japan's evolution toward a more cohesive and recognized state. This society was most developed in the Kinai Region and the easternmost part of the Inland Sea (Seto Naikai), and its armies established a foothold on the southern tip of Korea. Japan's rulers of the time even petitioned the Chinese court for confirmation of royal titles; the Chinese, in turn, recognized Japanese military control over parts of the Korean Peninsula.\n\nThe Yamato polity, which emerged by the late fifth century, was distinguished by powerful great clans or extended families, including their dependents. Each clan was headed by a patriarch who performed sacred rites to the clan's kami to ensure the long-term welfare of the clan. Clan members were the aristocracy, and the kingly line that controlled the Yamato court was at its pinnacle.\n\nMore exchange occurred between Japan and the continent of Asia late in the Kofun period. Buddhism was introduced from Korea, probably in 538 CE, exposing Japan to a new body of religious doctrine. The Soga, a Japanese court family that rose to prominence with the accession of the Emperor Kimmei about 531 CE, favored the adoption of Buddhism and of governmental and cultural models based on Chinese Confucianism. But some at the Yamato court--such as the Nakatomi family, which was responsible for performing Shinto rituals at court, and the Mononobe, a military clan--were set on maintaining their prerogatives and resisted the alien religious influence of Buddhism. The Soga introduced Chinese-modeled fiscal policies, established the first national treasury, and considered the Korean Peninsula a trade route rather than an object of territorial expansion. Acrimony continued between the Soga and the Nakatomi and Mononobe clans for more than a century, during which the Soga temporarily emerged ascendant.\n\n- Japan: A Country Study. Ronald E. Dolan and Robert L. Worden, eds. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 1994"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tzm90", "title": "How did Feudalism exactly work, who actually owned the land?", "selftext": "As a history aficionado I've done some research on general history but I've never figured this one out. In a kingdom the one that owned all the land was the king and he vassalised (?) dukes and counts in order to manage the land with king being the highest then duke then count then baron, the king would have dukes directly below than those dukes would have counts directly below then barons below the counts, am I correct? I would appreciate correction, thanks ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tzm90/how_did_feudalism_exactly_work_who_actually_owned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ced65mu"], "score": [10], "text": ["Your confusion is completely justified, because your question is at the heart of the academic debate for the last 30 years of whether or not feudalism is usable as a word at all.\n\nThe reason being, feudalism means so many things to so many different historians, and its application even in its most broad definition is not uniform across western europe, let alone globally.\n\nThe starting point for definitions, is usually Marc Bloch who said \"feudal society\" consisted of:\n\n*\"A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man, and within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority -- leading inevitably to disorder; and in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and state\"*\n\nAll of these factors existed throughout Europe.  But the problem of feudalism, is whether they all existed at once and interconnected as a system.  A lot of recent historiography, has demonstrated otherwise.  \n\nWhich means in one region like England you might have vassalage, but you wouldn't have fragmentation of authority.  In another like France you might have the opposite, with a weak state but simultaneously weak binds of reciprocal military loyalty.  Even within France you would have many subregions where each one would have or not have aspects of this fairly broad definition.  This of course, not even counting the fact that feudalism as a system for a long time was assumed to span the full thousand years between the fall of the western empire and the renaissance, which increased its variability, as well as it possibly being a global system, (where the variability would go off the charts).\n\nSo with these caveats in mind, let me get back to your question.  Keep in mind most of the below, only really works for the area under the Carolingian Empire.  And even then, it's mostly about France.\n\nProper land ownership, like the late roman latifundium, even in the middle ages was very specific.  It was land which was owned in full.  The person could do whatever he wanted with it, and did not need to pass any of the profits from it anywhere else.  However, latifundium were not exactly vast, because of the full title to it.  It tended to be owned in patchworks, at least in the early medieval era.  A modern analogy would be, imagine a movie star with 10 houses all across California, clustered in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.  He owns a lot of houses, some in the same city, but they're not connected.\n\nNow aside from land ownership, there was this concept of jurisdiction, which is what you have control over as an officer of a higher (royal) authority.  As you can probably surmise, people who are royal officers will probably have larger and more cohesive jurisdictions than what property they actually own.  After all, in many ways, having control of land was as good as owning land.  In a modern analogy, it's like the difference between you owning a car as a sole owner of a business, vs you driving the company car as the CEO of your business.  Only in the former do you \"own\" the car, but is your available usage of that car any different in the latter?  These were what the early medieval counts were.  It wasn't a landed title like we imagined it was later, it was an office as a representative of the king, who was imbued with certain powers to try local justice, give directives on behalf of the king, and raise the local militia.  Although with that said, these officers used their positions to their advantage, sometimes to secure local land and power themselves, and this would play a major factor in the future fragmentation of early medieval state authority.  However at this time, these are just offices, and the problem of any office, is that you can be fired from it.\n\nBTW dukes, were traditionally a different sort of office from counts.  Dukes were military leaders who lead the regional army.  So whereas the counts wereat only the local representative, and could only raise the militia, dukes were in charge of all the military forces of many counties.\n\nFlash forward to the 10th century, after the collapse of Charlemagne's empire.  There's no central authority anywhere.  All that's left is local authority.  Now the land you used to properly own no longer matters as much as what you have jurisdiction over.  Because there's no one to remove you from your jurisdiction, that land is as good as yours now.  With no one firing officers from their posts, it is in your interest to keep the power within the family, i.e. hereditary.  \n\nIn modern terms, think of it as a transition from a small corporate office to a family business.  In a corporate office, people can be replaced and will no longer have power once removed.  But in a family business, just because you've fired your dad as CEO, does not mean he's not your dad anymore.  True you no longer have to deal with stranger bosses who don't care whether you have a job or not, but now you gotta deal with your nutjob family that you have to live with outside of work.  Thus the crazy dramatic medieval world we've come to know and love.\n\nOriginally, in the chaos of 10th century, even though dukes were regarded as \"higher\" than counts, it was not really a formalized system where dukes were in charge of counts who were in charge of barons, a la Crusader Kings.  More it was the size of the territory you claimed ownership/jurisdiction over, as well as regional language preferences, dictated what you felt comfortable claiming.  Thus a person who controlled what used to be the jurisdiction of 5 massive counties in southern France, decides to call himself a duke.  Someone who only controlled one county, decides to keep calling himself a count to not look foolish.  Someone who was in charge of a border province, a \"march\" calls himself a marchess, or \"marquis\".  But in reality, all of these titles mean nothing except for bluster, as everyone is essentially a petty king at the moment.  The only reason they don't call themselves a king, is because of a lingering respect for the office, and an expectation that one has to have control over the historic kingdom area to be called a king.\n\nWhere the formalization of rank comes, is much later, once the european kingdoms stabilize and begin recentralizing, which is about the late 13th century.  By now kings are flexing their muscle, they've probably defeated or forced to swear loyalty to them many of the formerly autonomous dukes and counts, thus they can safely reduce the positions of these essentially \"petty kings\" to just titles.  Thus a count represents the noble of one area of land, a duke over several counts.  But rest assured, this is only because the king grants them that limited jurisdiction.  He now, is monopolizing full jurisdiction under himself, and thus the modern state slowly begins forming.\n\nAnd because the kind of near-owned jurisdictional control of the earlier medieval era is gone, private property comes back into play, and land ownership begins (mostly) functioning like it does now.  \n\nHope this answers your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1a6kov", "title": "What is the history of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza (until 2005) etc, how did they come about and why are they such an issue of contention both internationally and domestically.", "selftext": "I'm going to grad school in tel aviv this summer and I'm trying to get a more coherent, balanced sense of the entire settlement issue. Viz, how they came about, why they are controversial, the arguments made both for and against them, and their impact on Israel both domestically and in terms of foreign relations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a6kov/what_is_the_history_of_israeli_settlements_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8unluf"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well this subreddit has a 20-year rule on discussing history, so anything past '93 is taboo.  However, a basic history can be discussed in that time frame.\n\nIsrael first \"got\" the territories after the 1967 war, in addition to the Sinai peninsula.  The Golan is somewhat different than the others, in ways I'll outline below.  The West Bank and Gaza were the parts of the British Mandate of the area that wasn't won by Israel in their war of independence.  However, despite the original plan to divide the area into Jewish and Arab states, the West Bank and Gaza were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, with puppet governments at first.  The Sinai was returned to Egypt after the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in the 70s.  The Golan wasn't part of the British Mandate for Palestine, but was part of Syria conquered in the war.\n\nEarly in Israel's history (pre- and post-state), there was a strong drive to develop new areas and establish a Jewish population.  There were a few reasons for this:\n\n* To make areas solidly Jewish for future agreements.  This applied pre-state, and was successful in the southern desert\n* To fortify areas against foreign expansion.  There was a fear that nearby countries would kinda creep into areas that weren't settled, which did happen in one important case, along the Sea of Galilee.\n* To provide fortification in the event of war.  Small *kibbutzim*, collective farms, had significantly delayed or halted Egyptian advances during the war of independence, and putting cities in bordering areas meant that armies invading would have to fight through cities constantly\n* To develop new areas for habitation.  This was especially a concern in areas that were there weren't cities, such as the southern desert, and swamps earlier on.  This was especially important considering the massive immigration to Israel.\n* To take some of the attacks from the central areas.  Border towns would get the brunt of incursions and attacks, which were common between wars.  This protected the larger cities in the center of the country\n\nThat attitude essentially continued after the war, which led to settlement.  The additional reason was that the West Bank is the historical Jewish heartland.  Many of the cities were major Jewish ones in the past, and having Jews there again was desireable ideologically.  There wasn't much against it, either.  Israelis saw the territories as conquered fair-and-square from a defensive war, and didn't really worry about the Palestinians now stuck in limbo.  Contemporary Palestinian nationalism was far less compromising than today, so settlements in the WB weren't much worse with regard to that than the rest of Israel.\n\nThis led to government encouragement of settlement of the territories.  Some moved in for ideological reasons, but for most it's economic.  Land is cheaper there, and parts of the West Bank are quite close to major Israeli cities (Israel is unbelievably small.  It's often difficult for Westerners to see just how small.  From a tall building in several coastal cities you can see both the West Bank and the ocean.  You could walk across pre-67 Israel).  The term \"settlement\" evokes temporary clusters of people, but the vast majority of \"settlers\" live in regular-looking cities.  The ideological settlers do have some tiny temporary towns.\n\nThe Sinai was returned to Egypt, and the few settlements within were dismantled.  The Golan was quasi-annexed.  It has a much smaller non-Jewish population than the other territories, and the Druze who live there, while pro-Syria, seem largely content with being Syrian residents of Israel.\n\nThat was essentially the status quo until the First Intifada, the first major Palestinian uprising.  Without going into ridiculous detail, the conclusion was the Oslo Accord.  The results included:\n\n* Agreement of Israel to Palestinian autonomy\n* Agreement of the PLO to settlement of some sort with Israel (what they agreed to is somewhat unclear, but it was a major step)\n* The basic principle of \"land for peace\".\n\nThis meant that removing the settlements was a useful bargaining chip for Israel, rather than a pointless thing.  Note that these were controversial at first among Israelis, but eventually became the mainstream view, even among hawks.  So removing settlements became reasonable.  This is about as far as I can go with this subreddit's 20-year rule.\n\nSo the result is that, for quite a while, Israel has been willing to remove at least some settlements.  But doing so is difficult politically (they're kicking people out of their homes, after all), so Israel generally wants some sort of concession from the Palestinians before doing so.  Though far-left Israeli political parties have been in favor of immediate removal of the settlements, that's not a mainstream view.  The mainstream view has long been that removing them is a possibility as a part of negotiations.\n\nedit: To answer your questions directly, they've always been somewhat controversial internationally, since they're on occupied territory.  Domestically, there's been objections from the start, but they only became significantly controversial within Israel when negotiations began.  Still, the mainstream Israeli political view is that their growth should be frozen and some should be removed as part negotiations, not because they're somehow wrong.\n\nNote that there is still significant Israeli opposition to removing settlements.  But even many hawks think it's an acceptable possibility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35h20q", "title": "How is Winston Churchill viewed in the modern UK? How is he portrayed in the schools when the history of the First and Second World Wars are being taught?", "selftext": "Winston Churchill certainly is a controvertial character whose persona dominates the history of the UK in the last century and represents the indomitable will of its people. However, he was much disliked by many British military figures during his time as First Lord of the Admiralty for his deep involvement in military matters as a civilian. During the meetings with Roosevelt (later Truman) and Stalin to decide the grand strategy and after-war division of Europe, Churchill often times had to be reigned in by Roosevelt and later Truman as to not further aggrivate the situation with the Soviets. Churchill also wanted an immediate invasion of the USSR after WWII to defeat the Soviets, and was subsequently voted out of office almost unanimously. In the US,  we weren't taught any of this.  We were only taught that Churchill was the bulldog of the UK, the face of indomitable will and fighting spirit, and overall a very great leader. I am interested to know both how history is taught in the UK in regards to Churchill, and how he is generally viewed by the public.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35h20q/how_is_winston_churchill_viewed_in_the_modern_uk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr4cym9"], "score": [5], "text": ["A quick reminder to anyone who is thinking about answer this question:\n\nWe are **not** interested in your personal anecdotes. We are looking for in-depth answers with a base in [accepted sources](_URL_0_). For example, some of these sources could be be modern curriculum (or other modern sources concerning how Winston Churchill is portrayed in schools), academic articles or books. If all that you can contribute is your personal experience, we'd ask for you to refrain from writing. Thank you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources"]]}
{"q_id": "75qpkg", "title": "Civil War battles", "selftext": "During the United States civil war, did we actually fight the way I was taught in school? Both sides of the battle lining up shoulder to shoulder with muskets and just trading shots until the other side submits or is killed off. If that is actually how it went down, what was the reasoning behind it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75qpkg/civil_war_battles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do9a589", "do9tgk7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["\u201cBattle Cry of Freedom\u201d by James McPhearson covered this topic.  \n\nHe wrote that military training and officer thinking for the first two years of the war was based on the musket.  They learned through practical experience that rifles changed the game.\n\nMuskets were highly inaccurate so their effective  range was around 200 yards.   An effective battlefield strategy was to march an overwhelming attacking force towards an enemy and then double time and rush the final couple hundred yards.  Given how long it takes to reload, the enemy is only able to fire off one or two volleys.   \n\nRifles were effective to around 1000 yards and very accurate at shorter ranges.  So, the defending army was able to fire off many well placed shots before the enemy can take them by bayonet.   \n\nAs a result, the strategic lessons learned and trained as part of the Napoleonic wars no longer applied.  Defence now had the advantage in particularly when they entrench and build other types of fortifications.   \n\nWith the rifle, the Civil War became more like WWI than it had in common with the Napoleonic wars.   But officer training wasn\u2019t up to speed.  So, officers often sent in large head on attacks against fortified enemies with rifles and these turned out to be suicidal in nature.  \n\nThe men learned through trial and error.  Innovative generals who never went to West Point and read dusty old books made up their own strategies.   Some clever men who did know old strategies rejected them and also wrote their own rules.  \n\nAs a result, the war saw much less of the traditional formations especially as time progressed.", "Because, believe it or not, it was the most effective means of controlling your army and delivering gunfire. Orders were delivered by trumpets and drums and bugles and spoken commands, so soldiers would need to stay close together, to each other and their commanders. Centuries of firearm doctrine and training manuals emphasized the importance of rate of fire over accuracy, because the smoke of gunpowder would quickly render the question of individual marksmanship irrelevant anyway - so formations focused on firing en masse in the general direction of the enemy, and putting their energies into reloading and firing as quickly as possible. While the musket now had rifling in the barrel, it was still a long firearm, meaning it could only be efficiently reloaded while standing. All of this comes together to mean that standing in line and delivering volleys was the most efficient method of keeping your army together and inflicting maximum casualties on the enemy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8qia9h", "title": "During medieval times, did the Egyptians know what the purpose of the pyramids were?", "selftext": "Did they know that it was a tomb, and that knowledge prevailed as some sort of communal memory or was the pyramids' purpose forgotten until recent times and they just knew that it was \"there\"\nCurious as to know what Egyptians during this time period thought of the pyramids and other massive structures from Ancient Egypt ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qia9h/during_medieval_times_did_the_egyptians_know_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0kv339"], "score": [8], "text": ["Not to discourage any further answers but you'll probably enjoy this older post on [Medieval descriptions of the pyramids](_URL_0_) by /u/khosikulu and /u/sunagainstgold"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6h11h4/the_new_assassins_creed_game_is_set_in_ptolemaic/diur0x2/"]]}
{"q_id": "4uqw69", "title": "Roman slaves buying their own freedom", "selftext": "We often read of Roman slaves in historical contexts being able to \"buy their own freedom\".  How did this work?  I'd have imagined that under slavery laws any possessions of a slave - for example his/her clothing - would have presumably belonged to the master.   \n\nBy extension any money owned by a slave would have already belonged to the slave's owner.  How then could a slave possess money independently to enable a purchase without that money already belonging to their master?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4uqw69/roman_slaves_buying_their_own_freedom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5s6gkw"], "score": [10], "text": ["It is true that anything the slave owned would have belonged to the master. Technically, the head of the family, the *paterfamilias* had the power over all the possessions of the people in his househould, under his *potestas*, excluding the wives' dowry (that is in a traditional *manus*-marriage, there were other forms of marriage that kept the possessions of both partners separate). So he was the sole legal owner of any and everything his wive, sons, daughters and slaves possessed until the time they left his power, since only persons who were *sui iuris*, of their own law, were able to own property. This is obviously a very unpracticable state of affairs.\n\nThe solution was not particular to slaves, but to all members of the familia who were under the power of the *paterfamilias*, and this was the concept of a *peculium*. In its original sense it is a special asset separate from other assets, in the common sense it meant those special assets that a *paterfamilias* entrusted to one of his subjects for them to work and manage, for example a small herd of animals, a building or plot of land and its profits, or a loan to run their own shop. *De jure* these assets are neither in the possession nor under the ownership of the holder of the *peculium*, their parts are still part of the assets of the owner. He or she only has *detentio*, that is the de facto possession and the ability to do with it what he wants. This has several advantages, for example it allowed sons to keep what they earned in the military (*pecunium castrense*) or through other service (*quasi castrense*); another advantage was that the master would not be liable with all his assets for the dealings that one of his slaves (or one of his profligate sons) undertook with the *peculium* entrusted to him, while still retaining possession of it; so a kind of ancient limited liability company, if you will. It also allowed the master to skim off the profits or dissolve the *peculium* at will. Since slaves were indispensable in the running of day-to-day business, this was an easy method to give them a freer hand, so they would need less control and could act on their own.\n\nThe biggest advantage in regard to slavery seems to have been that it provided a motivation for slaves to work hard for their master and profit from their own work. Varro in his treatise on agriculture, where slaves are discussed as part of the articulate tools needed to run a profitable farm, advises the farmer to give his slaves the opportunity to own some things of their own which they could profit from and use for their own goals.\n\n > They are made to take more interest in their work by being treated more liberally in respect either of food, or of more clothing, or of exemption from work, **or of permission to graze some cattle of their own on the farm, or other things of this kind**; so that, if some unusually heavy task is imposed, or punishment inflicted on them in some way, their loyalty and kindly feeling to the master may be restored by the consolation derived from such measures. [Varro, *rust.* 1.17, 7].\n\nHaving some cattle of their own to look after and profit from would have been a form of *peculium* fitting for a farm, and the word itself comes from the word for a small farm animal, *pecus*. So a slave could *de facto* have possessions of his own, even if they *de jure* belonged to his master, but there was a strong moral and economic obligation to honour this peculiar state of affairs, so it became common practice. I don't want to overstress the analogy, but in a certain sense it allowed the slave to become a share-holder in the masters enterprises, tying his economic success to that of his master. It seems obvious that this was a big motivation for the slave that was so minded to do his work well and look after his masters profits that thus became his own, in this limited way. \n\nIt also seems that the *peculium* normally stayed with the slave when he was transferred to a new master:\n\n > In the purchase of slaves, it is customary for the peculium to go with the slave [Varro, *rust.* 2.10, 5]\n\nAgain, the important word here is customary, it was all up to the disposition of the master. He retained full ownership and could withdraw the *peculium* for any reason and at any time should he be so inclined, only facing the obstacle of overcoming common practices and mores, damaging his public image (which should not be underestimated in a society where people were so preoccupied with precisely that). What I want to say by this is that your mileage may vary, and if you are a slave on some far away plantation or any other remote place, who are you going to look for to complain? \n\nBut, should the slave be freed at some point, he would also have retained possession and gained ownership of his allowance. In short, while a slave could not legally own anything, same as any other member of a household under the *pater*, there was *de facto* a possibillity to own and spend (and profit from) anything ranging from some pocket money or a small flock of sheep to a whole business operation. When Musicus Surranus, a slave of Tiberius, died some time in the 1st century, he was in possession of no less than sixteen under-slaves, or *vicarii* [see inscr. CIL VI 5197]. Slaves owning other slaves was another instrument to encourage loyalty and productiveness, and also competition among the slaves, something that might seem strange at first but makes perfect sense considering the things said above.\n\nNow, as regarding buying their freedom, the evidence seems a bit mixed. It is certainly true that slaves *could* buy their freedom, like Publius Decimius Eros Mentula, who bought his for 50,000 sesterces [CIL XI 5400] and became a great and wealthy benefactor of his home town after this. But Mouritsen has recently argued [H. Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge 2011), see here esp. p. 177ff.] that this was less often the case than is commonly assumed. One of his arguments is that there is less literary evidence for it than we like. The other, to me more convincing one is that it made less economic sense in the special context of Roman slavery.\n\nIt is true, buying your own freedom is a common staple of slaveholder societies ancient and modern, and a common trope, the deserving slave buying his own life back after hard work. However, the Roman freedman after his manumission still was in a very deep relationship with his former master, who now became his patron. Upon gaining his freedom, the slave took on the family name of his former master and thus became a full member of the masters family (and de facto this was one of the ways to perpetuate a family). One does only need to look at the way the Tulli Cicerones treated and cared for Ciceros slave and later freedman Tiro. He truly was family to them. Cicero and his brother Quintus in their letters show great concern both for Tiros health and well-being, but also for his professional success.\n\nWhat this means is that, while the freedman still has obligations towards his patron, usually staying in his household and continuing to work for his former master in some capacity or another, the patron also has obligations to his client, to care for him and help him in times of need. Often freedmen would carry out their masters business interest, act as his authorized officers or trusted messengers and manage workshops or farms for him. Being the freedman of an important patron was an important position in and of itself, and the imperial freedmen running the emperors bureaucracy became a common trope in the 1st century. So, while it might not necessarily have served to buy his freedom directly, the *peculium* was the proof of a deserving slave, one who managed his own (and thus his master's) affairs well and worked hard, thus he was deserving of freedom. This might be where the connection between the *peculium* and manumission stems from. Simply taking back that *peculium* from the slave upon manumission would undermine that special 'social and moral bond' [Mouritsen 2011, 180] that would form the basis of their continued and important relationship, in which trust would play a very important part. \n\nOne example of a type of slaves where the buying of ones own freedom was more common were actors and doctors (like Publius Decimius mentioned above), people who could make their own living with the specialist skills they had aquired without the support of their patron. Others might have been old or infirm slaves, who thus financed their replacement in a perverse twist of business acumen. But generally, other forms of manumission (by testament or for their hard service, or simply magnamity) seem to have been more common.\n\nEdit: Added some stuff and fixed some typos/smoothed out the language a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t4tn7", "title": "In the late Qing dynasty, what were their obstacles towards westernization? Why did they failed to fully commit to westernization?", "selftext": "I'm also interested in knowing their economic situation, I've read somewhere that Qing was actually quite rich. Was this true? Did they had the economic means of doing that.\n\nI know they tried to also set up western style officer training as well, but how effective was it? Was this training extended towards the soldiers?\n\nFinally, was the administration system to blame? Did it cause problems towards westernization as well?\n\nThis is a lot of question, so feel free to answer them partially if you can.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2t4tn7/in_the_late_qing_dynasty_what_were_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co0vbcg"], "score": [2], "text": ["I will address your initial question with some ideological context.  I will also address your second question.  I hope someone else can help with the  other two questions you've posed!  Also, I'm sorry this is a giant wall of text!  Brevity is something I struggle with.\n\nIn R. Keith Schoppa's book *Revolution and It's Past:  Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History*, Schoppa dedicates most of a chapter to this question.  Schoppa begins with the following:\n\n > Chinese culture had always focused on the past.  Even for Confucious the golden age had been in that past, a time when society was harmonious and the country was peaceful.  The goal of statesmen throughout the centuries was to restore something of that splendid past, even though no one thought that it could ever really be done.  The past framed the present, so any change in state and society had to be rationalized in terms of that past, whether the particularly relevant past was the policies of a recent emperor or one's family traditions.\n\nI think that this is one of the obstacles that the Qing encountered in regard to westernization.  It is also worth noting that people who were part of the 'self-strengthening' movement subscribed to the idea that they could convince conservatives that Western weapons were only inanimate machines.  They were able to rationalize that the weapons were culture neutral.  They were the means by which China could protect their culture.  Schoppa argues that this logic contains a glaring fallacy:\n > Foreign machines might look culture neutral (i.e., anyone can turn a switch, pull a trigger, or pilot a ship), but they came with a host of culture-specific scientific views and worldviews.\n\nEssentially, if a young man were to begin the study of engineering and technology, that student would return to Chinese culture with a new set of worldviews.  When applied to the Chinese classics, these worldviews would provide a broader context for the content and more questions would arise.  This was a threat to the revered classics and basis for Chinese society.\n\nAnother problem encountered was the problem of the civil service exam.  Until this time, success was measured by the civil service exam.  Officials were concerned that they would not be able to attract students to the shipyard schools or arsenals because the best students trained for the civil service exam.  How would the government be able to persuade good students to apply to schools which taught concepts that were not tested on the exam.  Schoppa cites Li Hongzhang:\n > One of the measures we can take is to introduce a new category in the civil service examination, namely the category of technology.\n\nAdditionally, I have notes from a course I took on Modern China.  The professor advised that China did not have the infrastructure to maintain modernization.  I don't have more information to support this assertion unfortunately.\n\nMost of the following is sourced from Schoppa's book and that lecture I mentioned above.  This is a basic chronology of the indemnities paid by the Qing and little bit about taxes.\n\nI think that to fully understand the economic problems of the late Qing, we must start with the reign of Qianlong.  The Qing essentially took over the Ming tax system and did not reform it or reassess taxes.  One might imagine that this was a mistake.  Taxes were paid in silver taels.  Farmers would trade their crops for copper and, in turn, trade those for silver taels.  Here are some statistics regarding taxes that I find startling.  \n > During the reign of emperor Jianqing (1769-1821)  1 tael equated to 1500 copper\n > During the reign of emperor Daoguong (1821-1850) 1 tael equated to 2700 copper\n\nIn 1834 the British East India Company went bankrupt.  China traded heavily with the company.  The Opium War ensued.  It lasted from 1839-1842.  The Treaty of Nanjing signed by Great Britain and the Qing opened the ports of Canton, Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Xenjiang.  It also relinquished Hong Kong to the British.  A total indemnity of 21 million pounds was to be paid by the Qing before 1941 in installments.  The British charged 5% interest on late payments.  \n\nAt this point, the general consensus of the public regarding taxes was \"the government doesn't help me, so I won't pay my taxes!\"  By 1864, the treasury is bankrupt.  The Tianjin massacre of 1870 ended in an indemnity to the French for 20 million taels.  The First Sino-Japanese War ended in 1895.  The Treaty of Shimonoseki established an indemnity to Japan for 200 million taels and the Qing gave up several key pieces of territory.  \n\nThe Boxer Rebellion resulted in another indemnity of 450 million taels ($333 million in 1901).  Schoppa notes that the average yearly income for the Qing at this time is only 88.2 million taels in 1901.  \n\nEventually, the Qing dissolved the ineffective Bannerman army.  Once violence erupted, they asked wealthy citizens to raise money and troops to protect the royal family.  The final straw in my opinion were the train lines.  in 1869, China had approximately 370 miles of rail lines.  The Qing needed investors for the rail lines.  Many foreign companies invested.  Specifically, Germans created shell companies to invest in the rail lines.  The fatal blow came in 1910.  The Qing decided to nationalize all of the rail in the country.  Schoppa notes that this is a last ditch effort to save themselves.  \n\nThe Qing government was not in a good economic situation near the end of the dynasty.  You can reason that individual Qing officials had wealth, but the government in general was in a very bad place economically.\nI hope this answers your question!  If you have further questions, I will try my best to answer them!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e4fi6k", "title": "Why did Anne Frank share a room with the dentist?", "selftext": "My understanding of the diary of Anne is that Anne\u2019s parents had a room,  the other family had a room, Peter slept in a hallway, Anne\u2019s sister slept in the parents room and Anne shared a room with the dentist. \n\nIs there any reason why it was this way? It would have made much more sense for Anne to sleep in the hallway and make the two men of the attic (Peter and the dentist) share a room.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e4fi6k/why_did_anne_frank_share_a_room_with_the_dentist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f9b7krz"], "score": [141], "text": ["The dentist (Mr Dussel in the published text of the diary, Fritz Pfeffer in real life...Anne gave many of the people she dealt with in hiding pseudonyms) wasn\u2019t originally supposed to be in the annexe with them at all.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\- The Franks went into hiding on July 6th 1942, the day after their eldest daughter Margot received a notice telling her to report to the German occupation authorities for deportation.\n\n\\- They were joined by the van Daan/van Pels family (Hermann, Auguste and Peter) a week later, on the 13th of July. At the time they hid together, Otto and Hermann had a working relationship; Otto\u2019s employer Opekta dealt in spices and food preservation agents like pectin and nitrites, which a butcher like Hermann would have regular need to purchase.\n\n\\- Dussel/Pfeffer doesn\u2019t start asking around for a place to hide until October, and doesn\u2019t FIND one until November. He knows both annex families as an acquaintance, he knows their helper Miep because she\u2019s a patient of his...and in any case, his dental qualification means he\u2019s as close as they can get to a doctor for the annexe. God knows, if anyone becomes seriously ill in hiding they won\u2019t be able to leave to find a proper doctor! So they agree to take him on, and he joins the group on November 16th.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen the dentist arrived, everyone else had already been living there for months. They had staked out their little territories and set up routines. The Franks had two adjoining rooms with a door between them on the lower level of the annex. The van Daan/van Pels family had upstairs; a room for Hermann and Auguste, and a tiny box room backing on to that for Peter. Peter effectively slept tucked under a set of stairs leading to the attic and the roof.\n\nThe options to accomodate an extra person they hadn\u2019t originally planned to take on were pretty limited.\n\nOption one reshuffles EVERYONE. If you look at the annexe layout [here](_URL_0_), you can see how it all fits together; Peter\u2019s tiny room would have been too small for a second bed, so he at least would have had to move if he was going to share with Fritz. Bearing in mind that Anne as the youngest would not necessarily have been trusted to live alone away from her family, this means that at minimum Peter moves to Anne\u2019s room to share with the dentist, Anne moves to her parents room AND Margot moves to the box room. If they do it this way, then neither family gets ANY personal space or privacy from members of the other family whatsoever. Not even the tiny scraps they eked out when they first moved in.\n\nOption two would be to set up an extra bed in Anne\u2019s room and just sort of cope with it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/secret-annex/"]]}
{"q_id": "8us4bo", "title": "What was the minimum age for a medieval Soldier ?", "selftext": "Would age matter for a local lord or would he draft every male that is able to carry a weapon ? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8us4bo/what_was_the_minimum_age_for_a_medieval_soldier/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1hx1o4"], "score": [2], "text": ["So the answer to your primary question is that there were no widespread rules about minimum age of service. There may well have been local customary rules that were never written down, but we don't have access to them. It's important to remember that medieval Europe was hugely diverse in its customs and very different in many aspects from our modern ways of doing things. Medieval armies were temporary affairs, put together from what fighting men were available. They were not in any sense professional armies, and it's a matter of debate whether we can even talk about soldiers prior to the 15th century.\n\nWith that said, there seems to have been a broad understanding that post-pubescent men, not adolescents, were the proper material for war. You can find examples of boys of sixteen or seventeen engaging in battle, but it wasn't terribly common.\n\nTo your second question: in almost all cases, medieval lords did not round up the peasants every time a war broke out. I'm not sure where this myth came from, but it's dead wrong. Even in times and places where a general levy was in place (Carolingian France, Anglo-Saxon England), it seems to have only been applicable to the wealthier farmers who could provide their own weapons and equipment. From about 1000 AD, the levy decreased massively in importance, with semi-professionals taking up much of the slack. So for a typical high medieval army, you could expect to find vassals fulfilling military obligations, retinue men following their lords to war, adventurous warriors who attached themselves to some notable for the duration of the campaign, mercenaries fighting for pay, levied men from the towns and shires, but very few unwilling peasant conscripts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2udvje", "title": "For what reasons did the emperor Diocletian move the capital of the Western Roman empire from Rome to Mediolanum in 286AD?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2udvje/for_what_reasons_did_the_emperor_diocletian_move/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7j32m"], "score": [3], "text": ["While you wait for more targeted answers, here's some previous threads with general information on the shifting Roman capitals:\n\n* [How did Constaninople replace Rome as a capital in the Byzantine Empire?](_URL_0_) - 22 comments, over 10 months old.\n * The commenters in this thread focus on the disadvantages of Rome's position in comparison with capitals nearer to the frontiers.\n* [What happened to Rome as a city after the Constantine moved the capital to his \"New Rome\"?](_URL_1_) - 20 comments, over 1 year old.\n * This goes deeper into the experience in the city of Rome as other cities were delegated to various administrative tasks and the Rome became less and less the heart of the empire.\n* [Besides Rome and Constantinople, what were the capitals of the Roman Empire?](_URL_3_) - 5 comments, over 7 months old.\n * This thread draws attention to other cities and their contributions and value to the empire as the city of Rome became less important.\n* [Why was Rome not made the capital of the Western Roman Empire when it was created?](_URL_2_) - 9 comments, less than 1 month old.\n * The commenters here go into Roman politics at the time of Constantine and his successors, noting tensions between the Senate (based in Rome) and the emperors which even led to a civil war being fought between the two."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zq13r/how_did_constaninople_replace_rome_as_a_capital/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ljxkj/what_happened_to_rome_as_a_city_after_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rbndc/why_was_rome_not_made_the_capital_of_the_western/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26g63v/besides_rome_and_constantinople_what_were_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "21tsq2", "title": "What was the experience of \"discovering\" the great lakes like for the colonials?", "selftext": "When reaching the eastern shore of presumably Lake Ontario and being faced with this never-ending horizon what was that experience like?  Was there a misunderstanding of it being another ocean, or did the native population provide the necessary guidance to navigate the great lakes?  Did the native population have the technology to traverse the lakes, or did that come later with the colonials?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21tsq2/what_was_the_experience_of_discovering_the_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cggtyjg"], "score": [30], "text": ["Indians knew the lakes were fresh water, 200 meters above sea level, and canoed along the edges for hundreds of kilometers.  The early French explorers soon knew it as well.  So by the time there were colonists, the extent and character of the Great Lakes was pretty well known.\n\n[Here's more on the 17th century mapping of the Great Lakes.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.uwgb.edu/wisfrench/library/articles/maps/maps.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "9eac1r", "title": "I have seen it said that Latin is a dead language, but it doesn't seem to have fallen out of actual use (between the Christian Church and study of the Classics). Where is the line drawn between a Dead Language and a Living one?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9eac1r/i_have_seen_it_said_that_latin_is_a_dead_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5nk3xf"], "score": [38], "text": ["The terms used in this question are often unspecific due to the variety of contexts people will use them in.  A linguistic answer would look at the problem in terms of first-language-acquisition (L1) or second-language-acquisition (L2).  Both sociolinguistics and neurolinguistics can demonstrate how these are distinct processes with very different assimilation paths.  L1s are passively assimilated in infancy and childhood, while L2s are assimilated with more difficulty and the active participation of the speaker.  Academically speaking, it has been suggested a language is living if it still has a renewable source of L1 speakers.  If the language has neither L1 nor L2 speakers, it is extinct.  If it has *nonrenewable* L1 speakers (living elders but only L2 children), then it may be considered living and endangered or essentially dead depending on the analyst.  But I would stress that this kind of distinction is relatively moot in both analysis and field research, whose primary goal is to record the language, not to preserve it.  \n\nRevitalization efforts, such as those in California for indigenous peoples who have lost their historical language in the Athabaskan or Uto-Aztecan families, rely on earlier records.  No doubt there would be a strong tendency within these groups to suggest the language still lives simply because people are trying to acquire it, but there are logical complications to suggesting true continuity here.  Recorded language is always an incomplete picture.  For example even if you had a *complete* lexicon, and a thoroughly documented grammar, the instincts the original L1 speakers would have for forming new words, for acquiring loanwords, and for nonce-words or wordplay, are likely gone.  The new L2 speakers may succeed in generating new L1 speakers if they then have children and isolate them in the L2 environment, but having skipped a generation, these L1 speakers will come to 'fill in the gaps' wherever they may exist in the imperfect L2 acquisition of their parents.  Politically their speech may be identified as Yorik or Serrano (a few extinct languages in California) and have importance within the tribe, but academically this is not the same language.  It may be more useful to look at such a case as a descendent language.  \n\nTake for example Hebrew.  Hebrew does not enjoy a continuous chain of L1 speakers from Biblical/Ancient Hebrew.  It is cited as successfully revitalized - often cited as the only such case - but modern L1 Hebrew speakers have pages and pages of their own innovations both lexically and grammatically that are influenced by other modern languages and do not descend from the structures used by the strictly liturgical Hebrew which was many people's L2, but nobody's L1.  For example native Hebrew morphology follows a root-and-pattern structure like other Semitic languages, but in modern Hebrew a growing number of words do not adopt native patterns.  This is common in areal linguistics even among 'unbroken' living languages - the morphology will often simplify or adopt innovations from neighboring languages of influence.  \n\nWhen this happens to a revitalized language, and it is inevitable that it will, the original teachers - the L2 speakers - will often perceive it as a threat and attempt to enforce conservative speech patterns on their L1 children.  This always fails for the reason language change occurs at all - newer generations have their own innovations.  In revitalized languages, they simply have *more of them* because their education could not provide for every possible situation.  \n\nTherefore there are ways in which the differences between a revitalized language and the original can be downplayed because the processes at work in those differences are common to all languages over time - but differences still remain that would make it a bad idea to consider the two stages of the language identical or continuous.  That discontinuity may ruin revitalized speakers from participating in studies where the original language was relevant.  \n\nYou will also find single instance cases of parents - for example - teaching their children Latin or Attic Greek as an L1.  In every recorded instance of this, the child has reverted back to the language or languages used in their community in all contexts except home, and as more modern vocabulary demands to be incorporated into their speech - a process L2 Latin-speaking parents can't hope to keep up with - even the home context has reduced or disappeared.  This fails for the same reason parents who teach their kids Klingon fail:  the lack of peers.  We ultimately learn language from our peers when peers are available, in preference to our parents.  If you had *a group or community* of L2 Latin speakers who all agreed to speak only Latin with their children so as to produce L1 Latin speakers again, then at best you would have the Hebrew scenario.  Is it or isn't it *really* Latin?  How much innovation makes the language a distinct form?  It'll certainly still be mutually intelligible, after all.  These are not questions linguists can answer, because they have no real bearing on study.  The old joke goes that a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.  And speakers of the same dialect do not always share the same features - usually they share anywhere from 20-80% of the same features (a specific set of features is then called an idiolect, the speech of *one* person).  Intelligibility is often used to attempt to define a conventional language barrier, but when is a dialect a different dialect?  There's always a town on the border, after all.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f8h2ea", "title": "Is it true that after the concentration camps were liberated, gay men were not let go as homosexuality was still a crime in Germany?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f8h2ea/is_it_true_that_after_the_concentration_camps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["filem6p"], "score": [3], "text": ["As usual, /u/commiespaceinvader has written an excellent previous answer [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o5n6a/people_dont_stop_hating_over_night_what_was_life/dchq164/"]]}
{"q_id": "emxj8n", "title": "Were there unifying reasons for the rises and falls of large, wealthy, diverse R & D companies like Bell Labs? Bell Labs, GE, and PARC all still exist in some form, but only GE is still a major entity and they're no longer particularly innovative.", "selftext": "Of course, these companies couldn't exist before the industrial revolution, but the late 20th Century also seems to have been a curiously bad time for them. There are specific examples of business decisions that were all wrong in retrospect (e.g., Kodak) but what about the larger business/industrial phenomenon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/emxj8n/were_there_unifying_reasons_for_the_rises_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffvg72f"], "score": [3], "text": ["Bell labs is still doing major innovation work as the research and development arm of Nokia. They are responsible for most of the patents surrounding 5G implementation and are leading the way in terms of network slicing and edge cloud development.\n\nThis will be a giant oversimplification, but there\u2019s a ton of great articles and books on the subject: \n\nThe biggest factor in (specifically) Bell\u2019s dip in early 1980s was the adoption of anti-trust laws by the U.S. AT & T was a giant monopoly that basically flowed unlimited amounts of cash to Bell Labs to work on communications challenges. With divestiture/monopoly breakups, the clear mission for research \u2014and the money \u2014 went away. This forced Bell Labs to find a new parent, but none would compare in scope and ability to AT & T, though they seem to have found a home with Nokia.\n\nBusiness models also changed \u2014 startup culture and modern corporate culture don\u2019t allow for 10 year research horizons, i.e. they can\u2019t wait years for research to yield results when you have shareholders and VCs to answer to each quarter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cy24gn", "title": "How were early cannons and hand-cannons manufactured?", "selftext": "Particularly in England and France during the Hundred Years War\n\nBut also by the Mongols and the Yuan, and the Majapahit Empire (which i just found out about on wikipedia :) )", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cy24gn/how_were_early_cannons_and_handcannons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyqmher"], "score": [8], "text": ["The two common technologies in Europe were casting in bronze, and forged from wrought iron. The wrought iron guns were typically made from strips of iron running along the length of the barrel being welded together, which would form the inside of the barrel. This was then reinforced by iron hoops heat shrunk onto the outside to stop the barrel from splitting along the welded seams. These reinforcing bands could form either a complete layer:\n\n* _URL_1_\n\nor be discrete separate bands:\n\n* _URL_7_\n\n* _URL_6_\n\nThe inner strips running along the barrel and the reinforcing bands can be seen clearly in this falling-apart example:\n\n* _URL_4_\n\nTo these, we can add that the Chinese were also casting guns in cast iron in large numbers already in the 14th century. One interesting variant was the forging of the inner barrel, followed by the casting of a reinforcing layer of cast iron around it.\n\nThe bronze guns are straightforward, although large ones presented technical problems due to their size. Some examples:\n\n* 14th century European: _URL_3_\n\n* 14th century Chinese: _URL_2_\n\n* 16th century Ottoman: _URL_5_\n\nVery early barrels in China might be made of paper or bamboo, reinforced by being wrapped by wire or cord. These were typically for fire-lances, the gunpowder flame-thrower ancestor of the gun, but were also used for guns (and fire-lances that also shot projectiles). Wooden barrels were also used for fire-lances in Europe (presumably reinforced like the Chinese examples). Iron-reinforced and iron-lined barrels were occasionally used for cannons, with some being relatively recent:\n\n* _URL_0_\n\nA cheap and nasty alternative to all-metal barrels!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wooden_Cannon_GNM_W622.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HandBombardWesternEurope1390-1400.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bronze_cannon_of_1332.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tannenbergb%C3%BCchse.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wrack_HH-Wittenbergen_Kanone_Dragge.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turkish_Bronze_Cannon.001_-_Tower_of_London.JPG", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:40KgWroughtIronMurderer1410France.jpg", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bombarda_Museu_Marinha_Lisboa_1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1wq9ht", "title": "What musical instruments were there in 0CE?", "selftext": "Med. and Western Europe to be precise, drilling down further to Roman North Africa or Rome itself, Roman Empire if not.\n\nI can imagine there being a harp at least...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wq9ht/what_musical_instruments_were_there_in_0ce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf4f8tk", "cf4fjmi", "cf4hqpg"], "score": [2, 13, 3], "text": ["I think you need to narrow down your question a bit, e.g. what part of the world are we talking about?", "[pedant]\n\nNone, because there's no such date as 0 CE; 1 BCE/BC is followed by 1 CE/AD. \n\n[/pedant]\n\nTo answer the spirit of your question:  *lots*.  Music itself is a [human universal](_URL_8_), and most cultures have a musical instruments of some sort.  Narrowing it down would depend on what culture you're interested in.  \n\nIn Augustan Rome - roughly the time period you're interested in, and I will take any opportunity to bring it up - Greek and Roman musicians had access to [a wide variety of Greek, Etruscan, and native Roman instruments](_URL_4_).  There were string instruments, like the lyre and [cithara](_URL_0_); breath instruments like flutes, pan-pipes, the [aulos](_URL_2_), and horns of various sorts; drums and cymbals and other sorts of percussion instruments (these were most common in ritual music and dance - the [sistrum](_URL_7_), for instance, imported from Egypt, was shaken in the ritual processions of the goddess Isis, and the [tympanum](_URL_1_) was imported in the rites of Cybele and Dionysus).  Romans even had pipe-organs, played in the arenas and theatres - Vitruvius, around 20 CE, [describes a hydraulic - water-powered - pipe organ](_URL_6_).  \n\nMusic was ubiquitous in Greek and (Greek-influenced) Roman society of the period; musicians (or amateur cultists) would play instruments in processions, religious rituals, funerals, celebrations, festivals, stage plays, banquets, military events, etc., etc.  We even have some surviving musical notation from the period:  the [Seikilos epitaph](_URL_3_), for instance.  (There's a link to a modern rendition.  Play it.  It's really neat.)\n\nI will note, though, that actually performing music for others, as a [banausic](_URL_5_) task, was seen as not quite appropriate for the Roman elite; the Emperor Nero performed on stage, singing and playing the lyre, which was considered morally inappropriate, a sign of disrespect for Roman tradition and his own position as first citizen.\n\n... so yeah, lots.  If you want to more carefully specify a place and culture, many people here will probably happily discuss it :)", "The [bagpipe](_URL_0_) had apparently diffused into the Empire by the time of Nero. The double reed instruments of the Middle East had two periods of diffusion into Europe. The first was the Roman-era introduction of the double-bladed chanter linked to a bag; the second was the bagless shawm introduced during the Middle Ages. It resulted in a number of European instruments with a few survivors including the oboe and the bassoon. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cithara", "http://www.vroma.org/~araia/tympanum.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aulos", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph", "http://www.aug.edu/~cshotwel/2001.Rome.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banausos", "http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/waterorg.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistrum", "http://humanuniversals.com/human-universals/full-list-of-donald-e-browns-human-universals-with-categories/"], ["http://www.essentialvermeer.com/folk_music/bagpipe.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1p8325", "title": "What did white people listen to before the music revolution of jazz?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p8325/what_did_white_people_listen_to_before_the_music/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cczrfbr"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm assuming you're meaning white Americans in the teens? The short answer is that the popular style before jazz was ragtime, which was \"black music\" in origin but enjoyed by lots of people, mostly in the form of sheet music sales for home playing, which was a good business at that time. Ragtime music, just to demonstrate how acceptable to white people it was, was played by the orchestra to first class passengers on the Titanic and was on the official White Star Line songbook. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2yh6o3", "title": "Was it likely William Shakespeare was a real person, or an alias?", "selftext": "We watched a short film in English class today going over whether Shakespeare was a real person, or simply an alias, most notably, one used by Christopher Marlowe. I was just too curious to end it at that. Has there been any new evidence towards these claims?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yh6o3/was_it_likely_william_shakespeare_was_a_real/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp9mhpf"], "score": [9], "text": ["Not to discourage new replies or relevant discussion, but /u/texpeare wrote an excellent reply to this question in a previous thread, in which he addressed not only the Christopher Marlowe authorship claim, but also claims of Francis Bacon, William Stanley, and Edward de Vere. Have a look: [Is there any solid evidence that Shakespeare's works were written by others?](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso, since your question emerged by watching one film, might I recommend Michael Wood's documentary [In Search of Shakespeare](_URL_0_)? Mind you it is a 4 part, 240 minute documentary rather than a short film. But if you're interested in understanding not only the plays but also Shakespeare's life and times it's well worth seeing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398492/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f0fvh/is_there_any_solid_evidence_that_shakespeares/ca5nncx"]]}
{"q_id": "4qar1e", "title": "Was there an agreed upon definition of fascism back in its heyday?", "selftext": "Question in title\n\n\nThere seems to be an enormous amount of different and often contradicting definitions of Fascism, usually from post-war historians and non/anti-fascists. What did Fascists themselves think back then? \nWhere there ever any quarrels between the fascists like ''You're not a real fascists'' or ''thats not fascism''?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qar1e/was_there_an_agreed_upon_definition_of_fascism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4rj1v0"], "score": [7], "text": ["George Orwell contributes an apt quote on the differing and contradicting definitions of Fascism:\n\n > ...the word \u2018Fascism\u2019 is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.\n\nFor fascism itself, especially of the *Partito Nazionale Fascista*, yes, there were some level of quarrel towards what Fascism was supposed to represent. A lot of this comes from the people that were recruited into the movement, and the background that they came from. The economic approach of Fascism as a amalgamation of leftist and rightest policies brought plenty of conflict initially among the *Squadrismo* who had joined up with the intention of literally beating the old order away. You can view the evolving 'goals' of Fascism as Mussolini and the party leaders bargained and schemed in order to improve their power base. For many, fascism was meant to be \"anticapitalist, antimonarchical, anticlerical, antisocialist, antiparliamentary, and, most especially, antibourgeois,\" (Tannenbaum) but this immediately put them at odds with the founders of the Fascist movement, who were almost all former revolutionary socialists and syndicalists. The base of the party in 1919 may have seen the movement as a way to beat people with their *santo manganello,* perform daredevil acts of courage, and overthrow existing order, but by 1921 as chaos and striking had been working its way through Italy alienated students and younger veterans started to join the Fascists as a call *to* order instead of *against* it. \n\nIt's impossible to look at Mussolini for guidance on what the goals of Fascism were, as until he was secure as *il Duce* he considered the PNF as nothing more than an instrument towards his own rise to power, and viewed those underneath him with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. Instead we can turn towards the various leaders of the Fascist movement themselves where we see the quarrel that you asked about. Edmondo Rossoni, president of the National Confederation of Fascist Unions during the 1920's wanted the movement to be a champion of Italian labor against employers. Roberto Farinacci, former party secretary, saw the party as the violent *Squadrismo* and thought Mussolini was too liberal. Giuseppe Bottai saw Fascism as the rise of new cultural elites to lead society, while Alfredo Rocco saw Fascism as a constitutional corporatist state. The only tie that led them to all stick together was the syndicalist nature that they all started in. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3q5a8b", "title": "If weightlifting was a modern construct, how did men get muscular before the 20th century?", "selftext": "What did they do to get bulky?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3q5a8b/if_weightlifting_was_a_modern_construct_how_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwc9ul4", "cwd7edy"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Did they even do that intentionally? This question seems to be based on the idea that men have been trying to look like body builders since the dawn of civilization. Can anyone comment on *that*?", "Since it looks like this will go unanswered by an actual historian, I'll point out that weightlifting is not a modern invention. \nThe classical Greeks were famous for weight training, and we do have some artifacts from them, but they were dar from the only ones. \n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a good (non academic) overview. If you want an academic's view then pretty much anything by Dr Stephen Miller should interest you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://physicalculturestudy.com/2014/11/18/an-early-history-of-weightlifting/"]]}
{"q_id": "1biztu", "title": "Is it really true that the Mayans never invented the wheel?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1biztu/is_it_really_true_that_the_mayans_never_invented/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c972f85", "c972nov"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["No American Natives did. Although they had toys using wheels, they never employed it for the purpose of transport. The supposed explantation for this is, from Guns, germs and steel, is that they didn't have any large animals to serve as a draft animal.", "The Mayans never invented the wheel and axle this is true, they did however use wooden/stone rollers to transport. [This] (_URL_1_) discusses the fact that while they did build roads or causeways that used stone rollers to compact the road they did not use a wheeled vehicle to transport across it. From what I remember from my History of the Early America's course and the book the lost history of aztec and maya, the reason for the non discovery was a lack of draft animals that would be utilized with a wheeled cart. I did a research paper on the Mayans and the contrast to Spanish technology I'll have to dig it up to add more sources if you would like to further learn about the gap between the old and new world. \n\nEdit* I do also remember now that there are theories that they had the wheel but were unable to bring it to large scale due to the lack of a draft animal. They did have it for [toys] (_URL_0_) but there are or at least weren't when I did the research any examples of large carts/carriages being made with a functioning wheel and axle that was used for movement of items/people.\n\nedit 2* Here's a [PDF] (_URL_2_) and one of the documents I used it is a very well written report and for the specific question you asked skip to page 244."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://research.mayavase.com/uploads/kerrfolio/hires/3670.jpg", "http://ambergriscaye.com/museum/digit4.html", "http://www.precolumbianwheels.com/Tula&wheeled_animal_effigies.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1osi5d", "title": "Why is Paris Peace Conference (1919) important as event and what is its greatest achievement?", "selftext": "I have all relevant data about Paris Peace Conference, ready for my 10-minute presentation, but I want to have a broader look on the theme. \n\nI am interested how much historians think PPC is important from today point of viewing, or maybe, for historians in 1930? \n\nWas it a, diplomatically speaking, great achievement, was it just, or a instrument for stopping revolutionary wave from Russia...\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1osi5d/why_is_paris_peace_conference_1919_important_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccv7kg4", "ccva4yp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The Paris Peace Conference essentially shaped the stage for World War II to happen through two means. The first was the War Guilt Clause that placed the brunt of the blame of WWI on Germany for giving Austria-Hungary the \"Blank Check\" to wage total war. This would cause the feeling of isolation that would lead the Germans to accept a pro-nationalist leader the the degree of Hitler. Compare this with the treatment of France after the Napoleonic era, and you'll see why public shaming of the losing country had such negative results. The second huge impact of the Conference was the fact that the United State did not join the League of Nations. Even though President Wilson direly wanted to join, the legislature viewed it as giving up too much congressional power, thus the States did not join, essentially invaliding the diplomatic power it held. That would allow Neville Chamberlain to continue to appease Germany until it was too late. Hope this helps.", "I'm actually writing a paper for a class right now that looks at, in part, the Paris Peace Conference. Its more focused on the Free City of Danzig, how the Allies came to that idea and what its ramifications were. \n\nTo put it simply, it didn't do any good. The Allies were woefully unprepared for the mess that is the ethnic composition of east central Europe. It was impossible to properly follow Wilson's goal of national self-determination, and millions of people became minorities in the various states that made up the region.\n\nMy focus is currently Polish-German relations, so I'll go in depth on that. The biggest issue was in (the former) West Prussia and Silesia. West Prussia was largely given to Poland, including the strip to the Baltic known as the Polish Corridor; this cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany, which angered nearly everyone in Germany. They also protested at Danzig being made a Free City, as the population was 95% German. \n\nSilesia was a total mess in that the population was something like 60-40 in favour of Germans. A plebiscite would be held to determine the fate, and a rather arbitrary line was drawn splitting it up between Poland and Germany; neither side liked the outcome.\n\nAll this was known and debated back in the interwar period. No German government accepted Danzig, and constantly looked at ways to reincorporate it. When the Nazis came to power, Hitler exploited the border issues with Poland to create nationalistic fervour amongst the Germans. It ultimately would be used as part of the pretext for the invasion of Poland in 1939."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ph3b9", "title": "Is there an explanation for the popularity of the name \" Thomas\" in early 16th century England?", "selftext": "I enjoy studying this period especially Henry VIII's reign, I've notice many prolific individuals are named Thomas, for example  Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Howard. Is there a reason for this? Or just the name was in vogue at the time? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ph3b9/is_there_an_explanation_for_the_popularity_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw69ekr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, popular names in the later Middle Ages *really* tended to cluster. Consider that 50% of Henry VIII's wives were named a variety of Catherine and 33% of them Anne. (And Anne Boleyn's father and maternal grandfather, in addition to the uncle you name, were both Thomas).\n\nIn some cases it's simple generational transfer--Anne's uncle Thomas Howard is the oldest son of Thomas Howard. The zeitgeist for the popularity of this particular name, however, is almost certainly the cult of 12th century bishop-martyr-saint Thomas Becket. (Latin *cultus*, devotional practices surrounding a particular saint or Church celebration like prayers of intercession, dedicated sermons and hymns, pilgrimages to a shrine, etc.)\n\nPossibly after St. George (England's patron saint), Becket was *the* saint of late medieval England. The popularity of martyr-saints towards the end of the Middle Ages (in conjunction with a lack of new actual martyrs) only promoted Becket's popularity. Recall that Chaucer's pilgrims are en route to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. He usurped a place for himself alongside Paul as co-patron saints of London. Parish and civic guilds frequently adopted him as their patron saint. While plays revolving around saints' lives and miracles weren't as common in England, there are actually quite a few examples of Becket ones from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They were popular enough among potential audiences that they're noted to serve as fundraising events for some of those guilds! And Becket's murder certainly brought the entertainment. Surviving records note payment to a local laundry for washing Becket's \"blood\" off the vestments worn by the actor during the martyr scene.\n\nIt's interesting to note that in the sixteenth century, the various efforts at a Protestant Reformation went after the cult of Becket with *extra* zeal--even to the extent of crossing out his name in manuscripts (but [save the artwork!](_URL_0_)), or cutting out just his specific feast day from [liturgical calendars.](_URL_1_) That's more likely a reaction to the actual saint's perceived role as martyr for the Church standing up to the king, than any connection with the multitude of reforming Thomases around Henry.\n\n*Pictures courtesy of the amazing British Library's digitized manuscripts collection.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/GwqqMWd.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/bROIv7E.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1x2ft9", "title": "Did farming practices not change for over a millennium between about 0 AD and the 17th Century?", "selftext": "I am currently taking a free Coursera course called the Age of Sustainable Development. One of the assertions made by Professor Sachs is that \"You could take a farmer from Roman times and if possible put him down into England on a farm in the 17th century and he would feel relatively at home.\"\n\nCan anyone verify this? It sounds rather dubious to me. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x2ft9/did_farming_practices_not_change_for_over_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf7jpzo", "cf7qpb5", "cf856ko"], "score": [5, 3, 4], "text": ["Farming practices indeed changed a lot as well as tools and practices. Three-field rotation, mouldboard ploughs, the widespread use of horse shoes, improved horse harnesses, windmills and the achievements of the Arab Agricultural Revolution etc. \n\nOf course, the difference between farming in the Roman era and in the 17th century is far smaller than between a 17 century and now, but this is applicable to a whole lot of other things. ", "As a farmer, it sounds extremely dubious. By the 17th century new world crops like corn (maize), potatoes and tomatoes would have been spreading around Europe. Now, that being said, the 18th century would bring many more changes, as Jethro Tull introduced his seed drill in 1701.", "Farming had not changed beyond all recognition, but it had changed between Roman times and 17th century England.  The iron plough had been introduced, and the mouldboard plough. The plough was now more often drawn by horses than oxen (and even ox ploughs may have post dated Roman times).  This was partly due to the innovation of the horse shoe.\n\nFarming had become more productive.  A farmer could grow more.  Monasteries had introduced new crops and farming techniques.  New crops from the New World were gradually being introduced, and some from the old world like sugar cane (but not in the average English farm).\n\nMore land was cultivated, forests had been cleared.  Expansion of Agriculture had perhaps peaked in the 13th century.  Thereafter, the little ice age caused a more problematic climate for agriculture in Europe, and the Black Death had depopulated the countryside.\n\nBy the 17th century, agriculture had perhaps mostly recovered from these setbacks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c84pic", "title": "Japanese immune to European disease?", "selftext": "Can someone with appropriate knowledge on the subject educate me on the factors that allowed Japanese people in early 1400's to not be infected by diseases from Portuguese? Or later once the Americans opened the trade routes how diseases seemed to not impact the island nation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c84pic/japanese_immune_to_european_disease/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esjuh9c"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry my dates are off, I meant the 1542 arrival of the Portuguese."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qy5u9", "title": "When the Romans flooded the colosseum for mock sea battles how did they get the water in and out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qy5u9/when_the_romans_flooded_the_colosseum_for_mock/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4wtrvq"], "score": [50], "text": ["We don't really know. It must have been done by aqueducts, and we know which ones fed the area, but the site of the Flavian Amphitheater was completely renovated at and under ground level under Domitian, and as far as I am aware no archaeological evidence of the actual means of how the site was flooded remains. We know that naumachiae were known for rapidly changing land shows and water shows, but no text refers to how it was done. However, the [Flavian Amphitheater was in fact rarely used for naumachiae.](_URL_0_) Most naumachiae were done in natural or artificial basins, which could be flood and drained from the Tiger or sometimes aqueducts (Augustus flooded his from the Aqua Alsietina since it's water was found to be nasty) or in the case of Nero's, in temporary amphitheaters built near the Tiber that could be drained easily. The Flavian Amphitheater was only used for naumachiae a couple of times, and we don't really know how or what it looked like. We assume that the Flavian Amphitheater was flooded with the floor serving as the basin's bottom, but it need not have been so. There's a surviving basin for aquatic shows (probably fish and sea monsters, it's too small for naumachiae) dug into the ground of a smaller amphitheater at Merida--it's below ground level so the idea would have been to put a false floor on top when land shows were staged. Since we have no idea what the Flavian Amphitheater looked like below ground before Domitian added the basements we see now there's no way of knowing--the fact that the naumachiae were only staged early in the amphitheater's life suggests that whatever Domitian did he made it difficult to flood the amphitheater (and certainly no remnants of a drainage system survive)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37l772/did_the_romans_really_fill_amphitheatres_with/"]]}
{"q_id": "46m6ws", "title": "How extensive was the industrialization of Manchukuo during Japanese rule?", "selftext": "As the title implies I'm curious on the economic development of Manchukuo during its existence as a Japanese puppet, from what I've heard it was to be an industrial powerhouse in Asia had the war not started, what was its output at its height? Did it rival Japan or China? What cities/regions were major centers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46m6ws/how_extensive_was_the_industrialization_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d06lx4o"], "score": [3], "text": ["Under the Manchukuo 5 years development plan(\u6e80\u5dde\u7523\u696d\u958b\u767a\u4e94\u30ab\u5e74\u8a08\u753b), group of bureaucracy and military person \"Niki Sansuke(\u5f10\u30ad\u53c2\u30b9\u30b1)\" including [Nobusuke Kishi] (_URL_0_) \nmanagemented to puppet country.  \nCommon belief said the target of the plan could not be achieved cause priority to the food demand due to the war in China.Then the major part of effort for industrial development has been abandoned in 1941 and it moved its emphasis on agriculture.But according to a recent study of Manchuria economy is now also clear that had evolved little by little during war in Pacific.   \nIf you are interested in numbers and charts, this paper will be helpful.[1940s Manchukuo industry](_URL_1_) (sorry in Japanese language)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi", "https://rikkyo.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_uri&item_id=3154&file_id=18&file_no=1"]]}
{"q_id": "4a5v3w", "title": "What sources do historians use to verify Stalin's supposed killings and deadly purges?", "selftext": "The most famous historians on the topic of Stalin's USSR seem to admit that their evidence comes from rumors and such:\n\n >  My collaboration with the people I have mentioned was based exclusively on personal initiative and trust. I did not make use of or have access to any closed archives, \u201cspecial collections,\u201d or any other limited-access depositories and I am not familiar with any.\n >  \n >  [...]\n >  \n >  In the nature of things there could not be a published source for much of the information in this book; it was passed on by the victims of repression or their friends or relatives.\n\n- Medvedev, Roy. \"Let History Judge\". New York: Columbia University Press, 1989\n\n >  For no other period [the Great Purges of the 1930s] or topic have historians been so eager to write and accept history-by-anecdote. Grand analytical generalizations have come from secondhand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories (\u201cMy friend met Bukharin\u2019s wife in a camp and she said\u2026\u201d) have become primary sources on central political decision making. The need to generalize from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumors into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation. Indeed, the leading expert on the Great Purges [Conquest] has written that \u201ctruth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay\u201d and that \u201cbasically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor.\u201d [The Great Terror, 754]\n >  \n >  [Footnote: Such statements would be astonishing in any other field of history. Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence. Conquest goes on to say that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with one another. This procedure would be sound only if rumors were not repeated and if memoirists did not read each other\u2019s works.]\n >  \n >  As long as the unexplored classes of sources include archival and press material, it is neither safe nor necessary to rely on rumor and anecdote.\n >  \n >  [...]\n >  \n >  [Footnote: The basic works on the Great Purges are uniformly based on memoir sources. Conquest, Terror, Medvedev, History: and Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago, all rely almost exclusively on personal accounts.]\n >  \n >  Soviet history has no tradition of responsible source criticism. Scholars have taken few pains to evaluate bias, authenticity, or authorship. Specialists have accepted \u201csources\u201d that, for understandable reasons, are anonymously attributed (\u201cUnpublished memoir of\u201d), and treat them as primary.\n >  \n >  [Footnote on Page: Much of the documentation in Medvedev\u2019s and Solzhenitsyn\u2019s works is of this form, as is much of the samizdat material. Such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history. One would be dubious about a footnote to the \u201cunpublished memoir of the Duc de\u201d in a work on the French revolutionary terror.\n >  \n >  [...]\n >  \n >  Each of the emigre and defector sources represents a variant on the vast pool of such rumors and stories [regarding the Kirov assassination], but clearly none of them was in a position to know anything about their veracity. The authors seemed to pick the stories that fit together into particular schemes, and subsequent historians followed suit.\n >  \n >  Indeed, in the rush to support a particular scenario, scholars have been strangely selective in their use of emigre memoirs. They have accepted and used those that supported their preconceptions and ignored those that did not. Students have embraced the rumors and flawed stories of Orlov, Barmine, and Nicolaevsky while ignoring accounts that call Kirov a \u201cconservative,\u201d describe underground oppositionist plots in the \u201930s, and argue for the existence of a planned military coup against Stalin. The point is not that these unused memoirs are any more credible than the familiar ones, but that all memoir accounts should be subjected to intense critical attention that takes contradictions into account. All claims or hypotheses based solely on secondhand gossip or rumor should be rejected according to the elementary rules of evidence.\n\n- Getty, A. \"Origins of the Great Purges\". Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985\n\n(A LOT more [here](_URL_0_))\n\nSo, I ask: What sources do historians use to verify Stalin's supposed killings and deadly purges, besides rumors and stories? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a5v3w/what_sources_do_historians_use_to_verify_stalins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0y3qhi"], "score": [2], "text": ["As others have pointed out, your problem is that you cite research from the 80s when Russian archives were very hard to impossible to get into for Western scholars.\n\nNow that the archives are open, we can utilize sources on the purges and the Stalinist killings that were not available to us as historians in the 80s.\n\nJ\u00f6rg Baberowski, one of Germany's foremost historians of Stalinism for example uses the sources of the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History as well as the State Archive for the Russian Federation. These include the files of the Soviet Politburo as well as the Central Committee and probably most importantly, the NKVD and Gulalg secretariats (GARF -- State Archive for the Russian Federation, Fonds 9401 and 9414). Form these files it is possible tor reconstruct the purges with incredible accuracy for they include all the confessions, all the notes of Stalin on who was to be purged and even a large body of death sentences signed by Stalin directly. Taken together with the personal papers of people like Molotv and others of the close circle, historians were able to a large part substantiate what was written about in the 80s as based on rumors, e.g. surrounding the Kirov assassination.\n\nFor further use of these sources, look for example to J\u00f6rg Baberowski or Anne Applebaum who are both able to use them to paint a quite vivid picture of Stalinist terror and methods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://espressostalinist.com/the-real-stalin-series/anticommunist-fairy-tales-about-stalin/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9pr2ia", "title": "Why did Akkadian come to replace Sumerian as the dominant language in Mesopotamia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pr2ia/why_did_akkadian_come_to_replace_sumerian_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e84d67z"], "score": [6], "text": ["Scholars used to believe in a linear model of linguistic development in ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerians migrated into the region, founded the first cities, and were conquered by Sargon and the Akkadians, who replaced the Sumerian language with their own, Semitic, language. Today we have a much more nuanced and complicated picture of that process.\n\nThere is evidence for the use of Akkadian *and* Sumerian from virtually all periods of cuneiform history, including the earliest periods. Names in Sumerian or Akkadian are short phrases, and as a result we can identify and analyze the grammar appearing in them. A name can contain Sumerian or Akkadian elements, and sometimes both, but our weaker understanding of the writing system concealed this nuance until a few decades ago. It seems to us now that Akkadian was spoken right alongside Sumerian, even before writing, especially in northern Babylonia.\n\nFrom the perspective of history in the ancient world, the dominant language is the *administrative* language because those are the institutions that produce the documentation that we read. Cuneiform writing was invented to facilitate book-keeping and accounting, and scribes throughout the Ancient Near East were primarily employed to manage the financial systems of the period. So when someone says that Akkadian \u201creplaced\u201d Sumerian in ancient Mesopotamia, they mean that the language of administrative documents changed.\n\nThe administration of the Sumerian city-states changed c. 2334 BCE when Sargon\u2019s forces conquered the whole of the region. Part of his new governmental policy was the appointment of both state and temple officials who were loyal to the regime, and it seems that these officials had a preference for Akkadian over Sumerian. The same scribes likely were doing the same work under the new regime, but they likely shifted the language to accommodate their new bosses. We do not have any inscriptions talking about the new king\u2019s linguistic policy, so it may have simply been the personal preference of the new officials just as it could have been a result of a royal policy.\n\nThe use of Akkadian spread rapidly beginning in this period, and it will eventually turn up in Syria, where it replaces Eblaite, and will go on to eventually appear in Egypt and Anatolia. Sumerian will return as the administrative language during the Ur III period (c. 2112 \u2013 2004 BCE) before declining, but it will remain a spoken language for some time and literary language for the rest of Babylonian history. In fact, the very last cuneiform tablets ever written were still primarily using Sumerian.\n\nFor more info, see Michalowski 2000 - \"The Life and Death of the Sumerian Language in Comparative Perspective\" for overview and bibliography"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1c2ksd", "title": "What archaeologically-interesting sites should headline a trip to Italy today?", "selftext": "(Apologies in advance if this needs to be deleted, I realize it's borderline but I genuinely am interested in the Historians' answer, not the tourist bureau's.)\n\nWhen my wife and I traveled to Ireland/Scotland/Northern England last year, our trip was heavy on sites like Newgrange, Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda, and the dozens of castles, ruins, burial sites etc... that crossed our path. Now we're planning for next year's trip to Italy and I'd very much like to do the same there. Not that I want to skip museums entirely, but I'm more interested in actual places of interest, rather than collections. An example would be Villa Adriana which, while I'm not certain of it being \"the best\" example of its kind, makes a nice bookend to seeing Hadrian's Wall.\n\nBonus points if it's off the beaten path. It's hard not to hear about Pompeii; what am I NOT likely to hear much about? We'll have a car for about half the trip (so ~10 days) so it doesn't need a bus tour.\n\nThanks!\n\nEDIT: Please don't be scared off by the excellent responses so far - I'll have to marry up my recommendations with the itinerary my wife is concurrently working on, so more options are always better. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c2ksd/what_archaeologicallyinteresting_sites_should/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9cfew7", "c9cgwbm", "c9chyf3", "c9cogea"], "score": [5, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["While I don't think you should pass up Pompeii just because it's well known, Herculaneum is supposedly really neat. Also, don't pass up the chance to look around the hilariously filthy city that is Naples (and get pizza somewhere small and off the beaten path). The Castel Nuovo was basically empty when I went there to check it out. It was pretty neat. If you're going to be in Rome, the Coliseum is a must, but you can get that done pretty quickly. A lot of people then wander around the forum, but less go up on the Palatine Hill. I was definitely more impressed by the Palatine than the Forum. Also, despite being well known, the Pantheon is simply incredible. I haven't been there in 13 years, but it still sticks out in my memory. ", "Unfortunately, Italy really isn't my specialty so I can't offer, but I think a good place to start would be this [UNESCO list](_URL_0_). UNESCO sites tend to be held up to a fairly good standard of accessibility and maintenance (there are exceptions like Gobekli, however) and are also generally well marked. Beyond that, here are some suggestions drawn from my limited experiences in Italy and suggestions from others:\n\n* Villa Adriana in Tivoli is absolutely stunning. No excuses, it is a must see.\n\n* I have sometimes heard Pistum called the coolest set of ruins in Italy. Unlike virtually everywhere else in Italy the ruins are relatively untouched by later development, and unlike Pompeii it is still relatively off the tourist trail.\n\n* Ostia is my favorite site in Italy, and is a much more interesting site than Pompeii. When I went in '06 it was pretty quiet.\n\n* Tiberius' villa on Capri is worth the trip. Capri itself is almost nauseatingly beautiful, and the villa is surprisingly well preserved.\n\n* Rome itself possess only a fraction of the ruins it once did, as runaway development in the past century and a half have taken an incalculable toll on its heritage. Of course, it still has enough sites to make entire countries weep, particularly in the old city center. Be sure  not to ignore the Baths of Caracalla, Basilica of Maxentius Forum Boarium, Domus Aurea (if it is open), and Forum of Trajan in your haste to see the Colosseum and Forum Romanum. Slightly outside that area are the Servian and Aurelian Walls, the Castel Sant'Angelo, the Castra Praetoria and tombs, tombs, tombs. If you like tombs, and we all like tombs, don't miss the Mausoleum of Augustus, the tomb of the Cornelii, the Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas, the Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella, and of cource the world famous and immortal Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker. There are a lot of smaller tombs in the archaeological parks along the Via Latina and, especially, the Via Appia.\n\n* Pompeii and Herculaneum are of course the 700 pound gorillas. perfect preservation, frozen in time yada yada yada. You may get more out of them if you read Mary Beard's *Fires of Vesuvius* before visiting.\n\n* Southern Italy is generally considered to be more archaeologically endowed than northern Italy, and I have heard particularly nice things about Thurii and Canos in Puglia.\n\n* Ravenna has some very nice Late Roman structures.\n\n* Pre-Roman you are a bit out of luck unless you go to Sicily or Sardinia, unfortunately. There are some nice Etruscan tombs in the north.\n\n* For the Medieval and Renaissance periods you are confronted with an embarrassment of riches. Toss a brick in Tuscany and you will damage a priceless twelfth century structure.", "For really off-the-beaten-path stuff, you should check out the database at _URL_0_. It's far from complete, but it does make it very easy to correlate with your itinerary. Mind that the locations of the sites are sometimes rather off if you're not zoomed in far enough in the maps (some wonky software thing that causes the different map layers to be unconnected, I assume), so be sure to locate your sites on Google Maps or other sources as well (or take down the address or coordinates (which can be used in gps navigation systems as well)).", "You HAVE to go to Herculaneum. It costs more the pompeii and the site is smaller. There are also some pretty iconic spots in pompeii that you should see. But if I had to pick I would go to Herculaneum every time. \n\nPompeii has been exposed to the weather for 100 years, so all you see is this dull sand color. Herculaneum is an ongoing excavation and is much more recent, hence better preserved. It is so colorful and awesome. My favorite part is  the exposed beach front right at the foot of  a 40 foot wall of soil."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/it"], ["http://www.megalithic.co.uk/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=13"], []]}
{"q_id": "2y4nyy", "title": "Are there any surviving epics or sagas from the Hittites?", "selftext": "I don't know a lot about them and was wondering if we had any surviving \"major\" stories or myth cycles from their culture. Is there anything along the lines of Homer, Volsunga Saga, the Heracles stories,  Snorri, Ramayana, etc. surviving from their culture?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y4nyy/are_there_any_surviving_epics_or_sagas_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp66w15"], "score": [13], "text": ["Yes, certainly, though the surviving remains aren't nearly as substantial as the other examples you mention, and they're much more fragmentary. [Here's a good anthology.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe most substantial ones, and probably the most interesting, are the Hurro-Hittite \"Kumarbi cycle\" and \"song of Ullikummi\", both of which give Hittite renderings of Hurrian versions of the succession myth -- one primordial god is usurped by another, who in turn is usurped by the god who is now ruler of the universe -- which can be seen in some other mythologies in the Near East and Greece, especially the Babylonian *Enuma elish*. The other really important one -- though again, it doesn't survive intact enough to appreciate it fully -- is the \"song of release\", a Hittite epic based on a Hurrian story, where both mortals and gods play a role in a way comparable to the *Iliad*, and which revolves around the destruction of the city of Ebla in Syria.\n\nAll the relevant source materials are given in the book linked in my first paragraph. The interpretation of Hurrian is still a work in progress, so bear that in mind when trying to read these rather esoteric texts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bookdepository.com/Hittite-Myths-Second-Edition-Gary-Beckman/9780788504884"]]}
{"q_id": "1bwzk5", "title": "As an average soldier, in any time period, what are my chances of survival being on the losing side of a battle?", "selftext": "I realise my question is quite vague, but as a casual observer of history I hear a lot about who wins and loses particular battles but not much about what that means in terms of men lost and soldiers available for future battles. So I am open to any response, in a way I am quite fascinated in the way a losing army reacts in battle and how survivable it is.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bwzk5/as_an_average_soldier_in_any_time_period_what_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9aw6yc", "c9awoaj", "c9az5at", "c9b2may"], "score": [20, 10, 5, 4], "text": ["I am going to start with Rome, just because this question is so vauge that if I went any earlier, I would be typing for hours. \n\nRome had one of the most effective foriegn policies I have ever known about.  It could be extremely harsh, or it could be quite merciful.  If you went up against a Roman Legion in battle, you were pretty certainly going to lose.  So a lot of the European tribes, like the Gauls, just surrendered, either individually or in groups.  These warriors were converted into auxilliary scouts, message carriers, and special units for areas where the Roman legion formations were not so effective (such as heavy forests, rocky or uneven ground).  They lost, but the Romans treated them very well.  On the other side of that coin, if you did not treat Romans with respect in wartime, they were pretty much evil.  They planted salt into the lands of Carthage so that they could never exist as a country again.  The Celtic people, who would cut off the heads of Roman negotiators, were massacred. \n\nAll of the Islamic invaders that popped up after that time either treated the losers of a battle very well or very horribly.  They were pretty varied.  How's that for vauge? \n\nIn developed Asia, the rules for this are weird in our own western way of thinking but oddly fascinating.  Basically, it was wrong to kill someone you did not need to kill, but it was also wrong to be taken prisoner or get into a fight you did not win.  So most Oriental people would die during the battle fighting to the last breath refusing to be captured even against impossible odds.  If they were captured, they were allowed to commit suicide.  \n\nMedevial European wars are actually pretty much the worst.  The knights would be all knightly to each other (if it was one of the better ones), but the foot soldiers would all die, because the knights did not even really see them as people.  No medical supplies were given, nothing.  \n\nWhen firearms were introduced into the picture, all of this changed a lot.  When you use a sword, it is not as certain who will win in a fight.  If you point a gun at someones head, they know that you have the drop on them and they surrender.  So with guns, oddly enough, a lot more prisoners were taken, not because of mercy, but because a musket has only one bullet and it is easier to take prisoners than to use the bullet and then get shot because you used the bullet.  A lot of these prisoners were kept prisoners throughout the war, and then let go after.  That is basically how it has worked since then. ", "Before the Russo-Japanese War (during which Japan inoculated all her soldiers and sailors), every army in modern history suffered more disease deaths than combat deaths.  So it was not a general rule that whether a soldier made it through a war depended on whether he was on the winning or the losing side.\n\nIn addition to potentially killing more enemy soldiers than vice-versa, the winner of a field battle might be able to seize guns and supplies abandoned during the retreat; and demoralize the opposing army.  As an added benefit, the losing side of a battle often falls into squabbling about whose fault the loss is, which can destabilize weak political systems. \n\nI'm not giving you numbers because, so far as I know, no one has added up the casualties of the losing side of every war in every time period! :)", "While he was uniting the Mongol tribes/confederations Genghis Khan, Temugin at the time, differentiated himself from most other khans by annexing defeated tribes instead of attempting to destroy them.  Women and children would be taken under his protection and defeated warriors who displayed loyalty to their khan would be rewarded.  So defeated Mongols had it fairly good.\n\nThis is all on wiki I believe, most of my information comes from a book I can find when I get home.  \n\nEdit:  Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection\nby John Man \n", "Aside from \"vagueness\", another problem is that each battle is different as well. Maybe specific battles are more interesting?\n\nAs far as aftermaths of battles go, one famous example that comes to mind is the [Battle of Solferino](_URL_1_), which motivated Jean-Henri Dunant to write \"A Memory Of Solferino,\" which is both an account of the battle, and a story about the treatment of the soldiers after the battle. This set off a chain of events leading to the Red Cross and Geneva conventions.\n\nYou can read the whole book here, it's only 38 pages, including a modern introduction and epilogue to put it all into context: [A Memory Of Solferino](_URL_0_) \n\nKeep in mind that Henry Dunant was not present at the battle itself, only at the aftermath. More importantly, he wrote this with a humanitarian agenda, so exaggerations to get across the horrors of war are to be expected. For example:\n\n >  Here is a hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness; Austrians and Allies trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with sabre and bayonet. No quarter is given; it is a sheer butchery; a struggle between savage beasts, maddened with blood and fury. Even the wounded fight to the last gasp. When they have no weapon left, they seize their enemies by the throat and tear them with their teeth.\n\nEven when you think of the past as more primitive and brutal, I hope you agree that \"killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses\" sounds quite unlikely, especially when you realise that by modern estimations one in a hundred men actually died. It's still a fascinating read of course, and it resulted in the Red Cross and Geneva conventions so I think the historical inaccuracy is forgiveable."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://pspanet.in/drupal/books/micp/dunantbook.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Solferino"]]}
{"q_id": "69pxzx", "title": "Did houses really use to be built with a larger upper floor to cheat attempts to tax property by its ground floor's surface area?", "selftext": "Over at [this /r/pics thread](_URL_0_), plenty of folk are making this claim about the house in the picture, yet providing zero sources. This honestly seems like some made-up story to say \"oh, look how stupid they were back then\"; I find it hard to believe that government figures in tribute-based economies wouldn't figure out that this was going on in such a large scale and devise new methods for collecting taxes. Does anyone know why it was actually done?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69pxzx/did_houses_really_use_to_be_built_with_a_larger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhapdym"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't answer your question, but I have a related one:\n\nWhen I visited the Old Fort of Galle in Sri Lanka (colonial Ceylon), I remember touring some colonial-era buildings that were extremely narrow but quite deep, sometimes IIRC opening up in the rear. The tour guide claimed it was because houses were taxed in colonial times on the basis of linear feet of street frontage and hence were built deep but narrow--a house 8' by 20' would be taxed at half the rate of one 16' wide along the street but only 10' feet deep despite the identical square footage of their floor plan.\n\nGoogling has failed me in turning up sources for this -- does anyone know if it was true?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/69o04f/the_oldest_house_in_aveyron_france_built_some/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bt0e5w", "title": "How the heck was modern China able to stay unified after WW2 ?", "selftext": "I'm not that versed in Chinese history, but, it seems to me that the empires that existed around the area always maintained their might via what essentially boils down to:\n\n* Strong economy/trade\n* Strong army\n* A lot of local independence\n* Advanced technology\n\nThere isn't a unifying language or culture that would hold people together, but it was easier to be ruled by the Dynasty than to fight them, especially when \"ruled\" often times didn't amount to any difference for either the subjects or the local rulers.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHowever, the China of post WW2 seemed to have had a strong grip on all the lands, despite seemingly having none of those advantages, as in, it's army was weak, it's economy was garbage, it didn't offer a lot of local independence and it was technologically behind by a few decades compared to most other global powers.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI perfectly understand how China is able to maintain it's territory nowadays, but I can't make sense how it was able to be unified in the mid 20th century under the CCP, granted, with fewer lands than those around the glory times of the Qing dynasty, but not significantly so (when you consider quality of land, not quantity alone).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAre there any books on this subject ? Or is it still too touchy for us to have a chance of getting a somewhat objective historical account (as in, not influenced by Western propaganda bolstering up the role of military oppression nor CCP propaganda focusing on portraying an exaggerated sense of national unity within the nation) ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bt0e5w/how_the_heck_was_modern_china_able_to_stay/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eosq28c", "eosuskk", "eov66zt"], "score": [27, 21, 2], "text": ["Well there\u2019s a lot to unpack here, but I think the central point to note is that China didn\u2019t really stay unified after the Second World War, in fact it fought an incredibly bloody, brutal, and divisive civil war between the 1945-1949. Historically speaking to give a brief rundown of modern Chinese history, the CCP did not emerge from the Second World War as rulers of China, but only after a much overlooked but very significant civil war . \n\nChina was ruled by a monarchy, under the Qing dynasty until 1911, when a broadly disorganised and spontaneous revolution swept the Qing from power and established the Republic of China. The ROC was initially led by the Tongmenghui, a revolutionary party led by Sun Yat-sen, but was quickly replaced by a militaristic dictator, Yuan Shikai. After Shikai\u2019s death in 1916, China splintered into a central government (the Beiyang Government) and a number of regional strongmen known as the warlords. The Tongmenghui now reformed as the Koumintang, a nationalist party who attempted to reunify China under central control. In doing so, they formed an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, which became known as the First United Front. \n\nPiece by piece the coalition of nationalists (KMT) and communists (KMT) managed to regain control of China, expanding their control both militarily and diplomatically from their stronghold in southern China, to implicit control of most of the country. However, I\u2019m 1927, the KMT leader, Chiang Kai Shek betrayed the communists by launching an attack on then known as the Shanghai Purge, in which CCP officials were ambushed and executed in large numbers. This then spread into a much wider attack on the communists throughout China in what came to be known as the \u2018White Terror\u2019. \n\nThis marked the end of the First United Front, and the beginning of a civil war between the CCP and KMT. The struggle would last for years, and the CCP as underdogs would almost be defeated many times. \n\nHowever, in 1936, the two sides reconciled temporarily under the threat of Japanese aggression. This lead to the Second United Front, and saw the invasion of China by Japan the following year. The two sides nominally fought together against Japan, but the two sides quickly fell apart and open conflict resumed in 1945 after Japan\u2019s surrender. What followed was an incredibly bloody, and brutal civil war in which the CCP, from an initial position of weakness, eventually defeated the KMT in 1949 and was able to establish itself as rulers of the news People\u2019s Republic of China. \n\nSo from what you can see there, is ultimately China wasn\u2019t unified before the war, and wasn\u2019t afterwards either, having fought a devastating civil war to reunify that was only concluded in 1949. \n\nHowever, to question why the CCP was able to hold such a wide territory is another matter. For one part, the CCP by 1949 had a very large, experienced, and well equipped military. But, more importantly the CCP offered a political platform that promised to provide positive change for the mass of China\u2019s population, in comparison the KMT offered much and provided little. As such, many genuinely supported the CCP. Meanwhile, the KMT has proved itself an ineffective and corrupt ruling party, and had become unpopular, even within its base. \n\nSadly though, as noted by Dik\u00f6tter, the realIties of liberation would prove somewhat less than ideal. \n\nIt\u2019s often difficult to try and compare two countries respective historical journeys, in the fashion you\u2019ve asked with your question, for while some regions found instability in the aftermath of war, the Second World War for China was really little but an interlude in a much longer struggle for mastery of China which had been going on since at least 1911. \n\nThere\u2019s a number of good books and authors about Chinese history if you\u2019re interested. Jonathan Fennel\u2019s history of modern China is very good and well written for non experts, and Jonathan Spence\u2019s Search for Modern China is also highly highly recommended. Both cover the entire period from the Qing to the Maoist era (and beyond). Further there\u2019s a number of good writers: anything by Kirby, Eastman or Zarrow is good, while Westad and Pepper write very good books about the 1945-1949 civil war.\n\n\nEdit: For a far more in-depth discussion of the 1937-1949 period see u/Enclavedmicrostates brilliant answer below.", "A common but likely apocryphal anecdote relates that when a Japanese diplomat tried to apologise to Mao Zedong for the Second Sino-Japanese War, Mao responded that in fact, he should be thanking the Japanese for facilitating the Communist victory over the Nationalists! While this almost certainly didn't happen, it still relates a truth of a sort: the war had essentially done the work of destroying the Communists' enemies for them.\n\nHelpfully, you do elaborate quite a bit, so your question provides quite a useful framework for the answer to follow. Firstly, we need to clear up a major misconception:\n\n >  There isn't a unifying language or culture that would hold people together\n\nWhile it is true that the *spoken* languages of China are very diverse (I should know as I speak one natively and know bits of another), the Nationalists had been promoting Beijing-dialect Mandarin as a *lingua franca* in the 1920s and 30s, and the written language operated on a unified system based on classical Chinese and later Beijing Mandarin. While the idea of a unified Han Chinese 'culture' has always been rather nebulous, there was nonetheless a strong ethnic-nationalist consciousness left over from the waning years of the Qing that served to bind together the vast majority of the Chinese population.\n\n >  However, the China of post WW2 seemed to have had a strong grip on all the lands, despite seemingly having none of those advantages, as in, it's army was weak, it's economy was garbage, it didn't offer a lot of local independence and it was technologically behind by a few decades compared to most other global powers.\n\nWell, China immediately after WW2 was the Nationalist Republic of China, which *didn't* hold onto that land, because four years of civil war ensued in which the Communists won. However, it is actually, paradoxically, kind of true that the Nationalists held onto a more united China than they had in 1937. There are two main reasons for that. Firstly, there was a general recognition that, as a relatively moderate political figure with widespread popularity, Chiang was necessary to keeping the grand coalition of Nationalists, Communists and warlords united. Secondly, the exigencies of the war had given Chiang Kai-Shek and the centre-conservative wing of the Kuomintang the upper hand in its internal power-struggles: the warlords had been driven into the arms of the KMT by the Japanese, while the radical wing had been severely weakened by the defection of its figurehead, Wang Jingwei (Wong Siu-Ming), to the Japanese and his formation of a collaborationist government.\n\nThe one problem was the Communists. Their strategy of predominantly guerrilla warfare against the Japanese had meant they had taken relatively few losses, while broadening their recognition, and by extension recruitment base, substantially. While a KMT campaign had driven the CCP out of its core regions in North China by 1947, a series of CCP offensives with Soviet support, beginning from the heavy industrial centre of Manchuria, was able to let the CCP take over most of China by 1949. This was not achieved by having a 'weak army' \u2013 the People's Liberation Army numbered somewhere in the realm of 4 million by the time the Nationalists evacuated to Taiwan, and over 1.3 million Chinese 'volunteers' were committed to the Korean War in 1950-3. While the economy was weak on the whole in relativel, global terms, the CCP held on long enough to rectify that. Local autonomy was in one sense actually rather substantial, as the anti-landlord campaigns took the form of mass action, largely by tenant farmers, which gave ordinary peasants a chance at direct political activity which had not been possible under the Republic, which operated on an electoral system with limited franchise. State-organised mass participation was still participation, and compared to the apparent malaise of the Nationalists, who in 1938 had deliberately flooded sections of the Yellow River for little apparent gain, the CCP's brand of publicly-serving Marxism-Leninism offered an attractive alternative.\n\n >  I perfectly understand how China is able to maintain it's territory nowadays, but I can't make sense how it was able to be unified in the mid 20th century under the CCP, granted, with fewer lands than those around the glory times of the Qing dynasty, but not significantly so (when you consider quality of land, not quantity alone).\n\nAs noted, the CCP had few enemies and broad support from the agrarian labour class, albeit mainly concentrated in the Yellow River basin to begin with. Both propaganda and policy helped galvanise public opinion in their favour, and was helped by the relative chaos of the preceding decades. Of course, CCP rule took a while to consolidate, but there just doesn't seem to have been a desire for the core regions of China to break away, only the Qing conquests of Tibet and Xinjiang (Manchuria itself having become almost entirely Han thanks to migration). All the regional power concentrations represented by the warlords had been first absorbed into the KMT and in turn obliterated by the CCP. The Communists promised ordinary peasants redress against their traditional oppressors, the landlords. And, in the end, they held onto power strongly enough to survive the tumult of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four, until the beginning of liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping.\n\nAs for sources, there are a couple of more polemical Western authors out there like Frank Dik\u00f6tter, but I would heartily recommend Rana Mitter's *A Bitter Revolution* or Hans van de Ven's *China at War* as good perspectives on the period in question, albeit the former having a broader view than the latter.", "I'd like to take a slightly different approach to answering this question and take a look at how things played out in the periphery, focusing on Xinjiang. Xinjiang had been under the control of various different warlords since the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 who really only paid lip service to the Republican government(s), while Outer Mongolia and Tibet would become independent states. However, unlike in Mongolia and Tibet, Han elites would continue to run the show in Xinjiang, meaning that in the words of the historian Justin Jacobs, \"for the duration of the Republican era, we might say that Xinjiang was one of China's last remaining colonies.\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBy the mid-1930s, Xinjiang had become a Soviet satellite under the warlord Sheng Shicai. It's worth noting that it's unlikely that Stalin sought to outright annex Xinjiang, since [we have telegrams from him](_URL_2_) saying that Sheng's talk of \"Sovietizing\" Xinjiang was \"alarming.\" Returning to the topic at hand, the KMT had spent the years since the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War re-establishing control over the northwest. By 1941, they had managed to bring the Ma family of warlords in Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia into the fold. ([Map for reference](_URL_6_)) The following year, Sheng Shicai would double-cross Stalin, expelling Soviet advisors and aligning himself with the KMT. They had assured him he would remain in power and the finance minister ~~gave him a large bribe~~ paid him $100,000 \"under the pretext of facilitating his work as a provincial governor.\" (Lin, 55) [The money was just resting in his account, that's all.](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis leads to a couple of questions: First, why was the KMT spending resources on the interior? Second, why would Sheng Shicai make the generally bad decisions to not only double-cross Stalin but also trust Chiang Kai-shek?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs /u/EnclavedMicrostate discussed in his answer, the war with Japan is a major factor. Control over Xinjiang would not only provide a lot of territory for the Nationalists, but it would also offer potential supply routes to make up for the loss of sea access and serve as an alternative to the Burma Road. Although \"technical and geographical issues\" prevented the development of large-scale supply routes through Xinjiang, it did serve as a base for extending political influence into other areas, particularly Tibet. (Lin 65) The KMT also saw Xinjiang as \"a springboard into the Middle East,\" from which diplomatic efforts could be launched that could offer China access to the region's oil reserves. (Lin 69) For his part, Sheng thought that the Soviets were going to lose their fight against the Nazis, while Chiang's odds now seemed better given US entry into the war.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSheng would come to regret his choices pretty damn quick: Nationalist troops and several thousand KMT cadres poured into the region, rapidly starting to build up colonization and infrastructure projects to use the area's resources for the war effort. In 1944, Sheng tried to switch back to the Soviets, who flatly rejected him. KMT control had become firm enough that Chiang was able to remove Sheng as governor and appoint his pick in September. The reassertion of central control \"provoked a backlash among ethnic minorities,\" leading to several uprisings by Uyghurs and Kazakhs, most notably the 1944 Ili Rebellion carried out by Uyghurs under the banner of the East Turkestan Republic. (Lin 70-71) These revolts generally enjoyed Soviet backing, but this support was largely given in the pursuit of extracting other concessions from the Chinese government. (Wolff 283-285) I would also like to caution against calling these revolts nationalist, however. If you have access to JSTOR, Jacob\u2019s 2010 article on Osman Batur linked below gives a pretty good explanation that narratives of Batur in particular as a Kazakh nationalist hero are later posthumous inventions.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe Ili Rebellion \u201cmay have paradoxically succeeded in doing far more to integrate the Xinjiang region and its people into China proper (*neidi*)\u2014and even more crucially, into the greater national psyche of a Chinese republic\u2014than its leaders ever could have imagined.\u201d (Jacobs 2008, 549) This is largely because of the efforts of General Zhang Zhizhong, who was dispatched to deal with the revolt. After working out a power-sharing agreement with the ETR and enacting several reforms in the province, he embarked on a major effort to ensure that Xinjiang would be popularly perceived as a part of China. This would be achieved through the publication of the \\*Tianshan Pictorial\\* and a tour of China Proper by the Xinjiang Youth Song and Dance Troupe. I don\u2019t want to get too into the weeds here, so if you want more info (and have access to JSTOR), the Justin Jacobs article from 2008 covers this at length. Ultimately, these efforts managed to \u201cmaintain the perceived territorial integrity of\u201d China, even as it was engulfed in an intensifying civil war. (Jacobs 2008, 546) From this point on, Xinjiang would essentially remain under central government control. However, problems would flare up again after Zhang\u2019s removal as governor in 1947, with the ETR rebelling again in 1948.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut how did the CCP end up in charge in Xinjiang? Local Han elites were very willing to defect, and most of the Nationalist leaders in the province defected to the CCP in September 1949, with the remainder fleeing to exile in Taiwan via India. Crucially, one of these defectors was Zhang Zhizhong, who provided pivotal knowledge about the province. This information was made all the more valuable since the remnants of the local Communist Party branch had been all but eradicated in a purge carried out by Sheng Shicai after his 1942 defection. Zhang would \u201ccontinue to play a key role both in the political integration of Xinjiang during the early years of the People's Republic of China and in the subsequent formulation of the Communist state's post-1949 frontier minority policies.\u201d (Jacobs 2008, 548-549) Without the defection of Han elites, \u201cthe Communist takeover of Xinjiang would have been more difficult, and in all likelihood, more violent.\u201d (Lin 73) Meanwhile, the ETR\u2019s leadership was pressured into negotiating with the CCP, but most of its leaders \u201cdied in a mysterious plane crash near Irkutsk\u201d while traveling to the PRC\u2019s proclamation in Beijing. (Wolff 284) Nonetheless, claims by PRC historians that Xinjiang was \u2018peacefully liberated\u2019 are, to put it bluntly, full of it, much like most of the official PRC narrative regarding Xinjiang. The PLA played a key role in consolidating power and quashing local autonomy, and \u201cno fewer than 120 battles were fought over a two-and a-half-year period.\u201d (Jacobs 2010, 1300).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources:\n\nLin, Hsiao-Ting. 2008. From Rimland to Heartland: Nationalist China's Geopolitics and Ethnopolitics in Central Asia, 1937-1952. The International History Review 30 (1) (March 2008): 52-75, [_URL_5_](http://_URL_5_)\n\nJacobs, Justin. 2010. The Many Deaths of a Kazak Unaligned: Osman Batur, Chinese Decolonization, and the Nationalization of a Nomad. The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1291-1314, [_URL_7_](http://_URL_7_)\n\nWolff, David. 2011. STALIN'S POSTWAR BORDER-MAKING TACTICS: East and West. Cahiers Du Monde Russe 52 (2/3) (April-September 2011): 273-291, [_URL_3_](_URL_1_)\n\nJacobs, Justin. 2008. **How Chinese Turkestan Became Chinese: Visualizing Zhang Zhizhong's \"Tianshan Pictorial\" and Xinjiang Youth Song and Dance Troupe**. *The Journal of Asian Studies* 67 (2) (May 2008): 545-591,[ _URL_4_](http://_URL_4_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDIT: Fixed some formatting errors"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bnh162vqk4", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/41708323", "https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/121892", "www.jstor.org/stable/41708323", "www.jstor.org/stable/20203377", "www.jstor.org/stable/40109957", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/China_administrative_alt.svg", "www.jstor.org/stable/23308070", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/23308070", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/40109957", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/20203377"]]}
{"q_id": "1uxu9h", "title": "Why was .08 chosen as the legal limit for alcohol when driving, and has that amount changed over time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uxu9h/why_was_08_chosen_as_the_legal_limit_for_alcohol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemriiw", "cemsm91", "cen5nxd"], "score": [36, 9, 3], "text": ["In which country or state or province or territory?\n\nHere in Australia, the blood alcohol limit is 0.05% for fully licensed drivers in all states and territories, zero for probationary drivers and drivers of commercial vehicles (with some other state-by-state variations). And, according to [this Australian website](_URL_0_):\n\n >  At 0.05 BAC drivers are twice as likely to have a crash as before they started drinking.\n\n", "NHTSA is the general authority for the topic in the US - that is to say, if you go to a DWI court, you're going to hear a lot about NHTSA standards. A quick trawl through their research and history can give you some background. That said, they recently recommended lowering the BAC limit to .05.", "For the US, here is a document from the NHTSA explaining why they pushed for this limit (holding highway funds from states until it was set at said level): _URL_0_\n\nHere is the list of reasons compiled from the organizations that desired the .08 limit (copy and pasted from article):\n\n(1) Virtually all drivers are substantially impaired at .08 BAC. At .08 BAC, there are significant decrements in performance of critical driving tasks such as braking, steering, lane changing, judgement and divided attention.5\n\n(2) The risk of being involved in a crash increases substantially by .08 BAC. Compared to drivers with no alcohol in their blood system, the risk of being in a crash gradually increases at each BAC level, but rises very rapidly after a driver reaches or exceeds .08 BAC.6\n\n(3) Lowering the per se limit is a proven effective countermeasure that will reduce alcohol-related traffic fatalities. NHTSA cites a number of studies to substantiate this claim. For example, a study in California found a 12% reduction in alcohol-related fatalities in 1990, the year .08 per se and administrative license revocation laws went into effect.7 A study by Boston University compared five states that lowered their illegal limits from .10 to .08 with five states that did not do so. Researchers found a 16% reduction in the proportion of fatal crashes involving fatally injured drivers whose BACs were .08 or higher in the five .08 states. That same study showed an 18% reduction in the proportion of fatal crashes involving fatally injured drivers at very high BAC levels (.15 or higher) in those .08 states.8 In a 1995 NHTSA study, four states that adopted a .08 BAC limit experienced significant decreases on several measures of alcohol-related fatalities. Decreases in alcohol-related fatalities ranged from 4% to 40% in those states that were studied.9 \nMore recent studies completed in 1999 and 2000 have continued to quantify the effectiveness of .08 per se laws. A study by a team of researchers from Boston University's School of Public Health concluded that states that lowered their illegal levels from .10 to .08 BAC in 1993 and 1994 experienced post-law reductions in alcohol-related fatal crashes.10 A NHTSA-sponsored 1999 study of 50 states and DC concluded that states which enacted .08 BAC laws experienced an 8% reduction in the involvement of drivers with both high and low BAC levels, when compared with the involvement of sober drivers.11 Another report, which studied the effectiveness of the .08 per se law in Illinois, concluded that the number of drivers in fatal crashes with positive BACs in Illinois decreased by 13.7% after implementation of the law.12\n\n(4) A BAC of .08 is a reasonable level at which to set the illegal limit. A .08 BAC is not typically reached with a couple of beers after work, or a glass or two of wine with dinner. The average 170 pound male would have to consume more than four 12 oz. cans of beer within 1 hour on an empty stomach to reach .08 BAC. The average 137 pound female would need at least three cans of beer in one hour on an empty stomach to reach that level. \n\n(5) The public supports levels below .10 BAC. NHTSA surveys show that most people report they would not drive after consuming up to 2 drinks in two hours, and a majority of those who are aware of BAC levels support an illegal limit of .08 or lower for their state.13\n\n(6) Most other industrialized nations have set BAC limits at .08 or lower and have had these laws in place for many years. Austria, Switzerland, Canada and the United Kingdom have set limits at .08. All of the states in Australia have a .05 limit. France and Germany also have a limit of .05, while Sweden's illegal limit is .02 BAC.\n\nEDIT: formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.drinkwise.org.au/you-alcohol/alcohol-facts/drink-driving/"], [], ["http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/alcohol-laws/08History/1_introduction.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4ib2jf", "title": "Is the Battlefield 1 trailer an accurate depiction of WW1 combat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ib2jf/is_the_battlefield_1_trailer_an_accurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2wlehr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not to discourage further discussion but there is a [thread about this](_URL_0_) on our mainpage right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i8bj7/battlefield_1_trailer_accuracy/"]]}
{"q_id": "2wb8ev", "title": "In everyday language we often use \"Soviet\" and \"Russian\" interchangeably. Is this legitimate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wb8ev/in_everyday_language_we_often_use_soviet_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cop7rqk", "copbogd"], "score": [8, 6], "text": ["Not really (although you could argue that common usage and ubiquity makes it essentially fine to get away with).\n\nThe USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was founded in 1922, combining several states which existed under the control of the Communists as a result of the Russian Civil War. The largest of these was Russia SFSR, but also included were Ukrainian SSR, Beylorussian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR (which would be broken up into several Republics later on). The USSR, quite literally, references the Uniting of these constituent Republics into a Federation. More would be added down the line, and by the time the Soviet Union began to crumble, there were fifteen of them. So essentially, during the period of the USSR's existence, Russians were Soviets (well, I know some ex-pats who would disagree with that, but I believe you understand my meaning), but Soviets were not necessarily Russian. And as such, \"Russian\" was not the proper term to refer to the Soviet Union as a whole, just Russia SFSR.\n\nEdit: A reasonable comparison I think would be the penchant for people to say \"England/English\" when they mean \"Britain/British/United Kingdom\".", "Russia was one country in the Soviet Union. It was the most important, most powerful, most prominent country, and it was where the seat of the Soviet power system was. It was where Soviet power started (in 1917), and spread from (in 1922 and onward). In some contexts you can use the terms interchangeably, because they overlap enough. In many you cannot. \n\nStalin, for example, was not Russian \u2014 he was Georgian in origin. Lysenko was Ukrainian in origin. They are both Soviet, but calling them Russian would be incorrect. Talking about \"Russian nukes\" in that period might make one not realize that the nukes in question, while developed in facilities wholly located in Russia, were stationed also in Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan (and much of the testing took place in Kazakhstan). Chernobyl was not a Russian reactor \u2014 it was in Ukraine, and that has important post-Soviet consequences.\n\nI have a friend who is a Russianist who gets very irritated with people when they use \"Russia\" for \"Soviet\" interchangeably, because it under-emphasizes the divisions that existed, some of which were quite important for Soviet politics and history, and all of which are very important for post-Soviet politics and history, when those individual republics became independent countries once again.\n\nThis can look awfully pedantic to the man on the street, but for precise, learned conversation, it is often an important distinction worth getting right. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "254uh2", "title": "What historically has caused the sheer number of assassination attempts on the US President?", "selftext": "To clarify a little - I've been looking at the history of US Presidents and British Prime Ministers. What strikes me is the amount of times an assassination has been attempted (and succeeded) against the US President when compared to the Prime Minister. I'm interested what the historical reasoning for this is. \nThe title sounds like I'm asking what the assassins motive was, this is not the case. I'm more interested in why assassination even becomes an option.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/254uh2/what_historically_has_caused_the_sheer_number_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chdsvpv"], "score": [3], "text": ["I would propose that prime ministers just aren't that important. They don't symbolize a country in the same way a president does. The American presidency is a cultural history subject on its own, whereas in Britain there isn't really a PM cultural history to the same degree. This is probably because there's a royal family that is much more symbolic and culturally relevant to the country's history.\n\nAs far as assassination, it makes a statement. Because the American presidency has such a cultural history and symbolism, if you stand against what the president stands for killing him feels like killing a tyrant (see John Wilkes Booth). People assassinate leaders because they disagree with them on a very deep level (i.e. believe themselves on the opposite side of the fight) or because they are nuts. You aren't going to be able to kill a president with subtlety and pretty much anyone who wants the president dead is going to want to ensure a method that has a reasonable chance of success. So that's why guns are most common in American assassinations."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32609i", "title": "What is a \"Day in the Life\" of Hitler during the war like?", "selftext": "I was just thinking about this the other day. I mean it's just so strange to think about Hitler having relationship problems or going to a bar for a drink. I mean obviously he was a national leader in wartime so he couldn't have that much free time, and couldn't just go out in public without being recognized. But what would it be like on a day-to-day basis?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32609i/what_is_a_day_in_the_life_of_hitler_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq8v7zz"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hitler's average day varied greatly from the beginning to the end of the war. I can only tell you most accurately about the end of the war however. At the end of the war he spent much of his time in his underground bunker along with the top Nazi leaders (many of which fled Germany as they realized the war was lost and left to places such as Argentina). Much of the time was spent devising plans for war and the last stand around Berlin. Some notable events that occured during these last days were Hitler's marriage and him greeting the Nazi youth some as young as 12 that would be sent into battle. During this time Hitler became increasingly depressed as he slowly began to realize that the war was over and his reign was coming to an end.\nSome more information here: _URL_0_\nAlso an assassination attempt was made on Hitler's life in his last days called Operation Valkyrie. It is quite interesting and a movie was made about it quite recently."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dw.de/former-nurse-tells-of-hitlers-last-days/a-1572696"]]}
{"q_id": "2g2vbw", "title": "What was the English contribution to the Pacific Theater in late 1944  &  1945?", "selftext": "I know the English had some carriers in the area. I don't know what campaigns they were involved in or if the English had ground troops or land aircraft in the theater. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g2vbw/what_was_the_english_contribution_to_the_pacific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckf8366", "ckf8k6f"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Britain made two major contributions to the war against Japan in 1944-45. The first was the Burmese campaign, which had been Britain's main contribution since 1941, while the second was the British Pacific Fleet, which are the carriers you mention.\n\nUntil 1945, the Royal Navy confined its operations to the Indian Ocean. During 1944, it began to build up strength in the region, in preparation for a move to the Pacific. In the latter half of 1944, these forces carried out several raids on targets in Indonesia. These began with Operation Cockpit, an attack on the naval base at Sabang, in May 1944, which was carried out by USS Saratoga and HMS Illustrious. Later operations were carried out solely by British carriers. Until 22nd November 1944, Royal Naval forces in the Indian Ocean came under the Eastern Fleet. On the 22nd, the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) formed, and took control of the carrier forces, as well as several modern battleships.  In January 1945, the fleet redeployed to Sydney. While in transit, it took the chance to attack the oil refineries at Palembang, on Sumatra. Most of February was spent working up and replenishing aircraft in Sydney. In March, the BPF began operations alongside the US 5th Fleet as Task Force 57. It's first operation was as part of the covering force for the Battle of Okinawa. The BPF had the job of suppressing the airfields on the Sakishima Islands to prevent kamikaze aircraft from staging from these islands. As the British carriers were more heavily armoured, and thus more survivable against kamikazes, they were also used to suppress the airfields on Taiwan, as it was believed that the most effective kamikaze units were based here. During July 1945, the BPF operated against the main Japanese islands in conjunction with the US 3rd Fleet, operating as TF37. These operations consisted of attacks against airfields, military installations and shipping, including the escort carrier Shimane Maru, the only carrier attacked by the RN in WW2. Transport links were also attacked. Royal Navy submarines also made contributions to the war, primarily from bases in the Indian Ocean. Operation Struggle, the attack on Singapore by two midget submarines, is worth looking up. The RN contribution was perhaps not the most significant, but it taught important lessons in international cooperation and fleet operations.\n\nThe main British Army contribution was the Burma Campaign. This had started in January 1942, with the Japanese invading Burma. British and Empire forces were forced to retreat northwards. Eventually, the front line stabilised along a line running roughly north-east from the Arakan province on the coast to the Chinese border. During the remainder of 1942 and 1943, the front line didn't really move. Neither side could commit a decisive force, due to commitments elsewhere. In early 1944, this changed. The Japanese attempted a major invasion of India, masked by a diversionary attack in the Arakan. The diversionary attack was unsuccessful, while the invasion of India was defeated at Imphal and Kohima. This was probably the Japanese army's most significant defeat until the Russian invasion of Manchuria, with 60,000 dead and over 100,000 wounded. Operations in the latter half of 1944 consisted mostly of pursuing the retreating Japanese forces. Amphibious landings were made to cut off Japanese troops using the coastal road. In March 1945, a Japanese counter-attack attempted to recapture the town of Mektila. This was defeated with heavy casualties. With the aid of an anti-Japanese uprising, the Allied troops made quick advances towards the major port of Rangoon, but were held up until 30th April by strong resistance at Pegu. This allowed the Japanese to evacuate before Operation Dracula, an amphibious attack on Rangoon, took place. The last battle in Burma was the Sittang Bend Battle. Japanese troops inland had been cut off by the Allied advance. These troops, covered by a diversionary attack, attempted to break out. The diversionary attack went in early, and was defeated. Stripped of their covering attack, the attempted breakout was a disaster, with troops falling into ambushes, or drowning crossing monsoon-swollen rivers. Had the atom bombs not been dropped, the next step would have been Operation Zipper, an amphibious assault on the Malaysian Peninsula. \n\nThe RAF mostly operated in support of the British Army in Burma. They made several strategic bombing raids on targets in South East Asia, particularly Singapore. The war ended before the main RAF contribution was ready. This was Tiger Force, a twenty-two squadron strategic bombing force. Operating mainly Avro Lancasters and Lincolns, it would have operated from Okinawa in support of the American strategic bombing offensive. This force consisted of some of the most experienced squadrons of RAF's Bomber Command, including 9 Squadron, which sank the Tirpitz, and 617 Squadron, of Dambusters fame.\n\nWhile not technically British, but falling under their command, ANZAC troops made a strong contribution to the Pacific Theatre. In late 1944 and 1945, they were mainly concerned with mopping up the Japanese presence in Papua New Guinea, and the recapture of much of the Dutch East Indies, particularly Borneo.\n\nFor more information on the BPF, I'd recommend [this article](_URL_0_).\n Max Hasting's Nemesis is a good introduction to the later part of the Pacific Theatre, and is quite detailed on Burma.", "NB \u2014 *British* contribution, not English. It seems like pedantry, until you're talking to a Welshman, a Northern Irishman or a Scot (like me!)\n\nBritain's role in the Pacific tends to get somewhat overlooked \u2014 partly because the theatre was dominated by the US, and partly because the popular memory of Britain's war is largely fixated on the European theatre and the Churchill vs Hitler paradigm. \n\nSo, to put the 1944-1945 situation in its historical context:\n\nThe British and their colonial allies were heavily engaged in the Pacific right from the get-go until July 1945: the Japanese launched attacks on British possessions in the Far East almost simultaneously with the raid on Pearl Harbor \u2014 Hong Kong and British Malaya were attacked on 8 December 1941, and 'Fortress Singapore' came under siege in February 1942. \n\nBritain's major regional interest was India \u2014 the cornerstone of the British Empire \u2014 but also the potential vulnerability of Australia and New Zealand if Japanese expansionism went unchecked. Indian troops were a major component of British forces in southeast Asia.\n\nThe US island-hopping campaign and the long, hard push towards mainland Japan represented one major sub-front in the Pacific Theatre \u2014 meanwhile, British Commonwealth forces were fighting a difficult jungle war in continental southeast Asia (the China Burma India Theatre.) \n\nThe [Burma Campaign](_URL_1_) was Britain's longest of the war, and cycled through multiple failed offensives and stalemates; the real fear was that Japan would mount a more substantial invasion of the Indian subcontinent. The Japanese even sponsored a small corps of Indian nationalists (the Indian National Army) whose objective was to liberate India from British rule.\n\nNow, to answer your actual question:\n\nIn spring of 1944, the Japanese launched the *U-Go* offensive (one of their last), invading northeast India. The offensive was decisively broken by a major Japanese defeat at [the battles of Imphal and Kohima](_URL_5_) \u2014 two of the worst military setbacks the Japanese suffered during the war. In response, Britain launched a series of counteroffensives in mid- and late 1944, driving deep into occupied Burma with the ultimate objective of recapturing Rangoon.\n\nIn January and February 1945, the British forces broke the back of Japanese forces in Burma at the [Battle of Meiktila and Mandalay](_URL_7_);  at this point, the Japanese were fighting (and losing) on at least three fronts: the Chinese were pushing them further and further back, and US forces were closing in on Okinawa.\n\nIn May, the British launched a combined amphibious/airborne attack ([Operation Dracula](_URL_2_)) on Rangoon \u2014 though by that point, the Japanese were already in retreat across the region. Aside from an attempted breakout by encircled Japanese forces at the [Battle of the Sittang Bend](_URL_3_), the campaign in Burma was all but over, and preparations were underway for an invasion of occupied Malaya when the atomic bombs fell.\n\nSo the tl;dr is that Britain was heavily involved in the Pacific \u2014 just not in the bits which have lodged in the popular memory; the British 14th Army is often referred to as the '[Forgotten Army](_URL_4_)' for that reason. I'd suggest looking at Louis Allen's *[Burma: The Longest War](_URL_6_)* or Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper's *[Forgotten Armies. The Fall of British Asia 1941-45](_URL_0_)*. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/Hobbs_THE_BRITISH_PACIFIC_FLEET_IN_1945.pdf"], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Forgotten_Wars.html?id=WQWVrbCNUbsC", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_Campaign", "http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=191", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sittang_Bend", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/21/a8708321.shtml", "http://www.nam.ac.uk/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/britains-greatest-battles/imphal-kohima", "http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Burma.html?id=f1WHkQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1122328.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "25c2sj", "title": "Why are angels often portrayed as infants in Christian paintings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25c2sj/why_are_angels_often_portrayed_as_infants_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chfuypz"], "score": [6], "text": ["Is it possible you are thinking of [putti?](_URL_0_) Putti are not angels in the traditional sense, although they are often confused with cherubim which were a kind of second class of angel. \n\nPutti are interesting fellows-they began as a non-secular symbol, and still represent worldly love, as opposed to god's love. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&biw=768&bih=927&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=C65wU8TSB4aVyATOi4HgDw&q=putti&oq=putti&gs_l=tablet-gws.3...0.0.0.93088.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1c..43.tablet-gws..0.0.0.oVTSseAi-EI"]]}
{"q_id": "24nhes", "title": "What is the history of homework?", "selftext": "When did it start? Wouldn't it have been counterproductive for adolescents that should have been working in the field or helping the family business be stuck doing homework in their room?\n\nThis post was inspired by [this](_URL_0_) wonderful comment by /u/ltlgrmln", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24nhes/what_is_the_history_of_homework/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch8vagf", "ch8vce4", "ch90m6p", "ch940rh"], "score": [195, 39, 6, 7], "text": ["I did some research on the topic but I couldn't pinpoint the beginning of the idea. The sources are ranging between Old Greek Culture and 19th Century.\n\nMost sources agree that homework was frowned upon when the modern school system came up in the 16th Century. As you said correctly, homework was frowned upon because the kids, if they actually go to school, should be able to help the family after school. But not only that, also health issues seemed to be a reason. Lack of sunlight and fresh air got mentioned. It seems that till the launch of the Sputnik in 1957 homework wasn't really popular, but after the launch its popularity raised because people thought that with the successful launch of the Russians the children in the States would fall behind their enemies, so \"not being the most advanced country in the world.\" In the late 60's the popularity of homework went down because parents were worried about the pressure on the students. Homework was limited at that point and this stayed more or less that way till the mid 80's when homework got more popular again because it was used to fight against mediocrity in schools and to help with the increasing load of school work. In the present the same ideology seems to be in the public mind.\n\nConcerning Europe I was just able to find [one source](_URL_2_) that mentions that homework in Germany seemed to be a part of school since the mid 19th century.\n\nSources that were mostly used:\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "I have a followup question to this, that's fairly open-ended (sorry if that's against the rules).  In most classes now (in my US-only experience), the learning \"cycle\" is the teacher gives information during class, and then the student practices that at home.  Is this always what homework has been in all cultures?\n\nA surprising amount of schools now (including the one I teach at) are starting to experiment with \"flipping\" - instead of the \"normal\" way I mentioned, students watch a video or read something at home, and then practice the material during class time with the teacher there.  Is this actually a new (and by new I mean on the scale of a few decades) idea, or have other cultures used this before?\n\nEssentially what I'm asking is if what we in the US think of as homework is what homework has always been, and if all cultures have viewed homework that same way. ", "Thanks for the mention /u/ObsoletePixel. I'd love to hear more answers to this question; I hope we can spark some more great minds to weigh in.\n\nQuestion time for the historians --\n\nHow was the idea of outside work (let's call it internship, apprenticeship, etc.) portrayed in the sense of schooling? Did any Alexandrian era Egyptian, Plato era Greek, or Puritan era American expect to do extra work as it relates to school when they got home? What about other periods?", "I think an interesting way to research this would be to look at literature, especially with young adults as main characters, who might do homework.\n\nThe first thing that comes to mind is Hermann Hesse's semi-autobiographical *Beneath the Wheel*, which was written in 1905 and takes place in a German seminary. The whole premise of the book is that the poor kid's always doing school work and can't develop as a person. \n\nI suppose that might not count as \"homework\" but it brings up another interesting point, that a lot of education was done at boarding schools and the like, so they probably had out of class assignments, but weren't doing them at \"home.\"\n\nSo perhaps if you want to know about \"home\" work, it might be best to start looking at the history of schools; for instance, trying to figure out when \"school\" as we now know it became a thing - less elitist than boarding schools, more community institution than home-schooling. And also, of course, figuring out where you want to examine this, geographically speaking.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians/comments/24mc7a/the_end_of_the_school_year_is_nigh_let_us_talk_about_homework/ch8n54e"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nctm.org/news/content.aspx?id=13798", "http://people.hofstra.edu/Esther_Fusco/ENC204view.pdf#page=8", "http://www.grin.com/de/e-book/63773/haben-hausaufgaben-einen-leistungssteigernden-wert"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ze7eq", "title": "Why didn't Thomas Jefferson ever free his slaves?", "selftext": "He wrote the declaration of independence which states that all men are equal. So what was he thinking when he wrote that but still owned slaves?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ze7eq/why_didnt_thomas_jefferson_ever_free_his_slaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftffba"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would start by pointing you to the following article, which describes his view in how abolition should take place (note it was in stages, and not ending slavery over night) and that he believed freed slaves would become a burden on society. I think this would help to show you his reasoning, even if we see it today as flawed. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nI would also note that he did free a few slaves in his lifetime, along with purchasing some slaves in order to keep a few slave families (somewhat) together. More here:_URL_0_\n\nAnd finally, as noted in the link above, in 1806 Virginia passed a law requiring all freed slaves to leave the state of Virginia within one year of freedom. Obviously this would be a crushing situation for any recently freed slave and their family to deal with, as most wouldn't know much outside of their general area or have anywhere to go. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/property", "http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-slavery"]]}
{"q_id": "chhp9s", "title": "The handover of Hong Kong is seen as a landmark moment in international relations and is considered by some to be \"the end of the British Empire\". Why then is the handover of Macau, a colony that existed centuries before Hong Kong was handed over two years later, viewed with much more nonchalance?", "selftext": "*and was handed over two years later\n\nHong Kong and Macau were the two largest major European colonies in China. When Hong Kong was given to China, it was viewed as a major turning point in world history. Prince Charles himself referred to it as the official end of the British Empire. Since then, Hong Kong has been a hotbed of controversy on the world stage due to China's actions in the city (as most should know if they follow the news lately).\n\nMacau existed centuries longer than Hong Kong (it was actually formed during the Ming Dynasty), but in contrast with Hong Kong it seems like it was not as big a deal when it was given to China. Why is this? Even today compared to Hong Kong things seem to be much more \"relaxed\" for lack of a better term. Both are 'Special Administrative Regions\" within China and hold a great deal of autonomy, but it is rare to see a major news story centered around China \"cracking down on Macau\" like you do in regard to Hong Kong. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/chhp9s/the_handover_of_hong_kong_is_seen_as_a_landmark/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euufwbw"], "score": [39], "text": ["The short answer is that the handover of Macau was far less of a break between colonialism and native rule. Since 1966 and the 12.3 incident (when leftist activists stormed Macau), Macau was a colony only on paper\u2014the Portuguese colonial administration failed to handle the leftist riots and acquiesced to Chinese influence (the governor signed an apology under a portrait of Mao Zedong). From 1966 forward, the colonial administration lost the will to govern, and actually offered to return Macau on several occasions (the Chinese refused). Portuguese troops were withdrawn in 1974, and Macau was known as a \u201chalf-liberated zone\u201d (\u534a\u500b\u89e3\u653e\u5340). By 1999, Macau had been effectively Chinese controlled for over 30 years. \n\nIn Hong Kong things were very different. The Hong Kong colonial administration successfully dealt with the 1967 leftist riots, and reformed Hong Kong in such a way that gained the support of the local population. Its economy also grew at a miraculous rate through the 70s and 80s. By 1997, Britain was handing over one of the most successful cities in Asia to the Chinese \u2014 a city that, to a large extent, fuelled China\u2019s own economic boom post-1979. Given the status of Hong Kong, its handover attracted far more attention and significance. \n\nEssentially, Macau was quietly handed back as a under-developed city where the colonial administration had lost real power for over 30 years. Hong Kong was handed back as the centre of Asian finance with extremely developed infrastructure and governance structures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xqcaj", "title": "Why have Turks historically been considered a dark skinned people, despite being racially closer to Europeans than Middle Eastern peoples?", "selftext": "I'm a Turk. Growing up I've always considered us Turks to be White. On application forms I've always identified as such and I know many fellow Turks do. It's not hard to see why if you are familiar with Turkey, we're a mostly light skinned people of various tones (light eyes and light hair is normal to see) but with some darker individuals as well. In looks and diversity we are not too different from our neighbours the Greeks and other European Mediterranean. \n\nWhat is the historical basis for Turks being seen as a dark people? I notice it a lot. For instance I've shown friends of varying ethnicities pictures of my family and celebrity Turks, and they're often shocked at the number of Turks that \"look white\". To me they look Turkish. I guess the fact that I'm personally olive skinned with dark curly hair throws them off as well, they probably assume other Turks look like I do (my Sister on the other hand is white, straight light brown hair, gray eyes, she says people are shocked when she tells them she's Muslim). \n\nAnother anecdote is when a blonde cousin of mine went on a school trip to Poland. She said people would often stare at her walking around with her schoolmates, presumably because they thought she was Polish. And yet another is an Uncle who used to be a sailor on trade ships. He says that when they went to South Africa during the Apartheid era that he and his crewmen were treated as Whites.  \n\nBut even looking at historical depictions of Turks we're thrown in with Moors, Saracens and pictorially representations have usually made us look like people from the Middle East in our looks, and I don't mean clothing which I am aware was similar to our Muslim neighbours. But this is not how I (and other Turks) self-identify us to be and looking at us it's clear as well. \n\nI'm well aware that the original Turks from Central Asia were likely similar in looks to East Asians, so I don't want any answers pointing that out. \n\nMy own guesses to this question is that our Muslim identity trumps our looks. In other words most Muslims in the world are not similar to Europeans in looks, so us Turks are just stereotyped along for the ride. Another theory I have is that the large number of Turkish Kurds (who are on average darker and less white looking than ethnic Turks) distorts the issue as well.\n\nWhat is the expert historian's answer?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xqcaj/why_have_turks_historically_been_considered_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfdpagi"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'm leaving this thread up for a little bit, but please note that our subreddit deals with history, and all answers discussing current racial classifications will be deleted. To anyone considering posting a reply: please restrict yourself to historical perspectives on the Turkish people only."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "73n240", "title": "Why didn't King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy stop Mussolini's power grab?", "selftext": "The King I guess would had seen it coming. Did the king have powers at hand to stop a rogue government like Mussolini? And was he not worried about the rise of such an incendiary ideology, or was he helpless under the laws of Italy then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73n240/why_didnt_king_victor_emmanuel_iii_of_italy_stop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnrq4zf"], "score": [13], "text": ["When we talk about Fascism, we look back at a political phenomenon that we more or less understand but that still defies a unifying definition. Many of the features displayed by the Fascist Regime were not only peculiar but in fact entirely new - the role of the masses, the cult of the leader, the role of the new media in the propaganda, etc.\n\n\nOf that, we may legitimately claim that the King had no idea at all, nor could we expect him to display any more foreseeing than his contemporaries did. In fact a large portion of the Italian establishment - essentially everyone except the Socialists and Communists - was at least open to a conditional support of Mussolini's Government, on the basis of what appeared to be a syncretic program largely indebted to the Nationalists, with liberal influence in the economic area and an overall tone that appealed to the masses through a mixture of traditional values and renovation claims.\n\n\nThis general positive view of Mussolini in 1922 was a key point in the King's choice to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister; a choice that the large majority gained by Mussolini in the Chamber confirmed. In fact Mussolini's Government wasn't rogue by any standards: it did not operate outside of the law, as the Italian law was already extremely favorable to the executive power - and the numerous acts of violence, that by our standards would certainly qualify as outside of a lawful government praxis, were often justified as reactions against the Socialist violence. Here again, the peculiar nature of the Fascist political violence was lost on many observers; and, while it appears that some were willfully blind to it, many others lacked the instruments or the oversight or even the mere *forma mentis* to concieve what we now can see with a certain degree of clarity.\n\nTo explain this point a bit, the tradition of public authority was - in short - authoritarian. Which means that to many observers in the public administration, the discretional use of force by the Government was wrong only in so far as it became arbitrary abuse, not wrong in itself. State violence was a prerogative of the Italian State and Fascism employed it sparingly, while the actions of the squads allowed for the illusion, that abuse of violence did not came from the Government but from elements that Mussolini tried to control and moderate, to survive for years.\n\nThis illusion was shaken in 1924-25 furing the crisis following the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. Still, by that time, the new Chamber (following the 1924 elections) was led by a huge Fascist majority, that included various political formations that had functionally joined the fascists under pressure of the new electoral law (the Acerbo law granted a huge boost to the relative majority coalition and had been devised with the purpose of favoring that process of concentration). There was therefore at the time no viable political alternative to Mussolini among the Parliamentary forces.\n\nHad the King wanted to dismiss Mussolini, his most likely alternative would have been to establish an authoritarian Government, dismissing the Chamber and allowing the Ministry to pass law by the King's decree. A process that would have been a larger breach of the constitutional regime than the permanence of Mussolini in charge appeared.\n\n\nIn fact the King followed the letter of the Statute and was careful to move within the boundaries imposed to him by the constitutional regime; it was an unfortunate flaw of the Italian Liberal State that it's insitutes had not evolved any solid safety mechanism, to prevent a radical evolution. \n\nThe attitude of the King towards the spirit of the Statute is something we can speculate upon - as the King was extremely private and we do not have clear informations on his thoughts at the time.\n\nWhat we know is that he appeared to care more for the form than the substance but also that he was genuinely concerned with preventing social conflict - both for his cautious nature and for his personal experience; the crisis of the years 1898-1900 had brought the death of his father, murdered by an anarchist. And we can safely say that the King had no sympathy for the Socialist forces, which probably favored a lenient attitude towards the fascist anti-socialist violence.\n\n\nAt the same time, the Socialists (and later Communists) had made themselves unavailable to any platform of reforms that could have brought about a moderate coalition Government, with the maximalist turn of 1919. Not only they were apart from the other political forces but had alienated most of the public opinion, including those progressive liberals that also would end up supporting Mussolini's Government from 1922 to 1924.\n\n\nTherefore in October 1922 Mussolini was - sort of - an obligated choice for the King, as long as he did not want to defy what he percieved as the will of the Nation and of the various social and political forces. Still attempts were made at first for a coalition Ministry with Mussolini at the Interior and a conservative/moderate as Salandra or Giolitti as Prime Minister. Only when these options were no longer viable, the King appointed Mussolini - but still acted within his prerogatives, for example refusing to sign a preventive decree of dismissal of the Chamber that Mussolini had asked and that the King expressed no intention to give, unless a compelling reason existed.\n\n\nBut here again, we must understand that the fascist coalition Government was not inspired by any incendiary ideology - it's program, it's inception's speeches, it's first steps were in fact fairly moderate; and the large discretionality in the executive powers meant that no dramatic turns were needed for the fascist to gain a substantial control of the Country.\n\nA first dramatic turn would be forced on the Nation in 1925 - almost by accident - as Matteotti's murder begun to shed light on the nature of the fascist \"political praxis\". Despite that event though, Mussolini retained a good measure of consensus and, as I noted before, no viable alternatives existed within the Chambers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3wu5wy", "title": "What is Christmas?", "selftext": "Non-religious American here, all of my familial christmas traditions are extremely bizarre: decorate a tree, celebrate a virgin birth, leave out milk and cookies for a chubby reverse-burglar...\n\nHow do I make sense of this random madness?!\n\nHow did it get like this?!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wu5wy/what_is_christmas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxz6aqu"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may want to ask more specific questions, as each tradition will have a different origin. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21o9qt", "title": "I found a Soviet pin at a thrift store. Any idea what it means? Is it legit?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nI found a bunch of campaign buttons at a thrift store and bought the lot of then without really digging through them. When I got home I found this in the bag. Any idea what it means? Is it legit or just a reproduction? \n\nI apologize if this is the wrong subreddit. I'd be happy to post it elsewhere if need be.\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21o9qt/i_found_a_soviet_pin_at_a_thrift_store_any_idea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgf36c6", "cgf3h3r", "cgf3t7u"], "score": [12, 8, 13], "text": ["Hello! I'm not a historian, but since I was born in USSR, there some things on this pin that are quite noticeable.\n\n1) On the very bottom it's written \u041b\u0415\u041d\u0418\u041d\u0413\u0420\u0410\u0414|LENINGRAD, so apparently it was made in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg)\n\n2) On the very top there are 5 medals. They represent 5 awards that were given to Leningrad. For example, on the very left there is [\"Gold Star\"](_URL_1_) - award, usually given to the Heroes of the Soviet Union. Leningrad was declared [Hero City](_URL_0_) in 1965 and given that medal.\n\nI've checked at the wikipedia, it seems that Leningrad had 5 medals, latest of them was given in 1967, so this pin was made after 1967.\n\n3) In the middle you have a statue of Lenin. On the background you can see the plan of central part of Leningrad, the heart of two Russian revolutions of 1917. \n\nSo that's all I can say.", "It's a pin ~~commemorating the siege of Leningrad 1941-44.~~  \nEDIT:  I stand corrected, then.  See above.\n\nThese types of pins were readily available to the average Soviet citizen and could be purchased for a nominal sum at newspaper kiosks.  Throughout the entire Eastern Bloc, these types of \"civic pride\" pins were very commonplace, even smaller towns of 20,000 often had their own.  Many of these combined civic identity with some important event, such as an anniversary of a military feat, life of a notable person, a party rally/congress or a sporting event.  Since their production was entirely in the hands of the state, they were an excellent publicity/propaganda tool.  For example, at the time of the 1980 Moscow Olympiad, the \"Mishka\" mascot pins were readily available well in advance of the actual games, not only in the USSR, but across the Eastern Bloc.  They were very collectable - while growing up behind the iron curtain, many of my childhood friends boasted of not only Soviet but also Czechoslovak, Polish, East German and Hungarian pins in their respective collections.", "This pin commemorates city of Leningrad (St Petersburg) as a \"cradle of revolution\".\n\n1967 was 50^th anniversary of Great October revolution (official name for coup d'etat of 7^th November, 1917 - 25^th October by Old Russian calendar style).\n\nIn the background you see a map of streets around Winter palace, which was stormed by revolutionary troops on that day. Remarkably, there were only 6 dead - as most of Winter palace defenders fled away. And the only unit, holding up was \"women battalion of death volunteers\" - composed mostly from widows of St George cavaliers, KIA during WWI. \n\nA. F. Kerensky - a head of Provisional Govt, has fled the city in woman dress. The irony...\n\nBy 1967 official party line was that it was Lenin who (sort of single-handedly) has led Great October revolution. In 60s there was resurgence of \"leninism\" - when Lenin role was idolized (as opposed to quite recent *personality cult* of Stalin)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/zcAYt"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_City", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Star"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1l5sq4", "title": "Were programs like Social Security and Medicare met with the same level of opposition as the Affordable Care Act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l5sq4/were_programs_like_social_security_and_medicare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbw0o94", "cbw4294", "cbw5fe5", "cbwatg5"], "score": [11, 12, 4, 2], "text": ["Moderator warning to those looking to answer this question: this post is not for a discussion of the Affordable Care Act or any other facet of Obamacare. Our 20-year policy is fully in effect for this question.", "Social Security? No. Not at all. It was passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress. Also, you have to consider the fact that the Democrats won both Houses of Congress during the 1930 midterms and didn't lose them until 1946 (and would regain them both in 1948 and keep them for all but two years until the 1980's). The general idea behind Social Security had also been around for a while, on both sides of the aisle, as neither party faced the same level of ideological rigidity they do today. In the House, there were only 33 votes actually cast against the bill: 15 Republicans, 15 Democrats, 2 Farmer-Labor, and 1 Progressive. You would have to look at the Congressional Record to see what the objections were, as it is quite possible that some who voted against the bill did not think it went far enough. In the Senate, 1 Democrat voted against the bill along with 5 Republicans. \n\nWhat interesting, however, is the time frame within which the bills were passed. The Social Security bill was introduced in both houses on January 17, 1935 and was on Roosevelt's desk on August 14th. The ACA was introduced on September 17, 2009 and signed on March 23, 2010. The former is about 210 days; the latter is 188 days. I would actually be very curious to read more legislative history on the SSA given that. \n\nI am a little tired right now, however, [so I would welcome someone else parsing the legislative history of the SSA found here](_URL_0_). The time it took to have it's first votes out of committee to the whole body are also important. With the ACA, the House acted very quickly, but the Senate stalled. You can find decent legislative history summaries in the Wikipedia sidebar for the law. ", "I don't have a detailed answer, but Ronald Reagan, when he was still an actor, [recorded an album opposing Medicare](_URL_0_), at the behest of the [AMA](_URL_1_).", "In republic era Rome, there was a man named Tiberius Gracchus (163-133 B.C) who suggested an early form of welfare in response to Rome being saturated by veterans of the third Punic war.  These soldiers fought for Rome; but their farms were destroyed in the process.  The vets sold their ruined farmlands to wealthy landowners who created *latufundia*, massive plantation-like farms.\n\nGraccus introduced a bill to the senate which would give public lands to these poor.  The senate had him killed.  Then his brother Gaius took up the mantle of social responsibility; adding the idea of giving free grain to the poor and extending Roman citizenship; to *all* peoples of conquered lands.  Gaius was not elected to a third term.  \nThe senate had Gaius and his 3,000 followers executed.\n\nSo, yes this is an example of a type of welfare in history being met with opposition.  [To read a bit more about Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, this website has a bit](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ssa.gov/history/tally.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Speaks_Out_Against_Socialized_Medicine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Coffee_Cup"], ["http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/tib-gracchus.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4m7a9u", "title": "Why did the US oppose the Israeli occupation of the Suez canal, which was supported by its strongest allies Britain and France?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4m7a9u/why_did_the_us_oppose_the_israeli_occupation_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3taqoc"], "score": [24], "text": ["The Suez Crisis was basically a culmination of several historical/political factors which were Cold War containment policy, the formal end of British and French power, and ideological concerns over colonialism.\n\nFirstly, Egypt as an Arab state was the most influential country in the Middle East. For this reason the US saw them as important potential partners in preventing Soviet influence gaining a foothold in the ME. Thus when Nassar (the charasmatic Egyptian leader) was given Soviet arms, it alarmed the US into taking action that would prevent Nassar from continuing to develop relations with the Soviets, by helping him to build the Aswan Dam. Nassar who was extremely clever in playing the Soviets and the Americans off each other tried gain further leverage from the US by courting even closer with the Soviets. In response the Americans and the Brits cut off funding for the dam, and Nasser in turn took over and nationalized the Suez canal. It is here that the  differences between the US approach vs the British and French responses become much more pronounced. The US did not want to use force to remove Egyptian troops from the canal. This is due to the fact that the US thought it was important to maintain goodwill among the Arabs to gain their support against the Soviets. Thus it was important for the US to distance themselves from any notion of colonial/imperial intent which was the complete opposite of the English and French intentions. What followed was a poor attempt by the Brits and French to take over the canal but also project an image of innocence knowing that an outright invasion would be morally hard to swallow for the rest of the world. The English and French did this by basically telling Israel to go ahead and take over the canal ahead of time. Under the guise of \"freedom of navigation\" British and French troops would then come in and create a buffer zone between the two ME states and occupy the Canal. This attempt to disguise the invasion as a humanitarian mission by the Brits and French was all the more laughable when they announced for both troops to leave the canal before the Israeli's even reached it. So your question is a little misguided. Instead of asking \"why didn't the US support the Israeli's\" it should be \"why didn't they support the English and French\" for the Israeli's were really only proxies in this drama.\n\nSecondly, while the end of WWII confirmed the US's super power status, the reality of the decline of France and England's power projection hadn't really set in. The weakening of these countries along with strong nationalism sentiment among their colonies during WWII should have made it clear to England and France that they can no longer keep their colonies. But instead of facing these realities, both countries tried to keep their empires intact. France was fighting overseas in Algeria and Indochina, while Britain had just lost its most valuable colony, India. And for the British Egypt was their 2nd most prize possession and an important part of their colonial legacy along with it being an important pipeline for oil. It is understandable how both the Brits and French would not let their colonies go without a fight. To lose here meant their influence in the ME had ended. It was a changing of the guard. Now the US and the USSR would be the main powers in the region. The Suez Crisis cemented British and French foreign policy for the next 50 years. For the French, they instead opted to forge greater European unity by offering an olive branch to West Germany and forging the EU. For the British, no longer would they be the most powerful country on earth but instead why not ally themselves with the current most powerful country? Thus the \"special relationship\" whereby the UK would turn to the US and partner with its foreign policy instead of Europe was born. \n \nIt also has to be understood, US repugnancy and moral indignation at colonialism. For all the accusations of US hypocrisy, they at least followed through on their commitment in jettisoning their colonial holdings (most significantly the Philippines right after WWII). For many Americans and President Eisenhower (especially since he wasn't informed of their intentions), there was legitimate moral outrage at their allies for using force so blatantly in trying to keep their colonial territories. This was something that both the British and French vastly underestimated and did not factor into their calculation when they tried to take over the Suez using the Israeli's as a proxy. \n\nI hope this answers your question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23637z", "title": "Did Mongol Empire actually exist?", "selftext": "I recently came accross blog post that claims that Mongol Empire never existed, since I am not historian it sounded very convincing and logical. Unfortunately original post is in Russian, but I will translate it's main points. Actually google translate produces readable translation. Here is the post: _URL_0_\n\nPoints:\n\n1. No mongolian written sources. It is no surprise, because mongols acquired their own writing system only in 20th century (before that they borrowed various alphabets of more developed nations). But in Russian chronicles mongols are not mentioned.\n2. No architecture heritage\n3. No linguistic borrowing: there are no Mongolian words in Russian language and visa versa (prior to 20th century)\n4. No cultural and judicial borrowings: Russian traditions do not show anything possibly borrowed from that region and visa versa.\n5. No economical leftovers: Mongols pillaged 2/3 of Eurasia, they were supposed to bring something home. At least gold from temples they destroyed in the process. But no, nothing.\n6. No numismatic signs: world doesn't know Mongolian coins\n7. No achievements in weaponry\n8. No folklore, Mongolians don't have any mentions of their \"great\" past in their folklore. \n9. Population genetics doesn't find any signs of presence of Asian nomads in Eurasian territories which they supposedly conquered.\n\nBasically he claims that all current evidences are circumstantial or based on well known faked materials. I tried to read the comments, but the other problem is that guy is very rude so most of discussions in the comments ended up with name calling and no meaningful discussions are there. But he sounds very convincing to non specialist. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23637z/did_mongol_empire_actually_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgtsnfd", "cgtuwz7", "cgtwof3", "cgty9q9", "cgu00su", "cgu03ph", "cgu13p3", "cgucj6y"], "score": [181, 16, 16, 32, 4, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Complete nonsense, I'm afraid.\n\nThe *existence* of the Mongol Empire and its successor khanates cannot seriously be questioned. To address the author's points in order (briefly, as I'm not an expert in this area):\n\n1. [The Secret History of the Mongols](_URL_0_), dated from 1240, is the defining contemporary source on the life of Genghis Khan and the politics/culture/history of the Great Khanate.\n2. It shouldn't be a surprise that an originally nomadic society (especially one whose empire was a cosmopolitan conglomeration of a massive range of cultures and societies) doesn't leave a significant architectural footprint. But there's always [Karakorum](_URL_3_).\n3. I don't know anything about Russian linguistics, so can't comment on this one.\n4. Russian culture is a unique fusion of east and west; Slavic and Turkic (and more besides.) The problem with melting pots is that deconstructing and taxonomising cultural influences is *hard*.\n5. You can't talk about the Mongol Empire as if it just *disappeared*; it's not (primarily) an archaelogical question in that sense. The empire splintered into four successor empires \u2014 the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Golden Horde in the Urals, Siberia and parts of Eastern Europe, and the Chagatai khanate in Mongolia and China. They, in turn, rose and fell and dispersed \u2014 and with them, their assets.\n6. There do appear to be [Mongol coins](_URL_4_).  \n7. See [Mongol bows](_URL_1_); an evolution from recurve/composite bows.\n8. I don't know enough about Mongolian folklore to offer a detailed answer. \n9. That's just not true. This is from [the precis of a study](_URL_2_) by geneticists at the University of Oxford on genetic admixture:\n\n >  **How do your results on the Mongol expansion relate to previous analyses?** \n > \n > More recently, a study using \n >  genome-wide data with different methods and genetic markers but on a similar (but smaller) set of \n >  populations to those used in our paper (Patterson et al. 2012), found evidence of admixture in the \n >  Uyghurs, dating to the time of Genghis Khan. As well as the Uyghurs, we found evidence of this \n >  Mongolian expansion in a further 6 populations, all with similar dates, and sometimes much further \n >  west. These populations approximately span the maximum spread of the Mongol empire. There are \n >  many central Asian and Eurasian populations in our analysis that don't show evidence of Mongolian \n >  admixture, implying that most Asian populations were not affected by this expansion. Taken together, \n >  we believe that there is now strong evidence that this event had a major impact on many Eurasian \n >  populations. \n > \n", "I think if you'd read the travels of Marco Polo, you'd be astounded to what degree of order you'd find in the Mongolian Empire under Kublai Khan.\nAmongst other things, you'd find that their postal system was incredibly advanced, with stations on every main road leading from Kambalik. Theese stations were set up every 25-30 latin miles (1 of which is about 1 1/2 KM).\nTheese were called \"Jamb\" and each one of them were large furnished houses dressed with silk tapestry etc, so that even exceptionally wealthy or highly regarded travellers could stay in them.\nAt each of these stations, there'd be about four hundred horses ready at a moment's notice to bring a messenger or other curriers on their way with a fresh horse.\n\nMarco Polo states that \"Thanks to this, royal messengers could travel both easily and comfortably throughout every province in the empire, and all this shows that the Khan has greater power than all other emperors and kings and other people combined. His postal service employs no less than two hundred thousand horses and ten thousand buildings filled with all the needed equipment. The system is actually so wonderful and so perfect as you could only imagine\" \n\nI've translated this from a Norwegian copy, so excuse the somewhat strange wording here and there, the translation is from the early sixties which makes it kind of strange even in Norwegian. \nReading Marco Polo's stories from when he was employed by the Khan leaves no question to wether or not the Mongol Empire was truly an empire, in fact it might well have been one of the more well organised in history.", "The Chinese - who lived under Mongolian occupation for so long that they ended up adopting it as one of their legitimate dynasties - were nothing if not fantastic record keepers.\n\n*The History of Yuan* was one of the 24 histories of China compiled during the Ming Dynasty in 1370 by the royal court, and under the direction of Song Lian.\n\nI can't say I completely blame the source for not rooting through untranslated Chinese historical records... but suffice it to say, all the information is there, from Ghengis, to \u00d6gedai, to Kublai, to Uskhal Khan's defeat by the Ming.  If someone wants to assert the Ming Dynasty, the Islamic world, and the Vatican archives were all in cahoots since the 14th century to spin an global empire out of whole cloth... more power to 'em... but they should at least not be saying there are no records when there are voluminous records available\n\n*The History of Yuan*, Full, Simplified Mandarin:\n_URL_0_", "The person writing this is obviously a Russian nationalist. I have met more than a few people who want to deny that Russia was ever under the control of the Mongols. It seems like it hurts their pride or something.\n\nMost of the points have already been addressed very well but I will add a few things:\n\n* **1.** Mongolian adopted a written system from Uighur in approximately 1204. This written system is still used in China (in Inner Mongolia) and was in turn adopted by other languages (Manchu and Oirat, unfortunately now basically dead). This is incontrovertible fact. That said, the Soviet Union did introduce a system based on Cyrillic to the Mongolian People's Republic in 1946 which is the system now used there (however note  < 50% of Mongolians live in modern Mongolia). Obviously the author is either confused and does not realize that the Soviet system replaced an old one or he is just a Russian ultranationalist.\n* **3.** This is incorrect. There are many words in Russian from Mongolian and Turkic (the language spoken by much of the Mongol army) -\n\n > **Language**\n\n > While the linguistic effects may seem at first trivial, such impacts on language help us to determine and understand to what extent one empire had on another people or group of people \u2013 in terms of administration, military, trade \u2013 as well as to what geographical extent the impact included. Indeed, the linguistic and even socio-linguistic impacts were great, as the Russians borrowed thousands of words, phrases, other significant linguistic features from the Mongol and the Turkic languages that were united under the Mongol Empire (Dmytryshyn, 123). Listed below are a few examples of some that are still in use. All came from various parts of the Horde. \n\n    \u0430\u043c\u0431\u0430\u0440                          ambar                                    barn\n    \u0431\u0430\u0437\u0430\u0440                          bazar                                     bazaar\n    \u0434\u0435\u043d\u044c\u0433\u0438                        den\u2019gi                                     money\n    \u043b\u043e\u0448\u0430\u0434\u044c                       loshad\u2018                                    horse\n    \u0441\u0443\u043d\u0434\u0443\u043a                        sunduk                                   truck, chest\n    \u0442\u0430\u043c\u043e\u0436\u043d\u044f                      tamozhnya                              customs\n\n > One highly important colloquial feature of the Russian language of Turkic origin is the use of the word \u0434\u0430\u0432\u0430\u0439 which expresses the idea of \u2018Let\u2019s\u2026\u2019 or \u2018Come on, let\u2019s...\u2019 (Figes, 370-1). Listed below are a few common examples still found commonly in Russian.\n\n    \u0414\u0430\u0432\u0430\u0439 \u0447\u0430\u0439 \u043f\u043e\u043f\u044c\u0435\u043c.              Davai chai popem.             \u2018Let\u2019s drink some tea.\u2019\n    \u0414\u0430\u0432\u0430\u0439 \u0432\u044b\u043f\u044c\u0435\u043c!                    Davai vypem!                   \u2018Come on, let\u2019s get drunk!\u2019\n    \u0414\u0430\u0432\u0430\u0439 \u043f\u043e\u0439\u0434\u0451\u043c!                    Davai poidyom!                 \u2018Come on, let\u2019s go!\u2019\n\n > In addition, there are dozens of place names of Tatar/Turkic origin in southern Russia and the lands of the Volga River that stand out on maps of these areas. City names such as Penza, Alatyr, and Kazan\u2019 and names of regions such as Chuvashia and Bashkortostan are examples.  \n\n[Source.](_URL_0_)\nI don't recognize most of these words from modern Mongolian so I assume they are mainly Turkic.\n\n* **6.** There are Mongol coins. In fact there are Mongol coins in the excellent Moscow history museum if you want to see them along with a number of other Mongol artifacts.\n* **8.** Of course Mongolians have mentions of their great past in their folklore. There are countless stories about Chinggis, his generals, his wives, and his successors.\n", "I wrote about the essential problem of the definition of \"empire\" in a [previous post](_URL_0_) elsewhere.\n\nEssentially, the identification of empire boils down to the acceptance of some or all of the following: socially negotiated structural definitions, self-identification, and/or recognition by others.\n\nWhich means, a case can be made by anyone whether the Mongols were an empire or not, and there is no satisfactory \"universal\" answer because those answers will be defined by people with a vested interest in pushing their answers a particular way.\n\ntl;dr - The Mongol Empire exists so long as someone says it exists.  Socially speaking, the broad majority of scholars and laymen say it exists.  A minority, like your blog author, say it doesn't.  Also, the definition of empire is not agreed upon by scholars or laymen either, so there's not really a way to compare its structural existence or not, outside of simple social acceptance.", "Actually I found very solid conterargument to the first statement. _URL_0_ , it was used to send letter to Pope. So obviously Mongols had their writing system and this seal is written artefact obviously.", "Side question:  Google translate keeps translating something as \"hamsters\".  Any idea what the Russian word actually means in this context?\n\nExample:\n\n > Okay, that's understandable - hamsters protect the myth of the \"\" (common human or parochial) great past. ", " >  1. ... But in Russian chronicles mongols are not mentioned.\n\nFor a midterm in a class on Russia I wrote a paper on why the Russians didn't like to talk/write about the Mongols much. According to Charles Halperin, Russian writers used ambiguous language to both protect themselves from the implications of Mongol rule and resist Mongol domination of Russian society. East Slavs had traded, intermarried, and allied with steppe nomads for centuries, and simply did not talk about these relations. They also framed militry conflicts as religious rather than political, \"ignoring cooperation and idealizing conflict.\"\n\nChristians elsewhere in Europe took defeat by Muslims and pagans as signs of their god's displeasure. When they failed their god, he withdrew his protection and used infidels to punish them. Either the Rus had to accept this or accept that the Christian god was not omnipotent. Russian writers \"chose not to choose\", and instead attempted to ignore Mongol domination. They denied they had ever truly been conquored, and continued to write as if Mongol rule never happened. When dealing with the facts of Mongol rule, they used ambiguous language to hide its causes or implications.\n\nWhen recording the campaigns of Mongol conquest, Russian writers said the hordes \"took\" cities and principalities without elaboration. This ignored whether or not the \"taken\" areas were held. Similarly, they use the word \"pleniti\", which could be translated as \"conquored\" or as \"plundered\", which continues to leave the question of occupation unanswered. These were the same words used to describe nomad raids from the Kievan period, so based on Russian records it seems as if the same kind of raiding warfare simply continued. There are only rare mentions of princes going along with Mongol \"will\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://kungurov.livejournal.com/69966.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://altaica.ru/shengl.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_bow", "http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~gav/admixture/2014-science-final/resources/FAQ.pdf", "http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/312072/Karakorum", "http://www.mongoliancoins.com/coins_of_mongol_empire_chakhatayid.php"], [], ["http://www.guoxue.com/shibu/24shi/yuanshi/yuasml.htm"], ["http://www.sras.org/the_effects_of_the_mongol_empire_on_russia"], ["http://my.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/231kp9/what_makes_an_empire_an_empire/cgssfar"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Seal_of_Mongolia"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8khjn7", "title": "If O.J. Simpson committed the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, why did Mark Fuhrman plead the Fifth when asked if he had planted evidence?", "selftext": "I know that O.J. was acquitted, and some believe he is innocent, but from my experience it is generally accepted as fact that O.J. was the killer. From O.J.'s psuedo confessions (both the 'If I Did It's book and his ramblings during the Branco chase) to a clear motive, means and opportunity, I believe that for the sake of this Ask, it is a safe assumption that O.J. committed the crime. \n\nI apologize if this question doesn't fit the theme of 'history' but I couldn't find a more appropriate subreddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8khjn7/if_oj_simpson_committed_the_murder_of_nicole/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz7t9z2"], "score": [97], "text": ["In the early stages of the trial, when Mark Fuhrman took to the witness stand, one of OJ's lawyers, Francis Lee Bailey, under oath, asked him if he ever said the word \"nigger\" over the past ten years, to which he said no.\n\nLater in the trial, OJ's legal defense team found tapes of Fuhrman being interviewed about female police officers and police culture in general. In the recordings, as claimed by the defense team, Fuhrman said the word \"nigger\" 41 times and as recently as 1988, well within the past ten years. In the tapes, he claimed to have perpetrated violence against African-Americans and also describes how, as a police officer, he thought lying was sometimes necessary and claims that he has provided testimony regarding events that he did not witness.\n\nThis is a major problem for two reasons, first off, he was the one who found OJ's glove when he was the first responder to the scene and more importantly, it proved that he committed perjury, which is prosecutable, by lying under oath.\n\nAfter much back and forth between the judge, defense and prosecution, the judge ruled that two excerpts from the tapes can be played to the jury: \"We have no niggers where I grew up,\" and, \"That's where niggers live.\".\n\nNow little context on Pleading the 5th (the right against self-incrimination), it's generally best practice to Plead the 5th on all questions instead of a specific one and not in all other questions. Once you invoke it your 5th Amendment rights, you cannot go back. A lawyer can almost definitely explain it more eloquently.\n\nSince it proves that Fuhrman committed perjury, the defense asked him once more the previous question of \"Have you ever said the word nigger within the ten years?\". This is why he invoked his 5th Amendment rights; the defense team laid out a very clear trap where no matter, what the defense team would discredit both Fuhrman and more importantly the prosecution, in front of the jury since he was a key witness for the prosecution.\n\nOnce Fuhrman Plead the 5th in that question, the defense team asked damning questions such as whether he had ever falsified police reports or if he had planted or manufactured evidence to frame OJ for the murder, to which he Plead the 5th for all the following questions. \n\nDuring the closing arguments of the trial Johnnie Cochran, the center of OJ's group of lawyers, referred to Fuhrman as \"a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist\" and compared him to Hitler. Also, he argued that Fuhrman had planted the bloody glove on O.J. Simpson's estate as part of a racially motivated plot against Simpson due to his racist beliefs.\n\nOne thing to keep in mind is that the jury was mostly comprised of African-Americans, one big reason for the defense stressing the racist language Fuhrman said. Also, the infamous Rodney King trial and aftermath was still fresh in people's minds, especially in the black community. The defense team was successfully able to play the \"race card\" for the jury and present the case that it is once again injustice by the LA court system against an African-American. But that's a whole other story.\n\nThis is one of the few cases where despite much evidence proving OJ committed the crime, the defense was able to spin the narrative that it is racial injustice and \"the system\" (aka the government, justice system, society, etc.) framed him because he was a (successful) black person. They spun this story so well that people even today, 14 years after the trial, still think he's not guilty despite all the evidence to the contrary. \n\nIf you get the chance, I highly, highly recommend the five-part documentary OJ: Made in America, which expands on all this and not only interviews the majority of the key players from the whole saga but breaks down the background and both micro/macro context to understanding the whole ordeal. It's a rare case of stranger than fiction and if the whole thing never happened and if it was a fictional story, few would find it hard to believe.\n\nEDITs: Grammatical corrections, expanded some of the contexts and added the recommendation for OJ: Made in America documentary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22oyi9", "title": "Was the attack on Pearl Harbour a gamble by the Japanese Empire, or did they truly believed such a attack would cripple the US to the point of not winning the war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22oyi9/was_the_attack_on_pearl_harbour_a_gamble_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgp1bgm", "cgp1bxn", "cgp1qs9", "cgp3293", "cgp5ld6", "cgqn3df"], "score": [308, 4, 14, 7, 4, 3], "text": ["The Japanese high command was not stupid nor were they blind, they could see the massive disparity in terms of military resources and industrial capacity that existed between the USA and Japan. Pearl Harbor was not necessarily intended to cripple the USA in the long term but rather it was intended to buy time. The Japanese had long identified the United States as Japan's future foe (along with China and the USSR), they had begun making plans for how to fight a war with the Americans as early as the 1920's. It was recognized by the Japanese high command that any drive southwards towards the East Indies and Malaya would be under threat from the US pacific fleet and units stationed in the Philippines. Admiral Yamamoto, also recognized this, and began to make plans to cripple the US fleet so as to give Japan time. Now the destruction of the American fleet also gave the Japanese the ability to implement their \"ring\" defensive strategy. This strategy called for protecting mainland Japan by building a ring of outposts in the Pacific by capturing various strategic islands, once these islands were secured, they would be fortified and any enemy fleet would be vulnerable to planes or guns on the island.\n\nThe Japanese knew a straight fight with the Americans would be suicide because of their vast resources, but they assumed that if they could build this defensive ring, that the Americans attempt to penetrate it would result in high casualties, which would make the American populace unwilling to fight the war. The Japanese strategy essentially rested on the idea that the \"decadent\" Western nations didn't have the morale to fight a long protracted war with high casualties, on the other hand the Japanese high command assumed that the Japanese people would be unaffected by high causality numbers. They also assumed that Germany and Italy would soon force to Britain to surrender which would lead to the collapse of China and cause a severe amount of damage to America's will to fight. \n\nSource:\n\nA History of Japan by L.M Cullen\n\nJapan's Imperial Army by Edward Drea ", "The Japanese believed they could cripple the American fleet with their secret weapon, but only with a complete surprise attack, and that part was the gamble.  They plotted an unusual path across the ocean to avoid areas where the US Navy trained to ensure the secrecy of the mission.   When they arrived at Pearl Harbor they gave the signal tora tora tora exclaiming that it was a complete surprise attack and to carry out the full scale bombing mission.\n\nThe secret weapon they employed was modified torpedoes.  Up until this time, torpedoes were not effective in the shallow waters of a harbor.  they would sink to deep and not carry forward tot heir target after hitting the harbor ground.  These torpedoes did not sink as low and decimated the US fleet in the harbor.  These big US battle ships trying to fight off the Japanese planes was akin to trying to fight off insects with a revolver.  This downplayed the importance of battleships going forward in the military and the uprising of war planes and aircraft carriers.  \n", "Yes and no. The army later claimed that the navy said that it would cripple the US. But I don't think the Army can be entirely trusted in this, it is a bit self serving to blame it all on the other branch. And the navy never thought it would be a \"war winner\" in of itself.\n\nIn part it was an extension of pre-war plans. Prior to the war (and I'm talking starting around the the Spanish-American war through the 20s and 30s) the Japanese envisioned the war would start as a sortie of the whole US fleet. The Japanese plan was to harass the fleet with subs and planes and then when it arrived in the Far East worn out and damaged with tired crews the Japanese fleet would engage it in a main fleet battle and destroy it. That would end the war. The US would sue for peace. And that would be that. It was expected to mirror the naval wars the Japanese had fought against other European countries and that the US had fought against Spain to win the Philippines in the first place.\n\nIt was not expected to be a multi-year conflict where shipbuilding capability would play a significant role... at least not by most leaders.\n\nSo the raids were the harassing plan writ large. Most of the Japanese admirals were still battleship men. And they still thought of carriers as scouts and raiders, not capital ships. The raids on Pearl was seen as a way to weaken and delay the Americans, not to sink the entire fleet. Although after the British success at Taranto the air advocates were beginning to gain influence. The Japanese expectation was that the Americans would gather what battleships they could and come steaming to save their possessions. But the US didn't have any intention of doing that. And after Pearl they didn't have any capability either.\n\nStill even as late as the battle of Leyte Gulf, you can see the Japanese trying to get a mass of battleships into a single spot to sink \"the American fleet\" in a grand Mahan style fashion. With the idea that if they could do that the Americans would come to the table and negotiate. But the US was basically fighting a different type of war at that point, and unlike the Japanese had resources to fight a war of attrition. The Japanese knew the US had the resources to fight a war like that. But they didn't think  the US had the will to fight a war like that.\n\nIn any case Pearl in of itself was never supposed to be a knockout blow. And the Japanese didn't achieve their best hopes. They missed all the carriers. And they didn't get the docks and stores. But a lot of their planning had assumed that they would take a lot more damage as well. Most Japanese planners had expected to lose at least a third of the planes and at least one carrier. So on the whole it went better than expected.\n\nFor a good overview of the prewar plans, Pearl, and the war as a whole I recommend Ronald Spector's Eagle Against the Sun. It covers what I've mentioned here quite well. ", "Since we are on the topic, how did Hitler view the attack?  Was it something he had prior knowledge of and approved (or disapproved) of?\n\nI can't imagine he felt like has ready for Britain to gain enforcement.", "Related Question: I was under the impression that some substantial fraction of the aircraft carriers stationed at Pearl Harbor were out conducting training manuevers during the actual attack and that this coincidence was not accounted for by Japanese high command. Is that at all accurate?", "I'm Japanese. Japanese leaders well know Japan could not win.\nThey want the nagotiation to keep the teritory.\n\nAt 1941, U.S. forbit the export of resources to Japan, and Japan had only 1 year's supply of stored resources.\nU.S. want Japant to abandon almost all their colonies in East Asia.\nJapan tried to contact U.S. and want to negotiate several times, but U.S. refused it and did'nt changed their requirement.\n\nAt September, in Imperial Conference, PM Konoe report the emperor to the war is not avoidable.\nThe emperor was enraged and told directly to PM Konoe (it was rare the emperor tell something directly) to avoid Japan-U.S. war.\nPM Konoe tried to make summit conference but U.S. refused it.\nOn the other hand, Japan started to prepare the war, and U.S. get the information about this act of Japan, so U.S. recieved that Japan decided the war.\nWith another words, U.S. did not mind to start the war against Japan.\nU.S. didn't change attitude to require Japan to abandon \nFor Japan, it is impossible to abandon all colonies at that time. Because many Japanese lived in the lands and Japan owe the debt to get colonies.\nIt is likely to abandon exporting cars or electronics in this time.\n\nPM Konoe report the emperor again that the war is not avoidable, and he resigned.\nAs next PM, Tojo was selected. During he was Minister of Army, he was hard advocate for war. But after he become PM, he changed his attitude.\nAt November, in Imperial Conference, PM Tojo was instructed from the emperor to avoid the war.\nTojo's thinking is lke one of bureaucratism. As the Minister of Army, he only insisted the benefit of Army.\nAfter he became PM, he thought Japan's benefit. He try hard to negotiate U.S. and try to avoid war,\nbut U.S. didn't change the conditions. Japan shows some compromised ideas, but U.S. refused it.\nIn this time, japanese code telegrams ware broken by U.S. and U.S. well knows Japan's acting and preparing.\n\nAnd then U.S. demand Hull Note, which required Japan to abandon their colonies.\nAt December, in Imperial Conference, it is recorded that Tojo crying in front of the emperor and reported that Japan can not avoid the war.\nThe emperor said like that it is impossible to win Japan-U.S. war.\nThen Ministers reported Japan can continue the war only 1 year, Japan have to beat the frces of U.S. and negotiate with them to recognize Japan's teritory.\n\nAfter that Imperial Conference, Japan decide the war. U.S. know the information about Japan's act and Roosevelt sent the telegram to the emperor.\nThe Telegram of Roosevelt tells U.S. want to avoid the war, but the emperor could not read it before Pearl Harbor.\nBecause the telegram was delayed by Ryuzo Sejima who is the staff officer of Imperial Force, Japanese fleets have already be sailing to attack Pearl Harbor.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2l8zqe", "title": "When and why did Sparta cease to become a military power?", "selftext": "Was it a decline in birthing rates? A large defeat? Were they overwhelmed by the rise of the Roman Republic? I love ancient history and studied the Spartan *agoge* at school, but their decline is something I've never really gotten around to looking into. Any help much appreciated.\n\nedit: Some great answers here. Thanks guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l8zqe/when_and_why_did_sparta_cease_to_become_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsn7or", "clsnmoy", "clt40dr"], "score": [168, 53, 8], "text": ["Edit: This is concerned with Sparta's immediate fall from Hegemonic power in the early 4th century BCE. For the continual decline into the Roman era, please see  /u/edXcitizen87539319's terrific reply below!\n\nOkay, so it all starts in 404 BC at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta has finally beaten Athens after nearly three decades of conflict. At this point, power in Greece was solidly in the hands of Sparta and her allies. However, Sparta ruled as a hegemonic power, using her military strength to bully other poleis into submission. This continued until the 370's when they royally pissed off the Thebans.\n\nThebes had been under the Spartan yoke for quite some time, and eventually, they had had enough. A band of exiled nobles under the leaders Pelopidas and Epaminondas forcibly expelled the Spartan garrison from Thebes' acropolis, freeing the city. What comes next is one of the greatest upsets in military history.\n\nThese two leaders then organized the Boeotians (territory surrounding and including the city of Thebes) into a formidable army. It started with [The Sacred Band](_URL_1_), a group of 300 crack troops, of 150 homosexual pairs. The idea was that you'd be more ferocious in battle should your lover be standing right beside you. Originally founded in 378 BC by Gorgidas, and dispersed throughout the hoplite army of Thebes, when it fell under the personal leadership of Pelopidas, he kept the 300 as a cohesive and singular unit forming the spearhead of the Theban phalanx. This cohort was undefeated in battle until 338, when, at the [Battle of Charonea](_URL_2_), the 16 year old Alexander destroyed them to a man, but that's a story for a different day.\n\nEpaminondas took over leadership of the entire Theban army, creating a phalanx far deeper than those before it. While previous phalanxes were maybe up to 12 ranks deep, Epaminondas' were up to 50! This took advantage of the fact that the Boeotians were mainly farmers, renowned for their hearty and robust physiques, but thought of as heyseeds: slow, agriculturally minded, militarily weak, peaceful, etc. This is where the Spartans went wrong. This Boeotian phalanx focused less on pure combat between the two lines, instead focusing on brute momentum from sixty rows of men shoving forward to destroy the opposing line. Man for man, the Spartans were the best soldiers the Greek world had ever known. That didn't matter when a hammer of powerful Thebans literally uprooted them from the ground.\n\nAfter several years of open Theban revolt in the face of Spartan hegemony, Thebes had lost any allies she had due to Spartan threats, which finally manifested in a full-scale Spartan invasion. Opposing this large invasion force was the new Boeotian army, led by Epaminondas and Pelopidas' Sacred Band. At the village of Leuctra the two armies met. The Spartans, accompanied by their allies numbered around 10,000, the Thebans, 6,000 ([According to Wikipedia](_URL_3_)). The Spartans had never before lost a land battle in which they outnumbered their opponent. Here, they did.\n\nNow, typically, the best troops were placed on the right flank of a phalanx battle, the weakest on the left. This left the weakest to face the strongest, and preserved the [cream of the crop](_URL_0_). Epaminondas wasn't about this. In a departure from accepted custom, [he placed the Sacred Band directly across from the Spartan elite, the hippeis](_URL_4_). Then he had his other divisions slowly pull back from battle to save them (and Sparta's allies-whom he professed no quarrel with) as he crushed the Spartan main contingent. The Sacred Band destroyed the Spartan troops, killing one of their two kings, Cleombrotus.\n\nThe effect of this victory cannot be overstated. It ended the Spartan mystique and their military domination of the country. From here, the Theban generals led an attack straight to the Spartan mainland. Along the way, the Theban army drew thousands of Greeks who were keen on destroying Sparta forever. Victor Davis Hanson estimates that in total, 70,000 Greeks ended up marching on Sparta, somewhere upwards of 5% of the total Greek population at the time. \n\nSparta at this time had suffered from severe downward population pressure. Their continuous military involvement had drained them of much of their male population. Additionally, their \"mating habits,\" if you will, nocturnal visits by husband to wife at an irregular frequency, paired with their infanticidal custom didn't help their numbers very much. It must also be remembered that the Spartan state relied on the enslaved region of Messenia to furnish them with food, slaves, and basic industrial goods. At this point, due to the diminishing population, the Spartans were even arming the Messenians-a scenario that the entire military state had been created to prevent! Seeing the weakened balance of power in Laconia (Sparta and the area of southern Greece under her direct control), Epaminondas besieged the city, but, instead of sacking it, turned to Messenia and freed the helots. \n\nThe helotry of Messenia outnumbered the Spartan citizens by perhaps more than 2:1. The Thebans armed the Messenians, built fortified cities, and forever freed them from the Spartan yoke. This destruction of the Spartan status quo, forever prohibited the Spartans from focusing their entire society on the creation of an exemplary military force, instead relegating them to the same sort of societal structure shared by the other Greek poleis.\n\nSorry if I missed things, please ASK QUESTIONS! I figured I should end there, but I'd be happy to talk more about this. For further reading, I'd suggest:\n\nXenophon's Anabasis 6.5\n\nDiodorus Siculus, Chapters XV-XVI\n\nPlutarch's Life of Pelopidas\n\nVictor Davis Hanson's The Soul of Battle", "This answer is based in large part on [an earlier answer](_URL_0_) I've written. I have fleshed out the early parts a bit but the part from Rome's entry to Greece onwards is largely unchanged (the previous question was particularly on Sparta under Rome).\n\n*Edit:* I don't really do the 'early parts' justice (it is before my time, so to speak). Read [the excellent reply](_URL_1_) by /u/kosherkowboy for the early decline of Sparta, then come back here to see what happened later on!\n\n----------------------\n\nSparta's height of power was in the 5th century BC. During the 4th century Sparta gradually lost power: important city states such as Athens, Thebes, and Corinth allied against Sparta (the Corinthian War); the Persians took back Spartan holdings overseas (in Asia Minor) and shortly after the Corinthian War Thebes dealt a major blow to Sparta's power by defeating them in battle. \n\nThis is when Sparta's gradual decline began in earnest. For a while, Sparta remained a proud and independent city-state, but it wasn't really a major player any more. Sparta was the only Greek city not siding with (or forced to side with) Alexander the Great in his campaign against the Persians in the late 4th century. It was just capable enough to withstand Macedonian pressure, but it wasn't nearly powerful enough to be a threat to Alexander or his Greek allies (indeed Sparta had lost another major battle against Greek forces only a few years earlier).\n\nFor more than a century Sparta remained in this state of being past-their-prime-but-not-yet-irrelevant. It is then that we see Roman involvement in Greece starting. During the First Macedonian War (late 3rd century BC) Rome sought the help of the Aetolian League, granting the rights of *amicitia* (friendship) to the Aetolian League and any city state helping Rome in the war against Philip V of Macedon (Rome was at the same time fighting the Second Punic War, so it had limited resources available for the war in against Philip V). Sparta sided with Rome in this war, and so became an amicus of Rome.\n\nBeing an *amicus* was somewhat short of being an ally; it was certainly not a defensive pact and dit not guarantee any protection from Rome. So it happened that Sparta in 201 attacked Messene, another *amicus* of Rome, and in 198 - during the Second Macedonian War - Sparta made peace with Macedon even though Rome remained at war with them. Pragmatic as always, the Roman Senate revived the *amicitia* with Sparta the next year, under condition that Sparta would assist in the conflict.\n\nAt the end of the conflict, Rome threw Sparta's actions back in their face. Livy reports that the Romans said this to Nabis, the Spartan ruler:\n\n >  Though you were our ally you seized by force a city in alliance with us, namely Messene, which had been admitted to our friendship and enjoyed precisely the same privileges as Lacedaemon [Sparta - ed.]. And further, you not only concluded an alliance with Philip, our enemy, but you actually established a relationship with him through Philocles, one of his viceroys. In open hostility to us, you infested the sea round Malea with your piratical barques, and have seized and put to death almost more Roman citizens than Philip, so that our transports, which were supplying our armies, found coasting along the Macedonian shores safer than rounding the Cape of Malea. Forbear henceforth, if you please, to talk about your loyal observance of treaties; drop the language of a citizen and speak as a tyrant and an enemy. (Livy 34.32)\n\nAs Rome had given many Greek cities their liberty by defeating Philip V of Macedon, so too would they give liberty to the city of Argos, which was under Spartan occupation. Under this pretext Sparta was attacked and defeated by Roman and Greek forces, ending whatever remained of the Spartan hegemony in Greece. Sparta was forced to join the Achaean League.\n\nFor the next fifty years or so Rome remained involved in Greece while proclaiming that the Greek cities were free. During the Third Macedonian War (171 \u2013 168 BC) Rome took prominent members of Greek communities as hostages to Rome, to ensure the continued loyalty of the \"free\" Greek cities. Eventually, after the final defeat of Macedon in 148 and the incorporation of Macedon in the Roman empire, it came to war between Rome and the Achaean League. The catalyst, interestingly, was Sparta.\n\nSince Sparta was forced into the league, it continuously tried to leave the league. At least three times the Spartans or Spartan exiles petitioned Rome with challenges tot he jurisdiction of the Achaean League, each petition being counter petitioned by representatives of the league. As Erich Gruen put it:\n\n >  Senatorial reaction was cast in the traditional mold: evasive and noncomittal answers which each party read in accord to its own wishes and employed to justify steps already determined upon. (p. 520)\n\nFinally Sparta seceded from the league, and the Achaean League responded with force. They figured this was an intra-Greek conflict; the Greeks were nominally free and Rome had so far proven to be mostly indifferent to what happened. Rome responded swiftly and decisively though. Roman forces moved from Macedonia and Italy into Greece and crushed the Achaean League. From then on Greek cities were no longer allowed to form confederations. Some cities - those which had resisted - were put under control of the Roman governer in Macedonia; others, including Sparta, remained \"free\". It would take another century before this charade was dropped and Greece was made into an official province of Rome. By then the Greek city-states had lost most of their relevance, except perhaps to serve as cultural guides (the Romans of that time loved Greek culture).\n\n**To answer your question:**\n\nSparta went through a long proces of gradual decline. Over the course of centuries, it's status changed from being the most important power in Greece to just another Greek city without much relevance. The main reason for Sparta's decline was political (though there may have been some social aspects). Sparta was on the losing end of the Greek system of coalition warfare a few too many times. \n\nAs for the *agoge* (since you mentioned it), [this reply](_URL_2_) in the other thread\n by /u/Azand may provide some insight.\n\n\n**Main source used:**\n\n* Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley 1984)\n\nAlso interesting (on Roman expansion and its nature):\n\n* W.V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70 BC (Oxford 1979)\n\n* A.M. Eckstein, Senate and General: Individual Decision-making and Roman Foreign Relations 264-194 BC (Berkeley 1987)\n", "I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about the topic of Sparta's decline in power in the 4th century so thought I would share my bibliography on the topic as many of the articles and books below go into great detail about the topic. Firstly I will briefly post my concluding thoughts on the issue though (can go into more detail tomorrow if you want)\n\nMy conclusion was that it was the longer term issues facing Sparta such as the declining birth rates, inequality of wealth, the challenges of the helots which were exasperated by shorter term challenges and issues such as the challenges of managing a Greek Hegemony, Agesilaus reign and the rise of Thebes that led to Sparta's decline\nEdit - and to answer the question of when Sparta ceased to be a military power well it ceased to be the major military power in Greece in the aftermath of Leuktra however it still remained a military power for decades (my immediate area of study ends around 350 so after that I am sure others can elaborate on Sparta's military after this period in a better way)  \n\nedit - Sorry about formatting its acting really strange when I try and copy it over\n\nPrimary Sources \u2013 from _URL_0_  (Search Sparta)\n\n1.\tAristotle, Athenian Constitution (ed. H. Rackham)\n2.\tAristotle, Economics\n3.\tAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ed. H. Rackham)\n4.\tAristotle, Poetics\n5.\tAristotle, Politics\n6.\tAristotle, Rhetoric (ed. J. H. Freese)\n7.\tDiodorus Siculus, Library\n8.\tHerodotus, The Histories (ed. A. D. Godley)\n9.\tIsocrates, Against Callimachus (ed. George Norlin)\n10.\tIsocrates, Antidosis (ed. George Norlin)\n11.\tIsocrates, Archidamus (ed. George Norlin)\n12.\tIsocrates, Areopagiticus (ed. George Norlin)\n13.\tIsocrates, Evagoras (ed. George Norlin)\n14.\tIsocrates, Helen (ed. George Norlin)\n15.\tIsocrates, Letters (ed. George Norlin)\n16.\tIsocrates, Nicocles or the Cyprians (ed. George Norlin)\n17.\tIsocrates, On the Peace (ed. George Norlin)\n18.\tIsocrates, Panathenaicus (ed. George Norlin)\n19.\tIsocrates, Panegyricus (ed. George Norlin)\n20.\tIsocrates, Plataicus (ed. George Norlin)\n21.\tIsocrates, To Philip (ed. George Norlin)\n22.\tPausanias, Description of Greece\n23.\tPlutarch, Agesilaus (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n24.\tPlutarch, Comparison of Agesilaus and Pompey (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n25.\tPlutarch, Comparison of Agis and Cleomenes and the Gracchi (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n26.\tPlutarch, Comparison of Aristides with Marcus Cato (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n27.\tPlutarch, Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n28.\tPlutarch, Comparison of Lysander and Sulla (ed. Bernadotte Perrin)\n29.\tThucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (ed. Thomas Hobbes)\n30.\tThucydides, The Peloponnesian War\n31.\tXenophon, Agesilaus (ed. E. C. Marchant, G. W. Bowersock, tr. Constitution of the Athenians.)\n32.\tXenophon, Anabasis (ed. Carleton L. Brownson)\n33.\tXenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaimonians (ed. E. C. Marchant, G. W. Bowersock, tr. Constitution of the Athenians.)\n34.\tXenophon, Hellenica (ed. Carleton L. Brownson)\n35.\tXenophon, Memorabilia (ed. E. C. Marchant)\n\nSecondary sources\nBooks\n\n1.\tBury, J. B, A History Of Greece To The Death Of Alexander The Great, 1st edn (New York: Modern library, 1937)\n2.\tCartledge, Paul  Agesilaus and the Crisis of Sparta (London, Duckworth, 1987)\n3.\tCartledge, Paul  The Spartans: An Epic History. (New York: Macmillan, 2003)\n4.\tCartledge, Paul , and Spawforth, Antony. Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2002)\n5.\tCartledge, Paul, Spartan Reflections, 1st edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)\n6.\tCartledge, Paul,. Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300-362 B.C. (London ; Boston, Mass: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001.)\n7.\tFigueira , T.J, A history of Sparta 950-192BC (Michigan, Hutchinson, 1968)\n8.\tForrest, William George Grieve, and William George Grieve Forrest, A History Of Sparta, 1st edn (London: Bristol Classical Paperbacks, 1995)\n9.\tGreen, Peter, and Peter Green, The Greco-Persian Wars, 1st edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)\n10.\tHamilton, Charles D,Agesilaus And The Failure Of Spartan Hegemony, 1st edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4lK41SX-Q", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Band_of_Thebes", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chaeronea_(338_BC)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leuctra", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leuctra.svg"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2go0p6/was_sparta_still_conducting_military_operations/ckl4nil", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l8zqe/when_and_why_did_sparta_cease_to_become_a/clsn7or", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2go0p6/was_sparta_still_conducting_military_operations/ckmmoya"], ["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/"]]}
{"q_id": "1op253", "title": "What are some minorities that were never really discriminated against in the United States?", "selftext": "I know Jews are one. But what are some of social groups that were never really persecuted/discriminated against much? I realize racism has always been quite prevalent in American history, but I just thought it would be interesting to learn about groups that were not racially discriminated much and why that is.\n\nI am well aware white Protestants never really faced much large scale discrimination, but I consider that to be merely because they were the majority. This question is about minority groups who were never the majority of people, that were not discriminated against and why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1op253/what_are_some_minorities_that_were_never_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccu5dww"], "score": [4], "text": ["Jews were certainly discriminated against in the USA, though perhaps not as much as in Europe.  Some organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan were openly anti-Semitic.  A 2005 survey found there were still considerable anti-semitic attitudes in the USA, with 9% of whites had strongly anti-semitic attitudes, 29% of Hispanics, and 36% of African Americans.\n\nSource:  _URL_0_\n\nWhite Protestants have had their moments of being discriminated against too in America.  Baptists and Quakers were hanged or banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s.\n\nAlmost every immigrant group that ever came to America would like to think that it was discriminated against at some time, and many of them were.  \n\nEven English Protestant colonists felt that they were discriminated against by the British.\n\nYou\u2019re probably right though, that Protestant groups, like Germans and Scandinavians had fewer problems than others and English and Scots had the least problems of all.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_States"]]}
{"q_id": "1x9g7t", "title": "How popular has historical fiction been throughout history? Has a historian ever mistaken such a work for a factual account, only for it to later be found out as fiction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x9g7t/how_popular_has_historical_fiction_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9hgd8", "cf9u14z"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Published in 1820, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe was so wildly popular that Alice Chandler asserts in \"Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival\" that the 19th century interest in the middle ages, which has continued until the present day, began because of this book. There was a newfound European interest in chivalry and romance, and Ivanhoe's publication helped give new life to stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur.", "Throughout the Greco-Roman period of the Middle East, \"Romantic Histories\" were very popular.  These are impassioned narratives that convey a historical *sentiment* but do not relate events as actually happened.  Some famous examples of these are 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, and 4 Maccabees.  Each work writes about a different aspect of either Antiochus IV Epiphanes or Ptolemy IV Philopater and his respective vendetta against the Jews.  \n\nI would classify these as historical fictions because they use a historical event or a historical character to impart the reader with some sort of lesson--sometimes moral; sometimes historical.\n\nThough these examples are earlier in the Greco-Roman period (3rd-1st c. B.C.E), a later example of the evolving genre is the *Greek Alexander Romance*, which details a romanticized version of Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1gpanx", "title": "What was Japanese military culture like between the Meiji Restoration and the rise of the militarist faction before WWII?", "selftext": "Today, I enjoyed the guilty pleasure that is *The Last Samurai,* a fun but entirely thoughtless movie. It did, however, get me thinking about how the samurai tradition was viewed late 19th/early 20th century Japan. During the Meiji period, Japan tried to expunge all traces of their traditional culture, goes as far as to outlaw the wearing of swords and topknots. Yet, by WWII, a neo-samurai/bushido ethos had taken hold in the Japanese military. How did they get from Point A to Point B?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gpanx/what_was_japanese_military_culture_like_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["camo2sy", "camsh53"], "score": [15, 3], "text": ["So I don't know of a way to answer this question without drastic oversimplification, since it requires summarizing almost 100 years or political history.\n\nThe basic reason is the relation of politics to the Army.  In the Meiji period, the feudal system was being replaced with a successful modern state.  Culturally this meant that the feudal armies were being actively discredited by the elite so that the elite could centralize power under the Imperial government.  Since western culture and technology was more easily dominated by the elite (who had more access to the west) they imported and promoted it as a way to achieve a new unified state.  It did not hurt that military technology from the west was demonstrably more powerful than the military techniques of the edo period.  In general, we can say that the Meiji leaders were successful in creating this modern state and changing the culture in and out of the military.\n\nHowever, in creating a modern centralized military, they created something like an institutional monster that would come to dominate the state.  During and after the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the military (especially the Army) became a political force.  The army reported directly to the emperor without going thru the political system, and began to view itself as superior to civilian politics.  Over time the Army began to attempt to dominate civilian politics and the entire state.\n\nNow that the Army had external colonies to govern and and internal power struggle to win, they needed an ideology that would legitimize these endeavors.  Furthermore, the Russo-Japanese war showed that massive casualties might be required to win future wars.  Finally, Japan in the post-WWI era was very insecure militarily because it realized that a large industrial base was needed to win wars and that they lacked this compared to western rivals.  The Army strip mined Japanese history to create the \"neo-samurai\" ideology because it gave the army the legitimacy it needed to rule at home and abroad, and a reason to believe they could win a future war.\n\nI feel this summary is terribly clumsy but I hope it helps.  I recommend Edward Drea's \"Japan's Imperial Army 1853-1945\" which most of this is taken from.  Drea is dry though, I admit.\n\n", "A very minor part of the military culture in the big scheme of things, but something that has always fascinated be about the Meiji-WW2 period of the Japanese military is the divisive factionalism that existed between the service branches. The IJN and the IJAAF saw themselves as in competition much more than you would find between, say, the US Navy and the Army, and even within the departments of a given service branch you'd see this.\n\nThe most notable example is aircraft, where design teams for the respective branches were loath to share data and lessons learned for each other, let alone actual designs, and in the field cooperation was hard to make happen. Wasn't so big an issue early in the war, but it was a major setback in development as the war progressed and one of the reason that the Japanese were still flying essentially the same planes as five years prior, while the Allies had practically jumped a generation in design.\n\nIt also happened with the limited Japanese paratroop services, as both the IJN and the IJA created airborne contingents, but didn't share training methods, or even equipment at first.\n\nPerhaps the most hilarious is within the Army only, and the Type 92 armored car. Its actually a tank, but the rules of the Army required all tanks be under the command of the Infantry, and all armored cars under the cavalry. The cavalry wanted a light tank, so had to call it an armored car to be allowed to have it..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20zsd6", "title": "How did we figure out mining, anyway?", "selftext": "I don't know if there's an actual answer to this question, but how did we make the transition from using flint and stone tools, to retrieving ore from the ground, to refining that ore into a metal, to then forging that metal into something useful?\n\nI'm sure that there's a natural evolution to these processes, but I've never heard anyone discuss it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20zsd6/how_did_we_figure_out_mining_anyway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg8actn", "cg8c89d", "cg8d28t", "cg8frcm", "cg8iyai"], "score": [171, 2, 19, 30, 4], "text": ["First of all, mining predates excavations for metal-bearing ore. Evidence of prehistoric mining for [flint nodules](_URL_0_) and for [salt](_URL_3_) is clearly documented, so it is wrong to think that a need for metals spawned mining. Rather, the need for other things inspired people to dig in and beneath the ground. Prehistoric people did not need to invent the industry of mining simultaneously to make a transition to the exploitation of metals. \n\nEarly retrieval of [tin in Cornwall](_URL_1_) suggests that it was easy to adapt the idea of excavations for flint to excavations for tin. Of course whatever the resource, people will first work the surface (a process that is also called mining). Going underground is costly and dangerous and is only pursued when there is a lack of surface resources and a clear incentive of rich underground resources. That said, people have been going underground for thousands of years. \n\nConsider the use of tin in [this early Bronze Age site](_URL_2_), 1900-1500BCE in Britain's Devon; the use of bits of tin to decorate - and not to be fused with copper for bronze implements - was probably an initial inspiration for mining metals. It is only a matter of taking that practice and discovering how various metals interact. The point here is that the retrieval of items from the ground predates metal use, and once in the act of retrieving things like flint and salt, it is easy to imagine retrieving other things like metals, even before people realized the full potential of those metals. ", "That, since the discovery of mining and smelting predates history, is more of an anthropology question.  You might try crossposting to /r/AskAnthropology ", "Here is a great article (scholarly context) covering your question:\n\n[The First Miners](_URL_4_)\n\nThe earliest known mine (with archeological evidence) is known as Lion's Cave in Swaziland. It dates to 40,000 BCE or earlier. The miners there were looking for haemetite to create ochre body paint for decoration or ritual.\n\nMining really took off in the Chalcolithic or Copper Age. We have many fine archeological examples in the Sinai showing very very early copper mines as well as turquoise and malachite (which contains copper). It is speculated that the Timna culture or Maadi were nomadic natives of the Sinai and spearheaded mining and metallurgy there -- a good way to make the nearby Pharaoh happy. \n\nNotable sites in the Sinai are Timna and Serabit el-Khadim:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere is [a scholarly article about ancient copper production in the area](_URL_3_).\n\nHere is [a scholarly article about Timna smelting](_URL_2_)\n\nSome actual tailings and objects found in mines of Serabit el-Khadim:\n\n_URL_1_", "Going to use a comparison to Minecraft here, bear with me.  When you start the game you're running around in a pristine world.  After a bit you've probably found coal and iron visible from the surface.  As time goes on and the surface resources are depleted, you go deeper into the caves to find what you need.  Eventually you're branch mining at level 5 looking for diamonds.\n\nHumans in history followed this same sort of progression.  In the stone age there was plenty of resources for tools and art at or near the surface.  In certain places where a particular stone was found, humans would keep digging in the same places as long as they kept finding what they wanted.  I believe there are a number of places where there's evidence of riverbanks/cliffs being dug into by people seeking flint, for instance.  As technology improved to the point of being able to melt bronze, then later iron, there happened to be enough of these resources near the surface to support the development of the technology before humans had to dig progressively deeper to continue finding the resource.  It was discovered that certain places were better to look than others, and a little bit on the surface typically pointed to more under the surface.  The Athenians/Greeks for instance realized that there was a lot of silver in the ground at Laurium, so they just kept digging there and exploited that area for millennia.  Recall that a particularly rich vein provided the funds to establish the Athenians as a major sea power between the Persian invasions.  Same with the Roman gold mines in the Alps and Spain.  As easily-reached deposits ran out, humans delved deeper with advanced mining techniques developing apace.\n\nI saw an interesting question once that asked if the human race could reattain our modern world if every bit of our technology and advances were stripped away - essentially putting us back into the stone age overnight.  The sad answer is probably not, since we would no longer have the technological means to get enough coal, oil, and ores to reignite the industrial revolution since all of the surface deposits are long gone.\n\nedit for sources: Any book on the ancient Greeks will talk about the mines of Laurium, [Kitto](_URL_4_) and [Martin](_URL_0_) are decent short survey texts on the subject.  Strabo included such things in his *Geographica* as did Pliny's *Naturalis Historia*, and Braudel mentioned the discovery of Roman mines in the Alps in his [*The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip \nII, vol. I*.](_URL_3_)  Hamblin's [*Warfare in Ancient Near East*](_URL_2_) discusses the technological change between the neolithic and bronze ages.  [Here's](_URL_1_) also the wiki link to a gold mine that's been worked since before the Romans.  Note the relatively advanced method they employed for following the veins.", "hi! you may find some additional info of interest in this section of the FAQ* \n\n[Mineral resource extraction](_URL_0_)\n\n*see the link on the sidebar or the wiki tab"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1006", "http://www.cornishmining.net/story/history.htm", "http://www.dartmoor-npa.gov.uk/lookingafter/laf-culturalheritage/whitehorse-hill-burial", "http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A61943493"], [], ["http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_mining_place_in_Timna_Park.JPG", "http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/sinai/index.html", "http://www.ucl.ac.uk/iams/newsletter/accordion/journals/iams_15_16/iams_15_16_1990_rotherberg_b", "http://books.google.com/books?id=NKCpAVR011MC&amp;pg=PA10&amp;lpg=PA10&amp;dq=chalcolithic+copper+smelting+sinai&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=HIdR6bJC-e&amp;sig=9Y3SVKn697qMPeylZmjBijVYjRs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=g2YsU-HdAsXhoASx24CYBw&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q=chalcolithic%20copper%20smelting%20sinai&amp;f=false", "http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~gel115/115CH2.html"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greece-Prehistoric-Hellenistic-Second/dp/0300160054/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1395427586&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=Ancient+Greece%3A+From+Prehistoric+to+Hellenistic+Times", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas", "http://www.amazon.com/Warfare-Ancient-Near-East-History/dp/0415255899/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1395427842&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Warfare+in+Ancient+Near+East", "http://www.amazon.com/Mediterranean-World-Age-Philip-Vol/dp/0520203089/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1395427716&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Braudel%2C+Fernand.+The+Mediterranean+and+the+Mediterranean+World+in+the+Age+of+Philip", "http://www.amazon.com/Greeks-Penguin-History-H-Kitto/dp/B000HT2OVC"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/economics#wiki_mineral_resource_extraction"]]}
{"q_id": "3nf4fg", "title": "How much did feminism contribute to women entering the work force, versus pressures from industry for more workers, or other factors?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nf4fg/how_much_did_feminism_contribute_to_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvnodkp"], "score": [2], "text": ["The early (WWI/WWII) feminist movements did in fact lead to women entering the voting system, this can namely be attributed to men going off to war and seeing a large increase in the amount of women working in factories and having to perform the duties of the men who where absent.\n\nHowever women have been working (for significantly less than men (in the industrial revolution)) since the industrial revolution when the need for workers sharply increased in Britain. So to answer the question, the feminist movement cannot lay claim to getting women into the workforce. A better claim would be that the Feminist movement lead to political reformation and female suffrage. The feminist movement also lead to rises in the minimum wage for women and men."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11mhyt", "title": "During the Ottoman rule over Lebanon, how come did the French Christian missions succeed in opening schools, monasteries, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11mhyt/during_the_ottoman_rule_over_lebanon_how_come_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6nsqts", "c6nxd0j"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["France fought to defend the Ottomon Empire in the Crimean war, indeed one of the causes of the war was France gaining authority over the Christian parts of Jerusalem from Russia. I don't know much about this area but that may be a point to lead off on if you want to look at this further. ", "The French missions weren't the only ones with success in this part of the world, or anywhere in the Ottoman Empire for that matter.  The Ottomans effectively had no problem with Christian missionaries operating in their territory so long as they weren't proselytizing to Muslims, and weren't acting as spies/subverting the state/evading taxes etc.  For the most part, christian missionaries abided by these rules because there were enough eastern orthodox Christians and Jews to which they could spread their word (and education, health care, etc.).  This would lead to the founding of the first American higher ed institutions abroad, Robert College and Constantinople Women's College (now Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University) in the 1860s/70s and the American Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut) not long after.  Of course these are American institutions (I'm more familiar with them), but French ones were dealt with in the same manner, at least legally speaking.  \n\nAnd it wasn't just limited to Christian organizations, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a French-Jewish \"regeneration\" organization, set up community organizations, schools and clubs from Bulgaria to Baghdad (and Iran too!).  All of these organizations only drew fire when they were perceived to be advocating separatist movements amidst its varied constituencies, but this was really only the case in the very late years.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7kmcbo", "title": "This Japanese flag was found with my great grandfather\u2019s (US) WWII Navy uniform. Can anyone help me figure out what the characters mean?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kmcbo/this_japanese_flag_was_found_with_my_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drffo98", "drfgoj7", "drfh26h", "drfilsn", "drfk6bc"], "score": [3, 2, 18, 41, 11], "text": ["Hey, I do not want to discourage anyone from giving any answers to this question, but you might want to head to the subreddit [r/translator](_URL_0_) where many people have been there with the similiar issue so it would be much easier for you to get an answer there.\n\nDisclaimer, I am not trying to advertise this subreddit in any way I decided to put the link just to help you out.", "Looking at the writings, these are names signed by different people. Perhaps they were signed by people from the soldier\u2019s hometown. \u201cMother  &  son\u201d is written next to one of the names. I would assume that it was a man signing it on behalf of his family.", "If it\u2019s something you\u2019re willing to do, you could try to track down the surviving family members of the soldier and return the flag. It really means a lot to the families and gives them closure.", "You're supposed to rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise.\n\nAs the image appears, the words at the bottom (supposed to be right hand side going up to down) is \"Prayer/Hope for continuing/long lasting military fortunes\"\n\nThe words surrounding the sun seem to be names, though the marking at about the 12:30 mark (between 12:00 and 1:00) is \"mother and son\". Plus at least two of them seem to be feminine names, so I'm guessing those are not the name of a soldier's brothers in arms.\n\nI don't suppose you know the circumstances that your grandfather acquired the flag in.\n\nEDIT: Taking a stab at the names themselves (I'm not 100% sure here), going clockwise from 12:00 as the image appears  \nKimura Ichita/Itta/Kazuta (or any of a bunch of other pronunciations used for the name)  \nmother [and] son  \nNakamichi Reiji  \nGaien Taiji  \nNonbei (no family name given)  \nCan't read the one at 8:00  \nKobayashi Michiko  \nAmbassador Kurusu (Cruz? A foreigner?)  \nYamada Anko (I think).", "Just an addendum question for anyone who is knowledgable about WWII Japan:\n\nOne of the signatures seems to be of a \u30af\u30eb\u30b9 \u5927\u4f7f (Ambassador Kurusu). Is it actually referring to Ambassador Saburo Kurusu? (I am not sure if people are in the habit of signing themselves in Katakana)\n\nDo officers and diplomats sign these good-luck flags? \n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/translator/"], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabur%C5%8D_Kurusu"]]}
{"q_id": "5qcdaw", "title": "How did people explain 'getting a shock' (from a door knob, standing on a rug, etc.) before they knew the true scientific causes?", "selftext": "I know it has to do with electrons jumping from an object to your body or vice versa, but how did people explain this phenomenon before they knew of these subatomic particles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qcdaw/how_did_people_explain_getting_a_shock_from_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcy3qza"], "score": [32], "text": ["Hi there, you may be interested in [this section of our FAQ](_URL_0_) while you wait for a new answer. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/science#wiki_ancients.27_views_of_static_electricity"]]}
{"q_id": "ui4b8", "title": "World war 1 casualties.", "selftext": "I was looking over the world war 1 casualty figures today and was wondering if anyone knows what percentage of military aged males  of the combatant nations were killed in ww1. I couldn't find this anywhere an was wondering if someone with more specific knowledge may be able to answer this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ui4b8/world_war_1_casualties/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vldfb", "c4vleq7", "c4voqbj", "c4vuyph"], "score": [3, 9, 3, 2], "text": ["The only book I can think of that might have this info is Niall Ferguson's *The Pity of War*. If I recall, he has some sections that deal with a sort of calculus of war, death rates of armies and replacement rates, that sort of thing. If you can't find this info around the internet, this book might have it. It's a decent read in any case.", "I can, in fact!  Just give me a moment to dig up some tables I saw earlier this week and I'll return with numbers shortly.\n\n**EDIT:** It turns out I can't, or at least not perfectly.  The tables I recalled were fine, but they don't give the precise statistic you're after.  I include their data below, though, in the hope that it might prove useful to you anyhow.  At the very least, some extrapolation from this might be possible if you operate from certain assumptions about the comparative proportions of certain population segments at the time.\n\nThe best I can offer just now is a comparative breakdown of the casualties suffered by the British, the French, and the Germans.  There is no doubt that data for other combatants exists, but I don't have it readily at hand just now.  I would present these numbers in table format if I could, but I can't seem to find how to do that - if it's even possible in Reddit comments.\n\nAnyway:\n\n**FRANCE**\n\n- **Population in 1914:** 39,000,000\n- **Men Mobilised:** 8,500,000\n- **Men Killed (all theatres, all services):** 1,391,000\n- **Percentage of Men Mobilised Killed:** 16.4%\n- **Percentage of Total Population Killed:** 3.7%\n\n**UNITED KINGDOM**\n\n- **Population in 1914:** 45,750,000\n- **Men Mobilised:** 8,375,000\n- **Men Killed (all theatres, all services):** 702,410\n- **Percentage of Men Mobilised Killed:** 8.4%\n- **Percentage of Total Population Killed:** 1.53%\n\n**GERMANY**\n\n- **Population in 1914:** 60,300,000\n- **Men Mobilised:** 13,250,000\n- **Men Killed (all theatres, all services):** 1,950,000\n- **Percentage of Men Mobilised Killed:** 14.7%\n- **Percentage of Total Population Killed:** 3.23%\n\nSource: Gordon Corrigan's *Mud, Blood and Poppycock* (2003), a somewhat irascible volume that seeks to dispel popular misconceptions about the war - these tables appear in the section dealing with the notion of a \"Lost Generation\".  The tables' data comes from L'Historial de la Grande Guerre in France (a museum), for the French and German numbers, and from *Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War* (1922; put out by the War Office) for the British.\n\n**ADDITIONAL EDIT:** As I suspected, there's also [a more comprehensive wiki page for this](_URL_0_), though it - regrettably like the material I included above - doesn't strictly break these numbers down by the percentage of only military-aged males.  Still, it might fruitfully be examined.  Also of note: consider how the numbers vary slightly from source to source.  The war was so vast in its encompassing that it is still difficult even today to find strictly accurate numbers about such matters.", "27% of the French ages 18-27 died in WWI. The [article] (_URL_0_) I got this from (in french) doesn't specify if they were male, although it's safe to speculate they were. Also, France's death \"rate\" for this category was the second highest after Serbia. Hope that helps. ", "Thanks everyone, your answers and suggestions have been helpful. It's hard to imagine 27% of my peers being killed off, it was quite a terrible war indeed.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties"], ["http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-3965-la_france_en_1940__pourquoi_la_defaite_.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "6l7c4g", "title": "What happened to all the \"von\" names in Germany? Why did they largely disappear after WWII?", "selftext": "I know a lot of titles were abolished after WWI, but it seems like there were plenty around during the WWII era (e.g. von Rundstedt, von Kleist). Was this a function of people born after the fall of the Kaiserreich being forced to drop it but people who already had it were allowed to keep it? Was there social pressure to drop it, either in the Weimar/Nazi periods or after WWII (i.e. People wanted to distance themselves from association with the old regimes)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6l7c4g/what_happened_to_all_the_von_names_in_germany_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsa07r"], "score": [3], "text": ["Nobility was abolished as a legal class in 1919. At that time, titles became surnames (differenced for gender). They haven't disappeared but some families have gone extinct in the male line. Many people today choose to simplify their names in everyday life (Facebook, etc) and omit the preposition.\n\nSource: Article 109 of the Weimar constitution: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic/weimar-constitution-1919/"]]}
{"q_id": "b6244x", "title": "Primary source showing Xerxes defeat at Greece", "selftext": "I've been looking for a while, specifically for something for Herodotus however I can't find any specific quote straight from him or source. Any help as to where I can find one ASAP is greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6244x/primary_source_showing_xerxes_defeat_at_greece/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejhskma"], "score": [3], "text": ["The defeat of Xerxes' fleet at Salamis is described in Herodotos [book 8](_URL_0_), specifically 8.83-95. The defeat of his army at Plataia and Mykale is the subject of book 9. There is a great deal of text, so it would help if you could say specifically what sort of quote you're looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hdt.+8&amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126"]]}
{"q_id": "488nw8", "title": "Was tattooing practiced in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and if so to what extent?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/488nw8/was_tattooing_practiced_in_precolumbian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0i04vc"], "score": [2], "text": ["I only know of one instance of confirmed tattooing in Mesoamerica, but perhaps my flaired colleagues could also jump in and comment. That being said, here is the one case I know of.\n\nIn 1889, Mexican archaeologist [Leopoldo Batres](_URL_4_) was contacted about the find of a \u201cToltec Mummy\u201d in a cave near Santa Mar\u00eda Camotl\u00e1n, Oaxaca. Batres published an obscure illustrated paper on the discovery later that year, which partially depicted the geometric forearm tattoos of the individual. Some years later, the mummy found its way to the [Trocad\u00e9ro Ethnographic Museum](_URL_2_) in Paris.\n\nOver the course of the following 123 years, the female mummy lay largely forgotten until 2012 when detailed studies of her body were finally conducted. Today, the mummy is housed in the collections of the [Muse\u00e9 du quai Branly](_URL_0_) in Paris.\n\nRemarkably, radiocarbon dating has shown that this individual dates to 250 A.D. Her arm tattoos are now known to be more extensive and complex that previously thought and are possibly related to Later Oaxacan (\u201cMixteca-Puebla\u201d) scribal traditions. The \u201cToltec Mummy\u201d provides the earliest firm evidence of tattooing in Mexico.\n\nHopefully additional studies (e.g., infrared photography, tattoo pigment research) of this unique individual will reveal more clues to the meanings behind her exquisite zoomorphic tattoos.\n\n[This drawing](_URL_3_) comes from an article titled 'Momias y tatuajes: Leopoldo batresy la \"momiatolteca\"' in the journal *Arqueologia mexicana*. This is a [photograph](_URL_1_) I found on the web that shows one of the tattoos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.quaibranly.fr/en/", "http://revistatucan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Figuras-geom%C3%A9tricas-en-la-espalda-de-la-momia-oaxaque%C3%B1a.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_d%27Ethnographie_du_Trocad%C3%A9ro", "http://i.imgur.com/3lm5R7T.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Batres"]]}
{"q_id": "52ujqt", "title": "Do we know how the people who built Stonehenge actually got the rock they used out of the ground?", "selftext": "I remember seeing many speculations as to how the rocks got moved to their specific positions and in that place (IIRC, around 100 Km from the closest source of that type of rock), but I have been wondering about how they actually got such uniform blocks of stone out of the ground.\n\nAs far as I understand, the technology around that time didn't actually use many metals, if any at all, and the process of building a quarry without metal tools seems like it would take hundreds of years.\n\nHas there been any research on the subject of how the people that built Stonehenge got the rocks out of the ground to begin with?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52ujqt/do_we_know_how_the_people_who_built_stonehenge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7nz3a7"], "score": [2], "text": ["The bluestone (which was used for the smaller stones and was the material that was moved long distance) was naturally formed into an exposed pillared structure. There wasn't a whole lot of \"constructing\" to be done. Extracting these pillars was probably a fairly straightforward process. You insert a wooden wedge into the gap between the stones, either that action or later swelling of the wedge causes the pillar to detach from the quarry rock formation.  \n  \nThere is a paper from a few years ago discussing the excavations at the quarry.  \n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/craig-rhos-y-felin-a-welsh-bluestone-megalith-quarry-for-stonehenge/D1E66A287D494205D22881CBF1F6DDE8"]]}
{"q_id": "13coay", "title": "Male Chivalry - What is the reason and context behind it?", "selftext": "I had a discussion with a male family member about chivalry (the kind of 18th Century throw down your coat for a lady to walk on stuff) and he said he thought it would be a good idea to begin standing when a woman left or entered a room and stand when she left the dinner table. I aruged that chivalry is dead, and from a feminist perspective he should honour and respect women in ways relevant in today's world. Women are not to be coddled and do not require these \"niceties\". \n\nMy question is whether the rules of chivalry were indeed sexist in nature, or is there some other reason that men acted this way other than politeness and trying to win a woman over?\n\nI apologize if this has been asked to death, but I searched and couldn't find anything relevant to chivalry from a Feminist Historian perspective. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13coay/male_chivalry_what_is_the_reason_and_context/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72s563", "c72tb1k", "c72tfqb", "c72th5q", "c72ufet", "c72wymf", "c7326pc"], "score": [36, 23, 53, 56, 6, 10, 2], "text": ["The issue with this question is that for large periods of history, the concept of \"Feminist History\"is inapplicable. It is certainly possible to look at the status of women in these societies, but the \"Feminist\" movement, and the modern conception of \"Sexism\", cannot be used to adequately describe any of their conditions. It's like using the term \"racism\" to describe the ethnic policies of the Roman Empire- \"Race\", as a concept, was not around at that point in history, and the peoples of that time would not have thought in those terms. \n\n\n", "Depends on your definition of \"sexist\".\nChivalry is from a time where the sexes each had distinct roles and privileges. Chivalry accentuated these differences. Holding the door for a women establishes the man like a servant in relation to the women, but also establishes the man as the more active and the women as the more fragile. This is not contradictory but two sides of the same coin.", "It was sexist in the sense that it was dependent on the idea that women were weak and needed to be protect from roughness and reality.\n\nMy favorite thing about Chivalry is that it was based on a satire by Ovid, The Art of Love.  It was poking fun of young people and how stupid they act when they become infatuated.\n\n\"Ovid\u2019s immense popularity during his lifetime continued after his death and was little affected by the action of Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries. From about 1100 onward Ovid\u2019s fame, which during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass Virgil\u2019s. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice been called \u201cthe age of Ovid.\u201d Indeed, he was esteemed in this period not only as entertaining but also as instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often studied their classics. Ovid\u2019s popularity was part, however, of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in its new chivalrous or \u201ccourtly\u201d guise, was developed in France, it was Ovid\u2019s influence that dominated the book in which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose.\n\nOvid\u2019s popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an educated man, and in the 15th\u201317th centuries it would be difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in particular, offered one of the most accessible and attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology. But Ovid\u2019s chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality. It is these things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, J.W. von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.\"\n\n_URL_0_", "\"Chivalry\" in the sense that you and your male relative were discussing is indeed an archaic system of courtesies that reflected what was an overarching custom in every civilization. Namely, that men and women of a certain social class had different displays of deference to one another, which were themselves reflective of one's elite status. \n\nWithout getting into the anthropology of it all, 18th century \"chivalry\" was a highly modified set of rules that were adapted from about six hundred years of constantly changing rules of courtly etiquette. The origin of chivalry as a cultural concept came out of the crusades, and credit is due to Eleanore of Aquitaine who introduced a great many of the ideals of what became the Code du Chevalier during the High Middle Ages. The consequences of the first three crusades included a radical restructuring of courtly society, and a shift in the cultural concept of knighthood. Whereas the pre-crusade knights of western Europe were wealthy mounted warriors very much steeped in a tradition of combat and bloodshed, the Chivalric Code served to hold these men up to higher expectations of civility. They included a lot of rules for the proper and honourable treatment of other well-born combatants, mercy to commoners, fairness on the battlefield, and (this is perhaps Eleanore's contribution) respectful conduct toward noble women. \n\nCourtly love as a game of chaste romance in the court of Poitiers is the source of much of what we refer to as \"chivalry\", in the sense that many of these archaic courtesies are no longer practiced with regularity. Most of the original Code of Chivalry emphasized conduct on the battlefield and on the march. The chivalrous customs of courtly love were perpetuated by popular works of literature such as La Morte D'Arthur. By the Regency period in England, the etiquette of a gentleman towards men and women of similar status had become independent of the setting of the royal court, or one's membership within the royal cavalry. It was a way of showing off one's good breeding, and was emulated by those of the lower classes. \n\nThe so-called \"death\" of chivalry was not actually an end to a tradition, but an evolution of cultural customs. Whereas the origins of these courtesies were confined to a small segment of the population on occasions of great importance, we recreate the same pagentry at weddings, formal dances, quincea\u00f1eras, etc.\n\n**TL;DR: Chivalrous courtesies of the type you were discussing reflected the inequalities of archaic societies, but themselves originated with cultural reforms meant to promote respect and kindness towards women.**", "I believe /r/asksocialscience would be better suited to answer this question. If you're debating the morality of chivalry, /r/philosophy would be the place.", "One of my favorite books is *Gender and the politics of history* by Joan Wallach Scott.   I'm going to refer to some ideas that are more extensively developed in that book while I attempt to clarify your question, which I'll need to do before contributing to an answer.  \n\nI ought to clarify the terminology: gender means the norms, roles, expectations, and ideas that a given society has about biological sexual difference.  While there are physiological differences between men and women (different genitals, hormones, etc.) gender is how these biologically fixed differences are understood; it is the significance and meaning a culture assigns to the basic fact of sexual differentiation.  Gender is a **social construct** because it is made up of shared ideas. \n\nAs such gender is highly variable.  No matter where or when you go men will have penises and women with have vaginas, but the perceived significance of this changes **radically** across cultures or across time within a single culture.  You might be surprised how quickly and dramatically ideas about gender can change.  In England in 1700 the prevailing belief was that women were more desiring of sex than men were; a century later people believed the opposite.  To emphasize my earlier point: the biology of men and women didn't alter over that time, people's beliefs about men and women did, so when we are talking about that change in attitude we are talking about the social construction of gender.\n\n\nIn its strictest definition chivalry was a honour code associated with the medieval institution of knighthood and the aristocratic warrior class.  But **that's not precisely how you're using the word in your question**.  You are not asking about how chivalry was related to gender in 13th century France.  Since the middle ages the word's meaning has changed; you're using a much more contemporary usage where 'chivalry' is defined broadly as a code of conduct regarding how men treat women.  Indeed, in your question you aren't referring to the conduct codes governing gender relations in any specific historical period/culture, you are questioning the relevance and acceptability of such a code in our own society.   \n\nCustoms regulating the relationships between men and women change over time, often quite dramatically.  Since the social revolution of women's liberation our own society has seen our ideas about gender change dramatically; the equality of men and women is now a concept most people believe in.  Our gender customs are changing as our gender beliefs change-- you now wonder whether it is right to hold a door open for a woman or stand in her presence.\n\nSo this concept of chivalry is a product of gender, and you are wondering about the acceptability of these behaviors because you implicitly recognize that many of the ideas our society and culture have about gender are patriarchal, by which I mean they place women in a subordinate and inferior role.  We can see that patriarchy and the subordination of women was a major characteristic of the past of most societies and, presumably, you have more a more modern gender concept and don't want to replicate that patriarchy in your own life and relationships\n\nSo now we've developed a clearer question: Since we recognize that in the past gender oppressed women in ways we now find unacceptable is continuing certain gendered customs (ie. holding the door) itself oppressive and unacceptable?  \n\nThe answer to that is a political and a personal one; we've reached a point where a historian cannot give you an answer because we aren't talking about the facts of the past but about how you ought to use your understanding of the past to decide how you'll behave in the future.  You are already mindful of how gender can be oppressive for **both men and women**, now what remains is your own decision of what to do with that information.  Is treating women differently from men, or 'chivalry' as you used the term, inherently oppressive?  I'm not sure myself; there are good arguments I can think of on both sides.  But hopefully now you have a clearer formulation of the debate you were actually having with your relative.", "It is certainly disrespectful now but the opposite in it's native era.\n\nIn it's essence chivalry excludes women from the male hierarchy. And all acts of chivalry involve the man putting the woman above his own pride (Opening doors, standing, clothing on puddle). Don't underestimate the importance of male pride in warring societies shaped by combat and physical aggression which makes chivalry an act of great submission."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/436057/Ovid/5428/Assessment"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "18b706", "title": "What was anarchist Ukraine like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18b706/what_was_anarchist_ukraine_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8dbszp", "c8dislj", "c8dja3z"], "score": [14, 4, 7], "text": ["I'm no expert, but I do believe that it was somewhat conceptually similar to the US during the war of independence, minus any Continental Congress. The peasants who lived on the land were in the middle of a war, but had always been and continued to be self-managing (as in, requiring no governmental organization to run their own farms  &  lives). Makhno's forces seemed to operate as a de-facto \"authority\", but I do not believe they did much other than try to protect the country from the Reds and the Whites and the invading western powers. That was their raison d'etre, at least. As far as what city life was like during that time, I'm very curious and totally without answers.\n\n", "Here's a sub-question for anyone who may know the answer:\n\nHow accurate is the portrayal of anarchist Ukraine, and of Makhno's life in general, in the Russian series \"Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno\"?", "Well, the [Anarchist FAQ](_URL_0_) explanation is the best I've come across. It's extremely detailed and well sourced, if admittedly partisan. If you're not too interested on the differences and struggles between Makhnovists and Bolsheviks, you can jump straight to section 4 \"Can you give a short overview of the Makhnovist movement?\" or section 5 \"How were the Makhnovists organised?\". \n\nTo give you just a basic idea, both the social and the military organizations were set up along the lines of democracy (even whn electing military officers) and self discipline. Since they were in the middle of a civil war (the Russian Revolution), deploying a competent army was the first of their priorities. However, they also created a social order based on self-managed socialism (as opposed to the hierarchical, bureaucratic organization the Bolsheviks were beginning to implement). They also rejected private and state property, instead opting for collectivization at the community level. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append46.html#app5"]]}
{"q_id": "fr9m8d", "title": "What were the actual belefs (if any) of the God Worshipers of the Taiping Rebellion? Could you call them actually Christian?", "selftext": "Would***", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fr9m8d/what_were_the_actual_belefs_if_any_of_the_god/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fluoxyj"], "score": [6], "text": ["Basically this exact question has come up before, and [I gave a pretty lengthy answer here](_URL_0_), but if you have any further queries I'd be more than happy to answer them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a504ju/the_religion_of_the_taiping_heavenly_kingdom_is/ebk19uw/?context=2"]]}
{"q_id": "14d0aq", "title": "Did America's relationship suffer as a result of the coups that took place in South/Latin America during the Cold War?", "selftext": "I know that are relationship with Cuba is not the greatest, but what about countries like Chile, Nicaragua or Guatemala where we got the result we wanted. It seems like they would be very bitter about it, yet present day politics do not really seem concerned with them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14d0aq/did_americas_relationship_suffer_as_a_result_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7bzbub"], "score": [2], "text": ["Thomas Walker (political scientist) has written a lot on Nicaragua. He's said a bit about 1990s Nicaraguan politics (remember, the Sandinistas were defeated electorally after the Contra war in 1990 by Violeta Chamorro). There was some tension between the US and the Chamorro government, as the Bush and early Clinton administrations \"pushed a polarizing agenda of de-Sandinization\" in the early 90s, but Chamorro was fairly moderate and preferred reconciliation, retaining major Sandinista figures in government/military positions, which displeased the US (Humberto Ortega as commander of the armed forces). This is from the concluding chapter of his edited volume, *Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s*. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9vh3eg", "title": "Aristotle died in 322 BC, one year after the death of Alexander the Great. What were his thoughts on his former pupil's domination of the known world?", "selftext": "Did he approve of this conquest or his later Persianization? Did he have opinions on Alexander's political, strategic, or tactical decisions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9vh3eg/aristotle_died_in_322_bc_one_year_after_the_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ch3xm", "e9chq9w", "e9d29n4"], "score": [72, 1085, 14], "text": ["Follow up question: how did the death of Alexander affect Aristotle?", "Not to discourage further replies, but I have in the past answered to a couple of questions relating to Aristotle\u00b4s and Alexander\u00b4s relationship:  \n\n[Do we know what Aristotle thought of Alexander the Great?](_URL_0_)  \n[What effect did Aristotle's tutoring of Alexander the Great have on him?](_URL_1_)  \n\nShort answer: we have no idea what Aristotle thought of Alexander, because Aristotle never wrote a word (at least that has survived) about Alexander. In general, the whole relationship between the two is massively glorified in later tradition; Alexander was tutored by Aristotle for couple of years at most during his teens (his education ended by the time he was 16), and the only detailed \"sources\" we have as to what went on in these lessons are written (by Plutarch) some 400 years after Aristotle and Alexander lived and most likely already tinted with idealised fiction. Alexander's later lifestyle and achievements are of course wholly incompatible with Aristotle's philosophy, but whether this says anything about either of them or their relationship is rather impossible to say. \n\n", "Related question. Is it true that there are zero primary sources for anything in Alexander's entire life? If so, how can we be sure he even existed rather than being a popular myth or legend? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yo0wl/do_we_know_what_aristotle_thought_of_alexander/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y5xdx/what_effect_did_aristotles_tutoring_of_alexander/"], []]}
{"q_id": "bfg55e", "title": "When horses were used for transportation in the US, were they treated affectionately like pets or as interchangeable tools? Was it okay to borrow someone else's horse?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bfg55e/when_horses_were_used_for_transportation_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elea46k", "elebe16"], "score": [192, 689], "text": ["So I can\u2019t answer this question for all periods. However, I can shed light into this from the perspective of the 18th century.\n\nHorses for much of Americans during this period were seen as living tools that were needed in order for agrarian survival. Until 1790, at least 95% of Americans lived on farms or small villages, not in cities. Agriculture, whether it was cash crops (like tobacco) or food, horses played an intricate part of life for farmers who needed to transport their goods from their farms/ranches/plantations and to ports. Horses and other animals like oxen and mules helped play important roles during this period, especially in the middle colonies, like Maryland.\n\nIn Maryland, the number 1 animal used for crop transport were horses. This was especially true for small scale farms (farmers who owned less than 50 acres of land), which actually made up more than 50% of the occupations in the colony by 1775.  In Maryland specifically, it was common for farmers to lend or rent their horses to their neighbors. Sources show that religious communities like Quakers, Methodist, and even Catholics (who made up about 11% of the states population) were more likely to let those in their own communities borrow their horses than outsiders.  Instances of this can be found all over the place, with people borrowing horses to transport livestock or even lending them to someone to make longer distance journies.  \n\nConfiscation of animals like horses also became a weaponized tool by the Patriot government in Maryland in 1777 when groups, like Quakers, refused to participate in militia musters or pay war related taxes. As punishment, the Maryland General Assembky authorized its agents to seize horses and hold them for ransom against Quakers, which happened over 100 of times between 1777 \u2014 1881.  Horses at this time were incredibly expensive, often costing over \u00a320, but if you adjust for wartime inflation, would be worth somewhere between $4000 to $6000 today.\n\nI don\u2019t have sources to show one way or another if people treated their animals the way 20th century folks treated their pets, however, I can say that farmers spent a lot of money and care taking care of their horses throughout this period.\n\nSources for most of this can be found in:\n\nAglietti, Jason B. *The Friends They Loathed: The Persecution of Maryland Quakers During the Revolutionary War* University of Maryland Baltimore County  &  Proquest LLC. 2018", " >  Here I mett Capt. John Richards of Boston who was going home, So being very glad of his Company we Rode something harder than hitherto, and missing my way in going up a very steep Hill, my horse dropt down under me as Dead; this new surprize no little hurt me meeting it Just at the Entrance into Dedham from whence we intended to reach home that night. But was now obliged to gett another Hors there and leave my own, resolving for Boston that night if possible.\n\nAs Massachusetts teacher Sarah Kemble Knight presents it in her 1705 diary, the exhaustion of her never-named horse was something more than a mere inconvenience, but less than a tragedy. The surprise still \"no little hurt me\" despite her being in just about the best possible place to have to swap out horses. But she--and whichever Dedham stable owner she encountered--saw no drama in swapping out horses.\n\nSome people absolutely did develop stronger bonds with their horse. Right around the time of Knight's journey, a horse owner from Appomac in Virginia named their mare \"Noby.\" Contemporary journals from the same area indicate that naming an animal was a sign of affection, not just utility--f.ex. cases where only one cow is noted as having a name, and is described with extra tenderness.\n\nBut in general, Knight's matter-of-factness about the horses that enabled her Boston-New York trip reflects the evolution of advice prescribed in horse-training and related manuals. Karen Raber and Treva Tucker sum up the general arc in their introduction to *The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World.*\n\nIn the 16th and early 17th century, different types of texts recommend force, even abuse, for training horses--the idea being very much a rational man versus irrational nature combat. \"Bit-Books\" are just that: descriptions and illustrations of bits, concentrating on how the human can gain forceful control over the horse. Pia Cunco describes the early modern attitude towards bits:\n\n >  The longer the\nshank, the greater the leverage when the rein is activated, and the\ngreater the pressure that is exerted on the horse\u2019s sensitive oral\ntissues. The greater the pressure, the greater the pain, and that was\nwhat solved the practical problem of regulating a horse\u2019s pace.\n\n >  As the brief texts of the bit-books make clear, different bits were\nimplemented according to different training and behavioral\nproblems. \n\nBut Traber traces a gradual evolution moving further into the seventeenth century. Richard, earl of Newcastle, wrote in 1658:\n\n > Great pains then must be taken to make a horse fear his rider, that so he may\nobey out of self-love, that he may avoid punishment. A horse\u2019s love is\nnot so safe to be trusted to, because it depends on his own will;\nwhereas his fear depends on the will of the rider, and that is being a\ndressed horse. But when the rider depends on the will of the horse, it\nis the horse that manages the rider. Love then is of no use; fear does\nall.\n\nObviously this sounds rather horrific, but there is something to be said about Newcastle's emphasis on *fear*. He's thinking about the horse's spirit, temperment, and (as is evident elsewhere in the treatise) thoughts:\n\n >  [The horse] is wise and subtile: for which reason man ought carefully to preserve his empire over him, knowing how nearly that wisdom and subtilty\napproaches his own.\n\nThe methods of training are still abusive, but there's more of a sense of a possible relationship--even if it's one of pure domination.\n\nIt's in the 18th century--the decades after Knight rode and wrote--that Traber sees training manuals advocating a more cooperative relationship. But there is still, she notes, absolutely no sense anywhere of a pet-type relationship.\n\nThis prescriptive advice is borne out in later diaries. Caroline Barnes Crosby's fascinating diary/memoirs of New York to Utah, and Utah to California, from the mid-19th century moves a step beyond Knight in terms of her willingness to portray affection for horses. But there is still a profoundly utilitarian sense. In the middle of a rough New York winter, she writes:\n\n >  We waited one day for\nthe snow to settle a little, and then set forth towards Lake Erie, found the\nsnow very deep, in some places. Mr Crosby walked nearly all the way; our\npretty black horse began to get thin, and look sober. \n\nCrosby's horse doesn't have a name, but she mentions it affectionately. And her description of its struggles goes a smidge beyond Knight's \"and it almost died.\" It's not a fluke. In 1836, she wrote:\n\n >  We found the roads almost impassable, the mud was up to\nthe horses knees. We had a hard time, was nearly a week going 100 miles. Our horse's breast became very sore. It gave me very unpleasant feelings\nto see him work in such misery.\n\nShe portrays herself empathizing with the horse!\n\nBut at the same time, horses were still a utilitarian possession. In 1848, her family encountered a group of Sioux riders \"dressed in very spendid indian style\" (...you think?). She writes that they traded a little bit and \"swaped horses\" [sic]. No detail, no description, no drama.\n\nThere still isn't a sense of \"horses as pets.\" And in fact, even in 1976, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins could remark that while the human-dog relationship resembled one of *family*, horses were traditionally treated more as servants or \"nonkin\" (friends?) even when they had personal names and \" we are in the habit of conversing with them as we do not talk to pigs and cattle.\" But even before horses ceased to be a primary mode of transportation, we can trace a long evolution *towards* a relationship closer to pets or friends than servants or beasts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "22nq3s", "title": "Did the Red Army deliberately hold back during the Warsaw Uprising so that a potential post-war threat (the Home Army) would be removed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22nq3s/did_the_red_army_deliberately_hold_back_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgomsa9"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's a contentious issue among historians, as usual with any topic dealing with the red army, western historians take a dim view of the red army where as Russian ones take the more positive view of it. Both sides have some merit. \n\nOn the Russian side of things. The soviets ha just launched a major offensive that regained a lot of ground, known as operation bagration, and this combined with the fact that the Soviet Union didn't have the greatest logistical system, means that after such a major offensive it is logical that the soviets would not be able to continue fighting. And the soviets attempts to gain a foothold on the Vistula, which would be a necessary step to get to Warsaw, were beaten back. \n\nNow for the western side of things. The soviets by the time of the Warsaw uprising already had a polish puppet government set up in Lublin to counter the London government, there was also polish communist troops fighting in operation bagration. The soviets told the polish home army that they would not tolerate differences between the Lublin and London governments (essentially telling them that the Lublin government was there preferred choice). The soviets also refused to allow allied aircraft to use soviet bases to supply arms to the insurgents. The polish home army had been promised support by the polish communists in exile, but it never materialized. \n\nSo, it's really up to how you interpret the events. For what it is worth, my opinion is that Stalin's signature realpolitik took over, he saw a chance to inflict damage both on his current opponent and a possible future opponent in the polish home army, who were obviously anti communist and politically dangerous. \n\nSources:\n\nThe Second World War by John Keegan\n\nThe third reich at war by Richard Evans \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4997x9", "title": "Sizes of medieval fiefs?", "selftext": "I'm particularly curious about fiefs such as duchies, counties, baronies and more, as well as the sizes of whatever a viscount or marquess may hold. \n\nWhat I do know is that duchies are more often than not a bundle of counties, be it two or three, and counties(for earls and counts) are what we know today the size of a province.\n\nSo, what are the sizes of fiefs, most commonly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4997x9/sizes_of_medieval_fiefs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0qngrv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Depends on the kind of fief and the time period. [In the early days of the French Monarchy, duchies were large and powerful](_URL_7_) but over time [their size would be significantly reduced](_URL_6_) \n\nCounties tended to be slightly smaller than what we'd call a \"Province,\" but different places use that name differently; so I'd stay away from modern comparisons alltogether (provinces in [Canada](_URL_1_) are much larger than provinces in [Italy](_URL_3_)). If you'd like to get into the details of how feudal subdivisions were structured, [this is a painstakingly assembled summary of feudal landholdings in Normandy](_URL_0_). If you don't mind clicking around, the nutters behind that list at the [Foundation for Medieval Genealogy have assembled detailed summaries of many feudal landholders in Medieval Europe (navigation is on the toolbar on the right)](_URL_9_) going so far as to source them (at the bottom of the page). \n\nI'm not surprised you ask about Viscounts, they're weird creatures depending on where and when you happen to be. In the resources I linked above, you'll notice that in France you get Viscounts ranking between counts and dukes (usually Counts with particularly large demesnes) but more commonly the title referred to an administrative position, literally the *Vice-Comes*, or \"Vice Companion\" (sometimes they had particularly large demesnes because of their additional responsibilities, while other times they were granted additional responsibilities and privileges precisely because of their amassed holdings).\n\nThe Visconti Family are the Ur-Example of viscounts. They Pop-up in the twelfth century under the name Cattaneo as landholders of the fief of [Mariano](_URL_8_) and were later granted the fief of [Massino](_URL_5_) on the shores of Lake Maggiore in the 12th century. The Bishop of Milan Landulf appointed them as his Vicars in the tenth century for unclear reasons (and good relations with Otto I meant that an Archbishopric Vicar was also an Imperial Vicar). The Visconti were small landholders, but so were their rivals; and their modest wealth originating from the tolls on the boats docking in Massino (as well as abundant tithes from the fertile lakefront) allowed them to impose themselves as one of the most prominent *Famiglie Capitanee* of Milan (families that provided for the defense of the city). They soon turned the title of Viscount hereditary, and it became a nickname which they would later adopt as their their surname. The Visconti had many rivals in the local politics of the city of Milan, notably the other *Famiglie Capitanee*, but over three hundred years they managed to become rulers of the city. Over the course of aggressive expansion in the 14th century, [while still technically Viscounts, the Visconti came to rule an area much larger than a Duchy](_URL_2_). \n\nA Marquis, on the other hand, historically was ennobled with holdings comparable to those of a Duke. However, a Marquis has more military responsibilities. Understandably, the title was normally given to Vassals in border areas. The Equivalent German title Margrave, for example, was granted in eastern territories bordering Slavic peoples. [You can see more here, a wonderful website run by a retired history professor who set it up in 1996 and left it that way](_URL_4_) (doesn't take away from its value as a resource).\n\nI'd like to warn you against looking for too many neat little boxes: the land-title relationship varied greatly depending on the case. Sometimes when a noble title was created the overlord gave land and/or a house with it, sometimes they did not. Sometimes the family sold or lost the land, but kept the title.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/NORMAN%20NOBILITY.htm", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Political_map_of_Canada.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Massima_espansione_Viscontea.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Italian_regions_provinces.svg", "http://www.friesian.com/germany.htm", "https://www.google.it/maps/place/Massino+Visconti+NO/@45.8227231,8.5181599,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x4786740f84c0e6b7:0x75372aef40ac3294", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Map_France_1477-en.svg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Capetian_France.jpg/800px-Capetian_France.jpg", "https://www.google.it/maps/place/Mariano+Comense+CO/@45.688618,9.1423494,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x4786a2b43db92959:0x12b6e7d4c4ab8885", "http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/"]]}
{"q_id": "1kizpa", "title": "Why did they even bother with lifeboats in the 19th century (Navy)?", "selftext": "I was reading \"Beat to Quarters\" from the Hornblower series (BTW, if you like Naval warfare you should read these, great books and TV series!) when they mentioned that they might not have enough Life boats to tow the ship, after a huge battle. This made me wonder, why the bloody hell did they even have them? Most ships I see only have 4-7 lifeboats and I refuse to believe that all 200-800 men could fit.\n\nEdit: thank you for the great answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kizpa/why_did_they_even_bother_with_lifeboats_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbpftin", "cbpfwmj", "cbpibwg", "cbpspyr"], "score": [10, 7, 5, 2], "text": ["The lifeboats were used as a means a ferrying passengers to other ships or the shore and not as a means of long term survival. The life boats were also used in non emergency settings of course as launch boats which in navy ships would have been there primary function. ", "I believe in the Hornblower series when they referred to those boats they were referring to the various smaller vessels that ships of the line and other naval ships had on board that could be hoisted out and used for other purposes. They are commonly referred to as [Ship's boats](_URL_3_) If you read the series you will see that they use such ships for a variety of purposes, from towing the ship to cutting out expeditions to setting the anchor to boarding actions to simply ferrying the captain and others from ship to shore or ship to ship.\n\nHere are some Wikipedia links to those types of vessels that they reference in the Hornblower series:\n\n[Captain's Gig](_URL_5_)\n\n[Longboat](_URL_0_)\n\n[Launch](_URL_4_)\n\n[Jolly boat](_URL_2_)\n\n[Cutter] (_URL_1_)", "These boats were not generally known as \"life boats\" at the time, and saving lives in an emergency was not their main intended function.", "Just as a practical consideration where are you going to put boats for 700-800 men on a vessel that is usually less than 250ft long? \n\nConsider also that the lives of most of the men on those ships were not considered terribly valuable. They could, and routinely were, replaced. One of the more common causes of surrender in an age of sail battle was not having enough crew left to keep fighting. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longboat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_(ship)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly-boat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship's_boat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_(boat)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain%27s_gig"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "39l78t", "title": "Did Roman politicians have professional political staff?", "selftext": "Speech writers, campaign strategists, press secretaries, that sort of thing; people specifically serving that politician and his image / career, not just assisting him in carrying out his official duties.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39l78t/did_roman_politicians_have_professional_political/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs4jzqv"], "score": [7], "text": [" Cicero did have a slave called Tyro who served as his secretary and confidante, that's the closest example that I can give to a political staff but my inclination is that they did not exist in the modern sense. On the speech writers point it was considered very bad face for a Roman not to write his own speeches. Nero was lambasted for it because it was clear that he had not written his own speeches. The custom was different in Greece where orators like Lysias making some extra income as paid speech writers, for instance \"On the Murder of Eratosthenes\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4u6bta", "title": "When did the Old Norse arrive in the Scandinavian Peninsula, and can they be said to have displaced the indigenous Sami people in the southern regions?", "selftext": "Can the Norse themselves be characterized as indigenous to Scandinavia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4u6bta/when_did_the_old_norse_arrive_in_the_scandinavian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5nf57s", "d5okjjf"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["It is generally believed that the Norse people did not displace the Sami people in the south because the Sami did not reach the south in large numbers. The Norse moved in from the south and the Sami from the east/southeast in Finland. It wasn't until the 16th and 17th centuries that the southern parts of the Scandinavian Peninsula were populated enough to move into Sami territory in the north.\n\nRegarding the Norse being indigenous to Scandinavia, it depends. The Norse were first among the \"current\" peoples to inhanit the southern parts. But in my experience, indigenous people usually refer to a minority people in an area where this minority first lived. The Norse were not a minority in Scandinavia. But you could make the case that they are indigenous if you only consider the \"here first\" aspect.\n\nSources: Harrison, Dick. Europa i v\u00e4rlden medeltiden.", "It is actuelly slightly wrong to look at Scandinavia and ask when the norse arrived there, because Scandinavia was where the norse cultur was developed. \n\nBefore I write more I need to remind that most of this knowledge builds on archeology, because we have extremly few written sources from Scandinavia and we get them very late. The first people seems to arrive in Scandinavia in 12000 BC, but we would not call these people norse. They have another religion and doesn't speak norse.\n\nAround the middle of the 3th millinium BC a new cultur often called the battle-axe cultur arrives in Scandinavia. This cultur is very importent, because they bring the indie-european language family to Scandinavia and we assume it is also the cultur that spreads it to most of Europe. They also brings another of changes that is importent when looking at germanic and norse cultur. Patriarchy and focus on chattel husbandry. We are not sure how this cultur spread and people have argued for two main ways. The first is that the innovations in this new cultur where so great that new tribes that came into contact with them simply assimilated it and the other is that it was spread with a people that moved west. Today genetics very much seems to show that it was spread with people from the region north of the Black Sea moving west.\n\nNow let us move to what we call the Nordic Bronze Age, that goes from 1700 - 500 BC, becuase here we starts seeing the proto-germanic cultur evolve. Even though we know very little about the religion in Scandinavia during this time, it seems like we can start recognizing a number of features that will latter be included in the norse religion, such as the sun being pulled over the sky in a wagon and we start seeing pictures of people that might be the gods Thor and Tyr. \n\nThe ending of the bronze age is also about the time where we assume that the language in Scandinavia have evolved into a proto-germanic language and the first germanic tribes started to wander south and west from southern Scandinavia. These tribes would come into contacts with the romans around 1th century AD. At this time we can still not really talk about a Norse cultur, because they are still part of a much bigger germanic cultur, but during the next 700 years, during the migration area Scandinavia will become distinctive norse as Scandinavia cultur moves in one direction and the other germanic culturs align themself with christianity. Their language will evolve into norse, they will aquire the runes, Odin will replace Tyr as the most prominent god and a new type of Scaldic poetry will evolve.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eam2xa", "title": "\"If they would rather die,\" said Scrooge, \"they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.\" Did Scrooge see those in question as unnecessary, or was there commentary at the time on what they saw as overpopulation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eam2xa/if_they_would_rather_die_said_scrooge_they_had/", "answers": {"a_id": ["favy4yf"], "score": [32], "text": ["Lots could be said about  how the early Victorians thought about the problem of the poor. But to limit this to Dickens: Scrooge is very much echoing Thomas Malthus ( 1766-1834), who had pointed out some years earlier that human populations grew geometrically but food only arithmetically, so that in theory humans would always outgrow their food supply,  and  that growth would therefore create a desperate struggle among the poorest for food. To put Malthus in context, at the time he was writing England had enacted Corn Laws, which put a tariff on imported grain. This kept prices high, which worked to the benefit of  landowners ( and most of the arable land in England was owned by the upper classes who were in control of the government)) but made it harder for the poor, at a time when a lot of the lower classes' income had to be spent on food. Other economists were for free trade and against the Corn Laws. Malthus was for the Corn Laws,  partially because he thought free trade would depress wages and earnings, but partially because he thought that,  if they were just fed more without having to work more, the poor would just increase until they were poor and again needed help. Malthus also disliked the whole notion of poor laws, which essentially distributed free food to the poor in a parish, collecting funds (called rates) to do so from the people in the parish.\n\n > The poor laws of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in these two ways. Their first obvious tendency is to increase population without increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence. They may be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain, and as the provisions of the country must, in consequence of the increased population, be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish assistance will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before and consequently more of them must be driven to ask for support.  \n >   \n > Thomas Malthus: [An Essay on the Principle of Population](_URL_0_) ( 1798) chapter 5\n\nMalthus thought that requiring people to first be self-supporting before they could have children would help limit the poor population. He and ( later) Jeremy Bentham  would begin a movement that would take the poor away from the older parish food-doles to new workhouses and poor farms, where , instead of just getting free food, they would supposedly be supervised and have to work to support themselves. As Scrooge would say, when pressed for donations for the aid of the poor, \"Are there no prisons? No workhouses? \"\n\nLater in Dickens' story Scrooge is shown a huge market by the Ghost of Christmas Present with foods from all around the world- clearly, Dickens felt that, with international commerce, there was enough food for all. And  Scrooge's \"conversion\" is not a very religious one- rather an odd thing for a Victorian.  Dickens was not a particularly devout Christian either..but Malthus was an Anglican minister, and perhaps that's significant, for  Scrooge's sudden conviction to always  \"keep Christmas\" has nothing in it about going to Church, following Christ, abjuring sin, reading his Bible, etc etc, but about spending money on pies and turkeys and sending them in a cab to Bob Cratchit and then raising his salary, giving to the poor... in short, merry Christmas and to hell with Malthus."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4239/4239-h/4239-h.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "16wk6g", "title": "War chants: were they common in pre-modern battles?", "selftext": "I was re-watching *The Return of the King* today and several times during the film the armies are depicted chanting as they go into battle ([here's an example](_URL_0_)). Was it ever common practice for soldiers to chant or sing like this while fighting? If so, I imagine that it would have been a very useful tool for intimidating the opposing army, but did these chants serve any other purposes? Were there any famous / infamous war cries?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16wk6g/war_chants_were_they_common_in_premodern_battles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c808w7a", "c80btqo"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["\"Ut ut ut\" (Out out out) was a common war cry used by Anglo Saxons when facing invaders. \"Got mitt uns\" (God with us) was used in by King Harold of England according to Norman historians along with \"Oli Crosse\" (Holy Cross).\n\nFrom another forum, some other sources are given there:\n\n_URL_0_", "It may not be exactly what you're imagining, but [Athenaeus](_URL_0_) (14.630) says that Spartans sang the poems of Tyrtaeus, their \"national\" poet (according to legend he wrote a Spartan constitution, and was well-known for his martial poetry), when going into battle, in order to keep step. Similarly, [Thucydides](_URL_1_) (5.70) says that the Spartans marched to the music of flutists for the same reason. The Spartans' discipline in this respect set them apart from the Argives, who \"marched to the charge with great violence and fury,\" which was a very bad thing for them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuRpOrTZaEs"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.englisc-gateway.com/bbs/topic/25458-was-this-really-our-battle-cry/"], ["http://www.attalus.org/old/athenaeus14.html", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0247%3Abook%3D5%3Achapter%3D70"]]}
{"q_id": "88qfdm", "title": "What was the Czech Legion doing in Russia in 1918", "selftext": "In schools, they teach us that the Russian Civil War started when the Czech Legion clashed with Bolshevik forces around the Ural Mountains. Czech Legion got the permission to pass through Russia and travel around the world to continue fighting German forces on the Western Front. I really do not understand this explanation. There must have been other way of getting to the Western Front without having to go around the globe such as going through northern Africa or even through the Northern seas through Sweden. This seems to me like a much more efficient and quicker way if the Czech Legion actually intended to fight Germans. Can someone explain what happened with the Czech Legion and why were they even so deep in Russia", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88qfdm/what_was_the_czech_legion_doing_in_russia_in_1918/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwmhcm0"], "score": [6], "text": ["Something I've written about before, so I'll repost this for you.\n\n**Founding the Legion**\n\nBack in 1914, when war broke out, tens of thousands of Czech and Slovak expatriates lived in the Russian Empire. Their homelands were under the control of Austria-Hungary, and generally speaking, the Czechs and Slovaks weren't all that happy about this. With the declaration of war, many who were still within the Hapsburg's empire were drafted to fight for rulers who they had little love for. The expatriates, however, threw their lot in with the Entente. While Russia was the most notable location for this (and the one we'll be focusing on) there were also tens of thousands who served on the Western Front and in Italy. These were mostly ex-pats living in France, and ethnic Czechs and Slovaks from the Austro-Hungarian Army POWs captured by Italy.\n\nBut back to Russia. Sensing that this was their chance to establish a national homeland, the ex-pat community in Russia petitioned the Czar to form the *Druzhina*, a small fighting unit generally translated as retinue, but literally meaning fellowship. It was small, less than 800 men (although many more living in Russia would soon follow), and they were deployed to the front against the Austo-Hungarians, with an eye towards their propaganda value to encourage defections within the Czech and Slovak conscripts. And it worked! Thousands risked crossing over the lines to surrender themselves, and they were happy to then join their compatriots fighting under the Russian banner. And many who had not surrendered specifically for that purpose were nevertheless easy to recruit from POW camps. The size of the unit kept growing, first to a Regiment, then a Brigade, until finally it was an entire Corps numbering some 40,000, a mix of former POWs and enthusiastic ex-pats.\n\nThe Legion was an important component of the future Czechslovak state that was being envisioned by the Entente powers and the expat leadership under Thomas Masaryk and the Czech National Council, but while the Czech-Slovaks had something to fight for, the Russian peasant conscripts... not so much. With the Russian Revolution in early 1917, their situation got a bit precarious. Under the Kerensky government, they still had political support certainly, but the will to fight was getting sapped from the (no longer) Imperial Russian Army. They continued to be one of the most committed fighting units on the Eastern Front, but the events of November 7th threw a wrench in their plans. The Czech-Slovak leadership - both the CNC and the Legion in Russia (A term coined for them by the CNC, not what they called themselves) - made it clear that they wished to take no side in the ensuing Civil War, and simply to extricate the Legion from Russia and bring them to the Western Front to continue the fight. They had fully endorsed the Entente powers however, who promised to assist in their evacuation.\n\n**The Long Trek East**\n\nThe immediate turmoil of Russia following the Bolshevik takeover placed the Legion in limbo. Fighting against the Central Powers had essentially ceased, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March left them isolated from any sort of support. A small number were able to quickly make their way to Arkhangelsk to be evacuated by the Allied Intervention Force that had occupied the arctic port. The majority though, hoping to get out of Russia, they made the decision to trek over the entire Asian continent via the Trans-Siberian Railroad and evacuate at Vladivostok, where the Allies had also landed troops. To get there though they had to fight. Such a trip would require massive transportation capacity and control of the rails, which no one was willing to share with them. The Germans, who had advanced into Ukraine and were allied with Ukrainian nationalists attempting to take control of the region, were threatening some of the rail junctions that they needed control of in order to start moving east. The Reds, who didn't trust them anyways, were being pressured by the Germans to disarm them and prevent the massive influx of troops that they represented, resulting in open hostilities beginning in late May. Some Czechs had recently accosted a train car full of Austro-Hungarian prisoners on their way to be repatriated and lynched one of the Hungarians on board who had been hurling insults at the Czech-Sovaks, known as the Chelyabinsk Incident. This was used as a pretense to try and fully disarm the Legion, who refused to comply. While having some nominal goals in common with the White forces, there was never any real trust between the two.\n\nSoon, the Legion was spread out along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They couldn't all move at once of course, but rather had to break into many smaller units in order to control the numerous junctions necessary to complete their journey through hostile territory. Advance elements reached Vladivostok relatively quickly, establishing a base of operations there to support their compatriots who remained further west, building up enough rolling stock to allow them to make the journey (for more info specifically on their awesome armored train, [check this previous post of mine](_URL_0_)). By September, 1918, the Legion controlled 6,000 miles of track stretched from Vladivostok all the way west to the Volga, and a massive collection of 11,000 rail cars to effect their journey (and had continued to grow, to nearly 70,000 people), but being able to now evacuate everything to the east was not going to be easy.\n\nAs, at least in theory, part of the Entente (technically they were considered part of the French Army) who was now not only fighting the Central Powers but also gotten themselves involved in the Russian Civil War, the Legion was asked to delay their evacuation, and instead to bolster their forces on the western terminus of their control and tie up the German/Austro-Hungarian forces in the region, as well as to continue fighting the Reds there. They assisted in setting up the KOMUCH in the Volga region, a socialist state that stood against the Bolshevik, but it was short lived and soon collapsed, with the Legion falling back to the Urals. Come the end of the year, the situation of the Legion again became precarious. Although the Entente remained committed to assisting in their withdrawal, the importance of the mission had become minor in the face of the whole end of World War One thing.\n\n**Homeward Bound!**\n\nAlso around that time, Admiral Kolchak had become the nominal leader (Supreme Ruler of all the Russias,) of the White Forces, as head of the Provisional government (although the Whites were quite fractured). He wasn't exactly the leader of the Legion though. They were loosely allied at best, both fighting the Reds, but not always trusting each other. Through 1919, the Legion - and the Whites - were essentially conducting a slow, fighting withdrawal as the Red forces pushed east, until finally in October the Legion was given the green-light to simply pack things up and make a full break for home, as the Entente powers holding Vladivostok were preparing to evacuate and break off their support for the Whites.\n\nAs the Legion was preparing to leave for good. Kolchak's government collapsed with the capture of Omsk, his capital. As he traveled through Legion controlled territory, he was arrested by them on the orders of the Entente powers. In late January, to ease their evacuation, the Czech Legion agreed to surrender Kolchak to the Bolshevik aligned forces in control of Irkutsk, as well as to hand over a large amount of gold bouillon that they had managed to take control of. After handing over the former White leader and much of the gold, the Legion was given safe passage out of region. Kolchak was executed a few weeks later, and within a month the Legion had managed to move their entire force out of Irkutsk unmolested. From there, getting to Vladivostok was rather simple, and soon ship after ship started carrying them home. It took until September 2nd, 1920 for all of them to leave the Russian soil, with the total number evacuated pegged at 67,730, including not only the soldiers but also wives, children, and hangers-on. About 4,000 of their number were left behind in the ground.\n\nUpon reaching their new Czechoslovakian state, the Legion quickly became a core component of the new county's military. Their number were perhaps some of the most fiercely patriotic citizens of their homeland, and it is estimated that 13,000 of the former Legionnaires died during World War II either as part of the resistance movement or in German Concentration camps. Veterans would also be generally mistreated by the Soviet backed government that took power after the war, as their history of anti-Communism did little credit to them in the eyes of the state. As for the gold, there are rumors about just how much they held onto, but I don't know if any are confirmed.\n\n**Sources**\n\nThe Czech Legion 1914-1920 by David Bullock\n\nThe Czechoslovak Legion by George F. Kennan *Russian Review, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct., 1957),* and Part II from *Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan., 1958), pp. 11-28* (If you want a summary longer than mine and have JSTOR access, I recommend this)\n\nThe Russian Civil War 1918-1922 by David Bullock\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28gr18/what_is_the_point_of_armored_trains/ciarngy"]]}
{"q_id": "96chmp", "title": "Both the UK and the US saw game-changing conservatives (Reagan and Thatcher) replaced with center-left leaders (Clinton and Blair). Was this due to interactions across the Atlantic, or just a coincidence?", "selftext": "P.S. I didn't forget about HW, I just wanted to keep the title short.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96chmp/both_the_uk_and_the_us_saw_gamechanging/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e404zq3", "e40mj3o", "e412qy9"], "score": [10, 2, 4], "text": ["Neither Reagan nor Thatcher were followed by Clinton or Blair", "Politics does tend to work like a pendulum and in that sense it is a coincidence that America and Britain both swung from centre-right to centre-left parties at roughly the same time. That said, since Clinton and Blair, the two political scenes have diverged considerabley, suggesting more than mere coincidence. \n\nIntellectually they both developed from the same source - the so called \"third way\" that was influential throughout the western world, but Clinton and Blair are perhaps it's most significant leaders. \n\nHistorically, UK and USA politics have influenced each other enormously. Clinton's Democratic party served as model for Blair's New Labour. Although Labour had since 1983 been approaching a more centrist position in policy terms, Blair borrowed heavily from Clinton in terms of electoral strategy, presentation, and PR. \n\nAs Blair says to Clinton, \"you showed the way\". \n\nI'd recommended looking at the transcripts of their conversations that Clinton published: _URL_0_ \u203a files\n", "I know more about US politics than UK politics, but I know enough about both to answer. It was *largely*, but not *entirely*, coincidence.\n\nDuring the Reagan/Bush 1 years, many people really thought that the US would keep electing Republican presidents for the foreseeable future. In 1968, Nixon is elected, and re-elected in '72. In the aftermath of Watergate, Jimmy Carter wins one term in '76. Then, Reagan wins '80 and '84, and Bush 1 in '88. So that's a full twenty year span with only one elected Democratic president. There were a variety of reasons for this. First, there was considerable anger at LBJ for not only the Vietnam War, but also the Civil Rights movements and Great Society programs, which many Americans did not agree with. Second, while we might think of politics today as polarizing, there were dozens and dozens of political bombings in the US in the 1960's and 1970's. Rapid cultural changes and the concomitant instability led to the rise of \"law and order\" politics. During the 1968 riots after MLK's death, LBJ brought in extra forces to make sure the White House was not stormed. The Weathermen were blowing buildings, and occasionally people, to smithereens. While the UK was not anywhere near as extreme as the US in that regard, transatlantic anger at people on the fringes of left politics really did make an impact.\n\nNew ideas about economics played a major role as well. Sluggish economies in the US and the UK (they were sluggish for related, but different reasons) played a role in convincing voters that it was time for a change. In fact, Carter had actually begun to implement some of the changes in economic policy that Maggie and Ronnie are famous for, but that's a discussion for another post.\n\nOne thing to remember is that Clinton won the 1992 election mostly because of Ross Perot as a spoiler candidate. Throughout most of HW Bush's term, people thought he would win again. But Perot won 18.9% of the vote, most of which probably would have gone to HW Bush, giving him a substantial victory. It's quite rare for Presidents to lose elections after winning wars. So Clinton won in '92 largely due to a spoiler candidate, which is obviously unrelated to the politics of the UK.\n\nIn the UK, Third Way politics were mostly a departure from the actual socialist policies that had previously been espoused, including things like nationalized industries. Tony Blair's politics embraced entrepreneurship and the free market, while providing a large social safety net, rather than simply socializing resources. In America, the democratic party hadn't been particularly socialist, so they couldn't depart from that, although Clinton did engage in welfare reform."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us"], []]}
{"q_id": "4gp521", "title": "Can you recommend some good \"layperson\" books on the 1920s?", "selftext": "I'm looking for non-fiction books. Can be topic specific, but would appreciate a few broad overview. I find the era so fascinating. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gp521/can_you_recommend_some_good_layperson_books_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jll8c"], "score": [3], "text": ["Frederick Lewis Allen's book *Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s* is a short, pretty simple, rather fun overview of the decade you might enjoy. Allen was a reporter who published the book in 1931, trying to wrap the decade up while touching on most of what he thought were interesting and important cultural, political, and of course economic moments. Now, his book isnt the most academic book on the decade. And Allen covers neither the long term effects of the events he discusses, nor each event in thematic detail. Rather, his book offers more of a coffee table, newspaper sort of narrative. You get the feeling that these were the things Allen thought Americans talked about during the decade, and that he is relating these events to us as they appeared to play out at the time. So, while it might not cover the entire breadth and depth of the decade, it definitely gives you some of the flavor, and is pretty easy to just pick up and read. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gzf1x", "title": "How can people and governments deny major genocides such as the Holocaust or Armenian Genocide if there are pictures, documents and admissions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gzf1x/how_can_people_and_governments_deny_major/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckny82p"], "score": [2], "text": ["hi! more input is welcome, but FYI, there are some previous posts on the Holocaust in the FAQ \n\n[Holocaust Denial](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_holocaust_denial"]]}
{"q_id": "2088gl", "title": "President LBJ: \"I\u2019ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years\" - Is this a real quote?", "selftext": "I found this over at /r/conspiracy:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere are the claimed quotes from Lyndon B. Johnson (warning language):\n\n\nLyndon Baines Johnson 1963... \"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference... I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years\".\n\nI did some googling, and it seems that the only source I could find linked to this was from an unofficial biography.  I was wondering if /r/AskHistorians could weigh in on the issue?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2088gl/president_lbj_ill_have_those_ns_voting_democratic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg0rk8h", "cg0uc04", "cg0whwo", "cg10gyp", "cg1w0yd"], "score": [99, 630, 51, 603, 2], "text": ["I asked about this quote a while back as well. It's authenticity can't be verified, though it's still possible it was said by him.\n\n\n_URL_0_", "I've looked into this before and to my memory the first appearance of the quote was many many years after Johnson supposedly said it. This isn't a definite discredit though. What does make me doubt it is that African Americans had voted majority Democratic, at least in presidential elections, since 1936. The majority of African-Americans had considered themselves Democrats since 1948. There is no way that LBJ didn't know that. It would seem unnecessary, to me, to restate something which was already an established fact. For more information on how African Americans started voting Democratic, [see here](_URL_0_). ", "This sounds like a gross distortion (a complete inversion, actually) of what he actually said upon signing the Civil Rights Act into law, about delivering the South into the hands of the Republican Party for a generation. The only direct attribution I can find at the moment is in Bill Moyers' book, Moyers on America, p. 167:\n\n > When he signed the act he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. \"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come,\" he said.", "As other comments noted, the quote is attributed to LBJ in Ronald Kessler's book, and was supposedly said to two southern governors. But in the absence of a reliable objective record of that quotation, among the best sources to answer your question are the presidential recordings made during the Johnson administration, which I've listened to at length during my undergrad studies. Several hundred conversations were recorded dealing with issues of racial politics and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [A discussion of those conversations can be found here](_URL_1_).\n\nNow, a quote like the one in OP's question is not found in any of these recordings, nor do they contain the oft-cited statement to Bill Moyers that LBJ had \"lost to the South to the GOP for a generation.\" But they do provide excellent insight into how LBJ talked about these issues in private. For example, it is simply undisputed that **LBJ did use the prevailing southern racial slurs of the time, including the word \"n-----r,\"** as [this actual recording demonstrates](_URL_0_). This is hardly the only example.\n\nAnother famous example is cited in *\"Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960\"*, by Robert Dallek. Johnson defended the Supreme Court appointment of the famous Thurgood Marshall, rather than a black judge less identified with the civil rights cause, by saying to a staff member, **\"Son, when I appoint a n-----r to the court, I want everyone to know he's a n-----r.\"** \n\nThat being said, for a rural-born white Texan in the late 1960s, the collected recordings show that LBJ had some astonishingly progressive views on race in America, but his nomenclature leaves something to be desired. It is also worth noting that LBJ knew his audience, and would speak differently to a Georgia state legislator than, say, a Connecticut governor. It's very difficult to tell when LBJ is putting on an act for audience or when he's speaking with his \"true\" voice. Additionally, I tend to detect a bit of self-aware irony in some of LBJ's discussion of these issues. I think that's key to understanding how LBJ could say the most radically progressive statements while simultaneously using a racial slur.\n\nBut given the tone and tenor of LBJ's conversations on these issues, I think the best we can say is that the quote cited by OP is not inconsistent with LBJ's style. But it seems unlikely that we will ever know if those exact words were uttered. From my own studies, I personally think the quote is either genuine or a fair paraphrase. It's the kind of thing LBJ might say to a Dixiecrat to convince them not to oppose the CRA. Thus, if anyone got \"tricked\" over the CRA, it wasn't black America -- it was Southern conservative democrats. In other words, as u/Thurgood_Marshall and others note below, **while the quote might be genuine, the sentiment was not.**\n\nSo, I think it does a disservice when these kinds of quotes are used to suggest that LBJ was duplicitous and uncaring about black America. Personally, I have no doubt over the *bona fides* of LBJ's empathy and humanity after listening to the conversations in June of 1963 during the Freedom Summer disappearances, where LBJ was positively distraught.\n\nIt's also revealing that on July 24, 1964, Barry Goldwater met with LBJ in the White House to discuss the issue of race in the presidential campaigns. Goldwater suggested that both campaigns not address the issue of race in order to avoid inflaming racial tensions. LBJ strongly disagreed. There is no doubt from the presidential recordings that LBJ considered race problems to be an issue of morality, going so far as to compare the CRA of 1964 as a moral challenge similar to that facing the Lincoln administration over whether to pursue the 13th Amendment.\n\n**EDIT:** Because it hasn't been mentioned yet, I will add that the source of the quotation, Ronald Kessler, is not what I would call an unbiased historian. Mr. Kessler has been the chief Washington correspondent for the far-right-wing Newsmax. He is known for incorrectly reporting that Barack Obama was present for Rev. Wright's \"white arrogance\" sermon, among other controversies. I'm not saying he's a bad journalist, and I'm not indicting his politics. I'm just saying that he comes to the table with his own biases.\n\n**TOP LEVEL EDIT:** The more I consider the OP's quote in light of my own time listening to the recordings at the LBJ library at the University of Texas, the more I am convinced that LBJ is putting on an act to these two southern governors to quiet their rancor over his pursuit of the CRA. I think the statements in OP's quote directly conflict with Johnson's private understanding of just how transformative the CRA would be, both politically and legally.\n\nAlso, I think he absolutely knows, at the moment that he is smiling and assuring these good ole boys that their political future is secure, that he is actually about to end their careers, as well as the present and future careers of a great many other conservative democrats in the south (as reflected in the Moyers quote, above). \n\nI won't begin to deny that LBJ was a ruthless political operator, and indeed, an unrepentant liar. But I cringe that this single quote, robbed of its context, would be used by some to imply that LBJ was a heartless racist manipulator. That's one notion that I think the historical record soundly disproves.  \n\n**GOLD EDIT:** Wow, much thanks. I can't believe my first gold post is littered with n-bombs. ", "I'd like to point out that it's problematic to use the 2014 connotations of the word to determine a man's state of mind a half-century ago.  The word\u2014though impolite\u2014could be used without rancor, among certain audiences, in the Hill Country of Johnson's youth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/206ve3/ill_have_those_ns_voting_democratic_for_the_next/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g8r6g/is_this_racist_quotation_about_winning_the_black/"], ["http://www.scribd.com/doc/76328825/African-Americans-and-the-New-Deal-Coalition-2-1"], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1rIDmDWSms", "http://presidentialrecordings.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/essays?series=CivilRights"], []]}
{"q_id": "es1i1d", "title": "How long was magic considered a viable topic of political discussion and consent in England?", "selftext": "I am interested how long English government accepted magic as a legitimate source for potential issue or remedy. Considering that witch trials were known throughout the world largely until the 18 century and beyond- I am curious to know how the government handled such issues- and if they had a section of government dedicated to magic, the occult or the paranormal be it for postage gain or to prevent perceived threats. \n\nIf England is too specific how about other governments in Europe?\n\nThank you for your time!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/es1i1d/how_long_was_magic_considered_a_viable_topic_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff7eu3s"], "score": [46], "text": ["As a brief note in advance: witch trials in Europe did not *begin* until the 15th century, and not in earnest until the 16th! You can find various parts of the witch stereotype well in action before then, but they are used to identify and condemn heretics, not Satan-worshipping, magic-practicing witches.\n\nThat said:\n\nFor England, the abolition of witchcraft as a political topic has a surprisingly straightforward answer: 1735, the passage of the Witchcraft Act [of 1735].\n\nThe law un-outlawed witchcraft, essentially...but it turned *faking* witchcraft into a crime. It was illegal to accuse other people of performing witchcraft; it was also illegal to turn a profit by claiming to be able to work magic yourself.\n\nETA: Oops, I missed part of the question, sorry!\n\nI said \"Witchcraft Act [of 1735]\" because there were in fact numerous Witchcraft Acts before that. The central English government was absolutely keen on condemning witchcraft.\n\nHowever, when it came to actually hunting, identifying, and punishing witches, the burden was on the local community. Malcolm Gaskill notes that witchcraft charges followed the common legal procedure in which charges were brought by the lay/civilian accuser, or accusers, and to a local court.\n\nIn Germany in particular, there are some infamous mass persecutions powered by an outside inquistitor on a full-scale torture spree of everyone in a town they could get someone else to name. But as horrific as that sounds, and how easily it fits with our nightmares of inquisitors, it was just not that common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ecwvpo", "title": "How accurate are the costumes traditionally used in productions of Les Miserables?", "selftext": "As seen, for example, in the [10th Anniversary Concert](_URL_0_).\n\nSince the costumes are definitely used to help create character, I\u2019m very curious about the extent to which they are able to mirror fashion in 1820s-30s Paris.\n\n(I\u2019m less interested in the uniforms, sorry.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ecwvpo/how_accurate_are_the_costumes_traditionally_used/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbluswu"], "score": [10], "text": ["Some of them are fairly decent. Some, not so much. One thing I'll note across the board is that the women never seem to wear corsetry, which affects their overall silhouettes - particularly in the earlier scenes, where the waistline and bust were still quite high.\n\n[**Fantine**](_URL_1_)\n\nThe first thing I have to mention is that Fantine's hair is extremely inaccurate. As you noted, the costuming is done to help with characterization, and Fantine's long, free hair both highlights the parts of her body that she sells to make money for Cosette and symbolizes the innocence she loses (as it's a well-known, if not fully accurate truism that girls and young women didn't wear their hair up - this is actually only a rule after about 1840 or so). But a young *grisette* would wear her hair neatly tied back into a bun, perhaps with a few curls on either side, and might also wear a sheer muslin cap on top.\n\nFantine's gown is grey, which was probably done as a reference back to her being a *grisette* - shopgirls often wore grey, a color that doesn't show dirt and wouldn't outshine the merchandise. Her sleeves are not accurate: they're much too full and floppy for around 1820, when a woman might wear a small puffed oversleeve on a fitted long sleeve. Her neckline is also anachronistically deep and narrow - it should be shallow and wide.\n\n[**Cosette**](_URL_3_)\n\nCosette frequently suffers from the same issue as Fantine with regard to her hair: it's a callback to her mother's flowing hair and a symbol of her youth and innocence. But again, it's inaccurate, as a young bourgeoise would have worn her hair up. On the other hand, her dress is cut reasonably well for the early 1830s, with sleeves made full at the shoulder and tapering to the wrist: the sleeves could be made larger at the top, but that might read as frivolous to the audience, when Cosette is meant to be sweet and focused on love and virtue rather than fashion. Pelerines, white shawl-collars that spread over the shoulders and often down the front and back of the torso as well, were fashionable accessories of the period.\n\n[**Eponine**](_URL_2_)\n\nEponine is tricky. Her costuming reflects her character more than any other: she's a waif who's clearly putting on anything she can find without attempting to mimic the modes, and even though an actual woman in her situation would be wearing modified formerly-fashionable clothes, she's dressed in what will read as \"right\" to the audience. It's unlikely that an actual destitute young woman would have ended up with a sleeveless top, or a newsboy cap, since neither of them were worn during the 1830s. Her coat, on the other hand, is a reasonable approximation of a man's overcoat, although the lapels are a little oversized.\n\n[**Mme Thenardier**](_URL_6_)\n\nWhere to start here ... overall, Mme Thenardier's clothing reflects the eighteenth century as a way of making her seem like the archetypal tavern-keeper's wife. This is particularly noticeable with the visible shift/chemise at her neckline and below the ends of her sleeves; while both areas are done more exaggeratedly than they would have in the eighteenth century (there would have been about an inch showing below the sleeve, and probably just the ruffle showing above the neckline), that was specifically something no longer done after 1800. Her sleeves are fullish and gathered to a band, which isn't characteristic of the eighteenth century or the early 1820s, either.\n\n[**Jean Valjean**](_URL_5_)\n\nMen are usually dressed more accurately than women, and Les Mis is no exception. Valjean typically wears an accurate shirt with full sleeves and a starched collar, held up with a cravat; his waistcoat's shawl collar and his coat's notched lapels are appropriate for a respectable gentleman of the 1820s or 1830s. [This portrait of Andrew Combe](_URL_4_) is a great comparison. However, the beard that turns up on a number of stage Valjeans is not accurate - it's good for showing that he's older and more mature than Marius and the revolutionaries, and rougher, too, but men still tended to be clean-shaven at this time, maybe sporting some intense sideburns.\n\n[**Marius**](_URL_7_)\n\nHonestly ... I could say exactly the same things about Marius, except that he doesn't have the beard. The same goes for all of the revolutionaries - they wear the standard white shirts made with squares and rectangles, their waistcoats are typically patterned and cut correctly. Their cravats *are*, however, more loosely tied than you see in art of the period, likely to emphasize their disreputable, outside-of-society positions.\n\nMarius's bow-tied cravat is a little florid and more reminiscent of the 1850s; compare to [this portrait of Thomas Richards, hairdresser in Penzance](_URL_0_).\n\nAnd that's pretty much it for characters not dressed in uniforms!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2sx47p31M"], "answers_urls": [["https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/mr-thomas-richards-penzance-hairdresser-15016", "http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/lesmiserables/images/2/22/Lesmis4.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130929164717", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/37/dc/f737dc9275f06d900b460b0e92353936.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/66/c3/f6/66c3f6627f98c2f6907fc1357605cc43.jpg", "https://www.artuk.org/discover/artworks/andrew-combe-17971847-186095", "https://66.media.tumblr.com/3ec7b39629e897cd33e21e8d46bbb5e4/tumblr_nrzcnfOAgO1uzhjipo2_500.png", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/00/88/0a/00880ae7147f9710abc9aada9d13264c.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/26/90/37/269037f02df52df0d5b310277f76bdbf.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "320pm6", "title": "What are the main historical records/accounts of Jewish enslavement and release/exodus from Egypt?", "selftext": "Are there historical records/accounts of the 10 plagues, and (evidence-based) theories on their causes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/320pm6/what_are_the_main_historical_recordsaccounts_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq6sd8x"], "score": [3], "text": ["Would like to add to OP's question: BESIDES THE BIBLE/TALMUD, since that tends to be the only source people use to refer to the event. \n\nFrom what I've gathered researching this independently there is absolutely no physical evidence of Jewish enslavement in Egypt besides the less than credible evidence from scripture. Because it is scripture there have been many attempts to try and demonstrate the exodus and Moses as historical fact. \n\nHowever, there is great difficulty identifying which Pharoah ruled Egypt at the time of the Exodus, there are several candidates spanning a period of 500 years [From Thutmose II, Akhentaten, Ramsses II, etc](_URL_0_)\n\n\nFurther, the numbers given by the Bible number the Jews at about 600,000 when Egypt itself numbered [2 million](_URL_1_) at the time. Assuming we have a clear idea of the time, and such a large number of people leaving at the same time would have been both impossible and catastrophic. \n\nIf you'd like to leave historicity for the realm of conspiracy one theory that I can't find the book for here at home suggests that Moses was an Egyptian priest and supporter of Pharaoh Akhentaten and led a few hundred followers out of Egypt after that Pharaoh's death and this could be the origin of monotheism in Judaism, but archaeological evidence in Israel could probably discredit that point of view.\n\nAs of yet I have come accross nothing resembling objective non biblical evidence of the existence of any significant number of Jews or Jewish slaves in Egypt. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaohs_in_the_Bible#Pharaohs_in_the_book_of_Exodus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Numbers_and_logistics"]]}
{"q_id": "a78er2", "title": "How prevalent were family summer camps in the mid-20th century?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve seen a few movies and TV shows set in the 50s/60s (Dirty Dancing, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) where relatively wealthy families would spend the summer in a bungalow in the Catskills or a similar environment. How prevalent were these family summer camps in society and what type of people would vacation here? Is it mainly an upper middle class East Coast thing?\n\nDid families do this every year? If so, how would people be able to take the whole summer off of work to go? \n\nWhat was the culture like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a78er2/how_prevalent_were_family_summer_camps_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec16s8t"], "score": [6], "text": ["This question was asked just a few days ago and got answers from a number of people!\n\n* [In movies and TV shows based in the 50s and 60s, rich families would go spend their whole summers at fancy summer camps. How realistic was this of the times?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a51646/in_movies_and_tv_shows_based_in_the_50s_and_60s/"]]}
{"q_id": "g3iwgi", "title": "How large of an impact did the drowning of Frederick I (Barbarossa) have on the outcome of the third crusade?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve always felt like this single event may have changed the entire history of the Holy Land and subsequently that of Christianity and Islam themselves. Frederick was an establish commander and the crusader armies of Phillip and Richard would have cooperated under his command. I believe this crusader force would have been far more successful than any other had it stayed together.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g3iwgi/how_large_of_an_impact_did_the_drowning_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fns2x3m"], "score": [8], "text": ["What if? - questions are always difficult for historians to deal with in a professional manner but they're fascinating nonetheless.\nConsidering the third crusade was the one with the three most powerful leaders in western Europe, King Richard of England, King Philip II. of France and Emperor Frederick I. Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire, it was set out to be the most successful one in terms of possible conquests.\nThey as well as many other Christian leaders of Europe made peace and united to follow the call to a new crusade made by pope Gregory VIII and then Clemens III. after Gregory's death. \nSo considering the participants and the preparation that went into this 3rd crusade (especially on Frederick's side) it should have been the most successful yet and managed to retake the Holy Land, Jerusalem and more. \nThe numbers of contemporary sources vary a lot on the amount of troops and knights that went on the crusade on behalf of Frederick's call, but the number of his troops was much larger than Richard's and Philip's, estimated at about 100,000 people (not all combatants), which also had grown on his journey through eastern Europe (especially Hungarians joined in larger numbers). \n\nFrederick being the oldest and as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire also the most respected one of the leaders most likely would have been able to mediate the animosity between Richard of England and Philip of France as well as others and therefore could have kept the crusaders united for a longer time. \n\nFrederick's troops were well trained and lead as victories against the attacking Byzantines under Emperor Isaac II. Angelos as well as some turkic Seljuks on the way proved. \n\nFrederick's death in the river Saleph, in what is now southern Turkey, demoralized his troops tremendously and most of them went back home. Only a smaller contingent under his son and later under Leopold V. of Austria participated in the fights to come, but even then left after the city of Acre was taken back from Muslim troops. \n\nConsidering lastly that the 3rd crusade was in its entirety not at all a failure and Richard and Philip had made great successes against Saladin, a most accomplished and capable leader, although not retaking Jerusalem they took several coastal territories and managed to open Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims and merchants again as well as establishing a European Christian presence in the Holy Land again. \n\nTo conclude, there is enough evidence to say that Frederick's death had probably a huge impact on the overall success of the 3rd crusade and its aftermath. However if those suspected successes would have changed the course of history, e.g. the survival of the Byzantine Empire or even a Christian state in the region is of course a matter of speculation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "70mxcy", "title": "What is the origin of Rohingyas and how are they different from other Muslim ethnics(Kamans) of the Rakhine state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70mxcy/what_is_the_origin_of_rohingyas_and_how_are_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn4e6v4"], "score": [104], "text": ["[Here's my answer earlier today to the question \"How Accurate is the Claim that the Rohingya are 'Bengali' and not Burmese?\"](_URL_1_)\n\n >  The claim that Rohingyas are Bengalis is true insofar as the Rohingyas ultimately derive from Bengal, but in the end it's a justification for genocide. If the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from Bengal, why not say that African Americans are illegal immigrants from the Congo? Why not say that the Rakhines, the Buddhist neighbors of the Rohingya, should be deported back to central Burma? After all, it's questionable who the very first inhabitants of Arakan (the western coastline of Burma now shared between Rohingyas and Rakhines) actually were, although Bengali and Mahayana influence seems quite strong in Arakan in the first millennium AD.\n\n >  As historian Michael Charney says in a lecture ([YouTube link](_URL_2_))\n\n >   >  I would like to begin by discussing an immigrant group in Burma, and please bear with me for a few moments before forming any judgments. Before the fourteenth century there is no evidence that they even existed, or for the language that they use, or for the particular religion that they hold today, or for their particular ethnic culture as we would know it. They appear in Arakan in close association with a foreign court; they are both immigrants and foreigners to the region we know as Arakan. \n\n >   >  I'm not referring to the Rohingya, the theme of today's talks, but to the Rakhine Burmese speakers, the Theravada Buddhists, whose culture, religion, ethnicity, is foreign to the Arakan region and is predated by the Muslim presence there. \n\n >   >  Now, having said this, can I step back and argue that I'm not seeking to switch the positions of the Rohingya and the Rakhine. I'm suggesting that if we apply the same historical method to the Rakhine that I have seen applied to the historicity of the Rohingya by so much of the \"scholarship\" on the country in the years since my dissertation, no group in Arakan would pass the test as indigenous.  \n\n >  Muslims have formed a large proportion of the population in Arakan ever since the seventeenth century. Islam predates Theravada Buddhism in Arakan. Local traditions hold that as early as the eighth century AD, Muslim sailors were shipwrecked off Arakan and assimilated into local society. By the fifteenth century, Muslim mercenaries and merchants were key players in local society. Bengali soldiers helped the king maintain his power; Persian merchants in \"ocean-going ships and boats\" arrived \"yearly without fail\"; a \"Roman\" (an Ottoman, since Ottomans were referred to as Romans by most of Asia) was advising the Arakanese king in the early seventeenth century. But these Muslims were a very small minority, very often itinerants who would come and go. A large and permanent Muslim community did not emerge until the seventeenth century, in the later years of the reign of Mrauk-U.\n\n >  Arakan was ruled by the kingdom of Mrauk-U from 1430 to 1785. Mrauk-U at its height was one of the greatest kingdoms in Southeast Asia, its harbors full of \"Arabs, Egyptians, Syrians, Turks, Ethiopians, Romans.\" Most relevant for our purposes, though, is that Mrauk-U was a slaver kingdom.\n\n >  Early Modern Arakan was an underpopulated area where one or two disasters could easily wipe out a large segment of the population. The natural solution for the Mrauk-U kings was to abduct people from more populated areas and forcibly resettle them in Arakan. To quote a French doctor:\n\n >   >  They [the Arakanese] scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, called galleasses, entered the numerous arms and branches of the Ganges, ravaged the islands of Lower Bengal, and, often penetrating forty or fifty leagues up the country, surprised and carried away the entire population of villages on market days, and at times when the inhabitants were assembled for the celebration of a marriage, or some other festival. The marauders made slaves of their unhappy captives, and burnt whatever could not be removed. It is owing to these repeated depredations that we see so many fine islands at the mouth of the Ganges, formerly thickly peopled, now entirely deserted by human beings, and become the desolate lairs of tigers and other wild beasts.\n\n >  The Arakanese slavers, however, did not break down community ties nearly as severely as Europeans did in the Atlantic slave trade. Upper-caste captives and artisans were resettled in the capital to serve the king, but the more typical captives were humble Bengali farmers, entire villages of whom were resettled in Arakanese territory. The Bengalis were often relocated into jungle areas to clear the forest and put the land into cultivation, thus increasing state revenue. Others were bought by Buddhist monasteries to farm glebe lands, or otherwise set to work already cultivated lands.\n\n >  What was the religion of these Bengali slaves? The easy answer would be Islam, but it was more complicated than that. The religion of seventeenth-century Bengal was a Bengali folk Islam which still left room for Hindu and local gods (the modern division in Bangladesh between Muslims and Hindus would not have been meaningful back then). It was these traditions that the Bengalis initially brought to Arakan. But the local gods and spirits and saints of Bengal were precisely that \u2013 local \u2013  and of less relevance in Arakan. So the Bengali captives devised their own traditions, their own saints and holy places, which integrated popular Bengali Islam into an Arakanese context. Islam was made into a local religion. The Bengalis of Arakan no longer looked towards Bengal for religious guidance, but towards their new homeland. At some point, the Bengalis became Rohingyas (though the word itself would not be widely used until after Mrauk-U). \n\n >  A good example of this is the Badr Maqams, shrines dedicated to the Muslim saint Pir Badr-i Alam. Badr Maqams appear to have dotted the Arakanese landscape wherever there were Muslims \u2013 we know of at least three, though only one has survived. Muslim pilgrims from all over Arakan would gather here to make sacrifices to the saint to ask for his boons and blessings. Stories were told about the great powers of the saint, and about how he had traveled across Arakan and sanctified it into a Muslim land. The Badr Maqams became regional cult centers, places where Bengali Muslims could religiously connect to their new homeland and leave their old homes in Bengal behind. In time, the Badr Maqams became major centers of worship for even Buddhists and Chinese.\n\n >  It is possible that left to their own devices, the Bengalis would have assimilated into majority Theravada Buddhism. However, this was prevented by continuing ties to Bengal and the wider Islamic world. Rohingyas sometimes went to Bengal; sometimes Bengalis escaped Mughal rule to settle in underpopulated Arakan. There were always Muslim merchants in Arakan, who often preferred to trade in Rohingya villages because Rohingyas tended to live closer to the coast and were thus easier to access by sea. Shrines like the Badr Maqam attracted holy men from abroad. All this kept Islam alive in the region.\n\n >  How many were these Bengalis? We don't have hard statistics, but we can say that they made up a very large proportion of the population. Michael Charney estimates that the population of the Danyawaddy region (the center of the Mrauk-U kingdom; [all the Rohingya-majority areas and the northern one of the two Rohingya-minority areas in this map](_URL_0_)) was at most 170,000 in the seventeenth century. The entire population of Arakan was likely around 300,000.\n\n >  In 1630, we know there were around 11,000 Bengali families in rural settlements across Danyawaddy. The Arakanese continued to raid into Bengal and bring tens of thousands of Bengali captives into Arakan, so even accounting for the horrible conditions the Bengalis endured (some 40% of the captives died on the way, supposedly) and the flight of captives back to Bengal, the Rohingya population of Arakan must have grown substantially by 1700. All in all, it is not implausible that Muslims represented the majority group in Danyawaddy and nearly a third of Arakan's population as a whole. (The Muslim population outside Danyawaddy was insignificant, since 94% of Rohingyas lived in Danyawaddy at the beginning of British rule.)\n\n >  This is a significantly larger proportion of Muslims than at the onset of British rule, when Muslims made up a little over 20% of the Arakanese population. This isn't too surprising though, since the British took over after four decades of Burmese persecution of Islam, Burmese relocation of tens of thousands of Arakanese to Central Burma, and the general flight of Danyawaddy's population into British Bengal. It is, however, a significantly *smaller* proportion of the population than the Rohingya made up in Arakan before the ethnic cleansing began (if all the Rohingya went back to Arakan today, they would probably outnumber Buddhists).\n\n >  So it is true that the Muslim population in the region was bolstered by further immigration from Bengal under British rule. This does not mean that the Rohingya as a whole are immigrants who simply took advantage of British rule to displace the native Buddhists. The modern Rohingya are mostly descended from seventeenth-century captives and migrants from Bengal, and in my view they have as much right to be termed indigenous as their Buddhist neighbors (many of whom are also recent immigrants from the rest of Burma).\n\n >  Sources:\n\n >  * *Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan* (PhD thesis by Michael Charney and still the leading work on Early Modern Arakanese religion)\n\n >  * \"Slaves and Tyrants: Dutch Tribulations in Seventeenth-century Mrauk-U\" by Sanjay Subrahmanyam"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Map_of_Rohingya_people_in_Rakhine_State.png", "https://redd.it/70jh6s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZNe8WysEqM"]]}
{"q_id": "3i2ayc", "title": "In the 1800s, if two monarchs met, how would they address eachother?", "selftext": "EDIT: I honestly didn't expect so many great answers, and this has been really, really helpful. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i2ayc/in_the_1800s_if_two_monarchs_met_how_would_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucrnoo", "cucsyow", "cucuu88"], "score": [31, 326, 463], "text": ["Would two monarchs ever really meet?  Would they not have people for that, like envoys?", "I can only talk about Napoleon's interactions with European monarchs, but I'd say other such regal meetings would go down in a similar way.\n\nHis first meeting with Francis II, Emperor of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, took place in late 1805, just days after Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. The meeting is reported to have been cordial and very productive - the two managed to come to terms of peace in 90 minutes.\n\nNapoleon first met the Russian Tsar Alexander in 1807, in a meeting that would result in the Treaty of Tilsit - an end to the War of the Fourth Coalition and Russia forming an alliance with France. Napoleon sought to establish a warm personal relationship as well as an effective working one. They concluded the peace treaty the very same day, but spent the next couple of days reviewing each other's guardsmen, exchanging decorations, talking discussing the future of the Ottoman Empire, and most importantly, drinking together. It was a quite cordial relationship, with Napoleon even going so far as to consider Alexander his friend.\n\nBasically, it all came down to mutual respect. The three Emperors believed themselves to be on equal footing as the most powerful sovereigns in Europe, so even though calling their relationship friendly is a bit of a stretch, they were, by all accounts, quite cordial and respectful to each other.\n\nThat would be a rough overview about Napoleon's relationship with other sovereigns, but I'd be glad to answer any follow-ups.", "I cannot speak to meeting, but I can speak to the fact that in written interactions, a monarch addresses fellow monarchs as \"sister\" or brother\", due to a concept that all monarchs are members of the same family, so a letter would be addressed to, \"Sir My Brother\" or \"Madam My Sister\".  \n\nIf they are actually related, then that is also specified, as in \"Sir My Brother and Cousin\" or \"Madam My Sister and Niece\", which makes the already unwieldy Hapsburg, Hanover and Bonaparte family trees seem even worse than they are.\n\nFor sources, you can check Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia's letters, the letters of Napoleon, Debrett's collection of state papers, and so on and so forth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "225gao", "title": "Why can European Colonialism be seen as an earlier form of globalisation?", "selftext": "Do you think European colonialism is somewhat similar to the globalisation today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/225gao/why_can_european_colonialism_be_seen_as_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgjqg1k"], "score": [2], "text": ["Globalization refers to the international exchange of ideas, products, and cultures. There is something going both ways when we talk about globalization. Globalization is a much more equal exchange of cultures than colonialism was. Colonialism is basically just taking one culture, and transplanting it into a new location with little regard for preserving the culture and lifestyle of the native people. Only one group is benefitting when it comes to colonialism, where as the people who are being colonized are losing their original identity completely. With globalization you do see cultures change, but the changes are most often due to elements of other cultures being incorporated into your culture as opposed to forcing a foreign culture on a group of people as a replacement for the one they already had. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2p7ip0", "title": "What euphemisms did the Germans use in the Third Reich?", "selftext": "'Exterminating' was called 'Final solution'.\n\nWhat other euphemisms were in use, for the details of the extermination, for deportation, for camps, for gassing, for starving, for working to death, for torture, for experimentation, and so on?\n\nWhat euphemisms were used for defeats?\n\nThere was also the announcement at the start of the war with Poland in which Hitler called the attacks 'returning fire', are there any more examples of this?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p7ip0/what_euphemisms_did_the_germans_use_in_the_third/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmw2qwx"], "score": [2], "text": ["The way the Nazi regime changed and some say corrupted the German language is a very interesting topic that has been studied in some detail, though most of the scholarly works are naturally in German. I drew up a short bibliography a while back for another user.\n\nThe first to study \"Nazi German\" in depth was German linguist Victor Klemperer who kept notes all during the thirties and the war which were published in 1947 under the title *LTI:  Notizbuch eines Philologen*. He coined the Latin phrase \"Lingua Tertii Imperii\" (language of the Third Reich) to describe the phenomenon. His book was translated into English in 1999 under the title *Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii*. [Here's an online lexicon](_URL_0_) of all the Nazispeak words that Klemperer mentions.\n\nIf you can read German these are some major works in that language:\n\nSeidel, E.,  &  Seidel-Slotty, I. (1961). *Sprachwandel im Dritten Reich: Eine Kritische Untersuchung Faschistischer Einfl\u00fcsse*\n\nSternberg, D., Storz, G.,  &  S\u00fcskind, W. E. (1962). *Aus dem W\u00f6rterbuch des Unmenschen*\n\nSchmitz-Berning, Cornelia (2000). *Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus*\n\nA short introduction to the subject in English which is [available online](_URL_1_) (pdf) is: Doerr, Karin. \"Words Beyond Evil: Nazi German.\" In: Keen, Daniel and Keen, Pamela Rossi, eds. (2001) *Considering Evil and Human Wickedness*, p 51-58. Doerr is co-author, with Robert Michael, of  *Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich* (2002) which is a 400+ page lexicon of Nazi words and expressions and their English translation/explanation, with two long introductory essays.\n\nAs to the specific phrases you asked about: \n\n* the use of \"final solution\" was prohibited by Hitler in 1942, henceforth only \"resettlement\", \"emigration\" or \"evacuation\" were to be used.\n\n* \"Rassenhygiene\" (racial hygiene) was used to cover a wide range of activities from the prohibition of mixed marriages to forced sterilisation and later killing of disabled people and Gypsies.\n\n* \"Schutzhaft\" (protective custody) was a euphemism for incarceration in a concentration camp.\n\n* \"Sonderbehandlung\" (special treatment) meant execution.\n\n* \"Aktion\" (operation) was the code word for rounding up of all the Jews of a particular area and sending them to a death camp or shooting them on the spot.\n\n* \"durchgeschleust\" (passed through): Jews who had been \"passed through\" a camp were Jews that had  been killed there.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://lti-lexikon.de", "http://www.utwente.nl/gw/wijsb/organization/coeckelbergh/publications/06.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2w8due", "title": "Why didn't Caesarion become caesar's heir?", "selftext": "Apparently he was Caesars son to Cleopatra, so why is it that Octavian was Caesars closest male relative if he had a son?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w8due/why_didnt_caesarion_become_caesars_heir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cooi723"], "score": [6], "text": ["Caesarion was never acknowledged by Caesar as being his son, and there were a lot of Caesarians who refused to believe Cleopatra's claim--in fact, Cleopatra's claim seems not to have been taken particularly seriously or simply was ignored until Antony formally acknowledged Caesarion at the Donations of Alexandria, which was as much a political move to recover his wealth after his failure in Armenia as anything else. That's not to say that Caesarion *wasn't* Caesar's son--Syme examined the question and I think persuasively argued that at the very least Cleopatra had a good claim, a claim taken seriously enough by the War of Actium for Octavian to really freak out over Caesarion's existence. But it was hardly a sure thing.\n\nMore importantly, Caesarion wouldn't even reach his third birthday until several months after Caesar's death. Even if Caesar *had* acknowledged Caesarion as his son, it would've been foolish for him to entrust leadership of the Caesarians to a three-year-old, especially one with such a strong-willed and politically-motivated mother. Just look what happened to Alexander's son. Not to mention give him the enormous wealth that Octavian inherited from Caesar (and Octavian didn't even get all of the money that was due to him, Antony seized a fair amount of Caesar's estate and refused to hand it over). \n\nEDIT: I almost forgot, Caesarion was legally sole ruler of Egypt, with Cleopatra as his Regent, from 44 onwards, and from birth Cleopatra clearly intended to have him succeed her. Making an important member of a foreign royal family, indeed of a foreign family in general, would've been unthinkable, and the ruler of Egypt no less. Indeed, one of the primary ways with which Octavian turned opinion against Antony was by convincing the Italians that Antony's declaration of Caesarion's parentage meant that Antony intended to have Caesarion take over at Rome, essentially handing over Rome to Egypt. So even if Caesar had lived and changed his will the way he changed it in 45 (which made Octavian heir, not, presumably, Antony) Caesarion never would've inherited"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26hhx6", "title": "pre 1492 what was the most northerly native American group to have a writing system?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26hhx6/pre_1492_what_was_the_most_northerly_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chr96j0", "chr9njk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Mesoamerica is the only place that had true writing prior to 1492. Maya sites in the Yucatan, such as Chichen Itza are actually farther north than Nahua writers in the Triple Alliance or Mixtec writers in Oaxaca.", "The writing systems of the Americas were contained within Mesoamerica. The answer to your question, though, depends on what you consider writing. Here's the three possible choices, sorted more less with the farthest \"up\" Central America first.\n\n* **Aztecs**: The Aztec empire did use a form of [writing](_URL_4_) largely based on illustrative symbols not linked to any language. One could almost think of it as mnemonic aides rather than recording words and sentences.\n\n* **Assorted Early/Minor Scripts**: Many Mesoamerican cultures appear to have had their own writing systems, but very few examples exist for most of them. The [Epi-Olmec](_URL_0_) script is the earliest and appears to contain calendrical information. Schloars have worked out bits of [Zapotec writing](_URL_3_) that seem to indicate personal names and toponyms. Murals at the great central Mexican city of Teotihucan also appear to have glyhpic elements. None of these systems, however, can be said to be readable to any great degree.\n\n* **Mayan**: We know the most about the [script](_URL_2_) used by the Maya. It was a combination of logograms and syllabic signs used on everything from monuments to record historical or mythological events to vessels to describe their contents. The writing is in a dialect of the Cho'lan family, with regionally-varying influences from Yukatek and Cho'rti. We have a large corpus of inscriptions from across the Maya territory and can read a great majority of what they say. So while it is the most southern of these, it is also the most readable and most akin to our own conception of writing by a long shot.\n\nIf you're interested in any of these, I'd be happy to recommend further reading or answer questions.\n\nSource:\n[FAMSI](_URL_1_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.famsi.org/reports/05084/EMSt1.pdf", "http://www.famsi.org/index.html", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Mayan_stela.JPG/450px-Mayan_stela.JPG", "http://www.famsi.org/zapotecwriting/zapotec_figures1-2.pdf", "http://www.famsi.org/research/graz/borbonicus/img_page14.html"]]}
{"q_id": "188tqh", "title": "When did shortening names into nicknames become common?", "selftext": "When did nicknames become common? Not names given to you other than your real name, like \"Tiny\" or \"Bubba\", but shortening a long name in everyday conversation. Andrew becomes Andy, Katherine becomes Katie. Is there record of anyone calling Alexander the Great \"Alex\"? Was William Shakespeare called \"Will\" by his friends? Etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/188tqh/when_did_shortening_names_into_nicknames_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8cow90", "c8cq6za", "c8cqo6u"], "score": [2, 3, 6], "text": ["And how do you go from Richard to Dick?", "Well before History started, that's for sure.  You can't have a concrete answer to this question, but the closest you could come to the heart of the matter would be to ask an anthropologist why people have an affinity for shortening names.\n\nIt seems self-explanatory on the surface (quicker, more efficient) but there are probably some interesting layers and threads that might be followed back, if only theoretically (it could also indicate intimacy, helping to bond people in a tribal group, or it could have humorous connotations, for example).", "Examples I can think of from Antiquity include \"Yosi\" from \"Yoseph\" (Joseph) and \"Yeshua\" from \"Yehoshua\" (Joshua), from which \"Jesus\" is derived.  Note that often, that would be someone's given name, but it was given to them as a shortening of an existing name."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jigkz", "title": "Was there any concern in the US government that the Enola Gay could have been shot down before bombing Hiroshima, and that the atomic bomb could fall into the hands of the Japanese?", "selftext": "Was there even a slight chance that the Enola Gay could have been shot down by the Japanese? And would the bomb in that case have exploded if the plane crashed?\n\nI was wondering if in a worst case scenario, the Japanese could have even salvaged the bomb from a shot-down Enola Gay?\n\nWas there any concern in the US government / military regarding such a risk?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jigkz/was_there_any_concern_in_the_us_government_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clc3enc", "clc4xe1", "clc9cq5"], "score": [1037, 26, 4], "text": ["Yes, as with all flight missions, mechanical failure or being shot down is a completely real and valid concern.\n\nFor years, pilots of all nations were equipped with evasion kits.  Parts of these kits included cloth maps, [such as this one]( _URL_6_), which would allow for the pilots to be able to navigate on the ground to evade capture.  They were also issues something called [\"blood chits\"](_URL_8_), which included instructions in several languages that basically said, \"I'm an American, help me escape and you'll be rewarded.\"  These were most often issued in case the pilots were shot down or had to ditch in places that were occupied by enemy forces or in isolated areas.\n\nThey were also often issued survival kits that would include things such as fishing and hunting supplies, gold coins, lengths of rope, and other various items that would aid in their survival.  [These are a examples of such.](_URL_1_).\n\n[Here are some other types of kits from the period](_URL_3_), that would include such items as knives, basic first aid supplies, water purification tablets, \"iron rations\", miniature compasses, flare guns, etc.  Pilots and crew were also known to hide such items, such as these examples [were compasses were hidden in buttons or the soles of boots](_URL_7_).\n\nHowever, in the specific case of the Enola Gay and the secrecy and highly technical nature of the mission, as well as the fact they would be flying over Japan, which meant they would have been shot down over Japan or had to ditch there if they could not make it back out to sea, they had been given specific instructions.\n\n[According to an interview with Theodore Van Kirk](_URL_5_), the navigator for the Enola Gay, they were given instructions on the locations of the search and rescue teams which would be in the area.  Additionally, they were told that if they landed in Japan, they were \"on their own.\"  Also, there were given cyanide tablets in case they were captured.\n\nThe search and rescue operations in those days, were conducted not by helicopters mostly, which were still in their infancy, as demonstrated by the most common American craft the [Sikorsky R-4](_URL_4_), which did see limited use in areas such as the Indo-China-Burma theater.  They were heavily limited by range.  Instead, most S & R in that period were conducted by float planes such as the [Grumman Goose](_URL_9_).  These planes were able to land in the water near the downed pilots who would then load up and be flown back to land or a nearby ship.  \n\nAlso during this period, it was common for ships to rescue crewmen, including submarines.  In fact, President George Bush, a WWII aviator, [was rescued by the USS Finback](_URL_2_), in 1944.  \n\nAs for the actual bomb.  The \"Little Boy\" bomb was a \"gun\" style bomb, where an explosion would force a Tungsten-Carbide projectile into the fissile material causing the explosion.  The cordite used to detonate the device was loaded in flight and the bomb featured four different electrical safety switches.  This was common among all air dropped ordinance during the period.  Bombs even to this day are equipped with safeties that prevent accidental detonation.  During this period, it was part of the bombardiers duties to remove these safeties and arm the bombs during flight.  [Here you can see a cross section of an ANM-64 500 lb. bomb](_URL_0_).  At the front you can see where the safety was located.  They were designed so that the bombs would not activate unless the safety was removed, so even if the arming cable was pulled due to shifting in flight, it would not be activated (hopefully).\n\nIn the case of the atomic bomb, had the plane been shot down or crashed, the bomb at most would not have likely detonated in the full capacity, but have resulted in what we call today a \"dirty bomb.\"\n\n\nIn the case of the Enola Gay, the most probable concern for the crew was mechanical failure.  By August of 1945, most of the Japanese Air Force and Naval Aviation branches had been drained of their best pilots, and supplies were quite low.  Most bombing runs by Allied crews went unopposed during this period as they were holding the few remaining pilots and supplies for the anticipated invasion.  Additionally, the B-29 could fly well above most Japanese fighters, and the shortage of AA ammunition would have been wasted on a singular plane.  By this period Japan did not concern itself with singular flights of high altitude bombers as they were considered to be merely reconnaissance flights.  ", "The Enola Gay COULD have been shot down if the Japanese were expecting a bombing attack, but prior to the bomb there were leaflets dropped [as late as August first](_URL_0_), near the end of the war leaflet dropping had happened before to announce other bombings. So complacency due to there not being a formation of B-29s, along with the Japanese Air Force and IJN being in a shoddy state, kept planes from coming up in force. From an aviation standpoint, the Enola Gay was cruising at over 30,000 feet and about 220mph [when it went feet dry over Japan](_URL_1_). With the ability to go faster if need be. The combination of high altitude and a decent max speed at altitude made it difficult for the Japanese planes to catch the B-29s.\n\nLets say the Japanese had sent up an N1K, which had a fairly respectable climb rate and armament, (4x20mms, since machine guns wouldn't do much to a plane of that size). [It could apparently climb to 6000m in about 8 minutes](_URL_2_) which is a little less than 20,000 feet, we also have to assume that the planes climb would not have been a straight line from takeoff to right up on the tail of the B29 (which is the worst place to attack a bomber from), so add some time for turning, and some time for the decreased climb performance from the high altitude once it went above 20k. Once it got to that altitude it would have had to catch up to the Enola and then get in some kind of strategic position to attack it. This would have been possible only if the Japanese had detected the Enola early enough, and felt the need to send up interceptors. ", "Was a plan ever considered to blockade Japan from the sea as opposed to using nuclear weapons or invading?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://harringtonmuseum.org.uk/ANM64.htm", "http://www.donrearic.com/ww2kits.htm", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcdU--kqTb4", "http://www.bullfrogvalleymilitaria.com/category.cfm?SID=17", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_R-4", "http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-with-the-enola-gay-s-navigator-i-m-not-proud-of-all-the-deaths-it-caused-a-368433.html", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Silk_Escape_Map_of_Milan_area_issued_to_Major_Oliver_Churchill.JPG", "http://www.evasioncomete.org/TxtAids2.html", "http://www.mhs50.com/files/Blood_Chit_and_Escape_and_Evaison_Barter_Kit.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_G-21_Goose"], ["https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no3/article07.html", "http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/EnolaGay/EnolaGay.html", "http://www.combinedfleet.com/ijna/n1k-j.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "6jw9c9", "title": "If the Axis Powers in World War 2 so easily destroyed the air force of the French and English why didn't Hitler airdrop troops in mainland England?", "selftext": "Many movies and popular culture depict a defenseless England hunkering down against an onslaught of German Bombers. Why didn't the Germans just air drop troops in England if they had almost no air force to retaliate with? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jw9c9/if_the_axis_powers_in_world_war_2_so_easily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djhjqt1", "djhk9wk", "djhm2yf", "dji6cr5"], "score": [26, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["First, the Royal Air Force was not at all destroyed. Through 1940 the Germans usually had a small advantage in total airframes, but it was in the neighborhood of a 20% advantage at any given time. Flying defenseless troop transports into an area where your opponent could throw up hundreds of fighters is generally not a terribly good idea. There is no guarantee that the troops would reach the ground... at least not in a controlled fashion.\n\nSecond, in 1940 Germany had exactly one airborne division, the 7. Flieger-Division. This accounted for around 22,000 men at full strength. After the battles in Norway and the Low Countries it wasn't yet quite back to full strength. Against this single airborne division the UK had around 24 divisions in various stages of build up and preparation, along with another 11 independent brigades (worth about another 4 divisions). These divisions and brigades also included far heavier artillery and tanks that the airborne divisions weren't equipped to deal with. Now these 28 divisions weren't enough to attack the 150+ divisions that Germany used to conquer France. It was more than enough to repel any airborne assaults.\n\nSo an airborne assault would be decimated by air defenses on the way in. Once on the ground, the remaining troops would be outnumbered roughly 30 to 1, and the troops they faced would be far better equipped. If they survived long enough, they'd also run out of supplies in 3-4 days. It's a complete non-starter as an idea.", "In short, they didn't decimate the RAF and thus it was impossible for the German Army to be paradropped upon British soil without devastating losses that would cripple them when they arrived on the ground.\n\nOnce these troops, who did make it past the RAF and Anti-Air Defences had organised enough to mount an assault and gain any territory of any strategic value, they would be further crippled by the counter attack from the British Army. \n\nFor any land invasion to be successful the Luftwaffe would have had to completely decimate the RAF, sparing enough numbers to be able to destroy the royal navy to allow supplies, mechanized vehicles and more troops to mount a real assault of some degree upon the British Isles. \n\nUnfortunately from a German point of view, that didn't happen. Fortunately from my point of view, as a British person, this was stopped at the first hurdle.", "There are several major problems with this hypothetical airlanding in southern England. \n\nFirstly, the Luftwaffe success in the Low Countries and France in 1940 was far from easy. The Germans managed to win air superiority for [*Fall Gelb*](_URL_0_) only after a hard-fought campaign that managed to overrun a number of French airbases. Like the rest of the French military establishment, the Arm\u00e9e de l'air assumed that the war would be somewhat protracted, so it planned a national dispersion scheme of its air assets. This meant the Germans practically blundered into destroying the French ability to counter *Gelb* in the air. French aircraft had to travel to the combat zone while Luftwaffe aircraft had the benefit of operating proximate to their bases in Germany. There were other problems with the Arm\u00e9e de l'air in 1940 such as doctrine and equipment that all contributed to its defeat. Yet, even this victory was dear-bought by the Germans, which lost a quarter of its frontline strength from all causes. These losses were nothing though compared to the Battle of Britain in which German efforts to win air superiority over the British isles came to naught. The Luftwaffe tried to destroy the RAF in the late summer of 1940 and although it was a hard-fought campaign, the Germans could not destroy Fighter Command. \n\nThe fact that the RAF was a viable and present force in the field in 1940 meant a massive airlanding was not a militarily viable option to invade the UK. Subsequent experience with airdrops in Crete in 1941, Normandy and the Low Countries in 1944, and the Rhine crossings in 1945 showed that transport aircraft were vulnerable. Not only were they loaded with heavy cargo of troops and their equipment, the transport aircraft were slow and flew in a straight path at relatively low level. In short, they were  a massive target. There were large losses of transport aircraft even in conditions of near-absolute air superiority such as Overlord, Market-Garden, and Varsity. The latter successful operation crossing the Rhine saw the Army Air Force lose as many men in the air as the 17th Airborne Division did on the ground. Granted the numbers of the UK's antiaircraft gun defenses were not at the levels of the late-war German Flak arm, but it was large enough to extract significant losses as too was the intact Fighter Command.\n\nThis is also a very academic exercise since there was no massive German *Fallschirmj\u00e4ger* arm available to invade the UK. The Germans had used paratrooper and glider troops in the Low Countries on a massive scale. Some of these attacks were successful like the Eben Emael raid, but others less so such as the seizure of Dutch airfields. The high profile successes led to the expansion of the  two airborne divisions  of thr  *Fallschirmj\u00e4ger* and Heer into properly-sized divisions. This was an expansion that only bore fruit in 1941, in time for the German paratroops to be massacred in the Pyrrhic victory at Crete. Additionally, the Germans in 1940 lacked not only the warm bodies for a UK air assault, biut also the transport aircraft for such an operation. Among the losses in *Gelb* were a number of Ju-52 transports. The Low Countries had also exposed the deficiencies of German glider aircraft like the  DFS 230 which were too small for operations other than small-scale assaults. The DFS 230's replacement, the Gotha Go 242 would be available in 1941/42 as was the heavy-lift glider initially meant for a UK invasion, the Me 321. \n\nSo even had the Luftwaffe had managed to wrest air superiority over southern England in 1940, it had no means to reliably convey enough troops in the numbers necessary to subdue the UK. Neither and air assault nor an amphibious invasion were practical when the Germans had no means to conduct either. ", "I think you need to understand the nature and doctrine of use of Airborne Troops. Others have explained very well already the need for a significant force and the fact that the RAF was not wiped out. \n\nThat said, even if the RAF had been completely destroyed and even without AA defenses what you need to keep in mind is that Airborne Troops are Light Infantry, meaning they can only carry light equipment and limited supplies with almost no artillery, no anti tank weapons (remember this is 1940, no anti-tank rockets, no PIAT, no fancy modern TOWs). \n\nSo you drop thousands of soldiers in a very very very disperse landing zone. The comms and difficulties to regroup are considerable and you are very vulnerable as the enemy land forces can attack you in detail. Even if you manage to group and mount an attack you will run out of ammo soon, all your artillery support at that time may come from few light mortars and may be few 37 mm max. How do you resupply? How do you care for the wounded? No field hospital there no ambulances just basic medic attention. You are doomed to be overrun by the locals without external intervention.\n\nThese are only few examples but I have barely started with the issues. Hence paratroopers tend to be used for very specific and typically small local targets behind enemy lines until they can link up with the main army force advancing. Most airborne operations in WW2 were very costly, for both sides Germans and Allies alike, from Eben Emael to Crete to D-Day and Market Garden. There is ample bibliography on all of them to read. \n\nIf you want to see how messy and airborne operation can go I may suggest you do reading on the less known Vyazma airborne operation where Soviets landed forces behind the German rear in early 1942 around Smolensk. \n\nEdited for typos and structure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/1940-Fall_Gelb.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1s35dh", "title": "What was the Non-American opinion of successful generalship in the US Civil War?", "selftext": "In the companion Book to Ken Burn's Civil War Documentary there's a quote from Shelby Foote in an Essay on why Americans are still drawn to that period in their history. \n\n > We think we are a wholly superior people. If we'd been anything like as superior as we think we are, we would not have fought that war. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times. And our generals were the greatest generals of all time. It's very American to do that. \n\nGranting that, there are a lot of Americans who both study the Civil War and lionize their particular heroes: Of the Generals from either side that were considered successful (Even in Defeat) in the US Civil War, What was the prevailing opinion in academic or military circles outside of the US, either from contemporaries or modern scholars as to their competency? \n\nAs an example (without limiting the field) was/is Lee/Grant/Longstreet held in as high regard in military or military history circles outside the US, either from then to now, as he was or is even, in the US?\n\nEDIT: Thank you for the thoughtful responses. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s35dh/what_was_the_nonamerican_opinion_of_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdtg1s4", "cdtg8b2", "cdtibg9", "cdtiy3z", "cdtizrl", "cdtjpoy"], "score": [13, 8, 16, 47, 65, 13], "text": ["Relevant old thread discussing how our military was viewed after the civil war: _URL_0_", "I'm sure other people can speak on this more, but after the war, American generals were given more attention by their European counterparts. For example, General Sheridan was a guest of the Prussian at the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War.\n\nEdit: Sheridan was with the Prussians, not the French.", "The article linked at the end of this reply adresses your question more or less. It is an outline of the journal of Adam Gurowski, a polish expat living in the US during the civil war years. He (and the article's author) has a rather low opinion of US generalship and particularly despises George McClellan. It does not necessarily reflect european consensus around that era but it still makes a very interesting read.\n\n(This link will expire in 48 hours)\n\n_URL_0_", "Militarily, the generals on the continent were less than impressed with the strategies of either the Confederacy or the Union - particularly the seeming inability of either side to follow up after what might have been a decisive victory. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was famously dismissive, describing the war as \"a colossal conflict between two armed mobs chasing each other around in a wilderness.\" (F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism)", "In a brief comment, I can speak to their skill in historical view, though not internationally from the time. There are the good, the bad and the ugly in that War. \n\nYou have some Visionaries, Longstreet at Fredericksburg is basically fighting WWI 60 years early. You have Sherman foreseeing the development of total war in the march to the sea. Forrest was probably a genius and in Europe, god knows what that guy could have done in Crimea or the Austro-Prussian War. \n\nMost interesting, you have the styles of Lee and Grant. These guys are pretty cool. Lee is the old veteran, who pulls off the classic European (Read Napoleonic) victory at Second Bull Run, and earns him the place in the history that he deserves. Weigley Argues that it is Grant at Cold Harbor and the Bloody angle at Spotsylvania who develops what is going to be the lasting legacy of the war, a distinctly american way of war, marked by unconditional surrender and losses of tremendous amounts of men in persuit of the aim of breaking the enemy's spirit and capacity to wage war that was so uniquely suited to the wars of the early 20th century.\n\nPrussia wouldn't have cared, and didn't so far as I can tell because they're getting ready to take over Europe. The general staff was far too absorbed in their railway time tables. They also had a war on their hands in '66 with Austria, which all of Europe took much more notice of. We know now that the shadow of Austerlitz is still the problem here, as the prussians were able to pull off the descisive battle and the americans were not. Europe liked that idea. It was clean important and consumed the military imagination of a good number of military men. That shadow leads to the race to the sea and Jutland in world war 1. The problem is that the US Civil war is problably more instructive in various engagements about how war was to be waged in the future. So there is the problem of competing legacies; from the US Civil and The Austro-Prussian. Europe as a whole prefered the latter.\n\nSources:\nCraig \"Politics of the Prussian Army\"\nWeigley \"The American Way of War\"\n", "It's worth noting that after the war and his presidency Grant went on a world tour and dined with Queen Victoria, Otto Von Bismarck, Pope Leo XIII, the Meiji Emperor of Japan and the leaders of the Chinese government. I have no idea if that was because he was a former head of state, or if he was the victorious general in the U.S Civil War."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gxmiz/how_was_the_united_states_viewed_by_the/"], [], ["https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/adam-gurowski/49b6f71a2b203df5a016100170caa0ba31e0b889/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1deqi8", "title": "What historical treasures have been lost to human stupidity or accidents?", "selftext": "I just returned from a trip to Japan, and while I was there I visited the Golden Temple (Kinkaku-ji) in Kyoto.  I was really upset to learn that back in the 50's it was burned down in an act of arson and the current temple is a reproduction.\n\nThis got me thinking - what other historical treasures have we lost to human stupidity or accidents?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1deqi8/what_historical_treasures_have_been_lost_to_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pyfg4", "c9q0yfh", "c9q18t8", "c9q1yh6", "c9q2zvm", "c9pl0oq", "c9pldm5", "c9pli63", "c9plkcj", "c9plkqg", "c9pm2qo", "c9pmqx9", "c9pn10g", "c9pn1mh", "c9pnter", "c9pnxtf", "c9pny0c", "c9po3i1", "c9po5xa", "c9po9uc", "c9pop70", "c9pppaa", "c9ppqce", "c9ppwnj", "c9prayd", "c9prcoi", "c9prf7w", "c9prfhv", "c9prkmk", "c9psz2j", "c9ptjru", "c9pu5bh", "c9pu9mr", "c9pum60", "c9pv7e6", "c9pwlkr", "c9pwrbs", "c9pxpzv", "c9pxtpc", "c9py5q6"], "score": [9, 4, 2, 7, 2, 183, 39, 81, 50, 378, 51, 16, 108, 76, 18, 58, 143, 16, 96, 17, 6, 36, 6, 9, 9, 4, 8, 17, 7, 5, 7, 9, 2, 2, 9, 2, 8, 9, 3, 3], "text": ["The Taliban while they were in control of Afghanistan blew up some 1700 year old Buddhist Statues simply because they were Buddhist. \n\n_URL_0_", "The Floating Palace of Caligula. \n[Picture](_URL_0_)\nCaligula commisioned the construction of large barge-like ships to float on the relatively small lake of Nemi. These things were huge and featured tiled mosaics and bathrooms. \n\n*\"Seutonius describes two ships built by Caligula; \"...ten banks of oars...the poops of which blazed with jewels...they were filled with ample baths, galleries, and saloons, and supplied with a great variety of vines and fruit trees.\" It is reasonable to speculate that the Nemi ships were equipped to a comparable standard. One year after being launched, the ships were stripped of precious objects, ballasted and then intentionally sunk following the assassination of Caligula.\"*\n\nThe story of their second destruction was that once recovered they were stored in a hanger near the lake. During WWII *\"a German artillery post was established within 400 feet (120 m) of the museum \u2026 An official report filed in Rome later that year described the tragedy as a willful act on the part of the German soldiers. A German editorial blamed the destruction on American artillery fire. The true story of what happened that night will probably never be known.\"*\n\nEdit: [Wiki Article](_URL_1_). I first heard of these ships from a John Romer doco.", "the spanish destroyed 1000 years of history we will never get to know when they destroyed the aztec and the maya, including all of their records and codices. they also almost completely wiped incan culture off the face of the planet", "In 1889, a representative of Thomas Edison [made a wax cylinder recording of Johannes Brahms playing the piano](_URL_0_). Such a recording, the sole audio record of one of the 19th century's most renowned musical figures, should be an invaluable treasure. Unfortunately, due to a combination of \"inexperienced recording\" and subsequent negligent care (the owners of the cylinder played it with improper equipment), the original cylinder is useless, and Brahms's playing is nearly entirely obscured by noise in transfers made in the 1930s. While [speculative musical analyses](_URL_1_) have been made, musicologists generally agree that the recording contains very little of value.\n\nOne very interesting question that remains about the recording is whether we hear Brahms's voice. The two sources I've linked to disagree, although I believe the more prevalent view is that the voice (or voices?) on the recording is (are?) *not* Brahms. Here again, the recording is sufficiently garbled that we will likely never know with any certainty.", "Oxford burned the only intact stuffed Dodo because they had to clean the museum up a bit.", "One that's particularly frustrating, as someone who likes Irish history - during the Irish Civil War, Irish republicans made the very wise decision to store ammunition in the national public records office, located at the basement of the Four Courts in Dublin. When the ammunition accidentally went off during fighting at the Four Courts, the entire public records office went up in flames. So if you'd like to do research on most things before 1922, have fun using public records to find them.", "Heinrich Schliemann was an incredibly wealthy and intelligent man who was obsessed with the city of Troy, so after decades of research he went to the site where he (correctly) thought it to be... \n\n...and blew straight through it. The famous mask of Agamemnon is actually from a city that Troy itself was built atop. ", "We don't really know the full effects of the Iraq War, yet. I mean... cradle of civilization, Fertile Crescent, etc., turned into a looter's paradise and a war zone. US soldiers have posted photos of themselves next to ancient frescoes, hopefully not the only remaining remnants of these cultures.\n\nHitler had a penchant for looting everything he conquered and adding it to his personal museum. Many pieces were returned to Bohemia, France, Poland, but many remain missing and are presumed lost or destroyed.\n\nThis is a pretty common pattern of conquest, whether it was the Romans or the Mongols, the practise of sacking, looting and destroying means we've lost a lot of human treasures.", "You could argue that the recent burning of the Library in Timbuktu which, while not as bad as first thought, still saw the loss of a few hundred documents (which were thankfully digitized). Naturally the Library in Alexandria had no such help, and was also carelessly lost.\n\nRecently in Egypt rioters and protesters broke into the Egyptian Museum and severely damaged many artifact including a sizable fraction of the King Tut exhibit. I hesitate to call any of these people \"stupid\" or \"idiots,\" because they are merely ignorant of appreciating the historical significance and value of such items. \n\nOne of the saddest losses to hear about for me came out of Fascist Italy, when Mussolini decided to build a large street through Rome, to use as a parade ground for his emulation of a Roman triumph. In building this street, he also carved out a significant portion of Rome's medieval quarter. Mussolini was also famous for being a general demolition-happy kind of guy, tearing down Renaissance or medieval buildings to expose the Imperial Roman architecture underneath. While, as an ancient historian, I am happy we have these imperial Roman artifacts and sites, the loss of such marvelous history atop them was a blow to Rome.", "The Library of Alexandria. I really would have liked to read Ptolemy Soter's first hand accounts of his campaigns with Alexander the Great.", "The Statue of Zeus from Olympia, one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient world, an enormous ivory and gold seated statue, [appears to have been destroyed in a fire](_URL_0_) in Constantinople.", "The [Sibylline Books](_URL_0_), lost by fire in 83AD. I was rather surprised to find out that they really existed  in the first place. ", "Guys, try to not politicize and try to avoid talking about recent events such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Timbuktu.  These situations are still in flux, and we still do not have a clear picture of what was lost, or still remains.  Unless it is something clear like the destruction of Afghan Buddha's, please do not speculate and claim things that cannot be backed up.", "I'm not entirely certain whether this is exactly what you're thinking of, but the story of the [Singapore Stone](_URL_0_) really gets to me.\n\nIt was an ~10 ft by ~10 ft sandstone block at the mouth of the Singapore River covered in text in an undeciphered script probably of one the languages ancestral to those in the area. In 1843, a few decades after it was discovered the colonials blew it up so they could expand a fort. A hotel sits there now.", "The Mongols besieged Baghdad in 1258 and destroyed the Grand Library of Baghdad (also known as The House of Wisdom), as well as every other library in Baghdad.\n\n", "[The Siege of Baghdad](_URL_0_) which resulted in the destruction of [the House of Wisdom](_URL_1_)\n >  the House was an unrivaled center for the study of humanities and for science in medieval Islam, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, alchemy and chemistry, zoology and geography and cartography. Drawing on Greek, Persian and Indian texts, the scholars accumulated a great collection of world knowledge, and built on it through their own discoveries. By the middle of the ninth century, the House of Wisdom was the largest repository of books in the world\n\nWhen the Mongols took the city they destroyed it and threw the texts into the river\n > Survivors said that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river  ", "The [Cotton Library](_URL_0_).  A massive collection of manuscripts gathered for years, never shared with the public until a fire consumes the library, destroying at least a quarter of the books.  Those that survived?  The only copy of Beowulf  &  The Pearl, ancient books on Caligula, Nero, Cleopatra, Augustus, Vespasian,  &  many others.  Those destroyed - ??  Nothing was ever filed or organized. In fact, Beowulf hadn't even been given a space on the bookshelf - it was underneath a bust on a table.", "King John of England sent his baggage train, containing the English Crown Jewels, across The Wash at low tide. By the time the carts were only part-way across, the tide had risen again, washing away the jewels and pretty much everything else into the estuary.\n\nThere are speculations that this was a cover story, or that the losses weren't quite as extreme as the accounts make out (perhaps only a few pack-horses), but it's a pretty good match to your question, regardless.", "I don't know if this is the type of thing you're looking for, but a student cut down the oldest living non-clonal organism in the world in 1964. The bristlecone pine was 5 thousand years old and some dumbass cut it down for his graduate work. It was named [Prometheus.](_URL_0_)", "The [Peking Man](_URL_0_) collection was lost during the early part of WWII.  \n\nThe bones were supposed to be transported to the Natural History Museum in America, but were lost in transit.  It's still an open question as to what happened to them.  Popular theories include buried in the garden of the former U.S. embassy, lost at sea, taken to Japan, and stolen from a train wreck, and sold as 'dragon bone' folk medicine.", "The Abbey of Monte Cassinno was destroyed by allied forces during world war two.  The monastery had been bypassed by the retreating Germans but was still destroyed with several bombing sorties and artillery strikes.  Over 200 civilians hiding within the monastery were killed.\n\n _URL_0_\n\nSorry about Wikipedia but I'm at work.", "The Amber Room was a special ornate chamber contained within the Russian Tsar's palace at Tsarskoye Selo, outside of St. Petersburg (later Leningrad). The room itself was decorated with over six tonnes of amber from the Baltic region, was over 55 square meters, and took ten years to build (between 1701 and 1711). It was eventually presented as a gift by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia to Peter the Great.\n\nIn October of 1941, Hitler decided he would like that gift returned to Germany. During the siege of Leningrad the German troops occupied Tsarskoye Selo and a team of experts completely disassembled the room and its furnishings. It was shipped, in boxes, to the old Prussian capital of Konigsberg.\n\nThe Soviets eventually invaded East Prussia and laid siege to Konigsberg, which had been declared a \"fortress city\" by Hitler. The fighting was incredibly brutal, even by the standard of the time. Konigsberg castle burned to the ground during the fighting and the Amber Room was never seen again.\n\nThe actual fate of the room is a mystery that has baffled both art historians and scholars of the second world war. In Russia, the room is considered such an important cultural artifact that exhaustive searches have been launched in an attempt to figure out what actually happened to it. While the most popularly held belief is that it was completely destroyed in the destruction of Konigsberg castle, there are a number of theories on what might have happened to it, including it being secreted away in an ore mine somewhere in Germany or laying at the bottom of the sea after a failed evacuation attempt by U-Boat.\n\n", "The largest ancient ships ever (Nemi Ships) were destroyed by American shelling in Italy during WWII.", "This is recent, but I think its a perfect example.\n\nNamdaemun, the South Gate of Seoul, stood for 600 years, and was designated \"National Treasure No. 1\" by the South Korean government. It was [burnt down](_URL_0_) by a Mr. Chae Jong-Gi in February 2008. \u3160\u3160", "I would draw a distinction between deliberate acts of war or vandalism (such as the fate of the Library of Alexandria or the Bamiyan Buddhas) and losses due to human accident or ignorance.\n\nMuch less important, much more recent was the [routine erasure of early television broadcasts](_URL_0_) and the [loss of early films on silver nitrate prints](_URL_1_). I imagine this will be an annoying gap in the record for future historians of the early audio-visual period.", "The [Flood of the Arno River](_URL_0_) in Florence in 1966 damaged hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts.", "I haven't seen the Parthenon in here! Essentially, the venetians sent an expedition to Athens to recapture it from the Turks in the 1600s. And the Turks used the Parthenon as an ammo dump. And the venetians shot the ever living day lights out of it and then the powder went off and that's why a huge chunk is missing today", "Very important biblical/Christian manuscript discovery is the Nag Hammadi library.\n\nThey were found by goat herders who took the manuscripts home, believing them to be valuable And wanting to make some money off of them. Their mother at some point burned some of the manuscripts because she thought it would bring nothing but trouble to the family.\n\nnobody knows what she Burnt, or how many manuscripts She burned. For all we know it was the original Gospel of Matthew or something\n\n_URL_0_", "_URL_0_  When I visited archaeological sites in Peru, the remains of mining operations from the Colonial era were in most of the coastal areas. Trujillo, Peru center of the Mochi civilization had shafts drilled into the tops of pyramids, water diversion projects to ease extraction and transport of gold found there, an entire industry devoted to looting and systematically mining the sites. The temples look like gavel pits, absolutely horrifying.", "[This video](_URL_0_), in which a \"one of a kind\" Wax Cylinder recording collapses in an expert's hand immediately came to mind.  I've always wondered about its authenticity, but it seems genuine.", "The remains of most of the french rulers since Clovis were removed from the Basilique St-Denis and dumped in a pit during the Revolution.\nIs there any other example of remains that could be considered \"national treasures\" that were desecrated this way?", "A documentary you should all watch is \"These Amazing Shadows.\"\n\nWe have nothing left of the first Academy Award winning film aside from a trailer, among other disasters befalling silent film.", "Not so much human stupidity as much as human vandalism, but I would have really liked to see the library at Carthage and the collection of writings at Estakhr mentioned in writings of the time.", "The Copenhagen fire of 1728 did not only destroy 1/4 of the city, but a lot of unique documents were lost when the fires reached the University archives that contained original historic works by Tycho Brahe, Ole Worm and others. The fire also destroyed \u00c1rni Magn\u00fasson's library which contained a lot of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, although \u00c1rni managed to save the most precious texts that were written on calfskin. Supposedly the fire was started by a young child playing with a candle.", "When Henry VIII had his reformation, he burned innumerable documents lovingly preserved by the Catholic Church for centuries. Some treasures survive now due to a single manuscript. Others are gone forever. ", "A lot of the comments we're getting are about artefacts or historic sites looted during wars - this can't really be called *stupidity* or *accidental*, the people doing it knew what they were up to and had good (from their perspective) reason for doing it.", "Want to know why we only have footage of the aftermath of D-day? Because the rest of footage showing the actual battle is at the bottom of the ocean somewhere around France. \n\nThe officer in charge of collecting the footage of D-day dropped his bag of footage while getting on a ship. The only reason we have a short clip (a very short clip) of D-day is because one of the cameramen refused to give his tapes to him. \n\nIt really sucks because we have no idea what the battle was like, at least visually. We only have personal accounts and that short clip of about 3 guys dying from gunfire. If you want a good perspective of D-day, check out the beginning of \"Saving Private Ryan\" it's supposedly very realistic.", "Part of my Master's thesis concerned a Frank Capra movie called \"Rendezvous in Space\" that was shown at the 1964-65 World's Fair in NYC. Seven million people viewed the exhibit.\n\nDuring the film, a pair of full-sized spaceships \"docked\" with a space station hanging 130 feet above the audience's heads.\n\nI recently located the spaceship mockups. They're in museums in California and Oklahoma.\n\nWhen the NY Hall of Science changed out their exhibits that they inherited after the fair, they tried to find homes for all the equipments. The spaceships got out okay, but they couldn't find a home for the 2300 lb space station. So, they dragged it out to the parking lot of the exhibit hall, chopped it up with chainsaws, and threw all the pieces in a half-dozen dumpsters. ", "One example is the *Yuanmingyuan* (Gardens of Perfect Brightness), the Old Summer palace of Imperial China that was destroyed by the British as retaliation for the murder of two envoys during the [Second Opium War](_URL_2_). The ruins have been memorialized and you can visit them today. Haiyan Lee places the loss of the Old Summer Palace in its context to modern Chinese [here](_URL_3_).\n\nOne would think that Japan would have lost much in the US firebombing attacks on Tokyo that destroyed most of the city.  However most of Tokyo's archives had already been lost in the [massive earthquake of 1923](_URL_0_), which destroyed the Imperial University Library and its estimated 700,000 volumes.\n\nJapan also caused incredible damage to China's archives during its occupation.  To note, the National Tsing Hu University in Beijing lost the majority of its volumes to burning and looting. The University of Nank'ai in Tientsin was completely destroyed by bombing, along with a number of universities and libraries in Shanghai.  \n\nThere is actually a compendium of Libraries and Archives destroyed in the 20th Century alone, hosted by UNESCO here: _URL_1_", "The Dissolution of the Monasteries.  When Henry VIII wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon, but the pope wouldn't approve, he passed the Act of Supremacy, thereby declaring himself the head of the church in England and removing the pope from the heirarchy altogether.\n\nIn the process of removing the vestiges of popery from the land, he realized that he could pillage the monasteries and priories, which were often incredibly wealthy in spite of individuals being vowed to poverty.  He took the valuables and used them to enrich his own treasury.  Church lands were often split up and given to different lords as bribes or gifts.  Often, once all the portable treasures (gold, silver, tapestries, etc) were removed, they would destroy any remaining obvious signs of Catholicism.  Stained glass windows were smashed, frescos were destroyed/painted over, and sometimes entire buildings were demolished.  Others became residences for the ruling class.  \n\nIt's hard to know how many records, books and historically significant artifacts were looted or destroyed during that period.  I've always found it incredibly sad that so much history was just destroyed, and wonder at the amazing things we might be able to learn today had the dissolution never occurred.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1326063/After-1700-years-Buddhas-fall-to-Taliban-dynamite.html"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Nemi_Ship_Hull_1930.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_ships"], [], ["http://www.cylinder.de/resource_brahms.html", "https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/edison/brahms/brahms.html"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Zeus_at_Olympia#Loss_and_destruction"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibylline_Books"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Stone"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_%281258%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_library"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_man"], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino"], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/world/asia/12korea.html?_r=0"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiping", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Flood_of_the_Arno_River"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library#Discovery_at_Nag_Hammadi"], ["http://www.huacas.com/page080.htm"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnsizkVjGm8"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthquake", "http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/administ/pdf/LOSTMEMO.PDF", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Opium_War", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/27746912"], []]}
{"q_id": "2dq8qb", "title": "What is the historicity of early Christian martyrdom stories (Paul, Peter, Andrew, etc) and do we know who 'the Twelve' were?", "selftext": "Hello,\n\nI have read parts of Candida Moss's book The Myth of Persecution but I am more interested in the very early history of the church (as opposed to the 'lions in the arena' persecution era). Traditional stories about Peter being crucified upside down, Thomas being martyred in India, and Andrew being crucified on an X-shaped cross abound church tradition; what got me interested was looking at the Scottish flag, based on the Cross of St Andrew. I also read that the Vatican claims to have found the remains of Paul along with some purple linen. \n\nHow much of the traditional story is accurate and do we know for certain which early Christians and apostles were martyred, which were simply killed in non-martyrdom circumstances (I.e. executed without being told to renounce Christ first) and which just disappear off the map?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dq8qb/what_is_the_historicity_of_early_christian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjsp5ru"], "score": [7], "text": ["A PhD grad student (Classics) at UC Irvine has written a good overview of the sources for the fates of the apostles. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically, most of them come from apocrypha, many of which were written a century or more after the deaths of the apostles, include fairly implausible details and are not otherwise considered reliable accounts of history, even by the church. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://adversusapologetica.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/48/"]]}
{"q_id": "2xf975", "title": "Kurt Vonnegut and the Hottentots", "selftext": "In Vonnegut's novel Mother Night, the protagonist (who is a nazi war criminal in hiding) is badly beaten and wakes up in a neo Nazi compound. Looking around his room he sees old flags with swastikas and a framed picture of Hitler and remarks that he has been 'captured by Hottentots'. What does this South African tribe have to do with the Nazis? Or is this just a literary device im misinterpreting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xf975/kurt_vonnegut_and_the_hottentots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coznc64"], "score": [3], "text": ["He was insulting his captors by likening then to a group that Nazis would regard as sub-human."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bgbcf", "title": "How old can a book be before it's \"too old?\"", "selftext": "I have a copy of *History of the Ancient World* by Chester Starr and I've been reading through it, as interesting as it is I checked the date on the inside cover and found it was originally written in 1965 (though the copy I have dates from 1974). I've always wondered out \"out of date\" a history book be before the information in it is considered obsolete?\n\nGranted history doesn't change but our understanding and interpretation of it improves over time; a book on Egypt from 1925 is going to be far less accurate than a book on Egypt from 2005.\n\nSo is there a rule of thumb or does it range according to period or is there another method for determining if the information is still valid?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bgbcf/how_old_can_a_book_be_before_its_too_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj57asd"], "score": [3], "text": ["Many works attain canonical status in their field and will never be too old. A few examples without going too far back: Adam Smith, Max Weber, E. H. Carr. Perhaps a student of history a generation from now will read Richard J. Evans' defense of history against postmodernism. That doesn't make Carr less relevant to what the postmodernist critique was of, just as von Ranke remains relevant to understanding Carr if time constraints prevent reading von Ranke himself. Books dealing with \"facts\" are trickier.\n\nA narrative history of Egypt is going to change from generation to generation for a variety of reasons. New research, new perspectives, new tastes in what people enjoy. What remain are landmark studies and books that shaped public perception of a topic enough to be relevant to understanding future paradigms. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census is a work from 1969 that came out on the cusp of a revolution in quantitative data and remains relevant to the field. It led to articles like 1985's \"Deaths of Slaves in the Middle Passage\" that challenged previous assumptions about a phenomenon called tight packing, where slaves were given as little room as possible in what historians believed was a calculated decision to let some of them die in the name of greater profits. The paper showed a negligible difference in slave deaths based on allotted space.\n\nSomeone wishing to study tight packing is going to examine that article unless and until someone else unearths new data that makes its conclusions not worth studying. Important distinction: Not worth studying is not the same as coming to a different conclusion. The article remains a valid data point until slavery scholarship moves on with new methods, perspectives, etc. It becomes part of the history of the topic when it's no longer cited except as an example of where the field was at a given time.\n\nHope that makes sense. How to determine relevancy is usually a matter of reading the current journals and monographs in your area of interest.  Check someone's bibliography to get a feel for what's important (and how they used it!)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hm6p1", "title": "What are some good histories on the Stasi (East German intelligence)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hm6p1/what_are_some_good_histories_on_the_stasi_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2r4w2k", "d2rfruf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Gary Bruce's [*The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi*](_URL_4_;) is an accessible and short history of the MfS with a special focus upon the Stasi's impact on local regions of the GDR. Jens Gieseke's book on the MfS has been translated into and published by Berghahn as [*The History of the Stasi East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990*](_URL_1_). Gieseke has also written an extended [review essay- PDF warning](_URL_3_) for the German Historical Institute on recent research on the MfS, which was part of a [volume](_URL_0_) on the MfS. For a more technical look at the MfS and spying, [*Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World*](_URL_2_) by Kristie Macrakis examines the technology of the GDR's spy service and has some interesting material on how espionage work intersected with the GDR's abortive attempt to create its own high-tech computer sector. ", "I enjoyed reading \"Stasiland\" by Anna Funder. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ghi-dc.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=1481&amp;Itemid=1285", "http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=GiesekeHistory", "http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/seduced-secrets-inside-stasis-spy-tech-world?format=HB&amp;isbn=9780521887472", "http://www.ghi-dc.org/files/publications/bu_supp/supp009/bu-supp9_059.pdf", "https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-firm-9780195392050?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h7v6s", "title": "Is being mexican an ethnicity?", "selftext": "I'm a little confused.I currently study International Relations in Mexico. In our history of Mexico classes they have taught us that ethnicity means when a society is stablished in the same territory that shares language or dialect, ancestry, homeland, religion, cuisine, dressing style, physical appearance, etc.. \n\nAssuming for what they have taught us about the country, I believe Mexico is an ethnicity for the following reasons I noted underneath. I was recently confronted by a redditor about  the term, his argument was that we do not qualify for the term. It made me a little confused, so this are the reasons why I think Mexico is an ethnicity. I know I may be wrong, but I would love to hear from people who are dedicated to the history field and get proper correction. Thank you so much!\n\n\n\n**Language or Dialect**: Spanish, certain states have their own indigenous people with their own dialect. Although is a restricted community and some  don't see themselves as mexicans..even though we do. \n\n**Ancestry**: The most of us are Mestizos, maybe your great great grandparents or grandparents we're european but your parents probably married someone that has native blood. The natives as I said again, such as Huicholes and Coras they married between each other is the very few who marry mestizos.\n\n**Homeland**: Mexico (because of our native ancestors) and Spain mostly ( because of the Conquista) to other European countries.\n\n**Religion**:  91% of our citizens are Catholic.\n\n**Dressing style**: It mostly changes between cities and beaches. Although if you focus in the traditional dressing, it changes with states but the style is almost the same.\n\nPhysical Appearance: It changes within the states... sonora = tall woman, Guadalajara= Big eyes, Tepic= Asian looking, Chiapas= Short woman  &  tanner skin etc... but we do have a certain uniformity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h7v6s/is_being_mexican_an_ethnicity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carp6uq"], "score": [9], "text": ["There's nation, there's state, and there's ethnicity.\n\nFrench Rationalist philosophers in the middle of the 18th century stated that \u201cNation [or rather nation (in French)] denotes the population of a state, regardless of that population\u2019s characteristics and feelings.\u201d By the beginning of the 19th century, a new concept of the term nation evolved in reaction to the French use of the word. This new meaning emerged first in Germany, as Germany did not constitute a single state and was in fact composed of dozens of politically sovereign states. Fichte defined the German nation as the entity formed by all German-speaking countries, despite their political division. Isaiah Berlin had the notion that \u201ca nation is not a state, but a cultural entity of people who speak the same language, live on the same soil, and possess the same habits, a communal past, common memories.\u201d \n\nThe German (more romanticist) notion of nation has been at least as influential as the French (more rationalist) notion. But it has led to another confusion, namely that between the concepts \u201cmultilingual state\u201d and \u201cmultinational state.\u201d They are often used as synonyms, which is wrong, because, apart from unilingual uninational states (e.g. Portugal) and multilingual multinational states (e.g. Belgium and Canada), there are also multilingual uninational states (e.g. Switzerland), as well as unilingual multinational states (e.g. Bosnia-Herzegovina).\n\nModernly, nations are divided into ethnicities deriving from their origins. For example:\n\nI'm from Dominican Republic, and within the Dominican nation (people who identify as Dominican) the largest ethnic-groups are: Ibero-dominicans (Dominicans whose origins are from Spain), Afro-dominicans (Dominicans whose origins are from Africa) and Dominican-americans (Americans whose origins are from the dominican republic).\n\nIn the United States, there're English-American, German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, African-American, Chinese-American, etc. They are part of the \"American nation\" but their ethnicity or origins are from somewhere else.\n\nSame way, there might be Afro-mexicans, or arab-mexicans, or even american-mexicans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "27bsb1", "title": "In English, why don't we capitalize words like \"to\" and \"for\" in titles?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27bsb1/in_english_why_dont_we_capitalize_words_like_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chzd1dw"], "score": [3], "text": ["This question would probably be better answered over in the asklinguistics subreddit"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rrffq", "title": "I recently found out that the Illuminati actually had some historical significance, can anyone point me towards some good literature on them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rrffq/i_recently_found_out_that_the_illuminati_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdq5nif"], "score": [26], "text": ["The wording in your post makes me worried. What historical significance, what era and what historical figures?\n\nThe Illuminati is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. The real, historical Illuminati was the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment (where the latin names comes from) era secret society founded in 1776. Its members worked against superstition, prejudice, religious influence and particularly the catholic church, abuses of state power, and they worked to support women's education and gender equality. \n\nIt was outlawed by the Bavarian goverment who banned secret societies (with support from the Catholic Church) and was disbanded in 1785. There is no evidence that the original Bavarian Illuminati survived its suppression in 1785. That's the actual, historical Illuminati. \n\nOf course, well estimed historical researchers like David Icke will tell you that the Illuminati survived underground and now there are all the secret societes and conspiracies and historical figures said to be part of the Illuminati and alien lizards in the royal family and the jewish bankers masterminding all the important events in the world and the Bilderberger group and the moon is hollow and now they're taking our guns away and arrrghhh for the love of God can we just stop with all this nonsense and non-historical bullshit already. Please."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2udeqi", "title": "Who is the highest ranking US military member to ever be court-martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice?", "selftext": "Considering that all jurors must be the rank of the accused or above, what is the highest rank for which it is feasible to be court-martial?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2udeqi/who_is_the_highest_ranking_us_military_member_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7if9g"], "score": [27], "text": ["The highest ranking military US member to actually be court-martialed was Major General Robert Walker Grow, who commanded the 6th Armored Division in WW2. He was serving as a senior military attach\u00e9 in Moscow when excerpts of his personal diary were photographed and latter published in an inflammatory form by the Soviets. Grow welcomed a formal hearing because he expected it would clear his name, as none of the captured excerpts contained classified material, and wound up receiving an official reprimand and a suspension from command. Grow managed to get the sentence remitted in 1957 - the sensationalism that surrounded his court-martial had lessened significantly by then.\n\nAs for your second question, a court martial of a four-star general, while technically feasible according the Manual of Courts-Martial, is unlikely to occur today. Take the case of General William E. Ward, who was found to have perpetrated \"multiple forms of misconduct\" but was only demoted to (and allowed to retire) a major general. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20qoqr", "title": "Why were parts of Eastern Germany annexed after WWII? Was there an ethnic justification, or was it just a land-grab?", "selftext": "On the face of it, this question might seem a bit obtuse, because annexations were not uncommon in 19th-20th century European conflicts. However, I was just curious about eastern Germany. Looking at old maps, it looks as though these regions (Eastern Pomerania, Frankfurt, Liegnitz, Breslau, Oppeln, Ostprussen) belonged to Germany/Prussia for quite some time, some parts since 1700. \n\nI'm more curious as to why these annexations happened, what the justifications were, what kind of opposition Germans put up against it, etc. Did these regions have ethnically polish majorities? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20qoqr/why_were_parts_of_eastern_germany_annexed_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg5urz8"], "score": [2], "text": ["Starting around 1944 the German population in these areas began to flee back west. The first to begin fleeing were the German settlers who had settled in the Baltic area and the areas annexed by Poland. Many found their way to East Prussia. The Wehrmacht and what was left of the Kreigsmarine fought an extremely desperate rearguard action to allow these refugees to be evacuated via boat from the port of Pillau. It was relatively successful but some Soviet submarines got into the harbor and destroyed a few of the ships killing around 8000 German civilians. \n\nNow after the war the Russians and other allied communist states began to systematically remove the remaining German population from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. As a result these areas annexed by Russia and the Eastern European satellite states had next to no ethnic Germans living in them any more. The allies also felt they need to compensate the states that had suffered under Nazi rule.\n\nSource:\n\nSecond World War by: John Keegan"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6gr5h2", "title": "Why didn't Japanese people die from European diseases like the native Americans did?", "selftext": "Both were contacted by Europeans around the same era, 14-1500s so why was 95% of native Americans wiped out but not 95% of Japanese people? Just curious, and thanks in advanced. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gr5h2/why_didnt_japanese_people_die_from_european/", "answers": {"a_id": ["disybo6", "diunq9m"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Good question but one that has been asked before [right here](_URL_0_).\n\nBasically, Japan was close enough to the Asian mainland that they were exposed to much of the same Eurasian diseases that Europeans would have been carrying.  People in Mainland Asia and Europe were not too isolated that diseases couldn't spread across the continent, so the Japanese had little to worry about.", " >  Related to the premise of your question, I'd suggest checking out /u/anthropology_nerd 's post [Myths of Conquest, Part Seven: Death by Disease Alone](_URL_0_) which is a really good summary of why the 95% deaths from disease alone isn't an accurate story. \n\nIn that post /u/anthropology_nerd writes:\n > We hear that an infectious organism like smallpox, which historically has an overall fatality rate of 30%, killed 95% of infected Native Americans. Taken without reference to the greater ecological situation, and assuming the validity of colonial mortality rates (a large assumption), the myth arises of an immunologically weaker Indian population unable to respond to novel pathogens.\n\nCircling back to Japan, even though Japan has been in continuous contact with the Asian continent for all of recorded history, you're actually on to something about the spread of disease to the Japanese archipelago,  although I'm going to talk about the Edo period (1600 to the mid 1800s), not the original period of European contact. Japan's geography and history has contributed to an interesting pattern of disease spread in the case of measles: the one infectious disease whose history in Japan I've read about most thoroughly.\n\nAccording to Japanese population and epidemiology historian Ann Janetta, measles did not become endemic in Edo Period Japan until the 1860s. That is, the country went decades at a time without any measles cases. Because of its geographical isolation and a population spread out along well defined travel lines, measles would come in via the port of Nagasaki, tear through the population along the main routes, infect much of Japan, and then run out of victims and disappear from the islands. \n\nIn Europe, during this same period, measles would come around to a region every few years, infecting mostly children, as adults had already had the disease. In contrast, during the worst measles epidemic of the Edo Period: the epidemic of 1862, it's estimated that up to 63 percent of the Japanese population came down with measles, spread from a foreign ship docked in Nagasaki. The victims were mainly those 26 and younger, since the last measles epidemic had hit Japan twenty-six years before. In a year that also saw a huge cholera epidemic, and an era full of disasters and fears of foreign interference, the measles epidemic was a terrifying experience with a large death toll.\n\n*However*, Janetta makes the very interesting argument that massive measles epidemics every couple decades were ultimately much *less deadly* for the overall population than endemic measles were in Europe. The majority of deaths in a measles epidemic are of children under the age of five. In Europe, with a regular epidemic every four to five years, all children in the most vulnerable age bracket would run the risk of contracting measles. In Japan, the disease was way more likely to hit healthy young patients past the earliest years, and so, while a huge epidemic with many deaths might seem worse, overall, there was a much lower death rate from measles.\n\nI've gone into this example of measles because I think it points out that epidemiology is complicated. In the case of measles in Japan, a big disease hitting a population largely without resistance may have worked to their advantage, because they otherwise had a healthy state of society. Meanwhile, warfare, starvation, slavery etc. in the Americas could tip disease over the edge to destroy their societies.\n\nMy main source for this post is Ann Janetta's *Epidemics and mortality in Tokugawa Japan: 1600-1868* (1983)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hv6oz/why_didnt_the_japanese_get_sick_when_europeans/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2u4d53/myths_of_conquest_part_seven_death_by_disease/"]]}
{"q_id": "1xpkjj", "title": "What genre were the gospels and do we know of any books that influenced them?", "selftext": "Besides the Old testament, of course, do we have any specific examples of books that influenced the structure, style or content of the Gospels?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xpkjj/what_genre_were_the_gospels_and_do_we_know_of_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfdo1am", "cfdoj3x"], "score": [5, 16], "text": ["My background is in philosophical theology, so I'm not the most qualified person in the world to answer this question, but since no one else is taking a swing at it...\n\nIIRC, the exact lineaments of the gospel genre are somewhat in dispute.  What's a bit better understood, I think, is all the various genres that make up the subunits of the gospels.  \n\nThe gospels were almost definitely not written any sooner than the late sixties of the first century CE.  But they contain material that seems to go back to Jesus himself.  The gospel writers took various bits of tradition that had been handed down by Christians since the beginning and imaginatively stitched them together into their own theological vision.  But these little bits of tradition themselves come in different genres.  So, for instance, we're all familiar with the genre of the parable, but not everything in the gospels is parable.  For instance, Mark 13 is definitely in the genre of apocalyptic - writings which use dramatic endtimes prophecies to deal with current issues.  (Basically a powerless minority proclaiming hope that God is about to dramatically intervene/change/end history on their behalf.)  You also get miracle stories, allegories, moral exhortation, etc.  So, whatever the form of the genre \"gospel\" turns out to be, the content is a hodgepodge of other little genre pieces.  \n\nI know that the Book of Enoch gets directly quoted elsewhere in the New Testament, but I don't know of any references to them in the gospels themselves.  \n\nThe Gospel of John bears the marks of some kind of influence by Platonic philosophy, though it's hard to pinpoint a particular text.  I did hear an argument once that John is referencing Plato's Symposium in the account of the woman at the well, but I got the impression from the scholar making the argument that he himself took it to be a little idiosyncratic.\n\nSorry I can't give you more or provide good references.  I wouldn't break the sub rules so brazenly if it weren't that you've gotten no answers yet!  Maybe this will entice some more knowledgable folks to come correct me...\n\n", "Good (and somewhat complicated) question. \n\nA fairly wide consensus has emerged that many elements of the gospels cohere with those of *bioi* (\"lives\"). The basic structure of a *bios* might examine an individual's \"ancestry, birth, boyhood and education, great deeds, virtues, and death and consequences.\" \n\nHowever, \n\n > If the canonical Gospel writers were, indeed, consciously following the Greco-Roman *bios* literary form, they were also creative in their transformation of that literary form. If the *bios* form served as the literary \u2018starting point\u2019, the NT authors used and molded a known literary form to most effectively communicate to their respective audiences. The authors changed the very purpose and impact of the familiar *bios* genre, because they had a very different purpose in relating the story of Jesus.\n\nBut we needn't explain the variance with traditional *bioi* based solely on the authors' communicative/rhetorical strategies. We also have to remember that the gospel authors - as Jews (or para-Jews) writing in Greek - were heavily steeped in the Hellenistic Jewish literature of the times. They would have encountered the \"Old Testament\" through its Greek translation (the Septuagint), as well as other Hellenistic Jewish literature in Greek. So it's fairly certain that the gospels were also indebted to some of these literary forms as well, in some ways. \n\nTo take a few examples: a fairly recent monograph on the Gospel of Mark focuses on a close connection with the Jewish novels of the Hellenistic period - some of which constitute what we now call the \"deuterocanon,\" usually not accepted by Protestants. As for literary connections with the actual (universally) \"canonical\" Bible itself: the portrait of Jesus' early life in various gospels syncs up pretty closely with that of Moses (and events from Exodus) - as well as with Elijah, at certain points. \n\n____\n\nSources:\n\n- Richard Burridge, *What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography*\n\n- Michael Vines, *The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel*\n\n- Judith A. Diehl, \"What is a 'Gospel'? Recent Studies in the Gospel Genre,\" Currents in Biblical Research 9 (2011): 171-199\n\n- Michael Martin, \"Progymnastic Topic Lists: A Compositional Template for Luke and Other *Bioi*?,\" New Testament Studies 54 (2008): 18-41"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2lz9ds", "title": "How large was the Jewish diaspora in the 1st century AD?", "selftext": "I know there was a large population of Jews in Alexandria (and possibly in Rome?). Are there any estimates of the total Jewish population then and where they all lived? \n\nSome other related questions (not sure if these should be their own post): \n\nHow many of them were converts (or were most descendants of Judeans/Israelites)? Also, did they practice rabbinical Judaism or did they perform sacrifices and have a priesthood? If the latter, was it connected to the priesthood/temple in Jerusalem or were there other temples?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lz9ds/how_large_was_the_jewish_diaspora_in_the_1st/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clzjs7m"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'll edit and answer the first part when I'm back home with my books (I'm away from home on a business trip). Until then, I'll just answer the second bit. But note on the first part that there was also a large jewish community in Mesopotamia. \n\n > How many of them were converts (or were most descendants of Judeans/Israelites)?\n\nIt's difficult to say for certain. We know from Josephus that conversion took place in Roman areas, and the Talmud implies it. But there's no clear ratio of converts to native Jews. \n\n > Also, did they practice rabbinical Judaism or did they perform sacrifices and have a priesthood? If the latter, was it connected to the priesthood/temple in Jerusalem or were there other temples?\n\nThere's a bit of a false dichotomy here. Rabbinic Judaism does have sacrifices and a priesthood. The former is on hold while there's no temple to perform them, but the historical belief of rabbinic Judaism was (consistently until the 19th century) that sacrifices are not void. The liturgy is based off the sacrificial system, and references it, including references to its future resumption. The priesthood still exists, just with a much-diminished role without sacrifice. \n\nAnyway, answering the denominational makeup isn't really possible either. Unless you were a religious authority involved in a particular group (namely Pharisees or Sadducees were the two big ones, but there were more. Assuming a rabbinic vs non-rabbinic religious division in late ancient Judaism is often assumed, but isn't quite how things were), you were probably pretty ambivalent. Josephus said that most of the Judean common people were pro-Pharisee, but rabbinic texts generally state that the peasantry were not really \"rabbinic\", even if the formal structure and religious authorities were pharasaic. But that goes mostly for Judea itself. Elsewhere, outside the centers of the religious institutions, it's pretty likely that people would be similarly apathetic towards the religious devides, even if they formally practiced something resembling one sort. \n\nThere is record of another temple at elephantine in Egypt, but well before the time period you're asking about. By this time there wouldn't have been secondary temples .  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4sl2qi", "title": "Were there any groups that sequentially followed the path from Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam as they emerged?", "selftext": "It seems to me that there has to be at least one group of people who stayed abreast of Abrahamic prophecy and were able to transition from old to new as the religious traditions evolved and spread.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4sl2qi/were_there_any_groups_that_sequentially_followed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5a82k8"], "score": [30], "text": ["Three regions would really match up with these transitions. \n\n1) Levant/Egypt\n\n2) Horn of Africa\n\n3) the Maghreb\n\nAll these regions share a common denominator in that they are all inhabited by Afroasiatic people's and share many common cultural and ethnic features to begin with, as well as strong ties to the middle east for the Horn of Africa and Maghreb region, and a shared cultural milleiu throughout these regions. \n\nBecause of these factors, the Abrahamic religions were introduced to these areas at very early dates - or were founded in them, as is for the Levant. \n\nTo begin with, Judaism, being the first Abrahamic religion, was probably already well established in the Maghreb and in the Horn of Africa around 100 BC. Jews coexisted and intermarried heavily with the pagan Cushitic and Semitic Horners, as well as pagan Berbers, and were heavily assimilated into their societies. Jews also influenced the groups they lived amongst in these areas both religiously and culturally, but mostly religously, a good example being a mixed Cushitic pagan-Judaic religion of the Ageu highlanders. \n\nChristianity also had its first followers in these regions, and Christianity was present in Egypt from the very beginning, spreading westward to the pagan and also the partially Judaized Berber tribes. It also spread into the Horn, and Christian communities were well established there by 4th century AD, with King Ezana's declaration of Axum as an Christian state. It was also present amongst the pagan Somali clans in northern Somalia, who also contained Hebraic elements within their society. \n\nAs for Islam, it's first presence outside Arabia was in the Horn of Africa, with the first mosque outside of Medina being built in the northern Somali port city of Zeila, as well as the Prophet Muhammad sw own daughter, son in law, and other companions fleeing to the court of the Abyssinian monarch. Soon after the Prophets sw death, Islamic armies went into Egypt and the Levant, and westwards into the Maghreb. All these regions were the first areas were Islam was introduced and were early heartlands of the religion, and Islam replaced a lot of both the Judaic and Christian elements in all these regions by converting the Judaized and Christian Berber tribes, the partially Christian and Hebraic-influenced mostly pagan Somali clans and Christian and Judaic Ethiosemites, and a lot of the Christian and Jewish Egyptians and Levantines."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ebn6w", "title": "Why did the KKK disappear then reappear in the 1920s?", "selftext": "It seems strange that they largely went away, but then became immensely popular in the 1920s, 6 million members is a lot for what is considered a hate group today!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ebn6w/why_did_the_kkk_disappear_then_reappear_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ynu32", "c9yr3mu", "c9ytt7s", "c9ytxcv", "c9yugh0", "c9z0kg5", "ca02zu8"], "score": [32, 7, 2, 11, 2, 6, 2], "text": ["Two big things. The emergence of eugenics giving a 'scientific' basis to their claims of racial superiority on an intellectual level, and their status as a social group that was rabidly pro-Prohibition as a raw recruitment tool.\n\nIt's important to understand that Prohibition was heavily wrapped up in the classic 'white man's burden' rhetoric: the lower classes needed to be saved from their barbaric dependency on the demon gin. Vast swathes of society were actually behind prohibition not out of any sense that alcohol was in and of itself evil, but the sense that the poor needed to be saved from themselves.\n\nThere is no point in the Klan's history when it was not, at heart, a hate group. However, in the 1920s, it could successfully cloak socially unacceptable elements of that hatred beneath advocacy for social programs that by the *strangest* of coincidences just so happened to disproportionately effect anyone who wasn't a white anglo-saxon protestant.", "I don't know how significant it actually was, but one of the more interesting blows against the KKK was [\"The Clan of the Fiery Cross\"](_URL_2_), a series of Superman radio episodes that had the Man of Steel fighting the Klan.  It had the effect of simultaneously casting them as villains and trivializing them.  Through the undercover work of [Stetson Kennedy](_URL_1_), it also revealed much of their \"secret knowledge,\" the handshakes, passwords, and other privileged information that you would normally have to pay dues to earn (and which, incidentally, allowed them to mimic the mystique of other fraternal organizations like the Masons or Elks), thus rendering it worthless.  I can't speak to their accuracy, but [there are claims](_URL_3_) that KKK recruitment dropped to nearly zero in the weeks following the broadcasts.\n\nEDIT:  I did some more digging and it turns out that *Freakonomics* had a whole chapter on this, using the KKK \"secret information\" as an example of information asymmetry.  I also came across a [correction/commentary](_URL_0_) by the Freakonomics authors stating that Kennedy's claims of personally infiltrating the KKK have been questioned and that he instead appeared to have used informants.  Nonetheless, the information he conveyed about the inner workings of the Klan appears to have been accurate.\n\nEDIT2: Wordsmithing.", "Others have mentioned things that predisposed Americans to be receptive to the Klan, but one of the major immediate reasons for its success in the 1920s was the adoption of a recruitment and funding system similar to what we would today call multilevel marketing. Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler (advertising and PR executives, respectively) created a system where recruiters would pocket a percentage of membership dues from Klan members they recruited. Each Klan member was responsible for recruiting more members, and personally benefitted if they were successful. As you can imagine, Klan members higher up the food chain were highly motivated to sign up enormous numbers of new members.", "*Birth of a Nation* was an enormous hit and huge recruitment tool for the KKK. It was the highest grossing film in American history until the release of *Gone With the Wind* 25 years later. I don't think this should be downplayed or overlooked: the modern Klan was founded in the same year *Birth* was released and was in many ways a direct reaction to the film's popularity.\n\nThe early 20th century also saw a fad in America for fraternal organizations and secret societies, and the 20s era KKK tapped into that to make itself more appealing. The Reconstruction-era Klan was more of a classic terrorist organization and lacked a lot of the mystical and hierarchical elements found in the early 20th-century Klan.", "From what I remember, after their leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate officer, resigned from the post of Grand Wizard (the leader of the KKK), the Klan pretty much disintegrated. The motives of his resignation are pretty much unknown. However, a few years after his resignation he gave a speech apologizing for his hate against blacks.\n\nIn 1915, the KKK was recreated again by the very religious William J. Simmons when he burned a cross on Stone Mountain. He was believed to be inspired to recreate the group after watching the Birth of a Nation (a film very popular released in the same year).\n\nEdit: Is there any reason why people downvoted this post?", "Keep in mind the 1920s Klan was nativist and xenophobic as much as racist. They were a [political force in Oregon,](_URL_1_) for example, which had very few black residents; there they targeted Catholics in particular, and helped pass a state law mandating public schooling for children as a blow against parochial schools. They elected a governor, and at one point the Portland city council was dominated by klansmen. The [KKK recruited heavily in Oregon](_URL_0_) and had tens of thousands of members by the end of the 1920s, one of the highest per capita levels in the nation for that era.\n\n", "You have some decent answers. I'm going to try to be a bit more synthetic, and bring these answers together into a narrative. However, I am battling the flu at the moment, so forgive my lateness; I will try to make this as coherent as possible.\n\nA part of what led to the disappearance of the Reconstruction Klan is the fact that the Klan reached its goals. It wanted to walk back the civil rights gains of black southerners, and it successfully did that, ushering in Jim Crow. \n\nNow, why did the Klan appear again in the 1920s? Well, it didn't appear in the 1920s, but in 1915. Before Rev. William Simmons, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, constructed the altar on Mount Stone that led to the revival of the Klan on that fateful Thanksgiving evening in 1915, popular culture was priming the pump for the revival. Rev. Thomas Dixon, a Baptist minister,produced his wildly popular trilogy *The Clansman* in 1905. Dixon romanticized the goals of the Reconstruction Klan, and portrayed them as defenders of white women from tropes of aggressive, hyper-sexualized African Americans. Griffith took this stories and made it into an epic movie, *Birth of a Nation*, which took the nation by storm in 1915. But popular culture was not enough.\n\nIn a day of increasing racial taxonomies and of a godless Germany that ravaged continental Europe, there was a racial fear of foreigners. Southerners were not too keen on carpetbaggers, let alone foreigners who were not white. A Northerner, and a Jewish man, Leo Frank stepped into this racial cauldron. Frank was a factory owner and a white woman, Mary Phagan, worked at his factory. Frank was making a killing, and Phagan was living in abject poverty. Phagan turns up dead. The suspicion fell on Frank. And white folks wanted justice. It took two years, but Frank was eventually lynched in 1915. Frank was accused, but never tied to the crime, of brutalizing the poor white girl. The lynching was the product of the Knights of Mary Phagan. It was from this group that Simmons drew part of his inspiration for reviving the Klan. And he did so with gusto.\n\nBut this is not enough to explain the popularity of the Klan. The problem with the Klan was its sordid history. People did not look kindly on the rhetorics of hate and the violence, nor its particular Southern-only history, so Simmons did his best to downplay this side of the Klan. Simmons hired the public relations firm Southern Publicity Association, and they helped Simmons to refine the public image that allowed for a Klan that was more palatable for the rest of the nation. The Klans that arose spoke of a love of their own race, of a love for whiteness, not necessarily racial animus. Most of the Klans were nonviolent, but there were a violent klaverns (chapters), primarily in the South, and in places like Oklahoma. \n\nNow, historians like Nancy MacLean, who I respect tremendously, have done a wonderful Marxists interpretation of the Klan, though it is a bit reductionistic. MacLean argues that whiteness is connected to economics, and when there is an economic crisis, then there will be a crisis in whiteness that results in a resurgence of white supremacy. (This is a crass, Clif's notes version.) As more and more immigrants were coming to the US, the crisis became more and more acute. What this fails to understand is the religion of those immigrants. A part of what the Klan was deeply concerned about was that these were the wrong kind of immigrants. They were Catholic, not Protestant. (In fact, religion plays a significant. and largely overlook until recently, role in racial construction.) The Klan was a revival in Protestant white supremacy. It was about being free, in the libertarian sense of American freedom, and non-whites, loyal to the Pope, threatened American freedom.\n\nLast, we should address whether this is a hate group in the 1920s. This speaks to wider problems of historiography and presentism. The Klan did not view itself as a hate group. In fact, it was just one, albeit the most successful, of a large number of white supremacist groups operating in the 1920s. (The Klan is also not the only white supremacist group with revivals. The Red Shirts were recently revived.) Moreover, those who had a problem with the Klan, like the editor for New York *Methodist Advocate* did not have a problem with the Klan's racial ideology, but rather with the fact that they wore masks and violent. The question becomes, who is the center for culture. If we assume white folks were the center of culture, then most whites were on the side of white supremacy. The anti-racists were the exception. It becomes anachronistic to call the 1920s Klan a hate group, if we assume a point of view that is rooted in white culture. I find this version of history to be more troubling, the one when we don't call the Klan a hate group. If we call them a hate group, then we can imagine that hate was the exception, that we can cut off hate and root it in only one group. We burden them with all the sins, when, in fact, the sins of white supremacy were far more pervasive. A 1920s US that is pervasively white supremacist is far more disturbing. We can better understand what led to the Red Summer if we remember that white supremacy was troublingly strong."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08wwln_freakonomics.html?_r=0", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson_Kennedy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Superman_%28radio%29#.E2.80.9CClan_of_the_Fiery_Cross.E2.80.9D", "http://mentalfloss.com/article/23157/how-superman-defeated-ku-klux-klan"], [], [], [], ["http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=419C6376-F5D3-411B-1319F7210FB9FB94", "http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/ku_klux_klan/"], []]}
{"q_id": "12908d", "title": "Most Germanic countries are predominantly Protestant/Reformed while Latin countries are predominantly Catholic. Why did this split happen?", "selftext": "Here is my guess, you can confirm or deny it. \n\nDid the split occur because the printing press was invented in Germany, which made the spread of the new protestant ideas easier in Germanic languages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12908d/most_germanic_countries_are_predominantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6t68d0", "c6tabb0", "c6tbce6", "c6tbufi"], "score": [6, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["The printing press was a major factor, to be sure. It spread the ideas more quickly than handwriting could ever have done.\n\nAnother major reason was the fact that the Church's power was heavily limited in the Iberian countries by contracts the church made with the kings during the Reconquista (the conquest of Iberia from the muslim dominions). France also had quite an influence on the pope for a long time and Italy was the centre of the church's power. In the Germanic countries, esp. Germany and Scandinavia, the church was more powerful. The church hold a vast percentage of the land, either as their dominion or as property. In Germany, we have the phrase \"tote Hand\" (dead hand) which describes the fact that property held by the church will never leave the church. The reformation gave the rulers and the population a justification to get rid of the \"dead hand\". The Catholic church in Southern Germany survived mostly because the older bishoprics remained Catholic and became a base for the counterreformation (Jesuits, Capuchins, etc.)", "IANAH but I think it is curious how the border of the Reformation matches the border of the Roman Empire -  I think a population being well versed in Roman culture for a long, long time vs. a population that thinks of Rome as something really foreign and only a recent influence has something to do with it.", "That's not really true though. The southern half of Germany (Bavaria, Saarland and the southern part of Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg, and it's most common christian denomination in Baden-W\u00fcrttemberg, North Rhine Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate) as well as all of Austria are *very* catholic. In fact, the second largest religious group in Austria after Catholicism isn't Lutheranism, it's Islam. Although - and I'm just guessing here, 80% of these Muslims probably live in Vienna (which generally houses ~20% of the Austrian population). But go to the Austrian countryside, and you'll be surrounded by hardcore catholics.\n\nSource: I am a Half-Bavarian German person living in Austria. \n\nEDIT: I just looked it up, in Switzerland Catholics are also the largest religious denomination.", "More important is the religious background of the rulers of the territory. The Habsburgs for example (both the Spanish and Austrian branches), were adherents of Catholicism, which explains for the catholic nature of both present-day Belgium and Austria. \n\n- After the fall of Antwerp (1585), which de facto meant the recoquista of the Southern Netherlands during the 80-years war, ushered in a policy of strict contrareformation (both politically and culturally - see Rubens for example). The reason why the southern regions of the present-day Netherlands are dominantly catholic is because these parts of the Low Countries used to belong to the Southern Provinces and were conquered by the Republic later during the conflict. The contrareformation had however already done its work and these provinces stayed predominantly catholic until present day. \n\n- The same principle of the religious background of the rulers of a territory goes for the territories in the German realm. During the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio was declared, which meant that instead of personal choice, the inhabitants of a territory were forced to follow the religious preference of its rulers. Until today, the regions with catholic rulers are until today catholic regions, and the same goes for territories ruled by protestant rulers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8yyg6r", "title": "Exactly how detrimental was the Russian winter to the Germans in world war 2? I\u2019ve seen my fair share of Russian winter memes and know it\u2019s not the only factor.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8yyg6r/exactly_how_detrimental_was_the_russian_winter_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2eqs86"], "score": [19], "text": ["From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nThe Russian winter certainly did make offensive operations quite difficult for the Germans in 1941. Extreme cold degraded the combat performance of the army as a whole.  Vehicle engines were difficult to start in the cold, personnel wastage increased to frostbite and other problems, logistical resupply was easier than mud of the autumn *Rasputitsa*, but it was still difficult. Added to this was the morale problems the onset of winter engendered as the Soviets appeared no closer to collapse. Bread rations not only froze, but the snows summoned up images of Napoleon and other failed invasions. But with that said, \"General Winter\" did not discriminate between sides; many of the weather-related problems the Wehrmacht encountered in 1941/42 were also found within the Red Army as well. Some Soviet equipment was better for winter conditions than German ones.  Soviet felt boots were better than the hobnailed German jackboots. The Luftwaffe often had to fly out of captured or extemporized airfields which meant that they had to operate in the cold to the detriment of operational reliability while Soviet aircraft operated out of established  airfields. The same problems impacted the operations of German panzers and motorized transport as winter conditions made it hard to start engines and added further headaches to an already stretched logistical system. \n\nBut winter conditions often cut both ways in the war. The average Soviet soldier had the same biological response to cold as their Axis opponents. Hobnailed jackboots might have been more conducive to transmit cold to the toes than felt boots, but frostbite was still a major concern for the Red Army accounting for between 2\u20134% of the combat surgical trauma according to one estimate in *Military Medical Research*.  Some Soviet equipment might have been more robust to handle lower temperatures, but this discrepancy was not huge. The problem for the Germans was not winter but rather that intensive military operations continued through the winter season. \n\nMany of the Heer's general officers had experience with the climatic conditions of Russia during the First World War and many of them were aware of these difficulties. However, both the OKW and OKH planners for Barbarossa planned to defeat the bulk of Soviet armies before the onset of winter. In January 1941,  Luftwaffe quartermaster-general, Lieutenant-General von Seidel met with OKH head Halder in a conference coordinating the supply situation between the Heer and Luftwaffe, von Siedel broached the topic of winter clothing, his Heer counterparts tersely noted that the campaign would be finished by winter. For the most part, the German military establishment took a cavalier approach to the capabilities of their Soviet enemy and their thinking mirrored that of Hitler- that one swift kick would lead to a collapse of the Soviet state. The campaign planners anticipated that the winter of 1941 would mostly be a mopping up operation whose troops would require a minimum of supplies. \n\nThis massive underestimation of Soviet capabilities led to a disaster in late 1941 as the logistical system of the Wehrmacht began falling apart at the seams. Not only had the Red Army continued to fight despite massive losses in the various cauldron battles, but Barbarossa's logistical network was incapable of adequately supplying the German armies in the field. Instead of mopping up, German troops were engaged in offensive operations in November 1941 that ate up equipment and ammunition at a prodigious rate. In such a overburdened logistical system, winter clothing often had a lower priority than fuel or ammunition and sat well behind the lines in supply depots in Poland and the Western USSR.\n\nIn short, the \"titans\" of the German General Staff were in a dire situation of their own making. Their planning for Barbarossa was careless and they brushed aside inconvenient details that suggested defeat of the USSR would take more than a single campaign. Victory over France in 1940, which few officers in the Heer had actually expected, had engendered a fatal overconfidence which dovetailed with other problematic components of the German way of war. \n\nBut in one small way, the German planners of Barbarossa managed to wring a victory of sorts postwar by foisting all the blame for the campaign's missteps upon Hitler. This narrative stressed Hitler's tinkering with the campaign such as encouraging a drive towards Kiev that meant Moscow was only within reach of German arms by November. This and other alleged missteps by Hitler- who, let's be clear did make mistakes but also with the collaboration of OKW/OKH- meant that the Germans ran out of time in 1941. Such a narrative places responsibility of weather for defeating Germany not on the fact that the USSR had mobilized a staggering amount of troops since the onset of the invasion. The already common trope in the West of of Russia's General Winter  (which itself is not true- Napoleon's Grande Armee was a defeated force by the winter of 1812) lent this distorted and selective memory of 1941 a degree of legitimacy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70bc8d/what_affects_did_the_russian_winter_have_on_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "27t0w1", "title": "Why is the sport of Cricket so popular in India, but not football/soccer?", "selftext": "I assume both were introduced during the British occupation, but contrary to most of the rest of the world, Cricket seems much more popular in most of India. I'm wondering if there is a consensus among historians as to how that came to be.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27t0w1/why_is_the_sport_of_cricket_so_popular_in_india/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci49ofx"], "score": [2], "text": ["First of all, football IS very popular in India, being second most popular sport. It's another matter that the Indians are not as successful at it in international events and thus, not as famous. \n\nIt all started early and quite well. Football was introduced to the Indians by British soldiers in the 19th century and clubs were quickly set up around the country. Calcutta FC, was established in the 1890s, with several tournaments also springing up and the Indian Football Association established in 1893. In 1911 an Indian team won the IFA Shield, a tournament previously won only by British teams based in India. The All India Football Federation, which runs the game in the country, formed in 1937 and got affiliated with FIFA a decade later. \n\nThere was though the little odity that the Indian players preferred to play barefoot and even appeared barefoot in the 1948 Olympics. After that FIFA banned such frolicks and insisted on boots. This did not stop the Indian team winning. In 1951 the barefoot India beat the booted up Iran in the first Asian games. In 1962 the Indians won gold  in the same Asian Games. That was the golden age of Indian football and the team won several titles. After 1960s though they never qualified for the Olympics and hardly set foot in the World Cup. During the next decades they also lost foothold as a top Asian team. Until the 21st century, when their skills started to pick up again.      \n\nOn the other hand, cricket has advantages. It is not as physically challenging. It also requires a much smaller investment. You can play cricket in a very limited space and still be world class good, while football requires large and well maintained pitch if you want to reach competition levels. \n\nAs to how cricket got established in the first place, you are right. it was the British Raj you can blame. Cricket was played as early as 1721 and by the end of the 18th century there was a cricket club in the capital Calcutta. That's about a century headstart before the football arrived. After that they just kept winning. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "98sk9b", "title": "How do we research the material culture of dispossessed groups, such as Native Americans in North and South America?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/98sk9b/how_do_we_research_the_material_culture_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4itepi"], "score": [19], "text": ["I am an archaeologist that has had the lucky privilege of working in the United States, Canada, and Peru. As I am not a member of a dispossessed group myself, this is a very limited perspective but I hope to at least point people to sources and aspects of this topic to think about. I am also going to assume that the question refers to the past material culture of extant ethnic groups that were disenfranchised. I am also writing from the perspective of archaeology, obviously (^(please don't hurt me, historians)).\n\nThis is a very broad debate with very different attitudes, ethical considerations, legal reactions, and post-colonial contexts depending on the region and dispossessed group in question. There is considerable variation in the relationships between marginalized groups of people and research in material culture. Research can be seen as liberating, revealing and conserving a lost past that helps heal a fractured present and produces avenues of preserving and reclaiming traditions (ideally, through incorporating interpretations from descendants and breaking colonial barriers of archaeologist vs. subjects of study, etc.). However, research can also be seen as intrusive or, at worst, justifying and replicating colonial patterns of violence, alienation, and ethnocide. If you haven't picked up on it already, the colonial history of North and South America is unavoidable when discussing archaeology in these regions. This is because, well, that's how dispossessed people were \"dispossessed\" in the first place.\n\nExamples:\n\n[Layla Renshaw's work on exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War](_URL_5_), or [slave archaeology from the the Antebellum South](_URL_8_) as positive examples of recovering a \"lost\" or intentionally destroyed past.\n\n[Skull Wars, describes the Kennewick Man controversy](_URL_1_) and details the history of deteriorating relationships between scientific archaeologists and Native Americans in the United States. Much of this animosity and distrust stems from the [colonial history of archaeology](_URL_0_) in which anthropology was generally part of colonial systems and involved the collection (i.e. theft), analysis, and display of human remains as scientific curiosities. Some of the biggest museums in North America, [such as the Smithsonian](_URL_6_), still retain many of these skulls and have ongoing repatriation problems.\n\nMethods:\n\nMethods can include ethnographic data from descendants in combination with historical methods and processual and/or postprocessual archaeological fieldwork. The [bioarchaeology of marginalized populations](_URL_7_) is also an interesting area of research for this topic.\n\nA large part of the debate of how to ethically research dispossessed people surrounds who owns the data and material culture itself. Access, ownership, and control of information can all spark different controversies, especially concerning who gets to benefit from research activities. There are many data sharing and intellectual property issues being recognized and discussed by archaeologists, heritage practitioners, descendant communities, and policy makers. Questions that get asked: Why are we doing this research? Who gets to make interpretations of the material culture? Who is this research for? Who gets to read, see, and use this data?\n\nIf you're wondering why there is even a divide between \"archaeologists\" and \"dispossessed groups\" of people, reading about [indigenous archaeology](_URL_2_) might be of interest. [American archaeologists are overwhelmingly white](_URL_4_), so indigenous vs. settler politics heavily affects North American archaeology. Basically, institutionalized racism and the colonial history of antagonism in the United States and Canada between native groups and researchers has made indigenous archaeology challenging to implement (to say the least), but [there are examples of a transition](_URL_3_) into a more integrated approach to recovering and interpreting material culture. Theoretically and ethically, current trends seem to be shifting towards \"community based cultural heritage research,\" in which descendant communities are directly involved. The goal of such an approach is to involve a community with *all* aspects of the research process, from project design to authorship. There has also been an increased interest in using digital technology to make this possible (but getting into that too much might digress from the topic).\n\nMore on theory, practice, and ethics from a Canadian perspective: [_URL_9_](_URL_9_)\n\nNote: I have known quite a few archaeologists that would resent the perspective I am writing about and view these developments as endangering objective research. While I theoretically disagree with such viewpoints, it is important to recognize that there is a lot of diversity of thought around how researchers should approach studying the past populations of North and South America.\n\nSome examples of collaborative projects (that use digital technology to facilitate communication and reconstruct and conserve objects) between archaeologists and native groups that acknowledge or attempt to address these issues:\n\n\u2022 Haukaas, Colleen, and Lisa M. Hodgetts. 2016. \"The Untapped Potential of Low-Cost Photogrammetry in Community-Based Archaeology: A Case Study From Banks Island, Arctic Canada\". *Journal of Community Archaeology  &  Heritage.* 3 (1): 40-56.\n\n\u2022 Hennessy, Kate, et al. n.d. *The Inuvialuit Living History Project: Digital Return as the Forging of Relationships Between Institutions, People, and Data*. Museum Anthropology Review; Vol 7, No 1-2 (2013): After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge; pp. 44-73.\n\n\u2022 Lyons, Natasha, David M Schaepe, Kate Hennessy, Michael Blake, Clarence Pennier, John R Welch, Kyle McIntosh, et al. 2016. \"Sharing deep history as digital knowledge: An ontology of the Sq\u2019e\u0301wlets website project\". *Journal of Social Archaeology.* 16 (3): 359-384. \n\n\u2022 Ngata, Wayne, Hera Ngata-Gibson, and Amiria Manutahi Salmond. 2012. \"Te Ataakura: digital taonga and cultural innovation\". *Journal of Material Culture.* 17 (3): 229-244.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/abstract/10.5334/bha.16202/", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/skull-wars-kennewick-man-archaeology-and-the-battle-for-native-american-identity/oclc/265833349&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://muse.jhu.edu/article/202291", "https://www.cnm.edu/news/how-one-cnm-student-is-guiding-the-future-of-archaeology", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UyAZ3tIMj1AC&amp;pg=PR11&amp;lpg=PR11&amp;dq=zeder+the+american+archaeologists&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=q__VxemVBB&amp;sig=tdwjbeI4W_Jvkyt4cUVcegr9j-o&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=tChdUu_NPIWY1AWi9IGQBA&amp;ved=0CDsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=zeder%20the%20american%20archaeologists&amp;f=false", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/exhuming-loss-memory-materiality-and-mass-graves-of-the-spanish-civil-war/oclc/1018009751&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://naturalhistory.si.edu/arctic/html/repatsl.html", "https://www.elsevier.com/books/bioarchaeology-of-marginalized-people/mant/978-0-12-815224-9", "http://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0143", "https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/"]]}
{"q_id": "1vr1l8", "title": "Why did Russia give up on seizing Constantinople?", "selftext": "For more than a century, Russo-Turkish relations could be described as \"the Emperor's march on Constantinople.\" Especially in 1878, when Turkish power was so badly broken, why did the Russians refrain from seizing the city? Why didn't the vast significance of New Rome to such a deeply Orthodox nation overrule the foreign policy risks involved? And why was no further attempt made? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vr1l8/why_did_russia_give_up_on_seizing_constantinople/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceuys1d"], "score": [15], "text": ["Because Russia, as one of the Great Powers, was very aware of the importance of maintaining the balance of power in Europe.  Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia were the Great Powers in Europe  in the 19th century, and they operated under with the understanding that no one country should make significant gains on the continent without the rest getting a piece of the pie (see the partitions of Poland for an example of this).  So obviously the conquest of the Ottomans by one power would have been a big no-no in the eyes of the rest.  However, even capturing just the city of Constantinople would have been seen as WAY too aggressive expansionism by the other Great Powers (expansion, of course, was a good thing at the time- but do it in your colonies, not mainland Europe!  Think of the balance) and would have been met with immediate war to beat Russia back into line.  The reason for this is that who controls Constantinople controls the Black Sea, which is incredibly important economically and militarily.  And European Powers tend to get pretty bent out of shape when they're worried about your ability to control the Black Sea. For instance; The Crimean War.\n\nTL;DR  As much as Russia may have wanted to capture Constantinople for its cultural importance, they knew it was too strategically important for the other Great Powers to let them get away with it because it would upset the balance of power in europe.\n\nEDIT: I'm not sure if a source is really necessary since the question demands more a theoretical answer than a factual one, and everything I said about the balance of power and the importance of the black sea would be found in even the most basic survey course over Russia or Europe in general in the 19th century.  However, if you're interested in the the idea of the concert of europe, I'd recommend *Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814-1914* by CJ Bartlett.  It gives a good overview of European diplomacy and statecraft in the time period without dragging on too much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4906gk", "title": "My dad doesn't believe that LBJ whipped out his dong a lot, are there any legitimate sources?", "selftext": "Title says it all,  thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4906gk/my_dad_doesnt_believe_that_lbj_whipped_out_his/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0o1jjv", "d0og6bo"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["In a lengthy biography of LBJ, Robert Caro definitely makes mention of LBJ whipping it out and nicknaming his... Johnson. Caro is a highly regarded writer so he would fall under your need for a legitimate source.", "I answered a [related question awhile back](_URL_0_). Here's a copypasta of the citation from Robert Caro's *Master of the Senate*, part of his multivolume biography of LBJ. \n\n > Even at college, where sexual boastfulness is a staple of campus existence, Lyndon Johnson's boastfulness -- and exhibitionism about his sexual prowess -- had been striking to his fellows. Exhibiting his penis to his roommates, Johnson called it \"Jumbo\"; returning to his room after a date, he would say \"Jumbo had a real workout tonight\" ... If he was urinating in a bathroom of the House Office Building and a colleague came in, Johnson, finishing, would sometimes turn to him with his penis in his hand. Without putting it back in his pants, he would begin a conversation, still holding it, \"and shaking it, as if he was showing off,\" said one man with whom he did this. He asked another man, \"Have you ever seen anything as big as this?\"\n\n > _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l4q0k/why_didnt_lbj_get_sued_for_sexual_harassment/clrta48", "http://books.google.com/books?id=wBE-34_KfcAC&amp;q=penis#v=snippet&amp;q=penis&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2ogiah", "title": "Did the Catholic church really sell indulgences?", "selftext": "In the romance [Les Rois Maudits](_URL_0_) it is said that the Catholic church never sold indulgences. It is said that in a specific region they charged for a kind of 'pious certificate', which assured that the person went to church, confessed and communed. A pope that was from this region wanted to extend this 'service' to the entire Europe, though.\n\nStill, Martin Luther made a pretty big deal on the subject and split from the church for this specific reason. Is there any controversy on this subject?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ogiah/did_the_catholic_church_really_sell_indulgences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmn16jn", "cmn3ted"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["I've never heard that claim to be made previously.  In, *A Brief History of the Crusades*, Geoffrey Hindley claims that in order to avoid taking the cross and going on crusade, a person, having the wealth, was able to make a payment thus absolving himself of this duty.  This exchange he claims would later be an influence on the practice of selling indulgences.", "Maurice Druon\u2019s claim in *Les Rois Maudits* is technically correct. From the technical perspective of canon law (the law of the church) the church couldn\u2019t \u201csell\u201d indulgences since this would constitute the grave spiritual crime of simony, the buying and selling of church offices or graces.  An indulgence was a remittance of punishment for sin *if* the sinner was genuinely contrite for the sin and had previously confessed it to a priest.  Indulgences originally applied to pious acts such as going on crusade, visiting certain pilgrimage sites, performing good works like helping to build a church, repair a bridge or a road, or, especially, offering prayers for pious intentions (and later for souls suffering in purgatory).  Almsgiving was also something to which an indulgence could be attached, but the almsgiving in return for an indulgence was always construed as a *donation* not a purchase price.  The indulgence that Pope Julius II offered initially in 1506 (and later renewed) for pious contributions to the rebuilding of St. Peter\u2019s Basilica was technically not something for sale but something which was received for a donation.  But you can easily see how an ordinary person would have trouble making the distinction that a) it wasn\u2019t for sale and b) it didn\u2019t in itself forgive sins.\n\nLuther\u2019s specific criticism of the church was not aimed at indulgences per se but at the claim of the papacy to be exercising authority to grant indulgences without scriptural warrant.  The focus of his reforming ideas was that faith alone (*sola fide*) was required for salvation, not doing good works to which indulgences might be attached, and that scripture alone (*sola scriptura*) was the only necessary source for salvation, not the decrees of popes or councils, which could err.\n\nSource: Any decent history of the Reformation will cover this, such as Diarmaid MacCulloch\u2019s *The Reformation* (2004), a masterpiece.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Kings"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3ci2mh", "title": "What did Chinese military forces look like in the 17th and 18th centuries (early to mid Qing Dynasty)?", "selftext": "What was the state and nature of Chinese military forces during the 17th and 18th centuries, during the early to middle periods of the Qing Dynasty? \n\nWere Chinese soliders in this period mostly tribal Manchu levies, or were these professionals paid a salary?\n\nHow common were firearms and what kinds of firearms were in use?  How about artillery?  \n\nWere the armies of the period mostly non-Han, or were there large numbers of Han serving under Manchu overlords?  Can a comparison be drawn to the armies of the 30 Year War in Europe, where the \"Swedish\" or \"Austrian\" armies would have a few native commanders and be filled out by massive levies of Germans, Finns, Croats, and Czechs?\n\nI know there's probably too many questions here, but I'm trying to find some decent sources for understanding the Chinese military forces in use during the Qing conquest and the various subsequent frontier wars of the 18th century.  These questions were triggered by watching some modern Chinese \"historical dramas\" on Netflix and being struck by how anachronistic the technology and social systems seemed to my modern eyes.  I'm not sure how much of that is just my unfamiliarity with this period, and how much of it is \"Hollywood History\", Beijing-style.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ci2mh/what_did_chinese_military_forces_look_like_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cswl2lr", "cswvr9b"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["If anyone has good late 19th century Qing I'd also want to know as well. Turn of the century qing equipment is very fascinating to me.", "Qing armies were divided into two categories: bannermen and the Green Standard. The Green Standard armies were Han conscripts and were generally (considered to be) of lower quality than banner forces. They were, however, more numerous than the bannermen, and in the later Qing era acquired more and more significance, in part as a result of the failure of mainline Qing troops to cope with the Taiping Rebellion and European armies during the Opium Wars (as a result of the mid-19th century crises, Han generals were given much more authority over their troops and were able to incorporate Western technologies and training). \n\n\nBanner troops were divided into Manchu, Mongol, and *hanjun* banners. The hanjun are kind of an odd case: they were Chinese who had joined the Qing before the conquest of Beijing in 1644 (either voluntarily or after the conquest of the Northeast in the first half of the 17th c.) and enjoyed more privileges than Green Standard troops, although they began to be gradually dissolved in the mid-18th century. In Qing armies, they served as artillerymen and other specialized formations.\n\n\nMachu and Mongol bannermen (as well as people from smaller northern steppe communities like Solons and Daurs) were the mainstay of the Qing army. Manchus served in garrisons sprinkled all over the empire and received a stipend in silver from the state in exchange for not being allowed (formally) to farm, run businesses, or engage in other civilian activities. In theory, the entire Manchu population of the Qing empire was supposed to be a standing army. Manchus were expected to practice horse-archery as a sign of their devotion to steppe traditions, although by the 18th century this practice had substantially declined. Mongols and other non-Manchu steppe peoples, who were usually conscripted on a campaign basis, were the backbone of the Qing wars of conquest in the 18th century, particularly in the territory which would become Xinjiang; Green Standard troops were more significant in Qianlong's southern campaigns, which were generally not very successful.\n\n\nFirearms were standard equipment, especially in the 18th century, but Qing rifles were matchlocks which were obsolete in comparison to Western equipment of the same era. The same held true for artillery, which was much closer to 16th century European standards than to 18th c. field guns.  Soldiers also carried lances, bows, and swords. Banner troops were generally supposed to fight on horseback, though this was highly dependent on terrain; Green Standard troops were infantry-based.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9nb6ez", "title": "Why aren't the Tulsa race riots of the '20's ever mentioned in American history books?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9nb6ez/why_arent_the_tulsa_race_riots_of_the_20s_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7lsw7l"], "score": [9], "text": ["Hi there! You\u2019ve asked a question along the lines of \u2018why didn\u2019t I learn about X\u2019. We\u2019re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.\n\nFirstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.\n\nSecondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.\n\nInstead of asking \"Why haven't I learned about event ...\", considering asking \"What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?\" - the latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.\n\nThank you!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6xrfcl", "title": "Did the Final Solution significantly harm the Third Reich's ability to prosecute its war effort during WWII?", "selftext": "When I was taking AP World History in high school, my teacher told us that the mere cost of the bullets needed to execute all of the \"undesirables\" was calculated to be ruinously expensive, nearly bankrupting Germany. Moreover, thousands of soldiers, billions of Reichsmarks, and much of the SS's manpower were solely devoted to guarding, rounding up, and hunting Jews and other minorities. Is there any truth to the idea that the Final Solution and Holocaust were a significant waste of resources that harmed the German war effort in WWII?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xrfcl/did_the_final_solution_significantly_harm_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmi939y"], "score": [4], "text": ["In short, no. Under a normal functioning economy, the Final Solution would have absolutely done significant harm to Germany's ability to fight a multi-front world war however, given the \"free\" labor and raw materials Nazi Germany enjoyed, they were able to basically accomplish both. In other words, I have not seen any evidence that suggests Germany lost the war because of their Final Solution efforts. To the contrary, they were efficient in how they \"evacuated\" the Jews and others and even used them to aid the war effort. \n\nThe Nazi's knew exactly who and where the \"undesirables\" were in Germany and each country they invaded. Their system for finding and rounding them up into ghettos became very efficient. For a current reference, it would be similar to serving warrants on fugitives by US Marshals. They know names, addresses, same for close family members, occupation, etc. Plus, many of the conquered countries had anti-Semitic parties/factions that were all to eager to help the Nazi's complete their final solution. So yes, a large undertaking but they had a lot of help and were very efficient. \n\nMost necessary for the Final Solution were getting people from the ghettos to the concentration or death camps. The Nazi's were very smart in that they built the camps in areas with significant rail access from many directions. Once at the death camps, Zyklon B gas was used to murder and than industrial ovens used to destroy the bodies. On the whole, this was their preferred method of \"evacuating\" the undesirables. The USHMM estimates 2.7million Jews were killed in these death camps {1}. In addition, many others were killed by firing squad and buried in mass graves. Generally, these would have taken place on the front lines in an ad hoc manner. Again, the Nazi's were efficient. \n\nFinally, keep in mind while the Nazi's were simultaneously imprisoning and exterminating the Jews and others, German industry used those same people as forced labor in their factories and instead of paying the worker, the SS was paid their wage {2}. In addition, many of the raw materials were mined using forced labor in conquered countries. As almost all industry in Germany turned their production towards aiding the war effort, the Nazi's had plenty of armaments to fight a multi-front war however as they would later find out, they were no match for the U.S.\n\n\n{1} _URL_0_\n\n{2} _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007327", "https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007326"]]}
{"q_id": "aq12gf", "title": "What were Ottoman reactions to the Protestant Reformation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aq12gf/what_were_ottoman_reactions_to_the_protestant/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egdxsa1"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you\n\nInitially, the reformation was considered by the Ottomans to be nothing more than a theological problem. They considered the Reformation a Christian feud, and that the Catholic Christians were more than able to deal with these trivial theological differences, just as they had done earlier with other movements in the past like Jan Hus and Peter Waldo. However, when the movement managed to become a widespread political movement in Europe, the Ottomans took interest in the movement and supported or show sympathy towards the Protestants to prevent unity in Europe, oppose the power of the Habsburgs, and prevent a united crusade.\n\n For example in 1530, An intelligence report sent to S\u00fcleyman by an agent on the Albanian coast reported that Fra Martin Luther, the leader of a new sect opposed to the \"false\" rite of Catholicism, had raised an army of 30,000 men and routed Charles V\u2019s army in a battle at a place in Germany called San Borgo, amongst other things like troop and naval movement, and the general political situation in the Mediterranean. The battle was a fantasy, but the report shows that the Ottomans followed closely the movements and divisions among their contemporaries. This followed with gestures of sympathy towards the Protestants as an attempt to make an alliance or work together against the Habsburgs. S\u00fcleyman was an active player of this, he first made friendly inquiries to Luther and assured him that if they were to meet and establish some sort of alliance Luther would find him a 'gracious ruler'. Later on, S\u00fcleyman made various similar gestures like urging German protestant princes to hold firm and cooperate with the French against Charles V, and assuring that if the Ottoman army entered Europe he would grant the princes amnesty. He also promised help to the rebelling Netherlands and supported Calvinists in Hungary and Transylvania, where it later became the dominant religion to the extent that some Europe began to speak of 'Calvino-turcismus'. Though in this time the most of the Protestants has little desire to ally with the Ottomans, used both rather friendly stance and Ottoman pressure to the Habsburgs to further enforce their demands, like in 1532, where they forced Charles to sign the Peace of Nuremberg, to accept the Treaty of Passau and, finally, to sign the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 in which Protestantism was formally recognized.\n\nAfter S\u00fcleyman's death, this policy was continued by his successors. in a letter to Charles IX in 1572, Selim II proposed an alliance composed of Charles IX, a handful of German princes, and Elizabeth I to oppose Spain:\n\n > Your ambassador has presented us with your request that has reached us with the sincere content in which the lord of Navarre, a Lutheran (Henry of Navarre) and a firm enemy of Spain and the pope; who is nonetheless your sister (Margaret of Valois), was given in marriage to him and is an ally to the English Crown. The queen (Elizabeth of England ) sworn to be an ally to the allies and enemy to the enemies; and even with the German princes being together with the mentioned alliance with their ambassadors who come and go ... It is our decision \\[that you\\], on one side and the German princes on the other, join forces from Qayandus (Kaindorf) with the above-mentioned queen, with the intent to harm and attack this wretched city \n\nThough the alliance never really materialized, it shows the Ottoman intent to ally Protestant countries and oppose the Habsburgs. Later on, in a letter from Murad IV, he expressed theological sympathy to the Protestants in the Netherlands as to why the Protestants should be supported in the context of the Reformation that was well under way at that time. In that letter, the Protestants are viewed as sincere as Muslims in their working for the true faith, and a sincere community with respect to the divine cause and faith in the Oneness of God in contrast to the pope, who is depicted as a figure who lacks faith because of the attribution of divinity to Jesus. The Church thus strayed from the divine path, used idols and images that the Church made. Thus, they possessed the right to be protected whenever they needed security, even with military force, wherever and whenever possible:\n\n > Imperial Dispatch granted to the followers of the Lutheran sect in the lands of Flanders and Spain. Esteemed subjects, the Lords and the Princes of the nation of Christianity committed to the work of Jesus in the lands of Flanders and Spain, may your destiny be Divine favour ... You do not worship idols but reject them, \\[along with\\] the images and the bells of churches. For the Truth is One and you say that Jesus is His prophet and servant that you have faith in this, that you still claim to this Faith willingly through the spirit and by tongue \\[language\\] \\[against\\] the one called Pope, who is deprived of religion, who does not know his Creator but attributes deity to Jesus and worships idols and images made by their own hands, and casts the Oneness of Allah into doubt ...   It is evident that you are taking up the sword and defying the Pope. Our gracious Kingdom, without any regard of expense from the sea and land, will aid you against the cruel Pope who lacks faith, in your \\[struggle for\\] salvation and true conveyance of the True Faith  \n\nThis is probably in accordance to the friendly stance of the Ottomans with the Netherlands, which the former provided aid and assistance during the Dutch revolt ever since the reign of Murad III.\n\n**Bibliography**\n\n*\"The Ottoman Sociopolitical Impact on the West during the European Reformation\"* by Ahmed Akgunduz \n\n*\"An Ottoman Report About Martin Luther and the Emperor\"* by Christine Isom-Verhaaren \n\n\"*The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe\"* by Daniel Goffman\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) on more information about the Ottoman-Dutch relations in the 16th and 17th century"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.armandsag.nl/papers/Masterscriptie.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3vvbmq", "title": "What is the earliest poem/work of fiction known primarily for being bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vvbmq/what_is_the_earliest_poemwork_of_fiction_known/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxrbwjl", "cxrc83g", "cxrcboe", "cxrqqui"], "score": [89, 404, 31, 6], "text": ["Not exactly what you're asking, but it's one of the earliest parodies of an English novel:\n\nIn 1740, Samuel Richardson published *Pamela*, a very popular epistolary novel about a young woman reforming a libertine man into a proper husband. (A rather popular topic at the time, especially as the novel transitioned from a rambling \"fairytale\" as a modern reader might consider it to it's more \"realistic\" basis today and the protagonist were no longer nobility but often lower class--Daniel Defoe was one of the major driving forces of this.)\n\nAnyway, a novel known as *Shamela* (fully titled *An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews*) appeared in 1741. (Everyone believes Henry Fielding wrote it, it matches his style, but it was done under a pen name so there's always the chance it wasn't actually him.) Basically, it takes the entire plot of *Pamela* and points out the absurdities. It's an extremely entertaining read!\n\n(Please forgive any mistakes, I'm on mobile)\n\n", "Silius Italicus wrote an extremely long epic poem on the second punic war and Richard Miles (in his \"Carthage must be Destroyed\") mentions it was not received very well. Pliny, for instance, says Silius Italicus had more eagerness to write than he had genius. \n\nMecenas was a patron of the arts, supporting, amonst others, Horace, Virgil and Propertius. But he also wrote himself and got cited as something completely debased (and subsequently praised ironically) by Seneca in his letters to the governor of Sicily and poet Lucilius. The fact Trimalchio, a liberated Asian slave who's gotten filthy rich, recites his own terrible poetry, in the Satyricon novel by Petronius, may as well have been inspired by Mecenas.", "\"Voltaire's note upon Chapelain's poem of \"La Pucelle,\" etc., concludes as follows :\" In the time of Cardinal Richelieu lived one Chapelain, author of a famous poem, entitled 'La Pucelle,' etc., which consisted, according to the opinion of the celebrated Boileau, of twelve times twelve hundred miserable verses. In stating thus much, Boileau, however, was not aware that this renowned poet composed twelve times twenty-four hundred verses ; but that he had sufficient discretion to expunge the half.\" As a further proof of the estimation in which Chapelain's poem was regarded by the satiric Boileau and his witty associates, it is a known fact, that when the author of the Lutrin inhabited Auteuil in the vicinity of Paris, which house still exists near the church in the wood of Saint Cloud, he took delight in assembling under his roof the eminent geniuses of his age, especially Chapelle, Racine, Moliere, and LaFontaine. When he had these celebrated writers to dine with him, literature was, as might naturally be supposed, the general topic of conversation, and as the \"Pucelle \" usually lay upon the table, whoever happened to be guilty of a grammatical error in speaking was compelled by way of punishment to read a passage from the work in question.\"\" (Voltaire's own poetry once he died became exhibit A of disposable neoclassical glibness: \"the perfection of mediocrity\"). \n\n\"That Skelton's manner is gross and illiberal, was the opinion of his conemporaries; at least of those critics who lived but a few years afterwards, and while his poems yet continued in vogue. Puttenham, the author of the Arte of English Poesie, published in the year 1589, speaking of the species of short metre used in the minstrel-romances, for the convenience of being sung to the harp at feasts, and in Carols and ROUNDS, ' and such other light or lascivious poems which are commonly more commodiously uttered by those buffoons or Vices in playes than by any other person,' and in which the sudden return of the rhyme fatigues the ear, immediately subjoins: 'Such were the rimes of Skelton, being indeed but a rude rayling rimer, and all his doings ridiculous; he used both short distaunces and short measures, pleasing only the popular eare.' And Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasury, published in 1598. \"Skellon applied his wit to scurilities and ridiculous matters: such among the Greekes were called pantomimi, with us buffoons.\"\"\n\n\n\nOutrageously \"romantic\" dramas like Schiller's The Robbers and Hugo's Hernani--subject of riots for its first few performances--are not quite known for being \"bad,\" but rather infamous for being utterly, deliberately even, absurd; they are beyond good and bad, like Touch of Evil or Bad Lieutenant (either version). Both were strongly influenced by the \"irregularity\" of Shakespeare: known in France primarily, until Hugo championed \"the grotesque,\" as a disgusting savage (with Voltaire leading the charge). \n\n\nVarious late Roman poets became bywords for barbarism, but that was centuries later. Retrospective bad reputations is sort of a grey area, as well as just who it is that \"knows\" the work is \"bad\"; chivalric novels--ridiculed in Don Quixote, after their popularity had fallen--are relevent here. These romances (whose roots were in the middle ages) were highly popular but resented by the elite:\n\n\n\n write no jeste ne tale of Robin Hood,\n\nNor sowe no sparkles, ne sede of viciousnes;\n\nWise men love vertue, wilde people wantonnes\n\n", "You might find it interesting that there were a number of poets active in the time of Catullus, some of whom he got along with, and others whom he did not. His [14th poem](_URL_0_) is notable here -- one of his friends, the lawyer and fellow-poet Licinius Calvus has sent him a book of poetry as a Saturnalia gift, which Catullus hates, and so Catullus responds with this poem, in which he accuses his friend of trying to kill him on \"the best of days.\" Eventually he announces that he will get his revenge by going to the bookshops and purchasing \"all the poisons\" and lists these terrible authors by name: \"the Caesiuses, Aquinuses, and Suffenus.\" At the end of the poem, he repeats that the aforementioned are \"the curse of our time, the worst of poets.\" I've always been very amused by that poem, and there are a few others in which Catullus calls out other authors of his day as being particularly vile."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e14.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "fr3h4x", "title": "Did Mahatma Gandhi actually sleep with underage girls?", "selftext": "I've heard the 'fact' that he did 'experiments' where he'd sleep(simple sleeping, not sexual) with women, everyone nude, in the same room, towards the later stages in his life. Now people online and on reddit keep saying that he slept(in both senses) with minors too. However, I've yet to find a reliable source on this 'fact'.\n\nSo, dear historians, is this true or false?\n\nEdit: Turns out he didn't even sleep with naked adults(except his wife), let alone little girls.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fr3h4x/did_mahatma_gandhi_actually_sleep_with_underage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flu6acc"], "score": [2686], "text": ["I have written about this [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nShort answer, not really true and blown of proportion, although there is room for criticism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7i3h4m/is_this_vice_article_about_gandhi_accurate/dqw108s?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x"]]}
{"q_id": "3cjn97", "title": "How do western historians go about untangling the Falun Gong", "selftext": "I know this is pushing up against the 20year limit, but its historiography as much as anything. As a Google historian living in Zhengzhou, I recently heard about the Falun Gong. It was introduced to me by some Americans as a weird religion that did organ harvesting. Our Chinese friend mentioned that it was a cult, which immediately made me realize that it was probably a source of huge propaganda. Ive talked to many chinese, some of whom have been afraid to talk over weixing (possibly irrationally), about it. The accounts vary wildly. Some say they were a cult; some say they were a scam; some that they were a cult that pretended to be a religion and puts out propaganda. No one defends the Falun Gong, not even the progressive Chinese college students who know about tianamen and whatnot. Yet the online propaganda (ie Wikipedia, which is years out of date) paints a harshly negative view on China, as does some US resolutions it seems. \n\nMy question is how a historian would go about unraveling this. I ask this both for a professional historian (ie, do you rely on chinese documents/leaks that may never come or be falsified? Do you interview people who may be biased or \"brainwashed\"?) and for a google historian (what websites do you trust, how do you weigh evidence, etc). What are the problem solving skills I am missing to form an opinion, or is the problem intractable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cjn97/how_do_western_historians_go_about_untangling_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csw4kdt", "csxedpl"], "score": [42, 3], "text": ["This is old enough to not violate the 20 year rule, kinda, but I'll keep this short because it's a problematic question for AskHistorians for other reasons.\n\nFG is based off Qigong which became popular after the communists took power. FG itself didn't really get started until the 1990s. They weren't really on the radar of the Party until they made some pretty large demonstrations to intentionally get the attention of the state. ~~I've heard it analysed as a cynical play by the leaders of FG.~~\n\n(**important clarifying edit:** The previous sentence was an aside, not my thesis. There was an implied \"make of that what you will\" which I thought was obvious but then I guess there's no tone in text so I should have known better that it wouldn't be interpreted how I meant it. The point that I was trying to make with that was that *no part* of this topic is free of conflicting information and incomplete data because we just don't have the records of the actual events from *either side*, either FG or the Central Government. The point that this statement (the one references in the now-stricken sentence) comes up at all in conversations with well-read well-educated otherwise-knowledgable people is an indicator of just how messy the subject is when you're looking at the interaction between two parties that are very opaque dealing in this part of the world. That's all. Sorry it caused so much confusion. Also I'm writing this edit for a second time, because screw you Reddit.)\n\nTheir propaganda is exactly that, propaganda, and not something to be addressed as factual even in cases where it might be correct. \n\n > not even the progressive Chinese college students who know about tianamen and whatnot.\n\n(**edit:** misread that. Thanks /u/crazedmongoose) Oh they know. I can assure you that they most definitely know. They just aren't going to be willing to talk to a foreigner about it, especially someone who's there as a foreign teacher. It's not a safe move on their part, nor would it do you any good. Especially in places like Zhengzhou where the influence from Beijing is going to be stronger.\n\n > It was introduced to me by some Americans as a weird religion that did organ harvesting\n\nWow that's wrong. Even for the unfounded accusations that's wrong. It's the FG people that accuse China of live organ harvesting on FG practitioners.\n\nAnyway, historiography:\n\nAs to how something like this would be analysed, you really only have the records to go on. You can look at the leaders past claims, as people do with Scientology elsewhere, and see how things match up. If you happen to have a quote of one of them saying it's a scam, then there you go. Otherwise you have to look at the various records and rulings surrounding the events, which is going to be impossible at this point if you're not a fluent reader of Mandarin, and you're also not going to have access to the things that would really matter, such as internal communications within the government or within FG.\n\nOtherwise you're just looking at the Qigong movement in the past 70 years, comparing the FG leader's relationship to that, looking at their actions, looking at the state's actions and so on. It's all about comparison of events and connecting the dots.", "I couldn't help joining in. I am a history / world religion major in North America. My wife is From Wuhan China. Your question's starting point is based in the desire to uphold the integrity of truth which is very commendable. I empathize with your plight because, with this issue,  it is very difficult to find unbiased reports, or even know in your heart the truth of what actually happened, so as to base your result.   \n\nI have followed this issue for many years. My investigations started in 1999 so I have at hand referenced reports and news pieces from international media, China experts and human rights groups that were not yet banned in China and were able to investigate the issue for a few years before the Chinese regime's media blockage. In the interest of space I am leaving out all references but they are available if desired:\n\nIt is interesting to note that the independent investigations back then had a different view of the situation where the crackdown on Falun Gong seemed to echo campaigns from history where world dictators targeted mass groups of people resulting in atrocities, rather than the victim group being the one at fault. \n\n According to an April 26, 1999, New York Times report Falun Gong had over 70 \u2013 100 million people practicing it (based on Chinese government records) making it the single most popular approach to health and spirit at any one time in China\u2019s history. Due to its health benefits it brought to the people, Falun Gong reaped the praise of various official bodies, including the Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of Health. \n\nReports suggest that in 1999 the Chinese communist party (CCP), specifically past leader Jiang Zemin started an illegal and violent persecution against Falun Gong because of his political insecurity and Falun Gong\u2019s mass popularity. Falun Gong was a better target than other popular Qigong practices because it was not controlled by the regime where every religion and spiritual practice in China must be governed and controlled by the CCP or it is banned a \u201cheretical organization\u201d and it is persecuted. \n\nAs you have read, for the past 16 years researchers, western media, the United Nation and almost every human right organization has documented terrible atrocities happening to Falun Gong in China including over 65000 being potentially murdered for their organs to fuel a state-sponsored multi-million dollar organ harvesting campaign where state hospitals and the military are involved. \n\nAmnesty International is one of many organizations that has rebutted the labels by the CCP against Falun Gong. in 2000 they stated: \u201cThe government banned Falun Gong on 22 July 1999 and launched a massive propaganda campaign to denounce its practice\u2026 the impartiality of the government's information is questionable. Furthermore, the information published by the government leaves many essential questions unanswered.\u201d\n\nOne of the most powerful weapons used in every genocide campaign in our history from Hitler\u2019s elimination of the Jews in WW2 to the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and central to the persecution of Falun Gong has been propaganda campaigns of enormous proportions. Propaganda, like calling Faun Gong an \u201cevil cult,\u201d  or \"anti-China\" is used to vilify those who practice Falun Gong  The aim is to have everyone think controversial thoughts about Falun Gong so that they will turn their backs on the persecution and allow the attack to continue unabated because they are influenced to believe that \u201cthese Falun Gong people deserve what is happening to them.\u201d \n\nI then found a report about a Senior Chinese Embassy official named  Mr. Chen Yonglin who was stationed at the Chinese Embassy in Australia and defected from the Chinese communist party in 2006. He stated, \u201cThe Chinese Communist Party has always relied on violence, lies, and advocating atheism to maintain its power. They could not understand Falun Gong practitioners\u2019 peaceful efforts to protect their freedom of belief. Now they feel they cannot let international community know about what has been done to Falun Gong in China.\u201d\n\nFrom my investigations it is now very hard to find any independent information as the media blockage campaign is still in full force and the influence of propaganda from both sides have permeated the world. Therefore, I would focus some of my attention on reports from before and just after the persecution started in 1999 where everything was still free to access and not permeated by either side.  \n\nAs historians our mission is to get the facts right so I feel it is important to open our own eyes first. Otherwise we may do an injustice to the issue that will have lasting effects. This is why I admire your question to this list and felt compelled to reply. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8u2tp9", "title": "What was football like in 1300-1400s England?", "selftext": "I never understood how soccer and American football were variations of the same origin sport until I saw how rugby was played, which made me wonder what that original sport was. As near as I can tell gameplay effectively amounted to \"move the ball down the field however you want\" with virtually no rules. So, why was  called football? It seems like people wouod have been carrying and throwing the ball mostly if that was allowed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8u2tp9/what_was_football_like_in_13001400s_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1dat8c"], "score": [3], "text": ["I wrote about the history of football and the English attempts to ban the sport during the medieval period [in an earlier answer, here.](_URL_0_)\n\nAlthough not primarily focused on how the game was played (mainly because there were no generally agreed rules in this period, so it was played quite differently in different places), it may be of some interest to you while you await further replies. \n\nThe bottom line from the point of view of your query, though, is that sources are very scanty indeed for this period and the ones that exist are predominantly legal records that don't usually give a clear picture of what exactly happened on the field of play."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65g26v/football_soccer_was_banned_in_england_in_1363_was/"]]}
{"q_id": "fqwrdo", "title": "Is it true that the Phoenicians might have discovered America before the Vikings and Christopher Columbus?", "selftext": "I just heard that there's a theory that suggests the Phoenicians might have discovered America before the Vikings (The Phoenicians existed in 1500-300 BC). Can this actually be true and what evidence do we have to back it up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fqwrdo/is_it_true_that_the_phoenicians_might_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flvsfln"], "score": [18], "text": ["There are, in fact, many different theories purporting to \"prove\" a Phoenician presence in the Americas. Are we talking about Berry Fell claiming to have found \"Punic\" writing on a stone in Massachusetts? Possible Carthaginian coins in Alabama? Amphorae in a Brazil bay? Or maybe a rock in Brazil with purported Phoenician writing? Without additional specifics as to what you are referring to, I'm not sure I can really give a thorough debunking.\n\nAnd any discussion would be a debunking, because there is not actually any real proof of Trans-Atlantic Phoenician travel. Objects like the Bourne Stone (and various other inscribed rocks) have been shown to be either fakes (Bat Creek Stone, Grave Creek Stone) or misinterpreted Indigenous petroglyphs (Bourne Stone). Of the multitude of ancient coins found in the Americas, many are not actually ancient but modern products, and they never seem to manage to get found in proper archaeological context, as detailed in Epstein (1980) \"[Pre-Columbian Old World Coins in America: An Examination of the Evidence](_URL_0_).\"\n\nEven one of the biggest proponents of Carthaginian coins, geologist Mark Menamin, had to eventually conclude the \"Farley Coins\" which he and other diffusionists put so much stock into were either fakes or modern reproductions of ancient coins. In his book, [*Phoenicians, Fakes, and Barry Fell*](_URL_2_), he concludes that cache of coins \"may no longer be used to support the early crossing hypothesis.\n\nThe amphorae found in Brazil which may have been Phoenician (though most often claimed to be Roman)? This was claimed by a professional treasure hunter who, once he was denied funding, claimed a cover-up, conveniently not mentioning that he already in trouble for clandestine sales of other objects he had previously treasure hunted. Also, [a local businessman stated he put the jars there to artificially age them](_URL_1_), and that style of jar was used, and locally manufactured, [well into the Colonial era](_URL_4_).\n\nAs for the Paraiba Stone which was claimed to have a long Phoenician inscription about a Phoenician king? No one ever actually saw the stone, which mysteriously disappeared after being transcribed, and the transcription itself has been shown to be easily forgeable. \n\nSo could the Phoenicians cross the Atlantic be true? Maybe, anything is possible and there was a modern replica Carthaginian ship that a team sailed around Africa in order to re-create [an ancient voyage which may or may not have happened](_URL_3_) (per /u/mythoplokos). The problem with modern fabrications of ancient ships being used to \"prove\" ancient peoples sailed to the Americas always has the intrinsic problem of explaining *why* ancient mariners would want to sail off into a vast empty ocean with no idea what was on the other side, or even if there was anything out there. We modern people benefit from a well-mapped world that we can literally see pictures of from space. We know the boundaries of our planet and the shape of its geography in a way unfathomable to an ancient person. \n\nWe can envision an Atlantic crossing because we know the Atlantic is crossable and the Americas await us on the other side. Meanwhile an ancient person, even one with a mathematical understanding of the size of the globe, has no such guarantee. Indeed, any ancient person with an understanding of the size of the planet would be more intimidated by sailing westward, not less. The proposal of a trans-Atlantic crossing becomes less appealing and rational if you think of it in terms of sailing into a vast uncharted ocean for months with the baseless hope of finding something along the way to prevent a horrible death of dehydration and starvation before reaching China.  \n\nSo as for evidence to back up the Phoenician claims? None."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp364-fs17/files/2012/08/Epstein-1980-Current-Anthropology.pdf", "https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/25/science/underwater-exploring-is-banned-in-brazil.html", "https://researchgate.net/publication/326540959", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/496u27/how_accepted_is_the_hypothesis_that_phoenician/", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/25615659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "2kdoau", "title": "How would an aspiring conquistador acquire martial skills?", "selftext": "Considering that the conquistadores were often semi-private adventurers with little to no prior military service, where and how would they have learned how to fight?\n\nWhere and how would they have acquired the sword / crossbow / arquebus / martial skills they would need when it came time to fight the outraged native warriors?\n\nHow would, say, a desperate Extremaduran peasant or a Sevillian immigrant come to the New World or to the Philippines have learned how to fight with arms and armour?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kdoau/how_would_an_aspiring_conquistador_acquire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clka4f3", "clkrn82"], "score": [11, 5], "text": ["On the job training. Few if any would have had formal martial training. Some of the wealthier ones might have had some if they could have paid for it, but martial training was the preserve of the nobility and few conquistadors were noble. Those that came from the petty nobility (hidalguia) could have had some training as youths serving as pages or servants (criados).\n\nSome older men might have learned to use weapons during the campaigns of reconquest. Later others might have learned while fighting in European conflicts during the early-mid sixteenth century. Some might have learned while serving in the citizen militias of Iberian cities.\n\nMost men probably bought a sword before going to the Americas, or once there. Swords were controlled sumptuary goods and could only be carried publicly by the nobility in Castile and Aragon. Once in the Americas they might have received some training by more veteran members or simply by wielding the weapons in the field. \n\nThe most useful weapon was the steel sword, it was more durable, lighter, and longer than most similar indigenous weapons and probably was the primary reason Spaniards were able to hold their own in a melee battle and suffer such low rates of injury and death. (See Matthew Restall's *Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*).\n\nAlso, peasants did not become conquistadors. Conquistadors paid their own way, peasants did not have the disposable income for such a venture. Most conquistadors came from the middling classes not the peasantry or the nobility. ", "The difficulty with answering this is that many conquistadors show up in the historical record specifically because of their part in the various conquests throughout the Americas, with their pasts and even their future endeavors basically unrecorded. We do have more biographical information on some men like Cort\u00e9s, Pizarro, and some of their captains, but that is only on account them becoming notable through their actions, rather than any intrinsic factor of their lives. There's an interesting book by Hugh Thomas, *The Who's Who of Conquistadors* which aims to have at least some sort of biography for all the individuals who took part of campaigns of conquest and exploration. Many entries, however, are simply a sentence or two indicating that so-and-so was born in place X and was noted as being a part of campaign Y, with few other details.\n\n/u/historianLA is absolutely right that the men who traveled to \"the Indies\" were largely those who could afford to do so, but had neither the wealth nor the connections to climb the socio-economic ranks of Iberia. Gomara, for instance, describes the Cort\u00e9s family as having \"little wealth, but much honor,\" with long established family roots than nonetheless did not translate into much beyond a \"middle class\" lifestyle. Bernal D\u00edaz del Castillo was the son the *regidor*, a town councilman. These were the kind of men that had both the funds and connections to travel to the Americas, as well as the need and ambition to seek their fortunes in what was basically an unexplored alien world. \n\nAnother commonality in the families of conquistadors is that almost all had fathers who had fought in the service of some captain in some conflict. Many of the most famous conquistadors were born in the generation after the *Reconquista*, but many of their fathers had fought in wars in Spain and/or in Italy. This was true of Pizarro and was true of Cort\u00e9s, as well as Cort\u00e9s' lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, among others. Given the profound impact several centuries of warfare had had on the Iberian pennisula, it is reasonable to expect that these young men were raised with the expectation that they too would participate in conflicts. Cort\u00e9s, for instance, had set off to join the wars in Italy before, well, dicking about in Spain for a year and then heading to the Caribbean. Raudzens ([1995](_URL_1_)) discusses how consistent warfare in Spain and Italy had the effect of leading to a sort of arms race in both military technology and organization, even before the advent of what could be seen as modern professional armies, which resulted in essentially a militarized society. He quotes a few other authors on the subject in this passage which I think is relevant:\n\n >  Nor were soldiers in the early sixteenth century recruited from any special social group. Andre Corvisier agrees there was the old noble military class, but all other classes also served. \u2019Thus in Christian Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least, society was strongly permeated with a military spirit. Equally so was the state. Specifically for Spain, Elena Lourie argues that the Reconquista experience militarized society from top to bottom and made war the preferred option for both national and personal pursuits of gain; \u2019it was this prolonged and complex conditioning which made it almost inevitable that, once America had been discovered, it should be a handful of Castilians who would undertake the conquest of the New World.'\n\nThe fact of the *Reconquista* only a generation before, and on-going constant warfare in the Italian peninsula, meant that men of Cort\u00e9s generation -- who arrived in the Americas without formal training in war -- could also find themselves under the command, or in the company of, older men who had experience fighting in Europe and North Africa, particularly in Spain, Algeria, Morroco, and the almost continuous wars in Italy. Pedrarias D\u00e1vila was already an old man and veteran of campaigns in Spain and Algeria when he took command of Panama from Balboa. Diego Velazquez is thought to have fought in Italy before leading the conquest of Cuba. Nicolas de Ovanda, Governor of Hispaniola and family friend to Cort\u00e9s, was a high ranking member of Spanish military order.\n\nOnce in the Americas, these young and inexperienced men often found themselves involved in lesser conflict before going on to the more marquee expeditions they are known for. Cort\u00e9s took part -- according to his biographer, Gomara -- in the campaign against the Ta\u00ednos led by [Anacaona](_URL_0_). D\u00edaz del Castillo, having arrived in the Americas with the aforementioned Pedrarias D\u00e1vila, most likely took part in the disastrous Cordoba Expedition to the Yucat\u00e1n and claimed to have taken part in subsequent Grijalva Expedition. It's important to recognize that while there are a handful of major campaigns which stand out in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, there was almost always low-level and smaller conflicts going on at the same time. \n\nEssentially, these men came from a background which was already highly militaristic, and more often than not had fathers and other close family members who had taken part in conflicts. They then traveled to the Americas where they worked along side older men who had combat experience, while getting firsthand experience through many smaller excursions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacaona", "http://wih.sagepub.com/content/2/1/87.extract"]]}
{"q_id": "2v2usz", "title": "In the run-up to WW1, was there a real possibility of the British Empire joining with the German Empire and it's allies, instead of the France/Russia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v2usz/in_the_runup_to_ww1_was_there_a_real_possibility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coe37wt", "coe50mf"], "score": [10, 6], "text": ["There was no chance in 1914 that the UK would enter the war as an ally to Germany. The Asquith government was split on the question of whether to enter the war. But if they entered the war there was no question about what side they would support, and that was the French. And these opinions were shared across not just the Cabinet, they were shared across the Liberal party, the Conservative party, and the public at large as well.\n\nThere was simply no interest at all, that I can find, in supporting Germany. Supporting Germany would go against centuries of British policy of not allowing a single power to dominate the continent. And good will toward Germany had been badly eroded by the recent German naval building and subsequent German-British arms race.\n\nIf Germany had stayed out of Belgium, it is likely they could have secured British neutrality. But by invading Belgium, they provided the Hawks what they needed to push the rest of the government and public into the pro-war camp.\n\nRobert Massie's excellent *Dreadnought* covers this final lead up to war quite well.", "From about 1904 on there really wasnt any possibility that GB would find common cause with Germany.\n\nIn particular this was driven primarily by Germany's aggressive naval expansion, which by 1918 was projected to outnumber the RN is building rates were maintained. Each successive \"Naval Law\" was seen in Britain as more proof that Germany wanted to be masters not just land, but sea as well, and German refusal to even consider an arms reduction treaty(until it was too late and Britain was obviously out pacing Germany) was taken as proof of their intentions.\n\nThe worst test of the Entente Cordial came in 1905 with the Moroccan Crisis, but German intentions of stirring up trouble to attempt to separate the new allies were plain to see and the united front they presented served to strength the new partnership.\n\nIt should be noted that the populations of both nations experienced a hardening of feelings as well. In both countries fictional accounts of German invasions were actually quite popular and widely read. And at one point the Kaiser even wrote a private letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty attempting to justify and explain away German expansion. This was seen as wildly inappropriate and an attempt to lull Britain into complacency, it also had the effect of moving King Edward VII out of the limitation camp firmly into the Navalists camp.\n\nThe War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret Macmillan\n\nMassie's Dreadnought, or his general history Castles of Steel are both wonderful\n\nAnd From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow by Marder is the most complete history of the RN and the nation in the lead up to the war I have found, with Volume I covering from 1904-1914."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "62eva0", "title": "Were infantrymen smaller and less muscular in WWII than they are now? If so, why?", "selftext": " I saw a picture of Eugene Sledge and his platoon at Okinawa where most of the guys are shirtless [here](_URL_0_)\n\nSledge was in a mortar platoon, and therefore those men would all be classified as infrantrymen and front-line combatants. While, the men there don't look weak or out of shape, they are definitely smaller than the Soldiers and Marines I personally know, especially the infantrymen.\n\nI know one factor could be that the men in the photo had been in combat for a while, and burning a lot more calories than they were consuming. And Americans in general were just a lot smaller back then.\n\nBut what other factors were there? Did infantry have to carry less? Were weapons and ammunition lighter?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62eva0/were_infantrymen_smaller_and_less_muscular_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfm54yh"], "score": [46], "text": ["During World War II, the average body measurements of the over six million male inductees into the U.S. Army was found to be 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 144 pounds in weight, on average an inch taller and eight pounds heavier than his Great War counterparts. He had a 33-1/4\" chest measurement and a 31\" waist measurement. The clothing sizes most most frequently issued were a 7 to 7-1/2 hat, number 9 gloves, a size 15 shirt with a 33\" sleeve, a 36 regular jacket, a pair of trousers with a 32\" waist and a 32\" leg length, size 11 socks, and size 9-D shoes. He could expect to add an inch to his chest and gain six to nine pounds during training. Army \"A\" rations were quite filling, often 1,000 to 1,500 calories more than many civilians were receiving. The average woman volunteer was found to be 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weigh 128 pounds. The average height and weight for a man in the United States today is 5 feet, 9.3 inches and 195.5 pounds; for a woman, 63.8 inches in height and 166.2 pounds. \n\nDuring World War II, men needed to be between 5 feet and 6 feet 6 inches tall and weigh more than 105 pounds to be accepted into the Army. The Marine Corps was far stricter; the 1940 Marine Corps manual specifies heights of between 5 feet 6 and 6 feet 2 inches tall.\n\nThe World War II-era figures are smack in the middle of the \"normal or healthy weight\" BMI category as specified by the NIH, 18.5-24.9. BMI measures body mass in relation to height, but (controversially) does not take into account the percentage of fat on a person's body in relation to muscle and vice versa. According to BMI alone, 65 to 75 percent of U.S. adults today are overweight or obese.\n\nEra|Sex|Height|Weight|Body Mass Index\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\nWorld War II|Men|68 inches|144 pounds|21.9\nWorld War II|Women|64 inches|128 pounds|22.0\nToday|Men|69.3 inches|195.5 pounds|28.8\nToday|Women|63.8 inches|166.2 pounds|28.5\n\nMost inductees were children of the Great Depression. For example, on October 15, 1943, 31.2 percent of soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale, Colorado, were between 20 and 22, with 21.8 percent being between 18 and 19, and 17 percent being between 23 and 25 years old. Most of these men would have been born between 1918 and 1925, making them between 8 and 15 during the height of the Great Depression in 1933. Outright malnutrition (which could lead to rejection until the problem was corrected) or low weight upon induction was a problem. In Missouri, 300,000 schoolchildren were examined in 1934; 14 percent of them were considered malnourished. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the percentage of children who were 14 percent or more below average weight increased from 7 percent in 1927 to 12.6 percent in 1934. The malnutrition rate in coal mining areas of states such as Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia often exceeded eighty percent.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* *G.I.: The U.S. Infantryman in World War II*, by Robert S. Rush\n\n* *History of the Tenth Light Division (Alpine)*, by Captain Thomas P. Govan (Army Ground Forces Study No. 28, Historical Section Army Ground Forces, 1946) \n\n* [*Tailor to Millions*](_URL_2_), by Harold P. Godwin (Quartermaster Review, May-June 1945)\n\n* [*\"Children with Half-Starved Bodies\" and the Assessment of Malnutrition in the United States, 1890-1950*](_URL_1_), by A.R. Ruis, Ph.D\n\n* [BMI Calculator](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://content.artofmanliness.com/uploads/2015/08/sledge-on-okinawa.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm", "http://www.andrewruis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/RuisChildren_with_Half.pdf", "http://www.qmmuseum.lee.army.mil/WWII/tailor.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "14u7dq", "title": "What have been the deciding factors in selecting a location for new capital cities throughout various eras?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14u7dq/what_have_been_the_deciding_factors_in_selecting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ggciv", "c7gmb8l", "c7hascq"], "score": [4, 6, 2], "text": ["A great case study would be early New France-Canada. At first, the colony was a very fragile affair, so security concerns dominated. The first capital was thus set at Qu\u00e9bec City, also nicknamed the Gibraltar of North America. For those unfamiliar with the site, it is the first really narrow portion of the St-Lawrence valley, bordered with easily fortifyable cliffs on both sides - a gread defensive position. But underlying the defence concerns is access to a key waterway leading into the continent as well as back to Europe. \n\nOnce the colony was well established and expanded, commercial imperatives of the fur trade and expanding agriculture inb the St-Lawrence lowlands grew more pressing and the capital was moved inland to Montr\u00e9al. This site still benefitted from the protection of Qu\u00e9bec City guarding its rear, but was opened to several major commercial routes along the Hudson river, the Ottawa river and the St-Lawrence-great lakes system.\n\nAt a later phase, once the importance of the fur trade diminished, pressure from conflict along the american border brought defensive imperatives back to the forefront of a much expanded colony. So the capital was moved once again, this time to Ottawa, which is both further from the border and closer to the center of gravity of the expanded colony.", "In Australia, the decision about where to put the capital city was purely political.\n\nDuring the negotiations leading up to federation of the Australian colonies, Sydney in the colony of New South Wales was the oldest and most prestigious city, but Melbourne in the colony of Victoria was the richest and most populous city. There was therefore a lot of tension and rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne who each, rightfully, thought of themselves as the pre-eminent colony in Australasia.\n\nThe Premier of New South Wales at the time wasn't in favour of Federation, and put a few conditions on this colony's joining - one of which was making Sydney the capital of the new country of Australia. The other colonies refused this demand outright. They didn't know where the capital was going to be, but they knew it was not going to be at Sydney! (Or at Melbourne, for that matter.)\n\nThere was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing I won't go into here, but the final result was a compromise, which was written into the proposed constitution: the capital city would be in New South Wales, but had to be more than 100 miles from Sydney.\n\nThen, after the Constitution was enacted a couple of years later, the newly constituted Federal Parliament had to set about finding a suitable place for the capital that was within New South Wales, but more than 100 miles from Sydney. That led to a lot of politicking and negotiations and delays, but eventually a place in the Goulburn region was chosen, known as \"Canberra\". \n\nThe Federal Parliament deliberately chose an inland site, because they didn't want to create a new port city which might compete with the existing port cities. In other words, they deliberately made sure it would never be a rich trading city.\n", "In Alaska, there has been almost a perennial debate about moving the state capital from Juneau to either Anchorage or some capital district north of Anchorage.\n\nProponents cite the fact that the capital would then be located closer to the majority of the state's population, not locked away on an island connected to the mainland only by ferry and air.\n\nOpponents cite the state's de facto economic divisions, which give Anchorage/southcentral the state's economic hub, Fairbanks/Interior Alaska the resource extraction opportunities and Juneau/Southeast government and timber. With the collapse of the timber industry due to federal restrictions, government spending has become critically important to the economy of Southeast Alaska, and so each ballot measure to move it has been defeated.\n\nThere's also a strong measure of anti-Anchorage sentiment, which feels that city is the tail that wags the dog.\n\nI've some editorial cartoons from 1962 newspapers that really enlighten this debate, but I don't really have the time to put them on imgur ... I can do that if there's interest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9ifhxv", "title": "How did human species protect themshelves before the ability to make tools?", "selftext": "Humans have naturally no chance against predators. No thick skin, no claws, no spikes, and we are not that fast on short distances. How could humans survive against the wildlife without spears?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ifhxv/how_did_human_species_protect_themshelves_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6jzmfu"], "score": [3], "text": ["Since toolmaking by hominids far predates written history, this question is better asked in r/askanthropology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13yi54", "title": "Learning about Ancient Israel and Early Judaism", "selftext": "I stumbled upon [this](_URL_3_) post while searching for old topics about ancient Israelite history, and I was wondering if there are any good books you scholars might recommend that are readable for the layman and summarize the relevant archaeological research in this area. I've just ordered [The Bible Unearthed](_URL_1_) and I've read [A History of God](_URL_0_) and [Who Wrote the Bible](_URL_2_), and I was curious what you fine ladies and gentlemen thought of those books or any others that might be useful in my quest for knowledge about the origins of my culture.\n\nMy formal education is in the biological sciences, and my humanities education consists of little more than a few general education courses in undergrad and a fundamentalist upbringing where the Bible was regarded as an accurate historical document. I'm most interested in learning what we actually know to be most likely true and how we know it, and I worry that the books I've read so far may not treat religion and religious history fairly as many of them are written by people who were raised in religions that they later rejected.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13yi54/learning_about_ancient_israel_and_early_judaism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c78ceb8", "c78gfsb"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["As a theologian turned historian, I would recommend [Bart Ehrman](_URL_0_).  While he does fall into the category of people who \"lost their faith\" I believe he treats the historical issues with an even hand. ", "The book I think you want is Hershel Shanks's *Ancient Israel*. It's an edited volume, with an expert writing a chapter on each period but covering all the history in a single volume. Very good on archaeology. This is what all the graduate students (both those studying History of Judaism and the MDivs studying for mainline Christian ministry) were assigned. His follow up in the same format *Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism* is highly recommended as well. Don't worry, both will have more than enough info to bake your fundamentalist-raised noodle. On Amazon, the 3rd edition is a pretty penny but the 1999 \"Revised and Expanded\" edition is steal at $2.44.  Also people on Amazon said it was fact overload (for them, in a slightly negative way). I just remember reading ahead in it to procrastinate from my other classes. \n\nIf you want to go a little further, there's Miller's *The Religion of Ancient Israel* is less of a page turner but still very good. This is even more academic than Shanks, if I remember correctly. It's about the actual practice of religion in Ancient Israel. The Friedman book you bought is also top notch and standard. I don't like reading Karen Armstrong at all--I find her treacly. I haven't read the Bible Unearthed one, but I think I read and liked something else of Israel Finkelstein's. \n\nIf you want to read something that's not strict history (it's still non-fiction, but literary criticism), check out Robert Alter's work. *The Art of Biblical Narrative* is a nice break from reading lots of attempts to look at the Bible as history and real it's also narrative and stories and beautiful in and of itself. Friedman can tell you that the near-sacrifice of Isaac and Sarah's death were written in different time periods, but Alter can show you how beautiful that moment is because of the economy of the biblical narrative. Reading his translation of the Hebrew Bible is amazing. Look on Amazon, I bet they'll let you read the first few pages of his translation of Genesis. It's just beautiful. \n\nSide question: was studying biological sciences an FU to your upbringing?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/History-God-000-Year-Judaism-Christianity/dp/0345384563", "http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearthed-Archaeologys-Vision-Ancient/dp/0684869136", "http://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630353", "http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/rxqai/were_jews_ever_really_slaves_in_egypt_or_is/c49i48g"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman"], []]}
{"q_id": "ch7kfp", "title": "How did Ataturk afford his reforms?", "selftext": "I was listening to a podcast about him and learning about his reforms made me wonder how he funded such sweeping reforms. If the Ottoman Empire was in such dissaray after WW1, how were they able to afford the war with Greece and then such massive projects which were more social rather than economic in nature. Was there any particular part of the Ottoman Economy that was very profitable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ch7kfp/how_did_ataturk_afford_his_reforms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eurkcxq", "euxijjq"], "score": [66, 6], "text": ["It might be useful to separate the reforms under Atat\u00fcrk as social and economic reforms. Social reforms include the abolishment of the sultanate in 1922 and of the Caliphate in 1924, the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, the introduction of a law coalescing all education under secular state authority in 1924, the adoption of the Latin-based Turkish alphabet in 1928,  removal of Islam as the official religion in 1928,  the gradual granting of suffrage to women in 1930, 1933 and full suffrage in 1934, the introduction of surnames in 1934, the introduction of laicism into the constitution in 1937... The list could go on. The key is that such reforms radically transformed the social, cultural and political life of Turkey. They did cost money, after all. But why they were not super-projects costing billions by their nature. They were of crucial importance but also, in a sense, were \"budget-friendly\" reforms.\n\nA brief comparison with the Young Turks era preceding the Atat\u00fcrk era may also prove useful. The Young Turks had comparable aspirations to Atat\u00fcrk, albeit in a much less radical tone. Their efforts, however, were hindered by wars. Atat\u00fcrk, who seems to have drawn many lessons from that period, chose to avoid war whenever possible. He firmly believed that centuries of Ottoman warfare did not make life any better for the regular Turk. If his sweeping reforms were to be implemented, a sustained period of peace was necessary. Indeed, this is what happened. In avoiding war and maintaining close relations with key actors in the region (barring the irredentism of Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s), he successfully diverted the country's economic resources as well as its limited manpower to other areas. Hence his dictum: \"*Peace at home, peace in the World.*\"\n\nNow, the previous paragraph might give a sense of how political astuteness of Atat\u00fcrk worked to the benefit of his country. This was the case in economic reforms even to a greater extent. Especially in the 1930s, when opposing political blocs were equally interested in drawing Turkey closer to themselves, Atat\u00fcrk often demanded investment or advantageous loans from them. As a result of such policies, Turkey agreed an 8 Million $ low-interest loan deal with the USSR in 1932, and convinced the British to build a high-tech steel factory in the province of Karab\u00fck in the late 1930s. Furthermore, improved means of communication and transportation (including a much-prided brand-new web of railroads built during the Atat\u00fcrk era), taxation could be more stable. Perhaps one could cite these under the heading of economic reforms, which would also include certain alterations in the taxation system. Some economic reforms strengthened the economy, despite the negative impact of the Great Depression of 1929. Other economic reforms involving a considerable amount of investment were helped by the political astuteness of the Turkish leadership at the time.\n\nHopefully, this provides a useful perspective in answering your questions! I cannot say this provides the whole picture and an economic historian can go into much more detail, but now it should be clear at least 1- Why some reforms were inherently not economically challenging for the country, 2- How could from an Ottoman Empire in \"disarray\" emerged the modern Turkey, 3- How centralization and technological advancements strengthened Atat\u00fcrk's hand, and 4- How Atat\u00fcrk and his companions' views on international relations and conflicts actually helped the country's economy.\n\nEDIT: I should also mention the capitulations. These were a set of arrangements providing near-invulnerability and almost complete independence to European merchants active in the Ottoman Empire. The historiographical debate still goes on but the contemporary opinion was unequivocal: the capitulations were thought to be a leech feasting on the Turkish economy. Accordingly, they were abolished by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This is an important comparison between the Young Turks' era and the Atat\u00fcrk era too. It also provides a context for understanding why Atat\u00fcrk and his companions insisted on building everything they could in Turkey (if possible by the private sector, if not by the state), and hence constructing diverse factories producing steel, sugar, armaments or even garments.", "Realize I\u2019m super late, but I wanted to add on.\n\nJust as a disclaimer: Most of my research focuses on the later Turkish Republic, post-1960. I\u2019m comfortable enough with the early Republican and late Ottoman eras, but my focus might colour my answer; I\u2019m less deeply invested in the literature for this period.\n\nGood question! /u/bugraeffendi has a great answer. I just wanted to address two things and maybe go into some more detail. \n\n1.\tHow did the Turkish Republic afford the economic costs of WWI and the War of Independence?\n2.\tHow did Atat\u00fcrk implement his reforms?\n\nAs /u/bugraeffendi points out, these are separate questions. Most of the reforms were social, and did not demand significant investments. They were pronouncement that *were* difficult to implement, but were *not* burdensome in expense. For a tl;dr:\n\n1.\tIt afforded recovery by reducing the costs it owed as part of the Ottoman legacy (through both fortune and policy) and adopting an \u00e9tatist, high-tariff, export-oriented development policy that aimed to build national industrial capacity. \n2.\tAtat\u00fcrk implemented his reforms by relying on the coercive state institutions inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s party was highly centralized, and used these state institutions to implement reforms despite resistance.\n\nSo, onto these. \n\n >  How did the Turkish Republic afford the economic costs of WWI and the War of Independence?\n\nThe Independence War cost less than you might think it was: Atat\u00fcrk did not need to entirely reinvigorate the military. At the end of WWI, by March 1919, the Ottoman General Staff had discharged almost 338 000 soldiers, leaving only 61, 223 standing, with 256 artillery pieces. *However*, the Empire kept most of its reserves\u2014some 791 000 rifles, 2000 machine guns and 945 artillery pieces\u2014so once the National Movement secured these, it was less concerned about resupply. The military also benefitted a very well trained officer corps. Even after demobilization the army Atat\u00fcrk inherited was highly standardized, had a large *already trained* reserve to draw on, and had a triangular organizational structure that allowed him to mix-and-match veteran and inexperienced battalions, significantly easing (and reducing costs for) mobilization.\n\nOn the economic side of the War of Independence, /u/bugraeffendi mentions the capitulations. These amounted to economic liberalizations, but essentially reduced the Ottoman economy to that of a primary producer. This made it dependent on the European economy, and debts skyrocketed. With the 1873 Vienna Stock Market Crash, credit dried up, causing Europe to intervene and establish the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. This significantly improved tax collection. But, with WWI, the Ottomans stopped paying these debts, yet continued to collect through the OPDA. Once the National Movement emerged, it seized these funds to support the war. Also, in the Lausanne Treaty, Atat\u00fcrk managed to negotiate with the foreign powers so that it only had to pay back about 67% of the Ottoman debt and abolished most of the capitulations of the pre-war era embedded in the Treaty of S\u00e8vres, including the OPDA (some argued Turkey left WWI with fewer debts than any other belligerent). \n\nNow, after the war, the Turkish economy was still in crisis. The economy recovered after the war, but soon collapsed again during the depression (1927-30), which hit Turkey\u2019s economy especially hard. Peasants, workers, and small merchants suffered enormously. This was worsened by the state response. Geared to resolve macroeconomic issues, Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s administration, especially in the post-1930 \u00e9tatist period imposed heavy taxes and tariffs to keep a balanced budget. Still, it gave a capital-strapped Turkey funds to invest in its economy.\n\nAt the 1923 \u0130zmir Economic Congress, Turkey adopted the \u201cNew Turkish Economic School,\u201d a proto-\u00e9tatist, protectionist, export-oriented economic approach. It aimed to increase private capital accumulation, establish a banking system, and foster development.\n\nFunded by high tariffs and taxes, the Turkish state invested heavily in its economy; foreign capital was accepted for some projects, but Atat\u00fcrk wanted to prevent a return to capitulations that gave foreigners more privileges than Turks. This included mass nationalization of foreign assets\u2014bought with additional debt, not seized; there was no Suez Crisis for Turkish railways. Turkey began a massive extension of Turkish railways, which in the pre-war was mostly constrained to Western Turkey; \u0130stanbul, \u0130zmir, Konya, Ankara, Adana. Turkey also invested in State Monopolies, of which the tobacco was the most profitable, and after 1926, the liquor monopoly.\n\nThe early Republic also created a number of banks and loans to provide capital for domestic industries. The most important were *T\u00fcrkiye \u0130\u015f Bankas\u0131* (Business Bank), the *T\u00fcrkiye Sanayi ve Maadin Bankas\u0131* (Industry and Mining Bank) and to a lesser degree, *Ziraat Bankas\u0131* (Agricultural Bank). Together these banks ranked in 10s of million Lira in deposits and almost as much in investments by 1930. This revitalized private enterprise in textiles, ceramics, rice, sugar, and harbours and easing Turkey\u2019s endemic lack of capital. Laws, like the Industrial Encouragement Laws, provided established firms free land and tax exemptions and encouraged mechanization, even if this was slow. Of course, the vast majority of export revenue came from agriculture (the livestock tax amounted to 58.7% of direct taxes in 1929), but these efforts to break away from the Ottoman Empire\u2019s role as a primary producer and build up national industrial capacity were key for the \u201950s boom.\n\nNow, what does all this have to do with Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s reforms? **Not much**. Atat\u00fcrk adopted a tight fiscal and monetary policy, geared entirely to balancing the budget, keeping prices stable, encouraging industry and trade, and setting the stage for Turkey\u2019s \u00e9tatist five-year industrialization plans in the 1930s (significantly supported by Soviet advisors and the loan /u/bugraeffendi mentioned). The economy is worth mentioning for context: money was tight, and aimed at recovery. \n\nBut the main problem the reforms faced was *administrative implementation*. So with that, I\u2019ll answer:\n\n >  How did Atat\u00fcrk implement his reforms?\n\nAs I mentioned above, Atat\u00fcrk implemented his reforms by relying on the coercive state institutions inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, his party\u2019s centralized organization in the single-party era was well-suited to radically expand this state structure and monopolize power.\n\nAtat\u00fcrk faced difficulties in implementing his reforms, not in affording them. As /u/ bugraeffendi noted, most of the reforms were \u201cbudget friendly\u201d. Creating new institutions, like the Directorate for Religious Affairs, the Ministry of Education\u2019s Head Council of Education of Morality, or the Language Committee and later Turkish Language Association, absolutely costs money. But compared to providing capital for economic development, these costs were very small. Still, Turkey managed to run small surpluses through the 1920s, excepting a deficit in 1925 when the agricultural tithe was abolished and replaced by direct taxes. Outside of the mentioned 8 TL loan from the USSR for the five-year plan, it budgeted its expenses to its income.\n\nWhen the Republic was founded and he became President, he deliberately took his rivals by suprise and sought to link them to the Sultan to secure his position; through this, his 1924 abolition of the Caliphate also was a major blow to his rivals. His control of the military, implementation of suppressive laws like the Maintenance of Order Law, and implementation of a single-party system gave Atat\u00fcrk enormous legislative power. He banned the rival parties of people like Rauf Orbay or K\u00e2z\u0131m Karabekir. By 1925, *passing* his reforms was not difficult.\n\nNow, *implementing* them is a different story. The Republican People\u2019s Party (*Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi*\u2014CHP) was a highly centralized party. It benefitted enormously from the late-Ottoman Tanzim\u00e2t-era reforms to the bureaucracy, which provided a capable state infrastructure. Much of this bureaucracy, located as it was in \u0130stanbul, defected to the National Movement after Allied forces occupied the city. Officers and civil servants gathered in Ankara, and the CHP\u2019s centralized organization was well placed to capitalize on this. The suppression of the opposition meant there was no need for Atat\u00fcrk to pursue a popular mobilization; he could simply rely on the coercive institutions he inherited.\n\nThe downside to this centralization was that CHP had a difficult time engaging rural Turkey (read: most of it). When Ankara became the capital, Atat\u00fcrk grouped the Ottoman *kaza* (districts) into provinces and appointed friendly governors. The CHP had a few provincial branches that it controlled through party inspectors. Beyond this, however, the CHP was not particularly interested in opening more than necessary, and its control of provincial branches remained low. Consequently, Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s reforms were mostly restricted to the major cities, and had *far less* penetration in rural Turkey.\n\nI\u2019ll use an example to demonstrate the bigger problem. In November 1925, the Grand National Assembly passed the *\u015eapka \u0130ktisas\u0131 Hakk\u0131nda Kanun*\u2014the \u201cHat Law\u201d that banned fezzes and other traditional headgear in favour of European-style hats. This triggered a series of \u201chat riots\u201d across Turkey. Even in Erzurum\u2014not exactly a rural backwater, but distant enough from the centres of power\u2014a riot forced the government to declare martial law. \n\nThese forms of resistance were a consistent response to Atat\u00fcrk\u2019s secularizing laws. In response, Atat\u00fcrk ensured they were implemented despite this by using the coercive state structures inherited from the Ottoman Empire and expanded during the single-party era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "401www", "title": "What would daily life for people like Socrates and Plato have been like during the Peloponnesian War?", "selftext": "I'm reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, which, despite having a fair amount of bad history, is still enjoyable and suits my purposes. In it, he mentions the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431-404 BC, and how it ended with Athens completely losing after suffering years of defeat. What would life have been like for Plato and Socrates during this time? And how could Socrates, who Russell says frequently refused payment, have gotten by as a near beggar?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/401www/what_would_daily_life_for_people_like_socrates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyr4fv9"], "score": [11], "text": ["The duration of the Peloponnesian War was a hard time to be an Athenian. From the outset, Spartan raids on the Athenian countryside forced people to crowd into the city, where squalid conditions soon led to a catastrophic plague epidemic. Largely deprived of the produce from their own farms, Athenians relied for their food supply on imports brought down a precarious lifeline from the Black Sea. Aware that they were no match for the Peloponnesian army in pitched battle, they were forced to endure the systematic destruction of their farms while constantly worrying over the possible revolt and defection of their subjects across the sea.\n\nDuring the first phase of the war, called the Archidamian War (431-421 BC) after the Spartan king Archidamos, Sokrates served as a hoplite in several campaigns. He took part in the long siege of Potidaia on the Thracian Chersonese - a siege that dragged on through a bitter winter, in which Sokrates impressed and disgusted his comrades by his stoic display of indifference to the freezing cold. Some years later, he took part in the Delion campaign, an abortive attempt to subdue the Boiotians, who were allies of Sparta. The battle of Delion (424 BC) ended in terrible defeat for Athens. Over a thousand Athenian citizens were killed. Sokrates, however, managed to save his own life and that of a young Alkibiades by remaining calm during the retreat and showing any pursuing enemy troops that he would fight them if they tried to have a go at him. Several ancient sources speak admiringly of his bravery during the rout. No doubt the gratitude and attentions of the fabulously wealthy Alkibiades did much to help Sokrates through these hard times. He served again during the campaign that ended in defeat at Amphipolis in 422 BC, though we do not know if he displayed similar heroics there.\n\nThanks to victories elsewhere, the Athenians were still able to make peace on quite favourable terms in 421 BC, and things seemed to be looking up for them. During the period 421-413 BC, life in Athens was basically going on as normal. Those who were not involved in the disastrous Sicilian Expedition (415-413 BC) would have been able to live their life more or less as they were used to. Plato was still a boy around this time; Sokrates no doubt lived off of the generosity of wealthy patrons, though he refused to be paid for his teachings like the sophists he despised.\n\n413 BC, though, is when things got really bad. When Athens began to raid the Peloponnese again, Sparta went back to war. This time, however, instead of invading once a year and burning what they could, the Spartans decided to build a permanent fort at Dekeleia in Athenian territory, and ravage the Athenian countryside all through the year. This effectively meant that local food production was permanently lost and Athens was under siege. At the same time, the Spartans sent a fleet into the Aegean to encourage Athens' many subject states to revolt. This cut off most of Athens' income and threatened the food supply from the Black Sea. Athenian finances were stretched to the breaking point in their attempts to send out a fleet large enough to deal with the Spartan threat.\n\nDuring this desperate time, Athens relied on the cavalry for its home defence; the rich men who could afford to fight on horseback rode out every day to attack Spartan ravagers, prevent slaves from deserting, and generally do what they could to keep the invading force in check. Plato, being a young member of a very wealthy family, may well have served in the cavalry at this time, as Xenophon (another pupil of Sokrates) very likely did.\n\nThe rich men of Athens increasingly felt that they were bearing the brunt of the war effort, both in terms of cost and harship. In 411 BC, they staged an oligarchic coup, and overthrew the democracy. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was soon restored, but the resentment of the rich kept on building through the final years of the war. The cost of the conflict kept on rising even as Athens seemed resurgent from 410-405 BC, winning several major victories and wiping out the entire Spartan fleet three times over.\n\nLasting Athenian confidence is revealed by the fact that they repeatedly challenged the Spartans in their territory to pitched battle on land - a challenge the Spartans twice denied. Sokrates would not have taken part in these actions, though. He had reached the age of 60 around 410 BC, and was no longer liable for military service. In 406 BC, he was chosen by lot to serve as a councillor in the *Boul\u00ea*, the government body in charge of everyday affairs.\n\nThe curtain finally fell for Athens at Aigospotamoi in 405 BC. Attacked by surprise, their entire fleet was destroyed. Their last hope went up in smoke; the grain supply from the Black Sea dried up; overcrowding and squalor increased at Athens as the Spartans tightened the noose and drove any Athenians living overseas back into their home city. Over the winter of 405-404 BC, the city was starved into submission. Plato's wealth would probably have kept him reasonably well fed, but Sokrates may have suffered, like many poorer citizens did. Athens surrendered in 404 BC and was forced to renounce its empire and tear down its walls.\n\nThe war was a demographic disaster for Athens. Scholars estimate that an adult male citizen population of 60,000 in 431 BC had fallen to a mere 25,000 by 403 BC. Due to the enemy presence at Dekeleia, the countryside lay in ruins. With the fall of the empire, state finances had collapsed. Of the once mighty Athenian fleet of over 300 triremes, the Spartans allowed them to keep just 12.\n\nTo add insult to injury, the Spartans abolished the democracy and put in place a narrow oligarchy known as the Thirty - or more ominously, the Thirty Tyrants. This puppet regime proceeded to unleash a reign of terror on what remained of Athens. Up to 1500 citizens are said to have \"disappeared\", their property confiscated to increase the holdings of the wealthy Thirty. Hundreds more were exiled. This dreadful regime was propped up by none other than the dissatisfied cavalry - the rich men who wanted power in return for shouldering the burdens of the war. Both Xenophon and Plato may have been involved in this. Luckily for them, once the democratic insurgency of Thrasyboulos gained momentum and the democracy was restored, Thrasyboulos ordered all past crimes to be forgotten, in a universally admired attempt to restore harmony to a war-torn, traumatised population.\n\nStill, forgetting is more easily said than done. Part of the reason for Sokrates' trial and execution four years later was that he had long been critical of the democracy. Such dissenting views could no longer be tolerated in such a prominent figure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8647tg", "title": "In Band of Brothers, Donald Malarkey asks a German POW where he is from. He is surprised to hear Eugene, Oregon and the POW explains his family \"answered the call\" for all true Aryans to return to Germany. How common was it for German/Austrian-Americans to leave the USA and return to Germany?", "selftext": "Was the call explicitly for the war effort? How far in advance of the United States joining the war were people returning to Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8647tg/in_band_of_brothers_donald_malarkey_asks_a_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw28irw", "dw28wqq", "dw2nwv9", "dw3gpcm"], "score": [108, 571, 88, 4], "text": [" < sets up lawn chair; good question! > \n\nFollow up question: there are stories about numerous German POWs who were interned in camps in western Canada (I'm sure in the US too) who were leant out to farmers as general labourers to... well, replace the young men who went off to fight in Europe. There was little risk of escaping (2,000 miles from nowhere, speaking very poor English) and they were eventually accepted as part of the community such that after the war, and being repatriated to Germany, they rounded up their families and immigrated to Canada, the US. \n\nFor those American (or Canadian) Aryans who answered the call, I'd imagine the reception might be different. Any stories of such and how they were received (or not) returning from their war internment? Would they have been returned to Germany first, or could they just leave and go home to Eugene Oregon?", "Here is a great response from a similar question a few years ago by u/coinsinmyrocket\n\n_URL_0_", "I can unfortunately not add further information about the subject matter to u/coinsinmyrocket's excellent answer [here](_URL_0_) but I can add a couple of why this is so hard to find out and to some of the details of the presentation in BoB.\n\nFirst on the difficulty of finding reliable source on any sort of number: We usually are aware of numbers and individuals of foreign volunteers in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS through information either supplied by these organizations themselves or via post-war trials in former occupied countries, which supply us with individual stories of people who went as volunteers.  Recruitment in non-occupied and non-neutral countries was obviously illegal (I'll return to this point later) and thus we can say that most likely only a very small number of Americans joined the Wehrmacht or SS. Something that is further corroborated by the lack of many post-war trials in these countries. coinsinmyrocket mentions one concerning an American but as current scholarship stands that seems to be it.\n\nThis however also means that unlike in occupied countries, Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS files give very little detail on any sort of recruitment effort in GB and the US since, effectively, there wasn't one. Unlike, say, in Albania or the Netherlands or the Soviet Union where there were whole units of foreign volunteers and concerted recruitment drives, individuals from the US would not really show up in the documents of the leadership of these organizations. There are no seperate files on them like there are on the Skanderbeg Division or the Arab Free Legion, which were created with propaganda and recruitment effort in mind.\n\nThis lack of files leaves with but one possibility to ascertain the birth place if not nationality of members of the German Armed Forces \u2013 the [Deutsche Dienststelle Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle (WASt)](_URL_1_). Originally founded as an office to document the Wehrmacht's war losses in 1939 since 1945 it has grown to the foremost organization collecting Wehrmacht service records. In short, if you want to know about your relatives that served in the Wehrmacht, you write to WASt and they can and will supply you with at least the most basic information of their service record: Name, DoB, Place of Birth, Unit, Posting, Places served and if applicable, place of death and PoW time.\n\nNow, you are thinking, this is easy, just request all the files of people born in the US. That seems like a good idea but it isn't possible. WASt is not an archive in the refulag sense, rather it is an agency with the specific purpose of supplying family members with information. That means in order to obtain information from WASt you have to have a name because they can not sort the data they have by place of birth. That is not their purpose, they don't exist for research, they exist as an information agency. So, in order to obtain the number and names of those Americans who served the Germans, it would be necessary to convince them to wave their rather strict privacy restriction and go through all their files identifying American-born Wehrmacht members. With 18 million Wehrmacht soldiers and most likely not more than 50 or so Americans serving in the Wehrmacht this is a task that would likely take you years of research.\n\nAnother detail from the aforementioned scene in BoB is that the soldier in the show spoke of \"answering the call\" for Volksdeutsche to join the Wehrmacht. This is most likely a throwaway reference but it points to another problem: Who would recruit Volksdeutsche in the US through propaganda and effort. The Nazi party had an ally in the US that served as their arm in the US, the German American Bund. Its first iteration already ended before the start of the war. Their leader Fritz Julius Kuhn was sentenced in 1939 to five years in prison for embezzlement and the Bund was in shambles. Later Bund leaders would not prove as effective as Kuhn had been.\n\nThe Bund did run draft evasion campaigns and was under intense legal scrutiny for it, specifically some of their leaders were prosecuted and Kuhn's successor had to flee to Mexico to avoid imprisonment. From their records, which are kept at NARA (RG 131) no propaganda material that called for Volksdetusche to go to Germany can be ascertained. So whatever call the POW from BoB answered, it was not an institutionalized one in the US.", "Follow up: The part of my family that originally came over from Germany said they dropped customs, language, etc during WWI.\nIf many German-American families had assimilated a generation previously, how prevalent was German-American specifically as a cultural identity in the 1940s? Were there still large blocks who hadn't yet assinilated, or were many of these newer immigrants?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21l5v8/how_many_us_citizens_of_german_descent_fought_for/cgeglvm/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21l5v8/how_many_us_citizens_of_german_descent_fought_for/cgeglvm/", "https://www.dd-wast.de/en/home.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "1bwakz", "title": "What evidence (if any) exists of cultural exchange between Ancient Rome and Southern India?", "selftext": "I believe that previous threads have mentioned that there was trading in spices along the southeastern coast of the subcontinent, but I am curious as to how significant this was, and whether it resulted in any other non-economic activity. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bwakz/what_evidence_if_any_exists_of_cultural_exchange/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9avx2p"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's difficult to tease out many precise details in Indian history because the quality of the written records is not spectacular. The most solid evidence of cultural exchange of which I am aware is the arrival of Christianity in Kerala in the 1st C. CE (according to Church history, an apostle arrived as early as 52 CE).  There are still Syriac Christians in Kerala today.\n\nAccording to Strabo it was a busy trade route.  It's hard to judge the flow of goods either relative to the whole Roman economy, or to other trade routes. The major trade item was black pepper.\n\nThis isn't exactly what you were asking, but the most spectacular evidence of Mediterranean-Indian cultural exchange came earlier, through the overland trade routes.  For a long time historians of art were confident that Greek sculptural styles reached India through the Greco-Buddhist kingdoms of the 3rd C. BCE; since that consensus, though, we've had several decades of post-colonial studies, so I don't know if that position is still in vogue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nozb8", "title": "How were the European nations able to thrive after the Middle-Ages, as opposed to nations in other continents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nozb8/how_were_the_european_nations_able_to_thrive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvpyy0l"], "score": [7], "text": ["Well, first there's the fact that \"the Middle Ages\" is an ill-applied term in other continents. And in China, for example, the High Qing period of the 18th century is generally considered a golden age, an era when China reached unprecedented territorial extent and a period when great works of literature and art were made. The celebrated splendor of the Mughals in India comes well after 1500, the Ottoman Empire continued to expand and thrive to the point of besieging Vienna in the late 17th century, and new players like Asante entered the complex game of politics in West Africa. \n\nCould you clarify what makes you think this is the case?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1u24r3", "title": "The Supernova of AD 675? (x-post from /r/askscience)", "selftext": "I was reading through the Chronicle of Theophanes (a Byzantine history chronicling the years AD 284 - AD 813) and I found a curious line for the year AD 675 (Byzantine World Year 6167).\n\n\"In this year, a sign was seen in the sky on the sabbath day.\"\n\nDo we have any corresponding descriptions from other cultures of this event AND do we have any planetary nebulae/supernova remnants that might be linked to this event? What comes to mind is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's \"red crucifix\" description for the year AD 774-775, but, of course, that was a hundred years later.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u24r3/the_supernova_of_ad_675_xpost_from_raskscience/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedstsv"], "score": [7], "text": ["This is almost certainly not a supernova, as supernovas take a long time to fade (on the order of weeks to months) and would certainly have been reported from other parts of the world too. However, there are other alternatives: eclipses, comets, and interesting conjunctions.\n\nI haven't turned up any evidence for particularly bright comets that year (for reference, it wasn't Halley), though someone else might; and it wasn't a solar eclipse, as [the solar eclipses that year](_URL_4_) were on the wrong side of the planet.\n\nThe best candidate I can find, [from this catalogue,](_URL_1_) is a partial lunar eclipse that took place on Saturday 17 March 675, reaching umbral magnitude 0.5126 (i.e. the earth's umbra blocked out a bit more than half of the moon), with umbral duration 144.8 minutes, and reaching greatest magnitude at 07:51 UTC. [In this map,](_URL_3_) the white area shows where the eclipse would have been visible; the completely dark area shows where it wasn't visible at all. Constantinople is right on the edge of the dark area, as you'll notice, so I'm not totally comfortable with this identification.\n\n(We can rule out the lunar eclipse on 9 September, as that took place on a Sunday evening at 23.21 UTC; also it was a very slight eclipse -- umbral magnitude only 0.1203.)\n\nThe other type of candidate, a conjunction, seems more doubtful to me as conjunctions are happening all the time. But for what it's worth, here are the relevant possibilities, [extracted from this catalogue](_URL_2_):\n\n >  Venus and Jupiter  \nJD 1967781.600910 = CE  675 June 30 02:25:18.6 UT  Saturday\n\n >  Mercury and Jupiter  \nJD 1967851.328450 = CE  675 September 07 19:52:58.1 UT  Friday\n\n(I give the one on Friday evening in case your source presumes that the Saturday begins at sundown. Obviously we ignore conjunctions involving Uranus and Neptune. [This converter](_URL_0_) is useful for getting from the astronomical notation given to a calendar date.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php", "http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEcat5/LE0601-0700.html", "http://astroclub.tau.ac.il/ephem/PlanetsConj/index.php?Year=675", "http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/5MCLEmap/0601-0700/LE0675-03-17P.gif", "http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE0601-0700.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1yda8i", "title": "How fluent were Reformation era monarchs in languages other than their own?", "selftext": "For example, could Henry VIII speak Spanish or would he have needed a translator?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yda8i/how_fluent_were_reformation_era_monarchs_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfk55l6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Henry VIII spoke English, French, Italian and knew Latin and some Spanish. It was the same with Francis I. \n\nCharles V Holy Roman Emperor spoke German, French, and Flemish, later adding an acceptable level of Spanish.\n\nI think that Elizabeth I spoke French, Flemish, Italian and Spanish. By the time William Grindal became her tutor in 1544, Elizabeth could write English, Latin, and Italian. Under Grindal, she also progressed in French and Greek."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8vt4ik", "title": "From what I understand, what is now part of Ethiopia had an ancient Hebrew-speaking population (the Kingdom of Semien) and now contains some of the oldest populations of both Christians and Muslims. Why was this region seemingly so hospitable for followers of Abrahamic religions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8vt4ik/from_what_i_understand_what_is_now_part_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e22z1xm"], "score": [25], "text": ["Edit: this post was apparently too long to post as one, so I broke it in two and posted the second part as a reply to the first.  I probably could edit it for size, but since I already spent the time writing it, hopefully I'll be forgiven for not revising it so extensively as to cut it in half.\n\nArchaeology PhD here with a regional focus on Ethiopian archaeology. I'll try to weigh in on your question, though it's not a question I generally regard directly in my research, so forgive me for treading lightly on some aspects of your question and not having a full list of citations at hand.\n\nTL;DR: Ethiopia has long been at the center or key periphery to trade and geopolitics in the world, particularly during the spread of Christianity and Islam out of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Like neighboring Sudan, all three major Abrahamic faiths have had some presence there. However, the phrasing of your question makes it sound like you are asking why do they all get along? In fact, though for larger stretches of Ethiopian history, the three religions have not been personally antagonistic to one another, economic and political interests often used religion as a cover to persecute one another.\n\nFirst off, you have to realize that Ethiopia was effectively at an important cross-road of civilizations during Classical Antiquity and the early Medieval Period, particularly in geographical relation to the Abrahamic faiths. Ethiopia was a major player in Red Sea trade before and especially during the Aksumite Period (c. 0 - 700 AD). In archaeology, we have found everything from Roman wine amphora in Aksumite tombs to Aksumite coins in India. The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a first century AD itinerary of coastal trade communities around the Red Sea Indian Ocean even mentioned Aksum's port city of Adulis and the goods it imported and exported. With the spread of Islam, global trade networks shift and much of the Horn comes under the control of Muslim states, but Ethiopia remained an important source of materials nonetheless. For what it's worth, many traditional Ethiopian populations (i.e. Ethiopians off the ancient state) also spoke Semitic languages (e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya), related to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic.\n\nTo your question more directly, I would be careful how you phrase it. The Judaism, Christianity, and Islam where often at odds in Ethiopian history, though as often as not this antagonism was about economics and political power as much if not more than it was about religion.\n\nChristianity formally arrives in Ethiopia in the 4th century when two young Christians supposedly wreck on the shores of modern Eritrea and are taken as captives/slaves to the Aksumite court. The youths become companions to the royal heir Ezana, then in his youth. The three grow up together, Ezana converts to Christianity following the proselytizing of  his companions, and he asks one of them, Frumentius, to go to Alexandria, head of the Coptic Church, to ask for a bishop so that priests can be trained and appointed in Ethiopia and other Christians and converts can be ministered to. Frumentius is lauded by the Alexandrian patriarch for his work and is made the first Metropolitan (bishop, basically) of Aksum. We know Ezana actually converted by two means. First, though I've never really pursued the original documents, is that the Alexandrian patriarchy supposedly has independent records of this appointment. More tangibly, though, Ezana, like many Aksumite kings, minted his own coins to the same standard as the (Eastern) Roman Empire. His earlier coins contain pagan iconography, while his later coins feature a cross and a Ge'ez inscription that basically translates as \"by this sign you will conquer\" in a clear imitation of Constantine's conversion story. A lot of evidence indicates this conversion was probably socially top-down and for economic purposes unlike the Roman Empire. Ezana's coinage, again, was meant to be fungible with Roman coinage to facilitate international trade. Likewise, a stele erected by Ezana found at Aksum contains a Greek inscription and a Ge'ez inscription. Both are largely the same, except for some clever word use that linguists (Tamrat 1972 - Church and State in Ethiopia is always a good source for this basic scholarship) have pointed out: The Ge'ez makes use of a rather banal and generic address for the God of Ezana that was used rather imprecisely by his pagan predecessors for the patron deity of the king; the Greek translation, on the other hand, uses explicitly Christian language that any Eastern Mediterranean Christian would have noticed. This suggests that while there may have been Christians in Ethiopia prior to Ezana's conversion, the conversion was largely an economic move to identify more closely with the Mediterranean world, Ethiopia's prime market region. Cynicism aside, Christianity flourishes.\n\nThe by 14th century, a manuscript circulates called the \"Kebre Negast\" or \"Glory of the Kings.\" The manuscript describes itself as a Coptic document translated from Arabic into Ge'ez, but I think most scholars believe it is really a conflation of disparate writings, myths, and oral histories compiled together. The story it tells is rather interesting, but to keep it brief, it basically says that an early Aksumite queen heard of the glories of King Solomon, visited him, had a child by him, and the Covenant of God was passed on to that son, who returned to Solomon's court and eventually returned to Ethiopia with the symbol of God's covenant, the Ark. The story thus establishes a biblical tie between Ethiopia and Jews/Christians and, not coincidentally, provides a foundation story legitimizing the newly emergent \"Solomonic\" Dynasty that came to power by overthrowing the previous dynasty claiming that they, not the Zagwe kings, where the true inheritors of the throne of Aksum and thus the divine bloodline traced back to King Solomon.\n\nIslam in Ethiopia has an interesting history as well. According to both Muslim hadith and Ethiopian tradition, the first followers of Muhammad faced persecution in Mecca and were forced to flee. The Ethiopian king at the time supposedly learned of the persecution of people believing in the Abrahamic god across the Red Sea and offered Muhammad's followers sanctuary in Ethiopia until Muhammad was finally able to subdue his persecutors. By the 8th century, Islam spread rapidly across North and East Africa. This spread was not always by adoption and Ethiopia eventually lost control of its coastal territories in modern Eritrea to independent Islamic states. Ethiopia thus went from a primary trading state to a peripheral state that engaged in international trade largely through intermediation by its Muslim neighbors. A number of Islamic states and cities ringed Ethiopia to the north, east and southwest and Muslim caravans became a vital means of international trade for the king and state.\n\nBy the 15th century, however, relations between Ethiopia and the states to its southeast like Ifat and Adal, became heated. The Christian and Muslim states regularly raided one another, and some Ethiopian kings demanded their citizens make visible shows of faith by bearing crosses at all times, even going so far as to have them tattooed on their heads or hands (a tradition taht persists today). I want to say it was Zara Yeqob or Amda Seyon ordered this according to their chronicle, but I can't remember. Though often expressed under the guise of religious animosity, it's pretty clear the goals of much of this conflict were at their heart economic. Ethiopia wanted direct access to the sea again (which they would eventually do by reclaiming Eritrea as a semi-autonomous state) while neighboring Muslim states did not want to go through Ethiopia as an intermediary to access its resources of gold, ivory, animal skins, etc... Conflict between Ifat/Adal and Ethiopia is a perennial problem in royal chronicles until the rise of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (\"Gran\": The Left Handed). Ahmad was basically a rabble rouser who managed to become an imam and usurp the power of the Adal sultinate, claiming it for himself and conquering his neighbors. Under the guise of a jihad he then goes on a campaign of conquest in Ethiopia, very nearly succeeding. The contemporary account, the Futuh Al-Habash records his exploits and the focus on looting treasure is notable. Gran nearly succeeds in conquering Ethiopia, offing a number of kings and very nearly taking the spiritual capital of Aksum when well-armed Portuguese explorers and Jesuit missionaries just happen to arrive and save the day. Gran is killed, Adal largely slides into irrelevance to Ethiopia, and Ethiopian attention turns toward the newly arrived Catholic missionaries. Relations between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia at this point largely return to normalcy with little recorded animosity or inter-state conflict after this, again, probably because the issue was always one more of economic interests than religious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1avlop", "title": "What was a Mesoamerican merchant's life like?", "selftext": "How did they live? Where did they get their goods from? Did they travel a lot?\n\nEDIT: Thanks for the answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1avlop/what_was_a_mesoamerican_merchants_life_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c915lyp"], "score": [16], "text": ["From *Everyday Life of the Aztecs* by Warwick Bray:\n\n >  The traveling merchants, or *pochteca*, formed a separate class within Mexican society and are not to be confused with the pedlars and petty traders who sold their wares in the market places of the Valley. The *pochteca* engaged in foreign trade. They were organized into powerful guilds with their own privileges, and by the time of the Conquest there were corporations of *pochteca* in more than a dozen highland cities.\n\n >  The merchants lived together in their own quarters of the city (there were seven such districts in Tlatelolco, including on called Pochtlan) and kept very much to themselves. They married within their profession, and only the sons of merchants were allowed to become *pochteca*.  They had their own courts which were outside the state system and dealt with both civil and commercial offences among the trading community. Their judges pronounced and executed all sentences including the death penalty for serious crimes. The merchants also had their own god (Yacatecuhtli, the Lord Who Guides), and at the great festival of Huitzilopochtli, which was held in the 15th month, the traders were privileged to sacrificed slaves immediately after the warriors had offered their captives.\n\n >  In Tenochtitlan the guild was ruled by a small group of three (or perhaps five) experienced merchants who had grown too old to make long and dangerous journeys. They served as advisers and administrators, representing the corporation in its dealings with the ruler, regulating market prices, and presiding over the ceremonies which accompanied the departure and arrival of caravans.\n\n >  Since a trading mission represented a vast capital outlay and might spend years away from home, nothing was left to chance. Departure was timed to coincide with a lucky date, if possible the day of 1 Serpent which was particularly fortunate for merchants. On the day before setting out, both the *pochteca* and those relatives who were left behind washed their heads and cut their hair--a thing they would not do again until the travellers returned safely. On the eve of departure offerings were made to the gods, and the corporation gave a feast for those about to set off. The senior merchants reminded the travellers of their duties to each other and to the gods, and warned them about the trials of the journey--the rough roads, deserts, swollen rivers, fatigue, unseasoned food, stale tortillas, soggy maize, and foul water. The farewell speeches did not attempt to gloss over the risks: 'We know not whether thy mothers and fathers lose thee forever. Perhaps thou goest for good; perhaps thou goest to be lost... Yet know and carry in thy heart that thou goest fortified by the tears and compassion of they fathers and mothers' (Sahagun).\n\n >  Meanwhile everything had been prepared for the journey. Porters were engaged, and the merchandise and rations were assembled at the house of the caravan leader. Trading was organized on a corporate basis, and the caravan took goods contributed by non-travelling members of the guild and even by women traders. The ruler himself was not above making an investment, and Ahuitzotl's stake in one expedition amounted to 1,600 large capes and other rich clothes. In their packs the *pochteca* carried raw materials from the highlands and all sorts of manufactured goods: gold ornaments, lip-plugs of rock crystal and tin, rabbit fur, medicinal herbs, sewing needles, conchineal alum, razors made of obsidian blades with leather handles, clothing and pottery.\n\n >  All these were loaded into canoes, which slipped unobtrusively out of the city by night. Farewells were kept short: 'None entered the women's quarters, neither did any turn back or look to one side. If perchance he had gone forgetting something, he might no more come to take it, nor might they still go to offer it to him' (Sahagun). On the march the long line of porters was accompanied by experienced merchants and by apprentice youths making the trip for the first time. An armed escort was in attendance to keep off robbers and, where necessary, to force trade upon unwilling partners.\n\n >  A Mexican trading mission was equipped like a small army, and on occasion behaved like on. If a foreign tribe refused to trade this was regarded as an unfriendly act which could lead to war, and history shows that trade was often the prelude to conquest. The merchants acted as spies, assessing the wealth of the land and looking out for military weakness which could be exploited later. Often the *pochteca* deliberately provoked the local population in the hope of starting a war, and in the time of Ahuitzotl a group of Mexican traders had to withstand a four-year siege in the city of Quauhtenanco on the Pacific coast. When eventually the ruler sent an army to relieve the *pochteca* he learned that the merchants had fought their way out of the town and had conquered the surrounding district by their own effort.\n\n >  Aztec merchants sometimes visited the country of the Mixtecs and the Totonacs, but the most important trade route led to the Hot Lands further south. The caravans from the highland cities made for Tochtepec, and entrepot town where all the corporations owned store-rooms and rest-houses for their members. The wealth of the province of Tochtepec, which contained 22 towns, can be guaged from the list of tribute which it paid to Tenochtitlan. Every 80 days the province contributed 2,800 items of clothing, and once a year it sent the following commodities:\n\n* 40 lip-plugs of gold and semi-precious stones\n* 80 handfuls of quetzal plumes\n* 7 strings of jade\n* 3 large pieces of jade\n* 100 jars of liquidamber resin\n* 200 loads of cocoa beans\n* 2 necklaces of gold beads\n* 4 bunches of quetzal feathers bound in gold\n* 24,000 bunches of mixed red, green, and blue feathers\n* 16,000 balls of rubber\n* 1 rich warrior's costume\n* 1 feather shield\n* 1 gold shield\n* 1 feather head-dress\n* 1 gold diadem\n* 1 gold head-band\n\n >  From Tochtepec the merchants visited friendly cities, while certain brave traders, and 'diguised merchants' who spoke foreign languages and could pass for natives, slipped into hostile territory to spy out the land.\n\n >  East of Tochtepec, trade was the monopoly of the *pochteca* of Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Quauhtitlan and Uitzilopochco. One major route led to the Pacific coast and the provinces of Ayotlan and Xoconochco. The other route lead northwards to Xicalango, a trading port to the territory of the Chontal Maya who controlled the sea trade round the coasts of Yucatan and whose canoes brought jade, tropical plumage, and jaguar skins from the Maya hinterland, as well as coral and sea shells from the coast. Nahuatl was the *lingua franca* of the traders and at the time of the Conquest was still spoken in Xicalango, even through Maya was the native language of the countryside.\n\n >  Not everyone survived the journey. If a merchant died far from home, his companions bound his body to a carrying-frame and dressed it in ornaments and a paper stole. The face of the corpse was painted (black around the hollow of the eyes, red on the lips) and the body was painted with white stripes. The dead man was carried to a mountain top where the corpse, still on its frame, was propped up and left. When the caravan returned home the family of the dead merchant made an effigy which was cremated as if it had been the actual body.\n\n >  For their homecoming the traders tried to choose a favourable day such as the 1 or 7 House, and entered the city secretly at night, with their goods hidden in a covered boat so that no-one could see their riches. The merchandise was not taken to the house of the trader himself but left with a friend or relative, and by dawn everything was stowed away out of sight.\n\n >  Secrecy and evasiveness were characteristics of merchant life. As a class the *pochteca* were wealthy, privileged, and politically important, but nothing of this was allowed to show on the surface. Except on feast days they wore simple capes of maguey fibre, with no insignia to rouse the envy of the warriors and officials, and if one were to meet a merchant on the road he would deny all ownership of his goods, saying that he was transporting them on behalf of another member of the guild.\n\n >  The *pochteca* had power, but in a society which valued public service above private gain they tried not to draw attention to themselves. As Sahagun's informants put it, 'They were very moderate; they did not exalt themselves. They greatly feared notoriety, the praise with which one is praised.' "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "71iomf", "title": "Are there any biographies out there on the life of Harald Hardrada?", "selftext": "Hiya! I'm just curious about whether or not any biographies exist that cover the life of, 'The last great Viking' Harald Hardrada. I've tried searching on my own, but I'll admit that I'm not the best at looking for academic sources. Any help would be greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71iomf/are_there_any_biographies_out_there_on_the_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnb3l8v"], "score": [8], "text": ["I can't find any books that focus exclusively on Harald Sigurdsson (aka \"Hardrada\"), no, but there are a few sources that will get you started in the right direction. These are the English references Claus Krag includes in his (relatively short) bio of him in the ODNB.\n\n* E.A. Freeman, *The history of the Norman conquest of England*, vol. 3 (book, over a century old, but not useless)\n* F.M. Stenton, *Anglo-Saxon England* (book)\n* S. Bl\u00f6ndal, \"The last exploits of Harald Sigurdsson in Greek service,\" in *Classica et Mediaevalia*, 2 (1939) (journal article)\n\nAlso possibly useful:\n\n* Oleksandr M. Fylypchuk, \"Harald Sigurdsson and the Russo-Byzantine War of 1043\" in *Slovene* (2014) (journal article)\n\nGood luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26vat9", "title": "I recently heard that the word \"Hello\" was invited as a telephone greeting and didn't exist until the 1890s. How true is this?", "selftext": "I heard this on NPR, the person speaking was a representative of Merriam Webster. He just sort of mentioned this fact off hand but I'm having a very hard time believing it's true.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26vat9/i_recently_heard_that_the_word_hello_was_invited/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chut4sy", "chuu2wm", "chuyl5s"], "score": [64, 6, 11], "text": ["Not quite, it seems. According to the OED: \"hello\" is a variant of \"hallo\" which is in use from ca. 1830. \"Hallo\" derives from German \"hallo, halloh,\" also Old High German \"hal\u00e2, hol\u00e2,\" imperative of \"hal\u00f4n, hol\u00f4n\" to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman. Also written \"hullo(a, hillo(a, hello,\" from obscurity of the first syllable. The origins of some sort of shout along these linguistic lines traces to the fifteenth century.\n\nA minor bit of trivia is that Alexander Graham Bell's preferred telephone greeting was \"Ahoy-hoy\". Montgomery Burns (Mr. Burns) from the Simpsons uses that exact phrase because he's just that old.", "I have heard that the Japanese moshi moshi works in a similar way but that it continues to only be acceptable in telephone conversation. Can any Japanese speakers verify this?", "It wasn't invented for the telephone, it was adapted for it.\n\nThe word existed but did not have the greeting meaning that it has today. \n\n Quite a few variants existed in the mid 1800s, some going back to at least the 1400s in English;  'hello', 'hullo' 'hallo' 'holla' etc.   \n\nThese were used as interjections when calling for attention and as commands to hunting dogs (like tally-ho) \n\nThe use of 'hello' as an interjection rather than as a greeting still exists in the stereotype of the British policeman saying 'hello! hello! hello!, what's all this then?!' a stock phrase which pre-dates the telephone and which means 'Oi! What's going on?!' \n \nThe old meaning of the word as a shout for attention is reflected in the related word 'holler' back in the mid 1800s' you would 'hallo' at someone just as you might 'holler' at them today. \n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_ (QI clip) \n\nNote - OED is cited by a few of these sources, I don't have access to the full OED to cite it myself here, although various dictionary sites give snippets of the OED entry with this basic info.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.snopes.com/language/eponyms/hello.asp", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xXSw07zrio", "http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/17/133785829/a-shockingly-short-history-of-hello", "http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/05/garden/great-hello-mystery-is-solved.html"]]}
{"q_id": "srpew", "title": "When did we start writing science fiction?", "selftext": "As historians we are so involved in defining the past, I find it fascinating to consider those who worked at defining the future.  Though I don't think you can point to a single science fiction story that ever really predicted the future as it occurred.  So the exercise stands as a sort of ... societal dream.  Look at something like Star Trek, which legitimately influenced an entire generation [citation needed], but they still got the \"future\" completely wrong.  There is, after all, no Khan Noonien Singh.  And I doubt we will see First Contact any time soon.  Science fiction stands as an exercise that is completely ephemeral but still very influential.  \n\nSo, does anyone know anything about the history of science fiction?  Or, more broadly, when did we start to imagine the future?  Is there a point (maybe late 1800s?) when western society began to imagine what the future would look like?\n\nI also wonder if the nature of our \"imagining of the future\" changed as religion became less dominant.  Did we once imagine the future as simply being the End of Times?  Was there a shift to envisioning a technological future?  A humanity centered future rather than a divine one?\n\nAnd of course, the big question, if we did move towards a new imagining, why and what does it signify about us as a society?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/srpew/when_did_we_start_writing_science_fiction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4gehgc", "c4geiaq", "c4gekjx", "c4geopp", "c4gg56v", "c4ggaks", "c4ggpyq", "c4ghbce"], "score": [5, 17, 10, 7, 3, 2, 2, 5], "text": ["It is considered that the first true sci-fi novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, though she is closely matched by jules vernes and 20,000 leagues under the sea, A journey to the centre of the earth so on so forth. in terms of Modern literature in the era of the priniting press I  think thats it, but I cannot answer for tales and writing that happened before that.", "Scifi is actually much older than you would think.  I actually was just wondering about this question after reading some Voltaire.  As early as the 17th century authors were writing the precursors of modern science fiction.  [The Man in the Moone](_URL_1_) was published in 1638 and described travel to the moon.  Voltaire wrote a story about interstellar travel in 1752 called [Microm\u00e9gas](_URL_0_).  Sorry for only citing to wikipedia, hopefully someone has better sources.  ", "When science and technology advanced into modernity, around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Before, things were mostly realistic fantasy (Gulliver's Travels) until people began to hypothesize and imagine about the future not in terms of plain events but rather advancements in science and technology.\n\nIn terms of literature, it may have been derived from Gothic literature. Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe dabbled in sci-fi mostly for investigating the human psyche with works such as Frankenstein, The Last Man and Arthur Pym. This paved way for future authors to take inspiration and incorporate them into their own works, with H.G. Welles and Jules Verne being the first 'true' sci-fi writers.\n\nThe early 20th century saw magazines play an influence in spreading the genre, and new discoveries in science gave writers more ideas to write about. You'd notice that before the World Wars, sci-fi was very much focused on individual journeys and exploring things, and after the second, military sci-fi came into play with Starship Troopers in 1959, written by an retired military veteran himself.\n\nHowever, going back to the origins of sci-fi, you can see two distinct subgenres already. There was the non-fantasy apocalyptic genre (War of the Worlds, The Last Man) and the exploratory genre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Earth to the Moon), which is pretty interesting, reflecting on our fascination with discovering the unknown and the apocalypse.\n\n**tl;dr** - Modern science fiction started around the mid-1800s.", "Depends. We can't just accurately measure something and go \"Ah ha! This is sci-fi here! Thus this is the first one.\"\n\nAt a certain point its arbitrary. Do we say [The Bamboo Cutter](_URL_0_) was sci-fi? Or what of religious tales that involve the stars or the night sky?  How about Arabian Nights? I think in general people have always worried and imagined the future, they just didn't do so with pocket calculators and Gibson-esque dystopias. \n\nSo lets say we only focus on post-enlightenment writers who are familiar with enlightenment ideas as well as early modern science. So that leaves us stuff like Micromegas or Frankenstein. We might be able to shoehorn Gulliver's Travels if we accept fantasy as part of the genre. I think its fair to say that its only sci-fi if the author was purposely writing sci-fi, that is to say a critique of technology or society using typical sci-fi elements like the future or a creation in a lab or a space travel or some other applied technology that doesn't exist.\n\n > Though I don't think you can point to a single science fiction story that ever really predicted the future as it occurred. \n\nI'd also like to point out that 'predicting the future' isn't the point nor even a common theme in sci-fi. The future is a locale for a story. Sci-fi is just storytelling. You can take most sci-fi and replace blasters with spears and still have a decent storytelling experience.  This is more difficult to do with harder sci-fi because now we're writing stories really to impress the idea of a new set of technologies.  Sci-fi writers aren't stressing out about whether their flying car be feasible in 20 years, but if their characters are relatable and if the stories moves to their liking.\n\n > Look at something like Star Trek, which legitimately influenced an entire generation [citation needed], but they still got the \"future\" completely wrong.\n\nBecause ST is little more than a crummy but very fun pot boiler. Look, by the time ST came out, we had a golden peroid of sci-fi writers exploring things like philosophy, life, technology, religion vs reason, aliens, etc in very deep and interesting ways.  Philip K Dick is the easiest example.  ST is a very watered down crowd friendly, lowest common denominator distillation of this type of sci-fi.  We tossed out the heady stuff about our place in society and whether our weapons are too powerful for us to handle and put girls in short dresses and shot lasers at aliens who were stand-ins for ethnic stereotypes. Lets just face it, ST is a male fantasy of driving a big warship, exploring, and fighting enemies in a largely unaccountable way. Oh, and also getting the girl.\n\nSometimes the ST writers touched on social issues but they were secondly to the plot, but to be fair they did try to shoehorn some philosophy or ethics into their tales but no where near the point of someone like PKD. The writers of ST also didn't give two shits about predicting the future, they were writing drama. They were experts at making dramatic television within the confines of that media and within the expectations of a 1960s audience.  \n\nA contemporary view is that all sci-fi is merely fantasy and one I agree with perhaps to the point that all fiction is fantasy as well.  At the end of the day throwing a lighsabre and a FTL ship in a story doesn't make in \"realistic\" or \"predictive futuristic\" it just provides a setting.  There's some really hard sci-fi that might not fit into this category but even then its a crapshoot on whether its fair to take it outside of the fantasy category as hard sci-fi is highly speculative in itself, its just not a space opera like Star Wars or Star Trek. For example, I would never charactorize Anathem and, say, Star Wars in the same category, but I won't hand-wavy Anathem into some special category because its harder sci-fi.  Its still fantastic, just less fantastic than SW or ST.\n\nLastly, I find it a little unfair to look back at old works and go \"Ah ha! So and so predicted the ipad because a character has a pad-like device.\" Err no. First, this kinda pisses on all the engineers who work hard on difficult problems and over compliments the guy who thought \"Err yeah, electric note pad, Done.\"  Unless the writing is extremely detailed like \"multi-touch tablet with wireless networking and social applications, etc\" its really unfair to see these things as predicative. That said, contemporary sci-fi is wonderful because it straddles the line between entertainment and learning/imagining.  It also came from this 50s and 60s sub-culture where the rules and conventions of modern society didn't really apply and weirdos like PKD could rise to the top and do interesting things that we weren't doing before in fiction. Predicting the future isn't required or even wanted. That's the job of futurists, stock speculators, and government planners.", "In addition to the other notable authors listed (Shelley is the big one and probably the earliest really popular sci-fi writer), it's worth mentioning Margaret Cavendish who was writing in the 1660s and 70s.  With poems about atoms and an extended prose Romance called *[The Blazing World](_URL_0_)*, Cavendish certainly has a claim at being the first significant sci-fi authoress.  She's really quite an eccentric character to read about. ", "When I was just a wee lad, my parents bought for me *The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction*, and it was the best christmas present I had ever gotten. I would stay up for far to long reading entry after entry. \n\nIt has, as always, an answer, in the long and thorough discussion in the entry labelled [Proto SF](_URL_0_). If you're really interested, that article will answer your questions. ", "It's well worth mentioning [Somnium](_URL_0_) by Johannes Kepler, written between 1620 and 1630, which involves a journey to the moon. Carl Sagan describes it [here](_URL_1_). The entire video is worth watching for historical context, but the description of the story itself begins at 2:45.", "Big time book nerd here.  I am not going to give a simple answer to this question, because it does not have one.  In order to have an answer the term scfi needs to be defined.  It seems self evident to whoever says it but there really is not a good answer.  The easiest way to show why it is so hard is with a few examples.\n\nFrankenstein is considered to be one of the first modern scifi stories, because it deals with a new technology (electricty) and mans hubris.  But some literary people argue that it is just a modern retell of the homunculus myth.  As the famous quote goes any advance technology would seem like magic to a primative society (not real quote just the gist).\n\nSo if science is magic then tales like King Arthur can be considered a spectrum of scifi.  Merlins magic is just mans desire to control the forces of nature.  The king is trying to survive in a hostile world while trying to make it better.  But since it was looking back instead of forward it becomes fantasy/myth.  However tons of modern scifi deals with someone going back in time and doing just these sort of things.\n\nI could go on for a bit but I think those are the examples that most people woukd be familiar enough with to understand my point.\n\nAs a general rule most people consider the founders of modern scifi to be H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Hugo Gernsback, and Mary Shelley.  Verne and Wells being more tech oreinted and Shelley being more towards the myth side.  And of course there were solitary works of note before them, but these 4 kind of ushered it in.\n\nHope that kind of helped."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microm%C3%A9gas", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Moone"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Bamboo_Cutter"], ["http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/blazing/blazing.html"], ["http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/proto_sf"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnium_%28Kepler%29", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CE4owAfDow"], []]}
{"q_id": "3lu5f9", "title": "Did the WW1 Russians consider using the Black Sea Fleet to bombard Istanbul as the British and French intended before Gallipoli?", "selftext": "The Russian Black Sea Fleet was superior to the Ottomans if I recall correctly. Did the Ottomans have Defensive gun emplacements? Did the Russians have fuel or ammo shortages that prevented them from attacking? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lu5f9/did_the_ww1_russians_consider_using_the_black_sea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv9dc9h"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes Constantinople did have several shore batteries of varying quality, but the presence of German 'Advisors\" greatly increased their efficiency, as demonstrated down flow at Gallipoli and in the Dardanelles. \n\nThe biggest threat to the Black Sea Fleet was far and away the Battlecruiser Goeben, a fully modern warship, crewed by Germans, and who'se Capt. essentially forced the Ottoman's hand into joining the war when he sailed off and began shelling Russian positions and shipping after the ship was \"sold\" to the Empire. \n\nBy 1916 though the addition of 2 modern Dreadnoughts to the BSF and the wear and tear on Goeben had shifted the momentum to the Russians but their lack of breakthroughs on land, lack of naval elan and daring, and perpetual shortages of material contributed to a lack of any daring plan. They DID however manage to mine the exits of the Bosphourous meaning that any ottoman movements were dangerous and had to be conducted slowly to with major resources to protect the Goeben. The fleet was then used primarily to shell targets in the Caucuses, and in late 1916 an internal explosion destroyed one of the 2 Russian Dreadnoughts, once again leaving them with an uncomfortably small margin of strength. \n\nThen just months later the nation would dissolve into civil war, revolution, and ineffectiveness before leaving the war entirely. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xcrin", "title": "What was the first team sport that resembled modern leagues?", "selftext": "Did the meso-american's root for the Tikal Jaguars vs the away team? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xcrin/what_was_the_first_team_sport_that_resembled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfacwxj"], "score": [9], "text": ["In the European context we trace it back to the Ludi Romani (Roman Games) held at the Circus Maximus (lit. big circuit) in Rome. The agitatores (Chariot drivers) competed together as teams during races, the first of these teams were apparently created during the Kingdom period sometime between the 8th c. and the 6th c. BC. according to the Roman historian Tertullian. He lived many centuries after this period in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and so the accuracy of his accounts of the history of the sport may suffer from chronological distance from the events he writes about, but he is our prime source. Tertullian tells us that the first teams to be established were the 'Whites' representing Winter and the 'Reds' representing Summer. \n\nDuring the Republican era new teams including the Greens and the Blues were created, during Justinian's reign in the 6th c AD the Nika riots, the prologue to our modern Soccer and Hockey riots occurred and the tradition of team Chariot racing continued within the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Rome in the West. \n\nThere's a lot to the topic of the chariot teams, it ties in with notions of Citizenship and what it meant to be Roman, to religious identity and how the act of participating in the games as a spectator or as a a sportsman was an integral part of that, to Roman notions of social mobility and opportunity and who could and could not access those. \n\nIt's great place to start for anyone interested in learning more about the history of Sport or the history of Rome or both, as it's simultaneously very familiar in certain respects such as team rivalries and high earning stars and very different in other respects such as the overt religious overtones. \n\nSources \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/colosseum/a/CircusMaximus.htm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vtoj2/who_were_the_blues_and_the_greens_in_the/", "http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/circus.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_racing", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/circusmaximus/circusmaximus.html"]]}
{"q_id": "56bvke", "title": "The Yellow Turban Rebellion in China took 21 years to suppress. I can't think of any peasant rebellion in Europe that lasted that long. Am I wrong? What were the situations that allowed a peasant rebellion to last so long?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56bvke/the_yellow_turban_rebellion_in_china_took_21/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8j85o6"], "score": [3], "text": ["It is a bit misleading to say that the Yellow Turban Rebellion took 21 years to suppress. It started out as a religious movement and then became a widespread rebellion organised by its leader Zhang Jue in March 184. Though they had some initial successes, the tide started turning soon enough as the government started organising a response, and when Han forces recaptured their stronghold of Wan city on 11 January 185, the Yellow Turbans were effectively ended as a political force after about 10 months in rebellion. Sure, some scattered remnants still remained, but these were essentially local disturbances that could be mopped up by local authorities.\n\nTrue, several groups show up later that are also called Yellow Turbans, but it is far from clear that these had any direct connection to the original Yellow Turbans and their beliefs.\n\nThe Yellow Turban severly shook the Han emprie's hold on its provinces, and a general rise in unrest, banditry and lawlessness was the result, but unlike the Yellow Turbans they were not united in a common conspiracy against the Han state"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ifth4", "title": "Did the clan system also exist in the Scottish lowlands?", "selftext": "From what I have read I believed that the Scottish highlands were very culturally different to the lowlands. In fact, they were descended from different tribes. The highlanders being descended from the Picts and the Gaels, which produced the \"Scots\", and the lowlanders being a mixture of many peoples including the germanic tribes that conquered England and even the Romans. They even have a different language: Scottish Gaelic is celtic language native to the highlands and the \"Scottish language\" is a Germanic language native to the lowlands. As such, the lowlanders did not have a clan system and looked down on it. If I understand this correctly, why then do I sometimes find references to \"lowland clans\" such as the Douglas or Campbell clan. Is it because both regions had the clan system but the lowlanders abandoned it after the middle ages, whereas the highlanders used it until the highland clearances? Was a lowland clan simply a family?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ifth4/did_the_clan_system_also_exist_in_the_scottish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d32keyi"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't give a reason as to why specifically different terminology has been employed, but I'm familiar with family organisation in the Borders due to my work on crime in the sixteenth century.\n\nYou're right that the cultures diverged somewhat over time.  From the twelfth century, increased Anglo-Norman influence brought the Lowlands more in line with the rest of Britain and continental Europe culturally and socially.  That said, family was still quite a strong organising principle throughout Scotland well into the early modern period.\n\nSo what you'll find in the Lowlands (more particularly the Borders) is the concept of 'surnames' (Rae, *The Administration of the Scottish Frontier*, 1513-1603, 1966).  These were similar to clans in that these were kin groups based historically in particular geographical areas.\n\nYou tend to find the concept of surnames associated primarily with bands of reivers and particularly troublesome families like the Armstrongs, Maxwells, Johnstones and Douglases.  This accounts for the crown's attitude towards both the Highlands and the Borders as wicked, chaotic or lawless regions.  These areas were quite remote from Edinburgh and often difficult to manage through messengers and direct royal oversight, so local customary justice and clan or surname politics tended to have more sway over life in these regions.\n\nIn Central Scotland and the Lowlands north of the Borders, urbanisation was more widespread and, although kin was still central to social and political relationships, it was not necessary to rely on family for protection and order to the same extent as in the more remote regions of Scotland.\n\nIt's quite correct to refer to Lowland family groups as clans, but more often they are referred to as surnames and it tends to be in the context of border crime and culture.\n\nWhy the different terminology, I'm not entirely sure.  The clan system was not exactly looked down upon.  Rather, as the cultural and social differences (religion, language, justice, economy) between Highlands and Lowlands grew over the years, the Highlands came to be considered a somewhat \"backwards\" or uncultured region and so too did many aspects of life in the area.  It was also problematic for a government and monarch that was ever trying to centralise to have men making bonds and oaths to heads of families as it undermined the authority and importance of the crown.  The Borders, a site of conflict for generations, was likewise considered unruly, if not barbaric."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lkb60", "title": "What is something that I, as a pretty average Joe American, can do that would ease the jobs of future historians?", "selftext": "Time capsuls? Write about my life and current events as they happen? Nothing because this age is already so incredibly well documented?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lkb60/what_is_something_that_i_as_a_pretty_average_joe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clvkxd2", "clvleoi", "clvpghc", "clwfr12"], "score": [132, 64, 23, 4], "text": ["To document our time? Write a diary.\n\nDo the most good? Write a peer-reviewed book about something that isn't World War II and contains footnotes, a bibliography and index.", "For the love of god, write legible. Also on the back of photographs. ESPECIALLY on the back of photographs. \n  \nTell us who the people on the photos are.  \nI just received an important family album this week, and just one generation later, many people cannot be identified anymore.", "Leave behind physical evidence of your life.\n\nFuture cultural historians are going to have a hard time because so much of our lives, and for some people our entire lives, are on Facebook.  \n\nAlso the fact that we generate more information than we ever have before, you are going to see an increasing focus on microhistory. ( a long way off obviously.)", "Support your local archive and other public history institutions. \n\nNot that others' posts directing you to make sure your own leavings are well-documented and accessible aren't on point, but (in general) archivists are reasonably good at dealing with and collecting historically relevant stuff, no matter what kind of paper you leave it on. And (especially at the small, local level) their biggest problem isn't a lack of stuff to collect, or gripes about handwriting, or even un-labeled photographs. Their biggest problem is funding and public support.\n\nToday's historians rely on collecting institutions to preserve and provide access to the \"stuff\" (for lack of a better word) that they turn into history. Barring a major paradigm shift, the historians of the future will too. If you really want to help them, working to make sure that those institutions thrive and can do their jobs to the best of their ability is the best way to make that happen (even if the 'stuff' that they wind up preserving isn't your stuff).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ca6gi7", "title": "WWII Invasion of Hawaii", "selftext": "The surprise attack on pearl harbor was a huge success for Japan. Would Japan have been able to successfully complete an invasion and occupation of Hawaii? What were the logistical challenges that prevented them attempting this? Was a full invasion considered by Japan during the planning of the attack?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ca6gi7/wwii_invasion_of_hawaii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et69ovd"], "score": [6], "text": ["No, they would not have had the logistics capacity to sustain an invasion of Midway, let alone the main Hawaiian islands, which were not (and are not) remotely self-sustaining in food. I wrote about this before here: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nand here \n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd also check out the answers from u/dbht14 in the first linked thread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aip710/what_was_the_japanese_plan_post_pearl_harbor_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80xu8w/did_the_japanese_seriously_consider_invading/"]]}
{"q_id": "5ktur6", "title": "Why is Liechtenstein?", "selftext": "Liechtenstein is 62 Mi^2 with a population of about 37,000.  It's been under the imperial umbrella of several different empires for hundreds of years, but has always been able to maintain its' relative sovereignty.  How did such a tiny nation not become totally absorbed and assimilated into the fold of a larger nation  I've read the Wiki articles and still haven't gotten the answer I'm looking for.  \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ktur6/why_is_liechtenstein/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbqtzbi", "dbqvdjg", "dbqxf3d", "dbrv1q9"], "score": [124, 104, 4236, 26], "text": ["i'd like to add on to your question. with all of these different umbrellas over the ages, how was Liechtenstein affected? were there large changes in infrastructure or culture during these times, and did anything stick to today?", "This question has been asked a few times before. I think you'll find the following illuminating:\n\n[Comment](_URL_1_) from /u/the3manhimself four years ago.\n\n[Comment](_URL_0_) from /u/Dr_Whett_Faartz two years ago.", "I love Liechtenstein!\n\nThe short answer is three parts: **a late start**, **good alliances**, **not being a belligerent.**\n\n**A Late Start**\n\nFirst of all, you wouldn't consider Liechtenstein to be a \"country\" or even an \"independent principality\" by contemporary European standards until 1719. Before that, the area was barely occupied, and variously controlled to different degrees by the Holy Roman Empire, and was also traded around various dynasties and families for a couple of hundred years. That's why we don't think about Liechtenstein being captured in the Swabian War in 1499, or the Thirty Years' War from 1618-1648, for examples, because it wasn't Liechtenstein then. It was a couple of little hamlets and a castle or two. It doesn't even get a mention in the Wikipedia articles on those conflicts.\n\nCompare this with Vatican City---which was either trying to control the rest of the peninsula or the whole world since about the 8th century, being controlled by the locals, or getting booted out to France---or compare with Malta, which has been occupied for 7,000 years and conquered by every one with a boat from the Romans to the Muslims to the Normans to the French. Plus the British got Malta for a signature in the Treaty of Paris. So yeah, a late start is reason number one.\n\n**Good Alliances**\n\nThings are pretty quiet in Liechtenstein during from 1719 onward until Napoleon starts conquering much of Europe. Most notably for our story his victories at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805 lead to the Treaty of Pressburg (aka Bratislava), which pretty much shatters Liechtenstein's hope of maintaining their Austrian friends. Within a few months Napoleon is building the Confederation of the Rhine. This is an agreement among a bunch of conquered/nervous German princes to provide taxes and troops for Napoleon's future conquests. But in order to get the princes to sign up, a process called *German mediatization* was conducted in which various states were merged and properties handed over. In short, \"Ok, I'll join your confederation, but only if you declare my neighbor's house to be part of my house and you give me all their stuff.\"\n\nMaximilian I of Bavaria wanted to mediatize Liechtenstein as part of his deal to sign up for the Confederation, but Napoleon refused. The reason was because Johann von Liechtenstein---who was part of the negotiations back at the Treaty of Pressburg---really impressed Napoleon. So, Lichtenstein got be a co-founder of the Confederation and maintain their sovereignty.\n\nThe Confederation collapsed within a decade because Napoleon stopped winning all the time. And technically the French occupied the country for a minute there, but again because Johann and Napoleon were buddies it still operated pretty independently. \n\nNext up, Lichtenstein joins the new German Confederation until that starts to fall apart in the 1860s. The country gets a new constitution with some representative democracy, and officially declares itself permanently neutral. \n\nSo what about the 20th century? The Austrian ties do create problems during World War I, and the Allies impose an embargo. Lichtenstein forms a monetary alliance with the ever-neutral Swiss to stay afloat. After the war, they sign a treaty with the Swiss to let them handle tons of their diplomatic needs elsewhere.\n\nIn World War II, Liechtenstein's alliances also come in handy. They remain neutral, even when the dynasty's hereditary lands over in central Europe get claimed by Czechoslovakia and Poland as they are reclaiming territory from the retreating German army. Liechtenstein also gave asylum to about five hundred German-allied Russian soldiers in 1945. They got them permanently resettled in South America. For a country that was struggling to feed its own, this was considered a great sacrifice. Other German-allied Russian soldiers that were granted asylum elsewhere in the world were repatriated to the USSR, and often executed.\n\nNo neutral country in World War II got consumed into a larger country, but Liechtenstein wasn't even able to join the UN. That's because there was a fear that the Soviet Union would pressure small states to leverage their votes. This may have further helped secure their identity as an independent actor for the rest of the 20th century.\n\n**Not Being a Belligerent.**\n\nYou asked \"how did such a tiny nation not become totally absorbed and assimilated into the fold of a larger nation?\" The answer is that it basically did. Geopolitically, Lichtenstein is pretty much Switzerland. Culturally, it's pretty much Austria. Most of the Lichtenstein's history it avoided being consumed by another Germanic state by participating in confederations. Then it declared itself neutral, and managed to maintain that into the 20th century. \n\nOther modern micronations or would-be micronations have tended to get involved or traded about in conflicts. Andorra fought with the Moors, got passed around among various French, Catalan, and religious rulers, declared war on Germany in World War I, and got occupied by the French following unrest in their 1933 elections. In the Low Countries, only one of the Seventeen Provinces (Luxembourg) survives as its own country today. The rest variously split off to form the Dutch Republic, were divided up by feuding families, or became part of the kickoff for the Eighty Year's War. Most of the US Territories (American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virigin Islands, Wake Island, etc.) were the results of conquests or land swaps or just purchases for the strategic military advantage.\n\n**The TL;DR Summary**\n\nLichtenstein avoided becoming the name of a province in Austria because they got a late start being defined as a country by that name, because Johann I impressed Napoleon, because the confederations they joined held up long enough to keep them from getting conquered, and because they decided to stop picking sides well before the start of the 20th century. \n\nP.S. I'm tempted to rewrite this entire post in a James Burke style \"Because Johann was a smooth operator\" but you'll just have to imagine that.\n\n--------------------------------\n\nSources: \n\nSecrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City, by Thomas M. Eccardt\n\nMetternich's German Policy, Volume II: The Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815, by Krahe, E.E. \n\nHeart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson\n\n[Mediatization in Germany](_URL_0_)\n\n[The Prince of Liechtenstein on leadership](_URL_1_)", "This was actually the subject of my last master thesis stub (specifically the question why Liechtenstein remained a sovereign state). I want to add some things to the already excellent explanation by u/Robbyslaughter. Sorry for my terrible English.\n\nThere actually were a lot of countries questioning the Liechtenstein independence/sovereignty shortly after World War I. By 1919/1920 Liechtenstein tried to join the League of Nations. The small size of the country wasn\u2019t a problem, but the narrow bonds with Austria (till WW I) and later Switzerland were seen as a reason to reject Liechtenstein\u2019s application. (which was somewhat strange since \u201ccountries\u201d like British India and Belarus (then part of the Sovjet Union) were accepted before.\n\nIn my opinion the main reason Liechtenstein is still an independent nation (and more sovereign than the other micro states (I will come back on that)) is it\u2019s royal family. There were more threats to Liechtenstein\u2019s sovereignty after the Bavarians tried to annex the country. \n\n**Papal Liechtenstein?**\n\nDuring World War I there was actually a plan to make the pope sovereign monarch over Liechtenstein. A German politician (Matthias Erzberger, later a minister during the Weimar regime) proposed it and the top of the Roman Curia (including pope Benedict XV) was quite enthusiast about the idea. Since the Papal State was annexed into the Italian state, the pope was a \u201cprisoner\u201d in Rome; he had no territory. Due to that, he couldn\u2019t be invited to the peace talks, if he was made sovereign over Liechtenstein that problem would go away. Therefore some countries (like Austria-Hungary) and the papal administration put some pressure on the royal family of Liechtenstein to give up its sovereignty over the country and trade it in for a high title equivalent of a cardinal and the head of the Liechtenstein royal family would be a permanent regent of the country. The crown prince rejected that offer. There were quite serious negotiations going on in 1916 but after the rejection by the crown prince the Curia stopped its attempts.\n\n**Annexed into Switzerland or a neutral Tirol buffer state?**\n\nShortly after the first world war, the British government had a serious plan for a neutral Tirol buffer state that would include Liechtenstein but the plans were terminated early on. After that there was a treat from Vorarlberg. Vorarlberg is the Austrian region that neighbors Liechtenstein, tucked in between Tirol and Switzerland. Economically and culturally the region has more ties to Switzerland than to Austria and in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland a small movement was formed propagandizing the annexation of the area into Switzerland. On November 3th 1918 the region declares itself independent, May 11th a referendum on the question whether the region should join Switzerland is hold and 80 percent of the population voted in favor of annexation. The allied victors of the first world war however didn\u2019t recognize the declaration nor the referendum and drawed the new Austrian borders with the inclusion of the Vorarlberg region, mainly due to French objections and a lack of enthusiasm from the Swiss. If Vorarlberg was annexed into Switzerland Liechtenstein would be completely enclosed by Switzerland and it wouldn\u2019t be unthinkable that in a later stage the country would be absolved in it too. (there still is an active secession movement in Vorarlberg)\n\n**But then came F\u00fcrst Hans-Adam II**\n\nThen we skip a few decades and end in the 1970s. Liechtenstein is mostly dependent on Switzerland economically as well as on foreign policy, since, due to several treaties with Switzerland, the country wasn\u2019t allowed to sign treaties with other nations unless Switzerland approved. But then came then Crown Prince Hans-Adam II. He was a controversial figure, not the political correct type. He spoke his mind and was considered by many to be blunt. In a controversial speech in 1970 he said Liechtenstein was in the backpack of other nations, first Austria, later Switzerland, for ages and couldn\u2019t really be considered a sovereign nation. He said like in the fairy tales a Prince should wake up Liechtenstein. (source: \u201cEinen F\u00fcrsten als Touristenattraktion?\u201d, Volksblatt (September 15th 1970))\n\nSince then the country slowely becaume more and more active on the world stage. When the country wanted to join the European Economic Area and Switzerland didn\u2019t, they broke the old treaty in which Liechtenstein wasn\u2019t allowed to have its own foreign policy. Since then it joined a lot of international organizations, conducted treaties with the largest countries in the world (including Russia and the USA) and became much more confident.\n\nBut now I stop writing since this piece is already becoming to long and I skipped lots of information. If you are interested I will write more. For example on the accidental \u201cSwiss invasions\u201d and \u201cbombings\u201d which were really interesting since the Swiss military were condemned by its own people for not respecting Liechtenstein sovereinity.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nMaximilian Liebmann, \u2018Der Pabst \u2013 F\u00fcrst von Liechtenstein: Ein Vorschlag zur L\u00f6sung der R\u00f6mischen Frage aus dem Jahre 1916\u2018, in: Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins f\u00fcr das F\u00fcrstentum Liechtenstein 85 (1985), 229-250. \n \nDieter Petras, \u2018Die Vorarlberger Frage\u2018, in: Historia scribere 1 (2009), 583-606.  \n\nDavid Beattie, Liechtenstein: a modern history (Triesen 2012).\n\nMichael M. Gunter, \u2018Liechtenstein and the League of Nations: A precedent for the United Nation\u2019s ministate problem?\u2019, in: The American journal of international law 68:3 (1974), 496-501.\n\nWalter S.G. Kohn, \u2018The Sovereignty of Liechtenstein\u2019, in: The American journal of international law 61:2 (1967), 547-557.\n\nWilfried Marxer, \u2018Nationale Identit\u00e4t: Eine Umfrage aus Anlass 200 Jahre Souver\u00e4nit\u00e4t des F\u00fcrstentums Liechtenstein\u2018, in: Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins f\u00fcr das F\u00fcrstentum Liechtenstein 105 (2006), 198-237.\n\nChristoph Maria Merki, Wirtschaftswunder Liechtenstein, Die rasche Modernisierung einer kleinen Volkswirtchaft im 20. Jahrhundert (Z\u00fcrich 2007).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bjml3/how_did_small_countries_like_liechtenstein_or/cj623u4/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13ebo4/how_have_the_microsmall_states_of_europe_andorra/c737eaq/"], ["http://www.heraldica.org/topics/royalty/mediatization.htm", "https://www.ft.com/content/191ef6fc-5135-11e3-b499-00144feabdc0"], []]}
{"q_id": "s2yku", "title": "Is Kiev really that relevant to Ukraine?", "selftext": "Is Kiev really that relevant to Ukraine? I mean, Kiev is from the times of Kievan Rus, and modern Ukraine is pretty new. I know the territory itself got the name from the Pols and the Russians (from their word 'Krai' which means 'edge'), but when did that happen? When did Ukraine was officially recognized as \"individual territory\" by the Russian Empire? And were the cossacks there really the center of culture and a majority of the population? And are the modern Ukrainians their descendants?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s2yku/is_kiev_really_that_relevant_to_ukraine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ar5dc", "c4awv2f"], "score": [12, 9], "text": ["Without getting too much into the details, this is a dangerous line of questioning to get into. The borders of Eastern Europe shifted constantly until the 1950s. Many countries (including Ukraine) ceased to exist during many periods of time, and there were multiple times when countries (including Ukraine) existed but were completely controlled by foreign powers. Needless to say questions about who owned what when, and who is descended from whom, are rather complicated. ", " > Is Kiev really that relevant to Ukraine?\n\nIt's their biggest city and historical center. Yes?\n\n > I know the territory itself got the name from the Pols and the Russians(from their word 'Krai' which means 'edge'), but when did that happen?\n\nIn the 17th century it come to mean the areas around Kiev (though certainly not all modern day Ukraine), it wasn't a dominant name though. The Cossack (semi)-state that existed then was officially called \"Zaporozhian Host/Army\" while the hypothetical autononomous part of Poland-Lithuania (see [Treaty of Hadiach\\)](_URL_0_) was supposed to be called Duchy/Principality of Ruthenia (Rus).\n\n > When did Ukraine was officially recognized as \"individual territory\" by the Russian Empire?\n\nRussia officially recognized the autonomy of Zaporozhian cossacks in several treaties and agreements during the 17th century. After 1667, cossack state existed in Ukraine under Russian protections. Their autonomy become much more limited after the failed uprising in support of Swedes in the early 18th century (see Great Northern War) and was finally dismantled by Catherine the Great in the 1770's.\n\n >  And were the cossacks there really the center of culture and a majority of the population? And are the modern Ukrainians their descendants?\n\nMajority of population, almost certainly no. Center of culture, I would say yeah, probably.\n\n > And are the modern Ukrainians their descendants?\n\nProbably to some small degree. I don't think that's terribly relevant though.\n\n    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Hadiach"]]}
{"q_id": "17ums3", "title": "What is the truth about Martin Luther King Jr.?", "selftext": "Living outside of the US, some of my friends have some really weird conspiracy theories. Yesterday, while we were discussing heroes, I mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. She made a face, and said, \"You know he was an anti-Semitist?\" Having lived in the U.S. for most of my life, I was, of course, skeptical, but she was convincing, telling me about how he met with Hitler (seemed unlikely to me, as he was only 16 when Hitler died). And that he made pro-Hitler comments.\n\nI remember a quote by MLK saying something along the lines of anti-Semitism being a blot on humanity, but since I couldn't remember the quote, I doubted myself.\n\nIs this true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ums3/what_is_the_truth_about_martin_luther_king_jr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c891ey5", "c891gi6", "c892q9h"], "score": [15, 25, 9], "text": ["\"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was \"legal\" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was \"illegal.\" It was \"illegal\" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.\"\n\nFrom \"[Letter from a Birmingham Jail](_URL_0_).\"\n\nI'm not up on King's overall stance on anti-semitism, but in general, when people believe things like MLK meeting with Hitler (why the hell would Hitler meet with *him*?), you're probably not going to be able to formulate any response that will convince them otherwise. Conspiracy theorists will do whatever they can to hang on to their beliefs in the face of all evidence to the contrary. \n", "We don't know, as King made no public statements re: Jews or Zionism.  The \"Letter to an anti Zionist friend\" attributed to King has been exposed as a hoax.  The notion that King met Hitler is simply idiotic.  King never traveled to Germany as a child, Hitler never came to the US, and hitler hated blacks.  Many in the black civil rights movement were and are antisemitic, and some of King's detractors use this as \"evidence\" of antisemitism by King.\n\nSince the King haters often bring it up in an effort to tarnish his positive achievements, yes, King did frequently cheat on his wife, sometimes with prostitutes, and sometimes with white women.  \n\nWith King, as with many historical figures, we tend to diefy the man, whitewashing any sins, as though they somehow diminish his achievements.  And, as with many historical figures, there are those who will try to diminish the achievements by talking up the failings.", "Is it possible that your friend is confusing things she heard about Martin Luther King Jr. and Martin Luther? Martin Luther was certainly anti-Semitic.\n\nThe Hitler stuff is sort of inexplicable, though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1v3ozg", "title": "How did Biblical hymns eventually gain their melody?", "selftext": "Maybe my history with church is limited here in the United States, but I feel as though most denominations in which singing is encouraged follow a similar tune when singing various hymns. I'm not sure if this is the case in other English speaking countries, though I do know some Spanish churches also have similar tunes. Do churches that sing in other languages share any relationship to the English speaking melodies?\n\nI'm just wondering how this element of organized religion got, well, organized.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v3ozg/how_did_biblical_hymns_eventually_gain_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceoia0b", "ceptib1"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["It depends on the hymn, but some of the melodies for hymns are *very* old indeed, dating from late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. These oldest tunes were the standard accompaniments to the Roman Catholic liturgy. Psalmodies, the tunes to which the psalms are sung between the liturgical readings, are some of the oldest and most constantly used\n\nSo, yes, while words change there is a huge reuse of melody within liturgical music, much of it pointing back to these traditional forms or modifications thereof. ", "Church music and words are sometimes written to go together (sometimes even by the same person), but in other cases the words are used with several different tunes. A tool for interchanging hymn tunes is called the \u201cmeter\u201d. Just like in poetry, it refers to the number of syllables in a line. You\u2019ll usually find it in a hymnal next to the tune name or composer\u2019s name, either under the title or at the bottom of the page. Any two hymns (words) with the same meter can usually be sung to the same piece of music. The back of the hymnal has a \u201cmetrical index\u201d which will list the tunes according to meter. For instance, 8.6.8.6 refers to a song with 8 syllables in the first line, six in the second, and so forth. \u201cDouble\u201d means the meter repeats in the tune (so two verses become one verse). [Here's a more in-depth description.](_URL_1_)\n\n So, for example, you can take the words to \u201cJoyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee\u201d, generally sung to \u201cOde to Joy\u201d and sing them instead to \u201cErie\u201d, to which tune is commonly sung \u201cWhat a Friend We Have in Jesus\u201d.  They are both 8.7.8.7.D meter. It\u2019s fun to mess with your church friends this way. \n\nAmerican Protestant worship has a long history of hymns and congregational singing. Originally, only psalms were translated and set to music. Over the centuries, many famous writers have written hymns and composers have written hymn tunes. There are several \u201cstreams\u201d of origin of American hymns: European establishment church music (like Bach chorales); non-conformist hymns ( [Isaac Watts](_URL_3_), the Wesleys, the Welsh hymns); American [shape note tunes](_URL_2_), which started as singing schools; the evangelical music of the third Great Awakening in the nineteenth century; the African-American spiritual tradition; and twentieth century writers/composers worldwide.  Missionaries sometimes used the familiar tunes with words in local languages; there is also plenty of original music in the non-English-speaking Christian world.\n\nChurch-goers become very emotionally attached to their music, as they have learned it. In the mid 1800\u2019s, a couple of English clergymen set out to compile a collection of hymns to standardize them. This collection is called \u201cHymns Ancient and Modern\u201d. It set the tradition for new hymnals to be despised by their users for \u201cchanging\u201d hymns\u2014it has sometimes been referred to as \u201cHymns Asked for and Mutilated\u201d.  Most of the large denominations publish their own hymnals (often with worship resources included), and there are also independent hymnal publishers like Hope Publishing. \n\nEnthusiasts may consider the [Hymn Society](_URL_0_) for further edification.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.thehymnsociety.org/", "http://malcolmpk88.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/hymn-meter-and-tune-names/", "http://fasola.org/", "http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/w/a/t/watts_i.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4yd22w", "title": "Is a photo of a primary source a primary source itself?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if this is the right sub, but I'll go ahead and ask anyway. Say there is a newspaper from 1850 (or whatever) at the library. I can't bring it with me, but I need to work with the article on the front page. So, I take a photo of it, and bring the photo home with me and work from that.\n\nAm I now using a primary or secondary source? (Counting the newspaper as a primary source of course)\n\nWould there be a difference if I take the photo myself (as I then know for a fact it has not been tampered with/edited) or if I get the photo from someone/somewhere else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yd22w/is_a_photo_of_a_primary_source_a_primary_source/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6mqupf", "d6mrcq9", "d6mxdaq"], "score": [3, 27, 8], "text": ["I would argue that it is a copy of a primary source. As long as you quote the original article in your paper there shouldn't be a problem. If anyone would read your paper, he or she could read directly in the newspaper if you quoted it right. It gets interesting if the original source somehow would be completly lost and your photo would be the only remain of it. Then the photo would become a secondary source.\n\nThe photo would be come a primary source for someone in, lets say a hunderd years, working about historians in the early 21st century. He or she would ask questions like \"why did /u/Nattsang take this photo? why no photocopy?\" etc.", "A photo of a newspaper article or other primary source is merely documentation of that source. It is not a secondary source, as it offers no interpretation of the primary source. It is merely a means to an ends. If you were to alter the photograph, as in [Marcel Duchamp's famous *L.H.O.O.Q.*](_URL_0_), then you would have created your own, original work, which would then count as a primary source if someone were to use it as a source.\n\nHowever, for the purposes of academic publishing (or even dissertation-level original research), you should verify all digital or photographic reproductions either against the original, or that they came from a reputable source (like a professional database of historical newspapers, or from the staff of the archive that holds the material). \n\nTo summarize: the newspaper is a \"primary source.\" The photograph you took of the newspaper does not change that, it is merely a research aid. If you are using scans or photographs that someone else took (like those on various historical newspaper databases), you should indicate that you accessed them via that database in your bibliography.", "I agree with u/Nicht200Ponys -- a photo of a primary source is a copy of a primary source. For the purposes of a written text that analyzes the content of the source, it makes no difference if you worked only with the original newspaper, with a photocopy of it, a photograph of it, or if you made extensive notes about the original and used that in your analysis. A thornier issue, in my opinion, is how we should think about a photograph of a PHOTOGRAPH. If the photo is a primary source, is a photo taken of a photo merely a copy? In many cases, I can imagine the answer is a simple yes. But it the photo of the photo cuts off part of the image or reframes it, it could change the meaning... There is a famous example in Holocaust history. A secret photograph was taken by Jewish Sonderkommandos during the burning of bodies in Auschwitz Birkenau. When the photo is reproduced and discussed in history texts, it is usually cropped to remove the black around the edges--but the dark portions come from the wall of the building the photographer was standing inside. Seeing this helps to explain the circumstances behind the existence of the photos, clarifying how it was taken. So cropping in reproductions can alter the meaning. Would be interested to hear what experts in visual history think. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Marcel_Duchamp_Mona_Lisa_LHOOQ.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "1ibd0y", "title": "Have empires in decline historically been able to rebound? What, if any, are the most notable examples of this occurring?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ibd0y/have_empires_in_decline_historically_been_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2tp6x", "cb2twbn", "cb2vy9i", "cb2xly8", "cb2y6tm", "cb2yf41", "cb2zy28", "cb2zzm4"], "score": [89, 69, 27, 6, 7, 23, 3, 6], "text": ["[Justinian the I](_URL_0_) and his general Belisarius made a solid effort in the Byzantine renovatiio imperii to reclaim the Western Roman Empire in the mid sixth century. The Byzantine resurgence under him reclaimed, at the greatest extent, large parts of North Africa, Spain, Italy, and the Balkans, although he never reclaimed Gaul or Brittannia, and much of his efforts dissolved after his death. The germanic invaders (visigoths and lombards) took back Italy less than five years after Justinian's death and Spain was lost 80 years after that. The muslim conquests of the 7th century did in for much of the north african conquests, as well as previously firmly Byzantine/Roman territories in Syria and Anatolia/Turkey.", "A divisive argument can be made that the Soviet Union was little more than the Russian empire under new management. In little over twenty years the Soviets went from the old man of Eurasia to a world superpower. The nation that couldn't conquer Poland (it's an expression more than accurate depiction of the realities of the Revolution) was able to dismantle the most powerful military nation in Europe in only 25 years.\n\nIn more modern times, China went from Europes's punching bag to a world power, albeit over a century.", "The British Empire seemed like it was on the decline after the American revolution, when it lost its largest and most populous overseas possession. This was followed up by the Napoleonic wars, during which France seemed wildly successful and forced the British to scramble to line up continental allies to oppose the French and those same allies losing several wars in a row to Napoleon. It was a time when Britain really seemed to decline from its high point after winning the seven years war against France in 1763.\n\nBut at the end of it all Britain was able to triumph over Napoleon, and acquire new territorial possessions and expand existing ones in Asia, India and Africa all the while expanding its domestic economic base by being the first nation to industrialize. So Britain bounced back from what seemed like a decline in the 1803 to becoming the premier world power by the mid-late 1800s.", "I'm not a historian, but I would highly recommend checking out the [Crisis of the Third Century](_URL_1_) where the Roman Empire very nearly collapsed.  The History of Rome podcast starts to cover it in [Episode 106 - Barbarian at the Gate](_URL_0_).  The Empire bounced back and managed to go on for another two centuries in the west.", "The transformation of the Roman Republic into the Empire has often been interpreted as a most forceful rebound from decline.  Historians now tend to look at longer processes of cultural, economic and political tensions and change, but ancient sources often consider the formation of the principate as a sudden rebirth from the ashes of immorality and Civil War.  \n\nThe history of this period is obviously layered with source issues and bias, but I've always found it interesting that ancients often spoke of the decline of empires as a moral failing, rather than the geopolitical causes we tend to look for.  On one level, it's clear that a large number of Romans wanted to paint this long transformation as a sudden rebound, and not just those who gained from Augustus' rise to power.", "Oh well, since no one seems to have mentioned China. China *sort of* qualifies here but in other ways doesn't. China is in reality an expanding empire from the Han/Yellow River heartlands and outwards over many, many centuries. The empire was thrown into countless wars, rebellions, and conquests while different areas fought for absolute control, also at time totally crushed and conquered by outside forces (Mongolian/Yuan Dynasty) but due to the similarities in culture, history and language it was still often considered a nation, just split temporarily. This is also why so many rules of the different areas during times of separation often shared the same goal: To re-unify the Middle Kingdom. \n\nIf we define China as an empire, then it is arguably the only one left from the pre-Middle ages era. I know certain Islamic states like Egypt and Persia/Iran sometimes offer similar claims, but to that extent I believe a country like Russia probably has a better case, although Russia's massive eastward expansion only really began after the 16th century.", "The reign of Emperor Majorian (AD 457-461) was a short lived rebound and was the last attempt by a Western Roman Emperor to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. He managed to not only defend Italy, but reconquered territory in Gaul and reconquered most of Hispania. He also planned to invade and retake Mauritania which were only thwarted by traitors burning his fleet. Unfortunately Majorian was betrayed by his magister militum Ricimer and the Senate (who opposed his system of reforms) who murdered Majorian at the age of forty. Considering that only five years before Majorian came to power Rome had been sacked by the Vandals, his conquests were a remarkable achievement. Majorian's reign probably gave the Western Empire a few more years of existence, while his death (and thus the loss of a strong and capable leader) almost certainly robbed the West of a few more years.", "\"Reboots\" have often worked.\n\nImperial Russia to USSR.\n\nPersia has done this a couple of times (say, Parthia to Sassanid).\n\nMacedonia kind if rebooted Greece, which had been on something of a slide after Athens lost to Sparta.\n\nYou could even make a case that Austria of the declining Austria-Hungary resurged massively (if for a short period) with the 3rd Reich."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I"], [], [], ["http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2010/08/106-barbarian-at-the-gate.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_third_century"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "9w8nfb", "title": "Why did hunting ever become a way to gather food when simply trapping animals is much more efficient?", "selftext": "Would it not have been much easier to simply snare, trap, perhaps let them fall into a pit, or to capture them in cages and keep them as live stock instead of hunting them? It seems to me that when we see historic reenactments on TV they always portray ancient Native Americans and such with spears and bows and arrows, walking around hunting. Is this an accurate representation of how it was done?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9w8nfb/why_did_hunting_ever_become_a_way_to_gather_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9irw5e"], "score": [8], "text": ["Hi, this question is about human behaviour that reaches deep into *prehistory* (and even pre Homo Sapiens). For that reason, it would be worth x-posting to our sister sub /r/AskAnthropology. While there are some anthropologists here, there are more there, and with greater focus on earlier time periods and human evolution. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "322nlu", "title": "I heard somewhere that the \"natural born citizen\" requirement for the U.S. presidency was added to the U.S. Constitution to prevent Alexander Hamilton from becoming president. Is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/322nlu/i_heard_somewhere_that_the_natural_born_citizen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq7bp6y"], "score": [20], "text": ["Finally, a question I can answer!\n\nFirst and foremost, there was nothing keeping Hamilton from running, except his political apathy (and death by gunshot wound). Nobody was a natural born citizen at that point, they were all British subjects, and Hamilton, while born in the Caribbean (Barbosa i believe) was still a British subject as it was a British territory. It's similar to how McCain was able to run for president in 2008 despite being born in Panama. \n\nI have no sources as to whether or not Hamilton expressed any desire to run for president. However, there was discourse among the federalists as to which of the party leaders (Adams or Hamilton) should  represent them in the 1800 election. Ultimately they felt it unwise to run Hamilton, he was a very controversial figure. \n\nNow as to the creation of the continuation:\n\nIt's difficult to say because, as delegates were prohibited from taking notes on the goings on at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia (that of course didn't stop James Madison) so they could speak freely without fearing that it would tarnish their reputation. \n\nAlexander Hamilton was preset in the constitutional convention, he was the rep from NY, so I can't imagine that they would present it as such while he's in the room, but even if they did, it still doesn't keep him from running. \n\n**Edit**: Hamilton was born on the Island of Nevis, not Barbados as I believed (or Barbosa according to iPhone Autocorrect.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3suh1p", "title": "All through school I was taught that (classical) Roman and Greek culture were extremely similar, because the Romans copied Greek culture. How reasonable do you think that claim is?", "selftext": "When I was eight I remember looking at pictures of stereotypical ancient Greeks in a children's text book. The teacher told us that it was no coincidence if we thought they resembled Romans (who we'd \"leaned\" about some months before) because the Romans copied there entire culture from the Greeks ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3suh1p/all_through_school_i_was_taught_that_classical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx0w1uz"], "score": [3], "text": ["\nThe Romans did adopt some areas of Greek culture, many Greeks were taken as slaves and served as teachers and doctors in households, however the Romans admired the Greeks of around the 4th century BC as great heroes and legends whilst they considered the Greeks that were around in their time to be little more than a warrior race of barbarians, and hence a threat to the Roman way of life\n\nBenjamin Isaac, Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ahw5s", "title": "What were some interesting historical rude gestures?", "selftext": "What were the middle finger equivalents back in the day?\n\nI know 'the figs' from reading Dante, what else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ahw5s/what_were_some_interesting_historical_rude/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8xnmde"], "score": [3], "text": ["In 17th century England MPs farted during parliamentary speeches to show their derision."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "39x9x9", "title": "Who are Russia's oligarchs and how did they become rich?", "selftext": "History up to 1995 is allowed!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39x9x9/who_are_russias_oligarchs_and_how_did_they_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs7sp35"], "score": [14], "text": ["Put simply, the term 'Russian Oligarch' refers to Russian businessmen who rapidly accrued large amounts of wealth through the purchasing of Soviet assets after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991). Effectively business magnates, they saw the opportunity of the Soviet Union's vast production assets (factories, mines etc.) and bought them off the state. \n\nFor those who don't know, the transition from communism to capitalism involved the sale of most state-owned industry, due to the nature of the transition there was a huge amount of denationalisation which needed to occur and as a result most state-industry was effectively given away. Newly freed from communism, those who are today often known in the media as 'Oligarchs' are the men who took ownership of these industries. I won't talk about it in detail as it's a slight meander but many of these Oligarchs amassed such industrial wealth through corruption, bribery and other dishonest means. Ultimately many of these men became Billionaires essentially dividing up the Soviet state amongst themselves and reaping the rewards. The term 'Oligarch' is used somewhat loosely in the media sometimes just referring to very wealthy individuals from former Soviet countries.\n\nTLDR: Men who made fortunes through buying up state-owned industry when the Soviet union dissolved; they became rich through owning large factories and other economic facilities\n\nEDIT: Added some punctuation and Soviet dissolution date"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8cys6w", "title": "Did the Council of Ephesus effectively end Nestorianism in the West, and, if not, what measures would the Church have taken to combat the heresy afterwards?", "selftext": "In 431 AD, the Council of Ephesus ruled that Jesus was one person with two natures, not separate divine and human persons, as the Nestorians held. Did Nestorianism remain popular with any group in West in the following period? Do we see it continue in \"folk\" religion despite its official status? Did any scholars show its influence? What measures would the Church have taken to combat this and other heresy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cys6w/did_the_council_of_ephesus_effectively_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxk18nz"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a great question, thanks for asking it. \n\nLet's start with some background. Nestorius was an Antiochene monk who had been installed as the Bishop of Constantinople in the Spring of 428. Early in his career, he preached against the title \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u03c4\u03cc\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2 (*Theotokos* or \"God-bearer\") for Mary, the mother of Jesus, offering instead the title of \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c4\u03cc\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2 (*Christotokos* or \"Christ-bearer\"). The latter, Nestorius thought, preserved divinity from being implicated in birth and death (and thus change). Divine impassibility was one of Nestorius' principal concerns, obviously. But it should be noted that *Theotokos* was a pious title in use since at least the 3rd century (we find it in Origen as well as the hymn *Sub Tuum Praesidium*). \n\n According to Cyril of Alexandria's letter to Pope Celestine (*Ep.* 11), Nestorius allowed Bishop Dorotheus from Marcianopolis to come in and preach in the summer of 430. In his preaching, while Nestorius was in attendance, Dorotheus anathematized anyone who would call Mary the mother of God.  Socrates Scholasticus relays a similar story, saying that Anastasius, a presbyter in Constantinople and Nestorius' right-hand man, had preached against *Theotokos* arguing that \"it is impossible that God be born of a woman.\" (Socrates Scholasticus, *HE* 7.32).\n\nThe Council of Ephesus was called by Theodosius II in the winter of 430. Nestorius had already been condemned by Pope Celestine in the West at a Roman Synod held in August of 430. At the council in 431, Nestorius was deposed and Cyril's concept of the hypostatic union won out, understood as the better interpretation of the Council of Nicaea (the chief authority in late ancient Christianity next to Scripture). \n\nThis, however, did not settle the matter. Far from, in fact. As Jaroslav Pelikan writes:\n\n > That was anything but the end of the christological controversy. As soon became clear, the Ephesian resolution of the conflict was not acceptable to anyone and had itself to be resolved in one or another direction.\n\nThus, in the intervening twenty years, it became clear that Ephesus had satisfied neither the Nestorians nor Cyril's party. A new council was called in 451, this time at Chalcedon, to settle the matter. Nestorius had been in exile in the Great Oasis in Egypt between Ephesus and Chalcedon (spending a few years initially back at his home monastery, but moved to Egypt in the early 430s). \n\nThis question is particularly interesting because, in fact, the West never really saw Nestorianism take off. The West had, since the time of Tertullian (d. 220AD), held to a two-substance, one-person Christology (cf. his *Adv. Prax.*). Because the West had a stable concept of person (*persona*), it was never susceptible to the central issue in Nestorianism, namely assigning predicates ultimately to natures instead of persons. They always had a single person who was the subject of attribution. Thus, in the West, it was common to say that \"God was born\" (*Deus natus est*) or \"God suffered\" (*Deus passus*). The Westerners did not, of course, mean that *divinity* suffered - that would simply be to mirror Nestorius. Rather, they could say that \"God suffered\" because Jesus Christ, who is one person, is both God and man. He suffered, and since he is God, it is right to say that God suffered. This is what is known as the communication of idioms (*communicatio idiomatum*). \n\nThe only trace of \"Nestorianism\" in the West isn't really Nestorianism, but precedes Nestorius by about 10 years. It's found in the *Libellus Emenedationis* of Leporius, cited by John Cassian in his treatise against Nestorius, titled, *On the Incarnation of the Lord Against Nestorius in Seven Books*. In Leporius' *Libellus*, there is a key phrase wherein he says that:\n\n > quasi inferiora se deus agere videatur, ita hominem cum deo natum esse dicamus, ut seorsum quae dei sunt soli deo demus, et seorsum quae sunt hominis soli homini deputemus\n\n > Lest God be thought to do things beneath him, we said that a man was born *with* God, so that those things which belong to God alone may be said of him separately, while those things which belong to men alone could be said separately of the man\n\nThis is essentially Nestorius' dyophysite hermeneutic at work, parsing the predications according to natures rather than persons. But this is as close as the West ever gets to \"Nestorianism\", at least before Nestorianism. It never gains any ground in the West simply because Latin theology had this concept of \"person\" that the East did not figure out until the fifth century. \n\nFor further reading:\n\nBethune-Baker, J.F. *Nestorius and His Teaching: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence* (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998) [This book is mostly bad, but it ought to be read if you're interested in Nestorianism]\n\nLoofs, Friedrich, *Nestorius and His Place in the History of Christian Doctrine* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). [Loofs is slightly better, but still too sympathetic of a reader to Nestorius such that he is often blinded to the deficiencies in Nestorius' thought]\n\nPelikan, Jaroslav, *A History of the Development of Doctrine*, Vol. I: *The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition* (100-600) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kltri", "title": "How stringent was the Ancient Spartan eugenics program?", "selftext": "I understand that if the child was sickly or deformed that they were discarded, but what about if later in their life (from the 5 - 20 range) they started developing poor eyesight? This came up in a conversation with an ass who thinks he is a know it all and I just wanted some confirmation one way or the other. \n\nWe were talking about Ancient Greece at dinner and I was saying to a female friend that she probably would have been happier as a full citizen in Sparta that in Athens (_URL_0_) as she is the athletic, weightlifting type who had a track and field career in high school. The guy and another loudmouth said that Athens was best. I disagreed, and said Sparta would probably be better IMHO.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kltri/how_stringent_was_the_ancient_spartan_eugenics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbq930m", "cbqg4sn"], "score": [72, 10], "text": ["The problem with the Spartans is that we know very little about them in reality. The vast majority of the image you probably have of Spartan society, particularly with the *agoge* and the strict communal living situation, comes from sources writing centuries after the fact in an environment of intense romanticization about the Spartans. It seems quite likely that many of the descriptions of the *agoge* were at the very least highly exaggerated, especially as there are certain internal contradictions, particularly in descriptions of communal eating. The very brief glances we get from the one author we can really trust in these things, Xenophon, shows a far more complex society.", "Slightly better on a scale of 1 to crap, yes. But it also depended on your wealth.\n\nI'll talk classical Athens first. The ideal woman as Pericles put it was (to paraphrase) 'not be more terrible than your nature made you and to not be talked about'. Women were supposed to be sequestered in the house, busily beavering away weaving, raising the kids, instructing the house servants, and kicking out legitimate offspring (the line between citizenship and non-citizens was a big thing in Athens). Letting a woman out of the house risked her getting knocked up and pregnant with another man's child (because women can't go 5 min without thinking about the 'D' according to ancient Greeks) and questions about his citizenship (Athenian citizenship required that *both* parents be citizens whereas most poleis required only the father) and inheritance. They'd be allowed out for religious festivals and processions and possibly may have attended the theatre (evidence is inconclusive) but aside from that they were essentially under house arrest. So, yes your friend would have hated it there.\n\n**But** that is for elite women, wives and daughters of the aristocrats. If you were a smallholder who couldn't afford to buy slaves or hire workers, then your wife worked with you on the field, she'd go to fetch water from the fountain, go to the market, etc... So if you weren't wealthy, those standards were only unobtainable ideals. Now that said, women were always under the thumb of a man (whether her father or husband), had no political rights, couldn't use the courts (not even to give testimony). \n\nAs for Sparta, our sources are either pro-Spartan or pro-Athenian - Athenian writers. So our sources are very limited. Also there was what one of my profs called the 'Spartan mirage', that the Spartans projected that all they were was a badass polis of egalitarian warriors. Piercing that veil is difficult. So in Sparta the women were encouraged to train and exercise (separate from the men of course) in the theory that strong women make strong babies. And that's what they were expected to do, kick out future soldiers for the state. The weird thing was they did gain some significant powers - such as the ability to inherit significant chunks of land. We also hear of some women declining to even raise children, so some control over reproduction. So that's definitely a bonus. Except you still don't have a political say and the state views you as a baby-machine. And everything in the state exists for the state.\n\nBut again, that's for the small group of actual Spartans. If your husband/father didn't have enough land to support himself in the mess (*syssition*) then he lost his citizenship. What happened to you then, what was your life like? We have no idea. Same for the wives/daughters of the *perioikoi* (non-Spartan inhabitants) and the helots. \n\nGenerally speaking, maybe life would have been better for a woman in Sparta (from a modern sense). But it's like asking if you'd like to be kicked in the nuts by an angry mule or kicked in the nuts by a angry cow. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Sparta"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1i5hkx", "title": "What were the early settlements like in New Spain in the 16th century?", "selftext": "Were they like frontier towns? How did they construct the town? What materials?\n\nI imagine waves of new Europeans coming in periodically would change the make up and size of the settlements pretty quickly.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i5hkx/what_were_the_early_settlements_like_in_new_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb17wn4"], "score": [5], "text": ["It's hard to group all of New Spain into one group, as there are multiple stories that can be told from the Aztecs to the Maya. Broadly speaking, the origins of New Spain are with the destruction of the Aztec Empire in 1519 by Cort\u00e9s. Prior to beginning his war, Cort\u00e9s and his soldiers received aid and shelter from enemies of the Aztec empire (the Tlaxcaltecas, for example). The Broken Spears (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), translated by Miguel Le\u00f3n-Portilla gives an excellent overview of these municipalities.\n\nPost-conquest, the crown put in effect the encomienda system, which was a means by which conquistadores might justly gain labor from the Native Americans they helped conquer. This saw the rise of farms, mines, and other labor-intensive sort of practices that were worked by indigenous populations. In theory, the encomienda was supposed to exchange the labor of the Native Americans for \"civilization\", or instruction in Christianity, protection from warring tribes, etc. In practice, the system was another form of indigenous slavery.\n\nRunning parallel with this is the development of a pretty enforced caste system with origins in the 16th century, but really developed towards the 17th. It was based on race, the largest distinctions being between Spaniards born in Spain, Spaniards born in Latin America, Native Americans, and Africans. Race was a much more blurred line, however, as this caste system also had places for interracial groups, like mestizos (Native American/Spaniard), mulattoes (African/Spaniard), and Zambas (Native American/African).This caste system was much like any social hierarchy--it could be overcome (there are examples of Native American nobles, who were entrusted land grants by the crown, for example), but for the most part, it was a pretty stable social norm.\n\nTown structure and life, for the most part, was largely based on European appropriation to existing states. Getting into more detail is difficult, as it is largely based on the area you'd like to know more about, but the Maya for example had sort-of towns they'd refer to as cah (pl: cahob) that mixed our conception of neighborhood, family, and a few other European traditions (Matthew Restall's The Maya World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) is a great source if you want to learn more about cah in particular, while Farriss's Maya Society Under Colonial Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) is probably the standard reference book for all things Maya). The Spaniards in Yucat\u00e1n took these arrangements, and would formalize them in terms of municipalities, or town structures.\n\nAs for the waves of new Europeans, they tended to adjust towards what was acceptable in Latin America, rather than create Europe within Latin America. A lot of the initial reports of the indigenous populations (Hans Staden, Bernal Diaz and Cort\u00e9s, and Friar Ram\u00f3n Pan\u00e9 to name a few of the earliest accounts) emphasized the more sinful nature of the Native Americans, and while many Friars (especially the Franciscans) came to save souls, there was definitely a large population of Spaniards who came to Latin America as a sort-of playground for lust and riches. Stuart Schwartz's All Can Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) has a section about this particular aspect in Latin America.\n\nHope this helps!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t1rc7", "title": "How did cultural norm shifts define the transition from classical to modern day music? [X-Post from r/music]", "selftext": "Why is the contemporary period so drastically different from the romantic, classical, and baroque periods? For that matter, why are all of the periods so different from one another?\n\nI'm a classically trained pianist and I've long thought about this--what caused Bach's music to be so different from Beethoven's? And why are the two both labeled as \"classical pianists\" despite being so dramatically different?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t1rc7/how_did_cultural_norm_shifts_define_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce3or3h", "ce43fjw"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["This is quite a big question. As caffarelli said, it reaches into the philosophical realm. I will try to comment on some things that can be considered relevant.\n\n >  why are all of the periods so different from one another?\n\nBecause they are meant to be that way. These tags/names/periods/whatever were created to have a name to refer to a bunch of things that are really quite diverse. These tags started to be used in the 19th century, by German people who started to study music in a different way (see [this previous question](_URL_2_)). \n\nIt is quite complicated to try to give a coherent narrative to tell people about music composed in different ways, by different people from different places. We need to create abstract tools to manage that kind of knowledge, putting a bunch of people and music under a tag helps us to focus on what they have in common, on how some other people did things differently...\n\nThat answers why are these tags different. Going into why people wrote different music gets complicated.\n\n >  what caused Bach's music to be so different from Beethoven's?\n\nShort attempt to answer: because both had different elements to work with. They lived in different social contexts, they had different instruments, different theoretical tools, different aesthetic ideals, different personalities (and considering other differences might show some more light).\n\nWhy did Bach wrote more religious music than Beethoven? Well, we can take a look at who their respective employers were. Bach seemed to be a very religious man, while Beethoven's beliefs don't seem to be clearly defined.\n\nWhy did Beethoven, unlike Bach, write for the piano? The piano had become [the dominant keyboard instrument ](_URL_8_) by Beethoven's time, and not by Bach's.\n\nWhy was Bach's music typically more full of counterpoint than Beethoven's? The more modern formal harmonic way of thinking started in the 18th century, mostly in France (see Rameau's treatise). Bach was educated, and teaching, based on figured bass (he probably disliked some of Rameau's ideas, I think CPE makes it evident in his writings) . By Beethoven's time, this system was more popular and developed. \n\nHow come harmony became more popular than counterpoint? Good question. I am not sure I can really answer it... Music theory is usually created/updated out of need (see the birth of notation during the so called Carolingian Renaissance), and music theory happens to change how people compose music (see how we find differences in how chant was notated, probably because of people trying to make scales and actual practice match). It's a virtuous/vicious circle (see the beginning of [Taruskin's History](_URL_3_) for examples and references about both situations).\n\nHarmony offered a more direct and less verbose approach to think, teach, and write music. It didn't come out of thin air (chords were mentioned in the 16th century, I think by Zarlino), but it was truly a revolutionary way of thinking. It was probably the biggest revolution until Shoenberg's. Counterpoint was born when people tried to think of, teach and write polyphonic music (mostly vocal, at first). Counterpoint started in a time when Pythagorean tuning was the theoretical model to tune notes. Centuries later people were working with different tunings (mean tone, and later other temperaments), for more (different) instruments in bigger ensembles, playing in different venues. The length of the notes used had changed considerably (have you noticed Gregorian chant seems to be quite... slow, while Bach's or Beethoven's music is super full of movement?). Lots of things had changed, musicians were facing different working conditions, and some clever guys found a different clever way to do things. People seemed to like that way...\n\nSo Bach and Beethoven had different instruments and different theoretical frameworks. They had different tastes, goals and personalities: Bach was conservative even by the standards of his time, and Beethoven was quite into breaking rules. See for example Beethoven's story when [he refused to step aside and bow before noble people](_URL_5_), or how he pretty much answered \"I break rules because I am Beethoven!\" when questioned by his friends/students why he had not cared to follow some accepted rules (both stories and references to them can be found in [this book by Peter Kivy](_URL_0_)).\n\nBoth produced works of art, but the very ideas of what art was and how it was supposed to be made were different. Bach's \"generation\" was still probably influenced by [Affektenlehre](_URL_4_). Bach's sons were probably more into [empfindsamkeit](_URL_7_), and Beethoven grew up with [Sturm und Drang](_URL_6_).\n\nHow and why those aesthetic changes happened? Hopefully somebody learned in the history of ideas can come to our rescue. We are going to need them if we keep going back to the future... We could probably go into many other factors that might have influenced the production of both composers: the relevance of individualism in their time and their view of themselves, the social status of musicians, the idea of genius... We could probably use the help of people into sociology, not to mention German history... This is where things get scary, if we get away from names, events and objects to try to see the process between them. Those pesky tags invented in the 19th century some times help us keeping our sanity.\n\n >  why are the two both labeled as \"classical pianists\" despite being so dramatically different?\n\nI have not seen Bach considered a classical pianist. He might be considered so in informal circles, where \"classical\" is a huge (useful) tag that groups everything. \n\nIn any case, both are part of \"the canon\". This canon started in the 19th century (see my reference to how \"periods\" were created). Beethoven was taken from super great musician to music god (see the book by Kivy I mentioned before, he makes a really interesting comparison of the art depicting Beethoven at different points in his life, after his death, and after his \"canonization\")... He became the model of perfection for quite a lot of students and teachers . Bach's music was brought to life back then, too. Bach was found to be an extraordinary musician, and became the poster boy for the (German) baroque period, Beethoven was another poster boy. The next in the canon was Brahms, and even during his life he was told he was \"the next.\" \n\nThis canon helps us having some kind of narrative when it comes to composers. Having Mozarts, Haydns and so on really help trying to find order among chaos. Of course, it's easy to miss the forest for the tree... \n\nThe narrative in music history has focused on different things to try to make sense: names for periods, arbitrary periods of time, great compositions, great composers, groups of composers, etc.. Great men were a cornerstone in the narratives of the 19th century, that approach is still going strong in how most people talk about classical music (really, what do most people talk about when asked about classical music?)\n\nI really recommend you to read the first chapter of [this book](_URL_1_) for more on that narrative. To be honest, the whole Cambridge collection on music is great.\n\nI tried to make sense, but I had exams all afternoon and need to sleep. \n\nI can try to tackle the break with common practice (contemporary usually means \"music from the last 15-20 years, and the composer is probably alive\") tomorrow. I think there's a guy/gal who posts over here who is an expert in 20th century music, so we might find good insight on that soon.", " >  Why is the contemporary period so drastically different from the romantic, classical, and baroque periods?\n\nUsing contemporary to talk about all the music that sounds drastically different from the romantic, classical and/or baroque is not the best choice. That term is usually used for the music that is recent within our lives. \n\nIn any case, why did music become so different?\n\nIt was a gradual process. If you get into the details of how music has been written at different times, it's obvious there are huge differences from one composer to another (not even having to cover a huge time span). It's easy to see the sons of J. S. Bach writing music differently than his father. It's easy to see a different between Beethoven's music and Haydn's (who was his teacher for a while)... And those people knew each other!\n\nSome factors that are relevant to the big changes (pardon the attempt to cover a lot of change with just some observations). \n\nHarmony and tuning. Harmony became formalized in the 18th century, consolidating the big change that happened in the 16th century (that's the time when major/minor scales took over, leaving modes behind). Harmony and tuning are closely related. As I mentioned before, tuning had changed from [mean tone temperaments](_URL_0_) (16th century) to the so called circulating temperaments (18th century). Why is this relevant? Well, have you seen music from the 16th century written in D# minor? No? Is there any Vivaldi concerto written in, say, Bb minor? Hmm... \n\nFor keyboard instruments, temperaments allowed to write music using more intervals. There were some [super nasty](_URL_2_) ones that were not very helpful for the styles of yore. Wind instruments were in no condition to attempt to play many crazy notes (that's why we have different variations of the same instrument, producing different sounds under the same name) and strings obviously have problems playing crazy things in complicated keys. There was neither a model nor a need to use those crazy notes with such great difficulty. \n\nTuning systems evolved and allowed more intervals to be used, keyboard instruments had more options (the Well Tempered Clavier is the most famous example). Harmony started to include more dissonances (compare the dissonances in Palestrina with those in Bach) and enharmonics [became a thing](_URL_8_) and then you see Chopin writing that C# and Db are the same thing... \n\nHarmony started being about assigning specific names to specific combinations of simultaneous notes in the 18th century. The functional ideas we now learn in school were developed. These relationships gave a very good framework to use more and more dissonances and to keep some kind of unity/continuity when adding more and more foreign notes to music that was in a simple key.\n\nForm and social function. Liturgical music was a very important part in the past, and we had a lot of masses and what not. In the baroque, we find dances and groups of them as a model to organize music. Menuets, gigas and so on... They were not for actual dancing anymore, that social function was gone. After those, we get more abstract types of music: sonatas, preludes... We find a lot of music without text, that is meant pretty much only for listening. That music was meant for rich patrons in many cases, but then musicians found themselves writing for a broader audience (publishing their sheet music, giving concerts for well doing people to attend to, etc.). Great performers and composers become famous, they are now considered artists (not artisans), individuality and originality are valued more and more... \n\nComposers work on more and more abstract things, using their own (recently created) language (less and less guided by rhetoric, more guided by abstract music theory). Form, structure, becomes quite relevant in the German world. Compositions were not so long during the Renaissance and baroque, Beethoven's symphonies were massive in their time and then the romantics took those as a model (and made them even bigger in every way)... Big, abstract music, modern musical analysis was born by the middle of the 19th century (mostly to help performers making the most out of more complex compositions).\n\nThere were these \"models\" for people to follow. Sonatas for solo instrument, sonatas for small groups (quartets, trios, and so on), sonatas for big groups (symphonies)... No longer based on old social functions, and actually creating new ones (going to a recital, or symphony concert). Then some people wanted to go beyond that form (after all, Beethoven had extended it so much...), Liszt is usually the poster boy for this revolution. We now have [tone poems](_URL_6_) (of which Brahms was not a big fan): extra-musical ideas expressed through boundless music. Lots of freedom for the composer in terms of structure (and remember the huge harmonic options; they had more and more options for timbre, too).\n\nMusic had its own language, different social functions, ambitious composers were rewarded by their originality and were now writing music without form (or more like with whatever form they wanted for it) having a lot of harmonic choices (and audiences more and more tolerant of dissonance). \n\nFrom that we see how Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg pulled and pulled until there was not much left of the old harmonic system. We see how Liszt, Strauss, Scriabin pulled until there was not much of conventional form. Composers being more free to write what they wanted to, and having audiences wanting more original works.\n\nNew elements were added to the already complicated situation: exotic influences from other musical traditions, and influences from the past. These two are probably a result of the new born phenomenon of musicology. The 19th century was full of antiquarians, it was super fashionable to know about and play \"old\" music. At the same time, more \"primitive\" music was studied: the \"learned\" western men were interested in seeing what music was in other parts of the world. Debussy was very impressed, pun intended, by the music he heard at the [World Expo](_URL_3_) and wanted to try [those crazy rhythms and scales](_URL_5_) people were using in exotic places. Pentatonic scales, a lack of harmonic structure and the allegro sonata was gone... People were starting to look back at the old ways to compose music, and modes slowly came back to life (Beethoven's Dankgesang already included \"in the Lydian mode\" in its title, even if we have some trouble figuring out where the lydian is).\n\nAlso, technology happened... There had been a lot of changes in a lot of instruments, and then electricity gave composers a new world.  \n\nAfter all that, we are no longer in Kansas. \n\nIf you are interested in seeing in more detail how things changed so much (and what came next), see: \n\n* [Cambridge History of Western Music Theory](_URL_7_)\n\n* [Cambridge History of Nineteenth-century Music](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Materials and techniques of twentieth-century music](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/possessor-and-the-possessed-handel-mozart-beethoven-and-the-idea-of-musical-genius/oclc/246971479&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-history-of-nineteenth-century-music/oclc/56124271&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qhtdc/when_did_classical_music_stop_being_just_music/", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-history-of-western-music-vol-1-the-earliest-notations-to-the-sixteenth-century/oclc/723695489&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affektenlehre", "https://pay.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1s4wje/original_hipster/cdtz26d", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_drang", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_style", "https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k4pau/when_and_why_did_the_harpsichord_fall_out_of/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_tone", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-history-of-nineteenth-century-music/oclc/56124271&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_interval", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_expo", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/materials-and-techniques-of-twentieth-century-music/oclc/19510503&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQY9W7fCl8", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_poem", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-history-of-western-music-theory/oclc/45166705&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qxzft/music_historians_was_there_an_event_that_became/"]]}
{"q_id": "70kf05", "title": "What are some good American History primary sources to teach my 9th graders about how to analyze history?", "selftext": "Hi!\n\nI'm student teaching this semester and I've been tasked with creating a learning station about how to read primary documents. What I'm looking for are events that may or may not be often studied in American history classes and have good examples of primary documents that the students can read and then make an attempt to tell *me* what happened.\n\nI remember that in my college American History Post 1949 class, we read two memos and were asked to then tell the professor what happened.  I think the two we read were \"The Long Telegram\" from George Kennan and another telegram from Nikolai Novikov.  I remember it as one of my favorite assignments from a history class.\n\nSo the eras we're studying are US Expansion and Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, The Great War, and the Great Depression (I'm only here eight weeks).  Does anyone have any sources that would be good for this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70kf05/what_are_some_good_american_history_primary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn3ufka", "dn3xddj"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["Definitely try googling \"us history primary sources [topic]\"! On imperialism, for example, I turned up [this awesome collection](_URL_0_).\n\nI'd also suggest you include an image or two (contemporary map, photograph where applicable)--that can *really* influence how people understand an event, and it's good to make students really think about the role of visuals. Like, have you ever seen those colorized World War I/World War II photos? It feels like a whole new level of *immediacy* and *reality* when they look like modern photos instead of \"old\" ones.", "I am very partial to the Stanford History Education Group. They have tons of lessons for World and US History that involve analyzing primary sources. And the best part is they are all free. The only downside is that they can be pretty paper-intensive though you can easily turn them into digital lessons.\n\nExplore the site, let me know if you need any more help with it. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/to1914.htm"], ["https://sheg.stanford.edu/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ceg3d", "title": "Is the current amount of Islamic jihad attacks a modern phenomena?", "selftext": "Obviously the concept of jihad is an old one, but is the amount of attacks that happen now unique in history? Or has this element of radical Islam always existed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ceg3d/is_the_current_amount_of_islamic_jihad_attacks_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1hhaun"], "score": [5], "text": ["*Jihad* (lit: Struggle/strive) itself is an interesting topic within Islamic history.  You are correct in saying that Jihad has always existed.  It is explicitly mentioned within the Qur'an as both an inner struggle and an outward fight.  It is from here that come the terms *Jihad Akbar* (Lit: Greater Jihad) and *Jihad Asghar* (Lit: Lesser Jihad).\n\n*Jihad Akbar* is, linguistically and historically, the more important aspect of jihad, and refers to the inner struggle to live a piously.  This would include things such as avoiding sins and temptations, not being arrogant, and just generally living a holy life.  This is the jihad that, in the view of many such as Abdelkader El Djezairi (19th century spiritual/political leader and father of modern Algeria), necessary for all muslims to undertake.  It is only if you have tackled this issue of *Jihad Akbar* that you should move on to *Jihad Asghar*.\n\n*Jihad Asghar* is this concept of militarily opposing an enemy, and is seen as a secondary part of the overall jihad struggle.  This has always existed, although it wasn't always seen as radical.  For example, it was viewed as just and the duty of Muslims to rise up against oppressive rulers.  This is what happened in 750 CE with the 'Abbasid rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate, which was widely viewed as corrupt.  This rebellion could be viewed as a form of \"jihad\".  Even after the rebellion was over, there existed roaming groups of *khawarij* (sing: *khariji*. lit: those who exit the community) who were determined to stay away from the rest of the Muslims who they viewed as *kafr* (lit: unbeliever).  Some of these extremist Khawarij even attacked Muslim city centers, in the name of killing the apostates.\n\nIf you are referring to Islamist jihadist attacks against civilian targets, then it is indeed more of a modern phenomenon. In fact, suicide bombings themselves (especially against non-government/military targets) didn't become common until well into the 20th century.   Muhammad himself, although not free of bloodshed in any way, largely opposed the killing of innocent civilians except in certain cases.  For example, he slaughtered the men of the Benu Qurayza in Medina after they broke the treaty with the Muslims and helped the Meccans.  This was taken as justification by some, such as al-Qaeda, to justify attacks against civilians (you can read about the 7 justifications al-Qaeda used [here](_URL_0_)).\n\nSo the justification for and the precedent of the killing of civilians has always existed, at least in a limited fashion.  It is the interpretation and acceptance of killing civilians that has changed.  Due to the rise of fundamentalist strains of thought from the 19th century onwards, such as the *wahhabi* movement in Saudi Arabia (I can link to a post I wrote about that before if you would like), literalistic followings of the Qur'an and Sunna (including the belief in offensive jihad) have gained prominence.  It is groups that subscribe to these thoughts who carry out the vast majority of terrorist attacks.\n  \nI would recommend if you are interested the book *The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11* by Lawrence Wright if you are interested in the path of al-Qaeda towards offensive jihad.  It is supremely interesting and heavily acclaimed.\n\n**Sources**\n\n- Bonner, Michael. *Jihad in Islamic History:Doctrines and Practice*. 2006.\n\n- Kaltner, John  &  Wiktorowicz, Quintan. *Killing in the Name of Islam: Al-Qaeda's Justification for September 11*. Middle East Policy Council Volume X, Summer 2003.\n\n- Oxford Bibbliographies. *Kharijites*\n\n- Lecture notes from university course \"Modern Arab Political Thought\" and others.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mafhoum.com/press5/147S29.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8o8m9w", "title": "What was the role of the United Kingdom in the Nuremberg Trials post world war 2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8o8m9w/what_was_the_role_of_the_united_kingdom_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e01iwoq"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, the UK was part of the four Allied judges and prosecution for the International Military Tribunal (IMT).  Geoffrey Lawrence  was the main British judge at the IMT and President of the tribunal. Hartley Shawcross was the UK's prosecutor for the IMT and worked in conjunction with the other prosecutors for the IMTs. \n\nThe IMT though soon became mired in legal fog and the emerging Cold War meant that the type of inter-Allied unity that enabled the IMT fell apart. Each of the Allied powers conducted their own tribunals, often called National Military Tribunals (NMTs), in their own occupation zones in the aftermath of this breakdown which was apparent while the IMT was going on. The UK was no different in this regard and they held tribunals in the [British zone](_URL_0_) with many taking place in Hamburg's [Curiohaus](_URL_5_).  L\u00fcneburg was the site of an earlier British-run tribunal, the [Belsen trial](_URL_3_). The Hamburg courts were often overshadowed by their American NMTs (confusingly located in Nuremberg and called the Subsequent Nuremberg Tribunals although they were not inter-Alllied affairs like the IMT) but the British did have some prominent defendants. The [Tesch trial](_URL_1_) involved the responsibility of corporate entities for the Holocaust. The [Stalag Luft III case](_URL_4_) was a trial against the German officers responsible for the execution of escaped PoWs from the \"Great Escape\" in March 1944. The British NMTs, along with others, were collected in the [*Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals*](_URL_2_) for the UN. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_occupation_zone#/media/File:Deutschland_Besatzungszonen_8_Jun_1947_-_22_Apr_1949.svg", "http://www.worldcourts.com/imt/eng/decisions/1946.03.08_United_Kingdom_v_Tesch.pdf", "https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/law-reports-trials-war-criminals.html", "http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Contents.html", "https://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/WCC/wielen1.htm", "https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/en/curiohaus/"]]}
{"q_id": "1hqbyb", "title": "Did the wealthy ancient Greeks (the ancient Greeks of around Socrates's time) hunt lions for pleasure?", "selftext": "Apparently they weren't extinct there yet", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hqbyb/did_the_wealthy_ancient_greeks_the_ancient_greeks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cawv85k"], "score": [4], "text": ["Possibly; but (a) they would have had to go to Thrace to do so, and (b) it's very unclear how many lions were still around at that time. Lions are frequently used in poetic imagery in Homer and other Classical-era poetry, but that doesn't imply that they were still around all over the place: it's likely that the population explosion of the 8th century BCE, in particular, led to very dangerous animals like lions being hunted to extinction (local extinction, I mean).\n\nArtistic evidence indicates that lions were an unfamiliar sight to Greek artists working prior to the mid-4th century. Prior to about 350 BCE, depictions of lions were very stylised -- that is, drawn by people who had never seen a lion. Over the period 350-330, though, there was a switch to much more naturalistic portrayals of lions,^1 and this may be a result of circuses with lions, which Isokrates mentions as an annual occurrence in a text written in ca. 354/3.^2\n\nBut there were lions -- just not south of Macedonia. Xenophon, *On hunting* 11.1, which is around the time that you're asking about, indicates that in his day you had to go to Thrace or the Near East to find lions. Herodotos 7.126, writing a few decades earlier, also states that lions were confined to Thrace in his time (and that they attacked camels in Xerxes' army in the second Persian invasion); and ditto in Aristotle, *History of Animals* vi.579b.\n\nHere's how Xenophon describes the process of catching lions:\n\n >  Lions, leopards, lynxes, panthers, bears and all other such game are to be captured in foreign countries \u2014 about Mount Pangaeus [in Thrace] and Cittus beyond Macedonia; or again, in Nysa beyond Syria, and upon other mountains suited to the breeding of large game. In the mountains, owing to the difficulty of the ground, some of these animals are captured by means of poison \u2014 the drug aconite \u2014 which the hunters throw down for them, taking care to mix it with the favourite food of the wild best, near pools and drinking-places or wherever else they are likely to pay visits. Others of them, as they descend into the plains at night, may be cut off by parties mounted upon horseback and well armed, and so captured, but not without causing considerable danger to their captors.\n\n---\n^(1) C. Vermeule, \"Greek funerary animals,\" *American Journal of Archeology* 76 (1972) 49-59.  \n^(2) Isokrates, *Antidosis* 213ff. For discussion see L. J. Bliquez, \"Lions and Greek sculptors,\" *The Classical World* 68.6 (1975) 381-4."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mrr8q", "title": "Why do we know so much more about Celtic and Norse mythology than Baltic or Slavic mythology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mrr8q/why_do_we_know_so_much_more_about_celtic_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm7blzp", "cm7cqu0"], "score": [15, 37], "text": ["Much of what we know about norse mythology comes from the Prose  &  Poetic Edda, several centuries after the christianization of scandinavia. Without that, we might not know more about scandinavion mythology, and what we know is very difficult to extract from a culture that has been thoroughly christianized. This results in the illusion that we know what pre-christian norse mythology is like\u2014this is actually a fairly open mystery.\n\nSo, in two parts of an answer: We don't know very much about \"true\" norse mythology, and what we do know very much hinges on the two eddas, which has the convenience of producing a 'canonical' reference for the belief system. I would actually argue that we don't know much more about the norse mythology than we do about slavic and baltic mythology.\n\nI can't speak to the celtic beliefs, but my understanding is that we don't know much about them before britain was thoroughly christianized either.", "/u/LoveSomeLove provides an important caveat, that many of the details of Norse mythology are foggy. This is even more true of Celtic mythology, because we don't actually know very much about it. We have legendary and heroic stories, particularly of Ireland and to a lesser extent Wales and Scotland, but doing something as basic as reconstructing the pantheon is virtually impossible. Imagine, for example, if we knew about the Trojan War, Hercules' labors and the voyage of the Argonauts but we didn't know who Zeus and Ares were. A good example is the much ballyhooed \"horned god\" a name that evokes the sort of arcane, primal, mysterious sense much beloved of modern perceptions of the Celts. But the reason he is called the \"horned god\" is because, well, the iconography has horns, and the closest thing we have to a name is \"Cernunnos\", which probably means \"horned one\" and is thus more an epithet than a name. Again comparing to Greek mythology, it would be as if we only knew Zeus as \"the thunderer\" (Brontios).\n\nSo we don't actually know very much about Celtic mythology, and while we know significantly more about Norse mythology (for example, it is often possible to correlate names and scenes to iconography) what we know is complicated. Still, you are correct that in both cases we know more than for Slavic and particularly Baltic. The major thing that sets the Celts (Irish, really) and Norse apart from the Balts is that they were self-Christianizing, that is, they were not conquered by a Christian power. In particular we know about Norse mythology largely from Iceland, which adopted Christianity by vote and was pretty lax in terms of formalism and conversion. Ireland likewise adopted Christianity through its own processes (although obviously not free from external pressure). This means that for both Christianity was not a tool of conquest, and non-Christian belief was not a sign of resistance to be stamped out.\n\nWhile the Slaves were also to a degree self Christianizing, but there was also a great deal of coercion, particularly in regards to the Northern Crusades. When Iceland converted, there wasn't an unstable and threatening frontier with a non-Christian people of the sort that the early Slavic Christians had, and so the fault lines of \"us\" and \"them\" along religious lines weren't really drawn. So I think the key is that the degree to which pre-Christian beliefs and stories survive is directly correlated to the degree to which conversion was internal and the degree to which non-Christian was threatening."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "dbskm1", "title": "How did someone go about buying a house in medieval times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dbskm1/how_did_someone_go_about_buying_a_house_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f26o9tt"], "score": [21], "text": ["Well as the other answers and deleted answers have already implied, it\u2019s a bit difficult to say because the question is extremely broad. The answer would change depending on where and when you are (as it would today as well - buying a house can be vastly different even within one country).\n\nFirst of all, the idea that you can be a person who can afford to buy a house, and that there is a market for houses for individual people or families to live in, really depends on an urban environment and a \u201cmiddle class\u201d, or at least a class of skilled labour with disposable income. That kind of class and environment didn\u2019t always exist, so we\u2019re limited to places with cities and a middle class - urban areas of England, France, the Low Countries, the Hanseatic towns in the Baltic, northern Italy, for example.\n\nThere was a real estate market, sort of, but no real estate industry with agents doing all the work for sellers and buyers. Individuals probably wouldn\u2019t be buying their own houses either - so don\u2019t think of it in terms of modern people buying a single-family detached house. Those didn't really exist unless you were a wealthy lord living in a rural manor. Towns and cities were packed tight with houses, and they were mostly all attached like row houses, with maybe three or four floors if they were big houses. There are lots of surviving timber-framed medieval houses, so that\u2019s the type of thing we\u2019re talking about, more like a small apartment building, with lots of people living in them (also, if you imagine how many of those still exist, imagine how many there used to be! They burned down pretty easily\u2026)\n\nSo if individual people didn't buy a whole house for themselves and their families, who owned the houses? Here\u2019s a brief summary for England:\n\n > \"In larger towns lords owned urban property, ether exploring the houses which had been attached to rural estates since pre-Conquest times, or buying houses as an investment. These were sometimes intended as bases, perhaps for warehouses and accommodation for officials trading on behalf of the lord...Lords also acquired houses which could be rented out profitably to merchants and artisans...\" (Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850-1520, Yale University Press, 2002 pg. 147)\n\nHouses could also be owned by hospitals, churches, abbeys, military orders, etc...i.e. they were usually ultimately owned by a large institution and rented out.\n\nHow exactly these houses (or rooms or floors in a house) were rented out or sold could vary enormously, but I can give one example. It\u2019s from the crusader states, so probably similar to how it would have worked in Italy or France. When two people agreed to rent/buy/sell property, including a house or a part of a house, the transaction was usually regulated by the \u201cburgess court\u201d. Burgesses are literally people who live in cities, merchants, artisans, etc., rather than rural lords or peasants (the same word as \u201cbourgeois\u201d essentially). The court approved the transaction and kept a record of it. But it wasn't mandatory, so property could be bought and sold just by a private agreement. If there was any sort of dispute though, it would obviously be preferable to have an official court document. Transactions could also be approved by a church court if the property was owned by the church. Later in the 13th and 14th centuries and beyond, there were notaries to regulate these kinds of transfers, and any other sort of contract. Just like today, you needed a lawyer to do all the paperwork!\n\nHouses could be sold, but so could the ownership of smaller divisions of a house, and any debts associated with it, vifgages, mortgages, etc...this gets into the real gritty details of medieval economics. Mortgages are still familiar today - I don\u2019t know how it works everywhere, but for me, basically a bank gave me a big loan to buy my house and I pay them back in small increments forever and ever until the heat death of the universe. The same idea existed in the Middle Ages.\n\nOtherwise hopefully a medieval economic specialist could comment on mortgages and rent prices...my own specialty in this is really only in the legal sense (who wants to hear about disputes over property boundaries! Anyone? No...OK...)\n\nHere\u2019s some further reading, although I don't know if there\u2019s anything really accessible...this is pretty dry stuff, even for a medieval historian: \n\nEmily Tabuteau, *Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law* (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)\n\nMarwan Nader, *Burgesses and Burgess Law in the Latin Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus* (Ashgate, 2006)\n\nRodney Hilton, \u201cSome Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages\u201d, in *Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth*, ed. C. H. Feinstein (Cambridge, 1967)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bcwnzo", "title": "In what ways did the post-WWII \u201cbaby boom\u201d affect the \u201ccrime wave \u201cof the 1960s and 1970s - especially in the context of so many young, (disproportionately) black men coming of age in impoverished, segregated urban centers that had experienced massive white flight?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bcwnzo/in_what_ways_did_the_postwwii_baby_boom_affect/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekuu7zp"], "score": [2], "text": ["It seems like you are asking for the connection between the baby boom and crime in black neighborhoods in the 60's and 70's, but I think your question is assuming the answer. History is not so easy to draw a line through, but there are some important factors that contributed to crime in black communities in the 60's and 70's unrelated to the baby boom. \n\nIn general, these factors are (1) private segregation of businesses, (2) de jure segregation by the government, (3) discrimination by financial institutions and influence carriers (especially homeowners insurance), (4) the budding war on drugs and what is now called mass incarceration or the new jim crow if you fancy an excellent book by Michelle Alexander), (5) urban \"renewal\", in which black neighborhoods were designated as blight and demolished, (6) large migrations of black families out of rural communities, and many other factors.\n\nWhite flight was just one of many ways in which neighborhoods became segregated and people of color were pushed into areas with fewer resources and less healthy conditions. Other ways included restrictive covenants, where deeds on houses prevented transfer to people of color, or home owners associations preventing deed transfers, or zoning ordinances which were designed to push black residents into specific address, and many many more. \n\nI'm not so sure how related the baby boom was to segregation or crime, but rather the underlying discriminatory policies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "trrlu", "title": "Religious history question, specifically Jewish history", "selftext": "Do we have any record of how modern Judaism grew it's traditions from the often very specific or contradictory laws found in the Torah?\n\nFor example, the Torah specifically forbids \"seething a young goat in the milk of its mother\".  Nothing about a general ban on mixing meat and milk, but modern Kosher interpretation makes it a very broad ban up to and including keeping two separate sets cooking and eating tools.\n\nBut, by way of counterpoint, the ban on mixed fabrics is equally specific, it simply prohibits wool/linen mixes.  That one didn't grow to be a generic ban on mixed fabric of all sorts, cotton/poly blends are ok per modern shatnez.\n\nSimilarly, some explicit commandments, such as the death penalty for disobedient children, if they were ever enforced (whcih seems doubtful) have been pretty much completely ignored by modren Judaism.\n\nDid the decisions on that sort of thing come down from Council of Nicaea style decisions for which we still have records (or at least mention somewhere if not actual records), or did a lot of the major changes happen early enough that there aren't any reliable records of how it happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/trrlu/religious_history_question_specifically_jewish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4p5ofu", "c4p5tn5", "c4p71rt"], "score": [9, 4, 3], "text": ["You seem to have thought this question out pretty well, without reading a book about Judaism or anything...\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nGoing to the library and picking up an English translation of the Talmud will teach you more about this than I ever could by writing a comment. Seriously, it looks esoteric, but it's exactly what you are talking about.", "Jewish law is extremely complex. The death penalty in Judaism, even in ancient times was not taking lightly at all. It is said that if a Jewish court sentenced a person to death once every 70 years, it was considered a bloody court. \n\nOften, laws had intentionally absurd requirements, for example: If one wished to sentence a child to death for being disobedient, that child would have to be proven to be unteachable (can't remember the proper term) and his mother would have to throw the first stone during the stoning. Obviously, no mother would do this and so, it supposedly never happened.\n\nThe milk and meat restriction is a little easier; the commentary on that law says it's not right to eat a life-giving substance and a dead animal together. \n\nLastly, concerning laws with serious punishments, i.e. homosexual relations: For one to be convicted and sentenced, they would a) Have to be warned prior to engaging in homosexual sex b) Be caught in the act c) Have 3 eye witnesses testify, who were proven to have actually seen the sex taking place.\nSeeing as though this is impossible in today's world, Modern Judaism does not enforce punishments on people.\n\nI do not have any knowledge on the other parts of your question, although I recommend you take a look at the History of the Mishna/Gemara (commentaries)  ", "The thing you are looking for is the talmud which is basically rabbinic codification of oral jewish law written over a period of a few hundred years, roughly 500BC to 100AD. There are many debates within the talmud and people still disagree about meanings to this day. Also what do you mean by modern judaism that could be anything from Haridim to reform there are many interpretations of Judaism and generally they all disagree on interpretation?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud", "http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10805-midrash", "http://virtualreligion.net/iho/midrash.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m0ho4", "title": "Did team sports originate in the Americas?", "selftext": "I heard that somewhere, and I can't seem to find anything to verify it.  I know that only individuals competed in the [ancient greek olympics](_URL_2_).  I also know that [lacrosse](_URL_1_) was a team sport originally played by Native Americas, and the Maya had their own [sport](_URL_0_) played by teams of at least two.  But is there no evidence of a pre-columbian exchange team sport from Asia, Africa or Europe? Is there proof that team sports came from the Americas? Is the same true for ball sports as well (which are usually team sports, and weren't a part of the ancient greek olympics)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m0ho4/did_team_sports_originate_in_the_americas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4nx4v"], "score": [3], "text": ["No. The Greeks and the Romans played  Episkuros or Harpastum (which seems to be the ancestor of Rugby and Association Football.) The Chinese played Cuju, or Tsu Chu a game much like Association Football. The Iranians, Indians and Afghans all played a game like Polo. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHarris, H.A. Sport in Greece and Rome. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lacrosse", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Olympic_Games#Events"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fifa.com/classicfootball/history/the-game/origins.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3kbeu5", "title": "Why are American government officials secretaries but European government officials are ministers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kbeu5/why_are_american_government_officials_secretaries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwg7ft"], "score": [2], "text": ["Actually, the term \"secretary\" is used for offices in the United Kingdom as well: Secretary of State, Home Secretary, Chief Secretary, and so on.\n\nThe word comes from the Latin *secretarius*, literally meaning a person entrusted with a secret, or a confidential officer. The term was first used as a title for ministers presiding over executive departments during the reign of Elizabeth I - e.g., Chief Secretary for Ireland.\n\nThere are other European countries that [still use the term Secretary of State](_URL_0_).\n\nFrom the Oxford English Dictionary:\n\n > The occurrence of the title \u2018(Principal) Secretary of State (\u2020Estate)\u2019 under Queen Elizabeth may be taken as indicating the beginning of the development by which the king's secretary... became a minister invested with governing functions. Throughout the 17th c. there were two officials jointly holding the office of Secretary of State, and in the 18th c. the number varied between two and three; till near the close of this period the two (or two of the three) were distinguished as \u2018Principal Secretary of State for the Southern Province\u2019 and \u2018Principal Secretary of State for the Northern Province\u2019, with reference to the division between them of the control of foreign relations... ; but with regard to internal administration no division of functions was formally recognized. At the end of the 18th c. there were three Secretaries of State, and shortly afterwards the division of functions between them was recognized in their official designation, as \u2018Secretary of State for Home Affairs\u2019, \u2018for Foreign Affairs\u2019, and \u2018for the Colonies\u2019. In 1854 a Secretary of State for War was added, and 1858 a Secretary of State for India. The Secretaries of State are often more briefly called the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, etc. The Chief Secretary for Ireland (officially styled the Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, and informally the Irish Secretary), and the Secretary for Scotland (first appointed in 1885) were not secretaries of state, but had similar functions, and were (c 1911) members of the cabinet. The Secretary at War (down to 1855, when the office was united with that of the Secretary of State for War) was the parliamentary representative of the army, and had some degree of control over its finance. There have been numerous changes (too complex to set down here) in the nomenclature and duties of Secretaries of State since the nineteenth century. Since 1945, principal Secretaries of State have included the Secretary of State for the Home Department (Home Secretary), Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary), Industry, Defence, Employment, and Northern Ireland. The title Chief Secretary (to the Treasury) was introduced in 1961: it is a ministerial appointment as opposed to the various civil servant Treasury Secretaries. The principal Secretary of State (usu. the Home Secretary ) is sometimes referred to as the \u2018First Secretary\u2019.\n \n > In the U.S., the Secretary of State corresponds approximately to the British Foreign Secretary. Other cabinet ministers, heads of executive departments, are the Secretary of the Treasury, of War, of the Navy, of the Interior, of Agriculture. Each state of the Union has also its Secretary of State (or a corresponding officer with some other title). In recent years, the nomenclature of senior U.S. cabinet ministers has (as with their counterparts elsewhere) been subject to extensive changes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_State#Europe"]]}
{"q_id": "6bjkb5", "title": "What was the average age of a British person attending college in the 17th century?", "selftext": "I'm doing a presentation on Andrew Marvell, a famous British poet from 1621 - 1678.  It says he attended Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 13, and I was just wondering if this is as impressive as it is today?  How off would it be from the average age?  \n\nAlso, as an extension to this, who was the average person attending college?  Was it mostly high ranking or rich people who wanted to attend or did most people, like today, want higher education?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6bjkb5/what_was_the_average_age_of_a_british_person/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhoi9xr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Attending Oxford or Cambridge at 13 was not unusual - there was no minimum age at which you could enrol, although younger than 13 would have been uncommon. And of course, you had to be male - women could not take degrees in Britain until the mid-19th century.\n\nThe diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys didn't enrol at Magdalene College, Cambridge until he was 17 (in 1650), but this was in part due to ill health and lack of finances. The thing to remember is that the course of study was both very different and much less formal than it has been in the 20th and 21st centuries - in theory you would study works of philosophy and religion, in Latin, Greek and perhaps Hebrew; but many young men left without taking their degree. A 13 year old and a 19 year old could all be accommodated within this system, even at varying levels of ability and preparation. For a later example of this, consider the 18th century politician Charles James Fox, who went to Hertford College, Oxford, at 15, but left without a degree because he found the work easy and tedious."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hqjji", "title": "What happened to the Middle East?", "selftext": "Forty or fifty years ago, the Middle East was much more secular and westernized. What happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hqjji/what_happened_to_the_middle_east/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckvdr6n", "ckve89v"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["You need to go further back than that; the rise of modern militancy can be directly traced to the destabilising efforts of the German intelligence service during WWI.\n\nAJ Barker's *The First Iraq War 1914-1918* (originally titled *The Bastard War*) is an excellent source, if a little light on the politics. EDIT: For that side of it see *When God Made Hell* by Charles Townshend.", "For start, many Middle Eastern nations were more secular and westernized, but it isn't like those views were found universally amongst the residents of those nations. There were definitely conservatives, they just generally weren't in any positions of power and often weren't even in the main cities. Terrorist groups as we see them existed during the Cold War era as well, though their goals and methods were often quite different than their descendants in the Middle East today.\n\nThat being said, the main thing that one should remember is that pretty much all of these \"secular and westernized\" governments were dictatorships or autocracies of some form or another. People like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi weren't exactly accepting of things such as dissent, peaceful or otherwise, and they had a strong habit of jailing opposition leaders, censoring the press, and presiding over regimes that were often very corrupt. Egypt is quite notorious for essentially remaining under martial law almost continuously from 1967 to today (there was a brief reprieve in 1980).\n\nWesterners look at old photos of Alexandria and Tehran and like to reminisce of a time when people were wandering about those places in miniskirts and whatnot, but the Cold War was not exactly completely rosy in the Middle East. Now, this is a generalization, of course - after all, I'm pretty much completely leaving out the Arabian Peninsula itself (after all, the people in charge there were mostly quite conservative) - but across the Middle East there were genuine political and economic grievances (economic trends are hugely important - things like price fluctuations can have a big impact on public attitude), and given the overbearing nature of many of the governments of the Middle East, the people often had few ways of airing those grievances. Want to have a peaceful street demonstration? Want to be able to vote for an opposition party in a fair and safe election? Want to be able to print and distribute your own newspapers? Too bad (once again: this is a generalization, to fit the nature of the question), you probably can't. There is also the factor that in some Middle Eastern nations, minority groups had essentially ended up dominating government and locking out others - the two main examples being the Sunnis in Iraq and the Alawis in Syria. Most other Middle Eastern nations weren't like this, but in general the borders of the Middle East were often drawn without any real consideration as to what sorts of people would be living within those nations.\n\nWhen a government shut downs more legitimate and moderate means of dissent, it forces those sentiments underground. Sometimes this resulted in the opposite of what people typically associate with radical Middle Easter groups - it took the form of *highly* secular Marxist-Leninist opposition groups. Communists played a large role in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Leftist movements have also been very important in Palestine, forming a large part of the PLO. Very often, however (especially after the fall of the USSR), this sort of underground organization was conducted by conservative Islamic groups. The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the best known example of this - they've been around in Egypt since *1928* and for much of their history they have faced government repression. A lot of Islamic terrorist groups (as well as Communist ones) rose in this era (though some predated it) to attack the governments of the Middle East themselves - al-Queda's insistence on attacking the West set that organization apart from the rest when they rose to prominence.\n\nBasically, when people are angry at their lot in life - whether it be due to economic malaise, price fluctuations of basic goods, political repression, what have you - and they don't have legitimate means of affecting change in the policies of their states, they will often come to support more radical organizations. The Middle East is far from the only part of the world where this has occurred. In Iran in 1979, the fall of the Shah meant that there was a power vacuum, one that ended up being filled by the Islamists who would create the theocratic Iran that exists today. They certainly hadn't been the only opposition group when the Shah was in charge, but they proved to be the most organized and capable in the aftermath of the Revolution. To talk about a lot of other nations would infringe upon the 20-year rule, but I hope that I have sort of established some sort of point or another, albeit a generalized one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "29kgrb", "title": "How long have there been factions within Islam that seek to destroy the Kaaba?", "selftext": "I heard today that ISIS has vowed to \"Destroy Mecca\u2019s Kaaba, 'Kill Those Who Worship Stones.'\" A friendly redditor suggested that:\n >  \n >  \"The idea of wanting to destroy the Kaaba has a long and interesting precedent. Throughout history, Arabs who have traditionally hated Muhammad have expressed their desire of doing so, probably out of spite of what Muhammad represents.\n >  Yazid bin Muawiya of the opposing clan of the Ummayads, who massacred Muhammad's family including Muhammad's grandson Hussein at Karbala, also attacked the Kaaba with catapults.\n >  Previously, Muhammad's grandfather Abdul Muttalib organized the defense of the Kaaba against another attacker named Abraha.\n >  In the current incarnation, ISIS represents Wahabi'ism, a cult that wishes to erase Muhammad's heritage and establish the supremacy of the rival, non-Hashemite clans descended from Ummaya and Abd Shams(translated as slave of the Sun). Wahabis have already destroyed many heritage buildings belonging to Muhammad and his family and friends in Saudi Arabia, under the same guise.\n >  So why the enmity stretching over centuries? At its core was the ideology of Muhammad. Muhammad belonged to the poor, the downtrodden, the disenfranchised. The opposing clans represented elitism, money, power and Arab imperialism. It was the selfless vs the selfish. They tried to persuade, bribe, cajole, armtwist him to their side. He refused. They massacred most of his family. The survivors refused to budge, citing egalitarianism and condemning the trappings of concentrated power and wealth.\n >  And so it continues to this day.\"\n\nHow accurate is this assessment? It seems biased, but I know very little about the subject. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29kgrb/how_long_have_there_been_factions_within_islam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cilt002", "cilyqfm", "cilz4zv"], "score": [9, 10, 155], "text": ["It's exceptionally biased. Yazid did not \"massacre Muhammad's family.\" He was himself, with all the other Umayyads related to the prophet, although Hussein was more closely related. This is occurring in the context of the Second Fitna, a succession struggle to the Caliphate in which the Ummayads were not an \"opposing clan,\" they were themselves the Caliphs.\n\nThe whole part at the end about selfish clans and Arab imperialism probably first comes out of Abbasid propaganda from the end of the 8th century and later. There's no real contemporary evidence for it, but it has become a standard part of both Sunni and Shia polemics. Why both? The Sunni view the Umayyads as having ended the Rashidun caliphate and gone away from the Sunna. The Shia view them as having killed Hussein and others members of the house of the prophet. It would take a long explanation but that's basically wrong on both counts. The sunna as we know it today didn't exist, and the House of Ali/the Prophet that the Shia focus on would not have been a very clear lineage for another century or so \n\nNone of this stuff going on in the first couple centuries has anything to do, at root, with Wahabism, which is an early modern movement arising out of the alliance between Abd Al Wahab and the Al Saud. They aren't a cult, but they have been regarded as religious fanatics for much of their history, such as when they forcibly put down by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 19th century. The Wahabis do, however, generally disdain artifacts generally, and can be called basically iconoclastic, but they aren't a cult, they're the official religious ideology of Saudi Arabia. As far as I know the Saudis have never sought to destroy the Kaaba. I would also hesitate to characterize the ideology of Isis as Wahabist (this is getting into 20 year territory rule) as while Saudi Arabia has their fingers in a lot of international jihad pies, Saudi State Wahabism is not the ideology of any terrorist group I'm familiar with, and they generally hate the Al Saud for cooperating with America.\n\nedit: I was looking for a reference for what the guy was referring to when he said that Yazid attacked the Kaba with catapults, as I've never heard of such a thing. A quick look in the encyclopedia of Islam refers to Yazid attacking Mecca with catapults but it wasn't to destroy the Kaba it was because Mecca was the capital of Ibn Zubayr, who was holed up in the city, and had established himself as counter Caliph (considering the land he held, Ibn Zubayr, in effect, *was* the Caliph.) Yazid died before he could attack, the siege was eventually accomplished years after his death by Abd Al Malik. So the idea that Yazid did such a thing has no basis whatsoever as far as I can find-- he didn't even control the city.", "Forgive me if this is against the rules, but I just want to point out that the source reporting that ISIS plans to destroy the Kaaba is pretty sketchy.\n\nI will be extremely surprised if the quote is genuine, as talking about destroying the Kaaba is a really bad way to get support from Muslims.", "Your friendly redditor has engaged in a nice bit of \"let's make stuff up and hope people don't actually question what I'm saying.\"\n\nHe seems to think that the Kaaba was somehow seen as a symbol of Muhammad by the Arabs of his time. The Kaaba predated Muhammad by centuries and pagan Arabs in the area would have revered it just as much as Muslims did. Furthermore, the actual physical building of the Kaaba is a product of each time. Other than one stone, the building is rebuilt periodically. The location is what is sacred in Islam, not the structure. \n\nMoving forward, I have no idea what he means by \"Arabs who have traditionally hated Muhammad have expressed their desire of doing so, probably out of spite of what Muhammad represents.\" What Arabs? What are the sources that state this? There have been some groups (e.g. Qarmatians) that have wreaked havoc in Makkah but they, in their own twisted logic, would have argued that they were doing it out of love for Islam/Muhammad/God. \n\nNow, on Yazid ibn Muawiyah. The poster is mixing up people. Yazid ibn Muawiyah was the caliph at the time.....in Damascus. The man who \"attacked the Ka'ba\" was Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (quite an infamous character in Islamic history). Furthermore, it's quite deceptive to describe him as \"attacking the Ka'ba.\" The background is that a man named Abdullah ibn Zubair (grandson of the first caliph, Abu Bakr) had also laid claim to the caliphate and was supported by the people in Makkah and the surrounding areas. Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (a general, under Yazid ibn Muawiyah) was attacking *him*, not the Ka'ba. In the battle, yes, the Ka'ba was destroyed. However, to suggest that this was purposeful is ludicrous. In fact, when the Ka'ba was **accidentally** destroyed by the catapults, people in Hajjaj's army began defecting, sure that this was a sign that they were on the wrong side. Hajjaj (ever the shrewd politician) convinced his soldiers that *they* hadn't destroyed the Ka'ba, Abdullah ibn Zubair had. After all, if he had surrendered without a fight, they wouldn't have been forced to use the catapults, right? So really, this was his fault. The point I'm making is that yes, the Ka'ba was destroyed, but it was far from purposeful, let alone part of a expression of hatred towards an ideology.\n\nNext line, wow, even more pseudohistory. I've heard some pretty strange descriptions of Wahabism, but to say that they wish to erase Muhammad's heritage and establish the supremacy of the Banu Umayyah is the equivalent of someone saying the Republican party wishes to establish the supremacy of the descendants of Robert E. Lee and erase all aspects of George Washington's heritage. Literally, that's the comparison of how his statement sounds. Wahhabism is, in a *very* short nutshell, a puritanical (for lack of a better word) movement that attempts to bring Islamic theology and law back to its foundations by relying solely on the first three generations of Islam and removing Islam of any characteristics it has picked up in its 1400 years that was not present at its founding. Their destruction of these heritage buildings is mainly two reasons, one theological the other practical. Theologically, a lot of these buildings were taken as shrines or holy places. However, the earliest Muslims did not consider these locations to be holy so in the eyes of the Wahhabi movement, these are innovations which should be removed to return Islam to its original state. The other, practical reason, is that the buildings needed to be demolished to make room for the new construction.\n\nFinally, the idea that there has been a long class struggle between \"Muhammad and his followers\" and the rich/elite does not hold up to historical scrutiny. Yes, even a lot of Muslims will claim that the vast majority of early Muslims were poor and downtrodden and that the rich and powerful opposed Islam but this really isn't true. If you actually do an analysis of the earliest converts and group them by their clan affiliation, you'll see that they span all economic and social groups. Yes, you have Bilal and Abdullah ibn Masud who were slaves and clients (poor people without a strong tribal affiliation). But then there are plenty of early Muslims from the strong and rich classes like AbdulRahman ibn Awf and Al-Arqam ibn abi al-Arqam. Heck, out of the first four caliphs, **all** were from elite tribes. The first three were merchants and relatively wealthy (the third exceptionally so). \n\n**TL;DR: Friendly redditor has spun a nice fictional yarn**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1x79rz", "title": "Who was allowed to vote in 19th century Britain?", "selftext": "I've been reading a lot of Anthony Trollope lately. His characters often refer to \"the ballot\" as a new thing. What changed in the 19th century about how members of parliament were selected? (This is my first ever Reddit post, it's not for homework help, I'm just a 59 yr old reader.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x79rz/who_was_allowed_to_vote_in_19th_century_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8qviu"], "score": [8], "text": ["In the 1800s suffrage was expanded about every 2 or 3 decades.\n\n\nAt the start of the 19th century, probably 5% of the British population could vote. This right was reserved to wealthy landowners. The Reform Act of 1832 changed this. Voting rights were now spread to bankers, merchants, etc.\n\nThe Reform Act of 1867 was the next time voting rights were expanded. If you were a male, owned a home, or rented a home of at least a certain value you were permitted to vote.\n\nThe Reform Act of 1884 extended suffrage to those owning or renting land in the countryside, outside of town limits. Around the time this was passed, around 60% of men could vote in Britain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kq3rn", "title": "Did Mark Twain really say the following? \"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference\"", "selftext": "Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference. \u2014Mark Twain\n\nI stumbled across this quotation on the interwebz... doing a quick search I can't find the origin of the phrase other than several 'quotation' aggregate type sites... any ideas? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kq3rn/did_mark_twain_really_say_the_following_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbrj0yc"], "score": [6], "text": ["I see what you're talking about. [This](_URL_0_) is the best site for Twain quotes, but it does seem to appear there. Other sites that I looked at, which give the quote do not give sources. And this makes it suspect. There are so many of these attributed to Twain, it is always difficult to chase them down. I would say a 20% chance of being Twain. It's also a 30% chance today of rain. I bet we don't get any."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.twainquotes.com/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "6d93hj", "title": "How did Christianity develop differently in West and East Germany from 1945 until 1997?", "selftext": "(Since 1997 is as far as this sub goes)\n\nI'm interested in whether the Capitalist/Communist areas had very different effects on Christianity. Obviously in East Germany the government was anti-religion (but how much? Marxist govts vary a lot on how they deal with religion, and I'm not familiar enough with German communism to know), while in the West you had the CDU as a key party. But on the other hand, the unpopularity of the Communist govt might have made Christianity more popular in East Germany, as being anti-establishment or something. \n\nI know today, that Germany is one of the less religious countries in Europe (though not the least), but I wonder if there are significant differences between East and West.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6d93hj/how_did_christianity_develop_differently_in_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di126gq"], "score": [7], "text": ["There is an important distinction to be between religion (meaning the organized church administration and structures) and religiosity (religious belief and observance), and this distinction is quite important to understand the position of the church inside the GDR. Although religiosity did decline under the auspices of the SED state, the churches themselves neither withered away, and indeed gained a greater degree of salience and relevancy during the closing years of the GDR.\n\nThe Protestant and Catholic churches occupied a highly ambivalent position within GDR society. As good Marxist-Leninists, the SED saw the churches' presence as a relic of the past and encouraged a broad secularization of GDR society so that the church would wither away. This secularization strategy included substituting religious ceremonies like confirmation and funerals with socialist ones. More importantly, the SED oversaw a near complete secularization of the educational system which not only limited GDR youth's exposure to religion but also starved the church hierarchy of trained professionals to replace the ageing pastorate. These efforts bore fruit as exemplified by the decline in Lutheran church membership from 80% of the total population in 1945 to approximately 30% in 1978. Yet the SED never really felt confident in completely eliminating the churches through a co-option like it did with the various bourgeois political parties in the GDR. Again, Marxist-Leninist ideology on the ultimate irrelevancy of religion likely played a role in the SED's oversight of the churches. Much of the SED's leadership likely expected churches to wither away through the advances of socialism and a vigilant communist party at the helm. But keeping the churches in a state of semi-autonomous existence also served the purposes of state. Religiosity among a prominent minority of GDR pastors and bishops served as a means to critique the FRG's resurgent economic prosperity. The SED might have been an atheistic party, but it was useful to have an alliance with its own Christians who would contend the FRG's CDU worshiped mammon not God. Furthermore, the continued autonomy of the GDR churches served to deny Adenauer's CDU the claim that the GDR was a thoroughly godless state. Religious rhetoric on pacifism also added a further arrow to the SED's attack on NATO's sponsorship of the Federal Republic's remilitarization. \n\nBut this utility of the churches  did not mean the SED trusted or liked the presence of churches within GDR society. Church leaders provided critiques of the SED's collectivization and memories of the churches' co-option by National Socialism ran long. The MfS devoted a considerable amount of effort in both penetrating church organization and compromising church leaders and Stasi monitoring of churches remained consistent throughout the entirety of the GDR. Church-state relations reached their nadir under Ulbricht's *Aufbau des Sozialismus* campaign of the 1950s as the SED pressured the Protestant churches to cut ties with their \"NATO\" counterparts in the West and more closely align themselves doctrinally to the SED state. Church-state relations entered into a thaw during the early Honecker years as *Ostpolitik* led to an domestic truce with the churches. Again, reasons of state played a role in the SED's actions as an independent and separate GDR church proved that it was a viable, alternative Germany. The 1970s also witnessed a reorientation of the GDR's attitude towards the German past and the SED sought to recover and claim the historical patrimony of Lutheranism and the Reformation as part of the progressive German tradition, of which the SED was the self-proclaimed heir. \n\nBut the detente with the churches did not lead to a cooperative relationship between church and state. Most prominently, the Lutheran pastor Oskar Br\u00fcsewitz self-immolated himself in 1976 in protest of the state's system of control and observation of the churches, a gesture that the SED-controlled press denounced as the act of a sick mind. Nevertheless, Br\u00fcsewitz's suicide was a sign that the churches' relationship with the state was anything but sound. The economic stagnation of the late Honecker period gave the churches new relevancy inside the GDR as they were the only real institutions not thoroughly controlled by the state. As such, they emerged as an umbrella-like organization for a variety of dissident opinions and oppositional groups. In hindsight, this evolution of the churches had long roots as the SED tended to view the churches as a useful social dumping ground for individuals that did not fit into the mainstream SED system of social integration and loyalty. The GDR Lutheran church, for example, became one of the beachheads  for gay rights in the GDR as \"discussion groups\" served as both support networks and political action groups for the GDR's homosexuals. Even the SED's sponsorship of Christian pacifism proved a double-edged sword in the 1980s, as it provided an umbrella for a peace movement first directed at Reagan's military build-up, but what soon mushroomed into a culture of wider public protests against the single-party state. \n\nAlthough a few commentators went too far in suggesting that 1989 was another German revolution spearheaded by German churches, the churches as an institution were an important component of the *Wende* and protest culture of the 1980s. Revelations about MfS infiltration of the churches and its compromising prominent church figures like  Bishop Moritz Mitzenheim naturally created a scandal and tarnished the GDR churches' post-1989 reputation. Concurrent to this, the social forces reinforcing the trends towards secularization continued in the former GDR regions despite the end of SED rule. Yet to focus on the decline in religiosity among the GDR's population is to miss the forest for the trees; the churches and the SED had a fluctuating relationship throughout the GDR and however much the SED leadership might have wished it, the churches never fully withered away into irrelevance nor did they prove a pliable instrument of the dictatorship. \n\n*Sources*\n\nChilds, David, Thomas A. Baylis, and Marilyn Rueschemeyer. *East Germany in Comparative Perspective*. London: Routledge, 1989. \n\nFulbrook, Mary. \"The limits of totalitarianism: God, state and society in the GDR.\" *Transactions of the Royal Historical Society*(Sixth Series) 7 (1997): 25-52.\n\nGoeckel, Robert F. *The Lutheran Church and the East German State: Political Conflict and Change Under Ulbricht and Honecker*. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. \n\nRoss, Corey. *The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR*. London: Arnold, 2002"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1quthm", "title": "Barbershop Quartets: Why \"Barbershop? \" Were There Any Other Types of Popular Singing Groups?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1quthm/barbershop_quartets_why_barbershop_were_there_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdguf8y"], "score": [73], "text": ["There is/was a long English tradition of the barbershop as a gathering place, and many English barbershops featured live music, albeit mostly instrumental. That tradition continued in the United States, especially in post-Civil War African American barbershops, where groups of men would improvise on popular folk songs, so, as you may guess, it's called barbershop because it began mostly in barbershops. The distinct sound comes out of the necessary arranging (albeit improvised) to allow four men to sing without putting the tenor or bass into impossibly extreme ranges. \n\nAnother related tradition are the collegiate glee clubs that flourished about the same time. There are reasons they differ from barbershop that I won't bore you with the music theory behind, but, yes there was a very common \"other\" kind of a cappella singing group. If you go a bit broader, bluegrass, though not always a cappella, also qualifies.\n\nEdit: I'll add more if my internet decides to cooperate and I'm not on mobile, mostly because barbershop is a huge part of the minstrel show tradition.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5pkh4j", "title": "What was the reaction of members of the British government and/or military leadership to the build up of the United States's navy in the early 20th century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pkh4j/what_was_the_reaction_of_members_of_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcryxso"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Admiralty was much less concerned with the USN's build up than they were with (hypothetical) French or (actual) German naval expansion. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, a strong USN was much less of a direct threat to Britain than an equally strong European navy. A French or German navy that could challenge the Royal Navy threatened an invasion of Britain. A strong American navy could threaten Canada, but had no bases on the eastern side of the Atlantic from which to invade Britain. The European powers also had strong armies, exacerbating this threat. Secondly, the USN, unlike the European powers, was a 'two ocean navy'. It had to protect coastlines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. This meant that it was harder for the USN to create a force that could truly challenge the RN. Should a war occur, the RN could defeat the USN in detail, destroying its Atlantic fleet, before facing the Pacific fleet. As a result, the USN would need to have a fleet that could do real damage to the RN in both oceans, something that was out of reach for much of the 1900s-1910s. Finally, and this was especially true after WW1, there was a general understanding within the Admiralty that Britain could not afford to outspend the USN. The war had greatly damaged the British economy, with it becoming burdened with unsustainable levels of debt. Spending money on a new naval arms race was not in British interests, and so there were moves towards limiting the US's buildup in different ways. The Washington Naval Treaty was the ultimate outcome of this, with Britain accepting equality in tonnage with the USN.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2j67ui", "title": "Which national economies, if any, were not affected by the Great Depression of the 1930's? Did anyone actually grow during this period while the majority of developed nations were mired in recession/depression?", "selftext": "I'm curious to know if any significant nation (not say, a micro-nation in Polynesia) was able to get through the 1930's unscathed or even in better shape while the rest of the major economies like US, Canada, Europe suffered in either deep recessions or outright depression?\n\nI would appreciate any hard data, GDP/GNP, unemployment, etc., if you know of it.\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j67ui/which_national_economies_if_any_were_not_affected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl9019q"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Soviet Union is the obvious exception. The Great Depression had an impact, in that it reduced earnings from foreign trade, but this was *relatively* minor. The reduction in grain prices made the managing the balance of payments more difficult but, overall, the Soviet economy had few connections with the capitalist market economies. Most of the capital used in its industrialisation drive was savaged from domestic sources and thus unaffected by the global slowdown.\n\nThe issue is of course that putting accurate figures on the growth of national income is notoriously difficult in the Soviet case. Nonetheless, and regardless of costs, there's no question that the Soviet economy did grow significantly in these years. Indeed, Moscow made great propaganda hay of this contrast and tens of thousands of US citizens emigrated to the USSR (what Tim Tzouliadis has called 'the Forsaken').\n\nIf you do want figures then Mark Harrison has a good essay on exactly this (complete with comparisons to capitalist economies over these years) in *The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union*. I don't have it on hand (travelling this week) but I can give you details at the weekend, if you're still interested then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1egbuv", "title": "How common were inns in the ancient world, and how did they function?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1egbuv/how_common_were_inns_in_the_ancient_world_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca00trw", "ca04fhz"], "score": [13, 8], "text": ["Our evidence for this is rather limited, as identification of inns outside of the Vesuvian cities is rather limited. So discussing how inns focused outside of the immediate Mediterranean core is rather tricky. Even within the Vesuvian cities we can't really say much except that they seemed to function as restaurants, bars, and inns.\n\nFrom literary sources we hear that inns are dangerous and you have a 50/50 chance of getting your throat cut, but considering that these were written by the literary elite this isn't the most reliable information.", "According to a [previous question](_URL_0_), inns were not that common in Medieval Europe, and the stereotype of \"Ye Olde Inn\" is largely influenced by Tolkein: \n\n > Travel. Inns and always a wild boar roasting over a spit at the friendly, warm inn of each medieval village.\nMost inns of this era were simply peasants who offered you a place in their bed (yes, people used the same beds a lot during this era, in the same room, to keep warm), a share of of their meal (often porridge, bread and some boiled vegetables) and some fodder and a place in their barn for your mount (if you were rich enough to have one). The modern idea of the inn as a friendly pub and restaurant, with a trobadour, the locals gathering for a drink and perhaps a meal and some laughing and dancing is very, very wrong.\n > \n >  The upper classes travelled either with a large following of servants who set up tents, cooked and cleaned for them. It was not rare for nobles travelling between their estates to have servants travel ahead, not only to set the other estate in order, but to prepare resting points along the way as well.\n > \n >  Lower class people rarely travelled beyond the local church, the market, the thing and perhaps as a soldier as part of a crusade or a royal campaign."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ecbg1/what_wrong_ideas_about_medieval_europe_might_one/c9z3z05"]]}
{"q_id": "2ev4mr", "title": "Would someone finally settle this... How the heck did people hold a shield?!", "selftext": "I've seen this same conversation come up repeatedly, in RPG gaming communities, LARPers, SCA, movie fans... hopefully /r/AskHistorians can give me an answer with some credibility.\n\nThere are two general schools of thought, that shields were strapped on to the arm with two straps, or held in the fist at the center. I know both of these likely happened (I'm sure there is an example of just about everything in history) but in general, what was the popular way to hold a shield? Did it change over different periods in history? Did it vary with different types of shields (I'm certain no one was strapping a buckler to their arm, but what about kite shields, tower shields, etc)?\n\n What's the right answer? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ev4mr/would_someone_finally_settle_this_how_the_heck/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3isdo"], "score": [4], "text": ["Comment I made from his post over at /r/wma\n\n\"Although there is not alot of extant historical material from the \"dark ages\" about the use of the sword and shield, we can extrapolate on their use from Renaissance sources.\nThe early historical martial arts manual is MSI.33 from the late 14th century which depicts the use of the sword and buckler. From their illustrations and descriptions they held the buckler in the fist. Other manuscripts, surviving artifacts, and modern reconstruction, greatly support this notion. They were very rarely strapped to the forearm. The later masters from Bologna, Italy in the late 16th century also wrote extensively on the subject of sword and buckler. In which they describe holding the buckler in the fist and having it well extended at or around shoulder height. Having the buckler in this extended postion, creates a virtual cone of defense in which one only needs to move the buckler slightly in order to close off a line of attack. It is an active means of defense, for one moves the buckler in relation to the sword (and that of the opponent) in order to compensate for vulnerabilities created from the actions of your sword.\n\nMany times you see people who are unfamiliar with historical technique hold their buckler too close to their chests. This essentially eliminates the cone of defense, making the buckler a poor means of defense.\nRoland Warcheza is an expert in the MS I.33 style and applied the principles from that style to the use of the center gripped viking shield, shown here. This is, in my opinion, one of closest reconstructions of Viking sword and shield fighting you are going to find. In this example you see that the shield is held with the arm well extended, which allows one to cover nearly the whole body with relatively small movements.\n\nWhen it comes to forearm strapped shields, we can again turn to the Bolognese masters of the 16th century. While they didn't have heater shields they did have a rotella, a round shield about 20-30inch in diameter, that is strapped to the forearm. This was often accompanied by the sword or a spear. If you look at the picture in the article linked above, you see that the arm will again well extended. In such a guard you are again creating a cone of defense. With the rotella held in such a way, you completely close off the left side, and while providing some cover to your right. Again one would have to simply move the arm up or down to protect the head and legs. I imagine the same would be true with a heater shield, however, as I understand it a heater shield was mainly for mounted combat, and it's shape would not provide much protection to the legs. \n\nMany time you see people holding their forearm strapped shield against their chests, which eliminates the cone of defense and only provides protection to the area immediately behind the shield. Such a position also requires much larger actions (and as a result, slower) to cover your head and legs.\n\nAll this being said, there was a article recently, in which forensic analysis was performed on skeletons from known battle fields. It was found that strikes to the head and lower legs were exceedingly common. Perhaps that is why you often see ancient warriors depicted with prominent helms and greaves, however I don't know how historically accurate that would be.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qzkez", "title": "Has there ever been a peaceful and majority accepted transition from one form of government to another?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qzkez/has_there_ever_been_a_peaceful_and_majority/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnb24ms", "cnb36hp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["your title and comment are asking different questions. Which one do you want answered?\n\nhistorically republics have been under threat from victorious generals who were lifted to general acclaim to a kingly position and those can often be peaceful as old rulers either flee or realize the hopelessness of their cause.\n\nAs for the United States specifically it is constitutionally impossible for the US to change to a different form of government except perhaps parliamentary democracy (via a really long amendment or more likely a couple of amendments at a national constitutional convention which has always been allowed by never exercised) since there is a clause guaranteeing a republican form of government to every state. That being said America's founding provides an alternative path to change: just ignore the constitution and create another one (constitution went into effect before articles on confederation said they should)\n\nso no protocol and really no possible protocol thus guaranteeing any change by necessity be either quick or a new constitution.", "Historically this is fairly common. Czechaslovakia and Spain were good recent examples of a shift to democracy without significant violence. South Africa also managed it with minimal violence. \n\nI think the closest comparison in the US case was the adoption of the current constitution.  There is no system for dissolving the existing dispensation. It is about getting a consensus around the new regime. In the 18th century a series of state conventions did that. Today you might need a referendum or the support of all the legislatures.\n\nThere is some material from the archives on ratification here _URL_0_\n\nPauline Maier *Ratification* (2013) gives a fuller account.\n\nHow such a change might come about is too hypothetical/political for this sub reddit but I'd guess a major economic crisis would have to be involved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/constitution-day/ratification.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1otra8", "title": "Why were Scandinavia and the Steppes so often producing major and disruptive tribes?", "selftext": "Almost all of the major bands of tribes that threatened, destabilized, or invaded Roman/Gaulish/Byzantine/Gaelic territories for a *millennium* came from Scandinavia (Goths, Germanic tribes, Norse) or the Steppes (Huns, Turks, Mongols). \n\nIs it that we only hear about invader tribes, and those were the ones on the borders; or was it that the comparatively harsher climates bred 'harder' soldiers; or the lack of major states led to more frequent wanderlust of its inhabitants; or what? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1otra8/why_were_scandinavia_and_the_steppes_so_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccvo7px", "ccvtr3r"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["This is because that is the only place they could have come from. The Romans controlled the mediteranian. The Sahara made a great defense of the African provinces from the south. To the west was the Atlantic. In the east was the Sessonid empire. While they were a constant source of conflict, the two empires fought over control of territory. These were wars, not raids. The Germanic tribes in the north and the tribes from the steppes in the north-east were the only places that had the ability to mass huge armies to take on the romans. But at the same time these armies were mostly based on a strong central leader, so their goal was more to raid than to conquer and govern large territories. This meant they could mount attacks almost anywhere in the empire because they weren't trying to control all the land they went through. ", "I have been wrestling with how to phrase this, but I can't think of an ideal way, so ask for clarification on any points that aren't clear:\n\nUltimately, the question is circular. \"Scandinavia\" (I'm taking this to mean \"greater Germany\") and \"the Steppes\" are demarcated and defined by the presence of \"troublesome tribes\". Maps are a human creation for the purpose of categorization, particularly those with lines on them, and while \"the Steppes\" corresponds to a feature used in modern geography, the way the word is used in this context is actually the product of a particular discourse between civilization and the barbarians (speaking figuratively). There are many groups in those geographic regions that were not troublesome, and there were many groups that were troublesome not from those regions. In fact, were we to ask this from the perspective of the Cherusci or the Xioungnu we can just as easily ask why same questions: why does the Mediterranean basin and the Central Plain produce the major and disruptive tribes of Chinese and Romans, encroaching on our land, interfering in our politics and carrying out raids? but because of the nature of literature, the Romans and Chinese get to be civilization, and the Germans and Turks get to be the barbarians.\n\nOf course there is an underlying reality--central Asia and greater Germany were late comers to what we might call \"state level political organization\", and therefore order there tended to be more fluid, dynamic and ephemeral. So while we can still see series of \"dominating presences\" in these regions equivalent to the successions in China or Mesopotamia, these presences tended to be less organized and were less able to, so to speak, frame the narrative of contact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "cy819o", "title": "How did Henry VIII actually break with Rome?", "selftext": "There must have been a time when one day England was Catholic and the next day they were Protestant - how was this change actually made? Did he send a letter to the pope telling him to do one? Was there a new law introduced?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cy819o/how_did_henry_viii_actually_break_with_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyqutoh"], "score": [3], "text": ["The main document that lead to this split was the Statute in Restraint of Appeals, passed by Parliament in 1533. The idea went like this: The king of England, Henry VIII the only religious authority for all of England's possessions, so instead of going to the Pope for religious concerns, you would go to the King. This was based on a claim that England was an empire, based on Henry being the descendant of a most likely mythological descendant of Aeneas (of Rome founding and Trojan fame), and this is important because a king recognized ecclesiastical powers as equals, an emperor did not. One year later, the act of Supremacy declared Henry head of the Anglican church."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c0hmet", "title": "Why it is said that people drank alcohol of the middle ages cause water was unsafe to drink since there are many clean natural springs of water even today?", "selftext": "I go out on mountains and trails a lot and I always drink water straight from springs and creeks without problem. Is it true that medieval and ancient people preferred to drink wine, ale or beer because water was unsafe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c0hmet/why_it_is_said_that_people_drank_alcohol_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["er533ix"], "score": [5], "text": ["More can always be said on this question.\n\nBoth these answers come from the excellent [Askhistorians FAQ](_URL_0_)\n\nAn answer to the question [is it true most people in medieval Europe drank](_URL_2_)  by /u/sunagainstgold  tells us that water was usually looked down upon since it was free and it has been documented that people did know to boil water to make it safe.\n\nA more detailed answer on the debunking the myth of middle ages people drinking alcoholic drinks over water due to hygiene is in the answer by /u/Quweniden to the question [What factors made beer so important to the establishment of civilisation? What made it a more practical drink than plane water?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_factors_made_beer_so_important_to_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7b8jea/is_it_true_most_people_in_medieval_europe_drank/dpgj9wp/"]]}
{"q_id": "33dglg", "title": "Why did the Nazis and German people keep fighting after the winning was no longer an option?", "selftext": "I'm about to start a research paper on the \"final days of Nazi Germany\" and I'm just looking for some basics sources to gather more information on what besides the atmosphere of propaganda and Nazi fanaticism caused this mentality to occur.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33dglg/why_did_the_nazis_and_german_people_keep_fighting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqjtegd", "cqkekb0"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Ian Kershaw's *The End: Hitler's Germany 1944\u201345* is perhaps the best recent book on the topic. It focuses almost exclusively on the mentality and the decisions made by both national and regional politicians in Nazi Germany as well as the ordinary German civilians in keeping on fighting and enduring during the last two years of the war. I highly recommend it.", "Back then, Germans only heard what the Nazi propaganda machine wanted them to hear. \n\nProbably the only people who knew winning was no longer an option were among the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Some knew defeat or a stalemate was inevitable once Operation Barbarossa failed to take Moscow (even then, it is dubious that the Soviet Union would have lost if Moscow had fallen to the Nazis). Heck, the US introduction to the war wasn't even necessary to assure that the Nazis would be unable to defeat the Soviets. More Nazi officials probably saw the light when the counter-attack to relieve the encircled army at Stalingrad failed to succeed. The final nail in the coffin for anyone who wasn't certifiably insane or delusional was when they lost the Battle of Kursk.\n\nUnfortunately, the propaganda was controlled ultimately by the person who didn't see the inevitable defeat after the Nazis lost the Battle of Kursk, namely Hitler. So even though, starting in mid-late '43, much of the High Command in the Nazi military likely knew the Red Army would eventually reach Berlin, none of their dissenting voices were heard by the public.\n\nSo why did the German people have this delusional mentality? Well, no one told them that losing was a possibility.\n\nAs for the soldiers? Well, until the Normandy landings, the only opposition a Nazi soldier could surrender to was the Red Army, which was understandably likely to be a fatal endeavor. Rest assured, the High Command were very clear about what the Soviets would do to surrendering Nazis (even if it some of it were lies)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9qfs91", "title": "Did Native Americans Have Forts or Fortified Villages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qfs91/did_native_americans_have_forts_or_fortified/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e890m68", "e8mr1vm"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["Not to discourage further answers, but check out [this discussion of pre-Columbian warfare, sieges, and fortifications](_URL_0_) in North America written for a previous, similar question.", "This really depends on where and when you look. The short answer is yes, we do see evidence of fortified villages at various sites prior to European contact. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo what would a fortified village look like in pre-Columbian North America? Well an extraordinary example would be the palisade that was in place at Cahokia, a Mississippian site just east of St. Louis, Missouri. I will link some images of reconstructions of the palisade as well as the map of it in context to the site at the end, but there can be little doubt that the palisade was constructed for anything other than defending some portion of the settlement. We see guard towers that would have allowed for defenders to fire upon would-be-attackers, and some arguments have been made that the plaster material placed on the outside of the palisade may have been intended to prevent the wall from being set ablaze by flaming arrows (Dye 2018). Another Mississippian site, Aztalan in southern Wisconsin, shows evidence of palisade construction as well. Again it would have surrounded the settlement and seems to have been treated the same by the community living within it. The palisades at both Cahokia and Aztalan show evidence that they were often reconstructed without tearing down the previous palisade structure. This may seem trivial, but this may indicate routine maintenance being performed as a preventative measure. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nHaving a palisade for protection may seem very straightforward, but this is not the case for all settlements in this region and may indicate some level of conflict within the region that caused construction of a palisade. It is interesting to compare this to sites in Western Wisconsin/Eastern Minnesota, sites that prior to AD 1050 do not show signs of palisade construction(Theler and Boszhardt 2006). This is interesting as the 'big bang' at Cahokia is attributed to be around this time as well, and while they may not be directly related it may give insight into the pre-Columbian world at this time.  Its also important to note that from 1050 on, we see major changes in how people lived in these regions such as increased trade and signs of increased conflict in the region. We also see that people begin to live more sedentary lives, we see more storage pits, we see increased reliance on agriculture, and we see more of a reliance on local game and less movement onto the plains to hunt bison (Theler and Boszhardt 2016). Prior to 1050, we see an increase in people living within this region, and after we begin to see shifts in settlement patterns, and following the collapse of Mississippian influence from Cahokia we do not see a return to the more 'egalitarian' lifestyles seen before the rise of Mississippian influence in the region. So around AD 1050 something was occurring across the Midwest, and it resulted in a brief period of increased reliance of palisades at some sites. For some reason we see an increase in agriculture, more sedentary lifestyles, and increased fortifications around when we also see the rise of more influential societies to the south at Cahokia. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis is important as it shows that fortified settlements existed in the pre-Columbian world, but they may have been more reactionary than a central point of settlement construction. This may have been a by-product of increased conflict over land, when your reliance on agriculture increases, so does the value you put on land that is better suited to farming. People begin to live in one area for their entire lives, and this is an incentive to defend your land when in the past you may have been able to leave to avoid conflict. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo to sum up, yes, fortified villages existed, but I think the answer is a bit more complicated than yes or no. While in Europe at this time walled cities may have been a common site, it seems that walled settlements in the New World were maybe a byproduct of specifics to the 'mood' of the region during which they were constructed.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\n Dye, David H. \u201cRotten Palisade Posts and Rickety Baffle Gates: Repairing Native Eastern North American Fortifications.\u201d *Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains*, edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth, University Press of Colorado, Louisville; Colorado, 2018, pp. 145\u2013176. *JSTOR*, _URL_4_. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n Theler, James L., and Robert F. Boszhardt. \u201cCollapse of Crucial Resources and Culture Change: A Model for the Woodland to Oneota Transformation in the Upper Midwest.\u201d *American Antiquity*, vol. 71, no. 3, 2006, pp. 433\u2013472. *JSTOR*, JSTOR, _URL_0_. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_5_](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g8fp5/do_we_know_anything_of_large_scale_native/ctw20oz/"], ["www.jstor.org/stable/40035360", "https://cahokiamounds.org/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CahokiaMounds-Timeline-8-1500x575.png", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cahokia_reconstructed_palisade_HRoe_01.jpg", "http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/cahokia.html", "www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvgd21w.7", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cahokia\\_reconstructed\\_palisade\\_HRoe\\_01.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2gebmd", "title": "Why are halos seen as \"holy?\" When were angels and such originally depicted with halos? And why do we automatically associate halos with divinity or goodness?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gebmd/why_are_halos_seen_as_holy_when_were_angels_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckibt6j"], "score": [8], "text": ["In the late Roman/early Byzantine world, a halo represented power rather than sanctity. See, for example, the Missorium of Theodosius, c. 388, a large silver plate on which the Emperor Theodosius is shown with a halo; he is also significantly larger than the other figures in order to show his power.\n_URL_2_\n\nThis tradition continues in Byzantium, whereas in the West the halo comes to mean only holiness. Until the late 11th century, however, there are two kinds of halos, the round one familiar to us today and a square one to indicate that the person was alive when the image was painted. A good example is  Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino (d. 1087), who is shown donating his church.\n_URL_0_\n\nFor early representations of angels without halos in a Christian context, see Therese Martin, \u201cThe Development of Winged Angels in Early Christian Art,\u201d Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, 14 (2001), pp. 11-30. \n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://erogianpi.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/formis62.jpg", "http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=1035410", "http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshaf/Missorium_of_Theodosius.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3c1zc9", "title": "What was North America like before the English settlers", "selftext": "Never learned in school what North America was like before the 1400s or so. Very open-ended question so feel free to give as much or as little info as possible", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c1zc9/what_was_north_america_like_before_the_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csrkzia", "csrq9xz"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["I'd recommend starting with [1491 by Charles Mann](_URL_0_). It's an informative and fast read, and gives you a good idea of the scope and timeline of the rise and fall of key civilizations in the Americas.", "I\u2019m away from my books for the weekend, so here are some older questions that I\u2019ve answered that you\u2019ll find interesting. Also, be sure to check out our [Mega-AMA on the Pre-Columbian Americas](_URL_20_) and the relevant section of our [FAQs](_URL_14_)\n\n* [Did Native Americans have accurate maps of North America? What groups had the most geographical knowledge of the continent?](_URL_15_)\n* [Is there any reason why the Native American civilization never was able to work metal?](_URL_5_)\n* [How sophisticated was the Iroquois Confederation's government at its peak?](_URL_24_)\n* [Did Native Americans smoke marijuana?](_URL_40_)\n* [Did Native Americans make roads?](_URL_41_)\n* [How much contact did the Mesoamerican cultures like the Mayans/Aztecs have with Indian groups in what is now the United States and Canada?](_URL_36_)\n* [In a talk I saw recently, David Graeber implies that (at least one) Native American Culture found by Europeans could be the byproduct of a revolutionary ideology that brought down earlier civilizations in the area. Is there any evidence to support this?](_URL_21_)\n* [Why are there no ancient Native American cities in North America?](_URL_27_)\n* [Did Native Americans really use \"all parts of the buffalo\"?](_URL_26_)\n* [What was happening in North America during the life of Jesus?](_URL_34_)\n* [Monacht-ape\u2019s Journey](_URL_22_)\n* [Why is there nothing old present around Americans?](_URL_16_)\n* [Miami Kinship](_URL_1_)\n* [Is there any evidence of ancient structures (Like those in Mesoamerica) existing anywhere in the United States?](_URL_13_)\n* [Could Native Americans be considered communists?](_URL_12_)\n* [Why are there no pyramids or temples in North America, but there are so many in South America?](_URL_6_)\n* [Do we have any examples of pre-columbian Native American humor?](_URL_2_)\n* [The Lost \u201cKingdom\u201d of Saguenay](_URL_29_)\n* [How accurate is the popular US perception that Native Americans lost their land \"because they didn't understand the concept of ownership?\"](_URL_17_)\n* [There was supposedly a reasonably complex Mississippi Valley civilization before Europeans arrived. What would the biggest settlement in the area, and what would it have looked like?](_URL_18_)\n* [Is there any sort of historical accounts, written or passed down orally, of major events or battles in North America before conquistadors and others arrived?](_URL_33_)\n* [Suppose you were sent back in time to New Jersey (or where New Jersey is now) in AD50 and then AD1050. Could you easily tell which was which by observing the native Americans?](_URL_19_)\n* [To what extent were Precolumbian Native American Navies used militarily?](_URL_38_)\n* [Were any canine breeds indigenous to North America, and have any of those breeds withstood time to become a common breed among our domestic pets today?](_URL_23_)\n* [Siege warfare in pre-Colombus Americas - How prevalent was it? What were the tactics and technology used?](_URL_8_)\n* [It's gonna be negative -30 (factoring windchill) in Boston the next couple of days...how did our ancestors survive this?](_URL_35_)\n* [Jigonsaseh: The Mother of Nations](_URL_11_)\n* [What differences caused the Mesoamerican societies to be much more successful than Eastern North American societies?](_URL_31_)\n* [Were there any seafaring cultures centered around the Great Lakes region of North America?](_URL_0_)\n* [How did Native American Indians adapt uniquely to their environment?](_URL_25_)\n* [What methods did the pre-Columbian American Indians use to gather precious metals and stones, and were there any surprising materials they prized the way Europeans prized precious metals and gems?](_URL_7_)\n* [How did Native Americans deal with the harsh New England winters?](_URL_39_)\n* [When the first colonists came to North and Central America, how come the Native Americans never fought back when they first arrived?](_URL_9_)\n* [During their 'Mourning Wars', the Haudenosaunee would capture and assimilate their enemies. What was the process of assimilation like for individuals captured, or for entire tribes, for that matter?](_URL_28_)\n* [What native tribes lived in Spanish-claimed Florida, before the Seminole arrived? How were the politics and trade between these tribes?](_URL_4_)\n* [How much do we know about how the Iroquois would have hunted?](_URL_30_)\n* [How can I learn about the indigenous inhabitants in my area (Ohio)](_URL_32_)\n* [Were there any civilizations near the Ohio River and if so who were they?](_URL_3_)\n* [Were native american tribes aware of the mound builder civilization?](_URL_10_)\n* [did the native Americans John Rolfe's group met in Virginia follow a religion that was at all related to the religion of those the pilgrims met in and around Plymouth?](_URL_37_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wikiwand.com/en/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36t3k5/were_there_any_seafaring_cultures_centered_around/crhan0q", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h8s2t/friday_freeforall_june_28_2013/carxmug", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36s0as/do_we_have_any_examples_of_precolumbian_native/crglwgu", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mc4m8/were_there_any_civilizations_near_the_ohio_river/cc9d4h6", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rpx63/what_native_tribes_lived_in_spanishclaimed/cdpu1om", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/256w3b/is_there_any_reason_why_the_native_american/chebtp5", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2halks/why_are_there_no_pyramids_or_temples_in_north/ckr8nu0", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l30m0/what_methods_did_the_precolumbian_american/cbxjjjh", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1coe7f/siege_warfare_in_precolombus_americas_how/c9iilm9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2irjfs/when_the_first_colonists_came_to_north_and/cl4xvl2", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rgpvo/were_native_american_tribes_aware_of_the_mound/cngd1u9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zj54l/tuesday_trivia_historys_greatest_nobodies_iii/cfu7n2y", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x3gp1/could_native_americans_be_considered_communists/cf7t9kp", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23l729/is_there_any_evidence_of_ancient_structures_like/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq#wiki_americas_before_columbus_and_native_american_history", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1clgn7/did_native_americans_have_accurate_maps_of_north/c9hnm74", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1etw5w/why_is_there_nothing_old_present_around_americans/ca3soxn", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g8v2t/how_accurate_is_the_popular_us_perception_that/cahy86e", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z0290/there_was_supposedly_a_reasonably_complex/cpejyqs", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20bo7y/suppose_you_were_sent_back_in_time_to_new_jersey/cg2c999", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pa7hf/civilizations_of_the_precolumbian_americas/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yowgi/in_a_talk_i_saw_recently_david_graeber_implies/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ndmuo/tuesday_trivia_firsts_and_lasts/cmcpsam", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qw9dt/were_any_canine_breeds_indigenous_to_north/cdh5zi7", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pzuyu/how_sophisticated_was_the_iroquois_confederations/cd7wvl4", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oahye/how_did_native_american_indians_adapt_uniquely_to/ccqcumn", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ni5s2/did_native_americans_really_use_all_parts_of_the/cmdwze0", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rrm1y/why_are_there_no_ancient_native_american_cities/cninu10", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2avcz4/during_their_mourning_wars_the_haudenosaunee/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tbsgr/friday_freeforall_december_20_2013/ce6ccb3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tksyr/how_much_do_we_know_about_how_the_iroquois_would/cebcaql", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v5n7x/what_differences_caused_the_mesoamerican/ceq19qp", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hje1j/how_can_i_learn_about_the_indigenous_inhabitants/cav1aoq", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jycjn/is_there_any_sort_of_historical_accounts_written/clgn7o6", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2azh2j/what_was_happening_in_north_america_during_the/cj0otsd", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rmptd/its_gonna_be_negative_30_factoring_windchill_in/cni7ns6", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2olx5w/how_much_contact_did_the_mesoamerican_cultures/cmokhaa", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/257216/did_the_native_americans_john_rolfes_group_met_in/chee4dd", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ldhjw/to_what_extent_were_precolumbian_native_american/clu2aji", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ayx5c/how_did_native_americans_deal_with_the_harsh_new/c921yhl", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1etmii/did_native_americans_smoke_marijuana/ca3nc9x", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2n9qve/did_native_americans_make_roads/cmbqrm7"]]}
{"q_id": "2x8hi9", "title": "Was the average quality of life really worse during medieval than in ancient Greece/Roman Empire?", "selftext": "Hearing about the amazing city designs, culture and governing systems in ancient Greece and Roman empire it has lead me to believe that it was better for the average citizen than in medieval, but it's hard to interpret the facts and look at all aspects, are there any good answers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x8hi9/was_the_average_quality_of_life_really_worse/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coy7ec0"], "score": [21], "text": ["To answer this question you have to really first define who the average person in the Medieval period was, and who the average person in the Roman Empire was. It at first seems easy; the average person in the medieval period was a peasant, and the average person in the Roman Empire was living in a beautiful city with modern plumbing, access to water, and very likely assisted living allowances.\n\nBut, quite frankly, that second one is a fantasy. Most of the urban population of the Empire were not living in the five or six largest cities where those amazing public amenities were, and instead were in a smaller class of cities such as Londinium. These cities certainly still offered some comforts, but were by and large not that different from the cities of the Medieval period, serving as administrative and trading hubs for the far greater share of the population living rurally. Indeed, even at it's height, the urbanization rate of the Empire likely did not exceed 10% of the total population (up to seven million of a total population between 50 and 70 million), leaving the other 90% of the population living on the farms and large estates. Now, before I go on, I should say that this might lead someone to immediately think that the majority of that 90% is slaves and thus they must have had a terrible life. The answer is that this isn't really true for the most part. While slavery was very common in Italian estates, where it **may** have made up nearly half of rural labour, this also represented the bulk of the slave population in the Empire. The majority of rural population in Rome was made up of either paid labourers or tenant farmers who paid a portion of their crop to the landholder. I cannot remember the man's name, so hopefully someone else can remind me, but he was a fellow who left a grave marker in Roman Africa telling how he went from being a paid labourer, all the way up to managing a team of labourers, all the way up to eventually buying his own farms. However, this was likely an outlier.\n\nSo, if we assume that the majority of people continued to live rurally, and in relatively similar conditions between the Empire and the Medieval period, what are the key differences that might help us answer this question? Well, I'd say the big two to consider are **taxation** and **security**. The late Empire in particular ramped up taxation to pay for the increasing needs of the state to fight off the Persians and Germans, something that Peter Heather suggests increased to unsustainable levels as Gaul, Spain, and then Africa fell. This taxation would have meant ever decreasing surpluses for local landlords and farmers. In this sense, the fall of the Empire would have meant more local production and surplus could be retained by those farmers for feeding themselves. On the other hand, that taxation also paid for security, and there's no doubt that the lack of security in the early Medieval period had an impact on people, with raids from migrating tribes being a problem all the way up into the 9th and 10th centuries with the Vikings. However, it's doubtful much actually changed for the average Joe working the fields under Germanic leadership, as most Germans were absentee land lords in that early period. The main question is whether they would have taken nearly as much taxation as their Roman predecessors, and I'd say that's unlikely.\n\nAll this said, there is also one other thing to consider, and that is total population. Population in Europe fell drastically between 300AD and 600/700AD. When the population is high, it means a large amount of relatively marginal land is forced into service as agricultural land. With a fall in population, you have two really important changes. One is that the land being put to use agriculturally is usually on average more productive, since less crappy land needs to be tilled, and second, you actually have more rights for people working that land, as their labour becomes more valuable. People sometimes wonder what exactly happened to all those laves the Roman Empire had. They didn't disappear. Instead, their labour became more important and thus they were given more rights. This is something that began even before the fall of the Empire; as the slave population stagnated, slaves were given more protections against abuse by their masters, a logical step to protect the economy. On the other hand, the labour requirements also led to laws designed to reduce labour mobiliity, meaning that our self-made man from Africa was no longer really possible.\n\nSo, in the medieval period, that average farm worker would have had more rights than a slave, but less than a free worker. They likely would have had more food available, but less security against the privations of raiding peoples. When it comes to a subjective question like 'quality of life' it's not possible to say with certainty who had it better, since it depends on what one places importance on. However, I'd say that having more food and more rights trumps the small chance of a raid. This equation would shift in areas where such raids were more prevalent and stability was lower, and might lead me to say that Ancient people's had it better. All that said, the average life for either person isn't going to be that high quality compared to modern times.\n\nIf you're looking for additional reading, I suggest looking around for analysis on the pre and post Black Death period, particularly it's effect on labour, to see how the fall of Rome might have benefited the average person."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "407l11", "title": "In 387BC, Sparta successfully concluded the Corinthian War. 15 years later on the eve of Leuctra it was loosing the fight against the Second Delian League and for peace. Why?", "selftext": "Sparta won a war against Athens, Corinth, Argos, and Thebes leading the Boeotian League.\n\n15 years later it was losing one against Athens and a new and much reduced Boeotian League that was initially Thebes itself, that they had to call for a peace conference.\n\nWhat changed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/407l11/in_387bc_sparta_successfully_concluded_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cysd7pm"], "score": [5], "text": ["The main point is that Sparta didn't really win the Corinthian War so much as pretended the bloody stalemate was in its favour.\n\nBy 387/6 BC, both sides in the war were exhausted, and neither was anywhere close to winning. The Spartan overseas empire had been dismantled and its fleet destroyed by Kimon; costly fighting dragged on around Corinth with no decisive result. Embassies were sent to the Persian court to ask the Great King to mediate between the two sides, largely to avoid the situation at the end of the Peloponnesian War when Persian support for the Spartans effectively decided the issue. \n\nThe peace that concluded the Corinthian War was therefore called the King's Peace; it was imposed upon the Greeks by Artaxerxes II. Its most important clause was that all Greek cities were to be left autonomous, curtailing the ability of any Greek state to form a new hegemony. This applied as much to Athens and its attempts to form a new empire as it did to Sparta and its unequal alliance system.\n\nIn the ensuing years, Sparta profiled itself as a \"champion of the peace\", maintaining its primacy among the Greek states by curb-stomping anyone who showed any hint of forming a confederacy. This was the only way they could spin the terms of the King's Peace in their favour. By keeping others small, Sparta could pretend to be great. In the process, they made inveterate enemies of the Mantineians, the Thebans and the Olynthians, and exasperated their remaining allies with their constant demands for support on their military campaigns.\n\nTheir greatest crime of this period was the unlawful occupation of the acropolis of Thebes in 383/2 BC. They justified it with the claim that the Thebans sought to violate the King's Peace by reforming the Boiotian League (which would reduce the other cities of Boiotia to a submissive state). Essentially nobody supported the move. When the Thebans revolted in 378 BC, Athens promptly chose their side.\n\nAt this point, by the terms of the King's Peace, Sparta could not force anybody to support them, as they had done before through the unequal alliance system of the Peloponnesian League. They found themselves unable to simultaneously fight the Thebans on land, fight the Athenians at sea, and keep their allies willing to fight on their side.\n\nRepeated Spartan invasions of Boiotia remained essentially fruitless. The Spartans were defeated at Tegyra in 375 BC, and in the same year they suffered a heavy defeat against the Athenian fleet, as they had done during the Corinthian War as well. Their attempts to interfere with affairs on Kerkyra ended in a combined defeat on land and at sea in 373 BC. Dissension among Sparta's allies was on the rise, and they had nothing to show for their efforts.\n\nLuckily for them, the Thebans had taken and destroyed the dissident community of Plataia, which was an old ally of their allies the Athenians. The Athenians then realised that the Thebans were no longer acting in their interest, and decided to try and establish peace. The Spartans happily agreed to negotiate.\n\nThe short version, then, is that even by the end of the Corinthian War, Sparta was a paper tiger. Persian interference prevented any Greek state from building up a power base of the size of the Athenian or the short-lived Spartan empire. No single Greek community could shoulder the cost of extensive naval warfare, and Sparta's allies on land were using any excuse to break away. Sparta's callous use and abuse of other states made them widely resented. No one wanted to see them restored to the supremacy they had held between the battles of Aigospotamoi (405 BC) and Knidos (394 BC). The best they could do after the King's Peace was subdue one upstart city-state at a time. They could not handle both Thebes and Athens at once."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13axbt", "title": "Requesting aid from you history buffs. ", "selftext": "Greetings /r/Askhistorians! I come to you guys today to ask for your help. I don't really post much on this subreddit, I just lurk. However, I recently started a research project and I am in need of your help. I'm a freshman in college and for one of my classes I have to write a research paper about human experimentation; particularly about the 20th century pre and post World War II decades, think Nazi concentration camps, Japanese unit 731, Soviet experiments on Jews, stuff like that. So far, I've gotten about 7 different sources which I might use in my paper but I still need to make an interview with someone who either lived through the experiments (highly unlikely), or someone who has a degree in the history of that particular time. So I ask you guys, are any of you willing to help me out? This interview must be either over the phone or through e-mail. Personally, I prefer through e-mail because then I have physical proof of the interview, but it's really up to you. I will be asking you a few questions about yourself and then more about the experimentations that were performed. It would be great if you were educated about the horrors of that time and having at least some kind of degree in history would also be great. \n\nI am going to have to cite this interview and I will give you all the credit in my research paper. \n\nThanks in advance, Russz.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13axbt/requesting_aid_from_you_history_buffs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72cmm0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Actually, if you are in the states you could look into the Lynchburg, Va experiments  &  eugenics. Probably at least a few people involved still around. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17lppn", "title": "How did American Inner-City Gangs develop?", "selftext": "With a lot of gun debate in the news, inner city gangs, \"gang bangers\" and the like keep popping into conversations, and it has made me curious of where they came from and what sort of, if any, cultural or societal circumstances led to their rise?\n\n(I have lurked this subreddit to learn things but have never posted before so if I violated any rules, sorry in advance)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17lppn/how_did_american_innercity_gangs_develop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c86uzr8", "c86wy9q", "c871k7x", "c872h7w"], "score": [10, 5, 2, 7], "text": ["The main cause for most urban gangs is poverty and for as long as America has had cities it has had gangs. Since people arrived in the US as immigrants they have tended to stick together in their cultural groups, which makes a lot of sense. If you look at early Irish gangs like the [40 Theives](_URL_0_) that formed literally because they were so poor and had no chance to rise in society by normal means. As new waves of immigrants moved into the country new gangs formed, all tending to stick to their own cultural/racial groups. Italian immigrants were often exploited/extorted by gangs from their own country, as the [Black Hand](_URL_1_) was already an established part of Italian life. Extortion was a common thread among gangs though and can still be found, especially in trades that are legally questionable. The real boom era for American gangs was prohibition. That was pretty much the golden age of gangsters, when they first really started making headlines and become public figures. They also made a lot of money from the government outlawing alcohol, many lamenting the repeal of prohibition when it all ended. In modern times you could call the outlawing of drugs like marijuana a new 'prohibition' which allows gangs to make boatloads of cash. Any illegal drug makes up a massive part of any successful gang's income.\n\nThe rise of modern gangs follows pretty much the same threads. Poverty and social inequality cause people to band together (usually of the same backgroud/race) and seek alternative means of making money, usually criminal, very likely trade in illicit substances. Each gang has its own history but they're all very similar.", "Gangs have always been around.  Always.  That was kind of the point of the whole movie Gangs of New York.  Even before that time period, there were actually roving gangs of noble youths in the 1600s terrorizing the cities at night, and getting away with it due to their status and lack of police.  \n\nThe problem, is the violence and organizational capability of modern gangs, which has greatly increased in the past 50 years, due to narcotics (which gave them a financial base from which to organize off of) and availability of more powerful weapons (killing far more people than would've been possible before).  \n\nBut to say that gangs are a new phenomenom, is to simply ignore the wide body of evidence that shows gangs have always been around.", "Gangs often develop in urban areas because of income disparity and racial separatism into burroughs. Many of the gangs do have similar stories of development but I can give you some specific examples that you can draw the generalizations from yourself.\n\nThe Irish migrated to the U.S. looking for work. Many ended up in New York City. The hours were long and the pay was little. They spent many nights hanging out at the local halls drinking and engaging in other activities. The bartenders and owners of the local places were loansharks and often knew of people who could do criminal work or favors for them. They used their respect in the community to run the organized crime.\n\nAsians migrated to the U.S. in order to work on the railroads out west. After the jobs were finished, they were stuck in the not so nice areas of the cities in California (most famously San Francisco). Much like the Irish, they hung out in places called Tong Halls that had the same hierarchical culture and criminal elements.\n\nBiker gangs were developed after the wide-amount of veterans came home from WWII and were displeased with  a slow, 40 hour week culture. Many moved out west and took their criminal tendencies with them when they formed Motor Cycle Clubs. You might ask what this has to do with urban areas. Motor cycle gangs have a lot to do with the trafficking of weapons and drugs from city to city as well as having some headquarters in cities.\n\nGangs are people often of a same attitude, culture, and moral code/disrespect for the law. They often find each other from forced and voluntary segregation from other ethnicities and cultures.\n\nEdit:\nAlso, I found an article just on your question and it is highly in depth.\n_URL_0_", "This is an excellent question on a very sensitive topic. It is more than welcome. Considering the recent race kerfuffle, however, this is a warning that this thread will be heavily moderated. Racism will not be tolerated. \n\nEdit: also, sources people. Just go ahead and post them straight away with your answers. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Thieves_(New_York_gang\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand_(extortion\\)"], [], ["http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Content/Documents/History-of-Street-Gangs.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "4ahkub", "title": "What's a historical fiction novel that impressed you with its accuracy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ahkub/whats_a_historical_fiction_novel_that_impressed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10huid", "d10jpq2", "d10kf48", "d10kqp4", "d10m866", "d10misp", "d10mm2c", "d10mv59", "d10nknr", "d10nv6x", "d10p96r", "d10pkuy", "d10pnnz", "d10qro8", "d10sj09", "d10sqyp", "d10t23x", "d10tbhr", "d10uhm5", "d10uu3e", "d10v16k", "d110q8k", "d112f37", "d112q2j", "d118hai", "d11980x", "d11cgeo", "d11jvyx", "d11vm12"], "score": [23, 404, 50, 221, 21, 71, 147, 9, 46, 13, 377, 15, 11, 57, 20, 13, 13, 51, 3, 3, 6, 6, 5, 2, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Is it ok if I throw a question in here? \n\nI'd like to know how accurate The Given Day by Dennis Lehane is. It deals with the end of the World War I, the Spanish flu, and the Boston Police Strikes, as well as a perspective from Babe Ruth.", "The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford\n\nIt covers the race to reach the south pole between Sir Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. Huntford created scenes and dialogues based on the journal entries kept by all parties (and references said entries in footnotes throughout). It blurs the lines between historical fiction and annotated biography as the dialogues are largely imagined by the author but it is presented with such insight into the characters of the men based on their own thoughts and accounts that it is easy to forget that it was not penned by a party who was present at the time.", "Any historians with an opinion on the accuracy of Conn Igguldens novels? More specifically the Emperor series set in ancient Rome, and the series about Genghis Khan.", "This is the low-hanging fruit of this thread, but why not:\n\nHilary Mantel, discussing her \"literary origins\", had a striking remark about a scene from Shakespeare's *Julius Caesar* (ETA: not the focus of this post) in an interview with the *Guardian*:\n\n >  Everything I have done is somehow wrapped into that scene. I have been concerned with revolution, with persuasion, with rhetoric, with the point where a crowd turns into a mob; in a larger sense, with the moment when one thing turns into another, whether a ghost into a solid person or a riot into a revolution. Everything, it seems to me, is in this scene.\n\nThis is, fundamentally, the question on which *scholarship* of the English Reformation turns. How does a country go from its king ordering the works of Luther burned, to founding his own Church for purposes of divorce, to shutting monasteries, to burning Protestants and banning vernacular Bibles, to Catholicism, to increasingly *Calvinist* Protestantism? How to we go from a voice to a crowd to a mob, what is the driving force behind that?\n\nSo even when Mantel claims her research for *Wolf Hall*, *Bring Up the Bodies*, and the forthcoming finale of her fictionalized biography of Thomas Cromwell is meager next to her knowledge of the French Revolution--she's already approaching not just the era but what *drives* it. That, to me, is a key reason why these books have worked so well.\n\nHenry VIII's England is a rare era, I think, where modern pop culture consumers are most familiar with heavily fictionalized versions of real people instead of pop history (WWII/the History Channel) or fictional pastiche (the Middle Ages). And each new entry into the genre revises it some way, redeeming a protagonist out of an incredible cast and villainizing others. *A Man for All Seasons* gives us hagiography of Thomas More in film. *Tudors* managed to make some people believe in Henry+Anne=4ever.\n\nMantel takes up the man who hadn't had his shot at popular redemption, Cromwell. It's a fascinating new angle, since his story *should* be what we cling to: the rise from obscure origins to fortune and power, and a tragic fall at the hands of a capricious king. But while redemption is the goal and possibly the outcome, the process is messy. Mantel, through her characters, has to grapple with the big question: *how religious was the early English Reformation*? Were Cromwell and/or the Boleyns sincere evangelicals (=Protestant)?\n\nMantel did her place-space research, of course. She kept track of who was where, who was with whom, who was talking to whom. She's not interested in conflating characters because having two people named Mary would be too confusing. But that's almost beside the point. What makes *Wolf Hall* and *Bring Up the Bodies* work is her self-consciousness as an interpreter of history as well as a novelist.\n\nOf course I'm a historian, and my perspective on Tudor England/the English Reformation is shaped by reading *history* by other historians. Which raises the question: do I think these books are \"realistic\" because they reflect what I've read, instead of the era? And this is where, I think, Mantel's skill as a novelist comes in.\n\nI tend towards caution in my own research--I stay closer to my sources. When I speak with questions in my answers on AH, they're not just rhetorical devices--it's because the sources are silent on what people did or why they did it, and I might have thoughts but I'm too nervous to assert them for sure. To write *good* novels, Mantel can't live in that uncertainty. If the books are going to work as books, with consistent characterization, she has to try to reconstruct what people were actually thinking.\n\nAnd what emerges from WH and BUTB, for me, is a portrait and a tale of people whose thoughts and motivations lead logically to what I know of the history from the sources. Whether or not I would have ventured the same reconstruction, it works. It works piece by piece, step by step, evolving over time. It works not just for Cromwell but for other hotly disputed figures (Anne Boleyn, looking at you).\n\nWe can't *know* whether Mantel 'got it right' with her characters in the same way we can say, \"Henry VIII on his deathbed did not look like Jonathan Rhys-Meyers\" or \"seriously, *Reign*, WTF.\" But to me as both a reader and a historian, the books make *sense.*\n\nThey're also fantastic books and you should read them. :)", "Would In Cold Blood by Truman Capote be a good fit for this thread? It's an incredibly well researched novel, almost on the brink of being a complete historical account of the Clutter murders of 1959. There are very few instances, iirc, of fictional input in the story, with most of the facts being taken from numerous interviews with many friends, family members, neighbors, and the murderers by Capote himself. Granted, it's often argued that Capote took liberties in detailing one of the murderers, as they'd become close through the interviewing process.", "Mary Renault's *The Last of the Wine* and her Alexander Trilogy, particularly *Fire from Heaven* about Alexander's youth with Hephaestion and *The Persian Boy* which detailed the life of the Persian eunuch Bagoas and his eventual status as Alexander's companion. Besides being historically accurate, they are also beautifully written and *oh my god so romantic I want to die*.\n\nThere are plenty of things in the novels that are inventions for the sake of narrative (Bagoas, for example, is hardly mentioned in the Alexander sources) but the day-to-day details of kingship, respect, belief systems, social systems, and society are astonishingly accurate considering that Renault was not a classically-trained classicist but, in fact, a nurse. Historians have been particularly pleased with her treatment of Macedonian society in the time of Alexander's youth and providing many plausible explanations for gaps in Alexander's history and strange decisions made by his father and himself. In addition, *The Persian Boy* offers a beautiful and quite reasonably accurate portrayl of eunuch culture in Persia and the ancient Meditteranean, a subject that I simply did not know I was lacking information on. The hierarchical structure of concubines, prostitutes, eunuchs, non-eunuch servants, older eunuchs, eunuchs of certain family trees as well as the incredibly understated role of eunuchs in politics (if you're interested in this subject, check out Chinese history which dealt with eunuchs as key political influences for centuries).\n\n*The Last of the Wine* interested me a great deal because it dealt with homosexuality in ancient Greece in a fascinating way. It's essentially a novel that treats the Greek homosexual relationship *as if that was the norm at the time the novel was written*. It's certainly a major theme of the novel but the characters don't spend massive chunks of the novel questioning their affections, hiding their love from society, or even describing their passions (there's little to no sex scenes in the novel and it could ostensibly be read as a Platonic relationship but, in my opinion, you'd *really* have to want it to be Platonic to believe that). Instead they are mainly concerned with their lives, battles, society, place in the world, etc. and work through it together. They even marry women later in the novel and while the change in the relationship is commented on by the characters it's more of a \"Ah, no more boys night out!\" conversation than an \"Alas, thy supple limbs will no more support my lithe body.\" In true Athenian fashion (at least at this point) *it's just not that monumental of an event*. While you can't necessarily say the novel is about a man who just so happens to have a homosexual love, it's also not a novel about a man with a homosexual love who just so happens to have a life. We learn about his childhood and how education was set up, we learn about famine, we learn many things about Athenian symposiums, even the very system of *eromenos* and *erastes* and how a suitor might be rebuffed by a beloved that was uninterested in his affections.\n\nOne of my favourite things about *The Last of the Wine* in fact is the description of the drinking-game played at symposiums called *kottabos*. It's obvious that Renault scoured each and every source she could possibly find for this trivial aspect of life and got it down so close to perfectly accurate that you forget it's a historical novel. \n\nFor example, there is a scene in which the narrator (beloved) and his lover (suitor) are playing kottabos together. The lover, known for being damn good at the game, throws the lees of the wine in such a way that, when they land, they form the first letter of the narrator's name. When you read the scene, you don't think, \"Wow, how accurate!\"; instead, your only thought is \"Oh my god that's so romantic I'm going to die why doesn't any beautiful man spell my name with wine lees ;_;\" (that might just be me but you get the the point). Her historicity is so implicit in the text that you learn by reading the book rather than studying it. ", "James Clavell's [*Sh\u014dgun*](_URL_0_. It's very loosely based off historical Japan, but the attention put towards Japanese culture is pretty impressive.\n\nI've actually asked about it in this sub before and [here is an entire thread devoted to it](_URL_1_).\n\nIt's definitely far from an academic work, but it is interesting starting point for anyone with a western perspective that is interested in historical Japan, specifically the 17th century.", "[Brazil Red by Jean Christophe Rufin](_URL_0_) is a historical fiction taking place in 1555 on the shore of Brazil. It's about the tentative by the French to setup a colonie in Rio de janeiro. \n\nThe main character is a malte knight : [Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon](_URL_1_). \n\nThe book cover the religious tension between catholique and protestants, as well as contact with natives peoples. \n\nThe book is based on the life of Villagagnon, as well as on personal journal of one of the protestant sailor : [Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Br\u00e9sil,\nautrement dite Am\u00e9rique](_URL_2_), the first edition is from 1578. \n\nSome other character, like the two \"truchements\" kids are fictional but inspired by common practice of the time in term of language learning and translation. \n\nThe natives tribe \"Tupis\" is describe in a coherent way as other sources:_URL_3_\n\nIt's a fun read! \n\n", "[*Winds of War*](_URL_0_) and [*War and Remembrance*](_URL_1_) by Herman Wouk (who won the 1951 Pulitzer for *The Caine Mutiny*) come to my mind for the World War II era.  Wouk masterfully weaves the story of a US Family, the Henry's, into the events leading up to the war and throughout the war.  Through various events, Wouk is able to place one member of the family at almost all the major political and military events in the war while providing plenty of historical background to the same events.  Wouk is also able to accurately portray the major historical figures of the war while never presuming to read their minds as most fiction writers will do.  His portrayal of the treatment of the Jews in Italy and Germany through the time period is particularly poignant when he has one of the Henry sons marry a US born Jewish girl who is living in Italy at the outbreak of the war.  The struggle of this character to get his family out of Europe through the war and his search for them after the war has ended is incredibly powerful.  I also love the fact that Wouk provides plenty of philosophical background material to pursue as to why the Holocaust could even happen in Germany at this time period.  The books clock in at well over 2000 pages total so they are a daunting prospect but for anyone who loves to study the time period, they are well worth the effort.", "Some of my personal favorites are the RFC/RAF novels written by Derek Robinson. He often incorporates actual historical events into his plots, suitably modified, to illustrate the larger points of aviation history. His characters inhabit a world that is often deromanticized and absurdly random, which is no small feat given that aviation is often heavily cliched with tropes on heroism and bravery. Despite its often grim plots, his books' are often characters incredibly funny and the absurdity of their situation is often not lost on them. As one of his characters says in *Piece of Cake*:\n\n > The whole purpose of the armed forces can be summed up in one word \u2013 killing. Now, I don\u2019t find that goal \u2013 in your words \u2013 marvelous, or magnificent, and try as I might I cannot bring myself to feel proud of it. Grateful, perhaps, as one is selfishly grateful for the existence of men who keep the sewage system working. But proud? No.\n\n", "I highly recommend **Patrick O'Brian's [Aubrey-Maturin series of historical naval fiction](_URL_5_)** (beginning with *[Master and Commander](_URL_2_)*, which was sort-of made into a movie starring Russel Crowe a few years back) for both superb writing and attention to historical accuracy. The series is comprised of twenty novels, set during the Napoleonic Wars and featuring characters in the British Royal Navy, primarily Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin. \n\nO'Brian did exhaustive research into the naval battles featured in many of the novels, such as the fictional Captain Jack Aubrey's capture of the *Cacafuego* in *Master and Commander*, which is based on [Lord Cochrane's capture of the 32-gun Spanish xebec-frigate *El Gamo*](_URL_1_) in HMS *Speedy* (an under-manned 14-gun brig). The details of the action described by Cochrane in his dispatch (linked) are almost identical to the engagement in which O'Brian places Aubrey's sloop HMS *Sophie.* \n\nTo his credit, O'Brian himself frequently alludes to the historical context in the prefaces to his novels, and claims no credit for inventing those heroic actions that are based on real battles. In discussing the writing of his first novel of the sea, *The Golden Ocean* (based in [Commodore George Anson's circumnavigation](_URL_0_) - a voyage that began in 1740), O'Brian [describes his research processes and the pleasure of immersing himself in historical records](_URL_4_) (emphasis mine):\n\n > I was fortunate enough to have great material, and I wrote the book in about six weeks (or was it less?) laughing most of the time. In the first place there was the chaplain's excellent account, together with other contemporary sources; a mass of documents from the British Public Record Office; and the great wealth of the National Maritime Museum and its library at Greenwich. My own knowledge of the sea was useful too; but though I had sailed for many years and in many rigs, both fore-and-aft and square, my vessels were far removed from Anson's ships and it called for a great deal of research to get the technical details quite right\u2014very agreeable research, too, in an atmosphere where I felt thoroughly at home, and in very good company: research that has, in the course of later years, led me through countless ship's logs, official correspondence, courts-martial, Admiralty orders, memoirs and letters written by sailors of all ranks from admiral of the fleet to ordinary seaman, and of course innumerable books dealing with naval history, ship-handling, ship-building, the health of seamen, and the fighting of battles at sea.\n\n > In my subsequent naval tales I have rarely had everything, character, plot and ending, handed to me on a salver; but I have often found a comfortable kernel of fact for my fiction: for example I borrowed Cochrane's taking of the immensely superior *Cacafuego* in *Master and Commander*, Linois's unsuccessful action against the Indiamen in *HMS Surprise*, and Captain Riou's collision with an iceberg in *Desolation Island*.\n\n > **Indeed, anyone who reads extensively in the subjects I have mentioned will find a great many traces of my borrowing; nor shall I blush on being confronted with them, for I do not claim the merit of originality: only that of being a tolerably exact mirror, reflecting the ships and the seamen of an earlier age.**\n\nAll this is not to say that his books contain no historical inaccuracies or artistic license; he is a novelist and his characters largely fictitious, though historical figures that would be contemporaries of his characters do play varying roles, or are alluded to within the novels. The most notable liberty taken with history is [one of scale and time](_URL_3_); the first few novels progress through history fairly rapidly, while the events of the latter novels are often compressed to fit within the timeline of relevant historical events. \n\n****\n\nEDIT to add: I limited the scope of this comment to the veracity of the naval battles upon which O'Brian based many of the actions in his novels, but his writing is often surprisingly accurate beyond the engagements between warships. His characters' dialects, the social mores of the period, the technical accuracy in describing the ships and rigging, the Royal Navy itself, and naval tactics of the time are all well-researched. Even the narrative prose of the novels is written to mimic the style and tone of the period. However, since that's harder to demonstrate with sources, I've chosen to leave those aspects to one side for now. I'm happy to answer questions or elaborate as best I can if others are interested, though. \n\n*(I've never commented here before but I love reading AH threads, so if this comment doesn't meet the requirements, my apologies. If a moderator finds issues here, I'd appreciate a comment to that effect so I can remedy the problem, rather than wholesale deletion, if that's feasible.)*\n", "I've found anything by Steven Pressfield to be meticulously researched. Gates of Fire, which is an account of the Battle of Thermopylae, Virtues of War, which follows Alexander's campaign in the first person, and Killing Rommel which is an account of The Long Range Desert Group in Africa during WW2 are just three from his stellar arsenal of work. ", "The Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich.  Also known as The Willing Flesh from its original German publication.\n\nThe novel follows a squad of German landsers (infantrymen) on the Eastern Front in 1943.  Heinrich himself fought against the Russians and experienced first-hand what the book's jacket calls \"the death throes of the mighty German Wehrmacht.\"\n\nThe story follows the camaraderie of the men during their continual retreat and final stand against the Red Army.  A major plot point involves the rivalry between the main character and a ruthless officer who sacrifices his own men for personal glory.  \n\nThe novel tends to stray away from overt historical facts and details for the sake of the story.  However, Heinrich's writing is beautiful and haunting because it's all inspired by personal experiences.  When he describes a man getting run over by a Russian T-34 tank, it's clear he's not just dreaming this stuff up. \n\nNo spoilers, but one of the final scenes involves the characters fighting for control of a factory in a Crimean city.  They're running through pitch black corridors lit only by the tracers of submachine guns, and the Russians are racing to cut them off at every corner.  It was one of the most terrifying chapters of a book I've ever read. \n\nSam Peckinpah made a movie of the book in 1977, and it was okay.  Personally, I loved the book so much that I'm going to try and get reproduction rights from the publisher to produce a new, more faithful (independent) film adaptation.  I don't know what I'm getting myself into, but this is a story that truly resonates in contemporary times.   ", "My absolute favorite historical novel series of all time is the *Masters of Rome* series by Colleen McCullough.\n\nFrom memory it spans seven books beginning with Gaius Marius' day and his contact with Julius Caesar's grandfather to make a political marriage with Caesar's Aunt. It plays out the drama of the late Republican days to the point where Octavian consolidates power. \n\nAbsolutely riveting writing and I couldn't put it down. Undoubtedly some historical license is taken to flesh out the characters and imagine situations they may have been in - for example, Sulla walking a young Caesar home because the author imagines Sulla's first wife - Julia Caesaris - as one of Caesar's aunts, therefore making him Caesar's uncles and a brother-in-law of Gaius Marius.\n\nIn any case, the authenticity of its portrayal of Roman culture, Roman society, Roman politics was all superb. Although I wouldn't say its focus was at all on warfare, the parts that did feature warfare were quite interesting. \n\nOverall highly recommended.", "Any historians with an opinion on Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World)?  They cover quite a span of years and historical locations, and it was the historical aspect that always had me intrigued so, putting aside the introduction of clearly fictional characters into a historical context, I'm wondering about the accuracy of the historical material itself. ", "It's very surprising that no one mentionned it : \n\nEVERY ZOLA'S NOVEL. \nHe wrote books about his time, so XIX century France. He did some awesome research to do these : for example, when he talks about a flat in one of his novels, it means that he went to that flat, took notes about every details, made an outline etc etc \nMost of the characters never existed though, but they're real in the sense that they could have existed. It's really an in depth look on France at the time.\n", "As an add on to this question, I loved Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series and his Century Trilogy, which take place in mid 12th Century England and a large portion of the 20th Century Europe respectively.\n\nCan anyone comment on the relative historical accuracy of these novels?", "Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (*Quicksilver*, *The Confusion*, and *The System of the World*) is a tremendous work of three massive historical novels (as well as a modern day sequel (*Cryptonomicon*) tracking the same families in the twentieth century).\n\nThe story starts in 1661 and concerns itself with one Daniel Waterhouse, a fictional mathematician and college roommate of Issac Newton.  His father was a apocalyptic Puritan who sided with the Roundheads during the English Civil War  Waterhouse later becomes good friends with Gottfried Leibniz.  One of the greater conflicts in the series is who actually created the calculus, Newton or Leibniz.  The books also concern themselves with \"the philosophical language,\" an Enlightenment idea that tried to organize all knowledge into an ordered and scientific model.\n\nMeanwhile, Jack Shaftoe is a vagabond and pirate who circumnavigates the world on his quest to have substantial wealth.  He is joined in part by Eliza, a harem slave who proves to be a genius at investment markets and who finds herself embroiled in espionage in the court of Louis XIV.  She also ultimately meets up with Waterhouse as she spies on and for England and William of Orange.\n\nThere are numerous unhistorical parts to the books, starting with its four principle characters (Waterhouse, Jack, Eliza, and Enoch Root).  However, this is not due to lack of research, as the books are meticulously researched.  Minor elements of history are intentionally altered to allow the narrative to go where it needs, but it's surprising how faithful it remains to issues of seventeenth and eighteenth century science, economics, sailing, courtly intrigue, coinage, and alchemy.  I highly recommend, but be aware that this is 4000+ pages you'll be diving into.", "Robert Graves' *King Jesus,* written in the 1930s, addresses both the historical and scriptural setting for the story of Jesus. It necessarily includes inventions, but doesn't contradict any extant source and sets the scope of the story very wide. It is excellent, especially for readers who are not of any particular faith but are still drawn to the power of the story. It offers a very different interpretation of the story than has ever been suggested anywhere else. ", "From Sea to Shining Sea by James Alexander Thom. It covers the Lewis and Clark expedition. It is truly a joy to read and I would recommend any of his other titles as well. James Alexander Thom has thoroughly researched all his characters and sites his resources through out the book. Lewis's journals were the primary resource for Sea to Shining Sea of course but the way the author paints the picture of them preparing for their trip, the hardships they faced and even after they had returned home felt very real and made me connect very deeply with this part of American history.", "I'm interested to know the community's thoughts on *Space* by James Michener.  It follows the stories of a whole host of fictional characters as they work through their lives and careers in the shadow of the Space Race as we see America change itself as a country from WWII until the Space Shuttle, giving us looks at how German scientists were brought over and acclimated, the paths some took in the military to become pilots and ultimately astronauts, the creation of NASA, and more.  One of my favorite books, and I'm curious what others think of it and its accuracy.\n\nGiven Michener's background (he was an advisor at NASA), I trust its accuracy in space-race-related things, and given his general style of historical fiction and extensively researching things, I'd trust he's pretty spot on with his portrayal of ~25-30 years of post-WWII America.", "Try Joseph Boyden's The Orenda, which is a novel that deals with the first sustained interactions between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in New France. The story is told from three competing perspectives: a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) woman who is captured, her captor who is a Wendat (Huron) war chief, and the final perspective is that of Jean de Br\u00e9beuf, who is easily the most famous of the Jesuit missionaries who worked in Huronia.\n\nIt is a book on a par Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, in my humble opinion, and deals with similar themes of a peoples in crisis, who might have ordinarily resisted the incursions of outsiders. In their weakened state, however, the Christian outsiders promised much and delivered when the Wendat ways couldn't. It shows that a great deal of what happens in history is merely good or bad fortune, coupled with disastrous decisions pursued by well-meaning, but ultimately ill-conceived plans. There are a few major events that are transpiring to draw out these themes: \n\n1. A war between the Haudenosaunee and Wendat that predates European contact. It was a modestly even affair at first, but at the time the book opens the Wendat are starting to lose, and this is because...\n\n2. The Wendat have been struggling with illness and famine, again before the arrival of Europeans. Needless to say, this has affected their ability to wage war, but the Wendat war chief fails to see he is increasingly alone in the war.\n\n3. The Jesuit Mission to Huronia arrives as this is happening, promising salvation and protection, and lures many away from their tribal teachings and habits, both for better and for worse.\n\nThe book has attracted some controversy, mostly for its brutality and the sense that it could perpetuate ideas of \"savagery\" among Indigenous peoples prior to the Colonial period in North America. Those criticisms are overblown, however, as the characters clearly understand how combat, capture and torture fit into the social and political lives of their respective peoples. It IS a very brutal book at times, but it also portrays the internal politics of the peoples, and their commitment to their own ways of life, as well as the ways that deviating from tradition can lead to disastrous consequences. That said, it also shows that the Christian Mission did offer some hope to a people who were literally starving to death, and so one comes to understand how they were so successful at converting the Wendat. Br\u00e9beuf was not a monster, in that sense, but he was an ideologue who was absolutely wedded to his missionary pursuits. There was no higher calling, just as we see with the Haudenosaunee woman and her Wendat captor.\n\nIt's a huge accomplishment, as literary fiction, and I hope it becomes required reading for Canadian high-schoolers.", "Julian by Gore Vidal \n\nIts a classic really. The story itself concerns the last pagan emperor of Rome, Julian, and his attempt to stem the tide of christianity. Its a romanticized tragedy concerning the death of antiquity and the coming of christianity and the \"Dark\" ages. This is obviously a kind of portrayal which is no longer academically in fashion but the book also contains many delightful and interesting references to middle- and neoplatonic philosophers such as Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus and many early church figures. ", "George Ebers' \"Cleopatra\",\n\nIt's incredibly vivid and interesting, all while remaining accurate to the history and the time period, which is rare enough for novels set in antiquity. \n\nOne thing that helped was that the majority of the novel was written from the perspectives of side characters (real and fictional) which allowed the author to characterize and flesh out characters like Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Caesarion and Octavian from the third person, which is how history remembers them for the most part, making their deeds, words and behaviours tell a story about them that is convincing and detailed, while not departing too far from fact (I say too far because for all I know about them I still was not there, although I am *very* interested, and I dare say knowledgeable about both Ptolemaic Egypt, as well as the Roman Republic particularly as it approached it's transition into an empire). The storyline begins after war has been declared between Octavian and Cleopatra (as well as Mark Antony by association) and ends with Cleopatra's suicide and the annexation of Egypt, and the novel's namesake does not make an appearance until the novel's second act (but the clever writing keeps things more than interesting and relevant enough up till then, and at no point did I ever willingly set it down) One thing I appreciate is the author's refraining from applying modern, Christianity-influenced morals to ancient societies and individuals shaped by paganism, it's refreshing for a writer to allow the reader to make up their own mind about the right or wrong of certain actions (although I imagine George Ebers was a fan of Cleo, but then again, even ancient writers of history like Suetonius and Plutarch had their biases and favourites). \n\nThe setting is masterfully crafted, and you can tell that it was written with a lot of care for detail and accuracy, but also with an eye for artistry, as well as how well the cultural, social, and political nuances of a setting with so many influences, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Judean etc. And the events mirror reality, but Ebers took historical happenings and projected emotion on them, such as the atmosphere of confusion, fear and false joviality in Alexandria following the Battle of Actium. \n\nThe amount of time and research that went into this novel is apparent, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the time period, as unlike many dramatic works based around these events, this one allows the tensions and drama of history excite the reader, rather than trying to loosely base the author's own story in that time and place and slap a historical filter on it (even HBO's Rome, which I thought was great mind you, failed for me in the accuracy department) with the exception of some possible mystical elements although these are kept vague and implied as we really only know that certain characters *believe* in the supernatural, and others do not, which is need I say, accurate for a time when even rational and learned men believed in such powers as those possessed by the Vestal Virgins and the priests and acolytes of various deities.\n\n In short, this novel is an enjoyable read suited for both hardcore fans of history and casual adventure seekers, and as a bonus it is in the common domain because of it's age (which unlike many books does not show in the writing) [Here is a link on Project Gutenberg where you can read it free of charge](_URL_0_) \n\nHopefully you will find it enjoyable and informative!", "I would love to make the case for Thomas Pynchon's [Mason  &  Dixon](_URL_0_).  Hear me out!  \n\n'Mason  &  Dixon,' is the 1997 book by Thomas Pynchon. The historical period the book covers surround the eras and overlap of the Enlightenment and Colonial/Pre-Revolutionary America (though many allusions to events before and just after are made). The main action and events of the book surround the meeting of astronomer George Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, their friendship, their attempted documenting of the 1763 Transit of Venus, and of course and in depth, their famous surveying and chartering of the Mason Dixon line.  In effect, the characters named the line which imbued the concept which fascinated the author to write the book, an example unto itself of its style. Indeed, \"Mason  &  Dixon\" is a work of \"Historiographic Metafiction\" meaning that it is written in a style that combines the elements and rules of Historical Fiction and Metafiction. So one can be sure that Pynchon became *very* well read up on his Historical sources, became quite literate with the years from 1750-1790, but also hoovered the actual fiction of the day, and thus took great pains to write his fiction in something like the literary style and language of the day. This ostensibly to show the extent to which works of both literature and historiography are dependent on the history of discourse.  And of course, Pynchon's own zany style and tics (the book is *very* humorous comes through.  Here's a select passage from where Mason  &  Dixon, now in America, learn about the passage of the Stamp Act (22 March 1765).\n\n > The Stamp Act has re-assign'd the roles of the Comedy, and the Audience are in an Uproar. Suddenly Fathers of desirable Girls are no longer minor Inconveniences, some indeed proving to be active Foes, capable of great Mischief. Lads who imagin'd themselves inflexible Rivals for life, find themselves now all but Comrades in Arms. The languorous Pleasantries of Love, are more and more interrupted by the brisk Requisitions of Honor. Over the winter-solid Roads, goes a great seething,- of mounted younger Gentlemen riding together by the dozens upon rented horses, Express Messengers in love with pure Velocity, Disgruntl'd Suitors with Pistols stuff'd in their Spatterdashes, seal'd Waggons not even a western Black-Boy would think of detaining. The May Session of the Burgesses, the eloquent defiance of Mr. Patrick Henry, and the Virginia Resolutions,- that Dividing Ridge beyond which all the Streams of American Time must fall unmappable,- lie but weeks ahead. At the College, Dixon may hear wise Prophecy,- at the State House, interested Oratory,- but there proves no-place quite as congenial to the unmediated newness of History a-transpiring, as Raleigh's Tavern. Viriginians young and old are standing to toast the King's Confoundment. When it's his own turn to, Dixon chooses rather to honor what has ever imported to him,- raising his ale-can, \"To the pursuit of Happiness.\"\n\nNaturally and following the course of the aforementioned traits, shortly following this toast Dixon meets a young and emotional Thomas Jefferson who feels inspired by such a proclamation.  Highly comical and yet perhaps pointing to one of the two main issues that I hear people having about Thomas Pynchon, namely that\n  1. His style is too over the top and zany, which in conjunction with its denseness and his book's lengths (Mason  &  Dixon, for example, runs to 771 pages in my edition) to the point of removing the casual reader from enjoyment.  And 2) where a saving grace for any more experimental artistic effort is the \"grounded main character\" (if you've seen the works of David Lynch, you'll realize that the main difference between his most critically acclaimed work and his more derisive ones is that the popular ones ['Blue Velvet,' 'Twin Peaks,' 'Mulholland Drive'] usually have one of these], Pynchon's works usually have no \"main\" characters, opting instead for a cast counting in the dozens and hundreds. Well...\n\nCertainly Thomas Pynchon is far more reknown for the more *literary* aspect of his novels.  As one of the de-rigeur post-modernists, there is a great amount of anachronism and the characters occasionally reference or allude to things that are simply *far* and removed from their time (there are within the book, allusions to surf music, whole songs are sung, Lovecraftian horror, a highly comical \"first pizza in the colonies,\" to begin with).  Too, there are many instances throughout the novel of things or devices that are simply not reconciable with what we consider to be \"possible\" (there is a flying robotic duck, alluding possibly to alternate dimensions [this is never made explicit and may only be conjecture] including one in which a \"hollow-earth\" is reality.  So all in all (and these are not all), many things that may if you prefer more traditional or usual Historical Fiction may turn you out.  But all of these things work in direct conjunction and toward a greater purpose with the other elements of the book (and to be sure, the aforementioned or only minor elements).  Indeed, from angle of a Historian, arguably the way Pynchon views and writes Historical fiction is much more in line with the way History is taught now (things like \"plot\" and \"linear-narrative\" being the stuff of \"Great Man Theories\" and the stuff of Webber, whereas M & D feels like all of your Senior level History classes over the course of a semester all at once, with yucks thrown in.\n\nAnd as for the other concern?  Of all of Pynchon's larger works (ignoring 'Crying of Lot 49,' and more recently, 'Inherent Vice' and 'Bleeding Edge'), 'Mason  &  Dixon' arguably has his most grounded, relatable, and beloved characters.  And where Pynchon can, he adheres to the truth and veracity of their history to the most minute degree (George Mason's family life, feelings are reflective of primary sources, for Jeremiah Dixon, his \"Geordie\" accent and Quaker heritage are highly preserved.  But of the two we admittedly don't have everything, so it is therein that Pynchon takes a few liberties, but nothing that is outrageously egregious to the Historical truth.  He does form a bit of a \"Laurel  &  Hardy\" vibe out of the two, but this would appear to be in line with History.  But this is in line with any Historical Fiction.  \n\nOf the History itself, as I've mentioned, all appears to be meticulously researched. I can't provide any confirmation from the Horses' mouth as Pynchon famously has never given any interviews (and we would only even appear to have *two* photographs of the man), but the stuff holds.  In its almost 800 page length (and true to form regarding the nature of contact and relations during the Enlightenment) we encounter a stream of walk-on cameo appearances by the likes of though certainly not limited to John Harrison, Nevil Maskelyne, Robert Clive, Samuel Johnson (Boswell, too), Benjamin Franklin, George and Martha Washington, the aforementioned Thomas Jefferson, to be sure (and many others of the era are mentioned).  Too, we encounter (and each in their element and in accordance to History) Jesuits, Chinese geomancers, South African plantation owners, the American kind too, early American slaves, Native Americans, and many many Colonial Americans.  It is simply a beautiful book made of the very stuff one could love about the study of History, the literature of the past (and present), and how all of these meet at some juncture between the past and our present (wherein we study these things) and just at the point where present and past begin to fray.  I encourage anyone to give it a read", "I am particularly fond of any of the First North Americans / \"People of the\" series by W. Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear. They are both actually archaeologists and there is always a list of sources at the end of each novel which gives me confidence that they know their stuff. (In saying that I'm not familiar at all with any of the cultures or sites that they highlight so if anybody can comment on this then that would be fantastic!)\n\n\nMost their books are standalone and each set in a different time period, location and culture ranging from Ice Age Alaska through to European contact in Florida. There are some themes that carry through and some characters from earlier novels are legendary figures and then become part of the creation myth in later books.\n\n\nThe stories themselves become pretty predictable after you've read 3 or 4 of them. There always seems to be a mysterious trader with a murky past, the jaded old war chief with a heart of gold and a naive young Dreamer (shaman) with something to prove. But I don't really mind that - it's comforting that I know what I'm getting when I pick one up. The real thing they have going for them is the small details. The world that they are living in seems believable and you can tell the authors know a lot about it and care about getting this across to the reader. Without it becoming a dramaticised textbook.", "Barbara Mertz wrote a historical fiction series about egypt from 1884 to 1922. They are called the Amelia Peabody mysteries. They follow a wealthy British womans career in Egypt including egyptology, romance, murder mysteries and real life events. She recieved a phd in egyptology in the 50's. She has written many other books including two books about anciet egpyt.\n\nThe main characters are both practicing egyptologists and many of the events not directly relating to them are historically accurate and many of the characters are based on real people. They have roughly correct ancient myths in most of them that are paralleled in the books.\n\nThese are her nonfiction books.\n\n >   *Temples, Tombs, and Hieroplyphs* 1964\n >  \n *Two Thousand Years in Rome* 1968\n >   \n*Red Land, Black Land* 1966", "The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara is incredible.  He uses real notes from Rommel's journal and diary, read interviews from the people he wrote about, and even interviewed the paratrooper specifically.  It's awesome.  It slows down the invasion of Omaha Beach so you can easily grasp what's going on, and it does a good job of portraying how quickly people were shot to shit.  It goes into detail about what the aftermath of the battle was.  It follows one paratrooper as he goes deeper into France, and mentions why so many paratroopers were dropped all over the place.  Not to mention why the transports were flying so fast.", "Q, by Luther Blisset ( a pseudonym for an Italian writers collective) is one of the most incredible historical novels I've read. It follows an anabaptist as he travels through wartorn Europe during the Thirty Years War and afterwards, getting caught up in the apocalyptic insanity of Munster, then falling in with the survivors who washed up in the liberal enclaves of the Netherlands, before heading to Italy. All the time he is pursued by a Vatican Counter-Reformation spy known only as Q, who writes letters back to his handlers in Rome detailign his pursuit of the mysterious anabaptist who keeps changing his name and identity as he struggles to survive among the wars, massacres, and persecutions that wrack Europe. The accuracy seems very well done, and the book shows a vast and impressive knowledge of the Reformation from the point of view of the non-mainstream protestants who broke with Luther over what they saw as his unacceptable compromises with the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. It highlights an area of history that is all-too often overlooked even in histories of the period, which focus solely on the big names of Luther and Calvin, and ignore the many others who did not follow them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dgun_(novel)", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2af74z/how_accurate_is_james_clavells_shogun_in_terms_of/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Red", "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Durand_de_Villegagnon", "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_d%27un_voyage", "http://brasil500anos.ibge.gov.br/territorio-brasileiro-e-povoamento/historia-indigena/modos-de-vida-dos-tupinamba-ou-tupis.html"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Winds-War-Herman-Wouk/dp/0316952664/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1458053713&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=winds+of+war", "http://www.amazon.com/War-Remembrance-Herman-Wouk-ebook/dp/B0033UT24E/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"], [], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16611/16611-h/16611-h.htm", "https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/15393/page/949", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_and_Commander", "http://www.hmssurprise.org/aubrey-maturin-chronology", "http://www.wwnorton.com/pob/vol1i.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2%80%93Maturin_series"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5482?msg=welcome_stranger"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Mason-Dixon-Novel-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/0312423209/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1458079415&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mason+%26+dixon"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2q2dnc", "title": "Have bare legs on women been a popular fashion in any part of western civilization before the 20th century?", "selftext": "In some of the books I've read involving time travel, women wearing short skirts and so on are seen as scandalous; sometimes they're mistaken for prostitutes.  However, I'm aware that fashion trends have waxed and waned over the centuries.  Did western women of any region and era wear bare legs as a style of fashion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q2dnc/have_bare_legs_on_women_been_a_popular_fashion_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn26atn", "cn287sn"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["Some Georgian/Regency dresses might show a little bit of ankle ([example](_URL_0_)), but for the most part it has never been part of western high fashion until the 20th century. \n\nThere are many traditional European folk costumes with knee-length or ankle-length skirts though, for example [Transylvania](_URL_1_), [Poland](_URL_2_) (woman is on the left), [Switzerland](_URL_3_), etc. However note that almost all women still wore thick stockings or boots to cover their legs, no one seem to go completely bare-legged (excluding the likelyhood that some very poor women could not afford stockings and shoes.)", "Hemlines raise and lower constantly, but stockings are always worn. In the later half of the 18th century the fashionable length was anywhere from [3-8\"](_URL_3_) off the ground. When in working attire it could be [mid-calf](_URL_1_). The popular length goes down to ankle length as the century turns, but raises up now and then such as [this French fashion print](_URL_2_) from 1815. It isn't until the middle of the 19th century that you loose the view of the ankles.\n\nThe important thing to note is that it's not [prostitutes](_URL_0_) that wear shorter skirts, it's working women. [Laundresses](_URL_4_) for example, will often remove their shoes, if not their stockings, as well as wear shorter hems to avoid dampness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fashion-era.com/images/calthrop/WOMEN-DRAWINGS/1794-empire-line-dresses.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/qnnMuGo.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/VhMpGr8.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/zHOeIHZ.jpg"], ["http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr03558", "http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O186428/h-beard-print-collection-print-jackson-h/", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bq9b1P29gx0/UofTa4cXi3I/AAAAAAAABRQ/veQaWjfuRII/s1600/no+8.jpg", "http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr04418", "http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1564994&amp;partId=1&amp;searchText=waSHERwoman&amp;page=1"]]}
{"q_id": "1dbkcy", "title": "How did trade work between West Berlin and the rest of Germany after the end of the Berlin airlift?", "selftext": "How did the system generally work after the end of the blockade?  How did the GDR and Soviets regulate passage between West Berlin and the rest of West Germany?  Did West Berliners feel like they were trapped or especially inconvenienced by the split?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dbkcy/how_did_trade_work_between_west_berlin_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ot4vd"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most goods were transported via trucks crossing through East Germany. The German term for it was *Transitverkehr*. Traffic between West Germany and West Berlin was only allowed on specific routes. Cars were only allowed to stop at specific places. \nThe routes were heavily monitored by the Volkspolizei, Grenztruppen and MfS. \n\nHere is a map: _URL_2_\n\n\nDrivers and Passengers had to pay a transit fee for the roads and the Visa. In 1972, East and West Germany arranged a transit treaty an West Germany paid more than 2.2 billion DM to East Germany for the reconstruction of roads, train tracks and water ways. \n\nThere is a good German Wikipedia site available, maybe google translate will produce a useful version: _URL_0_\n \n\nBesides that, there also was a lot of trade between East and West Germany and some West German or West European companies had cooperations with East German combines. For example, political prisoners in East Germany had to produce furniture for IKEA. \n\n\nTrade embargoes and blockades were used in the 1940/50s, but both Germanys realized that they were useless after 1950 and the relationships became more normal and less political after that. \n\nThere is a great paper on this topic available at the BPB, but it's in German: _URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitverkehr_durch_die_DDR", "http://www.bpb.de/apuz/30717/innerdeutscher-handel-als-wegbereiter-der-entspannungspolitik?p=all", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/DDR_Transit041.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3settg", "title": "Looking for introductory literature explaining reformation era theological controversies involving Luther, Zwingli and Melanchton", "selftext": "I'm looking for recommendations for a book which can explain the core ideas and differences between Luther, Melanchton and Zwingli. I looked at 'Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700' but its page count and detail is not what i'm looking for. \n\nI'm writing a paper in which these disputes have a tangential relevance and as such i need a general rather than an in depth understanding of these issues. I'd like the literature to be academic if possible. \n\nHoping for some great reformation era historians out there! \n\nThanks for reading.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3settg/looking_for_introductory_literature_explaining/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwwkl42"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, MacCulloch takes a very strongly intellectual history approach, and is a very good writer--there's nothing to stop you from reading only the relevant parts; *The Reformation* has a very nice index. To anyone else reading this thread, read this book.\n\nThat said, the book is you want for your specific purposes, OP, is Carter Lindberg, ed., *The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period.* Each chapter focuses on a different early Ref. figure and is written by a specialist in that particular thinker."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "319ko4", "title": "Did Nazi or Japanese propaganda highlight Roosevelt's paralysis? Were they aware of it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/319ko4/did_nazi_or_japanese_propaganda_highlight/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpzy2z7"], "score": [33], "text": ["It's important to remember that although Roosevelt was effectively paralyzed from the waist down, he could stand with the aid of leg braces and even walk short distances with the aid of a cane and/or people helping him balance. He could also stand at a podium and deliver speeches by using braces and holding the podium.   Public appearances with roosevelt were carefully orchestrated to conceal his handicap.  He was often photographed standing, but with a cane, or leaning on someone sort support.  [this shows his cane and some pictures of public appearances of him](_URL_2_). \n\nIt's also relevant that even when Roosevelt was first elected president in 1932, he was 50.  Not old exactly, but old enough that having a cane wouldn't have been terribly out of the ordinary.  There are many reasons a 50 year old might walk with a cane or limp around that don't amount to total disability that would somehow make him unfit to govern. (hell, I've been told by a doctor that I'll probably be a candidate for a knee replacement by my 50's). \n\nHowever, more recent historical work has attacked some of the conventional wisdom. [The myth of FDR's secret disability](_URL_1_) \n\n > An NBC Nightly News report on the discovery stated that there was \u201ca gentlemen\u2019s agreement\u201d between FDR and the press corps to hide the extent of his disability, and the Associated Press wrote that it was \u201cvirtually a state secret.\u201d That has long been the conventional wisdom, repeated in countless books and articles. But it is inaccurate. In fact, the press sometimes described his condition in great detail.\n\n > A 1932 New York Times Magazine profile of the then-Governor of New York described how, at his Hyde Park home, he \u201cwheels around in his chair.\u201d A TIME article from February 1, 1932 said that swimming and exercise \u201chave made it possible for the Governor to walk 100 ft or so with braces and canes. When standing at crowded public functions, he still clings precautiously to a friend\u2019s arm.\u201d Before his inauguration as President in 1933, TIME noted, \u201cBecause of the President-elect\u2019s lameness, short ramps will replace steps at the side door of the executive offices leading to the White House.\u201d And a TIME article from December 17, 1934, described a scene in which \u201cbodyguard Gus Gennerich helped the President into his wheel chair, rolled him the length of the West colonnade to the new White House offices.\u201d Another profile, this one in the New Yorker in 1934, stated that \u201che is almost always pushed to the west end of the White House in a small wheelchair.\u201d Seven years later, on January 20, 1941, LIFE magazine noted that \u201cby 11 o\u2019clock he is up, dressed and on his way in a wheel chair down the long passageway to his office\u2026\u201d (Not that it slowed him down in any way. The headline for the article was \u201cRoosevelt: From Breakfast in Bed to Wisecracks at Movies, President Retains His Bounce after Eight Years.\u201d)\n\n\n > As for incriminating images, it took far more than a \u201cgentlemen\u2019s agreement\u201d for the FDR administration to discourage photos and newsreel film of the president in his wheelchair. Rather, the Secret Service used force. As Editor  &  Publisher reported in 1936, if agents saw a photographer taking a picture of Roosevelt, say, getting out of his car, they would seize the camera and tear out the film. \u201cBy what right they do this I don\u2019t know,\u201d the correspondent wrote, \u201cbut I have never seen the right questioned.\u201d A 1946 survey of the White House photography corps confirmed this, finding that anyone the Secret Service caught taking banned photographs \u201chad their cameras emptied, their films exposed to sunlight, or their plates smashed.\u201d\n\n\nThis shows, that there was certainly *some* public knowledge of his disability, but it's unclear realyl how widespread this was.  \n\nAs to whether his disability made it into foreign propaganda, it doesn't seem to have been the focus of much, if any.  [this article has a fairly significant discussion of Roosevelt's perception in Germany during the war as well as a nazi prpaganda poster showing roosevelt standing to put an uncle sam tophat on the globe](_URL_0_)  - it cites a 1941 book of collected german cartoons, and says of Roosevelt \"a puppet of the Jews, as a warmonger, or as a failure with his New Deal, but his disability is hardly evident.\"\n\n > For example, the book's front cover features Roosevelt admiring his mirror reflection as a Jew. Other cartoons show Roosevelt and Churchill as puppets of the Jews, a blind Roosevelt being led by a Jew (this from a U.S. pro-Nazi newspaper), and Roosevelt being ridden, and thus controlled, by Jews in a \"Jewish kindergarten.\" Another group of cartoons combines antisemitic imagery with attacks on America's supposed belligerence and desire for world domination. The back cover shows a standing Roosevelt putting Uncle Sam's hat over the entire globe (Fig. 4), and another cartoon transforms his famous toothy grin into a mouthful of bombs. One particularly loathsome cartoon depicts Roosevelt holding a barely visible cane while supervising Jews who are torturing the American people and preparing for war. Finally, the magazine of satire called Kladderadatsch published the only cartoon I know which shows Roosevelt with two canes, headed down the \"path of Wilson\" into war (Fig. 5). It appears that the image of Roosevelt's disability in the Nazi press did not change in any significant way as the war progressed. Later, in newspapers such as Das Reich, there were relatively few cartoons depicting Roosevelt, since the U.S. was usually portrayed as an ugly Uncle Sam, along with Britain's John Bull and France's Marianne.\n \nThere is, however, some evidence of knowledge as described in the article. \n\n > Undoubtedly there was a certain amount of knowledge abroad, including in Nazi Germany, about Roosevelt's physical condition, although it is not so clear whether the extent of his limitations was recognized. One graphic statement was made by Mussolini on the occasion of a speech by Roosevelt that Italy's fascist leader especially disliked: \"Never in the course of history has a nation been guided by a paralytic. There have been bald kings, fat kings, handsome and even stupid kings, but never kings who, in order to go to the bathroom and the dinner table, had to be supported by other men.\"[7] In Germany, comments on Roosevelt's disability seemed to focus mainly on the supposed connection between physical illness and mental or emotional condition. The Nazi editor of the above-mentioned book of political cartoons, for example, referred to FDR's bout with polio by saying that \"After a few years his affliction improved so that he was able to return to the political arena in 1928, but the struggle with his illness not only increased his high self-esteem, but also increased his desire to be active in a very dangerous way.\"[8] And he went on to say that it was probably possible to understand Roosevelt's mentality only by realizing that he was \"a physically broken person who is constantly venting his hysteria\n\n\nWe can conclude, I think, that there was some knowledge of his disability. The leaders of foreign countries probably knew Roosevelt was \"lame\" so to speak, but maybe not the true extent of his paralysis.  And for whatever reason, they thought it far more advantageous to claim that being physically \"lame\" made him crazy, than focus on him being disabled as a propaganda point in and of itself. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0037.207;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg", "http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/12/the-myth-of-fdrs-secret-disability/", "http://www.travelchannel.com/shows/mysteries-at-the-museum/video/roosevelt-s-walking-cane"]]}
{"q_id": "8gcpjv", "title": "Did Japanese forces ever transfer captured POWs to German camps?", "selftext": "Was doing some family research about a relative who was captured by the Japanese in WWII and the WWII Prisoners of War Data File from the military states the following:\n\n > Name: *name*\n\n > Event type: Military service\n\n > Event Date: 1942\n\n > Event Place: Japan\n\n > *Personal information about race and place of residence in the US*\n\n > Military service: USN: United States Navy\n\n > Military status: Returned to Military Control, Liberated, or Repatriated \n\n > Military Service Branch: Navy\n\n > Military Rank: Carpenter's mate, third class \n\n > Destination Place: Stalag 11B Fallingbostel Prussia (Work Camps) 53-09\n\nIf he was captured by the Japanese, how did he end up in Japan. He served on the USS Canopus (AS-9), the crew of which apparently were all captured or killed by the Japanese. Anyone know what happened/if the records are even accurate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gcpjv/did_japanese_forces_ever_transfer_captured_pows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dybf6gn"], "score": [8], "text": ["What a fascinating bit of information.\n\nUnfortunately, I'm practically certain that the search engine you have interrogated is returning some sort of error. The *Canopus*, as I am sure you are aware, was scuttled at Bataan in the Philippines in 1942 and about 500 of her crew were sent to fight on land, eventually being killed or captured at Corregidor. They were sent to Japanese prisoner of war camps from early May 1942; you can find some details of POW camps in the Philippines [here](_URL_3_).\n\nGiven the geography of the war, there was only limited contact between Germany and Japan, mostly via submarine, with [a very few blockade runners also active](_URL_4_). Perhaps the most successful and most interesting of their exploits was the voyage of the *Tannenfels*, which sailed from Bordeaux in February 1942 and reached Yokohama in May as part of a plan to establish a regular supply service for essential goods \u2013 the ship carried German machine tools and military hardware samples, and returned with a cargo of rubber, tungsten, titanium, zinc and other rare metals. (Other blockade runners of this period carried similar cargoes, plus coffee, walnut oil and, perhaps bizarrely, [powdered egg](_URL_1_).) Overall, there were 12 successful voyages up to the period when Corregidor fell, and these ships succeeded in bringing almost 220,000 tonnes of cargo to Germany, more than half of it rubber. \n\nThe *Tannenfels* left Japan in August 1942 and made port in France in November. One month later the ship was damaged by a British commando raid and efforts to establish regular communication with Japan were then pretty much abandoned. The reason I focus on this ship is that we know she did carry some POWs, but on investigation it appears that the prisoners she brought to France were all crewmen from various allied ships intercepted and sunk in the course of the voyage. \n\nSubsequent to her adventures, we can say that, between the fall of Corregidor and the cessation of all surface communication between Germany and Japan in the spring of 1943, there are records of only **four** other completed voyages from Japanese-held to German-held ports; 11 other Axis ships were intercepted and captured or sunk. The successful blockade runners were:\n\n > *Dresden*, from Yokohama to Bordeaux, departing August 1942\n\n > *Kulmerland*, from Dairen in China to Bordeaux, departing August 1942\n\n > *Pietro Orseolo*, from Kobe to Bordeaux, departing January 1943\n\n > *Orsono*, from Kobe to Bordeaux, departing February 1943\n\nThus it is, theoretically, possible that a transfer of prisoners did take place via blockade runner. (Although later voyages involving submarines did take place, there would have been no room on such vessels for any but the most dramatically high profile of prisoners to be transferred.) However, because the main priority was cargo, it was certainly not usual for this sort of thing to occur and there would have needed to be a very specific and significant reason to undertake a transfer of this sort. \n\nI note from your query that your relative was a carpenter's mate, third class, so it is not at all clear why he might have been singled out in such a way, and the suggestion that he ended up in an ordinary enlisted men's work camp, rather than a secure facility for high value prisoners such as Colditz, also makes it hard to see why such a transfer would have been attempted. If you are aware of a reason, please let us know! Otherwise, sadly, it appears much more likely that the database you are interrogating is returning an error, perhaps caused by it containing more than one person with the same name as your relative's.\n\n**Sources**\n\nMartin Brice, *Axis Bockade Runners of World War II* (1981). This book has been digitised and can be searched, but not read, at the Hathi Trust site, [so you could run a name search for your relative](_URL_0_) to see if it is worth consulting the book itself.\n\nVincent O'Hara, *The German Fleet at War, 1939-1945* (2013)\n\nThere is also a selection of links relating to the history of the *Canopus* online (last updated 2012) [here](_URL_2_).\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015003652800", "http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/blbr-ladeliste.htm", "http://as9.larryshomeport.com/html/links.html", "https://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/prisoners-of-war-of-the-japanese-1939-1945", "http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/km/blbr.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1bxef5", "title": "Islamic Fundamentalism: What caused hostility towards Western ideas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bxef5/islamic_fundamentalism_what_caused_hostility/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9aztcg", "c9b7m21"], "score": [15, 7], "text": ["I think your question needs to be more specific.  There are many reasons for hostility towards the West that have nothing to do with fundamentalism.  It also varies from country to country.\n\nFor example, in the case of Iran, many Iranians blame the U.S. for overthrowing the democratically-elected government in 1953 and supporting the authoritarian rule of the Shah until 1979.  Until 1953, Iran was hostile to Britain, not the U.S., because the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company controlled the oil industry.  \n\nIran nationalized the oil industry in 1951 and took steps to make sure Britain could not orchestrate a coup; Britain persuaded the U.S. to orchestrate a coup instead.  So before 1953 Iran was hostile to Britain but not necessarily to the U.S.; since 1953 the people have been hostile to the U.S. and the 1979 revolt was an expression of that long-suppressed hostility.  \n\nWas the hostility, then, really because of Islamic fundamentalism?  Or did the pre-existing hostility towards the Western powers that perhaps had little to do with religion allow fundamentalism to flourish, to step in because the foreign powers had undermined a more democratic system?", "At a basic level, the Islamic fundamentalism is a conservative movement which disapproves of excess, imorality, and consumerism in general. It emphasises tradition, honour, and strict adhesion to sharia. Simply put, many aspects of American culture are diametrically opposed to the things they believe in.\n\nWhy it is such a popular movement is a much more broad question, as wjbc already discussed. The entire first world doesn't really have a very good track record in the middle east.\n\nBeyond that, for a long time Islamic fundamentalism was the only effective opposition to rather unpopular dictators. they used the money that American (and to a lesser extent Soviet) governments gave them to prevent political discourse and eliminate opposition. It was much more difficult for them to crack down on schools of religious learning due to their wish to appeal to pan-arabism and the spectre of the caliphate. Thus the most prominent opponents of the regime tended to have been immersed in this very conservative religious environment. This is where we get the muslim brotherhood, Al Queda, and the \"cult\" of the Ayatollah.\n\nTo directly adress /u/Hellscreamgold 's comment on another post, Islam is not \"a political system masquerading as a religion.\" it is a religion that has become politicised due to opression that we funded."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9171vz", "title": "How was John Milton's Paradise Lost, a poem portraying Satan sympathetically and as the protagonist, allowed to be published? Did the Church not attempt to prevent it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9171vz/how_was_john_miltons_paradise_lost_a_poem/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2vyyy0", "e2w1i8w", "e2xhuql"], "score": [955, 47, 8], "text": ["\nParadise lost was not seen as sympathetic towards Satan until the Romantic era. It was Blake who said that Milton was \"of the Devil's party without knowing it\", at the time a radical reinterpretation, but with emphasis on \"without knowing\". Milton was a devout Christian and though the text is can be seen as subversive from a post-romantic, rugged individualism perspective, the original religious intent is made clear from the beginning, \"to justify the ways of god to man\". However, as recently as 1941, CS Lewis wrote that the poem does not seek to glorify Satan:\n\n > In the same way, the proposition that Milton's Satan is a magnificent character may bear two senses. It may mean that Milton's presentation of him is a magnificent poetical achievement which engages the attention and excites the admiration of the reader. On the other hand, it may mean that the real being (if any) whom Milton is depicting, or any real being like Satan if there were one, or a real human being in so far as he resembles Milton's Satan, is or ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the poet his readers or both. The first, so far as I know, has never till modern times been denied; the second, never affirmed before the times of Blake and Shelley-for when Dryden said that Satan was Milton's 'hero' he meant something quite different. It is, in my opinion, wholly erroneous. In saying this I have, however, trespassed beyond the bounds of purely literary criticism. In what follows, therefore, I shall not labour directly to convert those who admire Satan, but only to make a little clearer what it is they are admiring. That Milton could not have shared their admiration will then, I hope, need no argument. The main difficulty is that any real exposition of the Satanic character and the Satanic predicament is likely to provoke the question 'Do you, then, regard Paradise Lost as a comic poem?' To this I answer, No; but only those will fully understand it who see that it might have been a comic poem.\n\n In terms of whether this intention resonated with contemporaries, Maltzahn reports that \"the conservative Hobart welcomes Milton's christian epic as a counterweight to the irreligious court culture of the day\". He goes on to discuss the contemporary need to separate Milton's incendiary political views from his orthodox religious ones. Paradise Lost was controversial when seen as a political allegory, depending on which side of the English civil war you were on. As CS Lewis mentions, Dryden handled this topic as well, and as a royalist he rewrote the poem figuring Satan as Oliver Cromwell, which was certainly meant to be an insult not a compliment.\n\nIn terms of Milton's sensitive publications, his Aeropagitica is a polemic arguing for free speech. This and his discussion of divorce were the publications which attracted the most controversy although they were never censored. Remember that this is well after the reformation, and though it might be a generalisation, power lay with either the King or parliament, not with the church. If something was politically expedient it was allowed, see Christopher Marlowe's extremely blasphemous productions of Doctor Faustus while allegedly in the secret service of Elizabeth I.\n\nSources: \n\nAlicia Ostriker, Dancing at the Devil's Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry Critical Inquiry Vol. 13, No. 3, Politics and Poetic Value (Spring, 1987), pp. 579-596\n\nC. S Lewis, A Preface To Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942).\n\nJohn N King, Milton And Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).\n\nNicholas von Maltzahn, The Review of English Studies Vol. 47, No. 188 (Nov., 1996), pp. 479-499.\n\nWilliam Blake, The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell And A Song Of Liberty (New York: Florence Press, London, 1911).", "OP, you might consider x-posting this question to /r/AskLiteraryStudies for their perspective ", "During and after the civil war (a period that Milton lived through), there was a huge outbreak of politico-religious experimentation and unorthodoxy. The classic study is Christopher Hill 1972, *The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution*. New sects sprang up like the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Grindletonians, Muggletonians etc etc. Many of these groups did not believe in life after death, or the historical Christ, thought the Bible was mainly allegorical, and subscribed to a general rationalistic \"pantheism\", which we would probably call atheism by our standards. Gerrard Winstanley, a Digger, equated \u2018God\u2019 with \u2018Reason\u2019; a Ranter, Laurence Clarkson, wrote that to the truly pure, \u2018Devil is God, hell is heaven, sin holiness, damnation salvation\u2019 (*A Single Eye*, 1650). Milton actually said something similar in *Aeropagitica*: \u2018To the pure all things are pure, not only meats and drinks but all kinds of knowledge, whether of good or evil.\u2019\n\nSo there were a lot of these ideas around during the interregnum, driven as explained in another comment by a relaxation in printing censorship, and it's a key part of the intellectual environment that continued even after the restoration specifically through writers like Milton and Bunyan. In many ways, his religious thinking, though often radical, wasn't especially unusual for his period: what's unusual is that he's become enshrined (with reason) as a canonical Great Writer, whereas most of his contemporaries with similar ideas have long been dismissed or forgotten as minor heretics or pamphleteers.\n\nIf you want to get more into this, Hill's book includes an appendix dedicated to Milton and how he contributed/reacted to the religious experimentation of the civil war period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7axu8k", "title": "When Martin Luther published his vernacular bible, how much of the population was literate in German, and did this affect that? At what point was Latin no longer the \"go-to\" language for intellectuals, and what replaced it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7axu8k/when_martin_luther_published_his_vernacular_bible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpewz1h"], "score": [8], "text": ["Demographics and literacy rates: the great amoebas of medieval and early modern scholarship. As Tom Scott, one of the leading socio-economic historians of Reformation Germany, put it: \"For the moment, all that can be said is there is no agreement among historians on population figures for Germany in [1500-1600], or on their means of calculation.\"\n\nSo allowing for some ridiculously broad ranges:\n\n* Euan Cameron (Reformation/cultural historian) estimates that vernacular literacy rates in cities ~1500 ranged from 30%-50%. This would have been deeply stratified by class. It's actually an open question whether there would have been a gender gap in 1500; later literacy rates would favor men until into the modern era. Contemporary satirical literature sometimes assumes that women are *more* likely to read than men, that this is not the right order of things and so men must learn to read. But that could just be an exaggeration, another \"women are taking over!!!11!1!\" joke - boys rather than girls had formal opportunities for education before the Reformation. (Afterwards, there is more evidence that [Catholic] convents ran schools for local girls.)\n\n* Assorted studies of the 1500-1600 urban population have given rates of urban:total population anywhere from 8.5% to 16% in 1500-declining to 13% by 1600.\n\n* There would also have been rural clergy who were more likely to be literate after the Reformation than before, or at least before 1450. Fifteenth-century ecclesiastical records are filled with rural parishes asking the diocese for a new priest because theirs does not know religion/cannot preach - meanwhile theologians and printers are working overtime to produce handbooks for priests, which ought to have supplied that knowledge to those who could access it.\n\nSo overall, I think, you'd say maybe 10-15% of the German population was literate to the point of being able to muddle through a vernacular Bible in the early Reformation years. \n\nDid the Reformation/Protestantism change things? Sort of but not really - mass literacy in the West is, quite frankly, a modern phenomenon. (For example: white-universal literacy in New England is only achieved by 1815, later in the South; racist education and social circumstances kept rates far lower for black Americans). There is some evidence that \"learning to read for the Bible\" played a factor: Lutheran Scandinavian countries were the first to reach universal literacy, with that as a goal. Some studies of the education of enslaved people in the U.S. have suggested that by the 19th century, some slaves were in fact allowed/encouraged to read for the purposes of religious instruction, that actually learning to *write* was the forbidden skill of white fears.\n\nDefinitely the 16th century continued the trend of better educated *clergy*. Pastoral care handbooks and *especially* collections of sermons/sermon skeletons were enormously popular in 16C print, and they were definitely used by preachers to preach. (Sermon authors complain that pastors are taking their words straight-up instead of as a guide to be expanded upon.) But this was not an exclusively Protestant phenomenon. Education for Catholic clergy was also systematized, gradually, over the 16th and 17th centuries.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ku2gb", "title": "Was Sparta really the ultra-militaristic city that we always see it depicted as?", "selftext": "Life in Sparta seems like something out of a fantasy book rather than a real ancient civilization, and I feel as though such a state could never exist (or at least, couldn't exist for as long as Sparta did), even in modern times.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ku2gb/was_sparta_really_the_ultramilitaristic_city_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3hwr3m", "d3hwxm8", "d3jicgg"], "score": [17, 379, 3], "text": ["This has been covered many times.\n\nHere is one to get you started:\n\n_URL_0_", "Nope.\n\nTo save u/Iphikrates the trouble, I'll post this neat Index of Spurious Spartan Superiority\n\n* [Were the Spartans really all that great as warriors?](_URL_3_) (No. Also, descriptions of how their culture evolved over time.)\n* [What happened to Spartans who got injured](_URL_1_) (They lived just like other Spartans did: mostly a life of leisure.)\n* [Were any there ever any other societies as focussed on one's power as the Spartans?](_URL_0_) (No. And neither were the Spartans.)\n* [How did Sparta become Sparta?](_URL_2_) (Too complicated for me to sum up in a pithy phrase. But there is a lot of uncertainty involved.)\n\nIf you still have further questions, feel free to ask them here or in the threads I linked, most of whom are rather recent (i.e. the last 2 days) but I expect the answers there should give you plenty to go on.", "I read a few of the topics. Instead of starting with recommandations of modern books, you could start with Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. (One of the many Lives that would probably interest you). It's gonna give you a good idea ( and far from \"mythical\") of how Sparta became The very peculiar city that it was. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ecneb/do_we_know_how_sparta_became_sparta_what_was_the/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/422aq0/were_there_ever_any_other_societies_as_focused_on/cz75mfm", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ko8hk/do_we_know_what_happened_to_spartan_soldiers_who/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ecneb/do_we_know_how_sparta_became_sparta_what_was_the/d1z2na9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kqvwk/were_the_spartans_really_all_that_great_as/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3assdu", "title": "Who was the *last* POTUS to be quoted saying the n-word while in office?", "selftext": "\"last\" as in before President Obama. \n\n\n\nEDIT: a lot of comments are getting deleted. I thought this was due to blatant racism, but when I was writing a  response to a great find by /u/cuginhamer of [JFK using the term while in office](_URL_0_), the comment was deleted. \n\nEDIT 2: Paraphrasing some guidance I got from a mod (BTW I hope to keep the discussion on-point rather than meta policy stuff).\n\n* Contentious terms are generally allowed as part of a direct quotation. \n* If not being quoted, starring it out is preferred. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3assdu/who_was_the_last_potus_to_be_quoted_saying_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csfo5ud", "csfwgq9", "csfwrgr", "csfx4p7"], "score": [518, 233, 33, 10], "text": ["I am pretty sure it was President Richard Nixon. Other President's may have said it since of course, but were not captured on tape saying it. \n\nWhile Nixon said the slurs privately at the time, the quotes were taped by the White House recording system in the Oval Room (and those tapes are in the National Archives), so it is fair to say that Nixon was indeed \"quoted\" while in office, caught on tape referring to blacks with racial slurs like \"niggers\" and \"jigaboos\". \n\nAt one point in the Nixon tapes, when he was working on his first presidential address to Congress, during a conversation with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about how to handle African foreign policy, the President was quoted on tape as saying [*\"Henry, let's leave the niggers to Bill and we'll take care of the rest of the world\"*.](_URL_0_)\n\nEDIT - Here is a link to some audio from the Nixon tapes of [Nixon talking to Donald Rumsfeld and saying \"nigger\" in reference to American blacks as well](_URL_1_), though in this instance he plays it off as if he is just quoting Southerners.", "Clinton used the word while giving [a speech](_URL_0_) at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner in 1995.\n > \"...organized groups, committed to destruction, based on racial or ethnic or religious or political extremism, have enormous capacity to do that destruction... you see it in more subtle ways, yes, even in America.\nLike when five children in an upper class suburb in this country write the hated word 'nigger' in code word in their school album\"\n\nEDIT: Found [C-SPAN video](_URL_1_) of the speech if anyone is interested. Relevant  quote starts at 14:30.", "Followup question: has a sitting president ever used that word on the record in the presence of the press as a racial slur? ", "What does potus mean? Is it a short way of saying president?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/race_republicans_and_democrats.html#ixzz3duKDQF7H"], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.ca/books?id=LQzZ0hhvGZAC&amp;pg=PR60&amp;lpg=PR60&amp;dq=%22leave+the+niggers+to+Bill+and+we%27ll+take+care+of+the+rest+of+the+world%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=h_vU1p_3dl&amp;sig=TiN741cTdi-2e02ea8oRoemKIsA&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=CgKJVbR_yKnIBKnuhcgK&amp;ved=0CCAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%22leave%20the%20niggers%20to%20Bill%20and%20we%27ll%20take%20care%20of%20the%20rest%20of%20the%20world%22&amp;f=false", "https://youtu.be/dbFzpq343s8?t=45"], ["http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=51902", "http://www.c-span.org/video/?67326-1/congressional-black-caucus-dinner"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "u4d9w", "title": "Your thoughts on the map of Piri Reis? ", "selftext": "Not a historian,  I have come across references to this ancient map with a colorful history; among other things it's purported to accurately depict the land mass of Antarctica, which has been under ice for thousands of years.  So I ask historians:  is this just hot air,  or is there something to it?  What is current thinking on this map?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u4d9w/your_thoughts_on_the_map_of_piri_reis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4s7ka0"], "score": [8], "text": ["I think that rather than my usual wall of text, I should instead link you to this commentary on the map written by two professional archaeologists.\n\n[Here you go](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=969"]]}
{"q_id": "2376hh", "title": "Was Constantine the Great really all that great?", "selftext": "I've been listening to The History of Rome and what struck me is that Constantine really didn't seem that great. I've read a bit of Gibbon and, of course, with him blaming Christianity for the decline of empire, Constantine does get blame apportioned to him. In addition to his elitist economics and his family murdering, his succession after his death was badly organised. Does he only get called \"the Great\" due to his introduction of Christianity (in a \"history is written by the victors\" style) or was he actually really good as he seems, to me, to pale in comparison to a really great contemporary emperor like Diocletian.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2376hh/was_constantine_the_great_really_all_that_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgu78ju"], "score": [9], "text": [" >  Does he only get called \"the Great\" due to his introduction of Christianity\n\nNo. It is but one of many things that gave him the title. I would implore you to first take a look at his rise to prominence. What he was able to accomplish against three of the other tetrarchs is nothing short of extraordinary. He began as the leader of the weakest region of the Tetrarchy and through adversity, he was able to one by one defeat the rest of his rivals, who commanded militaries and economies far more powerful than his own. The Battle at Milvian Bridge shows that Constantine was not only an effective military commander, well aware of traditional strategy, but also a master of psychological warfare.\n\nBut Constantine wasn't just a great commander on the battlefield. He also was a great builder. Don't forget that it was at his command that the city of Constantinople was built from the ground up into a fully-capable \"New Rome\" in the span of just a few years. Constantine's wise choice of the site of Byzantium ensured that the capital of the Empire remained prosperous and untouched for nearly a thousand years.\n\nI would also implore you to please not take Gibbon on his anti-Christian rants. His theory about the collapse of the Roman Empire being due to Christianity has been almost universally refuted by modern scholars. There were many more dire political, economic, and military matters that plagued the Empire and brought about its ultimate demise. The rise of Christianity was but a drop in the bucket compared to the root causes and effects of the Crisis of the Third Century. Even Diocletian's tetrarchy system, while good on paper, was shown to be ultimately a failure. While I would give Diocletian part of the credit for restabilizing the Empire (along with Aurelian), it was Constantine who completed the restabilization, especially in the East, and that alone makes him worthy of his title."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17sbe6", "title": "Punk Rock in the 80's", "selftext": "I've been assigned a research paper and I'm very interested in the Punk movement in the 80's. I definitely want to something about that but I need help narrowing it down in order to come up with a good argument/thesis. I would greatly appreciate if anyone would help me out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17sbe6/punk_rock_in_the_80s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88e4hj", "c88hqut", "c88p52p"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["I am willing to help you with this but I need a little more information. What are you trying to say about punk in the 1980s? Are you interested in commenting on the evolution of the music itself? Commenting on the scene and movements that may have been attached? What kind of music it influences today? Give me an idea of where you are trying to go with your paper. ", "There's TONS to write on this topic, and I'm obviously not going to develop a thesis for you, but I think you need to pick some larger issue and make a specific claim within it. Here are three interesting article length sources that might be able to get you started.\n\n* 1) (Race): [Daniel S. Traber, \"L.A.'s 'White Minority': Punk and the Contradictions of Self-Marginalization](_URL_1_)\n* 2) (Economics) [Steve Waksman, \"Metal/Punk Reformation: Three Independent Labels\" from *This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk*](_URL_0_)\n* 3) (Politics) [JJ Ward, \"'This is Germany! It's 1933!' Appropriations and Constructions of 'Fascism' in New York Punk/Hardcore in the 1980s\"](_URL_2_)", "I strongly recommend Dick Hebdige's [Subculture: The Meaning of Style](_URL_0_) (buttressed with a little Roland Barthes' [Mythologies](_URL_1_ as always) if you have any interest in discussing the semiotics and aestheticization of the punk scene."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=LqDJjAeYxssC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=steve+waksman&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=2BYOUfb_E-GRiAKcnIB4&amp;ved=0CD4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=steve%20waksman&amp;f=false", "http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/v048/48.1traber.html", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1996.00155.x/abstract"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subculture:_The_Meaning_of_Style", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythologies_(book)"]]}
{"q_id": "4mhfw2", "title": "During WWII, what did the Japanese initially think happened after we dropped the first atomic bomb: Did they know we had developed nuclear capabilities, and is there any record of communication of \"what happened\" prior to the second bomb?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mhfw2/during_wwii_what_did_the_japanese_initially_think/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3xtxfp"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Japanese knew what had happened after the Hiroshima bombing because America told them, essentially. A leaflet was created that described the weapon as an atomic bomb that was \"the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29's can carry on a single mission.\" These were dropped from T-3 leaflet bombs to 47 Japanese cities with a population of over 100,000. Unfortunately, the printing and delivery of six million leaflets was a time consuming process, delayed even further by a shortage of leaflet bombs, and some cities did not receive the information in a timely fashion. Nagasaki, for example, was hit by its Atomic bomb on August 9th, while the flyer warning of the strikes didn't reach them till August 10th. However, the printed message was also broadcast every 15 minutes by Radio Saipan and likely began the same day as the Hiroshima bombing. \n\n[Full leaflet text](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's also important to note that the Japanese did have their own research into the feasibility of a fission weapon, although they eventually concluded that neither Germany or America had the requisite spare industrial capacity to produce atomic bombs in time to determine the course of the war. Research was then sidelined into  things like radar and nuclear propulsion instead. However, there would have been Japanese scientists who'd have a reasonable understanding of how such a weapon would have worked.\n\nStill, among the average military officer, there was quite a bit of confusion as to how the weapons operated. Lt. Marcus McDilda, a P-51 pilot who was shot down and captured the day after Hiroshima, experienced torture by Japanese officers intent on discovering how the atomic bombs worked. Faced with decapitation, he fabricated a story about how the US had worked out a way to separate negative and positive charges, kept apart by a lead sheet, and that with the removal of the sheet, the intermingling of the charges caused the explosion. He also claimed the United States had 100 more atomic bombs and Tokyo and Kyoto were the next targets. He was sent to Tokyo, where he was questioned by a Japanese physicist who realized that McDilda had no idea how the bomb worked. McDilda revealed that he had made the story up, and he and the physicist both shared a laugh.\n\nSources: \n\nRhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster\n\nHagen, Jerome T. (2005). War in the Pacific: America at War Volume 1, Honolulu, Hawaii: Hawaii Pacific University\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/truman-leaflets/"]]}
{"q_id": "84y1a5", "title": "How long have people been \u201cplaying cards\u201d?", "selftext": "It recently occurred to me while shuffling a deck of cards that they seem to be made very specifically and particularly. The card itself isn\u2019t like normal paper, and attempting to use normal paper doesn\u2019t seem like it would be as plausible as you wouldn\u2019t really be able to shuffle nearly as well as with a regular deck, and I can\u2019t imagine that cards like these were easy to make before paper could be mass produced. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/84y1a5/how_long_have_people_been_playing_cards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvttzao"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're right, it's very difficult to make cards before paper can be made cheaply and easily - so it's not much of a shock that the earliest paper playing cards would come from the first civilization to make paper cheaply and easily: the Tang Dynasty of China as of c. mid-9th century CE.  The 11th century Song Dynasty historian Ouyang Xiu wrote of Wrote in his *Gui tian lu (Jottings after returning to the fields)* with a preface dated 1076\n\n >  The game of *yezi ge* (Rules of Leaves) was present after the mid Tang period [\u2026] it was popular during banquets of the scholar-officials of the Tang period. This was still so in the Five Dynasties period (907-60) and the early years of the [Song] dynasty (906 onwards), and then gradually it was put aside and not handed down. Some people may possess the rules for this game now, but no one knows how to play it.\n\nThere are even (though likely apocryphal) references to the game of leaves \u2013 or some variant thereof \u2013 being played as early as the reign of Tang Taizong (r. 627-649).\n\nFrustratingly, while the game is *referred* to now and again, its actual rules of play seem to have been lost to time. As Ouyang noted, even by his own time it had fallen so far out of fashion that almost no one knew how to play anymore. It seems to have been a combination card and dice game, with a set of especially complex and perplexing rules of which we have only hints. A poem from Li Dong titled \u201cBureau Director Wei of Longzhou first dreamt of dice, and then later, because he played the leaf game, I humbly offer him this poem\u201d goes (tr. By Andrew Lo):\n\n > *Fragrant smoke from red candles waft toward the decorated pillars;*  \n*The plum blossoms have fallen, and the majestic building is quiet.*  \n*The brilliant round soul of the moon peeps out from the mountain, producing a chilling effect;*  \n*And the cubical ivory dice chiseled in colour are lightly cast with a flick of the wrist.  \nDrawing the precious token [card?], the lion marker weighs down on it;  \nTaken out from the golden bowl, the male and female phoenix [red dice?] tumble.  \nWas it a happy sign [in your dream], like Huang [Ba] called to the capital [and promoted], [or was your dream unreal like] the dream of Zhuang Zhou?  \nBut now once again the dice form the [winning double-four combination of \u2018the Prime Minister\u2019s] seal [as in your dream].*  \n\nAnother hint at how the game was played comes from the Song dynasty, when Wang Pizhi writes:\n\n >  Recently, Cao Gu, Director of the Ministry of War, invented a game called New Rules for Old Joys, based on the former game [of leaves], and the rules are especially detailed and tight. The rules are the following: use six flat dice, ten rhinoceros horn lions, and starting from the section [?] concerning bowl and tokens [cards?], fifteen categories are distinguished. Each category has a description, and there are altogether two hundred and twenty-seven well-known [dice?] combinations and two hundred and forty-seven special combinations, totaling four hundred and seventy-four combinations. I have the rules, but no one in the world can play it.\n\nSo at least we know that the game involved 6 dice, lion weights (to hold down the cards so they didn\u2019t blow away), a bowl, and the token cards. It seems as though the dice were rolled by a player, and then according to the outcome, cards would be drawn from the bowl \u2013 possibly serving a similar function as modern poker chips: representing cash values to be won.\n\nAnother type of game that was very popular from the Tang onward, and utilized paper cards were drinking games, which seem to have been largely derived from a game called \u201cFishing for Giant Sea Turtles\u201d. The name itself seems to come from the term used in the Tang/Song times for candidates for officialdom being accepted into the prestigious Hanlin Academy at the capital, called \u201cgetting onto the head of the giant sea turtle.\u201d Zhang Yuan of Southern Song describes the game:\n\n >  People in the Tang Dynasty had many wine games. There is the Fishing for the Giant Sea Turtle Game. A rod with a red silk thread line attached to it is held at a distance of 5 chi [~1-1.5 meters] inside the hall. A stone bowl, holding various \u201cfish\u201d [drawn or carved onto cards or plaques], forty kinds in total, is placed 7 chi [~2 m] away from the hall. Each fish is made in the form of a plaque with its name carved on it. There is a poem on each plaque. At one fishing, [a player] may get two plaques, but the recorder reads out one poem to carry out the drinking and the penalty. [\u2026] the poem for the Giant Sea Turtle goes:\n\n >  *The immortal giant sea turtles at the bottom of the sea are difficult to match,*  \n >  *The carry a golden peak which Yingzhou Paradise.*  \n >  *How did the giant from Elder Dragon Kingdom fish for turtles then?*  \n >  *He used a rainbow for a long rod, and the crescent moon for a hook.*  \n\n >  [Instruction:] Please use fine wine to urge those who have passed the examination to drink a full ten units.\n\nIt seems that in the time it took for the reader to read the poem aloud, the player was to drink their whole cup \u2013 10 units is a sizeable cup\u2026 though not the biggest\u2026 excavations have unearthed cups used to play such games as ranging from 5 up to 40 units large.\n\nLater drinking game, like those invented during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), also used cards. Zhao Yushi explained one such game invented in the early- mid-11th century:\n\n > Paper cards (*zhi tiezi*) are used. On one is written \u2018Examiner in Charge of Presenting Scholars\u2019, on a second \u2018Imperial Archivist\u2019, on the third \u2018Gentleman Hermit\u2019 and the rest \u2018Scholars\u2019. Those present are asked to quietly draw one card each. The person who gets \u2018Examiner in Charge of Presenting Scholars\u2019 does exactly what the title says. The person who gets \u2018Imperial Archivist\u2019 helps the examiner to look for the Gentleman Hermit to present him to court. If he is not found, the Examiner and Archivist drink a forfeit.\n\n > Later, new rules were added. There was added an \u2018Emissary of Appointment\u2019 and a \u2018Head of Academy\u2019. If the \u2018Hermit Gentleman\u2019 is found, the two drink along with him. When the \u2018Hermit Gentleman\u2019 has been discovered, the two announce themselves, and there is no need to look for them. Before the \u2018Hermit Gentleman\u2019 has been found, they cannot announce themselves first. If they break these two rules, the wine penalties are doubled.\n\nSo it\u2019s basically like playing a Werewolf/Mafia party game, but getting really drunk in the process.\n\nThe Yuan Dynasty also had popular card/drinking games\u2026 Played in mixed company, the player would pull a card, read a poem and follow the instructions. Such games could get pretty bawdy, for instance:\n\n >  **Card #7: The man from Qi begs for leftovers**\n\n > *Begging for leftovers is truly despicable,  \nNot satisfied, he goes off elsewhere.  \nHis wife and concubine mock him in turn,  \nBut happily he comes home still wanting to brag.*\n\n > [Instructions:] He who gets this order receives an old cup of wine, drinks a little and then begs for wine and food from the guests. The he brags. If there are courtesans in the party, they pretend to be his wife and concubine and scold him. If there are not courtesans, his two neighbours act as wife and concubine.\n\n > **Card #55: Lord Pingyuan and the extinguished candles**\n\n > *Drinking in the night, the candles suddenly went out,  \nAnd a guest pulled at the beauty\u2019s robe.  \nThe beauty pulled the ribbon fastner off his cap,  \nThen all the guests did so, and she never got to know.*  \n\n >  [Instructions:] Extinguish the candles at the banquet. In a while, no matter if there are courtesans around or not, everyone is allowed to say a rude phrase, but they cannot take advantage of the moment to move their hands. If it is daytime and there are no candles, everyone closes his or her eyes and still has to say a dirty phrase. The person who gets this command drinks a cup secretly to apologize for pulling at the clothes of the beauty. It is not necessary for anyone to pull off his cap ribbon.\n\n________\n\n\nLo, Andrew. \u201cThe Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards\u201d in *Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London\nVol. 63, No. 3 (2000)*.\n\nTsien, Tsuen-Hsuin. \u201cPaper and Printing: (d) Uses of paper and paper products: (6) Papercraft and Recreaional Use of Paper\u201d in *Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part I: Paper and Printing.*\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2hkp6f", "title": "Should a historian try to determine a historical figures personal thoughts and feelings?", "selftext": "In a philosophical way- no one can TRULY know another person's thoughts or feelings. But in every day life we say that we know how another person is thinking or feeling based on a number of cues (body language, what they say, how they say it, etc). Can/should the same be done with historical figures? Has this ever been done? What were the results?\n\nI know that writers and historians have said \"He/she was angry\" and so on, but I'm more wondering if someone has tried to delve into the mind of a historical figure- made that their primary focus.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hkp6f/should_a_historian_try_to_determine_a_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cktl0w1", "cktlqx9", "cktn6uc"], "score": [12, 2, 2], "text": ["It is often said that the most difficult thing to grasp in historical study is personality and personal motivation. Of course, that has not stopped historians, and particularly historians who write biography or \"Big Man\" history- that is, history focused around large personalities who are said to be responsible for historical change. Only in the last few generations have the problems of this type of history really been explored.\n\nTo provide one example of the problem of big man history and trying to read motivations: Alexander the Great. The sources that we have for Alexander the Great are all from centuries after his life. They are based on earlier sources that no longer survive, however, including some that were contemporary to Alexander's life or immediately afterwards. So nearly all we know of Alexander, aside from occasional contemporary inscriptions or numismatic evidence (coinage), is filtered through three to four centuries of distance and source transmission. And the various sources that we do have contradict each other in many ways, particularly when it comes to Alexander's motives.\n\nSo, Plutarch's Life of Alexander, chapter 38 ( _URL_0_ ), records that the burning of the palace of the Persian king at Perseopolis was caused by a drunken party in which a courtesan named Thais decided it would be fun to burn down the palace. Plutarch then notes that his sources disagree on whether it was done like this, or whether the deed was pre-meditated. This is what another historian of Alexander, Appian declares in book 3.18.11ff: he says that Alexander burned the palace as retribution for the burning of Athens in the Persian Wars (unfortunately, I can't find an online translation to link to). So we have two versions of Alexander's motivations; we know that Plutarch and Arrian both had access to contemporary sources. \n\nAnd there's the problem for modern scholars. Those who have a pre-concieved notion of what Alexander's character was will choose to privilege one of the two stories, and will find all sorts of convoluted reasons to do so. For Tarn, who believed Alexander was a noble conqueror attempting to unify mankind, of course the Plutarch version is correct, and he focuses on Plutarch's statement that Alexander was repentant afterwards and claims that Plutarch is relying on more reliable sources here. For Badian, who views Alexander as a cynical Machiavellian ruler, of course Arrian is correct, and he can find all sorts of reasons to justify why Arrian is following more reliable sources. But the honest answer is that we simply have no idea which is correct- but that will not stop historians and biographers of Alexander the Great from speculating on his motives and offering pseudo-objective reasons for why their interpretation is correct.\n\nI hope that example gives you an idea about the problems historians have with great man history and describing the thoughts of historical figures. Most historians these days are much more willing to recognize the problems of doing it, but it's pretty impossible to avoid it all together. Now, of course, the Alexander problem is particularly bad, and often historians (especially modern historians) have a lot more access to contemporary evidence or the writings of historical figures themselves. But even so, determining the thoughts of historical figures will nearly always be a guessing game and will vary depending on your preconceived ideas about that person.", "It;s called [psychohistory](_URL_0_) and I think it can be productive if the data is good. In particular, I think it's valid if we have an individual's own words or writings. It's probably fair to draw some conclusions about Hitler's psychology from reading *Mein Kampf*, for example and practically every New Testament scholar tries to analyze Paul.\n\nIn many cases, though, the data is too incomplete or unreliable to have confidence in any conclusions.", "Coming from an anthropological perspective, it is generally split among different camps on whether ideas can actually be known and examined. Combinations of processual archaeology and cognitive anthropology can offer insight into the major ideas, customs, and practices of groups of people, but when it comes to individual thought it is dangerous to assume knowledge. What may seem an obvious conclusion to the researcher or historian may be entirely different from the individual in questions thought. Modern and cultural biases inherently color our perspective on the past. It may be possible to ascertain motivations and explanations for actions, but even with first-hand sources it is impossible to know with 100% accuracy what someone's true feelings were.\n\nMany biographers and researchers attempt to understand the minds of their subject individual, although some of the cues you are looking for were not able to be seen until recently historically speaking with the advent of film. You can't exactly pick up much in the way of subtle cues from written records or archaeological context.\n\nWhile I don't know of any specific examples, I may be able to point you in the right direction for your question. Analyzing the physical/verbal cues of U.S. presidents has been a focus of research, especially for presidential races (ex.Nixon/Kennedy debates). I believe there has been a research of this sort on major figures of WWII and the Cold War as well.\n\nYou may also find appropriate information among specialized research of major figures in positions of power, in particular European rulers, Egyptian dynasties, United States government, and religious leaders such as Catholic Popes/Cardinals. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/5.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory"], []]}
{"q_id": "2ugspn", "title": "When did the institution of a police force begin? Was there ever a society that used the public as the police?", "selftext": "More about the second question: In westerns, normal citizens occasionally participate in the execution of the law.  The Andy Griffith Show talks about the 'citizen's arrest'.  Was there ever a culture without any kind of police force? Where the community did a kind of self-policing?  If so, how effective was it? What would motivate a culture out of one form of policing and into another?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ugspn/when_did_the_institution_of_a_police_force_begin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co8ba8l", "co8ffxq", "co917aw"], "score": [11, 15, 2], "text": ["Well in the Middle Ages, the Guilds had to take the role of 'police force'(militia) in the cities. They protected the streets with their small militias and every guild had to deliver a small number of men to do so. It was also used to protect the trade in a city and fight of any agressors who tried to attack. The numbers were quite small but effective(oh, well ofcourse it depends on how large the city is). On the countryside, the lord was the policd officer and he had a mercenary force, or used his own farmers(Feodum, farmer gets plot of land in trade for duty during wars) to keep the villages etc. safe. This kept up until the Industrial Revolution. Then the guilds slowly disappeared and the government took over the role of supplying the police force. So it first was in hands by the citizens themselves (the guilds, who were not directly in control of a city, but had an important role) and later became a government duty. \n\nSource: McKay, a.o.(2011) Modern History of Western Society, tenth edition. ", "hi! you may be interested in these\n\noverview \n\n* [At what point did societies begin making a distinction between military and police?](_URL_8_)\n\n* [What is the history of Law Enforcement?](_URL_10_)\n\nexamples of early law enforcement\n\n* [Law enforcement in ancient Egypt, \"were there cops in Egypt?\"](_URL_14_) - Ancient Egypt\n\n* [Did ancient greek cities have any kind of police force?](_URL_11_) - Ancient Greece\n\n* [What was law enforcement like in cities of the middle ages? Was there any distinction between law enforcement and soldiery?](_URL_5_) - Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, 17th c France\n\n* [How did the Roman empire deal with police and fire services, if they did exist at all?](_URL_0_) - Ancient Rome\n\n* [Were Lictors the Roman Police?](_URL_2_) - Ancient Rome\n\n* [What was law enforcement like in Ancient Rome?](_URL_6_) - Ancient Rome\n\n* [How were crimes investigated in the past?](_URL_12_) - Ancient Rome, China, Medieval  &  Victorian England, Aztecs, 19th c Europe  &  USA\n\n* [Before the modern era where did people go to report crimes? Who were their 'police' basically?](_URL_9_) - China, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Visigoths, Germany\n\n* [Crime and law enforcement in Middle Ages](_URL_13_) - Medieval Europe\n\n* [Law and Order in Medieval cities](_URL_7_) - Medieval Europe\n\n* [Who were the local law enforcers in Medieval Germany?](_URL_1_) - Medieval Germany\n\n* [What did \"law enforcement\" look like in the great Mesoamerican cultures at their height?](_URL_4_) - Mesoamerica\n\n* [When was the traditional police system created in the UK?](_URL_3_) - 18th/19th c UK; includes links to a few more posts", "this is going to be a bit heavier on sources than on deep commentary but i think it's useful. \n\nwell the \"posse comitas\" or posse in common terms has had a long history in the Anglosphere dating back to the anglo saxon times. Afred the Great's reorganization of local defenses against viking raids lead to the creation of the \"shire reeve\" or sheriff \n\nI haven't read this paper but the author contributes to a law blog (volukh conspiracy) now hosted at the Washington Post. \n\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nfrom the wapost article\n\n >  From Anglo-Saxon times until the present, a core power of the Sheriff has been the authority to summon posse comitatus\u2013\u201dthe power of the county.\u201d Like jury service, posse service is a mandatory duty of the citizen.\n\nso i would argue this broadly counts: for a long time the local lawman pretty much acted independently deputizing locals when more manpower was needed. \n\nInterestingly backstory radio recently did a program on policing and interviewed professor Alasdair Roberts whose take on the rise of police is that it's not due to a failure of posse comitas and small law enforcement groups to do their job, rather it is due to the need to maintain social order in a time of rising industrialization and political unrest between labor and capital. \n\n_URL_2_\n\n*A fun sidenote about this is that Andy Griffith literally cannot be the Sheriff of Mayberry because in some episodes he is seen presiding over some trials (violation of separation of powers since sherrifs run the justice system) and really acts as a chief of police for mayberry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sej2p/how_did_the_roman_empire_deal_with_police_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pycmi/who_were_the_local_law_enforcers_in_medieval/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m8was/were_lictors_the_roman_police/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rbfwi/when_was_the_traditional_police_system_created_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rl2w3/what_did_law_enforcement_look_like_in_the_great/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mjg8l/what_was_law_enforcement_like_in_cities_of_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zkdts/what_was_law_enforcement_like_in_ancient_rome/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p70al/law_and_order_in_medieval_cities/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17dpim/at_what_point_did_societies_begin_making_a/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wbmk8/before_the_modern_era_where_did_people_go_to/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iiqrc/what_is_the_history_of_law_enforcement/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vnoeg/did_ancient_greek_cities_have_any_kind_of_police/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sipwy/how_were_crimes_investigated_in_the_past/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u8iew/crime_and_law_enforcement_in_middle_ages/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1chard/law_enforcement_in_ancient_egypt_were_there_cops/"], ["http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427430", "http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/15/sheriffs-and-the-posse-comitatus/", "http://backstoryradio.org/shows/serve-protect-2/"]]}
{"q_id": "1qha16", "title": "Between 1492 and 1519, how much awareness did the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Spanish Empire have of one another?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qha16/between_1492_and_1519_how_much_awareness_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdctw6y", "cdcx67s"], "score": [23, 14], "text": ["According to Diego Duran, the Aztecs encountered a European ship prior to the arrival of Cortes which deeply upset the reigning Emperor and within the context of Duran's interpretation of the Conquest, laid the foundation for Moctezuma's groveling to Cortes.\n\nConversely, the Spanish had encountered a few Maya ships and had heard rumors of great wealth on the mainlands of Mexico.  Actual knowledge of both political entities wasn't gained until Cortes was already traveling across Mexico and even then information would seem to have been fairly limited.  This is likely the best explanation as to why Moctezuma responded to Cortes as he did:  knowing virtually nothing of Cortes, where he came from and what his intentions were, it would have been extremely difficult to make a sound decision.", "The first meeting between Spaniards and the Aztecs was in 1518 under the expedition of Juan de Grijalva. The Aztecs had received reports of the Spanish during the prior (1517) expedition of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba. Cordoba had fought (and lost) against a small-ish Maya city-state known as Champoton, and word of this encounter appears to have spread through much of Mesoamerica. When the Spanish returned under Grijalva, the Aztecs heard about this as well. They had apparently learned from the Maya (at this point the only real Mesoamerican culture the Spanish had encountered) that the Spanish were small in number and seemed obsessed with gold. (According to Diaz del Castillo, Motecuzoma had received this information via a written/painted canvas which included pictorial representations of the Spanish.) Motecuzoma then sent orders to all of his vassals along the Gulf Coast that if they were to encounter the Spanish they should engage them in trade and attempt to acquire more information about who they were and where they came from. When the Aztecs received word that they had appeared near one of their tributary provinces, they sent a large diplomatic party to go meet them. Bernal Diaz del Castillo describes the event:\n\n > We kept on our course, all four ships together until we arrived at the mouth of another river, which we called the R\u00edo de Banderas [river of flags] because we there came on a great number of Indians with long lances, and on every lance a great cloth banner which they waved as they beckoned to us.\n...\n > When from the ships we saw such an unusual sight we were fairly astonished and the General [Grijalva] and most of the Captains were agreed that to find out what it meant we should lower two of the boats, and that all those who carried guns or crossbows and twenty of the most daring and active soldiers should go in them, and that Francisco de Montejo should accompany us [in command], and that if we should discover that the men who were waving the banners were warriors we should bring news of it and anything else that we could find out.\n\nThe party was lead by three high ranking lords, one of them was the ruler of the nearby city-state/province (I'm unsure which one). They laid down some mats beneath a nearby tree and served the Spaniards food (turkeys, tortillas, and fruit are mentioned specifically). They also burned copal incense. When Montejo reported back to Grijalva, the latter decided to go ashore personally. Unfortunately, there was no verbal communication at this time as the Spaniards did not have a Nahuatl interpreter. Nevertheless, they were able to communicate through gestures enough to indicate a desire to trade. They remained there for six days and traded for gold and 'jewels.' After that, they got on their boats and left."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7cpfhu", "title": "Why are Vikings portrayed as being alien to the Anglo-Saxons even though they had similar origins?", "selftext": "It strikes me after reading about the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England that the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and their ethnic background and even the means by which they came to England is very similar to that of the Vikings.\n\nBoth groups originate in Scandinavia and Norther Germany, both groups speak related languages, and both groups came to England as naval invaders and eventually colonists.\n\nAnd yet both popular culture and history seem to suggest that the Vikings (or Danes) and the Anglo-Saxons were extremely different groups of people, that the Vikings terrified the Anglo-Saxons, and that when Vikings settled the did so in their own state (the Danelaw) with significantly distinct differences to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England.\n\nDid the Anglo-Saxons not realize that the Vikings had similar geographical and ethnic origins to themselves? How is it that people with such similar origins and related language and ethnicity could come to be so alien from each other in a matter of a few hundred years (from the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England c. 500 and the beginning of the Viking raids and invasions c. 800).\n\nOr is this just an artifact of pop culture and obsolete historiography and the reality was more like a protracted struggle for land and power between a spectrum of similar and related peoples?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7cpfhu/why_are_vikings_portrayed_as_being_alien_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dprm4y9"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may want to look at this answer to a similar question by /u/BRIStoneman\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7akz2t/did_the_anglosaxons_and_the_vikings_both/"]]}
{"q_id": "3xf52r", "title": "How deep can a dynasty go before people of different branches aren't considered part of the \"main\" dynasty anymore?", "selftext": "Let's use the Capets for my example, because they're one of the biggest dynasties in history and there's a lot of information to be found of its members.\n\nAccording to Wikipedia the dynasty can branch of into their own houses. Those houses are part of the main dynasty, but can also branch of into their *own* branches. This could continue for a few more branches and now you would be so far away from the main dynasty that I would think that they aren't a part of it anymore.\n\nTake [Denis of Portugal](_URL_0_) for example, he's part of the Portuguese House of Burgundy, which is part of the House of Burgundy, which is *then* part of the Capetian Dynasty. At that point you'd think that you would be that far removed as to *not* refer to the Capetian Dynasty anymore, but instead start a new dynasty for themselves.\n\nWould Denis *really* been seen as a Capet? I know that the French Kings were, but I have a hard time believing that the same is true outside of France (or just any other dynasty in general).\n\nWhat makes it a House, part of a dynasty, and not a dynasty on their own? E.g. Capet with Robertians.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xf52r/how_deep_can_a_dynasty_go_before_people_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy462ve"], "score": [6], "text": ["As a side question, what kind of documents did European nobles and rulers in the Middle Ages use to verify their royal/dynastic lineages?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_of_Portugal"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6pwnh9", "title": "7 different coalitions fought France in the Napoleonic Wars. In modern warfare, is the idea of various coalitions forming to fight the same adversary again and again unique to the Napoleonic Wars?", "selftext": "Why were the various countries involved in the coalitions weak enough that they lost multiple wars, yet strong enough that they could come back to fight again?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pwnh9/7_different_coalitions_fought_france_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkt99se"], "score": [28], "text": ["you've asked two questions here; i'll address the one in the title.\n\nthe various coalitions formed against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France are not unique. it is perhaps not surprising that only a century earlier a similar series of alliances were repeatedly formed against the preeminent power in Europe at the time--the France of [King Louis XIV](_URL_1_).\n\nLouis XIV fought 3 major and 2 minor wars during his long reign (1643-1715), all against varied alliances of his European enemies:\n\n\n\nWar|France and Allies|Coalitions\n:--|:--|:--\n[War of Devolution 1667-68](_URL_3_) | **France** | Spain\n |  | Dutch Republic\n |  | England\n |  | Sweden\n[Franco-Dutch War 1672-78](_URL_0_) | **France** | Dutch Republic\n | England (1672-74) | England (1678)\n | Sweden | Spain\n | Munster | Holy Roman Empire\n | Cologne | Prussia\n |  | Denmark-Norway\n[War of the Reunions 1683-84](_URL_6_) | **France** | Spain\n |  | Holy Roman Empire\n |  | Genoa\n[Nine Years' War / War of the Grand Alliance / War of the League of Augsburg 1688-97](_URL_2_) | **France** | Dutch Republic\n |  | England\n |  | Scotland\n |  | Holy Roman Empire\n |  | Spain\n |  | Savoy\n |  | Sweden\n[War of the Spanish Succession 1702-15](_URL_4_) | **France** | Austria\n | Spain (Philip of Anjou) | Spain (Habsburgs)\n | Bavaria (1702-04) | Dutch Republic\n | Mantua | England + Scotland / Great Britain\n |  | Prussia\n |  | Hanover\n |  | Savoy\n |  | Portugal\n\n\nas you can see France fought most of these wars alone, or with only a few allies. the geopolitical reasoning--particularly for England--behind these wars of shifting alliances was to maintain a [balance of power](_URL_7_) in Europe. the goal was to prevent any single state from ever achieving hegemony over the rest of the continent. as France was long the largest, wealthiest, and most populous European state it is then not surprising that it found itself the target of a series of alliances aimed at limiting its expansion.\n\nthese shifting alliances seeking to maintain a balance of power later came to be popularly referred to as the ['Stately quadrille'](_URL_5_), beginning with the War of the Spanish Succession and continuing through the rest of the 18th century. this concept, combined with a monarchical opposition to France's revolutionary fervor contributed to the formation of the coalitions against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.\n\nedit: ~~having trouble with formatting; will work on correcting it shortly.~~ formatting fixed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Dutch_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV_of_France", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Years%27_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Devolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spanish_Succession", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stately_quadrille", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Reunions", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power"]]}
{"q_id": "44ond2", "title": "When did the trait of strongly \"saving face\" and the \"Honor culture\" fade in the western world and what factors help to phase it out?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44ond2/when_did_the_trait_of_strongly_saving_face_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czs1xr1"], "score": [21], "text": ["Has it faded? I can only claim detailed knowledge about the history of Scandinavian men's culture, but if that's any measure of what's going on in the \"West\", it's still here - it's just lost much of its prestige and visibility in the field of middle- and upper class public discourse. The honour-motivated crimes of foreigners are proof of their alienness, while the honour-motivated crimes of ethnic Scandinavians are dissolved into other categories - tragedy, mental illness, random incomprehensible violence, overindulgence, age, class, politics, plain old stupidity...\n\nCulture is sort of like a palimpsest - unless the information and the entire substrate it existed on is utterly obliterated, it's always available to be resumed or resurrected as a strategy when it becomes useful again. We still do incredibly stupid vile shit, and egg others on, in the name of saving face, it's just that \"his girlfriend told him to 'man up' when some jerk cut them off in line for the taxi home late on a Saturday night\" does not appear with a checkbox next to it in police report forms, even though, as a reason to kill someone, it's as old as the Sagas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aos9xx", "title": "Syphilis in the middle ages", "selftext": "I heard from a, pretty unreliable, source that around the middle ages most of the human population had syphilis, and that the clothes worn by nobility were made to hide the rashes. After that, our resistance to the disease had improved because everyone not resistant had died.\n\nAny possible truth in that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aos9xx/syphilis_in_the_middle_ages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg4tlpj"], "score": [4], "text": ["Not really.\n\nSyphilis (despite claims to the contrary) was a New World disease that didn't reach Europe until the late 1490s.\n\nThe first major outbreak began at the Siege of Naples, where it swept through the French army of Charles VIII. The \"French disease,\" now widely thought to be syphilis, swept through Europe in 1495, reaching as far as Scotland in 1497 and Russia in 1499. However, there's no evidence to suggest most people in the 1500s to 1600s got it, or that populations became resistant (syphilis doesn't really work that way anyways). It wasn't until better 19th and 20th century medical care, especially antibiotics in the 1940s, that people had an adequate response to syphilis.\n\nPrior to this early modern outbreak, there were STDs in Europe, although its hard to parse what is propaganda, what is rumor, and what is more trustworthy.\n\nTake this case. In the 1440s, the chronicler Thomas Gascoigne wrote that the father of Henry IV of England, John of Gaunt, \"died of putrefaction of his genitals and body, caused by the frequenting of women, for he was a great fornicator.\" Medical fact? Anti-Lancastrian propaganda? Mistaken diagnosis? Medical historians are still debating it.\n\nStill, it seems that genital ailments that sound a lot like STD symptoms were common enough that surgeons and doctors were coming up with widely-circulated treatments. \n\nJohn of Gaddesden wrote in the *Rosa Anglica*, circa 1314:\n\n > If you wish to preserve your organ from harm, should you suspect your partner of being corrupted, purify yourself, as soon as you have withdrawn, with cold water in which you have mixed vinegar, or with urine.\n\nThe *Trotula* guide from the noted that there 1100s noted that there were men:\n\n > \"Who suffer swelling of the virile member, having there and under the prepuce many holes, and they suffer lesions.\"\n\nThese were to be treated with a poultice and then the carer should:\n \n > \"Wash the ulcerous or wounded neck of the prepuce with warm water, and sprinkle on it powder of Greek pitch and dry rot of wood or of worms and rose and root of mullein and bilberry.\"\n\nThere were even some rather graphic illustrations, like [this one](_URL_0_) in John of Arderne\u2019s *Liber Medicinarum.*\n\nThese veneral diseases, however, did not cause generally cause bodywide rashes, tumors, and sores that would have needed covering. That's a symptom of secondary and tertiary syphilis."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/hZHCSEn.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3h17m9", "title": "Why did the double-headed eagle become such a common symbol in heraldry?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h17m9/why_did_the_doubleheaded_eagle_become_such_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu3n68k"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might also want to try /r/heraldry if you haven't already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ssk41", "title": "The Guardian just wrote that North Korea was \"once one of the most prosperous and industrialised [countries] in the region\". Is that true? If so, when?", "selftext": "Link to the article - Hope, pride, fear: how North Koreans feel about their homeland\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ssk41/the_guardian_just_wrote_that_north_korea_was_once/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlfa9yg", "dlfyldy"], "score": [8, 34], "text": ["Could you add a link to the article in question so the context is included?", " Quick disclaimer: I'm away from home and don't have access to anything other than my collection of e-books, so this won't be as detailed as I'd like.\n\n**Having just read the article, I think that point (and honestly, most of the paragraph that surrounds it) is a little problematic.** However, in fairness to the writer, I think she's really just making a point about how the North Koreans *themselves* perceive this issue, rather than how a statistician or historian would see it. (Her final conclusion, which we really can't discuss here at length due to the subreddit's rules, is also within shouting distance of the consensus among Western intelligence agencies regarding NK's pursuit of nuclear weapons. In short, the Kim regime may be populated by rat bastards, but they're rat bastards who read the newspapers and know what happened to Qaddafi and Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.) She's absolutely right that many North Koreans look back on the early Cold War period with nostalgia, when things seemed to be running okay and there was enough food and clothing for everyone ... or was there?\n\nTo get us all on the same page, this is the bit in question:\n\n*Disaffection among the rank and file, who have enjoyed none of the luxuries of their superiors, is real and growing. The country was once one of the most prosperous and industrialised in the region. The state gave its people jobs, food and healthcare and promised there was \u201cnothing to envy\u201d in the outside world. But the devastating famine of the 90s, which killed hundreds of thousands, spelled the death blow for a system that was already struggling.* \n\nSo let's tackle this point by point:\n\n**\"Disaffection among the rank and file, who have enjoyed none of the luxuries of their superiors, is real and growing.\"** True. The North Korean regime has never successfully reclaimed the absolute control it exercised over its population before the 1994-1998 famine. However, further discussion violates our 20-year rule, so we have to leave this alone.\n\n**\"The country was once one of the most prosperous and industrialised in the region.\"** Ehhhh ... sort of. The really important bit is that NK was more prosperous and industrialized than *South* Korea for a period between, say, 1955-1975, but I'm not sure exactly how it rates elsewhere.\n\nTo start off: I'm not totally sure what she means here by saying \"region,\" which could have an impact on how we treat this. I assume she's referring to East Asia, and political scientists and historians generally consider East Asia to be China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Mongolia, with some wiggle room for eastern Russia, Vietnam (if you want to define East Asia on the basis of broad and historical Chinese influence) and Hong Kong/Macau. No matter how you slice it, there aren't a whole lot of countries for comparison, so that makes our job a bit easier. \n\nWhen the Japanese empire annexed the Korean peninsula (arguably a process that began slowly in 1876, though not formalized until 1910), it didn't take long for colonial authorities to figure out that the mountainous northern half had a lot of valuable coal, iron, and gold veins. The south was the breadbasket. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese built a lot of mines, roads, railways, factories, and infrastructure in the north. The south's major road and rail arteries were constructed mostly with the thought of getting food to the north and to the empire's territories in Manchuria. Put simply, the north built and mined stuff, and the south grew stuff.\n\n**When Japan got drop-kicked out of Korea after World War II, none of this changed overnight, and it was still true both during and after the Korean War ... mostly.** The American bombing campaign went after anything that looked like it was sticking more than two feet out of the ground, like bridges, railways, factories, and unusually tall geraniums. While the North Koreans had to rebuild and repair most of their transportation infrastructure and factories after the war, they still had a leg up on the South Koreans. It's nearly always easier to fix something that already exists than to build something from nothing, although no one seems to have informed my state's highway commission of this.\n\nSo when historians look at North Korea vs. South Korea in the postwar period, they typically start off by acknowledging that: \n\n - North Korea was certainly doing better by the numbers up until around 1975 (which is the point at which the South Korean economy caught up and never looked back), but:\n - The numbers don't necessarily give us an accurate picture of what was happening within the country, and:\n - NK's relative prosperity was owed to a lot of things that didn't necessarily have much to do with NK itself.\n\nBasically, a lot of inherited Japanese industrial investment that they were able to build on + a tremendous amount of economic assistance from the U.S.S.R. = a fairly optimistic set of numbers for the regime. On paper at least, they *were* doing better than the South Koreans. NK had more easily-exploitable sources of national income, all of the road and rail links to the peninsula's only neighbors, and was significantly ahead with respect to industrialization. But how much of this is owed to Kim il-Sung, and how much of it is owed to leftover Japanese infrastructure and a relatively privileged position for trade?\n\n**People who later defected have commented that, while the 1955-1975 period was kind of a golden age for the country, and anyone old enough to remember it feels nostalgic, it was far from perfect.** The population grew, but agricultural and industrial output didn't keep up. People were not allotted clothes or household goods as frequently as they would have liked, and Kim's dream of the people eating \"rice with meat soup\" remained a dream. Pockets of the country -- most miserably, the growing number of prison camps that Kim built to house threats to the regime, real or otherwise -- were pretty much expected to fend for themselves food-wise and generally did poorly. Moreover, the public distribution system stuck to a rigidly-enforced series of grain allotments divided by sex and occupation that wasn't that generous even at the best of times.\n\nWith respect to other nations in East Asia:\n\n - **China:** Without access to my books, I'm honestly not sure how NK rated in comparison to China with respect to industrialization or wealth, but I would be very surprised if China hadn't been ahead on both metrics. (GDP-wise, China was probably leagues ahead on population alone, so it's GDP per capita that you'd want to look at.) However, on an interesting little note, Chinese citizens actually fled *to* North Korea during the Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine; there were periods in which NK was certainly the more politically stable of the two. \n - **Japan:** I think I can say without fear of contradiction that there is no way NK ever began to approach Japan's level of industrialization or wealth.\n - **Taiwan:** Taiwan was similar to South Korea in that most of its striking economic gains were in the 1970s onward, but I don't know how it rated in comparison to NK beforehand.\n - **Mongolia:** Not sure. \n\n**\"The state gave its people jobs, food and healthcare and promised there was \u201cnothing to envy\u201d in the outside world.\"** Mostly true, although the quality of the jobs, food, and healthcare provided was notso hotso. However, I'd argue that NK's health system is actually a decent argument for how much you can do with even limited resources (and, let's be frank, the coercive power of a totalitarian state; dictators can order people to report for health checks without giving a damn about whether or not they actually like going to the doctor).\n\n**\"But the devastating famine of the 90s, which killed hundreds of thousands, spelled the death blow for a system that was already struggling.\"** True. Famines are a major crisis of legitimacy for governments, and justly so; a famine can be *started* by a natural disaster like a flood, but it generally does not *happen* because of the flood, if that distinction makes any sense -- [more background on this here](_URL_0_) (but read /u/Instantcoffee's critiques below too). Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland in their statistical study *Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform* came to the conclusion that roughly a million deaths can be directly attributed to the famine, although they discuss why even this painstakingly-researched number is problematic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/10/hope-pride-fear-how-north-koreans-feel-about-their-homeland?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copiar_para_a_%C3%A1rea_de_transfer%C3%AAncia"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zqz3z/i_often_hear_people_say_that_the_irish_potato/cplvaxl/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "caswuy", "title": "Where did WW2 Londoners go if their houses were destroyed during the Blitzkrieg? What options did they have?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/caswuy/where_did_ww2_londoners_go_if_their_houses_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etbqg96"], "score": [20], "text": ["Local authorities were ill-prepared for dealing with homelessness at the start of the Blitz. Pre-war estimates predicted appalling devastation and massive numbers of deaths resulting in measures including stockpiling of cardboard coffins, as it turned out there were far fewer casualties than expected but many more people made homeless - something like one person in six in the London region (1,400,000 people) at some point over 1940-41. Outright destruction of houses was comparatively rare; in the first six weeks of attacks around 16,000 houses were destroyed, 60,000 seriously damaged but repairable, and 130,000 slightly damaged. Unexploded bombs also forced many houses to be evacuated, with over 3,000 UXBs by the end of November 1940 awaiting disposal.\n\nRest centres had been established for bombing victims, typically in schools, but these were envisaged as a very short term measure, for a matter of hours rather than days before people made their own arrangements for accommodation. In most cases this was possible; wealthier people could rent a flat in London or a cottage in the home counties, others arranged to stay with family or friends. Some took to 'Trekking', leaving cities entirely at night for camps outside in places such as Epping Forest; others were evacuated to different parts of the country. For some (around one in seven) the rest centres became longer term accommodation. Up to 25,000 people were staying in them during the first months in poor conditions, most rest centres having minimal sanitation facilities and insufficient bedding, but they were rapidly improved by both government action and individual volunteers (*Problems of Social Policy* by Richard M. Titmuss includes the account of a \"Mrs B\", a beetroot seller who took charge of an Islington rest centre to organise the feeding of babies, washing, sweeping, breakfast etc.) Responsibility for assisting the victims of bombing was disjointed, with 96 different authorities concerned with billeting and housing in the London region. Some exhibited posters after attacks with information about the rest centres and other services, but the approach was piecemeal until late 1940; air raid victims could spend much time going from office to office trying to get assistance.\n\nOn September 26th 1940 Henry Willink was appointed Special Regional Commissioner for the Homeless. Repair of damaged houses was a priority, as people strongly desired to return to their own homes, or at least neighbourhoods, if at all possible, and by January 1941 80% of the 500,000 damaged houses in London had been repaired with linoleum, cardboard, plasterboard and tarpaulin used for at least temporary repairs if necessary. Local authorities requisitioned empty houses (25,000 by late October 1940), though these still required furniture, bedding and utilities before people could be moved in, and Willink also appointed a permanent staff of social workers for as a Ministry of Health circular put it: \"Experience has shown that the rehousing of homeless people involves more than securing simply that there is accommodation in billets or in requisitioned homes for the number of persons involved. \"Case-work,\" taking into account the needs of the individual persons or families affected is also necessary and becomes more important the greater the distance between the original home and the new accommodation\". By the middle of 1941, then, the situation was greatly improved. More government administrative centres and information centres had been established, along with assistance from voluntary bodies such as the Women's Voluntary Service. Over the course of the London Blitz around 107,000 people were rehoused, 366,000 were billeted, and 181,000 mothers and children were officially evacuated.\n\nFurther reading  &  watching:  \n*The People's War: Britain, 1939-1945*, Angus Calder   \n*The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945*, Richard Overy  \n*Problems of Social Policy*, Richard M. Titmuss   \n*Blitz: The Bombs That Changed Britain*, [BBC](_URL_0_)  &  [Open University](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09gtbh2", "https://www.open.edu/openlearn/tv-radio-events/tv/blitz-the-bombs-changed-britain"]]}
{"q_id": "4c1bc2", "title": "Ants and houseflies and other pests enter modern dwellings easily - how did medieval or ancient dwellers keep them out?", "selftext": "It would be interesting to have an account from diverse places", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c1bc2/ants_and_houseflies_and_other_pests_enter_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1e9z2q"], "score": [16], "text": ["Thanks to an offhand reference in the biblical Book of Proverbs, medieval Christian preachers just loved using ants as an *exemplum* for their audiences. Ants were models of industriousness, always persevering, never selfish. You can imagine how well this would go over with people returning home from sermon to find ants eating their bread or harvested grain.\n\nThe *Geoponika* is a fascinating miscellany of classical and early medieval agricultural texts compiled in 10th century Byzantium. The collected authorities offer various advice for keeping ants away from crops before and after harvest. We can think that people might have employed similar measures to protect the food in their own homes. Mostly, the remedies consist of various substances spread around or poured on anthills:\n\n* cedar resin\n* mixture of tree resin and oil\n* brimstone and oregano\n* powdered snail shells mixed with resin\n* chalk and oregano\n\nI imagine medieval people also utilized the well-worn traditions of kill it or put up with it--after all, people and animals sometimes lived in the same dwelling, a \"mixed house,\" though there was usually some attempt at a partition. But I have no offhand citation for that. ;)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xacb8", "title": "In the 1980s and 90s, did the Soviet Union have its own HIV and crack epidemics?", "selftext": "If not, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xacb8/in_the_1980s_and_90s_did_the_soviet_union_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coyjfva", "coyk6gd", "coykggn", "coyltme", "coymtoz", "coyv5mo", "coz09f6"], "score": [68, 15, 13, 529, 290, 17, 4], "text": ["This is a threadwide warning: **PLEASE** do not post an answer here unless it [follows our rules about answers](_URL_0_). Speculation, personal anecdotes, pure jokes, etc. are *not* tolerated. Keep this in mind before you post in this thread or any other /r/askhistorians thread.", "Additional question if not answered in response to OP: were these viewed as social or moral short comings in propaganda and public resources?", "Related question: How widespread where things like the AIDS and crack epidemics? Were they relegated to the US? North America? Just the Western Hemisphere? Etc?", "First I would say we need to look at the structural factors that might make it difficult for us to have a clear scope of the early HIV epidemic as it pertains to the Soviet Union. \n\nThe first structural issue (and this is a fairly obvious one) is that the Soviet Union was particularly good at obfuscating, and little information on the state and spread of HIV in the USSR was released to the West throughout the latter days of the Soviet Union. For example, prior to October 1988 the country only reported 1 HIV infection publicly, and this is likely a misrepresentation. What we do know (and this still holds true in Russia today) is that the primary transmission route of HIV in the USSR was injection, specifically the multiple use of syringes. The leads to the second structural issue: contemporaneously there was not only a shortage of syringes in the country in general but the USSR was significantly behind the West in deploying single-use (disposable) syringes; in other words, the common syringe you would see in the country would be old-fashioned, heavy, multi-use syringes that, at least in theory in clinical settings, would be sterilized between use. In practice, even in a clinical setting, this was not always the case. This lead to many of the earliest \u201coutbreaks\u201d of the virus. These were often among children who had been hospitalized in the same institution (significant instances of this occured in the cities of Elista and Volgograd). Because of this same scenario, there was also widespread co-infection with Hepatitis B, and Tuberculosis spread dramatically among these populations (TB is an opportunistic infection for advanced HIV-infection/AIDS).\n\nInto the 90s, the fall of the Soviet Union and the entrenchment of widespread poverty and joblessness proved to be, as it often does, fertile ground for drug use. By 2000, there were estimated to be 2.3-4 million injection drug users in the country and 2001 had a higher incidence of new HIV infection than all previous years combined. I cite these more recent figures because HIV burden accumulates by a magnitude, and very high rates are as a result of the spread of HIV through the period you enquired about. The low penetration of HIV treatment and antiretrovirals too adds to the rates of transmission, as higher viral loads (common in untreated or poorly treated persons) lead to increased likelihood of transmission. \n\nAs to the crack question, I can\u2019t really speak to that (like another commenter I\u2019m not sure as to the relevance or relationship you\u2019re drawing between it and HIV, other than a supposition that because HIV and crack emerged as major societal concerns at a similar time in the US they might have behaved analogously in the USSR). Otherwise, I hope this was helpful.\n\nSeale, J R  &  Medvedev, Z A. Origin and transmission of AIDS. Multi-use hypodermics and the threat to the Soviet Union,\n*Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine*, 1987, Vol 80(5), pp. 301-4.\n\nMedvedev, Z A. The AIDS epidemic and emergency measures. (Evolution of AIDS policy in the Soviet Union, part 2) *British Medical Journal*, 1990, Vol 300(6729), p.932-3.\n\nSchwalbe, N. HIV and tuberculosis in the former Soviet Union, *Lancet*, 2002, Vol 360, pp.19-20.\n\nEdit: forgotten words, clarity", "**The Soviet Union had problems with AIDS and illegal drugs in the 1980s, but strict rules, mass testing and at-times brutal punishments kept those problems largely underground or under control until the collapse of the Soviet Union.**\n\n***\n\nLet's talk about illegal drugs first. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, there was a vibrant underground \u2014 particularly in larger cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow \u2014 trading in *samizdat*, illegal but prized media. This could be political stuff, but it was usually innocent. The gold standard was the VHS tape: Finnish TV broadcasts of Western TV shows would be recorded and re-recorded, passed from hand to hand through the samizdat networks. Think *sneakernet*.\n\nI've talked with a few people involved in this trade \u2014 Alaska and Seattle were the back doors into this, thanks to direct Aeroflot and Alaska Airlines flights to the Soviet Union. \n\nIn addition to media, the *samizdat* providers were usually the people you went to for things ... a little less savory. [One defector I've written about](_URL_3_) went to a *samizdat* guy who had a rack of humming VCRs in his apartment. He wasn't there for tapes, though. He was there to pick up a false passport and documentation he would later use to cross the ice to Alaska with.\n\nOthers, of course, traded in illegal drugs alongside their illegal tapes.\n\n[The key source for the Soviet Union's illegal drug trade was Afghanistan.](_URL_1_) [Before, during and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan](_URL_13_), [that country and Pakistan were the world leaders in heroin and opium production](_URL_6_).\n\nThe poppies that grow in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied as much as 85 to 90 percent of all heroin sold in New York City in 1983, but there was more than enough to flow to the Soviet Union, too. It wasn't just heroin, of course. \"Half of them smoke hashish,\" a Soviet defector said in 1985 of the invading soldiers.\n\nWhy? The answer's in the New York Times story I linked above:\n\n > According to Western diplomats and analysts of the Afghan situation in Pakistan and elsewhere, Russian troops in Afghanistan have turned to drugs for the same reasons that many Americans did in Vietnam: They are young, away from home constraints, bored, frightened and under fierce pressure to prove themselves. And many of the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan are said by the defectors to have a 10th-to-12th-grade education.\n\nSoldiers returning from Afghanistan brought their drug problem with them, and the *samizdat* conduit provided the drugs they needed. With a steady supply available, the market for illegal drugs expanded. [By 1986, when the Soviet press started covering the illegal drug trade significantly, the CIA estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of drug addicts nationwide in the Soviet Union.](_URL_12_) \n\n[By August 1990, the head of the KGB said publicly in *Pravda* that the illegal narcotics trade was worth 14 billion rubles.](_URL_5_) After the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, these figures skyrocketed, and the growing illegal trade expanded from a quiet network into a mafia ...\n\n***\n\nThe case of the AIDS epidemic is an interesting one. The United States identified the disease publicly as early as 1981, [but at the first world AIDS conference in 1983, the Soviet representative reported no cases of the disease.](_URL_2_) (In comparison, 267 cases had been reported in all of Europe.)\n\nIn fact, the Soviet Union at first looked to AIDS as a propaganda tool. [In 1985, the Soviet weekly *Literaturnaya Gazeta* published a story declaring that AIDS had been created by an American military laboratory](_URL_10_). The Soviet Union subsequently provided scientific experts to lend credence to the charges. The next year, state television aired *The Man From Fifth Avenue,* a documentary that depicted New York City as [\"Gomorrah on the Hudson\"](_URL_11_) and was at the time one of the longest examinations of American life ever shown on television in the Soviet Union. Drugs, squalor, pornography and poverty were prominently featured. \n\nAnd yet, the Soviet Union could not hide its own problems. [In December 1985, a Soviet publication acknowledged for the first time that AIDS existed in the Soviet Union](_URL_8_), but the number of cases was fewer than \"the fingers on one's hand.\" As late as October of that year, a deputy health minister had said there were no recorded cases in the Soviet Union. [Previously, the party line had been, \"'in foreign countries AIDS is primarily found among people who lead a dissolute sex life and are inclined to sexual perversions,' as well as among drug addicts who use unsterilized needles.\"](_URL_9_)\n\nBy 1987, when the United States had recorded at least 30,000 cases, [the issue had \"become a matter of concern at the highest levels\" of the Soviet Union.](_URL_14_) That year, a Soviet law [mandated testing of anyone suspected of carrying the AIDS virus](_URL_0_) and provided jail time for anyone who knowingly spread the disease. The same year, the Soviet Union began [general testing of foreign visitors to the country](_URL_4_). The testing was limited to those who intended to visit for more than three months.\n\nIn 1989, an outbreak of AIDS in the Soviet city of Elista garnered international attention. It was the largest publicly documented case and it came when [27 children and five women were infected through contaminated needles and blood.](_URL_7_)\n\nBy and large, however, the Soviet medical system either kept AIDS in check or at least under wraps until the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the collapse, of course, AIDS cases skyrocketed \u2014 and at least part of that increase may be attributable to the chronic underreporting of bad news in the Soviet Union.", "I recognize that this is not what you asked, but I feel that it is really relevant to your question, and that there will be many overlaps between your answer and my response, which will hopefully expand on the topic.\n\nDuring the eighties, Poland suffered from a severe heroin outbreak. Polish Heroin or *kompot*, was invented sometime around the end of the seventies. In a very short amount of time, the drug became incredibly popular, as communist-enforced closed borders prevented another source of heroin to enter the country, but mostly because the poppy plant was so widely available (my dad recalls it basically being, \"A weed on the side of the road.\") The drug was extremely deadly, not only because of the rudimentary and crude ingredients (often times adding ammonia was the only thing done), but because there was little understanding of how the drug worked, leading to a large amount of people overdosing (living in Warsaw up until '86 when he left the country, my dad says he lost somewhere around thirty friends to overdoses, and that going when going to parties, seeing people doped up was more common than not.) \n\nRelating to your question about HIV, I believe that it was not nearly as much of a problem, as I will show you with a quote in a moment, because being that the drug was so crude, it was vital that the user used the cleanest approach so to ensure the best high.\n\n >  Przemek Hirniak: So hygiene and careful preparation were crucial?\n >  \n >  W: You could do it carelessly. But if did it for yourself, you would do it the best you could, the cleanest, the coolest and with good solvent.\n >  \n >  ...\n >  \n >  W: I was working at the time and I had to function normally. I didn't want to inject it. I was doing the same thing as Marek [the other person being interviewed]. I would spread poppy juice on toilet paper and roll it, then I would put it on my tongue and wash it down with tea.\n\nKrzysztof Krajewski wrote an article about the change in the popularity of the drug since the end of communism, it seems alright, but I will refer to it, because I cannot find much other sources of this epidemic sadly.\n\n >  The scale and speed with which the problem developed may be illustrated by some statistical data. In the year 1978 there were 18 officially registered cases of death resulting from overdoses of drugs. Four years later, in 1982, 102 such cases were registered, in 1986, 117, and in 1992, 167 (an almost tenfold increase during twelve years). Also **numbers of addicts registered** by the police because of their involvement in criminal offenses **increased from 6200 in 1975 to 8385 in 1980 and 16675 in 1985**. There is no doubt that **such official data represent only a small fraction** of the real dimensions of the problem which may be only very roughly estimated.\n\nI agree with Krajewski, and would like to say that the numbers do not nearly give justice to how grand of a problem this actually was.\n\nThree references I can give to you - \n\nThe Krajewski journal piece, which explains the much about the drug on the first two pages:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAn extremely interesting interview between two former kompot addicts in Poland, weirdly translated, but still effective, which is where I got the interview questions from:\n\n_URL_2_[termalias-raw]/discovery-made-gdansk-one-can-get-you-really-high\n\nand a Chicago Tribune article from '86 which discusses the wide use of the drug:\n\n_URL_1_", "Not a direct answer to the question but an important point that hasn't been mentioned. I'm gonna copy and paste my child comment from elsewhere in this thread:\n\nThe \"crack epidemic\" is a misleading term. Infact some argue it only is viewed as an epidemic due to the media's scare-mongering. While drug use was increasing in many countries, especially harder drugs, other countries didn't cover it as an epidemic, so it wasn't viewed as one.\n\nMay of the \"facts\" at the time have turned out to be twisted, or even completely made up in some cases. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nA similar example from a comparable country is looking at the UK in the '90s and the media and politicians attitude towards increased ecstasy use.\n\nSince the '90s people have been more critical of this. Even mainstream papers have run stories that question whether there really was an epidemic in the US (specifically thinking of the NY Times and The Guardian (UK)). \n\nSome more extreme commentators even view the Crack epidemic as deliberately manufactured problem to justify tougher treatment of lower class black people. While it is currently impossible to say if that is true it is certainly a fact that black people bore the brunt of the government crackdown. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nDrug use rises and falls based off various factors and the term \"epidemic\" is misleading hyperbole because it is being used as an adjective to mean \"wide-spread\" but people associate it with the noun meaning an infectious disease that is spreading radipdly. \nI was gonna provide some statistics where, by the definition of the US crack-epidemic, we can see more so called epidemics. Sadly the information I based this off seems to no longer be available online (or at least I can't find it on my phone) but I used the UNODC's reports on world drug use if anyone can find them. \n\nNow, in the UK at least, most claims of illegal drug epidemics are dismissed as scare-mognering and pandering to worried parents. Except for papers like the Daily Mail who run many \"scare\" stories. However the abuse of prescription drugs is sometimes called an epidemic and isn't being dismissed as scare-mongering.\n\n\nI havn't gone into anymore detail as it isn't a direct answer to the question, just a relevant point but I can write more and dig up some more articles and statistics if anyone is interested or feels like I havn't explained enough."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"], [], [], [], ["http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/27/world/new-soviet-law-makes-aids-testing-mandatory.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/02/world/afghanistan-s-other-front-a-world-of-drugs.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/29/science/aids-now-seen-as-a-worldwide-health-problem.html", "http://juneauempire.com/state/2014-06-16/melting-ice-curtain-pt-2", "http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/17/world/moscow-s-testing-for-aids-is-begun.html", "http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1990-Duke-23-Neuhauser.pdf", "http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world/afghan-opium-yield-up-as-pakistan-curbs-crop.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/world/outbreak-of-aids-triples-the-testing-in-a-soviet-city.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/world/soviet-acknowledges-a-few-cases-of-aids.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/10/world/soviet-press-tells-of-aids-overseas.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/08/us/soviet-aids-campaign-denounced.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/07/world/through-a-soviet-lens-gomorrah-on-hudson.html", "http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000500703.pdf", "http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/world/pakistani-afghan-area-leads-as-supplier-of-heroin-to-us.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/06/world/aids-peril-worries-soviet-leaders.html"], ["http://www.bisdro.uni-bremen.de/boellinger/cannabis/15-kraje.pdf", "http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-30/news/8601230379_1_addicts-drug-treatment-clinic-drug-abuse", "http://www.narkopolityka.pl/"], ["http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states", "https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=170650"]]}
{"q_id": "6zeu78", "title": "Why didn't the annexation of Manchuria have almost any international consequences for Japan?", "selftext": "Manchuria is around the same size as Western Europe yet it seems like the UK and the Soviet Union and France did not care when the Japanese annexed it and violated international law. But why?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zeu78/why_didnt_the_annexation_of_manchuria_have_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmvjo6b"], "score": [6], "text": ["The same reasons why the response to Hitler's aggression was tepid. Nobody wanted war, nobody was in a position to make war, and people were hopeful that everything would just somehow work out for the best.\n\nAn interesting case study here is the response to the \"Mukden Incident\". In 1931 a railway line owned by the Japanese South Manchuria Railway company was attacked by a small dynamite explosion. The explosion didn't even destroy the track, however the incident was used by the Japanese government as an excuse to occupy Manchuria. The British government, having several interests in China and the region in general, investigated the incident through the auspices of the League of Nations (producing the \"Lytton Report\") and discovered that the attack had been committed by the Japanese themselves, and not Chinese dissidents. The fallout from that revelation led to the Japanese withdrawing from the League in 1933, and no other consequences.\n\nThe world powers at the time were very leery of breaching the careful balance of power that had been setup by the post-WWI diplomatic systems and the Washington Naval Treaty. They wanted to avoid new direct conflict or arms races between major powers in substantially the same manner that direct conflict between nuclear powers was undesired in the 20th and 21st centuries. The recent example on everyone's minds was, of course, WWI, and the desire was to avoid similar experiences at all costs. There was little perceived advantage to pursing direct conflict with Japan over the occupation of Manchuria, especially given the tremendous costs it would have taken to do so. It was yet another indication of how toothless the League of Nations was in practice. Only a few years later (in 1936) Germany would remilitarize the rhineland, without substantial repercussions.\n\nThe US did undertake a series of efforts to work against the Japanese occupation through the 1930s, including increasing levels of trade restrictions, supplying and aiding Chinese forces, etc. which would eventually bring Japan and the US into direct conflict in 1941. But by then, of course, the war had proceeded into a much hotter stage across the globe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hkfq4", "title": "Was the Dalai Lama's Tibet a Theorcratic Regime?", "selftext": "The Dalai Lama is obviously often revered as a wise man of peace. If one hears him talk this seems rather obvious. However I have heard it said that when the Dalai Lama still were in Tibet before the Chinese came, it was actually a theocratic regime where the rulling religious class severely mistreated the population. Accusations of torture, starvation and gauging eyes have been made by people like Christopher Hitchens (who has an obvious anti religious sentiment which might influence what he says).\n\nMy question is, how did the religious class treat the Tibetan people before China? How common were these practices if there is any truth to them and what would a citizin of Tibet have to 'do' to suffer such a fate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hkfq4/was_the_dalai_lamas_tibet_a_theorcratic_regime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu8f9bl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Tagging on: what were the castes and how were they enforced?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9abzgl", "title": "Why did the Nazis create the concentration camps if their goal was extemination? What were their goals with forced labor practical or for torture?", "selftext": "I don't mean to be at all disrespectful in this question. I'm simply trying to understand the aim and process that the Nazis had.\n\nI am reading Man's Search for Meaning and I was wondering: Why did the Nazi create the camps if the goal was extermination of the Jewish people. Wouldn't it have acheived their evil goal quicker to just make gas chambers / mass graves etc. Why give them clothes, beds, food etc (even if it was incredbily little and bad quality)? What was the benefit of creating the camps for the Nazis?\n\nAlso i was wondering what kind of work the Jews did. Was it practical or more like move that rock there and then move it back. Was the work created to simply try and make them suffer or was there work to be done and the Nazis so opportunity with the Jews in the camps to get free slave labor?\n\nThank you. Hopefully this doesn't get removed. 3rd time trying..  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9abzgl/why_did_the_nazis_create_the_concentration_camps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4unojc"], "score": [7], "text": ["\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nthese threads on the topic are written on intentionalism vs functionalism debate on nazi policy by /u/commiespaceinvader \n\n\nI would recommend listening to this episode of the podcast also with /u/commiespaceinvader in the askhistorians podcast where they tall about the idea/theory of intentionalism (that the Nazi's set out to exterminate the jews from the start) vs Functionalism (changing circumstances/further radicalization resulted in the mass murder of jews)\n\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48xbqa/askhistorians_podcast_057_intentionalism_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40b0s0/in_the_intentionalismfunctionalism_debate_about/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55gnyp/what_exactly_is_the_structuralistfunctionalist/"]]}
{"q_id": "5ppdwa", "title": "Why does Turkey deny the Armenian genocide so vehemently when the genocide was done by the Ottomans, not the current Turkish state?", "selftext": "Is modern Turkey seen as a direct continuation of the Ottoman Empire, so a stain on the Ottomans' honor is a stain on Turkey's honor as well? Or is it something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ppdwa/why_does_turkey_deny_the_armenian_genocide_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcsvyh4", "dcsxqa6", "dcsz00s", "dct1963", "dct1vgo", "dctq8hp"], "score": [16, 90, 1993, 294, 19, 20], "text": ["I would like to ask a related question: was Turkey so worried about Armenians because the Seljuk Turks are not native to Anatolia; thus, they are sensitive about uprisings by 'native' pre-Turkic Anatolians?", "You may wish to read /u/yodatsracist's comment on [this thread](_URL_0_) which addresses this question.", "As outlined in Geoffrey Robertson's book *An Inconvenient Genocide*, the core belief behind the Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide lies in the *motives* for the killings. Turkish Officials don't deny that Ottoman military personnel killed Armenians; they dispute the amount (they claim 300 000, while the most commonly referred to number is 1.5 million) and the reasoning behind it.\n\nRobertson cites the Turkish \"official\" numbers of Armenians living in Turkey at the time as a reason that 1.5 million Armenians couldn't have been killed: \"[Turkish] demographic studies prove that prior to World War I, fewer than 1.5 million Armenians lived in the entire Ottoman Empire. Thus, allegations that more than 1.5 million Armenians from eastern Anatolia died must be false.\"\n\n(It's noteworthy that Robertson counters this with evidence from the Armenian Church, who claim that 2.1 million Armenians were living in Anatolia at that time.)\n\nOn the intention, Article II of the United Nations *Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Genocide* outlines that, in order for a sanctioned killing to be classified as a genocide, there must be \"intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group...\". Turkish officials today claim that the killings were performed because Armenians \"rose up\" against the Ottoman government in support of Russia, hoping that in victory they would claim their independence. To support this, in 2007 Turkish counsellor Orhan Tung wrote in the New Statesman (an opinion that the government mirrors to this day) that \"credible evidence\" for the intention to commit genocide has never been concretely found. This is obviously disputed, because as opposed to the Holocaust or the Bosnian War, there are no reported documents that are widely internationally recognized as showing intent for genocide.\n\n(Again, its worth noting that Armenian historian Ara Sarafian reported to Mediamax that *Talaat Pasha's Report on the Armenian Genocide*, which was published by the Gomidas Institute in April 2011, as a proper Ottoman government document showcasing this exact intent.)\n\ntl;dr: The Turkish government doesn't belief that an Armenian *genocide* happened, but refer to it as politically motivated killings, because of the definition of \"genocide\" by the United Nations.\n\n", "Okay, this is a hard question, because it is a very loaded one. You assume that current Turkish state does not see itself as the continuation of Ottoman Empire, but it does. I think an easier question to answer would be \"why and how Turkey denies the Armenian genocide\". \n\nThere are different levels of genocide denial in Turkey, I will explain some of them and source them.\n\n1st level: \"There was no killings, therefore there was no genocide.\" This is NOT the most popular version of the denial in Turkey. Most Turks accept that there were killings. Defenders of this version are commonly the Neo-Ottomanists in Turkey. Their argument is that Armenians were called as \"sadik millet\" or \"millet-i sadika\" (\"loyal nation\") in the empire, then they betrayed Ottomans and sided with Russians. Started gangs and mass killed Turkish people and Ottomans had to exile them. This version of history totally dismisses all the evidence of mass killings, by using conspiracy theories. As an example of this theory you can look at an example, which defends that Armenian genocide was invented to slander Ottoman empire:\n\nErmeni Sorunu: B\u00fcy\u00fck Oyun (Armenian Problem: Grand Game) by Adem Suad\n\n2nd level: According to this, there were mass killings on both sides, but this was not a genocide. This is by far the most commonly believed version in Turkey. They mix truth with conspiracy theories and say that accepting genocide will have serious consequences for Turkey so we should not do that. They describe Ottoman Empire at the time as weak, they say that as the empire could not protect its citizens, it had to use force against Armenians. As Armenian gangs terrorized Turkish villages, Turkish people started arming themselves and attacked Armenians for revenge and Ottoman Empire could not stop them. \n\nThere are many different versions but they are all around denying responsibility in some manner. They say that for it to be counted as genocide, it has to be systematic, government has to round up all Armenians and kill all of them. As Ottoman Empire exiled the Armenians and some of them died on the road due to climate, starving etc. it is not a genocide. Founder of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself described the events by using the word \"fecaat\" (\"disaster\"). But he would not see it as a genocide as well. The defenders of this theory overlook events where government killed people just because they were Armenians as particular mistakes. They say that \"there is no written general plans of genocide\".\n\nSome examples of Turkish historians, politicians and generals defending this theory:\n\nS\u00fcrg\u00fcnden Soyk\u0131r\u0131ma: Ermeni \u0130ddalar\u0131 (\"From Exile to Genocide: Armenian Claims) by Yusuf Hala\u00e7o\u011flu (historian)\n\nErmeni Su\u00e7lamalar\u0131 ve Ger\u00e7ekler (\"Armenian Accusations and Truths\") by \u0130lker Ba\u015fbu\u011f (ex army chief of Turkey)\n\nErmeni Sorununda Strateji ve Siyaset (Strategy and Politics in Armenian Problem) by Do\u011fu Perin\u00e7ek (far-right politician)\n\n3rd level: It was a genocide, but it was committed by the Kurds. This is a last resort defense and has some truth to it, but again only partly. Ottoman Empire armed Muslim Kurds against Christians during 1890-1908, they are named as Hamidiye corps. After 1908, Ottoman Empire continued to support Kurdish a\u015firets (tribes? clans?) against Christians, especially Armenians. So some people claim that genocide happened, but it was the Kurds. Again, dismissing how Armenians in other parts of the empire were killed as well.\n\nSource:\n\nHamidiye Alaylar\u0131 A\u011fr\u0131 K\u00fcrt Direni\u015fi Ve Zilan Katliam\u0131 (\"Hamidiye Corps, Agri Kurdish Resistance and Zilan Massacre\") by Kemal S\u00fcphanda\u011f.\n\n\nAll of these are very controversial. Especially in Turkey. But I hope I gave you some idea at least. Sorry if I made mistakes, English is not my native language.\n\nEdit: There are also many other versions that I did not list. For example some people claim that it was the will of Germany and not the Ottoman Empire. A source for that:\n\nErmeni Tehcirinde Almanya Etkisi (\"German Influence at Armenian Exile\") by B\u00fclent Ke\u00e7ik", "There is some debate over whether the modern Republic of Turkey was the continuing state to the Ottoman Empire or a successor. The two entities fought on opposing sides in the Turkish War of Independence (1919\u201322), and even briefly co-existed as separate administrative units each claiming authority (whilst at war with one another): Turkey with its capital in Ankara and the Ottoman Empire from Istanbul. The nationalist faction, led by Mustafa Kemal who defected from the Ottoman army, established the modern republic as a nation state by defeating the opposing Ottoman elements in the independence war.\n\nThe Treaty of Lausanne (between UK, France, Italy, and Japan (world powers at the time) of 24 July 1923 led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the newly formed \"Republic of Turkey\" as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.\n\nSuccessor states choose to successor states so they can inherit the treaties and claims of the previous state, and in this case inherited the responsibility of the greco-muslim and armenian-turkish migrations.", "Finally one I can chime in on! \n\nA lot of people in this thread have commented on the reasons the Turkish government itself believes there was no genocide. But, I feel that these answers are more based in *how* the Turkish government denies the Genocide and not *why*.  In her paper, *Reading Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the Armenian Genocide* Fatma Ulgen argues that denialism is a core facet in the foundational ideology of the Turkish Republic.\n\nMany of other other posters here have correctly stated that the narrative that there were massacres on both sides, Turkish and Armenian, is the state posited and state approved version. Fatma Ulgen argues that this state doctrine of denialism directly stems from Ataturk. It is necessary to know that Ataturk had a major hand in writing the history of Turkey and the Turks and the development of the national culture of Turkey. He had such a hand in these processes that Ulgen calls him the \"ideological mastermind of Turkey.\" Further,  that the memory of Ataturk, to the present day, embodies and defines 'Turkishness' that \"any criticism of him that deviates from the official ideology\" can drive one out of 'Turkishness'. \n\nKnowing this one can fully understand the argument that Ulgen makes. A national identity of Turkey was lacking at the outset of the Republic, given that the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, empire and had not sufficiently transitioned over to the idea and practice of a nation-state even in the Young Turks time. Ataturk was concerned with building a national identity, and one method to building a national identity is to create myths out of real, historical events. Myths necessitate  revision and omission/addition of detail, in the telling of the events which occurred to the Armenians in 1915, Ataturk was building a foundational myth of the Turkish Republic as whole. So what did Ataturk have to say about the Armenian Genocide? \n\nWell...nothing good. Ulgen utilizes speeches, telegrams, and documents Ataturk wrote to analyze his stance on the issue and his actual contribution to the denialism which, up until recently, was the de facto narrative of the Turkish Republic. During the War of Resistance in the 1920s most of  Ataturk's texts on the Armenian issue tend to portray Armenians in an extensively negative light: On the eastern front, where the Armenians were fighting in a war of independence with the aim of setting up the first republic of Armenia, Ataturk calls much of the Armenian actions a \"policy of extermination\", \"murder and savagery\" of the Muslim inhabitants. In regards to the south Ataturk reframed the Maras massacres, in which thousands of Christians were slaughtered, into an event which portrayed Greeks and Armenians as the \"old murders\" and the Muslims as an \"oppressed people wandering in the Anatolian territory in misery.\" Already, before even the establishment of  the Turkish Republic the narrative has placed the Armenians as a the negative actors in the war and the Muslims as those oppressed. While, not explicitly denialism, it sets up a myth of the Turks being oppressed and brutalized by Christian elements(the largest of these within Anatolia before the Genocide being the Armenians) which sought to take Turkish land away from them. This is an important thing to understand because it sets up the undertone for the actual denial of the genocide found within the *Nutuk*, a gigantic speech/history of Turkey given by Ataturk. \n\nThe *Nutuk* a 600 page document, given over 6 days discusses the Armenian genocide literally within the first few pages of the speech, which goes to show the underlying necessity of addressing the \"Armenian question\" and the Armenian \"deportations\" in Ataturk's mind. Given that the *Nutuk* essentially sets up and directs all later Turkish state historiography and history, this is extremely important to the conception of the Turks as a national community. So, what does Ataturk say? He stresses that the deportation of the Armenians and the cruelties they faced were only committed by \"instigators and agitators\" and that \"the people\"(*millet*)  had no part in the \"mistreatment\". Within the first few pages of the Nutuk, which is probably the most important document to modern Turkey, the \"Deportations\" are played down by Ataturk, the actual horror of the events completely minimized and placed on faceless instigators and actors. Later he states that \"the report of Armenian massacre was a 'calumny' perpetuated by those who wanted to prove the Armenians in the majority in the Eastern provinces\" and that they were trying to \"mislead the public into believing that the Muslim population 'was composed of savages whose chief occupation was to massacre Armenians.'\" The other Armenian references within the *Nutuk* was much of the same content: the portrayal of Armenians as a the true perpetrators of the savagery in the East and in the South against the Muslim population.\n\nThe demonizing of the Armenian population, Ulgen argues, is an attempt by Ataturk to portray the Turkish people in a light of innocence and victimhood. So that, in effect, the destruction of the Armenian population is both denied and seems implausible to the eyes of anyone educated by the Turkish state educational system. Knowing now, that Ataturk through the *Nutuk* set up the foundational history and ideology of the Turkish state, central to which, as evidenced by the early addressing and the staunch support found within the document, is denialism. The reason the Turkish Republic denies the Genocide so vehemently is not because of reparations they would need to pay, but because the denial of the genocide is a foundational aspect of the Turkish identity and 'Turkishness' in general and thus acceptance of the genocide is a threat to the survival of the Turkish identity as a whole.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g8blc/the_armenian_genocide_why_is_the_current/?st=iyadjpy6&amp;sh=d05d495e"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15joek", "title": "How did American film and TV end up being so moralistic (or if my premise is wrong, why does it seem so)?", "selftext": "It particularly stands out with comedies, where the last few minutes are devoted to sappy, cloying cadences (even in supposedly adult films like *This is 40*). I'm not suggesting that exceptions don't exist, and perhaps my premise is wrong, but those exceptions would seem pretty run-of-the-mill in German, Japanese or British media.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15joek/how_did_american_film_and_tv_end_up_being_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7n529q"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hmm. This might be a question better directed to /r/AskSocialScience. \n\nHaving said that, the premise strikes me as iffy at best, particularly if you don't have the requisite fluency in another language to read/watch untranslated stuff. One of the observations most frequently made by people who spend a lot of time in different countries is that the international media isn't as globalized as we think, and that what we see of another country's media while in our own nations is often a *very* small slice that's invariably off the top. Naturally, with unrestricted access to our own movies and TV shows at home, we're disposed to think that our own culture creates more crap, but there's no filter present here. \n\nAnyway, in order to answer this question, someone would need to read and understand German and Japanese in addition to English, have a thorough and contextual knowledge of movies and TV produced in Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. over the past, oh, 40-50 years or so, and also know the creators sufficiently well to guess at where and how they'd been influenced. And at the end of it, you'd still be subject to the observer's bias. \n\nIt's certainly an interesting question, but one I feel people would be tempted to generalize about (often badly) on the basis of very limited experience. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22rk8a", "title": "In her heyday, Athenian bread was made from Scythian wheat. Why did the grain trade with the Pontic steppe stop not long after that?", "selftext": "It looks like the Greek colonies along the northern shore of the Black Sea played an important role in intermediating the wheat trade to the Athenian empire during the Peloponesian war. Did something happen in later ages that this trade stopped? Did Pontic wheat become uneconomical or not available any longer to the classical world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22rk8a/in_her_heyday_athenian_bread_was_made_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgpxe8c"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well, it didn't. The trade from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, of which grain was a crucial component, continued well into the Roman period and beyond. In fact, it was a crucial aspect of Byzantium, and later Constantinople's, success. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Greek colonization continued, and the colonies themselves founded. I believe our best information on them is from the Hellenistic, in fact.\n\nBut the other question is whether, in fact, Athens was feed by Sythian grain. Our source for such an importance is the Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes, who, among other things, was famous for securing the good relations between Byzantium and Athens. It was thus very much in his interests to magnify the importance of Black Sea grain imports. A careful study of other, more specific evidence has shown that the grain was not nearly so crucial or constant.\n\nThere is a good discussion of this in a chapter of *Patterns of the Economy in Roman Asia Minor*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cthdgu", "title": "Did Britain have any interest in continuing its presence in Egypt/Suez Canal after India achieved independance?", "selftext": "Seeing as how India was the main reason for controling Egypt, British intervention in Egyptian politics seems unnecessary.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cthdgu/did_britain_have_any_interest_in_continuing_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exlfkjy"], "score": [7], "text": ["Absolutely they did! The British interest in the Suez actually led to continued trouble for British-Egyptian relations, as well as for US-British relations.\n\nThe dispute led to negotiations over how to handle the British presence in Egypt. Around 1952, the British sought US agreement on issues relating to their continued occupation of the Canal Zone, as well as terms for any potential withdrawal. While the Truman administration seemed supportive, the new Eisenhower administration was far less so. For the British, the interests were clear: withdrawal from the Canal Zone would mean less influence over Egypt, no base along the Suez servicing British imperial positions, and less ability to form a worldwide defensive network that the British still wanted to hold (though it was clear they lacked the means soon enough).\n\nThe negotiations with Egypt, at least to the US, were a sign of the British trying to seize more than they could hold.\n\nThe British still wanted to maintain a base because they had holdings in the rest of the Middle East that the Suez provided a useful conduit for. They also had another claim: the Egyptian government had abrogated a treaty the British viewed as still valid that let the British lease the Suez base until 1956. The British were trying to keep their Suez control in part so they could more easily reach their key allies in the Middle East, the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq. Of course, the Hashemites in Iraq were eventually overthrown, but the British didn't know that was coming, necessarily. The British suspected, rightly, that Egypt was likely to end up joining the Soviet bloc under the Free Officers, and believed that there needed to be a counter to pan-Arabism under Nasser, as well as a way to ensure that their alliance network remained intact. The British continued to have interests in alliances with Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and more, and treaties made during the period of tension over the Suez reflect that. At the same time, one could see Nasser's attempts to frustrate British ambitions in the Middle East (his goal was instead to unite the Middle East under a pan-Arab coalition, preferably with his leadership of course) through the influence of his propaganda arm, the Voice of the Arabs radio station. The influence of that station led to significant domestic threats to the Hashemites and made it harder for their governments to remain as friendly openly with the UK as preferred.\n\nWhy did the British care so much about these alliances? Partly for oil, of course. The British ability to field forces through the Suez, particularly to reach places like Iraq more easily and service military installations (Iraq was the most important energy provider for the British at the time) was quite crucial to maintaining those energy interests. The ability to reach oilfields was perhaps the most crucial reason at hand, more important than any other desire to have colonial holdings, and the end of British control of India did not change this. There were other interests, though, primarily the belief that Britain was \"responsible\" for these areas and had an obligation to protect them from communism and pan-Arabism, and that played its own decent part in the British interests."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "112m2y", "title": "Why were full medieval suits of plate armor left exposed at the butt and hamstrings?", "selftext": "I figure maneuverability is the reason, but was protection in that area really not worth the inconvenience?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/112m2y/why_were_full_medieval_suits_of_plate_armor_left/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6iqx6r", "c6isy91"], "score": [4, 7], "text": ["For comfort and practicality to ride. Most people in plate were knights, and therefore could afford the cost of a suit of armor, and one or more war horses, and sometimes pages or groomsmen to go along. The horse carried the weight, the knight swung the sword or held the lance. It's also why knights were so vulnerable when dehorsed, such as we saw in the battle for Agincourt.\n\nI'm not a medieval military historian, so there may be some instances of more heavily armored foot soldiers (something tugs at my dendrites in Germany), elsewhere. But my experience in French and English history speak to mounted, plated soldiers.\n\nYou wouldn't be that heavily armored if you were a foot soldier - usually they wore some kind of boiled or stitched leather, chainmail, etc, which offers some degree of protection while being considerably lighter and mobile.\n\nIt comes down to a question of practicality.", "There were a few reasons that I know of\n\n- Making plate cover those parts while retaining mobility was actually pretty much impossible. (i'm assuming my hamstrings you mean the back of the knee joint?)\n- when you look at plate suits by themselves they often appear to be full of gaps, however men-at-arms wore tunics under their armour that had chainmail sewn at the appropriate areas, so they still had some protection.\n\nThats all I know atm, i've got a bunch of relevant books on my desk I can check tomorrow."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9gppf7", "title": "Why were the German naming conventions for its OOB so weird and senseless? It seems that many divisions corps, army, brigades, etc... had random numbers attached to them instead of just having them in order, e.g. 1. Infanterie-Division, 2. Infanterie-Division...", "selftext": "Same with the Americans too tbh. Like the 101st Airborne Division. Or the Soviets with their idk 374. Guard Infantry Battalion.\n\nIt seems that all those countries didnt care mich for an organizer, number after number, OOB.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gppf7/why_were_the_german_naming_conventions_for_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e663lpl"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  Same with the Americans too tbh.\n\nThe first conventions which gave the long-lasting and still-somewhat-in effect numbering scheme of U.S. Army units came into being in the summer of 1917, guided by the [National Defense Act of 1916](_URL_0_). To allow for any future expansion, the War Department reserved blocks of numbers for certain types of battalions, regiments, and divisions.\n\nComponent|Numbering scheme|Note\n:--|:--|:--\nRegular Army infantry divisions|1-25\nRegular Army cavalry divisions|15 and up|Excepting the 1st Expeditionary Division which deployed overseas in June 1917, the War Department could organize thirteen more Regular Army infantry divisions with the regiments still stateside\nNational Guard divisions|26-75\nVolunteer Army divisions|76 and up\n\nComponent|Numbering scheme\n:--|:--|:--\nRegular Army infantry, cavalry, and field artillery brigades|1-50\nNational Guard infantry, cavalry, and field artillery brigades|51-150\nVolunteer Army infantry, cavalry, and field artillery brigades|151 and up\n\nComponent|Numbering scheme\n:--|:--|:--\nRegular Army infantry regiments|1-100\nNational Guard infantry regiments|101-300\nVolunteer Army infantry regiments|301 and up\n\nComponent|Numbering scheme\n:--|:--|:--\nRegular Army machine gun battalions of divisions and brigades|1-60\nNational Guard machine gun battalions of divisions and brigades|101-151\nVolunteer Army machine gun battalions of divisions and brigades|151 and up\n\nTo conform to changing War Department policy and tables of organization, many National Guard units were broken up and redistributed, and all lost their state designations. Before the new War Department numbering scheme came into effect, the first National Guard divisions were numbered 5 through 20; they were later consecutively re-numbered to 26 through 41. As part of an expansion in 1918, the 9th through 20th Divisions were authorized, to be made up of Regular Army and Volunteer Army troops, as well as the 96th through 102nd Divisions, of the Volunteer Army. None of these divisions went overseas, and most were not even fully formed by the Armistice\n\nThe postwar reorganization of the Army initiated by the [4 June 1920 amendments](_URL_1_) to the National Defense Act of 1916 authorized the units of the National Guard and the Organized Reserve (the combination of the Enlisted Reserve Corps and the Officers\u2019 Reserve Corps created by the 1920 act) to keep their names bestowed upon them by the War Department during World War I, thus essentially continuing the numbering order already set down.\n\n >  SEC. 3a. THE INITIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE NATIONAL GUARD AND THE ORGANIZED RESERVES.--In the reorganization of the National Guard and in the initial organization of the Organized Reserves, the names, numbers and other designations, flags, and records of the divisions and subordinate units thereof that served in the World War between April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918, shall be preserved as such as far as practicable.\n\nUntil the above amendment was passed and War Department inspectors could get around to interpreting it and allowing units to be redesignated, National Guard units were reorganized temporarily under their old state designations. The 134th Infantry Regiment;\n\n >  Arrived at the port of New York on 24 January 1919 on the *U.S.S. General Goethals* as the 134th Inf., an element of the 34th Div. Demobilized on 18 February 1919 at Camp Grant, IL. Reconstituted in the N.G. in 1921 and allotted to the state of Nebraska. Concurrently relieved from the 34th Div. and assigned to the 35th Div. Reorganized on 25 October 1921 by redesignation of the 1st Inf., Nebraska N.G. (organized 1920\u201321; HQ organized 7 July 1921 and federally recognized at Omaha, NE) as the 134th Inf.\n\nThe Army decided in peacetime to maintain nine Regular Army infantry divisions (the 1st through 9th), two Regular Army cavalry divisions (the 1st and 2nd; although the latter was constituted, the headquarters was only activated in 1940), three territorial infantry divisions (Panama Canal, Hawaiian, and Philippine; the numbering of the Regular Army units assigned to these divisions corresponded to those which would have made up the 10th, 11th, and 12th Divisions, respectively), eighteen National Guard infantry divisions (the 26th-45th, originally less the 31st and 42nd), and twenty-seven Organized Reserve infantry divisions (the 76th through 104th). The National Guard and Organized Reserve were also allotted cavalry divisions, but these do not have any bearing on the discussion here. A National Guard division's headquarters was not permitted to be organized and federally recognized until at least 75 percent of the division's subordinate units had been organized and federally recognized.\n\nThe allotment of National Guard divisions to states as it had been in World War I required some reconfiguring; the 43rd, 44th, and 45th Divisions were new units. The 42nd Division was not reformed, since it was a special case made up of National Guard units from 26 states and the District of Columbia. The numerical designations of three divisions, the 30th, 31st, and 39th, were offered to the planners in the Fourth Corps Area (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee) as these divisions had been organized in that area for World War I, and the 30th and 39th were chosen, with the 31st Division being the second division deleted from the mobilization program.\n\nThe 39th Division initially was allotted to the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but before the headquarters was organized and federally recognized, the adjutants general of the states assigned to the division petitioned the War Department to change the designation of the division to the 31st Division (in World War I, the 31st Division was made up of troops from Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, while the 39th Division was made up of troops from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas). The 39th Division, less the Arkansas elements which became non-divisional troops, was redesignated the 31st Division on 1 July 1923.\n\nDivision|Allotted states\n:--|:--|:--\n26th|Massachusetts\n27th|New York\n28th|Pennsylvania\n29th|Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C.\n30th|Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee\n31st|Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi\n32nd|Michigan, Wisconsin\n33rd|Illinois\n34th|Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota\n35th|Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska\n36th|Texas\n37th|Ohio\n38th|Indiana, Kentucky. West Virginia\n40th|California, Nevada, Utah\n41st|Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming\n43rd|Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont\n44th|Delaware, New Jersey, New York\n45th|Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://legisworks.org/sal/39/stats/STATUTE-39-Pg166.pdf", "http://legisworks.org/congress/66/publaw-242.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4cvs87", "title": "Was there ever a time where \"colonel\" was pronounced as it's spelled?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cvs87/was_there_ever_a_time_where_colonel_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d22tsco"], "score": [2], "text": ["The answer is maybe _URL_0_ (I think!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/22270"]]}
{"q_id": "u7oyi", "title": "Who were the most incompetent leaders in history?", "selftext": "What leaders have caused the most damage and destruction to their country through incompetence and stupidity rather than malicious actions or bad luck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u7oyi/who_were_the_most_incompetent_leaders_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4t0p61", "c4t2i1t", "c4t2no8", "c4t3cmz", "c4t3g5a", "c4t40a8", "c4t5skc", "c4t60xh", "c4t637r", "c4t817w"], "score": [8, 6, 39, 3, 19, 9, 38, 12, 11, 15], "text": ["James Buchanan, president from 1857-1861, gets blamed for the US Civil War.  ", "Well, Moctezuma II, Last Emperor of the Aztecs has to be somewhere on your list of utterly incompetent leaders, though I'm not sure it is entirely his fault...\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "Charles II King of Spain (1665-1700) would definitely be up there. The Spanish Hapsburg dynasty had not out-bred since around the mid-16th century, and this guy couldn't speak until the age of eight and was completely incapable of ruling. I read a really good quote once along the lines of \"He consistently amazed Western Christendom simply by continuing to live.\" Obviously, he failed at having kids, so the War of Spanish Succession followed where the French and Austrians tried to put their own contender into the throne.", "Stalin.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhere to begin?  Murdering any and everyone with education or a brain in Russia.  Mass resettlements into uninhabitable lands.  Famines, gulags, the support of this retard Trofim Lysenko _URL_1_ \n\nCostly wars with Finland and support of other wars abroad with no real aid to Russia.  A pig headed atheist that destroyed thousands of beautiful religous sites, a man in charge of a regime responsible for the deaths of upwards of 60 million people.  Truly the worst and most incompetant leader in history.", "Santa Anna, [11 time president of mexico](_URL_0_), almost every single one of those presidencies being a disaster.  ", "Depending on which historians you believe Emperor Nero certainly deserves a spot on this list. Suetonius pretty much hated the guy, and his dislike clearly comes through in his writing--so he may not be the best source. Others like Tacitus give a softer view of him, but generally regard him as corrupt.", "Chief Sarhili of the Gcaleka Xhosa tribe ordered the mass slaughter of their own cattle based on a prophecy passed to him by two young girls. The resultant extermination of 400 000 cattle by the Xhosa people led to the deaths of 40 000 tribespeople due to starvation as they eventually turned to cannibalism and infanticide in order to survive.", "The two men whose incompetence were most directly responsible for the American Revolution, [Lord North](_URL_0_) and most especially [Lord Germain](_URL_1_), who was as close as the British government came to having one guy in charge of the colonies. Their refusal to come to terms with the colonists lead to the downward spiral of tensions in the years before fighting broke out. During the war itself, they never took the American threat seriously enough, and never adapted their expectations to a war in North America. As such, they missed numerous chances for Britain to retain the 13 Colonies, either through military force or political compromise.", "Maybe not the most incompetent, but I think he definitely ranks up there: George B McClellan. \n\nAt the beginning of the Civil War (US) he was the overall commander of all Army of Potomac troops. He was good at moralizing his troops, and he was a great planner....and he was crap at everything else. I would say that he was important at first- he gave the troops vital training and reorganized them after getting badly crushed during the First Battle of Mannassas(Bulls Run). \n\nHe had a massive army that he had camped out in a nice safe spot, but he kept requested ridiculous amounts of supplies. When he did attack, he overestimated his own troops and sent small parts of his forces against an entrenched army. At other times he delayed and fretted, ignoring every opportunity and taking defensive action. \n\nIn the Battle of Antietam, he had a whole whopping two thirds of his army ready to kick butt, but only sent out a single third (which also ended up getting destroyed). On the other hand, the much more competent General Lee had pitted his entire force (which was under supplied by the non industrialized south) and was able to hold out. \n\nHad McClellan been competent he could have been able to end the war that day, or at least badly damage the enemy. Heck, if he had simply listened to his division commanders he could have gotten a victory. Instead, the day became the bloodiest day in American history- and still the war would last for 3 more years.\n\n*On a side note, the battle did mark a point where the Confederates had lost so many soldiers and supplies that they could never hope to replace, whereas the north was only increasing in production and strength. ", "Pol Pot. Surprised it hasn't already been mentioned. His regime killed everyone that was suspected of anything. Even people that wore glasses were killed because they were thought to be bourgeoisie. He moved everyone out of the cities and tried to create a totally agrarian society. His whole experiment wound up being a complete disaster."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moctezuma_II"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_L%C3%B3pez_de_Santa_Anna"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_North", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_George_Germain#American_War_of_Independence"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cxxqlx", "title": "Before Copernicus, what did people think a year was?", "selftext": "So, people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth until after the Copernican revolution, but we had also known that a year was 365.25 long days since Classical Antiquity, so what did people believe a year was before Copernicus? It couldn't just have been \"one orbit around the sun\" because nobody believed the Earth revolved around the sun. Was it simply the idea that a 'year' was one full cycle of the seasons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cxxqlx/before_copernicus_what_did_people_think_a_year_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eypyw1j"], "score": [10], "text": ["\"Year\" is ambiguous. In the absence of astronomy, it would simply be a cycle of the seasons. However, with astronomy, we have two differing definitions:\n\n1. The year is the interval between equinoxes/solstices. That is, the time from one Spring equinox to the next Spring equinox, or similarly measured by the other equinox or solstices, is one year. This definition gives a year that coincides with the cycle of the seasons. This is the *tropical year* or *solar year*, in modern terminology.\n\n2. The year is the period of the Sun's motion relative to the \"fixed stars\" (i.e., in modern terminology, the stars (excluding the Sun). This gives almost the same year as the previous definition, differing only by the precession of the equinoxes, the 26,000 year-long motion of the equinoxes relative to the fixed stars. This is the *sidereal year*.\n\nThe first year is measured by the Sun's motion relative to the celestial equator, and the second by the motion of the stars. In practice, without precise quantitative astronomy, there is no practical difference between them, unless one uses a star-based calendar for long enough so that the precession of the equinoxes de-synchronises the seasons from the calendar year. This can matter! A number of cultures (at least the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks) used the heliacal rising [1] of various stars to time various seasonal activities, the most famous example being the Egyptian use of the heliacal rising of Sirius to predict the Nile floods. While the 26,000 year precession is slow, it does result in an error of one day for every 70 years - after 700 years, the floods would be 10 days late relative to the prediction. Of course, this doesn't have to be a problem - one simply notes that the heliacal rising of another star corresponds better to the event, and switches to using that.\n\nThe old Egyptian calendar year was exactly 365 days, so would desynchronise with the seasons much faster, about 1 day every four years, due to the lack of leap years. This mean that the agricultural year moved relative to the calendar year. The Egyptians were quite aware of this, and we could add the \"calendar year\" as a third type of year to our list.\n\nThis ambiguity was discussed by Ptolemy in his *Almagest*:\n\n >  The very first of the theorems concerning the sun is the determination of the length of the year. The ancients were in disagreement and confusion in their pronouncements on this topic, as can be seen from their treatises, especially those of Hipparchus, who was both industrious and a lover of truth. The main cause of the confusion on this topic which even he displayed is the fact that, when one examines the apparent returns to equinox or solstice, one finds that the length of the year exceeds 365 days by less than 1/4 day, but when one examines its return to the fixed stars it is greater.\n\nPtolemy is one of the few ancient astronomers to discuss this, surely because there is so little difference: the tropical year is approximately 365.242 days, and the sidereal year is 365.256 days, a difference of 20 minutes (as Ptolemy wrote, these are just under and just over 365 1/4 days). Indeed, some ancient astronomers explicitly denied the precession of the equinoxes. However, with precise quantitative astronomy, even with pre-telescopic instruments, this is measurable.\n\nPtolemy strongly preferred the tropical year, noting that\n\n >  The only points which we can consider proper starting-points for the sun\u2019s revolution are those defined by the equinoxes and solstices on that circle.\n\nand rejecting the sidereal year:\n\n >  One might add that it seems unnatural to define the sun\u2019s revolution by its return to the fixed stars, especially since the sphere of the fixed stars is observed to have a regular motion of its own towards the rear with respect to the motion of the heavens. For, this being the case, it would be equally appropriate to say that the length of the solar year is the time it takes the sun to go from one conjunction with Saturn, let us say, (or any other of the planets) to the next. In this way many different 'years' could be generated.\n\nFrom a modern perspective, contrary to Ptolemy's opinion, it wouldn't be equally appropriate to define a Saturn-year, etc. The sidereal year is, astronomically speaking, the most sensible choice. However, our (modern) calendar year is tied to the tropical year, for the simple reason that the seasons matter more to most people than astronomical logic and simplicity.\n\n[1] The heliacal rising of a star is when it first rises above the horizon before dawn and is visible before the sun rises (and makes it no longer visible). After this first rising, the star rises earlier each night."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17tf22", "title": "When did the Byzantines start to use the name Basileus for their Emperor?", "selftext": "Question in title", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17tf22/when_did_the_byzantines_start_to_use_the_name/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c88qhzd"], "score": [7], "text": ["Heraclius.  \n\n*\"It was Heraclius who decreed that Greek, for long the language of the people and the Church, should henceforth be the official language of the empire.*\n\n*He abolished the ancient Roman titles of imperial dignity.  Heretofore, like his predecessors, he had been formally hailed as Imperator Caesar and Augustus; all these were now replaced by the old Greek word for 'King', Basileus -- which was to remain the official title for as long as the Empire lasted.\"*\n\n-- Byzantium: The Early Centuries, John Julius Norwich"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4j2obt", "title": "where does the ground that cover the ruins of ancient building is from?", "selftext": "I'm italian and where i live the news of discoveries of ancient buildings during excavations to build. Where all the ground on them is from? and why sometimes there are also a few meters between the ground level and the ruins? This happen both in field and cities. In the latter case i thought that in order to build new buildings they used to demolish the previous structure and use the rubble as a \"foundation\", but the fact is that you can find building with the walls standing up! For example: it has been found a Roman domus under a square in my city (Cremona), how the heck it came under 6 meters of soil?!? and there is no hills it's all flat!\ni hope you can understand my english", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4j2obt/where_does_the_ground_that_cover_the_ruins_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d335yc0", "d33687v"], "score": [22, 3], "text": ["I've actually answered [similar questions before](_URL_4_)\n\nI'm going to copy one of my previous answers and tweak it to your specific questions.  Here goes.\n\nThere are a lot of reasons why sediment builds up over ancient ruins.\n\nSediment moves in many different ways.  First, you have wind.  Wind picks up small particles of sediment, and the stronger the wind, the bigger the particles it can pick up.  Buildings create little traps for the airborne sediment, and when the wind slows down because it's being blocked by the crumbling buildings, the sediment suspended in the air drops out of suspension, because the air slows down and can't carry as much.  \n\nSecond, you have water.  Water erosion from rain can break down buildings, and spread the resulting sediment around a site.  This is especially the case with buildings made from brick.  For sites that are in valleys or near rivers, you also have the issue of flood plains.  Rivers carry a lot of sediment, and if a river floods, it can deposit large amounts of sediment.  This is the case in China, where Neolithic settlements are tens of meters underneath alluvial sediment, because the broad flood plains of the rivers have deposited so much sediment over time.\n\nThird, you have gravity.  It's absolutely possible to have sediment moving down a hill solely because gravity is pulling it.  This is called colluvial deposits (as opposed to aeolian - wind and alluvial - water).  If a site is at the bottom of a hill or is surrounded by elevated landscapes, a combination of water erosion and redeposition as well as gravity action will cause sediment to move down the hill and over the site. (this may be less effective in the area you are talking about, but is still a way that sediment is naturally moved).\n\nYet another cause for sediment accumulation is by people bringing it into the site.  This is called \"anthropogenic deposition\", and it can take many, many forms.  People bring a TON of stuff into a site, from foodstuffs and building materials, and clothing, and tools, and all their possessions.  Many of these things are made of perishable materials, such as textiles, wood, animal products.  Perishable things decay into sediment.  In addition, the building materials that people bring into the site are another major factor in sediment accumulation on ancient cities.  In the Near East, the main form sites take is called a *tel*, which is a mound composed of the remains of cities built atop older cities. Basically a layer cake of civilization.  It's so much easier in these instances to just knock down a building and cover it over and flatten it out than it is to dig it all up and haul it away.  When a city is destroyed, they simply bring in a bunch of dirt, level the place out, and build on top of the remains.  [Arlene Rosen's 1986 book *Cities of Clay: the Geoarchaeology of Tells*](_URL_3_) is the seminal work discussing this phenomenon of tell site formation.  And as I said before, rainwater erosion on earthen buildings will cause a lot of sediment accumulation.  \n\nOne other way you can get sediment accumulation is by the decay of organic matter.  Just as in wooded areas, leaves, dead trees, and other decayed plant material can add to the soil level.  Organic material decays into sediment.\n\nBut the basic gist of all of this is that dirt moves, and it moves in different ways, and it's made from organic things, and people bring it in sometimes, and it all works together in a complicated way.\n\nIn your specific situation, I would have to see excavation reports or see the dirt myself to say for sure, but I think the best explanations are a combination of the above sediment moving methods.  First we have people bringing all sorts of stuff into their city.  They throw away their trash, they dump their waste, it all turns back into dirt.  Buildings wear down (yes, even stone ones, over a long enough time).  Water and wind spread this sediment around.  Sometimes people want to build a new building, but an old one is in the way.  In most cases, it's much easier to just knock the old one over and cover it with dirt and build on top.  This is how you get a lot of buildings underneath the ground, they are actually buried by people who want to use that space for something else.\n\nIf you want to study the nitty-gritty details of how sediment moves in archaeological sites, there are a couple very good books I recommend:\n\n[Goldberg, Paul, and Richard Macphail. Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2006](_URL_1_)\n\n[Rapp, George R, and Christopher L. Hill. Geoarchaeology: The Earth-Science Approach to Archaeological Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998](_URL_0_)\n\n[Goldberg, Paul, Vance T. Holliday, and C R. Ferring. Earth Sciences and Archaeology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001.](_URL_2_)\n\nI've done a lot of research in this area, as much of my graduate work was done in the realm of geoarchaeology.  If you have any further questions about this, I would be happy to answer them.", "Hi, hopefully someone can drop by with more detail on where the soil in  &  around ancient Roman buildings likely comes from, but to get you started, there have been a few interesting comments on the general subject\n\nLayers\n\n* [Why did the Romans build on top of things?](_URL_3_) - featuring /u/kookingpot \n\n* [Many archaeological sites of settlements are often described as having \"layers\". Are these literal layers or an archaeological term?](_URL_2_) - featuring /u/Aerandir\n\n* [How can cities be built upon another?](_URL_4_)\n\n* thread in [Monday Methods|Finding and Understanding Sources- part 6, Specific Primary Sources](_URL_1_) - /u/kookingpot gives an intro to  archaeological layers\n\nBuried ruins\n\n* [Why does so much archaeology end up underground?](_URL_6_) - featuring /u/kookingpot and /u/alriclofgar \n\n* [How did ancient archaeological sites like the Palace of Knossos and Troy (but not limited to) get buried?](_URL_0_) - featuring /u/mictlantecuhtli \n\n* [Why are ancient cities underground?](_URL_5_)\n\nof possible tangential interest\n\n* [what percentage of roman construction is still standing today?](_URL_7_)\n\nMost of these posts have been archived by now, so if  you have questions for any of the users, just ask them here  &  tag their username to notify them"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.worldcat.org/title/geoarchaeology-the-earth-science-approach-to-archaeological-interpretation/oclc/36857400&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/practical-and-theoretical-geoarchaeology/oclc/60796167&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/earth-sciences-and-archaeology/oclc/42888089&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.worldcat.org/title/cities-of-clay-the-geoarcheology-of-tells/oclc/13526083&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tfl88/why_does_so_much_archaeology_end_up_underground/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rw69q/how_did_ancient_archaeological_sites_like_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xq447/monday_methodsfinding_and_understanding_sources/cy6rrc7", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oylvy/many_archaeological_sites_of_settlements_are/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bz6zp/why_did_the_romans_build_on_top_of_things/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sjw66/how_can_cities_be_built_upon_another/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/204w8g/why_are_ancient_cities_underground/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tfl88/why_does_so_much_archaeology_end_up_underground/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11urpx/what_percentage_of_roman_construction_is_still/"]]}
{"q_id": "5alir3", "title": "What do you think happened to the lost colony of Roanoake?", "selftext": "Personally, I think they did go back to Croatoan Island, but wouldn't we have some of their names as people's ancestors in our records? \n\nWhat do you think happened to the colony?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5alir3/what_do_you_think_happened_to_the_lost_colony_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9hwtfv"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question gets asked quite a bit and an [answer](_URL_0_) is in the FAQ section.  u/colevintage or others may have more to add."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22w4qr/what_happened_to_the_lost_colony_of_roanoke/"]]}
{"q_id": "1trku6", "title": "How has the depiction of war in fiction changed since the World Wars?", "selftext": "I remember reading about how the act of war had been glorified and made to seem heroic and noble in the time before the first world war, and the first world war changed that a lot. Nowadays, it seems like most depictions of war in fiction show a much more gritty and dark side to warfare, and I genuinely can't think of a single time it has been made to seem glorious or something anyone should aspire to. I was wondering whether the horrors of the two world wars caused this, and how war was depicted before the first world war.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1trku6/how_has_the_depiction_of_war_in_fiction_changed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceaxwkx"], "score": [3], "text": ["I wouldn't agree that war was glorified prior to the World Wars.  Famous works like Tolstoy's *War and Peace* portray war as a chaotic, futile endeavor.   Even famous British poems like Kipling's [Arithmetic on the Frontier](_URL_5_), [The Last of the Light Brigade](_URL_6_) and Tennyson's [Charge of the Light Brigade](_URL_4_ depict  large amount of futility of war along with themes of the heroism of those involved in conflict.  I would agree that more modern works are much more explicit in their denunciations, largely due to the scale of destruction in WWI and WWII and the massive impact they had on society.  Works like Remarque's [All Quiet on the Western Front](_URL_0_), Heller's [Catch-22](_URL_2_), Vonnegut's [Slaughterhouse-5](_URL_3_) and Pynchon's [Gravity's Rainbow](_URL_1_) all depict the combatants as more morally flawed than pre-world war literature in addition to questioning the overall purpose of war and in showing the non-battle related aspects of war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=pgvqsaYvgacC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=all+quiet+on+the+western+front&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=vAC9UsXMFpD2oAST-oHIAg&amp;ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=all%20quiet%20on%20the%20western%20front&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=gravity's+rainbow&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=KQG9UuazKdPboASV-4DoDQ&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=gravity's%20rainbow&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=n4UmQQAACAAJ&amp;dq=catch+22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=7wC9UqnXEdiFoQT0r4H4Cw&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA", "http://books.google.com/books?id=FM4y7N1kM9AC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=slaughterhouse+five&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=DgG9Uqn2A4_woAT2rIGoCg&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=slaughterhouse%20five&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade_(poem)", "http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Light_Brigade"]]}
{"q_id": "63qgmc", "title": "Parents who lose their child seem to enter into an intense and lifelong grieving process (today). Was this always the case? What about in societies where infant and child mortality rates were very high?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63qgmc/parents_who_lose_their_child_seem_to_enter_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfwao50"], "score": [2], "text": ["In the middle ages, though my source (Women's Roles in the Middle Ages, Edited by Bardsley) doesn't specify time period beyond \"the middle ages\" or a specific country, midwives were allowed to baptize infants who seemed like they were not going to make it. This was the *only* time women were allowed to perform such rites. In this way, it's clear that there was some contingency plan in place to prepare for the very real possibility of dying infants. \n\nAdditionally, many pre-modern cultures had naming traditions where the child was not named immediately after being born, but was instead named after a delay. This is because it's easier to handle the loss of a child that died before being named, and thus died before going through that rite of passage that helps integrate him/her into the household.\n\nThe pertinent paragraph: \"In many cultures, infant mortality is so high that presentation or naming ceremonies are postponed until it seems likely that the child will survive. Until that time, the child does not have a social identity. If it dies, its death is faced with stoicism and equanimity. Likely, the dead child is not publicly mourned, nor funeral rites held for it.\" [Source](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is in stark contrast with modern-day first-world countries in which infants are frequently named immediately after birth, sometimes even before they're born. And if the worst happens and there's a miscarriage, or the child is stillborn, or dies shortly after being born, society tends to treat it as a person with a social identity. Funerals are held, the parents and often extended family grieve, friends and even acquaintances offer condolences if they're informed (which often happens if the woman miscarried after she was visibly pregnant). In short, our society assigns \"personhood\" to infants before they're born, while many cultures with high infant mortality rates don't assign personhood to them until after survival is more certain. The difference is in emotional investment and attachment, as well as in expectation.\n\nFor us, a dead infant is a tragedy. For cultures with high infant mortality, it's a probability."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&amp;context=jpps"]]}
{"q_id": "5oy56h", "title": "French Foreign Legion: How important of a fighting force has it historically been?", "selftext": "ANy recommended readings? Am mostly interested in the earlier periods/lawless?  Appreciate anyone who studied and has opinion of", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5oy56h/french_foreign_legion_how_important_of_a_fighting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcmzkbd", "dcn7pp2", "dcn8ocj"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["First and foremost I must recommend The French Foreign Legion by Douglas Porch, it is an exhaustive, and in english at least, definitive history of the legion. I dont have my copy on hand, but when I get home I can give exact quotes to support this summary.\n\nThe Legion was inherently very different from the regular, conscript army even from its beginning in 1830, it had a much more professional, mercenary feel. It was created out of expediency as in 1830 France was an exile refuge of revolutionaries throughout europe, and the July Monarchy wanted to ease tensions by essentially shipping them out to the new colony of Algeria, after briefly fighting in Spain against Carlist revolutionaries. Algeria became their home and base, becoming one of the three main forces (along with the Zouaves and the penal Battaillons d'Afrique, though after 1871 these essentially disappeared) in charge of its \"pacification\". They played a large role in the failed Mexican expedition, and it is there that one of its central regimental legends, the last stand at Camerone where they fought to the last man, was cemented. They were present during the Italian war against Austria and played a key role in the Battle of Magenta. Shortly thereafter they participated in the defense of France in 1870 and the crackdown of the Paris Commune in 1871\n\n1871-1914 was basically the Golden age for the legion, where they and the French Marines formed the spearhead of colonial efforts of the period. They led the forces in Dahomey, Indochina, Madagascar, Syria, and Morocco. They were pretty much THE unit in charge of colonial ventures. Furthermore, commanders who cut their teeth in the legion would go on to become prominent generals in the metropole army.\n\nIn WW1 they did fight in france (though they left austro-german enlistees in Morocco for obvious reasons) and played key roles in scattered offensives, mostly in 1914 and 1917.\n\nFor the interwar and WW2 periods again they were relegated mostly to the colonies. However, they once again became key units in the decolonization conflicts, forming the backbone of french forces in Vietnam and Algeria.\n\nIn fact, to this day, the 3e R\u00e9giment \u00c9tranger is one of the most decorated units in the entire French military.\n\nI understand this is heavily summarized and I can go into much greater detail on recruitment, national makeup of the Legion, and combat doctrine when I get back home\n", "All right, expanding on my original response I can go into more detail. You said you were more interested in the earlier history of the legion. Douglas Porch in his work shows the semi-conscious connection between the Legion and the Ancien R\u00e9gime's reliance on paid, foreign-national troops. The Revolution(s) changed this attitude, by 1830 these units were seen as \"mercenaries\" willing to fight for any cause, and a recruitment bill passed in 1832 stated that \"no one will be admitted to serve in the French forces if he is not French.\" This attitude meant that for a long time the Legion was seen as something approaching a penal battalion; necessary to get rid of unsavory types from France, but not a unit of any military worth or virtue. Then Minister of War Soult wrote in 1834 that \"The government has no desire to look for recruits for this Legion. This corps is simply an asylum for misfortune.\"\n\nThus the Legion, after being rented out to the Spanish Crown for a bit, was purposefully resettled to Algeria. It wasn't until Marshal Bugeaud was appointed commander-in-chief of Algeria in the 1840's that it would come into its own as a crack colonial force. He built the Legion into a unit focused nearly exclusively on harsh-but-fair discipline, and peak physical endurance: the lack of cavalry meant that to subdue Algerian rebels, Legion columns had to regularly undertake quick, hellishly long marches under blistering heat. This also meant that for a long time, Legion style combat differed vastly from European doctrine, with a focus on mobility and utilizing cover rather than drill formations.\n\nAs for recruitment, until the globalization of the mid-late 20th century, the main source of men for the Legion were Germans, followed by Swiss, Belgians, Poles, Spaniards, and a smattering of English and Italians. Before WWI, french citizens made up only roughly 40% of the Legion, and this percentage was far lower in the years before 1871. The romanticization of these men being scorned \"bourgeois\" lovers or scoundrels fighting for a cause, such as in Beau Geste, of the Legionnaire as a patriot or at least man of conviction was mostly a myth. Until 1914, most Legionnaires were older men with a background in skills and trades, and typically middling to lower class. Regimental pride and a sort of professional sense of duty were the main motivators. It certainly wasn't the pay, so ridiculously low, the sale of bits of uniform or equipment was regularly and harshly punished. Desertion was always higher in the Legion, facilitated by the anonimat (for a long time, recruits had to give almost no personal information on enlistment, and many could and did enlist under assumed identities).\n\nI have the book on hand if you have any questions!", "Always more to be said on the topic, but you'll likely find this [brief history of the Foreign Legion I wrote awhile back to be of interest!](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27kcff/why_did_france_create_a_french_foreign_legion/ci1ux5q/"]]}
{"q_id": "42ngjq", "title": "What did Soviet leaders make of the hippie movement in the West in the 1960s?", "selftext": "I'm interested both in (1) what policy makers thought of it in terms of its effect on the Cold War and the ability of the Soviet Union to exploit the cultural shift, and also (2) how the movement was interpreted by Soviet scholars of Marxism.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42ngjq/what_did_soviet_leaders_make_of_the_hippie/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czbv3c5", "czc3xn7", "czcdgih", "czcjq4h", "czcomo2"], "score": [11, 36, 3, 2, 36], "text": ["I've wondered this myself. Also, was the general Soviet population aware of the cultural movement?", "Follow up question and my apologies if it has already been asked:  Where did the USSR get their soldiers (not during a major war)?  Did they have a draft like the US?\n\n\nWhy am I being downvoted?", "[here's](_URL_0_) a pretty interesting article about bootlegged music in the soviet union", "While the movement wasn't as widespread as in the west, I can tell you that western parts of the Warsaw pact were certainly aware atleast from my experience.\n\nI can tell you that western music was widespread in the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact, you can find any western classic also in any North Korean library from John Lennon to the Queen.\n\nWhat really didn't affect the Warsaw block population was the political meaning and active protests that characterized the western world. There wasn't a Vietnam to protest against.\n\nCertainly hippy movement was present in the Warsaw block but it was less spread among young, we as Poles certainly enjoyed the sexual freedom-music movement, the will of peace, you had people dressing like \"children of flowers\" ecc, but it never came to open opposition to authorities to create a more free world.", "Expanded from [an earlier answer](_URL_4_). \n\nOne of the salient points of the Western counterculture of the 1960s was that it was a much more diverse movement than the popular stereotype of long-harried flower children. While the latter certainly existed, they also cohabited a movement of a new breed of politically-engaged intellectuals (often called the New Left), the antiwar movement, and other people seeking to transgress the existing social order. When faced with the rise of this movement in the West, the Soviet leadership was quite confused as to what to make of it. For example, these two Soviet cartoons [1](_URL_0_) [2](_URL_3_) show solidarity with the war protesters as true representatives of the struggling masses that the USSR was on the side of. In contrast, this [cover \"Distinguishing Badges\"](_URL_2_) of the 1969 Soviet satirical *Krokodil*  mocked the West's fashion of long hair and androgynous clothing as does this [Soviet cartoon](_URL_1_) which presented the stereotypical hippie garb in a less than flattering light. \n\nThe New Left was one of the more vexing aspects of the counterculture for the Soviet Union's leadership and cultural figures.  In general, the Soviet leadership was ambivalent about the New Left and this mirrored the generalized ambivalence the New Left held for the USSR.  Although the New Left espoused a harsh critique of American society, their ideological focus was more in line with younger communist movements and leaders like Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or Che. Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders had experience with this type of ideological independence with both Tito and Mao during the 1940s and 50s and that had led them to be leery of ideological movements that deviated from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The fact that the SDS did grew out of an American progressive milieu instead of the American Communist Party added a further layer of skepticism for Soviet leaders. \n\nMoreover, the New Left would also occasionally critique Soviet actions; one of the precursors of the New Left in Britain, the Communist Party Historians Group, which included such luminaries like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, openly critiqued the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. There were similiar sentiments over the Soviet's crushing of Prague Spring. Graffiti both at Berkeley's and Chicago's1968 protests drew explicit connections between American police actions and Czechoslovakia. While this graffiti (welcome to Czechago) was more about thumbing the eye of the anticommunism of the West, it was not a celebratory picture of the USSR either, especially in contrast to how the \"Old Left\" romanticized the Soviet worker state in the 1930s.\n\nThe transgressive cultural precepts of the New Left, especially its liberal stance on sexual mores, were at odds with the social conservatism that typified Soviet leadership during the Brezhnev era. One of the odder quirks of Soviet state attitudes towards music in the late 1960s and 1970s was they felt that rock bands exemplified by the Rolling Stones, The Doors or Jimi Hendrix were a cultural plot by the capitalism to sap the revolutionary vigor of youth through an appeal to hedonistic excess. The Soviet state was very quick to repress its own counterculture that arose in this time whose hippies took their cues from the global movement (long hair, sexual freedom, etc.).    \n\nWriting in 1975, the German journalist Klaus Mehnert observed:\n\n > The New Left is not one of the perennial topics that Soviet writers *have* to write about, rather it is a marginal phenomenon in Soviet writing [emphasis original]. Therefore, it is studied only by those especially interested. Seldom have I found anyone in the Soviet Union who even knew the New Left\u2019s name. \n\nMenhert found that although the Soviet state published extensively about the New Left and student protests, the state was more interested in the fact that the New Left was protesting than what in fact the New Left was actually saying. \n\nThe same could be said of Soviet response the wider Western counterculture movement. When the counterculture threatened to upend cultural mores and practices, the response of the Soviets was to treat such a movement as distinct and separate from the true interests of the toiling masses. The state would accordingly quarantine aspects of the counterculture like rock music it deemed harmful to the Soviet body politic. But when the counterculture was useful for Soviet interests, especially when it portrayed the Americans in a less than flattering light, Soviet media would position itself as their self-appointed champion in the global stage. The problem for the USSR was that few in the Western counterculture movement wanted this patronage and often had a vision of the future that departed from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Brezhnev era.   \n\n*Sources*\n\nDworkin, Dennis L. *Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the origins of cultural studies*. Duke University Press, 1997.\n\nKatsiaficas, George N. *The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968*. Boston, Mass: South End Press, 1987. \n\nMehnert, Klaus. *Moscow and the New Left*. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.    \n\nRisch, William Jay. *The Ukrainian West Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv*. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/29/bone-music-soviet-bootleg-records-pressed-on-xrays"], [], ["https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-ZLbRtrPfPKk/ThnbVSs5tDI/AAAAAAAAHhk/dbV9G3Hw0qg/s800/crocodile_1971_12.jpg", "https://v1.std3.ru/1f/08/1445051565-1f08360542fa211414da6672f84da034.jpeg", "https://i.imgur.com/MRJ7slt.jpg", "https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-NpefDwDrpKw/ThnbQ9r5abI/AAAAAAAAHhY/nW5rEAUX7mk/s800/crocodile_1971_16112.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dxuub/what_did_the_soviet_union_think_of_the_american/"]]}
{"q_id": "9ffday", "title": "So if salt was a currency at times in Rome, are there any records of someone just boiling seawater until they'd amassed a fortune in salt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ffday/so_if_salt_was_a_currency_at_times_in_rome_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5w5svm", "e5wg1d7", "e5xd7hw"], "score": [76, 5, 6], "text": ["There is no evidence in ancient sources that indicate that salt was used as a currency in Rome.\n\nOccasionally an incorrect translation of Pliny's Natural History 31.89 surfaces that claims he says this, when in fact he says that salt:\n\n > is also related to magistracies and duty abroad, and that\u2019s where we get the word \u2018salaries\u2019 \n\nWhich is a typical Roman etymological explanation. \n\nLivy 29.37.3 talks about the imposition of a salt tax c. 200 BCE and it is possible, I suppose, that this was used for military purposes.\n\nSalt simply wasn't that valuable and the Romans had good supply routes to abundant sources  ", "In regards to boiling seawater for salt, there a couple answers explaining how impractical it is to amass and sell.\n\n[u/wcspaz](_URL_3_) and [u/AncientHistory](_URL_2_) answering _URL_1_\n\n[u/Lynx_Rufus](_URL_4_) answering _URL_0_", "Down river from Rome at Ostia there are salt marshes, which from Rome's earliest days and even earlier were exploited for salt.  The process is the same as sea salt harvesters use today.  [Harvesters](_URL_1_) arrange large flat pools surrounded by walk ways and little gates to let sea water in.  Let water evaporate under the sun so that salt crystals precipitate to the bottom.  Let in more water.  Repeat until there is enough salt to rake into piles and gather for export.  The Via Salaria, so called Salt Road let traders carry the stuff from Rome into the mountains where salt was harder to come by and was valued as a preservative for meat and for making cheese. (By the shore it could preserve fish.)\n\nThe salt/salary thing, as skimitar notes, is folk etymology; the Romans had a lot of that sort of thing, and this one is such a good story, it has lasted to this day.  But salt was never anything more than a commodity, valuable, but not a means of exchange.  People expected to be paid in bronze, silver and gold.  The failure of Roman silver and gold reserves to keep up with demand and the catastrophic debasement of silver currency with lead is one reason for the decline of the empire.  By the end, soldiers demanded and got payment in gold.  \n\nBut that's another story\n\n(See [Kiwi hellenist](_URL_0_) for the long read re salary)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5opntw/why_was_salt_so_scarce_and_valuable_when_it_is_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kz3le/im_given_to_understand_that_in_the_premodern/", "https://www.reddit.com/user/AncientHistory", "https://www.reddit.com/user/wcspaz", "https://www.reddit.com/user/Lynx_Rufus"], ["https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html", "https://triciaannemitchell.com/2016/08/07/harvest-sea-salt-gozo-malta-mediterranean/"]]}
{"q_id": "cwoie6", "title": "Has there been much precedent for suspending the British parliament since the Cromwellian era?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cwoie6/has_there_been_much_precedent_for_suspending_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyflsfo"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, it happens very regularly, usually annually. \n\nThe act of proroguing Parliament by the Queen's primary (Prime) minister is, in itself, entirely normal. The differences in precedent here come from the length of prorogation (five weeks instead of the usual week-or-so) and the fact that the new Prime Minister has not demonstrated the Confidence of the House. His opponents may well be seeking to question that Confidence in order to remove his ability to enact any actions of Royal Assent or otherwise.\n\nThere's an [interesting article covering the detail](_URL_0_) at the factcheck section of Channel 4, a British public broadcaster/"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-parliament-prorogation-explained"]]}
{"q_id": "7ql2dz", "title": "It is said that slavery had a long history in Africa. Was there an indigenous anti-slavery or abolition movement?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ql2dz/it_is_said_that_slavery_had_a_long_history_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsr6h9e"], "score": [3], "text": ["I can't answer this, but for the sake of clarity, when you say 'Africa' are you asking about a movement that spanned the entire continent? Or about any anti-slavery action in any African nation at all, even on a local level? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kmt2g", "title": "Where and how do documentaries and TV channels get hold of original war footage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kmt2g/where_and_how_do_documentaries_and_tv_channels/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqxgxj"], "score": [3], "text": ["I want to preface this by stating that I am NOT an expert in this; but I have had some limited experience.\n\nFootage typically comes from two sources; one is independent footage houses like AP/WorldWide Photo that can legally license footage that they have acquired over the years. The second is news outlets that have their own footage archives.\n\nHonestly the very best way to find the specific names of sources of footage is to watch any half-way decent War documentary on the History Channel or Smithsonian Channel or whatever; fast forward to the very end, get your remote ready to hit \"pause\" and every single source they used will be listed in credits there (it's a requirement).\n\nFor a documentary I worked on about terrorism in the 1970s in Germany, pretty much all of the footage was available through television news outlets. Many of these outlets have their collections digitized and searchable through a password protected website; others are less \"with the times\" and you either have to show up yourself or pay the company a fee to research footage for your product (this is separate from the actual licensing fee you will pay to show the footage).\n\nFootage CAN be expensive. I was interviewed as part of a history channel documentary about the \"Baader-Meinhof Gang\" and they clearly had a VERY limited budget for footage and photos because they continually showed the same 10 second clip of Ulrike Meinhof over and over again, and they showed the same three photos of each of the group's leaders over and over again. Yet they flew me to Los Angeles to interview me, they interviewed people in london, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Munich. In other words it was cheaper for them to fly to a city to interview someone than it was to obtain and license footage.\n\nfinal note: if you are asking about War Footage that predates the TV age; you would be talking about a footage licensing house. If you talking about footage from Vietnam onward; this is almost exclusively the domain of television news outlets.\n\nEDIT: I forgot to mention that for WWII, an enormous amount of footage was actually shot by the US Government by the Signal Corps. Famous directors like John Ford actually filmed the D-Day invasion _URL_0_\n\nI don't know where to obtain this footage, but licensing would be MUCH less expensive, presumably, because it is in the public domain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue12/ford.html"]]}
{"q_id": "23u4sl", "title": "AskHistorians Podcast Episode 009 Discussion Thread - ANZAC Day", "selftext": "[Episode 009](_URL_1_) is up!\n\nThe [AskHistorians Podcast](_URL_4_) is a project that highlights the users and answers that have helped make /r/AskHistorians one of the largest history discussion forum on the internet.\n\nYou can subscribe to us via [iTunes](_URL_5_), [Stitcher](_URL_2_) or [RSS](_URL_3_). If there is another index you'd like the cast listed on, let me know!\n\n**[Previous Episodes](_URL_4_)**\n\n**This week's Episode:**\n\n/u/TasfromTas speaks with Margaret Harris of the [ANZAC Remembered Project](_URL_0_) at Monash University. We cover the Gallipoli Campaign and the different ways in which Australia, New Zealand and Turkey remember the events of WWI.\n\nMargaret also asked me to make a minor correction in the discussion thread: Maurice Francis Richard Shadbolt's play is *Once on Chunuk Bair* (1982), and the film version *Chunuk Bair* was released in 1991. Also remember to visit and contribute to her [project](_URL_0_)!\n\nPlease ask any followup questions in this thread. Also feel free to leave any feeback on the format and so on.\n\nIf you like the podcast, please rate  &  review us on [iTunes](_URL_5_).\n\nThanks all!\n\n**Coming up next week:** We have a surprise! But I'll spoil it now. To celebrate our 10th Episode, the hosts (/u/TasfromTAS, /u/400-Rabbits  &  /u/Celebreth) will be getting together to drink, spread bulldust and talk about our plans for the Podcast. It will be like a pub session *but online!* I'm really excited :) Of course if that falls through (coordinating across 3 time zones is hard), we will play the interview with [Shakespeare Gurl](_URL_6_) on Japanese Pirates! So win-win for you guys really.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23u4sl/askhistorians_podcast_episode_009_discussion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch0n3re", "ch20hsx"], "score": [19, 2], "text": ["I have never done an interview like that before! Thank you for the opportunity. \n\nIf anyone has questions, I am more than happy to go into much more detail than I was able to in the podcast. It was tricky to make everything simple, and I was nervous. My accent is also not so good!", "I use DoubleTwist for my podcasts but can't find it. Would it be possible to add a listing there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/anzac-remembered/", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-009", "http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tas-stacey/the-askhistorians-podcast", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/rss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/podcast", "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-askhistorians-podcast/id812302476?mt=2&amp;ign-mpt=uo%3D8", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/shakespeare-gurl"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "d7tpdr", "title": "Why did the american colonies unite as a country while the spanish colonies did not?", "selftext": "I have always wondered how come the american colonies united as one large state after driving the British out of their territory while the spanish colonies in South America never integrated themselves in a similar manner into a large state even though they had just finished winning a well coordinated, long and bloody transcontinental war campaign against the Spanish Empire in which they won their independence. Not to mention the incredible official cultural homogeneity of the Empire (which ran from the northern US to the south of Chile) in which they all spoke spanish as lingua franca, they had the same currency, same state religion, same laws and similar mores. \n\nOne would logically think, as in the case of the 13 colonies, that the newly freed spanish colonies would also unite to form one country but obviously this did not happened. Why though?\n\nWas it the greed of the regional elite creole classes? The extraordinary size and fragmented geographical nature of the Empire?\n\nOr was the well established and mechanical imperial structure of power and governance in which Spanish America was divided into four Viceroyalties and not colonies (and inherited by the newly freed spanish americans ) with the same rights as any other province of continental Spain, the very same reason why the nodes of political power remained separate even after Independence? \n\nWorld history would have been much different if instead of about 20 separate similar states, they had become one large continental power. Why did they not unite?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7tpdr/why_did_the_american_colonies_unite_as_a_country/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f156yur", "f159y1d", "f15c3k9", "f15wka4", "f16qveo", "f16tt3i", "f17n0m4"], "score": [16, 1020, 65, 37, 2, 13, 2], "text": ["There's [a section of the FAQ](_URL_0_) devoted to this which you may find interesting.", "There's three big factors that should be looked at. One is the level of interconnectedness between the English colonies v. the level of interconnectedness between the Spanish colonies; one is the nature of the economies of the respective colonies; one is the geography of the English colonies v. the Spanish colonies.\n\n**Interconnectedness and print capitalism**: I'm going to borrow from Benedict Anderson's *Imagined Communities* here. He argues that nationalism is essentially a feeling of belonging to a national community that was made possible by disseminating print media (via the advent of print capitalism) in a specific vernacular. This means that a key factor in French nationalism, for example, was the ability of people in France (as a geographical and political unit) to consume print media en masse in French. Another example he points to is Indonesian nationalism which was made possible by a) the creation of the Indonesian language and b) the dissemination of literature in that language. Anderson writes about nationalism in Latin America in his first chapter and I'll borrow from him below.\n\nIf we examine the dissemination of print media in the English colonies versus the Spanish colonies we're going to find two prominent trends. One, print media in general was more common *earlier* in the English colonies than in the Spanish colonies. The English were less restrictive regarding the press than the Spanish, and in general the English were more interested in facilitating capitalism (and by extension print capitalism) than the Spanish. While the English colonies were certainly tied to various forms of \"extractivism\" ranging from fur trapping to the essentially feudal slave economy in the South, there was a stronger capitalist class in the English colonies than in the Spanish ones. This means that, generally, the structural conditions for print capitalism, and thus the dissemination of nationalist literature in English to would-be-Americans, were more favorable earlier on than in the Spanish colonies.\n\nIn the Spanish colonies there was a greater emphasis on resource extraction, and less of a capitalist influence than in the English colonies. This effected (negatively) the dissemination of nationalist literature in Spanish to would-be-\"Gran Colombianos\" (we'll use that as the placeholder, since Bolivar's Gran Colombia was the most significant political project toward Spanish American unification). *What's more, and what's more important, is that communication between the Spanish colonies was prohibited in a way that communication between the English colonies was not.* Spain did a better job of centralizing colonialism through Madrid than the English did through London. Communication, and thus the dissemination of nationalist literature in Spanish to would-be-Gran Colombianos, was more limited in the Spanish colonies than in the American colonies. This made it easier for the would-be-Americans to express their nationalist ideas to other would-be-Americans than it was for would-be-Gran Colombianos to other would-be-Gran Colombianos.\n\nTL;DR The Americans had a stronger print capitalism that facilitated print media in a way the would-be-Gran Colombianos did not, and communication between the American colonies was permissible and occurred in a way that was not possible in the Spanish colonies. It was easier for Americans to communicate with a grand national community of Americans than it was for would-be-Gran Colombianos to communicate with a grand national community of Gran Colombianos.\n\n**Nature of the economies**: In the English colonies there was a strong class of petty farmers that were eager to acquire new land to farm. What's more, there was a capitalist class that was eager for Westward expansion as a way of creating new markets and generating greater wealth. The farmers needed land, the capitalists needed them to get that land. This created a strong emphasis on *expansionism* in American nationalism. As the colonists found out, the English colonial authorities had no desire to permit this expansion (as they blocked expansion west of the Appalachians) and the west was already claimed by the French and Spanish, and also occupied by the Natives. The need for expansion largely drove the centralization of political authority in the Federal government, as the colonies and then states realized that their need for expansion would best be served by a central authority. This brought together the colonies (and later the states) and united them in a common political project, and strengthened American nationalism.\n\nThis was not the case in the Spanish colonies. The economy was based mostly on mineral extraction and sugar production. Unlike the English colonies, there was really nowhere left to expand, and the resources useful to the Spanish American landed aristocracy were essentially already under use or already claimed by other criollos. This meant that even if externally a union may have offered greater strength against outside powers, materially there was very little to promote a union (unlike the farmer-capitalist alliance in the English colonies and early United States). The landed aristocrats throughout Spanish America were inherently more interested in defending their land than the farmers and capitalists in North America were in uniting to acquire more land and markets.\n\nIn the English colonies and early United States the landed aristocracy in the South was always the most hostile to independence and later to unification and centralization under the Constitution. Basically, all of the Spanish Americas were ruled by a landed aristocracy like that in the American South.\n\nTL;DR The essentially feudal economy in the Spanish colonies, combined with the lack of area to expand to, did not generate the same material interests toward union that there was in the English colonies and the early United States. There, farmers and the capitalist class had very strong material interests in union, as it was able to provide greater access to land and markets. In short, the American farmers and capitalists had plenty to gain from union, while the Spanish American landed aristocracy had plenty to lose from union and centralization.\n\n**Geography**: This relates to the issue of interconnectedness. While communication and transport in the English colonies and the early United States was by no means easy, it was far more difficult in the Spanish colonies. Already inter-colony communication was forbidden, and it was much more difficult to get from, say, Caracas to Lima than it was to get from Boston to Savannah. Administration and troop movements were easier for the Americans than it was for the Gran Colombianos, and as such it was easier for the Americans to avoid fracturing than it was for the Gran Colombianos. The geographical disparities also inhibited the spread of nationalist print media, and as such it was more difficult for would-be-Gran Colombianos to hear about and get behind the idea of a union of the Spanish colonies than it was for the would-be-Americans to hear about and get behind the idea of a United States of America.\n\n________________________________________________________\n\nTL;DR:\n\n1. The English colonies were more connected commercially and culturally, meaning that print capitalism, print media, and nationalist literature were far more prevalent and stronger than they were in the Spanish colonies.\n\n2. There was a strong alignment of material interests toward unification in the English colonies/early United States brought on by expansionism. Even if there was a political interest toward unification in the Spanish colonies, there was little materially to push the landed aristocracy toward unification. In fact they were hostile to creating a centralizing government, due to their position as landowners who had nothing to gain through expansion.\n\n3. Geographically it was easier for the English colonists/early Americans to communicate with one another and conceive of an \"America\". It was also easier to administrate and defend militarily than in the Spanish colonies, where troop movements and administration were significantly hindered by South American geography.", "I can speak at least for Central America. \n\nNative populations, especially in Mexico, were more populous, highly concentrated, and politically organized than those in North America. Without a variety of extenuating factors (notably the bitterness spread throughout the Nahua peoples against the hegemony of the Triple Alliance), they might have even stayed off European colonization for a couple hundred years. The question of native diversity isn't as much of an issue here, as North American native populations were also diverse, but rather the significance that the native peoples' political structure and culture played in the formation of the Spanish colonies. In Central America, the prominence of the Nahua/Toltec/Mayan ruling class led to intermarriage (or, at least, the keeping of mistresses that led to procreation) with Spanish conquistadores, which contributed to more regional identification and political structuring. \n\nAdditionally, the means and methods of colonization were vastly different. Conquistadores were perhaps more politically motivated than (at least the initial) British settlers. They immediately established and set up local governments backed by the power and influence of the Catholic church. The regional governments were empirically-minded, always attempting to gain additional territories and resources immediately after conquest. \n\nIn this sense, a lot of the amalgamation occurred pre-independence. Semantically, you might have contradicted your own question. Mexico, specifically, was split up into different \"states,\" usually determined or influenced by the regional native populations preceding conquest. During the Mexican revolution, these somewhat disparate \"states\" fought for independence together and even established another empire in the wake of their victory! It was never really a question, even in the establishment of a republic, that these states would not form a unified Mexico, even in an atmosphere where the definition and identity of a \"unified Mexico\" was unclear. Mexico even claimed, of course, decently sized territories both in the north (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas) and the south (Guatemala). If Mexico had won its various battles for these territories (ironically, if they were more unified), the size of its republic would be much closer to the U.S. \n\nDespite all of this, I might have even been burying the lede here. A lot of these things just fall to geography, resources, warfare, etc. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and Costa Rica did \"unite\" as a Federal Republic after their collective fight for independence against Spain. It was civil war shortly thereafter that split them up for good. After gaining independence, the British invaded and claimed Belize, which remained a colony until the 20th century. In an a different political climate, they might have formed another large country in the region. \n\nI'm much less knowledgeable regarding South America, but on that continent you have even more geographical, political, and cultural factors, including that fact that not all South American territories were Spanish-ruled. It would have been quite an empire (as it would be hard to imagine a republic thriving over such a large area) if the countries of South America united to form a single entity of any kind. \n\nIn sum, this question could obviously be answered in a much larger work, as the development of Central and South American statehood post-colonization compared to what developed in North America is a fascinating issue that has real-world implications today. But the issue of statehood formation is much more nuanced and complicated than whether different regional people groups wish to form a unified state or not; usually it's much more dependent on economic and political power structures that determine governmental polity and state lines.", "Because after gaining independence, most former Spanish subjects didn't have the rights that former British subjects did, and the only way they were going to get those rights was through increasing local autonomy. \n\nUnlike the British colonial administration, the Spanish colonial administration governed through a system that would later by termed a \"corporate state\", where the Spanish governor balanced the interests of haciendados (landlords), the Church, and resguardos/native reservations to create a somewhat harmonious order. This system left out artisans, peasants, and slaves. After liberating their countries, revolutionaries in each country split into two factions. \"Conservatives\" believed that economic development was only possible through a central government and a unified military, which enforced property rights and a code of law. \"Liberals\", meanwhile, rightly pointed out that the old colonial system left most of the population disenfranchised, and argued that only local democratic movements could reform laws in the provinces, thereby affecting social change - as long as the central government didn't get in the way.\n\nCritically, both factions were made up of ex-revolutionaries (with Simon Bolivar himself being on the \"conservative\" side), and both, contra popular misconceptions about their labels, desired some degree of social change. The conservatives wanted to create a modern bureaucratic state with the rule of law, while the liberals wanted to expand suffrage, rights, and democratic institutions on a provincial level. This central conflict was the reason for the \"fragmentary\" politics of the various large unions that originally emerged after the independence wars, including the First Mexican Empire, Gran Colombia, Peru-Bolivia, and the Argentine Confederation (of which only the fourth survived).\n\nThe parties weren't able to find common ground because they were supported by different interest groups. The Conservatives generally drew support from indigenous people (who were fearful of settlers encroaching on their resguardos), haciendados, and the Church. The liberals, meanwhile, drew their support from tenants, artisans, and slaves, who formed societies for democratic reform. One of the main points of contention in most countries was land enclosure - after independence, Conservatives largely took control of every country's cabinet, and passed laws that formalized property rights, which had been looser under the Spanish \"corporate state\". This meant that the ejidos - communal lands - were rapidly claimed by local haciendados, impoverishing much of the countryside.\n\nThe collapse of Peru-Bolivia, Gran Colombia, and the First Mexican Empire all followed a familiar pattern. A strongman rose to power, largely with Conservative support (Iturbide in Mexico, Santa Cruz in Bolivia-Peru, and Bolivar in Gran Colombia), attempted to impose a centralist constitution, faced a revolt from autonomists, and was thus ousted, with the victors partitioning the country between them. This pattern generally repeated in the \"rump states\" left over from the dissolutions of the grand unions, but the end result was more often increased autonomy in all provinces instead of outright dissolution. For example, the revolt of the liberal Tomas Mosquera against Conservative President Mariano Ospina Rodriguez of the Grenadine Confederation (formerly Republic of New Grenada, modern day Colombia) led to the defeat of the Conservatives, but the only real outcome was the creation of the modern day United States of Colombia, with more autonomy for the provinces.\n\nOther times, the conservatives were victorious in the successor states, which led to brief moments of consolidation, before another civil war or political shift would restart autonomist momentum. Examples of this happening were Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's victories against rebellious provinces during his first presidency (shortly before his defeat and capture in Texas), and then-Conservative President Mosquera's victory against Jose Maria Obando (also the key actor in the 1830-31 liberal revolt against Bolivar and his ally Urdaneta) in the Colombian \"War of the Supremes\". As you can see, side-switching among major military and political leaders was quite common. Santa Anna was ironically the main \"liberal\" leader who deposed Iturbide in 1822-23, while Mosquera led a liberal rebellion against Ospina in 1860-61.\n\nThe nature of the autonomist struggle in former Spanish colonies meant that, among the early trans-national unions in Latin America, only the Argentine Confederation survived.\n\nAutonomism in former Spanish colonies was much stronger and more widespread than it was in the United States, due to the aforementioned disenfranchisement of the majority of the population during the colonial period. In the British 13 colonies, subjects were generally free to govern themselves through pseudo-democratic institutions. While the British did show favor to certain families (most notoriously, the Hutchinsons of Massachusetts), in general the colonial governments were sensitive to these local assemblies, which were an accepted part of colonial administration.\n\nIn contrast, the Spanish colonial administrations only represented powerful \"corporate groups\" such as the haciendados, Church, and resguardos. The generals who liberated their countries generally came from the haciendado class, and early revolutionary administrations essentially imposed a more oppressive version of the same system, still empowering those corporate groups while dissolving the ejidos, cloaked in enlightenment concepts like rule of law and strong property rights. In this environment, the only way commoners in former Spanish America could obtain the same rights that *colonists in the 13 colonies largely already had* was by keeping the central government out of provincial affairs. \n\nBecause of this, independence movements in former British colonies were limited to local, and often temporal, interests. For example, the 1812 Hartford treason of New England merchants was over a war that was destroying trade profits. The American Civil War was over slavery, and only had popular support in parts of the American South. Independence and autonomist movements in former Spanish colonies were pervasive and widespread, and at times took hold in almost every province outside the capital in each of the major unions. The unions collapsed because their early \"revolutionary\" governments were fundamentally repressive and shut out the majority of the population. In order to gain rights, democratic reformers had to go against the central government, leading to autonomism being *the* central political issue in almost every Latin American country after independence.\n\nSources:\n\nFowler, Will. Mexico in the Age of Proposals.\n\nFowler, Will. Independent Mexico: The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, 1821\u20131858.\n\nAcemoglu and Robinson. Why Nations Fail.\n\nAguas, Sergio. Indian Resguardos, Cattle Ranching and Social Conflict in Old Bol\u00edvar, 1850-1875.\n\nGrafe and Irigoin. A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of Spanish Imperial Rule In America.\n\nValdes, Jose. The Imperial Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy.\n\nRodriguez, Francisco. The Political Economy of Latin American Economic Growth.\n\nWegen, Pim. The Origins of Post-Independence Political Instability and Violence in Colombia and Venezuela.\n\nKuchar, Pavel. Liberalism in Mexican Economic Thought, Past and Present.", "During the time of colonisation of Spanish America, Spanish Habsburgs kept separated the crown of Castile from the crown of Aragon, so the court of each kingdom managed their own affairs, sort of like a federal kingdom. Under this setting, new kingdoms were created in Spanish America in the name of the crown of Castile. That's why most of Spanish colonisers were from Castilian origin and not Aragon.\n\nThat's why all the viceroyalties and kingdoms created in Spanish America were left to handle their own affairs answering to the Viceroy that represented the king in his absence. It was until the Bourbons reforms in the 17th century, that Spanish American started to become centralised handled directly from Madrid, affecting the local creole populace. They could no longer hold positions of power as everyone was sent from Madrid.\n\nDuring this period, Napoleon invaded Spain, removed the king and indirectly kick-started the wars of independence in Spanish America. \n\nIn the case of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, they decided to become independent were news arrived from Spain that the liberals were forcing the king to enforce the Cadiz Constitution which would have turned the Spanish Empire into a liberal monarchy. Powerful local clergymen and landowners of Spanish origin conspired to start a new Mexican kingdom to keep the same structure as before offering the crown to the king or one of his offspring which he rejected.\nThus, mostly all of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (several kingdoms and lands like Californias, the new kingdom of Leon, Yucatan, Central America) became the Mexican Empire. Only Cuba and Phillipines didn't join. Central America broke off once the Mexican Empire was dissolved to become the Mexican Republic, and lastly, the US of A basically stole half of Mexico's land in the Mexican-American war in the 1840s.", "Others have stated a lot of great reasons why the colonies of Spanish America did not unite. As it was mentioned, the territories of the New World were largely considered proprietary fiefdoms of the Kingdom of Castilla y Le\u00f3n, not Arag\u00f3n. The vast majority of European settlers were of Castilian origin. It is a bit of a reductionist argument to state that they were simply \"four viceroyalties\". In reality, these viceroyalties were divided into kingdoms, *audiencias*, and other forms of administrative bureaucracy (such as Captaincies General) that were loyal to Madrid. For example, you could state the Viceroyalty of New Spain consisted of 9 \"colonies\" at its peak.\n\nAnother reason, as stated by others, was that Spain created an infrastructure in which contact with Spain was placed over that of other colonies, but that is not to state that contact between colonies did not take place. The Viceroyalties of Nueva Granada and Peru were in consistent contact in the period following the establishment of the former (1717) in order to facilitate territorial transfer and administrative efficiency, primarily concerning the territories of modern day Ecuador (the *Real Audiencia de Quito*).\n\nHowever, it is this point which I have not seen addressed:\n\n > Not to mention the incredible official cultural homogeneity of the Empire (which ran from the northern US to the south of Chile) in which they all spoke spanish as lingua franca, they had the same currency, same state religion, same laws and similar mores.\n\nand which I will address here as well.\n\nAlthough there was a degree of cultural homogeneity, especially amongst the *peninsulares* who emigrated from Spain and first-generation *criollos* (Spaniards born in the colonies), it is a misnomer to state that the colonies of the Spanish New World would have shared everything in common, beyond being ruled by Spain, speaking the Castilian language, and having the Catholic Church as its religious body as to be considered as united as the English colonies. Each territory that was ruled by Spain was the product of a different process of adaptive colonisation, and that showed significantly in terms of its population and how the colonists would have adapted to the environments in which they found themselves. Those on the frontiers certainly lived a different sort of life than those in the metropolises of the realm!\n\nTake Mexico for example - the Viceroyalty of New Spain was founded on top of a society which had already been extant for several centuries, and constructing their infrastructure on that of a conquered empire was a process that facilitated Spanish settlement in the area (as opposed to areas in which the Spanish had to construct their societies from the ground-up, such as the Pampas in Argentina). It also was the first colony in which *mestizaje* (from which the concept of the Mestizo \\[Spanish  &  indigenous American/African/Asian\\] comes from) would have taken place - indeed, they were designated as a separate racial identity from European whites as early as the 1540s, two decades after Spain's conquest of the Aztec Empire. The process of *mestizaje* is one which took place in nearly all of Spain's colonies, but Mexico is the one in which it is best documented, followed by (to my recollection) Peru. These two nations contained the most prolific of the pre-Columbian empires and thus contained the largest populations by which European Spaniards and Native Americans could mix.  The *sistema de castas* were the legal designations surrounding admixture of races, and they became an interesting art genre in 18th century Mexico - part historical document, part ethnography, part demographic information.\n\nAdmixture of races in the Caribbean would take a different route entirely. The ta\u00edno (the indigenous inhabitants of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and the territories of Colombia and Venezuela bordering the Caribbean) would be nearly extinct by the middle of the 16th century, which resulted in an uptick of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean to work, and thus resulting in a greater percentage Afro-Latino populations. There were also Africans brought in small numbers to Peru, Mexico, and even as far south as the R\u00edo de la Plata, although only in the former do we have documented cases and evidence of even remaining admixture - Peru having a greater number than Mexico percentage wise.\n\nAlthough these groups all similarly assimilated to the society of their conquerors, becoming Catholic, speaking Spanish, and owing fealty to the Crown of Castille, you would be hard pressed to find an inhabitant of New Spain considering himself the same as one in Peru, Nueva Granada, or R\u00edo de la Plata. The cultural influences due to the society in which he was raised would have impacted him greatly, as would his education and personal upbringing, and his views on the territory in which he lived. After being surrounded by Nahuatl speakers for his entire life (or at least being aware of significant numbers of them), a *novohispano* may consider a Quechua speaker to be as alien to him as someone from the Arab World or East Asia. He would recognise an inhabitant of Lima as a citizen of Spain, as he was, but consider him to be different enough as to have been from another kingdom entirely, much as a Castilian might have looked upon a Catalan in the same time period.\n\nEssentially, whilst there were *aspects* of the culture of the Spanish colonies which were no doubt shared, each colony or viceroyalty had differing cultural, ethnic, political, and social considerations to take into account, all of which would have prevented, or at least hindered, any sort of federation on shared *hispanidad* (Spanishness). The closest accounts we have historically are Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar's attempted Gran Colombia (in reality just called *Rep\u00fablica de Colombia*), the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, and the Federal Republic of Central America. It is worth noting that the nations in question which formed these unions often had shared cultural and geographical ties and were united under Spanish colonial rule, facilitating their unification (if even for a short while - the Central American experiment was tried four more times, the most recent being in the 1920s). You would be hard pressed today to find an Argentine who would support an outright political union with Mexico, and likely even less in the 1810's during the era of independence, the differences which existed were disparate and apparent.\n\n*Sources*\n\nCarrera, M. M. (2012). *Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings*. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.\n\nKamen, H. (2004). *Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763*. New York, NY: Perennial.\n\nKatzew, I. (2004). *Casta painting: images of race in eighteenth-century Mexico*. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.\n\nRestall, M.,  &  Lane, K. (2018). *Latin America in colonial times*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.", "There are two main reasons for this: geography and culture. \n\nGeographically speaking it is impossible to govern a territory that big, which was one of the reasons why the Spanish Empire divided the territory in the viceroyalties. Also, some countries (though they do not like to admit it) were artificially created to serve as backstop territories in order to stop the advances of other colonial powers (such was the case with Uruguay/Paraguay and Brazil). A proof of this difficulty is that, After the independence, there was an attempt in the northern part of South America to create a big state called the Gran Colombia. However, that quickly failed due to administrative, political and economic issues which were the result of the massive span of the country (though admittedly, there was a lot of rivalry between the Veneluezan and Colombian sides). Another example of this was western part of the US almost up to Canada. The Mexican state did not had the manpower to properly manage/defend these territories which eventually contributed to them being lost to the US.\n\nThe economic factor also influenced a lot the geographical division of the continent as different territories had different needs which were mandated by their unique geography and that would not be able to be satisfied under a big overarching nation. Case and point is Panama. They had their own particular economic needs which were the result of their location and their historical way of commerce. However, when they were part of Colombia, said needs were not satisfied as Panamanian politicians were effectively a minority within the Colombian congress and most of the decisions made regarding the peninsula, were made by people who had never set foot in Panama (which is why they had been trying to get their independence from Colombia since mid 1800's).\n\nAs for the cultural factor, most territories had followed the blueprint of the traditional cultural/administrative borders that existed before the arrival of the Spanish Empire which would have made it difficult to create a overarching nation in the continent. Added to this, the arrival of the Spanish brought changes in the local culture that varied depending on the territory as the Spanish culture and idiosyncrasy merged with the local cultures in very different ways and led to the creation of very different practices. This was also true regarding the language as Spanish sort of assimilated parts of the traditional languages of a territory, thus creating massive differences between the Spanish dialect (see for example the differences between the Mexican and the Peruvian cultures or the language differences between Chile and Nicaragua) \n\nAll of this  would have made it increasingly difficult to create a state which would have properly respected each individual cultural/language manifestation. Finally, the issue of culture also influenced their feeling as a nation and most territories would have seriously objected being ruled by people which were not from that territory (take what happened in Yugoslavia as an example). Again, this was seen in the Gran Colombia experiment, when both Venezuelans and Ecuatorians objected -and even resented- that the rule of the country was made from Bogota and that people from outside their territory had a say in how their territories were ruled."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/southamerica#wiki_post-independence_fragmentation_of_latin_america"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "340xba", "title": "Could the US during the very early cold war start a nuclear war against the USSR without the fear of a worldwide nuclear holocaust?", "selftext": "We always hear that the US and USSR didn't want to fight in a direct war, because they feared WW3 would be nuclear war that ultimately will destroy human civilization through nuclear fire.\n\nThe US has had nuclear weapons since 1945 and the USSR since 1949. So I was wondering if there was a short time frame during the late 1940's or even early 1950's where they could conduct nuclear strikes against Soviet countries without the fear of full-scale nuclear retaliation that would result in the end of times or that the damage caused by the retaliation would at least be within acceptable boundaries.\n\nSorry if this is the wrong subreddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/340xba/could_the_us_during_the_very_early_cold_war_start/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqqftfz", "cqqlt6u"], "score": [17, 16], "text": ["Technically yes, the United States had nuclear arms superiority for a very long time. However, politically it wasn't really possible without provocation, and the USSR never did anything to warrant such retaliation.\n\nDuring the Cuban Missile Crisis, many (such as General Curtis LeMay) wanted the US to use the crisis as an excuse to launch an attack against the USSR because even though there would have been retaliation, we (the US I mean) still had way more weapons than they did.\n\nBetter to strike now and lose tens of millions than to wait until the Soviets caught up and lose many more.\n\nLuckily that didn't happen. \n", "The US had the ability to deliver small, isolated nuclear weapons onto Soviet territory as early as 1945. However they lacked the ability to do widespread nuclear bombing until after the Soviets had the bomb. The US air force analysts estimated that it would take well over 200 nuclear bombs to achieve a real \"knock out punch\" that would not just be some sort of conventional war mixed with a few nuclear detonations, and they didn't have that many bombs until the 1950s. Their delivery mechanisms (aerial bombers) were also a little insufficient (they were unreliable, could be shot down, etc.). So the US was wary about its nuclear superiority, especially since they also overestimated Soviet abilities to defend or deter. \n\nBy the 1950s the USSR was capable of striking targets in Europe or Asia but not the mainland United States. The US analysts did not entirely realize this, however, because they overestimated Soviet bomber capability. So they were in fact somewhat deterred even though in reality it would have been very hard for the Soviets to muster any kind of reply in kind to the US mainland. (For European allies, it would have been much easier.)\n\nThe Soviets did not really get the ability to threaten US mainland targets reliably until the development and deployment of their first ICBMs in the late 1950s/early 1960s. They were still outmatched considerably by the USA until the 1970s, which is when they were really at parity for the first time. But by the 1960s the Soviets could effectively threaten major US population centers and thus effectively deter. \n\nThe trickiest period in the establishment of the \"nuclear taboo\" in my mind is the Korean War, because it was a period in which the US could have plausibly used nuclear weapons without expecting any kind of reply in kind (the Soviets would not have nuked Europe just because Korea got nuked). Ultimately the US planners concluded that any military advantage would not be worth the risks and political opposition amongst allies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8buozx", "title": "To what degree were Pantheons shared in the Late Bronze Age Near East?", "selftext": "In literature, Homer implies that Trojans and Greeks keep similar gods, albeit being different cultures. I also noticed on a map of Neo-Assyrian Ninevah there was a temple to Hermes. I'm afraid my ignorance prevents me from forming a well worded question, but I was hoping someone could discuss how and why a god might \"spread\" beyond its indigenous culture in the late Bronze Age.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8buozx/to_what_degree_were_pantheons_shared_in_the_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxjjxka"], "score": [18], "text": ["I've only now had the time to give this question the time it deserves, so hopefully you're still interested in an answer.\n\n#Pantheons\n\nEach of the societies in the ancient Near East had its own pantheon of native deities. The Egyptians worshiped Amun, Re, Isis, Horus, Osiris, Thoth, Hathor, and so on. The most prominent deities among the Hittites were the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna. Marduk reigned supreme in Babylonia; other prominent deities included Enki/Ea, Ninurta, \u0160ama\u0161, Inanna, Enlil, Gula, and a host of others. We know much less about the Mycenaean pantheon, but the names of some gods known from classical Greek texts have been identified in Linear B texts, such as Poseidon (*po-si-da-o*), Zeus (*di-we*), Dionysus (*di-wo-nu-so*), and Ares (*a-re*). Additionally, there are deities whose roles are not quite clear, such as the \u201cLady of the Labyrinth\u201d (*da-pu2-ri-to-yo po-ti-ni-ya*). The close ties between the people of a land and their gods are seen clearly in the Hittite prayer of King Arnuwanda and Queen A\u0161munikkal to the Sun Goddess of Arinna.\n\n > Only Hatti is a true, pure land for you gods, and only in the land of Hatti do we repeatedly give you pure, great, fine sacrifices. Only in the land of Hatti do we establish respect for you gods. \n\n#Movements of People and Their Gods\n\nTo complicate this picture, groups moved around and brought their gods with them. This happened with Semitic-speaking peoples, who moved into southern Mesopotamia, and the Hittites, who migrated into Anatolia. What to do with the deities? There were two common strategies for preventing religious conflict. \n\nThe first strategy was to combine deities into a single deity worshiped by multiple groups. The Semitic sun god \u0160ama\u0161, for example, was identified with the Sumerian sun god Utu, and the two names are used interchangeably in Akkadian and Sumerian texts. As another example, in the Ptolemaic period, the Greek god Zeus was identified with the Egyptian god Amun. Scholars of ancient religion call this process \u201csyncretization.\u201d \n\nThe second strategy was to worship both the gods of the people(s) already living in the region *and* newly introduced gods. The Hittites are infamous for doing this. To the preexisting Hattic (or Hattian) panthon, the Hittites added their own gods derived from Proto-Indo-European religious traditions. Around 1400 BCE, when the Hittites exerted hegemony over Cilicia and northern Syria, the Hittites began worshiping Hurrian gods as well. To muddle things still further, the Hittites were inheritors of the Babylonian scribal tradition - in other words, Hittite scribes copied Babylonian hymns, prayers, and other religious texts - so Babylonian gods and even at least one Elamite deity made their way to the Hittite capital. Little wonder that the Hittites claimed to worship 1000 gods! The Hittite queen Puduhepa (ca. 1290-1220 BCE) attempted to overhaul and simplify this unwieldy pantheon, and her prayers indicate a process of syncretization near the end of the Hittite Empire. In a prayer to the Sun Goddess of Arinna, for example, she conflates the Hittite Sun Goddess and the Hurrian goddess Hebat.\n\n > O Sun Goddess of Arinna, my lady, queen of all lands! In Hatti you gave yourself the name Sun Goddess of Arinna, but in the land which you made, that of the cedar [i.e. Syria-Lebanon], there you gave yourself the name Hebat. \n\n#Other Transmissions of Deities\n\nI mentioned above that groups of people moved around the ancient Near East, bringing their pantheons with them. Sometimes, however, only a few deities were transmitted. As ancient empires developed, governors and soldiers were sent to monitor conquered regions and exact tribute. Additionally, prisoners-of-war were deported to the imperial core to work as servants/slaves. Consequently, ancient empires adopted new gods from abroad. Religious cults were also transmitted through more peaceful means, such as the movement of merchants and itinerant artisans and the transmission of literature. Finally, gods could arrive as part of the diplomatic marriages that were common in the Late Bronze Age. The Hittite king Mur\u0161ili II, for example, mentions in passing that his stepmother Tawananna, the daughter of the king of Babylonia, carried out traditions from her homeland.\n\nDuring the New Kingdom, Egypt established control over the southern Levant as well as close ties with other Canaanite centers like Ugarit. As a result of this contact, Canaanite deities such as Resheph, Anat, Astarte, and Ba\u2019al were introduced to Egypt. These gods became such a prominent part of the Egyptian pantheon, in fact, that Ramesses II gave his daughter the Semitic name Bint-Anat, \u201cdaughter of Anat.\u201d Moreover, Canaanite gods began appearing in Egyptian literature, such as the fragmentary tale about Astarte and the Sea (P. Amherst IX), which was probably adapted from Canaanite literature. \n\n#Scribes and Gods\n\nAs a scribal convenience, the name of a foreign god could be written using local deities. The Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty provides the best example. Hittite treaties required both human witnesses (high-ranking members of the royal court) and divine witnesses, who enforced the terms of the treaty. As you\u2019d expect, the Egyptian-Hittite treaty includes both Hittite and Egyptian deities. Interestingly, the Egyptians wrote the names of the Hittite deities using the names of Egyptian gods. \n\n > They are with me as witnesses to these words: the Re, lord of the sky, the Re of Arinna, Seth of the sky, Seth of Hatti, Seth of Arinna, Seth of Zippalanda\u2026\n\nThis is a bit deceptive, as the Egyptians did not really think that Re and Seth were gods of the Hittites. The Egyptian sun god Re was rather similar to the Hittite Sun Goddess, however, and the Hittite Storm God could be equated with the Egyptian Seth. The Egyptians could therefore write \u201cSeth of Hatti\u201d (*StX n xt*) to refer to the deity the Hittites wrote as \u201cthe Storm God of Hatti\u201d (*dU uruHa-at-ti*). \n\n#Gods on a Mission\n\nGods were sometimes sent from one society to another on diplomatic missions. In one of the Amarna letters (EA 23), for example, the king of Mitanni notes that he sent the cult statue of the goddess \u0160au\u0161ka on a mission to Egypt. \n\n > Thus spoke \u0160au\u0161ka of Nineveh, mistress of all lands: \u201cTo the land of Egypt, to the country which I love, I very much would like to go, and then I would return.\u201d Now I have sent her, and she has gone forth. \n\nOne sometimes gets the impression that local ritual practitioners did not know quite what to make of these foreign gods. A Hittite oracular inquiry, for example, inquires of the gods about the proper way to worship the cult statues from Ahhiyawa (Mycenaean Greece) and Lazpa (Lesbos) that had been sent to the aid of the ailing Hittite king Hattu\u0161ili III.\n\n > With respect to the fact that the freeing of the deity of Ahhiyawa, the deity of Lazpa, and the personal deity of his Majesty was indicated by oracle as incumbent upon his Majesty\u2014when they bring the personal deity of the King, should they bring them (the other deities) too? And as they perform the rite for them over the course of three days, is it likewise mandated for three days for the deity of Ahhiyawa and the deity of Lazpa? And as his Majesty has done obeisance to the polluted and purified offering tables and they have sacrificed in the style of Hattusa, should he do precisely the same for them? \n\nFor more on gods on diplomatic missions, see my write-up about the Bentresh stela and the Egyptian cult statue sent to aid the princess of Bactria in [Are there any accounts from ancient literature which narrate demon-possessed victims being cured by an exorcist?](_URL_0_)\n\n#Limits of Divine Power\n\nWell-traveled or well-educated individuals knew that different societies worshiped different gods. In the prayer of Arnuwanda and A\u0161munikkal mentioned above, for example, the king and queen note that only the Hittites worship the Hittite gods in the proper fashion. \n\n Not everyone was willing to accept geographic limitations of their gods\u2019 power, however. In the Egyptian Tale of Wenamun, the eponymous priest attempts to persuade the ruler of Byblos to give him cedar logs by emphasizing the importance of the god he brought with him.\n\n > There is no ship on the river that does not belong to Amun. His is the sea and his the Lebanon of which you say \u201cIt is mine.\u201d \u2026Truly it was Amun-Re, king of the gods, who said to Herihor, my master: \u201cSend me!\u201d And he made me come with this great god. But look, you have made this great god spend these 29 days moored in your harbor. Did you not know that he was here? Is he not who he was? You are prepared to haggle over Lebanon with Amun, its lord? As to your saying, \u201cThe former kings sent silver and gold\u201d - if the kings had life and health, they would not have sent those things! It was in the place of life and health that they sent those things to your fathers! But Amun-Re, king of the gods, he is the lord of life and health, and he was the lord of your fathers! They passed their lifetimes offering to Amun. You too, you are the servant of Amun!\n\nThe prince of Byblos was left unmoved by this appeal to piety and refused to give Wenamun the cedar until payment had been received from Egypt. \n\nA similar sentiment is found in the religious hymns of the Amarna period. Since Akhenaten largely rejected the existence of gods other than the Aten, hymns emphasize the Aten ruling benevolently over all peoples and lands. An excerpt from the Great Hymn to the Aten:\n\n > How many are your deeds, \n\n > Though hidden from sight,\n\n > O sole god beside whom there is none!\n\n > You made the earth as you wished, you alone,\n\n > All peoples, herds, and flocks,\n\n > All upon earth that walk on legs, \n\n > All upon high that fly on wings,\n\n > The lands of Khor (the Levant) and Kush,\n\n > The land of Egypt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/86s44z/are_there_any_accounts_from_ancient_literature/dw8b958/"]]}
{"q_id": "1hhf1x", "title": "Why aren't the Pyramids at Giza restored to what they would have looked like in ancient times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hhf1x/why_arent_the_pyramids_at_giza_restored_to_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caueka0", "cauhajy"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["**Costs**\n\nThe Great Pyramid alone has ~85,000 m\u00b2 of lateral surface.\n\n* You could either restore it the way it used to be, with large, white limestone blocks. For that you would need at least 170,000 tons of limestone to be quarried, transported and fitted. That would probably cost tens of millions of dollars;\n\n* Or you could build a steel framework on which you would apply limestone slabs. That would be much cheaper but still cost millions and egypt has barely money for excavations, let alone restoration.\n\nEither way the construction would most likely disrupt tourist activity\n\nand it would hinder present and future research.\n\n-----------------------------------------------------\n\nThat is for the Great Pyramid alone. Restoring the other two major pyramids (combined) would be equally as difficult and expensive, \n\nnot to mention that there are ten other minor pyramids, hundreds of mastabas, 5 major temples, causeways and countless other buildings worth restoring on the plateau.\n\n", "Also historical ethical considerations have to come into it. The great pyramids haven't been restored because that would mean altering/disguising the history that has occurred since they were built. There is an argument to suggest that any historical object or monument is not only a representation of the history of its creator but also has potential to reveal the later histories of the civilizations and people who came into contact with it. A good example of this is the [gold covered joman pots](_URL_0_); the inside has been lacquered with gold much later so it could perform a different function that the one it's original creators intended it for. The same principal can be applied to the pyramids, they represent not only the intentions of the Pharaohs who built them, but also the millennia of history that has followed. The same arguments could also be applied to large scale monuments such as Hadrian's Wall in Britain. The key is *conservation* not *restoration*  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/asia/l/jomon_pot.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "13dvzg", "title": "Can you help me identify a 1962 (Swedish?) military dress uniform?", "selftext": "Picked this up at a military surplus store in the US.  I believe it's Swedish because the tag on a similar item said that it was Swedish.  This particular jacket didn't have a tag.  It feels like high quality construction, and I believe it to be genuine.  What rank and section of the military was this from?\n\nMe wearing it:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n(it's not clear, but there are three five-pointed stars on the shoulders, with the numeral \"3\" also on the shoulders, on the side furthest away from the neck)\n \n\nLapel badge/pin: (I assume this denotes where the original bearer served)\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\nA label on the inside:\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13dvzg/can_you_help_me_identify_a_1962_swedish_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c734an0"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, that's a Grenadier's badge, but I don't think it's Swedish; the only Swedish Grenadier regiment in 1962 was the Livsregements grenadj\u00e4rer, which had red and white as it's official colours, not solid red.  I'm not 100% up on my Swedish military uniforms from that period, though so I could be wrong.\n\nIf we could get a better picture of the other insignia on the jacket - epaulettes, buttons, etc. - that could help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/Robqm.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/b7lCX.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/Dvx6w.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14jl4s", "title": "What was the difference in GDP between the US and the USSR throughout the Cold War?", "selftext": "I understand that's a long period, but just how big was the gap nominally?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14jl4s/what_was_the_difference_in_gdp_between_the_us_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7dn86n", "c7dxtx1", "c7fxes7"], "score": [6, 2, 2], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nSee the fourth figure. This is probably a better question for google than askhistorians.", "The 1990 CIA Factbook showed the GDP of the soviet union as $2,659,500 millions as opposed to the USA's $250,410,000 millions. The per capita GDP was $9,211 for the Soviets and $21,082 for the USA.", "Thanks for all the help, guys. I appreciate the answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/f_Conclusion/xxKubyshkin_FinalDays.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e5k1h", "title": "How did one become a Roman General?", "selftext": "Specifically a Legatus? And what was their formal education like: both military and civil? What their roles prior to becoming Generals? By this I mean, in modern times, before a soldier becomes a General, he has to go up the ranks from Lieutenant to Captain to Major To Colonel, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e5k1h/how_did_one_become_a_roman_general/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9x21sd"], "score": [18], "text": ["*Specifically* a *Legatus?* Well, there was pretty much one overriding prerequisite to becoming a *legatus.* You had to be born that way. Romans put a great deal of emphasis on people from different classes of their citizenry - and let me explain how that worked real fast. Your class was based off of a few different factors. \n\n* **Citizenship** \n\n* **Ancestry** - determined whether you were a *patrician* (high class folks) or a *plebian* (General citizenry, not necessarily low class)\n\n* **Census rank** - essentially a ranking based on wealth and privilege. If you were rich, you were an *equestrian.* If you were REALLY rich, you were of the *senatorial class.* \n\n* **Attainment of honours** - Essentially allowing for self-made men to make their way up the social ladder. \n\nNow, back to *legates*! A *legate* had to be part of the senatorial class- who were old, privileged families who were generally very very wealthy at the same time. It's essentially like having only the families of politicians as your generals - BUT, of course, there were some slight exceptions to this. Notably, if you could buy an army (Late Republic), you could lead said army (Crassus). \n\nLegates were generally the top dogs in their army, but they DID have to answer to someone, depending on the situation. That person was known as the *dux,* and could be anything from the provincial governor to one of the consuls. However, we're not interested in the dux, so we're going to figure out how you could become a legate.\n\nSo you're from an old, distinguished house in Rome. Your family goes back, and you can trace it all the way back to the 'founding fathers' of Rome. Unfortunately though...your house is relatively poor. You're in debt to a LOT of folks, and all you have to pay them with is promises. To be fair though, you're popular! You're with the young and hip crowd, and the people adore you! They even help you out against the guys you owe debts to, and they (your friends) convince them (the debt holders) to forget about those debts that weren't your fault anyways. Well, not all of them, at least. Well, back to the bad news. The guy in charge of the Roman Republic, which has just been through a terrible civil war, is named Corneius Sulla, and he does NOT like you. In fact, he wants to have you *proscribed* (put on a hit list.) However, you've got REALLY good friends who convince him not to proscribe you (phew), and he's finally convinced, responding with exasperation:\n\n >  \"Have your way - and have your man - but be aware that the man you so desired to save, believing him to be attached to the aristocratic cause for which you have fought alongside me, will be its downfall [He's talking about the Roman Republic here]. For in [him] there are many Mariuses.\"\n\nThat's Sulla essentially saying that you're a worse threat than the guy who caused that civil war in the first place. Meh, he's old and butthurt, he'll get over it eventually, right? I mean, you're really not that bad of a guy, you're just young and hip. Old people. Bah. But hell, it might be best to get out of the area for a bit. Especially because Sulla had stripped you of your role in the priesthood. So, you join the army! And with the help of your friends, you get stationed in Asia. \n\nBecause you've got influential friends, despite your youth (You're only about 21!), you're appointed to the council of the military legate, and you earn honours in battle. During this time on the council of that legate, you learn military strategy, as well as how to run an army. \n\nSkip forward seven years. You've spent time developing your oratory skills as a lawyer, becoming VERY well known and very popular, especially for your aggressive prosecution of former governors. And you get elected to be the *military tribune,* which is a rank above the centurion and right below the legate. It's essentially the gateway position, militarily and politically, and it's a HUGE step - there are six tribunes per legion, generally 5 *equestrians* and one senatorial. The senatorial tribune is the only one with real military power, and is second in command to the legate himself - this tribune often commanded the legions in the absence of the legate. Guess which one you are! :D \n\nSo, after your term as a tribune is up, you rank up again! This time, you're known as a *quaestor*. In the Roman Republic, *quastores* were elected officials who supervised the treasury and financial affairs of the state, its armies and its officers, and who doesn't like handling money. You're back in a civil position, but no worries! You're going to be heading back to the military soon enough. This office is mainly just the gateway to the Senate (to which you get elected), and lets you get even more famous. To help with the whole 'being famous' thing, you spend TONS of money on lavish games and festivals to make the people love you even more than they already do. On top of that, you get yourself elected to the office of *pontifex maximus*, or high priest. Unfortunately.....well, you've spent a TON of money. And that money was....borrowed. And those guys you borrowed from....want some money. And there's no such thing as an official bank in Rome. However....there's something that's a bit more dangerous. And that's an individual who can cover those debts for you - in exchange for a later favour. That man's name was Crassus, and he's known as the richest man in Rome. Crassus covers your debts, but you get yourself appointed to a military position in Hispania - mostly to avoid becoming a private citizen after your term of office was over. Once you became a private citizen after you were a politician, the lawyers descended like VULTURES. Well....congratulations! Your position in Hispania is that of *propraetor,* which grants you control over the legions in the area which you use to put down the rebellions in the province, which earns you a *triumph,* the highest military honour in Rome. \n\nOh right. I forgot to tell you - your name is **Gaius Julius Caesar**, and that's how he moved up the chain of military command ;) \n\n---\n\nBest example that came to mind of a *detailed* account of the path to military generalship. Sorry about the long-windedness ;)\n\n**TL;DR** - Roman generals were even more of politicians than generals in the US Army are today. Knowing people was the path to power, and you had to make lots and lots of friends."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8ak0qi", "title": "During the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, were the Soviets purposely giving ground as they had during Napoleon's invasion, or where they actually being driven back by the German war machine?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ak0qi/during_the_axis_invasion_of_the_soviet_union_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwzadcn"], "score": [7], "text": ["To answer your question briefly, the Soviets were actually driven back by the German war machine. \n\n/u/MrMarbles2000 goes into the [reasons why in this answer](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w91we/why_was_the_soviet_military_so_ineffective_in_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "drm5hm", "title": "How long did it take Allied officials to understand what was happening in the Holocaust, and how did they initially react?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/drm5hm/how_long_did_it_take_allied_officials_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6kv0sk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not to discourage further discussion, but u/commiespaceinvader talks about what allies knew and when in [this previous answer](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6696bw/new_understanding_of_allies_knowledge_of_the/dggmqh6/"]]}
{"q_id": "b0o4wr", "title": "Reliability of Commentaries made by Caesar and Tacitus on the German Peoples", "selftext": "I had read both Julius Caesar's Bellum Gallicum and Tacitus' Germania recently and when comparing to two authors, had a question on how reliable the accounts they provided were. Is there any available commentaries on this subject or key points that would help clarify this matter on whose account can be generally taken as more trustworthy in containing reliable accounts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b0o4wr/reliability_of_commentaries_made_by_caesar_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eihd3ix"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends from what could be considered as reliable : both Caesar and Tacitus extensively used previous scholarly sources (and probably accounts from merchants, envoys, officers, etc.) and while Caesar had direct contact with Germanic peoples during the Gallic Wars, Tacitus probably didn't and wrote what was been sometimes called an \"armchair ethnographic work\".  \nStill, there's no real indication that either Caesar and Tacitus were actively making up things in their accounts and it certainly depicted a set of various realities with regional and chronological mix-up.\n\nIt's not to say their accounts are worthless, far from it. But they have to be considered along other sources, notably archaeological : the main problem of Germania, for instance, was its acritical or biased interpretations, taking for granted Germanic peoples were pure ancestors of Germans (which they weren't, in the ethnic or  historical sense, being mixed up with various other cultural groups) for instance.\n\nMotivations of the authors should be taken in consideration too, keeping in mind sincere interest still played a role both for authors and readers : \n\n\\- Caesar is probably the most straightforward of the two, recycling Gauls' considerations on what differentiated them from Germans (being mostly territorial and ancestry differences, hence why several peoples were listed as Germanic while living in Gaul, and why several German groups seems to have Celtic traits) and stressing the cultural, geographical, economical and political differences, Caesar justified his takeover of Gaulish states further (demonstratively in the name of the Gaulish assemblies and aristocracies). Depicting a fierce and dangerous people, Caesar both legitimize this takeover and justify why he didn't past the Rhine while there were not much clear difference between cisrhenan and transrhenan peoples.\n\n\\- Tacitus' goal is less obvious. While happening in a context of imperial triumphs over Germans (that Tacitus mocks as triumphs without victories), was it a call for an actual imperial policy in not-so-impressive Germans (described there in less flattering terms than Caesar), or a philosophical essay on the nature of Germans and overall societies? Maybe a bit of both.\n\nWe can certainly trust both (and other) authors in the pursuit of these motives, and if not their integrity, at least the ideas that their contemporaries would have made a number of too wild assumptions. Past that, and the usual stereotypes, archaeological sources can provide needed counterpoints to texts that remain really useful giving that such accounts are rare, and whom contents were, while contextualized, not outright disproved.\n\n[Borealism. Caesar, Seneca, Tacitus and the Roman discourse about the Germanic north](_URL_0_) by Christopher Krebs is interesting into depicting the Roman narratives on \"Northerners\"\n\nFrom the same author  : *A most dangerous book, Tacitus' Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich*\n\n[Images du Germain dans la Germanie de Tacite](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.academia.edu/2648309/Borealism._Caesar_Seneca_Tacitus_and_the_Roman_discourse_about_the_Germanic_north", "https://www.persee.fr/doc/vita_0042-7306_2010_num_182_1_1699"]]}
{"q_id": "5fyt3w", "title": "In terms of cultural artifacts, how damaging was the Cultural Revolution in China actually?", "selftext": "I was speaking with someone who thinks that the negative effects of the cultural revolution are overblown, and his question to me was \"Can you actually name any important artifacts that were destroyed?\" \n\n\nI couldn't really though I have to admit Chinese history is not a large topic of interest of mine, but even with further research the most important thing I could identify was some desecration of Confucius' family tomb - which while unfortunate seems quite marginal in the grand scheme of all historical artifacts. The lesson I was taught in school was that in an effort to get rid of \"traditional\" culture and emerge as a true socialist state, Red Guards destroyed lots of historical buildings and artifacts.\n\n\nSo my questions are - is the reputation of the Cultural Revolution as being destructive to Chinese cultural history exaggerated? Or if not, is there any significant knowledge that is permanently lost due to the events during the Cultural Revolution?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fyt3w/in_terms_of_cultural_artifacts_how_damaging_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daol6tf"], "score": [8], "text": ["Follow up question:  can you reccomend any decent documentaries on the cultural revolution? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4x4cxp", "title": "When partitioning Yugoslavia, why did Nazi Germany throw its weight behind the Croats and not the Serbs who were already in positions of power?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x4cxp/when_partitioning_yugoslavia_why_did_nazi_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6cd5ta"], "score": [10], "text": ["Serb here, passionate about learning history so I will try to do my best.\n\nFirst, Yugoslavia had a pact with Germany that allowed them to move troops whenever the wanted. But a few years before the war started there was a coup (British influenced and staged) in Belgrade which put to power the government which declared the pact non-standing and that pretty much angered Hitler. At this point Yugoslavia was starting to bother him.\n\nSecond, in order the break up Yugoslavia, he had to support the Croats because Serbs were the cohesion factor (which didn't make other nations happy but that is another subject). Croats were trying to get independence from 1925 - in one shape or another and serbian monarch and Belgrade government always found a way to stop it from happening. So Croats welcomed the idea of breaking up Kingdom of Yugoslavia.\n\nThird the Serb - Croat feud was reaching a climax (you can see all the horrible things Croats did to Serbs in WWII, especially the only children concentration camp in WWII  - \u0414\u0435\u0447\u0458\u0438 \u043b\u043e\u0433\u043e\u0440 \u0443 \u0421\u0438\u0441\u043a\u0443) and Hitler just picked a side which favored his interests and pushed the button..\n\nSry for bad english and am open to questions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kj291", "title": "What kind of armours and shields where used by Europeans during VI-VIII centuries?", "selftext": "I'm trying to find what kind of equipment people carry to battle for protection during these centuries on Northern France, Denmark, the Netherlands, the British Islands, and North-western Europe in general.\n\nThank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kj291/what_kind_of_armours_and_shields_where_used_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuxtqng", "cuxyb44"], "score": [3, 17], "text": ["[Sutton Hoo](_URL_0_) is arguably the most celebrated early Anglo-Saxon (7th century) archaeological find, and provides some answers.  Specifically, the iconic [Sutton Hoo Helmet](_URL_1_).  This is thought to be the helmet of an Anglo-Saxon king, with [R\u00e6dwald of East Anglia](_URL_2_) the most popular candidate.  Also present are shield fittings which [allow us to reconstruct a shield of the period](_URL_0_#/media/File:Sutton.Hoo.Shield.Minophis.jpg).  In the literature of the period, Beowulf is described as wearing \"isernbyrne\", which is to say \"iron shirt\" (or rather, taking it off: *\"\u00f0a he him of dyde  isernbyrnan\"*).  So we can assume the notion of wearing iron mail was at least familiar to the audience.  \n  \nBut as for the question of what the average member of the [fyrd](_URL_4_) would wear, well, the answer there is \"whatever he brought with him\".  Byrnies and decorative helms seem unlikely, for other than wealthy thegns and kings.  \n  \n*Edit: Just realised I didn't translate \"isernbyrne\" as originally written, making the implication unclear*", "We know a lot about shields. We know less, especially in the British isles, about armor. I'm still coming to grips with the archaeological material for continental Europe, so my answer's rather skewed toward British evidence.\n\n**Shields**\n\nShields were your most common form of bodily protection. They were always made of wooden boards that were glued together edge-to-edge ([modern reconstruction](_URL_4_)). These boards were, so far as we can tell from the archaological evidence, always covered in leather or rawhide (it's hard to tell the difference between leather and rawhide archaeologically, but rawhide would be harder and more effective at stopping the boards from splintering). The shields had a hole cut in the center of the boards across which a handle was riveted or nailed ([like this](_URL_7_)), and this hole was covered with an iron dome called a shield boss ([example, reconstruction](_URL_2_)).\n\nShields shown in contemporary art were always round.\n\nIn England, the boards were usually referred to in poetry as linden wood, but archaeological evidence shows that the most common choice was usually willow or poplar. The boards were thin, but - in England at least - grew thicker over time, from about 5-6mm in the 5th century to 7-8 in the 7th. Shields also, on average, got wider over this period (in England, at least - I'm not as confident about the continent), moving from small (30cm) bucklers toward the larger (90cm) shields we associate with the Vikings. This change in size suggests a change in fighting style, moving from shields as personal, portable protection toward a shield large enough to form a shieldwall formation, covering your whole upper body and locking up with the shield of the men beside you.\n\nThere's little surviving archaeological evidence that these shields were painted (the leather faces of the shields only survive as traces on the rusted ironwork, and any paint is long gone), but illustrations from contemporary art suggest that they usually were.\n\nMy personal reproduction weighs about 5lb, and it's a typical 6th English century size (about 60cm wide).\n\n**Armor**\n\nArmor's a tricky thing from this period. We have references to it in poertry written a few hundred years later (like Beowulf), but not a lot of it shows up in the archaeological evidence. How often was it actually worn, and by whom?\n\n**Helmets**\n\nThe best examples of helmets from this period usually come from graves. In England, we have 5 (or 6) helmets. The most famous is Sutton Hoo, which shows a lot of Swedish influence and was buried in a grave in the early 7th century. It was made from iron, and covered with silver plate into which designs of dancing warrriors and knotwork were hammered. [Here's a high quality reproduction](_URL_3_) (the original was fragmented when the grave it was buried in collapsed). You can see the original and the replica in the British Museum.\n\nWe also have a helmet made from an iron frame covered with cow horn, found in a barrow at Benty Grange in the 19th century. It dates to the mid 7th century. [Here's a reproduction](_URL_1_), and [the original](_URL_5_).\n\nThen there's the [Pioneer Helmet](_URL_8_), which was recently discovered during a construction project and probably dates to the 7th century, the [Coppergate Helmet](_URL_6_), found in a 9th century well but probably made in the 8th, and a [recently discovered helmet from the Isle of Wight](_URL_0_) that looks a lot like examples found on the continent. There were, finally, a bunch of helmet fragments in the Staffordshire Hoard (a recently discovered 7th century stash of battlefield loot), and they appear to be fitting together into [our 6th surviving helmet](_URL_9_), which is pretty cool.\n\nGo to the continent, and we have some similar fancy, expensive helmets appearing in graves (as at Sutton Hoo in England), especially in Vasgarde and Upsala in Sweden. There's ongoing debate about whether the Sutton Hoo helmet was made in Sweden (it looks a lot like the helmets from Upsala), or made in imitation of their style. But this style definitely seems to be a fashion among really rich people in the late 6th and 7th centuries.\n\nIn France, you also see spangenhelms and bandhelms, but I'm still reading up on the archaeology there.\n\nWritten texts (again, often written a little after the period) describe the boars you see on top of helmets like Benty Grange and the Pioneer Helmet, and it's generally assumed that these animal figures offered some sort of magical protection.\n\n**Other armor**\n\nWe have a few examples of mail from the period. The Sutton Hoo grave has what appears to be a full shirt of mail (it's very rusted, and difficult to reconstruct). There's mail in a few really rich graves in Scandinavia too.\n\nWe also have what appear to be splinted arm and leg armor in one of the Swedish graves, made from parallel strips of iron held together with leather bands. [Here's a reconstruction](_URL_10_), commissioned by a UK reenactor (along with the helmet and sword from the same grave).\n\n**But...**\n\nBut, the problem with all this armor is, it's incredibly rare. Shields appear very frequently in archaeological digs. It was common for people in this period to be buried with weapons (usually a spear, in England), and something like 1 in 8 male graves have a shield in them. Weapon burials pose a number of interpretive issues (not every weapon being used necessarily makes it into a grave!), but the sheer volume of shields surviving from these burials makes it clear that there were a lot of them.\n\nArmor is a different matter. Sutton Hoo is almost certainly the grave of a king, and the burials with helmets in Upsala and Valsgarde are also pretty clearly royal burials. They're full of treasue and other objects that suggest their occupants weren't ordinary guys. Almost all of our evidence for armor comes from these kinds of high-status burials.\n\nIn contrast, ordinary people are often buried with weapons and shields, but basically never with armor.\n\nThere are a few ways to interpret this. It could, on the one hand, mean that armor was inherited, not buried with the dead. This is entirely reasonable, but of course means that any such exchanges are archaeologically invisible, so we can't say if the armor that might have existed was common or not. It could also mean that people wore armor made from organic materials like leather or rawhide; we have found rawhide lamellar in a late Roman dig in Syria, so it could have existed elsewhere in the late- and post-Roman world. But again, this is just reasonable speculation, as all traces of this armor - if it existed - have decomposed.\n\nBut the safest answer to give is that, for most of the early middle ages, ordinary people didn't have armor. Perhaps because it was expensive (it was - iron takes an enormous amount of charcoal to produce), or because it was reserved for a particular social class. Perhaps warfare was less professional during this period: in England, at least, most warriors appear to have been primarily engaged in farming, and Guy Halsall has argued that serious conflicts only happened about once a generation in Frankia. But whatever the reason, the evidence suggests that during most of the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, armor was somewhat rare in northwest Europe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sutton_hoo_helmet_room_1_no_flashbrightness_ajusted.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A6dwald_of_East_Anglia", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo#/media/File:Sutton.Hoo.Shield.Minophis.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyrd"], ["http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/BMTRB_6_Hood-et-al.pdf", "http://www.odroerir.com/Bilder/Textinformationen/Sachse.jpg", "http://drentha.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/11392993_825894304722_9105040312285611078_n1.jpg", "https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/102/313113212_bd4bcd0f93.jpg", "http://drentha.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/11427161_825894030272_6893129298510353339_n.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Benty_grange_helm.jpg", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppergate_Helmet", "http://drentha.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/11391155_825894224882_2227293237601443691_n.jpg", "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Helmet", "http://www.bbc.com/news/32880447", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/4c/ac/0d/4cac0da66c637eade7171da380cbb13d.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "703jty", "title": "How have historians of the Holocaust evaluated and contextualized the place of sexual assault as part of our understanding of the Holocaust experience?", "selftext": "Rape during the Holocaust has, apparently, been a fraught subject. Some historians, such as Lawrence Langer, appear to downplay the role of rape in the Holocaust significantly. For example, in this (relatively) recent interview on the subject, [Langer noted](_URL_0_): \n\n > \"I have no doubt that some women were raped,\" says Lawrence L. Langer, a preeminent Holocaust scholar. But while rape is undoubtedly significant for those who are victimized, \"the historical significance is very small in the context of the Holocaust experience,\" Langer says. \"To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened.\"\n\nMy understanding is that even this allowance for rape is a relatively recent turn for Langer and that his earlier work argued for even fewer instances of rape. \n\nAt the same time, historians like Dagmar Herzog have shown pretty conclusively that rape (in the form of forced prostitution) was widespread and could be found in many of the ghettos and camps. Although I can't cite them off the top of my head, I'm also pretty certain that other historians have shown that rape (whether through extortion, \"forcible rape\", or other forms of sexual violence that we would today consider rape) was relatively common, certainly much more common than the relatively low numbers suggested by Langer in the quoted passage above. (Note, he appears to be arguing that rape was extremely uncommon, by saying that those numbers would have to \"be in the thousands\", which suggests that he believes they didn't even reach that threshold. This, in a system of persecution that saw tens of millions of victims). \n\nI'm interested in this older notion of Holocaust scholarship that sees rape as not being a fundamental experience for victims of Nazi persecution. Can anyone here speak to how those older arguments were made and the evidence that they used in doing so? I suspect that part of the problem is that survivors didn't necessarily speak much about rape, and I know for certain that there was a stigma in the immediate post-war period regarding women being seen as having survived by trading sex for food/better treatment. I'd imagine that this phenomenon of the post-war era plays a part, but that's speculation. \n\nSo how did historians of the Holocaust originally argue that rape was not a fundamental experience for victims?\n\nPlease also note: I don't want to limit this to male-on-female rape, as I know that there is a lot of evidence of male-on-male rape as well, especially in the camps (see, for example, Heger's *The Men With the Pink Triangle*). \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/703jty/how_have_historians_of_the_holocaust_evaluated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn0evzq", "dn0evzq"], "score": [40, 40], "text": ["**Part 1**\n\nSo, this CNN article cited here suffers from the usual problems of science reporting in a lot of media, chiefly that some of the things stated there are a bit overstated.\n\nFirst of all, Lawrence Langer has written a lot about Holocaust memory and survivor testimony but to call him a preeminent Holocaust scholar is a bit too much in my opinion. As a PhD and professor of English he has contributed to the field of commemoration and testimony but his contributions as far as historical research into the topic per se go are not that prominent.\n\nSecondly, Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel's book \"Sexual Violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust\" has indeed been an important contribution to the field but also wasn't as revolutionary as the article makes it out to be. Studies in German on the camp in Uckermark for teenage girls or more generally a wave of studies of the female SS personnel from the mid-2000s forward have dealt a lot with sexual politics and sexual violence and Nazi oppression as have a number of more recent and more groundbreaking studies of Anna H\u00e1jkov\u00e1  who wrote \"Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,\" in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (vol. 38, no. 3) spring 2013, Recipient of the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship 2013 or Doris L. Bergen who frequently wrote about the topic as far back as 2003 and Atina Grossmann.\n\nAlso, Langer in his downplaying of sexual violence being part of the Holocaust experience is pretty much in the minority as far as I am aware because older scholars of generations from before the 1980s/early 90s have \u2013 as far as I am aware \u2013 largely ignored the subject despite at least virtual knowledge that it was something that occurred. The most likely reasons for that I will go into later but I want to go into what Langer says above first a bit.\n\n >  Langer says. \"To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened.\"\n\nWhile the second part of that statement is true \u2013 as in we might never know how often it happened \u2013 in terms of the first part, we can get at least an initial estimate. Not only does the article mention at least 17.000 memoirs that point to sexual violence but as I [have gone into in this post](_URL_2_), the frequency of sexual violence enacted by the Wehrmacht especially in Poland and the Soviet Union is just staggering, not just in the face of what little numbers we can construct with certainty (traveling and camp brothels e.g.) but also in terms of how newer scholarship deals with the issue of consent, namely that consent as a process between two adults of roughly equal power within the relationship was massively curbed by the general situation surrounding a war tie occupation that by its very nature creates an imbalanced relationship of power between men with arms and women forced to navigate a physically, socially and other wise extremely hazardous environment. So, while we may never know the exact number, many scholars speak of at least 3-4 million cases of rape committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, many of which certainly involved Jewish and other women (and potentially men though that is even harder to research) as part of the process of victimization during the Holocaust.\n\nNow, as I wrote above, from my reading of the scholarship, the issue of sexual violence is one that starts to appear in academic literature on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution as a subject of research in the 1980s at its earliest and is before that largely not addressed by scholarship but rather simply ignored (at least that is my strong impression of German language scholarship, maybe /u/kieslowskifan might know more?).\n\nAnd it is not like the issue was completely unknown at the time \u2013 there is a whole Israeli genre of literature called \"Stalagim\" that heavily deals with sexual violence in the camps \u2013 albeit in a very pulp manner \u2013 which goes to show that the subject was out there and had to be dealt with at least somehow. But I'll start with the most obvious reason why this subject has been ignored for such a long time:\n\nThe vast majority of academic historians of earlier generations of Holocaust scholars \u2013 and all academic historians really \u2013 were men \u2013 a dynamic that has recently [made progress in terms of new PhDs](_URL_3_) but has still not caught up in terms of institutional representation (as in professorships and so forth) overall. Now, men, whether in academia or not, were back then and are still today massively socially conditioned to regard their own life experiences as the default, both in terms of the society that surrounds them and also, as is relevant in this case, in terms of looking back into and researching history. As I said, this is still the case today but was even more so before the rise of feminist and women's studies perspective and theories in academia and hence, sexual violence, the experience of which is strongly socially coded female (because it is an experience that is in fact an overwhelmingly female one when it comes [to being the victim of sexual violence](_URL_0_)), simply didn't figure into their thinking as an experience that existed and that is worthwhile researching. You can even see this in Langer's position: The fact that he can't \u2013 despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary \u2013 not imagine there having been thousands or even tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence speaks volumes as to how he views a male perspective as the default one in history.\n\nAnd it also bears mentioning in connection to this point that the issue of sexual violence as a part of history of social experience of women overall and not just in terms of the Holocaust, had been ignored by academia for a long time and basically until feminism and women's studies as theoretical frameworks and approaches came along.\n\nThe same, in an even more specific manner, is true for what kind of testimony of survivors of Nazi oppression were socially privileged \u2013 as in heard and noticed by society at large \u2013 for a long time. In the immediate aftermath of the war, continuing a tradition started during the war where [there was public knowledge of the killing of the Jews but it was relegated to the back pages of newspapers](_URL_1_) \u2013 so much so that the NYT issued an apology for that in 2001 \u2013, it was male political victims that the public focus was on, who wrote memoirs, and whose narratives became the default victim of the Nazis narrative in post-war Europe (and stayed that in the socialist countries). The Holocaust, as in the experience of Jews in being relegated to Ghettos, systematically killed in camps and so forth only really started to get public attention with the Eichmann trial and only really became part of the public Western conscious at large with the 1979 TV miniseries Holocaust.\n\nAnd with that came another important shift in academia: The focus on every day lives and individual experiences of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust. Before this point in time, academic history had been extremely structuralist in its approach, meaning it focused on social and political big structures rather than individual experiences of actual humans. The functionalist-intentionalist debate of the 70s and early 80s is a perfect example for this: It almost treats individual historical actors not as actual human beings with choice but rather as either slaves to an ideology with a single minded purpose or automatons within a structural system. But once academia at large underwent methodological and theoretical innovations along the lines of micro-history or cultural history started, victims' and perpetrators' individual experiences started to become more important in the overall focus of research. Christopher Browning's works and Saul Friedl\u00e4nder's writing on integrated history were really what set this in motion.\n\nAnd what also changed was the way the public started to engage with survivors and their testimonies themselves: It was in the 80s and 90s that such a thing like survivor testimonies outside of courtrooms \u2013 in schools, memorial sites and so forth \u2013 really started to become a thing. The linked article mentions that it was the Bosnian wars and the public reporting on sexual violence as a weapon of war that changed what survivors were able to discuss \u2013 and this is absolutely true. There had been a long standing taboo surrounding public testimony about sexual violence for survivors because the social context around them regarded this topic as controversial and taboo. But it also needs to be taken into account that such a thing like survivor's testimony as a social and political project on a grander scale only started in the 80s and 90s \u2013 before that neither academia nor the public had been willing or interested to listen really.\n\n\n\n\n", "**Part 1**\n\nSo, this CNN article cited here suffers from the usual problems of science reporting in a lot of media, chiefly that some of the things stated there are a bit overstated.\n\nFirst of all, Lawrence Langer has written a lot about Holocaust memory and survivor testimony but to call him a preeminent Holocaust scholar is a bit too much in my opinion. As a PhD and professor of English he has contributed to the field of commemoration and testimony but his contributions as far as historical research into the topic per se go are not that prominent.\n\nSecondly, Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel's book \"Sexual Violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust\" has indeed been an important contribution to the field but also wasn't as revolutionary as the article makes it out to be. Studies in German on the camp in Uckermark for teenage girls or more generally a wave of studies of the female SS personnel from the mid-2000s forward have dealt a lot with sexual politics and sexual violence and Nazi oppression as have a number of more recent and more groundbreaking studies of Anna H\u00e1jkov\u00e1  who wrote \"Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,\" in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (vol. 38, no. 3) spring 2013, Recipient of the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship 2013 or Doris L. Bergen who frequently wrote about the topic as far back as 2003 and Atina Grossmann.\n\nAlso, Langer in his downplaying of sexual violence being part of the Holocaust experience is pretty much in the minority as far as I am aware because older scholars of generations from before the 1980s/early 90s have \u2013 as far as I am aware \u2013 largely ignored the subject despite at least virtual knowledge that it was something that occurred. The most likely reasons for that I will go into later but I want to go into what Langer says above first a bit.\n\n >  Langer says. \"To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened.\"\n\nWhile the second part of that statement is true \u2013 as in we might never know how often it happened \u2013 in terms of the first part, we can get at least an initial estimate. Not only does the article mention at least 17.000 memoirs that point to sexual violence but as I [have gone into in this post](_URL_2_), the frequency of sexual violence enacted by the Wehrmacht especially in Poland and the Soviet Union is just staggering, not just in the face of what little numbers we can construct with certainty (traveling and camp brothels e.g.) but also in terms of how newer scholarship deals with the issue of consent, namely that consent as a process between two adults of roughly equal power within the relationship was massively curbed by the general situation surrounding a war tie occupation that by its very nature creates an imbalanced relationship of power between men with arms and women forced to navigate a physically, socially and other wise extremely hazardous environment. So, while we may never know the exact number, many scholars speak of at least 3-4 million cases of rape committed by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, many of which certainly involved Jewish and other women (and potentially men though that is even harder to research) as part of the process of victimization during the Holocaust.\n\nNow, as I wrote above, from my reading of the scholarship, the issue of sexual violence is one that starts to appear in academic literature on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution as a subject of research in the 1980s at its earliest and is before that largely not addressed by scholarship but rather simply ignored (at least that is my strong impression of German language scholarship, maybe /u/kieslowskifan might know more?).\n\nAnd it is not like the issue was completely unknown at the time \u2013 there is a whole Israeli genre of literature called \"Stalagim\" that heavily deals with sexual violence in the camps \u2013 albeit in a very pulp manner \u2013 which goes to show that the subject was out there and had to be dealt with at least somehow. But I'll start with the most obvious reason why this subject has been ignored for such a long time:\n\nThe vast majority of academic historians of earlier generations of Holocaust scholars \u2013 and all academic historians really \u2013 were men \u2013 a dynamic that has recently [made progress in terms of new PhDs](_URL_3_) but has still not caught up in terms of institutional representation (as in professorships and so forth) overall. Now, men, whether in academia or not, were back then and are still today massively socially conditioned to regard their own life experiences as the default, both in terms of the society that surrounds them and also, as is relevant in this case, in terms of looking back into and researching history. As I said, this is still the case today but was even more so before the rise of feminist and women's studies perspective and theories in academia and hence, sexual violence, the experience of which is strongly socially coded female (because it is an experience that is in fact an overwhelmingly female one when it comes [to being the victim of sexual violence](_URL_0_)), simply didn't figure into their thinking as an experience that existed and that is worthwhile researching. You can even see this in Langer's position: The fact that he can't \u2013 despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary \u2013 not imagine there having been thousands or even tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence speaks volumes as to how he views a male perspective as the default one in history.\n\nAnd it also bears mentioning in connection to this point that the issue of sexual violence as a part of history of social experience of women overall and not just in terms of the Holocaust, had been ignored by academia for a long time and basically until feminism and women's studies as theoretical frameworks and approaches came along.\n\nThe same, in an even more specific manner, is true for what kind of testimony of survivors of Nazi oppression were socially privileged \u2013 as in heard and noticed by society at large \u2013 for a long time. In the immediate aftermath of the war, continuing a tradition started during the war where [there was public knowledge of the killing of the Jews but it was relegated to the back pages of newspapers](_URL_1_) \u2013 so much so that the NYT issued an apology for that in 2001 \u2013, it was male political victims that the public focus was on, who wrote memoirs, and whose narratives became the default victim of the Nazis narrative in post-war Europe (and stayed that in the socialist countries). The Holocaust, as in the experience of Jews in being relegated to Ghettos, systematically killed in camps and so forth only really started to get public attention with the Eichmann trial and only really became part of the public Western conscious at large with the 1979 TV miniseries Holocaust.\n\nAnd with that came another important shift in academia: The focus on every day lives and individual experiences of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust. Before this point in time, academic history had been extremely structuralist in its approach, meaning it focused on social and political big structures rather than individual experiences of actual humans. The functionalist-intentionalist debate of the 70s and early 80s is a perfect example for this: It almost treats individual historical actors not as actual human beings with choice but rather as either slaves to an ideology with a single minded purpose or automatons within a structural system. But once academia at large underwent methodological and theoretical innovations along the lines of micro-history or cultural history started, victims' and perpetrators' individual experiences started to become more important in the overall focus of research. Christopher Browning's works and Saul Friedl\u00e4nder's writing on integrated history were really what set this in motion.\n\nAnd what also changed was the way the public started to engage with survivors and their testimonies themselves: It was in the 80s and 90s that such a thing like survivor testimonies outside of courtrooms \u2013 in schools, memorial sites and so forth \u2013 really started to become a thing. The linked article mentions that it was the Bosnian wars and the public reporting on sexual violence as a weapon of war that changed what survivors were able to discuss \u2013 and this is absolutely true. There had been a long standing taboo surrounding public testimony about sexual violence for survivors because the social context around them regarded this topic as controversial and taboo. But it also needs to be taken into account that such a thing like survivor's testimony as a social and political project on a grander scale only started in the 80s and 90s \u2013 before that neither academia nor the public had been willing or interested to listen really.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/24/holocaust.rape/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4791564/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6696bw/new_understanding_of_allies_knowledge_of_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zo976/how_many_rapes_were_committed_total_in_world_war_2/", "https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2010/what-the-data-reveals-about-women-historians"], ["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4791564/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6696bw/new_understanding_of_allies_knowledge_of_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zo976/how_many_rapes_were_committed_total_in_world_war_2/", "https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2010/what-the-data-reveals-about-women-historians"]]}
{"q_id": "2l595i", "title": "How did football manage to become a truly global game, whereas other popular British team sports such as Rugby and Cricket, are mostly only popular within the former British Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l595i/how_did_football_manage_to_become_a_truly_global/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clrny2u", "clrow01"], "score": [25, 20], "text": ["Please, if you're coming here to answer the question, make sure your answer is indeed comprehensive, in-depth and informed, such as an historian might give. Your guesses, opinions and assumptions aren't acceptable and will be deleted. Which is what happened to *every single comment in this thread* before this one.\n\nThank you.", "Since the entire thread has been nuked heres some links to some similar questions that have been asked before:\n\n* [Why is football not a major sport in many countries of the former British Empire?](_URL_3_)\n* [Why did cricket become popular in some former British colonies (India, Pakistan, West Indies, Australia etc) but not others (Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, USA, etc)?](_URL_6_)\n* [How did cricket get so popular in India](_URL_1_)\n* [Why is soccer the sport of the world instead of, say, cricket, or baseball?](_URL_2_)\n* [Why isn't Soccer the most popular sport in the former 'white' dominions of the British Empire?](_URL_8_)\n* [Why did cricket not catch on in Canada like it did in the rest of the former British Colonies?](_URL_5_)\n* [Why didn't Australia, or many other commonwealth countries, embrace soccer as their primary football code?](_URL_7_)\n* [Nearly all of the world's most popular sports seem to have been invented in English-speaking countries. Why?](_URL_0_)\n* [Can anybody explain when and how rugby, football, soccer, etc. developed?](_URL_4_)\n\nHope these help"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s09cl/nearly_all_of_the_worlds_most_popular_sports_seem/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16z2zj/how_did_cricket_get_so_popular_in_india/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mmphe/why_is_soccer_the_sport_of_the_world_instead_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u5p6l/why_is_football_not_a_major_sport_in_many/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ofbu/can_anybody_explain_when_and_how_rugby_football/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o9uga/why_did_cricket_not_catch_on_in_canada_like_it/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tu4f3/why_did_cricket_become_popular_in_some_former/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tv78h/why_didnt_australia_or_many_other_commonwealth/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yzglf/why_isnt_soccer_the_most_popular_sport_in_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "13nist", "title": "Why did it take so long for the Spanish Reconquista to take Granada? ", "selftext": "I'm sure many of you saw [This Video](_URL_0_) posted in /r/history.\n\nThe relevant part take up about the fist minute, in Spain of course.\n\nAlthough there are no time stamps, it's easy to tell that the Muslim state of Granada was allowed to exist for a long time after most of Iberia was retaken by Castile.\n\nWhy is that? Was it just that difficult to conquer, or were there political reasons like In-fighting within Castile, problems with other nations, Castile believing it could be of some use to them?\n\nI always knew that the reconquest took a while, but this seems really odd. \n\nI'd ask what the hell is going on in Germany, France, and Italy, but I don't think any of have that kind of time.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13nist/why_did_it_take_so_long_for_the_spanish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c75jqon"], "score": [8], "text": ["Mostly, they stopped bothering. In 1236, Cordoba fell to the Castillians, and Granada realised which way this was going, and aligned themselves with the Castillians as a tributary state (meaning they paid money to not be conquered, essentially), allowing the Castillians to focus on taking Sevilla. By 1252 Granada was the only remaining Muslim state in Iberia, and since they were still paying tribute, the Castillians really just never bothered to push on. It wasn't until the end of the 15th century when Isabelle and Ferdinand got ideas about a unified Spain under their rule that Granada became an interesting target."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=ugqGueQ9Ud8"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ws7jm", "title": "How would I go about trying to find information about a plane crash from WW2?", "selftext": "Sorry if this isn't the right place but I've tried other subreddits and didn't get any answers. I also couldn't find any thing in this sub's archives.\n\nLong story short: My dad was a child in Hungary during WW2 and he said one day a plane got shot down just outside of his village and the pilot was taken prisoner. He is pretty sure it was American.\n\nAre there any resources I could be pointed to that could help me find records of it? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ws7jm/how_would_i_go_about_trying_to_find_information/", "answers": {"a_id": ["decpf01", "ded1kad"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Yikes that's going to be a pain to find.  Your best bet would be local archives in Hungary if there are any.  There were many planes that went down during WW2, so finding one in particular, especially if it wasn't a major crash.  If you knew where the prisoner was kept, you might be able to find prison records.  Even just googling \"WW2 prisoners of war\" might help.\n\nI would go ahead and say Hungarian archives are your best bet.\n\nThe closest thing I found was this article _URL_0_", "The USAAF prepared Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR) for lost aircraft; from [the Air Force Historical Support Division] (_URL_2_):\n\n\"The information contained in a typical MACR includes a date, time, and location that the crew and aircraft were last seen or reported missing from the formation. Details about aircraft incidents were taken from statements given by crew members from other aircraft flying in the same formation. These statements usually mentioned whether any parachutes were seen to have opened and how many airmen exited the aircraft before it crashed. The names of the missing air crew member(s) were listed by crew position, rank, serial number, and known status such as MIA or POW.\n\nAdditional information included in the MACR is the aircraft AAF serial (tail) number; nickname or squadron identification letter; and the type, model, and serial number of the engine(s) or machine gun(s). The name of the assigned air base and numbered unit (squadron, group, or air force) to which an aircraft belonged also appears in the MACR.\"\n\nThere's a searchable index of MACRs at _URL_4_ , but unfortunately the summary information is by date, aircraft type and serial number rather than location (location information could be of variable quality). \n\nIf you don't mind doing a bit of digging, Joe Baugher has compiled an extensive list of US aircraft serial numbers on [his website] (_URL_0_usafserials.html) with potted histories. If you plug:\n\n     hungary site:_URL_0_\n\n into Google it will come back with all mentions of Hungary from where you can drill into particular lists. Locations seem to vary from \"Hungary\" to \"NE of Budapest\" to \"8 km SW of Mosonmagyarovar, Hungary\", so I'm not sure what the chances are of being able to pinpoint a particular instance. If you do find a likely candidate then the index number of the MACR should be listed, and you may be able to access it at [Fold3] (_URL_1_), possibly via the free trial.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081001375.html"], ["http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_serials/", "https://www.fold3.com/documents/28597484/missing_air_crew_reports_wwii/", "http://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/FactSheets/tabid/3323/Article/754820/missing-air-crew-reports-from-wwii-macrs.aspx", "http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_serials/usafserials.html", "http://data.armyairforces.com/Data-Sets/MACR"]]}
{"q_id": "2qremm", "title": "There is no December 25 in the Bible. How did this date become celebrated as Jesus's birthday?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qremm/there_is_no_december_25_in_the_bible_how_did_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn95wpe"], "score": [15], "text": ["Even scholarly sources get tainted by inference on this topic, so perhaps it will be of some use to expose you to some of the primary evidence.\n\nIn the first place, some other posts I've seen here cite 354 CE as the year that Christmas was *instituted*. What that date actually represents is the *earliest attestation* of Christ's birth being celebrated on 25 December, in a document known as the \"354 Calendar\" or the \"354 Chronology\". [Here's a copy of the relevant part of the text.](_URL_3_)* But \"earliest attestation\" is not the same thing as \"that's when it was first instituted\". The likelihood is that that choice of date was earlier; though it's up for debate whether that means a couple of decades earlier, or a couple of centuries earlier.\n\n(\\***Edit.** Oops, linked to the wrong part of the 354 Calendar. Fixed now.)\n\nNow, there are some earlier sources that could *potentially* be thought of as pointing towards celebration of Christ's birth -- or the Incarnation, depending on the theological flavour of the source -- at an earlier date. They are:\n\n1. The late 2nd century/early 3rd century writer Clement of Alexandria at one point claims that some people assigned Christ's birth to \"the 25th day of Pachon\", and others to \"the 24th or 25th day of Pharmouthi\". These are dates in the Alexandrian calendar, which had been adopted as a standard solar calendar in parts of the eastern Roman Empire ca. 30 BCE. When you translate these dates into the Julian calendar they're nowhere near December (they come out as 20 May and 19/20 April, respectively), but the focus on the 25th (or 24th) day of the month is rather conspicuous, even so. Of course it could be coincidence. Moreover, there are alternative interpretations of Clement's dates: see S. Roll, [*Towards the Origins of Christmas* (Kok Pharos: Kampen, 1995), pp. 78-9](_URL_4_)).\n\n2. A reference to Christ's birth on 25 December in an early 3rd-century writer, Hippolytus of Rome's *Commentary on Daniel* 4.23. This reference is useless, though: it's definitely an interpolation of mediaeval date. One manuscript of Hippolytus omits the date altogether; another may possibly give the date as 2 April (but that text appears to be corrupt); and other writers of the first millennium quote Hippolytus differently. See further [this open-access page](_URL_5_); S. Hijmans, [\"Sol Invictus, the winter solstice, and the origins of Christmas\", *Mouseion* 3.s. 3 (2003): 377-98](_URL_2_), at 377 with n. 3; and [Roll, pp. 79-81,](_URL_6_) especially p. 80 with n. 106. The upshot is that most textual critics accept the 2 April date as being, if not the original text, at least closer to what Hippolytus wrote than the 25 December date.\n\n3. A statue of Hippolytus of Rome, dated to 222-235, has inscribed on it a table converting the date 14 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar (the traditional date of Pascha for early Christians outside Judaea) to the Julian calendar for various years. Since Pascha shifted around relative to gentile calendars, it was useful to have a reference table. For one year, ca. 30 CE, 14 Nisan is converted to 25 March, potentially suggesting a death-date for Christ on that day. A convoluted argument could feasibly maintain that this also represents the date of his conception; using a straightforward nine-month gestation period, this would put his birth on 25 December. Again this could potentially be coincidence. More details in [Roll, pp. 79-80.](_URL_6_)\n\n4. A text falsely attributed to Cyprian, the *De Pascha computus* (\"computations concerning Pascha\"), written in 243, at sections 18-23 puts the creation of the cosmos on 25 March; the creation of the sun on 28 March; and therefore also the *genesis* of Christ, the \"Sun of righteousness\" (a phrase in Malachi 4.2 which according to Christian tradition refers to Jesus), on 28 March. The author expressly claims divine inspiration for these dates. The word *genesis* would normally be translated \"birth\", but a number of writers use it instead to refer to conception -- for example, Clement of Alexandria at *Stromateis* 3.12.83.2. On that interpretation, that would translate to a birth-date of 25 December or 28 December (depending on which date you think pseudo-Cyprian made up).\n\nAll of these earlier references are at worst simply wrong, at best uncertain. So 354 ends up as the earliest *uncontroversial* date for an assignment of Christ's birth to 25 December.\n\nAs an endnote I should perhaps mention that there is basically no reason to suspect that Christmas was adapted from one of various pagan festivals. The usual candidates are the winter solstice, Saturnalia (17-19 December), Brumalia (exact date unknown), and a festival of Sol Invictus \"the unconquered sun\" (25 December). \n\n* Winter solstice: 25 December is not the winter solstice, and the ancients were perfectly well aware of that fact. Moreover, there were no festivals dedicated to celebrating the winter solstice (until Brumalia came along, at a late date: see below).  \n[**Edit,** written a bit over a month later. It turns out this isn't quite so simple. Around the time of Jesus' birth, say 1 CE, the solstice did in fact fall on 25 December (Julian calendar). However, in 325, the date of the Council of Nicaea, at which the date of Easter was formally decided, the solstice fell on 19 December (Julian). Given that, and given that Christmas never had a shifting date to be in synch with the solstice, it'd be hard to sustain a case for Christmas as a solstice festival.]\n* Saturnalia: also the wrong date; there's nothing to link the two festivals in terms of specific customs; and Saturnalia continued to be celebrated alongside Christmas after the Christianisation of the Roman Empire.\n* Brumalia: in some ways an even worse candidate than Saturnalia, as it's not attested very early (earliest attestation is in the late 2nd century CE), and the date is even more wrong (it was initially celebrated on 24 November). It too continued to be celebrated alongside Christmas after the Christianisation of the Empire, at least as late as Justinian. On the other hand, in the Byzantine era it was combined with Saturnalia and some customs associated with Saturnalia/Brumalia (which included gift-giving, in the case of Brumalia) may possibly have been reassigned to Christmas as the pagan festivals gradually dwindled in importance.\n* Sol Invictus: a festival for Sol Invictus is first attested in the 354 Calendar, the same document that gives us Christmas on 25 December. So there's nothing to suggest which had priority. More importantly, there's nothing to suggest any connection between them (other than the date): this festival of Sol Invictus (there were other festivals of Sol) was a state cult associated with a specific temple; Christmas wasn't localised in that way.\n\nTL;DR: the earliest *evidence* for Christmas on 25 December comes from the year 354. It was most probably earlier, but how much earlier is a matter for dispute. There is nothing to suggest Christmas was an adaptation of an earlier pagan festival.\n\n---\n\nSo much for clearing away misinformation. Actually answering the question as posed is a lot harder, and I think needs a specialist in early Christianity. [One old post on the subject](_URL_0_) by /u/Gadarn states the following, and it seems to be a widespread view though I'm not familiar with the evidence for it:\n\n >   The most popular view is that early Christians derived the date from the date of the Passion of Christ which had been established earlier as March 25th. The idea is that the time between Christ's conception and death was exact to the year so, if he was conceived on March 25th then he was born on December 25th.\n\n[In another old post](_URL_1_), /u/talondearg points out\n\n >  The date of Christmas was calculated on the belief that great prophets and the like, were born and died on the same day of the month. The historian Tighe argues, and some patristic evidence supports, that when Easter was fixed, it lead to the calculation of Christmas as 25th Mar. The only rival date was Apr 6th, based on different calculations of Easter (yes, I realise Easter is movable because of the lunar calendar, but we are talking about the calculation of the first Easter in particular).\n\nI don't have the chops to support or refute their view; only to say that this appears to be the mainstream view on the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t7hbg/what_are_the_historic_facts_about_december_25th/ce567j0", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sgz6v/happy_festiviuswinter_solsticechristmasyule_etc/cdxn7ay", "http://www.academia.edu/968841/_Sol_Invictus_the_Winter_Solstice_and_the_Origins_of_Christmas_Mouseion_Number_47_3_2003_277-298", "http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chronography_of_354_12_depositions_martyrs.htm", "http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=6MXPEMbpjoAC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA78#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://chronicon.net/blog/chronology/hippolytus-and-the-original-date-of-christmas/", "http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=6MXPEMbpjoAC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA79#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "ailerm", "title": "Why is army, division, brigade, etc... numbering so seemingly random?", "selftext": "Disclaimer: I asked this like half a year ago but did not recieve a suffcient answer to my liking yet, so I am trying it again.\n\nThis seems to be a constant phenomenon across all armies from the Napoleonic Wars onwards to WW2 and even up until today. \n\nYou have things like the 1st, 5th and 38th Army when there are no numbers inbetween, then you have the 2nd and 6th tank division with the 23rd panzer battalion and 347th infantry brigade. \n\nFor a better example, just look up the current German OOB for example. Or the OOBs of the armies in WW2. Or the Cold War. Or... you see what I mean.\n\nI understand that when you shuffle units around you will get a 36th infantry division under the 6th army with the 3rd battalion. But what I am talking about is that there is a 6th army when there isnt even a 5th army. For an example of how I would do it:\n\n1. Army\n  1. Infantry Division\n    1. Infantry Battalion\n    1. Artillery Battery\n  2. Infantry Division\n  1. Tank Division\n2. Army\n  3. Infantry Division\n  2. Tank Division\n\nI hope I could make it clear what I am referring to.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ailerm/why_is_army_division_brigade_etc_numbering_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeoyqpn", "eeozmob"], "score": [55, 39], "text": ["I answered a similar question to this some time ago [here](_URL_0_), but I'll repeat it below with some additional information. Non-sequential numbering in seemingly sequential units sometimes arose naturally, out of specific regulations as I've described below, or it was used to purposefully confuse enemy intelligence; they could not describe the exact composition of all of one specific type of unit, what they were bound to face when they heard a specific unit or group of units was coming their way, or deduct exactly how many there really were, wither in the combat zone or preparing to enter it.\n\n", "This is a...huge question. There's so many different variations from army to army and time period to time period. Every army has its own little quirks and practices. Sometimes numbers are chosen very deliberately and have a meaning, sometimes they're just products of how an army grew and evolved. \n\nSometimes, unit's designation might not be \"rational,\" but **the number contains important information about the unit's origins.** For example, you might noticed that U.S. Army tank destroyer units have oddly-clustered numbers. The 601st, 767th, and 805th Tank Destroyer Battalions all fight in Tunisia in 1942, for example. There's some logic to this scheme. \n\nIn 1941, the U.S. Army had taken all the anti-tank battalions in the entire U.S. Army and re-designated them as \"tank destroyer battalions.\" They were given numbers that reflected their origins - battalions from infantry division were in the 600s, battalions from armored divisions were in the 700s, and battalions from the the GHQ field  artillery battalions were given 800-series numbers.\n\nThe Army tried to keep the 600-series units with their old infantry divisions (i.e. 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion with the 1st Infantry Division, etc.). Some the 601st to the 64th Tank Destroyer Battalions were matched with the 1st to 45th Infantry Divisions. However, this all got mixed up as units were disbanded or reassigned as needed. Winning the war was more important than keeping number straight. \n\nConstantly re-numbering battalions to keep the neat numbering battalion-matched-to-division scheme would have created an organizational *nightmare*. Imagine this, the 601st TD Battalion is attached to the 1st Infantry Division when it orders some spare tires. The tires are despatched and en route. Before they can get there, the 601st is reassigned to a new division given a new number. Are the tires going to get to the right place?  \n\nThe same scheme was also used in some air forces. For example, during WWII many RAF units were given numbers that matched their origins. No. 300 to No. 352 Squadron all had aircrew from countries in Occupied Europe, like the famous No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron. No. 400 to No. 490 were all flown by RAAF, RNZAF, or RCAF crews from Australian, New Zealand, and Canada, respectively. \n\nIn other cases, **the number contains important information about the units' role or branch of service.** Going back to the RAF, No. 651 to No. 666 Squadrons were Air Observation Post (AOP) squadrons that flew as artillery spotters. And the Fleet Air Arm (originally under RAF control until 1939, when it transferred to the Royal Navy) was organized into squadrons with numbers in the 700s and 800s. \n\nIn other cases, **unit designations were jumbled deliberately as part of deception operations.** The Special Air Service got its start in 1941 as \"L\" Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, even though the Special Air Service Brigade didn't exist and Detachments A through K were equally imaginary. Founder David Stirling had wanted to fool the Germans into thinking there was a much larger force of paratroopers. In reality, L Detachment only had 65 soldiers!\n\nThis deception could also be done on a *much* larger scale. In preparation for the invasion of Occupied Europe in 1944, the Americans and British launched Operation Fortitude, a massive deception campaign to fool the Germans of their real intentions. Of Fortitude's children was the phantom First United States Army Group (FUSAG). \n\nOne would imagine the *First* Army Group would be tasked with the important job of making the main landings in Europe (in reality, the job went to 21st Army Group). Allied planners certainly hoped the Germans would make that assumption. To further sell the deception, Allied planners created phony divisions like the British 2nd Airborne Division and the American 25th US Armored Division. They transmitted radio traffic and leaked messages to German intelligence to reveal the \"existence\" of these units\n\nIf you've ever wondered why are some missing U.S. Infantry Divisions with numbers in the 50s, this is why.  The 50th, 55th, and 59th Infantry Division were all phony divisions \"assigned\" to various deception plans.\n\nAnd yes, **units do get shuffled.** Imagine you have several matched sets of china in your kitchen. Blue in one cupboard, white in another, and so on. Since you're well-organized, you want to keep each set in its own cupboard. But then you have a lot of guests over - so you have to take down one set. A plate gets dropped and you have to replace it with one from another set. The party's over and your washing up, but you're in a hurry, so you put the plates away wherever there's room. By the end of the night, you have blue and white china mixed in one cabinet and red and white china in another. \n\nThat's how modern armies work and have worked. There's a crisis and the nearest units get sent out, regardless of number. A unit's been garrisoned in one place and it doesn't make sense to move them closer to a unit with a similar number. A unit gets wiped out and has to be replaced with another one. And so on.\n\n \n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gppf7/why_were_the_german_naming_conventions_for_its/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1uq5a9", "title": "Why did Germanic kingdoms in modern France, Spain and Italy end up adopting the languages of the substrate populations while in England the opposite occurred?", "selftext": "Roman Spain, France and Italy all were conquered by Germanic tribes (Visigoths, Franks and Lombards respectively) who created kingdoms there in late antiquity. These kingdoms all ended up speaking the language of the general population and abandoning the Germanic languages of the ruling class.\n\nA similar invasion occurred in post-roman Britain but in this case the kingdoms kept their Germanic languages and it was the native Romano-Celtic languages that were abandoned.\n\nIs there any explanation for this difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uq5a9/why_did_germanic_kingdoms_in_modern_france_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cekuf5o"], "score": [3], "text": ["Britain was *abandoned* by the Romans. Around 410, the last legion stationed there was recalled to defend the continent, and Roman civilization in the island collapsed subsequently in the face of the invasions.\n\nThe Visigoths, the Franks and the Ostrogoths all settled in Spain, France and former Yugoslavia/later Italy in connivence with the Romans, as autonomous allies/vassals called *Foederati*. These peoples adopted aspects of Roman culture as their own, including the Latin language. As the Western Roman Empire finally decomposed, the *Foederati* just gradually gained more autonomy until they carved all territory into their own kingdoms. In this case, there was no clear rupture with the Roman past, and the \"Barbarians\" preserved more Roman culture than they eliminated.\n\nI don't really know much about the Lombards, but they arrived in Italy centuries after the others."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "al9kk3", "title": "what authoritative and up to date papers can I read about the cause(s) of the Black Death?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve been reading Cohn on yersinia pestis perhaps not being the cause of the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague as well as the plague of Justinian. I gather he is controversial. Who should I read to get opposing perspectives? I want to know the current prevailing theories and questions as well as the cutting edge.\n\nI gather there are recent genetic findings. Are these more preliminary and suggestive, or robust and conclusive? My hard science background is insufficient to read these studies critically.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/al9kk3/what_authoritative_and_up_to_date_papers_can_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efcc058"], "score": [5], "text": ["I suppose the works of Ole J. Benedictow should be still authorities for the Black death:  \n\n* Benedictow, Ole J. *The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History*. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004; 2nd ed. 2017.\n* ________. '*Yersinia pestis*, the Bacterium of Plague, Arose in East Asia. Did it Spread Westwards via the Silk Roads, the Chinese Maritime Expeditions of Zheng He or over the Vast Eurasian Populations of Sylvatic (Wild) Rodents?' *Journal of Asian History* 47-1 (2013): 1-31.  \n\nAlternatively, I'm waiting for the monograph of John Aberth on the Black Death, but what he have published so far is just to update his primary source collection (though very useful).  \n\nAberth, John (ed.). *The Black Death, The Great Mortality of 1348-1350 (Bedford Series in History and Culture).* 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.\n\nI afraid these are most up-to-date and the latest genetic researches have perhaps sill not incorporated in the monograph of the history of the Black Death (I only have the 1st ed. of these books, so I also kinda have to update......).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4r6c54", "title": "What country spoke English first?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r6c54/what_country_spoke_english_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4yo4hf"], "score": [24], "text": ["Maybe you should elaborate on your question. Currently, it sounds as though you believed English started as an international language like Esperanto, instead of originating in, well, England."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21c965", "title": "What were the most common type of cars used for Bootlegging?", "selftext": "I'm writing a story on bootlegging, mainly for myself, in the late 1920's during prohibition.  I can't really find what kind of cars were used, or the most sought after types.  Can you help a menial writer out?  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21c965/what_were_the_most_common_type_of_cars_used_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgboqls", "cgc53du"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Funny enough, the history of bootleggers and moonshiners also blends into the history of NASCAR. The American Historical Vehicle Association has put together a short article on the subject that basically says during the 1930s and 40s [the Ford V8 coupe was preferred for it's speed.](_URL_0_)", "Cars or trucks? Succesful bootleggers were selling in bulk, so Model T (and later Model A) trucks were popular. The REO Speed Wagon was also very popular, it had a bigger engine than the Fords and could run faster. Some 20's cars known as legendary bootlegger cars are the Hudson Super-Six and the Studebaker 6, a model so popular with bootleggers it was nicknamed the \"Whiskey 6\". \n\n Stutz was the number one sports car and racing company in the 20's, sort of equivalent to Ferrarri today in that respect but more approachable pricewise.  The Stutz V8 was a bootlegger model fast enough to evade the police or the klan (the popular KKK of the 20's ran morality crusades and sometimes targeted bootleggers). Buicks and Lincolns were also popular with more well heeled bootleggers, these were both semi-luxury models but quite fast.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.historicvehicle.org/News/Articles/All-Articles/2013/12/10/Moonshine-Cars"], []]}
{"q_id": "7jvfe1", "title": "Why was British General Election of 1940 cancelled?", "selftext": "Was there a fear that a \"pro-Peace\" party might win?  Were there any prominent politicians who advocated negotiations with Germany?  How did the British public respond to the cancelled elections?  Was it considered constitutional at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jvfe1/why_was_british_general_election_of_1940_cancelled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dr9l89m", "dr9y2kj"], "score": [7, 8], "text": ["If it's permitted to expand a question it would also be interesting to know *how* it was cancelled. Was there a vote in the Commons or did the two main parties simply agree that the PM needn't call an election.", "My lords, I rise to thank my noble friend for his interest in the topic, and I hope I might illuminate the matter to his entire satisfaction.\n\nOne might first refer to several previous discussions addressed to your Lordships,\n\n* [In WW2 elections were suspended for ten years in the UK, what was the mechanism for this?](_URL_5_), in particular the comment by my noble friend Lord /u/petros08\n* [Why didn't Britain hold elections during WWII?](_URL_2_), again with my noble friend expanding his comments, and additionally by my noble friend Lord /u/wizzyhatz\n\nThey are certainly good brief introductions to the subject.\n\nBut I have looked into Hansard, the [records of the proceedings in Parliament](_URL_0_), and, deeply influenced by them, I think it profitable to expand on the answers previously given to your Lordships.\n\nThe issue pressed on Parliament.  The Septennial Act of 1715, as amended by the Parliament Act of 1911, forbad a parliament to extend past five years from its first meeting.  The parliament of the day had first sat on 26 November 1935.\n\nI should like to refer to the divers answers given in [the Lords on 5 November 1940, vol. 117 cc. 577-84](_URL_3_), on the occasion of the first bill.\n\nThe noble and learned Lord Chancellor (Viscount Simon) referred first to the legal preliminaries and precedent to which I have alluded [in another comment](_URL_1_).  He also mentioned difficulties with maintaining the register of electors.\n\nMy noble friend Lord Addison expanded on it, with \"on account of the difficulties of registration and other difficulties connected with the enormous displacement of population, it would be a practical impossibility to hold an Election just now, apart from the reasons connected with the war itself and the necessity for the non-diversion of our mental and physical energies from war ends\".\n\nMy noble friend Viscount Samuel asserted that there was unanimity on the issues before the kingdom.  There would be no issues to place before the people, and the existing governing coalition would probably agree not to contest existing seats, so that the new parliament would return practically the same House of Commons.  \"There would, however, be this difference, that the same old Parliament would be given the status of a new one, and the present artificial conditions would have their effect during a period of perhaps four or five years. That would not really be to strengthen the control of the people over Parliament, but in effect would be detrimental to it.\"\n\nOr, alternately, elections might be contested, but over side issues not related to the war, \"That might perhaps result in a House of Commons being elected which would not reflect the permanent desires of the electorate.\"  And it would be difficult for the coalition leaders to continue \"while their political followers were fighting for their electoral lives\".\n\nHe expanded on the previous points about the register not being updated, large displacement of populations, and \"there are difficulties with regard to the black-out and political meetings which would greatly detract from the effectiveness of any General Election\".\n\nI see no sign of there being a vote count in that year, regardless of the house, just a note that it passed on the third reading.  In a debate in another place, on [Parliament (Elections and Meeting) Bill of 26 October 1943](_URL_6_), Mr. Morrison noted, \"there is usually a minority of nine or to Members on the Prolongation of Parliament Bills\".  But division happened in the Commons, not in the happy precincts of your Lordships.  I see a division on the second reading in the Commons, [here](_URL_4_), 30 September 1942, Mr. McGovern (Glasgow, Shettleston), \"On the first occasion, we challenged a Division in connection with this legislation, but the House overwhelmingly accepted the point of view that there should not be an election. At that time, the country accepted that view also, to a large extent. We carried the matter to a Division and recorded four or five votes.\".  I cannot help but mention a bit later,\n\n >  Mr. McGovern  Will hon. Members give me an opportunity to complete the point? \n > \n >  Sir R. Ross      The hon. Member must be accurate. \n > \n >  Mr. McGovern    I am trying to be accurate. \n > \n >  Sir R. Ross      The hon. Member is not very successful. \n\nThe division on this occasion: Ayes, 215; Noes, 9.\n\nI can find no division in 1943 or 1944.  There were a few non-Coalition members, Common Wealth Party or Communist or whatnot, that spoke against the acts.\n\nI thank my noble friends for allowing me to go on at such length.  I should summarize the answers: \n\nNobody evinced any fear of a \"pro-Peace\" party winning.  Had such happened as a result of a general election: the tenor of the remarks made by all members, that the Commons must reflect the will of the people, that the deepest constitutional principles must be upheld, and that elections are the necessary and useful basis for all governance, indicate that the will of the people would have been necessarily heeded.\n\nI see no prominent politicians who advocated negotiations with Germany.  \n\nI do not know how the British public responded to the cancelled elections, but nobody mentioned objections in the debates that I saw.\n\nSeveral members mentioned that, because the constitution was not written in stone, as in America, but could be modified by statute, the passage of the bills was an effective means of accomplishing the ends.  But I must emphasize that the basic constitutional principle was still upheld, and I believe that that was one reason why each extension was for a year only, not an indefinite or \"for the duration\" extension.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/bills/prolongation-of-parliament-bill", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jvfe1/why_was_british_general_election_of_1940_cancelled/dr9nz75/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bxbbb/why_didnt_britain_hold_elections_during_wwii/", "http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1940/nov/05/prolongation-of-parliament-bill", "http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1942/sep/30/prolongation-of-parliament-bill", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zehkw/in_ww2_elections_were_suspended_for_ten_years_in/", "http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/26/parliament-elections-and-meeting-bill#S5CV0393P0_19431026_HOC_238"]]}
{"q_id": "19w5hw", "title": "How do we date events and items when it comes to prehistory?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19w5hw/how_do_we_date_events_and_items_when_it_comes_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s5lae"], "score": [2], "text": ["Different forms of radiocarbon dating. There are gaps in prehistory in whcich we cannot date though. This is because C-14 dating only goes to ~50 tya and the next step we can date starts around ~100 tya. That's about a 50,000 year gap of human evolution that we have trouble dating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1a4gwi", "title": "During your time period of study, was crop rotation known about or practiced?", "selftext": ".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a4gwi/during_your_time_period_of_study_was_crop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8u55c6", "c8u57re"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Crop rotation for Japan came during the Heian period. Rice was much more efficient crop for feeding people, 1 farmer could feed 80 people. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the reasons why Asia has so much population. ", "Crop rotation was known about in the Antebellum South, but the sheer profitability of cotton meant that most people didn't use it.  Cotton doesn't leech the soil very quickly, but it did lead to problems with the South's economy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "38ksvo", "title": "So how do we learn from history?", "selftext": "Hi all,\n\nI graduated college 3 years ago and since then have been reading much more history (I was a philosophy and biology major).  One question that has become reoccurring for me is how do we learn from history?  Part of the reason why I read history (beyond the fact that I just enjoy it) is that I think we can learn from other people's success and failures and so my question is how exactly should one read history if one wants to learn from it?  Is there a specific way one should read history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38ksvo/so_how_do_we_learn_from_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crvtkjq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Obviously rigour, backing arguments with data, analysis of sources etc. are very important to the pros, but it would be a poor way to set out (which is the same as saying some of the nitpicking and dogmatism both methodological and factual you'll encounter from aficionados could be worth less than nothing to you -- take everything on your own terms). My advice is to find something you're interested in and just read -- there are any number of fascinating stories big and small scattered through time.\n\nAfter that, try to get some big-picture perspectives on the great arcs of history -- eras, civilizations, philosophies, religions, social structures and so on. These broad ideas are often meaningless to pros, but it's essential to develop instincts and acquire broad contextual knowledge without which no amount of detail can ever be meaningful. Make your own observations and remember it's really all about human psychology -- someone else may be more knowledgeable about a given topic, but if you can see that their sense for human nature, social dynamics, politics or culture is flawed then feel free to stick to your own opinions. Test your ideas in different contexts and subject them to criticism and you'll correctly feel you're moving forward, plus it's more fun to that way. You'll learn much more trying to work things out independently (even if you later decide you've made foolish errors) than by swallowing some expert's opinions whole.\n\nOnly when you've completed this broad-brush portrait of the eras or cultures that interest you does it become necessary to look at particular questions in real depth. You *can* do this out of curiosity regarding a particular issue at an earlier point but shouldn't feel at all obliged to.\n\nAs you gradually mix in more detailed investigations, you can then begin to consider more 'professional' ideas about history as a subject: What is evidence? What makes an original source reliable or unreliable?\n\nYour background in philosophy will be of immense help in unifying disparate phenomena regardless of where you look. It has always exerted a subtle but powerful effect on culture and society at all levels and scales, and will make your perspective valuable even to specialists."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7lkljj", "title": "What is the most plausible theory on Cleopatras\u2019 skin color?", "selftext": "A quick internet search showed me that there is no concrete evidence on her actual skin color. What do you think, was she pale because of macedonian ancestors or not?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7lkljj/what_is_the_most_plausible_theory_on_cleopatras/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drn0dd5", "drn2anu"], "score": [30, 4], "text": ["Well there is no way to \"theorise\" her skin colour, at least not with any level of accuracy.\n\nSure Macedonians were Caucasian, but some were fairer and light-haired while others were swarthier and dark haired. Maybe she took after golden haired Ptolemy II through the paternal line or maybe she took after some of the Persian, Anatolian and Sogdian ancestors through her maternal line.\n\nSome scholars like Dr. Duane Roller have suggested that her mother was an Egyptian but I respectfully do not believe there is enough evidence to speculate as to the scope of her ancestry with any certainty beyond the obvious conclusion that most of her ancestors were Macedonian or Greek and a few others were Near Easterners and Central Asian.\n\nShe definitely was not *black* like some Africentrists would claim but unlike many others claim on the internet there are no ancient accounts describing her as a strawberry blonde. The thing is, ancient authors have a lot to say about Cleopatra but nothing in the way of a physical description besides vague references to the fact that she was charming and somewhat attractive. The closest thing I can find to an ancient description of her is a passage in Lucan's *Pharsalia* which describes her as fair breasted but although elements of this poem are believed to be based on historical accounts it is still fictionalised and *poetic*, being written about a century after she died.\n\nOn the one hand, Southern Europeans living around the Mediterranean have a stronger tendency towards tan or olive skin than those in more northern areas. On the other hand, as an aristocratic woman she would have spent more time indoors than her male counterparts and have been somewhat more secluded from the sun's rays. \n\nBut as for theories on her skin colour? She probably looked Greco-Macedonian, it just so happens that not all Greco-Macedonians looked the same.", "Thanks for such a detailed answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2bb3l8", "title": "Houses on bridges in pre-industrial Europe cities?", "selftext": "In the 2006 film \"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer\", there are several scenes depicting a bridge in 18th century Paris, with houses built on top of it: _URL_0_\n\n* Was that actually happening in that period or before, or is it just film fiction?\n* Were those bridges at risk of collapsing from overload or could they handle it with no problem?\n* What was the rationale of building on top of a bridge instead of on a land plot?\n\nedit: the title should spell \"European\" instead of \"Europe\"; sorry about this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bb3l8/houses_on_bridges_in_preindustrial_europe_cities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj3qjo0"], "score": [2], "text": ["This indeed happened. I personally can't speak about Paris, but the old London Bridge, the one from the song \"London Bridge is falling down\" was entirely built up. Indeed there was so much commercial activity on the bridge that taking a ferry was quicker than going over the bridge by horse. Another famous example is Florence's Ponte Vechio, which still has shops on it. \n\nI think collapse in itself wasn't necessarily the greatest risk, but the increased chance and increased impact of a fire on the bridge.\n\nMedieval cities had few bridges, so they were very busy with traffic, and therefore building shops on the bridges was very attractive. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/x54FS9k.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "96cvl3", "title": "First wave casualities on D-Day", "selftext": "Is it true that on D-Day places like Omaha and Utah beach had close to 100% fatality rates within their first waves? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96cvl3/first_wave_casualities_on_dday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e40jiku"], "score": [8], "text": ["In short: no. Fatalities reaching 100% is extremely rare in a combat situation.\n\nIn long:\n\nOf around 156 000 participants in the landings, only around 4 500 were confirmed dead (with another 8-15 000 wounded/missing, depending on the sources I have access to).\n\nOne by one:\n\n* Utah Beach: 21 000 men of the 4th Infantry Division stormed the beaches in 4 waves, with less than 200 fatalities.\n\n* Sword Beach: Combined Allied forces (UK, Polish Army, Norwegian and Free French) landed just under 30 000 people and lost just under 700, with most casualties occurring when attacking inland from the beachhead.\n\n* Gold Beach: British XXX Corps landed 25 000 men with around 350-500 fatal casualties total.\n\n* Juno Beach: Another combined Allied assault, this time with a lot of Canadian forces included. While they came under heavy fire and took severe casualties in the opening stages of the invasion, D-Day casualties were limited to 340 dead out of 14 000+ landed.\n\nAnd then there's the big one:\n\n* Omaha Beach: Made famous by scenes in Saving Private Ryan and games like Medal of Honor, this is the most infamous beach of D-Day. 44 000 men landed here over the course of June 6, 1944, and thousands were counted among the dead, wounded or missing. Even with everything going wrong, the majority of soldiers who landed *survived*. They might have been hit, but many were wounded and not outright killed.\n\nThe first wave reportedly suffered about 50% casualties, with about 1 000 Americans dead or wounded.\n\nIt's important to note at this point that a unit is considered \"destroyed\" in most sources if it has lost enough men to become unable to basically exist as a unit. This rarely means every single man was killed or even wounded. Army units, especially modern ones as they were introduced during World War II, depend on a multitude of people in roles other than frontline grunt. Put enough of these people (logistics, technical, officers, communications, etc.) out of action and the unit will seize to exist, especially when combined with a coordinated assault on the fighting forces. This is what is often meant when people say a unit is \"destroyed\".\n\nAnd, on the topic of entire units being wiped out, I'm going to put this here. It's a copy of a comment I posted earlier today:\n\nThere are very few instances in history where any army lost the majority of their troops in battle.\n\nSome famous examples of armies who lost a battle and the amount of men who died:\n\n* Battle of Kursk (Operation Citadel): 780 000 German soldiers with less than 55 000 lost in battle\n\n* Battle of the Bulge (Unternehmen Wacht am Rein): German forces peaked at just under 450 000 men, with a maximum of just under 100 000 lost (KIA, MIA, WIA)\n\n* Operation Market Garden: 41 500 Allied airborne troops engaged, 17 200 killed, wounded or missing\n\nEven looking at larger theaters, we rarely find a majority of men being killed: over a million men were involved on the Axis side of the invasion of Russia (Unternehmen Barbarossa), with an estimated 250 000 actually being killed.\n\nComplete units being wiped out in battle is a very uncommon if not rare occurrence.\n\nHope this helps!\n\nEdit: spelling, grammar and lay out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bxkja", "title": "Why did Geneva remain Swiss all these years?", "selftext": "The city of Geneva is surrounded on all sides by France. The people here speak French, and seem to have much more in common with the French Alpine cultures than with the Swiss Germans. This could be a massive misunderstanding on my part, but as an outside observer I see very little cultural difference between places like, for example, Evian-les-Bains (France), Mont Blanc (France), Lausanne (CH), and Geneva (CH), while this region in general feels very different from Zurich or Bern.\n\nI understand some of the history with the formation of the Swiss Confederation 500 years ago, but it seems strange to me that Geneva was never just swallowed up into France at some point in the last half-millennium. Was that ever an option? Would the Genevois have favored it at any point in their history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bxkja/why_did_geneva_remain_swiss_all_these_years/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj9wnvd"], "score": [26], "text": ["The majority of the citizens of Geneva tended to be at odds with France and its attempts to influence the city most of the time.\n\nSince Switzerland swore eternal neutrality (and renounced their claim to Milan) after their disastrous defeat at the hands of the French and Venetians at Marignano in 1515, France wouldn't attempt to seize the city by force.\n\nFrance actually *did* annex Geneva 1798, during the French revolutionary wars. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, Geneva was readmitted to the restored Swiss Confederation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mkd3j", "title": "Where do the stereotypes of witch's outfit (conical witch hat, black attire, etc) and witch's broom come from?", "selftext": "[We had a fascinating insight on witch's potion](_URL_2_) a few days ago, now I'm interested in knowing where did the typical portrayal of witch as a woman wearing black outfit with black conical hat riding broom come from.\n\n[Wikipedia](_URL_1_) only lists Wizard of Oz as the earliest appearance of witch's hat. [The Atlantic](_URL_0_) explains the origin of witch's broom but of course it's not the most credible source.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkd3j/where_do_the_stereotypes_of_witchs_outfit_conical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm52nwn", "cm5bq78", "cm5isbv"], "score": [14, 3, 6], "text": ["[This image](_URL_0_) is from Robert Hunt's book on Cornish folklore (1865) - and I am certain this is not the oldest visual reference; the image of the earliest witch's hat clearly predates the Wizard of Oz, which means Wiki may be wrong - a moment in history just in itself.\n\nI have seen speculation that the pointed hat descends from traditional women's hats on the Welsh/Cornish Celtic fringe, and that's probably as good a point of origin as any. Presumably, this cultural outlier was perceived as being more magical than others, and so the old women - the keepers of the old ways - with their traditional garb, would have become the source of the image of a witch. But a lot of that is speculation.\n\nRosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft (1999), suggests that \"there are different hypotheses as to why brooms are associated with witches. One is that brooms are a symbol of female domesticity, a tool of every woman, and most witches were women.\" This is a fairly weak link, but lacking a stronger one, it may be all we have.", "hi! here are a few other posts that may be of interest\n\n* [What is the origin and purpose of the pointed hat we commonly associate with witches and wizards](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Where does the concept of the pointy witches hat come from? Was this actually a form of fashion that came to be associated with witches?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Where did the idea start that witches flew on broomsticks?](_URL_2_)", "To the lay reader, the Atlantic article you link, [\"Why do witches ride brooms?\"](_URL_1_) seems to answer the question fairly comprehensively: it marshals historical detail and connects the dots, tells a good story.\n\nExcept that it fails as history. \n\n\n\nWhatever our conception of the black hatted, broom stick riding, potions armed witch, she had been stripped of the demonological sources which so inspired fear in her and solidified her place in lore. We'll keep specifically to the question of broomsticks.\n\nThe witch of the 15-17th century witch hunts were devil-worshipping, cannibalistic sorceress (and sorcerers), who performed sabbats with other witches, crossing immense distances to attend their synagogues. She was invented in the late 15 through 16th century, but she was not  conjured by demonologists from nowhere. We can trace her antecedents very closely in the *striga* and the *malifica*. Here we will concentrate on the *striga*.\n\nThe Roman *strix*, whose name descends from the Greek for 'screech', was in first conception a bird-like creature. However,\n\n > Pliny the Elder admitted he could not fit the *strix* into any recognized species of bird; and he added that according to popular belief it offered it's breasts to babies to suck. It's purpose for doing so was sinister: Serenus Sammonicus, who wrote about medical science, considered that it's milk was poisonous. \n\nThe *strix* (also *striges*, *striga*) appear in Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius with shifts towards woman-like forms practicing various sorcery and spells and cannibalism,\n\n > Thus the [2nd century] grammarian Festus, in his work on the meanings of words, defines the late Latin word *strigae* as 'the name given to women who practise sorcery, and who are also called flying women.'\n\nNorman Cohn treats these as Roman literary creations, as 'ornamental' and not real. He argues that the Roman idea of strigae gets wedded to real beliefs in early medieval Germany, finding it represented in Salic Law, *Lex Salica*. Here the striga (medieval Latin jurists kept the name) are issued fines and punishments if they are found to have performed cannibalism; fines are also issued for false accusations. The more Christianized law of following centuries still address some obvious customary belief in these things but made clear they were not real, including Charlemagne's 789 CE capitulary for Saxons:\n\n > \"If anyone, deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary amongst pagans, that any man or woman is a *striga*, and eats men, and shall on that account burn that person to death or eat his or her flesh, or give it to others to eat, he shall be executed.\"\n\nThe choice of *striga* was telling. She was not *malefica*, that word some times deployed for the magic practicing sorcerer/sorceress, but who could not fly. Nor was the *striga* considered 'of the devil' or related to the devil. In fact those who thought *striga* existed were considered to be inspired to think such by the Devil.\n\nThe *striga* continues to appear - cannibal, night flying, a woman - in the high middle ages in the 11th c. penitential the *Corrector* by Burchard, and in 13th c poetry. The anonymous 13th c poet of Tyrol,\n\n > mocked these same popular beliefs about cannibalistic night-witches. Jokingly, he says that he has gone from university to university, in many countries; nowhere has he heard any scholar lecture on these uncanny beings. Indeed, he adds, it would be a wondrous thing to see a woman riding on a calf or a broomstick or a poker, over mountains and villages.\n\nIn the same century the English Gervaese of Tillbury recounts the German \"idea that certain men and women fly by night through vast distances, enter homes, dissolve bones, suck human blood, and move infants from place to place.\" This is the *striga* in the Germanic context through to the 13th century. There are variants of the same in southern areas through the same time period, but that is not our point. Our point is that the *striga* was a night-flying woman, a cannibal, but from the perspective of the learned culture she was not real, not a demon nor demonic. \n\nI do not have the space here to recount the parallel path of the *malefica*, the medieval sorcerer/sorceress. Like the striga, medievals paid fairly little attention to *maleficium* (low magic) unless it involved a crime. Otherwise, such beliefs were dismissed. The point is to suggest that there is a genealogy to certain beliefs to the later middle ages. At the transition from medieval to early modern era, the striga is merged into the malefica, for very particular reasons.\n\nThe medieval inquisition began in the 13th century focused on heresy. What constituted heresy was a fairly nebulous thing and could change over time. It did and [I've written about it before](_URL_0_). 100 years into the inquisitions, *maleficium* (sorcery) began to be subjected to scrutiny by inquisitors like Bernardo Gui and found to be heretical; striga played no part, it was too fantastic to be believed. But in the 200 years between Gui and the witch hunting heights of the 16th century, *malefica* became the witch we know, the anti-Christian society of heretical, cannibalistic, devil worshippers, celebrating the devil's sabbat. But for demonologists a certain practical obstacle remained to connecting witches in a geographically vast conspiracy. How could the *malefica* traverse great distances to sabbat without being noticeably absent for days? The answer again lay in the rich soil of folk culture: the striga. \n\nTo see the effect of this, and refute the Atlantic article's claims, we need to dig deep into actual demonological beliefs about the witch at the height of persecutions. Here is Norman Cohn's summary of resulting demonology inspired by confessions of the likes of Guillaume Adeline at Evreux in 1453, Pierre Vallen at La Tour du Pin in 1438 and a hermit at Langres in 1459:\n\n\n > At regular intervals witches were required to betake themselves to the sacrilegious and orgiastic gatherings known first as 'synagogues', later as 'sabbats'. There were ordinary sabbats, which were usually held on Fridays and were small affairs, involving only the witches of a given neighbourhood; and there were occumenical sabbats, held with great ceremony there or four times a years, and attended by witches from all quarters. A sabbat was always a nocturnal happening, ending either at midnight or, at the very latest, at cockcrow. As for the locality, it might be a churchyard, a cross-roads, the foot of a gallows; though the larger sabbats were commonly held at the summit of some famous mountain in a faraway region.\n > \n > To attend the sabbat, and in particular to attend the occumenical sabbat, witches had to cover great distances in very litle tie. They did so by flying. Having anointed themselves with they magic salve they would fly straight out of the bedrooms, borne aloft on demonic rams, goats, pigs, oxen, black horses; or else on sticks, shovels, spits, broomsticks. And meanwhile the husband or wife would sleep peacefully, quite unaware of these strange happenings; sometimes a stick laid in the bed would not only take the place but also the appearance of the absent spouse.\n\n-----------------------------------\n\nHere we can turn back to the article and deal with specific claim of the broomstick, potions and vaginal insertion.\n\n\n1. The article cites two quotes about 'ointments' and 'potions' from dubious references.^1 To be sure there are plenty of cases where these are cited, including Johann Nider in his *Formicarius* of 1435 who writes in great detail about a peasant woman who claimed to fly at night, and she offered to show a doubtful Dominican how exactly she did it. In front of the Dominican (and another witness) she performed a ritual of applying an ointment and fell to the floor unable to be woken. Sometime later, she roused herself and claimed that she had flown. The problem with this story, as all stories we have of these ointments, is that they are *never* directly witnessed by the writer. In this case Nider was writing down a story told to him by his teacher once about an unnamed Dominican. What ointment recipes we do have from the earliest days are actually not narcotics or psychedelics but the flesh of snakes, lizards and children; ointments containing things like belladonna show up 150 years later. And these ointments may be applied to the person, or a variety of riding devices, as in the 1475 chronicle of Mathias Widman of Kemnat.\n\n2. If we get through the great problem of what an ointment was and where it was applied we face a barrier that demolishes the stereotype: absorbing the potion through vagina.  As you we can note from the above, flying witches included men. Estimates range between 10-20% of witches burned were men. Even if ointments and potions were being used, those fellows aren't going to absorb anything through their balls. \n\n\n\nWhy we only see the broom now is a question of how culture has winnowed down the latter day image of the witch along gender. But at the height of witch trials the *malefica*, the witches, did not just ride brooms on her way to the sabbat, they rode all manner of objects and animals. They used ointments in a variety of ways, on a variety of things, and the evidence (dubious as it is) suggests less psychedelics and more devil's creatures like those of stereotypical in witches chants ('eye of newt', etc).\n\nAs /u/itsallfolklore stated above, any desire to attribute the entire iconography to psychedelics is distorting and indeed overlooking the sources to fit a wholly inadequate theory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/why-do-witches-ride-brooms-nsfw/281037/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hat", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kw5h5/where_do_our_stereotypes_about_witches_potions/"], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/LA8mwiU.jpg"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24sokn/where_does_the_concept_of_the_pointy_witches_hat/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2is9fy/what_is_the_origin_and_purpose_of_the_pointed_hat/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l0cof/where_did_the_idea_start_that_witches_flew_on/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/idjet", "http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/why-do-witches-ride-brooms-nsfw/281037/"]]}
{"q_id": "589y4b", "title": "Where to learn about war photography ?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/589y4b/where_to_learn_about_war_photography/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8yureh"], "score": [2], "text": ["What sort of information are you looking for? It's a fairly broad topic, honestly - are you looking for information on its origins, the development of it, the cultural impact of it, the technology used in it, etc.?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xgvgi", "title": "Were the Americas referred to as anything besides the New World before adopting the name America?", "selftext": "Sorry if this isn't super specific, but I'm asking about what it was called before the widespread usage of the term \"America.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xgvgi/were_the_americas_referred_to_as_anything_besides/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp0arpz"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'd be additionally interested in the use of \"Columbia\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33cvgh", "title": "How long was the average commute for Americans before the automobile?", "selftext": "18th or 19th century, American cities. Also how did the mode of commute differ with regard to status. Now the poor seem to live in the cities and the well-off live in the suburbs, was that the case back then? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33cvgh/how_long_was_the_average_commute_for_americans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqjvgxa"], "score": [10], "text": ["Prior to the rise of the automobile, most people would have gotten to work by walking or on a streetcar and lived near to their work.\n\nThe idea of wealthy people living in the suburbs and the poor in the inner-city is a largely an American invention. Though there was some early suburbanization, it really kicked off after World War II. Soldiers returning from WWII received VA-back mortgages on good terms, and so there was a huge surge in the demand for modest single-family housing. As part of the terms of the mortgages though, the VA often prohibited people from buying homes within inner-cities. \n\nWhy? The suburbs were often \"whites only\" in practice and African-Americans stuck in the inner-city didn't have the same access to capital from the banks so the housing stock deteriorated. Because of this, lenders like the VA \"redlined\" the inner-cities (not wanting to give mortgages for homes in areas with plummeting property values), preventing capital from being spent in the inner-city, creating a negative feedback loop. People with money who lived in the inner-cities got out to avoid the falling property values, making the problem even worse.\n\nIt's only been in the past couple decades that we've really seen the growth of housing in downtowns again outside of very large cities so I'll hold off on that to avoid the 20 year rule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ztaq1", "title": "Why did European cavalry wear plate armor long after infantry had abandoned it?", "selftext": "From what I understand, continental dragoons and other cavalrymen wore cuirasses well into the 19th century.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ztaq1/why_did_european_cavalry_wear_plate_armor_long/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpm6hpd"], "score": [30], "text": ["Dragoons would've been considered heavy cavalry or line cavalry as opposed to the more traditional role of mounted Muskets/Rifles by the 19th century, but certainly never would've worn Cuirasses in most European armies. \n\nAs for the preponderance of single or double breastplates well past the more traditional usage of them; the answer is simply because it still made sense to. Cuirassiers were meant to quite literally bludgeon their way through an enemy line; smash it to pieces. While a perfect charge means the enemy breaks before or at the moment of contact, a brief and violent melee may ensue, and of course braced musketeers pose a significant threat to the life of both horse and rider. A breastplate would do little against a musketball, and were mainly meant to stop slashing attacks (such as a light cavalry saber), spent balls and shrapnel and lessen the impact of a thrusting attack (e.g: A bayonet or heavy cavalry sabre). It also added weight to a charge, and by tradition curiassers were big men on bigger horses, not meant to conduct 'hell for leather' charges but rather choreographed, short and powerful charges at a decisive moment. One also must remember that even concentrated musket fire would be of questionable impact on cavalry gaiting into trot in say, 1815. Until the advent of standard issue, breech loading rifles, it was more sensible to form a square and cease fire with small arms while heavy cavalry closed distance for a charge. Once you could successfully interdict and cause casaulties at beyond a few hundred yards range, the cumbersome cuirasses became questionable; and even then some nations had them for *battlefield* purposes as late as 1915.\n\nThe intelligence of using cuirasses proved itself time and again during the Napoleonic wars; French Carabiners were eventually given breastplates due to horrendous causalities being taken in cavalry scrums; a testament to the perceived life-saving measure of wearing a breastplate. Likewise, Austrian Cuirassers still wore a single breastplate to protect their front. \n\nNot all European armies continued to use breastplates, it must be noted. Prussian Cuirassers were so in name and tradition only, and by the time of the Napoleonic wars no longer used any breastplates whatsoever. Nor does heavy cavalry require armor of some sort to remain effective; the designation of 'heavy' is more a reference by this time to horse, rider (both expectedly large and powerful) and their perceived role and endurance on the battlefield. Many Heavy Cavalry regiments had no semblance of armor; Dutch Carabiners, Prussian Garde D'Corps, the British Household Cavalry and French Grenadiers a Cheval, to name a famous few. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xoasf", "title": "Why was Venice able to win the Morean War (Sixth Ottoman\u2013Venetian War from 1684-1699) when they had lost the 5 previous wars before it? What changed to allow the Republic of Venice to stand up to the giant Ottoman Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xoasf/why_was_venice_able_to_win_the_morean_war_sixth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfddqvi"], "score": [47], "text": ["The Republic of Venice didn't fight alone. In 1683, the Austrians beat the Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna. In 1684, a Holy League was formed on initiative of Pope Innocence XI, with the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and Venice as the most notable members. In 1686, Russia joined the league as well. This alliance was the turning point of the advance of Ottoman power in Europe. While they were able to reconquer Morea in 1714, their rule over Greece was unstable which was the key factor for the successful Greek independence movement in the 19th century.\n\nSource consulted for this answer: Heinrich Kretschmayr: *Geschichte von Venedig*, Vol. 3, Stuttgart 134 (Reprinted in 2012), p. 343-345."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gqwaf", "title": "How would the victims of Aztec (Mexica) human sacrifice understand their fate?", "selftext": "By which I mean, did they believe (abstractly at least) that their sacrifice was achieving something, or would the reasons for it be alien to them? Clearly this depends on where they came from, so I guess part of that is how dominant was the Aztec cultural-religious belief behind the sacrifices when it came to neighboring and vassal states?\n\nAdditionally, assuming that they did believe that there was a purpose, what would they have understood to happen to them after the deed? Was this some noble death on their part that would see some sort of reward in the afterlife, or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gqwaf/how_would_the_victims_of_aztec_mexica_human/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu0wtkl"], "score": [24], "text": ["I can't speak to how people who did not share similar beliefs with the Aztecs would understand their sacrifice, but I can pass on some information of how those who *did* share those beliefs saw their fate.\n\nThis comes from *The Aztecs (Peoples of America)* by Michael E. Smith (bolding mine):\n\n > The Aztecs believed in several distinct afterworlds, and one's fate depended upon one's status in life and upon the manner of one's death. Soldiers who died in battle **and sacrificial victims** went to an eastern solar realm to accompany the sun during its rise to zenith. Women who died in childbirth went to a western solar realm where they accompanied the sun during its setting. People who died by drowning or other causes related to the rain god (such as lightning or certain diseases) went to the earthly paradise of Tlalocan. Most people, however went to one of the nine levels of *Mictlan*, the underground realm of death.\n\nSo to sum up, sacrificial victims would go to an eastern realm just like warriors. I think I remember reading that certain sacrificial victims may have gone to a different realm depending on how/to which god they were sacrificed, but I'm not certain on that. Could anyone elaborate on that point?\n\nAlso, keep in mind that sacrificial victims would not only be captured warriors. Depending on the god they were being sacrificed to specific types of people were required for the correct form of the ceremony. Here's a bit more from Smith's book:\n\n >  The victims of this ritual were not considered ordinary mortals. They were viewed as deities whose deaths repeated the original sacrificial deaths of gods described in myth. The key Aztec concept here was *ixiptla*, often translated as \"deity impersonator.\"\n\n > ...\n\n > Most gods required warriors for their *ixiptla*, either purchased as slaves or the secondary offspring of nobles. Women were sometimes sacrificed as *ixiptla* for female deities. The most stringent requirements were those for Tezcatlipoca for the sacrifice in the ceremony of Toxcatl. His *ixiptla*, selected a full year in advance, had to be a handsome, well-bred youth with no bodily imperfections.\n\nSo while captured warriors were important for sacrifice, they did not compose the entirety of sacrificial victims. Those non-warriors who were chosen from within Aztec society would probably have shared the belief system of those carrying out the sacrifice.\nThe above all comes from amateur reading of Aztec history, so if anyone has critiques or suggestions for improvement please let me know.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "122fs7", "title": "Where can I find information on the 170th Aero Squadron (US) during WW1?", "selftext": "My great-grandfather was deployed with them from June 1918 to June 1919.  I would like to find out more about where they were sent, stories from the front, anything that can give me more information about my great-grandfather and his service.   Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/122fs7/where_can_i_find_information_on_the_170th_aero/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6rlfnf"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Home - Then What? The mind of the doughboy, A.E.F. by the doughboy himself](_URL_0_). (ed. James Louis Small) is a 1920 collection of essays (reminiscences and rants) by U.S. servicemen and includes one by *Richard V. Fealy, Sgt. 1 c. 170th Aero Squadron, Camp Pontanezen, A.P.O. 7 16. Home Address: St. Helena, California.* (pp. 85-89)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://archive.org/details/homethenwhatmind00smal"]]}
{"q_id": "fk33by", "title": "During the Middle Ages, How Did A Woman Rise To Lead A Convent or Abbey?", "selftext": "Was it a matter of meritorious promotion, or political connections, or a combination of the two?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fk33by/during_the_middle_ages_how_did_a_woman_rise_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkxpr4o"], "score": [20], "text": ["Oh, yes, there were *many* ways a woman could become the leader of a religious community in the Middle Ages. And Hildegard of Bingen witnessed almost all of them.\n\n**I. Live an exemplary life in a strategic place and gather a new community around yourself through reputation**\n\nWhen Jutta von Sponheim elected to enter a formal religious life in 1112, she chose to be enclosed in a \"cell\" (in this case, probably a set of rooms) attached to the men's convent at Disibodenberg. 14-year-old Hildegard and another girl went with her. *Jutta* quickly developed a reputation for holiness that spread far and wide. Women and men alike came to consult her on spiritual matters. And Jutta inspired enough women to take religious vows and join her that her \"enclosure\" ended up as essentially a women's convent attached to--and subordinate to--a men's.\n\nChristina of Markyate is another well-known example of this method. (And interestingly enough, she is an exact contemporary of Hildegard--there's a pretty good likelihood they were both born in 1098).\n\n**II. Be elected on the basis of merit**\n\nThat would be Hildegard herself.\n\nWhile Jutta was alive, she seems to have kept her visionary gifts and writing/composing/political ambitions to herself. (Also, Hildegard would very strongly protest my use of the word \"ambitions\" there.) The first known vision that she expressed when she had it was, in fact, at Jutta's funeral. Nevertheless, Hildegard's leadership skills and holiness were evidently quite clear to her sisters at Disibodenberg.\n\nHildegard's letter collection presents ample other cases of election. Mostly, women and men chosen to lead their communities wrote to Hildegard with their inner conflicts, fearing that to take the leadership position would threaten their time and ability to devote themselves fully to God.\n\n**III. Found a convent with a ready-made group**\n\n...That would also be Hildegard.\n\nShe had some pretty strong beliefs on Benedictine monastic life, sought a different lifestyle than was apparently possible in the 'enclosure' environment, and--above all--wanted her nuns to be free of the Disibodenberg monks' control. It took some doing, but eventually she founded *two* convents under her oversight--the Rupertsberg, where she lived; and Eibingen, which actually still exists today!\n\n**IV. The convent's patrons get what they pay for**\n\nOne of the Rupertsberg nuns, Richardis, willingly left Hildegard's community to lead her own. Hildegard's efforts to prevent her departure are a good window into the various outside powers that could, and frequently did, intervene in nuns' own choices (helping OR hindering). The archbishop of Bremen in the 1150s was Hartwig, Richardis' brother. So when his family obtained the abbess-ship of the prestigious convent at Bassum for Richardis, Hartwig had the power to enforce the choice.\n\nQuite a few of the surviving letters to and from Hildegard involve this situation, giving us multiple perspectives on the matter. (Though never, it must be said, Richardis' own words.)\n\n**V. (Which Hildegard would have hated) Found an entire new monastic order**\n\nA variant on III. In the mid-12th century, Hildegard was witness to the first flowering of multiple, separately Rule-governed monastic *orders* in the West--not just reform movements that affected some houses but not other. That is, this is when \"monasticism\" becomes \"the Benedictine Order\" and all the subsequent new orders.\n\nYes, most medieval monastic orders were founded by men. But not all. The Poor Clares (Second Order Franciscans) and Birgittines, founded by...well, Clare of Assisi and Birgitta of Sweden (bet you didn't see that coming) are probably the most famous. The Birgittines are especially interesting in this case because the order's structure is based around \"double houses\"--that is, a woman's convent and a men's convent administered together, though entirely separated as single-sex communities--but unlike other order, in this case it's the *abbess* who is the head of the entire thing.\n\n**VI with shades of IVb. Installed by the order to reform a house**\n\nThe history of monasticism in the Middle Ages (and, frankly, of Christianity in general) can more or less be described as a series of reform movements. But especially in the late 14th and 15th centuries, \"reform\" is often a technical term. A very organized and widespread movement known as Observant reform spread throughout different religious orders, especially but not only the Franciscans and Dominicans. A typical procedure would involve bringing in a few nuns or friars from an already-reformed convent to lead the reform of an existing house. \n\nSometimes a few current residents would refuse to accept reform and move to a different community; sometimes essentially *all* existing residents would refuse to accept reform and move to different communities. Hence \"shades of IVb\": the conversion to Observance in those cases was typically the result of the monastery's outside supporters, secular or ecclesiastical.\n\nI certainly don't mean this list to be exhaustive, or to cover more informal religious communities (like two women buying a house together and pledging themselves to lives of charity and chastity). But it's a good overview of some of the most common ways women could become the leader of a formal women's religious community."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23gdby", "title": "Why did America instigate a coup in Iran when it was already well on the way to becoming a democracy?", "selftext": "Seems pretty weird don't you think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23gdby/why_did_america_instigate_a_coup_in_iran_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwr1ab", "cgwr2tn"], "score": [114, 40], "text": ["The British government's embargo of Iran after the Iranian Prime Minister's Mossadegh's nationalization of the oil industry from primarily British control in 1951 had a seriously damaging effect on its economy. This, coupled with a powerful new sense of nationalism among the Iranian population in the wake of their defiant stand against their former colonial British overlords, produced an atmosphere of extremely high tensions.\n\nAt the same time, Iran's main communist political party, the Tudeh, capitalized on the volatile situation by reversing their previous opposition to Mossadegh and joining in support of him instead, taking to beating up and threatening political opponents of the prime minister during the nationalization crisis. Acting in the hopes that Mossadegh would appreciate their support and pivot the country's development toward communism (and presumably closer relations with the Soviet Union), they contributed significantly to British and American foreign policy makers' calculations about Mossadegh's likelihood to oppose the West's goals and interests.\n\nPresident Eisenhower and a number of senior figures in his administration and the intelligence community were eventually persuaded by British intelligence and convinced by the argument that the situation was unsustainable, and that if left to continue any longer without decisive intervention, the risk of a communist takeover of the government (via the Tudeh party) would become unacceptable. \n\nIn what would become a consistent theme for both major powers throughout the Cold War, the U.S. undertook the coup to install a sympathetic government rather than allow self-determination to produce one that chose to align itself in opposition to Washington. The Shah was reinstituted as essentially an absolute monarch, and his rule was supported and financed by the United States for the next two and a half decades.\n\nNow, whether or not this seizure of the Iranian government by pro-communist forces was actually a likely possibility is honestly a matter of debate. But its role as a major motivator for the U.S.' actions seems clear.\n\nSource: *Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran*, Mark Gasiorowski", "It really feels like you are just fishing for responses to what you already know so that your view gets attention. Looking at your profile sort of confirms it. There are better subreddits than /r/askhistorians for that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2e9ndf", "title": "When was the 1914-1918 Great War labelled as \"First World War\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e9ndf/when_was_the_19141918_great_war_labelled_as_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjxdb4m"], "score": [3], "text": ["The term \"First World War\" was first used in September 1914 by the German philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that \"there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.\"\n\n Shapiro  &  Epstein 2006, p. 329 citing a wire service report in The Indianapolis Star, 20 September 1914"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4faogy", "title": "How did relatively smaller warships, such as brigs and frigates, do battle in the 18th century?", "selftext": "I understand the massive \"Ship of the lines\" would line up in front of one another, and whichever ship had the sturdiest hull and most cannons would sink the other. Is this true for smaller ships as well, or did they manoeuvre around more, trying to find better angles from which to strike?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4faogy/how_did_relatively_smaller_warships_such_as_brigs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d27l4wq"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, by the time of the 18th century, the formalism of the line of battle was falling out of fashion, as it was seen that line-of-battle, uh, battles, often didn't produce decisive results. I wrote more about this [here](_URL_2_), [here](_URL_3_) and also [here](_URL_1_) if you'd like to read about that. \n\nIn terms of smaller ships, though, you're correct in thinking that they did not form in traditional lines of battle very often (partly because it would be fairly unusual for several frigates or brigs or other ships to operate together, they were too valuable as scouts and messengers to be very often sent out in groups). If we take a hypothetical encounter between two frigates, for example, the pre-battle maneuvering would be entirely taken up by trying to gain the weather gage (that is, an upwind position) that would allow the ship with the weather gage to control the engagement. Depending on the nature of the captain, ships might engage in maneuvering at a distance or might try to simply close and fight it out, gun to gun. If you're interested in ship-to-ship engagements of the period, there are a few good, easily accessible books out there: \n\n* [Toll, Ian W. *Six Frigates*, Norton 2006](_URL_5_) \n\n* [Miller, Nathan. *Broadsides*, Wiley 2001](_URL_0_)\n\n* [O'Brian, Patrick. *Men of War: Life in Nelson's Navy*, Norton 1995](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/837092.Broadsides?from_search=true&amp;search_version=service", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mwla6/what_were_the_tactical_options_facing_naval/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ebdk5/how_did_nelsons_tactics_work_at_trafalgar/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jh7og/why_was_horatio_nelson_able_to_succeed_so/", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/866088.Men_of_War", "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39000.Six_Frigates"]]}
{"q_id": "6gzixv", "title": "Why did the Nazis possess anti-aristocratic and anti-monarchist views?", "selftext": "You would think that they would be appreciative of a system that enables absolutist rulers", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6gzixv/why_did_the_nazis_possess_antiaristocratic_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diug39n"], "score": [11], "text": ["Royals were in an anomalous position within National Socialist ideology. On one hand, the NSDAP's leadership cult and various Party organs like the SS celebrated those individuals who managed to bend history to their will. Propaganda and other materials cast figures like Frederick the Great or Bismarck as proto-National Socialists and often drew explicit parallels between these noble precedents and contemporary NSDAP leaders like Hitler. The SS in particular aimed at creating a modern neo-feudal aristocracy among its members in which SS men would be the elite of the new era. Conversely, the NSDAP's concept of the *Volksgemeinschaft* was that of a undivided German community united by race. This vision of German society argued that the Party would create a classless society not riven by social divisions and cleavages. Such leveling populism was one of the major selling points of the NSDAP in the terminal years of the Weimar Republic as Hitler positioned himself at the head of a *Volkspartei*, a political party that drew from all across the socioeconomic spectrum. These two tendencies of National Socialism meant that royals had a position within the Third Reich, but one that had to be mediated through the Party. \n\nDespite Hitler and the NSDAP's reputation as crude rabble-rousers, a number of Germany's nobility did join the Party and the larger movement. Nobles were disproportionately more likely to join the NSDAP than other occupational groups and their numbers included Prince August Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm II's fourth son. Catholic nobles like the Wittelsbach family were far more reluctant to join the Party and some of the noble-led religious circles featured prominently in the anemic wartime resistance to the Third Reich. Most of Germany's nobles though switched their allegiances from traditional conservative causes and circles and acclimated to the 1933 regime quite well. National Socialism's elitism certainly found resonance among a number of nobles as was the promise that the new political order would protect their estates and even allow them to be expanded. East Elbian estate owners found the National Socialism's ideals of a strict hierarchy and the visions of social harmony of the *Volksgemeinschaft* meshed well with older discourses on *noblesse oblige* and the idealized social relations of the peasant and his bread lord. Moreover, the antisemitism and *v\u00f6lkisch* nationalism of the NSDAP was something that was not unknown in various noble-dominated social milieus of the *Kaiserreich* and Weimar such as the German fraternity system. There was much in the NSDAP's platform and ethos that appealed to this social group. \n\nThe NSDAP itself also spent a good deal of time cultivating the nobility and winning them over to their cause. A number of the Party's leaders saw their access to the nobility and their social networks as a means to buy the Party a degree of respectability in the run-up to the Nazi seizure of power. At times this meant holding out the possibility that Hitler would restore the Hohenzollern monarchy, a prospect that briefly brought both the exiled Wilhelm II and his heir Crown Prince Wilhelm to speak of the NSDAP in rather neutral terms in the early 1930s. The Night of the Long Knives shocked the former Hohenzollern monarch and his presumptive heir, but the murder of former conservative allies like Kurt von Schleicher also signaled that the new state would not have a role for the former monarchy. Nonetheless, Party elite like Hermann G\u00f6ring sought good relations with the German nobility and while a monarchical restoration was off the table after Hindenburg's death, it was clear that the the Party elite did seek to enfold German nobility into its ranks.  G\u00f6ring's parties and hunting expeditions often had a noble component in the entourage and his residence of Karinhall maintained a striking pretense to ape the nobility. As with many NSDAP elite, G\u00f6ring had a parvenu cast about him and having the former elite assume a visible, if subordinate, position in these social networks was a way to buy status and legitimacy. \n\nThe nobles' engagement with the Third Reich proved to be a Faustian bargain. While the state guaranteed titled estates and valorized an elitist system, it had to be under the auspices of the NSDAP. The nobility possessed cultural capital that many of the largely-middle class NSDAP leadership desired, but even noble cultural refinement could not take the edges off the crude ideology of the NSDAP and its leadership. The wreckage of the war validated those nobles with the good sense to remain aloof or publicly disassociate themselves from the Nazis like the Wittelsbachs, but defeat marked a major turning point for Germany's nobility. The Soviet zone disestablished noble estates and held the *Junkers* landowners were class enemies of the peasantry and proletariat. Things went slightly better for the nobility in the Western zones, but there was added scrutiny towards nobles in denazification hearings. Some like the zu Guttenberg family were able to reestablish themselves within the FRG's conservative society but others noble families faded to irrelevance. The postwar FRG's leaders had some limited engagement with the nobility in the early postwar years but this was ephemeral and the nobility was ill-suited to navigate the social leveling and consumerist FRG. The noble world of socialites and high culture looked increasingly archaic and stuffy in this new Germany.  It was only after reunification that marrying into noble families returned to being in vogue among the Republic's elite. As with the Nazi period, this engagement with the old nobility was more reflective of the allure of noble birth than any such real power the nobility possessed.\n\n*Sources*\n\nBaranowski, Shelley. *Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia*. Oxford University Press, 1995. \n\nPetropoulos, Jonathan. *Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany*. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72voae", "title": "TIL that Tsar Nicholas II asked his first cousin, King George V of England, for political asylum in Britain during the Russian Revolution. George rejected it, and Nicholas was executed soon after. Did King George ever express remorse after Nicholas was killed?", "selftext": "I've been reading about WW1 a lot recently, and I know that George and Nicholas were very close to one another. I read that King George's reason for rejecting Nicholas's asylum request was due to fears of a similar revolution in England being agitated by Nicholas's presence in Britain. However, I could not find anything online about George in his post-war life commenting on his fateful decision. Does anybody know more on this subject, considering King George lived another 17 years after Nicholas's death?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72voae/til_that_tsar_nicholas_ii_asked_his_first_cousin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnlo0wb", "dnm2e98", "dnmdf6w"], "score": [1156, 531, 59], "text": ["Follow-up question: Though definitely not a democracy by modern standards, turn-of-the-century Britain was certainly not nearly as autocratic as turn-of-the-century Russia. Were George's fears legitimate?", "Hi there! \n\nYou've probably reading this page hoping for an answer to this really interesting question! If that's you, do check out this reply from 3 months ago to a similar question by our Top Quality Contributor /u/kieslowskifan: [Why did George V oppose asylum for Tsar Nicholas II? Did he regret it after the Tsar's murder?](_URL_5_)\n\nAnd if you're wondering why there's so many removed comments: the reason for that is that a) /r/AskHistorians has high standards, and b) the subreddit is not a place for free discussion, even below the top-level. If your post starts with things like \"I don't have a specific answer for you, but...\", chances are we will probably remove your comment. If it's only a paragraph long, we will probably remove your comment. If your post is complaining about there being no answer yet or wondering what happened to the removed comments, we will definitely remove your comment. For better or worse, Reddit is set up to show you the amount of comments, including removed comments: as a moderator who can see the removed comments, you're mostly missing posts like 'This is the meanest, most stuck up sub ever', 'Why is every answer removed?' and 'Eagerly awaiting response', along with people replying with about three sentences.\n\nOur readers want accurate, comprehensive, in-depth historical answers based on good historical practice and high-quality sources (it's amazing how many downvotes and reports an obvious shitpost can attract on a popular thread on /r/AskHistorians within minutes, thanks to our readers!) On /r/AskHistorians, we want people answering questions to be able to explain not just what the basic facts are, [but why we know that these basic facts are right, and to put those basic facts into context](_URL_3_). This is why we encourage [the use of primary and secondary sources in answering questions](_URL_0_), rather than tertiary sources like Wikipedia, podcasts and textbooks.\n\nIn other words, on /r/AskHistorians, we'd rather have no answer than bad attempts at answers. By deleting short, quick, bad answers, the well-researched in-depth answers (that take people time to research and write) are more likely to be seen. In general, on Reddit, [the early answers get the bulk of the karma](_URL_6_) regardless of quality. On /r/AskHistorians we want to make sure that the things that people likely actually read - the top post on a thread - are accurate. We want that top post to have the depth that a good understanding of history requires (people are complex, and so history is complex). Thus we remove answers that are not up to standard in order to reward the posters who - in their own free time, let's not forget - go to the effort of doing the research and writing up a quality response (which often takes *hours*). \n\nAs you can see from [this post on the statistics of AskHistorians](_URL_4_) by /u/georgy_k_zhukov, 90%+ of popular threads like this will get an answer. That answer usually appears, on average, about 9 hours into the life of the thread. So while this thread does not yet have a suitable answer in it, if you are patient, something awesome will hopefully be here if you come back before too long. And if you want to read some awesome answers while you're waiting, might I suggest [the answers we link to on our Twitter](_URL_2_), or [our weekly Sunday Digest feature](_URL_1_) that links to overlooked posts that never got to /r/all but are often incredible?\n\nAlternatively, if you want to discuss history or ask historical questions without these constraints, /r/history or /r/AskHistory might be a more appropriate subreddit for you than /r/AskHistorians. \n", "/u/kieslowskifan answered a similar question to this [quite recently](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "http://twitter.com/askhistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hf14o/why_did_george_v_oppose_asylum_for_tsar_nicholas/diyls2m/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/64y44g/the_mostupvoted_comments_in_reddit_threads_arent/#"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hf14o/why_did_george_v_oppose_asylum_for_tsar_nicholas/diyls2m/"]]}
{"q_id": "13xjr5", "title": "Was there ever any antagonism between the various sects of Buddhism in Eastern Asia in the middle ages?", "selftext": "I was curious if there was ever any sort of relationship similar to the Protestants and Catholics", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13xjr5/was_there_ever_any_antagonism_between_the_various/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7854i2"], "score": [6], "text": ["Buddhism is slightly different organized than Protestanism and Catholicism. In Christianity, if you go talk to a Methodist minister and attend Methodist services, you are a Methodist. in Islam, you can talk to a Salafi imam or a Sufi imam because they're both right and holy imams. The elites have formal affiliations in a way that the laity don't have to. \n\nIn Buddhism, historically I believe this was even more extreme. The \"laity\" might support bhikkus (monks) from several schools, as would the political elites. While, based on our ideas about Protestant Christianity and Judaism, we assume that everyone who is a \"member\" of a religion has the same obligations, this is not the case in many to most religions. But especially I'm early Buddhism, the only \"members\" were monks committed by vows. They were supported by laity who was not necessarily \"Buddhist\", you know? They might support several different groups (Buddhist and non-Buddhist). The laity is not required to commit to a sect the same way Christianity expects. (I don't know about the case today but this is how it was in early Buddhism--most studies of religion annoyingly look at the specialists and not the beliefs and practices of the peasants and aristocrats who support them). Gradually there arose what are sometimes translated as sects like Nichiren, Pure Land, and True Pure Land (at least, that was what's up in Japan. I know nothing about the Theravada world), which basically offered a different deal with the laity (you say these prayers, we got your back when it comes to total up karma) which created different structures of lay-specialist affiliation. I believe at least one or more of these groups was involved in essentially millennialist rebellions (millennialist is probably not the right word to use with Buddhism) that were put down by state actors, presumably with the support of the mainline religious institutions. \n\nThere was a lot of jockeying for political patronage between the sects though and these sometimes turned violent, but it was always monks of one ~~monetary~~monastery or group of monasteries vs. a neighboring one. *Gates of Power* I remember being the book on this subject in the Japanese context. \n\nEdit: damn you autocorrect. Also I added more before anyone saw. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16h8rn", "title": "Was the Russian front really used as a threat/punishment for German troops in WWII?", "selftext": "I've recently been watching the show Hogan's Heroes, and all the German soldiers in the show are afraid of being sent to the Russian front if they screwed up. Did the German commanders really use this threat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16h8rn/was_the_russian_front_really_used_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7w873w"], "score": [6], "text": ["Considering that over 75% of the German troops served on the Eastern Front, it is kind of hard to call it punishment. It is also my understanding that German units periodically rotated between heavy combat in the east and lighter assignments in the west to give the troops/units a chance to rest and recover. In any case, the vast majority of German troops would have served in the east at one point or another, regardless of whether they screwed up or not. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2adute", "title": "If Serbia started the ball rolling on the events that triggered WW1, why is Germany always portrayed as the prime evil in the war?", "selftext": "So, [this polandball comic](_URL_0_) got me thinking, even though I know that the events that triggered WW1 were always presented as the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, but I always remember hearing how Germany was the big bad guy, and that do to the treatment of the German State post WW1, it was critical in leading to the events of WW2.\n\nBut, why is Germany looked at as the main bad guy in the whole thing? I understand that WW1 was a massive cluster of treaties and agreements, but I never thought about the effect on Europe as a whole, because I always hear about Germany.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2adute/if_serbia_started_the_ball_rolling_on_the_events/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciu6pvh", "ciu903w"], "score": [27, 292], "text": ["Because Serbia did not really start the ball rolling.  It was a convenient political excuse and was an attempt to drum up a *casus belli*, but it's worth remembering that Princip was actually an Austro-Hungarian subject and not Serbian. (He was tried as a regular criminal and in fact served most of the war in an Austrian prison due to being a minor at the time of the assassination, dying of tuberculosis in 1918 while serving a 20 year sentence).  He definitely had links to Serbian extremists, some of whom were government officials, but he was not a foreign national.  Regardless of Serbian sentiments, it's fairly well accepted that Vienna played up the situation in order to extract [humiliating concessions](_URL_0_) from Serbia.  In fact, they set terms that they were well aware the Serbians (or any sovereign state) could not tolerate and despite the Serbian willingness to capitulate to every term except for allowing Austria the right to send their police force into Serbia they refused to negotiate.\n\nFurthermore, Germany essentially gave the Dual-Monarchy the green light to ratchet up the escalations by guaranteeing that they would back the Austrians in the case that Russia (almost certainly) mobilized to defend Serbia.  This is the so-called \"[Blank Cheque](_URL_1_)\"  It's unlikely that Austria would have risked war with Russia without German backing.\n\nGermany was not alone in creating the circumstances that led to the outbreak of war there is a lot of background to the events that led up to the July Crisis, but the German government seems to have either through incompetence or malice (my personal view is a bit of both) done almost everything they could have to ensure that war broke out.  My personal view is that Austria was more guilty than Germany, but they would never have gotten as far as they did or acted so boldly without the Blank Cheque.\n\nIt's possible that a European war would have happened no matter what, but Germany definitely threw fuel on the fire by backing Austria and was generally behaving in a way that put its neighbours on edge.  The French, Russians and British were all likely to react the way they eventually did and the German government must have foreseen the result.  They simply miscalculated how hard it would be to defeat the Triple Entente on the field of battle.\n\nIf you're interested in more, I'll try to post a more detailed response if somebody more qualified doesn't, but as a basic primer the site I referenced in the first two paragraphs has a decent overview of how the war broke out.", "Well you struck at two very different topics here, that of \"evil\" and \"aggression\" which are completely different discussions in regards to WWI. So let's tackle each separately. This is going to be a huge post because it's a huge topic, so brace yourself.\n\n-----\n\n**Why does Germany bear war guilt and given the title of the aggressor?**\n\nLet's wheel the clock back to 1871 and get an overview from the beginning. Bismark, after cleverly tricking the French into declaring war would unite the German states with Prussia, Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and Saxony leading the charge into a single Germanic State. They would in the process of peace negotiations seize the French territories of Alsace-Lorraine and as the result of the war Napoleon III would be ousted and the Third Republic would be declared. \n\nAfter this war and the 1866 war with Austria to seize other German lands, Germany would be declared and they would overnight rise into being a world power. By 1880 they would be the leading industrial power in Europe...and they would be completely surrounded by \"great powers\" -- Britain in the seas to the North, France to the West, Austria-Hungary to the South, and Russia to the East. This is where we briefly mention Bismarkian politics or what is more aptly referenced as the \"3/5th's rule\". That is, Germany must always have alliance 3 out of the 5 \"great powers\" as to secure the risk from total encirclement. In 1879 they would create a defense treaty with Austria-Hungary w.r.t. the mutual threat of the Russian Empire. In 1887 Bismark would also secure a non-aggression treaty with said Russian Empire which would state both parties would remain neutral in each others respective conflicts unless the other was the aggressor.\n\nThis was precisely what Bismark wanted -- he had completely secured his Southern and Easterly borders. With the addition of Italy to the group Germany would only have to worry about her French enemies to the West and a potential British threat in the North Sea. When Willhelm II ascended his fathers throne in 1888 he had big shoes to fill and felt the need to do it on his own with his own new troupe of advisers, thus sacking Bismark to retirement and taking up the reigns of diplomacy himself. When in 1890 Russia (rather persistently) tried to renew the treaty for a more permanent, more alliance sounding one Willhelm II would just as persistently refuse. The Russian Tsar, Alexander II, would (rightfully so) feel exposed and without any friends. The British hated Russia and vice versa because of the Crimean War and Central Asian colonial ambitions, Austria-Hungary was a natural enemy to them because of conflict in the Balkans, Germany was supporting Austria-Hungary and was giving him the cold shoulder, but France remained. And boy, France would take Russia in with open arms creating a formal alliance in 1892.\n\n----\n\n**Now we can start discussing aggression.** This is the formal state of affairs going into the 20th century: **Germany and Austria-Hungary** have a defensive pact with regards to Russia. **France and Russia** have a mutual defense treaty against Germany. **The United Kingdom** is allied to nobody formally but is unfriendly to the Russian Empire, neutral with the French Republic, and neutral with a leaning of cordial with the Germans.\n\nKaiser Willhelm and frankly the German people as a whole were incredibly insecure about their status in the world. They were less than 50 years old at this point and were bordered by nations which had been around for almost a thousand and at times can trace their history back even further. They had no great national history or prestige to work off of as a unified Germany. They also came into the game in 1871 -- well after the 16th and 17th century colonial rushes. They had no colonies. Germany is a notably isolated region and as the industrial leader relied on foreign imports to keep its factories churning out goods but perhaps equally important is the concept of **prestige.** Wilhelm II embarked on a policy of \"*Weltmahct*,\" or world power. A common turn of phrase in Germany was \"*Weltmacht oder Niedergang*,\" world power or downfall. They legitimately believed, the Kaiser, the government, and the people themselves, that it was Germany's time to be the world power. That the German people, through social darwinism, were the superior and they were to seize prestige, colony, and resources through aggression. Don't conflate this with Nazism, it wasn't by any means. However, the concept of social darwinism was a popular one in this time and would last well into the 20th century.\n\nTo get colonies and to secure colonies though, you need a navy. So Germany would start a rapid buildup of said navy. This had a twofold purpose -- one of creating a colonial fleet to secure shipping lanes and seize lands through war and to secure an alliance with the British. By performing a rapid naval buildup and flexing German muscle, combined with a shared cultural heritage, he had hoped that Britain would see Germany as too strong too culturally similar to be an enemy and would fall right into Germany's arms with an alliance. Does any of that make sense? No, because it doesn't and it failed horrendously. Britain told Germany to stop building up such a massive navy (which was being created for the express intent of contesting British naval hegemony) and Germany repeatedly refused. \n\nAs the Germans continued to contest British naval hegemony into the 20th century, we get to our first major date! In 1904 the French and the British, already uneasy with the German buildup, would begin to create some of the first legitimate and lasting bonds of friendship in their entire history. It actually wasn't initially made with any regard toward Germany but rather a mutual understanding between the two powers. France would recognize the U.K.'s control over Egypt and likewise the U.K. would recognize French hegemony of basically the rest of North Africa Westward from there, Algiers and Morocco namely. In a few years Britain would also begin to make nice with Russia by diplomatically solving the  the disputes in central asia (ie: Persia primarily) permanently.\n\nThe French and Spanish would divvy up Morocco between them (with the French getting the majority, obviously) and Germany would respond in its second act of aggression -- the May 1905 Moroccan Crisis. Kaiser Willhelm II would sail to Morocco just as these deals were being finalized and gave a keynote speech with the Sultan in front of a large crowd crying out for Moroccan independence from \"foreign oppressors\" and that Morocco should remain independent and free from influence. This was an attempt to undermine French legitimacy and drive a wedge between the British and French relationships by giving the Entente Cordiale a strenuous test w.r.t. the legitimacy of their agreement. It would have the exact opposite effect as you might already imagine. The French and British, already uneasy by the German build up, would be pressed closer than they would at any point in history. While it would be nothing formal, Britain began seriously considering Germany a threat at this point and would, more as an act of informal policy and general thinking than anything else, lean toward supporting France in a theoretical European conflict.\n\nThe third major event would be the coming of the famous *Dreadnought* -- with one [pictured here.](_URL_1_) The coming of the Dreadnought shook the naval world, so much so that every battleship in recent memory before it became known as \"pre-Dreadnoughts.\" They would completely and utterly outclass anything any other nation was fielding. Their range and their firepower and their new engines and armor was like a [fencing sword facing up against a claymore.](_URL_0_) and it would \"reset\" the naval arms race between Britain, Germany, and the world as a whole. You see Britain's policy was called the **Two-Power Standard** -- that is, having as many ships as the next two highest powers *combined*. They were a naval nation and they had naval hegemony. This gave Germany its first real shot, as both were starting from a blank slate essentially, to create a fleet that could legitimately contest the British in the [North Sea region.](_URL_2_) It should be noted that Dreadnought's were not exactly long range fighters, which made them useless for colonial protections. They had one use, attacking the British fleet in the North and Baltic Seas. The Germans would begin an unprecedented buildup buildings dozens upon dozens of these ships and constantly making orders for more. \n\nAll these tensions would finally culminate in 1911 -- the Second Moroccan Crisis. Oh those Germans were back for a vengeance and it would *totally* work this time. Right guys? The Moroccans would rebel against French rule and the French were going to send troops to protect its interests. Kaiser Willhelm, always the opportunist, would seize the situation by the proverbial horns and send a gunboat -- the *SMS Panther* -- to be backed up by the *SMS Berlin* shortly after to go \"protect German trade interests.\" Let's call a spade a spade however, Germany sent *war ships* to go intervene in a conflict between France and a country which had, in the *very conference Germany called for in 1905* was determined to remain under French influence. Germany would also demand territorial concessions in sub-Saharan Africa from the French along with pulling out of Morocco entirely. Not only would Britain back up France *again* driving them closer, Austria-Hungary wouldn't even give Germany diplomatic support -- let alone military backing. \n\n\nGermany had at this point completely abandoned Bismark's strategy of balance: Constantly giving conciliatory gifts or speeches or letters to rival powers to calm their nerves and keep everyone friendly. Remaining content as not only a land power, but *the* land power of Europe. Not getting greedy about the idea of the superior German and German prestige. Germany was in a precarious position in the world and Willhelm II did everything in his power to do the worst possible options. France and Britain, who were formerly neutral at best were driven into the strongest friendship they've had in their 1000 year history. Britain, who in 1887 had no intent of getting involved in continental conflicts and was now drawing up plans for direct land intervention in Europe to assist the two powers and had an agreement with France to provide it naval support in the event of war with Germany. Even more astoundingly was how it drove Britain and Russia together. These were two nations who for all purposes wanted nothing to do with each other. Britain, fearing German control over the Baltic Sea (that one to the right of Sweden and bordering Russia and Germany) and a reciprocated fear from Russia would begin to fix former grievances. Britain and Russia would go from hating each other in 1900 to informal military support and friendship in 1912 because of Germany's actions.\n\nThe last peg in Germany's coffin of war guilt was their actions in between June 28th and July 28th 1914 -- the July Crisis. This post is dragging on and this doesn't require the most analysis so it goes like this: Austria-Hungary used the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand as a justification and premise for their long standing objective of annexing Serbia. They knew however this would definitively mean war with Russia, which means they need German permission before doing this. Germany would give them the infamous **Blank Cheque** -- essentially telling the Austro-Hungarians to do whatever they want with Serbia and tacitly accepting war. Austria-Hungary would send Serbia, who to this day has absolutely no hard link to the assassins and by all accounts cut ties with the Black Hand well before the killing, an ultimatum. A list of concessions Serbia would have to agree to which amounted to essentially Serbia becoming a puppet state. Serbia would obviously decline. Russia would begin to mobilize, Germany would declare war.\n\nNot only would Germany declare war, it was their strategic plan that sealed the deal of them being perceived as the aggressors. Fearing their 'encirclement' they wanted to strike at France with everything they had and knock them out immediately. Infamously it would be given 950 hours -- 40 days, no more. To do this they couldn't just go through the border and push the French back, they would need to crush the French with total encirclement. This meant attacking through neutral Belgium. This is a topic that goes into the \"evil\" discussion that I'll talk about briefly but needless to say, Belgium had absolutely no ties to the French or Russians or Germans or anyone for that matter. They were sitting there by themselves and Germany saw them as a convenient stepping stone to knock the French out faster so they invaded this completely uninvolved power without provocation. This would be the primary accusation as to the claim of German aggression -- someone who is merely defending against two fronts would not declare war and then immediately perform a massive offensive through an uninvolved neutral country for the express intent of encirclement and annihilation of the enemy army. That is aggression full stop. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/HLDxP6w.png"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/austrianultimatum.htm", "http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/blankcheque.htm"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-62CEWENFw&amp;t=1m07s", "http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h61000/h61019.jpg", "http://worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/northsea.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "31a5cv", "title": "How did Germans come to live throughout the Baltics?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31a5cv/how_did_germans_come_to_live_throughout_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpzx6qn"], "score": [2], "text": ["You're not specifying any time, so I'm going to make an assumption, which is that you're talking about pre-Industrial times.\n\nIn that case, the question implicitly assumes that the modern nation-state was how things always worked. However, the whole \"I belong to [nationality]\"-narrative is a byproduct of the industrial revolution.\n\nBefore the industrial revolution things worked very differently: people moved around more freely, and tended to say they were from a region, city, culture, instead of belonging to a country. Countries were more the domain of rulers, who cared about where they could impose taxes. The invention of the modern nation state changed that.\n\nSo basically: because back then, people could just migrate more freely.\n\nSources: \n\n\"[End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?](_URL_1_)\" by Debora MacKenzie - aNewScientist article discussing how the nation state came to be\n\n\"[A Commonwealth Of Diverse Culture - Poland's Heritage](_URL_0_)\" - a website dedicated to the pre-WWII diversity of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. I really encourage you to have a look here, it will probably give you a good impression of how things worked back then."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://commonwealth.pl/", "http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329850.600-end-of-nations-is-there-an-alternative-to-countries.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4cj6ka", "title": "Why did the Greeks help the Ionians during the Ionian Revolt?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cj6ka/why_did_the_greeks_help_the_ionians_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1iuvtq"], "score": [8], "text": ["Heya. Nice username.\n\nWe know much less about the Ionian Revolt than we would like to. Our only source for the events is the very unsatisfactory account in Herodotos' *Histories*. While Herodotos was from Halikarnassos in Asia Minor, and presumably knew a lot about the affairs of the Greeks in those parts, his tale of the Ionian Revolt is simplistic and full of holes. Much of what we claim to know about the conflict is speculation based on plausibilities.\n\nHerodotos has it that the entire Revolt was the responsibility of Histiaios, the tyrant of Miletos, and his deputy Aristagoras. These men were afraid that the Persians would strip them of their lofty position, and therefore enticed the other cities on the west coast of Asia Minor to revolt. He does not explain how they did this, or why the Greeks would be so keen to revolt against Persia in the first place. Modern theories include bitterness over being excluded from the Aegean trade network, over the high tribute imposed by the Persians, or over the tyrants that were imposed on them by the Great King. There is hardly a whisper of any of this in Herodotos. Indeed, the Greek cities (with one exception) let their tyrants go free after deposing them, suggesting they were not the focus of particular hatred; when the revolt was put down and Mardonios was sent to reassess the tribute, it was established that the previous level had been fair, and it was kept unchanged by the Athenians when they \"liberated\" the region and started levying their own tribute. Basically, we don't know why the Ionian Revolt happened at all.\n\nSomething similar can be said about the involvement of allies from Old Greece. Most Greeks clearly wanted nothing to do with the Ionian business of waking a sleeping lion, but Athens and Eretria sent a small force in support. Why? Again, Herodotos doesn't say. In his version, Aristagoras simply went from city to city trying to persuade people to help him out, spinning them tales of untold riches ready for the taking and cowardly Persians unable to mount any effective resistance. His sales pitch failed when he tried it on King Kleomenes of Sparta, but it succeeded in the Assembly at Athens; all Herodotos has to say about it is that this proves \"it is easier to deceive many than one\". Why the Athenians thought the idea was attractive is left for the reader to decide. Ancestral ties to the Ionians in Asia Minor is one possible explanation, although there is little in Herodotos to confirm that the Athenians would have cared that much; he claims the Eretrians only went because the Milesians had supported them in war in the past. \n\nIt should be noted, though, that the force sent by the Athenians and Eretrians was very small - 25 triremes in total (20 Athenian and 5 Eretrian). Given that the Ionians themselves mustered well over 300 triremes for the battle of Lade, it is hard to imagine that either Athens or Eretria was trying to make a stand here and commit to the success of the Ionians. \n\nMore likely, they just wanted a slice of the pie. The large forces commanded by the rebellious cities (which were also joined by the Karians, the cities on the Hellespont and the Greeks on Cyprus) may have made them optimistic about the outcome. They may have been happy to believe Aristagoras' tale about the great plunder they could get from the Persians. Their actions confirm this picture: they crossed the Aegean, helped the Ionians sack and burn the local Persian administrative centre of Sardis, and then went home. When the Persians struck back, the Athenians were notably absent, and they would offer no more support to the Ionians for the remainder of the Revolt. This hardly sounds like the behaviour of a mother city protecting its ancient colonies.\n\nAfter the Persians responded in force and the Revolt was put down, many Greeks on the mainland roundly blamed the Athenians for bringing themselves to the Great King's attention. Their actions provided the Persians with a nice pretext to expand further west. The campaign that ended at Marathon is mostly known for the result of that battle; it is often forgotten that the Persians, before they came to Athenian territory, landed on Euboia, assaulted Eretria, and burned it to the ground in retribution for its support of the Ionians at Sardis.\n\nThe short version, then, is probably that the Athenians and Eretrians were to some extent blinded by greed, and overly impressed with the forces mustered by the rebellious cities and regions of Asia Minor. A fleet of 350 triremes must have looked to them like it could conquer the whole world - until the Persians sent a fleet of 600 to crush it. The mainland Greeks had no previous experience fighting an enemy like the Persian empire, and it is likely that they simply did not know who they were dealing with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qlzfm", "title": "When did underwear become a thing? Was it concurrent with the development of trousers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qlzfm/when_did_underwear_become_a_thing_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4ungl6"], "score": [3], "text": ["I would suggest [episode 62 of our podcast](_URL_0_), which is an episode about hygiene and cleanliness, with a section about the development of modern underwear."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/cleanliness-and-hygiene-in-the-early-united-states"]]}
{"q_id": "97npx2", "title": "Did Ancient Civilizations Have Restaurants?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97npx2/did_ancient_civilizations_have_restaurants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e49vvrt"], "score": [1503], "text": ["That depends on what you mean by \"restaurant.\" Civilizations in practically every time period have had places where you could go and buy a cooked meal, either to eat there or take home. In some places, such as classical urban Rome, it could be a massive fire risk to cook meals in a tenement apartment, so \"eating out\" was something of a necessity for the poor. The ancient world, however, is not my specialty, so I'll defer to those for which it is for details about the ancient culinary world. \n\nBut if you mean something more than just a place outside the home where you could get food, the \"restaurant\" per se \u2014 a public establishment where anyone could come in at any time, sit down at a private table, interact with a dedicated wait staff, order from a range of food off a menu and pay per item at the end of the meal \u2014 developed at a specific place and time: in the back half of the 18th Century in France. The following comes primarily from a single source, but a most apt one: Rebecca Spang's *The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture.* For broader context about the medieval predecessors of the \"restaurant\", see u/lord_mayor_of_reddit's [great reply](_URL_0_) and u/rkiga's [note about China](_URL_1_). (*Paragraph edited to clarify and add links.*)\n\nUnder the *ancien r\u00e9gime*, if you wanted to sit down for a meal outside of your home, there were two possibilities. If had rich friends, you could be invited into one of their homes, where their personal chefs would prepare sumptuous meals. For everyone else, there was the *table d'h\u00f4te* or host's table, where an innkeeper or caterer would prepare a single meal for guests, served at a single time for a fixed price. This was particularly galling if you were a traveler from out of town, as the numerous complaints of 18th Century English and German visitors to France attest: the food was unhealthy, the companions were greedy and rude; per one 1790 visitor, conditions were so bad they could spur an English traveler to suicide.\n\nAs hard as the private dinners of the wealthy elite might be to get into, the *table d'h\u00f4te* could be just as insular:\n\n >  A meal set at one large table, always at the same specified time, and at which the eaters had little opportunity to order or request particular dishes, the *table d'h\u00f4te* was frequently a regular midday meeting spot for local artisans and workers, old friends and long-time residents of a neighborhood. An urban tradition, the *table d'h\u00f4te* offered dependable gossip for those interested in neighborhood nourishment, but it could be a less than pleasant environment for recently arrived strangers. (Spang, 8)\n\nThe \"restaurant\" would gradually come along to change this situation, to the point where in 1814, foreign visitors were coming to France specifically FOR its cuisine. \"The best chefs and restaurants in Europe were... to be found in Paris,\" writes historian Philip Mansel. Baron L\u00f6wenstern at \"the best dinner possible\" of oysters, fish, champagne and Clos Vougeot [wine] at the Rocher de Cancale in the rue Mandar; \"less wealthy visitors found they could enjoy an excellent dinner of soup, fish, two dishes of meat, dessert and a bottle of wine in a Palais Royal restaurant like Le Caveau\" for two to three francs a head. \"Such a dinner in London,\" Mansel writes, \"was four times more expensive, and by no means so good\" (Philip Mansel, *Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution, 1814-1852*, 43-44). \n\nHow did French cuisine experience such a *volte-face* \u2014 dare one say, a revolution \u2014 in just half a century? For this development, we are indebted to some peculiar beliefs of 18th Century medical science. The digestion was seen as having a massive and vital effect over all bodily processes. Despite its powers, digestion \"could easily be deranged by ill-prepared foods, intellectual exertion, or emotional anguish,\" Spang writes. \"In the medical imagination of the eighteenth century, *indigestion* therefore posed a constant and serious threat.\" The eminent Swiss physician Samuel Tissot wrote that \"all ills \u2014 including consumption, madness, and early death \u2014 could be traced to deranged digestion\" (Spang, 36). \n\nTo the rescue came the *restaurant* \u2014 not a place to eat, but a thing to eat. A *restaurant* was a cup of bouillon, meat broth, \"sweated and cooked for many hours in a tightly sealed kettle of *bain marie* (hot water bath)\": \n\n >  According to experts, the prolonged cooking began the process of breaking down the flesh and allowed the meat to reach the eater already partially digested... *Restaurants*, it was thought, thereby provided the necessary blood-heating nutrition of meat, without taxing an invalid's weakened digestive system (1-2). \n\nIn the latter half of the 18th Century, people opened \"restaurateur's rooms\" to serve this bouillon:\n\n >  The first restaurateurs sold little solid food and advertised their establishments as especially suited to all those too frail to eat an evening meal. In its initial form, then the restaurant was specifically a place one went *not* to eat, but to sit and weakly sip one's *restaurant.* (2)\n\nThere was one vital feature of the *restaurant* that helped the restaurateurs take off: because it was basically a broth, one could take one's *restaurant* at any hour of the day, rather than requiring a meal to be prepped and served at a particular time as at the *tables d'h\u00f4te*. So restaurateurs were open at all hours. As they became more popular, they gradually started diversifying their menus away from simply bouillon \u2014 until the modern restaurant emerged. As Spang notes, \"If eighteenth-century models of physiology had singled out the souffl\u00e9 for its restorative powers, the restaurant could not have taken the form it did\" (68). \n\nTwo other innovations came in the 1780s and 90s, both in the form of creating a more individualized and less communal dining experience.  One was \"a new kind of personalized treatment\" to the diner: \"the restaurant's effete clientele required a host of attentions unheard of at an innkeeper's or cook's *table d'h\u00f4te*, and those new modes of interaction would long outlive the fashionable ill health that originally provoked them\" (66-7). You could eat alone or with a small group at a restaurant instead of being forced to interact with unpleasant strangers, but would still receive individualized service as at the finest private tables. The other innovation was a vastly increased variety of culinary options. Instead of a single meal for the whole table, you could choose from a range of possible dinners \u2014 and to help people keep all these choices straight, *restaurateurs* began offering *cartes* or menus listing the options. Just as crucially, these menus listed the price for each individual item. (It did take people time to adjust \u2014 throughout the 1790s, menus \"carried reminders in large and boldface type informing eaters that prices listed were for *single* servings only.\") (76-7)\n\nAs I said above, I can't compare in detail how these innovations compared to the dining options available in the ancient world. But at the time, at least, restaurants were seen as a novel development \u2014 not just in France, but worldwide. \"American and English travelers to Paris marveled at its restaurants, terming them among the city's 'most peculiar' and 'most remarkable' features,\" Spang writes. As late as the 1850s, \"the children's book *Rollo in Paris* carefully explained that in Paris one did not stay at a boarding house but took rooms in a hotel and dined wherever one pleased\" (2). \n\n**SOURCES**\n\n- Mansel, Philip. *Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution, 1814-1852.* New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2001.\n- Spang, Rebecca L. *The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture.* Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97npx2/did_ancient_civilizations_have_restaurants/e4ceiya/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97npx2/did_ancient_civilizations_have_restaurants/e4a9wqy/"]]}
{"q_id": "4all1r", "title": "Can someone give me an unbiased account of Mother Theresa's life, her work, and her philosophy and whether it is reasonable to somewhat objectively call her a overall \"good/\"bad\" person? Is the Catholic Church accurate in the way we remember her?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4all1r/can_someone_give_me_an_unbiased_account_of_mother/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d11g8jw"], "score": [13], "text": ["Hi, you may be interested in this earlier post\n\n* [AskHistorians consensus on Mother Theresa.](_URL_0_) - a long discussion post featuring several flaired users, including a side conversation on the issues historians have with casting judgment on other people's lives"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hn2eh/askhistorians_consensus_on_mother_theresa/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ws7uu", "title": "Did General Haig Make a Good Choice By fighting the Battle of the Somme?", "selftext": "I was just pondering about World War 1 and came up with this as a question. I hope you guys can share some opinions with me. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ws7uu/did_general_haig_make_a_good_choice_by_fighting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotoayc"], "score": [29], "text": ["**TL;DR:** Yes.\n\n---------\n\nYou're asking one of the biggest historiographical questions of the First World War, one that was hotly debated at one point but is now, quite conclusively, decided upon. With this question, was the Battle of the Somme a 'good choice', we must ask ourselves a series of questions:\n\n1. Was it necessary?\n\n2. Does Douglas Haig, necessarily, deserve the credit or blame on the tactical errors of the first day?\n\n3. Did it do what it was intended to do?\n\n4. Was it, overall, a net positive for the Allied war effort?\n\nSo let's hit this from start to finish.\n\n**(1)**\n\nYes, it was completely necessary. The French were getting creamed at Verdun, by the end of July the French warned that there would not be a French army left to assist the British. The Brits were in a not-so-conundrum-conundrum: They could not partake in an offensive and withdrawal as the French theater was bound to collapse without interference or they could perform an offensive to draw weight off of the French burden. Could the Brits not have withdrew, used superior sea power, both indirectly and directly? They tried that at Gallipoli and it failed horribly; it just wasn't there yet for massive seaborn invasions.The Western Front was where Britain had to fight as it was the best possible place to meet Germany and beat them. They couldn't wait for more tanks, which Haig would have preferred, as they were on the clock as well. The circumstances *demanded* an *immediate* infantry attack to siphon focus away from Verdun. \n\nThe Somme was, honestly, one of the best choices of areas to attack as well. It was the connecting point between British and French lines which means they could do a dual offensive in mutual support. It was wide open ground which meant no massive mining operations to hold them off while also, unlike Ypres, being completely dry ground. However, we must also recognize the very real political fact that after the Somme it was done for. It was total war; this was the point of no return. Diplomacy still had potential before this; peace envoys were still being sent either way before this point. After this all sides were fully committed; there was no chance for peace until one side was totally defeated. Between August 1914 and June 1916 the British Army lost 522,206 men and from July 1916 to November 1918 they lost 2,183,930. 73% of the financial burden of the war, 8,742,000,000 pounds, occurred after July 1st 1916. However *it was still necessary if the British wanted the best chance at victory.* The French were about to be creamed and, with the Russians also starting the Brusilov Offensive, there was legitimate chance that they could 'squeeze' the Germans out from all side. Britain didn't want to be the one ally who sat on the sidelines while the war was lost and everyone else was fighting for their lives. \n\n**(2)**\n\nNo. He does not. Haig little more than chose the area of attack and said that it was going to happen. General Sir Henry Rawlinson, Commander of the Fourth Army, was the one in charge of how the actual plan of attack would go. It irks me endlessly that Haig is thrown into the grinder for all the faults of the first day but it was Rawlinsons decisions that were truly responsible for the loss of life. Rawlinson based his plan on three assumptions:\n\n* His army was largely unskilled.\n\n* That his artillery was powerful enough to destroy German defences, line by line, but not more than one line at a time.\n\n* That there was little possibility of a breakthrough followed by cavalry actions.\n\nAs there was no breakthrough there was no need to concentrate a decisive force at any particular point so both artillery and infantry were even spread out. Rushing the lines was not necessary as the artillery was to have mostly removed the threat of German resistance; despite Haig's insistence otherwise. Rawlinson believed the artillery would conquer the land and the infantry would just occupy it; **and this was not a dumb thing to believe because it's precisely what the Germans did at Verdun.** It had worked not only before but recently. Honestly it's a situation where if it had worked Rawlinson would have been praised, to this day, as a mastermind of simplicity; artillery shelled the first lines, infantry advanced and occupied, artillery moved up and hit the second line, rinse and repeat. Whereas Haig, on the other hand, wanted a more 1918 styled approach of rapid, hurricane barrages followed by rapid infantry advance and seizure of the lines. Ultimately a mixture of these plans would be accepted.\n\nIt's worth noting that two of the three divisions in the Fourth Army which saw wild success on the infamous first day, the 36th Ulster and the 18th Eastern Divisions, were the ones who threw the 'new' tactical pamphlet out the window and used frontline bomber parties which followed the barrage to immediately strike at the German lines following the barrages lifting. The 18th Eastern Division notably took the German front line in their first rush. More significantly those that followed most closely to Rawlinsons tactical pamphlets of slow advance and no advanced bomber parties suffered the highest casualties. The French, who did not use a wave system but used small tactical squads, captured the entire German front line trench in their sector within an hour; but that may also be due to the fact they had 4x the amount of heavy guns than the Brits so that's up in the air.  By the 14th of July these tactical fantasies began to break down in lieu of what was actually working [more progress began to be made.](_URL_1_) But we must remember, again, that he was not stupid he was just trying to copy *what was already working for the Germans.* He felt he had a largely untrained mob that was incapable of performing tactically sophisticated maneuvers and that by complicating things that would doom them to failure.\n\n**(3)  &  (4)**\n\nAlso yes. The three original aims for the battle were, in some way or another, fulfilled. Even on the first day the relief on the Verdun front was enacted by the Germans. They swung a wild amount of men from there to the Somme Front *immediately* and the French began to hit back hard. The positions held by the Allies by the end of the offensive was, as you can see from the above picture, better than where they started. This would be further exemplified when the Germans enacted Operation Alberich, [retreating to a newly built massive defensive line](_URL_0_) which ceded even more territory. This ties into the last one which is that the Brits *did win the game of attrition in this offensive.* The Germans lost the core of their battle hardened army and we know from their own personal writings in the Generals Staff *they were freaking TERRIFIED of another Somme.* Hence Operation Alberich; they were fortifying the most dangerous position on the front where the French and Brits could tag team them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Operation_Alberich,_March,_1917.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Battle_of_the_Somme_1916_map.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2p6pml", "title": "How did the Mona Lisa end up being permanently displayed at the Louvre, so far away from Florence? And what happened to the painting in the centuries before its permanent display?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p6pml/how_did_the_mona_lisa_end_up_being_permanently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtv6el"], "score": [8], "text": ["The Mona Lisa was actually in France quite close to DaVinci's death; he seems to have brought it with him to France when he moved there late in his life at the invitation of Francis I. This is not terribly surprising; other Italian artists like Cellini were invited to work at Francis's court as well. Francis later brought the painting very soon after Leonardo's death, probably via his assistant Salai who inherited the painting and it has been in the French royal collections(first at Fountainbleau, where several early accounts describe seeing it and a number of copies were made at various point, and then Versailles until the French Revolution and the transfer of the royal collections to the Louvre) and then the Louvre ever since."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "34rcaq", "title": "Did people actually talk how Shakespeare wrote?", "selftext": "So I assume the average person could understand Shakespeare's plays when they were first being performed. However, I'm curious if this is how the average person would speak in the context of daily life. I ask because there have been movies that, while watching, I think to myself \"nobody would ever talk like that in real life\" and I am just wondering if the average person would also think that while watching a Shakespeare play back when they were first being performed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34rcaq/did_people_actually_talk_how_shakespeare_wrote/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqxg7z2", "cqxkrhw", "cqxx0wg"], "score": [65, 17, 4], "text": ["By the most part, yes, but let me explain why is not fully yes. Most of Shakespheres works are actually written iambic pentameter, a type of verse in poetry, also happening to be one of the most popular. \n\nThat being said, people at the time did not speak generally in that \"perfect\" speech, espaiclly lower classes. It may have been used in speeches given by upper class and royalty. Many of idioms and words used in his plays were used, just not the style that his plays are written in. \n\nAlso note, you are speaking the same type of English as in those plays, as Shakeperean English is modern English.", "Shakespeare also varied the way his characters spoke. He uses the iambic pentameter in the speeches of kings and lords, while lower-class characters are more prosaic. Magical characters (Puck, Oberon, and the fairies in A Midsummer Nights Dream; The Witches in Macbeth; Ariel in The Tempest) often had non-iambic but still poetic meters. Poetic or heightened speech often communicates the nature/background/status of the character. Kings will just rhyme lines sometimes (\"High-stomach'd are they both, and full of ire,\nIn rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.\" - King Richard II, I.i) as a way to show their status and sound fancy compared to others. \n\nAnother example is in  [Act 1 Scene 5](_URL_0_) of Romeo and Juliet. When R & J first meet, their lines sync up in meter and rhyme scheme so that their first interaction forms a sonnet, a popular form of poetry at the time. \n\nPeople didn't go around casually spitting sonnets at the time, but here it communicates their status as uncommonly bound lovers to the audience. It's as if you started flirting with someone and the resulting conversation turned into solid freestyle rap. \n\nSource: Am a theatre major, many a lecture on the old Bill \"the Bard\" Shakespeare.", "In conjunction with the historical perspective, it's useful here to relate this to what you're talking about - artistic license and/or hackery. Shakespeare's characters - much like normal people do - use different levels of speech so that the audience can perceive different personalities, different states of mind, different levels of status, etc. \n\nAs has been stated elsewhere here, people of high status will often speak with much formality. You'll also often see moments of \"poeticism\" with characters who are mocking each other, or deliberately obfuscating, or trying to seduce one another. \n\nTake a look at [Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 2](_URL_4_) and at [Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 3](_URL_0_) as examples. Hamlet is being deliberately obtuse and wasting everyone's time by talking like a teenager with a thesaurus who belongs in /r/iamverysmart. The people around him are speaking very clearly - \"Where is Polonius?\" and \"What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?\" - and he is responding with statements like \"Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin\" and \"Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain\nconvocation of politic worms are e'en at him.\" In the following quote he gives up the game (in response to \"Where is Polonius?\"): \n\n\"In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.\"\n\nIn most productions, \"as you go up the stairs into the lobby\" gets a laugh, because it feels shockingly direct and modern in response to all the obfuscatory near-nonsense he's been spouting since he decided to feign madness several acts ago. \n\n[Here](_URL_3_) is an especially good example of Shakespeare using this type of contrast. It's from Merchant of Venice, acted by Ian McKellan and David Suchet as part of a BBC program on how to approach Shakespeare as an actor. Except for a few outdated wordings, Antonio's Speech is easily understood and direct - \"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad / It wearies me; you say it wearies you\". By contrast, the speech that follows is dense with wordplay and ornament, and the actors and director go into the reasons for that particular character to be using heightened language - mockery, playfulness, showing off, etc.\n\nAnyway, you are absolutely right to compare Shakespeare's non-naturalistic language to modern non-naturalistic language. We take it for granted when an Aaron Sorkin character is able to rapid-fire through several acronyms and statistics, quote Latin, and speak in large, fast paragraphs, or when Miranda Cosgrove uses an especially roundabout sentence construction like \"Sexy is what I try to get them to see me as after I win them over with my personality.\" In Shakespeare, because the conventions aren't as familiar to us, we dismiss them as poetic, high-falutin, or antiquated even though the dramatic device of \"Powerful person using heightened language among normal-speaking peasants\" is usually the same whether you're watching Thor, The West Wing, or a Shakespeare History. \n\nFinally, it's worth noting that people do this *in real life*. Not everyone speaks in what we consider \"naturalistic\" speech all the time. [This slightly-suspect study](_URL_1_) notes that men tend to use words of lesser frequency (aka fancier words) when primed for 'romantic' conversation. People frequently use heightened language in order to be funny, or to appear smart, or to be playful. Formal speeches follow their own conventions. And [long-winded blowhards often write entire essays that are nearly incomprehensible gibberish](_URL_2_). Shakespeare's plays tend to have a robust mixture of linguistic styles, and many excerpts have a lot in common with modern speech, which indicates that your suspicion might be correct.\n\nEdit: I a word"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://nfs.sparknotes.com/romeojuliet/page_66.html"], ["http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.4.3.html", "http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep06538549.pdf", "http://www.newrepublic.com/article/put-differently/92750/shakespeare-as-you-like-it-language", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLiS9i7MSYc", "http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.4.2.html"]]}
{"q_id": "27esqy", "title": "Has any monarch ever un-abdicated their throne?", "selftext": "Has any Monarch, after peacefully abdicating their throne, tried to take it back or been returned to the throne?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27esqy/has_any_monarch_ever_unabdicated_their_throne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci03xx6"], "score": [4], "text": ["Definitely.  The most recent example I can think of is Gyanendra of Nepal, who reigned as King while an infant in the 1950s after his father and grandfather fled from the country after a dispute with the Rana family, who were the hereditary Prime Ministers and in some respect the real effectual rulers of Nepal.  When the dispute ended, Gyanendra's reign was agreed to have ended, so he effectively abdicated.\n\nHe was returned to the throne in the 21st century after a mysterious shooting spree by his nephew wiped out multiple royals.  He then abdicated a second time when Nepal was transformed into a Republic, but he still has some political support and has stated that he wants to return to the throne, which would mean he would have reigned, abdicated, reigned again, abdicated again, and then reigned again.\n\nSource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4225171.stm"]]}
{"q_id": "2abo6k", "title": "Soviet historical revisionist who was author of a hefty tome re-imagining most world history..?", "selftext": "I'm not positive whether this is the correct sub-reddit for this inquiry (r/badhistory?), but I'll try. Years ago, I'd come across an online book by some Soviet historian who had crafted a revisionist world history, completely re-writing events and their contexts, from as far back as ancient Greece, all the way to At Least the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. The conceit of the book was that he had a theory that the ancient world had been \"made up\", so to say (I believe that was his theory), by folks in the more-modern (Early-Modern?) world, and as if that isn't enough, he further insisted that many of the historical events of the ancient world were actually modern events superimposed upon this \"made-up\" period in the past, for the purpose, I believe, of sort of rounding-out this otherwise-sparse period. \n\nOther specific aspects of this work which I can still recall included his providing an illustration of, say, the Fall of Troy, which had been made during the Middle Ages, the artist of which had portrayed these Trojans in distinctly Medieval attire (basically, he had drawn them as though they were contemporaries, as folks are wont to do); the Soviet historian had insisted that this \"proved\" that Troy had actually fallen in modern times, and that the myth was actually an echo of the actual Fall of Constantinople. Other choice tidbits were things such as \"Alexander the Great was actually Mehmet the Conqueror\", etc etc for hundreds of pages. \n\nNow, I recall neither the name of the historian nor the title of his book. I had stumbled upon it by accident and, as though stunned, proceeded to read through it for hours. Eventually, my digression had to end and I continued my real studies and the bizarre history was more or less pushed to the recesses of my mind. But every once in a while it comes to the fore and I find myself excited all over again by the sheer audacity and outlandishness and quasi-erudition. But, alas, I have never found the source again. Now, however, I have discovered reddit and its wonderful subreddits. So my question is: Who was this man? What was his \"great\" work? How was he able to create it--delusion, dedication to the propaganda machine, both? What do other historians make of him?\n\nThank you", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2abo6k/soviet_historical_revisionist_who_was_author_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cithcpg"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's Fomenko and Nosovsky you probably talking about and their [New Chronology](_URL_0_).\n\nFomenko is prominent mathematician, member of the national Academy of Science, and his weird little \"hobby\" was strongly opposed by scientific society in USSR, but nobody was taking him seriously.\n\nThere's rumors that even Fomenko never took it seriously or even made it on a bet (that anybody without even shred of knowlege in history can create comprehensive theory, which would be popular among public).\n\nAlso fun side fact - Garry Kasparov, 13th World Chess Champion, is strong supporter of Fomenko, and seems to genuanly bielive in this \"version\" of history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29"]]}
{"q_id": "21nz4r", "title": "Why were exclaves (and by extension, enclaves) so prominent in history, but less so now?", "selftext": "Why did these areas get enclaved? Why didn't they go 'that's dumb, lets just make a line? In what logical world was such a place as [Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau](_URL_1_) born?\n\nAnd why did the Partition of India create such (well, outright stupid)[ borders](_URL_0_) between Bangladesh (although then it was E. Pakistan I think) and India? IIRC it was the brits who made those lines, why did they do such a botched job?\n\nWhy are there only a handful of examples of these in Modem History? (Baarle, Indo-Bangladesh, and I think Oman somewhere)\n\nEDIT: Title could have been worded better as '*more plentiful in history compared to the modern day*' but I digress.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21nz4r/why_were_exclaves_and_by_extension_enclaves_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgexjyn"], "score": [4], "text": ["Interesting question. I think enclaves and exclaves were more common back in the days before the nation state and before nationalism. This all comes down to how land is owned, I think. In the pre-modern days, lands were owned by lords, families, etc. A single person could hold a title which controlled an area. When that person died, his titles and lands were (usually) handed down to his heir(s). This lead to people like Charles V inheriting large amount of lands that weren't necessarily connected - in Charles V's case this was Spain, Austria, parts of Italy, the Low Countries and he conquered parts of the New World. The only link between these lands was Charles V. The major parts of his empire themselves weren't even necessarily one whole - the Low Countries, before his rule, were a chequerboard of small counties and duchies and so on, none with straight, pretty borders. These borders were drawn over the centuries after countless wars, after being split up dozens of times in inheritances, by treaties, etc. In this setting, it was fairly common for a lord's lands to include several exclaves and enclaves and this didn't really form a problem. \n\nHowever, shortly after Charles V's reign - and you could start seeing signs of this during his, what with the unification of the Low Countries into an administrative whole, for instance - something happened. The nation state was born. The traditional starting point for this is 1648, with the treaty of Westphalia. Now, these lands were bound by more than just this single person that ruled/owned them - there was a growing administration/bureaucracy, an army loyal not to a single man but to a country, a *state*. With the advent of nationalism in the 19th century, this became even more pronounced. This, however, all has an effect on the borders of these lands. Countries strived to erase enclaves and exclaves, as territorial integrity became important. A large factor in this was the strive towards efficiency and centralisation. Countries became more and more indivisible. And through wars, treaties, ethnic nationalism and other forms during the 19th century, exclaves and enclaves were hammered out. Where in the past a lord could split his lands in two for his heirs - or lose a title and the accompanying lands after a war, this was no longer quite as evident as it was back then. \n\nEnclaves and exclaves still exist, obviously, but they're more the result of difficult negotiations and difficulties drawing borders (as was the case with Baarle-Hertog/Nassau and Indo-Bangladesh) and are thus fairly different to the enclaves and exclaves of the past. \n\nThat's as far as I can figure, at least."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Bangladesh_enclaves", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau#The_border_with_Baarle-Hertog.2C_Belgium"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7jtfid", "title": "Were the tales collected by the brothers Grimm widely known before they compiled them? Did the more popular ones (Snow White, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood) match the ones more popular before they collected them? Were they immediately of academic interest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7jtfid/were_the_tales_collected_by_the_brothers_grimm/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dra1zdu", "dwnxltv"], "score": [7, 4], "text": [" I will answer the first part of your question. (and I humbly request someone who knows better than me to give a full comprehensive one)\n\nJacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (known better as the Brothers Grimm) compiled a huge array of folk tales from various sources in an effort to preserve Germany's cultural heritage and promote solidarity amidst a Napoleon-dominated Europe. Primarily gathered from Hessian and Westphalian soil, they compiled these stories from numerous sources, primarily from the lips of people from lower classes (although oftentimes upper class people also  chimed in). So it is safe to say that these tales were fairly well known before the famous publishing by the Grimm brothers, although they definitely were not part of widespread literary discourse during that time.\n\nThey werent strictly \"fairy tales\" in the sense we know them today, and the brothers Grimm actually didnt use the term for them. These stories were folklore, legends, mythology, passed down as oral tradition for centuries. These stories often contained mature and violent themes in them and touch on some very sensitive (or as we put it, **NSFW**) subjects.\n\nNow were there changes? Yes. \n\nIn 1810, they  sent Clemens Brentano, a poet and writer, these tales. However Brentano didnt like these tales, somehow, and left his copy in the Olenberg Monastery where it was eventually lost. Somehow by chance it was rediscovered in 1920. \n\nWhen comparing this copy (known as the Olenberg Manuscript) to the official editions of the Grimm's tales in 1812 and 1815, some differences begin to emerge. Much of it was due to the fact that it was difficult for the Brothers Grimm to faithfully copy down the exact words of the tales they heard. Another reason is that they themselves made some intentional changes to the story. They felt it was justified because they felt they understood the natural \"poetics\" of storytelling. Oral tradition always has a habit of mutating over the centuries and they felt as long as they could capture the \"gist\" and \"essence\" and \"moral\" they were doing the story justice.   \n\nNot all the stories were strictly German (some were of French and Dutch origin but found a popular audience among Germans), and some had actually been published in older more obscure books. (The Brave Little Tailor was from a 1557 manuscript)\n\n(\"Sleeping Beauty\" and \"The Little Red Riding Hood\" were also originally actually published by Charles Perrault for example, and had some prior following. )\n\nJacob Grimm sought to establish a more \"Germanic\" form of storytelling. Rather than fey, they became enchantresses. When there were glaring plot holes in the story he sought to fill the gaps with his own effort.  \n\nWillhelm Grimm sought to cater to a more \"popular\" audience. Evil mothers became evil stepmothers (like in Snow White). He also used more \"literary\" words to give the story style and attractiveness.  It is very notable though, that they *didnt* tone down the violence in many of these tales...\n\n\nOverall I can say this: it was a good effort of them to copy down and preserve these wide collection of tales that would have eventually faded into obscurity. Some changes were made, out of necessity or otherwise, but overall the core tone of the stories was preserved. It is also important to note that many of these stories were not originally intended for children, and was later bowdlerized again to make it family friendly. \n\n \n  \n \n\n\n ", "Thanks to /u/integral_grail for a solid answer! I can give a more comprehensive answer, but you definitely laid out some of the basics.\n\nSo: \"Where the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm widely known before they compiled them?\"\n\nYes, they were (or at least, the *vast majority* of them were). We have records of tale variants of most of the tales the Brothers Grimm collected from all over the world, sometimes several variants from a single location, from different centuries. Cinderella, for example, has over 500 variants in Europe alone! Many of the tales the Brothers Grimm collected were widely known and circulated in various forms for hundreds of years before the Grimms came along. The brothers themselves were heavily influenced by the French versions of several of their tales, for example. Several of the more popular versions of well-known tales (the versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, etc that we think of today when we say \"the story of [x]\") were actually first widely circulated in Italy, France, and Spain before they ever reached Germany on the same level. \n\nThis actually leads into your second question, \"Did the more popular ones (Snow White, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood) match the ones more popular before they collected them?\" The short answer is \"no.\" The slightly longer answer is \"many bore a lot of similarities, but every variant is different.\"\n\nMaria Tatar actually briefly covers this in her introduction to *The Classic Fairy Tales*:\n\n > Fairy tales, Angela Carter tells us, are not \"unique one-offs,\" and their narrators are neither \"original\" nor \"godlike\" nor \"inspired.\" To the contrary, these stories circulate in multiple versions, reconfigured by each telling to form kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different effects. When we say the word \"Cinderella,\" we are referring not to a single text but to an entire array of stories with a persecuted heroine who may respond to her situation with defiance, cunning, ingenuity, self-pity, anguish, or grief. She will be called Yeh-hsien in China, Cendrillon in Italy, Aschenputtel in Germany, and Catskin in England. Her sisters may be named One-Eye and Three-Eyes, Anastasia and Drizella, or she may have just one sister named Haloek. Her tasks range from tending cows to sorting peas to fetching embers for a fire.\n\n >  ......The story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, can be discovered the world over, yet it varies radically in texture and flavor from one culture to the next. Even in a single culture, that texture or flavor may be different enough that a listener will impatiently interrupt the telling to insist \"that's not the way I heard it.\" In France, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are devoured by the wolf. The Grimms' version, by contrast, stages a rescue scene in which a hunter intervenes to liberate Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the belly of the wolf. Caterinella, an Italian Red Riding Hood, is invited to dine on the teeth and ears of her grandmother by a masquerading wolf. A Chinese \"Goldflower\" manages to slay the beast who wants to devour her by throwing a spear in his mouth. Local color often affects the premise of a tale. In Italy, the challenge facing one heroine is not spinning straw into gold but downing seven plates of lasagna.\n\nThe French Cinderella by Perrault, for example, is the version with glass slippers, a fairy godmother, and a pumpkin carriage. The Brothers Grimm version? Her \"fairy godmother\" is the spirit of her dead mother who resides in a tree, there is no pumpkin carriage, and she is gifted three beautiful dresses (one for each night of the ball) rather than a pair of glass slippers. Basically: every version of a tale is different, especially ones based in the oral storytelling tradition. Location, class, time, and the teller all affect how the story is told and *what* story is told. This is why fairy tale scholars usually examine the underlying basic plot structure (known as a \"tale type\") that appears despite rich cultural variation rather than trying to find exact copies of tales transmitted across cultures. When we do find tale variants that are remarkably similar to each other in plot, theme, tone, narrative structure, and language, that tends to be a sign that those two cultures were communicating with each other on a fairly regular and intimate basis via trade, immigration, or other forms of cultural exchange.\n\nYour third question, \"Were they immediately of academic interest?\" is a little bit tricky, because the Brothers Grimm *themselves* were trying to collect, preserve, edit, and distribute the tales due to their academic interest in them; their initial collection of the tales was what essentially amounted to a literary archeological expedition (complete with making it up as they went along). As they stated in the preface to the 1812 edition: \n\n > \u201cIt was perhaps just the right time to record these tales since those people who should be preserving them are becoming more and more scarce...Wherever the tales still exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude. People know them and love them because they have simply absorbed them in a habitual way. And they take pleasure in them without having any reason. This is exactly why the custom of storytelling is so marvelous.\u201d \n\nI think I would need further clarification on whether you were referring to the Grimms' collection 'Kinder-und Hausm\u00e4rchen/Children's and Household Tales' or whether you mean fairy tales more generally. I've previously detailed [here](_URL_2_) and [here](_URL_3_) how the Brothers Grimm were extremely self-aware that they were preserving German heritage and how many of the fairy tale collection collectors/editors did so due to the rise of romantic nationalism and the rise of a \"scholarly interest\" in folklore and fairy tales/wonder tales. In general, academic interest in wonder tales/household tales/fairy tales has been around since at least the late 1600s/early 1700s with the rise of French salon culture and the renewed interest in such tales among the aristocracy, though *serious* academic interest didn't arise until the late 1700s/early 1800s.\n\nParsing out whether the *Grimms* collection was of immediate academic interest is a little more...convoluted because they weren't working in a vacuum; as I stated before, they were operating within the rise of romantic nationalism and a rising academic interest in folklore and fairy tale collection and dissemination. They were themselves scholars employed at the University of G\u00f6ttingen as professors and librarians and later at the University of Berlin. It's important to stress they produced other things besides their collection of Household Tales, though that is what they are most known for today: Jacob's collection Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology) in 1835 was actually considered a more valuable addition to the German literary landscape at the time than the Household Tales (then in their third edition), and they were working on a comprehensive German dictionary at the time of their death. They also compiled collections of folk music and literature, and Jacob did a lot of work in the historical linguistics field. You can view a more-or-less complete list of their works [here](_URL_1_). In this respect, both brothers were quite prolific in their scholarly outputs, and their efforts did not go unnoticed. \n\nAs folklore and fairy tale/'wonder tale' collection and dissemination became the focus of scholarly attention throughout the 1800s, the Brothers Grimm worked in scholarly concert with a growing number of other fairy tale collectors and scholars: Joseph Jacobs and Andrew Lang in the UK/Scotland (as well as John Campbell), Asbjornsen and Moe in Norway, Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, and later, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (who pioneered the Aarne-Thompson organization/categorization method to categorize tales by \"tale types\"), along with many others. Various folklore societies and journals were founded throughout the late 1800s as the field grew; Georges mentions that \"For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different.\" All were working generally for the same reasons: to collect, preserve, study, and disseminate folklore for scholarly reasons (though said specific reasons varied). In this respect, *all* fairy tale collections were of academic interest, because they were all being collected and published for largely scholarly reasons. However, if you're asking whether or not the *Grimm* collection was of a particular academic interest or whether it was unique at the time of the first edition's publication, the answer is \"no.\" The Brothers Grimm had much more luck marketing their collection towards the rising literate general public than they did the academic world at the time of publication (even though the collection was originally compiled for academia). The academic interest in various specific collections of tales wouldn't really happen until the early 1900s.\n\nFor more information, I would consult the following sources:\n\n* *The Classic Fairy Tales*, edited by Maria Tatar (especially the introductions to each section and the various essays at the back)\n* *The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales*, Maria Tatar\n* *The Annotated Grimms' Fairy Tales*, ed. Maria Tatar\n* *When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition*, Jack Zipes\n* \u201cCross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale,\u201d Jack Zipes (Found in Norton's [The Great Fairy Tale Tradition](_URL_0_))"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://smile.amazon.com/Great-Fairy-Tale-Tradition-Straparola/dp/039397636X?sa-no-redirect=1", "http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/87cfet/ive_heard_the_disneyified_versions_of_grimms/dwc5oyz/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/877v8m/what_sources_did_the_brothers_grimm_compile_their/dwd7rb0/"]]}
{"q_id": "21hoe1", "title": "Did Cortes really order his own ships burnt? Did he ever really stand a chance of losing when he made this decision?", "selftext": "And how did his superiors feel about him burning 11(?) of their navy's ships? Frankly I'd be a little pissed. Were they expensive or important ships?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21hoe1/did_cortes_really_order_his_own_ships_burnt_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgd76br"], "score": [57], "text": ["This is a very common misconception. He did not burn his ships. He scuttled them. Why you might ask? For several reasons, first he had already sent a ship back to Spain under the command of Francisco de Montejo who was charged with presenting the Emperor Charles V with a petition by the 'city of Veracruz' that asked that the emperor authorize Cortes to conquer on the mainland. \n\nWhy was that necessary? When Cortes left Cuba the governor of Cuba had only authorized him to trade and explore not conquer. To get around that Cortes and his men 'founded' the city of Veracruz (on paper no buildings) and then as the city of Veracruz provisionally authorized Cortes to conquer and requested that the emperor support that authorization. In the Spanish political hierarchy, cities could opperate as autonomous political actors. Consequently, a petition from the 'city' of Veracruz carried much greater weight than a petition from Cortes especially when it was going up against the interests and political clout of a regional governor.\n\nWhy scuttle the remaining ships? Cortes knew that he did not have that many men and by this time he knew of the Aztec Empire and knew that he was vastly outnumbered (although even at this point he was planning to use alliances to change that disparity). So by skuttling the ships he was able to press all the sailors into service as footmen. Had he not scuttled the ships they would have stayed with the ships on the coast or worse gone back to Cuba where the governor was upset with him. \n\nAs to the cost of the 'navy's ships' there was no royal navy in the Western Atlantic. And the royal navy that existed back in the Mediterranian was almost exclusively a coast guard that used galleys. All the ships used by conquistadors and explorers were privately owned and operated. Cortes and his company had hired the ships they used. After scuttling them those sailors, pilots, etc. became partners in the conquest venture and were eligible for the spoils of that expedition, which they previously would not have been as simple contract hires for transportation. \n\nSome good resources would be Restall's [Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest](_URL_1_) and a new book about to come out Schwaller and Nader's [The First Letter from New Spain](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/schfir", "http://books.google.com/books/about/Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest.html?id=2hMp9z_OsUMC"]]}
{"q_id": "a78usw", "title": "Why did Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s destroy Tenochtitlan and build M\u00e9xico City right on top of it?", "selftext": "Tenochtitlan at the time was one of greatest civilizations on earth. An Aztec city built on a lake with heigh pyramids along with a network of roads and bridges. Wikipedia says that Cort\u00e9s  and his men were astonished by the sight of it when they found it and thought they were dreaming. I could also imagine that no other european had ever seen such an organized society in the new world. But why not only conquer but also destroy the entire capital city and build your own city over it?\nI understand it was a different time and the conquistadors declared everywhere for Spain, because they could, but why erase something of that magnitude?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a78usw/why_did_hern\u00e1n_cort\u00e9s_destroy_tenochtitlan_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec1cuj6"], "score": [961], "text": ["Lots of Tenochtitlan related questions recently... So we can note at least two reasons for Cort\u00e9s' comparatively harsh actions against Tenochtitlan (and the Mexica): military and religious reasons. His native allies also used the fall of the Mexica as an opportunity for revenge. Lastly, not all of pre-hispanic Tenochtitlan was destroyed with the Spanish victory, as its indigenous population rebuilt parts of the city afterwards.\n\n## Military reasons\n\nAs you say, the Spanish were at first very impressed with the huge city they found built on Lake Tezcoco (estimates are of roughly 250.000 inhabitants), with its large markets and canal system. This changed with the Noche Triste, when after a massacre carried out by one of Cort\u00e9s' generals the Spanish were chased from the city. Barbara Mundy notes (in \u201cDeath of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City\u201c)\n\n >  While Cort\u00e9s initially wrote admiringly of the city in his letters to Charles V, his attitude and those of his fellow conquistadores would change dramatically when they attempted to capture the watery city. The surrounding lake functioned like a great moat protecting the island city, and the bridges spanning the breaks in the causeways, which allowed the flow of water from one part of the system to another, could be removed to further isolate the island capital. \n\n >  [During the Noche Triste, the Spaniards] found that their enemies used the urband canals as transport routes for canoes filled with as many as 60 armed warriors each. Slogging around the canals slowed the conquistares in their retreat, and when, exhausted, they fled on foot along the causeways, those raised roads served to organize them into a neat firing line for the Mexica sharpshooting archers gathered alongside in the lake in their canoes. Small wonder that they emerged from the war with little appreciation of the role that these causeways and dikes played in protecting the city from the scourges of floods. (p. 76)\n\nThis knowledge of the canals and dikes was then used by the Spaniards in their siege of the city about a year later. They methodically destroyed these structures that had helped the Mexica, used them to their advantage, and even cut the city fresh water supply. These were methods of warfare only bent on conquering the city that Cort\u00e9s and his men had lost once before, without much thought about the long-term effects. These effects were harsh: For centuries after conquest, the city then known as Mexico City would be plagued by heavy floodings, lacking the protection of the dike system, the knowledge of which was lost by then. This led to many projects of draining lake Tezcoco, finished centuries later, which has led to massive other problems for the city. \n\n\u200bHere's [the earliest European map of Tenochtitlan](_URL_2_), sent with one of Cort\u00e9s letters in 1524 so 3 years after the siege. It's probably based on native maps and gives a good idea of the bridges and moats I find.\n\nBut getting back to general military reasons: For Cort\u00e9s at this point it was imperative to conquer Tenochtitlan, since his whole plan was built on overthrowing the Mexic, leaders of the Aztec Triple Alliance. The year between the Noche Triste and the siege of Tenochtitlan he had spent preparing by planning attack plans with canoes, and bringing together more native allies \u2013 including from Tlaxcala, Tezcoco and ~~Huejotrinco~~Huejotzinco. His strong reaction against Tenochtitlan was partly typical European siege warfare; and party due to the city's special position lying on a lake, and to his necessity of conquering it. They also fits in a pattern of Cort\u00e9s using sometimes extreme violence as examplary punishment, so that other native groups would not oppose him (also evident in his later hanging of the last Mexica ruler Cuauhtemoc).\n\nAnd his native allies were not passive either after the city's fall. One native chronicler (Fernando de Alva Ixtlixlochitl) describes that the Tlaxcalans actually were more brutal against the Mexica who remained in the city, who had been their traditional enemies. While  Alva Ixtlixlochitl had an anti-Tlaxcala bias, we can deduce that overall it was in many native allies interest to avenge themselves of their former overlords the Mexica \u2013 in part by looting their former capital.\n\n\n## Religious reasons\n\nAfter the city had fallen into Spanish hands, major buildings like the palace and the temple were destroyed. However, their fundaments remain intact until today (the temple can be visited), with e.g. the palace building the base of the later colonial palace. In the descriptions of conquistadors like Cort\u00e9s and D\u00edaz de Castillo they already note their disdain of the temple during their first visit \u2013 in contrast to their suprise and admiration of the canal system, and the large markets that were according to them bigger than any in Spain. \n\nOf course, the conversion of the native population to Christianity was officialy the main reason for Spanish colonial expansion. So the destruction of temples fits with a larger pattern of destroying any important symbols of native beliefs: especially statues, art, manuscripts, and of course the large temples. This has to do also with the influence of religious orders in early colonial Mexico. Especially the Franciscans were called by Cort\u00e9s there shortly after conquest, and showed fervour for destroying signs of native faith; but also of learning about it in order to replace it more effectively. \n\nStepping back from Tenochtitlan, I'add that the destruction of temples happened in many other cities in central Mexico after they fell under Spanish jurisdiction or were conquered. Even though many were not destroyed as systematically as Tenochtitlan was (in part due to its special position). What is more, destroying temple of other religions and building Christian cathedrals has a long tradition in Iberia. This is what happened during the \u201creconquista\u201d in medieval Iberia, with the major cathedrals e.g. in Sevilla and Cordoba built over the remains (or partly inside) the former mosques. So that the Mexican conquistadors also built on medieval Iberian patterns here, as in many other areas. We have then in Tenochtitlan also a symbolic replacement of native buildings representing state power (palace) and religion (temple) with their Spanish equivalents.\n\n## After the fall...\n\nThe traditional view is how the Spaniards completely destroyed Tenochtitlan and then built Mexico City on its ruins. Barbary Mundy's fascinating study of the city challenges this view by describing continuing indigenous influence in the colonial city. This goes beyond your question so I'll keep it briefer, but hope it adds an interesting perspective. \n \nAfter the siege, Cort\u00e9s contemplated leaving Tenochtitlan abandoned and making his new capital in nearby Coyoacan. But something of the city's former splendour seems to've stuck with him, so that he eventually allowed the native people who had mostly fled to return to their city. Of the original ca. 250.000 as many as 100.000 may have returned. He also started the rebuilding process of the city center, following European architecture and city planning. But the many neighbourhoods and outskirts surrounding this centre followed much more pre-hispanic customs.\n\nMundy notes various continuing indigenous influence in the city: For example to markets were rebuilt, that were so  important to the city's ecomony. And the four indigenous neighbourhoods surrounding the centre followed native patters, aligned with the four cardinal directions. They also had indigenous officials in their local administration, and at least until the 1560 the city's governors were descended from the Mexica. Traditional agriculture on the lake also continued on the outskirts. \n\nMore basically, while Spanish officials called the city \u201cMexico City\u201d since the mid-16th century, indigenous elites continued to use the name \u201cMexico Tenochtitlan\u201d into the 17th century (*edit:* I go into the name Mexico some more [over here](_URL_0_)). Even today, we can notice the continuing presence of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City \u2013 one nice example is the city's metro, which has many stops named after pre-hispanic places and rulers. While most of Tenochtitlan was initially destroyed, parts of it were rebuilt and its memory kept alive.\n\n\u200b\nIn this way, Mexico City exemplifies how indigenous cultures have since colonial times continued to shape the society of modern-day Mexico. It shows that the idea of a clear break with the past is too simple. Traditional history writing has focused mainly on sources by Spanish priests, conquistadors and historians, who would argue for such breaks: native belief systems were simply replaced by Christian ones, as were native polities, writings, art and languages. By incorporating indigenous alongside European sources, more current research has shown that in all these and other areas, indigenous modes of life did not vanish. They mixed with European counterparts in myriad ways, often in forced ways due to colonial violence, bringing forth new forms. Tenochtitlan did not fall in a day, after all.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*Edit: Also check out 611131's [excellent answer elsewhere in this thread](_URL_1_) for more on Cort\u00e9s and on early colonial Tenochtitlan/Mexico City.*\n\n\n\n---------\n\n* For those interested in reading more about what happened to Tenochtitlan before and after the Spanish conquest I'd recommend Barbary Mundy's book cited above (*Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City*), which gives and in-depth look at it from a more indigenous perspective.\n\n------\n\n & nbsp;\n\nEdit: Added context; last part; spelling\n\nEdit 2: Added a last paragraph; maps\n\n*Edit 3: Wow! Thanks for the gold kind stranger!*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a1dagx/i_just_finished_reading_an_1803_english_novel/ebcllh9/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a78usw/why_did_hern%C3%A1n_cort%C3%A9s_destroy_tenochtitlan_and/ec1lubp/", "https://www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/tenoch.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9f6ooc", "title": "To what extent did normal people lift weights to build muscle and become stronger in ancient civilizations?", "selftext": "...or is this a uniquely modern phenomenon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9f6ooc/to_what_extent_did_normal_people_lift_weights_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5uihjw"], "score": [56], "text": ["Ancient people in the Greek and Roman world did lift weights to build their strength, especially in the cities. However, wrestling was more popular and ball-based exercise was seen as superior (which I suppose can count as lifting weight since it is a weight and you lift it, but I assume you are talking about dumbbells and specialised gym equipment). I've included two classical weight lifting routines in detail, quoted at the bottom. \n\nThe idea of a gym is not a modern one, the ancient Greeks had the *gymnasion*, which is where the modern word comes from. Many ancient cultures such as the Egyptians and the Japanese practised wrestling, but we do not know whether they did structured weight training. We do have a lot of evidence for the Greeks though, who did. \n\nThe gymnasion was a a multi-purpose facility for the general improvement of one's health. Initially they existed to train athletes for the Olympics and other religious sporting events, and became popular once people quickly realised that working out made you more likely to win. We do not know when the gymnasia became a formal and regular part of public life in ancient Greece, but the writer Pausanias claimed that the Athenian gymnasia had been around for as long as Athens had existed. The politician Solon (638-558 BC) passed legislation governing the gymnasia, so they were embedded in public life from at least that point (A comment below by /u/Iphikrates has informed me that we need to take attribution to Solon with a pinch of salt even though Aeschines, Plutarch, and Demosthenes attribute the first laws about gymnasia to Solon). Physical training took placed under the supervision of the gymnastai, who were the ancient equivalent of fitness trainers. Most exercise concerned wrestling, with exercises such as one where someone would attempt to restrain someone trying to escape their grip, but there were ones which used equipment such as discus exercises. We do not know the exact equipment commonly used, but 8-lb dumbbells were initially used to assist athletes in the long jump and became part of strength building since they were convenient, and other weights and heavy objects were also used. \n\nPlato states that the philosopher Prodicus was the first to formally note down the health benefits of regular exercise in the 5th century BC, though the benefits were surely known before he wrote them down. Over time, the gymnasia came to be about far more than weights and athletics and by the time of Plato included education and philosophy as well as building muscle - Plato's Academy was originally a gymnasion called 'Academy', one of Athens' three great public gymnasia (the others being Lyceum and Kynosarges). The writings of ancient Greek authors make it fairly clear that by the time of Plato, normal people were expected to attend the gymnasia for both intellectual and physical exercise. \n\nWe also know that many Roman villas began to include exercise rooms as of the 1st century BC, as the architect Varro exalted farmers for being healthy whilst 'not requiring the citified gymnasia of the Greeks.' and complained that 'In these days one such gymnasium is hardly enough, and they do not think they have a real villa unless it rings with many resounding Greek names.' \n\nIn the 2nd century AD, the Roman medic Galen wrote about the benefits of exercise, but did not like weights because he thought they only exercised one part of the body at a time. He did not like athletes because they had a habit of exercising to the point of injury. He wrote an entire treatise called 'On Exercises with a Small Ball' where he advocated using a small heavy ball to build muscle mass through a training regime devised to exercise the whole body - 'I particularly commend exercise which provides sufficient health for the body, concord of the parts, and excellence of the soul\u2014all things which exist with the small ball.' He advocated this instead of running, dumbbells or push-ups and sit-ups because he thought they were boring, repetitive, and made people's minds 'lazy, sluggish and slow'. He also advocated ball-based exercise because they encouraged dexterity and hand eye coordination as well as strength, as well as being a bit more fun (in his opinion), and for meditative qualities - his routine included many exercises similar to modern yoga. \n\nThat being said, Galen did recognise the value in lifting weights and gives us detail of one popular ancient exercise:\n \n*\"Some people place jumping weights in front of them that are six feet apart, then standing in between them and bending forward, raise them up, the one on the left with the right hand and the one on the right with the left hand, and replace each again in its proper place; and they do this in sequence repeatedly, keeping their base still. This movement particularly works out the lateral parts of the spine, just as the previously mentioned movement does those parts that are central.\"*\n\nHe also wrote about a slightly more confusing exercise where: \n\n*\"taking hold of some weight with each of the outstretched hands apart, such as the weights that are in the wrestling school, he holds the hands motionless, having extended them forward or raised them up. If he then were to direct someone to draw them down or bend them forcibly, while keeping himself immobile and rigid, not with his hands only but also with his legs and spine, he will be carrying out a substantial exercise\"*\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8rrbio", "title": "how was propaganda before Stalingrad, and how did it change after the defeat?", "selftext": "I'm researching how the defeat at Stalingrad changed the way in which propaganda was implemented in Germany, and was wondering especially how the image of both Hitler and the German folk changed. If the propaganda before 1943 was about the unification of the folk, did it then become about the survival of the German/Nazi ideals against Bolshevism? \nThank you ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rrbio/how_was_propaganda_before_stalingrad_and_how_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0tjojr"], "score": [11], "text": ["Modified from [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_) \n\n >  Enjoy the war, for the peace is going to be terrible- popular German joke in the last year of the war\n\nAs the fortunes of war turned against Germany after the Battle of Stalingrad, German propaganda found an imperative need to readjust to this new reality. Prior to the military reversals of 1942, German propaganda had operated on the principle of presenting an \"ersatz reality,\" wherein the state-dominated media maximized Germany's victories and ignored the salient truth that Germany's war was not a short one and her enemies persisted in fighting Germany. The scale of defeats like Stalingrad, the growing Allied bomber raids, and the surrender of German forces in North Africa pricked this media bubble and German propaganda organs responded accordingly. \n\nThis retooling of the Third Reich's propaganda apparatus in light of defeat pursued several seemingly counter-intuitive strategies. For one thing, despite the fact that the Third Reich was a personalist dictatorship *par excellence*, the figure of Hitler disappeared from German propaganda. In contrast to propaganda from the earlier years of victory, post-Stalingrad news of German military operations seldom invoked Hitler's name or connected him too heavily to military operations. This was part of a deliberate strategy on Goebbels's part as he recognized connecting Hitler too intimately to Germany's military fortunes made him, and by extension, the legitimacy of the entire regime, culpable when these operations did not bear fruit. Rather than present images of the F\u00fchrer, Hitler was  invoked in late war propaganda as an abstract figure that stood for all Germans. This could just be from invoking his title, or oblique historical analogies such as films that made apparent the connection between Hitler and historical personages like Frederick the Great. Hitler, whose visage was omnipresent in state propaganda between 1933-1941, became an abstraction. By the same token, German propaganda also emphasized the severity and violence of German military setbacks, but with a unique spin. Allied bombing, the Soviet massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, and other actions of the Allies became staples of German propaganda after the tide had turned as it showed that Germany's enemies were merciless. The idea behind this emphasis upon the Allies' purported barbarity was to bind the Germans together through a policy of \"strength through terror.\" This dehumanization of the Allies' military underscored that no compromise was possible and this was a war in which there was to be no quarter given and none expected.  \n\nThese new strategies often dovetailed with established propaganda discourses that had been present within the Third Reich since 1933. The regime's castigation of the so-called \"November Criminals\" of 1918 also found new currency in this environment. Interrogations of German troops captured after 20 July 1944 often reported back that one key motivation for fighting on was to prevent a repeat of Germany's humiliating defeat at the end of the First World War.  One important component of the demonization of the Allied military was that German retribution was in the making. Since 1933, one of the central legitimizing planks of the NSDAP was that it had enabled German technology and genius to reach its full potential. The vaunted V-weapons tapped into this established narrative that German technical expertise brooked no rivals. But beyond rockets and other *Wunderwaffen*, National Socialism had always stressed the ability of the will to transcend any material obstacles. This propaganda's emphasis upon collective action in the face of numerical superiority fed into this notion that the will is superior to rational logic. Similarly, the destruction of German landmarks and the seemingly indiscriminate nature of Allied bombing heightened the sense that this was a cultural war and that the Germanic culture constantly trumpeted by the Third Reich was in existential danger. \n\nOne sinister aspect of the late war propaganda was its turn to a heightened antisemitism. Goebbels used the solidarity of Allied coalition of both the imperial Britain, hypercapitalist United States, and the Bolshevik USSR as evidence of grand global Jewish conspiracy against Germany. Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who by fortune escaped deportation and murder, would note in his diaries the increasingly shrill antisemitism in propaganda as Germany's fortunes waned. The widespread knowledge about the Holocaust amongst the German public imparted a weight to this propaganda that it might not have otherwise possessed. Although they might not have known the specifics of the Holocaust, most Germans were aware that something quite terrible had happened to the Jews in the East. Even though the antisemitism was troweled on so thick to strain credibility in this propaganda, it encouraged the expectation that the Allies would hold Germany collectively responsible  for the mass murder of the Jews. This does not mean that the German public accepted the NSDAP and Propaganda Ministry's antisemitism wholesale, but in some cases interpreted antisemitism quite differently than the state. One popular rumor among German civilians in 1943/4 was that Hungary had not been the target of any Allied  bombings was because the Hungarian government had spared its Jews. The SD recorded a number of complaints that because the Horthy government has ghettoized Jews in Budapest the Allies would not attack this human shield, and there was grumbling within the German populace that Hitler did not do the same for cities like Berlin or Hamburg. And some of this disgruntlement was not clandestine, but took the form of direct petitions to Goebbels. There were a string of letters to the Propaganda Ministry after the mass operations to clear Hungary's Jews in 1944 demanding that they be used as human hostages against Allied bombing. But the general acceptance of some of the antisemitism produced by Goebbels's machine precluded any thought or possibility of a negotiated peace for much of the German public. News of the Morgenthau Plan, which would have deindustrialized Germany, the expansion of Allied bombing, and the scale of German reverses fostered the expectation of a Carthaginian peace.   \n\nThe effectiveness of this late-war propaganda is open to interpretation. While it could not rekindle hope in final victory, it did strengthen the resolve of some Germans to see the war to its bitter conclusion. Yet, even as propaganda turned to negative integration (uniting around a threat), it could not arrest the gradual estrangement of much of the German public to the National Socialist state. Goebbels himself appreciated this sentiment and his famous  February 1943 *Sportpalast* speech had veiled threats against the \"Golden Pheasants\" of the NSDAP who were thus far still enjoying a prewar lifestyle.  This late-war propaganda often worked in conjunction with greater arbitrary state violence directed against Germans, especially after the 20 July plot. Extralegal state violence had been embedded in the DNA of the Third Reich since 1933, but outside of political enemies and German Jews, most Germans' interaction with arbitrary state violence was the *threat* of it until around Stalingrad, when the security services began a much more thorough crackdown against shirkers and potential fifth-columnists. The 20 July plot helped to further this turn towards extralegal violence and other forms of domestic terror. \n\nMost Germans would have been obviously aware that the war had been going poorly by 1943. Analysis of letters sent back home as well as SD reports show a drop in expectations of victory. There were simply too many salient reverses to ignore. The Allied bomber campaign against the Ruhr and the sound of flak would have been something impossible to ignore. The government itself publicized some of the Allied victories as an example that Germany's back was against the wall. Goebbels and other media arms would try and manage news of defeats such as framing retreats as tactical withdrawals. Other mass surrenders like Stalingrad and Tunisia were framed as modern day sacrifice in the vein of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans. This spin-doctoring of defeat became so ubiquitous that one grim homefront joke was \"what sound does a clock make when it goes forwards? *Tick-~~tock~~tack*. When it goes backwards? *Tak-tik*.\" By the the winter of 1944, the Red Army had begun to occupy German territory in the East (both in the Reich and those annexed in 1939) and Goebbels's propaganda ministry published lurid atrocity tales. Moreover, the advance of Anglo-American arms across France had eliminated what had been Hitler's greatest strategic victory in 1940. The retreat of German troops as well as the fall of the German city of Aachen in October 1944 would have been a reality that would have been difficult to ignore. \n\nThe mid- and late-war propaganda drive for mass action and a collective response to Allied aggression worked in often counterintuitive ways. While it stiffened resolve to not have a repeat of November 1918, propaganda along with the deteriorating war effort engendered a kind of grim fatalism for the future. Both rhetoric and reality heightened the sense of social anomie and the breakdown of society that came as bombing and wartime pressures destroyed the German infrastructure and stretched the civilian domestic economy well past its breaking point. The final agonies of the last few months of the war, as well as the violence meted out to Germans that shirked in their duties, helped to cement the postwar myth that Germans were double victims of the war- who were both subject to extreme violence from their military enemies, but also brutalized by a hypocritical criminal regime.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qu8ma/how_did_propaganda_change_in_nazi_germany_after/"]]}
{"q_id": "1u13x4", "title": "What did *I, Claudius* make up?", "selftext": "I understand it lies somewhere between historical dramatization and historical fiction, and should not be taken as a scholarly work.  It draws from histories that are biased and unreliable, and portrays the characters in a way to fit Graves's underlying narrative.\n\nBut does it get anything demonstrably wrong?  I know Livia probably didn't poison Augustus, but she could have.  Other works of historical fiction create new or composite characters to tell the story, or merge historical events together to move the narrative along.  \n\nIs there anything in *I, Claudius* we can point to and say \"that definitely did not happen\"?  Or is a possible, if implausible interpretation of the events as we know them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u13x4/what_did_i_claudius_make_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cedlyyl", "cedneyo", "cedpknq"], "score": [6, 28, 17], "text": ["Nothing leaps to mind, to be honest. Obviously the framing device about the Sybil's prophecy is invented, but in terms of the characters and how the all met their ends, there is at least one primary source that backs up his story. (Notably Seutonius's Lives of the 12 Caesars, but Graves was intimately familiar with all the primary source material available. If memory serves, he even did his own translations of some.)", "As you've pointed out, apart from Graves' rhetoric, there's very little in *I, Claudius* that's totally unattested. That being said, much of it is utter hogwash and everyone (including Graves) knew it. Graves relied most heavily on Suetonius and Tacitus. He drew on Suetonius and a host of late Roman authors (who are, how do you put this delicately...inaccurate? At best?) particularly for his narration of the earlier emperors to provide all sorts of juicy gossip that those works are full of. Seeing as that Suetonius is not particularly favorably inclined towards Claudius, Graves drew from authors under the Flavians and very late sources to paint a particular picture of Claudius, while dismissing or totally ignoring works of authors such as Seneca, who despised Claudius. As a result, the works are highly sifted and selected to provide particular, no matter how unlikely, versions of the events that took place. \n\nThere actually is some matter that Graves invented, particularly as regards Claudius' personal character. There was a sharp division among writers of the 1st and 2nd Centuries, A.D. as regards Claudius. Many of his contemporaries, and particularly the Neronians, saw Claudius as the bumbling old idiot that we're used to in the pages of Seneca or Suetonius. However, under the Flavians Claudius became a model emperor, who was a struggling intellectual and who expanded Roman power militarily and through his public works, rather than the idiot who let everyone else do all the work for him and eventually had to rely on his wife so much that he fell into her trap easily. Graves chooses the Flavian view of Claudius, and attempts to explain away the aspects of his character seen negatively by Suetonius and Seneca by various means. Graves claimed that it occurred to him while reading through Suetonius and Tacitus that perhaps Claudius was not really as stupid as everyone else thought and that he was cleverly trying to stay alive in a time of intrigue and plotting that undoubtedly would have killed him otherwise. Graves invents Claudius' voice and completely fabricates many of the motives behind Claudius' actions. Furthermore, Graves has this nasty little habit (although it makes for a great story) of inserting things into historical events in order to tie the story together. Sometimes this comes in the form of characters who would not actually have been present (such as Cassius Chaerea, who pops up all over the place in *I, Claudius*, at the Teutoburg Forest, at the great Augustan games--as a competitor!--and at Caligula's assassination. In fact, other than a reference in Tacitus that he subdued the Rhine legions when they tried to mutiny after Augustus' death, the only mention of Cassius Chaerea is as Caligula's Praetorian and assassin. Graves may be conflating several figures named Cassius here who are almost certainly different people in order to make the story interesting) or motives given by characters that are purely invented (a lot of the reasoning behind what Caligula does before he goes mad comes to mind in this category). In many of these cases Graves admitted to inserting such things, particularly in the case of characters' motives, since the texts hardly ever explain them (Claudius' irrational hatred of Livia comes to mind, regarding which Graves said that there was no direct indication that Claudius did in fact despise Livia, but that he had every reason to, and it was consistent with Claudius' personal character as he saw it).\n\nThis being said, *I, Claudius* is actually not without value to classicists. At the time it was written the general consensus regarding Claudius was that he was the buffoon that Seneca lampoons, and the admiration of the emperor Vespasian (who served under Claudius in Britain) was not taken seriously. Graves was one of the first classicists (and he was a trained classicist, although much of his professional work isn't taken very seriously because it's full of holes) to suggest that maybe we weren't seeing all the sides of Claudius' character. Immediately after the book was published the classical community exploded, with some denouncing the book and condemning Graves (who explicitly states that he was not attempting any sort of historical or professional publication with the book, merely his own fancy), or going back to revisit the textual material. In general the book prompted a mass re-reading of all the material on Claudius, if only to fact-check Graves, and a great deal of things that were overlooked until then popped out. This coincided with a revisiting of the emperors in general, prompted by such scholars as Syme.", "I agree with u/faceintheblue that Graves was intimately familiar with Suetonius and Tacitus and many other primary sources, but I want to emphasise that this is both a blessing and a curse. Primary sources are great, no doubt about it, but you must always take care when interpreting those sources, and when reading other peoples' interpretations. The problem with \"I, Claudius\" is that it's a dramatic retelling of the time. It was unique because it portrayed the Julio-Claudian dynasty not as this fantastically aristocratic and pretentious clan, but as a mafia-esque family constantly scheming and manipulating and warring among themselves and among outside forces. It's brilliant and it's funny and it's dramatic and I love it (oh boy, you have no idea how happy I am the entire series is now on [YouTube](_URL_0_) for free -- so pumped) Graves took those primary sources, interpreted them himself, and then crafted them into a book that was meant not to tell \"the truth\" but to engage an audience. Which, to be fair, is essentially what Suetonius and Tacitus did before him. But we'll leave the agenda of ancient historians for another day -- that's a whole other kettle of fish. For now, let's go in turn through a few major character of a more controversial nature, and I'll give a little recap on what's pretty accurate, and what's a stretch.\n\n* Livia Drusilla - My dear Livia, my favourite character of \"I, Claudius\", oh how I do enjoy her machinations, and Si\u00e2n Phillips plays the role of villainess to perfection. The role of Livia is superb as a villainess, an ageing femme-fatale past her prime but powerful all the same. But her entire mien in \"I, Claudius\" is stretched quite taut. She was the model of intelligence and beauty and tact, and acted as the ideal wife/Roman matron, and while all of these attributes would have definitely been pushed by both Augustus and herself at the time as just a part of the propaganda behind many of Augustus' reforms, I don't doubt that she was a highly intelligent political animal. Her role in politics, both formally and informally, was quite staggering, which would have (and did) put off many politicians, including her son, Tiberius. We know from Suetonius that Livia and Tiberius butt heads a few times (quite understandably, I think. Can you imagine being Tiberius? You campaigned as a very effective general, yet lived under Augustus' shadow, and when you finally became emperor your mother was still alive, and would lean over your shoulder and point out all the things you did wrong; and you knew she was probably right, because she was married to the most powerful man in Rome and spent years playing the political field while you were off fighting Germans and Parthians.) This was a woman with astounding political acumen, who supposedly had the gnads to intercede on behalf of conspirators, specifically Gnaeus Cornelius Cinna Magnus, and convince Augustus to pardon him and even make him a consul, after which he left Augustus his sole heir (Cass. Dio 55. 14-22). The formation of Livia's character as a malicious schemer and poisoner would have been propagated by the likes of Tacitus, but as someone who is familiar with these authors, I read these accounts with no small amount of suspicion.  \n\n* Lucius Aelius Seianus - Sejanus, at the peak of his power under Tiberius in AD 21-23, convinced the emperor to build the *castra praetoria* in the city, where the Praetorian Guard would all be gathered, and Graves pushes Sejanus the Praetorian. But what I don't think Graves underscores quite enough is that Sejanus was elected consul in AD 31, which I think actually shows that Sejanus was aiming not at a military coup, but at an aggressive political alliance. He pushed to have himself married into the Julio-Claudian family by asking for Livilla's hand in marriage, which Tiberius allegedly refused. \"I, Claudius\" portrays Tiberius more as being betrayed by Sejanus, but I don't reckon Tiberius was either that foolish or that surprised; In reality Tiberius' reaction to Sejanus' political manoeuvers was swift and brutal, taking out any alleged co-conspirators along the way. (In fact, it's thought that Caligula and Macro had a helping hand in orchestrating Sejanus' downfall as well). \n\n* Caligula - I won't dwell too much on Caligula, as he's just an all-around strange and controversial figure, always open to slander. It's only in quite recent years that he's been given more of an unbiased study. What Graves doesn't really mention in the show -- that I can recall, anyhow -- is that Caligula wasn't that bad of an administrator. He built improvements to roads, and aqueducts, and the harbour at Rhegium, and a circus on the Vatican hill, and such expenditure actually stimulated the economy. (The same slanted view goes for Nero, whose first few years of rule are almost universally regarded as a golden age). \n\n* Claudius - The freedmen, Narcissus and Pallas, that assisted Claudius with affairs of state are slipped into the narrative very well by Graves, though he doesn't stress that they were particularly hated by the aristocracy. Moreover Graves only underlines Claudius' uxoriousness where Messallina is involved. In reality, Messallina was a central political piece on account of her bearing his only son, Britannicus, born in AD 41. And Britannicus lives -- he lives long enough to be pushed aside from the political arena when Nero came on stage, but \"early in 55 Agrippina seems to have considered using Britannicus to prop up her failing influence, but he very soon died, almost certainly poisoned by Nero's order\" (OCD, Claudius Caesar Britannicus, Tiberius). I always find the last few episodes of \"I, Claudius\" to be a bit rushed; they skip through Claudius' bumbling with Judea and Greater Armenia, as well as his adding of 4 more provinces to the empire after Britain: the Mauretanias, Lycia and Thrace. That being said, Claudius himself stressed his victories in Britain, because they showed to the senate that he had the support of the army. After the capture of Camulodunum, Claudius received 27 salutations as *imperator*. No other emperor would receive that many until Constantine I. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9PA_DB9K04"]]}
{"q_id": "4rq5aq", "title": "Taxmen seem to have existed for a long time, how did the early Taxmen establish what citizens owed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rq5aq/taxmen_seem_to_have_existed_for_a_long_time_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d53p8nc", "d53qdnk"], "score": [35, 2], "text": ["(My area of \"expertise\" is Roman Britain and Roman general history, but I think I can answer this question)\n\nIn ancient Rome, the collection of taxes was done by the publicani, public contractors, and operated in a tax farming environment. \u00a0Later, a direct taxation method would be employed.\n\n\nThe rights to collect taxes in a region would be auctioned off and the highest bidder won the rights to collect. \u00a0The publicani would pay the taxes to Rome and then collect, with interest, from the people to recuperate their loss.\n\n\nThe taxes were levied against all property, real estate, and slaves. \u00a0During the annual census each citizen's tax obligation would be determined by the censors and this information was used by the publicani to determine how much was owed by each person. \u00a0It seems that the tax rate was usually around 1% though it could fluctuate.\n\n\nIn the provinces, where it could be difficult to obtain accurate census information, the tax obligation was estimated for an entire region and then divided out by the number of citizens and collected.\n\n\nThis method of tax farming was, as you can imagine, very susceptible to abuse and corruption. \u00a0Augustus put an end to this practice early in his reign due to constant complaints from the people (particular provincials). In it's place a direct wealth tax and flat poll tax, were developed. \u00a0With this method, each citizen knew exactly how much they were required to pay; under the farming system your taxes were whatever the publicani thought they could get out of you.\n\n\nIt should be noted that the term publican does not actually mean tax collector, they were just general governmental contractors of equestrian status.\n\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n_URL_1_\n\nEdit: added disclaimer to the top regarding my ability to answer competently", "How would they go about collecting the direct wealth tax? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.unrv.com/economy/roman-taxes.php", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Vectigalia.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "axasrk", "title": "Do we have any surviving pre-Columbian maps?", "selftext": "Researching for a DnD campaign I came across some beautiful maps of Spanish settlements and the surrounding area in South America shortly after conquest.\n\nI'm curious if we have any surviving examples of maps made in the pre-Columbian era, since all I can seem to find through Google is modern maps marking pre-Columbian settlements. Would, say, the Aztecs or the Inca even make something like a regional map? Or is that more of a tradition in Eurasia? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/axasrk/do_we_have_any_surviving_precolumbian_maps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehsqf8z"], "score": [18], "text": ["The answer is, yes, the Aztecs did have maps, the Oztoticpac land map springs to mind. This 'map' is actually a land survey showing the holdings of lords and townships in the Acolhua region of the Valley of Mexico. The map itself was written/drawn in Native style and on indigenous paper. However, it is essential to note that it was actually produced during the Colonial era (According to Howard Cline in about 1540), and contains a series of notations in both Spanish and Nahuatl, probably for use in court. \n\nThere is also the Maguey Plan, which may come from either Tenochtitlan or Azcapotzalco. Again, this document is a land survey intending to show the locations of fields, canals, and causeways in the chinampas region of the Valley of Mexico. Other rural townships were also known to retain extensive maps of land holdings, which they used in court to protect their territory from outsiders (either Spanish or rival Indigenous communities). However, few of these documents were originals, which were lost, destroyed, or hidden, and so copies were used. It was not uncommon for these copies to be doctored, or even forged to bolster a townships claim to land.\n\nSo, for Mesoamerica at least, maps were a thing. However, they seem to have been mainly in the form of land surveys, rather than geographical. However, this may be due to selection bias. Land surveys may have been preserved (in rural zones), while other maps were destroyed when urban libraries were put to the torch during colonial battles.\n\nSources:\nCalnek, Edward E.: \u2018The Localization of the Sixteenth Century Map Called the Maguey Plan\u2019, American Antiquity, 38/2 (1973)\n\nCline, Howard F.: \u2018The Oztoticpac Lands Map of Texcoco 1540\u2019, The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, 23/2 (1966)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cxald0", "title": "In the United States, approximately when did most restaurants make the shift from homemade food (e.g pies, bread, chicken patties, etc) to processed products that were shipped to them? How did the public react during this shift?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cxald0/in_the_united_states_approximately_when_did_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezgcr80"], "score": [2], "text": ["The prevalence of processed and preserved products (both shelf-stable and frozen) is rooted in the post-WW2 economic and scientific boom. The extremely good economy meant lots of well-paying jobs and the GI Bill let returning soldiers get college educations that had previously been unheard of in their family trees. After the lean years of rationing and wartime work, people wanted something better.\n\nThe rule of the day was technology. People were looking toward the future and expecting the golden age of science fiction to be right around the corner. One of those new innovations was convenience foods that made the housewife's life very easy! Cookbooks emphasized the use of canned and frozen products that could simply be combined and cooked to create meals, like the endless casseroles. Keep in mind that this was a pre-microwave period; it wouldn't be until the 1970s that microwaves became cheap and commonly available.\n\nThis affected most restaurants as well. In practice, few people will tell the difference between canned beans and dried beans soaked overnight, especially after cooking and seasoning. However, processed meats like chicken nuggets were more the realm of late 20th century fast food restaurants that needed to produce massive amounts of food quickly and cheaply; the McNugget wasn't even introduced until 1981.\n\nWhat most people don't realize is that restaurants using frozen food dates back almost 150 years! After the Civil War, technological advances were made in refrigerator cars that could ship trainloads of frozen meat across the country. Combined with the growing numbers of cattle being raised and transported to stockyards (like the famous Union Stockyards in Chicago, which produced 82% of all domestically consumed meat in the US at the turn of the 20th century), meat was now available much more cheaply and freshly than before. You no longer needed to rely on preserved meat products like sausages, salt-cured bacon, and smoked ham when tens of thousands of cows' worth of steaks were being shipped to urban butcher shops every day.\n\nThis also extended the other way with luxury goods, and some luxuries were even created accidentally by this. Lobster and oysters are expensive delicacies today, but they were once considered foods of the commoners and even the poor on the coast. It's believed that lobster had such a bad reputation because it goes bad fairly quickly after being killed so most people were basically eating them after they expired, but oysters and other shellfish were so abundant through the early 20th century that they were practically free. This changed when these items could be frozen and shipped west, allowing saloons and hotels in the desert to showcase their opulence by providing frozen shellfish and molluscs on ice. Gold prospectors who struck it rich would buy cans of turtle soup and lobster salad to eat over the fire; they may have been common elsewhere, but they may have never even had it before and now they created a market for it as a luxury good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z9pwi", "title": "Has anyone tried translating ancient western books into a more readable form for amateurs?", "selftext": "I love reading about the ancient Greeks and Romans but I can't read direct sources, but want to. I am just a fan of history, not formally educated (in history anyway). I find a have a massive common knowledge problem. It seems every page has multiple references to things (ex. cities, family names, ethnic groups, etc) that I have to look up. It's especially hard when I am suppose to know that that thing has a trait (ex. specific type of priests, political family, nomadic raiders, etc). It makes for difficult reading and I just go back to re-reading my favorite books about the ancient world.  Thanks for any recommendations! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z9pwi/has_anyone_tried_translating_ancient_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrrxcj", "cfrrzno"], "score": [9, 8], "text": ["I'm a little confused, you're looking for modern translations of classical texts that explain references in the text?  \n\nIf that's the case then you're in luck because there are a lot of very good critical editions of classical texts which have extensive notes that provide exactly what you're looking for.  It's hard to point to a single one simply because there's so much out there.  For example, if you wanted to read Herodotus, the [Landmark Herodotus](_URL_1_) might be exactly what you're looking for.  For the *Republic* you might try [Bloom's translation](_URL_0_) and so on.  I'm sure if you ask about specific texts (or even just specific topics, philosophy, history, plays, etc.  that you're interested in) than you'll get a lot of great responses!", "Absolutely, keeping your Messegetai and Scythiae straight is difficult for everyone. What you will want is the [*Landmark* series](_URL_0_) edited by Robert Strassler. The series so far includes Thucydides, Herodotus, Arrian, Xenophon, and Polybius to my knowledge, and as this is quite a new series there are certainly many more on the way. They are scrupulously annotated an include many maps, illustrations and background information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato-Second/dp/0465069347/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1393691884&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bloom+republic", "http://www.amazon.com/Histories-Second-Norton-Critical-Editions/dp/0393933970/ref=la_B004560ORE_1_7?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1393691772&amp;sr=1-7"], ["http://www.thelandmarkancienthistories.com/BooksandSamples.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "bdhdp5", "title": "Were there any nations that practiced segregation aside from South Africa or the United States?", "selftext": "Across the world, particularly at around the same time as Jim Crow or Apartheid, was there any form of legal segregation that might not get talked about as much? I'm just curious, because all we ever talk about are those two countries, and I find it hard to believe that this wasn't a wider spread phenomenon.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bdhdp5/were_there_any_nations_that_practiced_segregation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekybdrq"], "score": [6], "text": ["In short: absolutely. However, the answer is not as simple as that and it is important that we contextualize what we mean when we talk about \"practicing segregation\". Like all great historical topics, we must talk about talking about the issue then do a deep dive. \n\nThe reason why apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow immediately come to mind when segregation is discussed is because some US states and apartheid South Africa codified segregationist and racist practices. Michelle Alexander's *The New Jim Crow* argues that what differentiates this type of racial regimes from so more informal regimes (we will get into this later, don't jump the gun) is that by codifying racial regimes, the United States (and similarly South Africa) effectively created a caste system and a group of \"untouchables\" or \"dalits\" (whether this argument is going a bit far or not I leave up to you). Interestingly, in the wonderful collection *Black Power Beyond Borders* Nick Slate details the Dalit Panthers, a group in India who advocated for dalit empowerment by equating their struggle with black empowerment the worldwide and utilized similar imagery, tactics, and rhetoric as the American Black Panther Party, so take that for what it is. All of this is to say that there has been a variety of state's and regimes throughout history that have codified segregation or racial regimes in one way or another: Nazi Germany, Qing China, fascist Italy (eventually), and Rhodesia immediately come to mind. \n\nThese racial states, however, have obfuscated the ways in which racism and segregation function in informal and systemic ways. David Goldberg, for instance, has argued that all modern states are in essence racial states as race has been fundamentally integral to the conceptualization and material emergence of citizenship, state institutions, etc. As consequence, a variety of informal regimes of race have been present throughout history. Take for example the nation that many lift up as America's antithesis, Canada. [James Daschuk](_URL_1_) has recently documented the ways that the Canadian state utilized food as a coercive measure to settle Western Canada and have indigenous peoples \"voluntarily\" move to reserves. Is this segregation? Whilst there was no mandate that indigenous peoples could not live amongst white settlers, there were certainly measures in place to ensure that was the outcome. Or, take for example the province of Nova Scotia. [Constance Backhouse](_URL_0_) has a wonderful piece on Viola Desmond's arrest and subsequent court proceedings I suggest you read to understand how segregation works in often informal ways throughout history. Desmond was denied access to a certain seat in a New Glasgow, being told by the cashier that she \"could not sell tickets to you people.\" The cashier never mentioned \"black\" or \"Negro\" yet the implication is clear. Desmond responded by sitting in an area where she was forbidden by the theatre, and was arrested and charged under a provincial statute that contained no reference to race, segregation, etc. The act stipulated that persons who did not pay \"an amusement tax\" that entered a theatre were subjected to arrest. Since the cashier would only sell Desmond a ticket to the upper balcony (30 cents) and Desmond sat in the lower balcony (40 cents), Desmond was subjected to arrest. \n\nThis is but one example. There are countless examples, from employment to housing that effectively serve to segregate communities that are not so easily identifiable as Jim Crow or Nazi Germany. Yet, the end result has often been the same: segregated communities and inequality between those communities. \n\nFurther reading:\n\nMichelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow\nDavid Goldberg - The Racial State\nConstance Backhouse - Colour-coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950\nCarl Nightengale - Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.constancebackhouse.ca/fileadmin/publicationlist/Racial_Segregation_in_Canadian_Legal_History_-_part_1.pdf", "https://uofrpress.ca/Books/C/Clearing-the-Plains2"]]}
{"q_id": "ent0hr", "title": "How do you organize your notes on history books?", "selftext": "When you read a lot about your expert topic you are likely to have read so much about the subject that you will find it easy to connect the dots. However, often when I read books on parts of history I am less familiar with, I find it hard to remember things after a while, even though my memory is surely not bad. I would be interested in how you manage taking/organizing your notes on what you read (assuming you do take notes). Do you write annotations right into the book? Do you write short notes on pieces of paper and store them in the book? Or do you write summaries later on on the computer? Do you use a personal wiki software or something like that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ent0hr/how_do_you_organize_your_notes_on_history_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fe4ryrn", "feah8jz"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["I use [Zotero](_URL_0_), which basically lets you import the books bibliographic data and then keep notes attached to those books. It's pretty good software. Endnote does the same thing, I believe.", "When I'm starting on a particular time period or event that I'm not as familiar with, I usually make a running timeline of events and a general list of people (which will usually include birth/death dates, their titles, and any other notes that are relevant). Since I am easily distracted, I generally don't use the computer while working and generally do this on paper. I may also keep a running list of other books/articles cited in this book that I want to check out. If I own the book, I'll also make some notes on post-it notes so that I can easily flip back to a previous event. I don't do this with library books or borrowed books because some libraries can be quite particular about things left in their books. \n\nDo as much or as little as you need, and what suits your purpose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.zotero.org"], []]}
{"q_id": "2p3iy8", "title": "Hopefully this is the right place: Why is there such a big knowledge gap with the trans-Saharan slave trade compared to its international counterpart, the trans-Atlantic Slave trade?", "selftext": "Spanning for more than a millennium, although incredibly integral, the slave trade was just one component in a complex network of exchange. Though equally effective to the development of Africa as a modern day concept, the Trans-Saharan slave trade, to this day, remains insufficiently covered. \n\nWhy is this? Is it simply due to a historical lens of eurocentricity that the trans-Atlantic slave trade has received more academic attention? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p3iy8/hopefully_this_is_the_right_place_why_is_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmt5701"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  Is it simply due to a historical lens of eurocentricity that the trans-Atlantic slave trade has received more academic attention?\n\nYes, this is the first reason. Access to European and American sources is much easier for European and American historians. The second reason is that racial conflict in the Americas up until the present day provides a motivation for attention to be paid to its origins. Because there is no significant black population in the Arab world there is less popular motivation for its study.\n\nAlso note that from an US perspective, there is also unbalance within the study of the Atlantic slave trade, with disproportionate focus on the US trade compared with the numerically more significant Central and South American trade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4wvljp", "title": "Was the use of profanity as common in Medieval Europe as Game of Thrones would have us believe?", "selftext": "I understand that words such as \"cunt\", \"fuck\" and \"shit\" have only been considered rude for the past couple of centuries, and that profanity in medieval times generally meant taking the Lord's name in vain.\n\nIn the show the characters use curse words quite freely. Was it common for people (particularly nobles) in medieval Europe to use words and phrases *they* would have considered to be obscene in casual conversation with each other? Was there any punishment associated with inappropriate use of profanity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wvljp/was_the_use_of_profanity_as_common_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6ad12j"], "score": [15], "text": ["Following up: Would there have been a distinction between the obscene language the OP mentioned (e.g. \"fuck\") and actual profane language like \"God damn it\"? Which would have been considered worse?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20ly8n", "title": "Were there ever any countries that were completely stamped out of existence, only to reemerge at a later time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20ly8n/were_there_ever_any_countries_that_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4k6bd"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm not sure what exactly you mean by \"completely stamped out\". If you mean that a country ceased existing as a political entity or lost sovereignty, then there are very many countries like that. Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Armenia, Hungary, Israel, Georgia, Norway, Sweden - just a few examples. I'm sure there are many more in other parts of the world but I'm not as familiar with Asia and Africa. \n\nOther than that it gets a bit ambiguous. For example, in some sense modern Iran draws its origins to ancient Achaemenid Persia. Between then an now a number of different states and empires occupied that geographic region (Iranian plateau). Are they all just different versions of the same state, if you will, or are they different?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5e4aj0", "title": "We are the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. We maintain an archive of over 100,000 oral histories of US veterans. Ask us anything!", "selftext": "Hi, we are the staff of the Library of Congress\u2019s Veterans History Project. Since we were established in 2000 via a unanimous act of Congress, we have been collecting oral histories and memoirs from US veterans, as well as original photographs, letters, artwork, military papers, scrapbooks, and other documents. We have over 100,000 collections and that number is growing every day, making us the largest archive of this kind in the country. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nWe work with organizations and individuals around the country to grow our collections, but anybody can participate. All it takes is a veteran willing to tell their story, an interviewer to ask them about their service, and a recording device to capture the interview. Eligible collections include either an audio or video interview of 30 minutes or longer, 10 or more original photographs, letters, or other documents, or a written memoir, diary, or journal of 20 pages or more. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nTo ensure these collections are accessible for generations to come, we stabilize, preserve and securely store them for posterity according to standards developed by the Library of Congress. Our materials are available to researchers and the general public, either by viewing the original materials in person at the American Folklife Center\u2019s Reading Room in the Library of Congress\u2019s Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. or by visiting our website (_URL_0_) and viewing the more than 33,000 collections available online.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nStaff who will be answering questions are:\n\n* Col. Karen Lloyd US Army (Ret.) (Whirleygirl09), Director of VHP\n\n* Monica Mohindra (VHP_ComsMngr_Monica), Head of Program Coordination and Communication\n\n* Andrew Cassidy-Amstutz (VHPArchivist_Andrew), Archivist\n\n* Andrew Huber (VHPSpecialist_Andrew), Liaison Specialist\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nFrom 9:30am-12:30pm Eastern today, please ask us anything about how we collect, preserve, and make available our collections, as well as anything about the individuals who comprise our archive and their stories, and of course questions about how to participate or any other aspect of the Veterans History Project. We will also try to answer questions about the Library of Congress in general, but keep in mind that it is a very large institution and we might not have specific knowledge about every detail. \n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nWe will do our best to answer every question we receive before 12:30pm, but feel free to continue asking questions afterwards. VHP staff will be actively monitoring the page and we\u2019ll continue answering questions as they arrive.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\nAlso, please sign up for our RSS feed [here,](_URL_1_) read our blog [here,](_URL_3_) and like our Facebook page [here!](_URL_2_) If you don\u2019t make it to the AMA in time to have your question answered, you can always email us at vohp@loc.gov. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5e4aj0/we_are_the_library_of_congress_veterans_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da9ir33", "da9jbkp", "da9jgjz", "da9jof9", "da9jpce", "da9jv2b", "da9k5qu", "da9kque", "da9ku9g", "da9l85j", "da9ma0g", "da9mc76", "da9nhx9", "da9nn39", "da9nz3p", "da9owwu", "da9qkgn", "da9ssrv", "daa0vx8", "daa960w"], "score": [21, 7, 7, 5, 11, 8, 9, 8, 10, 7, 8, 8, 7, 4, 5, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Thanks for doing this!  Can you post links to some of the interviews or documents you find personally fascinating?   Like great stories of valor?  ", "What is the oldest piece of material you have in your collection and what did you find particularly enlightening about the content? ", "What is the worst act of humanity that you guys have recorded?", "Thanks for doing this folks! My question is something of a multi parter.\n\nHow did the experience of drafted soldiers differ from volunteer soldiers? In popular media they are often portrayed as receiving more dangerous/less desirable infantry assignments than those who volunteered. Is there any patterns in the oral history differentiating volunteers vs drafted?", "This question is more about the Library of Congress in general - what is your favorite item in the Library's collection?", "What materials are the most difficult to preserve?\n\nIf I have material that is personally meaningful, can I (or will VHP) digitize it instead of submitting originals, or do you only want originals?\n\nDo you all travel around to collect oral histories and other material? \n\nThanks for doing this, what a great project :-) ", "You now must have several generations of soldiers memories. You include journals, so I imagine your collections may go back to the founding of our Republic. (Edit you mention in comments that the earliest records currently in your collections are from WWI)\n\nWhat differences do you notice over time? Does each war or era have a distinct feeling? Do the people in the different branches of the armed forces have different voices?\n\nWhat are some things that once showed up all the time, and now hardly show up at all? And conversely, what's something that has become much more prominent in recent years?\n\nAnd what are the constants, the things that our veterans talk about across all eras?", "Hello and thank you for being here!\n\nI'm currently preparing for a research project on the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War and I've been picking a few things from your great collection.\n\nConsidering the great amount of immigrants that has moved to the United States after participating in the side of the United States, such as the Vietnamese diaspora after the Vietnam War, have you ever thought of including the stories and recollections of immigrants that fought *alongside* US troops? (given that they are now living in the US that is).", "Though it wasn't much noticed in the West, [Svetlana Alexievich](_URL_0_) won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature primarily for her oral histories, particularly her oral histories of the Second World War and the Soviet War in Afghanistan, and also the Chernobyl disaster and the Fall of the Soviet Union. \n\nThis leads me to three distinct questions: what's the purpose of your archive? And what more broadly is the purpose of oral history? Alexievich work is pretty implicitly political, but I imagine your view your work as apolitical. She views her work as \"monuments to suffering\", but I doubt that's how you see your own work. How do you see your work? \n\nWhile you make your work available to the public online and in person, have you or anyone else condensed some of the primary sources you have into a more traditional oral history book, the kind that Alexievich and other oral historians write/produce? Or do you really think of yourself more as purely archivists, collecting the work for historians and later generations to comb through?\n\nThird, does your archive include the family members of veterans?  Alexievich's first two books focused on women and children, respectively, during World War II, and I'm curious if you do anything to get the experiences not just of the men and women who went off to fight for their country, but the people who loved them and stayed behind?", "People probably get emotional during some of your interviews. How do you handle talking about possibly difficult issues with people? \nAnd presumably, some interviews touch you emotionally as well. How do remain composed if and when that happens?", "How do you index your collections? Is there some sort of keywording or meta tagging? Who does it and to what level of detail?", "I helped transcribe the interviews as a part time job in college. It really opened my eyes to the different experiences from each guy who served! Thank you for this keeping this service going. \n\nAll of the interviews I transcribed were either from WW2 or Vietnam veterans. Have there, or will there be, interviews from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq?", "Are the stories and memoirs of veterans from recent wars and past wars somewhat similar in what they usually tell or say? For example, an infantryman in the second world war, compared to the same in the Gulf War or Vietnam War. ", "Were there any stories that revealed new things about the US in WWII, that you (or historians) didn't know of before?", "Hi, thank you for being here and for the work that you do to preserve the stories of veterans. Does the VHP include the fascinating story of Louie Zamperini from the book Unbroken? Related, do you ever reach out to particular individuals to solicit their stories?", "are you hiring?  I live in the DC area and have a masters degree in history. How can I help even in an unpaid way? ", "Do you have any records on The Fenian Raids? I'm doing a thesis on them and its quite hard to find any first hand accounts of them.", "You wanna hear the story about getting drunk with my Drill Sergeant during AIT, tearing ass down range at Ft. Benning in his mustang, and tossing our empty beer cans at folks on road marches?\n\nIt's not a story that has any heroes.", "A friend of mine was a WW2 vet in the pacific, he passed away over a decade ago. He used to tell me stories about flying from india to china over the himalayas and also trying to recover downed us airmen from --then neutral -- tibet using a radio link from kathmandu, the only radio in the country. Do you know anything else about this?", "I work for the Veterans History Project at the University of Central Florida! I am sad i missed an opportunity to talk with the people I regularly submit interviews to! UCF will be hitting our 500th interview by the end of the year, if we haven't already.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.loc.gov/vets", "http://www.loc.gov/rss/vhp/vhp.xml", "https://www.facebook.com/vetshistoryproject/", "http://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "uwxh7", "title": "How have leaders of Christian people justified unchristian things like war?", "selftext": "Given the pacifist tendencies of Jesus' teachings, how have historic Christian leaders justify unchristian activities such as war? And how did their more philosophically Christian subjects react?\n\nHas there ever been an attitude of \"hey, Jesus told us not to be like that\"?\n\nAlso interested in non-Christian areas with similar instances of leadership going against their local philosophies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uwxh7/how_have_leaders_of_christian_people_justified/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4zas9k", "c4zau7x", "c4zhpy1", "c4zvwoy"], "score": [12, 12, 2, 2], "text": ["You may want to look into [Just War Theory](_URL_0_).\n\nBut for the most part I don't think the majority of people are that philosophical. There are a lot of things people aren't supposed to do, but they do them anyway. War would just be something else to feel vaguely guilty about but figure will be ok if you're a good person in general.", "This is a fantastic question, and is in some ways central to the work of St. Augustine, the greatest Christian theologian. I will give the Augustinian justification because his writings in many ways shaped Christianity, but there are other ways of interpreting it.\n\nAugustine interpreted the world as having two essential structures (this is a gross oversimplification, by the way): The City of Man (Rome) and the City of God. Broadly speaking, the City of God applies to personal lives, and it is with it that the Christian morality applies. However, because of the nature of the City of Man, war was sometimes necessary, but only for the protection of innocent lives and the aim of bringing peace. Naturally, not every war falls under that, and yes, religious leaders very frequently criticized the warlike tendencies of kings and lords.\n\nI would suggest crossposting this to /r/Christianity. I believe there are some theologians there, and it is said to be a very nice community. be sure to note what denomination the responders come from.", "If you want the skinny of the first couple of centuries, then buy ['It is not lawful for me to fight'](_URL_0_), which summarises all the pre-Constantine thought on war and violence (tl:dr version - most were against both war and violence).\n\n", "To put simply, war changes both individual and societal perceptions of morality.  Whether Christian, Muslim, Atheist, or Agnostic it can with relative certainty be said that your idea of what is morally right and wrong will change during times of war.  This change occurs out of a need to rationalize the supremely irrational, to give a sense of order to the naturally chaotic, and to provide a new moral viewpoint in reaction to an inherently immoral situation.  \n\nYou can see the reversal in the most basic aspect of war: killing.  During peacetime, murdering someone is seen as the most heinous crime; in war, it becomes the most celebrated act, at least by those watching the conflict from the sideline, cheering their side on.\n\nHistory has shown that war is often seen as a time of absolutes.  Opponents in the war are branded as the \"evil Other,\" whose barbarity poses an existential threat to our traditional way of life.  Any dissent within our own society is stifled and the person or group is ostracized.  All aspects of a culture--political, economic, religious, artistic, linguistic, and more--during times of war mobilize to help the war effort.  The use of religion as a reason for starting or supporting a war has been used countless times, so I don't think examples are needed. \n\nI'll try to put my answer in a much more concise form: Religion is subservient to war.  War has a greater influence than religion in shaping societal, and therefore individual, beliefs.  Of course, during times of peace, societal institutions and individuals eventually restore their normal sense of morality and reality, but during times of war, for a short period, normalcy is shattered and war holds absolute power over a society.  Chris Hedges refers to war as a form of lust: a society becomes over-powered by the onset of war, falls in love with it, mythologizes it, and is unconcerned with any other part of life except for war.  Eventually, this lust subsides and the reality of war becomes apparent.  We realize that we are killing people, not barbarians, that our cause isn't an absolute moral right, and that the situation is much more complex than we initially had deluded ourselves into thinking.  Perhaps this is why we see some Christians justify war in some instances and support it in others.  My final point is that this isn't just a Christian or religious phenomenon; war effects everyone and few are able to actually maintain their sense of reality and morality when war occurs.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory"], [], ["http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/160608934X/"], []]}
{"q_id": "g1qru2", "title": "Non religious or 'neutral' sources for the existence of people who claimed to be Prophets among abrahmic Faith ? Is there any works documenting them? What are the approaches taken?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g1qru2/non_religious_or_neutral_sources_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnhchet"], "score": [3], "text": ["You'll be interested in [this older post](_URL_0_) by u/talondearg!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/259vcd/how_much_evidence_is_there_for_a_historical_jesus/chf3t4j/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "4xl5sq", "title": "if I went to London in AD 250 would I see different clothes and architecture than I would in a Roman city where it does not drop below freezing regularly every winter?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xl5sq/if_i_went_to_london_in_ad_250_would_i_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6gi4y6"], "score": [4], "text": ["I don't know about London, but I know from the excavations of the Roman city at Wroxeter that the engineers had initially sought to install an outdoor bathing area in the bath complex, as was standard in warmer parts of the empire.  This fell out of use rather quickly due precisely to the colder climate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3a0u5f", "title": "What exactly is Sharia Law anyway?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a0u5f/what_exactly_is_sharia_law_anyway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs8bz15", "cs8f1gp"], "score": [46, 8], "text": ["Several posters have already said that the question of Sharia law is better suited for a religion sub. \n\nIn fact, the question of how law codes arise out of religion and are influenced both by religion and culture (and how religion and culture are intertwined) is a perfectly legitimate avenue of historical inquiry. A religion sub would, of course, have its own perspective, but that doesn't mean the question can't be answered here. \n\nSo please, if you're coming here to tell the OP to go elsewhere, don't. \n\n/u/Snowchill: You may be interested in some of these previous posts about Islam, while you wait for an answer from an expert: \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_", "Sharia law is at a very basic level a collection of opinions given out by an enormous number of Islamic scholars over the course of Islam's history. It is not monolithic, and it is not a handbook of barbaric practices as it is sometimes portrayed. Think of it as being somewhat akin to the Talmud or especially to the common law.\n\nIt has had more than a thousand years to develop and evolve, differs in interpretation from one time and place to another, and during that time opinions have been issued that cover everything from riparian rights to workplace health and safety. Precedents may or may not be binding depending on where you are, and the importance or currency of a decision often depends on the reputation of whoever offers the opinion and his quality of scholarship. The folks over in /r/Islam can be of some assistance to you, and if you are curious about the similarities between Sharia and other legal systems, ask them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39t53f/what_exactly_is_sharia_law_and_how_has_the_wests/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ych3d/ama_modern_islam/"], []]}
{"q_id": "an9w8g", "title": "American all-black WWI battalion?", "selftext": "All-black WWI battalion. _URL_0_\n\n\nHey guys! I already posted this on r/WWI\n\n My dad found this cleaning out my grandmother's house after she died. He remembered my grandmothertelling him that her dad (my dad's grandfather) fought in WWI.\n\nI know about the Canadian black battalion, but was there ever an American all-black battalion or something? Or is my great-grandfather actually Canadian?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/an9w8g/american_allblack_wwi_battalion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efs5u2h"], "score": [12], "text": ["One, the soldiers in the photo are Americans. The cut of the uniforms (high collared-tunic with pointed breast pocket flaps) fits the [American uniform in 1917-1918](_URL_2_). The cartridge belts with ammunition pouches are also American, the Canadians carried their ammo in web pouches on their chests, [as you can see here](_URL_1_)\n\nTwo, they're probably a rifle platoon (~60 men in the U.S. Army of WWI), since they have rifles and steel Brodie helmets (the famous broad-brimmed \"tin hat\"). Most black troops in WWI were used in labor units and many men in labor units wouldn't have been armed or given helmets.\n\nThree, there were quite a few black units in the U.S. Army during the war. \n\nAt the start of the war, the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments, the famous \"Buffalo Soldiers,\" were all part of the Regular Army, although none of them saw combat. Instead, they did garrison duty along the Mexican border, in Hawaii, and in the Philippines. \n\nThe black soldiers who saw combat were volunteers, draftees, or National Guardsmen from northern states who'd been called up. Although many of these men ended up in support units, some did see combat. There were two large frontline formations that were mostly black: the 92nd Infantry Division and 93rd Infantry Division. The 92nd fought under U.S. Army control and had four infantry regiments, three field artillery regiments, a trench mortar battery, three machine gun battalions, a signal battalion, an engineer regiment, an engineer train, and various support units. Most of the junior officers were black, although senior officers were white. The 93rd was attached to the French, since some white American troops refused to command or work with the black troops. Also, the French were clamoring for manpower, so the black soldiers were a much-needed and welcome reinforcement. The 93rd had four infantry regiments, three of which were comprised of National Guard units from New York, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and Tennessee.\n\nYou can read more about how the two divisions faired in [this excellent article](_URL_0_).\n\nIs there any chance of getting a higher-resolution scan? The more I can see, the more I can tell you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/gallery/WiOXY6S"], "answers_urls": [["https://armyhistory.org/fighting-for-respect-african-american-soldiers-in-wwi/", "http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/en/explore/online/gray/pics/4782_soldier_1020.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6b/87/26/6b87262f40cdc10b5f155068182c35a5.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3h58f4", "title": "Would American scientists have known the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll would be unable to return after nuclear testing?", "selftext": "I read a TIL post about it and I was curious about whether or not America tricked the inhabitants out of their islands purposefully?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h58f4/would_american_scientists_have_known_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu4ika1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Just figured we should add on that Bikini Atoll was not the only place used by the US for nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific.\n\nWhile Bravo Shot does appear to be a case of extreme negligence exposing un-evactuated island populations, US navy personal, and Japanese fishermen to dangerous levels of radiation, in the case of Enewetak Atoll representatives for the US navy did clearly deceive the island populations promising that they could return after the testing- and though thirty years later some were allowed to return- they found the islands completely changed and unfit for large scale habitation.  Like many other Marshallese peoples whose islands have/still are used by the US military for munitions testing, many of their descendants have become dislocated and displaced.\n\nIf the OP is interested in reading further about these current/past/prevailing issues, I would recommend some of the following.\n\n* Carucci, Laurence Marshall. Nuclear Nativity: Rituals of Renewal and Empowerment in the Marshall Islands. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997.\n\nMore of an anthropological review- Carucci is concerned primarily with the populations from Enewetak and does a good job explaining why the island leader initially assented to allowing their islands to be used for testing and their belief that they had done so to allow for \u201cpeace and freedom for all humanity.\u201d\n\n* Niedenthal, Jack. For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and Their Islands. Majuro, Marshall Islands: Micronitor Publishing, 2001.\n\nNiedenthal looks at how the isolation and remoteness of Bikini Atoll (and this is a common story) which had protected the island from much outside interference or colonialism, made it the perfect site for post WWII nuclear colonialism.  The story of the Bikini and Enewetak islanders intersect in the overview when US investigations on Rongerik, where the Bikini islanders had been relocated, revealed that  people were suffering greatly from malnutrition and starvation.  An attempt to move them to another island failed when the US Government relocated islanders from Enewetak to that island so they could perform nuclear testing on Enewatak.\n\n* Barker, Holly. Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear/Colonial World. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.\n\nBarker\u2019s goal is to write the history of nuclear testing the stresses the ways in which the Bravo test altered the health, environment, language, economic, politics, and social organization of the Marshall Islands; but a history in which the Marshallese are not just helpless victims rendered powerless by the events in their land, but as fighters and advocates for their communities and their future.  The Marshallese have fought attempts by the US to buy silence, minimize, and keep secret the nuclear testing program and its aftereffects on the Marshallese community and landscape.\n\n* Dorrance, John C. Oceania and the United States: An Analysis of US Interests and Policy in the South Pacific. Washington, DC: National Defense University, Research Directorate, 1980.\n\nThis is actually a government report about strategic situations in the Pacific.  I include it on this list because it helps highlight the lasting diplomatic fallout for nuclear testing in the Pacific- especially US fears regarding the Nuclear Free Pacific movement as the US ended its direct colonial control over the Trust Territories of the Pacific.  \n\n* Weisgall, Jonathan.  Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994.\n\nWeisgall is focused specifically on Bikini and the Operation Crossroads testing.  He argues that it revealed not just the devastating power of the bomb to sink ships and wreck land, but the danger of fallout and the lingering threat of the bomb blast even after the detonation.  The bomb proved itself as a killing instrument, a genocidal weapon, more prone to taking out civilians than targeted military strikes.  The US turned the Bikini islanders into Nuclear Nomads in their ignorance and arrogance in detonating dozens of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.  US scientists and military officials were playing with fire and had already demonstrated a complete ignorance of the effects of the atomic bomb, arguing the radiation poisoning in Japan was propaganda, a trumped up hoax."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1olhsb", "title": "Were Native Americans (from actual tribes/reservations) drafted for the Vietnam War? And if so how common was it?", "selftext": "I tried searching if drafting Native Americans happen during the Vietnam War or if Native Americans were even eligible.  I couldn't find anything directly related to Vietnam.  I did find that they were eligible and drafted during WWII thanks to the Nationality Act of 1940, and that many served in Vietnam.  But nothing on the draft.  \n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1olhsb/were_native_americans_from_actual/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccte2nj"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes. The [1924 Indian Citizenship Act](_URL_1_) conferred US citizenship to all Native peoples indigenous to the United States. Part of the reasoning behind the 1924 law was US citizenship was granted to Native Americans who served in WWI in 1919 ([Lemay](_URL_2_)). Lemay states that 90% of the Native Americans who served in the Vietnam War, 90% were volunteers and only 10% were drafted. According the US Census information as relayed by Robert Sanderson, 82,000 Native Americans served in the Vietnam War ([Sanderson](_URL_0_)). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ualr.edu/sequoyah/uploads/2011/11/sanviet.html", "http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0146.html", "http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/a-brief-history-of-american-indian-military-service-115318"]]}
{"q_id": "8ww0mu", "title": "Were the views of the early Quakers really that much more progressive than those of their contemporaries?", "selftext": "Whenever I hear about Quakers, it tends to be something involving their contributions to the Underground Railroad, their positive treatment of the Native Americans, or how they were treated so poorly by the Puritans during the colonial times.\n\nWere the Quakers really as forward thinking as they've been made out to be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ww0mu/were_the_views_of_the_early_quakers_really_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1z0ier"], "score": [6], "text": ["I would generally advise against using terms such as \"forward thinking.\" For one, ascribing values to an entire religious minority is bound to produce inaccuracies. Not all Quakers were abolitionist. Second, most Quaker abolitionists would not have considered themselves \"forward thinking.\" To most Quakers (and any Christian involved in the abolition debate for that matter), they were acting in accordance with their religious beliefs. That's a very different thing than forward thinking. I've had the luxury of reading transcripts from abolition debates on the religious implications of slavery, and neither side seemed particularly concerned with whether or not they were \"forward thinking.\" To them, the issue of slavery was one with deep hermeneutical implications on what Christian morality meant. Using terms like forward thinking runs the risk of dismissing the beliefs, however abhorrent to our modern eyes, of Christians who most certainly believed what they were saying. History is a vastly more complicated process than most books let on, and categorizing groups as \"forward thinking\" or \"backwards\" does more damage than good to understanding historical processes. \n\n\n\n\n To answer your question: yes, most Quakers espoused political beliefs that a modern audience would find agreeable (i.e. \"forward thinking\"), but with qualifications. The majority of Quakers were certainly pro-abolition by the late 18th century, but this does not mean that Quakers were *always* abolitionist.  The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting condemned slavery in 1696, but slavery remained legal for some time after that. Remember that in the early 1700s, slaves constituted as much as 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia. As such, slavery was part of the economic system of Philadelphia in its early years despite having a large population of Quakers. The life of Benjamin Lay (born 1682) is a good representation of the development of Quaker abolitionism. Although he was an outspoken abolitionist in the embryonic days of Quaker abolition, the Overseers of the Press (who acted with the authority of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting) opposed him and sought to use their control of the press to clamp down on his abolitionist rhetoric.\n\n\n\nAnd not all Quakers *were* abolitionist. George Fox White, a Pennsylvania pastor and member of the Hicksite branch of Quakerism, responded to the deepening political divide of the 1830s by asking Quakers to forgo political partisanship in the abolition debate. While not necessarily pro-slavery, George Fox White was hardly what could be called an abolitionist. \n\n\n\n\nIt's tempting to assume that the egalitarian nature of Quakerism would make them unquestionably abolitionist and that Quakers are inherently more forward thinking, but history presents a more complicated picture. As for the question of whether or not Quakers were more forward thinking than their contemporaries, I think this a dangerous way to approach the matter. Christians who partook in the debate had genuine religious convictions backing their arguments. Here's an argument made by the proslavery reverend NL Blanchard: *Who denies (what that text imports) that in the privileges of the Christian church and in the blessed hopes of the gospel, there are no distinctions- that at the table of the Lord the richest man takes his seat by the poorest of the poor? But a king is a king still, though his meanest subject is on par with himself in all things of religion.  The equality of all men on the great platform of Christian privileges and hope, does not prevent great inequalities in their civil condition\u2026The equality of a Jew and his slave in their right to the Passover, did in no wise destroy their relation to each other as master and slave.* Trying to understand Christian interpretation can (and perhaps *should*) be disconcerting to a modern audience, but dismissing their arguments as \"backwards thinking\" or elevating the position of Quakers as \"forwards thinking\" can lead to a narrow understanding of history.\n\n\n\n\nIf you're interested in reading more about how Christian hermeneutics evolved for both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, I cannot recommend the work of J. Albert Harril enough. His article \"The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate\" is a fantastic resource. \n\n\n\n\nSources: \n\n\nBrycchan Carey *From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Slavery, 1657-176.* \n\n\nBlanchard and N.L. Rice, *A Debate on Slavery Held in the City of Cincinnati, on the First, Second, Third, and Sixth Days of October, 1845, Upon the Question: Is Slave-Holding in Itself Sinful, and the Relation Between Master and Slave, a Sinful Relation?*\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gpv11", "title": "Why didn't Islam become a major Reglion in Western countries? Or any other Reglion like Buddism or Hindu?", "selftext": "Western and South American countries are Christian based. Eastern are Hindu, Buddist, or Shinto. Africa is a mixture. The Middle East is Islam.\n\nWhy didn't Islam ever take over as a major or dominate Reglion in Europe or Asia (manly Mongola, China, Japan, or any of the SE-Asian countries other then Indonesia)? Islam had several golden ages of learning, art, science, writings, and more.\n\nWhy wasn't there a major movement to install a Islamic nation in Europe? We're there any I'm not aware of?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gpv11/why_didnt_islam_become_a_major_reglion_in_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cklgp73"], "score": [3], "text": ["There were two major Islamic threats to Europe -- in the westernmost part of the West, the Iberian Peninsula, there was an Islamic invasion of the petty Visigothic kingdoms in the 8th century AD, which created an Islamic society that lasted until the 15th century. They attempted expansion to the east, into Francia, but were stopped by a combination of fairly effective Frankish defense and other factors such as rebellious emirs (sometimes working in conjunction with the chief rivals of the Umayyad lords of Muslim Iberia, the Franks and the Abbasids), increasing interest in Mediterranean possessions such as Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily.\n\nWhy the *reconquista* was a success and drove Islam (both as a state power and, more brutally, as a popular religious belief) out of Iberia isn't easy to sum up with one quick statement. In fact, I'm not sure I'd be able to explain it at all, except to give a one-damn-thing-after-another summary of the alliances, betrayals, battles, sieges, and general ebb and flow of the fortunes of the various Christian and Muslim states of Iberia that ultimately lead to the fall of the last Muslim state of Iberia, Granada.\n\nMore recently, there was the Ottoman Empire, whose expansion reached a high water mark at the gates of Vienna in the 16th and 17th century. The Ottoman Empire didn't ultimately conquer Western Europe, but it did conquer the Byzantine Empire. Unlike the gains in Iberia, these have not been entirely lost -- Istanbul is, to this day, part of a nation that is predominantly Muslim, even if Turkey did abandon official Islam with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Albanian and Bosnian Islam both date from the Ottoman period.\n\nAs for Asia -- well, obviously, Islam had a big impact on *western* Asia. Zoroastrianism was essentially totally displaced by Islam in Iran. Hinduism survived, but many Indians did become Muslim.\n\nMongolia is an interesting case: the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate, two of the Mongol Empire's sub-states, both converted to Islam. In the case of the Ilkhanate -- which started off being predominantly Buddhist and Nestorian Christian -- it made sense as a way of ameliorating relations with predominantly Muslim subjects. The case of the Golden Horde is actually unclear to me -- I don't believe the territories of the Golden Horde were very predominantly Muslim (compared to alternatives like Orthodox Christianity or traditional Tengriism) -- but they did. The Mongolian heartland, however, ultimately became Buddhist.\n\nAs for China, Islam did make some headway in China. The two largest groups of Chinese Muslims are the Uyghers and Hui. Uyghers are a Turkic people, predominantly in the west. Hui are basically the same ethnicity as Han Chinese, except for the fact that their ancestors converted to Islam. Most Chinese didn't become Muslim, though.\n\nTl;dr: Muslims conquered and/or converted a lot of the world, but there's also a lot of the world that they didn't conquer/convert. They didn't convert the whole world to their one universal faith, but then again, no other religion has either."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1du0z5", "title": "Where did bank robbers in the 30's get their Tommy Guns and BARs from?", "selftext": "Where did these criminals get military grade weapons from? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1du0z5/where_did_bank_robbers_in_the_30s_get_their_tommy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9tucpf", "c9ty8j8", "c9u26vn"], "score": [2, 9, 2], "text": ["Well, according to a few sources I dug up (off Wikipedia) It seems that some raided police and/or national guard armories to seize the weapons.\n\nJohn Dillinger, arguably the most famous of the era, and his gang raided two police armories in Indiana after he was busted out of Prison. They stole machine guns, pistols, shotguns, and rifles along with some bullet proof vests.\n\n_URL_0_\n", "James Ballou, in *Rock and a Hard Place, the Browning Automatic Rifle*, states that\n > \"With the cessation of hostilities, Colt Arms Co. received the Browning patents to produce the BAR that had been withheld from issue during the war.\"\n\nThis allowed Colt to make the BAR available for commercial sale, including sale to civilian owners. The Colt Automatic Machine Rifle Model 1919, initially made up of overruns from the M1918 military production contract, was the first of several commercial Colt BARs that would follow. However, the high price of the weapon and its limited utility for most civilian owners resulted in few sales.\n\nAs far as the Thompson goes, Fitzsimmons states in *The illustrated encyclopedia of 20th century weapons and warfare* that\n\n > The Thompson first entered production as the M1921. It was available to civilians, though its high price resulted in few sales. (A Thompson with one Type XX 20 shot \"stick\" magazine was priced at $200.00, at a time when a Ford automobile sold for $400.00.) M1921 Thompsons were sold in small quantities to the United States Postal Inspection Service.", "Clyde Barrow got most if not all of his from robbing national guard Armories.  [Link to pictures of some of their weapons](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/john-dillinger/famous-cases-john-dillinger"], [], ["http://texashideout.tripod.com/guns.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3sgtas", "title": "If Sumerian is a language isolate, how was it deciphered?", "selftext": "I'm no expert on languages, but it seems like it is vastly harder to decipher language isolates.  For instance, even if you know what sounds the various signs make, you would then just have a long list of meaningless sounds.  In fact, isn't that the current problem with deciphering Etruscan?\n\nSo when I was looking up information on how Sumerian was deciphered, every source just lumps it together with the deciphering of Akkadian.  But logically even if you knew what sounds the different cuneiform symbols recorded, how would you know what the Sumerian inscriptions were trying to say?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sgtas/if_sumerian_is_a_language_isolate_how_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwx4vzw", "cwxdk6p"], "score": [2, 14], "text": ["[This thread](_URL_0_) may have your answer.", "Part of the reason for this is that it started from the decipherment of Akkadian-early scholars found texts in this non-Semitic language(although even before these texts were found, some people suspected that cuneiform was not invented to write a Semitic languages because it is not well suited to them). While this was an isolate, some things were clear about it-based on the pattern of syllables it was agglutinating, and in addition some bilingual texts had been found, providing at least a useful start. Unfortunately, at this point progress was delayed by an extended feud over whether or not Sumerian was ever a real language or just a sort of argot for a Semitic languages. This lasted some years, until it was agreed that it was at this point a real language.\n\nNow how was it deciphered from there? The bilinguals helped, but equally important, a staggering number of Sumerian texts were excavated in the 19th and early 20th century, providing an enormous corpus to base reasearch on. Equally crucially, this corpus included bilingual word lists, student exercises, and other texts that are useful to _URL_0_ by 1880-90 the first efforts to produce translations of these texts were published and by. 1910-20 scholars(mostly Germans) were starting to put together lexicons, grammars, and so on. Of course this is a very rudimentary summary but hopefully it gives you a good starting point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/xa3dw/is_anyone_familiar_with_sumerian_not_so_much_the/"], ["decipherers.So"]]}
{"q_id": "18rqgw", "title": "Why did Nazi Germany keep so many troops in Norway in WWII?", "selftext": "I just read that when the Germans surrendered they still had 400,000 troops in Norway. Why were there so many there and why were they not recalled for the more important fight in Germany.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18rqgw/why_did_nazi_germany_keep_so_many_troops_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hdqv6", "c8hh0u6", "c8hhbuc", "c8hwxiy"], "score": [24, 2, 20, 2], "text": ["Short version: primarily to safeguard iron ore from Sweden, and to make it easier for the Navy to operate in the North Atlantic. It really was that important to the Germans.", "In large part it was due to the British Commando raids. The raids were largely successful in sinking ships and destroying industrial equipment, most notably a heavy water plant (important in creating an A-bomb). This gives a brief summary. _URL_0_\n\nThe raids made Hitler fear that an invasion of Norway may be feasible, and as Theamazinghanna says Germany relied upon iron ore from the region.\n\nInterestingly, there was very little attempt to work on Hitler's fear of an invasion of Norway. There was an army based in Scotland that trained for invasion and the Germans knew about it, but there was no operation on the scale of Mincemeat or before Overlord.", "Finally, one I can answer in a somewhat acceptable fashion. \nGermany wanted Norway for a number of reasons, I'll try to list as many as possible. \n\n1) During World War I (WWI) part of the reason that Germany lost was the blockade by the Allied powers along the North Sea and the English Channel. The British enjoyed overwhelming sea power and succeeded in cutting off a large amount of Germany's imports and exports. Before entering into World War II (WWII) Germany's military command realized that another blockade would prove nearly as devastating as it had during the WWI. By taking Norway, Germany had access to a large number of fjords, inlets, and harbors all across the north Atlantic, too large an area to blockade effectively and also perfect landing points for submarines. This proved only marginally effective throughout the war because the Allies were still able to prevent cargo ships from passing through the area so the Germans had to rely more heavily on submarines which were less ideal. \n\n2) The German military commanders knew that they would want to bomb the British Isles. Norway would provide closer airfields for their bombers to take the fight to the enemy. This was not particularly effective because the Germans only had mid-range bombers that did not have quite enough range to bomb the more important areas located to the south of the British Isles. Also the Germans would secure airfields in France and other areas closer to the UK so they didn't need those in Norway as much. \n\n3) Norway served as something of a training mission for the German army. The German command expected to perform an amphibious landing on the shores of the British Isles which would be much more heavily fortified than those of Norway so it was a good exercise and measuring stick to judge the actual effectiveness of their combined forces offensive. I think in this respect the invasion of Norway was very useful because the Germans expected to take the country in much less time than they actually and were able to change a few things around as a result (I'm sorry, my book on this is 100 miles away so I can't tell you the exact times). \n\n4) The Germans really needed the iron ore provided by Sweden in order to craft the various implements of war. In this respect I think they were extremely successful in protecting their supply lines and ensuring trade with Sweden was not disrupted. \n\n", "First of all, apart from the [20. Gebirgsarmee](_URL_1_), the troops in Norway were at best 2nd line formation.\n\nThe 20. Gebirgsarmee was the German troops in Finland which had been involved in the attempt to capture Murmansk in [Operation Platinfuchs](_URL_2_). They had been cut off from Germany and their supply in Finnish Baltic ports when Finland switched sides in September 1944, and made a long and arderous retreat over Finnmark and northern Norway until they arrived at Troms\u00f6 and Narvik in late 1944 early 1945.\n\nThe western allies all but destroyed the German shipping ability in the North Sea during autumn 1944, and the Germans lost the ability to move large amounts of troops from Norway after that - which is before the 20. Gebirgsarmee arrived from Finland. Sweden closed down the transit agrement which had allowed unarmed German soldiers to move on Swedish railroads back and forth from Germany in August 1943, so that avenue was also closed.\n\nMuch of the German submarine services were stationed in Norway after the liberation of France, and a lot of technicians, submarine repairmen, staff troops, support and supply troops for the submarine services were in Norway. Likewise, part of what remained of the Kreigsmarine was still in Norway and more or less trapped there - they had been fighting the Murmansk convoys and keeping whatever surface units the Germans had left in service as a fleet in being (the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst being the most famous of these).\n\nThe Germans were also involved in a huge project to build a road and a railroad from Trondheim to Narvik (which the Norwegians finished after the war), and a lot of construction troops were present to work on these constructions and coastal fortifications.\n\nThe only German armorued formation in Norway was Panzer-division 'Norwegen', which consisted of a single motorised battalion of ww1 medium howitzers, a Panzer-grenadiere regiment marching on foot and 10 StuGs, 43 Pz IIIs (mostly L, M and N) and ~80 Hotchkiss 35 and Suoma 35 (French tanks captured 1940) - and the French tanks were spread out in independent companies in garrisons all over Norway.\n\nThe Germans did move their best troops out of Norway - the 25. Panzer-division was moved away in August-September 1943 and most of the remaining units bled their best and brightest, specialists and technicians to the fronts on the continent.\n\nSo, to be brief. Apart from the 20. Gebirgsarmee, which retreated to Norway from Finland after the Germans had lost the ability to move large amounts of troops from Norway, the vast majority of the men in Norway were either 2nd or 3rd line garrison troops, with captured Russian or French artillery, built into bunkers and pointing out to the sea or lacking the prime movers or trucks to move them at all, or they were construction, supply or naval staff.\n\nWhile the 20. Gebirgsarmee might have been a good force to have in the [fight for the Dukla Pass in Slovakia](_URL_0_), most of the forces in Norway would not have helped in the final battle for Germany in 1945.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Commandos"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Dukla_Pass", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Mountain_Army_%28Wehrmacht%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Silver_Fox"]]}
{"q_id": "5kjnl1", "title": "Is our understanding of Roman paganism based on elite Orthodoxy or popular practices?", "selftext": "Studies of the Monotheistic religions often argue from Orthodoxy, but when you look at popular practise in the areas where these religions meet you can find ideas and rituals where elements from various religions bleed into each other. \n\nThis got me curious about how where our understanding of Roman paganism comes from. When for example Hercules and Melquart were likened to each other, would this be equivalent to Muslims trying to gain favour of a Christian saint? Would the traditional religious elite consider such practices heretical?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5kjnl1/is_our_understanding_of_roman_paganism_based_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbotkdr", "dbp5btk"], "score": [11, 6], "text": ["Thinking about Roman or even just pre-christian paganism in the terms we think about Christianity today or even as it was thought of by the reign of Theodosius, who made Christianity the official religion of he empire, can have us running into some anachronistic problems. Roman paganism did not have much of any form of heresy. The closest thing I can think of is people practising personal magic in addition to state cult, magic being socially frowned upon as it was considered to be much more nefarious in nature. But the big thing to understand about Roman paganism is that it was very tied into civil society. Romans didn't really care which gods you chose to worship as long as they were those worshipped by everyone else. The other big point, a classic point regarding ancient Roman practices in general, is they were masters of appropriating other cultures and systems and integrating them into the empire. Thus the comparisons between various classical heroes and gods and those from other cultures like the Near East. Worshipping the god of Tyre would have been equated to worshipping the closest similar Roman deity or hero, such as Hercules. Even when Christians were persecuted it was not because they worshipped the wrong or different god, but because they refused to sacrifice as ALL pagans and traditional religionists had. We get to notions of heresy much more as it relates to the Christian faith. Persecutions led to infighting between Christians, as some challenged others for forsaking the faith in order to live rather than die a martyr. Then when Christianity gained more significance during he reign of Constantine we find a variety of heresies within the faith because Christianity did represent a fundamental break with paganism. It was no longer a go with the flow kind of religion, but a universal, Orthodox one, whose correct worship affected all humans, and thus it was considered important that all Christians worship correctly, hence Orthodox. \n\nA great book on this topic is Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox. Also consider looking at Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity.", "Neither, really. The popular understanding of Greco-Roman mythology comes from a variety of elite literary sources that were not actually representative of what the author actually believed, but were treated in much the same way that \"folk tales\" are today. And really, if you read a given account of a Greek myth there is a very strong possibility that the source was a single work, the *Metamorphoses* by Ovid. To give one of my favorite examples of this, the *Iliad* is arguably the most famous work of classical antiquity and almost certainly the most literately significant, but if you think of the primary character, Achilles, the first thing that usually pops into mind would be his heel, the one part of his body that was vulnerable. But the heel is not mentioned in Homer, and there is no suggestion in the *Iliad* that Achilles has such invulnerability, but the heel *does* appear in Ovid.\n\nBut Ovid was not really being sincere, his work is unapologetically literary, filled with ironic self reference and self parody. What Ovid's actual beliefs were is of course inaccessible, but the *Metamorphoses* was undoubtedly not meant to be taken seriously as history. It instead belonged to the category of what the great Roman scholar Varro called \"the religion of the poets\", the sort of thing that only the most ignorant bumpkin believes but makes a good story (Varro's critique of mythology follows in a long tradition, back to the Archaic poet Xenophones, but that is another story). This is contrasted first to the religion of the cities, the mix and match of ritual that held the community fabric together. The last as the religion of the philosophers.\n\nSo does this mean that the mythology we have is an accurate representation of \"common folk\" belief? Well, not quite. The mythology we have is a highly learned one stemming from the great works of Alexandrian compilation, and doesn't necessarily reflect what *anyone* ever actually believed. For example, while there is one \"canonical version\" of the story of Echo and Narcissus, there are a couple other ones mentioned in passing, for example, the author Pausanias mentions that in one area of Greece, Narcissus is not said to have fallen in love with his reflection, but with his twin brother. More substantively that divergence in myth, however, is that myth as we know it only barely touches on actual observable ritual practice. The many different Etruscan methods of divination, for example, continue all the way through Late Antiquity. Among Latin Romans, the focus of religious activity weren't the gods, but rather the ancestral spirits. And if you go outside of Attic Greece or Latin Rome any idea of \"normal\" goes out the window, as local and international traditions blend together."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8noahi", "title": "The Iran Hostage Crisis was resolved 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, how was that accomplished? Is there any truth to rumors of a deal behind Carter's back?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8noahi/the_iran_hostage_crisis_was_resolved_20_minutes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzy4vn8"], "score": [10], "text": ["Not to discourage additional answers and discussion, but this old post by u/gent2012 may answer your question:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lvj5k/whats_the_status_of_the_1980_october_surprise/cc3fz67/"]]}
{"q_id": "czy4g8", "title": "Why does Hong Kong have special laws compared to the rest of China when the British lease was going to end in 1997 anyways?", "selftext": "Why did China make concessions if it didn't need to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/czy4g8/why_does_hong_kong_have_special_laws_compared_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ez3vaz0"], "score": [5], "text": ["Hong Kong was not on a lease the new terratories were, Nor is it unique in this regard as Macau shares the same status.\n\nWhilst there's always more to be said this [answer](_URL_0_) by /u/Calorie_Man and this [answer](_URL_1_) by /u/Spiritof454 and /u/HKTenor may be helpful to you"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83ixki/why_was_hong_kong_returned_to_china/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c2j2rz/the_uk_gave_control_of_hong_kong_to_the_peoples/erlenz8/"]]}
{"q_id": "b7tamv", "title": "Why did US troops commit more crimes in Vietnam than they did in both world wars?", "selftext": "Young American men were drafted in WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam conflict, yet their presence in Vietnam was far more brutal. In both world wars, Americans weren't using flamethrowers on German villages or going into rural areas mass-slaughtering civilians like they did in Vietnam. If it was both mainly made up of young drafted men, why was their attitude different in Vietnam?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b7tamv/why_did_us_troops_commit_more_crimes_in_vietnam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eju98kf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Because they were fighting a different kind of war that they were not use to. The men were trained to fight for battles like in Europe in ww2. They didn\u2019t not teach the men how to fight a counter insurgency war. They would be trained in taking and holding objectives, then be deployed just to search a village not really knowing exactly what to look for, then round up the villagers and burn their homes and food supply.\n\nIt probably came from two main things. \nThe frustration of not getting anywhere, they would patrol the same area for weeks on end, and it would destroy morale to lose a man taking a hill, and then a week later returning to the same spot just to do the same job you already lost guys doing. The men would grow a real resentment to the VC/NVA, trouble is how do you tell a VC from a old farm hand? Especially when two villages back you found a similar man that was hiding 20 AKs under his bed. \n\nAnd they were kind of told to. Not really, but. America was not ready-or expecting a 10 year for a war run by politics, so their reaction when they realised that they needed a new strategy was body count. How do you get rid of an invading ideology? Kill so many of them that they don\u2019t return. The brass really hung onto this. The soldiers were taught that if you kill a civilian it gets counted as VC, and goes onto the body count. I think they became to numb between their own anger and frustrations of their own war, and the orders from above. They did not care if the war ended or not, just let them survive their 12/13 months and get home, whatever that would take.\n\nBut there were war crimes from the US in ww2 as well, Vietnam was just the first uncensored war on TV. There were newsreels of US in Germany shooting surrendering unarmed Germans, it was not shown on TV. The US has always been looked at as the good guy in every war, but I don\u2019t think that there is one at all. I love America though, and it is war after all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7a4h7v", "title": "Thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates' \"Five Books to Make You Less Stupid About the Civil War\"", "selftext": "This morning, in response to John Kelly's recent statement about the causes of the Civil War \n(and how he thinks it isn't slavery), Ta-Nehisi Coates published a rather cheekily titled article: [*Five Books to Make You Less Stupid About the Civil War*](_URL_0_). The books are:\n\n1. *Battle Cry Of Freedom* by James McPherson\n1. *Grant* by Ron Chernow\n1. *Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee* by Elizabeth Pryor\n1. *Out of the House of Bondage* by Thavolia Glymph\n1. *The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass*, Douglass's autobiography\n\nI was wondering what the academic community thinks of this list. You can see all the reasons that Coates' lays out for these choices in the article itself, but it is worth saying that he specifically notes: \n >  In making this list I\u2019ve tried to think very hard about readability, and to offer books you might actually complete. There are a number of books that I dearly love and have found indispensable that are not on this list. (Du Bois\u2019s Black Reconstruction in America immediately comes to mind.) I mean no slight to any of those volumes. But this is about being less stupid. We\u2019ll get to those other ones when we talk about how to be smart.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7a4h7v/thoughts_about_tanehisi_coates_five_books_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp73lef", "dp7ch2d", "dp7g6e3"], "score": [23, 8, 13], "text": ["Not bad books by any means (I haven't read them all, but their online synopses seem pretty solid), but there's far too little here about the antebellum period as a means to really understanding the *causes* of the war. The only real explanation of the sectional crisis (especially the history of the North) that I'd expect from that list is McPherson's first chapter or two, and that's not nearly enough. \n\nIf the list must be 5 books, and I have to replace something, I'd probably get rid of the biographies. McPherson covers enough of the military stuff anyway, and this doesn't seem to be a military history list.\n\nI'd replace them with Bruce Levine's *Half Slave and Half Free*, which is a very readable overview of how the North and South developed into disparate cultures prone to sectionalism, and Mike Morrison's *Slavery and the American West*, which is a great look at how disagreements over the West created the sectional crisis.\n\nIf we insist on having a biographical in there, I'd trade Morrison with David Donald's *Lincoln* or Allen Guelzo's *Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation*.\n\nNumbers 4 and 5 seem to cover the nature of antebellum slavery while injecting both black and women's voices into the story, though I might replace Douglas with something a little more general, like Walter Johnson's *Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market*. \n\nOf course, there are enough good books out there that we could debate this endlessly.", "To echo /u/Borimi's comments, these seem a bit heavy on biographies, although Frederick Douglas' is a good one in this case because it provides some very personalized examples of what slavery was like.\n\nThe core problem with this list is that it doesn't sufficiently contextualize the civil war and the practice of slavery and the racial caste system in relation to the American experience (for the enslaved, the slavers, for those who otherwise benefited from slavery, and for those who wanted to get rid of it). It also doesn't place the civil war and the fight over slavery and its abolition in the larger historical context. Lincoln is one of the most famous historical figures because he \"won\" the civil war and because he pushed for abolition as part of that victory. However, president Rutherford B. Hayes is comparatively almost unknown in the popular culture, though he can be said to have \"unwon\" the civil war substantially, at least in regards to the issue of abolition of slavery and the extension of the full rights and freedoms granted by the US constitution to all of its citizens, regardless of race. I think to rightly address the history of the civil war and to become \"less stupid about it\" would require understanding more of the history of race and especially of slavery in the US both before and after the civil war, likely all the way up to the civil rights era, if not through to today.\n\nI would add a book about reconstruction, a book about jim crow, a book about the great migration and its causes, a book about the civil rights era, and probably a book that studied the practice of slavery with a more broad based approach than, say, a single slave narrative (as valuable as such narratives can be).\n\nAs a preliminary list, I'd suggest these to replace some of Coates' selections:\n\n* *Reconstruction* by Eric Foner\n* *The Half Has Never Been Told* by Edward E. Baptist\n* *The Warmth of Other Suns* by Isabel Wilkerson", "Hard not to echo what others have said here. McPherson is a phenomenal choice, as it really is just *the* single volume history of the war, so it deserves to be in *any* list, but the rest? Nothing against 'em, but I would disagree for various reasons. A biography of Grant seems like a very short sighted inclusion if you are trying to make a \"Five essentials\" list, and while \"Reading the Man\" *is* quite a new look at Lee, again, why are we wasting space on biographies here? Same with Douglass! I haven't read \"Out of the House of Bondage\" so I can't *really* make a hard stand on it, so maybe I would say leave that, even though there are other options out there for similar coverage.\n\nSo what would I offer as an alternative list? Well... I'm going to cheat, and offer more than five, but instead focus on the five *aspects* that I think any given list should cover.\n\n1. A really solid general history of the war. This is the backbone of any list like this, and this is the one case where I not only will agree with Coates, but go so far as to say there is no other option I'd want to consider other than McPherson. \n2. Something that covers the road to war and secession. I'm a real fan of \"Apostles of Disunion\" by Dew, for that, but it *is* somewhat narrow in scope compared to something like Freehling's \"The Road to Disunion\". although then we hit the \"that is actual a really long duology, not a single book\" problem. /u/Borimi's suggestion of \"Half Free, Half Slave\" also would fit well here.\n3. A book that looks at the post-war historiography, especially of the Lost Cause, and the enduring political ramifications of the war. I have written *quite* the [list of books that cover this](_URL_0_) before, but if we had to go with one option, Foster's \"Ghosts of the Confederacy\", Blight's \"Race and Reunion\", Janney's \"Remembering the Civil War\", or Wilson's \"Baptized in Blood\" are all options to consider.\n4. Something that is focused specifically on slavery. As I said, I can't speak to \"Out of the House of Bondage\" but it would fit here. Otherwise, I still haven't gotten to it, but I've been hearing really good things about \"The Half Has Never Been Told\" which /u/rocketsocks brought up, but some other possibilities would be \"Master of Small Worlds\" by McCurry, ~~\"Roll, Jordan, Roll\" by Genovese~~ (I'm joking /u/freedmenspatrol!), \"Within the Plantation Household\" by Fox-Genovese, \"Ruling Race\" by Oakes... several more options beyond that, and I don't really want to say \"that's the one\" but I think you get the point. One of the five needs to be about slavery in the South.\n5. I have one spot left I'm split on whether to spend spot *the final* on something like Foner's \"Reconstruction\", which *is* a solid topic to cover (and definitely the book to pick for it) here looking at the immediate post-war world, or instead to include a book like \"Southern Storm\" by Trudeau, since I don't really want to waste a spot on what is essentially a military history (McPherson is enough there), but on the other hand Sherman's March is *such* a core part of the conventional wisdom of the conflict, that Trudeau's take would likely be eye-opening for many. Although I guess on that qualification I could of course also justify bringing back \"Reading the Man\". All in all I like the *symmetry* of Foner, since it creates something of a temporal progression here, since you could then read all five works as almost a narrative structure (4,2,1,5,3 being the order though...), so I'm leaning that way..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/11/five-books-to-make-you-less-stupid-about-the-civil-war/544628/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6v1yj5/monday_methods_collective_memory_or_lets_talk/dlx9vjg/"]]}
{"q_id": "4aduqi", "title": "Is it true that Native American were referred to as Indians because Columbus seriously thought he was in India when he landed?", "selftext": "Or is this a popular misconception?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4aduqi/is_it_true_that_native_american_were_referred_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zk9jx"], "score": [26], "text": ["Not an expert, but this question has been answered before. Lots of good information in these following threads, including answering very similar questions about this same topic.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHope this is helpful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vo2xj/did_christopher_columbus_really_think_he_landed/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/438ucy/george_carlin_and_indians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p3qhu/why_did_the_misnomer_indian_stay_in_place_for/"]]}
{"q_id": "217lrb", "title": "Why do no English/British monarchs have epithets following the Norman conquest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/217lrb/why_do_no_englishbritish_monarchs_have_epithets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgagcvd", "cgahvbr"], "score": [10, 4], "text": ["Well, see, they did. The one that springs to mind first is Edward I, known as Edward Longshanks due to his long legs. There was also Prince Edward, who was known as \"The Black Prince\", Henry \"The Young King\", Richard I \"The Lionheart\", and a couple others. If you count Oliver Cromwell, you get \"Old Ironsides\".", "Richard the Lionheart is the obvious exception here but you'll also come across William Rufus (William II), John Lackland (John I) and Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) all fairly regularly if you read a lot of British history.\n\nAs for the rest of Britain, most of the Scottish kings have epithets - though Scotland was of course not conquered by the Normans much of the Scottish nobility and royalty was of Norman origin. This trend does seem to end with the House of Stuart, so you do raise a valid point. \n\nThere was also a Llewelyn the Great ruling over most of Wales in the thirteenth century, who was married to John Lackland's daughter Joan.  \n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1yiysz", "title": "Why did the Yakut (Sakha) people migrate to the Arctic in the Middle Ages? Did it have something to do with the Mongols expansion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yiysz/why_did_the_yakut_sakha_people_migrate_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfkzibj"], "score": [2], "text": ["The presumption is footing on [modern day racial science](_URL_0_). These people dabble in the \u00abhalpogroups\u00bb of single frozen mummies and then try to connect it to modern day languages and cultures. \n\nHistorical evidence does not exist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20100333"]]}
{"q_id": "1v6l8z", "title": "When did marriage become about pairing with your \"one true love\" or \"soul mate\"? When did these romantic notions become popular, and what popularized them?", "selftext": "I am being ethnocentric here and asking about the western concept of marriage specifically.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v6l8z/when_did_marriage_become_about_pairing_with_your/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cep80b7", "cepanwh", "cepb3w2", "cepc6zs", "cepdcz3", "cepf5h4", "cepjh4q"], "score": [38, 8, 23, 36, 14, 13, 9], "text": ["You may be interested in the '[Marriage for love *versus* arranged marriages](_URL_0_)' section in the Popular Questions pages.\n", "Were marriages for love more common for the lower class or rural areas in ancient times? Seems silly to marry for economic reasons if none of your potential mates have any money/power.", "/u/American_Graffiti offers a great outline of the evolution of marriage in Western culture. Can anybody offers any insights about marriage from non-Western, non-European cultural perspective?  \n\nI'm curious about how Maoism and the later economic reforms changed ideas of love and marriage in China, how (unequal) interactions with Western culture and modernization affected ideas of marriage in the Indian subcontinent, etc. ", "This is my first time commenting in this subreddit, so apologies for any mistakes either substantive (I am not a trained historian) or procedural (I know this sub has very reasonable but strict rules).\n\nHowever, I believe that this duality may go at least as far back as Aristophanes's speech from Plato's Symposium.  There, he describes how people originally were double (two heads, four legs, etc.).  The gods split that creature in two, and we have been seeking our other half ever since.  I can't speak to the accuracy of the [translation](_URL_0_), but it is thus: \"After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one.\" [...]  \"Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.\" [...] \"And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.\" ", "Though a lot of the scholarship is dated, C.S Lewis' *Allegory of Love* is a seminal text in the field.\n\nFrom a literary perspective, a lot of romantic notions developed in the midst of the tradition of \"courtly love\" in the High Middle Ages- think French troubadours and Arthurian intrigue.\n\nHere is an excerpt from the first chapter on the courtly love tradition and marriage.\n\n\nTwo things prevented the men of that age from connecting their ideal of romantic and passionate love with marriage.\nThe first is, of course, the actual practice of feudal society. Marriages had nothing to do with love, and no 'nonsense' about marriage was tolerated. (Note: See Fauriel, op. cit., tom. i, pp.497 et seq. Cf. the wooing scene in Chretien's Erec quoted below.) All matches were matches of interest, and, worse still, of an interest that was continually changing. When the alliance which had answered would answer no longer, the husband's object was to get rid of the lady as quickly as possible. Marriages were frequently\ndissolved. The same woman who was the lady and 'the dearest dread' of her vassals was often little better than a piece of property to her husband. He was master in his own house. So far from being a natural channel for the new kind of love, marriage was rather the drab background against which that love stood out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery.\n\nThe second factor is the medieval theory of marriage - what may be called, by a convenient modern barbarism, the 'sexology' of the medieval church.\n\n[Here is an Amazon link to the book](_URL_0_). It can be very technical for someone not familiar with the literature of the time. But it also can serve as a great introduction to the periods and genres discussed. It is a work of criticism that is a joy to read in its own right. Lewis' prose is lively and at its scholarly best. ", "To kinda of piggy back on this question...\nIf I'm a serf in 1500's Russia, based on what qualities do I marry my wife? \n\nI'm just a laborer. I really own nothing. My dad was a laborer and my son will probably be one too. \n\nWhat about me? Which of the serfettes do I choose to sleep with and marry and make kids with?", "It's very culturally relative.  According to the classification system of Emmanuel Todd, England was historically characterized by the \"absolute nuclear family\" and more exogamy. But there are plenty of cultures where cousin marriage is prized, and of course ideas of \"love\" and courtship are quite different.  \n\n* [Gilles Duranton, Andr\u00e9s Rodr\u00edguez-Pose and Richard Sandall, \u201cFamily Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe\u201d](_URL_6_)\n* this paper is cited by [Frank Jacobs in the NY Times](_URL_3_)\n* Lucassen et al, eds., [*Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches*](_URL_7_)\n* [Consanguinity map](_URL_2_)\n* [Woodley, \"Consanguinity as a major predictor of levels of democracy\"](_URL_0_)\n\nTodd divides family systems according to the questions of: who may marry whom? and who inherits what?  The main systems per Todd are, quoting Lucassen p. 220ff: \n\n* egalitarian nuclear family (northern France, northern Italy, central and southern Spain, central Portugal, Greece, Romania, Poland, South America)\n* absolute nuclear family (Denmark, Holland (western provinces), England, North America, New Zealand, Australia\n* authoritarian family (central and northern Europe, Belgium, several areas of France, northern Spain and northern Portugal, Japan, Korea)\n* Exogamous community family (Balkan zadruga, central Italy, Finland, Russia, China, North India)\n* Endogamous community family (Arab world)\n* Anomic family (South East Asia, Central America)\n* African family (sub-Saharan Africa)\n\nWithin Britain, attitudes toward endogamy/exogamy vary widely among different communities, and with them, attitudes toward individual autonomy and ingroup loyalty.\n\n* _URL_5_\n* _URL_4_\n* _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/marriage#wiki_marriage_for_love_versus_arranged_marriages"], [], [], ["http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sym.htm"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Allegory-Love-eBook-Original-ebook/dp/B00F8P1X0I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1389718981&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=allegory+of+love+lewis"], [], ["http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/24/0022022112443855", "http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/health-why-cousins-can-be-just-too-close-the-pakistani-practice-of-marrying-relations-may-be-causing-genetic-disorders-in-children-says-sharon-kingman-1483250.html", "http://www.consang.net/consang-fe/", "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/family-ties-3/?hp&amp;_r=0", "http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/05/british-muslims-marriage", "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/11/forced-marriage-pakistan-matrimony-laws", "https://www.coleurope.eu/sites/default/files/research-paper/beer10.pdf", "http://books.google.com/books?id=tOkgZROdnGwC&amp;pg=PA218&amp;lpg=PA218#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "4m50i0", "title": "Why is the Delian League sometimes refered to as the \"Athenian Empire\"?", "selftext": "Forgive me, for I do not know a whole lot about the intricases of Ancient Greek politics. I would assume that ancient Greek leagues were like giant alliances between city-states. So what made this league an \"Athenian Empire\" instead of just an alliance somewhat dominated by Athens? Did Athens begin to govern the other city states through this league, or is calling the Delian League \"the Athenian empire\" akin to calling NATO \"the American Empire\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4m50i0/why_is_the_delian_league_sometimes_refered_to_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vibzo"], "score": [2], "text": ["So, first and foremost, a basic synopsis of what the Delian League was. It was supposed to be a coalition of city-states led by Athens to strip Persia of its remaining holdouts across the Aegean. Of course, the city-states had to pay (whether in gold or in ships and men) for the pleasure of being a part of the League. As Persian power began to recede and become less of a threat, Athens refused to let city-states leave the league and grew very comfortable with the influx of money and power that the position afforded them. Some city-states realized the disparity of power and protested, threatening to leave, Athens (with the power of the rest of the league behind them) refused to let that happen.\n\nFast forward to the Peloponessian War, which many would assert (Thucydides, our main source, included) was largely a result of Athenian hegemony and expansionism. We have a few passages that really highlight the difference between the Delian League and \"Athenian Empirei\"\n\nSo the situation is thus, Cleon (an influential Athenian statesmen after the death of Pericles) is arguing that Mytilene should be punished for its rebellion against Athens. \n\n >  What you do not realize is that your Empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs. (Thuc. 3.37)\n\nNote: I was informed by /u/bitparity that the penguin translation I was going off of was innacurate to a degree. Penguin decided to translate the word \u1f00\u03c1\u03c7\u03ae as empire, though it is more like rule or \"living under the power of\" (similar to the Roman concept of imperium). All in all, the Athenians never called themselves an empire. However, we must look at their actions and words and determine for ourselves what they were.\n\nThe Athenians end up being swayed by his argument to destroy defiant Mytilene, only to change their minds soon after. However, the argument that sways them wasn't an appeal to their better natures, but rather, what Mytilene offered to them if left in tact.\n\nFast forward again, the slaughter at Melos is particularly revealing to Athenian Imperialism. I also suggest you read the Melian dialogue, its widely available online.\n\nNow, Melos was a tiny island and, although a Spartan colony, had stayed out of the war. Athens decides to destroy Melos (i.e. killing the men, enslaving the women and children, sending new colonists to settle the land) for absolutely no reason. Seriously, you can read the passage and the Athenian delegates propose some pretty bizarre reasoning for the destruction of Melos:\n\n > [I]f we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us, where your hatred is evidence of our power.\u201d (Thuc. 5.95)\n\nAnd the ever infamous:\n\n >  \u201c[T]he standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.\u201d (Thuc. 5.89)\n\nYou are welcome to interpret the passages as you please and always bear in mind that Thucydides, our source, was an exiled Athenian general for his defeat at Amphipolis. It is also important to consider the vicious debate between the Athenian statesmen concerning Mytilene, who had rebelled, and the complete lack of debate concerning Melos who had done nothing to their aggressors. I would argue that the longer Athens sat on top, the more comfortable they became with their imperial aspirations and inclinations. The line between Athenian headed league and Athenian Empire was thin and as the realities of war set in, the line became thinner and thinner until it ceased to exist at all. They may have begun as a city-state that dominated a league of quasi-equals, but near the end, the interactions were more akin to what you would see between a master and a slave.\n\nAs I've mentioned with the Melian dialogue, the Mytilenean debate is also readily available online. Feel free to read them for yourself and observe the difference between the two when they were only just a decade or so apart."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1umdzt", "title": "Did Madagascar people maintained contacts with their Southeast Asian Austronesian brethren after the peopling of the island?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1umdzt/did_madagascar_people_maintained_contacts_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cejs9hl"], "score": [16], "text": ["Hi! I'm not a historian, but a biologist who spent some time in Madagascar and love the island. Since no one has answered, I'll give it a stab with what I learned, but if it doesn't qualify as a top comment, I apologize and mods please remove it.\n\nMadagascar is a really interesting island because it is believed it was only settled sometime between about 200 BC and 300 AD. And that's pretty strange, since at it closest point it is only 90 miles from the African coast. What's even stranger (which you address in your question) is that the first settlers, based on archaeology and some genetics (if I'm remembering correctly) were Austronesian!\n\nBut over time there were also Arab arrivers, as well as Africans. This mix of cultures can be seen throughout Malagasy language, modern culture (dances, festivals, religions, food, etc), and physical characteristics.\n\nSo what time period are you asking about? When it was only the Austronesians, or any time after? To the best of my recollection and some quick fact-checking, not a lot is known about the people on the island between the first settlement of Austronesians until about 700 AD. Some historians believe the other groups came before that, to various sides of the island, and moved up and down and up into the highlands in the center and become more or less the \"Malagasy people.\" Other's believe it wasn't until 6-700 AD that the Africans and Arabs come to the island and become integrated into the culture.\n\nBut by 6-700 AD, trading had picked up in the world. The oceanic silk road, spice trade, and slave trade went through the Indian Ocean and stumbled upon Madagascar. There were trading ports set up along the coasts by the natives for these ships. Back to my later point, most historians seem to think that this time between 600-1100AD is when Africans and Arabs came to the island and integrated, but it's hard to know for sure.\n\nSo, to answer your question: it doesn't seem so. Archaeological evidence shows people arrived around 2,000 years ago, but there is no real sign or evidence that I've ever come across that those people returned \"home\" with news of this island, and it remained Austronesian, isolated, and relatively unknown until 6-700 AD.\n\nEDIT: I don't really have sources, per se. This is knowledge that I gathered from talking with Malagasy, things that were briefly mentioned in ecology/conservation texts, and I refreshed my memory and facts with just a few wikipedia pages about the history of people on Madagascar. Again, if this doesn't fit the criteria well enough, delete this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ag8sz", "title": "Are there any books you would recommend about the Roman Emperor Caligula?", "selftext": "We spoke about him today in class and I became pretty interested in him. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole \"waging war on the ocean\" and \"naming his horse senator\" probably aren't very accurate, but I was curious to know more about his rule. Specifically the kinds of mental things he might have done to spark such stories about him.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ag8sz/are_there_any_books_you_would_recommend_about_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9gawnt"], "score": [2], "text": ["The 12 Caesars by Seutonius. Roman history by Cassius Dio.\n\nSeutonius is very much into scandal and gossip, but that has the advantage of discussing personal matters that more serious scholars might ignore.\n\nAlso The Annals by Tacitus, who is a better historian. This gives a good background about the general period but the sections on Caligula have been lost.\n\nI always prefer in reading the original sources and these books are well translated and entertaining. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9u5x4y", "title": "Were Victorian chimney sweep boys generally a happy sort, content with their employment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9u5x4y/were_victorian_chimney_sweep_boys_generally_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e92w7ll"], "score": [32], "text": ["No. Young chimney sweeps captivated Romantic writers, just before the Victorian period, as a symbol of the injustice and exploitation of industrialization;  William Blake, in 1789, wrote a poem from the perspective of a sweeper boy called \"The Chimney-Sweeper,\" which powerfully condemns the clean, warm lives that rest upon such filthy, dangerous exploitation (it's an amazing poem). Charles Lamb wrote an essay about young sweepers in the 1820's which, while characteristically mild in its critique, also refers to how degrading their lives were. So basically people had been aware of how terrible the job was for decades already by the Victorian era. \n\nThe main primary source for information on Victorian working-class jobs and lives is Henry Mayhew's *Labour and the Poor*, also called *London Labour and the London Poor*, a pioneering work of sociology and urban ethnography that combined statistical data with archival records and in-person interviews. He quotes from a Parliamentary Committee formed to look into the condition of child sweepers which found, in 1817, that \"It is in evidence that (1) They are stolen from (and sold by) their parents, and inveigled out of workhouses; (2) That in order to conquer the natural repugnance of infants to ascend the narrow and dangerous chimneys to clean which their labour is required, blows are used; that pins are forced into their feet by the boy that follows them up the chimney, in order to compel them to ascend it, and that lighted straw has been applied for that purpose; (3) That the children are subject to sores and bruises, and wounds and burns, on their thighs, knees, and elbows\" (page 347). So the kids had to be forced up the chimneys by sticking their feet with pins and literally lighting fires beneath them. This Commission led to the outlawing of chimney-climbing boys in 1829, so by the beginning of the Victorian period sweeper boys had been replaced by mechanical solutions using rods and gears, though apparently some master-sweepers found them less effective than boys (356). \n\nSo basically chimney-sweeping boys had been outlawed by the Victorian period, and when they did exist in the Romantic era, they were extremely unhappy; unhappy enough to bear the symbolic weight of all the injustices of industrialization on their filthy shoulders. If you have formed an opinion of happy chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins, I regret to inform you that this is not an accurate representation. There is a *street* sweeping boy in Dickens -- Jo in *Bleak House* -- who is arguably not conscious of how much his job sucks, but Dickens brings the full rhetorical force of his outrage at social injustice to bear on the plight of Jo and others like him.  \n\nI have never made a comment here before so I am uncertain about bibliography formatting. My only source used was: \nMayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work, vol. 2 (London, G. Newbold, 1851). \n\nEdit: Oh wow, reddit gold! I'm going to caper around the yard on my crutches like Tiny Tim on Christmas Day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "276e4q", "title": "From an oblivious Canadian, why was Robert McNamara so controversial in relation to the Vietnam War? In brief, what's his story?", "selftext": "Obviously I know of his responsibilities as Secretary of Defense. I don't really know where to begin on researching him outside of *The  Fog of War*. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/276e4q/from_an_oblivious_canadian_why_was_robert/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chxzenj", "chxztb4"], "score": [5, 28], "text": ["I would HIGHLY recommend watching 'The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara' (2003) . What becomes clear is that he had a very unique analytic perspective on things, a savant like knack to analyse war in a detached and mathematical method. The thing that sticks in my mind in the years since I first saw this film is how he broke down the loss/benefits analysis of lowering altitudes of bombing runs in Japan which you can see here: _URL_1_\n\nAs Secretary of Defense under Kennedy  &  later Johnson he was the primary architecture of the U.S War in Vietnam.  In addition to it being a unjust war premised on ignorance (see link below we he stats as much in his own words) he was in particular responsible for dramatically increasing the number of troops on the ground and later a massive increase in bombing runs (including Agent Orange) through much of South East Asia such as Laos, N.Vietnam, and Cambodia, the latter having a massive ongoing legacy. \n\n\nThe only other point I recall, and one of the more mind blowing moments, from Fog of War was his revelation of the ignorance of differences in perspective between the U.S and Vietnam. This dawned on him when he met his Vietnamese counterpart and realized that lack of understanding of each other was a source of conflict in itself. you can view it here _URL_0_\n\nI have not watched this in over a decade but thanks to your question I just realized I need re-watch and to get a hold of a copy to show my History class. ", "Robert McNamara is controversial because he bears a significant amount of responsibility not only for US involvement in the Vietnam War, but also for the strategy that the US used, which proved ultimately ineffective at winning the war. \n\nDuring the 1950s, McNamara worked as an executive for the Ford Motor Company. While there he helped save Ford from financial trouble, largely by instituting the widespread use of performance metrics. Essentially, anything that could be measured or regimented was, which greatly helped Ford's efficiency. McNamara had learned how useful such metrics could be during warfare during World War II, when he served in the Army Air Corps and helped devise the strategic bombing campaign over Japan. As with Ford, much of his wartime responsibilities involved figuring out ways to maximize efficiency, which was no small task when dealing with bombers that had to fly over very long distances before reaching their targets. McNamara's record at Ford was quite good, and helped him garner a reputation as being brilliant, if somewhat arrogant (which he was). Kennedy tapped him to be Secretary of Defense shortly after assuming the Presidency. \n\nAs Secretary of Defense to both Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara was rather hawkish when it came to Vietnam. He was one of three advisors whose advice Johnson gave most credence, the others being Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. All three were Kennedy holdovers. Johnson kept them on because he was inexperienced on foreign policy. JFK's major victories had been foreign policy related (think the Cuban Missile Crisis) and LBJ thought that he would gain some credibility in that field if he had JFK's people, most of whom were renowned for their intelligence, advising him. McNamara, Rusk and Bundy approached Vietnam from slightly different angles, but at the end of the day all three were hawks. Rusk believed that the US had to take a firm stance against international Communist aggression, and that LBJ could not withdraw from South Vietnam because \"we had given our word.\" McNamara and Bundy were a bit more pragmatic than that. While both of them certainly believed that the US had to roll back Communist advances, they were also more concerned with domestic politics, and their own careers, than Rusk was. In 1949, Harry Truman's political career had nosedived after China fell to Mao Zedong's Communist forces. Republicans charged Truman with being insufficiently tough on foreign policy. McNamara and Bundy both wanted to protect LBJ, and themselves, from such a fate. Furthermore, none of these men really understood Vietnam or the nature of the conflict. To them, it was an extension of the Cold War. They knew nothing about Vietnamese culture or society, and they refused to listen to the few people in the intelligence community that did. Despite their intelligence, they were arrogant men who thought that the US could impose its will on other, smaller, less developed nations. They did not recognize that the war was, at its heart, a civil war, premised on national reunification. Nor did they understand the lengths to which Hanoi was prepared to go to achieve its goals. This lack of understanding carried over into American wartime strategy.\n\nMcNamara's days at Ford had taught him how valuable performance metrics could be. As the Army lacked any real way to understand what success would look like in such a confusing and frustrating guerilla war, the senior command moved to adopt Fordist metrics. Probably the most well known is the \"body count\" whereby after every battle or skirmish, commanders would report the number of enemy dead. The idea was that if the US could kill enough NLF (National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong) and PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam, or North Vietnamese Army) fighters, it could force Hanoi to sue for peace. Therefore post-battle body counts were necessary to tally up how many enemy troops were dying, and at what rate. But McNamara, and the Army's senior command, failed to recognize that Hanoi was totally committed to winning the war, and had an almost inexhaustible supply of troops. Furthermore, local commanders often overinflated body counts to make themselves look good. This attempt to reduce war to a series of numbers and graphs failed to account for the conflict's complexity and the enemy's overall strategy. \n\nMcNamara did, eventually, realize that the war was unwinnable, and Johnson fired him in 1967. He probably had some doubts going back to 1964. But he was one of the major supporters of US intervention in Vietnam. And under his watch, the US adopted a variety of flawed strategies that, while successful in killing a lot of Vietnamese people, failed to achieve any kind of lasting success.\n\nSources:\n\nBerman, Larry. *Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam.* WW Norton, 1983.\n\nDaddis, Gregory A. *No Sure Victory: Measuring US Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War.* Oxford University Press, 2011.\n\nHalberstam, David. *The Best and the Brightest.* Ballantine, 1972.\n\nLogevall, Fredrik. *Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam.* University of California Press, 1999.\n\nMcNamara, Robert S. *In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.* Vintage, 1996."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8TOJy3eO1A&amp;t=77m52s", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8TOJy3eO1A&amp;t=35m5s"], []]}
{"q_id": "10xtf2", "title": "Theory Thursdays | Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", "selftext": "Welcome once again to Theory Thursdays, our series of weekly posts in which we focus on **historical theory**. Moderation will be relaxed here, as we seek a wide-ranging conversation on all aspects of history and theory.\n\n[In our inaugural installment](_URL_1_), we opened with a discussion how history should be defined. We followed that with a discussion of the fellow who has been called both the \"father of history\" and the \"father of lies,\" [Herodotus](_URL_2_). Most recently, we discussed several other important [ancient historians](_URL_3_).\n\nAt the risk over jumping past the historical works done by medieval and Renaissance-age writers both in Europe and in India, China, and the Arab world--not to mention anywhere else in the world--today seemed like a good day for a discussion of ancient Rome. Let us open such a conversation with the late-eighteenth-century English aristocrat and MP, [Edward Gibbon](_URL_0_). His [*Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*](_URL_4_) was first published in 1776, and argued that the empire fell due to the deterioration of \"civic virtue\" among the Romans, as Romans effectively outsourced their duties to \"mercenary servants\" of increasingly despotic emperors. He claimed, \n\n > That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion.\n\nIn terms of historiography, Gibbon noted that \n\n > History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.\n\nHow then should we in the 21st century regard an 18th-century Englishman writing about the fall of an empire fifteen centuries before him? What was his full explanation for the fall of Rome, and to what degree did it influence later scholarship? Is Gibbon's work still relevant? What other explanations have their been for the fall of Rome?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10xtf2/theory_thursdays_edward_gibbon_and_the_decline/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6hjtv1", "c6hjux4", "c6ho60j"], "score": [13, 7, 3], "text": ["There are plenty of 'explanations' for the wide-ranging process we shorthanded as 'fall of Rome', but the trick in reading Gibbon is actually reading him. His work is much more nuanced than it is commonly presented, and relies only on historical texts (including the Augustan History) and not on archaeology, but overall he does manage to describe the fall of the Empire as a historical process instead of just an event, with many different factors, both long- and short-term, being involved. I think Gibbon still is a very relevant historian, especially as his work demonstrates that the major theoretical advances of the past 50 years are not new ideas.", "Gibbon's work was a great achievement, but it's an anachronism. As a student of history I find myself opposing almost everything he stood for. Heavy-handed moralizing based on idealized notions of how \"civilized\" people were has no place in doing history. ", "It has been 5 years since I read Gibbon, but didn't he also lay the blame on Christianity? Which I think may have had some merit, although not to the extent he implies\n\nI thought he was unnecessarily hostile in regards to the eastern empire, which expressed the prejudices of his day. As a side note he was a member of of Parliament and voted for war with the American colonies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zu5si/theory_thursdays_defining_history/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1071mf/theory_thursdays_herodotus_and_the_invention_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10jxvc/theory_thursdays_ancient_and_medieval_historians/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "19iipl", "title": "What role did the Bubonic plague of the 14th century have in spurring the Renaissance?", "selftext": "I saw something about this in an askreddit thread, and I was wondering if there was any credence to this. The idea was that there were more resources to go around because there was a smaller population which allowed for people to pursue other interests. Is there any truth to this, or was the Renaissance inevitable regardless of the Plague?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19iipl/what_role_did_the_bubonic_plague_of_the_14th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ofgu5", "c8og4yt"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["It can be argued that the removal of one third of the population did in some way contribute to the Renaissance because it indirectly lead to increased social mobility and the creation of the merchant class which in turn led to humanism. However, this would not explain why it is that the Renaissance began in Northern Italy rather than anywhere else that was affected by plague. Other factors must be considered such as the opening up of antiquity to humanist scholars (after all, the Renaissance was a movement which was constantly looking back towards the classical world) through the study of the Greek language and access to the philosohpical writings of Aristotle and Plato. \nOne must look at the nature of the Italian city-states in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries in comparison to other parts of Europe in order to determine what factors caused the Renaissance to begin in Northern Italy. The city states of Venice, Milan and Florence were considerably wealthy and dominated by the merchant class for whom status became increasingly important in order to create social distinctions. One expression of social status in this period was that of a humanistic education. From this, an increasing number of the wealthy in Italy undertook the study of homer, plato, livy etc., and many of the great individuals of the renaissance such as Boccaccio and Petrarch came through this increased desire to study the humanities.", "Disclaimer: Renaissance is 'after' my advertised area of expertise, but I will offer the opinion of someone who has a serious interest in this time frame.\n\nSo, the idea that there were 'more resources to go around' is totally bogus.  Most of the deaths from BP hit demographics that lived in closer quarters or worked in more blue collar professions that would expose them to rodents such as shipping or agricultural.  With that in mind, BP actually led to LESS resources to go around because nobles are not suddenly going to start harvesting wheat or loading up shipping vessels.\n\nCouple this with the fact that Europe was actually still dealing with and recovering from unusually harsh winters, and this is a recipe for food scarcity and generally \"bad\" conditions altogether.  Wealthy people were, well, wealthy.  They ate anyway because they had the money to.  Poor people became malnourished and were the first to die.\n\nThis all leads up to the fact that lords now had to actually try to find people to do those menial jobs I mentioned before.  Lords now had to find peasants, and pay them, to work fields or bring in food.  This eventually lead to an uplift in quality of life for paid peasants, which eventually allowed social mobility and the development of a far more robust middle class.\n\nSecondly, the Renaissance blossomed in Italy because it was still the central authority for all Mediterranean trade.  Italian city-states didn't have to deal with nearly the same fallout from the harsh winters and could easily supplement whatever hardships they did have with imported goods.\n\nThings in Italy finally just got \"good enough\" where civilization could allow for the cultural sector to blossom in a way it had not in hundreds of years.  A biological fact of life, is that the better conditions are the more diversified a suitable organism will become.  When societies are doing really poorly, everyone is a farmer just so they can live day to day.  But when things are going really great, you get minds who can \"Waste\" time painting instead of harvest cow shit to spread on a field.\n\nSummary of my stance: The BP allowed northern Europe to transition into the Renaissance, but it had nothing to do with its start.  It was inevitable due to a multitude of factors happening in Italy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "yyr4q", "title": "When and why did we stop having state militias?", "selftext": "I assume that it was after the Civil War. Is the National Guard the same thing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yyr4q/when_and_why_did_we_stop_having_state_militias/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5zzear", "c606c9u"], "score": [9, 8], "text": ["The National Guard are classified as a subset of the term \"militia\". In the US, technically every adult male (and many adult females) are classified as part of the militia.\n\n[The individual state militias basically got rolled into the national army](_URL_0_). In other words, they still exist, but the states can't use them as private armies.\n\nNevertheless, many states still retain individual \"state defense forces\". For example, Texas and California both have separate armies, navies, and air forces.", "The Dick Act of 1903 homogenized the militia and state volunteer systems that existed through out the history of the country.  It was enacted following failures of the old system to meet the demand of rapid mobilization and organization of modern warfare that emerged during the Spanish-American War.  The National Guard replaced the previous system at this time.\n\nThe National Guard was (and still is) organized as the National Guard of the United States.  Under this system units raised by the states fall into the force structure required by the federal government, thus receiving federal recognition and funding.  All soldiers in units that are recognized NGUS status receive dual federal-state status.   Technically states can organize their own forces outside the federally mandated force structure but not received recognition (this happened most notably when Oklahoma's 45th Infantry Division was mobilized for the Korean War.  The state raised a replacement duplicate division for state emergencies while it away).  These units are designate as belonging to the National Guard of the state, but not the US.\n\nThe 3rd tier are the various State Defense Forces(Virginia Defense Force, California Military Reserve, Michigan Volunteer Defense Force, Mississippi State Guard) of unpaid volunteers.  These are true state militia forces as they are not simultaneously in the US Army also.  For the most part they provide their own uniforms, are unarmed, and receive no compensation.   I've worked personally with the VADF, and have found their personal to be an odd mix of retirees, military inclined folks with disqualifying disabilities, and teenagers.  The units are kept at \"cadre\" level, meaning there are a lot of chiefs and very few Indians. During the normal course of things they support the state's National Guard in its state duties.\n\nETA:  I'm getting excited.  This is the first time a question has come up about my area of expertise.  So of course now I'm remembering to add more things.\n\nAs a note the forces assembled during the Civil War were not state militia.  At least for the most part.  The units that we are most familiar with tend to be state volunteer units.  There is a slight difference.  A call would go out for the raising of units (once the initial 90 day call expired the Union tended to use 1 or 3 year volunteers, the Confederacy for the duration) and each state would be allocated a quota to raise.  These units would be trained and equipped by their state then turned over to the respective national government for war time use.  Militias were retained in parallel system for use by the states.  Sometimes whole militia units would volunteer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1903"], []]}
{"q_id": "448eoa", "title": "Was dual wielding weapons as common as the fantasy genre would have us believe?", "selftext": "The dual-wielding rogue is a common trope in fantasy games like D & D and Dragon Age, but was it ever considered a viable combat style on a larger scale? To clarify, I'm not talking about a sword and shield, but rather carrying a weapon in either hand and using both of them for offense and defense. I suspect that the complexity of learning to fight with both your dominant and non-dominant hand would make learning this skill quite difficult, and thus would be rare in military combat. So, what's the deal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/448eoa/was_dual_wielding_weapons_as_common_as_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czocv2o", "czojvqm", "czolb2e", "czp1l8l"], "score": [324, 30, 19, 2], "text": ["Generally speaking, no. \n\nNow that I've made a broad declarative statement I'm going to immediately undermine it by saying there were a few historical examples. Some cases in Japan of wielding a full length sword in one hand and a shorter one in the other for example. Some cases of vikings supposedly using combinations of weapons and shortswords. The one thing you'll almost always find in such cases was that they happened not by choice, but because a shield was in some way impractical. Japan didn't really make shields for example. Raiders expecting to meet light resistance might forego the extra weight, the better to carry more things off. Stuff like that.\n\n As a choice, when there was an option available, the only reason not to carry a shield was if a large two handed weapon that gave you extra reach was available. Fighting with two weapons requires a great deal of space, impossible in a tightly packed formation, a great deal of time and effort spent training, impractical in any large scale army, and at the end left you in a contest of skill that you might very well lose anyway. Especially when a proper shield makes a useful offensive weapon in its own right, the practice is only feasible if you can ensure you'll never have to fight someone with a shield. ", "While I am unsure as to their use on the battlefield, dual weapons (being two weapons of the same shape and size) are found in the treatises of Renaissance fencing masters from Italy.\n\nThe 1536 treatise of [Achille Marozzo](_URL_1_) has a section on the use of two swords. His own words state, \"I will compose for you a play of case of swords that makes an excellent affair,' which means he viewed the use of two swords highly.\n\n[Marozzo's illustration of a position with two swords.](_URL_0_)\n\nThirty-four years later, we see the 1570 treatise of [Giacomo di Grassi](_URL_2_). In the beginning of his section on dual wielding, he states, \"...they be not used in the wars.\" This is just talking about the use of dual side swords, so it doesn't rule out the possibility for dual wielding other weapons to have happened on the battlefield. He also says this: \"To him that would handle these weapons, it is necessary that he can aswell manage the left hand as the right.\" He confirms your suspicion that the swordsman would need to be trained in the use of both his hands.\n\nEDIT: Forgot to include [Di Grassi's illustration of a position with two swords.](_URL_3_)", "To answer specifically this part of your question:\n\n >  was it ever considered a viable combat style on a larger scale\n\nThe answer, with only perhaps a few exceptions, and then those would be arguable at best, is: no. Large-scale combat throughout almost all of human history prior to breech-loading rifles, focused on formations of men facing off against each other. While there were sometimes irregular formations of skirmishers or other groups intentionally meant to break up formations, melee fighters were almost always presented in formations of one kind or another. \n\nFighting with weapons in either hand is totally impractical for fighting in formation, because it takes up a large amount of room. You would be in danger of hitting the man next to you with your off hand, and he with his, unless your movements were exactly coordinated, which would make you predictable. As a result, these kinds of setups were never used on a larger scale -- though they may have been used for dueling and other small-scale combat.\n\nNow, I presume you're only talking about melee weapons, but if you're getting into the era of early firearms, say the 17th century, then it was by no means uncommon for sailors boarding a ship in combat to fight with a cutlass in one hand and a pistol or dagger (which would often be thrown) in the other. Since there would be no formations here, in most cases, and a man might find himself one against two or three in some cases, it is possible that he could give himself an advantage by having multiple weapons to his opponents' one.", "what about pistol cavalry in the 1500's and 1600's. I had read about carasoul formations where riders would hold a pistol in each hand, and when the got to the front they would fire one, turn, fire the other, then report to the rear to reload. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/9/93/Marozzo_10.png/272px-Marozzo_10.png", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Achille_Marozzo", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Giacomo_di_Grassi", "http://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/b/b7/Di_Grassi_20.jpg/300px-Di_Grassi_20.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "130gh9", "title": "Do we know if any first-hand sources about Medieval / Early Modern heresy exist, from the Heretic's POV?", "selftext": "Hey everyone.\n\nLately I've been trying to find sources for a paper I need to hand out about the Waldensian / Cathar / Lollard / Hussite heresies during the late medieval / early modern times. I'm mostly interested in comparing documents written by the heretics themselves and seeing if I can come up with anything interesting about the way they viewed their beliefs in contrast with the Church of Rome.\n\nProblem is all I can find is either second-hand sources from modern writers who write about those heretics, or at best inquisitorial documents which aren't as reliable and first-hand as I want them to be. I realize most of those people didn't even know how to write and most of what they *did* write got burned by inquisitors, but I thought I should ask here and see if anyone knows if there's a good collection of sources somewhere about the writings of heretics that might be available online / in my local university library.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/130gh9/do_we_know_if_any_firsthand_sources_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6zpz1s", "c6zqnk0", "c6zsorp", "c6zsqo1", "c6zstr6", "c6zxm4m"], "score": [13, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["For the Cathars, at least, we have a few of their texts. Most notably the Cathar Ritual and the Book of the Two Principles. Here is a website with some latin and english version of some of these texts: [link](_URL_0_). Also you should definitely look up [*Heresies of the High Middle Ages*](_URL_1_) trans/ed. Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, as it contains a broad range of texts both from about heretics and by heretics. \n\nAlso I should caution you right away about your use of both sets of sources, how we should use sources on heresy is greatly contested in modern scholarship. Don't take for granted that these texts are accurate representations of heretics, don't take for granted that our modern categorization of heretics is in anyway representative of the medieval reality, and further from that point, don't assume that any \"heretical\" texts you read are representative of some larger heretical sect or group. I mean you can draw all these conclusions, just be aware that these are all problematic areas.\n\nAlso I can point you in the direction of some secondary literature if you are interested, but you will need to be more specific about what you are looking for.", "There are virtually no documents written by heretics that have survived.  Virtually everything that we know about Waldensians, Cathars etc. comes from the writings of those responsible for trying to stamp them out.  A few random documents sometimes pop up, but they are generally lacking in context and even their origins are somewhat suspicious (i.e. they probably are still not *direct* heretical works but rather heretical works 'saved' by orthodox scholars).\n\nYour best bet, frankly, is to critically read the documents which purport to present heretical views and issues and try to figure out what exactly the Church is concerned about and what exactly the heretics seem to care about.\n\nIt isn't easy, in fact its one of the more frustrating gaps we have in medieval history.  \n\nOne of the best ways you can track down primary sources is to look at the footnotes/bibliography of the modern writers you have.  \n\nA few suggestions for places to start:\n\n* R. I . Moore *the Origins of European Dissent*\n* Herbert Grundmann *Religious Movements in the Middle Ages*\n* Malcolm Lambert *Medieval Heresy* (this one has a bibliography of translated texts which definitely might be helpful)\n* Peter Edward's *Heresy and authority in medieval Europe : documents in translation* may be useful.\n\n* The [Medieval Sourcebook](_URL_0_ Heresy) has a few translated sources.  \n\nGood luck :)", "Anne Askew wrote a first person account of being tortured for Protestant heresy in the Tower of London in 1545.  It was first published with John Bale's *The Examinations of Lord Cobham, William Thorpe and Anne Askewe,  & c* in the later sixteenth century.  There should be a 19th century Parker Society copy of this in any academic library.  But I'm sure there are some more modern editions if you search Anne Askew in Google Books.", "The easiest thing you could do is move a bit forward to the reformation, there are tons of writings by so called heretics regarding theology and views of the Roman Church.\n\nedit:  See Calvin and Luther for starters. \n", "Also another thing you can do is search the International Medieval Bibliography.  It is subscription based but most large universities have access.  It's online and it pretty much all the medieval secondary sources possible on a subject, from there you can look at their specialized bibliography and find some primary sources.  Many of the articles are in a different language than English, if you know French, you'd probably be golden.  If not it's not the end of the world as it's just a paper.  ", "[Jean Meslier](_URL_0_) might be outside your scope, but he was a Catholic priest who wrote a book advocating atheism that was unknown until his death."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://gnosis.org/library/cathtx.htm", "http://books.google.ca/books?id=IUUo5bKZNNcC&amp;dq=Heresies+of+the+High+Middle+Ages&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=b9efULnsDLSN0wWs1YGgBQ&amp;ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA"], ["http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/sbook1s.asp#Medieval"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Meslier"]]}
{"q_id": "a9lgxo", "title": "How was anorexia treated in the 1970s?", "selftext": "I\u2019m writing a short film where the protagonist is in denial of having anorexia. I\u2019ve been in treatment for it myself but I\u2019m wondering how different it was back then versus now.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9lgxo/how_was_anorexia_treated_in_the_1970s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eclk35d"], "score": [6], "text": ["Two quick references:\nHilde Bruch's The Golden Cage (pub. 1978) is a pretty representative book for the time - the reductive summary is about over-controlling mothers and type-A daughters. She also wrote in 1973 \"Eating disorders; obesity, anorexia nervosa, and the person within\". You might want to read the relevant portions of Joan Jacob Brumberg's Fasting Girls as well.\n\n--\n\nIt also depends what type of treatment - broadly speaking psychoanalytic (Bruch) and medical (hospitalize, refeed, discharge, repeat - look at Karen Carpenter for the kind of trajectory that has). Later in the 1970s, more so in the 1980s, Orbach etcetera discuss weight as a feminist issue. (eg On Feminism and Psychoanalysis\u2014In the Case of Anorexia Nervosa - Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth).\n\nCould also throw in cultural factors -- eg [\u2018Culture\u2019 in culture-bound syndromes](_URL_1_), Caroline Giles-Banks.\n\nFBT/Maudsley based on Minuchin's work comes at the end of the decade and takes a while to be established: see [LeGrange](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1414759/", "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/027795369290256P"]]}
{"q_id": "3ef7re", "title": "Was there any incidents of Soviet and Allied aircraft coming into accidental conflict with one another at the closing stages of WWII?", "selftext": "When the Russians advanced towards Berlin near the end of WWII was there any incident when their aircraft mistook Allied aircraft for German aircraft and attacked?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ef7re/was_there_any_incidents_of_soviet_and_allied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctedwq8", "ctenzoz"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["In Serbia, a formation of American P-38 Lightnings flying from their base in Italy attacked a ground column of what they though was German infantry in Serbia, only to be hastily intercepted by what they thought were BF-109's from a nearby Luftwaffe instillation. As it turned out, they were Soviet troops and the interceptors were Yak-3's, and a dogfight ensued before both sides withdrew after about 5-10 minutes, with both American and Soviets suffering casualties. The incident was quickly forgiven and forgotten, but it's the only example I can think of where the two sides clashed accidentally. \n\n(Only article I could find was [here](_URL_0_))", "There was a fairly serious friendly fire incident on 18 March 1945 involving the 359th Fighter Group operating in the Berlin region. After performing their part of the escort leg, elements of 369th FS followed two bogies to the airfield of Zackerick, which unbeknownst to the P-51 pilots was occupied by the Soviets. The American pilots misidentified the airfield's Yak-9s and La-5s as Bf-109s and FW-190s respectively and proceeded to strafe it. The result was a complicated melee on the ground and in the air where the Americans shot down nine Soviet aircraft and destroyed four more on the ground with no losses to the Americans.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://militaryhistorynow.com/2012/09/19/fatal-errors-the-worst-friendly-fire-incidents-of-world-war-two/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5bndje", "title": "Did people pay attention at the opera?", "selftext": "I recently saw Richard Wagner's _Siegfried_ and was surprised to discover that it is approximately a million hours long with four hundred intermissions. Also, it was in German. Eye-strain set in on hour two hundred thousand, so the plot is kind of fuzzy. I think it was the opera version of either _Lord of the Rings_ or _Game of Thrones_. Maybe a fan-fiction mashup of both? There was an evil hobbit. I'm pretty sure about that.\n\nPoint being, I didn't enjoy _Siegfried_ very much.\n\nSitting there in agony, I wondered why Wagner ever thought a run time of a million hours was acceptable. To that end, could someone break down the expectations of a theater-going person in the nineteenth century? \n\nSpecifically, did they....\n\n1) Actually pay attention? I'm remembering scenes from the _Count of Monte Christo_ where people canoodle, plot, wander around and do everything but watch whatever is happening onstage. They also arrive late and leave early. How did that compare to the behavior of actual patrons?\n\n2) I've heard that intermissions used to be much longer; people would eat a multi-course meal in stages between acts, making the opera a full-day experience. Is that true?\n\n3) Were the expectations different between classes? Did a rich man with a box do business at the opera, Monte Christo style, whereas people in the floor seats would see it as a \"special night out\" and pay strict attention, the way modern audiences (myself excluded) seem to?\n\n4) Unrelated bonus question: did Alexandre Dumas include the opera because it was a familiar setting for his (theoretically) wealthy audience, or because it would have been an _exotic_ backdrop for his (theoretical) middle class audience? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bndje/did_people_pay_attention_at_the_opera/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9pu1lk"], "score": [13], "text": ["Oh man, sorry you got subjected to Wagner. Wagner's not for everyone... given the choice between free tickets to the Ring Cycle and sticking my hand in a blender, I'd ask the speed setting. I hope this wasn't your first opera! \n\nFor your first bullet point, [I'm going to point you to an old answer if you don't mind,](_URL_0_) but the tl;dr is yes, Dumas actually does paint an accurate scene for opera crowd behavior in that time.... buuuut, not for Wagner. Wagner intended his operas to be watched sincerely the whole time, and when he got control of his own theater, he made it happen. But other composers, like Rossini for instance, wrote their music with the full knowledge not everyone would be listening to all of it. \n\n2) No, intermissions are actually kinda a new thing, and operas never went all day. It was fine to get up and leave when you wished, without the opera pausing. [There was even a conventional place in the opera where you had a sort of intermission,](_URL_1_) but someone was singing! You might be thinking of the convention in Paris in the 19th century to arrive after dinner in the 2nd act? I'm not sure. But the rhythm we expect to an opera now would be very foreign in the past, consider, for instance, that demanding encores in the middle of the opera was totally fine, and kinda expected for star singers. Also, when I say I'm a season ticket holder now, I mean I have one set of tickets to every opera this season... but back then it meant you had ownership of that particular opera box, and could go to *every performance* that season if you wanted. People commonly watched operas multiple times, and they'd vary from night to night. \n\n3) There was not much difference between classes actually in attentiveness. You could find serious opera buffs in both the pit and the boxes, but both would have liveliness. Pitters sometimes, depending on locale and time period, would include expensive prostitutes, priests, local merchants, even comped tickets from the impresario. There would also be some repeat viewers in the pit. Oh and pits usually had open bench seating, not numbered, assigned seating, as we have now. \n\nI have no idea on #4, but that's a damned good question! D: "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xj0v3/what_was_the_historical_opera_audience_decorum/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria_di_sorbetto"]]}
{"q_id": "18zfyf", "title": "Flamethrowers in WW1 - Vietnam War: In what scenario were they used? How was the use of this weapons perceived by the soldiers and what kind of soldiers was tasked with using flamethrowers?", "selftext": "I was watching a video recently that showed the use of flamethrower to clean out bunkers on Okinawa. It's really brutal footage and I started wondering how the use of the weapon was viewed by the soldiers on the battlefield. And more importantly, who were the men using them? Given the extremely gruesome nature of the flamethrower and also the venomous risk of running around with a tank of gasoline strapped on your back in the middle of a battle zone, I could imagine that the \"regular\" soldier would run into problems handling such a weapon properly. Were there special flamethrower units and if so, were the soldiers in those units trained to deal with the immediate horror of burning people alive? What was the kind of situation they usually operated in? Were flamethrowers used in \"active combat\" or only to \"clean up\" bunkers after they frontline has already shifted? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18zfyf/flamethrowers_in_ww1_vietnam_war_in_what_scenario/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ju8jy"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_0_\nWW2 medal of honor winner talking about clearing pill boxes with flamethrower during Iow Jima"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stl_YhYXyps"]]}
{"q_id": "46eq6k", "title": "Are there any notable works about Ancient Carthage (city state, not the empire)?", "selftext": "I'm doing a school project about Ancient Carthage and it's locale and i'm in dire need of credible source materials, preferably books and i don't have the faintest clue about where to start. So I'm asking here about this and if you would happen to have any insight into Ancient Carthage.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46eq6k/are_there_any_notable_works_about_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d051r15"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are currently two books seen as up to date regarding Cartage:\n*Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization* by *Richard Mills* \nand *Carthage* by *Serge Lancel* .\n\nBoth of them start at the Ancient era and move through time to its destruction.\n\nAdditionally, *The Phoenicians* by *Sabatino Moscati* goes in a lot of depth regarding all phases of Carthage, and I can highly recommend giving this a read, though copies might be challenging to find."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qf7hp", "title": "Why did the USSR help the Chinese develop their own nuclear arsenal capabilities instead of just guaranteeing them protection under their nuclear umbrella?", "selftext": "It seems like a risky thing to do.  What could the Chinese possibly have offered in exchange?  Did the Soviets wrongly predict that their relationship would always be a cozy one?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qf7hp/why_did_the_ussr_help_the_chinese_develop_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5qt2r", "cn5spfv"], "score": [3, 41], "text": ["I understood relations soured after the 1955 Sino-Sov split?", "Why would any state help another state acquire nuclear weapons? This is a general question (it has happened many times \u2014\u00a0the USSR and the PRC, France and Israel, China and Pakistan, Pakistan and lots of people, etc.), and has many different possible answers. The political scientist Matthew Kroenig has a theory (in his _Exporting the Bomb_) that I find plausible in many cases (but not all), which is that typically when one state is willing to help another state become a regional nuclear power, it is a reflection of the fact that the \"supplier\" state is not worried about the bomb complicating their own hegemony in that region (because they may not have any stake there), but it will complicate the hegemony of another state. So France helped Israel get the bomb fairly explicitly because they thought it would complicate the situation in the Arab world, which would help the French get leverage in Algeria. China helped Pakistan get the bomb because it complicated things with India, which served China's aims. Under this theory, the USSR helped China because it complicated things in Asia with regards to the United States \u2014 which it certainly did. \n\nBut wait, wouldn't it complicate things with the USSR in that region? Kroenig's argument is that in the period that the USSR was willing to help China become a big player in East Asia, the USSR had more or less given up on its imperial ambitions over there. If the USSR had had more global ambitions, it would have been much more wary.\n\n(This theory gives a good, easy explanation of why the USA was extremely unwilling to help any nation acquire the bomb\u00a0\u2014 it always had global, hegemonic ambitions. It did assist some nations with furthering their arsenals once they had \"proven\" they already knew how to make them, though.)\n\nThe Chinese started to push for nuclear weapons in the mid-1950s, during the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, after President Eisenhower explicitly used the tactic of \"nuclear blackmail\" against them \u2014 if they invaded Taiwan, he might use nuclear weapons as a response (even though the Chinese were not nuclear armed). Mao realized that if China lacked nuclear weapons the USA would continue to do this sort of thing indefinitely. \n\nThe Chinese had no confidence in the Soviet nuclear umbrella. They were right not to \u2014 it wasn't clear the Soviets would actually go to war over them, and the Soviet nuclear umbrella was much more paltry than the American one until the 1970s. China, incidentally, was targeted by early US nuclear war plans, whether they were part of whatever conflict the sparked it or not (there was not a \"don't nuke China\" option in the early plans), so they certainly would have suffered the negative side of being under the umbrella.\n\nWhat's kind of amazing about the Soviet assistance to China is that it started rather late \u2014 not until 1955 did they formally begin helping the Chinese. They did this in spite of many leaders in the Soviet Politburo, notably Khrushchev, thinking that there were going to be inevitable conflicts with the Chinese over matters of doctrine and policy (e.g. Khrushchev was already planning to break with the Stalinist past; Mao continued to embrace Stalin).\n\nWhat advantages, at this stage, would it be for the Soviets to give assistance? OK, there is the ostensible one of helping an \"ally\" against a common foe \u2014\u00a0necessary but perhaps not sufficient. Part of the motivation may have been to keep the Chinese somewhat dependent. If the Soviets were supplying the technological know-how, if they had the \"keys to the factories\" so to speak, then the Chinese would be reliant on them. And indeed, the Soviets did _not_ give the Chinese total control over the facilities, nor explain to them exactly how they worked, nor give them a \"educational bomb\" they had once promised them. When the Soviets pulled out in 1959 \u2014 a mere four years later! \u2014 they left the Chinese in a complicated, compromised position. The Chinese knew many things about uranium enrichment, but they didn't know how to make the whole process work. It took considerable effort (another 5 years) on behalf of the Chinese to \"re-learn\" all of these things and get a bomb developed. At first the Chinese technicians simply tried (under political pressure) to run Soviet equipment without understanding it deeply, and caused _hundreds_ of accidents in the process. Later they endeavored to completely understand the technology first, and had much more success, but their path to the bomb took 10 full years to complete, no quick acquisition. (On the Chinese side of things, there is still no better source than John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, _China Builds the Bomb_, 1988.)\n\nWe are preconditioned to see \"atomic assistance\" as furthering a nuclear program; it may do the exact opposite. Political scientist Alex Montgomery has argued in a wonderfully-titled paper, \"[Stop Helping Me](_URL_0_)\", that in fact, most instances of foreign nuclear assistance _slows_ indigenous nuclear programs. This is counter-intuitive unless you study technological transfer and organizations deeply, but the essential argument is one that any student has experienced: if you are simply given an answer, you may have solved a single problem easily, but you are far less ready to tackle new problems than if you had struggled through the process of education yourself. Similarly, if you go to a country, give them a complicated factory they do not know how to use, staff it with your own employees (who do not tell them how it works), then withdraw all of the staff (and some of the key pieces of equipment that are portable), you will have actually dragged out arguably longer the time it will take for them to get it working, as opposed to if they had, from the beginning, invested their time and labor into learning how to develop it all indigenously. \n\nWhile I don't think the Soviets thought that their help would actively _slow_ the Chinese bomb program, I do think they concluded that it was better for them to be involved with it, and to have the Chinese be dependent on them. If the Soviets were involved, they could monitor its progress, and (as they did) potentially pull out if they weren't happy with the Chinese. It could be a bargaining chip, in other words, as well as an excuse to see what the Chinese were doing on this front. (The US did similar things with non-military nuclear programs in European states.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Projects/ProlifTK/Montgomery2013Stop.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "59pl4f", "title": "In Ancient Greek comedy, have the plays ever directly or indirectly made fun of their audience?", "selftext": "I know about Greek comedy making fun of the elites while said elites were present, so mostly wondering about it making fun of what you may call \"the common folk\", so ordinary citizens that are sitting right there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/59pl4f/in_ancient_greek_comedy_have_the_plays_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9am26u"], "score": [2], "text": ["This conceit is very common in Aristophanes. There's a joke in Birds about the actors going and having sex with the councillors' wives while they're all in the theatre, but possibly the most famous line is from Frogs:\n\n > DIONYSUS\nBut tell me, did you see the parricides \nAnd perjured folk he mentioned?\n\n > XANTHIAS\nDidn't you?\n\n > DIONYSUS\nPoseidon, yes. Why look!\nI see them now.\n\nIt's generally accepted this is accompanied by Dionysus gesturing to the audience. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dtq0j", "title": "Books on the History of Gun Control/Laws in the United States", "selftext": "I am interested in learning about the development of law surrounding firearms in the United States. Can anyone recommend some good books on the subject?\n\nI have read the sidebar and \"Popular Questions\" tab regarding the subject, however there does not seem to be any overarching literature recommendations included (although there are fascinating answers regarding specific times and events). \n\nI look forward to your responses!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dtq0j/books_on_the_history_of_gun_controllaws_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjszeyt"], "score": [7], "text": ["Honestly, one of the best I have found is Clayton Kramer's \"The Racist Roots of Gun Control.\" It's been a while since I read it, and it clearly is attempting to reach a conclusion, but it does an absolutely fantastic job of researching early gun control laws in the US, and explaining their origins. The fact that prior to the 20th Century, pretty much all gun control laws in the US targeted minorities does, at least in my opinion justify the title.  20th Century gun control does not have a good book that I have found, particularly as anything from the Gun Control Act of 1938 (GCA 38) forward is rife with partisanship and strong biases (My own personal bias calls for a return of the days when you could buy a Thompson via mail order). \n\nI would however, if you wanted to study up on 20th century gun control read the full text of [DC vs Heller](_URL_2_) and [McDonald vs Chicago](_URL_1_) as these are two very well argued, and researched cases regarding gun ownership and gun rights in the US, and touch on a great number of historical matters. You'll find both the majority and dissent useful for study on both sides of the matter.  \n\nI hope this helps, it is of course a sticky subject, and I find that any discussion from GCA 38 forward winds up creating massive partisan argument, which makes true academic sources hard to find. 19th Century gun control in the US is almost solely rooted in racism, and efforts to disarm slaves, free blacks, or other social undesirables, and is pretty much openly discussed.  \n\nYou'll find too, a reading of various state [constitutional provisions on the right to keep and bear arms](_URL_0_) gives interesting insight into various thinking on the matter throughout various points in US history, and could serve as a springboard for further research. \n\nReally, one of the best things you can do, is pick a type of gun control (say GCA 38, and it's focus on machine guns, short barrel shotguns/rifles, sound suppressors, and other fun things or the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban) and examine the law itself, and the larger context behind it. Most gun control in the US is rooted in fears of particular groups of people, or in preventing certain types of real or perceived crime, and a given law tends to reflect that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/beararms/statecon.htm", "http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1521.ZS.html", "http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html"]]}
{"q_id": "xxy1d", "title": "What, in your opinion, are some absolutely required historical readings?", "selftext": "Any historical topic.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xxy1d/what_in_your_opinion_are_some_absolutely_required/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qjux9", "c5qk6x7", "c5qkemg", "c5qkq1i", "c5qkrsq", "c5ql38m", "c5ql45x", "c5qleyj", "c5qllfb", "c5qlsyo", "c5qlzc1", "c5qm84c", "c5qmes9", "c5qmmdv", "c5qms68", "c5qn42r", "c5qnghw", "c5qnsar", "c5qo413", "c5qobe4", "c5qoprs", "c5qpjdm", "c5qps3b", "c5qpy7n", "c5qqc21", "c5qrll6", "c5qs13k", "c5qw9ji"], "score": [33, 21, 15, 26, 3, 22, 12, 6, 4, 5, 7, 13, 48, 2, 7, 2, 2, 2, 6, 9, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["[This is on the sidebar.](_URL_0_)\n\nBut I'd like to also recommend *Devil in the White City* by Erik Larson, which covers the Chicago World's Fair.", "[The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich](_URL_0_)\nRequired lest history is repeated...", "*De la d\u00e9mocratie en Am\u00e9rique* ( Democracy in America)\n\nEdit:Since no one has mentioned it and everyone here loves Nazis \n\n*Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland*", "E.P. Thompson, *The Making of the English Working Class.*", "* The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot \n\n* American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 by William Manchester\n\n* Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt\n\n* The Secret History of MI6 by Keith Jeffrey\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "[Herodotus' *Histories*](_URL_0_) is pretty much the genesis of history as a subject, and obviously deals with the ancient world.", "\"Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin\" by Timothy D. Snyder gave me a quite different view of Europe's history during the thirties and forties.", "Both intellectual history and both just gorgeous:\n\n* *The Renaissance in Historical Thought* by Wallace Ferguson\n\n* *The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire* by Paul Dutton", "\"The Forgotten Soldier\" by Guy Sajer. It's a first person account of a German soldier fighting on the Eastern Front. It really opens your eyes on just how bad it was (on both sides) in that part of WW2.", "E H Carr's What Is History. Beautiful book, and the last chapter makes me want to dance. ", "[The Tragedy of Great Power Politics](_URL_0_), by John Mearsheimer. Technically a political science/international relations theory book, but he tests his theories extensively against the historical record in a way that illuminates the *realpolitik* calculations that have shaped the decision-making of great powers for the past 220 years. A book that will challenge the way you view history and the way states behave and interact.", "*The Return of Martin Guerre* by Natalie Zemon Davis.  *The Worm and the Cheeze* by Carlo Ginzburg.  Two phenomenal books.  In my field...there is nothing that has ever screamed \"ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED\" though I often recommend for people to read the Sean O'Casey play *The Plough and the Stars* to gain a good sense of life in 1916 Dublin.", "Benedict Anderson - *Imagined Communities*", "Timothy Egan's [The Worst Hard Time](_URL_0_) is one of my favorites for understanding not only the history, but also some of the science of America's Dust Bowl. ", "The following books are not necessarily introductory, through they aren't full of jargon or require perquisite knowledge. They are, in my eyes, fine examples of writing history and of conducting research, and are a must in every historians bookshelf.\n\n**Jacob Burckhardt** - *The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy*\nDon't mind it's historical inaccuracy, the way he writes history and looks at it changed the discipline. He is regarded as one of the most important historians of the west for a reason.\n\n**Johan Huizinga** - *The Waning of the Middle Ages*\nAnother take on the same subject, and another landmark in historiography. Wonderful read.\n\n**Braudel**'s *Mediterranean* has been suggested in the Master list, but I just have to mention it.\n\n**Arthur O. Lovejoy** *The Great Chain of Being* is a seminal work in the history of ideas, to which I must add the later **E. M. W. Tillyard** *The Elizabethan World Picture*\n\n\nAnother which takes a totally different approach to historiography is **Stephen Greenblatt**'s *Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World*. Or, even better, *Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare*. I'm not his biggest fan, but he is well worth the read, and has some incredible insights. \n\n**Philippe Ari\u00e8s**'s works have to mentioned here, controversial as the may be.\n\nFor some more \"straight-forward\" historical works, I really recommend:\n\n**Charles Ralph Boxer** - *The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825*\nA charming book, flows and very very well written.\n\n[If the subject interests you - I highly recommend **David Birmingham**'s books as well, for a more African based look at the Portuguese Empire, especially *Trade and Conquest in Angola*)\n\n**Eugene F. Rice Jr., Anthony Grafton** *The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559*\n\n**Eric Hobsbawm**, *The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848*\nShould be taken with a grain of Marxist salt. =]\n\n**Carl N. Degler** *Out of Our Past*\nOne of the best books about the history of the US, should probably be read side by side with **Howard Zinn**'s *A People's History of Yhe United States*\n\n\nFor general reference I really recommend   \n\n**Herman van der Wee** *The Economic Development of Europe, 950-1950*\n\n**B.H.Slicher Van Bath** *The Agrarian History of Western Europe, 500-1850*\nImmense source of reference material.  \n\nI probably missed so many, but these are the ones that cross my mind. ", "The Strange Career of Jim Crow, When Affirmative Action was White, Confederates in the Attic", "I was gonna make another thread but I guess I can just ask my little question here.\n\nHow do you all feel about the book, \"The New History of the World\" ?", "The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. ", "Its Art History not History but i think it belongs here too : **Ernst Gombich** - *The Story of Art* - It is probably one of the best introductions to the subject and written in a way that it is pretty accesible for anyone. \n ", "Karl Marx, *Das Kapital* (vol. 1)\n\nEric Foner, *The Story of American Freedom*\n\nMarc Bloch, *The Historian's Craft*\n\nHayden White, *Metahistory*\n\nKenneth Lockridge, *A New England Town*\n\nPatricia Nelson Limerick, *Legacy of Conquest*\n\nSidney Mintz, *Sweetness and Power*\n\nLewis Mumford, *The City in History*", "To throw out some (very well researched) historical fiction, \"The Coffee Trader\" by David Liss reveals the nature of Jewish society in early Modern Europe as well as the beginnings of modern trading and banking in Amsterdam. The sequel \"A Conspiracy of Paper\" does much the same but for London a few decades later.\n\n\"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet\" is set in the Dutch East India Company's port of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the only window into the closed-off and isolationist Japan at the beginning of the 19th century. It also delves heavily into the nature of European science and medicine at the time.", "*The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000* by Paul Kennedy. As you can probably tell by the title, it is rather broad in scope. That said, it is a fantastic book that really helped me understand the importance and role of economics in history much more thoroughly and clearly. Very eye opening in that regard, and totally recast my understanding of events in history.", "[The Spanish Revolution of 1936](_URL_0_) is a really interesting piece of history.", "Ernst Junger *Storm of Steel*", "I would read [Truman] (_URL_0_) by David McCullough.  It's a long read, but it's incredibly well researched.", "Aemon Duffy - *The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 to c.1580 (1992)*", "Marshall G. S. Hodgson, [*Rethinking World History*](_URL_0_) - the man was ahead of his time.  (M. Adas, ed., *Islamic and European Expansion* is also worth reading.)\n\nAlfred Crosby, *Ecological Imperialism* and *The Columbian Exchange* both (newer edition of the latter has a lot of great reflections on the outgrowths of the book).  I'd add Bill Cronon's *Changes in the Land* to make it a proper Western triptych.  \n\n(These are essential for world history and ecological history, which are burgeoning fields, but others may disagree.)", "\"God's Chinese son\" by Jonathan spence.  It examines the taiping rebellion.  A civil war that happened at about the same time as the American and was responsible for 20 millions deaths.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/timi4/the_askhistorians_master_book_list/"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1344527852&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=rise+and+fall+of+the+third+reich"], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Histories-Revised-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449086/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1344531109&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=herodotus"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics/dp/039332396X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1344534011&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=tragedy+great+power"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Worst-Hard-Time-Survived/dp/061834697X"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-World-History-Studies-Comparative/dp/0521438446"], []]}
{"q_id": "3lnkba", "title": "How did the check mark become a thing?", "selftext": "Or whatever background is known. Earliest use, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lnkba/how_did_the_check_mark_become_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv88mg9"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is anecdotal, but I restore old books and I find the \"x\" is common in the 19th century and the check mark starts becoming more common about 1920's. I don't know why. \n\nThe time frame seems to indicate post WWI.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1owm3d", "title": "Who built Teotihuacan?", "selftext": "I am currently enrolled in an independent study course at my university on the humanities of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca. I came across while I was studying that the Aztec actually stumbled upon the city rather than built it. With my class dealing with the myth and legends, I was wondering what do historians think?\n\nWho do most historians think built Teotihuacan? And how did the city become abandoned in the first place? \n\nSide-note, I have checked the the frequently asked questions and did a search on this subreddit but could not find anything. So I want to apologize ahead of time if this has been answered.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1owm3d/who_built_teotihuacan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccwft2c", "ccwgsit"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["To put it simply, Teotihuacan was built by the Teotihuacanos. As to who they actually were is up for debate. While Teotihuacan left some writing it appears to be pneumonic based much like the later Aztec writing was in which pictures were used to help recall something memorized. What the Teotihuacanos spoke is also up for debate with a number of groups advocating different languages like Nahuatl while I personally think Otomi is a candidate.\n\nThe northwestern part of the city is the oldest part, but still shows signs of being pre-planned and it was built before 0 AD (I forget the exact date). With the destruction of Cuicuilco in the southern part of the valley coincided with a surge in population in Teotihuacan and in fact some similar artifacts had been found that postdate the destruction of Cuicuilco (like the statue of the Old Fire God at the summit of the Sun Pyramid). It is theorized that the planning of the city was to accommodate such a large influx of people.\n\nI have a few resources available, mostly be Rene Millon, if you'd like to give them a search and you can always check out their bibliography to find out more. Other names I know of is George Cowgill does a lot of work with Teotihuacan as well as Saburo Sugiyama who proposed an interesting relationship in measurements of buildings which he dubs the TMU (Teotihuacan Measuring Unit)\n\n1960 The Beginnings of Teotihuacan - Rene Millon\n\n1961 A Long Architectural Sequence at Teotihuac\u00e1n - Rene Millon and James A. Bennyhoff\n\n1961 Earlier Structures within the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuac\u00e1n - Rene Millon and Bruce Drewitt\n\n1964 Teotihuacan Mapping Project - Rene Millon\n\n1967 Teotihuacan - Rene Millon\n\n1970 Teotihuac\u00e1n - Completion of Map of Giant Ancient City in the Valley of Mexico - Rene Millon\n\n2008 An Update on Teotihuacan - George Cowgill", "Teotihuacanos.\n\nNo really, that's what they're called today, we have no idea what they called themselves or what contemporaries called them. I took one Mesoamerican Anthropology course, the book we used was Prehistoric Mesoamerica: 3rd edition by Richard E. W. Adams. Published 2005.\n\nHe writes that there is a scarcity of written language in artifacts from Teotihuacan, though there are enough to know that they had writing and identify some as name glyphs. It used to be believed that their language was related to the Aztec one, Nahuatl, but now it is believed to be unrelated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1vdzcs", "title": "Has the United States Supreme Court ever made a decision that was a strong departure from what the public opinion was at the time?", "selftext": "I know that there likely are not public opinion polls going back as far as the birth of the SCOTUS, but I just had a general interest in this question. Anything you know would be interesting.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vdzcs/has_the_united_states_supreme_court_ever_made_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cercwu4", "cerg1qg", "cerlirk", "cerlkjc"], "score": [46, 14, 13, 2], "text": ["In 1967's [Loving v. Virginia](_URL_0_) decision, the Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional.  Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the unanimous court that \"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' [...] There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.\"  In 1968, a Gallup poll found that just [20 percent supported, while 72 percent disapproved,](_URL_1_) of the thought that blacks and whites should be able to get married.", "There's also the Warren Court's banning of prayer in public school in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). Gallup showed that at the time, [79% of Americans approved of religious observances in public schools.](_URL_0_)\n\nA handful of the Warren Court decisions on the free exercise clause were controversial at the time. One National Review columnist went so far as to say the decision made the United States the only country outside of the Iron Curtain that curtailed religion in schools. (Don't have the source for this, but you'd probably be able to find it.)", "Don't forget [*Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka* \\(*Brown II*\\)](_URL_1_). Although [*Brown I*](_URL_2_) is arguably more famous, *Brown II* was the decision that actually ordered desegregation to proceed with \u201call deliberate speed\"\u2014a requirement that sparked [\"massive resistance\"](_URL_0_) from Southern states, particularly Virginia. The Virginia General Assembly went so far as to completely shut down public school districts in order to avoid complying with the *Brown II* mandate\u2014a practice that wouldn't be struck down until 1964 in [*Griffin v. School Bd. of Prince Edward Cty.*](_URL_4_)\n\nEven after these extreme anti-desegregation measures were struck down, the Court would spend years invalidating the \"creative\" solutions of school districts committed to trying to circumvent *Brown II*. Only in 1968, in *[Green v. County School Board](_URL_3_)* did the Court strike down so-called \u201cfreedom of choice\u201d plans, which permitted minority students to enroll in white schools only if they made an affirmative request to do so.\n\nIt took almost fifteen years after *Brown II* for the Court to expend the political capital necessary to hold that school districts have an \u201caffirmative duty\u201d to eliminate racial discrimination \u201croot and branch.\u201d So while I don't have direct polling data, *Brown II* was nonetheless deeply unpopular throughout large swaths of the South.\n\nOther sources: Chermerinsky's \"Constitutional Law,\" my Constitutional Law class at the University of Texas School of Law", "Keeping up with the Warren Court love, Brown v. Board of Education was enough of a departure from public opinion that when the case came back to the Court a second time, it instructed the school district to desegregate \"with all deliberate speed\"; i.e. take your time, we know it's a touchy, complicated subject.  I recall hearing a statistic in law school that even after a decade, the vast majority (90%?) of segregated schools had yet to desegregate.\n\nAnother example could be *Dred Scott.*  It repealed the Missouri Compromise and was a large factor in starting the Civil War.  I'm not entirely sure what was the public opinion regarding slavery at the time, but the North was a lot more populous than the South (though the South had a lot of political power from counting slaves as 3/5 of a person), and the upstart Republican Party was elected into the Presidency and Congress a mere 4 years later.\n\nAlso, during the early to mid 1930s, the Supreme Court issued a number of controversial decisions overturning progressive legislation, such as New York's minimum wage law in *Morehead v. New York.*  These decisions were at the very least deeply unpopular with the mostly Democratic Congress and, of course, the Democratic President.  FDR and Congress threatened to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court in response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia", "http://www.pensitoreview.com/2010/02/19/gay-marriage-support-double-approval-of-mixed-marriage-in-1968-2/"], ["http://www.gallup.com/poll/7393/gallup-brain-prayer-public-schools.aspx"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13102254740887304967", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12120372216939101759", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18440688175993412182", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1995949797101046003"], []]}
{"q_id": "6cs7lh", "title": "[Australian Political History] - What are the seminal works (or most useful for a general understanding), of Australian politics/political history in the late 20th century (say, post-1960s)?", "selftext": "I am writing a paper on Youth Politics in Australia but before that I wish to gain a better understanding of the ideological positions and history of Australia's major parties and/or other significant players. Any more general histories of Australia's politics you could recommend for the late 20th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cs7lh/australian_political_history_what_are_the_seminal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhx2jiy"], "score": [3], "text": ["One of the more influential works on people's understanding of late 20th century Australian politics is Paul Kelly's political history of the 1980s *The End Of Certainty*, which argues that the 1980s ended what Kelly calls the 'Australian settlement'; the book in a lot of ways details the way that the centre-left Labor party negotiated a response to the 'economic rationalist' agenda dominant in economic thinking at the time. That might be a place to start."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cs7wbl", "title": "How high was a musket era soldiers morale?", "selftext": "In all the movies and things i've seen around this time period i've seen soldiers with guns stand around 50 feet away from each other with no cover, stand in a huge line and shoot at each other. How doesn't anyone run away in the seconds leading up to the firing? I would for sure", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cs7wbl/how_high_was_a_musket_era_soldiers_morale/", "answers": {"a_id": ["exdtmt0"], "score": [16], "text": ["Morale and discipline were constant problems for armies in age of linear warfare. Wars tended to be for pretty abstract purposes - pressing the right of a king to a piece of land, or defending some crowned head's (or later, nation's) sense of honor, or traveling halfway around the world to make someone else rich. Soldiers were often conscripts, and volunteers tended to be from the lower socioeconomic ranks who largely showed up for steady pay, clothes, and rations. As such, morale tended to be low by modern standards. This impacted warfare in a number of ways.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWith few soldiers really happy about being in the ranks, officers - generally of the higher and aristocratic classes, and carrying a degree of social contempt for the enlisted - widely felt that brutal discipline, frequently enforced, was the only thing that would hold an army together. Flogging was a common punishment in all the major armies before the French Revolution, with the number of prescribed lashes often reaching into the hundreds. Soldiers could be made to run through a gauntlet of their fellows swinging sticks, rope whips, or fists for committing offenses that disgraced the regiment, or executed by hanging or firing squad for a range of offenses. Capital punishments were particularly common for crimes that could alienate a civilian populace the army would rather stay supportive (or at least pliant), such as rape and theft (note that when sacking a city, these were actively encouraged). Attempts to terrify soldiers into staying well-behaved and in the ranks often backfired: soldiers would often desert, even to the enemy, rather than face punishment.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nA more positive cultural device used to hold men to their service was building an intense sense of pride and espirit-de-corps in the regiment. With wars often lacking a clear ideological cause that enlisted men could buy in to, fighting for the shared honor and safety of their brothers-in-arms was a more reliable motivator. The regiment was the basic organizational unit of the European-style armies at this time. Soldiers often served long enlistments, and transfers between regiments for enlisted soldiers were uncommon (officers, however, could chase commissions and open positions across regiments). Regiments became mobile societies, living and working and fighting together in war and peace. Even in peacetime garrisons or on campaign overseas, some soldiers were allowed to bring their families into camp, where their wives worked as laundresses, tailors, and nurses. This meant there was always children born \"under the drum\" around - children born to soldiers and camp followers who themselves lived the nomadic life of a soldier from their first day. Many of these people, having few connections to the civilian world, would themselves enlist when they came of age. In some instances, regiments were raised regionally (this was particularly common in America), meaning that soldiers would fight alongside their friends, relations, and neighbors. For example, the American militia commander at Lexington green at the very start of the American Revolution was related by blood or marriage to more than half the men under his command. These cultural bonds encouraged soldiers to fight for each other, rather than an abstract monarch/general/president/whatever, and promised social disgrace to anyone who would abandon their comrades and kin on the battlefield.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTactically, the way infantry formations stood in line positioned NCOs and officers to physically hold men in place. The tight, shoulder-to-shoulder formations used by many armies made individual movement difficult anyway, but sergeants and subalterns sometimes carried [some variation of spear](_URL_0_) to line men up and hold them in place by holding it horizontally. Rather than engaging the enemy directly,  the primary purpose of NCOs was to serve as file closers, keeping men in the ranks and directing soldiers to fill holes in the line caused by casualties and men fleeing to the rear. As casualties mounted and the perceived tactical situation worsened, more and more soldiers would flee the battle. Regiments would generally break and lose all cohesion rather than stay in line up until they were all shot or bayoneted. Bayonet and cavalry charges were specifically designed to be terrifying to behold, driving more soldiers to flee than their NCOs and officers could manage. Officers who tried to stop desperate men from running risked their own lives: During the Second Battle of Saratoga, Colonel Heinrich von Breymann was fatally bayoneted by one of his own Brunswicker soldiers as they fled Benedict Arnold's charging Americans after he started sabering men who had run from the ranks.\n\nMorale also impacted armies' operational capacity. American soldiers in the colonial and Revolutionary period were famously quarrelsome and difficult: they largely viewed themselves and contract laborers, and they *would not* march or fight if they were not fed and clothed to the standards they had agreed to when enlisting, and would fight no longer than the dates specified on their (frequently short-term) contracts, regardless of how closely their army was engaged with the enemy. Several British campaigns against the French in colonial America sputtered or never commenced because soldiers refused to cooperate. Concerns about his their army melting way due to expiring enlistments prompted ill-fated aggression from American generals Arnold and Montgomery at Quebec in 1775/6. Conversely, Washington successfully convincing his army to overstay their enlistments and cross the Delaware with him in the winter of 1776/7 is perhaps the best-remembered military moment of the American Revolution. Nearly half the German mercenary soldiers the British sent to America - at great expense - deserted and stayed in the US after the war, lured by better treatment, greater political rights, available work, and a large, friendly German population near the Pennsylvania prison camps the Continental Army set up for their POWs. Louis XIV motivated the French people to join his armies by appealing directly to the masses; a century later, the highly motivated armies of the French Revolution shocked Europe with their speed, ferocity, and willingness to endure both the rigors or hard campaigning and heavy casualties. The United States owes its existence to the fact that many Continental soldiers *did* believe in the cause and maintain their morale, even though Congress routinely failed to pay and provide for them. Morale and figuring out what exactly soldiers would endure was just as much a part of military operations in the age of linear warfare as logistics and tactics.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Sources**\n\nRuss Wiegley, *The Age of Battles*\n\nFred Anderson, *A People's Army* and *Crucible of War*\n\nDavid Hackett Fischer, *Washington's Crossing*\n\nJames Kirby Martin and Edward Lender, *A Respectable Army*\n\nCharles Royster, *A Revolutionary People at War*\n\nMatthew Spring, *With Zeal and With Bayonets Only*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1524/1342/products/on3333__8.jpg?v=1505314856"]]}
{"q_id": "3i2uqu", "title": "Why do we call the Greek sects devoted to worshiping one god a cult?", "selftext": "Were they worshiping primarily one god, or exclusively that god?\n\nIt's likely that the word's meaning is different in academic circles than the common usage today. But still, it's an image hard to shake. To what extent were they fanatics? How large were the groups? Were they hostile or defensive to other sects?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i2uqu/why_do_we_call_the_greek_sects_devoted_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cucyw15"], "score": [15], "text": ["This is a rather general question that can only be answered generally, and I think you may receive a better answer (especially to the latter part of your question) if you specify exactly which Greek \"cults\" you are referring to. No size fits all in traditional Greek and Roman religion.\n\nYou're correct-- in academic circles, \"cult\" (when referring to an ancient religious group) does not carry the same connotations as a modern cult. It does not imply that they only worshipped a single god, nor does it suggest hostile relations with other religious groups or any sort of fanatical tendency by modern standards. It is a bit difficult to pin down (or source) since it's just semantics, but in my own studies, \"cult\" refers more to its outlying position (as it appears to us historians, anyway) as a group than its inherent nature. But that's not to say that a cult is entirely separate from the most common religious traditions either-- it could be a special veneration of a certain deity that also appears elsewhere. \n\nBut the connotations of \"cult\" versus \"sect\" differ even in modern uses of the words. I'm assuming you're an American as \"cult\" is negative for you, but the term doesn't universally conjure images of Jonestown. I'm an American who did my master's in Europe, where \"sect\" is the term with the most negative implications, while \"cult\" is rather neutral. So from our perspective, the meanings are flip-flopped across the pond.\n\nThis is a pretty scattered explanation, but basically it comes down to the constructs historians use to understand what they study. It does not imply any specific nature or behavior as a group-- just that it *is* a group in its own right."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "170vqt", "title": "\"The Ancient Economy\"", "selftext": "Hi I just got my hands on a book called \"The Ancient Economy\" (1973) by M. I. Finley, and as far as i can see he has done a very good job of it. \n\nMy question is twofold. 1; Has there been any significant shift in the way ancient economy has been viewed since this book came out? If so in what ways? I must admit I haven\u00b4t finished it yet, but I remember someone on this forum having mentioned the vast impact of slaves on the economy of the ancient world, I think it was called \"The slave economic system\", and I haven't seen that term used in the book as of yet.  \n\n2; What new books/works/authours (I have access to jstore) would you recommend on the subject? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/170vqt/the_ancient_economy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c816zsd", "c81btdu", "c81mcbi"], "score": [2, 2, 2], "text": ["I'm not an expert on this particular time period, but I would be careful about taking what Finley says at face value. The book has been criticized for relying too heavily on literary sources (mainly Cicero, if I recall correctly?) and lacking data based on archaeological evidence. Someone with more knowledge than me could probably give a better overview of modern criticisms of Finley.", "I have not heard of the book you are talking about, but I can point you in the direction of this paper which seems relevant to your interests: Wealthy Hellas by Josiah Ober\n_URL_0_", "There seems to be a critique of Finlay's work/ideas [here](_URL_0_) unfortunately my university's off-campus access is playing games with me and after trying four separate approaches I've had no joy so cannot speak as to its quality. Apologies, hope you have more success if you choose to look into it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/ober/051001.pdf"], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877022000006799"]]}
{"q_id": "12tkj9", "title": "How have US presidents who won reelection differed between their first and second terms?", "selftext": "Awkwardly worded title, but hopefully the sentiment is clear. For those presidents that got a second term, how did it differ from their first? I ask specifically in terms of policy, national approval, and so on. Did they tend to behave more in line with a personal ideology? Did they try to pursue more drastic changes? Were they more effective leaders?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12tkj9/how_have_us_presidents_who_won_reelection/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6y321d"], "score": [7], "text": ["Woodrow Wilson won his reelection on the slogan \"he kept us out of war\" and then went in to ww1 in 1917."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ahsz4", "title": "It's the year 1100 and I'm on my way to join the Varangian Guard. Who am I, how do I get from my homeland to Constantinople, and who do I talk to about joining the Guard?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ahsz4/its_the_year_1100_and_im_on_my_way_to_join_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csdfkxe"], "score": [2], "text": ["You're probably taking a boat at some point along your journey, but depending on your starting point, the trip will differ in various ways.\n\nThe first Varangians were soldiers from the kingdom of the Kievan Rus people\u2014the ruling elite were ethno-linguistically Scandinavians who had settled in Eastern Europe during the Viking Age, and the general populace were of more Slavic origins. They made their way down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and then to Constantinople and made contact with the Byzantines (as explained [here](_URL_0_)). The first contact was violent, but then the Byzantines started to hire them as mercenaries to fight in various conflicts. Some Rus stayed behind and formed the core of the guard.\n\nAs the Varangian Guard grew, it started to attract other Germanic peoples from further West, especially in Scandinavia and the British Isles. In the 11th century, the Guard saw [a major influx of Saxons and Danes](_URL_1_) who arrived via ships that had sailed into the Mediterranean.\n\nIn other words, to get from your homeland to Constantinople, you're probably spending some time on a boat. How much time depends on whether you're starting out in Eastern Europe (in which case you might sail along the Dnieper and then through the Black Sea to get to Constantinople) or in Western or Northern Europe (in which case you might sail along the Western European Coast and into the Mediterranean to get there).\n\nOnce you're there, the Varangians are actively recruiting people like you (Germanic warrior types) and probably have connections to people you know, so you form up with those connections/those recruiters, who are ethno-linguistically similar to yourself, or at least, more similar to you than the rest of the general populace in the area is, and you join the payroll."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=MmwK9pIh0AQC&amp;pg=211#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=3eXew91YDiAC&amp;pg=425#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1s5kzf", "title": "Why the lack Roman villas in Cornwall / Dumnonia?", "selftext": "[Here] (_URL_0_) is a distribution map of known villas. \n\nI have many books on Roman Britain, none of which offer more than a passing mention of Cornwall, but they do all have versions of this map which appear to show this clear \"cut-off point\" or line beyond which there were little to no villas. \n\nI know Cornwall was, and still is, a remote part of Britain, but weren't the Dumnonii quite \"civilised\" compared to tribes further north? I believe they were known of and traded with the Carthaginians prior to the invasion, and surely Cornwall would be the first land reached by any ships sailing from the Mediterranean.\n\nMaybe there are lots of undiscovered villas in the area, but different farming methods mean less finds have been thrown up? \n\nMy tutor has mentioned there is an interesting theory that the whole peninsula could have been an imperial estate, but I can't find any material supporting this. If any of you have come across this theory or other examples of such estates I would be very interested to know more. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s5kzf/why_the_lack_roman_villas_in_cornwall_dumnonia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdu69dx"], "score": [3], "text": ["Cornwall is remote from the Roman center in SE England, around London. There are only archaeological remains of two Roman roads that go west into Cornwall. Further, my understanding is that Cornwall had been important as a source of tin before the Roman occupation, but the Romans had much easier access to tin in Spain. Most of the villas you see on the map spread around London or north towards the military presence on the Pictish frontier. There are some scattered villas in Wales and that area, but there was silver and lead mining taking place along a corridor that led north through that area (map _URL_0_ -- apologies for wiki source, but with citation \"Based on Jones  &  Mattingly's Atlas of Roman Britain (ISBN 978-1-84217-06700, 1990, reprinted 2007) \u2014 the source is cited in the image legend \u2014 section \"The Economy\", pp. 179\u2013195.\")"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.strangehistory.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/britannia-roman-villa-map.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman.Britain.Mining.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3z5o1z", "title": "Not sure if this is the correct subreddit, but you're historians and this is (I'm assuming) a historical thing. Found on the back of a bayonet, any idea what it is/says?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3z5o1z/not_sure_if_this_is_the_correct_subreddit_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyjf2lx"], "score": [15], "text": ["It says Mre d'armes de St Etienne Janvier 1876. Mre is short for \"Manufacture\" and d'armes means (you guessed it) \"arms\". So it is the makers mark for the state owned arms manufacturer in St Etienne, France in January 1876. \n\nA little more information about the [site](_URL_0_) \n\nI have a sword from the Napoleonic Era that has Imperial France foundry markings along the spine and remember researching the origin so I recognized yours right away. Yours was also much easier to read, as the blade I have has some patina to it. Very cool item you have there! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/r5JaY3t"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacture_d'armes_de_Saint-%C3%89tienne"]]}
{"q_id": "5hqgzr", "title": "What did Victorian era women carry in their purses?", "selftext": "Aside from the obvious, like money?\n\nI started wondering this the other day while watching a lady struggle to find something in her massive shoulder bag, thinking that these have been normal fashion accessories for as long as I could remember.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hqgzr/what_did_victorian_era_women_carry_in_their_purses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db2s9a8"], "score": [4], "text": ["Quite an interesting question!\n\nThe [Old Bailey records](_URL_1_), which have been digitized and put online, are an excellent resource for this sort of thing, as handbags/reticules were often stolen or stolen from. We have the most detailed records from the early decades of Victoria's reign; in the second decade, the contents of handbags do not tend to be listed.\n\nThe most common things to appear in the court records as being inside reticules are handkerchiefs and purses - that is, coin purses. At this time, these might be the sort of leather pouch with a kiss-clasp that the term \"coin purse\"/\"change purse\" calls to mind, but also might be a knitted or crocheted [long purse](_URL_0_) (also called a \"miser's purse\" in modern sources, but this seems to be a term invented in the 1910s, when use of this kind of purse was coming to an end; it's a cheeky reference to the number of steps it took to get coins out of it. Laura Camerlengo has a great paper on these purses [here](_URL_4_)). These often turn up as the only contents of a stolen bag, and could be considered the \"default\" - what most women would be carrying around on an average day.\n\nSmall items of clothing also tend to turn up - most commonly gloves, as they might be taken off or put on during the day, but occasionally stockings or a collar. The latter would most likely be recently purchased goods than stuff that was wanted for quick access during the day, given the difficulty of replacing them in public.\n\nWe see a certain amount of jewelry being carried: rings, buckles, necklaces, brooches, bracelets. Small items for everyday use are also common, like eyeglasses, scissors, keys, calling-card cases, printed books, and notebooks. \n\nSome interesting and detailed testimony: in [May 1837](_URL_1_browse.jsp?id=t18370508-1160 & div=t18370508-1160 & terms=reticule#highlight), a woman testified that\n\n > my daughter said, \"Give it him, mamma,\" or \"Let him have it,\" and on that he took it from me\u2014he had said, \"Give it me,\" meaning the bag\u2014he took it from me forcibly, and then ran off\u2014it contained a pocket-book, a silver pencil-case, a pair of scissors, a pair of silver-mounted spectacles, a pocket-handkerchief, a gold watch-key, and a lace collar\u2014I think I have seen the pencil-case since at Mr. Turner's, the pawnbroker's\u2014there were several other trifling things in the bag which I cannot recollect ...\n\nIn [August of 1843](_URL_1_browse.jsp?id=t18430821-2322 & div=t18430821-2322 & terms=reticule#highlight), George Newton stole a reticule from Lydia Linkson,\n\n >  containing 2 sovereigns, a bunch of keys, a pair of spectacles, a banker's book, and some other articles\n\nYou may have come across a pop history piece about the \"sexist history\" of pockets on Racked back in September, or when it was rehashed and simplified on _URL_3_ afterward. It asserts that exterior pockets - handbags - were prevalent during this period due to social strictures aimed at preventing women from navigating public spaces, traveling alone, or carrying unsanctioned publications. This is pretty much bunk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/157824", "https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/", "https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18430821-2322&amp;div=t18430821-2322&amp;terms=reticule#highlight", "Mic.com", "https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/11723/LauraCamerlengoMiser'sPurse.pdf?sequence=2", "https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18370508-1160&amp;div=t18370508-1160&amp;terms=reticule#highlight"]]}
{"q_id": "5j70x5", "title": "In WW2, what levels of losses temporarily neutralized or even destroyed military units?", "selftext": "Greetings!\n\nI have tried to find information about this online, but frankly I have no idea where to look and as such my searches have been pretty futile.\n\nI am curious what levels of losses - in particular to infantry units - harmed them so badly that they no longer could be expected fulfill their task, both at a tactical and operational level.\n\nI have read numbers such as that 10% actual casualties (platoon or company level) was enough to disrupt function and require consolidation, and that 30% losses effectively destroyed the unit for the time being and required substantial effort to consolidate. Doesn't seem unreasonable since 30% losses would be to lose an entire platoon in a company, and you'd probably need a whole platoon's effort just to initially take care of the wounded and regroup. On top of that your effective frontage would either be cut by a third even after consolidation, or it'd retain its width but become weaker overall.\n\nHowever I fail to find any sources for these numbers other than if I want to start reading dozens and hundreds of actual military reports, so I wonder if anyone here know the answer, or at least can point me in the right direction?\n\nEDIT: I realize that there simply is no clear-cut answer to the question, but there ought to be some rules of thumb that the different nations used to calculate the effectiveness and strength of a company, battalion, or division? Or maybe there is some post-war research that has been done in this area that I've simply been unable to find?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5j70x5/in_ww2_what_levels_of_losses_temporarily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdxv6v", "dbepghl"], "score": [25, 3], "text": ["A good resource that can partially fill in what you want to know regarding the experience of a typical (I say \"typical\" as it is not one from a very well-known unit like the 1st Infantry \"Big Red One\" or 101st Airborne) infantry unit is *G Company's War*, taken directly from the diaries of Lee Macmillan Otts and Bruce E. Egger of Company G, 328th Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry Division, the \"draftee regiment\" in a National Guard division originally from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.\n\nDuring WWII, the US Army commonly used the strategy of \"two up, one down\", as in one company of each battalion, one battalion of each regiment, or one regiment of the entire division, or a combination of these would be in reserve at any one time. After being beaten badly in an attack near Moncourt, France, on November 8, 1944, the 2nd Battalion, 328th Infantry was shifted into regimental reserve from November 15-20. In the US Army, if units could not \"break off\" conveniently, their strength would often be whittled down severely when they came off the line for rest and replacements.\n\n >  There were about 150 men left in E, F, and G Companies out of a normal complement of some 525 men....There were seventy-five men left in G Company, twenty-five of whom were headquarters personnel.\n\nBruce Egger's 1st squad of the 3rd platoon was hit badly during the attack on Moncourt after being caught in a German artillery barrage; Company G lost sixty men in total, 22 of them killed.\n\nMan|Fate\n:--|:--\nS/Sgt John Saulenas|KIA\nSgt George Kearny|WIA (not hospitalized)\nPfc. Carl Anderson|WIA (not hospitalized)\nPfc. Bruce Egger|\nPfc. Edward Evans|KIA\nPfc. Charles Foster|WIA\nPfc. Frank Kuchyt|WIA (not hospitalized)\nPfc. Allan Parlee|WIA\nPfc. Joseph Treml|WIA\nPfc. Thomas Twardziewski|KIA\nPfc. Ernest Viscio|\n\nCompany G, out of the line, later received about 79 replacements on November 10 to reconstitute. Companies E and F had also been hit particularly badly in the actions of early November; the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 328th Infantry needed most of the replacements, a total of 14 officers and 782 enlisted men including Second Lieutenant Lee M. Otts (he would later be transferred to Company G) Company E received about 120 of the replacements. Company G, before moving back to the front lines, later received about 114 more replacements along with several new officers in preparation for the battles of late November 1944. \n\nEven with replacements, squads, platoons, and the like mostly operated perpetually understrength after entering combat;\n\n**3rd Platoon Personnel Between March 5 and March 15:**\n\n**Platoon Headquarters:**\n\n * 1st Lt. Bill Schulze\n * T/Sgt. Pete Ruffin\n * S/Sgt. Francis Gormley\n * Pfc. \"Frenchy\" Dumais\n\n**1st Squad:**\n\n * S/Sgt. Stan Nachman, Ldr\n * Sgt. Joe Treml, Asst (WIA 3/13)\n * Pfc. Joe Bergeron\n * Pfc. Bill DeSoto (WIA 3/13)\n * Pfc. Bob Gelinas (to 2nd Sq 3/9)\n * Pfc. Barron Lintz\n * Pfc. Delbert Livermore\n * Pfc. Elbridge Walker (WIA 3/13)\n\n**Changes as of March 15:**\n\n * Sgt. Frank Micik, Asst 3/15 (from 4th Platoon)\n * Pfc. Harley Packer (from 3rd Squad)\n\n**2nd Squad:**\n\n * S/Sgt. Stew Rorer, Ldr (WIA 3/8)\n * Sgt. Tom Montgomery, Asst; Ldr 3/8\n * Pvt. Tony Clemens (SIW 3/8)\n * Pfc. Albert Evans (WIA 3/13)\n * Pfc. Emelion Gazda\n * Pfc. W.C. Lundy (KIA 3/13)\n * Pfc. John Marron\n * Pfc. Tony Messina\n * Pfc. Rufies Morgan\n * Pfc. Rene Poirier (WIA 3/13)\n * Pfc. W.S. Thompson\n * Pfc. Clay Williams (WIA 3/13)\n\n**Changes as of March 15:**\n\n * Pfc. Bob Gelinas, Asst 3/9 (from 1st Squad)\n * Cpl. Tony Catanese (ret from hosp 3/9 and assigned to 2nd Squad)\n\n**3rd Squad:**\n\n * S/Sgt. Bruce Egger, Ldr\n * Cpl. Hank Sosenko, Asst\n * Pfc. Ellis England\n * Pfc. F. LeCrone (to hosp 3/11)\n * Pfc. Alton Moores\n * Pfc. Tom Oakley\n * Pvt. H. Packer (to 1st Sq 3/15)\n * Pfc. Solomon Rubin\n * Pfc. Paul Scheufler\n * Pfc. George Schmitt (to hosp 3/7; ret to duty 3/10)\n\n**Squad Strength:**\n\nDate|1st Squad|2nd Squad|3rd Squad\n:--|:--|:--|:--\nAs of March 5|9|12|10\nAs of March 15|7|8|8\n\n**Platoon Strength:**\n\nDate|Strength\n:--|:--\nAs of March 5|35\nAs of March 15|27\n\nA normal rifle squad had 12 enlisted men, while a rifle platoon had 1 officer and 40 enlisted men\n\n**G Company's Losses by Period:**\n\nPeriod|KIA|WIA|Trench Foot|Frostbite|SIW|Misc.|Transferred|Total lost\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\nBefore Nov. 8|2|5|6|--|2|4*|7|26\nOn Nov. 8|22|38|--|--|--|--|--|60\nNov. 9-18|7|26|72|--|1|4|2|112\nNov. 19-Dec. 18|4|24|38|3|1|4|3|77\nDec. 19-Jan. 26|9|44|--|45|2|6|8|114\nJan. 27-Mar. 1|8|27|--|3|1|4|12|55\nMar. 2-13|4|23|--|--|1|5|1|34\nMar. 14-May 8|1|6|--|--|--|5|19|31\nTotals|57|193|116|51|8|32*|52|509**\n\nAsterisk: Includes two men taken prisoner by the Germans on 7 Nov 44\n\nDouble asterisk: By 8 May 45, 76 of these men had returned to duty, leaving a net loss of 433\n\n**Losses of Original G Company Personnel by Period:**\n\nPeriod|KIA|WIA|Trench Foot  &  Frostbite|SIW|Misc.|Transferred|Total lost|On Rolls at End of Period**\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\nBefore Nov. 8|2|5|6|2|4*|7|26|167\nOn Nov. 8|20|34|--|--|--|--|54|113\nNov. 9-18|3|13|31|1|1|2|51|63\nNov. 19-Dec. 18|2|4|8|--|--|1|15|53\nDec. 19-Jan. 26|1|8|1|--|1|2|13|43\nJan. 27-Mar. 1|2|6|--|--|--|1|9|39\nMar. 2-13|--|4|--|--|2|--|6|40\nMar. 14-May 8|--|1|--|--|1|8|10|40\nTotals|30|75|46|3|9|21|184|--\n\nAsterisk: Includes two men taken prisoner by the Germans on 7 Nov 44\n\nDouble asterisk: After Nov 8 the figures in this column include men who had returned to duty. There were a total of 31 returnees--25 WIAs, five trench foot cases, and one SIW--who rejoined G Company before May 8. five of the WIAs were wounded a second time; they count twice in the total of 75 wounded.\n\n**G Company's Losses by Replacement Draft:**\n\nReplacement Group|No. of Men|KIA|WIA|WIA twice|Net Lost to Enemy Action|Trench Foot|Frosbite|SIW|Misc|Transfer|Total lost|Left on Rolls 8 May 45\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\nOriginal Co.|193|30|70 (25)|5|82*|45 (5)|1|3 (1)|7|21|153|40\nOct. (2 grps)|11|2|6 (1)|--|7|--|--|--|--|--|7|4\nNov. 10|82|6|20 (1)|--|25|47 (5)|2|--|1|4|74|8\nNov. 19|117|6|39 (10)|4|39|22 (1)|21 (3)|3|2|9|92|25\nDec. 19|82|7|25 (9)|1|24|1 (1)|24 (8)|--|6|14|60|22\nJan. (4 grps)|78|8|21 (5)|--|22|1|3 (1)|2|11|4|42|36\nMar. (3 grps)|55|--|2|--|2|--|--|--|3|--|5|50\nApr.  &  May|7|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|0|7\nTotals|625|57|183 (51)|10|201|116 (12)|51 (12)|8 (1)|30|52|433|192\n\nThe numbers in parentheses indicate the number of men who eventually returned to duty after being wounded in action or hospitalized with trench foot or frostbite. One SIW also returned to duty.\n\nAsterisk: Includes two men taken prisoner by the Germans on 7 Nov 44\n\nSource:\n\n*G Company's War: Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe 1944-1945*, by Bruce E. Egger and Lee MacMillan Otts", "VT-8 was a US Navy torpedo bomber squadron that was mauled during the battle of Midway, June 4th 1942. VT-8 was flying fifteen TBD Devestators from CV-8, the USS Hornet. The squadron was supposed to get the new TBF torpedo bomber, but only six of the planes had been delivered to Hawaii. The Hornet also moved around a lot from April 1942 to June 4th 1942. It did make one call at Pearl Harbor, but they did not have the time to load the new TBF Avengers. When the commander of the six Avengers found out he was being left behind, he requested permission to fly to Midway island. On June 4th, his small air group was the first to strike out at the Japanese carriers. Five of the Avengers were shot down and the only plane that made it back to Midway had a dead rear gunner.       \n      After four B-26 Mauraders, 18  B-17 Flying Fortresses and thirty six Marine dive bombers attack, ineffectively, the US Navy carrier bombers arrive. Their attack was not coordinated. VT-8 in particular was left hung out to dry. With no fighter support, or dive bombers above. John C Waldron led the 15 Devestators to their doom. They were all shot down. One ensign, George Gay, survived the attack.      \n     So, it would seem like sixty of the sixty three men in VT-8 were KIA at Midway, surely that unit disbanded. There were 27 other men in VT-8, back on the West Coast. They were soon joined by 18 new recruits and began to train with TBF Avengers. VT-8 was assigned to CV-3 USS Saratoga, which was under repair. VT-3, which was the torpedo squadron that was based on the Saratoga was moved over to CV-8 Hornet.      \n     When Operation Watchtower started in August 1942, VT-8 was based on the Saratoga. After that ship was torpedoed and went back to the West Coast, VT-8 was moved to Henderson Field on Guadacanal. It operated there until November 15th 1942, when the unit was disbanded. In April 1943, a new VT-8 was created and it was assigned to CV-17 USS Bunker Hill.  There was no direct connection between the personnel of the 1942 VT-8 and the roster of the 1943 VT-8.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4lcv5v", "title": "Found an interesting-looking bible, might anyone know anything about it?", "selftext": "First off, apologies if this is the wrong place. It's the first place I thought of when my mum asked me if I could find anything out about it. If so, where would be the best place to ask?\n\nHere's the book: _URL_0_\n\nFrom what I can tell, this was \"Published as the Act directs, May 1st 1809 by Robert Scholey 46 Paternoster row\" and \"Printed by T. Davison, Lombard Street, Whitefriars\".\n\nI *think* the text on the cover is hebrew, but I was unable to do anything more than identify that it looks like the letter \"Khaf\" with the letter \"Tav\" with some accents around it.\n\nMainly what I want to know is what it says on the front, if the crest(?) on the front has any meaning or significance (my sister's boyfriend think it's Illuminati related...), but also anything else that might be worth knowing.\n\nThanks for any help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lcv5v/found_an_interestinglooking_bible_might_anyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3mk1hj", "d3mptxs"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Paternoster Row and Whitefriars are in London near St. Paul's Cathedral, the seat of the Anglican diocese of London. Paternoster Row was the center of English publishing at the time this Bible was printed. Given the time and location of publishing, the Bible is almost certainly the King James version.\n\nThe emblem on the front is a dove on a beam of light, a very common Christian symbol and, apologies to your sister's boyfriend, not connected to the Illuminati unless you REALLY want it to be. (The dove represents the Holy Spirit.) The Hebrew text in the middle is somewhat unusual for a Bible, however. Sorry I can't help you with what the text says, although the way the dove is displayed calls to mind a part of the Gospels in which Jesus's baptism in the Jordan is interrupted by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove and the words \"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.\" ", "The Hebrew letters are the [tetragrammaton](_URL_0_) the name of God. Written as YHWH, here with added vowel marks, in Jewish tradition it is not to be pronounced by mortal mouths, but it's usually transliterated as Yahweh and hence Jehovah."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/P42ys"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton"]]}
{"q_id": "b0dv2o", "title": "Was the flag of France during the Bourbon Restoration ever mistaken for an attempt to surrender? Furthermore, where does the usage of white flags to signal surrender (or truce) come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b0dv2o/was_the_flag_of_france_during_the_bourbon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eif8gw5"], "score": [3], "text": ["Earliest mentions of using white flags to surrender or parley come from the Han dynasty (AD 25 - 220). \n\nThe modern use of the white flag in Europe was standardized in The Hague Conventions of 1899 and later in 1907. Mis use of the white flag is considered a war crime. As the pure white flag was no longer used at that time due to the fall of the Bourbons in France and the count of Chambord refusal to use the tricolore during a possible restauration in 1873 this was never a problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dgnpk", "title": "Questions on Genocide", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dgnpk/questions_on_genocide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9q6vls"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think these questions would be more appropriate for /r/Politics, as none of these questions are directly related to history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s4o2i", "title": "How did slaves learn of Great Britain's offer to free them during the American Revolution?", "selftext": "I am currently student-teaching an 8th Grade U.S. History course, and I'm trying to anticipate questions my students may have about black loyalists.  I'm a bit of an amateur when it comes to history.\n\nIf slaves were deliberately prevented by their masters from interacting with the outside world, how did they catch wind of Lord Dunmore's proclamation, for example?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s4o2i/how_did_slaves_learn_of_great_britains_offer_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdtzj4p", "cdtzrzc"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Considering that most of the black slaves were illiterate, it would be difficult to reach out to a large percentage of slaves. Remember that he was a slave owner as well and eventually took his slaves with him when he left in 1776. At this point, he was desperate for support as he was now on a British ship after fleeing his Governor's Palace. By going after the slaves, which would include the Patriot Whig's slaves and Tories, he hoped to put a stop to the Revolution.The slave owners that lost there slaves would have to return home to protect their families and not be able to raise arms directly against the British rule. A slave rebellion would be frightening to both sides as well.\n\n[Dunmore's declaration of martial law and Proclamation](_URL_0_)\n\nOT: Ironically, John, the 4th Earl of Dunmore fought with his father in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion against the House of Hanover. He later joined the British army before becoming the next Earl.", "The simplest answer is rumor. In fact, throughout history, rumors of offers of emancipation have often provided impetus for slave rebellions. For example, in 1789 Martinique, slaves heard that the French King had granted them freedom, but that their overseers and owners were trying to keep this information from them., This led to their refusal to work. Likewise, 1823 British Demerara experienced a similar rumor and revolt. \n\nSlaves created networks of gossip and communication in defiance of their owners. Black sailors, free blacks, and slaves who were allowed to travel helped to spread all kinds of information. Additionally, while literacy rates were low, it was not unheard of for one or two slaves in a particular region to be able to read. More commonly, slaves might eavesdrop on their masters and spread the word among fellow slaves. \n\nReferences:\nEmilia Viotti Da Costa, *Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood* (1994)\nPhilip Troutman, \"Grapevine in the Slave Market\" in Walter Johnson, ed., *The Chattel Principle* (2004)\nLaurent Dubois, *A Colony of Citizens* (2004)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/document/csr10-0127"], []]}
{"q_id": "1loodr", "title": "Can you still find or watch the propaganda films from the Soviet Union and Communist China?", "selftext": "This might be the wrong sub for this but I have always wanted to watch these. I have interest in this period especially in Maoist China. Is there anywhere where I could get them or watch them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1loodr/can_you_still_find_or_watch_the_propaganda_films/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1ctwl"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes there are many films of both nations' propaganda departments on youtube. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bojvl", "title": "When did monotheistic religions begin precluding the existence of other divine entities? How did this process occur?", "selftext": "A monotheist is someone who believes and worships in one god and believes that their god is the sole deity occupying the cosmos. The existence of one monotheistic deity necessarily precludes the existence of other deities. \n\nIn the ancient world of antiquity, however, what we usually think of as strictly monotheistic religions today (Judaism and Christianity in particular) were not entirely monotheistic. Believers often provided allowance for the existence of deities posited by other religions. Certainly, they located their own god above all other divine beings, but these alternate beings were still recognized as \"real\" in some sense. \n\nTwo examples from Roman times that illustrate this point:\n\n1. Many early Christians believed pagan deities were demons. This made it a bad idea to eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods - you wouldn't want to eat anything that gave demons blood and made them stronger.\n\n2. King Herod saw no problem investing in the Jerusalem Temple while simultaneously building temples for pagan deities. \n\nThe point is, people recognized the existence of many divine beings in the world, even if they subscribed to a religion that is usually thought of as monotheistic in modern times. Believers of different religions may not have recognized each others' deities in the same manner, but there was still some basic level of recognition all the same.  \n\nSo the big-picture question: when did this begin to change? When and how did Judaism, Christianity, and other major monotheistic religions truly become monotheistic by rejecting the notion that other divine beings exist? \n\nFeel free to reference specific religions rather than generalize. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bojvl/when_did_monotheistic_religions_begin_precluding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c98ny1f"], "score": [3], "text": ["You are referring to [Henotheism](_URL_0_), the belief in the existence of multiple gods, but exclusive worship of a single one.\n\nEarly Judaism is believed to have been henotheistic, but at the time of the exile were fully monotheistic.\n\nChristianity were monotheistic from the beginning, since it inherited monotheism from Judaism. Early Christians did *not* recognize the existence of multiple gods, though they like Judaism did believe in \"lesser beings\" like angels and demons. By calling pagan deities for demons, they are denying that they are truly gods.\n\nA criticism raised towards Christianity was that it wasn't a truly monotheistic because it had both God and Jesus (and the holy spirit) as divine beings. The was attempted solved with the dogma of the trinity, which states that all three are the same substance, so it really a single God consisting of three \"persons\". "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism"]]}
{"q_id": "5c6acq", "title": "Who are the bourgeoisie and how do socialists, Marxist or otherwise, view them?", "selftext": "In high school I was taught that the bourgeoisie were society's middle class. I took only one History class in College and that was on Islamic civilization so I'm rather uninformed about this.\n\nToday in America we have left-leaning people like self-described socialist Bernie Sanders talk about their concern for the middle class. Aren't the bourgeoisie, and therefore the middle class, supposed to be enemies of the proletariat? Can someone explain this for me?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c6acq/who_are_the_bourgeoisie_and_how_do_socialists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9u8uif"], "score": [7], "text": ["'In high school I was taught that the bourgeoisie were society's middle class.' \n\nWhat you've got here is a problem of definitions. I'll clear this up first before addressing your main question.\n\nBourgeoisie: Marxist theory defines the bourgeoisie as those who own private property. In Marxist terminology, private property is productive property, like factories, mines, oil-wells, farms and so on,that is owned by a single individual or a small group of individuals, as opposed to being owned by society as a whole. By owning such property, the bourgeoisie are able to acquire wealth (in the form of profits), which they did not create and are not entitled to, by paying their employees less than the value they create (this is called Surplus Value).\n\nProletariat: The proletariat is the opposite of the bourgeoisie in that they are people who do not own private property. They therefore do not have a permanent objective source of income (profits from a business) to fund their lives, but must instead sell their labour to the bourgeoisie. In other words, in exchange for their work they are given a wage. A proletarian, therefore, is someone who sells their labour to another.\n\nMiddle Class: The general social definition of 'middle class' is far less precise. But generally it is considered to mean people who: are reasonably well educated, such as having a degree from a good university; work in a technical or professional job, perhaps as a doctor, lawyer or middle-ranking civil servant; and enjoy a comfortable standard of living, i.e. they live in a nice neighborhood (perhaps the suburbs), don't have to worry about paying the bills, and can afford luxury goods (big TV, nice car, foreign holidays). \n\nThe definitions of bourgeois and proletarian can overlap with middle class. Allow me to demonstrate this with two examples: \n\nFirst, imagine a man called John. John owns a small factory that makes widgets. His business is reasonably successful, it is profitable enough to provide him with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. He has a fairly big house, he drives a nice car and goes on holiday to Spain once a year. John makes his money by extracting surplus value from his employees. John, therefore, is middle class and bourgeois.\n\nNow, imagine a woman called Joanne. Joanne is a doctor, with a medical degree from a well respected university. She lives next to John in a similarly nice house. Her car isn't as nice as John's, not because she can't afford a nice car but because she isn't interested in cars. Instead, she loves art and spends some of her disposable income on collecting it. She also goes on holiday, but she prefers visiting France. Joanne works at a private hospital; she sells her labour to the company that owns the hospital (and the hospital profits from this). Joanne is thus middle class and proletarian.\n\nClearly then, the proletariat and the middle class are not enemies because they are not mutually exclusive groups.\n\nI hope this answers your question, although I'm sure it also raises more questions. Please feel free to come over to r/socialism to ask those follow up questions, as that's a more appropriate forum for political discussion than here. :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8byiop", "title": "Why is everyone related to Ghengis Khan?", "selftext": "Heard the a good portion of men can find direct links to the Khan. Why did he happen to be the one with so many descendants and not other figures from his time period? Why are so many related to him??", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8byiop/why_is_everyone_related_to_ghengis_khan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxao84p"], "score": [21], "text": ["This claim is based on a paper by Tatiana Zerjal titled [The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols](_URL_0_), which appeared in the *American Journal of Human Genetics*.\n\nCouple of things to clarify first:\n\n* Genetics can't narrow down descent to one person who lived so long ago. What the paper actually says is that about 1/200 men alive across the world today have an ancestor who lived in Mongolia about a thousand years ago. We can deduce that this person must have been politically powerful and prolific, so Genghis is a good candidate.\n\n* This marker was found on the Y-chromosome, so we're talking about patrilineal descent only. We haven't actually discovered Genghis Khan's grave so we don't have a sample of his DNA. The originator of this lineage might have been Genghis Khan's father or grandfather or great grandfather, since they fit the time frame as well as Genghis himself.\n\nSo the genetics evidence says that some Mongol male who lived about a thousand years ago in Mongolia left behind a lineage that has grown quite tremendously in the years since, and now includes about 1/200th of the world's population. How did this happen?\n\nIn order for a lineage to dominate others, it must consistently have more individuals who survive to reproduce than other competing lineages. So the short answer is that more males in this lineage survived to have children than was the world average at those time points.\n\nNote that we're **not** saying that it's because Genghis or his sons had a lot of children (though they did). That alone wouldn't account for it. We're saying that for ~35 generations since Genghis, his descendants consistently had more children who survived to reproduce than the world average. The 1 in 200 figure is the result of selection exerted *over 1000 years*, not due to the large number of any one person, whether Genghis or Kublai or someone else.\n\nHow much selection pressure is needed to account for these results? If you average it out over 34 generations, then each generation produced 36% more male offspring who reproduced than other people around them. That's a very high number which can't be explained by chance or genetic drift or any biological factor, so it must have been *social factors* which caused this lineage to be so prolific.\n\nThis is where history mixes with biology. The Mongols created a huge impression on people all over the world, an impression that was powerful and long-lasting enough that kings and rulers gained legitimacy for centuries by having a connection to Genghis Khan. Being able to trace your ancestry to Genghis gave you legitimacy and put you at an advantage, whether you were a king or tribal leader or just war chief. This advantage lasted for hundreds of years after Genghis died.\n\nSo the reason why Genghis Khan's lineage did extraordinarily well is because for hundreds of years, his male descendants were powerful kings and leaders across much of the world. To some extent, this may have enabled them to have more children through more wives, but the real reason for the difference is that more of their sons survived to reproductive age. Infant mortality was terrible in the old days, so even a small advantage that a child might gain from a wealthy and powerful father could produce a significant difference in survival rates.\n\nIf each of the generations since Genghis produced 36% more sons who survived to have children of their own, you can explain the 1 in 200 Mongol ancestry attributable to him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297\\(07\\)60587-4"]]}
{"q_id": "5aketn", "title": "After Japan surrendered in WW2 were there immediately Japanese women marrying Western servicemen and moving West? Or was there too much racism and bitter feelings for marriage?", "selftext": "japanese and westerner relations were strictly dating, non marriage for many years until racism and bitterness died off?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5aketn/after_japan_surrendered_in_ww2_were_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9j4gd7"], "score": [10], "text": ["**Part I**\n\nAll told, there were some 60000 Japanese war brides that made their way to the US between 1945 and 1967. This was a much smaller number than their equivalent German war brides, as well as other European women. Marriage between Japanese women and American men was an issue laden with a good deal of racial discrimination and issues of national identity that were not present with other Axis powers. Although there was some fear of \"fraternazis\" in the early years of OMGUS administration, the US military government's acceptance of marriage soon became one of its tools for the wider rehabilitation of Germany after the Third Reich. Although the same impulse to rehabilitate Japan also existed among SCAP, there was a much greater reluctance on the part of the military government to sanction such marriages.\n \nThis leeriness of Japanese war brides was already apparent early in the postwar occupation. The War Brides Act of 1945 in theory streamlined the red tape associated with marriages between American servicemen and occupation personnel and foreign women, but the Act explicitly stated that its process did not apply for individuals who were subject to the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924. This rather racist legislation, which enjoyed a broad bipartisan support, effectively ended immigration from East Asian and other non-European countries. Marriages between Japanese or other Asians thus had to jump through a number of hoops for the bride to legally enter the US. Servicemen would frequently petition their congressman to have a special act of congress passed to enable their wives to enter the US legally. As pressures mounted, Truman signed  Public Law No. 126 in 28 June 1947 which allowed a thirty-day period in which approved marriages could bypass the 1924 exclusions, and the AP reported some 823 marriages during this grace period. After that, servicemen had to go through the US consulate and congress to gain immigration approval. The case of Frank Endo, a *Nissei* American citizen, exemplifies some of the barriers to immigration. Even though he was ethnically Japanese and worked as a translator in the Tokyo War Crimes, he had to engage in a two and a half year battle with red tape and a special act of Congress to have his Japanese wife enter the US in 1950.  Adding to these federal legal barriers, a number of states pre-Loving had anti-miscegenation laws on the books that made these marriages illegal and void in the eyes of the state government. In a 31 May 1952 news item in the black newspaper *The Chicago Defender* on Mississippi anti-miscegenation laws, the *Defender* noted that white servicemen were now subject to these laws, which could entail fines or a prison sentence and tartly observed:\n\n >  The situation is regarded as a \"boomerang,\" wherein laws erected to \"keep Negroes in their place\" are indirectly shackling unfortunate veterans whose ancestors perhaps had a hand in making them. \n\nAlthough the *Defender*'s sympathies are with the veterans, a number of civil rights activists noted that Japanese war brides highlighted the existence of these laws and their hypocrisies. \n\nThere were other extralegal and negative disincentives preventing Japanese and American intermarriages. One common strategy was to reassign a serviceman if they applied for or even elicited interest in marrying a Japanese woman. One serviceman, Michael Forrester, recalled that even though he volunteered for an extra term of service in Japan (normally something rather uncommon), once he asked for the information on the marriage process, he soon received orders to return stateside. In the early days of SCAP, other servicemen would be shunted around the country by their superior officers if it appeared that they wanted to wed a Japanese woman. Another SCAP barrier was a regimen of psychological testing of both bride and groom to ensure that the marriage would last. These tests were both invasive and quite time-consuming and worked to  wear down applicants and strangle thoughts of marriage while they were still in the cradle. For civilians in SCAP, marrying a foreigner also meant a loss of security clearances, which meant that their career could suddenly reach a dead-end. \n\nThe publicly stated rationale for these barriers and disincentives often was a paternalistic concern for a healthy marriage, but racism typically lurked beneath this disapproval. The Australian government, whose immigration and citizenship policies were much more stringent and racist than the US, maintained a similar window like  Public Law No. 126, but March 1952 Reuters report, Immigration Minister Harold Holt stated \n\n > Before any Japanese will be allowed into Australia, the authorities will have to be satisfied their marriage was bona fide and there is a reasonable chance of it remaining unbroken. Each case will be considered on merits.  \n\nthe prospect of Japanese marriage also exposed racial anxieties about American men rejecting brassy and independent American women in lieu of a pliant and submissive Japanese bride. In a somewhat hyperbolic 25 April 1954 letter to the *Chicago Daily Tribune* entitled \"American Girls First\", Harley Barnes warned that state sanctioning of war brides would  have dire consequences for the republic. Although Barnes notes that these war brides are photogenic, they are :\n\n > collectively responsible for the creation of an American army of old maids. The votes of these spinsters added to the 7,500,000 widows in this country are sufficient to form the nucleus of a feminist America First party which will have what it takes for political fission. \n\nAlthough the letter lumped in European women with Japanese brides, Barnes\u2019s racial anxieties were apparent when she noted that if the US occupied China and when \n\n > GIs start marrying millions of Mongolian maidens, the American girls at home may wake up to what internationalism really means. \n\nA number of SCAP's female employees likewise attacked intermarriage as a threat to the domestic order. A number of reporters noted by 1947 that a number of servicemen were seeking to marry their *baby-san*s (Japanese girlfriends). In a 11 November  1950 *Chicago Defender* expose on Japanese marriages, \"Why Tan Yanks Go For Japanese Girls,\" *Defender* reporter Alex Wilson quoted a number of Red Cross women in SCAP that disapproved of marriage. Ethel Payne, a volunteer at an African-American service club saying:\n\n > By tradition, the Japanese woman is submissive. To the man of her choice or the one who wins her attention she presents a convincing superficial respectfulness and affection. Then there is the color factor. The hue of the girls range from very fair to a nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall for them . \n\nAnother volunteer, Thelma Scott, mirrored Payne\u2019s sentiments. According to her:\n\n > there is no comparison between the deceit of the Japanese woman and that of the American woman. The American woman won\u2019t keep her mouth shut and resents bending to a man. It is not unusual on the other hand, for the Japanese girl to shut up when ordered to do so and to voluntarily look after every whim of her mate while he is with her.  \n\nWilson further notes in his report that such sentiments were the rule rather than the exception. The racial anxieties of Payne, whose engagement with the *Defender* in Japan led to her own journalist career, was barely submerged with the fear that African-American servicemen were racially \"marrying up\" with an *ersatz* white woman (fair or nut-brown skinned). The white American media also hewed to these same racial anxieties and media depictions and stories of Japanese war brides tended to deal white-Japanese or *Nissei*-Japanese marriages to the exclusion of African-American-Japanese partnerships.\n\nBut the racial anxieties over Japanese women were not always tinged with fear of male abandonment. In her 1949 memoir/guidebook  *Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Postwar Japan*,  Lucy Herndon Crockett noted:\n\n > Baby-san and her humble sisters nevertheless are held up as having qualities which our own women would do well to emulate\u2014qualities which make the proud American beauty in contrast seem harsh, petulant, talkative, restless, spoiled, and arrogant.\n\nOther Red Cross workers with SCAP also saw that their job was to uplift Japanese women's subordinate place in society and reform them. For these workers, American servicemen subsidized what they saw as a retrograde culture of submissiveness and male domination that was counterproductive to the larger mission of reforming Japan. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "257mo4", "title": "What is the oldest known example we have of humanity introducing an invasive species to a new area?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/257mo4/what_is_the_oldest_known_example_we_have_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cheid5v", "cheqms8"], "score": [33, 19], "text": ["Humans introducing themselves to areas outside of Africa.\n\nAlthough, this depends somewhat on your definition of \"humanity\", as there were several times in pre-history when hominids seem to have migrated out of Africa.  If you mean \"anatomically modern humans\", or \"homo sapiens sapiens\" then this would be circa 100,000 years ago (although various pre-homo sapiens hominids had migrated out of Africa previously).\n\nAt the time when homo sapiens sapiens migrated out of Africa they seem to have had no domesticated animals, and had not adopted agriculture, so they would not have introduced any new animals or plants to new areas.\n\nOther than themselves as an invasive species, they may have introduced their own parasites, and possibly (though less likely, due to sparse populations) some diseases.", "Until something older comes along, I'm voting Dingo, arriving 4500-18300 yrs ago in Australia [link](_URL_0_).  This deserves an asterisk because (1) the date range is determined by dna testing rather than some written record, (2) there appears to be some debate as to whether it came with us on a boat or wandered over from New Guinea when it had a land bridge and people had been in Australia for ~20k years.\n\nAlso, I would quibble with humanity outside of Africa being invasive.  IF we had been placed somewhere by a higher species, and that Aliens dude on the History Channel was right all along, only then would we be invasive.  If any other species gets somewhere on its own, then thrives, that's its native habitat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2011/09/dingoes-originated-in-china-18,000-years-ago/"]]}
{"q_id": "16zi71", "title": "Why are Italian surnames so varied?", "selftext": "Try and think of two unrelated Italian people who have the same surname (after a long time the only example I could think of was Roberto and Dino Baggio). Many countries have very common surnames: eg. Jones, Price in Wales; Kim, Lee in Korea. So why is there such a diverse array of surnames in Italy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16zi71/why_are_italian_surnames_so_varied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c80t8ag", "c80terd", "c80vh8m", "c81naxy"], "score": [4, 3, 10, 4], "text": ["Many italian surnames like \"da Vinci\" is referring to places, in Leonardo da Vinci's case it was the village/town of Vinci. Names are so varied partly Since there are a plethora of different villages, towns and cities in Italy.", "Italy was not even a [unified country](_URL_2_) until the 19th century. One consequence of a long history of several independent states on the peninsula was a very diverse set of [dialects](_URL_1_). Upon unification, a particular dialect (that of Florence; in part due to that being the language Dante used) was selected as the [national language](_URL_0_), which at the time only around 3% of the population spoke. So due to the varying languages, it is not surprising that last names are much more varied than those from nations that were unified for centuries longer than Italy.", "In Italy, surnames have generally been formed in many more ways than in other countries. For example, surnames can be patronymic (e.g. Di Michele), geographical (e.g. Ancona), occupational (e.g. Sarti), or they can be based on a nickname (e.g. Basso), etc.\n\nTo this, add the fact that, for well over a millennium, Italy was divided into a myriad of states and statelets, each of which had its own language. For example, in some regions you can find the surnames \"Riccio\" or \"Ricci\" (meaning \"curly\" in the singular and plural), while in other regions those same surnames would be \"Rizzo\" and \"Rizzi\".\n\nSource: [this page](_URL_0_), plus I'm Italian.", "The most common surname in Italy is Rossi/Russo, with \"Mario Rossi\" sort of being their version of a John Smith. Other common surnames, depending on where you're from are Esposito, Ferarri, Bianchi, Gallo, etc. However, as has been mentioned, Italy has not always been a unified state, which has resulted in there being about 47 different dialects, and along with them, highly varied naming customs. My own last name (Pennacchia) could either mean \"panache\" or \"plume of feathers\" depending on translation, and the \"plume of feathers\" thing could mean either that someone in my background was a hat maker or something, OR that someone in my background was especially tall and thin. It also happens to be so rare that I am actually related to everyone else who has it- either in the masculine form or feminine form. The last name of some of my relatives in Italy, however, is much more common- Palmieri- which means like, people who carried palms for religious purposes- and I'm certainly not related to every Palmieri in the world.\n\nIn addition to all the differences between names back in the homeland, those of us here also have the craziness of Ellis Island to contend with. Many Italians who came over had their surnames changed to whatever city or town they were coming from, or they were spelled incorrectly or differently, or shortened or bastardized in any number of ways. In my own family, one brother took the masculine form of our name and another took the feminine. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_dialects", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification"], ["http://www.lifeinitaly.com/lifestyle/last-names"], []]}
{"q_id": "19agyx", "title": "14th century islamic explorers reached the Americas before Columbus?", "selftext": "My school is hosting a speaker, a former member of the Nation of Islam who mentioned this theory as a matter of fact, without giving much detail or background information to substantiate the claim. Is there any evidence for this theory?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19agyx/14th_century_islamic_explorers_reached_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ma2oq", "c8mcsan"], "score": [14, 7], "text": ["No, no, and no.  Islamic sailors from SW Asia or N/E Africa theoretically had the know-how, but they had no *reason* for doing so.  This is a variant of the \"Abu Bakr II sent a Malian fleet westward into the unknown in 1310\" account that has become sort of a staple of radical Afrocentric history.  Molefi Kete Asante is usually credited with such views, although Ivan van Sertima (*They Came Before Columbus*, 1976) was perhaps the earliest major proponent and remains the font for its acceptance.  As you might expect, [his statement rests on Arabic transmission of information from Mali, not first-hand accounts](_URL_0_).  As Mali was eclectically Muslim, this grafted over to the black nationalist Nation of Islam pretty seamlessly.  But there is zero evidence to suggest they ever got anywhere (much less returned), or indeed that they ever left in those numbers from West Africa.  Even van Sertima could only establish (badly) that the *theoretical* possibility existed.  I therefore put that claim in the same bucket I put Gavin Menzies and his \"Chinese fleets *everywhere*\" crap: technically possible, but logically ridiculous and historically without proof.  (Please do not ask what else I put in that bucket.)", "To add to khosikulu's point about historiographical one upmanship, if the speaker decides to go down that route then don't forget to mention the Viking's settling Vinland"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=RcBkDlJ7qjwC&amp;lpg=PA448&amp;ots=ymj2lX6ihS&amp;dq=molefi%20kete%20asante%20%22discovery%20of%20america%22&amp;pg=PA448#v=onepage&amp;q=molefi%20kete%20asante%20%22discovery%20of%20america%22&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "7pue43", "title": "During the Middle Ages, how easy was it to mess up and get yourself tortured?", "selftext": "There were so many horrifying torture methods during the Middle Ages. How easy was it to piss off the wrong person and land yourself in a world of hurt? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pue43/during_the_middle_ages_how_easy_was_it_to_mess_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsknbn2"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might have a better chance of getting a response if you specify a specific region. The answer to your question is probably very different if we're talking about France, China, Arabia, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62qoe5", "title": "Montgomery seems to receive a lot of hate from WWII scholars. Why and what's a counter argument?", "selftext": "I'm taking a class on the Normandy campaign, and my professor has a bias against Montgomery as well as other books I've read. Was he really so bad?  He accomplished a lot, so what did he do right or well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62qoe5/montgomery_seems_to_receive_a_lot_of_hate_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfpuw5m"], "score": [10], "text": ["Is your professor American?\n\nMuch of what I wrote over on this post is applicable here. _URL_0_\n\nThere are likely few serious students of military history who would say that Montgomery was the best general the British had in WW2. (Slim usually gets the nod). However, he was successful, there is no denying it.\n\nUnfortunately, he had a significant ego problem, and managed to piss off the Americans in spades. The end result is that one would find very few Americans of the time who would say much good about the man. British folks at the time said much good about him.\n\nThe other minor issue is that many of the things Monty did well generally only affected the British, not the Americans. His first WW2 success was in conducting a fighting withdrawl with his portion of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940. The US wasn't even in the war, and all they saw was \"British forced out of France.\" Any nuances are completely missed.\n\nThen there was the success at El Alamein, where he made his reputation with the British forces. Again, pretty much no Americans around to bear witness.\n\nAmericans often consider him to have been overly cautious. Given, however, the fact that UK manpower was, well, running a bit thin, this does not strike me as being an unreasonable position. No significant blunders happened as a result in Sicily or Italy after having dealt with the Axis in North Africa.\n\nMonty was the chief planner of the land portion of D-Day in France, which generally worked well enough. The European Theater is where he is often considered to have made three significant blunders.\n\nFirstly, Goodwood: A tank-heavy attack into the teeth of German anti-tank defenses, with obvious results. In Monty's defense, he didn't really have much of a choice. He had no infantry to throw in, (see aforementioned resources and caution), and he had to make a large attack in order to reduce the opposition to the Americans and allow them to break out.\n\nThen there was Market-Garden, the Arnhem assault. This could be considered an unforced error, or it could be considered a gamble worth trying which just didn't pay off. Not many generals had a career without a single setback.\n\nThe third was political. In the Battle of the Bulge, he was given command of a bunch of US forces, and generally did quite well with them. The problem was that he gave a press conference at the end, where his verbiage could have perhaps have been better chosen, and it was interpreted as his claiming to have saved the Americans. It wasn't what he was trying for, but it was another definite unforced error.\n\nA fourth cause of irritation for the Americans was his persistent badgering to be placed in overall command of land forces. This was actually not an unreasonable proposal: The command structure of the time was that Eisenhower commanded two Army Groups, in addition to air and sea forces. If the campaign were refought under today's structure, there would, indeed, be a CLFCC (Coalition Forces Land Component Commander) in between the CFC (Coalition Forces Commander) and the operational units. Of course, Monty really wanted to see himself in the position, but the idea of creating the position was not wrong, and given that Supreme Allied Commander was American, the Air and Naval commanders were both British, why would not the Land commander be British as well?\n\nAnyway, Monty got back into form, crossed the Rhine, and generally did well enough for the rest of the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pi60l/was_field_marshal_montgomerys_meticulous_planning/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ss9ze", "title": "How did Pakistan repair its relations with Bangladesh so quickly despite the 1971 genocide?", "selftext": "A quick read of this [wikipedia article](_URL_1_) indicates that both countries had repaired their bilateral relations as early as 1974. How did this happen when Bangladesh holds the Pakistani Army responsible for the [1971 genocide](_URL_0_) that killed 3 million and displaced 10 million? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ss9ze/how_did_pakistan_repair_its_relations_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5p5vb", "ce679ff"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["During the war of independence, Pakistan destroyed most of the infrastructure and burnt all the money that was kept in the central bank. So it became very difficult for the AL Government to run the country with so few resources and very little international cooperation. The Arab world was not helping Bangladesh due to anti-Bangladesh lobbying by Pakistan and USA did not provide food aid because of Bangladesh's policy of exporting jute to Cuba. In that situation Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was desperately seeking help from all around the world. In a bid to gain trust from the OIC, Sheikh Mujib visited Pakistan for OIC summit in 1974. And Bhutto, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan visited Bangladesh in the same year. It started the bilateral communication for the first time after the war. In 1975 Sheikh Mujib was killed in a coup d'\u00e9tat which some historians claim was orchestrated by CIA and ISI. ", "A lot factors contributed to this. Firstly, besides destroying the infrastructure, just before their defeat in the 1971 war, they also murdered a huge number of intellectuals- journalists, doctors, engineers, teachers, professors etc. So when the war ended, there was not many people who can raise voices, take responsibilities of building a new country from war and stop people from connecting with Pakistan so quickly.\n\nAlso after the war, a general amnesty was declared to stop any bloodshed which kept the people against Bangladesh, who were members of the now banned Jamat e Islami political party, out of jail and they relocated to their life in general population far from where they were known for their atrocities. A lot of them turned to be very religious. As pious people are in general accepted as good people and the simple minded and uneducated rural population see them as respected personnel. \n\nAlso after the war, the political climate was not very stable, two of the leaders of the war were murdered in coup- Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman (No relation). The former was accused of a lot of corruption and the later brought back the political party Jamat e Islami, which consists of the previously mentioned people against Bangladesh. As a result, there were no central leader to lead or unite the people under a common banner and everyone was distrusting of everyone. The army took advantage of the situation and grabbed power. The army and Jamat e Islami party increased the level of relation with Pakistan due to their pre-war relations with their counterparts in Pakistan. Combining all of these, you can say that the people was suffering from an identity crisis. You can find more information about it [here](_URL_0_).\n\nAt the same time, the student wing of the Jamat e Islami, which was renamed Islami Chatro Shibir, had started abducting, attacking and killing local politicians- at the root level. They did this very carefully so that no one can directly prove that they are behind these killings, but still suspect them. The goal was to remove the competition and establish the Jamat e Islami leaders as legit politicians who became accepted to the general population by donating large amounts of money. \n\nYou have to understand that East and West Pakistan were created based on religion. So even if there was cultural difference between East and West Pakistan, both countries consists of muslim majority. In Islam it is said that every muslim is each other's brother. Because of the previously mentioned identity crisis, as timed went on mutual cooperation increased, general population started viewing them as a general neighbouring country instead of enemies. Also after the assassination of Sheikh Mujib, the general feeling toward India was getting progressively worse due to various reason. Due to SAARC, OIC and general international relation, Pakistan became kind of accepted in Bangladesh as a neighbour. For example, army officers were sent there to get trainings, my father was sent there to get trained as a telecommunication engineer in the state owned national phone company (BTTB).\n\nThis is the Bangladesh's side of the story. On the Pakistan side, as far as I heard, the general people to this day are still ignorant about the genocide, rape and destruction during the war. The general people and soldiers were told that they are going on a religious war to kill hindus to free the country from kafirs. They have not yet apologized for the atrocities. So from their side, they don't have any problem reconnecting with Bangladesh. \n\nSorry for the wall of text. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_atrocities", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh%E2%80%93Pakistan_relations"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indemnity_Act"]]}
{"q_id": "55fj36", "title": "Who paid more tax, Roman Citizens or non- citizens?", "selftext": "To make it more specefic, lets put this question in the context of the Antonines. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55fj36/who_paid_more_tax_roman_citizens_or_non_citizens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8a505u"], "score": [14], "text": ["Roman citizens paid no taxes, at least not necessarily. Roman state revenue was divided into the vectigals and tribute. Tribute was, by the late Republic, levied only on provincials, and it constituted *by far* the majority of state revenues. The vectigals included a number of duties, most of which were some sort of customs duties (the *portoria*) or rents on the *ager publicus*. With the exception of the inheritance tax the vectigals could therefore be levied on either citizens or non-citizens--but citizens did not necessarily do anything that would incur payment of such a duty. More on this [here](_URL_0_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3oiqi4/what_was_the_roman_tax_system_like/"]]}
{"q_id": "1p9gnn", "title": "Did the Russian military fail in World War One? If so Why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p9gnn/did_the_russian_military_fail_in_world_war_one_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd0e7f1", "cd18ou4"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The Russian Army entered the war with the largest standing army in the world with 1.4 million soldiers.  While there was a plan in place to send four armies into East Prussia that plan was modified to send only two  groups as many Russian perceived Austria-Hungary as a greater threat.   Early defeats at the Battle of Tanneberg and at Lodz, inflicted heavy casualties.\n\nThe heavy losses made recruitment more difficult. The Russian Kerenski Offensive in July, 1917 failed and led to the October revolution when Lenin came to power and entered negotiations that ended fighting on the Eastern Front in December of 1917. Almost 15 million served in the Russian Army during the First World War. Casualties totalled an estimated 1.8 million killed, 2.8 million wounded and 2.4 million taken prisoner according to Spartacus Educational (_URL_0_).\n\nIn first hand accounts Arthur Ransome who made several visits to the Eastern Front reported the Russians to be ill equipped and ill clothed. The morale of the Russian troops was not high and many were probably happy when Russia withdrew from the War.", "I think it fair to say the Russian military had failed in WWI. As of 1917 and the subsequent surrender by the Bolsheviks there was no apparent prospect of the Russians turning the situation around and pushing the Germans out of Russian territory.\n\nAs to why, there are a whole stack of reasons. Here are some:\n\n- The Russian army was large, but its quality left a lot to be desired. At the Battle of Tannenberg the Russians couldn't effectively communicate their orders over radio in code... [so they just sent out their orders in the open](_URL_0_), which meant the German commanders knew their every move. By 1915 the Russian army was really feeling the pinch in terms of material shortages, notably in the shortages of shells and rifles. Insufficient weapons and ammunition naturally effect the capacity of troops to fight. Norman Stone devotes a whole chapter to this in his book on the Eastern Front.\n\n- This leads to our next point which is political/leadership failures. Norman Stone gives many of the reasons for shortage as due to bad planning before the war (people thought it would be a short war, so stockpiles had been limited), and failure to adapt during the war (preference seems to have been to import from the other Entente powers, despite their own shortages etc.). This is before we open the question of whether Russian generals were really up to the task as so on.\n\n- Late in the conflict, as ComradeSomo hints, the Russian army started experiencing mass desertion and difficulties of command due to the formation of soldier's soviets in the ranks - which would refuse to follow some orders. Mass desertion was partly political, partly a morale thing and partly driven by a belief among the soldiers from rural areas that land ownership was about to be redivided, and they wanted their share (on the latter point I think Bruce Lincoln mentions this in his text on the Russian Civil War).\n\n- Another element of the morale problem was some troops from parts of the Russian Empire were beginning to question why they were fighting for the Russians at all. A key example of this was the Latvian Riflemen, who ended up siding with the Bolsheviks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWrussiaA.htm#source"], ["http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwi/articles/tannenberg.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "5ar87j", "title": "Authorship of the iliad and of the odyssey : why homer isn't homer after all ?", "selftext": "I'm currently reading an article by martin west, \"[the invention of homer](_URL_0_)\", where he makes the case that \"homer\" is a fictitious name invented by the homeridae that didn't appear at least a century after the poems' composition.\n\nIn and of itself his argumentation doesn't rule out the possibility of a common authorship. It \"simply\" shows that the \"consensus of antiquity\" is utterly meaningless and has no bearing on the issue because the homeridae didn't have a clue about who composed what poem of their repertoire : they simply attributed everything to someone (surprisingly) called \"homer\", even compositions of their own.\n\nBut in the introduction of the article west takes as granted the idea that a common authorship doesn't add up to begin with. To quote him \n\n >  This is what is indicated by the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary and geographical perspective and by the apparently imitative caracter of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad.\n\nHow so ? what are do those \"many differences\" look like ? to what extent are they really compelling ? How people came about the idea that there was no way those two compositions had a single common \"author\" (whatever that means) ? when ? how mainstream is this idea today in modern scholarship ? (Cos' it certainly *isn't* in popular culture.)\n\nIf i want to read a single up-to-date article/book on the matter that is both readable and exhaustive, what should i go for ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ar87j/authorship_of_the_iliad_and_of_the_odyssey_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9iv54q"], "score": [9], "text": ["This is what we call the 'Homeric Question', and it's a big one. The subject of many articles, books and careers. Consequently, I don't feel I can hope to answer it comprehensively by any stretch, but let's see what we can do...\n\nThe Ancient Greeks absolutely thought that Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. (There might have been *some* question over this at various points in time, but most of our sources treat the question as a commonly known fact). It seems highly likely that he was considered to be the author of other epic poems  (about the Trojan War and other subjects). They didn't know much about him, though, and as such he was the subject of much mythology and speculation - a lot of people compare him to Shakespeare today in that respect. Plato (Republic, 595-606) Herodotus, (2.53, 11.116) and Thucydides (3.104) are just some of the Classical Greek authors who help us understand who the Greeks thought Homer was. He was THE poet and deeply admired, even revered/worshipped. Barbara Graziosi's 2002 book 'Inventing Homer' provides an excellent analysis of the ancient Greek view.\n\nSo when did people start questioning this? \n\nAs early as the 1790s, commentators were questioning whether Homer was really the one author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Friedrich Wolf's 1795 edition of the Iliad suggested that the poem was formed of several shorter stories that had been orally composed to start with. Whilst a few scholars at the time agreed on the basis of a logical argument that these traditional tales would have been passed down orally at first, it was only in the 1920s that serious literary, linguistic and anthropological analysis gave strength to this theory. Milman Parry's critical work *The Making of Homeric Verse* is now, in this respect at least, widely accepted. Many scholars after him have elaborated on and developed our understanding of how oral tradition helped shape the poems as we know them today, from narrative structure to detailed linguistic components. Indeed, the poets within the poems (especially Demodocus, the bard of the Odyssey) seen to represent exactly this kind of poet.\n\nOf course, an oral tradition doesn't exclude the possibility that one talented poet crafted The Version that became used across the Greek, and later the whole, world. This argument is a slightly different one...\n\nMost scholars, I believe, now hold that the Iliad and the Odyssey are sufficiently cohesive to have one author each. Najmar Dietrich's 1995 article 'Letter Distribution and authorship in early Greek epics' provides an internal textual analysis methodology now employed by many addressing this question on a linguistic level. The same cannot necessarily be said of the Iliad and Odyssey together. \n\nSo, what differences make people think the Iliad and the Odyssey might not have the same author?\n\nHere, Martin West's *The Making of the Iliad* (2010) *The Invention of Homer* (1999) and Gregory Nagy's 2001 article 'Homeric Poetry' are the most famous and strongest proponents of the theory of multiple authorship. \n\nTheir arguments rest on a variety of elements:\n- linguistic differences\n- the textual transmission of the poems (I.e. the difficulty tracing the text to a clear single version anywhere near the supposed date(s) of authorship and the possibility that others could have interfered with the version we have, even if there was an original by a Homer!)\n- different concepts of religion/portrayal of the gods \n- different geographic focus (Iliad in Greek East/Asia Minor, Odyssey in western/Aegean Greece) \n- different portrayal of characters, for example the Phoenicians seem to be admired in the Iliad and portrayed negatively in the Odyssey (West 2010).\n\nHonestly, there are so many components and technicalities to this part of the question and it's beyond my realm of real expertise to go into that level of explanation (my Ancient Greek just isn't up to scratch, among other things). Suffice to say, there are lots of possible arguments here. \n\nSo where does that leave us now? Do we have a consensus? Not really. Maybe that the poems come from an oral tradition. Probably that *most* of each of the Iliad and the Odyssey  (see textual transmission note above). Will we ever have consensus? Probably not. The evidence just isn't there - we have pretty much nothing from the time believed (by some) to be contemporary with Homer (if he existed!). The Ancient Greeks certainly don't seem to have been interested in reporting theories on alternative authorship, and even current technical linguistic analysis is pretty inconclusive, because language is only a little bit science and a lot flexible expression and craft...\n\nIn general, this debate is well-known and mainstream in classical scholarship, but views remain divided. Trends ebb and flow in terms of how the question is viewed and why/if it matters. \n\nIs there one good book on the subject? I really can't say there is. I've neglected a handful of eminent Homeric scholars in this answer already because this is one of the grand subjects for serious Classicists to tackle. I like Graziosi's *Inventing Homer*, because it brings the debate to life through the ancient sources really well. But for a summary of the current state of the Homeric Question and an analysis of it's academic history, you could do worse that Martin West's 2010 paper 'The Homeric Question Today'."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/639863"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25flgb", "title": "is it true that soviet soldiers yelled ura when beggining a charge?", "selftext": "i recently re-played Call Of Duty: World at War and in several moments in the russian campaign you can hear your comrades yell this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25flgb/is_it_true_that_soviet_soldiers_yelled_ura_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chgr95k", "chh4cwg"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["Yes, it was a common occurance during ww2. Russian soldiers have used \"Urrah\" (or \"Ura\") with a very long last a as a battle cry for a charge for a long time, at least since the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877.\n\nCompare to the US Marines and their \"Oorah!\" war cry.\n\nIt is still done at the victory parade in Moscow every year.\n\n[See this video from 2007](_URL_1_).\n\n[Here's a video of the Bulgarian army doing it at a parade](_URL_0_).", "oddly, there have been a couple of related questions lately; check these out for more info\n\n[Did the Red Army really shout 'Ura' as a battle cry?](_URL_1_)\n\n[What are the origins of the Russian military cheer ura, and how does its origins compare to the cheer of the U.S Marines](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=p5Yo8haGrDc", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=EbjQeW8KRn0"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22xlvj/what_are_the_origins_of_the_russian_military/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t2gd1/did_the_red_army_really_shout_ura_as_a_battle_cry/"]]}
{"q_id": "3h8f9a", "title": "How many missions did the average RAF pilot fly during World War 2?", "selftext": "Assuming I am an RAF officer that was commissioned in early 1941, if I made it to the end of the war, on average, how many missions would I have flown by then?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3h8f9a/how_many_missions_did_the_average_raf_pilot_fly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu5qepv"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are rather too many variables to be able to give a simple average, principally: type of aircraft, definition of \"mission\" and geographical location.\n\n1941 is a good starting point, as that's when the Air Ministry started to formalise the idea for tours of duty. Prior to that it was generally down to the judgement of individual Commanding Officers, and COs still had some discretion under the guidelines issued so things could vary.\n\nTours varied between the main units of the RAF: Fighter Command, Bomber Command and Coastal Command (there were also other areas such as Transport Command and Army Cooperation Command). In Fighter Command, tours were generally judged by flying time rather than number of missions; in 1941 the Air Council issued a general rule that \"personnel should be relieved from operational flying after a maximum of 200 hours in one tour\". After a tour, pilots would be rotated for six months, typically as an instructor in an OTU (Operational Training Unit), before starting another tour.\n\nAs sorties could be anything from low-level \"Rhubarb\" sweeps over enemy territory to long, tedious defensive patrols over convoys with a fairly low probability of encountering enemy aircraft, the contribution of flying time to the 200 hour total could be adjusted; generally, defensive sorties only ranked as 50% value when calculating the time.\n\nEven within Fighter Command there were variations, with night fighters at times having shorter tours (100 hours), and fighter pilots in Air Command South East Asia having longer tours (300 hours); tours could also finish after 12 or 18 months if the flying hour totals weren't reached.\n\nIn Bomber Command, tours were generally by number of completed operations, typically 30 for a first tour, 20 for a second tour (again this could vary, the Pathfinder force did tours of 45 operations). A sortie was considered a completed operation if the target was successfully bombed, so aborted missions didn't count. Again, the types of mission varied from bombing heavily defended targets deep within Germany to dropping leaflets over occupied Europe, the latter counting as only 1/3 of an operation. \n\nVery broadly, a typical fighter pilot might rack up 250 - 500 combat missions from 1941 to 1945; a bomber pilot, perhaps 50 - 100 if they survived (considering Bomber Command losses were averaging 5% at times, completing one tour, let alone more, was statistically unlikely)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zt0mi", "title": "In 1996, Michael Jordan, the most successful basketball player of all time, starred in the experimental children's film Space Jam. Given his wealth and the nature of the project, what spurred Jordan to take on Space Jam?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zt0mi/in_1996_michael_jordan_the_most_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cypoc7z"], "score": [5], "text": ["\"Experimental\" feels like a strange word choice for an $80 million production based on a wildly successful series of shoe commercials that employed a couple hundred animators. It wasn't doing anything terribly new; mixing softly-rendered cartoon characters with live action was bold and risky in 1988 when \"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?\" came out, but by 1996 it was a pretty normal thing to see a hyper-real Tony the Tiger hanging out with live action kids in ads. It was still kinda cool but it was also getting normal.\n\nThere'd been multiple Nike Air Jordan commercials mixing the Looney Tunes characters with Jordan since 1992; it was a well-understood technology by 1996. The high end of the animation industry was starting to move into digital ink  & amp; paint around then, which made a lot of the effects much easier than when stuff had to be airbrushed by hand to create soft shadows!\n\nUncited, expecting deletion soon, my sources are nothing you can't find by googling \"space jam commercial\" and being a passionate follower of animation news at the time. I have no idea why Jordan did it; my speculation as to why boils down to two things: 1. Being a movie star sounds like a fun thing to try after retiring from basketball (though apparently he was bored out of his mind for much of the shooting) and 2. I bet he got a meaningful percentage of that $80mil budget and the ~$240mil it grossed worldwide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "83njaz", "title": "How is Chiang Kai-shek viewed by historians from the People's Republic of China?", "selftext": "Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of the nationalists was defeated by Mao Zedong's communists in the Chinese Civil War which concluded by 1949. Kai-shek's Kuomintang subsequently retreated to Taiwan, where they tried to maintain the \"Republic of China\" - known informally as Taiwan -, whereas Mao Zedong proclaimed the \"People's Republic of China\" - often just referred to as China.\n\nMy question is: How is Chiang Kai-shek viewed in the country that is still under the one-party rule of a faction that once defeated him in civil war? Is his legacy perceived differently by historians in Mainland China than it is in the rest of the world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83njaz/how_is_chiang_kaishek_viewed_by_historians_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvkax2m", "dvkb1cj"], "score": [54, 37], "text": ["Hey I'm actually working on a paper regarding the Communist Party's definition of the \"Century of Humiliation\" and this is kinda related to that!\n\nThe current Chinese government frames themselves as the creators of a \"New China\" which freed and continues to free the people from the influence of imperial powers. While the Nationalists also had their grievances regarding imperialism, the communist definition of the \"Century of Humiliation\" within Chinese history defines the period as roughly lasting from 1850-1949.\n\nTherefore, opinion regarding Chiang is fairly negative from the point of view of the communists. For example, Chiang is viewed as someone who continued to allow foreigners to take advantage of China and someone who sold China out to Westerners after the fall of the Qing. Due to Chiang's association with Nazi Germany prior to the Japanese invasion as well as the failed \"New Life Movement,\" Chiang is also viewed as a fascist by many. \n\nIn fact, Chiang's obvious admiration of National Socialism and German culture in general is really the defining factor of his legacy in terms of mainland China. Chiang is quoted as saying the following by William Kirby in his book *Germany and Republican China*:\n\n > Germany is the only country from which we can learn something. They can give us the base from which to develop our own style, firm and solid.\n\nas well as,\n\n > We must, just like Germany, awaken our people's patriotic feelings and support the philosophy of a united China.\n\nThis meant that when the civil war resumed, the communists were able to fairly easily convince many that they were fighting a fascist who would continue to sell China to the highest bidders. If you have time, I highly suggest watching the first 20 minutes or so of the play \"The East is Red.\" It gives a fantastic visual for how the communists wanted the people to remember the era that preceded their rise to power and the \"role\" they played in saving China from tyranny. \n\nIn short, Chiang was and still is viewed as a tyrant in the eyes of the current government. While Sun Yat-sen continues to be honored as the father of modern China, Chiang receives no such treatment and is almost universally condemned as a man who betrayed Sun's ideals of democracy as a foundation for a strong China.\n\nSources: Kirby, William C. *Germany and Republican China*. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.\n\nAlso, here is the link to [\"The East is Red\"](_URL_0_) on YouTube.\n", "In short, no.\n\n\nEven within Mainland China, views on Chiang Kai-shek are quite divided. Naturally, Communist Party of China official stance toward him is contrary, there are many classroom materials, novels, drama and opera involved in casting negative light toward him. \n\n\nBefore 1990, he has been viewed as a rebel. Many colourful words have been used on him in both official and unofficial manner. Some of which might be difficult to translate into English. \"\u300c\u8523\u5e6b\u982d\u5b50\u300d\u3001\u300c\u6d41\u6c13\u528a\u5b50\u624b\u300d\u3001\u300c\u65b0\u8208\u8ecd\u95a5\u300d\u3001\u300c\u820a\u52e2\u529b\u4e4b\u5316\u8eab\u300d\u3001\u300c\u8ecd\u95a5\u4e4b\u5de5\u5177\u300d\u3001\u300c\u7fa4\u773e\u4e4b\u4ec7\u6575\u300d\u3001\u300c\u80cc\u53db\u9769\u547d\u300d\u3001\u300c\u53cd\u9769\u547d\u300d\u3001\u300c\u53cd\u52d5\u300d\u3001\u300c\u7121\u6065\u300d\u3001\u300c\u7f8e\u5e1d\u570b\u4e3b\u7fa9\u8d70\u72d7\u300d\u3001\u300c\u7f8e\u5e1d\u570b\u4e3b\u7fa9\uff0c\u5c01\u5efa\u5730\u4e3b\u968e\u7d1a\uff0c\u5b98\u50da\u8cc7\u7522\u968e\u7d1a\uff0c\u8cb7\u8fa6\u968e\u7d1a\u7b49\u53cd\u52d5\u52e2\u529b\u5728\u4e2d\u570b\u7684\u4ee3\u8868\u300detc. Most of which are \"rebel\" , \"treason\" , \"croward\" and \"unethical\" themed with \"selling out their country\" as the biggest keyword.\n\n\nHowever, since then, CPC's influences toward historical view has been cooled down with media and internet becoming common case.\n\n\nIn actuality, most of the CPC member generally has a positive-natural view on him. Despite being an enemy. For example, while Mao views him exceptionally negatively, Zhou Enlai's criticism on him mostly regarding to being a general rather than a politician/leader. (1) Hu Qiaomu also said that while they have differences in principle, he did a lot against Japanese invasion. (2)\n\n\nAs for views from actual historians from Mainland, in general, their views are fairly unified as someone who has weaknesses toward economy and politic side of things. In philosophy and cultural standpoint, his impact can not be underestimated. For example, Lo Man criticised (3) his effort in understanding supply and operation of the military, as well as understanding Japan's view at the time along with many of his political mistake, but overall he is viewed as a talented leader with an interesting view. \n\nHowever, the most critical part to get away from this information is your question:  \"Is his legacy perceived differently by historians in Mainland China than it is in the rest of the world?\" I would have to say the answer is No. While there is certain evidence of propaganda on this individual caused toward Mainland population, most of the criticism I see from historians are reasonably technical with no apparent bias, nor are there any real dividend and influence from being in Mainland. Their overall opinion is in line with the rest of the world.\n\n    \n\n\n(1) from  \u738b\u6210\u658c\u7b49\u4e3b\u7de8 (\u7de8). \u300a\u6c11\u570b\u9ad8\u7d1a\u5c07\u9818\u5217\u50b3\u300b\n\n(2) from \u3008\u80e1\u5fd7\u5049\u5e8f\u3009\uff0c\u520a\u5b89\u6dd1\u840d\u3001\u738b\u9577\u751f\u8457\uff0c\u300a\u8523\u4ecb\u77f3\u8a84\u8fad\u8aaa\u5c51\u300b\n\n(3) from \u7f85\u654f. \u3008\u8523\u4ecb\u77f3\u7684\u653f\u6cbb\u7a7a\u9593\u6230\u7565\u89c0\u5ff5\u7814\u7a76\u2014\u2014\u4ee5\u5176\u300c\u5b89\u5167\u300d\u653f\u7b56\u70ba\u4e2d\u5fc3\u7684\u63a2\u8a0e\u3009. (\u7de8) \u5442\u82b3\u4e0a\u4e3b\u7de8. \u300a\u8523\u4ecb\u77f3\u7684\u65e5\u5e38\u751f\u6d3b\u300b. \u9999\u6e2f: \n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQaK3tL6qIE&amp;t=522s"], []]}
{"q_id": "43ovwo", "title": "Why did the California Gold Rush end after only several years?", "selftext": "Did the word finally get out that no-one was getting rich?\n\nBeen reading about it and it seems like an insane time in American history that was glossed over in school. Literally thousands of people arriving in some cities over just a few days based on hype in the press?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43ovwo/why_did_the_california_gold_rush_end_after_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czjrn9x"], "score": [26], "text": ["The Gold Rush produced an incredible amount of gold, which caused the economy to boom, producing wealth of all sorts for the Pacific Coast. Gold deposits were extensive, meaning that no single person or group of miners were likely to become millionaires, but it was possible to \"make a pile\" in the vernacular of the day. A \"pile\" could be as little - or as much depending on your point of view - as $10,000. And that meant that you could return to the East or to the Midwest, buy a farm with livestock, and do very well for yourself.\n\nBecause the gold deposits were at or near the surface, it was easy for the gold fields to be picked over by the tens of thousands of 49ers who arrived. Within three years, it was becoming increasingly difficult to make a decent wage. I co-edited a collection of Gold Rush letters from the [Grosh brothers](_URL_0_), which provide an economic portrait of these sorts of 49ers. The brothers left Pennsylvania in February 1849, crossed Mexico, and arrived in San Francisco several months later. They and much of their company were so sick it took them two years before they were able to finally arrive in the gold fields. They were offered jobs in San Francisco, and they should have taken them since it would have set them up financially in a much better way. But they had gold fever, and they went to the mountains. Their daily wage was often about $2 per day when gold was selling for about $16 an ounce - meaning that the two brothers were retrieving about a quarter ounce a day. This barely met their needs and would not result in an accumulation of wealth. The brothers consequently sought underground deposits. They were correct in pursuing this goal because extensive mining was necessarily going to be replaced with intensive, underground mining pursuing veins of gold. But this game required expertise (and investment) and more luck since gold veins were rarer than surface deposits had been. Just as it seemed they might finally strike it rich (SPOILER ALERT), they both died in 1857.\n\nThe Grosh story answers your question: the Gold Rush continued, but depleted resources meant that miners realized declining rewards, and the hype correspondingly diminished. The real wealth to be made shifted from mining to the many other things that California had to offer. Gold Rush era fortunes had been made, but most often they were made by bankers and entrepreneurs who took advantage of the market represented by the tens of thousands of Argonauts who arrived with dreams and sought the wealth in the mountains.\n\nFor additional insight into this period using a primary sources, in this case the diaries of Alfred Doten, see /r/Doten. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Allen-Shepperson-Nevada-History/dp/1943859019/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1454340473&amp;sr=1-10&amp;keywords=Ronald+M.+James"]]}
{"q_id": "12ccpl", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | A wizard's spell allows you to make everyone better understand the history that matters to you by forcing them to read one book.  What is it, and why?", "selftext": "Previously:\n\n- [Questions you want to be asked](_URL_0_)\n- [Suggestion thread](_URL_5_)\n- [Greatest criminals](_URL_7_)\n- [Strangest inventions](_URL_9_)\n- [Natural disasters](_URL_2_)\n- [(In)famous non-military attacks](_URL_3_)\n- [Stupidest theories/beliefs about your field of interest](_URL_1_)\n- [Most unusual deaths](_URL_11_)\n- [Famous adventurers and explorers](_URL_8_)\n- [Great non-military heroes](_URL_4_)\n- [History's great underdogs](_URL_6_)\n- [Interesting historical documents](_URL_12_)\n\nToday:\n\nIn this second digression from specific historical subjects into more abstract questions, I'd like to know what book would occupy your mandatory single-entry reading list, if that's all you had the power to create.  We've already seen suggestions of this nature in Tiako's [book list thread](_URL_10_) in the sidebar, but those providing lists there had the advantage of however much breadth was desired.\n\nThis time, though, the wizard casting this spell is a cruel and capricious one -- you can only propose a single work.  As he is not a complete monster, he'll permit multi-volume works, too, so long as they do constitute just one work in the end.\n\nWell?  What do you say?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ccpl/tuesday_trivia_a_wizards_spell_allows_you_to_make/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6tvx9n", "c6twgin", "c6txb3t", "c6txkuc", "c6txrq2", "c6ty4rw", "c6tyadp", "c6tz3hs", "c6u088n", "c6u13oa", "c6u7jzu", "c6ua3c9", "c7v0907"], "score": [3, 2, 5, 8, 4, 2, 2, 8, 8, 6, 2, 4, 2], "text": ["Also, it should go without saying that this should be a history book, if possible -- though if you can make the case for something else, I guess I'd be open to it.", "Quick related note: I would love to put these suggestions on the book list, but please *please* put them in the proper format. I will be very grumpy if I need to edit your entry (because seriously, every book I have put up is in the exact same way, make my life easier) and if you don't include a nice, two to three sentence summary I won't put it up at all.", "The one that I always recommend is *Roman Sexualities* by Hallett and Skinner et al. - it's an awesome collection of papers that give a great overview of sexuality in Ancient Rome. In particular, the essay \"The Teratogenic Grid\" by Holt Parker is one of the best explanations of the Roman version of the Kinsey Scale that I have come across. Hallett's essay female homoeroticism is a fantastic read. It's not exactly an easy pop history kind of read, but it's definitely my favorite work on the subject.", "Man, I wish I had such a book. Does anybody know of a book aimed at a general audience that dissects/refutes the idea of progressivism in history? Something like that would be my vote. It is, by and large, the number 1 misguided attitude that I run into when talking to non-historians/anthropologists who enjoy reading about history. (Especially those who are avid Jared Diamond fans.... grr.)\n\nFailing that, I'd recommend *1491* by Charles C. Mann.", "Neil Price's *The Viking Mind*, hands down.  One of the most readable and comprehensive overviews of early medieval Scandinavian religio-social thought out there.  Unfortunately, it's out of print and rare as hell.", "Rosamund McKitterick's *Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity*.  A great introduction to the Carolingian world and to Charlemagne.  It combines a depth and complexity with a clear overarching control that is really impressive.", "Oh, man... this is a tough one. I think that the book I'd have people read is \"Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion\" by Jacques Gernet. Right now, my area of focus is on a few specific scholar-elite from the Southern Song Dynasty, but I can't recommend any books with that level of specificity to someone who doesn't have a good understanding of what was going on in the Southern Song Dynasty. So I'd recommend this book as a guide to the world of the Southern Song, and after that if someone really wanted to read a book on one of the scholar-elites I'm researching right now, I could give them a reading list.", "I would force every man, woman, and child to pore through every last word of E. P. Thompson's [_The Making of the English Working Class_](_URL_1_), particularly his essay [\"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.\"](_URL_0_)\n\nToo many people take capitalism and the cultural systems associated with it for granted in the world today - that it's the \"norm\" or \"default\" system - and I think Thompson does an extraordinary job showing that is neither \"natural,\" nor inevitable, nor a timeless phenomenon.  It emerges from a very specific context and a unique set of historical conditions.  Hell, I'd be satisfied if they just walked away realizing that the \"Invisible Hand\" is a cultural construct of the eighteenth century.", "*[Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying. The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs](_URL_0_)*. S\u00f6nke Neitzel  &  Harald Welzer, 2012. I'm lazy, so I'm copying the publisher's blurb:\n\n > In 2001 [...] historian S\u00f6nke Neitzel paid a visit to the British national archives. He had heard of the existence of recorded interrogations of German POWs, but never about **covert recordings** taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the prisoners. What Neitzel discovered, to his amazement, were reams of untouched, recently declassified transcripts totaling nearly eight hundred pages. Later, Neitzel would find another trove of protocols twice as extensive at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.\n\n > [...] for Neitzel and his collaborator, renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, they would supply a unique and profoundly important **window into the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general, almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. It is a myth these transcripts unequivocally debunk.** \n\n > [...]The details of what these soldiers did, after all, are **not filtered the way they might be in letters to family, or girlfriends and wives, or during interrogations by the enemy**. ", "For an insight into Aussie history, I'd choose Thomas Keneally's 'Australians' trilogy:\n\n* [Origins to Eureka](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Eureka to the Diggers](_URL_1_)\n\n* *third volume yet to be published*\n\nSure, he's mostly a novelist, not a historian, but this is straight history written with a novelist's touch. Keneally writes about actual people and actual events (he's done a lot of research for these books) without adding any fiction, but he does add something essential to any history: life. The people he writes about actually live on his pages.\n\nIn his own words:\n\n >  [the purpose of these books] is to attempt to place the reader inside the very flesh and breath and passion of Australian life in the past. The people of this book are the lenses through which \u2013 at least I hope \u2013 you will more adequately see Australia's history play itself out. If the author does not succeed in doing this, he extends his sincerest apologies.\n\nWell, Keneally has no need to apologise: these are excellent books. A lot of people complain about history being too dry: these books are not dry at all. They serve as an excellent introduction to Australian history, and should whet the reader's appetite for further study.\n", "If I had to pick just one book on the Civil War I guess I'd go with Shelby Foote's brilliant history of the war. \n\n* *[The Civil War: A Narrative](_URL_0_)*. In my opinion it's the single best source on the general history of the Civil War. If it has weaknesses it's in it's length and the fact that it's primarily concerned about the war itself, not the lead up nor the aftermath. \n\nIf three volumes and a couple of thousand pages of material are too much then the next best would be James McPherson's one volume history. \n\n* *[Battle Cry of Freedom](_URL_1_)* It's a truly outstanding one volume narrative of the war. McPherson does cover the events leading up to the Civil War, however I have to say I prefer Foote's approach. The Civil War is too vast a subject for one volume to cover thoroughly and that might be the single weakness in this book. \n\nBoth are 5 star books and in my view are required reading for anyone interested in the Civil War. ", "Someone please read *Raffles of the Eastern Isles* which would explain pretty much the entire SE Asia geopolitical situation from then til now.", "Alistair horne- a savage war of peace\nRobert Fisk- The Great War for Civilisation\nKarl Bermann- Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848\nJohn M. Hobson- The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation\nZhores Medvedev- The Unknown Stalin"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11kqer/tuesday_trivia_youre_introduced_to_strangers_for/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zbt9a/tuesday_trivia_stupidest_theoriesbeliefs_about/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/102s6u/tuesday_trivia_natural_disasters/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zq1d7/tuesday_trivia_infamous_nonmilitary_attacks/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y752q/tuesday_trivia_great_nonmilitary_heroes/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/117da3/tuesday_trivia_best_askhistorians_suggestions/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xtuht/tuesday_trivia_historys_great_underdogs/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10to32/tuesday_trivia_historys_greatestworst_criminals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ylame/tuesday_trivia_famous_adventurers_and_explorers/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10gh29/tuesday_trivia_strangest_and_most_interesting/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/timi4/the_askhistorians_master_book_list/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yyygy/tuesday_trivia_most_unusual_deaths/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xfviw/tuesday_trivia_what_is_the_most_interesting/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/650244", "http://books.google.com/books?id=k-7eA8ZyUbkC&amp;dq=making+of+the+english+working+class&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=VSeQUKf5K4b50gHJhYH4BA&amp;ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ"], ["http://books.google.be/books?id=j_Ge2H9Y8sgC&amp;dq=Soldaten:+On+Fighting,+Killing,+and+Dying&amp;hl=nl&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=sTaQUJLBNIaG0AWR8oHgDQ&amp;ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA\u00b5"], ["http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&amp;book=9781741750690", "http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&amp;book=9781742374482"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Narrative-Vol-Set/dp/0394749138", "http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/dp/0195038630"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fnpwze", "title": "The Third Reich\u2019s Wehrmacht has a largely modern perception of being vastly technologically superior to the western allies. Was this the sentiment at the time as well?", "selftext": "Did the western allies feel they were going into battle against a far more technologically advanced enemy? Was there a sense of being overwhelmed by German technology?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fnpwze/the_third_reichs_wehrmacht_has_a_largely_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fldpl4v"], "score": [12], "text": ["Whether this applies to the 'Western Allies' is a bit semantic, but - during the first period of the war, Soviet troops did certainly feel overwhelmed. Reports of \"tank shock\" abounded as Red Army infantry, often caught flat-footed without their own armor support due to endemic maintenance problems, panicked at the sight of Wehrmacht armored formations. Artillery commanders bemoaned their lack of shells, as the chaos of the invasion clogged supply lines and left batteries unable to provide adequate fire support. Tank formations, deficient in radios, found themselves unable to coordinate tactical maneuvers nearly as well as the Germans, with often devastating results. All aspects of the Red Army learned to dread the sound of aircraft engines, as they were almost inevitably Luftwaffe bombers. However, all of these feelings relate to a quantitative mismatch at the front rather than a *qualitative* overmatch. In general, even in the dog days of the initial period of the war, Soviet riflemen trusted their rifles, their machine guns, their cannons, and their tanks. I don't know of any direct accounts from the crews of Soviet light tanks - the outgunned or obsolete T-26, BT-7, T-60, etc of the early war - but the crews of the newer T-34s and KV heavy tanks tended to fight confidently and aggressively even in spite of their lack of radios or adequate training. They did not abandon their vehicles at the first sign of a German tank, and for good reason - these vehicles far outmatched the German vehicles of the time, and were often only knocked out by heavy field artillery (assuming the crews didn't abandon them due to running out of fuel or ammunition first, of course). Soviet aircrews did feel outmatched by their Luftwaffe adversaries in the early war, however. The Luftwaffe were better trained and battle-hardened, and their aircraft in the early war were qualitatively superior to Soviet fighters. Soviet pilots apparently made a dark pun out of the LaGG-3 fighter's name, calling it the \"*Lakirovanny Garantirovanny Grob*,\" or \"guaranteed varnished coffin\" owing to its wood-resin construction and lackluster kinematic performance. \n\nSoviet troops did often take boots from the bodies of dead German soldiers, particularly in the harsh Stalingrad winter, but by and large the Red Army's infantrymen seemed to like their winter gear. The greatest deficiency in individual equipment were the poor food rations - barely-edible combinations of \u043a\u0430\u0448\u0430 (a buckwheat porridge) and rendered fat abounded. The Germans were not substantially better fed, however, having resorted to eating horses when they ran out of local produce to loot. By the middle and late periods of the war, the technological edge had certainly shifted toward the Soviet favor, as well. The ability of Soviet industry to mass-field submachine guns was noted by fighting men and commanders alike; the PPS-43 was well-liked for its firepower and relative ease of maintenance (although anecdotally, from people who have fired museum copies, the trigger is quite unpleasant). Soviet armor, too, improved dramatically. Newer T-34 models had greatly improved reliability both as a result of factory quality control and improved logistics, and the T-34-85 (introduced late 1943) featured one of the the absolute best tank guns of the war. Soviet artillery had improved technologically and in terms of logistics; the *Katyusha* multiple rocket launchers, trialed early in the war, had matured significantly and were a potent threat during the 'break-in' assaults at the start of Soviet offensives. The ability of Soviet industry to supply huge quantities of ammunition was key for the increasingly complex artillery preparations that preceded Soviet assaults, in some cases becoming so effective that the assault echelons found no remaining resistance in the first German defensive belts. By the last two years of the war, although the Wehrmacht was still a dangerous opponent, Soviet fighting forces could see how battered the German supply situation was and generally felt as though they outmatched their opponents technologically rather than the other way around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3n6y9o", "title": "What's the earliest known example of \"fun running\"?", "selftext": "Are there any early historical examples of people running purely for the enjoyment of running?\n\nWhat about ancient examples of running for exercise outside of military or hunting training?\n\n**Edit**:  Not counting competitions either, if at all possible.  Just running to run or running for health.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n6y9o/whats_the_earliest_known_example_of_fun_running/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvlkc04", "cvlkdf1"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The Odyssey has a footrace in book 8. Not the best translation below but gets the story across... \n_URL_0_", "And also the Aeneid, taking its cue from Homer... _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey8.htm"], ["http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilAeneidV.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3jkhod", "title": "Inheritance in the Soviet Union.", "selftext": "Say I'm the son of a man who's just died in 1981, would their \"possessions*\" go to me or would they go to the state? Would my father write a will? What would happen to the stuff we used after he died?\n\n*Yes I know you didn't really possess anything in the USSR, I just don't have a better word for it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jkhod/inheritance_in_the_soviet_union/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuqblzm"], "score": [3], "text": [" > *Yes I know you didn't really possess anything in the USSR, I just don't have a better word for it.\n\nBut you did \"possess things\", why wouldn't you? Don't think the USSR was some fairy tale (or nightmare) land where magical property-less communism existed, don't think basic things and facts of everyday life didn't in a large part work the same as elsewhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a47gwg", "title": "Why is mainland SEA predominantly Buddhism and the island SEA practice more of Islam or Christianity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a47gwg/why_is_mainland_sea_predominantly_buddhism_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebc9v1x"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not to forestall further answers, but there's a fantastic answer to part of this question by /u/PangeranDipanagara, in reply to the question [How did Indonesia and Malaysia become majority-Muslim when they were once dominated by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms?](_URL_0_). Hope that helps!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o8avu/how_did_indonesia_and_malaysia_become/"]]}
{"q_id": "396asy", "title": "Why did the Khmer Rouge regime NOT destroy Cambodia's cultural heritage?", "selftext": "Examples would be the Angkor Wat, etc. If the government was so intent on wiping the country's slate blank, why not start at the most obvious place? Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/396asy/why_did_the_khmer_rouge_regime_not_destroy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs0sceq"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Khmer Rouge's goal was not so much to establish a blank slate, but to return Cambodia to a \"mystic state\" and recreate what Pol Pot viewed as the essence of pre-Western contact Cambodia. This came largely as a reaction to the US invasion of Cambodia and the huge loss of life that it caused, as well as a general sense of anti-colonialism and anti-Western sentiment. I'd keep in mind as well that Pol Pot's image of a \"mystic past\" did appeal to a lot of Cambodians. It was an image of a country not torn by war, not invaded and exploited, and one where people could be happy and hopeful, things which hadn't been the case in Cambodia for decades. \n\nInherent in this, though, is also a large degree of Cambodian nationalism, that sense of what Cambodia was and could be. Pol Pot, as I said, presented an image that appealed to people because it resonated with their own sense of what it was to be Cambodian and what \"Cambodia\" meant. Coupled with this, though, was the material and cultural idea of \"Cambodia,\" of which something like Angkor Wat was a part. It belonged in that \"mystic past\" where Cambodia existed as a powerful state independent from foreign - and particularly Western - influence. \n\nBasically, then, the reason the Khmer Rouge didn't destroy Angkor Wat and other such structures was because their goal was never to remake Cambodia as such. What they wanted was a return to an archaic Cambodia, one which they saw as following Maoist ideals of equal participation in agrarianism, but one which was undoubtedly Cambodian and which preserved the Cambodian identity. \n\nI hope that helps, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "66ecq3", "title": "Were all or most well known communist leaders in the early 20th century Jewish or are anti-Semitic people cherry picking communist leaders to perpetuate this narrative?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66ecq3/were_all_or_most_well_known_communist_leaders_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgieoyr", "dgikcku", "dgisthq"], "score": [2, 7, 10], "text": ["Do you have a source for the initial claim?  I know that the Nazis claimed that communism was a Jewish phenomenon, but I've never heard this claim made by anyone else.", "Both can be true.  Though, saying \"most communist leaders in the early 20th century were Jewish\" would be patently false. \n\nCommunism spread much further than Europe and Russia in the 20th century. \n\nFurthermore, the moniker \"Jewish\" means different things to different people.  Karl Marx never considered himself Jewish, in fact he was Lutheran and probably had little to no exposure to Judaism.  Ethnically speaking, he's more Dutch and German than Jewish.  Yet some people term him \"Jewish\" nonetheless.  \n\nHistorically speaking, these types of conversations have absolutely no value. I can't imagine what can be gleamed from knowing most communist leaders were Jewish or not. One thing is for certain, though, Anti-antisemitism persists.  Conspiracy theories tend to persist when a culture or group in insular and prohibitive, as Jewish communities have tended to be throughout history. Try not to feed the trolls, though.  It's a waste of your time.", "Jews were overrepresented in early 20th Communist leadership, but so were many other well-educated minorities for obvious reasons.  Left wing politics offered a way towards social equality in aristocratic societies, and also offered an alternative to the popular nationalist movements which generally excluded minorities implicitly or explicitly.  \n\nLet's focus on the Soviet case because it's the best studied.  Liliana Riga's recent \"The Ethnic Roots of Class Universalism\" argued that 2/3 of the Russian Revolution's elite were ethnic minorities.  Here's her abstract:\n\n > This article retrieves the ethnic roots that underlie a universalist class ideology. Focusing empirically on the emergence of Bolshevism, it provides biographical analysis of the Russian Revolution's elite, finding that two-thirds were ethnic minorities from across the Russian Empire. After exploring class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences of varying significance to the Bolsheviks' revolutionary politics, this article suggests that socialism's class universalism found affinity with those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic violence and sectarianism were exclusionary, and an ethnically neutral and tolerant \"imperial\" imaginary where Russification and geopolitics were particularly threatening or imperial cultural frameworks predominated. The claim is made that socialism's class universalism was as much a product of ethnic particularism as it was constituted by it.\n\nThe two other big works on this I know are Mosse's 1968 \"Makers of the Soviet Union\" and Mawdsley and White's 2000 *Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: the Central Committee and its members*.  Let me quote from Elena Semenova's \"Continuities in the formation of Russian political elites\" because it's convenient ([pdf](_URL_0_)), and it gives a good idea of how Mawdsley and White clearly point to the declining Jewish influence over time in the Soviet Union:\n\n > The representation of ethnic minorities was clearly a distinctive feature of elite structure until the mid-1930s. The elites under Lenin were ethnically diverse; Russians accounted for 52% of all CC [Central Committee] members, and Jews for approximately 17% (Mawdsley and White 2000, 15, 54). Both Jews and Ukrainians were overrepresented in the CC compared to their share among rank-and-file members. In 1922, Jews and Ukrainians made up 5 and 6% of the membership respectively, while Russians accounted for 72% of party members (Mawdsley and White 2000, 15; Rigby 1968, 366). After Lenin\u2019s death, the proportion of Russians among the CC elites increased from 52 to 58%, while Jews accounted for 15% (Mawdsley and White 2000, 54). The period from 1917 until 1934 was characterised by maximum representation of minorities among the Soviet top elites. \u201cNever again would the minorities have such influence, either in the top leadership or at the level of the Central Committee\u201d (Mawdsley and White 2000, 54).\n\n > The Purges of 1936-38, initiated by Joseph Stalin, resulted in increased representation of Russians among the CC elites. The proportion of Russians reached 73% in 1951 and declined to 67% after Stalin\u2019s death (Mawdsley and White 2000, 108). In contrast, there was a massive decrease in the recruitment of Jews to CC elite positions; they accounted for only 1% of the post-Stalin elite (Mawdsley and White 2000, 109). After the Purges, the proportion of Ukrainians in the CC was higher than their proportion among rank-and-file members and the general population (Mawdsley and White 2000, 250).\n\nMosse, really the father of all these quantitative studies, found that during the earliest years, the higher you went up, the more Jews were disproportionately represented, but even then we don't see anything like \"all or most\".  He builds a sample of leading revolutionaries from a Soviet Encyclopedia, which he breaks down into sub-samples.  Jews made up over 30% of the members of his \"leading group\", while among the \"Old Bolsheviks\" (those who were part of the party before the Russian Revolution) broadly they were 20%, though much lower among the New Bolsheviks (he says only one member of the New Bolsheviks was Jewish).  Jews made up 16.6% of his total sample of 246 revolutionaries, whereas they made up 5% of total party membership and 4% of the total population of the Russian Empire during that period.\n\nHowever, they were not the only group disproportionately represented.  Ethnic Germans made up 1.6% of the population but over 6% the revolutionaries in Mosse's sample.  Armenians and Georgians were also over represented (Stalin was a Georgian), but not to the same extent.  Mosse doesn't break up the individual Baltic ethnicities (at this time, including the Finns), but Riga did for her sample of 93 Bolshevik leaders.  She finds lower rates of German involvement than Mosse (still disproportionate with their total population), but notes that in her sample, Latvians make up 1% of the population but 6% of Riga's sample (compare that with Lithuanians, who make up 1% of both, and Estonians and Finns, who are absent from her Bolshevik sample entirely).  She doesn't break apart the South Caucasian into Georgian, Armenian, and Azeri, but does find that in total they have 10% of leadership for 2% of the population.\n\nInterestingly, groups that had strong nationalist separatist movements were underrepresented among the Bolsheviks: namely the Poles (3% of leaders, 6% of total population in Riga's sample) and Ukrainians (19% of the population but 9% of the leadership).  Russians were about proportional in Riga's sample, with 42% of the leadership and 44% of the population.  (Mosse for the most part didn't separate out the various Slavic groups, meaning that this part is difficult to see.)\n\nAs I mentioned, most of this work has been done the Russian Revolution because it's the easiest to study for the simple reason that they won.  What about the rest of Central and Eastern Europe?  The best study I know about this is from Poland in the interwar years.  Poland was then a democracy and had a good census, allowing Kopstein and Wittenberg to use to new statistical techniques to combine voting data with census data to estimate popular support among different ethnic groups in their 2003 \"Who Voted Communist?  Reconsidering the Social Bases of Radicalism in Interwar Poland\".  They acknowledge the long established perception the Polish Communist leadership was disproportionately (but not all or most) Jewish, but don't directly address it empirically.  Instead, they look at voting.  They find that Jews were actually *less* likely to *vote* Communist compared with other minority groups, which in Poland were the Ukrainians and the Belorussians.  The Belorussians were particularly stronger supporters of the Polish Communist Party, Kopstein and Wittenberg find, though overall all the minority groups voted mainly for specifically ethnic groups.  They estimate about 2/3 to 3/4 of the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Orthodox/Belorussian vote went to minority parties in 1922, for instance, though this had dropped heavily by 1928, with only about 21% of Orthodox/Belorussian voters, 33% of Jewish voters, and 71% of Ukrainian voters supporting minority parties.  In that same election, they infer that about 4% of Catholics/Poles, 7% of Jews, 12% of Ukrainians, and 44% of Orthodox/Belorussians voted for the Communist Party. Interestingly, non-revolutionary left parties seem to be supported almost exclusively by Catholics/Poles in this Election.  So all minority groups were more likely than the majority group to vote Communist, but among the minority groups, their method finds that the Jews supported the Communists the least, despite apparently being such a large part of the Communist leadership in the country.\n\nSo while it's true that Jews were disproportionately part of the Communist leadership, I don't know of a case where they made up *most* never mind *all* of the leadership.  What is interesting is that while Jews were disproportionate among the leaders of early 20th century Communism, the evidence suggests that they were not particularly strong supporters of Communism when it came to things like party membership in the Soviet Union (5% of party membership to 4% of the population) or voting in Poland (the strongest support came from Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/37283/ssoar-hsr-2012-2-semenova-Continuities_in_the_formation_of.pdf?sequence=1"]]}
{"q_id": "5ndbl2", "title": "Is there a consensus on what happened to the victims of the Dyatlov Pass incident that don't involve a Yeti or aliens? Is the radiation (if there actually was radiation) on some of the bodies explained?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ndbl2/is_there_a_consensus_on_what_happened_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcay6lu", "dcb1i9e"], "score": [1001, 30], "text": ["There is no consensus, sadly. It's even hard to say what facts about the event are true or not. The incident effectively amounts to something like a crime scene, and the evidence is long gone. What evidence that was there was subject to fallible and biased human perception. I do not believe there are enough solid facts to ever form a consensus as to what happened, especially since many of the researchers looking into the incident are actively trying to find \"mysterious\" answers.\n\nThis event occurred in 1959, in the a remote wilderness area of the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The information that has come down to us about it is just as much legend as fact. It has since been repeated many times in the stories of the \"mysterious things\" culture (the subculture that hungers for stories about UFOs and Bigfoot). I myself have belong to this subculture (as a fan of folklore, not as a 'believer'), so I have heard the Dyatlov Pass story told and retold in many formats. \n\nI think [Brian Dunning gave the best analysis of the incident I've read in his Skeptoid podcast](_URL_0_). While certainly not immune to error, Dunning generally does a good job of digging out primary sources when they're available. He reports that what translated Russian sources he could find also were spinning wild tales.\n\nI agree with Dunning's conclusion that an avalanche is the most parsimonious answer to \"what happened to the victims of the Dyatlov Pass incident\", but I know that this is not definitively proove-able.\n\nEDIT:\n\nI just want to make further comments about the 'Legendary' status of the Dyatlov Pass incident. There are many events in history that come to us through contemporary primary sources, but are so poorly documented that they frustrate the modern reader with the eternal unknowableness about something that likely had a simple and/or reasonable explanation. The famous [Devil's Footprints incident in Devon, England in 1855 is another great example](_URL_1_). The incident was reported in contemporary newspapers, but no one who observed it had the skills to properly document it in a way that it would be understandable to a person in 2017. Over the following century and a half, enthusiasts fill in the gaps in the primary source to try to explain it, and it enters the realm of myth and folklore. I think the same process has occurred with the Dyatlov Pass incident. There wasn't sufficient data recorded due to the remote and inhospitable region of the incident, leading to an unknowable \"crime scene\" in which too much information had already decayed or been lost. Combine the excitement of a mystery with the terrifying mystique of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and you have an Urban Legend of the highest quality ready to go.", "There is no consensus. Most popular non-mystical theories are avalanche and murder. \n\nThe Dyatlov case investigation files contain some expert evidence concerning radiation. According to the expert findings, some clothes of the deceased were radioactively contaminated. The recorded doses of radiation were very low (83, 93, 165 [Bq](_URL_0_)). The isotope is unknown so it's difficult to estimate initial doses. \n\nI could give a [link](_URL_3_) to the expert opinion but, of course, the text is written in Russian and it hasn't been translated into English. \n\nThere are several explanations, notably [environmental radioactivity](_URL_2_), workplace contamination or nuclear contraband. Two of the deceased (Krivonischenko and Slobodin) worked at a [nuclear plant](_URL_4_).  \n\nThe newest theory was proposed by Alexey Rakitin (see [*The Murders of the Dyatlov Group*](_URL_1_)). In the Cold War age the US intelligence often tried to obtain samples of radioactive materials produced in the USSR. Rakitin assumes that one member of Dyatlov's group (or two of them) was a double agent who worked both for the US intelligence (CIA or the military) and KGB. He had a mission to make such a sample and to meet his American liaison. KGB prepared a fake sample. The agent was planned to make contact with a group of the US operatives. They infiltrated the USSR territory using the long range spy aircraft. Such operations are described in *[Twilight Warriors](_URL_5_): Covert Air Operations Against the USSR* by Curtis Peebles. The spies met with Dyatlov and others posing themselves as tourists or hunters. Something went wrong, perhaps, the operatives decided that they had been compromised and preferred to kill all witnesses. \n\nThe problem of any theory involving KGB is logical incoherence. If KGB was involved, the Committee would totally cover up all the story.  If KGB knew that radioactivity played a significant role in the case, it would prevent the forensic examination. We should take into account that the relatives of the deceased had an access to the investigation files. The case wasn't secret and in late Soviet Union even a layperson could read its documents in a state archive. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Footprints"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel", "http://www.nibbe-wiedling.de/authors/rakitin/titles.html#", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_radioactivity", "https://sites.google.com/site/hibinaud/home/postanovlenie-o-naznacenii-fiz-tehn-eksp", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak", "https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Warriors-Covert-Operations-Against/dp/1591146607"]]}
{"q_id": "2mb78p", "title": "How accurate is the idea of \"jail or the military\" as a sentencing measure in the US, historically?", "selftext": "I know that now, it is nearly impossible to join the US Military with any sort of criminal record. I've seen several movies and read several books where either the main character or a supporting character committed some sort of major crime, and was given the choice by the sentencing judge of \"jail or military service\". How did this work? Were military standards just less strict in the past than they are now, or was this actually an official arrangement or program between the courts and the military? If this was an officially sanctioned program, why isn't it used anymore?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mb78p/how_accurate_is_the_idea_of_jail_or_the_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm335hp"], "score": [18], "text": ["This is an extremely difficult question to properly source, as it is so often difficult to prove a negative and unofficial agreements tend to be...well...unofficial so they don't leave paper trails.  There ARE, however, some parts of the question we can answer without the mods here getting too bent out of shape, I hope.\n\nIn many ways you have answered your own question.  Yes, in times past (let's focus on the Vietnam era, shall we?) US military standards were less strict.  Warm bodies were needed, and if a man was physically fit to serve not to many questions were asked.   This is an era that sparked ideas like \"Project 100,000\" that lowered entrance standards to allow more people to be eligible to join. \n\n*[I'll link to the dread Wikipedia here](_URL_0_) as Project 100,000 is a well documented government programme which is only tangentially related to the original question.*\n\nColonel David Hackworth talks  very briefly in his biography \"About Face\" about selecting men for what would eventually become Tiger Force and how men who had joined the army to avoid jail were scouted as they may have desirable traits. This is the only \"source\" that directly comes to mind, as vague as it may be.\n\nPart of the problem with providing records for this is that there simply aren't any.  It was an option \"supposedly\" given to men by some judges, not a sentence handed down by the court.  [As recently as 2006](_URL_1_) a judge tried offering this \"deal\", but the modern military isn't desperate for bodies like it was 40 years ago.\n\nIn the above linked article Eugene Fidell, then-\"president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a military law expert.\"  is quoted as saying \"There were cases in the \u201970s in which GIs tried to avoid punishment under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) by claiming they were not really in the military, having enlisted as a result of facing a jail-or-military choice\".   Considering the source it seems, at least to me, to be a reliable source of information.\n\nI hope this helps answer your question somewhat, without being too anecdotal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000", "http://www.stripes.com/news/judge-said-army-or-jail-but-military-doesn-t-want-him-1.44417"]]}
{"q_id": "ty2pt", "title": "Is there any historical evidence of any bastards or illegitimate children of royalty taking an English throne?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ty2pt/is_there_any_historical_evidence_of_any_bastards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qoshq", "c4qpjri", "c4qpkog", "c4qqp0y"], "score": [16, 8, 6, 2], "text": ["Well William the Bastard became William the Conqueror after he defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and took the English throne.", "Both Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I of England were legally considered bastards for years before they each took the throne. Henry VIII changed his mind about the line of succession, and which of his children were \"legitimate\", depending on which woman he was boning at the moment. I'm sure there are more examples; I'll edit if I can think of any.", "The legitimate children of Henry VIII were all born to women he was married to, though after the dissolution of his marriages, through divorce or death, he did declare his daughters Mary (born to Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (born to Anne Boleyn) as illegitimate. They both later succeeded to the English throne. \n\nAfter Elizabeth I, all British monarchs are the legitimate heirs to the throne, either as legitimate children, siblings, or cousins of the previous monarch.\n\n", "Wasn't Henry VII through John of Gaunt who was illegitimate?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "512rcf", "title": "How many years was it from the first humans to basic tribes, then from the basic tribes to the first true civilizations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/512rcf/how_many_years_was_it_from_the_first_humans_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d792ovx"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm no anthropologist but may be able to help you with your second part, what do you mean by 'true civilisation'? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "28vwln", "title": "Was Singapore ever a bigger country then it is today?", "selftext": "Is Singapore a somewhat new country that popped out of nowhere or was it ever a bigger country or civilization?\nAny thing about the history of Singapore would be great! \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28vwln/was_singapore_ever_a_bigger_country_then_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cif1c07", "cif39ig"], "score": [20, 24], "text": ["Singapore as an independent entity is relatively new. It declared independence from the United Kingdom and joined the Malaysian Federation. For a number of reasons there was quite a lot of tension between Singapore and Malaysia. This eventually led to Singapore being expelled from the country. As far as I as know, this is the only instance of a country gaining independence against its will. ", "Singapore, as a city, was a creation of the British.  In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post of the East India Company (with permission from the Sultanate of Jahore).\n\nThere were settlements there previously, (though not very substantial).  In 1613, Portuguese raiders burned down the settlement there, and there was not much established until Raffles came along 200 years later.\n\nIn 1824, by treaty with the Sultan of Jahore, Singapore became British.\n\nAlthough Singapore was ruled at times by the Chola Empire (before 1613) by the Sultan of Jahore (from 1613 to 1824), by the British Empire (fr0m 1824-1942 and 1945-1962), by the Japanese Empire (from 1942-1945), by Malaysia (from 1962-1965) and since 1965 as an independent country, and so, was part of bigger countries or Empires, Singapore itself was never a bigger country or civilization than it is today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ao0ro", "title": "Are tribes really a thing?", "selftext": "I find it strange that whenever you have an indigenous population you have tribes. I don't believe that there is a \"generic\" state for humanity to exist in, so the ubiquity of tribes of a thing now looks suspect.\n\nIs the term a generalized umbrella term? Like how \"Republic\" has been defined as \"anything that isn't a hereditary monarchy or empire\" regardless of how they are organized and who they are organized by, so fundamentally different and distinct groups are grouped as \"tribes\" and then promptly assumed to be the same.\n\nDo government create or promote tribes? After all, foreign government need someone to make agreements with someone and hold someone accountable should agreements aren't honored. This represents legitimacy and power, and could be plucking a minor player out of obscurity and into a driving position without the foreign government knowing or caring how they altered the power structure of the locals.\n\nAm I even barking up the right tree at all? I don't know, I'm just not sure that the same term should be applicable for Mountain people in Thailand, First Nation peoples in the Americas, and ethnic power blocks in Africa.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ao0ro/are_tribes_really_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8z5chn", "c8z7oek"], "score": [3, 22], "text": ["Anthropologists have a very specific definition of tribe, which doesn't necessarily conform to the generic one people often use. Following Elman R. Service's model from his *Primitive Social Organization*, there are four levels or types of societies: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Bands are the lowest, most \"primitive\" (and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, only in a \"least like a modern state\" sense). They are generally small groups, egalitarian, make decisions via consensus, are based on nuclear families, and survive via hunting and gathering. Tribes, the next \"level,\" are larger groups (but still kin-based) that are more settled and are governed by a \"big man\" who achieved status through charisma and ability. \n\nSo basically, yes, it can be an umbrella term, and it is meant to apply generally to types of societies, but not ascribe specific requirements to them. So does being described as a \"tribe,\" mean that all of those societies are the same? No, but it does mean that they have some characteristics in common.", "You're absolutely right and you've touched upon a number of key critiques of old fashioned cultural anthropology. Unfortunately, although those critiques have been accepted within anthropology for decades, adjacent disciplines and the mass media still largely use the outdated terminology and concepts when talking about indigenous peoples.\n\nI'd argue that in common usage tribe is close to meaningless. It's right up there with feudal or traditional as a word that is simply attached to certain societies for historical reasons that doesn't actually convey any information about that society. /u/RTGoodman is right to point out that if you looked it up in an encyclopaedia or a textbook you'd see a nice, neat definition along the lines of \"a society organised on the basis of kinship\". But these definitions are intimately tied up with one or another generalised models of sociocultural evolution which, for reasons that are really too long to get into here, have been utterly discredited in the past few decades. \n\nMoreover they suffer from common fallacy in anthropological terminology which is defining concepts based on *partial* similarity. So you go to the hoogooglies, who do ABC, and coin the term hoogooglism. Then you go to their neighbours the yooblies, who do BCD, and say hey, that's practically the same as the hoogooglies, they must be hoogooglists too. Then you go to the other side of the world and find somebody who does CDE \u2013 they don't look much like the hoogooglies, but they do look like the yooblies, so they must be hoogooglists too. Very quickly you end up with totally different phenomena lumped in the same analytical category. The end result is, as you were getting at, that the terminology obscures variation more than it classifies it. With tribe, the obscuring comes when you realise that the way anthropologists had actually been using it had nothing to do with \"societies organised by kinship\" (which is silly when you think about it \u2013 how many societies are there were kinship *doesn't* intersect with politics and group identity?) but was a catch-all term for societies that, when explorers from European states went globe-trotting all those years ago, did things differently from them, i.e. societies that didn't have states. But you don't need another word for societies that don't have states; \"non-state\" is fine. That at least makes it clear that you're talking about a group that is defined solely in opposition to something else and doesn't necessarily have any common features. Like \"non-French\" or \"foods that aren't yoghurt\". Because that is the level of analytical precision that tribe gives you.\n\nPolitically, tribe is also a problematic concept. Here's a [great essay explaining the problems using it in reference to Africa](_URL_0_), for example. In the media it's generally use as a euphemism for primitive and there's a lot of othering going on when the word is used. They don't just use 'tribe' to describe a different form of government, it brands the entire society and a whole chunk of vocabulary is modified: you get *tribal people*\u2014*tribesmen* and *tribeswomen*\u2014and their *tribal chiefs* fighting *tribal wars*. One proviso here is that many indigenous groups have incorporated the word tribe into their self-identity, for example in the US, where Native American groups are legally codified as Tribes. It would be condescending to start euphemising tribe in that context \u2013 but on the other hand, as the essay I linked above argued, when indigenous people self-identify as 'tribal' it can often be a problematic translation into English of very different concepts in their native language. So it's a bit of a nightmare."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.africaaction.org/talking-about-tribe.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ccbuqb", "title": "In terms of political movements, why wasn't the presence of fascism/Nazi ideology in America treated with the same degree of hysteria and urgency as Communism during the Red Scare?", "selftext": "I recall that people who were accused of being communists were arrested, lost their jobs, or in some cases were deported back to their native countries whereas the same hasn't been done to outspoken Nazis even after the Nuremberg trials. Was this information simply made less accessible, or is it really the case that the degree of attention just wasn't equivalent to that given to Communism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ccbuqb/in_terms_of_political_movements_why_wasnt_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etnip0i"], "score": [26], "text": ["One way to approach this question is to examine the reasons that the United States had such a strong reaction to communism in the period following World War II. First though, I shall set the stage with a little background. Communism was hardly new to the United States time. The Communist Party of the United States had existed since 1919. The height of the American Communist party was actually during the 1930s. At this time in the United States it downplayed any revolutionary tendencies and instead communists portrayed the ideology as adopted an American image, building Marx and Engels into the existing American pantheon of heroes such as Jefferson and Lincoln. Earl Browder, the head of the party at this time, stated in reference to this period that \"we became almost respectable. Never quite respectable. Almost.\" Some of the appeal of the Communist Party of the United States was actually its strongly antifascist nature, as fascism was very much seen as a foreign ideology at the time. This changed in 1939 when Stalin signed his non aggression pact with Hitler. The Nazis were seen as a danger by many and antifascism was certainly a popular stance in the United States. The USSR, by signing the nonaggression pact, had tarnished the reputation of communism in the eyes of many and led many liberals in the United States to become skeptical of the communists. The antifascism returned to some degree when the US entered the war and ultimately allied with the USSR, but the party's reputation was still tarnished.\n\nOf course with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, antifascism was seen as no longer necessary in the United States, as the major fascist powers had been defeated. The war left the world dominated by two superpowers: The United States and the Soviet Union. Communism has often been seen as an international and expansionist movement. The USSR certainly saw it that way at times and for much of its existence it supported communist parties around the world including in nations it did not control. While the US and USSR never fought direct wars, numerous proxy wars were fought in other nations during this period between US and USSR backed forces. Support for such wars may have been justified by the Soviets by the idea of self defense and having a buffer zone between it and nations allied to the US, but to many Americans this was an act of communist aggression.  For this reason to be associated with communism after world war II meant that one was not just a little questionable as it may have been seen in the 1930s, it suggested that one was actively working for the primary enemy of the the United States. While Senator McCarthy and his ilk were quite liberal when it came to labeling people as communists, there was in fact some legitimacy to the fear of communism in the United States as the American Communist party had received at least some direction from Soviet Union. While many of the people persecuted by entities like the House Un-American Activities Committee had abandoned the communist party decades previously, there were some communists in the United States who did carry out espionage.\n\nThe international campaign of the Soviet Union and polarizing force that the cold war was can be contrasted with the support (or rather lack thereof) for fascism and Nazism in the United States. As mentioned earlier, once Germany was defeated in 1945 there was no longer any major power that embodied those ideologies on the world stage. There were of course still some Nazis and fascists around, but as there was no major nation to back them up their existence would not have been an existential threat in the way that communism was perceived to be and therefore were not hunted down and persecuted by the United States in the ways that suspected communists were.\n\nA number of books have been published on the red scare and American anticommunism, a couple you could look into for more information on the fear of communism are the following:\n\nEllen Schrecker, *Many are the Crimes* (1998)\n\nRichard Gid Powers, *Not Without Honor* (1995)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f811v", "title": "Did ancient societies have \"Black Markets\"?", "selftext": "* What sorts of illicit goods/services could I purchase if I were to locate such a market?\n\n* If the answer is \"no\", what are the earliest known examples of illicit markets?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f811v/did_ancient_societies_have_black_markets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7rbcu", "ca7u022", "ca7wfo2", "ca8108h"], "score": [12, 8, 4, 2], "text": ["If you pick a date range for \"ancient societies\", we can give you simpler yes/no/maybe. \n\nA black market is a market which operates outside the scope of, and in violation of, the law. So we can safely safe there weren't any black markets until the first laws regulating the sale of goods. ", "In \"The Other Path\", the economist Hernando de Soto, an expert on informal economies, argues that governments have tried to take a cut of any surplus value in the form of sales taxes ever since surplus value could be created through the division of labour and trade i.e. Sumerian times.  It seems logical to assume that at least some people would have attempted to trade informally in order not to pay such taxes, both on the buyer's and the seller's side.  So you could conclude that the first black markets would have existed around then.\n\nI notice in the comment below that you talk about a product or commodity being forbidden and sold on the black market, rather than being taxed and sold on the black market.  Those are two very different incentives...", "Salt was a highly taxed government monopoly for many dynasties in ancient China; salt black market was huge organized underground business for centuries.  ", "It is tempting to date Black Markets from the beginnings of the modern market state.  With the centralized state's ever-growing demand for information and revenue, any economic transaction that is not rigorously documented can seem in some sense \"Black Market\".  It is easy to assume that prior to these demands, economic life must have been free and easy. \n\nThis would not be accurate however.  Prior to the Modern State, there were more burdens on trade than there are currently. They may not have been as heavy, but they came from multiple sources.  Medieval and Roman economies were heavily influenced by guild organizations.  The professions in a given city would band together to ensure that they were the only people able to practice their trade.  They would enforce these ur-regulations with the support of religious and secular authorities.  Any economic activity operating outside of these structures could in some sense be seen as \"Black Market\"\n\nWhere secular authority was able to put together centralized power, they often initiated monopolies, or firm guidelines for pricing.  Black Markets would naturally develop in response to this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6zmmll", "title": "Is it true that soldiers did not want to kill before World War 2 and the military training became more rough as a result?", "selftext": "In an episode of Black Mirror (S03E05) a man talks about how soldiers did not want to kill in World War 1 and aimed above the heads. Is there any scientific basis for this? \n\nFurthermore how has the boot camp of the army of America changed over the years?\n\nSources would be very helpful and thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zmmll/is_it_true_that_soldiers_did_not_want_to_kill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmwge94", "dmx1uec"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This question has come up before, so you will likely be interested in [this answer](_URL_0_), which references the book \"Men Against Fire\" which that particular episode took its name from.", "To add on to u/Georgy_K_Zhukov's answer a bit, a translation of [\"Battle Studies\"](_URL_0_) is available online now and Du Picq himself seems to have drawn very different conclusions from his experience than Grossman or Marshall did. Rather than troops simply not wanting to kill, Du Picq focused on the impact of smoke, noise, stress, and the instinct of self preservation. In fact he believed that the phenomenon of troops firing into the air or without aiming had more to do with nervous troops being *too* eager to kill the enemy in order to save themselves: \"He is instinctively in haste to \ufb01re his shot, which may stop the departure of the bullet destined for him. . . Even the bravest and most reliable soldiers then \ufb01re madly.\"\n\nIn situations where soldiers were reluctant to open fire or engage the enemy he instead argues that the soldiers are afraid of exposing themselves to danger and retaliation in the process. Rather than an opposition to killing in general the anecdote Du Pict gives is \"He [The average soldier] is not anxious to light the fuse that is to blow up the enemy, and himself at the same time.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2od6eg/ive_heard_that_during_the_first_and_second_world/cmm5bno/"], ["http://pdfbooks.co.za/library/COLONEL_CHARLES-JEAN-JACQUES-JOSEPH_ARDANT_DU_PICQ-BATTLE_STUDIES.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "30mrqd", "title": "What is the link between futurism and fascism?", "selftext": "It seems like anytime someone talks about the art movement futurism, talk of fascism isn't very far behind. What was the connection between politicians like the NFP and the futurist art movement and how did futurism come to be regarded as a fascist art movement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30mrqd/what_is_the_link_between_futurism_and_fascism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cptw2pp", "cptyo56"], "score": [8, 17], "text": ["Many of the movements built around the ideas of progress, science, technology and materialism share a similar aberrant perspective of humanity, that of a \"hive\", and fascism as well as any other totalitarian society model, are a good match for that perspective.", "Not an expert, but I'll relay some information from [*Art in Theory: 1990-1910*](_URL_0_) in case someone doesn't come through with a better explanation.\n\nFuturism was founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with the publication of the *Manifesto of Futurism*. *Art in Theory* claims that \"politically[,] Marinetti's nationalism led him into a lifelong relationship with Mussolini's Fascism.\"\n\nHere are a few things from the manifesto that stand out as compatible with Fascism:\n\n\"Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces.\"\n\nThis one's even more in line:\n\n\"We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.\"\n\nFinally:\n\n\"It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting, incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish *Futurism*, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, *ciceroni* and antiquarians.\"\n\nI'll acknowledge my lack of fluency here and refrain from commenting further. I hope that helps though."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93065.Art_in_Theory_1900_1990_"]]}
{"q_id": "fbu9dr", "title": "How did formerly enslaved people in America learn to read after the Civil War?", "selftext": "I read recently that many formerly enslaved people in America felt it was a priority to learn to read after the Civil War. How did they go about this? Were schools available for them or did they have other options?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fbu9dr/how_did_formerly_enslaved_people_in_america_learn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj810vy"], "score": [4], "text": ["The main way was through schools established by various northern aid societies with and in some cases for the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau (Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands). \n\nIn some cases, before the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau came and became involved, missionaries from Northern States had already established Schools.\n\nThese schools focused largely on the basics, reading, writing, and math. In some places, school was offered during the day for younger people and in the evening for working freedmen. \n\nThe schools, some of which were taught by Quaker missionaries, offered Sunday School on Sunday. \n\nAlthough the Bureau wasn\u2019t involved in education in terms of a lot of direct funding or determining curriculum, it did in many cases build or rent the buildings for the schools, and provide military protection, and in some cases overall supervision of the schools. \n\nThere were a few instances where the freedmen actually had to put up or find the land for these schools. Columbus, Texas is one. A Freedman named Benjamin Franklin Williams had acquired several lots in the burgeoning Freedmantown community, and one of his was used. \n\nThe Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen was more heavily involved in education than some historians revealed in the early 20th Century. In fact pages and pages of correspondence and reports on schools and education exist in the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau archives with the Library of Congress and National Archives, much of which has now been digitized. School matters, in fact take up an outsized portion of correspondence in some of the bureau regions. \n\nAfter these schools closed (and they closed at different times; the bureau and missionaries pulled out of Georgia, for example, in 1870), the responsibility was upon the states. \n\nIn terms of older freed people, I would suspect a thorough review of the WPA Slave Narratives would provide one or two primary sources on the children who attended school teaching older relatives on occasion, but I cannot lay my hands on such a reference at this time. \n\nSources: \n\n\nButchart, Ronald E. \u201cFreedmen's Education during Reconstruction,\u201d New Georgia Encyclopedia. \n\nCrouch, Barry A., The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans, University of Texas Press\n\nButchart, Ronald E. Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876, University of North Carolina Press"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1avn7f", "title": " How did ancient or medieval armies deal with things like thirst and heat stroke during what might be hours or days long combat?", "selftext": "A battle is probably the most physically arduous thing someone can do. Running and fighting in huge masses while covered in armor and clothing-- it seems like more people would die of exhaustion than enemy combatants. \n\nTo narrow it down a bit more, how did armies fighting in places like the Middle-East and Central Asia deal with this?\n\nEdit: My first time posting here. I read the rules, but if this is too ambiguous of a question, I could rephrase it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1avn7f/how_did_ancient_or_medieval_armies_deal_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91blxa", "c91c5gs"], "score": [11, 10], "text": ["As Aspergent summarized, in terms of pitched battle where two armies would engage in combat, there was nothing you really *could* do when the forces met. Hopefully the army has had enough preparation before the actual engagement to be at a level where they wouldn't be thirsty enough to effect their combat capability, and as far as heatstroke, like any campaign in the elements, armies would be forced to somehow accommodate the conditions of their environment or face a severe disadvantage to the enemy who would. In the ancient world, this often meant that many armies in the Near East were either culturally prepared to forsake heavier armor in favor of mobility and comfort in the harsher environments, possess a reliable supply line from which to maintain a campaign, or adequate knowledge of the area in order to take a route that would coincide with rivers and other favorable areas to forage from and camp near. \n\nThe most well known example of this in the ancient world where things like thirst and exhaustion from the heat contributed to a defeat would probably be Carrhae, where Plutarch's *Life of Crassus* tells us that Crassus, campaigning against the Parthians, was intentionally deceived by an Arab (Barbarian) chieftain by the name of Ariamnes to take a route that lacked anything save for endless desert, causing both thirst, exhaustion, and a loss of morale among the Roman legions before they even met the Parthian force. You can read about it [here](_URL_0_), specifically 21.2-4 and 22. ", "This may be considered slightly tangential, but both armies in the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) suffered from horrible cases of dysentery. How did they deal? No pants. War traditionally never stopped for \"petty\" things like hyper or hypothermia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3s4oh8", "title": "What was the most important port in Medieval Spain?", "selftext": "Also, what would be the fastest way to get from Spain to, say, Rome? Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s4oh8/what_was_the_most_important_port_in_medieval_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwu7x8e"], "score": [4], "text": ["According to Olivia Remie Constable's *Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900-1500*, the VIP Iberian ports were Seville, Valencia, Almeria, and Cartagena. The key factor was control of Mallorca and the other Balearic islands, since basically all sea trade had to pass through there. In the era of al-Andalus and the taifa kingdoms, these ports were crucial for Mediterranean trade. Intriguingly, as Christians conquered more and more of the peninsula, the same ports became key staging points for connecting the Mediterranean trade centered around Italy up north to the British Isles (and eventually south to the Canaries).\n\nThe fastest way to Rome was the easiest: by ship."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "68hk9d", "title": "What plane \"won\" the battle of Britain?", "selftext": "I have read various books and heard from various people that the Spitfire ultimately \"won\" the battle of Britain. However, I have always thought that it was the trusty Hawker Hurricane that was the true hero. Is there a general consensus that a certain plane changed the tide of the battle of Britain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68hk9d/what_plane_won_the_battle_of_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgyppu7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Allow me to direct you first to this answer of mine to a similar question: _URL_1_ \n\nLet's consider that answer an introduction and now let's get to your specific question. However, I don't think it can be answered with just one name. As you rightly indicate with the inverted commas, speaking of an aircraft (henceforth: a/c) which won the BoB is simply incorrect. The battle was won by *all* the a/c which participated, Defiant included, and all the aviators. Though I do, of course, understand what you\u2019re asking about: which a/c deserves more credit all in all. So in this sense I believe that yes, you are correct, that it was the Hurricane which should be considered the victor of the BoB. However, it\u2019s just my opinion on a topic where the debate will probably never be ultimately resolved.\n\nA few years ago I was convinced to favor the Hurricane over the Spit by Leo McKinstry, who wrote a book with the telling title **Hurricane: Victor of the Battle of Britain** (and largely upon said book I\u2019m basing this answer). According to McKinstry the Hurricane is not only the more important fighter of the two. It\u2019s the aircraft without which the RAF would have most likely lost against the Luftwaffe. \n\nWhen looking at German losses as analyzed by the British, you\u2019ll see that for every Luftwaffe a/c shot down by Spitfires 1.5 was shot down by Hurricanes. The crucial factor was that the Hurricane was much easier to manufacture and repair as well as to control in the air. In a crucial period when every a/c and every pilot was priceless this unglamorous factor had the potential to make or break the RAF. \n\nBy the onset of the BoB in early August 2309 Hurricanes had been delivered and there were 26 operational squadrons (C.F. Shores, Hawker Hurricane Mk.I/IV in Royal Air Force  &  Foreign Service, Osprey 1971). In the period from July to October there were a total of 35 Hurricane squadrons as compared to 20 Spitfire squadrons (C.F. Shores, Battle of Britain: Hurricane, Spitfire, Bf 109, Osprey, no year).\n\nVery early in its career the Spitfire surpassed the Hurricane in the fight for the hearts of the British public. Not just that, it even became an icon for the Germans. [This article](_URL_0_) by McKinstry mentions a certain German pilot shot down over England. \u201c\u2018He had been shot down by a Hurricane, which he thought much below his dignity. If it had been a Spitfire, it would have been OK \u2013 but not a Hurricane,\u2019 recalled Seabourne.\u201d It\u2019s therefore easy to understand why it might now be considered the victor of the BoB. But I will stand with McKinstry and whenever I have to pick, I\u2019ll see the Hurricane as the one plane that \u2018won\u2019 the battle\u2014until proven otherwise.\n\nBut as I\u2019ve already said, don\u2019t count on the debate ever being solved as it\u2019s not about anything quantifiable (such as the number of squadrons, in which case the Hurricane clearly wins, or the kill ratio). It\u2019s like choosing the world\u2019s best footballer or basketball player: in a team sport even the best of the best always need the support of a few minions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293468/The-unsung-plane-REALLY-won-Battle-Britain.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5k0up3/why_did_the_spitfire_end_up_being_more_iconic/"]]}
{"q_id": "b4nnor", "title": "Why didn't Japan or Korea ever get into the commercial aerospace industry?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b4nnor/why_didnt_japan_or_korea_ever_get_into_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej9fmqw"], "score": [4], "text": ["Japan has very much tried to get into the commercial aerospace industry. Their attempts have not been very successful, but try, they did, with Mitsubishi taking on the lion\u2019s share of the effort.\n\nThe first Japanese commercial aircraft to enjoy a measure of success (and one of the first Japanese post-war aerospace designs in general) was the [Mitsubishi MU-2](_URL_1_), a small twin-engine turboprop, first flown in the early 1960s. A number of airframes were actually license-built in the USA. The MU-2 has a nasty safety record. The generally reliable Aviation Safety database has a [long record of 219 accidents](_URL_4_), in which fatalities would easily total in the three digit range for the period from December 1968 until September 2017. But the aircraft itself was successful with 704 manufactured. Of these, 205 were still operational in the USA and 58 worldwide outside the US as of 2018.\n\nAround the same time that the MU-2 was first flown, the [NAMC YS-11](_URL_2_) also took to the air for the first time. This was an airliner in the proper sense of the word, able to carry 64 passengers. It was never used by any major airline outside Japan, but did see service with some minor fleets, such as Phuket Air, pictured above, or the American airline Mid Pacific, pictured [here](_URL_5_). Nowadays, Mitsubishi is working on its [Mitsubishi Regional Jet](_URL_0_), first flown in 2015. This aircraft is likely to see widespread international service, though we still have to wait and see whether that will be the case.\n\nSo, the question should not be: \u2018Why didn't Japan or Korea ever get into the commercial aerospace industry?\u2019 It should rather be phrased as: \u2018Why did Japan and Korea never become internationally successful in the commercial aerospace industry *in their own right*?\u2019 \n\nI\u2019ve added that last part, because it should also be noted that Japanese companies do participate in the international aerospace industry as subcontractors, mainly for Boeing. If you\u2019re interested in details, this book, [page 266](_URL_3_), provides a breakdown of which company manufactured what for which airframe.\n\n So, now that we\u2019ve re-framed the question, it\u2019s high time I gave you your answer. While it\u2019s impossible to pinpoint one factor, there\u2019s a number of factor which contributed to the current state of affairs and the main one is what I\u2019ve talked about in the previous paragraph: subcontracting work. Designing a modern aircraft is a supremely difficult task: it requires immense engineering know-how and huge up-front investments. With aircraft manufacturing banned for a number of years under US occupation, Japanese aerospace companies have deliberately focused on subcontracting work and subsequently on manufacturing home-made aircraft for the military (or the Self-Defense Force, I should say). As a result, there was simply little room left, in the financial and organizational sense, for developing commercial airliners. There was also no opportunity to develop an international tech-support network.\n\nBeing a subcontractor also makes you a master of one trade. You know the saying, \u201cJack of all trades, master of none\u201d? Well, to build a successful aircraft you need to be a master of *all trades* in order to integrate all the components into a functional aircraft.\n\nAdditionally, Japan has a well-developed railway infrastructure, which means that small, short and medium range passenger airplanes, which would otherwise be useful for connecting distant cities on separate islands, become\u2026 less useful. Don\u2019t get me wrong, Japan has a big domestic airline market in absolute numbers, but it pales in comparison to railways. It\u2019s not an insurmountable barrier, which we clearly see with the MU-2 and YS-11 as examples, but it does make a difficult situation even more disadvantageous.\n\nNowadays, the industry is absolutely dominated by two giants: Boeing and Airbus. Embraer of Brazil is a distant third. China and Russia are trying to get a slice of the pie. If another country wanted to fight for a slice, and not just breadcrumbs, it would require and immense effort. It\u2019s not totally out of the question, as evidenced by the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, but it\u2019s costly ad risky.\n\nIn Korea\u2019s case all these factors repeat themselves with varying emphasis, the most crucial ones probably being the late start and the fact that Korea Aerospace Industries, *the* Korean aircraft manufacturer, also focused on military aircraft.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/JA21MJ_TAXI_TEST.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/D-IAHT_Mitsubishi_MU-2.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/NAMC_YS-11A%2C_Phuket_Air_AN0923039.jpg", "https://books.google.pl/books?id=L8v4ijVw10YC&amp;pg=PA266#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/dblist.php?AcType=MU2", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Mid_Pacific_Air_NAMC_YS-11A-659_Silagi-1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3bwu1i", "title": "Where does the \"Africans are the only real Jews\" theory come from and does it have a factual base to stand on?", "selftext": "I've always lumped them in with the crazies but I've seen it popping up a bit recently among people I thought had at least a few of their marbles in place. Are they crazy or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bwu1i/where_does_the_africans_are_the_only_real_jews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csqcpee"], "score": [7], "text": ["It might be helpful if you provide a link or something to the claim because it  be referring to the Black Hebrew movement, or Beta Israel, or some other thing and each one would require its own explanation"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ablrl", "title": "How were a handful of Spaniards able to subdue the populous and powerful Aztecs and Inca empires?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ablrl/how_were_a_handful_of_spaniards_able_to_subdue/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0zxvj8", "d106xa6"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["There's always room for discussion, but perhaps these podcast episodes and previous topics will answer your inquiry\n\n* [AskHistorians Podcast Episode 004 Discussion Thread - The Aztec Conquest, Part 1](_URL_0_)\n\n* [AskHistorians Podcast Episode 005 Discussion Thread - The Aztec Conquest, Part 2](_URL_5_)\n\n* [Did the Spanish conquer the Aztecs because of military superiority? If not, how did Cortes do it?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [/u/historianLA's comment in the Mesoamerica AMA](_URL_3_)\n\n* [/u/pseudogentry's comment in the Civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas - Massive Panel AMA](_URL_4_)\n\n* [/u/Pachacamac's comment in the History of the Andes AMA](_URL_1_)", "/u/Mictlantecuhtli has provided some excellent links on this subject, but I'd like to just briefly touch on a few points.\n\n**1. A handful of Spanish didn't subdue the Aztecs**\n\nDuring the war against the Mexica there were about 1000 Spanish in Mesoamerica (with resupply and reinforcements coming from Cuba to replace lost equipment and men). Fighting right alongside that handful, however, were (by Cort\u00e9s' own estimate) about 100,000 Tlaxcalans, Acolhua, Totonacs, and others. Even then...\n\n**2. The Battle and Siege of Tenochtitlan was not easy**\n\nThe actual fighting part of the Conquest itself took the better part of a year. The above noted confederation of forces entered the Valley of Mexico shortly after Christmas 1520, and it was not until mid-August that Cuauhtemoc surrendered. Between those dates was a grueling and grinding 3 month siege which itself was preceded by months of intense fighting around the lakes and on the causeways into Tenochtitlan. So it's important to keep in mind that this was no cakewalk. Perhaps more important to keep in mind is that...\n\n**3. Framing the Conquest as a clash of cultures is anachronistic**\n\nIn retrospect, what happened in 1520-1521 Mexico was a world changing event with far reaching repercussions. At the time though, it was not framed in such stark terms, because the conceptualization of an American/European dichotomy did not yet exist. The notion of \"primitive\" peoples being \"naturally\" subdued and subsumed by an \"advanced\" race is something that took centuries to develop. Ca\u00f1izares-Esquerra's *How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistimologies, and Indentities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World* is (as the subtitle hints) perhaps a bit overly academic for a quick overview, but part of the thrust of the book is that the early Spanish essentially viewed the Aztecs (and other groups) on equal footing. They were vile pagans, true, but they were not innate inferior. Later (primarily French and English) writers, far removed in both space and time from the events of Contact, would discount early Spanish texts as both gullible and fanciful, while also viewing native sources as proof of their inherent inferiority. The point being that neither side was approaching the Battle of Tenochtitlan as a clash of cultures. Also consider...\n\n**4. It took time for things to change, if at all**\n\nThe process of synthesis and assimilation of cultures in Mexico was a decades (if not centuries or even on-going) process. Immediately post-Conquest, the ultimate head of state may have shifted from Tenochtitlan to Madrid, but the Mexica who had been happily conquering their way around Mesoamerica, went right on conquering their way around Mesoamerica. The problem of \"invisible Indians\" is particular severe when discussing post-Conquest expeditions to the North and South of Central Mexico. Every one of them was ostensibly a Spanish led mission, but native elites served right along side and indigenous troops often made up the bulk of the soldiers. Ironically, the Conquest led to opportunities for a Nahua identity to further spread and cement itself in Mesoamerica.\n\nI've written on these topics several times, so here are some past comments you might find interesting:\n\n- [How did the conquistadors translate their decisive military victories into day-to-day control of such vast swathes of the earth?](_URL_2_)\n\n- [Did Moctezuma II really believe Cortes was 'an armor-clad God'?](_URL_4_)\n\n- [Did the Aztecs,Incas or Maya ever try to adapt European technology before being defeated?](_URL_5_)\n\n- [Why did the Aztecs lose the battle of Otumba?](_URL_1_)\n\n- [What was daily life like for the indigenous population of Mexico City in the years directly after the conquest?](_URL_3_)\n\n- [After the Spanish Came to the New World and Conquered Local Empires, They Continued to Honor Local Nobles and their Titles - How did this Work? How Did the Nobility Intermingle?](_URL_0_)\n\nI'm more than happy to field any follow-up questions you might have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z65xn/askhistorians_podcast_episode_004_discussion/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ujqzx/ama_history_of_the_andes/cejo3wg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cspef/did_the_spanish_conquer_the_aztecs_because_of/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ee1h9/wednesday_ama_mesoamerica/c9zbl21", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pa7hf/civilizations_of_the_precolumbian_americas/cmuyyv8", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ztffa/askhistorians_podcast_episode_005_discussion/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/449hvy/after_the_spanish_came_to_the_new_world_and/czp3f7g", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pmwda/why_did_the_aztecs_lose_the_battle_of_otumba/cd4955m?context=2", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n7549/how_did_the_conquistadors_translate_their/ccg4tor", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25y5j0/what_was_daily_life_like_for_the_indigenous/chmcx1y", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/345ziu/did_moctezuma_ii_really_believe_cortes_was_an/cqs29jl", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z6skp/did_the_aztecsincas_or_maya_ever_try_to_adapt/cfrfod0"]]}
{"q_id": "1ktbt9", "title": "Field Marshal Montgomery - how close did the Allies actually come to accomplishing the goals of Operation Market Garden and was Montgomery\u2019s post-battle analysis valid?", "selftext": "Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in many of my readings is portrayed in a very negative light by many non-British, Allied commanders during WWII.  He is frequently cast as a glory-seeking commander who claims credit for victories that were not his. One of Montgomery's most ambitious strategies was his plan to force an entry into Germany over the Rhine during Operation Market Garden in an attempt to quickly end the war. In post-battle analysis, Montgomery claimed that Operation Market Garden was \u201c90% successful\u201d and also stated:\n\n >  *\"I must admit a bad mistake on my part \u2013 I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp so that we could get the free use of that port. I reckoned the Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I was wrong.\"* \n \n\n >  *\"In my prejudiced view, if the operation had been properly backed from its inception, and given the aircraft, ground forces, and administrative resources necessary for the job, it would have succeeded in spite of my mistakes, or the adverse weather, or the presence of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps in the Arnhem area. I remain Market Garden's unrepentant advocate.\"*\n\n___________________________________________________________________________________________\n\n\nField Marshal Montgomery remarks admitted failure, while also lamenting a lack of resources necessary for victory.  Were the Allies truly as close to victory as Montgomery claims and would additional resources have made the difference in the outcome of the battle?  How do you view Montgomery's overall assessment of Operation Market Garden and how accurately do you view his post-battle analysis?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ktbt9/field_marshal_montgomery_how_close_did_the_allies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbsokjd", "cbsvrbu"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Operation Market Garden had very little chance of success because it literally hinged on every part of the campaign going perfectly and exactly on time. Unfortunately for Montgomery there were many setbacks early on in the battle and it was far from 90% successful. \n\nThe British 1st Airborne division was for all practical purposes completely destroyed. The armored divisions were badly mauled and were constantly being harassed on their flanks. The 101st and 82nd suffered significant casualties and struggled to hold their objectives. It was a decisive defeat for the Allies. \n", "It should be noted that Montgomery only suffered one major defeat in the entire war, that being Market Garden. He was generally liked by his men, but not his superiors or peers who seemed to find him difficult.\n\nThe target of winning the war early, would have saved many lives and would have completely changed the post war landscape but whether he would have known the issues with letting the Russians get to Berlin first is another matter.\n\nI know the quote about \"90% successful\". **No** it wasn't. This was an \"all or nothing\" with the end result, a very costly zero. If the main objective of crossing the Rhine had not been achieved, how can it be described as 90% successful?\n\nIf we look at the key failures:\n\n  * Planning - This was done in a week due to availability of diverted supplies.\n  * Intelligence - there was [conflicting information available](_URL_3_) however [this report](_URL_4_) suggests that the intelligence was not sufficiently well understood by command. For whatever reason an American officer had a copy of the full plan with him when he was killed on landing and this was found and utilised by the Germans.\n  * Signals - Forgetting that the long distance comms were lost to the Germans when the LZ was overrun, the [short range communications used were hopeless](_URL_2_)). A key problem was a lack of understanding by the signals specialists in the field of having the correct antenna lengths for the frequencies chosen. This significantly  reduced the effective output power of the transmitters.\n  * Dutch Resistance. The link by the SOE with the Dutch Resistance had been discovered to be compromised by the Abwehr's so-called [Englandspiel](_URL_1_). There were standing orders to ignore them. However their really was an uncompromised Dutch Resistance and they could have helped with intelligence and telephone communications (eventually the British on the ground did ignore orders and [used the phone system provided by the resistance](_URL_0_)).\n  * Inexperience. It has been suggested that few of the senior officers involved were that experienced. Something may feel wrong but it is difficult to stand up and object when you have no experience to back it up (especially with Montgomery's management style). With objections discussed, they could be mitigated.\n\nNote that  if *any* one of the above had been addressed, the operation could have probably succeeded. Montgomery (or Browning) could not have discussed anything with regards to Ultra (including the status of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions) as it remained top secret until 1974. The analysis piece on the radio problems came out in 2004. However, you would normally address problems in advance with contingency plans - there was no time to develop these."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.marketgarden.com/2010/UK/page10.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englandspiel", "http://www.qsl.net/ve3bdb/CommsAtArnhem.pdf", "http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA406861", "http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA406941"]]}
{"q_id": "16g4v2", "title": "How did presidents view other presidents", "selftext": "I was curious if it was it common for former presidents to consider other presidents dumb or incompetent? Really what are some examples of presidents who either hated other presidents or thought they were idiots. I know of Nixon's views of Reagan, but would be interested in more. \nThis is from mother jones of Nixon and Kissinger \"President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He's got to know that on defense--doesn't he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we've been at--\"\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16g4v2/how_did_presidents_view_other_presidents/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7vq9x3", "c7vrth7", "c7vxnaa"], "score": [4, 18, 7], "text": ["I believe that LBJ and Kennedy didn't really like each other, and a quick google search turns up [this article](_URL_0_) that reveals a bit of it. I would, however, defer to someone else regarding this specific instance who knows more!", "As you mention, Nixon was not fond of Reagan and would never have chosen him to be the standard bearer of the Republican Party. Nixon didn't have much of a say in these things though after Watergate, even though he built the political coalition that Reagan used to win his election. \n\nGoing back to the early 20th century though, Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft had been good friends while Roosevelt was president and Roosevelt himself basically hand-picked Taft as his successor. This relationship rapidly fell apart during Taft's administration and descended into full-blown animosity when Taft dismissed Gifford Pinchot, one of Roosevelt's good friends, from his post as Chief of the U.S. Forrest Service (among other things). Prior to the election of 1912, Roosevelt had also respected Woodrow Wilson as a scholar and progressive governor, but became consumed in the throes of the election and reversed all of his previous opinions. Wilson and Taft, however, were perfectly cordial with one another and Wilson was grateful to Taft for his advice about living in the White House and how to run the Presidential household. Though they would eventually be on opposite sides of the fight, Wilson also consulted Taft on the League of Nations. \n\nMoving to the next Roosevelt, FDR treated Hoover with a degree of contempt and never invited him to the White House. This was partially because during the transition period, Hoover tried to rope FDR into making public statements about Hoover's policies, which FDR thought of as an attempt to tie him down before he even took office. Hoover reciprocated the opinion and the two men were never reconciled. When FDR died, however, Truman approached Hoover for advice as he was the only living former president. Truman indeed treated Hoover well and Hoover toured occupied Europe to give his advice based on his post-WWI experiences. Truman also appointed Hoover to chair a commission on governmental reorganization. Hoover himself would joke that he and Truman were the only two members of the \"Presidential Trade Union\" or something like that. Additionally, when Truman left office, he was basically broke and Congress decided to create a presidential pension; Hoover, even though he was very wealthy, took the pension as well to help Truman save face. \n\nTruman and Eisenhower had previously had good relations, but Truman became quite disenchanted with him during the election of 1952. Eisenhower also cooled in his opinion of Truman and there was some sort of snubbing on Inauguration Day 1953. They would eventually reconcile though after, IIRC, JFK's funeral. Johnson was friendly with both Truman and Eisenhower. LBJ signed Medicare into law at Truman's Presidential Library and consulted with Eisenhower on the war in Vietnam. Neither Johnson nor Truman liked Nixon, although they had cordial and respectful relations. Nixon once made the massive faux-pas of playing the Missouri Waltz when visiting Truman, who *loathed* the song. ", "Thomas Jefferson on Andrew Jackson-\n\n\"I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was a Senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage. His passions are, no doubt, cooler now; he has been much tried since I knew him, but he is a dangerous man\"\n\nJohn Quincy Adams on Andrew Jackson-\n\n\"A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity...he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory\"\n\nAnd Since no Early Republic quote would be complete without an Adams/Jefferson quote\n\n\"It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds. However wise and scientific as philosopher, as a politician he is a child and a dupe of party\"\n\nAdams 1797\n\nHarry Truman apparently commented on every previous president, his quotes are all easily available online. He didn't hold Monroe or either of the Adams' in high regard and apparently thought Jackson and Polk were the greatest.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Jacqueline_Kennedy/jacqueline-kennedy-reveals-jfk-feared-lbj-presidency/story?id=14477930"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "209whh", "title": "Where was the beginning of what we regard today as Government?", "selftext": "I have done some research on the topic and found that the first Civilization seems to be regarded as Sumer from Mesopotamia, even though there are several other theories. So we this where the first government took place?  If so could you please tell me a bit about the type of government that was there (or wherever government originated) or direct me to somewhere that could provide me with this information? \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/209whh/where_was_the_beginning_of_what_we_regard_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg1op82"], "score": [2], "text": ["If you want a long and detailed answer to this question, check out \"The Origins of Political Order\" by Francis Fukuyama - the whole book is answering the question of where political organisation came from.\n\nThe book goes into various historical examples of where political order came from - even going to pre-history. So I guess it might depend on your definition of \"government\".\n\nFor example, apparently political hierarchy emerged partially biologically (see: primates), but external factors can often force a group of homo-sapiens to form groups in which leaders emerge - such as an outside military threat.\n\nAs for how we regard government today though, the argument he makes is that there are three main things that make modern states/governments:\n- Strong government (can the government/rulers enforce laws?)\n- Accountable government (how is the government held to account?)\n- Rule of law (how is government forced to act in a non-arbitrary way, within the constraints of law)\n\nThese all emerged at different times and in different places (and arguably are not universal today). For example, he argues that rule of law emerged in Europe thanks in part due to the Catholic church providing an alternative power-base to secular rulers, acting to constrain some actions and legitimate others (the Holy Roman Emperor wasn't truly the Emperor until the Pope had given him the nod). In India it was similar the religious class which lead to the adoption of rule of law. China, he argues, doesn't have a rule of law tradition which is arguably why it experiences totalitarian government today.\n\nAnother nice example is in terms of accountable government. Fukuyama notes, for instance, that in most societies throughout history when there has been a transition of power, there has generally been a gathering of elders to legitimate it (these days we have elections, in ancient China all the rich and powerful people got together, in Afghanistan they'd have a loya jirga, etc).\n\nEssentially, its complicated! And depends how you define \"government\".\n\nObviously this isn't a complete answer - but I thoroughly recommend the book, even if it'll inevitable receive criticisms for being too teleological.\n\n(nb: not a historian, just an enthusiast here!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fx1y7", "title": "Would the average ancient Egyptian be able to read Hieroglyphs or was that knowledge reserved for the upper class?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fx1y7/would_the_average_ancient_egyptian_be_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caentgl", "caetw4m", "caex913"], "score": [3, 3, 5], "text": ["Associated question - What language did the ancient Egyptians actually use? Do the hieroglyphics letters have sounds associated with them? Was this the language that was used by commoners and kings alike?", "Tangentially related to your question, but today I was at the Uruk exhibition at the Pergamon Museum which had a segment about writing and literacy in that ancient city. They discussed how Uruk scribes who went on to the priesthood and astrology or to become lamentation singers had to undergo a regimen of learning not only Akkadian but also Sumerian, specifically 10,000 hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs were developed over a period of thousands of years and remained surprisingly stable based on the clay tablet evidence we have at our disposal. I infer from this that it was indeed akin to being a \"full time student\" as learning 10,000 words of any language, wherein a functional vocabulary is today defined as ready access to 2,000 words, is extremely demanding. To achieve B2 (i.e. \"upper intermediate\") proficiency in a modern language, i.e. one using an alphabet and therefore easier, requires anywhere from 500-600 hours of study. Thus only individuals with patrons or who are quite wealthy would have been able to take this free time and leisure needed in order to master the linguistic challenge.\n\nMy sources: visit to the Pergamon Museum today, various exhibit placards which I read, also Common European Union Framework of Reference for Languages", "Added question:  Do any hieroglyphs have 'jokes' in them?  For some reason I pictured there being some from of humour possibly hidden in them when I was looking at them in Egypt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3fkw9r", "title": "What happened when black diplomats went to Rhodesia, South Africa, or Jim Crow United States?", "selftext": "Specifically, their diplomatic immunity and its interaction with segregation laws.  I understand they don't want to make waves, but it seems like it would be impossible in the face of such vitriolic racism. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fkw9r/what_happened_when_black_diplomats_went_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctplh3d", "ctpr86q", "ctprjem", "ctpsyj5"], "score": [1484, 89, 161, 53], "text": ["There were fascinating conflicts and confrontations on all sides. Let's start with the United States.\n\nUntil 1961, the U.S. State Department relied on its Office of Security to provide escorts for visiting diplomats and dignitaries. Before the 1960s, foreign visits weren't all that common. Transportation technology was one hurdle, and another was the simple fact that were many fewer nations in the world. The process of decolonization created a wealth of new nations in Asia and Africa, and these nations could \u2014 thanks to jet transportation \u2014 send their dignitaries around the world.\n\nAccording to the official history of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, President Kennedy \"entertained more dignitaries and heads of state during his first two years in office than Roosevelt had in his 12 years in office or Truman had in eight years.\"\n\nThe 1961 Vienna Convention specifically ordered host countries to provide diplomatic security, but the U.S. government was slow to respond. As a result of this \u2014 coupled with the racist attitudes prevalent in and around Washington, D.C., \u2014 there were several incidents.\n\nA Ghanian diplomat who traveled to Georgia to observe an election was \"roughed up\" by white supremacists. An Ethiopian diplomat received threatening phone calls and found the tires of his car flattened again and again. When he complained to D.C. police, they ignored his request for an investigation.\n\nAfrican diplomats had a hard time finding housing in Washington, thanks to the ability of homeowners and landlords to discriminate. The same was true for their staffs and families. Washington's Metropolitan Club granted free membership to ambassadors \u2014 but not to African and Asian ones.\n\nKennedy realized this was a huge problem, so Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles proposed the creation of the Special Protocol Service Section of the State Department's Office of Protocol. As the section's first chief, Pedro Sanjuan, said: \"What affects one or more members of these groups is likely to have a strong influence on the opinions and attitudes of their governments.\"\n\nNevertheless, the creation of that section couldn't solve all the problems. When a restaurant denied service to the new ambassador from Chad, he returned to Chad and quit. The trip he was on \u2014 from New York City to Washington, D.C., had been to present his credentials to Kennedy.\n\nSecretary of State Dean Rusk, in *As I Saw It* (p. 382), tells a story about an African delegate to the UN who was traveling to New York when his plane stopped in Miami. \n\n > \"When the passengers disembarked for lunch, the white passengers were taken to the airport restaurant; the black delegate received a folding canvas stool in a corner of the hangar and a sandwich wrapped with waxed paper. He then flew on to New York, where our delegation asked for his vote on human rights issues. That same ambassador later became his country's prime minister. We learned later that his chronic bitterness toward the United States stemmed from that incident.\"\n\nFor more detail about what I've written above, I suggest Renee Romano's [\"No Diplomatic Immunity: African Diplomats, the State Department, and Civil Rights, 1961-1964\"](_URL_1_) in the September 2000 *Journal of American History*; Mary Dudziak's *Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy*; and Timothy Maga's \"Battling the 'Ugly American' At Home\" in *Diplomacy and Statecraft*. \n\n***\n\nNow, let's look at the other side of the coin \u2014 specifically, [when Edward Perkins was appointed the U.S. ambassador to South Africa](_URL_0_). \n\nIt was 1986, and apartheid was tearing South Africa apart. The country was on the verge of what seemed like a civil war. Into this mix, President Reagan appointed Edward Perkins, the first black U.S. ambassador to South Africa. He tells his story in *Mr. Ambassador: Warrior for Peace*, but I'll post an excerpt here of the Juan Williams story I linked above:\n\n > Perkins was instructed to step up to [South African president P.W.] Botha, who always tried to physically position himself above the incoming ambassadors.\n\n > \"The president's aides didn't know how tall I am,\" Perkins said. \"We ended up looking up straight at each other \u2014 right into each other's eyes. I could tell that he didn't intend to avert his eyes, and I didn't intend mine either \u2014 and then when I handed him the letter of credence, he had to look down to take it \u2014 so he lost the battle that day.\"\n\n > Perkins told Botha that he planned to travel across South Africa to meet with as many people as possible. He recalls the conversation that followed.\n\n > \"Then [Botha] stopped me and he stuck his finger in my face and he said, 'Listen. I've heard about you. I don't want you getting involved in our affairs. You understand?' And then I said 'Well, Mr. President. I'm here as a representative of the American people to the people of South Africa.' And he said, 'You didn't hear me did you,' and he stuck his finger in my face again,\" Perkins says. \"At this time, he was kind of shaking, he was so angry. The president and I were never to have a civil conversation during my entire time there.\"", "The South African authorities created the designation of 'honorary White' to deal with this issue. [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_)\n\nWhile the Wiki article deals mainly with the redesignation of certain Asian nations, this was also applied to, for example, diplomats from the four notionally independent Bantustans (the TBVC states), allowing them to live in White-designated areas, have their kids attend White schools etc.", "I recall reading in the Malcolm X Diaries that one of the formative sights that the young Malcolm saw was a delegation from an African nation, dressed in traditional attire, being allowed to dine in the whites only section of a restaurant, while Malcolm and his friends were denied entry.\n\nHe went on to write, if I recall correctly, that it was at that moment that it became clear to him that it wasn't merely the colour of his skin that led to the discrimination, it was because of the history and the stain of slavery\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "There may have been fewer problems in Rhodesia, because the Rhodesian authorities tried to maintain the pretence that they were not racist, merely that the African majority in Rhodesia was unready for political power.  The official fiction was that blacks in general were not inferior *per se*, merely that the ones in Rhodesia were.  In practice, of course, this meant deprivation and oppression for Rhodesia's black majority, which is the essence of racism.  \n\nThe first part of [this video](_URL_0_) shows black British comedian Charlie Williams entertaining a rapt Rhodesian audience at a nightclub in Salisbury during his tours of the country.  In this case, it seems, the \"British\" was more important to the Rhodies than the \"black\"; they may have treated foreign ambassadors slightly better to try and preserve their narrative that they were anti-communist and anti-chaos, not anti-racist.  \n\n\"This, as the manager will tell you, is a multi-racial club - except for Africans.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6369450", "http://www.academicroom.com/article/no-diplomatic-immunity-african-diplomats-state-department-and-civil-rights-1961-1964"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_whites"], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Diary-Malcolm-El-Hajj-El-Shabazz-ebook/dp/B00QMQ6KOG"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2NKlMW0vc"]]}
{"q_id": "27z6yz", "title": "What similarities do you see between modern america and nazi germany (not just the war years)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27z6yz/what_similarities_do_you_see_between_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5sybh"], "score": [2], "text": ["(This is not the place to ask a question like that)\n\nSimilarities can be drawn between any states, they share so much in common by simply being a state. Nazi Germany and the USA today do not share very much in common. Aside from the government having complete authority over the law and enforcement of it, I cannot think of any real similarities. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4k92a5", "title": "How did Soviet leaders view the Watergate hearings and Nixon's subsequent resignation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4k92a5/how_did_soviet_leaders_view_the_watergate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3dhnwp"], "score": [1164], "text": ["The Soviet leadership greatly underestimated the importance of the Watergate affair and did not understand its true political significance. When former ambassador Averell Harriman visited Moscow in 1976, he reported that General Secretary Brezhnev did not seem to understand what Nixon did that necessitated his resignation and express fear that it would undo the \"great progress\" the US and the USSR made together under detente. The Soviets feared that the loss of a partner in the US might jeopardize US-Soviet relations in the same way that FDR's death in 1945 brought in a president more hostile to the USSR.\n\nThe Soviet political culture, with its weak institutional and legal checks on executive power, meant that its leadership had trouble coming to grasps with the idea that the president could be forced to resign over abuses of power in violation of the law. Most Soviet officials considered the whole impeachment process not as a matter of constitutional constraint on presidential power, but rather a conspiracy of ultra-rightists who opposed detente, newspapers, and disgruntled democrats to depose Nixon. While others, such as the Soviet deputy procurator general, thought the whole affair was \"for show\" and that Nixon would survive if he just \"showed a little firmness\". \n\nSoviet Americanists are however, are at least closer to the mark. The Soviet political scientist Valentin Zorin described Watergate as a function of a power struggle between congress and the president, each of whom represented certain economic \"monopoly groupings\" power bases inside the US. Watergate was a reaction against the increasing power of the presidency and Nixon's powerbase and attempted to \"correct\" the balance of power in American politics. The political scientist S. B. Chetverikov described it as a power struggle to contain the power of an autocratic presidency. The Americanists in the USSR broadly perceived Watergate as a reaction against the overly autocratic tendencies of one president, which they understood through their own history with Stalin.\n\nThe one way Watergate did change Soviet perception of the US is to give them more respect to the power of congress as well as the constitution to guard against the power of the president. However, to this day, relatively little has being written in the USSR or Russia regarding the Watergate affair.\n\nSource: Soviet Perceptions of the United States By Morton Schwartz"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nintj", "title": "A far as sheer numbers of soldiers on a battlefield, what was the largest battle to ever take place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nintj/a_far_as_sheer_numbers_of_soldiers_on_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccj21kl"], "score": [5], "text": ["As /u/egavactip was saying, the term \"battle\" is a bit ambiguous, can we instead ask what was the largest single engagement (defined by number of involved soldiers) before the Korean War.  So while an entire siege would not count, the final \"over the wall\" attack that ended it would."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a8lrwa", "title": "In the past it was OK to marry girls in their early teens, what social forces lead to this becoming frowned upon and illegal?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8lrwa/in_the_past_it_was_ok_to_marry_girls_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecch1ic", "eccoaty"], "score": [75, 4], "text": ["Girls being married in their early teens has only been common in specific historical cultures and subcultures - this isn't a thing that happened overwhelmingly throughout \"the past\". So if there's a specific context you're thinking of, it would be really helpful as far as getting a comprehensive and in-depth answer goes. Here are a few past answers that might help you narrow it down:\n\n[Why did large age gaps in marriage go from being common to being unpopular?](_URL_2_) (about royal medieval/early modern weddings, and the Mediterranean marriage pattern), by me\n\n[A girl today looks at marriage and says \"its about love\"; but given that the concept of marriage for love wasn't invented until late medieval times, what would a Roman girl say about marriage? What would marriage mean to her?](_URL_1_), also by me\n\n[Are you living in Ptolemaic Egypt? Click here to meet land-owning soldiers looking for love in your village](_URL_0_), by /u/cleopatra_philopater \n\n[What was the average marriage age for people living in the Middle Ages?](_URL_3_), by /u/sunagainstgold\n\n[In the American South of the 1950s-1970s, was it typical for older men (in their 20s or older) to 'court' teenage girls? What were typical marriage ages and age gaps?](_URL_4_)\n\nDo any of these bring up more questions about early-teen marriage for you, or help you refine the question?", "If anybody can answer this with respect to the 1800s west and specifically Mormon polygamous culture, that would be outstanding. It is often argued among LDS apologists the that 56-year-old men regularly married teens in the 1800s, and I'd love to know exactly how inaccurate that is "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88kabf/are_you_living_in_ptolemaic_egypt_click_here_to/dwl718x/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2wxye/a_girl_today_looks_at_marriage_and_says_its_about/ebefwmg/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ersye/why_did_large_age_gaps_in_marriage_go_from_being/dy1960l/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pafst/what_was_the_average_marriage_age_for_people/cw4w6vb/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ch5v8/in_the_american_south_of_the_1950s1970s_was_it/dpql77w/"], []]}
{"q_id": "20bf05", "title": "What would Mjolnir actually look like? (How did the norse warhammers looked at the time)", "selftext": "We all know Marvel's Mjolnir and even the Mjolnir pendants that are all over the place. However what kind of weapon did the norsemen imagined that Thor had?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20bf05/what_would_mjolnir_actually_look_like_how_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg1lva4", "cg1okzu", "cg1ooiv", "cg1orjv", "cg1v8ec"], "score": [10, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["The modern day reproductions of the pendants are usually based off of actual archeological finds like [this](_URL_0_). This design is also found on several runestones and is most likely the way people pictured Mj\u00f6lnir. Realistically it would have been an impractical weapons, unwieldly and with a very limited range. \n\nThere is no such thing as a Norse war hammer. Hammers as such were uncommon as weapons during the viking age, they're a late medieval weapon well suited to beating the living daylight out of a plate armored warrior against whom edge and piercing weapons are rather ineffective. ", "Its important to note that Mjolnir was NOT a \"warhammer.\"  It was modeled after a blacksmith's hammer.  Norsemen (although that is a very broad term) didn't use warhammers until the renaissance.", "[This is the swedish wikipedia](_URL_0_) that has pictures of archaeological finds of pedants from the 5th to the 8th century in Sweden and as you can see they differ a lot. [Runic stones](_URL_1_) from that period was very diffuse so it is quite hard to really tell what they imagined but the pendants from the period it possibly closest to the real answer.", "The oldest recording of the Mj\u00f6llnir is about the 4th century on the [S\u00f6 111](_URL_0_) runestone. Basically a giant upside-down T.\n\nIn the 12th century there is the [DR 48 Runestone](_URL_1_) that looks slightly different, but relatively the same.\n\nBonus: In English S\u00f6 111 reads \"Helgi and Freygeirr and \u00deorgautr raised the rune-decorated landmark in memory of \u00dej\u00f3\u00f0mundr, their father.\"", "If you read the mythological story of how Thor got Mjolnir, you'd be made aware that the design of the hammer was due to a mistake made by the blacksmiths who forged it, caused by Loki. As I recall, it was supposed to be an axe.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe depictions of Mjolnir must be based on the hammer of a blacksmith, as others have pointed out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Mjollnir.png"], [], ["http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lner#Historiska_torshammare", "http://tannhauser3.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/1.jpg"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/S%C3%B6_111%2C_Stenkvista.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/DR_48%2C_Hanning.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lnir"]]}
{"q_id": "1zw63t", "title": "AMA: Late Antiquity/Early Medieval era circa 400 - 1000 CE, aka \"The Dark Ages\"", "selftext": "Welcome to today's AMA features 14 panelists willing and eager to answer your questions on Late Antiquity/Early Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, circa 400 - 1000 CE, aka \"The Dark Ages\".  \n\nVikings are okay for this AMA, however the preference is for questions about the Arab conquests to be from non-Islamic perspectives given our recent Islam AMAs. \n\nOur panelists are:\n\n* /u/Aerandir : Pre-Christian Scandanavia from an archaeological perspective. \n* /u/Ambarenya : Late Macedonian emperors and the Komnenoi, Byzantine military technology, Byzantium and the crusades, the reign of Emperor Justinian I, the Arab invasions, Byzantine cuisine. \n* /u/bitparity : Roman structural and cultural continuity \n* /u/depanneur : Irish kingship and overlordship, Viking Ireland, daily life in medieval Ireland \n* /u/GeorgiusFlorentius : Early Francia, the history of the first successor states of the Empire (Vandals, Goths) \n* /u/idjet : Medieval political/economic history from Charles Martel and on.  \n* /u/MarcusDohrelius : Augustine, other Christian writers (from Ignatius through Caesarius), Latin language, religious persecution, the late antique interpretation of earlier Roman history and literature \n* /u/MI13 : Early medieval military \n* /u/rittermeister : Germanic culture and social organization, Ostrogothic Italy, Al Andalus, warfare.\n* /u/talondearg : Late Antique Empire and Christianity up to about end of 6th century. \n* /u/telkanuru : Late Antique/Early Medieval Papacy, the relationship between the Papacy and Empire, Merovingian and Carolingian Gaul, Irish Monasticism. \n* /u/riskbreaker2987 : Reactions to the Arab conquest, life under the early Islamic state, and Islamic scholarship in the so-called \"dark ages.\" \n* /u/romanimp : Vergilian Latin and Late Antiquity \n* /u/wee_little_puppetman : Northern/Western/Central Europe and from an archaeologist's perspective. (Vikings)  \n\nLet's have your questions!\n\n**Please note:** our panelists are on different schedules and won't all be online at the same time. But they will get to your questions eventually!\n\n**Also:** We'd rather that only people part of the panel answer questions in the AMA, so as such, non-panel answers will be deleted. This is not because we assume that you don't know what you're talking about, it's because the point of a Panel AMA is to specifically organise a particular group to answer questions.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zw63t/ama_late_antiquityearly_medieval_era_circa_400/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxija6", "cfxin2e", "cfxinhk", "cfxiqdi", "cfxiwez", "cfxj17f", "cfxj1cl", "cfxj3rc", "cfxj4dr", "cfxj4gi", "cfxjat5", "cfxjcmi", "cfxjg5b", "cfxjgdm", "cfxjji1", "cfxjlwb", "cfxjtpl", "cfxjzq6", "cfxjzvu", "cfxk4j5", "cfxk4vm", "cfxk6ik", "cfxk9zn", "cfxkd91", "cfxkf7m", "cfxkkaz", "cfxl0r4", "cfxl6ri", "cfxlliu", "cfxlm5e", "cfxlnbf", "cfxloaz", "cfxlswc", "cfxlt1v", "cfxlv35", "cfxm0x8", "cfxm2de", "cfxm6bn", "cfxmcrb", "cfxmmjy", "cfxmmn7", "cfxmsjv", "cfxmwho", "cfxnieb", "cfxnmo1", "cfxnwr3", "cfxnx7v", "cfxoma0", "cfxostb", "cfxoufd", "cfxovnq", "cfxoz2p", "cfxp49a", "cfxp4b5", "cfxp6lc", "cfxp8bq", "cfxpcuj", "cfxpd5p", "cfxpq9c", "cfxpuzz", "cfxq2vi", "cfxqcbh", "cfxqdw3", "cfxqq5d", "cfxrftk", "cfxrkxj", "cfxrp65", "cfxruu4", "cfxrz6y", "cfxs2jv", "cfxs7vw", "cfxs8nc", "cfxscoz", "cfxsj4s", "cfxt87i", "cfxtb2p", "cfxtg59", "cfxtjvl", "cfxtulc", "cfxwe0a", "cfxwe35", "cfxwz7z", "cfy07ik", "cfyfzno"], "score": [40, 11, 33, 13, 93, 6, 6, 6, 34, 41, 4, 11, 27, 2, 13, 6, 3, 5, 8, 7, 3, 13, 5, 7, 4, 3, 9, 4, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 5, 3, 3, 9, 7, 5, 2, 10, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 9, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["I've got two questions for ya!                           1) Were there any early forms of public free education in Europe or the Mediterranean world?                                                                    2) How aware was the average peasant of the world around them? I'm referring to the geography, cultures, and the political structure of neighboring and distant lands.", "What was happening during the Dark Ages in Germany?", "What was the historical consciousness like during these eras? \n\nWe always hear about \"standing on the shoulders of giants\" in reference to the Renaissance and looking back towards antiquity.. So I've always been curious about this supposed transitory period.  Did scholars and kingdoms reflect on their alleged \"dark\" place in history?  How did Scandinavians understand their place in history?  Romans?  Irish? Etc.  Were there events that changed that consciousness?\n\nEveryone *loves* incredibly broad questions, so feel free to answer in brief!  All are welcome to answer for their specific subject area!", "For /u/wee_little_puppetman and /u/Aerandir\n\nThis period is popular known to be a \"stagnant\" time between Romans and the Renaissance.  Does this bear out in the archeological record?  Do cities expand much in this time?  Are new villages established?  What sort of uhh... archeological overlap is there ? As in, are people building on top of old structures or expanding out?  I hope there's some terms that better describe that phenomenon...\n", "How plugged in were mediaeval town and cities to international trade networks? Do we see a collapse of trans-continental trade after the fall of Rome? If it persisted in some form or other what were the goods that were still traded?", "Why did Tunis succeed Carthage as the preeminent city in what is now Tunisia?", "I'm curious about some Viking history. Can you shed some light on Viking tattoo techniques/meanings or significance? Also I've always wondered about the comparative populations of Scandinavia vs. England from about 300 A.D. to 1000 A.D. ", "Got a set of questions.\n\n1. What reactions from mainland Europe followed the Norse invasion of Ireland and the British Isles?\n\n2. Is there any evidence that there were a period of pagan romanticism which would have revived the different pagan faiths? (Doesnt have to be succesful)\n\n3. What was the motive for creating the HRE?\n\n4. Why didnt/what stopped Charles I/Charlemagne (to) go further east or north to conquer the Slavic/Norse people?\n\n\n5. What was the Byzantine reaction to the Catholic Holy Orders?\n\n6. Why didnt the Byzantine Empire launch orthodox crusades (as far as I know) to retake lost land? (I'm thinking about the Sultanate of Rum)\n", "The History Channel's *Vikings* shows most of the vikings using swords and axes, with very few spears to be seen.  This conflicts with my understanding that metal and metalworking was expensive, and so armies of nearly every ancient era were composed mostly of spearmen. \n\nCan someone talk about Viking weaponry and metalworking, or about weaponry and metalworking in general during this time period?  Were armies (and/or viking raiders) really able to supply their warriors with swords instead of spears?", "Do you agree/disagree with the assertion that the Roman Empire did not truly fall, but rather transformed to create the Europe of the Middle Ages?", "Thanks for doing this AMA! I'm currently reading one of the books on this sub's list, *Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel* by Frances and Joseph Gies. One part of the book describes how lucrative water mills were for the estate owner because of the cut taken from common folk using it, called \"multure.\" This book also mentions how it was illegal for a while to have handheld mills in certain estates since it would cut the profits of the owner. My question is: How did they enforce this prohibition on handheld mills? Did they invade the homes, or was it just an \"out of sight, out of mind situation?\" \n\nEdit: Too excited to spell", "I created a thread to ask this a few minutes ago, but I thought I might get a good response here as well:\n > I've created this thread to settle a small debate between two friends of mine regarding how much Christian beliefs and ideas from their neighbours influenced the mythology of Norse paganism.\n\n > One of them is adamant that Ragnarok is a creation of Christian missionaries or later Christian revisionism of the old myths. He is also of the opinion that the role of Loki was \"rewritten\" from a neutral trickster god to the a more Satan-like position by this Christianisation of Viking culture.\n\n > The other person in the debate takes the opinion that this apparent change in the nature of various entities in the Norse myths are the result of natural change over time. I'm inclined to agree with this view, although I would think that Christianity did have an influence but more due to cultural osmosis rather than intentional revisionism.\n\nBasically, what we want to know is how Christianity may have influenced the mythology and religion of the Viking peoples.", "I had a sociology professor who frequently drew distinctions between the official Christian religion of Europe  and the pagan beliefs of the general populace around 1000 AD.  He would argue that the beliefs of the peasantry were at least equal parts pagan and Christian, and that many peasant's beliefs probably bore a closer resemblance to pre-Christian religion than to anything the modern observer would name Christianity.\n\nI know that we generally know very little about the beliefs and lifestyle of an illiterate population, but how much do we know about religious beliefs around 1000 AD (or earlier)?  How much truth is there in the idea that priests and monarchs may have been Christian, but that the average peasant or tradesman, while he did attend mass, still retained many pre-Christian beliefs?", "In England, what happened to the House of Wessex after the death of Edward the Confessor?", "Quick question for you deppaneur. Growing up I was a big fan of the old Irish epics, the Tain no cuilgne and the stories of the fianna. Are the social structures portrayed in these works common or realistic? And could you give just a personally chosen fact about the time period for someone who has an interest, but may want to know some more information. Thanks much, and I apologize in advance for spellings.", "Did the pre-Roman peoples of western Europe--Iberia, France, Britain, Germany, etc.--have settlements that could be usefully called cities? \n\nTo people in peripheral areas such as fens, deep forests, and hills, and to peoples in the more productive agricultural regions of western Europe, did the changes from Celtic to Roman to post-Roman political organizations entail significant changes in their lives? Or, put another way, can we think of the phenomenon of the Roman empire as one with limited significance outside the higher strata of the population? \n\nHow did labor regimes and organization in the territory of the western Roman empire change from 400 to 1000? I'm interested in practices like slavery and serfdom, and the size of land holdings.\n\n\n", "Probably for /u/MI13\n\nAre there any other popular theories as to how the Carolingian armies were able to conquer and control the lands that they did besides what is presented in Bernard Bachrach's *Early Carolingian Warfare*? His thesis is that the armies *must* have been well trained, supplied, and organized to achieve what they did, but I've heard mumblings from grad students that the numbers are inflated and that there isn't enough evidence for the grand conclusions that are made in the book. ", "1. Was life in Byzantine Spain much different than it had been when under the control of the Western Roman Empire?\n2. What was the papal reaction to the Byzantine reconquest of Rome?\n3. How widespread were beliefs in the supernatural/magical in Europe during this time period?\n4. What were the reactions to the closing of Plato's Academy by Justinian I?\n5. How extensive was direct trade between the early Abbasid Caliphate and Western Europe, that did not flow through Constantinople/the Byzantine Empire?\n6. How much contact if any, was there between Roman/Byzantine North Africa, and sub-Saharan peoples?\n7. What did people think of the Pyramids of Egypt/the Sphinx during this time period?\n8. Where there any attempts of Christian/Islamic synthesis in Spain after the Arab Islamic conquest? If not, why?", "I once had a teacher tell me that, aside from thunder, the loudest thing most medieval peasants were likely to hear was the sound of a church bell, and that bells conferred on the Church some meaningful sort of authority because it made the Church sort of 'in control of time' and 'the loudest game in town'. I've had two sets of questions come from that (well, three if you count 'Is that accurate?');\n\n1. How prevalent were church bells in the Dark Ages in Europe? Was bell-making something easy or difficult to do? Were bells originally used as rough timekeeping pieces (as in times of day, not as in 'we will ring the bells on Christmas') or was that a later innovation?\n\n2. How common were bells that were not in churches - either in government buildings like the much later 'Big Ben' or elsewhere?\n\n\nOn an unrelated note, /u/depanneur, what are some good sources for learning about Irish history during this period? Almost all of the sources I see in my local bookstore are post-Union with Britain and most of the rest are at least post-1169.\n\n\nThanks!", "What is writing like in this time period? How common is it for someone to write a new creative work, or a new history? Who would the audience be for such a work and how far might it reach?", "I've always been curious about what the actual process of converting a Pagan people to monotheism would have looked like. How would missionaries gone about convincing a group of people to abandon the beliefs that had endured for generations? What were the conflicts between those who had accepted the new faith and those who had not like? ", "What is known about science and technology in early Byzantine empire? Were there important inventions and discoveries made at that time?", "How did the Arabian peninsula  go from being a Pagan society to a Muslim one in such a short space of time?", "I adore food history. There are great resources for medieval cookery and economic/gastronomic events like the spice trade. But my Dark Ages food knowledge is sorely lacking. What do we know of the era's recipes, food trends, spices, poems or songs including food, and so forth? ", "This is probably a little out of the scope but: where there any Christian-Zoroastrian apologetics or disputations?", "Most likely relevant for /u/Aerandir, /u/Ambarenya, and /u/wee_little_puppetman:\n\nVikings were a major factor in Russia, Ukraine, and the Black Sea during at least part of the time frame being discussed here (Rurik, Varangians, etc.).  However, while the cultural influence of Byzantium can clearly be seen on the various polities in the region, there doesn't seem, at least from the perspective of one not intimately familiar with the history, to have been a long-term cultural legacy left by the Vikings in the region.\n\nAre there examples of Viking traditions, language, or religion continuing to influence Russian principalities (or other polities in the region), which lasted beyond the Viking era?  Did any continue by the Muscovite era, or its evolution into the Russian Empire?", "Thank you so much for doing this, I have a question (well, a main question with a couple of sub-questions) for you. \n\nHow much impact did the political instability of this period have on the peasants? I've read some descriptions in popular history and survey history books that portray the rural peasant as basically watching the political chaos of this period with a shrug because it didn't really matter too much to them who ruled over them as long as they could provide protection and weren't too abusive. Is there some truth to this depiction, or did people actually have opinions about the political and social changes unfolding around them? And were they conscious of potential ethnic/lingustic/religious differences between them and the new rulers of the day, or did those differences not matter much to the \"average peasant\" (if such a thing can even exist)? \n\nAgain, thanks so much for doing this, this is a great example of historical outreach. I think professional scientists often do a better job of communicating with the general public than people in the humanities and social sciences, so this is a great opportunity for people to ask questions directly to an expert in the field.", "Following the collapse of the Roman Empire what groups lead efforts to form new states? What was the political nature of new entities formed?", "How did Rome end up as the Pope's residence and capital of the Roman church? I mean, as far as I understand, the city of Rome was one of the last bastions of paganism and by the time Constantine came to power and the christians took over, the Imperial residence was already in Byzantium. Why did then the Pope ended up staying in Rome?", "Was the canon of the Bible, currently used by protestants, set up by Catholics?  Or, when did Catholicism take over the early Christian church?\n\nThis has been sparking some debate in a forum I contribute to all the time. ", "General question regarding the study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic History/Archaeology/whatever: \n\nIn my undergraduate experience the study of these periods seem to be sharply and artificially divided in the sense that Historians of Religion will neglect to mention material culture, Archaeologists will ignore or place little importance in historical sources while philology - from where i come from - seems to be, entirely, an island of its own. \n\nIs there any truth to this whatsoever in your experience? Do academics in your field(s) do any sort of interdisciplinary study? I'm sort of pessimistic about this because, as a student, i must either choose Archaeology and thus 'renounce' History or vice versa. It drives me nuts that i cannot get to do both at once.", "Why (and perhaps how) have the scientific works of Islam during this period been so under-represented? I am thinking specifically of Al-Khwarizmi (codifier and creator of algebra in the late 9th century), but during the so-called 'dark ages,' the Islamic world was anything but.\n\nIs this a deliberate westernization of history? \n\n\nAlso, my thanks for doing these. You guys are awesome.", "I've got a question about Saxons and Britain! When the Angles/Saxons/Jutes came to Britain, was it closer to an invasion or was it mostly peaceful? When they were in control of southern Britain, were they like Normans ruling as an elite, or were most of the people there now Anglo-Saxon too?", "Was there ever a chance one Kingdom with support from the Pope could have ruled Europe? What would the effects of this Super-Kingdom gave been?", "Wow, I've been studying this period for years and there are some questions that I really want to have answered. If somebody could point me to some good sources/books, that would be wonderful too! \n\nI'd love to know more about the changes in population size and agriculture after the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm mainly interested in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire: modern England, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands. I read that agriculture got more advanced during Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Era, while the population only started to grow after the year 1000. This seems very strange to me. \n\nI'd really appreciate it if somebody could tell me more about changes in agriculture and population size during Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Era!", "These are questions for all of you, as you represent a variety of regions. In your area of study, how much freedom and autonomy did unmarried and married women have? What restrictions in society, their religion, and their households did they have? What were their occupations? What would their average day be spent doing?\n", "How developed was the concept of \"knights\" during this era?  if thet existed during this period, did the average knight in what is now france and England hold land?  What kind of structure would land-holding knights have on their land?  Would most have just manors or actually some sort of stone castle?  Did any knights have castles?  In what ways did society see the distinction between \"knight\" and \"lord\" if any.", "Did anyplace in early Medieval Western or Eastern Europe outside of the southern Caucasus or Anatolia have significant interest in or knowledge of the Sassanian empire or Iran more general? Also, was there any sustained early-ish Muslim interest in Syriac or Coptic literature and texts?", "I think of Christianity in this period as an extension of Roman culture/society/government that never quite died out. From organization, to habit, to writing it seems Roman to me in that while other societal structures of the Roman world collapsed and/or were replaced the Christian/Roman Catholic church is a more or less  direct line from Roman government to medieval times.  \n\n\nHow much merit does this idea have?", "What happened within the city of Rome itself in the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries?  I assume the population fell precipitously, but how did the remaining residents view it's former grandeur?  I can only imagine how it must have been to walk in the shadow of monuments like the Colliseum a few centuries after the fall.", "Greetings. A couple of unrelated questions.\n\nFirst - how influential were the Visigoths on later Spanish institutions and culture?\n\nSecond - can you recommend a good academic history of Venice that covers the 9th century? I know we don't have too much information from that period (judging by the books I've looked at, anyway), but where are we getting what information we do have? And those monks who supposedly stole St. Mark's body - are there any good reads for that, or does most of the story come from local tradition and the like?\n\n(My all-time favorite conspiracy theory, not that I lend it too much credence, is that they actually stole the bones of Alexander the Great.)", "I've once read that archeologists found an ancient \"graffiti\" in Pompeii. Do we have a clues about medieval graffitis, in a meaning of words, drawings, funny sentences etc. written in public places? ", "How much did the average person  really care about debates on heresy, nature of Christ's divinity, etc?  Was it purely an intellectual interest?\n\nIt's hard for me to imagine the common people actually giving a crap about a lot of the esoteric stuff, except as a means of group-formation.", "I'm taking a \"Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity\" class right now, and a point of discussion last class was the increasing prevalence and number of saints in the early church.\n\nHe told us about a \"pillar saint\" named Simeon the Stylite\" who stood on top of a pillar most every day and even caught birds by remaining motionless for hours. Are there any other examples of particularly ridiculous/interesting saints that stand out to you?", "Does anyone call them \"dark ages\" anymore?", "I was watching Stargate last night, and in the episode Enigma, they claim that the dark ages stunted us technologically fairly severely. Is there much evidence to support this or is it just something people like to say? ", "How did the institution of slavery change during Late Antiquity and the end of the Western Empire? Did the Roman latifundia transition into becoming manors, with the slaves becoming serfs? I've read that as many as 60% of the people within the Roman Empire were slaves. As the Western Empire crumbled, how did their legal status change?\n\nAs a side question, as more of the general population became Christianized, did the Church frown on Christians owning Christian slaves?", "What would the lower/bottom rung of nobility look like in say, France, of this time period? What would have being their careers?\n\nWould there have being a clear distinction between them and commoners?", "What exactly was Greek fire and how was it used?", "How aware were Romans , how revered was Caesar during these ages? Was he still the near god-like figure he is today ? Or was he not as studied due to the current politics. \n\nAlso can you make the argument that the Catholic Church became an extension/successor to the Roman Empire to any degree.\n\nFinally, what is what fact or something that interests you from this era that you believe is not particularly well known or deserves more attention ", "This is going to be a pretty vague and broad question, but...\n\nWas the Saxon culture and the Scandinavian culture during this time period generally the same? What are the differences between the two cultures?", "Is Islamic history also considered to be part of the Dark Ages and/or Middle Ages? Because I always thought the concept was mainly restricted to Europe.", "What's the current take on Arthurian Britain? \n\nRead the \"Warlord Chronicles\" by Bernard Cornwell recently, and I'm curious as to whether the Romano-British and Anglo-Saxons were at each others throats as constantly as he portrayed. I've heard conflicting views on the era that say the supplanting of the native population by Germanic tribes was relatively peaceful, so I'm not sure what to believe on the matter. \n\nOn a side note, what little do we know about the nature of interactions between the pagan faiths of Britain and early Christianity at the time? ", "What is know about Illyrian tribes? \nWhat was their relationship with Byzantium and Carolingians.\nHow did they react to Slavs? Were they displaced or just merged?\nWhere did the Slavs come from?", "I've heard people say that drinking alcohol was required to kill bacteria in the water.  If this is true, wouldn't everyone from that time period have fetal alcohol syndrome?", "I have a few questions I'm trying to answer for a research paper, but any one of these would help me tremendously.\n\nHow was the maintenance of roads funded during the early Islamic period in the East such as the Via Nova Traiana? Or the state-run inns on the roads, Mansiones?\n\nWere churches exempt from contributing to the costs of maintaining the roads? Are there taxes that state institutions - like the church - were not exempt from paying?", "Why and how did Byzantine monasticism make its way to Europe? ", "Hello! I'm part of the [Westeroscraft](_URL_0_) project where we're recreating a medieval like world (specifically, the Game of Thrones world) in Minecraft. We always strive to get things as realistic as possible, but none of us are historians, so a lot of the time we are just guessing. Would be great to have some questions answered. If any of you are able to expand answers to what would be the case in late medieval times as well then that would be great!\n\n\n* How big were common people's houses, and how many people would live in a single house? Several floors? Would someone with a trained profession like a baker or a cobbler live in similar conditions to someone like a farmer or a fisherman?\n\n* What were their beds like? Would several people share a single bed?\n\n* How did they prepare food? Did everyone have a stove? Open fire? Oven?\n\n* What were their toilets like? Was it usually outhouses or would that also be placed in the house? What about in cities where several families lived in the same building?  What was the system for disposing of the waste (particularly in towns and cities).\n\n* Were there prisons? What were they like?\n\n* How widespread was the use of glass in windows? How rich would you need to be to be able to afford it? And if anyone knows: around when did that start to become common in middle class houses?\n\n* Did bathhouses exist? What were they like?\n\n* How common were cobbled streets? What about wooden streets?\n\n* What could be a typical layout of a farm? \n\n* How did merchant and artisan guilds function? What exactly were their purposes? \n\n* To what extent did cranes exist? (the kind you would maybe use to hoist goods off a ship or higher up a building)\n\nI'm tagging those of you that seem to be the most relevant: /u/Aerandir /u/depanneur /u/GeorgiusFlorentius /u/idjet  /u/rittermeister /u/wee_little_puppetman\n\nThanks in advance!", "I'm aware that current academic thinking on this period views it as a period of transition, transformation and change rather than the traditional \"dark ages\" where people were oppressed by feudalism, superstition and vikings.  I'm interested in this traditional view.  When did people start to think of this period as \"the dark ages\"?  Was this view created with a political or anti-religious agenda?  And have any other periods, places or traditions also emphasised the positives of the \"dark ages\".", "How much sense of nationality did the common folk have? Did people consider themselves part of a nation like today Germans, French, English, Scottish, etc?", "Was there a rise in \"piracy\" during this period?", "What role did the early Christian church play in the fall the Roman Empire?", "So, I've been doing some reading recently about England ca. 800-1000 CE, and you can see a marked line in English history that begins with *The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle*. That is, a line in which histories are more diligently kept (or readily available).\n\nNow, the Dark Ages has always been associated with a distinct lack of available history. I've read a range of reasons, from marauding Vikings pillaging monasteries to just a general social disinterest in record-keeping. This leads me to my two questions:\n\n1. What changed in Europe that led to more histories being kept and, more importantly, protected.\n2. Are there any other documents or annals like *The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle* that mark so dramatic a shift from \"almost no history\" to \"extremely detailed history\"? ", "What do you think of this idea? That the Roman empire during the crisis of the third century, did for the most part end as a single entity, and they with the Gallic Empire and the Palmyrene Empire were three separate kingdoms for a time. Then Aurelian and Probus were the build up to Diocletian's tetrachy, which was in essence a different political structure than the Roman principet had been for the length of the empire. Once the Tetrachy fell, and Constantine came out on top, he began what we now think of as the Byzantine empire, with it's different political and religious customs. The Byzantine empire then split after Theodotious, into East and West, and finally they lost the Western half. In 2 1/2 centuries, from Augustus to Caracalla, there had been 22 Emperors, by the time Aurelian took over less than 50 years later, he was the 44th. It seems all that was really holding the \"empire\" together during a lot of this time was the bureaucracy, and that there barely was any Emperor until the roots of the Byzantine age took hold.\n\nSorry for rambling, it's a complicated idea I've been mulling over for awhile.", "Slavery ended (mostly) with antiquity and was replaced by serfdom; was this acknowledged by contemporaries, how did they view it, or was it understood as such only by later historians?", "When various Germanic tribes would \"migrate\" and settle in new areas, would entire peoples (men, women, children of all classes and occupations) ethnically cleanse the areas in which they eventually settled? Or would the new group of German warlords kill off the previous ruling elite and then become the new warrior/ruler caste over a larger, but still native subject population? What would the ethnic makeup of a place that was recently settled by a Germanic tribe look like in comparison to how it was before? Thanks.", "Today I went to the city of Aachen (Aken/Aix la Chapelle), in school I always learned that this was the seat of government of Charlemagne. I however noticed a few things:\n\n- The city isn't located next to any major rivers, it is even located almost exactly between two of them (Maas/Meuse and the Rhur).\n- There's a big hill next to city that seems if placed catapults upon you could easily shoot over the wall.\n\n- It isn't located in the center of Charlemagne's empire.\n\nI'm probably wrong in one of these things but I just can't see how this would be a convenient capital so could someone tell me why Aachen was the capital of the Frankish empire.", "Is there any evidence that any major Medieval monarchs who professed Christianity only did so for political reasons and were Christians in name only? I'm wondering in particular about Clovis, and in turn, Charlemagne.", "How much of Roman infrastructure persisted through the Dark Ages?  Which structures were most likely to survive, and which were most likely to be repurposed?", "I have a few music history questions, if you don't mind.\n\n- What do we know about the evolution of sacred music before Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)? Are there any major composers before her whose works have been reconstructed?\n\n- Do we know where the system of neumatic notation that was used throughout the middle ages and early Renaissance originated?\n\n- What kind of role did sacred music play in the lives of everyday people (if any)?\n\n- What do we know about secular music from the \"dark ages\", and what kinds of instruments (if any) are thought to be from this period, but were no longer in use by the late middle ages?\n\n- Where did the lute come from and why does it sound/look suspiciously like the Turkish oud?", "My sixth graders are studying this era, and writing a persuasive essay about what they think was the most influential event in western Europe at the time.  I would love to hear an expert's thoughts on this so I can give them the point of view someone who does this for a living. ", "When reading about Visigothic and Vandal invasions of Italy and North Africa, etc., did that involve mass migrations or Germanic peoples, or was it more of a military invasion, where military conquerors would simply assume leadership roles over the existing population?", "What became of the Reds and the Greens after the Nika riots?  Were these groups still powerful after the plague of the 540s?", "I have read that bathing took a drastic decline after the black plague - do to an association with the pores being open and more susceptable to illness (?) how true was this? I am familiar with Durer's depictions of bathhouses- _URL_0_  , but I know depictions on past traditions were common.\n\nEdit: I just recalled the black plague was after the dark ages, so to edit my question - How was bathing during this time? or Hygeine in general, Was dental hygene a thing? I feel like I frequently see achaelogical remains that seems to have possesed some remarkable dental hygeine.", "Hi I am live in Troms\u00f8, Norway, and have a question about my place during this time period. Who lived here, what did they do and had they any connection to the rest of Europe through trade and travels? Thanks :) ", "This might be really general, but could you pick a year, location, and person and tell me what their typical day was like? How might it have differed when the world wasn't in the Dark Ages and was prospering? ", "Can you give me a ranked list of factions that had the most influence right after the fall of the Roman Empire? You could include middle eastern factions too", "What Roman and Greek cultural/ethnic elements got incorporated into the Christian tradition?\n\nMainly I would like for a scholar to delineate nicely what parts of the Christian tradition (between 400-1000) is Roman and Greek intervetion into Christianity and what parts are inherited from the Apostles.\nBy Christian tradition I include:\n-theology\n-spiritual practice (prayers, fasts, holidays etc)\n-systems of institutional organisation\nThank you for your effort", "With respect to the territories that remained in the hands of Western Roman governors at the time the imperial title was abolished (e.g. the domain of Syagrius, the \"Romano-Moorish kingdom,\" Nepos' territory in Dalmatia), how were they governed? Were they, in essence, orphaned provinces, or did their circumstances force their rulers to make rapid alterations to the Late Roman provincial model? Of what troops were their armies composed, how were they compensated/supplied, and how was tax collection conducted? Was there any possibility that these polities could've viably remained independent in the long run?", "What was the musical culture of the Vikings like, and to a greater extent how important was music outside of the Church?", "Hope I'm not too late. I have two questions.\n\n1) What language did Charlemagne speak?\n\n2) I often hear that the Goths were made up various different people. Who were these people? Were they a German (Goth) / Iranian amalgamation or something different?", "Viking Question! I seem to remember hearing about a viking who was known for his great pants, but I can neither remember his name nor his many accomplishments. This makes me sad, because I would think that someone whose pants were his defining characteristic would be someone I would remember.", "What records are there of Jews in Europe during this period?  I've seen reference to Jews in external texts, but Jews in Europe didn't write all that much stuff during this time--we don't even have Jewish languages from this era!\n\nSo, what is there to know about European Jews in the \"Dark Ages\"?  I'm tired of Jewish histories sort of having Jewish communities in Europe magically appear around 900ish, with a vague reference to the Romans probably bringing them there several centuries earlier.  What happened in between?  Does the \"darkness\" of the era preclude one from knowing?  I mean...if there weren't really Jews writing stuff, should I even be hoping for more detailed info?", "Were the Gauls largely killed or displaced when the Franks invaded, or was Francia largely populated by Gauls, and the two ethnicities slowly merged into one?\n\nOn a similar note, were the Britons in England largely killed or displaced by the Anglo-Saxons, or did they also remain and merge into one ethnicity?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.westeroscraft.com/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.scottmcd.net/artanalysis/?p=702"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dbuer4", "title": "How did former Manhattan project atomic scientists react to the execution of the Rosenbergs?", "selftext": "I recently read an excellent biography of theoretical physicist and director of the Manhattan project Robert J. Oppenheimer [American Prometheus](_URL_0_). The book extensively details the leftist connections of many of the atomic scientists who worked on the bomb, including Oppenheimer and his brother. It also explains many of the scientists had mixed views on using the bomb on Japan and on the emerging Cold War. Some scientists even proposed to Oppenheimer a plan to convey nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in violation of their security clearances in order to prevent a nuclear first strike by the US, because of this Oppenheimer later had his security clearance revoked. Considering many of the atomic scientists who worked on the bomb had leftist sympathies and doubts by the emerging nuclear arms race, especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what were their reactions to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly conveying nuclear secrets to the USSR? Were those who advocated sharing the plans for the bomb during the war sympathetic to their decision? Or did the Cold War change the views of those who originally dissented against US nuclear policy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dbuer4/how_did_former_manhattan_project_atomic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f24ij48"], "score": [10], "text": ["I don't know of any systematic survey of how the Manhattan Project veterans thought about the Rosenbergs. For a few we know they, like many on the American left at the time, thought the charges were trumped up. Philip Morrison clearly falls into this category and was involved in the later appeal for co-defendant Morton Sobell, arguing that the information that Greenglass said he gave away was useless from a technical perspective. \n\nBy and large though there was silence on the subject. The premise of your question, that they might have _identified_ with the Rosenbergs and their impulse to espionage, seems totally unlikely to me. Rosenberg was not a scientist, and neither was Greenglass, his brother in law who was the spy at Los Alamos. They did not give away the information as part of a broader plan to make the world safer or anything like that. They were Stalinists, plain and simple. And of course the Rosenbergs went to the grave denying they had done any such thing, so there has never been any way to \"identify\" with their beliefs, whatever they were. ([I have written about this here.](_URL_0_))\n\nThe more interesting question is how they felt about Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was a scientist and a peer of theirs, someone they trusted. They literally used him as a babysitter during the war. His technical merits were impressive and he was core to the weapon design enterprise, having worked on the initiator, implosion waves, and was the co-holder of the patent on gaseous diffusion enrichment of uranium. So no minor figure. Many of them knew him personally and considered him a friend. \n\nThe main sentiment from those who were friendly with Fuchs, if they said anything, was that they were shocked and wanted to emphasize that even though he was a spy, he also worked very hard for the US and the UK. That is, they wanted to emphasize that he was not working _against_ the US-UK just because he was also working _for_ the USSR. This sentiment was said publicly at the time by no less than Hans Bethe, for example.\n\nIn terms of whether anyone said publicly that they supported the spirit of espionage after the fact \u2014 definitely not. For reasons quite obvious, I think; this was the time of McCarthyism. I have never seen anything that Oppenheimer ever said that would seem to be supportive of spying. \n\nThose (like Oppenheimer) who wanted to end the idea of the \"secret\" of the atomic bomb were doing so in the service of a  broader system of international control of nuclear weapons. What they wanted was an orderly disarmament and commitment to no further development. Not a secret arms race \u2014 the latter was what they feared most of all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://books.google.com/books/about/American_Prometheus.html?id=v9uS0wysYoUC"], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/10/17/riddle-julius-rosenberg/"]]}
{"q_id": "1qaqep", "title": "How close was Albert Speer to becoming the successor of Hitler?", "selftext": "I recently studied Speer in high school and he really did captivate my interest as a personality. However I could never find a conclusive answer to the titular question and given the fact that Speer is not a very well known (at least in the general public perception) confidante of Hitler compared to say Goering or Goebbels was he ever really Hitlers second in command during his time as Minister for Armaments and War Production?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qaqep/how_close_was_albert_speer_to_becoming_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdaz5sc"], "score": [3], "text": ["Goering was Hitler's successor until his attempted coup as Hitler saw it in the final days of the Reich and he was stripped or all rank.  Hitler penned a new Last Will and Testament that proclaimed that his successors would be Doenitz as Reichpraesident and Goebbels as Reichskanzler.  Hitler had combined the two positions into Fuehrer und Reichskanzler in 1934 upon the death of Reichspraesident Hindenburg.  \n\nI've never come across anything that suggests that Speer was ever considered for either Fuehrer or one of the newly uncombined positions.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fcetn3", "title": "When did Napoleonic style fighting fall out of fashion?", "selftext": "To be exact:\n-When was the period of time in which Precussion Cap Firearms replaced by other metal cartritge?\n-When did shakos fall out of fashion?\n-When did redcoats/colorful coats with white straps fall out of fashion?\n-when did line formations/marching on the field of battle and volley firing fall out of fashion?\n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcetn3/when_did_napoleonic_style_fighting_fall_out_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjbwu97"], "score": [2], "text": ["More can always be said on the topic (personally, I think that the post-Napoleonic conflicts that aren't the ACW could use quite a bit more coverage on the sub); for the meantime, here's two particular answers that cover some of your questions:\n\n* The sadly now-deleted u/elos_ [has this quite comprehensive answer](_URL_1_) that sees to your first and last questions;\n* u/vonstroheims_monocle [takes on British uniform here](_URL_0_). While the answer is rather older than I'm comfortable with, it is reasonably sourced."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19nf4b/what_was_the_last_battle_fought_by_the_british/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kcv1d/we_often_hear_about_how_war_changed_in_the_20th/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ll62s", "title": "What prompted the rise of the popularity of Occult groups/leaders in the late 19th century?", "selftext": "Was it tied to the dawn of modern archaeology? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ll62s/what_prompted_the_rise_of_the_popularity_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv7vq4j"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't see any tie-in between archeology and spiritualism.\n\nThe idea that spirits exist goes way back, and people were telling ghost stories back in the 18th century and earlier. Ghosts or spirits are described as ethereal beings who have died and wander the earth. In the mid 18th century a scientist named Emanuel Swedenborg was a firm believer in the world of spirits, and claimed he could contact them. He was also an early discoverer of what we now call hypnotism. Hypnotism became a popular demonstration of science back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, so his ideas of spiritualism spread with the popularity of these demonstrations. This was also combined with the similar opinions of Dr. Franz Mesmer, famous for demonstrating  Mesmerism (hypnosis). This makes the idea of spirits become well known by the start of the 19th century.\n\nThe Spiritualists of the 19th century in the USA normally declare 1848 to be the official beginnings of their movement when two young sisters in New York seem to be able to demonstrate communication with the dead. They are Kate and Margret Fox, and the stories of their spiritualist feats are published in newspapers around the country, repeatedly over many years. People of the time are fascinated with these sisters, and spiritualism gains believability and popularity. This kicks off the formal Spiritualist movement, and combined with the background of two very respectable men of science of the 18th century backing it, many people become believers.\n\nIn the field of science, there were three very mysterious properties that were called \"the imponderable elements\". They are light, electricity, and magnetism. These become more defined in the mid to late 19th century, and science discovers provable \"invisible forces\" of electron field, magnetic field, and electromagnetic field. The idea that nature actually has invisible forces excites the occultists and the Spiritualists, and some more prominent scientists even begin to believe that an invisible world might exist. \n\nBy about 1875, Spiritualism has some impressive followers, and this continues for the next 50 years. It finally falls apart in the 1920's when many of the leading Spiritualists are debunked as frauds and popular opinion turns against the movement.\n\nBut that connection to science and the imponderable agents... it still persists today with a small following of people who believe that spirits can alter or manipulate electro-forces, magnetism, and electromagnetic fields to communicate. They use modern gadgets like recorders, radios, and TV receivers to pickup these forces and try to find any evidence of communication. The movie \"White Noise\" is based on the beliefs of these modern followers of spiritualism.\n\nSo, the tie-in seems to be science and the discovery of invisible forces, and sparked by the popular fraud of the Fox sisters. Most of the followers and practically all of the leaders of the movement were highly educated people, and their exposure to what was happening in the world of science was much greater than the general public. This gave credibility to the movement.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f2jd3", "title": "Why was horse theft considered an offense punishable by death?", "selftext": "It seems very severe.  I know people relied on their horses, but it seems awfully drastic.  I can't see someone being put to death over car theft, for example.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f2jd3/why_was_horse_theft_considered_an_offense/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca665q7", "ca66eww"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["there is an old joke about this.  usually some young lawyer sees a judge that often commutes the sentences of murderers, but never horse thieves.  when asked about it, the judge responds \"some men need killing, but there are no horses that need stealing\".  \n\nIn practical terms though, two major points.  Horses are very easy to steal, being inherently mobile, so strong punishments were enacted as a deterrent.  Second, losing your horse was much worse than losing a car the horse and its saddle and gear were an immensely valuable piece of property, more like a house than a car, and often a source of livelihood. ", "Without a time and place I'll go right ahead and talk about England between ~1680 and 1823 (through to ~1860). This was the peak period in which the infamous *Bloody Code* held sway, a brutal series of laws interpreted by some later commentators as straight up class suppression.   \n  \nInitially there were ~50 offences punishable by death, that number had almost quadrupled by 1776 and reached 220 by 1800. In 1823 the *Judgement of Death Act* reduced the death penalty from mandatory to discretionary for all crimes except treason and murder. Gradually during the middle of the nineteenth century the number of capital offences was reduced, and by 1861 was down to five.   \n  \nGrand larceny, defined as the theft of goods worth more than 12 pence, was one of the crimes that attracted the death penalty. At the time 12 pence was about one-twentieth of the weekly wage for a skilled worker or perhaps between $50 and $100 in modern terms.   \n  \nWhy?   \n\nWell, in the words of George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, an English statesman, writer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons in 1660, and in later the House of Lords:    \n >  Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.   \n   \nThe contemporary belief held by lawmakers of the time was that harsh draconian punishments served to deter future crime.   \n  \nThe same period in British Law saw the introduction of lawyers for the defence, rather than only prosecutors, and an increasingly common practice by jurors to deliberately under-assessed the value of stolen goods, below the crucial figure that would have made a sentence of death mandatory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7v0q0v", "title": "Is \"Homage to Catalonia\" an accurate depiction of the Spanish civil war?", "selftext": "I read *Homage to Catalonia* a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, however I've been wondering ever since whether Orwell is biased in how he reports it (I recall he himself wrote he thought to be).\n\nMore specifically, I'm interested in the dynamics between the parties involved, and how Orwell claims the URSS ended up fighting against both anarchists and minority communists.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v0q0v/is_homage_to_catalonia_an_accurate_depiction_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtp3fyd", "dtp97uu"], "score": [9, 8], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is an interesting answer.", "/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov also covered a similar topic in this [week\u2019s short answers](_URL_0_). His answer emphasizes that Orwell\u2019s experiences were in some ways not topical and, also, of course Orwell was writing as a participant and witness rather than, say, historian. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m6nnu/accuracy_of_orwells_homage_to_catalonia/cvcg9jm/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ua3oo/short_answers_to_simple_questions_january_31_2018/dtjh4j2/?context=1"]]}
{"q_id": "7acez8", "title": "How accurate is the representation of Egypt in Assassin's Creed Origins?", "selftext": "I apologize if this type of question isn't allowed.\nTo make this question a bit less general, I'm especially interested in the world itself - for example, how accurate are the clothes that people wear or their day-to-day lives? What about architecture and agriculture?\nIn sum, would someone from Ptolemy XIII's Egypt recognize the world as Egypt at that particular time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7acez8/how_accurate_is_the_representation_of_egypt_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["druacfk", "dpa4k4u", "dpa5k0m"], "score": [2, 4, 52], "text": ["This was great, big thanks to u/cleopatra_philopater for the knowledge.\n\nFor more, please also see this post from r/assassinscreed _URL_0_", "Also, a second more specific question if I may: How accurate is the game's portrayal of the city of Alexandria? The Hellenistic/Roman architecture and the overall layout/style of the city, and the overt inequality between native Egyptians and wealthy Greeks in particular is fascinating; is this at least *mostly* accurate?", "Overall the game is fairly accurate with a few flaws mostly in portraying Ptolemaic society and the historical figures it handles, but you probably want a bit more detail than that ;-)\n\nIn terms of clothing I am going to deliberately gloss over the various outfits available to the protagonist because they happen to be extremely anachronistic or fanciful *on purpose*. The NPCs are another matter. For the most part we see a lot of more traditional Egyptian clothing and this is accurate since the production of linen from flax continued into the Ptolemaic period. The materials made from the relatively simple process of weaving this linen ranged in quality from simple sack-like cloth to more expensive fine sheer linen. The types of clothing manufactured included the *shendyt*, a linen kilt worn by men, tunics and cloaks and the loose fitting dresses and shawls worn by women For the most part linen garments were probably undyed although some woolen, and possibly linen, garments were dyed a variety of colours like blue, red and yellow in the Dynastic Period which in the Ptolemaic period would only have expanded with the growing wool and dye industries. More commonly, patterns would be embroidered onto clothing in often colourful and intricate designs. Jewelry was also very important to Egyptians or rather those who had the status and means to afford it, and as is portrayed in game bracelets, necklaces, diadems and the iconic *usekh* a broad collar (literally named \"the Broad One\") were favoured styles. Not all jewelry was made out of gold, or the more expensive silver, a lot of Egyptian jewelry was made of beads, ivory, shell, faience or precious stones, which again do appear in game on Egyptians. A lot of the NPCs, and in particular children and those of small means, are shown barefoot which is accurate as far as we can tell since many individuals often went barefoot even in their work although Egypt had sandals and closed shoes going back to the Dynastic period and these were worn often, particularly by elites. All in all, very much similar to the clothing we see Egyptian NPCs wearing in-game. On many Hellenic characters in-game we can see wide-brimmed sunhats made of straw or felt (*petasios*) and flat wide caps (*kausias*) which were brought over to Egypt by the Macedonian and Greek settlers. At the same time production of wool, which had previously not been favoured as much as the lighter weight and cooler linen by the Egyptians, expanded in the Ptolemaic period and was used in the production of more archetypally Hellenistic styles including the toga, chiton and himation, which were worn by Greeks and Egyptians alike, particularly in the Greek cities. Actually this takes me one nitpick, for the most part the ethnic background of an individual is made apparent by their garb, and while I understand that this might be due to the constraints of game design, it leaves players with the impression that Ptolemaic culture was more stratified and polarised than it actually was. Egyptians and most certainly \"Hellenes\" of Egyptian descent living in the cities or in areas with a heavy Hellenic influence could be found wearing Greek clothing, in fact many of the mummy portraits from the Late Ptolemaic period which give us our best indication of Hellenistic fashion in Egypt are thought to depict Egyptians.\n\nThe soldiers are mostly wearing mail or iron armour which is inaccurate, Ptolemaic soldiers wore either linen cuirasses or more rarely bronze chest plates. Most of the helmet types we see in-game are accurate and resemble Phrygian or Boeotian helms, although the Royal Gaurd with its flowing purple robes and large Corinthian helmets is fairly inaccurate.\n\nThe Royal pair, Ptolemy and Cleopatra are both wearing extremely inaccurate regalia (although to be fair, this is one of the least accurate portrayals of Cleopatra from the 20th-21st Century). Ptolemy XIII is even wearing the *nemes* headdress although Ptolemaic rulers wore diadems, along with white fillets or headbands. Ptolemaic royal women often wore jewelry most similar to Greek or Near Eastern styles. See this [gold tetradrachm portraying an earlier Ptolemaic couple](_URL_4_) for reference on their overall style of fashion. Cleopatra is portrayed in-game with an Egyptian styled coiffure, and frequently wears midriff bare robes or dresses however historically she more often wore the [himation typical of Hellenistic queens](_URL_0_) and her hair is depicted in [statuary](_URL_1_) and on [coinage](_URL_2_) in the \"melon\" coiffure style drawn back into a bun. [This portrait of her portrays her wearing pearl jewelry which is somewhat iconic of her](_URL_3_).\n\nWhen we are first introduced to Cleopatra it is mentioned that she uses opium recreationally which is not mentioned in any historical accounts and goes against what we know of ancient opium use. This was invented as a plot device for HBO's *Rome* and is quite awkward since opium pipes were not invented until the 16th Century but I suppose past a certain point reason goes out the window in favour of, plot I guess. She also offers to sleep with anyone on the condition that they agree to be executed the following morning and expresses an interest in Bayek but this side of her is actually a myth that appeared in the early modern French poet Theophile Gautier's *Une Nuit de Cleopatre* when she seduces an Egyptian lionhunter and this was later used in several films like the Italian historical-comedy *Two Nights with Cleopatra*. Historically, Cleopatra's love life was far less...extensive than in film and fiction, and prior to her meeting with Caesar it is generally assumed to have been non-existent (not that spicy but also way more realistic than the Hollywood verson). And it is worth noting that aristocratic and royal women were from the sexually liberated vignettes often portrayed on TV, in reality most of our sources on the (to modern eyes) harsh standards of modesty and virtue were written by aristocratic men about aristocratic women. Given the political importance of these women's sexual lives and reproductive capabilities they likely faced the sharpest scrutiny from their peers, after all, royal women were seen as a valuable commodity first and a political individual possibly second. Ptolemy XIII for his part, is portrayed as being somewhat awkward, arrogant and vicious, however we know very little about Ptolemy as he was only about 13 at the time the game is set and he seems to have acted mostly at the behest of his advisors and guardians.\n\nMost of the buildings we see in the villages appear to be made of mud-brick which is accurate as it was by far the most abundant and easily used material in Egypt. In the villages most of the buildings were one story constructions which housed residences or shops, and less commonly, multi-story buildings which often included apartments and shops. This went for Ptolemaic constructions that were both traditionally Egyptian and Hellenistic in style although the interiors of these structures did vary. The interiors of many of these buildings were often painted and decorated in Hellenistic styles to resemble more expensive materials like porphry or to have ornate patterns and paintings. Rugs and tapestries were also woven with the new booming wool industry providing customers with more than clothing, and expensive dyes were both produced in Egypt and imported from the Red Sea ports. So far, pretty close to what we see in the game.\n\nMarble buildings were considerably more rare given the expenses associated with it and even in the Greek cities of Alexandria and Ptolemais the only buildings that would be made out of it were temples, palaces and other civic structures that received royal or aristocratic patronage like the gymnasia or bathhouses. However even in the villages or rural regions, some villas of wealthy estate owners could be quite lavish with expensive marble and porphry being used in expensively furnished multi-story houses complete with gardens and porticos. One Ptolemaic papyrus describes the care and expense that went into these elite villas\n > About the work in the house of Diotimos; for the portico [I undertake] to have the cornice painted with a purple border, the upper part of the wall variegated, the lower course like vetch-seed, and the pediments with circular veining; providing myself with all materials, for 30 drachmae. For the dining-room with seven couches, I will do the vault according to the pattern which you saw, and give the lower course and agreeable tint and paint the Lesbian cornice, for 20 drachmae. And for the dining-room with five couches I will paint the cornices, providing myself with all materials, for 3 drachmae. The sum total is 53 drachmae but if you provide everything it will come to 30 drachmae. (Sel. Pap. I 171, cf P.Mich 38 from *Town and Country in Ptolemaic Egypt* by J. Rowlandson \n\n**Continued Below**\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/79w7d3/i_am_an_egyptologist_ama/"], [], ["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Berenice_II#/media/File:Fragment_of_a_Vase_Depicting_Berenike_II_MET_DP245506.jpg", "http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/cleopatra_vatican2.jpg", "http://snible.org/coins/bmc/ptolemies/30.html", "http://static.wixstatic.com/media/a9c1c7_95b9c51868be7da00b6ede19b44d6c7f.jpg_256", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Coins_of_Ptolemy_III#/media/File:Gold_oktadrachm_of_Ptolemy_III_Euergetes_MET_DP139891.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "bi5f0x", "title": "Was the American military understanding of the Soviet Union's military during the Cold War colored at all by World War 2 popular history such as human wave tactics and multiple soldiers sharing a rifle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bi5f0x/was_the_american_military_understanding_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elyetr2"], "score": [2], "text": ["Very much so. This previous answer of mine will likely be of interest for you: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zkamd/why_is_the_soviet_front_of_wwii_usually_described/e2kvczu/"]]}
{"q_id": "2lpeps", "title": "What was it like to be a dispatch rider during the Second World War?", "selftext": "I've got a lot of general curiosity about the scope of duties and the range of experiences among motorcycle couriers in the war. How did one end up doing that? How widespread was their use over the war? Was it ever or often dangerous? If there are any good sources on this (or sources that at least touch upon it), I'd love to see them! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lpeps/what_was_it_like_to_be_a_dispatch_rider_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clx9yac"], "score": [3], "text": ["An interesting aspect about dispatch riders in WWII - at least British ones - was that many were women. As WWII heated up, more and more men were required on the front lines. Therefore, women [nicknamed the Wrens] started taking up many auxiliary roles, with dispatch being one of these roles. By 1940 they completely took over the dispatch role for the Navy. \n\nIt can be a fairly dangerous job at times. For instance, Wren Pamela McGeorge was awarded the British Empire Medal after being hit by a bomb during a dispatch run. While her motorcycle was rendered useless, she was still okay - so she ran the rest of the way to deliver her message. \n\nYou can read a brief account of Wren McGeorge's effort here: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nGenerally Wrens were used quite extensively during WWII - for instance, during the invasion of the Low Countries and during the Battle of Britain. They would work eight-hour shifts, couriering messages back and forth between embassies and the Admiralty. \n\nAdditional source: [The WRNS: A History of the Women's Royal Naval Service](_URL_1_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19411102-1.2.23.aspx", "http://books.google.com.au/books?id=_UQm_D4ZHEsC&amp;pg=PA30&amp;lpg=PA30&amp;dq=wrens+dispatch+riders&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=DYoacq0zfS&amp;sig=DuEqhtnV3MagiHeFlzAqY64h4DU&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=xwVfVMStJqOnmAWSsoKwCQ&amp;ved=0CFcQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&amp;q=wrens%20dispatch%20riders&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "e1087o", "title": "Everyone is familiar with the US navy in the pacific during WW2, and also with the struggle of escorting convoys in the Atlantic at the same time. Did the US ever undertake carrier operations in the Atlantic that you just never hear about?", "selftext": "Curious if maybe there were a couple small carriers in the Atlantic to help with sub hunting or defend convoys against German air attack etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e1087o/everyone_is_familiar_with_the_us_navy_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8l1qx7"], "score": [15], "text": ["There\u2019s actually a pretty good answer archived [here.](_URL_0_) The US Navy deployed aircraft carriers that we are certainly less familiar with in the Atlantic. They were not considered duty in the Pacific due to their obvious limitations, but were perfect for service in convoys in the Atlantic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kahg9/were_there_american_aircraft_carriers_in_the/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=iossmf"]]}
{"q_id": "ce7a63", "title": "Would it have been socially acceptable in late Republican Rome for a Senator (or a prominent Roman male) to be exclusively homosexual? No marriage with a woman, no children, just exclusively and openly in relationships with other males?", "selftext": "I'm aware of some of the mores regarding homosexuality in Ancient Rome, like how freeborn males could engage in homosexual relations/sex without a loss in masculinity or status so long as they were the penetrative partner (I'm sure this was likely inconsistent and hiding it would be rather easy).\n\nBut what about a Roman Senator in late Republic Rome that was exclusively homosexual?  Between let's say the end of the 2nd Punic War and the start of the First Triumvirate.  I know that huge public figures like Sulla apparently preferred men, but what about a Patrician statesman that *exclusively* preferred men?  Would this have been bizarre or totally acceptable?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ce7a63/would_it_have_been_socially_acceptable_in_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eu0zg6q"], "score": [102], "text": ["You partly answer your own question with your understanding of Roman views on penetration; a senator who was purely (and willingly) receptive would be viewed as a *cinaedus* and thus utterly shameful.  More interesting to consider, however, is the apparently unusual idea that a *vir* would be only interested in one sex full stop - whether homosexual or heterosexual.\n\nCraig Williams's superb *Roman Homosexuality* (p. 187-188) gives some excellent - albeit Imperial, rather than Republican - examples from literature, particularly from Martial (who should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt as a savagely comic poet), expressing surprise at the idea of someone *only* being interested in men - or indeed, only *women*, in the case of Suetonius's discussion of the Emperor Claudius. Even with these slightly gossipy or silly sources, it is striking that there is no corresponding surprise at those who partner both men and women - as long as they are the penetrator.\n\nWith regards to the other aspects of your question, by picking the late Republic for your query you've avoided Augustus's *lex Iulia* which imposed severe penalties on the unmarried and childless; however, Plutarch does mention a Republican tax levied upon bachelors over the age of 60 (although it is unclear whether it would still have been in effect in the late Republic - probably not, given the fact that the *lex Iulia* were reportedly unpopular in the early Imperial period).  More important than marriage was the production of legitimate offspring to continue your family; not having any at all would seem deeply strange in Republican Rome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ux8sy", "title": "What is the history of the hotel detective? How were they employed, and what became of them?", "selftext": "I was reading a Noir novel the other day, and the main character interacts on several occasions with \"the hotel dick\" regarding a case he's working on. How did this work? Did hotels have in-house private investigators? And what was their role? What did the average day look like for these men?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ux8sy/what_is_the_history_of_the_hotel_detective_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cocv3y0"], "score": [2], "text": ["A \"hotel detective\" was, and is, just a plainclothes security officer for the hotel security team.  They are called \"detectives\" by analogy with the rank system many police departments use (or used to use), where there is a rank called \"detective\" below that of \"sergeant\", but above that of \"corporal\".  \n\nA hotel detective is not actively investigating incidents most of the time, or even at all -- he is a type of plainclothes security person who mostly is there to provide an invisible set of eyes and ears to the hotel security team.  Most of the time he (or she) would be loitering around the exits or common areas, or occasionally roaming the hallways, just generally keeping an eye on things, but not standing out, or alarming guests in the way a uniformed officer might."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9bmopv", "title": "When did rhyming in music become popular?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9bmopv/when_did_rhyming_in_music_become_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e579p82"], "score": [2], "text": ["First of all, rhyming in poetry goes back to time immemorial, our earliest example coming from the Chinese Shi Jing ca. 10th century BC. We really don't have a great sense of how poetic features like rhyme interacted with music here, simply because so little of the musical tradition survives. But as one instance, Hebrew \"songful\" music, like the psalms, did not tend to employ rhyme as a common poetic device. On the other hand, the Seiklos epitaph, one of our earliest complete musical pieces, does seem to contain some sort of rhyme scheme (though I am by no means an expert on Greek pronunciation\n\n >  \u1f4d\u03c3\u03bf\u03bd\u00a0\u03b6\u1fc7\u03c2\u03c6\u03b1\u03af\u03bd\u03bf\u03c5   \n\u03bc\u03b7\u03b4\u1f72\u03bd\u00a0\u1f45\u03bb\u03c9\u03c2\u03c3\u1f7a\u00a0\u03bb\u03c5\u03c0\u03bf\u1fe6    \n\u03c0\u03c1\u1f78\u03c2\u00a0\u1f40\u03bb\u03af\u03b3\u03bf\u03bd\u1f10\u03c3\u03c4\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f78\u00a0\u03b6\u1fc6\u03bd     \n\u03c4\u03ad\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2\u00a0\u1f41\u03c7\u03c1\u03cc\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2\u1f00\u03c0\u03b1\u03b9\u03c4\u03b5\u1fd6\n\nThe final words of each line, using the IPA for 1st century CE Egyptian Greek, are\n\n\u03b6\u1fc7\u03c2\u03c6\u03b1\u03af\u03bd\u03bf\u03c5 = /\u02c8p\u02b0\u025b.no/    \n\u03bb\u03c5\u03c0\u03bf\u1fe6 = /ly\u02c8p\u025b.o/   \n\u03b6\u1fc6\u03bd = /\u02c8za.o/   \n\u1f41\u03c7\u03c1\u03cc\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2\u1f00\u03c0\u03b1\u03b9\u03c4\u03b5\u1fd6 = /a.p\u025b\u02c8t\u025b.o/   \n\nSo here, at least. There does seem to be some kind of rhyme scheme going on, especially the /\u025b.o/ endings of lines 3 and 4\n\nThe rest of my post will deal with the tradition of Western Classical music, the music we have probably the most secure historical understanding of. \n\nThe tradition of gregorian chant, which in turn served as the basis for much of western music making until at least the Renaissance, was based on Latin versions of the bible, which mostly did not make explicit use of rhyme schemes except insofar as Latin naturally produces rhyming through its syntactical structure (like \"Notum fecit Dominus salutare suum; / ante conspectum gentium\" from the chant *Viderunt omnes,* which mostly seems to be a byproduct of the tense used in the verse rather than an explicit poetic rhyme).\n\nBut it's in secular song where we really see rhymed verse take off. The French Troubadours and Touveritzes of ca. the 13th century, for instance, employed rhymed verse all the time. Here's the poetry for Beatriz de Dia's lively \"A chantar m'er:\"\n\n >  A chantar m'er de so qu'eu no volria,    \ntant me rancur de lui cui sui amia;    \ncar eu l'am mais que nuilla ren que sia:    \nvas lui no.m val merces ni cortezia   \nni ma beltatz ni mos pretz ni mos sens;    \nc'atressi.m sui enganad' e trahia   \nCom degr' esser, s'eu fos dezavinens.\n\nThe obsession with \"-ia\" rhymes could not be more obvious here, it is broken only by the \"-ens\" rhymes that mark the 5th and 7th phrases. \n\nSecular traditions like these seem to be the way that rhyming is propagated throughout European music making, at least. In the 14th century, these regular rhythmic and rhyming properties were codified into sets of standard forms, called the *formes fixes* or \"fixed forms,\" which controlled not only rhythm and broad repetition schemes, but also rhyme schemes (the \"Ballade,\" for instance, had an ABABBCBC rhyme structure). These are the sorts of impulses that underpin the Western obsession with rhyming song that we still feel today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1wp4j8", "title": "Did any culture outside of North America have an equivalent of maple syrup or maple sugar made from tree sap?", "selftext": "I know there were maples in the old world (although they weren't sugar maples) and I've seen Birch syrup made of Birch sap (obviously). Did any other culture make a sweetener from tree sap? What tree?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wp4j8/did_any_culture_outside_of_north_america_have_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf44kwc"], "score": [12], "text": ["Coconut and date palms (and a variety of other palms as well) have been used throughout South Asia and the Pacific Islands as a sugar source for some time. The process of production is essentially the same, though it's often taken further to the point where the sugar crystallizes, and the product (which you can find in many Asian markets) has a flavor in some ways similar to brown sugar or molasses. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7gu1ya", "title": "This picture showing the stereotypes of several European ethnicities groups Turks and Greeks together. Why is that?", "selftext": "[The picture in question](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7gu1ya/this_picture_showing_the_stereotypes_of_several/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqlpkn1"], "score": [5], "text": ["Turkey and Greece have been dancing around each other for centuries.\n\n There was quite a lengthy period of time (some 370 years, from the 1450s to the 1820s) where much of what is now Greece was under Ottoman rule. Your picture looks to be smack in the middle of this period.\n\nIt was only in the early 20th century, in 1923, that a mass population swap involving several million people took place, to *incredible* demographic effect in both countries - Orthodox Christians from Anatolia poured into Greece, and Muslims from Greece poured into the freshly depopulated lands in Turkey. Weirdly, religious affiliation seems to have been the *only* thing they looked at. Not ethnic background. Not language. Many of the deported and denaturalised Muslims were either Greek or Albanian, specifically pinpointed as NOT being of Turkish descent. Nevertheless they were sent to Turkey.  Many of the deported and denaturalised Christians either did not speak Greek at all outside of church settings, or spoke a dialect (like Pontic or Cappadocian) that their new neighbours found completely incomprehensible. Nevertheless they were sent to Greece. The whole thing was a huge mess, deeply traumatic for the people involved and had remarkable effects on the demographics - the pre-swap Christian population of Turkey was ten times the size of the post-swap one, and they lost huge swathes of their merchant and urban professional population at a sweep.\n\n\nBasically, they\u2019re grouped together because they are kin. They\u2019ve intermixed for centuries, and it would be pointless trying to separate them out now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/LwTKxqk.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2idvi7", "title": "why were many soviet soldiers sent to battle with no weapons during the second world war?", "selftext": "I can understand that they had a lack of supplies but it seems that it would've been more efficient to keep unarmed soldiers as last option. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2idvi7/why_were_many_soviet_soldiers_sent_to_battle_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl1dtwr"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's a myth: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1skdcw/is_there_any_truth_to_the_popular_image_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "a2ll5j", "title": "Did people carry a form of ID in the nineteenth-century? How likely is it that a criminal could remain \u2018at large\u2019 without being identified in the \u2018Wild West\u2019 or Victorian England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a2ll5j/did_people_carry_a_form_of_id_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eazhhkh", "eb1vo9m"], "score": [58, 14], "text": ["Follow on question: how good/reliable/accurate were wanted ads and descriptions? How often were the wrong people brought in from far away only to be released when recognized as not the person being sought? ", "Common identification was rare until after the conclusion of the First World War in 1918 simply because the need for such mass verification was virtually non-existent. The drive for an easily acquirable form of identification began in the early part of the war, when national security became of paramount importance in both combatant and neutral states as the Allies and Central Powers grappled for control of Europe. In the period following the First World War, passports became an increasingly pressing issue as soldiers demobilized and were, in some cases, sent home from Europe to home destinations that could be half way across the world. Passports for personal international travel were finalized at the Paris Conference of 1920, but the standards required of every passport holder -- such as a passport picture and identifying marks -- rankled typically upper class travelers through the 1930s.\n\nEarlier passports issued to diplomatic staff were usually only presaged by a common preamble by the issuing government. This led to the universal adoption of a request for protection that can still be seen today in many passports.\n\nIn the United Kingdom:\n\n > Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.\n\nIn the United States:\n\n > The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.\n\nIn the French Republic:\n\n > Nous, Ministre des Affaires \u00e9trang\u00e8res requ\u00e9rons les officiers civils et militaires de la R\u00e9publique Fran\u00e7aise et prions les Autorit\u00e9s des pays amis et alli\u00e9s de laisser passer librement le titulaire du pr\u00e9sent passeport et de lui donner aide et protection. (*\"We, The Minster of Foreign Affairs, require local civil and military officials and the authorities of our friends and allies to allow free movement of the holder of this passport and to give aid and protection [when needed].\"*)\n\nDomestic identification on a large scale took the form of internal passports, which were particularly famous in pre-revolutionary Russia in order to travel from place to place. In America, rather darkly, internal passports were exclusively the domain of slaves, who required them to travel even the shortest of distances. Domestic identification was therefore something to be avoided as a mark of crime or servitude; Victor Hugo cast Jean Valjean as the holder of an infamous *yellow passport* that reflected his status as a parolee.\n\nWhile many nations had some sort of domestic passport to travel from town to town, in essence, a certificate of good behavior, there was no modern equivalent to a drivers license or identification card as we know it today. Your average American or Briton could therefore travel relatively incognito from, say, Ohio or Lancashire to Wyoming or London completely unimpeded save for regional markers such as accents, mannerisms or shibboleths that would mark them as an outsider."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1inanh", "title": "How was Poland affected by transfers of populations/territory between itself, Germany, and the USSR?", "selftext": "I've found a lot of information about the transfers of territory and population themselves, but not very much about how Polish politics, economy, society, or just Poland in general, were affected in the years following. \n\n11 million ethnic Germans either fled or were expelled from the territories east of the current German/Polish border, and the Polish borders [shifted so radically](_URL_0_) that cities which were in central Poland in the 1930s are now on the Poland/Belarus border. \n\nWhat I do know is that the USSR wanted the resources in the east, and incorporated those territories into the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian SSRs, and to compensate Poland for this loss (while punishing Germany), large parts of eastern German territories were transferred to Poland. The Germans were expelled from east of the Oder-Nei\u00dfe line, and the cities they left behind were repopulated with Poles who lived in the Polish territories now in the USSR. \n\nAny answers you can give are appreciated, and I'd appreciated it even more if you can cite sources! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1inanh/how_was_poland_affected_by_transfers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6extn"], "score": [6], "text": ["On a more general note, Poland's demographics were considerably altered. The Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) was a diverse country that had large numbers of ethnic Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Belarusians, and other peoples (Lithuanians, Russians, Czechs, etc.). Up to a third of the population was not ethnically Polish, according to estimates from the era.\n\nAfter the establishment of the People's Republic of Poland in 1952 and the completion of the population transfers (not to mention the effects 5 years of war and the Holocaust had on the population), there were effectively no minorities left; over 90% of the country was ethnically Polish. This has been maintained until today; the 2002 census saw 96.7% of the population claim themselves as ethnically Polish, making Poland one of the most homogenous countries in Europe.\n\nSources detailing this, as well as further reading, would include: Norman Davies excellent two-part series on Poland, *God's Playground* (Volume 2 details everything post-1795, and a recent edition includes post-Communist details); Timothy Snyder has a couple books on the subject: *The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999* goes into detail of the nationalities question, including a large section on the Second World War and the post-war population transfers; his recent book *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin* is more focused on the mass executions in the region, but provides context as to why the population was moved everywhere. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/aM0xXcU.gif"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42b9jh", "title": "Has Arabic evolved and changed over the years in much the same way that English has over the centuries?", "selftext": "Has imported words from the surrounding languages (Persian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, and so on) and has certain meanings or spellings changed over time? Are there specific phases of Arabic linguistic history such as Old English, Middle English, and Modern English?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42b9jh/has_arabic_evolved_and_changed_over_the_years_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz91i46", "cz93bjr", "cz94ups"], "score": [5, 3, 3], "text": ["I'd suggest asking over at /r/linguistics. Not that you won't get an answer here, but they specialize on this and stuff", "To clarify for others what you mean by English changing, English went through a radical change as a result of the Norman conquest in 1066. Old English is unintelligible to modern speakers. Slowly, over the course of 250 years, Norman French and Old English merged into one language. The merge was not 50/50, and modern English still has much more in common with Old English than with Norman French. But a lot of vocabulary changed, and English largely lost its conjugation according to subject. \"To be\" and the third person singular \"s\" are two examples of where modern English still retains conjugation according to subject. Since 1300, English has gone through some other changes, most notably the great vowel shift, which occurred around the time of Chaucer. Not too long after Chaucer, the \"e\" at the end of many words (e.g., \"come\") went silent. As English was standardized in the 1500s and due to the writings of those such as Shakespeare became popular, English has evolved much more slowly.\n\nThat being said, I can't compare the evolution of English to other languages since I'm not nearly as familiar with how they evolved. ", "I am no expert but I am an Arabic student and can give a really base answer. \n\nArabic does have loan words, and incorporates them very happily in with the language. The word for computer is Kombuter, cell phone mobayl, etc. It has somewhat of a phase, except that the first phase is unique in that it is still widely in use. Quranic, or Classical Arabic, constitutes the earlier recordings of the Arabic language we have, and eventually gave rise to Modern Standard Arabic, the uniform 'scholarly' form of Arabic spoken across the Arab world. At the same time, many tribal tongues began, as they were being written down, to incorporate the perso-Arabic alphabet, giving rise to the dialectal cluster fuck that is colloquial Arabic. I have no doubt that there was an early Arabic form, but whether or not we have it recorded anywhere or not remains to be seen. It is worth noting that Arabic is heavily related to Aramaic and Hebrew, and the actual writing system itself evolved from Aramaic. \n\nBeyond that, I don't know. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26ccol", "title": "Did Eastern Slavs Worship Perun?", "selftext": "I've been looking into Slavic Paganism recently and I was wondering if Eastern Slavs (such as the Russians) worshipped Perun. It seems that worship of Perun originated in Croatia and spread throughout the Balkans and to Western Slavic peoples (such as the Czechs) but I saw no mention of the Eastern ones.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26ccol/did_eastern_slavs_worship_perun/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chpqgq3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Perun,  the  Thunder  God,  was  one  of  the  major  deities  in  the  earliest  stages  of  the  recorded  history  of  the  Grand  Duchy  of  Kiev.   In  the  Rus  Primary  Chronicle,  it  is  said  that  when  Vladimir  became  the  Grand  Duke  of  Kiev,  in  980  AD,  he  erected  statues  to  seven  pagan  gods  in  front  of  his  palace.  The  Perun  statue  had  a  silver  head  and  a  golden  mouth.  When  Vladimir  converted  to  Christianity,  in  988  AD,  he  order  the  statue  of  Perun  to  be  dragged  down  to  the  Dneiper  river,  where  it  was  unceremoniously  dumped  into  the  river.    \nSources:  _URL_0_      \n_URL_1_             "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/PagKiev.html", "http://perun.ca/History.aspx"]]}
{"q_id": "1fleun", "title": "How seriously did Ancient Romans take the deification of their former emperors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fleun/how_seriously_did_ancient_romans_take_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cabguoj", "cabjdar"], "score": [32, 43], "text": ["I  would cite all the deified Roman emperors here, but there are 55 emperors that were proclaimed gods by the Roman people and the Senate. However, there were a small handful of Roman emperors who actually had the \"memory of them abolished\" by the Senate because they were so \"horrific\", such as Julio-Claudians.\n\nAs a whole, Roman people were not obligated to worship them. It was more or less an honorary title rather than some sort of meaningful position. The Romans did this out of respect for their leaders, but nothing really ever came about of it.\n \n\n", "You might be interested in reading the [Apocolocyntosis divii Claudii](_URL_1_) (\"The Gourdification of the Divine Claudius\").\n\nThis is a political satire, playing on the word \"apotheosis\" (what dead emperors went through to be deified), describing the death of Claudius, his ascent to the heavens and judgement by the gods - neither Claudius nor the gods escape unscathed from this story.  It is quite enjoyable to read, but more importantly for your question, it shows how \"seriously\" some individuals considered the deification of emperors - Claudius was not exactly the most revered of emperors, but it appears clear that, at least for the writer and the intended audience of this work, deification was almost like an inside joke.\n\n[Full text here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10001/10001-h/10001-h.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocolocyntosis"]]}
{"q_id": "adju3t", "title": "During the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry, how did the Japanese behave?", "selftext": "This question applies both during direct negotiations with the Americans, and also among themselves. Perry's own sponsored account of what happened is littered with descriptions of how the Japanese were bending over backwards in niceties, almost always smiling and jovial. Surely this was not the case? Or maybe it was but only when he or his crew were around? Obviously they weren't happy about being invaded. I've read quite a lot about this, including the sorts of discussions going on behind the scenes among the Japanese, but I've struggled to find much written by the Japanese themselves about what was happening.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/adju3t/during_the_opening_of_japan_by_commodore_perry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ediedja"], "score": [3], "text": ["Please delete this comment if it does not meet the academic standard of this subreddit (as for other areas, I'm sure it's not. I'm also specialized neither in this area nor in this period.).\n\n+++\n\nThere is actually counterpart of Perry's narrative in Japan, minutes within the contemporary goveners, titled as 'Bokui Ohsetsu-Roku (The record of how we coped with the American-Barbarians [sic])'. While considerable amounts of literatures for this negotiatiion between Perry and Tokugawa Shogunate and its aftermath in Japanese has culminated especially since 2003, the 150th anniversary of his visit in Uraga, this primary sources is said to be relatively not so known out of the limited circle of the academics (but I'm not in position to judge whether this catchphrase of the modern translation is really so or not).  I myself haven't heard about the existence of this primary source.\n\nThis primary source has been just translated in modern Japanese:  \n[*Modern Japanese Translation of Bokui Ohsetsu-Roku*, trans. and annotated by Kenji MORITA. Tokyo: Sakuhin sha, 2018.](_URL_0_)  \n\nThe standard study of Japanese historiography for this topic has been also translated in English, but it seems not to be known so widely (due to its publisher).  \n\nHiroshi MITANI. *Escape from Impasse: The Decision to Open Japan*, trans. David Noble.  I-House Press, 2008. [[Japanese Original: *Perry Raikoh \\('The Arrival of Perry'\\.)*. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kohbun Kan, 2003](_URL_1_)]  \n\nAgain, I've not read especially this English translation by myself, so I cannot say it's OK (especially as translation).  \n\nThe following is the latest literature for the Arrival of Perry rather for the non-specialists.  \n\n[Takeomi Nishikawa. *Perry Raikoh: Nihon-Ryukyu wo yurugashita 412 nichi-kan \\('The Arrival of Perry: 412 days of shaked Japan and Ryukyu'\\)*. Tokyo: Chuo-Kouron Shinsha, 2016.](_URL_2_)   \n\n[Edited]: Italicized all the titles of the books mentioned above. typo fixes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sakuhinsha.com/history/27174.html", "http://www.yoshikawa-k.co.jp/book/b34086.html", "http://www.chuko.co.jp/shinsho/2016/06/102380.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5f0195", "title": "Punishment for concubines in Imperial China?", "selftext": "I was recently reading Anchee Min's 'Empress Orchid' when I came across the punishment of removing the limbs of concubines and having her live in a vase. It was said to be especially reserved for unruly concubines of the emperor. One scene even involves the main character viewing a concubine who was a recipient of the said punishment, and was said to be only kept alive as a warning. \n\nDid these type of punishment really occur? I've read of various punishments in Imperial China (such as whippings, ordered suicides and the thousand-slice death) but I've never come across this. Granted, my knowledge of Imperial China is sketchy at best. \n\nPS. What other uncommon punishments were meted out in Imperial China for crimes? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f0195/punishment_for_concubines_in_imperial_china/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dah3xtx"], "score": [11], "text": ["This event might be based on [Wu Zetian](_URL_4_)'s treatment of her rivals, [Consort Xiao](_URL_6_) and [Empress Wang](_URL_1_), as recorded in the *Old Book of Tang* compiled around 300 years after the event. \n\nWu Zetian, then still a consort, ordered for her rivals' limbs to be cut off, thrown into a large wine jar, and had the jar filled with alcohol. \n\nSource: [Old Book of Tang, Chpt 51](_URL_0_)\n\nAnother infamously horrific incident of concubine punishment is [Consort Qi](_URL_7_)'s death.\nQi, a consort of [Liu Bang](_URL_3_) (Founder of the Han Dynasty), was killed by Liu's Empress Consort [L\u00fc Zhi](_URL_2_) after Liu's death. As related in[Shiji](_URL_5_), Qi was blinded, deafened, muted, her limbs removed and locked into a latrine. L\u00fc Zh called her a \"Human Swine\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%88%8A%E5%94%90%E6%9B%B8/%E5%8D%B751#.E8.89.AF.E5.A8.A3.E8.95.AD.E6.B0.8F", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Wang_(Gaozong)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_L%C3%BC_Zhi", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian", "https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E8%A8%98/%E5%8D%B7009", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consort_Xiao", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consort_Qi"]]}
{"q_id": "18tp8h", "title": "When Prohibition ended, how quickly did bootleg alcohol sales disappear? ", "selftext": "When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, what happened to all the underground alcohol sales? Did illegal brewers continue their unlicensed operations, did they give-up, or did they legitimize their operations? \n\nI am asking this question with the marijuana legalization context in mind. One concern with legalization had been the continuation of illegal sales. I was curious if any parallels could be drawn. However, I'm not looking for a discussion on marijuana here- my primary concern is the question posed on Prohibition. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18tp8h/when_prohibition_ended_how_quickly_did_bootleg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hyc1a", "c8i0n6e", "c8i5qa2"], "score": [19, 4, 2], "text": ["While this only a very partial answer to your question, it is important to keep in mind that \"the end of prohibition\" wasn't just 1933. The 21st Amendment didn't make the sale of alcohol legal in all 48 states immediately.  Mississippi, for example, was officially a dry state until *1966*.  A number of counties are still \"[dry counties](_URL_0_)\" today, though in all I believe can liquor still be brought in over county lines for \"private consumption\" (sometimes this is exactly what the law intends to happen--I grew up in a small, well-to-do, suburban, dry town, and if you wanted to go out to go out to a restaurant or buy a nice bottle of wine, you just went to the next town over).  In country music, you still hear about bootleggers *long* after 1933 because there was still a black market demand for them across the South, especially where there were restrictions on the licensing of small distilleries.  \n\nFurther, where there are [alcohol monopolies](_URL_2_) (these [exist in the United States](_URL_3_) as well) there may well continue to be a (much reduced) black market.  I just read [an article last year](_URL_1_) about the continued black market for Kosher wine in Quebec, for instance, even though alcohol is obviously legal there legal.\n\nedit: tl;dr: where alcohol's legal, but it's difficulty for small scale producers to get a license, there continues to be a black market.  The black market only disappears more or less completely, as far as I know, not just with legalization but liberalization.", "There still is moonshiners today but there was a marked decrease as legalization spread through the states, obviously if the tax isn't too *excessive* then there is much less demand for the black market. It's like drug legalization, would you continue to get cocaine from a gangbanger or get high-premium cocaine from your local mom and pop (thats comparable in price)?\n\nDo you get bathtub gin or regular gin? etc.", "Plenty of bootlegging still going on. In many rural areas it is the main source of alcohol. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_counties", "http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/98111/montreals-kosher-bootleggers", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_monopoly", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_state"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "buon8l", "title": "Which class of the social pyramid or which societal caste were medieval European doctors, lawyers, historians, engineers, etc. in, and where did they acquire their educations from? Were most of them family trades and businesses, or were their educations received from institutions of renown?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/buon8l/which_class_of_the_social_pyramid_or_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eppvn7u"], "score": [7], "text": ["While popular imagination might envision Medieval Europe as a simple society with strict class distinctions, this was most certainly not the case. Nowhere was this more evident in Italy, my own area of interest, where the political elite contained a segment of prosperous urban professionals, some of which were educated in institutions whose modern descendants are still active today. \n\nOf course, that is not to say Medieval Europe was not a place beset by stark inequality, or that the professional service industry was the largest component of the economy. Medieval Europe was indeed a very unequal society, and most people's economic activity was agriculture. While towns and cities did exist, many more people lived in small country hamlets. In many regions, large landowners could indeed unfairly exploit their tenants (\"Help help, I'm being oppressed!\"). However, in other regions small landholders were the majority, with few large magnates renting plots of land. In other regions still, a mix of small and large landowners coexisted with renters and serfs. But each individual region of Europe was characterized by its own social distinctions, shaped by their individual history and institutions. To again offer the example of Italy, while the North was characterized by many small landowners who participated frequently in the economic life of nearby cities and towns, in the South landed magnates were much more powerful. This, along with other factors, allowed for the creation of a single unified state in the South (whose main threat to stability came from internal upheavals) while the North experienced political fragmentation (whose existential threats were instead characterized by external rivalries). Not only did political organization develop different shades, but so did social organization. Across the Western Mediterranean and beyond, landowners could establish presences in cities and invest in commercial enterprises, while prosperous urban professionals, merchants, and artisans could purchase estates in the countryside. In some cities, like Florence, membership in a Merchant Guild was an important part of political enfranchisement, even if the member in question did not practice their guild's trade themselves (investment in an enterprise, or mere association with someone who did, was enough). In other cities, like Milan, land ownership remained an important component of political enfranchisement. Many times, prosperous urbanites could clash with suburban landowners, as could small landowners with large landowners, or the urban poor pit themselves against the urban rich. \n\nIt is also important to keep in mind that Europe dramatically changed over the centuries called \"the middle ages.\" In the eighth century, Italy was torn apart by war pitting the Byzantine Empire against the Lombard Kingdom, while in modern France the Carolingian Dynasty was founding an Empire, and England was divided amongst seven competing kingdoms. Two centuries later, Italy and Germany would experience an intellectual reawakening under the Ottonian dynasty, while in France the monarchy was experiencing a resurgence after a steep decline, and England was divided in two between the Danes and Anglo-Saxons.\n\nThe role of universities changed over the centuries as well. The earliest Universities, and I'm using the word in the broadest possible sense, were documented as early as the tenth century. But the inclusion of more modern courses of study like engineering (just as an example) would only really begin in earnest in the 19th century as Polytechnic Universities emerged offering courses adapted to industrialized society. Indeed for much of the Medieval period and beyond, in many professions training and certification would have been regulated by individual guilds, who set rules for apprenticeship and mastery of their respective arts. While having a family relative in a guild was seldom an explicit prerequisite for membership (prosperous artisans and professionals were often on the lookout for fresh manpower to take on as apprentices) having a trusted family member who knew the ropes could be a valuable boost when navigating the complex world of Medieval Guilds. \n\nIn the broadest sense, the earliest western european universities were collections of practitioners in law and theology. This is what was being taught at the time of the medieval founding dates of the oldest universities in Europe, like Bologna or Oxford. But while there is indeed evidence of students being taught by master practitioners in the eleventh century (indicating that teaching was probably already well established) it would be an enormous stretch to assume these lessons world have born resemblance to modern institutions of higher learning.\n\nIn this earliest period (prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) a university education would have been entirely religious in nature, geared to preparing a student for a life in the clergy. Nearly other professions would have been managed by an apprenticeship system, with degrees of formalization varying from place to place. It is also true that, in Italy at least, the destructiveness of the Lombard Wars had favored a social system where disproportionately wealthy individuals with time and resources could dedicate themselves to studying things like law and architecture on their own, developing mastery across multiple topics (think along the lines of designing their own palaces and castles, while also concocting legal arguments against their political enemies; an early Doge of Venice, Pietro Orseolo, was one such polymath). But in a society with a close relationship between religion, politics, and law, centers of religious teaching soon also became centers of legal study. Under the Ottonian Empire, the collection of scholars in the town of Pavia became one such center, validated by monarchs preferring Pavia it to the larger but more unruly city of Milan nearby. Pavia's status was later formalized in the 14th century by the rulers of Milan, and remains the seat of a University to this day. Universities could also spring up where there was the opportunity to exchange ideas: Padua and Bologna, for example, were longstanding Byzantine outposts in Italy, where Imperial Laws were still rigorously enforced and aspiring scholars could easily recover religious and legal texts. Thus Padua and Bologna had been welcoming students for centuries long before their universities were formally founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively. There were also many other cities in Italy where renowned practitioners resided who could also offer students a instruction deemed valid; some of these were later recognized and formalized, while others were not. And finally, in many of these places concentrated knowledge of Latin and Greek facilitated the outgrowth of additional topics of study, like philosophy and medicine.  \n\nThe kind of person which would move to Bologna, Padua, or Pavia in order to study would have been a person of means aspiring for a career in the law, in the church, and in later centuries, as a medical practitioner (but not a surgeon; that was considered a separate, more tradesman-like profession). But the great dynasties of Medieval Europe, however, could afford tutors to come to them and prepare their children for the rigors of political life, even if their children were to enter a career in the clergy. So the profile of the average university student, such as we can attempt identify, would be wealthy, but not too wealthy. And it's also important to keep in mind that while the kinds of students in universities were upper-middle-class (or lower-upper-class) not all upper-middle-class youngsters learned their trade in universities. Prosperous moneychangers, wool merchants, and other tradesmen whose guild education was considered just as formal could indeed inherit or develop large and lucrative enterprises. Through their guilds, they could even develop political influence and connections, all without an education from the universities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20d1pl", "title": "Why did the UK's nuclear deterrent not deter Argentina from invading the Falkland Islands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20d1pl/why_did_the_uks_nuclear_deterrent_not_deter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg22klq", "cg2au0l"], "score": [26, 6], "text": ["Because Argentina knew that the UK wasn't going to nuke them over the Falklands. \n\nThe problem with nuclear weapons is that they are something of a bluff. Since World War II, no state has really been that eager to be the first to use a nuclear weapon in a conflict, even against a non-nuclear state where immediate retaliation (either by the non-nuclear state or a nuclear ally) is a likely option. \n\nThe _general_ deterrence value of nuclear weapons is very unclear, even if it seems their ability to deter against other nuclear attacks is much better understood (though even that is less clear than most people realize). \n\nThe US, for example, implied during the first Gulf War that it might use nuclear weapons if Iraq set the Kuwait oil fields on fire. It wasn't clear that this actually influenced Saddam, however, who believed that the US was likely to use nuclear weapons _anyway_, but still ordered that the fields not be set ablaze. (They were set ablaze anyway by local commanders, without an order. The US obviously did not nuke Iraq in any case, though it did blame Saddam for the fires.)", "It's worth noting that tensions were sufficiently high with the USSR as to deter any consideration of nuclear attack. The British navy did not even attack Argentine naval targets outside of the zone of exclusion.\n\n The period of 1979 to 1983 is arguably the closest the world's ever come to nuclear war. A year later, Operation Able Archer nearly triggered a Soviet nuclear attack. In 1979, the Vela Incident and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had ratcheted tensions to high alert.\n\n Galtieri's government made a miscalculation about the UK's commitment to a very minor territory. However, they understood (correctly) that Britain was on a knife's edge with the USSR.\n\n As it was, Thatcher took considerable odium from the British Left over the sinking of the *General Belgrano*, an old WW2 cruiser. Information leaked to MP Tam Dalywell led to a bureaucratic inquisition of the MoD, and also, colorfully enough, several pacifist anti-war punk bands such as Crass."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ioa65", "title": "How did they pick the codenames of the D-Day beaches?", "selftext": "Is there any truth to the story that the British beaches were named after fish, but jelly was thought to be too silly so they changed it to Juno? Who decided the names of the American beaches?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ioa65/how_did_they_pick_the_codenames_of_the_dday/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2zrdf4"], "score": [6], "text": ["In general code names were randomly selected from an Inter-Services Code-Word Index, a list originally taken from a dictionary, sometimes with intervention such as Churchill personally selecting \"Overlord\" (*[The Art of Naming Operations] (_URL_1_)*, Gregory C. Sieminski).  There's a section in *Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives* by Peter Caddick-Adams on the Normandy beach code names:\n\n >  The British beach names, Gold, Jelly and Sword - all types of fish - were the original choices, but Churchill disapproved of the word Jelly for a beach on which many men might die, so he had the word changed to Juno.\n\nUnfortunately he doesn't give a source; it's plausible, in keeping with a 1943 memo from Churchill in which he said code names ought not to be \"... of a frivolous character, such as \"Bunnyhug,\" \"Billingsgate,\" \"Aperitif,\" and \"Ballyhoo.\"\" (*Churchill By Himself*), but I haven't seen anything else to corroborate \"Jelly\" being an original selection.\n\nCaddick-Adams continues:\n\n >  Omaha and later Utah were named after the birthplaces of the US V and VII Corps commanders 'Gee' Gerow and 'Lightning Joe' Collins.\n\nThis is less likely, as Gerow and Collins were from Virginia and Louisiana respectively. An [article in the Omaha World-Herald from 2008] (_URL_0_) offers the possibility that it may have been the home states of two carpenters building Omar Bradley's headquarters that resulted in the names, or the beaches being named after naval units assigned to the areas; there doesn't seem to be a definitive account of the selection of the names."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.omaha.com/news/military/d-day-was-omaha-beach-named-in-honor-of-local/article_5b631178-e2cc-11e3-a695-0017a43b2370.html", "http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/1995/sieminsk.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "276vuu", "title": "(wwii) how large scale were the UKs anti-invasion plans?", "selftext": "I'm vaguely aware of the home guard and 'dads army' esque resistance but I've never really heard about the extent of defending the uk against a d-day style German invasion.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/276vuu/wwii_how_large_scale_were_the_uks_antiinvasion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chxy7m3", "chy000a"], "score": [6, 6], "text": [" > I'm vaguely aware of the home guard and 'dads army' esque resistance...\n\nIn addition to the now well-known 'home guard', a typically less well-known element of the UK's post-invasion strategy concerns the 'Auxilary Units'. While the name may seem innocuous, their planned work would have been desperately perilous and likely to end in certain death in combat, or worse. The AU were drawn from the ordinary civilian population under utmost secrecy. They were trained as 'stay-behind' units of saboteurs and spies, who would have acted as the special forces under an anticipated British-government-in-exile. \n\n To this day very little reliable information has been published concerning them and is still subject to the Official Secrets Act. Their existence was only disclosed in 1968, by historian David Lampe (The Last Ditch: Britain's Resistance Plans Against the Nazis), and were not allowed to parade at the Cenotaph on (British) memorial day [until last year](_URL_2_), by which point most of them were dead. Reasoning for their history being classified is that much of the planning concerning the AUs is likely to have been highly controversial. For example, AU members have since revealed that some of their duties would include murdering British individuals who would collaborate with the Axis occupying forces. Even more controversially, in the 'open in case of invasion' letters held by servicemen (ordered destroyed and unread when an Axis occupation was deemed unlikely), an ex-AU revealed in an interview that, of course, he had destroyed his letter, but \"his friend\" had opened his, which revealed that his immediate task was to murder the policeman who had interviewed him when he applied to join, in order to ensure the security of the AU.\n\nSources: John Warwicker (2005) 'With Britain in Mortal Danger: Britain's Most Secret Army of WWII'. \n\nFurther reading: ['Britain's WWII secret army uncovered' (BBC)](_URL_1_)\n\n['Secret wartime resistance fighters are given an award' (BBC)](_URL_3_)\n\n[Several ex-AU have given (limited) accounts of their service, hosted on this website (which functioned as a source for Warwicker)](_URL_5_). Unfortunately many of these have 404'd. I will email them to let them know.\n\n[ WW2; Winston Churchill`s Secret Army; The Auxiliary Units.. Pt1 (February 2013).](_URL_0_) A blog entry which condenses more information concerning the AU and includes links to other media, including video interviews. Especially vital is the ['Coleshill Auxilary Research Team'](_URL_6_), who have published material pertaining to the AU also, [including the July 4th 1944 letter ordering a stand-down of the AU](_URL_4_).", "As far as scale goes, I think you have to include the Royal Navy and the RAF.  These two forces were obstacles that had to be removed or neutralized for any cross-Channel invasion to have a chance at success.  The Royal Navy dwarfed Germany's Kriegsmarine, and there was never a real chance at Germany winning or drawing a toe-to-toe slugging match in the Channel.  British aircraft production outstripped German production during the Battle of Britain--a battle of attrition that consistently favored the British.  Combined, these two forces were more than formidable.  They could oppose any landing, then attack any forces that made it ashore.  \n\nI haven't studied the ground defenses to any real depth.  The British Army lost a lot of its heavy equipment during the evacuation of Dunkirk, but they still had a good deal of manpower available.  The process of reequipping the army obviously took some time, but every passing day meant that the army became more potent.  That said, my favorite defense was the tiny [Romney Hythe  &  Dymchurch light railway coastal armored defense train](_URL_0_).  The efficacy of a 15 inch gauge armored train is *highly* questionable.  To me, though, it epitomizes the idea of 'British pluck.'  In the end, the determination to use every available resource to resist the Germans may very well have been the most important aspect of British defenses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://coastkid.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/ww2-winston-churchills-secret-army.html", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2833133.stm", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-24851203", "http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/humberside/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8743000/8743485.stm", "http://www.coleshillhouse.com/CART-Images/franklyn.jpg", "http://www.wartimememories.co.uk/secret/auxiliaryunits.html", "http://www.coleshillhouse.com/the-auxiliary-units-history.php"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Romney%2C_Hythe_and_Dymchurch_armoured_train.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "28dom2", "title": "What was the impression of the AK-47/AKM when it was first encountered during the Vietnam War?", "selftext": "I'd like to know the impression the rifle left on the Americans who first came up against it.  As far as I'm aware, this is the time that the US had any real experience against the AK.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28dom2/what_was_the_impression_of_the_ak47akm_when_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci9wzpx"], "score": [139], "text": ["The Kalashnikov was fairly rare early in the war. I believe that it began to be encountered in significant numbers around 1965, especially with NVA forces, but did not become entirely ubiquitous, especially among the Viet Cong, until somewhat later. Various other small arms were used, especially the SKS semi-automatic, the Mosin-Nagant's various iterations, French-captured arms, and Soviet and Chinese submachine guns.\n\nAs to the effect it had on American forces, see the quote below, from David Hackworth, a career army officer who had spent two years fighting in Korea, and would spend three years fighting in Vietnam.\n\n > At one stage of the work, one of the dozers uncovered a slightly moldy VC body, complete with an AK-47. I jumped down in the hole and yanked the AK out of the mud.\n\n > \"Watch this,\" I said, \"I'll show you how a real infantry weapon works.\"\n\n > I pulled the bolt back and fired thirty rounds - the AK performed as though it had been cleaned that day rather than buried in a marsh for a year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ox8je", "title": "Why did peasant rebellions plague china so much, happen every so often in India and barely happened at all in Japan?", "selftext": "i'm pretty curious as to some of the reasons for this. For china i know that the concept of the mandate of heaven played a major part, but i'm a bit lost on the other two. I'm only interested really in up to the 16th century so no sengoku", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ox8je/why_did_peasant_rebellions_plague_china_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmrfptk", "cmrjkao"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I'm confused by the time period you're asking for. The Warring States period spans 1467 to 1603. Are you asking about pre-Warring States, starting at 1467, or pre-16th century, including the first 50 years of the Warring States?\n\n", "Between 1336 (founding of Muromachi Bakufu) and 1467 (Onin War) there were 6 to 10 major ikki revolts.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14zjdp", "title": "Why has French-speaking Africa failed to make the transition to democracy?", "selftext": "Hello everybody,\n\nIt's my first post on this thing but I was wondering if anybody could explain to me why French speaking Africa has failed to make the transition to democracy. Unlike most English speaking countries in Africa where democracy was largely restored at the end of the Cold War, French speaking Africa doesn't seem to have followed suit (Cameroon and Gabon are two obvious examples).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14zjdp/why_has_frenchspeaking_africa_failed_to_make_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7i0992", "c7i0ax3", "c7i42dj", "c7i5hh3"], "score": [5, 25, 8, 5], "text": ["I'm not an expert but I think it's clear that French influence in Africa after decolonisation had a lot to do with it. However, this largely explains the Cold War era.\n\nHowever, the French even coined a term *Francafrique* to refer to their policies of interference in African affairs during the Cold War. Part of this involved their military [directly](_URL_0_) or [indirectly](_URL_1_) overthrowing regimes that they disagreed with. Also, in Gabon Omar Bongo was kept in power with French backing and France still maintains a military base there.  \n\nHowever, I really only know about that from reading \"The Dogs of War\" so I'd wait for somebody with an interest in post-colonial Africa.", "There's an element of confirmation bias here (see: Zimbabwe), but you're definitely onto something.\n\nFrance made a deliberate effort to control its former colonial empire through puppet strongmen. By propping up a clique of dictators, France has enhanced its standing in the UN with a cluster of safe votes, guaranteed itself a cheap supply of strategic resources, and maintained a misplaced sense of prestige while giving a mission and justification to its military. \n\nThis neocolonial system was designed in the 1960s by Jacques Foccard, a major adviser to French President Charles de Gaulle. It's come to be known as \"Francafrique,\" and you should be able to find a lot of information about that online. ", "English speaking Africa really hasn't successfully transitioned to democracy either. For the most part, even the English speaking countries that appear democratic on the surface are actually hybrid authoritarian regimes at best. ", "This is far outside my area of expertise, but I think the first step has to be separate out French North Africa from French West Africa.  The French had radically different policies in the two areas.  But before we start explaining why they're less free, let's establish that they are less free.  French West Africa doesn't compare poorly to British East Africa (I choose this because it's relatively easy to pick out the British colonies here; I would be surprised if British West Africa doesn't produce similar results, but I didn't want to have to figure out which colonies were British and which weren't).\n\n[French West African countries according to Wikipedia](_URL_0_) (2012 Freedom House Political Liberty score, 2012 Freedom House Civil Liberty Score) F=Free, PF=Partly Free, NF=Not Free:\n\n* Benin (2,2) F [low scores are better]\n\n* Burkina Faso (5,3) PF\n\n* C\u00f4te d'Ivoire (6,6) NF\n\n* Guinea (5,5) PF\n\n* Mauritania (6,5) NF\n\n* Mali (2,3) F\n\n* Niger (3,4) PF\n\n* Senegal (3,3) PF\n\nThings are changing (as they always do).  I chose 2012 just because that's the latest.  [Check for yourself on Wikipeda](_URL_2_) I've been told Senegal is getting better, Mali has the potential to get much worse.  But overall, that's not a *horrible* record overall.  Compare it to the sub-Saharan part of the British [Cape to Cairo Red Line, list selected from eye-balling the map so possibly off slightly](_URL_1_)\n\n* Botswana (3,2) PF\n\n* Kenya (4,3) PF\n\n* Malawi (3,4) PF\n\n* Sudan (7,7) NF\n\n* South Africa (2,2) F\n\n* Tanzania (3,3) PF\n\n* Uganda (5,4) PF\n\n* Zambia (3,4) PF\n\n* Zimbabwe (6,6) NF\n\nI think before we can talk about *why* French colonies are worse off in Sub-Saharan Africa, we need to look at *if* they're worse off.  The record is certainly mixed for both colonial powers, but I'm not ready to say former British colonies are clearly \"better off\" politically than former French ones.\n\nEdit: \n\n**Total Score:**\n\n**French West Africa (n=8): 2 Free, 4 Partly Free, 2 Not Free**\n\n**British East Africa (n=9): 1 Free, 6 Partly Free, 2 Not Free**\n\n*Slight French Advantage!*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokassa#Operation_Barracuda", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard#The_Comoros"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_West_Africa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_to_Cairo_Red_Line#.22Cape_to_Cairo_Red_Line.22", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Sub-Saharan_Africa"]]}
{"q_id": "536e68", "title": "Why were protests so common through out the world in the 60's?", "selftext": "I have noticed that student protests and other unrests were really prominent in the 60's, not only in the west, but throughout the world. The most prominent example would be the hippy/anti-war movement in the US, but I have also heard of examples of unusual level of civil unrest in a lot of other countries, such as:\n\nUK, Germany, France, Belgium, Japan, Korea, Thailand and China. \n\n(I admit I am not super familiar with the examples, so i may have some misconception).\n\nIs this merely a co-incidence that these all occured close to each other, or are there more underlining causes that link them together?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/536e68/why_were_protests_so_common_through_out_the_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7qeoak"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think the civil unrest is somehow part of a nexus of social (Civil Rights Movement, Prague Spring, May 1968 etc.) and economic (1973 oil Crisis) \u201acrises\u2018 and environmental movements characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s. These seem to be in part closely intertwined, so I wouldn't characterise them as being coincidences. On the other part, by identifying one or several main causes one would be overly simplifying an extremely ample and complex phenomenon.\n\nI'm therefore afraid I cannot give you a clear answer. Then again I'm far from being knowledgeable on the topic. My advice would be to seek for partial answers to your question by looking at small scale events or topics where social, economic and environmental issues seem to come together and influence each other. Personally I would recommend readings on general topics like environmental history (Joachim Radkau's \u201eNature and Power\u201c or John R. McNeill's \u201eSomething New Under the Sun\u201c) or specific ones like the cultural history of aluminium (Mimi Sheller's \u201eAluminum Dreams\u201c) to gain an insight into how consumer society or environmental issues and awareness played a part in the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe someone could also give us reading tips on social, political and economic history?\n\nInterestingly enough, opinions seem to be divided among some historians debating the question if the 1970s can be interpreted as historical turning point. (an example of such a debate, for German speakers: _URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-1699"]]}
{"q_id": "70bhvi", "title": "What was no-mans-land like between the Union capital in Washington, SC and the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA?", "selftext": "The distance is fairly small, given the size of the US at the time.\n\n* What were fortifications and defenses like?\n* Did people live in between the two capitals? Were there settlements or towns?\n* How often did efforts take place to infiltrate or assault an opposing capital?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70bhvi/what_was_nomansland_like_between_the_union/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn25x98"], "score": [19], "text": ["[This 1863 map](_URL_3_) may give you some idea. As might [this other 1862 map](_URL_2_). \n\n > What were fortifications and defenses like?\n\nThat changed throughout the war. Both capitals were lightly defended at the start. But both were quickly fortified. Lee's first assignment for example was to dig the initial defensive lines around Richmond. And by the time of Lincoln's second inauguration Washington was ringed by [dozens of forts](_URL_1_) with miles of trenches connecting them. Both sides continued to strengthen the defenses around their capitals, right up till the end of the war.\n\nIn betweeen the cities though, defense works were generally temporary and hastily built. They were intended to give an advantage in specific battles, more than to create permanent strongholds. \n\n > Did people live in between the two capitals? Were there settlements or towns?\n\nNorthern Virginia was well settled in this time. Almost all land was owned and worked, with some exceptions where the land wasn't as suitable for farming. So mostly it was farms, with small copses of trees dotting the landscape. Only here and there like along the Rappahannock was it densely wooded. Smaller villages and towns were everywhere. But larger towns were rare. Fredericksburg would have been the biggest with a population of around 5,000. All (well almost) of these remained occupied and the land worked  throughout the war. This part of Northern Virginia and the adjacent Shenandoah Valley provided a lot of food to the Confederates throughout the war. \n\n > How often did efforts take place to infiltrate or assault an opposing capital?\n\nBoth sides used spies and there was a small amount of traffic between the capitols. The lines weren't exactly solid or permanent. Actor (and later assassin) John Wilkes Booth continued to perform on both sides of the border, and apparently worked off and on as a smuggler. \n\nAssaulting Richmond was pretty much the primary goal of the Union throughout the war. But with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia standing in the way, it was hard just to get to Richmond to make the attempt. In the end it was only after the successful [Siege of the nearby town of Petersburg](_URL_0_) that the Feds were able to actually attack and occupy Richmond.\n\nThe Confederates only tried making a play on Washington once. That was in July of 1864 when Jubal Early came up with 10,000 men and skirmished outside Ft Stevenson. He was evenly matched. But the Feds were securely in a fort, and had about 2-3 times as many men nearby. So Early withdrew without making a serious assault. In both cases the capitals were hard nuts to crack.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Richmond-Petersburg.png", "https://www.nps.gov/cwdw/planyourvisit/images/washington-DC-map-1865.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/ATLAS_OR_VIRGINIA_MAP.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Northern_Virginia_Civil_War_Battle_Map_1862.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7a3cdp", "title": "How has the Republican Party changed in regards to helping the abolishment of slavery, into barely having any African American support at all? [serious]", "selftext": "I decided to do some research on politics and the origin of the Republican and democratic parties the other day. I was looking at a site that basically compared he two parties and even showed the popularities of each party by race and gender. I had learned that the Republican Party was formed and they were the driving force that helped abolish slavery, alongside Abraham Lincoln. The site also said that 90+% of African Americans today are democratic (that party was pro slavery at the time for the most part I guess). So I guess my question is how did the parties get so re-arranged? Why is it such a vile thing to be considered a Republican, other than the president sitting in office currently? I\u2019m genuinely interested in informative answers, wasn\u2019t sure if I should post this here or somewhere else. Thanks!\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7a3cdp/how_has_the_republican_party_changed_in_regards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp70bm9"], "score": [12], "text": ["While more can be said on a subject, here is a link to the [Changing positions of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the FAQ](_URL_1_)\n\nIn regards specifically to the shift of African American voters to the Democractic party, I'd recommend reading [this post by](_URL_0_) u/Samuel_Gompers"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democrat_vs_Republican"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_someone_address_a_brief_history_of_democrats/?st=j9h8l8qn&amp;sh=6b91a708", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_changing_role_of_republicans_and_democrats"]]}
{"q_id": "1jdiu2", "title": "How much did the Roman Catholic Church change since its inception to, say, post Vatican II?", "selftext": "For example, what were he differences betwee the RCC in the 12th century and the 19th century? Stuff like that. How has it changed over time is what I am trying to say.\n\nEDIT: as several of ou are pointing out, this is a very broad question. So banks for responding, and I was wondering if any if you had any really cool facts on the RCC? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jdiu2/how_much_did_the_roman_catholic_church_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdm32j"], "score": [4], "text": ["A great deal has changed, but also, a lot stayed the same.\n\nThere have been a lot of points when the Catholic church has changed, adapted and redefined itself. At the same time, those changes can be seen not as a sudden shift but a gradual slide. In some cases, it was a committee that decided what became doctrine and in other cases it was almost the work of a single individual. From the first council of Nicaea to Vatican II, the church has constantly redefined itself.\n\nMonastic orders, for example, were added along the way. From the Benedictines and all other little sects, to the Franciscans and Dominicans in the 13th century and the Jesuits during the reformation. The role of the priest himself, along with his credentials and job description, was somewhat in flux between the ideal and reality, with the church battling simony over and over. Several theological points, like the existence of Purgatory, the seven sacraments, the way one achieves penance, etc, were redifined throughout the centuries.\n\nAnd yet, one thing stayed the same - the church is the only way to god. The pope is the final authority on all matters divine. As the old Romans say, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.\n\nI'm sorry about the broad answer but this is a very broad question. I'm also afraid I know more about later church history than I do about the earlier times, so maybe another poster can help expand on pre-reformation Catholicism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "85f5kb", "title": "Why did Siculo-Arabic persist in Malta but was completely eliminated in Sicily, even though both places were subject to expulsions of Arabs and Muslims at around the same time?", "selftext": "Southern Italy, Sicily, and much of the Mediterranean was largely an extension of the Arab/Islamic world in the beginning of the Middle Ages. However, as the Normans and the Catholic church gained power, a new interest spawned in trying to rid the continent of these non-European invaders, and by 1300, they did just that. \n\nA dialect of Arabic was historically the lingua franca in this region during this time period, but that has since been gone-- except for Malta. I don't understand how the dialect can persist in Malta, while it all but disappeared in Sicily very quickly after the expulsion in 1224 seemingly without a trace.\n\nWiki articles for context:    \n_URL_2_    \n_URL_1_    \n_URL_0_    \n_URL_3_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/85f5kb/why_did_siculoarabic_persist_in_malta_but_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvxktix"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's covered pretty well in this thread: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Malta", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siculo-Arabic", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wdz2d/why_is_an_arabicderived_language_still_spoken_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "1vnsyp", "title": "What is the origin of the idea that China is the world's oldest civilization? (As opposed to Sumer)", "selftext": "Correct me if I'm wrong but Sumer was the world's oldest civilization. So why did the idea that China was the world's oldest civilization pop up? Was it part of the Orientalist ideas of 19th century Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vnsyp/what_is_the_origin_of_the_idea_that_china_is_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceu5lgo", "ceuc6ce"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["I think the saying is that China isn't the oldest civilization but rather the oldest continuous civilization. Even with China's modernization and radical changes in the communist era, their culture is still present to this day. Something that pretty much no other culture can claim (except for i think India and other countries in the Asia/Arab region) that aren't as influential and prosperous as China.\n\nJust saying, the Vietnamese name for China pretty much means Middle Earth.", "Firstly, no one is entirely sure when a \"civilisation\" in China emerged. Advanced political communities, metallurgy and a writing system were definitely present in China by the Shang dynasty (i.e. from around 1700-1500 B.C.), but the picture before that was far murkier. We have far fewer written historical records from that era than we do for middle eastern civilisations, because most writing was likely done on bamboo or other wood, as opposed to stone or clay as in Sumer. Archaeological records are also far scarcer - the geography of central China, with frequent earthquakes, floods and so on is not conducive to preserving anything of archaeological interest. It may be that in the future we find evidence of advanced societies in China that predate those of the Middle East, but we haven't yet. \n\nAs for the idea itself, I think its fair to say that it does contain a degree of Orientalist mystique, but also that it is perpetuated in large part by the Chinese themselves. The idea that China is the oldest continuous civilisation is central to modern Chinese nationalism and is part of a broader tendency to glorify the country's past (to the point of obscuring the diversity and lack of unity in early Chinese civilisation and the degree to which it has evolved since). The impact of nationalism on Chinese historiography is a huge topic that I probably shouldn't try to address here, but [this book](_URL_0_) has a fair bit to say on the subject. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=ANsmE1gBRKsC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR7&amp;dq=nationalist+history+early+China&amp;ots=abNrPl3sxh&amp;sig=fpYIMsUQx3yiJY9y5pFbAvLP5Oo#v=onepage&amp;q=nationalist%20history%20early%20China&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2xl5zu", "title": "During WWII, was it safer to be a fighter pilot or bomber crew?", "selftext": "Did a search but couldn't find anything for this.\n\nAnother follow up question; was this also the general consensus of pilots or did they think differently?\n\nMany thanks :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xl5zu/during_wwii_was_it_safer_to_be_a_fighter_pilot_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp1e032"], "score": [3], "text": ["The answer varies from time to time, place to place and airplane to ariplane. In the beginning of the war B -17 fighters were sent without fighter escorts while in the Pacific at the and of the war there was little resistance on the part of the Japanese to the death that rained down from above. Then you have the Lutwaffe in the battle of Britain which was utterly destroyed while at the end of the war in the English Gloster Meteor protected home skies and I have not heard of one being shot down. If you want a more definitive answer search for individual squadrons of fighter and bomber planes and the casualties suffered by them and compare them, while you will not cover a fraction of the total air forces you can get an idea of what went on in the skies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7pavo9", "title": "How would the children/adults of an upper class Victorian home address a governess?", "selftext": "The governess in question is a young unmarried middle class woman. What would the people she engages with call her? Miss or Mistress?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pavo9/how_would_the_childrenadults_of_an_upper_class/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsg5m6x"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is actually a rather simple answer: they would call her Miss [Lastname]. \"Mistress\" as a title was essentially defunct by the Victorian era.\n\nIt entered the English language through French in the Middle Ages as the feminine form of *ma\u00eetre* (well, *maistre*) - *maistresse*. Both *maistre* and *maistresse* could be nouns describing a man/woman in some position of authority within or over a household, just as \"master\" and \"mistress\" are today. They could also be respectful titles for individual men and women who didn't have noble titles of their own.\n\nBy the seventeenth century, \"mistress\" as a title could be abbreviated as either \"M^(is)\"/\"Mis\" or \"Mrs\". \"Miss\" as a standalone term first appeared in the late seventeenth century, possibly from people pronouncing the first abbreviation as it was spelled; it could be used for any woman, but was most frequently in relation to an unmarried woman, whether a chaste teenager or someone's, um, extra-marital ladyfriend. \"Mistress\" was then used by both married women as well as unmarried women who weren't particularly youthful.\n\nEven as late as the end of the 18th century, there was still a certain amount of confusion - some proclaimed \"miss\" as only appropriate for single women, some felt that \"Mrs\" or \"mistress\" was more polite. However, the majority of textual sources show a conformity with the modern usage, and some even treat the flipped version or \"mistress\" as quite antique! For instance, a footnote in the Tatler (annotated and reprinted in [1804](_URL_0_)) describes the shift as a curiosity of old that needs explanation:\n\n > We find Miss, a contraction of Mistress, in Miege's French Dictionary, 1688; but in 1709 the appellation of miss seems to have been given only to girls not yet in their teens, or to loose young women. In No. 9, the giddy Pastorella is styled miss; but here it is Mrs Jenny Distaff, and she was only turned of twenty, as we find No. 33. A young lady of nineteen is called mistress in Spec. No. 534 i.e. in 1712. Shakspeare distinguishes maidens from their mothers, by adding the christian names; 'mistress Ann Page', *anno* 1601. See more No. 13, note. - At what time the term *miss* first began to be used as the only appellative to unmarried ladies, it is not easy to ascertain. But from a passage in the Universal Spectator of July 1, 1738, it may be supposed to have been then of recent introduction. \n\nCertainly by the Victorian era, a governess would not be addressed as \"mistress\". If you're writing a novel about a governess, I would suggest reading some Victorian fiction featuring that profession - *Jane Eyre* (Charlotte Bronte), *Agnes Grey* (Anne Bronte), *The Governess* (the Countess of Blessington)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=z-gsAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA80"]]}
{"q_id": "1wizwo", "title": "Back when the Pope had an army and ruled over the Papal States, he fought wars and put down rebellions against people who were presumably Catholic. How did Catholic leaders and soldiers justify fighting the Pope?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wizwo/back_when_the_pope_had_an_army_and_ruled_over_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf2km38", "cf2kznn", "cf2l312", "cf2l3as"], "score": [4, 3, 13, 48], "text": ["The Papacy isn't a purely religious office. Even today, the Pope is the Sovereign of the Vatican City and holds absolute secular power within its boundaries. The same was true of the Papal States when they existed. So it was quite possible for the Pope to get involved in wars purely in his capacity as a temporal ruler. \n\nOf course this temporal ruler happened to inhabit the same body of the head of the Catholic faith so depending on how unscrupulous a Pope might be, going to war with him might not be the brightest idea.", "[Innocent III's](_URL_0_) campaigns provide a very interesting look at the Catholic Church acting as a nation state.  His conquest of the Cathars might be fun reading for you.  In this particular instance Innocent justified a fight against Gnostics for heresy but was most likely protecting/expanding (can't remember) papal property. \n\nThis is just one of many Innocent III episodes.  His story is truly fascinating.\n\nRead [this](_URL_1_) in a Medieval history course in school and loved it.", "Sometimes, they weren't even subtle about it. A perfect, and somewhat shocking example, involves Pope Boniface and the famous papal bull *Unam sanctum*. In short, the *Unam sanctum* declared the supreme authority of the Pope over all Christians in the Church. In other words, all Catholics were below the Pope. King Philip IV of France would have none of that. French soldiers attacked the residence of the Pope and nearly beat him to death.\n\nThis just one example, and it does not look into it any broad scope. As far as I know, most of the cardinals supported Boniface.\n\nIf you want justification, King Philip IV would try to gain control of the papacy by forcefully moving it to a French city named Avignon. Obviously, he had no intention of serving the Pope.\n\nYou can read about it here: _URL_0_\n\ne: FourOfTwenty provides a more complete answer.", "Excommunication was a powerful tool of the popes, but like any tool, you use it too much and after awhile it looses its edge. \n\nAlthough many Christian powers have tried to control the papacy in one way or another (See Byzantine Emperors, And Holy Roman Emperors and [Ceaseropapism] (_URL_4_) ) it was towards the end of the middle ages France effectively gained control over the papacy, and it was moved to Avignon. Technically this was a new papal States and not part of the French Crown, but it was on the French side of the Pyrenees and Alps and most non-French Catholic princes felt the Avignon papacy was a French puppet. \n\nThis move was the result of the conflict between the French [king Philip IV](_URL_5_) (Sometimes called \"The Fair\") and [pope Boniface VIII](_URL_3_). The issue was whether or not the French king should be able to tax the French Clergy i.e. who were the French clergy ultimately responsible too, the local prince or the pope? Philip IV wanted to be seen as a pious Christian prince, and war with a corrupt pope would not have been all that novel in the high middle ages. During the course of the conflict the pope tried to use excommunication against Philip and all his army, but the more he would use it the more it stopped being taken seriously. After all, if the pope is corrupt and a heretic, his orders of excommunication meant nothing and why would a good Christian prince like Philip VII, who's descended of King Saint Louis, be warring against a true pope? \n\nSo over time excommunication stooped having the force it could, partly because some popes over used it. Eventually the papacy's involvement in Avignon would set the state for the [\"Great Western Schism\"](_URL_0_) which began when the papacy tried to move back to Rome, and further eroded the pope's authority. \n\nBy the time the Renaissance comes around the papacy had only just returned to Rome from France, and partly because the French kings had a claim on part of Italy, but also simply to show the pope who's boss, French kings made repeated invasions of Italy at the close of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. \n\nThe pope in response would appeal to the other Christian Princes for help (Spain and England, at least until the reformation, were usually willing to back the pope against France because \"Screw France!\"). The Borgia, for example, was a Spanish Pope and so could in theory call upon Spanish kingdoms to counter France. Pope's like [Sixtus IV](_URL_2_) and his nephew the later pope [Julius II](_URL_1_) had virtually given up on using excommunication except as a disciplinary action against local bishops and priests. It was these latter popes who formed the Papal Swiss Guard we are all familiar with today.\n\nEdit: Added wiki links, tried to fix grammar... too tired. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Innocent_III", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Civilization-Middle-Ages-Completely/dp/0060925531"], ["http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1303anagni.asp"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Schism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuliano_della_Rovere", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sixtus_IV", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Boniface_VIII", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesaropapism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_IV_of_France"]]}
{"q_id": "743bg1", "title": "Is there any proof of the Fascist plot in the 1930s led by Wall Street financiers to overtrow Roosevelt?", "selftext": "So I'm translating a book by a Brazilian geopolitical scholar who's quite boldly claiming Wall Street staged a falled coup against FDR in the wake of his new deal policies. \n\nHe says the plot was thwarted by General ~~Gerard C. Macguire~~ Smedley D. Butler and subsequently investigated by the congressional McCormack-Dickstein Committee. But no arrests were made.\n\nAccording to the author I'm translating this is because \"there was a cover up to safeguard the image of the United States as a democracy, its myth of 'exceptionality', the country where no coup had ever taken place.\"\n\nI had heard of this before, but thought it was mostly hearsay.\n\nAnyway, can any reddit historian weigh in on the matter.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/743bg1/is_there_any_proof_of_the_fascist_plot_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnvqt81", "dnw33j8", "do2j8uf"], "score": [87, 10, 3], "text": ["I can't answer the question directly, but this plot is generally referred to as the \"Business Plot\", and searching for that will give you more information, such as [this previous post](_URL_0_) from /u/bug-hunter, highlighting the difficulty of verifying many important facts.", "Hello. Can you please tell the author's name and if possible the URL where I could find this article?", "There's some fairly recent stuff on this FOIA site: \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5e9t7n/a_cocktail_putsch_a_gigantic_hoax_perfect/"], [], ["https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/aug/29/smedley-butler-fbi/", "https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/smedley-darlington-butler-37608/"]]}
{"q_id": "58547m", "title": "How did Muslims initially react to photography given the widespread taboos against depicting people and animals in Islamic art?", "selftext": "Curious about what we know of the early reactions to the invention, debates over if it violated the relevant hadith, positions of different schools of thought, differences regarding men vs women and children vs adults, popular reception, etc. \n\nGiven that many Muslims would come to find themselves ruled by European empires, are there any accounts of the reactions to the odd reporter or visiting anthropologist taking a shot? What about photographing Muslim mosques and holy sites? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58547m/how_did_muslims_initially_react_to_photography/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8xi9af", "d8xw74t", "d8yyskz"], "score": [93, 331, 7], "text": ["Suppose we can throw in the earliest video cameras as well; would be interesting to know if film was treated any differently than still images. ", "Also, the 8th century Caliphs' palace in Jordan named [Qasr Amra](_URL_0_) is well known for its frescoes of people and nude women. So was this an exception, or the general unspoken rule that this \"depiction of people forbidden\" thing wasn't really taken seriously (and, of course, the \"no naked ladies\" thing)?", "While taboo is too strong a word for al-Andalus (Islamic Spain),  the discomfort with the concept of figural representation can clearly be seen in its complete absence from religious settings: you won't find a human or animal form in a mosque or a Quran from the Iberian Peninsula. By contrast, there are many representations of people and animals on luxury objects, such as silks, metalworks, and ivories, particularly from the 10th-15th centuries, which shows that figural imagery was considered perfectly appropriate for secular settings.\n\nA good source for images and explanatory essays is the exhibition catalog Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (ed. Jerrilynn Dodds), which can be freely downloaded from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qasr_Amra"], ["http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Al_Andalus_The_Art_of_Islamic_Spain#"]]}
{"q_id": "2ewrw6", "title": "What do we know about the oral traditions of children?", "selftext": "It just struck me that in places where children play together, like school playgrounds, they tend to have their own oral traditions, with the \"older\" generations constantly passing on knowledge to the younger one. Many games get passed on this way, playground songs, etc.\n\nI was curious if any serious research has been done on it, and if there had been any interesting findings (the origins of now nonsensical sounding songs, for example).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ewrw6/what_do_we_know_about_the_oral_traditions_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck3opnw", "ck4cpe9"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I've never delved into this, but there has been a tremendous amount of study of traditional songs games and other aspects of folklore carried on by children for children. [Here is a bibliography](_URL_0_) by the American Folklore Society. Consider also [this](_URL_1_) and [this](_URL_2_).", "hi! this question reminded me of another post, which you may find interesting\n\n[What is the history behind girls clapping games?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.afsnet.org/?BiblioChildren", "http://www.amazon.com/Play-Belfast-Childrens-Identities-Childhood/dp/0813533228", "http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/71/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fvonx/what_is_the_history_behind_girls_clapping_games/"]]}
{"q_id": "1wxd2k", "title": "What would happen to a German spy in the UK that was caught a few months after WW2 ended?", "selftext": "From what I understand if they were discovered during the war they could be either shot or turned against the Germans, as part of the double-cross system, but I was just wondering what would happen if they were discovered after, once the war was over. Its a minor plot point in a  cheesy piece of fiction I'm writing.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wxd2k/what_would_happen_to_a_german_spy_in_the_uk_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf68288"], "score": [2], "text": ["Interesting question.  Have you considered turning him to double cross the East German/Soviets?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2crx5c", "title": "Who are the descendants of the Trojans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2crx5c/who_are_the_descendants_of_the_trojans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjiev9t", "cjiobo1", "cjitui1", "cjixehm"], "score": [136, 4, 3, 16], "text": ["Before you can answer that question, you have to begin with, \"Who are the Trojans?\". And this question is not so easy as you might initially think.\n\nAnthropologists today pretty much define ethnicity exclusively in terms of ascription-- Does a person self-ascribe as a certain ethnicity, and do outsiders ascribe that same ethnicity to that person? If this is the case, they can be said to belong to that ethnicity.\n\nOf course, when someone self-identifies as an ethnic group, there is the tendency to act in ways that delineate boundaries between the in-group and the outside. Dressing a certain way, eating a certain way, or talking a certain way are all examples of acts designed to create and enforce boundaries. This is especially prevalent in border areas, where different ethnic groups come in frequent contact.\n\nSO, for a long time archaeologists have thought that if you can identify materials that are strongly associated with a supposed ethnic group, then you can reasonably say that you are probably digging where that ethnic group once lived.  For example, if you're digging a settlement with Greek writing, greek style architecture, and pottery sourced to clay deposits in Greece, then you're probably dealing with Greek ethnicity.\n\nIn general, this is a good start for studying ancient ethnicity.  \n\nBut there are three problems with this-- one, these \"ethnic groups\" like the Thracians or the Scythians or the Trojans may only have ever existed from the point of view of the people writing about them.  While the Greeks might have considered the Trojans to be the people across the Aegean in the city of Troy, in reality, it could be that there were multiple groups of people in the city who self-identified as various things.\n\ntwo, acts (and therefore material culture) that stress a certain ethnicity are almost never exclusive, and it's impossible to know if they were meaningful in the past in daily life.  Sure, some Thracians may have used scythe-like *sica* style swords. But many other groups probably did too. It could be that the style of sword, which modern classicists use to guess about a cultural identity, was actually not what was most important for the Thracians for defining their own ethnic boundaries.  They might not have given a second thought to their type of sword, in fact, it could have been more about language and burial customs. Who knows.\n\nthree, even with living societies, an ethnic group is still extremely difficult for anthropologists to define. Ethnic groups are porous, with people moving in and out of them depending on the social situation, politics of the day, geographic location, or time of year (you may be one ethnicity when you're driving your sheep in the spring, but another when you're settled in at the farm in the fall). Ethnicity is also relative, and dependent on perspective. To immigrant American Kurds, all Kurdish speakers in Kurdistan are Kurds. But in Kurdistan itself, there are other divisions, based on who farms, who herds, who lives in tents, who lives in cities.\n\nSo if it's hard to establish ethnicity even in the present day, when you can just go up and ask people, \"How do you identify?\", consider how hard it is to actually get at ancient ethnicity, where the whole population is long gone.\n\nIn conclusion, the Trojans really only exist to us as characters in a history book. Finding their descendents relies on finding the Trojans themselves, which is not something I think we can do archaeologically.", "The British have a literary tradition of tying themselves to Trojans, starting in the 9th century with the Historia Brittonum, but it is more well established with the 1136 Historia Regum Britannia by Geoffrey of Monmouth.\n\nIt's only an interesting literary tradition; the historical value of the Brut legend is pretty much nil.  ", "Purely from a literary/mythological standpoint, [Virgil's Aeneid](_URL_0_) has the surviving Trojans sail to Italy. Aeneas - one of the heroes of the Trojan army, relative to King Priam, Hector, and Paris, and son of Venus - led them there and married the Latin princess Lavinia.\n\nThey founded the city of Lavinium and their descendents eventually led to Romulus and Remus the founders of Rome. Eventually the family line connects with Julius and Augustus.\n\nI'm going to reiterate though, this is all through literature and mythology. ", "We know basically nothing about the ethnicity of the people who lived in Troy I through to Troy VII, as they left no written records; our only clues are that they tended to use Anatolian styles of pottery, and in ca. 1400-1170 BCE they were an adjunct to the Hittite Empire, first as a buffer state, later as a vassal/member state. After that the city dwindled away until it was abandoned ca. 950 BCE, but we know even less [**edit**] at that period.\n\nGreek colonisation of the Troad began in the 8th century BCE. We don't actually know *which* Greeks settled the Troad; *probably* Aeolians, but we can't be sure because the ethnic picture of the area was messy at the time. The Troad was never considered to be part of \"Aiolis\", the area of Asia Minor dominated by Aeolian Greeks, which included Smyrna not far south of Troy. Based on this it's likely that the Greeks never dominated the Troad in the same way that they did at Smyrna: it had a more mixed ethnicity. This mix *may* have included\n\n* Aeolian Greeks -- purely for geographical reasons, as the Troad is fairly close to Aiolis and Lesbos;\n* \"Leleges\", which is what the Greeks called the natives of pre-migration northern Asia Minor; and\n* Mysians, a people based in the region to the east of the Troad.\n\nThe reason why I suggest a mix of three ethnicities is this business of the Aeolians not dominating the Troad in the way they did the area just to the south. A cluster of at least three ethnic groups would seem to explain this better than a Greek overlay on a single native population. In addition, the Trojan catalogue in the *Iliad* attests to what 7th-century Greeks *thought* about the ethnic make-up of the area, and that firmly indicates an informal anti-Greek alliance of Mysians, Lelegians, and other peoples from further afield. Other possibilities for inclusion in this ethnic cluster that I'm suggesting would be Thracians (from across the Hellespont) and Phrygians (from central western Anatolia).\n\nThere's no hard evidence for this cluster of ethnicities, but hard evidence just isn't available. No specific, distinctive ethnic identity was associated with the Troad in the historical period. One possible exception is that some folks have argued that there was a dynasty of so-called Aeneadae in the area; no one's suggesting that we take seriously the idea of descent from a historical Aineias, but it's possible that a dynasty existed that made that *claim*. Unfortunately even the evidence for the Aeneadae is doubtful.\n\nWhatever the reality, the basic upshot is that, whatever ethnic identity Troy/Wilusa had in the late Bronze Age, it was diluted by the time of Greek colonisation, whether just mildly diluted, or diluted to the point of non-existence. The city itself was abandoned ca. 950, remember. When Greeks came along and colonised the area -- not fully successfully, it seems -- that only accelerated the process of dilution.\n\n(There's no reason to take seriously any of the legends about Trojan migration after a supposed Trojan War. They're not compatible with the fact that the city was still inhabited into the 10th century, anyway.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3c665y", "title": "Just how amazing were the German \"Paris guns\" that shelled Paris in 1918?", "selftext": "So I'm listening to Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon VI podcast and he's talking about the shelling of Paris in 1918 by the huge German Paris guns. He claims that the guns could fire up to 81 (!!!) miles while the 16 inch guns on an Iowa class battleship could fire up to about 30. He also claims that the German gunners had to take the rotation of the earth into account in their firing calculations. Not that I'd expect Carlin to intentionally disseminate incorrect info, but is this true? If so, how and why did the Germans build such ridiculously powerful guns while no one else did so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c665y/just_how_amazing_were_the_german_paris_guns_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csspcbh", "csspq00"], "score": [5, 10], "text": ["They were a logistical nightmare: maintenance heavy and the barrel wear was extreme. Every shell was machined with a progressively larger diameter to counter the barrel wear and if you dropped them in in the wrong order, oops. Since you're comparing with the Iowas, an Iowa 16\"/50 rifle fires 2 rounds/min with a 40lb explosive charge. The Paris Gun fires 20 rounds/day with a 7lb explosive charge. When you are putting that on a city sized target, the cost for effect value proposition really isn't there.  \nAlso, the coriolis effect is not a big deal. Even snipers have to contend with it at ranges less than a kilometer.", "From a technical standpoint they were quite the achievement, surpassing anything made at the time. But as a weapon of war they were nearly useless. They were so inaccurate that they could not be used against military targets. Even when fired at cities as large as Paris they would miss as often as they hit. Shortly after the war the French built an equivalent weapon but never produced many because it isn't that useful. The gun gets its extreme range by launching the shells quite high into the atmosphere where they cruise along in the low pressure. This also causes their extreme inaccuracy. \n\nThe Paris-Guns succeeded as propaganda weapons, but they only worked as such for a short while. Initially the French were demoralized that Paris was being shelled by an unstoppable weapon, but when people realized how inaccurate and weak the shells were the panic passed. Continuing to use them after that point was pretty much a waste of time and resources. \n\nComparing the Paris-Gun and a battleship cannon isn't really a fair comparison, the two weapons are built for different jobs. A battleship like the Iowa has cannons designed to destroy other battleships and to bombard land based fortifications. In theory you could mount a weapon like the Paris-Gun on a battleship, but it wouldn't serve any useful function; though, it might be easier to aim by steering the ship. You'd never hit another ship with it (much less a fortification), and it would be too slow to reload and too fast to deteriorate to be useful to support land operations. \n\nSo it was pretty neat as a technical achievement, but overall useless outside a small window of time as a weapon of terror."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2mgx51", "title": "Did Attila and the Huns come from Mongolia?", "selftext": "I can't seem to find a straight answer for this question.\n\n*****\n\nAs a side note, If you have any other interesting information about Attila and the Huns, I'd be open to hear it. Could you also list your sources please? :) Thanks.\n\n\n***Extra Question (If you fancy it) :*** What was Attila's Army composition like? Are there any detailed articles or books about this? (I've tried google and they all seem to be anecdotal)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mgx51/did_attila_and_the_huns_come_from_mongolia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm4bm1n", "cm4fk6u"], "score": [3, 14], "text": ["Another question, I was taught in school that Atilla was Turkish (or at leasr Turkic), is their any truth to this?", "From what I understand on this issue is that no one really knows. The Huns did not have a written language so most of what we know comes from outside sources who tended to dislike the Huns and not take too much interest in their history. Most sources I have come across only state that they came from the East but that is as specific as they get. They did come further East than the Crimean area as they pushed the Goths out of this general area as they moved Westward and I am not overly aware of any population on the steppe between there and the Pacific that was horse-based that wasn't Turkish or Mongolian in origin. That being said, this was before these definition became solidified in any way as these groups tend to share many features in their culture and religion. Based on the fact that they were renouned for their horsemanship they were likely Turko-Mongolic people who have a long history of horsemanship and horse-based warfare."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1vn1yc", "title": "What is the Warring States Period not called the era of Warring Kingdoms?", "selftext": "I don't see a difference between state and kingdom. Did the \"states\" in ancient China not have hereditary patriarchal monarchies operating independently like every everyone else? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vn1yc/what_is_the_warring_states_period_not_called_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceu8t11"], "score": [4], "text": ["Not all of the states during the Warring States period were ruled by nominal kings.  So they cannot be translated, strictly speaking, as \u201ckingdoms.\u201d This may seem like a matter of semantics to us, but whether a sovereign at the time was a viscount, a duke, or a king was of great political, and therefore historical significance.\n\nThe Warring States of the eponymous period (475 \u2013 221 BC) were indeed hereditary patriarchal monarchies. But they all began as feudal grants by the Kings of the Zhou Dynasty in order to better govern China (in a system comparable to feudalism in medieval Europe).  \n\nThe State of Chu, for example, was originally granted by King Cheng of Zhou in the 11th century BC to the Xiong clan, whose ancestor had once been the tutor to the grandfather of the King. The title bestowed to the Xiong clan, however, was not \u201cKing\u201d (\u738b) but Viscount (\u5b50).  So the State of Chu was really at first the Viscountcy of Chu (though no one ever seems to bother with that distinction as the entity is always referred to as the \u201cState of Chu\u201d). \n\n400 years later (700 BC), the ambitious 17th Viscount of Chu, Xiong Tong was not satisfied with the lowly title of viscount. He convened a meeting of regional nobles to discuss the advancement of his hereditary title. When the Marquis from the neighboring State of Sui did not show, Xiong Tong declared war and defeated the Marquis of Sui. Xiong Tong hence declared himself to be the King of Chu, marking Chu\u2019s de jure independence from the Kings of Zhou. The Zhou Dynasty\u2019s power was greatly reduced at the time, and so did not militarily contest the declaration. \n\nThis episode is significant because it was the first instance in which one of the seven Warring States (Chu, Qi, Wei, Yan, Han, Zhao, and Qin) would renounce its fealty to the Zhou Dynasty. It wasn\u2019t until more than 350 years later, well into the Warring States period, that the other six states (all ruled then by dukes) would declare themselves nominally to be King. \n\nSo, the Warring States really consisted of six warring dukedoms and one kingdom, until about around 300 BC, when the six dukedoms upgraded themselves to kingdoms. \n\nIt\u2019s worth pointing out that the distinction between \"kingdom\" and \"state\" primarily exists in translation. In Chinese, the Warring States period and Three Kingdoms period are \u201cZhan Guo\u201d (\u6218\u56fd) and \"San Guo\" (\u4e09\u56fd), respectively. The second Chinese character in each term, \"Guo\" (state) is identical. However, it would be incorrect to call \u201cZhan Guo\u201d \u201cWarring Kingdoms\u201d because the participants were not all kingdoms, where as the principal players in the Three Kingdoms period were all kings.\n\nSource: The history of the House Xiong of Chu can be found in the 10th Genealogy of the Annals of the Grand History by Sima Qian."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "519dbz", "title": "What were the main points of evidence in favour of Phlogiston theory? How long did it take for chemists to agree that it wasn't true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/519dbz/what_were_the_main_points_of_evidence_in_favour/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7a8mvl"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's an interesting question but one I feel is incomplete without understanding Kuhnian incommensurability, i.e. that concepts and the language which describes them do not change at the same rate.\n\nSo the big debate was between Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestly in the 1770s to 1780s.\n\nPriestly was a supporter of Phlogiston. He thought that phlogiston was what burnt and was absorbed into the air. So instead of the current understanding that fire feeds off oxygen in air until it runs out of oxygen, Phlogiston theory was that the air absorbs Phlogiston from the fire until it can make no more and the fire starves.\n\nIt's great point in favour was it was a way of explaining the demonstrated link between air and fire.\n\nAnd when Priestly and Joseph Black discovered nitrogen and oxygen they fit those elements into that theory so oxygen was air which still was empty and could take more Phlogiston and nitrogen/co2 was air full of Phlogiston which could no longer burn. In actuality it was deoxynated air with the air converted to co2 by the fire.\n\nAnd plants, which convert co2 into oxygen, were seen as then reabsorbing the Phlogiston from the air.\n\nSo essentially Phlogiston theory was a step in the right direction, they just got the details wrong.\n\nWhich gets back to Kuhnian incommensurability. Gravity as a term dates back to the 1620s and we say that newton was right about gravity. But what we understand to be gravity now is very different, we just kept the name.\n\nOr we say Galileo was right because he was less wrong than some previous people even though he posited the sun being the centre of the universe, orbits being perfectly circular and stars fixed in place. We improved and corrected his theories but didn't change the name.\n\nOr Darwin. Our current theory on evolution is different to Darwin's original one but we kept the name so it seems like he was right.\n\nThat could have happened to Phlogiston. Phlogiston can roughly stands in for carbon and it works. Phlogisticated air is carbon dioxide and dephlogisticated air is oxygen. You have to alter the details but the word could have been reused like gravity was.\n\nIt wasn't because Antoine Lavoisier, who was writing at the time, opposed the theory and he discredited it rather than modified it because he was disagreeing with priestly and his followers in real time.\n\nNow Lavoisier was a brilliant man, who worked out conversation of mass and oxidation and that there must be two elemnts in the air, oxygen and nitrogen, one which burned and one which did not. But he was equally wrong about what oxygen was, oxygen means \"acid former\" because Lavoisier thought oxygen was the constituent of all acids, which it isn't and he thought it was an abstract principle, never identifying it with a specific element with weight and other defined properties.\n\nSo it's not so much that phlogiston was untrue and oxygen was true. It's that the latter theory was adapted and changed and the former theory was thrown out. The current understanding is hugely different to what anyone in the 1780s, on either side, posited."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6vflfw", "title": "Why is Africa so genetically diverse yet nearly all African languages belong to just a few language families?", "selftext": "It seems to contradict the Father Tongue hypothesis in this case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6vflfw/why_is_africa_so_genetically_diverse_yet_nearly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlzvy48", "dm0ghmz"], "score": [6, 10], "text": ["Maybe a better question for r/AskAnthropology/ ???\n\n", "Africa is fairly linguistically diverse. I think the comparison would be to Papua New Guinea where you often have totally new languages every few miles because steep mountains and ravines keep ethnic groups separated. However, the geography of Africa is much flatter, and single ethnic groups have settled wide swathes of area. For example, the vast majority of all people in southern Africa are the descendants of Bantu language speakers. I'd also be careful of keeping linguistic and genetic diversity separate. The first language in many urban areas in Africa is often English, Portuguese and other colonizing language. Substantial language change can occur with only limited genetic change."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8zb853", "title": "Are any of the events in New Testament proven to be fake?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zb853/are_any_of_the_events_in_new_testament_proven_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2hjtu8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just for clarity, by \u201cfake\u201ddo you mean, event see k ow for certain did not happen?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9czxf6", "title": "why didn't Tasmanian aboriginals have dingos whereas mainland aboriginals did?", "selftext": " & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9czxf6/why_didnt_tasmanian_aboriginals_have_dingos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5efp1y"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are no dingos on Tasmania is the short answer to why the Aboriginal population there did not associate with the dingo in the same way as Australian populations.\n\nAs to why no dingos are present on Tasmania-- for that your best bet is to ask a paleo-biologist.  It is very likely that the dingo derives from the dogs brought by Austronesian or Papuan speaking peoples between 7000-3500 years ago.  These dogs (or dog like canines) would have come down through Island South East Asia and into Australia where they multiplied and spread and adapted to the harsh environment.  As there were no voyagers down in the South of Australia or strong maritime contact between South Australia and Tasmania, there was no one to carry the dingo across the sea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qh87y", "title": "Why is modern day Arabia so different from Ancient Arabia?", "selftext": "In the \"Arabian Nights\", Typical Arabian lifestyle seems much more glorified than it is today. Specifically women: they are portrayed as beautiful women who are not ashamed to show their bodies, specifically their stomachs. They wore sheen clothes and jewels. (viz. Jasmine in Disney's \"Aladdin\". That's how the Arabian Nights portrays women).\nThe Sultans and such also seem very rich. \nWhy are things so different? Did the Arabian Nights exaggerate the riches and beauty of the people for ego purposes? Are there other books (the media of the time) that had a different portrayal? \nI've heard that it had to do with the rise of Islam, requiring women to cover up and show humility. Which makes sense, except that in the \"Nights\" they are often referred to as Muslims already. \nWhy is modern Arabia seemingly more oppressed and hard than what it was in the past?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qh87y/why_is_modern_day_arabia_so_different_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn69bgr", "cn6afip"], "score": [74, 26], "text": ["There are a few things to keep in mind here. First of all, your original question assumes that the image you get of \"Ancient Arabia\" from Arabian Nights and Disney's Aladdin is an accurate one. However, as Edward Said has exhibited in his landmark work *Orientalism*, there has historically been many problems with Western representations of \"the Orient.\" One of the tendencies classical Orientalists engaged in was exoticization and fetishization of women from the Orient. One of the paradoxes of Orientalism is that Western observers would portray \"the Orient\" as conservative and traditional, yet sex-crazed. Therefore, it is useful to keep in mind that such portrayals of women in Arabia are often based off of distorted images by people who tended to hyper-sexualize and fetishize \"the Orient\" and its women.\n\nBut, more to the point, you are correct that modern day Arabia is more socially conservative than it was before, say, the 17th century. It does have to do with Islam, but is not simply due to the \"rise of Islam,\" (which emerged in the 7th century) but rather, the rise of a particular strand of Islam called Wahhabism (which emerged in the 18th century.) In the 18th century, a Muslim scholar from central Arabia named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab rose to prominence. He had a puritanical and rigid view of Islam and believed that the peoples of Arabia had deviated considerably from what he considered to be true Islam. He advocated a modeling of religious life on the way the Prophet Muhammad and his companions lived. In order to further his strand of Islam, he teamed up with Muhammad bin Saud, a warrior and *emir* in Central Arabia. Through this alliance, Wahhab and Saud helped establish the first Saudi state in 1744. The first state didn't last long, but the alliance between the Saud family and the religious followers of Wahhab persisted. Finally, in 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was declared by Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, and Wahhabism was its official religious doctrine.\n\nHowever, this particular strand of Islam is not the universal strand of Islam across space and time as is often portrayed. Indeed, Islamic doctrine during the Ottoman Empire was much less puritanical and strict. The Hejaz region in Western Saudi Arabia (where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located) was known as a multicultural and cosmopolitan region before it was taken over by the Saud-Wahhab alliance in 1924. Thus, before the influence of Wahhabism, \"Arabian lifestyle\" was not as portrayed in Western representations, but was also not as puritanical and strict as Saudi Arabia under Wahhabism. Indeed, Saudi Arabia stands out across the Muslim world for being the most harsh and strict in social attitudes, and that is not due to the rise of Islam, but due to the rise of its own official puritanical version of Islam that is not shared by the vast majority of Muslims.\n\nSide note: it is worth mentioning that what you were asking about was not \"Ancient Arabia.\" Ancient Arabia usually refers to the era that preceded the advent of Islam, i.e. before the 7th century. However, due to the nature of your question it was evident that you were asking why Arabia is so different today than it was earlier, but after the advent of Islam. Thus, \"Ancient Arabia\" is not accurate as this refers to the era before Islam. Premodern Arabia is a more accurate term for the era you seem to be asking about.", "First, you have to know a few things about the Arabian Nights.  They are not that Arabian and they were written for a courtly culture in the Abbasid Empire that was heavily Persianate.  The Arabian Nights, called simply The Book of 1001 Nights in Arabic, are comprised of various stories taken from an international culture that developed in the Abbasid Caliphate around Baghdad in the 8th-10th century and the stories come from Indian, Persian, Greek, and Arab sources.  One of the largest sources was, in fact, a Persian book called Hazar Afsad.  It is not necessarily reflective of the broader culture.  It reflects the culture of the court which was a mixture of Persian and Hellenistic influences but at a time when the ruling class who produced this literature was Muslim.  There was a large contingent of the poetry and literature of the period that celebrated wine, women and song, but think about Hollywood today.  The values portrayed in many Hollywood films are considered immoral by many Americans.  As I recall from a study I read many years ago the 1001 Nights, there was controversy around them in the Arab World.  This courtly life of wine and women was at odds with the scholars' values and that of the Ulema (the religious scholars).  There is no evidence that the tales were widely known--no quotations or references amongst scholars, but they were popular enough to have survived in several medieval manuscripts from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Also, as an aside, the story of Aladdin and his Lamp are not found in the 1001 Nights.  That story was added by the first European translator when he translated the tales into French.  He claims to have heard it from a Syrian story teller in Damascus, but no Arab source has ever been found so ironically enough, the most famous \"Arabian\" story is only known from an 18th century French manuscript.\n\nYou talk about the Sultan being wealthy.  If you're thinking of Disney's Aladdin, don't.  That movie doesn't even follow the story of Aladdin as told in the original tale and that tale isn't even known to be original.  The main characters of the frame story are a Persian King (Shah) and his Vizier's daughter Shahrazad.  The stories were composed during the Abbassid Caliphate when the Arab rulers were the most powerful empire on the planet ruling a territory that stretched from Morocco to Central Asia so it's natural that this wealth is reflected in the stories.  \n\nAs to women, this is a topic I'm less well versed on, but I can give you a start. The issue of veiling is complicated.  The Quran only instructs that men and women should dress modestly and cover their  \u0639\u0648\u0631\u0629 (Awrah) which is roughly translated as intimate parts and what \u0639\u0648\u0631\u0629 refers to is disputed.  Veiling of the face is not commanded in the Quran and the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) are ambiguous on the subject. It is clear that the Prophet's wives veiled their faces, but this is indicated as being due to their unique status of wives of the Prophet.  Some Islamic traditions define \u0639\u0648\u0631\u0629 as the hair, chest, belly, private areas, arms to the wrist and legs to the ankle.  Some say \u0639\u0648\u0631\u0629 includes the face as well.  There is a lot of disagreement.  However, then as now, the elite culture of the ruling class often went by different standards and there are stories of scantily dressed dancing girls and the 1001 Nights refer to sexual trysts, alcohol, and all sorts of un-Islamic things.  The writers certainly exaggerated for artistic stylistic effects, but at the same time, there are lots of stories in the Nights about humble men and women who abide by the mores of Islam.\n\nThere are other tales that might be closer to the \"common\" people and what they believed and practiced.  These include the tales of Juha or Nasruddin Khoja a sort of wise fool who uses his common folk wisdom to outwit thieves and kings.  There is also the Sirat epic literature about epic heroes of the Islamic past.  Sirat mean path and is often used in the sense of \"path of life\" i.e. biography or epic.  Among the most famous are the Sirat Sayf ibn dhi Yazan, the Sirat Abu Zeid Al Hilali (also known as the Taghribat Bani Hilal), the Sirat al-Zahir Baibars about Sultan Baybars, a Mamluk Sultan of Egypt who defeated the crusaders and became a folk hero in Egypt.  These were popular folk literature shared in markets and coffee houses by Hakawati (story tellers) and were much more widely known than the 1001 Nights and much more reflective of the societies that produced them.  One of the most popular books was Kalila wa Dimna which is a collection of animal tales (like Aesop's fables) and it is full of simple morality tales retold from Indian originals.  [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) has a nice little collection of Arab folk tales in English.\n\nAnd finally, remember that these tales are written by the elite for the elite--only the very elite could actually read.  These were not tales told around the campfires though they have been based in part on some tales that were.  They glorified courtly values for their courtly friends.  That culture is gone.  You cannot expect the world of the Arabian Nights, even where it reflects the culture accurately, to remain static for 1000 years.  We don't have the same values as Shakespeare or Dante and the world they depict no longer exists in the West.  Cultures change over time.  If you had gone to Egypt 50 years ago, very few women would have worn head scarves as it was seen as \"old fashioned.\"  Now head scarves are becoming more and more common.  \n\nArabia is furthermore no longer the center of culture, trade, and empire that it was in the 9th and 10th century.  That is a much longer entry but the gist of it is that the old centers of power decayed and trade routes moved elsewhere, especially as Europeans discovered ways around the Arab middlemen by sailing around Africa and off to the Americas.  New empires arose in the region (the Ottomans, the Safavids, the dynasty of Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and so on) but they never reached the same heights as did the Abbassids relative to the other powers.  Europe outstripped the Muslim world technologically (again, another huge and controversial topic) and were able to dominate the region beginning with the French invasion of Algeria and culminating with the Franco-British redrawing of the borders post World War I giving us, roughly, the borders we have today.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://al-hakawati.net/english/Stories_Tales/index.asp", "Al-Hakawati.net"]]}
{"q_id": "5uzbc2", "title": "Can we discuss the \"stone age\" and what to do about this misleading term?", "selftext": "The first stone tool made by humanoid apes is two million years old. But approx 13'000 years ago when agriculture were developed, Homo sapiens were still in the Neolithic age, or late stone age. Obviously the difference between these two states of being are enormous, yet in popular mind it's still referred to as \"stone age\". How come? And what can we do to spread the knowledge about early human development?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5uzbc2/can_we_discuss_the_stone_age_and_what_to_do_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddygvth"], "score": [5], "text": ["[3.3 million years old](_URL_0_), actually.\n\nI don't think the term Stone Age is inherently misleading. For a start, prehistorians very rarely use it. Instead we almost always talk about its major divisions: the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic; the Epipalaeolithic; the Mesolithic; the Neolithic; the Eneolithic; the Chalcolithic; or even finer subdivisions. These encompass more manageable chunks of time with more homogeneous archaeological records. But whether you split it up or lump it all into the Stone Age, it's important to realise that these are nothing more than arbitrarily divided periods of time in our broad-brush, relative chronology of world prehistory. They're not supposed to represent stages of technological development or \"states of being\", so it's not necessary to try and align them to what we think are important transitions.\n\nIn a lot of ways they're also anachronisms from the days when we only had relative chronologies. Now absolute radiocarbon chronologies are well-developed in most parts of the world, it's becoming much more common to write about, say, the \"7th\u20136th millennium BCE\" rather than the \"Late Neolithic\". However, \"Late Neolithic\" is both easier to say and easier to remember, so the relative chronologies stick around as a shorthand and mnemonics.\n\nNow that's not to say that the Stone Age isn't widely misunderstood by non-prehistorians. It certainly is. But I think the most common misconception has nothing to do with the Stone Age specifically, it applies to any system of periodization. Namely, people have a tendency to reify and imbue them with more significance than they actually have. So an arbitrary sequence of periods useful for writing about (pre)history (like Stone Age \u2013 Bronze Age \u2013 Iron Age) becomes a *Sid Meier's Civilization*-esque tech tree through which all human societies pass. I think we ought to be better at communicating that this ladder of progress idea has long been debunked, but that's a wider discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature14464.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1o0u0b", "title": "What factors contributed to the rise of the nation state?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o0u0b/what_factors_contributed_to_the_rise_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cco1j9d", "cco3gha"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["To add to the question,\n\nI had heard that since cannons were very effective and very costly for small feudal lords to maintain, there was a centralization of the military power as opposed to the decentralized feudal structure that existed previously. This centralization in turn lead to the rise of nation states.\n\nCould someone comment on the veracity of this theory?", "You will have to forgive my brevity, as I am on my phone, but this topic spans both of my flaired areas of expertise so I feel it necessary to chime in.\n\nStrictly speaking, there are innumerable factors involved. However, one of the most important was the spreading of common culture over a geographic or political area. France and Scotland are considered to be two of the first nation states (at least in Europe). To simplify it, people within these two geo-political areas began to become more homogeneous. Language became more standard and less regional. Power began to concentrate. Enemies began to give them a rallying cry and ergo a sense of unity. \n\nAnother very important factor is military strength. The rise of the standing army and then the professsional army concentrated a lot of power with the central government. The central government could equip and organize soldiers in a way that \"feudal\" (quotes placed due to the debated nature of this word amongst medievalists) lords or small countries simply couldn't compete with. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, an entire state's resources were necessary (demonztrated by the *levee en masse*) just to stay in the fight.\n\nAlso importantly, religion. Many of the nation states ended up defining themselves along religious lines. Of course, there remained catholics in england and protestants in France, but France was a *catholic country*. \n\nIt's all about identity, which is what all these factors feed into. People started seeing themselves as 'French' or 'English' rather than other forma of self identification such as along regional or religious lines. A person that was French *was* Catholic. Religion, in some respects, became a part of national identity, thanks in part to the Wars of Religion. However, as with the former factors that I mentioned, religion was simply one of these factors that contributed to sense of common identity linked to the state by geo-political boundaries and shared culture."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "16jgfa", "title": "Historians: throughout your studies, what was the oldest and most interesting text that you've personally handled from your field of history?", "selftext": "I was at a used book store yesterday and saw some remarkable first-edition books. It made me really curious about those of you in fields of study who have had access to rare old books and documents. Throughout the years you have studied, what were some of the oldest and most interesting documents/texts/books that you've read/touched/encountered in person? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16jgfa/historians_throughout_your_studies_what_was_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7wlqrl", "c7wlvxi", "c7wmlca", "c7wmpfa", "c7wmrv8", "c7wn2qs", "c7wnc6t", "c7wngwa", "c7wnzx0", "c7womh2", "c7woqc5", "c7wpa3f", "c7wpdgw", "c7wpfdf", "c7wpp9f", "c7wqotn", "c7wqtw1", "c7wra5v", "c7wrcpp", "c7wrslo", "c7wsvur", "c7x063g"], "score": [60, 3, 3, 11, 24, 5, 36, 9, 7, 9, 7, 5, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["I recently handled a portion of a tablet from Sumeria covered in Sumerian cuneiform. It dates to about 2000 BCE, making it well over 4000 years old. I touched it with my hands (they were gloved). It was one of the most amazing things I've ever done, to be able to hold something so old and examine it at length. I don't know cuneiform, but to be able to have access to it was mind-blowing.\n\nTurns out it was a grocery list.\n\nEdit: Got my dates wrong. Corrected.", "Getting a certification to teach high school history requires a lot of state and national history. One assignment was to look into your family, to wit: how did you end up in Washington (Washington State History, UW). \n\nWell, my family helped to found Port Angeles, which was originally called the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony (PSCC). So I got to go down into the basement of the Suzallo Library and check out this 100 year old tract filled with the story of my family and the city.  edit: by 'check out' I mean 'look at' - it couldn't leave the room, and I had to apply in advance for it to leave the case.\n\n\nThe takeaway: private enterprise realized that they could emulate the business model at the other end of town, logging and sledging the logs down into the Puget Sound. The colony struggled under the load of all the pensions, childcare and health-care for the entire community, while the private enterprise was basically a 'if you get hurt/old/pregnant, yer fucked' model. PSCC failed, Port Angeles was born. \n\nI don't know if my Great-Great-Great Grandmother Laura Hall (daughter of Ike Hall, Washington Territory Magistrate and first Washington State Judge) held that copy, however she certainly held a copy at some point. ", "Not from my field, but I've read one of the original newspapers from the Niagara region announcing the death of Sir Issac Brock in the Battle of Queenston Heights. \n\n", "I own a copy of *The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth* by Quick  &  Garran. 1901.", "It's hard to get excited about manuscripts after a while. For 13th century England, and later, there is just so much routine stuff available at the National Archives that you lose sight of the fact that its anything special.\n\nLast month, I wanted to look at some Cumberland accounts from the 1220s, ordered up the document, and was given this box to sort through:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nA jumble of sheriffs' accounts, writs and so on, from the 1220s to the 1560s. The little leather pouch at the front was used by an Elizabethan sheriff to send his accounts to the Exchequer.\n\nThere is so much material like this that you stop treating it as something out of the ordinary - none of that white gloves nonsense - and only occasionally remember that some of these documents are nearly 800 years old.", "It was a kusa-hon, or grass book. Basically it was the precursor to comic books, made in the early 1800's. I got to actually read (what I could, it used the crazy, Japanese cursive that was popular back in the day) it. There was also an encyclopedia that was from the late 1600's, but it was not as cool as the kusa-hon. I also saw a personal check made by Benjamin Franklin. It had nothing to do with my studies, but that was pretty cool.", "I had the opportunity to personally move (and casually examine) segments of the Dead Sea Scrolls when Google's digitization project got started.", "I was fairly lucky, while working at a small house museum, to help with an exhibit of Civil War artifacts (not my period, but still). At one point, I carried a small box from one end of the small exhibit to the other, only to then realize I was hauling around Robert E. Lee's personal Bible, the same he carried on his campaigns. It seemed so very odd to just be able to haul it around.\n\nAs to the oldest document I've handled, I recently picked up a 1704 edition of *Aesop's Fables*, which I'm shipping off to a bookbinder today to have rebound. The cover is practically non-existent, and without some form of conservation work, the book could be destroyed. I'm excited to restore it a bit, and perhaps make it more publicly available.", "This Christmas my mother showed me a little book that was a Sunday Missal that was dated and signed inside the cover 1796. The book itself is in good condition and was only about 3 inches by an inch and a half. The reason why it was so interesting to me is that the first Roman Catholic mass held in the community where my family settled was in our family's house in 1795. So this little book, that was owned by someone not in my family, made it to Newfoundland from Ireland, was owned by a woman in the community who more than likely knew my first relatives that came across and attended mass in their home. \n\nOne of those things that made me feel a bit closer to my ancestors of 200+ years ago But no where near as cool as a Sumerian tablet. ", "I've looked through some journals and diaries of teenagers in the American Midwest from the 1860s and 70s. Their writing styles were remarkably plain and easy to relate to, in stark contrast to most of the documents you'll read from the time, which are highly formal political documents/speech transcripts or excerpts from newspapers.\n\nTurns out, teenagers back then are a whole lot similar to teenagers from day. Those journals offered an interesting glimpse into what they were interested in. Can't remember most specifics now, but I recall them writing about how bored they were with work.\n\nJournals of military officers, too, were interesting, especially of one Captain who pretty clearly had an awful drinking problem and seemed baffled every morning when he had an awful headache.", "My old college opened its library treasures collection to undergraduates and I was able (with gloves and supervision obviously!) to handle some of the works there including a fifteenth century illustrated manuscript of the Koran and a first edition of Newton's Principia Mathematica.\n\nI am not a medievalist but I am jealous of them because I think the illuminated manuscript is the most beautiful art form humanity has ever produced.\n\nHave a look at this link for the kind of things I mean:\n\n_URL_0_", "The documents aren't old compared to some of what's already been posted, and I shared these a while back, but this summer I was looking through police records in the Archives Nationales (France) and found copious documents relating to secret societies in the 1820s.  Many were under police surveillance for \"liberal revolutionary activity.\"\n\n* [Example 1](_URL_2_)\n* [Example 2](_URL_0_)\n* [Example 3](_URL_1_)\n\nI found an entire box full of documents like this one containing strange scraps of paper and paraphernalia.  These particular documents are from the \"Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des amis de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9.\"  The first and second look to contain some kind of cypher (you can see the same symbols lined up in succession on both - one looks like Russian, the other looks a bit like Greek) and a fake bill of exchange (for \"fifty kisses\") possibly meant as a joke.  The third I'm a bit baffled by, as I'm not quite sure what it is.", "I'm still a student, and about to finish my bachelor. During our first year, we to the national archives in Copenhagen(I study at the university of Aarhus, Denmark), where we got the \"grand tour\" as many students of history do. We were fortunate enough to get a look at various historical documents, among them were the non-aggression treaty between Denmark and Germany, signed by Hitler in 1939. We looked at a personal \"diary\" of King Christian IV from when he was a child. ", "When I was in school I had the chance to go through the San Salvatore Monastery's earliest financial records. Although it can be a bit boring, I couldn't put it down, you could see how wars, plagues, peace and politics affected the Monastery in some really unique ways.  ", "As a historian of the twentieth century, I sadly come across very little from earlier than the 1950s. Fortunately, the documents are tremendously exciting. \n\nI'm going through the archive of a novelist and poet based in London, who became the unofficial heart of the international network of West Indian intellectuals. The archive is very new, and at best only roughly catalogued, so all sorts of items appear. Postcards, letters, magazine articles, newspaper clippings - all from or about some of the most important novelists in the region (and two Nobel Laureates in literature). I think my personal favourite is an unpublished manuscript on Shakespeare by CLR James, one of the leading thinkers of the last century. It's an impertinently personal relationship to such a giant - maybe only a handful of people have seen this version of his work, and I get to sit there poking fun at his awful handwriting. \n\nSo no age, but plenty of interest (at least, for me).", "As I was browsing in a rare bookstore in my hometown several years ago, I came across a slip cover that had \"Gutenberg Bible\" on the side. It turns out they had one (or part of one) years before and managed to keep the cover. \n\nI often went back to browse the books they had. I once asked one of the people who worked there what her favorite book in the shop was, and she started pulling down different books from the shelves like it was no big deal. There was a biography of Christopher Columbus written by his son that was printed on a particularly special paper (she made me feel this and compare it to other books). There were other books that had special annotations or other unique things about them too. If you can find a store specializing in rare books, the experience can be better than a museum.", "I got to inspect [the Middleham Jewel](_URL_0_) a couple months ago. It's not the oldest historical object I've handled, but it's certainly the most expensive, having been acquired for \u00a32.5 million several years ago. It was amazing and humbling.", "The letters of an American loyalists in London, [writing to his family back in the colonies.](_URL_0_). There was some really great stuff in there, including a letter from another loyalist musing on how the Revolution might not be such a bad thing, as it allowed men with obvious abilities, such as Washington and John Adams, to rise to a level of prominence that would have been impossible under the old system. The family letters were also neat, as it showed a human face to the war that transcended the mere politics of it all. Altogether, the collection is a fascinating look into a little-discussed and understood section of the Revolutionary conflict.\n\nEDIT: Being that \"most interesting is also on here, I've got a few more to add. I've handled some correspondence to and from Lowell Thomas, a filmmaker that accompanied TE Lawrence during World War I. The correspondence included letters from the films producers and director (we also have TE Lawrence's cricket bat, which I'm pretty sure I got to hold). Some of my work from that project went into a display at the Imperial War Museum, which is neat.\n\nFor my undergraduate thesis, I worked with the FDR papers at his presidential library, which included handling some correspondence from Harry Hopkins and one or two things written or signed by the President himself.", "These may not be as impressive as some of the other artifacts (many of them hundreds or even thousands of years old!) found so far in this thread, but I like 'em pretty fine all the same.\n\nThese are just some of the ones I personally own.  [Forgive the image quality](_URL_0_) -- had to do this with my phone.\n\n[From top left]\n\nRow I\n\n- Advertising circular for Lord Northcliffe's *At the War*, a collection of the propaganda baron's essays released to raise funds for the Red Cross.\n- The 1920 edition of *Sir Douglas Haig's Despatches* (sic), released in full for the edification of the public, providing a comprehensive chronicle of the Commander-in-Chief's orders from 1915 through 1919.\n- *The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book*, published by Hodder  &  Stoughton on the occasion of K's death to raise funds for his various charities.\n- Advertising circular for the first volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's *The British Campaign in France and Flanders*, his (eventually) six-volume history of the British army's involvement on the Western Front.  I own three volumes -- I, II and VI.\n\nRow II\n\n- Lord Northcliffe's *At the War* (1916), as seen in the advertisement just above it.\n\n- The folio containing the maps included with Sir Douglas' collected despatches.  [See this image](_URL_1_) to get a sense of the size of each map -- they are in full colour, and there are ten of them.  They are purported to be replicas of those sent by Sir Douglas back to the War Office to convey the situation on the ground at certain key points.\n\n- *King Albert's Book* (1914), a Christmas gift book edited by Hall Caine and published by Hodder  &  Stoughton.  Full of tributes to King Albert I of Belgium on behalf of many of the world's leading political and artistic figures, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister, the Aga Khan, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Henri Bergson, Sir Edward Elgar, and many dozens of others who may be more or less familiar to the general reader.  Also includes some lovely colour prints.\n\n- My copy of the Bryce Report on Alleged German Outrages (1915): a very important document that conveyed the findings of the Bryce Committee on whether or not the German army had been committing war crimes in Belgium.  While many of the anecdotes that inform the Committee's findings are difficult to verify, the consensus of modern historians is that the Report's four conclusions were largely accurate.\n\nI have more, but this is all I could really fit into the frame!  I have a great affection for the period's book culture, to say nothing of the period itself, and these purchases are just one manifestation of that.", "I read many original copies of *The Newport Mercury* (a newspaper founded by Ben Franklin's brother, James) for some research years ago. \n\nThe paper was founded in 1758, so reading issues that spanned from the middle of the Seven Years War to the end of the American Revolution was quite interesting in that support for the Crown took a seemingly sudden turn right around the Proclamation of 1763. It was also great seeing so many New England Merchant's and citizens rallying around William Pitt aka \"The Great Commoner\", especially when he pushed for the recognition and redress of the grievances of the Colonies that eventually led to the American Revolution. \n\nI also read through some early manifests and crew listings for ships in Newport and Boston. Those were super interesting to read as time went on. \n\nUnfortunately my other area of expertise, The Inter-War Years and World War II, seems to have an abundance of carbon copied material, so while the material is still interesting to pour through, it's not as fun at times as the Colonial papers were. ", "While writing my dissertation, I had to go and look at a number of university grants, none of which were that important in and of themselves, though the fact that they had been signed by James VI of Scotland got me pretty excited.", "It's not the oldest, but it's the most interesting:\n\nI ended up in the basement plan room of the Pretoria Deeds Office (they've moved since).  Behind a bookcase, as though bricked away, was a room full of plans and diagrams that were literally just stacked there.  I had to climb all over them to try and see them all.  But hiding in there were the oldest maps of Johannesburg, original mynpachten from the Eastern Transvaal under the Gold Law, and a metric ton of old diagrams and plans that were important only if you knew their context and what they linked to.  Some were beautifully drawn, and some were horrendously bad (in terms of accuracy).\n\nFortunately, I knew both.  Nobody else out there did and I still field questions from time to time from them.  It's weird becoming the institutional memory for a foreign government department.    So yeah, maps and plans that haven't seen daylight for 120 years, that's my thing.  I can probably dig up some pictures of the plan room if you like (before the 8' high stack of roller plans fell on me)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86360016/MSSbox.jpg"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/galleries/library-gallery"], ["http://i.imgur.com/VBH27.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/c2EOj.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/2cCVw.jpg"], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleham#Middleham_Jewel"], ["http://www.boscobel.org/history/history-timeline/#4"], ["http://i.imgur.com/iz9qG.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/ofNAR.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f6g0bf", "title": "Robert Graves Myths", "selftext": "Hi, I'm a History student from Argentina and I always had the doubt about the accuracy of Robert Graves in his Greek Myths. I wanted to know if he quotes his sources somewhere since my edition of the myths doesn't have any mention to Historic or Anthropologic works, neither of primary sources such as Theogony, Odyssey, etc. Thanks and sorry for the bad English", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f6g0bf/robert_graves_myths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi4pcbl", "fi5350k"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["Not to discourage any further discussion, but some previous answers have thoughts on Robert Graves:\n\n* [How reliable is Robert Graves' commentary in 'The Greek Myths'?](_URL_0_) by u/XenophonTheAthenian\n\n* [Pre-Bronze age Greek religion; why did Robert Graves speak of Pelasgians?](_URL_1_) by u/Alkibiades415", "If you get a full edition of his book, there are notes, in which he cites primary sources, including big names such as Hesiod, Homer, etc. but also scholia and later sources. But he cites by section, rather than individual sentence, so it's not always clear what source he is using for what particular detail.\n\nBut as I'm sure the links someone provided will show, no one should use Graves as a source for Greek mythology. If you're looking for good sources, try Grimal's book (which has been translated into Spanish: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)) or Gantz's much more detailed work ([_URL_3_](_URL_2_))."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4927yi/how_reliable_is_robert_graves_commentary_in_the/d0or58w/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bjwdrr/prebronze_age_greek_religion_why_did_robert/"], ["https://www.amazon.com/Mitologia-Mythology-Studios-Studies-Spanish/dp/8475095305/ref=sr\\_1\\_2?keywords=grimal+greek+mythology&amp;qid=1582153777&amp;sr=8-2", "https://www.amazon.com/Mitologia-Mythology-Studios-Studies-Spanish/dp/8475095305/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=grimal+greek+mythology&amp;qid=1582153777&amp;sr=8-2", "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=early+greek+myth+gantz&amp;crid=3CUHEWGP2HLLU&amp;sprefix=gantz+earl%2Caps%2C179&amp;ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_10", "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=early+greek+myth+gantz&amp;crid=3CUHEWGP2HLLU&amp;sprefix=gantz+earl%2Caps%2C179&amp;ref=nb\\_sb\\_ss\\_i\\_1\\_10"]]}
{"q_id": "6eetuy", "title": "The Russian navy between the 1600's and early 1900's", "selftext": "How big was the Russian navy between the 1600's and the early 1900's and what where their maps, clocks and other navigation technology compared to the French and British. Also I've been trying to find more info on the Russian navy during this period but other than the short paragraph on Wikipedia I've had no luck. So if you have any website or book suggestions I would be very appreciative.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6eetuy/the_russian_navy_between_the_1600s_and_early_1900s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diai0vh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Here are some numbers from XVIII cent.\n\nPrior to 1696 there were little attempts in creating a fleet in Russia. First frigate \"Frederick\" was build by Holstein merchant expedition (with russian carpenters) in 1636 and wear Holstein banner, lost in the same year in Kaspian Sea. Next ship \"Orel\" (\"Eagle\") was built in 1669 and lost during uprising of Stepan Razin.\n\nPeter the Great is considered as father of russian fleet, his main child was Baltic fleet. In 1724 Baltic Fleet had 32 ships (ships-of-the-line), 16 frigates, 8 snows, 85 galleys. ([1] \"\u0414\u0432\u0430\u0436\u0434\u044b \u041a\u0440\u0430\u0441\u043d\u043e\u0437\u043d\u0430\u043c\u0451\u043d\u043d\u044b\u0439 \u0411\u0430\u043b\u0442\u0438\u0439\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 \u0424\u043b\u043e\u0442\", Moscow, Voenizdat, 1990)\n\nAfter Peter's death fleet shrank and in 1757 it had 19 ships, 5 frigates, 2 bombard ships, 83 galleys. ([1])\n\nNext stage was time of Catherine the Great. Black Sea fleet was founded (1783; in 1787 it had 5 ships, 19 frigates, 1 bombard ship. In 1791 Ushakov had 16 ships, 2 frigates, 2 bombard ships ([2] \"\u041a\u0440\u0430\u0441\u043d\u043e\u0437\u043d\u0430\u043c\u0451\u043d\u043d\u044b\u0439 \u0427\u0435\u0440\u043d\u043e\u043c\u043e\u0440\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 \u0444\u043b\u043e\u0442\", Moscow, Voenizdat, 1987)). Baltic fleet still was main navy power, 35 ships, 10 frigates, 2 bombard ships, 163 galleys and scamps in 1789 ([1]).\n\n[1] _URL_2_ [russian]\n\n[2] _URL_0_ [russian]\n\nFor XIXth - early XXth numbers - _URL_1_ [again, russian]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://militera.lib.ru/h/chernomorskiy_flot/index.html", "http://militera.lib.ru/h/zolotarev_kozlov2/index.html", "http://militera.lib.ru/h/baltiyskiy_flot/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "qj2x1", "title": "What was the effect of returning military on the Tulsa Race Riot? ", "selftext": "I am in my graduate studies, and we are looking at the Tulsa Race Riot. The riot happened right after the war and many displaced veterans were back in Tulsa, out of work, and downtrodden.\n\nI have a theory, that the riot was so catastrophic because the \"rioters\", were highly trained ex military, who were used to warfare.\n\nAs a whole the rioters acted in fairly systematic delivery of destruction. What do you think, if any, the presence of ex military had on the Race Riots?\n\n\nI brought this over from askreddit, because I thought the members here may be able to give me a better insight, am I wrong in thinking that ex military presence could have accounted for the level of destruction? \n\nFor those of you, who do not know, about the Tulsa Race Riots.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qj2x1/what_was_the_effect_of_returning_military_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3xzhh4"], "score": [5], "text": ["The Tulsa Race Riot, was a incredibly violent and destructive time in our history (I am from Tulsa). What is more incredible is how little is actually taught about it in our school systems, I was in college before I first heard of it.\n\nWhen reading the stories and looking at the destruction I couldn't help but see a bit of militaristic training, everything seems very systematic, like it was carried out by machines. (I am ex infantry) \n\nThe rioters went from block to block in a pattern and looted, then burned each house, until there was literally (nearly) nothing left. It is hard for me to think that a regular group of people could have accomplished this, there would be a lack of discipline, or a softening of the people that would eventually cause them to back off.\n\nA couple of things that make me think the military had a big impact on this particular riot.\n\n    The train tracks were blocked (before rioting began)\n    The communications were cut, telegraphs and what not(before the rioting was started)\n    The land was burned in a pattern, (similar to fighting in trenches.) Burn a row, then move forward, burn a row and move forward.\n    There was what could only be called forward observers set up on the hills, where they knew people would run into the guns.\n\nThat just screams military to me, and was wondering what you guys thought?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ma2y3", "title": "What is the difference between the Romans and Byzantium?", "selftext": "Were the Greeks involved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ma2y3/what_is_the_difference_between_the_romans_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdgwp0", "cvdhvyr"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Short answer: What people call the Byzantine empire or Byzantium is the Eastern Roman empire, nothing less, nothing more.\n\n\nLonger answer: the Roman empire was very large and difficult to control efficiently, so at some point people decided to \"divide\" it in different areas and have several co-Emperors, one to rule each part. Eventually the most practical division was in two halves: the Western one, with Rome as capital, and which spoke Latin; and the Eastern one, with the city of Byzantium renamed Constantinople (nowadays Istanbul) as capital, and which mainly spoke Greek (Greek had been the international language of that region for hundreds and hundreds of years). Constantinople progressively grew as rich and powerful as Rome thanks to its very strategic location. At first the two regions were supposed to be parts of the same Empire, but in practice they were independent from each other. With time the political division worsened the cultural one, and the Eastern empire became more and more Greek, but it never ceased to call itself Roman.\n\n\nMeanwhile, as you know, the Western empire faced great invasions, withered and eventually fell, replaced by many small \"barbaric\" kingdoms. It left the Eastern as only remnant of the Roman empire. Under the reign of Justinian, it actually tried and manage to reconquer the city of Rome and large parts of the West, but soon after lost them again. So it just recentred on Constantinople and eventually abandonned Latin. Officially it remained the Roman empire, but it arguably didn't have much in common anymore especially since it didn't even include Rome.\n\n\nThe question of whether or not Byzantium was the Roman empire became very important in the Middle Ages, after Charlemagne was crowned Western Roman emperor by the Pope. Later Germany became the Holy Roman empire (not just Western, but the only real, legitimate one, as the other was apparently not holy), and as the Catholic and Orthodox churches split, each could back its own *real* Roman empire and reject the other as a fake. That's the reason why in the Western tradition we usually consider Byzantium as an entirely different, Greek empire, rather than as the Eastern Roman one.", "The differences in terms of legal and political structure are pretty minor, and there was a certain amount of cultural continuity. The key differences lie in language, and how they each conceived their ethnic identity.\n\nLanguage should be obvious. Latin was the lingua franca in the West; Greek in the East. After Rome fell the eastern empire tried adopting Latin for a while but soon dropped it because it was obviously pointless.\n\nEthnic identity is more complicated. Prior to the fall of Rome, we have no indication that people in the east thought of themselves as \"Romans\". They were under the power of Rome (at least until the split); they had Roman citizenship; but they never ever *called* themselves Romans. It's possible to see romanization in some respects: people routinely took Roman-style names, even though they spoke Greek; some people would read Vergil in the east, even in Latin. But while both West and East were standing, we regularly see elites in the east going to some effort to categorize themselves as precisely *non-*Roman: often, they instead laid claim to an elite Hellenic identity that was predicated on being \"educated\" (their term, not mine) and sophisticated, rather than being politically powerful.\n\nThis changed the moment Rome fell. With the western empire gone, a \"Roman\" ethnic identity was suddenly up for grabs. People who previously had no chance of claiming to be part of the hellenized elite found that they *could* claim to be \"Roman\". And that's exactly when we see the easterners start to call themselves \"Romans\".\n\nEthnic identity isn't the whole story of course, but it's an important part. In purely legal and political terms the Byzantine Empire was a continuation of Rome. But in other ways, their claim of being \"Roman\" was a more artificial gesture: it worked in pretty much the same way that the Holy Roman Empire claimed to be \"Roman\" a few centuries later."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1tva1h", "title": "Was internment (or similar action) considered for Korean-Americans during the Korean War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tva1h/was_internment_or_similar_action_considered_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cebw440"], "score": [3], "text": ["Two points. First, the Korean War was a civil war, so there was Koreans on both sides. It hardly makes sense to alienate the Koreans on the US side by interning Koreans in the. US. Second, there were hardly enough Koreans to matter.  The 1940 US census found only 1700 Koreans. The 1950 census doesn't have the data, but it could hardly have been a large number. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6qocb9", "title": "To what extent were the Allies ignoring the situation in East Asia during the Second Sino-Japanese War prior to the Japanese invasion?", "selftext": "Most books and TV series show Britain and France almost ignoring the conflict between the imperialist Japanese and the Chinese government, or seeing it as a problem too far away to intervene in. However, even with Fascism on the rise in Europe, it would seem almost comically ignorant to ignore the defense of valuable colonies (Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia) to a militaristic empire like Japan. So prior to the Japanese invasion of these colonies, how aware were the European allies that there may be war with the Japanese?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qocb9/to_what_extent_were_the_allies_ignoring_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkys3zi", "dkyv9er"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["War with the Japanese was considered extremely likely in the 1930s.  Britain especially was desperate to avoid war with Japan, not only due to their colonies in Southeast Asia but also the large number of British assets in China itself.  This included Hong Kong, the International Settlement of Shanghai (composed of foreign concessions), and the numerous British and other foreign-owned railways that consisted of the majority of China's railway infrastructure.  To that end, British policy was to avoid antagonizing the Japanese as much as possible in an effort to stay out of the fighting and expose these assets to Japanese attack.  \n\nThese included efforts to placate the Japanese, such as staying out of the fighting in the Battle of Shanghai (for instance Chinese troops retreating into the settlements were disarmed and interned), preventing the Chinese forces from utilizing their railways for deployment of troops (much to the anger of the Chinese), and even  temporarily closing the Burma Road in response to Japanese demands (to shut down the flow of supplies to China via Burma).  At the same time, there was increased deployment of military forces to Southeast Asia.  Singapore had been built up as a naval base almost entirely in response to the potential threat of Japan (the \"Singapore Strategy\").  In addition to the well-known redeployment of Force Z by the Royal Navy, the Dutch sent the rest of the Royal Dutch Navy (consisting of three cruisers and a variety of support craft) and doubled the size of the airforce of the KNIL (Kingdom of Netherlands East Indies Army), mostly consisting of Dutch air force craft that had escaped the Netherlands and were redeployed to the next likely location of attack.  There had already been an ongoing increased recruitment campaign, the pre-war KNIL of around 20,000 personnel was envisioned to reach 100,000 by 1942, along with increased recruitment of native peoples in the military (who previously were restricted due to suspicions of loyalty).  \n\nThe French, for their part, were also wary of the Japanese even after the German invasion.  While the French initially made some concessions about shutting down railways and roadroutes to Nationalist China, further attempts by the Japanese to increase influence in Indochina were met with refusals, and some plans were made to reinforce the colonies with additional colonial troops, although these plans did not take place until the Japanese occupied Indochina by force in 1940.  Even then, though, the occupation was not entirely peaceful, as French and Japanese forces clashed on several occasions and the Japanese maintained only a limited presence until later in 1941.  \n\nThat all being said, Britain was already extremely outstretched between the campaigns at home and in the Mediterranean, to say nothing about providing reinforcements to the Far East.  The priority of British assets was thus placed accordingly, and Singapore ended up suffering from a lack of first-line units.  The Germans intercepted information on the weakness of Singapore's defenses and passed the data onto the Japanese in part to encourage them to attack and force Britain into yet another front.  Similarly the Dutch were overwhelmed by superior Japanese firepower and numbers and were only able to resist until 1942.  So the overarching argument is that the situation was well understood-the problem was a lack of available military resources.", "I can't really speak much for French Foreign policy with Japan as that is not my area of expertise but I can speak with regards to the British.\n\nThe British and the French were still reeling from the effects of the Great War and had dramatically cut defense spending to help their over taxed economies recover. For the British this was a major problem as they had the world's largest and most strung out Empire at the time and relied on the Royal Navy to defend it. This problem was compounded because Japanese were not satisfied with the former German colonies they had been awarded from the conclusion of WWI and were becoming more expansionist. This conflict of interest led to the Anglo-Japanese alliance being allowed to lapse as the Japanese did not see it in their interest to renew it and the British on the other hand were not convinced that it was an adequate deterrence. The British identified the Japanese as the likely aggressors in the region early on in the 1920s and took many steps to attempt to deter or placate them.\n\nFirst and foremost they attempted to prevent the Japanese from expanding their fleet with the Washington Naval Treaty which worked as a stop gap measure but only further served infuriate the already spiteful Japanese. Next they attempted to deter the Japanese expansion by with the Singapore Strategy. The Strategy itself was born out of Admiral Jellico's concept of dispatching a battlegroup to the Far East to relieve the Malaya Garrison and then move on to reclaim Hong Kong and blockade Japan. This was all far-fetch and of course ultimately subject to the availability of forces. The British were well aware that a general war breaking out in Europe would effectively tie down all their forces and leave their colonies poorly defended. However the plan was kept around for political reasons as it served to placate the Australians who were clamoring for reassurance from the UK against Japanese aggression and that there was a distinct lack of political will or resources to create a better plan. Due to the change of British Naval policy from a two power to one power standard it left the Singapore Strategy even more half baked then before.\n\nThe British's primary concern in the 1930s was of course Nazi Germany and their rapid re-militarization. They were aware of the Japanese threat, especially after the Taisho Democracy came to an end and the militarist faction became dominant but lack the resources to cope with both issues. Thus, since the colonies were subordinate to the security of the home land, they became second line theaters. The British were desperately rearming as they chose not to renew the 10 year rule but there was limited resources that could be allocated to such a far flung theater. Tensions would continue to rise with Marco Polo Bridge incident and the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The British throughout this period were fully aware of the Japanese threat, especially after USS Panay incident where British Gunboats on the Yangtze were attacked and the Tientsin incident where the Japanese blockaded the British enclave there.\n\nThe British knowing that hostilities were inevitable began a building up of forces under Malaya Command and dispatched Force Z. However Force Z was too little too late and the RAF and British Army contingents in the region were made up of largely second-rate forces as more experienced troops and better equipment was committed to North Africa. It's not that the British did not see it coming or that they were living in their own fantasy that they would not be attacked. Rather, it was the worse case scenario and their distinct lack of resources made it such that they lacked the means to do anything about Japanese aggression. I think this is highlighted the Tientsin incident where the only option to relieve their enclave would have been to dispatch the main fleet. Not only was there a lack of political will to do so but this would not have been in their interest since they wanted at all cost to avoid a war and no matter how slim the chance was they did not want to risk it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.\n\nThe core of British foreign policy with regards to deterring Japanese aggression, in my own humble opinion, is the Singapore Strategy and to a lesser extent the Washington Naval system. I did not go into detail since your question seemed more focused on the awareness the British had and the steps they took to remedy it. I'd be happy to go into more detail about the plan if necessary. Also as a side note, the British as part of their Naval Strategy was hoping for the American Pacific Fleet to bail them out and thus made efforts to establish better relations with them in order to counter act growing Japanese power. Of course as History would have it, the Americans were also initially caught off guard by the Japanese onslaught.\n\nIn conclusion, they were very aware of the problem, but lacked the means to handle them and a general war in Europe and thus took measures to placate them. When this and their deterrence measures finally failed, the East Asia region being a secondary theater was quickly overwhelmed as most forces were committed elsewhere.\n\nSources:\n\n*The Defense and Fall of Singapore - Brian P. Farrell*\n\n*Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore - Malcolm H. Murfett, John Mikisc, Brian Farrell, Chiang Ming Shun*\n\n*Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress - Peter Elphick*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "zrbsj", "title": "What is a historical occurrence which was believed at the time, yet was not true, and had societal implications?", "selftext": "I understand the question may be vague though any responses would be great!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zrbsj/what_is_a_historical_occurrence_which_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c671g3b", "c6778fm"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Things like 'the Jews poisoned the wells!' and 'sect X murders babies!' have always been popular.", "I think the Exodus (and by that I'm including the Egyptian Sojourn where the Israelites were supposedly enslaved by the Egyptians) is a perfect example of this. There's absolutely no evidence for it but it's considered, perhaps, the foundation of the Jewish religion. A full 80% of the Torah is dedicated to the Sojourn, Exodus and Wanderings. Moses is still considered to be maybe the most important figure in Judaism. Yet the evidence for this having happened is literally none."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2963hl", "title": "How does the level of political polarization in the U.S. today compare to the years just prior to the Civil War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2963hl/how_does_the_level_of_political_polarization_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cii42ig"], "score": [10], "text": ["This is probably more of a question for /r/Ask_Politics, but I can give you a basic reason why this is so difficult for anyone to answer.\n\nThe attempt to compare political polarization to pre-Civil War polarization is very, very difficult not only because of the shifting parties, but because of the alterations in culture. For example, today we allow parties like African-Americans and women to vote, whereas before the Civil War we did not. The alterations in the political landscape could conceivably have led to party polarization as parties hoped to move towards things like affirmative action (or against it) in order to better establish a base among the other voting groups that are no longer just \"white males\" (simplifying, here).\n\nThe other problem is the question of \"How do we measure polarization?\" Is it based on how often one votes a party line? Is it based on how many laws get passed vs. filibustered + defeated because compromise couldn't be reached? How accessible are the records on all that, if that's the method, and how are we to measure them in the fluctuating parties as the Republicans and Whigs existed? Also, how does polarization get affected by voter turnout and mass communication changes since then: are we accurately measuring the polarization of *everyone*, or just the politicians?\n\nAlso, how do we know whether or not polarization has occurred among the general populace, or if we've simply self-sorted to live among people who are like-minded (as some argue California has over the past 3 decades, for example) and thereby contributed to *politician polarization* without *public polarization*? Or, in that self-sorting, did we fall prey to the group polarization effect?\n\nIt's a difficult question to answer, and it's not one I can give you an answer to. I don't feel qualified, and I don't know any studies on the subject to suggest (most I've seen relate to California, which I learned about, and only about the recent decades), but I hopefully can help clear up *why* this is so difficult to understand and why you may not get an answer.\n\nGood luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11x55l", "title": "Crooks and Criminals in the Union/Confederate Armies?", "selftext": "So I'm watch The Good the Bad and the Ugly right now and the main bad guy Van Lee Cleef is part of the Union army with a bit of power.  How common was it for lowlifes to join either side for personal gain?  Are there any interesting stories out there?  I feel like the need for bodies was so overwhelming during that time, recruiters wouldn't be so picky about who they chose.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11x55l/crooks_and_criminals_in_the_unionconfederate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6qtmcz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Of course there were bad guys in both armies. Some were just scoundrels and others were actually terrible people.\n\nFold3, which is a digitized primary records site, mentions Pvt. William H. Cole from the 109th New York Volunteer Infantry, who was court martialed for rape. His defense wasn't that he didn't do it, but that the woman involved was not \"moral\" so it didn't matter.\n\nIn my own research I found an army doctor who performed a really gruesome autopsy on a black soldier, but I don't think he did it because he was a bad person. Long story, will give details if you want.\n\nI'd suspect if you dug through the court martial files, you'd mostly find desertion cases, but you'd also probably find some interesting other cases that would show you what kinds of trouble some of the men stirred up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ankbcf", "title": "Ross Perot\u2019s 1992 presidential campaign garnered 19% of the popular vote, the best third-party showing since Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s run in 1912. Who were his supporters and why was he so successful?", "selftext": "I asked this question about a week ago. It gained some traction, but unfortunately didn't attract any responses.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ankbcf/ross_perots_1992_presidential_campaign_garnered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efvslzc"], "score": [13], "text": ["Great question!\n\nOne of the initial promises of George H. W. Bush was to not raise taxes.\n\nIt was his oft-repeated promise-- \"read my lips: no new taxes. I'm not going to do it.\" In fact, it was so often repeated by Bush that it formed the foundation for his portrayal on Saturday Night Live by Dana Carvey (who revised \"not gonna do it\" to \"na ga da,\" which you can see in some archival clips [here](_URL_0_).)\n\n*But ah, as poetry will tell us, the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft a'wry...*\n\nOne of the most significant financial crises of the late 20th century happened under Bush:\n\n > The Savings and Loan Crisis was the most significant\u00a0[bank](_URL_1_)\u00a0collapse since\u00a0[the Great Depression of 1929](_URL_11_). By 1989, more than 1,000 of the nation's\u00a0[savings and loans](_URL_3_)\u00a0had failed. The crisis cost $160 billion. Taxpayers paid $132 billion, and the S & L industry paid\u00a0the rest. The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation paid\u00a0$20 billion to depositors of failed S & Ls before it went\u00a0bankrupt.\u00a0More than 500 S & Ls were insured by state-run funds. Their failures cost $185 million before they collapsed. The crisis\u00a0ended what had once been a secure source of home mortgages. It\u00a0also destroyed the idea of state-run bank insurance funds.\u00a0\\[[x](_URL_8_)\\]\n\nThe Crisis, and subsequent financial measures undertaken to combat it, caused a minor recession in 1990 following years of economic growth in the USA and required-- counter to his promise-- Bush to raise taxes. This was met with great displeasure by Republicans and generally by Americans, who felt that Bush had mislead the public. This is one of the problems with making very concrete political promises: it's not that you're lying, but you can't predict the future, and what the future will require may be different than today. (Right, historians?)\n\nIn response to this, Ross Perrot emerged as a pro-business candidate, cemented by his billionaire status. His lack of political affiliation meant that he didn't need to shed the baggage of a conventional candidate-- no promises made means no promises broken.\n\nHe was also opposed to intervention in the Persian Gulf, which was broadly regarded as one of Bush's greatest successes:\n\n > [Operation Desert Storm](_URL_10_) ([Persian Gulf War](_URL_6_)): According to Gallup polls, President [George H. W. Bush](_URL_2_) was rated at 59% approval in January 1991, but following the success of Operation Desert Storm, Bush enjoyed a peak 89% approval rating in February 1991. From there, Bush's approval rating slowly decreased, reaching the pre-crisis level of 61% in October 1991.\n\nSo, here is a man with a non-intervention position (contrary to Bush) and with a pro-business stance (also sort of contrary to Bush, given the tax issue) with independent capacity to make himself a legitimate candidate. Add in the stresses of recession and tax increase and suddenly you have a sitting president at whom a sizeable proportion of former supporters are angry. They don't want to vote Democrat, but they don't want to vote for a person who has broken his promise. Pow, Perrot secures the disaffected vote and Slick Willy slides into an unexpected presidency. The rest is history!\n\nSources:\n\n* Peter B. Levy \"No New Taxes.\" *Encyclopedia of the Reagan-Bush Years*. pg. 260\n* NY Times, 1990: \" BUSH NOW CONCEDES A NEED FOR 'TAX REVENUE INCREASES' TO REDUCE DEFICIT IN BUDGET\" \\[[x](_URL_4_)\\]\n* Hetherington, Marc J.; Nelson, Michael (2003). \"Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism\". *PS: Political Science and Politics*. **36** (1): 37\u201342. [doi](_URL_9_):[10.1017/S1049096503001665](_URL_5_). [JSTOR](_URL_7_) [3649343](_URL_12_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvsjNi-pZzw", "https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-banking-3305812", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush", "https://www.thebalance.com/what-are-savings-and-loans-history-and-today-3305959", "https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/27/us/bush-now-concedes-a-need-for-tax-revenue-increases-to-reduce-deficit-in-budget.html", "https://doi.org/10.1017%2FS1049096503001665", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR", "https://www.thebalance.com/savings-and-loans-crisis-causes-cost-3306035", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War", "https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-depression-of-1929-3306033", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/3649343"]]}
{"q_id": "5f6bve", "title": "The average lifespan used to much lower than it is now, did people still have mid life crisis back then in their teenage years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f6bve/the_average_lifespan_used_to_much_lower_than_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dahv65q"], "score": [8], "text": ["Life expectancy is calculated by computing average age of death, so given that about half of children died before their teenage years the averages are skewered downward and don't tell us much at all about how long people lived at all. \n\nPost-childhood human life expectancy is was stable at around 70, before climbing upwards during the industrial revolution. Consequentially, people who were having mid-life crises were having them more or less the same time. Plus, in a hypothetical society where people face the horrible prospect of dropping dead at thirty, do you really think they would be asking existential questions about what they were doing with their life at any point? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2u173r", "title": "What is the history behind socialization of public roads in Western society? Were there ever any privately owned public roads, and if so what was the result?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u173r/what_is_the_history_behind_socialization_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co4en7i", "co4xnme"], "score": [11, 12], "text": ["Sorry, I don't mean to be pedantic but if a road is privately held then it by definition is no longer a public road.  It is now a private road.  As mentioned there are plenty of private roads right now, usually operating under the blessing of a state government. \n\nI am not an economic historian but I am an economist and give you a bit of overview of why road may or may not be public.  The real problem arises in that if a road is built and connected to \"the grid\" of other roads, then it becomes very difficult to exclude people from using.  So lets say I want a road so I build it, but now everyone uses it.  I paid for it but everyone benefits even those who didn't pay for it.  This is known as the free-rider problem.\n\nThe solution to this of course is to either fund roads with public monies (taxes - which is how most roads in the US are currently funded) or impose a toll (which is what the current private roads are now).  As far as the history of this solution, I don't know that it is possible to pen down a date or an exact starting event.  I can't quote sources on this just general knowledge (so mods feel free to let me know if this is not an appropriate response), but I believe publicly funded roads were a slow development stemming from the state wishing to spur commerce and the need to quickly move troops.  No one was building roads so the government started doing it.  \n\nAlso keep in mind that prior to the car, roads didn't really need to be anything fancy so many \"roads\" were just paths that were frequently used and Ill maintained.  You can actually find some stories about this in the rather odd but intriguing book \"Death in Yellowstone.\" The early chapters talk about the danger of traveling by means of horse. \n\n", "Roads and trails have a ubiquity and long history in English legal thought as something more related to a freedom than to a consumer good, the way modern drivers see them.  But toll bridges and tunnels were quite commonly built and owned by private individuals, in the same manner as ferries were.\n\nIn the US, there were a couple of periods in the 19th century that saw \u201ccross-country\u201d roads built by private enterprise.  The turn-pikes of the early 1800s radiated from major cities, allowing farmers in the region easier access to central markets and shipping facilities.  Farmers resented the high prices and often poor conditions of these facilities, and the growth of railroad connections soon made the turn-pikes irrelevant.\n\nIn the Middle West, another burst of activity 1848-1855 saw a half-dozen \u201cplank roads\u201d built radiating from Chicago (the area I\u2019ve researched most closely).  The wooden planks, smooth riding at first, deteriorated rapidly or were stolen and the plank roads were soon supplanted by the growing number of railroads radiating from Chicago.\n\nThirty years later, other privately financed toll roads were established in the Chicago region, this time surfaced in gravel, some of them following the routes of the earlier plank roads.   The toll roads were often in poor repair and farmers despised paying to use them. When the owner of one (today\u2019s Milwaukee Avenue) was shot during an apparent burglary in 1888, a court fight over the fate of the toll roads erupted and a mob burned down the tollgate. Courts eventually declared the toll road had been operating illegally since its 1865 purchase.\n\nAs with other 19th century transportation infrastructure, it can be hard to determine which, if any, of the private roads were ever intended to be actual ongoing profitable enterprises.  There was so much chicanery involved in securing franchises from the governments involved, stock fraud and overvaluation, and skimming of bondholder money through sweetheart construction contracts that the transportation facility itself can seem an unimportant detail in the scheme.  \n\nIn the 20th century we saw a new era of truly long-distance roads built as quasi-public enterprises, beginning with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1940.  For reasons of liability, the nominal owner and operator of all these new toll roads was a state commission or authority, but the bondholders were various private and institutional investors.\n\n[*America\u2019s Highways 1776-1976*](_URL_0_) offers some good history on this subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://archive.org/stream/AmericasHighways1776-1976#page/n13/mode/2up"]]}
{"q_id": "7z1yrj", "title": "William Wallace- the welshman?", "selftext": "Was digging on the web and saw a theory that before the rebellion and being named Protector, Sir William Wallace was a longbowman in Edwards army. One of the sources even took it a step further, positing his name \"Wallace\" as meaning \"Waleish\" (welsh) to claim he was a *welsh* longbowman. The only proof I see is in his seal (a longbow) and the etymology of his name.\nIs there anything more concrete to take this out of pure speculation? Anything to indicate his service in Edwards retinue?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7z1yrj/william_wallace_the_welshman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dul0g3h", "dul8cox"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Hi, hopefully someone can contribute regarding his military record, but meanwhile you may be interested in these\n\n* /u/cazador5  in [What is actually known about William Wallace?](_URL_0_) - \"What is not disputed is that he likely came from a landholding family somewhere in the vicinity of Lanark in Scotland.\"\n\n* /u/Valkine in [How formidable was William Wallace?](_URL_1_)", "The answers /u/Searocksandtrees linked will provide a more comprehensive account of William Wallace than I am going to here. The short version is that we don't know a lot about his early life, but what we do know is broadly supportive of him being a member of the lesser Scottish gentry. I've vaguely encountered the whole 'Wallace' as old-English for 'Welsh', but we don't know if that is where Wallace got his name, and even if he did it would be far more likely to refer to his ancestors having once lived in Wales (or somewhere south, medieval people sometimes didn't show the firmest grasp on geography). \n\nEdward I fought a lot of wars. Like, **a lot**. Between the Ninth Crusade, Baronial Revolts, Conquest of Wales, War in Scotland, and his French Wars with Philip IV he may have fought more wars than any other medieval English king. Across all these wars he obviously used a lot of soldiers, and while Edward left surprisingly detailed records for some of these campaigns, there are far too many for them to be comprehensive. We can rule out Wallace's participation in some of these based on date, Wallace was far too young to participate in the Crusade, Baronial Revolts, or early Welsh Wars (he's usually thought to have been born approx. 1270, and those conflicts are all pre-1280), but we can't rule out entirely his participation in other conflicts. The idea of him serving Edward during the Scottish Wars is pretty unlikely, though, I think we can all agree. The window between Wallace rising to military age and the Scottish Wars beginning isn't huge. Wallace would have been about 15 in 1285, which wouldn't make him the youngest soldier ever, which gives him about a decade of service before Edward's storming of Berwick in 1296. In that time he could have participated in the Anglo-French wars (approx. 1294-1303) or in suppressing some of the later Welsh revolts (1287-8 and 1294), but we don't have any evidence that says he did, and he isn't from the sort of background that would make it likely that he would have. On the rare occasion that I've seen someone support Wallace's participation in these campaigns, and I haven't found it anywhere in current scholarship (although I also haven't read every one of the dozens of books on the Scottish Wars), it usually derives from a belief that Wallace's success must be indicative of him having previous military experience. If you accept this (and I don't, firstly I don't think he was that successful, secondly I don't agree that even if he was he would have had to be battle tested first), then participating in one of Edward's many wars is the most logical place for a young noble to have gained military experience. \n\nAs a final note, Michael Prestwich (an eminent scholar of this period), has across a range of articles made a rather convincing case for the idea that the Welsh mercenaries employed in Edward's armies (and then later in the 14th century), primarily consisted of spearmen, not archers. The strong association between the welsh and archers is primarily the result of late 19th and early 20th century scholars, and not something that is particularly supported by the contemporary evidence. Prestwich's *Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages* is one of the best books on the subject, and should include references to articles where he discusses the Welsh spearmen in more detail (I'm at work without my copy so I can't pull them up, and even if I could I'm not sure they're particularly easy to track down outside of an academic library)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39262i/what_is_actually_known_about_william_wallace/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2547p7/how_formidable_was_william_wallace/"], []]}
{"q_id": "257p3g", "title": "Did historians of the time know that Pompeii and Herculaneum existed prior to it's discovery or had it been forgotten from history until it's unearthing?", "selftext": "I've been fascinated with the subject of Pompeii and Herculaneum but have always been confused by one aspect of the story. Everything I've ever watched or read regarding this subject says that the discovery of Pompeii was completely accidental, however, it's also said there are eyewitness accounts of the destruction that survived. So, as I asked in the title, did historians back in the day know that Pompeii and Herculaneum existed and had they ever attempted to find them? In addition, if not, why? Especially if we know there were written accounts of the tragedy.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/257p3g/did_historians_of_the_time_know_that_pompeii_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cheqim1"], "score": [3], "text": ["A contemporary account of these events by Pliny the Younger still exists, and an on-line version can be found [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pompeii.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "7w2uyk", "title": "The American Revolutions is often thought of as America vs. England. What was the sentiment about the rebellion in Scotland, Ireland and Wales?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7w2uyk/the_american_revolutions_is_often_thought_of_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtxmutf", "dtytj60"], "score": [12, 7], "text": ["Follow-up question: what was the state of the Scottish Parliament at the time, and did it have any interaction with or input on the decisions made by the English Parliament  &  Crown?", "It's often said here that there's always more to say on a given subject, and that's true, but in the meantime, you'll probably like this earlier response to the same question, though limited to Scotland, from u/sctlndjf:\n\n[What role did Scotland play in the American Revolution and what was the general opinion like in Scotland of the war?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35kyg0/what_role_did_scotland_play_in_the_american/"]]}
{"q_id": "49fp4n", "title": "What is the oldest record of human homosexuality in our history?", "selftext": "How far back does homosexuality go? How common/uncommon was it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49fp4n/what_is_the_oldest_record_of_human_homosexuality/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ri2o8"], "score": [3], "text": ["What is your definition of homosexuality? is it same sex relations? because that is not exclusively a homosexual practice. \nThe word itself was only coined in 1869 (\"Homosexual Studies and Politics in the 19th Century: Karl Maria Kertbeny\". Journal of Homosexuality) so can you trace homosexuality back further than the word itself?\nIf people in the past didn't identify as homosexual, despite practicing it. Is it fair to call them such?\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1v9ira", "title": "Were free blacks during slavery better off than 'free' blacks during segregation?", "selftext": "I was recently watching 12 years a slave and during the opening scene it looked to me that the freed blacks seemed to enjoy almost perfectly equal status to the common white men - there were seemingly no separate facilities and they (seemed to be) treated as equals. Was this the case, or just how it's portrayed in movies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v9ira/were_free_blacks_during_slavery_better_off_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceqp11w"], "score": [2], "text": ["In a word, no.\n\nFirst, remember that there was a great variation of standards of living depending on income, and location. Solomon Northrup's father was a property owner and he was relatively well educated. He likely was much better off than the average Negro at the time. The movie depicted an idyllic scene, but few, if any, whites in the 1830's would consider any black man an \"equal\", certainly there were friendships, but legally there was no comparison. \n\nSegregation was a step forward. Before \"separate but equal\" municipalities simply didn't offer those amenities for colored people. \n\nSouthern freemen had it even worse. Some slave codes applied to free blacks as well, in some states it was illegal teach even free blacks to read. Freemen had to carry their papers at all times, and any white man could force any black man to show their papers. \n\nAnd, of course, there was always the specter of being kidnapped and sold into slavery just as Northrup was. \n\n\"Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society; they are in no respect on an equality with a white man. According to their condition they ought by law to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors, from whom submission and respect to the whites, in all their intercourse in society, is demanded; I have always thought and while on the circuit ruled that words of impertinence and insolence addressed by a free negro to a white man, would justify an assault and battery\" -Wilson, Black Codes (1965), p. 27. Quoting John B. O'Neall, Court of Appeals of South Carolina, in State vs. Harden (1832).\n\nIf you are really interested, I would suggest reading [The Black Codes of the South, by Theodore Wilson](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30147751?uid=3739560&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21103250805181"]]}
{"q_id": "3rjqjh", "title": "Taking account of its diverging and unifying factors during its civilization gestation, to what extent is it sensible to refer to early East Asia (up to Circa 1200) as a collective region ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rjqjh/taking_account_of_its_diverging_and_unifying/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwoosi3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Is this a homework question? It says in our [rules](_URL_0_):\nOur users aren't here to do your homework for you, but they might be willing to help. Remember: AskHistorians helps those who help themselves. Don't just give us your essay/assignment topic and ask us for ideas. Do some research of your own, then come to us with questions about what you've learned. This is explained further [in this [META] thread](_URL_1_). \nYou can also consider asking the helpful people at /r/HomeworkHelp."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35pkem/askhistorians_homework_question_policy_rehash/"]]}
{"q_id": "9yf7yp", "title": "How did the Ancient Persians dress?", "selftext": "I have heard they were pretty modest for their time....is this true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9yf7yp/how_did_the_ancient_persians_dress/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea12vc6"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you mean the Sasanians or Achaemenids? Common people or nobility? Clergy?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ipaxz", "title": "Who really did invent aviation, Santos-Dumont or the Wright brothers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ipaxz/who_really_did_invent_aviation_santosdumont_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6rawd", "cb6supl", "cb6ui33", "cb6vkvn", "cb6wfei"], "score": [76, 21, 9, 13, 24], "text": ["No single person or persons invented aviation, rather it was the result of many years of research by a large number of people.  The Wright Brothers are generally agreed upon as being the first to invent a flying machine that had all the elements required to be practical, but they expanded upon the experiences of many other researchers rather than being the first.  This doesn't detract at all from Santos-Dumont's work with dirigibles of course.\n", "When people think about major inventions, I think we fall into this trap of trying to credit one single person or group of people with the invention.\n\nVery often, we shouldn't say \"so-and-so invented this\".  Oftentimes discoveries or inventions are made around the same time, by different people or groups, completely separately from one another.  \n\nI do not know specifically about aviation however I just thought it important to bring up that the history of discovery and invention isn't as simplified as we often like to (or want to) think it is.  Rarely is there this \"Eureka!\" moment, and more so it's a long process with many contributors making small adjustments and additions.", "As a sidenote, I got some interesting answers when I asked this [on ELI5](_URL_0_).", "There was also [Richard Pearse](_URL_0_) from New Zealand who arguably beat the Wright brothers.", "I agree with many of the answers here, but I don't think any of them are really hitting the depth that you're asking for; \n\nIt's true that hot balloons and gliders and some of the basic principles of aviation were pretty well-understood prior to the Wright brothers, but you have to remember that these two tinkerers were the ones to finally assemble all those pieces; to discover the unaccounted-for forces and develop new ways to manipulate them. \n\nYou see there were plenty of good engines at the time. And the principles of wings were pretty well understood. But what people didn't realize was that planes would in fact be pretty damn squirrelly in flight. Most of the time they chalked it up to insufficient wings or not enough power. Wilbur and Orville thought it might be more like riding a bike; something that takes a constant but not overwhelming degree of control. They thought the third part of the problem; not wings or engines but controls, was where the deficiency truly lie. \n\nSo these bike-builders started building their own gliders and riding them over the summer vacation. Just gliders at first. Slow and steady wins the race. Practice practice practice instead of rushing in like other scientists. They were never allowed to ride a plane or glider together; a promise long-kept to their father :) \n\nOne day in the shop Wilbur's bending a cardboard bike box and discovers wing warping. AKA flaps. Just bending a bike box. Over the next few years they build a makeshift homemade wind tunnel. They build a bizarre, three-wheeled bike contraption that singlehandedly disproved the published body of knowledge on manned flight. After contacting dozens of engineers for their special engine, they ended up going with the bike shop mechanic to build the Wright flyer's first engine. These guys were relentlessly and ruthlessly creative, to an extent that no other inventor ever took it prior to them, and with a passion that has since become synonymous with the things like rocket science and designing airframes. \n\nSo after rewriting the published data on the lift equation, conducting extensive wind-tunnel testing, discovering the principles of modern six-axis controls (yaw, pitch, roll), building voraciously for over a decade, and getting their local mechanic to build them a tiny little engine, they went out and did with the manned flight in North Carolina. The rest of course, is history. But it took them hilariously long to find any suitable recognition. \n\nMany years later, their homemade propellers were measured by laser and found to be within a few degrees of perfection in terms of angle. So they had plenty of predecessors and competitors. But Wilbur and Orville pioneered and solidified the vast body of relevant aviation knowledge. They took a body of theories and experimented with them until they could discover the facts.  They proved their facts in successful flight after successful flight. They established the ground rules for engineers and pilots, and they did a great deal to carry the industry, the science and the art of flight through its delicate adolescence. The Curtiss-Wright company is still in business today, and without the two strange single boys from Ohio, I don't think we would know flight--perhaps not even space aviation--as we know it today. \n\nSorry, Wright brothers are kind of a big deal for me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oe69f/who_really_invented_the_airplane/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse"], []]}
{"q_id": "f5bs6b", "title": "How did the Etichonids establish themselves?", "selftext": "How did this one particular family rise above everyone else?  Where did their money come from?  Their power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f5bs6b/how_did_the_etichonids_establish_themselves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhxvo5u"], "score": [5], "text": ["Beyond the VIIth century, we know little of most of Frankish aristocratic family and that includes Peppinids and Arnulfians. A great deal of hypothesis comes down to their genealogical origins and relations to other families during and after the Carolingian takeover, which does let out a lot of non-Austrasian lineages.\n\nEventually, the Etichonid dynasty appears in text with Adalric-Ethico himself, native from the sub-kingdom of Burgundy and genealogically to the regions' great families and thus probably part of the regional aristocracy himself with the implication of land grants, honors and benefices from the royal palace. His possible ascendents (Amalgar and Aquilinia) in particular seems to have been patron of upper Burgundian religious establishment, an important institutional and economical display and entranchement of power, that Adalric and his descendents perpetuated in Alsace. The familial wealth of Etichonids in Burgundy might what have allowed Adalric to fund his rise to power in Alsace in first place.\n\nThe region was in the VIIth century was disputed by the Austrasian aristocracy, the Burgundian aristocracy and probably the local nobility in search of autonomy, who gained something out of the establishment of a duchy under Dagobert I to protect the Lower Rhine against transrhenan raids (but also to limit Austrasian hegemonism in the region) and ruled by appointed domestici.\n\nWe don't know ewactly why Adalric-Eticho was appointed by Childeric II : proable reasons are an award for Adalric's support of the king in Burgundy, a possible role into the murder of Leodegar, the necessity to deprive Austrasian nobility to control the region, etc. From these grounds, Aladric-Etichon effectively acted as a territorial prince, especially with the continuing collapse of Merovingian authority, as many peripheral regions did in this period (such as in Aquitaine, Provence or even Maine  in the 700's) : percieving public revenues, control of public fisc and landed property, grant of public land and public honors, foundations of monasteries (altough, at first, on behalf of the Merovingian kings) etc.\n\nThese were basically the markings in the limits of his jurisdiction of an autonomous ruler that avoided being removed by Neustrian or Austrasian families alike by regularily switching sides, allying eventually to Peppinids, and carefully avoiding to outreach himself in bidding for further control and instead monopolizing political reorganisation in the region. The Life of St. Germanus in particular depict Adalric as \"oppressive\" and ready to bully or even crush resisting nobles whose properties were confiscated and redistributed; while other sources insist on his piety in the support or foundation of monasteries and \"re-organization\" of the region, probably with less-than-legally obtained goods and lands, whose donation or trust could thus be considered an early form of \"laundring\".\n\nYou might say Etichonids took control of Alsace thanks to a series of opportunist policies in relation to late Merovingian Francia, brutal policies in their new home turf, and a tradition of monastic/religious reshaping of Alsace\n\n & #x200B;\n\n* *Politics and power in Early Medieval Europe - Alsace and the Frankish realm 600-1000*; Hans Hummer; Cambridge University Press; 2006\n* *Servir l'\u00c9tat Barbare dans la Gaule Franque*; Bruno Dum\u00e9zil; 2012; \u00c9ditions Tallandier"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f2cvb", "title": "Discuss the accuracy of Allied WW2 Europe bombing missions.", "selftext": "I was watching a WW2 film and had the following question:\n\nAllied bombing missions, in Europe, during WW2. \n\nDuring combat missions, how accurate were those bombing missions relating to how close they came to hitting their intended targets ?\n\nI read _URL_0_ which talks about 1200 feet.\n\nHowever, that level of technology seemingly came into being towards the end of WW2.\n\nThank you.\n\nAs a followup, how did WW2 Allied bombing accuracy compare to Germany, Russian, Japanese accuracy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f2cvb/discuss_the_accuracy_of_allied_ww2_europe_bombing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca66lnr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Someone else can give some more detail, especially regarding other forces, but actually finding the target to bomb made the accuracy of the bombsight almost moot. The *United States Strategic Bombing Survey* found that, on average, only 20% of the bombs intended for strategic targets actually fell within the target area, that is, within 1000 feet of the target (the best month was February 1945, with an accuracy of 70%)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "31fskp", "title": "What is the origin of America's \"Car Dealership\" system, which seems to be giving Tesla such a problem these days?", "selftext": "How did this system originate? Did manufacturers ever sell cars directly? How are dealerships-who-financed-through-GMAC different to direct sales?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31fskp/what_is_the_origin_of_americas_car_dealership/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq14rwn"], "score": [7], "text": ["hi all! This post references current events, but don't let that distract you: per this subreddit's 20-year rule, do confine all responses to events/conditions prior to 1995 only. Thanks!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1abtc2", "title": "How did the mass arrival of Catholic immigrants from Europe influence northeastern America in the nineteenth century?", "selftext": "Also, can r/AskHistorians recommend good sources of primary or secondary sources pertaining to this topic?\nThanks so much :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1abtc2/how_did_the_mass_arrival_of_catholic_immigrants/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wfyau"], "score": [3], "text": ["well, for one thing, there was the Philadelphia Nativist Riots: _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Nativist_Riots"]]}
{"q_id": "816x8l", "title": "I've heard it mentioned a few times that NATO chose the 5.56 bullet because it more likely maim than kill outright, and thus wear down the enemy through attrition as they try to help wounded soldiers. Is this true? If so, won't this be against conventions of war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/816x8l/ive_heard_it_mentioned_a_few_times_that_nato/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv19ubo", "dv1ic6j", "dv1zdwz"], "score": [528, 106, 49], "text": ["Been asked before here  - your question specially is the second question comment down.  It\u2019s all a good read. \n\n_URL_0_", "I can't comment on the veracity of the claim, but I can provide some knowledge of international law. The Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which has *not* been ratified by the United States, says in Article 35(2):\n\n\"It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.\"\n\nThis would seem to include maiming rather than killing soldiers, and may form part of customary international law. However, there are other questions explored in the body of international law. An ICRC report from 1973 (before the Additional Protocol I) actually tackles the question of small-caliber projectiles. The report notes that the effects of weapons firing small-caliber projectiles, particularly at high velocities, may resemble \"dum-dum\" bullets, otherwise known as expanding bullets, which are expressly outlawed in international law under the 1899 Hague Convention's Declaration 3 on the subject. This has led to numerous criticisms, including during the Vietnam War (a complaint was lodged by Sweden) and later, that the 5.56 bullet is illegal under international law. Sweden attempted to call for a small-caliber protocol as well, but the UN-sponsored Diplomatic Conference that resulted went nowhere on the subject, and no such protocol was passed. If the bullet is indeed illegal, it has not been judged as such yet by any relevant authority of international law, but there is reason to believe that it is illegal due to the bounds of military necessity not necessarily applying to the reasons for choosing it (i.e. ability to carry more rounds). The question is muddied however by the lack of clarity in research by other organizations and states on whether or not a better judgment could be made based not on caliber but on velocity in combination with that caliber, which complicates the issue somewhat.", "The decision to use an intermediate round like 5.56 came from lessons learned during WWII. Every military on the planet began the war outfitting their troops with full-size rifles with effective ranges of 500+ yards firing .30 calibre ammunition. By the 1950s many countries (the USSR being a notable exception) were developing semi- and full-automatic full-size rifles with the aim of increasing soldier's fire output. However they were still limited by the full-size cartridges they fired, being heavy in both weight and recoil.\n\nAnalysis of western front firefights by Project SALVO concluded that the majority of combat took place after chance encounters with the enemy at relatively short range (under 300 yards) and that the primary determinant of the winner of a firefight was the number of rounds fired. The conclusion of the Project was that the most desirable infantry weapon fired a smaller-calibre cartridge accurately at a high rate of fire.\n\nPartly as a result of this, the US Army began making requests for manufacturers to develop a rifle that had these qualities, eventually resulting in the AR-15 and the progenitor of the 5.56 NATO cartridge, .223 Remington, in the late fifties. It was not immediately adopted, however, as the US Army had just adopted the M14 and some members of the US military were skeptical that a smaller cartridge would be sufficient.\n\nThen Vietnam happened, and more of the same lessons came back, and the AR-15 was finally officially adopted by the US Army as the M16, being used in a commercial off-the-shelf capacity by MACV SOG for years previous.\n\nBasically, the US Army figured out after three wars that it's better to shoot more than to shoot big. 5.56 NATO is less than half the weight of 7.62 NATO and consequently soldiers can carry twice as much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iy89g/why_was_the_556mm_round_chosen_as_the_nato/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2b66kv", "title": "Where did our traditional childhood fables come from?", "selftext": "A little off-topic, but I just finished a game that is called The Wolf Among Us. It is based off of a comic book series called Fables, which is about all of the fables (Snow White, Big Bad Wolf, Beauty and the Beast, Muffin Man, and MANY others) living in a somewhat modern times New York City. Thats the jist of it.\nAnyways, it got me really into fables. Im not talking about Aesop's fables, but about the traditional childhood stories. Where did these stories come from and what are the original works?\n\nI appreciate any help or information on the topic!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b66kv/where_did_our_traditional_childhood_fables_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj27lpx", "cj2c9ic"], "score": [12, 2], "text": ["The following summary of definitions of folktale and fairytale from my draft Introduction to Folklore (to be e-published in September), may be of use; feel free to ask questions:\n\nFolktales \u2013 or M\u00e4rchen, using the German, technical term \u2013 are longer stories with more than one episode. They are restricted, in theory at least, to evening presentation. A folktale is not to be believed, taking place in a fantastic setting. The European folktale also requires a happy ending, the clich\u00e9 of \u201chappily ever after.\u201d Any given folktale can be told with considerable variation, but they are traditional in basic form, and folklorists have spent decades tracing the history and distribution of these stories.\n\nA word here about the term \u201cfairytale\u201d is appropriate. At the end of the eighteenth century, various writers, most prominently the Grimm brothers, began publishing children\u2019s stories based on folktales. These collections became extremely popular, particularly among the urban and increasingly literate emerging middle class as it found itself removed from the peasant soil that served as home to the stories. Fairytales often cause misunderstandings. In a culture that knows more about fairytales than M\u00e4rchen, people assume that the folktale was intended for children. This is certainly not the case since the stories were often violent or sexual in ways thought inappropriate for children. Indeed, the telling of a folktale was usually delayed until the children had gone to bed. While fairytales provide the modern reader with the easiest access to the many stories that were once told internationally, one should always realize that they are removed from the primary inspiration. The original stories and their content provided serious entertainment for adults and they were part of an oral tradition, not something that was fossilized in writing.\n\nThe evolution of fairytales had a profound effect on the subject of fairies, elves, trolls, and similar entities. Because fairytales became the literary domain of children, many people \u2013 including writers and publishers \u2013 assumed the same was true of the supernatural beings. In their original context, nothing could be further from the truth. These were not cute, diminutive creatures whose sole purpose was to delight children. They were powerful, dangerous, and capable of great harm. The European peasantry feared and respected them, and their stories underscore this, conveying in uncompromising terms the code of ethics and behavior that one must employ to survive an encounter with the dangerous world of magic and power.\n", "The resident folklorist has done a great job answering the question, but I have a bit more to add to the pot. The original source of these stories is really unknown, as they were much older oral tales that were put to paper only centuries after they had been passed around from culture to culture and between social groups. Many original tale variations, like Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Vasalisa the Beautiful, were thought to have been told by women to pubescent girls during household work or spinning sessions (thus the term \"spinning a yarn\" or \"weaving a tale\". Lots of the tales outline common fears that these girls would face in their impending adulthood. Marriage to a complete stranger was a common occurrence and many girls feared the marriage bed, and \"beastly\" advances of men they didn't know. Some of these tales were cautionary and some were uplifting in their theme of love changing a man from a beast into a prince. Tales like Vasalisa and similar tale types outline duties expected of a woman. You might be familiar with the tales where a girl meets an older woman and has to perform a series of tasks. These tasks are often related to spinning, hard-work, upright moral conduct, etc. and the girl is usually rewarded when she completes these tasks and proves herself to be fit for the transition to the adult stage of life.\n\nOther tales, such as Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood were reflections of very real issues that the common people faced. Starvation and highway robbers lurking in the woods were every day dangers that figured highly in these tales and were often softened a bit once the Brothers Grimm adapted their original collection for children's readership.\n\nOriginal tales have, over the years, been adapted to suit cultural changes and trends. Many tales were introduced to the French court and given trappings of bourgeoisie that were not included in the original tales at all, but were appealing to the salons where nobles gathered and enjoyed them. Even the texts written down by the Grimms were not actually sourced from peasant women, as some may claim, but from women who were of French origin and also included tales by Perrault.\n\nIf you'd like a good book that I find is a great starter for how to analyze fairy tales, check out Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked by Catherine Orenstein. It features a lot of good information on the background tale, variations, and how it has been included in modern popular culture and advertising. That book launched my interest in folklore and once read, it makes it obvious at how fairy tales continue to evolve and permeate so many aspects of our lives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7fglyg", "title": "Were there any significant pagan rebellions/uprisings in Medieval Egpyt?", "selftext": "I know there was a cleansing of them via Muslim forces, but when were they officially gone?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7fglyg/were_there_any_significant_pagan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqbo5lr"], "score": [9], "text": ["I've never come across any suggestion that there were any pagans left at the time of the Arab conquests, so as far as I'm aware there was no \"cleansing of them via Muslim forces.\" They had already been \"cleansed\" by Christians over the preceding 300 years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1msou5", "title": "Could the break up of Yugoslavia have been conducted peacefully, and was there credible attempts to do so ?", "selftext": "Were the involved countries this much \"doomed\" to resort to war ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1msou5/could_the_break_up_of_yugoslavia_have_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cccgysc", "ccch4eu", "cccixv0"], "score": [5, 2, 10], "text": ["The European Community (EU from 1993) did so in Slovenia with the Brioni Agreement, but failed miserably from then on. The UN and EC both lacked the will and capability to try and bring a diplomatic solution to the Yugoslav conflict brewing. A good example is that Great Britain  &  France did not wish recognize Croatia as independent, whereas Germany did.\n\nThere is also the nationalistic side of things. The Yugoslav authorities, who at this point was basically the Serbs of Belgrade, had built their power on a nationalist base. Giving up Slovenia and later Macedonia was easy, as neither had significant Serb minorities. Croatia on the other hand had 500,000 Serbs in the Krajina area and eastern Slavonia, a distinct community that had existed for 450 years. Bosnia-Herzegovina had been a majority Serbian area a century earlier, but now only 31% of the population were Serbs. Both were considered to be part of Greater Serbia so willingly letting these republics becoming independent was not in the Serbs' interest, both from a nationalistic viewpoint, but also from a political viewpoint.", "Full disclosure: I know a lot more about the Soviet Bloc states than Yugoslavia itself, but I have spent a bit of time studying it, so here goes an attempt to half answer your question.\n\nIt's pretty difficult to look at each eventual nation as one whole revolution because the Serbs saw each so distinctly. Montenegro was allowed to leave a decade after the revolution itself because it was not necessarily historically significant to an ethnic Serbia, whereas Kosovo has been demanding independence for some time and it has not been peaceful (although it is recognized as independent by some).\n\n/u/Nhoj makes a good point of the Ten Day War in the case of Slovenia, but the Slovene case is largely considered peaceful in a general sense in most sources I've read simply because the casualties numbered roughly 300 or so, which when compared to another revolution like Bosnia is practically insignificant. \n\nThe biggest factor behind whether or not a nation could peacefully leave Yugoslavia was how much the Serbs saw it as a valuable piece of their own heritage or their economy. Slovenes were relatively isolated, as were Macedonians. Croatians, Bosnians, and Kosovars were seen as much more important to Serbia as a whole.\n\nAn interesting (albeit limited in this case) book to read on the subject is Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution, which focuses a lot on the social movements behind the 1989 Revolutions (and oddly enough on Slovenia as well). Kenney seems to make the argument throughout the text that Slovenia was fairly isolated from Yugoslavia and had much more in common with the Soviet Bloc states, which is why he decides to include it in his analysis. Basically the book details a lot of the relatively strange ways (as opposed to actual political opposition in the case of Gorbachev, Charter 77, or Solidarity) the people decided to rebel against their governments in the late 1980's. He includes a great deal on Slovenia and their growing interest in punk rock groups. Basically the people used rock music as a source of rebellion that was not immediately oppressed by the government. It was actually relatively similar to Vaclav Havel's defense of The Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia, which is one of the reasons Kenney argues that Slovenes were more distinct from Yugoslavia than the other ethnic groups.", "It is doubtful that violence could have been completely avoided, and certainly not in a situation of very tense national relations. However, I do believe that it could have been significantly reduced, in many areas or in total.\n\nAs both tunaghost and Sprinkless already pointed out, areas of violence are very well correlated with areas of significant Serb population outside Serbia. With breakup approaching, first there were widespread concern about Serbian minorisation in those areas, that they would become second class citizens. Keep in mind, we are not talking about Serbs that moved into Croatia or Bosnia and Hercegovina any time during socialist Yugoslavia, they were there long before national identities formed so were in fact in their homeland. \n\nSoon, central Yugoslav, or at that point rather Serb, authorities, started to play on those concerns and foster fears of much worse, including genocide. Their interest was in keeping as much of Yugoslavia and re-centralizing it. Such propaganda from Belgrade found a fertile soil, and it is in mutual fear that main sources of most extreme violence is to be found. \n\nTherefore, in Slovenia, where there were almost no Serbs, and ones that were there were recent immigrants, mostly state servants, the desire of central authority to keep Yugoslav borders could not be coupled to Serbian ethnic demands or fears. Finding little support from anywhere, military intervention in Slovenia was quickly and easily abandoned. \n\nIn Croatia it was very different, and here the potential for reduced violence was perhaps the greatest. As Croatia was moving towards independence, areas with Serb majority moved towards either significant autonomy withing Croatia or their own independence. However, that opened up a whole new questions of borders different from ones determined in 1945 (AVNOJ borders). Croatian central authorities did their best to give credibility to fears spread by Belgrade propaganda, from clearing Serbs out of any government jobs to openly and almost official rehabilitating WW2 fascist Usta\u0161a regime that did conduct a genocide on Serbs. It seems to me that for than Croatian leaders, Tu\u0111man above all, peace was a greater fear than war, because it could include some sort of confederate Yugoslavia. For example, it is pretty much certain that it was Croatian government that arranged an assassination of Croatian police chief Kir at Vukovar, because of his successes in keeping up the intra-ethnic relations. There is little doubt that Milo\u0161evi\u0107 would start an aggression against Croatia in any case, as it was started against Slovenia. But, unfortunately, we can't know with how much support among local Serbs if would be met with radically different Croatian policy. My guess is a lot less, therefore the violence would be a lot less.\n\nFinally, and most complicated, Bosnia and Hercegovina. The site of worse violence. I'd say in large part because there were ideas within both Serbian and Croatian nationalistic leaderships of dividing it, and annexing Serbian and Croatian parts respectively. Once fear, conflict and hatred between Serbs and Croatians was inflamed within Croatia it easily spilled over into Bosnia and Hercegovina. Add to that a third side, attempts to make as much of ethnically clear area by all party, and every possible combination of temporary alliances of two sides against temporary or locally dominant third, and you get the most violent and horrible part of the conflict. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1l9ub2", "title": "In the early 1870s, how long would a letter from the East Coast of the U.S. to the West take to be delivered?", "selftext": "Would it be easier to send a telegram?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l9ub2/in_the_early_1870s_how_long_would_a_letter_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbx7v0x"], "score": [4], "text": ["Telegraphic costs were far higher. I asked a similar question about [the expense of sending telegraphs during the Civil War](_URL_0_). In 1870, it would have cost 6 cents to send a letter. In that same year, it would have cost $1 to send a 10-word telegram between New York City and Chicago. Costs would have been much greater for an East Coast-West Coast transmission."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1egi00/how_much_did_a_telegram_cost_during_the_american/"]]}
{"q_id": "2x1ozx", "title": "If the US civil war wasn't fought well by European standards why didn't the two sides import expert help?", "selftext": "I've read a few right ups on this sub that compare the way the Civil War was fought with the Franco-Prussian War, and they are all negative about the tactics the Americans used.  If the Europeans were so much better, why didn't the Americans import some experts, the US has always been a nation of immigrants, surely some of them were skilled in the military arts. Did US commanders know they were getting criticized during the war? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x1ozx/if_the_us_civil_war_wasnt_fought_well_by_european/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cowazra", "cowbi5k", "cowdprs", "cowik8d"], "score": [4, 108, 98, 4], "text": ["Can you post the other write-ups? They sound interesting.", " >  If the Europeans were so much better, why didn't the Americans import some experts\n\nThe famous Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi was offered a commission as Major General in the Union army.  He turned it down because (depending on who you talked to) he wanted to be the Commander-in-Chief of the entire Union army, or Lincoln was unwilling to explicitly state the end of slavery as a war aim.\n\nRegarding the \"nation of immigrants\" comment, at least one foreign born person was giving a general's commission and placed in charge of foreign born volunteer units(Carl Schurz).  Although he had been an American citizen for many years at that point, rather than a expert contracted for the job.\n\nEDIT:  You could add Franz Sigel to that second paragraph as well.  And *he* had graduated from a European military academy, but didn't perform particularly better than other Union generals.\n\n > Did US commanders know they were getting criticized during the war? \n\nYes, of course.  But here's something that many, many people fail to recognize:\n\nThe Confederacy was not performing a whole lot better.  Indeed, throughout the war the Union was advancing everywhere, with the \"problem child\" being the area between DC and Richmond.  So, it's hard to make a compelling argument that the practices of most the Union army were so bad that they needed outside help to fix them.\n\nThe Union leadership certainly felt as if the Army of the Potomac was being poorly run compared to elsewhere, hence the revolving door of COs and bringing in successful generals from other theaters to \"fix\" the problem, some more successful than others.", "Firstly, I think it should be said that the superiority of European tactics and military organization in the 1860s is not universally acknowledged by historians.  In fact, Brent Nosworthy has suggested tactical differences in the American Civil War may have resulted from a higher standard of marksmanship by American recruits rather than any contemporary difference in tactics.\n\nBut largely American Civil War officers were actually trying to adapt up to date European tactics to the American local conditions.  There was no secret that Europeans knew and American officers had yet to learn, rather it was a question of adaptation.  European militaries had large peacetime establishments, conscription plans, and known opponents.  The American Civil War was fought suddenly, without prior military planning or infrastructure, and across massive distances, while amidst political turmoil.  This scale of multi-faceted improvisation was incredibly different, and a few Europeans who knew how to conduct a cavalry charge or handle artillery would have made little difference.   [Franz Siegel](_URL_0_) for example was an experienced german General officer who was mostly ineffective either as a subordinate or in an independant role  in the American Civil War. \n\n*Source: Nosworthy, Brent \"The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War\"*", "Follow up quesitons:\n\nCan someone refer me to those earlier write ups? I don't have a formal background in Civil War history, but my impression is that despite some incompetency the Civil War actually led to a lot of battlefield innovations. IIRC the Ken Burns documentary mentioned that the war began like the Franco-Prussian War, but progressed to a proto-WWI situation near the end with features like trench warfare, rapid fire weapons like the gatling gun, etc. Is that true? I'd especially like to know in reference to naval combat, for which I'm almost certain the ironclads (and tactics developed in using them) represented the cutting edge. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Sigel"], []]}
{"q_id": "3rn11e", "title": "Why did English Historians often Anglicise Roman names with a -y suffix? Livius to Livy, Plinius to Pliny, Pompeius to Pompey etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rn11e/why_did_english_historians_often_anglicise_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwptqrc"], "score": [17], "text": ["[Anglicization has always been about either preserving the meaning or the pronunciation of the word in a way where a native speaker of English can read and/or understand it,](_URL_0_) and Worcester's explanation as to how proper names are Anglicized feature the desire to make pronunciation easier as the names are not easily pronounced otherwise without knowledge of the language. Anglicization makes the word or name English.\n\nIt's interesting that two of your examples, Livy and Pliny the Elder, received their first English translations by the same translator, Philemon Holland. [In the preface of his translation of Pliny, he sort of explains the basis of his translation, if not the particular reason as to why that specific form of the name (he spells it Plinie)](_URL_2_). As his original preface is pretty hard to real for the modern reader, [the Critical Introduction to it may be easier to digest](_URL_1_). It's a bit off topic as to your specific question but it does go into a fair amount about early modern translations generally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=F-pEAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA850&amp;lpg=PA850&amp;dq=anglicization+of+latin+names&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=eSAY37r1nK&amp;sig=0v5nwuWOKUQ2hIm0hQVHS_pPDLk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CJoBEOgBMBRqFQoTCM-NqsGE-sgCFcI8Jgod39QHuQ#v=onepage&amp;q=anglicization%20of%20latin%20names&amp;f=false", "http://ttt.univ-paris3.fr/spip.php?article43&amp;lang=en", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/plinypref.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1jfq40", "title": "I have so many Questions about the World's Fair !!", "selftext": "There are always so many great pictures of the World's Fair on the HistoryPorn, it seemed so magical and well put together. It has me wondering when did the world's fair start? Who started it? Who decided where it would be held? How often was it held? Where did the money come from to hold it? And finally When did it stop? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jfq40/i_have_so_many_questions_about_the_worlds_fair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbebn23", "cbech3z"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["The World's Fair was conceptualized in its modern sense by Prince Albert around 1850. It was held in Hyde Park's Crystal Palace, and was perceived initially as a way to show off the results of industrialization within Europe, but also exposure of colonized worlds (in an admittedly very appropriated sense) for Westerners that otherwise may have never seen them. Since then, it's evolved into a reflection of what was going on politically--for example, after the New York expo in 1939, it became more about cultural exchanges. In the present day, they tend to reflect balances between national pride, technological innovation, and other forms of human achievement.\n\nIn the present day, I think there's a French body that determines where and when the next one will be held. For example, [Milan](_URL_0_) will be holding one in 2015. So it's currently still a thing!\n\nFor more sources, I'm most familiar with the Chicago Exhibition of 1893 because of prior classes, research, and my institution being here, but I think Greenhalgh, Peter *Fair World: A History of World's Fairs and Expositions from London to Shanghai 1851-2010* (Papadakis Dist A C, 2010) is supposed to be a pretty accessible source for a good overview, and lots of pretty pictures.\n\nFor a fun, informative read about Chicago in 1893, see Larson, Erik *The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America* (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004).\n\nFor an interesting, critical approach to the American world fairs in general, see Rydell, Robert W. *All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). \n\nHope this helps :)", "We should add that there wasn't an association that decided to hold Worlds Fairs in different cities at different times.  Instead, cities or nations would decide it would help to promote their locations and organize a Worlds Fair, and (since 1928) apply for recognition as a *registered* exposition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2015"], []]}
{"q_id": "2e94wl", "title": "How did Western music releases work in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact?", "selftext": "I was browsing Discogs, and I was really intrigued (and somewhat taken aback) when I ran across this East German Kylie Minogue [release](_URL_0_) for sale. I was also surprised to learn some time ago that the German disco band Arabesque (also popular in Japan) was very popular in the Soviet Union.\n\nI know all Western music was not banned there, but how did the licensing work under socialism? Were these authorized releases that resulted in royalties for the artists or some kind of state-sponsored bootlegs? Who decided what music would be allowed for import? Was a lot of music banned for \"decency\" reasons (I know that Soviet \u0412\u0418\u0410 groups were held to high standards of personal behavior), or just overly political songs?\n\nAlso, what about releases in the West by artists from the USSR / Warsaw Pact? Did capitalist record companies pay them royalties? Who got the money?\n\nI know this is a broad topic, so feel free to concentrate on the situation in particular countries and decades.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e94wl/how_did_western_music_releases_work_in_the_soviet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzntn0"], "score": [2], "text": ["While I don't know much about the \"official\" way of music coming across borders, there were many ways average citizens could distribute smuggled music amongst themselves. People would copy music from other copies, and even from Radio Free Europe transmissions. In a way, a low tech version of file transferring and counterfeiting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.discogs.com/Kylie-Minogue-Kylie/release/438415"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "792986", "title": "Why are English translations of ancient Egyptian texts usually rendered in an excessively formal and archaic style while Greek and Roman translations sound perfectly natural? Did the Egyptians really write or speak like that?", "selftext": "This is also to some extent true with the Hebrew Bible, even in the most up-to-date modern translations. \n\nAn example from the Kadesh inscriptions translated by Alan Gardiner in 1960:\n\n >  Then did My Majesty desist in life and dominion, being like Mont at his moment when his attack has succeeded. Then My Majesty caused to be brought to me all the leaders of my infantry and my chariotry and all my high officers collected in one place, to cause them to hear the matter concerning which he had written. Then My Majesty caused them to hear these words which the wretched Chief of Khatti had written to me. Thereupon they said with one voice 'Exceeding good is peace, O Sovereign our Lord. There is no blame in reconciliation when thou makest it, for who shall withstand thee on the day of thy wrath?'\n\nFrom the *Book of the Dead* translated by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1899:\n\n >  Homage to thee, O Ra, when thou risest as Tem-Heru-khuti. Thou art adored by me when thy beauties are before mine eyes, and when when thy radiance falleth upon my body. Thou goest forth to thy setting in the *Sektet* boat with fair winds, and thy heart is glad; the heart of the *Matet* boat rejoiceth. Thou stridest over the heavens in peace, and all thy foes are cast down; the never resting stars sing hymns of praise unto thee, and the stars which rest, and the stars which never fail glorify thee as thou sinkest to rest in the horizon of Manu, O thou who art beautiful at morn and at eve, O thou lord who livest and art established, O my lord!\n\nAlso what was the reason for the excessively long and weird royal titulary like this: \n\n >  Majesty of the Residence of Re-Harakhti The-Strong-Bull-beloved-of-Truth, sovereign who protects his army, mighty on account of his strong arm, a wall for his soldiers on the day of fighting, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Usima-re-setpenre, the Son of Re, lion lord of the strong arm Ramses-miamun, given life eternally. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/792986/why_are_english_translations_of_ancient_egyptian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doyvszs"], "score": [32], "text": ["I recently answered [exactly this question](_URL_1_). It's a combination of Egyptian grammar and older generations of Egyptologists lending a dignified air to Egyptian texts. \n\nAs for the titulary, it largely has to do with the Egyptian king's five names and the ideology behind them, which I've written about [here](_URL_0_). Heroic epithets are known from other parts of the ancient Near East (as well as Homeric Greece), though they were more elaborate in some regions and time periods than others. Whereas Hittite kings used a fairly simple titulary (Royal Name, Great King, King of the Land of Hatti, Hero), the Neo-Assyrian kings created an extraordinarily complex royal titulary, best seen in the Standard Inscription of A\u0161\u0161urnasirpal II at Nimrud. Royal titles were one strategy among many of setting the king above his courtiers and other subjects.\n\n > The palace of A\u0161\u0161urnasirpal, vice-regent of A\u0161\u0161ur, chosen of the gods Enlil and Ninurta, beloved of the gods Anu and Dagan, destructive weapon of the great gods, strong king, king of the universe, king of Assyria, son of Tukulti-Ninurta, great king, strong king, king of the universe, king of Assyria, son of Adad-na\u0304ra\u0304ri\u0304 (who was) also great king, strong king, king of the universe, (and) king of Assyria; valiant man who acts with the support of A\u0161\u0161ur, his lord, and has no rival among the princes of the four quarters, marvelous shepherd, fearless in battle, mighty flood-tide which has no opponent, the king who subdues those insubordinate to him, he who rules all peoples, strong male who treads upon the necks of his foes, trampler of all enemies, he who breaks up the forces of the rebellious, the king who acts with the support of the great gods, his lords, and has conquered all lands, gained dominion over all the highlands and received their tribute, capturer of hostages, he who is victorious over all countries..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6q3rfb/was_ramesses_iis_name_lost_from_history/dkxmbhz/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70pz3i/what_did_being_wealthy_look_like_in_the_bronze_age/do29jri/"]]}
{"q_id": "delrcc", "title": "Native American names like \"Wyoming\", \"Miami\" and \"Wabash\" have been applied to areas of the United States hundreds and thousands of miles away from the tribes whose languages they came from. Why?", "selftext": "Wyoming especially. How does a word from the Munsee language, native to eastern Pennsylvania, come to be applied to a state in the mountain west (not to mention no less than 7 Midwestern towns and cities and one in Australia)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/delrcc/native_american_names_like_wyoming_miami_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2yw79i"], "score": [786], "text": ["In early colonial times a lot of European explorers recorded Native American Indian (I'll just say \"Indian\" after this) names for places and these became a normal part of the named American landscape. In later colonial times and through the Revolutionary era Indian names generally fell out of fashion, as a lot of settlers thought the Indians savage, ignorant, treacherous, heathen, etc. \n\nBut by the early 19th century large parts of the settled eastern part of the US no longer had much direct experience with Indians and older ideas of Indians and Indian names being \"uncouth\" dwindled. At the same time there was a growing popularity and romanticized notion of the \"noble savage\".  Indian names began to become popular, especially for counties, at first. Into the early 19th century Indian names became increasingly popular and \"fashionable\". New states and cities increasingly took Indian names. Sometimes not for fashionable reasons but just because the name had been in common use for so long it seemed perfectly normal (for example \"Chicago\").\n\nOn the frontier, where direct contact with unsubjugated Indians still happened, Indian names remained less popular. Meanwhile in, for example, Massachusetts, the names became fashionable more quickly. The first Massachusetts town to take an Indian name on purpose was Seekonk, in 1812, then Saugus in 1815. But it wasn't really until the 1840s that the fad really caught on in a big way.\n\nMost Americans at the time, and away from the frontier, did not care much about tribal distinctions or where a place name was \"supposed\" to be. People found nothing strange in transferring an Iroquois name, say, to somewhere far away like Louisiana. Sometimes it didn't even matter if the names had actual Indian origins or not, so long as they *sounded* Indian.  For example a lot of the counties of Michigan have Indian-sounding names, but a large portion of them were simply invented to sound Indian, by Henry Schoolcraft. Another example: When Pasadena, California, was established the town founders wanted a fashionable Indian name but did not care in the least whether the name had anything to do with southern California. They had a friend who was a missionary among the Ojibwe in Minnesota, and through him they eventually settled on Pasadena.\n\nThe fad for Indian names was strengthened by people like Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. This fad for Indian place names remained strong through most of the 19th century, although usually only after direct contact with Indians had become just a memory in a particular region.\n\nThat is the basic answer, mostly taken from George R. Stewart's *Names on the Land*. To address the specific names you mentioned:\n\nThe use of \"Miami\" in Florida has different origins from the use in Ohio and the Midwest. In the Midwest the name usually comes from the Ohio tribe whose name was Anglicized as Miami (sometimes \"Maumee\" and other variations). In Florida the name came from the Mayaimi tribe of Florida, through Spanish to English. We spell them the same now, but they have unrelated origins.\n\n\"Wyoming\" was originally the Anglicized name of a valley in Pennsylvania. In 1809 Thomas Campbell published a romantic and sentimental poem called *Gertrude of Wyoming*. The poem became very popular and as a result the name \"Wyoming\" was applied all over the place. No one really cared if it made sense to use the word in one place or another. It was simply a famous and popular Indian place name during a time when Indian place names were \"fashionable\".\n\nI don't know the details about the history of the use of \"Wabash\".\n\n(edit: tpyos and words)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17vid3", "title": "What was life like for a 14th Century Nun in France?", "selftext": "I know this is an \"oddly\" specific\" question but I was doing some reading on the Avignon Papacy (Pope Gregory XI and Catherine of Siena) and I was curious about the religious life of the nuns during that time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17vid3/what_was_life_like_for_a_14th_century_nun_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c899q9i"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most nuns had it pretty good. Their days were spent in religious activities (prayer, etc.), as well as more secular pursuits such as tending to the sick and poor. Many abbeys and monasteries were the medieval equivalent to our hospitals and motels - a haven for those who were sick or who needed a bed to sleep in while traveling. Many nuns also did a lot of needlework, sewing clothing for themselves and for the poor, and creating decorative linens for use in churches.\n\nMany nuns lived better than their peers who didn't take the veil. Having access to decent food and physical care helped many nuns ward off sickness, not to mention they were spared going through childbirth. A woman who became a nun also had a better chance of learning to read and become better educated than a woman who did not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22ifj2", "title": "Dragon banners in pre-Norman Britain?", "selftext": "The red dragon of Wales is relatively well-known, but what about the other dragon banners in Britain? According to Wikipedia (sorry!), the Anglo-Saxons were represented by a white dragon in Welsh mythology. Things are further complicated by talk of a golden dragon-banner dragon having been used by the Kingdom of Wessex at the battle of Burford in AD 752 and again seen in the Bayeux Tapestry.\n\nCould anyone please shed some light on the matter and, if possible, direct me to sources where I can read more about it? Books are very welcome.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22ifj2/dragon_banners_in_prenorman_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgn7g39"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's some information on dragons and source material in [our FAQ](_URL_0_).  You might want to begin there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/religion#wiki_here_be_dragons"]]}
{"q_id": "5ln37v", "title": "Were the Greco-Persian Wars really that significant for the Achaemenid Empire?", "selftext": "Elementary schoolchildren are most certainly taught about how the \"heroic, democratic Greeks fought off the tyrannous Persians and the day was saved by Leonidas.\" The Achaemenid Empire was pretty big at the time though, and Greece was tiny in comparison (I don't know how they were wealth-wise though), so was the defeat a heavy blow to the Persians or just some unimportant frontier war among many other, more important fronts? Sort of like how the Battle of Tours has been hyped up by Euro-centrists but in reality was an unimportant battle for the overextended Umayyads?\n\nEDIT: important to unimportant", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ln37v/were_the_grecopersian_wars_really_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbxf7qz"], "score": [3], "text": ["Not to criticize your question--which I will answer--but right off the bat, you might want to tone down your assumptions. I know it's fashionable to bash school curricula, but in this case, it's possibly unwise.  I can't speak for every elementary system, but I can speak for California's state curriculum as it relates to the subject, and California is one of the larger school systems in the world, so:\n\nAhem. The ancient world is first broached in 7th grade, and at present, while narratives like Thermoplyae may be shared by individual (uninspired) teachers, the state has this to say of Persia: \": Over the centuries, the cities of Mesopotamia were divided into multiple states, conquered by invaders, and combined into new states. While it is not possible to teach all the states and groups that ruled over Mesopotamia, it is critical that students understand the importance of the Persian Empire. The names of the empire changed often with changes in the ruling groups (Achaemenids, Seleucids, Parthians, Sasanians), but the Persian Empire maintained its continuity and its domination over Mesopotamia, Persia, and often wide areas of southwestern Asia and Egypt, from c. 500 BCE to c. 630 CE. It was the primary political and cultural presence in western Asia during that period. Because the Persians fought wars with the ancient Greeks, Greek writers often criticized the Persians. However, the Persian ruled over a very large empire, from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, with policies of multicultural tolerance.\"\n\nWhich is hardly characterizing them as tyrannical, and in fact stresses that Persia's was the much more influential region. It later goes on to stress, possibly to correct teachers not well-versed in the era, that \"As the main heir of Mesopotamian civilization, the Persian Empire played as large a role in world history as the Greeks or Romans.\"\n\nSo assuming your teacher is reasonably well-trained (which I admit is not always a safe assumption) your children really shouldn't be seeing 300 as anything other than a mindless action flick. \n\nAs to your question: Your assumption is mooostly correct. Greece as a region was not crucial to the Persian empire; it was more than wealthy and populous enough without the Greek colonies. However, during the Greco-Persian wars, they were certainly at the fore of Persian attention, and rightfully so. Persia was vast and in many ways advanced, but recall that it would be invaded successfully by a largely-Greek army less than a century after the Greco-Persians wars! \nNow, there's a lot to say about this period--most notably, that it really wasn't always a team of Greeks fighting a team of Persians. The politics were often individual, and many Greeks fought for the Persians at various times. One of the more popular 'ends' of the period was when the Spartan-led coalition accepted peace with Persia by more or less ceding the Ionian greek colonies--Sparta having decided hegemony was worth giving up what was the essentially the point of the wars. '\n\nThis being one of the most-studied periods in western history, period, there's a staggering amount to say about it, so let me recommend almost any of the works of Peter Green--they're easily accessible and solid overviews of the period. Of course, they're also more Greek than Persian in sourcing. For that, I'd recommend Tom Holland's Persian Fire. Holland himself isn't without controversy, but the book was excellent, and gives a more engaging answer to your question than I can! (And he's surely more succinct.)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "190nxe", "title": "When and why did the stocks/pillory stop being a punishment?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/190nxe/when_and_why_did_the_stockspillory_stop_being_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jx84c", "c8jx88o"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["In London, it began to decline in popularity as a form of punishment because the spectacle often caused riots or other public disorder and sometimes resulted in  the unintended injury or death of the convict due to thrown projectiles. \n\nHistorian Emma Griffin writes: \"Historians have drawn attention to a cluster of beliefs\u2014humanitarianism, changes in the relationship between the state and the individual, a new faith in the power of prisons to reform the criminal\u2014that underpinned a growing unease about punishment upon the body. Equally, the power of the crowd to subvert the court's sentence, by either cheering offenders or seriously harming, on occasion even killing, them conflicted with the emergence of a well documented desire for more uniform punishment at the end of the eighteenth century.\" She argues that the rejection of the pillory in London had more to do with maintaining order than it did with emergent humanitarian concerns. \"The decline of the pillory,\" she writes, \"marked the end of punishment in *the market-place*, not the end of public punishments or of punishment on the body, and was part of the process of creating an orderly and civilized space at the heart of the town where ladies and gentlemen need not be troubled by the messier and baser aspects of life.\" \n\nEmma Griffin, \"The 'urban renaissance' and the mob: rethinking civic involvement over the long eighteenth century,\" in *Structures and Transformations in Modern British History*, David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 66-68.", "The punishment of standing in the pillory, so far as the same was provided by the laws of the United States, was abolished by the act of congress of February 27, 1839, two years after it was abolished in England. However, the state of Delaware refused to abolish the pillory until 1905. \n\nStocks (which only hold the hands or feet and not both the head and the hands) were used in England until 1872.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "27sl6b", "title": "Did Native Americans (North and South) self-identify with tribe names? How did they refer to themselves?", "selftext": "I had a professor once say that Native American tribe names were basically neighboring tribes saying \"Those guys over there\" in their own language. Was never sure if this was actually the case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27sl6b/did_native_americans_north_and_south_selfidentify/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci3zrf0", "ci405jk", "ci41c8u", "ci4ia9v", "ci4k6u7"], "score": [4, 7, 30, 2, 2], "text": ["For the Cherokee, the name they had for themselves was \"Tsa-La-Gi\" (\u13e3\u13b3\u13a9), which translated means \"Principal People\". I'm not sure what they called other tribes.", "For the Aztecs they actually called themselves Mexica which means \"the Mexica, or the Mexicas, the people of Mexico (plural of mexicatl)\". And Mexico is merely the suffix for place (-co) added to the name of people (Mexica). ", "That is true, most tribe names known by non-Indians are not titles originally used by Indians themselves. \n\nMembers of the Blackfeet Confederacy are believed to have been given the nickname \"Blackfeet\" by outsiders referring to the dark bottoms of their moccasins. The Blackfeet referred to themselves as Niitzitapi, which simply means \"the people.\" The Blackfeet Confederacy was a collection of several tribes (Piegan, Siksika, and Kaina) sharing similar culture who treated with the United States at the same time. Though on the present-day American reservation (there's a Canadian reservation too) these past divisions have fallen out of use and most identify solely as Blackfeet. Why is this? Because people change over time and new experiences and trials can serve to divide and unite people in new ways.\n\nMany Indians were removed from the Columbia River during the damming carried out by the U.S. government onto reservations like Colville, Yakama and Umatilla (there are others too). These people do not just identify by their government-named reservation, but see themselves as \"Columbia River People,\" as they had been fishing and trading on the river for centuries. But their division from the river lead to new identity-shaping events. \n\nThe Navajo, a tribe living in northern New Mexico, get their name from a mix between a Spanish and Pueblo word. The Navajos actually call themselves the Din\u00e9, which means \"the people.\" Sioux is a Chippewa slang (means something like raiders/serpents/enemy) that the U.S. government used to describe the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples. Whereas Lakota, the name used by the native people, actually means \"dwellers on the prairie.\" \n\nIn British Columbia, First Nations people around the Fraser River call themselves St\u00f3:l\u014d, which means \"river people.\" However, before they reached the River their mythology called themselves Tel Swayel or Tel Temexw, which means \"sky people\" and \"earth people.\"\n\nDuring the Red Power Civil Rights movement, different Native American groups worked to create a pan-Indian identity. They spoke of a broader Indian experience of broken treaties, stolen lands, and a need for greater self-determination. Indians were able to use this new identify to gain recognition on a national and international level.\n\nI've tried to include a long list of different tribe names to show how identity is a malleable thing. American and Canadian Indian peoples have identified themselves differently through time time for a variety of reasons. Some have taken on names used by outsiders (both white and Indian), had names placed on them during drastic change, and others changed their conception of identity on their own terms. \n\nSOURCES\n\nThe Reservation Blackfeet by William E. Farr\n\nShadow Tribe by Andrew H. Fisher\n\nThe Power of Place and the Problem of Time by Keith Thor Carlson\n\nBlood and Thunder by Hampton Sides\n\n[Sioux is not Even a Word](_URL_0_)", "Toponyms to identify people groups have a long history in Mesoamerica, but modern names typically reflect non\n\nAs is usual, the Maya left us the most complete record of names, but other cultures did have their own conventions. Of the few Zapotec symbols from Oaxaca that appear to have a glyphic significance, [some](_URL_4_) have been identified as toponyms indicating where a person was from. In central Mexico, the grand city of Teotihuacan appears to have used [similar methods](_URL_2_). The earliest symbols appear to indicate places by key geographic features. This abstracted into using terms like \"hill\" or \"mountain\" almost to mean \"place,\" something the Maya may have picked up. Given out limited knowledge of Teotihuacan writing, it can be difficult to tell if a motif represents a person, people, place, or deity. This is the case with [\"Spearthrower Owl Hill\"](_URL_0_). Its use in Teotihuacan suggests it is a toponym, possibly refering to the Temple of the Moon at the city center. But at the Maya city Tikal, inscriptions describe either the Spearthrower Owl people (Teotihucanos) or a man named Spearthrower Owl who supported a usurper in the 4th century. However, the modern name for the city is actually borrowed from the Aztecs.\n\nFor distinguishing their own peoples, the Maya used emblem glyphs. Each major city-state/dynasty had their own glyph which identified themselves. You can find a selection of them [here](_URL_3_) (pg. 11). Some were concrete: the people of Kalakmul went by *kaan*, \"snake.\" Others' original meanings, if there were any, are lost: the people of what we call Piedras Negras were once *y'okib*, for which we have no translation. Others are abstract: rulers of Yaxchilan called it *pa'chan*, \"split sky.\" The glyphs are most often used as titles for figures in a text or to record the conquest of a foreign people. David Stuart and Stephen Houston have a good discussion of it [here](_URL_1_), though it is a little dated.", "The original Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy sort of follow this trend. We all refer to ourselves as \u00d6gwe'o:w\u00ebh which like other Native American peoples means \"Real People\" but when we identify as individual nations we say the names we gave each other. The Senecas are called On\u00f6ndowa'ga:' or \"People of the Great Hill\". The actual translation is just \"great hill\", the people and specific hill are implied. The name \"Seneca\" is a mispronounciation of an old Mohawk word that they used to refer to the rest of the nations in the confederacy. Cayuga is a mispronounciation which means \"People of the Swamp\", Onondaga means \"People of the Hills\", and Oneida are \"People of the Standing Stone\". Mohawks however refer to themselves as \"People of the Flint\" this doesn't have to much to do with their location as it does trade. The word Mohawk is theorized to be Algonquin or Abinaki for \"man eaters\", this may have been also used to refer to the confederacy as a whole by their eastern enemies. Most of the names for our neighbors are forgotten. However the Delaware and Meskwaki, for example we have names for but don't know the exact translation. I know that Cherokees are called Oy\u00e1da'g\u00e9:a' which means \"Cave Dwellers\", why they are called this I'm unsure. The more neighboring tribes became absorbed and exstiguished the less we used their names. There were so many Delaware people absorbed into villages that they almost became the Seventh nation in the now Six nations of the confederacy. Some families, although on paper are legally Iroquois in the eyes of the government, even identify as Delaware. These days we use \u00d6gwe'o:w\u00ebh to refer to any Native American person, the way the elders use it makes me think that it has been used this way long before the pan-Indian movement of the 60's and 70's but not anytime before the reservation system. That's what I heard anyways "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.lakotacountrytimes.com/news/2009-03-12/guest/021.html"], ["https://www.academia.edu/649818/Spearthrower_Owl_Hill_A_Toponym_at_Atetelco_Teotihuacan", "http://books.google.com/books?id=THZAcB9MLQsC&amp;pg=PP7&amp;lpg=PP7&amp;dq=zapote+toponyms&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=YtPu-Y1Yc0&amp;sig=sD0WhwPr5X8VuiCs7YrBG54XR7A&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=h8GXU5HrJY63yATlsIGgCw&amp;ved=0CD4Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&amp;q=zapote%20toponyms&amp;f=false", "https://www.academia.edu/425147/Teotihuacan_and_the_Development_of_Writing_in_Early_Classic_Central_Mexico", "http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/calvin/glyph_guide_iv.pdf", "http://www.famsi.org/zapotecwriting/zapotec_figures.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "s5ehk", "title": "Is it pure coincidence that the borders of Catholicism in Western Europe correspond with the the borders of the Roman Empire?", "selftext": "Did the Romanization and ties to Roman culture to France, Spain, Italy etc. give those countries more cultural affinity for the Roman Catholic Church? \n\nOr was it pure coincidence?\n\nOr did both the Roman and the Catholic spheres of influence line up with geographic and logistical realities of maintaining influences in Western Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s5ehk/is_it_pure_coincidence_that_the_borders_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4b81u1", "c4b8lou", "c4bcgcp", "c4bezz8"], "score": [13, 9, 3, 3], "text": ["The borders of the Roman Empire at what point? The roman Empire covered areas that are currently Muslim and Orthodox as well. This [article](_URL_0_) may interest you.", "Short answer is yes - after the partitioning of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves in 495 AD, the cultures of each became more inwardly focused. After the Church schism in 1054, the East became Orthodox and the West Catholic - so Spain, Italy, France, etc, are still influenced mostly by Catholicism, whereas Greece and the rest of the Balkans were and still are Orthodox. Turkey would have been too, as well as much of north Africa, and 10% of Egypt's population is still Coptic (Oriental Orthodox). Orthodoxy was much diminished by the Ottoman Muslims, and actually served as a buffer that in many ways protected the West from invasion (from Muslim states, at least), so there's that.", "Do you mean vis a vis the Protestant Reformation? I think its more an accident it ended up that way, truth be told. Protestantism spread in Germany because it was a convenient way for the Princes/Free cities to get out from under the thumb of the Emperor (although genuine religious fervor came into it). Charles V wasn't able to curb the Reformation until it became too ingrained as he was dealing with Turks and the French. He was simply too distracted to go and handle a renegade priest from Saxony, and he didn't have the cach\u00e9 to just demand he be silenced. I could get into the unholy mess that was the Holy Roman Empire in Early Modern times, but I'll spare everyone. \n\nSo that's Germany. Onto France, Protestantism failed to take root because the King of France, unlike the Emperor, had much more direct power. Also, the French Church was in some ways less beholden to the Pontiff due to Gallicanism (Same thing happened in England, but due to the federal nature of the HRE they had no such protections from the Pontiffs). But, in my opinion, it came down to the fact that the French crown fought, *and fought hard* to stop Protestantism from taking over. \n\nNow I'm not entirely familiar with the Low Countries and their conversation, so I'll just say this is an educated guess. But, they were near the HRE and some parts were in deed members of the HRE (plus Charles V controlled most of the territories). So the distraction argument could hold. I would get someone else's opinion on the development of Protestantism in the Low Countries.\n\nEngland probably wouldn't have separated from Rome absent Henry VIII's need for a divorce. Yeah, Lollardy was still around, and Lutheranism made inroads, but Henry VIII was staunchly pro-Catholic (being named Defender of the Faith, a title the English Monarchy still uses) before the Pope rebuffed his annulment attempts. [interestingly, the Pope was currently besieged in Castel Sant'Angelo by Charles V's troops, so he wasn't really in a position to go ahead and piss off Charles by annulling his aunt's marriage to the King of England.] Only after it became clear he would need to find another way around it did he tolerate Protestant inroads, and only in a very traditional sense. The radical Prottys came under his son Edward VI and after (Puritans were unhappy with Elizabeth, she was too \"popish\" whereas Catholics were angry as she wasn't Catholic.)\n\nMuch like the Low countries, I have no good idea how Scandinavia became Protty, very sorry. \n\nHabsburg controlled lands (Spain and Austria principally) remained Catholic because tradition. They didn't have the need to subvert the HREmperor because, well, they were the HR Emperors. Spain stayed Catholic because a strong brand of Catholicism was in the air as left overs from Ferdinand and Isabella's reign, merely 25 years before (1492 was the defeat of the Moors and the expelling of the Jews).  \n\nItaly remained Catholic because the Pope would most likely have been very cross with them were they to rebel against his authority. Also, this is a good area for one to make the argument that lingering Roman sympathies played a large part. But it is important to keep in mind that the force of tradition, especially in beliefs you (and your ancestors) have had for hundreds of years, is hard to break. In all the Protestant reforming countries, they didn't split just because they woke up one morning and decided \"well this Luther guy has it right, screw this penance stuff! We're all justified by grace!\" but there were very strong political and economic motivating factors. The same holds true for those that remained Catholic.\n\nTL;DR: Maybe. \n\nI hope this helps, and if anyone here who is more of an expert can correct me I encourage it. I am merely an undergradute who's education Early Modern Europe consists of a class on the Reformation and the Thirty Year's War. If you have more questions, or want a clarification, i will be glad to help. ", "A major reason is that Catholic dioceses were established according to Roman provincial divisions. Basically, the church used the existing Roman administrative divisions in Europe to establish the limits of a Bishop's authority.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a map of Catholic dioceses in 400AD; as you can see, they are established within the existing boundaries of Roman rule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_Empire_with_dioceses_in_400_AD.png"]]}
{"q_id": "93em8p", "title": "During the times of slavery (Ancient Rome and America) how did free people get a job and make a living?", "selftext": "I wonder why wouldn't anybody hire a man and pay him a monthly salary when you could just buy a slave. How did free people find a job and live in Ancient Rome, the Spanish or British Empire or the United States while slavery was legal?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93em8p/during_the_times_of_slavery_ancient_rome_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3dk0uz"], "score": [7], "text": ["Despite the enormous numbers of slaves in the Roman world, they made up a minority of the total population of the Mediterranean. Slave labor could never provide for all the labor demands of the Mediterranean world in the first place. \n\nMore importantly, the assumption that free labor and slave labor are interchangeable is not necessarily true, and overlooks a number of economic and social circumstances that complicate the idea that one laborer is simply equivalent to another in any given society. Free laborers and enslaved laborers did not overlap very much. You mention that it would seem illogical to pay a laborer at a constant rate when one could buy a slave. But the logic doesn't hold. For one thing, the Roman world knew no such thing as hourly wages, or regular salaries at all. The common, unskilled, unlanded laborer worked and was paid by day in antiquity, often at an abysmally low rate. The cost of a slave was large, and though the actual cost of *buying* another human being was a single-time deal, even the enslaved need clothing, shelter, and food. Slaves were an extended investment, an expensive form of labor that required a large amount of capital up front and then the means to keep one's slaves alive for years to come. By contrast, a hired free laborer can be taken on temporarily and, besides his immediate pay, is left entirely to his own devices. During busy times, such as the agricultural harvest, more laborers are needed than at slow times. Adding slaves is simply not an effective economic means of filling that gap--Cato expresses a preference for free workers during the harvest, because he thinks they work harder and because you're not stuck with idle mouths to feed during the slow season. There is every indication that slave labor and free labor simply did not compete with each other.\n\nAs a final note, the social realities of slavery really should not be overlooked. The threat of mass slave revolt loomed large in the Roman imagination, even though actual slave revolts were fairly rare. The higher the density of slaves in an area the more likely it was considered for an insurrection to break out. We know of several attempts to break up the ability of slaves to get together, and we can conjecture some others. The fear of increased numbers of slaves was constant in Roman Italy. Moreover, the social impact of free labor should also not be ignored. Vespasian, says Suetonius, rejected a design for some sort of machine that would have greatly saved in labor in construction, on the grounds that the urban workers who relied on monumental building projects for their livelihoods would be unable to eat if he accepted it. Had economic concerns been the sole motivation for any socio-economic action Vespasian would presumably have accepted it quite willingly. However, Vespasian lived in a society."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aox3i9", "title": "I\u2019m a frail Jewish person who\u2019s shuffling to the gates of my Concentration camp that\u2019s just been liberated by whom ever, What so is I now that my camp is liberated? Where am I put for medical reasons and how would I get back to my home?", "selftext": "What do I do. Is that my camp is liberated*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aox3i9/im_a_frail_jewish_person_whos_shuffling_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg4zrnu"], "score": [26], "text": ["There is of course always more to say, but you will probably be interested in [this previous answer](_URL_0_) from /u/commiespaceinvader."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o5n6a/people_dont_stop_hating_over_night_what_was_life/dchq0uk/"]]}
{"q_id": "ajzukn", "title": "Was there ever any attempt by the Anglo-saxon kingdoms of the British isles to seek help from the Angles and Saxons of the continent during the viking age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajzukn/was_there_ever_any_attempt_by_the_anglosaxon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef0qxnk"], "score": [101], "text": ["In short, no.  The \"Angles\" and \"Saxons\" had no reason to help their insular cousins, lacked the capability to do so, and were no longer really operating in the same capacity across the North Sea as they had in centuries prior.  For the sake of simplicity I will keep the usage of Angle and Saxon, but it is worth mentioning that the various tribal groups that were retroactively described as coherent political organizations by figures such as Bede were not reality.  There was never an exclusive immigration of only Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to certain areas of Britain that became kingdoms based solely on this ethnic distinction.  The common cultural origin of the Anglo-Saxons in their continental antecedents is a bit of a fabrication truth be told.  Anglo-Saxon identity was really a melting pot between the native Britons (the Romano-British/Welsh) and the newcomers who hailed from not just Northern Germany and Denmark but also from Sweden and Norway as well.  \n\nThe Angles and Saxons by the time of the Viking Age were no longer deeply invested in migration to England, with most models of immigration to England showing that heavy numbers of people arriving in the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms likely tapered off in the late 7th century, nearly a century before the start of the Viking raids on England.  Furthermore, the political ties between England and their continental antecedents were always somewhat tenuous.  While there is certainly evidence for continued political links between Kingdoms such as East Anglia and Kent with the continent, they were not necessarily maintaining relationships with their cousins in Northern Germany and Denmark.  Kent in particular was far closer to the Frankish realms, the first Christian King of the Anglo-Saxons even had a Frankish wife who helped lay the groundwork for her husband's conversion.  Archaeology from East Anglia, namely Sutton Hoo, points to continued Scandinavian influence from Sweden instead of evidence from Northern Germany, Denmark, or Frisia.  \n\nWhile trade systems almost certainly existed across the North Sea at this time, the famous emporia of places like London and Hedeby were beginning to form in this time frame, there was little ability for power to be projected across the North Sea and maintained in the continent at the same time.  That would only be a later development with larger and more centralized Scandinavian polities.\n\nBy the time of the viking age the Saxon homelands had been conquered by Charlemagne and were in the process of a series of extremely destructive rebellions against the Franks.  In the series of wars between the Saxons and Franks it is hard to imagine the continental Saxons stopping their rebellions and helping their cousins in England who no longer shared their religious traditions or were of any direct assistance against the Franks.  \n\nThe other groups that had originally gone to England in the 5th-7th centuries from Scandinavia and ended up as settlers were actually doing the same thing in the Viking age, we just call them Vikings though, and instead of settling in England they were currently seeking economic opportunities by other means.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xvvcf", "title": "Piracy was said to have ended in the Caribbean and the American eastern seaboard between 1720-30. Were there still some secret acts of Piracy, or any reports of Pirates and their ships after 1720-30?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xvvcf/piracy_was_said_to_have_ended_in_the_caribbean/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy8oric"], "score": [2], "text": ["Piracy did not end, but the increased activity of the British Navy caused it to decline in the early 18th century. Still, piracy continued long after the 1720s. Privateering was a factor in every naval war of the period, and that's just dressed-up piracy. The last famous pirate I can think of is Jean Lafitte, who allied himself and his crew with Andrew Jackson to help defend New Orleans in 1815. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1g1s56", "title": "Why didn't the Marines lead the D-Day assault?", "selftext": "My understanding from their role in the Pacific was that this type of attack was their specialty.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g1s56/why_didnt_the_marines_lead_the_dday_assault/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cafyweu", "cafz5nt", "cag2dkv"], "score": [289, 57, 48], "text": ["During WW2 there were 89 U.S. Army divisions and six Marine divisions. \n\nIn June 1944, those six divisions were:\n\n1. Recovering after heavy fighting in New Guinea.\n2. About to be hurled into the Battle of Saipan.\n3. Preparing to attack Guam.\n4. About to join the 2nd Division in battle at Saipan.\n5. In reserve during the Battle of Guam.\n6. In the process of being formed in the Solomon Islands.\n\nThat said, there were some Marines who operated in a support capacity during the D-Day landings - amphibious assault training, sniping, pre-landing sabotage and reconnaissance, so forth. But Eisenhower barred the few Marines in his armada from landing - he didn't want the headlines to read \"Handful of Marines Save Army From Disaster at Utah Beach.\" The Marines present numbered only in the hundreds, in any case. \n\nThe relocation of a Marine division to Europe would not have had a huge impact on the landings, given the numbers involved, but it would have dramatically slowed down the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. Eisenhower only planned to be on the beach for one day. He planned to be fighting inland for months or years. \n\nEDIT: A Marine Corps Gazette correspondent critiqued the performance of the D-Day invasion and the German defense [in December 1944](_URL_0_). He didn't slam Eisenhower for shutting out the Marines - but he made a point of noting that both the U.S. Army's commanders and their German counterparts failed to absorb the hard-won lessons of fighting in the Pacific.", "In addition to what Profrock451 said about the Marines it should be pointed out that the U.S. Army had already performed several amphibious landings in the Mediterranian theatre so it wasn't like they had no idea what they were doing. There were amphibious landings in Morroco and Algeria for [Operation Torch](_URL_1_) against resistance from the Vichy French forces. The invasion of [Sicily](_URL_2_) involved amphibious landings as well. Then there were also the landings at [Salerno](_URL_0_) and [Anzio](_URL_3_) during the invasion of Italy itself. All these opertations happened prior to Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy).", "If it's any consolation the Royal Marines were there with bells on!  45 Commando landed on Sword Beach as part of the 1^st Special Service Brigade, famously led by Lord Lovat and piped ashore by Bill Millin.\n\n4^th Special Service Brigade was made up entirely of Royal Marines with the task of securing the flanks at Gold, Sword and Juno, linking up with the American forces at Omaha.\n\nEdit:  I ought to add that although the Special Service Brigades were elite units, they didn't lead the assault because they were needed for the more important, dangerous, specialised job of advancing inland quickly in order to secure key areas and destroy enemy fortifications and gun emplacements.  Throwing them against the first line of enemy defences would have been a waste of highly trained specialists."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/amphibious-aspects-normandy-invasion"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_invasion_of_Italy#Salerno_landings", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_invasion_of_Sicily#Seaborne_landings", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Shingle"], []]}
{"q_id": "1656jo", "title": "How and when did dissent (or opposition) towards the First World War emerge in the different belligerent nations of Europe?", "selftext": "I have two questions.  The first is about historical monographs or articles examining the support for war in any of the belligerent nations in August 1914 - historians often refer to the mass demonstrations of support (ie. crowds gathering/parades/flag waving/national anthems), but I am looking for historian who examine these occurrences critically.  Were they fabricated by newspaper reports?  What proof do we have of actual support for the war?  Anything along the lines of Adrian Gregory's Last Great War (for Britain).  I have a fairly good overview of Canada, but am interested in other nations (especially Britain, France and Germany).  I speak French and, if the source is good enough, know people who speak German.\n\nAnother question I have is even if with the supposedly widespread support for the war, what opposition was there to the conflict in the belligerent countries?  Again (using the British example) there are organizations such as the Union for Democratic Control that formed in September, 1914, but I was wondering if there are any other instances in Britain (or again in other countries).  \n\nEssentially I am trying to imagine a chronology of dissent in the belligerent nations of the First World War.  Was their dissent from August, 1914?  If not, when did it begin to organize itself?  Who organised it? What was the basis of their opposition? Etc.\n\nI havent even searched for other countries outside western Europe, but those would be great as well if you know about them.  Giving me some actual sources I can follow up on for further research is much appreciated, though I would love to just read about it too if you don't have time for that.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1656jo/how_and_when_did_dissent_or_opposition_towards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7svwxc"], "score": [3], "text": ["Some pointers for Germany, I don't know English language books, but Wikipedia should have some sources:\n \nFor the Spirit of 1914 have a look at the [original article published by Tucholsky](_URL_0_)\n\nThe relevant term in German is *Burgfrieden*, were the parties united behind the Kaiser, except for one member of parliament: Karl Liebknecht. \n_URL_3_\n_URL_2_\n\nThe leadership of the SPD supported the war and suppressed any opposition against it, leading to the secession of the USPD in 1917 \n_URL_1_\n\nLiebknecht, Luxemburg and Zetkin founded the Spartakusbund, another Marxist secession of the SPD. It was named after Spartacus and joined the Comintern in 1919. It was then renamed to KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany).\n\nThose secessions lead to a fragmentation of the left parties in Germany and weakened them until 1933. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.de/books?id=J4A1gt4-VCsC&amp;lpg=PA20&amp;ots=VVgibaeDV3&amp;dq=Spirit%20of%201914%20tucholsky&amp;hl=de&amp;pg=PA20#v=onepage&amp;q=Spirit%20of%201914%20tucholsky&amp;f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Social_Democratic_Party_of_Germany", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Liebknecht", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgfrieden"]]}
{"q_id": "96wjub", "title": "What are the sources for claims such as \"in middle ages the life expectancy was of 40 years\"?", "selftext": "In history books or articles, specially those related to medicine and science, we often see claims like this. I wonder, what are the sources for these claims? How can we know it when there was no kind of research about it back then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96wjub/what_are_the_sources_for_claims_such_as_in_middle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e43t8zm"], "score": [16], "text": ["More of an archaeological or maybe math question than a historical one. It\u2019s an average not an actual statistic. Child mortality rates were very high and that brings down the average life expectancy of the whole population. For example, if a child dies at two years old and an adult at 78 then the average is 40 years. People that survived childhood had a good chance of living into their 50s or 60s. Excavations of medieval cemeteries have shown lots of skeletons of young children and adults past middle age. Here\u2019s a study of one particular medieval Danish village as an example. \n_URL_0_\n\nTry over at r/AskAnthropology for more info."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/patterns.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "23jp6s", "title": "In what ways was the Soviet Union beneficial to the territories it gained after WW2?", "selftext": "In what ways did they benefit from being a part of the soviet union?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23jp6s/in_what_ways_was_the_soviet_union_beneficial_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgy4yya"], "score": [6], "text": ["The clear distinction to make is that the governments \"claimed\" by the Soviet Union following the Second World War (Great Patriotic War) were their own separate governments that had political ties that waxed and waned during the Cold War till the end when majority broke free from communism and thus the pressure of Moscow. This fact tends to dissolve when discussing the Eastern Bloc. That being said there was some inherent benefits to being incorporated within the Soviet sphere of influence. \n\nThe major one being trade with other Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union. On top of trade between \"member\" countries, with restrictions, there was a military benefit as well. The basic idea is that the Soviet Union would defend other communist countries in the region. This is pretty standard fair for typical trade and military alliances. The Soviet Union sought to create a buffer zone from the West in case of another round of World War sprouted, it did this by aligning these other countries in Military and Economic alliances through local communist governments. It also lead a benefit to the Eastern Bloc country's governments by protecting them by suppressing uprisings through military force. \n\nThe other benefits would be economics within the countries, which is a better discussion for Political Sciences; mainly the benefits to workers, education, and the similar that are inherent in a communist system. \n\nThis is obviously not mentioning the suffering the countries people felt throughout this period, and I am not going to discuss it because it would be a tangent from the original question. \n\n**Edit Note**: I did not include the territories directly part of the Soviet Union, who by contrast had a lot of direct investment into their respective countries, such as Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where the Soviet Union sought to industrialize and bring up through economic growth. The answer deals directly to the Eastern Bloc countries, as asked by the original poster. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tojag", "title": "How historically accurate are Bernard Cornwell's novels?", "selftext": "Specifically the Grail Quest (Hundred Years War), and the Saxon Stories.  Obviously many characters are fictionalized or completely made up, but as far as the general historical mileu, how accurate is the general portrayal of how life was during these time period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tojag/how_historically_accurate_are_bernard_cornwells/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceaeaua"], "score": [2], "text": ["Bernard Cornwell is actually one of my favourite historical fiction authors. The Grail Quest is one of his least historically true tales, his standalones tend to be the best simply because they don't need a continuing story. So 1356 and Agincourt are both pretty accurate for the most part, some things have to be assumed, and some names were changed for accuracies but I can't remember exactly what was changed. That being said, Cornwell *does* have a pretty good historical note where he says what happened and what didn't at the end of each book.\n\nSaxon Stories aren't too bad, especially early on as we know a lot from the time, often from Alfred himself. The later ones, especially the newest one is much more fictional as Cornwell is trying to have more character development for his main character, as such needs him to go north to retake Bebbanburg. As far as I know there were no Saxon efforts in this time.\n\nThe Winter King series is about Arthur who we have very little knowledge of and couldn't say if he even existed. \n\nStonehenge is a brilliant book, but *complete* fiction. Apart from the stones being put up nothing in that book is true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35vv0n", "title": "Why didn't the Nazis bomb things like Big Ben when they bombed London?", "selftext": "If the Nazis were so oriented on destroying things like art why didn't they destroy British monuments?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35vv0n/why_didnt_the_nazis_bomb_things_like_big_ben_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr8dai4", "cr8gczh", "cr8ne3y"], "score": [44, 100, 9], "text": ["1. Most bombing runs took place at night, so they only had London's lights to know what they were bombing.\n\n2. Bombers were usually situated  > 1km above their targets.\n\n3. Bombs dropped from that range have a very low chance of  directly hitting their targets (to compare, data from the Vietnam War show that unguided bombs hit their targets 5.5 % of the time, compared to laser guided bombs, which hit targets 50 % of the time).\n\n4. They would have to calculate when to release the bombs, a very daunting task when you're trying to hit something that takes up 40 sq ft.\n\nI don't know about motive, though.", "The Houses of Parliament was bombed 14 times during the war. The Clocktower (what people mistakenly call Big Ben) was also hit during one of the raids. It blew out the glass on the clockface and damaged the roof. The Commons Chamber was destroyed by fire from an incendiary bomb.\n\nSo it's not as if the building and the tower went unscathed, it's just hard to hit targets that specific with the technology of the time.", "There were two important instances in which they deliberately targeted monuments of historical or cultural importance. Aside form the aforementioned problems hitting such small targets with WWII technology and often at night, attacking these non-military targets doesn't make a lot of military sense. While there was plenty of collateral damage to historic monuments in conventional or area attacks, the Luftwaffe only started to deliberately target cultural or historic monuments in the UK as a policy of revenge for the increasing strength of the Allied bombing offensive, which had significant collateral damage to German cities.  \n\nThe V-1's programmed target was Tower Bridge. The rudimentary guidance meant that the missiles went widely off target, but one hit Tower Bridge on 2 August. \n\nAnd the Luftwaffe did conduct a series of raids targeting famous British landmarks in 1942. The [Baedeker Blitz](_URL_0_) attacked cities for their cultural and historical importance as revenge against the increased destructiveness of the RAF's raids.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/baedeker-raids"]]}
{"q_id": "3b9yt1", "title": "Has there ever been an artifact that's so weird that historians just consider it an ancient act of trolling?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b9yt1/has_there_ever_been_an_artifact_thats_so_weird/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cske4yd", "cskecr7"], "score": [7, 8], "text": ["One explanation for the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head, an apparently Roman artefact found in Brazil, is that it was planted as a practical joke during an archaeological dig.", "Slightly off-topic admittedly: from the flip side of this question, an act of trolling which fooled all the key academics for some 40 years was the [Piltdown Man](_URL_0_) Hoax. Discovered by Charles Dawson in 1912 he was initially regarded as a vital palaeoanthropological find, was heavily studied and was believed to be providing important clues in the evolutionary link between apes and humans. Eventually the hoax fell apart and London's [Natural History Museum](_URL_1_) did a feature piece to mark the 100th anniversary of the \"discovery\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/archaeology/piltdown_man_01.shtml", "http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/the-scientific-process/piltdown-man-hoax/"]]}
{"q_id": "5o077e", "title": "I am a Persian satrap/general at war with Greeks in Asia Minor, in 477-449 BC. How do I fight against a hoplite army and what battles exemplify these tactics?", "selftext": "This question is inspired by /u/SpartanOf2012 similar question [here.](_URL_0_).\n\nI find it interesting that in 477-449 BC the Greeks were able to defeat the Persians in so many battles after the very recent Persian invasion of Greece. Being a satrap in Asia Minor, I must be familiar with how the Greeks fight their battles. What tactics and stratagems are available for me to fight against them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o077e/i_am_a_persian_satrapgeneral_at_war_with_greeks/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcg67ts", "dcgnenu"], "score": [3, 20], "text": ["Is there a way to have Reddit remind me to look at a thread in ... pulling a number out of my hat ... 3 days?  There are always so many good questions that I never remember to go back and read the answers to.", "I can imagine that, as a Persian satrap on the edge of the Empire, you're pretty nervous about the Athenians and their allies getting all up in your business. But let's not overstate the matter. After their initial campaigns against Western Asia Minor and the Hellespont in 479-7 BC, the Greeks only won 3 major victories against the Persians before the probable signing of the Peace of Kallias in 449/8 BC. At the Eurymedon in the early 460s BC, the Persian fleet and army were destroyed; in Egypt in the late 460s BC, the Athenians helped the rebellious Egyptians defeat the Persian army sent to restore order; and in Cyprus in the late 450s BC the Athenian expeditionary fleet again managed to crush a Persian fleet and landing force. That's pretty much it. And let's not forget the final result of all that bloodshed, either. The battle of the Eurymedon was a setback for Persia, to be sure. But the Athenian force in Egypt was wiped out a few years after its initial victory; over 200 of their triremes were burned, and many thousands of Greeks lost their lives. And at Cyprus, even though the Greeks were victorious, they lost their general, Kimon - thorn in your side for decades - and withdrew quietly back to Greece.\n\nMost of these victories were in naval battles, or battles fought by a recently landed force. There was no attempt by the Delian League to advance further into Asia Minor. They knew their main strength was in the number of their triremes, and that the Greek settlements they sought to protect from Persian rule were near the coast. Given that you've already lost all those settlements to them, you have little reason to worry that any major Greek army will soon be descending upon you. Indeed, the treaty that was supposedly signed in 449/8 BC said that the Persians were to stay as far away from the coast as a horse can run in a day (Plutarch, *Life of Kimon* 13.4). Clearly the Greeks did not have designs on the inland parts of the Persian Empire; they only claimed the bits along the sea.\n\nStill, we know that the Greeks occasionally venture inland to bother you, and that you also try to reach out and harm them if you can. The Athenian Tribute Lists show interesting fluctuations, with settlements deeper into Asia Minor suddenly paying tribute for one year, while others along the coast sometimes seem to disappear from the lists. All this suggests that there was definitely some low-level raiding and campaigning going on along the new border of your satrapy. But it also shows that fifth columns and regime change had a role to play in the war. This is, of course, how you're planning to win; by encouraging the wealthy in each city to throw off the Athenian yoke and establish oligarchic regimes favourable to Persia, you are gradually re-establishing your control over the region. You're definitely damaging the Athenian reputation and their bottom line by forcing them to respond to rebellions like those at Erythrai and Miletos in 454/3 BC. \n\nGenerally, this is a pretty good way to fight Greeks. They are poor, while you are rich; they can't afford to lose much, while you have vast resources of money, manpower and land. It is better to play on their greed and exploit their internal divisions than to force them into a corner and make them fight you. Buy them off; wear them out with long campaigns; play them off against each other; let them waste their strength on worthless things; let them see how much power they could have if they joined you instead of fighting you. Is it any wonder that they are constantly suspecting their best generals of taking Persian bribes? Artaxerxes tried to take this approach one step further after his defeat in Egypt, sending an envoy to pay the Spartans to declare war on Athens and thus draw the Athenian fleet away. Unfortunately the Spartans refused to play ball (Thucydides 1.109.2-3; Diodoros 11.74.5-6). But a time will soon come when they will prove more willing.\n\nBut what if the Greeks actually attack? Well, the situation will be a bit tricky. Not much is known about the battles the Persians won against the Greeks during the Ionian Revolt; we know more about the times when they lost. \n\nOne thing it seems you shouldn't do is rely on your own home-grown elite heavy infantry. This may be the pride of the Persian army - a mass of warriors formed up behind a wall of wicker shields and fighting first with the bow, then with the spear, then with swords and axes - but it doesn't work well against the Greeks. You see, the Greeks don't play by the rules. They don't use many arrows of their own; they rarely bring horsemen, against which your tactics are best suited. Rather, when they go into battle, they immediately commit all of their heavy infantry in a  frenzied charge, piling into your shieldwall and rendering your carefully organised army ineffective. At this point it comes down to individual strength and bravery, and the savage Greeks, with their heavy shields and long spears and their insane disregard for their own lives, tend to have the advantage. This was how the Persians were eventually grinded down at Plataia, and at Mykale, and again at the Eurymedon (or so says Plutarch (*Life of Kimon* 13.2); Diodoros (11.61.2-6) claims the fight at the Eurymedon was a treacherous night attack).\n\nBut don't despair. The Persians have beaten the Greeks in pitched battle before. Greek hoplites don't always win even in close combat; at Marathon the Persian centre broke through the Athenian line. When they're stretched thin or outflanked, they're vulnerable. They're poorly organised and easily frightened. When they see some of their own side running, they tend to follow suit.\n\nOne way to even the odds in pitched battle is to use people who are used to fighting in the Greek manner. The Egyptians, with their long pikes and heavy tower shields, are best; but these won't be available to you in Asia Minor. You do have access to the Karians, though; the Phrygians also know how to fight as spearmen; and any Ionian or Aeolian Greeks you can persuade to fight for you will serve you well. Don't forget that you don't necessarily have to own Greeks yourself - they are always on sale in the mercenary market.\n\nMore importantly, when the Greeks go about by ship, they have no horsemen to support them. This gives you and your strong cavalry a great advantage. At the battle of Malene in 493 BC, the Persians defeated the Greeks by pinning them down with infantry and then charging them with their cavalry (Herodotos 6.29.1). Even safer would be to refuse battle altogether, but to ride down any Greeks that stray from their main body as they march about your lands, using your superior mobility to avoid getting bogged down in hand-to-hand fighting. They need to eat; in order to find food, they need to scatter; that's when you get them. In future, this will frequently allow the Persians to inflict serious casualties on the Greeks (Xenophon, *Anabasis* 6.4.24; *Hellenika* 3.4.22, 4.1.17-19). Innovations like the scythed chariot, designed to break up Greek formations, will help you in this task.\n\nIf you are satrap of Phrygia, you have access to Bithynians, who fight as peltasts and cavalry. These are a potent combination to field against hoplites. Again, all you have to do is avoid a pitched battle, and let attrition and exhaustion do its work. What use is it to them that they are good at close combat if the battle never comes to that? Your descendants will see Greek hoplites slaughtered \"like cattle in a pen\" by the Bithynians (Xenophon, *Hellenika* 3.4.2-5).\n\nTake heart, then, in the knowledge that you are not helpless. For all their recent victories, the Greeks know they should fear you, and they will soon fear you again:\n\n >  They saw an army drawn up in line of battle where their own road ran\u2014Karians with white shields, the entire Persian force which happened to be at hand, all the Greek troops which each of the two satraps had, and horsemen in great numbers, those of Tissaphernes on the right wing and those of Pharnabazos on the left.\n\n >  When Derkylidas learned of all this, he told the commanders of units and the *lochagoi* to form their men in line, eight deep, as quickly as possible, and to station the peltasts on either wing and likewise the cavalry\u2014all that he happened to have and such as it was; meanwhile he himself offered sacrifice. \n\n >  Now all that part of the army which was Peloponnesian kept quiet and prepared for battle; but as for the men from Priene and Achilleion, from the islands and the Ionian cities, some of them left their arms in the standing grain and ran away, while all those who did stand showed clearly that they would not stand very long.\n\n-- Xenophon, *Hellenika* 3.4.15-17"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5d7wuz/i_am_alexander_the_great_andor_a_diadochi_general/"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "505g6g", "title": "Monday Methods: \"They'll take our lives but they'll never take our transcripts!\" Grad School Admissions part 2: The Basics and getting started", "selftext": "Installment 2 of the Grad School Series on Monday Methods covers some of the very basic stuff: What options are available to me? How do I find the program that is right for me? What do I need (Transcripts! The GRE!) How do I contact a university / potential advisor? How do I know which program / university is the best for the field I am interested in? How do I decide if I need to go into history or an allied field?\n\nSo, professors, grad students, and interested parties, please share your experience / questions / tips.\n\n**Next Week: \"You're gonna need a bigger boat.\" Grad School Admissions part 3: Strategizing and a Plan B**", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/505g6g/monday_methods_theyll_take_our_lives_but_theyll/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d71cff9", "d71d4r0", "d72pbnw"], "score": [3, 11, 3], "text": ["After being rejected by a few programs this past year, I have to retake the GRE before I can apply to PhD programs this year.  Anyone have any advice on how to go about preparing for today's GRE?", "Last week there were some great tips on going to grad school in the US, here's some thoughts on doing a MA/PhD in the UK, which can be a very different experience. Due to the nature of funding/the system here, it's worth thinking about the following things before you decide to apply:\n\n**What is doing a PhD in the UK like?**\n\nUnlike in the US, you do not have to do coursework and you jump straight into research, largely because most people would have specialised already during their MA or even during their undergraduate degree (in History or a related field). As such, there are no classes unless you want to learn a language/skill, so you have a lot of free time. Your first year is generally known as a probationary year (different universities have different names for this), by the end of which you have to present your work so far (a chapter generally) to a panel to show that you are ready to do a PhD. After that, it's just writing, writing, and more writing. The whole process takes about 3-4 years.\n\n**Getting started**\n\n0 - Think about whether you really want to do a PhD\n\nAcademia is tough and the job market is tougher, so you need to think carefully about your next step. Last week's [roundtable](_URL_2_) covered this really well, so take a look there first. If you are ready for the next step, read on...\n\n1 - Your MA\n\nIn the UK it is necessary to first gain a Masters before you can start a PhD, so it is unfortunate that funding for Masters are minimal in many UK universities, especially after the research councils stopped funding MA students. These degrees generally take one or two years, one for a taught Masters (usually with a thesis) and two for a research-based Masters (in order to write a more extended piece of original research). Applying for these programmes is relatively straight-forward, but be aware that you will rarely get funding. When you are doing the degree, spend the relatively short time available to think strategically about what you want out of it, such as in learning new skills/languages, presenting papers at postgraduate conferences, and in networking with other researchers. If you are doing a one-year Masters, you only have a few months before you have to apply for PhD programmes, so you really need to get on top of things quite early on.\n\n2 - Start looking for potential supervisors and drafting your thesis proposal\n\nThis is not really necessary for MA students, but for PhD students this is essential. Start asking other academics, particularly your MA supervisor, for their thoughts, as well as researching academics in your field through Google or via browsing different universities' faculty pages. If you are up-to-date wit the historiography of your likely field of research, then you will know a few of the likely candidates by the time of application already, but it is always good to do more research in order to expand your options. Not only do you want a supervisor who will be able to help you with your thesis (because of their knowledge, their connections etc), but you want to find someone you can work with as well. This is why it's important to get other people's opinions; do these potential supervisors reply to emails on time? Do they have a lot of time for their students? They seem relatively minor now, but a helpful supervisor can make your life a lot easier when you start your PhD. \n\nYou should also talk to other PhD students/academics about the admissions process, since they are the ones who have recently experienced it. In my experience they are all very happy to help potential applicants, so they are an invaluable resource especially if you are a new Masters student. Lastly, it is important to bear in mind that your supervisor is by far the most important influence on your work, not the institution itself, and there are a lot of wonderful respected scholars working in non-Oxbridge/Russell Group universities. Reputation does play a role, but at this stage it is important to find a good supervisor first and foremost.\n\n3 - Emailing potential supervisors\n\nThis is a bit intimidating at first, but you'll quickly get accustomed to it. If they are open to your ideas, you can spend a while discussing your proposal with them and if they really want you, they can offer you a lot of help on how to draft your application or tell you what you need to know about the university. If they offer or if they are close by, do also take the opportunity to meet them in person!\n\n**Things you need to apply**\n\n1. A well-written proposal. This is very important, since this is how people judge your ideas. Different universities have wildly different requirements for the proposal, but if you are already in contact with a potential supervisor, they are likely to help you to refine your draft.\n2. Your undergraduate results and your predicted/actual MA grades. The better they are, the better your chance of securing funding, though this is not always the case.\n3. Sometimes universities also want you to submit a CV or a personal statement, this is quite tricky, but again, if in doubt, ask an academic at the university.\n4. Glowing references are crucial as well. If a particular lecturer has been really impressed by your work, feel free to ask them for a reference! Your MA supervisor's reference is important too, as they are the ones giving you a predicted result for your Masters work and they are the ones who are best-placed to judge how good of a researcher you are, so it's important to get them on your side.\n5. What you don't need to do is to take the GRE or pay for application fees (except for Oxbridge), so theoretically you can apply to as many universities as you want, but keep in mind that your referees are humans too and can only write so many references for you.\n\n**Funding**\n\nGiven the rarity of funding these days, you really need to consider this factor before you apply. Research funding in the UK comes from primarily three sources:\n\n* The most common way is from the research councils, AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) or ESRC (Economic Social Research Council). This pays for your fees and you will get a stipend of \u00a314,057 per year (this is the figure for 2015/6 and it will change annually based on inflation, I think). They are primarily for UK students, but EU students can get funding to cover their fees - Brexit will however change things in the near future. This is unfortunately open only to PhD students. To apply for this you normally just have to complete an extra form along with your application for the university itself, but it's worth co-ordinating with your potential supervisor over how to do this, since different funding consortiums want different things.\n* Most universities also offer some sort of internal scholarship for the most able applicants and are in some cases much more prestigious than getting an AHRC/ESRC grant. They generally match (or go beyond) the level of funding given by the research councils and are, naturally, very competitive, but you should give it a shot anyway. They are available for both home and international students. Some funding from this stream will also be available for Masters students, but only in very small numbers.\n* Some funding can be secured from other sources. A frequently-cited site is the [Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding](_URL_0_), which essentially lists many charities and other bodies which may be interested in funding your graduate studies. Each source is geared towards a specific demographic generally, for example students from a particular region, so it will be difficult to secure enough funding to match those provided by institutional sources. Some groups are not listed and I know for example that the [Leventis Foundation](_URL_1_) provides some postgraduate scholarships relating to Greek/Byzantine studies, though they are not at the level provided by the AHRC/ESRC. A lot of research is needed if you take this route!\n\nIf none of this is available, it is possible to study for a PhD without funding or by doing the degree part-time. A lot of people do study for a PhD without funding - at Oxford, despite its huge endowment, only about 1/3 of the doctoral students are funded. I agree with the frequently-given advice that doing a PhD without funding is risky, but if you have a solid plan and you are set on this course, it's worth keeping some of these things in mind:\n\n* Unlike in the US, research council/some university scholarships do not require you to teach, so one way to get extra money is through teaching. Anecdotally, I am told that the Cambridge History Faculty actively discourages PhDs from teaching and that in few other universities they are ambivalent about this, so this might not be possible in all cases.\n* You can get a part-time job, whether at a place associated with the university, a student bar or the union for example, or outside of it. Because UK PhDs don't require coursework, you have some flexibility with your time, though juggling so many commitments can be stressful!\n\nFor applicants for a Masters programme, funding is unfortunately very rare. One (very small) silver lining however is that you can complete the degree in one year, which, if you are set on doing a PhD, might be something you can power through via a part-time job/savings/living on ramen.\n\n\n-----\n\nLet me know if I missed anything important!", "I began my PhD program search late in the game. I went to a school with a terminal MA and decided that I wanted to pursue the PhD in March of my final year. Obviously, this was not a good thing to do. However, I had a MA advisor that managed to find me a grading position with him for a year so that I could stay in the department after graduating and work on my application and some other skill sets needed for PhD study (advanced historiography, paleography, etc). While working during that extra year I learned a few valuable lessons regarding the PhD application process. My years in a PhD program confirmed these observations. (YMMV)\n\n\u2022  Try to spend a summer in a research location before you begin applying. By this I mean, if you have the resources, go to an archive or research library that is of importance in your desired field. This may be difficult if you have foreign interests, but there are numerous libraries that have significant foreign materials that should benefit you in some small way. Maybe spend a week at the JCB and two at the LOC. Try to find something that will give you a lead into where you can do additional work once you get into the program or enough work that will allow you to present research at a conference during your first or second year. Why is this important for getting the initial nod from an advisor? There is a strong possibility that your advisor, their students, or related faculty will be at this location looking at similar material. Show these folks that you are dedicated: arrive early, stay until close, try to engage in conversation after hours, etc. The staff and heads of the departments at these research places are usually chummy with faculty. Try to get to know them and how their archive/library works. When you write your first letter to a potential advisor or your main letter in an application, some well placed name dropping can go a long way. This not only gets your name out there, but advisors might tell your contact or send an email to you saying that they are not accepting students or if they are what their GRE standards are. (This happened to me. I maxed the writing and did well in English, but my math was low. The professor told me his minimum. I worked extra hard and scored that exact minimum for math. Now I'm an economic historian. Go figure.) \n\n\u2022 Try to refrain from cold calling your potential advisors. This may be something that many here disagree with. However, I have noticed that most of the advisor/advisee decisions are made well before applications are sent out. Your current faculty mentor, if they are not doing a good job of telling you to get a real job, should be working their connections to try and place you. It looks good on their yearly reports to deans and dept chairs to say they mentored a student who went to X State U or an R1 for a PhD program. If they have contacts, use them. They might have info that you cannot get from the university website (the professor might not work well with your gender, might be more hands-off regarding your dissertation work, or might be an ass that most people cannot stand). These are things that your faculty mentor should know. If they are clueless, try working with your contacts you made while at an archive or library. Try to feel those contacts out for their opinion of the academic landscape. Maybe the R1 is prestigious but there isn't enough funding so they only see faculty and late-stage students while the X State U has two to three first or second years there at regular times. If your collection of faculty and professional contacts can send a quick note to the advisor you want, you are ahead of the game. (Hey, I have this student I worked with for a few weeks and they said they were interested in doing X. Look out for their application.)\n\n\u2022\u00a0Look at your field of desired study. Now look at the AHA or other organization's mapping of total PhDs awarded in that field compared to faculty positions. Now look at your bank account. You need to know going in that it is a rough market out there if you want to be a faculty member. Have a backup plan if possible. (Govt, business, non-profits, etc). It might be worth finding the university that has the advisor you want and a program that might help your backup plan. The main issues are placement, funding, and cost of living. There are some schools that will place any and all PhDs because they have a university name people want on their department webpage. However, if you can find a school that places graduates in R2s, liberal arts colleges, and state schools, go for it. These are places that will actually work on pedagogy and how to deal with university admins. I do not mean to say that if you get accepted to an R1 to turn it down, but there are benefits of being at an institution where faculty realize that they are training the next generation of professors. Is there regular funding for your program? Will you take out loans to get the degree? Do your best to find a school that guarantees 4-5 years of funding. Going into serious debt is not worth it. Will you be struggling to pay rent and other utilities if you are in the program? There is a possibility that you may have to get a second job to make ends meet. If you have a partner or a financial situation that allows you to live in the NYC or Frisco Bay area while making grad student stipends, go for it. Otherwise, rethink your program options. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.postgraduate-funding.com/gateway", "https://www.leventisscholarships.org/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z0poh/monday_methods_so_i_heard_youd_like_to_go_to_grad/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3fas2q", "title": "What was Columbus's source for the \"width\" of Eurasia", "selftext": "It is my understanding that Columbus significantly underestimated the diameter of the earth and this was one reason he thought he could reach east Asia. However, he also would have had to have some estimate for the \"width\" of Eurasia.  How accurate was he on the  \"width\" of Eurasia and where did he get his information from?  Ptolemy? Weren't longitudes only reliably calculated in the 18th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fas2q/what_was_columbuss_source_for_the_width_of_eurasia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctmxlve"], "score": [4], "text": ["Wow, there are a lot of questions there. I'll try to take them one at a time. \n\n >  It is my understanding that Columbus significantly underestimated the diameter of the earth and this was one reason he thought he could reach east Asia.\n\nYes, Columbus appears to have thought that the earth's cicrumfrence was about 25% smaller than it actually is. We know that he corresponded with Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a Florentine scholar who believed that sailing west would be a feasible way to reach Asia. Toscanelli had a map, possibly based on Martin Behaim's globe, that showed Asia extending much further east than it does, and the Azores, Canaries and Cape Verde islands extending much further west than they do (the Azores would end up right off the coast of Labrador in Behaim's projection). \n\nStill, Toscanelli thought the Atlantic (from Asia to Europe) was about 5,000 miles wide; Columbus on the other hand interpreted Asia as being much bigger, thinking the Atlantic was only about 3,200 miles wide. \n\n >  However, he also would have had to have some estimate for the \"width\" of eurasia. How accurate was he on the \"width\" of Eurasia and where did he get his information from? Ptolemy?\n\nYes, Columbus seems to have been influenced both by Toscanelli and also Behaim, and by a general contemporary thought that the Indies (that is, what we'd now call Indonesia) were a larger island chain going eastward, and that there were even more islands to the east of that -- particularly, it was thought that Japan was larger than it is, further east, and on the equator. \n\nPtolemy did estimate that Eurasia spanned 180 degrees of latitude (it's closer to 130). \n\n >  Weren't longitudes only reliably calculated in the 18th century?\n\nThe \"discovery of the longitude\" is dated to about 1760, when a method using lunar observation (either of the earth's moon, or the moons of Jupiter) to calculate time at a fixed point and thus the distance from the mariner to that fixed point, thus finding longitude. Harrison's H4 marine chronometer was built in 1761, but chronometers did not become widespread until the early- to mid-19th century. \n\nEDIT: I a word "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cnzk0i", "title": "As an historian are you allowed into museum archives for personal research?", "selftext": "I will soon be getting my degree and wanted to do a personal research on a matter. The thing is, the museum is abroad and so I intended to email them to ask for permission. But in case someone can give a heads up as to what answer to expect. My degree will also include archaeology and history of art, as in my country (Greece) we do all three as one course and later on choose which we prefer and focus on that. The items in question are mostly old letters and/or other personal papers of a physicist (if that makes any differece). Thank you in advance!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cnzk0i/as_an_historian_are_you_allowed_into_museum/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewf0loy", "ewftanz"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["The policy will vary by institution and country - in my experience, many if not most places are willing to allow any researcher access. Some places are more concerned about credentials though - they might want confirmation that you are affiliated to a university, for instance, or to know exactly what you want to look at and why. Without knowing where you're going, it's difficult to be more precise - but the easiest thing to do is simply to contact them directly.", "Each museum (should) have a formal policy, which (should) be included in their website. Depending on what you want to see (and the value of it) you may need to provide resumes and references."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "48xfsp", "title": "What policies did Abraham Lincoln and the Congress throughout the Civil War push that were not related to slavery or the war itself?", "selftext": "I realize that the American Civil War could very well be considered total war (in which all of a nation's resources, civil and military, are geared toward the objective of winning the war), but what policies were enacted or lobbied for/against, that were unrelated to either the war or slavery?\n\nIn other words, what would Lincoln be known for if the Civil War had not occurred?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48xfsp/what_policies_did_abraham_lincoln_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ngls1"], "score": [65], "text": ["Well, it's impossible to know what kind of President Lincoln would have been without the ACW, as the event (or threat of it) informed the politics of the Republican Party's formation, the previous two Presidential nomination cycles, and the vast majority of Lincoln's presidency. We have an understanding of Lincoln's political leanings outside the abolition debate (classically Whig, trusting in the authority of Congress, a big fan of internal improvements like roadways and canals...Doris Kearns Goodwin's 'Team of Rivals' is a great source for this). But the ACW consumed so much of his attention during his Presidency, and rightly so, that Lincoln really is defined by the conflict and the politics surrounding it. \n\nTo answer your question directly, though, Lincoln's administration is responsible for the Homestead Act (1862, more here: _URL_0_), which gave citizens the opportunity to purchase literally millions of acres of land out \"West\" that had previously been held by the government. Lincoln also signed the first Income Tax into law, and gave birth to the transcontinental railroad with the Pacific Railways Act. Lincoln also created the Department of Agriculture, and signed the National Banking acts of 1863 and '64. \n\nThere are plenty of resources available to read about any of these acts or initiatives via the Library of Congress, but if you want analyze what they mean within the context of Lincoln as a President, Goodwin (cited above) is a great start. Just looking at the facts, between the strengthening of the federal government via the banking, income tax, and even agricultural initiatives, and the push to open up the American West to future settlement and exploration, I think a great picture of the man comes into focus. This was a guy who really believed in the promise of America as a concept, in the tenants of the Declaration of independence and the promise of the republic in its loftiest state. This was a President that wanted to simultaneously strengthen the core foundation of what the U.S. **was** while giving ordinary citizens the opportunity to succeed within that framework. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Homestead.html#American"]]}
{"q_id": "sz2fj", "title": "Has there ever been anything in our culture that has been on the same or close too fandom as Beatlemania? (x-Post from beatles)", "selftext": "I would argue nothing since has surpassed Beatlemania. If there was anything that has come close, it be Pottermania but since Pottermania has been active for 15ish? years, it doesn't come that close to Beatlemania.\nWhat do you think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sz2fj/has_there_ever_been_anything_in_our_culture_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i721k", "c4i721v", "c4i7a9r", "c4i81pa", "c4i8iww", "c4id8zd"], "score": [10, 4, 20, 15, 17, 2], "text": ["I would say Jesus, but the Beatles were bigger.\n\nJokes aside, Charles Dickens was incredibly popular. I've read that boats carrying copies of his books from England would get mobbed in the New York harbor.", "Elvis. Martin and Lewis. The Pope. Elizabeth II on her 1953-4 coronation tour (three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen the Queen, for example).", "Elvis. How many Beatles impersonators and look-alike contests and dolls and statues and paintings and... do you see?\n\nI would argue that Elvis was actually a larger phenomenon over a longer period of time. Today kids say \"who were the Beatles\" but they know Elvis.\n\nIn 1637, [Tulip mania](_URL_0_).", "[Lisztomania](_URL_0_), the fan frenzies over Franz Liszt's performances. ", "Not in Western Culture, but the level of fandom in South India for popular actors is probably the most extreme I have seen anywhere.\n\nOf course, not every run of the mill actor can command huge fan followings. That is restricted to current and past 'superstars' including MGR, Rajinikanth, Dr. Rajkumar, Chiranjeevi etc. \n\nWhen Rajkumar was kidnapped by forest brigand Veerapan, Bangalore City faced riots and strikes for a month or two.\n\nMGR was so popular that when he made his foray into politics, he was instantly elected as Chief Minister (a role similar to 'Governor' in the United States but with more powers) of Tamil Nadu and successfully won re-elections and held that position till his death.\n\nRajinikanth is the biggest phenomenon right now. He plays charismatic, larger than life Chuck Norris like heroes in big budget blockbusters. He has a frenzied fan following here, with temples dedicated to him and prayers all over the nation in mosques, temples and churches when he fell ill last year. A few fans even committed suicide when they heard of his illness. When his movies release, 'first day, first show' tickets are sold at 10-20 times the original price and die hard fans try to attend anywhere between 7-15 screenings of his movies to ensure it breaks records for profitability (I personally know a few people who watched 'Endhiran' 20-25 times). During the first 3 days of a Rajinikanth movie, it is impossible to hear the dialogues due to the loud cheering and shouting each time he appears on screen. Patrons even throw bundles of notes at the screen when he makes his dramatic introduction in his movies or during song sequences. His words and actions are mimicked and his mannerisms have been copied endlessly. Every South Indian city or town (even those outside Tamil Nadu) have at least one Rajinikanth Fan Club where members organize philanthropic activities, blood donation drives and charity work under his name.", "Various current Asian popstars, especially K-Pop seem to be huge, with girls doing crazy things such as writing letters to them in their own blood and spending thousands of dollars to follow these commercialised people around. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisztomania_\\(phenomenon\\)"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "25jh1y", "title": "Question about these photos of great grandfather during the Russian Civil War", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nSo these are photos of my great grandfather during the Russian Civil War. As far as I have been told, he was part of the British air force and he was a war-photographer. He apparently took tonnes of footage of the British intervention, which was taken by a film studio by the name of \"united films\" or something along those lines  back in the 1930s to make a film out of, but that was the last my family ever saw of that footage.\n\nNow the question is, from these photos, is it possible to tell what rank or position he held from them? Is it possible to tell where they were taken? According to family members, they were taken in a place called Archangel or something like that? Is it possible to confirm that location in these photos at all? Also anyone have a clue what he is holding in pictures 6, 7 and 8?\n\nDon't know if this is the right sub at all, but I've been curious about these photos ever since I've seen them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25jh1y/question_about_these_photos_of_great_grandfather/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chi2zqi"], "score": [6], "text": ["That distinctive wrap-around jacket is the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps.They used to call it the \"maternity jacket\". There seems to be one \"pip\" on each shoulder, so he was a 2nd lieutenant when the pictures were taken.\n\nAs to where they were taken, I doubt that most are in Archangel (usually written Arkhangelsk these days), which is in the far North of Russia and according to the [wiki page](_URL_2_) has average temperatures below freezing for about half the year- you wouldn't get vines growing up walls there! In fact there's a very French look to the buildings, particularly that gate in picture 2, so perhaps this is  his base during WWI?\n\nHe's holding a small folding camera- not an aerial camera, those were much bigger things, just a snapshot type of camera. The [Vest Pocket Kodak](_URL_1_) maybe- it was popular with soldiers at the time.\n\nThe British army was certainly in Arkhangelsk though, in 1918/19, they were trying to support the \"white\" side in the civil war _URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/EWBQY"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_Campaign", "http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/entry_C89.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkhangelsk"]]}
{"q_id": "c22150", "title": "How did Wild West travelling shows influence and cultivate the mythology of the American West?", "selftext": "Buffalo Bill's is probably the most famous example of the traveling Wild West show. I'm interested in both the image of the Wild West these shows tried to create, and then the acceptance of that image both at home in the States and abroad. \n\nWere there prominent themes/stories/reenactments that proved more popular? How did traveling shows incorporate Native Americans into the storylines? Did these shows influence public perception of the West, and the colonization thereof? Did they influence the early motion picture industry? Do we still inherit popular myths of the Old West from these shows?\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c22150/how_did_wild_west_travelling_shows_influence_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erhdgav"], "score": [8], "text": ["**What does the Frontier myth mean?**\n\nThis section will draw from cultural historian Richard Slotkin's majestic trilogy on the creation of the Frontier myth. Please see sources below.\n\nThe North American frontier has been a space of both fascination, hope and fears ever since the first European settler colonists arrived at the east coast of the North American continent. For the settlers, the frontier was not only the border between wilderness and settlement but also the border between civilization and savagery. The fear for the unknown in the frontier and for the \"uncivilized state\" of the indigenous population co-existed with hope for the possibilities of the frontier that at the expense of the indigenous peoples (who were meant to be civilized, assimilated, or annihilated) could be \"tamed\", civilized (for example through the introduction of Christianity) and consequently establish and expand the European colonies on the North American continent. In this, we see the origins of the American *Myth of the Frontier*. The European settler colonists left a Europe (*separation* from civilization) to settle on the North American continent in an uncivilized state (*regression* from a civilized life to make a new, primitive life in the wilderness) which led to a life or death fight between the settlers and the wilderness (*conflict* with both nature and the indigenous population). The mythical story that is created is therefore a specific rotation of separation, regression and regeneration through violence. The last category has an important function in the myth because the progression of society in various incarnation of the Frontier myth is tied violence, in particularly towards the indigenous population. The conflict with the indigenous population created some of the earliest borders in the American national identity. In the view of the settlers, the fact that the settlers (and the subsequent \"white\" American population), like the indigenous population, \"originated in the American wilderness\" didn't mean that they were savages like the indigenous population. These important opposites (European colonists/indigenous person, civilization/wilderness) are present in an another, important aspect of the Frontier myth, an aspect that Slotkin calls *Savage War* symbolism. *Savage War* is the justification for the subjugation of the indigenous population in the European hierarchy in North America. The motivation that is given through *Savage War* symbolism is that civilized Europeans can not co-exist with the primitive indigenous population. They have to be subjugated and oppressed because if they are not, this will cause the destruction of white civilization. \n\nIn summary, the Frontier myth was not only a mythic construction but also a theory of development to explain the social, political and economic consequences of the European colonization and a historiographical argument to explain the large features of the short history of the United States."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "49jpl0", "title": "What was the status of Saint Pierre-Miquelon during the Nazi occupation of France?", "selftext": "Saint Pierre-Miquelon are French islands located just off the coast of Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula.  When the Nazis occupied the country, did their reach (or that of the Vichy collaborator regime) extend there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49jpl0/what_was_the_status_of_saint_pierremiquelon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1gi6j7"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure what their status was during the war but I know it was \"liberated\" (I.e visited) by De Gaulle and the free French army towards the end of the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ddrr3p", "title": "Did pre-capitalist nations have boom and bust cycles?", "selftext": "I\u2019m just wondering if pre-capitalist nations also experienced boom and bust cycles. From what I\u2019ve heard is that it sorta referenced in Hammurabi\u2019s law but I haven\u2019t yet been able to find any info to back that up. But I imagine they would have gone through periods of huge growth and heavy contraction no?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ddrr3p/did_precapitalist_nations_have_boom_and_bust/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2mawcm", "f2mqnu3"], "score": [31, 5], "text": ["The obvious instance of this would be Malthusean cycles in which the population would go through a period of growth, spurred on by previous depopulation or some new agricultural technique, before hitting the limits of existing agricultural capacity and collapsing again under plagues, famines and so forth. This would mostly represent extensive growth from there simply being more people, but of course more people could also mean more division of labor and specialization. The population growth of the Song and Ming Dynasties, for example, were matched by significant developments in the sophistication of commerce and industry. Often times, political developments could also spur a boom, such as the way the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean spurred economic integration, which could then unravel with the political order, such as the subsequent reversion to local autarky after the Crisis of the Third Century.\n\nIn a more abstract, generalized sense,  Joseph Tainter has a theory of social complexity that is essentially a broad socioeconomic boom bust cycle. Essentially, societies will go through periods of growth and increasing complexity that expand the scope and sophistication of economic/political institutions, and the windfall from this increased complexity will be used to subsidize future growth. However, eventually a tipping point is reached where developing costly new mechanisms are needed to maintain the gains, putting societies into a vicious cycle where you have this complex system that people can't afford to maintain *or* allow to collapse. Eventually, though, collapse does come. To cite the Romans again, their initial growth was a self reinforcing cycle of plunder, economic integration and administrative sophistication enabling further plunder, economic integration and administrative sophistication. Then they reached a point where things started to backfire as these produced social conflicts, famines, plagues, institutional defects they couldn't deal with. In the short term they managed them by creating an incredibly top heavy and coercive administrative apparatus in the dominate, but in the long term that was even *less* unsustainable and led to an even more spectacular collapse later on.\n\nFor a contemporary example, modern industrial agricultural practices are unsustainable. However, if we were to immediately end them, the result would not only kill a lot of people, it would also probably be worse for the environment. So we have to develop new technologies to grow ourselves out of the problem, but these create even more issues and arguably exacerbate the underlying issue. So we're in a bit of a pickle.", "Perhaps the most basic example is found in the new world agricultural communities - it was often the case that Iroquoian villages would amalgamate and grow to a (relatively) large size, essentially for reasons of protection (the larger the village, the greater its military worth) - only to use up the locally available resources, and shrink or move.\n\nA recently discovered example is the \u201cMantle\u201d site, near the present day city of Toronto: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis Huron/Wendat village is the largest ever discovered: it seems to have developed and been abandoned over a generation or so. The assumption I have read from the site reports is that it was an example of a boom-bust cycle - boomed because of the need for protection; bust because of unsustainably. \n\nIt would appear that the lower the tech, the shorter the boom/bust cycle: new world cities often display this process (see for example the city of Cahokia)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://asiheritage.ca/portfolio-items/the-mantle-site/"]]}
{"q_id": "23rqmr", "title": "What caused the fall of the Caliphate? Why have there been no attempts to recreate the title?", "selftext": "As in, why did the title of Caliph fall out of favor in the early 20th century [after the fall of the Ottoman Empire] and why have there been no attempts to revive the title?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23rqmr/what_caused_the_fall_of_the_caliphate_why_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgzx781", "ch0pifk"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Just to help, which Caliphate are you referring to? The Umayyad Caliphate, Abbasid Caliphate, Fatimid Caliphate, etc? There wasn't one caliphate and often times there were two simultaneously, such as the Umayyads, who ruled mostly over Spain, and the Abbasids, who ruled mostly over traditional Arabia and the Levant. Which one do you have in mind?", "There was discussion after WW1 about creating a new caliphate but there was no consensus about who who should assume the title. The Hashemites, who had been promised most of the Arab world in the Hussein-McMahon correspondences, had wanted the title for the Sharif of Mecca, King Hussein bin Ali who actually assumed it, briefly. The final extent of their domain was limited to Transjordan, Iraq, and the Hedjaz, and the Hedjaz only briefly because that was conquered by the Al Saud soon after, who also thought they might have a claim. King Fuad of Egypt, and later his son Farouk also had pretensions to the title but these were widely opposed. Fuad and Farouk both had a rather notorious reputation for un-Islamic behavior. The Turks, who formerly held the title, wanted a secular state and had abolished it.\n\nAll of these were under the sphere of influence, if not the direct control, of the British Empire who, through their imperial holdings in Greater India (i.e. Pakistan and Bangladesh as well) actually had a larger number of Muslims in their domain than did the old Ottoman empire, and certainly more than any of the post-Ottoman states. As such they had no desire to see the caliphate restored and this whole series of events was something of a coup for them.\n\nThe pan-Arab Socialist movements that eventually toppled many of these states, for example in Iraq, and Egypt, were secular and had no interest in the Caliphate.\n\nI've read some much longer sources on the politics of this but this this seems to sum it up in only a few pages: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZAXNxxkJKYsC&amp;pg=PA301&amp;lpg=PA301&amp;dq=sharif+hussein+king+fuad+caliphate&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=blVhH5azwb&amp;sig=EKMuhRK1uSwtsD6zCvcBdgfA0I4&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=8uNYU9bnCNPRsATrn4GgCg&amp;ved=0CD0Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=sharif%20hussein%20king%20fuad%20caliphate&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1bz2em", "title": "What happened to all the chariots?", "selftext": "So from what I've heard, in the ancient era chariots were a pretty big deal on the battlefield, spread all over Eurasia, and were huge in Roman sporting events. Yet by the middle ages (at least in most prevalent images) they seemed to have disappeared. What changed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bz2em/what_happened_to_all_the_chariots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9bgw4l", "c9bn14e"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["Chariots were used mostly out of necessity, not because they were superior to riding on horseback. When horses were first domesticated, they simply weren't that big (look at [Przewalski's horse](_URL_0_) as an example; they were proportioned more like a donkey than a modern horse). They could pull someone in a chariot all day, but a person riding on their back wore them out much more quickly. Through selective breeding, horses got larger and stronger and were able to carry a man for longer periods of time, rendering chariots unnecessary.\n\nA single horse carrying a rider was both more maneuverable and a more cost-effective usage of horses than chariots, which oftentimes had as many as four horses pulling a single chariot with one or two riders.", "The use of chariots in Roman sporting events doesn't imply that they were cutting edge military tech.  We race horses, but that doesn't mean we use cavalry.  The Romans didn't use chariots either. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_Horse"], []]}
{"q_id": "317q0z", "title": "How was Ahmad Shah Massoud important in Soviet-Afghan War?", "selftext": "What motivated him differently from others?\n\nAlso, without treading too much into the twenty-year mark, how was he important in the formation of modern Afghanistan?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/317q0z/how_was_ahmad_shah_massoud_important_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpz7pk6"], "score": [8], "text": ["Ahmad Shah Massoud was fairly important to the war effort. While he did not have much clout in the majority of the country, he dominated the Tajik north, particularly the area around the Panjshir Valley. This area contained important supply lines for the Soviet forces, so the constant harassment by Massoud's forces actually led to KGB higher ups signing a temporary peace deal with Massoud in 1983. Massoud used this deal to safely bulk up and train his forces, which then led him to continue harassing Soviet forces a few years later (I don't have the dates on the top of my head.) Massoud was also a leading member of the coalition that captured Kabul in 1992.\n\n > What motivated him differently from others?\n\nMany of the other poweful mujihadeen commanders (Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, Haqqani) were hardcore jihadis from the Pashtun highlands. Massoud was more socially liberal, and he fought more for his Tajik people and for Afghan nationalism than for religion. After the war ended, Massoud repeatedly entered coalitions against jihadi warlords, eventually creating the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban. This was not very successful though, as the Taliban pretty much dominated the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan while Massoud and his allies were left claiming a (shrinking) piece of territory composed mainly of Uzbeks and Tajiks until the American air war began in late 2001. Massoud was killed on September 9,  2001 as Northern Alliance lines were crumbling in the face of the stronger Taliban force.\n\n > how was he important in the formation of modern Afghanistan?\n\nUnfortunately, not all that important. as mentioned above, Massoud was killed prior to the American war in Afghanistan. When the war began, the American special forces and the CIA coordinated closely with Northern Alliance forces to guide airstrikes against Taliban positions, ultimately routing them from most of the country before the ground invasion by American troops even began.\n\nWhen it came time to form a political future for Afghanistan though, Massoud's people were more or less sidelined. The Pentagon supported bolstering Karzai (Pashtun) as the leader of Afghanistan, while some other factions in the USG (mainly the CIA) supported handing the country to the Northern Alliance. Without Massoud though, the most recognizable figure of the northern alliance was General Dostum (current VP of Afghanistan), but Dostum had actually sided *with* the USSR against the mujihadeen during the war, so he didn't really have any credibility as an Afghan leader. The loya jirga agreed that Karzai would be president of the country, and his relations with the US more or less dominated the politics of the country since.\n\nThere is a fair argument though, that Massoud's legacy has played a defining role in the direction of the country. He is still considered a hero by many, and many Afghans who don't support the Taliban still carry pictures of him and view him as something of a spiritual leader."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gs3lf", "title": "How did sculptors afford stone/marble?", "selftext": "I'm sure there was more marble and it was easy to get large chunks, but transporting it would be expensive I would imagine. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gs3lf/how_did_sculptors_afford_stonemarble/", "answers": {"a_id": ["can9620"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sculptors who work with marble either have a patron ([Pietro Bernini worked for a famous cardinal and the pope](_URL_0_)), worked as an apprentice ([Lorenzo Bartolini](_URL_1_) worked for Fran\u00e7ois-Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Lemot), or have some kind of financial or art background (Michelangelo was raised by a stonecutter and his father owns a quarry). There weren't a lot of poor bohemian artists who work with marble.  Also a lot of sculptors work with some other mediums before moving onto marble (Rodin worked as a porcelain designer before became a sculptor on his own). \n\nBut regardless of medium, usually if you commission an art piece, you will need to provide a \"down payment\" that the artist will live on while working on your art (edit: as well as material). This is especially the case before the late 1800's before the concept of being a poor bohemian artist and create art for the sake of art was popular. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Bernini", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Bartolini"]]}
{"q_id": "1dmxjn", "title": "Was science fiction a common theme in literature and art before the 20th century?", "selftext": "I've always wondered how science fiction was interpreted in the past, and if it was a common archetype in literature and art as it is now. It seems many 'blockbusters' today take some themes from sci-fi, and I'm curious if there are any examples of older art or writing that incorporate what they thought would be the future. \n\nTo sum it up, who was the Isaac Asimov of the 1700's?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dmxjn/was_science_fiction_a_common_theme_in_literature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9rurwy", "c9s470a"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["there was no isaac asimov of the 1700s, although you might consider some of voltaire's writing science fantasy (microm\u00e9gas, specifically).\n\nsomnium (ca. 1630), by johannes kepler, is considered by asimov to be the first science fiction story, because the protagonist is transported to the moon by occult forces. \n\nit kind of stands to reason that you wouldn't have science fiction before you had actual science. the genre really didn't begin to take off until the 19th century.", "you may enjoy this...\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/fullpics/HistSciFi2.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "17a8yi", "title": "How \"green\" was the fertile crescent back in biblical times?  Was it a land of lush green farmland like the US Midwest, or was it in fact not too different from modern day Iraq, which is a bit scrubby, but not exactly all desert.", "selftext": "I remember reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, and hearing it talk about deep forests, and how that didn't square with my view of modern day Iraq until I talked to some of my buddies who served there, who said \"no no, there are forests there\" making me wonder if modern Iraq wasn't as desert as I thought it was.\n\nBut it also made me wonder how lush ancient mesopotamia was, and how devastating desertification actually has been.\n\nI mean, Ctesiphon is now surrounded by desert, but at one point it had to support a metropolis.  \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17a8yi/how_green_was_the_fertile_crescent_back_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c83n1ko", "c83ntsu", "c83oq2b", "c83s6gc", "c83t06a", "c83vqs6", "c83xznf", "c83yyjr"], "score": [17, 8, 19, 2, 6, 2, 10, 2], "text": ["Depends on the area! For a recent example of an area of the region becoming less \"green\": _URL_0_", "Mesopotamia was probably less dry, in the Epic of Gilgamesh they talk about how Enkidu hunted in the steppe. However, the forests you're talking about were supposed to be in Lebanon, which has them to this day. And in Mesopotamia they naturally used irrigation, just as in Egypt, because it was never lush.", "Depends on what area you're referring to in the fertile crescent.  Even in modern day Iraq there are areas that are remarkably lush, think more like Florida than the Midwest.  In particular the region from Balad to Baghdad is still well irrigated and fertile.  Additionally there was a great deal of swampland in Iraq before Hussein intentionally drained it to punish the \"marsh arabs.\"  The swamps ran from the outskirts of Baghdad to Basra in the southern part of the country. [source](_URL_0_)  ", "I remember reading that during the era of Gilgamesh, the climate was much more lush and fertile the world over. Hundreds of years later (thousands?) there was a cooling of the climate which resulted in huge famine, perhaps so bad it brought down the Akkadian Empire. This climate change, coupled with the bad farming techniques used by the ancients causing the soil to have a higher salinity, fewer neutriants, etc, thereby making it poor for farming, probably is why it is not as fertile now.\nAnd as others have said the fertile crescent is really the area around the Tigris and Euphrates, which like the Nile, is only a small ribbon in the desert. So even today it is fairly good for farming. Just not as much as it was.", "[At one time the Persian Gulf was just a lake.](_URL_0_)  Much of the rivers that currently drain into the gulf used to actually drain into a series of shallow lakes creating an \"oasis\" effect for the area.", "According to Dan Carlin's 'Hardcore History' podcast \"The Wrath of the Khans (part 4)\", the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258 resulted in the destruction (filling in) of much of the elaborate irrigation canals that had crisscrossed the region. It also led to the massacre of 200,000 to a million people. Opinions are that the area did not really recover from this until the 20th century. ", "Yes, ancient Mesopotamia was much more fertile in that area. A combination of changing climate and human over-exploitation has resulted in the more hostile Mideast environment we're familiar with today.\n\nOne should understand that while the climate was more friendly during that period, the region was still very vulnerable to exploitation, just as semi-arid Sahel regions are today; the forests in question, IIRC, were the great cedar forests of Lebanon, which were slowly harvested for ships and every other wooden thing used by ancient Mideast states. The Once fertile crescent was destroyed by improper irrigation, which caused a build up of salt and silt causing desertification over time. It's directly why the region is so inhospitable now, although natural climate change would have saw some desertification regardless.\n\nBasically, all the arable land there was ruined by salt. The source rivers in the region pass through some pretty salty rocks in the mountains up north, and they bring that salt with them down river. So, even before people started irrigating with it, the ground water was already salty. Then, once they started irrigating large areas with the river water, this deposits salt all over the place and in everything, stopping anything from growing, and creating plantless desert in its place. Obviously, people would irrigate some other area once crop yields diminished enough, and over the millennia the region was slowly weakened.\n\n\nSource: I actually still have an old paper from JSTOR called \"Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture\" which had a detailed explanation of exactly this topic.", "The reason for the discrepancy between the \"Fertile Crescent\" descriptions in the Bible and the modern \"look\" of the land is primarily desertification, both human-caused and not. Since the Biblical times, in fact, and even earlier, the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East was a thickly populated region (especially considering how sparse population was distributed across the globe until the last two centuries.) and also the heart of agricultural revolution. It may be that extensive use of soil with repeated removal of natural vegetation, as well as livestock grazing, contributed to the desertification of the region since ancient times. As the covering layer of natural vegetation is removed for agricultural and/or husbandry reasons, it crucially exposes the land to floods and erosion which would remove or damage the topsoil.\n\nOn the other hand, causes for global desertification could also be related to non-human factors, such as levels of activity on the sun, or to do with the precipitation and other weather phenomena. We simply do not have concrete records about the weather patterns in ancient past but can predict that desertification has, in fact, began before the industrial revolution and the mass removal of forests/greenery. Though of course, we have contributed to the desertification immensely\n. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes"], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/events_marsh.html"], [], ["http://www.academia.edu/386944/New_Light_on_Human_Prehistory_in_the_Arabo-Persian_Gulf_Oasis"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3e6u9q", "title": "What populations other than African Americans have risen from an utterly prejudiced social and legal status without migration?", "selftext": "I am a non-American from an English speaking country. I have spent most of my life consuming the history of the USA through the eyes of Hollywood. America is regularly maligned for real and perceived injustices, I am curious what a wider historical context will do to this view.\n\nOne of the most striking formative narratives I have been exposed to is that of American slavery and black suffrage.\n\nI can only think of a handful of other oppressed populations (Irish occupation for example) that have managed to stay within a nations confines and fight for (and mostly attain) the same level of equality as afforded to the oppressing population.\n\nImmediately groups such as Women, LGBT, Protestants (under Catholic hegemony), European peasants, and children spring to mind but these are not specifically what I was hoping to learn more about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e6u9q/what_populations_other_than_african_americans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctcas9i", "ctd71cm"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["There is actually a fairly common and interesting trans-historical tendency for ethnic change to proceed from the bottom up. For example, in Khmer texts from the ~10th century the Thai are described as hill people and good mercenaries. Fast forward a few centuries and they are ruling the kingdom, so to speak. There is also a persistent argument that Mycenaean Greek was a purely \"elite\" culture, and its demise was because of social changes from the bottom up.", "The Acadian people (comprising primarily of French and Mik'maq heritage) of Eastern Canada received much trauma from both occupying British and French forces. They had been deported in 1755 from their homelands by the British Navy, initiated by the Nova Scotia government at the time. Huge amounts of Acadians would die from this disturbance (one third is claimed but I've never seen a source on that). Now Acadians have protected rights such as French language education and have official language status on a provincial and federal level (which guarantees French service in government related facilities like hospitals and public services, among other things). An Acadian by the name of Louis J. Robichaud had been premier of the province for a time, and many Acadians hold political positions (but going more into detail breaks the 20 year rule).\n\nI don't feel qualified to talk about this more but look up subjects such as the Acadian deportation, the silent revolution of the Acadians, and the new 1982 Canadian constitution.\n\nOther groups of French Canadians went through similar traumas, but saying we are on truly equal footing is perhaps controversial and too recent to discuss.\n\nSource: Heroes of the Acadian Resistance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9mmkii", "title": "How integral to the Manhattan project was Franklin Roosevelt?", "selftext": "How much of a role did he specifically play in the development of the project? How likely would this project have been had John Garner been president? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mmkii/how_integral_to_the_manhattan_project_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7g421l"], "score": [11], "text": ["Roosevelt's main contribution was providing the project with support. This was not at all a given: the idea of pushing for a full crash nuclear-weapon production project was not at all obvious (the fact that _no other nation_ attempted it is a nice sign of that). If Roosevelt had wavered in that support, or wavered in the increasingly large additional budget and manpower requests, the odds of the project being successful in the short period of time before the probable end of the war is very low. (The Manhattan Project still holds the \"world record\" for fastest nuclear production project \u2014 2.5 years from decision to bomb.) \n\nI do not know anything about John Garner, so I can't speak to that. But I can say, the project did appeal to certain aspects that I think of as being particularly... Rooseveltian. FDR was uncharacteristically (for his time) willing to delegate major scientific and technological decisions to new agencies of his own creation (one can ask, if FDR had not allowed Vannevar Bush to create the NRDC and OSRD, would the Manhattan Project ever have gotten created? probably not), to taking expert advice on technological issues (Bush again, but also Alexander Sachs and others), and he was for his time unusually fond of government secrecy (and thus he was willing and able to keep the thing from Congress, who probably would have killed it in its early stages). All of these qualities are somewhat unusual, and indeed Truman for one undid some of this work when the war ended (e.g., banishing the OSS without a replacement; banishing the OSRD without a replacement... only some years later were the CIA, NSF, and other \"replacements\" created; and Truman was never a fan of scientific experts telling him what to do). That FDR would, with a literal signature (\"OK FDR\") approve secret, multi-million dollar sci-fi expenditures, and then go away and let the people do their work, without micromanaging or investigating or auditing (and keeping others outside the project from interfering)... that's very unusual for _any_ US President prior or since.\n\nSo again, I think one can make a plausible argument that without FDR, you don't end up with three atomic bombs in the summer of 1945. That doesn't mean you might not end up with _anything_ \u2014 but you probably don't have the \"success at any speed and cost\" project that was necessary for that particular outcome. I think people underestimate how unlikely the specific outcome was: again, if it was delayed by a few more months, the odds of the Manhattan Project being \"successful\" during the war was very low, and we all know how easy it is for a large project to be off by a few months. And one need only look to other nations (the UK, Germany, the USSR, Japan) to see how difficult it was for anyone else to commit to making a bomb.\n\nOne can talk about other FDR-specific contributions (e.g., bringing the UK back into the project, which was very much an FDR-Churchill thing and something that FDR's advisors tried unsuccessfully to prevent), but I have focused on the ones that I think would have strongly changed the history had they gone differently. Obviously all of this is counterfactual and thus has limits to what we can know. \n\nI have written [a bit on FDR and the bomb here](_URL_0_), though there is more to say about it, to be sure. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/09/30/fdr-and-the-bomb/"]]}
{"q_id": "22cc7h", "title": "Which country benefited the most from the creation of the railways?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22cc7h/which_country_benefited_the_most_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cglfy74"], "score": [19], "text": ["I think a good case can be made for Canada, which in its modern form was essentially *created* by the Canadian Pacific Railway.  The vast land area of Russia was similarly bound together by the Trans-Siberian Railway.  Even the American West, though it had cultural and political ties to the eastern states, wasn't economically integrated into the nation until the transcontinental railway routes were completed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7f62bx", "title": "What's the round structure on top of PBM Mariner flyingboats of the US Navy in WWII", "selftext": "Picture for reference: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7f62bx/whats_the_round_structure_on_top_of_pbm_mariner/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dq9yygf", "dq9z36x"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["It's a radome - aerodynamic fairing for a radar. The PBM-3C (and presumably the pictured -3D) was fitted with radar on some airframes. Such equipment would vary depending on mission requirements and the operator. For example, the Royal Australian Air Force operated the Mariner without a radome in transport and air-sea rescue duties.", "It's a radome to cover the AN/APS-15 search radar, first fitted to an experimental model designated XPBM-3E then rolled out to production models starting with the PBM-3C (from Squadron/Signal's *PBM Mariner in Action*).\n\nThe most common installation of APS-15, also known as H2X (and \"Mickey\" due to some early installations resembling Mickey Mouse), was on B-17s, B-24s and B-29s as ground mapping radar for blind bombing; on naval patrol aircraft like the PBM it was used for general search operations, capable of detecting a 5000 ton ship at a range of around 40 miles. See [Radar Bulletin No. 2A: The Tactical Use of Radar in Aircraft] (_URL_0_) for further details, including some example images from the APS-15 scope. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.modellversium.de/galerie/img/6/0/5/8605/3118420/martin-pbm-3d-mariner-mach2.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/RADTWOA/RADTWOA-2.html#an/aps-15"]]}
{"q_id": "4hkie0", "title": "Why was Huey Long considered a fascist?", "selftext": "_URL_0_ \n\nThis post does a pretty good job of explaining his history but I can't at all see how the man described by that post came to be called a fascist. If anything, he seems quite the opposite. Am I misunderstanding what \"fascist\" is supposed to mean in this context? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hkie0/why_was_huey_long_considered_a_fascist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2qq70s"], "score": [3], "text": ["Do you have a source that calls Long a fascist? I have heard him called a populist and a demagogue, but I don't think I've ever heard him called a fascist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v856g/how_would_you_classify_governor_huey_longs/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21i2xg", "title": "Were there any gym-like locations in Ancient Rome or Greece where people would go and workout?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21i2xg/were_there_any_gymlike_locations_in_ancient_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgd96kr", "cgd98oo", "cgdd0a2", "cgden4u"], "score": [156, 22, 60, 5], "text": ["Yes.  The term gymnasium is actually derived form the greek work gymnos.  Most greek and roman communities would have a gymnasium where people would engage in athletics such as wrestling (completely in the nude).  These structures were large, open air facilities(think of a modern stadium). Over time, gymnasiums became a place of social gathering and health promotion.  Many gyms had baths and saunas attached that athletes would go to after their work-out.  ", "I found this question really interesting and I'd like to piggy back off it if you don't mind, OP. The first part may be a question for anthropology, but I'm curious as to what time in history people began dedicating time to physical fitness outside of what they already did for hunting purposes and what not. I'm also wondering when people began exercising purely for aesthetics, and not for functional strength. Were there any examples of ancient Romans lifting just to look good? ", "In his letters, [Lucius Annaeus Seneca](_URL_0_) (4 BC \u2013 AD 65) complains about the distractions of living over a gym:\n\n >    Beshrew me if I think anything more requisite than silence for a man who secludes himself in order to study!  Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates about my ears!  I have lodgings right over a bathing establishment.  So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!  When your strenuous gentleman, for example, is exercising himself by flourishing leaden weights; when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunt; and whenever he releases his imprisoned breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy and high-pitched tones. \n\n(From [Epistle LVI](_URL_1_))\n\nSo gyms haven't changed much in 2000+ years. :)", "The Baths of Caracalla were one of many bath houses built in Ancient Rome, used for fitness and hygiene by Romans, both men and women alike.\n\nThe Romans Bathouses often had spa-like services where they would offer hot baths, cold baths, mineral baths, mud baths, and after annointing you with scented oil, would scrape off dead skin and such as well. Understanding that the masses had no access to running water in their homes during the centuries of Roman rule, making these baths important factors in preventing the spread of disease. This final claim is unsourced, but Rome was a city of over a million people around the 1st century AD, and this kind of concentration of population demanded certain hygienic services provided to the populace to avoid the spread of disease by keeping the potential hosts at a certain modicum of cleanliness.\n\nThese \"spa\" services were available to every citizen of Rome, and was one of the more egalitarian services of the time. Rich and poor both tended to share bath times together. Men and Women were both able to access the baths, but on different days.\n\nRegarding the focus of your question, these bath houses also offered athletic training facilities to Roman citizens. Many of these traditions were inherited from Ancient Greece, which also utilized these kinds of bath houses. Typical activities were wrestling, javelin/shot-put/discus style throwing,  and weightlifting (although not the typical barbells we see today, more like picking up heavy things and moving them over there).\n\nThe actual bath house buildings themselves were double walled grand architectural achievements. Fires were lit beneath the baths to keep water hot and circulating through the walls, helping all of the many functions of the baths. These baths were also decorated with mosaics, depicting possible physical activity for athletes.\n\nFinally, much like gyms of today, these baths served greatly as social meeting places. With large groups of men or women gathering together , it was inevitable that socializing would take place.\n\nYou can find evidence of Roman bathhouses as far as england or into eastern Europe, althouhg some are in better condition than others.\n\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is an interesting site regarding the importance of Bathhouses in Roman Society, but for the above text most of my information has stemmed from varied sources, which I learned while leading guided tours in the Baths of Caracalla.\n\nHope this is helpful!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger", "http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#\u2018LVI1"], ["http://www.ancient.eu.com/Roman_Baths/"]]}
{"q_id": "sg5yu", "title": "I'm a new wide-eyed baby to history. Can anyone point me to some interesting resources? Some documentaries, features, etc? (No Netflix, I'm not in the USA)", "selftext": "So, sorry, my bad, should have provided a time period.\n\nAncient Rome fascinates me. So does Mesopotamia. And I guess the South American Civilizations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sg5yu/im_a_new_wideeyed_baby_to_history_can_anyone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4drdkd"], "score": [5], "text": ["Wow, could you be more specific? What are you interested in? Pic an area, a historical era, a topic...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cb8244", "title": "Before crucifying Jesus (happened or not, doesn\u2019t matter), was it often that people have been crucified, or that was the first time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cb8244/before_crucifying_jesus_happened_or_not_doesnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ete1488"], "score": [4], "text": ["It was common.\nAfter Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus crushed Spartacus, ending the Third Servile War (73 - 71 B.C.E), it's been estimated that around 6000 prisoners were crucified along the Appian Way. \n\nArrian (a Roman historian) claims that Alexander the Great crucified people as well (hundreds, if not thousands after taking the city of Tyre), and he supposedly got this information from material left behind by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's top generals. \n\nHerodotus\u00a0describes the execution of a Persian general at the hands of Athenians in about 479 B.C.E: \"They nailed him to a plank and hung him up\u00a0... this\u00a0Artayctes\u00a0who suffered death by crucifixion\"\n\nI'd also like to quote the following;\n\n\"This form of state terror, widespread across the\u00a0Roman Empire\u00a0which included\u00a0Europe,\u00a0North Africa\u00a0and\u00a0Western Asia, originated several centuries before the Common Era continuing into the fourth century CE when the practice was discontinued by Constantine, the emperor of\u00a0Rome. Hengel, in his monumental work on the subject, Crucifixion\u00a0(1989:22-23) writes that while authors generally regard it\u2019s origin as in Persia due to the writings of Herodotus it\u2019s practice was found among the Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Taurians, Celts, Greeks, Seleucids, Romans, Britanni, Numidians, Carthagians the latter who may have transferred it\u2019s knowledge to the Romans.\" - Crucifixion in Antiquity: The Archaeological Evidence, by Joe Zias"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "68qzu9", "title": "Have any 20th century dictators successfully given up power, allowed their countries to transition to democracy, and then retired either internally or internationally without facing prosecution?", "selftext": "I would think that would set a good precedent which could encourage people like Kim Jong Un or Bashar Al Assad to consider that as an option, but the closest example I can think of is Pinochet, who was eventually prosecuted. Maybe Mobutu, but he died very shortly after his exile. \n\nAlternatively, do any of the children of such dictators continue to live affluently off of the alleged proceeds of their parent's graft, free and clear so to speak... without threat of prosecution or civil forfeiture themselves.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68qzu9/have_any_20th_century_dictators_successfully/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh15yt0", "dh160c8"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["Best I can do is Daniel Ortega, leader of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and effectively the leader of the country from 1981-1984 and then officially the president from 1984-1990. You may remember the Sandinistas were targeted by the US government in the 80s as part of the Iran-Contra affair because they were dirty commies. During his tenure with the Sandinistas from '79 to '90 they did some pretty bad things, violating civil rights and doing a bit of ethnic cleansing on the indigenous population (on the order of thousands of people), but he was never prosecuted for any of this. As far as personal enrichment goes I have no idea\n\nIn 1990 he agreed to democratic elections, lost, lost again in '96 and '01, then was elected in '06 and again in '11 and a third term last year. International commissions have (when allowed to monitor them) seen Nicaraguan elections as being above board so he is probably a legitimate ruler now, but he is more moderate than back in the day when he helped rob a bank with a machine gun. He did get prosecuted for that, was jailed, but was released in the mid 70s and that was the last time he was behind bars", "I think President Soeharto of Indonesia fits your bill quite well. He is the second president of the Republic of Indonesia.\n\nThe legacy of his presidency is under debate even today. Some of his economic reforms and infrastructure projects helped make Indonesia one of the fastest growing economies in the world up until the 1990s. He transformed the Indonesian government into a strong, centralised unit that 'worked closely' with the military. His presidency saw the levels of poverty and illiteracy fall drastically. \n\n*But*, he also filled the ranks of the government with his military friends and relatives. Lucrative government projects would be assigned very often to his relatives. A select few people could own many businesses which were often assigned generous concessions and insurance through public funds. He used anti-communism sentiments to invade East Timor and many people died there until Indonesia pulled out many years later. He was quite draconian even on student protestors in Indonesia, even in the capital. \n\nTo get a small idea of the level of corruption, check out this New York Times article from 1998 after his resignation: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd yes, he did resign. But not without a fight. The 1997 Asian Moneyray Crisis hit Indonesia very hard with the exchange rate going from Rp. 2,000 to the USD to nearly Rp. 17,000 to the dollar. He still held on until the protests led to mass riots with local populations assaulting ethnic Chinese citizens and foreigners. I was about 3 years old at the time, so my memory is dim. But I distinctly remember the company my father worked for ( an Indian textile company) bussing an entire colony of Indian citizens ( around 400 of us) to an expensive hotel near the colony and then flying us back to India the very next day. This happened all across Indonesia. Really, he didn't have a choice but to resign. \n\nPost-resignation Soeharto lived quietly in his home. Multiple efforts to prosecute him have been tried until 2008 when he died, but each time his family doctors offered mysterious health problems that prevented him from being present in court to be tried.\n\nHis family has been fending off anti-corruption charges ever since. To this day they have wide support in the Indonesian Army and among anti-communist parties. The true amount of wealth controlled by the Government is unclear. But it must be vast. They still live in much more comfort than most people worldwide, let alone In Indonesia, can afford. \n\nHis son was tried and sentenced to jail. No other convictions have taken place. Since his death, the general mood in Indonesia seems to be to celebrate his legacy and his achievements rather than condemn his horrible human rights record. It is a tough debate to be fair. \n\nAs for whether this can help with removing Kim-Jong Un, I'd be sceptical. The Indonesian public's fury at Soeharto was what led to his resignation. In North Korea, despite a horrifying famine that had people resort to cannibalism to survive and terrible conditions of poverty and fear and state control, opposition is still only bubbling quietly, not furiously revolting to pull him down. There are not many more sanctions that can be placed on NK. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://mobile.nytimes.com/1998/01/16/business/suharto-billions-special-report-for-asian-nation-s-first-family-financial-empire.html"]]}
{"q_id": "17g148", "title": "Was being sent to the Gulag a death sentence in the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "I'm sure that the conditions in different camps probably varied and some had higher precentages of loss of life. However, did the people who ordered others sent to the Gulag consider it the equivalent of a death sentence in terms of your changes of survival? Or was it not considered a form of execution, but a different kind punishment altogether?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17g148/was_being_sent_to_the_gulag_a_death_sentence_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c856gu4", "c856pij", "c85al2i"], "score": [17, 5, 3], "text": ["GULag (\u0413\u043b\u0430\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u0443\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043b\u0430\u0433\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0439 \u0438 \u043c\u0435\u0441\u0442 \u0437\u0430\u043a\u043b\u044e\u0447\u0435\u043d\u0438\u044f) is a wider term for the prison and penal colony system in the USSR. \n\nTo answer your question, it was by no means a death sentence. There are some statistics of the mortality rate of prisoners. The rate peaked at 25% in 1942 and was at 22% in 1943, which likely has more to do with the war and the resources available for feeding the prisoners. Most of the other years the mortality was under 10%, and under 1% in the later years. The total official number of deaths in the GULag from 1930 - 1956 is 1.6 million (Source: \u0421\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043a\u0430 \u043f\u043e\u0434\u0433\u043e\u0442\u043e\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0430 \u043f\u043e \u043c\u0430\u0442\u0435\u0440\u0438\u0430\u043b\u0430\u043c \u041e\u0423\u0420\u0417 \u0413\u0423\u041b\u0410\u0413\u0430 (\u0413\u0410\u0420\u0424. \u0424. 9414)). The total number of prisoners that went through the system is 15-18 million, so we're looking at a mortality rate of 10%, while the death toll due to WW2 was aprox. 15% of total Soviet pre-war population. \n\nRemember, during the purges of the 1930s, the NKVD was not shy about the death penalty, so if they wanted someone dead, it was done. GULag was the prison system of the USSR, albeit a very rough one, nothing more. ", "I would say no, not really. Was it bad? Yes, definitely. However the mortality rate was not as high as to be expected from the tales woven. The mortality rate estimated from 1934-1939 was 4.23%. The ones who were more likely to die was the weaker and older. This is from the official archives which were released after the Soviet Union fell. So, I highly doubt it was considered a death sentence even to those in power. \n\nHowever keep in mind the sentences for even petty crimes was huge, so it was not a death sentence, but you would not be society for 10-20 years. You were made to basically disappear, because you would be sent so far from home, it would be like living in another world.  ", "The following answer mainly refers to the Stalinist era and prisoners arrested under the political and work related articles of the soviet penal code.  \n\nOne of the main points put forth in Solzhenitsyn's \"The Gulag Archipelago\" is that the Soviet economy depended on the gulags for free labour to complete the huge public works and infrastructure that allowed the USSR to become and remain a great power.  [Antoni Ekart](_URL_0_) referred to himself and other gulag prisoners as \"human machinery.\"\nMany people did die in the camps, but that was not the reason for their existence.  For a deliberate execution, the NKVD preferred mass graves and machine guns.\n\nTo address your question about the intentions of the person sentencing people to the gulags:\nAccording to Ekart, the sentences were a form of a quota. They were drawn up in mass, in absence of the accused, in Moscow. When a person was arrested, the local NKVD would write a report and perform an interrogation designed to fulfill the conditions of the type of sentencing they had received from Moscow. So who was really sentencing these people to the gulags? What was their intention?\nThe bureaucrats in Moscow didn't know who was being accused, they just needed more free labour to construct railways to Vladivostok, mining camps in Archangelsk, and factories in Magnitogorsk.  It didn't matter who was sent, they just needed numbers and justification.\n\nThe local NKVD's intention was to do their jobs, which in this case was to fill these sentences, and avoid falling out of favour with the party. To them, Moscow was sentencing these people, the local NKVD was just providing the justification.\n\nRemember too, that deaths in the camps were considered to be the fault of the workers themselves.  They were being fed, provided with shelter, and a purpose in life. If they died under such conditions, that was due to their own carelessness or any other factor that kept the blame away from the system. So the party did not consider the camps to be death sentences because the official line was that the camps were safe.\n\nI could go on, but this is getting long enough. I'm happy to reply if you have more questions.\nMost of this information can be found in Solzhenitsyn's book, but I don't have my copy on hand so I can't source it properly.\nThe information I use from Ekart's book is from the \"Human Machinery\" and \"No Escape\" chapters. It's an old book and I can't find an ISBN.\nThe rest is anecdotal from the members of my family who were sent to the Halmer-Yu, Vorkuta, and Magnitogorsk camps.  Of the 15 members of my family who were sent to the gulag, only 2 survived. Their crime was owning a house in Estonia when it was annexed by the USSR.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Vanished-Without-Trace-Antoni-Ekart/dp/B0028UDF52"]]}
{"q_id": "2jq206", "title": "How was bastardy viewed in classical Greek culture? Does the presence of so many heroes born to unmarried parents suggest that there was no great stigma against it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jq206/how_was_bastardy_viewed_in_classical_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cle9pt3"], "score": [71], "text": ["As a linguist, I can tell you a little about one word in particular: *parthenios*.\n\n*Parthenios* roughly translates as \"bastard,\" but more accurately as \"son of an unmarried woman.\" It is formed off *parthenos*, a term typically used of a virgin, but better translated as \"young woman.\" Anyway, *parthenios* shows up in Iliad 16 when Achilles is choosing whom to send with Patroklus into battle. Of the men he chooses, two are described as children of immortal fathers (Menesthios and Eudoros) but only one is labeled a *parthenios* (Eudoros). Both women *are* married at the time in our story, so the difference seems to be whether the sons were conceived in or out of wedlock, regardless of the father. Menesthios was called a son of Boros (much like Jesus is the son of Joseph) while Eudoros is a *parthenios*. Homer tells us that Ekhekles pays many bride-gifts to marry Eudoros's mother (16.190), so it seems that there wasn't a penalty for her lack of virginity. It may be, though, that so long as the sexual activity and birthing is kept secret, then there is no penalty (Hermes lies with her in secret and Eudoros is left to his grandfather to raise).\n\nThis latter explanation holds some weight because in Euripides's *Ion*, we find Kreousa raped and then birthing in secret, and when she exposes Ion to the elements, she retains the adjective *parthenos*. (Maybe someone else can talk about this example though. I'm not well studied on Euripides.) Pindar in *Olympian* 6 calls Pitana a *parthenia* (daughter of unmarried woman) and mentions her hiding in her mother's robe.\n\nBased on examples like these, the scholar Giulia Sissa is of the opinion that *parthenos* is a social status rather than a biological term. I'm inclined to agree, and I certainly don't find the concept a foreign one. \n\nThere's another word for bastard, *skotios* shadowy or dark, which also shows up in the Iliad (book 6), and the accepted explanation is that a bastard is one \"born in the shadows\" or \"born in the dark.\" This has further significance because of the wedding procession in which the bride would travel from her house to the groom's house in public by torchlight. Torches are typical identifiers of a wedding, used in both the Iliad (Achilles's shield) and in vase paintings. Thus, one born outside of marriage is one born outside the publicly sanctioned union and lacks the social benefits that would come with (such as first-born succession rights). I may be misremembering here, but I believe that Euripides also describes Ion as being born \"without torches,\" which would of course connect these two terms for bastardy in a tangible way.\n\nHopefully this is a good starting place while you wait on other historians to answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k81kx", "title": "I have a question about the history of Computers.", "selftext": "Ok. In the 1950's computers looked like [this](_URL_1_). This one can hold only 5Mb of memory. It was huge. What were scientists and government reactions to computers that were a lot smaller. Take the [LISA](_URL_0_) for example. What were their reactions to that? Was there shock going from a room consuming power hungry behemoth that could only hold so little, to something that was so much smaller, yet so much more powerful?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k81kx/i_have_a_question_about_the_history_of_computers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbmbd96", "cbmeshj", "cbmiklf"], "score": [7, 13, 2], "text": ["Several things. First the Lisa was released in the early 1980s (30 years later). Also the Lisa was hardly cheap at the time, and IIRC, was one of the reason it never really got popular. So the size difference is simply engineering and better technological advances. One of the biggest was the transistor which was developed in the early 1950s and replaced vacuum tubes which were much bigger. This, unsurprisingly, made computers smaller.\n\nIf I missed what you were asking please clarify. I'm not sure what you mean by reaction, I'm sure the government wasn't shocked by this, generally things improve and the government was involved in the technological advances. ", "Personal computers weren't initially of much interest to people involved with big computers. At the time the Apple Lisa was introduced, the fastest off-the-shelf supercomputer was the [Cray-2](_URL_0_), which would be roughly on the order of 2000 times more powerful than the Lisa in terms of scientific computing. So big machines still had their place at the time.\n\nThat's not to say miniaturization hadn't made an impact outside of the PC world, though. Somewhere between the tiny PCs and the giant mainframes and supercomputers were the [minicomputers](_URL_4_), introduced in the 1960s and wildly popular in the 1970s. These were computers that were about the size of a typical stand-up refrigerator and were a great boon to organizations doing medium-range computing (managing accounting and payroll, modest simulations, generating reports, etc.)\n\nAt the time the Lisa was released, the most popular minicomputer would have been a [PDP-11](_URL_3_) (I'm guessing maybe the PDP-11/70 or the PDP-11/34). The PDP-11s for sale at the time would have been likely roughly around the same price as the Lisa's $10000 (maybe more like $15000 or so) and with a little bit more powerful of a CPU and 4 times as much memory. This is speculation, but I'm guessing that if you were a business that already had a minicomputer, you saw no reason to consider looking at a personal computer.\n\nThe academic and business worlds did notice the effects of miniaturization beyond minicomputers into smaller things, though, especially once we got into the mid 1980s. Many manufacturers didn't think the PC market would explode like it did (most famously IBM), but \"big metal\" computers did get smaller.\n\nThe same year that the Apple Lisa came out, Sun Microsystems was formed. [Here's Wikipedia's article on the Sun-2, which came out the year after](_URL_1_). The Sun-2 \"workstation\" (and a lot of Unix \"workstations\" of the 1980s) looks like what we would think of as a personal computer, but it wasn't, really. Workstations of the 1980s were designed to be tethered to a server somewhere else. It was sort of a transition period between the old minicomputer age and the up-and-coming desktop computer age. You still had a \"big\" computer but now you were giving people small terminals that allowed them to make use of this \"big\" hardware remotely. Hewlett Packard was a little bit later to the game (they were a minicomputer manufacturer) but adopted the workstation model, too, with the [HP-9000](_URL_2_).\n\nIn the 1990s there began a sort of convergence between workstations and PCs. Workstations became more independently powerful, not so much dependent on doing everything through the server, and PCs (through things like Windows 3.1) became better at dealing with a server environment.\n\nThe long of the short of it is that these \"tiny\" computers really were good for little beyond toys in the beginning, so far as the big hardware users (\"scientists and government\" as you say) were concerned. A PC could do almost nothing useful. *But* the technologies that were going into PCs (such as an entire microprocessor on one IC) did immediately start working their way into the designs of the manufacturers of big hardware.", "As a general point, there are a lot of incremental steps between those machines. It didn't happen overnight (even if a few decades is not exactly ages and ages), and there are plenty of in-between steps (e.g. microcomputers).\n\nThat being said, the reactions of scientists and the government are perhaps the least interesting ones. The reaction was, \"oh good, more computing power for cheaper.\" \n\nThe more interesting reaction is the broader cultural one. Even by the 1960s people were getting the idea that computers were getting cheaper and more powerful very quickly. One nice visual example of this that I like to use are the Time magazine covers that feature computers, from the 1950s to the 1990s (which someone has [helpfully also compiled here](_URL_0_)). \n\nThe 1950 cover is the \"computer that fills a whole room, mostly used by the military or the government\" idea. But by the mid-1960s you can see them infiltrating into private life\u00a0\u2014 a sentiment we today can identify with. (One of the recurrent themes in the 1960s Berkeley protests was not wanting to be reduced to a punch card, which by that point had become a ubiquitous part of individual interaction with bureaucracy.) By the late 1970s, you have machines that seem \"personal\" and tiny; by the early 1980s, the computer has come into the home. And by the early 1990s people are gushing on about viruses and being online and the Internet is just about to take off \u2014 suddenly it becomes about connectivity and its dangers. \n\nBut not one of these things was really so far what came before as to be \"shocking.\"  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://oldcomputers.net/pics/lisa1.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/SHUGr89.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-2", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP9000", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer"], ["http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/files/2010/06/Time-Magazines.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "r4o9t", "title": "Slovenia in WWII", "selftext": "Hey there, a good friend of mine once did some research on Slovene men conscripted into the German army, and this piqued her interest. She was wondering if there was any good work done recently about Slovenia during the war. A quick search of my library catalog and didn't turn up anything, does anyone have any suggestions? Or, maybe anything about other groups conscripted into the German army?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r4o9t/slovenia_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c42vs69", "c42xs4k", "c42z4ci"], "score": [3, 3, 2], "text": ["Slovenia is not one I recall anything on.  Try looking around [this site](_URL_0_), you might find something.  They certainly have books on other groups that participated in the war on the German side (many of them in fact).", "You may be struggling with searching for sources as Slovenia wasn't a state (or even one of the states of Yugoslavia, which were Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia) before the outbreak of war. Slovenes were mostly situated in northern Croatia. After Hitler's conquest of Yugoslavia Slovenia was split 2:1 between the German Reich and Italy respectively: with the capital, Ljubljana under Italian control.\n\nAs I'm witing this I realise that my source has little relevant information and is focusing on something else, so I can't really help you apart from suggesting widening your search of sources to ones about wartime Yugoslavia or Croatia and going from there.   ", "I came across this book: _URL_0_\n\nI'm not sure where you'd find it though. I think. I think them not being an independent country and the fact that Slovenes were split between then-Yugoslavia, Italy, and Austria hindered a lot of scholarly work into the situation, since they were a lot less legible in these countries. The merging of their partisan movement into Tito's also put them on the historical back burner, so to speak.\n\n_URL_1_ describes the Axis side, but I don't think there's a whole lot beyond the usual low-level police-esque collaboration under the guise of \"anti-communism\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.europabooks.com/allied_axis_forces.htm"], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=tEQLNAAACAAJ", "http://books.google.com/books?id=s9AMAQAAMAAJ&amp;q=Slovenian+Axis+Forces+in+World+War+II+1941-1945&amp;dq=Slovenian+Axis+Forces+in+World+War+II+1941-1945&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=0qFoT7nlHszhrAeeg5nsBw&amp;ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA"]]}
{"q_id": "eay3oi", "title": "What happened to the Sumerians? Are there still any people group who share a common ancestor with them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eay3oi/what_happened_to_the_sumerians_are_there_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fb0c67m"], "score": [35], "text": ["Sumer was a city-state in Mesopotamia. It appears to end about 1900 BCE as a political power, as other peoples (\"Amorites\") push into the region.  Sargon of Akkad achieves lasting fame as perhaps the first \"Emperor\" in history; he conquers and rules what had been Sumerian polities. The Sumerian language and writing system continued to be used, but ultimately Mesopotamian populations become dominated by Akkadian; the last cuneiform tablets using the Sumerian writing system (but to write Akkadian) are roughly the first century A.D.   See\n\nCooper, Jerrold S. \u201cSumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad.\u201d *Orientalia*, vol. 42, 1973, pp. 239\u2013246\n\n. . . for a more extensive discussion of the linguistic evidence for the interchange between Akkadians and Sumer; this was a complex society using both languages, sometimes bilingually, sometimes for different purposes, for a thousand years or more. As a parallel, you might think of the way that Latin and other languages functioned side by side in Europe, long after the Roman Empire itself had disappeared. Sumerian is to subsequent Mesopotamian civilization a bit like that-- there's a language, a writing system, these persist long after the particular city state they belonged to has lost power.\n\nPopulation genetics suggest that some people of Iraq have ancestry in the region going back many thousands of years -- notably the \"marsh Arabs\"; that is not definitive proof that they are descended from Sumerians-- but they have been in the region for thousands of years, and their genes show a signal not descended from more recent arrivals to the region (eg Semitic peoples, South Asians).   This is a domain where the molecular geneticist's toolkit rather than the historian's provides the answers, see:\n\n[In search of the genetic footprints of Sumerians: a survey of Y-chromosome and mtDNA variation in the Marsh Arabs of Iraq](_URL_0_) for an extensive discussion.\n\nSo -- if there's a descendent of ancient Sumer alive today, the best place to look for him/her would be very close to the site of ancient Sumer itself, in the marshes around Basra in Iraq, just north of Kuwait."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-288"]]}
{"q_id": "5u8j9q", "title": "How different was the life of a Muslim woman under mughal rule compared to our present times?", "selftext": "I've been reading about Shah Jahan's eldest daughter and women during that time and it seemed that Muslims during that time were overall progressive compared to the muslim dominant countries of our present time.Can one assume so?What about other Islam empires of that time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5u8j9q/how_different_was_the_life_of_a_muslim_woman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dds4p3s"], "score": [10], "text": ["When you say present times there is a huge amount of difference between the current \"Muslim dominant countries\". You should ideally be more specific, do you want a comparison to the not progressive ones like Saudi Arabia or the somewhat more progressive ones like Turkey or Indonesia? Or India, given that's where the Mughal Empire was based and it has more Muslims than any other country?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5zksdk", "title": "In 1817 the Erie Canal began construction in order to facilitate shipping between NYC and the Great Lakes. This was cheaper than a railroad, how? Why?", "selftext": "The canal has 35 locks and obviously had to be excavated, that seems like it would be wildly more expensive than laying track. Can someone explain this to me further?\n\nAll information gained from this: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zksdk/in_1817_the_erie_canal_began_construction_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["deyvcqh"], "score": [9], "text": ["It was cheaper than a railway in one key respect: time. 1817 was well before the the railway became capable of transporting large volumes of goods over long distances. The world's first public steam railway, the British Stockton and Darlington Railway, opening in 1825. This was a comparably small railway, connecting the towns of Stockton and Darlington with nearby collieries. It only ran for some 25 miles, compared to over 300 for the Erie Canal. In 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first intercity route opened. Again, this was a short railway, connecting two cities close to each other, and stretching for just 35 miles. In the US, the first railway, the Baltimore and Ohio, began construction in 1828. By this time, the Erie Canal had been operating in full for three years. By the time the B & O opened in 1830, it had been operating for five. It would take several more years for the B & O to reach the length of the Erie Canal. The first trains were, while somewhat faster than a canal barge, carried less weight. This meant that if you wanted to ship a lot of stuff over long distances in the early 1800s, you wanted a canal. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6y4qxi", "title": "Did any ancient civilizations venerate insects?", "selftext": "So this is just something I thought of earlier; so tons of animals are held sacred by various ancient religions, but I've never heard of any ancient religion venerate insects like they do birds, snakes, etc. Did any ancient religions that we know of hold any particular insects to be sacred? If so, what were the insects symbolic of? Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6y4qxi/did_any_ancient_civilizations_venerate_insects/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmkoj2x"], "score": [24], "text": ["The dung beetle was worshipped by ancient Egyptians. It was seen as an incarnation of the sun god Khepri, and its name was part of many royal monikers, including Men-kheper-re and Kheper-ka-re. The scarab ornament found on mummies is a dung beetle.\u00a0"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rcptl", "title": "Did the American public really deride and scorn GI's returning from Viet Nam?", "selftext": "Weren't the majority of US soldiers drafted into the army and have no choice but to go?\n\nIf so, why would people be so cruel to their own soldiers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rcptl/did_the_american_public_really_deride_and_scorn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44r84i", "c44rd4g", "c44rocq", "c44sogx", "c45cxep"], "score": [13, 8, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["We've already tackled this subject [here](_URL_0_) and[ here](_URL_1_).\n\nIn a short summary: It was uncommon, but it did happen.", "Not a historian - was alive at the time - at the beginning of the war protest the soldiers were seen at anti-war rallies  and were welcome - as the protest increased and men began to flee to Canada to avoid the draft, soldiers became seen as aiding the establishment  - so they began to be scorned and even persecuted --- the idea was to shame them - the war was seen by the youth as unlawful and unnecessary however the establishment saw only communism taking over the world  if we backed down.\n\nthis is not close to an in depth analysis - just hoped to provide a quick and dirty answer until someone more versed in the time can explain --- those were very crazy days - the changes in how families interacted were shaken to the core by not only the war but the youth movement, free love and drug culture - in some ways the time between the death of JFK and John Lennon might best be called The Crazy Years - it was a wild ride - my grandpa still blames The Beatles (and that isn't too far from a truth)", "Anecdotal: My father returned from Vietnam around 1970 and was spit on by a crowd at the airport.", "Yeah, this is anecdotal,  but I know a mechanic that was denied employment at at least one location for his service.", "Also anecdotal: my Uncle Darryl came back from his second tour in 1968. He and the others in uniform were given Hawaiian shirts and shorts to wear before they reboarded in Honolulu so they would be less obvious at the terminal in San Francisco. He said to his dying day that he felt a burning shame at being forced to sneak back into his own country when all he had done was his duty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mee6s/this_has_bugged_me_for_a_while_what_is_the_key/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qkv5n/did_protestors_spit_on_returning_vietnam_vets/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7llemp", "title": "Americans often say that older generations didn't express emotion like we do nowadays and that's why PTSD wasn't discussed. The Korean and Vietnam wars took place less than a decade from each other, however, and Vietnam is seen as a conflict that resulted in more soldiers with PTSD. Why is that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7llemp/americans_often_say_that_older_generations_didnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drnnyk3"], "score": [642], "text": ["In reality, 20 years separated the armistice of the Korean War (1953) from the last American troops leaving South Vietnam (1973). The answer to this question lies not in the nature of the conflicts, but rather what happened to the veterans *after* the conflicts.\n\nDuring and after the end of the Korean War, many veterans returned home to a United States that, like what happened with after the Vietnam War, had mixed feelings about their participation. Unlike the Second World War, the Korean War did not produce an indisputable victory. In fact, it wasn't even classified as a war at first, only considered a \"police action\". Furthermore, unlike the Second World War, life continued in the United States. There was no home front, no rationing or involvement of a large part of the civilian population to drive the Korean War to \"victory at home\". The Korean War was forgotten and its veteran returned home to a world that they had troubles readjusting to, many feeling disillusioned with their service since they weren't received home in the same grand way as Second World War veterans were (although 20 % of Korean War veterans were veterans from that war as well) and the fact that the war hadn't finished with a conventional victory. Korean War veterans were even rejected from veterans organizations such as the American Legion or the The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States due to the status of the Korean War as a \"police action\" (and therefore not a real war in the eyes of Second World War veterans).\n\nThe first major academic study over the men and women who served in the Korean War, Melinda L. Pash's *In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War* (NYU Press, 2014), argues that many Korean War veterans internalized the issues stemming from PTSD (which they were unaware that they had) due to their upbringing during the Great Depression and the Second World War, two events that Pash argues are vital in understanding the attitudes of Korean War veterans towards their post-war life. The Korean War veteran suffered in silence. The difference between Vietnam War veterans and Korean War veterans in this regard is the simple fact that the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs never reacted to the problems of the Korean War veterans. They did, however, react to the problem of PTSD of Vietnam War veterans and the high visibility of PTSD treatment programs and counseling during this time (in particularly during the 1980s) made Korean War veterans attend them which in turn brought them to the attention of professional medical staff and the government. As Pash writes:\n\n >  Suddenly, doctors and researchers as well as the government took notice and began to fund and conduct studies of Korean War veterans and the incidence of PTSD. These efforts demonstrated that contrary to previous assumptions, not only did Korean War veterans exhibit symptoms of PTSD right after the war but older veterans were still suffering from the effects.\n\nUltimately, it had been the problems of the Vietnam War veterans that had made it possible for Korean War veterans to get attention for the very same problems, more than 30 years after the war. By that time, it was too late for some Korean War veterans who had suffered in silence until it was all too much to take. Many more Korean War veterans, not necessarily suffering from PTSD but rather of other injuries related to their wartime service, continued to fight for recognition and medical assistance. Not until the 1990s did veterans from the battle of the Chosin Reservoir receive medical assistance from the US government for frostbite-related health complications - something which the veterans themselves had been fighting for since the 1950s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1xgin1", "title": "Why is the Western United States not often mentioned in US Civil War history?", "selftext": "In particular I' thinking of the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Were there other battles in the West? Were they not decisive to the war and was that why they are hardly mentioned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xgin1/why_is_the_western_united_states_not_often/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfb759v"], "score": [10], "text": ["The Battle of Glorieta Pass, in the state of New Mexico in which I currently reside in, was the farthest west the Civil War ever went. There might have been small skirmishes elsewhere that I'm unaware of, but the largest engagement of the Civil War in the western theatre was fought in New Mexico.\n\nI have read a few books that only cover the east coast engagements--Gettysburg, Bull Run, Seven Days and Antietam--that only give a glancing look at the western theatre. As its been said many times before, the fall of Vicksburg effectively cut the Confederacy in half and was tantamount, in strategic terms, to R.E. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg. \n\nIn Shelby Foote's *Civil War Narrative* he writes in the author's note that his goal was to bring more attention to the western theatre and to the various naval engagements that were fought during the war. There are certainly many books that will do that--Foote's being one of them. \n\nHere's a great [link](_URL_0_) to an article that was recently published on the battles that were fought in New Mexico. It contains a link at the bottom to the author's expanded work on the New Mexico campaign between Canby and Sibley. \n\nIn my opinion, most casual students of history find it more interesting to learn about the exploits of U.S. Grant, R.E. Lee, George McClellan, and Stonewall Jackson in the eastern theatre. There's something about Lee invading Maryland or Pennsylvania that always gives the reading a more interesting tone for me. I figure part of the reason for this was the proximity that all of these battles were fought in relation to the capitals of the Union and Confederacy. When Lee invaded the northern states the question was would he make a run on the northern capital?  New York City?  Baltimore? \n\nWhen McClellan and Grant were on the doorstep of Richmond would they be able to seize the Confederate capital and the Confederate government? \n\nIn essence, it's like the difference in chess between going after a pawn or a rook as opposed to a king or queen. The circumstances, at least to the casual eye, make it more exciting to learn about the capture or almost capture of the king or queen.  If the Confederacy had been able to capture Washington D.C. in 1862-1863, hypothetically speaking, this would almost have assuredly led to European intervention on their behalf.  I'd say the battles in New Mexico were the equivalent of capturing or battling for a pawn--it mattered but not as much as the other pieces.  Whereas the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg would be the same as damaging or capturing a queen or a knight.  Maybe damaging is the wrong word to use for Gettysburg, but in chess you can get to a point where you take the queen out of play because of a position you've put it in.  I think that effectively describes what happened to Lee's Army of Northern Virginia after Gettysburg for a short while at least before the Wilderness campaign.  Whereas the Union capturing Vicksburg was the equivalent of taking that piece off the board altogether.\n\nBut the cool thing about all the campaigns or battles that were fought is they were all like going after a piece on the chessboard. While Glorieta or Red River might not have been as exciting as going after the king or the queen they were still fascinating nonetheless and influenced how the rest of the war played out.  Just like in chess, it's very difficult to capture the king or the queen in the opening moves when playing against an adroit opponent.  It's only after eliminating the smaller pieces on the board that you're able to go after the larger ones.  It was only after the Union captured their opponents or held on to their pawns, rooks, bishops, and knights--New Mexico, Chattanooga, New Orleans--that they were finally able to bag the queen and king--Richmond, Atlanta, and the Army of N. Virginia.   \n\nSo when people try to write and talk about the Civil War in a general fashion, I think they try to give the most interesting details up front and allow the listener/reader to go searching for the other parts of the chess board after they've got them involved in the game. This was certainly my approach when I started learning about the Civil War ten years ago and the tactic I employ when I try to teach people about it. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/glorietapass/glorieta-pass-history-articles/glorietaalberts.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3nxt2j", "title": "When did the profession or idea of therapy begin?", "selftext": "I was watching \"Shakespeare in Love\", in which Shakespeare goes to see a man whom he talks about his woes, and pays him for his time. The time is marked by an hourglass, and once his time is up, the man says \"See you next week\" or something similar. Which led to my question: when did the idea or profession of therapy begin, and how? Would Shakespeare have had access to such a person? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nxt2j/when_did_the_profession_or_idea_of_therapy_begin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvssl5m"], "score": [3], "text": ["I answered a [similar question](_URL_0_) about a month ago, although I can answer the Shakespeare aspect of your question I can answer the therapy part. So I'll post the relevant sections from my previous answer below:\n\n > Freud originally wanted go into Neurology however, in 1885, Freud was in Paris about to start a fellowship under Jean-Martin Charcot, a well known French neurologist at the time who was looking into Hypnosis. Freud would later remark that Charcot was pivotal in opening up his eyes to the burgeoning world of Psychopathology (as well as Psychology).\n\n > By 1886, Freud had setup his own clinic in Vienna where he wanted to employ the ideas of Hypnosis to his own theories. However his version of Hypnosis was a little different from the French variation as Freud had taken the advice of friend, Josef Breuer when Breuer had worked with a patient known as \"Anna O\". The method that Breuer used whilst talking to Miss O was to let her do the talking about whatever the symptoms might be under hypnosis.\n\n[\"Anna O\" was a pseudonym used by Freud  &  Breuer when discussing the patient \"Bertha Pappenheim\" in Freud  &  Breuer's paper *Studien \u00fcber Hysterie* (\"Studies on Hysteria\")]\n\n > Anna dubbed Breuer's method herself as \"The talking cure\". Freud found that this talking cure seemed to be working, so he adopted it himself however without the need for hypnosis this time, to just let the patients talk freely. Freud named this \"free association\".\n\n[I then go on to talk about Freud's cocaine addiction  &  how some Historians that said addiction was the cause for Freud's madcap theories, I shall not post those sections but if you wish to read them please check the original answer]\n\nFreud's approach to \"Free association\" was to try  &  understand why the patients had certain \"mental conflicts\" that kept repressed memories within the mind. Freud developed three explanations to try  &  explain what these mental conflicts were doing  &  the effect it had on his patients:\n\n* \"Transference\" ~ Transferring the feelings you have for one person on to another without meaning. [N.B. This is still very common today especially in Relationship therapy where the patient can develop feelings for their therapist. The opposite of this is \"Counter-transference\"]\n\n* \"Projection\" ~ Where the patient *projects* their emotions  &  mannerisms on to others  &  attributes it to them. E.g. If someone was infidel then they'd blame the partner as the reason to why they did what the did. [N.b. This can also be linked to \"Ego splitting\" (basically \"black  &  white thinking\") where one will see things as all good or all bad. Sometimes the therapist themselves can be viewed by the patient in this light.]\n\n* \"Resistance\" ~ Stopping yourself from recalling certain thoughts or events.\n\nWhen Freud was coining these theories, it is thought that he was having heart irregularities,  distributing dreams  &  depressive episodes. This led Freud to analyse his own state of mind  &  develop his theory of \"Neurosis\".\n\nHopefully that helped somewhat, if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask:)\n\n**Sources  &  Further Reading:**\n\n1) *Freud: A Life for Our Time* ~ Peter Gay\n2) *The Freudian Fallacy* ~ E.M. Thornton\n3) *The Life  &  Works of Sigmund Freud* ~ Ernest Jones\n4) *On Beginning the Treatment* ~ Sigmund Freud"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3iifop/freud_is_the_father_of_psychoanalysis_but_what/cugx6da"]]}
{"q_id": "9xob1q", "title": "Did Wilhelm feel bad and partly responsible about his cousin Nicholas' death?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xob1q/did_wilhelm_feel_bad_and_partly_responsible_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9u5ahh"], "score": [2], "text": ["This may answer your question.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nTo be honest, though, anything he truly felt was probably incredibly private, much like we do not know what was said between Nicholas and Alexandra after the former had abdicated in March 1917, it is unknown what Wilhelm *truly* felt. Unfortunately, we don't always know what happens in the royal's private lives."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pw9a4/what_was_kaiser_wilhelm_iis_reaction_to_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pw9a4/what\\_was\\_kaiser\\_wilhelm\\_iis\\_reaction\\_to\\_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "3f0uqg", "title": "Have any societies been known to deindustrialise?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3f0uqg/have_any_societies_been_known_to_deindustrialise/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctkagfz", "ctkcbnv", "ctkmk03", "ctky2wq", "ctl59u0"], "score": [34, 77, 7, 3, 4], "text": ["Do you mean removing industry and transforming to an agrarian society like the Khmer Rouge did in the 70s when the deported most city dweller to the countryside to starve to death on communal farms or did you mean moving from an industrial to an entirely post industrial economy?", "Parts of the Roman empire did during the fifth century. I'm most familiar with the situation in Britain, where cities and rural villas (which were centers of both Roman administration + elites, and industrial-scale production) were abandoned over a period of a few generations. In many parts of Britain, the economy returned to pre-Roman agricultural models (in some cases, the actual field boundaries seem to have shifted back to pre-Roman patterns), and large-scale metal production (one of Britain's important industries in the Roman empire) was mostly abandoned.\n\nThese industries seem to have existed primarily for the benefit of the wider Roman empire, rather than Britian itself. And they were distributed from Britain to the rest of the empire on a system of ships that brought grain and other supplies to the Roman garison in Britain. Even before those soldiers were moved out of Britain (410) and the infrastructure that supported them disappeared, industry had been slowing in Britain - this was probably a result of Roman administration contracting closer to norther italy, making a far-flung island less useful as an industrial center. When Roman administration began to fragment in the west and break into smaller regional units (which became the kingdoms of the early middle ages), Britain became more isolated (though there's still evidence of continuing lower-intensity long-distance trade with the Roman world), and its industry didn't recover.\n\nThere's debate about how this affected the lives of ordinary people (see Fleming 2011 vs Gerrard 2013). Most people ended up farming in small communities which appear (judging from their architecture) to have been much more egalitarian than the centralized villa complexes of the late Roman world. But their lives were hard and short, and their skeletal remains show that even the people who appear to have been relatively well-off were subjected to lives of hard, crippling farm work (many young men had back problems by their early 20s from repeated, overly strenuous physical exertion). But this was, perhaps, life as usual for farm workers in antiquity, and Roman industry was no less cruel to the bodies of the workers who made it function.\n\nThe quality of everyday objects improved in some cases, and grew worse in others. Iron objects actually improved once Britain deindustrialized - knives became sharper and made from better steel (the Roman industry seems to have valued squantity over quality). Pottery quality decreased, because there wasn't a need for industrial-scale kilns and people were left relying on small-scale pit fired pots (which are softer). Cows got smaller, but that may have been a good thing for the families who had to feed them through the winter. Some industries that disappeared may have had little effect on daily life - elites were no longer living in heated stone houses, but it's not clear how many ordinary peasants ever enjoyed such luxuries.\n\nIf I were to draw a general observation from this case, it would be this: industry requires infrastructure both to supply it with materials and labor, and to distribute its products. In fifth century Britain, the infrastructure that had organized labor (the Roman state and army), and the infrastructure that had need of what it produced, both disappeared. As a result, the need for industry largely disappeared, and the economy re-tooled itself to meet a smaller, local demand.", "Everyone is talking about the Romans, but from my limited understanding, some of the American Indian tribes did.  They had cities such as Cahokia (pop. ~40,000) that were basically abandoned.\n\nAnyone with specific knowledge care to elaborate?", "Regarding the current answers in this thread, what relevance do ancient Rome or the pre Columbian Americas have to do with industrialization?", "The Indian subcontinent was a thriving export center for textiles, manufactured on a massive scale, in the early 18th century.  As the British established their rule in India, output and market share dwindled significantly.  Perhaps because new production methods and reductions in transportation time and cost gave British exports an edge, the cost of competing rendered the activity uneconomic for Indian manufacturers.\n\nPolitical considerations played a role, to be sure.  The Mughal Empire was fragmenting into several competing successor states during this period.  Gradually, the new political units were reunited under the banner of the East India company.     "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4ls4gf", "title": "I just finished Kramer's \"The Sumerians\", have their been any new discoveries or revisions in the study of Sumer since this was released in the 70s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ls4gf/i_just_finished_kramers_the_sumerians_have_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3qckas"], "score": [2], "text": ["Greetings friend. I answered this question awhile back. Take a look and let me know if you have any more questions:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wozf6/what_has_been_learned_about_the_sumerians_since/cxyu09y"]]}
{"q_id": "1daol9", "title": "Why has New Zealand embraced indigenous culture more than other former British Colonies?", "selftext": "New Zealand seems to be in a unique situation embracing Maori culture as a large part of what it means to be a New Zealander. Maori is an official language and things like the Haka are performed by non-Maori people. Compared to Australia where the attitude seems to range from indifferent to out right hostile against the aboriginal people, and in Canada (where I live) and America people seem to view the native peoples as second class citizens and their culture is seen as separate from the national culture. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1daol9/why_has_new_zealand_embraced_indigenous_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9ojkiv", "c9oopyi", "c9osuov", "c9oun06"], "score": [26, 8, 7, 6], "text": ["Not really my field, but I read a lot about Kiwi society while looking at the political background of the nuclear ban, and [I'm not sure the situation's as rosy as you describe](_URL_2_). New Zealand is pretty frank about the problems. Maori is an official language because of that protest movement, and the use of the Haka isn't necessarily representative of wider Pakeha-Maori relations. There are many in the Maori community who consider its use a cultural appropriation, and the very cynical among them argue that New Zealand's embrace of the Maori only seems consistent insofar as it guarantees a lot of well-muscled Maori/Pacific Islander men on the national rugby team. \n\nPersonally I think that's a huge overreach, but there's no getting around the fact that New Zealand really has the same problems that Australia, the U.S., and Canada do in its efforts to [afford economic opportunity](_URL_1_) and [health resources](_URL_0_) to native people. \n\nRe: languages, the U.S. does not have any official language at the federal level, so language recognition isn't really a part of native acceptance or non-acceptance. I'm also not sure how much truth is in the assertion that natives are widely considered \"second-class citizens,\" but the complicated economic and social issues on reservations (or off of them) are way beyond the scope of this comment. I think the most serious problem with the U.S. government's relationship with modern tribes is the broken funding structure at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and how it is, for lack of a better word, stupid.\n\nEdit: Fixed up an awkward sentence.", "Partly because Maori fought to keep their culture alive. Some prominent politicians such as [Sir Apirana Ngata]( _URL_0_), [Sir Peter Buck](_URL_1_), and groups like [Nga Tamatoa](_URL_2_) and the Waitangi Action Committee pushed to have Maori language and culture taught in mainstream schools.", "I'd posit that it has something to do with the much greater relative number of Maori in New Zealand.  I pulled the numbers below from the CIA factbook:\n\n* Australia \"Aboriginal and other 1%\"\n* USA \"Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%\"\n* Canada \" Amerindian 2%\"\n\n* New Zealand \"Maori 7.4%, Pacific islander 4.6%\"\n\nI'm not exactly sure _how_ this plays into the question, but I'm pretty sure it's relevant.  ", "One under-rated factor to take into account is the history of armed resistance to colonialism.\n\nThe first europeans (sealers, whalers, traders) were dependant on Maori for survival. Trading and cultural exchange were integral to early race relations.\n\nBy the time that settlement started, Maori had learnt a lot from europeans and adapted useful elements into their culture. Maori culture changed very much as a result. Many tribes adapted thrived on trade, some even trading with australia and america.\n\nAs aside:\n\nOne really fascinating part of NZ History is the Pakeha-Maori: Pakeha who would live in Maori society. Sometimes to escape captive institutions. Sometimes to gain mana in both societies. They are a really important part of NZ's cultural history, but not widely known about. Even in NZ. Some Pakeha-Moari fought in the New Zealand Wars. You can find and read Kimble Bents diary online. Or read the recently published [comic](_URL_1_).\n\nPakeha-Maori formed a cultural bridge between the two cultures.\n\nAside ends.\n\n[The Musket Wars](_URL_0_) were inter-tribal conflicts that caused change on a large scale within Maori culture. Partly as a result of these wars, Maori tribes across the North Island now had veterans of a modern kind of war. This was before there was real military conflict between Maori and settlers.\n\nThe first settler armed operation against Maori was [the wairau affray](_URL_2_). It was a disaster for the settlers, who would no longer take up arms again against Maori on their own. The next battles required the full strength of the British army.\n\n[The New Zealand Wars](_URL_3_) heavily damaged Maori sovereignty in NZ. But it failed to make Maori a conquered people in a real sense of the word. In that sense it was a strategic failure.\n\nThe armed resistance to colonialism in this period and later contributed to (among other things) the survival of institutions for which Maori identity was core. \n\nContrast this to the Australian first nations peoples, who were unable to provide armed resistance to the same extent. \n\nFor further reading, James Belich wrote an excellent war history: The New Zealand Wars.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/health/life_expectancy/NZLifeTables_MR10-12.aspx", "http://www.3news.co.nz/Maori-discrimination-raises-unemployment---Turia/tabid/1607/articleID/276033/Default.aspx", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_protest_movement"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apirana_Ngata", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Rangi_H%C4%ABroa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C4%81_Tamatoa"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_wars", "http://fromearthsend.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/new-nz-graphic-novel-kimble.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wairau_Affray", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Wars"]]}
{"q_id": "6tqtxa", "title": "Is it fair to characterize the English Civil War as a religious war?", "selftext": "I'm reading Christianity: the first three thousand years and he heavily implies a key factor was religious division over what Protestant faith on the island should be. I am Catholic and have very limited understanding on differences between Protestants", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6tqtxa/is_it_fair_to_characterize_the_english_civil_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlnlct1", "dqpoghf"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["Ooooh, something that I know something about. Yay. Ok, a quick proviso, I have not read MacCulloch's book so I don't know exactly what his argument is regarding the English civil war, but I can approximate some of the key historiographical debates about the Civil War\n\nSince you asked about religion, lets start with that. It isn't hugely controversial that religion was a key reason for the outbreak of war in all three kingdoms by 1641 -- the debate is to what extent it assumes primacy as a reason. Now, the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland were all religiously divided (we will get to the interaction between them later) but the religious debate in England is probably what he is referencing. Broadly, there were three distinct religious groups in England at the time. Catholics, by far the smallest and concentrated in gentry households and the north. Those who supported the Church of England and 'Puritans'. I put Puritans in quotation marks because pinning down what they actually were was almost impossible -- they are the true 'protean beasts' of early modern England. To a certain extent there were doctrinal differences between the Church of Englanders and the Puritans. the former were creedal Calvinists (they argued from Calvin himself that it was impossible to know whether a person was reprobate or saved and therefore that the church could contain both sinners and saved. They were also generally in favour of Bishops and the maintenance of the church hierarchy). 'Puritans' meanwhile tended towards experimental calvinism (arguing from Calvin's disciple Beza that it was possible to know that one was saved) and tended to be Presbyterians. Further, both sides of the debate were shit scared that the other was trying to do them harm. In particular the Puritans feared that people like Laud would try to reintroduce Catholicism (Laud was generally thought to be an Arminian -- a protestant who believed in free will) and wanted to introduce a more ceremonial (Catholic) form of worship with altars in churches, new prayer books and so on. \n\nHowever, I believe that a lot of this is really quite overblown. Personally I am not convinced that Laud was an Arminian, to me he seems firmly in the tradition of other Conservative protestants like Whitgift, Elizabeth's Archbishop of Canterbury. Indeed, his programme seems to me to be very like the attempt made by James I/VI to bring his kingdoms into religious congruence. Further, the degree of theological unity and the requirement to be united against Catholic threats (France) always ensured a relative degree of Protestant solidarity.\n\nIt would also be possible to lay the blame firmly at the feet of one person -- Charles I. For context, the English and Scottish monarchies at the time were intensely personal affairs which required the constant attention of the sovereign to keep on the road and a generally gregarious outlook to manage some very large personalities. The first observation, was that he was an ideological ruler in the worst possible way. He had very clear convictions about his own prerogatives and pursued them doggedly and in ways which really rubbed people up the wrong way. He was also awkward, shy and insecure. So for instance to stop courtiers coming to him personally to discuss matters he had the locks on the Palace of Whitehall changed so he would not have to face them in a way which made him uncomfortable. He also had a tendency to view people who disagreed with him as traitors, which made legitimate expression of grievance difficult. Further, his dislike of open debate led to him governing through institutions like the privy council which he could control absolutely. Finally, he had a reputation as a man who would go back on his promises. This goes back to him being ideological, if you are a divine monarch with certain rights, then there is no reason not to go back on concessions because they were unjustly granted in the first place. So he accepted the Petition of Right in 1628 (which asserted the rights of parliament and subject against him) under pressure and once the furore had passed slightly dissolved parliament and did away with it. The upshot was that as the civil war loomed people like Pym did not think that they could trust the king's word, making them more likely to support armed resistance to charles.\n\nMacCulloch probably didn't talk a lot about the constitutional issues which helped to touch of the civil war, and why should he? But to make a long story short, there were real questions and contradictions floating about concerning the powers of the king and those of parliament. Charles's father James, canny political animal that he was, was able to split the difference during his reign. He repeatedly asserted the divine right of kings. For instance, in his speech from the throne in 1610 he commented said \u201ckings are not only god\u2019s lieutenants on earth, and sit on gods throne but even by god himself are called gods\u201d but makes a clear and firm distinction between original kings and kings such as himself that govern civil kingdoms who are bound to \u201cthe observation of the fundamental laws of his kingdom\u201d. His ordinary prerogative is expressed through king in parliament, but he had an extraordinary prerogative (to break laws made by parliament) that could only be used in a national emergency and supplemented, but did not contravene, the ordinary prerogative. He was thus absolute and limited at the same time and understood how carefully he had to use his extraordinary prerogative. His son Charles was not so nuanced. So with the forced loan of 1626 charles simply declared that there was an emergency and used his extraordinary prerogative to levy an extra parliamentary tax to create 240k. the other side (Thomas Scott, member for Canterbury) meanwhile argued that such a measure usurped powers that were meant for the good of the commonwealth for the good of the monarch personally\n\nThe final thing to say, which i'm not convinced by but whatever, is the so called 'British problem'. The argument from Conrad Russel is, put simply, that the arrangement by which Charles governed three legally separate kingdoms each with a different faith and very different constitutional arrangements was inevitably going to end in tears because dissident groups in each kingdom could appeal to others to support their cause. To take one example, the Scottish invasion of England during the Bishop's war emboldened Puritans in England to challenge Charles further. While this is very clever, in my view it underestimates the very different views about the nature of sovereign power which Charles and Parliament had. \n\nSo my answer to your question is simple. It was a combination of factors, not solely religious, and people at the time recognised this as well. So Pym thought that \u201cliberties of parliament, matters of religion\u2026the affairs of state or matters of property\u201d were the main reasons for the civil war and he was probably right. ", "I believe there is strong evidence to support the argument of the English Civil War being a religious war. Especially when we look at the pre-civil war era we can find some better answers. From the research I have done, it definitely seemed like a religious war from the perspective of rebels and revolutionaries. I don't believe there is one cause for the civil war, as it seemed to be the clash and timing of many factors (religion, politics, parliament and monarch issues, etc.) that ultimately resulted in civil war, but religion definitely played a part, especially from the rebels and revolutionaries perspective. I wrote a small essay from this point of view, that might give some more insight as to the religious pre-civil war tensions between the rebels and revolutionaries. I am not declaring any EXACT cause or reason for the civil war, but merely giving a different look at the religious perspective of the Civil War (I hope this is helpful in some way):\n\nThere are several theories about why the civil war in England came about. Conrad Russell accounts for the civil war as a result of  \u201cthree long-standing instabilities\u2026multiple kingdoms, problems of religious division, and the breakdown of a financial and political system in the face of inflation and the rising cost of war.\u201d  John Morrill accounts for local interests as being the cause and not from the problems coming together at the center, or Court.  It is difficult to pinpoint or account for the exact cause of civil war, as seen in the difference of opinions on the matter, but a closer look at the religious ideas and actions of rebels and revolutionaries (RR) may provide a better over-hanging cause to civil war. Simply put by Diana Newton, this was a \u201cwar of religion\u201d.  In opposition to Charles, RR\u2019s cause was that they were \u201cunited by their rejection of Laudian \u2018innovation\u2019 and by a genuine fear of a \u2018popish plot\u2019\u201d.  While the RR did not single-handedly cause the civil war, they heavily influenced it through the illegal press printing, the Protestation, and iconoclasm.  \n\nFirstly, a clear way the printing press was utilized for the RR influence to the onset of civil war was through the varying documents produced by the Cloppenburg Press. David Como noted this discovery of Johnsons\u2019, who uncovered several English pamphlets having \u201cidentical typeface and a distinctive set of printer\u2019 ornaments \u2013 [which] he dubbed it the \u2018Cloppenburg Press\u2019\u201d , as \u201ccontributing to our understanding of the crisis that led to the outbreak of the Civil War\u201d.  This can be seen in the fact that there were several RR groups who had illegal pro-propaganda printed from the same press, the Cloppenburg Press, to promote their different, but unified causes against their sovereignty. For example, the Scottish Covenanters had their manifesto, An Information from the States of the Kingdome of Scotland, printed , several Puritan leaders had their anti-Laudian propaganda printed, including Henry Burton\u2019s 400-page attack on Laud\u2019s treatise  and William Prynne\u2019s anti-episcopal pamphlet The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie , and other \u201cradical puritan propaganda by less august figures\u201d  all of which were agreeably seen as treasonous efforts and acts against the Monarch. The communicative efforts of the Scottish propaganda, however, to promote their cause is extremely important in the pre-civil war onset:\nEach official declaration published by Cloppenburg Press was carefully designed to highlight the fundamental unity of the Scottish and English causes; to identify the mutual enemies of the two kingdom, that is, the bishops and popish councilors who had led the king astray; and to emphasize the lawful and orderly nature of the Scot\u2019s proceedings, so as to Allay English fears that the Scots were seditious rebels or self-interested marauders. \n\nIt is clear here that there was some kind of political communication being done within the illegal printing press or a large scale. It may not have directly caused the start of the civil war, but it did influence the thoughts and opinions of crucial pre-civil war debates of the time regarding RR causes against the Monarchy. Therefore, the use of illegal printing for religious propaganda was an influencer to the onset of the civil war. \n\nSecondly, the Protestation document Parliament served as another influencer to the onset of civil war against the Monarchy. The Protestation was made by Parliament in May 1641. In summary, \u201cit brought discussion of the constitution, politics, religion, and the law from Westminster, to county assemblies, and into every church and parish.\u201d  Nearly a year after it was made, it had extended to the eyes of readers all over the nation.  It is clear why this happened, as the Protestation addressed the concerns of an entire nation. This shows the power and influence the document had, not only in its\u2019 content, but in the \u201cmanner of its application\u201d , as it \u201coutreached from the governing classes to the governed\u201d.  What was so important about it? Since it originated in the political crisis of May 1641 , fears that Charles was going to \u201cdissolve parliamentary liberties and subvert the reformed religion\u201d  had already been in existence, and this document gave hope to those fears: \u201c[it] was an armory against popery, a defense against Rome, a bulwark against superstition, and a pledge for a godly Church of England.\u201d  This document fed quite well into RR cause of fighting against the Laudian innovations. While the document was not necessarily meant to divide people, \u201cnearly everyone was tendered the Protestation found it something they could subscribe.\u201d   It was not specific, but \u201c[it\u2019s words laid] at the heart of the crisis that eventuated in civil war.\u201d  Therefore, its influence is clear as to affecting the onset of the civil war, as these vary matters developed into the key aspect of the civil war. \n\nLastly, the iconoclasm that took place within English communities also influenced the religious RR cause and onset to the civil war. As early as July 1640, \u201caltar rails\u2026in Essex were broken down and carried away by a crowd\u2026\u201d  and later \u201c\u2026the troops toured the area around Braintree, pulling down the rails in the godly parishes of Finchingfield, Terling, Little Leighs, and above fifty other church\u201d  as well as in Suffolk.  There is not an exact number of incidents that occurred , but what is known is that they happened, in part due, to the \u201cconflict between aggressive Laudian ministers and combative godly parishioners\u2026\u201d  Their influence lies in that public worship ceremonies became a debate on who would enforce the Laudian ceremonialism regime and who would not , which would have been an important issue for the Monarchy to handle in terms of who supported them. Any defiance against Archbishop Laud\u2019s religious administration would clearly be seen as rebellious, so violently taking down altar rails in churches would be a definite sign to the RR cause. Thus, iconoclasm, while more violent than pamphlets and the Protestation, was a clear way the RR influenced the religious discord leading up to civil war. Iconoclasm was a direct rebellion to the Laudian innovations set forth by the Monarchy, which gave strength to the RR cause. \n\nFrom a religious perspective as to the main cause of the civil war, it would appear the RR had a heavy influence. The pamphlets and books from illegal printing presses and the Protestation seemed to communicate and spread RR causes on a national stage. Whether they brought in more people to their side is not important, it\u2019s the fact that these two methods caused reactions and discussion that was important to building the tension that led to the break of civil war. Iconoclasm was clearly a much more abrupt way to build tension and communicate a message of opposition. Still, iconoclasm did bring about important central debates to the ceremonial practices of religion that were fought for and about during the civil war. In all of the influencers, the opposition against the Monarch\u2019s Laudian religion was clear, and this helped build the RR cause, which in return built the tension that eventually snapped into civil war. \n\n\nBibliography\n\nComo, D. \u201cSecret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and Origins of Civil War Radicalism.\u201d Past  &  \tPresent 196 (2007): 37-82.\n\nCressy, D. \u201cThe Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642,\u201d Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): \t251-280.\n\nMorrill, J. on \u201cThe Coming of War.\u201d in M. Todd. Reformation to Revolution. London and New \tYork: Routledge, 1995. \n\nNewton, Diana. \u201cThe Civil War and the Interregnum.\u201d In Papists, Protestants, and Puritans. \tCambridge: University of Cambridge, 1998.\n\nRussell, C. on \u201cEngland in 1637.\u201d in M. Todd. Reformation to Revolution. London and New \tYork: Routledge, 1995.\n\nSpurr, John. Religion, Politics, and Society in Britain: The Post-Reformation 1603-1714. Essex: \tPearson Education Limited, 2006.\n\nWalter, John. \u201cPopular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640-\t1642.\u201d \tHistorical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 261-290.\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "etbp2z", "title": "How bad was the 90's for Russia", "selftext": "I was inspired by [This](_URL_0_) r/askreddit post about how older Russian viewed the USSR and a pattern of \"the 90's were so bad that it made people look back on the USSR as 'the good old days'\" pops up a lot. My question is, how bad was it? I know there was corruption and poverty, but how much, why, and what's the timeline of events?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/etbp2z/how_bad_was_the_90s_for_russia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fffb9wh"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's a **lot** to say on this topic. While you await new answers, you might want to check out this [answer](_URL_2_) I wrote about how the Soviet economy unraveled in the early 1990s, and this [answer](_URL_0_) about the collapse in living standards and demographic decline. For good measure here is a (long) [answer](_URL_1_) explaining why political and economic reforms under Yeltsin didn't work out as planned, with a bonus comparison to the situation in the 1990s in Poland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/esy6i5/russians_of_reddit_what_is_the_older_generations/?utm_medium=android_app&amp;utm_source=share"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/arz241/the_population_of_the_soviet_union_grew_rapidly/eh1mgln/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ayjz4d/why_was_polands_transition_to_capitalism_so_much/ei37ge8/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/avap7n/what_was_life_like_in_the_former_soviet_socialist/eheit7p/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ansae", "title": "What is the significance of Gobekli Tepe?", "selftext": "I know this is more of an opinion question than fact and it could also be a current event but I think it also has great historical significance.\n\nWhy is it assumed that those who constructed it were hunter gatherers?\n\nHow significant is the timeline?\n\nDoes this have any effect on any of your fields?\n\nTwenty years ago would this have even been thought possible to exist?\n\nAlso, after carefully reading the rules I could not find a yes or no on if I could ask this question so please disregard it if it is not appropriate.\n\nDo you have any personal hypotheses on the construction, who built it or what it's purpose was?\n\nThank you so much. You guys make every day so interesting for me and I really appreciate everything you do. I hope this submission is okay.\n\nPost Edit: I would like to thank everyone for their thoughtful responses, i wish I could have been more involved and asked some follow up questions but ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ansae/what_is_the_significance_of_gobekli_tepe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8z4d9c", "c8z5wce", "c8z6c6y", "c8z82yy", "c8z8t1n"], "score": [16, 30, 7, 6, 6], "text": ["I believe one theory about its historical significance is the idea of religion (its the oldest known religious site) being a strong factor in humans changing from a hunter gatherer to an agrarian society because they wanted to settle down and be close to their religious sites. [The world\u2019s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.](_URL_0_)", "It's assumed that the people who lived at Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers because the radiocarbon dates of the structures there predate agriculture.  Through archaeology we've got a pretty good idea when people started cultivating crops, and this is before that.  Also, there's no evidence of permanent habitation at the site.  It appears to have been strictly religious or socially significant, rather than a 'city'.\n\nThe most compelling thing about that site is that it's monumental architecture that is that *old*.  It's not that there were people in areas that long ago - there were people lots of placed that long ago.  But they weren't building massive buildings.\n\nThink about the time investment.  What would cause you to build something very large when you don't even live in the area full-time?  It'd have to be pretty important - something like religion.\n\nThe timeline is hugely significant, as it's the first evidence that monumental architecture can predate sedentary agriculture.  That's never been found before.\n\nTwenty years ago, it would have been thought possible to exist, but it would have been thought improbable.  \n\nThe second-to-last line of your question puzzles me a bit. The basic facts of the site are not hugely mysterious.  Neolithic people built it, probably for religion.", "Aw man the post I was typing disappeared when I left the page for too long and now everyone's answered as well as I could've. \n\nI'll just add that it wasn't unthinkable 20 years ago, since we knew about Nevali Cori, a contemporaneous site. Sadly it's now underwater though. ", "The quick answer is that it changes our view on the social organization and cohesion of groups in that region at that time. The fame comes from \"that time\" being the transition from hunter gatherer to sedentary agriculture. It complicates certain models of how agriculture effected social development.", "Most of what I know about G\u00f6bekli Tepe comes from Elif Batuman's [article in the New Yorker](_URL_0_). This article is a great read (if you have no idea what G\u00f6bekli Tepe is, read this article), and Elif Batuman is a great writer (FWIW all of her stuff about contemporary Turkey has been spot on), but can any archeologists comment on that article? I would guess at least some of you have read it--archeology doesn't come up in society magazines very often. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text"], [], [], [], ["http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/19/111219fa_fact_batuman"]]}
{"q_id": "7d5s6d", "title": "Nazi Opinion of the Netherlands?", "selftext": "(Not sure if this classifies as a ''What if'' question so posting here.)\n\nSo, what was the opinion of the Netherlandish in Nazi high command, were they like the British and French, inferior to the all superior Scandinavians and Germans, or were they at the top like them? What would happen to their country? Would it be a part of the thousand year Reich, or would they be their own puppet state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7d5s6d/nazi_opinion_of_the_netherlands/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpwkftw"], "score": [4], "text": ["I can answer this question based on the authoritative and comprehensive work of L. de Jong. This 14-part history of the Netherlands before, during, and after World War II is the Dutch standard reference to the topic, written over a period 22 years.\n\nAs impressive as that may sound, not to mention [look](_URL_0_), there have been serious criticisms of the work, and it is very good to keep in mind that the specific part I will quote was published in 1974: years and years of research has passed since then, archives have been opened, new evidence uncovered, etcetera.\n\nAll of that notwithstanding, the book has the following to say about the early German attitude:\n\nIn Norway and Denmark, Hitler was dead set against a Milit\u00e4rverwaltung. Indeed, De Jong interprets certains statements by Hitler as implying that Norway and Denmark would be integrated into the Grossgermanische Reich. The specific phrase he bases this on is a phrase used by Hitler to Alfred Rosenberg, who was in contact with Quisling, a well-known Norwegian collaborator. On the day of the invasion of Norway, Hitler told Rosenberg: 'So wie aus dem Jahre 1866 das Reich Bismarckes entstand, so wird aus dem heutigen Tag das Grossgermanische Reich entstehen.'\n\nTo translate: In the same manner as the Bismarckian Empire came into being in 1866, so too is the present-day Greater German Reich formed.\n\nIn Denmark, the Danes capitulated in mere hours, and as a result, Hitler was more than happy to let the \"independent\" Danish government exist.\n\nOn the 10th of May, the \"Danish Model\" was offered to the Dutch, specifically, the minister of foreign affairs, van Kleffens. He dismissed it immediately. A few days later, the queen and royal family had fled to England in any case.\n\nA further big consideration in German policy towards the Netherlands were the Dutch East Indies. Rich in natural resources, the Germans understood that the Japanese desired the colonies. Any form of annexation or integration with regards to the Netherlands into the German Empire changed the status of the Dutch East Indies, and would give Japan a reason/justification to invade it.\n\nThink of this as a \"If the Netherlands didn't exist, who owns the Dutch East Indies?\".\n\nIn October of 1940, Hitler told Mussolini the Netherlands \"needed to appear independent, due to its colonial possessions\". In March of 1941, Generalkommisar Schmidt, political advisor of Seyss-Inquart, the Reichskommisar of the Netherlands, would tell a crowd of Dutch NSB (i.e. Nazis) that: 'wie es uns gelingt, diese wichtigsten Kolonien die es auf der Welt gibt und die es f\u00fcr die ganze Welt gibt, f\u00fcr die Niederlande oder, lassen wir ganz offen sein f\u00fcr Europa zu erhalten'.\n\nTo translate roughly \"These colonies, the most important ones in the world, must be kept for the Netherlands, or to be frank, for Europe.\"\n\nFinally, De Jong states that Hitler planned to \"win the Dutch as friends\" much like the Norwegians. This meant that the Netherlands was not to be exploited to the extreme, it was to supply the German war effort with what it could, but the standard of living was to be the same as the German standard of living. With regards to the standard of living, the phrase \"Gleichberechtigung\" is used.\n\nAlthough a military form of government was possible, Hitler distrusted his generals to handle the case of the Netherlands capably, and instead assigned Seyss-Inquart, a loyal Nazi who in the eyes of Hitler had proven himself.\n\nIn conclusion:\n\nThe German attitudes toward the Dutch was partly racial, partly based on actual political considerations. \n\nThe Dutch were most definitely regarded as the Norwegians and Danes, they were Aryans, fellow Germans, Nordic supermen, however you want to phrase it.\n\nAnother large part of their considerations revolved around the Dutch East Indies. It was a territory simply too rich in resources for the Germans to hand over to the Japanese, especially given the oil present there.\n\nPlease note that this is just a description of the German attitude up to and right after the capitulation of the Netherlands. When the Japanese finally invaded the East Indies, that reason obviously fell away. As to how that changed the situation, I cannot answer right now. Furthermore, there would undoubtedly be small changes in policy throughout the next 5 years of war. Nonetheless the Dutch were in general treated comparably to other \"Germanic\" people, the Dutch were among the first non-Germans allowed into the Waffen-SS, and the Reichskommisariat (i.e. civilian administration) stayed in power until the liberation in 1945.\n\nSource:\n\nHet Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlod 1939-1945: Deel 4: eerste helft, Lou de Jong, p.26-31"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Koninkrijk_der_Nederlanden_in_de_Tweede_Wereldoorlog#/media/File:LdeJong_12delencompleet.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3jcemr", "title": "Is there a podcast or series of good videos on greek history", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jcemr/is_there_a_podcast_or_series_of_good_videos_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuo1r6p"], "score": [7], "text": ["Yale online courses has a ancient greek history course. You can watch all the lectures given on youtube.\n\nEdit: Link: _URL_0_ this is the first lecture in a playlist."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FrHGAd_yto&amp;list=PL023BCE5134243987"]]}
{"q_id": "yosvy", "title": "How do historians convert historical financial amounts to current values?", "selftext": "Anyone tell me how historians are able to convert financial values from the past, into modern day figures. You know how in books the author might right, \n\n\"in 1890 the ship cost \u00a31300, an enormous amount that would be equivalent to \u00a3750,000 today\". [disclaimer - figures made up]\n\nAre there a set of tables somewhere? Is it a \"best guess\" or something else?\n\n**edit** thanks everyone for the comments and the links. Very useful. Very much an inexact science!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yosvy/how_do_historians_convert_historical_financial/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5xhs3x", "c5xmoei", "c5xqab7", "c5xs9u9"], "score": [13, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["There's a set of different tools to do that, and let me tell you one thing first: None of them are really precise. This is, because money is not worth anything without goods it relates to. You don't care if you have a billion dollars if there's nothing you can buy with that. Also, the goods you want to buy change in quality, quantity and demand. As someone living in 2012, you might be wealthier than someone living in 1920, but you don't have a need for a typewriter. Still, typewriters might be more expensive today than they were in 1970 because, if there's a factory still building some, it's producing so few they need to put a bigger price tag on it.\n\nIn modern history, the best tool to convert financial amounts is the working time. You take a relatively normal job with (at best) highly regulated wages, the product you want to research and the time. Then you can see that a trained factory worker had to work an hour to buy one liter of fuel in 1950 and only five minutes in 2012. (This applies for Germany, just read that last week). This describes the value given to the bought good in relation to the wealth of the population.\n\nAnother tool which is most likely incorrect is just to apply the standard inflation rate of the price (your 1300, e.g.) up until today. Due to the calculation of the inflation rate this is complete bullshit, in my opinion.\n\nFor bigger amounts of money (like the budget of a company) you could also compare it to the budget of the state. But this also has its flaws.\n\nBottom line: I'd be very careful to take these numbers granted. There is no way to precisely transport a price to modern times. It's getting more difficult every year you go back.", "You can take schabrackentapir's wage index method, but what many economists typically do also is construct a price index, tracking the change in price of a basket of goods over time. This is also how official inflation rates are calculated. Historical economists will pour over old ledgers and try to construct a typical price basket for a location and work from there.  Unfortunately, this method does not incorporate changes in quality (ie a car is a car in 1913 and 2012) particularly well. \n\nA good rule of thumb for ye olden days is that with the ups and downs of inflation and deflation, pre-1913 US dollars were typically worth 20 times what they are today. It could vary quite a bit, but gravitated around that amount", "Inaccurately.  There are a wide variety of methods, all of which give very different answers and none of which can be thought of as conclusively right or wrong.  For example, I prefer to think of prices in terms of % of global GDP, i.e. if a ship cost 1000 pounds in 1500, and global production was a billion pounds, then the ship's cost would be equivalent to 70 million dollars today (global GDP of 70 trillion).  But no one else seems to like this method, partly because estimates of the size of economies, to say nothing of the whole world, vary wildly.", "Late to the show, but [_URL_2_](_URL_1_) (run by the Economic History Association) has a pretty cool set of comparative tables and data series called \"[How Much Is That?](_URL_0_)\" Has info for the US dollar, British pound, Japanese yen, and Chinese yuan. British data set goes back to 1264(!), U.S. data to 1790. As everyone else has mentioned, however, comparative financial values is highly inexact. Enjoy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://eh.net/hmit/", "http://eh.net/", "EH.net"]]}
{"q_id": "2m3xec", "title": "Is any part of our beliefs about the Nazi regime and the extermination camps fruit of allied propaganda?", "selftext": "Obviously I'm not a Holocaust denier or anything like that, but I feel like it's natural and common for all parties involved in wars (specially ones with ideological ramifications like WWII) to exaggerate and fabricate facts, news, photographs and others to support propaganda against the other side.\n\nI confess that I'm quite ignorant on the subject, so I apologize if the question is out of place or kinda absurd. But I'm very curious about what's the academic consensus on it. Alternatively, is it possible that the events are still too new and alive in the collective memory of the peoples involved to reach any kind of objective and unbiased conclusion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2m3xec/is_any_part_of_our_beliefs_about_the_nazi_regime/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm0qu0w"], "score": [44], "text": ["Absolutely not.  The Allied forces were told about the camps but couldn't believe that kind of barbarism.  Even the Russians who had seen German atrocities across Russia were shocked by the camps they found in Poland.  Accounts of finding these camps aren't all based on some official story put out by government agencies.  Soldiers recorded the events in their personal journals.\n\nAfter the war hardened soldiers were shocked when interrogating some of the guards from these camps.  The history of what happened in the Holocaust is clear (well plus or minus a million victims).  Somewhere between 11 and 13 million people men women and children were starved tortured and murdered.  People couldn't even fathom that kind of horror.  The allies couldn't use the camps as propaganda because people wouldn't believe it.\n\nI know you state you aren't a holocaust denier but I think the [FAQ](_URL_0_) on holocaust denial will answer your question.  The facts aren't in doubt but the lessons we learn from the facts can change.  \n\nAs for objective history just trust me if you aren't of incredibly strong constitution the \"objective\" reports about the holocaust are worse than the subjective.  Reading about torture and murder in an objective report is for me sickening.  I wouldn't recommend you read the objective reports.  \n\nJust to be clear I am not accusing the poster of being a holocaust denier.  But I feel many answers relevant to the question are located in that part of the FAQ."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_holocaust_denial"]]}
{"q_id": "7v2mji", "title": "Geographically, where did the ancient norse think Asgard was?", "selftext": "Was it on Earth? Did they think it was on a different plane? A third option?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v2mji/geographically_where_did_the_ancient_norse_think/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtps5jb"], "score": [4], "text": ["\"Ynglinga saga\" claimed that Asgard was in Asia, to the east from the Don (Tanakvisl) river:\n\n >  Fyrir austan Tanakv\u00edsl \u00ed As\u00eda var kallat \u00c1saland e\u00f0a \u00c1saheimr, en h\u00f6fu\u00f0borgin, er var \u00ed landinu, k\u00f6llu\u00f0u \u00feeir \u00c1sgar\u00f0. En \u00ed borginni var h\u00f6f\u00f0ingi s\u00e1, er \u00d3\u00f0inn var kalla\u00f0r  \n.  \n >  The country east of the Tanaquisl in Asia was called Asaland, or Asaheim, and the chief city in that land was called Asgaard. In that city was a chief called Odin"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d6naax", "title": "By 1990 Japan's GDP surpassed the USSR's - Did the USSR React with the Same Fear as the USA to Japan's Huge Economic Growth in the 70s and 80s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6naax/by_1990_japans_gdp_surpassed_the_ussrs_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0vzoxj"], "score": [14], "text": ["This is an interesting question, so I'm going to take a stab at it. \n\nFirst I want to address the US side of the question. I'm not sure that it's entirely accurate to say that American fear of Japan, particular from the mid 1970s through mid 1990s, was neceesarily based on Japan's GDP growth *per se*, but rather what were some of the perceived causes of that economic growth, and some of its effects. \n\nFirst, a quick catalogue of examples of US anti-Japan sentiment from that period. It ranges from the murderous (the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin in Michigan, who was mistaken as Japanese), to the academic (ie, a long [catalogue](_URL_2_) of books describing the potential rise of Japan, including ones with inflammatory titles such as 1991's *The Coming War With Japan*, to pop-cultural (such as Michael Crichton's *Rising Sun*, Tom Clancy's *Debt of Honor*, or the *Robocop* movies. \n\nAgain, it's important to examine what was being feared in these contexts. It wasn't Japanese GDP growth per se, but a perception that Japanese economic growth was coming at the expense of US manufacturing industries, especially automobiles and electronics. The common perception was that Japanese imports were replacing domestically-produced goods in these sectors, harming US terms of trade with Japan (ie, that the US was basically financing these imports with debt, rather than with its own exports), and that the Japanese government, in particular the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, was providing subsidies and domestic market protections to allow these Japanese firms to profit at US expense.  \n\nThis was coupled with a fear that rising Japanese affluence was leading to a large purchase of US assets, especially real estate, by Japanese buyers. This purchasing spree largely started around 1985, and was aided by cheap Japanese credit and a strong yen to dollar exchange rate. Purchases reached some $76 billion and included notable real estate in California and New York (including Rockefeller Center) before rapidly [tailing off](_URL_0_) in the early 1990s with a financial crash that led to a \"Lost 20 Years\" of economic stagnation (the Nikkei index has *still* not recovered to its bubble-era heights). The rapid popping of that financial bubble, coupled with a dot-com boom in the US, largely put fears of Japan to bed, before a lot of the same fears were later translated to a rising Chinese economy.\n\nThe Soviet context is a bit different from that of the United States. Japanese GDP per capita had surpassed the Soviet Union's sometime in the 1960s, so Japan was already a richer country than the USSR by this period. In terms of absolute GDP size, calculating these figures for the USSR were always a little tricky, since price mechanisms didn't really function the same way as in economies with market systems, and the Soviet focus was generally on raw output figures in any case. It's also worth noting, as I mention in this [answer](_URL_1_), that the Soviet Union was largely thinking about economic growth in terms of how to close the gap with advanced, industrialized capitalist countries, and eventually surpass them, and as such it did not consider itself the richest economy in the world or a global economic hegemon in the way the United States did in this time frame. \n\nThe Soviet Union and Japan had very different economic relations compared to US-Japan economic relations, in part because the former was more like that of a developing and developed country than a relationship between two developed countries. Soviet exports to Japan were largely resources like wood pulp, coal, iron ore and the like. Imports from Japan were goods higher up on the value chain, but not finished goods like cars, rather things like steel tubes, sheet metal, plastics and machine tools. \n\nJapan, as a member of CoCom (the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) was in fact prohibited from exporting to the USSR any advanced technology that could have military uses. In fact, a major scandal in US-Japanese relations erupted when, in 1980, Toshiba signed an agreement with the Soviet government to sell them propellors that could be used in submarines (the agreeement was exposed later in the decade). The US Congress threatened to ban Toshiba imports in retaliation (the US was Toshiba's biggest foreign market), and this significantly cooled Japanese corporate interest in deals with the USSR, with Matsushita Electric even turning down a Soviet request for a trade deal for videorecorders.\n\nA number of joint agreements between the USSR and Japan were signed starting in the 1960s, but these largely involved projects where Japan invested in projects in the Soviet Union, largely in the Far East and Siberia (such as in projects to build port facilities or develop oil fields). These projects tended to be financed either by Japanese credit extended to the USSR for use in purchasing Japanese goods and services, or to be financed in exchange for trade of raw materials. Most of these projects tended to not get very far, given the general underdeveloped nature of the Soviet Far East, its difficult climate, and high input costs. \n\nAnother major barrier between the USSR and Japan was a territorial one, namely that the USSR had annexed the Kurile Islands (north of Hokkaido) in 1945, but Japan did not recognize this annexation as *de jure* (this is *still* an outstanding issue between Russia and Japan). As a result of these political and economic barriers, the USSR and Japan had a very, very small scale trade relationship - Soviet imports represented something like half of a percent of Japanese GNP in 1990. \n\nDespite a visit of then-Soviet Foreign Minister (and future President of Georgia) Eduard Shevardnadze  to Japan in 1986 (in which he praised working conditions for Japanese workers), and a 1988 speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Krasnoyarsk calling for improved trade relations between Japan and the USSR, these political barriers , as well as larger economic concerns by Soviet authorities over other parts of the economy, largely meant that Japanese-Soviet economic relations remained a relatively small sector of unrealized potential by 1991. There was certainly increasing economic chaos by that point, but factory workers in Gorky were certainly not losing their jobs to Japanese imports. \n\nSources:\n\nRobert Service. *The End of the Cold War:1985-1991*\n\nSumiye O. McGuire. \"Japanese-Soviet Trade Relations\". RAND Corporation. available [here](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-21-mn-2588-story.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d5e72u/did_the_average_soviet_citizen_have_a_better/f0lw4qa/", "https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/05/30/is-japan-the-enemy/", "https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R3817.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "7weqap", "title": "Why do we only cover black accomplishments in the US history curriculum while only touching on the other minorities.", "selftext": "We cover the first black congressman and many black authors (this isn\u2019t to discredit their work) as part of the curriculum, but the accomplishments of other minorities are only really brought up if the school itself is a part of a region where those minorities are the majority or a significant part of the school population. \n\nAn example would be how Asians are only really covered during World War II with the executive order with only one person actually being mentioned as a \u201ckey term\u201d and Hispanics are briefly mentioned in other places with the pain figures being \u201cPancho Villa\u201d and sometimes mentioned during WWII but not many real names given credit other than \u201cMexico didn\u2019t turn on the US\u201d\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7weqap/why_do_we_only_cover_black_accomplishments_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtzs2fv"], "score": [15], "text": ["The short, non-historical answer is that curriculum varies from district to district and what happens in one district may not be what happens in another.\n\nThe longer, historical answer is that due to the 10th Amendment (*The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.*) and the fact education isn't mentioned in the Constitution, curriculum decisions are up to the states. \n\nEast coast schools adopted a modern curriculum in the early 1900's (literature, science, history, mathematics, art, music, physical education) and as teachers moved west, bringing their curriculum and textbooks with them, they brought their world views and perspectives. Teaching has been dominated by white women in the classroom and white men in positions of leadership, which informs which textbooks are purchased, who gets emphasized in curriculum, and who gets left out. Some states, such as California and Texas, have historically required shared resources across schools so publishers write for those states. So, if Texas history standards don't mention Asian-Americans until World War II, there's no reason for a textbook publisher to mention them sooner. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3vtq5i", "title": "Regarding history writing - when to use or not use citations", "selftext": "Hey all,\n\nI'm writing a paper which is partly a biography ([Sabbatai Zevi](_URL_0_), who I highly recommend reading up on if you're into religious history). Part of the introduction is just a quick sketch of his life - birth, family, death, etc - events that are pretty much undisputed. How should stuff like this, for which I have 4 or 5 sources that all agree, be cited? Should I pick one source and go with it, or what?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vtq5i/regarding_history_writing_when_to_use_or_not_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxqp17p"], "score": [8], "text": ["For that kind of information; things you would expect to find in an encyclopedia, I would not bother with any citations.\n\nAn exception to this would be if our understanding of his biography- or brief life sketch- has radically changed any time in the past twenty years through new sources or ways of reading old sources.  Then you might need a citation and some acknowledgement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "74ojk4", "title": "I'm a well off unmarried princess living in Britain around 1000CE. What is my life like? (Specific questions down below)", "selftext": "I have a few more specific questions as well:\n\n1)What type of education would I have? Would i be expected to know how to cook and clean like a peasant woman would, or would I have servants to do that for me?\n\n2)What would I do in my spare time?\n\n3)My father has decided I should marry. How much choice do I have over the matter, both in regards to my  choice of spouse and whether or not i will marry at all? What would happen to me if I refused to comply with my father's wishes?\n\n4) What type of medical care would I have in regards to feminine issues, ie menstruation, childbirth ect..,\n\n5)Say I do marry. Who would be a likely candidate for my bridegroom?\n\n6)If my future husband dies, what will happen to me? I assume there is some difference in what happens regarding whether or not I have had children\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74ojk4/im_a_well_off_unmarried_princess_living_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do08tqz"], "score": [6], "text": ["I only really have the expertise to answer your questions on marriage, so will leave the other questions to those best equipped to answer. \n\n\nHow much choice women had in marriage varied greatly depending on their social status and their family. Some parents (there's circumstantial evidence that women were as involved in organising marriages as men) took their children's desires into consideration more than others. Evidence from my research suggests that marriages were often arranged in order to facilitate a positive relationship between the couple: husband and wife were near the same age, would have met previously, etc. But equally, there were times when the necessity for a marriage was so great (to prevent a war or to acquire a particularly juicy piece of land) that it might be arranged with little regard for either party's happiness. \n\n\nAt the highest levels of medieval society, most women would have known from childhood that marriage was their destiny. Princesses were primarily used in international diplomatic marriages and were very valuable in this regard, so most did marry. Marrying a large number of daughters could be a challenge, though, so if you had a lot of older sisters, there could be more flexibility for you. This would almost certainly mean entering religious life. \n\n\nIf your father picked out a husband for you and you really, really didn't want to marry him, there were options open. First, medieval canon law clearly stated that a marriage could only be formed by the freely given consent of the couple involved. This was formalised in the early thirteenth century, so your 11th-century princess had autonomy, but a couple of hundred years later, she would be good. If you absolutely refused, you could not legally be married. We have no way of knowing how often this happened, but it seems to have been very rare. Families could put a great deal of pressure on their daughters to marry according to plan (the marriage of Jane Grey to Guildford Dudley in the 16th century is a classic example) and everyone would have been raised with the idea of arranged marriages as the norm. \n\n\nAnother option was to find someone else to marry in secret. In 1297, Joan of Acre, the widowed daughter of Edward I, secretly married her esquire, Ralph de Monthermer. Joan, who was only 25 and had had children, was a valuable commodity on the marriage market. Her decision to marry in secret instead of keeping herself available for a diplomatic marriage angered her father. Joan was far from the only widow to employ this tactic: Alice de Lacy did the same when she married Ebulo Lestrange in 1324; Catherine de Valois married Owen Tudor at some point in the 1430s; Jacquetta of Luxembourg married Richard Woodville in 1437. A woman who wished to remove herself from the marriage market had the ability to do so, but it's interesting to note that each of these women did so as a widow. My own research backs this up -- younger women on their first marriage were more likely to follow the wishes of others, but widows likely had a bit more leeway flout expectations. \n\n\nAs mentioned above, if you did marry, your husband would likely be an important foreign prince or nobleman. Who exactly he would be depended very much on which way the political winds were blowing. Is there worry about war breaking out with France? You're marrying a French prince! Has war broken out? You're going to marry into the family of one of France's enemies in hopes of making any alliance. Is your country looking to expand trading relations somewhere? That's where your husband will probably come from. This wasn't always a given. Princesses did marry men from their own countries, particularly when relations between the crown and the nobility were tense. In the late 13th century, Edward I developed a policy of marrying his daughters to important English earls, in order to more closely align the interests of the crown and the top tier of the nobility. \n\n\nIf your husband or fiance died, you would often (though not always) be expected to make another diplomatic marriage. As in the case of Joan of Acre, women who were still young remained valuable on the marriage market, especially if they had already demonstrated their fertility by having children. There might be other ties that forced (or allowed, depending on your perspective) you to remain single. If you had a young son who had just inherited the throne, you might remain single in order to exercise on his behalf. If you were older, you might not remarry and either return to your home country or remain in your husband's country. Such women would have a bit more choice over whether to enter religious life or stay in lay society. \n\n\nIf you hadn't married yet and your fiance died, your father (or whoever was planning marriages for you) would likely re-open marriage negotiations elsewhere pretty much immediately. This was a very common occurrence. Betrothals could fall apart for a number of reasons and many women were betrothed multiple times before marrying. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "skstx", "title": "What is the most interesting discovery/ new understanding you made whilst exploring your area of study?", "selftext": "Let's stir a little discussion shall we. We dont all start out with a vast reservoir of knowledge on our respective areas of interest, it builds over time with study, where our understanding morphs with the input of new information. As part of this I'm sure we all get that moment during the study of an area of history or an event where we find out something that either changes our understanding of the topic, shocks us or at least spurs our interest further. So everyone, tell me your most interesting discovery during the study of your area of choice. It doesnt matter if its ground-breaking or something minor... as long as it had an effect on you and your understanding/study, and you can explain why.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/skstx/what_is_the_most_interesting_discovery_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4et4i9", "c4et8mm", "c4etdn4", "c4eteqw", "c4etrok", "c4ettue", "c4euvqz", "c4exedj", "c4exk2r", "c4f0xsz"], "score": [8, 2, 17, 9, 4, 3, 5, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["The day I discovered that the European world operated on a single-sex model prior to the 18thc really sticks out in my mind. The idea that people could \"discover\" or \"decide\" that there are two sexes virtually overnight and come up with a whole new set of terminology for female reproductive parts (ie, vagina, ovaries, etc) was really stunning to me.\n\nIt really helped me contextualize modern theories about gender and sex, and it's probably the one fact I still dwell on a lot. I think about how if I had been born four hundred years earlier, my being a woman would be considered a birth defect because I wasn't \"baked enough in the oven\", and that is truly astounding to me.", "Something I found particularly cool was relative dating of the different ancient greek cultures. \n\nOr the day I truly put the French Revolution into context, years after studying it in high school. \n\nNothing too momentous really, but feeling my brain get rewired was a great feeling. ", "I don't know if I can narrow it down to a single most interesting thing, but here are some:\n\n* Queen Victoria, contrary to popular conception, loved sex and disliked children\n\n* Metternich was not significantly involved in the creation of the police state apparatus he would later be identified with.  He opposed these measures, but was overruled by the intensely conservative Francis II\n\n* The basic plot of the novel *Heart of Darkness* [actually happened](_URL_0_); a French officer went off the deep end and took the indigenous soldiers under his command on an aimless rampage, eventually declaring himself their chief.\n\n* The CIA [actually was](_URL_1_) involved in cocaine trafficking in South Central LA during the early 1980s, when crack took off.  ", "I was raised Southern Baptist (on my mother's side, at least). To that side of my family, Israel was something sacred. It wasn't just a nation-state, it was a glorious promise from God to the Jews that guaranteed the second coming of Christ. I didn't hear the term \"Palestine\" until I was in college (\"Philistine,\" yes. \"Palestine,\" no.) Same thing with \"Palestinians\" and \"Zionism.\" Those words simply did not exist.\n\nMy entire research has been revelatory and eye-opening. Not only as I transitioned from the religious to the secular definition of Israel, but as I came to understand the wonderfully complicated and controversial field of the Middle East in general, and Israel in particular.\n\nThe crazy thing is, I was raised in a fairly liberal household. My family wasn't rabidly pro-Israel by any stretch, they just simply didn't know any different. I think my experience is a common one for the majority of Americans. What we learn about Israel, we learn from Sunday School and the news. In many ways, that fact alone helps explain the U.S.-Israel \"unbreakable bond\" (as Obama puts it).", "The notion that racial divisons in Malaysia were not as salient as they are today until the advent of British colonisation. I don't know how far I agree with this argument, but it was mind-blowing as a Malaysian to encounter it and the evidence for it.\n\nRacial tension has persistently plagued Malaysia for virtually all of Malaysians' living memory, but evidence from early colonial administrators suggests that racial boundaries were fluid before heavy British involvement in affairs of state.\n\nThe argument goes that once the British began actively governing the country in the late 19th century, it became convenient for them to bucket people by ethnic origin and treat them accordingly, since it simplified the process of administration to entrench various stereotypes about different races.\n\nThe article which advanced this argument: _URL_0_\n\nI was later able to personally read a bunch of primary source accounts from colonial administrators at various libraries in London and the British National Archives. There I made a second slightly less but still mind-blowing discovery about a clear distinction between two factions of colonial administrators: one which pursued a more racialist line of thinking to governance, and another which urged a more open and equitable approach to government. The first faction was always dominant, and the country is still governed today along similar lines.", "Two revelations have really had a lasting impact on me and have shaped my understand of history: that the idea of \"nature\" is a construction, and how utterly transformative fossil fuels have been in the last 200 years.", "Well one thing that constantly astounds people who don't know much about Crusade history (and surprised me at first) is that no one can agree on how many crusades there were. The problem is a definitional one. What is a crusade? And along with that, who is qualified to call for one? What are the goals of a crusade? \n\nI've seen historians argue that there was only one crusade (the commonly titled First Crusade) or that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of crusades and that they only ended when Napoleon conquered the Knights of Malta. \n\nLike I said, the problem is definitional. One can argue only the pope can call a crusade, and that affects the number. But if anyone can call a crusade, then things are different. If it's only a crusade when Jerusalem is the goal, then a lot of things called \"crusades\" are actually not real crusades. And so on and so on. ", "One of my favorite, which I learned this past year, was that some Canadians, and quite a few, believed that after the Boer War, Canada could become the central country in the British Empire. That is to say, it would be the rise of Canadian Imperialism that would be dominant in the world power. I always viewed ourselves, as I am Canadian, as being colonies to the British in general, but never realized how strong Canadian nationalism was in the early 20th C.", "I think the Chinese revolution of 1911 is one of the most interesting things that I've learned. The idea of a country-wide relatively uncentralized and fairly popular revolution against the last Qing rulers is pretty radical. Furthermore I think popular perception among most Americans is that China went from being ruled by an Emperor to being ruled by the Communist Party which is really untrue. \n\nLikewise, the fact that one of China's greatest national icons, Sun Yat-sen, was overseas at the time of the revolution is very amusing to me. That whole period from 1911/1912 to about 1948 is pretty incredible. So much conflict and yet so many different ideas about what Chinese society should look like post-emperor.\n\n_URL_0_", "Mainly a lot of my pre-conceptions of the Cuban Revolution and how people treat it. I grew up around the exile community so I didn't really get a second look at the history of the Revolution until I started reading. I guess for interesting though, [Operation Mongoose](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Voulet", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Danilo_Blandon"], [], ["http://faculty.washington.edu/charles/pubs/1986-MakingofRaceinColonialMalaya.pdf"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhai_Revolution"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project"]]}
{"q_id": "4cnmzu", "title": "Is there ANY truth to the Atlantis myth and could it be connected to ideas of ancient cultures actually being really technologically advanced?", "selftext": "This bothers me so much. What are the chances that the pyramids were used for wireless electricity, similar to what [Tesla theorized?](_URL_1_) Could the Atlantians have actually been an incredibly forward thinking civilization that, when their land began to be lost to the ocean, spread out across the world? That would explain [the pyramids all having a similar shape across the world](_URL_3_) and the [boat underneath the sphinx in Egypt](_URL_2_)\n\nListen, I know this may sound crackpot. I'm well aware. HOWEVER, if stories of a Biblical flood are true, (which every culture seems to have one, it seems plausible) then histories and culture could have been washed away. Things like [the Antikythera Mechanism](_URL_0_) could also be explained easier this way. \n\nPlease, if you have any info on anything related to this, I'd love to read it. And also, if you could, upvote this post. Obviously I won't get any karma from it and it would increase my chances of hearing differing opinions on this. thank you\n\n\nTL;DR Could ancient civilizations have had technologies that we don't know about? Was Atlantis perhaps a real place? or am i a crazy boy ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4cnmzu/is_there_any_truth_to_the_atlantis_myth_and_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1k8wia"], "score": [7], "text": ["I am no expert on Plato or the Atlantis story, but there are a couple of things I can add here that may be of use.\n\nThe first thing is that Atlantis is a story, used by Plato in the 4th century BC to make a philosophical point about his image of the ideal state. No other ancient source tells us anything about Atlantis. If the Greeks really did preserve some distant memory of an ancient civilisation, it is extremely odd that no one else bothered to say anything about it. In particular, given that Atlantis was supposed to be an expansionist sea power, it really should have featured in Thucydides' list of thalassocracies before Athens. Since no other Greeks (or indeed any other literate civilisation of the ancient world) seemed to have known or cared about Atlantis, the likely scenario is that Plato (who was not a historian) made it up.\n\nAgain, it's important to stress just how little we \"know\" about Atlantis. In all of Antiquity, only *one* source mentions it. This source places it in the distant west and nine thousand years in the past, even though the Greeks had no more than the vaguest idea of what had happened *in their own country* as little as three centuries before Plato. Their understanding of any event before the reappearance of writing in the 700s BC was a mix of oral tradition, fanciful legend and divine intervention; their account of anything that happened in prehistory is often staggeringly incongruous with what we learn from archaeological remains. To give just one example, they believed the Mycenaean palaces - built in Greece by Greek-speaking people just 800 years or so before Plato - were built by Cyclopes. Basically, they had no clue how those massive structures got there. Now, how likely is it that Plato (and Plato alone) had an accurate account of a land that supposedly existed 9000 years ago in the endless seas beyond the Pillars of Herakles?\n\nThe widespread existence of Flood stories hardly implies that a worldwide Flood ever actually happened. The idea of a cleansing flood or rising waters as punishment from the gods is fairly obvious; it would easily tie into the experiences of any people living near waters affected by the tide, on seasonally flooded plains, or in regions prone to earthquakes and tsunami. There is no reason why such stories should all go back to one great half-remembered worldwide event. In any case, such a flood (and the civilisations it supposedly washed away) should have left significant geological and archaeological traces, but to my knowledge it hasn't (though I may be wrong about this).\n\nThere are definitely remains of ancient civilisations that we know very little about. Most of these had no writing system and therefore can't tell us more than what we can glance from the structures they built and the art and tools they produced. But the extent to which their works baffle us is often overstated for the purposes of sensationalism. Meanwhile, the Antikythera Mechanism is pretty securely dated to the late Hellenistic period (2nd century BC - two hundred years *after* Plato). It belongs to a time of fairly well-attested scientific and technological advances, that also saw the perfection of torsion catapults, the accurate calculation of the circumference of the Earth, and the invention of the basic steam engine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism", "http://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_tower.htm", "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/pictures/110624-egypt-wooden-solar-boat-sun-discovered-pyramids-science-archaeology/", "http://jfalthouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/JFALTHOUSE-2013-7-16-four-pyramid-sites-four-stars-of-Orions-Belt.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3rzkby", "title": "Why were German tank engines in WW2 terrible when it came to power to weight ratios? Specifically the panzer 4, panther and Tiger tanks.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rzkby/why_were_german_tank_engines_in_ww2_terrible_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwsspkn"], "score": [57], "text": ["In general, power-to-weight ratio (in terms of the power and weight of just the engine itself) is not a very important property in a tank engine (compactness is much more important). This is because the performance of the tank is determined by the ratio of the engine's horsepower to the overall weight of the vehicle, of which the engine makes up a relatively small fraction (the Maybach engines in the Panthers and Tigers weighed around 2600 pounds, compared to the 50 ton and 60 ton overall weights of those tanks - 2.6% and 2.2%).\n\nSo the engines had (relatively) poor power/weight ratios because there was no reason to put a more expensive, lighter-weight engine into a tank. Brief tangent: an interesting thing that the British did in WWII was to power many of their tanks with the Meteor engine, which was basically just a Merlin without all of the weight-saving optimizations (usually using plain steel in place of aluminum, no supercharger etc.). For more than a year, in fact, they were able to build their Meteors using engine blocks recycled from war-weary Merlins, which is a bit of industrial efficiency I'm not aware of any other combatant making use of.\n\nA bigger problem with the German tank engines was that they were gasoline-powered, which made the vehicle ~~a severe~~ more of a fire hazard (as was true of American and British tanks as well). Russian tanks generally ran on diesels and so were able to carry less inflammable fuel (an obvious benefit when you're being shot at regularly). German commanders were well aware of these advantages and wanted their factories to copy the Russian engines (in fact they wanted copies of the entire T-34 when it first appeared) but this was impossible thanks to their general aluminum shortage.\n\nEdit: I interpreted this question as referring to the power-to-weight ratio of the engine itself. If OP actually meant \"why did a 60-ton tank have just a 600 hp engine?\", this was because even though the weight of a tank engine doesn't matter very much, the space taken up by the engine is critically important. A Tiger would certainly have benefited from a more powerful engine, but a more powerful engine would have been larger and required larger fuel tanks, which would have meant a larger vehicle, which would have meant more armor, making the vehicle heavier and easier to hit. The Tiger in particular was already severely pushing the upper size limit in terms of the ability of their transportation infrastructure (and the ground, literally) to support the vehicles. So the designers selected an engine that gave just enough power to move the vehicle at an acceptable tactical speed, and no more.\n\nRegarding gasoline vs. diesel: gasoline is more volatile than diesel fuel and has a lower flash point, so if vapors have accumulated in a partially-filled tank, the gasoline tank will be more likely to ignite as a result of a projectile/fragment penetration, although this risk differential can be mitigated to some extent by proper venting of the fuel tanks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3g80qt", "title": "Were there any civilian casualties, massacres, or war crimes during the American revolutionary war like those portrayed in Mel Gibson's \"The Patriot?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g80qt/were_there_any_civilian_casualties_massacres_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctx5soe"], "score": [2], "text": ["The scene from the movie was actually based on German war crimes carried out in Italy during World War II.  No none instance of anything similar occurred during the Revolutionary War.  That's not to say war crimes didn't happen or that civilians were never targeted.  However there is simply [no evidence](_URL_0_) of British soldiers forcing civilians into a church which was then burned.\n\nOn a related note, the British officer in the movie was based (loosely) on [Banastre Tarleton] (_URL_0_), who was accused of, and basically admitted to, massacring troops that were attempting to surrender, in a situation that was admittedly quite different from anything portrayed in the film.  \n  \n\n\n  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2000/07/did_the_brits_burn_churches.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9stp6j", "title": "Recommended reading on the history of medieval guilds?", "selftext": "I'm starting from zero here, I know basically nothing other than that they started in Italy and there was a strong distinction between guild labor and unguilded labor, and thus guild craftsmen and unguilded workers. I am interested in that, as well as their relationship, if any to the peasantry in particular and society writ large. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9stp6j/recommended_reading_on_the_history_of_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8rhwcn"], "score": [3], "text": ["The standard work on the subject is probably Steven A. Epstein's *Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe*. While I haven't had a chance to read it yet myself, the reviews are overall positive. Germany is apparently almost entirely ignored, while parts of the Low Countries and Rhineland receive less focus than they deserve and the chapters focusing on the early part of the Middle Ages are also apparently somewhat weak, but the \"classical \" period of the guilds - the high middle ages - is very well documented and discussed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "z6mqy", "title": "Why the reverence for the Founding Fathers?", "selftext": "Why do Americans in general hold the Founding Fathers in such almost religious reverence? It is a little hard for me to understand why it matters so much what a small number of men in the 18th century thought about nation-building, political rights, etc. Society evolves and so does political thought. Why does an appeal to the Founding Fathers' beliefs and intentions still carry so much weight in American politics? \n\n**Edit: I would like to thank everyone who participated in this very interesting discussion. There were some great book recommendations, the tone was very civil, I learned a lot. In addition, some of the answers embodied exactly the kind of reverend attitude I was asking about, which I find fascinating. All in all, it confirmed the fact that this idea is very much alive in the American mind.**", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z6mqy/why_the_reverence_for_the_founding_fathers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c61wy00", "c61wzoh", "c61x1ee", "c61xptt", "c61xvxm", "c61xw2p", "c61xwkx", "c61y0x0", "c61y2bl", "c61ybnm", "c61ypx9", "c61zte6", "c620kzs", "c622r6x", "c62482c", "c624co7"], "score": [22, 55, 10, 274, 2, 46, 2, 3, 13, 7, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["Because of the constitution. The constitution is literally the definition of what America is. If you want to imbue your country with a certain leaning, right or left or toward any religion you can point to successes of your ideas and you can point to prominent holders of your beliefs to legitimise them but the most crucial link you can make is to the constitution. This can't be done with the words of the constitution because its fairly non-partisan and secular so the only other way to do it is to say \"this is what the founding fathers, the framers of the constitution, thought and therefore what they really meant when they wrote the constitution\". \n\nThey carry so much weight because they wrote the document that defines American politics. ", "As a Lithuanian i can say without bias that the \"Founding Fathers\" were fascinating people, especially in contrast to European politicians at the time. Currently reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. To answer your question (Don't quote me i'm not fond of politics) the conservatives of U.S use them to justify whatever they are crusading about. I hope that doesn't turn you off because they happen to be very interesting individuals for their time. Sorry about my English, and i hope this helped.", "Because they founded our country, and we're pretty happy about how it turned out. We've kept our constitution since then, so obviously we've consistently liked what they have to say about political philosophy.\n\nAll that is much more respected because what they did at the time was so difficult and groundbreaking. ", "It's not just about the enduring power of the Constitution, though that certainly has a lot to do with it. It is about national mythologies. Every nation has some sense of what defines them against other peoples. In many European countries this often includes an ethnic element- look at modern France where there is a lot of social unrest stemming from how France can still be \"French\" with so many non-French immigrants living there. \n\nThe United States is a very young country though. They don't have any ethnic unity they can point to to say, \"this is who we are.\" They don't have a monarchy like the English, they don't have a millennium old culture like the Chinese. It is a country of immigrants unlike any that came before it; as the saying goes, \"the only country born from a good idea.\" The one thing that connects all Americans together is the ideals set forth by the Founders. Beyond that there really isn't much to rally around that can include everyone. Therefore the Founders get this huge importance put on them in order to fill the role of a mythic, unifying force any American can look to and feel connected to.", "Founders of organizations, political movements, etc, are always revered.  You see this in ancient greek city states with their quasi-mythic law givers, romulus and remus in rome, or today in political parties, where democrats worship at the altar of FDR and republicans at the altar of Reagan, both of whom created the party that endures to this day.  What is unusual in america is not the beatification of the founders in our civic religion, it is the degree of fealty we, supposedly but not really, have to their constitution.", "The founding fathers went through the process of setting up a new country with a huge amount of respect for the task. They did incredible amounts of research, studied countless empires and kingdoms which, when became despotic, were often overthrown by the elites (senate, barrons, feudal lords, etc) and when the new structure became unsolvable after that, devolved into a populist mess of pure democracy and beggering thy neighbor, and when the nations finally went bankrupt, were re-organized under a 'strongman' new dictator or king. \n\nThey've followed the rise and fall of all such nations, they've focussed on how power corrupts, they've focussed on what little details can lead to the fall of a nation or the subversion of a system of law, and they've made a system which has stood up really really damn well over the long haul. \n\nSure, there are problems. The USA's senate has turned into a virtual impasse machine... but it was actually almost designed that way. And yeah, the house of reps is supposed to be the people's house, subject to the whims of the population, while the senate is supposed to be steady and not subject to it... but this role has reversed. The house of reps has a huge number of lengthy tenures due to gerrymandering, and the senate now is directly elected by the population (It used to be appointed by the states, giving the states an actual position in the national government. This was changed via a constitutional ammendment)\n\nBasically, most of the problems with the constitution are all self-inflicted by us trying to change it. Some minor crisis pops up, and we go out of our way to remove the roadblocks that keep us safe, which allows government to grow yet again. After a few times of this, it becomes more and more obvious that such minor crises are almost pre-planned with the intention of pushing us to remove more such blocks. \n\nEvery time we change such stuff, unless we've done anywhere near the amount of research the founding fathers have done, we collectively recognize that we're rather clueless compared to them. We've not done our homework, and we probably shouldn't be tinkering with stuff we don't fully understand. \n\nOther countries do tinker, adn these countries often end up very instable. Or slight tinkering allows way more changes than wree expected. \n\nRepublics are fairly easy to break in general. Ours is damaged in some ways, but not broken, and not really getting much worse despite what people claim. The founding fathers did an amazing job considering all they had to deal with. ", "I'll second national mythology. I'll also note that there was a huge desire to create unifying myths when the country felt anything but united before the civil war. Are you familiar with longfellow?", "Same question: Religion\n\nAnd actually, as a translation professional, The King James Bible was and still is a clusterfuck of a translation. ", "For starters there is no real answer to your question and anyone who claims to know the answer is full of shit, the fact that they made a constitution and founded a country is in and of itself not unique to the modern world and doesn't explain why we(Americans) are so different. I can say that the American emphasis on the founding is something almost uniquely American and has not always been present. In fact the first reference to \"what the founders wanted\" was in a 1920's presidential campaign, so it is a fairly recent phenomenon. I would recommend you read *The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's revolution and the Battle over American History* by Jill Lepore. She is extremely harsh on the tea party but does an excellent job tracing what the meaning of the founding is and was throughout American history that will almost certainly give you a better insight that anyone here can provide( it's also a short read).", "They actually were pretty awesome - particularly when compared to similarly positioned revolutionary leaders. The fact that the system they set up actually worked, and none of them tried to take over personally sets them apart from most other revolutionaries. That being said the people who are focused on what the founding fathers intended are mainly doing so because they think it is the same thing they want. Politicians can use the founding fathers in this way because their stories are taught and mythologized in schools.", "One point that can be made is they lived during a period where one central government had absolute power over state and religion.  Since they had first hand experience living with tyranny they tried to create a government that prevented these problems.  Many people and politicians today do not understand what they were trying to prevent, and unfortunately are trying to dismantle the constitution to bring us back to tyranny.  It is a viscous circle, but common throughout history.  ", "Let's not forget that many of them were slaveholders... Although Benjamin Franklin, for one, became an abolitionist in his later years.", "While the founding fathers were always held in high esteem, after the US civil war the myths and legends of early founding fathers became particularly important as a way to reunite the war-torn country through common origins. ", "I think most revolutions end in disaster. It isn't easy to have a successful revolution and setup a new nation without making a real mess of things. The French couldn't do it in 1789, for instance, and they weren't short of political philosophers. Compare the US with some contemporary examples: \n\nIreland, revolution fails - no new nation\nFrance, revolution succeeds - new nation is born in a bloody killing spree and is unstable at best.\nMexico, revolution succeeds - but new nation is mired in civil war.\n\nWe see time an again in history that new nations (fresh from the revolution) can easily fall into dictatorships or into civil wars. The Founding Fathers managed through luck and skill and foresight to avoid the most dangerous pitfalls, and left us with a Constitution that has held up pretty well for 250 years. So I think one reason why the Founding Fathers are esteemed so highly is because they got right what is so easy to get disasterously wrong.\n\n", "Just like great philosophers and leaders are praised in europe for founding our \"humanism\" I guess. I don't know were you are from, but I France we have a similar trend toward the \"Enlightment\" (that wrongfully we believe were mostly french, ignoring by that that it was a collective work) and their thinkers. We also praise our first deputy and our Human rights declaration like a sacred texts, and towards our national hymn as well. (Did I speal about De Guaulle?)\n\nI guess every nations needs landmark to hold together, and what better landmark than the FF for the US ?", "Two parts.\n\nOne, we hold them in great esteem because they allowed the United States to exist as a democratic republic.  There are many stories about what could have gone wrong, and the United States as we know it today very nearly failed when people tried to proclaim George Washington king, when the Articles of Confederation failed, or when conflict inevitably and repeatedly threatened our country.  It was their framework that allowed the country to grow and improve past these tests.\n\nThat said, most people, particularly conservatives, invoke the founding fathers as a mythology to justify their principles through jingoism and fear of change.  There's a lot of mythologizing of the founding fathers, which makes things difficult (particularly when people proclaim stupid things like the United States being a \"Christian nation\" rather than a nation of majority Christianity)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1gvfh1", "title": "Inherited Musket, Can Anyone Identify?", "selftext": "My guess is late 1700s Charlottesville Musket. Any ideas?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: I did some measurements:\nThe barrel diameter is .75 caliber. The overall length is aprox 57.5\" and the barrel length (If I'm measuring it correctly) from muzzle to end of the chamber is 42.5\"\nIt has(had) 3 barrel bands. Only one remains intact.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gvfh1/inherited_musket_can_anyone_identify/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cao8rtt", "caocpws", "caocwrg", "caocyv4", "caoijop"], "score": [3, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["If nobody on here can help you, it might be worth posting to /r/guns :D", "Just a guess, but it *might* be a Springfield 1812. Here is an antique arms dealer that had one for sale.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nThey have a similar notch for the cheek on the left side of the stock. I'm no expert, but take a look at the photos, they look similar. Good luck.", "The barrel band would indicate its not a Brown Bess they, didn't have any. There is supposed to be a second barrel band near the muzzle, does the wood look worn like that anywhere closer to the breech? If so a Charleville had three bands as did the Spingfield 1795 which was patterned after the Charleville. With the lock plate gone there aren't many other distinguishing features. Any marks at all on the metal?\n\nEdit: After looking at the pictures of a Springfield 1812 and 1795 models I'm going to say its ones of those, they were produced at the same time, and the cheek cutout in the stock looks like the 1812 as u/GeneRottenberry pointed out. If not its something from the time period, the stock looks to be cut for a flint or percussion system. And the opposite of the lock side looks to be very similiar to those two models as well.", "The closest I could come after looking through some books I have was a US 1795.  The sideplate design made me immediately think US made.  The bayonet lug on the bottom of the barrel is peculiar. If you could get some measurements of the barrel, stock, overall length, lock mortise length, and a bore diameter, I might be able to narrow it down a little more.  Without the lock and trigger guard it will be very hard to get a specific type, but a general model can be determined.  If there are any marking on it at all, they won't hurt to mention.\n\nIs there supposed to be a third band further back on the stock, it's hard to tell in the one full length picture?\n\nEdit: The 1795 did not have the cheek recess on the buttstock while some of the 1812's did.  Also 1812's did not have the bayonet lug on the bottom of the barrel.  Perhaps the cheek recess was done in the field, or perhaps parts of both were fit together to make a working musket, both of which were not unheard of.  Again, measurements would definitely help.", "FYI there is a reason why the vent hole has been sealed up, doing so effectively inactivates the gun and renders it no longer a firearm. It can be legally shipped or sold almost anywhere in the world in that condition without any special paperwork.\n\nIf you take the gun to a licensed gunsmith then they might be able to open it back up again, although I'm not sure it would be worth it given the condition since it would take a lot more work to restore it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/kd51d"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.antiquearmsinc.com/1812-springfield-flintlock-musket.htm"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17jop6", "title": "How did the PRC reconstruct the narrative of historical Sino-Tibetan relations to justify Tibet's inclusion within Communist China?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17jop6/how_did_the_prc_reconstruct_the_narrative_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c86c3xo"], "score": [3], "text": ["Though someone might want to give a more detailed response the short answer is the PRC's justification for their borders is a historically revisionist maximum, or in other terms Mao looked at the historical maximum that any one border once was at any time in known Chinese history and decided that that would be where the current borders ought to be. Evidence of this can also be seen in the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962, where China seized a portion of sovereign Indian territory with a justification that they were restoring their traditional borders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10el7h", "title": "Why did the collapse of the Soviet Union not lead to Belarus's liberalization and integration into 'Europe'?", "selftext": "Belarus is considered the last dictatorship of Europe. How did once-repressive Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, etc. communist regimes collapse while Belarus's repressive communist regime survive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10el7h/why_did_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union_not_lead/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6s4agk", "c6cwhmf", "c6d275p"], "score": [2, 14, 7], "text": ["I lived in Belarus most of my live, and I can say that it was not bad until 2008 if you are not involved in politics. There were regular salaries paid, not high, but there were enough for live. But then economy began kind of down. People had to think about emigration in other countries more often, because they could not pay for everything from their salaries. In last couple years many people went to Russia.\nIt looks like there will be some revolution, and it\u2019s becoming pretty dangerous to be in the country because I guess it will be bloody.  ", "There is no direct connection between Lukashenko and Soviet Communist regime - he only come to power in 1994, and it probably took him some time to neutralize all the opposition etc.  In the period immediately after 1991, Belarus was a democracy* .\n\n* at least theoretically, don't really know enough about that.", "I think the initial question is comparing apples an oranges. The Polish, Hungarians, the Czechs and the Romanians were never part of the Soviet Union. They were behind the iron curtain and communist countries for sure, but being under Soviet influence is different from being Soviet themselves. They had strong expat communities that considered the interests of their nations outside of the communist lens, in other places in Europe, and benefited from occasionally less hardline governments. The Poles and the Hungarians gave the Russians a lot of trouble when they rose up against their dictators right after Stalin died. \n\nThe Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and Poles had economies that were far more independent from the Soviet state than Belarus (or any other SSR), and developed infrastructure less Moscow-centric. These countries also left the communist life behind far earlier than Belarus: 1989, for the most part, rather than 1991. That is to say, their states were born out of more or less popular rejection of communism.\n\nMost of the USSR states that stuck around until 1991 did not liberalize or integrate into Europe nearly as well as the states that abandoned communism earlier. The Baltic states were the first to leave, and they are the ones that liberalized and modernized' -- of course, their sovereignty was obtained through revolution and active rejection of the soviet system.\n\nCountries like Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, for the most part, stuck with the leaders of the Soviet days -- a passive rejection of Sovietdom, compared to the active rejection of the more western nations of the Iron Curtain. The Stans took longest to leave the USSR, their economies and infrastructures were dependent on their presence in the USSR... the people who took control after independence, continued doing their old jobs. Of course, Kazakhstan is modernizing rather well because its dictator ended up being a rather sensible one. Turkmenistan on the other hand did not improve at all from the Soviet days. \n\nRussia and Ukraine liberalized slightly better than the other countries, but there were plenty of Soviet holdovers left in power, that remain there to this day. They both underwent the same privatization scheme that created the modern oligarchs, and are both plagued with rampant corruption and distrust of western culture. The privatization of Ukrainian and Russian industries plunged both nation's economies into free-fall and civil unrest, as Russia had to fight separatists in Chechnya and Ukraine had to deal with Crimea. I can't speak with any real authority for Belorussian reasoning for electing Lukashenko, but he was not elected until 1994 -- when it was starkly evident that \"shock therapy\" was not pretty -- and coming from a communist industry manager background, it seemed appropriate to not take the liberal route that the Russians and Ukrainians took. The Soviet system seemed to some to have been working just fine until Perestroika to some people, and so you had governments like Belarus, and separatist factions like Transnistria rejecting the post-Soviet paradigm, and attempting to retain what was left of the world that they existed in. Transnistria still carries the hammer and sickle imagery on passports and billboards. \n\n\nTL;DR:\n\nPolish, Hungarians, etc. actively rejected the Soviet paradigm, never having fully accepted it, and they did it early.\n\nBelarus was comfortable being a Soviet province, and so did not liberalize as quickly as those states that really never quite consented to communism in the first place."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2npdks", "title": "What happened when Attila tried to take Constantinople?", "selftext": "I don't really know anything on this, I think Constantinople just threw money at them (my source is the movie \"Attila\") \nJust wanting to know what \"plans\" He had for if he took it over, how he would have done it, and what where his means to doing so? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2npdks/what_happened_when_attila_tried_to_take/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmfzkea", "cmg97f8"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Ya pretty much throwing money, although I haven't seen the movie.\n\nIn the fifth century Constantinople's defenses were strengthened during the reign of Theodosius II.  At this time the Byzantines were facing numerous \"Barbarian\" threats, particularly the Vandals raiding maritime trade and coasts.  Constantinople could fend of these small \"barbarians\", but would not fare so well against the overwhelming might of the Huns (who also had siege weapons).\n\nMeanwhile, Attila and his forces were paid off, though they remained uncomfortably close to the capital.  Eventually, the Huns began their raids again and devastated much of Thrace and surrounding areas.  Military efforts against them were ineffective and the Byzantine legions suffered many defeats.\n\nAfter giving the Byzantines a massive walloping and defeating many well fortified cities, Attila demanded a massive payment.  In 443, in exchange for peace, the Byzantines payed about 6000 lbs in gold and had to pay about 2000 lbs in annual tribute.\n\nAs for plans for Constantinople, I'm not sure.  Attila profited immensely off of the East and even lent his own forces to man their garrisons at times.  In 450, Theodosius II died (fell of a horse) and the new emperor, Marcian, refused to continue tributary payments.  At this time, Attila had already turned West and was trying to take Orleans.  In 454 he died and his empire followed.          ", "He didn't actually HAVE pans to take it. The first steppe people to actually be a real threat to the city were the avars- the huns didn't the the equipment or expertise to threaten such a well protected city, (it was among the largest and best fortified cities on the planet) and the imperial army at the time would have been able to devastate a hunnic force that was fool enough to get caught between the walls of the city and the entire might of the eastern legions. They'd also liekly starve in the attempt.\n\nThy paid the huns off because it was cheaper than trying to fight them-any force small enough to catch a hunnic raid would be too small to defeat them, and men sent to fend off the huns-who were ultimately raiders, and NOT a civilized empire who may completely destroy the empire-were men NOT fighting the persians. On top of that, the huns could and DID sack lesser cities in the empire, and, due to the differences in mobility between the two powers, nothing could be done about it without stripping the east of its defenders.\n\nAt the time, an imperial force could move maybe 20 miles a day, and  body of huns could conceivably cover 50, though they'd be limited in where they went by available pasturage.\n\nThe empire literally couldn't force them to fight unless the huns wanted it. This alone means trying to fight them is utterly pointless.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2hnbob", "title": "Did ancient South/Central American people use the wheel?", "selftext": "I have read that the Aztecs and Incas did not use the wheel because they did not have any animals that would be able to pull a carts.  Were there any civilizations in the Americas that ever used the wheel as a method of transport?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hnbob/did_ancient_southcentral_american_people_use_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckuut2h"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, but not for carts. Instead Mesoamericans made fantastic [ceramic toys, mainly dogs, on wheels](_URL_0_). [Spindle whorls](_URL_1_) were used throughout South and North America for twisting yarn. The Nazca culture of Peru created rotating discs for painting ceramics in the round (*not* pottery wheels) that have been in use ever since."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.atoda.com/amerindian/wheel.php", "http://www.americanindian.si.edu/searchcollections/results.aspx?catids=1&amp;objtypeid=Weaving+tools%2fequipment|Spindle+whorl&amp;src=1-4"]]}
{"q_id": "1y9f2j", "title": "Why do you always need an article in Romance languages?", "selftext": "I am currently learning German and Spanish, and found that I always need to use articles in Spanish but not in German. \"Ich trinke Kaffee\" is a correct sentence in German, as is \"I drink water\" in English, but \"Bebo agua\" in Spanish is not, only \"Bebo el agua\" is. From my understanding, ancient Latin did not have articles, and they were introduced to the language by Germanic invaders. Is there a historical reason for some languages not always requiring am article, yet modern Romance languages do? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y9f2j/why_do_you_always_need_an_article_in_romance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfiic9f"], "score": [6], "text": ["This question is probably better for /r/linguistics.\n\nHowever, there are an important note I can make.  Latin's descendants didn't get articles from Germanic invaders.  They're all Latin words, repurposed into articles.  Use of articles was likely a feature developed in Vulgar Latin, which is the ancestor of the Romance languages.  Wikipedia has a bunch of examples in different languages [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Romance_articles"]]}
{"q_id": "25miwa", "title": "Was there ever any statehood movements in areas occupied by American Troops in the years following WW2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25miwa/was_there_ever_any_statehood_movements_in_areas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chio9xf"], "score": [3], "text": ["The US offered to purchase Greenland (which we had occupied during the war) from Denmark in 1946; Denmark declined the offer. In Sicily, among the various nationalist/secessionist movements, there was one which sought to breakaway from Italy and become a US state."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "94us17", "title": "Why isn't Chinese historiography known in the West?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/94us17/why_isnt_chinese_historiography_known_in_the_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3pd7g1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi there! You\u2019ve asked a question along the lines of \u2018why didn\u2019t I learn about X\u2019. We\u2019re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.\n\nFirstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.\n\nSecondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.\n\nInstead of asking \"Why haven't I learned about event ...\", considering asking \"What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?\" - the latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.\n\nThank you!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3m9lsw", "title": "How often did tank crew, especially commanders, turn out of their vehicles during a battle?", "selftext": "In the film Fury Brad Pitt's character gives his orders to other tanks, his own crew and nearby infantry while squatting low in his hatch, was this historical or was it so the filmmakers could get a better looking shot? In the film he does this when under attack from other tanks as well as AT guns and machine guns. My question is concerned with the second world war but you answerers could answer if you have knowledge of WW1 or post war sources too", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m9lsw/how_often_did_tank_crew_especially_commanders/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdd20z"], "score": [7], "text": ["Tank commanders often did stick their heads or upper bodies out of their hatches in order to have a better view of the battlefield. If the tank commander had only a fixed periscope or no periscope at all, he would be forced to do this. Sometimes, it could have unfortunate consequences; the scene of Pitt's comrade being hit by a tank shell isn't a complete fallacy\n\n >  \"Good God,\" a GI in a light tank cried over the radio, \"I fired three rounds and they all bounced off.\" Panzer return fire dismasted a platoon sergeant. \"Just his legs and hips were there,\" a comrade wrote. \"One arm, with the wrist watch on it, lay near the house.\"\n\nThe all-around vision cupola with six periscopes of the late Sherman gave better visibility than the single-periscope split hatch of the early Sherman, but visibility was still quite restricted.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nSources:\n\n*The Guns at Last Light*, by Rick Atkinson"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/nj3R9Et", "http://imgur.com/LmZvblJ"]]}
{"q_id": "d9glcr", "title": "Since pigs were off limits to eat or sacrifice in ancient Israel, why were there so many pigs around in the Bible it or for Antiochus IV to sacrifice etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9glcr/since_pigs_were_off_limits_to_eat_or_sacrifice_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1hz3li"], "score": [9], "text": ["So, it\u2019s not that they were entirely off limits. Only a few laws in the Hebrew Bible outlaw eating the \u05d7\u05d6\u05d9\u05e8 (pig). (We don\u2019t know *why* pigs are treyf, only that they\u2019re not clean for eating.) \n\nWe do have pig bones that have been recovered from archaeological dig sites in the Central Highlands throughout the Iron Age and into later periods. (See Avraham Faust, *Israel\u2019s Ethnogenesis*, who cites the presence of pig bones as a marker of site ethnicity.)\n\nPigs were always in the region (and are of course attested in the New Testament as well\u2014think of the account of the demon Legion that Jesus cast into a herd of pigs and the account of Peter\u2019s vision in Acts 10. Greeks and Romans also eventually settled in the Levant. So, pigs were always available for the kind of thing we think is meant by the \u201cdesolating sacrilege\u201d referees to in the latter parts of Daniel and in Maccabees."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xkvsn", "title": "Who are the most badass women in history?", "selftext": "I'm a Girl Scout leader working with my girls on a badge called \"Playing the Past\". To earn the badge, each girl has to pick a woman from history to play for the week. She will give a speech as if she were the woman in character, make a costume, and we're going to have a \"living history\" party with all the characters.\n\nTo put it a little blunt, I'm specifically trying to find women my girls can identify with. Queer women, women of color, women who weren't christians, women from poverty, women from countries other than America, etc.\n\nSide Note: Exception for Hellen Keller, what a boss.\n\nEDIT: The girls are 12", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xkvsn/who_are_the_most_badass_women_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5n8fs2", "c5n97br", "c5n9ks4", "c5n9l1s", "c5n9rko", "c5n9w17", "c5na11e", "c5nabjb", "c5naj44", "c5naw9b", "c5nb0dv", "c5nb7zt", "c5nbyel", "c5nco8i", "c5ncsu8", "c5neudy", "c5nfotz", "c5nhc2e", "c5nii9u", "c5niyai", "c5nnlo8"], "score": [21, 3, 22, 9, 9, 2, 14, 7, 2, 3, 5, 4, 4, 13, 3, 9, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["I was going to mention Boudica but I'm not sure how appropriate acting out her casual butchering of Romans would be for little girls :O", "Drusilla Dunjee Houston. In the wake of the Tulsa Race Riot/War, she encouraged African American men and women to fight back in the pages of the *Oklahoma Black Dispatch*, an African American newspaper.", "Hildegard of Bingen. Mystic, botanist, composer, philosopher, physician, abbess, correspondent of popes and other senior clerics - and, incidentally, to be canonised later this year. Maybe the only saint with a discography?", "So, so many women to choose from! Here's a few of my favorite women that I wish more people knew about:  \n\n[Matilda Joslyn Gage](_URL_1_) :suffrage activist, noted for being more radical than Anthony or Stanton.  \n\n[Maria Stewart](_URL_3_), an abolitionist, the first woman in America  to give a speech to a \"promiscuous audience\" (i.e. a mixed audience of women and men) - a very dangerous thing to do, esp. for an African American woman. \n\n[Ellen Craft](_URL_2_), who posed as a white male planter to escape slavery.\n\nI also find [Victoria Woodhull] (_URL_0_), the first woman to run for Prez in the US to be pretty interesting.    \n\nEdit: I wish I had more than one upvote to give you for asking a question about women in history!", "[Mother Jones: Mary Harris Jones](_URL_1_), \"The Most Dangerous Woman in America\" - Union organizer\n\nUtah Phillips wrote [a song about her.](_URL_0_)", "[Cornelia of the Gracchi](_URL_0_) who, in late Republican Rome, was held up as an epitome of Roman motherhood. She was married to the general who saved Rome from Hannibal. After he died, she raised his three surviving children: two sons and a daughter. The two sons went on to become political firebrands, and were both murdered for their troubles. Cornelia carried on through it all, being a model of propriety and dignity, and held up as an example to all womanhood.", "Ida B. Wells is a MUST for inclusion.  She was a female, African American newspaper editor that crusaded against the lynching epidemic in Memphis, TN.   She was very up front and challenging to the white community.  \n\nAlso, thanks for going against the stereotype as a Scout leader and teaching these girls about equality and inclusion.  Very cool of you!\n\n", "[Caterina Sforza] (_URL_0_)\npretty much the picture of an involved ruler who also happened to be a woman. trained her military staff and kept control of her state's spending and taxes herself, fought hand to hand in the battle for her fortress against Cesare Borgia's invading army, and avenged the death of her first husband by imprisoning every conspirator and burning their houses down. also found the time to pop out six kids! i wanna beeee her :D\n\nEDIT: 8 kids :) even better", "_URL_0_\n\nAnd is there are reason you are looking for minority figures?", "[Mary Seacole](_URL_0_): By all accounts a much better nurse than the far more well known Florence Nightingale.", "Here ya go: [Badasses of the Week](_URL_0_)", "As a Brit I guess I am obliged to mention Boudica.  She has an awesome statue in a very prominent location in London. \n\nAs a fan of modern history, Rosa Parks.  She only died recently too, which might help a younger audience identify with her. ", "[Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians](_URL_0_).  Daughter of Alfred the Great (d. 899), she ruled over Mercia (central England) from 911-918, building a number of fortifications against the Vikings and then attacking them, conquering much of their territory. (Btw, she fits zero of your criteria; she's Christian, very rich, from England, but you did say badass. She is certainly that.  Plus she has a great name).", "Queen Isabella I of Castile took zero shit from anybody. She refused to let her half brother marry her off until she found a match that she found acceptable. When rebellion broke out while her husband Ferdinand was away at war, Isabella rode out and negotiated an end to that nonsense herself. \n\nShe was also an integral part of the centralization of authority under the Spanish crown that would take place during Ferdinand and Isabella's rule. She helped to revive and reorganize the Santa Hermandad, a combination militia/police force. In addition to cutting back on crime and disorder, this also effectively put an end to most thought of rebellion from royal authority. \n\nTo fix economic problems, she imposed a royal monopoly over all the mints in Spain and took a more active stance in regulating coinage. The ensuing economic restoration allowed the Spanish to finally destroy the last remaining Moorish possessions on the Iberian peninsula. \n\nWithout her organizational and leadership skills on the home front, I doubt Ferdinand would have been able to prosecute the War of Granada so effectively. Definitely one of Medieval Europe's most formidable and effective queens. \n\n_URL_0_", "The  Canadian  comic  strip  artist  Kate  Beaton  published  an  internet  web-site  \"Hark  a  Vagrant\"  that  often  includes  obscure  historical  women.  You  might  want  to  check  it  out  before  telling  your  girl  scouts  about  the  web-site  though.  I  sometimes  think  if  it  was  a  TV  show  in  the  USA,  it  would  have  the  parental  warning  label  \"Parents  may  not  find  it  suitable  for  children  under  the  age  of  14\".   Mary  Seacole  and  Elizabeth  I  are  two  of  the  women  other  respondents  mentioned  on  this  thread,  who  have  appeared  in  Hark  a  Vagrant  comics.   ", "[Nellie Bly](_URL_0_), an investigative journalist who pretended to be insane to report on mental institutions at the turn of the century.", "[Eleanor Roosevelt](_URL_0_) deserves some props for basically creating the position of First Lady as we understand it today.", "_URL_0_ She was a queen of a city state and fought against the British when they tried to annex her lands. I\u00e8m not a historian but thought I could add a little south asian spice.", "[Hojo Masako](_URL_0_)\n(1156-1225) was a badass tough woman from medieval Japan. She was born into an aristocratic warrior family (the Hojo), was wife and widow of the first official Japanese shogun, the mother of two more shoguns, the daughter of a Regent, and the sister of a Regent. Masako wielded a lot of influence behind the scenes and even rode out into battle with her husband. Later, she deposed and banished her father after conspiring against her son and put down several other warrior revolts against Hojo rule. \n\nHojo Masako did most of this while being officially retired as a Buddhist nun, leading a \"quiet\" and cloistered life. Her nickname was the \"Nun Shogun.\"\n\n", "Julie D\u2019Aubigny!  \"A 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun.\"  Perhaps leave the nun part out for the 12 year olds though.", "Hands down, Khawla bint al-Azwar.\n\nSee here: _URL_0_\n\nI'm sure you can find a less...colorfully articulated article on her somewhere\n\nTL;DR: Disguised herself as a guy to rescue her brother, was mistaken for [Khalid ibn Walid](_URL_1_) on the battlefield)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Joslyn_Gage", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_and_William_Craft", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_W._Stewart"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6y2St9zfQs", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Harris_Jones"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Africana"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Sforza"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tubman"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole"], ["http://www.badassoftheweek.com/list.html"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelfl%C3%A6d"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_I_of_Castile"], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/world/peopleevents/pande01.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_roosevelt"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhansi_Ki_Rani"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dj%C5%8D_Masako"], [], ["http://www.badassoftheweek.com/khawla.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_ibn_al-Walid"]]}
{"q_id": "2tglfo", "title": "How long after JFK's assassination did it take for conspiracy theories about the murder to become popular?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tglfo/how_long_after_jfks_assassination_did_it_take_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnz3zi1", "cnz6xtc", "cnz823z", "cnzbla2"], "score": [221, 6, 46, 12], "text": ["In September 1964 Bertrand Russell published Sixteen Questions on the Kennedy Assassination. I'm sure there were some earlier instances but that's one example from less than a year after. \n\n_URL_0_", "Question: I just got here, what's up with all the removed comments? There's 9 removed from what I'm seeing here, and only one comment has been left up. Wassup, admins?\n\nAlso, all the information I'm finding is pointing to /u/ricksplace's comment being correct. There were theories, obviously, before Bertrand Russel's publishing of them (otherwise he'd have had nothing to publish...), but that seemed to be the first widely-viewed and well-received publishing.\n\n[A reiteration of the link provided if you somehow missed the top comment from /u/ricksplace](_URL_0_)", "While not specifically a reference to the emergence of the very earliest of the JFK conspiracy theories, doubts as to the official accounts was mainstream enough that CBS televised a recreation of the shot that Oswald took in 1967.\n\n[[YouTube] JFK Assassination Oswald CBS Mannlicher Carcano Rifle Test 1967](_URL_0_)\n\nI think it is worth mentioning that the test was relatively successful in their attempts.  ", "Sort of revelant question: were previous assassinations, both within the U.S. and elsewhere, subject to the same type of speculation? Did conspiracy theories pop up as a result of, say, the McKinley assassination?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/sixteenQues.htm"], ["http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/sixteenQues.htm"], ["http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WovyEqfR8Hg"], []]}
{"q_id": "2voez8", "title": "What happened to the 'creeping barrage' as a tactic after WW1?", "selftext": "I've watched a number of documentaries and movies and read books about the Korean War recently and there seems to be a commonality with WW1 in that some engagements would have a heavy artillery barrage which would lift, (or airstrikes for the American side), and then a rush at the enemy lines.  After this had failed so completely in WW1 and the 'creeping barrage' had proved a successful tactic, did it endure in later conflicts?  If not, why not?  I can't help but wonder if those Chinese infantry wave attacks were able to hit right behind a lifting barrage if the result of some of those battles would have been different.  Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2voez8/what_happened_to_the_creeping_barrage_as_a_tactic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["colc7sg"], "score": [2], "text": ["The creeping barrage today it is one of many options of how to use artillery. It can be very effective in situations where communication is limited, there is sufficient concentration of guns, enemy position is fixed, and the objective is to gain ground or lines of defense. However, it is wasteful and it requires that the attackers synchronize their movement with that of the barrage. \n\nIn WW2 it used on several occasions on the eastern front by the USSR because it was suitable in many situations. The USSR army had limited communication, and the static condition in some battles meant they knew where the enemy was, or at least where they wanted to attack. \n\nWith improved communication, and improved artillery targeting, it is more effective to directly target certain positions, either relative to where the enemy is or relative to where your troops are. In the Korean war this is how artillery barrages were used by UN forces: they called for a barrage in the areas surrounding their defensive positions when they are attacked. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1a1345", "title": "Why is the history of Russia discussed so little?", "selftext": "It could just be me being from the US, but it seems like Russian history is just sort of skipped when it comes to history.  I think the whole idea of Russian history seems cool but this one aspect of it kind of baffles me. Thanks for any responses. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a1345/why_is_the_history_of_russia_discussed_so_little/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8t4owe"], "score": [7], "text": ["You pretty much answered the question yourself. Generally speaking, education systems build a certain narrative when teaching history, which is divided into two pars:\n\n1. Our history\n2. World history\n\n\"Our\" history is the history of the nation - as an American you probably learned about the founding fathers, the Civil war, MLK, all of that. You didn't learn about Russia for the same reason you didn't learn about Greenland, Sweden or India - because it was irrelevant to the curriculum.\n\n\"World history\" is the general flow of history that picks certain events and presents them to show the changes that happened historically. So this means you probably learned about the French Revolution, the Crusades, the Scramble for Africa, etc. In this sense, you probably met Russia when something \"world-relevant\" happened, like the Communist Revolution and the Cold War."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ftbl3", "title": "Why do some people say FDR's New Deal didn't help end the Depression, rather that WW2 actually did it?", "selftext": "Can you tell me why the claim is right or wrong? I had a conservative teacher who always said it, but I wasn't sure so I felt I needed to ask.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ftbl3/why_do_some_people_say_fdrs_new_deal_didnt_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctrtkuu"], "score": [4], "text": ["It's not completely wrong but it's not right either. Under FDR the American government took on a lot of reforms that would help the American people. While it's true that the amount of government spending and new employment supporting the American war machine was extremely helpful for the economy these reforms also helped significantly. FDR spent a lot of money not just on the war machine but on public projects that would provide employment for people. It's worth noting that while FDR was not formally educated in economics he still managed to contribute to the economy. He realized that the American people simply didn't have money to spend and so the economy shut down. He knew if he could get the American citizens spending money the American economy could gain strength. Before his administration the American government wasn't very concerned with the economic well-being of its people but under FDR's administration that changed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "53jzpi", "title": "Why was German estimation of Soviet strength so disastrously bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53jzpi/why_was_german_estimation_of_soviet_strength_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7twm0y"], "score": [11], "text": ["There are a couple of different factors at play. One was certainly an under estimation of Soviet capabilities. Bear in mind that the Germans were not particularly ignorant of Soviet capabilities, they had worked together in the 1930s to develop doctrine and equipment. However, this information would have been colored by the knowledge of the officer purges, the effect of which was demonstrated to satisfaction when the Sovuets had a crack at Finland. If the Finnish could do so well against the Soviets, the Germans wouldn't have any trouble, right? Besides, Intel was't viewed as a prestigious billet in the German system.\n\nThe second problem was an over estimation of their own capabilities. In an astounding lapse of Getman staff process, they basically ignored their own logistics experts, who made an incredibly accurate assessment of just how deeply into the USSR they could support an invasion: About 700 miles.\n\nIf you have a bit of time, the US Army's Command and Staff college has a presentation by their resident historian which covers this topic. For the short version, skip to part 3/8 on the playlist \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkGvnfy3IadOjuaBI2fYW4jHM9B-cI_WK"]]}
{"q_id": "dqmqdw", "title": "I have finally convinced my fiercely nationalistic father to read a book of my choice on the Armenian genocide. Could you recommend me a book that both makes compelling historically sound arguments that also doesn\u2019t demonize Turks.", "selftext": "I\u2019ve read plenty of books on the subject and came to my own conclusions and it\u2019s certainly something we argue frequently about. He said he\u2019s open to reading a book of my own choosing. However I know that any kind of demonization of Turks will make him thing it\u2019s an anti Turkish book. Moreover a book that acknowledges the perils faced by Caucasian and Balkan Muslims would be nice, since this is something he brings up frequently as being overlooked by historians. \n\nI\u2019m thinking Shattering Empires by Reynolds since that really explores the genocide from an international conflict perspective and gives plenty of background on various population deportations but also why the ottomans deportation differed and turned into a genocide.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dqmqdw/i_have_finally_convinced_my_fiercely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f67a3st", "f67j0uo", "f67q3vl", "f67xb55", "f69le9v", "f6a26yy", "f6bjkah", "f6d68mw", "f6wfnrp"], "score": [1351, 430, 54, 219, 109, 54, 13, 10, 2], "text": ["How about something by Taner Ak\u00e7am, who is well-known as a Turkish scholar who acknowledges the Armenian Genocide? Being Turkish, you will avoid the anti-Turkish subtext of some other historians, and he's also an academic and treats the subject accordingly.\n\nThe work of his that I have read and which both documents the genocide and investigates culpability is *A Shameful Act*. He has put out several other works since but I have not read them.\n\nA couple of others in the same vein would be Fatma M\u00fcge G\u00f6\u00e7ek and U\u011fur \u00dcmit \u00dcng\u00f6r. G\u00f6\u00e7ek has an Ottoman history background and often touches on the treatment of Armenians in the late empire. \u00dcng\u00f6r is from a newer generation and is less an Ottomanist than a genocide scholar so he also writes on non-Ottoman topics.", "I really enjoyed The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey by Dawn Anahid MacKeen. It's a memoir/diary written by the granddaughter of a man who survived the genocide. The author goes to Turkey and retraces his steps and she's worried about people knowing what she's doing there but finds friendly help all along the way. The grandfather's writings tell of horrible things that happen to him and his family throughout the genocide but also tells about people who helped him along the way and even some were in the military who would've had orders to kill or capture him. The book also contains stories I found interesting involving Bedouins and Syrians and what their situation was like at the time. It also goes into the politics of the US, Europe, and Ottomans and what was reported by foreign diplomats at the time, but is not so completely all about straight politics that it loses the human story. Good luck, I hope you find the right book and that he reads with an open mind!", "I really like  [\"Rebel Land\\_ Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town\" by Christopher D Bellaigue](_URL_0_) \n\nIt's a book by a british press correspondent, that lived in Turkey for a few years. The book reads like a diary of his experiences and he writes about stories, he heard from the people he talked in his travels around Mus. He also writes about the role, kurdish tribes and Hamidiye-regiments in the region played in the genocide. It isn't only about the Genocide though, it also thematises the turkish-kurdish conflict. \n\n**A big BUT:** In the book the author criticises Kemalism a lot, maybe that is to much for your nationalistic father or maybe he can take a dose of criticism.", "Although it is a work in progress, a revamping of the WWI section of the booklist has been in the works recently, and the following are suggestions made by /u/yodatsracist and I which will at some point in the future be included, so this is a sneak peak.\n\n*The Armenian Genocide: Evidence From the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916* edited by Wolfgang Gust is an absolute must. It isn't the most *accessible* book, but it is the one I would point to to perhaps meet what you are looking for, as it is heavily based on primary sources which came from the German observers in the country, who were, obviously, allied to the Ottomans at the time, and can hardly be taken to have been antagonists.\n\n*The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies* edited by Richard G. Hovannisian is a collection of writings by various authors, numbering over a dozen essays. I realize that anyone with an Armenian last name might not meet what you are looking for, but while Hovannisian is the editor, the contents reflect a wide array of contributors on many topics relating to the genocide.\n\n*The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History* by Raymond K\u00e9vorkian. Again, I know this has the same \"last name\" issue, but it does a decent job living up to the title and being a thorough and compelling work that does an excellent job laying out the topic.\n\n*\"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else\": A History of the Armenian Genocide* by Ronald Grigor Suny is a bit more basic, but great book for someone looking for a less hefty read, so probably more accessible a read than K\u00e9vorkian.\n\n*America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915* by Jay Winter takes a more international look at the issue, as the Americans were neutral at the time and in the country. Academic in nature though, so might not be super accessible again.\n\n*Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009* by M\u00fcge Fatma G\u00f6\u00e7ek. He is an historical sociologist covers early evidence of the Genocide (and other violence against Armenians, hence 1789) in Turkish sources, mainly memoirs, and also traces the history of the denial of that violence.\n\n*The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950* by U\u011fur \u00dcmit \u00dcng\u00f6r. His his section on the Armenian Genocide doesn't break a ton of new ground, but he places it in the context of larger \u201csocial engineering\u201d (that\u2019s a key era for him and many of his Dutch contemporary Genocide studies) in the region. It\u2019s about how what is and was an ethnically mixed region was brought definitively into and under control the Turkish nation-state.", "Taner Timur: 1915 ve sonrasi, Turkler ve Ermeniler\n\nExcellent book everyone who can should take a look. Timur calmly and objectively presents the atrocity clearly as a genocide with documents. He answers several official Turkish state arguments like the lack of intent argument factually, but also criticizes the \"lets leave history to historians\" argument on such a political event logically. He also very strongly criticizes how the perpetrators of genocide were in practice treated as absolved in modern Turkish state starting with Ataturk's death. He clearly shows that Ataturk himself acknowledges the genocide and never lets the perpetrators or even their remains after their death in Turkey, which might be helpful to convince a Turkish nationalist.\n\nHe also talks about events rarely talked about in Western academia on the subject like atrocities against Muslims in Eastern Anatolia, planning and logistical support by Germany, and also criticizes the Western use of genocide as a stick against Turkey while not failing to mention the serious issues of Turkish official denail that makes this possible, as well as official arguments of the Armenian state using the genocide to distract its own population and int. community from its serious internal issues. Being a socialist, Timur doesn't have a nationalist bias and is able to clearly attack the perpetrators and denial of genocide while emphasizing the problems behind blaming the civilian Turkish population for the atrocity.\n\nAnother good source might be Hrant Dink's articles collected in books by the International Hrant Dink Foundation for an Armenian perspective on the genocide and living in Turkey as an Armenian that is more emotional and journalistic and less academic.", "I'm going to make a somewhat unconventional suggestion,  *Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide*, by Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller.\n\nThe book approaches the topic directly by interviewing many survivors, and weaving their stories together, and showing how all of the stories coincide. For those who believe in conspiracies, or are only looking at the issue from the point of documents, this is a very different and emotional perspective, which still presents the case of genocide very well. \n\nFirst of all the weaving of the survivor stories is interesting in the following way. A survivor from say Marash, may recall a caravan of deportees from Kayseri coming through on such and such date, while a survivor from Kayeseri recalls passing through Marash at that same date. In other words, the book shows how all the stories corroborate each other. Next, the stories show the intent of the deportations. The current government line is that the Armenians had to be moved as a security measure, right? But the stories show the real intent was destruction of the people. How? Well first of all, it was overwhelmingly women and children in the marches - who posed no threat to begin with. The men were generally already executed. Second, the state made no provisions for them to eat or have shelter. Even if you then argue that this is understandable due to a lack of resources, you then come to see that the women and children were deprived of these things oftentimes, even when they could have procured somethings for themselves. Then the attacks, robbing, rapes, murders, etc, all along the way that so many experienced. It was no \"relocation\", clearly. The intent was obvious and the way it comes across in these excerpts from very personal stories is heart-wrenching and personal. It's not a dry book just about statistics and walls of academic text.\n\nIn any case if it sounds interesting, you may want to take a look at it yourself first and see if it seems like a good fit for your dad. It's great you're trying to get him to look at this from a new perspective. Good luck!", "This autobiographical article by a famous American chemist/Yale professor who escaped the genocide and was given everything he had as a child by the Salvation Army touches on it: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Idk if any one else suggested it but The Burning Tigris is phenomenal. Gives a good look at the genocide from both within and outside. Covers Americans lack of interest and basically the wtf lack of response from the supposed protectors of liberty without straight up saying how could you abandon us, it lays out the facts with strong historical first and second person accounts. My ex-grandfather in law gave it to me, he is Armenian, first generation American and probably the best man I\u2019ve ever met.\n\nEdit: OP I will mail you my copy of Burning Tigris if you dm me. I do t want to come across as forcefully spreading my point of view because I am definitely biased because of my wife\u2019s family but I just think it\u2019s important and think an on the fence denier could do well with the exposure.", "As I have read every book I can get my hands on on the subject of the Armenian Genocide (It started with my trying to find out how in the world the Holocaust of WWII could have happened) I can honestly say, there is no way to read a book on the Armenian Genocide that WOULD NOT demonize the Turks. \n\nThat would be like suggesting a \"sweet\" novel on how the Nazis dealt with the Jews."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7626259-rebel-land"], [], [], [], ["https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.earth.34.031405.125111"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1n64do", "title": "International sporting events and modernization", "selftext": "I've recently become intrigued by news reports coming out about the construction of huge sporting complexes, often the size of cities, that are constructed for international sporting events like the Olympics or the World Cup and how they destroy local populations and have terrible labor conditions for workers.  Does anyone know anything about the relationship between the preparation for these large scale events in former third world or second world countries, how it's influenced by international institutions like the IOC, and global concepts of modernization?  I realize this is kind of broad, but I know absolutely nothing about the topic.  If anyone knows any good histories on the topic, I would love to hear them.   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n64do/international_sporting_events_and_modernization/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccnr9v5", "ccfq3e6"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["If you're still interested, I just came across a great article about the Olympics as \"performance\" of nationalism/culture/identity/production. It's the final chapter in:\n\nJohn J. MacAloon ed. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Towards a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1984).\n\nIt's a fun read, too - if you're into thinking about the Olympics with a critical eye. ", "Seamus O'Hanlon, a professor at Monash University in Australia, has been recently working on just this sort of thing. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture of his just yesterday, in fact. One article that might suit your purposes is \"Seamus O'Hanlon, \"The Events City: Sports, Culture, and the transformation of inner Melbourne, 1977-2006\" *Urban History Review* 37, 2 (Spring 2009). Again, most of the literature that I'm familiar with in this regard mostly focuses on the urban contexts of change (growing out of my own interest in deindustrialization) and less on political machinations of upper-level institutions like the IOC, but it's interesting nonetheless.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6hee0m", "title": "How did vatican managed to survived the Italian unification?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hee0m/how_did_vatican_managed_to_survived_the_italian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diy7lns"], "score": [2], "text": ["It didn't. The members of the Piedmontese (and later Italian) political/ruling class had very few misgivings about seizing Rome from the Pope; indeed, it was seen as the vital last step in creating an Italian State. In the last act of the Italian Wars of, the Italian army seized Rome and annexed what remained of the Papal State on September 20, 1870. \n\nThe conquest of Rome opened up a whole bunch of cans of worms. The Pope excommunicated the House of Savoy, and in much of Italy lack of cooperation from the clergy was one of many obstacles in establishing an effectively run state. Although there were a number of complex factors at work, the Papacy's unwillingness to recognize the new Italy certainly contributed to the small but protracted insurgency in Southern Italy. Further, a whole contingent of the Roman Nobility followed the Pope in his refusal to acknowledge the Italian State; they would come to be called, \"The Black Nobility.\" The Italian parliament would try to find a way to accomodate the Papacy as an entity operating within Italy, but none was successful until the Lateran Pacts of 1929 recognizing the Papacy's sovereignty over the Vatican City. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3d94x3", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | Famous for Being Famous", "selftext": "[Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.](_URL_0_) \n\nToday\u2019s trivia comes to us from /u/hewhospeaks! \n\nIs being famous for nothing a symptom of modern living, or is it old news? **Please share the stories of historical figures who were famous without cause!** \n\n**Next Week on Tuesday Trivia:** Thrones, chairs, stools, and other choice places to land your bottom, we\u2019ll be sharing interesting seats from history! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d94x3/tuesday_trivia_famous_for_being_famous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct2y8bq"], "score": [45], "text": ["I don't know how much this counts, but I like this story.\n\nButton Gwinnett-Signer of the Declaration of Independence and pretty much nothing else. \n\nButton was born in Britain then moved to Georgia to start a plantation. Button's plantation was fairly successful, so he became involved in the local Georgia assembly. He didn't care much for colonial rights until they directly affected his lands and he became one of the less important signers of one of the most important documents in American history, the Declaration of Independence. \n\nAfter signing, he was a relatively inconsequential member of the Continental Congress, then served in the Georgia Assembly, then died in a duel against his political rival. Not too long after his death, his wife also passed away, and later his only child died, leaving him no legacy. All in all, [a relatively minor figure in the American Revolution](_URL_1_). \n\nBUT- Button Gwinnett now has one of the most valuable signatures of all time. \n\nAs the founding fathers started to die, collecting the signatures of all of the singers of the Declaration of Independence became a big deal. So the big guys, Ben Franklin, George Washington, etc, they were important, but they signed lots of things. Ben Franklin wrote hundreds of letters, so you can get his signature if you try. But Button Gwinnett didn't sign anything but IOUs (he was a serial debtor. And not a very active politican). As of right now, there are only 51 confirmed Button Gwinnett signatures in the world and about 40 of those are in libraries and museums. Button Gwinnett signatures are considered to be one of the rarest and most valuable signatures in the world. The last one that sold in auction went for I believe about $722,000 and it wasn't in great condition (as a frame of reference, at that auction they sold an entire set of Signers signatures and [the set was valued at](_URL_0_) about $1.2 million, about $700,000-800,000 of that being Button's autograph). \n\nSo here is this guy who basically did nothing but sign the Declaration of Independence, but the fact that he did almost nothing else makes him so important and valuable to collectors. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/morning_call/2012/12/rare-button-gwinnett-signature-for.html", "https://books.google.com/books?id=azgvAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA13&amp;dq=button+gwinnett+signature&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI5MLDnO_axgIVgigeCh0CRgnK#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "4yqhil", "title": "Why didn't the Ancient Romans wear beards?", "selftext": "It seems to me that most ancient cultures valued beards highly, associating them with virility and maturity, while the Romans associated them with decadent \"eastern\" cultures and considered them almost effeminate, in a paradoxical way. I do know that letting the beard grow was part of their mourning rituals. \n\nIs there any consensus among historians on why Romans rejected the beard, or any contemporary opinions on the origin of their shaving customs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yqhil/why_didnt_the_ancient_romans_wear_beards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6pv6i1"], "score": [29], "text": ["That is not exactly true. According to Pliny, first barber came in to Rome during Punic wars, so early republic was obviously bearded.\nThe popularization of shaving is attributed to Scipio Africanus and soon it become  a distinction of a true Roman- Easterners and Greeks were bearded, barbarians had mustaches, Romans were clean sheaved. \n\nFirst shaving even become sort of act of passage in to adulthood (Petronius even mocks over-emphasation of the event in Satyricon- Trimalchio holds his first cuttings in golden box).\n\nBeards regained popularity under Hadrian (again- as a sign of Greek-appreciation) and remained popular- at least among emperors- until Constantine the Great.\n\nIn between Scipio and Hadrian beards were grown only by devoted enthusiasts of Hellenic culture\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "514pxx", "title": "I know Germany was excluded from the Treaty of Versailles at the of WW1 but did they even have any requests for their surrender (e.g. \"we'll shrink the military if you let us keep X territories\" or \"help us rebuild\", etc.)?", "selftext": "And if so, why were they treated so harshly, i mean even France should've known the terrible effect the reparations would have on the German economy? Didn't Wilson even warn about punishing Germany too hard?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/514pxx/i_know_germany_was_excluded_from_the_treaty_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d79c90x"], "score": [7], "text": [" >  And if so, why were they treated so harshly, i mean even France should've known the terrible effect the reparations would have on the German economy?\n\nFor one thing, the Allies weren't really aware of Germany's hyperinflation, which was a result of over-drawing on wartime loans, **NOT** Allied reparations. Furthermore, aside from the Blockade and war casualties, what had Germany suffered? Aside from brief occupations of small parts of Alsace and East Prussia, the country was untouched and intact, and still possessed the industry and resources that had made it the world's second largest, and most advanced, economy prior to the war.\n\n >  Didn't Wilson even warn about punishing Germany too hard?\n\nNot exactly; he felt Germany needed to atone for it's wartime actions, like unrestricted submarine warfare, pilfering it's occupied territories, deporting civilians for forced labour, and mistreating Allied POWs. In the end, he also made reparations unavoidable, as he refused to support the original French proposal, which was to maintain the inter-Allied fund and use American money to stabilize the European economy, thus avoiding large reparations. The fund was instead shut down before the war ended, and Wilson reiterated the expectation that Britain and France would repay their wartime debts in full.\n\nAs to offers for surrender, the initial peace offer would have allowed Germany to keep the territories gained at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, and keep the Reich's territorial integrity. This was the offer made in October by the government. The only other one I'm aware of was made in November, and this was a German offer to pay 100 billion marks in reparations (the allies would demand 132, but only expect 50), 20 billion immediately and 80 to be negotiated at a later time. The issue with allowing the Germans into the treaty deliberations is that there wasn't really a precedent for that. For example, France was excluded from the Vienna talks in 1814, and was only included in 1815 under the aegis of the Bourbon Monarchy. Plus, the Allies were hardly a united group and they knew this, so allowing the Germans an opportunity to sow division would be counterproductive. Attempts at negotiation during the war, particularly over reprisals against Allied POWs in 1917, had not gone well. As a result, the Allies did not trust the Germans to act in good faith.\n\n* *Paris 1919* by Margaret MacMillan\n* *A Scrap of Paper* by Isabel Hull"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d2kbvs", "title": "A Bunch of Questions about 1066: Much, much more below!", "selftext": "Hello!\n\nMy apologizes for any informalities! I don't often write questions on Reddit, and this is my first time asking on r/AskHistorians! Here's some background: I've been attempting to write a work of historical fiction about 1066 England, encompassing the Norwegian and Norman Invasion of England. The story has several POV characters, currently including King Harold II Godwinson, Duke William II 'the Bastard' of Normandy, Earl Tostig Godwinson the ousted Earl of Northumbria, Hakon Sweynson who spent his young life as a hostage in Normandy, and Gytha Thorkelsd\u00f3ttir the wife of Earl Godwin and the family's matriarch. In each chapter, I tend to give the reader the person's perspective; you look through the biases, opinions, and general disposition of those characters, their flaws, virtues, all. I have created characters of my own and those without historical basis, however, I typically do this with a purpose of showing a different perspective of a group that might otherwise be disregarded or ignored; Eilmer of Malmesbury is one such who I plan to tie in with an ahistorical character (how can you not mention the guy who tried to fly and was essential to the Hailey's Comet prophesy, I mean come on!) and I hope to do the same to other groups and give a bit of recognition to the different people who coexisted together.\n\nThe story currently has five chapters and over sixty thousand words. Unfortunately, I am only in the month February 1066, where my story ends in December of 1066. Needless to say, I've come to slight stop due to a lack of sources on my part. So, without further adieu, here are some of my questions!\n\nThe Court of King Harold II and Duke William of Normandy: do we know of any courtiers, soldier/warriors, bishops, monks, or family members that resided in Court during that time (Winter/Spring/Summer? And court was in London, not Winchester, correct? These questions are mostly directed at Harold, but if there are any notable/important courtiers or players in the William's court in Caen, I'd appreciate any information!\n\nSpeaking of William, a question about his minstrel/juggler/fool, Taillefer: is he related to the Taillefers' as in the  [Count of Angoul\u00eame](_URL_2_)? If so, do we know his relation (I had researched his first name and found Ivo, but I did not know if that was confirmed) to the main family or anything about his background/age/mentality?\n\nBack to Harold in England! I have been trying to map out his next chapter, essentially how things have been since he took the crown in the first chapter. How was his reign? Was it dedicated only to fighting the Norman and Norwegian threat, or did he start looking into innovation, and continuing how he had under King Edward? Additionally, were there any stances/policies/innovations that Edward had started to implement, that Harold had agreed with and would have continued to go forth with, had he not died so early into his reign/survived and won both wars? Also, the relationship between Edward and Harold, was it strained? I know Tostig was King Edward's close friend, but did the two men have a decent enough relationship, as Tostig was exiled while Edward still lived? And how was Edward's relationship with his wife, after the events of the Crisis of 1051/52?\n\nWho was the relative of Godwin, the one which he had hoped to appoint to the Bishopric of Canterbury which had sparked the Crisis of 1051/52?\n\nHow rich was Godwin, and his sons after his passing? I understand that Wessex was essentially the richest of the earldoms, and that since Harold had been an Earl before his father's death, he accumulated a bit of personal wealth himself, how rich was he, say, compared to Duke William or other European monarchs? Could their wealth have been utilized better, say, to raise more men or contract a fighting force?\n\nThe Crisis of 1051/52,  [Diarmait mac M\u00e1el na mB\u00f3](_URL_1_), [King of Leinster](_URL_0_) gave aid to the Harold and Leofwine Godwinson, Leofwine being only about 16/17 during this time. Do we have much of a recount of their time in Leinster, or generally in Ireland for that matter? And of the men they recruited, did many/some of them settle in England afterwards/make up a portion of the fighting force year later in 1066? (Being a descendant of the Irish diaspora myself, I would love to write a few Irishmen into the story if there is a historical basis for it!)\n\nFinally, Tostig! Perhaps my favorite character to write, given his struggle, conflict, and eventual end! Do we know of any particular soldier/men who travelled with him on his way to Flanders, Normandy, Raiding the English Coast, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and finally back to England with the invasion force? Or any men who were with him up until he raided the English Coast? Continuing, do we know anything of his illegitimate children, or of their mothers? I had read he had two sons by his wife, Judith of Flanders, and up to three/four illegitimate children, was anymore written about the children or his extramarital affairs? Speaking of which, how did he get along with Judith? I understand that both were described as intelligent, but are there any sources/references to their marriage or relations with one another?\n\nThose are the extent of my questions...for now! If any of the above questions could be answered, or if anyone can push me in the right direction for getting some of these questions answered, I would be extremely grateful! If need be, I can provide contact information and willing to speak in depth to anyone who is very knowledgeable of this timeframe! I hope that this isn't flagged, or that I am not violating any rules or length, I only wanted to ask all these questions at once rather than posting all the questions individually, as they are very in-depth and tied together question! I am hoping to create an enjoyable story, as well as bring to light the different perspectives and events which led up to it. If you're unfamiliar with the events or with the background, you should consider looking into it, you can't make this stuff up!\n\nAnyway, history is freaking awesome! Thank you all for everything!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d2kbvs/a_bunch_of_questions_about_1066_much_much_more/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezvmxyz", "ezwh62q"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your novel, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists, based on past experience: some aspiring novelists have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.\n\nAdditionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.", "Although to be sure, there is plenty of specific advice that can be given, I would want to also direct you to [this older answer](_URL_0_) by /u/agentdcf which I think you may find to be of interest, as it is less about anything specific, than it is about the META approach to writing historical fiction and the inherent issues from placing modern perspectives into an historical context. \n\nI hope it may be useful for you!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kings_of_Leinster", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarmait_mac_M%C3%A1el_na_mB%C3%B3", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_Angoul%C3%AAme"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aiobi/i_want_to_write_a_novel_in_medieval_austria_can/civjgv4/"]]}
{"q_id": "c5ms2i", "title": "Why were American soldiers hanged in France during WWII?", "selftext": "I was reading about John C. Woods' life as the only executioner in the American army in France during WWII and at some point it is mentioned that John C. Woods took part in 11 failed hangings of U.S. soldiers between 1944 and 1946. \n\n  \nWhat did these soldiers do in order to receive the capital punishment by their own Army?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c5ms2i/why_were_american_soldiers_hanged_in_france/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es2zfkl", "es34hnr"], "score": [10, 31], "text": ["All bar one (Eddie Slovik) was convicted of rape, murder or both. A total of 98 U.S soldiers were sentenced to death by court martials in the European theater during WWII, all *were* buried in the infamous Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American cemetary. Here lie the dishonorable dead. No American flag flies over their graves, all 98 remaining men were dishonorably discharged the day before their execution and all are buried facing away from the main cemetary. Eddie Slovik on the other hand was unique in that he was the only soldier to receive the death sentence for desertion. An unfortunate set of circumstances led up his death.   \nFirst of all Slovik was a repeat offender who had served time in prison twice before the war, second he deserted not once but twice and finally he wrote a confession of his willful desertion from the army and, despite being given numerous chances to destroy it, insisted on not doing so. This, coupled with rising desertions in the US army, the German offensive and stiffening resistance in some sectors led to the army feeling like it needed to set an example on someone. Eddie Slovik just happened to be that unfortunate example. \n\nAs for the other 97, they are a variety of child rapists, ordinary rapists, murderers, robbers or in some cases all four. The only thing they have in common is that they were convicted of rape, murder or both. Two have since been reinterred on US soil, Eddie Slovik who is now buried next to his wife and Alex Miranda who was reinterred with his family (Miranda was not actually executed in France, he faced the firing squad at Shepton Mallet in England).", "Borrowing from some earlier writing I've done on US military executions:\n\nAlthough an executable offense, only a single soldier, Pvt. Eddie Slovik, was executed for the crime of desertion during World War II, with the remainder of military executions conducted during the conflict being for mostly the crimes of rape and/or murder. Looking specifically at the period of training in England, from 1942 to 1944, 18 soldiers were executed, eight having committed murder, 6 committing rape, and 4 guilt of both. \n\nThe exact number of executions carried out on US soldiers is somewhat in dispute. It is interesting that you bring up Wood as he is a core factor in this, having claimed to have hanged some 300 soldiers since the 1930s, which is far in excess of the official numbers given by the military in total, let alone by hanging. In the European theater, only 70 executions were recorded as having taken place through Nov. 1945, including the 18 in England carried out at the US military prison at Shepton Mallet. Some 38 executions were still scheduled to take place, but not all did, which complicates an exact number as a few are in dispute. \n\nSomething which must be put front and center here is the racial component in play. Despite making up only about 10 percent of the US armed forces, African-American soldiers were 56 percent of those executed. Including Latinos, a minority group which was nevertheless not institutionally segregated within the armed forced, it rises to 72 percent of the executions being minorities. Most strikingly is that *100 percent* of those executions for rape were carried out against minorities. This is not to say that white soldiers weren't committing that heinous crime - 2 *were* executed for rape-murder, and in the ETO as a whole, black soldiers were \"only\" 139 of the 152 rape cases prosecuted - but it does illustrate the extreme racial bias in how the crimes was punished, with regressive, bigoted views about race and sexuality placing more emphasis on minority offenders, something which is well illustrated by the death sentences handed out for desertion (of which only one was carried out), where black offenders were only 14.4 percent of the total sentenced to death.    \n\nThis of course echoes the application of the death penalty in the US justice system in general which has been well demonstrated to have an historical racial bias, as well as speaks to the echoes of the Jim Crow system which was in some ways recreated within the US military sphere in England at the time, where harsher sentencing of black offenders was quite clearly intended to be a message of deterrent for the \"relatively unintelligent soldiers\" who made up that racial cohort. In France, this pattern continued, with many hangings even being carried out publicly, not only to demonstrate to the French (no public hangings were done in Germany) that the Americans took the issue seriously, but much more sinister, to create a scapegoat for *American* ill-behavior in the *black* soldiers, or as Roberts' summarizes a SHAEF report, to \"make rape a 'negro' problem not an 'American' problem\". Of the 29 public hangings held, 25 were black soldiers.\n\nOn that topic of method, executions were carried out either by hanging or by firing squad, although hanging was generally preferred, although not required, in the case of 'regular' crimes. The Manual for Courts-Martial spelled out the dark logic behind this:\n\n > Hanging is considered more ignominious than shooting and is the usual method, for example, in the case of a person sentenced to death for spying, for murder in connection with mutiny, or for a violation of the [Articles of War] 92. Shooting is the usual method in the case of a person sentenced to death for a purely military offense, as sleeping on post.\n\nOf the 18 executions in England, only two were by firing squad, while the rest by hanging, a pattern that continued with Continental executions, despite the associated complications of constructing gallows and conducting the entire thing.\n\nSo all in all, the executions carried out were almost entirely for rapes and murders. Not all sentences were carried out, and this was particularly true with desertion, all but one being reprieved, but they still numbered somewhere around 100 total executions. That being said, the racism and bigotry of the military establishment meant that, in practice and doubly so with sexual offenses, executions were nearly as much for the \"crime\" of being black as they were for the actual offense carried out.\n\n**Sources** \n\nLilly, J. Robert., \"Dirty Details: Executing U.S. Soldiers During World War II\" *Crime and Delinquency*. Vol. 42 (4), 1996 491-516\n\n-- and J. Michael Thomson. \"Executing US soldiers in England, World War II: Command Influence and Sexual Racism\". *British Journal of Criminology* Vol. 37 (2) 1997. 262-288\n\nRoberts, Mary Louise. *What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France* U of Chicago Press, 2013."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1fmp8f", "title": "What sort of factors led Athens to survive from antiquity until today, but not Sparta?", "selftext": "Today, Athens is a city with over 3 million people. Sparta was left to ruin. What caused these two rivals (at one point Sparta even conquering Athens) to result in such differing fates?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fmp8f/what_sort_of_factors_led_athens_to_survive_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cabrzmu", "cabus2a", "cabw26p", "cabycks", "cac0arr", "cacouuh"], "score": [185, 88, 3, 5, 4, 3], "text": ["Sparta did survive. I actually visited it in 2007 on one of my Greek tours. It is a tiny settlement right near the ancient ruins of the town. Athens itself was a tiny settlement as well prior to its major urban expansion in the 1900s. Sparta never experienced this due to Athens being selected as the Greek capital.\n\nOK, here is the documentary evidence I alluded to in my lower-down post.\n\nGreek Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil (1890) by J.P. Mahaffy, M.A., D.D., P. 65:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAnd for purposes of comparison, a very similar acropolis-oriented view today:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nLooking at these pictures reminds me how much I miss Athens... beautiful city. Everyone should go!", "Thucydides 1.10 sums it up pretty well:\n\n > Now Mycenae may have been a small place, and many of the towns of that age may appear comparatively insignificant, but no exact observer would therefore feel justified in rejecting the estimate given by the poets and by tradition of the magnitude of the armament. For I suppose if Lacedaemon were to become desolate, and the temples and the foundations of the public buildings were left, that as time went on there would be a strong disposition with posterity to refuse to accept her fame as a true exponent of her power. And yet they occupy two-fifths of Peloponnese and lead the whole, not to speak of their numerous allies without. Still, as the city is neither built in a compact form nor adorned with magnificent temples and public edifices, but composed of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, there would be an impression of inadequacy. Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any inference from the appearance presented to the eye would make her power to have been twice as great as it is.\n\nAthens spent their money on lavish construction projects, especially during the reign of Pericles, which last to this day. Sparta used their money elsewhere, and, if I remember correctly, built with primarily wood.\n\nFurthermore, in the Roman period, Athens was more significant, since it was where many aristocratic Roman youth went to study, notably Cicero. Since the philosophy schools all developed out of Athens, it became famous for scholarship, leading to greater cultural importance. Sparta, meanwhile, was effectively closed off to foreigners, preventing it from becoming a major cultural center. Many of the historical buildings in Athens today are actually from the Roman period, and not from classical Athens--if you go to Athens, you'll see plenty of Roman era temples, theaters, fora, etc. Even on the Acropolis, one of the major sites is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, which was build during Roman times. Many philhellenic Emperors set out on large construction projects in Athens.\n\nFinally, and this is a bit beyond my area of expertise, Athens came to be a symbol of Greek nationalism far more than Sparta due to the strong ties between Athenian cultural and Classical Greek culture as a whole, which inspired the decision to make it the capital of an independent Greece.", "Here are some links that might help you. The first one is a site called Archaeology of the city of Athens, it contains 12 lectures, translated in english from the 1994 conference \"Archaeology of Athens\". The lectures were given by historians, archaeologists and architects and cover a wide time range, bibliography and sources are also cited, which might help you further your search.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThere's also this site: It's the Museum of the city of Athens, and it has a virtual tour available in greek, english and german.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nUnfortunately Sparta's history is not as easy to follow through time to the present. So your question might be answered indirectly through the history of Athens, as Sparta did not leave behind a cultural history as interesting and exciting. \n\nHope this helps.", "Alright. A good friend of mine recently wrote her philosophy/history thesis on this very issue, so I'll try to sum up what she said, although I have no background in the subject myself, so take this all with a big grain of salt. Her arguments were based on the book \"Money and the Early Greek Mind,\" by Richard Seaford.\n\nShe argued that the difference between the two city-states, particularly that Athens produced many well-known philosophers while Sparta did not, is directly linked with the rise of coinage. Over a relatively short period of time, Athens developed more and more abstract and effective standards of barter, eventually leading to the coin, which completely changed social relationships and caused people to think on a more abstract level, leading to philosophy. Meanwhile Sparta had huge, nearly immovable iron blocks as their standard of barter, and trade never really took off in Sparta in the same way that it did in Athens. \n\nThis is all in line with a weak form of Marx's theory of economic determinism, where any social group's cultural superstructure is shaped by its economic base. Hope this is helpful. Wish I knew more about the topic. Any responses and criticisms from actual historians would be welcome, I don't want to spread bad information.", "Athens collapsed into a small settlement the same as Sparta. After the great powers intervened in the Greek war of independence and eventually installed the Bavarian Otto as King, Athens became the capital. Athens won over Sparta because Western Europeans liked Athens history more and rebuilt it.\n\nEdit: The Greeks themselves chose Nafplio as their capital. Nafplio was a much better strategic location for a capital. It was an actual town during the time and not a rural village. Nafplio has two major fortresses and a few smaller castle. The Bourtz guards the bay, while The Palimidi was the largest fortress in Greece.", "To actually answer your question - in contrast to the astoundingly uninfromed speculation that is running rampant ITT - Athens was chosen simply due to it having had better marketing. I.e. the philhellenes that came from all over Europe to help Greece overthrow their ottoman rulers back in the early 19th century had all read the great stories written by athenians. Naturally, those stories featured Athens as the biggest, brightest, most important Poleis in the entire hellenic world. And to this day people's views on classic hellas are almost exclusively formed by those propaganda pieces, many of which were penned during the peloponnesian wars, when Athens and Sparta fought over who would get to be hegemon.\n\nSo, after Greece was released by the Ottoman Empire as an independent nation, the great powers of Europe gave her a bavarian royal as her king. The king ordered the construction of a new capital at the place were the (rather small at the time) town Athens was located, a place the first philhellenes coming to Greece actually had some trouble locating. The (probably apocryphal) story goes that it Athens was presented to them by their greek guide with the words \"here is the village.\" Being the only place that had a big influx of money and people from Europe proper, Athens flourished. Well, as much as a small city in a tiny country without much of an economy at the periphery of Europe could hope to flourish. My point, though, is that Athens really was the place to be at the time, simply because the philhellenes chose it rather arbitrarily.\n\nThen, after WW1 the greeks somehow managed to come up with something they called the \"megali idea\" (literally \"great idea\") but which would ultimately lead to what is today known as the \"Asia Minor Catastrophy\": they invaded Turkey with the goal of liberating all former hellenic territories and unifying them in one Greek nation. Yeah, it didn't go as planned. A huge number of refugees now came to Greece from Anatolia and since there weren't that many cities, most came to Athens. You can actually still tell by the names of athenian counties/suburbs: Nea Smirni, Nea Makri, Nea Zoi... (\"nea\" is the female form of \"new\")\n\nSince the greek economy hasn't been stellar since then and most of Greece is actually either a dry and rocky mountainside or a dry and rocky island, there was a considerable influx of people from the countryside into the cities, of which - as mentioned earlier - there really was just one: Athens. Which is why the greater Attica area now houses anywhere between 3.5 to 5 million people, depending on how you count (Greece doesn't force her citizens to register at their place of living) and how many illegal aliens you belive live there. (Hint: there are lots and lot and lots, with nobody really knowing how many.)\n\nSource: I lived in Athens for 7 years, I went to school there.\n\n\nMost hellenic poleis simply died out over the millenia, since the socio-economic environment changed dramatically. People will change their way of live and their place of residence at a heartbeat, if it offers an improvement. Once the hellenistic era was over, there was no great advantage to maintaining the status quo. Modern day Athens, Sparta, Thebes  & c. have practically no connection to the historic places."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/zCzl3Pg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Parthenon,_Athenian_Acropolis_(view_from_above),_Athens_cityscape._Athens,_Greece.jpg"], [], ["http://www.athenscitymuseum.gr/tour/index.htm", "http://www.eie.gr/archaeologia/En/Index.aspx"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7w05qc", "title": "Were high heels really developed for fighting on horseback?", "selftext": "I came across [this thread on Twitter](_URL_0_) where the writer makes a couple of claims:\n\n* High heels were invented because \"they let you stand up and fire arrows from stirrups\"\n* And that they were fashionable \"because they made men look a) warlike, and b) worldly\"\n\nThe writer cites a Thomas Herbert piece of artwork of King Abbas I of Persia as well.\n\nWere high heels really invented for use on horseback, and did they really enter European men's fashion because of that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7w05qc/were_high_heels_really_developed_for_fighting_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtxj6iq"], "score": [3], "text": ["The citable source for the origination of heels comes from Elizabeth Semmelhack's [Heights of Fashion](_URL_0_), but there's also a popular interview [the BBC did with Semmelhack](_URL_1_) a few years ago. We can track that this fashion arrived in Europe at the end of the 16th century. Political alliances with Shah Abbas I meant that there was a trend for Persian styles and heeled shoes were part of that. Heels helped with riding, particularly standing in the stirrups to use weaponry on horseback. [This pair of Persian shoes](_URL_2_) really shows how impossible they would have been for walking. I can't speak to whether they made men look warlike or worldly precisely, but they would have been a foreign style that had its roots in riding, hunting, and war, so it's not farfetched."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/960610611553071104"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Heights-Fashion-History-Elevated-Shoe/dp/1934772941", "http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21151350", "http://astepintothebatashoemuseum.blogspot.com/2017/07/conservation-blog-rare-shade-of-green.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3dp8h2", "title": "In the Middle Ages, were Jews always considered culturally and ethnically distinct from the non-Jews in the same country?", "selftext": "This is a very broad question, but due to this somewhat obscure topic (the medieval Jewish identity) I'd welcome any examples possible. To set some parameters, I'm interested in the Jewish communities of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, really from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the 16th century and the Protestant Revolution. Any examples whatsoever would be welcome.\n\nJewish \"otherness\" is a very old notion, seemingly present in every polity in which Jewish people resided. This notion of course facilitated the dehumanization, murder, and expulsion of Jewish people all over the world, particularly in Christendom. A post on 4chan (of all places) mentioned that the American Jewish experience was unique in that people were not Jews in America, but Americans who were Jewish. Despite this obviously completely non-credible source, I realized that this reflects what may be the implicit message of much media coverage about Jewish people. I was reminded of an interview with a person in Belgium, after last year's horrific attacks. They insisted that unlike most of their relatives, they did not identify as Jewish before they identified as Belgian. This surprised me, given that I don't think any Jewish people I know would identify as \"Jewish first, American after\". And one friend of mine, who was born in Britain and is Jewish, definitely considers his British birthplace to be the defining factor of his identity.\n\nAs a non-Jewish person, I can't really say how Jewish Americans, as a whole, identify. But this got me wondering about the medieval Jewish experience. Were Jews always seen as complete foreigners, even if their families had lived in a kingdom for centuries. Were Jews in 12th century France viewed as inherently distinct from the French people? What about in Poland or (to a lesser degree) Bohemia, where the Jews were not as persecuted? In pre-Reconquista Andalusia, post-Reconquista Algeria, and essentially the entirety of Egyptian and Mesopotamian history, Jewish communities flourished culturally, and some Jews were involved in government. In these four Arab Muslim nations, were Arab-speaking Jews seen considered to be not Arab? Were they considered more foreign than Arab Christians? \n\nLastly, how foreign were Conversos (and any other Christians of Jewish descent) treated? In the modern era, it seems that Christians of Jewish descent are almost universally seem as Jews. I don't think that most Jewish Americans would reject Bob Dylan, and despite coming from a Lutheran family Karl Marx is widely described as Jewish (often, quite horribly, by Neo-Nazis swearing to the immutable Jewish nature of communism). Was this true of medieval Jewish converts as well? Were Spanish individuals whose grandparents had been Jewish considered to be non-Castilian or non-Leonese? \n\nLastly, how did the Jews themselves identify? Maimonides seemed to view his religious brethren as a single culture scattered across two planes (the Kingdom of Yeshu and the Ishmaelites), but do his views represent those of everyday Jewish people? In 1200, would a Jewish person in London really feel more kinship to a Jewish person in Austria (or even in Egypt) than they would for a Christian person living in their own city? Are there any records of how Spanish Jews felt about their friends or relatives who converted to Catholicism rather than leave Iberia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dp8h2/in_the_middle_ages_were_jews_always_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct7ehbv"], "score": [10], "text": ["Okay, wow. I'm scared to answer this because there's like 50 questions there.\n\nMy qualifications on this are tricky and scattered. I grew up in Germany as an American. and didn't live in the US until high school. Then there's that one class on the history of antisemitism I took that one time in college (I hope someone else comes in here soon ;) ) ..and then I compiled my own curiosity on the topic over the decades and put it all here, in a 45 minute podcast episode: _URL_0_ where I think probably have half of your questions are at least superficially addressed in an easy-to-digest format.\n\nSources are:\n(edited by, it has like 10 authors) Roth  &  Berenbaum *Holocaust* 1989\n\nKatz, Jacob *From Prejudice to Destruction - Antisemitism 1700-1933* \n\n...and then all kinds of others over the years but I want to get to answerin'\n\nBut let me break bits and pieces down, and hopefully others can come in and correct me or fill in gaps.\n\n >  Your 4chan thing about Jewish American being Americans first and Jews second.\n\n...that really depends on the individual. I'd say (and that's the best I can do on this one, sorry) is that that's largely a post-WWII/holocaust/Israel-existing phenomena or trend (but again, that's a huge oversimplification) to some degree. But this wasn't at the heart of your question, so let's get to it:\n\n >  Were Jews always seen as complete foreigners, even if their families had lived in a kingdom for centuries. Were Jews in 12th century France viewed as inherently distinct from the French people? \n\nYES!!! Throughout medieval Europe they often had to wear an identifying mark. \nRed hats, robes, star-of-david patch, sometimes even a yellow star (sound familiar?)\nLike this guy in Switzerland:\n_URL_1_\n\nIs still around today. That's a Jew eating babies.\n\nLook up blood libel, for instance (or it's all in my episodes)\n\nJews were particularly set even lower than pagans because they followed an Abrahamic religion. Jesus was a Jew. So why didn't they know better? Pagans were just ignorant. Jews were active heretics. God-killers (Theocide: for killing Jesus)... that sort of vein.\n\nAnytime a plague hit, the jews were the first to be blamed. Ghettos. The word \"ghetto\" comes from the part of town in Venice where they made Jews live. It's the very definition of \"inherently distinct\" \n\n >  What about in Poland or (to a lesser degree) Bohemia, where the Jews were not as persecuted? \n\nMore broadly speaking Jews were always welcome to a degree. Some German cities (for instance) had quotas on how many Jews could live there. Prussia later did the same. But they were needed because Christians weren't allowed to practice usury in the middle ages, and someone needed to lend capital (all the way up to the king or emperor, or even pope) ...and so that had to be a Jew. But it was more give than take. If Jews got too wealthy, a pogrom was not far behind.\n\n >  In pre-Reconquista Andalusia, post-Reconquista Algeria, and essentially the entirety of Egyptian and Mesopotamian history, Jewish communities flourished culturally, and some Jews were involved in government. In these four Arab Muslim nations, were Arab-speaking Jews seen considered to be not Arab? Were they considered more foreign than Arab Christians?\n\nMuslims see Christians and Jews as \"religions of the Book\" i.e. Abrahamic. There are special rules regarding how to treat other Abrahamic followers. So generally yes, Jews were much better off, but it still really depends on the time and place. But in general, you're right. Christendom was pretty much the worst possible place to be for a Jew.\n\n\n >  Lastly, how foreign were Conversos (and any other Christians of Jewish descent) treated? In the modern era, it seems that Christians of Jewish descent are almost universally seem as Jews. \n\nThis is the time of the inquisition. Not a good time to be a Converso, particularly, because they were suspected of having converted merely to get the church off their backs. They were often treated harsher, and held to a higher/double standard than regular Catholics, and even other Jews.\n\n >  I don't think that most Jewish Americans would reject Bob Dylan, and despite coming from a Lutheran family Karl Marx is widely described as Jewish \n\nSee answer from 1.\n\n >  (often, quite horribly, by Neo-Nazis swearing to the immutable Jewish nature of communism). Was this true of medieval Jewish converts as well? Were Spanish individuals whose grandparents had been Jewish considered to be non-Castilian or non-Leonese?\n\nI guess it kinda depended on your last name, skin tone, etc, and just basically how obvious it was? But no, comparing it anything like Nazi Germany would be a mistake.\n\n >  Lastly, how did the Jews themselves identify? Maimonides seemed to view his religious brethren as a single culture scattered across two planes (the Kingdom of Yeshu and the Ishmaelites), but do his views represent those of everyday Jewish people? In 1200, would a Jewish person in London really feel more kinship to a Jewish person in Austria (or even in Egypt) than they would for a Christian person living in their own city? Are there any records of how Spanish Jews felt about their friends or relatives who converted to Catholicism rather than leave Iberia?\n\nNot being a Jew, you finally got me on this one :) I wouldn't presume to answer this one. but honestly, I think this one really depends on the individuals more than any of your other questions, and I just don't think an accurate answer is possible. I do hope someone can shed more insight than this though.\n\nEdit: I gave this last one a bit more thought: I still can't answer definitively, but Jews were indeed so segregated that they developed their own dialect of German (Yiddish) and kept that for centuries in places like Russia, Bohemia, Poland, the US, etc. So that alone shows that yes, there was clearly a certain sense of shared identity and culture at the least. Jews traveled more in the middle ages than most Christians. As tax-collectors, merchants, and often as refugees. Therefore they would have had a better sense as a whole as to what lays beyond the county line. But I'd only feel confident answering this as a sort of bell-curve. \"Yes, Jews would have felt closer to other Jews half a world away, then maybe some other groups would. Maybe on average -- maybe.\" I think when you're actively being persecuted in London, you'd feel a stronger kin to a fellow Jewish community in Austria, than the guy trying to find very creative ways to get rid of you, who lives next door. Don't you think?\n\nIf you want to narrow down your questions (or have questions after listening to that excellent podcast episode ;) ) I'll be happy to give it my best.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.historyofgermanypodcast.com/?p=107", "http://strangesounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kindlifresserbrunnen-Kindlifresser-Child-Eater.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2yjx8c", "title": "I heard/read somewhere that Charlemagne was surprised by pope Leo's coronation of him as the first Holy Roman Emperor, truly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yjx8c/i_heardread_somewhere_that_charlemagne_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpa77jj"], "score": [16], "text": ["There are several accounts about the coronation, most notably from the papal perspective in the liber pontificalis, and some frankish sources (i.e. Annales Laureshamenses). There are also sources from the Byzantine Empire. The sources differ somewhat in how the coronation took place.\n\nThe papal view stresses the papal influence over the whole ceremony. It serves to illustrate the fact the the crown was received by the church, putting the latter over the former. \n\nThe frankish sources paint Karl as the main actor, but he is not portrayed as actively pursuing the crown. However, not wanting to become emperor is a trope that is known from late antiquity. It serves to illustrate the humbleness of the would-be emperor and that it was his fate to become emperor.\n\nMost modern historians agree on that the coronation could not have been planned and enacted without the consent of Karl. The implications were so far-reaching that the Pope - who was utterly dependent on Karl for protection against the nobility of Rome - would not have attempted to do this without or against his will.\n\nThe last book I read about that topic was \"Karl der Gro\u00dfe Gewalt und Glaube\" by Johannes Fried. It contains an extensive part about the coronation and how it is presented in the sources.\n\nP.S. Karl is the german name for Charlemagne, as you might have guessed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "55qkxf", "title": "Why was the lack of foreign currency a big problem for the Third Reich?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55qkxf/why_was_the_lack_of_foreign_currency_a_big/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8d762g"], "score": [5], "text": ["To put it simply, the Third Reich wanted to buy things from foreign economies, like oil, chrome, manganese, rubber and food.\n\nA state with totalitarian powers doesn't need \"real\" money to acquire resources or manufactured goods on it's own territory.  It has many means to compel (or persuade) their production or acquisition, including printing money and setting prices by law.  However, anything that is required from outside a state's territory needs to be paid for in something of real value.  The economy of Nazi Germany did not produce a lot of goods that would be exported for foreign currency, they generally needed all goods produced domestically for domestic consumption or military preparedness.\n\nIn occupied territories (i.e. France 1940-44) the Germans could get around this for a while by setting an unfair exchange rate backed up with the threat of force.  This exchange rate insured goods would flow mostly from France to Germany.  In effect, setting up a \"legal\" mechanism for plundering occupied territory.   In the east, no pretense of legalism was typically employed, especially after 1941.\n\nFor sorta friendly states like the Soviet Union between 1939-41, the Germans and Soviets bypassed the currency exchange issue in effect by reverting to a barter system, in which precise exchanges (the Germans sent specified quantities of machine tools and finished goods and the Soviets sent raw materials.) were worked out by diplomats according to a schedule.  Of course, the Germans ended up not delivering many goods on schedule.\n\nGermany's raw material shortages caused immense difficulties during the war.  Producing synthetic rubber for example, took huge amounts of extra labor, factory space and energy compared to importing it. \n\nGermany's lack of foreign currency was a serious problem in the build up to the war, and in it's early stages.   By the end of the war, the Allied blockade and encirclement became so intense that it wasn't as relevant.  Germany could not expect to receive any resources from areas outside it's immediate control.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15wxe5", "title": "so Knights-errant are a common feature in fiction, but did some version of them ever exist?", "selftext": "if they did what did a quest typically entail, since dragons are so hard to come by?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15wxe5/so_knightserrant_are_a_common_feature_in_fiction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7qksa4", "c7qmb9s"], "score": [24, 5], "text": ["The Carolingian 'Comes' system worked by having 'Missi' regularly go out from the Imperial palace to check up on local affairs. A second source of inspiration might be the 'adventures' of types like Beowulf, the aristocratic nobleman who has to carve out a name, and eventually a kingdom for himself by doing heroic deeds. The knight-errant was a trope of fiction before the 'knight' was institutionalised, compare for example Jason, Odysseus or Heracles of Greek mythology. We have some indications that this 'go out and make your fortune by going on adventures' is also a feature of Bronze and Iron Age storytelling in Northern Europe.\n\nAlthough dragons and monsters do feature in the earliest tales, the 'quests' probably ended up either in the service of an existing king, like the Varangians under the Byzantines, or by conquering a new territory for yourself, possibly by cultivating a new patch of land, such as what the Vikings did in the Atlantic and the Eastern Baltic, or by gaining wealth on a trading expedition (which must have been quite adventurous). I'm not sure whether the Carolingian aristocrat had the same possibilities (was it possible to go raiding in Slavic territory without Imperial sanction?), but later on the Crusades (Northern, Levantine or Iberian) were quite the opportunity for adventure.", "You know... We need a culture / media examination subreddit for things like this. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4sw97r", "title": "How much do we know about proto-Indo Europeans?", "selftext": "I know that they were a pastoral steppe people, but do we know anything about their culture? How much did they influence the cultures of the places they invaded/migrated to? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4sw97r/how_much_do_we_know_about_protoindo_europeans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5d59en"], "score": [23], "text": ["I'm a linguist not a historian, but I'd like to urge caution in the terms used here. \"Proto-Indo European\" is not a designation of a cultural or geographical entity, but a historical linguistics term that *attests* a description of a variety of related *language precursors* to Indo-European languages that share certain feature sets. This is an attested language group with demonstrably shared features of distal languages, including (historically - as in, it was originally \"designed\" by specialists in the following languages) Sanskrit, Greek, Latin etc., and this group of languages is not, by extension, a cultural group. \n\nAlthough it's easy to use it as shorthand for the range of cultural and/or (we don't know) ethnic groups of (presumed) steppe warriors (or farmers, or pastoralists, depending on the academic), it's simply a construct that places all our linguistic knowledge of these early migrations (with a thin veneer of archaeological possibilities) into one convenient designation - e.g. all the lexicon for wheels and animals, and the flora and fauna that might have been encountered during the movement from east to west. One theory and a good initial exposure to these ideas is the \"Kurgan\" culture, which parallels the popular imagination and works as a way of explaining these shared influences. I don't cite any sources because it's not a primarily academic endeavor at this point - it's all very post-hoc. As mentioned above many question the type of language contact that occurred and so suggest much slower, more gradual population expansion scenarios than the popular \"conqueror\" mold.\n\nSo, your question of influence is incredibly difficult to answer without controversy in anthropology and linguistics, but it's important to recognize that the \"indo-euorpeans\" ('proto' is a technical term in historical linguistics) were not a group in the way that, say, the Mongols (or the Romans, or even the Crusaders etc.) were. We can cite what certain cultures might have been doing in areas that may have had early IE languages, but it wasn't likely monolithic, and we can't be sure of the dates or the timelines.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7tfnny", "title": "Where can I learn about European History that does not involve \"the drama of the nobility?\"", "selftext": "Hey all!\n\nOne of the things I really like about history is learning about everyday life, common people, trades and how they were performed, the cities and how they were constructed, etc.\n\nBasically, most historical programs I've seen all have to do with nobility, and the stories/drama of their lives.\n\nEven a program about Versailles for example is mostly about the politics, and less about the history of the palace itself and the inner workings.\n\nAre there any resources to learn European history that do not have to do with nobility, and focus on the other aspects?\n\nAn example of something I really liked was the BBCs Farm series, where they put the theory to practice, and tried their best to live as people would during, say, Tudor times for example. \n\nThanks!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7tfnny/where_can_i_learn_about_european_history_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtc4szm"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hey there! Some of what you're interested in dovetails closely with what I'm interested in (everyday family life), and I could try to help you out. part of the issue here is that you have a wide range. What era or place are you specifically interested in? What really gets you going about everyday life?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x92cm", "title": "Did the German empire have a similar treaty like Versailles in mind, in case the allies would have surrendered?", "selftext": "This question came to my mind when I saw [this drawing](_URL_0_) of Louis Raemaekers at an exposition.\n\nThe text below says: The Caudian Yoke\nThere now Fritz, not half as bad as you intended for us!\n\nThe sign says: Allies' Peace Terms\n\nThis made me wonder, did the German emperor or other members of the government system have certain points in mind for a peace treaty in case the allies would have surrendered? (I couldn't find much on this) Or is it just an assumption that the Germans would have made ridiculous claims? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x92cm/did_the_german_empire_have_a_similar_treaty_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coyde4e"], "score": [10], "text": ["There were fairly consistent war aims in discussion in Germany, almost from the outset. Typical of these was the 'September Programme' drawn up by Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, in September 1914. Although there were none 'set in stone' for the west, there was general consensus among the German leadership, i.e the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, the General Staff, etc. Annexation of Luxemburg, Belgium south of the Meuse, the Brie-Longwy ore fields in France, the Channel ports, crushing reparations on France (which was to be made economically dependent on Germany), but most of all, the establishment of so-called 'Mitteleuropa', or a Central European Customs Union, to ensure \"security for the Reich in the east and west for all time\". This would allow Germany to economically and politically exert Hegemony over the entire continent. They also had their eyes on Belgian Congo, French Congo and Equatorial Africa, Portugal's colonies in Africa, and other colonial possessions, for a so-called 'Mittelafrika' or a contiguous empire in Africa. \n\nIn the East, extensive annexations were planned, and carried out with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. The Bolsheviks were expecting harsh terms, but both sides, Bolsheviks (who wanted peace at any cost) and the German diplomats, were stunned by the Government's demands. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe establishment of a series of satellite states, to be incorporated into Mitteleuropa, that would essentially be vassals of the Kaiserreich, and amounted to 1/4 of the Russian Empire's population, 1/4 of it's industry, and 9/10 of it's coal. They also demanded whatever gold reserves the Bolsheviks possessed. On top of this, the Germans and Ottomans would have access to the Caucasus oilfields. There were also discussions of direct annexation of a part of Russian Poland, dubbed the 'Polish Border Strip', that was to be resettled with German farmers and soldiers, after close to 1 million Poles and Jews had been 'removed' that is. \n\nThat was in March, 1918. In May, the Germans and the Central Powers concluded the Treaty of Bucharest with Romania. Romania had to cede all of Dobruja, which included most of Romania's best ports, to Bulgaria, while the passes in the Carpathians along the border with Hungary and Bukovina were ceded to the Austro-Hungarians, denuding Romania of it's defenses. Romania would also have to fork over it's gold reserves, supply food and coal to the central powers (which Romania could barely do for itself), and lease all of it's oilfields, a major part of the economy, to Germany for 90 years. In return, they got Bessarabia, a Russia province that wasn't even majority Romanian, but at least they got that going for them!\n\nThen there was the earlier Treaty of Amity and Friendship with Bulgaria in 1915, which promised Bulgaria all of Vardar Macedonia (modern day FYROM), all of Serbia on the east bank of the Great Morava, and all of Serbia around the city of Nish, Serbia's major industrial center. During the war, the Bulgarians occupied Vardar Macedonia, while the Austro-Hungarians occupied Serbia proper. Atrocities were committed by both powers, while hundreds of thousands of Serbs starved because food was confiscated to feed the equally starving civilians in the Central Powers countries. \n\nLet's not forget 1871, with the Treaty of Frankfurt, signed between the French Third Republic and the new German Empire. France had to give up Alsace-Lorraine, which had been part of France for 2 centuries, and amounted to handing over 1 447 000 hectares of land, 1694 villages, and 1 597 000 inhabitants, with 20% of France's coal and steel potential gone. France was expected to pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs in 5 years, during which all of Northern France would be occupied by German troops, an occupation that the French would have to foot the bill for. France also had to give Germany a 'most favoured nation' clause in trade and navigation with France. The indemnity was paid in two years, and the clause was upheld till war in 1914.\n\nIn short, the Allies had every reason to expect a harsh Central Powers peace, hence why they fought so hard to defeat them, and thank God they did! I could go into how Versailles itself was not as harsh as is popularly believed, but my hands are getting tired.\n\nFor more info on this subject, David Stevenson's fantastic book \"1914-1918\" has a whole chapter dedicated to war aims and peace overtures. But, of course, the go to starter is, and always will be, Fritz Fischer's iconoclastic 1961 work, \"Griff nach Weltmacht\", published in English less provocatively as \"German War Aims in the First World War\". Also consult Hew Strachan's \"The First World War: Volume One, To Arms!\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/5sxizP0.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://alternatehistory.com/discussion/attachment.php?attachmentid=8876&amp;stc=1&amp;d=1134966449"]]}
{"q_id": "267y48", "title": "Was the peace treaty of the Winter War favorable for Finland, compared to simply surrendering right away?", "selftext": "Obviously Finland amazed the world by the large casualties they inflicted on the USSR. Now, I knew that Finland had to cede 10% of its territory in the treaty, but I thought this was favorable compared to other possible alternatives, i.e. \"it could be much worse\". I mean, Finland did retain its independence and all.\n\nBut apparently, according to wikipedia the peace treaty was even harsher than what the USSR was [demanding to begin with](_URL_0_). So what gives? Did they lose the war, even with their impressive military display? Would Finland have been better off simply surrendering to begin with and giving up 5% of its territory or however much the USSR demanded?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267y48/was_the_peace_treaty_of_the_winter_war_favorable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chok1mq", "chq8q4r"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["I can answer this even though i'm not a historian.\n\nPut shortly, Finland did lose the Winter war. Finns had early success with their defence, but as the war continued, the more frustrated Stalin was becoming with the situation. He couldn\u00b4t risk a situation where Great Britain and France would send troops to fight for Finland, for he knew that he would need allies against the future attack of Germany. Also the Winter war was quite humiliating for the Soviet Union. How could a small rural country possibly withstand an attack of the red army? \n\nStalin decided to break the Finnish defence by force: 600,000 soviet soldiers broke the Mannerheim-line in February and forced the Finns to retreat. Finns signed the Moscow peace treaty on 13th of march, 1940. Finland lost ten procent of its land areas, some of its islands and Finland was forced to rent Hanko for the soviets for 30 years.\n\nThis may seem like a failure on Finland\u00b4s part, but we must understand that it was also an unbelievable victory for Finland too. Finland wasn\u00b4t occupied and was able to keep its independence. This is important because Stalin may have been planning on attaching Finland to the Soviet Union before the Winter War.\n\nSee, in the Moscow negotiations the Soviet Union demanded that Finland had to let go of a part of the Karelian Isthmus. the same area held the Mannerheim-line, an extremely important defencive line that the Finns had built incase of an attack from the south-east. If Finland would have agreed to the negotiations, Finland would have lost a great defencive position. The Soviets would have had a much easier time attacking Finland in the future.\n\n We also know that the Soviet Union had dark plans for its border countries. in the summer of 1940, Estonia was attached to the Soviet Union. We can only guess what would have happened to Finland, if it would have agreed to the border-negotiations like Estonia had.\n\nSo that\u00b4s my answer. Now, if any of the the professional historians know better, want to correct my answer or just plain delete it, it\u00b4s ok. BTW sorry for the bad English.", "The Winter War was inevitable for Finland if it was going keep its sovereignty.\n\nMany say that the Soviet Union had never intended to fully occupy Finland. And that would otherwise sound plausible but the Soviet Union [invaded Finland from its full border length](_URL_0_), the Soviet columns penetrated deep Finnish inland where they were to cut Finland in half and proceed further. But the fear of rising casulties and economic costs forced the Soviet Union to accept the limited war outcome with Finland and cease operations. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War#Peace_of_Moscow"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/frwiki/87/Winter-War-Overview.png"]]}
{"q_id": "24q19q", "title": "Did Hitler have a plan to invade the U.S.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24q19q/did_hitler_have_a_plan_to_invade_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch9kxjm", "ch9mjj7", "ch9nlnu", "ch9q4de", "ch9zeb5"], "score": [284, 2, 27, 5, 2], "text": ["Nothing concrete, there were attempts to build bombers that could attack the mainland USA from Europe. There was also the various U-Boat attacks and the various attempts to land spies/saboteurs in the USA. \n\nHitler assumed that the United States would be unable to field armies right away and that they wouldn't be able to enter the fray until 1942/1943, which in Hitler's mind was more than enough time to deal with both the USSR and Britain. Hitler foresaw some grand struggle between the New World, led by the USA, and the Old World led by Germany. It was imagined that Germany would force England into a peace treaty and than the two would ally against the common threat in America; with Britain's navy being key to attacking the Americans. Here is a quote from Hitler on the matter:\n\n >  If America lends her help to England, it is with the secret\nthought of bringing the moment nearer when she will reap her\ninheritance.\nI shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf\nof the German people at the idea that one day we will see\nEngland and Germany marching together against America.\nGermany and England will know what each of them can\nexpect of her partner, and then we shall have found the ally\nwhom we need. They have an unexampled cheek, these\nEnglish! It doesn't prevent me from admiring them. In this\nsphere, they still have a lot to teach us\n\nHitler didn't imagine a huge battle between Germany and the USA in his lifetime but rather a protracted,almost coldwar like struggle. Hitler also planned to exploit what he saw as an \"Anglo-American Rivalry\" and he predicted that one would eventually destroy the other. To quote Hitler again:\n\n >  England and America will one day have a war with one\nanother, which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable.\nOne of the two countries will have to disappear.\n\nHitler also predicted that that the United States would collapse in on itself and thus a protracted struggle would be even easier to win. He imagined that once the British Empire allied itself with Germany, the American public would become angry and the American state, which Hitler had no respect for, would collapse. \n\n >  In that case, what would happen to the United States? They\nwould be territorially intact. But one day England will be\nobliged to make approaches to the Continent. And it will be a\nGerman-British army that will chase the Americans from Iceland.\nI don't see much future for the Americans. In my view,\nit's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem,\nand the problem of social inequalities. Those were what caused\nthe downfall of Rome, and yet Rome was a solid edifice that\nstood for something. Moreover, the Romans were inspired by\ngreat ideas. Nothing of the sort in England to-day. As for the\nAmericans, that kind of thing is non-existent\n\nFinally, Hitler had next to no respect for the Americans as soldiers, which is why he was so unaffected by things like the American invasion of North Africa, because he assumed that the German military would crush the Americans. He did however, have respect for their ability to mass produce and he acknowledged their economic strength. \n\n >   If we succeed this year in getting our new tanks into the\nline in the proportion of twelve per division, we'll crushingly\noutclass all our opponents' tanks. It's enough to give Rommel\ntwenty-four of them to guarantee him the advantage. If the\nAmericans arrive with their tanks, he'll bowl them over like\nrabbits\n\nHitler's ultimate goal was to establish German suzerainty over Europe and than lead this new German dominated Europe into the future. This was Hitler's goal, the United States wasn't the highest of priorities for Hitler. \n", "Didn't he have an architect make plans for the redesign of New York City?", "One of the causes of the recurring mentions that Hitler had plans to invade the Americas was the [\"Navy Day Address\"](_URL_1_) given by President Roosevelt in 1941 in which he said:\n\n > I have in my possession [a secret map](_URL_2_) made in Germany by Hitler's government-by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it...\n\n > This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself...\n\n > In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an International Nazi Church-a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi Government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols-the swastika and the naked sword. \n\nThe part about the plots against churches has never been sourced, to my knowledge, but the 'secret map' was given to the US government by William Stephenson, a Canadian expert in political warfare working for the British Secret Intelligence Services, who claimed that it was stolen from a German motorcycle courier in South America. \n\nAccording to the [book](_URL_0_) \"Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American \"Neutrality\" in World War II\" the account of the map was written up by three members of British Security Coordination, one of whom was the author Roald Dahl, and this was circulated after the war to select members of the intelligence services and British politicians as a top secret memento of the exploits of the spy service. \n\nIn this account the 'secret map' was not found in a motorcyle couriers bag, it was actually manufactured in Toronto by a counterfeiter at William Stephenson's behest in an attempt to draw the Americans into the war, or at least to give Roosevelt a plausible story to sell to the American public regarding why the US was entering the war.  ", "Gerhard Weinberg touches on it in his massive tome \"A World at Arms.\" Basically, Germany had some vague notions of attacking the US mainland eventually, but they knew they would need a large surface fleet in order to do so, which they did not have. Presumably once they had pacified Europe they would use the resources from their new territories to construct the necessary fleet (and a strategic bomber fleet, which they also lacked), but obviously they never came close to accomplishing it. ", "Followup question, since no-one sofar has adressed possible Japanese invasion plans: in Hitler's view, wouldn't Japan be more likely to invade the U.S.? In the U.S. its view as well? Japan is closer geographically and (at first) the only one actually fighting the U.S. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/418902/Excerpt", "https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ww2/fdr102741.html", "http://i.imgur.com/RRRqC.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1cdmmq", "title": "Can someone describe samurai or Warring States period Japanese battle tactics?", "selftext": "I know that Oda Nobunaga used riflemen in line to dominate the battlefield, but what other battle tactics were used? I know Tokugawa Ieyasu used artillery his battle plans, anything else? I have studied military history and it seems that battle usually involves an infantry force to hold ground or fix enemy forces in place and use cavalry or archers to outmaneuver or fire suppress the opposing forces (generally speaking).\n\nCan someone give me a historical source for the battle tactics of the period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cdmmq/can_someone_describe_samurai_or_warring_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9fl5wv", "c9fmduh"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Uh . . . I'll take a shot. I don't have sources on hand, sorry for that.\n\nThe Sengoku Jidai was a period that saw rapid development of both arms and tactics. It was also a period of constant civil war. These make it difficult to pin down \"official\" tactics as each clan made slight changes, tested new ideas, and revised plans and weapons constantly. For this reason if you're interested I highly suggest looking into how specific battles were fought. It's fairly rare that the exact same tactic was used successfully twice in a row. I'll list some to give examples\n\n* Okehazama: Oda Nobunaga uses 3 forts as decoys, and executes a brilliant ambush against Imagawa Yoshimoto's main camp while his vastly superior army is tied up fighting the decoy forts. Nobunaga overruns the main camp, kills Yoshimoto, and defeats an army of 30,000 with 3,000 men.\n\n* Kawanakajima: Kenshin Uesugi uses a \"wheeling formation\" that allowed his riflemen to keep up a constant rate of fire as the rank behind would step forward, fire, kneel to reload. The rank behind them would repeat, so the whole formation slowly \"crawled\" forward as rank after rank was able to step forward and fire.\n\n* Mikatagahara: Takeda Shingen teaches us why pikemen and arquebusiers should always stay close to each other. Cavalry, that's why.\n\n* Siege of Noda Castle: How to take an enemy castle without fighting? Drain the moat and all their drinking water. This is also one of many examples of [\"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!\"](_URL_0_) AKA commanders not knowing just how awesome guns are yet.\n\n\nYou might also want to look into [Pike and Shot tactics](_URL_1_) of European armies. Almost everything the japanese did the europeans also did and had a name for, so you will find a lot of things described there that the japanse just didn't put an official name to. \n\nEdit: words words words", "This is probably not what you are looking (or you've read it already) for but one of the most renown strategy guidebook \"The Art of War\" by Sun Tzu (supposedly) is assumed to be written at that time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sedgwick", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_and_shot"], []]}
{"q_id": "3vvuf4", "title": "Finding Information on a WWII Merchant Ship (Liberty Class)", "selftext": "I remember as a kid my grandfather telling me about his ship being sunk and spending time in a life raft in the Ocean. He died many years ago, and I was too young to care about the details, but now that I'm older I'd love to find out as much as possible about the ship, crew, and the night it was sunk by the Germans, and share with my family. \n\nThe ship was the S. S. Robert Bacon and was sunk on July 13, 1943. I was able to find some basic information through Google searches, but I'm not sure my next steps. \n\nI've really learned how influential merchant ships were in the war effort and how exposed they were. My grandfather was in the Navy and assigned to the ship.  \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vvuf4/finding_information_on_a_wwii_merchant_ship/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxr70zo"], "score": [3], "text": ["U-178 sunk SS Robert Bacon on July 14, 1943 off the coast of Mozambique according to [_URL_0_](http://www._URL_0_/allies/merchants/)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["uboat.net", "http://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/"]]}
{"q_id": "2kln9z", "title": "Did Russians deliberately burn Moscow during Napoleon's invasion?", "selftext": "Right now I'm reading War and Peace and it is stated there that it is only natural that a wooden city would burn during such times and it was not deliberately set on fire. Is there any truth to this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kln9z/did_russians_deliberately_burn_moscow_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clnezl4"], "score": [2], "text": ["No one really knows for sure. Dominic Lieven's new(ish) book **Russia against Napoleon** is a good book which addresses this.\n\nSome say the fire was intentional, some say accidental, but I would say most modern serious scholars contend it was accidental, in much the same way Tolstoy describes it. Had it been intentional, it seems that the conflagration would have been much more total. As it happened, the fire spread quickly, and destroyed much, but it wasn't systematic. Systematically burning a massive city like Moscow wouldn't be too hard given a few hundred police or soldiers or firefighters. Station them at various parts of the city and just light something big on fire, so if any one fails, the others would largely continue to spread.\n\nInstead, Moscow burned from probably one location and spread outwards from there, just like in the great Chicago fire. There's also no reliable documents which claim it was intentional."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1n6244", "title": "Does history get \"outdated\"?", "selftext": "I.e. if a read a history book that was perfectly accurate in 1980, how accurate will the same book be today?\n\nJust as an example, how about R.R. Palmers History of the Modern World.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n6244/does_history_get_outdated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccfp3a7", "ccfphso", "ccfq7cq", "ccfrrr1", "ccfrvgm", "ccft81g", "ccfxejj"], "score": [6, 11, 34, 9, 4, 3, 2], "text": ["Yes, history can get \"outdated\". The most obvious examples are political ones - i.e, books about Marxism written in Soviet Bloc will be mostly outdated when compared to books written after collapse of SU. Please note, that facts often don't change much, while interpretation of these facts changes.\n\nWhen speaking of democratic countries, the political reasons are not as important as methodological ones (methodological change happens in nondemocratic countries too) - historians develop new methods of interpretation of sources. Another important thing is availability of sources - sometimes it happens that a new historical sources are found in archives, libraries, etc., but it is also due to disclosing of previously secret material.\n", "Over time new information can be released.\n\nDuring WW2 the Allies launched Operation Mincemeat.  To cut a long story short it was where they dumped a body in the ocean with fake documents to trick the Germans into where they would be attacking.  After the war those in charge of the operation claimed that the man they dumped in the ocean had died from pneumonia and his family had been contacted and given permission for the body to be used.  Today though it's known that he actually committed suicide from ingestion of rat poison and had no surviving relatives to gain permission.\n\nAnother one from WW2 is the famous breaking of the Enigma Code known as Ultra.  Anything to do with that remained classified top secret until the mid 1970s.  This meant for decades after the war the exact reason certain decisions had been made were either not known or wrong conclusions drawn.", "All the time! It depends which particular field you're interested in, really. Any text written before the 1960s-70s (and most of the time, even those are suspect) about early medieval Irish history is probably wrong in its interpretation and only has value as a historiographical text, or if you just need raw data from texts like Binchy's massive translations of early law tracts. \n\nWhy are they outdated? Because new methodology and improvements in archaeology have shown that the interpretations of earlier historians about early Irish history are unfounded. Authors like Binchy based their interpretations primarily on law tracts with annalistic sources backing them up, but newer methodology regarding source interpretation showed that these interpretations were wrong because legal texts did not accurately portray Irish society, but rather the ideal society of early Irish law-men. We started reading these texts less literally than earlier scholars who took it for granted that the authors were stating objective facts.\n\nAs well, archaeology in Ireland originally had a very antiquarian foundation; people would collect items for the sake of collecting them, and would rarely try to tie them into a bigger picture coloured in by textual sources (unless it was a particularly notable piece of art or craftsmanship, like the Tara Brooch). But in the later half of the 20th century, advances in the field of archaeology helped Irish historians do exactly that. Now, a lot of previous conclusions were shown to be outright wrong because no one thought to seriously connect archaeology with textual history; historians had been relying on legal texts, annals, place names, literature and art history to draw their conclusions. Archaeology added a whole new dimension to early Irish history and totally changed the way we approach that period.", "Yes, history gets outdated quite often.\n\nThe thing that many people don't understand about History-with-a-capital-H is that it's a conversation that spans generations.  It's not simply an attempt to get at the \"truth\", but rather involves incorporation of new information and new methodologies and new foci to keep the conversation going.\n\nThere's a sub-discipline in History called \"Historiography\" that is basically the history of history.  Someone writing in 1940s France might have come to different conclusions than someone writing in 1940s America, for instance.  And their perspectives, methodologies and conclusions will differ from their predecessors and their descendants.\n\nThe reasons of course are varied: new information is uncovered and incorporated into the story, information is reexamined, methodological frameworks change etc.  Moreover, certain perspectives on history become more popular than others.  So maybe in a given decade Marxist interpretations are more prevalent than in the following decade.\n\nThis is why there isn't just one book about Benjamin Franklin or WWII.  Many different people are approaching history from many different angles.  They make different arguments and come to different conclusions than their peers.  Then they are praised and critiqued, people cite their work in a negative or positive way, new writing is done and the conversation continues.  That's what makes History-with-a-capital-H so great: there's always more to read!", "I have a followup question:  Why isn't the history of history included when history is taught? (Or is it, and I'm just ignorant?)\n\nIn the US, in particular (since that's where I'm from) I have the sense that 'generally accepted history' of certain events has changed dramatically from place to place and time to time.  The examples are probably still contentious topics.  What are the causes and consequences of: the Civil War through Reconstruction to Jim Crow, indigenous population at the time of Columbus' landing, the fall of communism in Europe, European colonization and decolonization (is that the word?) of Africa.\n\nIt seems a bit simplistic to ignore how these time periods were taught in the past.  \n\nEmpty political rhetoric often invokes phrases like \"People have forgotten their history!\" but (it seems to me) we never acknowledge that history *has* changed.  Possibly what our parents were taught is considered wrong according to what our children are taught.  Why not teach our children that their parents might have been told incomplete (or untrue) stories?", "It can certainly get outdated, but that should not detract from its usefulness. In Canadian history, for example, many people might see the old Imperial-based, nationalist-narrative history as outdated in the face of ethnic and social history - that said, all that kind of history still holds value as a reflection of a certain viewpoint. \n\nRR Palmer is quite good, IMO. I would make sure you have the latest edition (the 10th I believe - I think I have the 9th) if you want to be certain it is up to date, but in general the textbook is a fantastic overview. I pull it out regularly for quick reference. ", "Yes, there are new discoveries all of the time.  A good book to look at how history can get outdated is Orientalism by Edward Said, his book is basically a takedown of the practices made by anthropologists when studying non-western nations.  It was actually behind its time a little bit since Area Studies had already started to take off and was not based on the imperialist/Colonial view of the world.  \n\n\nWe also lose out on things that have already been discovered, sometimes because of competition and prestige arguments, and sometimes because the guy who excavated a site, or created the theory wrote it in a language that isn't common.  We also have a tendency to ignore, or not know about, some obscure school in a developing nation when we have more prestigious and respected sources even though the obscure school might have very important information.\n\n\nOther than that at some level every anthropologist is trying to make a logical conclusion based on the information available to them, this means that they will inevitably be missing things that would help with these conclusions.  Lack of sites, lack of chances to properly excavate, political concerns, and other issue often push these things back decades.  \n\n\nInterestingly enough its not just history that finds itself in that vein of lacking information, or finding its conclusions to be wrong, we find \"extinct\" animals with surprising regularity, and we might have missed the worlds largest freshwater fish until 1990 despite the fact that its habitat runs through the center of 2 cities with populations well over 5 million.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dvlesx", "title": "Can someone explain Inuits?", "selftext": "I hope I\u2019m getting that term right. By Inuits I mean the chaps that live in the northern hemisphere where the weather isn\u2019t so hospitable. \n\nBy explain them I mean a few things: \n\n1) why on earth did they stay in such cold climates instead of just moving south? \n\n2) how did they come to use metal tools in a place with arguably no iron ore? \n\n3) surely they must have lived very short lives, from a combination of the harsh environment and such a limited diet, amongst other things? \n\nI\u2019ve always wondered why humans would subject themselves to such dire conditions, I have similar quandaries concerning nomadic Saharan tribes....but anyway, any help would be much appreciated! I just want to know about their lives in general.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dvlesx/can_someone_explain_inuits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7dez3t"], "score": [7], "text": ["A lot of elderly Inuit people I\u2019ve met live to be quite old, like 90 to 100. They buy some stuff at northern grocery stores but the prices are absolutely ridiculous. Most survive on diets based on what they can get close to home. When younger community members hunt whales and stuff, the food feeds the entire community. They have berries, bannock, eat elk or muskox, fish, strips of meat or blubber. A lot of Inuit travel down to the city to stock up on essentials, and bring them back up to feed their family and friends. Farming can be quite difficult there. They use ulus to cut the meat, and other tasks but also have modern technology obviously. They are built for the frigid temperatures, and many wear the parkas with multiple layers, so if it\u2019s warmer out, they can just wear the cotton zipped layer. It\u2019s cool they have amauties (I think that\u2019s spelled correctly), so they can keep their babies in the big hood pocket for skin contact, and easy to care for baby\u2019s immediate needs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "285og5", "title": "What was the nature of physical training for militaries in Napoleonic times?", "selftext": "I was recently watching \"Surviving the Cut\" about ranger school, sniper school and others, and I was wondering if it has always been that harsh for military training throughout modern times. I realize this may be a stupid question, obviously military training has never been easy, but have they always had to do such terrifying stunts as highrises, freezing water, dives, 22hr days with limited calories and sleep in order to weed out weaker men. Has it always been this way, or is this kind of hardcore training a new development. \n\nP.S. I realize that what I am describing refers specifically to special forces, but the question still stands for basic Army training etc. Was it always as hard as it is?\n\nP.P.S. Also let me know if it's actually easier today haha", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285og5/what_was_the_nature_of_physical_training_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci7p6id"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, it was easier, much easier. Soldiering in the 18th and 19th century was much different than it was in the 20th century. The emphasis of military training was not on skill and surviving but rather marching and formations. Soldiers would spend their training in marching and moving in formation. If they were lucky, there would be training in how to load and fire their musket and even luckier if they were taught how to use their bayonet with skill (beyond \"pointy end goes in the enemy\").\n\nI have not come across any sort of discussion as to extreme or survival training beyond foraging (mainly in the French army). The focus was marching, because in the French style of war, marching was more important and effective than survival or skill with a musket.\n\nNow, you are talking about elite units, the closest thing you'd find to that is the Old Guard of the Imperial Guard. These men were trained and battle hardened soldiers that were required to have served a minimum of five campaigns and have several citations of bravery to show that they are worthy of being in the Guard. Beyond that, there was no training and anything training they received was up to the prerogative of the commanding regimental/battalion officer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aep4nz", "title": "Darius The Greats' Most important accomplishments?", "selftext": "Specifically during his early years as king, what would you say Darius the Great's most important achievements were? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aep4nz/darius_the_greats_most_important_accomplishments/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edsh4ub"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not like we have a great record of precisely what his accomplishments were, despite his reign probably being the best attested at least in terms of Persian sources.\n\nAnyway, by far his most important accomplishment would be keeping the realms intact after assassinating Bardiya, usurping the throne and elevating his own clan to rulership, succesfully repressing the rebellions that by his own account broke out - and somehow convincing people of his bizarre cover story for assassinating Bardiya.\n\nSecond, he appears to have been responsible for some type of reform, generally said to be the creation of \"Satrapies\" by Herodotus' account. The appointment of governors was obviously not something new, so it has been suggested (by e.g. Briant) that what he created a robust and reliable system for raising revenue, by demanding a fixed amount of tribute based on the amount of arable land in each administrative region, in addition to taxes and tithes on production, trade and capital (such as livestock), otherwise remaining relatively hands-off in the administration of each satrapy. The main sources for this are Herodotus (who gives a tabulation of the amount of tribute demanded) and Pseudo-Aristotle's Oeconomicus (that details revenue raising in a \"Satrapial\" economy). In additon the Persepolis tablets give insight into the economics of Persia proper.\n\nThird, he created a long-lived and powerful royal ideology, a theocratic institution centered on the absolute and divinely sanctioned authority and righteousness of the Great King, exemplified in the Behistun Inscription. It can hardly be overstated what an accomplishment it was to create an ideology and administration that would allow the incredibly vast Achaemenid realms to flourish for a century and a half after his death, in spite of rebellions, succession crises, and power struggles.\n\nThat I would say is a good summary of his accomplishments."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33h4w0", "title": "Compared to their contemporaries, how well did the various Chinese forces of the Second Sino-Japanese War perform in combat?", "selftext": "How much of their poor performance was due to poor leadership or infighting and how much was due to actual poor performance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33h4w0/compared_to_their_contemporaries_how_well_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cql2jmk", "cql2muj"], "score": [16, 46], "text": ["Size wise, a Chinese division, at full strength, was 9000 guys, more often than not, a Chinese division hovered at around 5000-6000 soldiers. A standard Japanese type B infantry division at full strength was 19,000 guys. A Japanese independent or mixed brigade was 9000 - 10000 soldiers. It's why when people talk about the Japanese \"only\" having 30 some divisions and a couple brigades in China it's a bit misleading. These were gigantic formations. \n\nEquipment wise, the disparity was worse. \n\nA Chinese division was lucky if they had any artillery and what they would have would be mountain guns and smaller caliber stuff. They lacked ammunition and the only thing that might be encountered in abundance were rifles, mortars and light machine guns. (The Czech ZB-26 was THE machine gun of the Chinese Army. They received 30,000 of them and produced them domestically as well). Chinese divisions lacked trucks and pack animals, by and large. \n\nThe 200th was the only Chinese division with an armored component, but read what they had in 1938. The Tank regiments had 70 T-26's 4 BT-5's, 20 CV-33 tanks. The armoured car regiment had around 50 BA Armoured Cars and 12 Sd Kfz 221 armoured cars. Besides, it had more than 400 Ford trucks. The motorised infantry regiment used Soviet trucks and rifles, and the artillery regiment had 12 122 mm howitzers, also 45 mm anti aircraft artillery and 75 mm field guns. That division was exceptionally well equipped and it's got the attack power of a poor quality Italian motorized division. \n\nA Japanese division, by contrast, would have an independent field artillery regiment as well as a smaller artillery regiment attached directly to the main infantry brigade. They also had a dedicated Engineer regiment, a dedicated transport regiment, and a dedicated cavalry regiment. A Japanese division, especially in the 1937 - 1943 period, could also replace any lost equipment far more easily than the Chinese could. \n\nTraining wise: the Japanese were of far higher quality. People would accuse the Japanese of being rigid tactically, but they were generally good tactics. (Later in the war, the tactics that they had perfected fighting the Chinese would fail them spectacularly against the better equipped and trained US forces.) The Japanese had very good staff colleges and could produce junior officers who were competent and experienced. The basic Japanese soldier was also literate. Japan actually had one of the highest literacy rates of any country in the world during the pre war period. \n\nThe Chinese, by contrast, were not as gifted. First of all, China only had a 15 to 25% literacy rate and the most educated and modern segment of the population had fallen under Japanese occupation when the Japanese took the coast. So suitable officer candidates were in short supply. As for the officers that the Chinese did have, one third of the Chinese army's officers had gone to Baoding Military academy in Beijing which had been founded in 1902 and closed in 1923. It gave some modern training and most of the officers from the north went here if they were old enough. (Chiang Kai Shek went here for a semester before going to Japan in 1906. In Japan, he attended an Imperial Japanese Army Academy in Tokyo and then served in the Japanese army for 2 years, returning when the Qing dynasty fell. It made the Allied refusal to listen to him even weirder since he actually was trained in Japanese doctrine and tactics.) In 1924, the KMT used Soviet provided funds to found Whampoah Military Academy (properly pronounced Huangpu) in Guangzhou, and Chiang Kai Shek cemented his rise to power by being the commandant of the Academy. Students here learned from Soviet instructors initially during the first five years and then a mixture of Soviet and German instructors during the 30's. Officers who had graduated during the 30's were generally quite competent, but there were only a couple thousand of them for an army of millions. (It's like Germany's problem of having to stretch the trained 100,000 of the Versailles Treaty to the entire Heer.) Half of China's officers went to Whampoah and Chiang Kai Shek generally didn't trust generals who hadn't gone to Whampoah. That said, Whampoah was lost to the Japanese with Guangzhou in 1938 and most of the competent junior officers died in Shanghai. The rest of ther generals went to various foreign (mostly Japanese) or local military academies or had no formal military training at all. \n\nWithin the Chinese army, generals tended to only promote subordinates who went to the same academies that they had. This was not very helpful to fighting quality and it sometimes led to weird outcomes. For example, there were 97 Chinese officers who went to US military academies from 1900-1937. When they returned, they had trouble finding good postings because of the above system. What ended up happening to a lot of them was that the Chinese Finance Ministry, under Columbia graduate Kong Xiangxi, was allowed to form a few tax enforcement divisions. Kong Xiangxi then invited an American trained officer whom he knew from Columbia to head one of these up, and then he in turn brought in more American trained officers to fill out the lower ranks. These finance divisions would then be made regular army in 1937. In Burma, there was one of these divisions, the 38th led by Sun Li Ren, and the British were often surprised when a random Chinese colonel from that division would respond in perfect New England English. \n\nNow put all this together, and the Chinese army had to be super conservative about attacking because the failure points across any given conglomeration of Chinese troops were so many. Not surprisingly, most of China's victories during WW2 were in defensive battles(the four battles of Changsha over five years). So China lost many more soldiers than the Japanese, however each Japanese soldier held a higher degree of importance to the Japanese war effort than the individual Chinese.\n", "The other response doesn't actually answer the question, so I'll give it a go.\n\nAt the time of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the National Revolutionary Army was composed of several types of formations.  Very broadly, they are divided into the German-trained divisions, the regular divisions, and the Chinese Communist units (such as the 8th Route Army).  \n\nThe German divisions were organized much along the lines of the post-WWI Reichswehr, with a size of around 10,000 troops, equipped with German rifles, German helmets (the Stahlhelm) and German training.  There were about 8 of these divisions fully battle-ready and another 12 divisions with at least some training.  These divisions were just as capable as the Japanese troops, with the Chiang Kai-Shek rifle superior to the Japanese Arisaka, although Japanese divisions were twice the size of Chinese divisions, so to achieve force parity the Chinese would need to employ two of the German-trained ones.\n\nThe regular trained divisions were roughly 5,000 troops each and were extremely diverse, ranging from poor warlord levies essentially conscripted from local peasants to elite warlord troops equipped with light tanks, Muslim Hui cavalry on par with Japanese cavalry, to sundered formations of other Chinese troops mix and matched together into a new unit.  \n\nThe Communist divisions had a mix of Chinese, Soviet, and captured Japanese equipment.  They were very well-trained, but they were underutilized in the war due to the Communist desire to preserve their strength, instead mostly participating in guerrilla actions.\n\nThe actual performance of the Chinese troops was quite good.  The Japanese predicted that they could achieve a rapid victory within 3 months.  Instead, it took them three months to break out of Shanghai, partly due to an ill-advised political maneuver by Chiang Kai-Shek to send his best German-trained troops into an urban struggle in Shanghai to attract the attention of the foreigners in Shanghai's concessions, hopefully leading to Western intervention.  In doing so, however, he severely attritioned these units, to the point that they were unable to take advantage of the defensive fortifications protecting Nanjing, which would likely have severely hindered Japanese efforts further.\n\nStill, even with this strategic error, while the Chinese were giving ground, the Japanese were also being attritioned, namely in their fuel and other tools required to wage war.  The reason for the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies-and for the Pearl Harbor operation-were to acquire the supplies necessary to continue the war in China.  This led to the Japanese attempt to cut off the supply route to China via the Ledo-Paoshan Burma Road, which severely impaired Chinese troops-as did the withdrawal of German aid in 1938-but was supplanted by the Allied \"Hump\" air-supply operation.\n\nIndeed, by 1945, the situation had so improved that the Chinese had defeated the Japanese units in southern China and as the atomic bombs were dropped were in the middle of a massive operation to roll up the Japanese flank all the way to Shanghai.  While there was certainly infighting, corruption, and self-interest that hurt the Chinese war effort, the National Revolutionary Army was still quite a powerful defensive force, especially against a lightly mechanized force like Imperial Japan."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4x8gyn", "title": "\"In the early 1960s, Krushchev promised the advent of communism by 1980\" - what did the USSR purport to be at that time, if not communist?", "selftext": "This is from Dmitry Glukhovsky's forward to the recent English translation of the Strugatsky brother's *The Doomed City*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x8gyn/in_the_early_1960s_krushchev_promised_the_advent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6dd00g", "d6deedo"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["The USSR purported throughout it's existence to be a socialist state. To understand this position, you must understand the usage of socialism and communism in Marxist thought, which differs somewhat from how the terms are used in popular culture. In the west, communism is typically used to refer to states ruled by Communist parties. However, Marx used it to mean a hypothetical future state for society, where property would be owned communally and where classes do not exist (property is, in Marxist usage, defined as anything that can be used to create profit). Socialism is, in Marx's view, a transitional stage between capitalism and communism. In this state, property is owned not by the bourgeoisie, but instead by the workers. Over time, the class distinctions and machinery of state necessary for this will wither away, and communism will result. The Soviet Union claimed to be socialist, aiming to produce the conditions necessary for communism (though the extent to which they were is arguable). This is what the quote is referring to - Khrushchev was promising that by 1980, the Soviet Union would be in the process of transitioning from socialism to communism. ", "We only called all those countries behind the Iron Curtain \"communist\" as a convenient shorthand (and were justified in doing so because they were mostly ruled by a single party which usually proudly called itself the \"Communist Party\"), but you will notice that the names of the COUNTRIES used a different term: the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and so forth.  This is the giveaway, and the answer to your question: the USSR considered itself (according to its own official ideology) \"socialist\".\n\n \n\nWhat is the difference, you may ask?  \n\n \n\nFor that, you need to turn to the philosophical underpinnings of those countries' (and, in particular, the USSR's) ideologies.  That underpinning is Marxism (though as a Soviet citizen, you would reflexively call it \"Marxism-Leninism\"), and in particular so-called historic materialism, which Karl Marx, the founding father of the Marxist school of thought, developed as a way of looking at how societies and states evolve over time.  \n\n \n\nTo a historic materialist, human history moves through certain inevitable stages: it all begins with an egalitarian primitive hunter-gatherer paradise which mirrors communism at the other end of history, in that the \"means of production belong to everyone\" and there is no oppression by the state.   However, the primitive society at the dawn of mankind has short, brutish lives with no amenities or much in the way of culture and pleasure.  Humanity bootstraps itself up to a higher level of transforming natural resources and amassing wealth, going through distinct stages of society, such as e.g. slaveholder society, or feudalism.  These are always marked by a ruling class and an oppressed class, and the oppression at some point gets so unbearable that the oppressed revolt and topple the ruling class and install a new society - rinse, repeat.  Please note: If this sounds ridiculous, it is mostly because of my criminal oversimplification in a short reddit post - there is more to it in actual Marxism, whatever you might think about the dubious merits of socialism in theory (or the horrible way it was implemented in actual history)!\n\n \n\nNow: we are moving up through history, going through a preordained series of class systems, up to present (at the time of Marx) where you have capitalism.  Capitalism is extremely efficient and productive: it makes countless goods and makes them well, and delivers them cheaply and reliably, etc. etc.  It has come a loooong way from the primitive hand-to-mouth stage of prehistory.  The only problem?  There is great injustice, committed by the ruling class (the capitalists) against the oppressed (the proletariat, or workers and farmers).  You see, the capitalists hold all the land and all the means of production, and that means that they can extract free rent from the proletariat, who only have their labor to sell.\n\n \n\nEnter the socialist revolution: the proletariat topples the capitalists.  \n\n \n\nAnd this is the most important point with respect to your question: see, even under orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine, it is quite readily accepted as fact that you still don't have communism at this point.  Communism means everyone has everything they might ever want.  Food and other material goods will presumably be produced by robots etc., you are free -- and so is everyone else -- to spend all your time pursuing whatever you might want, from inventing better robots to writing musicals to just hanging out and not doing much. \n\n \n\nBut clearly, that is not feasible just yet, even with all the complexity and the wealth produced by capitalism that just fell into the lap of the proletarian revolutionaries.  Therefore, there will still have to be a \"class system\" of sorts in place, a form of exercising power over your fellow citizens, and restraining their freedom.  \n\n \n\nThe difference with socialism is that, for the first time ever, the \"oppressor\" (i.e., the revolutionary socialist vanguard, embodied by the infallible communist party) indeed has the best interests of the oppressed (i.e., everyone else) in mind (in modern political science-speak, we might call them the \"benevolent dictator\", though I am not sure that would have flown with the party).  While, say, the feudal warlord had only one interest: that the world stay forever the way it is, with him extracting the good life from the serfs and having a good time at their expense, the socialist revolutionary actively wants to bring about a time where she renders herself redundant, by hastening the arrival of said Golden Age of Communism.    Marx called this the \"withering away of the State\".  \n\n \n\nIn other words, Khrushchev simply ventured a forecast that within 20 years' time, socialist society would make the final transformative leap to communist society.  Such a statement is politically important also because of the implications for the ordinary citizen AS A CONSUMER.  Consider the dim awareness of many under socialism at the time that their brethren in the west were so much better off, with better cars, food, household appliances, gadgets, leisure-time activities, and so forth.  Promising them communism, within the paradigm of the official teachings, was promising to go forward with one of the most famous pronouncements of Marx: \"From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.\"  It is the promise of endless abundance, brought about by communism's superior capability to produce and deliver anything and everything you might think of - and, crucially, unlike in a capitalist state, you will not have to work for it, kowtow to your employer or master, compromise in any way!  \n\nConsider (might the ideologue of the times say) that, while your West German counterpart has a nice Volkswagen while you are still on a years-long waiting list for a Trabant, that westerner is in constant fear of losing it all, if he loses his job, etc. etc.   Now, here with us, in socialist Germany, you already have some perks (guaranteed jobs, free healthcare) that they, poor capitalist workers will never have, but we freely admit cars and roast beef and color TV would be nice, too.  Here is the kicker: if you help us build that new society (by following the lead of the party's wise vanguard unquestioningly, enthusiastically), then you will hasten the arrival of the Time of Plenty.  There is a clear eschatological aspect to this Marxist premise of predestined history, put into the ideological service of a ruling class that wished for a population of docile dupes, which mirrors that of fundamentalist religions, and works equally well in both contexts.     \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1h6l00", "title": "History Blogs", "selftext": "I was just wondering what websites or podcasts this sub would recommend for casual daily/weekly/monthly history readings. \n\nI am mostly interested in 18th, 19th, 20th century European and American history, but any blog/podcast that is well made and easy to use is welcomed. \n\nThanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h6l00/history_blogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carbfzh", "carbmij", "carchk0", "cardpij", "carep8g", "carg4uy", "carjmq8", "carx8l8"], "score": [4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 6, 2, 2], "text": ["My favorite blog to check out is [Peashooter85](_URL_0_) on Tumblr. Mix of short photo captions, and long posts on various historical topics.", "Play The Past looks takes a humanities approach toward the analysis of games, mostly video games. It's contributors are mostly professors of various disciplines.\n\nThey have had great postings on games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls.\n\n_URL_0_", "I very much enjoy _URL_0_", "I recently started listening to this podcast from BBC: [History Hour](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's very interesting and mostly based on interviewing people who were involved in the events. Episodes are only available for\n30 days though", "_URL_0_ is a pretty good wwi blog", "[Hardcore History](_URL_0_)\n\nIn \"Hardcore History\" the unconventional Dan Carlin takes his \"Martian\", outside-the-box way of thinking and applies it to the past.", "The New York Times has an amazing blog called [Disunion](_URL_1_) about the American Civil War. The articles come from a broad group of Civil War academics, scholars, and enthusiasts on a diverse and fascinating array of topics, all written for non-experts. They're published chronologically according to the 150th anniversary of their topic, so I'm really excited to see what they'll be publishing for the 150th anniversaries of Gettysburg and Vicksburg next month.\n\nEven if the topic isn't your thing, I'd still highly recommend at least reading \"[The Limits of Lincoln's Mercy](_URL_0_)\".", "[Active History](_URL_0_) is a blog for Canadian historians. It's populated largely by people interested in environmental history, but there's also a broad swathe of contributors who deal with subjects spanning from labour history to institutional political histories. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.peashooter85.tumblr.com"], ["http://www.playthepast.org/"], ["http://fistofhistory.org/"], ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/history"], ["Missourioverthere.org"], ["http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh"], ["http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/the-limits-of-lincolns-mercy/?_r=0", "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/"], ["http://activehistory.ca/"]]}
{"q_id": "58mzcu", "title": "Were medieval European Jewish people illiterate?", "selftext": "I know that illiteracy in the peasantry is something that the European chroniclers exaggerated, like you see in the peasants' letters from the Great Rising in England, but Jewish rites of passage include getting up and reading Hebrew at synagogue; do we have evidence for higher literacy rates, at least Hebrew literacy, among European Jews in the high to late middle ages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58mzcu/were_medieval_european_jewish_people_illiterate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d92emmq"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's not entirely clear.  First of all, this question is confounded by literacy but being a literacy/illiteracy binary choice, but a continuum.  Especially in the past, people could often read but not write.  Still today, people might be able to read a menu or a sign, but have trouble reading a novel or a transcript of a speech.  There's also another difficulty with liturgical languages, like Hebrew, where it's common for people to be able to read the words printed on the page but either not understand them at all, or only get the gist of the content.  This would've been especially common where people's native language was written in Hebrew characters, which was the case in many Jewish communities until recently.\n\nAnyway, in the late ancient period it's fairly clear that a significant proportion of the population was illiterate.  Being able to read the Torah is a skill, for example.  At the same time, having written documents floating about is sort of assumed (with written marriage contracts and the like), as is literacy among the Rabbis, who were a scholarly elite but not necessarily an economic elite.  Comprehension of Hebrew was also limited, since there's discussion of translating parts of the liturgy to vernacular languages (again here Rabbis seem to have understood Hebrew, and been able to write in it, but they were not the norm).\n\nBut, you asked about the high/late Middle Ages.  Most Jewish texts we have in general tend to be scholarly religious texts, which are not about daily life, but do offer insights into it.  One interesting passage relating to literacy is from *Kuzari*, a theological work.  It is framed as a dialog between a Khazar considering conversion to Judaism and the author, R' Yehudah HeLevi.  The Khazar asks the reason why Jews sway when reciting Hebrew texts (a practice today usually called *shuckling*, from Yiddish).  The answer given is that there was a practice wherein the liturgy would be written in one very large book, which would be placed on the ground, and several people would read from it at once.  They'd bend over, read a few words, bend back up, etc, which over time developed into a habit of swaying.\n\nThe important bit from this is that it assumes that most synagogue attendees in R' Yehudah HaLevi's time and place (11th-12th century Spain) were able to read a Hebrew text.  It's not clear whether they could understand what was being read, but they could read the letters and say them.  If they were able to do that, presumably they would be able to use that skill to read with comprehension in another language using Hebrew letters, such as Judeo-Spanish or Judeo-Arabic..\n\nThere are clues in other texts, too.  Some medieval texts discuss whether a Torah scroll is valid or not, and in that context children are used as testers, so-to-speak--if a child can read such-and-such, it's valid.  In this context it seems that children are assumed to have knowledge of the letters and their shapes, but not necessarily be able to identify individual letters by the word they're found in--an adult could identify a word, and therefore correctly identify a misformed letter, but a child couldn't.\n\nBut, the best selection of sources we have for everything Jewish for daily life is from the Cairo Genizah, a huge document cache from Medieval and early modern Cairo.  It contains a whole lot of fascinating things, one of which is information on teaching children to read and write Hebrew (and, to a lesser extent, Arabic).  It seems that children were sometimes educated with whatever written material could be scrounged up, with groups sharing manuscripts, but there were also booklets for practicing forming letters, a technique which children in modern times also used (including myself).  There is no emphasis on learning to read or write words or phrases, which suggests that average people may've only partially understood Hebrew, or if they could read it, perhaps could not write down thoughts in it even if they could form the physical letters.  And it is suggested too by these texts that it wasn't just wealthy children learning, but regular Jews learning to read (though it does seem to have only been boys.  There is occasional evidence of women's literacy, such as what's possibly a woman's prayer book from Italy, but it seems to have been rare).  There seem to have been groups of children learning, not individual tutoring (which also happened), and children from families who owned no books learning to read.  Of course, this is a fairly urban cosmopolitan community--perhaps literacy was less widespread more peripherally.\n\nSo it does seem that the population as a whole was literate.  That doesn't mean everybody was, and it doesn't mean everybody could understand the Hebrew they were reading--people may've had more understanding of their local language written in Hebrew letters.  The fact that that was a common practice is evidence of literacy in Hebrew characters--Jews who spoke Spanish were writing down Spanish in Hebrew characters they knew and could use, rather than Hebrew script being the sole purview of those reading and writing in Hebrew for religious purposes.  But, ability to read and write seems to not have been restricted to the elite."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3vt040", "title": "When did shushing people become an acceptable way to tell others to be quiet?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vt040/when_did_shushing_people_become_an_acceptable_way/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxqr1ek", "cxqrf4r", "cxr5el8", "cxr5ral"], "score": [447, 119, 5, 4], "text": ["Your question really is more of a linguistics question than a historical one. There is a broad pattern across a large number of the world's languages to have an interjection signaling for someone to be quiet, and typically it follows a similar pattern. These sounds tend to come from a class called sibilants, which are very strident sounds made by restricting airflow with the tongue. In English, our s, sh, and ch sounds are all examples of sibilants. Compare how loud you can make these sounds with sounds like f or th. Essentially, if you want to easily cut through a noisy environment, sibilants will get the job done.\n\n[This wikipedia page](_URL_0_) has a number of examples from various world languages, but they almost universally use some sort of sibilant sound. These languages come from many different parts of the world and language families, so using an interjection with a strong sibilant appears to be a natural linguistic phenomenon, not something inherited. In light of this evidence, the answer to your question seems to be that shushing has always been acceptable for telling someone to be quiet, perhaps going back to the origins of human language itself. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it has always been seen as polite, and even today there are some situations where shushing someone can seem quite rude. But its existence as a social practice appears to go far beyond the historical record.", "As a librarian this question intrigues me, because I have a whole repertoire of shushes.  I've consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, which has \"shush\" going back to 1925 (with one notable use being in Edna Ferber's 1929 novel *Cimarron*).  But shush is an alternate form of hush, and hush goes back to the 16th century, with a notable use being Viola in Act 5 Scene 1 of *Twelfth Night* remarking \"My duty hushes me.\".  The OED notes that \"hush\" derives from Middle English words like \"hussht\", with a notable use being in Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* (The Knight's Tale).", "My Latin textbook in highschool (Cambridge purple book, I think the 4th iteration of their program) had \"sst\" as an interjection being the equivalent of the English \"shh,\" so I would say it's thousands of years old.", "As a follow-up question does the shush we use to tell others to be quiet and the shush we use to comfort babies come from the same place?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias#Hushing"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27pp65", "title": "Why are countries generally split politically, economically, socially, etc. along North-South lines?", "selftext": "Particularly thinking about countries like England, the US (at least historically), and Italy", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27pp65/why_are_countries_generally_split_politically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci37x1i", "ci39gfh", "ci3bbbi", "ci3c7op", "ci3pp9s", "ci3uosj"], "score": [4, 12, 4, 4, 2, 2], "text": ["Brazil is like that too, but the south/north logic is inverted. ", "**Is** this really the case, or is it just chance that a few major examples you're aware of are this way? Could any historians shed some light on whether this phenomenon actually exists?", "I'd recommend crossposting this question to /r/asksocialscience.", "Germany was divided by East and West, although those were outside forces.\n\nEdit: Eastern and Western Roman Empires. Just saying.", "The Chinese wheat growers verse rice growers divides has been used to explain the cultural differences in the country there.  The rice growing south, where production requires a more community based approach, has a much more communal and holistic identity that we often associate with East Asian and Chinese culture while the northern wheat growing regions have a more individualistic streak associated with Western culture. Hears a study that supports these results _URL_0_ .  Of course that's only one country with a unique scenario but it offers some insight into at least one reason one country does.", "Climate is one of the major reasons for socio-economical North-South federalisation within larger European countries (among others).\n\nMuch of the *economic* divide in Italy, for instance, has to do with industrialisation and urbanisation in 18th-19th centuries. South Italy, with warmer mediterranean climate, and rare snowfalls (Rome, Naples, Abruzzi, Palermo, etc.) was rich and agriculture-oriented since the Antiquity - compared with the cooler Italian north. During the industrial revolution; however, the agricultural sector of the developed European economies has shrunk, giving way for industrial production in the urban environment. As a result, starting in 1890s, southern Italy saw *en masse* emigration to the industrialised cities in the North - land tenants and farmers left for promise of greater personal wealth in the cities, profit security as wage-workers, etc. etc. The reasons were similar to those of mass urbanisation in most late 19th century industrialised countries.\n\nFrom this follows a conjecture that the rich agricultural regions of Antiquity/early Middle Ages (South Spain, South Italy, the Fertile Crescent, etc.) were ill-prepared for the socioeconomic changes of the late 19th century. In the cooler Northern regions of many geopolitical entities, the lack of reliance on agricultural produce has led the resident entrepreneurs/princes to pursue maritime trade and city-based production as a source of income/sustenance. In the age of exploration, maritime exploration has opened up new opportunities for maritime trade, richening the merchant republics of the North Italy. Industrial revolution bolstered the inland cities (such as Milan, and Lombardy in general) because their economy *had* to take up industrialisation as a viable alternative to meagre agricultural produce and lack of access to the coast (hence reducing trade opportunities). Basically, with the semi-autonomous and often independent Italian states pursuing different economic strategies, each would invest according to their climate and geographical conditions. The scientific/industrial revolution has then favoured those which industrialised quicker (just as age of exploration favoured coast-based trade republics).\n\nSo why didn't the rich agricultural regions of South Italy industrialise/develop faster, making use of their superior wealth in the Antiquity and the early Middle Ages? The simplest answer is that they didn't have to until it was too late. Reliance on agricultural produce crated little need to pursue maritime trade/industrialisation - and also political strengthening the feudal/land-owning class that was far richer (to begin with) than in the North. More difficult climate/geographical conditions for the medieval princes of North Italy meant that they were willing to give up more power to the bourgeoisie merchant class and later the industrial producers - in turn increasing democratisation of these areas.\n\nOf course, this analysis neglects to mention the poltiical landscape of Italy (among other countries) and its effects on the North-South divide, but I thought I'd concentrate on how climate helped shaped economy and politics.   \n\nThanks for the interesting question!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6184/603"], []]}
{"q_id": "1w895q", "title": "What was a common medieval peasant's relationship with the Church?", "selftext": "Sorry if this as already been answered- I didn't see anything that quite related to it in the FAQ.  I'm wondering how peasants in medieval Europe and Byzantium would have felt the Church influence in their every day lives.  I know that most people were Christian, and I have heard that in many areas, peasants tended to believe a mix of Christianity and more traditional beliefs (dragons and witches and such).  I also know that mass was given in Latin in Europe, which most peasants wouldn't have known.  Perhaps peasants in Byzantium where mass was in Greek would have been better able to relate to the Church?  \n\nI'm basically wondering how peasants interacted with the Church and felt the Church's influence. Would the peasants attend mass regularly? Would they be expected to tithe? Would they have known their local priests, and expected visits from priests to sick and dying family members?  I know the question is fairly broad in scope.  I am hoping to get answers about Europe and/or Byzantium 1000-1500, but please feel free to give partial answers in your area of expertise.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w895q/what_was_a_common_medieval_peasants_relationship/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cezlb2s", "cezn50r"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["hi! hopefully your post will attract other responses, but just wanted to give you links to a couple of interesting earlier posts\n\n[How often did people attend church at different points in the Medieval Period?](_URL_1_)\n\n[What were important every-village-has-one buildings in the Medieval ages?](_URL_0_)", "The Lateran IV council in 1215 mentioned in the first post /u/searocksandtrees provided is one of the more solid points we have in terms of providing information on church attendance among the poor, particularly the rural poor. The mandate of yearly attendance, confession, and eucharist probably means that most people were not going to church once a year in 1215.\n\nMost of the evidence for church attendance and involvement that we have comes from the towns - I don't know how you mean to define \"peasants\", so this may or may not pertain to your question. In towns, particularly following Lateran IV, there are not only reports of people attending mass daily, but attending multiple masses each day. It became a fairly common belief that the greatest point of spiritual efficacy in the mass was the actual raising and blessing of the Host (the bread), so you actually had groups of women (this sort of behavior was disproportionately female) running around to a whole bunch of churches to see as many elevations of the host as possible.\n\nThere was an intense sense of belonging and pride in high to late medieval town churches. There is no systematic study of this for the entirety of Europe, but Katherine French's *The People of the Parish* is a great case study of 15th century England. \n\nFor your specific questions:\n\n >  Would the peasants attend mass regularly? \n\nThere's reason to believe the once a year rule was effective, but there are no hard numbers. Before Lateran IV we assume average attendance was less frequent.\n\n >  Would they be expected to tithe?\n\nAbsolutely. The parish priest's income depended on this. \n\n >  Would they have known their local priests, \n\nIt depends on where they lived. Small town or rural parish? Yes. Big city? Probably not. \n\n >   and expected visits from priests to sick and dying family members? \n\nYes. Extreme unction was considered a necessary sacrament. \n\n >  I have heard that in many areas, peasants tended to believe a mix of Christianity and more traditional beliefs (dragons and witches and such)\n\nThis is kind of a dangerous conceptual road to start down. There are certainly examples where high ecclesiastics are very irritated about lay superstition (Stephen de Bourbon's story of St. Guinefort [comes to mind](_URL_0_)), but it would be unwise to suggest that even the great theologians did not believe in \"dragons and witches and such.\" The gap between \"high\" and \"low\" piety is much smaller than is usually imagined. \n\n >   I also know that mass was given in Latin in Europe, which most peasants wouldn't have known.\n\nWhile true, this does not necessarily mean that people wouldn't have understood. Latin was intelligible to Italian speakers until the thirteenth century, and we have a lot of evidence that people were quite aware of what was going on both in the mass itself and in general principles of theology and canon law more generally. One of the most well-known examples is that during the trial of Joan of Arc, Joan is very obviously completely aware of several apparently cunning traps designed to ensnare her in a declaration of heresy. \n\nI know nothing of Byzantine spirituality."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f6uq0/what_were_important_everyvillagehasone_buildings/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14p5gf/how_often_did_people_attend_church_at_different/"], ["http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/guinefort.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "328izo", "title": "What events lead to the transition of Britain from an absolute monarchy to the more democratic state we know today?", "selftext": "I've done a small amount of research into it, and my impression is that it was a relatively quiet, very gradual process that occurred over several centuries. However I find it a little difficult to get a succinct, coherent rundown of the events that lead from an absolute monarchy to the system we know today. So what were the major landmarks and/or driving events that led the monarchy to relinquish power?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/328izo/what_events_lead_to_the_transition_of_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq90b1u"], "score": [5], "text": ["The most important point to understand about democracy in the United Kingdom is that it was granted rather than taken, but not in the way you might expect. The seemingly obvious answer is that kings gave power over to the people, but this is, as any British historian will tell you, not really correct. Rather, it was Parliament which did it.\n\nLet's rewind a bit here. One of the things that really characterizes English history is the near constant strained relationship between the Monarchs and the lower nobility, and later, the burghers. The Magna Carta is, of course, the most famous example, but really it had little impact on the long-term governance structure of the Kingdom. Instead, I'd argue that there are three events that represent the true origins of the 'Westminister' democracy.\n\nFirst, we have the English Civil War. This represents the culmination of the simmering conflict between the parliament and the monarchy. However, 'parliament' in this case wasn't a body representing the people, but mostly composed of middle to lower nobility and a few burghers. Thus, it has more in common with the Baron's Revolt that led to the Magna Carta than a democratic revolution. At any rate, the beheading of Charles I, almost a century and a half before the French lopped of Louis XVII's head, is a microcosm of the event as a whole. In the French case, it was the supremacy of 'the people' in the democratic sense, while the English case was the supremacy of the lords of the land.\n\nThe second event was the Glorious Revolution. After the restoration of the monarchy in England after the Civil War, Charles II brought a period of calm to a degree; basically, he didn't do much to offend those who might oppose him among the lords. His successor, James II, could not say as much. He was a Catholic, which was bad, but worse, he tried to eliminate opposition, first through appointment, then by arrest, and particularly, pack parliament with his supporters. So, in response, parliament basically invited a new King in the form of William. Not only did they invite him and basically orchestrate the deposing of James II, they set the **terms** by which James (and his wife, the Queen regnant Mary II) were to assume and hold the crown. In essence, by this event they had assumed authority over determining who was a lawful monarch in the country. No more divine right of kings and all that jazz.\n\nFinally, we have the events of the 19th century. This is a bit of a cop out I know, but bear with me here. During the 18th century, Parliament consolidated it's power. And again, 'Parliament' here mostly refers to the landed nobility and a few burghers. The 19th century changed a lot. In this case, Parliament was mostly motivated by the events outside of the United Kingdom. Starting in the late 18th century, you have the French Revolution and popular revolts elsewhere, in the mid 19th century, you have a series of republican and nationalist revolts across Europe, and almost everywhere, absolutism was being challenged and new liberal thoughts brought forward. Meanwhile, in England, a demographic shift meant that many of the electoral boroughs were a century or more out of date; some of them only had populations in the dozens or less, making them easy to control for anyone with money. The cities were woefully underrepresented in number in parliament, and this helped contribute to a growing call for reform. I'm not going to go over every reform act, but put simply, the industrialization and urbanization over the late 18th and into the 19th and 20th centuries helped seriously weaken that landed nobility's hold on wealth, and eventually, power. Some would argue they were motivated by revolts on the continent and in Ireland, others simply by the self-interest of industrialists who could use the new votes to their own advantage, in either case, the nobility could simply no longer muster the strength or the will to virtually monopolize the power in government, and thus parilament slowly reformed. First, by adding more seats for cities and giving more men the vote, and then slowly expanding the electorate and more fairly distributing the electoral boundaries, until we have the system we have today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45jtrj", "title": "Has there ever been a republican or democratic nomination that was decided by super delegates that went AGAINST the popular vote?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45jtrj/has_there_ever_been_a_republican_or_democratic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czyn9u7"], "score": [125], "text": ["The biggest reason we have the current system of binding primaries and caucuses is because the 1968 Democratic nomination process was a total balagan.  We have a sitting Democratic president running for reelection--one who's even done quite good stuff in his Great Society Program and on the Civil Rights front, but whose escalation in Vietnam is unpopular particularly with the youth--and [he totally gets \"primaried\"](_URL_0_) by Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire before getting primaried was even a thing.  McCarthy's campaign was a grassroots effort mainly by anti-War young people, who \"got clean for Gene\" and went door to door in New Hampshire before going door to door in early primary states was really a thing.  Lyndon Johnson actual won in New Hampshire, 48% to 42%, but that's not the kind of result you see from a sitting president so by the end of the month Johnson says he will not seek or accept renomination.\n\nGene McCarthy won the battle (sort of) but lost the war, and LBJ's resignation set off a scramble in Democratic politics.  RFK steps in soon after NH but he is assassinated a few months later, in June, before the Democratic Convention.  As you can see from [the map on Wikipedia](_URL_2_), in 1968 most states did *not* select pledged delegates through caucuses or primaries, but had various other means (usually closed to the public) of selecting who to send to the convention.  Also, this was still a period when presidential candidates could be picked in the notorious \"smoke-filled rooms\".  \n\nAnd that's what happened.  Despite not winning a single state (though some of his surrogates did--it was a different time and one could have surrogate \"favorite sons\" on the ballot), the convention chose Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's vice president, instead of Eugene McCarthy or anyone else.  This caused a lot of controversy, including the infamous Convention in Chicago which was marred by protests and \"a police riot\".  Humphrey's strategy focused on getting delegates from non-primary states, and in the end--with RFK's assassination getting rid of the other quasi-\"establishment\" candidate--it was a successful one.  Even before RFK was killed, Humphrey was leading the delegate count (though RFK+McCarthy had more).  At the actual convention, Kennedy's various candidates didn't vote as a block, and Humphrey was able to win.  Many people--not just the radical anti-War protestors in Chicago--didn't like this, and the whole system was reformed.  Here are two posts about that:\n\n * [American states vote in a set order over a long period of time when choosing the candidates for presidential election. How was the order of voting and total time period decided ? If it was before all the current states joined, how was the integration of new states in this calendar handled ?](_URL_3_)\n\n * [The US is just starting presidential primary season. The modern primary and caucus system only dates back to the 1970's. Why did both parties switch at the same to the new system? How did this change happen?](_URL_4_) (this was actually my own question, but read the OP and the three comments)\n\nSo modern primaries only date from, at the earliest, 1972.  Super delegates were only really added to the Democratic side before the 1984 primary process.  The 1982 Hunt Commission added them because the Democratic establishment was unhappy that in 1972 and 1976 two \"factional\" candidates won.  McGovern won by clever focusing on early primaries and pledged delegate counts and managed to eke out victory at the convention despite having a narrow, liberal, anti-War base.  He got clobbered by Nixon in the general.  Jimmy Carter, who won the primary process in 1976 and was renominated in 1980, won the primary process by scoring media attention through early wins (something that everyone does now) and sweeping the South.  The Hunt Commission suggested 30% unpledged, party-picked delegates, but party eventually went with 14%.  This has been increased and now super delegates on the Democratic side make up 20%.  They're a lower number on the Republican side, as the Republicans didn't have the same problem with factional candidates as they were developing the modern primary rules.  I think they're about 7% of Republican delegates currently, though I don't know if this number has been consistent.  To my knowledge, they've never been deciding in an election.  It looked like they might be important in 1984, but Hart lost several key states on Super Tuesday, which put Mondale over the top (he was leading in Superdelegates already).  Mondale, who got the nomination, got whomped by Reagan almost as bad as McGovern got whomped by Nixon--both only picked up one state.\n\nIn 1988, once Hart was crippled by scandal (the first major Americna political sex scandal of the modern era), Dukakis ran away with it.  In 1992 Clinton ran away with it, and was reelected in 1996.  I'll be exceedingly brief post 1996 to avoid infringing too flagrantly on the 20 year rule, but no, it never happened since then either.  In 2000, Clinton's vice president Al Gore ran away with it.  In 2004, Dean led the early super delegate counts but once people actually started voting, Kerry won almost every state.  In 2008, people again thought the super delegates would matter, considering Clinton's early lead in them but a tight race otherwise, but in the end, as Obama was taken a clear lead in the pledged delegates, he also started taking a clear lead in the unpledged delegates.  You can see that from the graph [here](_URL_1_).\n\nOn the Republican side, Reagan ran away with it in 1980 (after being a strong challenger in 1976 against the sitting Ford) and was renominated in 1980.  Bush, Reagan's Vice-President, ran away with it in 1988 and was renominated in 1992.  Dole, Bush's strongest opponent in 1988, ran away with it in 1996.  In 2000, it wasn't as clearly someone's \"turn\" as it had been in the last several cycles (Dole's opposition--the paleoconservative Buchanan and the fiscal conservative Forbes--were both seen as highly factional candidates), but George W Bush triumphed convincingly over McCain and was renominated in 2004.  In 2008, despite losing Iowa badly, McCain managed to go the distance and convincingly beat his challengers, Romney (who failed to beat McCain in moderate Michigan) and Huckabee (who failed to beat McCain in conservative South Carolina).  In 2012, despite a lot of early fluctuations in his opponents, Romney carried it almost wire to wire (though it took him longer clinch the nomination than some expected after late, strong showings from Gingrich in the South and Santorum in the Midwest).\n\nSo, no, since the debacle of the 1968 Democratic Convention which gave rise to the modern primary rules, Super Delegates (the Republicans use a different word, IIRC, and are by all counts much less important, but conventionally they're also customarily referred to as Super Delegates still in the media) frequently been a hypothetical factor, some times discussed heavily in the media, but have to my knowledge never once been an actual factor in choosing a party's nominee at the convention.  The 2008 and the 1984 Democratic primary seasons were when there was the most speculation about their possible role of their role, since those were also the two elections where the nomination process was up in the air the longest and delegate counts the closest.  However, even there, they didn't actually make a difference."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mccarthy-does-well-in-the-democratic-primary", "http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/superdelegates-might-not-save-hillary-clinton/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_1968", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43u2lr/american_states_vote_in_a_set_order_over_a_long/czl7z1f", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4340w8/the_us_is_just_starting_presidential_primary/"]]}
{"q_id": "65mnff", "title": "What is meant by the Quote \"whilst most states have an army the prussian army has a state\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65mnff/what_is_meant_by_the_quote_whilst_most_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgbrknu"], "score": [3], "text": ["The phrase is an observation that most of the kingdom's subjects either served in the army or fulfilled a role in maintaining it.\n\nThe Prussian kingdom became highly militarized under the rule of Fredrick I and particularly his successor Fredrick II. During their reign, the Prussian army grew to number 200000 men out of a population of 2.5 million. Fielding such a disproportionately large standing army was an amazing feat for the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9iu5za", "title": "What did the english that peasants spoke in England around 1300/1400 sound like? I'm assuming most of the information historians have on language from that time comes from written documents, and it was mostly rich people who were able to write. Also spoken language is very different than written lan", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9iu5za/what_did_the_english_that_peasants_spoke_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6mgd6j"], "score": [21], "text": ["Hi OP, English spoken during 1300/1400 is known as *[Middle English](_URL_3_)*; prominent literary examples include *[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight](_URL_5_)*, and *[The Canterbury Tales](_URL_2_)* by  [Geoffrey Chaucer](_URL_4_) (1343\u20131400). \n\nHere are few posts discussing Middle English. I've indicated the ones that include links to readings, so you can hear what it sounds like\n\n* [Would conversational Middle English be that different than Chaucer\u2019s Middle English?](_URL_1_) - featuring /u/cdesmoulins\n\n* [How is it that I can mostly read \"The Canterbury Tales\" in the original, but \"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,\" written at roughly the same time and in the same country, is mostly unintelligible?](_URL_6_) - featuring /u/sunagainstgold and several other users in a long conversation on English in this period\n\n* [If you took an English person from 1314 and an English person from 1114 and got them to talk to each other would they think each other's speech patterns were odd? If \"yes\" would they still be able to easily understand each other?](_URL_0_) - featuring /u/popisfizzy and others \n\ncontinued..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dwsp2/if_you_took_an_english_person_from_1314_and_an/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/81bjay/would_conversational_middle_english_be_that/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Early_Middle_English", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/574fch/how_is_it_that_i_can_mostly_read_the_canterbury/"]]}
{"q_id": "3t6z92", "title": "What was the importance of the Mexican dollar in international economics during the early 20th century?", "selftext": "In \"The Blood White Baron\", about Mongolia during the Russian Civil War, there is off-hand mention of Mongolian currency being linked to the Mexican dollar, [\"a key international currency at the time\"](_URL_0_). This seems very strange to me, given that Mexico was only just finishing up a decade long period of marked instability from their revolution, and unrest would continue for some years after as well.\n\nSo is this true? An exaggeration? And if there is some truth to it, why Mexico of all places? Just seems very strange to me, so I'm wondering why and how this came to be.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3t6z92/what_was_the_importance_of_the_mexican_dollar_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx3q31n"], "score": [2], "text": ["They're actually referring to the Spanish dollar, which was a standard currency in many countries during the empire. Spain's American colonies produced upwards of 70% of the world silver supply for a long period in the 16th and 17th centuries, so this was a fairly sensible standard. After Mexican independence, Spain's mints were cut off from American silver (the bulk of which came from Mexico). Mexico itself continued to produce, but the name for the currency gradually became the \"Mexican Dollar\" rather than the \"Spanish Dollar\" in recognition of their source."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://books.google.com/books?id=t_2oJYvNHAQC&amp;pg=PA167&amp;lpg=PA167&amp;dq=mexican+dollar,+key+international+currency+at+the+time&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=TE2bZl34ng&amp;sig=uQQ2u5w55jyHb0bzy_k3xTms8Jo&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAWoVChMIzY7ZgZWYyQIVROYmCh3zlw-j#v=onepage&amp;q=mexican%20dollar%2C%20key%20international%20currency%20at%20the%20time&amp;f=false"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "422rgb", "title": "If a monarch had an heir who died and that heir has a son and a brother - who has claim to the throne?", "selftext": "Im aware that different *-archys have different rules for succession, but assuming the case in general for europe during the medieval era.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/422rgb/if_a_monarch_had_an_heir_who_died_and_that_heir/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz7ddeh"], "score": [2], "text": ["the son. \n\nthe type of succession for european monarchies you have a target image of in your head is one where the legal right is traced by direct lineage (grandfather to father to son). There are exceptions to this rule (say the early history of the British isles) but those exceptions are outside of the target image you're looking for and you're not really asking for a history of this sort of inheritance.  When you go from elder brother to younger brother you're replacing one \"line\" of the family with another. The relevant differences in midieval claims is essentially the difference between agnatic and agnatice-cognatice primogeniture where the question is what lines count and take precedence (agnatic means only male decadents and their kids  have valid claims, cognatic means all kids and ag-cog means all kid's lines but the male lines are prioritized instead of a strict chronology (youngest male then oldest female). The start of Shakespeare's Henry V is a fun illustration of this difference and its importance. \n\n\n\n\n*****************\n[A good historical illustration of your question is the transition from Louis XIV to Louis XV](_URL_0_). The linked tree is simplified but it shows how Louis XVI aka the great-grandson of Louis XIV by his eldest son took the throne instead of an older person from a more junior line. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbon_family_tree"]]}
{"q_id": "fdz2kw", "title": "Why did Europe colonize the Americas centuries before most of Africa, despite the latter being so much nearer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fdz2kw/why_did_europe_colonize_the_americas_centuries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjn1aut"], "score": [22], "text": ["To start I'd answer your question with another question. What is meant by \"colonize\". If we are refering to the deep and direct colonization of the Americas, then yes Europe did not colonize Africa in the same direct manner (at least initially). But if we refer to simply owning small plots of land and trading then Europe was in Africa first. \n\nOne thing that can't be underestimated is the extent to which European armament evolved from the 1500s to the 1800s. In 1500 most guns were expensive and unreliable (not to mention wildly inaccurate) and the hot new technology was deep water navigation (a.k.a. sailing out of sight of the coast). In 1500, while Europe did have a technological edge, it was minor at best, nonexistant at worst. At the time, the Ottoman empire was considered one of the most technologically advanced nations and their use of cannons was pivotal in their conquests. In 1500 \"modern\" weaponry was prohibitively expensive and arming an entire army with guns was a luxury that a) was impractical due to their drawbacks and b) financially unsustainable. As such, actually conquering into a continent that had not been depopulated by disease and lacked the same iron weapons and horses of the Europeans was a daunting task that few thought worth it. Battles such as Alc\u00e1cer Quibir are a testament to the risks involved in attempting to conquer Africa and North Africa.\n\nIn the 1500s Europe had not acquired the demand for raw resources that it would gain from industrialization and as such, trade was primarily for luxury goods such as sugar, cocoa, Tabaccoa and Furs. The Americas and the Carribean in particular had a practically ideal climate for producing these cash crops and/or other goods. In the 1500s, Europe's main focuses were on the Americas for these cash crops and on East Asia and Indonesia for spices. More blood has been shed for Nutmeg than many people realize. Outside of slave trading, which began quite early, there simply wasn't much of interest to Europe in Africa. The opportunity cost was simply too high and Europeans instead simply traded for the goods they wanted. Ivory and Slaves were attainable through trade and there was little need to deeper colonization to exploit raw resources. \n\nWhat Africa was used for was as trading posts. Sailing was dangerous and it was quite beneficial to have trading posts dotted along the way, rather than with direct colonial rule. The French used Senegal for this purpose and the Portuguese were particularly famous for their sprawling trading post empire, bordering (and sometimes crossing) into piracy in all but name. In short, Africa was hard to conquer and there was little benefit to Europe to do so. Trading in spices and in luxury goods coming from the Americas was simply more profitable and easier. Simply put, what use was controlling Africa to the trading empires of the Dutch and Portuguese? Yes there existed goods like Salt and Gold in West Africa in particular, but these were difficult to conquer and Europe already had access to this through the trade networks leading across the Sahara. While of course conquest was attempted, it was difficult, infrequent and Europe had easier opportunities just across the Sea. A good example of this is the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The Treaty of Tordesillas looks incredibly unfair to Portugal by modern standards, but at the time, the trade from Asia was massively profitable and Portugal was getting a pretty good deal. This balance would shift as trade from Asia became less monopolized and more contested, but the point that Asian trade was central to the European mindset still stands. \n\nLong story short, 1500s Europe had one goal in mind: luxury goods, Asia and the Americas offered these in huge quantities whereas Africa provided fairly little in comparison. Africa was well armed and not worth conquering at the time. We see the same thing in Asia, the European presence doesn't really intensify until a few centuries later when Europe possessed the technological advance. 1500s . 1600s Europe was simply incapable of conquering well-armed civilizations far away from the European homeland. Only through the wealth brought by trading and through the technological advancements that came from nearly constant warfare was Europe eventually able to afford technology so far above their African and Asian counterparts that it became laughably easy to conquer and control large portions of Africa and Asia. Europe was content to sieze key cities and use their superior naval power to maintain the trade routes that brought unprecedented wealth to Europe. \n\nIt was not until Europe started to industrialize that deep colonization of Africa became beneficial which is why we see colonization intensify in directness and truly massive European empires evolve. Conquest simply wasn't profitable or easily doable before the 18th and 19th centuries, as such Africa was left largely untouched save for the massive amount of trading posts Europeans built to facilitate trade from Asia.\n\nEdit: \n\nI recommend reading: Abernathy, David B. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415 - 1980. \n\nIf you want more information on how and why European empires formed when and how they did."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6h01qg", "title": "Why do tank armaments have such unusual calibers?", "selftext": "This question was asked 3 years ago on this subreddit but there wasn't a really conclusive answer. Anyway....\n\nFor example, the T-34 was a really popular tank in WWII, and it's main weapons were either a 76.2mm cannon (3 inches almost exactly, but russia never used the english system) or an 85mm cannon (3.34 inches). What's the logic behind using such strange calibers, some apparently being based in inches, others being based in the metric system?\n\nOther examples:\n\nM4 Sherman - 75mm, 76mm, or 105mm howitzer\n\nSlighty off topic, the battleship Yamato had 46cm/18.1 inch guns, kind of a strange caliber. \n\nKV-2 - 152mm, 107mm, ~~122mm cannons.~~ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6h01qg/why_do_tank_armaments_have_such_unusual_calibers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["div4tdj"], "score": [14], "text": ["While the USSR didn't use imperial measurements, its predecessor, the Russian Empire, did. In addition, the Empire often purchased weapons from abroad, which meant that the USSR ended up with a whole hodge-podge of old weapons and the tools to make them.\n\nFor example, the T-34's F-34 gun can trace its lineage all the way to the Lender's Gun, an AA gun, standardized in 1914. 3\" was a pretty popular caliber in the Tsarist army, so it makes sense that the USSR kept it around for as long as it was viable, since otherwise the factories would need to be radically retooled. Weapons using this caliber included regimental artillery (mod. 1927 and 1943), AA guns (mod. 1931, mod. 1938), tank guns (KT-28, L-7, L-10, L-11, F-34, ZIS-5, S-54), and field artillery (F-22, USV, ZIS-3). \n\nAs for the 85 mm S-53 gun on the T-34-85, you're right, it doesn't conform to the Imperial system. That is because the gun's family tree starts only in 1939, in the Soviet era. Attempts to put this gun on a moving platform began soon after, starting with a tank destroyer, then an attempt to put it into the KV-1 turret, then finally into the T-34 and T-34-85.\n\nThe story with the KV-2's guns is the same. The 152 mm caliber, or 6 inches, descends from the Schneider mod. 1910 siege howitzer. The 107 mm caliber comes from another Schneider weapon, the 42-line heavy field gun mod. 1910 (one line = 0.1 inches). The KV-2 never carried a 122 mm gun (that is an invention of Wargaming for World of Tanks), but the caliber's use in Russia dates back to the Schneider mod. 1910 48-line light howitzer.\n\nThe M3 gun on the Sherman tank was a descendant of the 75 mm M1897 gun (originally a French design) and could even fire the same ammunition. The 76 mm gun, on the other hand, was based on the higher velocity 3-inch M1918 gun, an American design. I don't know about the 105 mm howitzer, but 105 mm is a common caliber in American field artillery, so it would make sense to reuse it in assault tanks instead of cranking out a completely new weapon.\n\nSources:\n\n* *\"History of the T-34 tank\" Memorial Museum Complex, Documentary Historical Collection #4*\n* Y. Pasholok *Bolshaya Pushka dlya Nebolshoy Bashni*\n* P. Ware *M4 Sherman Tank 1941 Onwars (All Variants)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3cwtjy", "title": "What actually happened to cause the Bosnian War, and what were some of the main events during the conflict?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cwtjy/what_actually_happened_to_cause_the_bosnian_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cszxcdl"], "score": [194], "text": ["The Bosnian War was part of a larger series of wars surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia, which included relatively large wars in Croatia and Kosovo, and smaller ones in Slovenia and Macedonia. The war in Bosnia actually didn't start until almost a year after the outbreak of war in Croatia, so it's necessary to look at why Yugoslavia began to dissolve in the first place.\n\nThe key player in Serbia during this time was a guy called Slobodan Milosevic. He came to power in the mid '80s as the President of Serbia, which was the largest republic within Yugoslavia and home to the country's capital, Belgrade. One of his goals was to elevate the status of Serbia within Yugoslavia, and he did this through the \"anti-bureaucratic revolution.\" Basically, Milosevic staged protests throughout Serbia to kick out local government officials and replace them with his own friends. This way, Milosevic hoped to gain control of a large voting block in the Yugoslav presidency, which since the death of Marshal Tito had been comprised of representatives from each of the 6 Yugoslav republics and 2 autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina).\n\nWell, the other republics weren't too happy about this new plan, especially Slovenia and Croatia. Shit went down in early 1990, when Slovenia and Croatia walked out of the 14th Congress of the League of Communists, and Slovenia later held a referendum for independence. After a brief military engagement, Milosevic let Slovenia go, since there weren't many Serbs there that would support him. When Croatia separated, however, the Yugoslav army intervened to \"protect\" Serbs, which included campaigns of ethnic cleansing to remove Croats from places like Vukovar.\n\nThe way Milosevic rallied people was by inciting ethnic nationalism and creating a campaign based on fear of other ethnicities. Nowhere was this more damaging than Bosnia, which didn't have a clear majority population like the other republics. In 1990, the population was about 40% Bosniak (Muslim) 30% Serb, 20% Croat, and 10% other iirc. Plus, these people were all living together with one another, sharing communities, schools, and everything else. There was a high rate of mixed-marriages, and there wasn't a clear boundary between the territory of one ethnicity and another. It was all mixed up. You can look up a map of Bosnian ethnicities in before and after the war and see the effect that the war had.\n\nSo as ethnic propaganda began to flood Bosnian television and radio, people began to get scared. They became convinced that if other ethnicities were in power, their kids wouldn't be able to go to school, or they would be fired from their job, or things like that. A common misconception is that it was just Serb nationalism that was inflamed, and that Serbs were the sole aggressors in the war. Although Serbs were the best equipped side and did pursue an aggressive campaign of ethnic cleansing, Croats and Bosniaks also separated into ethnic blocks and removed other groups from the territory they held during the war. It got really messy all around.\n\nLet me share a story I heard when I was in Sarajevo a few months ago. My friends and I went on a tour around the city, and our tour guide was a cool young guy who was born in Sarajevo. He told us his father was a Muslim and his mother was a Serb, and when ethnic propaganda began to enter Bosnia, they were worried about what would happen to their mixed-race child. He said that just before the war, his mother's brother was approached by Serb police and given an AK-47, because they told him that he would need it. When war finally broke out in 1992, our guide and his father fled to Muslim territory, and he couldn't tell anyone that his mother was a Serb, he just said she was dead. It's that kind of stuff that made Bosnia the messiest war, and it really is a tragedy.\n\nWhen I try to explain how fucked up it all was to my family back here in America, I usually ask them what would happen if all the people in Los Angeles who identified as Mexican rose up with weapons and demanded their own country? Imagine how ridiculous that would be, if your Mexican neighbor who you've lived next to for 30 years just decided to kick you out of your house because you lived on \"Mexican territory.\" It's obviously not a direct parallel, but it was that kind of messy in Bosnia, and it completely tore the country apart.\n\nSorry if this was a little scatterbrained, I'm on my phone and I just woke up. If you want a good overview of the whole thing, I'd highly recommend the BBC's Death of Yugoslavia documentary. It's pretty comprehensive and they interview all the major players, which is really fascinating. There are many more facets to this issue that I know I didn't cover, and maybe I'll add more after I eat breakfast, but I hope I hope this helped somewhat. If you have any questions feel free to ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fcf8nn", "title": "I am a soldier who dies while on Crusade. How does my family find out?", "selftext": "Is it a letter (if they can read)? Do they just realize I\u2019m dead when I don\u2019t come home for years? Does a friend from the town tell my family when they return?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcf8nn/i_am_a_soldier_who_dies_while_on_crusade_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjb7rso", "fk0bljw"], "score": [1209, 2], "text": [" > \u201cHe is dead, dead, and the world and everything that is sweet in the world is dead to me!\u201d \n\nThis was the reaction of St. Elisabeth of Thuringia when her husband, Ludwig IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, died during Emperor Frederick II\u2019s crusade in 1227. In this case he didn\u2019t actually die on the crusade, he died in Italy before they departed, but Louis\u2019 men brought his bones home with them, along with the ring that he used to seal his documents. As he had promised to Elisabeth before he left, if his ring came back but he did not, it would be proof that he had died. \n\nElisabeth was later declared a saint and these details are taken from a hagiography that was written about her, so some of it might be a bit imaginary. But it contains elements that would have been familiar to other family members of dead crusaders from all over Europe: someone, a friend or another family member, brought news back home, and perhaps a piece of physical evidence that the dead crusader had left behind.\n\nEven going all the way back to the First Crusade, crusaders were very often members of the same family. Whether they were noble counts and dukes, or simple knights, we often see fathers and sons, two or more brothers, or cousins all going on crusade together. The first king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, went on crusade with his brothers (Baldwin and Eustace of Boulogne), as well as a cousin, Baldwin of Bourcq. Another one of Baldwin of Bourcq\u2019s cousins, Joscelin of Courtenay, was also present on the crusade. There are countless other examples\u2026Warner and Henry of Grez are another set of brothers from the First Crusade. From the Fifth Crusade, I know of two brother knights, who are otherwise completely unknown to history - Alexander and Assein of Archiac, a small village in western France. \n\nSo, family members often went on crusade together. Sometimes even their wives and children went with them!  If one of them died, the others could easily inform their relatives, whenever they eventually returned home. \n\nOften we don\u2019t know how a family was informed, but we know how they reacted. Ida of Louvain\u2019s husband Baldwin II of Hainault disappeared during the First Crusade. His body was never found, and although everyone was sure he had died, Ida insisted on travelling to the east in person to search for her husband herself. She never found him either, but this is evidence, at least, that someone had returned to Hainault and told her what happened.\n\nAnother way to inform relatives was to send a letter, as you mentioned in the question. Anselm of Ribemont sent [a letter](_URL_0_) to Manasses, the Archbishop of Reims during the First Crusade in 1098, listing some of the men who had died over the previous two years. There are only a handful of names in the letter, so it\u2019s certainly not a complete list, but they were probably the men that Anselm and the archbishop knew personally, and whose families Manasses could inform back home:\n\n > \u201cI ask, moreover, that you and all whom this letter reaches pray for us and for our departed brethren. Those who have fallen in battle are: at Nicaea, Baldwin of Ghent, Baldwin Ghalderuns, who was the first to make an attack upon the Turks and who fell in battle on the Kalends of July, Robert of Paris, Lisiard of Flanders, Hilduin of Mansgarbio \\[Maxingarbe\\], Ansellus of Caium \\[Anseau of Caien\\], Manasses of Glaromonte \\[Clermont\\], Laudunensis. Those who died from sickness: at Nicaea, Guy of Vitreio, Odo of Vernolio \\[Verneuil (?)\\], Hugh of Reims; at the fortress of Sparnum, the venerable abbot Roger, my chaplain; at Antioch, Alard of Spiniaeco Hugh of Galniaco.\u201d\n\nWhile Ludwig of Thuringia\u2019s bones were brought back home, another possibility for dead crusaders was to be buried in the east. When they died in battle, their bodies might have to be left on the field, exposed to the elements, or they might have to be buried in a mass grave; but sometimes they could be buried in a distinct tomb. This was the case with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, who died during the Third Crusade in 1190 and was buried in Antioch. Sometimes, the families of the dead crusader might come looking for their remains, and their bones could be brought back home to Europe - so, here again, this is evidence that someone must have returned home and told them that not only that their relatives had died, but also where they were buried. \n\nAs you also mentioned, it's possible that some families just never heard from their relatives again. If a minor knight or foot soldier died on crusade, but no one knew them or no one knew how to contact their families, their family back home might never know that they died. But at least among the wealthier knights and nobles, they definitely had a network of family connections, which made it easier for people back home to learn what happened.\n\nMy main source for this is Nicholas L. Paul, *To Follow in their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages* (Cornell University Press, 2012).", "Somewhat related to your question - you\u2019ll find that literacy was not as uncommon as one would think in this era. Numeracy, at very least, was a common and integral part of running any household. While men tilled the fields and went to war, the wives engaged in all sorts of cottage industries - such as weaving, baking, ale-making - and kept the accounts for the home to make sure they were able to keep up with their bills. Literacy may have been limited based on social status, time and ability to devote time to the study, and other mitigating circumstances, but it was certainly not a rarity, and numeracy was even more common."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://history.hanover.edu/texts/1stcrusade1.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2b6cqg", "title": "Has any nation ever peacefully transitioned from authoritarian to democratic rule?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b6cqg/has_any_nation_ever_peacefully_transitioned_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj27zhf"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would call the transition of many former Eastern Bloc countries a peaceful transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. Poland in particular comes to mind, as Poland is very much democratic and successful in the decades since the collapse of the USSR, despite having formerly been under one despotic state or another since the late 20s (when Poland itself fell to a military dictatorship).\n\nWhile they may have had plenty of troubles in the transition away from communist rule, they didn't fall prey to civil war (such as Iraq) or to yet another dictatorship. However, Poland also has a very long history of democratic traditions, going back to their elective monarchy system in which as many as 10% of the male population was eligible to vote (a staggering number at the time compared to the *zero* in, say, France)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7bpjfa", "title": "In WWII, what was the difference between joining the United States Navy vs the United States Naval Reserve?", "selftext": "I've been reading a lot of Medal of Honor and other WWII citations and noticed a high percentage of officers were naval reservists rather than full fledged navy officers. I'm aware that many older, retired officers were reactivated, especially to run auxiliary and transport ships, but I also see quite a few 20-25 year olds, often joining right out of college part way through the war, commanding small patrol ships and whatnot almost always listed as being from the USNR.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bpjfa/in_wwii_what_was_the_difference_between_joining/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpjvndn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Mostly for your purposes the distinction is from the commissioning source. \n\nBy and large with a few exceptions all those ROTC, V-12 and earlier V-7 College Program, and V-5 Aviation Cadet programs were producing Ensigns with Reserve commissions. It was understood that the Navy wouldnt need this many officers forever and the peacetime establishment could at least in large part be met by Annapolis which was producing most of the regular officers, though at a greatly enlarged and accelerated pace. Reserve is what the R in ROTC stands for in the end! Even if the programs and their outputs have changed a lot since in the experience of graduates, the new USNR Ensign from an ROTC unit would train briefly and then go to just a few weeks drill each summer on an installation or ship. While some were called to active duty as war threatened, the majority of the peacetime officer corps were regular officers from Annapolis. \n\nThere was some bias though in assignments from time to time. Admiral King even had to explicitly draft a memo requiring Flag Officers to give preference to USNR officers for their staffs, thus releasing more USN officers for duty at sea. And as the war wound down it would be obvious most USNR officers would be taken off active duty and sent on their way just like reservists through time, and those that wanted to stay on active duty as Reservists or drop the R and go Regular Navy had to make their case very strongly. Many did but the Navy and DoD as a whole was greatly reduced of course.\n\nBy the end as well the vast majority (between 70 and 80%) of the US Naval establishment by 1945 was technically Navy Reserve. And the vast majority of those officers doing good service, and many in the not too glamorous jobs like commanding support craft, patrol craft, and filling out staffs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21y5tv", "title": "Why weren't shields used during the musket era?", "selftext": "Was there ever serious experimentation with putting something between line infantry and incoming fire? I assume early guns didn't have great penetration.. why not advance with a metal wall in front of you going into pitched battles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21y5tv/why_werent_shields_used_during_the_musket_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghm4l0", "cghqe3s"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Those early guns were usually very heavy and were definitely two-hand weapons. The idea of the shield wall only works if you have a free hand for the shield and then a free hand for a sword or a spear. \n\nSo you'd have to have a big heavy gun, all of your paper, powder, reloading tools, probably a little knife or other hand to hand weapon, and carrying a big heavy shield. \n\nPlus, in Europe, where the first versions of what we would call a gun really took root, they had basically abandoned the type of warfare that made the shield wall effective.\n\nThe shield wall is a technique used by foot soldiers, arranged into what we call a phalanx. A phalanx is just an organized system of rows of men often staggered a little within the ranks so that there will be one row of men, and in the next row there will be men that fit in the gaps between the men in first row. basically looking something like this:\n\n-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -\n -  -  -  -  -  -  -\n- - - - - - - - - - -\n\nand so on and so on.\n\nThis way the men in the front hold the shield wall, backed up by the ranks and ranks of men behind them, making the wall of shields into a literal wall, with the men in the back ranks providing the strength to the men in the front. Your goal is to slowly advance your shieldwall forward as the men behind you stab at your foes with sword and spear.\n\nBy the early modern period in Europe, as the gun took rise, there were already many people using cavalry, massive groups of archers, and other more mobile or long-distance tactics that destroyed the strength of the shield wall and the phalanx.\n\nA wall of men and shields can stop other men on foot, but its not going to do shit to 300 mounted horsemen with full plate, and its not going to stand up well to continuous barrages from thousands of archers.\n\nSo, there may have been some basic experimentation in the early years of large-scale gun-using warfare, it would probably not have included bringing back the shield wall, since it would have been physically very inconvenient and not very effective considering the innovations in military tactics, and the basic organization of that culture's war machine.\n\n* edit\nAlso my picture of a phalanx looks nothing like that in my post, I don't know why it looks so different in the place I typed it to the place it posted, but I hope that helped out.", "Edit: This is a joke, don't believe anything here. Here be lies.\n\nAlthough never mentioned in most texts, shields weren't popular in the musket era simply due to a series of odd events that made them become unpopular.\n\nIt first starts during the Long War in 1591-1606 between the Habsburgs of Austria and the Ottoman Empire. In an effort to push the Ottomans out of Hungry and into the Balkans, the Habsburgs started to fund small bands of raiding dragoons that would push and harass any Ottoman force.\n\nA Dragoon is a very odd mixture of cavalry and infantry. While they are mounted on horses, they are armed with muskets or carbines in order for them to ride around with long range weaponry while not overburdening their horse. While a Dragoon has always been seen as a form of Mounted Infantry, during the Long War, they were seen as a form of light cavalry.\n\nHowever, the Janissaries of the Ottomans were experts with all weapons, from a scimitar to a musket. So they didn't use a specific fighting style that could easily be defended. Due to some work by noted Austrian historian Wilhelm von Shwarzkopf, in his *Der lange Krieg*, mentions that these Dragoons were often given large shields that were left over in an effort to arm these Mounted Infantry on the cheap. \n\nSurprisingly, he found that the few records that existed of these soldiers often noted how capable they were at defense, even against Ottoman musketry. Here's a quote from his book:\n\n > The Mohammedan is a skilled and ferocious fighter, but seems to be a poor shot. While they are able at hand to hand, they always seem to hit the large shields that the Crown has provided for us. Either their muskets are deficient or the shields are stronger than we realize.\n\nHowever, the Austrians seemed to find that the shields were rather strong against even their own muskets.\n\n > On the morning of the 18th, we had given one of our shields to a captured Moslem Magyar. In an effort to further our skill, we started to shoot at it, one by one. Our shield held up until one of the new soldiers ended up pouring too much powder and shooting through the shield, killing both the Magyar and the poor Christian whose musket exploded in his face. \n\nHowever, with the rise of the bayonet has been attributed to the fall of the shield, at least according to Shwarzkopf. Due to the size of the shields and their weight, it would be easy for a soldier to pull the shield away and stab the poor soldier in the heart.\n\nHowever, oddly enough, Napoleon did read this when he was considering a defensive action against the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon was well known for his wide breath of knowledge and large apatite for books, especially histories. After his defeat of the Austrians in the War of the Third Coalition, Napoleon had easy access to the Imperial Library. In a seemingly average text, he finds this concept of a protective shield interesting. However, it was very much against the French method of battle (The French have a phrase, *attaque toujour l'attaque* or \"the attack, always the attack.) So, he would put the idea aside.\n\nHowever, things did turn South for Napoleon. In 1813, Europe was turning against him due to his destructive economic policies. So Napoleon had to play defensive for the first time since Italy. So he calls for a copy of the history to be procured and from that creates metal versions for what would become the Battle of Liepzig. During the first day, the shields work well, allowing French light infantry from defensive positions with relative safety by placing the shields into the ground and firing from behind them. However, the battle turned rather quick, this is from *La Trag\u00e9die de Leipzig: La Chute de l'Empire Fran\u00e7ais* by Andre-Charles Villeneuve:\n\n > Very bravely, the *voltigeurs* were fighting off the backstabbing Austrians but the tide quickly turned during the second day. The Saxons whom turned sides against Napoleon quickly found a way to punch through the strong iron shields that Napoleon had employed against the Allies. In this, the Saxons would reload their musket but throw the ball away, but rather discharge the powder, they would add another charge in so that there would be double the gunpowder behind a ball.\n\n > It was effective but deadly. The soldiers first did this in a volley, the Saxons had fired in a line formation, but several soldiers died when some of the muskets exploded from the higher than standard pressure. So to fix this, the Saxons sent their soldiers out in open order, so that if there was a musket explosion, it would only hurt the user.\n\n > Much must be said about the bravery of these Saxons for willfully handling a weapon that could easily kill them. These brave turncoats stood forward and had a chance of seeing their death in order to fight what they thought was an evil army.\n\nOddly enough, this is the last time that shields were used. However this may be due to the use of stronger gun powder over time. As time continues, gun powder gets more powerful thus making metal shields too heavy. \n\n[To inform you, this was a joke. I have a real answer somewhere that I'll find for you, as this question has come up before.]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a09bct", "title": "Why were all of the Arab states caught so off guard by Israel during the 6 Day War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a09bct/why_were_all_of_the_arab_states_caught_so_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eag4ipv"], "score": [4], "text": ["As is often the case in these situations, a number of small factors compounded into an astonishing result. Therefore, I need to note that the order in which I discuss them does not necessarily reflect their order of importance.\n\nFirst of all, it needs to be said that the Israelis worked very hard for their success. Preparations for Operation Moked, which was its Hebrew name, were conducted over many years, essentially since the Suez Crisis in 1956 as even then Israel had been aware that in the case of an all-out war of aggression waged against the Jewish state, only a pre-emptive debilitating strike on the enemy air forces could pave a way to Israel\u2019s victory.  The result of these plans was what Tom Cooper describes as \u2018a massive and concentrated aerial campaign of sustained attacks on enemy air bases, right from the start of any war.\u2019 Mock-ups of enemy bases were erected at the Negev desert so as to give pilots as realistic a training environment as possible.\n\nThe training also involved ground crews, so that the aircraft could be refueled and rearmed, and sent back into the air at a record pace. Some Israeli aircraft flew as many as eight sorties on the first day of the war. This is known as force multiplication and to an extent it took the Arabs by surprise: they were not expecting the IAF as a whole to be able to fly so many missions in one day and send wave after wave over Arab bases.\n\nMoreover, as the 1960s progressed, Israel collected more and more detailed intelligence regarding the location and importance of potential targets. As a result, the strike was well coordinated and more often than not strike priority was assigned to the most important bases: those which housed Egyptian bombers and the most modern fighters. And since pretty much every strike package was led by an experienced pilot with substantial skills in the field of navigation, this theory was brought to life in practice. Even if a formation was delayed in its take-off (as it happened to the four-ship led by the famous Ran Ronen-Pekker), the flight leader was able to make speed adjustments in order to appear in the designated place at the designated moment.\n\nOn the other hand, Arab intelligence was far from efficient. The Egyptians didn\u2019t even have a full list of IAF air bases. They knew about most of them, of course, but not all, and they were also convinced that some airfields which had long been defunct were still operational. As a result, it was much harder for them to gauge the actual combat potential of the IAF.\n\nNow, one could argue that successful strikes against Arab air forces in one day a victory in a war do not constitute. Sure, except in this case, they did. The fact that the air forces were caught off guard precipitated a domino effect which\u2014as was hoped by the Israelis\u2014shattered the Egyptian will to fight (Egypt was the de facto leader of the Arab coalition). And where there was will, there was no ability, because a large proportion of the tools for waging war, the aircraft themselves, was left as burning wrecks on the ground, never having scrambled.\n\nThere were many small details in the plan of Operation Moked which increased its chances of success. For example, the time at which the strike occurred was carefully chosen to be *later* than the Egyptians expected. After all, the Egyptians weren\u2019t stupid, they knew war might come and sooner rather than later. They kept fighters above bases  to intercept the Israeli strike packages as they arrived, but the fighters had to land eventually. That\u2019s when the attack happened: after the Egyptians had landed and before they were able to take off again.\n\nThere was also some luck in play. Egyptian Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer was on a plane, flying between two air bases, when Operation Moked began. Thus, he was unable to command his forces in those crucial first minutes. In fact, he was ~~also~~ **almost**, not also, shot down himself.\n\nWhile Israel learned a lot from the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Egyptians learned very little and failed to update their philosophy regarding combat aviation (by this time they had already locked in to the Soviet philosophy). There were also political issues which prevented efficient communication between the armed forces of Arab states and Egyptian president Nasser himself did not want to believe that an Israeli attack was coming.\n\nYou will often see comments disparaging the Arab air forces and dismissing them as bumbling and incompetent. While *some* Arab leaders do fall into that category (looking at you, Marshal Amer), it\u2019s thoroughly unfair to see the entire officer corps in this light. They were simply outplayed by the skill and determination of their enemy. Operation Moked was a marvel of war planning, it was simple and beautiful in this simplicity. And what would become known as the Six-Day War was essentially the Twelve-Hour War. Fighting would continue, but when the sun was settin on June 5, anyone familiar with the situation on both sides of the conflict would have easily understood how the entire affair would end.\n\n**Sources**\n\nI\u2019m currently writing a book about the Israeli Air Force and what you see above is, to a large extent, a summary of the relevant chapter. However, if you\u2019re interested in further reading, my main sources here were:\n\nTom Cooper, David Nicolle et al., Arab MiGs Volume 3: The June 1967 War, Harpia Publishing 2012.\n\nMerav Halperin, Aharon Lapidot, G-suit: Pages from the Log Book of the Israel Air Force, Sphere 1990.\n\nLon O. Nordeen, David Nicolle, Phoenix over the Nile: A History of Egyptian Air Power, 1932-1994, Smithsonian 1996.\n\nEdit: added a passage about the political aspect."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mpvtz", "title": "Is it Anglo-centric to call Richard the Lionheart, English and not French, since he held titles in both countries, but lived almost all of his life in France?", "selftext": "From what I've read, he mostly used England for a source of revenue.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mpvtz/is_it_anglocentric_to_call_richard_the_lionheart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm6k0ij"], "score": [32], "text": ["This is a tricky question, precisely because questions of identity are difficult to tackle, and how we label individuals in hindsight often clashes with how that same person might have understood themselves in the context in which they lived.\n\nHonestly, I am not convinced that Richard would have called himself a Frenchman or an Englishman, these are identities more commonly associated with the rise of nationalism that just aren't a thing at this point in history. Certainly there was a concept of an Anglo-Saxon people and an understanding of a territorial realm under the nominal rule of a King of France, but there really weren't commonly held, unified national identities, especially in France. More than likely, Richard would have identified with his Angevin and Norman heritage. Granted, throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries we see the gradual formation of an Anglo-Norman aristocracy in England- so this is definitely not a period of static identity, which makes sense; identity tends to be quite fluid.\n\nI would hazard that we refer to Richard first and foremost as the King of England because people tend to care more about and are more invested in the office of kingship- not many folks are bothering to trace the lineage of the Dukes of Normandy. Which title Richard valued more (duke or king) I personally can't speak to, but in the general history that's led to the formation of English and French national identities, people seem more concerned about counting crowns and kings than dukes and counts. A kingdom was and is, generally, more prestigious than a dukedom. \n\nOn the subject though, it is interesting that among historians the recent trend has been to refer to the lands ruled by Henry II and his children as the Angevin Empire to better describe the multinational nature of the territories and people they ruled.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hbezd", "title": "Was the US school system designed specifically to produce semi-skilled laborers?", "selftext": "People on reddit (and elsewhere) will often say things like \"well, the US school system was designed to churn out factory workers, so no wonder it can't teach critical thinking/math/music/etc.!\"  I am rather suspicious of this, because the actual curriculum seems to me to be very different, and focused on knowledge for it's own sake, or for the sake of the intellectual development of the students.\n\nI'm curious what any historians think about this. What did people think about the purpose of secondary education, or education in general, throughout American history? (Although hearing about other countries would also be interesting.)  The claim I'm asking about is pretty vague, so I'm not sure if there's a definite answer as to whether it's true or false, but I'd love to know more.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hbezd/was_the_us_school_system_designed_specifically_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["casujkx", "casxavb", "casyjuz"], "score": [2, 4, 6], "text": ["I can't say for sure, but I do know our whole education system was completely refinished during the Red Scare, and with Sputnik. After Sputnik, Americans feared our education wasn't good enough, and that people were outpacing us, as far as science and math skills. ", "I work for a manufacturing company.  To be a factory worker, the only school-skills you *really* need are math and literacy.  Schools tend to teach those, but most school-time includes literature, history, science, etc, which isn't needed.  The vast majority of the skills factory workers do need aren't taught in schools at all, or only are as peripheral subjects, like welding or operating machinery.  Schools devote some time and energy to getting their students to read books, and learn history and the sciences.  They tend to devote none to, say, operating a lathe.", "I apologize as this is not a historical analysis of the education system. However, I believe the assertion, \"The US school system was designed to churn out factory workers,\" is most likely referencing [John Gatto](_URL_1_)'s *[The Underground History of American Education](_URL_2_)*. If I recall correctly (and it has been a long while), Gatto looks at the Prussian systems, as well as the relationships between the Indian and British school systems. I have not seen Gatto referenced in conversations about the historical development of the US education system, however; his arguments seem to be a part of a conversation about the state of contemporary education, concerns about standardized testing versus ingenuity, etc. To be sure, Gatto tries to develop a historical explanation for the contemporary issues in education, but I have not seen how his work fits in to a broader historical narrative, which poses problems for the viability of his conclusions, I think. Similar arguments about education include [Ken Robinson's Ted Talk] (_URL_0_) on Creativity, for example, which are part of a more current discourse regarding education philosophies like unschooling (in Gatto's case) and inquiry-based programs like Montessori, Reggio Emilia, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto", "http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0945700040"]]}
{"q_id": "9rv4ls", "title": "Did mainstream audiences in the 70s  &  80s really not know Freddie Mercury was gay (/bi)?", "selftext": "[This article in the Guardian](_URL_0_) essentially claims, at least in the UK (if not in the US), it was basically unthinkable that a rock star like Freddie was not straight. Is there evidence either way, and if so, what explains it: Mercury\u2019s own actions, the culture of glam rock, naivety on the part of the public...?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rv4ls/did_mainstream_audiences_in_the_70s_80s_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8lkcwp"], "score": [350], "text": ["Broadly speaking, the English press played a big role in creating early perceptions of Queen, and they saw Queen as copyists trying to follow Led Zeppelin's path (both musically and career-wise), who seemed to have a lot of financial backing. Said Nick Kent in a scathing 1974 review of their self-titled album: \n\n > ...the singer has so studiously got both Jon Anderson's cosmic castrato and Robert Plant's coy lemon-squeezer screech absolutely down pat or how the guitarist must have worked up every lick on Led Zeppelin 2 over and over again, and how the keyboards and harmonics are pure Yes Album vintage.\n\n It's also worth remembering that Queen came to prominence in England in the early-to-mid 1970s, a period when a style known as 'glam rock' was especially prominent, based around stars like David Bowie and Marc Bolan who had more than a hint of the androgynous to them. As such, music journalists often seemed skeptical of Freddie Mercury's flamboyant manner, suspecting it to be put on because that's what bands are meant to do.\n\nTo give some context to this, think the hard rock band AC/DC. Super blokey blokes making good honest rock'n'roll, right? Well, they strenuously deny all knowledge now, but in their early years 'AC/DC' as a name was interpreted by the press at the time as being a reference to bisexuality, one designed to make them fit in with the glam rock scene. [In this promo clip for an AC/DC song 'Can I Sit Next To You Girl?'](_URL_2_) - recorded with early lead singer Dave Evans - the group sound much more like Gary Glitter than the AC/DC sound that would become famous, and they wear the satin jackets and shiny boots you'd expect from a glam band. [And on an early TV appearance on Australian TV show *Countdown*](_URL_0_), lead singer Bon Scott wore a schoolgirl outfit. [The cover of the *High Voltage* album in the UK in 1975 looked like the one depicted here](_URL_1_). AC/DC soon went in a very different direction musically to David Bowie or Gary Glitter, but they were certainly marketed as being a glam rock band with a bit of androgyny and maybe a hint of ambiguous sexuality at the time - just as Queen were.\n\nA *Melody Maker* profile of the group in 1973 quotes Mercury explaining their image in quite a careerist way, along these lines: \n\n > \"We've always wanted to be pop stars and the group used to come first. Now we're all qualified we can concentrate more on the band. We're confident people will take to us, because although the camp image has already been established by people like Bowie and Bolan we are taking it to another level. The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic. Glamour is part of us and we want to be dandy. We want to shock and be outrageous instantly. We don't want people to have to think of they like us or not, but to formulate an opinion the moment they see us.\"\n\nAnother part of why his sexuality, at the time, was seen as a put on was that it seems that it was fairly well-known on the London scene that the music journalists were largely part of that Mercury had a girlfriend, Mary Austin, who worked in a fashion shop, and who he had a genuine (and quite complicated) life-long relationship with, leaving her much of his estate. This wasn't really mentioned in the articles about Mercury, but it was likely to be something the journalists writing their interviews might have learned about off-the-record. Thus, in early pieces profiling Mercury, they discussed his camper behaviour in a somewhat cynical way. In a profile of Mercury in *Melody Maker* in 1974:\n\n > \"Oh my dear, she's coming this way.\" Freddie sighed as the din grew louder. Fastidious, elegant, he maintained an even temper, despite the ravages of last night's celebrations.\n\nLater, Mercury again uses 'oh my dear': \n\n > \"We tend to work well under pressure. But do we row? Oh my dear, we're the bitchiest band on earth. You'll have to spend a couple of days with us. We're at each other's THROATS. But if we didn't disagree, we'd just be yesmen, and we do get the cream in the end.\"\n\nAnother interview in Melody Maker later in the year, written by Caroline Coon, describes: \n\n > ...pop scribes, like damp, weary pilgrims waiting for the dawn, have been aching to crown a new hero. Then, just when the prognosis looked direst, with a dazzling whoooosh, darlings, up popped Freddie Mercury. Suddenly we've discovered in our midst an exotic prancer, a quixotic chancer, an electronic Elgar who has penned some of the gaudiest, most soaring rock and roll anthems to be heard in a decade.\n\nLater she asks Mercury about being an 'androgynous sex symbol':\n\n >  You're on the way to being a huge androgynous sex symbol. What does it feel like to know that there are thousand's of lads and lassies out there who want a piece of you for themselves? \"It's a great feeling. I play on the bisexual thing because it's something else, it's fun. But I don't put on the show because I feel I have to and the last thing I want to do is give people an idea of exactly who I am. I want people to work out their own interpretation of me and my image. I don't want to build a frame around myself and say, 'This is what I am' or 'This is all I am.'\n\n > \"To be honest, I'd like people to think there is no falsity in me, because what I do is really my character. But I think mystique, not knowing the truth about someone, is very appealing. I'd be doing myself an injustice if I didn't wear make-up because some people think it's wrong. Even to talk about being gay used to be obnoxious and unheard of. But gone are those days. There's a lot of freedom today and you can put yourself across anyway you want to. But I haven't CHOSEN this image. I'm myself and in fact half the time I let the wind take me.\n\nSo Mercury wasn't exactly hiding his identity from the British press, but the British press didn't seem to see it as 'Freddie Mercury is gay/bi\"; instead they saw it, to some extent, as an act - an ambitious band doing the current cool thing to try and appeal to the cool crowd (and remember that both of these interviews occurred about a year before 'Bohemian Rhapsody', and the stardom here is based around what was then their biggest hit, 'Killer Queen'.)\n\nTheir press in the US, however didn't seem to discuss their sexuality much at all.\n\n*Rolling Stone* reviewed their debut album *Queen* in 1973, comparing them to Led Zeppelin and describing Mercury as: \n\n > Vocalist Freddie Mercury has a strong, steady voice that never lacks for power and authority. Through the storms of \u201cLiar\u201d to the artsy, choir-boy innocence of \u201cMy Fairy King\u201d he handles a wide range of vocal chores, never once losing his air of cocky, regal arrogance.\n\nThe earliest US profile of them I can find was in *Circus Raves* in 1974, in which Mercury is described as: \n\n > His image is that of a macho superman with a heart of gold. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/24/real-freddie-mercury-bohemian-rhapsody"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmoz-cRCXQE", "https://www.discogs.com/ACDC-High-Voltage/release/814211", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biaGJ_4rEzE"]]}
{"q_id": "3i4jxz", "title": "How interested were 8-10th century English kings in the Roman ruins and leftovers that were still there?", "selftext": "I'm watching the series of Vikings and king Ecbert of Wessex (ca.770-839) is, in private, doing some interesting research to the Romans that lived on his land before him. Were more English kings doing this and if so, what were their opinions of the Romans? Do we know? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i4jxz/how_interested_were_810th_century_english_kings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cudb93v"], "score": [16], "text": ["This question has been asked before but never got any responses from an expert on the period. My own knowledge ends around ~700, but I think it will be still be relevant, since in the seventh century anyone who was anyone knew about the Romans - I see no reason why this would change later, especially as contact with the Continent expanded further in the mean-time as the Carolingians consolidated their power. At the very least, I don't think Egbert of Wessex would be the only person interested in their island's Roman past, as he is portrayed on the show. My comment here therefore does not answer strictly your question, but I hope it will add an additional insight to any other answers that you may receive here.\n\nThe first Anglo-Saxon historian of note, the Venerable Bede, lived and wrote in the early eighth century and purely from flipping through my copy of his *Ecclesiastical History*, it is clear that he knew about the wider world - he for instances recorded the names and reigns of Roman emperors down to Leo III (717-741). This is not unusual, since from letters and other records, we know that Anglo-Saxons regularly travelled to Rome (and sometimes beyond) to gather manuscripts and relics to take back to England, including of course historical accounts of the empire. There were some pretty well-travelled people from this time, such as Arculf, who went all the way to Jerusalem in the late seventh century, as well as Boniface, who was a missionary working amongst German pagans and who had regular contact with the pope in Rome in the eighth century. This is quite important, since the city of Rome was still in theory within the Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, so visiting the city was in effect visiting the Roman Empire, whilst visiting Jerusalem involved passing through Roman lands and lands under Arab rule that had only recently been taken from the empire. \n\nBede's account, aside from his up-to-date knowledge of continental affairs, is also interesting because he stated outright that his *Ecclesiastical History* would be read by his king, Ceolwulf of Northumbria. If the king ended up doing so, he would have read about Julius Caesar's ill-fated invasion of Britain, Constantine I's flirtation with Arianism, as well as the danger posed by Attila the Hun - basically all the highlights from Roman history. Bede had at his disposal the chronicles and histories dealing with both recent and ancient history, so naturally he summarised them in his work. I don't know what happened after Bede, but his work was always extraordinarily popular and copied often, so presumably many educated individuals would have had a basic understanding of Roman history just from him. Even if this is incorrect, I doubt that Bede's sources were lost or that Anglo-Saxon travellers to the Continent failed to pick up some basic Roman history/manuscripts on the way, especially if they actually journeyed into the empire itself.\n\nThere are also other more interesting connections from the seventh century, the influence of which can at least be felt in the early eighth century as well. The best example is Theodore of Tarsus, a monk from Cilicia deep within the Roman Empire, who became the archbishop of Canterbury in 668. His deputy, Hadrian, was in fact a North African monk who had once served as an ambassador to Francia on behalf of emperor Constans II. These two men brought eastern learning to England, such as the theology taught in the city of Antioch and hagiographies of eastern saints (which included the cult of Anastasius the Persian, a convert from Zoroastrianism who was martyred by the Persians), as well as the popular collection of ascetic sayings/anecdotes collected by John Moschus, a very important eastern monk who compiled it c.630. Theodore and Hadrian founded the famous school of Canterbury, transforming England briefly into the 'light of the West', drawing students from both Ireland and Francia with a curriculum firmly based on the classical past and the most up-to-date contemporary knowledge (such as the work of Isidore of Seville from Visigothic Spain). The thing that impresses me the most is that these students were coming to England to learn Greek, which just goes to show how interconnected Christendom remained in this period, even though there is still a tendency for some people to see it as the 'Dark Ages'. Until the school of Canterbury gradually petered out sometime in the early eighth century, England was actually a hub of Roman learning!\n\nThis connection is even more impressive when we realise that Theodore had also been involved in the monothelete dispute (a doctrinal debate within the Roman Empire in the mid-seventh century) and was personally affected by the Arab conquests, as he had fled his native Cilicia to the city of Rome because of the danger posed; as a result, the Anglo-Saxon Church in the seventh century was very much aware of issues within the Roman Empire and its many councils serve as evidence of how keen they were to ensure that they also had a say in them, most prominently by backing the papal doctrinal position in 680 against the pro-monothelete elements then still active in Constantinople. Indeed, Theodore was a very important player in the rebellious Lateran Synod of 649 against the emperor Constans II and was still considered an important authority on countering monotheletism by 680 when the pope needed help to finally crush the heresy. Hadrian's career was even more important, as aside from being an ex-imperial ambassador, I think there are reasons to think that he had turned against Constans II by 668 and that his disillusionment represented a larger wave of discontent within the empire, which culminated in the emperor's assassination (with a bucket) the same year. As such, Theodore and Hadrian were deeply involved in and aware of the crisis the empire faced. As the Arab conquests marched relentlessly on, two individuals caught up in these extraordinary events ended up in England, how amazing is that?\n\nThis was also the age of Wilfrid, an influential Northumbrian monk-bishop who travelled to the city of Rome three times. Wilfrid was a firm Romanophile and he brought Roman liturgy, relics and craftsmen back to England. He had also been affected by the furore over monotheletism in Rome and I think it played a major role in his later conflict with Theodore; both were pro-papal figures, but their experience with Rome taught them different lessons about how to promote Roman orthodoxy in England. These two men dominated Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical politics in this period, so it is rather important that they had both been in Rome and were aware of the twists and turns of imperial politics. The battle between Wilfridians and the moderates would rage on into the eighth century, so again, it's a clear case of people with knowledge of Rome continuing to be influential throughout this period.\n\nThese individuals in the seventh century and their impact are literally my favourite things to research, so please let me know if there are any questions and I'll do my best to answer them! :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2flg66", "title": "How did medieval authorities investigate crimes in large cities?", "selftext": "Answers to this on any culture would be welcome. Thanks :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2flg66/how_did_medieval_authorities_investigate_crimes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckapmul"], "score": [6], "text": ["You need to be specific. The middle ages lasted for roughly 1000 years and Europe is a big place with a LOT of differences in culture throughout its regions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b5nr16", "title": "How did the apparent US interengration of religious conservatism and economic conservatism come about?", "selftext": "I appreciate this is kind of a broad subject, that could have many essays written on and that it could cause some strong reactions. But as far as I understand it, (please tell me if I'm wrong) that historically, within the conservative Republican party there has been a emphasis on both Christian values and on the benefits of Capitalism, the more free market the better.( Similarly with the Conservatives in the UK.)  But to me, at least on the surface, these two seem antithetical to each other. One emphasising self sacrifice, giving all you have to the poor and dedicating your life to following god, the other that \"greed is good,\" that you  should always act in your rational self interest. If someone has less than you it's their fault for not working hard enough.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo how did these two seemingly contradictory philosophies come to be held by the same people?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5nr16/how_did_the_apparent_us_interengration_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejjs9vp"], "score": [2], "text": ["**Part 1**\n\nJust at the start, I am biased towards the free-market perspective. I'm going to try to give an account of both sides, though what I say on the socialist side is biased towards what I think the strongest arguments are. I'm then going to give an account of some influential American economist views on this. But this is potentially a massive topic, so I'm going to focus on American views in the 19th century. At the end, I suggest a book that has a more comprehensive study, though a reviewer notes that it has some biases.\u00a0\n\n\n**A brief history of greed, and the debate over market economies**\n\n\nFrom a free-market perspective, it is not that \"greed is good\", it is that \"markets channel greed into good\".\u00a0\n\n\nGreed is widespread across human societies, both geographicaly and historically.\u00a0 Many religions have included messages against it, or its downstream impacts. As this is about American Christians, I shall note that Bible's 10 Commandments included: \"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's\", but the other major world religions such as Islam and Buddism have similar messages. There are numerous examples of greed throughout history and across the world (McCloskey, 1994). (This is not to say that greed is the only motive of course, economists and historians throughout history, from Adam Smith to Deidre McCloskey have recognised people have affections, and trust, and ethics.)\u00a0\n\n\nIf you think that greed comes from human nature, not from market economies, then a couple of arguments of socialists become less convincing:\n\n\n* You don't expect changing the economic system to eliminate greed, at least not without some other strong argument. As Jason Brennan (2014) argued, there is a difference between socialism defined as along the lines of \"people treating each other well and sharing\" and socialism defined as \"central planning\", or \"collective ownership of the means of production\" or \"production for use not for exchange\". We can agree that it is good for people to share and help each other, but disagree that socialist plans for economic organisation are more likely to bring this about than market economies.\u00a0 The history of attempts at socialist ideals, from Communist countries such as the USSR or China to Israeli kibbutz, to various communes, does show that, at least, human greed occasionally shows up in situations that are trying to get away from market economies.\u00a0\n\n\n* You expect governments to err lots too, as they are made of people, who are greedy. Therefore governments are prone to acting for reasons other than the public interest, and of course there are plenty of historical examples of this happening. Therefore, you do not expect government actions to necessarily lead to better results than market actions.\u00a0\n\n\nThus many economists, from Adam Smith to Deidre McCloskey to Jason Brennan, have favoured free markets on ethical grounds.\u00a0\u00a0\n\n\nBut, to respond to this, the socialist can well argue that:\n\n\n*\u00a0 Market economies are dependent on at least some constraints on greed, on people respecting property rights rather than stealing things, on judges making non-corrupt decisions. And there are wide variations in corruption around the world and within a country over time: Transparency International has been publishing an [annual index of perceptions of public corruption](_URL_0_) by country each year since 1995 (obviously a noisy estimate). If we can have honest independent judges, why not other honest, independent politicians and government bureaucrats?\u00a0\n\n\n* Some government actions, like transferring money to the poor, are fairly administratively simple and can be done in ways that are pretty transparent.\u00a0\n\n\n* The evidence for private superiority of provision of some complex services like healthcare or education are suprisingly weak too, at least in countries with competent governments, such as relatively uncorrupt ones. (See Dronkers and Robert 2008). As markets are poor at managing externalities that can't be turned into private property rights, and are poor at providing public goods, governments, even imperfect governments, might be better than none. And, more optimistically, we can hope to build on existing successes to build an even better, alternative system.\u00a0\n\n\nThere's more to be said on the socialist side, but I am stopping here for reasons of space.\u00a0\n\n\nThe two lines of arguments can of course be synthesised into a general view of using markets to do what markets are best at, and governments to do what governments are best at, and other institutions to do what they are best at. (The pessimist can think of this as\u00a0picking the least bad option.)  There's much individual variation in what people think is the best institution for any particular problem.\u00a0\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview"]]}
{"q_id": "153l1k", "title": "[Early 20thC] The Failure of American Socialism ", "selftext": "In you opinion, why did the American socialist movement, which emerged in the early 1900's, fail to become a sustained major force for change and/or reform in America's cultural, economic and political discourses? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/153l1k/early_20thc_the_failure_of_american_socialism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7j53bn"], "score": [5], "text": ["There is no simple answer here. \n\nMany will argue that simple state repression, in the form of strike breaking, red scares, and similar tactics had the effect of marginalizing the left. They are correct. \n\nMany still will argue that programs like unemployment insurance, worker's compensation, and most of the New Deal programs were at least partially designed to be a palliative to the rumbling American left. They are also correct. \n\nYet another group will argue that simple self-interest, in the form of trade union protectionism, anti-industrial unionism, racism, sexism, etc. all contributed to the (with apologies to Kolko,) triumph of conservatism. These people, too, are correct.\n\nAs a labor historian, I can rattle off a zillion titles on the American left (labor history and the left are tied in an almost-Gordian knot,) but a few that should be near the top of the list include:\n\nNick Salvatore's masterpiece, *Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist*\n\nDan Ernst's *Lawyers Against Labor* (a little dry, but hugely informative)\n\nRick Halpern's *Down on the Killing Floor* (companies, unionists and reds in the Chicago stockyards)\n\nJim Green's *Death in the Haymarket* (not quite as academically-focused as the others, a great read.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bewau", "title": "It seems like many, if not most, religions in history revere the sun in some fashion. Were there ever any cultures, perhaps in hot climates, that viewed the sun as an enemy?", "selftext": "If not necessarily as an enemy, at least as...not a friend? Did anyone see the sun as anything other than an ally/friend/provider?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bewau/it_seems_like_many_if_not_most_religions_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cslk4mq", "cslw24i", "csm311v", "csmgk1u"], "score": [264, 31, 136, 5], "text": ["This may be a question better suited for /r/askanthropology", "I asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago however it was removed because it was a \"throughout history\" question and was told it needed to be more specific. What gives?", "In some respects, the Aztecs both venerated and feared the sun. But first, a disclaimer: as with many things relating to Aztec mythology, this is disputed, vague, and varies fairly often. \n\nUnlike many cultures, the Aztecs considered the sun to be finite. As an extension of this, the sun itself is the fifth such sun to exist. And, according to the Aztec creation myth, the moon was also a sun, right up until the other gods threw a rabbit (yes, a rabbit) in front of it. But, perhaps because there were supposedly two suns rather than one, the sun was weak and dim. \n\nSo the gods gave their blood to the sun. You can probably see where this is going.\n\nBasically, the blood offering the gods gave to the sun wasn't enough to keep the sun strong. And since the gods symbolically offered their blood to the sun, the Aztecs themselves started symbolically offering the blood of humans to the sun (only, y'know, there was nothing symbolic about having your heart cut out). The Aztecs presumably believed that this human sacrifice would, in some respect, mirror the blood offering the gods made to the sun in the past and, therefore, the sacrifices would keep the sun strong. \n\nIt should probably be noted that in all four of the previous epochs as recognized by the Aztecs, the death of the sun occurred alongside the death of the planet. The Aztecs, therefore, believed that failing to cut enough hearts out would result in the sun dying which, in turn, would result in everyone dying. Human sacrifice was supposedly the lesser of these two evils. The *exact* nature of the sun in Aztec mythology varies (since \"Aztec\" sometimes corresponds to the broader Nahuatl area rather than just the Aztecs themselves), but the recurring theme is that if you don't offer up enough human sacrifices, the sun will die/stop moving/go out/explode/whatever and everyone will die. \n\nYou can read more [here](_URL_1_), [here](_URL_2_), and [here](_URL_0_). \n\nEdit: sun, not son. l2homophone, past me. ", "I live on the island of Maui. We grow up hearing the Hawaiian folk tale about Haleakala (House of the Sun) -- our dormant volcano -- which is where the demi-god Maui throws a net to capture the Sun. He wants the sun to slow down because it travels too fast for his mother to dry her kapa cloth. The sun is basically a jerk and in a hurry, so doesn't want to slow down. Maui has to catch it and he doesn't release the sun until it agrees to slow, then it goes slower in the summer and faster in the winter. Here are some some sources. [1](_URL_0_), [2](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://nyx.meccahosting.com/~a00001f1/cuezali/suns.html", "http://www.aztec-history.com/aztec-sun-god.html", "http://archaeology.about.com/od/Aztec-Religion/a/Aztec-Creation-Myth.htm"], ["http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/maui/maui07.htm", "http://oiwi.tv/keiki/why-maui-snared-the-sun/"]]}
{"q_id": "1pp6v9", "title": "How was suicide perceived among members of Europe's Royal Families?", "selftext": "From the Medieval era to the 18th-19th Century. What happened when someone committed suicide? Was it covered-up? Do we have any suspicion that some cases of poisoning might have been suicides? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pp6v9/how_was_suicide_perceived_among_members_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd4qmga"], "score": [5], "text": ["I don't know much about the subject, but here's an incident which might be of your interest.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBasically, the son and heir of the Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, called Rudolph, killed himself after he and his father got into a fight about Rudolph's mistress.\n\nThey first told the world he had had a heart aneurysm, but later it was changed to the correct story, that one of a suicide-pact."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayerling_Incident"]]}
{"q_id": "2i6yyk", "title": "Why is the extinction of the dodo so famous?", "selftext": "My apologies if this is the wrong subreddit - this seemed like the right place, but I'll be happy to take the question elsewhere.\n\nWhy is the extinction of the dodo so famous, as opposed to, say, the extinction of the carrier pigeon?  The latter was actually a much more significant feat, both in the impact the species had on human life and the environment, and in terms of the sizes of the populations involved.  So why have more people heard of the dodo than the carrier pigeon?  Is it because the dodo itself was such an oddity, or for other reasons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i6yyk/why_is_the_extinction_of_the_dodo_so_famous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckzn5e5", "cl0803g"], "score": [24, 6], "text": ["The dodo was limited to one small island in the Indian Ocean. It essentially demonstrated how birds and other animals will evolve to suit their surroundings. The dodo was enormous and a great source of food, but it had no natural predators on Mauritius. A turkey, by comparison, has a lot of predators, so it learns habits to protect itself. The dodo was beyond easy to hunt - it literally walked up to people out of curiosity. Trade ships were able to load up on dodo meat as they traveled around Africa. It was irresistible. \n\nI think the passenger pigeon is less famous mostly because it closely resembles the common pigeon we see every day. It was also hunted to extinction, but it had more instinctive defenses against predators. ", "The dodo was one of the first cases of documented extinction of an animal which had existed contemporaneous with modern, \"civilized\" humanity. It wasn't some old creature from eons before we were around, some relic of a previous age. It was something that we had seen and, uh, killed. \n\nWhy does this matter? Consider how radical the notion of \"extinction\" was to European natural theology of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The general belief, among scientific men as well as lay, was that every creature on the Earth was a product of God, put here for the service of man, and that God was responsible for the bounty of natural abundance. The idea that man could be responsible for destroying an entire species \u2014 so that it was irrevocably gone \u2014 does not fit well into this model. The dodo was documentable, because it was not mythical (they had good records and body parts preserved), but its range was incredibly small, meaning that you literally could say, \"there aren't any hiding somewhere that we can't see them \u2014 they're _gone_.\"\n\nElizabeth Kolbert's [writings in the New Yorker on the history of extinction as a concept are excellent](_URL_0_), as is her book _The Sixth Extinction_. The dodo was one of many things that pointed towards a new, more modern view of ecology, history, and biology\u00a0\u2014 a world much more fragile, integrated, old, and malleable than the more static, Biblical model seemed to allow for. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/the-lost-world-2"]]}
{"q_id": "aoeahi", "title": "In what ways did Marx and Engels *not* agree?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aoeahi/in_what_ways_did_marx_and_engels_not_agree/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg2eue5"], "score": [20], "text": ["Marx and Engels were collaborators, but many phrases and key Marxian terminology that are wrongly attributed to Marx were actually coined by Engels, such as the infamous phrase \"dialectical materialism\", particularly in his work *Dialectics of Nature* from 1883. (The actual term employed by Engels is materialist dialectic, dialectical materialism was later coined by the Marxist theoretician Plekhanov). The *Dialectics of Nature* is largely considered an outdated text which intends to apply the Hegelian dialectic to science and nature itself, often leading to pseudoscientific conclusions through Engels' attempt to extract universal scientific laws from what is now considered a heuristic logical device. After Marx's death, Engels attempted to refine and systematize Marxian thought, and Engels for many Marxian scholars was considered the first \"Marxist revisionist\". However, as Alvin Gouldner suggests in his book **The Two Marxisms:**\n\n*\"The imputation of a radical gulf between Marx and Engels, heedless of the differences in the periods in which they worked, and which fails to see Marx's own movement toward science, survives less because of its intellectual justification than because of the need it serves. What is at work here is the need to deal with the real contradiction within Marxism, its Januslike character as both a Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism. \"*\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThus, Gouldner proposes that people attempting to juxtapose Engels and Marx are really seeing the difference between what is recognized by contemporary Marxian scholars as the difference between early and late Marx (a difference elaborated by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser). It should be noted that the attempt to identify all of the flaws of Scientific Marxism (the historical presupposition of unilinear evolutionism, etc) with Engels fails because all of this flowed directly from Marx's own engagement with scholars such as Lewis Henry Morgan (in addition to presuppositions present already in Hegel). Thus, while some contemporary Marxist scholars may disagree with some of the theoretical premises of Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884),* the anthropology this is based on (namely Lewis Henry Morgan) was cited often in *Das Kapital,* and this particularly work (considered by many Engels' most lasting contribution to Marxist theory) was based on Marx's own research notes.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHowever, one difference that has been suggested theoretically between Engels and Marx is this:\n\n*\"Engels's view of capitalism involves a distinctive, ecologically sensitive critique of its degradation of nature. Capitalism and its social science, political economy, \"concerns itself for the most part only with the immediately intended social effects of human activities directed towards production and exchange.\" Capitalism means a narrowing of attention to market conditions and profit-making activity, and a corresponding neglect of the effects of their actions on nature. \"*\n\nI'm not sure if I personally agree with this distinction because the doctrine of alienation from nature is already present in early Marx, particularly in the *Economic and PhilosophicalManuscripts of 1844.* To quote from this:\n\n*\" In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.\"*\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEngels himself had a completely different personal background than Marx. His father was the owner of a textile mill, but Marx financially struggled throughout most of his life as an editor, radical labor organizer, political activist, and author. Marx was raised in a solidly middle class home in Trier. However, despite these differences, the friendship between Engels and Marx was lifelong, lasting from 1845 with the publishing of *The Condition of the Working Class in England* to Marx's death in 1883. If anything, Engels can be criticized for being too faithful to Marx; however, some scholars still maintain that Engels later writings, particularly the *Anti-Duhring,* can be blamed for the creation of the orthodox Marxist doctrines later taken up by the Soviet Union, including dialectical materialism and scientific socialism. The difference between the two writers can be summed up by the fact that Marx was far more interested in matters of political economy and philosophy while Engels was interested in making Marxism into a political reality, but on the other hand they were both leading leftist intellectuals both versed in Hegelian philosophy and other subjects and tried together to create the political ideology known as Communism.\n\nIt should be remembered that Marx famously said \"I am not a Marxist\", but it should also be remembered that Engels collaborated on Marx's most famous works, including *Das Kapital* (Capital) and the Communist Manifesto, and shared in Marx's fundamental beliefs in social transformation through a revolution of the working class to overthrow the existing capitalist system. However, it should also be remembered that while Marx referred to individual capitalists, Marx nor Engels never referred to the existing economic system as capitalism.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSources:\n\nKarl Marx: The Burden of Reason (why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) by Alan Megill\n\n**The Two Marxisms**. \u00a0New York:\u00a0 Oxford University Press, 1980, \u00a0Chapter 9 - \"Engels Against Marx? Marxism as Property\"\u00a0 pp. 250-286. by Alvin Gouldner\n\n*The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)* by Friedrich Engels\n\n*Dialectics of Nature (1883)* by Friedrich Engels\n\n*Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844* by Karl Marx\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rqmrl", "title": "Is there evidence for a pre-historic European cult of the bear?", "selftext": "I'm currently reading a book about the bear and its symbolic meaning in western culture, from the Paleolithic until the modern era. The author suggests that although many archaeologists deny the existence of a Paleolithic bear cult, the discovery of symbolically arranged bear remains in caves, widespread cave paintings of bears in numerous poses and portable art featuring bears or made from their bodies indicate that such a cult probably did exist. \n\nThe author then describes commonalities between bear-deities and veneration of the bear by Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic peoples. He seems to implicitly argue that these traditions were survivals from an ancient and pre-historic bear cult. I don't know enough about pre-history to formulate my own opinion about the former argument, but the latter seems pretty speculative and unlikely. \n\nSo, can any archaeologist or pre-historian help me out here? Is there convincing evidence for a pre-historic bear cult? Am I right in thinking that it is incredibly unlikely that veneration of the bear continued from the Paleolithic until the High Middle Ages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rqmrl/is_there_evidence_for_a_prehistoric_european_cult/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cniczwh"], "score": [5], "text": ["The idea of a circumpolar bear cult was given early expression by Irving Hallowell, Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. American Anthropologist 28, 1926. See [this site](_URL_0_), for example. One needs to be careful about interpreting nineteenth-century and twentieth-century ethnographic evidence of an expansive tradition as evidence of something that was Upper Paleolithic. But it is impressive that northern groups of Native Americans other than New World Artic indigenous people (who tend to travel and communicate with their Old World counterparts) have bear cults that look a lot like Northern Eurasian traditions. It is tempting to conclude that these bear cults were established before Native American colonization of the Americas and that remnants of this tradition survived into ethnographic times. But tempting is not evidence. Still, when we see echoes of the same motifs in Shoshone/Northern Paiute culture, in the Ainu culture, and in Sami tradition, as well as in the story of Bjarki in the court of King Hrolf (not to mention Grettir the strong, Beowulf, and Tale Type 301, the folktale of the Bear's Son), the temptation becomes considerable. Still, it is not proof.\n\nedit to clean up something.\n\nI hope that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/diehtu/siida/religion/bear.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2q1kb2", "title": "Pyramids of Giza", "selftext": "Is there a consensus among historians as to whether or not were slaves used in the Egyptian construction of the Pyramids of Giza?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q1kb2/pyramids_of_giza/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn202ra", "cn211us"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["hi! not discouraging other responses, but fyi, you can get started in this section of the FAQ\n\n* [Did the Egyptians use Jewish slaves to help build the pyramids?](_URL_0_)", "There is no solid evidence that I've ever come across while studying history that shows that any slaves were responsible for any large egyptian project, including the pyramids.  Slaves were mostly kept in Egypt for more servantile tasks; building great constructs was mostly seen as an honor and done by precisely skilled engineers and artisans.\n\nNot only that, there's the simple fact that the pyramids were the tombs of Khufu's bloodline, and the pharaoh's greatest accomplishment was the pyramids.  I'm not sure if its the case for all the pharaohs, but in general, slaves weren't given the honor of helping to construct the tombs, especially something as monumentally precise as the great pyramids.  \n\nThat said, there has been a great deal of speculation that the pyramids were built by slaves, but the general opinion of the archaeological community is that it was done by skilled workers employed and paid by the pharaohs, so there's no reason to assume a slave ever even touched a stone to move it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/antiquity#wiki_did_the_egyptians_use_jewish_slaves_to_help_build_the_pyramids.3F"], []]}
{"q_id": "2htm9q", "title": "What happened to Napoleon's aristocracy after he fell? Was there a clash between Napoleon's aristocracy and the old aristocracy when Louis the 18th came to power?", "selftext": "Do you guys recommend any books about this? I would like to read more about what happened to the Napoleonic aristocracy after he fell.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2htm9q/what_happened_to_napoleons_aristocracy_after_he/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckwbw8b"], "score": [11], "text": ["Although the Bourbon Restoration engaged in a degree of purging and score settling, the Napoleonic nobility emerged out 1815 largely intact, albeit often demoted in status.  Most of the Bourbon\u2019s ire was directed at the apex of the Napoleonic aristocracy, the Princes and Dukes of the Empire. As with the Napoleonic nobility as whole, these were individuals were overwhelmingly military men such as the Marshalate, but there were some non-martial examples such as Cambac\u00e9r\u00e8s who was the Second Consul. However, the top of the Napoleonic pyramid were all men who owed their position to a personal relationship with the Emperor. Napoleon wrote to Cambac\u00e9r\u00e8s \u201cI want no Dukes other than those which I have created or may create (...). If I make some exceptions with respect to the former nobility, these exceptions shall be extremely limited and shall only apply to historic names.\u201d\n\nAlthough the Bourbons executed Ney, they tended to be far more lenient to individuals who did not openly propagate a Bonapartist restoration after Waterloo. Although stripped of titles, these elites retained a sizable amount of their gifts and fortunes they acquired during their service to the Emperor. For instance, Davout retained some of his estate and the Bourbons eventually restored some of his titles despite the former\u2019s unwavering support of Napoleon, even after Waterloo. Others such as Soult and Gouvion St-Cyr were able to regain very prominent positions within successive French governments.  \n\nOne of the consequences of the Napoleonic system of coupling financial rewards with titles was that the corpus of the Napoleonic aristocracy was well-placed to marry into the old nobility of Restoration France. The result was a blending of the old and the new elite social groups within France. In addition, one of the foundations of the Napoleonic system was meritocracy (at least in theory) so there was a strong component of educated professionals within lower and middle strata of the Napoleonic aristocracy (the Barons and the Knight). These individuals were well-placed to expand their wealth and prestige during the Empire and became part of the foundation of the leading families of France during the nineteenth century. Although the Empire was infamous for its stifling court culture, Paris became an important social meeting place for these individuals and habituated them to the salon culture of the Restoration \n\nUltimately, the Napoleonic legend of French *gloire* outweighed their questionable loyalties for many elites for the French state. Although there were outliers who still maintained Bonapartist sentiments, much of this nobility recognized that Napoleon would not return again. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBergeron, Louis. *France under Napoleon*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.\n\nDwyer, Philip G. *Napoleon and Europe*. Harlow, England: Longman, 2001.\n\nNatalie, Petiteau. \u201cThe Nobility of the Empire and the Elite groups of the 19th century - a Successful Fusion.\u201d *_URL_0_*.  _URL_1_\n\nWoloch, Isser. *Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship*. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Napoleon.org", "http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/nobility_empire_elite_arsenic.asp#ancre3"]]}
{"q_id": "89sstf", "title": "How Were Elves Depicted Before Lord of the Rings?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/89sstf/how_were_elves_depicted_before_lord_of_the_rings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwtc657", "dwtcvzt", "dwtefmn"], "score": [2, 5, 4], "text": ["Good earlier thread on the subject: _URL_0_", "Okay, in Scandinavian contexts, we don't have many depictions of *\u00e1lfar* in manuscript illuminations, nor do we have many in textual remnants that are not Christianized quite a bit. Specifically, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlusson is our primary source for what we consider to be the 'classical' depiction of elves in Icelandic sources (and they appear almost exclusively in Icelandic sources.) Snorri's delineation of *\u00e1lfir* into *ljos\u00e1lfar*, *d\u00f6kkalfar*, and *svart\u00e1lfar* is in line with what we would now consider to be angels, demons, and dwarves, and may reflect a folk-belief in beneficial, oppositional, and neutral spirits.\n\nThat said, we have an extremely common alliterative element in Skaldic verse - *\u00c6s\u00edr ok \u00c1lfar* - which seems to equate the elves with the \u00c6s\u00edr, or gods or, at the very least, puts them on the same footing in terms of spiritual importance. Given this, it's possible - though by no means certain, since Old Norse texts are almost criminally light when it comes to the description of people, generally - that they looked similar to the \u00c6s\u00edr, which is to say like regular people.\n\n*However*, Tolkien was drawing from an Anglo-Saxon tradition and, while that's not *my* field of expertise, I do know a guy who's a great resource for it. \n\nIf you're up for some reading, Alaric Hall's [PhD on Elves in Medieval England is available online](_URL_0_), as is his article on [Elves in Anglo-Saxon England](_URL_1_). Both of them are fantastic places to get the information you're looking for and find some more sources (his bibliographies are goldmines)", "For the actual discussion of \"what constitutes an elf?\" in folklore, mythology, and pre-contemporary literature, I'm going to bow to u/itsallfolklore - you might want to see their answers for [Where did the lore of trolls, elves, dwarfs etc originate from? Are they from the same source or time period?](_URL_2_) and [J.R.R. Tolkein single-handedly created our modern conception of staple fantasy races such as Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs. Are his versions based on earlier legends, or did he invent them wholesale?](_URL_3_) for starters, and I'm going to focus on some of the literary traditions of depicting elves leading up to Tolkien.\n\n >  The Wild Things are somewhat human in appearance, only all brown of skin and barely two feet high. Their ears are pointed like the squirrel's, only far larger, and they leap to prodigious heights. They live all day under deep pools in the loneliest marshes, but at night they come up and dance. Each Wild Thing has over its head a marsh-light, which moves as the Wild Thing moves; they have no souls, and cannot die, and are of the kith of the Elf-folk.\n\n- Lord Dunsany, [\"The Kith of the Elf-Folk\"](_URL_5_) from *The Sword of Welleran  &  Other Stories* (1908)\n\nAt the time J. R. R. Tolkien was writing the background material for what would become *The Hobbit*, *The Lord of the Rings*, and *The Silmarillion*, the \"elf\" concept in English literature was largely synonymous with \"fairy\", and covered a wide range of supernatural beings, many diminutive. For example, in Shakespeare's [A Midsummer Night's Dream](_URL_1_), the elves are all implicitly tiny:\n\n >  Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;\n >  Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;\n >  Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,\n >  Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,\n >  To make my small elves coats, and some keep back\n >  The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders\n >  At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;\n >  Then to your offices and let me rest.\n\nAnd this followed through into the 19th century with popular works like [\"The Elves and the Shoemaker\"](_URL_4_) in *Grimm's Fairy Tales*:\n\n >  As soon as it was midnight, there came in two little naked dwarfs; and they sat themselves upon the shoemaker\u2019s bench, took up all the work that was cut out, and began to ply with their little fingers, stitching and rapping and tapping away at such a rate, that the shoemaker was all wonder, and could not take his eyes off them. And on they went, till the job was quite done, and the shoes stood ready for use upon the table. This was long before daybreak; and then they bustled away as quick as lightning.\n\nIn fairy tales as well as plays, there's a great variety in the depiction of elves - they tended to be diminutive, supernatural, and nature-oriented, but that was the extant of what you could say about them; it was practically a by-word for an entire class of minor spirits and entities as it was a specific designation, and not always well-distinguished form dwarfs. You can see the influence of this in fantasy fiction into the 20th century in forms like the popular depiction of Santa's elves, the Keebler elves, Lord Dunsany's \"The Kith of the Elf-Folk,\" and Tolkien discusses them in his essay [\"On Fairy-Stories\"](_URL_0_), where he notes:\n\n >  The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. [...] In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part.\n\nBut Tolkien's conception, drawing from further abroad and trying to marry the depictions of different myths with the contemporary English conception, yielded a more complicated elf. You can still see something of the \"wild\" appearance in an early depiction of Wood-Elves in *The Hobbit*:\n\n >  The feasting people were Wood-elves, of course. These are not wicked folk. If they have a fault it is distrust of strangers. Though their magic was strong, even in those days they were wary. They differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise. For most of them (together with their scattered relations in the hills and mountains) were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages, and grew fairer and wiser and more learned, and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before some came back into the Wide World. In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost.\n\nHere, Tolkien is making a distinction between the nature-oriented, less stately elves of the forest and the more noble, civilized, powerful and polished elves which would appear in *The Lord of the Rings*, based on Nordic and Germanic depictions. \n\nThis wasn't a completely unprecedented effort on Tolkien's part, in 1924 Lord Dunsany had published a novel titled *The King of Elfland's Daughter* which similarly focused on more regal, magical, civilized elves in the Germanic/Nordic mold than the diminutive nature-spirits of \"The Kith of the Elf-Folk,\" and Poul Anderson's novel *The Broken Sword* (1954 - one year before *The Lord of the Rings*) uses a very similar depiction, although his elves are necessarily very less scrupulous and somewhat degenerate in their tastes (not balking at incest or rape or stealing children, for example) - Anderson's novel went on to have a considerable influence on Michael Moorcock, who ended up writing the Elric of Melnibon\u00e9 series beginning in 1961 with the very cruel but highly civilized and sorcerous Melnibon\u00e9ans as elves-by-any-other-name. \n\nAnd while Tolkien, Dunsany, and Anderson's conception of the \"noble\" elf might be the most successful in fantasy fiction, and the diminutive elf of Shakespeare and fairy stories still popular in the form of Santa's helpers and the Keebler cookie elves, there was yet another trend worth looking at:\n\n >  More particularly I became convinced that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an exaggerated account of events that really happened, and I was especially drawn to consider the stories of the fairies, the good folk of the Celtic races. Here, I thought I could detect the fringe of embroidery and exaggeration, the fantastic guise, the little people dressed in green and gold sporting in the flowers, and I thought I saw a distinct analogy between the name given to this race (supposed to be imaginary) and the description of their appearance and manners. Just as our remote ancestors called the dreaded beings 'fair' and 'good' precisely because they dreaded them, so they had dressed them up in charming forms, knowing the truth to be the very reverse. Literature, too, had gone early to work, and had lent a powerful hand in the transformation, so that the playful elves of Shakespere are already far removed from the true original, and the real horror is disguised in a form of prankish mischief. But in the older tales, the stories that used to make men cross themselves as they sat around the burning logs, we tread a different stage; I saw a widely opposed spirit in certain histories of children and of men and women who vanished strangely from the earth. They would be seen by a peasant in the fields walking towards some green and rounded hillock, and seen no more on earth; and there are stories of mothers who have left a child quietly sleeping, with the cottage door rudely barred with a piece of wood, and have returned, not to find the plump and rosy little Saxon, but a thin and wizened creature, with sallow skin and black, piercing eyes, the child of another race. Then, again, there were myths darker still; the dread of witch and wizard, the lurid evil of the Sabbath, and the hint of demons who mingled with the daughters of men. And just as we have turned the terrible 'fair folk' into a company of benignant, if freakish elves, so we have hidden from us the black foulness of the witch and her companions under a popular diablerie of old women and broomsticks, and a comic cat with tail on end.\n\n- Arthur Machen, [\"The Novel of the Black Seal\"](_URL_6_) in *The Three Impostors* (1895)\n\nMachen's darker conception of the elves is implicitly euhemenistic; it takes as its base the fairy stories of stolen babies and changelings left in their place, elf-shot, and the like, and tries to make a quasi-realistic depiction of them as flesh-and-blood entities - dim, strange survivals, primitive and alien and terrible. This wasn't a necessarily widespread literary tradition, although the idea was picked up by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, but it goes to show that \"elves\" weren't just limited to the stately figures of Tolkien or the diminutive sprites of the Brother's Grimm."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4f91zc/jrr_tolkein_singlehandedly_created_our_modern/"], ["https://www.alarichall.org.uk/ahphdful.pdf", "https://libgen.pw/item/detail/id/383363?id=383363"], ["http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf", "http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x7tzw/where_did_the_lore_of_trolls_elves_dwarfs_etc/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4f91zc/jrr_tolkein_singlehandedly_created_our_modern/", "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2591/2591-h/2591-h.htm#link2H_4_0041", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swos/swos04.htm", "http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601861h.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3980uh", "title": "Has the US really been at war 222 out of 239 years since 1776?", "selftext": "I've seen this image being posted on social media claiming that the US has been at war 222 out of 239 years since 1776. Is this true or just some made-up fact?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3980uh/has_the_us_really_been_at_war_222_out_of_239/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs1j6l7", "cs1svwv", "cs1vt7w"], "score": [20, 9, 2], "text": ["Technically we haven't been at war since (WWII?). Only congress can declare war.", "In looking at this article from [\"Washington's Blog\"](_URL_0_) it seems like they are stretching a bit. While we can debate almost endlessly about the definition of war and how it could be looked at, the conflicts given in this list and many of the others I've seen falsely equate basic military operations and basic security operations with all out war. If you hold this same metric to other nations, you'd be hard pressed to find one that hasn't done the same thing or been \"continually at war\" on some level. There will always be operations to safeguard a nation, and those are different from an all out war. ", "The list literally includes almost every conflict which involved more than a couple US soldiers on foreign soil. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/america-war-93-time-222-239-years-since-1776.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "acfitr", "title": "In the British army of the 18th and 19th centuries, could an officer be promoted on merit or did all promotions have to be purchased?", "selftext": "Could someone, for example, buy themselves the rank of captain but then be promoted to a higher rank based entirely on merit?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/acfitr/in_the_british_army_of_the_18th_and_19th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed96w7u", "eddl9l3"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Hello!  \n\n\nThis is one of my PhD research questions so I am obliged to comment!\n\nAlthough purchasing commissions were very common in the 18th century in particular, what would also happen is a system of recommendations would be used whereby regimental commanders would look at the gaps in the ranks due to injury, peacetime demobbing etc, and then they would consider the lists of officers they had. If they felt the more junior officers were up to the task, they would pass their name up the chain, as far as the Prime Minister in some cases! These requests would then be either confirmed or amended, and ta dah, you have a promotion!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs far as I can see in my research, the commanding officer was usually considered a valid recommendation and amendments were uncommon. However, there is one example in MS. 9618 (see below) whereby two ensigns are turned down for promotion due to an investigation into their activities. One had been siphoning off money that was meant for be recruitment, the other  stole 90 Pounds from the regimental agent. And people say the army was corrupt....\n\n & #x200B;\n\n(it was, but that is for another question.)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI am basing this answer on primary research conducted with the following volumes in the National Library of Ireland:\n\nCopy of the typescript calendar, made by the Public Record Office, Belfast, of the State Papers, Ireland, in the Public Record Office, London, S. P. 63  MS. 9610-9618", "Short answer:\n\nYes. Merit, notable acts of courage or service to the army, service on staffs, seniority, etc. could all lead to unpurchased promotions.\n\nLong answer: \n\nYes! The 1871 Cardwell Reforms abolished the purchase of commissions so the a British army sensibly entered the 20th century with a promotion system built on merit, seniority, and social connections/status. Before 1871, getting an unpurchased promotion all depended on the officer's branch of service and/or how lucky he is (and how unlucky his colleagues were). This answer will dwell mostly in the Napoleonic Wars and the other wars of the French Revolution, but it broadly applies to much of the 18th and 19th century.\n\nThe Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers didn't use the purchase system. Their officers earned their commissions after completing a rigorous course of professional instruction at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. From then on, they usually got their promotions through seniority, with some considerations for merit. In broad strokes, it was similar to how the Royal Navy promoted officers.\n\nThe regiments of foot, cavalry regiment, foot guards, and horse guards all used the purchase system for commissions and promotions, with each category of regiment being more expensive than the last. Generally speaking, officers couldn't simply buy into the highest ranks, they usually had to serve time at lower grades and gradually purchase their way up. Outgoing officers sold their commissions to the rising men, which gave them something to retire on. It's important to note the purchase system did not apply to general officers and only affected **regimental rank,** a distinction that will become important in a minute.\n\nRobert Burnham and Ron McGuigan explain how the purchase system worked during the Napoleonic Wars: \n\n > Once an officer held a rank in the regiment, it was his for the rest of his life unless he was cashiered and forced out of the army. An officer, especially one who was older, could sell his commission to a junior officer and use this money to retire on, or he could go on half pay. A lieutenant colonel in a light dragoon regiment was authorized to sell his commission for \u00a34982 while a lieutenant colonel in a line infantry regiment could sell his for \u00a33500. This was the equivalent to almost 12 times the annual pay of the light dragoon lieutenant colonel and 11 times the annual pay for that of an infantry lieutenant colonel.\n\n > The commission was supposed to be offered to the senior officer in the regiment who was junior to that rank. For example if a lieutenant colonel decided to sell his commission, regulations stated that he had to offer it to the most senior major in the regiment. If that officer could not afford to buy it, then it was offered to the next senior major. If no one in the regiment was able to buy it, the officer selling the commission could offer it to any other major in the army who was looking to purchase his next rank. Although army regulations prohibited the selling of a commission for a higher price than what was authorized, it was not unheard of for an officer to sell it for a much higher price through his regimental agent.\n\nIn regular infantry and cavalry units, officers could be promoted without purchasing a commission. \n\nBurnham and McGuigan again:\n\n > Another way an officer could be promoted within a regiment was by appointment. With the expansion of the army after war broke out in 1803, there were many vacancies to be filled and many officers were promoted without having to purchase it.\n\nAs they note, promotion by appointment mostly happened during wartime. In peacetime, it might only happen if a battalion or regiment had lost officers to disease, shipwreck, etc. From this comes the rather macabe toast to \u201cbloody wars and sickly seasons\" in the officers' mess. \n\nHowever, junior officers could also have **army rank,** **brevet rank,** or **local rank.** Officers couldn't purchase promotions to these ranks, since these ranks weren't technically related to commission. \n\nLet's consider a hypothetical officer during the Peninsular War in around 1809: Simon Willis. \n\nWillis holds a commission as a captain in the 50th (West Kent) Regiment of Foot. He commands the 1st Battalion's 3rd Company. His *regimental rank* is that of captain and he draws a captain's pay - of course, since Captain Willis is a gentleman, he will supplement his meager pay with a small income from his estates in England. \n\nHowever, Captain Willis' witty *repartee* and the smartness of his company catches the eye of the division commander. Captain Willis is invited to serve on the division's staff. Since he now has more responsibility, Willis is given the **army rank** of major. His regimental rank is still that of a captain, but he is now called \"Major Willis\" and given a major's pay.\n\nAfter spending some time on the staff, Willis returns to his old job commanding a company of the 50th Foot. He's still technically a captain, but he's still addressed as \"Major Willis\" as a courteousy. But it's only a formality, since Willis now draws a captain's pay and only has a captain's responsibilities.\n\nDuring one sharp fight with the French, Willis saves the battalion's colors and rescues a brother officer from the clutches of some French dragoons. Since medals aren't common in this period, Willis is honored in another way. He is promoted to the **brevet rank** of major\n He'll be called \"Major Willis\" and might be given additional responsibilities to match his higher rank. He's still technically a captain, drawing captain's pay, of course. In that sense, brevet rank was very much like army rank.\n\nEven if he hadn't gotten a brevet for bravery, Willis could have gotten a brevet in another way. Beginning in the 1790s until the early 1800s, the army would periodically (usually once a year) give out brevets to long-serving or otherwise distinguished captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. Since the army needed officers in wartime, but there was a limited number of commission for purchase, brevetting officers was a good solution to get these officers. Brevetted officers exercised the authority of their higher rank, so in that sense, it was a very real promotion.\n\nThere's also **local rank,** which was usually given to higher-ranking officers serving on campaigns overseas. For example, many of Wellington's division commanders in the Peninsula had the local rank of lieutenant general, but only had the army rank of colonel.\n\nThe promotion system for general officers worked more or less in the same way as that for junior officers, with a few differences. Officers couldn't purchase promotions to general. It was unusual for an officer to be promoted a colonel or general officer through \"normal\" means (i.e. by appointment), so virtually all senior officers got their higher rank through the general brevets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5zl1p1", "title": "How fair is it to hold historical figures to modern ethical standards?", "selftext": "From my point of view there seems to be a large and recent increase in activists, writers, academics, etc. using modern ethical standards to retroactively judge historical figures. \n\nToday Shaun King, a prominent African-American writer, said on Twitter that no president who owned slaves is worthy of honor - including Washington and Jefferson. \n\nRecently, Princeton has been pressured to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from their School of Public and International Affairs, which so far they have resisted.\n\nA third example is with Christopher Columbus, whose reputation within my lifetime (I'm 33) has suffered immensely to the point where many refuse to celebrate the holiday in his honor and ask for it to be re-christened for some less offensive person or event.\n\nPersonally, it strikes me that it's unfair to judge historical figures so totally by modern ethical standards. In 2017 we have the benefit of hundreds of years of evidence (and pocket-sized computers which can access the sum of human knowledge in seconds) that certain policies and institutions were vile and reprehensible (though admittedly in the case of slavery it should have been apparent prima facie).\n\nAs historians, have you observed a surge in such sentiments recently, say the past 20 years? If so, what do you think are the reasons, and most importantly, do you think it's proper historiologically to judge historical figures harshly if they don't live up to early-21st century Western morality? Thanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zl1p1/how_fair_is_it_to_hold_historical_figures_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dez0sxi", "dez43ah", "dezbpu0", "dezc932", "dezdv20"], "score": [10, 19, 22, 8, 8], "text": ["This is mostly my own opinion (as I believe that is what you're asking for; correct me if I'm wrong).\n\n  Edit: I fear I've rambled a bit.  Oftentimes what makes perfect sense to me can be complete nonsense for others.  Not insinuating that anyone here is dumb, but I know I can have a tendency to make less and less sense, thus the TL,DR.\n\n TL,DR:  No, they shouldn't.  It's all based on context.  These same men if they lived today would have doubtlessly found the practices as disgusting as we do.  We are all affected by the society we live in and the morality that-that society has accepted as the norm.  \n\n  I've certainly observed a lot of historically 'good guys' have their names smeared for engaging in what amounted to standard practice when they were alive.  Why this happens could really be any number of things.  Everyone wants to erase the shame of their past even though were it not for that shame progress wouldn't have taken place and then continue to take place.  \n\n  As for judging these men and women, I feel that context is everything when it comes to understanding their motives, actions, and very way of life.  Many great men in history have done what by modern standards amount to 'evil' deeds but that does not diminish the fact that they were great men.  It merely shows that they were victims of circumstance.  In 1863 the London Anthropological Society published, \"The Negro's Place in Nature,\" which was an attempt to scientifically justify slavery.  The men who wrote it weren't 'evil,' those that read it and accepted it weren't either, and those that rejected it weren't 'good,' not for the time they lived in.  If something like that were published today, it would be unilaterally condemned, but back then it was completely acceptable.  \n\n  Something like owning slaves, which by our modern standards is seen(and rightly so) as barbaric and cruel, was completely acceptable when it was practiced.  Had it been widely accepted as 'evil' when it was practiced and these people had persisted regardless, then I could see the base for accusing them of being bad men, but judging everyone from history under the scope of our modern moral code without first understanding what their moral code was is pointless.  I imagine that in 100 years people will look to 2017 and think all kinds of negative things about the people of today.  Say (hypothetically) that some controversial thing like abortion becomes outlawed and taboo by 2117 and the pro-choice people of today are slandered and hated for that one specific belief.  Today they are heralded as generally good and decent people by our standards not because they were pro-choice, but because they contributed positively to society. \n\n  At the end of the day, what we happen to be or believe shouldn't have any bearing on what we do unless it is that belief that prompted us to take action in the first place.  Jefferson, Columbus, Wilson, Washington, they all did good for their people and in the time they lived they were heroes in their people's eyes.  It doesn't mean we need to regard them as heroes, but we shouldn't diminish what they did simply because of what the world around them encouraged them to believe.  ", "I do not have the expertise to comment on this subject, but there have been some threads with very good discussions between many of the flaired members here.\n\n[Why do historians reject moral presentism?](_URL_1_) asked by by /u/qspec02.\n\nAnd\n\n[Can anyone help me understand presentism and morality?](_URL_0_) asked by /u/124876720. \n\n(I limited my search to the past year.)\n\nThe gist of it seems to be that moral presentism is detrimental to considering historical figures within their own time. \n\nTo me as an amateur, it seems that using our own morality to judge historical figures instead of attempting to understand the context of an individual tends to reduce characters to binary figures (much as many \"moral judgements\" tend to today). And that is not helpful to the study of history.", "We had a [recent thread about this](_URL_0_) and in my opinion what is mixed up here is the question of historical assessment and the question of which figures a contemporary society chooses to celebrate.\n\nAs I wrote in that other thread concerning Dr. Seuss,wWhat I mean \u2013 and this is very much colored by my own sub area of history \u2013 is that as historians when it comes to assessing Dr. Seuss and Jefferson and other historical figures, we sure do take into account their historical context.  E.g. with Seuss, we can and should take a close look at the general discourse concering the Japanese and Japanese Americans at the time and draw a connection between what that discourse was and Seuss' cartoons, in the sense of how they were influenced by it and in turn further influenced the discourse themselves. We can also look for similar influences in his other work and so forth.\n\nWhen I study the Nazis, in order to understand their actions and the reasons behind them, I am very much forced to explore their stereotypes and ideological ideas in-depth and examine why they took hold, how they took hold, how widely they were held, and how they came about.\n\nBut does the fact that we can understand Nazi ideology in a historical context of European anti-Semitism and post-WWI Germany does not mean that we should not find their actions morally and politically reprehensible today.\n\nBecause the question, what and whom we as a contemporary society chose to celebrate, hold up as an example and revere while linked to a historical assessment within the context of their time is not solely dependent on this assessment but also linked with what images and traditions we want to project of our society and hold up as worthy.\n\nThe reason why we as a society want to and should celebrate for example Sojourner Truth or Rosa Parks is not solely related to their courageous actions against a system of injustice in their time but also because we as a society or as individuals want these actions to stand as examples to live up and aspire to in the sense of also standing up courageously to injustice. So, when it comes to the question of which figures to celebrate and revere, it is not just about their time but also about ours.\n\nWhile undeniable that important things historically happened under Jackson's presidency, the question if we as a society want to celebrate him as an exemplary president, who's legacy people should live up to, is not answered yet (and the answer is no, if you ask me).\n\nThe Stalinist Soviet Union played an undeniable important role historically in liberating Europe from the dangers of Nazism and Fascism \u2013 but that doesn't mean we should celebrate it as a shining example of virtue to aspire to.\n\nThis also applies to slave holding presidents in that sense, that, yes, historians will access them and will find that slave holding was normalized in their day despite the fact that due to the moralities they shared with ours also at the time did recognize the wrongness of slavery, at least partially. Yet, when it comes to the question if we as a society should celebrate them as shining examples of virtue we want to us to inspire, there needs to be a place for the full historical assessment and we have to ask ourselves the question if in terms of providing examples for society and people we want to overlook that they were the products of a time deeply racist \u2013 and if we instead of holding them as products of these times up as exemplary if we shouldn't critically assess that time and its continuing legacy it has to this day.\n\nIn that vein, the question if we want to make them part of what at this moment in time represents what our society wants to celebrate is not solely historical anymore, it is also influenced and shaped by what kind of society we want to be and what we want to celebrate as good and righteous. ", "Another part of the answer that I haven't (yet) seen anyone else post: historians, and scholars generally, first and foremost want to *understand* the past, and then and only then (if at all) judge it.\n\nIf we just say that everyone who owned slaves was a terrible person -- which may or may not be true -- and leave it at that, that puts a stop to the dialogue. A historian might want to know why people owned slaves, or why it was more prevalent in one area than another, or what arguments slave-owners used to justify it to themselves, or even how it affected the larger culture. In my area of expertise, ancient history, we might talk about, say, the gladiatorial games, and want to research the lives of gladiators, or how common the institution really was, what other people at the time thought of it, etc.\n\nJust saying \"They did it because they're bad people\" -- which, again, may or not be true -- makes it difficult to research those other topics or to discuss them with other scholars.\n\nPersonally, I usually try, one the one hand, to keep hold of what I think are real ethical advances in our own day (slavery really is bad, so that has to detract somewhat from Washington), while still putting historical figures in their own context and judging them accordingly (Washington was, by all accounts, a better master than most, and even if not he certainly did a lot of other good and noble things; he can't have been a villain). Yes, there were abolitionists in his day, but I can't blame someone for not having the intellect or unerring moral compass to realize that some things that were perfectly normal and acceptable in their societies, that they saw every day of their lives pass uncriticized, were actually evil. Washington isn't a monster because he wasn't a saint.", "Yes, I think it's perfectly appropriate -- though as historians, we should be doing much more than just judging people's morality, if we seek to actually *understand* the past for what it was.\n\nMoral absolutes don't, by definition, change, and consequently I cannot (for example) in good conscience say that slavery is always a moral evil while making excuses for people who practiced it in the past. It is true that different people, cultures, times, and places have different moral systems, and I have to recognize that something I feel to be morally obvious may not be obvious to others around me -- especially in the past. But that doesn't mean that all morality is relative. If my principles are sound, then the time or place doesn't change their soundness, and I would be violating my conscience by holding the past to a special standard.\n\nThat said, judging the past only gets us so far. Jefferson is dead, and he doesn't care what we say about him -- judging him is something we do for ourselves, not for him. It's important for our own moral health to be honest about the complicated way he was able to blind himself to the lack of freedom in his own house while writing eloquent defenses of freedom in public, and we shouldn't hesitate to condemn him for his hypocrisy. This is valuable, as the past can teach moral lessons for the present: we learn to identify evils in our own society by identifying them in the past.\n\nBut we can say much more interesting things about Jefferson's hypocrisy than just calling him a bad man. The fact that he -- and the rest of white Western Europe -- was able to live with such radical cognitive dissonance tells us a *lot* about how people thought and acted in the 18th century. If we want to really understand their motives, their actions, the writings they left behind, and their impact on the world we continue to live in, we need to dig into their ideas on their own terms, taking for example Jefferson's belief in the fundamental *rightness* of his actions seriously (even though I would say this belief was wrong), and doing our best to wrap our heads around the logic that made their moral world make sense to them. We need to practice empathy, and not just write off people in the past as monsters. But we can practice empathy without sacrificing our own moral judgment.\n\nIs there an uptick? No, I don't think so. If you read old historiography, it's *full* of moral judgments (declining societies, primitive peoples, barbarous actions...look at the adjectives historians used in the past!). More recently, it's been the trend to stay away from this language, as it can color our ability to fairly analyze the past if we *start* by writing it off as 'barbarous' or backwards, and perhaps we're seeing a bit of backlash against that now as more historians (myself included) realize that having empathy doesn't mean making excuses for people in the past. Yet these kinds of moral judgments have always been a part of history writing -- not the only part, and not I think the most important part, but part nonetheless of making sense of our place in time vis-a-vis the people who came before us."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3koz5x/can_anyone_help_me_understand_presentism_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vywvk/why_do_historians_reject_moral_presentism/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5x65of/meta_how_to_discuss_history_with_people_who_are/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "auorjx", "title": "Has there ever been a 13th-Amendment challenge to conscription/selective service in the United States? If so, how did it turn out?", "selftext": "The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: \n\n > *Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.*\n\nBeing drafted by compulsion into the military or alternative civilian service by the government seems like it would at least create a legal argument for \"involuntary servitude.\" Were there attempts to make this argument say, during, the Vietnam War era, or otherwise?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/auorjx/has_there_ever_been_a_13thamendment_challenge_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehawk11"], "score": [7], "text": [" > Were there attempts to make this argument say, during, the Vietnam War era, or otherwise?\n\nYes, during WW1, just after the Selective Draft Law was passed in 1917 (precursor to the 1967 Selective Service Law) several were charged and convicted of refusing to register and Emma Golding, the anarchist and prominent Socialists were also convicted of encouraging others to refuse to register.  After the trials, SCOTUS, snatched the three cases from the appeals courts and heard them immediately. Together, Arver v US, (245 U.S. 366), Goldman v US, and Ruthenberg v US, make up the \"Selective Draft Law Cases\") The NY Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) took up similar arguments in 1969, challenging the 1967 updated law along the same lines and arguing the Selective Draft Law Cases were incorrectly decided, specifically arguing 1) the Military Selective Service Act of 1967 is unconstitutional since it exceeds the powers granted to the federal government, and 2)that historical evidence demonstrates that the framers of the Constitution did not intend to grant Congress the power to conscript.\n\nSee: [Leon Friedman, Conscription and the Constitution: The Original Understanding, 67Mich. L. Rev.1493 (1969)](_URL_0_) \n\nThe facts from Friedman and the NYCLU:\n > Joseph F. Arver and Otto H.Wangerin refused to register and were indicted on June 8, 1917, tried the following month before a United States district court in Minnesota, found guilty, and sentenced to one year in prison. The Supreme Court granted a writ of error directly to the trial court and argument was presented on December 13 and 14, 1917, along with the cases of other draft resisters from New York. At the same time the Court heard the appeals of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,\"two noted anarchist leaders who had been found guilty of conspiring to counsel resistance to the draft law in New York, and the appeals of Charles E. Ruthenberg, Alfred Wagenknecht, and Charles Baker, prominent Ohio Socialists who were convicted of encouraging a young man not to register.\n\n > In asserting the invalidity of the draft, the defendants pressed two primary arguments:[1] that the thirteenth amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude deprived Congress of any power to conscript; and [2] that the draft conflicted with the militia clauses of the Constitution since the federal government had effectively destroyed the state forces by drawing all the members of the state militia into federal service and shipping them overseas. In the course of their argument, the defendants traced the history of English military organization, emphasizing that no general conscription law had been passed in England prior to the twentieth century.They also claimed that the acts and regulations of the draft unlawfully delegated legislative authority to the President.\n\nChief Justice Edward White authored the opinion rejecting all those arguments and  upholding the law.  Characterizing the power to conscript as \"an essential attribute of sovereignty.\"  He cited the large number of nations enforcing compulsory military service in 1917, concluding: \"It would be a contradiction in terms to declare the Government of the United States a sovereign, endowed with all the powers necessary for its existence, yet lacking in the most essential of all-the power of self-defense.\"'  C.J. White also cited the many colonial and state laws in force before 1787-almost 200 were listed-calling for compulsory militia service by all male citizens and noted the federal draft was proposed (although not passed) in 1814 and the fact that a conscription law was enacted during the Civil War showed the practical exercise of the power and was therefore a recognition of it.\nThe court further rejected the relevance of the militia clauses of the Constitution, since men were taken directly into a federal army by the1917 law rather than as members of a federalized state militia. The Court dismissed the thirteenth amendment argument by pointing out that the sole purpose of the amendment was to abolish chattel slavery, not to eliminate compulsory governmental service.\n\nThe Arver court wanted to settle the selective service challenges completely and for all time, and as much as Friedman and the NYCLU disagreed, 13A is and was **only** about dissolving the badges and incidents of slavery.  \n\n > Slavery  and  involuntary  servitude  were enforced, both prior to and after the  adoption  of  the  13th  amendment  to  the  Constitution  of  the  United States,  through  widespread  public  and private  violence  directed  at  persons because of their race, color, or ancestry, or perceived race, color, or ancestry.    Accordingly,  eliminating  racially  motivated  violence  is  an  important  means  of  eliminating,  to  the  extent  possible,  the  badges,  incidents, and relics of slavery and involuntary servitude. \n(National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-84, \u00a7 4707, 123 Stat.  2190,  2838\u201339.    Division  E  of  the  Act  is denominated as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.)\n\nThe final sentence of 13A is \"Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.\"  Congress created the Civil Rights Act(s) under this power, as well as the Hate Crimes Act in the quote above.  But the mandate is limited to laws necessary and proper to eradicating 'badges of slavery', nothing more.  Involuntary Servitude includes 'peonage', a kind of wage-slavery common in sharecropper agreements, company stores, and arrangements where an employer extends credit to an employee and works for free to repay it but never can.  Petty criminal charges and excessive fines and convict labor has also been judged as peonage and a badge of slavery (see 1903 Alabama Peonage Trials) in certain circumstances.  I'm in favor of a looser understanding of peonage to bring student loans under 'badges of slavery', but courts won't buy that anymore than military service for which a person receives wages.  Non-compete employment contracts were struck down as involuntary servitude by courts until about the 1970s, but that's the furthest they've taken it outside traditional civil rights.\n\nConscription isn't in the constitution, but was discussed in the Federalist Papers as a means of common defense, and because 'militia' in 2A meant all males, able bodied and 14 years old, the founders, the constitution itself and the Supreme Court are comfortable with the legality of conscription as a sensible means of homeland defense.\n\n > The Militia Act of 1791, ancestor of the present National Guard system, mandated universal obligatory service at the state level, with state forces available to the federal government in time of specific emergency. All else was to be handled by the standing army or by volunteer forces raised for a clear and limited purpose.\n\nVietnam, as a foreign war, and depending on your point of view, an immoral war, was missing that connection to homeland defense, so there's an argument that the obligation of common defense doesn't attach to foreign wars, but that's a losing legal argument.  Conscientious objector status is available and has been recognized for religious objections since the founding (Quakers, etc) but the moral objections are limited to moral objections to all war, not merely foreign wars or unpopular wars, but all. Gillette v US, 401 U.S. 437 (1971) With an all volunteer military- despite the taxing of National Guard forces in Vietnam and more recently- the chances of a draft and conscription are very remote, but not involuntary servitude as 13A precisely defines it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&amp;context=faculty_scholarship"]]}
{"q_id": "8g9snn", "title": "Why doesn't USA celebrate Labor Day on May first?", "selftext": "This holiday is pretty popular in my country, even though many people connect it with communism. I remember reading that this originated from an event that happened in the US.\n\nWhat were the reasons for US having it on a different day?\n\nAnd how widespread are the May 1st celebrations in the rest of the world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8g9snn/why_doesnt_usa_celebrate_labor_day_on_may_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyacrf4"], "score": [140], "text": ["While waiting for a new answer, [you may be interested in this response](_URL_0_) by /u/QuickSpore to a similar question, detailing the origins of May Day and why it gained international importance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jlyed/why_is_labor_day_in_america_not_celebrated_on_may/cuqkuqk/"]]}
{"q_id": "27ovga", "title": "What would be done with decommissioned naval vessels during the Age of Sail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27ovga/what_would_be_done_with_decommissioned_naval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci2x2v5"], "score": [18], "text": ["A common life cycle for a warship was to begin its career as either a purpose built warship or converted merchantman. Once it was older and either obsolete or no longer fit for war it might become a storeship for supplies or a training vessel. Sometime after that it might be moved to a harbor and permanently moored for use as a supply shed or barracks. Some might even be converted into temporary buildings. Finally when the hull was completely used up she would be scrapped and the useful salvage reused, metal fittings and fasteners being among the more desirable salvage. \n\nThe first *USS New Hampshire*, built in 1819, never saw combat as a warship, but is a good example of how a hull too old for war might see continued use. She was built, stored until the Civil War, then used as a depot ship and training vessel for the next 40 years.\n\n > Alabama, one of \u201cnine ships to rate not less than 74 guns each\u201d authorized by Congress 29 April 1816, was laid down by the Portsmouth Navy Yard, N.H., in June 1819, the year the State of Alabama was admitted to the Union. Though ready for launch by 1825, she remained on the stocks for preservation until needed during the Civil War. Renamed New Hampshire 28 October 1863, she was launched 23 April 1864, fitted out as a stores and depot ship of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron; and commissioned 13 May 1864, Commodore Henry K. Thatcher in command.\n\n > New Hampshire sailed from Portsmouth 15 June and relieved sister ship Vermont 29 July 1864 as store and depot ship at Port Royal, S.C., and served there through the end of the Civil War. She returned to Norfolk 8 June 1866, serving as a receiving ship there until 10 May 1876 when she sailed back to Port Royal. She resumed duty at Norfolk in 1881 but soon shifted to Newport, R.I. She became flagship of Commodore Stephen B. Luce\u2019s newly formed Apprentice Training Squadron, marking the commencement of an effective apprentice training program for the Navy. \n\n > New Hampshire was towed from Newport to New London, Conn., in 1891 and was receiving ship there until decommissioned 5 June 1892. The following year she was loaned as a training ship for the New York State Naval Militia which was to furnish nearly a thousand officers and men to the Navy during the Spanish-American War.\n\n > New Hampshire was renamed Granite State 30 November 1904 to free the name New Hampshire for a newly authorized battleship. Stationed in the Hudson River, she continued training service throughout the years leading to World War I when State naval militia were practically the only trained and equipped men available to the Navy for immediate service. They were mustered into the Navy as National Naval Volunteers. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels wrote in his Our Navy at War: \u201cNever again will men dare riducule the Volunteer, the Reservist, the man who in a national crisis lays aside civilian duty to become a soldier or sailor\u2014They fought well. They died well. They have left in deeds and words a record that will be an inspiration to unborn generations.\u201d \n\n > Granite State served the New York State Militia until she caught fire and sank at her pier in the Hudson River 23 May 1921. Her hull was sold for salvage 19 August 1921 to the Mulholland Machinery Corp. Refloated in July 1922, she and was taken in tow to the Bay of Fundy. The towline parted during a storm, she again caught fire and sank off Half Way Rock in Massachusetts Bay.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/n4/new_hampshire-i.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2b6ln7", "title": "Who, what, when, where, why, and how did a standing army replace local militias in the US?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b6ln7/who_what_when_where_why_and_how_did_a_standing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj2c8ms", "cj2ryr9"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["Im not quite sure what youre asking about here. The US Army has existed nearly continuously since 1775, so the standing army has existed longer than the United States. \n\nThe State Militias exist as well, albeit in a slightly modified form. See, in 1916 the US Government reorganized the State Militias into the various state forces, thereafter called the National Guard. These formations, which still exist, are the heirs and direct successors to the state militias. ", "While Beondthegrave is technically correct in that the State Militias still exist, effectively the state militias were largely in a state of decline from the early 19th century on. The increasing democratization of the American people coupled with challenges to the long standing social hierarchy in the aftermath of the revolution meant that the state militia system was in a dramatic decline and was largely no longer an effective means of national defense. Coupled with this is a dramatic expansion of the United States and the lack of wars against European powers which had dominated most of American history. The wars that the United States would fight in the future were largely on the fringes of the United States where state militia, would have been ineffective. The Mexican-American war would be largely fought by the Regular army and state raised volunteers. The exceptions to this trend were areas of the West where conflict with the native peoples was still a concern, and to an extent in the American South where failed slave rebellions in the 1820's and 1830's coupled with fears Northern extremists in the aftermath of John Brown's raid lead to Southern states to increasingly rearm themselves and organize civilian units."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ettxn", "title": "Why don't the British speak a Romance language?", "selftext": "Britain (or most of it), Spain and France (Gaul) were all Roman provinces that  were later conquered by Germanic tribes. Yet the French and Spanish speak Romance languages, but the English/British a Germanic language (with the exception of the Celtic minorities). What happened in the case of Britain that caused them to adopt a Germanic dialect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ettxn/why_dont_the_british_speak_a_romance_language/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck2vefb"], "score": [7], "text": ["This has been asked a few times already, [here's a link to some earlier discussions on the topic.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_why_doesn.27t_england_speak_a_latin-based_language_like_other_former_european_roman_provinces"]]}
{"q_id": "5csy0x", "title": "How did Roman engineers explain gravity?", "selftext": "When constructing aquaducts from the source on the highest point a distance away from the desired distribution point for the water, and at a precise gradient to ensure consistant flow, Roman engineers seemingly understood the effects of gravity but how did they explain the phenomenon? Did they assume that gravity was a property of water or of anything that \"rolled downhill\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5csy0x/how_did_roman_engineers_explain_gravity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9zfxe2", "d9zqd2x"], "score": [15, 9], "text": ["They probably explained it mostly through Aristotelian Physics, which was only fully repudiated in the 17th century. Aristotle claimed that there can be no effect (e.g. motion) without a cause. He explained gravity by appealing to the *nature* of objects. \"Earth\" and \"water\" were heavy elements, so they naturally moved down towards the center of the Universe. \"Fire\" was a light element so it naturally moved up towards the heavens. There was no conception of forces or energy or anything that we might describe as modern mechanics. It even implies that gravity is dependent on an object's weight, which Galileo would prove to be false centuries later. \n\nThere seems to be some developments of this theory during Roman times. In *De Architectura*, Vitruvius counters Aristotle's claim that an object's weight determines the effect of gravity on it by claiming that mercury can hold up a very heavy stone, but let a light piece of gold sink through it (recognizing the existence of specific gravities). He again related this to the \"nature\" of the object rather than things like balancing forces, density, and pressure. \n\nIn all, Roman engineers, with some adjustments, probably explained gravity by using Aristotle's theories of natures, so water, being a heavy element, would flow down towards the center of the universe (towards Earth). They could utilize this fact and set up aqueducts to make water flow to where they wanted.\n\n", "They didn't need to \"explain\" it \u2014 that's a very different perspective than a Roman engineer would have had.\n\nRoman engineers were not scientists and did not need \"science\" to build aqueducts. They knew how to build them from rules of thumb developed by engineers over very long time periods. They were not searching for explanations about how the natural world \"worked.\" Frankly they would not have gotten much use from anything a philosopher could have told them about this anyway; even through the 17th century and the \"Scientific Revolution,\" the science of statics was still inferior to things figured out from practical engineering experience. In the 18th and esp. 19th century, this starts to change, but you don't need a concept of gravitational force to build an aqueduct. It was not until the 17th century that people really understood on a theoretical level why arches even worked. \n\nIf they _did_ care about the \"why\" question, the reigning theory of the data was Aristotle's, and it basically said that all natural things have a natural motion, and the natural motion of water and earth is to move downward. There are no forces.\n\nBut again, this puts the cart before the horse. You don't need to know why water moves downhill to utilize that fact. It's pretty obvious that it _does_ \u2014 if you asked a Roman engineer, \"why does water move downhill?\" he'd probably think you were a dolt. \"It's just what water _does_, dummy. That's its nature. Every child knows that.\" The idea that one should quantify these kinds of \"laws\" and put them into an algebraic notation does not really show up until Descartes, and even then \"why\" questions are still pretty problematic (_why_ does gravitational force obey an inverse square law? Even Newton had to say, I don't know \u2014 _Hypotheses non fingo_ \u2014\u00a0I guess it's just its nature)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c5k38j", "title": "I just saw a TIL post saying that the fax machine predates the telephone by several decades. Please tell me anything and everything about the history of 19th century fax machines. How did they work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c5k38j/i_just_saw_a_til_post_saying_that_the_fax_machine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["es3q3ni"], "score": [10], "text": ["This isn't as strange as it at first sounds.  Sending pictures  and sending sounds as electrical signals were separate problems.  \"Fax machines\" that predated the phone were inventions to send images over wires.   When telephone networks became ubiquitous, the technology was adapted a bit such that it sent signals over phone wires (mostly, adapting to the signal constraints imposed by the phone system.)\n\nThe earliest example of such a device is probably Alexander Bain's.  It sent a drawing etched into a copper plate.  A pendulum would \"scan\" horizontal lines of the image by swinging across the plate.  The change in electrical potential between when it contacted the copper and when it did not was used to create electrical impulses.  On the other end, a pendulum would induce a chemical reaction via changing electrical potential to re-create the image.  Early devices like this were problematic in that both the pendulum timing and plate advancement were difficult to synchronize.\n\nFrederick Bakewell improved in this with a device that used rotating cylinders instead of pendulums and images printed on conducting metal foil with insulating ink instead of copper plates.  Giovanni Caselli's Pantelegraph was a bit more reliable because it used clocks at both ends to keep the devises synchronized.  It used scanning pendulums like Bain's earlier device but images to be sent were insulating ink on foil like Bakewell's device.  This saw some commercial success with a service to send images between Paris, Lyon and Marseille via telegraph lies (about 20 years before Bell's patent of the telephone.)\n\nEarly devices remained rather constrained in their input.   It wasn't until the 1920's that \"fax\" machines were invented that could convert light intensity to an electrical signal, allowing one to send photographs or reproduce images printed on normal paper."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32srrj", "title": "In British politics, what factors led to the decline of the Liberal Party and caused the Labour Party to be the main opposition to the Conservative Party?", "selftext": "The Liberals used to be the main opposition to the Conservatives, but the last election where the Liberals had more vote than Labour was 1918. In the US where we also have a first past the post system, when a new major party has arisen (like when the Republicans overtook the Whigs), the old party tends to disappear. In addition to my main question, what factors in Britain led to the Liberals to continue to exist as a party when it was overtaken by Labour?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32srrj/in_british_politics_what_factors_led_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqebdyz", "cqec3g2", "cqejia5"], "score": [99, 5, 3], "text": ["It's been a point of contention for many historians. In George Dangerfield's thesis *The Strange Death of Liberal England* he points to the failings of the Liberal Party 1910-1914 to suggest that the party was in terminal decline before the war, with the Labour Party rising to take its place. This view has been criticised, however, as the party was still in government and Labour was polling quite poorly in by-elections. The North-East Derbyshire y-election, for example, showed that Labour could not stand against Liberal candidates even in strong mining areas, where they were expected to do best. Due to the nature of the War, there were no elections between December 1910 and 1918, so it's hard to conclusively dismiss either theory.    \nMost, however, would point to the War as the main downfall of the Liberal Party (Lowe - 'WW1 started the rot'). Within the Liberal Party there were fundamental differences, that emerged primarily as pacifism and war supporters. The pacifist wing of the Party was small to begin with, but it grew in time due to the nature of total war, with some Liberals becoming concerned about the erosion of liberties caused by, amongst other things, the Defence of the Realm Act 1916. During this, the Labour Party was also split. Informal and formal ties with the Liberal Party, which had been present since the 1906 Lib-Lab Pact, were cut. In some ways this strengthened Labour; they were finally their own party and many of them (eg Ramsay MacDonald) resigned in protest soon after the outbreak of war. Problematically, some senior Labour ministers did not resign, Arthur Henderson most prominent amongst them, so the Labour Party was also split.    \nThe key turning point was the removal of Asquith as Prime Minister on December 7th 1916. A year earlier Asquith had called a grand coalition together to help with the war, concerned that he would not be strong enough to win another election if he was forced to call one. This was dominated by Conservatives, led by Bonar Law. There were concerns that the war effort was being run inefficiently and that Asquith was not giving them sufficient leadership. On December 5th, with the agreement of Bonar Law, David Lloyd George went to Asquith with a recommendation of a new, smaller War Cabinet of 5: Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Curzon, Henderson and Balfour. Asquith could remain Prime Minister in name but, effectively, not in power. Asquith seemed likely to accept this until a Times article was published on December 6th that ridiculed him, provoking a refusal. Lloyd George, Bonar Law and other key Conservatives all resigned, effectively ensuring that Asquith could not continue. On December 7th the King called for Lloyd George, making him Prime Minister.     \nWith this caused a split between the Asquithian Liberals and the Lloyd George Liberals. The Asquithian Liberals saw this as a coup d'etat by Lloyd George, whilst Lloyd George Liberals saw it as a necessary change for the good of the war effort. Asquith refused to serve under Lloyd George and this arrangement continued until the end of the war in 1918. Both Asquith and Lloyd George were never short of self-assurance, and a return to the pre-war ways seemed impossible.    \nMeanwhile the Labour Party was more united than ever. In 1917 Arthur Henderson resigned from the War Cabinet, and in 1918 the Labour Party launched its own constitution. The key addition here was Clause IV, which committed the Labour Party to a socialist agenda and the common ownership of the means of production. They were now significantly different than the flagging Liberal Party and offered a viable alternative for the working class.      \nWhen the war ended in 1918, Asquith and Lloyd George continued to disagree about the running of the Liberal Party. As such, Lloyd George decided to continue with the current arrangement; Bonar Law and the Conservatives were concerned that they had not won an election in 18 years, and the propaganda gained from 'The Man Who Won The War' was significant. The election was a whitewash; the coalition could call on 505 votes in the Chamber. Asquithian Liberals were reduced to 36 seats, with Asquith himself losing his seat (he would return to the Commons in a 1920 by-election). The third largest party was Sinn Fein, who refused to sit in the Commons. As such, the Labour party became the de-facto Opposition Party, giving them more credibility than they previously had.    \nThe coalition was a significant disaster for Lloyd George and he was removed from power in the 1922 Carlton Club Meeting. Asquith had taken with him the grassroots organisation of the party and Lloyd George could not build a new party by scratch. By the end of his tenure he was distrusted by a large majority of the electorate, particularly due to incidents like the Chanak Crisis 1922, where he nearly dragged Britain into another war with Turkey.  In 1923 Asquith and Lloyd George agreed to reunite to fight the election together in opposition to Imperial Preference, but by then it was too late. Asquith was old and Lloyd George was not trusted.        \nOne last, fatal mistake was made in the aftermath of the 1923 General Election. The Conservatives had won a plurality of seats with 258, but as the only party of Imperial Preference they could not gain the support necessary to form a functioning government. The Liberal Party, convinced that it would ruin Labour, allowed Labour to form a minority government with their backing. It only lasted 9 months, but Ramsay MacDonald followed a moderate stance that cemented Labour's credibility in the midst of a Red Scare. It solidified Labour as the second party and left the Liberals without a voter base - the working class vote belonged to Labour and the businessmen vote belonged to the Conservatives.          \nSources: Dangerfield, George: The Strange Death of Liberal England    \nHattersley, Roy: David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider    \nPugh, Martin: Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party      \n", "So far i only have one source on the subject which I am reading right now. In the book English History 1914-1945 by Taylor it is stated: That the Liberal party in 1929-1931 had failed to adopt itself to the new trend of municipal elections becoming an integral part of local administration. Furthermore he claims that many of it's supporters were nonconformists who lost interest in politics after significant advances in education had been made. There was insufficient contribution to local affairs where the Liberal party made no strong points. Labour would act in the interests of the needy and the conservatives in the interests of the ratepayers. The Liberals intended to position themselves as independents but in reality mostly went with the conservatives. \nThis all caused the Liberals to become detached from local politics and turned into a national cause. Here to it ran into great difficulties with party finance being the largest. Though financially supported by Lloyd George the liberal party was chronically short on funds which further impeded their position in government.\n\n\nI hope this helps.", "If you're interested on the subject there are two good books by Michael Freeden and David Dutton. I can't remember the titles though (I'll edit later if you need). \nPersonally I feel Dangerfield's work might be a tad outdated but it's still a good first read. But the first comment provided a good summary of the subject. \nI've spent quite a lot of time working on the subject lately, and it appears there's basically no real consensus as to why the party declined. Historians usually provide the same arguments (ww1, the internal division, the rise of labour etc...), but since one's historian explanation does not fit another one's political beliefs it goes full circle. \n\nIf you're interested I have a bibliography of 10+ references on the subject, I'll edit it in if people are interested (I'm on my tablet) \n\nEdit: \n\n* Dutton, David. Liberals in Schism. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008.\n\n* Freeden, Michael. Liberalism Divided. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.\n\n* Dutton, D. '1932: A Neglected Date in the History of the Decline of he British Liberal Party'. Twentieth Century British History 14, no. 1 (2003): 43-60.\n\nSome good historiographical reviews (albeit aging):\n \n* Laybourn, Keith. 'The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate'. History 80, no. 259 (1995): 207-226.\n\n* Thompson, J. A. 'The Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party'. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 22, no. 1 (1990): 65-83."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "f5uorw", "title": "Why and when did the Romans choose Venus as their founding deity?", "selftext": "The Aeneid mentions Aeneas, the founder of the Roman race, as the son of Venus, and it seems Ennius does in his Annales earlier. Why did Rome choose Venus for its founding deity and not Jupiter or any of the other deities in their pantheon? When was this choice first made?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f5uorw/why_and_when_did_the_romans_choose_venus_as_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi0xxhp"], "score": [9], "text": ["The idea that Venus is somehow the founding deity of Rome is, to a large extent, a result of the *Aeneid*'s success. Before Vergil wrote this poem, the story of Rome's origins were still up in the air.\n\nUntil then, Aeneas is viewed not as the ancestor of all Rome, but just of the gens Iulia (the Julian clan), to which Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar belonged. The Julii seem to have made a connection with Iulus, son of Aeneas, as early as the 3rd century, but again, that's just for one family.\n\nThe most important Roman ancestor is Romulus, whose father is Mars, which is why Mars has a better claim to be the founding deity of Rome than Venus does. Even before Vergil, some authors connect Romulus with Aeneas (as Ennius seems to do, by making Romulus' mother Aeneas' daughter), but there are numerous other versions of the founding of Rome, many of which have nothing to do with Aeneas or his descendants.\n\nSo, it's really only when Vergil writes the *Aeneid* that Aeneas comes to be viewed as the founder of the Roman race, and it's hard to stress how big an innovation this is. Vergil is saying that Aeneas is the founder of a race, which is not the way ancient ideas of foundation really worked, and Vergil is constructing an idea of Romanness that predates Rome.\n\nThe popularity of this poem makes everything seem neat and canonical now, but it was far from that way at the time, and it was a combination of Vergil's poetic skill and the political power of the Iulii at the time. Because she was the founding divinity of the Iulii, she comes to take on a larger role when they become synonymous with Rome.\n\nIf you want to read some of the other stories of Rome's foundation, the early chapters of Plutarch's 'Life of Romulus' are good, as is the first book of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' 'Roman Antiquities.'\n\nA solid overview of the Aeneas legend before Vergil can be found in Horsfall's 1987 \"The Aeneas Legend from Homer to Virgil\" in *Roman Myth and Mythography* (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 52), pp. 12ff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d5sumv", "title": "What were the original forms of names like John, Paul, Mark, Rebecca and Mary. And Jesus.", "selftext": "It seems most westerners have arabic (biblical) names. Though im guessing these are not in original form. What were these original forms and are they still common today? Was 'Jesus' a common name back then in the middle east?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d5sumv/what_were_the_original_forms_of_names_like_john/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0nz16j"], "score": [43], "text": ["Yes, the most practiced religion in the western world has had a large influence on the names people living there give their kids. You're mostly right, the original versions of those names were very different (though they're mostly Hebrew and Aramaic, not Arabic, which didn't exist until well into the first century AD at the earliest, although they are all part of the same family of languages), and in most cases went through several other languages before reaching the names we know now. \n\nPlease note that there is still some dispute as to the exact transliterations and etymologies of some of these names, I'm giving the ones I'm most familiar with.\n\nFor one example you mentioned, John, a common name in numerous western languages, comes from the Latinized version (Iohannes or Johannes), of the Greek translation (\u0399\u03c9\u03b1\u03bd\u03bd\u03b7\u03c2, Ioannes) of the Hebrew name  \u05d9\u05d5\u05b9\u05d7\u05b8\u05e0\u05b8\u05df (Yochanon, among other transliterations, meaning 'God is gracious').\n\nYou can trace a similar path with Jesus, which is the Latinized form of the Greek translation (\u0399\u03b7\u03c3\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 ,Iesous) of the Aramaic name  \u05d9\u05b5\u05e9\u05c1\u05d5\u05bc\u05e2\u05b7 (Yeshua), which was itself a shortened from of the Hebrew (\u05d9\u05b0\u05d4\u05d5\u05b9\u05e9\u05c1\u05bb\u05e2\u05b7, Yehoshua, 'God is salvation'), which is the same route we get the name Joshua from.\n\nSame with Mary: Mary being a shortened version of the Latin Maria, from the Greek \u039c\u03b1\u03c1\u03b9\u03b1 'Maria' and \u039c\u03b1\u03c1\u03b9\u03b1\u03bc 'Mariam', from the Hebrew \u05de\u05b4\u05e8\u05b0\u05d9\u05b8\u05dd 'Miryam'. Rebecca is much the same, being from the Greek \u1fec\u03b5\u03b2\u03ad\u03ba\u03ba\u03b1, from the Hebrew \u05e8\u05b4\u05d1\u05b0\u05e7\u05b8\u05d4 'Rivkah'.\n\nPaul and Mark are the odd men out here, as they were Romans, with Latin names, Paul coming from the Latin word paulus, meaning 'humble', and Mark a shortened from of the Latin Marcus, derived from the Roman god Mars.\n\nAs for your question about whether Yeshua was a common name, it seems to have been reasonably so. Jesus of Nazareth wasn't the only Yeshua held by the government at the time. The full name of Barabbas, the man whose sentence was commuted, was \u05d9\u05e9\u05d5\u05e2 \u05d1\u05e8 \u05d0\u05d1\u05d0, Yeshua Bar Abba."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2o2i3i", "title": "The British legislative system was completely abolished at America's inception, so why did the Founding Fathers adopt the British legal system?", "selftext": "First time on /r/AskHistorians and I have a question for you. I'm Canadian and from what I understand the legal system in the US is quite similar to Canada, UK, Australia etc. We're all part of the common law system, but our legislative bodies are completely different. Why did the Founding Fathers keep the British legal system but abolished the parliamentary system in favour of the American legislative system: \"three branches of government\", \"checks and balances\", president etc.\n\nI'm sure there are some things that could have been changed or is the common law system that good? I get that they were originally British and a lot of the Fathers had legal training; but why change the legislature while leaving the legal system untouched.    ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2o2i3i/the_british_legislative_system_was_completely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmjf6dg", "cmji0k9"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["I think you're approaching this from the wrong direction.  \n\nIn essence, the rebellious colonists believed that they were entitled to the the traditional rights of Englishmen, despite the fact that they were no longer in England.  (Blackstone's *Commentaries on the Laws of England* is the traditional text that sums up the state of late-18th century English law.)  \n\n[Let's look at the Declaration of Independence for examples.](_URL_0_)  Once you get past the famous preamble, the colonists provide a laundry list of legal rights that the King has refused to respect.\n\nSo,\n\n > He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.\n\n > He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.\n\n > He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.\n\n > He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.\n\n==============\n\nThese are all *specific legal rights* that the colonists believed they had!  And you'll notice, in reading the Declaration of Independence, that the indictment is not of the traditional laws themselves -- the Declaration, instead, is accusing the King of denying the colonists the rights they're entitled to under the law.\n\nEventually, after the colonials won the war, the worst of these abuses were specifically outlawed in the 1789 U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights accompanying it.  \n\nThus,\n\n >  > For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:\n\n > *Quartering of troops in private homes is specifically outlawed by the Third Amendment except as provided by law.*\n\n\n >  > He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.\n\n > *Article III, section 1 specifically mandates that judges serve \"during good behavior,\" and their salaries cannot be reduced as a matter of law.*\n\n\n >  > He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.\n\n > *Article I, section 8 places the military under civilian control by giving Congress the sole power to declare war, raise armies and navies, to suppress insurrections and to regulate the militia.*\n\n\nSo, as you see, the problem wasn't the law itself.  The problem was the King.  \n\nIn this vein, every state in the Union (Louisiana excepted) has a \"reception statute\" which imports the common law.  I've provided a couple examples below.\n\n===========\n\n > *From the North Carolina General Statutes:*\n > \u00a7 4-1.  **Common law declared to be in force.**\n > All such parts of the common law as were heretofore in force and use within this State, or so much of the common law as is not destructive of, or repugnant to, or inconsistent with, the freedom and independence of this State and the form of government therein established, and which has not been otherwise provided for in whole or in part, not abrogated, repealed, or become obsolete, are hereby declared to be in full force within this State.\n\n > *From the California Civil Code*:\n > 22.2.  The common law of England, so far as it is not repugnant to\nor inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States, or the\nConstitution or laws of this State, is the rule of decision in all\nthe courts of this State.", "Sorry, I know you're probably fed up with Brits saying that you shouldn't say \"English\" when you mean \"British\", but in this case it's the other way around. The legal system that the USA, Canada, Australia etc.  adopted is Common Law, which is the legal system of England and Wales. [Scots Law](_URL_0_) and [Northern Irish Law](_URL_1_) are different. I know almost nothing about Northern Irish Law. Scots Law has some obvious differences from Common Law such as a different size of jury (15) and a third verdict in criminal cases (Not Proven), but the underlying differences are apparently marked enough that it's not possible to train in one system and practice in another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_law"]]}
{"q_id": "agfnoy", "title": "How did the Persians lose the Byzantine-Sasanian War of the early 7th Century?", "selftext": "I've been wrangling with this one for a while now, as this defeat seems to be one of the most important in the progression of history, as without it Islam almost certainly wouldn't have risen as it did. It seems by the 620s that Xusrou II was completely unstoppable and Constantinople would fall to Persia. How did Heraxlius manage to so thoroughly turn the conflict around to that of q Byzantine victory and cause the disintegration of the Sasanian state?\n\nPersia had control over Egypt, Jerusalem, the Levant, Armenia, and most of Anatolia - it just strikes me as a forgone conclusion that Byzantium would fall. All answers appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/agfnoy/how_did_the_persians_lose_the_byzantinesasanian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eicg77t", "ee6r0sx"], "score": [8, 13], "text": ["Hi, I came across this thread while looking for another one, I must have forgotten about it when it was first up. Anyway, /u/J-Force has covered most of it pretty well (and I agree with his interpretation of Zoroastrianism's role in broad terms, but I think the most important aspect is the monarch's central role in it. I'm not sure the Christians were seen as \"evil\" as much as inferiors. Infamously, the Sasanians officially regarded the Roman Empire as a vassal state). I just have some things to add:\n\n- As /u/J-Force alludes to the Sasanian levy was largely provided by administrative units ruled by powerful noble families that would probably have seen themselves as comptetitors with the house of Sasan.\n\n- It is really important to note here that _Heraclius never fought Khusrau's army_ in his counter-offensive. The surviving accounts of Khusrau's actions following Heraclius' approaching of Ganzak are difficult to make sense of; the only way I can resolve it is that his hand was forced by internal power struggles (rather than the weird account of his army disintegrating following a skirmish with Arab scouts). I am not sure this relates so much to his conduct in the war as a general dissatisfaction among the nobility following the reforms of his predecessor Khusrau I Anushirvan in the mid-6th century. Khusrau I empowered the landowning \"middle class\" at the expense of the ancient nobility, leading to a more effective army, but also to tensions within the realm. Following this, Heraclius sacked Ganzak, and that was undoubtedly a massive blow to the legitimacy of Khusrau (perhaps even the final straw; without it, it is hard to say what Shahin and Shahrbaraz would have done in later phases).\n\nI don't know that we should see the tensions between Khusrau and his noble commanders as some inherent flaw in the Sasanian system as opposed to some superior system of Roman organization; I think that is a rather biased and moralizing view, and certainly Rome never had a shortage of ambitious generals creating instability (in fact, Heraclius himself was one such general, which the Sasanians took advantage of).\n\nWe should be careful about merely propagating Christian chroniclers' eulogizing Heraclius' waging of the war. I think it is also somewhat unfair to contrast the resolve of Christian armies and commanders fighting for their \"civilisation\" at the brink of the destruction of their empire with that of Sasanians who were and had been as concerned with internal power struggles as external ones. The beginning of the campaign and the battle of Antioch shows how effective the Persians could be, both in terms of strategy and tactics. In closing I don't think the later phase of the war damns the Persians any more than the earlier phase damns the Romans.\n\nTouraj Daryaee's _Sasanian Persia_ is a good overview of Sasanian history, if you want a broader perspective.", "**Part 1**\n\nThe thing about wars is that they aren't over until someone surrenders, and even then peace is not guaranteed. The Eastern Roman Empire was prepared to fight to the death in a war of attrition, the Persian nobility were not. \n\n**Reason 1 - Christianity vs Zoroastrianism**\n\nChristianity is a religion which can be utilised to prepare its followers for suffering and encourages resilience in the face of adversity. When Jerusalem was sacked in 614 and severely damaged, there was a very noticeable change in how Romans perceived the war. It stopped being another far off political squabble, and it came to be seen in religious terms. Artifacts such as the David Plates, which portrayed the struggle as a David and Goliath struggle against the Persians, and the use of relics in battle - the robes of the Virgin Mary were sometimes brought out to rally the troops - show that Christianity became a great source of strength for the remainder of the Roman Empire and for Heraclius' men. The concept of martyrdom also helped a great deal, especially in battles. Heraclius told his men that they would 'wear the crown of martyrdom' and go to heaven if they died in battle. This meant that on the battlefield, Heraclius' army fought to the end, whereas Persian resolve was not so high. \n\nZoroastrianism could not compete with Christianity in preparing its people for a war of attrition. I'm sure this subreddit's resident expert on Zoroastrianism can provide more detail and corrections, but Zoroastrianism was a duellist religion which cast the world as good and evil. The Persians, naturally, were good, and by extension those who opposed it were evil and should be resisted. This meant that Zoroastrians had a source of morale in their religion when on the offensive. If they really were in the right, then they ought to be winning, but that poses some pretty awkward questions if they were defeated. For many Christians, defeat meant stronger conviction in their religion - as times became more desperate clergy played an increasingly important role in fundraising, propaganda and even fighting. For Zoroastrians, defeat meant questioning the righteousness of their leader and their cause. Practically, this meant that nobles in the Shah's court would consider a coup to remove their ineffectual leader. \n\n**Reason 2 - Constantinople**\n\nAs is often the case when the Byzantine Empire is severely threatened, attention must be given to Constantinople. Surrounded on three sides by water, and protected on the fourth by the mighty Theodosian walls, it was the most well fortified city in the world. The Persians had no large navy in the eastern Mediterranean, so they could not overcome the Roman fleet to move troops over to help the Avars, who were not good at sieges.  Heraclius had also sent designs for artillery - including the rapid-fire ballista called a *polybolos* - and further fortifications to counter any attempts to get through the walls. However, such fortifications meant nothing if people were not willing to defend them. The Ecumenical Patriarch, Sergius, was key in organising defence and boosting morale through speeches, religious ceremonies, and the procession of holy relics of the Virgin Mary. This convinced the defenders that not only were they defending the heart of the empire, but fighting for God with the backing of a saint. With a highly motivated army manning some of the most formidable fortifications in the world, Constantinople\u2019s security was fairly assured. With Constantinople guaranteed to keep the Persians and Avars busy for some time, Heraclius had the freedom to operate elsewhere.   \n\nConstantinople was also very wealthy. With the imperial treasury, the wealth of tombs and churches, and a large amount of shipping, there was actually quite a lot of money around. As the war went on, shipping dried up and tax collection became impossible as wealthy areas - Anatolia and Egypt especially - had fallen under Persian occupation. The coinage was reformed to reduce the precious metal content, and a new coin called the hexagram was introduced. The churches melted down their silver goblets and crucifixes, whilst the tombs of old emperors were looted and statues melted down to make arrowheads, armour, and ballista bolts.\n\n**Reason 3 - Persia's Political and Military Structure**\n\nKey to Roman victory was the weakness of the Sassanian army command structure. Armies were commanded not by appointed generals, but by nobles who usually had their own armies not unlike a medieval army. This meant that some nobles competed for glory and royal favour and that the Persian armies were usually more loyal to their nobleman than the Shah or the Persian state, whilst the Romans had it drilled into them that they were fighting for their civilisation. This meant that the Persians were vulnerable to being turned against one another and lured into tactically disadvantageous situations. The most effective example of this in battle came in 625 when three separate armies led by the Persian generals Shahin, Shahrbaraz and Sarablangas were lured into fighting Heraclius one by one on ground favourable to the Romans. Rather than organise themselves and share in the glory, they rushed into battle hoping to claim prestige for themselves, believing Heraclius to be disorganised. The Persian armies were seen off in succession by Heraclius' army.\n\nAs the Romans themselves were well aware, if an army was loyal to its general rather than the state, then a major rebellion could arise if a wedge were driven between general and sovereign. In 626 Shahrbaraz fell out of favour due to a failure to make significant headway in taking Constantinople, so he rebelled after an offer from the Romans. In 628, when Khusro sought a scapegoat for the defeat at the Battle of Nineveh, his generals rebelled en masse with the support of aristocrats who were tired of the war and Khusro\u2019s inability to deal with Heraclius\u2019 army as it ravaged the area around Ctesiphon. Khusro II had promised total victory over the Romans, yet there was a point where they could have looked out the window of his palace and seen Roman banners. This made many generals wonder why the hell they bothered, and over time loyalty to the Shah declined and developed into hostility.  \n\n**Reason 4 - Heraclius' Excellent Army**\n\nIn 622 Heraclius decided that he could not fight the Persians through conventional means. He decided to use a long term strategy to exploit weaknesses in Persia's political system. It is hard to say how much of what transpired was planned out from 622, but in any case Heraclius and his army exploited the Persian weaknesses very well. Heraclius recruited a new army from Caesarea and built up the confidence of the army over time through minor, and then major, incursions into Persian Anatolia. The raids of 622 were not meant to be decisive like that of 627 which provoked the overthrow of Khusro, but to build up the army\u2019s confidence whilst securing some lost territory. They also allowed Heraclius to experiment with Maurice's *Strategikon*, a military treatise that Heraclius utilized to great effect throughout the 620s. When pitched battle came, Heraclius and his army had well practised strategies ready to go. Heraclius also brought Christian relics and frequently gave speeches to fortify his men with religious zeal. This meant that if the Persians attempted to foster desertion, which was a common strategy, it would not work. They were also drilled in winter and alpine combat, which gave Heraclius a lot more control over when and where he could strike. Although the Persians outnumbered the Romans, there is no doubt that Heraclius\u2019 army was the more effective force. Heraclius also had excellent scouts, and was able to evade Persian armies as they hunted him. \n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8f8z4p", "title": "What did the Soviet Union have against jeans?", "selftext": "Something that's always confused me. I've read, and heard stories from people who lived in the Soviet era, that jeans were something of a hot commodity as a Western fashion item, but were contraband with no equivalent manufactured in the Eastern Bloc, and that when restrictions were relaxed during Gorbachev's era they naturally became one of the most sought-after of newly available Western products. But the Soviet Union's anti-jean policy has always seemed a bit contradictory: blue jeans were designed explicitly as work clothes for manual labor, and occupied that position in American fashion until the 1950s and greaser culture moved them to the edge of mainstream. They're cheap to make. They're durable. They don't have to be washed after every wear. In short, the ultimate in proletarian form-and-function clothing. So why the hate? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8f8z4p/what_did_the_soviet_union_have_against_jeans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy22fjf"], "score": [29], "text": ["As you wrote, in the 1950's jeans became a fashion item rather than a typical clothing of blue-collar workers and this is precisely the moment when the first signs of 'thaw' after the XX CPSU Congress in 1956 became apparent.\n\nJeans as a fashionable item were considered a sign of Western modern life that basically stood against everything very conservative Soviet ideology stood for. This is why listening to Western music or wearing Western clothes were considered at least slightly decadent. It wasn't really serious, it wasn't banned, but until the 1980's, someone showing overt affection towards Western way of life was looked upon as a Hippie would be looked upon in 1960's US or a punk in UK a decade later - maybe not an 'subversive element' but definitely someone unproductive or unreliable (it is worth remembering that it was not a 'communist thing' but rather general conservatism that permeated Soviet society; religion and political affiliation aside, conservative Americans and average Soviets shared many views on work, life, education and so forth). So much for the ideological part. Also it is important that only American jeans that carried the 'fashionable' connotation. There was a lot of dungaree and cotton duck clothing available in Soviet Union, usually imported from India or produced locally in USSR.\n\nMain reason why jeans were not imported, was twofold. Firstly, import of such a staple product as everyday clothing from the West could have been construed a sign of economical weakness and was avoided at all cost by the authorities. Also, jeans were not specifically selected, they were one of many commodities suffering from embargo incurred by USSR due to political tensions during the Cold War. The other, even more important problem, was that due to serious difference in absolute purchase power, most citizens of USSR were hardly able to afford original American jeans (the currency exchange rates were artificially fixed in USSR and all satellite countries leading to emergence of a significant black market) if sold at an original price.  This meant that importing expensive Western (usually American) clothing for generally poor Russian blue-collar workers made absolutely no sense from economic standpoint.\n\nSo, the relatively high price, lack of availability and iconic status of blue jeans in the West made them a kind of 'forbidden fruit' among the youth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mzpso", "title": "How was the Vietnam War perceived in South Korea? Did their returning vets struggle with PTSD and reintegration like their American counterparts?", "selftext": "Do we have any accounts of what it was like serving and returning for them?  \n\nIt occurred to me to ask because I came across [this wiki article, specifically the massacres.](_URL_0_)  In the US there was a whole lot of outrage over the war, and I feel like these kinds of massacres would have turned it past the boiling point.  \n\nI mean, the My Lai massacre sparked outrage when it came to light in 1969.  Did these events not cause outrage at home?  Did they not care?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mzpso/how_was_the_vietnam_war_perceived_in_south_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmaevpe"], "score": [2], "text": ["The 1992 film [White Badge (\ud558\uc580 \uc804\uc7c1)](_URL_1_) depicts the war and its effects, although it garnered some criticism from veterans.  The novel was also translated into English.\n\nThe director also drew his influence from *Aimless Bullet*, a film about the difficulties of reintegration after the Korean War.  It was one of the first Korean films to deal with this issue, and it may offer some perspective.  \n\n[There was also some public debate recently](_URL_0_) about Korea's observation of the 50-year anniversary of the deployment.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_South_Korea_during_the_Vietnam_War"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.koreabang.com/2014/stories/vietnam-asks-korea-to-cancel-vietnam-war-celebrations.html", "http://www.koreafilm.org/feature/100_91.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "2b9dn6", "title": "Do you think you could teach a history class backwards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b9dn6/do_you_think_you_could_teach_a_history_class/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj33ee0"], "score": [2], "text": ["It would be interesting to try...but the thing about teaching history is so much of the later events are derived from decisions made in past events.\n\nSay you start with Obama and go backwards strictly.  What do you talk about without discussing the origin of the presidential powers or purpose in government without talking about the Constitution?  It was written over 200 years before, but because you are going backwards you can't talk about it or build on it without inherently negating the purpose of going backwards.\n\nWhat you could do is start a lesson with a mention of a recent example of a topic you want to cover, ask the class to discuss it in some way, and *then* explain the origin of topic of the lesson to explain the modern example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15pqnb", "title": "What was the point of stained glass windows depicting the gospels in Gothic cathedrals if no one could see them? ", "selftext": "I just watched a really awesome nova episode about the architecture of French Gothic cathedrals (_URL_0_). In it, someone described how the stained glass depictions of the gospels were one way for the illiterate, or those who just didn't speak Latin, to learn the stories contained in the Bible. Every cathedral I've ever been in, however, had stained glass very high up above the ground, well out of my ability to see ornate detail. My question, then, is: was there a key for the common person to consult when looking at the stained glass, or did it remain a mystery to most people? If the latter is the case, what was the point of making the beautiful windows, if no one knew what they were supposed to be depicting. \n\nThe same question applies to the ornate stone carvings on the outside of the cathedrals. So much detail, but so far away from anyone that could actually see it. What gives? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15pqnb/what_was_the_point_of_stained_glass_windows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ostic"], "score": [6], "text": ["Early stained glass would have been the main source of light in a cathedral. Oil lamps and candles were used throughout, but these weren't effective sources of light. The stained glass would have been less of a ignorable feature, it would have glowed with sunlight almost like neon lights. \n\nNarrative windows would have been easily understood by the masses (ha). Also, it's really important to note that when a person has no ability to read or write, they identify scenes and peoples by their attributes. Certain saints had certain attributes (St. Lucy always holds a goblet with two orbs, St. Catherine holds wheat in one hand and has a wagon wheel in the other, etc.). Certain Biblical stories were always depicted in extremely similar ways (the Madonna and Child Jesus, the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, the Annunciation, the Lamentation, etc).\n\nThe iconography would often depict multiple levels of the storyline. Most of the nuance would have been understood by the churchgoers. It gets to the point where certain stories are so heavy with iconography that the entire story is told in the one scene.\n\nThe most famous of these iconographic scenes would be [the Last Supper](_URL_0_). Most often this would depict the different reactions immediately following [Jesus' prediction of his betrayal](_URL_1_). The scene includes a lengthwise or half-moon table with Jesus at the center and the apostle John on his right usually being embraced and Peter on the left. Judas Iscariot is set apart - either by sitting on the opposite side or being dark-complected/sitting in a shadow or looking in a different direction and being visibly upset or having no halo. Judas will have a small [bag of silver coin](_URL_3_) with him. Peter will look incredulous (a reference to his future [denial](_URL_2_)), an emotion that Judas will not have.\n\n(My background in this is art history based, and not general medieval history. Medievalists could/would go into much greater historical depth than I could.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/building-gothic-cathedrals.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_supper", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_predicts_his_betrayal", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_Peter", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_pieces_of_silver"]]}
{"q_id": "13ri0u", "title": "This is short sword found by my family \nmember at least 50 years ago. Is it genuine?", "selftext": "Hi,\nThis piece of weaponry was according to family legend found at least 50 years ago by my grandfather in old part of my city. It lays on china-closet in my living room for last 20 years, and is used as gadget and everytime it is said that someday it will be tested if it is genuine.\n\nAnyway, here is this [album](_URL_0_). Does anyone have idea what to do with it?\n\nEdit: there are 8 more photos inside album.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13ri0u/this_is_short_sword_found_by_my_family_member_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76il5r", "c76inix", "c76iqe8", "c76j48t", "c76j5zl", "c76mefv", "c76oip7", "c76xrem"], "score": [1169, 10, 18, 12, 9, 29, 7, 3], "text": ["That's a Late Bronze Age 'vollgriff' type sword. If it's genuine, you should definitely contact an archaeologist. I'm quite excited by this, so let me first post this before I edit it into something long:\n\nI suspect it could be a reproduction cast. The metal looks a bit too dark (real bronze age swords used 10-15% tin, yours looks a bit less), the blade edge looks a bit too blunt (real bronze age swords are sharpened, which means that usually the edge has corroded and will look much more chipped; the point damage, however, does look like 'real' prehistoric use damage and corresponds with what I've seen on swords that were used in a thrusting/stabbing motion), it looks a bit too irregular (a bit shoddy; many irregularities at the blade, especially near the handle, which suggests a reproduction cast). The lighter coloured thing on the pommel also looks a bit iffish to me, but I've not seen that too often; most archaeological drawings only show the sides (unfortunately).\n\nNow, to be sure, I need a few good-resolution close-up shots of the grooves on the blade itself. If they are chiseled in (very small grooves within the grooves, slight bulges at the sides of the groove) rather than cast it's probably genuine. I'd also like an x-ray of the handle so we can see whether it's a handle cast onto a separate blade or whether all was cast as one (which is uncommon), but I guess that's a bit too much to ask (a museum might help you though! If it's real, you should definitely contact a professional archaeologist/museum in your region; you're even obliged by law to do so (I assume the law is the same in Poland as it is in Germany and the Netherlands).\n\nNow, I think it's a genuine sword. Firstly because of the patina ('rust'), which doesn't form that quickly on reproductions; if you look at the recent notch on the blade near the handle, you can see that the patina actually penetrates quite deep into the metal, which gives the metal more of a crystalline, hard, rocky texture than a metallic one. Particularly the deep patina on the handle-to-blade transition suggests that this is old, not recently formed on the surface. \n\nYou shouldn't do a lot with it. Actually, it's most important that you don't do stuff. Don't, please don't:\n\n* try to clean it (I see a bit of modern 'shine' on the edge of the blade; don't do this, it removes the small details that can give lots of information on, for example, the production process, or possibly even the scabbard)\n\n* resharpen it\n\n* play around with it\n\n* hit things with it (I see some recent impact damage on the blade; a lot of it is old (in prehistory they probably used this sword for ritual combat, you can see they hit other swords with it (making lots of regular shallow notches on the surface)))\n\n* handle it with bare hands (use soft textile gloves, and as little as possible). I can already see quite a lot of 'wear' on the handle from sweaty hands, wearing away at the soft surface.\n\nDo:\n\n* Contact a local professional archaeologist, tell him/her exactly how/where you found it and as much information as possible so it can be used to either locate a lost prehistoric monument (I suspect a burial mound) or expand our knowledge of the distribution of these items; possibly, it's a sacrificial find from a riverbed or a pond, but probably not a marsh, looking at the patina; a local archaeologist could tell you more.\n\n* Keep it away from moisture! A cardboard box lined with acid-free paper would do fine; if you're unsure, ask your museum. If you ever see bright green spots forming, contact your museum immediately because that would be bronze-rot and could completely destroy your object in a decade or so. Especially at the worn surfaces, because there primary patina no longer protects the bronze.\n\nNow, I have to ask; how did you find it? At an antique market, bought from someone, found during construction work, or with a metal detector?\n\nEdit: I contacted a Middle/Late Bronze Age Central European sword expert (there's a few, actually), because I'm still unsure. Check back in a few days.", "Contact a museum or a university. You could probably just email an archeology professor and they'd be able to direct you to where you can get it tested. ", "It belongs in a museum!\n\nDid they say how your grandfather found it exactly?", "Followup: What are the potential legal issues with an artifact like this (assuming it is in fact genuine)?  I imagine that some countries might be able to claim public ownership of a such historical find, though there could be some sort of heirloom clause if it's been in OP's family long enough.    \n  \nAre there any experts on Polish archaeological law lurking around who could shed light on this?", "OP, this is such a cool find. I'm very intrigued and interested to know more about this piece. Please keep us updated on what ends up happening with it. \n\nEDIT: I am still a little new to this subreddit so please let me know if this is not an appropriate comment.", "It's fun just reading the comments and watching people nerding out over this artifact. (And yes I'm just as excited as everyone else... I just don't know very much about artifacts)\n*bounces up and down* yay learning!\n", "It looks like a casting of an original, it has a thickness of edge that just does not look right.", "Normally, I'd expect the blade to be a separate piece so the hilt can be replaced/repaired. It's possible this is a facsimile made by taking a cast from an original piece, and then cast in solid metal: that would explain why it was one piece of metal. A 18th or 19th-century facsimile is still a piece with an interesting history. In any case, this is not my expertise, drop by in a museum to let it be tested, pictures only show so much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/xLc8n"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2064rr", "title": "What did the \"Iliad\" and the \"Odyssey\" sound like?", "selftext": "I recently found out these epic poems were originally sung. Obviously we don't have the sheet music for it or anything, but are there videos or CDs of similar works that give us an idea of what the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* sounded like? Did the singers sing the whole thing or did they sing one part, leave, and come back the next day to sing the next part?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2064rr/what_did_the_iliad_and_the_odyssey_sound_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg0d2hl"], "score": [27], "text": ["It's really very uncertain. A couple of Austrian scholars, Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel, have put a considerable amount of effort into trying to deduce some points about the musical side of Homeric performance, and you can [listen to the results here](_URL_2_) -- though I fear Danek's talents lie more in scholarship than in his singing voice (no offence intended, Professor Danek).\n\nPersonally, I find it far too speculative to be anything more than a \"here's *one* possibility...\" kind of way. The very biggest weakness lies in the impossibility of recovering stylistic devices such as ornamentation. This is not a minor matter. Get a musician friend to take a modern popular song and perform it removing *absolutely all* ornaments, syncopation, and other devices that wouldn't appear in a Grade 3 piano reduction, then compare it to the original, and you'll see what I mean. A slightly more concrete example: try listening to the vocals in [this relatively unornamented performance of a song](_URL_1_), then [this much more sophisticated (but still fairly low-key) performance](_URL_3_). Maybe that'll clarify what I'm saying.\n\nAnyway, the upshot is that there's a good chance that an ancient Greek kitharist performing Homer would have sounded, in terms of the vocals, [more like this](_URL_0_) than like Danek's performance. It's not pleasant to modern first-world ears, but it is at least a real oral epic tradition (recorded in 1930s Bosnia-Herzegovina). Listen for a while to get a feel for the kind of ornamentation he puts in. The language is different from Homer, the musical instrument is different, the rhythms are different, but I think it does give a good feel for the kind of alienness that should realistically be imagined.\n\nThe aspects of performance that we *can* recover are mostly non-musical. We know the rhythm, at least: it was a march rhythm, dominated by a *dum-diddy-dum-diddy* riff; that much is built into the poetry itself. About the social context of performance, we know nothing until the late 6th century BCE, when competitions in performing Homer were established in Athens: on those occasions, rhapsodes (\"song-stitchers\") would pick up where the previous one left off. Prior to that, we simply don't know on what occasions Homeric epic would have been performed; from the Athenian competitions, and from one of the Homeric *Hymn to Apollo*, we can infer that a public performance at a religious festival was one possibility. Other than that we're reduced to speculation. I can list some speculations off if you really want, but I'm reluctant to do so because it might make them look stronger than they are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8buaCDlYU2U", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2aMaMkDwTA&amp;t=63", "http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9sRJ-eOHnc&amp;t=51"]]}
{"q_id": "1r5pks", "title": "What were the duties and training that the guard of a medieval manor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r5pks/what_were_the_duties_and_training_that_the_guard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdk7mo7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Medieval manors, or small castles, did not generally have \"guards\".\n\nThat is, there were no people who's full time job was soldiers or guards in these castles or manors except the Knight.  The Knight (and maybe some members of his family like sons or brothers) would be the only people living in the castle who were primarily trained and equipped for war.\n\nThe male servants of the Knight who were of military age (the huntsman, groom, butler, falconer, etc.) would serve as \"men at arms\" in time of need.  They would have arms and armor stored in the castle.  They might have some training in the use of weapons and battle tactics.  They would often be the lieutenants in charge of companies of villagers (also armed from castle supplies) in times of danger.\n\nIt was only much greater castles, like royal castles, or those belonging to great nobles, which would have any full time \"guards\" or soldiers as a garrison.  Of course, in dangerous times, when raiders or enemies were known to be near, the manor or small castle might be on a defensive footing, with lookouts posted and men assigned to the gates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17n6nu", "title": "Were there any \"elite\" Roman Auxiliaries?  ", "selftext": "My understanding is that the Roman Empire would often assimilate soldiers from conquered lands and assign them to another province.  Do we have any proof from that era (I'm estimating 50 BC - 200 AD) that certain regions produced superior, \"elite\" auxiliaries? \nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17n6nu/were_there_any_elite_roman_auxiliaries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c871r43"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well, it depends on what you consider \"elite\", of course. \n\nBalearic, Rhodian and Macedonian slingers were condiered excellent troops to counter eastern horse archers, as were Cretan and Syrian archers. Germanic and Saramatian heavy cavalry were often used to suplement Roman cavalry. Illyrian medium infantry (combined javelineers and melee infantry) were also sought after, at least during the early era, before the Marian reforms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3vbpj5", "title": "Did Gaius Marius ever give a reason for his army reform?", "selftext": "Specifically why he started to allow landless men to join. I've seen many opinions about why it happened, but do ancient sources give a reason?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vbpj5/did_gaius_marius_ever_give_a_reason_for_his_army/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxm9nfc"], "score": [3], "text": [" > Specifically why he started to allow landless men to join\n\nThat *is* the so-called \"Marian Reform,\" there's not really anything to be specific about. That's it, that's the entirety of Marius' legislation regarding the army, and even then it was surely not as revolutionary a decision as is often made out--the property qualification had been violated several times during and after the Punic Wars. The period following the Punic Wars was characterized by changes in land policy and military organization, to which Marius' sole contribution more or less was the final abolition of the property requirement. Most of the things that popular culture associates with the so-called \"Marian Reforms\" don't derive from Marius at all. For example, the discipline and in particular the reformed arms drill of the legions was instituted largely by Marius' colleague as Metellus' legate and long-time enemy, Rutilius Rufus by 105. Marius only further refined a reorganization that had already been largely completed, giving his men a little more training before combating the Teutones. The cohort had already existed during Scipio's Iberian campaign. The legislation that made it a normal expectation for consulars and praetorians to govern provinces and command provincial armies with promagisterial *imperium* (possibly the most important military legislation of all) is something that comes from Sulla, not Marius at all. For that matter, the practice of enlisting voluntarily for booty probably didn't kick into full swing until Sulla, whose army in his campaign against Mithridates was notorious for having plunder as its only motivation--Appian mentions that Sulla prevailed on his troops to march on Rome partly by pointing out to them that Marius might raise other soldiers to prosecute the war and that they would miss out on their plunder, for which Appian says the troops were eager. Marius' army was probably not made up predominantly of volunteers--the OCD notes that \"Undoubtedly conscription along the normal lines still continued, but many volunteers probably chose to serve for sixteen years.\" Important military institutions like the *auxilia* did not exist under Marius--the *auxilia* owe their origin to the result of the Social War, which enrolled Italians into auxiliary cavalry squadrons, and to the practice during the later 1st Century, B.C. of using allied and tributary contingents alongside the legions. The *auxilia* that most people would think of when the term is used, the professional, permanent force that accompanied the legions in their frontier camps, didn't exist before Augustus. \n\nIn any case the details for Marius' abolition of the property requirement come mainly from Sallust and Plutarch. Plutarch gives no reasons, but Sallust says:\n\n > Ipse interea milites scribere, non more maiorum neque ex classibus, sed uti libido cuiusque erat, capite censos plerosque. Id factum alii inopia bonorum, alii per ambitionem consulis memorabant, quod ab eo genere celebratus auctusque erat\n\n >  > Meanwhile he himself drew up troops [*scribere* here might actually mean \"to levy,\" as it often does--it's a bit unclear how Sallust imagines these troops are drawn up] not according to the old custom nor from the property classes but those willing, many from the lowest census classes. Some said this was done for want of good men, others for the canvass of the consul [the Latin *ambitio* is a candidate's canvass for office--the idea is that Marius may have abolished the property requirement to secure votes in the future or to repay his debt to those who had supported him. Of these two I think the latter is much more likely, since the majority of Marius' political career was spent repaying favors, particularly his attempts at land distribution, to those who had helped him], because by those kinds of people he had been celebrated and supported\n\nSo Sallust proposes a couple of possibilities, of which the first (manpower shortage) is usually taken as the traditional orthodox view. But in any case the property qualification was very much on its way out and was an antiquated tradition that had long lost relevance, even in practice"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1buzwt", "title": "Need info on women accompanying scientific expeditions to wild places in 16th-18th century", "selftext": "Did women accompany men on such expeditions? Why (did men like to have their wives / daughters with them, or did the women want to see the world too ?) What was their role in such expeditions (did they contribute to them or were they just carried around like the women in the movie Aguirre?) What did they wear? Did they keep up their elaborate clothing and hairstyles or did they wear some kind of simpler clothes?\n\n I'd be greatful for any info, or links, or images, or accounts. Even non-historical materials like movies or novels would help me visualise my character and how she should behave. I need this for a theater role, where I am to play the young daughter of an entomologist who accompanies him to the bowels of some rain forests (fictitious story). I'm having a hard time visualising such a woman, so I'd be grateful for any kind of info or material that would point me in the right direction. Also, I know that my question spans a few centuries, but since my role is not set in a very specific time period, I'm willing to let myself be inspired by anything I find interesting. Thanks in advance to everyone who responds!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1buzwt/need_info_on_women_accompanying_scientific/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9adyup", "c9ae960", "c9ar3w1", "c9arhqi"], "score": [6, 3, 4, 3], "text": ["I don't know whether polar regions count as a wild, though I know about one example and would like to tell about.\n\nTatyana Pronchishcheva(1710-1736) is known as a first Russian female Polar explorer. She accomponied her husband, [Vassily Pronchishchev](_URL_2_) in his expedition to the Artctic ocean. \n\nAt that time the Arctic ocean was poorly explored. In fact it was not known whether there is land on Northern Pole. In 1732 Vitus Bering proposed to the Russian government a plan of new expedition to the Artctic and Pacific oceans. This expedition, later calles [Great Northern Expedition](_URL_3_), was an attempt to map all the Arctic and Pacific coast of Russia. One of the goals was establishing the existence of Northeast Passage. Because of the vast territory, there were several different groups, each had it's region to explore. Vassily Pronchishchev led group that had to explore the coast between Yenisei and Lena. This is very cold region, north of 70N, and even in 20th century there were great discoveries in this area(namely discovery of Severnaya Zemlya in 1913).\n\nTatyana(nee Kondyreva) knew Vassily from the early childhood and eventually they married in 1733. Immediately after marriage they went to Siberia, to prepare for expedition. They left Yakutsk in the summer of 1735 and by late August reached Arctic coast, however they had to stop there because they had to repair the ship. Next year they explored part of the coast, however had to retreat back to Olenek because of sea ice. Nevertheless, they reached 77 29'N.\n\nOn 29th of August Vassily broke the leg and later died. Two weeks later, on 12th of September, Tatyana also died for unknown reasons. Nevertheless, the crew managed to return back. \n\nDespite the death of the Pronchishchevs, the Lena-Yenisei group mapped several hundred kilometers of coast, discovered new islands, bays etc. \n\nThere is also a story about the name: for almost a century it was thought that her name was [Maria](_URL_1_). She wasn't mentioned if official dicuments by name, just as Vassily's wife. Only in 1980's new documents were found, revealing her true name, Tatyana. \n\nToday, there is a statue of Pronchishchevs in Yakutsk. Maria Pronchishcheva Bay is named after her. In 1999 Vassily and Tatyana's remains were exhumated, analyzed and reburied. [Here](_URL_0_) you can see forensic restoration of their faces.\n\nAs to why Tatyana decided to accompany her husband: usually wives of explorers stayed in the mainland, however it's claimed that during their trip to Siberia, the newlyweds were robbed, and she couldn't afford to stay at Yakutsk, while as a memeber of expedition she would receive food and other things.\n\nI want to add more, however most of the sources are in Russian, and translating them is very-time consuming. Also, my English isn't perfect.", "You might want to expand your time period into the 19th and 20th Centuries, both to include the whole Victorian expeditions phase and to accommodate shifting social roles of women. [Jeanne Baret](_URL_0_), for instance, accompanied a French circumnavigational expedition as the assistant of a botanist, but did so disguised as a man. Upon being found out in Tahiti, Jeanne (after possibly being gang-raped) and the botanist were put ashore on the colony of Mauritius to find their own way home. Contrast that with the founding of the [Society of Women Geographers](_URL_1_) in 1925, which firmly established the already present fact of female explorers. \n\nAs for clothing and fashion, [Louise Boyd](_URL_3_), an early 20th century Artic explorer, scandalously wore pants, but took care to state \"I powder my nose before going on deck, no matter how rough the sea is. There is no reason why a woman can't rough it and still remain feminine.\" An earlier (late 19th Century) explorer of Asia, [Isabella Bird](_URL_2_), had a note in her [book on her earlier exploration of the Rocky Mountains](_URL_4_) that explicitly her riding clothes to be \"thoroughly serviceable and feminine.\"", "[Maria Sibylla Merian](_URL_5_) was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator who (on her own) went on a scientific expedition to Surinam from 1699 to 1701. [She did a lot of entomological work](_URL_1_) and her illustrations are absolutely fabulous, as well as very accurate. You can try and find [this book](_URL_3_) about her. You can see some of her wonderful illustrations [here](_URL_2_).\n\n[Alexandrine Tinn\u00e9](_URL_0_) (1835-1869) was a Dutch explorer in Africa who did ethnographic and botanical research and the first European woman to attempt to cross the Sahara. More about her [here](_URL_4_).", "Florence Baker (1836 - 1916), wife of African explorer [Samuel Baker](_URL_1_), accompanied him on all his expeditions, facing extreme danger and hardships. Florence was born in Transsylvania and lost her parents in the 1848 uprising. According to the Baker family history, she was on offer on a specialist slave market in Vidin as a young girl when Samuel first saw her. She was destined for the Ottoman Pasha of Vidin. Samuel bribed the girl's attendants and they ran away in a carriage together and eventually she became his lover and wife and accompanied him everywhere he journeyed. [This page](_URL_0_) lists a number of books about her and her dramatic life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vasili_and_Tatiana_Pronchishchev.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Pronchishcheva", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Pronchishchev", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Expedition"], ["http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/01/23/145664873/the-first-woman-to-go-round-the-world-did-it-as-a-man", "http://www.iswg.org/about-swg/our-history", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Bird", "http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/summer/polar-women.html", "http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view?docId=VAB7146&amp;brand=vwwp&amp;field1=text&amp;text1=dumpy&amp;submit=Search&amp;hit.rank=1#1"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrine_Tinn%C3%A9", "http://www.epigenesys.eu/index.php/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/655-maria-sibylla-merian", "http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/microsites/amazingrarethings/maker.asp?exhibs=ARTmerian", "http://www.amazon.com/Chrysalis-Sibylla-Merian-Secrets-Metamorphosis/dp/B0025VL8YO", "http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=Alexandrine_Tinne_2006", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Sibylla_Merian"], ["http://www.shakariconnection.com/samuel-w-baker-books.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Baker"]]}
{"q_id": "17b3zl", "title": "How much would it cost Louis XIV to build Versailles, in today's currency?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17b3zl/how_much_would_it_cost_louis_xiv_to_build/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c83z2sp", "c83z4yf"], "score": [5, 16], "text": ["From the wikipedia entry for Versailles:\n\n We may never know the true amount spent on the creation of Versailles, and most current estimates are speculative. A recent estimate has placed the amount spent on Versailles during the Ancien r\u00e9gime as US$2 billion (Littell, 2000). This figure in all probability is an under-evaluation of the money spent on Versailles. France's Fifth Republic expenditures alone that have been directed to restoration and maintenance at Versailles undoubtedly surpass those of the Sun King.\n", "I recall in another thread that it is difficult to compare costs from that long ago because we do not know the exact market value of many of the items or how 300 year old currency compares to ours.  PBS has a claim that is may have cost anywhere between 2 and 200 billion dollars.  It also is not clear if that takes into account restorative efforts, renovations done by following monarchs, or furnature (There was said to be well over a ton of silver on display.  In modern day, a short ton of silver is worth about a million dollars.)\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.pbs.org/marieantoinette/life/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1gzi6z", "title": "Before instant communication how would a commander out in the battlefield know when to stop fighting if the war ended?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gzi6z/before_instant_communication_how_would_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["capehwn"], "score": [9], "text": ["I can answer for World War One if you're interested. As we know, the war ended at 11:00am on the 11th November 1918, but fighting continued all day, mostly because many commanders had not got the word. It was virtually impossible to use telephone lines during the war because the cables would quickly be destroyed by shellfire or grenades. Many commanders relied on runners or carrier pigeons to relay messages to headquarters and back. Unfortunately, runners and pigeons were often killed before they could deliver their telegram. This was often the case on the 11th November 1918. In other cases, a runner was simply not dispatched. Gossip spreads very quickly in the trenches, however, and many commanders and their troops discovered that the war had ended when they were told by a nearby battalion or even the enemy they were fighting. It was not uncommon for a soldier to see his friend die by enemy fire and then be told that the war was over and the fighting could cease.\n\nIf you have any questions, feel free to ask!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cb4jz0", "title": "How was Quebec able to so strongly hold onto its Francophonic identity over more than a century of British rule, and later as a part of the larger Anglophonic Canadian nation?", "selftext": "When I think about comparable examples in the US, there is nothing comparable. New Orleans was similarly French, and while it maintains a bit of that character, it is more just a quirk at this point in comparison to the Quebecois culture. And of course somewhere like St. Louis which was similar, that is practically just a distant memory relative. \n\nHeck, even in Canada, at least my vague sense from being a tourist it would seem that Quebec City is much more strongly entrenched in that cultural heritage than Montreal, so how consistent is that maintenance within the province itself, place to place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cb4jz0/how_was_quebec_able_to_so_strongly_hold_onto_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etdkqi1"], "score": [7], "text": ["  \n\nYay! Question for me. You are in for a long one. Alternatively, this question could be: Why does Qu\u00e9bec exist as Qu\u00e9bec today?  \n \n\nI will use your comparison with Louisiana to better contrast with Qu\u00e9bec. I will then discuss how Louisiana was formed. I don\u2019t mean the State; I\u2019ll leave others to that task. Rather, its population and French twist.   \n \n\nA few groups have lived there that spoke French, many of which were deported by the English in the 1750s and 1760s. Following the War of Austrian Succession, France gave modern-day New-Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island (Let\u2019s call it Acadia) to the English but kept modern-day Qu\u00e9bec. \n\nThe idea for the English is that in the medium-term they would get Qu\u00e9bec (and they did in 1760) who was still French. But they were worried about one thing: that the French population in Acadia would support the French and possibly be a problem for the English. The solution was simple: get rid of the French colonists in their territories. It would also provide a great benefit to the English colonists who would acquire the land of the deported Acadians.   \n \n\nThey shoved them on ships and sent them to a few places (Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Caribbean, France, Falklands\u2026 some even were left to die on the ships with no destination. Some ended up as slaves in Haiti or working in plantations in the thirteen colonies). A good amount of those who were shoved back to France (about a quarter of them) and there, the Spanish government recruited them. Although they had previously refused to swear oath to Great Britain, Spain was a catholic country and owned Louisiana since 1963. \n\nIn the end, about 18 000 people lived in Acadia and 12 000 were deported, 8 000 of which died in the process. Louisiana received most of those, in addition to existing French colonists there. The French in Louisiana would eventually become the Cajuns (coming from Cadiens in French).  \n \n\nSo far, we have Louisiana which have belonged to France, then Spain, which allowed them to keep speaking French and since Spain is also catholic and civil law, everything was dandy.   \n \n\nFrance got Louisiana back in 1801 from Spain and then, sold it to the United States in 1803; the Louisiana purchase. Laws in place to protect French were enacted and for the next 60 years or so but after the civil war, the government gradually forced francophones to go to school in English until even catholic school had to be in English. Eventually, speaking French became synonym with being uneducated and gradually, French fell out of favour with most.   \n \n\nNow contrast that with Qu\u00e9bec. The English conquered Qu\u00e9bec in 1760 and installed a regime in 1763. The French were no longer a problem (no need to deport them) and frankly, the population was too important for that to be attempted. The deportation of Acadians was already one of the largest ethnic cleaning to be systematically done and it was not really a possibility to do the same for Qu\u00e9bec. In order to ensure Qu\u00e9bec would stay under British rule, the Qu\u00e9bec act ensured that the clergy, the nobility, and the population would find it comfortable under British rule. And it worked. The thirteen colonies mostly failed to get would-be Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois on their side and lost when they tried to take Qu\u00e9bec city.   \n \n\nThe point here is that so far, there is protection for French-speakers on both sides (In Louisiana and Qu\u00e9bec). But the nature: one is kind of given, the other protected by the empire and its decrees. Let me exemplify: a notable fact is that following the American revolution, the loyal British subjects moved to modern-day Ontario and Qu\u00e9bec. The English (loyalists, merchants, etc.) eventually asked, as it was common in British colonies, to give Englishmen an assembly. So far, the British had refused to give them to Qu\u00e9bec and only accepted insofar that it was set up to ensure the Popists would not have too much power. The English in Acadia were refused their assembly exactly for that reason; too many Frenchies.   \n \n\nGreat Britain gave the 10 000 or so English in Upper Canada (Modern-day Ontario) 16 representatives and the 160 000 or so lower-Canadians (modern-day Qu\u00e9bec) 50 representatives. I won\u2019t spend too much time on the Constitutional Act and the Union Act except if you have questions as this is getting long. The point is that French-Canadians were given a surprising amount of power for a colony under British rule even if it did not equal their English counterparts living amongst them. \n\nFast forward to the 1870s.   \n \n\nFollowing the American civil war, the French in Louisiana lost a lot of rights. On the other hand, the important French population in Qu\u00e9bec, along with institutions giving the French power allowed them to protect their religion, laws, and language. The creation of Canada in 1867, along with Qu\u00e9bec as a province did see something similar to the US though: oppressing of French-speaking communities in the rest of Canada continued though with M\u00e9tis repression by Prime Minister John A. McDonald who hanged Louis Riel or Rule 17 in Ontario which prohibited French education for a while and failing to recognise French schools until the 60s. In other words, despite the protection provided to Qu\u00e9bec, the culture and institutions in Canada did profoundly weaken French-speaking communities.   \n \n\nIt\u2019s a lot of stuff right now but if you read it so far, it will become obvious once I point out why Qu\u00e9bec preserved its identity and not Louisiana. Namely: overtime, acts and constitutional documents as well as decisions made by London ensured that the place given to French-speakers and their identity was protected. French-speakers in Louisiana, and in the rest of Canada, did not have the same level of protection granted to them as it depended on the goodwill of the English majority rather than bureaucrats in London who cared more about keeping the peace while ensuring the interests of English-speakers. Still today, being served and French is considered a right at the federal level with provincial jurisdictions, on their end, routinely not taking measures to ensure access to services in French. Overtime, Qu\u00e9bec was able to leverage its demographic weight and powers to increasingly make more requests to the federal government in Ottawa and take the measures deemed necessary to protect its identity, something that was not possible in the smaller French-speaking communities or in Louisiana where despite their numbers, relied on the goodwill of legislators and politicians to enact laws rather than hard constitutional principles or imperial decisions.   \n \n\nFrench became the language of about 25-30% of the population and at this point, they had fought the English (revolution of 1837-38), and overtime keeping the peace with them ensured giving them the minimum to ensure their cultural survival until they were able to affirm themselves.   \n \n\nOne last point. Qu\u00e9bec, as well as other French-speaking communities, were usually catholic. This meant that they usually had much bigger families and Qu\u00e9bec was often able to increase its share of the population by virtue of having significantly greater demographic growth. In the case of Qu\u00e9bec, their powers given to protect their heritage in addition to powerful uh, baby-popping, helped ensured demographic importance. I did not know how to introduce this part so I just added it here. Priests were actively encouraging French-Canadians to get those babies poppin\u2019 and this ensured, to some extent, the relevance of the French-speaking demographic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6pimfq", "title": "How did the first European settlers of the new world react to new world wildlife?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pimfq/how_did_the_first_european_settlers_of_the_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkq5ch8"], "score": [5], "text": ["Heya, I have an earlier answer on [what New World explorers thought of alligators](_URL_0_) (and mosquitos), if you're interested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r5ipp/what_did_european_settlers_think_of_the_alligators/d4ym1r8/"]]}
{"q_id": "awm2sp", "title": "Where did Roman legionaries keep their money when away from home for years?", "selftext": "It seems trivial at first but as they were a professional army that may not have a true home for the duration of the service, what did they do with their pay, and any loot. Was there any proto- banking? Did they get credit from the paymaster, or did most of them just blow it weekly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/awm2sp/where_did_roman_legionaries_keep_their_money_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eho6q4f"], "score": [3], "text": ["I guess there are good answers about the subject in this other thread here: [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f5wrj/did_roman_soldiers_actually_get_paid_in_salt/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f5wrj/did\\_roman\\_soldiers\\_actually\\_get\\_paid\\_in\\_salt/"]]}
{"q_id": "40vjk9", "title": "When did flintlock firearms start getting replaced by self-repeating firearms? (Such as a classic revolver for example)", "selftext": "Also:\n\n1. Did people ever try to improve flintlock pistol and muskets with sharper accuracy, longer ranges, amount of black powder put inside the guns or shorter reloading times? If so, when did it began? \n\n2. I'm also very interested in double-barreled and multi-barreled flintlocks (such as the duckfoot pistol), how did people decide that it would be more \"practical\"? As in, being able to shoot consecutive couple or multiple shots before reloading again? Did people try these same techniques with flintlock rifles and muskets?\n\n3. Regarding double-barreled and multi-barreled flintlock firearms. Did people try to improve cannon accuracy, ranges, amount of black powder put inside them and reloading times? ( such as mortars, broadsides, carronades?) What were the results? (bad, good?)\n\n4. It seems like a pain in the ass to reload a gun between 30 seconds up to even a minute! Would reloading times have been improved in double-barreled and multiple barreled flintlocks as well?\n\n5. Last but not least, when did flintlocks actually began to be replaced with guns such as revolvers and ones like \"civil-war era\" rifles and pistols? \nWhat were the first countries to adopt self-repeating guns into their militaries and navies?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40vjk9/when_did_flintlock_firearms_start_getting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyxkpw4", "cyxriuu"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["The first major improvement to the flintlock musket was the *percussion* musket, which began to appear in military arsenals in the 1830s. The discovery of fulminates in the early 1800s made possible the creation of the percussion cap. When placed on a nipple and struck by a hammer, the percussion cap detonated and sent a tiny jet of flame down through the touch hole to the powder charge. This was a significant improvement over the flintlock, as it was both more reliable, especially in foul weather, and simpler in operation; rather than needing a sharp flint, a properly hardened frizzen, and powder sprinkled in the pan, one could simply place a cap and be done.\n\nHowever, aside from these benefits, percussion muskets and rifles were no more intrinsically accurate, quick to reload, or long ranged than their flintlock predecessors. Certain developments - namely, the conical bullet, first introduced in 1849 by the French Army - enabled rifled muskets to be loaded more rapidly than before, as the bullet no longer had to be wrapped with a cloth or leather patch and stuffed down the barrel to achieve a tight gas seal, and to have at least somewhat better long range performance. This inclined most European militaries, as well as the United States, to begin transitioning from smoothbore percussion muskets to percussion rifle-muskets.\n\nMeanwhile, in 1836 Samuel Colt introduced the first percussion revolver. Like the percussion musket, the revolver used paper cartridges and percussion caps placed on nipples; unlike the musket, the revolving cylinder could be loaded relatively quickly. The revolver proved much more suitable as a handgun used for personal defense than as long arms for military or hunting purposes. Some revolving rifles were used during the American Civil War, but they proved to be underpowered and prone to malfunction (when one chamber of the cylinder was touched off, the fire might spread to the others and cause a catastrophic explosion) and were quickly relegated to the dustbin of military history.\n\nBy the mid to late 1850s, viable breech-loading rifles such as the Sharps and the Burnsides were in existence. These were single-shot rifles that were loaded from the rear of the gun, rather than from the muzzle as with a musket. The Sharps used a paper cartridge, similar to those used in muskets and rifle-muskets, while the Burnside used a copper-cased cartridge. Both saw limited service in the Civil War, especially with Union cavalry units, but the rifle-musket ruled the infantry battlefield.\n\nIn 1860, the first really viable repeaters appeared. These were the Henry and the Spencer. Unlike earlier breachloaders, the Spencer and Henry could be loaded with multiple metallic cartridges, and upon operation of a lever, the fired cartridge would be thrown out and a new one seated in its place. The Spencer saw extensive use with Union cavalry, while the Henry saw limited use as a private purchase weapon. More importantly, the Henry would go on to directly inspire the famous Winchester repeating rifles.\n\nTo address your more specific points: of course people tried to improve muskets and cannon! And they were very largely successful. A flintlock musket from ~1750 was a far superior weapon to a crude arquebus from ~1500, just as a cannon from ~1850 was the clear master of a demi-culverin from ~1550. Metallurgy, machining, and chemistry were the real limiting factors in further improvement. While an early repeater could fire much faster than a rifle-musket, it was not noticeably superior to it in accuracy or power. Both were limited by crude, slow-burning black powder, and by the weakness of the metal. Superior steel and the development of fast-burning smokeless powder were necessary for the next evolutionary improvement to occur.\n\nI can't speak to multi-barreled muskets, other than to say they were never in serious use by any military that I am aware of, double-barreled shotguns excepted. Additional barrels added weight, made firearms awkward to handle, and made them *slower* to reload, not faster. If a skilled musketeer could reload his flintlock in 15 seconds, each additional barrel is going to add at least another 12 seconds, assuming they share a common lock.", " >  Did people ever try to improve flintlock pistol and muskets with sharper accuracy, longer ranges, amount of black powder put inside the guns or shorter reloading times? If so, when did it began?\n\nThe flintlock is the firing mechanism, which doesn't have much bearing on accuracy, range, and the barrel's ability to withstand larger loads of black powder.\n\nInstead improving accuracy, range, and powder capacity was largely a matter of improving the barrel. This resulted in \"rifled\" muskets, such as the British Baker Rifle, which first came into common use during the Napoleonic Wars. \n\nThey were much more difficult to reload however - the bullets barely fit into the barrel - hence their use was often limited to sharpshooter units (or equivalents). The French Army notably largely refrained from using them.\n\n >  I'm also very interested in double-barreled and multi-barreled flintlocks (such as the duckfoot pistol), how did people decide that it would be more \"practical\"? As in, being able to shoot consecutive couple or multiple shots before reloading again? Did people try these same techniques with flintlock rifles and muskets?\n\nIt was never deemed very practical as a combat weapon due to weight. Why carry a musket twice as heavy when reload time was not affected? Double-barreled flintlocks were therefore limited primarily for hunting weapons (where an immediate second shot might make up for a missed first shot), or for close-quarter weapons where there won't be much reloading happening regardless.\n\n >   Did people try to improve cannon accuracy, ranges, amount of black powder put inside them and reloading times? ( such as mortars, broadsides, carronades?) What were the results? (bad, good?)\n\nYes by the Napoleonic Wars the 12 pounder was the standard piece, which was considerably larger than the cannons at the start of the flintlock era. Field mortars were also first deployed in significant numbers by the Prussian Army under Fredrick the Great, which eventually evolved into howitzers used by some of the armies in the Napoleonic Wars.\n\n >  It seems like a pain in the ass to reload a gun between 30 seconds up to even a minute! Would reloading times have been improved in double-barreled and multiple barreled flintlocks as well?\n\nNope. Reloading two barrels requires twice the time to reload a single barrel. The main use of twin barrels is to have a second shot ready in case the first shot misses and reload time is not a major factor - hence its use primarily in hunting weapons and for close quarter combat.\n\nThe long reload time also meant that muskets were primarily formation weapons - you need to have disciplined formations of troops reloading, aiming, and firing together. A well-trained soldier in the Napoleonic Wars could in fact fire much more rapidly than once every 30 seconds - five shots a minute (1 per 12 seconds) being an oft-quoted standard. \n\nThe 30 second reload time applies more to the US Civil War, where everyone was using rifled muskets (which were more difficult to reload) and troops tended to be citizen-soldiers.\n\n > Last but not least, when did flintlocks actually began to be replaced with guns such as revolvers and ones like \"civil-war era\" rifles and pistols? What were the first countries to adopt self-repeating guns into their militaries and navies?\n\nAs Rittermeister noted they were replaced primarily by the percussion musket, which completely replaced the flintlock firing mechanism. \n\nMuzzle-loaded muskets continued to be used by major armies for the rest of the 19th Century, albeit their last major deployment was during the US Civil War when most muzzle-loaded muskets had rifled barrels and percussion firing mechanisms. Repeating revolvers and carbines were also available at this point but were not widely distributed (likely due to cost).\n\nThey were replaced by breech-loaded \"needle guns\" in Europe a short while later, and these weapons were the primary firearm of both the French and German armies in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. These weapons are often considered to be the first true \"rifles\", as opposed to being \"muskets\" or \"rifled muskets\".\n\nEdit: Clarification"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2b1yne", "title": "Did FDR, Churchill or Stalin ever communicate directly with Hitler during WWII? Phone? Telegram?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b1yne/did_fdr_churchill_or_stalin_ever_communicate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj11z1g", "cj12nis", "cj14rsq", "cj1atyn", "cj1bjm1"], "score": [782, 2, 27, 16, 8], "text": ["Stalin and Hitler never met, nor did they ever actually talk to each other. The same goes for Churchill and FDR who never talked to Hitler either. The only allied leader that I can think of who actually met and talked with Hitler and then later fought him in World War Two was Canada's prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Also Chamberlain and the French prime minister \u00c9douard Daladier. Hitler did however write Stalin a letter and he had Ribbentrop give it to Stalin personally. The letter states that both sides should unite against the allies and that the Soviets should support the German claims in Poland. Its been speculated that Stalin and Hitler may have talked one the phone, but no evidence for such a meeting actually exists. The closest Hitler got was his meeting with Soviet foreign minister Molotov in Berlin in 1940. \n\nAlso for anyone curious (and because it feels weird to have such a short post) here is a list of countries who's prime ministers or presidents met with Hitler at least once:\n\nBritain (Neville Chamberlain)\n\nCanada (PM William Lyon Mackenzie King)\n\nFrance( PM \u00c9douard Daladier)\n\nItaly (The King- Vittore Emmanuel III and Mussolini)\n\nCzechoslovakia (President- Emil H\u00e1cha)\n\nHungary (The Regent- Milkos Horthy and the PMs B\u00e9la Imr\u00e9dy and Paul Teleki)\n\nRomania (Prime ministers Ion Antonescu and Ion Gigurtu King Carol II )\n\nBulgaria (king Boris III) \n\nSlovakia (Prime Minister Jozef Tiso) \n\nCroatia (Prime minister Ante Pavelic \n\nVichy France (Prime Minister Pierre Laval and President Phillipe Petain)\n\nSpain (Fransico Franco)\n\nYugoslavia (PM-Dragisa Cvetkovic)\n\nBelgium (King Leopold III)\n\nFinland (Mannerheim)", "I'm not sure how to word this but was there communication between the countries? did representatives from each country talk?  ", "Churchill agreed to meet with Hitler before the war when they were both in Munich: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever, Churchill had a couple questions for Hitler than probably changed Hitler's mind ", "This is a really interesting question, and I actually just finished reading a book about this possibility. It's called *Hitler's Peace*, by Philip Kerr. Here's part of the summary from Google Books:\n\n > Autumn 1943. Since Stalingrad, Hitler has known that Germany cannot win the war. The upcoming Allied conference in Teheran will set the ground rules for their second front-and for the peace to come. Realizing that the unconditional surrender FDR has demanded will leave Germany in ruins, Hitler has put out peace feelers. (Unbeknownst to him, so has Himmler, who is ready to stage a coup in order to reach an accord.) FDR and Stalin are willing to negotiate. Only Churchill refuses to listen.\n\nIt's a really fascinating historical fiction story, effectively weaving hypothetical happenings within actual events. If you're wondering what such an event might have looked like, I think this book would be a good read.\n\n**Mods:** I apologize if this is against the rules - I couldn't find anything prohibiting it.", "Sorry for the followup question, but how did they actually communicated during war time? Telegraph? Phone? Written letters?\n\nThe reason I'm curious is that if communication was mantained via wires, did both sides had any agreements about not destroying/razing certain wirings or poles for the sake of mantaining contact?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/churchill-proceedings/596-churchill-and-the-holocaust-the-possible-and-impossible"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "33rzgg", "title": "In medieval European art, angels are depicted with rainbow or coloured wings. Modern angels have white wings, though. When was there a shift in wing colour? Why? What triggered it?", "selftext": "For clarity's sake, something like [this angel](_URL_0_) from England or [this angel](_URL_1_) from 13th century Serbia has colourful wings. However, [this painting](_URL_2_) from 17th century Spain has white wings. Was this difference based on geography? Time? Why is there a difference in wing depictions? Why do we now almost universally see white wings? Is there some significance to each colour?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33rzgg/in_medieval_european_art_angels_are_depicted_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqsja2b"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't give a total answer to this, but I can make some observations which may help. Firstly, the habit of depicting angels with colourful wings has never actually been fully abandoned. [Here](_URL_3_) is a mural from 17th century Italy. [Here](_URL_6_) is a French painting of the 19th century, and a 20th century [Irish stained glass window](_URL_0_). At the same time, here is [Giotto's fresco of the crucifixion](_URL_7_) from around 1300, which depicts quite plain-winged angels. Personally, I suspect that local traditions and the artist's own imagination and resources were a large part of it, rather than set tradition. William Blake, for example sometimes depicts angels [with iridescent wings](_URL_2_), sometimes [with white](_URL_5_). You can see a similiar range of approaches with non-Christian winged figures as well, for example Cupid. See an [18th century British](_URL_1_) take on Cupid and Psyche, and a [17th century Dutch rendering](_URL_4_). The colours of angels wings are (to my knowledge) not explicitly mentioned in the bible, though some artists have, I believe, associated certain meanings with various colours. For instance, there is a certain tradition of depicting the seraphim wearing red, and possibly with red wings. I unfortunately don't have a copy of *Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art* to hand, but that might be a good place to start looking for more information."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://johnrochaphoto.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/BHTBKRangel.jpg", "http://www.olgachristine.com/icons/OL_WhiteAngel.jpg", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cortona_Guardian_Angel_01.jpg#/media/File:Cortona_Guardian_Angel_01.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://images.cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.PC.520880.7055475/84846.jpg", "http://www.christies.com/lotfinderimages/d51758/d5175829l.jpg", "http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/rbc/rbc0001/2003/2003rosen1806/014r.jpg", "http://kimballtrombone.com/files/2010/04/san-martino-detail.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Cupid_and_Psyche_-_Anthony_Van_Dyck_%281639-40%29.jpg", "http://www.thehypertexts.com/images/William%20Blake%20Angels%20Hovering%20Over%20the%20Body%20of%20Jesus%20Christ.jpg", "https://images2.bonhams.com/image?src=Images/live/2005-10/19/7127895-1-2.jpg&amp;width=640&amp;height=480&amp;halign=l0&amp;valign=t0&amp;autosizefit=1", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Giotto_Crucifixion.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2806nb", "title": "Did Saxon England have any thing like a parliament?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2806nb/did_saxon_england_have_any_thing_like_a_parliament/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6baxq", "ci6gdpn"], "score": [3, 6], "text": ["There's some controversy about the nature of the witenagemot -- did it exist continuously, or was it only only convened ad hoc when needed? What powers of legislation did it have and at what time periods? Could it really depose and elect kings, or was royal \"election\" just a rubber-stamping ritual of fealty to the pre-determined new king? -- but it was probably the closest analogy to the parliament.", "Hope I'm not too late! Now this is an interesting question and I'll try to bring in some historiography at the end because that it very important in gaining a full understanding.\n\nNow if were going into semantics during the Anglo-Saxon period 'England' as a polity didn't exist because there were many kingdoms and it wasn't till the 10th century under the House of Wessex that power and land was unified to create the 'Kingdom of the English'.\n\nFrom the 7thn century to the Norman Conquest there existed the Witenagemot (Witan) which was a meeting or assembly of all the major landowners, nobles, churchmen or even traders depending on the period who would advise the king. Also depending on the literature your reading sometimes the term Witan is used to describe assemblies present in the localities of the previous kingdoms post-unification, so the Witan of Northumbria, Wessex, East-Anglia, etc.\n\nNow there is considerable debate to the actual functions and the power wielded by the Witan and assembly members throughout the period. For example they would advise on matters of taxation, justice and domestic or external security, but depending on the contemporary situation, such as the weak rule of Ethelred the Unready the Witan was able to exercise more power, though it must be noted that it was still very much a small advisory council compared to the larger gatherings of the 17th century Parliaments.\n\nNow on to some historiography! The idea that British Parliament had ancient origins in the Witan was mainly expounded by the Whig historians of the 18th century who suffered from a problem of presentism in seeing the British Parliamentary state as the apex of human-political development and an outcome of the 'march of progress' of history. Additionally these Whig historians commonly liked to say many features of the British state derived from pre-Norman Conquest origins, which were sometimes called the 'Norman Yoke', because of course at the time there was much political and military enmity between France and Britain.\n\nMedievalists do recognise the similarities of the Witan assemblies and the later Parliaments and some may point towards them sharing in the *general tradition* of landowner representation in England, but contemporary debate recognises the centuries gap between the Conquest and later Parliaments and the Whig tendency to romanticise the origins of the traditions of the British political state to ancient times.\n\nBibliography: \n\nBarlow, Frank. *William I and the Norman Conquest*. London, 1965.\n\nChibnall, Marjorie. *The Debate on the Norman Conquest.* Manchester, 1999.^1\n\nDavies, Wendy, ed. *Short Oxford History of the British Isles: From the Vikings to the Normans*. Oxford, 2003.\n\nEdit: Woops forgot a bib reference.\n\n^1 This is a brilliant resource for historiographical information on the late Anglo-Saxon and Norman period.\n\nEdit: Sentence on Norman Yoke and bibliography formatting. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3j4zdg", "title": "How did so many underage WW2 soldiers manage to enlist?", "selftext": "I'd really like to get an idea of the cultural context of this. Did the armed forces actively recruit the underage, or did they just look the other way when the time came? Was it still technically illegal? Did families still find it honorable for their children to join even if they were committing fraud to do so?\n\n(I asked a similar question on askreddit, but didn't get the type of responses I was looking for) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j4zdg/how_did_so_many_underage_ww2_soldiers_manage_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cumm7ph"], "score": [7], "text": ["I don't have great answer to this, but I think there were several aspects:  \n\n1) The armies needed the manpower, so unless the man applying was visibly clearly way too young or otherwise physically unqualified to enlist (too short, physical disability, etc) the recruiters didn't look for reason to disqualify a potential recruit or draftee.\n\n2) In the United States, at least, most people, especially from rural areas, just didn't have a great deal of official paperwork that could be used to verify their identity and vital statistics, the way we do today.  Birth certificates were often non-existent for rural residents who weren't born in a city hospital, social security cards had only been introduced in 1935, and lots of fewer people had any kind of drivers licnese or photo ID.\n\n3) The cultural distinction of treating teenagers as basically children rather than adults is mostly a development of the last 60 years or so.  In the 1930s and 1940s, a very large percentage of the population had only an middle-school level of education, and had entered the labor force, formally or informally, by the age of 12 or 14, if not earlier.  So during WWII the idea of teenagers-as-adults was much more culturally present that is the case in today in the early 21st century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4xl2lk", "title": "How where harems organized ? Was there a \"bottom girl\" to keep the others in line? How would a poorer man go about these things ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xl2lk/how_where_harems_organized_was_there_a_bottom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6glnt1"], "score": [14], "text": ["The Ottoman harem is the subject of an excellent 1993 study by Leslie Peirce, called *The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire.* Anyone with any interest in this topic should pick it up. Really a great book.\n\nPeirce's study is mainly about the way in which female power was exercised in the Ottoman Empire from roughly 1550-1650, but it also aims to dispel many myths about the role of the harem and of women in Islamic society. First among these is the idea that the harem's purpose was fundamentally sexual. Harems were *not* just large collections of women meant only to serve the man. They were actually parallel households - just as rich men gathered large numbers of male servants, rich women did the same. In the Ottoman case, the head of the harem was the Valide Sultan, i.e. the sultan's mother. Like the sultan's household, the harem was organized into a strict hierarchy, in which access to the Valide Sultan and her favor determined each woman's place and status within that hierarchy, indicated by the size of their cash stipend. Women's status was also affected by anything which tied them more closely to the dynasty, such as bearing children or becoming an imperial wet-nurse. Women in the harem would be educated and taught practical skills before being married off to bachelors from the sultan's household. The majority of them would never have sexual relations with the sultan.\n\nHarems (in this definition, as opposed to the technical meaning of the word, which just means the part of the house which belonged to the women) were limited to the rich elite. This is, of course, because poor people wouldn't be able to afford servants and slaves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1f0iys", "title": "Why were Scots the first to rebel against Charles I in the late 1630s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f0iys/why_were_scots_the_first_to_rebel_against_charles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca5upwh"], "score": [2], "text": ["A lot of Scots were Calvinists, a protestant sect similar to Puritanism. Charles was attempting to impose a version of the Book of Common Prayer which was in disagreement with Calvinist theology. The Scots were trying to show that they did not agree with this imposition of a religious text they did  not agree with. Things turned violent fast, and was one of the sparks that lit the gunpowder on the Wars of the Three Kingdoms."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lq4ce", "title": "Why did the U.S. quickly conclude that Castro was not a leader we would support when he initially declared that he wasn't a communist?", "selftext": "It is my understanding that Castro was not initially a communist  &  the U.S. could of fostered a working relationship with him.  Why did we bail on him forcing him to turn to Russia for support  &  contributing to a near nuclear catastrophe a few years later?  Also, could it be considered a substantial failure for the U.S. not to have good relations with a neighbor 90 miles from Florida?  No one ever talks about this it seems. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lq4ce/why_did_the_us_quickly_conclude_that_castro_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv8uw2v"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well this is a debate amongst historians on the topic: was Castro \"pushed\" into the arms of the Soviets by the U.S, or, were Castro's intentions all along to break ties with the U.S diplomatically and economically? \n\nTo first answer this question, we must decide what we believe Castro's political persuasion was. First, why would Castro claim not to be a communist? The answer to this is one of two things: either A) He genuinely wasn't a communist in 1959 when he stated as such to Herbert Matthews in a series of interviews, or B) He was a communist, however, seeing U.S intervention throughout Latin America and knowing the longer imperial history between the U.S and Cuba, he lied in order to avoid direct U.S intervention in his revolution.  \n\nWhilst Castro himself has stated in his [autobiography](_URL_1_) that indeed he was always a Marxist, having seen the blight of sugar farmers on his fathers estate, and his statements to American media outlets were intentionally deceptive. However, how do we take such a statement? If Castro was so willing to lie for the sake of optics once, who is to say he isn't lying in his autobiography regarding the origin of his Marxist beliefs? Thus, its hard to ascertain whether Castro was truly a communist or not in 1959 when he took power. However I would argue that Castro's genuine belief in communism was not at the root of the rapid deterioration in U.S-Cuban relations\n\nWith that said, Castro certainly was a nationalist. One need look no further than the Program Manifesto of the July 26th Movement to understand why the relationship between Cuba and the U.S quickly soured. I'm having trouble finding a free link to it, but you should be able to find it online or through a university library if you have access. The driving force behind the Revolution was a politically and (more important to U.S relations) economically independent Cuba. The latter was certainly at odds with U.S interests in the region, as U.S industries, particularly in regard to sugar and other agrarian industries, held tremendous power and market share under the Batista regime. For Cuba to become economically independent, it was necessary to seize control over the islands biggest exports, namely sugar. \n\nThats exactly what Castro did after taking power. He issued agrarian reform that expropriated large land holdings and also stipulated that sugar plantations could not be owned by foreign nationals. This was central to the strain in U.S relations (there is a good overview [here](_URL_0_) if you want more details on agrarian reform). Remember, just a few years prior the U.S staged a coup in Guatemala largely due to lobbying by the United Fruit Company over similar agrarian reforms. U.S economic hegemony in Latin America was very important to U.S Cold War interests.\n\nIn 1959, Castro would visit the U.S  and meet with VP Nixon (Castro had thought he would meet with Eisenhower). After the meeting, Nixon issued a memo to the CIA, State Department, and White House that it was foolish to try to \"get along\" with Castro, suggesting the U.S organize the overthrow of the new Cuban regime. Whilst Eisenhower ultimately decided against this approach (unlike JFK, however it should be noted that Eisenhower did sign off on the training of Cuban exiles) the U.S did begin to issue trade restrictions, refusing to buy Cuban sugar or export oil to Cuba as a response to Cuban nationalization of U.S industries, leading to the eventual embargo in 1960. This resulted, as you have noted, in Castro turning to the Soviets to export sugar and import oil. \n\nSo to answer you question: its hard to say the U.S \" forced\" Castro into anything. Judging from his actions, his association with communism is of little consequence. Rather, Castro's nationalism was at odds with U.S \"soft\" imperialism in Cuba. Eisenhower was initially willing to work with Castro until Castro's reforms directly threatened U.S interests and influence in the region. \n\nMy understanding of this is largely from a U.S historians perspective. I hope someone with a little more expertise on the matter can fill in the gaps and details I may have missed.  \n\nEDIT: Formatting and stuff"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.ca/books?id=PApA01u_6RQC&amp;pg=PA124&amp;dq=cuban+land+reform&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CD4Q6AEwB2oVChMIpr6M3uGHyAIVhH6SCh3A4gOT#v=onepage&amp;q=cuban%20land%20reform&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=45yJZHaan-8C&amp;dq=fidel+castro+autobiography&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CCQQ6AEwAGoVChMI05qzzdyHyAIVlhGSCh0bmgEX"]]}
{"q_id": "1t4tv1", "title": "Who is this? Is it worth anything?", "selftext": "Got this from an old church, im looking to find out more about it. Thanks\n[Imgur](_URL_0_)\n[Imgur](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t4tv1/who_is_this_is_it_worth_anything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4du4k"], "score": [3], "text": ["The inscription to the left of the head says it is St. Basil, who was one of the Cappadocian theologians. The colorful, onion-domed cathedral on Red Square in Moscow that you have (perhaps) seen pictured is named for him. \n\nedit: With apologies to the mods, the [wikipedia article](_URL_0_) looks pretty good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/CGx3OrS.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/MYtekDF"], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_of_Caesarea"]]}
{"q_id": "a8prdz", "title": "Were the D-Day attacks known about before hand by general population?", "selftext": "I\u2019m not expecting people would know the when\u2019s and where\u2019s. But how aware were they that something was building up? Did everyone read the paper the next day and find out? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8prdz/were_the_dday_attacks_known_about_before_hand_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eccthnl"], "score": [4], "text": ["It wouldn't have come as a surprise to most Americans or Britons. It was obvious to many Britons, who could see the influx of men and war material. Many American families had relatives who'd been sent Britain and could easily guess why so many GI had been deployed there.\n\nBut the exact date and location of the landings were closely guarded secrets. Before the landing, almost all military posts had been locked down and most troops were not told about the landings until shortly before the planned landings (which ended up being delayed due to weather).\n\nRadio, newspaper, and word of mouth would have been the first serious news about the landings most civilians heard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "42eeg0", "title": "Why didn't Western Europe have a Red Scare?", "selftext": "In the 1950s, the United States was paranoid about everything that even resembled Communism. This can even be felt today with many Americans decrying things they don't like as Socialism. This paranoia is attributed to the threat of the Soviet Union. My question is: why didn't this occur in Western Europe? Not only were they also facing the Soviet Union, but they were much closer/bordering the Warsaw Pact.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42eeg0/why_didnt_western_europe_have_a_red_scare/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz9q7cx", "cza8neh"], "score": [50, 2], "text": ["Firstly, several countries did have similar worries about communist spies, revolutionaries and militias. And in fact, this was at times true: far-left revolutionaries and terrorists were actually a problem in some western European countries, for example in Germany the Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) and Revolutionary Cells. Not to mention left-wing/nationalist terrorists like the IRA and ETA. \n\nHowever, while intelligence officers did search out left-wing agitators, and groups like MI5 did keep tabs on prominent left-wing activists, intellectuals and celebrities, there was not the same visceral dislike of Socialism.\n\nWhy? I'd argue that the main reason is simply that many European countries were ruled by Socialists, or their watered-down version, the Social Democrats. Several countries had small Communist parties in parliament, or even occasionally in coalition governments.\n\nAlthough most have given up on mass nationalisation, most European states still have prominent Socialist or Social Democrat parties today. For example, the British Labour party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Parti socialiste of France (which is currently in government), Partido Socialista Obrero Espa\u00f1ol, etc. While in America the main seperation that developed was between Conservatives and Liberals, in Europe the main political divide has been between Conservatives and Socialists (both of whom have been influenced by Liberalism) with Liberals generally taking the part of third party (for example, the British Liberal Democrats, German Free Democrats, etc). Most of these Socialist parties are, or at least used to be, members of the Socialist International. Until the 90s, the Party of European Socialists was almost always the largest Party in the European Parliament.\n\nSo, of course, these countries were much more sympathetic to Socialism. It's hard to view Socialism as anti-British when Prime Minister Clement Attlee is nationalising industry and the health service, while in America it was much easier to view Socialism as anti-American.\n\nNow, it should be said that many of these Socialist parties were explicitly anti-Communist, and were supporters of NATO, as they considered Communist governments to be dictatorships. But they were still more sympathetic to left-wing academics and celebrities.", "I would also argue that *anti*-socialism was a crucial element of American political ideology (of the elites and of the right wing) long before the 1950s.  \n\nAnti-union propaganda in the 1920s and earlier was usually framed around the claim that (somehow) unions were a step towards socialism--and thus, un-American.  \n\nFor instance, the attack on the Bonus Army--US Army veterans from the First World War--by the US Army in 1932 was justified primarily by the claim that there were \"communists\" in the encampment. \n\nBut you can see this also in the massive reaction to the Haymarket Riot (1886), which set in motion widespread attacks on labor organizers as socialists/anarchists. \n\nI might even argue that, in start contrast to Europe, *anti*-socialism played a much greater role in American political culture than socialism itself.   But other historians might argue this.  \n\nOverall, the US had a Red Scare in the '50s because socialists had been demonized in American politics for the previous 80 years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1q3kyh", "title": "What was it like to stay at an inn through the centuries?", "selftext": "I assume that inns in movies and/or books are idealized and I've always wondered what staying at an inn was really like.\n\nKinda like that scene at the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1q3kyh/what_was_it_like_to_stay_at_an_inn_through_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd8uib2", "cd8zvf8", "cd907up", "cd9ops3"], "score": [11, 16, 5, 2], "text": ["We had earlier posts on inns in the [Ancient](_URL_1_) and [Medieval](_URL_0_) world, if you want to have a look at them. But there must be more to the history of inns, so I hope your post will get additional answers.", "In 19th century Paris, you had a couple of options.\n\nFirst, if you were staying for longer than a couple of days, you could rent waht they called a h\u00f4tel garni. These were basically small, studio or one bedroom apartments that were furnished with old and cheap furniture. They were considered to be trashy, and not at all respectable for anyone except single women (courtisanes: think mistresses that are still on the lookout for lovers) and students. However, if you were a \"middle-class\" person visiting Paris for a few weeks, this was probably where you'd stay, unless you had family here. \n\nThe second option for shorter stays (but not necessarily...) were the auberges. Auberges are sort of like hotels that we have now - but just very, very low quality. Think a bed and a desk. And you sometimes would have to share that bed if the auberge was too crowded. At an auberge, you could also pay for a \"pension,\" which means you would get dinner/lunch with your room. All the guests with a pension would eat in the dining room at the same time, and the food was normally stew (\"pot au feu\"). Auberges were for the really lowest classes. Fishermen, vagrants, criminals...\n\nNow, let's say you don't have enough money to buy a place, but you need to live somewhere for a year or more. You could live in a \"pension\" (yes, same word as before) which would be like a hotel garni, in that it's furnished, but you would also eat with the other residents and the caretaker. There was nothing really wrong with living in a pension, but the minute you said you lived there, people would know you didn't have much money, but that you were planning on staying in Paris for a while.\n\nBasically, the more temporary the housing, the less reputable it was. Elegant hotels began appearing in the late 19th century, like the Hotel Ritz in 1898. By the early 20th century, you could find very fancy accommodations for just a few nights if you had the money.", "I am actually researching victualing ( eating) establishments in the 18th century in London.  Interestingly they weren't considered restaurants c until french chef opened a restaurant called Pontack's in 1653, in which you can read about in Richard Tame's *Feeding London*.  But the inn would have large benches with a few rows of large tables and would be a very communal area, there would have been no single tables like we know today.   I read that mutton and small game birds were on spitts and served for a fixed price.  You can read about that in *Londinopolis* by Jenner and Griffiths", "If you're a poor medieval peasant on the road, a merchant's hall would likely be your shelter for the night, in a big room with rushes on the floor and a wooden pillow for comfort, all jammed in there with other poor travellers sleeping on the floor around the fire. If you can afford an inn, it's most likely you're going to be sharing your bed with not just other travellers, but with fleas and bedbugs. Usually several beds to a room and two (or three, in Germany, described by Deschamps in the 14th century) people to a bed. Beer would be available- only beer. \n\nEdit: source. *A Distant Mirror*, Barbara W. Tuchman"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1np7cu/are_there_first_hand_accounts_of_medieval/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1egbuv/how_common_were_inns_in_the_ancient_world_and_how/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6b78w3", "title": "Why are there no photos of a battlefield covered with thousands of bodies?", "selftext": "Surely the sight of, for example, Omaha beach right after the landings or no man's land at The Somme after 60,000 British troops were cut down in a single attack would have been shocking enough that at someone would have wanted to document it.... \n\nJust seems kind of strange to me. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6b78w3/why_are_there_no_photos_of_a_battlefield_covered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhkrukp"], "score": [27], "text": ["There's an obvious safety hazard in taking photographs or video during a pitched battle, particularly in an age where the requisite tools would be very burdensome and require purposeful inclusion in planning.\n\nTaking D-Day as an example, NPR and Fresh Air just broadcasted an interview centered around media, propoganda, and filmmaking during the war. [The discussion of D-Day occurs about halfway through the transcript.](_URL_0_) The tidbit that applies here is that while there was footage taken (which survived the battle), it was difficult for the artists to compile the more graphic footage in a comprehensible or tasteful manner for folks on the homefront, therefore these tapes languished in storage for years afterward.\n\nThere are many possible components to impractical coverage - the film can be destroyed during the battle, the government may deem it unairable, or the footage might be unusable. All converge to limit your exposure to the carnage you're asking about. That doesn't mean that there wasn't any coverage - quite the contrary - but a majority of the material is going to be from post-battle or posed situations.\n\n ~~I'd imagine more contemporary wars, with modern pocket-sized cameras may have more of what you're asking about~~ I suppose I don't have to imagine, but to better stick to the rules of the sub (and to avoid trawling through the material too much myself), I'd just ask you to google or search liveleak any recent military action and you'll find a bevy of 'found footage' at your fingertips.                    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.npr.org/2017/03/31/522175483/during-world-war-ii-even-filmmakers-reported-for-duty"]]}
{"q_id": "1dydvw", "title": "What was life like for Native Americans during the American Civil War? Did life change amidst the chaos? Were they largely unaffected?", "selftext": "I realize that is a broad group of people I am asking about. I obviously would narrow my question down to the tribes and regions that would be affected by the war. I am not knowledgeable enough to name names, but hopefully you fine historians will.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dydvw/what_was_life_like_for_native_americans_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9v7gnk", "c9v8xah", "c9vch95", "c9vgx4d"], "score": [3, 2, 6, 3], "text": ["How the Civil War affected Native Americans depended markedly on where they were: some were involved and others knew little of it (or enjoyed a period a lightened intrusion during the distraction provided to people who would have otherwise come West). But you may want to look at the National Historic Landmarks nomination for the Honey Springs Battlefield site in Oklahoma for an unusual spin on Native American involvement: _URL_0_\n", "Some joined the war on one side or the other. Confederate Cherokee General Stand Watie comes to mind as perhaps the most famous native American who fought in the war. ", "I'm not a historian, but I have looked into some of this a little bit for personal reasons: At the the time the Dakota alliance in southern Minnesota was strongly divided between pro-war and anti-war factions; both sides unhappy with recent treaties but disagreeing on how to respond. The pro-war faction explicitly argued that, with the U.S. Army distracted by the Civil War and so many Minnesotan men away to war, they could retake their lands and the Army wouldn't be able to stop them. The anti-war faction included several prominent delegates from a recent trip to Washington D.C. who were stunned by the resources available to the U.S. and didn't agree with that argument.\n\nThe pro-war faction got their way by default when there was a minor incident that touched off the war. Long story short, the anti-war faction was proven right. The Dakota made early gains because the U.S. *was* distracted and the settlers *were* vulnerable. But eventually reinforcements did arrive and they were routed. That includes the (I think) 3rd Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, which was thought to have performed dishonorably in the Civil War, and was sent home to Minnesota to essentially \"restore their honor\" by putting down the uprising. They were vicious.\n\nSo for \"tribes\", that would basically be the Sioux, specifically the Dakota (eastern end of the Sioux group). The Dakota in turn were a confederation of mostly 4 tribes.\n\nFor regions, southern Minnesota is where the fighting happened, especially in the vicinity of the Minnesota river. After the battles, the Dakota were mostly brought to a concentration camp near Minneapolis/St. Paul for a while, then relocated to places like the Dakota territory (but also as far as Oklahoma and somewhere in Canada that I'm blanking on). One of the pro-war leaders, Little Crow, escaped and traveled all around the region from Wisconsin to Manitoba trying to rally other Indian nations to the cause but was unsuccessful.\n\nLocally it had a profound impact on how the white settlers would think about Indians for generations - on the one hand in line with the Hollywood stereotype of \"savages on the prowl\", but on the other hand many members of the anti-war faction actively tried to protect settlers from their compatriots and created a stereotype of the \"good indians\" who just wanted to assimilate and get along and be nice.\n\nFor the Dakota it led to their being held in a concentration camp, then forced out of the state, regardless of which side they were on or what actions they took during the conflict. It scattered them among several reservations or proto-reservations, and reinforced the perception that there was nothing like justice for them under U.S. law, but that active warfare was a futile response.\n\n(Sorry if I've goofed on any of this subreddit's norms; new here.)", "By 1862, the largest tribes that had been moved into Indian Territory were the Five-Civilized tribes Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole. Albert Pike, the Confederate Commissioner of Indian Affairs, [negotiated treaties](_URL_0_) of alliance with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. The treaties required the Indians to support Confederate war aims and raise military forces for their own defense. Soldiers were rounded up from these tribes, primarily in 1864, and formed two brigades, the First and Second [Indian Calvery](_URL_1_).  Cherokee soliders made up the core of these brigades.\n\n  \nThe Confederacy promised that the Indians would not be called upon to operate outside the boundaries of the Indian Territory. From the Confederate perspective, the treaties secured the western boundary of the new nation and allowed the government in Richmond to concentrate on other fronts.\n\nTheir confederate alliances would only end up serving as another strike against them after the war. \n\nThe Confederacy also tried to force [Lumbee](_URL_2_)  and other eastern Indians into their ranks. Many eastern Indians had wanted to join the war early on, but they wanted to do it on their own terms, so they rejected the confederate's offers. Many Lumbee also opposed slavery , didn't want to fight against the North. When General Sherman\u2019s \nUnion army entered North Carolina in March 1865, the Lumbee helped guide his men through the state.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nps.gov/nhl/Fall2012Noms.htm"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Civil-1862-1865-Bison/dp/0803259190/ref=pd_sim_b_1/181-4478197-6209221", "http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/F/FI008.html", "http://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/collateral/articles/F00.american.indians.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2709jm", "title": "How would a British/HMS Frigate built in 1715 differ from his Napoleonic (say, 1790's+) descendant? What improvements would be made and did it's paint pattern or any aesthetics change?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2709jm/how_would_a_britishhms_frigate_built_in_1715/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chwbk51", "chwi9gj", "chwmdm0"], "score": [23, 9, 14], "text": ["This is quite a difficult question to answer as in the early 18th century the individual design of each frigate would have been down the the master ship builder at each individual dockyard. The idea of building to class doesn't come in until the 1740's, when ships began to be built under contract.\n\nThis means a great deal of variation between ships of the same rate. One of the biggest changes one would notice is that a lot of larger earlier frigates (5th rate) had their guns split across two levels. This meant their firepower was massively limited in rough seas, as the lower gun ports would be to avoid flooding. Later frigates put all the guns on the same level to avoid this problem.\n\nThe biggest leaps in frigate development for the British came after the capture of the French frigate \"H\u00e9b\u00e9\" in 1782. They initially copied the design, creating the Leda class of frigates. Which were faster and more manoeuvrable than the previous classes of 5th rate British frigates. The problem with them was that they had limited storage and were not very good in bad weather. The British took this design and developed the Lively class of frigates, taking all the pros from the French design and making the ships more suitable for long voyages and bad weather. \n\nThere is obviously a lot more to cover on this topic, but I have one Robert Gardiner book to hand the rest are back in Canada.\n\nReading:\n\nR. Gardiner \"The First Frigates\" 1992\n\nR. Gardiner \"Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars\" 2000\n\nR. Winfield \"British Warships in the Age of Sail\" 2008\n\nR. Winfield  &  D. Lyon \"The Sail and Steam Navy List, 1815-1889\" 2004\"", "One change that would have been implemented in this time period that came to mind was the implementation of copper bottoming of warships. \n\nExperiments on this began in 1761, and was eventually installed on all warships as a result of wars with France in the 1780's. The process  involved nailing sheets of copper onto the hull of warships under the waterline using iron nails. This prevented the corrosion and biofouling of the wooden hull.\n\nThe benefits of this was that British warships were able to be kept at sea for longer periods of time before requiring maintenance in dry dock. I've also heard that it may have also given a small increase in ship speed as a result of a more streamlined hull but I can't find anything to back that up.\n\nAs for paint schemes, Nelsons Chequer scheme became quite common for British warships after his Victory at Trafalgar.", "/u/on1879 offered a good overview, but I'd like to add some more information that might contribute to a more complete understanding of the question. (Great question, by the way!)\n\nIt's important to note that the term \"frigate\" had different meanings at different times in the British navy. During the civil wars of the 1640s, the parliamentary forces fought mostly with armored merchantmen and did not make much use of the \"great ships\" that Charles I had built. After the third civil war started in 1649, English shipping was attacked by fast cruisers from Dunkirk and other Channel ports. The Dunkirker ships were called \"frigates,\" but were very different than what we think of as classic frigates of the Age of Sail; they were very small, lightly built, with very minimal armament and large crews. They were designed essentially for commerce raiding and high-speed operations against weak targets. \n\nThe word, though, became applied to bigger ships that the English navy would build, and also became a verb (in French, \"to frigate\" meant to build long, low ships) and an adjective, so it loses a bit of descriptive meaning. In any case, in 1650 the English navy launched the *Speaker*, a two-gundeck ship originally built to carry 44 long guns and carrying 60 by 1655. The *Speaker* is arguably the ancestor of the two-decked ship through the 1750s. \n\nThe reason why I'm bringing this all up is that the shift from the shorter, handier ships of the Elizabethan era to these longer, lower ships with broadside armament meant a change in tactics, where ships would no longer approach and fire off all their guns before withdrawing, but would rather lie in line of battle and batter each other. \n\nThe drawback of building ships to this model is that the second (and in some cases, third) gundeck led the English to over-arm the ships, which made them top-heavy. This led to problems of the lower gundecks being submerged in any kind of weather, and also the ship heeling and not being stiff enough to get the full driving force out of its sails. New ships were sometimes \"girdled\" with extra planking at the waterline in an effort to increase buoyancy; this did not improve sailing qualities. These defects were serious in the North Sea and worse in the Atlantic, and were compound when Parliament became involved in ship design and voted in the 1690s money to build ships to an (unrealistic) specified tonnage and gun rating (80 guns at only 1,100 tons), which proved to be inadequate in practice. \n\nTo get to your question more specifically, it's a bit of a false premise. Parliament did not vote any new funds for shipbuilding between 1696 and 1745, so any \"new\" construction during that time would have been done under an administrative dodge of a \"great rebuild,\" in which ships were more or less broken up and some of their timbers used in new construction. So a \"frigate\" built or \"rebuilt\" in 1715 would be of that older, two-decker type and thought of as a line-of-battle ship, so the ships \"built\" in 1715 were really of the older design dating back to the 1650s and later. \n\nNow, technical improvements: /u/unclebourbon mentioned coppering. Copper sheathing replaced earlier experiments with lead sheathing that had been conducted starting in the 1670s. These failed not because of anything wrong with the premise, but because of electrolytic corrosion, which was not underwood at the time (the lead and iron parts of the ship combined with seawater to form a slight current which ate away at the iron). \n\nA more obvious technical development of the 1690s was the invention of the steering wheel, which replaced the whipstaff attached to the ship's tiller. It doubled the potential range of movement of the rudder and allowed for many more men to combine their efforts to steer a ship in heavy weather. \n\nNow, to get to the real meat of your question, which is frigate design between 1715 and 1780: it's complicated. I'm going to have to gently disagree with /u/on1879 on one point: the British did not copy the Hebe (or other ships); even if they had wanted to build exact copies of ships or even if shipwrights told their superiors they had built exact copies, British ships were always more heavily timbered than French ships and fastened with treenails, not iron nails. There were also substantial internal differences due to the British preference for increased stowage, and the decks/hatchways/magazines/etc. would have been changed to meet those needs. It's much more correct to say that British \"true frigate\" design was **influenced** by the capture of the French *Medee* in 1744, but that British fridges were built with British needs in mind. (The *Medee* was lightly built, like many French ships, and was not bought into service.) The shipwrights of the 1740s were comparing French designs with older British designs, such as the yacht *Royal Caroline,* and were building cruisers with 11-12 gun ports per side. These were initially built with a 22-24 gun battery of 9-pounders, and became larger over time, with 28-gun 9-pounder frigates being replaced by 32-gun 12-pounder frigates and the very large 36-38 gun 18-pounder frigates by the 1770s, in time for the first American wars. \n\nTo put those changes in perspective, it's useful to examine the change in armament of the ships. A 22-gun 9-pounder frigate would throw a broadside weighing 99 lbs (11 guns/side * 9 pound balls). The 32-gun 12-pounders would throw almost twice as much iron per broadside (192 lbs), while the 38-gun 18-pounder would throw 342 lb at once. All these ships were built with the idea in mind that they would be fast, weatherly and carry enough stores for a long cruise. \n\nedit for sources: N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean; Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates; Robert Gardiner, First Frigates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1dflka", "title": "How much independence from Moscow and the central party did Soviet Republics enjoy? Did the bureaucracy of the USSR contribute to the development of these states at all?", "selftext": "I was thinking about this after reading about, [Tshakhiagin Elbergdorj](_URL_0_) the current president of Mongolia who was sent to Russia for education when that country was under Soviet rule before returning to Mongolia and advocating for political reform, which he apparently was educated on in Russia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dflka/how_much_independence_from_moscow_and_the_central/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9pwzsv"], "score": [3], "text": ["Mongolia wasn't a Soviet Republic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsakhiagiin_Elbegdorj"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4x7tzw", "title": "Where did the lore of trolls, elves, dwarfs etc originate from? Are they from the same source or time period?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x7tzw/where_did_the_lore_of_trolls_elves_dwarfs_etc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6d8vnf", "d6dcp25", "d6dia5g", "d6dojkt", "d6dowpy", "d6dut3d"], "score": [723, 58, 8, 28, 2, 3], "text": ["This is a difficult question to answer. First a minor point of clarification: the term \"troll\" can mean many things depending on the location in Scandinavia. I think it is safe to assume that you are referring to the array of supernatural beings that figure in popular fantasy literature and films and that the trolls you are asking about are the big ogre-like monsters.\n\nOne of the reasons why this is a difficult question to handle is that cultures nearly universally emerge from prehistory with beliefs and stories dealing with a full array of supernatural beings. Finding a point or origin in a prehistoric past is nearly impossible and can only be a matter of speculation.\n\nThe focus of what is certainly the subject of your enquiry is the pre-industrial inheritance of Northern Europe. Medieval Norse literature frequently mentions these sorts of supernatural beings. It is not clear if these entities are identical to what nineteenth-century folklore collectors encountered, but there is enough continuity to suggest that they are either the same or there was cultural drift that at least links the supernatural beings expressed in literature and oral tradition in the two periods. Some of the difference may also be the result of different forms of expression: medieval literate writers as opposed to illiterate nineteenth-century storytellers.\n\nOne the peculiar things about a certain type of supernatural beings is that regardless of the term used, they seem to hang together with a great deal of continuity. These are the elves (but we can also refer to them as fairies, sidhe, huldrefolk, or in parts of Scandinavia they are also called trolls). These entities are distinct in the way they are believed to live in communities with societies that roughly reflect the human condition. Outside of Britain, Ireland, Brittany, and Scandinavia (with some bleeding over into continental Europe and Russia), this idea is virtually non-existent. Supernatural beings playing the same part in similar legends are usually singular, or appear in pairs or threes - but they act singularly. It is reasonable to ask how this concept existed across linguistic lines in a well-defined geographic zone. If the idea diffused, why did it not diffuse elsewhere? Most folklorists would shun the explanation of diffusion because this perception of elves seems to be such a core perception of the supernatural world that it would be difficult for it diffuse: when it comes to folklore, stories travel easily, but they usually adapt to local belief systems rather than carry foreign belief systems with them.\n\nSo by way of not answering your question, we can describe this peculiar aspect of oral tradition related to elves, but we cannot say with authority were it originated. The question of origin for all the supernatural beings at the heart of your question is in a remote past that is difficult to describe or understand.\n\nFor sources: on trolls, a great piece of work is Elisabeth Hartmann, Die Trollvorstellungen in den Sagen und M\u00e4rchen der Skandinavischen V\u00f6lker (T\u00fcbingen: Eberhard Karls Universit\u00e4t T\u00fcbingen, 1936). In general, one of the most respected authorities on the question of Celtic and Scandinavian folklore is the late Bo Almqvist; see his Viking Ale: Studies on Folklore Contacts between the Northern and the Western Worlds (Aberystwyth: Boethius, 1991) edited by \u00c9il\u00eds N\u00ed Dhuibhne and S\u00e9amas \u00d3 Cath\u00e1in.\n", "/u/sunagainstgold wrote a [very nice post](_URL_0_) on the origins and influences of that very famous popularizer of \"trolls, elves, dwarfs, etc\": Tolkien. It will give you some helpful background into the origins and overlap of Northern European mythologies.", "Honestly I didn't expect any responses so thanks for your replies, will be great reading them all. ", "The trolls, elves, and dwarfs from Tolkien's books and resulting high fantasy works were heavily inspired by Germanic and Norse mythology. Norse creation stories and other mythology are documented in the Poetic Edda (compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources) and the Prose Edda.\n\n > \n\n > A dwarf (Old Norse: *dvergr*, Old English: *dweorg*, Old High German: *twerg*, Proto-Germanic: *dwergaz*) is a certain kind of invisible being in the pre-Christian mythology and religion of the Norse and other Germanic peoples. The dwarves are pitch-black in appearance and live underground in Svartalfheim, a place which was probably thought of as a labyrinthine complex of mines and forges. The dwarves are most often noted for being extremely skilled smiths and craftspeople. ([Source](_URL_2_) ; This page has a cited list of primary sources.)\n\n(edit: Not to go on a rant here, but this author uses a very literal interpretation of the text with which I don't personally agree. Many Norse academics and practitioners of the Norse religion believe that the places these beings lived in were meant to be interpreted as different dimensions, in a sense. Therefore, places like Svartalfheim weren't necessarily considered by the Norse to actually be underneath the physical Earth, but underneath it on a more spiritual plane. It was located on a lower branch of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, which had many branches in which nine different worlds sat, including our own.) \n\nAs you see, they were very similar in description to the dwarfs seen in popular modern fiction! As to where they came from, [*The Poetic Edda*](_URL_0_) has some answers. (Ymir is the original j\u00f6tnar, or giant, and a sort of magical creation deity.)\n\n > Then Bor's sons took Ymir and bore him into the midst of Yawning-gap, and made of him the earth; of his blood seas and waters, of his flesh earth was made; they set the earth fast, and laid the sea round about it in a ring without; of his bones were made rocks; stones and pebbles of his teeth and jaws and the bones that were broken; they took his skull and made the lift thereof, and set it up over the earth with four sides, and under each corner they set dwarfs, and they took his brain and cast it aloft, and made clouds. \n\n*[The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson](_URL_3_)* has a more detailed description of how the dwarfs were actually formed:\n\n > Then the gods, seating themselves upon their thrones, distributed justice, and bethought them how the dwarfs had been bred in the mould of the earth, just as worms are in a dead body. It was, in fact, in Ymir's flesh that the dwarfs were engendered, and began to move and live. At first they were only maggots, but by the will of the gods they at length partook both of human shape and understanding, although they always dwell in rocks and caverns.\n\nI will come back and update in a reply to this comment with further info about the other mythical races you asked about if you're interested! :) In the meantime, I highly suggest [Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas](_URL_1_) if you're interested in learning more about Norse mythology. It's provided for free online by Project Gutenberg.\n", "Related (enough I hope) - where do the four Icelandic \"guardians\" fall in this .... taxonomy I guess.  Are they considered troll/faye/etc or gods?", "Coming at the question from another direction, there is [speculation](_URL_1_) that elf folklore may have been influenced by the individuals with [Williams syndrome.](_URL_2_)  This is a genetic disorder that results in [elf-like facial features](_URL_0_); small upturned nose, long philtrum (upper lip length), wide mouth, full lips, small chin, and puffiness around the eyes.  It also results in various learning disabilities, paired with unusually high verbal and musical skills, and a very outgoing personality.  \n\nI don't know that this link could ever be more than speculative.  I'm not sure this response meets the high standards for this subreddit.  Apologies if it is found lacking.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4umc7c/i_remember_once_being_told_tolkien_believed_that/d5r78f8"], [], ["http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/vlsng/vlsng01.htm", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28497", "http://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/dwarves/", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14726"], [], ["http://sproutflix.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/embraceableIMAGE2.jpg", "https://www.google.ca/search?q=williams+syndrome+elf+folklore&amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;ei=a_esV-iVH8SRUfOsnbgH", "https://williams-syndrome.org/what-is-williams-syndrome"]]}
{"q_id": "30n99e", "title": "What do people from past centuries say about man ever walking on the moon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30n99e/what_do_people_from_past_centuries_say_about_man/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpu94f3", "cpueypy"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["[A similar question](_URL_0_) from recently. ", "There is much literary work, across various ages and cultures, that feature traveling to the moon or encountering moon inhabitants as a key narrative:\n\n* [Japan](_URL_1_)\n* China (Chuang Tzu, couldn't find a serious reference, though)\n* [Ancient Greece](_URL_2_)\n\nAnd, as you may be aware, many myths and legends regarding 'moon deities' across the world.\n\nMore recently, Jules Vernes' work ' a trip to the moon' and Melies' first ever science-fiction movie ['A trip to the moon'](_URL_3_) follow this literary topic. \n\nIn these works, however, the notion of traveling to the moon is handled as a *fiction* meant to entertain, not a serious consideration, or as a myth (Actually, wikipedia has a page dedicated to the [subject](_URL_4_)).\n\nFontenelle's [Conversations on the plurality of Worlds](_URL_0_) is more interesting, as it is perhaps the first serious discussion on the possibility for mankind to move outside of earth, in particular land on the moon. \n\nVery representative of the Enlightenment period, Fontenelle addresses the issue of determining if others worlds are inhabited, and of the possibility of ever going to the moon, with a purely rational approach. Fontanelle did not investigate the *means* to do it, but entertained a blind faith that the ingenuity of the human mind would, one day, allow a man to land there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yzvmo/did_people_in_ancient_times_or_even_medieval/"], ["http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520071711", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Bamboo_Cutter", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_History", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landings_in_fiction"]]}
{"q_id": "549k7j", "title": "What happened to the Moroccans who fought on Franco's side? How were they treated in fascist Spain?", "selftext": "Did they return to Morocco? Were they allowed to practice their religion? Did they face any discrimination?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/549k7j/what_happened_to_the_moroccans_who_fought_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d801nq8"], "score": [5], "text": ["On page 92 of Anthony Beevor's Battle for Spain, an important note is made that Franco made the regulares honorary christians. On page 401 he depicts the victory parade where regulares  took part. \n\nIn Preston's Spanish Civil War, the regularles were noted multiple times as being extremely loyal to Franco, ruthless toward both members of the Republican Army and civilians in republican territory, especially on their march to Madrid from Morocco during the early stage of the war.  Which is corroborated by Beevor. \n\nThe irony of using the conquered from reconquista for Franco's reconquista of the left is one of my favorite ironies of the war (along with Franco denouncing the republicans for having 40 to 60k foreign volunteers during the war while he had the Italians and the german's condor legion).   \n\nAnyways back to the point. Preston's book is a biased perception (but still really good) and a great read if you are sympathetic to the republican cause. The republican atrocities are somewhat glossed over and excused by \"the disorder of the republic\" while the nationalist's were analyzed and described in detail.  Preston is biased enough that for me the omission of any maltreatment of the regulares, the repression of their culture or religion by Franco, indicates that they had a privileged status after the war. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a1fnn2", "title": "Why did the US give the USSR a lend lease six weeks before the invasion of Russia by Germany? Wasn't there a Red Scare going around with the invasion of Poland and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?", "selftext": "I'm reading Brian Garfield's The Thousand Mile War, about WW2 in Alaska. He mentioned that there was a red scare in Washington because of the M-R Pact. Now I'm at the chapter about the ALSIB - Alaska Siberia Lend-Lease route.\n\n\"The lend-lease bill was signed into law on March 11, 1941; six weeks later, Hitler's troops had marched across the Russian border, and the United States suddenly had a new and hungry ally. Red scares were forgotten...\" \n\nSo my question is multiple parts. How big was that first red scare between the signing of the Pact between Germany and Russia, and why did the US offer lend-lease so long before the the USSR got invaded? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a1fnn2/why_did_the_us_give_the_ussr_a_lend_lease_six/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eapkjid"], "score": [35], "text": ["That didn't happen. The Soviets didn't get any Lend-Lease aid prior to the German invasion.\n\nThe Lend-Lease Act was signed in March 1941. It gave Roosevelt enormous discretion as to what could be sold or given and who it could be sold or given to. The bill stated the president had the power to: \"sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of, to any such government any defense article.\" Although he needed Congress to authorize more money for the program as it got larger.\n\nIn March 1941, that meant the British. FDR had waged a long public relations battle to get aid for Britain, so the public was generally supportive of Lend-Lease for Britian, gradual reversal from 1930s isolationism. Still, even Lend-Lease aid for Britain didn't have unanimous public support. Most Republicans in Congress voted against the bill. The GOP was generally isolationist at the era and opposed giving the Roosevelt administration even more unchecked authority. A month later, the Nationalist government of China was brought into Lend-Lease. Again, PR work by FDR and a very vocal pro-China lobby by prominent Chinese figures like T.V. Soong had helped pave the way for aid to China.\n\nGetting Lend-Lease for the Russians didn't come until later and it was not as widely-supported. The Soviet Union didn't become part of Lend-Lease until after the German invasion of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. After a massive and bitter debate, Congress approved giving aid to Russia on November 7. \n\nTo give you an idea of Congressional feelings about Russia at the time, here's what one senator said in 1941: \"If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible...\" Who was the senator? Harry Truman.\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-approves-lend-lease-aid-to-the-ussr", "http://movies2.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0508.html"]]}
{"q_id": "29myqm", "title": "How Islamic was the Islamic Golden Age?", "selftext": "With all of this talk about ISIS in /r/worldnews a few people are very quick to defend Islam and are always quick to bring up the Islamic Golden Age. However a few other commenters have said that the Islamic golden age was more of an Arabian Golden age than an Islamic one.\n\nSo what say you r/askhistorians?  Was it Islamic? Arabic? Both? or neither?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29myqm/how_islamic_was_the_islamic_golden_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cimlds7", "cimmfgb", "cimqg41", "cimt8pk", "cindfkv"], "score": [35, 73, 6, 3, 4], "text": ["Obviously characterizing the ethno/religious character of several centuries of a rather amorphous \"Golden Age\" is difficult, but a few features are worth bringing up:\n\n1. the extraordinary role that the region around Bukhara/Khurasan played in this era. Politically, culturally, and religiously people from that region keep popping up in huge roles. Nizam al-Mulk, Omar Khayyam, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Al Farabi, etc. are all coming out of what would today be eastern Iran. This east Persian characteristic of the era also extends to those who didn't leave behind writings, as Persians were apparently the most sought after teachers for the newly built madrasas across the Islamic world.\n2. Nonetheless, the output of the most prominent works was still in Arabic.\n3. As far as an Islamic character goes, many of the writings of these philosophers might be characterized as a proto-scholasticism. They are, as Aquinas would with Catholicism a few centuries later, attempting to apply rationalist neo-Platonist philosophy onto an Islamic framework. Also, one of the major vehicles for this golden age was the founding, often credited to Nizam al Mulk, of madrasas (i.e. schools of higher education, usually teaching religious law) throughout the middle east. Within a century of their introduction the number of madrasas had exploded, such that a major city that at the start of the 11th century might have one or two by the middle of the 12th would have almost a hundred.\n4. The importance of urban centers, particularly Baghdad. Marshall Hodgson describes Islamdom in the middle periods as \"agrarianate.\" That is, wealth is primarily created by agricultural production but political/cultural life is focused on urban centers. This is for a number of reasons, but the effect was that although much of the \"Golden Age\" was overseen by Turkic dynasties the cultural drivers in society remained the Arab urban classes of scholars, merchants, bureaucrats, etc.\n\nAll of that said, I would emphasize once again the difficulty in making simple characterizations of the era, as your assessment will depend in large part on what criteria you're looking at. If you look at the major architectural works they tend to be mosques, and they remain extraordinary examples of cultural production, but are obviously religious. The poetry of the Abbasid era on the other hand, exemplified by Abu Nuwas, is downright irreligious, describing the poets love for pederasty and wine (often at the same time.) Then you have the philosopher scientists, forming, as I've mentioned, a sort of scholastic accommodation between Greek philosophy and Islam. However you could also look at the often Christian early figures in the Translation Movement as being the really instrumental figures in that their work preceded everything else. On the other hand, they didn't introduce anything nearly as innovative as al-Ghazali, or Ibn Sina, both clearly writing as Muslims.\n\nSo it all depends. Basically that ISIS thread you mentioned was a total mess. A lot of bad history there.\n\nedit: dangling modifier.", "Going to r/worldnews to learn about Islam is a bit like going to stormfront to learn about Judaism. \n\n\nThe Arabs, before the advent of Islam, were considered to lack such value that neither the Romans nor the Persians even bothered to invade them. On the other hand, the Arabs looked at them as being invincible superpowers, never to be provoked. \n\nThe Arabs really cared about 2 things:\n\n\n* Genealogy: Your relations made the difference between life  &  death, it defined loyal lines. \n* Poetry: The Arabs mastered arabic. Language was their honey. It was how they recorded their history, how they influenced public opinion, how they built (or destroyed) reputations (or tribes), how they bragged or loved or satirized. \n\n\n\nAnyway, my point is that only after the advent of Islam did these same pagans spawn an intellectual explosion of trade, research in countless disciplines  &  sciences, art, etc. In [Knowledge Triumphant](_URL_0_), Franz\n Rosenthal observes that:\n\n >  \"*the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ('ilm), for knowledge is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion*\"\n\n\np.s. In case you want more == >  [Subdivisions of Knowledge in Islamic History] (_URL_1_) via Abdal Hakim Murad (7 min.)\n\n\n", "The Islamic Golden Age is unique because it can be almost entirely attributed to Islam itself.\n\nAs [u/AndTheEgyptianSmiled](_URL_0_) mentioned, the Arabs, pre-Islam were nomadic desert people who couldn't care less for knowledge beyond poetry. With the rise of the caliphate in the 600s and 700s, Arabs were now part of the same polity as Greeks, Persians, Indians, Copts, Berbers, etc. The combined knowledge of all those previous nations and empires could then be centralized at one location (The House of Wisdom in Baghdad). Before Islam, an Indian would have no reason to go to Constantinople to study Aristotle's works, but in the new order that Islam brought about, borders were gone and interactions between previously distant people became commonplace. Most scientists of the Golden Age were in fact not Arab, but Persian. True, they wrote mostly in Arabic, but that was because it was the lingua franca of science. Similarly, most scientific research today is conducted in English, but we wouldn't call it English science or an English golden age. \n\n**More importantly however**, Islam itself hugely emphasizes gaining knowledge. The Prophet Muhammad spoke numerous times about the importance of gaining knowledge as a method of gaining the pleasure of God. \n\nExamples:\n\n*\"Whoever travels on a path seeking knowledge, God causes him to travel on a path towards Heaven.\"\n\n*\"Seeking knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim.\"\n\n*\"Knowledge from which no benefit is derived is like a treasure out of which nothing is spent in the cause of God.\"\n\nSo for the Muslims, advancing fields like science, math, and astronomy was more than just a secular endeavor for the sake of knowledge. It was seen as an act of worship directly from Islam itself. It would be very difficult to argue that the giant outpouring of knowledge from around 750-1258 would have happened without the unity that Islam provided coupled with the emphasis Islam places on knowledge itself. ", "Not very.\n\nThe golden era **came about** because of the embrace of Islam, there's no question of that.  By taking over so much territory, the Islamic Arabs, as a military force, created the preconditions for the onset of the golden era.  But after that, things are more complicated, and not contingent on Islam at all.\n\nOnce the Abassids rose to power they had this leader, al-Mansur, who was obsessed with Persian culture (a region they controlled at the time).  He wanted to [Persianize himself and his comparatively uncultured Arabic brethren](_URL_0_).  But the Persians had derived much of their culture from their absorption of the Greek intellectual culture.  The Persians themselves had an influx of intellectuals in the 5th and 6th century due to the early Byzantine empire exiling pagans, Nestorian Christians, and closing down Pagan schools, such as the Neo-platonic academy of Athens.  I.e., all the smart guys from the nearby Byzantine empire had fled and made a new home in the adjacent Persia who welcomed them with open arms.\n\nAnyway, back to al-Mansur: basically, he was very successful in lots of border skirmishes with the Byzantine Empire, but rather than gaining territory, he picked up a lot of loot as a condition from the peace treaties [he forced the Byzantines to sign](_URL_2_).  With this he basically funds the Caliphate.  He had so much money left over he decided to buy up books of any intellectual value from all over the Byzantine Empire, bring them back to the Caliphate and have them translated.  Apocryphally, this is said to have taken place in Baghdad in a place called the House of Wisdom (bayt al-Hikma), however, the real purpose of this place and its scope of existence is reasonably disputed (see: [\"Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society\"](_URL_1_)).  Also many works had already been translated in Persia (though into Pahlavi and Syriac, instead of Arabic).  Though, apparently it is known that the translations did take place in Baghdad.  Another factor is that the Arabs had suddenly gained access to the Chinese technology of paper.  With this they were not resource limited in the production of books; they could make them as fast as they could be written.\n\nAnyhow, both the act of performing these translations, and the product of these translations caused an intellectual culture to spark.  At this point, this phenomenon isn't really connected to Islam specifically.  It was just being practiced by people whose official religion was Islam.  Of course, astronomy was used to figure out where Mecca was from any position in the world (in Islam you have to pray in that direction).  And Al-Khwarizmi's algebra was used to deal with Islamic inheritance laws.  But these were fairly minor uses of the rather massive intellectual material they had at their disposal at this time.  Those more steeped in Islam tended to come to [different conclusions about the material world](_URL_3_).  Fortunately, those people didn't hold sway as far as the intellectual culture was concerned.\n\nOver in the western side of the Caliphate, the Spanish territory was taken over by the older Umayyad lineage (the ones that the Abassids deposed in their rise in the east).  Their early legacy is noted for being extremely tolerant of other religions (oddly not true of the prior Umayyad leaders of the east).  They too were making a mint from border skirmishes to the North of Spain.  But they became envious of the rising intellectualism occurring in the east, so they bribed intellects to come and bought up books from the east for their own libraries.  They started from behind but, over time, numerous intellects flourished in Arabic Spain as well.  But these intellects were represented by Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  It should also be noted that Arabic Spain basically claimed independence from the East; so technically it wasn't part of the Caliphate, but rather a Caliphate all on it's own.  As you can imagine, a strong enough culture of intellectualism (i.e., one based on books, teaching, and a common language) ignores such capricious border claims.\n\nI would say that on balance, the Arab scholars were probably mostly Muslim, but they almost certainly were not motivated solely by some sort of extreme piety towards Islam.  It would be hard to call it solely Arabic as well, since Persians and Spanish people were well represented in this culture.  I think the story of the Golden Era is a story about the success of multiculturalism, not Islam and not the Arabic lineages themselves.\n\nDisclaimer: I am not a professional historian by any stretch of the imagination, but I have read extensively on this particular issue.", "Up into the 3rd Caliphate, the Abbasids, one of the few dynasties sympathetic to Shi'ism. \n\nThat dynasty tried to borrow from the learning of the past, which was mostly Greek and Persian (i.e. Byzantine  &  Sassanian). A lot of science/jurisprudence/philosophy/civil administration/military; so intimidating was this legacy from the past that the Arab/Muslim scholars had to come up their own local versions (e.g. Hanafi jurisprudence) \nto counter the influence from the past and to have \"legitamacy\"\n\nOne of the things that the Abbasids tried to borrow from the Greek was the pursuit and investigation of 'Reason' as a basis of interpreting the world.\n\nWhile this was all happening, the Caliphate was using all the legacy inherited from their non-Islamic 'predecessors' to prosper and expand. \n\nAgriculture, technology, literature, law, government/administration, the sciences, military sciences; all advanced under the Abbasids.\n\nThis was not to last however, the dynasty was overthrown by traditionalists who rejected 'reason' as un-Islamic and untraditional.\n \nThen w/ a state of civil war over who secession caused a great decline in the known world of Islamic civilization.\n\nBut why ?\n\nIn the Koran, it says that Islam is immutable, that it cannot 'change'. This is interpreted as innovation in Religion is *forbidden* and I guess this ends up applying to everything else. So the seeds of decline in Islamic Civilization is thus 'built-in' and inevitable.\n\nWhich explains why, Islamic civilization has been doing so poorly since the 15th century. They have never had a Renaissance nor the Age of Enlightenment (\"islam is immutable).\n\nThey are however allowed to borrow w/o question from the Kaffir/Ferangi, hence the use of IEDs, AK47s, cell phones, and the Internet.\n\nRead up on your Bernard Lewis about all this stuff"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.ca/books?id=_fV7ER4sc1AC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I722oPzk8"], ["http://www.reddit.com/user/AndTheEgyptianSmiled"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH595DMVs-E", "http://books.google.com/books?id=EUpfyCZHXPUC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_vpt_reviews#v=onepage&amp;q=bayt%20al%20hikma&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbasid_invasion_of_Asia_Minor_%28782%29#Campaign", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali#Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers"], []]}
{"q_id": "2nxx0w", "title": "Soviet war medals. Additional benefits?", "selftext": "Hello\n\nI was reading a book about Soviet military history. Medals like \"Hero of the soviet union\" was mentioned as being awarded for great deeds in battle.\n\nDid this medal come with any additional (material) benefits apart from the honor? What about other Soviet medals for warfare or worker related honors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nxx0w/soviet_war_medals_additional_benefits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmi1ixy", "cmidz9g"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Those who received the top level awards were in many cases after the war given (if they didn't have it already) preferential access to join the Party. This gave at least somewhat greater access to the ability to buy restricted consumer goods and foodstuffs. The higher up in the hierarchy and nomenklatura system that they could exploit their wartime record to gain, the greater their access to these goods, and the cheaper they would be to purchase. \n\nThis was how it was on an informal level for those who had distinguished war records, though some were given much greater privileges as they became 'celebrities' and important figures (think the treatment of Sniper Vasili Zaitsev in  Enemy at the Gates). \n\nAlfred Evans thought that the preferential treatment shown to this 'Veteran's generation', who made up a very large number of the low and middle ranks of the party structure, was a significant factor in the disillusionment of the subsequent socialist generations, as the 'glut' of the wartime generation acted to limit the young's access to party status and promotions within the party, as well as the preferential access to goods this provided. At the highest level this can be seen by the pre-Gorbachev leadership (Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko), increasingly old men of the wartime generation, dying off with increasing rapidity and becoming increasingly out of touch with the problems of the Soviet Union.", "To answer your question, we'll have to look at the law, which was voted on by the Council of People of the USSR and Central Excecutive Committee of the USSR in May 7th 1936. That law stated that those who won medals and orders would have to have a monthly bonus added to their salary, discount when paying the rent (anywhere between 10 to 50%), bonus when retiring, in some cases no longer having to pay income taxes, free trip once a year either on train or by ship both ways, completely free public transport (tramways, buses, etc.)\n\nThe extra money were paid for those who won and we are going from the most money to the least money.\nHero of the Soviet Union = 50 rubles\nOrder of Lenin = 25 rubles\nOrder of the Great Patriotic War = about 20 rubles\nOrder of the Red Banner = 20 rubles\nAll other orders and medals would have received anywhere between 10 to 15 rubles. In cases when somebody was awarded the same award they would have been paid per each award given. \n\nSadly, this came to a close when in 1948 payments, free transportation were cancelled. Zhukov himself tried reinstating those in 1955. You may ask why did that happen? Some may speculate, that government simply was trying to save some money and to help boost start the economy. In 1956 another vote was put through, where a certain some of money would be paid once a year to each veteran per order/medal, it did not go through. \nLater \"tickets\" were given to veterans who participated in WW2, which enabled them to get free items or items with discounted prices. The bonuses were reinstated sometime in 2000 or so, where veterans once again were able to get extra money for their medals. Not all though, some of the awards included in that law are: order of Lenin, order of the Great Patriotic War (I, II, III, and IV), order of Glory. \n\nA bit of a visual for this answer. Orders and medals were given with so \"award booklet\" which had coupons. Those booklets had name of a person, when said award was issued, ID number, date when the money can be handed out, as well as the sum of money. [Here](_URL_0_) are a few photos of how it looked like. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://mondvor.narod.ru/SProchKup.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "27acp1", "title": "Why in 1822 did Brazil gain independence in such a unique way?", "selftext": "I thought it was interesting that French negotiator Talleyrand was the first to help raise Brazil up to the status of being a kingdom in 1815 but I don't know enough about the period or the Napoleonic wars to really make a judgement about how significant this little tidbit was. \nWhat are the main reasons for Brazilian independence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27acp1/why_in_1822_did_brazil_gain_independence_in_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chz0148"], "score": [3], "text": ["* The Brazilian higher class wanted independence to get better deals. With the independence they could directly deal with other countries and not paying any kind of taxes to Portugal.\n* Since there was this independence feeling, the house of Bragan\u00e7a (house of the king of Portugal and colonies) sent D. Pedro to negotiate with the nobles and merchants of Brazil. I don't know much about the process but it resulted in Brazil gaining independence with a Portuguese king, maintaining good relations\n* Brazilian gold and natural resources were being explored and used by Portuguese in Portugal, leading to discontentment with Portuguese management.\n\nAlso related to this was the Portuguese Royal Family changing the Portuguese capital from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. This was done to avoid Napoleon conquering the Portuguese capital.\nWhen the Portuguese RF was preparing to come back to Lisbon, the Brazilian elite didn't want to lose power and losing an \"European Capital\" in their territory, which led to an rising will to gain independence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1q6s1c", "title": "What were relations like between the Russian Tsardom and Ming China?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1q6s1c/what_were_relations_like_between_the_russian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cda09kp", "cda3a7k"], "score": [12, 12], "text": ["Exploratory. \n\nIn 1618-19, the ambassador Petlin was sent to Ming. \n\nCount Kurakin sent Tomsk' teacher Petlin (who was fluent in several languages) and Madov, both siberian cossacks, plus retinue - in total 12 cossacks. They traveled together with the train of mongolian ambassador from Altyn-khan to China.\n\nThey started from Tomsk in May and reached Beijing in August of 1618. Since Petlin mission didn't bring gifts, worthy of emperor attention, they weren't invited to meet him, but they've conducted talks with high-ranking officials and passed their official papers with proposals of peace and trade. They received similar letter in response, but since nobody could read hieroglyphs, content remained unknown for a long time. 'Chinese Letter' (*\u043a\u0438\u0442\u0430\u0439\u0441\u043a\u0430\u044f \u0433\u0440\u0430\u043c\u043e\u0442\u0430*) became an idiom of unreadable document and still in use in modern russian.\n\nExistence of this mission was disputed, but new documents from archives prove that it was a real mission (see [2]).\n\n\n1. [Russian Wiki - Petlin Mission](_URL_0_)\n\n2. [Russian - article about archival evidences of Petlin Mission](_URL_1_)", "The Russians, despite the close proximity of Siberia to the Chinese capitol at Beijing, tended to have very little success until well into the Qing dynasty period.  /u/Acritas correctly points out some of the problems of one of the late Ming dynasty mission.\n\nPart of the problem was the sheer distance and wilderness involved- it was a ROUGH trip.  Unlike the more southerly routes along the Silk Road, the trip from Moscow crossed a lot of forest and uninhabited steppeland and mountain ranges.  So, geographic barriers were an issue.\n\nCompounding this, the Russians seem to have not had a good grasp of the niceties of Asian diplomacy, as Acritas mentions.  The later Qing mission of Nicolae Milescu in 1675 (despite the Romanian/Moldovan name, he was a Russian ambassador) had similar problems- these guys would show up on the doorstep of the Emperor of China, undoubtedly pretty ragged after their trip, and the court functionaries must have thought they looked liked something the cat dragged in.  The Chinese thought they were uncouth barbarians, the Russians tended to have a chip on their shoulders and didn't want to bow and scrape to the degree the Chinese expected, so things didn't go very well.  An earlier mission by Fyodor Baykov in about 1657 had the same trouble.  It wasn't until the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 that anything other than diplomatic snubs was accomplished.\n\nAs Acritas alludes to, the issue of language was also a problem- the Russians didn't speak Chinese, the Chinese for damn sure didn't speak Russian, and the only decent interpreters available were the Jesuits, who could interpret from Latin (which, at least, some of the Russians spoke) into Chinese.\n\nRussia and China. Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 by Mark Mancall.\n\n\u0421\u043f\u0430\u0444\u0430\u0440\u0438\u0439 \u041d. \u041f\u0443\u0442\u0435\u0448\u0435\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0438\u0435 \u0447\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0437 \u0421\u0438\u0431\u0438\u0440\u044c \u043e\u0442 \u0422\u043e\u0431\u043e\u043b\u044c\u0441\u043a\u0430 \u0434\u043e \u041d\u0435\u0440\u0447\u0438\u043d\u0441\u043a\u0430 \u0438 \u0433\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0438\u0446 \u041a\u0438\u0442\u0430\u044f (Travels through Siberia from Tobolsk to Nerchinsk and the Chinese Border, published in St. Petersburg in 1882)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B2_%D0%9A%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B9", "http://www.vostlit.info/Texts/Dokumenty/China/XVII/1620-1640/Reise_Petlin/text2.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "2h2lx6", "title": "Given that Roman Catholic Mass was in Latin until the Second Vatican Council, how well did the laity understand church doctrine?", "selftext": "My understanding is that Latin had become the official language of the mass by around 600 CE, that mass was standardized into the Tridentine Mass in 1570, and that this continued until Vatican II in 1962.\n\nAs Vulgar Latin differentiated into the various romance languages, did the mass transition from being understandable to the broad swath of the laity? If so, was doctrine transmitted to the laity in some other manner? Would the typical mass have contained anything that was understandable to someone who did not speak Latin?\n\nI am given to understand that the very well educated would have known Latin as well as their native tongue. I am guessing that the vast majority of the population would not have understood Latin, but is this assumption correct?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h2lx6/given_that_roman_catholic_mass_was_in_latin_until/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckotdm2", "ckov0to"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["I cannot speak to how much Latin Catholics would have been able to understand.\n\nRegarding doctrine though, Mass is generally not for dissemination of doctrine for Catholics, it is a celebration of the eucharistic sacrament.  Doctrine in the US was largely disseminated via various education initiatives and from the late 1800's until the 1960's it was largely based on the Baltimore Catechism.  [Here is a link to the 1941 version](_URL_1_).  It is in English and has a question and answer format.  [Here is its explanation of what the Mass is](_URL_1_lesson27.html).  Many doctrinal issues were also covered by papal encyclicals and other papal documents, most of which have an English version.  [Here is the Vatican's offerings of Pius XII's writings and speeches](_URL_0_), you can use the left navigation to find selections from his papacy on a number of issues.  [Here is John XXIII's site](_URL_3_).  Things like the Baltimore Catechism and papal documents would have supplemented and underpinned catechetical classes (largely given to children, but also to adults as well--especially converts), all of which would have been in English.  So for teaching doctrine Latin comprehension would have been largely unimportant.", "Given that a comment by another participant clarifying that while the Catholic liturgy was in Latin, homilies were given in the vernacular was deleted I will provide a source.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/", "http://www.catholicity.com/baltimore-catechism/", "http://www.catholicity.com/baltimore-catechism/lesson27.html", "http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/"], ["http://www.hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/early_manuscripts/preaching/language.cfm"]]}
{"q_id": "1eoypm", "title": "Monday Mysteries | Unsolved Crimes in History", "selftext": "**Previously:**\n\n- [Mysterious Ruins](_URL_1_)\n- [Decline and Fall](_URL_4_)\n- [Lost and Found Treasure](_URL_3_)\n- [Missing Documents and Texts](_URL_0_)\n- [Notable Disappearances](_URL_2_)\n\n**Today:**\n\nThe \"Monday Mysteries\" series will be focused on, well, mysteries -- historical matters that present us with problems of some sort, and not just the usual ones that plague historiography as it is. Situations in which our whole understanding of them would turn on a (so far) unknown variable, like the sinking of the Lusitania; situations in which we only know that something did happen, but not necessarily how or why, like the deaths of Richard III's nephews in the Tower of London; situations in which something has become lost, or become found, or turned out never to have been at all -- like the art of Greek fire, or the Antikythera mechanism, or the historical Coriolanus, respectively.\n\n**This week, I'd like for us to talk about historical crimes that remain unsolved.**\n\nFor as long as we've had laws we have had people breaking them.  Often this is done in an ostentatious and obvious manner, and whatever punishment is merited by the transgression is swiftly meted out.  Sometimes, however, things are not so clear.  Sometimes the culprit isn't there to be punished.  Sometimes he gets away... and stays there.\n\nWhat are some notable crimes throughout history that have not been satisfactorily resolved?  You can take this in any direction you like, really -- the most obvious would be the lack of an apprehended culprit, as suggested above, but it would also be interesting to hear about crimes for which no motive or even means has ever been discovered, even if the person responsible has been found.  So, if you can think of a crime in history of which we might say that a) we don't know who, b) we don't know how, or c) we don't know why, it should be fair game here.\n\nIn your post, please try to describe the circumstances of the crime, its outcome, and the problems that have hampered its resolution both at the time and at the present hour.  If you have your own view of what likely happened or of who was responsible, please feel free to provide it -- the daily project posts are purposefully less rigorous than regular submissions, so there's room for a bit of speculation, here.\n\nModeration will be relatively light.  Please ensure as always that your comments are as comprehensive and useful as you can make them, but know that there's also more room for jokes, digressions and general discussion that might usually be the case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eoypm/monday_mysteries_unsolved_crimes_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca2djcx", "ca2fto6", "ca2kgfv", "ca2kuae", "ca2pie9", "ca2sqjo", "ca3368e"], "score": [37, 21, 15, 8, 10, 14, 3], "text": ["This is a relatively minor historical incident, but I've always been particularly haunted by the Babes in the Woods case. In 1953, a park worker unearthed the skeletons of two children in Stanley Park in Vancouver. Items around the bodies included a hatchet, a woman's shoe, a child's belt, bracelet, cap and lunchbox, and a little aviator's helmet. The bodies were covered by a woman's raincoat. Because of the way the skeletons were dressed, it was assumed that the children were a boy and a girl. It wasn't until 1998 that DNA testing revealed that the children were both boys: half-brothers. Despite this being one of the most high-profile murder cases in Vancouver's history, the murders have never been solved, and there has never been even a single suspect or even a theory about who the children and the murderer might be. \n\nThere's just so much about this case that intrigues me. Was the woman the murderer or was she also a victim later? Did she kill her children or was there another male who killed them? (Perhaps one of the reasons the case is unsolved is that police deemed that women were more likely to smother/drown their children than kill them with hatchets, so hunted for two suspects rather than one). Did she cover her children lovingly or was it done to hide their bodies? How did two children disappear without friends or family members wondering where they'd gone and how did they stay in the park untouched for so many years? Why did the murderer(s) leave shoes and the murder weapon behind when they'd obviously had enough time to carefully arrange the bodies? Now that it's known that the two children were boys, it astounds me that no one has come forward after all these years with information on the case.\n\nBizarrely, the Vancouver Police Museum used to display the skeletons of the children, until a police detective obsessed with the case convinced them that maybe it wasn't the best thing to show the bodies of un-named murdered children to the public. (You can still see their personal effects and the hatchet). He petitioned the city to save a portion of the skeletons for DNA evidence, cremate the bodies, and give the children a proper burial. This particular detective remains obsessed with putting a name to the children. [Article](_URL_0_) . ", "One unsolved crime that has always interested me is the \"[Glico-Morinaga Case](_URL_0_)\". In Japan from 1984-1985, an extortionist who identified himself as \"The Monster With 21 Faces\" (a reference to a novel by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo), took a series of actions against several large Japanese food companies. \n\nThe crimes began with the kidnapping of the president of the Glico company, who was captured during a home invasion and held for ransom, although he was able to escape after several days. After that, cars in Glico's parking lot were set on fire, and a container full of acid was sent to the company in the mail, accompanied by a threatening letter. The \"Monster\" then sent letters to Glico informing them that he had contaminated some of their products with poison, forcing them to withdraw large amounts of product at great expense. \n\nAfter two months, he wrote a letter saying that he \"forgave\" Glico, and he shifted his focus to several other similar companies, most notably Morinaga. He contaminated examples of their products with lethal poisons on two occasions - the contaminated products were located in stores, and were marked as being the ones that the \"Monster\" had poisoned.\n\nIn August of 1985, the police superintendent of Shiga Prefecture committed suicide by self immolation, out of shame over his failure to catch the \"Monster\". The \"Monster\" responded with the following message:\n > \"Yamamoto of Shiga Prefecture Police died. How stupid of him! We've got no friends or secret hiding place in Shiga. It's Yoshino or Shikata who should have died. What have they been doing for as long as one year and five months? Don't let bad guys like us get away with it. There are many more fools who want to copy us. No-career Yamamoto died like a man. So we decided to give our condolence. We decided to forget about torturing food-making companies. If anyone blackmails any of the food-making companies, it's not us but someone copying us. We are bad guys. That means we've got more to do other than bullying companies. It's fun to lead a bad man's life. Monster with 21 Faces.\"\n\nHe was never heard from again. The statute of limitations on the crimes ran out more than a decade ago, and while several suspects were identified, all of them were ultimately cleared by police. So nobody knows who did it, or why, and the perpetrator or perpetrators are still at large.", "Oetzi the Iceman. Despite the finest forensic minds on the case, the killer has yet to be found. One could almost the case...cold.\n\n\nSorry about that. For a more serious example, the affairs surrounding Cicero's famous *pro Caelio* are pretty mysterious. The basic outline is that King Ptolemy XII was deposed from his throne for, in essence, being a terrible ruler and being in Rome's pocket. He fled to Rome to make the case for why the throne should be restored to him, and the Alexandrians sent a delegation led by the philosopher Dio to argue against. Ptolemy successfully argued his case, but an oracle overturned that decision. Ptolemy in frustration retired to Ephesus.\n\nA year later, Dio was murdered. That Ptolemy had a hand in it is certain, but he also probably had help from someone in Roman politics. Pompey was a natural candidate, because he was closely tied to Ptolemy, but enemies of Caelius took the opportunity to charge him.", "Who burned down the [Library of Alexandria](_URL_2_) as there are a few theories that have yet to be proved. One suggests that Caesar burned it down during the Alexandrian war, Muslim Conquest, or the destruction by another force. This library was the knowledge hub of the Ancient World and had a collection of knowledge that was vast and spanned countless centuries documenting the history of numerous civilizations that had risen and fallen in the Middle East, parts of Central Asia, Europe, and North Africa.\n\nThe [Zodiac Killer](_URL_0_) and [Jack the Ripper](_URL_1_) are two mysteries that involve serial killers who were able to murder multiple victims and remained at large and their cases unsolved to this day.", "Probably one that we've all mentioned at least once in our life has to be that of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Most of us generally accept the 'Crash-and-Sink' theory, but 70-80 years down the road, we have little concrete evidence for any theory, with the most being that Earhart survived and crashed at the island of Nikumaroro. Evidence includes an aluminum panel and plexiglass believed to have come from her Electra along with part of a shoe dated around the 1930s.\n\nI got most interested a few years ago thinking about its untimely close proximity to the war in the Pacific, leading me to believe the Japanese may have been involved at some point. When I looked it up, in fact, there're many theories that involve the Japanese if not the majority. The one that strikes me most are multiple Saipan theories, especially one surrounding her briefcase. US Marines found a safe with it inside. Many natives and some Japanese servicemen have claimed they witnessed the execution of Earhart and Noonan. Japanese and American servicemen also separately claimed to witness the destruction of her aircraft.", "The Taman Shud murder always bugged me. Anyone have any ideas or theories on the identity of the body and why he was murdered?\n\n_URL_0_", "Not sure whether this counts as \"unsolved\" or \"just mysterious\", but I wrote about a potentially unusual atomic-bomb related death in 1946 awhile back: [\"Death of a patent clerk\"](_URL_0_), in which one of the people who helped generate thousands of patents on every aspect of the atomic bomb died under questionable circumstances in the early postwar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cvbaz/monday_mysteries_missing_documents_and_texts/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e9el2/monday_mysteries_ancient_ruins/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ce73h/monday_mysteries_notable_disappearances/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dcbb3/monday_mysteries_lost_and_found_treasure/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dslor/monday_mysteries_decline_and_fall/"], "answers_urls": [["http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2010-02-11-vancouver-cold-case_N.htm"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glico_Morinaga_case"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Destruction"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case"], ["http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2013/03/15/death-of-a-patent-clerk/"]]}
{"q_id": "188vhk", "title": "Did hunter-gatherers really have an easier life that (early) agriculturalist? Is civilization counterproductive to the average person happiness?", "selftext": "By easier I mean they had to work less, had better diet, a more healtier life style a more egalitarian society, etc...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/188vhk/did_huntergatherers_really_have_an_easier_life/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8cp1o6", "c8cpegu", "c8cq3h2", "c8cqbz6", "c8crlnl"], "score": [9, 88, 3, 26, 4], "text": ["Significant technological innovation would not have been possible without an agrarian lifestyle that allows for division and thus specialization of labor.    The lifestyle may be healthier in that youre actively hunting for food but you would be without immunizations, scientifically proven medications, advanced surgeries, specialized medical care etc.  Hunter-gatherer societies simply do not advance past the basics of technology, culture, philosophy and science because everyone is so focused on finding food.", "Happiness is subjective.  One thing that is pretty clear however is the effect of diet.  Hunter-gatherers generally lived longer than early agriculturalists and had healthier teeth.  In fact tooth decay is a major marker for grain agriculture in archaeology (there is some debate on this point but the fact remains that in Scandinavia post-conversion grain production goes up, tooth decay rates go up, and life expectancy goes down, and anywhere you have high tooth decay rates people are eating grains, which tells me that it's only in the middle range that we can even begin to question that).  Additionally it isn't clear what egalitarianism means in this context.  They probably had a less *stratified* society, but a lack of stratification doesn't mean egalitarianism.\n\nThe issue that eckliptic points out is that there are upsides and downsides to a lack of social complexity.  The upsides are that you can support more people in a given area, and thus more specialization becomes possible (although none of the technological innovations would have been available through most of agricultural society so it isn't clear what his point is in the comparison).  The downsides are more disease, tooth decay, and social complexity/regulation.", "I don't have a source but I do remember reading once that your average European peasant farmer pre-industrial revolution would've had incredible amounts of time off. Something like half the year was spent in festivals and holidays, which generally reflects the basic lack of stuff to do year round. So I guess it wasn't all back-breaking toil every day...\n\nCan anyone confirm?", "tl;dr: No.   \n    \nThis is very difficult to answer becaues it includes some subjective parts. Disssecting the question up:    \n     \n* \"Easier\": This is the crux of the question for me. It is clear that hunter-gatherers had a lifestyle making longer potential life possible, and worked less on food production. But it seems that there was a huge amount of warfare. War Before Civilization looks at this in some detail. In short, the land had a lower carrying capacity than if it were farmed. There was also fairly little governance to enforce peace and negotiation. This, coupled with a fairly healthy life, creates population pressures that must be relieved. This was done through warfare. Significant percentages of hunter-gatherer males (20% to over 50%) died in war. So while living day to day was easier, I am not sure that life as a whole was.     \n    \n* \"Healthier\": Yes, survivors were probably healthier, based on the evidence. einhvefr's comment has some notes on this.  \n   \n* \"Work less\": It depends on what you mean by work. If you mean time collecting food, then yes, they probably worked less. But there is a lot more to work than that - think about your day, and how much time you spend relaxing vs \"at work\". There is some evidence that the hardest mankind ever worked (in hours) is in Victorian England. We work substantially less hard now (about 2000 hours a year) and so did hunter gatherers. But again, it depends what you mean by work.\n    \n* \"Happiness\": This is really hard to evaluate. Partly this is because there is no good definition of happiness. We can divide it into daily happiness and life happiness, and the results are usually different. For example, when parents today are asked using a daily reflection approach, they are evaluated as more miserable than single people. But when they are asked, as old people, to reflect on their lives, they are overwhelmingly happier. It all depends on what you are counting. So I don't know. I think incessant war would tend to make hunter-gatherers miserable, but that is just my subjective opinion.\n", "No one has addressed the question I thought was the crux of the matter: the threat of starvation. Who was at greater risk, hunter gatherers or farmers?  I thought avoiding famine was why people started agriculture. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40srgm", "title": "Who preserves speeches and other documents for the American government?", "selftext": "Hi There,\nThis is a bit more of a meta-history question, but i've often come across stories built around some preserved document from government history in the US, the most obvious example is [William Safire's Moon disaster speech](_URL_0_).\n\n\nWho holds on to these? I feel like it might be the library of congress, but i remember it being mentioned in The West Wing (sources, amiright?) that is was the treasury. I can't find anything on this, so I'm curious if one of you folks knew.\n\n\nFollow up: when did they realize that all this stuff was worth keeping?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40srgm/who_preserves_speeches_and_other_documents_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cywutfl", "cywywb5"], "score": [13, 6], "text": ["The National Archives and Records Administration maintains the official records of the United States government.\n\nThe Library of Congress is responsible for collecting non-governmental materials, including books, music, film, television, and non-governmental archives.", "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is responsible for the retention and disposition of official records of the US federal government. It has, at this point, very complex and baroque [regulations](_URL_0_) governing record retention and what kinds of things they have to give to NARA. According to them about 1-3% of all US records are retained indefinitely (which is a _massive_ amount, when you consider how much information is created by the federal government). It is not a haphazard process \u2014 if anything it may be over-bureaucratized. \n\nNARA was created by Congress in 1934 as a central institution for this record management. Prior to that, records were maintained but in a more haphazard form by different agencies. Many agencies still maintain their own archival record systems, of course, though in theory after some amount of time they are meant to be transferred to NARA custody. (As you can imagine, compliance is often limited by time and budget \u2014 for no agency other than NARA is historical record retention their primary function, and true to American approaches to government, NARA is perpetually underfunded for the amount of work that is given to it.) NARA has many facilities across the country, some of which are for researchers, some of which are just basically warehouses. \n\nI am not sure to what degree Congress itself is bound by these laws \u2014 they often make themselves an exemption (like they did with Freedom of Information Act). There is a Congressional Records section of NARA which contains the records of many Congressional committees, but I don't know whether their regulations are as ironclad as it is with federal agencies. (The Archivists I have talked to at NARA make it sound like stuff just sort of shows up from Congress whenever it shows up, like Congress works on its own system internally. But it may just look that way from where they are sitting.)\n\nThere are other places where governmental records can end up, like Library of Congress, but NARA is meant to be the main repository of archival information. LOC's holdings are mostly of published material and some personal archival collections (as opposed to official agency collections). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/doomsday-speeches-if-d-day-and-the-moon-landing-had-failed/251953/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/policy/guidance-regulations.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4in5v2", "title": "Are there any good books on the Korean War?", "selftext": "Seems like every year in school we conveniently skipped over, or stopped just short of, the Korean War. I know literally nothing about it but the name.\n\nMy question is what book or podcast or perhaps documentary can I get to become at least generally aquatinted with the subject? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4in5v2/are_there_any_good_books_on_the_korean_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2zk1a4", "d2zs0md"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["There sure are. Four I would strongly recommend are:\n\n- *Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51* by Russell Spurr\n\n- *The Korean War: Australia in the Giant's Playground* by Cameron Forbes\n\n- *The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953* by Clay Blair\n\n- *The Korean War: A History* by Bruce Cumings\n\nI find the Korean War fascinating. The US goes from fighting this massively mobile war where their firepower plays a decisive role (WW2) to fighting a static war reminiscent of WW1 where firepower means nothing in the face of ridiculously difficult terrain (Korea) and in just the space of five years", "I've just finished Max Hastings' [The Korean War](_URL_0_) and I found it very compelling. Although I might add that you can tell the book was originally written while the Cold War was still ongoing (1987); also I feel it's a bit Anglo-centric, IE (over)focussing on the British aspect of the war. Which is of course something you might expect from a British writer, writing for a predominantly British following, but I did find it notable/obtrusive at times. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55407.The_Korean_War"]]}
{"q_id": "7v6ds5", "title": "Roman victory parades, with a slave in the cart whispering \u00abRemember, thou art mortal\u201d?", "selftext": "Saw this quote today, with no reference. \nSounds overly interesting, anyone inow if it had some truth?\n\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 \n\nWhen a Roman consul returned home after a particularly spectacular military campaign abroad, a \u201cTriumph\u201d was held \u2013 which was a parade through the streets Rome celebrating his accomplishments. But there was an additional component that (as it was told to me then), a slave would be put in the chariot beside the consul, who\u2019s sole job throughout the Triumph was to whisper into the victorious leader\u2019s ear \u201cRemember, thou art mortal\u201d.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v6ds5/roman_victory_parades_with_a_slave_in_the_cart/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtpwtqv"], "score": [19], "text": ["The Roman triumphal procession, like the ancient funeral with the coins over the eyes and bloodsoaked gladiatorial fights, are very powerful images in the modern imagination of the ancient world but are surprisingly slippery to pin down in reliable sourcing. To give an illustration of just how slippery it can be, Mary beard's *The Roman Triumph* is a 400+ page book dedicated entirely to tracking down where in the ancient source this modern image came from--the painted face, captives marched in chains, displays of booty, and a slave whispering \"remember death\"--and comes to the conclusion that there actually is not one. All of these are attested separately in one way or another (\"remember death\" comes from the early Christian author Tertullian), but the creation of a singular \"Roman Triumph\" with set elements is a modern one.\n\nThis does not mean that triumphal processions were not very important parts of a noble Romans career, but their specific form was not set. Arguably this is what made them so important--the ability of powerful leaders to shape the event to their own purposes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "boh49j", "title": "What caused cavalry to become outdated? What was the turning point?", "selftext": "I'm asking for general, long term causes, and specific ones, like the general and war theorists that decided to actually get rid of cavalry.  \nAnd, to come to the original question that brought me to post this, when was the last cavalry charge? Was it recent enough to be photographed/depicted?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/boh49j/what_caused_cavalry_to_become_outdated_what_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["enh6pou", "enhcoj6", "enkw2yu"], "score": [19, 5, 3], "text": ["Short answer: (armored) vehicles in WW2. Maybe. Not really. If you insist.\n\nLong answer:\n\nThere was no definite turning *point*. The role of cavalry became minimized over the course of the last couple *centuries*, during which it had stayed very relevant up to and including WW2. Though the armored knight charges that are so ingrained in the public mind had ceased to exist long before, cavalry as a blanket term for \"men on horses\" has been useful for all this time, constantly changing and evolving into different roles. Many types of cavalry have come and gone, both their making and demise often centuries in the make. In a way, cavalry has its role even today, albeit it an extreme niche, as military/riot police, and some minor recon/patrol forces that operate in environments with extremely poor infrastructure.\n\nCavalry has a very long history, starting as shaky chariots and very light anti-skirmisher forces, and gradually developing into various forms of well-trained troops that formed the hard core of many medieval armies. Among them: heavy cavalry with outstanding armor and heavy weapons is what people are most familiar with, but over the course of the last 2 millennia, light cavalry has been a far more iconic type of cavalry, being present in pretty much every western culture (post-antiquity) and fulfilling critical tasks. Throughout the centuries, the fast-moving rider that can scout, quickly move around the battlefield and harass light troops or cut down routing units has been essential. It's remained useful in that simple form for an immensely long period. \n\n/u/Bacarruda gave a [fine overview of the various types of cavalry that existed around the 18th and 19th century here](_URL_0_) a while back, and I'd very much recommend reading it for information about cavalry in that time period. For the bigger picture, it's important to note *how different* cavalry in the 18th century already was, compared to the archetype of the heavily armored medieval knight. Gunpowder weapons had completely changed the dynamics of war, but cavalry as a whole did not instantly become obsolete, rather *a very specific type of cavalry* became outdated; namely the fully armored knight, drawn from an aristocratic caste. The reason why it became outdated should be clear: classic medieval knights were an elite force. They were **extremely expensive** to raise and maintain, both in terms of time and material, and drawn from a small pool of aristocracy, yet they could incur serious losses when facing even early firearms, and that gradually made their use impractical at best. But heavy cavalry in general did **not** cease to exist. It stayed useful and thus held on for much longer. They gradually ditched the armor, the life-long training, and the nobility requirements and that alone extended their use on the battlefield by several centuries.\n\nThe same occurs for various other forms of cavalry. From antiquity to the medieval period, skirmisher cavalry and cavalry archers were seriously dangerous forces. Skirmisher cavalry used to be a potent skirmishing force, but was -among other things- pretty much useless *when* faced with opponents that had foot archers with their much greater range... but not every culture in every period had those. So they only gradually fell out of favor as foot archers became commonplace. And cavalry archers fell out of favor for all the same reasons foot archers did (I'd recommend doing a subreddit search on that one, if you want to know more. There's been so ridiculously much written on that, I don't want to waste words on it here). Cavalry archers didn't stop being dangerous. They were just no longer practical, compared to mass infantry equipped with firearms, hence why they didn't spontaneously cease to exist (never mind how slowly military technology permeates through the world) but rather slowly diminished and eventually stopped being altogether. Various types of 18th/19th century cavalry still had some basic breastplates, but gradually they lost it as the vulnerability of cavalry in a charge on the open field became more and more pronounced, as both rifles and cannons became more accurate, and faster firing. So that at the start of the 20th century there's *hardly* any cavalry with breastplates and swords left. Hardly.... The French infamously charged into battle in WW1 with heavy cavalry in colourful uniforms, shining breastplates and sabers drawn, and paid the price for it. Only after that, the glorious cavalry charge wholly ceased to exist. And so we arrive at the end of cavalry, right?\n\nNope. With motorization only in its infancy, the world wars saw widespread use of cavalry. In fact, WW2 saw the deployment of over **90 divisions of \"cavalry\"**. Most of these, around 60 at the peak, were from the Soviet Union; the other big time users were Nazi Germany and the Balkan states, but every army at the onset of WW2 had cavalry to some extent. With around 7,000 men in a cavalry division, that's close to half a million cavalry for *just* the Soviet Union. Ironically this completely dwarfs the numbers of cavalry in conflicts in antiquity and the medieval period! But what did this cavalry look like? Well, mostly they were **mounted infantry**; basically just normal infantry, with a horse for transport. It'd existed for centuries already and the concept still worked. Cavalry in WW2 fought as regular infantry, with largely the same support equipment, artillery, et cetera, but used horses for strategic movement, and occasionally tactical movements as well, but they (with some extremely minor exceptions) did not fight on horseback at all. The benefits are pretty evident: horses can carry more supplies than humans, can travel greater distances per day, and very importantly: **you don't need to produce them, and they don't need gasoline**. Sure, horses needed to be bred, and maintaining the horse population *was* actually a big concern for countries like Nazi Germany, but they were far more readily available than trucks at the onset of WW2. Cavalry was also frequently used for reconnaissance, as a single attachment, added to normal infantry divisions, used to draw artillery pieces, and most importantly of all: logistics. Far greater than the number of mounted troops is the number of horses used for logistics. Not what anyone means with \"cavalry\" but it's very much worth noting.\n\nBut this is not the whole picture on what WW2 \"cavalry\" looked like, because before, during, and after WW2, the actual cavalry-part of cavalry was slowly being phased out. Truck (and car) production soared throughout the war (whereas the horse population growth declined massively due to war losses), and armies rapidly motorized their troops. This was driven by the increased productivity of factories, which lowered the cost of trucks, as well as more robust designs (the reliability of many types of trucks was lacking, diminishing their use) making trucks increasingly more reliable than horses (in regions with roads). Horses aren't with their own, very significant drawbacks, which include the enormous amounts of fodder that they need, lower weight capacity, the big training requirement for riders, and a great vulnerability to the environment and diseases. One more notable disadvantage that mounted infantry had compared to motorized infantry, is the lack of speed. Armoured and motorized divisions outpaced leg infantry by so much that leg infantry was a big liability in fast offensive operations, falling behind so much that faster divisions could be encircled, and pure cavalry did not have the speed to keep up either. The reasons why countries didn't completely motorize all of their cavalry before WW2 is thus a big question and the answer is worthy of its own thread I think, being a combination of the budget choices and doctrines of the various armies. But throughout the war, cavalry divisions were often the first to be partially or completely motorized/mechanized, and this could mean a lot of things: either some, or all of the horses were replaced with trucks or armored cars, or tanks or armored cars were added in various quantities to the divisions, or brigades were swapped and divisions merged into bigger motorized/armoured divisions. This is worth keeping in mind, when seeing a division or brigade in WW2 with the 'cavalry' nametag; it doesn't actually mean it was a pure cavalry division. For that you need to check the actual composition. Nonetheless, mounted infantry remained a very common thing up to the end of WW2.\n\nLastly, armored vehicles and airplanes replaced cavalry recon, and trucks also took over the logistical aspect, being far superior at both of those tasks, but *especially* the latter. So where is the \"turning point\" here? I'd argue WW2 is probably the best turning point you're going to get, with the rise of mass truck production. But cavalry had been *slowly* on its way to obsolescence for centuries by then, it wasn't actually all that obsolete compared to leg infantry, and had become unrecognizable next to the 'cavalry' as it existed (1)500 years back.\n\n______________________\n\nToward Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of 20th-Century Tactics, Doctrine, and Organization, Captain Jonathan M. House, August 1984\n\nHANDBOOK ON U. S. S. R. MILITARY FORCES, WAR DEPARTMENT WASHINGTON 25, D. C., 1 March 1946", "/u/LuxArdens has done a good job explaining the reasoning, so I won't elaborate on that.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs far as the \"last\" cavalry charge, a lot of it depends on what specifically you'd qualify as a cavalry charge, but the Polish-Soviet War in the aftermath of WW1 had a lot of large-scale cavalry operations. The 1920 Soviet counteroffensive near Kiev saw the Soviets make excellent use of cavalry by Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army to slip large forces around the gaps in the Polish lines and force the Poles to withdraw. Budyonny's forces remained a major component of the Lvov theater up until the end of the war, and the Battle of Komar\u00f3w would see Polish cavalry forces play a decisive role in the defeat and near destruction of Soviet forces in the area. The Polish Uhlan regiments would conduct several cavalry charges during this battle, nearly overrunning the 1st Cavalry Army and forcing Budyonny to abandon his staff car to avoid capture.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOne thing to note, however, is that the cavalry forces in this war greatly benefited from the disorganization of the period. The forces at play on both sides were much more poorly organized and equipped than those a few years earlier on the Eastern Front in WW1, and the numbers available were small enough to prevent there from being a single coherent line - especially during the Kiev campaign. Because of that, cavalry were able to take advantage of the situation. Poor reconnaissance meant it was easier for cavalry forces to maneuver around and attack unprepared forces - in fact, that's exactly what happened at Komar\u00f3w. The sparse placement of forces often created large gaps that forces couldn't adequately cover, allowing for breakthroughs like that performed by Budyonny around Kiev. Poor organization and supply meant that forces were less likely to be able to create defensive positions to adequately fend off cavalry attacks, and the shock value of cavalry on morale was going to impact soldiers more. Just before Komar\u00f3w, at Zadw\u00f3rze, we see what happens when even Budyonny's infamous Cossacks went up against a determined, dug-in force. At Zadw\u00f3rze, a little over 300 isolated soldiers defending a village managed to fend off several attacks and stall the 1st Cavalry Army for a day before being overrun.", "Cavalry didn't become outdated. Modern armies still have \"cavalry\" formations that fulfill the classic roles of the cavalry: scouting, flank protection, moving mounted and fighting dismounted, exploitation, and the like.\n\n*Horse* cavalry became outdated. As technology advanced, vehicles like trucks, helicopters, and tanks became better mounts than horses. From the mid-20th century onwards, cavalry troopers continued their old duties of scouting and mobile action, only this time on metal mounts.\n\nGranted, some roles of cavalry did become outdated. Cavalry charges, for example, were a very risky proposition in 1914. From the late 19th century onwards, the prevalence of faster-firing artillery, repeating rifles, and machine guns meant that charging cavalry had to be smart (choose hidden approaches, do good pre-attack recon, and time things right) and lucky (have good terrain, catch their target by surprise, and hope their target didn't have any nearby friends). Most of the time, cavalry just wasn't that lucky. As a result, the \"shock attack\" with lance and sabre became less common and cavalry tended to move mounted, but fight dismounted with rifles and carbines.\n\nThis [previous answer about how training and mobility helped make cavalry obsolescent](_URL_1_) and [this answer about manpower usage](_URL_2_) (many cavalry units were dismounted in WWI and WWII to make up critical infantry shortages) may be of interest to you. You also may like [this discussion about firepower](_URL_4_) and this post about [the Battle of Halen, the debates over the future of cavalry, and the role of cavalry in 1914](_URL_3_) over at r/WarCollege.\n\nu/jonewer also has [an excellent post](_URL_0_) about British cavalry in WWI that deals with the changing role of cavalry during this war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bhwqnp/during_the_napoleonic_wars_as_well_as_before_and/ely1zp7/"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a3g1qw/wwi_bef_cavalry_recruitment_training_culture/ebcitei/%20%20jonewer", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ah278v/why_did_cavalry_become_obsolete/eecan96/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a8sylu/what_tended_to_be_the_most_suitable_job/ecfib5b/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/bikv5v/one_of_the_first_major_battles_of_ww1_was_in/emdzqw1/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/avzsbn/what_finally_made_the_cavalry_obsolete/ehjevm5/"]]}
{"q_id": "6kws2w", "title": "To what extent was Kashmir historically Tibetan?", "selftext": "I don't mean Tibet as a political entity, nor do I mean Kashmir as a political entity. I know Ladakh is still fairly Tibetan in terms of cultural influences, but was the \"Tibetan-ness\" more spread out than that? How far back are we talking for Tibetan cultural movement into the area?\n\nThis question came about because a friend was telling me about the oral tradition of his particular group having come from Kashmir, and \"India\" before that, and while I'm highly suspicious of the accuracy of oral migration traditions in therms of broad place names, I actually don't know all that much about Tibetan culture in the Kashmir area. I'm much more familiar with more recent migrations into areas like the Brahmaputra Valley or settlement of groups like the Monpa in Tawang.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kws2w/to_what_extent_was_kashmir_historically_tibetan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsdpa3"], "score": [3], "text": ["I've only encountered scattered bits of information about Kashmir in the literature I see out there so I'll give you my best educated guess to try and answer your question: \n\nMy own understanding of Kashmiri topics in general is quite limited, so hopefully an Indologist will come in at some point and correct me, but the area seems to have served as a highway for so long between Central Asia and the Subcontinent that it doesn't seem to me like there was a grander Kashmiri nation to speak of. Again, I could be wrong on that point. \n\nAs it relates to Tibetan topics, Kashmir shows up relatively early with reference to [Padmasambhava](_URL_0_biographies/view/Padmasambhava/7442)^1 who is said to have been born in Oddiyana^2 estimated to have been in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, i.e. Kashmir. During the reign of Tri Song Detsuen, Padmasambhava became a great tantric master and was invited to Tibet to help establish the Dharma in the country and to sanctify Tibet's first monastery Samye^3. I'm telling this because it points to Tibet being Kashmirized, rather than vice-versa. [This interesting paper actually discusses the roots of Tibetan tantra which can be traced through Kashmiri Saivism.](_URL_1_) Caution: while fascinating, it's not for the faint of heart. The Padmasambhava story is one of my favorites (I skipped the parts where he goes to Bhutan, seduces/is given the Emperor's wife for his own, freezes some archers, etc.) but in the terms of the question, it seems emblematic of the plantic of Kashmiri religious concepts into Tibetan soil. This was in the eighth century, Tri Song Detsuen died around 796 AD. \n\nThe Kashmiri-zation of Tibet, and then the Tibetanization of parts of Kashmir (Ladakh in particular, as you mentioned) probably continued in this way over the centuries, with Kashmiri Saivites feeding Tantric concepts and initiations to Tibetans who wandered into the area for business, trade, or religious reasons (possibly on pilgrimage to Oddiyana?). If you click through [The Treasury of Lives](_URL_0_), you'll stumble upon religious leaders, especially in the 1200s that were getting initiated into Tantric rituals and philosophy in Kashmir. \n\nThat said, outside of Ladakh, I don't know how Tibetanized Kashmir ever became, but my gut tells me \"not very.\" For one, it's a pretty safe bet when the local language doesn't have their own term for it, that it's a foreign concept to them. I.e. In Tibetan, \"Tibet\" is \"bod,\" \"Bhutan\" is \"'brug yul,\" \"Sikkim\" is \"'bras ljongs,\" India is \"rgya gar,\" China is \"rgya nag,\" and \"Ladakh\" is \"la dwags.\" \n\n\"Kashmir\" in Tibetan is \"ka sha mir.\" I might be missing something, and it's possible that the region might have been subsumed under earlier polities (i.e. Zhangzhung) but it's notable to me how Tibetans today don't have a name for the area. \n\nShakabpa, famous as the first post-exile Tibetan historian, writes in his *bod kyi srid don rgyal rabs* (literally History about the Politics of Tibet): \n\n >  de bzhin sbal ti si than yul skad l'ang bod skad dad ha cang 'brel che yod pa de yang lo brgya phrag drug pa dang bdun pa'i nang de dag bod kyi chab khongs su gtogs pa dang bod pa'i dmag mis lo mang sa srung du bsdad pa deb\n\nWhich is something along the lines of: \n\n >  Similarly [to the connection between Tibetan and Burmese languages] there is believed to be a strong connection between the dialects of Tibet and Baltistan^4. As for that in the 600s and 700s those [the Baltisthanis] were subsumed under the dominion of Tibet and soldiers were stationed^5 for many years in that land to guard the border... \n\nSo what we have is reference to the area coming under Tibetan political control as early as the 600s (which would be under Songtsen Gampo, so again, we bump into the possibility that the land was previously under Zhangzhung until the Yarlung's conquered it), but I still find it a bit strange that Shakabpa has to use the term \"sbal ti si than\" to describe the region, which is clearly not Tibetan in origin, and he's in the middle of a description about where Tibetan language and literature comes from. \n\nThe History of Ladakh is another animal in itself. I'm not as well versed in its specifics as I am of Lhasa or Bhutan, though it's next on my list to conquer. I know A.H. Francke's *A History of Ladakh* and *A History of Western Tibet* are considered classics in this area. A lot of the Tibetology in that area of the Himalayas was done through the missionaries as they seemed the most academically focused until very recently. (Hell, our best Tibetan Dictionary still comes from H.A. Jaeschke who was one of them!)\n\nAnyway, I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. I'm in the middle of reading a bunch of other things right now, but Francke's work are on my summer reading list so I'll see if there's anything else I can find to help. \n\n1. I never miss a chance to discuss naming conventions. \"Padmasambhava\" is Sanskrit for \"Lotus born.\" In Tibetan that would be \"pad+ma 'byung gnas\" (Tib: \u0f54\u0f51\u0fa8\u0f0b\u0f60\u0f56\u0fb1\u0f74\u0f44\u0f0b\u0f42\u0f53\u0f66\u0f0d, Pema Jungney), literally \"Arisen from a Lotus.\" He has Eight Manifestations, the most famous of which being Guru Rinpoche, which he is more commonly known among both the Bhutanese nationality and the Nyingma sect. This manifestation has come to be almost representative of his worship among the Nyingma has come to be a point of contention among Gelukpa-Nyingmapa tensions in the eighteenth century. \n\n2. Oddiyana, also known as \"o rgyan\" (Tib: \u0f68\u0f7c\u0f0b\u0f62\u0f92\u0fb1\u0f53\u0f0b, Orgyan, Ugyen) is a common name among Tibetans, and a name directly associated with Padmasambhava. Bhutan's first King was Ugyen Wangchuck. \n\n3. Tibet's first Buddhist temple was built by Tri Song Detsuen's ancestor, the First Dharma King, Emperor Songtsen Gampo. He married two Buddhist Queens, one from Nepal and one from China. The Chinese Preincess, whom the Tibetans refer to as Kung Chu, used *Yijing* geomancy to establish the location for a temple, which his Nepali wife (so the story goes) Princess Belsa, designed and built according to Nepali customs. The Temple, the Jokhang, is considered Tibet's holiest site. Twelve more temples were built, the vast majority in Tibet, while two ended up in modern Bhutan. The difference is that temples are public places of worship, while monasteries are for monks to formally study. Their purposes and functions often overlap. \n\n4.  lit. yul skad = dialect, skad = language, so it's a bit weird here that he specifies \"Baltistan dialect and Tibetan language.\" \n\n5. The word here is \"bsdad\" which literally means \"dwell,\" \"stay,\" or even \"sit.\" But I'm taking the responsibility for the word \"station,\" which is, IMO, what you do when you place soldiers somewhere, as far as I'm concerned. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.treasuryoflives.org/", "http://www.sutrajournal.com/the-tantric-age-a-comparison-of-shaiva-and-buddhist-tantra-by-christopher-wallis", "http://www.treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Padmasambhava/7442"]]}
{"q_id": "1ik4rn", "title": "How did Germany pay for military equipment, food, general supplies etc in during WW2?", "selftext": "It's well known the financial problems Britain encountered during and after WW2, but I've always been curious if the Germans borrowed money, and if so, who from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ik4rn/how_did_germany_pay_for_military_equipment_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb5ids4"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, you may interested in these past replies:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dzvcl/was_the_nazi_regime_genuinely_popular/c9vluqf", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e5ofg/when_nazi_germany_imported_goods_from_other/c9x74a6", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dsif3/some_people_like_to_claim_that_nazi_germany_was/c9tfl4i"]]}
{"q_id": "24225b", "title": "Were lowborns and low-ranking knights generally punished or rewarded for killing high-ranking nobility in battle?", "selftext": "I'd prefer if the answers referred to personal combat, but discussion of crossbows is fine too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24225b/were_lowborns_and_lowranking_knights_generally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch334h3", "ch371px"], "score": [107, 22], "text": ["I can't find the video online, but the special [*Going Medieval*](_URL_3_), presented by [Mike Loades](_URL_2_), covers aspects of this.  He begins discussing singles combat at 5:20, I typed out the transcript below:\n\n >  **Loades**:  What would happen in a battle is the crush of men from either side squeezes you in\u2026 They\u2019re getting closer and closer, and eventually they\u2019re in a tight melee.  Finally, they have no choice but to fall to grips and grapples.  Wrestling techniques were of particular use when knights came upon other knights on the battlefield.  They had their own code of honor:  Chivalry.  And my sparring partner, Dr. Tobias Capwell [(Curator at *The Wallace Collection*, a national museum in London)](_URL_1_), is an expert in the rules.\n >  \n > **Dr. Capwell**:  Knights are fighting other knights, other equals of the same social class. And within the brotherhood of chivalry, you don\u2019t necessarily want to have to kill your social equals all the time.  You have the process of ransoming; you can force them to yield to you, they become your prisoner, and then you can sell them back to their family for an extraordinary profit.   But they\u2019re not going to yield easily. \n >  \n >  **Loades**:  You\u2019ve got to defeat them, but not kill them.\n\nThey then demonstrate how one knight can put the other in an arm-breaking position [(screenshot)](_URL_0_).  Dr Capwell (top) can make it worse and worse until Loades (bottom) yields. \n \n >  **Loades**: I yield, and then I give you my word: \u2018I yield, I am now your prisoner, you can let me up\u2019.  Chivalry works with people of the same class. Of course, if he does not perceive I am of his same social class, then Chivalry doesn\u2019t work and he drops me to the dirt.\n\nSo, it all comes down to whether or not the \"losing\" knight or nobility is willing to give himself up, and if the aggressor see's this person as having the equal social standing to be considered trustworthy.  They mention the money that could be made by ransoming the losing party, so it certainly gives the impression that it would be far better to take him prisoner.  *If* a knight or noble would submit to a peasant, even in the face of certain death, is a different question.  And unfortunately, it's an answer that I do not know.", "It's an interesting question and one I would like to see answered by better minds than my own since, for the most part, I have been unable to locate any reliable form of record either way.\n\n(apologies in advance btw, a half assed browser hijack just killed my better post)\n\nWhere as in field rewards for gallantry etc were common I cannot find many 'rewards or punishments' expliticly stated for killing a noble during open conflict or even under tournament conditions. (Gabriel the count of Montgomery accidentally killed Henry II of France in 1559 by a lance wound to the face, Gabriel requested execution for his act, but the dying king forbade it ~ The Queen of Pubes bore a grudge though so don't discount the people, social norm and exceptions abound).\n\nWithin [The Law of War and Peace](_URL_0_) by Grotius 1625 there is no mention of punishment for killing under war conditions but only percieved legal or illegal killing. (poison is illegal for example)\n\nDuring the Hundred Years War ransom taking was the go to get rich quick method even going so far as to be formalised and taxable. [Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages](_URL_3_). Actually [Remy Ambuhl](_URL_2_) has made a fascinating study of it. \n\nFor other information i would suggest Juliet Barker. ([Conquest](_URL_1_)  &  [Agincourt](_URL_4_))\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/jBjzwNx.jpg", "http://www.wallacecollection.org/thecollection/curators/thecollectioncurators", "http://www.mikeloades.com/", "http://www.history.co.uk/shows/going-medieval"], ["http://www.constitution.org/gro/djbp.htm", "http://www.amazon.co.uk/Conquest-English-Kingdom-France-Hundred/dp/0349122024/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1398589404&amp;sr=1-2", "http://www.southampton.ac.uk/history/about/staff/ra4c09.page#publications", "http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Prisoners_of_War_in_the_Hundred_Years_Wa.html?id=35Av5d0HKCQC&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://www.amazon.co.uk/Agincourt-Campaign-Battle-Juliet-Barker/dp/034911918X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1398589404&amp;sr=1-1"]]}
{"q_id": "5ze4nz", "title": "How did the Roman baths work, in terms of bureaucracy? Did you have to pay to enter, to use certain facilities inside and to whom did you have to pay?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ze4nz/how_did_the_roman_baths_work_in_terms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dext9md"], "score": [43], "text": ["There were a whole variety of baths in ancient Rome, ranging from personal baths within a home for use of the household and guests to the massive public baths such as those of Caracalla, which could hold hundreds of people, contained libraries, sporting areas and commons to provide other diversions and were decorated by some of the most famous works of ancient art. The imperial baths were free and open to all, an expression of the generosity of the emperor, and the variety of entertainments on offer arguably make seeing them as just a *bath* is misleading, they were comprehensive entertainment and relaxation centers that could really fill up an entire day.\n\nHowever neither of these were really the typical bath--private baths were obviously only available to the wealthy few, and imperial baths represented a true upper end of the spectrum. Between them were baths of all sizes, of all quality and representing all sorts of answers to the question you ask. For example, in Rome itself there were quite a few \"neighborhood\" baths that served a utilitarian function and charged fees. Some of these would dole out hot water on an individual basis, perhaps for somebody to fill their own tub, perhaps meant to function almost more like a shower (you might poor the hot water over yourself, then dip in the cold pool). There were also communal baths not built by the emperor but rather wealthy patrons or the community itself, and might be subject to targeted generosity--there are examples of patrons donating all the wood needed for heating for a year, or supplying the oil for a month. And there were some baths that were more like health spas (perhaps Gadebridge Park and Bath in England were examples of these), suitable for a trip away from the city.\n\nThere is a truly bewildering quantity of scholarship on baths, which reflects their prominence in the archaeological record (they are *very* easy to recognize) as well as the real importance they held in the daily lives of Romans great and small. Garret Fagen's *Bathing in Public in the Roman World* is one of the standard entry points."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "78jfxq", "title": "Why did the US work to (covertly?) fight communism spreading to Central and South America?", "selftext": "Why didn't the US just let countries adopt the systems they wanted? It seems like if communism was truely an inferior system the US would have more examples to point to to say how communism is doomed to fail.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78jfxq/why_did_the_us_work_to_covertly_fight_communism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doum55p"], "score": [9], "text": ["The US interference in Latin America was not something that stemmed from the Cold War. Long before communism was even a political ideology the US established the Monroe doctrine in 1823 that stated Latin America was under the US sphere of influence and that they would not tolerate influence of other powers in the region. What this entailed was that Latin America were in a sense satellite states to the US that served their political interest and the US intervened in their internal affairs however they saw fit. The US has done this multiple times prior to the Cold War such as pushing for Panama to succeed from Columbia so the US could construct their canal there and the Banana Wars where the US essentially invaded Honduras to ensure their economic interest were secure which led to the term Banana Republic. Thus, the US had a vested interest in Latin America long before their ideological conflict with the Soviets even erupted. \n\nWhen the Cold War did finally kick off,  two central characteristics of it was the ideological competition and competition for sphere of influence between the superpowers. What this entailed for Latin America in specific is that the US wanted to maintain its control over the region as the governments there (installed by them or not) were friendly, supported US interest and were economic partners for the US. In the case of Cuba and other nations in proximity to the US, they were strategically important as their proximity was a potential outpost or launching off point for hostile forces against the US. The conversion to communism in the region would compromise strategic and economic concerns as it would create hostile regimes to the US and undermine their prestige in the ideological conflict. At the time it is important to note that the prevailing belief was that communism was a threat to western civilization and their way of life due to its atheistic nature and its for rule of the proletariat. It was not necessarily believed to be inferior because it did not work and at this point no communist state had yet collapsed with one of the world's superpowers being communist thus providing them a level of empirical legitimacy as a political alternative to democratic capitalism. A country becoming communist would not necessarily mean their eventual collapse to the policy makers of the time so to let them turn communist and hope they collapsed later on was a foolish gamble given the strategic implications. \n\nThe US at the time also subscribed to the domino theory which in short believed that if one country fell to communism their neighbours would follow suit eventually taking over the whole region. While the validity of this concept is debatable since there is merit for both sides of the arguement, the important thing is that the US believed it to be true. Thus one country in Latin America becoming communist to them had the potential to spread the revolution to the whole region which would turn them against the US. These nations were important economic partners to the US and as stated above were strategically important as well. Thus the whole region falling to communism would be an unacceptable situation and they worked to combat it, enforcing the new Truman Doctrine of containment using the precedence of the Monroe Doctrine. The proxy conflicts themselves effected the prestige of the US which was one of the measures it used to compare itself to the USSR. Their ability to protect their allies or sphere of influence reflected on their standing as a superpower. Thus to let the states adopt communism (which was often through revolution) would be seen as a defeat for the US as their allies would be ousted and a victory for the USSR it implied the superiority of communism over the old regime.  \n\nOverall, the while you could make the argument that the eventual failure of communism would show the superiority of the capitalist-democratic system, it simply was not in their interest to do so and went against precedent. Letting countries become Communist, or even anti-US for that matter would have had strategic and economic implications for the US that they would not just accept. At that point communism had not yet proved itself to be an unsustainable economic system so to hope that they collapsed would be wishful thinking and the act of communism becoming dominant in a country replacing the old capitalist system undermined the claim that it was inferior in the short run which in turn hurt the prestige of the US. This argument only make some sense with the benefit of hindsight and doesn't take into account the immediate short run implications letting states turn effectively hostile.\n\n*Edits for clarity and better phrasing*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "46hyru", "title": "What impact did Wyatt Earp  &  the gunfight at the O.K Corral have on today's history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46hyru/what_impact_did_wyatt_earp_the_gunfight_at_the_ok/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d059y5e"], "score": [9], "text": ["I've answered this question before, so here's my answer from last time:\n\nInterestingly enough, the actual historical event itself *wasn't* significant or have much of an impact. It could have been forgotten, left as nothing but a footnote in a history about boomtown violence in Arizona during the late 19th century.\n\nBut it wasn't. I'll come back to that.\n\nFirst, let me talk about what it actually was. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral was the climax of a larger semi-feud between two \"sides\": one side was formed around Wyatt Earp and his brothers. The other consisted of a semi-organized group known only as \"The Cowboys\" who made a living through cattle rustling. They were also involved in other criminal activities, which involved robberies.\n\nNow, the details of what led up to the O.K. Corral are plenty and it would take time to really write it up since it involves so many individuals and events that it could fill a book. And it has.\n\nTo cut to the point, on October 26th 1881, close to the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona; Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp and Town Marshall Virgil Earp together with Earp's friend Doc Holliday, confronted Ike Clanton, Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury and Tom McLaury. Virgil Earp, who was the Town Marshall (in western movies, this is usually titled 'sheriff' which is wrong), attempted to disarm the four men as per Tombstone ordinance no. 9: *Section 1. It is hereby declared unlawful to carry in the hand or upon the person or otherwise any deadly weapon within the limits of said city of Tombstone, without first obtaining a permit in writing.*\n\nIt was a tense situation to begin with. All the four men they faced belong to the \"Cowboys\" and Ike Clanton himself had a personal feud with Wyatt Earp for months. Clanton had threatened to kill the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday before. However, this was not a planned shootout. This was simply Virgil Earp and his deputies trying to disarm four men carrying weapons unlawfully according to section 1, ordinance no 9. While it is not known exactly who shot first, the gunfight lasted a total of 30 seconds. One man was dead, two men were mortally injured and would die within moments. Ironically, the man who had contributed the most to the tension between the two sides escaped and died six years later in an unrelated incident. He did however take the Earps (and Holliday) to court over the death of his two friends and his brother, but they were exonerated, much thanks to Ike Clanton's own testimony which was filled with so many holes and inaccuracies that it simply couldn't be believed. The \"trial\", which was in fact a  preliminary hearing, did not get any further than that. \n\nNow, what made the gunfight at the O.K. Corral so famous? \n\nIn 1931, *Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal* was released. It is a largely fictional biography over Wyatt Earp but it cemented everything about him and painted Earp as a hero of the frontier, standing up against bandits and other bad guys in the Old West and he became a symbol of the Wild West Lawman and gunslinger (despite not being a marshal at the time of the gunfight). It is also in this book in which this particular gunfight was introduced in a dramatized form. One might say that it wasn't the gunfight that made Wyatt Earp famous, but that the gunfight was made famous by Wyatt Earp through this particular book. In a larger social and cultural context, it was released during the Great Depression in which dime novels was a popular form of entertainment and escape. In time of hard trial, people were looking for a popular heroic figure and some found it in this dramatized, fictional version of Wyatt Earp.\n\nThis book became the basis for the whole Wyatt Earp and Tombstone legend. The book was adapted into movies and TV-shows, which in turn inspired even more projects based on this historical event. Even the name for the gunfight was taken and popularized through the title of the movie *Gunfight at the O.K. Corral* (1957).\n\nTo sum it up, the gunfight itself had a small significance outside of Tombstone itself and was soon forgotten. It was then popularized in 1931 together with the legend of Wyatt Earp and has from then on become far and far more distorted and dramatized throughout the years, leading up to the very popular movie *Tombstone* (1993) where I imagine most people get their image of Wyatt Earp and the O.K. Corral from these days."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5s9bna", "title": "Do you think that Oliver Cromwell himself was responsible for the limited success of the protectorate in England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5s9bna/do_you_think_that_oliver_cromwell_himself_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddd9vm0"], "score": [3], "text": ["Or would you put it down to factors such as the Army, Parliament, the Major General rule, religion at the time?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fcto7f", "title": "Did medieval Middle-Eastern monarchs have crowns, crown jewels, and coronations? What were the Middle Eastern symbols of royal power, and how were their reigns formalized?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcto7f/did_medieval_middleeastern_monarchs_have_crowns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjfah61"], "score": [12], "text": ["The Middle Ages are a broad and ill-defined period, and the Middle East is similarly broad and ill-defined in a geographic sense. So I'll take these questions one at a time, and try to treat the various cultures of medieval Islam.\n\n*Did medieval Middle-Eastern monarchs have crowns?*\n\nIt's complicated. The most common Arabic and Persian word for crown, *t\u0101j* (\u062a\u0627\u062c), comes from Middle Persian where it was used as a symbol of Sasanian royal power. The association between the crown and royalty continued through the Islamic period\u2014as, for example, in al-Jahiz's *Kit\u0101b al-t\u0101j*, a collection of Sasanian royal traditions. And in the *Sh\u0101hn\u0101ma*, a 10/11th-century epic celebrating the heroes of pre-Islamic Iran, the *t\u0101j* is an emphatic mark of royal power\u2014which is why Rustam, a major figure in the first part of the work, bears the epithet *t\u0101jbakhsh*, or \"crown-bestower\" (referring to his role as a champion of the realm).\n\nHowever, early Islamic writings also tended to denigrate the crown, emphasizing the turban in its place. This attitude is best encapsulated by the hadith that \"turbans are the crowns of the Arabs\" (Bayhaq\u012b, *Shu\u02bfab al-\u012aman*), though M.J. Kister's article lists a number of other examples in which crowns are portrayed as attributes of specifically non-Arab and non-Islamic kings. If turbans were associated generally with Islam, they were especially associated with Muhammad, who wears one in pretty much every medieval Islamicate picture of him\u2014many of these pictures, incidentally, have other figures wearing crowns, so again, you see the ways in which different modes and types of authority were represented in different ways. (Robert Dankoff's essay, linked below, has quite a few of these pictures embedded if you're interested in that.)\n\nThis distinction between turban and crown seems to have been pretty generally maintained up to the \u02bfAbbasid period \\[ED: according to Dankoff and Bj\u00f6rkman\u2014Richard Ettinghausen has argued for the crown's place in a three-hat system (crown, turban, tall conical hat) used by the Umayyad caliphs\\], where a *t\u0101j al-khal\u012bfa* was included among the caliphal \"insignia of sovereignty\" (*\u0101l\u0101t al-mul\u016bkiyya*). It has been suggested that in this as in many other aspects of \u02bfAbbasid culture, we should see a resumption of Persian practices. Later rulers in the \u02bfAbbasid domains\u2014the Buyids, the Seljuqs, and the Ghaznavids\u2014all seem to have worn crowns for ceremonial purposes, at the very least; again, we see this more commonly in the Persianate world than in other contexts. Elsewhere, however (for example, in Spain), the crown retained its association with non-Arab and non-Islamic rulership.\n\nSources:\n\nRobert Dankoff, \"Turban and Crown: an Essay in Islamic Civilization\" \\[[_URL_5_ link](_URL_0_)\\]\n\nW. Bj\u00f6rkman, \"T\u0101dj,\" in *Encyclopedia of Islam, Two*\n\nM.J. Kister, \u201c\u2018The Crowns of this Community\u2019 \u2026 Some Notes on the Turban in the Muslim Tradition,\u201d *Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam* 24 (2000), 217-45 \\[[link](_URL_1_)\\]\n\n\"Regalia - I. Crowns,\" in *The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture* \\[[link](_URL_3_)\\]\n\nElsie Peck, \"Crown iii. On monuments from the Islamic conquest to the Mongol invasion,\" in *Encyclopedia Iranica* \\[[link](_URL_4_)\\]\n\nA. Shapur Shahbazi, \"Crown iv. Of Persian rulers from the Arab conquerors,\" in *Encyclopedia Iranica* \\[[link](_URL_2_)\\]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.academia.edu/13435409/Turban_and_Crown_An_Essay_in_Islamic_Civilization", "http://www.kister.huji.ac.il/content/crowns-community-some-notes-turban-muslim-tradition", "http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/crown-iv", "http://oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t276/e780", "http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/crown-iii", "Academia.edu"]]}
{"q_id": "2od6eg", "title": "I've heard that during the First and Second World Wars many soldiers would deliberately miss their shots when shooting at enemy soldiers. Is there any truth to this? Did it vary from army to army, or war to war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2od6eg/ive_heard_that_during_the_first_and_second_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmm1vec", "cmm5bno", "cmn9ncq"], "score": [111, 96, 3], "text": ["There has been a lot of discussion about this, mostly inspired by Dave Grossman's *On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in war and Society* and a number of other books such as Melanie Joy's *Unnatural Born Killers*.\n\nOpinion on the validity of these claims is divided to say the least and hence there is no clear answer. My personal opinion based on the research I've done into developing military tactics tends to be that while there may be some truth to the claims there was not a systemic issue with soldier's deliberately missing. Instead, warfare changed so that the objective of pulling a trigger was no longer primarily to kill the enemy, but rather to keep their head down.\n\nThe advent of cover-based conflict was still fairly young at the dawn of the 20th century. Previously firefights would take place at much closer ranges and so the effectiveness of firearms was much greater. However with the advent of more and more accurate and quick firing infantry weapons and machine guns in particular it became incumbent on soldiers to take cover and prioritize self-preservation over annihilation of the enemy.\n\nHaving a target in the open was a massive rarity during these conflicts and the majority of firing was done to prevent the enemy from maneuvering to an advantageous position where they could overcome your cover. In WW1 in particular when troops went \"over the top\" and left cover, the slaughter was horrific and opposing soldiers most certainly shot to kill. Whole platoons and even companies were wiped out in minutes, hardly what you'd expect if there was a systemic determination to miss.\n\nAsk any modern soldier how often they have a target in the open and they'll tell you it's a tremendous rarity.\n\nInstead of firing at the enemy, you fire at their cover hoping to pin them down and gain a maneuverability and encircling advantage or, these days, hold them in place long enough for a Warthog to blitz their position. In this way, yes, I suppose the soldiers do not fire to kill, but they're certainly not trying to spare the opponent, it's just that firing to kill is no longer directly possible the majority of the time.\n\nPeople point to statistics like the 50,000 bullets fired in the Vietnam War for every combatant killed as evidence to support this claim but fail to understand that the majority of combat under these circumstances involved concealed soldiers firing at each other with no real idea of exactly where the enemy was. You fired at the building you believed them to be in hoping to saturate it with enough bullets that one of them would get lucky and kill the bugger.\n\nAgain, it's one of those questions that's pretty much impossible to answer with certainty one way or the other as it asks us to speak to the psychology of people in events almost a century ago. But I've never seen any really compelling evidence that it was a systemic issue.\n\nEdit: I would highly recommend that everyone who reads this also read /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 's excellent response below which goes into detail about many of the methodological and research problems that *On Killing* faces.", "*I posted this as a response originally, but with a bit of edits, it does address your question itself, so reposting it as a top level*\n\nOver the past decade, this claim has become quite prevalent due to the work of Lt. Col Dave Grossman, in his book *On Killing*. It is a interesting book, certainly, but incredibly controversial. His conclusions come from a synthesis of other sources, and the central argument is that firing rates are very low and this is because most people have a very compelling urge *not* to kill which must be overcome. This isn't really his own work though, and the core of his argument comes from *Men Against Fire*, a work by S.L.A. Marshall, a US Army historian. Marshall claimed that, after conducting extensive interviews with US Army units, often immediately after they had been in conduct, he had discovered that only 15 to 25 percent of men actually fired their weapons with the intention of killing, and the rest either missed purposefully or just didn't fire. This statistic is really the heart of Grossman's book in many regards, and he takes it to be the word of god, for all intents and purposes.\n\nMarshall's study did have a major impact on training by the US Army, but in the years following its publication, pretty much everything about it has been called into question. There is no end to the pieces you can find published in the past few decades which essentially rip him to shreds, going from just questioning his methodology to outright claiming that many of the interviews he gave were essentially fabricated. [A few] (_URL_4_) quick  [examples](_URL_2_) I [dug up](_URL_0_). Roger Spiller's \"S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire\" seems to have been the first full assault on Marshall, but I can't find a copy online, [just this](_URL_5_) which has some quotes.\n\n[Grossman draws on other sources as well - mentioning French studies done in the 19th century, the recovery of unfired weapons at Gettysburg, studies done by the noted British wargame designer Paddy Griffith, and most interestingly, supposed laser reenactments of historical clashes done by the British Army in the 1980s which confirmed low firing rates](_URL_6_) (I have searched high and low for these by the way, cause it sounds awesome, but never with the least bit of luck. If anyone knows what the heck Grossman is talking about, please let me know!). So anyways, Marshall isn't his only sources, but it is the course of his argument at points, and you can find plenty of sites, both professional and [amateur](_URL_1_), taking Grossman to task for relying on the numbers so uncritically. \n\nAnd really, that's perhaps the most important part. Using the numbers isn't a sin in of itself, it is passing them on without the least bit of mention of their controversy. It points to Grossman finding evidence to support his preconceived notions rather than having evidence point him to a conclusion. He cherry picks and ignores what he doesn't like. He also doesn't entertain similar objections that can be made about other evidence he uses (see /u/BOMPendragon about the Gettysburg arms). Especially in the case of Marshall, his study was essentially dropped so long ago, so not mentioning the controversy is a real disservice, as people won't even be aware of it anymore!\n\nMarshall's work does have its merits, and even Grossman's does, as I find his book very interesting (Avoid *On Combat* though). He does use first person accounts to good effect (he relies on Keegan a good deal IIRC) to demonstrate his ideas, and there really is no lack of literature on the topic that points to *some* hesitation on the part of *some* soldiers to engage in combat, and the internal demons that must be wrestled with. Grossman just does a terribly inept job of investigating that, and lets his own biases get in the way of a proper study. As for Marshall, I read his book ages ago, and he too brings up important points that have merit, but again, we can't overlook the shoddy job he did on some of his central points.\n\nSo to directly answer your question, there is a lot of literature out there that makes the argument, and a lot which questions the former group, the former being popular in the post-WWII era and the later a reaction beginning in the 1980s. I'm not going to get into my opinion on the matter exactly, since I do have one, but simply say that it isn't a settled matter of fact, and I doubt you will see the argument put to rest any time soon (although opinion has certainly been shifting away from Marshall, Grossman's resurrection of him not withstanding). The best you can do is read the opposing arguments and evaluate their merits.\n\nEdit: After a bit of digging, here is [Grossman's response to the criticisms of his use of Marshall.](_URL_3_)", "Some reading for you. [SLA Marshall and the Ratio of Fire](_URL_0_).\n\n[Killing for Their Country; a New Look at Killology](_URL_1_)\n\nTL;DR \n\nSLA Marshall's research was not enough to prove anything. Documents about Canadian infantry at the same time showed that inexperienced and frightened soldiers were apt to fire *too much* at the enemy, wasting valuable ammunition as their survival instinct kicked in and they did nearly the only thing they could to survive -- shot back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1356", "http://www.theppsc.org/Grossman/SLA_Marshall/Main.htm", "http://www.canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/4-Engen-Marshall-under-fire.pdf", "http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no4/18-grossman-eng.asp", "http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/03autumn/chambers.pdf", "http://warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm", "http://www.killology.com/article_agress&amp;viol.htm"], ["http://www.canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/4-Engen-Marshall-under-fire.pdf", "http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no2/16-engen-eng.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "3s6kv0", "title": "To What Degree Was Metal Commonly Used in Shields?", "selftext": "I feel like in movies and video games, many shields are portrayed as being made of metal, and wooden shields being portrayed as inferior. However, many historical examples I have seen, such as the Roman scutum, are clearly wooden or wrapped in leather. To what degree was metal used in shields? What is an example of a high quality shield for a foot-soldier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s6kv0/to_what_degree_was_metal_commonly_used_in_shields/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwv24y4"], "score": [5], "text": ["I don't believe fully metal shields came into being before the rotella, which were used mainly by the Spanish before they fully developed the tercio pike  &  shot formations. They only lasted for about 50-60 years before being made obselete. \n\nI guess you could count bucklers as shields though but to what extent they were ALL made out metal is entirely dependent - I don't believe there was a trend of all metal or composite buckler construction dealienated by time period but all the bosses were made of iron. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ujkd9", "title": "How did the Russian Army perform so well against the Allies during the Crimean War despite their logistical and technological disadvantages?", "selftext": "During the Crimean War I understand that the Tsars army was hampered by their limited ability to transfer reinforcements, strangling bureaucracy that stifled flexibility on the part of Russian generals, and technological handicaps with the Russian Army armed more or less the same as it was during the Napoleonic era, with flintlock smoothbore muskets and limited ammunition and encouraging the bayonet over the bullet. Meanwhile British and French forces were using rifles firing Minie balls and were much more able to move troops and supplies around. Despite this the Russians seemed to put up a helluva fight and inflicted some horrendous losses on the Allies. Why? Given the substantial advantages the Allies seemed to have had, why wasn't it more of a sweeping victory for them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ujkd9/how_did_the_russian_army_perform_so_well_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxg9tbi"], "score": [2], "text": ["A couple of points:\n\n* A lot of the Crimean campaign boiled down to a siege against Sebastopol. This tended to level the playing field for the Russians. A siege takes fewer people to defend, the defenses give an advantage against an attacker's firepower and so on.\n\n* The allied armies in the Crimea won pretty well every field battle against the Russians. So in a sense when given the opportunity to use their advantages the allied armies did better.\n\n* A lot of the allied loses were to things like disease, resulting from poor supply arrangements, infrastructure and implementation. Borrowing from Wikipedia, of the 21,097 British dead in the war, 16,323 were victims of disease rather than Russian action. The length of the siege contributed to this so some extent I suppose so perhaps this was something of a success for the Russians?\n\n* There have been some suggestions that British command of the campaign was flawed but I think this is a matter of dispute. So for example it depends on whether you think the failure to pursue after the Battle of Alma was because of overly cautious/foolish command by the British, or because they were legitimately concerned about preserving their cavalry arm.\n\nThe only proper book I've read on this topic is Cecil Woodham Smith's  \"The Reason Why\" which is mostly about the Charge of the Light Brigade, but gives insight into the broader campaign and its flaws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "63eq06", "title": "Did Helen of Troy have a daughter named Hermione?", "selftext": "and if she did so:\n\nDoes the Iliad mention this alleged daughter?\n\nWas Menelaus the father or was it Paris? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63eq06/did_helen_of_troy_have_a_daughter_named_hermione/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dftjfvy"], "score": [4], "text": ["Helen is not a historical figure, nor is the *Iliad* a historical text, and this question is better suited to, say, /r/Classics. But since there is no shortage of classicists around here:\n\nHermione is not mentioned in the *Iliad*, but she features in the *Odyssey*. At *Odyssey* 4.12 Hermione is said to be the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, and half-sister of Megapenthes, whose mother was a slave woman. Homer specifically says that Helen only had one child, Hermione, but Hesiod knew of a tradition in which Helen and Menelaus had a son as well, Nicostratus. The two sons became conflated with each other often in later tradition and at Rhodes were comparable to Castor and Pollux. In Homer, Hermione is promised to Neoptolemus at Troy, but the later tragedians wrote a tradition in which Menelaus promised her to Orestes, resulting in conflict between them--this is the tradition that Ovid favored, although of course he knew both."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ychw6", "title": "Were decapitations common on medieval battlefields? ", "selftext": "Did a lot of people get their heads chopped off completely in medieval battles? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ychw6/were_decapitations_common_on_medieval_battlefields/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5uc6nm", "c5uepjn", "c5uf7qd", "c5ugdws", "c5usb3d"], "score": [14, 15, 47, 11, 3], "text": ["I'll let a more well read person answer, but I think that decapitation was something more commonly done after the battle to injured or dead of the other side, especially to Nobles or important leaders of the other side, likely to stick their head on a stick or on a castle as a message to the people. \n\nI would guess it takes some force to take a head clean off, and would probably take a good few hacks to get through the bone, sinew and muscle, even with high quality metal blade. For example It took an [executioner three tries to properly behead Mary Queen of Scots](_URL_0_).", "Yeah, cutting someone's head off in one shot is pretty tough, particularly with a sword. Ever cut something with a machete? The angle and force need to be just right. On a melee battlefield, with so many people moving around (not to mention actively NOT trying to get their heads cut off), it'd be a rare sight.\n\nMore technically, look at medieval weapons and armor, or the depictions of battles from tapestries and the like from the period. The focus, particularly in sword design, was often on piercing soft spots in the armor, not dramatically slashing through. We see more cutting actions in the movies largely because they look cool.", "Short answer: No.  It's a tricky shot, and the neck is actually fairly easy to armor with either a gorget or a mail aventail off the helmet.\n\nLong answer: The best record I know of for wounds in a medieval battle is the [Battle of Visby](_URL_1_), which took place in 1361.  The battle was extremely one sided, with a group of well armed Danish troops steamrolled a local peasant militia, killing about 2,000 of them.  Because of the hot weather and the large number of bodies, the bodies were all dumped into a mass grave.  It's one of the great treasure troves of information about medieval battles because of the relatively intact nature of the bodies.\n\n[Here's an catalog](_URL_0_) of the distribution of wounds on 200 of the bodies.  70% the bodies had leg wounds in the lower leg.  Of the head wounds on the bodies, about three quarters were downward strikes from above.  The average kill appears to have been a shot to the leg or arm, followed by a skull cracker once the opponent was injured and unable to defend themselves.\n\nThis is not to say decapitations didn't happen, but it would be basically a fluke.", "Is there a book that really delves into medieval warfare that anybody could recommend?", "As an example of how hard it can be to cut someone's head off even in a controlled situation (i.e., an execution), I give you [Jack Ketch](_URL_0_), the worse executioner ever in England.  One example:\n\n > On the scaffold on July 15, 1685, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, addressing Ketch, referred to his treatment of Lord Russell, thus disconcerting him, stating \"Here are six guineas for you. Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard that you struck him three or four times. My servant will give you some more gold if you do the work well.\" The duke subsequently undressed and felt the edge of the axe expressing some fear that it was not sharp enough, and laid his head on the block.\" The first blow dealt by Ketch inflicted only a slight wound after which the Duke struggled, rose from the block, and looked reproachfully at the executioner before sinking down once more. Ketch struck the duke twice more, but still the neck was not severed, and the body continued to move. Yells of rage and horror rose from the onlooking crowd to which Ketch flung down the axe with a curse and stated that \"I cannot do it, my heart fails me.\" The sheriff present asked Ketch to \"Take up the axe, man\" to which Ketch responded by once more taking up the axe and dealing two more blows to the duke, killing him. Still, the head remained attached and Ketch used a butcher's knife from the sheath on his hip to cut the last sinew and flesh that prevented the head from dropping. The crowd was so enraged that Ketch had to be escorted away under strong guard."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Queen_of_Scots#Execution"], [], ["http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=172734&amp;d=1328911671", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Visby"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ketch"]]}
{"q_id": "2hbd93", "title": "How did the world leaders and people of the day actually react to George Washington's relinquishing of power and refusal to crown himself a king?", "selftext": "It's one of those things that always comes up when people talk about George Washington: everyone in Europe was \"shocked\" when he didn't seize power when he easily could have.\n\nIs this just a myth (in hindsight it seems like the obvious outcome given the principals the Revolution was fought on), or was this something truly surprising to contemporary elites in Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hbd93/how_did_the_world_leaders_and_people_of_the_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckr85ei", "ckr8lql", "ckr8y6s", "ckr9q02"], "score": [210, 574, 104, 43], "text": ["This article from the *Boston Globe*'s \"Ideas\" section doesn't address leaving power at all, or Europeans, but you may still find it interesting. It focuses on Washington's taking power, and specifically the debates about which honorific to use with the Presidency: \"[His Elective Highness, President Barack Obama](_URL_0_)\" (the article is about Washington, not contemporary politics).  Needless to say, the lack of pageantry associated with the presidency disappointed some people in America. \n\nIt's short and well written, but to give people a sense of it, here's a preview:\n\n > The Senate went on record to recommend the title of \u201cHis Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties,\u201d which senators saw as in keeping with global title conventions. As the debate unfolded in three weeks of closed-door wrangling, the chamber also considered some curious hybrids, like \u201cElective Highness\u201d and \u201cElective Majesty\u201d\u2014whose strangeness to present-day ears is a testament to the novelty of the American experiment at the time.", "Here's one of the more famous anecdotes quoted here from *George Washington: The Founding Father (Eminent Lives)* by Paul Johnson:\n\n >  Everyone else, in varying degrees, was astonished at this singular failure of the corruption of power to work. And, indeed, it was a rare moment in history. In London, George III questioned the American-born painter Benjamin West what Washington would do now he had won the war. \"Oh,\" said West, \"they say he will return to his farm.\" \"If he does that,\" said the king, \"he will be the greatest man in the world.\"\n\nAnother version replaces Benjamin West with an ambassador.  I'd like to think it's true given George III's own fondness of the farmer and that he was kept abreast of American political developments.\n\nI can't find a quote from King Muhammad III of Morocco but he had a very favorable opinion of the United States and presumably of Washington as well, being the first nation to recognize the US and also signed the longest unbroken treaty with the US in 1786.\n\nThis is also kind of cheating but the Maquis de Lafayette also wrote glowingly of Washington throughout his lifetime and would have praised Washington's Cincinnat**us**-like restraint especially as he participated in the French Revolution.\n\nIn part due to Washington's precedent, America did gain a reputation as a backwater refuge in the early 19th Century before heavy industrialization as a place to escape the Old World entanglement of nobility and social stratification.  ", "I'll answer the title question first: \n\nThere's an apocryphal account that British King George III reacted with admiration and shock to the news that Washington would resign his commission. The King is said to have asked his painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after the war. When West replied that Washington's fondest desire was to return to his farm, the King replied: \n\n > If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.\n\nThe exchange is quoted as fact by many -- including most biographies of Washington, and other secondary sources on the Revolution. But I've yet to see a primary source for it. A thread on /r/todayilearned -- I know, I know, but bear with me -- actually took up this very question, quoted and identified several secondary sources, but found that the anecdote couldn't be traced [to a primary source.](_URL_0_) As noted in the thread, though, the secondary sources are numerous. I would be very curious to hear where the account comes from. \n\nLet's set that to one side, then: whether world leaders remarked on Washington's resignation, others certainly did. American leaders at the time certainly played up the significance of Washington's decision. The moment of his resignation is [immortalized in a painting by John Trumbull.](_URL_2_) Washington entered Pennsylvania to perform that act under a wooden triumphal arch adorned with the likeness of Cincinnatus, the semi-legendary Roman dictator who Livy says saved the city, only to resign as dictator immediately once the danger was passed (Livy III:26-29). The new nation, in other words, took every step it could to make Washington's example a memorable one. The effort was not in vain: Byron's *Ode to Napoleon Bounaparte* makes the equivalence explicit in its [closing lines](_URL_1_). \n\nTo your other question, whether the resignation was a surprise, it was not to those who knew Washington, and Washington removed all doubts in his \"circular to the state governments\" of June 1783, which [he closed](_URL_3_) by saying that he intended to \"bid a last farewell to the cares of Office, and all the employments of public life.\" Someone else -- there are some excellent flaired users on Revolutionary history -- might be better suited to answering the question of what the nation's expectations were of Washington. ", "I have always wanted to ask this question, so I ask it now as a followup question:\n\nSince the Revolution was mostly about secession from Britain, did anyone think about declaring their own King, instead of a Republic? Was the idea of Republic intrinsically connected to the idea of secession?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/09/19/his-elective-highness-president-barack-obama/llWb9GSBFiIUp5ex1T6JCL/story.html"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2fkwp0/til_when_king_george_iii_found_out_washington_had/cka9mfo", "http://bit.ly/1uZnWDt", "http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/historic-rotunda-paintings/general-george-washington-resigning-his-commission", "http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/collection/other_1783jun8.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "5y1bo3", "title": "Could Ming Dynasty China have really been capable of reaching the Americas?", "selftext": "I recall reading or hearing somewhere that the resources/technology/etc of Ming China reached levels even in sea travel great enough for such an expedition, but they simply didn't think about exploring at the time due to border issues.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5y1bo3/could_ming_dynasty_china_have_really_been_capable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["demjg20"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the sections [Historians' views of Gavin Menzies' \"1421: The Year China Discovered the World\"](_URL_0_) and [Travel and contact across the Atlantic before Columbus](_URL_1_) from our FAQ will answer your inquiry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_gavin_menzies.27_.221421.3A_the_year_china_discovered_the_world.22", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_travel_and_contact_across_the_atlantic_before_columbus"]]}
{"q_id": "e01esa", "title": "Given that Pre-Islamic Arabia was a very women-friendly and sexually \"liberal\" society, what is the source of Islam's extremely puritanical culture?", "selftext": "In Robert G. Holyland's Arabia and the Arabs, various historical sources are mentioned that tell us pre-Islamic Arabian culture was one in which women could marry multiple men, advertise for mercenary husbands when they wanted children, had the right to dismiss their husbands when they wanted, enjoyed significant financial independence, with Arab tribes sometimes having matrilinear lineages, female gods, and queens. \n\nThe Qur'an partially mentions some of this (like the female gods, decrying them) and urges Muslim women not to emulate the women of the time of ignorance in their bedizenment, with the Tafsirs pointing out to pre-Islamic Arabian women dressing in a skimpy manner and without modesty. **How come that Islam, which developed against this backdrop, came to be such a puritanical religion in which any sexual or romantic affection before marriage is heavily frowned upon, and in which women have to cover themselves partially or fully almost all the time?**", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e01esa/given_that_preislamic_arabia_was_a_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8cr3zo", "f8cthsu", "f8tckbn"], "score": [402, 1100, 14], "text": ["I think you're vastly overstating Pre-Islamic Arabia's \"very\" women-friendly and sexually liberal society. \n\n >  In Robert G. Holyland's Arabia and the Arabs, various historical sources are mentioned that tell us pre-Islamic Arabian culture was one in which women could marry multiple men, advertise for mercenary husbands when they wanted children, had the right to dismiss their husbands when they wanted, enjoyed significant financial independence, with Arab tribes sometimes having matrilinear lineages, female gods, and queens. \n\nLooking back at Hoyland it seems these thing are weren't as ubiquitous as you make it seem. He mostly cites only one or two sources for each claim. How common or prevalent these things were remains unseen. The time period was long enough and pre-Islamic society diverse enough where we cannot take these things as representative. \n\n >  women could marry multiple men\n\nHoyland says; \n\n >  Diversity in marriage customs is also evident in the degree to which monogamy, polygyny (one man many wives) and polyandry (one woman many husbands) all crop up in our sources. \n\nHoyland then goes on to quote a source saying polyandry was practiced as fraternal polyandry and brothers would share a wife. \n\n >  Arab tribes sometimes having matrilinear lineages\n\nHoyland says;\n\n >  While  descent  through  the  male  line  would  seem  to  have  been the norm in pre-Islamic Arabia, we are occasionally given hints of matrilineal arrangements.\n\nThe problem with discussing pre-Islamic Arabia is that there just aren't that many sources let alone sources about women, to give insight on how most women lived. So it becomes difficult to make any kind of judgment about how \"liberal\" pre-Islamic society was. Even Hoyland's book only discusses women in society for six pages and mostly only discusses the things you mentioned here. Hoyland's book does not give a rigorous enough discussion to make any kind of judgement on the \"liberalness\" of pre-Islamic Arabia. The things discussed do not in and of themselves indicate a women-friendly or sexually liberal society. These things can still exist in a patriarchal and misogynist society. Hoyland also mentions that women were encountered \"first and foremost as wives and mothers.\" Not to mention they may not have been as ubiquitous as the book suggests. \n\nOne of the largest sources for information on pre-Islamic Arabia come from Islamic sources themselves. However Islamic sources are not charitable to the position of women in pre-Islamic Arabia and characterized the time as a time of ignorance and barbarism. For example sources mention things like bride kidnapping, forced marriage, marriage by inheritance, female infanticide, forced prostitution etc. Islamic sources saw Islam as elevating the position of position of women in Arabia and giving them rights like the right to divorce, the right to consent to marriage, right to a bride-price, etc. Early Muslims who had known both pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Arabia commented on the positive turn Islam had given women in terms of women's status in society. \n\nSo we actually don't know very much what it was actually like for women in pre-Islamic Arabia and cannot make judgements about how \"liberal\" or \"women-friendly\" it actually was. There simply isn't enough historical information to make this kind of judgment.", "Hey!\n\nSo this has a couple of different parts that I hope to address.  I can't give a super specific answer, but will try to touch on a number of facets you could ask follow-up questions about.  I'm pulling some from previous answers that I have written, but much of this is also new.  A great book on this topic is Leila Ahmed's book *Women and Gender in Islam*, which I will heavily use below.\n\n# Part 1 \u2013 Quick Note on Veiling Itself\n\nBecause you specifically mentioned it, I wanted to start with a small section on veiling itself.  Veiling was common practice in multiple pre-Islamic societies across the Middle East.  In Assyrian culture wearing a veil separated between a 'respectable' woman and those who were 'up for grabs', so to say.  Upper class women, concubines accompanying those women, and former \"sacred prostitutes\" all had to wear it whereas normal prostitutes and slaves were forbidden from veiling themselves, even so far as being under threat of flogging or having their ears cut off.  Ahmed then writes that this practice spread throughout the upper-class Mediterranean world - from the Levant through to Persia - and also crossed religious lines appearing in Byzantine Christian societies.  Here, Ahmed gives the example of a 10th century Byzantine patriarch who wrote that he only allowed his daughter to go out \"veiled and suitable chaperoned\".  She also notes the reasoning, separating the respectable from the rabble, remains constant even in these other societies.  \n\nHowever, that is not to say that veiling was necessarily widespread in Arabia itself.  Women of the *jahilyya* pre-Islamic period did not normally don a veil. This of course varied from city to countryside, with cities being more likely to veil.  Overall, nowhere was the veil common to the extent of places like neighboring Syria and Palestine.  As you noted in your question, sexual relations in Arabia were more open than in those other societies, with both polygamy and polyandry being present. \n\nThrough Muhammad's entire life, the only women who were regularly veiled or secluded were his wives. Through successful revelations received by Muhammad, the practice of veiling and seclusion took hold among them, getting to the point where the phrasing \"she took the veil\" became synonymous to \"she became a wife of Muhammad\".  Various impetuses pushed Muhammad towards these rulings.  For example, it was after he became annoyed with guests staying too long chatting with his wives after dinner that the Sura 33 was revealed, within which [verse 54](_URL_0_) details that one should only speak to Muhammad's wives from behind a curtain. The word he uses for curtain is *\u1e25ij\u0101b*.  Most westerners associate the word *hijab* with some sort of head-wrap of veil, but it also literally can mean 'veil' in the sense of a curtain.  [Verse 59](_URL_1_) then gives the commandment to women to \"bring down over themselves [part] of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused.\"  This is allegedly in response to the \"hypocrites\", mere nominal converts to Islam, harassing Muslim women and claiming to have thought they were slaves.  Finally, I should note that the later second Caliph, Omar, was a proponent of seclusion of women and veiling and actively pushed Muhammad towards this position.\n\n# Part 2 \u2013 The evolution of the Woman\u2019s place\n\nThis is what I suspect to be the more interesting section \u2013 why did Islam develop the way it did, when women played such major roles in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times?\n\nIn the *jahilyya*, and within early Islam, women contributed in a number of facets of life.  Women were soothsayers and prophetesses such as Sajah, a Christian woman of the Ban\u016b Tam\u012bm who led a force of over 4,000 along with Musaylimah, \u201cThe Liar\u201d, in rebellion against the nascent Muslim state.  Like the previous sentence indicates, they were also involved in warfare. They were not only poets, telling stories of the battles and engaging in ritualistic pre-battle exchanges of insults, but also warriors themselves. Umm \u2018Umara fought at a number of battles alongside men, eventually losing her hand at the Battle of \u2018Uqraba in 634.  Women were heavily involved in early Islamic religious life, providing the many of the *hadith* that came to guide religious life.  It was common for them to remarry, showing there to be a lack of stigma against non-virgins, and often they brought significant wealth to these relationships (Muhammad\u2019s first wife, Khadija, was one such widow.  15 years his senior, she was rich enough to allow Muhammad to not have to work, allowing him to instead focus on his spiritual teachings).\n\n\n#**So why did this begin to change?**\n\nThe changes actually started before the spread of Islam, as merchants in urban Arabian cities were increasingly exposed to the norms and cultures of lands with much more rigid gender roles.  This can be seen as an explanation as to why it was the cities, not the countryside, that first adopted veiling.  However, what brought the changes into hyperdrive was the rapid expansion of the early Islamic Empire.  Not only did this bring increased contact with these foreign cultures, but it also brought an influx of slaves, diminishing the bargaining power of even Arab-born women. \n\nThe conquests brought untold wealth to the Arabs.  Even regular soldiers were able to afford slaves, houses, and concubines.  Accordingly, women lost one of their original bargaining chips \u2013 the wealth they brought to marriages.  Further, as a condition for surrendering and keeping their place, many Persian and Sassanian nobles converted to Islam. They kept, however, their original cultures.  One of the features that developed around this time was the harem, with a multitude of women being walled off for rich and powerful men, guarded only by Eunuchs.  With easy access to sex slaves, Ahmed argues that the line between \u201cwoman\u201d and \u201cobject\u201d started to blur.  Men did not need to put up with the demands stipulated by Arab women\u2019s wedding contracts when they had access to sex elsewhere.  Women faced increasingly strict restrictions and were treated increasingly poorly.  Some elite men even went so far as to lament the fact that they had to marry their daughters, as their standards of living would so dramatically fall.  Ahmed included the following poem in her book, written from one noble man to another on the occasion of his daughter\u2019s death.  This did not come from a sense of general misogyny, that daughters were worthless, but rather from the degradations and humiliations their daughters were liable to face.\n\n\n >  To Abu Hasan I offer condolences. \n\n >  At times of disaster and catastrophe \n\n >  God multiplies rewards for the patient. \n\n >  To be patient in misery \n\n >  Is equivalent to giving thanks for a gift. \n\n >  Among the blessings of God undoubtedly \n\n >  Is the preservation of sons \n\n >  And the death of daughters.\n\nBut cultural and economic changes are only a portion of the story.  Also in play was the religious framework that marriage operated within. Islamic law works through a local judge, a *Qadi*, issuing a ruling on a specific case so that it is in line with religious teachings (we have to note that there was no separation between the illegal and the immoral, but rather they were the one and the same).  However, while the Qur\u2019an protected women\u2019s rights in a number of areas, judges often interpreted these not as legally binding rules, but rather as binding only upon the individual\u2019s conscience.  So, a man would not be legally bound to treat his 4 wives fairly, even if that is a stipulation within the Qur\u2019an itself. There was, in essence, the loss of many Qur\u2019anic provisions that could protect women.\n\nThe 11th century also brought the *Closing of the Gates of Ijtihad*.  That is, Islamic jurisprudence reached a point where they (allegedly) decided that there had been sufficient rulings in the past that any questions which need an answer were answerable, and it is was longer necessary to use independent reasoning to come to new solutions (for more on this, see my answere [here]( _URL_2_))\n\nThis in essence froze many Islamic teachings. There are 4 main schools of Sunni Islamic thought, and at the point of the closing of the gates of Ijtihad, only the Maliki school allowed for women to obtain a divorce on the grounds of desertion or cruelty. Meanwhile, only the Hanafi school fully enforced marriage contracts that would bind a man to monogamy.  While before the closing of these gates a judge could, theoretically, use his own reasoning to analogize and come to a new ruling, they were now largely bound to *taqlid*, imitation of the past. So, these doctrines, along with countless others controlling women\u2019s lives, ceased to develop at the same speed as before.  That is not to say that women were completely locked out, as one could effectively \u201cshop\u201d between the different schools of thought for the most favorable ruling.\n\nThere is much, much more one could write on this topic, but I unfortunately have work that I have to do.  I hope this can help begin to answer your question, and if you have follow-ups I\u2019ll try to respond if possible.", "The most comprehensive answer above has given you a good idea of the role of women in early Islamic society. I also wanted to give a few examples of other interesting situations in Arabic culture/law in terms of women.\n\nThere's a hadith from the Sahih Bukhari that deals with the matter of Thabit ibn Qais's divorce from his wife Jamilah. I'll post it in full here: \n\n\"Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: The wife of Thabit bin Qais came to the Prophet and said, \"O Allah's Apostle! I do not blame Thabit for defects in his character or his religion, but I, being a Muslim, dislike to behave in un-Islamic manner (if I remain with him).\" On that Allah's Apostle said (to her), \"Will you give back the garden which your husband has given you (as Mahr*)?\" She said, \"Yes.\" Then the Prophet said to Thabit, \"O Thabit! Accept your garden, and divorce her once.\"\n\n*Mahr here means dowry.\n\nBasically this hadith said that Thabit's wife was able to procure a divorce thanks to an agreement between herself and her husband. She gives back her dowry and they are divorced. This is an example of *khul,* which is a type of divorce that's often called mutual agreement. I think it's important though that Muhammad *tells* Thabit that he has to divorce her, and also that her divorce is phrased as a way for her to maintain her religiosity. She will be a better Muslim as a result of her divorce!\n\nTranslation of the Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 63 (Divorce), hadith 197. From _URL_0_.\n\nAnother kind of divorce was called talaq, which is probably the most famous form of Islamic divorce to westerners in the form of \"triple talaq,\" when a husband repeats three times that he wants to divorce his wife.  It appears in another hadith (185) when a man divorces his adulterous wife: \"Then he pronounced his decision to divorce her thrice before Allah's Apostle ordered him to do so.\" Talaq was generally seen as a reprehensible way to divorce someone.\n\nAs for the marriage itself. Judith E Tucker suggests that consent was an important component to the marriage contract, called the nikah, even in the case if she were married off by a guardian. Obviously, consent can be a dubious issue when pressure from a guardian is involved, but in the sources it encourages guardians to obtain consent. Sometimes that consent could include silence, because silence would indicate embarrassment at how much someone wanted it. You can see how we might be critical of this idea. In any case, these only applied to adult women. Pre-pubescent children could be married off by their fathers without obtaining this consent.\n\nOn the other hand, widows or \"non-virgins\" could be choosier. A professor of mine once encouraged the female students in our seminar to marry an old man so that he would die and they would get to be widows, the most comfortable position for a woman in patriarchal society. What he was getting at here was that a widow has essentially 'done their part' by marrying. Widows needed to give explicit consent to a marriage.\n\nThe public role of women was also controversial. While there are many prominent female figures in the history of Islam, like Muhammad's wife Aisha herself or the Sufi saint Rabi'a, the question of the acceptability of women in various roles has been answered differently by different scholars. Some, especially early on, argued that women could be imams. \n\nThe issue of veiling is similarly contested. \n\nNow, head coverings are far from exclusive to Islam. Many Irish people of a certain generation could talk about women wearing headscarves to Mass, and many Orthodox Jewish women today cover their hair or wear wigs when out in public. It's a common religious idea that women should go covered. But we're talking about Islam here and not Judaism or Christianity, and particularly early Islam.\n\nDifferent schools (and there are four main schools in Islam, called madhab) argued that women should conduct themselves differently. Some said that women's entire bodies were awra, which is basically a way of saying private parts, and that they should therefore cover themselves entirely. Others said that women could go uncovered and have hands and legs relatively bared. Unsurprisingly, the parts of a woman that non-related men could see also correlated to a woman's ability to participate in wider society. Many women held property, participated in commerce and the market, etc.\n\nCitation:\n\nTucker, Judith E. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge University Press, n.d.\n\nFinally I'd like to share a story that I think is interesting and noteworthy, if not directly related to the question at hand. The 1001 Nights includes a story called *The Lady and her Five Suitors.* The gist of the story is as follows: a woman is conducting an affair with a man who gets thrown in the clink. In order to get him released, she claims that he's her brother and tries to entice various important figures-- judges/qadi, a wazir, even the king-- into letting him free. In the process she seduces them and traps each one in turn in a cabinet, where they eventually can't hold their bladders and pee all over themselves. The story is obviously a satire and isn't reflective of 'real life', whatever that means; it's intended to make the big people look small and show that they can be duped by even a simple adulterous woman. But she is depicted as the hero of the story despite the fact that her aim is to free her lover from prison after he gets in a fight! So socially unacceptable women still appear in literary texts as heroes. The aim of the story is obviously primarily to diminish the high, who the story portrays as being undeserving of their high position, and the woman is used as a way of shaming them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://quran.com/33/54", "https://quran.com/33/59", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vynzv/when_and_why_did_muslim_countries_stop_using_the/dtwak37/"], ["SearchTruth.com"]]}
{"q_id": "y2pnd", "title": "Why did liberal democracies flourish in North America and Europe earlier than in other continents?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y2pnd/why_did_liberal_democracies_flourish_in_north/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rsc70", "c5rswui"], "score": [2, 9], "text": ["Is this the best way to phrase this question? And is it arguable that it's the governments of those very same western liberal democracies that have occasionally prevented democracy from succeeding elsewhere?", "Western Kings tended to be very weak compared to eastern kings( the power of the Chinese emperor for instance was leagues ahead of the European competition). At the same time you had a long history of councils such as Parliament, Estates General, Hungarian Diet etc.. who often formed the basis for Democratic movements. Tocqueville writes that all Europeans contained the seed of democracy within them. Europe was also the birthplace of the enlightenment, Liberalism, natural rights of man etc.. it should be no surprise that they adopted these principles first, being as they were the ones exposed to them, the revolutions of 1848 are a great example of this. As European colonists go to Europe to be educated they are exposed to these ideas themselves and return home to form their own democratic movements. With the expansion in global trade and the conception of capitalism the power of the landed aristocracy also slowly diminished and wealth came to be measured in $$$ rather then land. \n\nFor the United States Bernard Bailyn argues that the lack of a aristocracy greatly accelerated democracy ( minus Lord Baltimore and one other guy whom I can never recall). I would also add that the various monarchies never had a firm control over the new world colonies and as a result significant power had to be turned over to local governments( even in Spanish America).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1wjqhd", "title": "Were there any other kingdoms or empires with considerable power in Europe in High or Late Middle Ages apart from France, England and Holy Roman Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wjqhd/were_there_any_other_kingdoms_or_empires_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf2z0de"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire) was the powerful and ancient Eastern counterpart of the later German \"Holy Roman Empire\". But unlike the \"German Kingdom\", as the *Romaioi* called it, Byzantium was actually an unbroken extension of the old Roman Empire, unlike its Western imitator. When the HRE came about in AD 962, Byzantium was already 600 years old and it was still a powerful and lively relic of Late antiquity.\n\nThe Byzantines reached their second zenith in AD1025 under Emperor Basil II, and had another golden century under the Komnenoi from AD 1081 to 1180. However, in AD 1204, Constantinople was sacked by Latin Crusaders and this event severely crippled the Empire's political, military, and economic power. Despite this, the Byzantines managed to recapture their capital and persist for another 200 years until, when, in AD 1453, the Ottomans extinguished the flame of the Empire for good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ebxj0", "title": "Is there a sense of cultural, social or historic loss in Germany due to the fact that massive portions of what was Prussia lie in modern day Poland, Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast)  &  Lithuania?", "selftext": "Prussia played the leading role in the unification of Germany, the Prussian ruling family provided the Kaiser of Imperial Germany, many of the leading figures in Imperial Germany were from Prussia and owned massive estates in Prussia. With this kind of influence and history one would think that massive amounts of historical and cultural capital were lost during World War II and it seems to me that very little of it is talked about or preserved. I was very curious if there was a sense of loss in Germany over not just the territory but the history and culture that came with the regions that were lost. \n\nOne thing that really sparked my interest was looking at google maps images of the countryside in old East Prussia and towns look very German and there are tons of abandoned estates, churches and run down towns that clearly were populated by Germans not even 75 years ago. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ebxj0/is_there_a_sense_of_cultural_social_or_historic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di9hks7", "dia1n8k"], "score": [5, 6], "text": ["Hey there. I wouldnt say that germany as a whole tries to distance itself from prussia. If we're talking about bavaria, that certainly would be true. Prussian culture is still present in modern germany. For instance that [Preu\u00dfens Gloria](_URL_1_) is still frequently played at marksmen festivals. The \"german values\" stem inherently from what used to be \"prussian values\" although they can be traced back to the teutonic knights.\n\nMy family lived in prussia but was displaced by the red army and I dont feel like I lost something. It simply does not exist in the heads of the average german citizen. When the soviet union fell, they even tried to sell east prussia back to germany but the chancelor at the time (Helmut Kohl) declined. The german reunification was a huge project on its own and nobody wanted to touch a peace of land that was\n\n* a) economicaly run down\n* b) not german anymore\n* c) filled up with russians\n\nDoes this answer your question?\n\n*Source:* _URL_0_ ", "  > \"The Oder-Neisse, Eastern provinces - they're gone! They don't exist anymore\"- Konrad Adenauer in conversation with Willy Brandt, 1953.\n\n\nOne of the curious features of Cold War-era maps produced in the FRG was that often listed the territories beyond the Oder-Nei\u00dfe  line as \"under Polish/Soviet Administration.\" This [Diercke Weltatlas](_URL_2_) map from 1970 not only kept the old 1937 German borders intact, its cartographic language treated German division as an ephemeral phenomenon. This  sentiment was not just limited to FRG maps. Adenauer made a public statement of a \"right to one's homeland\" in his 1957 [*Face the Nation* interview](_URL_1_) when discussing the Oder-Nei\u00dfe. Although on the surface, the importance of the Oder-Nei\u00dfe within West German political discourse looks like a revanchist sentiment, in reality its importance within FRG politics is relatively prosaic. Although there were some revanchists within the FRG, the FRG's political mainstream adapted the position that Oder-Nei\u00dfe area was under temporary control due to reasons of domestic and international politics. \n\nAt the core of the Adenauer generation's opposition to the Oder-Nei\u00dfe line was the issue of sovereignty. Even as it became increasingly clear that Germany was to be partitioned, the main goal of FRG politicians was a return to normalcy and assert that Germany was a fully-functioning sovereign nation. Adenauer's basic position, which was reflective of both SPD and FDP's opinion,  was that Germany's final borders needed to be decided by an all-German government in negotiation with the deciding parties. The charter generation of the FRG asserted that it was that all-German government. The FRG's Basic Law asserted that it applied to the whole of Germany including the Eastern zones and territory now controlled by the USSR and Poland. Far from being quixotic, the FRG politicians knew that the Oder-Nei\u00dfe revision was unachievable as exemplified by the above Adenauer quote, the Oder-Nei\u00dfe issue possessed something of a *Realpolitik* character. Keeping the issue alive was one way for the FRG to assert that it was the true political inheritor of Germany by counter-intuitively asserting that Germany was incomplete. Heinrich von Bretano, the FRG's Foreign Minister would say in 1956:\n\n > I have stated very plainly. . . [that] there is no German Federal Government, either today or tomorrow, which can recognize the Oder-Neisse Line as the frontier. Firstly, it will not do so because it is not entitled to do so. It is not entitled to dispose of German territory. Secondly, it will not do so because it is not entitled to do so towards the people, the German people, who have lived there for centuries.\n\nThe latter half of the von Bretano quote exemplifies another aspect of the Oder-Nei\u00dfe issue: its importance to electoral politics. A sizable portion of the expellees ended up in the FRG and they became an important voting bloc in the FRG. In the early decades of the FRG, most of the mainstream political parties sought to court this voting bloc and keeping the issue alive was one of tactics used to court them. The *Bund der Vertriebenen* (Federation for Expellees/BdV) formed in 1954 as a pressure group for expellee rights and organization. In addition to pioneering a very noxious form of anticommunist politics, the BdV also published a massive amount of materials on this lost German territory as well as organizing social events within the FRG for the expellees. The strength of the BdV was important element of Adenauer's constituency even though the Rhenish Chancellor had little love for historic Prussia and recognized that there was no way Oder-Nei\u00dfe was not going to be the border in the future. This political pressure abated somewhat during the period of *Ostpolitik*, but it was still present.  The expellees also created other special interest groups and organizations that kept the issue alive during the 1960s and 1970s as it became more apparent that the borders were fixed.\n\n\nAlthough some of these expellees' leaders were revanchist, most of its membership recognized that this territory was gone. Tours of the lost East organized by these groups in the 1960s and 70s often underscored the permanence of this loss. Much of the time these tours revealed the discrepancy between the more prosperous FRG and the poverty of the Eastern bloc. Demshuk's recent study of these groups persuasively argues that as new immigrants to the FRG, the amount of attention paid to the *Heimat* of the East was a mechanism to cope with their internal migrant status by creating a \"*Heimat* of memory\" to assert their German identity and heritage in the FRG. \n\nThis *Heimat* of memory comes the closest to the sense of loss from these territories. This assertion of German identity was important in the early decade of the FRG because there were real pressures on the expellee community in this period. Most of their initial housing was quite poor; repurposed barracks at Dachau was one of the early centers in southern Germany and expellees tended to be among the first residents of the FRG's public housing tenements. While hindsight makes the BdV's attacks on the Oder-Nei\u00dfe look rather Sisyphean, the expellee organizations' protests and advocacy of more spending for housing is far more understandable. Both federal and state governments in the late-1940s and early 50s were quite reluctant to part with funds for *Volksdeutsche*. The romance of these lost territories was one of the major subfeatures of BdV and other expellee materials meant for consumption by other expellees. BdV conventions and other forms of social organization were a means for this diaspora to socialize and build a sense of community in a nation in which they were regional outsiders. \n\nThe sense of loss was arguably strongest among the first generation of expellees, but subsequent generations tended to assimilate into wider FRG society. The BdV fought *Ostpolitik* and even attacked Kohl in 1989 when he met with the Polish President Tadeusz Mazowiecki and reaffirmed the territorial line. These attacks made little headway against the mainstream FRG parties and the aging expellee population was no longer the voting bloc it once was.  This was part of the reason why Kohl's complete abandonment of Eastern territories with reunification did not register much in German politics. As with Adenauer, Kohl recognized they were not worth the trouble and even a vague Soviet offer of exchanging Kaliningrad for loan forgiveness did not gain any real traction.\n\nOne of the more roundabout ways in which the Eastern territories has entered into German public memory post-1989 is through film. The fall of the Iron Curtain and lower operating costs in Eastern Europe made location filming there quite attractive. Some of the older city architecture such as [Wroclaw's](_URL_0_) can stand in for a historic Germany that no longer is visible in Germany's modern cities. [*Bridge of Spies*](_URL_3_), for example, used the Wroclaw to stand in for Berlin. Non-German and German filmmakers have also been using Silesia for location shots or border towns like [G\u00f6rlitz](_URL_4_) as a means to capture a vision of a German past without having to place too much effort into sets and location dressing. \n\nBut as a whole, the narrative of lost territories is a dying one in the Berlin Republic. Most mainstream politicians do not really feel appeasing the remnants of the BdV worth alienating Polish relations and reabsorbtion into Germany would lead to the minor problem of what to do about the Polish and Russian inhabitants. By the same token, the few expellee groups active today also flirt with a type of reactionary neo-*V\u00f6lkisch* politics of the German far right. While such political branding was an advantage for the CDU during the Cold War 1950s, it is a political liability in 2017.  \n\n*Sources*\n\nDemshuk, Andrew. *The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970*. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. \n\nHughes, R. Gerald. \"Unfinished Business from Potsdam: Britain, West Germany, and the Oder-Neisse Line, 1945\u20131962.\" *The International History Review* 27, no. 2 (2005): 259-294.\n\nLiulevicius, Vejas G. *The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/wiedervereinigung-moskau-bot-verhandlungen-ueber-ostpreussen-an-a-695928.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TEGPelS3Ac"], ["http://www.imdb.com/search/text?realm=title&amp;field=locations&amp;q=wroclaw", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rHqsO1mIbA", "https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7608/16852270415_e89653e1f5_k.jpg", "http://www.wroclaw.pl/en/the-trailer-of-spielbergs-wroclaw-film-is-ready", "https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2015/jan/19/gurlitz-perfect-german-town-movie-star-grand-budapest-hotel-oscars"]]}
{"q_id": "f90gua", "title": "How effective was the use of crystal meth by soldiers during the Blitzkrieg (in order to maintain speed and fight fatigue and low morale)?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f90gua/how_effective_was_the_use_of_crystal_meth_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiparez"], "score": [6], "text": ["More input is always welcome; in the meantime, you may be interested in what u/commiespaceinvader has to say on [this matter exactly](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lxjb6/there_is_a_thread_on_rbooks_about_high_hitler_a/"]]}
{"q_id": "6ey4ep", "title": "Prior to 1944, was Ukraine a part of Russia?", "selftext": "Prior to 1944 (during WW2, from 1930s onwards), was Ukraine a part of Russia? particularly the Crimean Peninsula, and cities like Sevastopol. After doing a bit of research, it looks like it wasn't Ukrainian - it was under Soviet control. But was that area called Ukraine in the 1940s? Or was in under a Soviet name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ey4ep/prior_to_1944_was_ukraine_a_part_of_russia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["die3k1i"], "score": [7], "text": ["The name \"Ukraine\" has been used since the 16th-17th centuries if not earlier. During Soviet rule, most lands of the former Russian Empire were divided into \"republics\" (like states in the US but with borders based on locations of ethnic groups), and Ukraine was one such republic while Russia was another. \n\nThe western and southwestern borders of Ukraine were adjusted when the Soviet Union acquired new territory after WWII - this territory, including Lviv and the strip of land between Odessa and the Danube delta, was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. Crimea, however, was indeed part of Soviet Russia before it was transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hbgv0", "title": "City Economic Policies from 40s-70s in America?", "selftext": "Today it is common for politicians to lure businesses to their cities and states with tax breaks, incentives, and generally questionable behavior. This is widely agreed upon as an integral piece of neoliberal economic politics.\n\nHow did the economic policies of cities and states prior to the creation of trickle-down policies differ? Did they try and offer incentives to businesses to locate? Did businesses locate more organically with labor growth and specialization? Obviously the economic policies during this time accepted a much higher rate of taxes on businesses.\n\nAny recommended citations/books/articles would be wonderful, Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hbgv0/city_economic_policies_from_40s70s_in_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu64k30"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't answer specifically, but one of my mentors, Dr. Greg Hise, has written many books and articles about the growth and development of Los Angeles.  He talks about the urban and economic development of the city in great detail. \n\nMagnetic Los Angeles: Plannin the Twentieth-Century Metropolis by Greg Hise."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36vm94", "title": "What JSTOR essays should I download before I leave university and lose access?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36vm94/what_jstor_essays_should_i_download_before_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crhggbo", "crhir7g", "crhirpf", "crhj5v1", "crhjics", "crhjioh", "crhjtz4", "crhl6ns", "crhmm5r", "crhonpb", "crhpe56", "crhr41k", "crhus4b", "crhuslj", "crhvxs9", "crhwcdm", "crhxfmi", "crhzkgr", "cri8qm3", "cri9ce5", "cricy1q"], "score": [11, 569, 166, 39, 12, 5, 12, 8, 147, 13, 4, 23, 5, 13, 3, 3, 12, 2, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["I found *When is food a luxury* by M van der Veen to be an interesting paper. Not sure how well it holds up in comparison to other papers on the topic, but it's interesting and the subject matter is relevant outside of pure academia.", "Check [this list of universities](_URL_0_). When I graduated, no one told me that I still had Alumni Access to JSTOR provided by my school, and I only found this out several years later. There are about 100 schools that do apparently.\n\nEdit: In the best /r/AskHistorians tradition, the dozen or so posts that are only a thank you for pointing this out are removed to prevent excessive clutter! So there is no need to thank me, I'm just happy to bring this to peoples' attention! But if you just gotta, a PM is fine :)", "Don't lose access!  Your local public library probably provides access to JSTOR, and library cards are free.  You will lose access to many databases (e.g. ScienceDirect), but JSTOR, Proquest Historical Newspapers, and Academic Search Complete are commonly offered by public libraries.  If your local library does not offer these, you can typically get a library card for any system in your state, and chances are the major metropolitan systems do offer access.", "Keith Hopkins' [\"Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery\"](_URL_0_) is one of my all time favorite papers. It is really brilliant both in what it says and in how it lays out its methodology, and it is quite readable.", "I believe JSTOR offers discounted access to [independent scholars](_URL_0_) who are members of the AHA or OAH. ", "I compiled a list of my interests, then used search terms to browse recent papers. Do you like nootropics? Use those terms. Interested in sexuality? Adoption? Volcanoes? There are so many options/topics.", "What topics are you interested in?", "The Many Headed Hydra by Rediker (William and Mary Quarterly, I believe)! Excellent and foundational article that later became a book.  It makes the case that sailors throughout the Atlantic World were behind much of the unrest and revolutions in the 18th c.  ", "I threw together a hodgepodge list of interesting (to me) articles on Mesoamerica a while back for someone who pm'd me a similar request. Aside from all the other advice about keeping access, [JSTOR offers free limited accounts](_URL_0_). You can \"check-out\" 3 items at once, each of which stays on your \"bookshelf\" for 14 days minimum. It's so convenient that I use it when I'm outside the Ivory Firewall and don't feel like using my remote access.\n\nAnyway, here's that list (I picked out a few in *italics* which are more recommended):\n\n**Agriculture  &  Diet**\n\nSantley  &  Rose 1979 Diet, Nutrition and Population Dynamics in the Basin of Mexico\n\nEvans 1990 The Productivity of Maguey Terrace Agriculture in Central Mexico during the Aztec Period\n\nPohl et al. 1996 Early Agriculture in the Maya Lowlands\n\nTaube 1996 The Olmec Maize God: The Face of Corn in Formative Mesoamerica\n\n*Merrill et al. 2009 The Diffusion of Maize to the Southwestern United States and Its Impact*\n\nPiperno 2011 The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the New World Tropics Patterns, Process, and New Developments\n\nMinnis  &  Whalen 2010 THE FIRST PREHISPANIC CHILE \"(CAPSICUM)\" FROM THE U.S. SOUTHWEST/NORTHWEST MEXICO AND ITS CHANGING USE\n\n**Crafts  &  Trade**\n\nDrennan 1984 Long-Distance Movement of Goods in the Mesoamerican Formative and Classic\n\nRafferty 1990 The Virgin Anasazi and the Pan-Southwestern Trade System, A.D. 900\u20131150\n\nCharlton et al. 1991 Aztec Craft Production and Specialization: Archaeological Evidence from the City-State of Otumba, Mexico\n\n*Hosler 1995 Sound, Color and Meaning in the Metallurgy of Ancient West Mexico*\n\nHosler  &  Macfarlane 1996 Copper Sources, Metal Production, and Metals Trade in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica\n\nDewan  &  Hosler 2008 Ancient Maritime Trade on Balsa Rafts: An Engineering Analysis\n\n**Politics  &  War**\n\n*Barlow 1945 Some Remarks on the Term \"Aztec Empire\"*\n\nRounds 1979 Lineage, Class, and Power in the Aztec State\n\nIsaac 1983 Aztec Warfare: Goals and Battlefield Comportment\n\n*Isaac 1983 The Aztec \u201cFlowery War\u201d: A Geopolitical Explanation*\n\nKurtz 1984 Strategies of Legitimation and the Aztec State\n\nBrumfiel 1985 Aztec State Making: Ecology, Structure, and the Origin of the State\n\nSmith 1986 The Role of Social Stratification in the Aztec Empire: A View from the Provinces\n\nSmith 1987 The Expansion of the Aztec Empire: A Case Study in the Correlation of Diachronic Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Data\n\nSmith 1987 Archaeology and the Aztec Economy: The Social Scientific Use of Archaeological Data\n\nCarrasco 1995 Give Me Some Skin: The Charisma of the Aztec Warrior\n\nLucero 2003 The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers\n\nSpencer  &  Redmond 2004 Primary State Formation in Mesoamerica\n\n**Other**\n\n*Coe 1962 Costa Rican Archaeology and Mesoamerica*\n\nMoser 1973 Human decapitation in ancient Mesoamerica\n\nFox et al. 1981 The Late Postclassic Eastern Frontier of Mesoamerica: Cultural Innovation Along the Periphery\n\n*Smith 1984 The Aztlan Migrations of the Nahuatl Chronicles: Myth or History?*\n\nOrtiz De Montellano 1985 Counting Skulls: Comment on the Aztec Cannibalism Theory of Harner-Harris\n\nKellogg 1986 Aztec Inheritance in Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Colonial Patterns, Prehispanic Influences\n\nJusteson 1986 The Origin of Writing Systems: Preclassic Mesoamerica\n\nRead 1987 Negotiating the Familiar and the Strange in Aztec Ethics\n\nFox et al. 1996 Playing with Power: Ballcourts and Political Ritual in Southern Mesoamerica\n\n*Haslip-Viera et al. 1997 Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs*\n\nJoyce 1998 Performing the body in pre-Hispanic Central America\n\nPohl 1998 Themes of Drunkenness, Violence, and Factionalism in Tlaxcalan Altar Paintings\n\nCarrasco 1999 Uttered from the Heart: Guilty Rhetoric among the Aztecs\n\n*Hicks 1999 The Middle Class in Ancient Central Mexico*\n\nElferink 2000 Aphrodisiac Use in Pre-Columbian Aztec and Inca Cultures\n\nJoyce 2000 Girling the Girl and Boying the Boy: The Production of Adulthood in Ancient Mesoamerica\n\nWhite et al. 2000 Testing the Nature of Teotihuac\u00e1n Imperialism at Kaminaljuy\u00fa Using Phosphate Oxygen-Isotope Ratios\n\n*Barker et al. 2002 Mesoamerican Origin for an Obsidian Scraper from the Precolumbian Southeastern United States*\n\nJoyce et al. 2004 Lord 8 Deer \"Jaguar Claw\" and the Land of the Sky: The Archaeology and History of Tututepec\n\nDuncan et al. 2008 Human Cremation in Mexico 3,000 Years Ago\n\nPrice et al. 2008 Strontium Isotopes and the Study of Human Mobility in Ancient Mesoamerica\n\nVargas et al. 2009 Daily Life of the Ancient Maya Recorded on Murals at Calakmul, Mexico\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "You can also hang out in /r/Scholar, where people who wish they had Jstor access ask stuff to people who do.", "All of them!\n\nSeriously though, I would say pick the ones that fit what you want to continue pursuing the best.\n\nThere are some general historical articles, but I really, really wish I would have had some copies of articles I read in grad school now, especially some of the ones I used in my thesis, but did not print off.\n\nSome universities will have Alumni Access, others won't.  I ended up teaching back at the university I graduated from, so I have access again.", "What are your interests? If it is critical theory or related to Japan I have some suggestions.\n\nEDIT:\n\nI want to preface by saying that anyone interested in Japan and not yet privy should definitely check out [The Asia-Pacific Journal](_URL_1_) it is a free journal that puts out really great stuff every week. While mainly focused on Japan, there are often articles on other places in the region. While not peer-reviewed many of the articles published are from scholars who do publish in Monumenta Nipponica, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, etc. That is to say, they are academics, know the game and the articles published are valuable. \n\nWith that said, here are the ones behind 'the ivory firewall' (saw that somewhere in this thread and liked it)\n\n**Pre-Modern**\n\n* **Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan\nLand and Lordship in Early Modern Japan by Mark Ravina; Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa by Luke S. Roberts**\nReview by: Ronald P. Toby\nMonumenta Nipponica, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 197-237\nPublished by: Sophia University\nStable URL: _URL_3_  \n\n**Post-War**\n\n* **Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia**\nJohn W. Dower\nThe Journal of American History\nVol. 82, No. 3 (Dec., 1995), pp. 1124-1135 Stable URL: _URL_8_\n\n* **Exporting Democracy?: American Women, \"Feminist Reforms,\" and Politics of Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952**\n Mire Koikari\nFrontiers: A Journal of Women Studies\nVol. 23, No. 1 (2002), pp. 23-45 Stable URL: _URL_5_\n\n**Ryukyu/Okinawa**\n\n* **Ambiguous Boundaries: Redefining Royal Authority in the Kingdom of Ryukyu**\nGregory Smits\nHarvard Journal of Asiatic Studies\nVol. 60, No. 1 (Jun., 2000), pp. 89-123  Stable URL: _URL_7_\n\n* **Between War and Tropics: Heritage Tourism in Postwar Okinawa**\nGERALD FIGAL\nThe Public Historian\nVol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 2008) (pp. 83-107) Stable URL: _URL_9_\n\n* Taku Suzuki (2006) **BECOMING \u201cJAPANESE\u201d IN BOLIVIA: OKINAWAN- BOLIVIAN TRANS(NATIONAL)FORMATIONS IN COLONIA OKINAWA** , Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 13:3, 455-481 _URL_2_  (Not JSTOR, but your library probably still has access and **very interesting**)\n\n**Literature**\n\n* **Fractious Memories in Medoruma Shun\u2019s Tales of War** Davinder Bhowmik,  The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10 Issue 38, No. 3, September 17, 2012._URL_0_ (Free)\n\n* **Five Stories by Kunikida Doppo** \nAuthor(s): Kunikida Doppo and Jay Rubin\nSource: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 273-341 Published by: Sophia University\nStable URL: _URL_4_\n\n* **Murakami Haruki and the cultural materialism of multiple personality disorder** John Whitter Treat. Japan Forum, 2013\nVol. 25, No. 1, 87\u2013111, _URL_6_ (again, not JSTOR)", "These aren't strictly JSTOR, but you might have access anyway, and these are great articles.\n\n* [Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany](_URL_1_) by Ulinka Rublack is a fascinating read I really enjoyed. [edited in JSTOR link]\n* [Beyond Discourse Theory](_URL_0_) by Lyndal Roper was my go-to cite-this-to-sound-clever article, but it's genuinely a brilliant article on the limitations of discourse theory and the need to analyse emotional experience as part of cultural history, and uses a 17th century Swiss man's experience of \"demonic possession\" as a case study, which is always fun to read.\n\nI don't have my old reading lists here right now, but I'll update this once I have access again.", "I suggest\n\n* A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization by Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Fienman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, Peter N. Peregrine\n\n* Social Identity and Ethnic Interaction in the Western Pueblos of the American Southwest by Tammy Stone\n\n* Toward an Ethnology of Mesoamerican Customary Social Units by Eileen M. Mulhare\n\n* Architecture and Energy: An Evolutionary Perspective by Elliot Abrams\n\n* Architectural Energetics, Ancient Monuments, and Operations Management by Elliot Abrams and Thomas Bolland\n\n* Recent Research in West Mexican Archaeology by Helen Pollard\n\n* Recent Research in Western Mexican Archaeology by Christopher Beekman\n\n* Corporate Power Strategies in the Late Formative to Early Classic Tequila Valleys of Central Jalisco by Christopher Beekman\n\n* Controlling for Doubt and Uncertainty through Multiple Lines of Evidence: A New Look at the Mesoamerican Nahua Migrations by Christopher Beekman and Alexander Christensen\n\n* A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing by John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman\n* Recent Developments in Cypriot Prehistoric Archaeology by Stuart Swiny\n\n* Prehistoric Cyprus: A Current Perspective by Stuart Swiny\n\n* Of Cows, Copper, Corners, and Cult: The Emergence of the Cypriot Bronze Age by Stuart Swiny", "My favourite JSTOR article is \"The Liberal Order Framework\" by Canadian Historian Ian McKay. It's a fantastic analysis of trends in Canadian history and his thesis that Canadian history ought to be looked at as a centralized project of national rule really reverberated with me.", "I think the body of works present in online databanks, including JSTOR, is so vast that I'd rather advise you to find a way to keep access to these databanks than to download a few articles. Also, I've always used it as a tool to get articles and never really remembered which ones I got on that specific database.", "JSTOR has free accounts for individuals that allow you to read three articles every fortnight/78 annually. ", "If you are Victorian, you can access JSTOR at anytime for free through the State Library of Victoria provided you sign up to be a free member beforehand.", "If you are interested in social cooperation and how groups, organisations and civilisations can thrive without a central governing agency (a state), I recommend you download everything you can by Peter T. Leeson.\n\nSure, he is an economist. But most of the economic theories have historic context. \n\nSome of the best are:\nAn-arrrr-chy: economics of Pirates\nHuman Sacrifice\nLaw of the Lawless\nGypsy law\nBetter of Stateless\n\nand so on and so on... he is by far a personal favorite at the moment. ", "You know about [Library Genesis](_URL_1_) and [Sci-Hub](_URL_0_), right? Just paste a DOI or Title or even link there \u2014 and get a full-text instantly.\n\nThese largest in the world underground free archives of nonfiction scans and access proxies are the only Russian things I'm proud of as a Russian.", "I interpret this question as op wanting more of a \"what's your favorite history journal article\" rather than \"how to get access\", oh well. I recommend [Cities and States in Europe, 1000-1800](_URL_0_) by Charles Tilly, but If you're interested in for example Marriage, family and household history, a lot of the \"classic\" articles by [Hajnal](_URL_1_), [Berkner](_URL_2_) and Laslett are up there, the theories are still very interesting though more problematic today with all the new source material that has been uncovered in the last 20 years.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://about.jstor.org/alumni#Institutions-in-program"], [], ["www.jstor.org/stable/651186"], ["http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/"], [], [], [], ["http://about.jstor.org/rr"], [], [], ["http://www.japanfocus.org/-Davinder-Bhowmik/3830/article.html", "http://www.japanfocus.org", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10702890600839652", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2668408", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2383917", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347272", "http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2012.741142", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2652701", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2945119", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2008.30.2.83"], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612021003634141?journalCode=rwhr20", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/651238"], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://sci-hub.org", "http://gen.lib.rus.ec"], ["http://www.jstor.org/stable/657611", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/1972376", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/1868698"]]}
{"q_id": "114oy3", "title": "When did \"Autumn\" start being called \"Fall\" in the United States?", "selftext": "As a Brit I never really understood why North-Americans call autumn \"the fall\". I mean I get it that it's because the leaves \"fall off the trees\" but none of the other seasons have been renamed. Spring isn't called \"Growth\", summer isn't called \"Hot\".\n\nI'm assuming the original English settlers would have called it autumn, so at what point did it become fall?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114oy3/when_did_autumn_start_being_called_fall_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6jaz63", "c6jdpqr", "c6jfi00", "c6jfq9i"], "score": [114, 12, 10, 5], "text": ["You're assumption is incorrect. \"Fall\" comes from Old English, whereas \"autumn\" is a French import that only became predominant in British English well after the peak of English emigration to the American colonies.\n\n_URL_0_", "Also, it should be noted that spring is probably called spring as it is the seasone that plants spring up. _URL_0_", "Just came to add that at some point there was only 2 seasons, Summer and Winter. The \"Spring of the leaf\" and the \"Fall of the leaf\" were added later.\n\nI don't remember the exact years when it started happening because I heard this on a radio program last week.", " > Harvest was the English name for the season until autumn began to displace it 16c \n\n_URL_0_\n\nCompare to German Herbst, or Dutch herfst. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn#Etymology"], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spring"], [], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=harvest&amp;allowed_in_frame=0"]]}
{"q_id": "4gs6v5", "title": "Why did the Sallet Helmet become near universally used by armored German Men at Arm and Knights?", "selftext": "Why did the Sallet Helmet become so common in the German states but not as common in other western European regions like France, Italy, or Britain? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gs6v5/why_did_the_sallet_helmet_become_near_universally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2kn944"], "score": [10], "text": ["This is a fascinating question touching on historical memory and armour fashions across Europe from the 15th into the 16th centuries.\n\nThe shortest answer is that the sallet -was- common across Western Europe, from central Europe and northeastern Europe all the way to Spain. In England and the Low Countries, it was nearly ubiquitous in the 3rd quarter of the 15th century and very common in the 4th quarter. The image of Sallets as a 'german' helmet is mostly pop cultural trope more than a reflection of medieval reality. Throughout Europe (including Italy) open-faced sallets were used by more lightly armoured troops (those soldiers who were not men at arms) for most of the 15th century. Italy produced a large number of sallets for the export market in the rest of Europe. Really, the question is why Italian men at arms -didn't- use the sallet as much as their German, English and French compatriots. The second question is, if the sallet was used throughout Europe, how did it come be be remembered as 'German'?\n\nAt the beginning of the 15th century, men at arms (knights and those who fought like knights) wore a bascinet with an aventail (a mail drape or mantle hung directly from the helmet). In the first decades of the century bascinets with rigid metal neckpieces were introduced. The most common arrangement came to be the ['great bascinet'](_URL_0_), where a metal neck and chin guard was rivetted to the back of the helmet skull, which was extended to the nape of the neck. Other metal throat defenses involved one piece neckplates or even banded neck defenses made of several lames. Compared with a mail aventail, the rigid neck protection of the great bascinet offered a lot more protection in a vital area. The great bascinet was probably the most common helmet among men at arms in England, France, The Low Countries and Germany from 1420 to 1440 or 1450.  Like all helmets it had a variety of different variations in construction and style (generally, German great bascinets are much fitted closer to the skull than say, English great bascinets)\n\nSallets were developed, probably in Italy or perhaps in France or England, in the early 15th century, and spread to the rest of Europe by the second quarter of the century*. After 1450 they are the most common helmet among Men at Arms in England, the Low countries and, after 1460, Germany, based on the surviving examples we have, household accounts and [artistic depictions](_URL_4_) from the same period. While Germany is a late adopter of sallets, it is an enthusiastic adopter, and sallets are the dominant 'knightly' helmet among both artistic depictions and surviving artifacts from the later 15th century in German lands. Great bascinets rigid neck limited turning one's head (at least in English examples, one can turn one's head -inside- the helmet, accoridng to armour historian Tobias Capwell, who has worn one). By contracts, sallets gave the wearer a fairly free pivot around their neck. The visor could be worn down in situations of acute danger, or up for air and vision. The long tail protected the back of the neck without restricting movement. In short, sallets were supremely -flexible- helmets that offered a good combination of visibility, comfort and protection.\n\nMeanwhile, Italian knights did not adopt either the sallet or the great bascinet in the numbers that knights north of the alps did. Instead, in the second quarter of the century they adopted the [armet](_URL_3_), which has hinged cheek-pieces that close shut around the head, and generally a kind of pointed visor. It could be equipped with a reinforcement, or wrapper, that covered the lower edge of the visor and had lames extending to the chest. Italian men at arms continued to wear this helmet through the end of the 15th century and beyond. So, why did Italian knights wear armets rather than sallets? Fashion might be one reason - Italian painting, clothing, architecture and other aesthetics are very distinctive in the 15th century; men at arms seemed to have preferences for 'style', which was partly regional. Italian knights might prefer a distinctively 'Italian' helmet because that is what was popular in Italy. On a more funcitonal level, Italian men at arms were equipped in a way that made them very well protected for mounted shock combat, and the expense of flexibility when fighting on foot - their armours have a lot of reinforcing pieces for surviving being struck by a lance at a full charge. Similarly, the armet is a somewhat more protective if less versatile helmet - while sallets offer a gap where the bevor meets the lower edge of the visor, the only gap an armet offers is the eyeslit of the visor itself. However I should note that towards the end of the century the armet and the close helm (a helmet that often looks like an armet, but is put together differently) start to replace the sallet in areas of Western Europe where sallets once dominated. This may be related to tactical developments (French Knights fighting on foot less in the Italian Wars than in the Hundred Years War) or it might be a result of armour fashions for the armet finally spreading from Italy.\n\nNow note that I said the ideas of Sallets as 'German' is 'mostly' a cultural trope. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, men at arms in the German lands may have been slower to replace sallets with close helms and armets than men at arms in the rest of Europe. There are depictions of German Men at Arms wearing sallets into the early 16th century in funerary effigies. Durer's [the Knight, the Devil and Death](_URL_2_), perhaps the most famous depiction of a sallet in the 16th century, appears to be based on [a drawing](_URL_1_) from the turn of the century, though the engraving is later - though not an illustration of a contemporary knight, necessarily, Durer's engraving is a use of the sallet in an iconic image (which may contribute on its own to the idea of sallets as germanic). In addition to the survival of the sallet into the very early 16th century in German war-harness, the distinctive German 'Rennen' form of joust used a modified sallet, and continued to do so into the mid 16th century; this was at a time when other nations were mostly jousting using tilt barriers with other types of helmets. By the middle of the 16th century, we see the 'sallet=German' trope in 'The Meeting of Henry VIII and Maximillian', an anonymous Flemish painting.\n\nWhile genuine survival of sallets into the 16th century may have given them 'germanic' associations, I think that we should also consier survival bias and 19th century collectors when talking about this trope. Later 15th century German armour survives in much greater quantities than English or Flemish or French armour of the same period. The only other nation with as much surviving armour from the period is Italy, and Italian men at arms wore armets more than sallets. The contrast between all of the German sallets in collections and the Italian armets may have suggested that the sallet was a 'German Helmet.'\n\n\nSources:\n\nArms and Armour of the Medieval Knight, Edge and Paddock\n\nMasterpieces of Armour at the Wallace Collection, Tobias Capwell - this includes discussion of the sallet's possible German associations in the 16th century.\n\nEuropean Armour C. 1066-1700, Claude Blair\n\nArmour of the English Knight 1400-1450, Tobias Capwell\n\n*Here Tobias Capwell, who suggests a franco-English origin, disagrees with the older Edge and Paddock. It may be that the original, open-faced 'celeta' was developed by the northwestern European armourers into a helmet with a visor that protected the lower half of the face with a bevor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/63/48/9f63484bb18adba8cec869fbfb1e82d7.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Duerer_-_Studie_Reiter_1495.jpg/468px-Duerer_-_Studie_Reiter_1495.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_-_Knight,_Death_and_the_Devil.jpg", "http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/20.150.1/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/BNMsFr2643FroissartFol97vBatNevilleCross.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4nxg3e", "title": "What is known about the origins of the \"four humours\" concept of health and disease?", "selftext": "I know that a lot of the concept comes from ancient Greece and Hippocrates, but is there evidence that it was an older idea perhaps connected to Egypt or Mesopotamia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4nxg3e/what_is_known_about_the_origins_of_the_four/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d47v5b9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most standard histories locate the origins of humoral theory in the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition. For instance:\n\n > Historically, humoralism formed the basis for the Western tradition of medicine down to the nineteenth century. In its earliest manifestations, in sixth- and fifth-century BC Greece, it reveals no links with any of the medical systems elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean,and the few apparent parallels with Indian or Far Eastern medical systems may well be fortuitous.\n\n > Vivian Nutton (1997) Humoralism. In WF Bynum and R Porter (eds), *Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine*. London  &  New York: Routledge, p. 281\n\nHowever, some of the concepts underlying humoral theory can be found in other traditions. The influence that other medical cultures may have had on the humoral system is a point of debate.\n\n > It was ... the literate Hippocratic-Galenic tradition that produced, eventually, the 'classic' system of four humours. Its durability and dominance in Europe - in scholarship as much as medicine - ensured the projection of 'humours' onto other medical currents such as Ayurveda.\n\n > It would have of course been open to us to begin further east so as to counteract that project. It would also have been possible to begin elsewhere, and earlier, in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. The belief for example implied in some Egyptian medical writings, that disease was caused by corrupt residues in the body, bears some resemblances to Hippocratic physiology. So does the emphasis in Babylonian medicine on fluids as a determinant of health. In neither medical culture was anything resembling a humour articulated into a full disease aetiology. On the other hand, underlying conceptions of ill health as caused by disruption of the natural order have been detected in ancient Mesopotamiam culture. And, strikingly, *maat* (balance, order, justice), a concept with its eponymous goddess, seems to have been central to Egyptian medicine. Health depended on the 'balanced' flow of substances along the twenty-two *mtw* or vessels, as described in the Ebers papyrus, irrigating it by their passage as the Nile's waters irrigated the land.\n\n > How far the Greeks knew about, and were receptive to, these other medicines is a matter of continuing scholarly argument.\n\n > Peregrine Horden (2013) Introduction. In Peregrine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu (eds) *The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice*. London  &  New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 6-7"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "am94gh", "title": "How often (if ever) are previously unknown or lost works from the classical antiquity discovered today?", "selftext": "I can't help but wonder when I see lists of famous works that we know exist from classical antiquity, but are thought to be lost, does anything new of significance get discovered these days?  Something like a lost chapter of Livy, a biography by Plutarch, or a play by Aristophanes?\n\nI would think it must be very rare as almost every document from the era would have long since disintegrated.  My understanding is the most writing from the world of classical antiquity is lost, unless enormous effort was undertaken throughout the ages to save it.  Monks or some of the other tiny population of literate people had to recopy by hand everything they wanted to preserve every hundred years or so.  And so any writing that does survive from that era is more like the 20th recopy by someone 1500 years later than an original from the time.  As such, even if a new historical site is excavated, they might find pottery, but wouldn't find a treasure trove of ancient scrolls.\n\nIs my understanding correct and that everything lost likely to remain lost, or does new stuff ever come to light?  What was the most significant discovery in recent times along these lines?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/am94gh/how_often_if_ever_are_previously_unknown_or_lost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efl03ga"], "score": [6], "text": ["The Archimedes Palimpset is an extraordanary example of finding information from the classical world. The original work was actually a copy several generations removed from it's original, written in 950AD,  and had it's writing scraped off to hold religious texts. Modern scholars rediscovered it in 1920's, but academics only had access to it in the turn of the century, and only recently have we had the tools to make out most of what it actually says. \n\nThe Palimpset is collection of a few copies of Greek texts, but the most significant is several copies of original, Greek Archimedes works on arithmetic, geometry, and especially an example of what we'd call modern Integral Calculus, used to solve the volume of a few three dimensional shapes, and several fairly rigorous proofs. \n\nThat we have it is a miracle - even when we found it, a war intervened, it disappeared,  the eventual possessor tried to auction it off privately, hidden in conditions bad for books, and later partially vandalized by a forger attempting to add value.  This is work that was intended to be destroyed, since paper was precious, and it was the combination of someone who could recognize the significance of the text coming upon it at the right time that let us have it.\n\nWhile I'd doubt we'd ever find, say, the rest of the Greek plays we know existed, or the works of all Pre-Islamic poets, but sometimes we're just flat out lucky and we get a chance to pry a snapshot of knowledge from the jaws of entropy. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15wl22", "title": "How did Argentina keep the invasion of the Falkland Islands a secret?", "selftext": "I'm an American who has always been interested in the Falklands conflict since originally watching coverage of it on television as a 10 year old. However, one thing that has always puzzled me is how Argentina managed to keep their preparations a secret up until the invasion? How could they keep such an endeavour under wraps from the rest of the world? Did the U.S. have any idea concerning what was about to take place? It seems implausible that if a similar event were to occur today that the world would be taken by surprise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15wl22/how_did_argentina_keep_the_invasion_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7qi5ru", "c7qjcdc"], "score": [7, 7], "text": ["It's possible that part of the US military establishment knew, but didn't divulge to the UK. The White House staff were divided as to which side back when the war kicked off, so this may have been reflected in the military as well. ", "Argentina was under a heavily repressive military dictatorship at the time- not only was it easy for them to cover things up, their military was essentially always at high alert. However, their preparations were anything but secret. They had \"invaded\" South Georgia and been sabre rattling in the state media for months. There were numerous warnings, but they were simply lower priority at the time. \n\nThe actual invasion remained somewhat of a mystery in the metropol. The governor got off a short message relaying that Argentina was in control, followed by a CB radio conversation between a journalist and a local resident detailing the Argentine forces, but apart from that the UK was in the dark."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "14egrn", "title": "Is this a Viking sword?", "selftext": "My mother-in-law has this hanging in her house. She said there were more but they were taken by her ex-husband. She thinks that it is an old Viking sword and so do I. Is there anyone here who recognizes the marking, or style of the hilt/blade?\nHere is a link to some pictures I took with my phone:\n_URL_0_\nI can go get clearer ones if needed, just ask.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14egrn/is_this_a_viking_sword/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cct8m", "c7cd5tw", "c7cfvup"], "score": [3, 3, 4], "text": ["You might try /r/whatisthisthing", "I am thinking almost certainly not.\n\nIt certainly doesn't look like anything I've seen from the archaeological record, Viking or not. The pommel and crossguard don't look like usual early medieval swords. And I don't recognize whatever the markings on the blade are. And the hilt is... weird. Like, I don't understanding why it would be attached the blade like it is. To me, it looks like something someone cobbled together out of pieces of stuff they had lying around. And not particularly well. Sorry.\n\nI can't provide any books or scholarly links now (I'm out of the country away from anything like that), but even just looking at Wikipedia shows you that this doesn't look like anything historical. For a specific counter-example, though, look at the sword just recovered from Ardnamurchan (a Viking elite burial site in Scotland), or even the sword discovered from Sutton Hoo (albeit Anglo-Saxon, not \"Viking\").\n\nA better picture and some background would be appreciated though.", "No. I'm sorry to have to disappoint you but this is quite definitely, without a doubt not a Viking sword. [This is what Viking swords look like.](_URL_2_) In fact it's unlike any European or Asian sword I have ever seen. It does remind me of African tribal swords, though. In fact, I am fairly certain that it is a Sudanese or Chadian [Kaskara sword](_URL_4_). ([More pics](_URL_1_)). I'm no expert on Africa, though, so all I can offer is the [short wikipedia article](_URL_0_) and [this article](http://www._URL_3_/ethsword/kaskara/index.html), ironically hosted on the site _URL_3_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/U5Lex#0"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaskara", "http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/s261_full.html", "http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnybo/2353897448/", "vikingsword.com", "http://www.swordsantiqueweapons.com/images/s261h.jpg", "http://www.vikingsword.com/ethsword/kaskara/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1waheq", "title": "In AD500 would zoroastrianism have been the dominate religion in and around the place where Mecca now is?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1waheq/in_ad500_would_zoroastrianism_have_been_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf09h8g"], "score": [6], "text": ["No.\n\nFor a more detailed answer, see this similar question posted last month: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t03qi/before_he_founded_islam_what_religion_did/"]]}
{"q_id": "32x3dl", "title": "Citing the Rape of Nanking and their reaction to the Chinese populace after Operation Doolittle, why was there such an upsurge in the viciousness  &  cruelty of the Japanese people/army in the first half of the 20th century leading up to the end of WW2?", "selftext": "From my limited knowledge it seems like incidents such as these were completely out of step with previous generations and indeed the generations since WW2. What caused this societal change? Did winning the Russo-Japanese war combined with aggressive expansionism give an inflated sense of ego to the Japanese and mob mentality took over? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32x3dl/citing_the_rape_of_nanking_and_their_reaction_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqfh9fd", "cqfkpww"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["They're not 'out of step' more than they are the culmination of an expansionist policy that began in the 1890s and bred, as you suggested, a culture of invincibility and aggression. There's also evidence of a racial sense of superiority.\n\nJapanese expansionist policies in WWII were based on several goals, ranging from the immediate strategic concerns to ones based on older ideals and Imperialism. Japanese reasons for beginning their rapid-fire series of invasions across SW Asia at their very basest can be narrowed down to 2 immediate goals:\n\n1) Strategically, seizing the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, blocking British India (and securing a springboard for potential further action) in Burma and knocking out the forward most US territory in the Philippines. \n\n2) Out of a twisted sense of nationalism and idealism that saw Japan as the potential centerpiece for a Greater Asiatic empire. This manifested in the rhetoric of \"Asia for Asiatics\" and the euphemism for a new Empire - East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. While its debatable as to when this vision first entered the Japanese conscious (Bill Yenne believes its roots can be found as early as 1890) its very clear that its present before both the Rape of Nanking and the US's innovative and morale-boosting strike with the B-25s. \n\nAn excerpt from a pamphlet given to IJA soldiers, roughly translated as \"Read this alone: and the War can be Won\" \n\n > \"We Japanese have been born in a country of no mean blessings, and thanks to the august power and influence of His Majesty the Emperor our land has never once, to this day, experienced invasion and occupation by a foreign power. The other peoples of the Far East **look with envy upon Japan; they trust and honor the Japanese; and deep in their hearts they are hoping that, with the help of the Japanese people** they may themselves achieve independence and happiness.\"\n\nMy emphasis. The rhetoric is telling; and this pamphlet was issued in December 1941 before the Japanese began their lightning campaigns across the Southwest pacific. Its clear that an aggressive sense of superiority was already present in the culture of the Japanese military and that they viewed themselves as superior in position and culture to the peoples they were conquering.\n\nThis is made even more ironic by parts of the pamphlet *not* quoted by Bill Yenne. The entirety of the pamphlet's first Chapter re-iterates the conditions of the campaign area and the mission, stating the importance of the oil and steel resources Japan needs. The second chapter stresses kindness and respect towards the natives - but this clearly was lost in translation for it rarely manifested, the second chapter also details how Asians in this area have been subjugated by whites. This is important for two reasons, first it attempted to paint the Japanese soldier as liberator, and secondly it showed that while Japan had never been \"conquered\" by European Whites in their own view, these other Asian nations had been. Japan, therefore, was in an inherent position of superiority over these countries. \n\n", "If this subject interests you, I'd suggest reading Ian Toll's *Pacific Crucible*.  Toll's main story is the first six months of the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to Midway. His focus is on the naval officers who led those actions.\n\nIn explaining those sets of leaders, he describes the history and behavior of the political leaders of both the U.S. and Japan. My take on his description of the Japanese political system is that a relatively small group of military officers and industrialists pushed their government in a hard-right direction. \n\nI think every culture has racist and xenophobic tendencies. The extreme elements in Japan played on those to achieve their goals. (Not that they didn't believe what they were saying. They really did believe in the racial purity of the Japanese people - an opinion perhaps exacerbated and nurtured by the relatively homogenous population of their island.) When they took over other countries, their treatment of the indigenous populations were impacted by their belief that those populations were inferior, a belief that was highly encouraged by the Japanese army. \n\nThis belief was not as strong in the navy - possibly because they were exposed to more cultures? Yamamoto, the admiral in charge of the attack on Pearl Harbor, had studied at Harvard, was stationed for a time in D.C. and traveled extensively throughout the U.S.\n\nIf you like reading history, I'd highly recommend Toll. This and his other book, *Six Frigates* are both extensively researched and very well written."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3v3m36", "title": "Why did the Dutch East Indies became only one independent state (Indonesia) while all the other colonies in South and Southeast Asia fractured to become multiple independent states?", "selftext": "The British Raj became Pakistan, India and Burma.\n\nThe British Malaya became Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.\n\n\nThe French Indochina became North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.\n\nDutch East Indies, despite its huge number of ethnics and cultures and its size, became only Indonesia.\n\nWhat does this happen?\n\n(This was originally asked on [Quora](_URL_0_). I thought that this sub might have a more in-depth answers) ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v3m36/why_did_the_dutch_east_indies_became_only_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxkcofh"], "score": [32], "text": ["I won't speak to how the British Raj, British Malaya, and French Indochina fragmented, but I can speak to how Indonesia didn't become fragmented. \n\nIn short, it is a combination of: \n\n* Effective suppression of organized independence movements under the Dutch. \n* A new cadre of nationalist leaders developed by the Japanese. \n* Political and rhetorical compromise by independence leaders. \n* The inability of the Dutch to build enduring regional states following WW2 as it enters into an agreement for independence. \n* A political turnaround in '65-'69 that brought Indonesia under US orbit and thus US support in suppressing regional dissent. \n\nIn the early 20th century there was no agreement as to what Indonesia was to be, even as anti-colonial movements started to grow. Most of them were divided along sectarian, religious, regional, ethnic divisions. The few that espoused a modern multi-ethnic idea of Indonesia did not have popular support. \n\nAs WW2 drew to a close and its independence declared, these important questions were left unanswered, and as the struggle against the return of Dutch colonials began, nationalist leaders followed a line of strong compromise, both internally and externally. \n\nLacking political support from key allies, the Dutch agreed to the independence of a United States of Indonesia, with the hope that the Dutch could still strongly influence or control the constituent states. However, these states did not last in the upheavals of 1950. \n\nThe US then supported regional rebellions, as Sukarno summoned further nationalistic rhetoric leading into confrontation with Indonesia's neighbors. However, a change in regime to Suharto brought Indonesia under the orbit of the US, who supported his centralist government in suppressing regional dissent. \n\n**Colonial era to Japanese occupation**\n\nDuring the DEI days, the Dutch were able to suppress anti-colonial movements to a fairly effective degree, to the point that there were little organized movements when WW2 started and the Japanese occupied the region. There were some number of organizations, such as Budi Utomo (for Javanese only, or at best Javanese-culture), Sarekat Islam (only for Muslims), and finally the Indische Partij (IP) of Douwes Dekker the notable Indo eurasian, who with his partner Mangunkusumo proposed a multi-ethnic, secular Indonesia. IP may have espoused the first modern philosophy of what Indonesia could be, but they had neither the numbers nor the political influence to make a direct impact. \n\nThe Japanese did not envision a united Indonesia, as the Japanese military organized SE Asia into three occupation zones: the western zone included Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, the central zone contained Java, and a eastern zone included Borneo and the eastern islands. All were controlled to the SE Asia command in Singapore. \n\nThe Japanese ruled Indonesia very differently than the Dutch did, as they wanted to mobilize the entire population and the resources of Indonesia for their war effort. To some extent they preserved the structures from the DEI days, even if they changed the leadership and placed Dutch and Indo administrators into prison camps. But the Japanese knew they needed local collaborators, and they elevated Indonesian nationalist leaders to rally support for the Japanese war efforts. Sukarno, in particular, was made to travel widely to give speeches espousing the nationalist message and argue in support of Japanese war effort. Hatta, an ethnic Minangkabau, was another figure active in this effort, even if he was considered unreliable by the Japanese. Other Indonesian leaders refused to collaborate, examples include Sutan Sjahrir (from Sumatra), Tan Malaka (a Communist from Java), Amir Sjarifuddin (a Christian Batak). \n\nAs WW2 drew to a close, Sukarno's declaration of independence was made under pressure of kidnapping by youth groups. The circumstances are still little known today, even if it played a major role in the \"official government\" historiography of the Indonesian independence. Many militia groups had sprung up around the country, and in the Jakarta area. The kidnappers were Peta leaders, a Japan-run paramilitary youth group.Both Sukarno and Hatta refused to declare independence without a firm commitment of support by the Japanese. There were also very limited organization among different pro-independence groups, in particular those outside of Java. \n\nFinally, we know that the declaration of independence did nothing to resolve the questions of, what is Indonesia, what areas does it cover, and how should it be run? Notably, several nationalists such as Muhammad Yamin demanded a return to the entire territorial extent of the historic Majapahit empire, claiming all of British Malaya, Cambodia, all of Borneo, all of Timor, parts of the Philippines, and even northern Australia. By contrast, Sjahrir and Hatta were highly pragmatic and instead focused on reachable political compromise. \n\nHere we saw Sukarno at his best, delivering rousing speeches in which he appealed for national unity, downplaying his Java-ness and instead speaking of his Balinese mother and his long periods of stay outside Java as political prisoner.\n\n**To Independence**\n\nAs the Dutch and Allies returned to the DEI, the Dutch expected the Allies to support the return of the DEI under Dutch rule. However, most of the troops in the area were under Mountbatten and led by the British, his force consisting of many Indian troops keen for their own independence in India, or British troops eager to return home. Regardless, as the Dutch started to gain success and reducing the Republican territory everywhere, there were many enclaves of nominally independent territories. In Java in particular, it became an armed contest between the \"formal armed forces\" of the Republic and the many warlords and militias. This is the context in which the Communist uprising in East Java should be viewed, as Communist Indonesians fought Republican Indonesians in 1948. \n\nIn the Linggadjati (1947) and Renville (1948) agreements, the US largely supported the Dutch as it had reservations against Communists in Indonesia. The internal war between Communists and Republicans argued that the situation was not as simple as the Dutch had presented it. The Renville agreement had set up regional regencies with Dutch support, and agreed on the eventual formation of the Federal Republic of Indonesia (RIS) following referendum to determine whether each region would be part of the Republic of Indonesia (itself a member state of RIS), or a different state also part of RIS. Sjahrir the prime minister agreed to respect the property of foreign companies, and played down the involvement of Sukarno and Hatta in Japanese war efforts. \n\nFurther, it is important to note that collaboration across class lines, beyond regional sentiments, was key. Throughout its occupation of DEI, Japanese administrators imprisoned Dutch and Indo workers instead of putting them to work, resulting in [significant decline in production across all industries](_URL_1_). Important classes include Indo (mixed eurasians), Malay-speaking traders, and ethnic Chinese groups, giving impetus to the [growing movement to define a common Indonesian language](_URL_0_). \n\nHowever, the lack of control both on the Republican and Dutch side, led to the Dutch launching another military action that succeeded in effectively taking all of Java. This success came at a high price, as the regents set up with their support elsewhere resigned, and the Dutch no longer credible. Most importantly, the US changed its policy and started to pressure the Dutch to leave the DEI. The compromise was the formation of RUSI, the Republic of the United States of Indonesia, a federal government of which the smaller Republic of Indonesia was a member. \n\n**Beyond Independence**\n\nRUSI was an unwieldy state. Rebellions such as APRA (who demanded a fully independent Pasundan in West Java) was a challenge. However, the successful suppression of APRA led to absorption of the Pasundan state by the Republic of Indonesia. As emergency powers were declared, anti-Dutch and anti-RUSI sentiment rose and under pressure from Jakarta, constituent states of RUSI were dis-empowered and absorbed. Pragmatically, Java (and in particular Jakarta) was the most populated area by far, so as the disproportional political powers of the constituent states were dismantled through emergency decree, so did their political independence in the absence of overt Dutch support. \n\nNot all was well as the Republic of Indonesia was formed in 1950. There was widespread social upheaval, regional tension, and challenges to the government. On one hand, the formation and rise of the national armed forces strengthened government power and unity of the nation. On the other hand, Sukarno's popularity did not lead to political unity. \n\nThere were notable regional revolts, many of which followed the territorial lines of the member states of RUSI, such as South Maluku (RMS), PRRI-Permesta movement, and Darul Islam in West Java. RMS had many former soldiers who fought for the Dutch, and they were majority Christian. The US supported PRRI-Permesta, which was associated with Sutan Syahrir, as they feared Sukarno's increasing alignment with Communist powers elsewhere, and they wished to protect investments in the oilfields in Sumatra. \nAnd as the name suggests, Darul Islam wanted to form an Islamic state in West Java. \n\nOf course, US policy changed radically as Sukarno was replaced by Suharto, who swiftly brought Indonesian politics to be strongly anti-Communist, much to the benefit of US interest. This led to US support of Suharto's centralist, Java-centric policy, at the cost of regional autonomy. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Netherlands-East-Indies-became-only-one-independent-state-Indonesia-while-all-the-other-colonies-in-South-and-Southeast-Asia-fractured-to-become-multiple-independent-states"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3s2zon/given_how_linguistically_diverse_indonesia_is_why/cwu04yn", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ugros/why_did_japan_not_assist_in_germanys_invasion_of/cxeyvfx"]]}
{"q_id": "2qlr33", "title": "Did people watch East German programming in West Germany?", "selftext": "I'm well aware of the popularity of West German TV programming in the DDR, despite attempts by authorities to crack down on it. Were there any examples of the reverse being true? Did any East German programs achieve popularity (cult or otherwise) in West Germany?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qlr33/did_people_watch_east_german_programming_in_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn7ck0c"], "score": [5], "text": ["Yes, East German television was watched in West Germany. Many TV sets sold in West Germany at the time were specifically equipped to receive the East German SECAM colour TV signal in addition to the standard PAL code for this reason.The evening variety show \"Ein Kessel Buntes\" and the children's evening programme \"Unser Sandm\u00e4nnchen\" were fairly popular. Sports programming was also watched.  West German TV guides carried listings for East German programming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bmgoeo", "title": "When did people start using \"-ass\" to emphasize adjectives? How did this practice start?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bmgoeo/when_did_people_start_using_ass_to_emphasize/", "answers": {"a_id": ["emwfqiw"], "score": [2], "text": ["I hope it's ok if I make a quick suggestion that you also drop this question in a linguistics, or better yet a historical linguistics, subreddit.  I hope to be surprised but in general historians are not likely to encounter these locutions to a degree that they can confidently answer this question, and we are not trained to have any real understanding of these kind of grammatical shifts. Whereas historical linguists are by definition interested in these sorts of changes.  \n\n\nAs with most linguistic topics, I was able to find a Language Log post on this phenomenon.  Haven't yet looked at it in detail but maybe it'll point you in the right direction.  [_URL_4_](_URL_4_)  \n\n\nSince this is not really a history question, I hope it's ok to mods if I drop some other links I was able to find.  \n\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_2_)  \n\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)  \n\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.vice.com/en\\_us/article/4x3q3n/the-weird-ass-use-of-ass-to-beef-up-our-adjectives", "https://daily.jstor.org/in-which-we-get-to-the-bottom-of-some-crazy-ass-language/", "https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3q3n/the-weird-ass-use-of-ass-to-beef-up-our-adjectives", "https://adequateman.deadspin.com/curious-ass-scholars-look-into-ass-as-a-modifier-1780416654", "http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36421"]]}
{"q_id": "btj7qe", "title": "Are there any in-depth texts that shed light on how gourmet food tasted long ago? For example, recipe books pertaining to what English royalty ate in the 9th century, or Roman emperors ate in Byzantium?", "selftext": "My wife and I were looking over a hotel restaurant menu from the late 1800's, and remarked at how odd and unusual some of the menu items were. We don't really see mutton anywhere now, for example, except for in select restaurants. Although, when looking at the recipe, it seemed genuinely amazing. \n\nThen it had us thinking: since we have access to so much food in the United States, I wonder if we could recreate a few fun recipes from history. Unfortunately, it does not seem as if the literature on historical recipes is abundant. Most information pertaining to food seems to be quite general, such as \"Romans ate breads and dates for breakfast.\" Is there anything more specific that I could replicate myself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/btj7qe/are_there_any_indepth_texts_that_shed_light_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoyyezh", "eozlypo", "ep0h19z"], "score": [10, 8, 6], "text": ["I can't anwser for cuisine in the Antiquity, but I can give you some pointer in medieval cuisine, specifically for french cuisine in the XIVe century (wich is already \"a long time ago\").\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWe have two main sources for that : *Le Viandier de Taillevent* (roughly translated : \"Taillevent's Meatbook\"), redacted by Guillaume Tirel, chief cook for the french kings Charles V et Charles VI, and *Le M\u00e9nagier de Paris* (roughly translated : \"The Parisian Household guide\"), attributed to a Parisian bourgeois in the XIV century. I think both have been translated in english (from the translation in french, because they were written in old French, and pretty much un-readable by the average french speaker)\n\n & nbsp;\n\nWhat kind of recipes can be found in those books ?  \n\n*Le Viandier* is the recipe book fit for a king's table, so keep in mind it's food that only nobles would eat regularly. There is a lot of meat, but mostly pork, poultry and venison, because ox and cows were used primarly for farming and milking, and raising one was long and expensive. Fish is also quite present, but keep in mind that it was more frequent on the shore than inland. The recipe make heavy use of various spices : pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, even saffron. Vinegar is also commonly used, often with honey, so many dishes would have a bitter-sweet flavor. Meat are roasted or prepared in a stew.\n\nMost of the recipe from *Le Viandier* are quite rich and sophisticated, but also includ simpler, lighter dishes for fasting days. Vegetable are often cooked in soups, or in the stews. Broth (from meat and from vegetable) is often used  to dilute stews and sauces\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*Le M\u00e9nagier* is a household guide, so it gives both recipes and general advices on how to maintain and direct your household. The recipe are not as fancy as thoses in *Le Viandier*. There is a lot of recipe for poultry and egg, since it was the most common animal products. Eggs are boiled to various degrees, and accompanied with vegetable sauces (for instance, the \"*brouet vert d'oeuf et de fromage*\", poached eggs with a sauce made of parsley, spinach, broth, red wine, spices, served in a bowl with cheese, wich I heavily recommand, but I will come to that). There is also a lot of pies and dough, garnished with meat (often cheap cuts of meat). Soupes are also very common. \n\nFish is also presented in *Le M\u00e9nagier*, with a distinction between fresh-water and sea-water fishes, but the recipes are not very complex. Most of them consist of fried or boiled fish, with broth and/or wine. The notable exception are pies, that can be quite complex to make, and quite tasty (for instance, the *M\u00e9nagier* as a eel pie recipe that is delicious)\n\n & nbsp;\n\nMy main references on the subject is the french book *Alimentations m\u00e9di\u00e9vales. ve-xvie si\u00e8cles* Paris, Ellipses; 2009), by Alban Gauthier, and a medieval cook book by Jeanne Bourin. I didn't read anything on the subject in english, so I can't recommand any specific books. But there is quite a lot on the subject, if no-one here can give you some pointer, I sure a bit of googling would give you a basic bibliography.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nSo here is a overview of the recipes. But it doesn't anwser your main inquiry... What did it all tasted like ? Well, there is one simple way to find out... Just try it. Both *Le Viandier* and *Le M\u00e9nagier* has been translated. However, the translation doesn't make for a very good cook book, because the quantities are often not clear. Some ingredients are obscur, and we are not sure what they are talking about.\n\nBut, many people have studied and tried to recreate those recipes. And there is many \"Medieval Cook book\" that lift heavily from both these sources. I own one of those, Jeanne Bourin's *Cuisine M\u00e9di\u00e9vale pour table d'aujourd'hui*, wich, while not a hundred percent accurate, is the product of serious research on both the sources I mentionned. I'm sure there is some equivalent in english. \n\nSo, with my cook book (and a passion for cooking and food, because, as I'm sure you have guessed by now, I'm French), I tried some of those recipes. The result is... often underwhelming. Spices tends to be too overpowering for my taste. Recipes from the *Viandier* are heavy on the stomach, but not unpleasant. The bitter-sweetness of some of the stews are quite satisfying : I tried a veal stew, with vinegar, spices, limes, a bit of honey and chopped liver mixed with the broth, and it was stellar. Where medieval cooking shine, is in its sauces, soupes and pies. All of them make satiating meal out of cheap ingrediens, and offer flavors that are not often used in modern days cooking (especially, since there was no potatoes, they use various tubercules that are pretty much not used anymore, like paneys or chervil). \n\nSo overall, I would recommand you to find a cook book of m\u00e9dieval recipes, and try some recipes for yourself. Don't expecte something out of this world, but it's, if any thing, a fun thing to do, especially with friend and family.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nOne last thing, to end on little fun fact : Those cook books also contain \"impossibles recipes\", especially the *Viandier* : Swan roast, dolphin stew, salted whale... And some ridiculous serving ideas : \n\n- a method to serve a full peacock, cooked, but not plucked, and to make it look like it's spitting fire by putting a metal rod covered in oakum in its beak\n\n- A method to garnish the inside of a pie with live birds that will fly out as soon as you cut the top of the pie open.\n\n- A recipe - And I'm not joking - to dress a cooked chicken in a custom made armor, with a veal skewer as a spear, riding a roasted piglet \n\n & nbsp;\n\nSo, that's all I have on the subject. I hope I anwser part of your question.\n\n[edit : formatting, wording]", "Considering a redditor made a very well writen answer for medieval cuisine, I'll try to make the same for antiquity. My answer will be centered around Roman cuisine in the proximity of the Gaul between the II th B.C. and the V th century A.D. (And while we're at it you guessed it I'm also french and most of my sources are in french but I believe you can find traduction of my principal primary sources)\n\nI'll examine firstly which sources are available and make  a general overview of the Roman cuisine then I'll go deeper into several group of food products (fruits, milk product, meat, fish, shell fish, fish sauce and Wine/alcohol).\n\nSo first the primary sources. We got a lot of roman texts directly or indirectly talking about food consumption or production. To name a few : **Pliny the Elder** in his \"*Naturalis Historia\",* **Cato the Elder** with \"*De Agri Cultura*\" or **Virgil** in \"*The Georgic\".* Cato is mainly manual for aristocrats on \"How to run and understand a *Villae* (a rural aristocratic habitation with a farm) 101\", **Pliny** make a general overview of the world and therefore include food subject and **Virgil** is a poet. But the ultimate source about roman cuisine is *\"De re coquinaria\"* by **Marcus Gavius Apicius**, it's the one and only roman cookery recipes that went through times right to us. Obviously it got heavily modified through time but thanks to it we can get a general overview of what is roman cuisine. But we got a problem **Apicius** and his successors did not think it was useful to indicate basic info such as the exact quantity of each ingredients or the precise cooking time. But some mad people has gone through the process of experimentating each recipes to find the exact quantity and times. Nedless to say that they gone through a LOT of intoxication and indigestion. They compiled part of their work into a book in french (of course) *\"A la table des anciens: guide de cuisine antique\"* (by **Laure de Chantal**). I cannot also stress enough to immense input of archaeology in this domain : providing many field observation that allow us to draw a more concise view of food production and consumption at ancient time.\n\nSo let's begin with a general overview of the roman cuisine. Her main feature is the huge numbers of ingredients in a recipe (around 10) so we got a cuisine with many flavour, very scented. The most used ingredients are Pepper, *Garum* (I explain what it is below), olive oil, honey and a variety of celery called \"liv\u00e8che\". You can note the absence of salt, it's remplaced by the *garum :* a salted fish sauce. Combined with the wine, thick and perfumed at that time (Roman mixed it with water, Celt doesn't). So we have a roman cuisine almost emetic for our modern taste. For example : preserve sow teat were very popular or the *Patella* which was a dish based on fresh cheese mixed with brains, codfish, chicken liver and numerous spices. Now let's go deeper into some foods products. \n\nFruits at antique times. Production were already based on huge orchard so fruits were pretty popular, they were also considerably smaller and with bigger pits. They also tasted diffrently for example peach were more close to apple than the modern one, or melons were considered as vegetable. In ancient time you can eat plum, sloe, damson, peach, cherry for example. Grape and Olive were absolutly predonderant and at the root of the Roman/Greek culture. Olive were consumed as a fruit and mostly as oil. Olive oil was not only for food, it was also cosmetic, used for light and so on. It was used in almost all aspect of life. So for olive oil and grape/wine it's not a surprise that it existed a wide range of quality and a vast commercial network. Around all the Mediterranean sea 10 to 17 variety of olive tree were cultivated and the most esteemed (according to **Pliny**) was from *Picenum* and costed more than perfume.\n\nMilk itself were not commonly consumed, considered as babaric. And therefore mostly used in cosmetic. Nevertheless cheese were produced and was mainly a rural and familial dishes. Only fresh (no maturing) and flavoured with various spices it was a \"working-class\" dishes, consumed at breakfast. Despite everything we know that Augustus was fond of mozzarella. According to **Pliny** the best cheese came from the region of N\u00eemes in Gaul. \n\nRoman consumed mainly 3 type of meats : beef, pig and sheep (completed with fowl). Hunting wasn't common (around 1% to 2% of total meat). And like olive oil there were a wide range of quality depending on your economic situation. The production was already specialised and organised both for the structure and for the species. One of the best ancient brisket came from the Allobroges territory (Savoy/Dauphin\u00e9). We have the pictures of decadent roman consumming exotic animals such as zebra or pink flamingo. This pictures is not true for most of the time and are an exception when it occurs. \n\nFish were problematic, it's an edible goods that stay fresh for very little time. So the consumption of fish and shellfish were inversely proportional with the distance of the sea. Yet it existed perservation techniques mostly involving salting. Most of the fish were from coastal fishing area so mackerel, anchovy, sardine were mostly consumed. For shellfish : oysters were the most eated. In fact roman eated so much oysters that they began to use theirs shells to make fondation for road or houses. \n\nFish sauces were produced and consumed in industrial quantity with specialised structure and network, Brittany and the mediterranean coast of the Gaul and Hispany (Cartagena notably) were reputed for their prodcuction of fish sauces. There 2 kind of fish sauces : The *garum* (fluid) and the *halec* (solid) there are both the product of the same production line. To make them you take fish part (from bones to head) you put them into a very salted water and you wait. Fish parts auto-digest themselves and don't rot because of the salt. You have now a very aromatic (understand smelly) mix with a liquid part and a solid part that you filter to obtain both *garum* and *halec.* Then you can add whatever you want to flavoured your *garum* or *halec.* I want to insist on the fact that fish sauces were the main ingredient of numerous recipes and was probably the most common and iconic feature of the roman cuisine. Nuoc-m\u00e2m from South-east Asia is very similar to what could be roman fish sauces.\n\nConcerning alcohol, spirits were not a thing since distillation was invented during middle-age. So the percent proof were 16/18 max. Beer, mead were common but wine were THE alcoholic beverage and a is a whole subject in itself (just as olive oil). **Fannette Laubenheimer** wrote a synthesis of beverages in Gaul in his *\"Boire en Gaule\".* \n\nIn conclusion today I Believe we have a pretty good image of what could be the roman cuisine. A very flouvered cuisine with many ingredient thanks to the wide territory and commercial network of Roman Empire. But keep in mind that the picture we get is mostly concerning elites and therefore my affirmations need to be nuanced. Not every inhabitant of the empire had access to fine wine and fish sauces nor have the possibility to make complicated dishes with various ingredients. Keep also in mind that's very ancient times and most plants have since evolved or completely disapered so many recipes are impractical.\n\nHope that my broken English is mostly understandable and that I responded to your question, at least partially.", "There is comparatively less documentation of cooking habits from the Byzantine period as there are for other parts of the ancient and medieval world--the Romans had Apicius and the Greeks Athenaeus to preserve a detailed account of their culinary habits, but the Byzantines never found an equivalent writer (or at least, if there was one, their work did not survive into modernity). As far as I know, no comprehensive study existed in English until 2010. Today, we have Andrew Dalby's *Tastes of Byzantium* which paints a fairly clear picture and consults a healthy variety of the sources that *are* available about daily life in the empire and its cuisine.\n\nThe picture of food in the ancient Greek and Roman world is a fairly clear one. /u/Kaayred covered the Roman world quite well, to touch briefly on the Greek we have a lot of textual evidence discussing culinary life from the period. The 5th century BCE poet Archestratus (called at various times \"the Daedalus of tasty dishes,\" \"the Hesiod of gluttons,\" etc) wrote a poem, now only extant in fragments, called the *Hedypatheia*, which more or less walked a reader through the cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean world. Athenaeus' *Deipnosophistae* is another critical work from around the 3rd century CE which recounts a series of banquets including detailed remarks on the cuisine and recipes. *Deipnosophistae* actually gives us the oldest known recipe with a named author, with the 5th century BCE chef and cookbook author Mithaecus' recipe for the preparation of *tainia* (red bandfish) preserved in the original Doric. Some of these have even lasted into the modern era. Moussaka is actually recounted in ancient Greek cooking, although probably not in the exact same form that it is today.\n\nByzantine food essentially grew out of the shared cultural influences of the Greco-Roman world. The heavily spiced cooking of Rome could be incorporated into the more traditional Greek diet, and near eastern influences were never entirely far either. It was not really comparable to modern Turkish cuisine--the daily food of Constantinople was very fish-heavy and would extensively employ both spices and honey. The 12th century satirical dialogue *Timarion* illustrates the importance of fish to the Constantinopolitan diet; when the protagonist, freshly arrived in Hades, meets his first shade, he is met with the following chain of questions: \"How many mackerel do you get for an obol? Bonitos? Tunnies? Picarels? What\u2019s the price of oil? Wheat and all the rest of it? And I forgot the most important thing: how\u2019s the whitebait catch?\"\n\nDalby produces recipes where he can, but the reality is that there just aren't many of them. The most ambitious is for a one-pot dish called *monokythron* which included \"cabbage, five kinds of fish, fourteen eggs, three kinds of cheese, olive oil, pepper, garlic and sweet wine.\" This particular recipe was preserved in the work of 12th century poet Theodoros Prodromos, and this is how most recipes that he presents are preserved--in random other works such as traveler's accounts, medical texts, etc. \n\nI suspect you will not find this answer as satisfying as the more comprehensive ones available for Rome and medieval France, but I hope it has been at least somewhat illuminating. If you're curious about Byzantium specifically, I do recommend Dalby's work. It's dense and one can learn a lot about not just cooking, but daily life through the variety of sources he pulls in to reconstruct Byzantine cuisine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1aadxo", "title": "Question about the Thugee.\nDid the assassin cult realy exist, or was it an invention of the British empire's propaganda?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1aadxo/question_about_the_thugee_did_the_assassin_cult/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8vk94f"], "score": [10], "text": ["This is a controversial question that doesn't have a simple answer.  What answers historians give have a lot to do with their own understandings of colonialism and since answers to those questions rely on still contentious theoretical debates there will be a lot of disagreement.\n\nThere are a range of views amongst historians.  On one extreme of that range is the positions that thugee was mostly an invention stemming from anxieties about an unknowable indigenous underworld, on the other end there are people who uncritically accept all British claims.  In between there are many people who are interested in analyzing thugee as a real form of banditry that became distorted in the minds of the British.  Personally I find the last option most convincing, but my knowledge isn't deep enough to referee that debate fairly.\n\nIf you're interested in reading a recent work of scholarship that engages with and navigates these debates while offering its own convincing interpretation I'll recommend [this book](_URL_0_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Thuggee-Banditry-Nineteenth-Century-Cambridge-Imperial/dp/0230547176/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_5"]]}
{"q_id": "ac3hb5", "title": "Why did the Byzantines prefer mosaics to sculpture in the previous unified Roman Empire?", "selftext": "There was an artistic shift in the late third century where the features of the sculptures became more stylized with larger eyes and more \"medieval\" features. By Justinian's reign, I only see mosaics.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ac3hb5/why_did_the_byzantines_prefer_mosaics_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed4z6cj"], "score": [3], "text": ["Does iconoclasm have to do with it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "52v3lr", "title": "How good or reliable is Winston Churchill's biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough?", "selftext": "Is it good history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52v3lr/how_good_or_reliable_is_winston_churchills/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7skeik"], "score": [2], "text": ["Historians are generally hesitant to call books by laypeople \"good history.\" I haven't read this book, but it's probably a great way to understand Churchill, especially if you read it alongside some scholarship on him. That said, if you find it interesting, read it! He certainly put a great deal of effort into the, what, four volumes? And he was intelligent, educated, and invested in the story he was telling. That being said, I would probably find it a bit boring.\n\nIf you're interested in the historical period Churchill is writing about, [you might check out this book](_URL_0_). It's written by a historian, but it's intended to be pretty accessible to non-professionals. You should be able to follow citations to less-general work on the period if something catches your interest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=14odBQAAQBAJ&amp;lpg=PA306&amp;dq=restoration%20england&amp;pg=PR9#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "7dmmmn", "title": "How was Britain\u2019s resilience in the Battle Of Britain viewed around the world at the time?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dmmmn/how_was_britains_resilience_in_the_battle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpzefu7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Garry Campion's *The Good Fight: Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few* looks at coverage of the Battle, with the United States being the primary focus from an international perspective. There was a wide perception, after the German invasion of France and British withdrawal from Dunkirk, that Britain could not hold out. This bolstered the position of some American isolationists that it was pointless providing aid, so it was important for British propaganda to try and project strength.\n\nThe early phases of the Battle, being generally inconclusive, attracted relatively little interest; \"Most Americans were more interested in China\u2019s continuing resistance to Japanese invasion\" according to Campion. American correspondents presented neutral or pessimistic views of the fighting using officially published aircraft claims from both sides (almost always considerably higher than actual losses), the *Herald Tribune* published a pessimistic assessment of the RAF's chances from the US Army Air Corps.\n\nAs the Battle progressed the fact that the RAF were continuing to fight and Germany had not launched an invasion gave the Ministry of Information and Air Ministry a strong hand, and the switch of the Luftwaffe from targeting to the RAF to launching large scale raids on London in early September shifted perception in America from a detached fight between air forces to an assault on civilians, a perception bolstered by Ministry of Information films like [London Can Take It] (_URL_0_). A small number of American pilots in the RAF (who had mostly pretended to be Canadian to circumvent American neutrality) also presented propaganda opportunities, the first American-manned Eagle Squadron starting to be formed in September, and several Hollywood films based around the Battle rapidly emerged in 1941 (including *International Squadron* starring Ronald Reagan). Britain's success in the Battle reinforced the position of American politicians in favour of aiding Britain, with the destroyers-for-bases agreement in September signifying the start of more overt support.\n\nCampion also has a shorter section on propaganda across neutral and occupied countries, indicating that Britain's continued survival provided a boost to morale in the latter, and at least gave pause to considerations of strategic plans and alliances with Germany.\n\nFrom the German perspective there isn't really a notion of a separate Battle of Britain distinct from the following Blitz; July 1940 - June 1941 is considered a single campaign, the \"England-War\" or \"England-Attack\" (Overy, *The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1941). The result is seen by some as inconclusive rather than a defeat (e.g. Goering said it was \"a draw\" during interrogation by \"Winkle\" Brown, as did pilot Hans-Ekkehard Bob to James Holland), a distraction from the main event of the invasion of the Soviet Union ([Hitler's pilots shoot down Battle of Britain 'myth'] (_URL_1_))."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/films/london_take.htm", "https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jul/16/theobserver.uknews1"]]}
{"q_id": "62zyy9", "title": "Is it true that homo-/bisexuality was normal/tollerated in islamic countries till 19th century?", "selftext": "So i read exerpts from a book that argues homosexuality was accepted in islam till western intervention.\n\nI read some wikipedia pages about it but it mostly covers various gay kings and such, but i'd like to know how accepted homosexuality was in the general population and how ist was viewed by the clerics.\n\n\n\nSome points that i have read and was curious if they are true or not:\n\n-A lot of historic homoerotic poetry & art are from islamic cultures\n\n-It was common for young man to have sex with other men to prepare them for later heterosexual marriage\n\n-In all of recorded islamic law there was no homophobic sentencing in over 1000 years till 1979\n\n-The sudden shift in attitude towards homosexuality was due to western colonization", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62zyy9/is_it_true_that_homobisexuality_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfq9aag", "dfqt6nq"], "score": [27, 2], "text": ["Check out this thread from 9 months ago: [What lead to the Ottoman Empire decriminalizing homosexuality in 1858? Was there a lot of opposition and controversy around this?](_URL_0_) \n\n/u/PaxOttomanica /u/gamegyro56 /u/thevarsoviana and /u/Groib provide a ton of interesting info in there.", "Hi, do you know if this book specifies what region of the world or what type of Islam it's talking about? Does it refer to Islam generally, or list specific countries or regions?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_lead_to_the_ottoman_empire_decriminalizing/"], []]}
{"q_id": "dakcil", "title": "How did Harald Hadrada die?", "selftext": "So far, all I've found on the Death of Harald Hadrada from a quick Google search was that he died in the Battle of Stamford Bridge, No shit. The only actual explanation of how he died that I could find was that one page (the Civilization wiki, I know it's not the most reliable of sources but I couldn't find any better) that said he was killed by an arrow to the throat, but that can't be true as Harold Godwinson's army had no archers, at least not in the battle of Hastings.\n\nAny answers would be great appreciated.\n\nthanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dakcil/how_did_harald_hadrada_die/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1qv703", "f1r63ah"], "score": [11, 9], "text": ["The source on that is the Saga of Harald Har\u00f0r\u00e1\u00f0a in _Heimskringla_, a work written by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson around 1230 or so, in other words at least a cenury and a half. The [text](_URL_0_) says, in part 96: \n\n >  Haraldr konungr Sigur\u00f0arson var lostinn \u00f6ru \u00ed \u00f3stinn; \u00feat var hans banas\u00e1r (King Harald Sigurdsson was hit by an arrow in the throat; this was his mortal wound)\n\nNotably this is in a prose passage written by Snorri. The text is interspersed with poetry which is older and not written by Snorri, and used by him as a source. (and since it's harder to change poetry without screwing up the verse meter; it's generally thought the poetry sections are relatively unchanged). In other words, the information that he was was hit by an arrow in the throat specifically is an oral tradition Snorri's heard but it's not as reliable as other parts of the story.\n\nNone of the details in Snorri's text can be regarded as definite truths; on the contrary its clear some details are a bit wrong; e.g. \n part 86 makes it out that Harald laid siege to York at Stamford, and generally it seems Snorri assumed the location was much closer to York than it actually is. \n\nSo Snorri (and/or the tradition he drew upon) could definitely be wrong. An obvious source of such an error would be someone getting their Harolds mixed up and drawing on the arrow-to-the-eye that killed Harold Godwinson.", "The simple answer is the the Anglo-Saxons had archers, and used archery in battle. It is very unlikely that Harold Godwinson's army, either at Stamford Bridge or at Hastings, had no archers. The usual Bayeux Tapestry-based story is that the Anglo-Saxons had few archers compared to the Normans, based on only one Anglo-Saxon archer appearing in the Tapestry, compared with many Norman archers. (But also note that it is usually thought that the Normans also used crossbows, and none are shown in the Tapestry, so appearance therein isn't the final word on the presence of weapons at Hastings.)\n\nThus, it's quite possible for Harald to have been killed by an arrow. Whether or not he was killed by an arrow is another story, as discussed by u/Platypuskeeper\n\nThere was recent discussion about Anglo-Saxon archery by u/BRIStoneman and u/Hergrim and myself in _URL_0_ which covers some of the evidence for Anglo-Saxon archery and their use of archers in battle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Sagan_af_Haraldi_har%C3%B0r%C3%A1%C3%B0a"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d76tz2/the_origins_of_the_english_longbow_and_archery_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "31k0za", "title": "Is there no cultural legacy of the Mongol Empire in the Western world?", "selftext": "Has no dish/word/custom survived that would be part of (for instance) my life in Denmark? I tried googling it quickly, and the only thing I found was [one source](_URL_0_) claiming that the word \"bazaar\" is of Mongolian origin. It seems weird if there's nothing else, given my language has many words from Arabic, Latin, Greek and so forth and probably a slew of other things as well.  \n  \nI hope you can help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31k0za/is_there_no_cultural_legacy_of_the_mongol_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq2e6t8", "cq2pytp"], "score": [39, 10], "text": ["Does your country have compasses, printing presses, and gunpowder? Because they came to Europe while the Mongols were in power over the silk route.", "Mongol states closest to Europe adopted local languages (Cuman for the Golden Horde, Persian for Ilkhanate) and abandoned Mongolian. So \"bazaar\" is a Persian word and \"horde\" is Turkic (cf. yurt).\n\nRussian language has several Turkic words that have been adopted during the years of Mongol overlordship, such as the words for money (\u0434\u0435\u043d\u044c\u0433\u0438), border customs (\u0442\u0430\u043c\u043e\u0436\u043d\u044f), postal service (\u044f\u043c, no longer used), treasury (\u043a\u0430\u0437\u043d\u0430), label (\u044f\u0440\u043b\u044b\u043a, originally a khan's executive order).\n\nSource: Vasmer's etymological dictionary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.sras.org/the_effects_of_the_mongol_empire_on_russia"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "80fvop", "title": "Language in Ireland", "selftext": "I was looking at maps and territories from a long time ago and noticed that Ireland was part of the UK for some time. I didn\u2019t know that before. \n\nI\u2019m wondering if Irish was the most commonly spoken official language of Ireland *before* the Act of Union. I know that there are still lots of native Irish speakers, but when and why did people start speaking English? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80fvop/language_in_ireland/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duxnnxs"], "score": [3], "text": ["Irish was the majority mother tongue in Ireland up until the 1800s. There's a few reasons why English was becoming more widely spoken, in brief:\n\n* **British education**: The 'National Schools' instituted in the early 19th century by the British government, who ordered that English only was to be taught right up until 1871. \n\n* **Church and political advice**: The Catholic Church had a monopoly over many aspects of life in Ireland and urged people not to use Irish, and this was done quite effectively through the schools which they run. The Church did not begin to promote worship in Irish until 1914. Political leaders also thought that the Irish language was a backwards part of culture.\n\n* **The Famine of 1842**: The potato blight struck worst rural areas in the west of Ireland, where the Irish language was proportionately most spoken. The eastern and middle parts of Ireland were not affected so badly by the famine, and they had been speaking in the English language since the 16th century in any case. When people were fleeing Ireland during the famine, they weren't speaking Irish. \n\n* **Economic Advantage**: This is one of my favourite arguments from one of Linda Colley's works - a lot of the time in the early United Kingdom, people chose to speak English over the language or dialect which was common in their area for the economic prosperity it might have brung. Thus, with the emigration from Ireland in the 1840s to Great Britain and the United States most commonly, it was sensible to speak English and have your child get into the habit of conversing in it. The perception of Irish as backwards and ancient did not help sustain it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1n86kw", "title": "During the American Civil War, how likely was it that Britain and France would have intervened on the side of the C.S.A.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n86kw/during_the_american_civil_war_how_likely_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccg9k43"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not very likely that either France or Britain would have actually fought the Union army along side the Confederacy even if the CSA had won at Antietam. France was in no position to be fighting a war in the US at the time and the British imported a large about of goods from both northern and southern states. Great Britain was seriously considering recognizing the CSA as a sovereign nation if the South won at Antietam, but more than likely they would have tried to avoid sending soldiers to fight with the Confederacy.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ohdtn", "title": "Could the Anasazi have migrated south and become the Aztecas?", "selftext": "I have been mulling this over in my head all day and have thought it'd be an interesting hypothesis. The Aztecas end up in central Mexico after traveling from where people hahve postulated to be somewhere arid up north. They also share many cultural characteristics. Is this idea possible? Has anyone thought of this before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ohdtn/could_the_anasazi_have_migrated_south_and_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccrzo9w", "ccsgl8i"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["This idea had been kicked around in the past, just as a similar idea had been kicked around of the Mound Builders in the east. Both have been rejected by the archaeological community. \n\nThe Anasazi are one of four major archaeological cultures that contributed the modern nations of the American Southwest--the others being the Hohokam, the Mogollon, and the Patayan. In particular, the Anasazi and the Mogollon were the main predecessors of the modern Pueblo (which is one of the reasons the Anasazi are often referred to as the Ancient / Ancestral Pueblo--the other reason being that it's a exonym given by the Navajo to refer to their enemies which is not appreciated by the Pueblo).\n\nThe Pueblo are a multi-ethnic cultural grouping (briefly united against the Spanish in the late 1600s), and they speak many distinct languages. Of these, only Hop\u00edlavayi (the Hopi language) is in the same language family as Nahuatl (the Aztec language), and the two are only very distantly related; they're both Uto-Aztecan languages, just like English and Farsi are both Indo-European languages. That said, the Tanoan language family, which many of the Pueblo speak, might also be distant relatives to the Uto-Aztecan family. The others, like Keres and  Shiwi'ma (the Zuni language), are isolated languages without known connections to other languages.\n\n >  They also share many cultural characteristics.\n\nOut of curiosity, which of cultural characteristics do you think they share?", "I highly suggest taking a look at this book chapter by Christopher S. Beekman and Alexander F. Christensen titled *Power, Agency, and Identity: Migration and Aftermath in the Mezquital Area of North-Central Mexico* (2011). Your most likely candidate for origins of not only the Toltecs, but the Aztec, may rest in the Bajio area and north of it where ecological constraints brought on upon by a long term drought slowly forced migrants to leave the area to more productive areas.\n\nThe book is titled *Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration* and it is edited by Graciela S. Cabana and Jeffery J. Clark"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1a40ai", "title": "What happened to all the Aircraft Carriers from WW2? How come Russia only has one aircraft carrier despite the Cold War?", "selftext": "Looking at the list of Aircraft Carriers in service, the numbers seemed much lower to me then expected.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nMost perplexing, is how Russia only has one Aircraft Carrier, when I thought the Cold War would have driven them to build at least as many as the United States.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a40ai/what_happened_to_all_the_aircraft_carriers_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8tx4pc", "c8tx4yr", "c8txc9k", "c8tz2lq"], "score": [5, 5, 2, 5], "text": ["Some are lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, most have been scrapped and precious few have been preserved as Museum ships. Four *Essex*-Class carriers, *Hornet, Intrepid, Yorktown, Lexington* have been preserved. It is an exceptionally expensive exercise to preserve a ship of that size.\n\nWhen considering why Russia so few carriers, you must consider national security concerns. Throughout the Cold War, Russian attentions were focussed on mainland Europe, it had military bases set up in Warsaw Pact countries it could fly its aircraft from, what need did it have of floating airports? The US on the other hand was involvng itself in affairs that required the kind of projection of power a Carrier Battle Group commands.\n\nGeographically, look at the United States, to the north is Canada, a staunch ally, to the south, Mexico, a country that never could have hoped to challenge the US militarily even if it had wanted to. Any threats to the US had to come from across the Atlantic or from across the Pacific, Carrier fleets provided a first line of defence. Now compare that to Russia, any threats to the USSR would have come from Western Europe or from China, all connected by land and all capable for being fought by land based aircraft.\n\nHope that helps.", "Lots  of  things happened  to  WWII  era  aircraft  carriers.  Take  the  US  Navy.  It  had  three  pre-war  carriers  survive  the  war.  CV-3  Saratoga  was  used  as  a  target  in  Operation  Crossroads,  an  early  Atomic  bomb  test  at  Bikini  atoll,  in  1946.  CV-4  Ranger  was  scrapped  in  1947.  CV-6  the  Enterprise  was  scrapped  in  1958,  despite  an  effort,  led  by  Admiral  Halsey,  to  save  that  famous  warship  as  a  museum.     \n\nThe  Essex  class  were  24  ships  authorized  in  1940,  with  six  more  ordered  during  the  war.  Twenty-seven  were  eventually  finished,  but  only  fourteen  of  the  Essex  class  actually  saw  service  in  WWII.  Some  of  the  newer  Essex  class  were  used  in  Korea.  Some  of  the  Essex  class  carriers  were  modified  during  the   1950's,  with  angled  flight  decks,  and  bigger  aviation  fuel  tanks,  so  that  they  could  handle  jet  planes.  After  the  US  Navy added  Forestel  class  carriers,  it  began  to  demote  the  converted  Essex  class  carriers  into  Anti-Submarine  Warfare  carriers  or  training  carriers.  Essex  Class  carriers  were  also  the  ships  that  recovered  the  astonauts  in  the  Mercury,  Gemini  and  Apollo  missions  after  they  splashed  down.     \n\nMost  of  the  converted  Essex  class  ships  were  retired  in  the  late  1970s,  but  CV-16  Lexington  lasted  until  1991  as  a  training  aircraft  carrier.  Four  of  them  still  exist  as  museum  ships.  CV-10  Yorktown  in  Charleston  SC ;  CV-13  Intrepid  in  New  York  City ;  CV-12  Hornet  near  Oakland  CA  and  the  CV-16  Lexington  in  Corpus  Christi  TX.      \n\nThe  US  Navy  commisioned  nine  Light  Carriers.  One  was  lost  at  Leyte  Gulf,  CVL-22  Independence  was  expended  as  a  target  at  Bikini  in  1946.  The  Navy  leased  the  CVLs  Belleau  Wood  and  Langley  to  France,  who  named  the  ships  Bois  Belleau  and    Lafayette.  They  transported  planes  to  Indo-China.  Spain  got  the  CVL  Cowpens,  and  after  Spain  bought  a  Harrier  jet  capable  carrier  in the  early  nineties,  the  Cowpens  was  sold  to  a  group  of  WWII  veterens  based  in  New  Orleans.  Unfortunately,  they  could  not  raise  the  money  to  rehabilitate  the  Cowpens,  and  it  was  scrapped  in  2000.  ", "The Soviets built four [*Kiev* class aircraft carriers](_URL_5_) in the 1980's. The expense of maintaining them was too high post Soviet collapse and so they were either sold or scrapped. [One is about to enter service with the Indian Navy](_URL_0_), whose current aircraft carrier was [laid down in 1944 and launched in 1953](_URL_7_). \n\nMany of the Aircraft carriers used by the United States in the early Cold War were heavily modernized, surplus WWII carriers. [USS *Midway*](_URL_3_), for example, was commissioned in September 1945 and didn't leave service until 1992. These carriers were all either scrapped or are now museums, like USS *Intrepid*. All but one carrier we built post WWII is either in commission or laid up. [Here are the post war classes](_URL_8_). So to be clear, we still have four [*Forrestal* class](_URL_2_), two [*Kittyhawk* class](_URL_6_), and the [*John F. Kennedy*](_URL_4_) in reserve either to be made into a museum, scrapped, or reactivated in the event of WWIII. The [USS *America*](_URL_1_) was sunk as a target in 2005. The USS *Enterprise* and all ten *Nimitz* class ships are still in commission, though *Enterprise* is scheduled to be decommissioned later this year. ", "The American Carriers question has been answered rather well so I'll elaborate on the Soviet question.\n\nThe Soviet Navy was the lowest prioritized armed service of the USSR during the Cold War (with the Strategic Rocket Forces, which operated nuclear missiles, as the highest priority) and thus could never afford to develop a large fleet of supercarriers like the United States. Moreover after Stalin (who had planned a fleet of carriers down the line), Khrushchev scaled back military size/spending significantly  as part of a plan to compensate with nuclear capability. Any plans for a large carrier fleet were scraped in favor of submarines, coastal bombers armed with nuclear cruise missiles, and missile-armed fast attack craft, which Khrushchev and his subordinates believed could counter American carrier battlegroups and surface fleet superiority at minimal cost. Overall, the Khrushchev period set Soviet naval development of carriers back significantly.\n\nHowever under Brezhnev and onward which saw a significant revival in Soviet military spending/development, the Soviet navy finally began to slowly employ carriers of their own. The first were two fairly small [Moskva Class] (_URL_1_) Helicopter Carriers, which were primarily designed for anti-submarine warfare. After that came the [Kiev Class] (_URL_0_) which were designed along similar lines to smaller European carriers meant to launch helicopters or small numbers of VTOL aircraft. Due to this limitation, the Kiev Class was mainly used as an anti-submarine helicopter platform. Furthermore, the Kiev Class was also designed to act as a surface combatant itself as opposed to simply a platform for aircraft, and was well-armed with cruise missiles, something that significantly reduced its aircraft carrying capability. However these were still not true fleet carriers like the United States, the Soviet Navy lacked the funding and experience to build such ships right off the bat. All of these factors resulted in the Kiev ships not really being comparable to American carriers in role, size, or capability.\n\nThe 1980's was the true heyday of Soviet Naval development, and thus the first real aircraft carriers of the USSR, the [Admiral Kuznetsov] (_URL_3_) class, were constructed. However again, primarily due to funding, doctrinal differences (even by the 1980's, the Soviet Navy was still primarily employed as a coastal defense force or anti-submarine fleet despite a substantial blue water capability), and a lack of experience with carrier development, the Kuznetsov was dwarfed by American ships and used a ski ramp similar to the British Invincible Class as opposed to any sort of catapult mechanism for aircraft launching. Nonetheless it was the first Soviet carrier design able to launch true fixed-wing fighter aircraft (such as the Su-33 and MiG-29K) and was a significant leap forward for the Soviets. However by the time the USSR collapsed, only one Kuznetsov Class ship had been commissioned and another was only partially completed.\n\nIt should be noted that had the USSR endured longer (to about 1994), the Soviets planned to finally commission two true American-style \"supercarriers\", the [Ulyanovsk](_URL_2_). These ships would have operated nearly 70 aircraft via catapult, all fixed wing Su-33's/MiG-29's as well as AWACS aircraft and anti-submarine helicopters. These would have finally been the culmination in the Soviet Naval leaderships desire to compete with American Fleet Carriers, which was something that had been denied to them throughout the Cold War primarily due to funding, the Ministry of Defense's differing priorities, and a lack of technical experience."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Vikramaditya", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_America_(CV-66\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrestal_class_aircraft_carrier", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Midway_(CV-41\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_(CV-67\\)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_class_aircraft_carrier", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Hawk_class_aircraft_carrier", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INS_Viraat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carrier_classes_of_the_United_States_Navy#Cold_War"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_class_aircraft_carrier", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskva_class", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_aircraft_carrier_Ulyanovsk", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Kuznetsov_class"]]}
{"q_id": "3808vs", "title": "Question about the Croatian Coat of Arms and the Yugoslavian conflict of the 1990s", "selftext": "My understanding is that when Croatian nationalists (namely Franjo Tu\u0111man) came to power in 1989, they insisted on using the Croatian Coat of Arms. \n\nThis inflamed the Serbian minority living within Croatia, as they saw this emblem as the sign of the fascist group, the Usta\u0161e. Considering this group was well-documented for torturing and murdering Serbian civilians because they were \"racially impure\", their reaction was no surprise. It would be similar to a Nazi Swatiska or the Confederate flag in the US. \n\nWhy did Tu\u0111man and his cohorts insist on this symbol? Did Tu\u0111man et al knowingly provoke the Serbs within their borders? Why is this symbol still used today on the Croatian national flag? \n\nFurthermore, what did Josip Broz Tito think of this symbol?\n\nAny more information is appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3808vs/question_about_the_croatian_coat_of_arms_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crrets4"], "score": [2], "text": ["I believe you got two issues mixed up, the old \"first field white or red\" debate on the Croatian coat of arms and the general unease about using Croatian symbols. But let's go from the top:\n\nNationalism was always the greatest issue in Yugoslavia and when the situation in the country started firing up in the early 90s, the individual republics (primarily Slovenia and Croatia) first got wider autonomy from the central party and then had democratic elections and the declarations of independence were considered as part breakup/evolution from Yugoslavia and part renewal of earlier independence.\n\nThe preamble for the Croatian constitution of 1990 listed a dozen historical basis for independence and notably one of them was the Socialist Republic of Croatia (aka Yugoslavia) and the WWII era Antifascist council's decisions *opposite* the Usta\u0161e, which still stands today.\n\nIn light of all the historical reasons, many features of the \"new\" country were derived from old symbols and the coat of arms wasn't an exception. Here we come to what I believe is your confusion.\n\na) There's still a big debate about the coat of arms and to sum it up some people believe the first field should be white and others believe it should be red. As you can see [here](_URL_0_) historically it's been both since the 15th century and the difference is mainly political, with the right wing thinking it should be white and local Serbs thinking it's too close to the Usta\u0161e you mentioned. Note that it was used in Yugoslavia as well so as a symbol it wasn't controversial until politics came in.\n\nb) Franjo Tu\u0111man believed that after nazism and communism the \"new\" Croatia could finally be united and to appease the right wing of the ruling party he used dubious iconography and alluded to the old Nazi puppet regime. This naturally frightened the local Serbs and Milo\u0161evi\u0107's propaganda machine used it to great effect to mobilize them and use for his own purpose. It's still a very heated subject in both Croatia and Serbia with Tu\u0111man himself expressing regret for using such terms.\n\nNow that this is cleared up:\n\n >  Why did Tu\u0111man and his cohorts insist on this symbol?\n\nIt was a legitimate symbol of the country, but Tu\u0111man used radical nationalism as a tool to unite the country before what he saw as an inevitable war. The jury is still out on his role in starting it, but he certainly didn't stop it.\n\n >  Did Tu\u0111man et al knowingly provoke the Serbs within their borders?\n\nYes, but more with speeches and laws than symbols like the coat of arms.\n\n >  Why is this symbol still used today on the Croatian national flag?\n\nAgain, it's a legitimate symbol of a country so the Nazi comparison doesn't stand.\n\n >  Furthermore, what did Josip Broz Tito think of this symbol?\n\nI haven't found any information but since nationalism was suppressed in Yugoslavia, all national symbols were sparsely used. In the end, the red-white checkboard was the official coat of arms of socialist Croatia and as such was used in formal occasions, much like the corresponding Serbian national coat of arms.\n\n**BONUS**\n\nTu\u0111man's idea of a national reconciliation was unsuccessful later but managed to unite the country during the war. He was really in a specific position to do that since he had both left and right wing credentials as a Partisan in WWII and Jugoslav Army general and later Croatian dissident.\n\nThe full coat of arms used today, with the crown, is considered by professionals to be kitsch and historically incorrect. But Tu\u0111man liked the grandiosity. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Croatia#Gallery"]]}
{"q_id": "6jwrd7", "title": "did telephone companies pay to have operators work overnight or did your phone have 'hours' similar to the way television did?", "selftext": "I'm writing a horror story about an operator who works the graveyard shift in the early 1950s. is this realistic?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jwrd7/did_telephone_companies_pay_to_have_operators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dji06lc", "dji3cw3", "djisclb"], "score": [28, 11, 2], "text": ["Is this story set in a big city?\n\nDoes being an operator play into the story?\n\nSo, yes, there were operators working at night in the fifties, especially for international and long distance calling and also running the local exchange in smaller towns.  Local exchanges in the larger cities were doing direct dial by the end of the fifties.  A few small local exchanges stayed manual up to the early nineties.\n", "It depends entirely where in the world the operator is (I'm assuming your story is set in the United States), and in how large a city or other settlement.  By the late 1940s, many major cities in the United States, like New York and Chicago, and even medium-sized cities like Buffalo or Cleveland, had \"round the clock\" (as it was called) telephone service.  However, many smaller towns and cities continued to have only daylight hours telephone service into the early 1960s, especially if the local exchange was operated by a smaller local telephone company rather than by Ma Bell (which was more common in rural areas and towns of 10,000 persons or less)", "OP, in what location and size of settlement is your story taking place?  It's impossible to give a precise and accurate answer without this information.  Extant deployment of telephone technologies in the late 1940s and early 1950s varied greatly between urban and rural markets, with somewhat less variation regionally between urban markets depending on their size and location."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1ozfni", "title": "What parts of the US Constitution were the least controversial?", "selftext": "In US Government classes, teachers often emphasize the points of contention in drafting the Constitution.  Specifically, they point to the apportionment of delegates to the Senate and slavery's three-fifth compromise.  This is useful in highlighting the fact that the document was the result of compromise.\n\nThe Constitutional Convention did not exist in a vacuum.  The fact that there needed to be a convention suggested political turmoil existing under the Articles of Confederation.  Delegates must have agreed extensively on some points found within the Constitution.\n\nWhat parts of the US Constitution were generally agreed to by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention?  Before the finalizing of specific clauses, what part of the framework were the least controversial?\n \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ozfni/what_parts_of_the_us_constitution_were_the_least/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxfzho"], "score": [5], "text": ["[James Madison took a lot of notes during the debates.](_URL_0_)  I don't have a direct answer to your question, but if you don't get any help from this subreddit, I would suggest looking at his notes.  It is the most extensive record of what the delegates actually proposed, debated, and compromised on.  The SCOTUS cites these notes from time to time when making arguments based on the original intent of the founders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/debcont.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "99av9r", "title": "Was Latin commonly spoken in western half of North Africa under Roman rule?", "selftext": "Much of the former Western Roman empire today speak languages descended from Latin (French, Catalan, Portuguese ect) which is a legacy of Roman rule and cultural influence. So while people from places like Morocco and Algeria today primarily speak Arabic, was Latin used by large sections of the population  in those areas under Roman rule?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99av9r/was_latin_commonly_spoken_in_western_half_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4ma4ht"], "score": [3], "text": ["It is famously known that Saint Augustine, Church Father from the late IV^th and early V^th century, was a fluent Latin speaker of Northern African descent, with scholarly consensus on Berber origins. He was famously the bishop of Hippo (modern day Annaba Algeria) but born in Thagaste (same general area). He mentions when he discusses his difficulties to learn Greek (IV, 13) that Latin was not his mother tongue : *La difficult\u00e9 d\u2019apprendre cette langue \u00e9trang\u00e8re assaisonnait de fiel la douce saveur des fables grecques. Pas un mot qui me f\u00fbt connu ; et puis, des menaces terribles de ch\u00e2timents pour me forcer d\u2019apprendre. J\u2019ignorais de m\u00eame le latin au berceau*\n\n\"The difficulty to learn this foreign language embittered the sweet delights of greek tales. Not a word that I knew, and terrible threats of punishments to force me to learn it. I even ignored Latin at first (in the crib)\"\n\nGiven the relatively high status of his family, it is plausible that he acquired fluency in Latin at a very early age : Power considers that his first language is likely to have been latin (Power, Kim (1999) \"Family, Relatives\", pp. 353\u2013354 in *Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia*. Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, ISBN\u00a0978-0-8028-3843-8). Miles Hollingworth \nalso suggests that his family, having acquired Roman citizenship more than a century earlier than his birth and being of high status probably spoke latin primarily or exclusively at home ((2013). *Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography*. Oxford University Press. pp.\u00a051\u201352.)\n\nI remember that in his Confessions (one of the first autobiographical texts in the history of western literature), where he discusses his childhood, he mentions in passing that not only was Latin the lingua franca of the region but there were still speakers of a *lingua punica*, possibly a carthaginian dialect, for instance when he mentions the need for clergymen fluent in the local language to further evangelization of Northern Africa. See for example *Saint Augustin et la survivance de la langue punique*, Courtois, Christian\nComptes rendus des s\u00e9ances de l'Acad\u00e9mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres  Ann\u00e9e 1950  94-3  pp. 305-307.\n\nRemember that the region of modern day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia had been extensively romanized and colonized as early as I^st century BC (before northern Gaul for instance) : there are Roman ruins in the region on a massive scale (the Bardo Antiquities Museum in Tunis has one of the foremost collections of Roman mosaics in the world). Cato (the Younger), whom you may know as a defender of Republican insitutions during the life of J. Caesar, was born and raised in Utica, in northern Tunisia (the ruins of the city can be visited).\n\nIn conclusion, in the 450s, there was probably a widespread use of Latin as a primary language in the middle to upper urban classes in Northern Africa and as a lingua franca, while local languages retained some use in different contexts.\n\nIn the Northern Mediterranean, we know from Gr\u00e9goire de Tours (*Historia Francorum*) that as late as the VIth century there was some survivance of Gaulish, albeit very limited. Modern French has incredibly little words of Gaulish origin (an example is *ruche* which means hive, there are also several toponyms and names of rivers predating the Romans). The difference is that for 1500 more years there was continued cultural influence of Latin (through Church, legal uses in the Middle Ages, etc.) while in Northern Africa it switched abruptly to Arabic at the moment of Muslim conquest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1lyt8w", "title": "In ancient phalanx warfare, how was determined who would fight where in the phalanx?", "selftext": "-", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lyt8w/in_ancient_phalanx_warfare_how_was_determined_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc44p4h", "cc4644y", "cc475sk", "cc49ems", "cc4fuwj"], "score": [17, 7, 6, 11, 5], "text": ["Being in the front row was a big deal. Statues commemorating the dead would mention that the man fought in the front row in battle, for example the [Kroisos Kouros](_URL_0_)\n\n > \u03c3\u03c4\u03b5\u0311\u03b8\u03b9 \u2236 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bf\u1f34\u03ba\u03c4\u03b9\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd \u2236 \u039a\u03c1\u03bf\u03af\u03c3\u03bf \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u1f70 \u03c3\u03b5\u0311\u03bc\u03b1 \u03b8\u03b1\u03bd\u03cc\u03bd\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 \u2236 / \u210e\u03cc\u03bd \u03c0\u03bf\u03c4\u2019 \u1f10\u03bd\u1f76 \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03bc\u03ac\u03c7\u03bf\u03b9\u03c2 \u2236 \u1f44\u03bb\u03b5\u03c3\u03b5 \u03b8\u03bf\u0311\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u2236 \u1f0c\u03c1\u03b5\u03c2.\n > \n > \"Stop and show pity beside the marker of Kroisos, dead, whom, when he was in the front ranks, raging Ares destroyed\".\n\nAlthough you're unlikely to get a definitive answer, the question being shrouded in time, Spartan Olympic champions would be put at the front of the formations (indeed, their only known 'reward' from the state, according to 'Persian Fire' by Tom Holland).", "It depends on what period in Greek history you are referring to.\n\nDuring the Greco-Persian Wars (Early 5th century BC), many Greek city-states held the belief that serving in the army was a duty incumbent upon all free citizens. Those same citizens were expected to purchase their own weapons and armour.\n\nThus, in a general sense, the front ranks were made up of the wealthiest citizens as they could afford to the full hoplite panoply.\n\nThe next point is my own personal belief: since the armies of the Greek city-states were composed of free citizens, I imagine that certain individuals wished to fight in the front rank in order to increase their prestige, both amongst their comrades and at home. This would be beneficial for anyone seeking a political career as they could emphasize how diligently they fulfilled their obligations.", "I'm not sure how AskHistorians feel about the bible, but according to 2 Samuel 11\n\n >  15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.\n\n > 16 And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were.\n\nThis portion of the bible was written maybe a century or so after the formation of the phalanx as a concept in Greek warfare. And we know that the Jewish scholars of the time were often influenced Greek culture and had a tendency to repackage Greek stories as Jewish stories (see the story of 300 retold in Judges 7-8). \n\nThis may not be a direct answer to your question, but I think this quote shows that fighting in the front lines could be seen as an honour or a punishment. This is of course specific to one specific culture, but I think it may be reasonable to state that other cultures in the surrounding area had similar views.", "The most experienced men at the front and rear would shepherd the rest of the phalanx to stay in formation and to actually advance where they were bid, both led and driven.\n\nXenophon, in his _Memorabilia_ (3.1.8), has Sokrates saying:\n\n >  \"\u2026 It is well to understand tactics, too; for there is a wide difference between right and wrong disposition of the troops, just as stones, bricks, timber, and tiles flung together anyhow are useless, whereas when the materials that neither rot and decay, that is, the stones and tiles, are placed at the bottom and the top, and the bricks and timber are put together in the middle, as in building, the result is something of great value, a house, in fact.\"\n\n >  \"Your analogy is perfect, Socrates,\" said the youth; for in war one must put the best man in the van and the rear, and the worst in the center, that they may be led by the van and driven forward by the rearguard.\"\n\nSokrates continues by fitting the front-rankers to the task at hand: the most silver-loving in front when seizing prize money, the most ambitious and honor-loving when facing danger, leading Dionysodoros to state:\n\n >  \"Oh yes: they [ambitious] are the men who will face danger for the sake of glory. About these, now, there is no mystery: they are conspicuous everywhere, and so it is easy to find them.\"\n\nAsklepiodotos, writing in the Hellenistic era, had this to say (3.5-6):\n\n >  We shall not, however, arrange the file as above, but we shall place the strongest in the front rank and behind them the most intelligent, and of the former the file-leaders shall be those who excel in size, strength, and skill; because this line of file-leaders finds the phalanx together and is like the cutting edge of the sword, for which reason the companies, when covered on both flanks by file-leaders, I called double-edged.\n\n >  The second line must also be not much inferior to the first, so that when a file leader falls his comrade behind may move forward and hold the line together; and the file-closers, both those in the files and those attached to larger units, should be men who surpass the rest in presence of mind, the former to hold their own files straight, the latter to keep the battalions in file and rank with one another besides bringing back to position any who may leave their places through fear, and forcing them to close up in case they lock shields.\n\nElsewhere (5.2) he says:\n\n >  And the Macedonians, then say, with this line of spears do not merely terrify the enemy by their appearance, but also embolden every file-leader, protected as he is by the strength of five; while the men in the line behind the fifth, though they cannot extend their spears beyond the front of the phalanx, nevertheless bear forward with their bodies at all events and deprive their comrades in the front ranks of any hope of flight.\n", "This rather depends on whether you are talking about the Phalanx, proper, or the hoplite formation. Phalanx as a logistic term technically refers only to the formations influenced by Philip, or occasionally to those of Epaminondas (this is just a convention that's followed by classicists, although it's starting to fall out of use I believe). Anyway, it's mentioned in our sources that Philip picked the tallest and strongest men to be in the front ranks. Alexander and his successors seem to have used the same policy. Within the Classical Period the armies were citizen levies, with specialized contingents of professional or semi-professional soldiers mixed in (e.g. the Spartiate Similars or the Athenian marines). What seems to be apparent is that the office of file-leader and file-ender were important officer positions, responsible, respectively, for setting an example to the men and maintaining the order of the file. File leaders and enders are some of the only officers that we know of, being documented in the Spartan army and hinted at in the Athenian army, as well as possibly under the army of Epaminondas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroisos_Kouros"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8qw9wq", "title": "Did the ancient Greeks ever realize that pedophilia was wrong? Did they ever have opponents in the society itself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qw9wq/did_the_ancient_greeks_ever_realize_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0ndaa4"], "score": [13], "text": ["The answer really depends on how we consider the question. For instance, if we were to ask whether ancient Greeks in the Classical period considered it automatically wrong to have sexual contact with an individual under the age of say, 18, the answer would be \u201cno\u201d. If we were to ask whether Classical Athenians or Spartans thought it was wrong to have sex with an Athenian or Spartan boy under the age of 18 it would be \u201cyes\u201d, because obviously that would be seen as abusive. But then these same apparently morally concerned men would see nothing wrong with having sex with an enslaved or prostituted male under this age or with marrying a girl in her tweens. Obviously, there is something more complex and alien under the hood of Greek culture, and we are going to have to dig into this if you want an answer to your question.\n\nThere are three main points to consider:\n\nWhen did people grow up in ancient Greece and how does their concept of adulthood compare to ours?\n\nIn what ways did ancient Greeks try to protect youths from abuse?\n\nWhy are these questions important and what do we hope to gain by considering Greek opinions on pedophilia?\n\n#Growing up in ancient Greece\n\nThe first thing we have to unravel is the concept of adulthood and childhood in ancient Greece, because the question itself hinges upon the idea of childhood and transgression against the innocent youth. So what made an adult in ancient Greece?\n\nBroadly speaking, a girl matured when she had her first menses, but she was not really a woman until she married. The term for an unmarried adolescent girl was simply *parthenos*, which implied both youth and virginity, after marriage she was a full-fledged *nymphe*. But students of ancient Greece will realize that the most common term for a fully grown Greek woman is actually *gyne*, which denoted a woman who had a child. \n\nFor an Athenian girl marriage might occur anytime between 12 and 22, but most Athenians married in their mid-teens (14-17). A Spartan girl would marry around 18 or older. The reason for this cultural difference was not made out of respect for the girl\u2019s emotional or developmental maturity, but out of differing rationale relating to maternity and other practical considerations. \n\nFor Athenians marriage was a way of creating a bond between two families, and the bride\u2019s family was compensated with a dowry. This made it important for girls to be married off as soon as possible for financial and at times political reasons. Women in Sparta occupied different societal role as equal inheritors to their brothers. This made arranging marriages easier as grooms could expect that the bride would bring capital into his household. Additionally, the Spartan emphasis on the health and strength of the citizen body contributed to later average age for marriage. This is because the Spartans recognized the medical danger posed to mother\u2019s under a certain age, which include an elevated risk of miscarriage, labour-related mortality, and other complications. As a consequence, Spartan women typically married at slightly later ages when their bodies were fully developed and better able to handle the strain of pregnancy and childbirth.\n\nA boy (*pais*) became an adolescent or young man (*neos*) between the ages of 18 and 20. This was signalled by the appearance of facial hair and the more manlike appearance of his body. The fact that these changes occurred somewhat later than they do in most modern populations has been corroborated by archaeological evidence which suggests that adolescents in antiquity generally reached puberty a few years after their modern counterparts would have due to nutritional and environmental factors. It was only after a youth became a *neos* that they were considered to valid objects of romantic pursuit for other Greek men, and this time frame is hardly incompatible with the age of consent in modern Western countries.\n\nSo for both males and females, the physical signs of puberty signalled their departure from childhood but there were also different rites of passage associated with adulthood. For instance, Athenian girls dedicated their toys and childish possessions to Artemis, the goddess of maidenhood, before they married. Spartan girls had their cropped and were dressed in male clothing to prepare for their marriage. Spartan males over the age of 20 were separated from boys under this age, and were referenced in different terms, and Athenian males also reached certain rites of passage at this time. However, peak maturity for a man was usually placed around age *30*, which is also when most Greek men married.\n\nThis late age of marriage made sense for the aristocracy because of social reasons surrounding a man's peer status and perceived maturity, but for the lower classes it would have been practical to wait for marriage as it allowed time for men to acquire the capital (through inheritance and labour) to sustain a household.\n\n#*Why* age of consent matters in modern society, and why this becomes difficult to make sense of  in ancient Greek society\n\nThe idea behind the concept of pedophilia is complex, but there are two major issues involved. The first is the issue of consent, and the idea that individuals without a certain minimal level of life experience are not capable of making potentially life-changing decisions and are easily manipulated or coerced. The second ties into the first, and is concerned with the potential for individuals with legal power and personal authority over a minor can easily abuse them. Modern societies around the world have created laws to prevent this, with varying levels of success but the central idea that children ought to be protected from sexual abuse is at least given lip service to.\n\nBeing able to understand this framework and the separate legal and moral framework which existed in ancient Greece is essential to deconstructing this question. For instance that central idea that *no* child should be abused under any circumstance seems obvious to us, but was utterly absent from ancient Greece. From helots, to slaves, captives from war, foreigners, and even the lower classes, there were demographics with little or no protection under the law, and no consideration in the eyes of the affluent Greek citizens whose writings survive. This was a society where slaves could be harmed or killed on a whim, where prostitutes were openly and routinely assaulted, and where unwanted infants were abandoned to die or be taken by slavers. \n\nIt was only free individuals who were protected under the law, and even then most of the laws and customs I am going to mention only applied to *citizens* who were themselves often a large minority of the Greek population. What this means is that historians can only make educated assumptions about \"silent\" or poorly represented social strata. For example, it is generally assumed that pederasty was much less common among the lower classes than it was with the aristocracy, but the homoerotic or homosexual relations were nonetheless fairly common. Unfortunately, we do not have the volume of literature or art necessary to really understand the social lives of the statistically average inhabitant of ancient Greece, so instead we talk about the fairly rich people who *did* leave a large mark on the historical record.\n\nWith this in mind, we can take a look at how the ancient Greeks felt about age and consent, including which groups of minors were protected and in what ways.\n\n**Continued Below (1/3)**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fdspce", "title": "Did the Confederacy ever have a plan to annex Maryland or its Eastern Shore?", "selftext": "Obviously the main goal was to secede, but Maryland, being a slave owning state with many confederate sympathizers, remaining in the Union, had to aggravate the CSA, right? With Lee's army marching as far north as Gettysburg, was there ever a discussion as to if secession was solidified, that an attempt to invade and annex Maryland or parts of it with large slave populations like the Eastern Shore would be made?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fdspce/did_the_confederacy_ever_have_a_plan_to_annex/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjl0gjf"], "score": [2], "text": ["They wanted Maryland, expected Maryland to join them, and deluded themselves into thinking that Marylanders preferred the Confederacy but were being held in the Union by the state and federal governments. There was a substantial secessionist minority, but no overwhelming public demand for secession. When Lee invaded Maryland in 1862, he thought his army would be greeted as liberators, but being invaded by the Confederacy only hardened Unionist sentiment there.\n\nAs far as plans to annex anything, the Confederacy had a lot of big ideas about a possible future empire. They never got close to making it happen on account of they never managed to become a country.\n\nStephen Sears' book *Antietam* touches on this."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3elczj", "title": "Was the American prison system ever focused on rehabilitation? If so, what caused the change to focusing on punishment?", "selftext": "Nowadays, American prisons seem generally designed to punish criminals while keeping them separate from the general population.  Was this always the case?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3elczj/was_the_american_prison_system_ever_focused_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctgcyr7"], "score": [17], "text": ["This is a complex question and not really in the realm of US legal history that I have spent the most time in, so I will try to outline the specific limitations of what I am saying as I go along. The short answer is that as part of the systematization of mass incarceration in the 19th century, the United States did initiate a period generally recognized as oriented around rehabilitation when large-scale efforts were undertaken; there are several important caveats to this that I will try to cover shortly. The end of that period is often held to be the 1970s and 1980s, as part of the conservative resurgence that would begin with Nixon (at the national level) and culminate in the Reagan \"revolution\", at which point \"tough on crime\" could be regarded as the new middle ground in American politics. A useful marker is Robert Martinson's 1974 paper *\u2018What Works? \u2013 Questions and Answers about Prison Reform\u2019*, aptly summarized as the birth of the scholarly \"nothing works\" doctrine. While it would be criticized in short order by other scholars and eventually largely withdrawn and corrected by Martinson himself by 1979, the belief that rehabilitation was a failure and could be backed by science became fairly dominant. \n\nOver this entire discussion is the fundamental problem of states vs other states and vs federal law; in some ways, this renders discussion of an \"American\" prison system difficult even with relatively recent history, but in other ways I think your question does get at the heart of some useful generalizations we can make. Just understand that addressing it in this manner is a useful conceit, one that provides us with a model that is necessarily inaccurate both in terms of the ebb and flow and the overall practices in a given state or region. \n\nEarlier, I mentioned the caveats to the notion of a progressive period. First, the markers used for this are the large prisons at Auburn, Sing Sing, etc, built in the 1820s and afterwards. Paradoxically (given the terms of your question) the intent was to *isolate* inmates from society in order to rehabilitate them. This, in addition to the many other potentially problematic \"rehabilitation methods\" of the period, mean that for the modern observer there is a clear tension between intent of the designers and practice as experienced by the inmates. So to look more specifically at how this works: The Sing Sing Correctional facility was regarded as both modern (in keeping with the times, it would turn a profit for the state from prisoner labor) and rehabilitation-oriented (through the Auburn method, regarded as cutting edge means of making bad people behave themselves). Neither of those would likely fit your modern definition of rehabilitation-oriented, particularly as the Auburn method was essentially universal solitary confinement (at night) and flogging-enforced (as well as all kinds of more subtly brutal practices, once flogging went out of style) silence during the workday. And yet in WWI-post WWI era, Sing Sing would in fact transition to something more recognizably rehabilitation-oriented, as a couple of wardens radically changed the prison to match early 20th century progressive ideals, which can still be criticized for all kinds of reasons but were an undeniable improvement in quality of life for inmates (among other things, sports leagues, education, etc). So while that's just one prison, I think it's fair to say that while rehabilitation outcomes were often questionable from the birth of large prisons to the 1970s, the intent of reformers was at least nominally that prisoners be rehabilitated. \n\nSecond, there's the problem of race, Jim Crow, lynching, and a variety of related factors. *Lynching in America* is a useful source here, as it surveys a number of scholarly works in order to provide some interesting and compelling claims about American justice. It's a very dense (in a good way) piece, but my summary would be that *in parallel* with any and all progressive elements during the birth and evolution of mass incarceration, you had a vast extralegal/vigilante brand of \"pure punishment/vengeance\" doctrine in action along primarily racially coded lines in lynching, and it was both popular and tacitly approved, at least at the local level, by authorities. Most interestingly, he alleges that the systematization and standardization of the death penalty in the first half of the 20th century was an effort to co-opt murderous, racist vigilantism as much as anything else, which suggests that in at least a few important ways that for blacks and other minorities the progressive era of prison never really happened. While they are legal scholars and not historians per se, *The New Jim Crow* and *The Collapse of American Criminal Justice* both provide compelling analyses from different legal perspectives for the role of rehabilitation relative to different groups and why that occurred. Finally, from a historical perspective, *Texas Tough* provides an interesting argument that the Jim Crow-rooted Southern approach to punitive justice both endured throughout the so-called progressive period and would eventually become the national model in the 70s and 80s. That \"universalization\" of punitive prison practices is, I think, another useful argument for a significant change even if it inherently refutes the notion of a progressive, rehabilition-oriented American consensus. \n\nThirdly, there is the question of design/intent versus systemic outcomes that may be beyond any particular goals or strategies. That's a good place to talk about the stresses created by the American war on drugs and other policies that derived from \"nothing works\"-related beliefs in the incorrigibility of criminals and the threat that \"soft\" punishments would make them the pace-setters of society. In short, from Nixon's declaration of the war onwards, there's a steady upward trend in the raw number of people targeted for incarceration, often in ideological climates where a concomitant expansion in legal resources pre-incarceration and facilities/strategies during and after incarceration. In short, I would suggest that the raw increase in inmates, coupled with extensive racial and class coding of felon/ex-convict status concentrations in society, provide a systemic feedback loop that subsequent forays into privatization have only enhanced in favor of punishment. There's sort of a chicken and egg problem going, then, where you have to isolate different points in different places and decide which is driving harsher regimes (ideology or numbers) at different times. \n\nThere's a lot that I'm glossing over here, but I hope the general impression of a shift in the 70s and 80s is a useful one.  \n\nAlexander, Michelle, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow. The New Press, 2012.\n\nMiller, Randall M. \u201cLynching in America: Some Context and a Few Comments.\u201d Pennsylvania History 72, no. 3 (October 1, 2005): 275\u201391.\n\nPerkinson, Robert. Texas Tough: The Rise of America\u2019s Prison Empire. First Edition edition. New York: Picador, 2010.\n\nStuntz, William J. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Harvard University Press, 2011.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cboazk", "title": "Question regarding Norse and Slaves", "selftext": "Hi! I'm writting a historical fiction (with emphasis in fiction) novel wich main character is a chinese slave who somehow (working on it) is selled to a norse jarl in Denmark, and then it goes full The Last Samurai style, with the chinese slave embrasing the norse culture and becaming a viking. So, my question is: it would be posible, even for historical fiction? I mean, it would be at least 1% belibable?.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cboazk/question_regarding_norse_and_slaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ethzgqc"], "score": [14], "text": ["I'd call it plausible but not probable.\n\nFirstly, the situation in China is a bit of an issue, as the probability of a westward traveller in the period described is somewhat slim. The 'Viking Age' (if defined as beginning with the Lindisfarne raid in 793) would have encompassed three periods in Chinese dynastic history: the final century of the Tang Dynasty, which collapsed in 907, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, and the early years of the Song Dynasty, which began in 960. During these periods, imperial control was constrained to China proper, and so the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin lay outside Chinese dominion, with the Tang having retreated from Tarim in the 750s-60s thanks to An Lushan's rebellion. This meant that the most viable direct land route west, on which one might be intercepted by the Vikings, was comparatively inaccessible. Gan Ying's ability to travel westward into the Arsacid dominions in search of Rome in the late 1st century was facilitated by Han control of Tarim (he was in fact sent there by the commander of the Tarim garrison), while the Nestorian Christian priest Rabban Bar \u1e62auma was able to set out from Beijing and travel across Europe in the late 13th century by virtue of travelling through regions of Mongol dominion, which at that time extended from China to the Black Sea. That is not to say an intrepid traveller might not be able to pass through, and that some may have done without leaving a trace, but given that other westward travels from China were official dispatches from dynasties holding Central Asian dominions, it is somewhat less probable.\n\nIf our traveller does make it out, however, the geography is more favourable. For a brief period in the former half of the 10th century, there was a significant amount of Viking raiding and trading in the Caspian Sea via the Volga river. Ibn Fa\u1e0dl\u0101n in 921 encountered Viking traders of Slavic slaves (mostly sex slaves) on the Volga, while the Arabic historian Mas'\u016bdi, writing in the early 940s, records a Viking raid in the Caspian in 913. Just as Mas'\u016bdi was writing, another Viking raid happened in the Caspian, this time capturing the city of Bardha'a (now Barda in Azerbaijan) according to the late 10th/early 11th century historian Miskawayh. Rabban Bar \u1e62auma's route took him to Mar\u0101gheh, which is quite a ways inland, but according to Mas'\u016bdi the Vikings got as far as Ardabil, which according to him was three days from the coast, so with any luck our hypothetical private/fugitive traveller could find himself caught in a freak Viking raid on the Caspian coast. The physician Marwaz\u012b, writing in modern-day Turkmenistan in the 1130s, alleges that Viking piracy in the Caspian was still ongoing then, but as the one example he lists is the 943 Bardha'a attack take it at your own peril. The last major specific attack in the Caspian region recorded in Arabic sources seems to be the 965 sack of the Khazar capital of Itil, as recorded by Ibn Hawqal.\n\nIf our traveller does gat raided, how likely would they be enslaved in such a raid? The answer is... not hugely, but plausible in certain conditions. Neither Mas'\u016bdi nor Ibn Hawqal specifically mention enslavement as part of the 913 or 965 attacks, but we could chalk this down to simple brevity. Miskawayh, whose account of the Bardha'a attack is much more detailed, does say that the Viking raiders kept 10,000 captives, robbing and then releasing the men while enslaving  > !and raping! <  the women and boys. These captives were taken after a massacre of many of the other inhabitants, but only after a three-day grace period after capturing the city in which those who wished to leave could. If we can take Miskawayh at his word here, then our hypothetical traveller could have had ample chance to make it out, and if not then they'd be more likely to be killed than captured. If lucky enough to be captured, the traveller would probably be robbed of everything and let go if a man, but if a woman then they would likely be enslaved. As a sex slave, of course, which is not exactly the sort of thing that would make one see Norse culture as somehow especially worthy of emulation.\n\nBut let's assume that our traveller is enslaved irrespective of gender. How likely is it that they'd end up sold to a Danish *jarl*? Again, unlikely, but nonetheless possible. Firstly, slaves were sold internationally, with a major slave market at Hedeby in Jutland and a substantial quantity of slaves being sold to the Islamic world \u2013 as we have mentioned there was Ibn Fa\u1e0dl\u0101n's encounter with Viking slavers on the Volga, while Ibn Hawqal's universal history in 988 notes that the majority of slaves captured from the Franks and of Slavic eunuchs were sold in markets in al-Andalus. In all likelihood an enslaved traveller, particularly one captured on the Caspian rather than in Ruthenia, could find themselves sold off at a different point than Denmark, especially as it was primarily the Swedes who plied the Eastern European rivers. Moreover, as slavery was quite widespread, the likelihood that a *jarl* rather than an ordinary freeman purchased our traveller would be similarly limited. Perhaps our traveller's exotic origin would attract attention \u2013 especially given that they'd likely be a sex slave \u2013 but once again it must be stressed that slaveowning was not just a luxury afforded to high-ranking nobles.\n\nBut can our enslaved traveller end up 'embracing Norse culture and becoming a Viking'? Well, kind of? But not really. A male thrall could be manumitted by various means, but would hold 'freedman' status, marking them below normal freemen, along with two generations of their descendants. In all likelihood one was not going to be armed to go on the very raids that one had been captured in. However, slaves captured from Western Europe and the British Isles do seem to have formed a part of Viking colonisation of Iceland based on genetic studies. Sex slaves, that is, because I should stress again that most Viking slaves captured abroad were female sex slaves.\n\nSo to conclude, I'll grant you your 1% believability, but you'd firstly need to explain why the hell someone who had the resources to make such a journey out of China would do so at a time of political fragmentation within China and powerful nomadic empires in the way, and there's a lot of aspects to do with Viking slavery that you're going to have to grapple with \u2013 particularly the sex slavery."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2r430h", "title": "How were Japanese men and women, who married Koreans, viewed during the Japanese occupation of Korea?", "selftext": "Artist Lee Jung-seop was married to a Japanese woman, and they had children together. How was that viewed? Also, how was the rule of law during this period. Say Lee's wife wanted a devorse, would Lee be fairly treated in court?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r430h/how_were_japanese_men_and_women_who_married/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cne469h"], "score": [2], "text": ["So to understand this, we'll have to understand how the \"normal\" Japanese were viewed in Korea.\n\nThe Japanese government, like the US government during the 19th century, British crown, and several other colonial powers did with their lands, promoted Korea as extremely arable land, offered acres to people who would settle their and \"Japanize\" the population. By 1910 about 173k Japanese people inhabited the Korean peninsula- more than in the United States. These people, despite promises of land, wealth, keeping their Japanese citizenship, etc. were often abandoned. The Japanese government wanted people off the island due to it lacking resources- which was the entire reason the Japanese imperial empire began. Many of those who went to Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and other Japanese \"approved\" areas were poor or criminals and not \"true Japanese\"- which is exactly how the British viewed their white colonial subjects- as not true British gentlemen, and were not cared about. The average ethnic Japanese was not cared for by the Japanese government,the merchants and wealthy business leaders were- but not to the extent they would be if they had succeeded in Japan. Now if the average person intermarried with an ethnic Korean, a couple of things happen. First, it nearly guarantees that the children will not have rights to the land that the original settler(s) were promised. Second, It made the children and partner second-class citizens in a third class colony- and with the only real judges in society being other people, the largest judge would be other ethnic Japanese. Think of how Europeans were viewed if they married Natives/African Americans in the US during the 18th and 19th centuries. Third, on the settlers death, all land, wealth, etc. would be inherited by the Japanese government as opposed to the family (unless there were other ethnic Japanese in which case it would go to them.) The individuals were looked down upon for marrying non-Japanese, but at the same time were looked on with pride for taking pity on the natives, Japanizing them, making them more civil in the sense. They were treated worse than they already were, and their land was taken from them, but it was somewhat encouraged to do so due to it helping eradicate the Korean nationality and identity- which settler-colonialism's goal is."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jxmwv", "title": "Why do Ultra Orthodox or Hassidic Jews dress in old timey clothing?", "selftext": "Also extra question: Why do mizrahi jewish temples have cool neon lights unlike the  the ashkenazi ones", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jxmwv/why_do_ultra_orthodox_or_hassidic_jews_dress_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clg5ufo"], "score": [3], "text": ["While this question is totally appropriate for /r/askhistorians, I think you're much more likely to get an answer in /r/judaism."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4mie5y", "title": "What makes the difference between a figure being mythical/legendary and historical?", "selftext": "In all manner of historical pieces (presented both by scholars and laymen), certain figures are referred to as \"mythical\" or \"historical.\" Characters such as Ragnar Lothbrok, King Arthur, and Emperor Jimmu are usually referred to as such, and which stories about them are factual (and in some cases, if they existed at all) is often a point of debate.\n\nI am interested in knowing what makes some figures widely accepted as having existed, while others are considered \"legendary\" or \"mythical,\" with their existence disputed. I assume this is a matter of the amount, type, and contents of primary sources available on them. What kind of primary source is considered acceptable to lend weight to their existence and what amount or breadth of information is \"enough\" for a figure to become widely accepted as having existed?\n\nI understand that on some level this is a matter of opinion of what each historian might consider sufficient to cause them to lean one way or the other, but I am hoping for some sense of what generally tips the scale. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mie5y/what_makes_the_difference_between_a_figure_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3vzt47"], "score": [17], "text": ["The difference between legendary and historical figures is somewhat vague, but the ideal evidence for the historical existence of a person or ruler would be the existence of contemporaneous textual source material directly related to that person. In practice, historians dial with a variety of texts and materials with varying degrees of credibility and usefulness, and often complex chains of evidence are constructed. \n\nLet me illustrate this with the example of Gilgamesh, who is probably the earliest iconic legendary hero. Gilgamesh was the ruler of Uruk, now considered a \"semi-legendary\" or \"possibly historical\" individual who may have lived roughly in the 26th century BCE. Gilgamesh is mentioned in the [Sumerian King List](_URL_0_),  which is an ancient scholarly composition that contains both mythological accounts (including antediluvian kings ruling thousands of years) as well as historical information that can be more or less verified from other ancient historical documents. In fact, these same sources probably also served as the source material for the scholars who composed the Sumerian King List probably in 18th century BCE. However, it is difficult to determine just which part of the King List are historical, as modern scholars don't have all the same material as the ancient ones, while the ancient scribes clearly misunderstood parts of their source material, to the effect that they place contemporaneous rulers to different eras. In any case, Gilgamesh in the King List is said to be the \"son of a phantom\" and to have ruled for 126 years, so that doesn't exactly help much. \n\nThe actual \"Epic of Gilgamesh\" was composed, partially based on earlier poems and (probably) oral narratives, first in the 18th century BCE; the so-called \"Standard Babylonian\" which is best attested and most well known today was composed sometime in the late 2nd millennium BCE. So by that time, over a thousand years had passed from the time when Gilgamesh may have lived; in terms of content, of course, the Epic is an adventure story with mythological and philosophical implications, with hardly any relevant historical information whatsoever. So that also doesn't help much.\n\nThe most compelling evidence that Gilgamesh was, in fact, a real person has to do with Enmebaragesi of Kish, the father of Aga of Kish, whom Gilgamesh fights a war with in in [Gilgamesh and Aga](_URL_1_), one of those earlier Sumerian poems. Enmebaragesi is also mentioned in the Sumerian King List where he rules for 900 years, so he was previously thought to be a largely mythical figure as well. But as it happens, his name is inscribed on several alabaster fragments, one of which was discovered in the Temple Oval of Khafajah, which dates to about 2700 BCE, which essentially proves that at least Enmebaragesi did in fact exist and rule Kish. While this does not directly prove that Gilgamesh existed, it makes it much more credible, as it makes it quite clear that the Sumerians scholars who composed the King List did in fact have source material dating all the way back to the 27th century, and could very well have had similar material of Gilgamesh as well.\n\nThe Kojiki, from which the account about Emperor Jimmu derives from, is in my admittedly limited understanding a source material that is quite similar to the Sumerian King List; it contains both mythological and historical information, but given its relatively late composition in comparison to the events and stories it describes, it is not by itself a credible source. To verify such stories it'd be necessary to find older material which could somehow corroborate them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr211.htm", "http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.1#"]]}
{"q_id": "1qqjh1", "title": "Was there any James Bondesque type spying done during WWII and the cold war? What I mean is more open fighting, direct assassinations, and much more open use of weaponry.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qqjh1/was_there_any_james_bondesque_type_spying_done/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdfk8t9", "cdfqzq7", "cdg2g9q"], "score": [5, 2, 2], "text": ["The Double Cross book is a very good example of this very thing. (Double-Cross)[_URL_1_]\n\nthis podcast:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nis a good starting point for more information with many first person accounts along with some historians.\n\n\n\n", "I'm not quite sure it qualifies as \"bondesque\", but you could check out _URL_0_, Walter Schellenberg. Basically, he was working for the counter-intelligence by the time he was 29, kidnapped two MI6 agents and tried to kidnap a British Prince...also, he allegedly had an affair with Coco Chanel", "In the book *Ill Met by Moonlight* by W. Stanley Moss, the author recounts how he, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and a small group of Cretan partisans kidnapped the German governor of Crete and spirited him away to British-occupied Egypt. It's a terrific read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/", "http://www.amazon.com/Double-Cross-Story-D-Day-Spies/dp/0307888770/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1384586842&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=double+cross"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Schellenberg"], []]}
{"q_id": "27rrzd", "title": "How important was getting drunk to soldiers in pre-modern eras?", "selftext": "Anecdotally, it seems that modern American military forces have less access to alcohol or drugs than other nations during other time periods.  It's probably quite likely that the modern American \"sober\" military is a product of the \"War on Drugs\" as well as reaction to drug use by soldiers during Vietnam.  I'm sure there are many other reasons that have lead American troops to be, at least ostensibly, a sober force.\n\nAt the same time, Hollywood films often portray pre-modern military forces as crude men as heavily reliant on alcohol as food or ammunition.\n\nMy question, therefore, is how integral was some form of intoxication to soldiers in different eras and cultures?  Alcohol seems to play a pivotal role in preparing soldiers for battle, though the drug's role seems to have waned in recent generations (mimicking the overall US policy towards drugs and alcohol).\n\nI realize this question is quite broad and invites speculation, so I'd ask that you limit your answers to your area of expertise.  In your field, was getting drunk on alcohol a standard part of warfare?  Did it help or hinder in completing military objectives?  Were there long-term psychological effects associated with using alcohol as a short-cut to deal with immediate psychological issues?  That is to say, did getting soldiers drunk on the front lines help them deal with the immediate problems, but create more problems after returning home from the front?\n\nWhile I'd like to open this question to substance abuse in general, I really want to restrict it to alcohol for the time being.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27rrzd/how_important_was_getting_drunk_to_soldiers_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4389x", "ci4h7gf", "ci4sdkf"], "score": [9, 3, 3], "text": ["In the Vasa Museum in Sweden I remember seeing a set of instructions containing a list of rations each man would recieve, and this list included an alcohol beverage. Should fighing be expected, the rations were the same, but the amount of alcohol was doubled.", " >  I'm sure there are many other reasons that have lead American troops to be, at least ostensibly, a sober force.\n\nThe US military is *not* sober by any stretch of any imagination, at least in garrison.  Overseas, yeah, alcohol is strictly prohibited (because drunk soldiers on guard is really, really, really not good practice), but on base?  Good *lord* does booze get downed.  When I was at Bragg, I was never more than a ten minute walk from any barracks to any place where I could get a fifth of gin for under 10 dollars.  I drank a *lot* of gin.  I know of exactly one person who was teetotal during my time of service.  Hell, even the Mormon in my battery was drunk from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.  PT is filled with hungover people suffering through it.  \n\nAt my initial inprocessing before basic, a sergeant asked the group who drank.  \"Those of you who don't--you'll learn.\"  You do learn.  You learn to drink, because that is all you *can* do for recreation quite often, and the unnecessary bullshit is tolerable somewhat if you get blitzed that night.\n\nThe US military is filled with raging alcoholics, bottom to top.  Commands rarely do more than desultory attempts to stifle it, because *everyone* under their command drinks.  I've seen CSMs give soldiers they knew to be underage beer at certain events.  The battalion commander was right there, handing beers out as well.  Liquor is the bond that soldiers in garrison share with each other, and drunken antics are the cause of every commander's headache and premature grey hair.\n", "During WW1 French soldiers had three types of ration :\n\n-the normal ones that were distributed everyday when in garrison it was made of fresh aliments and was supposed to be consumed within the day of the distribution.\n\n-the \"strong\" ones that were distributed during combat and were slightly improved but still consisted of frehs aliments and supposed to be consumed within the day.\n\n-the reserve ones the soldiers always kept on them in case they could not be supplied with fresh products, the soldiers were forbidden to touch it without orders.\n\nThe normal and \"strong\" ones were composed of lard, bread, dry vegetables or rice, coffe, sugar, salt and half a liter of wine, generally called \"pinard\", \"holy pinard\" or \"pater pinard\" (\"pater pinard\" was a mock god the poilus would pray to so they never run out of wine) by the men. All that for one day. Soldiers would sometimes receive an additional ration of wine, they generally hated when it was the case as it generally meant a big assault was planned sometimes in the day.\n\nThe reserve rations included some \"war bread\" (basically bread that did not go bad, soldiers would generally complain that it was because it was never good to begin with), canned meat, sugar, coffee, dried fruits, dehydrated soup, chocolate and about 60 ml of rum or eau de vie, once again it was for one day. \n\nAs you can see alcohol was definitly a part of the soldier's everyday rations and the logisticians always made sure the soldiers had an additional ration of \"liquid courage\" before any major assault. The goal was not to have wasted soldiers but only to make them bolder and less subject to fear.\n\nThe \"pinard\" also had a propaganda purpose and represented the drink of civilized peoples ( resulting from honest earthly labor) and as a symbol of France. In propaganda, the French soldiers were often depicted as happy soldiers drinking some wine between brothers in arms in a convivial way (here, sharing his wine with a British soldier _URL_0_) while the German soldiers (\"boches\" in the French trench slang) were generally depicted as drunkards barbarians getting blind drunk on \"schnapps\" just for the sake of it.\n\nRelated books : \n\n*Paroles de poilus*, it is a book regrouping original letters of poilus sent to their families during the first world war. It is an incredibly interesting book as it gives a first hand testimony of life in the trenches.\n\n*Les poilus* by Pierre Miquel\n\n*Mourir \u00e0 Verdun* by Pierre Miquel"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinard_(vin)#mediaviewer/Fichier:Lucien_M%C3%A9tivet.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "8shcv7", "title": "How do medievalists go about finding manuscripts?", "selftext": "I have been doing various forms of postgraduate study for a while now and yet there's still one problem which presents itself which I'm too embarrassed to ask my colleagues. There are a vast number of unedited manuscripts out there. Some are thankfully mentioned in catalogues, but it isn't always clear what they actually deal with.\n\nI spend hours trawling through footnotes, bibliographies and catalogues that it seems I'll never stop, and along the way I gain the sense I'll never find anything original.\n\nHow do you, as historians, go about finding the resources that you need?\n\nEdit: I intended this as a rather meta question about research methods, but if it isn't suitable for this subreddit I do apologise.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8shcv7/how_do_medievalists_go_about_finding_manuscripts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0zh3qm"], "score": [20], "text": ["Not certain that this post will stay up, as it's not really a question about the human past or a meta-question about the /r/AskHistorians. But here's a reply anyway, because it's worth talking about!\n\n >  I'll never find anything original\n\nNot true! Here I'm assuming by 'original' you mean something which has received no scholarly attention. You'll be hard-pressed to find much untreated material in footnotes or bibliographies, as manuscripts generally show up there when they're being treated. Catalogues are a different story, but it can be difficult to know how to distill what you're reading into something useful. If your driving goal is to look at something as of yet untreated, printed materials like these will be difficult.\n\nAt the end of the day, you will want to get to an archive. While there are a good number of resources being digitized these days, some of which have not been treated (the ones I know best are early modern, unfortunately), the greater share have been in some way accounted for. Getting to an archive is your best bet, but you will face challenges depending on geography. If you are based in North America, for example, there will be significantly fewer unexamined medieval holdings than if you were based somewhere in Europe, where they didn't have to travel in the same way. That's not saying there aren't unexamined manuscripts elsewhere, but your odds are better in the areas they accumulated.\n\nThere are two steps I can recommend you. First, talk to an archivist. Ask them if there's anything they know of they'd wish someone would take a look at. While learning Middle French, I came into a conference paper this way: I asked an archivist at a nearby institution if he had anything interesting in Middle French he wished someone would examine, and it just so happened he did! Through my work, he got to know his holdings better, and I got to practice my languages and write a paper.\n\nThe second step is to find a topic which interests you and read deeply in the literature until you figure our where the primary source material is originating. Sometimes, this is easy: most information about medieval Bern will be in Bernese archives, for example. Figure out where people go to research a topic and then go kick around there, if you can. Chances are, either through talking with the archivist or digging for yourself, you'll come across something of interest.\n\nLike I said, all this can be hard to do from a distance. If your interests can stretch into the early modern period, I'd be glad to point you to some digitized manuscripts, many of which have seen no work. As a bonus, most of them are printed! So much easier on the eyes...\n\nUnfortunately, the above is personal experience, which is a mediocre source. In the interest of maintaining decorum and citing some sources, let me add a resource of two:\n\n[AHA Resources for Historical Research](_URL_0_)\n\n[A Survival Guide to Archival Research](_URL_2_)\n\n[Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research](_URL_1_) by the Society of American Archivists"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/professional-life/resources-for-historical-researchers", "https://www2.archivists.org/book/export/html/14460", "https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2004/a-survival-guide-to-archival-research"]]}
{"q_id": "8gubns", "title": "What was the North African Landscape like before desertification in antiquity?", "selftext": "Nowadays, lots of Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria are inhospitable on account of the progressive desertification of North Africa, but in the ancient world, these were quite rich areas; wikipedia [which is always *totally* reliable, I know] says there are archaeological finds that confirm large scale habitation in now hostile terrain.  What was the terrain like in say Libya during the Roman empire?  It doesn't seem like it would have any rivers draining the area; was it just a coastal plain?  Did they just rely on rainwater for growing crops?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gubns/what_was_the_north_african_landscape_like_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyfnj8t"], "score": [3], "text": ["You\u2019ll probably get good answers in r/AskScience as well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "40r8zz", "title": "What's the deal with Mein Kampf's copyright outside of Germany?", "selftext": "There's much journalistic hay being made over the [recent republication of Mein Kampf in Germany](_URL_1_) as Adolf Hitler's bestselling work of epic fantasy hurtles towards public domain status.\n\nAll of these articles mention that copyright was held by the state of Bavaria in the aftermath of World War II, but - anecdotally - the book has clearly remained in publication and I can only assume that it was in print prior to 1996 (our noble cut-off point). \n\nHere's [a bunch on Amazon](_URL_0_) for a start.\n\nSo, post-World War II was the copyright simply not respected? Or were there existing licensees that merely continued to publish as was their legal right? Or are there other factors that are relevant?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40r8zz/whats_the_deal_with_mein_kampfs_copyright_outside/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cywh7xy"], "score": [2], "text": ["For the US that question is easy to answer:\n\nThe US government seized the copyright in 1942 under the Trading with the enemy act and sold in 1979 to Houghton Mifflin which is the current US publisher of Mein Kampf.\n\nIn the EU and other parts of the world the situation is a bit more difficult but in several countries the copyright from before WWII is still in effect when the book was published in translation there. Also in some countries, it is easy to find unlicensed reprints from the internet or other sources since the state of Bavaria spends little time and resources on pursuing court cases concerning the copy right. This has certainly to do with them being rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. I mean, the new commented edition just came out but with only a print of about 4000 copies and so it was sold out immediately with the pre-orders alone."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=mein+kampf", "http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/12/the-guardian-view-on-mein-kampf-a-good-new-edition-of-a-very-bad-old-book"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "75w3hk", "title": "The British army used to be famous the world over as \"Red Coats\". When and how did the uniform come about, and when and why did it disappear?", "selftext": "This was the case for at least several hundred years, from the American Revolution up to Victorian times, and the Red Uniform was in use throughout the Empire. By the time of World War I the Red Coat was no longer prevalent. \n\nI'm aware that some units of the British army still wear red when undertaking ceremonial duty, however, it is never worn in the field anymore as far as I can tell. Is it simply down to practical issues? I.e. trying not to stand out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75w3hk/the_british_army_used_to_be_famous_the_world_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doa8twm"], "score": [13], "text": ["So, a couple things here: the red coats and the standardization of the military, which are not necessarily exclusive to each other.\n\nWith the widespread use of black powder on the battlefield it became important to avoid friendly fire and part of this was to wear easily identifiable colors. The British opted for madder red for their regular infantry as it was a cheap and recognizable color. Officers, who paid for their own uniforms, wore scarlet red derived from the cochineal beetle and was very expensive (at by the time of the American War of Independence.)\n\nThis practice was phased out in the Victorian era for a couple different reasons. In hotter weather climates, like Africa, heavy wool coats were not very desirable and the British switched to khaki hot weather uniforms (after being exposed to the fabric in India) and this trend continued into WWI with the British actually being among the very first to adopt drab uniforms suited to the trenches of Western Europe. \n\nNow, the standardization of the military is slightly different. Keep in mind that not everyone in the British army wore red. For example, the Royal Artillery wore blue coats with red facings in a style very similar to what people perceive American infantry of the time. In fact, both British and American artillery wore almost identical uniforms and some American infantry regiments were wearing red coast as well! What we know is that each regiment, on both sides, were prescribed a color combination of coat and facings/cuff colors with the British also using regimental lace around the buttons. The practice of regimental lace is still prominent going into the Zulu wars but not after their uniform reform when it is replaced by shoulder insignia. \n\nFinally, red coats are not exclusive to the British in the Old World either. Both the Spanish and the Portuguese would outfit their regular infantry with red coats, and some Frenchmen would be seen fighting in their small clothes, which included a solid red sleeved vest (basically a coat) in North America against the British so now one must take into account a cockade. A cockade was worn in your hat and the combination of the cockade and coat would identify you, at a glance, with your nation. The British, at least in the 1750s wore black, the French wore white and the Americans (in the 1770s) were wearing a combination black/white. \n\nSo, long story short, red coats were worn widely from the early to mid-1600s (sources vary) to about the 1880s. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "snx92", "title": "Why did Truman decide against using nuclear weapons in the Korean War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/snx92/why_did_truman_decide_against_using_nuclear/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4finj6", "c4fiztb", "c4fml4t"], "score": [13, 18, 2], "text": ["His explicit reason was retaliation from the Soviet Union, which he thought was very liable to invade Europe at any time.", "As douglasmacarthur pointed out here already (and, of all people, he *should* know) Truman's explicit reason was the fear of retaliation from the USSR.\n\nAs soon as China entered the foray, the diplomatic situation changed immensely. It was assumed that, though without the presence of Soviet personnel on the field of battle, that Kim Il-Sung must have received at least permission from Stalin to invade the South. That fact has since been confirmed in de-classified Soviet documents. When Chinese soldiers first appeared in force [first time *in force* being the operative term] at the Chosin Reservoir, eventually leading to the total and, as it happened, permanent withdrawal of UN troops from North Korean territory, it was presumed that diplomatic ties between the USSR and China were strong enough that a military attack on Chinese territory would precipitate a retaliation from the USSR. \n\nAlso, Truman had his top General publicly criticising his policy and advocating for the use of nuclear weapons. In fact after a particular statement of MacArthur's was read on the floor of the House of Representatives, orders of authorisation were drafted for MacArthur to use nuclear weapons on Chinese targets. Truman wasn't happy. While not strictly insubordinate, MacArthur was intentionally pushing buttons that wound up with him being relieved of his position. It turned out to be another unpopular move for an already unpopular Truman, but it was also a kind of symbolic commitment to the indefinite continuation of his policy of limited war, which has in fact continued indefinitely.", "Let's not forget, Truman was not exactly thrilled by the idea of bombing a second Asian country within a decade. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tt1di", "title": "Did monotheism in East African religion develop independently of influence from Christian Ethiopia or Muslim traders/settlers on the coast? How far back were East African tribal religions monotheistic?", "selftext": "I should clarify that when I say \"East Africa\", I'm talking of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi specifically. My experience is in Kenya, where most (if not all?) traditional belief systems have one god.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tt1di/did_monotheism_in_east_african_religion_develop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cebjcpz"], "score": [2], "text": ["You might have more luck in /r/askanthropology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9f17h6", "title": "How did ancient civilisations (Ancient Greek, Romans for example) trade using different currencies? Was there a rate of exchange between their different currencies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9f17h6/how_did_ancient_civilisations_ancient_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5tzg75"], "score": [16], "text": ["I\u2019ll mainly be talking about the Greek world here as this is as far as my ancient numismatic knowledge extends. \n\nWe have to keep in mind that as many of these currencies were stamped gold and silver coins, there was nominally no particular exchange rate - instead of doing conversions all you needed to do was weigh the sum total of silver and/or gold, with the only exchange rate being the 1:10 rate between the two metals. As an added bonus, the two predominant weight standards during the Classical period were based on either the roughly 18g tetradrachm or the roughly 9g stater, which further simplified matters.\n\nThings get interesting, though, when the Hellenistic period rolls around. Fiat currency, where the monetary value of a piece of currency exceeds its intrinsic value, had been around since the end of the Peloponnesian War, when silver shortage in Athens led to the minting of silver plated bronze obols, although there was little confidence in the coins as demonstrated by a brief lament in Aristophanes\u2019 *Frogs*. However, bronze coins of up to tetradrachm weight could be found all across Hellenistic Anatolia, and by no means restricted to their place of minting, with coins \u2013 of the same weight-standard, of course \u2013 travelling tens of miles from their towns of origin.\n\nHowever, states could also deliberately mess with the value of silver for their own purposes. Anatolia was also the source of the \u2018cistophoric\u2019 tetradrachm (so named for the image of a snake in a basket adorning its reverse side) which had the claimed value of a tetradrachm despite only a tridrachm\u2019s weight in silver. The Ptolemies, possessing no precious metals of their own, deliberately used distinct coin weights and \u2013 even more unusually \u2013 a distinct gold-silver exchange rate to prevent outflow of currency, limiting exchange in previous metals to bullion.\n\nMy main source was Peter Thonemann, *The Hellenistic World Using Coins as Sources* (2016)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1o5ctq", "title": "Who and when came up with marking the birth of jesus as the year 0 ?", "selftext": "and how did the people react to it ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o5ctq/who_and_when_came_up_with_marking_the_birth_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccp5y8f"], "score": [5], "text": ["Firstly, there is no year zero in the BC/AD year-numbering system. The year that Jesus was born (supposedly - more about that below) is the year 1 Anno Domini (\"in the Year of the Lord\"). The year before that is the year 1 Before Christ. There is no year 0.\n\nHaving gotten that out of the way... :)\n\nIt all started with a monk called Dionysius Exiguus, about 1,500 years ago.\n\nDionysius was working on [a better way to keep track of when Easter fell each year](_URL_1_). As part of this, he decided he wanted a better year-numbering system.\n\nSo, he decided to start counting years from Jesus Christ's birth. He calculated that Christ had been born 525 years before the year he was doing this work. So, Dionysius called his current year, 525 In The Year of Our Lord - in Latin, \"[Anno Domini](_URL_0_)\".\n\nMostly, there wasn't a reaction to this. People didn't know about it: for a long while, this system was used only by people like Dionysius, who were calculating Easter. But, gradually, more and more people started using it. The historian the Venerable Bede used it a couple of centuries later in his historical works. Bede also added the idea of counting the years backward before Christ's birth, starting at 1.\n\nCharlemagne used it in his Holy Roman Empire, which made it more well-known across Europe. \n\nThe Catholic Church picked it up a few hundred years after that.\n\nAnd so on.\n\n*By the way, Dionysius got it wrong - we now believe that Christ was probably born about 4 to 7 years earlier than he calculated. Therefore, the current year should be more like 2016AD - 2019AD (assuming we want to continue with his calendar).*\n\nThe rest of the world got the Anno Domini system from the Europeans, who took it with them when they went out colonising and conquering territories all over the globe. Eventually, it reached critical mass - so many countries were using it either as their official calendar, or as an unofficial alternative, that it was more convenient for the hold-outs to switch over. So, during the 1800s and 1900s, many non-European countries adopted the Gregorian calendar and its Anno Domini numbering system, so that it became the default world standard.\n\n***\n\nYou may also be interested in the \"[How did the world agree on what year it is?](_URL_2_)\" topic in the Popular Questions page (as linked in the sidebar).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini", "http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/dionysius_exiguus_easter_01.htm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_how_did_the_world_agree_on_what_year_it_is.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "1pbwkl", "title": "What happened to Franz Ferdinand's driver?", "selftext": "The man inadvertently caused one of histories greatest catastrophes and then seemingly disappears from the history books. Who was he and what became of him during and after the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pbwkl/what_happened_to_franz_ferdinands_driver/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd10309", "cd14z8s", "cd167wq"], "score": [90, 6, 11], "text": ["There seem to be very few good sources on this (or maybe I just don't know where to look), but everything I've come across seems to agree on a few details.  \n1. His name was Leopold Loyka (or Lojka)  \n2. In the immediate aftermath, he was the one who had to telegraph Emperors Franz Joseph I and Wilhelm II, as well as the Archduke's children.  \n3. He was later given a sum of money by the Emperor Karl, which he then used to buy an inn.  \n4. He died in Brno in 1926.   \nSources: [An article in Spanish on the Czech national radio station's website](_URL_1_)  \n[The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder that Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans](_URL_0_)\n", "I don't know if it's acceptable to not answer the question, but to point to further reading around the question - if so please let me know, I just want to point to a fascinating book that deals with a lot of the personal stories around this era:\n\nBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West goes deep into the psyche of the region at the time - it talks about the assassination in depth. I don't recall whether it mentions the driver, but if you're interested in this period and region, the book is well worth a read.", "I definitely believe that Leopold Lojka had the greatest unintended influence over modern history.However, to be fair, he was not informed of the change in his route he needed to take after the assassination attempt and subsequently went the wrong way. Leopold only realized his mistake when he was already lost. He then proceeded to reverse in order to go the correct way but stalled his car. Right in front of the cafe one of his attempted assassins just happened to be at. At which point i assume Leopold did the only thing logical in his situation, buy an inn somewhere in Czechoslovakia. Strangely enough the man who tried to kill him in the first attempt, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, failed misserably to kill himself. He took an expired cyanide pill that did not work then jumped into a river that was 4 inches deep.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tQf4AAAAQBAJ", "www.radio.cz/es/rubrica/legados/las-primeras-gotas-de-la-primera-guerra-mundial"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "37cayd", "title": "FEATURE Round-Table | Psychology and History", "selftext": "Often on /r/AskHistorians we see questions that address psychology in history. The most frequent may be variations on whether particular groups (Spartans, Romans, medieval knights) suffered from PTSD. Despite the frequency of this question, it turns out that answering it, and other questions based on psychological assumptions, can present a complicated challenge for historians. This round table is intended to discuss those challenges.\n \nThe field of psychology emerged in the nineteenth century and with it our modern understanding of the mind. Vocabularies of mental health and disorder shape the way that people in western culture think about the human psyche. Modern psychotherapists diagnose patients based on sets of specific criteria outlined in handbooks such as the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (currently the DSM-V). Despite the seeming precision of the DSM, the field as a whole often accepts new diagnoses or re-figures or jettisons old ones. Psychotherapists themselves often take a fluid approach to evaluation. When assessing a patient, they use a dynamic process that usually is focused on interviews with the patient sometimes supplemented by batteries of tests.\n \nHistorians and psychologists are now aware that cultural context can affect both the development of the human mind and the ways individuals understand their own minds. In the past, behaviors and emotions that we would consider to be disordered were often incorporated and accepted into society or, conversely, behaviors that we are coming to accept were pathologized. Even in contemporary psychology, some disorders are recognized as culture-bound syndromes which occur only in specific cultural contexts (anorexia, amok), or are recognized as having [different trajectories or valence](_URL_2_) depending on cultural context.\n \nThis cultural construction has played out many times over the past 150 years or so. PTSD as we currently understand it has [its origins]( _URL_0_) in the mid-nineteenth century when it was identified variously as railway spine, soldier\u2019s heart, nostalgia, or simply as cowardice. It wasn\u2019t until the 1970s that it was fully understood as a response to trauma. The concept of (homo)sexuality was developed by German psychologists in the late nineteenth century, and the [removal of homosexuality from the DSM]( _URL_1_) was one of the earliest goals of the American gay rights movement. Similar revisions, additions, and deletions accompany each new version of the DSM.\n \nHistorical records rarely, if ever, align with our modern tests and in no way replicate an interview with a therapist. Nor do they use the same vocabulary or approach to define symptoms or specific conditions as modern therapists do.\n \nGiven the limitations of the historical record, can historians evaluate mental illness within past historical contexts? What do modern scholars gain from identifying disorders that people in the past may have suffered from? Conversely, how should we evaluate diagnoses and descriptions from within particular cultural contexts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37cayd/feature_roundtable_psychology_and_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crlfyk7", "crlgnvb", "crlhsh2", "crlmj7v", "crlze9b", "crmjbv8", "crmkyt2"], "score": [8, 14, 12, 4, 11, 2, 3], "text": ["I remember one of the more interesting discussions I had with my therapist was the question of whether or not the resulting goals of therapy as it's taught and practiced now were themselves a means for maintaining the mental stability of workers intended for a capitalist system.  Especially considering that the goals were focused on internal adaptation (reducing anxiety) of an external system (the corporate workplace) that could be said as the ultimate cause of stress.\n\nBecause from there, we compared what would be different approaches toward \"mental health\" if one were in a religious society where priests would be the primary \"therapists\" with an eye toward the adherence of a particular dogma or alternately, what if one were in a revolutionary communist society, and how different the advice offered for the channeling of anxieties could be?\n\nSo I guess this goes back into those constant questions about historicism.  Are we to evaluate mental health on the basis of our perceptions of what they should be, or that society's perception of itself?  Or are both perhaps, incomplete in some way?", "Ultimately, psychological diagnosis is one of the ways modern societies make sense of particular sets of behavior, usually behaviors that are seen as problematic in some way. Although these sets of behaviors may have biological and neurological root-causes, the behavior may be interpreted in different ways depending on cultural context, and the interpretations may shift quite dramatically depending on that context. It is tempting for a medievalist, working in a period *long* before the development of psychology, to simply reject psychology as a useful tool. However, a nuanced use of psychology as a way to interpret medieval culture, rather than to diagnose Saint So-and-So, can represent an opportunity to understand medieval culture.\n\nTrying to use psychology presents, I think, two major problems for the historian. The first is whether to adopt a specific diagnosis and try to apply it to the past. The second is how to interpret behavior that we would associate with specific psychological conditions within the cultural context of the past in which it occurred \u2013 whether it is aberrant from our perspective or the perspective of the past.\n\nAs regards specific diagnoses, I have the most reservations about trying to apply modern psychological diagnoses to the Middle Ages. Some historians do indeed attempt to investigate the psychological conditions of historic individuals, but this seems dangerous. Often the accounts that we have of an individual\u2019s psychological state are second or even third hand (and medieval sources are not assessments of the *psychological state* at all). They lack the objectivity of a trained observer, and sometimes the descriptions were written by people who were hostile or overly dedicated to the individual. Rarely if ever are they first person accounts. Further, most historians have no training in the field of psychology, and often approach the subject with the knowledge of intelligent but untrained lay-people. These issues alone are enough to make an attempted diagnosis dangerous. Even though we can surmise that many people in the past did indeed suffer from psychological illness, in the medieval period we do not have the types of information necessary to definitively diagnose a particular individual, so much so that it is almost pointless as a historical exercise.\n\nAdditionally, the goalposts of diagnosis are always being adjusted by the psychiatric community. Most of us would be appalled now to read a profile from the 1960s which identified a historical figure as a sexual deviant based on the criteria for homosexuality laid out in the DSM-II, or a historical paper from 1890 investigating the prevalence of hysteria in twelfth century women. We risk creating similarly dated work, although perhaps not so appalling, trying to apply fairly dynamic psychological diagnoses to the past in any authoritative way.\n\nThe cultural application of psychology is perhaps more fruitful, but the technique is most useful when it\u2019s not attempting to impose modern psychology onto the past. Any medieval historian considering this topic will immediately think of the discussion, going back to the mid-1980s, about *holy anorexia*, *anorexia mirabilis*, or *inedia prodigiosa*. The 1980s saw the publication of two major books on the subject, more or less, of anorexia in the Middle Ages. The first, [*Holy Anorexia*](_URL_0_) by Rudolph Bell, argued that female medieval saints exhibited the symptoms of clinical anorexia. The second Caroline Walker Bynum\u2019s [*Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women*](_URL_1_) looked at some of the same women but contextualized their behavior within contemporary medieval society, rather than explicitly attempting to diagnose any particular saint with anorexia. Although both books were well received, Bynum\u2019s book is regarded as one of the leading pieces of scholarship produced within her generation of medievalists.\n\nBynum\u2019s approach, although not eschewing modern psychology entirely, was one of cultural and historical analysis rather than attempted diagnosis. While Bell in some ways cast the religious aspects of Holy Anorexia as almost incidental to the mental illness, Bynum investigated it as a religious practice \u2013 which is how the young women at the time interpreted it. Rather than attempting to prove a diagnosis, Bynum was able to explain why medieval people celebrated a set of behaviors that we modern people consider disordered. She demonstrates that the young women practicing inedia, most notably Catherine of Siena, were using it as a devotional practice. Inedia represented an extreme form of fasting in which they subverted the desires of the body for the purification of the soul and the service of God. Further, she contextualizes inedia, a uniquely female practice, within the gendered spaces of food and religion in the Middle Ages. Bynum points out that men and women had separate roles surrounding food and religion. Women were specifically responsible for preparing and serving food. Men controlled the religious hierarchy and instructed women in how to be devout, while women meekly participated.\n\nBy participating in fasting, women stepped outside of or even inverted these structures. As Bynum points out,\n\n > In the long course of Western history, economic resources were controlled by husbands, fathers, uncles, or brothers. Yet human beings can renounce, or deny themselves, only that which they control. Thus, in periods such as the later Middle Ages in which world-denial was a favorite religious response, women found it easier to renounce food than anything else.\n\nFurther, by choosing to fast, especially to extremes, the women were able to invert the control that priests usually exerted over religious women. As the men around these women became concerned over the extremes of their fasting, they would be seen as attempting to dampen the devotional fervor of the woman. When the woman continued to deny herself food, she was simply responding to her call to asceticism over the fears and temptations of her male protectors.\n\nAn approach like Bynum\u2019s potentially provides a much more satisfying methodology for addressing questions of psychological disorder in the past. Bell finds himself speculating about hypothalmic lesions, tabulating data pulled out of Saint\u2019s Lives, and ultimately concluding that Holy Anorexia existed as a disease parallel to anorexia nervosa (although he cannot confirm anorexia nervosa as a definitive diagnosis). Bell falls into some of the pitfalls that I suggested above when it comes to analyzing sources. While Saints Lives provide some of the only quasi-biographical information available in great quantity in the Middle Ages, they *are not* in any way psychological profiles. For example, Bell notes that high percentages of his saints had hostile relationships with their parents, but he fails to consider the fact that the hostile family is a trope of the female Saint\u2019s Life. It is impossible to tell which of the descriptions of hostile parents were true indicators of hostile parents and which were examples of biographers relying on typical indicators of saintliness in order to demonstrate the saintliness of their particular subject.\n\nEven if we assume that the underlying neurological causes were the same over time, the culturally determined valences and manifestations of those conditions are what is visible to the historian, not the firing of the neurons.  An approach situated in the culture seems ultimately to be much more useful to the historian. It helps us make sense of what we might otherwise find to be extremely strange behavior. It also helps us pinpoint what specific behaviors people in the past celebrated or feared rather than searching for medieval PTSD or medieval depression. A quest to diagnose medieval PTSD by sussing out any symptoms that we might be able to attribute to the disorder makes us feel better about PTSD in our own time \u2013 but it tells us nothing about how medieval people perceived soldiers, how soldiers interacted with their society, what concerns medieval people had about war or about soldier\u2019s well-being. History is far more interesting when it can uncover and explain the incongruities of the past than when it is impressing our concerns backward onto the past.", "This is somewhat out of my field to a certain extent, but it is tangential and important to my field as a whole, so I am here to talk about how you cannot sexualize history. What do I mean by sexualizing history?\n\nWell, it's quite simple in description but quite complicated in effect. To explain: **you cannot assign sexual identities to groups of people who did not have a societal concept of sexual identity.** \n\nWhat this means is that you cannot call Alexander the Great, for example, homosexual because he was a man who had sex with men. While at first it might seem simple to assign this label to him (a man who has sex with men is obviously a homosexual!), its an invalid and dangerous presupposition because Ancient Greeks, for one, had no concept of sexuality or sexual roles in that manner. Indeed, the concept of heterosexuality and homosexuality were roles and ideas that only devloped in the mid-1800s with the work of pioneering sexologists in Germany [\\(Richard von Krafft-Ebbing](_URL_1_)) and England ([Havelock Ellis](_URL_0_)) and then later showhorned into developing ideas of psychology by Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung. \n\nPeople in pre-1800s times didn't concern themselves with sexuality and categorizing sexuality in the ways that we do, and indeed these 1800s categories come with many presuppositions that we could consider ridiculous today. Krafft-Ebbing, for example, believed that the purpose of sexual desire was for procreation and procreation alone, and that any sexual activity that was fun was very dangerous and a perversion of sex. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuals were created through early use of masturbation. Havelock Ellis was a bit better, because he refused to criminalize or pathologize homosexual relationships:\n\n > I realized that in England, more than in any other country, the law and public opinion combine to place a heavy penal burden and a severe social stigma on the manifestations of an instinct which to those persons who possess it frequently appears natural and normal. It was clear, therefore, that the matter was in special need of elucidation and discussion.\n\nThis refusal quickly lead to the banning and prosecution of his book under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.\n\nSo when you see people discussing how this or that historical figure was gay or straight, I hope it becomes easier to realize that the entire debate is premised on wrong ideas.\n\n", "I am uncomfortable with the description of anorexia as being purely culturally caused because there is a growing body of evidence which points to anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as being co-morbid with autism spectrum disorders and other cognitive processing disorders such as ADHD and OCD.\n\nTo the extent that some autism specialists are now suggesting that ASDs may be as common in girls as they are in boys (the current rates of diagnoses is about 4:1) but that ASD is often missed in girls because it manifests in other ways, such as in eating disorders, rather than through the classic textbook symptoms. (There are also many other reasons why diagnoses might be missed in girls, the key one being the notion that ASD is a typically 'male' condition.)\n\nWhilst it is self-evident that the association of low body weight with success *is* culturally determined and therefore someone driven to seek 'perfection' is much more likely to develop an eating disorder in certain cultural contexts, there is likely not just one cause for these eating disorders, rather in many cases (if not the majority) they probably result from an interplay between biological and cultural factors. \n\nBelow I've linked a relatively small study conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen who is the director of the Autism research centre at Cambridge which explores the links between ASDs and eating disorders in female adolescents. There are other larger scale studies in the literature but I've chosen this one because the methodology and potential short-comings thereof is well explained. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere is also the basic question of access to diagnostics, medical professionals may be less likely to notice a *psychological* cause for malnourishment if they are seeing lots of cases of malnourishment caused through medical or economic problems. The provision of mental health care and diagnostics is generally poor in poorer countries and eating disorders could be being missed because of that, especially since they don't manifest in ways stereotypically associated with severe mental illnesses. \n\n ", "I have a particularly narrow and strong stance on this issue. I'm convinced that it's deeply inaccurate and fundamentally wrong for historians to apply psychological models, disease concepts, and theories that have been developed in the social and cultural context of the 20th/21st Century to periods, places, and cultures where those concepts did not exist.  \n\nSince saying that usually gets me into an argument, let me be clear what I mean about that: I'm not saying that it's incorrect to discuss mental illness in the context of the past, or to discuss the psychological trauma and suffering that people in the past experienced. What I'm saying is that when we take modern understandings and definitions of psychological illness and try to apply them to people in the past, we run the risk of severely distorting history.  \n\nOur modern understanding of psychological illnesses and conditions like PTSD are just that; *understandings* -   they are social and cultural constructions in the same way that genderized and racialized concepts like \"woman\" and \"black\" are.  Just as there's a difference between \"female\" and being \"a woman,\" or between being of African origin and being \"black,\" there's a fundamental distinction between our *concept* of a psychological disease/disorder and the \"actual\" condition that a given individual is suffering from or experiencing.  The former *describes* and gives meaning to the latter, but they are emphatically not the same thing.  To me, it seems incredibly hubristic and inexcusably presentist to assume that we understand the human mind, people in the past, and people in the present so incredibly well that we now know what x person in the past was \"really\" suffering from, based on what we *think* we know about the psychology of people in the present. \n\nThere are a number of big problems with doing this:\n\n- Our understanding/definition of a disease could be wrong, and will almost certainly change.  As the OP points out in this very thread, homosexuality was considered a mental illness a few short decades ago.  The specific disorder that we call PTSD was not \"invented\" (ie: defined as we currently understand it) until the late twentieth century.  Our understanding of disorders like ADD and Autism is constantly changing even today.  History is full of examples ailments which we no longer even believe exist, but which were very real to the people who *thought they were experiencing them* and to the doctors and healers who *treated* that illness in the past.  See the history of [lovesickness](_URL_2_) as a disease for a fascinating example of this.  Clearly, people's ideas about illness and mental illness changes over time - by projecting our own modern notions of a particular (modern) disorder onto people in the past, we are privileging our perspective over everyone else's in history, often in situations where we know very well that our ideas and interpretations wouldn't have made a lick of sense to the people we're studying. \n- Historical records are very very rarely (if ever) detailed or accurate enough for us to draw conclusions or make assumptions about exactly what kind of condition a person in the past was suffering from, let alone to \"diagnose\" them with a modern psychological disorder. No psychologist today would diagnose someone based on such thin evidence, and historians aren't even psychologists; we're kidding ourselves by thinking we can determine whether or not someone in the past was suffering from a specific disorder.\n- Psychological diseases and disorders often have physical or biological causes; but they are also shaped by the culture and environment in which a person lives, or the lived experiences which they've had.  The lines between these different causes of psychological illness are often (if not always) blurred.  As a result, we often have no way of knowing how much illness x (or the *symptoms* of illness x) are a product of biology, of life in our society, or of specific experiences or environments that a specific individual has had.  We can't always (and I'd argue ever) separate the disease from the culture and environment in which person lives - as a result, it's wholly inaccurate to assume that a particular psychological illness is historically constant or unchanging.  Bottom line, we *don't know* and can *never know* if someone who was displaying some of the symptoms of a modern psychological illness in the past had that illness.  The illness as we understand it is very likely shaped by the culture of the people who suffer from it, by the experiences that they have in the modern world, and potentially by *their own or our own understanding of the illness itself.* \n\nAs a historian of childhood, I have had particularly bad experiences with historians who have tried to apply modern notions of psychological illness (and especially of psychological trauma) to the past.  As anyone who knows anything about the history of psychology and psychiatry can tell you, the notion that childhood experiences shape personality, and that childhood trauma can cause psychological illness, is and has been a core component of psychological theory for a very long time.  Well, much of the earliest work on the history of childhood was informed by this perspective; historians like [Llyod Demause](_URL_1_) wrote some of the earliest broad, in-depth explorations of the history of childhood, but they did it through the theoretical lens of what they called *psychohistory:* they believed that we could use psychoanalytic and psychological knowledge about how humans develop and how the mind works to better understand and explain the past.  For those of you who are Dan Carlin fans, his [\"Suffer the Children\"](_URL_0_) episode was based on one of Demause's books.  \n\nBasically, Demause argued that since people have not had the same concept of childhood had we do throughout history, did not always see children as uniquely innocent and vulnerable, and - most importantly -did not always *treat* children as if they were innocent and vulnerable, that this meant that children had been routinely and endemically *abused* throughout the course of human history.  More than that, he argued that we could therefore use modern psychoanalytic and psychological theories about how children respond to abuse *in the present* to explain the actions and the mindset of not just individuals in the past, but *whole past societies.* \n\nHopefully the problems with doing this kind of analysis are pretty clear: Demause was basically bending history to fit his model, rather than starting form the evidence and working towards a theory.  Historians who study the history of childhood have wholly demolished his ideas in more recent years, by focusing on the actual *evidence* from the past about how children were treated, and looking at how they responded to their own environment and experiences.  \n\nThe last thing I'll say in my initial comment here is that studying the very *recent* history of childhood is also one of the things that makes me incredibly cautious about using modern psychological theories and knowledge to interpret the past.  The psychology of childhood and child development has been changing *incredibly* rapidly over the past century or so - it really is not that long ago that widely respected, very authoritative psychologists thought some men turned gay or became delinquents because their mothers were too assertive and not submissive enough to their husbands.  People have said and argued a lot of stuff about child development that is patently crazy from our present perspective - but they've done it surprisingly recently, with a straight face, and won a huge amount of acclaim for doing so.  I'm not saying this to disparage the field of psychology or anything - the point I'm trying to make is simply that *ideas change,* and that psychology is one area of study were theories and disease concepts evolve extremely rapidly.  As historians, we're supposed to be particularly conscious of how much things change over time - it seems fundamentally wrong-headed to me for us to try to argue that things change, but that the human mind and psychological conditions don't - that they are constant and can be applied to other times and cultures.  ", "The rising (or even dominant) paradigm in mental illness lately is neurological, or somatic - stuff that the body is doing or not doing that is affecting the mind and the personality. \n\nI'm thinking of Oliver Sacks writing about [Spalding Gray's depression as a consequence of physical trauma to the brain](_URL_0_) as a recent example of this way of thinking about illness, but it's also present in all kinds of hard research. \n\nI'm curious if this way of looking at mental illness - the biological, pharmacological cause/effect chain - has revealed anything interesting in anyone's historical research. Traces of stimulants found in remains that might have explained a monarch's weird decisions? Scarring on a skull that could shed light on a famous bout of depression? \n\nDoes the bio-psychological help history?", "I realize I'm a little late to the party, but since I'm overseas doing fieldwork and spent yesterday and today outside all day supervising a bulldozer, I'll say it's ok.\n\nIt is very difficult to diagnose any sort of internal or mental or psychological disorder in the distant past.  Prior to writing, we have literally no way of telling if someone was mentally ill or suffered from some form of psychological issue or not. It's not something that can show up in the archaeological record.  All we can see are the material results of people's actions, and often we must interpret these as the actions of a sane, rational-thinking person.  For example, in a number of ancient skulls we see evidence of a practice called trepanation, which it the drilling of a hole into the bone of the skull of a living person to provide relief of some sort.  Now, this practice took place mainly before the development and widespread use of writing, so we have little information about why trepanation would have been administered.  Some scholars have suggested that the practice was used as an early method of treating mental illness or other illnesses of the head (such as migraines), to let the badness out (Nolen-Hoeksema, Abnormal Psychology, 6e, McGraw-Hill Education, 2014). Could it have been to relieve headaches?  Or to release demons that are tormenting a person?  Or are they the same thing?  All we know is that people drilled into other people and many of them survived and the holes were at least partially healed.\n\nSecond,  we must be careful when diagnosing ancient mental illnesses with our modern understanding of the mind and how it works today.  Ancient people had extremely different worldviews from the way we understand the world today.  Superstition and religion played much larger parts in explaining how things worked.  In ancient Assyria, life was difficult, and the entire male population was subject to military service every three years.  A number of them suffered from symptoms they believed were caused by the ghosts of the enemies they had killed during battle.  Modern scholars reconstruct these symptoms as what we today call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Does that mean the ancient people were wrong and we are right?  I don't think so.  We learn so much more about them when we understand what they think is happening, and we can only make a diagnosis from afar, based on whatever symptoms they decide to write down and share with us.  This is very important to remember. We cannot directly diagnose anyone.  Also, conditions were different in the past, and I would be extremely wary of projecting modern stresses into the past.  Cultural dynamics are often very specific to a time and place, and to project the psychological disorders of this time and place into the past is a very tricky thing.  Is PTSD deriving from modern stresses and violence the same disorder that might be caused by ancient stresses and violence?  Are there unique subtleties that distinguish the two?  We will most likely never know.\n\nSo, when the King of Elam's mind \"changed\" after a war, was it PTSD or the ghosts of his enemies?  I say the answer is yes to both.  We must understand the mental illness the way it was perceived in the ancient past, even if it is a diagnosis we think would be horribly wrong to pronounce today.  We also are able to understand the symptoms preserved in ancient writing, and put them in paradigms we ourselves understand in our modern society.  In the end, the outcome of both belief systems is the same.\n\n(Abdul-Hamid, Walid Khalid, and Jamie Hacker Hughes. \"Nothing New under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World.\" Early science and medicine 19.6 (2014): 549-557.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ptsd-civil-wars-hidden-legacy-180953652/?no-ist", "http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/12/homosexuality-came-dsm/", "http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/when-hearing-voices-is-a-good-thing/374863/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo5954712.html", "http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520063297"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing"], ["http://www.molecularautism.com/content/4/1/24"], ["http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-31-blitz-suffer-the-children/", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=PqVXXO6NgCQC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=psychohistory+demause&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=gCtlVcy7HbLbsASy8oGgDQ&amp;ved=0CCsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=mwGNBgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PP2&amp;dq=lovers+and+livers&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=GgplVdurCtPWoASc_YPICA&amp;ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.traumaticbraininjury.net/oliver-sacks-and-spalding-grays-frontal-lobe-injury/"], []]}
{"q_id": "52qq06", "title": "Did the cost of maintaining the Empire outweigh the economic gains made by the British overall?", "selftext": "I read about how Richard Cobden, a member of the  British parliament in 1860 suggested that that it was far better to simply pay the war profiteers a small fraction of the cost of war and to spare the rest of society the burden of fighting and dying.\n  \nSimilarly, Lance.E.Davis and Robert.A. Huttenback concluded in their study that the British as a whole did not benefit economically from the Empire.\n\nSo, I know that a lot of people gained because of the Empire, but was their gain miniscule compared to burden imposed on the ordinary British taxpayers?\n\nEdit - Typos", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52qq06/did_the_cost_of_maintaining_the_empire_outweigh/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7mphoq", "d7mu61o"], "score": [11, 73], "text": ["Are you asking about the Empire (16th century to later 20th) or just about the relations of wars and the Empire. I am a bit confused to exactly what you are asking.", "As most of my usual sources are temporarily unreachable, I'll address the aspects of imperial wealth that I do have sources for.\n\n**The City of London and Empire as Profit by Position**\n\nDavis and Hutchback cite as one example of Empire's relative unimportance the fact that colonial finance did not dominate the capital markets in London. The problem with this is that London's position as the centre of the world's capital markets owed itself partially to empire. The vast reams of information on land, people, and finances produced by imperial pursuits provided prospective overseas investors with more information than they could hope to find in other capital markets [1], which in turn only increased the expertise and capital located in London, and thus made the City the thoroughfare of investment into the entire extra-European world instead of just Britain's own possessions.\n\nThis situation extends itself to many other aspects of Britain's wealth in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The African colonies, for example, may not have contributed much to the balance sheet of the Treasury in hard tax terms. However, their strategic position in relation to the security of the Suez Canal and Cape of Good Hope offered a benefit for the Royal Navy, and thus the British economy as the two major sea routes from Europe to the East were more firmly in British hands, and easier access to their ports offered the British Merchant Marine a competitive advantage that helped British business as a whole.\n\nThen there is the matter of the White Dominions, whose legal and cultural relation to Britain is complicated to say the least, and their \"burden on British taxpayers\" in relation to the trade relationships created. All this to say nothing of the massive Atlantic Economy that the British Empire indirectly created through the United States, both in its origins as a British colony, and the millions in Sterling invested in the country over the course of the Nineteenth Century.\n\nThe Empire's main contribution could thus be argued to be its role in Britain's status as the number one world power and centre of the world economy, but the contribution of that status to Britain's domestic and foreign markets is very hard to quantify. And since it's hard to quantify how much of those markets owe themselves to empire, it's hard to quantify how much or little of the profits of empire really contributed to the wealth of the average Briton. It is much the same problem as trying to quantify the cost-benefit of the military and treaty commitments of the United States in the post-World War II world.\n\n**Tax Burden**\n\nLike the whole project of Empire, its tax burden depends on which part of it is being discussed. The White Dominions for example, *de facto* had their own governments and armies by the First World War. But I want to take this moment to mention the Jewel in the Crown.\n\nThe British Raj, strictly speaking, was not paid for by the British taxpayer. The Raj funded itself through India, and this allowed Whitehall to increase the size of its military commitments without levying extra taxes at home, or even putting the expenses down to the Treasury. Instead, they would order the Raj to raise regiments, and naturally, as part of the Indian Army, the Raj would pay.\n\nIn short, as far as Davis and Huttenback go, I wouldn't dismiss them at all, but I also wouldn't take it as gospel that the average Brit didn't benefit from the Empire. Perhaps they did not in direct profits from the colonies themselves, but perhaps they did in the status and competitive advantages the Empire afforded British enterprise.\n\nHopefully this helped, even if it is far from my finest work, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone with a more complete understanding of *Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire* comes to tear me apart on the whole thing.\n\n[1] - You can see some of the extent of these archival treasure troves simply by going to the National Archives and searching the name of a colony. The amount of documents that will pop up is staggering. For example, the search term [\"Sierra Leone\"](_URL_0_) brings up nearly 18,000 results, including journals and correspondence by governors and maps produced by the Colonial Office for all kinds of purposes.\n\n**Sources**\n\nDarwin, John, *The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970*, (Cambridge, 2010)\n\nCain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. J., *British Imperialism: 1688-2000*, (London, 2002)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_q=sierra+leone"]]}
{"q_id": "1pn1zl", "title": "Were there any atheistic societies or, at the very least, were there any societies that tolerated atheists before the English and Spanish began colonization of the New World?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pn1zl/were_there_any_atheistic_societies_or_at_the_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd40d4s"], "score": [6], "text": ["Hi, while you are waiting for in depth answers you might check the FAQ. The general answer to your question \"Were there any atheistic societies\" seems to be no.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/religion#wiki_were_there_societies_without_religion_and.2For_deities.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "787t9p", "title": "Where can I find a chronological database of WW2 newsreels?", "selftext": "I have looked around quite a lot and found several databases with tons of reels, but to be frank, most of them are a mess and jump from 1946 to 1935, sort of speak.\n\nI know the Allies (and the USA in particular) produced hundreds, if not thousands, of newsreels in the course of the war. Since the military loves order and bureaucracy, I'd half expected to find a clean, ordered (albeit maybe technologically outdated :p ) central database.\n\nAny and all info on such a place is welcome!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/787t9p/where_can_i_find_a_chronological_database_of_ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dorw7n6"], "score": [3], "text": ["You can find a large number of relevant British newsreels, searchable by year, here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.britishpathe.com/search/recordcategories/War++Revolution"]]}
{"q_id": "151pa4", "title": "How and why were the terms Hispanic/Latino created?", "selftext": "Just wondering how they got started because It just doesn't make much sense to me? \n\nAlso why isn't Canada part of Latin America? (if they also speak French there?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/151pa4/how_and_why_were_the_terms_hispaniclatino_created/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ijw75", "c7il9t2"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I had a professor who is Latino and she explained it like this.  A Hispanic is literally a Spanish person not living in Spain but somewhere else.  A Latino is someone of Spanish descent.\n\nMost people use them interchangeably, but some people resent being called Hispanic when they are Latino.", "Just to echo what everyone else said, the term \"Hispanic\" derives from the old Roman name of Spain, Hispania. It is used to denote all Spanish speakers in the Americas, from Mexican mestizos to Afro-Caribbean Dominicans to white Argentines. \n\nAs for Latin America, I see no reason to doubt the Wikipedia definition, where Quebec was included in the original meaning. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xcel1", "title": "What's the oldest instance we know of of business owners advertising -- as in posters, billboards, etc. not on their own place of business?", "selftext": "Business owners also meaning tradesmen, artisans, etc.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xcel1/whats_the_oldest_instance_we_know_of_of_business/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfa5czk", "cfa74z5"], "score": [36, 12], "text": ["Pompeii, which was destroyed in 79CE, has thousands of ads written on the walls of the houses. Graffiti advertising the nearest brothel, candidates for elections, prices at the local baths, and upcoming games etc. Things like \"Once you stay in Gabinius\u2019 hotel you\u2019ll stay there.\" And \"The gladiatorial troop hired by Aulus Seuthus Certus will fight in Pompeii on May 31.There will also be a wild animal hunt. The awnings will be used.\" I don't know if these are the oldest known forms of advertising but they're certainly the oldest I've seen. \n\n\n\n", "[I asked this question 8 months ago, here are the responses.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f6x3q/what_are_the_earliest_known_examples_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "8nc5hg", "title": "Did Akhenaten succumb to Judaic pressure to conform to monotheism?", "selftext": "They key objective of this question is to identify the Pharaoh of the exodus. A popular candidate is Thutmose II who ruled briefly before Akhenaten. Is it possible that Akhenaten got the idea to synthesise the pantheon with monotheism from the events that occured to one of the Pharaohs that ruled before him? And if not Thutmose II, then who? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nc5hg/did_akhenaten_succumb_to_judaic_pressure_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzufe2w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Short answer,  no. \n\nLonger answer, while it is very probable that a group of individuals, who had been held in slavery or sub par conditions in Egypt, later migrated to Palestine and helped form what would become the Israelites, the story in the Biblical account just isn\u2019t accurate. There was most likely no mass slavery of proto-Israelites, and no mass exodus. \n\nThere is debate as to the legitimacy of an Egyptian group at all, but most mainstream scholarship on the origins of the Jewish people argue that what the exodus shows (besides the theological implications) is the remembering of one small group that migrated to Palestine and eventually mixed with other groups, one probably from the Mesopotamia region and another that split off of the Canaanites. These multiple groups merged, and eventually worked to create a unified national epic that contained historical nuggets of all three. \n\nEven if we accepted a mass migration, the Hebrews at that time weren\u2019t really monotheistic. They practiced a form of polytheism called henotheism. And to be fair, some of the early Hebrews also worshipped multiple gods. \n\nA better connection with monotheism would have been Zoroastrianism, which was a dominant force in Persia (or became such. The religion had an origin further back then). There may have been some influence with Egypt but I think that may all be reaching for a solution that isn\u2019t needed. \n\nThe easiest answer is that a monotheistic view isn\u2019t that much of a stretch from polytheism, especially when you place politics with it. It\u2019s an easy way that one can unify a country even more, or it can blow up in your face. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rj6h2", "title": "Is there any historical evidence of organized Satanism before the 19th Century?", "selftext": "I know the Catholic church labeled just about anything they found offensive \"devil worship\" during certain time periods. And of course, there was the Yazidi sect of Islam that venerates an angel called Shytan.\n\nBut I'm more interested in whether or not there were actually people who identified themselves (privately or publicly) as followers of the biblical Lucifer/Satan. Where and when did they live? Were they ever influential? Were they persecuted? Are there any sites we're aware of dating to before the 1800s where there is credible evidence that Satan worship took place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rj6h2/is_there_any_historical_evidence_of_organized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdnsyjg"], "score": [25], "text": ["There was a book published a decade ago about Satanism in the French court in the 17th century that made for rather spine-chilling reading: \"The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV\". \n\nThe affair lead to the execution of dozens and, as I recall, the imprisonment of more still.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14l7jg", "title": "The Choctaw and the trail of tears...", "selftext": "I am working on an assignment for my history class which requires some specific info about the trail of tears, but more specifically the Choctaw. I was wondering if anybody here had any good books, websites, or just info in general it would be greatly appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14l7jg/the_choctaw_and_the_trail_of_tears/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7e5mta"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma discuss [forced relocation](_URL_1_) on their website. [Here](_URL_2_)'s commentary about removal by Len Green in their tribal newpaper, *Bishinik*.\n\nAn interesting side note is that a few short years after their removal to Indian Territory, the Choctaw donated money, blankets, and corn to starving [Irish people](_URL_0_) who were victims on the potato famine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.choctawnation.com/news-room/press-room/media-releases/choctaws-helped-starving-irish-in-1847-this-act-shaped-tribal-culture/", "http://www.choctawnation.com/history/choctaw-nation-history/removal/", "http://www.choctawnation.com/history/choctaw-nation-history/trail-of-tears/"]]}
{"q_id": "53qpba", "title": "What sparked the worldwide explosion in popularity of ninjas in the early 1980s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53qpba/what_sparked_the_worldwide_explosion_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7vpjgt"], "score": [4], "text": ["Japan's economic rise was a major factor since it looked like Japan would become the new global economic powerhouse. This produced a keen interest in Japanese culture with a lot of concepts being popularised in this west, either from Japan itself or immigrant populations.\n\nSecondly the ninja concept was introduced to the US via film as a way of revitalising the Kung Fu movie formula, which was copied by western film makers starting with Enter the Ninja in 1981 which was very influential. Ultimately these kind of movies were cheap to make while the stereotypical ninja suit obscured the actor so stunt doubles didn't need to be so exact. Because of American cultural power the idea of the ninja was spread around the world.\n\nIn addition Japanese culture got a lot more exposure in general with anime exportation and Japan's post 1983 place in the video game industry.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uujh9", "title": "Hey historians! As a French gal I often get told pretty bad jokes about how I should just surrender whenever a challenge comes up. I'd like to know if the jokes are justified and the French were indeed complete idiots, or just something blown out of proportions ", "selftext": "In my school (French) the surrender is rarely mentioned and we mostly only learn about the resistance led by De Gaulle. I'm curious to know the other side's opinion.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uujh9/hey_historians_as_a_french_gal_i_often_get_told/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4yo3go", "c4yo3pl", "c4yo782", "c4yo7ma", "c4yoakv", "c4yobut", "c4yoi85", "c4yoj5g", "c4yojzz", "c4yom75", "c4yos9i", "c4yoxce", "c4yp3hk", "c4yp4ub", "c4yp8rq", "c4ypafe", "c4ypz6g", "c4yqa2l", "c4yqf4f", "c4yqoik", "c4yqwh2", "c4yrlm7", "c4ysdxo", "c4ytdj5", "c4yvb2i", "c4yvitw", "c4yyfuj", "c4yyv5l"], "score": [27, 4, 194, 11, 40, 12, 12, 31, 5, 135, 37, 16, 4, 23, 2, 11, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["I mean, France was really badass.  You don't colonize Africa and go on Napoleonic campaigns without having some military prowess.  This stereotype probably arose post-World Wars just because you guys took a thrashing in each one.  \n\nIf you were really that incompetent, Britain would have taken you over centuries ago", "Not a historian, but maybe this [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) might help.", "France's major surrender, and the one which most people are aware of was in 1940.  Though faced with not much of a choice - the combined German military would have overwhelmed the French defensive forces still left, it was handled in a less than edifying manner by Petain, who acquiesced completely to the German demands once in office.  It's also worth noting, in relation to your knowledge and education in De Gaulle's resistance, that more French nationals fought in the Vichy military against the Allies, than in the Resistance for the Allies.  Basically, the idea of the French as \"surrender monkeys\" stems largely from Petain's humiliating, but damage limiting actions in the Summer of 1940.", "France has won a lot of great victories this is obviously true.\n\nBut it did wind up with foreign troops in Paris in 1814, 1815, 1870 something and 1940.\n\nAnd didn't the English occupy Paris for some 40 years in the 14th century.\n\nOf course there are lots of the usual excuses and exculpations for all of these things, which no doubt will be forthcoming but in the final analysis the fundamentals of certainly the last two hundred years of the record are a bit creaky, in my humble opinion. ", "This was a comment I made in a different post about anti-French sentiment in America:\n\n > As for the French military defeats: Yes....sadly that is a true and fairly common thing in the culture from my experience. There is a misconception of the French as weak and quick to surrender. This most assuredly comes from WWII...or more likely from the POST war years. The quick fall of France to Hitler scared the shit out of England (and the U.S. politicians who were more inclined to intervene), who was now on her own against what seemed an unstoppable foe. Once the war was won, we could look back and make fun of the French defeat safely....no longer shitting our pants at the loss of such an important ally. The US has had it relatively easy with respect to WWI and WWI, we entered late and suffered relatively little compared to our allies. We were there for the end of both wars, and to our way of thinking we were solely responsible for \"saving your asses\" in both cases. This is horribly simplistic and self-centered aggrandizing bullshit...but we do love to think fondly of ourselves after all.\n\n > Of course, anti-French sentiment goes back much farther than WWI...we almost got into a major war with you guys back under the Adams presidency (IIRC, I'm refusing to double check with google on principle, so I may misspeak since it's all from the ol' noggin). Napoleon was a concern for the U.S. (we even tried placating him by going against our newly founded love of liberty and blockaded Haiti during their revolution), albeit a much lesser concern than say for Britain or the Hapsburg states. So anti-French sentiment existed, but more because France was a threat. After we stroked our egos regarding our saving the day during the World Wars, that deeply held sentiment shifted focus from threat to derision. ", "Well most of those jokes are rather unjustified, even though they are funny.  In reality France took very high casualties in the Battle of France.  In a little over one month the French lost over 300,000 soldiers.  Also, Petain and his supporters believed that the Germans were winning the war and thought it would be best if France jumped on the Nazi bandwagon.  They already lost 300,000 people in a month.  De Gaulle didn't recognize Vichy and organized the surviving elements of the French military into the Free French and set up a government in exile in Britain.  So the Germans overran France because of superior strategy and political divisions in France.  ", "France's \"cowardice\" comes almost entirely from world war II. Historically France has one of the most successful military history in the world. Napoleon did almost conquer all of Europe. Charlemagne created the large Frankish empire. Charles \"The Hammer\" Martell was a Frenchman who stopped the Muslims from advancing throughout Europe.  France also won the 100 years war. France did very well in the 30 yeas war. The Normans were French and they conquered England (as just a Duchy taking over an entire Kingdom, talk about embarassing). Norman mercenaries also took over Naples and Sicily under Guiscarde. Normans in general were considered fearsome mercenaries. The Anglo-French war was a decisive French victory.\n\nThese were just some of the French military accomplishments. The French are also largely responsible for that whole Enlightenment thing too. There is nothing to be ashamed of about being French. ", "The contrast with the insanely dogged and determined Russians did not help perceptions of the French. I ran across a great quote when reading Wikipedia about Pavlov's House, a fortified apartment block in Stalingrad during the siege:\n\n*Vasily Chuikov, commanding general of the Soviet forces in Stalingrad, later bragged that the Germans lost more men trying to take Pavlov's house than they did taking Paris, a boast which was false but not far from the truth if the Soviet era casualty figures are to be believed.*\n\n(original article [here](_URL_0_))\n\nIf the Germans really did lose nearly as many people taking a single apartment block in Russia as they did taking the capital of France, it doesn't say a lot for French determination or persistence.", "The \"Cheese eating surrender monkeys\" meme is totally unjustified. Yes, France has had some serious losses in it's history, but it has a long and distinguished military history. When you've been fighting for as long as the French have you are bound to have a few losses. No one looks at Cannae and Teutoburg and exclaims \"Wow, the Romans sure did suck\". The most recent flair up in the run up to the invasion of Iraq is just more French bashing(which rarely fails in the USA).l\n\nAny time someone gives you shit about France and surrender send them [this article by Gary Brecher](_URL_0_).", "You can always tell Americans that our revolutionary war victory would have been far less certain without the help of le French. ", "It is worth noting that the perception that leads to the jokes has a complex history in and of itself, and it does not necessarily begin with WWII.  During the post-war years, i.e. during the Cold War, the US and France had a rather complex relationship.  It would take more space than it's probably worth at this point to explain all the details, but it can be summarized by noting that disagreements over Cold War strategy was the basis of this complexity.  \n\nThis came to a head when France left NATO in 1966 and almost immediately reached out to the Soviet Union in an attempt to develop its own relationship that did not rely on acquiescence to demands from the United States.  In the context of the Cold War, this was perceived as a kind of \"surrender,\" and from this experience, animosity in the United States towards the French exploded.  In popular culture, the French were seen as ungrateful for the US's help in WWII and during the years afterward.", "France's shame was in collaboration, not surrender. The UK was on the verge of surrender before a miraculous escape at Dunkerque. Additionally, *many* other countries collaborated with the Nazis as well, but France was supposed to be Germany's powerful archenemy, so collaboration was seen as especially shameful.", "Vietnam also cemented the image. \n\nThe fact that a once global power had trouble dealing with Vietnamese did not help. \n\nIn frustration they built a huge base at Dien Bien Phu in Northern Vietnam, basically challenging the Viet Minh to come out and get their asses kicked. The Viet Minh did show up. And asses were kicked, but they were French.", "It's blown out of proportion.\n\nThe French basically bore the brunt of the fightimng against the Germans in WW1.\n\nThe French lost an entire generation in that war.  France lost 1.3 million men in a population that was only 39 million. That is a HUGE amount.\n\nThis caused the French birth-rate to crash. The resulting period was called \"The Empty Years\" due to a lack of off-spring. This was 1.3 million men who did not reproduce.\n\nAs such, France did not have the man-power to staff it's military and industries and to stand against the Germans. That was one of the reasons for the defeat.\n\nFor centuries France had been *the* military power on the continent. It basically held off most of Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the Grand Alliance.", "[List of Battles involving France](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's a huge myth that France is a surrender-monkey. Can't find the quote but one historian said something to the effect, \"They know how to fight, and fight well.\"", "[This part of QI is a good adding up of French military victories and defeats.](_URL_0_) In short they won more than they lost, by a long way.", "The French had an empire that lasted for around 300 years and was one of the few countries that could stand up to the British Empire. Regardless of the surrender during WWII, that's pretty impressive. Plus, no one gains and holds an empire without being an incredibly strong military force.", "Worth noting that a fall of the capitol doesn't always mean fall of all armed resistance. Case in point - surrender of Moscow during the Napoleonic invasion.", "Then blame your teacher for not teaching you about the \"phony war\",the post-war purge or how the Gaullists built up the myth of a France full of \"R\u00e9sistants\". These are aspects that are not overlooked and are supposed to be studied (or at least mentioned) in high-school. \n\nJust to say that we French don't only learn about our \"positive actions\" in our schools ,but also about our less glorious ones. At least when it comes to WWII.", "As far as I'm aware, the whole 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' thing was invented by the Simpsons. ", "QI- - You would want a Frenchman on your side in a fight because the French are one of the best countries in the world when it comes to war, despite their cowardly reputation. According to historian Niall Ferguson, of the 125 major European wars fought since 1495, France has taken part in 50, which is more than Austria (47) and England (43). Out of 168 battles fought since 387 BC, France has won 109, lost 49 and drawn 10.  Episode [link]( _URL_0_)", "Other than her utterly humiliating defeat during the Battle of France in 1940, France has had one of the most successful military records in history(So no the jokes aren't justified).   ", "France gets downplayed with this surrender nonsense because of what necromancer said, Petain was in a position where giving into the Germans was the most reasonable course of action. Never forget the thousands of Frenchmen who died defending their homeland up to this point. It is to spit on their graves to spew some crap about French people not having courage in the face of impossible odds. \n\nAfter the French 'government' surrendered you can look at the French resistance and all of the work they did to help the allies during their invasion plans. They assisted pathfinders, they cut radio lines, destroyed train tracks, and in plenty of instances engaged in direct conflict with the Germans. If you call that cowardice you are a fool. \n\nGiven the circumstances the French were some of the most courageous fighters of the war.  \n\nEdit: For a reference on figures, over [200,000 french soldiers](_URL_1_) were ultimately killed and over half a million French citizens died during the war. Take into account also that in 6 weeks France lost over [150,000 soldiers](_URL_0_), roughly twice the number of men lost during the invasions of normady Don't get discouraged or believe stupid bigoted idiots, the TRUTH of what happened is starkly different than what drunken idiots may spew to you once they hear where you are from. The Allies would not have secured a beachhead in Normandy AT ALL without the assistance of the French people. ", "But the French underground resistance went on after that surrender.    The French resistance assisted the Allies in the Invasion of Normandy in 1944.", "Having spent some time in France I was always left with the impression that De Gaulle's resistance was rather trumped up to help repair a sense of national identity for post-war france.  There was resistance - brave, courageous resistance... but the \"historical narrative\" seemed a little patchy and inconsistent on the national scale.\n\nCould anyone comment on this and prove me wrong, or show me another side?", "France is probably the most victorious nation in Europe.  It's probably won more wars than any other nation in European history.\n\nUnlike what many Americans say, France did not surrender in WW1.  Sure, it surrendered in WW2, but France rarely surrenders.  \n\nWar is France's business and business is good.", "If you look at the history of post-Roman Western Europe, the French actually have one of, if not the sole, best war records out of any country. WWII has tainted their image - historically, they've whooped some serious ass.", "I know little of France's military history. I do believe they captured Mexico City once, and that the French Foreign Legion is one of the toughest, if not the toughest military unit in the world (as a former US Marine, I respect that).\n\nAs others have mentioned, the reputation likely comes from the World War II era. That's at least from an American perspective, but the US and France has always had a sketchy relationship (for example, France was a partial cause for the Nixon Shock because they were hording gold and planning to bail on Bretton Woods).\n\nOne thing I can say, Napoleon didn't receive the reputation he did from losing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_France"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov%27s_house"], ["http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7061&amp;IBLOCK_ID=35"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_France"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=G8oOcRowHCA#t=1943s"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DG8oOcRowHCA&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=XePUT4L4CuXL2QWg7NCiDw&amp;ved=0CFMQuAIwAA&amp;usg=AFQjCNFCZhpidrJH3Hsx5U8hLzgILPritQ"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_twentieth_century", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2razt6", "title": "How were Christian missionaries from the West perceived in the Mongolian Empire", "selftext": "I have been reading the account of William of Rurbruck who traveled to Karakorum as a missionary in the mid 1200s and held audience with Mongke Khan. However, while reading his account it seems terribly ones-sided, in almost every account he gives of the people he meets (e.g. the 'Saracens\" in court, the Mongolian women) he tends to just give his detail on how he feels he is perceived. Is there any good primary accounts about how the Mongols at this time really perceived the West and missionaries?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2razt6/how_were_christian_missionaries_from_the_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnekytr"], "score": [7], "text": ["I would recommend checking out John of Plano Carpini's writings of his travels to the court of Ogedei Khan. _URL_0_\n\nWhen he travelled to the Guyuk Khan's court he bore with him a letter from Pope Innocent IV called Cum Non Solum.  In it, the Pope inquires as to the Mongols future intentions, requests that Christians be treated with respectfully and proposes peace between the Mongol Empire and Christendom. Of course, this led to some interesting inferences on the part of both parties as the letter, written in Latin, had to be translated something like 6 times to get into the Mongol language. Perhaps the most interesting miscommunication in the Pope's letter is that the word for \"peace\" in Mongolian is synonymous with subjection. The predominant belief in the Mongol ruling class was that all lands under the sky were subject to Mongol rule, even those lands that hadn't been conquered yet. Guyuk's response to Pope Innocent reads as follows:\n\n\"You must say with a sincere heart: \"We will be your subjects; we will give you our strength\". You must in person come with your kings, all together, without exception, to render us service and pay us homage. Only then will we acknowledge your submission. And if you do not follow the order of God, and go against our orders, we will know you as our enemy\"\n\nThat said, the predominant attitude in the Mongol empire toward religion was, to borrow a not-so-precise modern term, tolerance. That is to say, the Mongolians believed in taking out what could be called \"celestial insurance\" in that they didn't really care who their subjects worshipped so long as they prayed for the victory and wellbeing of the Great Khan and the empire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/carpini.html"]]}
{"q_id": "19v4u0", "title": "Is there any historical reason/evidence as to why African nations never became a world power?", "selftext": "I know that Northern Africa was very influencial in its time (Carthage, Egypt).  However why did the interior, being the ~~'cradle of civilization'~~ 'cradle of humanity' never develop the sciences or infastructure to compete in the ancient world?  Was it lack of resources? or stringent social rules?  Tell me! =p", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19v4u0/is_there_any_historical_reasonevidence_as_to_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8rkii8", "c8rp7eb", "c8rpshu", "c8rqtjm"], "score": [9, 6, 4, 3], "text": ["\nYou may be interested in these questions about \u201c[Why is Africa \"less developed\"?](_URL_0_)\u201d on our **Popular Questions** page (which is linked at the top of every page in this subreddit, and in the sidebar).\n", "I can't decide whether you're talking about the modern world or the ancient world.  If the modern, see the link provided by our antipodean colleague /u/Algernon_Asimov.  If the ancient, reverse the question and see if you can spot the basic issue of centricity:\n\n\"However why did the Mediterranean periphery, being a place of monumental construction and literature, never develop the sciences or infrastructure to compete in the ancient world?\"  The world was a big place, and you can as easily ask why Greeks and Romans weren't able to \"compete\" in sub-Saharan Africa or China as you can ask why Africans and East Asians weren't in Europe.  The concept of \"world power\" is a decidedly modern one.\n\n(See Chris Ehret, *An African Classical Age*, for more about central/east Africa's classical era--it was vibrant and inventive, but merely different from its northern counterparts.)", "A minor nitpick: it's an outdated term, but *the* cradle of civilization almost always refers to the Near East, where the first urban state societies developed in the Fertile Crescent. Sometimes people talk about other cradles of civilization (i.e. Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, the Andes and Mesoamerica) where similar sociopolitical developments happened independently, but sub-Saharan Africa isn't counted among them. Perhaps you were thinking of \"cradle of humanity\" \u2013 sometimes used to refer to east Africa, because that's where humans evolved?", "Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa, Carthage  &  Egypt were all powerful countries in their own right at some point. There are probably other examples, hhowever I think what you really need is to know why you're asking this question. \n\nOne thing to keep in mind is that being our origin point Africa represents some 90% of our genetic diversity, and you can probably determine from that, a similar level of linguistic or cultural diversity. This can be a major hurdle for a growing empire since these divisions act as natural barriers to expansion. In addition there are major tropical diseases prevalent in sub Saharan Africa which are exacerbated by the development of major cities. So often the foundations of an expansive empire can be weak compared to neighbouring semi nomadic people. Add dense jungle and oppressive weather and you have some very unique problems to overcome. \n\nAs a result of these barriers, many empires were expended before European's arrived. This isn't universal. Egypt and Carthage fought Rome on equal terms and Ethiopia defeated Italy in the 19th century. But the overall course is that Africa was fragmented in the face of European colonisation. This led to them being subjected to horrendous economic theivery in the one era where they could've built a powerful state. Now-a-days, countries are smaller, more fractured and less hegemonic (excluding the few exceptions like the USA, China, Russia, India)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/africa#wiki_why_is_africa_.22less_developed.22.3F"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1haqyl", "title": "What are the reasons why Taiwan and Philippines have a relatively good relationship with Japan?", "selftext": "Both countries were occupied by the Japanese during WW2 and suffered horrific crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. What happened between then and now to explain their *relatively* good (compared to China and Korea) relationship with Japan?\n\nAnd doesn't the PRC bombard the Taiwanese with their brand of education or does Taiwan have an independent school system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1haqyl/what_are_the_reasons_why_taiwan_and_philippines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["casn2va", "casygeo"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Being Taiwanese I think I can answer at least part of this question. Taiwan is very fiercely opposed to the PRC, although the old lines of hatred are beginning to soften a bit with increased trade and the influx of those very rude and smelly mainland tourists. Taiwan has very much an independent schooling system which is ranked pretty high above China's. It used to be that Taiwanese schools were under much more direct control by the Kuomintang, who used to impose such things as mandatory flag-raising ceremonies every morning, but this has changed recently (although there are fears that it might return). Both Taiwan and Japan are far more opposed to communist China than they are to each other, and in my dealings with the Taiwanese I've never noticed a particularly high degree of anger or hostility towards what the Japanese did during the war. There are those who still remember it (like my Ahma) but in general these days people forgive them, especially since the Japanese have gone to great lengths (some would say not great enough) to apologize for what happened during those years on both sides. ", "I think I can answer for the Philippines, but I am not sure if this would pass muster as a top-level response. For some reason, no one (at least AFAIK) has really bothered to study why Filipinos do not bear the grudge the way that the East Asian countries did.\n\nBased on what you would see in the mass media in the Philippines, the \"forgiving\" nature of Filipinos is taken as a truism and used to explain not just the lack of ill will towards the Japanese, but also why people would elect a convicted plunderer as Mayor of Manila, among other things. Based on the historical record, this theory may hold some water, as:\n\n* Even as Filipinos revolted against Spain on the basis mainly of the abuses of Spanish friars, they never tried to establish an independent church until 1902, after the First Philippine Republic has already been defeated by the Americans in the Philippine-American War (Philippine Insurrection in American historiography). It was sparked more by Pope Leo XIII's refusal to appoint Filipino bishops and his resistance to expelling abusive Spanish clergymen from the country than as a means of spritual support for the Filipino independence movement during the revolution against Spain. Even then, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente did not gather much support from Filipinos, who preferred to remain in communion with Rome.\n* With the exception of Makario Sakay, resistance to American occupation was more or less gone after 1902. While the case could be argued that the landed class has already cast its lot with the Americans, the peasants of the Philippines never had any issues with revolting on their own before, as is the case with virtually every revolt against Spain. In addition, the people overwhelmingly rejected the American-supported Partido Federal in elections in favor of the independence-minded Partido Nacionalista, which can show that Filipinos by then have accepted American rule and would rather work through parliamentary means to achive independence.\n* In World War II, Filipinos more or less sided with the Americans against the Japanese, and paid dearly for it. Almost all politicians even in the Japanese-sponsored Second Republic had contacts with guerrillas and a few actively supported and hid those guerrillas. The larger guerrilla movement would not have been possible without the support of the populace, who have cast away the grudges against Americans from 40 years prior to wait for MacArthur's return.\n\nAlternatively, it could be simply because the Philippines never had to suffer as much as the Koreans and the Chinese. While the Japanese occupation was rather brutal, it was also too brief to form any lasting cultural memory of hatred. Victory against the Japanese might have helped with closure as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "mikjf", "title": "What Would You Guys Say Was History's Most Influential Event On Our Modern World?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mikjf/what_would_you_guys_say_was_historys_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c317x94", "c318ark", "c318ezd", "c318mhk", "c319eqv", "c31a9f8", "c31bh4x", "c31d220", "c31f4zj", "c31f7kf", "c323zvh", "c324b36", "c317x94", "c318ark", "c318ezd", "c318mhk", "c319eqv", "c31a9f8", "c31bh4x", "c31d220", "c31f4zj", "c31f7kf", "c323zvh", "c324b36"], "score": [18, 2, 5, 2, 2, 10, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 18, 2, 5, 2, 2, 10, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Too vague: Define 'modern.' And 'our.'", "The invention of the wheel", "Almost all current events can be traced back to the French Revolution.", "The invention of the stirrup.", "The thing about history is that just about everything traces back to something earlier; if I wanted to be facetious, I would say the most influential moment was whenever our ancestors slithered out of the primordial ooze.\n\nStill, on a more serious note, I would have to say Nikola Tesla's work on alternating current made possible everything we now take for granted in electrical infrastructure.", "Domestication of animals begat civilization in general (if you like Jerry Diamond's books). \n\nIn the \"modern era,\" which starts from the end of the Italian renaissance at the Protestant reformation: Probably the 1471 outbreak of the Black Death in England (said to have killed up to 15% of the entire English population). There were many more outbreaks throughout the period, but that one seems distinguished in casualty count.\n\nThe plagues were interesting. While killing lots of peasants, they ironically raised the value of the work of peasants. Surviving peasants were able to demand more for their scarce work. In receiving more than necessary for survival, these peasants were able to save money, move from rural areas (/farming slavery) to newly vacated city centers (property in cities was cheap due to mass deaths). This moved the economy from a decentralized, widespread rural feudalist mess to an artisan/guild-based, centralized capitalist system. That paved the way for bankers to meet with tradespeople for crediting and expansion, for tradespeople to hire and apprentice workers, and the basic capitalist model that the industrial revolution would take to take hold. \n\n\n... Other \"modern\" times?\n\nIf you're referring to the literary modernist era I'd say the most important event was ... WWI...\n\nIf you're referring to anytime past WWII, I'd say WWII. Barring inclusion of WWII, probably the proliferation of atomic/thermonuclear weapons. The atom is what made dual hegemony of Russia and the United States, but also what made the Cold War never go \"hot\" except in a few particular cases. \n\nIf you're referring to anytime after the cultural revolution of the 60s, I'd say the most influential event was the proliferation of birth control pills. The pill radically changed how women treat relationships (marriage is no longer about family, pregnancy is avoidable and no longer a cause to marry; women are capable of working and have no vast financial reason to stay in marriages with men). Basically, women in education and the workplace with the right to opt out of pregnancy = the most widespread climbing of the social ladders and radical social upheaval the century has seen. \n\nIf you mean right now at this very moment? Probably the widespread use of the microprocessor... Silicon wafers are in everything now. \n\n\nWhy are these questions so goddamn vague? ", "I would argue for the Battle of Poitiers. This battle secured the survival of Christianity. Had Karl Martell lost this battle, Islam probably would have spread in Europe, thereby having a deep impact on history.", "For Western Europe I'd suggest the decline of christianity as a monolithic block. It didn't only have religious repercussions (like the reformation), but it also changed the way people were governed, the way the state's economy was implemented, etc. It -to cut a few corners- eventually led to all sorts of revolutions over time, like the Dutch revolution against the Spanish crown, and of course the French revolution, etc. It even led to the formation of the U.S. So I'd vote for that as the most influential event on our Modern World.\n\nEdit: typos", "Personally I think WWII built the foundation of our modern way of life.  WWII gave birth to Jet Engines, Modern Encryption, Computers, Radar, Nuclear Weapons, The \"Atomic Age\", GI Bill (Education), the Baby Boom, the Suburbs and a huge boost to modern physics.  Plus two of the most recognized figures in modern history, Hitler and Einstein.  Come on! All that in a decade!  What more could you ask for?", "Newcomen's and Watt's development of effective steam engines. Granted, there had been prototype steam engines (like the aeropile) long before. However, the engine designed by Thomas Newcomen allowed mills and factories to be emancipated from river power. I include James Watt because he made Newcomen's design much more efficient, and that really helped the development of the Industrial Revolution. \n\nThe reason I think that is more important than other events stated here, like the crucifixion of Christ or the french revolution is that the growth of industry fundamentally changed peoples material wealth, travel, education, social mobility, etc.\nBasically, people's daily lives were affected much more by the growth of industry than by what god they pray to or what political system they are under.", "This has to be Gutenberg's use of movable-type printing in the mid-15th century. Without it, no Martin Luther, no Reformation, no Industrial Revolution, etc etc.", "I would say the Battle of Poitiers in 773 that stopped Muslim expansion into Europe. Were it not for Charles Martel's victory it is likely that Europe would not have had a renaissance and thus would not have been so interested in expansion/colonization. After all the Muslim world was not known for their massive colonization efforts.", "Too vague: Define 'modern.' And 'our.'", "The invention of the wheel", "Almost all current events can be traced back to the French Revolution.", "The invention of the stirrup.", "The thing about history is that just about everything traces back to something earlier; if I wanted to be facetious, I would say the most influential moment was whenever our ancestors slithered out of the primordial ooze.\n\nStill, on a more serious note, I would have to say Nikola Tesla's work on alternating current made possible everything we now take for granted in electrical infrastructure.", "Domestication of animals begat civilization in general (if you like Jerry Diamond's books). \n\nIn the \"modern era,\" which starts from the end of the Italian renaissance at the Protestant reformation: Probably the 1471 outbreak of the Black Death in England (said to have killed up to 15% of the entire English population). There were many more outbreaks throughout the period, but that one seems distinguished in casualty count.\n\nThe plagues were interesting. While killing lots of peasants, they ironically raised the value of the work of peasants. Surviving peasants were able to demand more for their scarce work. In receiving more than necessary for survival, these peasants were able to save money, move from rural areas (/farming slavery) to newly vacated city centers (property in cities was cheap due to mass deaths). This moved the economy from a decentralized, widespread rural feudalist mess to an artisan/guild-based, centralized capitalist system. That paved the way for bankers to meet with tradespeople for crediting and expansion, for tradespeople to hire and apprentice workers, and the basic capitalist model that the industrial revolution would take to take hold. \n\n\n... Other \"modern\" times?\n\nIf you're referring to the literary modernist era I'd say the most important event was ... WWI...\n\nIf you're referring to anytime past WWII, I'd say WWII. Barring inclusion of WWII, probably the proliferation of atomic/thermonuclear weapons. The atom is what made dual hegemony of Russia and the United States, but also what made the Cold War never go \"hot\" except in a few particular cases. \n\nIf you're referring to anytime after the cultural revolution of the 60s, I'd say the most influential event was the proliferation of birth control pills. The pill radically changed how women treat relationships (marriage is no longer about family, pregnancy is avoidable and no longer a cause to marry; women are capable of working and have no vast financial reason to stay in marriages with men). Basically, women in education and the workplace with the right to opt out of pregnancy = the most widespread climbing of the social ladders and radical social upheaval the century has seen. \n\nIf you mean right now at this very moment? Probably the widespread use of the microprocessor... Silicon wafers are in everything now. \n\n\nWhy are these questions so goddamn vague? ", "I would argue for the Battle of Poitiers. This battle secured the survival of Christianity. Had Karl Martell lost this battle, Islam probably would have spread in Europe, thereby having a deep impact on history.", "For Western Europe I'd suggest the decline of christianity as a monolithic block. It didn't only have religious repercussions (like the reformation), but it also changed the way people were governed, the way the state's economy was implemented, etc. It -to cut a few corners- eventually led to all sorts of revolutions over time, like the Dutch revolution against the Spanish crown, and of course the French revolution, etc. It even led to the formation of the U.S. So I'd vote for that as the most influential event on our Modern World.\n\nEdit: typos", "Personally I think WWII built the foundation of our modern way of life.  WWII gave birth to Jet Engines, Modern Encryption, Computers, Radar, Nuclear Weapons, The \"Atomic Age\", GI Bill (Education), the Baby Boom, the Suburbs and a huge boost to modern physics.  Plus two of the most recognized figures in modern history, Hitler and Einstein.  Come on! All that in a decade!  What more could you ask for?", "Newcomen's and Watt's development of effective steam engines. Granted, there had been prototype steam engines (like the aeropile) long before. However, the engine designed by Thomas Newcomen allowed mills and factories to be emancipated from river power. I include James Watt because he made Newcomen's design much more efficient, and that really helped the development of the Industrial Revolution. \n\nThe reason I think that is more important than other events stated here, like the crucifixion of Christ or the french revolution is that the growth of industry fundamentally changed peoples material wealth, travel, education, social mobility, etc.\nBasically, people's daily lives were affected much more by the growth of industry than by what god they pray to or what political system they are under.", "This has to be Gutenberg's use of movable-type printing in the mid-15th century. Without it, no Martin Luther, no Reformation, no Industrial Revolution, etc etc.", "I would say the Battle of Poitiers in 773 that stopped Muslim expansion into Europe. Were it not for Charles Martel's victory it is likely that Europe would not have had a renaissance and thus would not have been so interested in expansion/colonization. After all the Muslim world was not known for their massive colonization efforts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "75su1e", "title": "question: when-where-why did hate towards muslim begin?", "selftext": "to be clear, im not asking if muslims are bad or not. im talking about the hate towards muslim amongst some parts of humanity, justified or not. im wondering if it can be tracked in history? when , where, or why did this start?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75su1e/question_whenwherewhy_did_hate_towards_muslim/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do8pb7o"], "score": [6], "text": ["I don't think I really understand the question? Muhammad and Muslims encountered \"hatred\" virtually from the outset. As confusing a historical document as the Qur'an may be this is clear from the Qur'an itself. Q37:36 for instance has the unbelievers respond to Muhammad's preaching by asking:\n\n >  And [they] said: Shall we forsake our gods for a mad poet?\"\n\nResistance to Muhammad and his message was also one of the causes of the Hijra from Mecca to Medina (though he had also been invited there by the Medinans). Muhammad's life was in large part dominated by overcoming violent resistance to himself, his followers, and his message. So Q2:217-218 (revealed near the end of his life):\n\n >  They question thee (O Muhammad) with regard to warfare in the sacred month. Say: Warfare therein is a great (transgression), but to turn (men) from the way of Allah, and to disbelieve in Him and in the Inviolable Place of Worship, and to expel His people thence, is a greater with Allah; for persecution is worse than killing. And they will not cease from fighting against you till they have made you renegades from your religion, if they can. And whoso becometh a renegade and dieth in his disbelief: such are they whose works have fallen both in the world and the Hereafter. Such are rightful owners of the Fire: they will abide therein.\n\n >  Lo! those who believe, and those who emigrate (to escape the persecution) and strive in the way of Allah, these have hope of Allah's mercy. Allah is Forgiving, Merciful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1d8bic", "title": "How many third Party Presidents have been elected in America?", "selftext": "So far, I can only name two third party presidents-Millard Fillmore (Whig) and Abraham Lincoln (Republican). There must have been more than just these two. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d8bic/how_many_third_party_presidents_have_been_elected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9nvmgg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well...we got some problems here.\n\nMillard Fillmore was never elected President.  He succeeded to the Presidency upon the death of Pres. Zachary Taylor, also a Whig.  So Filmore was neither elected, nor from a \"third party.\"\n\nSecondly, what matters also is how you define a \"party\" and a \"third\" party.  I'm assuming you're using the term colloquially, so I'm going to rephrase your question to something like this: \"When there has been an established two-party system in the United States, has a third-party candidate ever won when the other two parties still existed?\"\n\nIf that's your question, then Lincoln might not even count, because a two-party system no longer existed.  The Whig Party didn't field a candidate in 1860, with a number of former Whigs flocking to the Constitutional Union Party, with John Bell as their candidate, while a large number voted for Lincoln and the Republican Party.\n\nThe historical concept of \"third party\" as far as I know, is a modern, 20th century invention, born well after the establishment of the Republican and Democratic Parties.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5t3hlg", "title": "What branch of the US Military was this a Uniform for in ~1862?", "selftext": "My grandfather is big into genealogy and has us mapped back pretty far. However, there are some holes in his information and this is one.  We have an ancestor who was buried as \"Gen Firstname Sirname\" and died in 1862.  However, we can find no record of him in any old military files that we have searched so far. \n\nThankfully, we have a picture/painting of him (presumably) in uniform. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n Can anyone identify this? From my amature researching it looks very similar to the Union Army but the timeline is iffy with him dying in 1862 at 62years old. \n\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t3hlg/what_branch_of_the_us_military_was_this_a_uniform/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddjznh5"], "score": [7], "text": ["So there are a few parts to this that make me think he may be wearing a State's militia uniform.\n\n1. Is that while it is similar to what the Regular Army would have been wearing around that time, its just a bit off.\n\n      Compare it for instance to the M1833 Coat for Officer worn before and after the Mexican War in the late 1840's while Frock Coats and shell jackets of various models become more the norm as well. _URL_2_\n\n2. Is the Hussar Stripes across the chest. While not unknown in US uniform's they arent exactly common either, [West Point](_URL_1_) being the notable exception along with several of the state military schools over the years. But an officer stationed there wopuld have worn his prescribed uniform not that of a cadet. And he is clearly beyond his college days in the photo.\n\nThus it is very likely a local militia or state unit's uniform, they could get rather outlandish, but also many come close to what is depicted.\n\nThe Maryland State Military School: _URL_3_\n\nA unit of the New York State Militia: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/u90EC"], "answers_urls": [["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e4/90/23/e4902319b337dfffd6eb51ffd9f2a02c.jpg", "http://armylive.dodlive.mil/files/2013/05/8775506796_5649d02098_b.jpg", "http://www.ushist.com/mexican_war/us_military/uniforms/qm-3255_dress_tail-coat_m1833_officers_mexican-war-us.shtml", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/05/73/fb/0573fb582187285b7b2be9888be147dc.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "287tmq", "title": "Post-Civil War, How were the Confederate Soldiers treated in terms of pension, health care, respect, etc?", "selftext": "Title pretty much sums it up. I'm curious if the United States provided pension/health care/other needs to the surviving veterans or if that was expected of the Southern States. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/287tmq/postcivil_war_how_were_the_confederate_soldiers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8cy6a"], "score": [22], "text": ["A good deal of the American welfare states lies in the idea of providing pension for soldiers, their widows, and orphans.  See Theda Skocpol's *Protecting Soldiers and Mothers*.\n\nConfederates were pensioned by individual states. This [website](_URL_0_) gives an overview.  As the intro to the site says, \"The veteran was eligible to apply for a pension to the State in which he lived, even if he served in a unit from a different State. Generally, an applicant was eligible for a pension only if he was indigent or disabled.\"   The first two states were North Carolina and Alabama, who both \"began granting pensions to Confederate veterans who were blinded or lost an arm or leg during their service\" in 1867.  Most states also had some form of disability benefits by the early 1890's, though Missouri waited until 1911(!) and Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma apparently never offering benefits to disabled Confederate veterans.  Georgia was the first to grant pensions to widows, in 1879, with almost all states granting widows pensions, though some only started as late 1915.  The website is awesome because it lets you actually look at the primary sources of who was on the rolls!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/confederate/pension.html"]]}
{"q_id": "f6kbd5", "title": "Did Americans travel to Australia to participate in the Australian Gold Rush?", "selftext": "It seems that if I were in California long after the gold rush ended there in 1855, and found out about a similar gold rush in Australia beginning around 1890, I might be inclined to pack up and head to western Australia to seek my fortune, especially if I missed out on the first one.  Did any Americans do this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f6kbd5/did_americans_travel_to_australia_to_participate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi5mr2p"], "score": [8], "text": ["Yes, it happened pretty much as you suggest, but people were crossing the oceans in every direction in search of gold, including from Australia to the US and then back. We have records of Europeans coming to California, and of Americans going to Canada and Australia in search of gold. Similarly people from around the world found their way to South Africa. Gold was the driver of global transfers of capital, technology and people--  for example workers from China, engineers from the US, capital from England . . . all come to South Africa\n\nThe man sometimes credited (along with others) for first discovering gold in Australia, Edward Hammond Hargraves, had in fact left Australia to go to California in 1849. He returns to Australia in January 1851, and together with four other men finds flecks of gold in February. He gives newspaper interviews -- and the Australian gold rush is on. (There are other versions of the story where Hargraves and crew aren't the first-- but he was well known, and he did very well out of it).\n\nAccording to some contemporary sources, the Americans weren't all that welcome in Australia, which was more aggressively and effectively governed than California at the time. In the Times of London in October of 1852, we read from their correspondent in California:\n\n > A considerable emigration took place from \\[California\\] about six months ago to Australia, and a good many passengers are still taken by every ship. But it is rather curious that most of the foreigners who went to \\[Australia\\] from this are coming back. The Americans and French do not seem to be able to get a footing there, and they are all returning.\n\nThe most celebrated American miner to go to Australia wasn't after gold, though. Herbert Hoover, by training a mining engineer, went to Australia to mine zinc in the early 20th century, which makes him unusual (unique?) among US Presidents in having been employed overseas in a civilian capacity.\n\nBeyond the details of the gold rushes, the comparison of experiences between the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia (there's also a very brief episode in New Zealand) is a nice platform for comparing American expansion to British colonial administration. The short form is that the American gold rushes were less regulated, those in the British territories more subject to law and policy under the administration of Gold Commissioners, an office that didn't exist in the US.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSee:\n\nPaul, Rodman W. \u201c\u2018Old Californians\u2019 in British Gold Fields.\u201d *Huntington Library Quarterly*, vol. 17, no. 2, 1954, pp. 161\u2013172.\n\nHargraves, Edward \"*Australia and its Goldfields: a historical sketch of the Australian colonies from the earliest times to the present day with a particular account of the recent gold discoveries\"* \\[1855\\]\n\nWilson, Karen S. \u201cSeeking America in America: The French in the California Gold Rush.\u201d *Southern California Quarterly*, vol. 95, no. 2, 2013, pp. 105\u2013140.\n\nGerald D. Nash, \u201cA Veritable Revolution: The Global Economic Significance of the California Gold Rush,\u201d in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, edited by James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (University of California Press: 1999)\n\nErnest de Massey, A Frenchman in the Gold Rush: The Journal of Ernest De Massey, Argonaut of 1849,trans. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (California Historical Society, 1929)\n\nBAUR, JOHN E. \u201cCalifornians Elsewhere: The Golden State's Nineteenth-Century Citizens At Large.\u201d *Southern California Quarterly*, vol. 66, no. 2, 1984, pp. 89\u2013132.\n\nGOJAK, DENIS, and CAITLIN ALLEN. \u201cThe Fighting Ground Creek Quartz Roasting Pits and the Early Importation of Gold Processing Technology into Australia 1850-1860.\u201d *Australasian Historical Archaeology*, vol. 18, 2000, pp. 29\u201338.\n\nHigginson, John. \u201cPrivileging the Machines: American Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africa's Deep-Level Gold Mines, 1902\u20131907.\u201d *International Review of Social History*, vol. 52, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1\u201334."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t605m", "title": "If Hitler wanted to create a Third Reich, what were the First and Second Reich? Was there a particular aspect of the previous Reichs he wanted to recreate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t605m/if_hitler_wanted_to_create_a_third_reich_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4ohz8", "ce4ol93", "ce4om7r", "ce4ornb", "ce4rg1c", "ce4s40e"], "score": [1092, 174, 12, 41, 17, 8], "text": ["The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire (Heiliges R\u00f6misches Reich), and the Second Reich was the German Empire (Deutsches Reich, or the Kaiserreich).  Mainly, he was seeking to emulate a strong, united, \"German\" Germany, that was able to forge her own destiny and become a powerful player in world affairs.    ", "Reich means \"empire; realm; nation.\"\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe First Reich would have been the Holy Roman Empire which covered much of modern Germany.  The Second Reich is the German Empire, from when Germany became a singular nation state in 1871 ([here](_URL_0_) is an excellent map showing that unification) to Germany's defeat in WWI. The idea of a great and proud again Germany, like Germany had been in the past, is what Hitler was trying to inspire in the people.", "The 'First Reich' was the Heilige R\u00f6mische Reich Deutscher Nation (Holy Roman Empire), existing from 962 to 1802 in Central Europe, encompassing what is today Germany plus different territories around it. The 'Second Reich' would be the Deutsches Kaiserreich (German Empire), existing from 1871 to 1918, succeeded by the Weimar Republic which then evolved into the Third Reich. Note that these empires are in general not referred to as First and Second Reich, but by their individual names.", "I found previous instances or partial instances of this question, [this](_URL_0_) one is probably most useful.\n\nTo summarize, the Third Reich was a term used to legitimize a nazi German empire as a direct continuation of ancient German rule. This would have started with the first reich being the holy roman empire, and the second being the German empire from 1871 to 1918. Nazi rule was supposed to be a natural progression from these.\n\nThe use of the term third Reich was discontinued and actually outlawed in 1939, in favor of the term \"Greater German Reich.\" I'm afraid I've been unable to uncover why, if anyone can help it would be much appreciated.", "Hitler viewed the [Weimarer Republic](_URL_0_) as evil, as installed by the Entente, as the (one of the) root of the problems in Germany at that time. By referring to the **Holy Roman Empire (Heiliges R\u00f6misches Reich deutscher Nation) as first empire** and the **German Empire (dt. Kaiserreich) as second empire**, he \"marketed\" his world of being in the tradition of large, powerful nations/empires, He basically claimed being the truthful heir to the German history, denying the legality of the Weimarer Republic.\nAlso, counting the Empires or Repulics is somewhat normal in Europe, the French have their fifth republic and we Austrians have our Second.", "The first was the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations (Heiliges R\u00f6misches Reich deutscher Nationen, the second one lasted from 1871 until 1918 under \"the Kaiser\", the Third Reich while now associated with the Nazi regime, was what we now call the Weimar Republic. The name Weimar Republic is used by historians to distinguish it from the the \"Deutsches Kaiserreich\"(1871-1918)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/German_Reich1.png", "http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reich"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18s66u/what_were_the_first_and_second_reichs/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic"], []]}
{"q_id": "2k1ydm", "title": "In the HRE, why were some kingdoms, like Prussia or Austria, technically inside the empire, but had territory outside of it?", "selftext": "I thought Austria controlled Hungary during the time of the HRE, but it seems as if Hungary is not included in the borders. Konigsberg from Prussia, which belonged to Prussia, is also not included.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k1ydm/in_the_hre_why_were_some_kingdoms_like_prussia_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clh61pi"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Holy Roman Empire is not a standard Empire. It is more akin to a confederation of small German lands that are tied together in a confederation. While I can't talk about why or how it was formed, by the 18th century, Prussia and Austria (or rather the House of Hohenzollern and the House of Habsburg) gained lands through marriage. These were not counted as Austrian because they were crown lands of the House of Habsburg but it became known as Prussia because the Elector of Brandenburg was allowed to be called \"King in Prussia\" by the House of Habsburg because they didn't see any problem with him being a King outside of the HRE.\n\nGenerally, it's because the lands were tied not to the \"nation\" but rather the House of the controlling family."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4l5nwf", "title": "Are there any documented incidences of intentional mistranslation through interpreters which resulted hostile relations amongst nations or tribes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4l5nwf/are_there_any_documented_incidences_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3kja7r"], "score": [3], "text": ["Around Kenedy, Texas in 1901, a bad interpreter led to shoot out between Karnes sheriff W. T. \"Brack\" Morris and tenant farmer/vaquero [Gregorio Cortez](_URL_1_) who was falsely accused of stealing a horse. The shootout led to a famous statewide manhunt as Cortez elluded posses as he attempted to escape across the US/Mexico border. Even though he was eventually captured, the incident turned him into a Tejano folk hero as documented by Americo Paredes in his famous book [With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero](_URL_2_) that documents ballads or corridos written about him.\n\nTexas history is full of conflicts between different groups (Americans vs Mexicans vs Comanche vs Tejanos vs Apache etc) and you do wonder about the role of translators had in causing these [conflicts](_URL_0_). It's can be hard in pointing out where something was misunderstood or just flat out ignored by one of the parties in conflict. The Gregario Cortez incident does stand out to me as one of the bigger examples that spawned violence between Anglos and Tejanos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btc01", "https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fco94", "http://www.amazon.com/His-Pistol-Hand-Border-Classics/dp/0292701284"]]}
{"q_id": "tgg0p", "title": "What part of history do you find the least interesting?", "selftext": "I love history, and I know you all do as well. But history is huge, and some parts just aren't that interesting (blasphemy!). I'm curious to see what parts of history (be it time periods, regions, themes) just don't do it for you. \n\nI'll start: I just can't get into military history. I know it's important, but my mind just glazes over whenever I start reading about it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tgg0p/what_part_of_history_do_you_find_the_least/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4mdyat", "c4mdzjt", "c4me3a8", "c4med51", "c4medvl", "c4meeqt", "c4mei92", "c4meieq", "c4memd3", "c4men9u", "c4meqhh", "c4meruu", "c4mf3cx", "c4mfbsl", "c4mfywz", "c4mg6vc", "c4mgb96", "c4mgeoq", "c4mgjv2", "c4mgkx7", "c4mgla7", "c4mgoye", "c4mgpe5", "c4mgrk9", "c4mhik0", "c4mib9a", "c4miqgb", "c4mixvp", "c4mj6rq", "c4mjk0t", "c4mjrbw", "c4mk3eg", "c4mk3f6", "c4mkl7s", "c4mklt8", "c4mkpbe", "c4mkrut", "c4mkuxx", "c4mkx5g", "c4mlcqh", "c4mlu4p", "c4mly4g", "c4mlzon", "c4mmc74", "c4mmj4e", "c4mml3y", "c4mmq2g", "c4mmqhk", "c4mmqov", "c4mn0ja", "c4mn63o", "c4mn87f", "c4mnfop", "c4mntnj", "c4mo8x4", "c4moa6e", "c4mofd3", "c4moga7", "c4mprfz", "c4mq6aj"], "score": [91, 66, 10, 58, 28, 9, 5, 38, 142, 15, 10, 57, 12, 4, 7, 11, 9, 3, 8, 7, 5, 14, 10, 9, 2, 5, 2, 6, 2, 5, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 8, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["I know this makes me a bad person, but I can't get into not-Western history at all - Chinese, Japanese, African, etc.  I know it's important, but I'd rather someone else study it. \n\nAnd then this is when people inevitably say to me, \"Oh, you just want to study white people?\"  Whoops.", "U.S. History between the Civil War and WWI. A big part of that is how pissed off I am that the dickhead elements of the South \"won\" Reconstruction. ", "Middle Ages. Probably because I never really learnt enough about them. I don't like that I'm practically missing out on a whole period of European history, but I just never got into it.\n\nGender History. Yeah, it's important. But I'm just not that interested in it.", "I'm a self confessed glutton for all history. There's nothing I don't find interesting.\n\nBUT.\n\nThere are periods/things that I am tired of due to oversaturation. World War 2, the American Civil War, the Soviet Russian State/Russian Revolution, and the Nazis. I just summarised almost all of my 2 years of A Level History (this is from 16-18 year olds for any non-Brits here).", "Most things American history.  I just find it so boring, but that might be because my school system taught the same stuff to us three times over.  I'm sure it was also inaccurate.  I plan on giving it another try by studying Philadelphia history to help with my friend's tour guide business. ", "For  me,  it  is  the  US  Civil  war  1861-1865.  ", "American history. I feel that as an American, I should be interested in it and learn more about it, but it just bores me to tears.", "I find post colonial African history really boring. It's just one dictatorship after an other. ", "Two classicists walking past the Modern History department, one turns to the other and scorns: \"Pfft, Journalists\"", "Pre-revolution America.\n\nOn a side note, in regards to your lack of interest in military history, you may find Tolstoy's *War and Peace* worthwhile. Sure, battle scenes aren't really that fun to read, with all the ridiculous butchery, but viewed through a wider lens you get a sense of important shifts in power over the earth. Tolstoy can weave some great human interest stories while offering an even review of Napoleon's exertion of power and Russia's response.", "18th-19th Centuries, Europe and the America's in particular.  It just seems so introverted, so procedural.  The names of kings and battles and prime ministers all blend together, and the mish-mash of dates and concurrent conflicts gets far too confusing.\n\n\n**major edit:** and Methodology/Historiography.  I. JUST. DON'T. CARE.  I get historical method, I will happily take it into account when I write, and I will do my best to keep in mind source biases, those who are left out of sources, and all the issues of Marxism, Feminism, etc., but I don't want to write my work on those, just acknowledge that they are issues and get on with writing the History I can.  (This was a major piece of contention between my -historiography-obsessed- supervisor and myself, and was the main reason for me leaving my studies under him)", "I am not interested in revision history of inserting women in movements they were not in. Gender studies is hugely important and I value the contribution women made in feudal societies, for example, but omitting teaching a class about the Renaissance painters to focus on one woman seems a bit much. Revision history in general boils my blood, but when you're doing it to give roles to people -- no matter who they, no matter what gender -- that were not there, to satisfy some new construct... I am not interested. I AM A BAD WOMAN.\n\nI am also, sorry to say, *not that interested in Rome post the Julio-Claudians*. I know there is a huge amount of beautiful history I am missing out on, but I cannot make myself take an interest if my historical boyfriend Augustus isn't within a few generations. ._.", "I have a number of things I just don't care to know much about, and they all make me seem like a bad person. First is the Holocaust, and while I know it is important and sad, it is too sad for me. So I will just accept that it is awful, and let others deal with it. Second is slavery in the Americas. I just find it boring. ", "The Cold War, and most post-1945 stuff. To me, the world just got really boring after that. I know, the bomb and whatnot, and Vietnam is somewhat interesting, but for the most part I just can't force myself to enjoy reading about the Cold War. I have friends who are the total opposite, and can't really get into anything pre-WW2, or aything pre-20th Century, and it boggles my mind, but to each their own I suppose. \n", "Anything before 1850 may as well be calculus.", "Civil War. Not because the topic is boring (it's actually closely related to my areas of interest in many ways-- the evolution of American race relations) but because of the way it is taught. So much more focus on memorizing the dates and locations of battles than other war history. It doesn't have to be that way!", "The whole (middle-) European bronze age is PRETTY boring. \n\nNeolithic is quite interesting, and the iron age is where the fun begins... But everything between? IMO just boring.\n\nBut that's also true, because I dig out broken and ugly bronze age stuff 3/4 of the year ...", "In my AP European History class the teacher called the mid 19th Century period the Widomaker because it's just so politically dense. It's just hard to learn and there are no exciting parts other than the 1836 and 1848 revolutions", "political history of the middle ages. Yes, the [Investiture Controversy](_URL_0_) was one of the most important conflicts in the history of the middle ages, maybe even the whole of history. But I don't care. I also don't care for the house of Hohenstaufen or the Ottonian dynasty. Fuck that. Social history is much more interesting.", "There are parts of history that I don't care for not so much because I don't find them interesting, but because most of the scholarship in the field is such crap.\n\nThe classic example for me is subaltern studies because most of what they do is grounded in theory instead of sources.  To quote Sanjay  Subrahmanyam, the field is \"self-referential to the point of irrelevance.\"\n\nAnother would be the history of science.  There are some good books written on the subject (Steve Shapin's _A Social History of Truth_ is excellent), but most of the scholarship is still overwhelmingly positivist and grounded in intellectual history.  There's still a perception that science is somehow different from other historical phenomena.", "19th century midwestern us", "I agree on military history being unbearable.  \n\nThis might sound hypocritical from someone who has gotten stuck arguing about it as often as I have recently, but the arguments in military history are just so trivial and essentialist.  The vast majority of them are seemingly motivated by a desire to lionize some hero, demonize some enemy, or prove that one's own side was truly admirable and in the right.  Military history's streak of nationalist hagiography is just too strong for me.   Either that or it too often reeks of misplaced nostalgia for a time when men were real men who lived with honor and such like.\n\nIt's not all bad though, Dower's [War Without Mercy](_URL_0_), as a history of the role of race and ideology in the execution of the Pacific War, is incredibly interesting.  ", "I'm personally sick of hearing about the Titanic. Yeah, a ship sank 100 years ago. Who gives a shit?", "Ask any Canadian undergraduate student and he or she will tell you the same thing: \"*CANADIAN HISTORY IS SO BORINNNNGGG!*\" ... That said, I tend to agree. The thought of doing Canadian history makes me cringe. (Ironically, my \"Canadian Regional\" grad course, which focused mostly on Canadian historiography, was the most useful course I took, and I'm using a lot of the theory from it in my own project. So a big thank you in the end to Canadian history!)", "The further in time it is,the least interesting it is for me. I just don't really feel connected to anything pre-19th century. Maybe because I can feel the impacts of 19th and 20th c. more on my own skin. ", "Ancient Greece before Alexander. I had to do a lot of it in the early years of my degree, and my Ancient History department was *very* Greece-heavy in terms of the specialties of my professors. I found it so, so dry. Painfully dry. A friend of mine did his dissertation on Thucydides and wanted me to proofread it and I had a hard time telling him that I sincerely would have rather watched paint dry.", "But military history is great!\n\nAnyway, I don't really care for most ancient history. I have a hard time seeing any relevancy, the world is such a radically different place now. I mean *people* don't ever really change but the world as we know it sure has.", "Economics. I'm not saying much more...", "This is probably blasphemy as well, but I just could not get into the history of the Ottoman Empire. Just was not feelin' it.", "As a Canadian, our history is the WORST. For me at least. It seems like every Canadian History course I've ever taken has been the same stories over and over again. Maybe there are some good stories in there somewhere but the Canada's official textbook history is the most boring shit I've ever read.", "The last 5 mins.\n\nBut Yesterday was great!!", "American History. The irony of that is that I *am* a student in America. I am from Asia and our countries date back to 2000+ years and here I am just forced to study about every granular detail about a country that just was a land that was populated by back-and-forth boating trips from people like 200 years ago. 200! ", "19th Century Midwestern US, no question.\n\nBut seriously, everything after the Industrial Revolution, with the exception of Maoist China.", "Anything after the great depression or before 1700 I find to be rather dull.", "I think it largely depends on how the history is presented. I've heard some interesting discussions on the production and regulation of milk in America. ", "Victorian England. Probably because of how heavily it is romanticized.", "European monarchy. Too often I feel like - in an effort to color their writings - medievalists turn some perfectly good historical research into a gossip column, except the people who they're gossiping about are long dead. ", "US history in the midwest from 1800-1899", "I find most African and Asian history pretty difficult to get into. The two exceptions are Somalia and the middle east, I find the Islamic caliphates fascinating. And Somalia for some reason is fascinating to me. I think part of the reason I find most African and Asian history rather boring is the names and locations. I can picture Berlin and Paris and Moscow in my head. A place with a bunch of x and ys ruled by a guy with a super long name is not going to stick in my memory like Frederick will.", "The Gilded Age.", "Anything involving different economic theories and practices. I know it's important stuff to know, but I just can't get energized about it. My main interest is military history, though, so when economic factors work their way into that, then I can pay attention to it.", "Recent history. In school / college, I didn't do history because most of the work was about history no more than 100 yrs old. An assignment on the 90's  &  80's, one from the 60's, one about 1850's doctors  &  one about cowboys. Not my style. Chose other subjects  &  independent study.", "America in the 1800s. My eyes just glaze over.", "I'm an aspiring history teacher, I student teach world history daily, and I love every minute of it. I love all history, I read everything I can from neolithic man, to the \"Scramble for Africa\", to territorial disputes in Southeast Asia in the past decade. I thoroughly enjoy all of it.\n\nThat stated, I can't stand learning about anything related to the Dust Bowl, hot damn that is a boring topic. I tried my hardest to become interested in the period by reading the Grapes Of Wrath and all about the \"Okies\" in California, but its just so incredibly boring.", "The majority of American history.  \n\nAlso, to a much lesser extent, everything that happened after WWI (that's a 1, not a 2) in the west.  EDIT: this is probably due to saturation.  Like, the same reason most people don't like Stairway To Heaven.", "I find Roman and Greek history incredibly boring. I think it's the names.", "Australian history.\n\n*ugh*\n\n\n\n", "Chicano history. *Shudder*. This stuff was force-fed to me as an undergrad and I found it to be the least interesting history ever. This was my own fault, I originally transferred to the school for the business program and switched to history after I was accepted and felt \"why the hell not!?\" Never looked to see what history classes were *actually* offered in the history department. In fact, most modern histories bore me, I'd much rather look at it from a political science standpoint rather than history. ", "The American Civil War. Sick to death of it. I know it's important to the American narrative, but it's overdone", "I *hated* American history until I got into the social/cultural side of it. Americans, in my opinion, just include way too much as canon when it comes to political and military history. I feel as though zeitgeist often gets overshadowed by what the president had for lunch on any given day in the last 236 years. There are so many 'looming figures' to learn about in American history that it often seems almost impossible to move beyond them and actually consider what events meant for the people. \n\nThe perception is magnified as a Canadian, because we (as a society in general) have so little active interest in our own history. \n\nIn fact, I'll add \"Canadian history\" as well - not because I'm not interested in it, but because it is by and large a horribly taught discipline. \n\nThe only moderately interesting course I've ever encountered on Canadian history was a course on the history of the city of Toronto. Any macro-level 'Canadian history' invariably ends up being such a general overview full of blanket statements about 'Quebec', 'the West', 'Anglophones' et al. that it borders on farcical. ", "Age of Religious wars in Europe from around the reformation. Annoys the hell out of me and fell asleep several times while reading those chapter in European history, it is also the only time I've fallen asleep will reading a history book.", "I find boring the Roaring 20s. Maybe it is just me. I don't know. ", "I really don't care about political history.", "Political history!! One of my majors is classics, and I can not stand talking about the politics behind everything. Now military history, that's where I shine. Unfortunately, the rest of my department is obsessed with political history so whenever we have coffee hours, I just zone out until I hear the word  \"war\". I get all excited and hope someone starts talking about wars... but no one ever does :(", "Historiography.  I read a lot of it.  I do my level best to grasp it.  I try to make sure I'm informed by it.\n\nBut it bores me to fucking tears, because it isn't written for historians, it's written for methodologists.  Which will quickly make a non-specialist want to stab themselves in the eyes.  I mean, have you read Jenkins?  Painful.", "I absolutely despise 19th century United States history. \n\nI also hate most forms of what one might call \"social history.\" I simply don't care for studying what the average joe farmer was thinking and feeling, regardless of whether he was from France during World War I, Russia during the revolution, or 16th century England. I don't think there's anything more boring. ", "European history from 1450 to WWI. I find it a tedious and boring string of monarchs and wars between France and Germany and Britain. Though a few historical characters make exception, especially if they have funny names. Like Prestor John. Or Jethro Tull.", "United States History. Don't get me wrong, I know that it's important and everything, but I never was able to get really interested in it. I delved into Asian History years ago and never looked back. I became hooked on learning about Japan and China. ", "Generally speaking, modern and religious history.", "Pretty much all constantly-covered topics in American history. After hearing about the same events with slightly more depth year after year through public education, I'm kind of tired of it. There are still some aspects of American history that interest me, but War of Independence/American Civil War/WWII they are not."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_Controversy"], [], [], ["http://books.google.com/books/about/War_without_mercy.html?id=X-Th04d7jj0C"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1yopt6", "title": "AskHistorians Podcast Episode 003 Discussion Thread - On Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerican Cultures", "selftext": "[Episode 003](_URL_7_) is up!\n\nIn case you haven't heard, the [AskHistorians Podcast](_URL_3_) is a project that highlights the users and answers that have helped make /r/AskHistorians one of the largest history discussion forum on the internet.\n\nYou can subscribe to us via [iTunes](_URL_1_), [Stitcher](_URL_0_) or [RSS](_URL_4_). If there is another index you'd like the cast listed on, let me know!\n\n**Previous Episodes:**\n\n* [Episode 001](_URL_6_) - On Julius Caesar\n* [Episode 002](_URL_2_) - The Convict Cannibal of Van Diemen's Land\n\n**This week's Episode:**\n\nWe are trying a slightly new format, with /u/TasfromTAS and /u/idjet reading a series of answers by /u/snickeringshadow on the topic of human sacrifice. The answers were taken from this thread: [Were human sacrafices in Mesoamerican societies voluntary or were they slaves? Was it honourable to be sacrificed?](_URL_5_)\n\nHowever, please ask any followup questions in this thread. Also feel free to leave any feeback on the format and so on.\n\n/u/snickeringshadow gave me the following as supporting material:\n\n* Hassig, Ross 1988 *Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control*\n* Hassig, Ross 1992 *War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica*\n* Leon-Portilla, Miguel 1963 *Aztec Thought and Culture*\n\nIf you like the podcast, please rate  &  review us on [iTunes](_URL_1_).\n\nCheers!\n\n**Coming up next week:** Part One of The Aztec Conquest; an interview with /u/400-Rabbits", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yopt6/askhistorians_podcast_episode_003_discussion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7v6u3", "cfmdw1h", "cfmgygp", "cfmhjuo", "cfmir70", "cfmnmy3"], "score": [2, 3, 5, 11, 8, 2], "text": ["These are fantastic!  Thanks for contributing/compiling/etc. :)", "My best feedback is that as soon as I saw that this thread existed I instantly downloaded the podcast and am really looking forward to listening to it tomorrow. I really am enjoying these shows so far.", "Really been enjoying these podcasts! I wasn't sure how good they'd be, but now I've heard the first two I think that they're brilliant! Thanks for all the hard work you've all been putting in.", "I did not like it.\n\nThere is no added value IMHO if all you do is have someone with vastly inferior audio quality read prepared questions to you, and you reading the prepared answers of one of our flaired users. \n\nIt's actually much nicer to just go here, read discussions, read follow-up questions/answers, and understand it. \n\nI don't think this format is good. In fact, I think it's bad. Please just go back to the style of the first episode. Celebreth was able to swing out great answers, and there was a dynamic going. I don't think that is possible with scripted question/answers. I recommend something like \"StuffYouShouldKnow\". That way would be nice. ", "As TAS  mentioned, I and the other Mesoamerican users will of course be happy to answer any follow up questions you may have. ", "I have a question, about human sacrifice in other parts of M\u00e9xico, like I remember being told about human sacrifice in Chalchihuites so did some of the Chichimeca people practice it? How was it, what meaning did it have, where did it come from in these other places?\n\nThank you"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tas-stacey/the-askhistorians-podcast", "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-askhistorians-podcast/id812302476?mt=2&amp;ign-mpt=uo%3D8", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-episode-002", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/podcast", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/rss", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o54yd/were_human_sacrafices_in_mesoamerican_societies/ccowd58", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/ask-historians-podcast-episode-001", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-episode-003"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3eir1h", "title": "Did Prescott Bushes Nazi connections help his son George H.W Bush advanced in the CIA? Were those Nazi connections ever brought up during either Bush campaign?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3eir1h/did_prescott_bushes_nazi_connections_help_his_son/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctfsnja"], "score": [7], "text": ["According to the Anti-Defamtion League the charges of Bush being a nazi sympathizer are \"untenable and politically motivated.\" So those connections don't exist and even if they did I don't see how they would help his son advance in the CIA?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "74gijn", "title": "What was everyday life like for LGBT people in Colonial North America?", "selftext": " >  The legal victory for same-sex couples was unimaginable at the time of the writing of the Constitution when homosexuality was seen as a moral failing and same-sex relations were punishable by death in many colonies.\n\n >  [My Political Science Textbook](_URL_0_)\n\nGiven the above quote, I have a few questions:\n\n1. What was everyday life like for LGBT people in Colonial North America?\n2. Is the quote true that homosexuality was punishable by death in Colonial North America? If so, did anything change after the US gained independence?\n3. Did the founding fathers ever mention homosexuality in their writings?\n\nThis is a repost of a unanswered question I asked [here](_URL_1_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/74gijn/what_was_everyday_life_like_for_lgbt_people_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnzqf5b"], "score": [12], "text": ["\u200b\nSo I would like to address the quote and your second question first, and then I will move on to your other questions. First, technically yes, homosexuality could be punishable by death in British North America prior to America's gained independence. [The English Sodomy Act of 1533-34](_URL_0_) declared the sentence of death for sodomy and bestiality and this law was essentially copied into the New England legal codes in 1648 Massachusetts. That said, records suggest that only one such execution ever took place in America during the 17th or 18th centuries, leaving such laws were largely unenforced.(1) A total of three people are known to have been executed for homosexual charges during the colonial period.(2)  No laws were outright changed to protect people of the LGBT community after independence was won.\n\n\nOther people who were homosexual experienced persecution in a number of ways.  They could be arrested, publicly shamed (even having their offenses printed in newspapers), disowened by their family, amongst other forms of persecution. Court records are a major source for many historians since, in New England, anyone caught or believed to be guilty of homosexual behavior would be prosecuted, but this only happened about 17 or 18 times. Historian Robert Oaks said in his article, \"Things Fearful to Name:' Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth Century New England\" that \"there was undoubtedly much more homosexual activity than the court records indicate.\" (pp 271)\n\n\nNow answering your first question is much harder because while it is believed that homosexual behavior was likely practiced, the challenge is proving it. People who were apart of the LGBT community had to hide their romantic and sexual feelings from the public and their own families. Men were expected to marry a young woman by their mid twenties and young ladies were, due to coverture, were pretty much legal property. If a woman was a lesbian, and expressed this publicly, not only did she risk being arrested if she acted upon her feelings, but ultimately could face serious social shunning as a result. This isn't to say people did not act on their feelings, they likely did, however they rarely, if ever left written sources behind for historians to study. People likely lived with deep senses of dread over their homosexual feelings since in places like New England, they were referred to as \"abominations\" and ministers regularly preached against this in church.(3)  Anthropologists have found that in cultures where there is a fear both of sexuality in general but especially female sexuality, lesbian behavior is usually found to be \"organized along the dominant patterns.\" (4)  Essentially, women who were lesbians in oppressive societies like these tended to still have same-sex experiences but were more dominant in those relationships than they were in their other lives. Essentially, both gay and lesbian folks existed in America, often acted upon their beliefs, but did so in private, fearful of facing shunning and retribution from their neighbors.\n\nTo answer your last question, yes homosexuality was discussed by the founders at different times, but rarely in the theoretical context, but rather it's usually reference as an actionable references (i.e. condemning someone for it or wanting to create laws against it). Here are two examples. The first is from orders issued from [George Washington in 1778 who is talking about an offer who is about to be Court Marshaled for \"sodomy\"](_URL_1_). Sodomy is not the only thing being levied against this soldier, but it is obviously a punishable offense here. In a letter from [John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 9 March 1807](_URL_2_) Adams is condemning the actions of Napoleon and talking about retributions and vengence that God would surely inflict upon the vial French people. Sodomy is one of many \"sins\" that France is guilty of in Adams' eyes.\nUltimately, homosexuality was something that was not only eagerly condemned, but greatly feared in British North America. While the punishment of death was rarely enforced, lebsian and gay people in British North America risked public shame and extreme harships apart from any formal punishments from the state if they were caught acting upon their feelings. The founders, like most of America, greatly condemned its open practice. As a result, being gay or lesbian during this period meant having to either live by completely supressing your most intimate desires or living in absolete fear of discovery.\n\n**Sources:**\n\nColin L. Talley. \"Gender and Male Same-Sex Erotic Behavior in British North America in the Seventeenth Century.\" *Journal of the History of Sexuality*, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jan., 1996), pp. 385\n\n\nRoger Thompson. \"Attitudes towards Homosexuality in the Seventeenth-Century New England Colonies\" *Journal of American Studies*, Vol. 23, No. 1, Sex and Gender in American Culture (Apr., 1989), pp. 28\n\nThompson. pp 32\n\nTalley, pp 405"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.amazon.com/LooseLeaf-GOV-2017-2018-Joseph-Losco/dp/1259444937", "https://redd.it/6ywqfg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buggery-Act", "https://founders.archives.gov/?q=sodomy&amp;s=1111311111&amp;sa=&amp;r=3&amp;sr=", "https://founders.archives.gov/?q=sodomy&amp;s=1111311111&amp;sa=&amp;r=8&amp;sr="]]}
{"q_id": "8dpkny", "title": "The year is 50 BCE. I am a Roman merchant sailing through the Eastern Mediterranean trying to sell my wares. Would the Greek spoken in Alexandria, Antioch, Athens etc. be the same or would I need to know multiple language to engage in business?", "selftext": "The question might be better served if we change the time period to 150BCE, before the Romans had near complete control over the region", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8dpkny/the_year_is_50_bce_i_am_a_roman_merchant_sailing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxql0q4"], "score": [8], "text": ["They spoke a type of Greek known as 'Koine Greek'. Koine is a little different to creole or pidgin languages in a rather interesting way - wheras the creole that emerged from centers of migration was a result of the interaction of different languages, Koine was when different regions spoke a version of the same language. (Alexandrian or Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern mediterranean) So while there may have been a dialect in Alexandria, in mainland Greece, in Anatolia etc, traders would have spoken Koine among each other which was a sort of 'common dialect'. I'm no expert btw, just a guy fascinated with languages and their dialects.\n\nSource: Andriotis, Nikolaos P. History of the Greek Language"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1e676s", "title": "I am not sure if this is the appropriate place for the question, but here goes. With the amount of information generated today - is there a concern about what future historians can tell about today's world?", "selftext": "More information is generated today than at any time in the past. \n\nIs there some interest in documenting part of this information as a marker of our time now or do we let some sort of cultural selection decide what future historians can gather?\n\nHow do we decide if something is worth preserving?\n\nI am not sure how exactly to ask the question even, but I figured I'd give it a shot.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e676s/i_am_not_sure_if_this_is_the_appropriate_place/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9x7acq", "c9x96yp"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["First of all, \"more information is generated today\" is a highly subjective statement and one which - from my perspective anyway - ought to be greeted with considerable justified skepticism. :) I would, however, agree that a greater absolute volume of text is generated.\n\nKeep in mind that we have basically comprehensive knowledge of the 20th, 19th and 18th centuries. The reason for this is simple, namely that mass media came into its own during this time. Specifically, I'm talking about newspapers. Right now, almost every event worth documenting is reported in some newspaper somewhere. This wasn't the case even in the 17th century, when publications were much rarer and more expensive.\n\nFor this you may want to consult Gerhard Schuck, Rheinbundpatriotismus und Politische \u00d6ffentlichkeit zwischen Aufkl\u00e4rung und Fr\u00fchliberalismus, 1994. The first section has an excellent review of late 18th-early 19th century publishing and the development of mass media and public opinion.\n\nNobody - and no central authority, certainly - per se decides \"what is worth preserving\", rather, this is a process that is engaged in naturally. In Germany, in any case, there is a Federal Library which receives a copy of every single book published. It is stored and archived. As a result, the risk of not being able to reconstruct documentary evidence - insofar as the Federal Library isn't destroyed - is virtually zero. To the best of my knowledge the US Library of Congress receives a similar literary input each year.\n\nI imagine that, in time, and as the cost of maintaining all of this information becomes prohibitive, or as wars and other problems arise and lead to the loss of documentary evidence, or if barbarian hordes of one kind or another (rioters?) do their thing, it may lead to the loss of this neatly assembled documentary evidence. Then we'll just need to do what we always do, which is seek out odd locations for original sources (e.g. in people's attics and cellars) or try to find important documents which were, for whatever reason, copied, and therefore give insight into the original contents, or we will use secondary sources. If all else fails, we can anticipate a rich archaeological record for anything post 18th century, given how much garbage we cause.\n\nAs to the \"digital mass media\" archiving issues, let me refer you to an excellent and highly insightful post by caffarelli which I read earlier today:\n\n_URL_0_", "While we're generating an unbelievable amount of data nowadays, a huge problem is developing in saving that data so it can be accessed in the future. Opening a computer file from the 1980s or finding a webpage from the 1990s can be extremely difficult or impossible. Additionally, most of our methods of storing data now are not very robust. Optical disks degrade quickly (though there are \"archive grade\" CDs available that supposedly last hundreds of years), and hard drives break or are degaussed. There's also a troubling trend of libraries disposing of paper and microfiche newspaper and magazine archives (which last essentially forever if stored properly) once they've been digitized, putting many of our 20th and 19th century sources at greater risk as well. \n\nComputer data is robust in the sense it can be losslessly copied instantly, so redundancy is very easily achieved, but I worry what will happen in a catastrophic scenario where it becomes difficult or expensive to continue backing up old data (we're already losing a lot through carelessness, as well).\n\nAs far as being overwhelmed with data, I'm not too concerned. I've never met a historian who complained he had *too many* good primary sources available. I'd say historians certainly haven't been stymied covering extremely well-documented events like World War II or the US Civil War."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e5c7j/have_we_ever_recovered_data_from_older/c9x09qp"], []]}
{"q_id": "3g99zb", "title": "During the civil wars of Marius to Augustus, how many legions were from Rome? Italy? The provinces?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g99zb/during_the_civil_wars_of_marius_to_augustus_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctw2zjq"], "score": [4], "text": ["All legions were from Italy. At least sort of. Only Roman citizens could serve in the legions, and Roman citizenship was not widespread in the provinces until well into the Principate. With very few exceptions legions were raised in Italy--indeed, consular and proconsular armies were always raised in Italy, although additional legions could be raised by a commander, either from Italy or the province of his governorship. Caesar had a legion that Plutarch claims was composed of Transalpine Gauls, to whom he gave citizenship, although I think we should suppose many of the soldiers to actually have been Cisalpines and probably Cispadanes as well, who had citizenship to begin with. Pompey had several Syrian legions at Pharsalus, and Caesar used allied legions at Alexandria--but these should not be seen as real legions, since they were raised by allied and client states from among their own citizen populations, and were not legally real legions. In this same category we must include the Numidian legions at Thapsus"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zlcds", "title": "Prevalence of bayonet wounds in European armies, pre American Civil War?", "selftext": "I've been trying to find information on this for awhile now. One of the oft repeated statistics of the US Civil War is that only 1% of the wounds in battle were due to bayonet wounds. This is cited as proof that the bayonet was an obsolete weapon that was going out of style and that it was rarely used. \n\nHowever, this is mostly used without context and without regard to other armies and other wars. (There are many reasons why I think that 1% number is too low, but I'll save those for another day.)\n\nHere are my questions. Those of you familiar with military history of the 18th and 19th centuries, can you point me to any sources that mention the prevalence of bayonet wounds? \n\nThe [report](_URL_0_) on Civil War wounds that was put together by the US Surgeon General a decade after the Civil War mentions several conflicts since the end of the Civil War but doesn't specify type of wound, only location. (You can get [all six volumes](_URL_1_) of the report from the Internet Archive).\n\nWhat I'm looking for is anything referring to the prevalence of bayonet wounds after battle. This could be from either the 18th century or the 19th, though I'd prefer to get as much from the mid 19th century onward as possible. Any sources to point me at would be wonderful as well, if you don't know the numbers off hand. \n\n[This webpage](_URL_2_) on the Napoleonic Wars cites three reports (one from 1715, one from 1762, and one from 1807) that seem to indicate that bayonet wounds composed 2-5% of total wounds in the army. If so that would place them right about the same level as during the American Civil War, indicating that the bayonet was still an effective tool during that war. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zlcds/prevalence_of_bayonet_wounds_in_european_armies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c65lmv1", "c65nsrs"], "score": [5, 3], "text": ["Can't find any peer-reviewed articles at the moment, but this is a breakdown of types of trauma that British military surgeons dealt with during the napoleonic wars, according to M.Crumplins [\"Men of Steel: Surgery in the Napoleonic Wars \"](_URL_0_):\n\n62,0% : Musket-, Rifle-, Pistol Bullets\n\n\n13,5% : Sword, Saber\n\n\n8,0% : Projectiles\n\n\n5,0% : \"Canister\"-Artillery\n\n\n4,0% : \"Common shell\"-Artillery\n\n\n3,9% : Lances, Pikes\n\n\n **1,2% : Bayonet**\n \n\n1,1% : Other Trauma (z.B. Falling, Burns)\n\n\n 0,7% : Ramrods\n\n\n 0,5% : Knives\n\nAt least as far as bayonet wounds are concerned, this seems to be very similar to your numbers from the American civil war. A caveat is of course, that the british did a disproportionate amount of naval fighting, so this might have skewed the numbers somewhat.\n\nEDIT: Spelling, grammar.", "There are those that consider the bayonet (well used) to be an effective tool for today's wars as well as that one.\n\nFor examples,\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nAnd personally, I feel disinclined to argue with that lot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_and_Surgical_History_of_the_War_of_the_Rebellion", "http://archive.org/details/MSHWRMedical1", "http://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/infantry_tactics_2.htm#infantrycombatbayonets1"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.co.uk/Men-Steel-Surgery-Napoleonic-Wars/dp/1904057942"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Op1zjd7KKE", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pzxb2sxbDU"]]}
{"q_id": "3vxndc", "title": "Were flappers considered masculine by 1920's standards?", "selftext": "I'm doing a project for our schools's GSA club and part of it deals with gender expression. I wanted to use an example of how expression is influenced by culture by using flappers as an example of early \"tomboys\" due to their engagement with traditionalaly masculine things at the time (driving, smoking drinking, etc.) Also the flapper ideal of boxy figures short haircuts were an affront to traditional victorian ideals and gender roles at the time.\n\nBut the thing is I'm not really sure this is the case as sexual and gender orientation as we know it is new and I'm unsure this was even the case. I asked because if I was wrong I didn't want to be dishonest.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vxndc/were_flappers_considered_masculine_by_1920s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxrluca"], "score": [11], "text": ["You definitely have the right idea. The roles of women were being challenged during WWI, working in industrial and professional jobs. Which, in a large part, led into the struggle during the 1920s of what was acceptable for women. While the extreme version of the flapper we tend to think of was well beyond what most women would have attempted, elements of that lifestyle permeated regular society. I haven't read any books on the particular subject of Flappers, so I'm loath to recommend any, but there are [quite a few](_URL_0_) on the topic available. \"Feminism and the 1920s\" would be another good keyword search. [This article on the Gender Forum](_URL_1_) discusses flappers as well as their German counterparts. It would probably be useful to look on either side of the flapper movement as well, understanding where they came from (Suffragettes and feminist movements of the 1910s) and the swing back the other way (1930s feminine form and the Great Depression). It helps to better frame a rather distinct and short fashion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=flapper", "http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-consumerism/flapper-girls-feminism-and-consumer-society-in-the-1920s/"]]}
{"q_id": "131gy0", "title": "Was the crucifixion of Jesus as told in the New Testament more extreme then a normal Roman execution of the day?", "selftext": "If you were a common citizen of the day and saw Jesus's execution would it look different in any way to a normal execution?  This is to include the things that happened before being placed on the cross, i.e the crown of thorns the carrying His own cross and such.\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/131gy0/was_the_crucifixion_of_jesus_as_told_in_the_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c701bhi", "c702koc", "c7031jt", "c703xc5", "c706bj6", "c706tk1", "c70cc6r"], "score": [42, 83, 13, 14, 7, 3, 3], "text": ["Yes in general.  Crucifixion was rare for most people and it wasn't particularly common.  You had to really piss of the Romans to warrant it.\n\nOnly slaves, traitors, and enemies of the state were crucified.\n\nSorry, the source is going to be wikipedia because I don't want to dig through my Rome books to find a quote:\n\nCrucifixion was used for slaves, pirates, and enemies of the state. It was considered a most shameful and disgraceful way to die. Condemned Roman citizens were usually exempt from crucifixion (like feudal nobles from hanging, dying more honorably by decapitation) except for major crimes against the state, such as high treason.\n\nUnder ancient Roman penal practice, crucifixion was also a means of exhibiting the criminal\u2019s low social status. It was the most dishonourable death imaginable, originally reserved for slaves, hence still called \"supplicium servile\" by Seneca, later extended to provincial freedmen of obscure station ('humiles').[citation needed] The citizen class of Roman society were almost never subject to capital punishments; instead, they were fined or exiled. ", "It is hard to say, really. We don't really have that much information on how crucifixions would actually be carried out, as the only detailed sources are passion pieces, which are flawed as history. It is probable that crucifixion was actually just one term for a whole range of execution methods, such as impalement, the \"classic\" crucifixion, or even the gibbet. I think  have heard an archaeological discovery confirming that nails were (or rather, could be) used, but were used on the wrist rather than the hands (obviously, as the hand would not support the weight). As far as I now, the only thing that we really know for certain is that the execution method was drawn out and brutal.\n\nAs for things like the crown of thorns, I don't think that was standard practice, but I would not be surprised if executioners often chose to mock their subjects like that--although the crown of thorns is rather on the nose as a metaphor.", "As far as crucifixion goes, Jesus actually had one of the easiest ones in history, if the gospel accounts are accurate. \n\nDeath by dehydration takes days-- Jesus was only up there for a few hours before dying.   Additionally, Jesus was given access to a sponge soaked in some analgesic liquid. \n\nAs far as crucifixions go, Jesus had it easy.   Contrast with the  crucified 6,000 followers of Spartacus.   ", "Follow-up question: what non-scripture evidence is there of the crucifixion of Christ?", "As an interesting aside, I'm in a class at my university now on the Gospels and Jesus, and we've seen a few early Christian texts so far which don't even mention Jesus's death by crucifixion. I forget the text exactly(maybe its by Paul?), and it mentions that Jesus was hung for his sins. We've learned a lot about how the crucifixion of Jesus as told in the New Testament(and other associated elements of the passion narrative) were very consciously crafted and formed over many centuries to emphasize certain themes. If you even examine the major Gospels and compare their passion narratives, the often contradict each other and disagree on points such as whether Jesus died painlessly and willingly as a way of bringing salvation to the masses, or if he died painfully and woefully. \n\nInteresting stuff....", " >  >  If you were a common citizen of the day and saw Jesus's execution would it look different in any way to a normal execution?\n\nThe crown of thorns and vinegar to drink were not normal. Carrying your own crucifix was probably pretty normal.\n\nBut because they pierced his side with a spear he probably bleed out faster died more quickly then is normal for crucifixions. Usually you asphyxiate when your legs and arms grow to tired to hold your body in a position where you are able to breathe. Often Romans broke the legs of the victims so they could not stop themselves from asphyxiating. It depends on how long they want the victim to suffer.\n\nMark 15:44 And Pilate marveled that he was already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been for some time dead\n\nPontius Pilate seems surprised that Jesus died so quickly the spear thrust probably accounts for this.\n\n", "If you are concerned with the cruelty and *pain* of the crucifixion, there really isn't much to see here. Crucifixion wasn't about trying to cause the most possible pain. There were many different methods for such tortures at the time.\n\nCrucifixion was as much about the public humiliation and spectacle of the death. This is an important consideration that is often left out of the matter. When St Paul calls it a scandal, he means it. To follow Christ was to follow someone, not merely to death or even a painful death, but to complete humiliation as well (which by many people's accounts is worse than death).\n\nThe insult of the cross is lost when we do deeply gaze at the macabre voyeurism of it all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5lfov5", "title": "After Columbus' first voyage to the New World, why did the Spanish crown allow other countries to find out about his discoveries? Was there any attempt to keep the existence of a new continent (or \"India\" anyway) to the West a secret?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lfov5/after_columbus_first_voyage_to_the_new_world_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dby1dxl"], "score": [2], "text": ["/u/Lynx_Rufus\n\nThat would have been very difficult, considering Columbus [had to stop in Lisbon on his return voyage due to bad weather](_URL_0_). \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5j4r1i/european_history_how_did_the_fleet_led_by/dbebtnr/"]]}
{"q_id": "5a5h5f", "title": "When did it become a thing for countries to receieve refugees to help them out?", "selftext": "I suppose there was some kind of refugee programs that might have been unofficial or non-governmental - maybe church based? - before immigration laws became a big deal? Was there some kind of transition from that to a more government-sponsored/controlled and legal implementation?\n\nI'm obviously thinking about the more recent times say post Enlightenment, but anything along the same lines that predates that is interesting too! Are there any good stories from antiquity or was refugee aid not really a thing back then?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5a5h5f/when_did_it_become_a_thing_for_countries_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9e2tkc", "d9e6uod"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Follow up question: Would Irish immigrants escaping the famine be considered refugees?", "Political asylum as a concept goes back to ancient times. States would allow political asylum to individuals persecuted in their home countries. \n\nPost WW2 the international refugee system really developed with:\n \n1) Conventions outlining the obligation of states to give asylum claimants a fair hearing and not return them to persecution. \n\nand \n\n2) UN refugee camps and efforts to resettle their residents elsewhere. \n\nStates each have their own systems to evaluate asylum claims, but they are obligated to give each claimant a hearing to determine whether they face persecution in their home country. States also choose how many (if any) people they are willing to resettle from refugee camps every year. The UN determines that the camp inhabitants are in fact refugees, so the resettling country generally does not need to redetermine that.\n\nI'm not an expert on the Irish Potato Famine, but generally speaking you are only a refugee if you are fleeing persecution, not hunger or poor economic conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1l104e", "title": "WW2 German Infantry Tactics", "selftext": "I've recently been playing I-44 a popular mod for the game ARMA II. While playing it I've been trying to set up some realistic scenarios for me to play around in. While I know that the Germans focused heavily on the counterattack I don't know much other than that. \n\nI'm interested at what kind of tactics were taught and employed by German forces throughout the war. How were they to defend positions, attack, etc. Anything that may have something to do with it I would be interested in. \n\nIf tactics differed depending on the front I would also be interested in hearing the differences. \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l104e/ww2_german_infantry_tactics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbuok24", "cbv22sr", "cbv6017"], "score": [29, 4, 3], "text": ["Well, at a squad level the German infantry doctrine is centered around the general purpose machine gun, most commonly the MG-34 or the MG-42. There would be one MG per squad. A squad would consist of about 10 men. Squad leader, asst. squad leader, 3 men for the MG team with the rest of the squad composed of riflemen. The squad leader and the assistant squad leader would generally carry a sub machine gun, usually the MP-40.\n\nThink of the squad as a machine gun team with riflemen protecting it. It is the squad leader's responsibility to place the MG in the most deadly position he can find. The MG will engage group targets and provide suppressing fire while riflemen pick of lone targets. The squad leader and the asst. squad leader add to the volume of fire with their SMGs.\n\nIn the attack, the squad would advance in sections, with one covering the advance of the other. Extensive use of cover was engrained into the average German soldier, who would often shift his position after going to cover, so as not to get up from an obvious point. The goal of the attack would be to gain fire superiority over the enemy while inflicting as many casualties as possible. This would be followed by getting to close quarters with the enemy and killing the remaining men with grenades and, on occasion, hand to hand combat.\n\nCounter attacks would be to recover lost ground and often took place within a few minutes of losing a position. These had extensive support from mortars. Most Americans killed during the push through Northern France were killed in such a setting.\n\n\nFor defense, I will quote a US intelligence report regarding company level defense instructions.\n\n \n  It was stated that, since a creeping barrage always preceded an attack, this type of fire was to be a signal for each man to go at once to his alert station and make a further brief check of his weapons.\n\n\n  Even during the barrage, every man was to keep a continual lookout, frequently raising his head above the parapet. This was described as particularly important when the fire moved, or \"lifted\", because, it was said, a hostile advance would follow the barrage closely, and the opposition would use mortar fire and grenades for purposes of deception.\n\n\n  When the attackers arrived in close proximity to the position, special attention was to be paid to any cover or dead space within hand-grenade range. Hand grenades were to be used against any hostile soldiers who might succeed in reaching such places.\n\n\n  The first section to discover that a hostile attack was in progress was to send a reliable, speedy runner to platoon headquarters by the safest route. It was stressed that speed was essential if the heavy weapons were to give proper support.\n\n\n  It was ordered that the position be held at all costs. Every man was to stay at his post and fight. A single well-aimed rifle shot was to be regarded as more worthwhile than a badly placed burst of machine-gun fire.\n\n\n  The dispatch of a runner was not to be considered necessary when a Very pistol was available.\n\n\n  It was stated that platoon headquarters should have sufficiently good observation to enable the platoon commanders to keep up with the situation and to insure against any hostile attack achieving surprise.\n\n\n  Platoon headquarters were to be turned into strong points, so that a hostile force could be engaged at any time from the depths of the position. A reminder as to the effectiveness of enfilade fire was added.\n\n \n  It was ordered that, if the next hostile attack were to be made at night and with armor, the forward sections were to fire with everything they had, while the best hand-grenade throwers were to be assigned for this specific duty. It was pointed out that the resulting damage to the opposition's morale might serve to halt the advance.\n\n\nHope that helps you.", "/u/SMIDSY is spot on in his description, but if you are interested in more specifics, there is a 1943 War Department pamphlet that details German squad level infantry tactics titled *The German Squad in Combat*. I found a copy hosted online [here](_URL_0_).", "See this [American WWII training video](_URL_0_) about German small unit tactics. It seems to be the very thing you are looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/wwIIspec/number09.pdf"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz0a_QGifPM"]]}
{"q_id": "741gw8", "title": "How did European monarchs pick their royal mistresses? Did kings visit brothels?", "selftext": "In the middle ages or early modern Europe.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/741gw8/how_did_european_monarchs_pick_their_royal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnvf7a9"], "score": [96], "text": ["When you look at the known mistresses of European royalty, most of them are members of the court or daughters of prominent families in the era. \n\nFor example, when you look at some famous mistresses, few, if any, were \"common\" or prostitutes - Rosamund Clifford (mistress of Henry II of England) was the daughter of a wealthy Marcher Lord.  Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn who were rather famous mistresses of Henry VIII (and by extension, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. While unproven to be \"mistresses\" per se, they were chosen as wives while Henry VIII was still married to someone) were both daughters of wealthy men who were in favor of the King and part of his court. Sadly, many of these mistresses served as maid-of-honours to the Queen, and thereby caught the King's eye. (I got this information from years of researching  Tudor England. Recommended books and sources of information is at the end of this reply.)  A King in Medieval Europe couldn't risk going to a common brothel - threat of harm or assassination, disease, and bastard children with an \"embarrassing\" woman was not worth it to most people in the aristocracy. It was much easier and safer to catch the eye of a maid or courtier. \n\nI'll refrain from expounding on every known royal mistress in Medieval Europe (plus I can really only confidently speak of English history. As you can imagine, the list is rather large.) But the pattern is consistent - a young, beautiful, woman in court catches the King's eye and the having the affections of the most powerful man in their world was rather appealing to many ambitious women. \n\nI'd recommend reading \"The Six Wives of Henry VIII\" by Alison Weir - it gives great insights on late medieval England and the courting practices of Henry VIII. It includes a lot about his mistresses, and that's where most of my knowledge comes from. \nWeir also has a book exclusive to Mary Boleyn - \"Mary Boleyn: the mistress of Kings\" which also a great read. More on royal mistresses can be found in Dennis Friedman's book \"Ladies of the Bedchamber: the Role of Royal Mistresses\" \n\nEvery mistress is different, but they all have a fascinating history."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2t73pk", "title": "What was the US Navy like post-Civil War and pre-WW1?", "selftext": "I am familiar with the types of ships and the innovations made during the civil war (USS Monitor, CSS Virginia). \nI also know that the first world war saw widespread use of battleships and warships of the like. \n\nI am wondering what the ships were like in the intermediate decades. Anything I should know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2t73pk/what_was_the_us_navy_like_postcivil_war_and_preww1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnwiv9q", "cnwjx61"], "score": [19, 8], "text": ["Until the 1880's it really wasnt doing anything. The ships were mostly paid off, and all those fancy ironclads (which even by the end of the war were 2nd rate) were mostly rusting in harbor. European navies continued to innovate and expand with full steel ships, larger guns, advanced machinery and designs. \n\nIt wasnt until the Garfield presidency in the 1880's that the Navy began to receive the attention it deserved. The first attempt to make modern steel warships resulted in the ABCD ships the (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin) 3 cruisers and a dispatch ship all made of steel with steam engines, but also mounting masts and sails. They were combined into the Squadron of Evolution (_URL_0_)\n\nHowever the USN still lacked any even 2nd rate battleships (in the quality sense). In fact Brazil's purchase of a brand new British built battleship mounting 9.2in guns made her the best equipped naval power in the hemisphere. SO 2 new battleships were ordered built, while not up to the standard of new European ships they were a step in the right direction, these would be the ill fated Maine, and her half sister Texas. Though a drawn out construction period meant they slipped further behind other navies, made worse by problems in getting sufficient industrial bases in the US for quality steel and guns. \n\nThen in 1890 came the 3 ship Indiana class which while even more advanced was designed as a coastal warship and they all lacked sufficient free board and had ineffective armor scheme. The following single ship USS Iowa commissioned only in 1897 was the first true sea going battleship in US service. \n\nAdditionally the US had been constructing classes of both Armored and Protected cruisers. The difference being that Armored cruisers had a heavy belt of armor to protect as much as possible, while Protected cruisers concentrated it around machinery and weapons. \n\nThe only notable actions were in relation to the Spanish American War in 1898. In the waters around Cuba the USN concentrated its battleships such as they were (including the Oregon sailing 14k miles around South America from the west coast). And protected the landing o the expeditionary force. Then destroyed the poorly equipped and outclassed Spanish Squadron as it attempted to flee Santiago bay.\n\nIn the Philippines then Commodore Dewey led his Asiatic squadron to much the same result against the Spanish squadron in Manilla Bay. Dewey's flagship the USS Olympia is still afloat as a museum ship in Philadelphia and is the last Protected cruiser left and gives a good idea of the USN at the time.\n\nOther notes would be that in 1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan published his \"The Influence of Sea Power Upon History\" which in many respects dictates naval policy to this day. And in 1907 Teddy Roosevelt ordered the battle fleet on an around the world cruise to demonstrate that they could after the Russians had encountered so much difficulty. The Great White Fleet was a great success and spread a deal of goodwill. But by the time they had returned HMS Dreadnought had already been launched and the USN was building their own response and every ship in the fleet was obsolete.\n\nEDIT FOR SOURCES FROM FLAIR APPLICATION: \n\nUS Cruisers 1983-1904: Birth of the New Steel Navy by Lawrence Burr\n\nManila and Santiago: The New Steel Navy in the Spanish-American War by James Reckner\n\nAnd The New American Navy by John D Long (SECNAV during the war)", "A notable example of the US Navy was the [Great White Fleet](_URL_1_) that was commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt and ordered to circumnavigate the globe (1907-1909) during his presidency. \n\nPrior to this, the US Navy consisted of only 90 ships with almost a third of them wooden. Congress, hoping to enforce treaties, and protect overseas holdings among these were 16 steel battleships all painted in peacetime colours, which at the time happened to be bright white. Hence *The Great White Fleet*.\n\nEver since the Japanese defeated the Russians during the [Battle of Tsushima](_URL_4_) in 1905, Japan had grown as a Naval power. Therefore, one of the purposes of the White Fleet was to show Japan that the US Navy could be deployed any time, anywhere, even from Atlantic ports, and they shouldn't get any ideas. And it worked. [At least for the next 34 years](_URL_0_).\n\nWhile this was the largest American show of force at the time, it wasn't the only one. During the [Algeciras Conference](_URL_3_) in 1906, Roosevelt ordered eight battleships to patrol the Mediterranean. \n\nWhile the White Fleet was considered obsolescent by the time it returned home, the fleets trip resulted in massive changes to American Naval policy. Including a complete overhaul to Warship design, and long term deployment, which would then serve as the basis for the [Pacific Theater](_URL_2_) 35 years later. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squadron_of_Evolution#mediaviewer/File:Chicago._Leading_the_Squadron_of_Evolution,_1889_-_NARA_-_512952.tif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_White_Fleet", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_War", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeciras_Conference", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima"]]}
{"q_id": "5owx73", "title": "Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures depicted women as soft with curves. Which period of time did we begin to see the ideal female body as having a lower body fat?", "selftext": "And why do we now think the ideal female body is more attractive with lower body fat when for most of humanity, it was attractive to have more meat on the hips and thighs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5owx73/ancient_greek_and_roman_sculptures_depicted_women/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcn1c0b", "dcobmgu"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Ancient Egyptian women are portrayed as very slim, with a few notable exceptions. So it's not a universal truth that it was attractive in all ancient societies to have \"meat on hips and thighs\". \n\nThe female body ideal in the West also went through several changes in the 19th and 20th century.\n\nBasically, there are no universals. Beauty ideals vary tremendously between different cultures and different time periods. ", "So this is actually a fairly complicated question. First I want to note that it's impossible to say what was considered desirable for most of humanity/human history, because the vast majority of that time - several million years - has left little cultural information. It would be a mistake to assume too much of a biological component and to conclude that until the 20th century, humans preferred one particular body. For instance, to quote from [a previous answer of mine](_URL_0_), \n\n > Across Europe through the high middle ages (and into the late period), the standard of beauty was fairly consistent: the ideal men and women were willowy and thin, with fair hair and skin and red lips and cheeks. Women were to have a high forehead, curved eyebrows, light eyes, small breasts, and a posture that pushed the stomach forward. In an Old French reworking of a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the beautiful Philomena is described as having small, high breasts, thin thighs, and narrow hips.\n\nThis is actually fairly similar to the current ideal, despite the common perception that women with more body fat were considered more attractive when food was more scarce.\n\nThe more recent trend toward thinness does date back to the mid-19th century, when corpulence began to be seen as something to be cured; weight was linked to lifespan and seen as a potential cause for other conditions. The low-carb diet was invented around this time by a doctor who believed a patient's deafness was caused by his obesity; the patient, William Banting, wrote a pamphlet about his experiences, and it spurred on the idea of making an effort to lose weight through the food one ate (which his name became a synonym for). By the end of the century and going into the next, dieting was becoming an industry, and the ideal woman's figure was taller and leaner.\n\nThere's no real answer for why we went from movie stars having to be thin but with breasts and hips to the willowy models of the 1960s. There's a constant give and take between artists, designers, models, fashionable beauties. For instance, couturiers made decisions in who they were designing for, whether it was a specific woman (eg, Paul Poiret designed for his petite wife, Denise, in the 1910s and made her figure fashionable) or simply an aesthetic they preferred - yet their preferred aesthetics were affected to some extent by what was current. A woman who becomes well-known for her social role, or acting talent, or an aspect of her body that does conform to beauty ideals may affect other standards where she does not conform - these standards are less about one or two specific body parts, but include texture and color of hair, shape of lips, height, etc. There are a host of factors that come together to affect what becomes fashionable in every cultural change; I can't give you a silver bullet to explain all of them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4e8c52/did_heavier_men_and_women_used_to_be_considered/d1ymvot/"]]}
{"q_id": "1jhjg6", "title": "Did members of royal families often marry commoners or is this more of a recent occurrence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jhjg6/did_members_of_royal_families_often_marry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbeqxfz"], "score": [5], "text": ["That depends on what you mean by \"royalty\" and which time period/geographic area you're discussing. \n\nAmong the Ancient Romans it was quite common for members of the Imperial family to marry Plebians or non-Romans. However, during the early-Modern and Victorian eras in the West, there was virtually no marriage between Royalty and the non-nobility."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21yiuv", "title": "How accurate were rulers prior to mass production?", "selftext": "The measure stuff type of ruler, not the political kind. Oh, and also were particularly accurate rulers considered valuble/expensive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21yiuv/how_accurate_were_rulers_prior_to_mass_production/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cghplie"], "score": [4], "text": ["In my main area of study, the Near East, rulers were of course vital to architectural planning. Many great city-states and Empires built large walls, large temples, and indeed enormous cities. Of course that required planning, and plans in detail would require a standardised straight edge. You ask a good question, how accurate were they? Well, they had an unusual method of standardising their ruler sizes that lasted for many centuries- they used the length of Gilgamesh's left ulna, allegedly, as their standard length. A skeletal arm was kept in Uruk, which was actually a major city in the Near-East comparable to Babylon for much of its history, and there the ruler-makers would travel when a new one was required. Gilgamesh's arm would be reverently extracted from its resting place, and then the wood/bronze/bone ruler would be carved directly against the proportions of the ulna. Now, as you can imagine for large bureaucracies constantly getting through rulers, this became something of a problem. But they solved this by having dedicated workshops for rulers in Uruk itself, right next to the temple of Anu in which the skeletal arm was kept. However, this did introduce problems- the bone was slowly splintered by various accidents, and even slight chips would cause a change in the standardisation of all the other rulers. By the Bronze Age collapse c.1200 BC the practice was increasingly untenable, and then disaster struck- the Arameans stole Gilgamesh's bone. However, the last ruler made from his arm was then used as the template to make rulers now standardised by smelting into moulds and sanding off the edges, and though ruler's were still known by the poetic name of 'The Reach of Gilgamesh' they were no longer based on the skeleton of their ancient and mighty ruler.\n\nSources\n\n* *The Ancient Near East .c3000-330 BC* by Marc Van Der Mieroop\n* *The Intricacies of Near Eastern Architectural Practices* by Lionel Q. Deveraux, though this is now very hard to find.\n\n[WARNING THIS IS TOTALLY A JOKE NONE OF THIS IS REAL. READ MOD NOTE HERE](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21yyci/important_message_re_source_reliability/"]]}
{"q_id": "b5ffuy", "title": "Are the classical music pieces that are identifiable by the average person the equivalent of \u201cpop music\u201d of their day or have the centuries found the truly best pieces to propagate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5ffuy/are_the_classical_music_pieces_that_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejeemqr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Could you clarify what you mean by pop music? The dichotomy in your question doesn't really make a lot of sense, as far as I can tell. Do you care about things that are popular (in the classical world today) now that were also smash hits in their day? Or do you care more about things that we don't care about now that were highly regarded in their day? I'm trying to figure out exactly what sort of historical phenomenon you are trying to get at...\n\nI will say that it is not generally the job of a decent historian to answer the second question. Historians don't have the ability to judge what are \"truly the best pieces,\" in fact, I'd wager that a good many historians here, myself included, would be very hesitant to say that there is such a thing as \"truly the best.\" What there are, instead, are pieces of music that are good relative to some value system, but that sorting out which value system is \"right\" is an extremely fraught project."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rxdy9", "title": "What is the earliest recorded hostage situation?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rxdy9/what_is_the_earliest_recorded_hostage_situation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnke5js", "cnkhl7n"], "score": [25, 14], "text": ["Do you mean the stereotypical hostage-holdout situation, with multiple random people inside and the building surrounded? Or do you mean any hostage-taking at all?\n\nBecause if it's the latter the answer is probably going to be whatever the oldest war is that we have good records for. Prior to the modern age hostage-taking was politics 101. If you wanted a vassal to be loyal, you took hostages. If you wanted to secure an agreement, you exchanged hostages.\n\nThe earliest *specific* incident I can point to is the Third Punic War, 149 BC when the Romans demanded 300 noble Carthaginians hostages as terms of peace (they didn't honour it, but that's neither here nor there). You get the feeling from records of the city's reaction that this is an unusually large number, but it's clear that by this time hostage-taking is well-established tradition.\n\nI'm also certain that my more learned colleagues can provide many, many earlier instances.", "In Chinese history \u516c\u7f8a\u4f20: \n\n\u5e84\u516c\u5341\u4e09\u5e74 ...  \u51ac\uff0c\u516c\u4f1a\u9f50\u4faf\uff0c\u76df\u4e8e\u67ef\u3002... \u5e84\u516c\u5347\u575b\uff0c\u66f9\u5b50\u624b\u5251\u800c\u4ece\u4e4b\u3002\u7ba1\u5b50\u8fdb\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u541b\u4f55\u6c42\u4e4e\uff1f\u300d\u66f9\u5b50\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u57ce\u574f\u538b\u7adf\uff0c\u541b\u4e0d\u56fe\u4e0e\uff1f\u300d\u7ba1\u5b50\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u7136\u5219\u541b\u5c06\u4f55\u6c42\uff1f\u300d\u66f9\u5b50\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u613f\u8bf7\u6c76\u9633\u4e4b\u7530\u3002\u300d\u7ba1\u5b50\u987e\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u541b\u8bb8\u8bfa\u3002\u300d\u6853\u516c\u66f0\uff1a\u300c\u8bfa\u3002\u300d\u66f9\u5b50\u8bf7\u76df\uff0c\u6853\u516c\u4e0b\u4e0e\u4e4b\u76df\u3002\u5df2\u76df\uff0c\u66f9\u5b50\u647d\u5251\u800c\u53bb\u4e4b\u3002\n\nRough translation:  year 680 BCE winter, Duke of Lu met Duke of Qi at Ke for peace treaty.  At the meeting, Duke of Lu's general Cao suddenly drew sword and got behind Duke of Qi.  Qi's chancellor Guan Zhong asked: \"What do you want?\"  Cao said: \"You took so much of our land, what do you think?  I'd ask you to return (certain area) to us.  \"  Guan Zhong looked at Duke of Qi and asked: \"My lord please promise so.  \"  And Duke of Qi promised, then they had the pledging ceremony.  Then Cao threw down his sword and walked away like a boss.  (Later Guan Zhong persuaded Duke of Qi to honor his word)  \n\n\nYou can say this is a kind of hostage situation.  \n\n\n\n\n\nAnother piece, in \u4e09\u56fd\u5fd7\uff0c it is recorded that [Cao Cao](_URL_0_) (probably not related to the General Cao above) in year 192 CE made it into law that officials are NOT to be responsible to the safety of hostages and should always attack the hostage-taker, this law greatly reduced the number of hostage taking incidents; this implies hostage situation was a common thing in the chaotic years of late Han dynasty before 192 CE.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao"]]}
{"q_id": "343u7f", "title": "Did Scottish nobles from the Highlands actually speak Gaelic?", "selftext": "For the sake of narrowing the scope of my question, let's say \"did Scottish nobles from the Highlands actually speak Gaelic before the Act of Proscription (1746)?\" Or, were nobles mostly absentee landlords of the kind seen in France and England who spoke court French or English and left the management of their Highland estates to stewards, and therefore had no use for Gaelic as a language? If they did speak Gaelic, how fluent were they? Are there any books on this topic that I can pick up?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/343u7f/did_scottish_nobles_from_the_highlands_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqrlbgo"], "score": [10], "text": ["Before I get into the nitty gritty of answering this question, I'm going to define some parameters for the sake of specificity. First, although I suspect you might be talking about actual peers when you say 'nobles', I'm going to expand the definition to include both clan chiefs who had not been raised to the peerage and lairds since these men were effectively the nobility and the gentry of the Highlands. Secondly, I am defining the Highlands geographically as those counties that lie north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, so, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty, Inverness-shire, Argyllshire, Nairn, Moray, and bits of Perthshire, Banffshire, and Aberdeenshire, as well as all of the Outer and Inner Hebrides.\n\nThat established, the short answer to your question is 'yes, they did.' For the long answer, keep reading.\n\nThere are a lot of factors that influence the retention of Gaelic by the Highland nobility, some of them cultural and some of them economic since Scottish nobles were amongst the poorest in Europe. While French and English courtiers regularly attended the royal court and kept residences in the capital, only Scottish magnates, most of whom were of Lowland extraction, had the means to live away from their estates for any extended length of time. That said, culture certainly played a significant role in the way that Gaelic was perceived and practiced by Highland gentlemen and peers and it is Gaelic cultural pieces that have survived to give us our evidence regarding these lords' retention of the Gaelic language.\n\nMost of the evidence I'm citing here comes from the remarkably large collections of manuscripts belonging to various branches of the Clan Campbell, most notably those of the earls (later dukes) of Argyll and those of the lairds of Glenorchy (later the earls of Breadalbane). The Argyll Campbells were seated at Inveraray Castle in Argyllshire while their cousins of Glenorchy were situated variously and Dunblane and Taymouth Castles in western Perthshire. We know that members of these families were fluent enough in Gaelic to be able to test potential ministers on *their* fluency when searching for parish priests and we know that they were invested enough in Gaelic culture to have taken the time to learn the rules associated with Gaelic lament, panegyric, and satire to be able to successfully compose poems in these styles themselves. We know that they patronized Gaelic bards and that they commissioned manuscripts in the Gaelic insular uncial hand when all their official business would have been transacted using the Latin secretary hand alphabet. Although we do not have any evidence that any of these men or women actually wrote in Gaelic insular uncial, we can probably assume they were literate enough in the alphabet to read it and so were not confined only to oral fluency in the language. Of course, the Campbells of Argyll and Glenorchy were also fully fluent and literate in Scots as well and many of them were polyglots who could speak and read Latin, Greek, English, French, and Italian besides.\n\nIf you're interested in this topic though, then I would highly recommend reading John Bannerman's research on medieval and early modern literacy in the Highlands: \n\nBannerman, John, \u2018Literacy in the Highlands\u2019, in in Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw (eds.), *The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson* (Edinburgh,\n1983), pp. 214-235.\n\nFor an overview of the geographical history of Gaelic in Scotland, take a look at just about anything by Charles W.J. Withers. Unfortunately, all of my sources are scholarly by nature but if you'd like more recommendations and titles, just let me know!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "10pqgm", "title": "Detroit during WWII ", "selftext": "Detroit's peak population was during the later stages of WWII and the years following. According to the 1950 census, it had about 1.85 million people within its city limits, which made it the 5th largest city in the United States and the largest population in its history. Today there are just over 700,000 within city limits, and it has steadily decreased by the year.\n\nAs a native Detroiter, the figures are astonishing. I am familiar with its demise, which includes the race riots, the redlining, white-flight, etc., but reaching such a high capacity during the later years of WWII and seeing how high the unemployment is today sparks some questions. I know that Detroit played a big role for manufacturing towards the war effort, but to what scale? What specifically was being made, and was it more towards the European theater or the Pacific theater? How was it in Detroit during these times also? Were the majority of those employed inside factories women? And can anybody elaborate on how the African-American 'middle and upper-middle class' was born? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10pqgm/detroit_during_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6fladq"], "score": [2], "text": ["As you know Detroit was, before the war, a major auto producing city. Well when WWII rolls around the government is in need of large scale production of war materials (planes, tanks, amunition, etc...) Well all the many auto factories in Detroit are converted from auto production to the production of tanks, planes, and so forth. With all of this large scale and widespread production, people were needed to do these jobs. As you probably know before the war the U.S. was in the \"Great Depression\" so any word of job availability was met with a large amount of responses. So people would move, often in large quantities, to the major cities where this type of production was taking place. And yes many of these workers were infact women. As most able bodied men were over seas fighting or preparing to go over they had to leave their jobs, so the positions needed to be filled and the majority of people left were women. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fwibcj", "title": "How did the ottomans replenish their troops so quickly? Was their army that large in the 1500-1600s?", "selftext": "It seems like they could replenish their army quite effectively. There are battles/sieges, even minor ones, where the ottomans lost 20.000+ soldiers, yet a few years later are able to field armies in the ~100k range. \n\nWas it possible because of a large population to recruit from? Did they simply have a much larger army (sipahis, janissaries, etc...all included) than other countries and could afford keeping reserves in areas far away from the front?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fwibcj/how_did_the_ottomans_replenish_their_troops_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmqo72u"], "score": [8], "text": ["The numbers you might read about, like with any historical numbers, should be taken with some circumspection. But it is true that the Ottomans were able to field large armies for their time. In terms of manpower, the empire had two principal military bodies: the kapikulu or household troops and then the timariot army until the seventeenth century. The first one is pretty simple. The kapikulu consisted of the janissary regiments in the capital and those deployed to the provinces plus the six standing cavalry regiments also based out of Istanbul. The janissaries were conscripted from the devshirme initially, but by the end of the sixteenth century more and more Muslim-born men join the corps voluntarily. The janissaries had tremendous growth at the end of the sixteenth century because of the war with Persia (1578-1590) and a major war with a Habsburg led coalition (1591-1606). During this period the janissaries and household cavalry grew by about three times in number. \n\nThe main advantage they had during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the structure of the timariot army. A timar was a semi-feudal land grant to an Ottoman notable, but unlike in Europe it was not hereditary. Each timariot sipahi brought himself as a mounted soldier plus a retinue to war, the size of which was calculated based on the land he had the rights to. Typically, it was these cavalry plus their retainers that made up the high numbers of Ottoman armies during their main period of conquest and expansion. By the early seventeenth century because of economic and political factors the strength of the timariot army declined. Many of these timar holders could no longer afford to outfit a war party. \n\nMaking up for the loss of timariot forces in the seventeenth century were provincial governors and their private mercenary armies. During the instability of the 1590s are early 1600s many peasants became bandits or mercenaries to make a living. By the mid-seventeenth century, these kinds of mercenary musketeers (sekbans) matched or exceeded the numbers of janissaries in Ottoman armies. I should add that research into this topic is somewhat emerging and not as well-defined as the Classical Period timariot army, so precise details are a little thin. \n\nThe overall trend for the Ottomans was a mix of centralized standing forces augmented with manpower pools they could mobilize during wartime, whether timariot or sekban. This gave them an edge over European armies of the early modern period which consisted entirely of seasonal levees or mercenaries (barring some exceptions of course). This gave the Ottomans a lot of manpower and the federated structure offset some of the costs on the state treasury. \n\nSome additional readings: \n\nRhoads Murphey, *Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700*\n\nBaki Teczan, *The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5oitpq", "title": "How did researchers do literature searches before the invention of computers?", "selftext": "I read that Penicillin was discovered because in 1940 a group of Oxford researchers found Alexander Fleming's paper on it from ten years before. How did one do a literature search in those days? How were they able to search for keywords like \"antibiotic substance\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5oitpq/how_did_researchers_do_literature_searches_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcjlokw"], "score": [11], "text": ["There were several ways to unravel one's target bibliography to begin research. A library's card catalogue was an excellent means to find sources on the subject (these were cards arranged in little drawers, organized alphabetically, with references by author, book title, and subject). Finding a recent book on the target subject would provide a bibliography of recent credible sources, and that would begin the trail to find other sources and expend the net of available sources on a subject.\n\nOf course, articles provided the most up-to-date research and bibliographies. Professional journals usually published hard copy indexes of recent articles, which included subject references. Articles could be used in the same way as a recent book's bibliography to unravel the appropriate sources for research on a subject.\n\nAttendance at conferences was also a viable way to learn about available sources. I also wrote letters to scholars seeking advice of research topics (letters were pieces of paper placed in envelopes and sent by the Postal Service - you needed to apply a purchased stamp). And publishing articles resulted (as it still does) in quick feedback as to what sources one might be missing.\n\nThe library card catalogue system (and the Library of Congress published card catalogue) were excellent sources and led to a path of discovery different from the internet. The latter is superior in many ways, but anyone who used a card catalogue misses them for the opportunity of serendipitous discovery.\n\nNow if you want to know about the preparation of vellum and of inks from vegetable matter, you'll need to find someone else, because that is a year or two before my time. I go back to a previous century, but not that far back."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9h09d4", "title": "Why Was HMS Hood Considered \"Invincible\"?", "selftext": "To add to the question above, considering the fate of the British battlecruisers at Jutland, why did HMS Hood enjoy such a favourable reputation, particularly vis-a-vis the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, and considering it was never tested in battle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h09d4/why_was_hms_hood_considered_invincible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e68839v", "e688gy4"], "score": [29, 21], "text": ["From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nFlagships can be peculiar things in the twentieth century. Admirals sometimes chose flagships based on habit, others because the ship in questions had better communication equipment. Raymond Spruance preferred heavy cruisers likely for both reasons. Kurita Takeo's flagship before Leyte was the heavy cruiser *Atago*. He had to transfer his flag to *Yamato* after the submarine *Darter* sank her as the IJN taskforce was on its way to Leyte. So flagships are not necessarily the biggest and the baddest ships available. Some though were quite formidable and HMS *Hood* was one of them.  There were two reasons why HMS *Hood* earned this particular moniker \"pride of the RN.\" \n\nOne, HMS *Hood* was one of the more prominent ships within the public face of the RN in the interwar period. When launched, she was the largest and fastest capital ship  in the world. She held this record well until 1940 with *Bismarck*'s launching. Although Japanese and American battleships too would outshine *Hood* after *Bismarck*, the British battlecruiser was still among the most well-known ships in the fleet. One of the major duties of  HMS *Hood* was to serve as the flagship for a number of prestigious assignments such as the head of the Home Fleet's battlecruiser squadron or as flagship of the Mediterranean Feet. This gave her a very high visibility both among the British public and the world. The height of this visibility was arguably the 1923-1924 world tour in which the *Hood* was the flagship of a RN fleet that visited numerous ports around the globe as a gesture of goodwill. She actually was at the time the largest ship to ever traverse the Panama Canal and a number of ports on the tour were not deep enough to accommodate her draft. \n\nThe second reason for HMS *Hood*'s public visibility was that she had little other competition within the interwar RN for the spot. Although she was a battlecruiser, she was better armored in many respects than the *Queen Elizabeth*-class battleships and faster. The only other capital ships the UK constructed before the \"battleship holiday\" of the Washington Naval Treaty were the [*Nelson*-class](_URL_1_) battleships. Although they had 16-inch guns and a decent armor scheme, they did not *look* like a battleship. They were squat, very slow (top speed was 23 knts), handled poorly, had an asymetiric main armament, and they looked like oilers with their aft-located superstructure. The *KGV*'s were new ships, but were also going through teething troubles. The RN was never quite able to make its quad 14\" turrets work as promised and the battleships' design was somewhat compromised by trying to hew towards displacement limits set by the now-abandoned London Treaty. In short, HMS *Hood* beat its main rivals for being the most modern British battleship partly on aesthetic reasons. *Hood*'s clean lines, rakish bow, and symmetrical superstructure all screamed \"battleship\" while the *Nelson*s appeared to be the compromised design they were. \n\nThe collapse of the naval limitation treaties did end the battleship holiday, but far too late for the RN. The *King George V*-class battleships began construction only at the end of the 1930s, so they would only be launched during the war. This meant these new ships had very little time to fix themselves in the public's eye. The advent of airpower and the gradual eclipse of the big guns as the main deciding factor in naval combat meant there was also not much for the *King George V*s to do during the war. HMS *Prince of Wales* had a highly visible career, but as part of failed missions: *Hood*'s attempt to stop the *Bismarck* where *PoW* was damaged, and as part of Force Z at Singapore where she was sunk along with HMS *Repulse*. ", "It's important to remember that *Hood* was just as well armoured as the *Queen Elizabeth* class battleships. Her 12in armour belt was only an inch thinner than that of the *Queen Elizabeth* class, but the slope of the armour made it equally effective. *Hood* also had a thicker upper belt than the *Queen Elizabeth*s, and an equally thick deck. The upper belt was the main weakness for both classes. She was also not considered invincible, at least not by the Royal Navy. Most discussions of *Hood* by RN officers focused on her poor protection, and there were frequent calls for her to be upgraded. There were plans for her to be upgraded in the 1940s, but shipyard space for this was not available before the Battle of the Denmark Strait. The upgrade would have fully extended her 12in belt, added more deck armour, and a more modern AA armament. \n\nEven the public did not feel that *Hood* was invincible. The public generally considered her beautiful, graceful, imposing, and a powerful symbol of imperial might. Hood was awe-inspiring in her might, in her size, and in her design; Ted Briggs, one of the three survivors of her sinking, described his first encounter with her:\n\n >  I stood on the beach for some considerable time, drinking in the beauty, grace, and immaculate strength of her. 'Beauty' and 'grace' seem rather ludicrous words to describe a vessel of such size, particularly one whose primary function was for destruction. But I can honestly say I never could, nor indeed can even today, think of more suitable words to describe her.\n\nThe look of a ship went a long way with the sailors of the RN, and with the general public, much more than the capabilities of the ship. A simple way to show this is to look at the nicknames the ships received. Nelson and Rodney, both more heavily armed and armoured than Hood, received the disparaging nicknames 'Nelsol' and 'Rodnol', because they resembled tankers in design. Ramillies, equally well-armed and armoured as Hood, was the 'One-funnelled Baa-Ram'. Hood was only ever 'the mighty Hood'.\n\nHood also, thanks to her cruises with the Battlecruiser Squadron, became a symbol of the might and power of the British Empire. Her first cruise was to Scandinavia, in 1920, but her more famous cruise was the 1923-4 World Cruise. Accompanied by Repulse, she visited the Empire's most important outposts, as well as ports in North and South America. In all these ports, she was a major attraction - at Melbourne, she was visited by 486,000 people in a week. She would visit more countries during her service in later years, especially during her Mediterranean cruises. These cruises turned her from a ship into a symbol; as V. C. Scott O'Connor would describe in his contemporary account of the World Cruise:\n\n >  In her mass and speed and perfection of armament, the Hood symbolises the valorous determination of war-weary Britain to maintain intact for the good of mankind the far-flung Empire she has built up through the centuries. It is this symbolism that lifts Hood out of the machine and irradiates the great grey hulk with a halo of splendour.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6q8rmr/why_was_the_hood_an_old_ww1style_battlecruiser/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson-class_battleship"], []]}
{"q_id": "3gkqkg", "title": "Why did Japan invade East Timor in WW2 if Portugal was neutral? They didn't invade Macau after all", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gkqkg/why_did_japan_invade_east_timor_in_ww2_if/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctz2fdb", "ctz4fcr"], "score": [24, 20], "text": ["While you're correct in saying that the Japanese didn't invade Macau, that's not to say that they didn't have a rather overbearing presence there.\n\nIn 1943, they crossed into Macau in an attempt to capture a British cargo ship.  The Macau police force fired on them, and had 20 killed.  A couple of months later, Japan had \"advisors\" installed in the government of Macau and stationed troops there; in effect, turning Macau into a puppet state.\n\nA good source of info on Macau in WWII [can be found here.](_URL_0_)", "As the nearest of the large Indonesian islands to the major Australian base at Darwin, Timor was a logical staging base for Allied defenses in the days after the Pacific War's outbreak, as Japanese ships began moving through Indonesia. To turn Timor into a staging base, however, the Allies needed the port at Dili in East Timor. Over the protests of the Portuguese government, the Allies established a beachhead there and started setting up defenses. \n\nIn January 1942, just a month after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese began bombing Timor. The Dutch East Indies collapsed, and the small contingents of British, ANZAC, and American troops there soon pulled back. Several hundred Australian troops remained on Timor to stage a holding action. \n\nThis unit, known as Sparrow Force, held off 20,000 Japanese troops for a year with the help of Timorese supporters. Timor suffered greatly due to reprisals against the civilian population. Some Timorese embraced the opportunity to collaborate with Japan and throw off Portuguese rule. When the Japanese left, the Portuguese rounded up these collaborators and dealt roughly with them. When the war was over, East Timor was devastated and over ten percent of the population was dead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.academia.edu/8985760/The_Macanese_at_War_Survival_and_Identity_Among_Portuguese_Eurasians_during_World_War_II"], []]}
{"q_id": "75z37x", "title": "What was going on in America that caused the Founding Fathers to create the Second Amendment and sign it into law?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75z37x/what_was_going_on_in_america_that_caused_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doa494x"], "score": [147], "text": ["This is a complex question that I\u2019ll need to supply a lot of context for in order to answer it. Sources are in my direct reply. \n\n\n**Firearm Ownership in Pre-Revolutionary America**\n\nFirearms were quite common in the American colonies during the 17th century.  Based on data of a survey conducted in New England in 1775, historian Robert Churchill discovered that somewhere around one third of free white males owned at least one firearm in New England.(1)  This number might seem low since common misconceptions seem to think everyone was armed, but firearms were expensive to buy and to maintain.  Unless you lived on the frontier, they were generally not necessary for a colonists\u2019 survival.  However, firearm ownership at least doubled during the earliest stages of the American Revolution.  \n\n\n**Armed Rebellions of the Pre-Revolutionary Era**\n\n\nIn the build up to the American Revolution, tensions grew between the common people of American society and the elite who were often viewed as manipulators of laws and wealth in order to oppress the underclasses.  No better example of this can be seen than in the case of North Carolina where an armed insurrection turned the politics of the state upside-down. This insurrection is known as the Regulator Rebellion between farmers living out west and the gentry who controlled the economy and government.\n\nThese farmers, who called themselves The North Carolina Regulators, came to the state \u201cseeking a haven for independent farming\u201d in a state controlled by the gentry who wanted \u201cto create a society dominated by large plantations and enslaved laborers.\u201d[2].  When oppression escalated due to the corruption of the government (the governor even had their own elected representatives thrown in jail), these farmers took up arms against the government in order to fight to be left alone.  They called themselves \u2018regulators\u201d and they wanted to regulate the government who they saw as deeply corrupt.  The regulators lost their rebellion when the gentry called up a militia and marched west. The two sides clashed, leading to about three dozen dead and even more hanged in June 1771. While this rebellion may seem irrelevant, it most certainly influenced future events. \n\n**The 1780s:**\n\nThe Constitution was created in 1787, but the Bill of Rights was not ratified until December 1791. Because of this, it\u2019s extremely important to understand what was happening in America during this time period.  This context is critical because it directly influence how and why the US Constitution was assembled.  \n\n\nEconomic hardships and uprisings defined the 1780s.  While uprisings happened across the United States, the most famous one, known today as Shays\u2019 Rebellion, directly influenced the creation of the Second Amendment. \n\n\nShays\u2019 Rebellion was an armed uprising led by former Massachusetts militiamen and veterans of the American Revolution which took place between 1786 - 1787. Daniel Shays led several thousand \u2018rebels\" to fight against the economic injustices that were facing farmers and agrarian peasants all across America. (3) These farmers were experiencing extreme poverty following the end of the Revolutionary War. All across America, farmers saw their lands foreclosed on in unfair property seizures, and they wanted to fight back. They were also trying to fight taxes which were beginning to be levied against them.(4) People in rural American fought these perceived injustices in a few ways, with Shays' Rebellion being the most violent. Shays' Rebellion would ultimately be put down, but it startled the gentry who feared further uprisings throughout the United States.\n\n\nWhile we call it a \u201crebellion\" today, these men did not label themselves this way.  They called themselves \u201cregulators,\u201d specifically they called themselves the \u201cMassachusetts Regulation,\u201d modeling off of the North Carolina Regulators that we saw just a moment ago.(5)  This was the larger part of a trend of poor Americans fighting back against economic injustice. The idea of \u201ccivilian regulation\u201d was catching on and becoming a popular idea for ending government corruption. They believed that if the government wasn't regulating itself on behalf of \"We the People\", then \"the People\" had the right to regulate, or take back the government \u2013 to take it back and do what they believed was right. They didn't see themselves as a rebellion, but rather the gentry labeled them as such in order to de-legitimize their cause. By calling them \"rebels,\" neutral Americans would see these men as insurgents who needed to be stopped.  But this regulation was not the only type of fighting Americans across the country participated in.  Many states saw widespread revolts, with one historian explaining:  \n\n\n > In Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and South Carolina, protesters closed courthouses, halted sheriffs\u2019 auctions, and threatened violence if state officials continued to confiscate property for unpaid taxes. In Massachusetts, widespread popular resistance turned to civil war. (6)\n\n\nBy the time the the constitutional convention convened, America was under extreme duress. In Terry Bouton's article \"A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania\" he masterfully explained the fighting and rebellion that took place in the rural country sides of Pennsylvania that mirrored what had happened in Massachusetts.(7) The gentry were terrified that they were losing control of rural America, and as a result they would not be able to seize foreclosed land and collect taxes, which they needed. Empowering militias to be trained and carry firearms allowed the gentry to call up these men in times of need and suppress these rebellions that were taking place.  The Founders knew that the only solutions were to call up militias as they had done in North Carolina and Massachusetts.\n\n\nAmerican Revolutionary veterans like Benjamin Lincoln raised a militia and mounted his own assaults against the \"rebels\" in Massachusetts and eventually defeated the Massachusetts Regulators in June of 1787, the exact same time that the Constitutional convention was convening.  So as they begin to debate this on the national stage, especially in 1787 at the Constitutional convention, the gentry singled out Daniel Shays (even though there were actually many other leaders), and they said he was crazy and people were only following a demagogue. They hailed leaders like Benjamin Lincoln and his \u201cMassachusetts Militia\u201d as the victors and saviors and asserted that militias are what will save America in the future against such madness.  Thus they needed to protect the government\u2019s right to call up militias when necessary.  \n\n\n**Writing the Second Amendment**\n\n\nThe Bill of Rights was something hotly debated from the start. Some well-known politicians, particularly Federalists like Alexander Hamilton did not even want a Bill of Rights created, believing that it was unnecessary.  Others, like James Madison, insisted that in order for all states to get behind this constitution, a Bill of Rights would be necessary.  So James Madison first introduced the first draft that would become the Bill of Rights in 1789.  These items then were debated, both publicly and privately, were re-written, and then incorporated in a little over two years.  Of course among these became the Second Amendment. \n\n\nA precedent existed at the state level for protecting militias. Multiple other bills of rights from other states had already protected a militia's right to bear arms (such as Section 13 of Virginia's Declaration of Rights) and many of these states were fighting to have the federal government protect this as well.  Here their declaration stated: \n\n\n >  SEC. 13. That a well-regulated militia, or composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.(8)\n\n\nThis wording is even more carefully crafted then in the national Bill of Rights.  Here, they define \u201cwell-regulated\u201d meaning they were trained my military officers.  You also see that they define the purpose of it as being necessary to \u201cdefend\u201d the state (implying against people in rebellion) and they of course explain why they feared a standing Army.  Now if you examine the wording of the Second Amendment, we can see some clear similarities:\n\n\n >  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.\n\n\nLike in Virginia, \u201cwell regulated\" is the key phrase. They are referring to militias led by people like Benjamin Lincoln and his Massachusetts Militia, not Shays and his \"rebellion\".  The idea that people need firearms to protect themselves from the government is not accurate. It was a message propagated by anti-gun control advocates of the 1980s.  This \u201cright\u201d was crafted when rebellions were happening everywhere and the only way the government could maintain control was to make sure they could call up their militias.\n\n\nIt is worth mentioning a newer theory from about 20 years ago is cited these days. Carl T. Bogus, a law professor argued that slavery was a driving force behind this amendment.(9)  His argument is based off of the number of slave-owning individuals in the south who were afraid of slave rebellions. It\u2019s a plausible theory, but not one eagerly embraced by the academic historical community. This hesitancy to accept the theory is founded in the understanding that no slave rebellions were ever attempted in America during this period, thus were not a serious threat. \n\nTo sum up, the 2A was created out of fear of uprisings of the 1780s. The Founders protected an individual's right to own firearms so that when threats presented themselves, they could call up militias to defend them.\n\nEdit: clarity"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "51r0k6", "title": "Ive noticed in several westerns games and movies, ranchers wearing large leather armbands, that I havn't seen on anyone else wear in that setting. Did they have some use on the ranch?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51r0k6/ive_noticed_in_several_westerns_games_and_movies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7eap9c"], "score": [8], "text": ["I think what you might be referring to are leather wrist cuffs, which were/are used to protect you from just about anything that could rub your wrist raw (reins, scratchy brush, ropes, etc.) and to protect/clamp down the sleeve of your shirt (since a cowboy on a long cattle drive often only had the shirt on his back, it was good to keep it in one piece). I've seen their use dated back to the Spanish vaqueros. They spread in the US as the great cattle drives in the 19th century drew in foreign cowboys. OP, try an image search for \"western leather wrist cuff\" and tell me if that looks like what you're searching for.\n\nOf course, searching for just \"leather wrist cuffs\" is bound to bring you to a whole other kind of product....\n\n(Sorry for the brief reply, but I don't know what else I could really say about wrist cuffs. If you ask, I'll try to answer.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nb6d8", "title": "When was the last time that global population was less than the previous year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nb6d8/when_was_the_last_time_that_global_population_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmci1qy", "cmcia3l", "cmcj82d"], "score": [2, 10, 2], "text": ["Well, from looking for long term data it seems that humans haven't had a serious decline in some time.\n\n[Population from 1750-projected 2050](_URL_1_)\n\n[Wikipedia chart from 10,000BC-2,000AD](_URL_0_)\n\nYear to year in that chart shows some drops, but the population bounces back near immediately.\n\nIt looks like the last time growth was truly stagnate was 8,000BC-6,000BC.\n\nFinal note is the theory of the [Toba Catastrophe](_URL_2_). Some argue from the limited varitey of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA that there could have been a serious population bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. The estimated number of total humans was around 10,000 at the time. \n", "I'd argue for 1919 or 1920: the flu pandemic is estimated to have killed 50-100 million people (Wikipedia), mostly in late 1918, whereas UN estimates give an average rise in world population of about 10 million a year at this point (1750 million in 1910, 1860 million in 1911)[source, table 1](_URL_0_). So we can be certain world population had dropped from 1 Jan 1918 to 1 Jan 1919, with possibly a further drop to 1 Jan 1920. \n\nThe UN publish population estimates every year from 1950 ([source](_URL_1_)), and there's at least a 40M increase every year, so we can exclude that period. The only other plausible period seems to be during WWII, but you'd need something like 25-30 million excess deaths in a single year which I don't believe happened.\n\nEDIT: I have now read the paper the estimate was based on: Johnson NP, Mueller J., . Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 \"Spanish\" influenza pandemic. Bull Hist Med. 2002 Spring;76(1):105-15. They state \"in the order of 50 million\" and can allow for 48-60 million deaths, but say it could be higher due to underreporting. Other estimates of the death toll have been lower, ranging from 22 million (1920s) to 30-40 million (2001). But even the lowest of these is sufficient for my argument, as at least 2/3rds of the deaths were in 1918 and the population rise you're trying to counter is safely under 15 million.", "My first shot was to use the curated data of Wolfram Research to see if in recent times major catastrophes or wars resulted in negative population growth, but it appears [that it was not the case](_URL_0_). The data locates the minimum growth  between 1850 and 1851 with ~1 million people. A big \"dent\" in growth can be seen between 1918 and 1920 as a result of the flu pointed out by /u/crb11. However it seems that the global population still rose by about 7 millions.\n\nTo look back in history is tricky, as we only have estimations and the data is aggregated in large time spans. I found a meta-study of population estimations conducted in the framework of [HYDE](_URL_2_), History Database of the Global Environment by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. The data can be downloaded [here](_URL_1_). \n\nI [plotted every series](_URL_4_) and the overall trends point to an always growing global population. However a few of the authors point to [a slight decrease at around year **1400**](_URL_3_), so this would be my candidate, if at all. However bear in mind that these are some **selected** estimations so not everyone would agree! The result of the meta-study (HYDE 3.1) however agrees with a slight decreasing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/World_population_growth_%28lin-log_scale%29.png", "http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history1.aspx", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans"], ["http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf", "http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx"], ["http://i.imgur.com/I0HC6R0.png", "http://themasites.pbl.nl/images/pop_summary_tcm61-44258.xls", "http://themasites.pbl.nl/tridion/en/themasites/hyde/index.html", "http://i.imgur.com/UZJOmR1.png", "http://i.imgur.com/GJmafPS.png"]]}
{"q_id": "bb3f9u", "title": "What are the basis, if any, for the theory that puts Trojan Horse mythos has an origin story created by the Romans to put themselves as the survivors of a treachorous scheme to win a war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bb3f9u/what_are_the_basis_if_any_for_the_theory_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eki6qnr", "ekirvq7"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Sorry, I don't quite understand. Are you suggesting that the Trojan Horse was a story invented by the Romans? The horse appears already in Homer, it's mentioned briefly in the Odyssey.", "If the question is whether the Trojan Horse story is a Roman invention, the answer is a categorical \"No!\"  It's in Homer,  and vase painting,  for example. \n\nDid some romans exploit that story?  Sure.  But it wasn't their story to start with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "bu6sj0", "title": "What \"ended\" the Satanic Panic of the 80s, regarding heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons, etc?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bu6sj0/what_ended_the_satanic_panic_of_the_80s_regarding/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epa8xi7"], "score": [909], "text": ["The delightful answer is that we don't really know. Yet.\n\nI'd like to talk about *why*.\n\nReichert and Richardson's (R & R 2012) article \"Decline of a Moral Panic: A Social Psychological and Socio-Legal Examination of the Current\nStatus of Satanism\" is actually about the *survival* of fears of Satanism, played out in custodial and other court cases. When it comes to the actual decline, they write:\n\n >  As with any moral panic, reasons for the decline\nare unclear. One proposed explanation involved the discrediting of so-called \u201crepressed memories\u201d of Satanic ritual abuse in trials of the late\n1980s and 1990s, in which victims would recant their charges and prosecutors would fail to produce adult witnesses or corroborating physical\nevidence. Some cases even resulted in successful suits against therapists\nwho allegedly had planted memories in clients.\n\n >  The failure to achieve\nconvictions in some high profile Satanism-related cases, such as the\nMcMartin trial, may have contributed to the decline of moral panic.\n\n >  The decline also coincided with the emergence of new concerns such as\nterrorism after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which may have helped\nsupplant Satanism as a significant public fear.\n\n(I'll get to D & D specifically, I promise.)\n\nStanley Cohen (Cohen 1972, 1987, 2002), the foundational theorist on \"moral panic\" in the first place, had two key points about the decline of moral panics:\n\n1. \"Volatility \u2013 the panic erupts and dissipates suddenly\nand without warning\" is one of the five defining characteristics of a moral panic. (He points to illogical fears of immigrants as the big exception.)\n\n2. \"First, why do full-blown panics ever end? My original answers were\nonly guess-work.\" His answers for possibilities were: \"a 'natural history' of moral panics\"--i.e. that's just how they are; people are convinced by rational data that there is no there there; the thing gets commodified/absorbed by respectable society. That's in 2002 revisiting his 1972 and 1987 work. He...does not go on to offer updated ideas: \"No readily available explanation exists as to how and why the\nsequence ever ends.\"\n\nA second theory of moral panic, derived in large part from the works of Stuart Hall and Kenneth Thompson, suggests that \"moral panic\" is more or less an endemic state of society--however, its *focus* shifts. This theory also points to the fundamentally conservative and even regressive nature of moral panic(s): they focus on a situation perceived as out of control, deviant, needing restoration to a previous state.\n\nBut even Cohen points out that any framework is unsatisfactory because it is sociological and \"a-historical,\" that is, it cannot explain why moral panics (or a phase of endemic moral panic) develop around a particular thing at a particular time and then fade away at a particular time.\n\nAnd that brings us to the problem: to this point, moral panics have been the focus primarily of scholars outside the field of history. Looking at the methodologies and explanations that have been posited do not actually address the root cause of a decline.\n\nReichert is a psychologist; Richardson is a sociologist. The central thrust of their argument is that juries didn't convict people of SRA, and people started mistrusting therapists instead. (I don't know why on Earth they chose 9/11 as \"the next moral panic\" when, FFS, violent video games much?) They don't address crucial underlying questions: \n\nFirst, *why* were people suddenly willing to accept objective evidence/why was the media willing to report objective evidence or take a closer look?\n\nSecond, why did the specific example of debunking SRA result in the decline of the overall *Satanic* panic?\n\nThese two points are both relevant to one of the major recent works related to the Satanic panic, philosopher Joseph Laycock's *Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic about Role\u2010Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds* (**See? I told you I'd get there!**). Laycock focuses exclusively on RPG panic. Anti-D & D panic fizzled out in the early 1990s, he argues, because *anti-RPG panic* evolved into spurts of anti-White Wolf panic, on a much smaller scale, in the 1990s.\n\nLaycock's argument focuses specifically on the nature of RPGs as a perceived teenage, white, and male hobby. He argues that the introduction and popularity of White Wolf games like Vampire, Werewolf, Mage (he talks about a couple of GURPS variants as well) mirrored a shift in popular discourse towards the bleakness of human nature. \n\nHe gives an overview of the development of the \"superpredator\" thesis, in which inherently corrupt (primarily) teenage boys are going increasingly out of control in a tidal wave of youth crime. Superpredators \"do not fear the stigma of arrest, the pains of imprisonment, or the pangs of conscience.\" (quoting Bennett et al., *Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America\u2019s War against Crime and Drugs*). Importantly, as the idea developed in the early 1990s, this meant urban, lower-class, and above all black boys. (The parallel panic was the teenage mother, especially the teenage mother on welfare, who of course is never white.)\n\nThe public connection between superpredators and RPGs, he suggests, was triggered by two phenomena. First, *white, middle-class* boys started being visible in the media for committing shocking crimes. Second, there were a handful of Shocking, Nice-White-Family Murdered cases in which the murderer had played *Vampire*, had been kicked out of a game of *Vampire*, or kinda maybe sorta thought they *were* a vampire.\n\nThe book is fascinating and I absolutely recommend it (especially the analysis of the World of Darkness from a religious studies POV), but there's still a problem from a historians' view: context. Laycock isolates RPG panic from anti-heavy metal fears and from Satanic panic in general. But despite tracing a trajectory from D & D to WW outrage, he calls the 1996 burble of anti-WW media attention a revival or rebirth--not a historical continuation.\n\nThere's a lot of research on how D & D became tied up in the panic over Satanism--but Laycock fails to consider this larger dimension when looking at the decline/evolution of anti-RPG panic. He says *that* fears of inherently bad superpredators eventually replaced fears of Satan corrupting boys--but not *why*.\n\nAskHistorians has a 20-year moratorium on questions. Part of this is that 9/11 is still less than 20 years away, and we plan to introduce a 21-year moratorium on Jan. 1, 2021 (just kidding...I think). But no, the real reason is historical perspective: we haven't had time to see all the implications and tendrils of a thing play out; we're too personally involved in whatever phenomenon we're studying. I think the decline of Satanic panic is a great example of this principle in action; I think Laycock's book, despite coming from a religious/cultural studies angle rather than history, is a sign that people are getting interested in deeper explanation.\n\n~~\n\nAdditionally, there's a fairly recent edited volume on *Moral Panics, the Media, and the Law in Early Modern England* that's pretty explicit about being *historians* addressing moral panics. *Dangerous Games* is a better read, but this might interest some of you as well--especially from the perspective of mass media and, relevant to all of us reading this, I think, media *change*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "362v44", "title": "Who are these warlords in the late Qing period?", "selftext": "What I've read about this period is filled with accounts of these warlords controlling large parts of the country.  Who were these guys, and how did they come to power.  Also is there any idea how many there were?  Would warlords control whole provinces or they much pettier?  Any light that can be shone on the subject would be appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/362v44/who_are_these_warlords_in_the_late_qing_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cra96ik", "cracbn2"], "score": [6, 8], "text": ["Just posting a followup question if thats okay.  Did any of these warlords and their factions survive into the republican era?  ", "Wait, which ones? During which period?\n\nBecause their origin came during the Taiping rebellion when the central army was destroyed by the rebels. The solution to that was the creation of regional militias under the control of ethnically Han gentries to fight the rebels instead. Under this system, where ethnically Han soldiers were recruited by ethnically Han gentry under the overall command of an ethnically Han court official ( Zeng Guofan) defeated the rebellion.\n\nBut the consequences of that is military power was thereafter decentralized. You had a feudalesque arrangement in which soldiers were loyal to their immediate superiors personally rather than the central government. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the Qing attempted (and succeeded) in creating a modern army (the Beiyang army) based on European lines out of the forces which won the Taiping rebellion. However, decentralized military control remained. That is not to say that regional military commanders had independence, but they were significant power in their own right.\n\nThough the Qing tried to appoint Manchu commanders for the Beiyang army, they were sidelined by ethnic Han generals from the provinces, the most important of whom was Yuan Shikai. Originally appointed as an army counselor in Beijing to get him away from his provincial power-base, he ended up becoming the most influential person over the Beiyang army. \n\nIn 1911 when an uprising against the Qing occurred, Yuan had the choice of either backing the dynasty or backing the rebels, he chose to back the rebels and thus the Qing dynasty fell and the Chinese Republic was proclaimed. Yuan soon became the president.\n\nLong story short, Yuan subsequently made a whole bunch of bad decisions, including trying to make himself emperor, that lost him the support of the other Beiyang generals. Then he made the horrible decision to simply die of uremia after abdicating. Thereafter there was no central leadership available to hold together the decentralized military system. Which meant that many Beiyang general formed his own \"clique\" based on the geographical extent of his own powerbase (which IIRC was often provincial based).  Thus began the era of the warlords.\n\nSo the answer is that the late Qing ended up having a decentralized military system, which meant each regional commander had a huge deal of power because his troops were often loyal to him personally. But they did not have independence either. It was the failure of the early Republican era and Yuan Shikai that gave them independence in the 1920s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7h7f5c", "title": "Why does English have a mix of Latin-based words and Germanic-based words? And why is there other influence from other languages like Greek?", "selftext": "And did this happen with other major modern languages? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7h7f5c/why_does_english_have_a_mix_of_latinbased_words/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqp4ppb", "dqp54qm"], "score": [5, 10], "text": ["I suggest you ask this question r/linguistics", "All languages take bits of words from other languages near them (and sometimes far-off! Shampoo, bungalow, kung fu, etc). So yes, in modern Latin languages (Spanish, French, etc) you'll find some German words, and in Germanic languages (German, Dutch, etc) you'll find some Latin words. For example, the German word Kaiser is derived from the Latin word Caesar. And of course, as today English is the word's predominant language in technology, many languages use English-derived words for various pieces of modern technology (look at the German words \"Komputer\" and \"das Internet\").\n\nYou can also see this in non-European languages too. Turkish and Persian, for example, have some Arabic words.\n\nBut, in terms of Latin and German words, English has much more of a mix than some other European languages. Why?\n\nThe reason of course, is history.\n\nAt the tail end of antiquity, the Romano-British were culturally dominated by the arriving Angles, Saxons and Jutes. How exactly this happened is not completely clear, so I won't go into it here. But, in short, by the 7th century AD the people of central and southern Britain (today called England, ie Angle-land) were speaking Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic language. As a Germanic language, this was, unsurprisingly, somewhat similar to other Germanic languages.\n\nHowever, in 1066, England was conquered by the Normans, who spoke their own language, somewhat similar to French. They had deep connections to French, and English monarchs would continue to learn French, marry French women, and own large areas of land in France (which some monarchs would spend more time in than England). Most importantly, the court language of England wasn't English, but French, until the later Middle Ages.\n\nSo, we have a peasantry that speaks the Germanic language of English, and a nobility that speaks the Latin-derived language of French. \n\nThen of course, there's a Church that uses classical Latin. As the main institution of learning in Europe is the Catholic Church, this means that Latin is also the language of learning, philosophy, science, universities, etc. (Hence why all plants and animals have genus names in Latin).\n\nOver time of course, English was heavily influenced by the French of the nobility and the scientific/religious Latin.\n\nIt's also important to remember that this continued all throughout the middle ages and into the modern age. France continued to be a centre for learning, fashion, philosophy, art, etc, while England was, until the 17th century, not so much. \n\nYou can often see this when you look at what words are French or Latin derived, and what words are Germanic derived.\nBasic words used by English peasants every day (be, have, is, yes, no, hound, cow, hello, name, I, me, God, Hell) are similar to modern-day German.\n\nBut words of philosophy, politics, riches, and the Church hierarchy (democracy, duke, communism, cuisine, philosophy) are derived from French. And of course, since French is itself a Latin-based language, French words are often derived from Latin. That, plus the more direct Latin influence from the Church and scientific community, ensured Latin words found their way into English.\n\nBut what about Greek? Since Roman times, Greek was considered a language of learned philosophers, scientists and thinkers. Educated men in the Roman Empire often learned Greek, and this continued up to the 19th century. In fact, some of Britain's top schools still teach ancient Greek. This then led to Greek-derived words influencing English.\n\nBut this isn't something particularly notable to English. French, Italian, etc, also have plenty of Greek-derived words. Consider the Greek word \"Biblion\", meaning \"book\" and \"theke\" meaning store or box. A latinised version of this became \"Bibliotheque\", the French word for library (you'll note, I'm sure, that the Bible, half of which was written in Greek, derives from this as well)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3seznf", "title": "Did Charles Darwin believe in God?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3seznf/did_charles_darwin_believe_in_god/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwwpdie", "cwwx42e", "cwx1uqq", "cwx9aad"], "score": [20, 2, 3, 3], "text": ["I've never read his journals or anything on his personal beliefs, which are in any case indeterminate--how do we genuinely verify someone's *belief*? Even the most devout question their faith at times, so our ability to definitely prove this is limited. Still, we can comment on some of the things that Darwin wrote and published. This is a substantial excerpt from his *The Decent of Man* (1871):\n\n > The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection. It is not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may be inherited. **With the more civilised races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality.** Ultimately man does not accept the praise or blame of his fellows as his sole guide though few escape this influence, but his habitual convictions, controlled by reason, afford him the safest rule. His conscience then becomes the supreme judge and monitor. Nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection.\n\n >  **The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals.** It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man's reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Deity. **The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture....**\n\nNow, the highlighted bits don't prove that Darwin believed in God or even necessarily that he saw it as a good thing. But, it does appear to be the case that he saw it as *reasonable* to believe in an omniscient deity, and even an evolutionary advantage. It's of course possible that he's writing this with an ethnographic eye, attempting to explain the function of human societies while holding himself separate from them and the laws that seem to govern them. Still, there are key points at which he not only discusses why belief in God might be evolutionarily beneficial, but also makes implicit value judgments on it: an \"elevated\" culture produces belief in God, it helps the \"advance\" of morality, and is found among the \"more\" civilized people. Those words suggest that underlying this whole discussion is a baseline of ethnocentrism, in which his own society and its beliefs are the ultimate measuring stick for others.\n\nSo, this is hardly definitive, but just from what we have here my answer to \"Did Charles Darwin believe in God\" would be \"sure.\" \n", "Recently someone sold a letter from Darwin, at auction, which at least shows that he did not believe in Christianity. Given its ubiquity in his society you could say that this is tantamount to atheism but I'll leave the nuances to you:\n\n_URL_0_", "When in Darwin's life are you asking about? His intention was once to become a member of the clergy, so he certainly believed in God at that point.", "There's a famous quote [available on Wikipedia](_URL_0_) from one of Darwin's letters:\n\n > With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonid\u00e6 with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical.\n\nHe's explicitly saying that his theory of evolution is not incompatible with an Enlightenment-style belief in God as a watchmaker, but it seems to me significant that he specifies the problem of evil, rather than his theory of evolution, as his main reason to doubt traditional Christian belief.  Obviously I can only speculate regarding his thoughts, but I view him as a man who wished that a benevolent God existed, or even just that he could believe a benevolent God existed, but not as a man who believed in God."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3243818/I-m-sorry-inform-not-believe-bible-Rare-letter-secretive-Charles-Darwin-confesses-atheist-set-sell-90-000-auction.html"], [], ["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin"]]}
{"q_id": "3rzttf", "title": "Copy of an Egyptian hieroglyph on papyrus", "selftext": "Dear historians\n\nFor a school assignment I have to do research on ancient Egyptian religion. In my home I have a copy of an Egyptian hieroglyph on papyrus and I was wondering if you, historians, could help me identify the image.\n\n I have limited  ancient Egyptian knowledge and the only thing I can identify is the god \"Horus\".\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rzttf/copy_of_an_egyptian_hieroglyph_on_papyrus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwsvr67"], "score": [4], "text": ["While Ask Historians is not here to do homework for people, I think it's probably ok if I point you in the right direction to find more information on that item (the mods obviously will correct me if I'm wrong!)\n\nThe scene on that souvenir there is taken from the wall of the tomb of Horemheb, a pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. It features the goddess Hathor (far left) and her consort, Horus (third from left). Also, just as an additional item so you have the terminology you're seeking correct, a \"hieroglyph\" would refer to each individual symbol in the writing - think of it as roughly synonymous with \"letter\" as in \"the letter A.\" The overall scene is a painting that includes numerous hieroglyphs.\n\nI think that should be enough to get you on the right path!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/zjgB66x"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "55hc0p", "title": "Elizabeth II is still the Queen of Canada, Australia and New Zealand among others. Does this mean that these countries are still a part of the Queen's 'rule'? How does this system work and how exactly were these countries given independence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55hc0p/elizabeth_ii_is_still_the_queen_of_canada/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8am5a4"], "score": [11], "text": ["It means that officially, she is the Head of State.  Being Head of State means you're the official representative of the country in public affairs.  This is different from being Head of Government, which means you're in charge of running the country: in the Commonwealth countries, the HoG is the Prime Minister.\n\nTheoretically, the Queen does have powers to veto laws, dissolve the legislature, etc. (which is why laws are still given the \"Royal Assent\" when they are passed, and why you always hear things about the Prime Minister asking the queen to dissolve parliament).  In practice, the queen devolves these powers to a representative (The Governor-General), who carries out these powers on her behalf.  Furthermore, while theoretically, she has a lot of power, in practice, none of this is ever used except at the request of the ruling government.\n\nThe Queen's Head of Stateship derives from histroical ties; when the Commonwealth countries gained independence from Parliament in Westminster, the colonies decided to continue accepting the Queen as head of state.  Think of the queen's rule this way: she is Queen of the United Kingdom, AND of Canada, AND of Australia AND of New zealand etc.   She is not queen of the United Kingdom and THEREFORE Queen of Canada.  She is simply queen of multiple countries at once, all of which have broadly the same succession laws (whenever the succession laws are changed, the British government tends to consult with the Commonwealth countries to ensure that these are maintained).  This was particularly important during the Edward VIII abdication crisis, where the Commonwealth countries all individually had to agree to his abdication (in practice nobody liked the man, so this was done very quickly), and during the recent changes to the succession law to change to absolute primogeniture (i.e. firstborn child is heir to the throne) rather than male-preference primogeniture (i.e. a male will always inherit before his sister).\n\nThe independence of these countries was a gradual process, and not all achieved it at the same time.  Most of these went through a phase where they were granted self-governing legislatures (\"Responsible Government\"), awarded formal dominion status, where a colony was self-governing but still subject to vetoes from London (Canada was first, in the middle of the 19th century), and then, after the Statute of Westminster in 1931 became Commonwealth Realms, made them de facto independent from the British state (i.e. legislative oversight from London).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5i4yt0", "title": "How do military historians justify the study of war?", "selftext": "I'm curious as to how this is done. War is no joke, and surely the argument could be made that the study of culture and art is more important?\n\nI'm not trying to bash on military history, I find the armor and weapons fascinating due to the craftsmanship that goes into it. But I was reading Greek Ways by Bruce Thornton and this subject came up. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5i4yt0/how_do_military_historians_justify_the_study_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db5z62y"], "score": [7], "text": ["Why, specifically, do military historians have to justify their field? War is not a joke, but neither are most subjects historians study. The Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, and violence against women are all incredibly grim topics that have been studied a great deal of attention by historians as well as scholars in other fields. If we are restricted solely to topics that are pleasant and give us happy feelings to read about, I imagine we wouldn't have an enormous amount of material to work with. The human experience is vast, and war/organized violence are an important dimension of that experience. Certainly one can argue that military historians as a field sometimes tend to glorify war, or that a particular kind of military history receives an undue amount of public attention and popularity. But that to me is a criticism of the *direction* of the field, not a valid critique of the field itself. If bad examples of a field of study disqualified the field from being considered proper avenues of historical study, then the entire concept of colonial studies would have to disappear because of Niall Ferguson. \n\nAs for the argument of \"more important,\" I find that pretty facile and ridiculous. It's funny you mention art history as an example of being \"important,\" as art history is a frequent target of people making similar arguments. In fact, the entire field of history is often derided as a useless major that's not important or worthwhile because it doesn't make money. Historians study many things, from medicine to art to food to thought to history itself. I don't think we should look down on any potential avenue of research because someone doesn't think it's inherently \"important.\" It wasn't so long ago that any history that wasn't primarily focused on high-level politics and military engagements was derided and considered less prestigious. Just because you personally don't find it interesting doesn't make it inherently less important. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "357gb6", "title": "How did sailor avoid hypothermia in the 18th century?", "selftext": "Whilst watching \"Master and commander\" the thought hit me, how did sailors manage to keep warm and avoid hypothermia? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/357gb6/how_did_sailor_avoid_hypothermia_in_the_18th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr203rw"], "score": [10], "text": ["In addition to bundling up when possible, there were three things that would keep a sailor warm enough not to die of hypothermia, though certainly not comfortable.\n\nFirst, men on a sailing ship move around a great deal. They are hauling rope, climbing into the masts, rolling sails, and otherwise constantly running around. The constant motion keeps the body warm.\n\nSecond, sailors often coated their shipboard clothing with a layer of tar. The tar would make the clothing somewhat waterproof and would keep out the worst of the damp. \n\nLast, sailors generally only stood short duty watches. In English and American vessels generally 4 hours. Afterwards they would go below to warm up, get some food, or grab some blankets and sleep. Some captains would have the cook keep hot food available in the galley if conditions were safe enough. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "261paz", "title": "How historically accurate is that Anne Boleyn slept with her brother ( George Boleyn) or was it used to have her arrested for treason?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/261paz/how_historically_accurate_is_that_anne_boleyn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chmz3cw", "chn05of", "chn106y", "chnf5qw"], "score": [136, 12, 27, 3], "text": ["This is one of those things that we can really never know for certain. But, the incestuous nature of George and Anne's relationship was believed by many at the time and was an easy way out for Henry VIII.\n\nAs you know, Henry went through a LOT of trouble to put aside Katherine in favor of the younger (and hopefully more fertile) Anne. The need to have an heir was her sole job as Queen and after the birth of Elizabeth, followed by a few miscarriages, her need to have a male heir would have been imperative in order to truly secure her place. Much of the public didn't accept her as a true Queen and more of a concubine, but bearing a royal prince would have probably changed all of that for the better. Later wives of Henry VIII had similar issues with pregnancies, indicating that the problem probably lay with him. It's entirely possible that Anne thought as much and sought a pregnancy at any cost. Her brother would have been the most trusted person to keep that secret, if she had gone outside the marriage bed to conceive.\n\nThe last miscarriage was said to have been greatly deformed, necessitating the King to clearly define that it was not his issue. A monstrous child that was of his loins would have, perhaps, been viewed as a sign from God that he had done a really terrible thing by ditching the Catholic church and putting aside his wife. So, claiming adultery was a solid way to ensure that no one thought he could be the father of a deformed baby.\n\nIt didn't help that Jane, wife of George, allegedly testified that the affair had taken place. And though Anne could provide her whereabouts on all the occasions she was alleged to have committed adultery with a host of different men, her fate was sealed before the trial even began. King Henry VIII had already started planning his next marriage and executing Anne was the most expedient route to ensure he didn't have to face the enmity of his people with yet another divorce.\n\nWhen we look at his subsequent treatment of his wives and how all of them were put aside in one way or another (with the exception of Jane Seymour), it seems fairly clear that Anne was probably innocent of the charges against her. Most historians agree that the trial was a farce and that the political maneuverings in the court were more at fault than Anne herself.\n\nThere are also some interesting studies on the possibility that Henry VIII was Kell positive, which would have created the same pregnancy patterns that we see in his lineage.", "The answer is - there is no answer as historians don't agree.  When Anne Boleyn was accused of high treason for adultery, she was accused of sleeping with more than just her brother George Boleyn.  ([National Archive sources](_URL_1_) and more [national archive sources](_URL_2_))  Henry Norris, Sir William Breretan, Sir Francis Weston, and Mark Smeaton were also on the list and specific dates were given of the alleged affairs and it was a few days later when George Boleyn was accused.  The primary testimony at George Boleyn's trial was his estranged wife, Lady Jane Rocheford, and it's interesting to note that she was later executed by Henry VIII for her knowledge of Catherine Howard's previous relationships - and possible assistance with the continuation.  \n\nNow as for the accuracy of the claims in the trail- there is no real answer.  According to the late [Joanna Denny](_URL_4_) \"Henry\u2019s hand in the whole sordid business is clearly seen: the real blood-guilt lies with the King.\"  On the flip side you have George Bernard who cites letter written by a French poet as proof of her guilt due to the various gifts she gave her favorites.  However a few of the men have been \"acquitted\" of their crimes at least as far as the trial.  As I mentioned earlier very specific dates were cited for the transgressions with the exception of her brother.  Using household documents showing the progress of the court throughout the year historian [Eric Ives](_URL_3_) was able to prove that on at least 12 of those dates (75% of those cited in the original court documents) Anne and the gentleman in question were in different places.  That still leaves a few dates where she was in the same place - which is why there is still that small chance that they were right 25% of the time.  Since no dates were associated with George's crimes and his wife's testimony is what damned him, chances are historians will never be able to say with 100% certainty if she did or did not sleep with him.  \n\nThere are also a few historians that suggest the reason for George's later addition was his (alleged) homosexuality ([Retha Warnicke](_URL_0_)) however none of the more modern sources cite that particular reason - although both Bernard and Ives include arguments against this accusation in both of their books.  Another explanation worth including is 'The Cromwell Conspiracy', that essentially he engineered the entire thing in an attempt to save himself - which is suggested by Ives, [Claire Ridgeway](_URL_5_), and even Bernard (at times) but is never conclusively proven.  Which worked until Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves as he was arrested on June 10, 1540 and executed July 28 of the same year.  His letters to the king can also be found in the National Archives, and include letters from the time period of Anne's trial.  \n\nFor a really interesting (IMHO) read check out the [William and Mary Law Review](_URL_6_) for while it doesn't proclaim her guilt or innocent it does do a fantastic job of describing the trail.    \n\n", "Allow me to speak on behalf of the dead and often maligned  Anne Boleyn.  I shall do it indignantly (but with cites).  She was accused of sleeping with five men including her brother.  The evidence consisted of evidence supplied by her 'lovers' after they had been tortured and some hearsay evidence from people like her brother's wife (later pronounced mad)\n.  _URL_8_ and _URL_4_.  \n\nTo be fair, some scholars claim she might have had affairs.  Based on a poem they found.  _URL_6_.  Other historians have noted that the executioner was sent for before the trial and the King married his mistress 11 days post execution. _URL_2_.  They also note there wasn't any real evidence produced, in fact, the men charged weren't allowed to defend themselves at all and had confessed after being tortured.  The evidence at Anne's trial consisted of accusations, not evidence.  Most agree she did not get a fair trial._URL_0_\n\nThe actual reason Anne Boleyn was executed?  Henry needed a male heir and Anne produced only a daughter and had had 3 miscarriages.  She had to be gotten rid of just as he got rid of all his other wives who weren't able to give him a son.  He knew that not having a son to succeed him could lead to another War of the Roses.   _URL_1_.\n\nAs it turned out, historians believe Henry Viii's lack of success in producing a healthy male heir had to do with his own health issues (_URL_5_) so divorcing and murdering a variety of spouses didn't really help him out much.  \nSo the body count thanks to Henry trying for a male heir comes out to three dead wives (two to execution and one to childbirth). There were also two divorces and one annulment. _URL_7_\nOn the bright side, we do get two plucky survivors of marriage to Henry.  Anne of Cleves had her marraige annulled by Henry and strategically withdrew and led a happy, if quiet life unmarred by executioners.  _URL_3_  Meanwhile, Katherine Parr survived Henry and got to marry someone she actually liked. Ironically, Henry's son did not survive but his daughter Elizabeth was a very successful ruler and averted the civil war he feared.", "All the defendants denied the accusations against them before and after sentencing, save Smeaton.  Contemporary views were that it wasn't really possible that the accusations could have been true.  The Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys said 'although everybody rejoices at the execution of the putain [whore], there are some who murmur at the mode of procedure against her and the others, and people speak variously of the king'.  John Foxe couldn't believe that Anne was guilty of incest 'being so contrary to nature, that no natural man will believe it', George Wyatt (Anne's first biographer), considered the whole thing to be 'impossible', and George Constantyne recalled 'there was much muttering at Anne's death'.\n\nSo no, it wasn't true."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Anne-Boleyn/dp/0521406773", "http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/henryviii/", "http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/henry-viii-and-anne-boleyn-clothing-courtship-and-consequences/", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Death-Anne-Boleyn/dp/1405134631", "http://www.amazon.com/Anne-Boleyn-Englands-Tragic-Queen/dp/0306815400", "http://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/", "http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2290&amp;context=wmlr"], ["http://www.britannia.com/bios/aboleyn.html", "http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/henry-vii-the-kings-great-matter-and-the-succession-acts.html#lesson", "http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122872854", "http://tudorhistory.org/cleves/", "http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/anne_boleyn.htm", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42041766/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/king-henry-viiis-health-problems-explained/", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7295739/Poem-provides-evidence-that-Anne-Boleyn-had-numerous-affairs.html", "http://www.pbs.org/wnet/sixwives/meet/", "http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2290&amp;context"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fudmn", "title": "How common was marriage between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the past and were there any societies where they held equal status?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fudmn/how_common_was_marriage_between_christians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dana9v7"], "score": [10], "text": ["Medieval Iberia is an absolutely fascinating case study of interfaith tensions and diplomacy which was often informed by sex, gender, and interfaith marriages.\n\nThe first thing you should know is the myth behind the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711.  According to legend, there was a Christian count in North Africa called Julian.  Julian sent his daughter to the court of King Roderic of Visigothic Spain to be educated.  When Roderic raped Julian's daughter, Count Julian betrayed him and invited the Muslims to invade the peninsula.  \n\nAlready, we see the influence of sex, interfaith, and intrafaith tension come into play.  The rape of a woman is analogous to the penetration/rape of the peninsula.  Some stories portray the daughter as a vixen who deliberately seduced Roderic, while others assert that Roderic was wicked and depraved.  In any case, it's interesting that the conflict arose as an intrafaith conflict between two Christians, rather than between Christians and Muslims.  This will become significant later.  \n\nDuring the coexistence of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in medieval Spain, there were varying degrees of tension and harmony.  In most places under Islamic rule, Jews and Christians were nominally protected as \"people of the book.\" They paid extra taxes but were allowed to practice their own religion and build churches and synagogues.  Arabic and Romance dialects were the most common languages used to communicate amongst all faiths.  There were even Arabized Christians, called Mozarabs, who spoke Arabic and dressed in the Islamic fashion.\n\nSo on an individual level, many people were able to live in relative peace.  Keep in mind that pogroms weren't uncommon and there were sometimes public burnings of the sacred texts of the different religions.  This was during the time of the Reconquista after all.  Christian rulers in the northern mountains continually tried to push their borders further south.  They were sometimes successful, but the Reconquista wasn't the pure ideological religious warfare we read about in textbooks.  It wasn't purely a case of Christians vs. Muslims.  Often, a Christian ruler would ally himself with a Muslim ruler to defeat a fellow Christians rival.  It was a time of opportunism and constantly shifting alliances between Muslims and Christians.\n\nIn the midst of the Reconquista, members of other faiths often proved valuable intellectual resources and courtiers, particularly Jews.  Jews were regarded as skilled scholars, translators, doctors, and astrologers by both Muslim and Christian rulers.  Islamic fashion and architecture also became prized and imitated in Christian courts even as they fought vicious holy wars allegedly to bring Andalusia back under Christian control.  It became a form of intellectual and cultural warfare to appropriate the language, architecture, cultural style, and knowledge of the comparing culture as a display of cultural power and dominance.  The goals of such cultural and intellectual exchanges were often explicitly conversionary.  For instance, the Abbot of Cluny commissioned a Latin translation of the Qu'ran for the express goal of converting Muslims to Christianity.  There were also public disputations in which Christians and Jews made public defenses of their faiths in an attempt to convert Jews to Christianity through debate.  Perhaps the most famous of these debates is the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 in which Christians were declared the winner despite convincing arguments by Nachmanides.  \n\nThere was massive anxiety about conversion in medieval Spain.  Conversions between all three faiths were quite common, sometimes forced, and often aligned with whichever powers currently controlled one's city or the fate of one's family.  Some of the most common conversion accounts concern servants converting to the faith of their masters.  In contrast, there were also accounts of crypto practitioners of all three religions.  Women in particular were known for continuing to practice their faith behind closed doors, including butchering their own meat and performing ritual bathing.  Women were also known to hide religious texts in the folds of their skirts during interrogations, both to protect their families abd preserve their connection to their faith.\n\nThere were also several legal measures specifically designed to make a person's faith obvious upon inspection, because you couldn't always tell from language or dress alone.  I've come across texts with specific instructions for circumcision and inspecting men's genitalia to determine their faith.  In other cases, Jews and Muslims had their hair and beards unceremoniously shaved.\n\nDespite these tensions, interfaith marriage was more common than you might expect.  Interfaith marriages were sometimes brokered as part of diplomatic negotiations, and conversion was sometimes a prerequisite for these matches.  For the Umayyads, interfaith marriage was a savvy political tool that helped them consolidate dynastic power and minimize internal threats.  As Simon Barton has convincingly argued, claims from other Muslim families were a massive threat in the Umayyads' tenuous empire.  Christian marriages solidified alliances with Christian powers and also neutralized the threat of other Muslim families gaining too much power through royal matches. The practice of taking concubines and slaves from other faiths was even more common.\n\n As time wore on, the lines between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim became blurrier and blurrier. Most people could speak the same language and dressed similarly.  Skin tone and physical appearance had never been a good indicator and was even less so after several decades of intermarrying and conversion.  With crypto religious practices and conversion so common, it grew increasingly likely that any given person might have ancestors from more than one faith.\n\nThis anxiety about religious identity and mixing was very evident in early modern Spanish literature, in which Moorish and Jewish prostitutes were perceived as spreading syphilis and moral depravity to their clients of all faiths and backgrounds.\n\nI've typed this all on mobile so apologies for any spelling or formatting errors!\n\nIf you're interested in interfaith marriage in medieval Iberia I highly recommend the works of Simon Barton, particularly *Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines.* "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fgo51", "title": "Why didn't Napoleon use archers? Who were the last archers in western armies?", "selftext": "From Ian Morris' book 'Social Development': \n\n > Even well trained Napoleonic infantry could only get off\nabout **4 shots per minute**. Muskets could shoot up to 400 m, but at ranges\nmore than **50-75 m they were so inaccurate** that individual fire was virtually\nuseless; and even when fired at less than 75 m, only masses of volleying men\nhad much chance of hitting their target.\n\n > Particularly in England, some soldiers wondered whether longbows\u2014which,\nin trained hands, could discharge **10 arrows per minute** and were **accurate\nup to 200 m**\u2014might not still be superior weapons, and on the steppes, where\ncavalry were much more important, bows did continue to dominate the\nbattlefield well into the 17th century.\n\nI understand that armies adopted the musket because they are easier to mass-produce and soldiers require way less training to use them, but a bow in trained hands seemed to be a lot more deadly than a musket from the Napoloenic era. You can also use multiple lines of archers, while men wit muskets need direct line of sight. \n\nIt seems to make sense to [deploy archers](_URL_1_) behind [men with muskets](_URL_0_). Why didn't Napoleon do this? Who were the last archers in professional western armies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fgo51/why_didnt_napoleon_use_archers_who_were_the_last/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caa2y7r", "caal9sc"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["I was half way through a reply then I realised you got some [answers to this](_URL_0_) a few months ago which cover my own opinions. Especially /u/Tiako 's top comment and I notice you have posted a brace of Shogun 2 : Total War pictures, firstly don't use a game as any kind of basis for historical fact, and secondly see /u/cahamarca 's reply on how the musket beat the bow in Japan.\n\nI have spent a lot of time on ranges, I've practiced numerous different bows since I was about 12 (I'm 30 now) and there is no way I could keep up 10 arrows a minute for any more than 5/10 minutes. The training needed for archers was by far too costly by the late 18th/early 19th century.", "First off, you are mixing foot missile infantry with heavy infantry.\n\nArchers are missile troops. They can provide both direct and indirect fire, defend a fortified position and give supporting fire for cavalry and heavy infantry. They are vulnerable to cavalry, other missile troops and heavy infantry. \n\nA body of troops bearing muskets are heavy infantry and will readily defeat any body of missile troop arrayed against them. They are able for form ranks and repel cavalry, they are able to fight defensively in both a prepared fortified position (ie breastworks, fortifications) or offensively assaulting a prepared position or other heavy infantry. \n\nNow, I'm not saying archers aren't useful but Napoleon's logistic train was big enough as it was, supporting, feeding and clothing troops of the line, cavalry, engineers, pioneers, ambulances and troops of the train that an extra provision for something as high specialised as archers something of an annoyance. He would need bowyers to make bows (which have to be individually steamed and bent over a pot), fletchers need to be employed to make thousands of arrows, armourers to make the points and a whole load of linen/hemp that could have clothed thousands of soldiers into bowstrings. And that's just making the most basic self flat-bow. Compare this to a musket, of which the stock can be turned out on a lathe by the thousands, the barrel which was a simple wax-loss casting tube and the lock which was produced via a combination of casting, milling and drawing. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/CyXi9JU.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/XWTbagW.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18984h/the_bow_is_better_than_the_musket_why_did/"], []]}
{"q_id": "ny7tb", "title": "Why did the American revolutionaries bitch out King George III when by that time power had been firmly cemented in Parliament?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ny7tb/why_did_the_american_revolutionaries_bitch_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3cw0jr", "c3cwqk9", "c3cydl2", "c3cypwe", "c3cyuh2", "c3czgmy"], "score": [11, 6, 5, 3, 6, 5], "text": ["It's a little more complicated, but here's the simple answer.\n\nAmerican politicians were the American aristocracy. When the British government started getting involved in American politics, it eroded some of the power that the colonists traditionally held. American politicians said, \"that's fine, but we're the aristocracy. If you give us power in your government, we'll call it all even.\" That didn't go over too well in Parliament, and this rest is history.", "The simple answer is the same reason people blame Obama.  Easy to consolidate misgivings one person instead of many (congress has the power)", "Parliament's power stopped at the shoreline. The colonies, like wars, were completely under the control over the king. Think of it as roughly like the current American system except foreign policy included the colonies. Parliament was quite deferential to the king's prerogative over the colonies. And G III was leading a rebounding monarchy that was challenging Parliament for authority. Plus the king was the state, he was talked of and seen as the embodiment of England. ", "By appealing directly to the King, they were articulating a theory of empire in which constituent parts are subject to the authority of the monarchy, not parliament.  They were in essence arguing that parliament had no authority over the entirety of the empire, only the Monarchy had that power.  They argued that colonial assemblies were the only legitimate legislatures.  See especially the work of historian Jack P. Greene for more in depth analyses on the colonial assemblies and their relationship to the metropole.", "Blaming Parliament would have alienated the British people from the Americans' cause. In England, Parliament represented the people and to attack them would have put the colonists against the British people. It had also been tradition in England going back to the Magna Carta to make a list of grievances (which you'll find in the Declaration of Independence) towards the king. ", "The British government changed a great deal over the 18th century. It grew in its power to both tax and govern, as Brewer argued convincingly in *The Sinews of Power* (1988). However, this intensification of government was largely limited to Britain, and it met considerable resistance within Britain. One example of this is the continuing sympathy for Stuart pretenders to the throne among Scots, which culminated in 1745. \n\nAfter the Seven Years'/French and Indian War, the British government was in debt and attempted to extend its intensification of taxation to the colonies. One argument I've heard is that the colonists had a political mentality more in line with 17th-century Britain; they were not accustomed to paying greater taxes and undergoing greater governance, and they reacted violently when the British government attempted to bring them more in line with how it governed the archipelago. \n\nEdit:\nThe really interesting question raised by the OP here, I think, is why--if the colonists directed their attacks at the King, they sought representation in Parliament as an initial remedy. Those aren't necessarily contradictory, but I'm not sure how they relate to one another.\n\nOne thing to keep in mind though is that their addresses to the King were not necessarily literal; they might not, and indeed probably were not, intending to simply have the King solve all the problems. Rather, an address of grievances to the King was simply the accepted rhetorical strategy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1xgcck", "title": "Could Alexander the Great actually have wept because there were no more worlds to conquer (i.e. did he conquer the entire known world?)", "selftext": "I know nothing about Alexander's life and times but it seems like they were plenty of places he could have tried to conquer but didn't. Where does this quote even come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xgcck/could_alexander_the_great_actually_have_wept/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfb63s8", "cfb91tb"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["There were still places to conquer and he knew it. The quote seems to come from the legend he sought to create about himself. He probably wept when he had to turn back simply because his army was too worn out to continue. I think I read somewhere that he envisioned that he would conquer all the way to the end of the world and would be faced with an endless ocean. He obviously wasn't able to fulfill his dream.", "It is true, there were many more lands for Alexander to conquer even after 15 years of campaigning. However, the soldiers were compelled to turn around because of the ancient geography since they just crossed a dangerous river, saw a large jungle in front of them, and saw the Himalayans to their left. This map should be a good diagram to understand the ancient geography and why they didn\u2019t want to fight with Alexander anymore: \n\n_URL_0_ \n\nThis showed that after most of Alexander\u2019s campaign enfolded, his army realized that Alexander was a leader that wanted to conquer more than he wanted to rule.  This is shown in Arrian\u2019s account of Alexander\u2019s campaigns when he reaches the frontiers of India and his men had been fatigued by the length and hardships of the campaign. At this point, his men decided to have a mutiny against Alexander because of the scary geographical challenges ahead of them. The discontent and wants of the Macedonian army were conveyed by one of their main officers, Coenus.\n\nCoenus replied to Alexander after his motivational speech at the Himalayan foothills with \u201cDo not try to lead men who are unwilling to follow you; if their heart is not in it, you will never find the old spirit or the old courage. Consent rather yourself to return to your mother and your home. Once there, you may bring good government to Greece and enter your ancestral house with all the glory of the many great victories won in this campaign, and then, should you desire it, you may begin and undertake a new expedition\u201d (Arrian 297). This passage by Coenus displayed at this point that the Macedonian army wanted Alexander to lead them as a king, not a conqueror. However, this was a hard concept for Alexander to imagine because he just wanted to be a great conqueror, like his father Philip II of Macedon (Arrian 293). The creation of this mutiny and the fact that Coenus said this to Alexander proved that he had a determination to take over endless amounts of land and would not stop doing this until he died. For getting to the end of the world was the only goal in his mind.\n\nSo it was very likely that Alexander cried because he could not keep conquering, sustain his pothos, and obtain the ultimate form of pothos he wanted to possess. Plutarch defines Alexander\u2019s pothos and declares that he wanted people to know of him and \u201cto perform deeds which would live in song and story and would cause poets and musicians much toil and sweat to celebrate them\u201d for many days to come (Plutarch 293). As an avid lover of the Greek hero Achilles and his ability to use his wrath in war, Alexander the Great wanted to be remembered like him. This is why Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and went to Troy when he was on his long campaign. In sum, Alexander cried because he wanted to conquer more land and be remembered as a great warrior. He wanted be remembered as a war hero like Achilles in the annals of Western history. The history of Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides he studied some much as a kid under his teacher, Aristotle. So thank goodness for him we mark him as one of the best, if not the best, military commander of the ancient world. \n\nSources \nArrian *The Campaigns of Alexander* (Penguin Edition)\nPlutarch *Age of Alexander* (Penguin Edition)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.armenian-history.com/images/Alexander-Great/map_Alexander.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3duzni", "title": "Why are the French and German pronunciations so close to each other?", "selftext": "A quick overview. The question is about Standard French and Standard German:\n- In French, the \"u\" is the same as the German \"\u00fc\".\n- The \"r\" is pronunced the same in both languages.\n- These letters are common everyday sounds in these two languages, but rare and unusual in virtually every other major language. If they do exist, they are \"special\", like scientific terms or loanwords, and natives usually get them wrong.\n\nIn most other languages, the \"u\" is either \"oo\" or \"uh\" (as in \"burden\"). The \"r\" is that one that the French are so infamously bad at getting right, often defaulting to LW (veLWee difficult to get LWight indeed), or alternatively, it is a rolled \"r\" like in Italy, the stereotypical Scottish accent, and admittedly most Southern German accents.\n\nThe letters \"r\" and \"u\"/\"\u00fc\" prompted my initial question, but after writing it out, I realise it goes much deeper. I can read Spanish or Italian, even Portuguese, provided the vocabulary is casual enough, but the pronunciation is so hugely different it might as well be from another planet. Latin languages sound a lot like each other, at least superficially, except for French with sounds totally different.\n\nMeanwhile, French and German are completely separate, and yet, in almost every aspect, except arguably the French nasals like -on, there is nothing in French a German speaker couldn't pronounce with absolute ease, and vice-versa.\n\nWhy? Did they get these sounds (r/\u00fc) from each other? If so, which came first and how did that happen? Why are they absent (or at least rare and unusual) in other major languages? Why are French and German so similar in pronunciation while much closer languages like Spanish or Italian sound nothing like French?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3duzni/why_are_the_french_and_german_pronunciations_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct8x3ia"], "score": [4], "text": [" >  In French, the \"u\" is the same as the German \"\u00fc\".\n\nThis is not exclusive to French and German. It is also present in Romansch and many Gallo-Italic (ie. most Italian dialects from north of the La Spezia-Rimini line) dialects, as well as pretty much every Continental Germanic language I can think of. \n\n >  The \"r\" is pronunced the same in both languages.\n\nAgain, this is also seen in Danish, Scanian and some dialects of Norwegian and Portuguese. It's also a relatively recent development in Standard French and German, and is not present in Austro-Bavarian/Swiss Dialects or in many traditional rural Metropolitan French or Quebecois dialects. \n\n >  often defaulting to LW\n\nI have never, ever heard a French person do this.\n\n >  there is nothing in French a German speaker couldn't pronounce with absolute ease, and vice-versa.\n\nI disagree, the 'h' sound, as well as the 'ch' sounds in the German words *Ach* and *Ich* respectively, are very hard for French people to pronounce. And German people speaking French sound just as terrible as English people speaking French.\n\n >  Why are they absent (or at least rare and unusual) in other major languages?\n\nThey aren't particularly. I don't know how either /y/ or /R/ developed originally, I imagine there is some element of Sprachbund, but I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if they developed in both languages independently. \n\n >  Why are French and German so similar in pronunciation\n\nFrench pronunciation had a lot of Germanic (as well as indigenous Celtic) influence in its early history, but nonetheless I wouldn't go as far as to say their pronunciation is particularly similar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "awoth4", "title": "Did NorthAmerican natives actually cast copper?", "selftext": "I've read a paper from some years ago, that shows evidence of how the natives of Wisconsin casted copper to make some tools.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n*A Metallographic Analysis of the Old Copper Osceola, Wisconsin Site : 1900 to 1200 B.C.E. on JSTOR*\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIs there any evidence to refute this analysis? If they actually did it, how old are the copper tools that were casted? **I mean, the site is supposed to be old, however each tool has its own dating, yet the arcticle doesn't mention these specific datings.**\n\n & #x200B;\n\nGreetings haha. A link here  _URL_0_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/awoth4/did_northamerican_natives_actually_cast_copper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eho7593"], "score": [3], "text": ["The short answer is no. Native North Americans north of Mexico for the most part cold-hammered copper. Recent publications (see below) document heating and hammering of copper at Cahokia during the Mississippian Period. [This] (_URL_1_) \n post from our FAQs provides a lot of good information as does [this one] (_URL_0_). See entries by u/Reedstilt and u/400-Rabbits. But if anyone has any new information or discussion, I'm sure it will be welcome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://docdro.id/SQ5B74V"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/256w3b/is_there_any_reason_why_the_native_american/chebtp5/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l30m0/what_methods_did_the_precolumbian_american/"]]}
{"q_id": "23s45a", "title": "What happened in the western portion of the Pacific theater during WWII?", "selftext": "Almost all history books that entail information on the war, or the Pacific theater, mention the US' [island-hopping](_URL_1_) strategy and the eventual [Soviet invasion of Manchuria](_URL_0_)/Korea. However, what isn't touched on, that I've seen, is what happened in the western portions of the theater? How were the Japanese expelled, or were they simply standing guard while the rest of the front fell apart?\n\nFor our purposes, let's say the area in question is East-Central China and SE Asia.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23s45a/what_happened_in_the_western_portion_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch08s4f"], "score": [4], "text": ["In China fighting continued in one form or another until the Japanese surrender. But after Pearl Harbor the Japanese focused their efforts elsewhere. The Chinese however weren't in any position to take advantage of this. Most of their population and industrial base was under Japanese occupation. And the Allied supplies were largely inaccessible. Either the Japanese, the Himalayas, or The Soviets were in the way (Stalin was secretly occupying parts of China and refusing to allow supplies through). So for most of the war China was a stalemate.\n\nWhich frustrated the US to no end. They saw great potential in the Chinese and had visions of 10 million Chinese soldiers using American arms. Chiang loved the idea of getting the equipment. But never had the control over his subordinates that say a Stalin did. And thus never quite committed to the American plans. That and the fact that he didn't get along with Stilwell, the general the Americans sent to lead those soldiers and well the plans never quite got off the ground.\n\nThe one that did, was in late 1943 the US started basing B-29 bombers in China. Bases in China were close enough they could bomb Japan itself. The raids were never very successful. But it did finally motivate the Japanese and in April of 1944 they launched Ichi-go, a series of offensives with around 400,000 men that drove the bombers from those bases. Of course they then relocated to the recently captured Marianas. And eventually these air raids proved to be horrifyingly successful.\n\nAt the same time Burma was an \"active\" theatre throughout the war. True full operations were only possible from about December through April during the dry season. So the story is one of punctuated drives, and then pauses. \n\nThe first Arakan campaign from December 42 to April 43 was a disaster. The British attacked and were driven off, fairly easily. Chinese operations were badly organized and of little help.\n\nSo the British switched over to raiding operations. The \"Chindits\" as the brigade was known conducted small raids, cut telephone wires, tore up rail tracks, and made a general annoyance out of themselves, but did no real harm. And really got themselves chewed up doing so. General Wingate lost about a third of his men. But it raised British morale and showed the the British could conduct operations in the area and so was considered a success.\n\nBy December 43 everyone was ready for an offensive The Japanese wanted to push the British further back into India to protect the border. The Chinese were ready to drive south, the British East, and a super-sized American version of the Chindits was set in the interior. The resulting battles eventually all turned the Allies way although the fighting continued well into the monsoon season. The result was the Japanese were stopped and pushed back a bit, resulting in a road being re-opened into China.\n\nBy December 44 the British were ready to go again. And they drove all the way through Burma before the monsoon stopped them.\n\nIn the end Burma has been called a \"sideshow.\" And it has been nicknamed the forgotten war. It is an open debate what if anything the combat operations there did to really defeat Japan. Especially the last campaign. By then the troops probably couldn't be moved anywhere else. Nor could the equipment or supplies. So you have to wonder what the men on either side were dying for.\n\nBoth the war in China and Burma are covered in Ronald Spector's, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Second_world_war_asia_1943-1945_map_de.png"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1u9e1f", "title": "What would have been the implications to Britain if the Sykes-Picot were public instead of private.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u9e1f/what_would_have_been_the_implications_to_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceft7yj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Unfortunately, AskHistorians only deals with what did happen, not what might have happened and I've therefore had to remove your post. However, your question would be perfect for /r/HistoricalWhatIf, should you wish to cross-post.\n\nThank you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f3o9sg", "title": "How did the French adapt to English longbow tactics? In \u2018The King\u2019 they just keep charging blindly - is that accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3o9sg/how_did_the_french_adapt_to_english_longbow/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhk1lam"], "score": [23], "text": ["The French get a bad rap in a lot of older scholarship and, as a result, also in pop-history and movies. The near-constant defeat of the French has been taken as evidence that the French, in their arrogance, preferred to keep their \"chivalric\" tactics and rely solely on the massed cavalry charge and individual prowess for most of the the Hundred Years' War. This is likely where the writer and director of *The King* were coming from when they portrayed the French attacking all mounted in two suicidal charges. \n\nThe truth, though, is that the French already made massive changes in how they fought by the time of Agincourt and, importantly, they made many of these changes early in the HYW, not late. While they had never relied solely on the cavalry charge, having made extensive use of combined arms tactics all the way back into the 11th and 12th centuries, they altered this dynamic considerably during the first decade of actual combat against the English.\n\nI'm going to trace the development of French tactics through the end of the 1360s, where they had very nearly completely matured their tactics against the English. Some minor alterations were made before Agincourt, but for the most part the tactics at Agincourt were no different from those at Restellou or Mauron.\n\n**French Tactics Prior to the Hundred Years' War**\n\nStarting at the Battle of Courtrai in 1302, we see the French combined arms system as it had been more or less for several centuries. Both the French and the Flemish put their crossbowmen out in front of their lines, with the French placing light infantry (bidauts, Spanish javelin men) behind their crossbowmen to bolster their line. Behind the Flemish crossbowmen, though, was a solid formation of infantry, while behind the French crossbowmen were mounted men-at-arms. The French crossbowmen drove off their Flemish rivals, and the Flemish line moved back from the edge of the stream in order to get away from the French missile fire. The French crossbowmen, however, were running low on bolts and the bidauts were not adequate for standing up to heavy infantry, even if they were good at skirmishing. If either force crossed, the Flemish would probably destroy them against the stream. \n\nOn the other hand, the Flemish did look to the French like they were in retreat and, if pushed immediately and not given time to regroup, could be defeated. They therefore launched a cavalry charge across the stream. This is where they went wrong - there wasn't enough room on the other bank to fully regroup after crossing, and there were a number of ditches on the other side that were full of water and broke up the French formation further. The result was that the French didn't have the space to launch their charge, except in the center. There they very nearly broke through, and some of the men there began to flee, but reserves came up and reinforced it. As a result, the French were forced back against the stream and into the ditches all across the battlefield, which is where most of the casualties were taken.\n\nIt really needs to be understood here that the French were very nearly successful. True, they did underestimate their opponents and also misinterpreted a tactical withdrawal for the beginnings of a rout but, in spite of the sup-optimal battlefield conditions, they came close. Had the battle been fought on open ground, they still might have lost, but the battle wouldn't have been the disaster that it was.\n\nBy the time of the next major battle, Mons-en-P\u00e9v\u00e8le in 1304, the French altered their plan of attack slightly. They brought along siege engines to target the Flemish formation - although the Flemish managed to destroy these before the battle started - and started off by skirmishing and staging a false charge to test the Flemish resolve. When this failed, they tried repeated charges in conjunction with an attack on the wagenburg at the rear, but this failed as well. After retreating to their camp, Flemish went on the offensive and attacked the camp. This plan almost succeeded, but failed when the French rallied and attacked the disordered Flemish infantry, solidly defeating them.\n\nCassel, in 1328, was the culmination of what the French had learned from Courtrai and Mons-en-P\u00e9v\u00e8le. The French again deployed some siege engines against the Flemish, but rather than mount cavalry charges they stuck to skirmishing and ravaging the Flemish countryside around the static Flemish position. In essence, they besieged the Flemish camp and forced them to take the offensive. When they did, a mounted reserve was used slam into their flank and crush them. The heavy losses suffered in this phase of the battle meant that the French could then break the final Flemish defensive formation and claim total victory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4yq0dg", "title": "How did the Highland people of Scotland end up speaking a Celtic language (Scottish Gaelic), while the Lowland people of Scotland ended up speaking a Germanic language (Scots)?", "selftext": "Also, on a different yet related question, what was the language of high nobility and the King's court (before the union of England and Scotland, of course)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yq0dg/how_did_the_highland_people_of_scotland_end_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6pou1c"], "score": [27], "text": ["Before I answer your main question, I want to give an advance apology for not going into as much detail as I possibly could, nor for providing any sources. I am currently typing this in my phone with a busted hand, so if you or the mods ask for further details or sources, I will be glad to eventually do so when I have access to a computer. Also, I did not answer your second question, but I intend to get around to it eventually.\n\nScottish Gaelic originated as a result of Irish settlements in northwestern Scotland during the 4th century CE. At this point, Scotland was inhabited by people commonly referred to today as Picts, whose now extinct language very little is known about, though the commonly held theory is that Pictish was related to the other Brythonic languages (side note: Insular Celtic languages are divided into two groups: Q-Celtic or Goidelic languages, of which Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic belong to, and P-Celtic (Brythonic) which includes Welsh, Cornish and Breton).\n\nAround the 8th century, continuous contact with the Pictish kingdoms results in Scottish Gaelic spreading eastward, as Dal Riata becomes first a client to the Picts, then merges with the Pictish kingdoms to form the Kingdom of Alba, replacing Pictish with Gaelic. Around this same time, settlers from Northern England begin moving into southeastern Scotland, and English remained a language particular to that region until the the establishment of administrative townships (burgh or \"toun\" in Scots). As a result of the establishment of the burgh, many English speakers moved further into southern Scotland, and Scots began developing from there.\n\nWith regards to the actual development of both languages, I would not be much help, as I am not a linguist, though I am sure someone on here may be able to provide some further information into the development of Scots and Scottish Gaelic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8j2p1u", "title": "This isn't a question about history but a question to historians. For those who have a degree in history why did you want to study that? Also what jobs can you get with a history degree?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8j2p1u/this_isnt_a_question_about_history_but_a_question/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dywhev7", "dywp8kt", "dywxmkh", "dyx0ms7", "dyxbxc1"], "score": [10, 8, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) are links to several posts about careers for history graduates and postgraduate study.  ", "I've been into history since before I started elementary school, and it's always been a passion for me.\n\n\nWhen I was a kid, I was obsessed with medieval history. As a teenager, I became interested in ancient Egypt (a bit because I thought Daniel Jackson was a total boss), and because Czech egyptology is kind of world-famous and I wanted to be a part of that, I studied for years to be able to get through the egyptology entrance exams at Charles University. But because they don't really *need* all that many egyptologists in our tiny country, they only accept about 2-3 new students every few years. And for four years after I finished high school, they didn't. In the meantime, I switched to modern history, which I ended up getting a degree in (BA specialization was 20th century US, MA 20th century Europe with a focus on Central Europe and the process of European integration).\n\n\nWith that, you can do a lot! Be a historian, teach at a university, get into journalism or politics, diplomacy/foreign relations, write books, public administration, various advisory roles... Depends on where you are and what you like.", "I started studying literature, but that left me very much unsatisfied. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I knew that I needed to learn more about to world if I wanted to understand it. I didn't pick history because of what the degree could offer me on the job market, but out of intellectual curiosity. I'm so happy that I did. Studying history has really shaped me into who I am today and it has formed my understanding of the world. While I've had less job security compared to some of my engineering friends, I do feel like my studies have changed my as a person in more ways than one. When you study history and you are lucky to have great professors, you are taught to see patterns and analyze complex puzzles with limited information. It's a skill that still comes in handy every day of my life. I can't get into a discussion without internally connecting it to something I've read while studying or researching history.\n\nI'm not sure what it's like in the United States, but it's not an easy feat to work as a historian or to even acquire your PhD. There is very little funding going around so the spots at Universities are very limited. It's something you should only do if you are passionate about it. There are some available options for private research in Europe, but those are also very coveted. Most of all, holding a PhD in Europe means that you'd be considered overqualified for plenty of jobs. Sadly, a degree in history is generally also very undervalued in many branches of industry. I've found that the branches of industry that most heavily value my degree are : finance, communications or anything affiliated with the government. I know that our department of defense heavily recruits historians and I've heard that it's the same for organizations such as the FBI, CIA or Homeland Security?", "Art history major, I specialized in religious art because I wanted to explore how humans expressed their beliefs in art form. What I found is that art has the ability to relate peices of history in a way no book ever could. As the victor writes the history, the artist often paints a  very different picture. \nI worked in an art gallery for a while but didn't like the sales aspect of the job. Now I live a relaxing life as a daytime bartender, leaving me lots of time to read and play music. I don't use my degree persay, but constantly use the things I learned. Worth every penny of debt I am still paying off.", "If it helps, think of education like a toolbox and a set of tools. Your primary and secondary school education gives you a basic set of tools that you can do a lot of things with. These are your hammer, your screwdriver, and a basic wrench, for example.\n\nYou can do a lot with just those basic tools, but as your skills improve, you might find yourself wanting more tools, or wanting more specialized tools.\n\nWhen you go to college/university, you have a chance to get specialized tools \u2014 say that particular deep socket wrench that helps you get that one hard-to-reach bolt. You can also get a wider array of higher-quality tools. Instead of one screwdriver, you might get a whole array of all sizes, allowing you to do things more precisely.\n\nI tend to think of a computer science or other STEM degree as the first kind of toolset. I think of a history degree as the second kind of toolset. It's a great basis for a lot of different kind of work, not all of which involves turning a particular type of screw. With a history degree (and relevant job experience), you've got a huge array of options in front of you, I feel. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8768f6/i_am_a_high_school_student_and_i_have_a_few/"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "55faau", "title": "Was premarital sex really punishable by death during the Middle Ages in Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55faau/was_premarital_sex_really_punishable_by_death/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8a34ou"], "score": [18], "text": ["To put it simply, punishments for the sin of fornication in the medieval world depended upon the marital status of both parties. Premarital intercourse between two young people who were both unmarried but intended to one another carried less of a penalty than adultery involving one or both parties. For Ivo of Chartres fornication was a sin that required confession, absolution and penance (often several years removal from the sacraments), and an earthly punishment such as a fine and/or a corporeal component such as whipping. Whipping was common in England for example, and would occur publicly in full view of the population for instructive purposes. It could also happen close to the parish church or stretch through the streets of the village to compound the shame of the offence. \n\nWhile it is true that in cases of adultery it was not uncommon for men to murder their spouses and occasionally received a degree of licence to do so from some authorities we should remember that this fundamentally a different kind of thing relative to simple premarital intercourse. Moreover support for such violence was hotly contested and Church authorities often argued strenuously against this kind of vigilante behaviour. Brundage has written at length on this and contends that scholars such as Gratian in the twelfth century argued vociferously that adultery was a matter for public authorities and not private vengeance. Offenders should be forced to do public penance for their crime, receive a punishment and eventually rejoin the community.\n\n**A few things to consider which might complicate this question**\n\nIn the twelfth century there was an unfolding argument regarding the nature of marriage and when exactly a marriage was constituted. Scholars such as Gratian contended that marriage was not merely about the consent of the betrothed it was also about the union of the physical bodies of the intended. Marriage in this context was only completed or perfected when sexual consummation had occurred. \n\nFor fellows such as Hugh of St. Victor or Peter Lombard this was not the case. For them it was consent and consent alone that made marriage. To insist upon intercourse as a central component of validating a marriage was to devalue the relationship of Mary to Joseph in the Holy Family and therefore to call into question the entire nature of their relationship. \n\nWith these things considered one can imagine how complicated the question of marriage would be to contemporaries, particularly those far removed from the intellectual academies of the Latin Christian West who had no exposure to these lofty theological arguments.\n\nThus was a man an unlawful fornicator when he had intercourse with his intended? If they had exchanged promises were they indeed already married? At what point did they pass over into the realm of man and wife when it was very common for individuals to have private celebrations or none at all? Quite often there would not even be witnesses to their union, and it was by no means a given that a priest would ever be involved in the process. As Brundage notes it was an entirely valid defence to claim that one earnestly believed that the woman they were having sex with was their true spouse and wife. This emphasizes the degree of uncertainty at the heart of many of these cases. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 247. \n\nIt is also important to remember that children conceived before a marriage had taken place could be retrospectively legitimated if the parents of the infant became married subsequently. There was therefore an ideal standard that people seem to have been aware of but authorities did recognize that people were people and often fell short. So long as they \"did the right thing\" thereafter such incidents could often be resolved. \n\nThe immediate family members of either party might intervene as well if they discovered the relationship had crossed over into copulation in order to ensure the wellbeing of children and the honour of the woman involved. \n\nShannon McSheffrey has noted that it was very common for men to \"dangle marriage\" in order to entice a potential partner into intercourse and so women were advised to be wary of aspiring partners and their intentions. \n\nMcSheffrey also encourages us to consider the similarly for contemporaries between concubinage and premarital relations occurring among people who were loosely intended. Shannon McSheffrey, *Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London* (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 69.\n\nAs for instances of pre-marital or extra-marital intercourse in the context of sex work the question is rather complicated. Men such as Thomas Aquinas readily admitted that prostitution for example was an evil, but nonetheless recognized that it was a necessary one. Leah Lydia Otis notes that for him sex workers were a means of ensuring that sexual appetites did not boil over and cause deeper social problems. \n\nAquinas famously compared prostitution to a sewer for lust so that male sexual passions did not accumulate and lead to the endangering of good or virtuous women. It was not uncommon for clergymen to be land lords for brothels in large cities and receive rents drawn from their revenues. Leah Lydia Otis, *Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qdpqp", "title": "How did the Warsaw Pact military stack up against NATO? Could it defend itself, or would it have fallen apart quickly?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qdpqp/how_did_the_warsaw_pact_military_stack_up_against/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdbrm2b", "cdbv1q4", "cdbvo4w"], "score": [2, 5, 6], "text": ["Specifically, during some of the CW crises, like Able Archer or the first phase of the Korean War.\n\nEdit: How could I forget the Cuban MC?\n\nEdit: Aside from nuclear weapons. While they did IMO prevent the Cold War from going hot, I'm thinking conventially. This does sort of debase the subject from reality, but I want to see if the Soviet propoganda was actually valid.\n\nIf I remember correctly, in 1945 the Soviets had a 5:1 manpower advantage, but virtually non-significant airpower **EDIT** in an air-to-air context. Their logistics were overstretched by the race to Berlin.\n", "One of the things that must be remembered when considering the military might of these two groups is the time period in which they were formed. Immediately following World War II, Europe as a whole was in shambles and their military forces were not much to see. The United States was working to assist in the rebuilding of Europe through the Marshall Plan, and they had just gotten out of the greatest depression that the nation had seen to date. \n\nUnfortunately it is hard to gauge a comparative strength from the proxy-wars that took place during the cold war. This is mostly because, while the United States and NATO forces were directly involved, the USSR's and the Warsaw Pact's forces were not. They were mainly involved with supplying and influencing the forces, and occasionally supplementing the forces (Chinese specifically in the Korean War). Most of the comparison comes from potential strength through budgetary numbers and usage of force. That being said, with the USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact having most of their money go into their military government, the numerical forces are almost equal. \n\nThe Congressional Budget Office actually published a document assessing the comparison between the two forces in the late 70s which I have linked [here](_URL_0_). In this they describe the budgets and spending of both groups, and find them roughly equivalent with regard to their power. \n", "There were huge differences between countries, as their goals and interests varied greatly. For instance in Hungary, in the fifties the military was of outmost priority, there was no amount of money too much if it was meant for defense. They bough fairly up-to date soviet weaponry and had the means (adequate training, fuel, ammunition) to use them. \n\nLater, after the revolution, military spending was slowly sacrificed to increase the standard of living, and any equipment slowly fell due to lack of maintenance. By the end of the eighties, live ammunition shooting practices were few and far between, pilots spent most of their time on the ground. Many cost cutting measures were taken. For instance most of the army was a conscripted army, and many units were \"not entirely filled units\". This simply meant that the equipment was there in some warehouse, the officers were there, however not a single soldier was present, the explanation was simple: In a war, they will get new conscripts and old soldiers, and they will fill the ranks with them. Many of the equipment was victim of mechanical cannibalism, if something broke in a truck or a plane, they simply took that part from another, currently not used truck or plane, and replaced it, thereby saving the cost of spare parts. Due to this practice, there were vast amounts of vehicles which were only present on paper, for instance if an inspection came, they could show them hundreds of trucks parked on the base, however everyone knew that only four or five could be used, as every other one missed vital parts, or was simply rusted beyond repair. \n\nIn theory soldiers were conscripts, you can imagine what a company of 40+ fathers could have done on the battlefield with distant memories of their two year of basic training when they were 18. By the end of the cold war, basic training simply deteriorated into a boy scout camp, for instance marksmanship training consisted of firing seven (7!) bullets, and in many bases the officers simply stole half of that ammunition and sold them to hunters. Soldiers were simply not rady for combat, after seven shots you will not hit the broad side of a barn. Officers were promoted based solely on service time, simply everyone got a new rank every two years, officer posts were higly dependent on nepotism, so freakishly incapable people were organising this whole mess, who have never seen combat in their lives.\n\nMy father was a surgeon from 1979, so he got plenty of training, where they were told about the plans for a war. I am not joking the plan was: We have medical supplies for 48 hours, we can do what we want for that time. When someone asked what will happen on the third day, the answer was simply: By that time we will capture enough supplies from the westerners to continue operating. \n\nSo the Hungarian army was grossly incapable, equipped with mostly useless weapons, it would have crumbled in two days in case of a NATO assault."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/101xx/doc10146/77doc579.pdf"], []]}
{"q_id": "fohgmm", "title": "To what extent was the Ottoman administration inherited from the Byzantines?", "selftext": "After 1453, how many of the Roman Empire's laws, tax policies and administrative practices were carried over to the Ottoman state? And after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and Syria, did those Byzantine \"leftovers\" take precedence over the administrative practices the Ottomans borrowed from the Mamluk state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fohgmm/to_what_extent_was_the_ottoman_administration/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flhcav3"], "score": [6], "text": ["The transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule was a kind of synthesis between the two. Mehmed II had a Greek mother according to the chronicles we have, so he saw himself as the heir to Greco-Roman civilization in some way. Starting in the fourteenth century, the Ottomans already incorporated Balkan Christian nobility as quasi-feudal landholders in exchange for military service, this was called the timar system. When Mehmed II conquered the remnants of Byzantium many of his administrators were Byzantine nobility who converted to Islam and were incorporated into the government. The early Ottoman state even going back to Osman Ghazi was extremely syncretic and took in many different types of people into the power structure. However, after this period the Ottoman elite in the late fifteenth and into the sixteenth century was made up of men conscripted from the devshirme. Typically people associate this with just the janissaries, but palace administrators were also recruited from this pool. Keeping people connected to their Byzantine noble heritage could have been problematic, since the devshirme conscripts were cut off from their family ties. Overall, you have some links to older forms of administration but the general structure of the Ottoman state was a combination of government adapted to their circumstances while also trying to incorporate those existing elites into the system. Overall though, Ottoman state administration developed its own course because it was a mix of Turkic, Islamic, and some elements of old Byzantium. \n\nMamluk Egypt was a bit of a different case. The Mamluk state was ruled by the descendants of Turkic and Caucasian mercenary soldiers (the \"mamluks\") brought in by the original elites, and over time they began to rule the state. \n\nStavrides, Theoharis. \"From Byzantine Aristocracy to Ottoman Ruling Elite: Mahmud Pasha Angelovi\u0107 and His Christian Circle, 1458\u20131474.\" In *Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries*, edited by Isom-Verhaaren Christine and Schull Kent F., 55-65. Indiana University Press, 2016."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vrira", "title": "Why were the only countries interested in colonisation of the new world in Western Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vrira/why_were_the_only_countries_interested_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cev65ec", "cev6frf", "cev6kb2", "cev8a6x", "cev8d5f", "cevcxpw"], "score": [5, 4, 9, 2, 18, 2], "text": ["Western Europe had the easiest access to the New World because of of its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. I'm sure other countries were interested in exploring and colonizing the New World, but geography blocked them from establishing colonies and keeping them supplied and defended, because foreign, potentially hostile nations stood between them and the Atlantic.", "Woof, talk about a big and non specific question.\n\nHere are a few key points to consider:\n\n * State centralization had gone furthest in the parts of western Europe facing the Atlantic for whatever reason. \n\n * Most of the best early staging points for the principal colonial routes were controlled by countries on the north Atlantic\n\n * Domestic and foreign policy troubles distracted potential competition from other states with an interest in Atlantic seafaring, such as Venice, Genoa and the Hanseatic states\n\n* Using Venice in particular as the obvious potential colonial power -- being as they had long established colonies in Crete, Constantinople, Cyprus, Acre and other parts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea -- they were tied up in fighting in the Italian Wars and against the Ottoman Empire, plus had poor relations with the Portuguese (according to Norwich)  plus were focused on traditional (and far more lucrative) trade through Alexandria\n\n * Power projection across the Atlantic required a greater population and capital investment than most states were capable of given their existing foreign policy commitments.\n\n * It wasn't until pretty late in the game that the route around Africa became cheaper than the route through Alexandria, partly because the Mamelukes (and later the Turks) cut rates on through traffic to keep it competitive\n\n * Navigational maps (rutters) that included information about currents, prevailing winds, reefs, location of lands and sailing directions were carefully guarded and difficult to acquire, complicating the planning of a colonial excursion", "There are a number of reasons that could be attributed to it all the way down to the mentality and traditions of each nation in question, but I think the biggest two are distance and availability of resources. \n\nThe initial drive which lead to the 'discovery' of the new world was to open up trade routes to India and China. India and China did not need to find these trade routes because the people and their money were already knocking down doors to get to them. The impetus was on the Europeans to find more efficient routes and bypass middlemen. Colonialism is almost always based on economics, and colonies were usually designed to extract resources from their location, not to spread a population. Population spreading and growth was just a side effect of a successful colony. Colonies rarely made a particular country that much richer but they did make some people who lived in that country richer. \n\nThe other is distance and practicality. Crossing the Atlantic is much easier due to distance and trade winds. To take the trade winds of the Pacific would push you up along the frigid coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and down the western coast of north America. Going back was perilous as well as you had to cross the vastness of the equatorial region of the Pacific where there are almost no islands for 5,000 miles. \n\nAtlantic Trade winds were very helpful in this respect. They would take you south from Europe to Cape Verde off the African Coast, and then straight across to the Caribbean, a mere 2,800 mile journey. I don't mean to make it sound that easy, but compared to a Pacific journey it would be. From there it was just a matter of island hopping to the rest of the continents. \n\nAll that said, countries outside western Europe were interested in colonization and colonialism, just not in the New World due to practicality. The Empire of Japan certainly had colonial ambitions, as did Italian states. Russia even colonized all the way to the Pacific ocean. ", "Now I am far from an expert in the subject but one must consider that there is a difference in a country being interested in colonialism and actually building a colonial empire. Some nations may have been interested in such colonialism but may have never we carried it out.\n\nSome countries in Eastern Europe such as Courland and Brandenburg-Prussia(one could debate if that is eastern or western), did have colonies in Africa and the Carribean.\n\nMy apologies for the lack of value of this comment, but hopefully it provides some food for thought for the discussion from Historians here as I am quite excited to read on this.", "They weren't. The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, which was a vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in modern day Latvia, had a colony in Tobago in the West Indies. Sweden had a colony in Delaware. Russia had colonies on the west coast in Alaska and at Fort Ross in Northern California.", "I cannot tell you why were they the only countries interested in it, or even if that sentence is true, what I can tell you is the reason for one of those countries being so interested in it. Portugal\n\nLet's look a bit at it's history before that country started the Age of Discovery.\n\nPortugal as you may know is a very small country bordered on the North and East by Spain (then Castille), and on the West and South by the Atlantic Ocean. It's land area represent's about 15% of the Iberian Peninsula, has a different and more unified feudalism than the rest of Europe and due to those factors, small size, small strength compared to it's bigger neighbour, and unity, Portugal had no reason whatsoever to become engaged in politics and disputed with the rest of the Continent.\nIt's to no surprise that many Spanish monarchs considered it to be a geographic aberration.\n\nIn 1385 Portugal emerges from a two year succession crisis victorious against Castille, and the new King is D. Jo\u00e3o I, he has plenty of children one of them becomes of great importance to the start of the Discovery age - D. Henrique or in english Prince Henry - The Navigator.\n\nHe became the rich governor of the order of christ, and sponsored a \"school of navigation\" where knowledge and techniques would be brought to be learned from and perfected, and a large number of expeditions to map the coast of Africa, not just for the sake of it, but for two reasons linked to eachother. To see the extent of the Muslim territory in Africa, and spread Christianity. Every pit stop the ships took the captains would order the sailors to erect a cross, with the country's arms, they would celebrate a mass.\n\nWhen speaking about Colonization and Discovery, and in this particular Portuguese case, spreading christianity and amass wealth were given almost the same importance. Portugal had a a small population, so colonies were far from portuguese horizons, in the late 14th and through the 15th century, Portugal developed a trade empire and in some cases a monopoly (dominated atlantic slave trading for almost 100 years)\n\nAnd keeping on to trade (I will get to colonization soon). In 1498 Vasco da Gama, sailed past the southern tip of africa in to the Indian ocean and reached India. On a side note, I saw a reply to this thread that said traditional trade through alexandria, so I assume silk road or close to it, was far more lucrative) Vasco da Gama expedition to india with 3 ships, brought back six times it's cost in spices. And then it began what could be called a trading post empire, with the portuguese charging tarifs to all trade in the Indian Ocean. This was mostly done by force at first and later through strategic aliances, although vastly outnumbered, better ships and much better naval artillery were no match for the vessels and fortresses of the nations that priveously dominated the indian ocean trade (I should mention now that I mostly refer to the coasts of the arabian sea until Sri-lanka). The Indian Ocean became for a while the Portugese *\"Mare Clausum\"*\n\nNow Colonization. In 1500 Portugal discovers the coast of Brazil, and news soon reaches the portuguese court in Lisbon. News of exotic naked people, and land untouched by civilization. The goal of spreading christianity was still very present, and this was seen as a great oportunity for that.\n\nThis is becoming a huge mess (I am writing this having badly slept the past days, if anyone wants more info on this I can try to help just PM) I will try to sumarize it.\n\nReasons for Portugal to become interested in colonizing and become a powerhouse were\n\n* Geographical location in Europe, closest country to the Atlantic\u00b4\n\n* No interest in Continental politics\n\n* Some argue that it would be the \"next logical step\" after the trade empire to build a colonial one\n\n* Sailing techniques, and a vast knowledge of cartography, navigation, astronomy, and shipbuilding made it easier and more possible to find new places to settle\n\n* Spreading the faith and subdue the \"infidels\".\n\n\nHere is a bit of backstory and some of the reasons why one (small) country in western Europe decided to colonize, expand and build the first global empire. Your answer may come from seeing the reasons of the other countries that also became interested in colonization. Or matching these reasons to the ones who didn't.\n\nPS: I am sorry for the many grammar and phrasing mistakes I made, I might edit this after I get some sleep. Sorry for the long post, and sorry for murdering the English language."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1hn2eh", "title": "AskHistorians consensus on Mother Theresa.", "selftext": "She's come under fire by people on the internet\u2014largely, I suspect, due to to the works of Christopher Hitchens. Are the claims that she promoted faulty medical techniques, that she served to prolong suffering, and that millions died or suffered because of her valid? What do you think of her association with the Duvalier family?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hn2eh/askhistorians_consensus_on_mother_theresa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavz7s1", "cavzkpb", "caw07h3", "caw0crq", "caw3eam", "caw4p8w", "caw5xjs", "caw6y8y"], "score": [85, 735, 11, 337, 14, 34, 8, 8], "text": ["I have heard a lot about her being pro 3rd Reich, any instight on this?", "At the risk of putting the cart before the horse, I'd like to put a notice here.\n\nThis question is here because I don't feel it breaks any rules, and the questions asked are valid. However, it is not an opportunity to attempt to politicise the person at the centre of discussion, or soapbox about your own personal interpretation. Any response to this question should be considered and measured. Comments that ignore this and attempt to turn this thread into a political rant will be removed, because that's not what this subreddit is here for.", "as far as the comment about suffering goes, there's this article that criticizes her fairly harshly about her treatment of the sick and dying.\n\n[anything but a saint](_URL_0_)\n\n**some highlights**\n\n\n > \u201cThere is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,\" was her reply to criticism\n\n. . .\n > In her acceptance speech, on the subject of Bosnian women who were raped by Serbs and now sought abortion, she said: \u201cI feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing\u2014direct murder by the mother herself.\u201d", "If your only judging her on her motivations then most people do think that she was trying to help people. She was just ~~horrible at it~~ using questionable practices which made some people say that she was not helping people as much as she could have . Her house of the dying \"hospices\" saw a much lower standard of care than many people who donated had thought and were poor hospices by the standards of developed nations   ~~were horrible~~.  Hospices have people who are medically trained and try to minimize suffering. Her \"hospices\" had untrained nuns making ~~horrible~~ medically bad decisions that assumed most people were terminal. They were ~~horribly~~  poorly run (administrational problems, methodological problems) and if they had been more focused on treatment instead of care it would have done far more good..  The nuns were not medically competent, many practices were in place that led to a lot of unnecessary suffering, some people question her priority on care rather than treatment. \n\nHer House of the dying \"hospice\" gave \n\nThere were plenty of problems not associated with cost. For example all she had to do was allow her nuns to boil needles and it would be a lot safer and more sanitary yet she didn't allow it. That's not a cost issue. Other issues had some cost but really its basic care and any budget means it should be done (for example only giving cold baths is horrible for sick people)\n\nJust this year there was research  done by a Montreal/Ottawa university that questions  money management, origin of her image, views about suffering, etc. [ link ](_URL_1_) \n\nThe study was an analysis of most of the documents covering Mother Teresa.\n\nSome intresting excerpts. \n\n > \"the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers.\"\n\nDespite the ciritisisms the report does talk about some of the positives \n\n > \nIf the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice. It is likely that she has inspired many humanitarian workers whose actions have truly relieved the suffering of the destitute and addressed the causes of poverty and isolation without being extolled by the media. Nevertheless, the media coverage of Mother Teresa could have been a little more rigorous.\u201d\n\n\n\n**Edit for Sources.** \n\nThe claims of poor medical treatment is based from an article from the Lancet, a British medical journal.  The PDF costs $30 and not something I'm going to shell out money for.  Most of what I said are from memory of reading that article so its understandable that people are taking the critisism with a grain of salt. That being said the Lancet is arguably the best known and most respected medical journal, or at least was when this particular article was written.   \n\nhere is the link _URL_0_\n\nThe Canadian university research, the Lancet article, and the Hitchen's book are the main sources for criticism of Teresa. All of them cost money to get, and the Hitchens one is usually dismissed immediately. That leaves two sources, both costing money and one of them in French.\n\nThere is also a book by an ex-nun that I have not read titled \"Hope Endures: Leaving Mother Teresa, Losing Faith, and Searching for Meaning.\" that seems to address some of the criticism.  \n\nAnother book I haven't read called \"Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict\" by an Calcutta born Indian/British doctor.\n\n*Addressing the actual question*\n > Are the claims that she promoted faulty medical techniques, that she served to prolong suffering, and that millions died or suffered because of her valid? What do you think of her association with the Duvalier family?\n\nMillions did not die because of Teresa.  What Hitchen's was saying is that if the money Teresa got (the amount is not released by the organisation) spent on preventing and treating sicknesses then it would have done much more good.  Also he was addressing how Teresa was a force again progressiveness in the world (particularly India) and that this would hinder life saving developments.  This is a rather extreme claim and I don't really know how to address it.  \n\nI would say that there was unnecessary suffering because of the medical choices made.", "An honest question. Mother Teresa died only 16 years ago. Do we have enough time distance for historians to objectively judge her and establish historians consensus?", "This is a subject I've studied rather thoroughly, having bought several books on the issue and even interviewed people that knew her.\n\nBasically, Hitchens' claims are two parts of hand-waving and one part bullshit. He describes her as a sadist, someone who \"got off\" on the pain of others, when nothing could be further from the truth. She had very hardcore ideas about suffering, and the virtue of suffering, which sounds odd to us in our country, but she was absolutely about the relief of suffering of others. My interviews confirmed this, and I can pull out quotes from my books if you all are interested.\n\nThe criticisms about her running a poor hospital are also off the mark. She was *not in the business of running hospitals*, or even street clinics. She ran hospices, where people could die surrounded by people who loved them, people who had nobody else to care for them. Again, this sounds odd to our modern sensibilities, but this shows the fundamental misunderstanding of the charges brought against her.\n\nSure, you could argue that she could have built hospitals (EDIT: lots of people have made this argument, [for example](_URL_1_)). She could have done a lot of things with the money that she had, and *fundamentally didn't want or need* to carry out her mission, which was to go, with her sisters, through the filthiest, dirtiest parts of the world, pull people out of the gutters, clean them up, and show them love. She did things that you don't see anyone else in the world doing - even the hospitals that her critics hold up as a model of what she should have been doing. So again, the charges against her represent a fundamental misunderstanding of her mission.\n\nEDIT: Here is the [Catholic League response](_URL_0_) to The Missionary Position, which provides compelling examples against Hitchens' veracity.", "I have a question historians, about the Duvalier family.\n\nWho were they and what did they do that was so bad? ", "ITT: no one mentions the culture in which the care was taken place in -- India -- which is primarily Hinduism.\n\nSorry for the cliche above, but there is much western/eurocentrism going on in this thread.  Granted Mother Theresa was from a \"western\" background, but how much of the political blame (so we can weed out to the legitimate) is actually against people of the Hindu culture (both in treating and in dying whishes)? \n\nSo, let's understand Hospice care for Hindus:\n\n >  Of particular\nimportance is the notion of a good death, which provides\na model of how to die; a bad death is greatly feared...\n\ncherry picked quote later to get point across...\n\n >  A dying person can refuse medication to\ndie with a clear and unclouded mind, and view pain as a\nway of expurgating sin.33 This belief can cause problems\nfor non-Asian professionals whose training makes them\nwant to maintain life and relieve suffering\n\n\n[Source which is western Hindu focus still and Caution PDF](_URL_0_)\n\n\nI have often wondered how much this cultural difference may play a role in the OP's question...\n\n\nEdit:  another source of \"good death with quote\"\n\n >  Death is considered an inevitable part of life. In India and other non-Western cultures, death is often described as good or bad(Emanuel  &  Emanuel, 1998; Firth, 1989; Thomas  &  Chambers,1989; Westerhof, Katzko, Dittmann-Kohli,  &  Hayslip, 2001). A\u2018\u2018good death\u2019\u2019 is believed to have three qualities. First, close relatives of the dead are prepared for the event. Second, the deceased person had not suffered physical or mental trauma, and third, friends and family members have said their goodbyes to the dying person. There is a great deal of anxiety when the death is sudden or traumatic as these deaths are considered \u2018\u2018bad deaths.\u2019\u2019 One senior female gave as an example of bad death her friend\u2019s son\u2019s drowning in the river,despite being a good swimmer. The family grieved that the young man must have struggled before his body was found. Children are not supposed to die before the parents. The death of a child is explained as bad karma for both the deceased and the family left behind to grieve. \n\n > Other examples of bad death are suicide, accident, and murder.  An example of a good death was a professor living in the United States who found out that he had stage 4 stomach cancer and was given 6 months to live. He made a list of all his friends, family,and students and informed them that he was going to India for good.  He wanted to say goodbye to all those who wanted to come meet him. Over a period of couple of months, he was able to bid adieu to all, and then he packed his bags to go back home to die in his little village in India where he had some family. He did not want any trap-pings of modern medicine, but wanted a peaceful death.\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20130301-mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint.html"], ["http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673694923531", "http://sir.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/15/0008429812469894.short?rss=1&amp;amp%3bssource=mfr"], [], ["http://www.catholicleague.org/christopher-hitchens-the-missionary-position-mother-teresa-in-theory-and-practice/", "http://news.yahoo.com/mother-teresa-actually-sort-jerk-182700128.html"], [], ["http://www.asu.edu/clubs/bioethics/hindu.pdf", "http://academia.edu/484057/Cultural_beliefs_and_practices_on_death_From_an_Asian_Indian_American_Hindu_perspective_in_the_United_States._Death_Studies"]]}
{"q_id": "3amoxe", "title": "Is it possible lands now underwater were settled by humans thousands of years ago?", "selftext": "So, I was reading the Wikipedia article about [Doggerland](_URL_0_), and the land available surprises me. Of course, it's hypothetical, but still, did settlements exists? Or we can only suppose?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3amoxe/is_it_possible_lands_now_underwater_were_settled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cse1xqh"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! it would be worth x-posting this to the anthropologists  &  archaeologists in /r/AskAnthropology. Or possibly /r/AskScience or /r/Archaeology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "41dezd", "title": "Is there a discipline among academic historians studying the role of women in history?", "selftext": "Case and point, the research into Margaret Hamilton - the lead software engineer for the Apollo missions, and Katherine Johnson - lead navigation specialist for the Mercury missions.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41dezd/is_there_a_discipline_among_academic_historians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz1h55s", "cz1zv5v"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["Yes, historians have spent the last 50-odd years learning to pay attention to the women of the past. In some cases, like medieval religion and cultural history, this development has radically changed our understanding.\n\nIf you're interested, I wrote about historians' changing attitudes towards women [last week.](_URL_0_)\n\nAlthough some historians do consider themselves, specifically, \"women's historians,\" others who focus on women explicitly reject the title: women are a part of ALL history, not an isolated branch that can be compartmentalized and ignored by 'mainstream history'.", "Gender history (often part of wider gender studies) is an umbrella discipline that includes this. It also looks at the meaning of masculinity, analyses sexuality or the way gender was constructed in the past and things like that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-project-apollo-158754170da8#.t3gueprm5", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4061zj/it_seems_that_the_victorian_era_distorted_our/cyrrf4i?context=3"], []]}
{"q_id": "375mmq", "title": "What were Japanese firearms like during Sengoku Jidai?", "selftext": "I just watched the Extra history videos on Sengoku jidai, and it said that there were more guns at the end of the warring states period than there were in Europe. What were these firearms like? Were they less advanced or just different than the European firearms, and what were the tactics associated with these guns?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/375mmq/what_were_japanese_firearms_like_during_sengoku/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crk38gh", "crk5aoi"], "score": [6, 14], "text": ["I find that claim incredibly orientalist exaggeration. And really Extra History's Sengoku Jidai is not their best work to say the least (there's zero use of new research, and lots of sensationalist fluff instead of accuracy).\n\nJapan had about 200k firearm from the 17th to mid 19th century. Considering the tercio's ratio of guns to pike was 1:1 and the Spanish Empire alone (admitted the largest power in Europe at the time) had 300 000 men under arms, I find it hard to believe that the entire of Europe can not field 200 000 guns (though I would concede Japan probably had more guns than any single European polity, but it also had more population). Especially since Japanese battle formations even in Edo had less than 1:1 gun ratio due to a huge number of squires and other \"semi-combatants\".\n\nArquebus were lighter types used by Portuguese, mostly not requiring the stock support used in Europe. Their craftsmanship were recorded by traders as surprisingly well. Most armors could be penetrated at 50 meters (Japanese were not very well armored in comparison to Europeans).\nI've heard (but have not seen sources) that says later on they moved for higher accuracy but lower rate of fire. But other ignition systems like wheellock and flintlock were not produced, and the matchlock was used all throughout.\n\nTactics varies with period and place. And a lot of famous tactics in the past are called into question. But setting those aside, in a pitched battle generally arquebusiers worked in conjunction with archers, with archers providing covering \"fire\" while the gunners reloaded. They formed the front of the formation and seem to worked in small teams of less than 10, and did not stand shoulder to shoulder but a bit looser, with the team firing in volleys. When they just started to be used they softened the enemy for a spear charge. By the end of the Sengoku they...still did that but the spear men were almost relegated to protecting the gunners.  \nSome commanders also told their gunners to fight sitting down.", "While I'm tempted to just post my Senior Thesis here, because it was exactly on the Japanese Teppo or matchlock in the Muromachi and Azuchi\u2013Momoyama eras (Esentially from ~1337 C.E. to 1600 C.E.) I'll try to answer your question point by point and add some more background when i can. \n\nI'll start from the beginning and work my way though your questions along the way. The Japanese peoples probable first encounter with gunpowder based weapons is when the Mongols tried to invade in 1274 and 1281 C.E.. These devices were primitive and were closer to grenades or mines than anything resembling a matchlock or musket. \n\nThe next encounter with gunpowder that japan would likely have was at sea from pirates in the early 16th century. This was made possible by the Portuguese taking the Fort at the Malacca Strait and moving from there upward toward Japan. However it was the  a Chinese Junk that was damaged off the coast of Tanegashima Island in south-west Japan on September 23, 1543, that arguably brought the first matchlock to Japan. The Teppoki or Record of the Musket, was the account of the interaction between the crew of this ship, the lord of Tanegashima and their interaction with the new weapon. Soon after this they were able to poorly copy the new weapons but after another ship came close with a Portuguese Blacksmith they were truly able to perfect the weapon. To answer your question about the differences between European and Japanese matchlocks of the period, the Japanese esentially copied the European design but that design was likely from an Armory built in Goa, India, conquered by the Portuguese in 1511. So by the time the got the weapon in 1543, they likely would have been inferior to the matchlocks made in Europe. \n\nTo answer the tactical question, they were usually deployed behind cover and had a limited effective range of about 50 meters. \n_URL_0_\nThis picture from Wikipedia show's how they would likely have been deployed. The first person to take full advantage of the Matchlock was Oda Nobunaga, where he used their skill to defend Nagashino castle, at the aptly named battle of Nagashino. \n\nAs for you first numbers question, Hideyoshi, the second of the great unifier's, launched an invasion of Korea in 1592 with roughly 200,000 men. Roughly half of them were thought to have been equiped with period matchlocks. This would probably be the high number for the period, so ~100,000 would be a decent guess. As for their effectiveness, the Japanese army took Soul, South Korea in less than a month and they were highly effective against the Korean forces because they had not seen them used in mass and effectively. The Koreans with the help of the Chinese would eventually push them out but the Japanese held their own. Hopefully this isn't too long and answers most of your questions. \n\nSome Refenences.\n\nLidin, Olof G.. Tanegashima: the arrival of Europe in Japan. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2002. \n\nIf there is any book a recomend on the subject that isn't in Japanese it is this one. It has tanslated versons of the Teppoki and the Tanegashima Kafu or the history of Tanegashima Island. \n\n\nSwope, Kenneth. A dragon's head and a serpent's tail: Ming China and the first great East Asian war, 1592-1598. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009.\n\nThis book is about the Hideoyshi's Korean war and has some but not a great amount of detail on the subject or matchlocks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ashigaru_using_shields_(tate).jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1td4hx", "title": "How did Roman emperors travel? How were they protected?", "selftext": "I'm asking specifically for Hadrian's case, he enjoyed travelling so how did he travel? Would it be on carriage pulled by horse? How many bodyguards would he have had? Specifically for long travels.\n\nThank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1td4hx/how_did_roman_emperors_travel_how_were_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce6rwrj", "ce7416j"], "score": [85, 2], "text": ["First, a disclaimer: the ancient sources are not very good.\n\nThe historian Dio tells us how he traveled: not in a lazy man's carriage, but always walking or on horseback! (Dio, Epitome of Book LXIX 9.3)\n\nHe also tells us that Hadrian loved to drill the soldiers and \"fixed\" their training, which had become lax (apparently).  The dubious Historia Augusta says something similar.\n\nIn general, it is safe to assume that he traveled with a substantial force of arms.  Upon his accession, he traveled from Syria to Rome via the land route through the Balkans.  We know he had an army with him because he took side trips to rectify several problems along the way.  For instance, we know that he \"sent troops ahead\" (Hist. Aug. 6.6) to see about problems in Pannonia/Dacia and left a prefect in charge there.  By chance, an inscription (IGR III 208) tells us that a local official called  Latinus Alexander helped quarter some of the troops.\n\nIn general: they traveled with legions, nearly always.  By the end of the 1st century AD, the majority of the provinces had been made relatively safe from random hostile encounters.  You could still get some spears thrown at you in the high passes of the Alps, or run into a band of robbers in a forest in remote Illyricum, but anything approaching a legion in size was pretty safe traveling. ", "If you want to learn more, there is a chapter in *The Emperor in the Roman World* that answers your question in detail. To summarize: emperors traveled slowly in huge groups. Soldiers, bureaucrats, groupies, clients, servants and all other sorts. These groups were so large that cities (rather the wealthy people living in cities) feared that the emperor might visit even though it was also considered a great honor to host him. Hadrian is the most famous traveling emperor (see Alkibiades' comment) but later emperors (Valentinian III for example) also did a lot of traveling between multiple capitals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1w4gbt", "title": "Why did Knights still use swords after the invention of Plate? Wouldn't the Mace become the more favorable and even \"romantic\" weapon?", "selftext": "I remember visiting the Tower of London an seeing the Monarchs \"mace\" used for ceremonies and such. This make me think, why did Knights bother using the sword anymore by the time Plate entered the field? Other than ceremonial use, what would it so in a battle against a fully armored knight? It might kill peasant levies with ease, but so can a Hammer or mace.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w4gbt/why_did_knights_still_use_swords_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceymxqi", "ceynasj", "ceyncnk", "ceyrf1o"], "score": [36, 352, 9, 31], "text": ["I cannot speak directly to the Middle Ages of England, but I can speak about a similar development that took place during the Bronze Age of the ancient Near East.  Up until the early 1200's B.C.E., the stone mace was the best weapon a warrior could carry.  It could easily smash through whatever type of armor a solider wore into battle.  \n\nDuring the Iron Age, however, the surrounding peoples learned how to work with iron to a much better extent.  Iron had already been largely used during the Bronze Age (the terms \"Bronze Age\" and \"Iron Age\" were developed during Europe's industrial revolution and are misnomers, more reflective of the ideals of 19th c. Britain, France, and Germany).  But during the Iron Age, many peoples, especially one group of sea-fearers known as the Philistines, began crafting a majority of armor from iron.  Iron was a much tougher metal than bronze and required a substantial amount of force to break.  Because of this, other weapons, such as spears and battle axes, became more widely used.\n\nBased on this example, we see that weapons often adapt to new types of defensive technology and vice-versa.  A solid mace in the hands of a strong enough opponent could rattle an enemy and possibly dent plate armor, but it would not break the armor.  Swords, on the other hand, can still hit vital parts of the body not completely covered by armor.  These places, as displayed in crusader era British armor, are areas that required flexibility (i.e.:  joints).  A sword had a must better chance to pierce a weak place in the armor than a mace had in causing it to break.\n\nThe excavation reports of Tel Megiddo and Tel Hazor deal with the development of weaponry in response to defense, which is a pattern that we still at play today.\n ", "With the advent of plate on the medieval battlefield, both the design and techniques of swords began to shift to handle the new threats. Two-handed weapons became more popular as the shield was discarded. Swords often became longer and thinner (with a few exceptions, such as the famous [sword of Henry V](_URL_2_)). You can see a few examples of these longer blades in the category of swords that Ewart Oakeshotte labeled the [Type XVIIIs](_URL_0_). When fighting against other armored knights, a man-at-arms would use a technique called [half-swording](_URL_3_), where he would grip the sword by the middle of the blade in order to thrust through the gaps of his opponent's armor. You can see the man on the left going for a thrust, while his opponent is employing the *mordschlag*, where you take the blade in both hands and bash your enemy over the head with the hilt of your sword. Every part of the sword is dangerous in the hands of a proper swordsman. \n\nMaces were always a common sight on the battlefield, but knights began to adopt the [poleaxe](_URL_1_) in increasing numbers. There's a wide variety of different types and names for these, but essentially they're something of an all-in-one polearm. A poleaxe might have an axe-blade on one side, a hammer on the other, and a spike at the top. Some had more of a \"beak\" type of blade for penetrating armor. These were enormously popular weapons for soldiers in the late middle ages. The long shaft allows for a two-handed swing, therefore giving you more power to penetrate or crush through an opponent's armor. Since men-at-arms generally didn't have any use for a shield, the one-handed, much shorter mace was less useful for them. \n\nEven though the poleaxe was arguably more popular for fighting against armored men while dismounted, it did not render the sword irrelevant in warfare. Medieval knights carried multiple weapons and used each according to the situation they found themselves in. A mounted knight used his lance in the charge, then switched to sword, mace or axe if his lance broke or if the charge was bogged down in enemy infantry. If ordered to dismount (or forcibly dismounted by an archer) he would have waded into melee combat with a poleaxe and a sheathed sword and dagger. Weaponry was never an either-or decision for a knight. \n", "Thank you all for the great answers!", "In addition to the great extensive answers already in the thread, let's remember that at no point in the Middle Ages were most participants on a given battlefield equipped with all of the latest technologies.  There weren't any battles (at least on a large scale) in which everybody was equipped with full plate, and in most battles, the majority of participants weren't necessarily even knights.  So, yet another reason for swords to continue to be used after the advent of plate armor is that a) most people didn't wear it, and b) those that did didn't necessarily have it on all parts of their body."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.myarmoury.com/images/features/pic_spotxviii01.jpg", "http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_spot_poleaxe.html", "http://darksword-armory.com/images_site/historical/Henry%20V%20sword%20-%201325.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Augsburg_Cod.I.6.4%C2%BA.2_%28Codex_Wallerstein%29_107v.jpg"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3xucop", "title": "When did people start thinking about how different the future might be?", "selftext": "What's the first evidence of people saying \"I think the future might be like this\", as we get in the [1920s-30s](_URL_0_) etc., giving predictions for what e.g. new technologies might mean for civilisation?\n\nI'm not thinking about Nostradamus and soothsaying/seer-like predictions for specific events, but instead suggestions of predictions for changes in society, perhaps driven by technological developments, perhaps driven by societal progression.\n\nThis perhaps assumes that the civilisation doing this thinking does not assume it's the peak of humankind's civilisation.\n(Please note I'm not asking an alternate history question, but instead asking what is actually documented about contemporary views of the future)\n\nIf this only started happening fairly recently (e.g. in the 1920s-30s, or perhaps Victorian times), did people write in any meaningful way about whether things would be different 2, 3, or 5 generations after their time, or was the expectation for much of history that the only things that would change would be who was ruling, rather than societal shifts within that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xucop/when_did_people_start_thinking_about_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy7tkai"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not meaning to dissuade anyone from answering, but OP, you may find some interesting answers in these related threads:\n\n* [Was there something like \"futurology\" or \"science fiction\" in ancient times or the middle ages?](_URL_1_)\n* [How did people in the middle ages view the (distant) future of the world they lived in?](_URL_0_)\n* [Before around 1700, where there any books or plays with a definite setting in the future? How did they present future society, and what where their predictions?](_URL_2_)\n* [Did ancient cultures have science fiction?](_URL_3_)\n* [When did people first start to understand that the people of the future would have important technologies that they didn't have?](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30379986"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qafud/how_did_people_in_the_middle_ages_view_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vslrp/was_there_something_like_futurology_or_science/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vovzs/before_around_1700_where_there_any_books_or_plays/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u4pbz/did_ancient_cultures_have_science_fiction/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32hp3y/when_did_people_first_start_to_understand_that/"]]}
{"q_id": "563dcl", "title": "How did the Yakuts, a Turkic group, end up in Siberia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/563dcl/how_did_the_yakuts_a_turkic_group_end_up_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8gc1z7"], "score": [9], "text": ["Turkic groups were most probably living in present-day eastern Siberia.[1] Nomadic tribes from Siberian forests (*taiga*) migrated to Asian Steppe (*bozk\u0131r*), where they built their legendary city: *\u00d6t\u00fcken* (present-day Mongolia). As Bilge Khagan Inscription (from Orkhon Inscriptions) states, *T\u00fcr\u00fck Ka\u011fan \u00d6t\u00fcken y\u0131\u015f olursar ilte bun yok* (If Turkish king lives in \u00d6t\u00fcken, there will be no angst in Turkish country).[2]\n\nSo, Northeastern Asia was motherland for Turkic groups, not the other way around.\n\n-----------\n\n[1] Histoire des Turcs (Chapter II), Jean Paul Roux\n\n[2] Bilge Khagan Inscription (North Facade, second line)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4n0ca5", "title": "What languages were spoken in Southern China before the early Chinese Empires expanded there? Did those languages have any effect on the modern Chinese languages of Southern China?", "selftext": "AFAIK, the languages of Hakka, Cantonese etc. in South China are the descendants of Old (Middle?) Chinese, after various dynasties expanded from the traditionally Chinese North.\n\nAs they expanded South, what languages/peoples did they replace? Do any of those indigenous languages survive? Are there any examples of words in South Chinese languages which come from the indigenous languages?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4n0ca5/what_languages_were_spoken_in_southern_china/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d408l3y"], "score": [11], "text": ["Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin, Wu, and a few others, are the descendants of Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese and Min are descendants of Old Chinese. Min was an earlier branch than those others, and thus we find Southern Min (Taiwanese, Teochew, Hokkien among other names/groups), Nothern Min, Eastern Min, Puxian Min being really quite distinct, in some regards as distinct as Cantonese is from Wu (Shanghai area).\n\nThere's some argument about what I just wrote, but it's basically the common view and detractors are a small minority.\n\nAs to what languages were there before, one of the answers is \"just about every Southeast Asian language you've heard of\". So Thai/Lao and Zhuang were one. The modern Dai \u50a3\u65cf ethnicity are the members of this larger old group that remain in China. The Shan in Burma, the Ahoms and Phakes and Khamtis in India, and the Dais in China are all branches off a Tai-speaking group centred in modern day Yunnan and into Guangxi. So Thai  &  Zhuang were one such group. Thai, Lao and Zhuang belong to the Tai-Kadai language family.\n\nThe Miao \u82d7\u65cf also known as the Hmong are another group. The Hmong who today are found in Southeast Asia (and further abroad) had ancestors who were originally living further north in what's now China.\n\nThere are other groups as well. The She \u7572\u65cf are a prime example of one such group which had an impact. The She were living (and many still do) in Zhejiang province, Fujian, and throughout Southeast China. Much of the substrata details in Hakka are pointed to the She as the source. The She spoke a Mienic/Yao language, which is closely related to Hmong/Miao. You'll see \"Hmong-Mien\" as a language family outside China and in Mandarin the same group is called \"Miao-Yao\".\n\nThere's a 2004 paper by Laurent Sagart, *Gan, Hakka and the Formation of Chinese Dialects*, which is available online and is a good overview of this sort of substratum development. It pretty directly answers your question, in linguistic terms.\n\nThere we also Austronesian speakers in the area, though it's hard to say how many and when. Off the top of my head I don't have much to offer on that point.\n\nThere's a huge amount written on this topic, mostly in Mandarin. I don't have the papers handy but if you can read Mandarin I can suggest some authors to look into. The Sagart paper gives some examples of reflexes of these other languages, but it's more in the form of phonology than lexicon. \n\n---\n\nedit: some further reading as requested \u2013\u00a0\n\n > Lu\u014d M\u011bizh\u0113n \u7f57\u7f8e\u73cd has written a fair bit, e.g. \u300a\u7572\u65cf\u6240\u8bf4\u7684\u5ba2\u5bb6\u8bdd\u300b from 1980 and \u300a\u4ece\u8bed\u8a00\u4e0a\u770b\u50a3\u3001\u6cf0\u3001\u58ee\u7684\u65cf\u6e90\u548c\u8fc1\u5f99\u95ee\u9898\u300b\u3002 Also W\u00fa Zh\u014dngji\u00e9 \u5433\u4e2d\u6770 \u300a\u7572\u8a71\u548c\u5ba2\u5bb6\u8a71\u300b and also D\u00e8ng, Xi\u01ceohu\u00e1 \u9093\u6653\u534e\u300a\u5ba2\u5bb6\u8bdd\u8ddf\u82d7\u7476\u58ee\u4f97\u8bed\u7684\u5173\u7cfb\u95ee\u9898\u300b\u3002 Then also \u300a\u58ee\u8bdd\u4e0e\u767d\u8bdd\u3001\u5ba2\u5bb6\u8bdd\u3001\u95fd\u8bdd\u7684\u5171\u540c\u7279\u5f81\u300b by W\u00e9i D\u00e1 \u97e6\u8fbe for another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6yebkj", "title": "Is there any evidence of discrimination within concentration camps between the different demographics/race of prisoners?", "selftext": "Edit: to clarify my question, I am asking about discrimination from one prisoner group to another rather than from the guards. :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6yebkj/is_there_any_evidence_of_discrimination_within/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmmvsi2"], "score": [14], "text": ["**Part 1**\n\nFrom the wording, albeit it is not entirely clear to me, I assume you mean discrimination of one group of prisoners by another group of prisoners and not singling-out one group of prisoners by their guards and the Nazis. The answer to both of those issues is, yes, that happened and, in fact, the two \u2013 discriminatory group practices by the Nazis within the camp system and inter-group discrimination \u2013 are strongly related and intentional.\n\nSomething that needs to be heavily emphasized at the beginning of this is that the Concentration Camps were a huge complex: The Nazis built over 42.000 camps in all of Europe with at least 1.100 of them being the big main Concentration Camps and their sub camps (this doesn't include the death camps e.g. or the Organisation Schmelt camps in Poland that are closely related to the Auschwitz camp complex but not actually under the administration of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps). In January 1945, the SS counted a total number of inmates of all camps with 714.211 \u2013 and this is just the peak. [Here is an unfortunately bad scan of a table from Nicholaus Wachsmann's book KL](_URL_0_) (my homescanner is shit for scanning books, I apologize) giving inmate numbers throughout the years of the existence of the camps. Some of these are counted continuously but the table shows that throughout the years from 1933 to 1945 literally millions of people were imprisoned in camps by the Nazis.\n\nThis is important in several respects for this question for a variety of reasons: First of all, these are people thrust into a situation that heavily relied on group discrimination and where positions of power meant a greater chance of survival (I'll detail a bit more momentarily); that came of many different backgrounds from Polish Catholics to French communists to German Jehovah's Witnesses; and who didn't suddenly stop having the convictions and opinions they had before. The Concentration Camps were a huge amalgamation of different groups and populations of Europe and, crucially, must not be seen as moral reformatories, in the sense that being or having been imprisoned in a Concentration Camps made these people victims of Nazi oppression but didn't turn them into shining beacons of behavior we'd consider moral. Italian and Austrian fascists imprisoned in Concentration Camps because of their opposition to German fascism at one point in time makes them victims of Nazi persecution but it doesn't change the fact that they were fascists and embraced a lot of the political ethos that entailed, for example.\n\nThe fact that it is quite possible to be a victim of Nazi oppression while still holding views and engaging in practices that are also oppressive neither justifies Nazi oppression nor does it mean that these people somehow \"lose\" their status as victims. A criminal imprisoned in a Concentration Camps without due process and being killed there in a brutal fashion is still a victim of Nazism and its systematic oppression because he was deprived of the process and civil rights \u2013 and murdered \u2013 in a fashion that completely goes against the ethos, rules, procedures, and basic human rights upon which democratic societies are build thus representing an act of oppression and injustice.\n\nThe second point that needs to be reiterated and emphasized is that the internal system of the Nazi concentration camps and the structural aspects of its prisoner society were intentionally designed by the Nazis in a way that would foster rivalry, power imbalances and conflict amid its prisoners and would make certain groups of prisoners complicit in the functioning of the whole system by thrusting them in a position where an individual's survival often depended on treating his fellow prisoners badly from a position of power.\n\nI assume many readers here will be familiar with [this chart of different categories of Concentration camp prisoners](_URL_3_). I have gone a little bit into the problem with this chart [in this answer](_URL_2_) but the problem generally is that we know little about how closely and stringently it was followed throughout the years and only have ample evidence for the widespread use of red and green triangles and the Star of David while lacking concrete evidence for the widespread use of other symbols. But the point of the chart is not so much how accurate it was and more that it represents the institutionalization of something that had been very present from the very inception of the German concentration camp: the classification of prisoners into different groups and according to this group classification different privileges and access to positions of power within the camp hierarchy.\n\nThere are numerous examples of this but one of the most illustrative is the status of Jehovah's Witnesses and other so-called \"Bible-students\" in Concentration Camps. I go into this more [in this answer](_URL_1_) but the gist of it is that despite the relatively small size of this group of prisoners, they were after a certain point over-represented in positions such as so-called Kapos (prisoner foremen of CC work details), prisoners working in the camp administration like accountants, running the magazine or kitchen and so forth because the Nazis realized that JWs and other Bible students would not try to escape the camp.\n\nEven if given the chance, the Bible-Student prisoners would not escape the camps. In their faith, imprisonment in the camps was basically a test from God for the coming end times and while they refused any cooperation with the war effort, they also refused to flee. Theological debates took place in the cams surrounding this in illegally printed watchtower leaflets. Anyways, once the camp administration figured this out, they used the Bible-Students as preferred prisoners for work details outside the camps. In Austria, one such detail e.g. fixed up a farm house for a high ranking Nazi where the prisoners also slept in said farm house with only one guard. They could have overwhelmed him but stayed put.\n\nAnother example of this a colleague of mine discusses in a forth-coming article on the subject of \"Yugoslav\" as a prisoner category is that people from Yugoslavia imprisoned in the camps had a higher chance of survival when classified as \"Slovenes\" or \"Croats\" or even \"Serbs\" than when classified as \"Yugoslav\" since \"Yugoslav\" still carried a stronger implication of being opposed to Nazism due to the history between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany than the individual nationalities carried and people classified as Yugoslavs suffered stronger discrimination and higher violence from the camp administration than people classified as \"Slovene\" etc.\n\nWhat resulting from these classifications and from the general structure the camp administration set up was a distinct hirarchy among prisoners. Historian, former political Auschwitz prisoner turned Nazi hunter Hermann Langbein compiled a book about the camp experience called *Menschen in Auschwitz* (Humans in Auschwitz) in which he extensively relies on prisoner testimony to re-construct a comprehensive picture of life in the camp and where he describes this hierarchy:\n\n >  If one survived the initial hard times after arriving in the camp, if one had learned the rules of camp life and had made contacts with other prisoners, one became an \"old prisoner\". Demonstrative harshness and brutalization were often the signs of \"old prisoners\". This type was stronger developed in camps with a longstanding German prisoner population and thus never fully developed in Auschwitz.\n > \n >  An unwritten law in all camps said that new arrivals would receive harsher physical work while prisoners with low numbers would receive a good work detail. The SS didn't even have to monitor this rule too closely for it was a respected law of prisoner hierarchy. With a good work detail came a better living space and block that was not as crowded, more food, and less physical violence.\n > \n >  Equally as important was that a better work detail and a lower prisoner number meant better clothing. The moniker \"clothes make the person\" was nowhere as true as in the Concentration Camp as the episode of George Wellers illustrates:\n > \n >  Weller, an orderly in the Monowitz sick bay and wanted to help a friend who was still at the lowest rung of the prisoner ladder. Dressed with care he visited him in his block. He played the big cheese, smoke demonstratively despsite this being forbidden to the average prisoner, stood in the middle of block floor so that everybody had to squeeze past him mumbling apologies, in short, he did everything so that the people in the block knew how well connected his friend was.; because he knew that in their eyes the luxury he radiated as a prominent prisoner would reflect back on his friend.\n > \n >  (...)\n > \n >  All too often the old prisoners looked down on new arrivals and those who were in the worst shape in the constant struggle for survival that was the camp. Primo Levi said about this: \"The social structure of the camp was build on the fact that those with privileges oppress those without them.\" Bruno Bettelheim wrote: \"The fear of sinking into the sub-human class of prisoners was a strong motivation for waging a class war against them.\"\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://imgur.com/a/ncmNK", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6r1dle/why_did_the_nazis_target_jehovahs_witnesses_are/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5911n4/ww2_holocaust_how_were_homosexual_concentration/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1993-051-07%2C_Tafel_mit_KZ-Kennzeichen_%28Winkel%29_retouched.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4dsdvb", "title": "Were the European witch trials partially rooted in the Cathar heresy and the Albigensian Crusade?", "selftext": "[This web page on the history of European witchcraft persecution](_URL_0_), written by legal scholar Doug Linder from the U. of Missouri, states that many of the distinctive features of European superstitions towards witches - pacts with Satan, flying on poles and brooms, transforming into animals, and the whole smorgasbord of sexual deviancy ect.- came from the persecution of the Cathars, many of whom were coerced under torture into confessing these same crimes. He then says that, following Pope Innocent III's suppression, many Cathars migrated into the Holy Roman Empire- where the bulk of executions occurred during the height of the Witch Trials- from their original home in Southern France and Northern Italy. \n\nWhile Linder is an accomplished legal and Constitutional scholar, he doesn't as far as I know have an extensive background in Medieval studies and doesn't list his sources for this section of the page. I know that there were many cultural influences leading to the Witch Trials, from the Torah to Pagan Rome to Thomas Aquinas, but Catharism isn't one I had thought of before. Do any experts on this period of history know if this interpretation is commonly accepted? If so, it seems to me that the Cathar heresy is a seriously undervalued event in Western history, given that it would have shaped European notions of Good and Evil from then on. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dsdvb/were_the_european_witch_trials_partially_rooted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1u3lxj"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is not a commonly accepted interpretation. No real mention of Catharism is made when trying to explain the origins of the witch trials. Inquisitors interrogating Cathars were not looking for evidence of Satanism or black magic, they were looking for evidence of the heresy that the Cathars actually believed in \u2013 for example the belief the material world was created by the evil Old Testament God while the spiritual world was created by the good God of the New Testament. Magic and demon-worship did not become a topic of inquisitorial concern until the 1320's, under Pope John XXII. John decreed that black magic was a form of heresy, conflating the two concepts in a way that was relatively novel at the time.\n\nLinder does not mention one of the most commonly cited inspirations for the emergence of the concept of witchcraft: the actual practice and fear of necromancy (black magic) in the Late Middle Ages. Necromancers were typically educated men (often monks, clergy, or courtiers) who wrote, bought, or used grimoires of demonic magic. They did not worship demons, but they did attempt to summon them. Often they used the name of God and other holy figures to compel these demons into service. Their magic was highly ritualistic in nature, involving the drawing of circles and long incantations. Necromancers often went unpunished, but when they were they were tried by conventional secular and ecclesiastical courts rather than by the special inquisitorial tribunals that dealt with the Cathars. It's from these necromancers that many Early Modern ideas about witchcraft evolved.\n\nThe sources below are a good starting point for learning more about the evolving concept of demonic magic before the beginning of the witch trials.\n\n\n* Isabel Iribarren, *From Black Magic to Heresy: A Doctrinal Leap in the Pontificate of John XXII*\n* Michael D. Bailey, *From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages*\n* Richard Kieckhefer, *Forbidden Rites \u2013 A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/witchhistory.html"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2912sf", "title": "Yorkist Claim to the English Throne", "selftext": "Why does virtually every source agree that Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York's claim to the crown was stronger than Henry VI's? Usurpation by his grandfather aside, Henry VI was descended from Edward III's third son, John of Gaunt, while the Yorkist line was derived from Edward III's fourth son, Edmund of Langley.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2912sf/yorkist_claim_to_the_english_throne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cii42ep"], "score": [2], "text": ["There was also a female line descent from the second son. It was the lack of something like a salic law in England that complicated things over whether a senior cognatic link beat a lesser agnatic link"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18qv9t", "title": "Nelson Mandela before his arrest, history with the MK", "selftext": "Hi, r/AskHistorians.  I've been trying to find some information online about the nature of Nelson Mandela's work with the MK prior to his arrest, but I've had some trouble finding any concrete detailed discussion about what his actions with the MK involved or what exactly the charges of \"sabotage\" that he was sent to prison for meant.  (I've taken the fact that he was charged with \"sabotage\" and not just straight up murder to indicate that the government had trouble pinning any deaths to him.)  I've heard conflicting reports, in the range from (and I'm paraphrasing), \"In the time between its founding and Mandela's arrest, the MK was involved only in bombing of government targets.  The bombings were designed to minimize loss of life and to only target government officials.  It wasn't until the early eighties that the MK began to explicitly target civilians, by which time Mandela had been in prison for twenty years,\" to \"Mandela was a hardened terrorist who intentionally targeted white farmers and 'enjoyed' indiscriminately targeting whites.  His terrorist history has been glossed over because it is politically convenient.\"  More often, I find vague one-sentence gloss-overs like this:  [\"He led an armed resistance that used techniques such as the destruction of government property to fight against apartheid.\"](_URL_0_)  All I've really been able to verify from multiple sources is that the MK was co-founded by Mandela in 1961, after Mandela was convinced, in part by the Sharpevill massacre, that non-violent resistance could not be effective.  The MK engaged in several so-called \"sabotage\" bombings between late 1961 and Mandela's arrest in 1963.\n\nAny help finding some more actual, verifiable facts would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.\n\nEDIT:  Thank you everyone for contributing so far; I haven't had the time to comment individually yet, but I appreciate the discussion and especially the book recommendations.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18qv9t/nelson_mandela_before_his_arrest_history_with_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8h6hp9", "c8h80y8", "c8h8mzo", "c8h9n2q", "c8hcmf7"], "score": [12, 8, 20, 10, 4], "text": ["He goes into considerable detail about it in his autobiography. From memory, he talks about starting the MK, setting up weapons training, and he explicitly justifies civilian collateral damage. I remember being fairly surprised by it when I read it.", "You should read his autobiography, I don't think it's possible to understand Mandela without having read it. \n\nMy opinion is that in his youth Mandela was quite angry and bitter. Part of what makes him great is despite his long painful journey he was able to change and forgive. Nobody is trying to claim Mandela has been perfect all his life. He grew up in a nightmare reality, he made mistakes. But ultimately he overcame his demons, helped his country gain freedom, and much more. \n\nAnother interesting point to learn from the Mandela story is that the difference between a freedom fighter and terrorist only depends on your point of view. ", "I have an eye on this thread, keep it factual folks.", "OP:  Mandela was arrested on August 5, 1962, not 1963.  Bombings only began with the 57 explosions on December 16, 1961.  So Mandela's direct involvement with operations was only about seven months long.  The raid on Liliesleaf (which produced important documentation) was in 1963 but Mandela was already in ~~jail~~ custody.  The trial, however, wasn't carried out until 1964, so that may be the source of the confusion.  \n\nI am not aware of any deaths attributable to MK's actions in the first year or two of its existence, because (as you rightly point out) the NP would have loved to pin murder to the 192 counts of sabotage at Rivonia.  Unlike sabotage, the Nats wouldn't have needed a new law to aid prosecutors in securing convictions, which had been part of the reason the Treason Trials failed to produce prison sentences for key ANC leaders. \n\n[Edit:  There's a lot of politicized crap out there about this phase of SA History, so you have to tread carefully.  David Welsh's *The Rise and Fall of Apartheid* (2011) is a good omnibus and covers the sweep of the struggle itself.  Francis Meli's *South Africa Belongs to Us* is an ANC-slanted (1989) history of their operations, but has a lot of data and details that could only come from ANC documents and first-hand accounts.  If you read it while keeping in mind that Meli is *strongly* valorizing the ANC in qualitative descriptions, it can be a very useful book.  I forget if Allister Sparks covers some details as well, but as a long-time SA journalist, his work is extremely readable.  Martin Meredith is also a good tertiary compiler who separates wheat from chaff and is accessible; his book on Mandela is *Mandela* (2010).  If I can think of any other good titles, I will include them, but comb Welsh's footnotes.]", "It was only in 1985 that the ANC officially moved away from the policy of strategic hits on infrastructure and decided to target enemy personnel, like the security police and armed forces members, but they never had a policy of targeting civilians. Here are the decisions from the ANC Kabwe Conference in June of 1985 that mentions this change, see [section 6j](_URL_2_).  In December of 1985, an MK team carried out an attack on a shopping mall, tried to phone in the threat to the police so people would leave, and couldn't find a phone that worked to call.  One of the members, Andrew Zondo, went on record claiming it was a rogue attack that did not conform to MK guidelines, due to the civilian casualties.  A good book about that case is [Fatima Meer's The Trial of Andrew Zondo.](_URL_1_)  \n\nThe Pan-Africanist Congress was the organization who particularly targeted white civilians in certain operations, both during its '60s incarnation as Poqo, then later when it was called APLA.  Their argument was that if black civilians walking down the street, perhaps to school or church, can be killed indiscriminately by the apartheid forces, then white civilians' lives should have the same fear instilled into them.  Their most notorious hit was on a church which was condemned worldwide.  The church was often attended by security police officers, and the priest pulled out a gun and shot back at the attackers.  The priest, Charl Van Wyk, talked about going to a homecoming for the APLA commander and the St. James attack  [here.](_URL_0_)  Their reconciliation outside of the official truth and reconciliation committee was quite something.  \n\n*Edit: mixed the priest's first name up with a friend's.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://history.howstuffworks.com/african-history/nelson-mandela.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://frontline.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=192:in-the-lions-den-for-the-worlds-greatest-revolutionary&amp;catid=24:persecution-cat&amp;Itemid=200", "http://www.amazon.com/mis-trial-Andrew-Zondo/dp/0947009248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1361215368&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=mis+trial+of+Andrew+Zondo%2C+Fatima+Meer", "http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=137"]]}
{"q_id": "cfwz40", "title": "In modern strategy games, it is easy to see if you are winning or losing a battle, because the game simply tells you. But how did foot soldiers and officers discern victory and defeat during the heat of battle? How did they evaluate if they should retreat or stand their ground?", "selftext": "Edit: It also helps that yopu have a birds eye view over the battlefield, which you don't in real life.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cfwz40/in_modern_strategy_games_it_is_easy_to_see_if_you/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eudv72v", "evevcgs"], "score": [1250, 3], "text": ["During the Napoleonic Wars, there were three main factors that helped armies determine if the day had gone against them: the presence of strong forces in reserve, the safety of the line of retreat, and the possession of ground.  \n\nDuring the Wars of the French Revolution, war, battle, and combat changed dramatically, even though they used all the same weapons as the previous century.  In the 18th century, armies typically marched, encamped, and deployed as one body, staying always under the eye of their overall commander.  They usually deployed in two main lines, with small forces kept in reserve.  The battalions, as the actual tactical units, had assigned places, and their long linear formations inhibited rapid movement across the battlefield.  Battles often took the form of long parallel lines of infantry shooting it out in close order formations; in many ways, it was a contest of endurance decided by the skill of the infantry, rather than their commanders.  \n\nBy contrast, the reorganization of armies into divisions and corps, combined with the increasing use of infantry formations like open order and columns, led to a dramatically different shape of combat.  Instead of the whole army spending a few hours at the beginning of the day of battle getting lined up, battles increasingly took the shape of meeting engagements between vanguards with more forces being committed from the corps' main bodies as each tries to overpower the other.  Armies attacked with what they had, trusting the other corps would arrive either throughout the day or in time for the second day of battle.  \n\nRather than deploying the bulk of their armies in long, parallel lines, generals sought to engage the enemy with only a small proportion of their forces, generally infantry in skirmish order, supported by artillery, while the bulk of their armies were kept in reserve, either at the corps level or under the eye of the overall commander.  [See Figure 1](_URL_0_).  The combat at the front smolders away 'like damp gunpowder', occasionally disrupted by cavalry and bayonet charges, as the fighting men exhaust themselves.  When the equilibrium is disrupted, the commander will commit just enough of his reserve to right it; often, a general's only function on the day of battle was committing or withholding reserves.  Units that have been in combat on a given day are not as effective as fresh ones, even if they've won; their arms weaken, their muskets foul, their flints get dull.  Eventually, they get burned into cinders by combat.  Committing reserves is representative of attrition; the faster one's forces waste away, the more need to be drawn off from the reserves to replace broken units.\n\nThe goal is to reduce as much of the enemy army to this state of exhaustion as possible, while keeping as many of your men fresh as you can; if you succeed in this, you can use your remaining reserves to smash through their line and take their line of retreat.  This forces the enemy to retreat in haste, often to the point of exhausting the men and potentially abandoning artillery.  Generally, though, battles tend to go one way from the beginning; one side has to start feeding in reserves first, and from there, it's hard to get on the right side of the 8 ball again.  As such, generals can usually tell when victory has become unlikely by looking at how often they have to commit reserves, and will usually retreat well before their army is in serious danger of being smashed.  When they fail to do this, the result is disastrous; the reason Waterloo was such a smashing victory for the Allies was that Napoleon spent his last reserve trying to win a battle he had already lost.  When the Guard was repulsed, his army scattered to the winds, and he fled the field basically a fugitive. \n\nI mentioned lines of retreat earlier, so to elaborate, generals usually take great care to maintain a means of withdrawing their army in case of a lost battle.  Armies going back to the ancient world generally had the fortified camp of the previous night to fall back on.  From here, they could stay behind the ditches and palisades to ward off the victorious enemy, or begin a retreat back towards their base of operations.  Napoleonic armies usually were not able to avail themselves of this, having marched and arrived on the field separately.  As such, the strategic layout of the campaign exerted even greater significance; the availability of lines of retreat in the strategic sphere was termed an army's 'freedom of action'.  If it became necessary to retreat, the army would have to do so directly from the battlefield.  Lines of retreat thus exerted significant influence on the tactical conduct of battle.\n\nLet's look at a couple different schema for armies and lines of retreat.  Generally, the strongest deployment has a line of retreat running perpendicular to the fighting front, located behind the center.  Armies are generally strongest in the center, and circumnavigating an army to cut off it's line of retreat is extremely difficult on the tactical level.  Alternatively, the line of retreat can be located behind one of the wings; these are more vulnerable to both breaking and turning.  The line of retreat can be an extension of wings, running parallel to the combat front.  [See Figure 2](_URL_1_) These are very vulnerable to turning; at the battle of Jena-Auerstadt, Napoleon's vanguard took the Prussian line of retreat through Naumberg before the fighting even began.  Alternatively, a general may opt to fight a battle 'on reversed fronts', which can effectively mean no lines of retreat for either side.  This is a high risk, high reward play; Marengo is probably the most famous example from the Napoleonic Wars, but the Battle of Leipzig was initially planned this way, as Schwarzenberg wanted the allied Main Army to unite with the Army of the North behind Napoleon and master his communications.  \n\nLines of retreat behind or extending from the wings represent less grievous blows to an army when taken than a center breakthrough that threatens that line of retreat, as this causes an army to be split in two.  When this happens, the army generally *must* quit the field, fall back, and regroup before it can continue fighting.  Tying back to the earlier point, an enemy with fresh reserves can continue to drive this wedge after the initially splitting, delaying the enemy's ability to regroup and turning their tactical reserve into the strategic spearhead.  The more the enemy is forced to rush and scramble just to regroup their beaten army, the more damage can be inflicted on them.  With this in mind, most generals payed close attention to the course of the battle near their lines of retreat.  \n\nLastly, there is the possession of ground on the battlefield itself.  The field of battle was never a snooker table; they typically had several topographic features that lent physical and psychological advantages to those who possessed them.  The most common type was the village; combat in Napoleonic battles often revolved around the brutal struggle for them.  While one stretch of field was as good as another, a captured village represented a tangible prize for the victors, leading men to fight much harder over its possession.  The Battle of Lutzen is called Grossgoerschen in German after one of the villages; most of the fighting revolved a quadrilateral of four villages in the center of the field, which witnessed some of the most brutal combat of the Napoleonic Wars. \n Much of the Battle of Auerstadt concentrated on the village of Hassenhausen, which formed a key strongpoint in Davout's position against the Prussian onslaught.  Other structures assumed great importance; the farmhouses Le Haye Saint and the Hougamont saw intense fighting throughout the day of Waterloo, and on the Prussian side of the field, the fighting mostly revolved around the village of Plancenoit.  At Borodino, the Russian field fortification were the nexus of most of the fighting, with the Great Redoubt on the Russian right and Bagration's fleches in the center repeatedly changing hands throughout the day of battle.  Natural features, such as woods, hills, and streambanks often filled the same function.  \n\nCarl von Clausewitz never got the chance to command a victorious battle, but he had the opportunity to observe several defeats, such as Auerstadt and Borodino, and his description of the tenor of a losing battle is remarkably vivid.  \n\n > All these indicators serve as a kind of compass by which a commander can tell the direction in which his battle is going. The loss of entire batteries while none are captured from the enemy; the crushing of his battalions by the enemy\u2019s cavalry while the enemy\u2019s own battalions remain impenetrable; the involuntary retreat of his firing line from point to point; futile efforts to capture certain positions, which end in the scattering of the assault troops by well-aimed grape and case-shot; a weakening of the rate of fire of his guns as opposed to the enemy\u2019s; an abnormally rapid thinning out of his battalions under fire caused by groups of able-bodied men accompanying the wounded to the rear; units cut off and captured because the battle line is disrupted; evidence of the line of retreat being imperiled: all this will indicate to a commander where he and his battle are heading. The longer they are headed in that direction, the more definite the movement becomes, the more difficult it will be to effect a change, and the closer comes the time when the battle has to be conceded.", "During the Hundred Years' War at the Battle of Cr\u00e9cy in 1346, Edward III looked on from a reserve force of his household retinue. His son, Edward, the Black Prince (aged only 16) held one of the three groups of soldiers under his command.\n\nAt this battle, Edward III was informed that his son was in possible peril when he fell with his own banner. However he was rescued by a household knight. Edward III told the informant (a possible runner/messenger) to fight on. Edward III wanted his son to \"win his spurs\" and likely saw that his son wasn't in complete peril - but he did have heavy cavalry in reserve in case of emergency. The banner falling was a significant moment as this indicated where the commands for a group of soldiers were coming from and could possibly indicate trouble and a need to retreat.\n\nSo there are three examples of how commanders evaluated this particular battle:\n\n1) A key leader potentially commanding from a high position.\n2) The banners still raised and protected.\n3) Runners/messengers informing other's around the battlefield with live updates.\n\nSources for the Battle of Cr\u00e9cy:\n\u2022 Chronicle of Jean le Bel\n\u2022 Froissart's Chronicles\n\u2022 Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker\n\u2022 Life of the Black Prince by the Chandos Herald\n\u2022 Letters of the retinue of the Black Prince"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/284123262731026434/602547371880087585/unknown.png", "https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/284123262731026434/602547324572532768/unknown.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "7yx7wb", "title": "Why is Ottoman bureaucracy considered efficient?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7yx7wb/why_is_ottoman_bureaucracy_considered_efficient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duksbdr"], "score": [7], "text": ["Could you elaborate on this question? Who is making this claim, in what context, and for what time period? Right now it is too vague to properly answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fw2gi8", "title": "How could the Romans mass produce the Gladius while in Medieval Europe swords were limited to the elite?", "selftext": "Well, while reading a few things about medieval warfare, I noticed that the use swords was limited to nobles, professional men at arms and wealthier soldiers, as they were the only ones who could afford them. Yet, in antiquity, the tens of thousands of legionaries serving Rome after the Marian reforms were all equiped with the gladius as their primary (?) weapon.  \n\nNow, I understand that most Medieval Kingdoms could only dream of reaching the industrial power of ancient Rome, but still, I can't help but wonder... just how could the Romans pump out swords in the thousands while the latter Europeans could produce so few of them?\n\nThanks in advnace!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fw2gi8/how_could_the_romans_mass_produce_the_gladius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmrpp2a", "fmn94je"], "score": [9, 34], "text": ["In terms of mass production or production I think '***nickelfldn***' answered it thoroughly. In terms of medieval warfare I could tell you that they needn't mass produce swords.The use, or not, of a weapon is heavily tied to the way you conduct warfare. The sword is an expensive weapon to make; it requires much more steel that a spear, or mace and of course requires a specialised craftsman, swordsmith. It has the advantage of being a versatile weapon able to be used in the hills of Spain, forests of Germany, mountains of Illyria, deserts etc. However it has several disadvantages. It has not the reach of the spear, but most importantly it can't pierce through armor, unlike the movies. Now medieval armies were rather small compared to roman or Hellenistic period armies. Their composition although certainly varied depending on the region could be described as such: The mounted elite warriors, lords and knights heavily armored, a small core of professional men at arms maintained by the said lords and knights also armored, and the rest and majority were peasant levies raised by the lords' demense who if they were lucky were given a helmet, shield, spear and a cross necklace for good luck. Their effectiveness in combat was doubtful at best. In an ironic way we can see that even in the medieval period all soldiers, at least professional soldiers, had access to swords.  \nStill as medieval armies became more permanent, the states became more centralised, the sword was never to regain its position as primary weapon which had in the roman era. And that is because it was ineffective against armor even the cheapest armor the gambeson which after the Hundred Years War would probably have be worn by every combatant. The use of the sword in roman era is tied to **the way the romans conducted battle** as opposed to the phalanx the greeks and most other people used in some extend. Perhaps it came from the necessity of fighting against different people in different environments. They had to be versatile and they also had the advantage of having a state capable of supporting their army. The roman army was the first real professional army. Nor the spartans not even the Macedonians of Philippus and Alexander were a professional army in that regard. People tend to think of the roman army as invincible but that was far from the truth. In many cases the legion faltered even in battles that were finally won, Cynoscephalae for example, or Magnesia. The romans however had the luxury of being able to lose one, two, three or more battles, luxury Hannibal, Antiochus and several others didn't have. What made roman expansion possible was diplomacy, trade and logistics not the armies. The armies were just there to confirm the conquest. Well the last one is my personal opinion you can make what you think of it.  \nIn the middle ages the mode of fighting  for infantry reverted to the phalanx-shield wall where the spear would again become the primary infantry weapon. Read about battles in the early Middle Ages: Tours, Haestings and read about battles of the romans. You will notice many differences in tactics, logistics,army composition, numbers etc...  \nSo to close and answer your question in terms of warfare is that medieval states Neither Could as '***nickelfdn***' said nor Needed to mass produce swords.  \nAs an afternote however, it is interesting to see that although mass production of swords was not taking place we know for a fact that the **Arsenale** in Venice at its height had the ability to manufacture a ship every day so the concept of mass production might have been uncommon but not impossible even in the middle ages, given enough money and necessity and as our friend Euripides says: \"Nothing has more strength than dire necessity\".  \n\n\nI hoped this helped you or at least gave you a different perspective. I'm sorry for my English I don't write often so I've become rusty.", "I am going to open with the fact that you will need someone else to answer questions about medieval arms and production. \n\nYou touched a little bit on the answer in your post, namely that Roman\u2019s had a higher capacity to produce arms and armor than medieval kingdoms, and this is true for many other states in Antiquity. This stems from the higher economic capacity of both the economy and the state. Put simply, the Roman state  &  economy was probably more complex than anything in the west until around 800 years after it\u2019s decline and demise in from the 4th \u2013 6th Century. Roman society was highly complex and economically diverse. It supported cities large urbanized populations that are not matched in Europe until the industrial revolution. Supporting the army and urban populations made up pretty much the entire Roman budget. To support cities, you need to be able to bring a significant amount of goods in to the city to support the population. That means both food and consumer goods. The most famous example of this is the Annonae trade and the grain dole in the city of Rome itself. A massive project that started in the 2nd Century BCE, the state sponsored cheap and free grain to certain citizens all the way until at least the 5th Century. That doesn\u2019t even cover the massive commercial economy that is possible when you have large urban populations and specialized production. \n\nYou may have heard of Monte Testaccio in Rome, which is a man-made hill and garbage dump of pottery imported from what is now Southern Spain in the 2nd and 3rd century. Mass produced pottery, which was also used by Roman peasants, has been found all across areas of the former empire. We have found the produce from a mass production facility near Millau, France in Spain, Tunis, Morocco, Algeria, Italy, England, and Germany. The Roman State, and private traders, were shipping millions of goods across the empire towards commercial hubs. This isn\u2019t specifically military like you asked, but it goes to show the level of commerce in the Roman empire. People had the ability to mass produce goods, ship them across the empire, and keep in business.  \n\nThe army itself was supplied by state run manufactories, fabricae, which could provide weapons and clothing to all the men on the frontiers. This included building said goods, and then shipping them to the needed location. Generally, these facilities were close to the frontiers but the ability to mass produce weapons and get them to the correct camp shows a significant state capacity for organization. There were state sponsored production facilities all across the empire. Even in the 5th Century, a soldier on the frontiers could have been supplied by several different factories.  \n\nThat complexity, interconnectedness, and capacity disappears from the 5th to the 7th Century in Western Europe. There is debate over how much the overall population actually drops, but Mediterranean trade, especially in the west takes a nosedive in the 5th  &  6th Centuries. The urban population drops significantly, several million urban residents in the west disappear and there was probably a drop in the rural population as well. There are recording issues with population, estimates but the overall population drop at 25-33%.   We even see significantly lowered coin production as well. An archaeological dig at Yeavering found pots in the tomb of a Saxon King that was of lower quality than the mass-produced high quality, if basic, pottery that was available for many in the empire. Britain is an extreme example, and the regression not as total in other areas of the post-roman west. High quality good remained available for the extremely wealthy, but mass production basically disappears with the economic collapse of the 5th - 7th Century.\n \nI\u2019ve focused a lot on the economics side of your question, because it really is the only way to show the extreme drop in the level of complexity in the Western Mediterranean. Some aspects survive for multiple centuries, but overall economic activity falls off, population drops, and states get significantly less complex. Why were higher quality weapons limited to the wealthy? Because the entire economic and social system that paid for, armed, fed, and clothed the Roman Army slowly disappeared in the West and the states that rose up in the aftermath never had the capacity to do anything close what the Roman state could."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "993dyp", "title": "Is it true that Emperor Rameses 2nd had red hair? And if this is the case, where did he and the 19th Dynasty of Egypt come from?", "selftext": "I was reading into a (psuedo)archaeological belief by [a collection of people who claim that New Zealand was previously populated by red-haired caucasians](_URL_1_), either Celts or an \nIndo-Aryan tribe from India, and that they are the reason why some (supposedly non-mixed) Maori [have striking red hair and green eyes](_URL_2_), as a documentary on the subject was just recently pulled from New Zealand television amidst a storm of criticism.\n\nI was reading through this blog of people involved who made [claims that they found West Eurasian skeletons in some Northland caves that a university refused to have DNA tested](_URL_9_) (as usual psuedohistory tends to co-habitate with conspiracy theories about why it is not taken as standard history), but what caught my eye was the passing mention of a number of ancient historical figures in odd places who had red and blonde hair, and amongst them was the mention of [**Emperor Rameses II of Egypt, from 1300BC](_URL_7_). Thinking this a particularly conspiratorial idea, I googled Rameses II only to be shockingly surprised. Not only does his Wikipedia page give multiple sources confirming he had red hair, but numerous images also surfaced of the head of his mummy, which possesses a striking tuft of orange hair. The Wikipedia page also mentioned that he had an \"aquiline nose\" and likely came \"from a family of redheads\". In Ancient Egypt? 3300 years ago!?\n\n[A picture of Rameses II's head with the hair in question. Redhead or Henna? Most sources I've come across state he was a natural redhead.](_URL_5_)\n\nI had always assumed that red hair, alongside blonde hair and other fair hair-colours originated in Northern Eurasia, for both Neanderthals and Humans separately. Red hair is commonly associated with Celts, but moreso historical Indo-European speaking peoples such as [Ancient Slavs](_URL_0_), [Scythians](_URL_8_),  [Tocharians](_URL_6_) and the like, along with other groups like [Chechens](_URL_4_) and other peoples of the Caucasus, etc. are known for having a large number of red-haired people amongst their populations. Almost all of these people modern and historical are found in places nearby, or as a result of, [Indo-European migrations](_URL_3_) and also in Europe in g, though I think I read something recently calling this a dated assumption and that these hair colours originated in Central European farmers, I don't know. Whatever the case, this brings me back to the question in the header: If an emperor of Ancient Egypt, in North Africa, had red hair in 3300BC and was indeed from a family of redheads, then where the hell is he from!? Because that doesn't sound very Egyptian at all. Could his family have originated from Europe? Anatolia? Was he the child of a wedding to a foreign princess? Was having Red hair and an aquiline nose common amongst ancient Egyptians in 1300BC? Could, similar to the [Mitanni](_URL_10_) of the Hurrians around the same time period - a recent entry of Indo-Iranian or Other IE-speaking tribes have become Egypt's 19th dynasty? Are other Bronze Age farmers culprits for Rameses' heritage? \n\nI'm very curious if someone on here could enlighten me, and maybe sweep away some dated assumptions or preconceived biases in the process, of why a Bronze Age Ancient Egyptian Emperor had reddish-blonde hair.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/993dyp/is_it_true_that_emperor_rameses_2nd_had_red_hair/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4legpu", "e4lj9tc"], "score": [13, 5], "text": ["Not directly about Ramses, but /u/400-rabbits wrote [a post](_URL_0_) about other pseudohistorical claims about redheaded mummies in the Andes, where he(?) mentioned that reddening is a well known chemical process post mortem.", "Many Mediterranean populations are believed to descend from the same proto-indo-european population that spawned the populations you speak of. Although rare, it is not unheard of for people in the Levantine region to sport red hair - the famous pirate and Ottoman admiral Oru\u00e7 Reis, the original 'Barbossa' (italian for Red Beard - this name was carried to his brother after his death) reportedly sported a red beard, though other sources claim it was a mistranslation of his name. Regardless, Auburn hair is not considered odd in Turkish and middle eastern populations. On the other southern end of the Mediterranean, Berber populations of Morocco and Algeria frequently sport red hair even today. It should be noted that, as the gene responsible is recessive, naturally over time, it will become less common. As another user mentioned, the red coloring may be a side effect of mummification processes. \n\nI doubt very much these claims of a 'celtic' population reaching New Zealand in ancient times. An Indus river valley population migration is more plausible. I might propose European settlers of Australia being adopted to indigenous populations, or that it evolved independently, like [the naturally blond indigenous people of the Solomon Islands](_URL_0_). A genetic test would probably clear some questions. \n\nHowever, I'm not sure I understand the connection to Rameses; while Egypt is closer to NZ than, say Europe, it is still quite far away, with no indigenous populations of red heads appearing along any possible route taken"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Slavs#Appearance", "https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2z6PlYiQSTs", "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x-HhfbCk2oU/hqdefault.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechens#Genetics", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Ramesses_II_mummy_in_profile_%28colored_picture%29.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wusun#Physical_appearance", "http://www.celticnz.co.nz/hot_mail5.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g06k6/chahapoyas_the_cloud_people_of_the_amazon/"], ["https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/05/naturally-blond-hair-in-solomon-islanders-rooted-in-native-gene-study-finds.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4lnpot", "title": "When did crossing one's legs become a worldwide habit? Is it a natural position?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lnpot/when_did_crossing_ones_legs_become_a_worldwide/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3p2ci3"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Before there was such a thing as humans and human history.](_URL_0_)\n\nLeg-crossing is a natural, instinctual habit, not a learned one. In fact, the way you feel more comfortable when crossing your legs (right leg up vs left leg up) is [determined to a point at a genetic level and inherited from parents to children.](_URL_1_)\n\nWant to have a laugh with your (extended) family? Ask each member:\n\n > 1) If their hair grows clockwise or counter-clockwise\n\n > 2) If they can bend their tongue upwards, or not\n\n > 3) If they can bend the sides of their tongue while keeping the middle down, turning their tongue into a tube, or not\n\n > 4) If their little finger sticks out from the others when they keep their fingers stiff\n\n > 5) If they have hair on the middle section of their fingers, or not\n\n > 6) If they cross their arms with the right one above or the left one above\n\n > 7) If they cross their legs with the right one above or the left\n\nAll those things are inherited."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a8/53/e1/a853e11f76797f9b5f607ea3b694a340.jpg", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8084429"]]}
{"q_id": "4mdfn0", "title": "Why were the czechs considered german?", "selftext": "Referring mostly to the fact that they were part of the german federation of the mid 1800s", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mdfn0/why_were_the_czechs_considered_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3uva4l"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not that Germans considered Czechs to be German, it's that Germans considered most of Bohemia (half of the Czech Republic today) to be German.  The reason is that these lands *were* German in addition to being Czech -- they were multi-ethnic.  And since Bohemia was a part of the Austrian empire, it was dominated by ethnic Germans.  For a time, Prague (the Czech capital) was a German city, i.e., German was the primary language spoken in Prague.  The Czech nationalist movement countered this in the eighteenth century, and by the time of World War I, Prague had become a Czech-dominant city once again.  Nevertheless, when Czechoslovakia declared its independence in 1918, Bohemia still maintained an enormous German minority of millions, so much so that one if five citizens of Czechoslovakia was German as the Second World War approached.  Ostensibly, it was because of this large German minority that Hitler demanded that the other powers of Europe cede to him a large portion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.  After England and France (but not Czechoslovakia) agreed to his demands at the infamous Munich Conference of 1938, Hitler subsequently invaded the remaining ethnically-Czech portions of Czechoslovakia, thus revealing his true intentions (i.e., to obtain Czech industry for Germany).  And, yes, this does have something to do with your question, because in 1945, after Nazi Germany's defeat, Czechoslovakia expelled millions of Germans from Czechoslovakia, and this is the reason that we no longer see a large German minority in Bohemia (for the remainder of the twentieth century, to stay within the rules of the subreddit)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1eohy5", "title": "Did any of the big German companies we see today, like Volkswagen or Audi, use Jewish slave labour during the Holocaust?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eohy5/did_any_of_the_big_german_companies_we_see_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca27zp1"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Yes](_URL_1_)\n\nAlthough it's important to remember almost all major companies in wartime Nazi Germany used some sort of slave labor. Men of fighting age were, wait for it, fighting the war. So the factories and mills needed people to run them. It was also economically feasible for a state at war to use free work- more money to spend of war stuff. \n\nThere is a good list [here](_URL_0_) of German companies that used slave labor during WWII."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/germancos.html", "http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/11/world/volkswagen-to-create-12-million-fund-for-nazi-era-laborers.html"]]}
{"q_id": "21ttku", "title": "Wondering about the history of the fedora - when did it start being stylish? When did it start being associated with neckbeards?", "selftext": "I bought a straw fedora the other day and I thought I looked really good but my friend says it was *never* cool. It got me wondering about the history of the fedora. Help me prove her wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21ttku/wondering_about_the_history_of_the_fedora_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cggg4h7", "cggk2ad"], "score": [32, 7], "text": ["[WARNING THIS IS TOTALLY A JOKE NONE OF THIS IS REAL. READ MOD NOTE HERE](_URL_1_)\n\nThis was something I learned about during my time as an underwater archaeology minor while pursuing my degree. Fedoras (at least the ones we've seen worn for the past 100 years or so) actually have a long history and were only recently \"re-discovered\" about 170 years ago.\n\nPrior to their rediscovery in early 1844 by a British Archaeological team digging in what used to be an Etruscan village, referred to as Turelbi in some older texts (though I haven't been able to find it referenced any later than 1918) in what today is Northeastern Italy and discovered a cache of preserved fur-pelted hats that were similar in design to what we would recognize a Fedora to look like today except it had two distinct corners at either end. \n\nAnyhow, the team brought these items back to England to show off in an exhibit at the British Museum that ran for a few years. Oddly enough, years after the exhibit had closed, Fedoras began to become fashionable piece of head wear among men in England and France after a play written in 1882's main character wore a hat inspired in design by the fur pelt hats found at Turelbi and displayed at the British Museum. Fedora's then became the fashionable head wear of the bureaucratic middle class.\n\nThe original hats that were discovered have been lost unfortunately, supposedly they went missing while in transit between a museum warehouse and Liverpool (the hats were to be shipped to the Americas to be exhibited in recently opened American Museum of Natural History in NYC in the mid 1870's). \n\nSource: \n[*Address to the Ethnological Society of London Delivered at the Anniversary, 25th May 1844*](_URL_0_)\n", "I have a followup question: some Classical sculptures, such as this [bust of the Emperor Nero](_URL_0_) feature what we today might call a 'neckbeard'. Was this a widespread style of facial hair, and what kind of social demographic would it have been popular amongst?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/3014114", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21yyci/important_message_re_source_reliability/"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Nero_1.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "5dyy9v", "title": "Quarterstaff combat is all over fantasy games, were quarterstaves ever used in real combat? If so, where, when, and how?", "selftext": "I have found some references to this type of combat for sport but not much for actual warfare. Any good resources or references?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dyy9v/quarterstaff_combat_is_all_over_fantasy_games/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da8i77n", "da9hg4m"], "score": [123, 9], "text": [" > The short staff [ie. quarterstaff] or half pike, forest bill, partisan, or glaive, or such like weapons of perfect length, have the advantage against the battle axe, the halberd, the black bill, the two handed sword, the sword and target, and are too hard for two swords and daggers, or two rapier and poniards with gauntlets, and for the long staff and morris pike.\n\n-- George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence\n\nNote that he equates the staff to various polearms of similar size that can be wielded using similar techniques. For the purposes of combat these weapons were interchangeable, so soldiers in warfare would generally be using staves with metal heads that made them into bills, glaives, and so on. But quarterstaff was the core technique that they were all based on.\n\nThe deadliness of staff combat was perhaps most convincingly demonstrated by Richard Peeke in 1625, who claimed to his Spanish captors that (like Silver said) an Englishman with a quarterstaff alone was superior to Spanish swordsmen. Peeke went further than Silver: he boasted that he could best *any number* of swordsmen at once, using only a staff with no head. The Spaniards took him up on the boast, removed the head of a halberd, and had him fight 3 sword-and-dagger-armed Spaniards simultaneously. Peeke defeated all 3, killing one of them in the process. And that was *without* the weapon head. In battle with proper warheads, these pole weapons were extremely dangerous.\n", "Quarterstaffs are present in a wide variety of medieval fechtbucher, and continue to have a presence in later periods, as well. It's difficult to give a general answer, as many of these manuals were written in different periods with different goals in mind, but very generally, it seems that quarterstaffs were used often as training weapons for other polearms, like pikes and halberds.\n\nGeorge Silver, as mentioned by u/BlueStraggler, is one example, but he's also somewhat problematic, as much of his martial advice seems to be aimed toward discrediting non-English martial traditions. \n\nGerman manuals like Joachim Meyer and Paulus Hector Mair, both of whom published their manuscripts in the mid 16th century, include substantial sections on polearms, and Meyer himself states, at the beginning of Part 5 of his manuscript: \n\n >  \"...I will first cover the quarterstaff as a basis of all long weapons...\"\n\nMeyer's manuscript was an attempt to teach an interconnected system of fencing, which included the use of the longsword (a two-handed weapon of varying lengths that might be more popularly known as a \"bastard sword\"), the dusack (a short saber), the rappier, dagger, and staff weapons. All of these weapons in his manual shared postures, cuts, thrusts, and more importantly, the systemic concepts that Meyer had synthesized from earlier manuals. In his dusack section, for instance, he states that the dusack is:\n\n >  \"the basis of all weapons that are used with one hand.\"\n\nWhich is almost exactly what he says about the staff. Now, we know that the dusack was absolutely a battlefield weapon, but even here it's being taught as one element in Meyer's complete system.\n\n In that respect, Meyer is teaching his weapons both as a means of personal self-defense, their use in duelling, their use in \"*fechtschuler*\" or popular festivals in which skilled martial artists would demonstrate their skill and compete in non-lethal tournaments, as well as, arguably, their use on the battlefield.\n\nA couple of clarifications and expansions, here. Meyer is sometimes regarded as an outlier from the standard German martial tradition that started somewhere in the 14th century by Johannes Liechtenauer. His *zettel*, which is sometimes translated as \"the recitation\", was a poetic explanation of swordsmanship, manly virtue, and chivalric behavior. Nearly every German martial manuscript follows this tradition, and glosses many of Liechtenauer's verses, attempting to explain or expand upon them. There are dozens of these manuscripts.\n\nMeyer, who wrote in the mid 16th century, is often argued as being removed from this tradition, although his manuscript quotes *directly* from Liechtenauer's *zettel*. The reson being that many consider Meyer's system of fencing as being something useful only for displays at *fechtschules* and for other non-lethal fencing (one of the main reasons being that Meyer states in his longsword section that \"thrusting is abolished amongst us Germans\" but happily teaches thrusting as a means to start attacks with the longsword, and he has no problem teaching the thrust as core to the dusack, rappier, and polearms). \n\nB. Ann Tlusty, in her *The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany* however, makes a concrete case that swords and swordsmanship were far from useless in mid 16th century Germany, and Meyer's prohibition of the thrust may have had more to do with demonstrating your desire to defend yourself, as opposed to just murdering someone in the street. Punishments for murders were much more severe than for manslaughter, and since thrusting was far more dangerous to your opponent than a controlled cut, use of the thrust might argue that your intentions were murderous.\n\nAnother theory is that Meyer's longsword, far from the sporting weapon that many modern Historical European Martial Artists regard it, was actually a way to synthesize the Liechtenauer tradition with the battlefield *zweihander*, which was a weapon used to break up pike formations. Meyer's system uses many cuts and \"handworks\" that attempt to keep the weapon moving, which would be of great use to the long *zweihander*.\n\nIf we agree with the latter theory, then his use of the quarterstaff as a training weapon for a pike, halberd, or other polearm make it very useful for battlefield use. It was unlikely, though, that the staff itself would have been used on the battlefield in any significant degree.\n\nOutside of the German tradition, the Italian Fiore dei'Liberi,  thought of as a likely contemporary with Johannes Liechtenauer, taught a substantial section on the spear that utilized the kind of percussive cuts that would certainly be of use to a quarterstaff. \n\n**tl;dr** the staff was present in many medieval manuals as both a means of self-defense, and as a training platform for other unambiguous battlefield weapons. \n_________________________________________\n\nYou can feel free to search around in the Wiktenauer website for specific manuals, including [Paulus Hector Mair](_URL_4_), [Joachim Meyer](_URL_1_), [Fiore dei'Liberi](_URL_3_), and [George Silver](_URL_2_).\n\nMuch of the context for the culture of violence in Germany comes from, as abovestated, B. Ann Tlusty's wonderful *The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany*.\n\nThe translation of Meyer's words above come from Jeffrey Forgeng's translation of Meyer's 1570 *Kunst des Fechtens* or \"The Art of Combat.\"\n\nMore info on the dusack can be found here: [The Dussack - A Weapon of War](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://hroarr.com/the-dussack/", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Joachim_Me%C3%BFer", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/George_Silver", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fiore_de%27i_Liberi", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Paulus_Hector_Mair"]]}
{"q_id": "8tjqdj", "title": "How did the weregild work in England?", "selftext": "I've heard of the weregild in England prior to the Norman conquest, but how exactly did it work? When did it become the standard method of justice/solving disputes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8tjqdj/how_did_the_weregild_work_in_england/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e18a51p", "e18bl5h"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["*Weregild* appears in the earliest codexes of English law - the immediate post-conversion laws of \u00c6thelberht of Kent from *c*.597 - which implies that at this point, the custom is already a well established part of customary tribal law. The lexigraphical expansion which accompanies the conversion to Christianity merely allows these customary laws to be properly codified and to then be increasingly expanded and stratified. \n\nThe initial laws of \u00c6thelberht set *weregilds* of 40-80 shillings, but by the reign of Alfred, the legal codex implies individuals with *weregilds* in excess of 1,200 shillings to be a relatively regular occurence. The later legal codes don't tend to state individual *weregilds* like earlier codexes, which suggests that these may have been listed in a separate document, perhaps one that could be regularly updated without necessitating a completely new codex. There are, however, clues from which we can infer some values; the *weregild* of a land-owning Welshman in Alfred's codex is set at 200 shillings, from which we can infer that that of an English freeman would be significantly higher. It's worth noting that the penalty for starting a fight in somebody else's home is 120 shillings. Alfred's codex also notes some of the additional fines available: for a *weregild* of 200 shillings (perhaps a 'cottager' or 'smallholder' tenant farmer) 30 shillings must be paid to the victim's lord. For those with a *weregild* of 1,200 shillings, 120 must be paid to the lord.\n\nThe Anglo-Saxon system is largely based on restorative justice. The maintenance of law and order is seen as the collective responsibility of the community as a whole, often directed through the person of the *ealdorman*, thegn or 'hundredman' as necessary, of through the king's officers and reeves. By the tenth century, systems of mutual guarantee such as the *Frankenpledge* were also starting to appear, and it is likely that, at least within settlements, *fyrd* garrisons or household troops were also used in law enforcement, or at least in the pursuit of fugitives. \n\nThe system of *weregild* typifies the 'restorative' approach, and at heart is designed for the prevention of feud by compensating a victim or their family. Fines are therefore paid directly to the victim or their family, and only to the king if royal tenants, officials or property are involved, or no family or dependants can be found. The system is essentially designed to provide some resource for a family who may have been deprived of their main provider, or as recompense for stolen property. By the ninth century, the law covers a wide variety of injuries which, while not life threatening, may prevent somebody being able to work. The *weregild* thus compensated them for that lost income, as well as, as previously seen, compensating their lord for *their* lost income from taxation or service. Similar compensations were extended for thefts, and even a wide variety of sexual assaults ranging from groping to rape.\n\nThe exact punishments for a failure to pay *weregild* are not always specified. In some cases, non-payment is punished by slavery or the confiscation of property. In most cases though, codexes simply state that matters are left to 'The Avengers'. This doesn't mean that Captain America and Iron Man are going to come swooping in to bring justice, but rather that the avenging family of the injured party, or jndeed the injured party themselves, if they had not been killed, were now allowed to exact whatever revenge they now desired upon the perpetrator. Obviously it was this kind of action which led to the sort of feuds which the *weregild* is explicitly meant to prevent wherever possible.", "Well let us start with some extreme basics.  Weregeld is the payment of a fine for restitution in cases of criminal conduct or behavior.  Theft, assault, rape, abduction, and so on are all included in law codes that have survived.  The payment depended heavily upon the social class of the both the grieved party and the offender.  In the law codes that are available the most common method of payment described is in shillings.  The level of standardization of weregeld and the specific amounts to be paid is something that will likely forever elude our understanding, the early English kingdoms and their laws are somewhat shrouded and incomplete.  The most famous of these law codes from early Anglo-Saxon England come from the Kingdom of Kent and date to the 600's.\n\nThe Laws of \u00c6thelberht of Kent spell out the payment required for restitution to a variety of crimes.  For example, the first law put forth in the text details that property stolen from the church is to be returned twelvefold.  This continues throughout the law code.  Unfortunately the amount to be paid is not always clear, in some cases it is quite clearly laid out, such as 50 shilling for murder on the king's land, and in other cases it is less clear, such as when recompense is to be paid twofold following offending the king at a feast, there is no system in the laws as preserved for recording how much particular insults would be valued at.  \n\nHowever these levels of payment also vary by the social class of the offended party.  Stealing from a bishop is a lot more expensive to repay than theft from a deacon.  This continues down the line as well, rape/seduction of a slave is judged as requiring more payment if she belongs to a certain class or owner than in other cases.  So these payments were offered to the offended party in many cases, or to the king himself in certain circumstances.  If the offender flees in order to avoid payment, then his family takes up the slack and is still liable for a certain amount of the payment.  \n\nThe Law of \u00c6thelberht is not the only recorded instance of weregeld payments of course though.  Kent and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms all produced their own law codes on the amount and object of the payments.  It remained a fixture of Anglo-Saxon law codes up until the Norman Conquest.  However payment of money, or in kind, was not the only method of restitution for crimes.  Banishment, beatings, execution, and enslavement still retained a place as a punishment for certain crimes, especially one imagines if the offending party was unable to pay the entirety of the fine or weregeld or if the offender was a slave.  \n\nNow what are the roots of weregeld as a system of adjudicating disputes?  It stems from Germanic societies that existed on the periphery of the Roman world and during the collapse of Imperial authority in the west these societies ended up in control of large amounts of Roman land.  In many cases there would be two separate law codes, one for the Germanic people and another for the Romans still living there, this is seen especially well in Frankish Gaul (I say to denote it from Francia or France).  In England specifically, it managed to outlast Roman law in many parts of the country, why this was I think is a little tangential.  However suffice it to say, that by the end of the 6th Century it seems clear than in many areas formerly part of the Roman Empire and now ruled by a variety of Germanic groups weregeld was a part of the legal system in place.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2d4dyy", "title": "How did the Roman's design their buildings?", "selftext": "In particular I was looking pictures of the Pantheon on Google Earth (360 Cities really) and was wonder at the amazing condition the structure was in. Wikipedia mentions that the porch was meant to be taller so as to hide part of the dome. Again according to wiki it was built in only 3 years.\n\nAll this made me wonder how the design process worked. Where architecture structures made? Scale models. What kind of measurements were recorded before hand? \n\ntl;dr See title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d4dyy/how_did_the_romans_design_their_buildings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjm7f22"], "score": [8], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nThis page opens up the table of contents of *de Architectura* by Vitruvius (1st Cent. BCE). Each chapter opens up a link to Latin, Italian, and English versions of the text.\n\nVitruvius was a civil engineer or architect during the late Republic. That means that he was not one of the great architects to the emperors such as Apollodorus of Damascas (2nd Century), who was worked for Trajan. Although he never attained such heights, Vitruvius had access to a high degree of training. Fortunately for modern historians and Renaissance architects, he wrote them down.\n\nThe text of *de Architectura* can be seen as a technical manual of sorts for would be engineers. Despite these qualities, the work still possesses literary *topoi*. For example, the tract includes a prologue that contains the story of Alexander the Great's chief architect. The second half of the book, however, would be of great interest to you. In this section Vitruvius discusses how one might build pumps, baths, aqueducts, you name it. The later architects who built the great works of the principate built off of this collected knowledge."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/home.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1sgfy6", "title": "What caused the coup of Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sgfy6/what_caused_the_coup_of_hawaiian_queen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxosxd"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm studying for an exam on this very subject! I am currently taking Geography of U.S. and Canada and my professor has created a textbook because he didn't feel there was a proper textbook for this course. I believe we will have to go farther back than just the reign of Queen Liliuokalani to understand the forces that created the coup. Here is an excerpt from chapter 19 on historical geography and settlement of the islands:\n\n >  \"In the 1820s, the first missionaries arrived from New England. While the missionaries' moral code and religion conflicted with native beliefs, both the natives and the missionaries eventually compromised their positions. The natives accepted Christianity, and the missionary families often intermarried and therefore began acquiring land. Previously royals \"owned\" land, although it was shared and used by all. Europeans applied their ownership rules to the land, and the Hawaiians lost their previous rights to use land. Subsequent generations of the missionary families shifted their interest from religious conversion to socioeconomic conversion of the islands. \n     The missionary families' progeny became plantation owners, building economic empires that uprooted the natives, their culture, and their way of life. The reign of the last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, sought to preserve and restore Hawaiian nationalism and sovereignty but threatened the nonnative sugar planters, who counted on the sugar crop and removal of tariffs to increase their profits. \n     Sugar was all the more lucrative for Hawai'i because it did no need refrigeration. Shipping the commodity to the United States was profitable and possible, but the tariffs to import the sugar into the United States were high. Tariffs were higher than the plantation owners' profits, and so the white plantation owners instituted the last of several policies to shift power from the Hawaiians to the whites; they imposed the Bayonet Constitution in 1887.\n     In a bloodless coup, the planters overthrew the monarchy, despite opposition in the U.S. Government. After the queen was deposed in 1893, the Republic of Hawai'i was established; it lasted until 1898, when the United States found it politically strategic to annex the islands as a coaling station for ships and the U.S. government claimed more than 1.8 million acres of Hawaiian land for military use. Hawai'i was annexed despite opposition from Native Hawaiians and became a U.S. territory in 1900. The plantation owners no longer had to pay tariffs.\nIn 1959, Hawai'i became the fiftieth state.\" < \n\n   \n\n ** The missionaries who came to Hawaii integrated with the population but brought European ideas about land ownership and \"legally\" took land from the Hawaiians. The future generations of these missionaries focused less on converting the natives and more focused on exploitation of their new found land in the form of sugar plantations. Tariffs on importing to the US, the biggest potential market for sugar, were higher than potential profits on the sugar plantations. The coup of the Queen was the final (and successful) attempt of white land owners to acquire power on the islands, perhaps to attempt to gain a better relationship with the US, therefore reducing tariffs.\nIn what is becoming painfully obvious in my various history courses, the great instigator is money**\n\nSources:\n\n\n A Regional Geography of The United States and Canada: Toward a Sustainable Future (C. Mayda) 2012 Rowman  &  Littlefield\n\n\n\n\nISBN:978-0-7425-5689-8 "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4d21qs", "title": "[WWII] Why did the Target Committee believed Kyoto to be a good target for the atomic bomb and described it as \"more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget\"?", "selftext": "*\"The scientists on the Target Committee also preferred Kyoto because it was home to many universities and they thought the people there would be able to understand that an atomic bomb was not just another weapon - that it was almost a turning point in human history\"*\n\nWhat did they expect their own bomb to achieve? Didn't USA know the destructive qualities their creation had?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4d21qs/wwii_why_did_the_target_committee_believed_kyoto/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1npoyj"], "score": [5], "text": ["The quote you have printed there was spoken by me, so let me just elaborate on it a bit.\n\nThe scientists who made the atomic bomb and were at the higher levels of policy discussion (i.e. the ones who got to talk about targeting plans, who were all quite senior), were worried that the atomic bomb would be seen as \"just another weapon\" \u2014 that is, just an elaboration on conventional bombing.\n\nWhy did they worry about that? Because the \"identity\" of the atomic bomb \u2014 it's _meaning_ \u2014 was not established. There _were_ people who saw atomic bombing as just an elaboration on conventional bombing. The US had been [burning Japanese cities by the dozen](_URL_0_) since March 1945 \u2014 the atomic bomb was not new in that respect. \n\nOne can even make an argument, and people today sometimes do, that the atomic bombs were morally and qualitatively the same as, say, [the bombing of Tokyo](_URL_1_). And while one can quibble with that (and I do), you can see the logic of it. The first atomic bomb could destroy a mid-sized city. So could conventional weapons. \n\nSo why were the scientists so worried? There were two reasons, the immediate and the long-term. Immediately, they hoped the atomic bombs would convince the Japanese to surrender. That required the Japanese to see the situation as having _changed_. So they needed to see the atomic bombs as something different from the firebombing \u2014 a real difference from the status quo.\n\nThe more long-term, though, is the more interesting, in my view. The scientists knew the atomic bombs they had were only the first draft. They had ideas on the table for doubling and quadrupling their firepower that they would implement before the end of the decade. They also understood that once you could put them onto long-range rockets, the whole geopolitical game was going to change. And they knew about the terrible possibility of what they called the \"Super\" \u2014 the hydrogen bomb \u2014 and it loomed heavily in their reasoning. The Super would be a nuclear weapon that was around 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs of World War II. It would set ablaze entire metro areas and spread radioactive contamination for thousands of miles. It was of a different character.\n\nIn 1946 or so the scientists calculated how many World War II atomic bombs they thought it would take to render the Earth too radioactive for human life. They thought it was on the order of 10,000-100,000 \u2014 a very large number. For the Super, they thought it might be on the order of 10-100. That's a _very_ small number. Now, their calculations were very crude, and not correct as far as we know today. But it gives you an idea of what they were afraid of.\n\nIf the world thought the atomic bomb was a weapon that could be easily integrated into the military arsenals of the world \u2014 like a conventional bomb \u2014 then the world was sunk. Nations of the world would stockpile atomic bombs and this would, they thought, likely lead to world conflagration. To misunderstand the bomb was to misunderstand the terrible danger the world was in. They had modest confidence in their weapon; they did not have confidence in the global public.\n\nAfter the war, the same scientists lobbied strongly for \"international control\" of nuclear weapons \u2014 that the UN or some other similar body would set up a system to guarantee that nobody produced nuclear weapons and nuclear war was impossible. They failed in this effort. But the choice of targets on Japan was done in part to support this kind of reasoning. Like many things in the nuclear age, there is a paradox at its core: the worse things are, the better they are. The more horrible the atomic bombings of Japan, the more likely nobody would use atomic bombs in anger again. And even though the scientists in question were wrong about international control, they were successful at that: Nagasaki was not just the second atomic bomb, it was [the last atomic bombing](_URL_2_). So far. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/03/12/firebombs-usa/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/", "http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/nagasaki-the-last-bomb"]]}
{"q_id": "s891r", "title": "Did Caesar being elected as Pontifex Maximus somehow lead to his rise to power?", "selftext": "Someone claimed so, but didn't provide any evidence.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s891r/did_caesar_being_elected_as_pontifex_maximus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4bvyex", "c4bzcfr", "c4c18hz"], "score": [7, 7, 4], "text": ["The Pontiff was one of the most important social and political roles in ancient Rome.  It was almost the modern equivalent of being Vice-President in the stepping stone to the Presidency.\n\n[The Roles and Duties](_URL_0_) that were written were still pretty important, not to mention the more...backroom powers.", "Caesar's election as Pontifex Maximus didn't *lead* to his rise to power - it was *part* of his rise to power.\n\nIt was only the third time that the office of Pontifex Maximus had been elected directly by the people, rather than being co-opted by existing members of the College of Pontifices. Caesar's election shows that he was either popular enough or rich enough (bribery was common in elections) - or both - to win this election. This shows that he was *already* a man with clout.\n\nGetting the office gave him a lot of prestige for someone who hadn't yet been consul (the office usually went to men who'd already been consul). It gave him a higher profile. And, it put him in a position to acquire more money. \n\nSo, it definitely *helped* him *continue* his rise to power, but it didn't *lead* to it. The fact that he got it at all shows that he was already powerful.", "Yes and no. The office of Pontifex Maximus conferred a certain degree of prestige but little real influence or power. The individuals who held the office does not really correlate with the individuals who were most influential in the driving of the state.\n\nThat being said, although his office was somewhat insignificant, the fact that he was elected is extremely important. Roman elections were, for lack of a better phrase, extremely corrupt. Being elected Pontifex Maximus proved to Caesar's financial backers that he was capable of winning elections."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifex_Maximus#Extraordinary_appointment_of_dictators"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "73kj9s", "title": "How accurate are western movies in comparison to the actual history of the west?", "selftext": "I recently watched an episode of Adam Ruins Everything where they essentially said western movies are completely fabricated. Is this true, and if so to what extent? Were there real gunslingers and sheriffs duking it out? Were there men that fought the elements and violent Native Americans while transporting cattle or building the railroad? Ultimately, what was the average life like on the western frontier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73kj9s/how_accurate_are_western_movies_in_comparison_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnrxue8"], "score": [2], "text": ["You may find the documentary [Reel Injun](_URL_0_) or the book [Celluloid Indians](_URL_1_) interesting. They both explore the role of Native Americans in film and might help answer your question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/reel-injun/", "http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803277908/"]]}
{"q_id": "9idmvu", "title": "Is there still tea at the bottom of the Boston Harbor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9idmvu/is_there_still_tea_at_the_bottom_of_the_boston/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6ixihh"], "score": [244], "text": ["In short not likely.\n\nBeyond the issues of the tea, bags, and wooden crates breaking down over time. The area where the ships were has been filled in as part of the radical changes in the Boston coast since 1773.\n\nTo start the ships the crowd descended on are said to have been tied up to 'Griffins' Wharf. But the position of said Wharf is actually a bit of a debate! Here are two maps published in 1776 and 1775, which put Griffin's Wharf in two separate locations some distance from each other, on either side of Fort Hill and the Southern battery. The National Park Service, and most other sources have gone with the more Westerly option, near the modern intersection of Congress and Atlantic Ave in Boston. \n\n[Map 1 Library of Congress](_URL_3_)\n\n[Map 2 same source](_URL_0_)\n\nBut in either location it would eventually have been dredged and filled in over time. Now instead of an isolated peninsula connected to the rest of the mainland by a small neck, the city has grown pretty wide, the area where the ships were and towards Dorchester Heights is now most of South Boston and the Fort Point neighborhood. There is however a small channel there still(the Fort Point Channel) which has the Tea Party Museum built on a pier off of  the Congress Street bridge, they do have some artifacts including a chest recovered from the event, and some replica sailing ships.\n\n[Map of Modern Boston](_URL_2_).\n\nIn trying to find some of the old maps I actually stumbled across this fine blog site that has the relevant parts of them and established the places they dont agree. And in the end comes to the conclusion that the current marked location, included on the modern map I linked is near but slightly away from where the location was. The wharf changed shape as many do over the years with new construction and at some point seems to have changed names to Liverpool Wharf, this being sufficiently known and common knowledge to even be mentioned by Hawthrone as the author notes. Either way, virtually every site that was examined has been subject to one land reclamation project or another since then. \n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3764b.ar088900/?r=0.185,0.386,1.033,0.514,0", "http://www.his.jrshelby.com/btp/", "http://ontheworldmap.com/usa/city/boston/boston-city-center-map.jpg", "https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3764b.ct000252/?r=0.331,0.34,0.278,0.138,0"]]}
{"q_id": "7zq8a2", "title": "What happened to the German princes?", "selftext": "What happened to the German princes after the fall of the HRE and later the unification of Germany?\n\nDo they still hold some sort of influence today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zq8a2/what_happened_to_the_german_princes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duq45vn"], "score": [19], "text": ["In short: No. \n\nLonger answer: No, but they did.\n\nEven longer answer:\n\nThe situation of the German principalities that survived mediatisation and the *Reichsdeputationshauptschluss* (such a lovely word) didn't really change much. While the larger of them were now kings, or in the odd case of Hesse - Electors (don't ask), they were still firmly wedged between three of the European superpowers, Prussia, Austria and France. While the first two were fighting for political supremacy in the newly-founded German Confederation, a loose coalition of states, the French still had their eye on the Rhine.\n\nThis pretty much meant that the smaller principalities were used like playthings by the larger states, clinging to their overlord and hoping that everything will work out. Outside of revolutionary overtures that had to be quelled in '48/'49 it sort of did, but only for Prussia, when it annexed most of the German states opposed to it in the Austro-Prussian-War (Hannover, Frankfurt, Hesse-Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein, Hesse, part of the other Hesse, lots of Hesse, really) and formed the North German Federation with its allies. The only properly independent princes left at this point were the Grand Duke of Baden, the King of W\u00fcrttemberg and the King of Bavaria. Austria pretty much was left to sulk and do nothing in regard to Germany from this point on - Prussia simply won.\n\nCut to the Franco-Prussian-War. The German states unify to form the German Empire, which notably was still a *federal* state. This meant that even though Prussia was by far the largest state of the German Empire and dominated it politically, every single itty-bitty formerly independent principality (all those tiny Saxon duchys!) or free city still had its own government, legislature and constitution in addition to the federal one. With the transition to the Weimar Republic, that didn't change much - except that every single prince and king was ousted, of course. They kept their wealth and land, but had no political influence written into the system itself, only soft power.\n\nI'll keep it short in regard to today because of the 20 year rule and firmly say no, they do not. Most Germans today consider nobility as a curiosity of the past that has no bearing on everyday life or politics. They'll have their fancy events and sometimes one of them will pop up in politics (looking at you, Gutti!), but it's not institutionalised in any shape or form."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nkns4", "title": "If adult neanderthals had larger brains than modern man, why didn't they develop what we would consider modern languages or sophisticated tools like the Cro-Magnons?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nkns4/if_adult_neanderthals_had_larger_brains_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccjhufb", "ccjiodk"], "score": [16, 3], "text": ["This is an anthropology question for sure, but I can give you a little info to start you off. Brain size has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. Elephants and whales have larger brains than we do, and they're definitely smart, but not as smart as us. Brain structure is what's important. Also, we have had brains comparable to modern humans' for a LONG time. The real change that allowed us to utilize our brain's capacity was our larynx dropping, allowing us to make a much wider variety of sounds. With precise language, we could transmit knowledge down through generations. The ONLY thing that makes us so capable is the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years that we pass along to each other using language.", "Adding onto this, the Brain-Body Size ratio is important in determining intelligence. In addition, the evolution of modern man was really distinguished by the brain's development of a prefrontal cortex. I don't know anything about Neanderthal brain physiology, but this could play an important role in their lack of development of tools. Source: Neuroscience student\n\nFurther, I actually believe that Neanderthals did use tools and had some very advanced (symbolic) behavior. For example, they may have cooked their food and preformed funerals for their dead. [Source](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Behavior"]]}
{"q_id": "1kfuze", "title": "Has a widely spoken language ever completely died out?", "selftext": "Additionally: Has the national language of a reasonably sized country ever died out? Like Swedish in Sweden or Japanese or Japan.\n\nOh and obviously I mean \"died out\" and not evolved into other languages like Latin did. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kfuze/has_a_widely_spoken_language_ever_completely_died/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbokpxn", "cborrez"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Akkadian and Sumerian come to mind. Aramaic will likely be dead within a generation or so, and it was once spoken in huge swaths of the Middle East. ", "Many ancient languages have died out. Hittite, Hurrian, Elamite, Akkadian, Lydian..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "936a4p", "title": "The Lombards had a very succesful kingdom in Italy, but then disapeared quite swiftly. What happened to them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/936a4p/the_lombards_had_a_very_succesful_kingdom_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3czpxc"], "score": [24], "text": ["Did they have a \"successful kingdom\" in Italy? I would suggest not.\n\nI am drawing mostly from the New Cambridge Medieval History chapters on the subject in vols. 1 and 2.\n\nAs Moorhead points out in Vol. 1, the first mention of the Lombards in Roman sources suggest that their numbers were very small compared to other groups and cemetery evidence seems to bear this out. He goes on to point out that 90 percent of the male graves included arms, suggesting implicitly that the few Lombards (compared to the rest of the population) had to use force of arms to maintain their hegemony. Furthermore, they entered Italy after the harrows of the Gothic Wars and the Justinianic Plague and even then had difficulty securing the port cities and could never contend with the Byzantine navy.\n\nDelogu, who has written a couple of other excellent chapters and books about the subject, points out that royal administration was not nearly as evenly spread. He states:\n\n >  Nevertheless, King Liutprand's concepts [of royal administration] were *more aims to attain* (my emphasis) through royal government, than objective reflections of the institutional machinery for the time being. IN reality, political and jurisdictional powers were not as evenly ordered as the *iudicaria* system might suggest. Not all of the Lombard territories, for instance were equally subject to royal authority. This extended over the greater part of northern Italy, comprising the Po valley, Trentino and Friuli; in that part of Italy only the provinces of the Byzantine Empire\u2014Venetiae, the Exarchate and the Pentapolis\u2014escaped royal control. South of the Apennines, Tuscia, approximately corresponding to modern tuscany, was also subject to the king, perhaps in looser form. Further east and south, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, two vast regions named after the seats of Lombard dukes who presided over them, *did not fully recognize the authority of the king* (again, my emphasis), even though they shared the laws and customs of the kingdom.\n\nAll over Italy, local dukes held titular power rather than the king and there were many wars fought after the Lombard invasion.\n\nIt was only in the 8th century when kings began to be able to exert more royal control over their kingdom and by that point the much more powerful Frankish kingdom began to become enmeshed in Italian politics.\n\nAt the same time, the cities of Italy began to reassert themselves as major centers and became loci of resistance to royal authority. One thing that Delogu doesn't get to here (but I believe he does in one of his books) but people underestimate the number of old Roman families that would have persisted in the region.\n\nTL;DR\n\nThe kingdom was not \"successful.\" The Lombards were a small minority and kings had to contend with powerful nobles to assert their authority."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2fh577", "title": "How did Revolutionary War militias fit into the command/organizational structure of the Continental Army?", "selftext": "It seems like during the American Revolution, there were a lot of militias around. How did they figure into the command/organizational structure of the Continental Army? Were they autonomous, or under the nominal command of a regular Army officer (or somewhere in-between)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fh577/how_did_revolutionary_war_militias_fit_into_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck9chsz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, you have to remember, there weren't radios, phones, and so on during this period, so, if a bunch of farmers wanted to collect their guns and go shoot at someone, no one could stop them!\n\nIn any case, \"militias\" (and the word is very vague, these people could basically end up as bandits, did sometimes operate without much oversight from nearby (If there were any) Continental army forces. This is especially true in the southern states, especially in Georgia and North Carolina. \n\nWhile they did sometimes operate as an ad hoc force, they often operated alongside and underneath Continental Army regulars, often at pretty significant battles like [Cowpens](_URL_0_) and [Moore's Creek Bridge.](_URL_1_)\n\nThe British also made use of militia, both in an informal fashion in the backcountry, but also raising regiments of Loyalist militia, like [The Royal North Carolina Regiment](_URL_2_) who were technically not militia, but essentially were.\n\nSo the answer to your question is an unsatisfying \"it varied.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cowpens", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moore's_Creek_Bridge", "http://ncpedia.org/royal-north-carolina-regiment"]]}
{"q_id": "3mnmlx", "title": "I'm watching Troy right now, how do the soldiers of that time know if they're actually attacking the enemy?", "selftext": "And throughout history, in times of big melee battles, how often was \"friendly fire\" an issue? Most battles (like the ones in the most recent Moses/Prince of Egypt movie) look like large confusing clusterfucks. How did soldiers know who the enemy was?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mnmlx/im_watching_troy_right_now_how_do_the_soldiers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvglq37", "cvgumcy"], "score": [37, 6], "text": ["[Here's a link to the FAQ where this has been asked before](_URL_0_)  But in short:\n\n1) friendly fire did happen on occasion, but\n2) battles didn't really look much like we see in the movies.", "Followup question, does Illiad have a good representation of the warfare at that time? I don't mean heroes, rather good soldiers initiating the war but others are defending, and a lot of fraternity or emnity on both sides."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/war#wiki_identifying_sides_in_battle.2C_and_avoidance.2Ffrequency_of_.22friendly_fire.22"], []]}
{"q_id": "2h7z6r", "title": "I'm trying to date an interwar map. Can anyone help me?", "selftext": "Ok, so in my flat there is a map hanging on my wall, which judging by Germany's borders (Polish corridor present but East Prussia still part of Germany) is inter-war. I'm thinking it was produced between 1923-1935 (ie between the Treaty of Lausanne and the Gran Chaco War). I was just wondering if anyone could date it more precisely than that? I'm aware the pictures (see bottom) are really bad quality, so I will describe some features here:\n\n**Europe**\n\n-Germany and Poland's borders reflect those post-Versailles\n\n-Bessarabia part of Romania\n\n-Karelia part of Finland\n\n-Yugoslavia is one country\n\n-The Baltic states are all independent\n\n-All the SSRs that would later become independent of Russia are presented\n\n-Turkey's borders are roughly its modern-day borders (ie post-Lausanne)\n\n**Asia/Pacific**\n\n-Saudi Arabia's borders are quite weird; South Yemen (but not North Yemen) is part of Saudi Arabia, as is much of Oman and the Southern UAE (although the UAE is known as 'Trucial Oman'). Aden is also marked as separate.\n\n-The Wakhan corridor is absent\n\n-Western Nepal seems to be part of British India\n\n-There is an internal border between India and Burma\n\n-Arunachal Pradesh is part of China\n\n-China, Mongolia and Tannu Tuva are all in the same colour, although (internal?) borders are drawn between them.\n\n-Tibet is split into two provinces, with the eastern province known as 'Sikang'\n\n-Beijing is known as 'Peiping'\n\n-Korea is known as 'Chosen and is marked in the same colour as Japan.\n\n-Southern Sakhalin is Japanese\n\n-The Philippines are still American and Indonesia is known as the 'Netherlands East Indies'\n\n-Many of the Pacific islands have two names given, for instance Tonga is marked 'Tonga or Friendly Isles' and Hawaii is marked 'Hawaii or Sandwich Isles'\n\n-The Pacific in general is a clusterfuck of mandates, among which there are Australian and Japanese mandates\n\n-NZ is a dominion, as is Canada\n\n**Americas**\n\n-Newfoundland is not marked as a dominion\n\n-The Dominican Republic is marked as 'Santo Domingo'\n\n-The Maynas basin is part of Ecuador\n\n-The Gran Chaco still belongs to Bolivia\n\n**Africa**\n\n-Egypt is independent\n\n-Ghana is split into three. The North is known as the North Territory (I think that's what 'N. Ter.' means), the Centre is known as 'Ashanti', and the South 'Gold Coast'.\n\n-The borders within French West Africa are a bit weird. The northern bit of Algeria is hived off from the rest of Algeria. SE Mauritania is part of Mali, which is called 'French Sudan'. NW Chad is part of Niger. Burkina Faso is part of the Ivory Coast. The CAR is known as 'Ubang-Shari'. \n\n-All of Cameroon, as well as Northern Gabon, Western CAR and parts of Northern Congo-Brazzaville, are cross-hatched between France and the UK.\n\n-There are internal borders between Transvaal, Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape of Good Hope in the Union of South Africa.\n\nLet me know if there's any other bit of information you might want...\n\n**Edit:** As some people have requested (courtesy /u/brigantus, /u/yodatsracist and /u/keylian), I have now uploaded some images onto imgur. The close-ups are deliberately close-up as I have taken these on a very poor phone camera, and even then the resulting images may as well have been taken by a potato (I blame the cameraman as well as the camera though).\n\n[The whole world zoomed out](_URL_0_)\n\n[Europe](_URL_2_)\n\n[South America](_URL_1_)\n\n[West Africa](_URL_4_)\n\n[Southern Africa](_URL_7_) (I'll try and retake this picture later)\n\n[The Arab Peninsula](_URL_5_)\n\n[Close-up of the Levant (as /u/yodatsracist requested)](_URL_3_)\n\n[China](_URL_6_)\n\n[Micronesia/Melanesia](_URL_8_)\n\n**Edit number 2:** According to the source website as found by /u/yodatsracist, the map is from 'around' 1920, but this is clearly bullshit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h7z6r/im_trying_to_date_an_interwar_map_can_anyone_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckq7msg", "ckq8r23", "ckq956o"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": ["Peiping is so named from 1928 to 1949.\n\nXikang is a province under the Nationalists from 1939 to 1950.\n\nArunachal Pradesh is unfortunately not much help since it's still contested territory and China has publically claimed it as recently as 2006.\n\nThe Japanese left Sakhalin in 1949.\n\nYour Burma description sounds like some time from 1937 to 1948.\n\nNew Zealand gets you to 1947.\n\nKorea as Japanese controlled and called Joseon narrows the end-date down to 1945.\n\nTanu Tuva was only recognised by Mongolia and the USSR as independent, and in 1944 that stopped. So then I think you're at 1937 to 1944, at least based on Asia so far.\n\nIs Indonesia the same colour as Japan? From 1942 to 1945 it was occupied, so that'll help narrow it down a little more. If Indonesia is the same colour, then I'd say youre between 1942 and 1944. If not, then 1937 to 1942. The Maynas Basin might settle that though, since I think Ecuador lost it officially in 1942. Then still on the topic of South America which I admit no expertise on, Grand Chaco was lost in 1938.\n\nI think you're possibly at 1937 or 1938, but that brings up more questions. What does Shantung look like in China, just across from Korea? Is any of it under Japanese control?\n\n(edit: I realised Burma is all I'm basing the start date on and that's rocky. So let's say I'm only offering thoughts on end dates.)\n\n(edit2: wait no I'm not. Xikang. 1939).\n\nThere's also a lot of stuff that would be dependent on the cartographer's interpretation, so I'm just assuming they were more or less in agreement with the view of the Anglosphere at the time, and that they were up on current events.\n\nWould you be able to put some photos of the map on here? Dying to see it. I'd love to see how the names in China are transliterated beyond Peiping. ", "If you'd like to show us a picture, you can upload it to [imgur](_URL_1_) (you don't need an account), then add a link to your post like this:\n\n    [Here's a picture](_URL_0_)\n\n(Replacing ``_URL_0_`` with the URL they give you after you've uploaded your image.)", "Wait, all the SSRs are there? Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were all part of the \"Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic\" 1923-1936. \n\nAlso, does Turkey have that little bit that extends down along the Med coast that Syria still claims? That's Hatay, and Turkey only got that province in 1939. What are the internal boundaries of French Syria? Those changed a lot in this period, and could help establish when everything is--assuming the map is up-to-date. \n\nBut like /u/keyilan, I'm leaning towards a later date. \n\nAlso, I agree, see if you can load it to imgur (completely anonymous, no account required, and the site strips all the metadata that can identify where and when a picture was scanned/taken). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/jaPHkIA", "http://imgur.com/xD49lsL", "http://imgur.com/KLdzKbH", "http://imgur.com/P5PUFNb", "http://imgur.com/HQToZ3l", "http://imgur.com/8pL4VYH", "http://imgur.com/vEPPugs", "http://imgur.com/oLtH5oc", "http://imgur.com/Wnvcfl9"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://imgur.com/abcdef", "https://imgur.com/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2p4a48", "title": "What are three intermediate-level books you would recommend to someone interested in WWI?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p4a48/what_are_three_intermediatelevel_books_you_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtb2sl", "cmtbk5e", "cmtenl3", "cmti9gu", "cmtia9m", "cmtjkj7"], "score": [4, 2, 7, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["\"A World Undone\"\n- A well researched, documented, and detailed book that starts with the causes of the war, gives background on events and key players, and step by step goes through the major events  from both the Central Powers and Entente.   It's the best all around WWI book I've found, highly recommend.", "Follow up question.  Any recommendations on books specific to WWI aviation?", "It depends with respect to what specifically.\n\n* I'd consider Hew Strachan's *The First World War: To Arms* for as an intermediate work on the 'starting positions' of everyone. It's absolutely thick (something about 1300 pages I recall) and covers literally everything from Austria-Hungary to the shell shortages and everything you can imagine. \n\n* I'd certainly consider Robert Massie's work *Dreadnought* for the naval realm of things, however, I'll wait for /u/an_ironic_username to weigh in as his other work, *Castles of Steel*, may be more appropriate (I have yet to read that one). \n\n* Holger Herwig's *The Marne: The Opening of World War I* is a great introductory book but I'm still putting it here as it's packed with a stupid amount of sheer information. Everything from what infantry divisions fought where, how much of X everyone had going into what. It's not so much rivet counting (as I feared going into it) but it just leaves no stone unturned. If you just want a wave of just pure military knowledge for August - October 1914 this is it.\n\n* Holger Herwig's other work, *Germany And Austria Hungary 1914-1918*, is just a great general history. It involves military history stuff (obviously) but it's very much in depth about everything that happened in the homefronts and in their political systems throughout.\n\n* If you want to know about trench life *Hot Blood and Cold Steel: Life in the British Trenches in the First World War* by Andy Simpson is not so much 'intermediate' (it's just a collection of firsthand accounts with some pretty elementary analysis) but it's still invaluable in my opinion. Certainly pick it up. If you want a bit of a more in depth work (but significantly less focus on firsthand account) *Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918* by Richard Holmes is your best bet.\n\nYes it's more than 3 but this is as far as I could narrow it :P", "\"The Guns of August\" It gives a great detailed history of pre war settings as well as in depth analysis of the fighting.", "I am currently in the middle of [Now it Can Be Told](_URL_0_) by Phillip Gibbs. He was a battlefield reporter that wired back his stories to the papers in London, which were heavily censored and redacted before publishing. (The book was written after the war, hence the title)\n\nIt gives (to me) a very stark, unwashed view of the day to day of the line soldiers and lower level officers, and does not hold back one bit on the horrors the Tommies faced. Not much on overall strategy, but concentrates on the individual stories and anecdotes about life in Flanders during the war.", "I'm in the middle of Dan Carlin's *Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon* podcast. \n\nDoes anyone know how legit it is? Or how legit Carlin is? \n\nThis podcast, and all of his others, are truly fascinating. He is a great raconteur. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Now-It-Can-Be-Told/dp/150313511X"], []]}
{"q_id": "2i44ht", "title": "I've heard claims that Karl Marx was anti-semitic, supported slavery and called for the extermination of Slavic peoples, calling them \"retrograde races\". Is this true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i44ht/ive_heard_claims_that_karl_marx_was_antisemitic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckyopm2", "ckyrmi3", "cl3jiy6"], "score": [16, 4, 2], "text": [" > claims that Karl Marx was anti-semitic, \n\nThat idea derives from his \u00abZur Judenfrage\u00bb in which he attacks Bruno Bauer who in turn attacks the Jews. Marx concedes all the terrible vices that Bruno ascribed to the Jews but proceeds to explain how the rest of the world is not any better; that the whole world had by that time adopted Bruno Bauer's brand of \"Judaism\". It were not the Jews doing usury, but the entire bourgeoisie. And converting the Jews to some modern day bourgeois version of christendom wouldn't magically shut down all the banks. It can well be said to be an antisemitic work because Marx enters polemic with an antisemite *agreeing to his premises and to his slogans* only redefining his *Jews*. \n\n\nsource: \n\nthe 1843 works of Bruno Bauer (I've only found them in German, sorry):\n\n[\u00abThe Jewish Question\u00bb book](_URL_0_)\n\n[\u00abThe Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free\u00bb article](_URL_2_)\n\nthe 1844 answer of Marx:\n\n[On the Jewish Question](_URL_3_)\n\n > supported slavery\n\nI don't know which text that's ought to be. Sorry.\n\n > called for the extermination of Slavic peoples, calling them \"retrograde races\".\n\nIt was the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 1848 and 1849. In it he and Engels not only slammed the Austrian Slavs, but also the Danes and Russians in the most vicious terms. It was their revolutionary rabble rousing tabloid very different in tone from all of their other works. \n\nThe Panslavists were opposed to the liberal rebels, both German and Hungarian, and the Russian tsar has helped to put them down. At that point Engels did evoke the image of a race war with the slavs.\n\nsource:\n\n[all Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles of 1848](_URL_1_)\n\n[all Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles of 1849](_URL_4_)\n\nagain: both in German.", "The good folks at _URL_0_ have an unreasonably large collection of Marx and Engels. So it's odd to me that searching this phrase, \"retrograde races,\" pops up only detractors with third or fourth-hand citations to old newspapers, but *not* to original Marxist works. And most of it is wacky New World Order or anticommunist Christian work. I'll keep looking, but I'm very skeptical he said anything of the sort.\n\n[Here is a similar phrase.](https://www._URL_0_/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm) The sarcasm is so clear, however, in the whole context.\n >  In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law and offer itself up uncomplaining as cannon-fodder.\n\n[Here's Marx responding to the same accusation, interestingly enough.](_URL_2_) In this case his own bourgeoisie background is coming through a bit, but he's being hyperbolic about an internal Party political struggle.\n\n > Klein really does wield some influence over the Solingen workers, and they are the best in the Rhine province. I, pour ma part, have never, either drunk or sober, expressed the view that the workers are fit only for cannon-fodder, although the louts, among whom little Klein is evidently coming to rank himself, are, to my mind, barely fit even for that. It would be as well to treat little Klein with your accustomed discretion as a tool that may perhaps (?), in time of action, be of use to us.\n\nI'm not finding \"retrograde races\" or comparable anywhere in Marx's work. Except in a fit of extreme sarcasm (which he was prone to) this doesn't match up with the rest of his philosophy. To Marx, members and cultures of the proletariat were distinguished by their time and place (following Hegel's similar line of thought) but were far more united than divided. [I mean, hell, even Lenin was on that same boat:](https://www._URL_0_/archive/lenin/works/1911/jun/11.htm)\n >  The difference in the attitude of the two bourgeoisies was not due, of course, to the \u201ccharacteristics\u201d of different \u201craces\u201d, but to the different levels of economic and political development which caused one of them to fear the \u201cyounger brother\u201d, and made it vacillate impotently between deprecating the violence of feudalism and censuring the \u201cintolerance\u201d of the workers.\n\nIt would be a very interesting turn of events for Marx to support the destruction of the Slavs, when panSlavism is inevitable in the discussion of Stalinism and Bolshevism at large.", "[Here is a letter](_URL_0_)from Marx congratulating Lincoln on the emancipation proclamation. I'm by no means an expert but I'm currently reading capital volume one, and in it he says that slavery, along with feudalism, is an inferior economic system because (among other reasons) they retard economic growth by disincentivizing innovation of and investment in labor saving technology. Capitalism is superior bc it is always trying to reduce labor time and thus becomes increasingly productive. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLdUAAAAcAAJ", "http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me_nrz48.htm", "https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/referenz/bauer-b/1843/xx/juden.htm", "https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/", "http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me_nrz49.htm"], ["marxists.org", "https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm", "https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1853/letters/53_10_18.htm", "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/jun/11.htm"], ["http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "a7dnug", "title": "Should I go in history?", "selftext": "I'm about to finish my highschool. And at the moment, my biggest interest in life is History. For the past years i'v been in love with everything that's dated back from the two world wars to the Macedonian empire. It fascinates me, and I was wondering what options i have with that interest in life. What's the best and what would get the most income. I know life isn't about money but it's still important. Thanks in advance", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a7dnug/should_i_go_in_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec2xtiw"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi! History teacher here. With your rather specific interests, I would recommend pursuing a Ph.d and either writing or teaching at the college level. You will find that teaching at the middle or high school level (as I do) requires you to move very quickly through time periods and does not allow much in the way of depth. That said, do you really like spending most of all of your time around teenagers? If so, teaching may be for you. \n\nAlso keep in mind that your interests may shift or change as time goes by. I started out as a specialist in British military history, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. Along the way, I developed a real love for the American Civil War. And while I was teaching middle school, I learned to love the Japanese medieval period. \n\nFinally, because you choose one thing and one point does not mean you can\u2019t to anything else. You can teach, and write. You can go to law school and then teach later. It took me some years after I was done with graduate school before I got my credential and started teaching. History is a broad field, and I\u2019m sure you will find your way. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5sqqy1", "title": "Please recommend a book about Queer history in America", "selftext": "I'm looking for a book that is about Queer history in America, but I'm open to pretty much anything. For example, I LOVE the documentary called The Celluloid Closet and I wrote a college essay on \"out and coded queerness on stage\" where I referenced a lot of Oscar Wilde, Tenneesee Williams, etc. I also love a lot of Kerouac's novels and Ginsburg's poems as well as the films Kill Your Darlings, On the Road, Howl, Life and James Dean and biographies of Brando and Dean. \n\nParticularly interested in queer history in theatre/film, New York City or queerness within the Beat or art community.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5sqqy1/please_recommend_a_book_about_queer_history_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddh7m5s"], "score": [9], "text": ["Funny - as soon as I saw this subject , I had a book in mind to share with you, but as I opened the topic, I thought \"I hope he's OK with something that's a bit NYC-focused\"....then I got to your second paragraph :) \n\nThere's a great (almost definitive) book called\" The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America Since World War II\". It's pretty much exactly what you're looking for. The word \"metropolis\" in the title is significant; the author focuses mostly on gay history in NYC, with SF and LA also covered to a smaller extent. \n\nIt's a favorite of mine and I'm sure you'll love it. I learned a ton of stuff which really blew my mind - for instance, exactly why San Francisco became the gay mecca that it famously is (It's because many WW2 soldiers and sailors had used their time away from home, while out in the Pacific front, to explore their same-sex desires. Upon returning stateside and landing at San Francisco, many decided to just stay and settle in SF, due to feelings of \"I can't go back home like this\")    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2bm5je", "title": "Was scientific research performed in the New World?", "selftext": "Earlier today, I needed to replace a broken beaker in my research lab.  It took me about thirty minutes from realizing the equipment was broken to being able to replace it.  The item I ended up replacing it with was produced in Germany.  This got me thinking: how long would it have taken for me to get a replacement for a piece of precision scientific equipment 200 years ago, especially if it were made in Europe (I am in Canada)?  \n\nWere there \"lab\" scientists in the New World in the early 1800s?  If so, when and where did they start setting up?  Was their work respected or even accepted by Old World scientists?  I would imagine there was a lot of exploratory science being performed, identifying new flora and fauna, but I'm mostly curious about fields like chemistry or physics, where the work could have been performed just as easily in Europe.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bm5je/was_scientific_research_performed_in_the_new_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj79nah"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is a great question but also very broad!  You could try sending a message to some of the flaired users with expertise in the history of science and perhaps some North Americanists will comment as well.  In short, yes, there was lots of science going on in the New World!  I\u2019ll speak to science in the Spanish Empire around 1800, especially in the R\u00edo de la Plata region.  Due to the prevalence of the Black Legend, many people believe that the Spanish Empire was backward and dogmatic, and while there are lots of examples of backwardness, the recent historiography has largely discredited (or at least significantly complicated) these narratives.  For instance, many historians have shown that Spanish science was highly developed.  Scholars like Jorge Car\u00f1izares-Esguerra, Neil Safier, Paula de Vos, David Goodman, Daniela Bleichmar, and Helen Cowie have demonstrated how vibrant Spanish scientific innovation was.  It did differ somewhat from Enlightenment science in other empires; the Crown tended to believe that any science that was not royally sponsored was dangerous and antimonarchical.  This attitude retarded somewhat individual scientific innovation, but under the supervision of the Crown, Spanish science in the New World thrived.  \n\nIn Spain, the Crown established the Royal Pharmacy and Chemical Laboratory, the Royal Mathematics Academy, the Royal Natural History Museum, and the Royal Botanical Garden which housed thousands of plants from their colonial possessions and from around the world.  Similar institutions sprang up in cities throughout the empire in which individuals debated advances in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, alchemy, and cosmology.  Additionally, the monarchy sent dozens of scientific expeditions to their colonies, which relied on local expertise to inform European \u201cdiscoveries.\u201d  Unfortunately, many of the men and women who helped were never credited for their work and were forgotten.  Also, keep in mind that science as we know it today was very much in its infancy; physics and chemistry were only first developing (I know, this is a big generalization).  During the Enlightenment, physics and chemistry were intimately tied to the natural world, and the people with the prerequisite education necessary to participate in advanced scientific study and research often became \u201cjack of all trades\u201d scientists.  Individuals tended to have their hands in many scientific disciplines at once.  Thus, it is difficult to talk about physics or chemistry research individually without also mentioning biological research.  The New World represented all sorts of new learning opportunities.  Scientists attempted to figure out just what this massive space contained and how it related to scientific learning that already existed.  In the process, the New World became *the* testing ground for the scientific debates of the day.\n\nThe best \u201clab science\u201d facilities in the Spanish Empire were in major metropolitan areas like Mexico City and Lima.  Here, the most educated men, both criollos and europeos, participated in the scientific debates of the day.  For example, Paula de Vos, in her article \u201cResearch, Development, and Empire: State Support of Science in the Later Spanish Empire\u201d published in *Colonial Latin America Review* describes how scientists in Mexico City participated in the debate over \u201cthe use of chemicals and chemical techniques in the preparation of medicine\u201d (62).  Scientists in Mexico City tested the ingestion of mercury to treat syphilis and advocated for its use due to the results of their studies.  Their work altered Europeans\u2019 understanding of how the body reacted to chemicals and changed the leading theories of how medicine should be created.  De Vos also points out in another article that major cities in the empire were also among the first places where scientists tried to carry out vaccination campaigns, representing significant advancement in the fields of chemistry and pharmacy.\n\nFour of the most famous scientists that spring to mind from South America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were Alejandro Malaspina, F\u00e9lix de Azara, Pedro Franco D\u00e1vila, and Charles Marie de la Condamine.  Malaspina led a lengthy expedition that sailed around South America, along the Pacific coast as far north as Alaska, the Philippines, China, Australia, and back across the Pacific again, all while taking vast amounts of specimens, notes, and astronomical readings on the way.  The men brought on this expedition some of the finest scientific equipment available in the entire Spanish Empire, which had no equal and was of great interest to local enthusiasts in every port they visited.  They assembled mountains of data and collected unpublished scientific information in cities, libraries, and private collections throughout the colonies.  Azara was sent to the R\u00edo de la Plata to set the border between the Spanish and the Portuguese empires.  He taught himself natural science, documented hundreds of birds and animals for the first time, and included information about local plants and their suggested medical and scientific uses.  While in the R\u00edo de la Plata, he received a copy of Buffon\u2019s *Historie Naturelle* and used his observations to correct many of the inconsistencies he found between his observations from the field and observations made in Buffon\u2019s lab.  Azara helped demonstrate that science needed to be done both in the field and in the lab to show how scientific theories, chemical properties, or animal behavior changed in more complex systems.  D\u00e1vila was a creole from Ecuador who eventually became director of the Royal Natural History Museum.  He collected vast amounts of scientific work from the colonies and published several important books that added to Europeans\u2019 understanding of chemistry, biology, and physics.  More importantly, he helped develop the scientific network between Spanish officials in Europe and the colonies.  Lastly, Charles Marie de la Condamine traveled to Ecuador to test Newton\u2019s hypothesis that the Earth was not a perfect sphere.  He took extensive astrological observations but also documented rubber and the antimalarial properties of the cinchona tree (among many other scientific observations).  \n\nWhen published (if a scientist was wealthy enough and had the connections to make that happen), their works were met with enthusiasm and skepticism by European audiences hungry for both scientific information in general and information about the New World itself.  At the time, many believed that the New World was naturally inferior to the Old, so works that called this idea into question were heavily debated.  For example, Azara\u2019s publications were highly praised for their content but demeaned for their blunt corrections of Buffon\u2019s work.  Scientists ridiculed Azara for spending twenty years on the fringes of the Spanish empire, believing that his experiences in the \u201cinferior\u201d New World had rubbed off on him and his work.  The Spanish Crown did not necessarily believe this scientific convention though.  Products thought to have useful medicinal or chemical properties were sent to the scientific academies, tested, and if successful, marketed to the public.  Publications that tested physics theories in physics or astronomy were met with a great deal of interest as well since data collection or testing often could not be done in Europe at the time.  However, the vast majority of Spanish scientific research never reached European audiences.  The Crown is infamous for remaining tight lipped about their colonies, so much of the research was collected in manuscripts by royal institutions but failed to reach larger scholarly audiences.\n\nGetting equipment to scientists proved difficult in such a massive empire with very little infrastructure.  Sending equipment to major metropolitan centers like Mexico City or Lima would have taken a few months, more time if the individual needed to request it and pay for it.  Wealthy creoles in major cities amassed large libraries, specimen collections, and scientific equipment holdings as a result.  However, shipping grew more infrequent as Spanish naval capabilities decreased.  Getting scientific materials on the fringes of the empire was much more difficult and expensive.  Azara waited years to receive the most popular scientific works of the day.  He waited even longer to get scientific equipment that allowed him to take more accurate measurements of elevation for example.  He even documents in his work *Viajes por la am\u00e9rica meridional* an episode in which he spends several weeks working and comparing notes with another scientist who built homemade lab equipment to test pressure and elevation theories because the individual neither had the contacts to find the equipment nor the funds to pay for it even if he found it.\n\nSo although they sometimes struggled to get the respect they deserved and the equipment they needed, science was very important in the Spanish Empire.  Scientists were able to access the New World to test ideas, read new scientific research, publish their findings, participate in scientific debates, and get equipment.  That being said, only an elite, educated, and wealthy few were able to participate in science because few average people had access to royal Spanish scientific networks and intraempire connections.  The vast majority of americanos were poor and uneducated who, in the eyes of many Europeans, lived outside of the \u201cpale of civilization\u201d altogether.  Ironically however, it was often these people who knew of the medicinal or chemical properties of local products, led scientists or expeditions to the best places to carry out their experiments, and played key roles behind the scenes that made scientific advances possible.  Unfortunately, their influence remains in the shadows or has disappeared completely."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "338aa9", "title": "Why was Pol Pot never prosecuted for war crimes? Why was his government still recognized by the United Nations after they knew the atrocities he committed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/338aa9/why_was_pol_pot_never_prosecuted_for_war_crimes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqipzqo", "cqiu13u", "cqj0tay", "cqjad9b", "cqjd819"], "score": [754, 150, 11, 6, 10], "text": ["There is some debate over whether he killed himself or was killed by his fellow Khmer Rouge while in custody. He never made it to trial. Several of his comrades did go to trial and were convicted of crimes against humanity. The Khmer Rouge were recognized by the rest of the world (most of the western world including the US) because they were in conflict with the communist Vietnamese government. It was the Vietnamese who liberated Cambodia and chased out the Khmer Rouge, setting up a new government. Cleary the US could not support a government backed by the Vietnamese, so they continued to endorse Pol Pit and the Khmer Rouge. The rest of the world followed suit and the Khmer Rouge were allowed a seat at the UN for many years after they were deposed from power. An enemy of my enemy is my friend.", "Pol Pot was supported because he was a US/UK/China backed proxy against a fearful but unfounded idea that Vietnam wanted to conquer and turn Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia/Thailand into it's own version of a united Socialist bloc.\n\nKhmer Rouge in power had already purged a significant majority of the more \"Orthodox\" Marxist Leninists in the party in favor of Pol Pot's rabid Nationalist line.  By the time Pol Pot lost power he and the Khmer Rouge had fully and completely abandoned Marxism, openly praising the USA, and Ieng Sary was even praising Ronald Reagan.\n\nSource:  Cambodia 1975 - 1982, Michael Vickery.\n\n\n\n\nHere's a post I made else where on Cambodia that may provide some insight.\n\n\nPol Pot's revolution was an entirely peasant based uprising. Democratic Kampuchea was an attempt to turn the entirety of Cambodia into a peasant based agrarian society. The Cambodian peasantry didn't know private property. All land and property belonged to the French, the Aristocracy, and the Japanese. The Cambodian peasantry didn't know education. The French purposefully kept literacy and education rates as low as they could to prevent political unrest. Once the Japanese were run out of Cambodia, a new Aristocracy took control and through Prince Shinouk's attempts at neutrality Cambodia began to be infiltrated with Vietnamese. Cambodian peasant relations with the Vietnamese had always been sour as the Vietnamese were better educated and enjoyed higher privileges in Cambodian society than even Cambodian peasants. Eventually a military dictatorship came to power, one that allied with the United States and was complacent in the death of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian innocents. The peasants who had never earned much money were packed into cities to escape bombing runs, left with no money to buy food or provisions, left to starve.\n\nAccording to the Khmer itself, the US bombing raid was the final rallying cry for the Cambodian peasantry, which fully allied itself with the Angkar, the Khmer Rouge before they fully adopted Marxist/Communist posturing.\nThe Khmer state reflected what the Cambodian peasantry knew: It was an agricultural state, one that favored agricultural labor over education, one that favored full communalization of property, one that favored Cambodian ethnicity, one that favored traditional Cambodian peasant life. Property, education, money, multi culturalism were all symptoms of things that had kept the Cambodian peasants poor and destitute, and in the new Cambodian state, those traits would be eradicated.\n\nPol Pot was overwhelmingly popular with the Cambodian peasantry. Enough to empty entire cities through force.\nYou know what happened to the Cambodian people afterwards and Pol Pot eventually began to alienate the peasantry through over work and dehumanization and using starvation as a weapon and means of control (\"If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.\"). When the Khmer Rouge were removed from power through collaborators with the Vietnamese a sizable portion of the Khmer Rouge forces went with Pol Pot into exile. These forces were the ones that came from the provinces within Cambodia that saw the least amount of strife, as certain districts did not suffer nearly as immensely as others. They were also propped up with US and UK funding but their entire goal was to remove Vietnam from Cambodian soil.\nIn interviews post downfall Pol Pot was steadfast in believing that what he was doing was right, and he still had support from a faction of the peasantry. While I've never heard that particular saying in your question, Pol Pot's isolation from the absolute worst situations in the Khmer Rouge, his belief that all that oppose the Angkar were not true Cambodian peasants, and his continued support in exile gave him all the vindication that he needed.\nSources:\n\nThe Khmer Rouge: Ideology, Militarism, and the Revolution That Consumed a Generation\n\nPol Pot's Little Red Book\n\nBrother Number One: A Political Biography Of Pol Pot\n\nPol Pot Plans the Future\n\nNate Thayer's AMA and the reference interview as well.", "According to [Nicholas Wheeler's *Saving Strangers*](_URL_0_), this is partly due to the fact that most countries believed in pluralism until the 1990's. Pluralists stress the importance of sovereignty over anything else, and so humanitarian interventions were never really a thing. In fact, when Vietnam invaded, they were condemned for trying to set up a puppet government. Vietnam didn't even use humanitarianism as an explanation for the invasion, but rather the fact that the Khmer Rouge attacked them first. Due to pluralism, countries that were fully aware of what Pol Pot did not think they had the right to invade and still recognized his government over the new Vietnam-back government. Therefore, they would never have tried him for war crimes at the time. By the 1990's, the international system had become open to the idea of humanitarian intervention because pluralism was replaced by solidarism. The Khmer Rouge agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal in the 90s, but he died shortly after.", "There have been a lot of answers addressing your second question, but not so many addressing the first, so I'll take a shot at it. While /u/rucheleh06 is right that Pol Pot died ages ago, there is still the very valid question of why he wasn't prosecuted. Quite simply, there wasn't an avenue for it. While today we have the International Criminal Court that deals with genocidal people and those who commit crimes against humanity, it's a fairly recent institution, having mostly been established in the wake of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Calls for the prosecution of the Khmer Rouge did not start to take place until after the establishment of the court.", "Not sure if this will get seen, but I've actually done a lot of research on post-war Cambodian history and can speak on the subject\n\n**Officially, the reason is that Prime Minister Hun Sen delayed holding tribunals as [the country was not \"stable\" enough](_URL_1_) for 35 years.** To understand this though, you have to be cognizant of the political environment and the political priorities dictated by neoliberalization, in which stability was paramount.\n\nThe United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia that was mandated to oversee the peace process and formation of an independent Cambodian state faced an extremely fractured Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge still possessed substantial political power well into 90s, as they continued to wage a civil war from the Western provinces. This was partially due to [SAS training](_URL_0_) and Western humanitarian aid that was essentially funneled to Khmer Rouge fighters (a fact which John Pilger explores in his documentaries). A major objective of the international community involved in UNTAC was creating stability necessary for the transition of the market economy, as until the fall of the Soviet Union, the country had survived almost entirely on USSR development aid, and the years immediately leading up to the Peace Process had seen a substantial demand for neoliberal reform (especially in regards to FDI and land tenure reform) by the Cambodian People's Party (lead by Hun Sen who was himself a former Khmer Rouge commander) and the international community. This entire period was profoundly unstable- although the UN elections had selected King Sihanouk's successor by a landslide, when Hun Sen threatened to launch a succession movement, the international community effectively let him be 'co-president', and later more or less turned a blind eye when he launched a coup from the position and consolidated power.\n\nThe emphasis on unifying Cambodia under Hun Sen in the face of such a political rift produced a peace treaty that was extremely concessionary to the Khmer Rouge. By the end of the peace process in the late 90s, near the end of Pol Pot's life, they had been essentially fully reintegrated into the Cambodian government and military, even at the highest levels, and the Khmer Rouge were granted arguably the most mineral rich and valuable province in Cambodia to control. As a consequence, many of the former Khmer Rouge became the some of the most politically powerful members of the new state, which compounded their power as the wealth resulting from the market economy disproprtionately ended up in the hands of the political elite of an increasingly militarized authoritarian state (the proportion of military spending actually increased dramatically after \"peace was declared). Even today, the ruling Cambodian People's Party is full of ex-Khmer Rouge. As a consequence, it wasn't very politically feasible to start tribunals that would threaten them and potentially threaten the economic stability of the country.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://m.oxfordscholarship.com/mobile/view/10.1093/0199253102.001.0001/acprof-9780199253104"], [], ["http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/09/cambodia", "http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/justice-squandered-cambodia%E2%80%99s-khmer-rouge-tribunal"]]}
{"q_id": "couhz1", "title": "Why did Luther's reformation succeed and spread across Europe while previous movements such as the Lollards, Waldesnians and Hussites stayed persecuted minorities or at the very best localized in one country?", "selftext": "Inspiration for this question: playing eu4, reformation started in England and barely spread out of it, no country is protestant and yet still the reformation branches out in Provence (I'll imagine these are the Waldesnians). I was wondering why such a reformation which started in isolated island England would succeed while Lollardy did not.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/couhz1/why_did_luthers_reformation_succeed_and_spread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewmuc6m"], "score": [25], "text": ["Luther was different from many of the other radical populist movements like the Lollards in that he was generally supportive of the secular powers of the time and supportive of commercial enterprize and private wealth.  His moral teachings are very 'common sense' and supportive of traditional structures like marriage and family, nothing radical.  As such he developed a following among the burgers, a growing and increasingly wealthy class of traders and artisans not included in the Catholic aristocracy power structure.  \n\nThis was greatly appealing to many of the minor nobles in the Holy Roman Empire, where large wealthy states maintained regional hegemony often with the explicit help of the Catholic Church, resulting in widespread discontent with corruption and exploitation.  Protestantism was the wedge many minor nobles needed to free themselves from political intrigues of the bishops and creating their own power base.  \n\nThe best example perhaps is the first.  Frederick III, Elector of Saxony became one of the most important early supporters of Luther, allowing him a safe base to attract followers, preach, and disseminate his writings.  While Frederick gained potentially as a leader of the new Protestant faction, much of the power behind the throne came from the wealthy Pfaffinger family (look up their descendants!).   Once he was in their service he was able to devote most of his time to writing and developing his worldview, as he was pretty much prevented from traveling anywhere once the reformation was in full swing after the Diet of Worms.  \n\nBut what really helped him was his ideological service to his new benefactors.  When radical revolts broke out in the south during the Peasant's War he decried the worldly political aims in \"A Sincere Admonition\" and the \"Invocavit Sermons\" where he basically said violence and force were unchristian (but that obeying laws of worldly rulers was an obligation).  \n\nThis same pattern repeated all over the HRE: where local guilds, merchants, or cities had wealth and power to overthrow a weak aristocracy, they often would adopt Lutheranism - often the case in the north and Hanseatic cities.  Where the Catholic aristocracy or church itself had more power often these movements were suppressed or expelled.  Because this is the HRE, though, obviously there is a lot of heterogeneity, on all sides.\n\nThe key to most of these movements at the heart of your question is that in order to have a lasting religious movement in old Europe it was key to secure the support of local political powers.  At the time of Martin Luther there was a wealthy class with political powers, and political powers maintained with religious traditionalism.  He was just religiously radical enough to invert this political power situation, but still conservative enough to prevent complete change in the underlying structure of power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20xa9b", "title": "When the Cherokee lost their land in the Indian Removal Act and the subsequent \"Trail of Tears\" what happened to the slaves of Cherokee plantation owners?", "selftext": "So far as I can tell, the Indian Removal Act did not legally expropriate property other than land, so technically Cherokee slave owners were still legally slave owners after losing their land. I know in practice legal niceties weren't followed in the execution of the act, but there is a tantalizing unsourced sentence in the introduction to the [Trail of Tears wikipedia page](_URL_0_) that says some slaves did in fact embark on the \"Trail of Tears\". \n\nI'm guessing many must have been left behind. Were any set free? Would they perhaps been sold off in a hurry to white settlers (that would seem a likely self-interested choice of a slave owner in response to any impending relocation if it were possible)? Were any simply \"stolen\" and illegally assumed to be the property of some encroaching white settler? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20xa9b/when_the_cherokee_lost_their_land_in_the_indian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7pxq8"], "score": [2], "text": ["Many were taken along on the Trail of Tears. There was intermarriage as well. They're now known as the Black Cherokees, though getting recognition on modern rolls has been difficult. In 2007, tribal membership was revoked from the Black Cherokees, but then in 2008 that was reversed.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears"], "answers_urls": [["http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2005/09/newest-indians-dna-black-cherokee-and.html", "http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/09/black_cherokees_regain_tribal_citizenship.html"]]}
{"q_id": "7pxdwg", "title": "What are examples of fabricated Casus Belli in European conflicts, circa. 1000-1400?", "selftext": "I'm mostly asking because of Crusader Kings 2, to be honest, but I'm curious how many claims were fabricated back then.  Who would create these?  The nobility themselves, or their staff?  What was their actual reason for war/what were they covering up?  And how did we learn, ultimately, that the claims/reasons were fabricated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pxdwg/what_are_examples_of_fabricated_casus_belli_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dslh4c8"], "score": [7], "text": ["It may not be quite the same thing, but here's a good example of sharp practice from the late middle ages that I came across recently. (From *The Wars of the Roses* by John Gillingham.)\n\nAt midnight on 29th March 1448, commissioners from France and England met to extend the terms of a truce for another two years. The documents were drawn up by the English and handed over \"without so much as a candle\" and the French didn't examine them too closely, assuming that they were the same as the previous terms.\n\nWhich they mostly were, except for one change. The list of allies and liegemen of the King of England now included the Duke of Brittany. In fact, he was a vassal of the King of France.\n\nWhen English forces launched a raid into Brittany, they used this document to maintain it was a purely 'domestic' matter, between a vassal and his liege, and the King of France had no right to intervene. The King of France was not persuaded and declared himself no longer bound by the truce.\n\nIn this case the war went badly for the English, but had it been backed up by sufficient force, it's easy to imagine this document being the start of a process leading to England 'legally' annexing Brittany.\n\nWhat makes this case even stranger is the fact that it seems like Henry VI, who generally wanted good relations with France, didn't know or approve of what was going on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8koyml", "title": "ancient Mideastern literature (or lack thereof)", "selftext": "It seems that, despite being literate before anyone else, the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent left behind very little in terms of literature compared to the Greco-Romans, Indians, Chinese, etc. We mostly have dry records, some religious texts, manuals, etc. from the pre-hellenistic Mideast, the Old Testament being a remarkable exception in terms of its scope. Or is this an erroneous impression?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8koyml/ancient_mideastern_literature_or_lack_thereof/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz9n6a6"], "score": [4], "text": ["While you wait for an answer, you might be interested in [this discussion of Ancient Egyptian literature](_URL_2_) with u/Bentresh, and likewise [Egyptian musings on what makes a good ruler](_URL_0_) and [Sumerian disputation literature](_URL_1_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6limtx/are_there_any_texts_of_political_philosophy_from/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6uah65/why_does_mesopotamian_mythology_represent/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7hawn2/ama_ancient_egypt/dqpkgub/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ai89c", "title": "Who was the richest Merchant, or is believed to be the richest, in human history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ai89c/who_was_the_richest_merchant_or_is_believed_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d10ky51"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "17qh9g", "title": "Just how badly did the Japanese loss at midway affect their military strength?", "selftext": "Was that loss one they would have been able to recover from or was it too much to overcome in any scenario? How did it affect their morale? And what did it mean to the US?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17qh9g/just_how_badly_did_the_japanese_loss_at_midway/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8805fr"], "score": [5], "text": ["There's no other way to say it: it was devastating. With the loss of the four large carriers at Midway, the IJN was down to... exactly two (the *Shokaku* and *Zuikaku*). They were not able to complete any new fleet carriers until two years later.\n\nBy contrast, the USN put in service five Essex-class carriers in 1943 and another seven in 1944.\n\nFor reference, this is useful: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3jn7x5", "title": "Why is Constantine generally viewed as a Top 5 Roman Emperor given his role as the prime architect in the destabilization of the Tetrarchy, thus causing multiple civil wars, and the eventual collapse of the Tetrarchy?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jn7x5/why_is_constantine_generally_viewed_as_a_top_5/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cur3qgq"], "score": [3], "text": ["It should be pointed out that the Tetrarchy was shaky enough on its own. A case could be made that Constantius as Augustus had the authority to appoint Constantine his successor and the future emperor accepted a demotion to the lesser rank of Caesar. That same year Maxentius was hailed as emperor in Italy and defeated the eastern Augustus Severus. Galerius didn't help things by only promoting close friends - so instead of the Caesar Constantine stepping up to become the Augustus, he instead promoted another friend Licinius as Augustus - bypassing Constantine. \n\n\nHe did accomplish many things as emperor. One of which was simply reigning for 13yrs - itself is a massive accomplishment considering the constant civil wars that had been going on. Militarily he defeating the Gothic menace in 332 providing some (ultimately) temporary security on the Danubian border. He reformed the monetary system and brought some stability and halted the inflationary cycle by replacing the silver standard with a gold one (albeit abandoning the poor in an economic ghetto). He founded a new city of Constantinople (on top of the older Byzantium) and it's strategic and strong location would ensure the survival of the eastern empire into the 15th C. He also seems to have a very strong sense of justice and issued many rescripts addressing corruption in the empire - one of my favourites is from the Theodosian Code which preserves a law of Constantine where he states that if any of his officials has committed an injustice it should be brought directly to him and \"I Myself will avenge Myself\". \n\n\nWas he *OMG teh greatest emperor evar*? Not in my opinion (and hopefully one of the flaired commentors will chip in with a more authoritative ranking) but he certainly was a very important one - he re-unified the empire, he was an absurdly successful general, his laws speak to his strong sense of justice and desire for proper and fair administration in the empire, and importantly he was a pragmatist. The latter is key considering the potential for another civil war if he had imposed his Christianity on the broader (majority pagan) empire. In his laws he states his distaste for pagan rituals yet he leaves it mostly intact (barring a few rituals). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ppxi6", "title": "How does Marxism turn into repression?", "selftext": "Hi guys, hope this is the right place for this..\n\nHow does the ideas of Marx get turned into repression? How come most communist states are repressive dictatorships? Isn't the desire to become a stateless, classless society? Therefore, how is an all-seeing, pervasive state justifiable in the eyes of a communist/stalinist? Is it that through state-action \"the revolution\" they will one rad in the far off future eliminate the need for a government as there will be no \"counter-revolutionaries\"?\n\nJust some thoughts I had, can anyone answer these?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ppxi6/how_does_marxism_turn_into_repression/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd4sakz"], "score": [2], "text": ["- the precise details and events obviously vary from nation to nation, but you have clearly spotted a pattern.\n- Marx proposed a large transfer of ownership of property esp. the means of production, and it is easy to see how that was unlikely to be voluntary in most cases. \n- He advocated an intermediate step to the ideal communist state. \n- The extreme reordering of society was work undertaken by those prepared to be sufficiently ruthless. The collectivisation of farms leading to famines in Russia, China, North Korea etc., is an example of this. \n- Communists typically needed a violent revolution to gain power (with some exceptions).\n- Therefore you need revolutionary leaders with the qualities to overthrow the existing regime by force, establish a communist dictatorship and then somehow transition to a more representative form of government eventually. Tragically the third behaviour does not often coincide with the former two.\n- Stalin and other communist leaders like him established a cult of personality around themselves and established a paranoid absolute rule. You should read up on their lives (Stalin, Mao etc.) to understand the personalities and circumstances that lead to this.\n\nMany Communists would argue that Communism was never achieved and that these dictatorships wallowed in an intermediate state. Personally I see this as almost a no-true-Scotsman fallacy, and am of the opinion that Communisms political flaw is that it requires and cultivates dictatorship without any reliable mechanism to ensure that dictatorship was temporary.\n\nIf anyone wishes to contribute to this thread who can speak to Marx/Lenin/Mao's expectations and plans for how long Communism would require dictatorship and if/how it would transition away from it, I would be interesting in reading about it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wfgpm", "title": "Theory Thursday | Academic/Professional History Free-for-All", "selftext": "[Previous weeks!](/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Theory+Thursday%22 & restrict_sr=on & sort=new & t=all)\n\nThis week, ending in February 19 2015:\n\nToday's thread is for open discussion of:\n\n * History in the academy\n\n * Historiographical disputes, debates and rivalries\n\n * Implications of historical theory both abstractly and in application\n\n * Philosophy of history\n\n * And so on\n\nRegular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters like those above, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wfgpm/theory_thursday_academicprofessional_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coqspze", "core5dy"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["Do you think that it is really evident how fashions arise and die in academia? And do you think that such questions damage fund allocation, topic selections and analysis outcomes in a very detrimental way? E.g. I noticed how in my field every research and conference that was \"hot\" became in recent years mostly about \"gender\". But I highly suspect that this trend will shift in recent years, maybe going about inequality?\n\nI dunno if this might qualify as a \"loaded question\", but I'm just curious about fashion in social sciences and possible bad effects.", "For a seminar on rural histroy I'll be writing a paper/essay on food consumption in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Could someone point me in the direction of some literature on this subject? I have a hard time finding general theories on food consumption in those periods. I'm most interested in what people ate and the difference between the lower classes and the upper class. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1pmjq5", "title": "What's the best scholarly text(s) on the ideology of the Cathars?", "selftext": "Looking for some reliable background on the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, specifically on the theologies and ideologies that made up Catharism. \r\rMost of what I've come across on Amazon seems to be pseudo-historical conspiracy theories. Any recommendations for a better and more reliable monograph?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pmjq5/whats_the_best_scholarly_texts_on_the_ideology_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd3vle3"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is my field of study - heresy in Medieval Southwest France in 12/13th century. I've just moved to SW France to do further research work on this subject. Happy to help on the subject!\n\nFrom a research perspective, the best reference English-language book for this is Malcolm Lambert's The Cathars (Blackwell, 1998). It refers to most known primary and secondary source documents and outlines the basic history and supposed religious beliefs. \n\nHowever, Mark Pegg's A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford, 2009) is a more readable and sensitive introduction and will give you some critical insight into modern views of Catharism. \n\nKeep in mind that 'the Cathars' did not exist. Heretics in SW France did not use that name, nor any name as a group. We get the word Cathar *once* from a German bishop writing in early 12th century Rhine region - we do not know conclusively if the heretics he was writing about used that name themselves, or if he applied it. No Pope prior to, during or directly after the Albigensian Crusades, nor any Cistercian monk who fomented the crusades against heresy, ever used the term Cathar. The bishops and Dominican inquisitors who were tasked with investigating heresy in SW France for the 100 years after the crusade never used the term Cathars, nor did they find any evidence of a Cathar Church, bishop or other such infrastructure.\n\nThe heretics of SW France were usually referred to in the local Occitan language of the time as the Good Men and Good Women, or bons hommes. We know this through the existing inquisition records of the time after the crusade.\n\nThe historiography of Catharism has undergone significant review in the last 20 years and has seen the development of significant new models of heresy at this time and location. Most of what has been referred to as 'evidence' of the existence of Cathars and Catharism has been subject to significant scrutiny and found wanting. \n\nA good overview of this current in recent historiography is RI Moore, The War on Heresy (Belknap Press, 2012). \n\nThe classic monograph in the field is still in print: Walter Wakefield's Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100-1250 (Allen  &  Unwin, 1974). Still the reference point on the subject and contains some very good translations of original Latin source documents.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2f92kr", "title": "History of Taiwan", "selftext": "I'm interested in a more detailed history of Taiwan than the one provided on Wikipedia, for example:\n\nWere there any interactions with China prior to the European colonial powers or Ming?\n\nWhen did the first Hakka, Fujianese or other settlers arrive in Taiwan?\n\nWhen and in what capacity did the Ming Dynasty interact with Taiwan - why did they decide to take it?\n\nHow did the Qing Emperors feel about Taiwan? Did the average late 17th-19th century Chinese feel that Taiwan was part of the Chinese Empire?\n\nWhen did the modern mythology that \"Taiwan has always been a part of China\" become a part of mainstream history?\n\nAny info on pre-Japanese Taiwan not found on Wiki or other quick Google searches would be great. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f92kr/history_of_taiwan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck70w80"], "score": [5], "text": ["*Were there any interactions with China prior to the European colonial powers or Ming?*\n\nThe first interactions that may have been recorded were during the Three Kingdoms period, where expeditionary forces of the Kingdom of Wu may have landed on the island during a series of expeditions which also reached Japan.  Later, there was extremely limited trade with the aborigines throughout the Song Dynasty.  \n\n*When did the first Hakka, Fujianese or other settlers arrive in Taiwan?*\n\nMajor Chinese settlement did not start until after the Dutch establishment of Fort Zeelandia in 1624.  They primarily arrived for economic opportunities and due to Dutch encouragement.\n\n*When and in what capacity did the Ming Dynasty interact with Taiwan - why did they decide to take it?*\n\nAdmiral Koxinga of the Ming Dynasty was in the midst of a losing civil war with the Qing Dynasty.  In order to secure a power base safe from the Qing, he led Ming Dynasty troops to capture Taiwan to use as a naval base to harass the Qing, and later, as a bastion of resistance.  His plan was to use Taiwan to perhaps invade the Spanish Philippines, and from there to build up military and economic strength to restore the Ming Dynasty, although with the death of the last Ming Emperor this may have been less feasible.\n \n*How did the Qing Emperors feel about Taiwan? Did the average late 17th-19th century Chinese feel that Taiwan was part of the Chinese Empire?*\n\nWhile initially Koxinga defeated Qing expeditions to capture the island, after his death from Malaria his son agreed to pledge fidelity to the Qing in return for security: however the Qing were later able to capture the island.  \n\n*When did the modern mythology that \"Taiwan has always been a part of China\" become a part of mainstream history?*\n\nThis is a leading question as it is highly political.  I'm not sure if I can answer this fairly, but the prevailing narrative around 1950 was that the KMT forces were the legitimate government of all China that just happened to mainly be in Taiwan at the time.  In a sense, the thinking was \"China belongs to Taiwan.\"  With worldwide recognition of the PRC around 1970 as being the legitimate government of China, the prevailing PRC position is precisely that, but the other way around.  Taiwanese independence first started around 1895 with the declaration of the Republic of Formosa, but this was a reaction to the Qing Dynasty's defeat by Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4rj1f9", "title": "\"Best of June\" Winners", "selftext": "[The votes are in, and the winners for the 'Best of June' award are decided.](_URL_0_)\n\nThere is no \"User's Choice\" or \"Flair's Choice\" award this month, simply a first and second place! \n\nSitting at the top for both as the unanimous winner was /u/CrossyNZ's response in the WWI AMA regarding [\"the complex \\(and somewhat appalling\\) appropriation of historical war wounds in *Bioshock*\"](_URL_3_).\n\nAnd close the heels, and equally unanimous as the second awardee, was /u/brigantus's answer to the question [\"Why is the Fertile Crescent now desert?\"](_URL_2_)\n\nAs always, a big congratulations to the winners, and a big thanks to everyone who contributed to the subreddit in the past month! Also a reminder, if you want to nominate answers for the monthly awards, the best way to do so is to submit your favorite posts every week to the [Sunday Digest](_URL_1_)!\n\nFor a list of past winners, check out [this Wiki page!](_URL_4_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rj1f9/best_of_june_winners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d51h11y"], "score": [6], "text": ["Congratulations both /u/brigantus and /u/crossynz!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r7xya/best_of_june_voting_thread/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=new&amp;t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p4qt7/why_is_the_fertile_crescent_now_desert/d4il79r?context=3", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qrum0/ama_world_war_one_in_history_art_and_games/d4wnjd5?context=2", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/bestof"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8zg7kg", "title": "Truman and NATO", "selftext": "Nicholas Burns, a former NATO ambassador from the US, said that \"Trump is the first president since Truman to not think NATO was necessary to American national security interests.\" Here is the politico article for reference: _URL_0_\n\nTrump aside, my question is, Truman was president when NATO was founded. What is the background of his views toward it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zg7kg/truman_and_nato/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2ioxm1"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is a second hand quote that in its original on CNN is the transcript of an on air interview.\n\nReading both I think its just awkwardly stated. He isnt saying that Truman was not a supporter of NATO forming on his watch, it was very much something he ended up supporting, and the US was a driving force behind. Indeed he had to fend off some opposition to ratification in the Senate and even then the final vote was 82-13 with calls that the US was abandoning its traditional position of friendship with certain allies but fundamental avoidance of entangling commitments. \n\nHe is just saying that every President from Truman on down held the same fundamental position on NATO's structural value proposition. \n\nFor more on NATO and Truman you might want to take a look at this stuff from his Presidential Library: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/15/trump-nato-europe-history-dependence-219011"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.trumanlibrary.org/nato/nato.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8brdq9", "title": "In the American Civil War, what did the Union soldiers fight for?", "selftext": "There is a lot of talk about the reason Confederate soldiers fought for. What was the story for the other side?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8brdq9/in_the_american_civil_war_what_did_the_union/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx9cth6", "dx9dhyh"], "score": [6, 29], "text": ["I'd like to add a historiograpic rider to this question and ask how historical perceptions of Union soldiers' motivations have changed over time.", "This is an interesting question. Often times, the Civil War is presented as a dichotomy of Confederates wanting to fight to maintain slavery and Union soldiers wanting to free slaves, but that's not entirely accurate. \n\nNew England was touched most heavily by the Second Great Awakening, and citizens of that region were imbued with much religious fervor. Abolitionism was strong in this region as well due to social reforms growing out of the Second Great Awakening. Slavery was seen as sinful. Many of the Union soldiers from New England joined to free slaves. \n\nAlso, remember, in 1848 and leading up to the American Civil War, revolutions broke out all over Europe. Many immigrants to the U.S. joined both Northern and Southern ranks because they wanted to be apart of cementing a new regime. The revolutions of 1848 did not bring about lasting change, but the American Civil War could. \n\nAlso, remember that racism was alive and well in the North, to the extent that Ohio, for example, opposed the admission of slave states nearby to keep fugitive slaves and freemen out. Those soldiers not from New England did not fight to free slaves, but fought to preserve the Union. \n\nOthers joined because a steady paycheck as a solider was better than life on the frontier. Some joined to travel. You have to remember that a lot of people didn't travel far beyond from where they were born. Further, some even joined to impress a woman.\n\nSome were motivated to join out of a sense of community pride. Companies were formed in cities and town all over country. These companies would then be attached to regiments. Initially, the first 1000 men from Pennsylvania would be the 1st Pennsylvania Infantry, made up of ten companies from across the state. Oftentimes, a company would be organized by someone with clout in a community. If your brother, uncle, cousin, or neighbor joined, you would be compelled to join as well, to save face. Someone who refused to serve would be seen as a coward. Further, the idea was that if your friend or family was standing next to you, you'd be much less likely to run. \n\nIndividuals had lots of motivations for serving, and it varied from person to person"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9hf9mk", "title": "How does one get buried at Westminster Abbey?", "selftext": "Stephen Hawking's ashes were recently interred at Westminster Abbey. Normally monarchs and heads of government are buried in the Abbey.\n\nWho decides who can be buried at Westminster Abbey?\n\nDoes the person to be buried have any say in the matter? (If they give other instructions before death, can this be overruled?)\n\nIs there a formalised process for selection? How does one nominate a person to be buried there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hf9mk/how_does_one_get_buried_at_westminster_abbey/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6cbbrp"], "score": [2], "text": ["The decision is made final by the Dean of Westminster. The honored is given to royalty, aristocrats and other people of note. The specifics of nomination I am not sure. Most likely a discussion between the Abbey and the Royals. For some I would think it is assumed but other are most likely offered either in advance or the family is given the option. I would think someone with enough notoriety would be approached about the option in advance to avoid problems post-mortem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "mp9mp", "title": "Were Romans dry and cynical?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mp9mp/were_romans_dry_and_cynical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c32r1v5", "c32r1v5"], "score": [14, 14], "text": ["Personally, I think that's a bit of an ...unusual question, but I'll answer nonetheless.\n\nNo, not unusually so. Yes, there were people who were so, but equally there were people who were not. Take, for example, the poet Catullus. A contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, he wrote some of the most touching poetry of all time, couple with rabble-rousing rude and riotous verses which are rather funny. One was even used in a sexual harassment case recently (The line in question was \"*Pedicabo ego vose et irrumabo vos*\", which, for purposes of decency, I will leave you to look up for yourself. Obviously one man does not a culture make, but he is an example.\n\nBesides Catullus, there are other ways that Latin poetry can express the romantic nature of the Romans. There was an entire sector of the poetic community writing on the subject of the virtues of the countryside and the simple life (the \"pastorals\"). Ovid made so many jokes in his poetry that eventually, having told one at the emperor Augustus' expense, he was expelled to the far reaches of the realm.the first lines of Virgil's Aeneid can still be found scrawled upon the walls of Pompeii, the remnants of children's attempts to memorise at least some of the poem.\n\nBut it's not just poetry that proves this. There is the story of the Roman (whose name, unfortunately, escapes me) who was ordered to commit suicide by the emperor. So, he slit his wrists, then went to dinner. When food was served, he bandaged up his arms, and between courses, took the bandages from his arms. His last act, before his life eventually slipped away from him, was to deliberately smash some of the emperor's favourite kitchenware. Apparently, it was an excellent meal.\n\nBut the obvious example of the Romans not being \"dry and cynical\" can be found the the works of the orator Cicero. Aside from the various puns and jokes to be found in many of his speeches, one can find a documentation of the late Republic's hedonism. Lavish feasts, ostentatious spectacles, adulterous affairs... you name it, they did it.\n\nTrue, there were some dry and cynical Romans (if you're looking for one, Augustus was a bit of a prude, and many senators were manipulative and cutting); however, you cannot say that this applied to either the inhabitants of the city nor the citizens of the empire.\n\nBonus fact: the original cynic was a Greek named [Diogenes](_URL_0_). He lived in a barrel and was generally a miserable man. One time, Alexander the Great came up to him and asked if there was anything, anything at all that this conquering hero could do for or give to Diogenes. He replied \"yes, move; you're blocking my light.\"\n\nThe word \"Cynic\" comes from \"kunos\", the Greek word for dog; Diogenes believed that dogs led an admirable lifestyle, and that man had much to learn from them. As a result, he lived among them and behaved much like one himself.", "Personally, I think that's a bit of an ...unusual question, but I'll answer nonetheless.\n\nNo, not unusually so. Yes, there were people who were so, but equally there were people who were not. Take, for example, the poet Catullus. A contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, he wrote some of the most touching poetry of all time, couple with rabble-rousing rude and riotous verses which are rather funny. One was even used in a sexual harassment case recently (The line in question was \"*Pedicabo ego vose et irrumabo vos*\", which, for purposes of decency, I will leave you to look up for yourself. Obviously one man does not a culture make, but he is an example.\n\nBesides Catullus, there are other ways that Latin poetry can express the romantic nature of the Romans. There was an entire sector of the poetic community writing on the subject of the virtues of the countryside and the simple life (the \"pastorals\"). Ovid made so many jokes in his poetry that eventually, having told one at the emperor Augustus' expense, he was expelled to the far reaches of the realm.the first lines of Virgil's Aeneid can still be found scrawled upon the walls of Pompeii, the remnants of children's attempts to memorise at least some of the poem.\n\nBut it's not just poetry that proves this. There is the story of the Roman (whose name, unfortunately, escapes me) who was ordered to commit suicide by the emperor. So, he slit his wrists, then went to dinner. When food was served, he bandaged up his arms, and between courses, took the bandages from his arms. His last act, before his life eventually slipped away from him, was to deliberately smash some of the emperor's favourite kitchenware. Apparently, it was an excellent meal.\n\nBut the obvious example of the Romans not being \"dry and cynical\" can be found the the works of the orator Cicero. Aside from the various puns and jokes to be found in many of his speeches, one can find a documentation of the late Republic's hedonism. Lavish feasts, ostentatious spectacles, adulterous affairs... you name it, they did it.\n\nTrue, there were some dry and cynical Romans (if you're looking for one, Augustus was a bit of a prude, and many senators were manipulative and cutting); however, you cannot say that this applied to either the inhabitants of the city nor the citizens of the empire.\n\nBonus fact: the original cynic was a Greek named [Diogenes](_URL_0_). He lived in a barrel and was generally a miserable man. One time, Alexander the Great came up to him and asked if there was anything, anything at all that this conquering hero could do for or give to Diogenes. He replied \"yes, move; you're blocking my light.\"\n\nThe word \"Cynic\" comes from \"kunos\", the Greek word for dog; Diogenes believed that dogs led an admirable lifestyle, and that man had much to learn from them. As a result, he lived among them and behaved much like one himself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope"]]}
{"q_id": "2irjfs", "title": "When the first colonists came to North and Central America, how come the Native Americans never fought back when they first arrived?", "selftext": "Since Columbus Day is almost here I thought of this question that I really want to see answered.\n\nAs far as I know, when the first colonists came to the Americas, it seemed like for the most part the native people were really peaceful and did nothing to really stop them from coming over. Of course we know in the coming years the colonists would go on to enslave and decimate the native population in North and Central America.\n\nThe thing that kind of bothers me is that when they first came over, how come the Native Americans never fought back or stopped them from coming over? I mean, there were only a few thousand European explorers and colonists coming over versus the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans living on the continent already. I'd think that for such a large amount of Natives they could have easily taken out the colonists from the beginning since there were so few of them.\n\nPlus if they had fought and killed off the Europeans as soon as they came here it'd stop them before they got too big to handle and before their diseases spread to the Native Americans and caused most of them to die.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2irjfs/when_the_first_colonists_came_to_north_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl4xvl2"], "score": [11], "text": ["In what's now the continental US (and elsewhere, but let's stick with the US for now), the first wave of colonists were vigorously resisted, which is why the likes of Juan Ponce de Le\u00f3n, P\u00e1nfilo de Narv\u00e1ez, Hernando de Soto, and Lucas V\u00e1zquez de Ayll\u00f3n are best remembered for their failures to establish colonies in La Florida. Just to hit the highlights:\n\nIn 1521, Ponce de Le\u00f3n ran afoul of the Calusa's shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy regarding the Spanish (likely encouraged by the Taino refugees who established villages under the Calusa's protection after fleeing the Spanish invasion of Cuba). Fatally wounded, Ponce de Le\u00f3n retreated from Florida and promptly died. He's rather charitably remembered as the man who led the European discovery of the mainland US, though his attempts to establish a permanent presence there failed.\n\nThe same year that Ponce de Le\u00f3n died, Lucas V\u00e1zquez de Ayll\u00f3n was organizing efforts to colonize what's now the Carolinas from the Bahamas, a region that was known on Spanish maps in the 1520s as Tierra de Ayll\u00f3n due to his royal charter on the territory. Men under Ayll\u00f3n's command captured dozens of Native slaves from the area in order to establish guides, informants, and translators for the eventual colony. Ayll\u00f3n's favorite was a man given the name Francisco de Chicora (Chicora being the name of his tribe). Chicora traveled with Ayll\u00f3n to Spain to drum up support for the colony, and in 1526 the two of them, along with 600 others established San Miguel de Gualdape - the first European colony in the continental US. Chicora, now home, promptly abandoned the colony. After three months of dwindling food reserves and persistent indigenous resistance, 150 surviving colonists fled back to the Bahamas. Ayll\u00f3n was not among them.\n\nTwo years later, P\u00e1nfilo de Narv\u00e1ez (the same guy who failed to arrest Cortez in Mexico) led another expedition into what's now Florida. Narv\u00e1ez's expedition bypassed the Calusa but was rebuffed by the Apalachee near modern Tallahassee, FL.  Afterward, Narv\u00e1ez's ground forces attempted to retreat back to the naval forces on hastily crafted rafts. Narv\u00e1ez's raft was swept out to sea and the conquistador was never seen again. The others went along the Gulf coast until they were shipwrecked in near Galveston, TX. Of the 300 men who made landfall with Narv\u00e1ez, only 86 reached Texas and only four ever reached Spanish territory again. \u00c1lvar N\u00fa\u00f1ez Cabeza de Vaca, who spent eight years in Texas before walking the long way to Mexico City, is the most famous of these survivors.\n\nCabeza de Vaca's report of the American Southeast and Southwest inspired two more expeditions into the current US in the late 1530s through the early 1540s. Francisco V\u00e1zquez de Coronado led an expedition into the Southwest, eventually crossing into the Great Plains, guided by Cabeza de Vaca's fellow survivor Estevanico, who died during the Zuni resistance of Coronado. Unlike the other conquistadors here, Coronado had the good fortunate of making it out of his failed expedition alive.\n\nUnlike his contemporary, Hernando de Soto didn't know when to call it quits. Between 1539 and 1542, he marched his men from Florida to North Carolina, and from there westward across the Mississippi, guided in part by a member of Narv\u00e1ez's belated rescue party that had been stranded in Florida. Unlike Narv\u00e1ez, de Soto's men narrowly managed to defeat the Apalachee and secured Anhaica, the Apalachee's principal town, as their base of operations. However, the Apalachee carried out an extensive and successful guerrilla campaign against the Spanish, forcing them out of the town to follow faint hopes of green pastures elsewhere. From there, de Soto's expedition is a cascade of tragedy, for himself as well as the indigenous nations he contacted. He managed to survive for as long as he did based on a combination of dumb luck and paranoia that somehow managed to overcome his hubris and greed. His men kept advising him to pick this territory or that territory as his colony, but de Soto was always unsatisfied and kept leading his men onward on a war of attrition he was losing. Eventually, de Soto died of a fever on the western bank of the Mississippi. After a failed attempt to cross Texas to get back to Mexico, de Soto's men were forced to flee down the Mississippi pursued the vast armada of Quigualtam, whose forces boasted that they would conquer Spain if only they had ships to reach it. It seems that Quigualtam brandished his boastful armada as warning against future attempts at conquests, as they seemed more interested in harrying the Spanish and reclaiming Spanish-held captives than actually wiping out the exhausted expedition completely. \n\nIn 1561, the Spanish captured a young man from Tsenacommacah, which the Spanish called Axacan, and we call Virginia today. This man, who was eventually baptized as Don Luis, was a member of one of the communities that were or would soon be part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Over ten years, Don Luis traveled extensively through the Spanish Empire, visiting Mexico, the Caribbean and Spain. In 1570, he was part of a modest effort to establish a colony in Axacan. However, like Chicora before him, Don Luis immediately abandoned the colony and returned to his own people. When the Spanish came to reclaim him, Don Luis led an assault on the colony. Only a single altar boy survived to be adopted by the local community, though he was returned to the Spanish when a Spanish vessel eventually showed up to investigate why the Axacan colony fell off the map.\n\nThere's a popular, though dubious, tradition that associates Don Luis with Powhatan himself or, more often, his brother and successor Opachancanough. Certainly, the scant Spanish records concerning Don Luis describe him as the nephew of a prominent leader in the area (based on the laws of hereditary employed in the area, this would have readily put him in the line of succession). Equally certain, Opechancanough is famed for his staunch anticolonial policies. But he had ample reason to resist English colonialism even without prior experience with the Spanish.\n\nWhich gets us to the reasons why places like St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Plymouth succeeded were other attempts failed.\n\nSometime after de Soto's expedition marched through the area, a war broke out between the two most powerful Timucua alliances in northeastern Florida / southeastern Georgia. The two sides both sought out European alliances. The Spanish allied with the dominant Utina; the French allied with the Saturiwa along with other local factions. The Timucua wars and alliances permitted the Spanish to establish a permanent foothold in the area, which resulted in the establishment of St. Augustine. Soon even the Calusa were warming to their Spanish neighbors. The Calusa certepe (paramount chief) known to the Spanish as Carlos likewise sought a military alliance with the Spanish and toward that end, his sister soon married Pedro Men\u00e9ndez de Avil\u00e9s, the founder of St. Augustine. The Calusa also began sending trading missions to Cuba. Despite their close ties with the Spanish, the Calusa maintained their autonomy until the English and Creek slave raids into Florida during the early 1700s.\n\nLikewise, Mamanatowick Wahunsunacawh (leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, also known as Chief Powhatan) and Massasoit Ousamequin (leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy) saw the handfuls of English colonists that initially settled in their area as potential military allies and trading partners against more immediate and local enemies. For the Powhatans' this included the Monacan to the west, the Massawomecks and Susquehannocks to the north, and the Spanish to the south. For the Wampanoag, they were almost exclusively concerned about the Narragansett to their west, who had largely been spared an epidemic that had devastated the Wampanoag's formerly sizable numbers (enough that their numbers alone discouraged European colonial aspirations in the area until the epidemic(s) of the late 1610s).\n\nEDIT: I forgot to include Juan Pardo's expedition into the Carolinas during the 1560s. Luckily, I had a chance to mention in [here](_URL_0_). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j3adx/why_did_spain_not_settle_further_north_than/cl8094y"]]}
{"q_id": "26fhvb", "title": "Were there any significant battles or other events that demonstrated the obsolescence of armor against firearms?", "selftext": "Basically, were there any major events that caused European armies to disband armored units and adopt firearms?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26fhvb/were_there_any_significant_battles_or_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chqndwj"], "score": [4], "text": ["You seem to be setting up a divide between armored troops and firearms in the question, assuming that adopting the latter means disbanding the former. While any weapon and armor technology always exist in a state of tension, armored soldiers continue to be used alongside firearms up to the present day.\n\nThe adoption of firearms and the decline in personal armor are trends that don't quite overlap. The period from the 14th-16th centuries is not only when firearms and firearm tactics were adopted and refined into a coherent tactical system, but also saw the peak of armor production, sophistication, and use. Firearms delivered a powerful blow to even heavily armored soldiers, but a blow comparable to certain heavy crossbows that had existed alongside armor for centuries."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "asuzte", "title": "How much more technologically and militarily advanced were the Romans than the Visigoths when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/asuzte/how_much_more_technologically_and_militarily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["egwyvj9"], "score": [22], "text": ["Militarily, hardly at all. The Visigothic army was built out of a core of predominantly Gothic soldiers who had fought as part of the Roman army, along with other defectors. They had Roman weapons, Roman armour, Roman tactics etc. As of 410, if you put a Gothic and Roman soldier next to each other, they would look very similar and would fight very similarly. \n\nTheir leader, Alaric, had held many military offices in both the western and eastern halves of the Roman army. In 397 he was appointed *magister militum per Illyricum*, and appears to have been promoted to *magister utriusque militiae* in 399. Alaric was an excellent commander, well respected by Roman administrators. When Alaric made the decision to march on Rome, he had previously been preparing to march under the Roman banner to re-secure the Balkans for the Western Roman Empire.  \n\nFrom what our sources (Claudian the poet, Zosimus, Jordanes, occasional references in other histories) tell us, Alaric was not alone in this. Goths, for some unknown reason, crop up frequently in positions of command across the sources. In 399, the Goth Tribigild rebelled for unknown reasons, but he clearly commanded significant influence as he called for the dismissal of Eutropius, a hugely influential figure in the Eastern Roman Empire. From 398-9 the eastern field army was commanded by the Goth Gainas, who was sent to negotiate with Tribigild but ended up joining him. When the position of *magisterium utriusque militiae* became available in the western half of the empire there were two Goths considered for the position: Alaric and Sarus. When we think of Goths and barbarians more generally we often picture a disorganised and ill-disciplined horde, but the Goths could comfortably command armies just as well as a 'native' Roman general in the Roman style. The 410s were arguably the peak of Visigothic military capability. \n\nIn the field, there would not have been much difference between the technology of the armies. The one thing the Goths could not produce which the Romans could was artillery, but the Roman use of artillery was in rapid decline anyway and Ammianus Marcellinus - who loved artillery and mentioned it frequently - makes almost no mention of it after Julian's disastrous campaign against the Persians in 363. \n\nWhat the Goths lacked was naval technology. The Visigoths, for some reason, simply did not build ships on any notable scale. The Romans had a small navy to patrol trade routes, which could be called up to build a more substantial navy. This wasn't much, but it was better than anything the Goths could put together. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4j0nmo", "title": "Were anti-immigrant and anti-catholic sentiments essential to the temperance movement's successes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4j0nmo/were_antiimmigrant_and_anticatholic_sentiments/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d32tits", "d339lst"], "score": [19, 2], "text": ["Its hard to say if it was essential, but it certainly played a role. During the late 19th century and turn of the century there was a large influx of immigrants in to the cities of America while most people already here lived in rural areas ir s all towns. Saloons and alcoholism and thus abusive fathers/husbands had been a problem for a lot of the century already and so the protestants were already pushing against alcohol. However women and children weren't the ones in power so it was tough to gain enough support to make law changes happen. As the early 20th century went on the disdain for city folk (almost synonymous with foreigners/catholics at the time) grew for a variety of reasons and those people certainly drank a lot. This gave the men previously on the fence or against prohibition more reason to push for it and voilla. \rIn short, I don't think you can argue that an anti-immigrant/anti-catholic sentiment was the sole driving force behind prohibition. Especially considering many states had already experimented with their own prohibition laws. However it is fair to say that it largely contributed to the \"success\" of prohibiton on a national level.\rWhether you consider that essential is up to you.\r\rHistory of Alcohol Prohibition\r_URL_0_", "Answered here by the illustrious /u/descafeinado: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/nc/nc2a.htm"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34cof1/how_are_cigarettes_legal_in_the_usa_how_did/"]]}
{"q_id": "oilk1", "title": "What was the situation of the feudal system in Eastern Europe", "selftext": "Good morning,\nI am curently reading a Romanian book on Toponimics and the authors are of a communist education and thus, of a clearely malformed knowleadge upon History. I am interested in the feudal system of the XVII-th century and an objective analisys of the level of freedom of the slaves/peasants in Eastern Europe, and especially in Romania, subject which has been visibly malformed by the communist/socialist propaganda. \nIf anybody could be of any help concerning this, I would kindly appreciate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/oilk1/what_was_the_situation_of_the_feudal_system_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3hrv9x"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hah, the most surefire way to piss off a medievalist is to mention the word \"feudalism\". The economic systems of Europe varied enormously both through time and through place. Anyway.\n\nI'll admit I am not a Medievalist and know even less about southern Romania, but I know a bit about Transylvania. The problem with Transylvania is that the class system was very heavily bound up with ethnic and religious differences. The rulers were Hungarian Catholics, the lower classes were largely Romanian Orthodox. There were also free German cities and the Romani, who were treated like slaves and very often were slaves (people who despise \"gypsies\" need to study their history). The Romanian  peasant population was treated fairly badly--for example, they were not allowed to use stone or metal in any of their construction, which is where the gorgeous Romanian wooden architecture comes from.\n\nThis is the situation largely until the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately,it is still very difficult to find objective analysis of the tolerant and effective Ottoman administration. After that, the picture is likely complicated by the arrival of the Hapsburgs. This is also a simplified picture provided above. That being said, due to the effect of ethnic and religious differences life for a Romanian peasant in Transylvania was generally quite unpleasant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "198yvy", "title": "Were there bars in Egypt and/or Israel in the first century? ", "selftext": "Where did people hang out and socialize in Ancient Egypt and Israel? What did people do for fun?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/198yvy/were_there_bars_in_egypt_andor_israel_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8lxj8q", "c8lyb80", "cb9rv1y"], "score": [7, 3, 2], "text": ["What I know for sure is that there is a bar in the Epic of Gilgamesh two millenia earlier; Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, does drop by during his (vain) quest for immortality.\n\n > In the first light of dawn Gilgamesh cried out, 'I made you rest on a royal bed, you reclined on a couch at my left hand, the princes of the earth kissed your feet. I will cause all the people of Uruk to weep over you and raise the dirge of the dead. The joyful people will stoop with sorrow; and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.' The next day also, in the first light, Gilgamesh lamented; seven days and seven nights he wept for Enkidu, until the worm fastened on him. Only then he gave him up to the earth, for the Anunnaki, the judges, had seized him.\n\n > Then Gilgamesh issued a proclamation through the land, he summoned them all, the coppersmiths, the goldsmiths, the stone-workers, and commanded them, 'Make a statue of my friend.' The statue was fashioned with a great weight of lapis lazuli for the breast and of gold for the body. A table of hard-wood was set out, and on it a bowl of carnelian filled with honey, and a bowl of lapis lazuli filled with butter. These he exposed and offered to the Sun; and weeping he went away. \n\n > Bitterly Gilgamesh wept for his friend Enkidu; he wandered over the wilderness as a hunter, he roamed over the plains; in his bitterness he cried, 'How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead.  Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the Faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.\n\nAnd on his quest for Utnapishtim he does stop at *Siduri's* on the seashore:\n\n > She looked, and as she scanned the distance she said in her own heart, surely this is some felon; where is he going now? And she barred her gate against him with the cross-bar and shot home the bolt. But Gilgamesh, hearing the sound of the bolt, threw up his head and lodged his foot in the gate; he called to her, 'Young woman, maker of wine, why do you bolt your door; what did you see that made you bar your gate? I will break in your door and burst in your gate, for I am Gilgamesh who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven, I killed the watchman of the cedar forest, I overthrew Humbaba who lived in the forest, and I killed the lions in the passes of the mountain.\"\n\n > Then Siduri said to him, 'If you are that Gilgamesh who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven, who killed the watchman of the cedar forest, who overthrew Humbaba that lived in the forest, and killed the lions in the passes of the mountain, why are your cheeks so starved and why is your face so drawn? Why is despair in your heart and your face like the face of one who has made a long journey? Yes, why is your face burned from heat and cold, and why do you come here wandering over the pastures in search of the wind?\n\n > Gilgamesh answered her, 'And why should not my cheeks be starved and my face drawn? Despair is in my heart and my face is the face of one who has made a long journey, it was burned with heat and with cold. Why should I not wander over the pastures in search of the wind? My friend, my younger brother, he who hunted the wild ass of the wilderness and the panther of the plains, nay friend, my younger brother who seized and killed the Bull of Heaven and overthrew Humbaba in the cedar forest, my friend who was very dear to me and who endured dangers beside me, Enkidu my brother, whom I laved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept far him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death, because of my brother I stray through the wilderness and cannot rest. But now, young woman, maker of wine, since I have seen your face do not let me see the face of death which I dread so much.'\n\nher advice is to chill out and to enjoy all the little pleasures of mortal life\n\n > She answered, 'Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.' \n\n\nAs for the first century AD both Egypt and Israel were parts of Rome. D.k. about bars but they did have *taverns*, that word is theirs.", "Do you mean taverns and inns in general when you say bars?", "Jew (and Talmud studyer) here. There were absolutely inns and taverns around the first century, even before. I don't believe they were in the same vein as our modern \"Let's go out and get shitfaced\" bars, but they served 'chamar medinah' which translates to 'national fermented' i.e. the national drink of diluted wine. Water wasn't always safe to drink so wine and beer were prevalent at the time (up until the mid-1800s, actually) and places where travelers stayed were where one could have purchased a meal, and presumably a drink."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g0sokc", "title": "I'm part of the French nobility in the 1300's and I'm getting what we know today as the cold. Assuming I have the resources to get myself treated by a doctor, how would I go about doing that and what would my treatment be like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g0sokc/im_part_of_the_french_nobility_in_the_1300s_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnemzeq", "fneozt7"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Thank /u/mimicofmodes for the notice about the post, sorry for the delay!\n\nI'll make an assumption the French noble is of low/middle peerage, has their own fief and manor in the French countryside. \n\nThe bad news is a cold could become very serious and deadly. Limited medical knowledge, unknown and unsolved pre-existing conditions, exposure to hearth smoke, and no germ theory could lead to a high enough fever or pneumonia to be deadly. The other bad news you particularly chose the 1300s, so congratulations on freaking this noble out that he might be coming down the the plague in the latter half of the century. Although humans have always been able to live to 80 and beyond, harsher lifetimes and lack of medical knowledge routinely saw common illnesses prematurely ending lives even in a wealthy person's prime. Malnutrition and lack of sanitary, dry, and warm conditions were big factors in a minor illness today becoming a mortal one back then.\n\nThe good news is as a noble would be able to afford to stay on bed-rest, have better overall nutrition and able to eat well, and consistent access to warmth. The noble would also have access to 'healthcare', but being a noble on his fief, it's unlikely going to be a dedicated physician. While it is possible, it is just less common because physicians tended to be in cities, or traveling around curing ailments for pay. The more accessible healthcare would likely be the local learned clergy, abbot (from a monastery), or perhaps even a knightly order. There was also the possibility of hedge apothecaries, midwives, medicine folks, or even folk healers (aka witches). As standards of knowledge varied greatly, it is also entirely possible an abbot could be just was well practiced as a physician as a dedicated one was. On the contrary, the local abbot's solutions might be rudimentary or even counterproductive (bloodletting, leaching, odd folk remedies, extreme fasting) and prayer focused.\n\nOk, so to the actual question is the noble wants to be treated by a doctor. As I mentioned, there's unlikely to be a physician present. In which case, maybe they live close enough to one they can send a messenger to bring a physician in time. It could be a nearby city or perhaps the physician was known to be traveling. While they wait, they will be treated by the aforementioned professions. When it comes to a cold, it's entirely possible the physician wouldn't even know too much more than the locals. What a physician is likely to do is follow humorism and inspect any fluids they could (erroneously or not) which were yellow bile, phlegm, black bile, and blood. Basically anything the body could produce. Now with a cold, the physician is going to say hmmm...a lot of phlegm from the nose and a fever, and likely diagnose a cold. But again, there's only so much that can directly be done. You may have ready stories about royal physicians or Arab and Jewish physicians routinely going through an ill royal's fluids. \n\nGenerally, the type of ailment would often have treatment involved with the afflicted area. So a lung affliction might be treated with inhaling things, for better or worse. The effective or at least neutral treatments (I'll go less into the outright harmful ones mentioned above) would include:\n\nDiet control - although this could be damaging, there were thoughts to avoid foods that were difficult to digest or memorialized as beneficial or not by the theory of humors.\n\nContinuous source of warmth - which would be fire and blankets. The problem here is they may not always recognize due to the construction of the residence (wither it be a manor house or castle), that the smoke may *increase* difficulties. This would also include boiled then cooled to warm cloth to be placed on their head and face.\n\nApplication of oils and sacraments, burning incense, and prayer. This follows the more pre-miasma theory where the air could be considered to have become bad or afflicted with foul spirits. The incense and fire was believed to cleanse the air.\n\nThey may also be prescribed to actually bundle up and go outside if it was determined the air inside their quarters was to blame! The harmful part of this is, they could be recommended to do this with minimal or no clothing!\n\nSpecific instructions on bathing, which might include folk remedies (like adding a certain plant or burning a specific leaf).\n\nJust like in modern day, there's isn't a whole lot to do with a cold other than eat well, get rest, stay warm and dry. Failing any of those four could lead to death back then. \n\nFor example, even if you say this were similar to a cold - say a bacterial sinus infection, they had no antibiotics. The infection could progress and fever could kill the patient. However, again as it is a cold, they were likely to be prescribe to inhale steam, which could help! There are historian arguments wither or not nasal irrigation techniques were ever used in Europe, but the evidence is weak.\n\nSo as you have it, different healers would have different sources of why they are healing the way they do. A priest might lean a lot towards more religious infused miasma theory - keep the air clean. Or an abbot that has done a pilgrimage to the holy land and treated many sick might have very practical solutions with little pseudo-philosophical ideology behind it. However, then a physician might prescribe the correct treatments but may or may not be driven by looking to ancient classics - like Galen and Hippocrates. It could almost be like applying modern alternative and homeopathic techniques; basically at risk of being too academic in their own Humorism theories. However, a physician could also be pragmatic. Then there were your apothecaries and midwives who would know of local herbs and salves that might help with a fever or dry throat - basic symptoms.\n\nSometimes they might do the right things for the wrong reasons, and other times they may do the wrong things for what would be considered pseudo-scientific quackery today. \n\nThe Crusades: A History by Jonathan Riley-Smith (contains a few passages regarding disease and famine)\n\n_URL_1_ (Like most medieval physicians, I'll be referring to Galen and Hippocrates!)\n\nThe Black Death: The History and Legacy of the Middle Ages\u2019 Deadliest Plague\n\n_URL_0_ I honestly recommend reading through this then the related essays because it's from the Met and well sourced.", "The treatment of colds believe it or not is not all in all different from what people do today. People used teas and and nasal flushing to battle congestion and also used herbal gargles to aid with sore throats. \n\nThat being said as a French noble you would have access to resources inaccessible to others which would also aid in your recovery. You would likely have a much larger wardrobe and servants which meant you had the privilege of fresh clean clothes to change into should you get the sweats and a plethora of servants to aid you in daily activities that you could not manage on your own.\n\nThere was also superstitions regarding colds such as that the action of sneezing was forcing a piece of one's soul from its body. To combat this, the person sneezing covered their face and anyone in the immediate vicinity \"blessed them\". This is where we get the common tradition of saying \"bless you\" when you hear someone sneezing. By \"blessing\" them, you were in essence asking God to protect their souls. Other common superstitions included avoided cold air, which has a small amount of truth to it. Cold dry air can irritate the nasal passages more and can increase the symptoms of a cold. \n\n\"Bleeding\" or \"bloodletting\" and such was also used, but often proved mote detrimental to the patients health than effective. And this was a common treatment prescribed hy many physicians at the time. \n\n\nCastelow, Ellen. \u201cDisease in the Middle Ages.\u201d\u00a0Historic UK, Historic UK Ltd, _URL_1_.\n\n\nRider, Catherine. \u201cSixteenth-Century Remedies for the Common Cold.\u201d\u00a0The Recipes Project, 2 May 2014, _URL_0_.\n\n\nSimkin, John. \u201cMedical Treatment in the Middle Ages.\u201d\u00a0Spartacus Educational, Spartacus Educational, _URL_2_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medm/hd_medm.htm", "https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hippocrates-the-writings-of-hippocrates-and-galen"], ["recipes.hypotheses.org/3200", "www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Disease-in-Medieval-England/", "spartacus-educational.com/Medical_Treatment.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1gqy85", "title": "Islam in Japan", "selftext": "I was wondering if there were any interaction between the Japanese and the Islamic world. I know that Japan isolated itself from the rest of the world around the beginning of 1600's under the Tokugawa shogunate . I know also that the Chinese interacted with the Muslim world, as people like Zheng He were Muslim, and the Japanese interacted alot with the Chinese.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gqy85/islam_in_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["camwdm5"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is no documented evidence that there was ever a significant presence of Islam within Japan - very few Muslim traders ever reached Japan"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "379f1b", "title": "Did the Ptolemaic Greeks in Egypt intermarry with the native Egyptians or no?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/379f1b/did_the_ptolemaic_greeks_in_egypt_intermarry_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crktwsb"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think [this](_URL_0_) answer should be of use to you "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31t4y0/in_hbos_rome_the_actress_they_had_playing/"]]}
{"q_id": "1lvf1v", "title": "What happened to people whose jobs were eliminated as a result of the Industrial Revolution?", "selftext": "I'm interested in light of the impending automation of current jobs, like truck and taxi drivers eventually being replaced by computer controlled cars.  What happened last time?  Did people get retrained, or were they just screwed?  I assume that eventually new industries popped up and employed these people (or their kids), but how long did it take, and what kind of industries were they?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lvf1v/what_happened_to_people_whose_jobs_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc35phx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Given the lack of a social safety net, we can reasonably say of those who lost their jobs, either they were able to get another or not. Those who could not would have resorted to thievery to feed themselves, likely ending up doing forced labour in prison. Those who did successfully become reemployed would have had to work for decreased wages, due to the increase in competition due to larger supply of potential workers. Basic economics. It is possible that more business would have been started due to the decreased cost of employing people, overall bettering society, but this is where my knowledge of the issue breaks down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3srzws", "title": "At what point in history did radical Islam become a serious problem?", "selftext": "The Middle East during the Middle Ages seemed like a decent place during the Islamic Golden Age. What happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3srzws/at_what_point_in_history_did_radical_islam_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx04tbh", "cx0658v", "cx06iez", "cx0866d"], "score": [13, 75, 3, 15], "text": ["Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but as I understand it there is no scholarly consensus on the matter and there is a lot of discussion on the how and when of radical Islam. I don't think there was any one point where it became a problem, more like a series of events that took place that set up the situation we have today. Also, it is somewhat difficult to define what constitutes a \"serious problem\". After all there's a pretty big gap in time between the Islamic Golden Age and the modern version of radical Islam. I'll focus in on the current situation and attribute modern levels of violence, destruction, and deaths as what was meant by the term \"serious problem\".\n\nOne example is [The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism](_URL_0_) which argues in a broad general sense that the late 1960s point in time saw a shift from Arab nationalist/populist regimes and forces to Islamism. There are so many geo-socio-political causes for this shift, the oil boom of the 70s, the growing threat of Communism, and the rather arbitrary borders drawn after other conflicts last century, and especially the '67 conflict with Israel, all of which led to Islamism being seen as \"the answer\" to those problems. \n\nHistorically this area has always been in contention as it is important for trade and for buffer zones, and the modern era has seen the region used as a sort of theater for superpower proxy wars. There's just so many interests pulling in so many different directions that it's hard to pinpoint any one cause for conflict. It's no wonder that natives to the area are latching onto Islamism as a life raft as it's arguably seen as the only non-outside influence. \n", "There have always been radical individuals.  I mean, if we want to call the [Kharijites](_URL_0_) radicals, we can say almost since the beginning (they've recently come more into focus since [many have compared them to the Islamic State](_URL_7_)).  If we want to say that the original Arab raiders who conquered Arabia and ultimately all of what's today the Arab and Persian worlds were radicals, then we can say radicals have been part of Islam since the beginning.  (Incidentally, we can also talk about radical Christians and [radical Protestants](_URL_3_), [two](_URL_4_) since the beginning as well--I'm blanking on the name of the Christian group that tried to get themselves martyred, but Romans generally saw Christians as antinomian and, well, a problem).\n\nBut I suspect that's not what you're asking.  You're asking about modern \"jihadi terrorism\" and its relatives.  This is a much more recent phenomenon.  An example that I like to give is that Palestinian \"resistance\" to Israel was largely secular until the 1980's.  The Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920's and 1930's was of course instrumental in the riots and pogroms of the era, but that genealogy isn't very strongly connected to modern Islamic terrorism.  It was more a nationalist movement led by a religious leader, than a religious revivalist movement with violent elements.  By the 50's, 60's, and 70's, the Palestinian leadership infrastructure (Fatah, PFLP, DFLP) was clearly nationalist and vaguely secular socialists.  They committed acts of terrorism, certainly (the infamous [killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics](_URL_9_) was only one example of many), but it would be a mistake to see them as groups that saw themselves as inspired by Islam, groups that encourage piety (never mind demanded it), or groups that gave religious justifications for their violence.  In Palestine, those groups only emerged in the 1980's: Islamic Jihad in 1981, Hamas in 1987.  So in Israel, clearly, the answer is the 1980's.\n\nIn Lebanon, Hizbollah only emerged in the 1980's, and only in reaction to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon (though it gained power in part because it was support by Iran).  Iran was a secular state and, if you study the protests that ended up overthrowing the Shah, it's unclear that an Islamic movement is going to take over until very late in the Revolution.  Before that, the pious protestors were just one group of many in the protests.  Most modern Shi'a \"radical\" groups can be tied the Iranian regime's post-1979 support in some way (the Houthis, who are Zaydi rather Twelver, are an obvious exception--they didn't start receiving serious Iranian support until more recently).\n\nMost violent  modern Sunni groups that you may have heard of and \"threaten Western interests\" have a slightly older genealogy, but one only dating back to the mid-20th century.  The key group is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the key figure is [Sayyid Qutb](_URL_8_), who it should be pointed out was never even the Brotherhood's leader (some people call modern Jihadism \"[Qutbism](_URL_10_)\").  But the key thing to remember is that Qutb is a mid-20th century figure.  He urged a violent overthrow of the secular Egyptian state (and similar states led by \"hypocrites\", a key term for Qutb), and was ultimately caught and killed by the Egyptian State in 1966.  The Muslim Brotherhood was and is one of the most important civil society groups in the Arab World (Hamas is a descended of the Muslim Brotherhood as well).\n\nFor more on Qutb, Osama bin Laden, and the relationship between them and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (perhaps you've heard of \"Wahhabis\"), see my earlier explanation \"[What is the history of (modern) Islamic Extremism?](_URL_2_)\", particularly paragraph five (about Qutb) and paragraph six (a thin paragraph how Osama bin Laden helped bring Qutbism and Salafism together, but most people who support Al Qaeda don't actually quite believe in Salafism--for more on this, I strongly recommend Charles Kurzman's [*The Missing Martyrs*](_URL_5_)).\n\nBut while we saw radical Islamists, who wanted to instate shari'ah law (the Ottomans ruled by a mix of religious *shari'ah* and secular *kanun* for centuries), except in a few places like Egypt, they were generally marginal groups.  In Turkey, there was the tiny Tijani group defacing statues of Ataturk as idolatry (they were the first modern statuary in the country), but it never really went beyond that.\n\nThomas Hegghammer shows that modern, trans-nationalism jihadism didn't really get its start until the 1980's War in Afghanistan. Before this, what radicals there were were generally only interested in local fights.  This was fairly small, but it was still a couple of thousand fighters.  This is really where \"modern jihadism\" comes together.  It's no coincidence that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda really got their stats there (they later combined with some older, originally more domestically inclined groups already existent in the Arab world--most of these old Qutbist factions). Now, not all parts of Islam you'd call \"radical\" fit under the label of modern jihadism.  The Taliban, for instance, who were in post-war Afghanistan and allies of Osama bin Laden don't come from the same mold.  For more on this, see Charles Kurzman's very short and very readable article, \"[Bin Laden and Other Thoroughly Modern Muslims](_URL_6_)\" (in short, Kurzman argues that Bin Laden and his ilk are a modernist while the Taliban are traditionalists).\n\nSo, in sum, the second half of the 20th century is probably the best bet.  In Egypt and a few other places, you start to see Qutbists emerge and become a serious problem in the 50's, but in most places you don't see radical Islam \"becoming a serious problem\" until the last quarter of the 20th century.  You have the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the siege of Haram al-Sherif (and the subsequent tightening of Saudi Society) starting in 1979; you see the emergence of a variety of violent Islamist groups in the Levant in the 80's; you see the first big Islamist attack on the U.S. [in 1983](_URL_1_) (this was by a Shi'a group) followed by more sustained attacks on the U.S. interests in the 1990's by al Qaeda and al Qaeda-type groups (1993 the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000); you have important ideologies (Qutbism+Salafism+importance of attacking outside groups, rather than domestic \"hypocrites\") coming together in Afghanistan, as well as important networks (preachers+fighters+fund raisers) in the 1980's as well.  \n\nIn short, as Charles Kurzman says, the kind of radical Islam I believe you're asking about is a thoroughly modern problem.", "The problem with modern radical Islam is that it didn't appear out of nowhere. I would argue that radical Islam began in the early 20th century with persons like Abu A'la Maududi, Hasan al-Banna (the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) and then, a little bit later on Sayyid Qtub. \n\nI want recommend you Emmanuel Sivan's \"Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics\". It's a really good and well-written book tracing the origins of \"modern\" radical Islam. I put modern in quotation marks since the book was published in 1985 and therefore cannot adress anything that happened past that year. Sivan argues that radical Islam did emerge as a reaction to modernity and that radical Islam basically is fighting against modernity.\n\n\nSivan's main argument for the emergence of radical Islam is that after the Arabic/Islamic world became  independent from Western colonialism modernity did not deliver in the way it did in the Western world. Expectations of catching up economically and in terms of standard of living were not met and at the same time, as a result of mass media, popular culture, and education Islam became virtually absent in society. As a result disappointed young men turned towards radical thinkers like Maududi or al-Banna.\n\nIf we look at the main concern of the early thinkers the main concern, which is nationalism, becomes clear. Maududi coined the term \"Modern Jahiliyyah\". Jahiliyyah means \"pre-Islamic ignorance\" and describes the state of being before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century. He argues that the modern Islamic world has reverted into Jahiliyyah because the Shari'a as the godly order was replaced by constitutions and laws, inspired by the West. \n\nMaududi's thoughts about modern Jahiliyyah are picked up by Sayyid Qtub in the early 60s in his book Signposts along the road (Ma'alim fi al-Tariq). Qtub argues that the Sharia has to be brought back as the only kind of order. He further argues that the fight against Arab nations would be Jihad. In theory Islam forbids inter-Islamic warfare. But Qtub brings in Ibn Taymiyyah, a medieval Islamic theologist and scholar who issued several fatwas against the invading Mongols around 1400. Qtub, and later Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj (he was part of the group that assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 and wrote their ideological base \"The neglected duty\"), argue that the modern rulers of the Islamic world are no Muslims but apostates because they do not rule according to the Sharia but rather according to manmade laws. Since they are apostates they are no longer Muslims and therefore it is the duty of every Muslim to fight and wage Jihad against their unjust rule (the neglected duty Faraj is talking of is Jihad). They rely heavily on Ibn Taymiyyah's so-called Mardin fatwa which, as far as they understood it, justified fighting against the invading Mongols even though they had converted to Islam. What they did not know and only came to light in 2010 is that at some point an error occured while copying the Mardin fatwa. The orignial version was forgotten and the version with the error was distributed. \n\nThe version that was used by Qtub and Faraj ends like this: \u201c\u2026while the non-Muslims living there outside of the authority of Islamic Law should be fought as is their due.\u201d \n\nThe correct version is as follows: \u201cThe Muslims living therein should be treated according to their rights as Muslims, while the non-Muslims living there outside of the authority of Islamic Law should be treated according to their rights.\u201d\n\nThere was a conference in 2010 where the Mardin fatwa was discussed and this came to light/was made public. The following link leads to a short paper in which this is discussed and you can find the full text of the fatwa in English translation: _URL_0_\n\n\nComing back to Qtub. His usage of Ibn Taymiyyah, argument that the modern rulers should be treated as non-Muslims and his justification became one of the most important pillars of modern radical Islam and hugely influenced groups like Al Qaeda.\n\n\nAlso very important to note is that almost all of the ideologists of modern radical Islam were self-taught and did not have a formal religious education. Maududi started as a journalist, Qtub was a teacher and author, Faraj was an engineer. Hasan al-Banna was a teacher as well as an Imam and was learned in his local mosque. \n\nComing to some reading recommendations:\nAs already mentioned:  \nSivan Emmanuel, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics\n\n\nAlso very interesting: Keppel, Gilles, The Roots of Radical Islam\n\n\nOn the topic of Ibn Taymiyyah: Yahya Michot, Muslims Under non-Muslim Rule\n\n\nI would also recommend having a look at Qtub's Signposts as well as Faraj's The neglected Duty. Both are pretty short and give a great insight in the thinking of these radicals. Even without being knowledable in Islam one can recognize the flaws in their thinking and sense their hate and resentment. You can find them without problems via Google in English translation.\n\nI hope this post answers at least some part of your question.\n", "**Warning: long answer!**\n\nSo before I get into this, because I do have some historical examples that you might find interesting, I do feel compelled to at least touch on the definitional issues involved in your question particularly around the words \"radical,\" \"Islam,\" and \"problem.\" The issue isn't so much that these words are subjective, because historians make relative subjective judgements all the time, it's that they have very different meanings based on time and place and that these meanings have only a limited relationship to one another.\n\nTo avoid spoiling some of the examples I'll discuss below imagine if we were to ask \"at what point in history did radical Christianity become a serious problem?\" If you're the Romans in 50 AD you can plausibly say \"from the start!\" but the challenge of a radical fanatic (from the Roman perspective) like Jesus Christ is different and poses different kinds of problems than the radical Christianity of the Crusaders. That in turn poses a different problem than John Calvin. They also have very little to do with one another! So even though different peoples at different times might have perceived a problem with some particular group of radical Christians these groups may not have had any ideological kinship whatsoever. Calvin may have embraced the early Church, in rejection of the Crusaders, but Christ may not have recognized the violence of the Calvinists. That sort of thing.\n\nThere's at least two solutions to this problem. One is to get way more specific with the kind of phrasing you use. So you're question might instead read something \"What are the intellectual and historical origins of the late 20th century violent Sunni Jihadist movement, particularly Al-Qaeda?\"\n\nI'll touch on that one specifically, but I don't think that's quite as fun as just discussing some of the more interesting \"radical\" groups throughout Islamic history, just as I'm sure some people in this sub might have fun talking Anabaptists or the Taiping as interesting examples in Christian history.\n\nFeel free to ask about any particular example that strikes your fancy as being interesting:\n\nSo let's begin!\n\n**Islam under Muhammad**\n\nEssentially from the start Islam was a challenging religion to the people of Arabia that posed a serious problem to the established order. Even though Muhammad was a member of the most powerful tribe in Mecca, Quraysh, it was made clear to him that his preaching was not welcome and so he was more or less forced to flee to Medina, helped along by an invitation from that city for Muhammad to mediate their own political disputes and, as a result, to effectively become the leader of their community.\n\nWhile Islam has connections with a number of religious traditions and customs that would have been familiar in Arabia-- certain aspects of pagan ritual, Jewish dietary law, Christian figures, etc. -- it nonetheless demanded quite radical changes in society and was, more or less from the start, involved in violence with neighboring communities for one reason or another.\n\n**The Conquests**\n\nAfter Muhammad's death was when the true expansion of his state began. By the middle of the 7th century the Arabs had smashed two of the largest and oldest empires on the planet.\n\nThis is actually the one example that I might push back against. Gibbon, writing in the 18th century, felt comfortable describing these conquests as Islamic and headed by religious fanatics who basically out of sheer religious fury were able to conquer these lands. The past century or so of scholarship has really cast doubt on that idea.\n\nThe Arabs were unified by Islam but were not uniformly Islamic, they don't seem to have been viewed as being particularly outrageous in their religion, and the conquests, considering their scale, weren't particularly brutal. Some have gone so far as to say that certain disaffected Christian groups may have actually welcomed their Islamic conquerors as a more tolerant alternative to the Orthodox Roman Church. I think that's not at all supported in the contemporary evidence but the point stands that this was not viewed as being religiously all that unusual.\n\n**The Kharijites**\n\nThe fourth succession to Muhammad has caused arguably some of the greatest debates in the religion. Muhammad's nephew and son and in law Ali, according to his supporters, was supposed to have been the first and primary successor to Muhammad but had to settle for being the fourth of the rightly guided caliphs. A cousin of his predecessor Uthman disputed this and the result was the First Fitna, a sort of Islamic civil war.\n\nWhen the two sides met in battle Ali decided that he actually wanted to settle the dispute by arbitration, but many of his supporters rejected this as blasphemy or heresy. Ali's refusal to determine the divine will by combat, thus proving that he was the chosen successor of God's messenger, was beyond the pale and as a result they \"went out\" from his camp, or in Arabic verb \"kharaja\" to go out, thus Kharajites.\n\nAli defeated most of this group at a later battle, but he was eventually murdered by a Kharajite. Ever since the title has been applied to a number of groups, usually by their detractors, which have only a tenuous relationship to one another but do, in that description, often have several things in common.\n\nOne notable commonality between historical Kharajite groups has been their willingness to declare what they few as not being valid Islam and a willingness to kill accordingly. The Azraqites are one notable example of this who went so far as to say that failing to actively join them in their beliefs was itself a mark of unbelief and rendered all others lawful to kill.\n\nAs W. Montgomery Watt writes: \"From the first the militant Kharijites had engaged in the practice of *isti'rad* [NB: lit. exclusion], that is, the killing of those, even Muslims, who did not accept all their views. Their justification for this was that such persons, although professing Islam, were not really Muslims....The Azraqites...went a step further. To be a true Muslim in their eyes it was necessary not merely to hold the beliefs they held but also to go out [NB: there's \"kharaja\" again] to their camp in the mountains. To 'sit still' at home was a mark of unbelief. Moreover, since the 'unbelievers' thus defined were the enemies of the 'Muslims', the Azraqites believed it lawful to kill them and enslave their children.\"\n\nI think you can see from the above why some contemporary observers of radical Islamic movements in our own time have drawn connections and used some of the same terminology to describe modern groups. Nonetheless, the only practicing group of Muslims that actually has any direct connection with the historical Kharijites are the Ibadi muslims of modern Oman. In our own times Ibadi Muslims are a sect that is regarded as having some of the least affinity for radical extremist violence. \n\nThis kind of historical irony also applies to the latter day existence of my next example the...\n\n**Assassins**\n\nLet me preface this by saying that the Assassins are kind of a specialist topic insofar as they draw a huge amount of attention as you might imagine, so there's a huge amount written about them of which I have read very, very, very little. I am not an Assassins expert, just as I am not a Crusades expert.\n\nThat being said-- the Assassins were a militant order of a particular branch of Shia Islam (i.e. that traced the descent of its leadership back to Ali) that actually at one time in predecessor sect ruled Egypt as the Fatimid Caliphs. The Assassins were ruled by the descendants of Nizar who was basically deprived of the throne and then fled Egypt.\n\nTo cut a long story short, the Assassins, who had an interesting power structure, basically set themselves up in independent castles across Syria and parts of Persia and, most famously, seem to have conducted political assassinations.\n\nThe most famous such assassination was the killing of Nizam al-Mulk, longtime vizier of the Sunni Seljuk Turks and therefore probably one of the most powerful men in the world at the time. As an aside to your question on the Islamic Golden Age, Nizam al-Mulk was also critical in that Golden Age as he tried to promote a kind of religious tolerance as well as making huge educational reforms that massively expanded the number of very-nearly-university-esque educational institutions in Islamdom, the eponymous \"Nizamiyya\".\n\nThe Assassins were nearly wiped out by the Mongols, but as I mentioned their latter day history is perhaps a bit unexpected because the ultimate lineal descendants of the Nizari Shia \"Assassins\" are the modern followers of the Aga Khan, who basically spends his days promoting peace and education and whose sect of some 15-25 million people promotes reason, pluralism and social justice as cornerstones of their faith and have no contemporary or recent historical violent movements that I'm aware of.\n\nedit: to be continued!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=VLjHZT3HC1MC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=the+rise+of+islamic+fundamentalism&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CCgQ6AEwAmoVChMI_pOPwcWQyQIVC9FjCh3lHA4O#v=onepage&amp;q=the%20rise%20of%20islamic%20fundamentalism&amp;f=false"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khawarij", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ryeph/what_is_the_history_of_modern_islamic_extremism/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Peasants%27_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M\u00fcnster_Rebellion", "https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-missing-martyrs-9780199766871?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;#", "http://www.asanet.org/images/members/docs/pdf/featured/kurzman.pdf", "http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/01/islamic-state-kjarijites-continuation.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qutbism"], ["http://muslimmatters.org/2010/06/29/the-mardin-conference-%E2%80%93-a-detailed-account/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3fiecx", "title": "What was life like for the Tlaxcalans after the Spanish conquest?", "selftext": "Since their contribution was crucial to defeat the Aztecs, did the Spanish respect them more?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fiecx/what_was_life_like_for_the_tlaxcalans_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctpcilk"], "score": [9], "text": ["The Tlaxcala received some special rights under Spanish rule that other peoples did not enjoy. They were promised not to have their lands seized, nor to be taxed by Cortez, both of which were at first respected. The Tlaxcalans also aided the Spanish in their conquest of other states, including in the Mixtec Rebellion (1540-41) and the Chichimeca War (1550-90), which they afterwards helped settle. \n\nThese rights were extended after 1585, when Diego Munoz Camargo's Historia de Tlaxcala was shown to the Spanish king Philip II. The book detailed the history of Tlaxcala with rich illustrations, especially focusing on post-colonial history. The purpose was at least in part to make the Tlaxcalans appear better in the eyes of the Spanish - Spanish-Tlaxcala conflicts were downplayed or ignored, Spanish conflicts with other states were overstated and the Tlaxcalans were portrayed as being more enthusiastic about Christianity than they were when they first encountered it. It is also a valuable historical document that portrays Tlaxcalan history, customs and culture though.\n\nIn 1591, Tlaxcala settlers were granted further rights, so they could be used to peacefully colonize other tribes, by having them settle among them, thus allowing them to be introduced to a peaceful, agricultural, Christian lifestyle. These settlers gained some special rights, such as being exempted from Spanish taxes, getting control of various Chichimeca resources, property rights of the land seized from the Chichimeca and being allowed to ride on horseback and use guns. These Tlaxcalan settlers settled among other places along the Rio Grande.\n\nIt worked, at least for a while, though later the Spanish Crown extended control over the New World in an effort to squeeze more profit out of it. The Tlaxcalan special rights were gradually eroded.\n\nThe Tlaxcalans were not immune to smallpox and other epidemics either. Combined with emigrations and the construction of a canal to drain the valley of Mexico, the city state of Tlaxcala was almost wiped out - according to a 1625 document the population had declined from 300.000 in the sixteenth century to a mere 700 then.\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/jan2003.html", "http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/tlaxcala.html", "http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14747c.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3c0tva", "title": "Was there any backlash from religious communities when the U.S. Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) which included the phrase \"the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion\"?", "selftext": "I was surprised it was unanimous. Was this not contentious at the time?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c0tva/was_there_any_backlash_from_religious_communities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csrhyqa", "csrkd7l"], "score": [17, 11], "text": ["followup q: how would that clause have been read at the time? would it have simply been denying that there was a national church? ", "How did the Muslim Barbary states react to that statement by the US Government?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xca24", "title": "Was Russia a net exporter of grain before communism? If so, what was their system of production like and how did it differ from the Soviet years?", "selftext": "Title says it all.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xca24/was_russia_a_net_exporter_of_grain_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfa1raf", "cfa1t4a"], "score": [5, 6], "text": ["Russia was an exporter of grain but unlike other nations like America it did so at the cost of its people. Since grain was used similar to Iran's oil barter system currently in use i.e. it would send grain in return for machinery or other products. \n\nThe way it worked was pretty much serfdom with the Tsar taking a tithe of the grain produced by a serf every year. This however often ended in the serfs not having enough food and starving over over the winter months.\n\nThe communists maintained the same system (but had abolished and reinstated it for different reasons). Initially abolishing the system as part of their promises on the rise to power, Lenin discovered that Russia literally had nothing else with which to trade for the tool and machines he needed to industrialize Russia. Combined with the civil war where armies were starving on the field, he re-instated the system with the standing order that anyone who resisted would be shot. \n\nThe new system was much worse since unlike the Tsar who would take a set percentage the communists would take anything they wanted, often leaving families with nothing at all. Which led to the rise of the Green Armies which fought both the Whites and the communists during the civil war.\n\nAfter the civil war the farm system changed from the serfs to one of community management where the farmers would work community land for grain to send to the centralized collection which would then distribute it where it was needed. However unlike earlier the farmers were allowed to keep a small plot of land for themselves to grow what they wanted. \n\nA little side-not, around 30-50% of all produce during this period was in those tiny plots despite them being a fraction of the much larger fields they were meant to be working on. \n\nIm not sure what happened post Stalinist era however so I'll leave that to someone else.", "Russia did indeed export grain before communism. In fact Russian grain exports were considered important to the earlier industrializing powers of Western Europe, and Russian attempts during the 18th and 19th centuries to gain trading access to these markets occasionally became international issues (such as Russian access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean).\n\nRussia's agricultural economy was based in serfdom far later than most other European countries, only ending in the 1860s. After this labor was little better, and was often performed for absentee landlords increasingly looking to international markets. The collectivization of agriculture during the early Soviet era created large, and much more efficient farms. Agricultural reforms that had taken hold in the 19th century in western Europe were quickly (and often brutally) implemented in Russia and the Ukraine particularly. While Russia modernized quickly in the 1920s and 30s, atrocities like the Holodomor (the mass starvation of Ukrainians by Stalin) would later lead to some Communist westerners (such as Hannah Arendt) to condemn him as a totalitarian nearly on par with Hitler.\n\nFor further info, check out Gildea's *Barricades and Borders* for a history of 19th century Russia and the international importance of its grain exports, and Arendt's controversial (at the time) *The Origins of Totalitarianism* for a comparative overview with Stalin's practices."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3pcarg", "title": "How familiar would contemporary audiences be with the basis of Shakespeare's history plays?", "selftext": "Given the general standard of education in England at the time, would the average person be familiar with the tales of Richard II, Henry VI etc? Seeing as this is English history would it just be common knowledge? \n\nSame with Julius Caesar and Antony  &  Cleopatra, was classical history widely known?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pcarg/how_familiar_would_contemporary_audiences_be_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw55dct", "cw57s2p", "cw5todf"], "score": [8, 30, 2], "text": ["Follow-up question: What kind of people would have seen Shakespeare's plays in the late 16th/early 17th century? I've read claims that they were the \"soap operas of the day\" but did they actually have a mass audience? And were the plays performed outside London, or even England?", "Let's examine the recentness of (and public familiarity with) the English History Plays first.\n\nFor the sake of perspective, let's say that it's Friday, the 28th of June, 1613 and you just bought admission to see *Henry VIII* in its second-to-last performance at the Globe Theatre.  At some point in the show, a cannon will be fired backstage and the audience will jump and cheer at the awesome special effects.  So if you brought a drink, finish it early.  During tomorrow's show, that cannon will misfire and burn the legendary \"Wooden O\" to the ground.\n\nIf you were an English native, you knew the story of Henry VIII (or at least the official Tudor/Stuart approved version) pretty well going in.  Even if you were an uneducated and illiterate person who could barely afford the ticket, you could probably summarize the most important plot points if asked.  The stories of Henry VIII and Shakespeare's other English kings would have been *the* central part of your country's cultural narrative as you received it.\n\nSo how far removed in time would you be from the events you are about to see portrayed on stage?\n\nHenry's coronation happened in 1509 (104 years before the \"present\" in 1613).  It would have felt like reflecting on the events of 1909 from today.  It's conceivable that your great grandparents would have been Henry's subjects.\n\nLet's say this imaginary you is a long-time Shakespeare fan  &  saw several of the English History Plays in their original run.  How distant in the past were they?  I'll use the following format:\n\n*Title of the play*, year debuted (~years since actual events) [2015 perspective]\n\n**NOTE: Precise dates of some first performances remain debatable.**\n\n*Richard II*, premiered 1595 (~218 years since events) [like looking back to 1797]\n\n*Henry IV Parts 1  &  2*, 1597 (~198 years) [1817]\n\n*Henry V*, 1598 (~185 years) [1830]\n\n*Henry VI Parts 1, 2,  &  3*, 1591 (~162 years) [1853]\n\n*Richard III*, 1592 (~109 years) [1906]\n\nSo while the events of the English History Plays had passed out of *living* memory, they would not be very far removed from *cultural* memory.\n\nBut what about Caesar?  The story was widely known and taught, though not as extensively studied as the local history.  If this imaginary you was formally educated as a child, you would have learned the tale in school.  Shakespeare's *Julius Caesar* premiered in 1599, 1,643 years after the events depicted in the play.\n\nPlutarch\u2019s *Lives of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus* was translated into english in 1597 by Thomas North.  It was a very popular seller and is widely believed (almost certain) to have been used by Shakespeare as a source while writing *Caesar*.  Books were expensive in the late 1500s, but if you were an educated person of privilege you could have purchased a copy and read it before seeing the premiere.", "The schools of the time didn't cover English history (nor English grammar, either), and in fact the English theatrical industry was given a big shot in the arm when Elizabeth I came to power and used the theatre for propaganda to engender a sense of Englishness in the people to unify the country by giving them a patriotic, pro-Tudor version of English history, while at the same time luring them away from Catholicism and toward the state church. The theatre had been traditionally used by the Catholic church to entertain and edify the population, but Elizabeth outlawed religious playing and secularized the playing companies and made them answerable to the crown by requiring that they be sponsored by aristocrats. Along with censorship of the press and stage, that ensured that subversive ideas were prevented from being spread amongst the population (which was often circumvented by clever playwrights by writing allegorically). So to answer your question, the average person would not have known English history except by traditions and hearsay, since every area of the country was owned by aristocrats who had allegiance to the crown and who were required to provide soldiers from his area for the wars of the crown. Churches also educated the populace to an extent by providing moral support for the wars and by being the repositories of elaborate tombs of the illustrious inhabitants of the area.\n\nClassical history was most often learned by the study of Latin in both grammar schools and universities. Grammar school attendance and literacy increased greatly during the Early Modern era as the bourgeois class and the government expanded hand-in-hand, but I don't think it could be said that the average person was literate. Only about 20% of the males and 5% of the females of the time could sign their names, which is a rough indicator of literacy. However, many people could read without knowing how to write, but it is doubtful that even half the population could. See David Cressy's *Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England* (1980)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "wa6z7", "title": "What was the process new world foods went through in the transition from \"exotic\" to \"traditional\"?", "selftext": "Ever since I learned that maize and tomatoes and other such foods came from the \"new world' originally, I have been a bit uneasy about this notion of \"traditional $REGION/$ETHNICITY food\", that includes peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and the like. I understand that in 500 years traditions can be formed and deeply rooted, so it isn't that part that really bothers me.\n\nI am more curious about what cuisine was common prior to 1492, and how new world foods became adopted into various traditions. I recently read [1493](_URL_0_) and feel I'm starting to get a grasp on why some foods were rapidly adopted, however the book doesn't talk about the generations of people doing the adopting.\n\nSo my question is: How did people react to the new foods, did they quickly and readily welcome the new foods? Did they slowly adopt them as availability filtered down through social classes? Was there resistance because \"the old ways are better\"? How did they become so welcome and widespread that they went from \"new world foods\" to \"food\" to \"traditional\"?\n\n**Edit:** The book I referenced does talk a little about this question, but not at the depth I was hoping.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wa6z7/what_was_the_process_new_world_foods_went_through/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bnpou"], "score": [4], "text": ["The question is not in line with my expertise, but I can give you a few examples and a recommendation about traditions.\n\nFirst, a paste from [this site](_URL_1_) of what I believe is a myth, though not presented as such on a link:\n\n > Frederick the Great of Prussia saw the potato's potential to help feed his nation and lower the price of bread, but faced the challenge of overcoming the people's prejudice against the plant. When he issued a 1774 order for his subjects to grow potatoes as protection against famine, the town of Kolberg replied: \"The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?\" Trying a less direct approach to encourage his subjects to begin planting potatoes, Frederick used a bit of reverse psychology: he planted a royal field of potato plants and stationed a heavy guard to protect this field from thieves. Nearby peasants naturally assumed that anything worth guarding was worth stealing, and so snuck into the field and snatched the plants for their home gardens. Of course, this was entirely in line with Frederick's wishes.\n\nThere is more on potato there, but I didn't read it all, I was just googleing for that story. Like all great myths it has an element of truth and I am somewhat familiar with the introduction of potato to Hapsburg military frontier in the 18th century.\n\nAs in the story, peasants were reluctant to start planting potatoes. However, I would not put it so much to superstition but to the rational conservatism. Without much of a safety net, taking a risk with a new plant is to gamble an entire livelihood, risk poverty, hunger and even starvation, for oneself and his family. So, naturally most people would rather stick with lower productivity but safe plants.\n\nFor Hapsburgs, military frontier was significant in introduction of potato (and corn, I believe), because unlike with either free peasants or with serfs, there was a mechanism of enforcement. So, military authorities obliged growing of potatoes on certain parts of land, until it spread by its own virtues. \n\nAs for traditions, while not dealing with food as such, you might check a classic collection [The Invention of Tradition, edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger](_URL_0_). 500 years is almost an order of magnitude longer than it takes a tradition to form and seem almost ancient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307265722"], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.hr/books/about/The_Invention_of_Tradition.html?id=sfvnNdVY3KIC&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://www.history-magazine.com/potato.html"]]}
{"q_id": "43fxlt", "title": "After the acquisition of Alaska, was there ever a serious political push to link Alaska with the 'mainland' USA?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43fxlt/after_the_acquisition_of_alaska_was_there_ever_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czhxxrj", "czhyk2r"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I responded to [a similar question a few months ago](_URL_0_). I've copy-pasted that reply below, and I'll expound a bit in a subsequent comment.\n\n > There *was* a push, but it didn't happen because of **Canadian Confederation**, the **settlement of the Alabama claims** and **divided American politics**.\n\n > One of the most frequently cited papers on this topic is David Shi's 1978 work, \"Seward's Attempt to Annex British Columbia, 1865-1869\" which was published in *Pacific Historical Review*. You can also refer to Richard Neunherz's \"Hemmed In: Reactions in British Columbia to the Purchase of Russian America,\" which appeared in the July 1989 issue of *Pacific Northwest Quarterly* and Donald Warner's 1960 book, *The Idea of Continental Union: Agitation for the Annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849-1893.*\n\n > The key things to understand are that at the time of the Alaska Purchase, there was a widespread belief that the United States would attempt to acquire \"British Oregon\" through purchase or force. In 1860, Eduard de Stoeckl, Russian minister to Washington, D.C., wrote that if Russia sold Alaska to the United States, \"British Oregon would be crowded on the northern side and on the southern side by the Americans and would escape with difficulty from their aggressions.\"\n\n > America was very much expansionist in the years after the American Civil War. William Henry Seward, the Secretary of State, was a proponent of the Manifest Destiny ideal, but he supported the idea of purchase rather than conquest. You know about the Alaska Purchase, but Seward also explored the idea of buying Greenland, Iceland, and various Caribbean islands (most notably the Danish Virgin Islands).\n\n > At the time, however, the U.S. government was riven by a gaping divide between the two wings of the Republican Party. The Radical Republican wing, largely a product of the 1864 U.S. election, took a hard line on postwar reconstruction, and it viewed President Andrew Johnson's approach as much too moderate. This divide was so great that it [led to Johnson's impeachment in 1867](_URL_1_).\n\n > This was happening at the same time that Seward was attempting to push his imperialist ambitions, and the Radical Republican distaste for Johnson extended to the rest of his administration. Thus, Seward's attempts were foiled by internal dissent. Only the purchase of Alaska, aided by Russia's eagerness to sell and the application of liberal bribery, passed the U.S. Congress. \n\n > At the time of the Alaska Purchase, most Americans were in favor of Seward's ambitions. A survey of American newspapers at the time of the Purchase reveals that 45 percent of editorials on the Purchase also included the belief that the United States should acquire British Columbia as a bridge to its new possession. All but a handful of the editorials (and those in the most rabid Radical Republican newspapers) viewed the Alaska Purchase positively.\n\n > Debates in the U.S. House of Representatives, the topic of annexing British Columbia repeatedly came up during talks about the Alaska Purchase. 13 of the 31 addresses on the Purchase referenced its effects British Columbia, and several speakers said the Purchase would speed annexation of British Columbia.\n\n > In the immediate postwar years, the United States was also engaged in negotiations with Great Britain over the *Alabama* claims. During the American Civil War, Great Britain had sold or manufactured a series of commerce raiders that the Confederate Navy used with great success, destroying American shipping around the world \u2500 from the waters off the U.K. to the South Pacific and even the Arctic Ocean.\n\n > In early 1867, there were indications that Britain was prepared to pay the United States to settle claims that it bore responsibility for the destruction of these American ships. Seward pressed for more, however, claiming in his letters that Britain's recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent extended the war. That would have opened the door to massive indirect claims.\n\n > In 1866, the *New York Times* quoted a government report that proffered the idea that Britain \u2500 instead of paying the United States to settle the *Alabama* claims \u2500 might instead give the United States territory worth the amount of the claims. \"If Great Britain desires to propitiate this country,\" the report stated, \"would it not be her true policy to cede to us a portion of her remote territories, valuable to us, but of little value to her? Were she to cede us Vancouver's Island and British Columbia ... might she not easily bring our claims to a peaceful solution?\"\n\n > In the colony itself, people were divided. British Columbia was in a recession at the time of the Alaska Purchase \u2500 its economy was down, people were emigrating, and the government was an undemocratic farce. In an era when border controls were almost nonexistent, plenty of Americans lived in British Columbia, and there was also a sharp divided between the Vancouver Island residents and the mainlanders. Until just a few years before, they had been separate colonies.\n\n > Of the six major newspapers in British Columbia, three endorsed annexation by the United States. All were on Vancouver Island. Mainland publications largely rejected the idea. The *Victoria News* stated that a transfer to the United States \"would be received by a majority ... of every nationality, with ... unmingled satisfaction ... if not loud demonstrations of joy.\"\n\n > The *Times-Colonist* reported that talk of annexation was \"heard at every street corner,\" but the newspaper itself said it remained in favor of Canadian confederation rather than annexation.\n\n > A petition began circulating in favor of American annexation, but it turned into a fizzle as the summer of 1867 continued. Opponents of annexation argued successfully (if not truthfully) that the annexation movement was being funded by \"outside money\" and didn't truly represent the colony's inhabitants.\n\n > Nevertheless, U.S. Army officers visited British Columbia in the fall and turned in a report that said two-thirds of the colony was in favor of annexation. The report contained so much detail that it could only have been constructed in close consultation with higher-ups in the colony, even if it didn't mention those higher-ups by name. The officers found annexation talk everywhere: \"It did not become necessary in a single instance to broach the subject of the cession of that territory to the United States, for it was the constant theme of conversation \u2500 obtruded upon us everywhere, and upon nearly all occasions when we came in contact with the people, either officials or citizens.\"\n\n > In the end, however, all this furor and planning amounted to nothing. Canadian confederation in the same year as the Alaska Purchase generated enough local opposition to annexation that it never happened locally. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson hamstringed Seward's expansion efforts, and the election of Ulysses S. Grant replaced Seward in 1868 with Hamilton Fish. Three years after he took office, Fish settled the *Alabama* claims with an international arbitration tribunal that awarded the United States $15.5 million.", "After the settlement of the Alaska Boundary Dispute secured the Alaska-Canada border, there was much less of a notion to expand the borders of the United States at the expense of Canada. In place of that idea were a series of plans to establish overland transportation links between the 48 states and Alaska. During the Klondike Gold Rush, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of vessels wrecked while traveling the Inside Passage. Those who attempted to travel overland had to endure months of incomprehensibly difficult travel and impossible conditions.\n\nBetween 1897 and 1935, there were many railway and roadway plans floated by northern promoters. These never went anywhere \u2500 reluctant bankers and reluctant politicians doubted their economic and engineering feasibility, and so none were ever built. In the 1930s, attitudes began to change. In the United States, infrastructure construction was on the upswing, courtesy of a surge in federal spending. The growing threat of Japan, and continued high gold prices encouraged a new surge of serious interest. Plans were drawn up, but the Canadian and American provincial and federal governments were reluctant to pay for the project.\n\nThat changed with the outbreak of World War II. With Japan on the advance in 1941 and early 1942, it seemed possible that Japan's naval superiority could result in Alaska's coastal supply routes being cut off. An overland route, it was thought, would be less vulnerable to attack and thus important to the war effort. In hindsight, this was wrong, but with political pressure from military authorities added to that of Northern politicians, the road was funded and built, serving as a physical link between Alaska and the Lower 48."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jmbta/why_wasnt_there_a_stronger_attempt_to_connect/", "http://www.nps.gov/anjo/learn/historyculture/impeachment.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "1lolok", "title": "How much of a negative impact did the aristocracy have on military leadership?", "selftext": "My question is primarily about the British army pre WW1, as I know that before modern times high ranking military positions were heavily filled by landed title holders.  Was it 'easy' to rise up to the top of the military as a commoner who showed exceptional ability?  Did the British (or anyone else) suffer humiliating defeats against a more professional leadership?  Did any of these aristocratic men have a large amount of success, and was there social pressure to be a good general? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lolok/how_much_of_a_negative_impact_did_the_aristocracy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1cco0"], "score": [3], "text": ["I asked a question about this, and got a great answer. [Here's the thread](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13ac6b/question_about_the_sale_of_commissions/"]]}
{"q_id": "7vknzr", "title": "What's the truth about the Battle of Kursk?", "selftext": "This was obviously a very important battle during World War Two after which Germany lost the initiative in the Eastern front. However I'm still a little unclear as to what exactly happened during this battle. According to the Soviets this was a massive victory with the Germans losing hundreds of tanks but according to the Germans they permanently lost only a few dozen tanks with many damaged tanks being recoverable and inflicted horrendous losses on the Soviet tank forces in turn. Only the Allied landings at Sicily prevented turning their tactical victory to a strategic one. At least that's my impression of how this battle is portrayed in various online sources. Do we have a more accurate portrayal of the true version of events?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vknzr/whats_the_truth_about_the_battle_of_kursk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dttrbw9", "dtu30nw"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["In his book [Kursk: The greatest Battle: Eastern front 1943](_URL_0_) LLoyd Clark argues  that the decisive factor is not that the Germans lost more tanks than the Soviet Union(I am going to use SU for short), but that they lacked the ability to replace them. \n\nAcording to Clark SU suffered 177 847 casualties, lost 1 600 armored fighting vehicles and 460 aircrafts opposed to the germans who sufferd 56 827 casualties, lost 252 tanks and 159 aircrafts(note that Clark uses \"armored fighting vehicles\" about SU and \"Tanks\" for german vehicles. This indicates that not all of the 1 600 soviet losses were tanks). As you can see SU lost considerably more men and vehicles than germany. The problem was that although germany showed great tactical superiority over SU, they were not capable to recover the losses suffered during the offensive. It was as Guderian later admitted \"We had suffered a decisive defeat\"\n\nI hope this answered your question and would be glad to answer any further questions. ", "According to Dennis Showalter, in his work Armour and Blood, 'The German Army on the Eastern Front was neither bled white nor demodernised by Citadel's human and material losses' - what it did lose, however, was the initiative. The strategic initiative on the Eastern Front, held predominantly by the Germans since June 1941, was now solely in the hands of the Russians. However, for this victory, the Soviets paid a heavy price: some 2,000 Russian AFVs were lost to 250 German AFVs, and over 320,000 casualties to 54,000 German. Moreover, although the Red Army had wrested the initiative from the Germans, the disorganisation caused by the deployment of so many Soviet reserves arguably set back Stavka's plans for up to a year.\n\nKursk then, was not a 'lost victory' for the Germans, despite Manstein's claims, nor a decisive victory for the Soviets; it was a watershed, the Germans losing that great offensive drive that had characterised their earlier operations, and falling back increasingly on the defence, and the Soviets gaining that vital planning experience and flexibility that had been direly absent in the summer of 1941-42. If one wished to, you might even label Kursk a 'turning point' in the Second World War.\n\nShowalter, Dennis, Armour and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (New York: Random House, 2013)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.worldcat.org/title/kursk-the-greatest-battle-eastern-front-1943/oclc/818734611&amp;referer=brief_results"], []]}
{"q_id": "etg601", "title": "Can anyone tell me about this photo?", "selftext": "This is a [photo](_URL_0_) of my paternal grandfather (center) and I don't know anything about this photo.  I had no idea he was in the military and have no recollection of him.  He died in the early 90s and my dad died early 2000s.  My mom doesn't know anything about the photo either and I have no other family that can help.\n\nI know it will be your best guess but I'd love to learn anything I can about my family.  A lot of times when people immigrate, they leave so much behind.  It would be nice to get a little of that back.\n\n1. Is my grandfather wearing a Chinese, Hong Kong or Taiwan uniform?  Can you tell his rank?  Is he a soldier?\n2. What country are the sailors from?\n3. What time period would this be?  Before or after communist take over?  \n4. Why are the sailors there?  \n\nGiven when my dad was born, my guess would be this photo is from the early 40s, maybe 30s?\n\nI didn't know where else to ask this question.  I looked on the FAQ section but none of the other subs really fit.  Maybe someone can point me in the right direction if I'm off.  Thank you so much for helping!\n\nedit: formatting", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/etg601/can_anyone_tell_me_about_this_photo/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffgd8fu", "ffgnfei"], "score": [31, 19], "text": ["Based on [this](_URL_0_) image it looks like a Chinese military uniform. The other sailors are Americans. World War 2 for the time period, definitely before the Communist take over. Rank/Insignia aren't visible in this photo unfortunately. \n\nThat answers some of your questions in general, but I'm sure there are experts on uniforms on this sub who will provide a more thorough answer.", "The uniform is from the Chinese nationalist army. Picture probably around 1945\n\nMy grandfather served in the naval reserve for WWII. Although he never talked about it, I did find his records on _URL_0_ and found the war diaries of his ship, the USS Kenneth M willett. According to the diaries, after the war the ship and its sailors had an excursion to shanghai and enjoyed the local culture. \nSome ships were also deployed to shanghai/the Yellow Sea at this time to help the Chinese nationalist army against the communists."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/Sss2egF.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a5/53/a0/a553a0dd6f52f6cc83f05688a8c39b81.jpg"], ["Fold3.com"]]}
{"q_id": "5de1r2", "title": "Why are Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews distinguishable genetically both from each other and the local population?", "selftext": "The way I see it, either they mixed with the local populace, creating a genetic distinction between Sephardic and Ashkenazi, or they stayed within the Jewish population, resulting in a distinction between them and the local populace but not between one another. Another possibility is that they converted locals, but from my knowledge of Judaism, that was pretty uncommon (due to both a lack of tendency for the Jews to convert others, and a lack of tendency for others to want to convert), so I think we can safely rule that one out.\n\nHowever, Ashkenazi Jews are distinguishable from both Sephardic Jews and Eastern European Gentiles (I don't know about the Sephardic side, but I assume they aren't genetically the same as Spaniards and Italians in the same way). So how did this happen? Because they either did or didn't mix with the locals, and this makes it seem like they somehow did both and neither.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5de1r2/why_are_sephardic_and_ashkenazi_jews/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da43vk3"], "score": [6], "text": ["I'm not a historian but I have a background in evolutionary genetics so I think I can provide some insight. The bulk of genetics studies has been done on ashkenazi jews and they show significant genetic relationship with both middle eastern populations in the Levant (ie Lebanon, south syria), as well as with europeans. This indicates both a middle eastern origin with substantial mixture with the host populations, which appears to be recapitulated in most or all major jewish communities. For a nice review on the subject see _URL_0_\n\nOne may conclude that while conversion and intermarriage may be uncommon, it appears to have occurred frequently enought to see a substantial genetic signature."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543766/"]]}
{"q_id": "5nqzmz", "title": "How did the Romans view Alexander the Great while he was alive and where there any contacts between his empire and Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nqzmz/how_did_the_romans_view_alexander_the_great_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcdwaiy"], "score": [41], "text": ["It's very difficult to answer this question with any great confidence, as the historical record simply isn't available. \n\nThe first time the eastern Greeks seem to have taken notice of the Roman state is the wars by Phyrrus in defense of the western Greek city of Tarentum. This was roughly 40 years after Alexander the Great's death. \n\nThe only Roman historian I can think of who considered the question was Livy, and he was pretty confident that the Romans would have beaten the Macedonians. As to peaceful contact between the Roman/Latin state and the Empire, he doesn't provide any information.\n\nWhen Alexander the Great died, he had numerous plans in his head for the subjugation of the Western Mediterranean. It's dubious he would have given much thought to Rome and the Greek Historians point his interest as being western Sicily and Carthage. At the time, the Carthaginians and the Romans had good relations, so conflict may have been inevitable. \n\nAt Alexander's death Rome would have been little more than the formal capital of the Latin confederation. The first embassy from the successors didn't arrive until shortly after the first Punic War. \n\nIt's not a very helpful answer, I know, but it's the best answer that I think I can give. If anyone else knows something that says I'm wrong, I would love to hear it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "12l6ot", "title": "\"The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts divert attention from the secret influences around the recorded events.\" What do historians do to compensate for \"history being written by the victors?\"", "selftext": "First quote from Frank Herbert in *Heretics of Dune*. Second quote I first heard from Walter Benjamin, although I'm sure it was around before him.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12l6ot/the_writing_of_history_is_largely_a_process_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6w1105", "c6wapsh", "c6we7ri"], "score": [14, 9, 4], "text": ["The incorrect assumption is that history is only written by the victors and no one else. Cross referencing statements and claims from multiple sources is a staple of verifying events/people that were observed by different conflict cultural groups. \n\nThe easiest example would be verifying the existence of Christ as a person of his time. Before Constantine's \"christianization\" of Rome documents were written by followers of Chrsit, non-believing Jews, and from Romans all confirming the existence of Jesus as a profit. \n\nKnown history is most often not constructed around one account of a single author/group when multiple groups are involved. People don't stop writing and recording events just because they're loosing a war or there's some other social cataclysm.  ", "People often say that \"history is written by the victors\" as a way to describe how sources need to be evaluated. However, at best, the statement is a simplification and at worst it is an outright falsity. If you must give a pithy description of history writing, don;t say history is written by the victors, say that history is written by *writers*. Genghis Khan was always a victor, but he doesn't exactly have a great writeup. The Chinese Empress Wu Zetian is one of the most canny and successful politicians in its history, but because she antagonized the intellectual class (largely for having the gall to be a woman) she is called an evil, corrupt despot in the sources.\n\nPeople's loyalties and sentiments are far too complex to be reduced to a simple look at one side vs. the other. And then this is complicated because for any given event there are often multiple historical traditions. Was Mehmet II a bloodthirsty and craven demon or a just ruler and capable warrior? That changes depending on whether you know Turkish or Greek.", "I'll repost an older post I made:\n\n > History is written by the victor\n\nI blame Braveheart for popularizing this particular piece of nonsense. History is written by any number of people. History is, these days, mostly written by people who put together what people wrote earlier and see how it fits. And yes, that's grossly simplified and does not take into account various concepts and schools, but it's a nice starting point.\n\nI'm mostly doing ancient Greek and Roman stuff so let's take Thucydides. He was most certainly not the victor of just about anything, be it war or avoiding getting sent into exile. So when you read his Histories you read it, being aware of who wrote it, how he wrote and if possible, why.\n\nOr take Tacitus, writing on Nero. When reading of Nero you might get the idea that he's mad. But then you realize that Tacitus wrote under a new dynasty so he might have had good reasons to tar the old one. Does that make Tacitus worthless for a historian? Hell no. You just need to know what to do with sources. And that's the problem with most people these days that fancy themselves well versed in history: they haven't a clue about sources and how to use them.\n\nThen there is transmission of said sources. Did the Persians write of their defeat at the hands of the Greeks? Possibly. But if the things they wrote is lost then it's besides the point. If the losing side either don't have a class capable of writing or if the writings are in a medium that get's easily lost then we are left with nothing. Or rather, left with Herodotus as our primary source for the Persian Wars and Xenophon as a major source for later Persian politics and factional warfare.\n\nTL;DR History is written by whoever has a pen and some paper. That says nothing about who reads it or even if anyone does.\n\n(A quick edit to sort some formatting.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2a64y9", "title": "How many Jewish people became Bolsheviks during the revolution and did antisemitism decreased after the revolution?", "selftext": "After watching Fiddler on the Roof, I caught myself wondering this question. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a64y9/how_many_jewish_people_became_bolsheviks_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirxale", "cis9rck"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["A number of Jews did join the Bolsheviks. I cant give an exact number of Jewish people that supported the the revolution because it is hard to keep tract of that many people. Now in the party leadership there were a number of Jews. the 7 man Political Bureau lead by Lenin had 4 Jews (Trotsky, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev) and in many other parts of early soviet leadership Jewish people held a lot of power for being about 5% of the total Russian population. for the most part these Jews that held political power were more likely Jewish ethnicity and probably, at least openly, didn't really practice the Judaism.\n\nNow as for the antisemitism during this time i'm fairly certain that it existed but during the revolution and post revolution recovery but the soviets government didn't really attack the Jewish people because it was better to get help where you can to maintain power. Unlike the Eastern Orthodox Church the Jewish religious leadership in Russia didn't openly Oppose the Bolsheviks during the revolution.\n\nSource:_URL_0_", "The short answer to this question is that it was less that Jews became Bolsheviks and more that the Bolsheviks offered many Jews a far better deal than their rivals (Whites and the Ukrainian Rada)\nPrior to WWI, most  Jews within the Russian empire were restricted to the Pale of Settlement (roughly modern day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and corners of Lithuania). Legal permission to reside outside the Pale was restricted to professionals or those that served the Russian state. As such, as Jewish political life evolved in a local milieu that was highly confrontational to the tsarist state (for good reasons). The largest organized political parties (in the loosest sense of the word) for Jews were the Bund, which took its inspiration from other socialist parties such as the Polish Social Democrats, and the Zionists. Where the Bund differed from Marxist-inspired parties is that they considered Judaism to be an ethnicity/race, and not a religious identity. Perchik, Hodel's husband, would have been an archetypical Bundist; he's proud to be a Jew and a political reformer. The rising antisemitism of the period, exacerbated by war, prevented Bundist from forging lasting alliances with any oppositional parties such as the Social Democrats.\nThe rising antisemitism of the war exacerbated this trend. The Ukrainian Rada, the revolutionary party of Ukraine in 1917, found itself either encouraging, or at least giving a silent approval to the various pogroms during the Civil War. When the Red Army occupied Ukraine, it was an official policy to protect the Jewish population from White and Rada armies. This led many Bundists to throw their lot in with the Bolsheviks. \n\nAs to your question did antisemitism increase or decrease because of the Revolution, the answer depends upon your time-frame of Russian/Soviet history. In the Revolution and Civil War period, violence against Jews soared to unprecedented levels and many enemies of the Bolsheviks found it easy to characterize the Bolsheviks as Jews, even though its leaders did not identify as such. For example, while Trotsky was born a Jew, he claimed such national thoughts were quite far from his consciousness. The Bolsheviks themselves were ambivalent about Jewish support. This stemmed from the question whether or not Judaism was an ethnicity or a religion. If one argued the former, then Jews could be welcomed into the Brotherhood of Nations (what the Bolsheviks called all the oppressed minorities of the Russian Empire). If Jewish identity was primarily a religious phenomena, then to be Jew was at best a temporary reality within the Bolshevik state. In the immediate period after the Civil War (the 1920s) the Bolsheviks tended to treat Judaism as an ethnic category. The state encouraged affirmative action-style programs and cultural development for Yiddish within the former Pale. And Bundists and literate Jews became quite prominent within the USSR's personnel-starved bureaucracy.  Public displays of antisemitism became a disciplinary offense within the USSR. \n\nThe good times of the 1920s ended with the advent of Stalin, who tended to favor the wing of the party that felt Judaism was a religious category. The Great Purges of 1937 and their precursors often hit Jews particularly hard because to have a Bundist mark in your background was a red flag to the NKVD. The Soviet state still openly eschewed antisemitism, especially since it saw antisemitism as a hallmark of its fascist enemies. But in this case, the rhetoric did not match the reality for most Soviet Jews. As with WWI, the Second World War helped to unleash antisemitism within the USSR as the state became more Great Russian nationalist and Jews were a suspect population. The suffering of Jews in the Holocaust became something of a political embarrassment as the USSR since it uneasily sat beside the notion that the Soviet Union was the primary victim of Nazi aggression. Postwar memorials of Nazi atrocities tended to deemphasize Jewish suffering within the Eastern bloc. The Cold War and the Soviet support of the Arabs against Israel made antisemitism much more accepted and open within the USSR. \n\nIf you're interested, Zvi Gittelman's *A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present* is an excellent survey of Jewish history in Russia and the Soviet Union. For the Bund, the monographs *Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish* by Joshua Zimermann and Scott Ury's *Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry* covers it nicely. *A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920* by Henry Abramson covers 1917 and the decision by Jews to opt for the Bolsheviks. \nAnd finally, if you're interested in the origins of Fiddler, check out *The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye* by Jeremy Dauber, which is an accessible biography of the Yiddish author who created the Tevvye stories which the musical is based upon.    \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rense.com/general43/jewishrole.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "1t7ifo", "title": "How did the Cults of Personality of Stalin and Hitler differ from each other?", "selftext": "I've been doing (too) much reading recently on World War 2 and I am curious if anyone could shed some light on how the cult of personality cultivated by Hitler and the cult of personality cultivated by Stalin differed from each other? How were they similar? How were they viewed at the time and how did they originate? How did it change over time (i.e as the fortunes of Hitler changed for the worse and Stalin for the better over the course of the war)?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t7ifo/how_did_the_cults_of_personality_of_stalin_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5c3x6", "ce5iqi1"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Stalin ruled much more by fear than by awe at his grandiose achievements.  He purged rivals at regular intervals. Hitler tended to be more oblivious to intrigues and played Nazi leaders off against one another (eg, Goering and the air force against Himmler and the SS).  \n\nStalin had to manufacture the image that he and Lenin were close, and 'remove' from history the roles of others.  Stalin had only a marginal role in establishing the Bolshevik state, whereas Hitler's efforts were beyond question.\n\nStalin during World War II had to change his image from that of orthodox socialist leader and class warrior, to that of defender of the Russian motherland. This saw a rise in the prominence of traditional Russian images, the Orthodox church and so on, and less emphasis on working class victory over capitalism.", "I know less about the inner workings of Nazi politics than I do that of Soviet politics, so I will just comment on Stalin here.\n\nFirst, I think it would be less accurate to talk about a cult of personality of Stalin or cultivated by Stalin than a cult of the *individual* cultivated by the Stalinist leaders and the bureaucracy as a whole.  That is, surely Stalin was accorded vast accolades in public discourse, but so were many public leaders, and various individual workers and others who were identified as heroes within the new Soviet order.  This appears to have a feature of developments in the 1930s, but one that grew and changed over time.  In the 1920s, Stalin was often viewed as a cold and distant leader or a mystery, and the Bolsheviks preferred to maintain the image of anonymous collective leadership.  By the middle of 1933 Stalin was occasionally referred to in public as 'beloved Stalin' when in the 1929-33 period he was merely identified as the unambiguous leader of the party.  In the 1934-41 period, the cult expanded to include various heroes of Soviet society, including Stakhanovites, writers, aviators and others, and intolerance of criticism of leaders became increasingly serious.  In this, not only was Stalin viewed as above criticism, but so were many of his closest cadres like Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, and so forth.  To a great extent, love of Stalin and patriotism were considered, among official sources, to be equivalent.  In this respect, the cult of personality was intended, in part, as a sort of 'glue' to bind people together in a chaotic and uneasy time.  It was also obviously a reflection of the regime's fear of its own weakness.\n\nThe second issue I want to raise here is that the cultivation of the leadership cult in general was not a sole creation of Stalin's, and it is even possible that Stalin himself did not being the target of the cult.  I think here is it important to emphasize the practical importance or value of this sort of official discourse to regime stability in unstable times.  This is almost certainly why the cult originated in the 30s as part of the continued *ad hoc* responses of the Stalinist leadership/culture to the instability they helped to create.  \n\nInteresting source on this is:\n\nDavies, Sarah.  *Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-41.*  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1xkina", "title": "What is a good source to gain a full understanding of Ronald Reagan?", "selftext": "Reagan is probably one of our most controversial presidents where he is adored on the right and vilified on the left.  I was wondering if there was a good biography(-ies) or histor (-ies) of his presidency that capture the whole spectrum.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xkina/what_is_a_good_source_to_gain_a_full/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfcc3zo"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's a large volume of histories on the Reagan presidency/era.  Many are good, and many are crap.  Here's only a handful of some of the major ones.\n\nIf you're looking for a comprehensive history the best place to go is still Lou Cannon's *Role of a Lifetime*.  It's a big book, so if you're looking for something a bit more concise Michael Schaller's *Ronald Reagan* is also really good.  If you want something more recent and more academic than Cannon's, the best book is *The Reagan Presidency*, edited by W. Elliott Brownlee and Hugh David Graham, although it's expensive ($35).  This book isn't a single narrative; it's a series of essays by different scholars on different subjects about the Reagan presidency.  Lastly, if you're wanting to place the Reagan presidency within the larger context of contemporary American history, two really good books for that are James Patterson's *Restless Giant* and Sean Wilentz' *The Age of Reagan*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gixte", "title": "Why did the Roman Salute become the salute of many fascist parties?", "selftext": "I understand that it symbolized friendship and commitment in Ancient Rome, but why was this gesture chosen out of all of the possible gestures out there? The gesture was used by Hitler, Mussolini, and various other fascist leaders, as well as being used for a short time in America during the pledge of allegiance (called the Bellamy salute in America). \n\nSo why was this Roman Salute so prevalent in modern history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gixte/why_did_the_roman_salute_become_the_salute_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cakokp8"], "score": [24], "text": ["Historical Note: There is almost no evidence to suggest the 'Roman Salute' (hand held out, palm down, fingers together) was actually used by Romans. No Roman text describes this salute, and contemporary statues never seem to show it. The modern idea of the Roman Salute seems to come from [this painting](_URL_0_), produced in 1784. \n\nThat being said, the reason the *idea* of the Roman Salute was so popular with fascists is that when Fascism took root in Italy, the leaders were hearkening back to the glory of the Roman Empire in their appeals to the people, so many such gestures were useful to instill this idea (the same can be seen in their style of banners and symbolism). When Fascism came to Germany, it was largely inspired by the Italian movements, and the gesture was adopted from there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_the_Horatii"]]}
{"q_id": "48yehr", "title": "To what extent were East Germans less well off?", "selftext": "During the Cold War (specifically the later half), to what extent were East Germans less well off than West Germans?  Specifically, were there differences in diets and nutrition?  If so to what extent?  \n\nIf the East Germans did have inferior nurishment, was this due to lack of agricultural productivity of East Germany or else a movement of resources from East Germany to other Soviet states or Soviet satellite states?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48yehr/to_what_extent_were_east_germans_less_well_off/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0nrpm7"], "score": [3], "text": ["In general a GDR citizen after the late 50s (food stamps were abolished in 1958) was unlikely to be malnurished since basic food (bread, butter, most things that could be easily produced localy) was widely available. This was not the case for \"luxury\" goods, many of which had to be imported (chocolate, coffee, certain fish, certain cheeses and more) and required the GDR's leadership to use the ever scarce amounts of foreign exchange to aquire. These dietary goods were, especialy outside east Berlin, scarce. Unfortunately for the GDR's leadership supplying it's population with these goods was necessary to avoid dissent. In fact the inability to import the required amounts of coffee during the late 70s ( a result of increasing coffee prices and a decrease in oil revenue) ultimately lead to considerable protests.\nThe lengths the GDR leadership went to somehow alleviate their constant foreign exchange shortages (and therefore, among other priorities, increase the amount of available consumer goods) can only be broadly described here. One of the most interesting examples is surely the Bereich KoKo (Kommerzielle Koordinierung) which had as it's main task to aquire as much foreign exchange as possible. Ways to do so were the GDR Intershops which sold \"west-goods\" to the population against hard currency (and were therefore a useful way to aquire foreign exchagne from the population) as well as the Genex, which allowed foreign citizens (mostly in the FRG) to purchase goods for east germans (relatives, churches and so on) in hard currency. A relatively short lived increase in diplomatic activity with african socialist (often in name only) \"brotherstates\" was another attempt to save foreign exchange (typicaly by trying to export manufactured goods for raw materials). \n\nAnother point that needs to be kept in mind is that a planned economy like the GDR's produces a much smaller amount of diverse consumer goods than a market economy, where various businesses try to compete with several variants of the same basic good. I have a short anectode to illustrate that point. The first time my grandmother visited her sister in Munich she was downright amazed at the many variants of bread at the local bakery and to this day she often recommends that she still fails to understand for what we need dozens of only slightly different variants of what is basicaly the same good (be it bread, tooth paste...) :D\n\nSo, the tldr version:\n- Inferior nurishment as in malnurishment cannot be said to exist after 1958 in the GDR\n- Nurishment in the GDR was much less diverse than in the FRG partly because:\n   - the constant shortage of foreign exchange to import consumer goods\n   - planned economies usualy do not lead to dozens of competing goods within the same niche\n- It was, within limits, possible to aquire western wares if one had the hard currency to do so\n\nSome literature (merely what i currently have at home or nearby :D):\ncoffee crisis:\n- *Volker W\u00fcnderich: Die \u201eKaffeekrise\" von 1977 Genussmittel und Verbraucherprotest in der DDR*\nKoKo/ Africa:\n- *Hans-Joachim D\u00f6ring: Es geht um unsere Existenz*\n- *R\u00fcchel/ D\u00f6ring: Freundschaftsbande und Beziehungskisten*\n- *Winrow, Gareth: The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa*\neconomy/ foreign currency shortage:\n- *Steiner, Andr\u00e9: Von Plan zu Plan. Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR*\n- *Volze, Armin: Zur Devisenverschuldung der DDR. In: Am Ende des realen Sozialismus Bd. 4*\n\nIn addition Zatlin's *\"Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR, 1971\u20131989\"*, while only indirectly related to the question, is an interesting read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "agtf59", "title": "Why was government service such a coveted job in China despite the shockingly low pay?", "selftext": "In the Ming and Qing dynasties I know that salaries for government officials were especially low, which sometimes led to widespread corruption. Also funding for local government was also pretty bad which led some officials to pay out of their own pocket or raise extralegal taxes just to maintain the government.\n\nGiven this, why was being a mandarin official so coveted? \n\nSecond question is: Nowadays, there is a stereotype (especially among the Chinese diaspora) that parents push hard for their kids to become doctors and lawyers. How did service in government fall out of favour as a coveted job?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/agtf59/why_was_government_service_such_a_coveted_job_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee9354u", "ee9b4gy"], "score": [24, 17], "text": ["Delicious, a question on Imperial China's bureaucracy.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nLocal officials were not particularly well compensated (officially anyways) but there were a number of extremely enticing factors that came with passing the civil service examination.\n\nBy the mid-late Ming, it became basically absolutely mandatory to hold the  \u9032\u58eb - *jinshi* degree if you wanted to attain the highest levels of office (like a 4th grade or higher official) and there was actually an extraordinary excess of the lowest degree levels (*tongsheng, shengyuan,* etc.) so those holding degrees from the lowest levels of the exam tier had little or no chance of actually holding any form of governmental office but nevertheless, were still granted the social privileges afforded to a member of the scholarly class - the same social caste all members of the Imperial government belonged to.\n\nThe point I'm getting at is that it isn't even necessarily being a mandarin that was coveted, but it was the ownership of a degree that marked an individual as a member of the social elite. Holding a degree and office did offer a stable income, and benefits much like federal jobs today (when there isn't a shutdown), but even degree holders who did not have office were eligible to receive governmental benefits and statutory exemptions like reduced taxes, immunity from receiving corporal punishments and the ability to be excused from forced labor for Imperial works. Those degree graduates also were looked up to in their local villages and residential areas as well, and deferred to as a sort of Imperial liaison due to their education and shared understanding of Chinese culture with Imperial officials. Even the sons of wealthy merchants (merchants are quite a bit below scholars on the Confucian social hierarchy, regardless of wealth) aspired to hold degrees and civil office as a means with which to elevate their own social standing, and to be seen as socially acceptable and not be frowned down upon by the  social elites of Imperial China. I know that there were even cases of wealthy merchant families just straight up purchasing degrees for their sons.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIn short, social standing and benefits made passing the Imperial Examination an extremely enticing prospect for the citizens of Imperial China.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdits: Clarification and wording\n\nP.S. : As an asian dude I don\u2019t really recall my parents pushing me to become a doctor or lawyer. My girlfriend says she also was never subject to such pressures. We both were just sternly encouraged to aspire to Ivy League schools and earn a respectable living. Granted my sample size is 2 but I think it isn\u2019t so much that parents specifically want their children to be doctors, but more that they want children who are well-educated and who will live comfortable lives, which may or may not be a cultural vestige of the Examination system. ", "To add to what /u/beepybeetle has said, it's important to add, also, that because corruption was rife, civil servants could accumulate absolutely vast sums of money through various illicit means. Funds would be embezzled going both up and down the chain: by 1900, 40% of the *likin* tax collected on goods in transit went unreported, lining the pockets of the various officials in charge,^1 whilst by the 1840s, perhaps 10% of the funds earmarked for the Yellow River Conservancy were *not* being used for different purposes.^2 When the Qianlong Emperor's favourite, Heshen, fell from grace upon the death of his patron in 1799, he was put under investigation, and his personal wealth was in some cases alleged to be so vast it would have amounted to four times the GDP of the United States at the time (said estimate was off by an order of magnitude, but even so, his actual wealth, the equivalent of $150,000,000, would have been no paltry sum \u2013 indeed, that was an amount of personal wealth comparable to the emperor himself, and larger than the treasury surplus in 1796 just before the White Lotus Revolt broke out.)^3\n\nTo give an idea of the general perception of the mandarin's potential wealth, Zhang Zuyi's *Qingdai Yeji*, published in 1914, recounted his service with Shengbao, a general who rose to prominence after the Xinyou Coup of 1861, and had this to say regarding a Manchu official, Mukedengbu:\n\n >  The person of Mukedengbu, styled Shaoruo, used to be a Manchu Bannerman stationed at Jinzhou. He was the seventh son of the late Nanjing General Kuiyu... and he later climbed up to the Governorship of Jiangsu. He asked for an additional inspector to supervise taxation. He stated that since the *Dao* [circuits] and *Fu* [prefectures] had their own duties, it was not proper for them to supervise it. To prevent corruption and with the Emperor's consent, he would take up this responsibility. A term was four years and it was said that he received 300,000 *liang* [taels; 1 tael \u2248 37 grams] of gold. He built great mansions in Nanjing, bought land in the most prosperous areas along the river; he also had big capital in money-lending and salt transportation. He was the richest among all the inspectors in Jiangnan... The abundance of his opium stock amounted to several thousand *jin* [catty; 1 catty \u2248 600 grams]. When the Taiping Army captured Nanjing [1853], his opium was thrown out on the roadside and it was impossible to count.^4\n\nYes, we may question the reliability of this source: it describes events at least eight or more years in the past at the time of writing and over sixty years by the time of publication; it has a clear reliance on hearsay; it occasionally resorts to hyperbolic language; *et cetera*. However, the key thing is this is what a prominent official was *perceived* to be capable of, by a highly literate man with significant experience in both court and bureaucratic politics. For sure, this is not behaviour Zhang encourages, and he does implicitly point to Mukedengbu's background not only as a Manchu but also the son of a general in getting him where he got, but the entire situation is posited as entirely conceivable and, notably, Mukedengbu is only singled out as the 'richest of the southern inspectors'. Is Zhang implying that there were northern ones who were richer? Or that Mukedengbu was only the most prominent of a whole slew of corrupt but incredibly affluent southern officials? Whatever the case, the nature of Mukedengbu's behaviour was not by any means unexpected or extraordinary, only its extent.\n\n**Sources, Notes and References**\n\n1. Yeh-Chien Wang, 'The Fiscal Importance of the Land Tax During the Ch'ing Period' in *The Journal of Asian Studies*, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Aug., 1971), pp. 829-842\n1. Susan Mann Jones and Philip A Kuhn, 'Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion', in Fairbank ed., *The Cambridge History of China: Volume 10, Late Ch'ing 1800-1911, Part I*, p. 127; in Julia Lovell, *The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of Modern China* (2011), p. 47\n1. Stephen R. Platt, *Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age* (2018), pp. 95-97\n1. Zhang Zuyi, *Qingdai Yeji*, vol. III pp. 143-6; in Zheng Yangwen, *The Social Life of Opium In China* (2005), p. 62"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6wx836", "title": "How close did France get to becoming Communist? What factors likely played the biggest role in France *not* becoming Communist?", "selftext": "Given its socialist tendencies and history of revolution, I'm surprised France didnt become Communist after the Russian Revolution. Was France becoming Communist ever a likely possibility? What are the main reasons it didn't?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wx836/how_close_did_france_get_to_becoming_communist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmboa0p"], "score": [17], "text": ["First of all, having \"socialist tendencies\" isn't exactly a proper interpretation category when it comes to history. How are you gonna measure, or see those tendencies ? Because we have universal healthcare in 2017 means we have socialist tendencies ? Or because we elected a President coming from the Socialist Party in 2012 ? Is the Socialist Party still socialist ? \n\nAlso, your question encompasses a lot of moments and rests on the eventuality of a possibility, which is quite hard to answer. \n\nI'd say the first \"red scare\" that France has known was in 1871, during the Commune de Paris. One might argue that it was not a Communist movement but an Anarchist one, but it's one of the closest we got from departing liberal capitalism altogether. I'd recommend reading on it, it's a fascinating event, often forgotten in French history, and with very interesting characters, like Louise Michel. \n\nFor the period that followed the Russian Revolution, you've got to understand that revolutions don't just happen because of tendencies. It helps, but the whole socio-economical context is way more helpful to understand the triggering of a revolt. Russia was in very delayed state of development in 1917, with authoritarian political system based on inheritance. France was a parlementary democracy since 1870 (give or take) and left-wing politicians have been intergrated to government. \n\nYou could also explain the absence of revolution by the internal divisions of French socialists. In 1920, the Tours congress of the SFIO (French Section of the Workers International) saw an explosion of what was the great leftist party, between socialists and communists. The secession was based on the adhesion, or not, to the 3rd Internationale. Basically, the socialists refused it and leaned towards a reformist line, the communists joined it and kept their revolutionnary stance. It durably influenced the French left-wing and it was only periodically that communists accepted to rule with socialists (in 1936, 1946 or 1981 for example). Starting from here, the Communist party (SFIC then PCF) became slowly marginalized where it was, at first, the most powerful party. The SFIO (that became the actual Socialist Party) became the leading left-wing party and pushed for reforms aimed at workers that could undermine any revolutionary tendencies. For example, Leon Blum alliance in 1936 passed the first paid vacations for workers, alongside limitations on the workday. In 1946, a socialist-communist coalition voted the Social Security as we know it today. And it was Mitterrand in 1981, the first Socialist president of the 5th Republic, who passed, the fifth week of paid vacation. \n\nA third reason that one might point out is intellectual, and has more to do with later events. After the WW2, marxist was outrageously dominant in the intellectual field of France. It had its critics obviously, but the universities were essentially held by marxists, maoists and trotskysts. During the 70s/80s, there was some sort of an intellectual reaction, especially after the events of May 68 and the publication of Soljenitsyne's book. We saw an actual anti-communist intellectual wave that try to counter the cultural hegemony (hehe) of marxist in social sciences and the humanities. This led to the \"New philosophers\" movement and a general delegitimization of the whole communist movement. A few political choices also helped, as the PCF was very close to Moscow and refused to denounce some foreign intervention by the USSR. \n\nThe failure of Mitterrand governance during the first two years (when he was governing with the PCF) was the final blow to the communist party and the revolutionnary stance of a large part of the French left. In the early 90s, the PCF was polling below 5% and the Socialist party officially embraced globalized capitalism. \n\nI could go more into details for every point that I made but it's 7:43 am and I need a breakfast. Don't hesitate to ask for more details or sources, I have them if you want. But in general, a good line of explanation for \"why we haven't had a socialist regime\" is a mixture of social, political, economical and cultural context. I also probably forgot tons of stuff, this answer is a mere introduction to the problem, not the exhaustion of every lead. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26zorf", "title": "I just watched \"The Battle of Algiers\" and I was wondering what kind of policies did the French have in Algeria that lead to the Algerian rebellion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26zorf/i_just_watched_the_battle_of_algiers_and_i_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chw5yvx", "chw8xof"], "score": [35, 9], "text": ["I love that movie! The crowd scenes are simply amazing, I almost disbelieve that they didn't use documentary footage just because of how many extras would have been required. I could probably spend this entire response gushing over it.\n\nFor the sake of clarity, in my answer when I refer to the \u2018French\u2019 I will be referring specifically to public figures and policy makers who supported French colonialism in Algeria. Far be it from me to tar Sartre or Alleg with the same brush as men like Paul Aussaresses. Anyway, as to your question:\n\nThe short answer is that France was running a racist, exploitative colonial enterprise in Algeria. The consequences of such an enterprise are illustrated quite well in The Battle of Algiers. After World War 2, the French struggle to dominate Algeria was characterized by arbitrary killings, torture and political repression. Such is alluded to in the film when the character Colonel Mathieu asks \u201cShould France remain in Algeria?\u201d and respond \u201cIf yes, then you must accept all the consequences.\u201d Indeed, many in France were willing to answer \u201coui,\u201d and with their answer face all attendant consequences. Such men were those like Colonol Bigeard who saw the French presence in Algeria as part of their mission civilicatrice. As he put it: \u201cWe are not making war for ourselves, not making a colonialist war, Bigeard wears no shirt as do my officers. We are fighting right here right now for them, for the evolution, to see the evolution of these people and this war is for them. We are defending their freedom as we are, in my opinion, defending the West's freedom. We are here ambassadors, Crusaders . . .\u201d It\u2019s a fine sentiment, but with the supposed mission civilicatrice beholden to the r\u00e9gime du sabre as it was, colonial policy was more violent than uplifting.\n\nThe attitude of the French colonialists to the proper nature of their relationship with the colonized people was longstanding. Even so far back as 1843 Lieutenant-Colonel de Montagnac wrote in a letter to a friend that \u201cAll populations who do not accept our conditions must be despoiled . . . In one word, annihilate all who will not crawl beneath our feet like dogs.\" It was the clear attitude of the French that their civilization was superior, and that without them Algeria was hopelessly lost: despotic and oriental. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted: \u201cThis rebellion is not merely challenging the power of the settlers, but their very being. For most Europeans in Algeria, there are two complementary and inseparable truths. That they have the divine right, and that the natives are sub-human.\u201d The French attitude towards Algeria betrayed an outcome predicted by Albert Memmi when he theorized that colonization must always end by the annihilation of the colonized.\n\nIt was exactly this which the FLN feared most. The French mission in Algeria, by pressing Algerian Muslims to abandon sharia and other touchstones of their cultural identity created violence not only against the physical person, which is bearable, but also against their identities of self and community, which is not. These things, along with increasing feelings of economic and political alienation caused many Algerians to believe that violence alone would free them.\n\nAdditionally, French settlers, the pied-noirs of Algeria, reacted to and fermented violence by the FLN with violence of their own. The government, police and military in Algeria was dominated by white settlers who made torture and repression their regular tool. The Colonel Bigeard referenced above is famous for tying Algerian prisoners hand and foot before throwing them off of planes into the Mediterranean. Additionally, as white Algerian settlers felt increasingly threatened by violence and the threat of disengagement by the DeGaulle government many joined the Organisation de l'arm\u00e9e secrete. This was a secret paramilitary society which engaged in a wave of bombings and assassinations. The mutual hatred of native Algerians and settlers was such that one of the FLN\u2019s most popular and effective slogans was \u201cla valise ou le cercueil\u201d (The suitcase, or the coffin.)\n\nRead Henri Alleg\u2019s The Question. It is the most devastating account of the reality of war and colonialism I have ever encountered. \n\nAlso Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth and Alistair Horne The Savage War of Peace \n\nSorry about formatting, I suck at it. \n", "In some ways, the rebellion had simmered since the supposed crushing blows of the 1870s.  If you have a look at Prochaska's small-scale study of B\u00f4ne (*Making Algeria French*) he gets at the massive expropriation and impoverishment of the entire countryside in the name of the *colons* and market production for France.  \n\nIn the wake of WWII, when more moderate voices for reform began to speak out, they were disappointed or, if they dared demonstrate, were repressed brutally.  French attempts to find middle ground were laughable; the 1947 idea (in the Organic Statute of Algeria) for a toothless consultative body wasn't good enough for nationalists because it didn't offer them any meaningful voice; it wasn't acceptable for the *colons* because it offered a voice at all.  While France was trying to redefine itself as something other than an empire outright with the \"French Union\" in 1946 and the \"French Community\" in 1958, it faced the problem that the same kind of moderation wasn't acceptable to the 10% settler population in Algeria, which itself had a strange administrative position.\n\nAs in many minority-settler colonies--think South Africa (the ANC's move to armed struggle), Kenya (\"Mau Mau\"), Southern Rhodesia (ZANLA/ZIPRA) here--that led to radicalization and a cycle of violence that pushed people on both sides to significant excess.  That's part of what Pontecorvo is describing--how it spirals into total upheaval, but also how even defeat and loss can't stop a truly mass movement from re-emerging."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1h52r0", "title": "Gandhi supported gun rights? Quote of his being misconstrued?", "selftext": "\"'Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest\" Guns right supporters are using this quote to claim Gandhi supported guns. Can anyone verify or point to source that does? The quote on its own seems compelling. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h52r0/gandhi_supported_gun_rights_quote_of_his_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caqynyg", "caqyqil"], "score": [19, 6], "text": ["Gandhi is here referring to the de-arming of India as a whole via the Arms Act of 1878. Here is the second half of the quote:\n\n >  If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.\n\nCertainly the British passed the Arms Act as a way of keeping the Indian population under control, and there the Second Amendmenters have a point. However, to suggest that Gandhi would be in favor of gun ownership as it exists in modern day US is, I think, misleading. Gandhi never once suggests that Indians needed guns to throw off British oppression. Rather, he saw Indian use of guns as a way to help the Empire, prove India's loyalty, and achieve Home Rule nonviolently. \n\nThe quote is in the context of war, not personal liberty; the British Empire refused to conscript Indian soldiers during World War I, and one of the things Gandhi did was to circulate pamphlets containing that quote as part of a strategy to get Indian soldiers to voluntarily enlist as soldiers. It seems to have been a double-pronged strategy, as it would both educate many Indians as to how to use firearms while at the same time helping to save the British Empire from its enemies. Patriotism aside, Gandhi certainly saw that true Home Rule of India was much more likely with an Allied victory than with an Axis one:\n\n >  I know that there are many in India who consider no sacrifice as too great in order to achieve the end, and they are wakeful enough to realize that they must be equally prepared to sacrifice themselves for the Empire in which they hope and desire to reach their final status. It follows then that we can but accelerate our journey to the goal by silently and simply devoting ourselves heart and soul to the work of delivering the Empire from the threatening danger. It will be national suicide not to recognize this elementary truth. We must perceive that, if we serve to save the Empire, we have in that very act secured Home Rule.\n\nSource: Mohandas K. Gandhi, *The Story of my Experiments with Truth* (1929): pp. 447-8.\n\n", "In short:\n\nThis is the full quote: \"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.\" \nThe arms act allowed Europeans to carry arms but not native Indians, this in his eyes was unjust because at the time Gandhi believed that if Indians took up arms and fought for the British Empire in WW1 that the British government would realize the potential of Indians and make them equal partners in the Empire (note that at this time Gandhi was still pro-British). \n\nHere is another quote: \"I would make India offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire at its critical moment, and I know that India, by this very act, would become the most favoured partner in the Empire \u2026 I write this because I love the English nation, and I wish to evoke in every Indian the loyalty of Englishmen.\" Note again that Gandhi's views changed on this subject later in his life. \n\nSo yes the quote is completely taken out of context.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9u2z7v", "title": "How did the public of other European nations and the US react to the attempts at a social revolution by woman (eg. Mujeres libres) during the Spanish Civil war?", "selftext": "Did the press/public condemn this breakdown of traditional gender roles or was it partly endorsed? Was there any reporting in the field by journalist from these countries?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9u2z7v/how_did_the_public_of_other_european_nations_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e91cjf7"], "score": [15], "text": ["This is a brilliant question (that was well worth asking twice!). Too brilliant, really, as it exposes a gap in historical literature. To my knowledge, while there is quite a bit that has been written on women, gender and the Spanish Civil War, little of it touches on how gender roles (and their subversion) was perceived outside of Spain. Equally, a lot of the expansive literature on foreign involvement in and perceptions of the conflict neglect gender as a category of analysis. If there's anyone reading this looking for a topic for their undergraduate dissertation or similar, examining gendered portrayals of the conflict overseas would be a really interesting topic. In any case, I'll do my best to sketch an overview from the material I'm aware of.\n\nTo begin with the organisation you mentioned, the anarchist-aligned\u00a0*Mujeres Libres*, there's no doubt that this was probably the most important single women's organisation in Republican Spain during the civil war. They had expanded greatly during the war, from a small, Madrid-based organisation in early 1936 to having tens of thousands of members in branches across the Republican zone by mid-1938. They undertook all sorts of initiatives across Republican Spain, helping women transition into the workforce in factories and collectives. One of their most prominent achievements was setting up a system of day-care centres that would allow for communal care of children while their mothers worked in agriculture or industry. They were far from alone in undertaking such work \u2013 there were dozens, if not hundreds, of anti-fascist women\u2019s organisations active in Republican Spain. Yet amid all these groups, *Mujeres Libres* was distinctive in viewing themselves not just as a mechanism to channel women\u2019s support in service of government or political party, but in articulating its own message that women\u2019s liberation was a necessary component of the social revolution that had accompanied the outbreak of civil war. In the words of Temma Kaplan, the organisation \u2018was unique in that it was also concerned with the personal, ethical, and economic emancipation of Spanish women as well as with their wartime service.\u2019 \n\nTheir very distinctiveness in this regard is quite telling, and indicates the answer to part of your question \u2013 the Spanish Civil War saw relatively limited and incremental changes in the societal role of women, and there were few voices actively calling for more. While women entered the workforce and took on new roles, as might be expected given the extent of the Republican mobilisation for the war effort, attitudes towards women\u2019s place in politics and public life did not shift nearly so far. Even anarchists were inclined to dismiss women, or, as one young member of *Mujeres Libres*, Sara Berenguer, was to discover, assumed that any women who wanted to talk about freedom meant that she was \u2018freely sexually available to them\u2019. Indeed, foreign observers were sometimes dismayed at the extent that Spanish women seemed to be excluded from the enduring patriarchal structures of left-wing politics. One British medical volunteer, Winifred Sandford, was astounded to hear that the only reason she was allowed to sit and converse with the men was because, as an Englishwoman, she had been \u2018educated like a man.\u2019 Another, Nan Green, was dismayed that traditional gender roles held firm on an anarchist commune she visited, with women seemingly accepting that they had no right to take part in discussion and maintained traditional gender roles such as only eating after then men had finished. Green, like Australian poet Mary Low, was concerned that Spanish women would be willing to accept far too little emancipation \u2013 \u2018the little scraps which answered their first call.\u2019 This in turn reflected a broader tendency in the Spanish Popular Front to moderate revolutionary demands in favour of anti-fascist unity \u2013 a revolution in women\u2019s social roles, in other words, would need to wait until the war was won. It should also be noted that not all foreign observers were as critical as those quoted above \u2013 for some, the fact that Spanish women had responded so enthusiastically to the call to join in the war effort, despite the ingrained cultural attitudes towards women in public life, was proof of the both popular enthusiasm for the war effort and the Republic\u2019s emancipatory credentials. Even then, however, discourse was often tightly limited \u2013 gender conventions were being altered but not overthrown, with the role of women redefined to include new duties but within a framework that would do less to offend bourgeois sensibilities.\n\nSo, while *Mujeres Libres* was not exactly ignored internationally \u2013 prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman, for instance, wrote for their periodical (which only accepted articles written by women) in December 1936 \u2013 they were something of an anomaly, and it\u2019s unlikely that many observers overseas pointed to them (much less any other women\u2019s organisation) as evidence of a radical female revolution in Spain. For overseas observers, a much more potent symbol of revolutionary femininity came from the early days of the war \u2013 the famed *milicianas*, immortalised in images and words in the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup. On the left, these portrayals helped galvanise support for the Republic, proof of the depth of resistance to fascism among the Spanish people. However, even in the most glowing portrayals there could be subtexts that diminished the *milicianas* as symbols of emancipation. Within Spain, they could be used as tools to mobilise men \u2013 the implication being that if women were willing to fight, their own masculinity was called into question if they did not. Moreover, their presence at the front was often softened. The British *Daily Herald*, for instance, showed one picture of a \u2018Loyal Woman Soldier\u2019 not carrying a rifle but repairing a male soldier\u2019s tunic. This was perhaps a more honest portrayal of the *miliciana* reality \u2013 the communists, for instance, organised a women\u2019s battalion for their Fifth Regiment, but relegated it to support work. This did not, of course, stop foreign fascination at such exotic practices \u2013 the *Times*, for instance, referred to it as the \u2018Amazon battalion\u2019. In other instances, even the determinedly neutral language of the *Times* conveyed a sense of unease at the breakdown of gender norms.\n\n > Corps of milicianas \\[militia-women\\] have been organized, and women, armed and aggressive, take their place in the front line with men. All that womanhood traditionally stands for is rapidly disappearing. Women of the proletariat are not at all perturbed by the fact that in the region held by the government scarcely a church is open, scarcely a priest dares appear in public.\n\nThis was among the more measured portrayals of the *milicianas* from the right. The direct involvement of \u2018Red\u2019 women on the outbreak of the civil war was taken as proof of the ill-effects of emancipation on women, with lurid tales of the animalistic, fanatic and wanton behaviour gaining currency, particularly in the tabloid press. Such portrayals were heavily sexually charged; the women themselves of \u2018loose morals\u2019, if not actual prostitutes. Many of these stories are of dubious provenance, and they continued to be published long after the brief involvement of *milicianas*at the front. This can partly be explained by the shocking novelty of women\u2019s intrusion into the masculine world of war, but also doubled as a way to condemn both Republican society and morality, as well as liberalising tendencies at home. In contrast, women under Nationalist rule were represented as \u2018true\u2019 Spanish women, virtuous, religious and dedicated to family, proof of the need for traditionalist rule in Spain (and a return to traditional values at home). While women were naturally mobilised to support the war effort in Nationalist Spain as well, care was taken to portray these roles as conforming to gendered expectations \u2013 maternal, comforting and supportive, knitting scarves and serving meals. Ironically, the Republic was trying to do much the same thing \u2013 as ever, perception was far more important than reality in the eyes of partisan foreign observers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3phs0i", "title": "What would happen to Knights or Lords who were captured during battles during the Middle Ages? Were they ransomed off or were they executed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3phs0i/what_would_happen_to_knights_or_lords_who_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6j3a8"], "score": [6], "text": ["This depended a lot on the time period and warring states.  \n\nTake, for example, the Battle of Flodden Fields in 1513.  The Scots King, James IV, was killed on the field, as were the majority of the Scots nobility.  Most of the Scots court was killed at Flodden, and it was England's greatest triumph over the Scots in a century.  The nobility was decimated, and it took nearly a generation for their sons to replace them, and the court of Mary, Queen of Scots looked quite different from that of her grandfather and father, even though they were only thirty years separated.\n\nContrast this with the Battle of Lewes, in 1264.  Henry III of England initially attacked from strength, but was defeated and was captured by his barons.  As regicide was not considered acceptable at this point in history, the Barons never considered executing Henry, but forced him to sign over many of his powers to the leader of the Barons, Simon de Montfort, who was later referred to as an \"uncrowned king.\"  \n\nEdward II and Edward V were both killed in prison, and Richard II was likely starved to death in prison as well, while Richard III was killed on the field of battle.  However, since there was belief in the divine right of Kings, a defeated King was not killed outright by his opponents, at least during the medieval period - John and Henry III were both forced to relinquish some of their kingly powers when they were defeated in battle, but execution never crossed the mind of their captors.  \n\nKnights and nobles were similarly treated, but it was not unheard of for nobles to be killed on the field.  Outright execution of nobles was, again, frowned upon - Piers Gaveston, one of Edward II's close advisors, was hunted down and killed by other nobles because they believed he earned too much of the King's patronage.  This caused the King to fly into a rage, and it was not for some time that he came to an accord with the barons, even pardoning them for the crime.  Executing nobility was not taken lightly. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3x75jn", "title": "How accurately did medieval monks copy down Greek and Roman texts?", "selftext": "Do we know if they ever added their own commentary or omitted parts of stories? Or were they faithful to the originals?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x75jn/how_accurately_did_medieval_monks_copy_down_greek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy2h9ub", "cy2hnvy"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["The answer would vary greatly depending on the text in question. The extent to which we can determine what the original was (and thus what are interpolations) is itself highly dependent on the manuscript tradition and the number of extant witnesses (*i.e.* surviving copies). Yes, all the things you mention happen in places. Sometimes they are easy to pick out; certain interpolations or omissions (particularly omissions) have surely escaped modern notice. \n\nTo approach a manuscript tradition, you must first locate as many copies of the text as you can. Manuscripts can be dated, sometimes with astounding precision, based on their script and codicological features. This discipline, paleography, had its first stirrings in the Humanist movement of the Renaissance, but it has its true origins in the seventeenth century, when various monasteries attempted to assert the legitimacy of their privileges, often attested on manuscript charters, or \"diplomas\". \n\nA handwritten copy will never be 100% accurate. Scribes skip lines, make spelling errors, transpose words, etc. By looking at these variations, you can create a \"family tree\" of the extant copies, though if you do not actually have the autograph manuscript (exceedingly rare), you can only approximate the original text. The art of reconstructing this *stemma codicum* (family tree of books) was actually first used by 19th c. German philologists to attempt to restore the \"original\" text of the Bible, but became generalized with its use in the massive (and continuing) *Monumenta Germaniae Historica*.\n\nScholars now use and create \"critical editions\" of texts. These have the author's interpretation (and without the autograph it is always an interpretation) of the original text, but provide footnotes with the variations found in each manuscript. These are invaluable resources for modern historians. If the text I am reading quotes a variation of another text only found in one manuscript of that text, that tells me something about the author!", "The idea *usually* was to accurately reproduce the text in front of them (which almost certainly wasn't the original), but all kinds of things could and did go wrong.  Just as an experiment, try copying out something in whatever your native language is by hand and see if, working in a language you operate in on a daily basis, you can produce an error-free copy.  The copyists of our texts had varying abilities with the languages and it shows in things like misspelling words several different ways and such.\n\nThen there are reading errors.  I don't know how much handwriting you have to read anymore, but again, making out someone else's handwriting can be a huge pain in the ass.  We also have a tendency to want to fill in things we don't understand by inference from the things we do, so if a scribe misreads a word, he might try to construe the rest of the sentence in a way to make his original mistake make sense.\n\nThen there are things like skipping lines, or repeating a line already copied, all the same kinds of reading mistakes we make every day.  Pages get stuck together.  Someone takes a break and loses their place.  All of that will show up in the new manuscript.\n\nSometimes scribes realized there was a mistake in the text and tried to correct it, either by erasing bits, or writing in the \"correct\" reading (corrections aren't always right), or by sticking stuff in the margin.  But they might also use the margin to include other info - a sort of cross reference.  Now, a third scribe gets his hands on a manuscript with notes in the margin and has to decide if they are corrections that belong in the text, or if it's the cross reference sort of note, and whether it should be reproduced in the text itself or the margin.  Or at all.  \n\nModern editors of these texts try to sort out these errors and produce something like the earliest possible text we can - this is the field of [textual criticism](_URL_0_).  We are pretty good at it (we can sometimes test our corrections against papyri, for instance), and in case we get things wrong, a good scholarly edition will have what's called an apparatus at the bottom of the page - a bit of notes that give important possible alternative readings.  These are extremely brief notes in a sort of code; they are not for everyone to use.  They scare me a bit.  But they are there so a reader, if one wants, can evaluate the decisions the editor made in producing the text he or she produced.\n\nThere are places where some people suspect the text has been changed on purpose to suit an agenda. Bart Ehrman's book *Misquoting Jesus* looks at several of these kinds of changes.  It is also a very accessible introduction to textual criticism generally."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism"]]}
{"q_id": "7240li", "title": "The evolution of the democrats/republicans", "selftext": "I guess I'm after something between a lecture and a TL;DR, but as an australian i'm fascinated by foreign and historical politics. Perhaps it is no surprise that some of the highest profile records are that of the USA.\n\nSo I'm intersted, *what's the deal* with the republicans and democrats through the ages.\n\nTo give context to my question: \n\nRecently, in house of cards, Underwood is a democratic president with deep south connections. On the face of it, this flies in the face of the south's depiction in maintsream media. (ie, it is 'backwards' and racist - not the overt qualities of a US president)\n\nAnd then this question: \n_URL_1_\n\nlead me to: \n_URL_0_\n\nWhich talks of Lincoln's (an independent/whig ((which raises further questions, a whig, I tend to think of as a westminster/english idea!?)) that advocates a more or less conciliatory approach) actions in dealing with the southern loyalists. (now, I will obviously concede that TBoaN is fiction and I have no idea of the real treatment of any of the southern captives/defeated states at the hands of the north)\n\nIt just seems to me that at some point american politics have been 'twisted.'\n\nYou don't seem to have a working class V 'landed gentry' kind of narrative. I'm just seeking insight into the situation.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7240li/the_evolution_of_the_democratsrepublicans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnfkn09"], "score": [2], "text": ["Maybe as a post script:\n\nTo clarify my perception of lincoln: Upon revision, he was actually a republican, which further muddies the idea of him being a democratic ideal (ie, freed the slaves, eloquent ((or *verbose*)) statesman.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71z0op/so_the_kkk_in_the_mid1920s_could_boast_having_45/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dxson", "title": "What are the major challenges to Book of Mormon historicity?", "selftext": "Non-Mormon scholars don't view the Book of Mormon as a genuine historical record, but rather as a work of 19th-century fiction. Could you list some of the major reasons why this would be the case? What would we expect to find in the Book of Mormon if it **were** a genuine historical record of people in the Americas (location uncertain, often hypothesized by Mormon apologists to be somewhere in Central America, or in the Great Lakes region) from 600 BCE to 400 CE?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dxson/what_are_the_major_challenges_to_book_of_mormon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9uuvc5", "c9uvz8b", "c9uw2qq", "c9uw3xe", "c9uwepd", "c9uwy9q", "c9uwyo4", "c9ux0a8", "c9ux2xa", "c9uxdpg", "c9v9chg", "c9vbji1", "c9ve11o"], "score": [119, 74, 121, 24, 22, 434, 15, 84, 51, 29, 41, 9, 16], "text": ["One of the claims that is questioned is that, in the book of mormon, ancient isrealites moved to the americas. Here is a statement on the tracking of genitics in the Americas:\n\nLDS/Mormon researchers such as anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy and former-LDS plant geneticist Simon Southerton state that the substantial collection of Native American genetic markers now available are not consistent with any detectable presence of ancestors from the ancient Middle East, and argued that this poses substantial evidence to contradict the account in the Book of Mormon. Both Murphy and Southerton have published their views on this subject (Southerton 2004). The arguments of both Murphy and Southerton were disputed by David G. Stewart in a 2006 edition of FARMS Review\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n", "The Book of Mormon claims that there were approximately 200 years of utopian peace and plenty after Jesus Christ visited around 34 AD. In reality, pre-classic Mayan civilization suffered a devastating collapse involving widespread violent destruction of major trade centers in the Second Century.\n\nThe Book of Mormon claims that a group of people fleeing the \"confusion of tongues\" at the Tower of Babel sailed to America in sealed wooden submarines to found a civilization known as Jaredites.  Such ships are impossible.  Wood could never handle the warping and force of the ocean in order to make a large survivable submarine.  Also, the Tower of Babel is considered a fable by linguists and is contradicted by Sumerian or Egyptian writings found long before it supposedly happened.  The Book of Mormon claims it was a literal event.", "The Book of Mormon names a dozen animals like horses, donkeys, and elephants that did not exist during this time period in the Americas.  It also mentions technologies like smelting, rusting swords, bows and arrows, silk, and chariots that did not exist in the Americas.  There is a conspicuous lack of actual weapons, animals, customs, or plants that were actually present and important among the pre-classic Maya.", "I recommend taking the time to listen to [this interview with Michael D. Coe](_URL_0_) concerning the issues with Mormon archaeology.", "As a followup question: I've heard that much of the theology in the Book of Mormon (adult baptism, nature of God, etc) answer popular 19th century questions. How consistent is the Book of Mormon with 19th century Methodism?\n\nEdit: at the very least, does somebody here know of any good sources for learning about early 19th century Methodism?", "Here are just a few of the reasons: \n\n* It's riddled with [anachronisms](_URL_2_).  This also includes life-altering technologies that were not known to the native people such as chariots or steel.  (See the great documentary, Guns Germs and Steel for more on this point)\n\n* It's plagued with [plagiarism of the King James Version of the Bible and other sources from the 17-1800s](_URL_6_).  This includes copying translation errors accidentally introduced and italicized words added for clarity in the KJV translation.  \n\n* The English translation includes references which did not exist at the time the source was claimed to have been written (see the reference to [Satyr](_URL_1_))\n\n* The claimed original record is unavailable for verification.  The story being that it was taken back to heaven when the translation was finished. \n\n* The story tells of [wars resulting in millions](_URL_4_) dead, which can not be sourced or confirmed.    \n\n* The story includes incorrect declarations of the customs at the time, such as the use of a [coined monetary system](_URL_0_) which represented various weights of crops, or use of steel/metal armor and weaponry during warfare. \n\n* The origin story of [Native Americans being descended from Jews](_URL_3_), and having [once been white](_URL_5_), has been debunked so thoroughly that the religion changed the introduction to the book.  Where it once said the small family of Jews were the principal ancestors of the native americans, it now says they are simply among the ancestors.  (2005 change)\n\n* Joseph Smith has proven that he is unable to translate ancient works, despite his claims to the contrary.  [This example of a gross mistranslation is still in the LDS canon today](_URL_7_)\n\n* The language it was supposedly translated from, reformed egyptian, does not exist.  It especially does not exist on any south american ruin, tablet, parchment, or material.\n\nIF the book were a legitimate record, I would not be able to point to any of the items linked above.  I would not be able to show a 1700's myth being touted as absolute truth.  And we would need to have seen a civilization prior to the spanish conquest with military might and technology to rival the European conquerors.   \n\nFurthermore, the claims such as DNA evidence or the latter translations would have been validated by scientific discovery and not disproved. \n", "A bit circumstantial, but the circumstances for religious fervor were ripe at the time  &  place.  Always helps to look at the context when looking for motive: _URL_0_", "Among the greatest achievements in science are the ones that corroborate between the fields of science.\n\nPhysics allows us to measure the age of rocks based on half-lives of radioactive elements. Geology allows us to measure the time length of continental drift. Biology allows us to calculate branching of species and human races with DNA.\n\nArcheology, anthropology, and sociology let us know what happened, how people were, what technologies they were capable of, and how they got along.\n\nThe union of the sciences, and their ability to confirm each others' results, allow us a strong level of certainty in our discoveries.\n\n-----\n\nBy using these mutually-reenforcing theories, we know a few things about the historicity of the Book of Mormon:\n\n- The Native Americans are not, and never were, Jews.\n\n- Native Americans did not possess chariots.\n\n- There were no modern ride-able horses in the Americas.\n\n- Native Americans did not use iron or steel.\n\n- The size of the Nephite and Lamanite armies in the Final Battle of the BOM would require a much larger logistical support chain, more advanced infrastructure and technology, and much much larger citizen population than was available.\n\n-----\n\nThe story *in* the BOM is problematic, but the story *of* the BOM is also familiar:\n\n- The story *in*: There were Nephites but they all died, and didn't leave a trace, so you can't *disprove* it.\n\n- The story *of*: There were these Golden Plates, but an angel took them, so you can't *disprove* it.\n\nSure, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but you aren't allowed to promote or charge money for a drug that hasn't been proven to work.\n\nYou likewise should not be able to charge money for membership in an organization that makes fantastic claims about the condition of the universe and the earth and human history and metaphysics until you *prove it.*", "The Book of Mormon claims MILLIONS died in battle on the Hill Cumorah (The place where Joseph Smith supposedly found Gold plates).\n\nNot one steel sword, chariot wheel or skeleton has been found there.", "A picture of the \"caracters\" said to have been copied from the original Book of Mormon still exists.  [You can see a picture of them Here](_URL_1_). It doesn't look like ancient writing. If it were real, it should actually be some sort of Egyptian lettering, as the Book of Mormon was said to have been written in \"Reformed Egyptian\".\n\nThe Book of Mormon contains great swaths of the Bible.  One of the main groups of people in the book was the family of Lehi.  They were Israelites that left Jerusalem and traveled to the new world just before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple about 600 bc.  With them, they took some plates that had portions of the Bible written on it.  One of those portions, transcribed into the Book of Mormon, are sections of [deutero-Isaiah](_URL_0_), written **after** the destruction of Jerusalem, and after Lehi and family were in the New World.  \n\n\n", "Since this seems to have drawn some great responses, but also some quite terrible ones, I find it necessary to say this as a official moderator warning to those posting in this thread:\n\nReligious respect is paramount in this sub as a whole, but even more so in questions that talk about one specific religion. Therefore, answers which can give an objective insight onto the historicity of the Mormon beliefs are great, but straight-up Mormon-bashing is not. This thread will be moderated heavily.", "Not a theologist/historian, just a Utahn, but I wish someone who was a theologist/historian would talk about the Book of Abraham. Really interesting story where a friend of Joseph Smith's asked him to translate some ancient papyri, which Smith claimed contained a first-hand account of Abraham's life. It's widely believed to have actually been one or more of several other fairly common ancient Egyptian books, but a lot of the papyri were lost in a fire, so the evidence is just patchy enough to keep some debate alive. ", "In the book of Mormon, we find references to the following:\n\n* at least 46 cities\n* at least 11 different coin types\n* at least 11 unique land areas\n* at least 7 unique metals including steel for making swords\n* at least 8 unique animals\n\nThe list above shows 83 unique items for which archaeological evidence should be found. In fact, due to the unique nature of these items, archaeological evidence should have already been found (such as the evidence of horses being present in the pre-Columbian New World) . However, not even one item has been found to validate the book of Mormon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=18&amp;num=1&amp;id=602"], [], [], ["http://mormonstories.org/268-270-dr-michael-coe-an-outsiders-view-of-book-of-mormon-archaeology/"], [], ["http://www.mrm.org/coins", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronisms_in_the_Book_of_Mormon#.22Satyr.22", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronisms_in_the_Book_of_Mormon", "http://runtu.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/dishonesty-and-dna/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_mentioned_in_the_Book_of_Mormon", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelph", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Book_of_Mormon#Purported_plagiarism", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham#Facsimile_No._1"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned-over_district"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Isaiah#Deutero-Isaiah_.28Isaiah_40.E2.80.9355.29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caractors_large.jpg"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "yci99", "title": "So what do you think about James Clavell's Asia cycle?", "selftext": "For those who haven't read them, they're books where an important juncture in asian history (the claiming of Hong Kong as a British territory, the beginning of the Tokagawa shogunate, the Iranian revolution) are viewed through the eyes of westerners.\n\nFrom a writing perspective, they're really good books and as an expat living in China, I feel like the guy nails a lot of things about life as a westerner here. What about the history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yci99/so_what_do_you_think_about_james_clavells_asia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ucw1l", "c5ugqe5"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["I haven't read the rest, but I have a rather low opinion of Shogun's historical accuracy. First and foremost, the events and characters are drawn from history, but not actually historical.  That aside, he did a lot of research, got much of the material culture right, and the events themselves are plausible (many characters' stories are based on the lives of real people). However, I think he missed by a wide margin when it comes to historically accurate characterization of the people, culture and \"feel\" for the times.  Much of it is pure orientalist fantasy (*of course* the white guy is well hung and *all* the Japanese ladies can't wait to see it.  *Of course* the courtesans have special techniques to give men pleasure and are all too willing to share them with him.  *Of course* he's too civilized to give into his base desires at first - in some ways, the outline of the story is the same white-man-irresistible-to-racialized-other-falls-in-love-and-saves-the-day-with-superior-know-how (guns in this case) BS you get in Avatar, disney's Pocahontas and all the rest).\n\nIn particular, I feel that he missed in his portrayal of samurai and their ideals of honor and death in bushido. While their are plenty of sources that will tell you all about the strict code of the warrior that samurai lived by, the truth of the matter is that none of those codes ever held real dominance, and were not even created and written down until a bunch of samurai were feeling dissatisfied with their positions as non-fighting, glorified pencil pushers under the Tokugawa. Even then, it wasn't codified or put forward as *THE* way of the samurai until the Meiji era (here's someone's [dissertation on the construction of Bushido in the Mieji era](_URL_2_)).  To paraphrase that source, this idealized way of the warrior, although occasionally discussed historically, is largely a creation of later times, born out of cherry picking sources that supported a particular national identity that served state interests around the time of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905).   The historical sources don't really support that notion of warrior culture as being dominant during the times that people claim it came from.  \n\nHe also missteps is in his depictions of the eta (a derogatory term - now called [burakumin](_URL_3_)) in that he conflates ritual pollution and outcaste status with abject poverty.  In fact a number of Buraku communities were quite well off in the premodern era due to their monopoly on leather and other much needed animal goods (Burakumin \"liberation\" in the 1870s actually hurt Buraku communities in that it deprived them of their traditional monopolies and forced them into constant interaction with mainstream Japanese society, while doing little to end social stigma).  In a similar vein, he largely misunderstands the buddhist/ shinto prohibition against meat.  It only applied strictly to certain priests, and was practiced to some extent by the court. Fowl and game were a significant part of samurai diets, although there is a critical distinction in that they hunted for their meat rather than raising it as Europeans did.\n\nWhile it's an engrossing story, in the end I feel that it is more of an Orientalist fantasy of what medieval Japan *could* have been like, rather than an accurate depiction.\n\n**Edit**:  If someone's looking for more evaluation of Shogun, here's an apparently free and legal pdf (hosted at _URL_1_) of an edited volume entitled [*Learning From Sh\u014dgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy*](_URL_0_).  For more evidence that I'm not just making up the white savior aspect of the story, allow me to share with you this (half joking but still problematic) quote from Clavell, drawn from that PDF:\n\n > My forebears are all military, so I was brought up to be one of these people who ruled the empire. You know, two or three people used to go out and they used to rule the natives. And they used to dress in dinner jacket in the sweltering jungle. When the natives came and killed them, they said, \u201cThat\u2019s a terribly bad show, old boy.\u201d And then the British, wisely, would send a battleship and knock off the leader, and say, \u201cNow, look, *please* behave yourselves, because we *really* are better than you, and we really know how to look after you better. (p.14, italics in original)\n\nOn the next page, the author continues with more quotes illustrating how Clavell's sense of the main character as a captive, along with his interpretation of Japanese culture came from his time spent in a WWII prison camp.  Given the huge disparity in culture and social organization between the WWII Japanese Imperial Army and the samurai of more than 300 years before that, I think we can safely say that projecting those experiences back in time is not a good historical method for recreating a the culture of the times.", "My biggest problem with James Clavell isn't historical. For the most part he seems to have done his research but sticks to the fictional side of historical fiction and I am alright with that. There's a lot of artistic license involved, but it makes for entertaining stuff.\n\nMy main problem with Clevell's writing is that, once you have read a number of his books, you realize that he wrote himself into all of them (and as the protagonist in the majority) which means that the main character of each book has a different name but is essentially the same person. The protagonist is always the white guy who 'gets' the culture he is surrounded with, is always comparatively clean (and is disgusted by European filthiness), is a genius but also physically intimidating, etc.\n\nFrom a historical standpoint they're worth a read if you keep in mind that it's fiction but as fiction they tend to get dull having the same 'perfect' character in the lead role."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/learning/Learning_from_shogun_txt.pdf", "columbia.edu", "https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/31136/ubc_2011_spring_benesch_oleg.pdf?sequence=1", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin"], []]}
{"q_id": "5b9vpl", "title": "What did boat drivers do after landing in Normandy? Did they stay on the boats, or they helped on the beachs? And what about boat gunners? Did they dismount the machinegun, or left it on the boat?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5b9vpl/what_did_boat_drivers_do_after_landing_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9mvr6h", "d9ngx7j", "d9ni4zk"], "score": [778, 55, 14], "text": ["In general, small boats, i.e. higgins boats, backed off from the beach and returned to the ships they launched from in order to bring in subsequent assault waves.   Landing craft were a valuable asset for logistical support in the days after the landing and were preserved when possible.  \n\nThere are exceptions to this, of course.  Some craft were stuck on the beach or holed by enemy fire and not seaworthy enough to return to the transport ships.  I don't have any detailed information on the behavior of these crews.\n\nThere is at least one notable case of gunfire from larger landing craft being important:\n\n > In breaking this deadlock during the next hour, naval intervention played an important part. At about 1030 two landing craft, LCT 30 and LCI(L) 44, steamed full ahead through the obstacles off the Colleville beaches, firing all weapons at enemy strong points guarding the Colleville draw. The craft continued to fire after beaching. Not only did their action prove that the obstacles could be breached by ramming, but their fire, though failing to neutralize German positions in the Colleville draw, had at least a heartening effect on the assault troops.\n\n*(from US Army Historical Series: Cross-Channel Attack)*\n\nAn LCI would have 4x20mm cannon or similar and an LCT 2x20mm cannon, so their fire would have been slightly heavier than machine guns.  Close in support from destroyers 5 inch guns was probably more effective than landing craft fire, since 5 inch guns could actually destroy some German fortifications, not just suppress them.\n\nAt any rate, while circumstances varied widely, naval personnel were supposed to stay with their ship and either fight or keep bringing in troops and supplies, not go ashore and try to perform as infantry when they were not equipped or trained to do so.\n\n", "Coast Guard personnel in many instances served as coxwains and crew members. I/Yaksarecool asked about this and to answer: Coast Guard personnnel served in all theaters of the war, and perhaps the most recognizable role they played was as boat crews, considering their expertise in maneuvering in close aboard and shallow draft, they were ideally suited for the role they played.\n\nAs a member of the Coast Guard, I can tell you that this is a tradition which the service is very proud of and chooses to educate members on while they are processed through boot camp. Douglas Munro, the only Coast Guard recipient of the Medal of Honor, was killed in action in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, if I remember correctly) while providing covering fire and positioning his craft between Marines that were evacuating the beach and the enemy firing positions that were targeting them. Petty Officer Munro was a Signalman, and his job was to direct landing craft to the beach.\n\nThe Coast Guard combat contributions tend to be forgotten by the general public and other branches, but in WW2, I believe they really made a name for themselves.\n\nAdditionally, there was a quote from a Coast Guard veteran of Normandy which I saw in this thread that mentioned the use of Springfield rifles. This is not surprising to me in the least. Marines like to complain that their equipment is the hand me down of the Navy, and while that may be true, it is certainly doubly so for the Coast Guard. On my previous assignment our armory had M-16A2s, while the Army and Marines are on the A3 and A4 variants. Some things seem to never change.", "I personally wondered why the boats were designed to open in the front?\n\nIf they instead opened on the sides, the enemy machines guns would be only to hit one side or the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e7345b", "title": "Why did the Bolsheviks not recapture the Baltic states and Finland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e7345b/why_did_the_bolsheviks_not_recapture_the_baltic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["faa4rd6"], "score": [6], "text": ["The short answer is that they did, or in case of Finland, tried to, in 1939. \n\nI cannot speak with authority about the events in the Baltic states, but it should be noted that the Baltic states and Finland were all battlegrounds for revolution. Indigenous revolutionaries were to some extent aided by the Soviet government, and for instance in Finland, the result was a very bloody civil war between the Reds and the Whites. For the initial period, before Germany's defeat in the World War, the White forces were supported by Germany; after the Armistice, Britain in particular provided some support in its attempts to contain the Soviet revolution. \n\nHowever, as far as I'm aware, the main reason why Bolsheviks did not immediately set out to recapture the Baltic states was simple exhaustion: on top of the losses Russia suffered in the World War, the Russian Civil War continued until 1922 (with minor skirmishes dragging on until 1923 and armed resistance until 1934). The droughts of 1920 and 1921, and the famine of 1921, further sapped the strength of the new Soviet regime, as did pandemics, general disruption, destruction of industry and infrastructure, and the flight of much of the educated class. Foreign adventures that could bring about another military intervention by the Western powers were unappealing at least, if not entirely impossible for years."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2euuva", "title": "Since there wasn't much clean water, what exactly did people in Medieval times drink? What was that clich\u00e9 bubbling mug of \"Ale\" the peasant folk drank that is always so deliciously depicted in movies and shows?", "selftext": "I don't think wine and mead have not changed much since then and you can get them at most liquor stores. But when I try to find the original \"ale\" at Specs or someplace, the employees give me their most puzzling looks.\nAnyone know what it is exactly and if there is anyone out there who reproduces it for sale? I'd love to try it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2euuva/since_there_wasnt_much_clean_water_what_exactly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck35o37"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hello! This has been covered before on this sub.[ Here](_URL_0_) is the relevant section from the FAQ.\n\n[This post](_URL_1_) in particular from /u/idjet covers the topic quite well. To sum it up, the idea that clean water wasn't available in the Middle Ages and that people used beer or ale as a\"substitute\" for water is a myth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/health#wiki_drinking_water", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_did_people_esp_european_townsmen_get_fresh/ce1r5xw"]]}
{"q_id": "4qdr7x", "title": "I know that the CIA and the AFL-CIO worked close together in order to destabilize the Guyanese government in the 1960s. Were similar tactics used in other Cold War conflicts in Central and South America? Did the CIA and the AFL-CIO both work together to spy on American citizens as well?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qdr7x/i_know_that_the_cia_and_the_aflcio_worked_close/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4t682s"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't know about other nations, but Tim Weiner's *Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA* mentions that the Kennedy Administration had CIA cash funneled through the American Institute for Free Labor Development for use in Brazil. Weiner characterizes the Institute as\n\n >  an arm of the AFL-CIO (British diplomats in the know called it the AFL-CIA.)\n\nIt wasn't the only channel for financing the Brazilian Right (Kennedy is on the tapes as describing the effort explicitly \"against the Left\".) but it was one of them. The plan was for $8 million to swing the elections and/or throw a coup, the latter of which happened in 1964, two years after Kennedy talked about it on his new (literally installed the prior weekend) taping system.\n\nWeiner describes the CIA as backing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela in addition to Guyana as of the late Sixties. He doesn't, so far as I can tell from his index and hunting around just now, implicate the union in efforts outside Guyana and Brazil or in domestic affairs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "607rsb", "title": "Is it fair to say that America caused the global (1930s) Great Depression? Were other countries' economic systems as responsible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/607rsb/is_it_fair_to_say_that_america_caused_the_global/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df4xxv5"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would say America as such is not to blame, but the global economic system at the time, coupled to the circulation of debt.\n\nDebt circulation:\nAfter the Versailles treaty Germany was bound to pay reparations to the victors (France and Great Britain mainly).\nAmerica loaned money to Germany, which they in turn used to pay the repairs, which France and Great Britain in turn used to pay their debts to America. \n\nIn addition the economies of the European countries lay in shambles post WWI. The US benefited from this initially, through the global food shortage, by increasing wheat production. After a while the European agriculture recovered and prices dropped dramatically, and farmers whom had loaned large sums to grow their business went under causing banks to collapse, next to other forms of 'bad' credit that was readily given out by these banks.\nIn short this collapsed the US economy, the largest in the world. Loans were called in, dragging the European countries down with the US.\n\nSome say that had the victors been more realistic in their terms with regards to Germany, and possibly accepted pay in kind allowing Germany's economy to develop in stead of deliberately frustrating it, the crisis would not have been so deep, due to the lack of the debt circulation described above.\n\nOthers argue that the US, as the new leading global economy, didn't take enough responsibility with regards to giving out credit in their domestic economy to ensure economic stability.\n\nI personally feel the crisis is the result of a combination of both, as supported by the way the US and allies dealt with the aftermath of WWII.\n\nSources:\n- Palmer, a history of Europe in the modern world.\n- McNeill  &  McNeill, The Human Web\n\n*I'll ad the exact chapters later*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aonw9p", "title": "Was Christianity responsible for our cultural aversion to nudity, or did it precede that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aonw9p/was_christianity_responsible_for_our_cultural/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eg2uf6z", "eg2xb3m"], "score": [274, 49], "text": ["What do you mean by \u201cour\u201d? America? Western Culture? Humanity? You can\u2019t quite answer the question until you clarify who you are talking about.", "May I ask if you are talking about America specifically?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "7n1hsi", "title": "Specific Holocaust denials - the elites were intact", "selftext": "Hello. I am interested in history, particularly World War II and public (also Jewish) relations and lives during these days. Lately I've been fighting the lack of common sense in my family, because they decided to switch to YouTube videos with yellow subtitles instead of books. \nLet me write down a sentence I'd love to slam dunk:\n\"The Holocaust may have been entirely or partially planned by Jews, since the elites weren't wiped out. Perhaps they planned their extermination to create Israel after the war.\"\nIs there proof that \"higher ranked\" Jews were in fact a subject to similar conditions like normal people? I mean ghettos, concentration camps, executions from the hands of Einsatzgruppen etc. Earlier asked questions and answers to them are helpful, but I'd love specific informations about rabbis, musicians and artists, politicians, scientists etc. Specific people like Janusz Korczak or Franciszka Mann may not be enough, since they are singular examples - are there documented transports of whole groups of scientists or politicians etc? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n1hsi/specific_holocaust_denials_the_elites_were_intact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dryp65v"], "score": [15], "text": ["First of all, [here is an older answer of mine](_URL_0_) dealing with direct, German-produced, undeniable evidence for the Holocaust and [here is the Monday Methods on Holocaust Denial](_URL_3_). Arguing with deniers is always a bit of a wasted effort I feel since it is my as well as other's experience that one hardly ever succeeds in convincing them. After all, when you do not even share a premise \u2013 that facts are facts \u2013 arguing indeed becomes like nailing a pudding to the wall.\n\nSecondly, while there were no specific transports consisting only of artists, politicians and so forth, traditional social elites were as persecuted and experienced the same conditions and level of horrendous treatment as normal people did. While I'll get to a broader discussion of that in a second, one thing that is important here is the specific fate of the German-Jewish community. German Jews experienced a longer period of social ostracizing and state-persecution than other Jewish communities in Europe for they \u2013 obviously \u2013 lived longer under Nazi rule. At the same time, this also meant that they experienced persecution at a time when genocide was not yet the political goal of the Nazi regime.\n\nFrom 1933 to about the start of the war (and ultimately ending altogether in 1941), the Nazis' preeminent policy was voluntary and forced emigration. Meaning that the goal of persecution measures and so forth was to encourage Jews to leave Germany by all measures available to them. While the Nazis created whole schemes that used money confiscated from rich German Jews to finance the emigration of poorer German Jews, the period of (forced) emigration was one during which German Jews with either financial or social standing had a somewhat easier time than their poor counter parts; especially when it came to other countries allowing them to immigrate. Scientists like Einstein or Sigmund Freud found more open arms and easier entrance into the US and Great Britain than a Jewish grocer or shoe maker.\n\nI have described the evolution of the Holocaust and anti-Jewish policy in greater detail in [this answer](_URL_4_) but to sum it up quickly: The period between the start of the war and the decision to murder all of the Jews of Europe wholesale at the turn of the year 1941 to 1942 was characterized by a whole slew of plans of how to rid Europe of Jews \u2013 most famously the Madagascar Plan \u2013 that already carried genocidal overtones. It was also characterized by the increasing ghettoization of Jewish populations under Nazi control, most famously in Poland but also including the German Jewish population.\n\nTo this end, the Theresienstadt Ghetto/Concentration Camp came into existence. In order to avoid public protests \u2013 [I go into this more here](_URL_2_) \u2013 Theresienstadt was created as a Ghetto for Jewish-Germans of prominence and \u2013 also critically \u2013 Jewish-German veterans of the First World War. The Nazis frequently called it a \"Ghetto for the prominent\" and although conditions in Theresienstadt belied that fact, being as brutal and unrelenting as in other camps, many of the prisoners were what one can consider famous musicians, artists, politicians and so forth.\n\nThe reason I mention all this is because the history of Theresienstadt comes closest to what you are asking about, for all the prominence of the prisoners of the ghetto \u2013 which consisted of among others: Esther Adolphine, Sigmund Freud's sister; famous actor Eugen Burg; Robert Desnos, the French Surrealist poet; Alfred Flatow, German Olympic gymnast; Rudolf Karel, Czech composer; Emil Kolben, Czech industrialist; Clementine Kr\u00e4mer, writer and social worker; Georg Alexander Pick, Austrian mathematician; Mathilde Sussin, actress; and many more \u2013 were not spared from deportation. Starting already in 1942 and continuing until 1944 the German authorities deported over 46,750 Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, among them some of the most prominent prisoners of the camp. If even noteable and famous Germans, including veterans who had fought in WWI and were highly decorated in some cases were not save from deportation and death, no Jew in Europe would ever be.\n\nAnd that was definitely the case. The Einsatzgruppen did not care very much about whom the shot anyways but where there remained a semblance of Jewish social organization \u2013 in form of the Jewish councils in the Ghettos \u2013 they were far from save either. I go further into this [here](_URL_1_) but where Ghettos were liquidated, meaning its inmates deported to a death camp and/or shot, nobody remained save and members of the Jewish councils were included in such measures. \n\nBasically, in response to the claim you posted: Prominence did not save Jews from being killed by the Nazis. Such a claim has no basis. In fact cases, most prominent among them Theresienstadt as an institution itself, show quite the opposite."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76avmk/how_do_we_estimate_the_number_of_jewish_deaths_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dd275/to_what_extent_did_the_formation_of_jewish/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7hqfee/why_was_the_final_solution_kept_secret_did_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57w1hh/monday_methods_holocaust_denial_and_how_to_combat/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5z20xa/evolution_of_the_holocaust/"]]}
{"q_id": "bvatb5", "title": "I\u2019m watching a Netflix show on Julius Caesar and they are saying Caesar had one of his epilepsy episodes in front of the senate and that\u2019s why he left Rome to invade Parthia. I read Caesa\u2019rs biography and it never mentioned him having his seizure in front of the senate. Did that happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bvatb5/im_watching_a_netflix_show_on_julius_caesar_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epnyt3v"], "score": [8], "text": ["This does not sound very right at all; firstly, Caesar never invaded or (otherwise went to) Parthia. He was planning a campaign during the final months of his life, but he was assassinated in 15 March 44 BC, three days before his planned date of departure. The \"historicity\" of Caesar\u00b4s epilepsy is much debated and pretty much all the ancient sources give different stories and instances of his supposed fits of epilepsy. All the incidents are recorded from the period late in Caesar's life; late onset of epilepsy is possible, but very rare. Some historians even suggest that his epilepsy might have been a convenient \"political illness\": epilepsy (or, a large variety of symptoms that could be due to epilepsy or some other illnesses, e.g. brain tumour - the ancients did not have a very good grasp of the medical facts) was associated often with genius in antiquity, and the few reported instances relate to critical moments of e.g. military failure, so it is possible that Caesar feigned/lied about convenient fits of illness, or his admiring biographers explained away his less glorious moments with the illness.    \n\nThe makers of the show might have gotten inspiration from some ancient sources. Appian (B Civ. 2.110) suggests that Caesar\u2019s  convulsions pestered him when he was not active and thus he was always looking for new challenges, and the planned Parthian invasion was therefore partly driven by his illness. This is, of course, just Appian\u00b4s own speculation. There is one, sort of, tradition of an instance of a public and again convinient fit of illness in the senate; Dio 44.8 reports that after the Civil War, Caesar failed to customarily stand up in the senate at the approach of consuls and praetors. In the senate, senators were supposed to always stand whenever someone of higher rank and seniority was standing; sitting while others are standing was a hugely important sign of status in Roman culture. So, Caesar's failure to stand was a refusal to acknowledge the seniority of the elected top Republican magistrates and a sign of monarchical hubris. His admirers have apparently explained this unacceptable behaviour with illness; Dio took Caesar to be suffering from diarrhoea, Plutarch in turn thought he was suffering from one of his fainting fits (i.e. perhaps epilepsy). It's pretty impossible to know what was the historical truth about this particular event in the Senate, both Dio and Plutarch are writing 150-200 years after the fact and there was already a very rich and complex and varied and twisted literary tradition about Caesar's life and legacy. But, neither of them link the event in anyway with the invasion of Parthia, and any link does not seem very plausible, not to mention we can't even know if there was any illness."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8ifmdf", "title": "How were Soviet Factories Profitable?", "selftext": "Hi! I need a simple, to-the-point explanation of why soviet factories never went bankrupt. If a Factory has \"X\" Production but then they sell it at a fixed, subsidized price that didn't match the production costs, then how did enterprises, collective farms and factories remained profitable? (The first soviet factory to go bankrupt was in 1988, when the Federation was no longer Socialist). Was it because the production costs were also fixed or something like that? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ifmdf/how_were_soviet_factories_profitable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyroew9"], "score": [33], "text": ["It didn't work that way. The Soviet Union did not have a market economy with state owned enterprises. Its economy was a planned command economy which utilised the material balance planning system. You may read to last paragraph for tl;dr.\n\nBriefly, the Soviet economy was administered by an agency called the State Planning Committee \u2014 **\u0413\u043e\u0441**\u0443\u0434\u0430\u0440\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0435\u043d\u043d\u044b\u0439 \u043a\u043e\u043c\u0438\u0442\u0435\u0442 \u043f\u043e **\u043f\u043b\u0430\u043d**\u0438\u0440\u043e\u0432\u0430\u043d\u0438\u044e, or \u0413\u043e\u0441\u043f\u043b\u0430\u043d, for short. We'll use English, and call it Gosplan.\n\nEvery five years, Gosplan created a plan for the next five years (Five year plans), which was usually quite broad. It would have to decide if it wanted more capital goods (things that help you make other things) or consumer goods (stuff we buy to use). The prices available to the public were set at rates relative to incomes, and industry had to keep up to make enough stuff. This is the \"planned\" part.\n\nLet's take a random, created example: Gosplan wants a factory to make 500 more cars per year. So they need 500 more engines, 2,000 more wheels, and so on. The factory is given the command to make 500 more cars. It will be supplied with all the things it needs from other factories like motor factories, leather for seats, and so on. Those factories do not choose what to do but are instead told what to do by government bureaus under the aegis of Gosplan. This is the command part, and Gosplan is the commander (mostly). \n\nAs you can imagine this is quite complicated. Everything must be worked out in terms of inputs. If you want 500 more cars, you need at least 500 more tonnes of metal. So on and so forth. Gosplan did have financial account sheets (I won't go into this here, but it was not same as our UN system of national accounts, Communists had slightly different one) but it also had to keep track of every type of produced thing. This is called material balance planning.\n\nFactories weren't profitable, and were not intended to be. They didn't sell things at a higher cost than it took to make them, but instead produced goods in accordance with a larger output plan. They would go on working and the state would go on paying the workers, even if it wasn't efficient enough. But if they couldn't make enough stuff, there simply wouldn't be enough stuff in the shops for workers to buy. Gosplan didn't control the whole economy of USSR. There was always allowed a little bit of private activity. But basically, that's how the system functioned. No matter what, the state continued to pay workers in cash for goods whose price was not dependent upon their supply.\n\nedit: soviets themselves used capital to output ratios (ie what did fixed plant produce relative to how much it cost) as a basic measure of what we might call \"profitability.\" the return on investment ratio was important to communists. russian term is \u0424\u043e\u043d\u0434\u043e\u043e\u0442\u0434\u0430\u0447a (fotdootdacha)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "111k6y", "title": "Has a state ever been forced to \"release nations\" like in the game Europa Universalis 3? ", "selftext": "I'm curious to how historically accurate it is as either part of a treaty or reason for war, examples would be great. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/111k6y/has_a_state_ever_been_forced_to_release_nations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6iitzv", "c6ij4k6", "c6ij9k4", "c6ik3qo", "c6ikw8b", "c6ip1xj", "c6islyz"], "score": [8, 8, 2, 12, 2, 5, 4], "text": ["In \"modern\" history, there is the obvious example of Poland after world war I.", "What do you mean by \"release nations\"?", "Looking at The fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British annexed territories from the Ottomans which they then released as sort of puppet states. \nWhich state in their right mind, with the power to enforce such a thing, wouldn't ensure they had some control over the nation released afterwards. And such, can we even claim that nations are being released? Based on this standard, no one can claim that Norway was released from Denmark after the Napeolonic War, rather the country fell under Swedish rule instead, though with a greater degree of autonomy.\nThe most \"pure\" example of a nation being released as a result of war, might be the release of Czechoslovakia from Austria-Hungary following World War 1.", "Sure.\n\nDuchy of Warsaw was created as a part of the Treaty of Tilsit following the Franco-Prussian war during the Napoleonic era.\n\nIn the 1870's, Bulgaria was created after a Russian-Turkish war.\n\n ", "The disintergration/breakup of the British Empire. For example India, or for that matter Ireland. They were ruled by the British Crown but were 'released' as you woud say in EU3 due to armed/passive resistance. ", "For those of you wondering what the OP is talking about:\n\neu3 is a grand strategy video game covering the Early Modern era. \"Forcing a state to release a nation\" is a condition that can be included in peace treaties, where:\n\n* independence is granted to some of the loser's territories\n* the newly independent state is automatically allied to the victor\n* the new state is fully autonomous - other than its alliance with the victor, it is permitted to run an independent foreign policy.\n\nAn important part to note here is that *this is an agreement between two internationally recognized states, where the released nation is a third party*. Therefore, the following does not count as \"releasing a nation\".\n\n* Rebels declaring independence\n* Granting independence to colonies\n* Devolution of regional autonomy during peacetime\n\nIn eu3, an example could be France defeating the Habsburgs and placing some third-party noble on the throne of the County of Tirol. Although the third-party noble would be somewhat obligated to help out his benefactor, he would generally operate primarily as a vassal of the HRE.\n\nHowever, as kameratroe points out, in reality most \"released\" states are under some degree of control of the war's victor - the eu3 mechanism of released states having total independence is probably there mostly for game balancing so that aggressive states can't expand too quickly.", "This falls just into the purview of /r/askhistorians (viz. right before 1992):\n\nSaddam's Iraq had annexed Kuwait in 1990. The subsequent Gulf War forced Iraq to release that territory as an independent country once more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6lclhr", "title": "Are prisoners of war counted as casualties?", "selftext": "This is a little question that around out of [this] (_URL_0_) thread on /r/ShitWehraboosSay. I have been under the impression that a casualty is any soldier unavailable for duty, mostly due to my long-held habit of reading Wikipedia articles, where the convention is to list POWs as casualties of battles and wars. /u/Ophichius is under the impression that casualties only include soldiers who have been wounded (presumably also people who have been wounded to death). We have decided to let this sub arbitrate.\n\nWhat is the consensus on this among historians? Among military personnel? Among journalists? Among other relevant categories that I missed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lclhr/are_prisoners_of_war_counted_as_casualties/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djsub2u"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just to clarify, my understanding of the topic is that KIA/WIA are always counted as casualties, some militaries have counted those with battlefield illness (trench foot, etc.) as casualties, and POWs are typically categorized separately.\n\nHowever, this is just my understanding gleaned from a layperson's reading of the literature, and not any sort of formal training. Hence why we're appealing to the good folk of /r/AskHistorians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://np.reddit.com/r/ShitWehraboosSay/comments/6l7vdp/western_front_is_moron_brigade_turkey_shoot_the/djs2b5t/?st=j4qoxyv8&amp;sh=523c2e0a"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c85rtw", "title": "Has the US military (including any branch such as the Navy, Marines, Army, etc.) ever been used in a military style parade in the United States?", "selftext": "In light of recent news of President Trump's planned use of tanks in 4th of July celebrations, I was curious to know if any of the military branches had ever been used for a 4th of July parade by past presidents. Or, more broadly, were there any parades out of wartime where the US military was included? At the very least, I'm aware there were military style parades during the 1910's and 40's during the height of the World Wars. However, considering the state of world politics and how morale at home would affect the front lines at the time, this is somewhat expected. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'm rather more curious about the US military's use outside of morale-boosting military parades during war time. If there were parades that used the US military, how were they viewed at the time? If I had to guess, I wouldn't be surprised if there parades of this sort during the height of the Cold War in the 50's and 60's. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAny suggestions for sources and future reading is always appreciated :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c85rtw/has_the_us_military_including_any_branch_such_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eskz65a", "esl5705"], "score": [16, 18], "text": ["One of the biggest military parades in American history happened at the conclusion of the Civil War following the  assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was called \"The Grand Review of the Armies\" and happened in Washington DC in May 1865, a month following Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Around 150,000 Union soldiers from the armies of the Tennessee, the Potomac, and Georgia under Sherman and Meade marched for two days in front of approximately 250,000 spectators, with Grant, Johnson and his cabinet present for the festivities. The armies had to be quickly mustered from active service on the front back to DC to take part in the grandiose spectacle. With the uproarious celebration occurring in the wake of Lee's surrender at Appomattox being quickly overshadowed by the shock of Lincoln's assassination and Seward's near assassination, the government wished to restore post-war morale to the nation with a massive military parade reviewing the victorious armies. It can rightly be called one of the biggest national exhibitions the United States had ever executed at that time.\n\nThe New York Times wrote this column on the first day:\n\n > \"The weather to-day was everything that could be desired for the unprecedentedly grand review of the Army of the Potomac. The atmosphere was pleasant, the sun shone with unclouded splendor, and the recent rains had laid the dust, putting the streets in good marching condition. Thousands of persons, including many from other cities, who have specifically come hither to see the pageant, line the sidewalk from the Capitol to the Executive mansion, a distance of a mile and a half, while windows and balconies, and all eligible positions, including house-tops, were occupied by deeply interested spectators... The general idea is that the number of troops comprising the Army of the Potomac, reviewed to-day, is about seventy-five thousand. No negro troops were in the procession. From the portico of the Treasury Department to-day, the flag of the Treasury Guard Regiment was displayed, the lower portion tattered and torn, not by battle, but by the spur of Booth, the assassin, as he jumped from the box at Ford's Theater to the stage, on the night of the assassination. A placard appended stated this fact, and it attracted much attention.\"\n\nI'm not sure if this exactly falls into your criteria, but it happened about a month following the generally accepted conclusion of the war with the intent of fostering public morale and national unity.", "Well we can start with the obvious basic fact, that the military has been a participant in a vast number of parades not directly linked to an ongoing conflict, or recently ended one, and that includes the 4th of July. \n\nIt just usually takes the form of a ceremonial marching contingent, assorted bands, and maybe some mounted cavalry when time and location appropriate. Instances with more broad participation, with towed artillery, armor, support vehicles, and timed flyovers, etc are far less common, and typically very context dependent. Things like the 1946 WW2 Victory Parade in NYC, or the Gulf War parade, or IKE and JFK's inaugurations as the Cold War escalated are good examples here. \n\nNor is this a new trend, and has as much philosophical origins as practical. Remember the Founding and Framing generation were not generally big fans of standing armies, many could still remember Boston under British occupation before the Revolution, and of course the actual war itself. Even those that did support a regular force werent looking for a large one. Thus local militia units played a far larger role in public celebrations, reviews and parades, gun salutes and all that with the role still today carried on by many communities having local National Guard units in their own small parades for 4th of July and other holidays. So another aspect of military participation in public celebration but one reflective of the fact that for 150 years the US Army was relatively small, not concentrated  near major urban centers, and institutionally not occupying the same respected central space it does today.\n\nWe should also draw a distinction with the Fleet Week celebrations around the nation annually, which were in essence semi organized celebrations that the Navy decided to officially support in an attempt to better shape their public image. As while a ship at a dock is less worrisome to the American sense of distrust of an motives of an overt military display, its also much easier to forget about and ignore. And again the modern iteration of FLeet Week, with the big ones in NYC, SF, and other cities only took off in the early 80's amidst renewed Cold War tension and the 600-ship Navy initiative. And a similar story with the air shows many bases host each year, a cool jet just doesnt hit the cultural sensitivity to an assertive military domestically that tanks rolling down main street in peacetime do.  \n\nSo yes there has been at least military participation in many public celebrations including the 4th, going back to the early national history, but rarely anything more than a ceremonial contingent, and usually as just one of several organizations participating. With exceptions being very context heavy.\n\nThe Smithsonian did a nice article tracing the history of Presidential participation w/respect to the military in 4th of July celebrations recently, and it also has a few quotes with regards to the Gulf War parade. Showing that for that event too there was concern about its use not as a celebration of the American fighting men and women, but as a tool of political optics as President Bush geared up for a reelection campaign. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-military-parades-us-have-changed-180968102/"]]}
{"q_id": "4q6yto", "title": "Did the Soviets ever suggest the US faked the moon landings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4q6yto/did_the_soviets_ever_suggest_the_us_faked_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4r1snm"], "score": [9], "text": ["No, in fact Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were widely know in the population and praised for their \"exceptional achievement\" by Soviet newspapers. \nThough it should be noted that it received way less attention than any development Soviet in space program.\nIt was recognised but not detailed reported about, to not make it look like a Soviet defeat like it was portrayed in the west.\n\n >  Soviet Premier Alexsey Kosygin complimented U.S. on lunar landing and expressed interest in widening U.S.-U.S.S.R. space cooperation during July 21 Moscow discussion with former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who was ending Soviet visit. \n\n\nSources: \n\nCollection of Press releases from [Nasa](_URL_1_)\n\n[Picture](_URL_0_) from the Pravda front page.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://translate.google.at/translate?hl=de&amp;sl=ru&amp;tl=en&amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arhivtime.ru%2Fdokument%2Fpage_dok%2F001%2Fdok_04.htm", "http://history.nasa.gov/AAchronologies/1969.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1kckui", "title": "Alphonse Capone experts: Could information provided in a reddit AMA have helped Capone if it had ever surfaced years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kckui/alphonse_capone_experts_could_information/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbnjztg"], "score": [5], "text": ["I looked into this.\n\nThe infamous trial against Al Capone which convicted him of tax evasion took place in 1931. The woman in question said that she was born in 1914. In this particular quote: [\"First, I changed my baptismal certificate so that I could start working at the age of 12 after my father was killed by a streetcar.\"](_URL_0_) She mentioned that she started to work at age 12. That would put this around 1926, several years before the trial in question. The only major accusation that could have brought Al Capone to trial in 1926 is the killing of William H. McSwiggin, however there was not enough evidence for a trial. \n\nIt's an absolute tragedy to lose ones father at such a young age, and while I can't confirm the fact that a jury member from an Al Capone trial was involved, it doesn't seem likely. The woman in question would have been 16/17 around the time that the Al Capone trial was taking place and not 11/12 like she stated she was when she had to start working after her father died."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ka8kp/iama_99_year_old_woman_who_helped_her_mother_make/cbn2w4v"]]}
{"q_id": "4lk22x", "title": "Did the atomic bombs help end the war? I've always believed they did but current article claims they did not.", "selftext": "So I recently saw an article (_URL_0_) written by Peter Kuznick that claims the atomic bombs had nothing to do with ending the war. He even says they were clearly a war crime. Now I could have sworn I've read on here that they *did* end the war and actually saved lives in the long run.\n\nIs there any truth to this article? Have I always been wrong in justifying the bombs dropping?\n\nThank you guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lk22x/did_the_atomic_bombs_help_end_the_war_ive_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3nzgnc", "d3o3cxv"], "score": [100, 22], "text": ["Kuznick is an advocate of what might be negatively called an extremely \"revisionist\" position on the atomic bombings. This argument is not a new one \u2014 the question of whether the atomic bombs ended the war or were necessary to end the war [has been debated since the 1940s](_URL_0_), but got more steam in the late and post Cold War. The basic argument is that Japan was already defeated, and that what ended the war was that the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. \n\nThere are some versions of this argument that are more persuasive than others. Kuznick is what I would consider to be on the far \"left\" side of that particular stance (with the 'orthodox' \"two bombs were necessary to end the war and they did\" argument somewhere on the right end of things). I think most historians of this period are somewhat more in the center of things, what J. Samuel Walker calls [the \"consensus\" view](_URL_1_). This position recognizes the strongest and most persuasive parts of the \"orthodox\" and \"revisionist\" arguments but also tries to get around their shortcomings. \n\nThe \"orthodox\" argument ignores that in some ways the US did not exhaust its options in avoiding the use of the bomb, typically ignores the Soviet component, and generally warps the \"decision\" to use the bomb into an [overly simplistic binary choice](_URL_2_) (\"bomb or invade,\" which pretty much locks you into \"bomb\"). (And the fact that the \"orthodox\" argument is itself a deliberate historical construction by several of the people who were involved in dropping the bomb, largely as a response to criticism, gets swept under the rug by people who advocate it.) The \"revisionist\" argument makes the US leaders far too prescient, ignores that one can have multiple motivations for things, and expresses far too much confidence on matters that are very hard to determine (like whether the Soviet invasion or the atomic bombings were more or less influential on the Japanese decision to surrender \u2014 they are hopelessly entangled as they happened near-simultaneously). \n\nAnyway. Kuznick's approach isn't totally outside the bounds of good historical scholarship (Hasegawa's _Racing the Enemy_ makes the same argument), but he has a definite \"slant\" to how he reads things. That doesn't make him different from other historians. But I think you'd find most historians of the subject to be a little more moderated. He is correct, though, that the simple notions of the \"orthodox\" version \u2014 which is what most people know and are taught \u2014 are not considered accurate by most historians. The questions being asked \u2014\u00a0were the bombs necessary? did they cause the Japanese to surrender? \u2014\u00a0are not easy to answer. ", "Ill repost the reply I just wrote in another thread today. \n\nIts not a new theory, and saying its \"rattling cages\" implies a certain tone against history as it happened that I don't appreciate. \n\nThe Japanese were going to use the Russians as mediators to sue for peace with the Americans after they bloodied their (US forces') noses in the invasion of Kyushu, which all sides knew was happening before 1946. The Russians rebuffed the Japanese efforts to assist in that matter, with increasing coldness, until the Japanese started seeking neutral third parties like Switzerland to mediate between Japan and America. \n\nThe Japanese were well prepared, militarily, logistically, and mentally, to defend the home islands from invasion, from the Americans and the Russians if need be. They knew they couldn't stop the allies, they merely pinned their hopes on making the invasion forces suffer sufficient losses as to broker an attractive bargaining position for peace. They were confident (and in fact never recorded more than a few isolated lines of any alternative) that bloodying the invading ground forces would be Japan's final play. Their confidence was well placed; numerically, they had superior ground forces and kamikaze forces in the area they (correctly) predicted the Americans would invade. It was going to be bad. \n\nThe A Bombs changed that. The Russians declaring war did not. By the time the Russians declared war, Japan was already starting to build up forces in the Northern home islands. They weren't counting on the Russians to remain out of the coming fight. \n\nThe atomic bombings did several things that Russian declaration of war didn't. It heaped pain upon civilians on a scale that personally affected the Emperor. It gave him and those who secretly wanted immediate peace (they weren't many, but they were in influential positions; they remained nearly silent up till this point due to the very real threat of assassination) a way to surrender with at least some of Japan's dignity in tact, by pointing to the overwhelming firepower and technology arrayed against them in the form of atomic weapons. Third effect, and probably the smallest compared to the other ones I've mentioned, is that one of the major coordination areas for forces in Kyushu (the ones building up to repel the American invasion), not to mention the actual army headquarters for all forces in Kyushu, was completely destroyed by the bombing of Hiroshima. \n\nThe Russian declaration of war was a blow to their chances, but their chances of victory were already non-existant, and they had already resigned themselves to an Okinawa-esque fight of attrition. \n\nAdding another enemy only steeled that resolve.\n\nThe atomic bombings shattered that resolve, and gave the emperor a way to surrender without a bloody invasion. \n\nSource: Dowfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/its-time-to-confront-painful-truths-about-using-the-atomic-bombs-on-japan"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-presidents-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-hiroshima", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/"], []]}
{"q_id": "3k8ohh", "title": "How much trade was there between the aboriginal people of Australia and surrounding areas (such as Indonesia or the Polynesians?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3k8ohh/how_much_trade_was_there_between_the_aboriginal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuvl7g9", "cuw49el"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["With Polynesia, none. But with Indonesia, the story is very different. Macassan traders and fishermen from Sulawesi had been sailing to Arnhem Land and the Kimberley since at least the 1700s, though there's disagreement over exactly how long they've been doing this. Rock art in Arnhem land depicting Macassan vessels has been dated to at least the 1660s and perhaps as early as the 1510s. Some old camping sites associated with Macassan, distinguished by the presence of taramind - a tree brought to Australia from Indonesia by such sailors - have been dated to between 1170 and 1520 (though there is some suspicion that the older dates represent a purely Aboriginal settlement phase at the site, predating the arrival of foreign traders). A 12th Century coin from Kilwa - the dominant Swahili port in East Africa - has been found on an island off the coast of Arnhem Land. Whether it got their as part of 12th Century trade routes across the Indian Ocean or whether it was brought much later by the Portuguese who pillaged the Swahili coast on their way to the East Indies is a matter of some debate. In the oral history of the Yolngu (the people of eastern Arnhem Land), the Djanggawul Ancestors encounter a people called the Baijini who came down from the north to fish for trepang and brought tamarind with them, but were said to pre-date the Macassans, so perhaps another group arrived from Indonesia before the Macassans did. \n\nHistorically, between 60-70 Macassan vessels, with crews of about 30 men each, arrived each year in Arnhem Land. They made camp along the shore and worked with the local Yolngu to harvest and process trepang - sea cucumbers - that were then sold to the Chinese. In exchange for their assistance and the right to use their land and waters, the Yolngu received goods from the Macassans: metal tools and weapons and cloth being the main items of traded. Many Yolngu joined the Macassan crews and sailed back and forth between Indonesia and Australia, and many Macassans married into Yolngu families. \n\nAlong the coast of the Kimberley, the story is a bit different, at least historically. There the Macassans might have overstayed their welcome or otherwise ran afoul of the *wunan* (also spelled *wurnan*) - the law that governs trade relations in the Kimberley. The oral history here indicates that the people of the Kimberley felt that they had been cheated out of their due by the Macassans. By the time Europeans showed up the Macassans had to fortify their seasonal camps and were subject to raids and thefts. ", "There is a lot of evidence for historical contact with Indonesia, but its very hard to discern prehistoric trade/contact with Australia's surrounds (i.e. the vast majority of Australian time). One of the contributing factors for this is that in the 20th century it was popular to explain Australian technological and social developments of the last 5000 years as the result of influences from these external places like Indonesia. But from the late 80s onwards there was a backlash against this idea (because it robbed Aboriginal people of their innovation) so that today people are reluctant to talk about prehistoric trade between Australia and its surrounds.\n\nThat said, the other reason is simply that evidence is very scarce! The only definite link between Australia and the outside world is the dingo (Canis dingo), probably brought around 4000 years ago. It was most likely the Austronesians who brought the dingo, but it also possibly might have been from New Guinea via the Torres Strait.\n\nOther possible links with New Guinea include shell fishhooks which made their way down the eastern coast in the last 1000 years, and outrigger canoes, which were restricted to Cape York in the historical period. \n\nTrade in the historic period between Cape York and New Guinea via Torres Strait was well known and a number of goods were traded across.  People in the Strait were intermediaries of trade between NG and Australia, with a major aspect being animals - domestic animals like pigs were imported (occasionally) from NG for their meat and tusks, and it has been suggested similar practices account for the importation of cuscus, cassowary, macropod and dog/dingo as either pets or sources of wild meat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "68v8d8", "title": "What would a grocery store in the early 1900s look like as far as selection of meat goes?", "selftext": "Was it similar today in that we have hundreds of different cuts of meat and many different brands or would they have to go to a butcher to get a specific cut of meat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68v8d8/what_would_a_grocery_store_in_the_early_1900s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh1ulg7"], "score": [5], "text": ["Modern \"grocery stores\" are actually what you would call \"super markets\" where you can find a wide variety of durable goods, preserved foods, as well as fresh produce, meat, baked goods, etc. This is a historically fairly modern invention, dating back to around the mid 20th century.\n\nHistorically, there would be a variety of different vendors for various foods that one could find in a market, similar to today's \"farmer's markets\" in the US. Back then there were storefronts that sold foods but primarily they would have been long-lived dry goods like spices, tea, sugar. Things with high shelf-lives and also high prices relative to their size. Around the mid 19th century or so that started opening up as more ways of preserving foods started becoming common and as industrial food production started ramping up (with things like canned foods, prepared mixes, and so forth).\n\nHowever, to answer your question, people would have gone to a butcher for meat in the early 1900s, or bought (or killed themselves) whole animals. Things like chickens, turkeys, geese, fish, etc. might be expected to be bought whole then cleaned and dressed at home by whomever was doing the cooking for the household. Things like cows or pigs one would typically have gone to a butcher to get cuts. And what was available would be highly variable depending on where one lived and what the regional traditions were.\n\nSomeone living in the French countryside would probably find a much different variety of cuts and products available at their local butcher than someone living in, say, New York City, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or St. Louis.\n\nAlso I should re-emphasize that butchering techniques and cuts depend on local culture and regional popularity. Different regions and cultures practice different butchering techniques (such as seam butchery versus, I guess you'd call it \"bandsaw butchery\") and have different favored cuts and preparations. For example, bacon in the US and Canada has long been different from bacon as it's known elsewhere (which tends to be either some type of back bacon, fatback, or peameal bacon). Different meat primals might be cut up in different ways and made up into different steaks/cuts or processed into different foods (sausage, hams, ribs, etc.) depending on local demand, traditions, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qhgst", "title": "How effective/powerful was the military of the british empire late 18th century-ww1?", "selftext": "I have heard claims that the british army was somewhat lacking and the navy near unstoppable but i assume there is a fair bit more nuance than that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qhgst/how_effectivepowerful_was_the_military_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwfdtoi"], "score": [5], "text": ["You are right. \n\nThroughout this period, Britain had the most powerful and probably the 'best' navy in the world.\n\nBritain was also the richest country in the world through most of this period, which certainly helped.\n\nThrough most of this period, Britain, being blessed by being an island nation, with no land borders to defend, did not have a particularly strong army.\n\nThere were only two times in the period when Britain's army could be possibly described as world class.  \n\nOne was in the latter stages of the Napoleonic wars, when the British army that fought its way across Spain into France, and contributed strongly to the victory at Waterloo, was very good (though still not very large compared to some of the other armies of the time).\n\nThe second was in the latter stages of WWI, when Britain had a very large army which was perhaps the best in the world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ccmo4", "title": "Has there ever existed a true \"hidden/sunken treasure map\"? Or has anyone stumbled upon such treasure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ccmo4/has_there_ever_existed_a_true_hiddensunken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9f8ipo", "c9fcwjl"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["Yes!  While I'm not aware of treasure maps, sunken treasure can be and has been found.  In fact, in St. Augustine, FL it is not uncommon to see pieces of such treasure for sale in antique shops...obvious treasure such as gold coins, jewelry, and the like, as well as ornate cannons, sextants, compasses, and more.  Imagine, in hundreds of years of shipping, not every vessel survived the voyage, and in many cases they didn't have the technology required to recover their lost goods, so they were left to the seafloor for centuries. \n\nOne of my favorite tales I discovered is that of infamous pirate Captain William Kidd.  In 1699 captain Kidd commandeered a ship from the East India company called the Quedagh Merchant: a 500 ton Armenian vessel loaded down with fabrics, silver, and gold.  Well, after over 300 years it finally turned in 2007... In the Dominican Republic, off the coast of Catalina Island under a measly ten feet of water.  What's more is that somehow no one had discovered it in all that time and it remained virtually untouched, although Kidd's men, who he had entrusted with it, apparently looted it and burned it at anchor.  \n\nNow, they are in the process of turning it into an on-site underwater museum.  Although it is true much of the precious cargo was looted by the pirate crew, to find a 300 year-old vessel of historical significance that has been the mission of treasure hunters for just as long, loaded down with 26 cannons, is still a pretty amazing find, especially considering the location.\n\nSo what happened to Kidd?  Although he felt he was acting within the bounds of his capacity as a privateer, the British Empire saw otherwise, and it was the Armenian owners of the Quedagh Merchant that supplied the key testimony leading to Kidd's execution for piracy and murder in 1701.  He was hanged...twice.  The first time, the rope broke, so they hung him again and had him gibbeted over the Thames river, where he would stay for three years as a reminder to how the Empire felt about its privateers overstepping their bounds.\n\nKind of makes you wonder what other sorts of things are right under everyone's noses?\n\nSource material:\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_", "Buried treasure has been found on several occasions on [Suwarrow Atoll in the Cook Islands](_URL_1_). James Cowan's [*Suwarrow Gold*](_URL_0_)  describes in great detail some of these finds. I don't have a copy on hand, but I believe at least one box of coins was dug up by a sailor who purchased a treasure map in Tahiti in the 1850s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kidd#Trial_and_execution", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quedagh_Merchant", "http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-06-05-long-lost-armenian-ship-the-stuff-of-legend-to-become-a--living-museum--in-the-caribbean", "http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/captain-kidds-treasure-ship-found-after-300-years-765294.html"], ["http://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Suwarrow_gold_and_other_stories_of_the_g.html?id=nTxCAAAAIAAJ&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://www.ck/suwarrow.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2piogd", "title": "Do we have any indication that the classic \"Lincoln voice\" that's used in almost all modern depictions of him is at all accurate to how he sounded?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2piogd/do_we_have_any_indication_that_the_classic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmx2nnp"], "score": [10], "text": ["Quite the opposite, in fact - his contemporaries commented on his thin, reedy-sounding voice. [This website](_URL_0_) collects some quotes about it: \n\n >  Lincoln's voice was, when he first began speaking, shrill, squeaking, piping, unpleasant; his general look, his form, his pose, the color of his flesh, wrinkled and dry, his sensitiveness, and his momentary diffidence, everything seemed to be against him, but he soon recovered.\n--William H. Herndon letter, July 19, 1887\n\nDaniel Day-Lewis took a lot of flak for his portrayal of Lincoln with a high-pitched voice in *Lincoln*, but it was a lot more accurate than the deep, stentorian voice usually seen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speaker.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4px0bd", "title": "Did everyone bite their nails before nail clippers were invented?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4px0bd/did_everyone_bite_their_nails_before_nail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4oooei"], "score": [462], "text": ["It is free to bite your nails and, more to the point, quite standard for nails to break off in the course of even light manual labor. So in some premodern societies where status is less based on conspicuous consumption than today, one of the things archaeologists have observed is that nail-grooming actually becomes a status symbol! \n\nEamon Kelly makes this case for early Ireland especially off the \"bog bodies\" found in Ireland and a few other places. Clonycavan Man, who was (archaeologists argue) sacrificed in the 300s, was found with nicely manicured nails and a sort of hair pomade made of materials probably imported from northeastern-ish Iberia. (Tollund Man and Graubelle Man, from Denmark, are two others frequently cited as having manicured fingernails.)\n\nIt's not unusual for later Bronze Age/early Iron Age northern European bodies to be buried with \"hygiene kits\"--razors for men, tweezers, and a sort of mortar-and-pestle set that may have been used to grind powder for makeup. Fair warning, I'm WAY out of my normal area here--reading AskHistorians has given me a side interest in how archaeologists interpret gender roles and practices from gravesites. But to my knowledge, we don't see specific tools used for nail *trimming*. Instead, there are [nail *cleaners*](_URL_0_). \n\nThese are particularly prevalent in grave sites in Britain: elite graves from the pre-Roman period, and then becoming more common during the formal Roman presence. They're found at all sorts of sites--villages, larger towns, military camps, Roman villas, suggesting a distribution across social strata. I should note, following Hella Eckhardt, that we can't be these are specifically nail cleaners. However, in British sites' hygiene kits they replace the type of pick more typically found in Gaul and have a tip type that seems more suited to be a *dedicated* nail cleaner versus the other major possibility, a tooth pick.\n\nAs far as nail *cutters* go, there are a few options. First, scissors in the sense of \"two blades that slide past each other\" are quite ancient. In ancient Rome proper, where nail hygiene was a defining element of style, barbers used a tool called a *cultellum tonsorium* (literally, \"barber's little knife\") to cut customers' nails. The tradition of using knives persisted in the Latin Middle Ages. I have read that archaeologists have found what they suspect are specialized nail-cutting tools in Romano-British grave sites, but I've not seen a clear description of how they functioned."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g186306-d3392727-i94500808-Verulamium_Museum-St_Albans_Hertfordshire_England.html"]]}
{"q_id": "f5bfn7", "title": "Why did the Baron\u2019s and Nobles support Stephen over Matilda during the Anarchy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f5bfn7/why_did_the_barons_and_nobles_support_stephen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fi33dnm"], "score": [3], "text": ["I plan on coming back to this, but in the meantime, I discussed the diplomatic history of the Anarchy [HERE](_URL_0_), which may shed some light on some of the frequent support shifts during the Anarchy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eowktj/during_the_anarchy_did_stephen_and_matilda_try/fefuz4s/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "2vp43n", "title": "Why are there so few surviving Ancient Chinese ruins, compared to Rome and Greece?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vp43n/why_are_there_so_few_surviving_ancient_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cojp0nk"], "score": [6], "text": ["Aside from the base, traditional Chinese structures were mostly constructed of wood, which made them more susceptible to corrosion. The Cultural Revolution as well as foreign invasions over the last few centuries also saw mass destruction as well as looting. The Porcelain Tower for example was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. Religious and cultural artifacts, especially large metal objects, were taken down for smelting during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the large city walls which used to guard Chinese cities were torn down to make room for construction. Sometimes simply because there weren't any resources to spare for repairs. Today Chinese archaeology is primarily one of tomb hunting, as these were built using stone, and aside from looting, left untarnished by human turmoils. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "206bdr", "title": "What happens to old American flags when a state is added and the number of stars changes?", "selftext": "Inspired by [this question](_URL_0_) about the Canadian flag, I have the same question about the American flag. What did/do they do with the old flags when a new state is added and the number of stars changes? Is there any official protocol? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/206bdr/what_happens_to_old_american_flags_when_a_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg075c6", "cg0clr6"], "score": [84, 19], "text": ["Unlike in Canada, there was actually a procedure in place for the most recent flag changeover. It was outlined in [Executive Order 10834](_URL_0_). The relevant part is in Section 25:\n\n\"Subject to such limited exceptions as the Secretary of Defense in respect of the Department of Defense, and the Administrator of General Services in respect of executive agencies other than the Department of Defense, may approve, **all national flags and union jacks now in the possession of executive agencies,** or hereafter acquired by executive agencies under contracts awarded prior to the date of this order, including those so possessed or so acquired by the General Services Administration for distribution to other agencies, **shall be utilized until unserviceable**.\"\n\nIn other words the old 48 and 49-star flags were used until they wore out, at which point they were destroyed in a dignified manner in accordance with the U.S. Flag Code and replaced by a 50-star one. The government also issued a statement saying it was appropriate for citizens to do the same.\n\nIn the past, Americans often updated their old flags by sewing new stars right onto them. Some flags were made with a bit of extra blank space for just this purpose. [There are some great examples of modified flags here.](_URL_1_)\n\nThere was no official arrangement for the stars on the flag until 1912, so that kind of modification was much more common before then. Nowadays flag manufacturers tend to follow or at least come close to the government specifications (\"G-Spec\"), so everyone's flag pretty much looks the same.", "I'm no historian but have do enjoy reading up online about flag-related topics from time to time. Going along with what dream_face posted, I found this regarding displaying flags that are not the 50-star current version:\n > **Official United States flags are always considered living, active flags. From the Betsy Ross flag to the present 50-star flag, any flag that at some time was the official flag is still considered a living flag to be accorded all due respect.**\n\nThis is quoted from [_URL_4_](_URL_0_) and I believe I've read it elsewhere when looking up info on displaying older flags, though it doesn't seem to be in the Flag Code nor the aforementioned executive order that dream_face posted, but it certainly seems within the overall feeling for those two documents. Thus, assuming it is fit for display and not \"unserviceable\", it seems to be perfectly appropriate to display something like, for example, a 13-star, 48/49-star, or one like [this particular 33-star Flag](_URL_1_) which interestingly has the stars arranged in a star formation.\n\nFor some other interesting and somewhat-related reading, including how to dispose of a flag no longer suited for flying, there is [the US Flag Code](_URL_2_) and its  [Wikipedia page](_URL_3_), which actually specifies some standards that many people ignore when trying to show off their patriotism. **\"The flag should not be used as \"wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery\"** is probably the most often ignored, and by people trying to be patriotic and wearing clothes that are basically made out of flags.\n\nOf course there's also some interesting stuff in the Wikipedia article for [the Flag of the United States](_URL_5_) as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/204kws/when_canada_changed_its_flag_what_did_they_do/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/10834.html", "http://www.rareflags.com/RareFlags_Collecting_Updating.htm"], ["http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/faq.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_33_Star_GreatStar_Flag.svg", "http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30243.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Flag_Code", "USHistory.org", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States"]]}
{"q_id": "7ggglx", "title": "Did people from New York City's 5 boroughs originally consider themselves to be part of the same city?", "selftext": " I recently found out that the five boroughs consolidated to form New York City in 1898. Did people from Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens consider themselves to be just parts of a single metropolis before then?\n\nOn a speculative note, had the Subway system been set up differently, would Manhattan and Brooklyn be considered more like San Fracisco and Oakland?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ggglx/did_people_from_new_york_citys_5_boroughs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqjpkm1", "dqjvh5s"], "score": [5, 15], "text": ["I'd like to expand on this question: Why did Staten Island join the city of New York? It was far from the others and had no direct connection to the other boroughs(no bridge, no tunnel).", "They did not. They were separate cities through much of the 19th century. City agglomeration became a tend in the 19th century, as advances in public transit (e.g. steam ships and street cards) helped tie metro areas together and create new suburbs and increased municipal services (fire to departments, water, etc) gave incentives for towns to consolidate. Read, for example, Walt Whitman\u2019s poem \u201c[Crossing Brooklyn Ferry](_URL_5_)\u201d\u2014the poem was written when Brooklyn and New York (Manhattan) were separate entities. Where Brooklyn-native Whitman\u2019s ferry crossed is apparently today where the Brooklyn Bridge is. (I\u2019m going to guess you live in New York\u2014the bomb ice cream shop Ample Hills takes their name from a line in the poem.) To give you a sense of how different Whitman\u2019s Manhattan was, he wrote the poem in 1855, two years before Central Park was established. The first consolidated institution, the Metropolitan Fire District, between Brooklyn and New York came not long after in 1865. Both were still decades before consolidation. \n\nToday we know *the* Twin Cities as Minneapolis and St. Paul, but for much of the 19th century this was used to refer to other cities, including New York and Brooklyn. The first reference to them as the twin cities in the NYT is from 1859, but refers to Pittsburgh and Allegheny City ([Allegheny](_URL_3_) became a part of Pittsburgh in 1907), comparing them to New York and Brooklyn. The first use of twin cities in the NYT to refer to explicitly refer to New York and Brooklyn in the *Times* comes only slightly later, in [1860](_URL_7_): \n\n > For instance, Mr. CONKLING presented a memorial from New-York, asking for the passage of a law creating a Health Department for the Cities of New-York and Brooklyn, (a Metropolitan dodging of the Constitution,) and that provision be made for the formation and enforcement of a sanitary system, proved to be so necessary by the increased bills of mortality [\u2026] I wonder not that they are solicitous for the health of **the good people of the twin cities**. It is in the public health -- and the consequent ability to pay -- that these gentlemen find their reward.\n\nIn an 1872 article called \u201c[A Tale of Three Cities](_URL_1_)\u201d, the *Times* compares mortality rates for New York, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (I believe during a particularly severe heatwave). Again, though, we see the fairly common attribution of \u201cthe twin cities of New-York and Brooklyn\u201d (there was als an 1870 article in the *Times* about elections that search says mentions \u201ctwin cites\u201d but I couldn\u2019t find. Interestingly, it broke down election results for New York, for Brooklyn, then \u201cReturns from Cities and Towns\u201d, which covered the rest of the state. For whatever reason, there\u2019s no returns from Queens County or Richmond County reported, but you\u2019ll notice there are returns for Kings County that aren\u2019t listed with Brooklyn. Why? \n\nAt that time, Brooklyn did not cover all of Kings County and there were several other towns in the county. [Curbed](_URL_4_) actually has a really fun little history of Brooklyn and Kings County, but have you ever heard someone refer to \u201c[South Brooklyn](_URL_0_)\u201d and mean like Cobbel Hill, Park Slope, Red Hook areas and not the parts of Brooklyn that are actually furthest south? That\u2019s because in the 19th century, before consolidation (the consolidation of all of Kings County into Brooklyn was a process separate from but related to the consolidation of all of the Five Boroughs into New York City), this was the southern limit of Brooklyn. Williamsburg(h) and Bushwick were also separate municipalities. Where was that border? Not surprisingly, at *Division* Ave. There were several splits in the 19th century (for example, New Lots breaking off from Flatbush and Williamsburg(h) breaking off from Bushwick), peaking in the period 1852-1854: the cities of Brooklyn and Williamsburg(h), and the towns of Bushwick, New Lots, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Ultrecht, and Flatbush. \n\nIn 1854, Brooklyn started swallowing up its smaller neighbors, Bushwick and Williamsburg(h) first. They then tried unsuccessfully to annex the rest of the county in 1873, but successfully annexed New Lots in 1886, everything but Flatlands in 1894, and finally Flatlands 1896. But, other than Williamsburg and Bushwick, these areas were small and still largely rural. In the big 1894 annexation, for instance, Brooklyn had a population of nearly a million. The biggest town they annexed was Flatbush, which had a population of just 12,625. \n\nBy the time New York and Brooklyn (and the rest of the Five Boroughs) consolidated, Brooklyn was either the fourth largest city in the county, behind only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, but much much larger than Boston and St. Louis, which only had about half a million residents each. This is actually a slight step down for Brooklyn due to Chicago\u2019s rapid growth. In the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, Brooklyn was the third largest city (in the 1840 and 1850 censuses, before the Bushwick consolidation, it was the 7th largest city). Fun fact: before Philadelphia consolidated in 1854 (before that, Philadelphia was just today\u2019s Center City), two of its future neighborhoods (Northern Liberties in 1840, Spring Garden in 1850) are among the ten largest cities in the country. \n\nNew York was actually consolidated in 1898, which was before the subway. The main mass transit was still ferries (which may help somewhat explain why Staten Island was included, /u/aamirislam) and street cars. But look at a city that didn\u2019t consolidate as aggressively, Boston. The MBTA serves all the \u201cinner ring\u201d suburbs (once known as \u201c[street car suburbs](_URL_6_)\u201d) like Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville. The first streetcars, interestingly, were horse-drawn rather than electric or internal combustion and, in the Boston area, actually connecting Boston to Cambridge from the very start. Here, I think the difference from San Francisco and New York were more bridges than municipal boundaries: there were long bridges across the Charles, but the East River was harder to navigate, never mind San Fransisco Bay. The first bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan was of course the Brooklyn Bridge, which was started in 1869 and only finished in 1883. The next bridge to tie Manhattan to what are now the outer boroughs (the Williamsburg Bridge) wasn\u2019t started until shortly before consolidation (1896) and wasn\u2019t finished until after consolidation (1903). The first bridge across the San Francisco Bay didn\u2019t open until 1937. By that point, there were six bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens and I think maybe eight connecting Manhattan to the Bronx, with another bridge set to open in 1939 connecting the Bronx and Queens. The biggest period of subway growth was in the early 20th century. After 1950\u2019s, there was less of an emphasis on rail travel and more of an emphasis on cars. Americans often take New York\u2019s subway as typical, but it is really quite extraordinary, not just compared to other American cities, but compared to the rest of the world. For a long period of time, it was the only (or at least one of the very few) subway which ran 24 hours a day.\n\nSo, getting back to the original question, while of course the residents of what became the outer boroughs knew they were in the New York area, they didn\u2019t always want to be part of New York (or even Brooklyn). When Brooklyn tried to annex the rest of Kings County in 1873, a local official from New Ultrech was quoted in the *Times* as saying:\n\n > The government of New-Utrecht, he said, was the least expensive; it was only an agricultural village, a long way from Brooklyn, and not in need of being included in the expenses of municipal government, at least not for the present.\n\nThe soon to be consolidated towns of Kings County were small and, very often, still dominated by old Dutch farming families. Brooklyn often had similar cultural reasons for their reticence to join with Manhattan: Brooklyn was largely Protestant, whereas Manhattan had many more recent immigrants like Jews, Italians, and the Irish. These fears were particularly pronounced mid-century, closer to things like the 1863 Draft Riots, but they lingered on. The title of one 1894 NYT article: \u201c[Greater New York in Doubt: the City Votes For It but Brooklyn is Uncertain](_URL_2_)\u201d (then, in smaller type, the City of Churches\u2019 [Brooklyn] Figures Held Back, It Is Said, By Politicians Who Want To Keep Their Power, Long Island City Gives a Majority of 2376, and All Richmond County [Staten Island] Is Willing to Join the City). To give a sense of how small the other boroughs were at the time, while New York was 1.8 million in 1890, and Brooklyn over 950k, Long Island City (the largest town in what would become Queens) was 30.5k, Flushing was 19.8k, Jamacaia was 14.4k, etc. Its worth noting that in this same period, much of Westchester was considered for consolidation, but ultimately decided against it. \n\nWhile other areas seem to want access to both services and the future growth potential (making their real estate more valuable), as far as I can tell one major reason the already developed city of Brooklyn finally decided to join New York was water: New York City had already built an extensive system to bring in water from upstate, but Brooklyn still relied on local aquifers on Long Island. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Brooklyn", "http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9806E1DD1E38EF34BC4153DFB1668389669FDE&amp;legacy=true", "http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9403E0D61531E033A2575BC0A9679D94659ED7CF&amp;legacy=true", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny,_Pennsylvania", "https://ny.curbed.com/2014/7/24/10069912/brooklyns-evolution-from-small-town-to-big-city-to-borough", "https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass/Book_VIII", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb", "http://www.nytimes.com/1860/02/27/news/our-albany-correspondent-avalache-petitions-divorce-among-indians-solid-men-new.html"]]}
{"q_id": "39fnfq", "title": "Reading recommendations on al-Andalus (Moorish Spain)", "selftext": "This question is inspired by a [2003 column on the NYTimes](_URL_0_) titled \"Was the Islam Of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?\" by Edward Rothstein. \n\n >  But as many scholars have argued, this image is distorted. Even the Umayyad dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far from enlightened. Issues of succession were often settled by force. One ruler murdered two sons and two brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in C\u00f3rdoba were answered with mass executions and the destruction of one of the city's suburbs. Wars were accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom. C\u00f3rdoba itself was finally sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal library destroyed.\n\n >  Andalusian governance was also based on a religious tribal model. Christians and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had the status of dhimmis -- alien minorities. They rose high but remained second-class citizens; one 11th-century legal text called them members of ''the devil's party.'' They were subject to special taxes and, often, dress codes. Violence also erupted, including a massacre of thousands of Jews in Grenada in 1066 and the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.\n\nUnfortunately, the author of the column provided no references to the \"But as many scholars have argued...\" line. I'd love to get reading recommendations exactly of this topic. \n\nThanks in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39fnfq/reading_recommendations_on_alandalus_moorish_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs2ywz5", "cs357gx", "cs3ds5d"], "score": [7, 4, 6], "text": ["In my opinion, the two critical works are David Nirenberg's [*Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages*](_URL_1_) (1996) and Maria Rosa Menocal's [*Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain*](_URL_2_) (2002). Both books are beautiful reads and sure to evoke a strong reaction.\n\nThis article seems to be Rothstein's reaction: a rejection of Menocal's then-recent book about tolerance (what he means by \"this image\") in preference for views earlier established by Nirenberg and others about violence. But both Nirenberg and Menocal were making scholarly arguments full of nuance. In my opinion, both authors leave space for tolerance and violence to coexist in their visions of medieval Spain. I'd recommend reading both, probably starting with Nirenberg. \n\nRothstein only wants to see one side of things. He cherry picks examples of Muslim violence from almost 800 years of history to argue that medieval Spanish Islam was intolerant. This argument has methodological problems. I'm uncertain that his examples are a representative sample of Andalusian history. Rothstein doesn't show how these acts of intolerance are in fact symptomatic of Islam, so there's no \"smoking gun\" to show how these examples demonstrate specifically *Islamic* intolerance. And he doesn't attempt a comparative analysis, which would quickly show that these acts of intolerance were not in fact uniquely Muslim. His handling of both evidence and argument are therefore insufficient to provide a reliable answer to his question: \"Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?\"\n\nI was, however, a bit perplexed at the supporting evidence he adduces. He cites Joel Kraemer, whose career seems to have been more narrowly focused on Greek and Judaic theological influences on medieval Islam. And he gives a rather thought-provoking analysis of the [Alahambra](_URL_0_) palace/fortress in Granada. But I'm not sure how either of these actually connects to his main arguments. I don't know whether Kraemer ever wrote specifically to consider issues of tolerance, or whether Rothstein's analysis of the Alhambra was rooted in or supported by scholarly study. There might be literature here that I simply haven't seen.", "*The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings* by David Wasserstein would probably be quite enlightening if you have access to a library that either has it or can get it through inter-library loan. It actually spends a lot of time talking about the situation before the taifa period where the single state broke up into many competing ones.", "I second /u/textandtrowel and /u/TheRealGC13's recommendations.  I'd also recommend a few more:\n\n- *Medieval Iberia*, a collection of primary sources edited by Olivia Constable\n\n- *The Medieval Spains*, by Bernard Reilly\n\n- *The Martyrs of Cordoba*, by Jessica Coope\n\n- *The Arab Conquest of Spain* and *Early Medieval Spain* by Roger Collins\n\n- *The Caliphate in the West* by David Wasserstein (same author as *The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings*)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/arts/was-the-islam-of-old-spain-truly-tolerant.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra", "https://books.google.com/books?id=eET4HN9yodQC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=4dxbqEmU-OkC"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "agnevn", "title": "How did they introduce leap year in 45 BC?", "selftext": " Were they technologically advanced back then to determine that the calendar needed a leap year? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/agnevn/how_did_they_introduce_leap_year_in_45_bc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee9fbq5"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  Were they technologically advanced back then to determine that the calendar needed a leap year? \n\nYes and people had been for some time. I assume you're talking about the introduction of the Julian calendar as you mention 45BC.\n\nGreek astronomers had long known (for at least a century by 45BC) that the year was not exactly 365 days long, but more like 365.25. The original Roman calendar dealt with this by having a normal year of 365 days and occasionally adding an extra month between February and March called the *Mensis Intercalaris*. This extended the year and brought the calendar back into line with the solstice, at least in theory.\n\nUnfortunately, how long the extra month was and what years it occurred in was determined by priests, who were often also politicians. Since Roman elections were based on the calendar it was not unheard of for priests to lengthen a year when their friends were in power, or refuse to when their enemies were. If no months were added for several years, or if they were added back to back, the calendar drifted out of sync with the seasons, causing no end of confusion, especially as the calendars were often published quite late.\n\nJulius Caesar decided to fix this by reforming the calendar and removing the need for human intervention. And it worked for over a millennium until the introduction of the still more accurate Gregorian Calendar in 1582."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5s98vt", "title": "What did a typical day of 17th century philosophers look like? Where did they get their income from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5s98vt/what_did_a_typical_day_of_17th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dddc5qj", "dddix8z"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["The 17th century? Presuming you're referring to European philosophy, and sampling on the substantially eminent: while I'm not sure it makes much sense to speak of a 'typical day', elite philosophers i) very commonly held lecturerships or professorships at universities, ii) were engaged to tutor and guide eminent folks and their children, including monarchs, and iii) were awarded state pensions in recognition of their work by monarchs. For example: \n\n* Hobbes was tutor to the Prince of Wales (later Charles II of England), who later made him a state pensioner of England.\n* Descartes taught at the University of Utrecht and was awarded (though never actually received) a French state pension by Louis XIV; he also variously advised and/or tutored the Elector of Bavaria, Prince of Orange, and Queen (regnant) of Sweden, as well as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. \n* Leibniz counseled the Elector of Mainz, the Electors of Brunswick-L\u00fcneberg/Hanover, the Queen of Prussia, the Princess of Wales, and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors\n\nThen there's Spinoza, who declined the above kind of life in favor of remaining a lens grinder his entire life. ", "Thanks a lot, that's exactly the answer I was looking for"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "57smzy", "title": "How come the Middle Eastern world didn't undergo a \"Muslim enlightenment\" period, similar to the Christian enlightenment period in Western Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57smzy/how_come_the_middle_eastern_world_didnt_undergo_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8urcns", "d8uz0jq"], "score": [73, 5], "text": ["First we need to recognize that this is an out and out counterfactual question which will not have a satisfactory answer. Explaining causality is difficult enough, explaining something as complex as why an entire intellectual movement *didn't* happen is impossible.\n\nThat being said I think I can point to the discussion of some things that might be pertinent. Unfortunately a good amount of this post, perhaps even a majority, will be about the European enlightenment which is *not* a specialty of mine, so if any of our European historians want to chime on any mistakes I make please do.\n\nWith that being said, let's answer a few preliminary questions:\n\n**What was the European enlightenment?**\n\nThe Enlightenment refers to a period in roughly the 18th century. It takes its name from the cultural, political and intellectual legacy of the period in which, as the name would suggest, self-identified virtues of \"enlightenment\" were given cultural force: reason, liberalism, liberty, limited government, religious toleration.\n\nOn the one hand, while we can quite clearly identify a lot of Good Things that came out of the enlightenment, it was hardly an unblemished success. While we often think of \"Science\" as a good in and of itself, 18th century scientism also gave us the very *un*-scientific practice of [scientific racism.](_URL_4_) At the same time that Thomas Jefferson was writing about how all men were created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with, among other things, liberty, Jefferson was also a slave owner. The age of Rousseau was also an age of absolute monarchy. And so on.\n\nOn balance however we take these positions as enlightened not only because they form a jumping off point for modern liberalism, modern science, and so on, but also in contrast to what came before.\n\n**Why did Europe undergo an enlightenment?**\n\nThe time period between when Luther publishes his 95 Theses in 1517 and the end of the European Wars of Religion is a pretty disastrous time period all around. In the 30 Years War in the German states you have territories that lose 30-40% of their population. They're closely followed in death toll by the French Wars of Religion. Then you have the English civil war which entailed not only battlefield slaughter but the political upheaval of regicide as well.\n\nWhat's more, even after the worst of the violence subsides by the end of the ~~18~~17th century, it's clear that intellectually Europe is still in a bit of chaos. Once the edifice of the Universal Church is torn down, there is nothing obvious in Christian religion that could replace it. This was true even in Catholic Europe, which was changed, I won't say as much as the reformation, but to a very great extent by the counter-reformation.\n\nAll of that being said, it's clear that if we go with our earlier definition of what the enlightenment was, it's clear that the intellectual pre-cursors of the enlightenment come out of or are a reaction to the reformation. Whether it's the science of the Baconian method, the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the state system and religious \"toleration\" of the Peace of Westphalia, we can see the Enlightenment as a reaction to a particular set of circumstances that came out of the tumult of the reformation and the wars of religion. i.e. Locke's toleration is only necessary if you have such an intense multiplicity of conflicting viewpoints that they are in need of toleration (also remember that Locke's toleration did not extend to atheists and Catholics).\n\n**What was going on in the Middle East?**\n\nWell, frankly, nothing like that. The mass internecine religious slaughter that was going on in Europe had no parallel in the Islamic world. Certainly Islam was *incredibly* diverse in its practices during this period. The advent of Sufi orders in the later middle ages and their spread meant that practically the entire male urban population of the Islamic world may have been members of a particular \"tariqa\" Sufi order, of which there were thousands. But all of this was perfectly *orthodox*. \"Toleration\" of a basic kind was baked in the cake, even if it was not raised to a cultural or intellectual virtue as with Locke. In other words, Muslims were more tolerant of their differences with other faiths than Christians were of one another in this period, but they did not pat themselves on the back and say \"look how tolerant we're being to the Dhimmis.\" It was just the law.\n\n**Ok but surely something had to change over time in reaction to Europe, no?**\n\nOh definitely. Islamdom was not ignorant of what was going on in Christendom. Let's look at one concrete outcome of this time period, the European scientific revolution and the [Military Revolution](_URL_0_) (which is itself a controversial idea, but let's discuss it as-is).\n\nThe Ottomans (I'm more familiar with them than I am with the other gunpowder empires, the Safavids/Qajars and the Mughals but I believe this would apply equally) took an approach to scientific development that I think is more pragmatic than most 21st century people might think would be possible.\n\nSo for instance, they were perfectly happy to adopt the latest and greatest scientific developments in military hardware. But they also successfully suppressed the advent of the printing press in the Arab world for 300 years.\n\nNow, if you're a technological determinist you might end the story right there. It's hard to imagine the Enlightenment, which involved such an enormous volume of *discourse*, without the advent of the printing press to facilitate that discourse. Imagine if *The Social Contract* had to be hand copied and disseminated with the permission of the state. It's impossible.\n\nI, personally, am *not* a technological determinist but it nonetheless strikes me as obvious that there were technological developments in Europe, like the printing press, that when combined with proximate but diverse states that allowed some degree of press freedom (e.g. the Netherlands for England) that allowed for cultural developments that are hard to imagine in the absence of those specific factors.\n\n**How did the Middle East/Islamic world react to the Enlightenment?**\n\nWell, it's interesting. Absent the printing press and a systematic market for translation of European texts, these ideas, to my knowledge, did not disseminate during the period of the Enlightenment itself (at least in the Arab world, I'm less familiar with Turkish discourse, it's possible that the intellectual life of Istanbul may have been different than that of Cairo).\n\nIt's therefore almost hilariously ironic (given 200 years of temporal distance) that the ideas of the enlightenment were unavoidably introduced into Middle Easter and Islamic history in the most *un*enlightened way imaginable: at gunpoint.\n\nSpecifically, when Napoleon decides in 1798 to take the French revolution global and invades Egypt, he does so on the basis of liberating the Egyptians from the Mamelukes, introducing them to the Rights of Man and bringing them all of the intellectual, cultural, scientific and political fruits of the enlightenment (at least ostensibly. In reality Napoleon probably just wanted a route to India.) Moreover, they paid far more than lip service to these ideas. Napoleon brought with him the [Commission des Sciences et des Arts](_URL_1_) which included what we would today describe as linguists, botanists, ethnologists, geographers, artists, chemists, engineers, historians, archaeologists, etc. etc. They found the [Institut d'Egypte](_URL_2_) and eventually publish the monumental [Description de l'\u00c9gypte](_URL_3_). Bonaparte brings with him the first Arabic language printing press. Upon landing he announces the ideological intentions of his campaign in enlightenment terms.\n\nThe best (indeed, to my knowledge, the only full-length) native Egyptian reaction we have to this is the chronicle of al-Jabarti. Jabarti was a bonafide member of the religious scholarly elite establishment in Egypt. What did he think of all this?\n\nWell, first of all, he was savvy enough to see that Napoleon's statement to the Egyptian people of his intentions was unbelievably patronizing and cynical. In that declaration, Napoleon stated:\n\n >  O ye Qadis, Shaykhs and Imams; O ye Shurbajiyya and men of circumstance tell your nation that the French are also faithful Muslims, and in confirmation of this they invaded Rome and destroyed there the Papal See, which was always exhorting the Christians to make war with Islam. And then they went to the island of Malta, from where they expelled the Knights, who claimed that God the Exalted required them to fight the Muslims. Furthermore, the French at all times have declared themselves to be the most sincere friends of the Ottoman Sultan and the enemy of his enemies, may God ever perpetuate his empire!\n\nJabarti (rightly) recognizes this for the opportunism that it is:\n\n >  As for his statement \u2018and destroyed there the Papal See\u2019, by this deed they have gone against the Christians as has already been pointed out. So those people are opposed to both Christians and Muslims, and do not hold fast to any religion. You see that they are materialists, who deny all God\u2019s attributes, the Hereafter and Resurrection, and who reject Prophethood and Messengership.\n\nOn the face of the French Revolutionary claims of Egalite, Jabarti found the claim to be ridiculous:\n\n >  His saying \u2018[all people] are equal in the eyes of God\u2019 the Almighty, this is a lie and stupidity. How can this be when God has made some superior to others as is testified by the dwellers in the Heavens and on the Earth?\n\nI'm running out of characters in this post so I'll continue in a Part II.\n\nedit: typos", "I'm not sure I'd be willing to grant your premise.  During the early Baghdad caliphate from 750 and on to 1100 or so you can something that looked a lot like the European enlightenment.  Intellectuals questioned conventional wisdom on the nature of god.  People were allowed to question aspects of religion and there was a lot of effort put into giving religion a rational basis, such as figuring out which supposed sayings of the prophet or *hadiths* were well attested and which weren't.  This was also the hayday of the Mutazilite school of theology which tried to put theology on a rational basis more generally. \n\nSo the real question is more, 'why didn't their Enlightenment take'.  There was reaction in the West too, such as the Romantic movement, but it wasn't as thorough.\n\nMy main source here is *Lost Enlightenment:\nCentral Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane* by  S. Frederick Starr."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Revolution", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_des_Sciences_et_des_Arts", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_d%27%C3%89gypte", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_de_l%27%C3%89gypte", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Enlightenment_thinkers"], []]}
{"q_id": "6g10e3", "title": "What kind of tea would have been thrown into Boston harbor during the Boston Tea Party?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6g10e3/what_kind_of_tea_would_have_been_thrown_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dio1ydg"], "score": [13], "text": ["As it happens, there is a document reprinted in Benjamin Labree\u2019s [*The Boston Tea Party, 1773*](_URL_5_), which details the exact composition of the crates of tea that were dumped into Boston Harbor in December 1773. The official report, filed in February 1774, lists the following: out of 340 crates carried on the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver, 240 contained Bohea, 215 were Congou, 10 were Souchong, 60 were Singlo, and 15 were Hyson.\n\nSo what exactly were these varieties of tea? Even though the tea monopoly belonged to the East India Company, all the tea leaves were imported from China. While the Chinese themselves had a sophisticated system of classifying tea \u2013 defining tea varieties primarily on the place of origin, as well as by mode of preparation and quality of the leaves \u2013 English merchants had a cruder method of defining tea by color and appearance. \n\nIn the early years of the tea trade, dominated by the Dutch, green teas dominated, but by the mid-18th century the Dutch had innovated methods of exporting a kind of black tea commonly known as [Bohea]( _URL_4_), which was a cheap, low-quality variety that allowed tea-drinking to become popular in both Europe and among American colonists.\n\nThe tea took its name from the Wuyi mountains between Fujian and Hokkien province; \u201cBohea\u201d was the English pronunciation of the Fujianese word. The superior grade of Bohea, also from the Fujian area, was known as [Congou]( _URL_0_), derived from the word *kung fu*, meaning \u201cskill\u201d. By the 19th century, this variety became the basis of English breakfast tea.\n\n[Souchong]( _URL_1_) was another high-grade black tea variety from the Wuyi mountains, often made by roasting leaves in a bamboo basket. The word simply meant \u201cvariety of leaf\u201d.\n\nSinglo and [Hyson](_URL_3_) were varieties of green tea, grown in the Anhui province. Hyson was possibly named after Philip Hyson, director the East India Company, although a high-quality variety picked in the spring was known as yu-tsien, meaning \u201cbefore the rains\u201d.\n\nSinglo was also a green tea, with larger leaves than Hyson, which was typically picked later in the seaon. According to [this 1813 source](_URL_2_), Singlo was \u201cmore dusty than Hyson tea\u2026 twice tossed in baskets: Hyson only once.\u201d\n\nFor more on the 18th-century tea trade, see Chris Nierstrasz, *Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India companies (1700\u20131800)*; Markman Ellis, ed., *Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England*\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congou", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsang_souchong", "https://books.google.ca/books?id=2LpLAAAAYAAJ&amp;lpg=PA524&amp;ots=NWAH_i07HW&amp;dq=singlo+tea+-single&amp;pg=PA524&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=singlo%20tea%20-single&amp;f=false", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyson", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuyi_tea", "https://archive.org/details/bostonteaparty1700laba"]]}
{"q_id": "23lubl", "title": "Can someone talk about the spread of Buddhism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23lubl/can_someone_talk_about_the_spread_of_buddhism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgy9yud"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! here are a few previous threads to get you started\n\n[Spread of Buddhism](_URL_0_)\n\n[AMA: Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, the Three Great Traditions of China](_URL_5_)\n\n[How did Hinduism, Buddhism  &  Indian culture spread through SE Asia?](_URL_1_)\n\n[How did Buddhism spread to Japan and why it didn't spread to Europe?](_URL_3_)\n\n[When did Buddhism become the dominant religion in japan?](_URL_2_)\n\n[Why didn't Buddhism spread west to the Mediterranean like it spread east into China?](_URL_4_)\n\n[Why didn't Buddhism spread westward towards Europe despite the contact between the Greeks and the Indoiranians after the conquests of Alexander the Great?](_URL_6_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ee1i/spread_of_buddhism/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ubo0n/how_did_hinduism_buddhism_indian_culture_spread/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t4btq/when_did_buddhism_become_the_dominant_religion_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tvp0w/how_did_buddhism_spread_to_japan_and_why_it_didnt/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pu9mu/why_didnt_buddhism_spread_west_to_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i8n36/ama_daoism_confucianism_buddhism_the_three_great/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ubgf5/why_didnt_buddhism_spread_westward_towards_europe/"]]}
{"q_id": "fy1v3y", "title": "What was the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy like? How did the nobility function and what were similarities and differences with the nobles of continental Western Europe?", "selftext": "What were the ranks and social classes of Anglo-Saxon England (starting from say, \u00c6thelstan)? I know the basics like slaves, peasant farmers and serfs, ceorls, thegns, reeves, ealdormen/eorls/earls, and the king of course, but I'm not so sure as to they actually did and the subclasses for thegns confuse me even more.\n\nApparently an ealdorman had to be appointed and have titles revoked or even be banished unlike hereditary dukes (Tostig and Godwin)? And they only ruled individual shires (not sure what those are analogous to) up until Canute? I really have no idea what the earldoms looked like (at least not before Canute), so a map would be much appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fy1v3y/what_was_the_anglosaxon_hierarchy_like_how_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmye24j"], "score": [10], "text": ["At the bottom you've got your serf, these are essentially slaves to the land they are on (and its landowner). There are a few distinctions between them and slaves but in practice there is little difference.\n\nYour next highest are Ceorls. These are free men but lowest of the low. They are you peasant farmers, they will form the rank and file of the Fyrd armies.\n\nThegns are above Ceorls, they are families the Eardermen rely on to govern their land. In the most part they were important military leaders but they could also be civic leaders or the premier family in a village.\n\nEaldormen were next. These men ruled a patch of land in the name of the King. You are right to point out there is a change in this during Canute's reign. Under Athelstan there were a lot of Ealdormen controlling a patchwork of burghs or shires. They usually ruled for life and the sons of ealdormen almost always were ealdormen themselves but not necessarily of the same area as their fathers. Often they were given a different region. This was to reinforce the notion that they did not inherit the land but were appointees of the King, who also had the power to revoke ealdoms. Now these are a lot of ealdormen for a king to manage and it does appear the system was prone to factionalism. Canute decides to simplify things. He creates Earls (an imported Danish term for Ealdermen) above the old Ealdermen who now act more like Thegns of their land.  Instead of small shire sized areas these far fewer earls rule roughly what were the boundaries of the old anglo-saxon seven kingdoms. Map below\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEarls were massive powerful rulers. Canute is this great powerful leader with an empire behind him so he was more than capable of keeping the Earls in line and was happy with how much simpler these changes made ruling England, but he'd created a real difficulty for his successors. Edward the Confessor can not get himself out of control of the Godwins who have sown up the majority of ealdoms. William the conqueror's solution is to bring back the patchwork of little lords directly answerable to him and get rid of these big powerful Earls.\n\nThe King you know.\n\nReeves are the King's officials with a role specifically of administering the King's Justice and collecting taxation."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://images.app.goo.gl/GQC4udcYJwDdfy689"]]}
{"q_id": "ff1kfn", "title": "When did Germany and France become historical rivals and why?", "selftext": " & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ff1kfn/when_did_germany_and_france_become_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjv6sba"], "score": [6], "text": ["The most reductive answer to this question is 1871, when Germany as a country came into existence on the basis of a humiliating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. Not only was there no such thing as a country called \"Germany\" before then, but the harsh feelings and especially territorial losses the nascent Germany inflicted on France (Alsace-Lorraine) made a desire for \"*revanche*\" or revenge against Germany a dominant factor in French politics until the Franco-German rivalry boiled over into World War I (in conjunction with English-German naval race tensions, Balkan nationalism, and a host of other factors.\n\nBut I think a more interesting answer to this question, allowing for some ambiguity in the term \"Germany,\" is October 14, 1806. That's when Napoleon's Grande Arm\u00e9e encountered the Prussian army in a pair of battles in east-central Germany. The French won both the Battle of Jena, where Napoleon's 40,000-man army defeated 53,000 Prussians, and the Battle of Auerstadt, where Napoleon's \"Iron Marshal\" Nicolas Davout, in a tour de force, crushed more than 60,000 Prussians with his single corps of 27,000 men. \n\nIn the aftermath of Jena and Auerstadt, Napoleon swiftly captured Berlin, then defeated the Prussians' Russian ally to triumph in the [War of the Fourth Coalition](_URL_2_). The [Treaties of Tilsit](_URL_0_) that concluded that war were very generous to Russia, but devastating to Prussia, which lost half its territory, had to pay a huge war indemnity, was reduced to a veritable French puppet state, and subject to occupation by French garrisons, who Prussians were required to support. \n\nUnsurprisingly (and now we move from the broad strokes of history into my particular expertise), the Prussians didn't take this well. When the fortunes of war turned and they found themselves part of the victorious coalition to defeat Napoleon in 1814 and again in 1815, the Prussians (or at least, some prominent Prussians) were widely noted in Europe for their vehement anti-French attitude. While Britain and Austria wanted to punish France for the war, cut her down to size a little bit, and prevent any future French aggression, Prussians advocated ([particularly in 1815](_URL_1_)) for dismembering French territory; their soldiers were particularly brutal when occupying France after Waterloo; the Prussians even tried to blow up the Parisian bridge named after the battle of Jena as symbolic revenge for that humiliating loss. (They were finally talked out of it by some combination of the Duke of Wellington, Russian Tsar Alexander I, and the restored French King Louis XVIII, who is reported to have threatened to sit on the bridge himself to keep it safe.) \n\nThe Prussians largely didn't get any of the big punishments they wanted of France, though the French felt plenty aggrieved by the treatment they received at the hands of the Prussians (especially in those parts of northern France that the Prussian army occupied). And though more than 60 years would pass between Jena-Auerstadt and the Franco-Prussian War, it clearly had not been forgotten. The [headline of the New York Times on Sept. 4, 1870](_URL_3_), after Napoleon III's defeat by the Prussian-led armies at the Battle of Sedan, was \"JENA AVENGED.\" The 5 billion-franc war indemnity France was required to pay in the Franco-Prussian War's peace treaty was explicitly designed to be proportional, based on population, to Prussia's 1807 indemnity. \n\nThe Franco-Prussian War, as we've already discussed, created the German Empire (ruled by the Prussian royal family) and shifted the now Franco-German rivalry into a new gear. Both sides would engage in an arms race, a diplomatic struggle for position, and constant military espionage (with famous consequences in the Dreyfus Affair) for decades to come, with the tug-of-war over Alsace-Lorraine the festering sore at the heart of the issue. But arguably the emotional root of the entire struggle goes back to Napoleon and Davout at Jena and Auerstadt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_Tilsit", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cy38lt/after_napol\u00e9on/ezf3gau/?context=3", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Fourth_Coalition", "https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1870/09/04/issue.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1i24bx", "title": "When and why did the Spartan identity die out in Greece?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i24bx/when_and_why_did_the_spartan_identity_die_out_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb0hi42", "cb0j24q"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["The fall of Sparta was a complicated issue involving their first ever land battle loss (with an army at full strength) to Thebes and spartan population decline. essentially they had so few natural born Spartans they had to allow helots to bolster their standing army.\n\ncheck out: _URL_0_ \n\nand excerpt:\n\n\" The Spartans were again too few to prevent the Thebans from building a new fortified capital city for the Messenians on the slopes of Mount Ithome. The great stone walls of Messene, which still stand as a monument to Greek military engineering, were the seal of Sparta's doom. The Thebans liberated the Messenians, and Messene became an independent city-state\u2013a state intransigently hostile toward its former master. Without the forced labor of the Helots of Messenia, Sparta could not maintain its military traditions and quickly became just another second-tier polis, capable of winning occasional border skirmishes with its neighbors, but never again a player on the larger Greek scene.\n\nBy the Roman era, Sparta had devolved to little more than an antiquarian theme-park; tourists flocked from around the Greek world to watch Spartan boys endure savage whippings in old-fashioned endurance contests\u2013conveniently held in an outdoor theater to accommodate the jaded, bloodthirsty crowds. \"", "Three events come to mind which illustrate to me the fall of Spartan identity: the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, Sellasia in 222, and Corinth in 146. \n\nLeuctra- Before this battle, fought against Thebes, Sparta had consistently been seen as the premier military power in Greece, and were coming off of a victory thirty years prior in the Peloponnesian War, as well as as fighting much of the rest of Greece to a stalemate in the Corinthian War soon after. These were the allegedly invincible Spartan hoplites that we hear so much about. Yet, they lost decisively to a numerically inferior force, from a city with less highly regarded soldiery. What happened?\n\nThe problem in this battle was the long-term consequence of the very  Spartan military ethos that had brought them victory and glory so many times before. At the the top of Spartan society existed the Spartiate class, these are the soldiers who lived to fight and did little else. Although it is true that if you raise soldiers from birth they will be superior on the battlefield, this belief that only a small portion of Spartan society (as the majority of \"Spartans\" were helot slaves) was worthy of serving in the army had its drawback- namely, that these Spartiates tended to end up as casualties. This was compounded further by the belief that the only way for a Spartan to die honorably was facing the enemy (as evinced by the fact that the only Spartans to have their names written on their grave markers were those who died in battle, regardless of how much those who died from old age had achieved in life). As a result, the Spartiate class, due to the losses suffered in near-constant warfare, had shrunken significantly. \n\nNeither did it help that although there was only one convenient way to become a Spartiate (namely, being born as one, and succeeding in years of rigorous training), there were many ways to be stop being a Spartiate- in addition to death, any hint of cowardice on the field, or any other substantial shame that one brought upon himself would lead to an exile from the leading class. \n\nAs a result of all this, the army fielded at Leuctra was simply not of the same calibre as the Spartan armies fielded at Plataea or Thermopylae, as although there were still full Spartiates on the field, the majority of Spartan forces were not. To illustrate this, of the casualties on the Spartan right flank, according to Xenophon, only 400 of the 1,000 dead were Spartiates. Take note that the right flank was traditionally the location of the best troops a Greek city-state had to offer- and the Spartan could not even fill this with full citizens. Over time, Sparta had been forced to use the Perioikoi (free non-citizens such as merchants and craftsmen) and eventually the helots themselves to fill the ranks of battle. When this Spartan right was crushed by a 50 deep Theban column, the rest of the army rapidly fell apart.\n\nSellasia- This marks the last significant show of Spartan military strength, fought against post-Alexander Macedon and the Achaean league, who wanted to bring Sparta into the fold. The Spartan king Cleomenes III had reformed the Spartan society and military- through instating many Perioikoi as full Spartiates (and giving them land to match), utilizing the sarissa pike which had come to prominence during Alexander's conquests, and removing the influence (through killing almost all of them) of the ephors. However, even though Sparta was strengthened by years of relative peace, as well as these reforms, it was not enough, Cleomenes III lost his war and Sparta became a part of the Achaean League. \n\nCorinth- Not much to say here, as by this point Sparta was merely an insignificant state, and part of an alliance against Rome that would be defeated, leaving Sparta as a dependent backwater part of the Roman Empire. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historynet.com/sparta-the-fall-of-the-empire.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "580wpw", "title": "Was the pike really the most used weapon in the Medieval Age? If so, why do movies depict the sword as the most used weapon? And why did european armies still use heavy cavalry as the main striking force if it was so easy countered?", "selftext": "In hollywood movies or most notably Game of Thrones, most soldiers carry swords. As far as I know, this is incorrect and Pikes were the most used weapon since it was so easy to manufactore and to train. Please correct me if I am wrong.\n\nBut why do movies and series always use swords as the main weapon if it was in reality the Pike?\n\nAnd as far as I know, heavy cavalry, as in heavily armored knights, where the main striking force in the Medieval Age, flanking the enemy and striking a fatal blow to win the battle. But if the pike was so prominant, why did european armies still relied so heavily on their knights to win the fight, or rather: Why was the cavalry able to do this, if atleast 1/2 of the enemy army was equipped with pikes that basically rendered cavalry useless?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/580wpw/was_the_pike_really_the_most_used_weapon_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8x58ks", "d8xckhw"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Are you specifically talking about pikes or polearms in general?", "Hiya!! Not at my computer right now, so sources will be delayed and apologies for formatting. I can't do a well-informed media critique, but let's talk a little bit about medieval warfare. I don't want to say you are incorrect, but you are oversimplifying things heavily.\n\nTo start with I don't really know how you would quantify what the most commonly used weapon was. Some other commenters have mentioned the variety of polearms during the period, a pike being a fairly specific one in a broader category. While polearms are are in principle cheaper and easier to make, by the late Middle Ages, a sword wouldn't be prohibitively expensive, especially for a nobleman or someone who is spending extensive time soldiering. There are also advantages to a sword. Depending on the design and length, a sword could be used within arms length, with both slashing and thrusting maneuvers. The weighted pommel could be used in a hammering motion and the steel bar could act as a staff for blocking if a halfswording technique was employed. A greatsword could be gripped with both hands and employed like a polearm.\n\nSecondly, these things are not mutually exclusive, you may ride into combat with a lance or start in a pike formation, but keep additional weapons in case. If you are risking your life/army in battle, you would likely not keep a single weapon just for the symbolism, but try to employ all options to give the most adaptability to combat. Swords work well for the aforementioned flexibility, as well as the ease of carrying one in your belt. But you would also see daggers or hammers as well. Pikes and lances are great weapons in particular situations, but can break, or become unwieldy depending on how close the enemy is or how much mobility the conflict requires. Carrying around a 20 foot spear in tight formation was no easy task!!\n\nI guess this gets to the final point, which is that weapons have different uses in different situations, but in a pitched battle, tactical flexibility was still incredibly important. It is a huge exaggeration to say that soldiers armed with pikes render cavalry useless. A well disciplined and ordered pike formation on even ground can repulse a cavalry charge would be more accurate. But even then, what if the cavalry refuses to give battle and raids you villages 10 miles away? Have fun keeping lugging those sticks around on foot trying to keep up with a mounted force. Even if they give battle, a massed formation wasn't invulnerable. Missile fire could disrupt the morale and order of the formation as happened at falkirk with welsh archers softening Scottish pike formations before the main force charged. If pikemen become fixed in position due to Melee with enemy infantry, they will have a harder time wheeling their formation or forming squares to repulse a flanking charge.\n\nThe takeaway here is that apart from symbolism, prominence of weapons wasn't really that decisive in battles. This is why in the high and late Middle Ages you see the development of combined arms systems, employing simple fortifications, projectile fire, cavalry and infantry. Commanders would then add their own wrinkles, such as mounted infantry (riding to battle, but fighting on foot), chevaunchee, and Fabian tactics. There simply wasn't a decisive or definitively favored weapon, even the onset of gunpowder took a long time to cause a military revolution in pitched battles.\n\nHope this helps and let me know if you have follow ups (lunch is over so they will have to wait till this evening). Hopefully someone else can do a media critique for you too!!\n\nEDITS (grammar and readability above):\n\nA couple of additional points that I should have originally included but didn't have time (plus I think some relevant comments in this discussion have been removed, so I wanted to reiterate those ideas as well) and then sources.\n\nPikes fall under a larger category known as polearms which is not a very well-defined category, pretty much \"a stick with a piece of metal on the end.\" Pikes specifically (generally a 15-25 foot polearm), were a fairly late development in the medieval period, reflecting the rise of infantry as a major force in pitched battles. They really only hit their stride in terms of use in the early modern period after the middle ages are generally considered over, but more on that in a moment. Pikes, in short, created a very powerful defensive formation if properly deployed and handled by disciplined soldiers. This was no easy task, think of how terrifying to face down hundreds of horse galloping toward you with men encased in armor pointing sharp objects at you. But the strength of the formation also relies on its mass, the soldiers have to act cohesively to be successful. This required a good amount of training to effectively understand how to position yourself and your weapon in the formation as well as adapt to the stress of combat. In addition, there needs to be a certain degree of uniformity in equipment for a pike formation to work. Early on, at the Battle of Golden Spurs or Bannockburn, these pike formations were more or less fixed in place, making them great defensively. However, mobility both on a strategic and tactical level was an issue. Moreover, the organizational level to successfully prepare pike formations was often beyond many medieval political entities.\n\nIn truth, pike formations really only came into there own during the Burgundian and Italian Wars during the early modern period. At this point, there were some polities, specifically cities in the low countries, Italian City-States, and Swiss Cantons, that had significant enough organization to develop regularized pike militias, with quality equipment and training. This led to the development of the famous Swiss mercenaries, who were not only capable of fighting in fixed positions, but were capable of incredible degrees of maneuver, as demonstrated at Grandson and Nancy where they defeated Charles the Bold. These infantrymen could also charge other positions. Eventually, other political entities began to adopt and develop their own pikemen. Machievelli, for example, was very peeved that Louis XI gave up on developing is own standing army skill in favor of simply paying for Swiss mercenaries. The combination of these troops with firearms led to the Spanish tercio. However, this still required combined arms and tactical flexibility (as well as quality equipment and training). Once pike formations were fixed in a \"push of pike,\" troops with closer range weapons, such as swords or halberds could try to sneak past the pikes to break the formation, or projectile/firearms could break the formation. There was no definitive \"weapons\" advantage. Hope all this helps!\n\nSources:\n\n*Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War* edited by Anne Curry and Michael Hughes, 1994\n\n*Medieval Warfare: A History* by Maurice Keen, 1999\n\n*A History of Warfare* by John Keegan, 1993\n\n*The Renaissance at War* by Thomas Arnold, 2006\n\n*Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages* by Maurice Keen, 1996"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "13l5zh", "title": "A Question Concerning Anglo-American Relations", "selftext": "In 1940, when Britain was nearly bankrupt, the United States wished for Britain to sell all holdings to buy American goods. How would holdings in the NY stock exchange held by private citizens be helpful to the British government?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13l5zh/a_question_concerning_angloamerican_relations/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c74yq9n"], "score": [2], "text": ["I've never heard of the United States pushing for Britain to take such extreme financial measures to purchase goods. Where did you read this? My recollection is that the British were more worried about finding enough tonnage that could actually visit American ports to trade because the neutrality laws prevented United States flagged ships from trading with belligerent powers. When money started to become a problem, you had Congress pass the Lend Lease Act to get rid of the pesky old dollar sign in anglo-american trade matters. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2kierc", "title": "A late mediaeval knight is travell\u00edng through an area he knows to be dangerous but in which an attack is not guaranteed. Does he wear his armour all day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kierc/a_late_mediaeval_knight_is_travell\u00edng_through_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clm26or"], "score": [3], "text": ["He'd probably be wearing an \"Arming doublet\", under a rather more dressy garment. It was a sort of padded jacket worn under armour, with mail gussets to protect armpits etc. See the illustrations here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=21451"]]}
{"q_id": "1y2vhp", "title": "Was there any attempts to unify Italy or Germany prior to the 19th Century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1y2vhp/was_there_any_attempts_to_unify_italy_or_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfh3c21"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Holy Roman Empire was, in many ways, a unified Germany (albeit a very loosely unified one).\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is a map of the empire around 1800.  \n\nAlso worth listening to: the HRE national anthem - [Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser](_URL_2_) - which was composed by Haydn in 1794 for Franz II Holy Roman Emperor (who dissolved the empire after the battle of Austerlitz and created the new Austrian Empire as Franz I).  The melody has been used both as a family hymn by the Habsburgs ever since, and is today the German national anthem.  [Here](_URL_1_) it is being sung at Otto von Habsburg's funeral in Vienna a couple of years ago.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Roman_Empire_ca.1600.svg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5V98E3e9eA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC0SxTl3hEA"]]}
{"q_id": "a1hobt", "title": "What would a Tudor kitchen look like?", "selftext": "I recently watched Tudor week on the Great British Baking show and it got me wondering what royal cuisine would look like. I'm guessing that there would be a need to cook food for a large number of people that is high quality and at least somewhat varied. Before things like electric lights, not to mention all the other amenities that seems challenging. \n\nSo what would the physical kitchen look like, how large would would it be?\n\nAlso how would the personal work? Did it have a structure we would be familiar with, chefs, choux chefs and the rest? Would these folks be English or imported or trained abroad or what? \n\nHow varied and good would the food be? Sometimes I get the sense that what would be fit for a king at one point in time would be fairy regular today. If a modern food critic went back how might they rate the grub? \n\nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a1hobt/what_would_a_tudor_kitchen_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eaqzdw9", "eari4at"], "score": [4, 28], "text": ["Follow up questions: how did the average commoner's kitchen or food preparation area look in comparison to the royal/noble's kitchen?\n\nMy understanding for many castles is that kitchens were often separated from the main house/keep as a fire precaution. Did the common person have any way to take precautions like that or did they just do their best not to burn their house down?", "I'm going to speak specifically about Henry VIII, as it's him and his court who I am most familiar with on this particular topic, and because I personally think it's the perfect example of the height of Tudor opulence. \n\nHenry's own personal favorite foods included: \n >  venison, game pies stuffed with oranges, haggis, eels, baked lampreys, salmon, sturgeon, ling, and an early version of beef olives (beef stuffed with forcemeat and vegetables). For the void, he preferred custards, fritters, tarts, jelly and cream of almonds. (1)\n\nCourt meals would have been several courses with multiple dishes. The diet would have been quite meat heavy, even considering that no meat was to be eaten on a Friday, only fish. Luckily for the Tudors, \"fish\" included eel, crab, whale, most poultry (chicken, swan, peacock dressed in its own feathers), porpoise, and seal. (2)\n\n >  The royal court\u2019s annual provision of meat consisted of:\n >  \n >  \u2022\t1,240 oxen\n >  \n >  \u2022\t8,200 sheep\n >  \n >  \u2022\t2,330 deer\n >  \n >  \u2022\t760 calves\n >  \n >  \u2022\t1,870 pigs\n >  \n >  \u2022\t53 wild boar (3)\n\nAnd:\n > And if they [the nobles and many of their servants] do not have 20 varied meat dishes at dinner and supper, they consider themselves slighted.\u2019\n\n > (\u2018A dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford\u2019, 1529-32)(3)\n\n \nSpices were very popular, and an indicator of ones wealth as they were very expensive at this time, so you can imagine a lavish court like Henry's would have a truly abundant amount of spices. Henry had a special staff of servants responsible for his spicery. He also had servants of the pantry, cellar, lardar, scullery (dishwashers), and woodyard, overseen and managed by clerks and underclerks of the kitchen - a truly enormous staff was needed to take care of the king and his court. (2)\n\nAs to how things tasted, well, here's a few recipes:\n\n > Chykonys in bruette. \u2014 Take an Sethe Chykonys,  &  smyte \nhem to gobettys ; \u00fean take Pepir, Gyngere, an Brede y-grounde,  &  temper it \nvppe wyth \u00fee self brothe, an with Ale ; an coloure it with Safrouw, an sethe \nan serue forth. (4)\n\nMore or less translates to:\n\nChickens in broth - take and seethe chickens, and smite them to gobbets, then take pepper, ginger, and bread ground, and temper it with the same broth, and with ale, and color it with saffron, and seethe and serve forth. \n\nOr  \n\n > Sauce for shulder of moton.\u2014 Take percely, and oynons, and mynce \u00feem and \u00fee rostyde shulder of Moton; and take vynegre, and poudre gingre, salt and cas a-pon \u00fee mynced shulder, and ete hym so. (4)\n\nAgain, translation is more or less:\n\nSauce for a shoulder of mutton - take parsley, and onions, and mince them and the roast shoulder of mutton, and take vinegar, and powdered ginger, salt and cast upon the mince shoulder, and eat him so. \n\nOther recipes use mace, almonds, garlic, wine sauces, and cloves. They might not be your mom's meatloaf, but probably would be mostly edible to modern diners.  Though we would probably take a pass on the lamprey. \n\nSources: \n\n1. Henry VIII: The King and His Court - Allison Weir\n\n2. A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household, made in divers reigns : from King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, also receipts in ancient cookery - Society of Antiquaries of London\n\n3. A History of Royal Food and Feasting - University of Reading via _URL_0_\n\n4. Two fifteenth-century cookery-books - Thomas Austin\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["futurelearn.com"]]}
{"q_id": "2jtmyl", "title": "What's the history of the term \"Judeo-Christian?\" Why don't we talk about \"Abrahamic _____s?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jtmyl/whats_the_history_of_the_term_judeochristian_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clf9jji"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, I think it has a bit to do with the history of the usage. It used to be just \"Christian\". People talked about Christian history, and Christian values, and Christian morality, and Christian tradition. If you look at the Google ngram viewer, \"Judeo-Christian\" doesn't even register until 1933, and gradually picked up popularity through time. Basically, it was a way to often be historically correct as well as inclusive of the history of the Bible, to add \"Judeo-\" before \"Christian\" in certain circumstances. The Old Testament is Jewish, so referring to values, traditions, and history of both Old and New Testament as Christian leaves out the Jewish aspects of it. Some continue to say \"Christian,\" while others have modified the term with \"Judeo-\". It's less of a modification than using the completely different word of \"Abrahamic\". But \"Abrahamic\" isn't necessarily the correct term, anyway. Typically, when the words are used, they are genuinely talking about only Jewish and Christian issues, not Muslim. Abrahamic refers to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, so should be used when talking about all 3, not when talking about a tradition that doesn't include Islam, for example. In any case, if you look at google ngram viewer, Abrahamic has a longer history than Judeo-Christian. For some reason, Abrahamic starts being used a lot in 1828, and has gradual spikes in popularity followed by no use. But around 1965, it started to grow in popularity in English, and its usage continues to rise, though has not reached the heights in usage of Judeo-Christian (in English).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7rv509", "title": "Why are the people of American Samoa not born American citizens? How did the US acquire American Samoa?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7rv509/why_are_the_people_of_american_samoa_not_born/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt31et7"], "score": [2], "text": ["The American Samoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States. In 1901 the case Downes v Bidwell the Supreme Court held that the Citizenship Clause  of the 14th Amendment does not extend birthright citizenship to U.S. nationals who are born in unincorporated territories. Here is a link to the court's decision- _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/182/244.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4f1l5z", "title": "Were the Vikings that raided Britain and elsewhere all elite warriors, or were they common folk?", "selftext": "Many societies had a division between elite warriors and common farmers. Was this the case with the Norse and if so what was the makeup of the raiders and settlers? Did they bring farmers with them? When they went to places like Iceland or Greenland did they take common folk or what? Or was it all too cold for farming in Scandinavia anyway? Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4f1l5z/were_the_vikings_that_raided_britain_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d25jl6m"], "score": [80], "text": ["*V\u00edking* just means pirate. Apart from the few specifically named heroes (saga-characters like Egill Skallagr\u00edmsson, Gunnar H\u00e1mundarson, etc.) there's no suggestion that they were in any way or form part of an elite. Some may have been very wealthy (the ones in charge of expeditions, ships, and the like) but on the whole, they were just dudes who showed up when people weren't expecting it, killed some folk, stole a lot of things, burned some stuff, and took off again.\n\nWhen you get into armies of Scandinavians invading and settling in places, then you have elite retinues around petty-kings or princes (like the *h\u00faskarlar* of the Lo\u00f0broks\u00fdnir during the Danish invasion of Britain) but they were, of course, less common than your standard land- and plunder-hungry soldier.\n\nWhen Scandinavians went to settle places, they went as, well, settlers; generally after an army had already secured the area. Iceland and Greenland were exceptions, as they were very sparsely populated, so explorers just set up shop where they landed and went from there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1jbllo", "title": "How were Czechs treated within Austria-Hungary?", "selftext": "I know that at one point, Austria and Bohemia were in a union, and that a large amount of Germans used to dwell in the region. But what was the status of the Czechs in the Empire? Were they treated like second-class citizens? Were they allowed the same privileges as their German and Hungarian counterparts? What sort of discrimination went on within the Empire? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jbllo/how_were_czechs_treated_within_austriahungary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdbazr"], "score": [6], "text": ["It's complicated. It was basically the industrial center, out of the five older carmakers [two are Czech](_URL_1_). So nobody would have said they cannot work right. Still, the working class Czech immigrants in Vienna were generally looked down upon, [despite their numbers being large](_URL_4_) (and there was not really such a thing as a \"welfare queen\" back then, people had to work), I remember faintly that there is a term in Viennese German something like \"czech noodle restaurant\" which means \"chaotic, unruly, disorganized\". However their numbers were so large, and so concentrated on Vienna that they kind of became part of the identity in the sense that if you meet a Hans Podhola somewhere in Austria, you just know he must be Viennese.\n\nThe Monarchy was created by Hungarians having an uprising against Habsburg rule in 1848, they could only crush it with Russian help and basically offered the dualism in 1867 as a compromise. So many Hungarians thought the dual monarchy is a hard won thing that should not be shared with those people who have not fought for it. Then again, [Palacky](_URL_3_) pushed the literal opposite, a a Germanic-Slavic confeferation leaving Hungarians out. Then again some Hungarians supported Czech rights as a natural ally against German-Austrian or pan-German nationalism. \n\nThe complexity of it is demonstrated by the fact that there were a lot of debates around whether to make Czech an official language, but the Emperor [learned it anway](_URL_0_) which is obviously a sign of respect.\n\nDiscrimination or first or second class are too modern concepts. People were more like subjects than citizens (and the Emperor Franz Josef was a King of Bohemia from 1848, while he became King of Hungary only in 1867), the language was certainly not first class but then again quite some Czech had German as their mother tongue e.g. Franz Kafka, as they had a really long history inside the German-Roman Empire.  Czechs played important roles in the imperial administration, in the army (famous general Radetzky), and of course in industry, basically if you say that aside from the language question it was not a particularly bad, repressed or humiliating thing to be a middle class subject in Prague as long as you could speak German (and if you were middle class, you could, period) that would be roughly close to reality. But they clearly weren't happy with it, clearly not seen as full equals and being basically the most industialized, [best educated](_URL_2_), most efficient of the minorities, they played an important role in blowing up the empire, I would say if the empire managed to keep Czechs happy (fully equality) then the empire could have survived."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary#Ethnic_relations", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0koda_Auto#History", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1%C5%A1_Garrigue_Masaryk", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_Palack%C3%BD", "http://www.porges.net/CzechsInVienna/CzechsInVienna1.html"]]}
{"q_id": "8fihyi", "title": "How did India become one country? how did it avoid civil war after independence?", "selftext": "Throughout history, the Indian subcontinent was home to many ethnicities, religions, and states. Occasionally would an empire rule the entirety of the subcontinent, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule. So my question is how did the idea of a unified India come to be? How was this idea sold to common people? How did India avoid escalation of conflicts (outside Kashmir) into civil wars?\n\nAlso can we say that Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka remained independent of India because they are not majority Hindu?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fihyi/how_did_india_become_one_country_how_did_it_avoid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy5hdqj"], "score": [7], "text": ["This is a question which can only be fully answered over the pages of several books since the formation of the India Union spans nearly two centuries and the the geopolitics of the subcontinent is equally broad and complex. What ill attempt to do here is provide a summary that goes through various political, social and strategic processes that led to the contemporary situation in the subcontinent. Since I specialise in the history of the Indian Union the summary I give is primarily a history of the same entity. I wont be commenting much on Pakistan, Bangladesh and Srilanka for the same reasons.\n\nAt the end of colonial rule, British India was a vast territory that stretched from Afghanistan to Burma. Burma had been made a separate crown colony in 1916. The modern political geography of the current nation states of the Indian subcontinent derive from the British India of the early 20th century. Now British India was culmination of a variety of forms of political control. There were the Presidencies in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras and the territories under these presidencies. This was under the direct control of the monarch of England from 1858. Interspersed between this territory were the Princely States which were ruled by local monarchs but were controlled by British Resident or Political Officer. At the time of Indian Independence these Princely States numbered around 556. It is within this political system that Indian nationalism began to emerge and grow. The main political entity in the Indian national movement was the Indian National Congress founded in 1885  but it is not the only anti-colonial entity that was active in creating the Indian identity. There were a variety of regional interests that created their own discourse of nationalism, nativity and anti-colonialism . The transportation, communication and political systems of British colonialism had made it easier for the subjects of British India to interact and share ideas to form a coherent identity. The modern Indian identity is not formed overnight but it took nearly a 100 years worth of poetry, literature and political activism to create the consolidated idea. It is also not a monolithic identity there are several sub-nationalisms that contribute to the larger idea. Its better to understand the Indian identity as aggregation rather than a singularity.\n\nRecommended Reading : [Sumit Sarkar- Modern India](_URL_0_)  [Shekar Bandopahyay- From Plassey to Partition](_URL_5_)\n\nIn 1947 India gained Independence from colonial rule. As political negotiations to keep India integrated with the same political geography as British India fell apart and the country split into two. Pakistan(which in 1947 was west-Pakistan and east-Pakistan which is present day Bangladesh). Minus this territory most of British India began to form the Indian Union. Now the present day political map of the Indian Union is not what the country looked like in 1947. In fact constant shifts occurred in the territory of India till 1976 (2016 if you count enclaves). In fact contrary to mainstream Indian historiography the Indian Union is the product of a series of negotiations conflicts and insurgencies. Initially several princely states objected to joining the Union. The state of travancore wanted to remain independent but a popular left wing uprising overthrew the monarchy and voted to join the Union. The state of Hyderabad was annexed by the Indian army in 1948, essentially because the state would have been a country within a country with strong ties to Pakistan. The princely state of Junnagad became a site of conflict as to if it would join Pakistan (because of the interests of it muslim monarch) or join India in the interest of its hindu majority(the latter was what happened). The reverse was true of Kashmir which had a Hindu monarch who after a speedy referendum ceded to India. Stating the muslim majority argument Pakistan invaded what is today azad kashmir/Pakistan occupied kashmir. This issue as you may know is still unsettled. There were other political negotiations that the Indian Union had to undergo to tip the balance in the French controlled territories of pondicherry, yanam and mahe. These territories would referendum out of colonial rule and accede into the Union. The Portuguese colony of Goa would also be absorbed into the union in 1961 through strategic military move by the Indian army. The latest change to the map of the Indian union happened in 1976 when the princely state of sikkim was made an Indian state. Sikkim had been an Independent kingdom during British rule. The Indian union had turned sikkim into a protectorate after the Indo-china war of 1962 taking over military and diplomatic affairs of the kingdom. In 1975 a controversial referendum and social strife against the monarchy in sikkim saw it absorption into the Union. \nRecommended reading- \n[vp menon- The Story of the Integration of the Indian States](_URL_4_) [Smash and Grab- Sunanda Ray](_URL_3_) [Andrew Duff-Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom](_URL_2_)\n\nAs you can see from these examples there is a complexity of factors that created the present day Republic of the Indian Union. \n\n\n\n\n > How did India avoid escalation of conflicts into civil wars?\n\nThere is no real answer for this. In fact the Indian union has always contained problems that in other nations would have definitely escalated into civil wars (or in India multiple civil wars). But the fact remains that the republic has always been strong and none of India\u2019s internal conflicts have ever caused a breakdown of the entire system. This could be primarily because of how the Indian Union is designed. Unlike a standard nation state India is not a monolithic governmental entity. One allegory(not comprehensive) is to say India is like the European Union but with a state structure similar to the United States. Like the EU India is made up of several nationalities but like the US its it has a centralised government below which function very strong state governments. These state governments are small nations in themselves but military and economic policy is with the central government. This form of power sharing is significant reason for the sustenance of the Indian Union. Though demographic differences do favour certain cultures and linguistic groups in the union the states still hold significant autonomy. In fact except for a few cases the solution in the Union for conflict is often to co-opt opposing parties and give more self governance. By doing this the Union never escalates a conflict beyond a certain point. \n\nAt the same time this system is not without its fractures. A significant number of secessionist conflicts dot the history of contemporary India. Everyone knows about kashmir so I wont delve further into that. Apart from this India has had secessionist movements for several regions. The conflicts in north-eastern india are significant in this regard. Having been mostly outside direct colonial control and not fully linked to the politics of Indian nationalism most states in north-eastern India remained socially, culturally and linguistically different from the mainland. The political entity that was once British Assam further turned into 6 different states in the Union. All of these states have their own secessionist movements. Naga nationalism which still survives today in a few small insurgent groups hoped to create a separate nation \u2018Kuknalim\u2019, joining different naga tribes in Myanmar and the Indian states of Nagaland, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh. The Garo Liberation army pushed for separate state in  Meghalaya and the Mizo National Liberation Front was formed to create a separate Mizo nation. Besides this there are several secessionist movements or movements that seek to form new Indian states like the United Liberation Force of Ahom, Boro Liberation Tiger Force. In the mainland there is a long history of maoist/marxist militias that span central, eastern and southern India. These groups consider the Indian state a semi-colonial, semi-feudal, capitalist entity and have been in conflict with the central government for decades. \n\nAll this has led to the Central government developing a series of military divisions that are deployed for a variety of conflicts. Unlike most countries Indian armed forces are of two type. The Indian military (Army/Navy/Airforce) which is controlled by the Defence Ministry and the Reserve Police controlled by the Home ministry. The Reserve Police play a significant role in the regulation of domestic conflict. They are essentially the counter balance. Within the reserve police there are divisions for border patrol, the Border Security Force for the Bangladesh/Pakistan borders, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, Sahastra Seema Bal(nepal-bhutan border), Assam rifles(Myanmar border), and the Coast Guard for the seas. For engaging in domestic often secessionist conflict the central government deploys the Central Reserve Police Force and the Rapid Action Force is a division sent for riot and crowd control. There are also division like the Central Industrial Security Force and the Railway Protection Force which is for infrastructure security. Apart from the co-optation and political/diplomatic negotiation the reserve police are the other side of how India ensures internal integrity. Most internal conflicts in India are fought by reserve police not the army. \nRecommend Reading \u2013 [Steven Wilkinson- Army and Nation](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.in/Modern-India-1885-1947-Sumit-Sarkar/dp/0333904257", "https://www.amazon.in/Army-Nation-Military-Democracy-Independence/dp/0674728807", "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25202243-sikkim", "https://www.amazon.com/Smash-Grab-Annexation-Sunanda-Datta-Ray/dp/9383260386", "http://sardarpatel.nvli.in/media/1786", "https://www.amazon.in/Plassey-Partition-History-Modern-India/dp/8125025960"]]}
{"q_id": "6fq7n4", "title": "How extensive was the system of slavery in Dutch South Africa?", "selftext": "I recently discovered that in 17th-18th century, the Dutch colonists of South Africa had a slave system in place. Wikipedia, unfortunately, [is incredibly sparse](_URL_0_), so I was hoping to get some more information on how it worked there. Did the Dutch enslave the local population, or were they importing slaves from elsewhere, or both? How extensive was the slave population? Was this a plantation style system, plot-farming, or something else? How quickly did things change with the takeover by the British? How direct does the end of slavery there relate to the later rise of the apartheid system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fq7n4/how_extensive_was_the_system_of_slavery_in_dutch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dim0cxo"], "score": [6], "text": ["/u/Khosikulu is the best person to address this question. However, I think he is supposed to writing a proposal right now. I'll give a college-try, though if he reads this he might dispute some aspects, or at least recommend some further literature on the matter.\n\n > Did the Dutch enslave the local population, or were they importing slaves from elsewhere, or both? How extensive was the slave population?\n\nIn the period of Dutch rule up until 1790s, the majority of the slave population was imported from Mozambique, Madagascar, the Comoros, or else from Indonesia.^1\n\nHowever, in 1807 the new British administration imposed a ban on overseas imports of slaves to the Cape Colony (as part of an over-all ban on slave trading in all the colonies of the empire). In 1807, the population of the Cape Colony stood at roughly 25,000 white settlers, 1,100 free blacks, and 30,000 slaves. \n\n > Was this a plantation style system, plot-farming, or something else? \n\nSlave labor was involved in all aspects of Cape colony society. Slave labor was used in warehouses and as longshoremen in Capetown, as fishermen, and as farm labor growing wheat and making wine in vineyards. \n\n > How quickly did things change with the takeover by the British?\n\nSo, as I said above, the British imposed a ban on overseas slave imports in 1807. Britain had governed the Cape Colony from 1795-1803 before briefly returning control to the Dutch under the Batavian Republic. When Napoleon invaded the Batavian Republic in 1806, the British again took control of the Cape Colony that same year, and imposed their ban on slave trading the next year.\n\nHowever, that ban on overseas trade could not completely cut off the flow of new slaves into the colony. Raiding across the frontier and capturing captives, or trading with African traders were also a source for slaves. Of course, the inflows of slaves from these sources were much reduced compared to the overseas trade. While there were roughly 30,000 slaves in 1807, slave numbers increased slightly to 32,046 in 1817, and to 32,243 in 1828. Importantly, this period also saw a shift in the geography of slavery. Some slave owners in Capetown were quick to take advantage of spikes in slave prices immediately after 1807, and sold their slaves to rural farmers. Also, since the eastern frontier was the only viable source for new slaves, the five eastern districts are the regions that see the increase of slave populations, reaching ~20% of total slave population in the colony by 1828.^2\n\nThe ban on slave imports also forced the Cape Colony to investigate other labor pools. In 1809, the colony introduced the pass system for contract labor, where free Khoikhoi adults in the colony were required to have passes that specified where the person worked and how long the term of service was. This pass system was introduced as a security measure after Khoikhoi uprisings during the Third Xhosa war.\n\nIn 1812, the a system of \"apprenticeships\" was also introduced, where Khoikhoi and San children were incorporated in the rural workforce. These apprentices were technically free, but they were not paid until they reached maturity at age 25. At maturity, they could theoretically seek alternate employment, but in practice there existed substantial barriers to employment mobility. \n\nPrior to the introduction of the apprenticeship system, Khoikhoi had largely avoided systems of unfree labor, and played an important role in providing livestock in trade to the colony.\n\nIn 1834, the British decreed that slavery itself was now illegal in British colonies, including the Cape Colony. Slaves were to undergo 4 years of apprenticeship to prepare them for freedom, and were to fully enter the labor economy by 1838. \n\nTo quote Paul Lovejoy\n\n > The beginnings of the Great Trek coincided with the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, and the two were hardly unrelated\n\n > ....\n\n > In the long run, the emancipation of slaves and the further consolidation of the apprentice system [in the Cape Colony] were important steps in the evolution of a migrant labor force, **based on the issuance of passes to control settlement and employment.** the short term, many Boers took their slaves and Khoikhoi apprentices and moved inland to seize land for livestock and agriculture, for the devastation of the *dificane* wars had left the best land for settlement. Beyond the British colony, the apprenticeship system functioned as a thinly disguised form of slavery. The Boers who had left by 1837 took with them perhaps 4,000 apprentices and supposedly former slaves who continued to be treated as servile. the Trekkers also continued to seize children or buy them from the rest of the century; the Nguni at Delagoa Bay became one source of \"apprentices\" were slaves in the eyes of the Nguni. As late as the 1890s, this modified form of slavery continued in the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Natal, although by then free migrant labor was more important as a source of manpower than slavery.^3\n\nEmphasis mine. \n\nI think that quote also helps answer your last question. The control of migrant labor and settlement that the pass laws addressed in 1834 would continue to be an animating issue for South African society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and labor passes would continue to be used by the Apartheid state.\n\nOn the other hand, if we accept Lovejoy's proposition that the Great Trek was connected to the emancipation decree (in addition to Boer perceptions of Anglo discrimination), then 20th century conflicts over land rights and access can be said to be indirectly related to the end(?) of slavery in 1834.\n\n---\n1 _URL_0_\n\n2 *Transformations in Slavery* by Paul Lovejoy, chapter 10 \"Slavery in Central, Southern and Eastern Africa in the Nineteenth Century\" pp 232. \n\n3 ibid, p232-233"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_South_Africa"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-cape-slave-trade"]]}
{"q_id": "2ybzur", "title": "Besides the Anabasis, is there actually any other information to corroborate Xenophon's Persian Expedition?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ybzur/besides_the_anabasis_is_there_actually_any_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp87dzi", "cp87fjl"], "score": [2, 10], "text": ["Xenophon occasionally cites a man called Ktesias, the personal physician to the Persian king Artaxerxes II, who apparently wrote a history of Persia up to the present day. However, his books, the Indica on India and the Persika on Persia, have not survived in anything other than fragmentary form. The ancients, however, would have had something to corroborate Xenophon's account with. ", "Artaxerxes II had a Greek doctor, Ctesias, who wrote a Persian history that mentions Cyrus the Younger's campaign.  It is extremely fragmentary.  [Here](_URL_0_) is a translation of the relevant fragmentary.  It's preserved in Photius, a Byzantine Patriarch.  The fragment notes Cyrus brought Greeks and names Clearchus as the Greek general, and claims Ataxerxes reached an arrangement with the Greeks.  No mention of Xenophon in the fragment.\n > (63) Cyrus revolted from his brother and assembled an army mixed of Greeks and barbarians\nwith Clearchus as the general of the Greeks. Ctesias describes how Syennesis entered into an\nalliance with both Cyrus and Artaxerxes and how each man advised his own army.\nClearchus, the Spartan who led the Greeks, and Menon the Thessalian, both allies of Cyrus,\nwere always at odds with each other because Cyrus always deliberated with Clearchus while\nhe did not rely on Menon at all. Many men deserted from Artaxerxes to Cyrus but no one\ndeserted from Cyrus to Artaxerxes; consequently, Arbarios intended to join Cyrus but was\nbetrayed and thrown into the ashes. (64) Cyrus attacked the king's army, won a victory, but\ndied in the battle when he failed to follow the advice of Clearchus. His body was mutilated\nby his brother Artaxerxes, who cut off his head and the hand which he used to wound the\nking and paraded around with them. (65) Clearchus the Spartan retreated with his Greek\ncontingent during the night and occupied one of the cities under Parysatis' dominion.\nFinally, the king concluded a peace with the Greeks. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0022521/nichols_a.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "184vj5", "title": "How much mathematics was used in Greek and Roman architecture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/184vj5/how_much_mathematics_was_used_in_greek_and_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8bpx3w"], "score": [7], "text": ["It's difficult to give a general answer, because specific projects would require specific approaches, but I think it's safe to say \"not very much\".\n\nIf you read an ancient architectural treatise like [Vitruvius',](_URL_1_) you'll see lots of references to numbers, proportions, and famous mathematicians, but nothing in the way of formulae for mathematical techniques for deriving constraints on architectural feature, and certainly nothing at all on how to calculate stresses. [Section 3.1](_URL_3_) has a lot of numerological trivia about \"perfect numbers\", but it's more about superstition than engineering; the [introduction to book 9](_URL_2_) has reports of amazing feats performed by famous mathematicians, but no guidelines for general architectural practices. It seems like architects were encouraged to have an interest in maths, but it was *very* hit and miss.\n\nFor further reading, [here's an old discussion](_URL_0_) that touches on this subject pretty closely. and links to some further material."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sxcvu/is_there_a_chance_that_before_its_destruction_the/c4hrunj", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/home.html", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/9*.html#Intro.1", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/3*.html#1"]]}
{"q_id": "60e7gi", "title": "What would the rule of the Dalai Lama have been like?", "selftext": "I ask because I had been lurking on Reddit a few days ago when someone mentioned that it was 'disgusting how the liberal left embraced the Dalai Lama when he was more or less a theocratic dictator in Tibet,' implying vaguely that perhaps the Chinese annexation of Tibet was a good deed.\n\nI don't personally think the Chinese intervening in Tibet is particularly good. But I am an Indian, and I'm probably not very objective here. \n\nMy pivotal question is this: Would a rule for Tibet under the Dalai Lamas have been 'good?' I understand he is somewhat like a pope, but I can also point to the monarchs of Bhutan and the people there seem pretty happy. \n\nWould the Dalai Lamas' rule have been liberal, focused on education, given opportunities for capitalism and fair and free markets for wealth generation, free migration within the country and free speech (excluding lese majeste I suppose).\n\nIs there historical precedence for this? Or would Tibet have become a vassal state of the Chinese regardless? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/60e7gi/what_would_the_rule_of_the_dalai_lama_have_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df62ewj"], "score": [9], "text": ["I've answered this question in depth before. [My first answer](_URL_0_) on r/AskHistorians was actually a variation of this question and it's still the most popularly asked question regarding the history of Tibet. \n\n >  'disgusting how the liberal left embraced the Dalai Lama when he was more or less a theocratic dictator in Tibet,' implying vaguely that perhaps the Chinese annexation of Tibet was a good deed.\n\nThis is a good alarm system you have going. Statements like this are usually accompanied with justifications for the Chinese activities from the '50s to today... glossing over the way the People's Republic (often violently, and always forcefully) dismantled the Tibetan society, often by packing the committees and government bodies that actually did any governing with Han Chinese and Party cadres, while placing Tibetans in figurehead positions (they did this with the Dalai Lama himself from roughly '56 on) as evidence that Tibet was a willing partner in their \"liberation.\" \n\nStatements like this imply that the Chinese \"liberation\" solved all of Tibet's problems and established a modern functioning society without slavery and imperialism (accomplished by Marxist-Maoist ideology which simply states that imperialism and slavery are simply \"impossible\" under Communism, therefore under a Communist regime, by definition there is no slavery or imperialism...). And then completely ignore the forced collectivization of the '50s and '60s, the involuntary seizure of cultural artifacts, the thousands of tonnes of gold stolen from Tibetan monasteries which was sent to Beijing, melted down into gold bars, (and then mysterious, the PRC paid off all of its debt to the Soviet Union in 1965. Weird timing, huh?). \n\nEven today there is a lot of problems between Tibet and China and any consideration or balance is usually taken as a form of dissent which makes discussion on this topic very difficult. It's easy to see why: both Tibetans and Chinese have faced centuries of discrimination (religious and ethnic) at the hands of outsiders and are defensive about their history. Rightly so. Though Tibet was certainly not a \"Shangri-La\" that westerners (and Tibetans themselves) often portray it. Nor was Post-Liberation Tibet suddenly a happy place where poor Tibetans were lifted up by Communist brethren (as Chinese propaganda portrays it). \n\n >  Would a rule for Tibet under the Dalai Lamas have been 'good?'\n\nThis is a fundamentally impossible question to answer. Most Tibetans will answer \"yes,\" and most Chinese will answer \"no,\" for reasons stated above. \n\nTibet from 1912 - 1950 was in a period of state-building. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama (the current one's predecessor) was trying to build Tibet into a modern, independent state. And that necessarily involved developing the country, modernizing the military, cracking down on the tax code, and then suppressing dissent. \n\nThis process isn't unique to Tibet, and is in fact something we can trace through primary source documents in any society and country that has made it from a medieval period ruled by an upperclass religious-based elite, to modern statehood. Even Bhutan has gone through this process, and one of the explanations of the nastiness that happened in the early '60s and the early '90s is a part of the state-building process. India is arguably still going through this process. \n\nState building is, again, arguably, good for many at the expense of the few because it often necessitates modern medicine, modern infrastructure, modern social institutions, and increased civil liberties compared to medieval societies where the concept doesn't exist (though this last point is increasingly being challenged). \n\n >  Would the Dalai Lamas' rule have been liberal, focused on education, given opportunities for capitalism and fair and free markets for wealth generation, free migration within the country and free speech (excluding lese majeste I suppose).\n\nAgain, this is impossible to answer and it's impossible to speculate about alternate history scenarios (not least of which because it is against the rules of this sub. \n\nBUT, what we can answer definitively is that the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama was very pro-modernity and even pro-Marxist. The Dalai Lama has said quite often that he believes Buddhism is the answer to people's Spiritual Needs while Marxism can be the answer to their Material Needs. He and the Panchen Lama went and visited Mao in Beijing in 1954. When the Dalai Lama returned to Tibet (he would stay there until 1959) he was excited that Mao seemed willing to work with and respect the Tibetan's wishes for a slow transition to socialism as opposed to rapid developments. \n\nThe PRC had actually told the Tibetans several times during their \"liberation,\" that they had come to liberate the Tibetans from feudalism and serfdom. And once they were liberated, they would not stay \"even if you begged us to.\" Obviously, that's not how it worked out. And the increasingly heavy hand of Chinese rule eventually convinced the Dalai Lama and those closest to him to fear for his life, so he fled to India. Even in exile, Beijing still believed it was possible to work with the Dalai Lama, who has certainly changed in exile: becoming pro-democracy, pro-education, pro-science, etc. etc. How many of these opinions were formed in Tibet and how many in exile? Hard to say. He has dozens of books out, his autobiography *Freedom in Exile* and the many essays and publications on his website (take careful note of the dates) are good indications of the opinions he held and when. \n\nIt actually wasn't until the 1980s and '90s that Beijing formally turned against the Dalai Lama and stopped trying to court the exile administration in Dharamsala. They wanted to try and get His Holiness back to Tibet to legitimate their rule, but after a few short visits of his brothers to Tibet that ended in a publicity disaster (especially for PRC relations with Taiwan) Beijing decided to stop portraying the Dalai Lama as a loyal, but misguided Communist, and start publicly calling him a \"splittist\" despite the fact that the Dalai Lama has consistently, since 1950, advocated a \"Middle Way\" approach to union with China: where Tibet was able to manage its own affairs underneath a Chinese government that would manage Tibet's international affairs. \n\n >  Is there historical precedence for this?\n\nI would say yes: Bhutan is a good example, and of extreme interest to me, because it's the only example we have of a Tibetic culture zone that has been able to function and develop with minimal outside interference. \n\nOne comment you often see, esp. here on Reddit, but in any article about the Dalai Lama or Tibet with comments open, is that the Lamas \"want their slaves back.\" Though (as you can see from my original comment in the link above) \"slavery\" and \"serfdom\" aren't the same in English language, and they are very different institutions in Tibetan history as well. \n\nNot only that, but Bhutan banned both practices in the early '50s, and then even allocated royal land to the newly freed Drap and Zap so they could move away from their former masters and not feel awkward about the situation. \n\nIt's impossible to note when an independent Tibet would have done something similar and made those institutions illegal, again because that's alternate history and it's impossible to know, but it's important to note that every other country in the world has criminalized slavery and approximately 0 of them have needed the People's Liberation Army to do so. \n\nSources: \n\n*Tibet: A History* by Sam Van Schaik\n\n*Tibet: A Political History* by W.D. Tsepon Shakapba\n\n*Dragon in the Land of Snows* by Tsering Shakya \n\n*Tibetan Nation* by W. Smith"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/273mh9/there_has_been_some_claim_that_the_dalai_lama/chxbgrd/"]]}
{"q_id": "5o6fsa", "title": "When military commanders in middle ages were making strategies and decisions, would they really consider chivalry as a important thing?", "selftext": "For example, would they really refuse to ambush enemies or attack enemies in retreat just because of honour?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o6fsa/when_military_commanders_in_middle_ages_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dch12ww"], "score": [11], "text": ["Medieval conceptions of \"chivalry\" were multifaceted, confusing, and often contested. There were multiple meanings of the term and different ways of understanding it. It is better to think of the concept in terms of \"chivalric culture\" as opposed to a singular, codified \"chivalry.\" Popular modern understanding of chivalric culture is pretty warped, often driven by 19th century misconceptions, romantic mythology, and stereotypes. However, in the medieval period itself, commanders did not see chivalry and clever military scheme and plots to be in opposition. They launched raids against unprotected enemy holdings, ambushed poorly prepared enemy forces, strove to outflank and outmanuever their opponents, carried out attacks at night, bribed captains to surrender their fortresses, and numerous other \"dirty tricks.\" Many people imagine that there was some kind of knightly antipathy towards the use of missile weaponry, artillery, or combat on foot. Even a cursory examination of the most famous medieval battles reveals that this was not the case. Far from the stereotypes about foppish, arrogant, and ineffectual aristocrats, medieval commanders were often hardened, experienced soldiers with a hard-won understanding of the practical realities of the battlefield. They were quite capable of bending or breaking customs as they saw fit. A famous example of this behavior is the debate surrounding the killing of prisoners at several famous battles. In general, a soldier who had surrendered could expect mercy from his captors, but sometimes a commander might decide that killing their prisoners was necessary. While there is often a clear discomfort with and distate for these actions, they should not be considered \"war crimes\" in the modern sense. French chronicles might express sorrow when English soldiers killed French captives, but they did not attack such actions as \"dishonorable.\" "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3v09d4", "title": "To what extent did organised natural disaster relief exist in Europe during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period?", "selftext": "I'm mainly thinking of large floods, like the [St. Marcellus flood](_URL_0_) or the [Buchardi flood](_URL_1_), but also city fires or other catastrophes of a larger size.\n\nWhat would happen in the aftermath to address the destruction and the victims who have lost everything they owned? Would the local lord send food and clothes, or workers to bury the dead and rebuild the houses? What about the king? Would the church collect donations throughout the land? Would there be any private endeavours, maybe neighbouring towns or single rich burghers acting on their own vocation?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v09d4/to_what_extent_did_organised_natural_disaster/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxn5uz3"], "score": [2], "text": ["Since noone answered, perhaps a piece of info from the roman times could prove interesting, even if largely unrelated to your question. A flood destroyed a dam in central Greece. It was the dam that kept lake Copais dry (the previously submerged land was now farms but the flood destroyed the crops and some infrastructure). Locals, who at the time were conquered by Romans (I think the incident took place in 1st century AD) sent an \"embassy\" to Rome, then Rome decided to give them some funds for rebuilding the dam plus 5 years tax-free status. Sorry for not having the Greek source available now. My point is that if this happened so early, then it is very likely that similar relief actions would have taken place in the period you are interested in.\n\nThis lake was dried many times since at least 1200 BC but natural disasters or acts of war (usually by the neighbours) often flooded it again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Marcellus%27_flood_(1362\\)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burchardi_flood"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "81u6y3", "title": "Defeated crusaders were often presented with a choice: convert to Islam or die. What happened to the ones that converted to Islam? Did they assimilate into their societies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/81u6y3/defeated_crusaders_were_often_presented_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv5eho2"], "score": [23], "text": [" >  Defeated crusaders were often presented with a choice: convert to Islam or die?\n\nDo you have a source for this assertion? I can\u2019t claim that the crusades are a specialty of mine, but I\u2019m not familiar with this claim.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5m1oj3", "title": "I've heard a lot about European colonialism and Imperialism on the indigenous people of the Americas but what about Russia's interactions with indigenous people as it spread to the Pacific?", "selftext": "I feel like this is a pretty bad question but i struggled how to frame it as what I saw was the complete absence of coverage. Am I wrong? How have historians covered this and how widely covered is it? How often is it invoked in comparative studies? Wish this wasn't so vague", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m1oj3/ive_heard_a_lot_about_european_colonialism_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc0cdu3", "dc0uotu", "dc1z0ch"], "score": [2, 29, 5], "text": ["It would help if you clarified your question.  Are you looking for information about Russian interaction with natives as they moved across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, or about Russian interaction with natives after the Russians began to spread East from Kamchatka?  Most information about the former (which is what I suspect you are asking about) is published in Russian, and is not my area of interest.  There is lots published in English on the Russian spread into the Pacific and into Alaska.\n", "Hey, great question. The period that you'll be most interested in extends from 1558 to 1819 and from the Ural Mountains to what is now British Columbia in North America. During this time, Russia expanded across Siberia to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Faced with an immense ocean obstacle, the Russians drove themselves onward, crossing that ocean and establishing themselves upon what is now known as Alaska. They drove still further, establishing trading posts in California and Hawaii.\n\nThroughout these 300 years, one thing principally drove Russian expansion: **furs.**\n\nAs the Stroganov Chronicle states:\n\n > \"Then through God's grace the Muscovites and the cossacks ... became very wealthy from trading in furs, and they lived in joy and happiness, thanking Almighty God for having given the Sovereign such rich land.\"\n\nIt was fur wealth that encouraged the eastward advance. Furs were valued in China, and Chinese goods were valued in Europe. The Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 settled the Russian-Chinese boundary to a large degree, and it also created the trading city of Kiakhta, located directly on the Russian/Chinese border in the middle of Siberia. It was here that the Russians carried furs, and from here that they carried Chinese goods on an immense transcontinental journey to Europe.\n\nEnormous amounts of money were made from furs, and this led to overhunting, which in turn led Russians to constantly look eastward and eventually to North America. 1558 is the year that Tsar Ivan Vasilevich granted Grigorii Stroganov financial, judicial and trade privileges along the Kama River to the east of Kazan.\n\nThis claim brought the Stroganovs into conflict with Kuchum Khan, a descendant of the Mongol Empire who held a shaky dominion over a large portion of Siberia. In 1581, the Stroganovs funded a band of cossacks led by Ermak Timofeev. Ermak's cossacks crossed the Urals and conquered huge swaths of land, and even though Ermak and most of his party were killed, Stroganov reinforcements held much of the terrain they took and implemented a procedure of conquest and tribute that would extend to North America.\n\nEven today, Siberia is lightly settled. Between 1581 and the end of the 18th century, this was true even more so. Instead of outright control of a particular piece of (otherwise valueless) terrain, Russian authorities set up a system of tribute called the *yasak*.\n\nAfter the Stroganovs' success (and huge riches earned from tribute), the Russian government authorized other ventures across Asia. These operated much as the Stroganov venture did. A well-armed force would advance and defeat the armed forces of a tribe, khan or region. In turn, that defeated group would swear loyalty to the tsar and agree to pay a tribute to the conquering agency. That tribute might be paid in furs, gold, or other precious, tradable objects. In exchange, the armed force would agree to not kill (pretty much) everyone and restrict itself to petty corruption, extortion and massacre. If the group continued to resist, the Russians would fight them and convince the group's neighbors to pile on by pledging a share of the loot.\n\nA beaten group might be forced to supply *corvee* labor for Imperial projects, or be forbidden to conduct diplomacy. It might be required to trade only with a particular trading company or trader. It would be required to follow the Orthodox church, discard other religions and give Orthodox priests and monks safe passage.\n\nThe Russians built a series of small forts *ostrozheks* and large forts *ostrogs* at strategic locations, not unlike what the United States would do in the 19th century. State employees and colonial officials would oversee this forcible tribute traffic and ensure the imperial government got its proper take. The *streltsy* (musketeers) provided firepower to back up the cossacks who did much of the conquering.\n\nThese techniques extended across the Pacific Ocean to Alaska during much of the 18th century. There, the prime fur was sea otter, but the Russians' inadequate naval skills meant they had to compete against the British and Americans for the fur trade in North America. Furthermore, the Russians were prohibited from trading at China's Pacific ports, while the other European powers were allowed.\n\nThe march of progress and the Enlightenment also put pressure on Russia to reform its practices. Catherine the Great formally forbade the practice of *yasak*, and Tsar Paul granted a monopoly in North America to the Russian-American Company in order to prevent some of the worst competition-driven offenses there.\n\nIt was not until the RAC's second charter was issued in 1819, and the company's American operations came under the authority of a naval officer, that the worst parts of the *yasak* came to an end. About the same time, the sea otter trade collapsed under the weight of overhunting, and the Russian government instituted some of the world's first environmental protection measures to allow the continued, sustainable harvest of Alaska fur seals.\n\nThe study of the Russian advance got a lot of fuel in the 1970s and 1980s, during a period of *detente* between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Oregon Historical Society in particular deserves a great deal of credit for translating some 3,000 pages' worth of Russian documents into English in the last five years of the 1980s. These documents were published in a three-volume set, and they're an incredible English-language primary source with the subtitle *To Siberia and Russian America*. There are plenty of popular works about the Russian conquest of Siberia, which was completed with the 1858 Treaty of Aigun.", "The response by The_Alaskan below is an excellent one, especially on the issue of Russian expansion into Siberia.  I think his response with regards to the expansion across the Pacific glosses over some important details.  He refers to the yasak process, without really going into details of how it affected the native population in the Aleutians, the Bering Sea, and the remainder of Alaska (Russian America).  In fact, starting with the first fur-gathering expeditions (e.g. Chuprov's Eudoxia voyage- 1745), the relationships with the natives were marked not only by misunderstanding, but by massacre, war, and slavery.  The first populated island Chuprov landed on (Agattu) was the site of the first \u201cmisunderstanding\u201d.  Records are unclear, but it seems that several natives were shot after a dispute.  On the next island (Attu), the Russians tried to trade, and demanded that the Aleuts give hostages for good behavior.  Disputes over relations with native women led to the killing of at least 15 natives in one village.  Settling down for the winter, the Russians took control of the native women in the villages they \u201csettled\u201d, and forced the males to hunt for them, occasionally with pay, but normally without.  Threats were made to destroy the villages and food stores, if the hunters did not bring back enough furs (and the reality of these threats was demonstrated). \n\nThough there were some \u201cgood\u201d Russians (e.g. Tolstykh), the majority of the fur traders in subsequent years followed the example of Chuprov.  \n\nThe Yasak process (taxation based on the concept of tribute and swearing allegiance to a foreign lord) was not formally imposed on the Pacific area until 1748 by Tsarina Elizabeth, and was frequently ignored or used to essentially steal anything the natives had-- it was not administered fairly or for the benefit of the government.  The government took some weak initiatives to protect the natives from Alcohol and venereal disease, but without much effect.  The Aleuts saw little benefit from the Yasak (which was supposed to provide protection from the state, among other benefits), and resisted paying the taxes.  One Yasak collector (Pushkarev) in retaliation reportedly killed 23 Aleut girls and committed many other crimes. \n\nAs a result, Aleuts on Unalaska revolted in the early 1760s, and destroyed 4 ships with a large number of their crews. In retaliation, 18 Aleut villages were totally destroyed on Unalaska, as well as numerous others on surrounding islands. Aleut property and boats were burned, and torture was used to find natives in hiding.  A later Russian in Alaska (Bishop Veniaminov) wrote that one time Soloviev had a dozen Aleuts tied in a row to see how many bodies it took to stop a musketball (the answer was reported as 9).  \n\nTsarina Catherine supported the fur traders in the Pacific through a \u201claissez faire\u201d policy, which while it saved the government the problems and costs of control, still failed to stop the maltreatment of the natives. She issued a ukase demanding kind dealings with the natives, which most of the traders ignored. Shelikov was maybe the exemplar of a trader who tried to maintain good relations with the natives-- He formed probably the first large-scale fur trading company in Alaskan waters, about 1783.  He formed a settlement and trading post at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island in 1784, and by all reports kept his personnel under tight control. He developed good relations with the Kodiak natives, and paid them for work done. \n\nThe government in Moscow seems to have wanted to stop some of these widespread depredations, and that goal was partially the impetus for the later formation of the Russian American Company (RAC).  Early years of the company, however, continued the forced labor of the Aleut males in the search for furs.  As years progressed, Many Aleuts worked voluntarily for the RAC, and even fought alongside the RAC in combat with other tribes (e.g. the Tlingits around Sitka).  \n\nUnder the RAC, depredations continued (though at a lower level), and open warfare occurred occasionally, as at Yakutat and Sitka.  Against this must be placed the actions of the RAC in readily accepting children of mixed (Russian and Indian) ancestry to schools and into the employ of the RAC (including sending some to Russia for technical training).  Many accusations of mistreatment of the natives are well-documented in documents provided by representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church who lived and preached in Alaska.  However, these latter accusations need to be understood in the context of the political in-fighting which raged for decades between the Church and the RAC. They probably did occur occasionally, though were probably exaggerated by Church reporters including Bishop Venimeniof.  The RAC, though far from a perfect employer or entrepreneur, seems to have eliminated the worst of the transgressions which were occurring prior to its formation.\n\nThis website is too short to allow a full description of the subject, but there are numerous works available, including Lydia T. Black, \u201cRussians in America, 1732-1867\u201d, and Hector Chevigny \u201c Russian America/The Great Alaskan Adventure 1741-1867\u201d.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "twf8n", "title": "Did medieval castles really have water filled moats?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/twf8n/did_medieval_castles_really_have_water_filled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4qatkw"], "score": [6], "text": ["Yeah sure! Like [that](_URL_0_) for example. But only when the castle was in the low lands near a river or at least at sea level.\n\nOn everything higher was no water. There were just no logistics to get that much water up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://download.bildindex.de/bilder/mi01891d01a.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2ehg4d", "title": "What was the German language known as before the creation of the modern Germany", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ehg4d/what_was_the_german_language_known_as_before_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzomzv", "cjzpqpv", "cjzqcue", "cjzt02y"], "score": [15, 7, 12, 12], "text": ["I'm not sure what you mean by the creation of modern Germany.\n\nThe first unified German state was the German Empire formed in 1871, and before then I don't believe the German language was vastly different from its modern incarnation.\n\nCan you clarify the question, please?\n\nEDIT: Misread. I thought you asked what it was LIKE before the creation of modern Germany. As for what it was called...German. The IDEA of a national German identity and ethnicity existed before there was an actual German state.\n\nYou'd probably have to go back quite a while to find it called something other than German, and by then I'm not sure it would be recognizably German, anyway.", "[The page on etymonline for German](_URL_0_) would probably be of interest to you. ", "In English, the words \"German\" and \"Germany\" (or similar iterations thereof, such as \"Germayn\") have been in use since the 14th century, well before the creation of the modern unified German state in 1871. The words are directly related to \"[Germania](_URL_0_),\" the Roman and Greek term for the region. In Middle English, the terms \"Almain\" (for the language) and \"Almaine\" (for the country) were also used.  ", "Swedish sources about Swedish warfare in Germany, primarily during the 30 years' war usually make distinctions between *Plattyska* (Low German) and *H\u00f6gtyska* (High German). The former was spoken along the Baltic coast and in Brandenburg and the North Sea coast. The latter was spoken in Bavaria, Austria, Sudet and Bohemia and so on.\n\nHowever, both were considered German languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=German&amp;allowed_in_frame=0"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania"], []]}
{"q_id": "97ep87", "title": "I just finished reading Shogun by James Clavell and I have some questions about the historical events that followed the Battle of Sekigahara", "selftext": "Hello Historians!\n\nI just finished reading Sh\u014dgun by James Clavell. I\u2019m interested in the time period (1600-?) after Tokugawa Ieyasu took the shogunate. Particularly, I was wondering what happened to the Jesuits and Portuguese during that time period. \n\nWere they allowed to stay in Japan? Was Catholicism accepted, however secretly? I know there came a point when one of Tokugawa\u2019s sons or grandsons closed Japan to foreigners. What precipitated this event?\n\nAnd were the borders forced open by the British in the Meiji era, or before? How long did Japan stay closed to foreigners, and was trade still allowed in Nagasaki, or did they close their country to trade as well?\n\nI\u2019m sorry if my questions are amateurish. I\u2019d just really like to fill in some of the blanks I have. \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97ep87/i_just_finished_reading_shogun_by_james_clavell/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e47sxqw"], "score": [3], "text": ["Christianity was banned, and people were usually registered to Buddhist temples through the danka system.\n\nMissionaries/Jesuits were absolutely not allowed to stay in Japan, and would be killed if found out, especially if they had an underground church. \n\nThe Japanese era of Sakoku (closed off country) was created in order to banish Christians/barbarians from influencing Japanese religion and politics, and to control Japanese trade by preventing unfair treaty ports from forming across Japan. Japan instead created their own port, Dejima, which they limited to only trade with the Dutch. There was however trade with Korea/China going on at this time.\n\nThe borders/international trade with Japan and the rest of the world were opened by Matthew Perry and his black ships, an American. This preceded the Meiji era.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z71i4", "title": "How much of pregnancy death in past ages is attributed to the young age of mothers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z71i4/how_much_of_pregnancy_death_in_past_ages_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfr3gjr", "cfr5bvw"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["A certain amount would have been due to the young age of mothers, a body being physically too small to give birth makes labour far more complicated. However in most instances girls would marry after puberty set in and should be physically prepared for labour.\r\rMany deaths would have been caused by poor hygiene and poor medical knowledge. When Mary I of England was 'pregnant' it was believed that a boy would be born after 9 months and a girl after 10 months. Medical forceps were not invented until 1620, but as there was little knowledge of germs and infection these often did more harm than good; doctors were often reluctant to use them due to the associated risks. Princess Charlotte was left for days before forceps were used and eventually bled to death. Problems with infection, bleeding and pain contributed massively to maternal and infant mortality.", "I visit many of my county cemeteries doing restoration and Civil War research. Granted people didn't arrive into our area until the 1830s (Indiana) but most of the pregnancy deaths I have personally seen seem to vary in age. I don't recall seeing any under 18, and most are in their mid-twenties. \n\nA local example would be the Ray family in [Memorial Cemetery](_URL_0_) (scroll down toward the bottom). Josphine was the 1st wife of Edgar and died at 23. His second was was younger but she died at 19. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gsr&amp;GScid=85886"]]}
{"q_id": "1d1v60", "title": "Is it true Hitler was distraught when he watched The Great Dictator because he had always looked up to Charlie Chaplin and saw himself being ridiculed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d1v60/is_it_true_hitler_was_distraught_when_he_watched/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9m3fxl"], "score": [15], "text": ["It is not true.\n\nWell, it's not true in the sense that we have no unbiased, confirmed source stating that he ever saw it.  A TV documentary said Hitler watched it twice, but Albert Speer says Hitler never watched it.  No matter whether or not he watched it, there is no recorded reaction to the film. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4rf98l", "title": "Why in some countries people greet each other with kisses in the cheek? Where this tradition comes from?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rf98l/why_in_some_countries_people_greet_each_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d50vj4y"], "score": [3], "text": ["follow-up question as I'm just returning from Belgium but met with Dutch nationals as well...:\n\nhow did the regional variations come about? in Belgium it is one kiss on the cheek. in the Netherlands it is three alternation kisses. secondarily, when - assuming this is a tradition that spread, rather than popped up independently in each place - did these variations manifest as culturally contingent practices?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1yfg6s", "title": "How did the Royal Navy recruit new sailors in the Napoleonic Wars?", "selftext": "I've recently been reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books and in The Fortune of War, it is mentioned that all the American ships were crewed by \"volunteers\" - which I understood in the context to mean people who signed up willingly - which was different to the Royal Navy's approach. It seems from what I've read (and I understand O'Brian did his research) that new hands on a Royal Navy ship were either criminals or pressed into the service.\n\nSo what I'm wondering is the actual process involved in pressing crews. Could the navy recruit/press pretty much just anyone they liked (who was male and working class)? How did they go about the process?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yfg6s/how_did_the_royal_navy_recruit_new_sailors_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfk14uj"], "score": [4], "text": ["There were volunteers in the royal navy as well - especially skilled craftsmen such as carpenters, barrelmakers and ropemakers could make a decent sum working on a royal navy vessel, and the workload and food was usually better aboard a warship than it was aboard a merchantman. However, much of the crew was indeed pressed into service (ie conscripted).\n\nThe law allowed the royal navy to press any sailor between the age of 18 and 45 into service in the royal navy. Press gangs were usually sent aboard merchant vessels and into the harbours and forcibly took sailors (and rarely, non-sailors) to serve aboard royal navy ships.\n\nHaving a severe manpower shortage, the royal navy routinely stopped US merchant vessels and searched them for British subjects during the Napoleonic war - and the royal navy often took a very liberal aproach to who was a British subject - if you were born as such, you were such, which meant that most grown US citizens qualified. Thus the royal navy pressed plenty of US citizens into service - which was one of the reasons for the War of 1812."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dvxl44", "title": "What would have been the diet of people who lived in the region of Alexandria, Egypt, in the early to middle third century?", "selftext": "What are some examples of the kinds of foods that would have been eaten then? Would it have been closer to modern Greek or Egyptian cuisine, or something else?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dvxl44/what_would_have_been_the_diet_of_people_who_lived/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7jtbg5"], "score": [4], "text": ["A lot of their food would have recognisable as Egyptian food today. Much would have also been recognisable to Egyptians of Pharaonic times. Dishes such as *ful medames* (stewed broad beans/fava beans) and *molokhiya* (green soup of mallow leaves) are considered national dishes for good reason - they have been eaten in Egypt for many thousands of years.\n\nThe foundation of the diet was grain (wheat and barley). This was eaten as bread, both flatbreads and thicker raised oven-baked breads, and in other forms such as bulgur wheat and porridges.\n\nVegetables included onions and leeks, a variety of greens (e.g., mallow, lettuce, radish/turnip greens), okra, cucumbers, a radishes. Legumes were very important in the diet, with broad/fava beans, lentils, and chickpeas all being important (black-eyed beans/peas are common today, but I don't know when these reached the area (they were domesticated in West Africa)). A variety of fruits were available, including dates, grapes, pomegranates, figs, peaches, quinces, and citrons and possibly lemons. And, of course, the olive. Nuts included walnuts, pistachios, pine nuts, \n\nDairy products such as cheese and butter were eaten. Other animal products in the diet included eggs, a variety of seafood, and meat.\n\nOils included butter, and sesame, olive, linseed, and rapeseed (as a general term for *Brassica* oils) oils.\n\nFlavourings/spices/herbs included garlic, cumin, coriander seeds, coriander leaves (cilantro), parsley, and that great ancient Mediterranean favourite, fish sauce (garum etc.).\n\nAlcoholic drinks included beer and wine.\n\nKey differences between their diet and modern food were the widespread use of fish sauce, lower average meat consumption, no rice yet (rice would arrive a few centuries later), and no Columbian Exchange foods from the New World (the chilli and tomato being prominent today, and absent then). Sweeteners were honey and sweet fruits such as dates and raisins; sugar wasn't yet grown in the area (Egypt was a sugar pioneer in the region in the 8th century, and a major producer in the next few centuries). Cooking oil was relatively more expensive, so less deep-frying. And, of course, there were no modern processed pre-packed snack foods."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "en2283", "title": "Possibly a dumb question but here we go; There have been multiple female absolute monarchs in history who had total power over the laws, why didn\u2019t they just make total gender equality laws and then enforce them?", "selftext": " I was reading about Queen Elizabeth I when this popped into my head and I noticed how severely her half-sister, Bloody Mary, enforced widely unpopular anti-Protestant laws very harshly but effectively. Why couldn\u2019t a Queen or Empress pass and enforce the same laws. Sure there would be outrage but it would be quelled with flogging and execution like almost all other crimes against the Crown\u2019s word of the time. So why didn\u2019t female monarchs make and enforce these laws?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/en2283/possibly_a_dumb_question_but_here_we_go_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdxlmmu"], "score": [111], "text": ["**Short answer:**\n\nNot a dumb question-- it's one whose answer gets to the heart of medieval and early modern ideas about political power. Don't assume that \"people then\" thought like \"people now\", or that power was ever really absolute.\n\n**Discussion:**\n\nVariations of this question have been asked before.  You make an assumption\n\n > \"**There have been multiple female absolute monarchs in history who had total power over the laws\"**\n\n. . . that\u2019s too strong  as regards your example Elizabeth I-- and it's not easy to think of many queens with the power you suggest. Mary certainly does have an authoritarian inclination-- but that's with the support of a large Catholic constituency; she could do some things she wanted to do, but not \"anything she wanted\". Her \"bloody\" impulses were part of the Wars of Religion-- not something she thought up on her own as a whim.\n\nQueen Elizabeth I was not  \"absolute monarch\" and did not have \"total power over the laws\". She was a Queen with a Parliament and a hardly supine nobility-- they could and did push her to do all sorts of things she didn't want to do, and there were clearly things she might have wanted to do, but couldn't do. This particularly affects her personal life, where she seems to have had her desires for partners, but was pressed to consider marriage to people she wasn't interested in by others.\n\nOne can find female monarchs with power in history -- but its hard to find \"multiple female absolute monarchs\" with the \"total power\" you suggest. It is unusual to find any monarch who vastly liberalizes a social order by decree-- Alexander II freeing the serfs comes to mind, but there aren't that many examples, and it's not clear that monarchs possessed the power to change social custom against prevailing values. The most dramatic liberal reordering of a society by a monarchy might be the Meiji Restoration, but this was only nominally at the \"Emperor's command\" -- and they had to fight a war to accomplish it. \\[Edit: I should have mentioned Peter the Great here, an even more dramatic example, but the Tsar's power is quite different from what you see in Western Europe-- and his reforms did produce a rebellion, the Streltsy Uprising of 1698, good evidence that there were bounds to the power of even the most powerful monarchs\\]\n\nMoreover, you assume that Elizabeth's view of a woman's place would naturally conform to contemporary notions of equality-- there's no reason to think that. In the celebrated Tilbury speech -- accepted by most as authentic, though there are some skeptics among scholars- Elizabeth was reported to say\n\n > I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.\n\nElizabeth's idea of gender and her idea of her own royal status live in quite separate compartments; she is a king who happens to be a woman; she is not a modern feminist-- we've no sense that her ideas about women were much different from her contemporaries.\n\nFor more on this topic see answers to previously asked questions\n\n[Was Queen Victoria reacting to a specific group when she said that \"feminists ought to get a good whipping\"? Why did she have so much hatred for feminists?](_URL_0_) \\- where u/sunagainstgold has the very nice discussion of the complexities of women on the throne.\n\nand\n\n[Considering their history of prominent female monarchs, how did the British justify denying women the vote?](_URL_1_)\n\n\\-- where I discuss Elizabeth and have a bit about Ernst Kantorowicz and ideas about the nature of a King or Queen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qvm8e/was_queen_victoria_reacting_to_a_specific_group/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/czckhc/considering_their_history_of_prominent_female/"]]}
{"q_id": "62qby4", "title": "Did the King of France actually control Avignon during the Avignon Papacy?", "selftext": "My understanding is that the primary reason the papacy was in Avignon for a time is that the popes of the era were clients of the Kings of France, but I'm unclear on whether Avignon was part of France at the time. \n\nIf Avignon was *not* controlled by the Kings of France, why was it advantageous for them to keep the Popes there instead of in Rome (or somewhere actually in France)?\n\nI've tried to figure this out on Wikipedia but different pages have conflicting answers (as well as dubious sourcing). The most coherent I've seen has Avignon in the Kingdom of Arles, within the Holy Roman Empire, during this period.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62qby4/did_the_king_of_france_actually_control_avignon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfol2a5"], "score": [15], "text": ["Avignon was formally part of the Kingdom of Arles when the various popes lived there.  Arles was independent from France and remained formally a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  It was culturally distinct from the north in many ways.  However, despite the formal distinction of the region, it was basically settled that the King of France controlled the region, even if not legally.  The last pope to try to claim power over the King of France by excommunicating him (Pope Boniface VIII) wound up getting beaten in his home by French and Italian troops that the king had sent, which eventually led to his death.  The next pope decided to absolve the King of France, and after him, the next pope (and the first pope to reside in Avignon) was a personal friend of the king.  The reason Avignon was chosen over Rome was due to a similar conflict between the church and the Holy Roman Emperor, both of whom were vying for secular and temporal control.  Avignon was seen as a safer area for the church, particularly due to the positive relationship with the King of France.  The area surrounding Avignon was already owned by the church, and in 1348, the church purchased Avignon and united the two areas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gc9o6", "title": "During the Napoleonic wars did any high ranking officers serve with their men in the frontlines?", "selftext": "I've been reading and doing lots of research into the napoleonic wars recently, and something I could never find while researching is about high ranking men serving on the front lines with their men, who would be the highest ranking man in the front lines and are there any notable officers or high ranking soldiers who died in battle during the napoleonic wars with their men? Thank you in advance, I'm looking forward to your answers!   ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gc9o6/during_the_napoleonic_wars_did_any_high_ranking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckhoprw", "ckhsvhu"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["If you are speaking of what we would now refer to as 'General Officer' ranks, then only in very isolated - but famous - incidents.\n\nDuring the Siege of Toulon, a vigorous counterattack was personally led upon the French batteries by British General Charles O'Hara. During the course of his advance down overrun French trenches, he was taken in enfilade and in close quarters by a hodge-podge of French infantry and artillerymen, led by a young Artillery Officer by the name of Buonaparte. Allegedly O'Hara personally surrendered to this Officer from this rather compromising tactical position (Source: Chandler).\n\nThere is a more 'routine' example to be found in leaders of large-scale Cavalry corps, who would often begin a charge paces ahead of their men. As the distance closed and the danger grew exponentially, their gait would, almost imperceptibly, slacken so they could rejoin the safety of the main body, but it was not uncommon for a Cavalry General to find himself in the wild scrum, charge-and-repeat of a Napoleonic Cavalry melee. Joachim Murat famously (and contemptuously) led one of the largest Cavalry charges in history at the Battle of Eylau with nothing more than a riding crop in his hand.\n\nFinally, one of the most famous cases of a General Officer leading personally would be Michel Ney during his rearguard actions in Russia. There is a famous period engraving of him holding a musket and personally fighting with the picked rearguard. While I'm sure there is much embellishment to how much danger he was in, there are too many sources from within the French camp to doubt he did so. Truly deserving of the honorific 'Bravest of the Brave.'\n\nNone of these men died while leading these personal actions, but such reckless bravery cost the French many excellent Division and Brigade commanders. Perhaps the most famous example is LaSalle, a rising star in the French cavalry who died leading furious charges at the head of his light horse division.\n\nHope that sheds some light! The fact that these are almost all near legendary should show you how very rare it was, and as for 'supreme commanders' doing so...well, Wellington summed it up nicely when he said that a General is meant to command, not swing a sword.", "/u/BritainOpPlsNerf handled the notable cases but I'll handle the average day to day with exclusive respect to the French. \n\nThe most basic (ie: smallest) tactical body in the French military was the battalion. As in, the battalion of 840 men composed of a *voltiguer* (skirmisher) company, a grenadier (which I go over in some depth [here](_URL_0_) for what made them so special) company and 4 *fusilier* (ie: line) company's. \n\nEach company post 1808 would have a total of 140 men separated into two \"sections\". These sections would be 3 rows deep and have a corporal on each of the 4 corners; a lieutenant would be in charge of each section and placed dead center in the rear. A Company Captain would be placed at the right of the 1st section (traditionally also to the right of the 2nd) and would lead from there.\n\nWith 6 companies creating a Battalion however there needed to be more officers above the rank of Captain to maintain the force. In this you would have two *Guide \nG\u00e9n\u00e9ral*'s on either side of the line or positioned at the front and back of the column to, as is clear in the name, guide the battalion and keep it from breaking apart. There would also be an *adjutant* and a *sous-adjutant*, equivalent to a Major. One would control 2 *fusilier* Company's and the *voltiguers* and the other the other 2 *fusilier* Company's and the Grenadiers (traditionally). In the case of column formation one *adjutant* would be placed at the front and one at the rear. The leader of the Battalion, the *Chef de Bataillon* would remain on horseback between the two *adjutants*. His rank can be loosely compared to that of a Colonel in our English system. It should also be noted that these rank titles, *adjutant* and *Chef de Bataillon*, are used in the French military to this day.\n\nNow it's easy to say that the *Chef de Bataillon*, or the \"Colonel\", just sat back as his men walked in and did all the fighting; you could not be further from the truth in this regard. The base of the French model of fighting was the column attack; it was the foundation on which Napoleon built his tactics behind. Through combined arms the infantry organized in line would hold the enemy infantry in place, the cavalry would threaten the flanks and force the enemy to commit his reserves, and then the French reserves would strike the weakest point with their full weight along with the *Grande Batterie*. By the very nature of a column attack the entire Battalion is at direct risk as it is an inherently aggressive maneuver that puts everyone there rushing into enemy fire and eventually into meeting them in a melee. So in that regard if you were in the Battalion and were in a column attack you were in direct danger and could never 'loaf about' as the rest of the men did the fighting.\n\nSo I'd say for certain the highest ranking man on the 'front line' would be a rough equivalent to a Colonel, the *Chef de Bataillon*, ie: the Battalion commander. If you mean the *literal* frontline that would be the Company Captain who was literally on the first rank of the front line leading the men.\n\n-----\n\nJohn Elting, *Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon's Grande Arm\u00e9e*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e001k/how_did_grenadier_regiments_gain_their_elite/"]]}
{"q_id": "1hkqtq", "title": "Did any other countries in the 20th century with significant ethnic minority populations implement an equivalent of the \"separated but equal\" policy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hkqtq/did_any_other_countries_in_the_20th_century_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cavgtqr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Poland had something a little like this for a bit.  Jews were segregated in many areas, but still had legal rights.  As in the US, they weren't actually equal, but the inequality wasn't as severe as in the Jim Crow era."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2golvj", "title": "Did the Soviets have anything similar to the U2 or SR-71? And did they fly over the US in the way the US did over the USSR.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2golvj/did_the_soviets_have_anything_similar_to_the_u2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckl2ur3", "ckl7ttp"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["My understanding is that the Soviets never developed long-range planes that could do this sort of thing. They made the jump right to satellite surveillance. In general, the US did much more basic long-range airplane development than the Soviets did, in part because we had an early lead in the area and because we had friendly bases that were close to Soviet territory. The Soviets lacked these near bases and put their resource dollars primarily into rockets and satellites. They did develop some long-range bombers but they always lagged behind the US in this regards.", "[The question was asked and answered here.](_URL_0_)\n\n > Yes and no.\nThey did have a U2 like plane in the M-55.\nHowever Russia had issues spying on the US via planes. Problems the US did not have. That issue was the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.\nYou have to understand the the Russia is a huge country that UNLIKE the US is bordered by a vast amount of land not all of which is friendly. The US is ocean locked on the east and the west while they have an ally and interconnected military with their northern neighbor Canada.\nThe US was able to send spy planes not just over Russia but would send planes that flew on the BORDER of Russia. They could do this because UNLIKE Russia the US had basses all along their border. In Turkey, Germany, Japan, and throughout the pacific. This made spying runs easy and more importantly not as fuel costly since you just took off and in no time bam your on the border ready to snoop. So spy planes where able to spy on the Russia with ease not ever entering foreign airspace.\nOn the other hand Russia would have to fly across the pacific, past all the detection rings in the pacific and somehow gets some pics before the jets arrived. The only other way was to go through Alaska and Canada which again good luck detection posts in Alaska as well as joint military bases in Canada will get ya.\nRussia focused on Live intelligence gathering due to the openness of US culture while the US focused on physical intelligence due to its ease and the difficulty of penetrating a closed nation like the USSR."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tx5ew/did_the_soviet_union_have_any_specialized_spy/"]]}
{"q_id": "4pvvxt", "title": "Did the United States know of Russia's presence in the Americas before the Lewis and Clark expedition?", "selftext": "I was looking at an older thread here on this subreddit and apparently a commenter said that the expedition encountered Russian explorers at some point but I couldn't find a source on this. Also did the US ever feel threatened by possible Russian expansion? Did the Russians actually wish to expand southeast of Alaska? And lastly what was their attitude towards the newly formed US?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pvvxt/did_the_united_states_know_of_russias_presence_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4p5iq9"], "score": [15], "text": ["**Yes,** the expedition did know of Russia's presence, and so did the wider world. While the explorations of Russian pioneers like Chirikov and Bering were known among select audiences in Europe as early as the late 1740s, knowledge of Russian explorations was not initially disseminated widely due to the language gap and the generally lower level of discourse between Russia and other European nations. Russia and Spain, as the only two nations with firm presences in the Pacific Northwest until the 1770s, also had an interest in not widely publicizing their work. The British, as the insurgent power, had no such compunctions.\n\nIt wasn't until the accounts of James Cook's third voyage were published that knowledge of Russian possessions in the Americas became widespread, particularly in the English-speaking world. By the 1780s, and particularly after the Nootka Sound controversy of 1790, the English-speaking world was well-informed about circumstances in the Pacific Northwest. \n\nIn the 1780s, before even the Louisiana Purchase, and while he was serving in Paris as the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson had extensive conversations with John Ledyard, a Connecticut man who served on Cook's third voyage.\n\nLedyard was the first American to circumnavigate the world (Cook's voyage began shortly after the Declaration of Independence, but Ledyard had not yet learned of it before the voyage began), and he was a strong advocate of the notion that the United States should explore the Pacific Coast because, as many Americans believed at the time, the United States was destined to span the entirety of North America and possibly South America as well.\n\n\"I wish to be on the coast before them (the British),\" Ledyard wrote in 1785, \"for they are the worst people in the world to follow in commerce or colonization among an uncivilized people.\"\n\nLedyard was foiled in his attempts to charter a ship for a mission from France to the Northwest, but in early 1786, [Jefferson suggested an alternative plan](_URL_0_): \"I suggested to him the enterprise of exploring the Western part of our continent by passing thro St. Petersburg to Kamschatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka sound, whence he might make his way across the Continent to America.\"\n\nLedyard took up that idea, and he traveled across all of Eurasia, reaching Okhotsk, Russia's principal Pacific port, in 1787. During his travels, however, Russian officials became suspicious and believed that Ledyard was a spy. With the approval of Catherine the Great, Ledyard was arrested, declared *persona non grata* and deported from Russia via Poland. By 1789, he was exploring the Nile and drafting plans to explore North America from the east (via Kentucky) when he died of a disease caught in Egypt.\n\nJames Zug's ~~*American Traveler: The First Bicoastal American*~~ *American Traveler: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man Who Dreamed of Walking The World* is the fourth and most recent biography of Ledyard, and I'd encourage you to pick it up if you get a chance. It's a fun read, as Ledyard led an incredibly fascinating life. I've used some of it to write this reply.\n\nDespite Ledyard's struggles, American interest in the Pacific Northwest continued. The Cook missions had proved that there was enormous money to be made in the sea otter pelt trade with China, and in 1787, John Kendrick's *Columbia Rediviva* and Robert Gray's *Lady Washington* left Boston for the Pacific Northwest to participate in that trade. Both ships and both captains became involved in the Nootka Sound controversy, but both also became marked in history for their accomplishments on the voyage. Kendrick returned to Boston in 1790, having completed the first American-flagged circumnavigation of the Earth. Robert Gray, meanwhile, made the first confirmed discovery of the Columbia River, giving the United States a firm territorial claim on the Pacific Northwest by right of discovery.\n\nAt the same time the two were in the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. War Department attempted to coordinate exploration parties to the West, but these fell apart for various reasons. In 1790, a mission coordinated by a Lt. John Armstrong fell apart because of the difficulty of the challenge, and a subsequent mission led by a French naturalist was discontinued because the naturalist fell afoul of Federalist reaction to the French Revolution.\n\nFrom 1795 to 1797, James Mackay and John Thomas Evans explored up the Missouri River, drafting maps and documents that would later be used by Lewis and Clark on their own expedition. I suggest Wood's *Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition* if you're interested in this \"Lewis and Clark prehistory.\" At the same time, Alexander Mackenzie was traversing North America from Montreal, reaching the Pacific Ocean in 1793. His journals were published in 1801, and they provided another incentive for the United States to conduct an expedition.\n\nWhen Jefferson was elected president and approved the Louisiana Purchase, he then had the means, motive and interest to put together an expedition that would have both the strength and the resources to travel across North America, then return. That expedition did not travel without predecessors, and it did not travel into a vacuum. \n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffwest.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3m4onj", "title": "I'm currently listening to the Cast Recording for the musical 'Hamilton'. What historical liberties does it take that I should be aware of?", "selftext": " A) the musical is excellent, you should totally give it a listen and \n\nB) NPR is streaming the entire thing [here](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m4onj/im_currently_listening_to_the_cast_recording_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvcdfj1", "cvew0fr", "cw48c4e"], "score": [7, 8, 2], "text": ["This is a bit meta, but it may be useful to have a mega thread unpacking this and added to the FAQ, as I imagine that these questions will become pretty regular with this show being the hottest ticket on the east coast and getting so much attention. ", "At the risk of submitting a less-than-in-depth reply, I'll highlight two major inaccuracies in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable about Hamilton (though perhaps not the musical) can expand upon them - \n\n1) *The Farmer Refuted*. In the musical, this is depicted as a debate in the street, with the original author reciting from a manuscript while Alexander Hamilton repeatedly interrupts. In actuality, this was a written rather than verbal disagreement, and Hamilton's responses were published anonymously as two essays - \"The Farmer Refuted\" and later \"A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress\". \n\n2) *The years of activities leading up Hamilton writing The Reynolds Pamphlet*. Here is probably where Miranda takes the most liberties with the historical record, for what I think are very good dramatic reasons. In the play, Jefferson, Madison, and Burr confront Hamilton in person about his financial improprieties. Hamilton shows them all the letters, clears his name, and then decides to author the pamphlet based on his distrust of the three men. \n\nIn actuality, Hamilton provided the letters and information regarding his affair and subsequent extortion to James Monroe and Frederick Muhlenberg, who'd been tasked with investigating his improprieties under the Monroe Commission. Monroe then sent copies of the letters to Jefferson. (Another Democratic Republican, John Beckley, is also speculated to have copied the letters.) In a 1796 essay (whose name escapes me) Hamilton made thinly-veiled references to Jefferson's own infidelities, and was rebuked a year later with references to the Reynolds allegations published in James Callender\u2019s *The History of the United States for 1796*. It was a mixture of truths and falsehoods that put Hamilton in a rough spot - he had to rebuke the charges of embezzlement and treason, but couldn't rebuke all the charges of financial impropriety. So he wrote the pamphlet, which was widely disseminated by his enemies (represented in the play by Jefferson and the other Democratic Republicans showering the stage with the pamphlets, like dollar bills in a music video's strip club scene). \n\nRon Chernow has made some reference to this particular change in a [New Yorker article](_URL_1_) published earlier this year. Miranda and Chernow maintain that the active parties were changed and the amount of confrontations and back-and-forth condensed to a single meeting to avoid introducing too many unnecessary characters and to streamline the story. The second act takes actions of various Democratic Republicans and ascribes them to different members of the party (and/or Aaron Burr, when dramatically useful) in order to keep a focused narrative. \n\nThe rest of the changes are fairly standard stuff - years of correspondence condensed, several ongoing cabinet meetings condensed into one, etc. \n\nSlightly off-topic but worth mentioning is the way the play handles historiography and cases in which there is missing evidence or conflicting narratives, such as the deal to move the capital (\"The Room Where it Happens\") or Burr's insistence just before the duel that Hamilton intended to shoot to kill (because he was wearing his spectacles). The author, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is both a fan and a friend of the author Stephen Sondheim, who's written several historical musicals, among them a piece called [*Pacific Overtures*](_URL_0_) (I've linked here to a production taped for Japanese television). The technique of having an entire song highlighting different accounts of the historical narrative, and making a point of saying \"nobody knows the full account\", can be traced to the Act One finale of *Pacific Overtures*, a number called \"Someone in a Tree\" that's considered in the musical theatre community to be of Stephen Sondheim's crowning songwriting achievements. Both musicals (Hamilton and Pacific Overtures) are concerned with not just the *story* of what happened, but about who tells that story, how we arrived at that story, what the historical record says, and how our perspectives and the perspectives of the people telling the story shape that history. In a sense, both musicals can be described as not just *historical retellings*, but *plays about the study and reconstruction of history itself*. \n\nThere's also another Sondheim musical that does this, *Assassins*, about various successful and unsuccessful assassins of U.S. presidents. The play is narrated by an all-American, midwestern balladeer who sings commonly-accepted descriptions of the assassins and their motivations (typically dismissing them as crazy and against the grain of American culture), while the actual depictions of the assassins show them as quintessentially American and of their time - they are not un-American, but toxic exaggerations of America. \n\nAll three musicals are excellent depictions of history as it's made, in contrast to historical musicals like *1776*, which tend to depict events and characters through a narrow focus, showing clear heroes and villains and glossing over inaccuracies, gaps, and conflicting narratives. \n\nSource: Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton, and also Meryl Secrest's hit-or-miss biography of Stephen Sondheim. ", "I believe Angelica was already married when she met Hamiliton, and they had brothers, but she's such a good character."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.npr.org/2015/09/21/440925873/first-listen-cast-recording-hamilton"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ546PASgHI", "http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/hamiltons"], []]}
{"q_id": "5hx5ky", "title": "Why was the Soviet army able to win against the Kwantung Army in 1938-39, but was incompetent in the Winter War 1 year later?", "selftext": "If the main reason for the failure of the Winter War was incompetent leadership due to the purge, why did the Soviet army succeed against the Japanese?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hx5ky/why_was_the_soviet_army_able_to_win_against_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db6e57a"], "score": [3], "text": ["Other factors helped the Soviets in the Far East.\n\nFirst, the terrain: compared to heavily forested Finland with many lakes and rocky outcroppings breaking the terrain further, Manchuria was more or less open plain, perfectly suited for the Soviet mechanized combat technique and penalizing the Japanese, who had far fewer tanks. Had Finland's terrain resembled Manchuria's, it alone would probably have all but guaranteed a relatively swift Soviet victory.\n\nSecond, Japanese hesitation to escalate the conflict: apparently, the Japanese did not want an all-out war and refused to plan operations elsewhere along the Japanese-Soviet border. This allowed the Soviets to concentrate their best units at Khalkhin Gol, where the actual battle was taking place, without fear of Japanese counterattack elsewhere. \n\nThird, leadership: even though the Soviet army was still reeling from the purges, the mastermind of Khalkhin Gol two-pincer envelopment attack (which trapped the Japanese 23rd Division and ultimately brought about a ceasefire) was Georgy Zhukov, later known as the defender of Stalingrad and a Marshal of the Soviet Union. \n\nNevertheless, it should be noted that the Soviets weren't happy with the performance of the Red Army: other battles than the final, decisive one had been more or less stalemates. Despite having very large advantages in technology, numbers, and firepower, the Red Army suffered huge losses, largely because of poor leadership. Therefore, the Soviet success was at best a qualified one.\n\nHowever, this lesson came too late to have much influence in the conduct of the Winter War, yet alongside lessons from the Winter War, were likely very important for the Soviet military reforms that followed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nv471", "title": "Why do Kings go by just their first name, whereas modern heads of state tend to go by their last name?", "selftext": "For example, we have King George or Queen Elizabeth. On the other hand we have President Obama. What historical development contributed to this phenomenon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nv471/why_do_kings_go_by_just_their_first_name_whereas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcejvf9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, the reason is that monarchs often didn't/don't have surnames. There's room for more contributions on this topic, but for now, there are a few responses in this old thread \n\n* [What was the surname of English monarchs?](_URL_0_)    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p2who/what_was_the_surname_of_english_monarchs/"]]}
{"q_id": "2t9a40", "title": "Is it possible there were civilizations 10 or 20 thousands years ago that are lost? Or is it generally accepted fact that the first civilizations started around 5,000 years ago?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2t9a40/is_it_possible_there_were_civilizations_10_or_20/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnx4o27", "cnx8uo4", "cnx984p", "cnx9may"], "score": [195, 22, 97, 55], "text": ["\nGobekli Tepe in Turkey is a site that appears to have been in use sometime between the 10th and 8th Millenium BCE. It's a fascinating site that may upend some of our prior notions of how civilization developed - but much work needs to be done on the site before we get any real answers. And of course we may never get them.\n\n_URL_0_", "As others have noted, there just isn't the data to back it up. And from another perspective, it sort of \"makes sense\" that there wasn't. To take a very mechanistic view, we are living in the [first interglacial period since *homo sapiens* left Africa](_URL_0_). \"Civilization\" as dependent on agricultural sedentism is a pretty unstable thing, so it isn't too much of a reach to think that, in its current form, it is only possible within a fairly narrow climate range. This does of course leave Africa, so if you are looking for \"lost civilization\" that is the place, but it may simply be that populations were too low and dispersed during the previous interglacial to occasion the drive towards agriculture.\n\nThis is not to say that the definitive answer to the question of the origins of agriculture is a simple bit of climate history, but rather that it makes a degree of sense that this is the first period to see the development of sedentary agricultural civilization.", "It is very widely accepted that agriculture, stone architecture, writing, states, metalworking etc. started 10.000-5000 BC. You are asking whether such things could also have existed before, but have disappeared. This would not at all fit with what we do know about people during the last Ice Age. We have plenty of material evidence of life in those times, which suggests that people everywhere had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There is no evidence for anything else.\n\nYour question is about proving a negative. 'Was it possible that...?' It also explicitly says that your 'civilisation' is 'lost', which must mean there is no evidence for it. You are explicitly asking a non-answerable question. A more concrete question would be 'do we have any evidence for [agriculture, writing, states, stone architecture etc.] from before the end of the last Ice Age?', to which the answer would be 'no'.\n\nNow, this does not mean that people back then were not 'civilised' or were 'backwards' or 'undeveloped'. Rather, they had developed a succesful lifestyle adapted to their circumstances. These include hunting big game, fishing, collecting wild plant resources etc. There was no need for grain storage, or for working together to irrigate cultivated fields. There was, apparantly, no need to develop all these things that you might call 'civilisation'. This nice circular argumentation makes clear that in our current understanding, there could not have been a 'lost civilisation' building cathedrals and writing books, because there is no evidence for that. There was, however, a rich world with its own music, culture, beliefs, and art that is now lost to us. \n\n\nIf you are interested in this real 'lost world' I can suggest some books once I get home to my library.\n\nEdit: added some further reading [here](_URL_0_)", "From an environmental perspective, it isn't very plausible to have monumental building civilizations before the last Ice Age. Before the Holocene the environment was erratic. You could have a few good years and then a decade of drought or cold temperatures. This inhibited people from being able to hunt or gather a large surplus and prevented them from domesticating plants and animals. It is when the Ice Age ended that we begin to see the rise of domestication and sedentism. With a surplus of food, even during a brief part of the year when you are not farming, one can dedicate the time to other activities such as construction. A surplus of food could also support non-agriculturalists during the whole year which is one of the leading hypotheses on the rise of artisans in early cultures.\n\nRicherson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger\n\n2001 Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. *American Antiquity* 66(3): pp 387-411."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Vostok_Petit_data.svg"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2t9a40/is_it_possible_there_were_civilizations_10_or_20/cnxixiz"], []]}
{"q_id": "65ywy6", "title": "Why was Russia so broke in the 1990s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65ywy6/why_was_russia_so_broke_in_the_1990s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgf62l7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Two factors led to this the first was following the breakup of the USSR Russia took on all of the debts/contracts the USSR made. The problem with this was that the USSR depended on the economies provided by all of their member states but especially Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, and the Baltic nations. The loss of those in the late 80's was a huge blow to the economy that Russia was handed. \n\nThe second factor is that the funds created to purchase goods from outside the Warsaw Pact had been underfunded since the late 1960's which made it hard for the USSR to purchase things they needed but could not produce domestically.  The lack of these funds meant that all purchases made by the post-USSR Russian government had to be made in their currency which was extremely weak in the early 90's. \n\nEssentially the USSR's collapse was economic in nature as well as political and as Russia was the state that inherited the mantle of the USSR they inherited their problems as well. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d8ye1l", "title": "Have there been cultures that primarily associated women with short hair?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d8ye1l/have_there_been_cultures_that_primarily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1dk94z"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_1_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "fd6g9u", "title": "Civil War Help!!!", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fd6g9u/civil_war_help/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjh2cfp"], "score": [3], "text": ["I believe that just naming some sources that would work well for this question would be a violation of this sub's rules about helping with [homework](_URL_0_), because tracking down and selecting sources is clearly a component of the assignment here.\n\nSo, with sources so overwhelming, we need to figure out some ways to narrow your sources and know which sources are going to have the best potential to be useful.\n\nThe question of how \"the South viewed itself and why they fought an outright war\" is one that surely, given what we know of the slaveholding south, has multiple answers. The South was, after all, a violently stratified slave society, where a tiny elite brutally ruled over four million enslaved and disenfrachised people and dominated politics at the expense of their less wealthy free neighbors. So narrowing down what we mean by \"the South\" is going to be important here, as a project seeking to explain how white and black, rich and poor, male and female, free and enslaved southerners viewed themselves might require multiple volumes.\n\nI think, for the purposes of your project, focusing on elites, who were the biggest proponents of secession, would be a good move. Of course, then we run into the problem of the fact that the majority of southern sources are elite ones. We've barely narrowed it down at all!\n\nSo, we have to ask: what sorts of sources left behind by elite Southerners can potentially answer our question here? Secession was political process, one that sometimes took multiple rounds of voting (since white Southerners were far from unified behind secession). Speeches may have been made, newspapers -- partisan organs in antebellum america -- may have covered them and weighed in themselves. Pro-secessionists had to do *something* to convince fence-sitters to get behind them. What documentation do you think may have resulted from this process? Surely the conclusion of this political process must have resulted in official documents as well. What do you think those might have been? When the 13 colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, they publicized their reasoning in a pretty famous document. Could Southerners have done the same?\n\nAnd what about national politics? If you're writing a research paper on the American Civil War, you may have learned about the \"Sectional crisis\" of the 1850s, when the tenuous, compromise-based balance of power between free and slave states began to dramatically break down. Congressional Representatives and Senators representing Southern states wouldn't have left Congress until Secession. Can you think of any important laws passed in the 1840s and 1850s, relevant to the question of slavery, that may have provoked debate in Congress? It's hard to imagine that some Southern Congressman *didn't* express some sentiments that were revealing of elite southern self-conception in such debates! Where do you think you might be able to find records of such debates and orations?\n\nAnd outside of the immediate realm of active political campaigns, speeches and such, how else do elites in a nineteenth century society express their views? In this question you're lucky because the South's literary culture was not as large and developed as the antebellum North's. Were there newspapers, periodicals, journals where elites may have expressed themselves? Given what we know of the sectional crisis, if such publications existed, what years do you think you'd do best to focus on?\n\nAs for secondary sources, a broad overview type of work could be very useful for you to give yourself a larger context in which to answer your narrower question. And such a book would almost certainly reference elite southerners using primary and secondary sources. Time for some footnote mining! Where did this idea that Southern elites feared working class whites come from? Better check that footnote! Or go into the index of your big book, look for \"slaveholders,\" \"elites,\" \"secession, debates over\" and so on int he index, and soon you might even notice certain scholarly patterns, sources quoted frequently, shared assumptions that will give you further context to make your own original argument.\n\nI don't know what the timeline for this project is, but you'd also do very well to ask your professor for recommendations of secondary sources. Your instructor is likely very well-read in the field of American history, and even if Southern elites are not their primary scholarly focus, they'll know some books and likely be happy to recommend them, especially if you can clearly explain what you're trying to do and finding difficult.\n\nThere is always more to add to an answer like this, but this is what I thought might be helpful without violating the sub's rules."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_homework"]]}
{"q_id": "5fzt1o", "title": "Were \"throne rooms\" purely ceremonial, or did kings actually spend hours a day just sitting in one place? Surely there must have been a better way for a king to spend his time.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fzt1o/were_throne_rooms_purely_ceremonial_or_did_kings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dapahor"], "score": [73], "text": ["This isn't about *kings* necessarily, but for emperors, yes the option was absolutely open to sit in a \"throne room\" all day, if they wanted. The emperor Claudius was somewhat infamous for this, his general persona was that of a Republican magistrate and he was perhaps the only one of the emperors to really take his Republican offices seriously. He had a habit of spending all day on court cases, and was an extremely energetic censor. Ancient authors were somewhat divided on this: Suetonius generally notes with approval his administrative reforms in a single short section (14), and then goes on in great detail criticizing the particularities of his judgments. It is pretty funny too, by the way, particularly if you are familiar with the general literary culture of the time you can see how it becomes a parody of Claudius' pretensions. Whether you view the disparity of Suetonius' focus as an example of an elaborate critical device, presenting a staid \"official\" account which he then gleefully undercuts with lengthy descriptions of details in a delightful subversion of the propaganda of the imperial court, or simply because stories about Claudius being kind of muddle headed and socially inept are funnier than ones about changes in court procedure, largely comes down to how you view Suetonius. Tacitus more clearly has a subversive purpose, as he presents a pretty stark juxtaposition of Claudius' wife running wanton with half the senators and conspiring to murder the other half, the emperor himself doing some damned thing with the alphabet. To quote:\n\n > She had grown so frantically enamoured of Caius Silius, the handsomest of the young nobility of Rome, that she drove from his bed Junia Silana, a high-born lady, and had her lover wholly to herself. Silius was not unconscious of his wickedness and his peril; but a refusal would have insured destruction, and he had some hope of escaping exposure; the prize too was great, so he consoled himself by awaiting the future and enjoying the present. As for her, careless of concealment, she went continually with a numerous retinue to his house, she haunted his steps, showered on him wealth and honours, and, at last, as though empire had passed to another, the slaves, the freedmen, the very furniture of the emperor were to be seen in the possession of the paramour. \n\n > Claudius meanwhile, who knew nothing about his wife, and was busy with his functions as censor, published edicts severely rebuking the lawlessness of the people in the theatre, when they insulted Caius Pomponius, an ex-consul, who furnished verses for the stage, and certain ladies of rank. He introduced too a law restraining the cruel greed of the usurers, and forbidding them to lend at interest sums repayable on a father's death. He also conveyed by an aqueduct into Rome the waters which flow from the hills of Simbrua. And he likewise invented and published for use some new letters, having discovered, as he said, that even the Greek alphabet had not been completed at once.\n\nAnyway, that is a somewhat roundabout answer to your second question, did they have anything better to do, as the answer was, for many people, yeah. \n\nAs for what they would do, a lot of what Claudius did was hear cases. The Roman empire had an overlapping set of legal systems, with most places maintaining their traditional codes and courts. But it also had a great deal of Roman colonists and citizens scattered around the place, and citizens had the option of appeal all the way to Rome. This meant that not only was Claudius hearing legal disputes from the city and surrounding area, but theoretically throughout the empire. Add to this, he might also be hashing over details of administration, drawing up plans for construction projects, hearing petitions from all across the empire, and you can understand how he might be kept busy in a place for an entire day.\n\nBut of course emperors did have the option to not do this. The emperor Tiberius for example \"retired\" to a villa on Capri, and many other went on campaign and the like. But for the few that really had the interest in detailed governing, the option was certainly there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7wvbo2", "title": "Common Law is considered so uniquely British that the Spanish term for it literally means \"Anglo-Saxon Law.\" Did anything similar to it exist on the continent before Napoleon largely standardized Western European legal codes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wvbo2/common_law_is_considered_so_uniquely_british_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du3k70v", "du4l87j"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["Hey, \n\nYou can divide European law into two groups, which you can divide into subgroups: \n-continental group\n  (germanic circle),\n  (romanic circle),\n  (nordic circle),\n-common law group (England and Wales - not whole UK (Scotland is abit different)\n\nWhy did the two groups who started from the same root differentiante so much you might ask.\nThere are two important factors for that:\n-reception of Digeste (Justinian's codification - Roman law) 11th-12th century,\n-codification (Napoleonic codifications, ABGB ...) 18th-19th century\n\nBefore reception there were no major differences between continent and british isles in terms of perception of law. \n\nAfter the Digeste were rediscovered in 11th-12th century whole continental Europe studied cases in them and then developing new rules building on knowledge from Roman Iurists. This was studied on univiersities all across Europe so there was law that was standard for whole continent called Ius Commune. Although its use was subsidiary it became more and more used as it was seen as more fair and reasonable then local traditons. \n\nSince that didn't happen in Britain - common law was always about the proccedure not material rights there was no need to study Digeste at such scale - the two legal systems started driffting apart. \n\nSo before the era of codifications the law was standard across whole continental Europe. With the codification the Iurists didn't invent new law - they just codified the already present Ius Commune. \n\nAlthough it may seem that todays law differs from country to country in Europe alot that is only partly true. Because all the codifications originate from the same all-continental law they are very similar in their core and offer similar solutions to similar problems, use simiar terminology etc.\n\nHope that answer helps.", "Following on the post just made, Napoleon largely updated and republished the Roman law, the Code Justinian.  I'm not sure that I agree that law was uniform across the continent prior to that, but Napoleon's actions in doing that, given his place in time, did have a very large impact.\n\nYour question basically asks if there was anything like Common Law on the continent at some point, and the answer would be yes, but you'd have to go back well before the Napoleonic Era.  The Germanic and Nordic cultures all used a type of common law early on, much of which was basically self administering.  If you want to read a dramatic account of who it tended to work the Icelandic Sagas, interestingly enough, provide examples as much of what was going on with them had to do with that culture's perceptions of the operation of their laws, none of which differed greatly from one culture to another in Northern Europe, at various points.  Clearly, they did differ some and certainly differed as the cultures came under the influence of Christianity.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1f6uq0", "title": "What were important every-village-has-one buildings in the Medieval ages?", "selftext": "Was every village expected to have a inn, or a butcher, townhall, and so fourth. Please and thank you in advance.\n\n**Edit**: Thanks for all the information. Not to seem ungrateful though, but maybe we could talk less of how to act in churches and how they worked and more village layouts and non-religious buildings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f6uq0/what_were_important_everyvillagehasone_buildings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca7da46", "ca7j7h5", "ca7magr"], "score": [47, 9, 6], "text": ["Depends on the size of the village, of course. But most decently sized villages (that is to say, not entirely dependent on other villages or cities for the basic buildings) contained at least a church, a townhall and whatever craftsmen were applicable to the region, ranging from food (indeed, a butcher, bakery or, in coastal villages, local fishermen) to products (woodworkers and more rare, blacksmiths).\n\nThe question hasn't got a definite answer because you didn't define a certain period or region (which is fine): villages could be so vastly different based on location, region, timeperiod, culture that it's neigh impossible to establish a default set of buildings.\nA very small village in the French alps could have a church, but not a townhall, and a bigger village in West Germany could have a townhall, but not a church because the city one mile North hosted a huge Cathedral.\n\nBut it's safe to say that by far most of the villages in the Middle Ages contained a church.\n\nThis knowledge stems from studying Medieval History and personal observations throughout West-Europe.", "Let's toss in a mill to this mix, often owned by the manorial lord who charged to grind grain into flour.  In some places in England it was illegal for individual peasants to own millstones; this was a right of their lord.", "A larger village would likely have a [tithe barn](_URL_0_), where farmers would have to deliver their \"church tax\", i. e. a tenth of their produce annually."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe_barn"]]}
{"q_id": "25b0p3", "title": "Did Spartacus receive any moral support from Rome's intellectual class?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25b0p3/did_spartacus_receive_any_moral_support_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chfnfy5"], "score": [11], "text": ["If he did, there are no extant records of it. Here is a [pretty good summary](_URL_1_) of the ancient texts that deal with Spartacus's rebellion. It's in English, too, which is nice. I can't recall any others that handle the topic in any detail, though my memory often fails me and someone else might recall others. So short answer, if he did, we don't really know about it.\n\nSomewhat longer answer - I doubt it. We tend to separate the academic and political spheres in modern Western society. The line in Rome was... a lot more blurred. Sure, you have guys like Catullus, Vergil, and Horace, who were *equites* for the most part and not really involved in government, but you also have guys like Gaius Asinius Pollio (cos. 40 BCE), who by all accounts we have was considered one of the great historians of the first century BCE. My main point here is that the \"intellectual class\" was probably as invested in the institution of slavery as other members of the oligarchy. If there *had* been a general slave uprising in Italy, a lot of the writers, historians, and philosophers at the time would have been the first to be nailed to the proverbial (and perhaps actual) cross.\n\nThe second reason I doubt he received any support from this source was the fact that there didn't really seem to be any voice advocating against slavery at the time. Seneca appears to come the closest to this position in his [47th Letter to Lucilius](_URL_0_), but note that nowhere in the letter does he condemn slavery as an insitution; he merely criticizes some of the common practices of slaveowners (and this is almost 150 years after the Spartacan uprising). If anyone else can recall a text which advocates for the abolition of slavery, I would be very interested in reading it.\n\nEdit: Fixed a date."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/gruffini/cl116/seneca.epist.47.htm", "http://books.google.com/books?id=qfmEfDsq-6IC&amp;pg=PA233&amp;lpg=PA233&amp;dq=the+principle+ancient+sources+on+spartacus&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=eRmIYfuD2a&amp;sig=1LoKK_UbTEbPFNcmzw_EuMeoJYI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=kS9wU-OMDpLaoATyoYGwCg&amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=the%20principle%20ancient%20sources%20on%20spartacus&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "3g7afp", "title": "How common was \"underage\" enlistment during WWII in the U.S.?", "selftext": "My grandfather enlisted in the Navy at 16 years old and served on the USS West Virginia during WWII.  Was underage enlistment like this common in the U.S.?\n\nEdit:\n\nIf it helps answer the question, he was raised in Nashville, TN and by all accounts grew up rather poor.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g7afp/how_common_was_underage_enlistment_during_wwii_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctvrbr8", "ctx59xt"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["How would someone go about getting enlisted underage? Would it require a fake ID or just were there enlistment people who didn't care?", "Most evidence of this occurring is likely to be anecdotal, due to the illegal nature of the practice.  From the evidence, it appears that getting away with it only required someone willing to provide an affidavit that the person is of age.\n\n[Audie Murphy](_URL_2_) got in by having his sister claim he was old enough.\n\n\nIf memory serves me correctly (been a while since I read his book) [Colonel Hackworth](_URL_1_) found a homeless person to claim he was his father.  He later submitted a form to have his birthdate corrected, and no disciplinary action was taken.  \n\n[More anecdotal evidence](_URL_0_) of how it was done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.americanveteranscenter.org/2012/02/veterans-of-underage-military-service/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hackworth", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy"]]}
{"q_id": "1ibn3m", "title": "What are the most interesting cases of civilizations throughout history discovering dinosaur bones, and how did these different civilizations interpret, explain, and react to the discovery?", "selftext": "So I was thinking about the subject earlier this afternoon. How did different ancient civilizations (Romans, Aztecs, Chinese) react to the discovery of dinosaur bones, *if* anyone ever uncovered any?\n\nWere bones discovered in more recent eras? (Colonial?) I'm interested to know how different cultures throughout history explained such colossal beasts.\n\n---\n\nThis is my first post to this subreddit, and I'm trying my best to follow the guidelines laid out. If I've messed anything up, sorry! :P", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ibn3m/what_are_the_most_interesting_cases_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2wfr9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Welcome! your question is great, but it pains me to tell you that it's actually a really common one. The good news is that there are plenty of responses all ready for you to check out! /u/1Tw03Four recently did a great round-up of previous posts in this one:\n\n[Did ancient societies discover dinosaur bones? Is there any written history about it](_URL_1_)\n\nand this question came in yesterday:\n\n[Have the people in the middle ages or before found dinosaur bones, and if yes, what did they think about them?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i7vvv/have_the_people_in_the_middle_ages_or_before/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ezivy/did_ancient_societies_discover_dinosaur_bones_is/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ud5c3", "title": "Are there any texts, especially novels, that were considered \"trashy\" in their time, but that have come to be regarded as great literature?", "selftext": "or \"Can we expect to see 50 Shades of Grey in AP literature classes in 100 years?\"\n\nEdit: Some responses have asked what I mean by trashy. I used trashy to describe a book that, in its time, was considered by the public and/or critics as being low-brow or uncultured entertainment. However, I'd be interested to hear about books that were not highly regarded for other reasons too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ud5c3/are_there_any_texts_especially_novels_that_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cegx9vl", "cegxpyb", "ceh0r7g"], "score": [10, 21, 8], "text": ["There have certainly been books that were considered critical and commercial failures that ended up as great literature. As the other comment notes, the answer to your question depends on what you regard as \"trashy.\"\n\nAs an example of a book that originally failed, Moby Dick provides a very good sample. While originally published in 1851 in America and England, it was not until the early twentieth century that it became well admired. When it was originally published, reviews were decidedly mixed, but more telling was the public perception of the novel. While initially mixed like the critical reception, the public perception worsened as Melville published other unpopular works such as Pierre: or the Ambiguities. \n\nEventually the reception became that these works, including Moby Dick, were monstrosities and mistakes. While it had a handful of admirers in England and Scotland, it became virtually nonexistent in America. In fact, the year it was released, only 2,000 copies were said to have been printed, while books like Uncle Tom's Cabin printed in the hundreds of thousands. \n\nThis was until the early twentieth century when, what could be termed a modernist revolution, began to appreciate the stylistic approached found in works like Moby Dick. Sadly, Herman Melville passed away in 1891, long before Moby Dick ever received its praise. \n\nSource: New Essays on Moby Dick by Richard H. Brodhead\n\n\n\nI don't know if this is necessarily an answer to the question you were asking, as the responses for Moby Dick were not negative due to promiscuity or anything of that nature. Perhaps it would be useful if you defined exactly what you meant by \"trashy.\" I think it would be relevant to define who found the novel \"trashy\". If you are referring to religious groups, the list is likely extensive (I can think of The Scarlet Letter as an example just off the top of my head). If you are referring to the general public or critical reception, the question becomes a bit trickier.", "Perhaps the novels of the Bront\u00eb sisters would qualify. Reviews were often mixed, always recognizing how popular and enjoyable the stories were, but often deploring the subject matter. Also, as novels concerned with women and particularly beloved by women, they were considered to be in a lesser category, like children's literature.\n\nI think *Wuthering Heights*, by ~~Charlotte~~ Emily Bront\u00eb, was probably the most controversial. Here you can read some [contemporary reviews](_URL_0_) where the writers simply did not know what to make of it. An example:\n\n >  Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power\u2014an unconscious strength\u2014which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage. The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. ", "My understanding is that most of William Shakespeare's plays were intended to be \"trashy\" pieces for the enjoyment of lower classes.  Consider the opening of Romeo and Juliet, where before the gang fight the Montagues were jostling each other and joking about sexual relations in the manner I expect from something like American Pie.  Note also The Theater - most likely the theater R+J premiered - was built in Shoreditch and whose wiki states \"this area in the \"suburbs of sin\" was notorious for licentious behaviour, brothels and gaming houses.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews.php"], []]}
{"q_id": "2wlqwc", "title": "Why is it that Greek Mythology has held up so well?", "selftext": "I know it is full of great stories, but why is it that Greek is the main focus in (at least American) mythology in literature classes? For example, why are we not taught Chinese/Brazilian/or even Nigerian mythology? Surely they all have stories that could go toe to toe with most Greek stories right? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wlqwc/why_is_it_that_greek_mythology_has_held_up_so_well/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cos6ee9", "cosoga1"], "score": [43, 2], "text": ["Let's agree for sake of argument that all cultures have equally impressive bodies of oral tradition that include stories about the origins of things and about the conduct of powerful supernatural beings and heroes. I think that's a fair statement, but it is difficult to evaluate a subjective term such as \"equally impressive\" - but we are agreeing on that premise to answer your question.\n\nFirst of all, the Greeks were good at codifying their stories in writing. They weren't the only culture that did this, but many did not, so those that did not go through this process could participate in the international contest of being recognized and celebrated in the same way. \n\nSo then the question focuses on why the Greek tradition is celebrated more than others that were recorded (the Egyptians come to mind, for example). While the Romans conquered both Greece and Egypt, they tended to recognize kindred supernatural beings and stories in the Greek tradition. And given what seemed to them to be the eloquence of Greek authors and poets, their material tended to be promoted as a requirement to achieve cultural literacy for an educated Roman. In turn, subsequent European society tended to continue this notion. The fact is, even today, it is difficult to read and understand the greater body of western literature or to view much of western art without understanding the many references to ancient Greek stories. The only other body of ancient stories that occupies a similar role when it comes to cultural literary would be ancient Hebrew traditions as manifested in the Old Testament.\n\nStories of other cultures can be just as remarkable and enlightening, but none have been as thoroughly and consistently integrated into western literature and art than these two traditions. One can contest why it is necessary to understand western art and literature for a sense of modern cultural literacy - but that is a separate discussion. As long as understanding western art and literature is essential, understanding Greek mythology (and its ancient Hebrew counterpart) will be required.", "There's already a great answer in here, but there's also the fact that Greek civilization has never really \"collapsed\". No matter how many times Greece was conquered, it was never replaced by another culture. And, as other posters have pointed out, Greek was the language of learning for a long time. \nTl;dr: Greek culture has never been dominated by another culture\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c991ou", "title": "The terminology of sexual violence in late medieval and early modern Europe", "selftext": "This question emerged from my reading on early modern sexuality and law. I'm wondering how the concept of rape was understood by Europeans of this time period (c. 1300-1600). Nowadays we have a definition of the term tied very closely to the concept of consent. But as far as I understand it this wasn't the case in Europe during the period in question. For example, I've read that spousal rape was not recognized as such, and that prostitutes in some cities could not legally be raped, as they were regarded as belonging to the community. Clearly, consent was not necessarily the main factor that went into determining what was and wasn't rape. So how was rape actually defined? What language was used to refer to it (presumably this varies by region)? Was the concept contingent upon the law - i.e. in the case of the above-mentioned prostitutes, would acts of violence against them be thought of as \"legal rape\" or would they, because they were legal, not be defined as rape at all? What, if anything, was \"consent\" understood to be?\n\nIn effect, I want to try to get an understanding of how the men and women of this period defined and made use of these concepts.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c991ou/the_terminology_of_sexual_violence_in_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esvry2e"], "score": [24], "text": ["Consent absolutely was the definitive factor, then as now. The big, *big* difference lies in what \"consent\" means. Even just in the last decade, we've shifted from a No Means No to a Yes Means Yes paradigm--meaning that today, silence from fear, ambivalence, or chemical substances can't be reasonably taken to mean consent.\n\n...Now go back six centuries, four waves of feminism, access to higher education, 90% of the literacy rate, the concept of human rights, and knowledge of biology.\n\n\"Spousal rape\" could not exist as a concept because medieval people believed--and canon (Church) law asserted--that marriage was synonymous with sexual consent. for once and for all. Theologians described the \"marital debt\" or \"marriage debt,\" in which couples actually *owed each other* sex on demand. Well, as long as it was [within the bounds laid out by the Church](_URL_0_). *[Chart by James Brundage in 'Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe']*\n\nUncontrollable bodily responses such as orgasm or pregnancy were also generally taken as consent. In some cases, the absence of evidence of resistance was *obviously* consent, right?\n\nAs far as prostitutes goes, you're correct, Ruth Mazo Karras notes that some cities protected them(or tried to) with inclusion in rape laws. In other cities, accepting money for sex from even one man was considered general/universal consent on her part.\n\nRape is and was nonconsenual sex (...that seems like way too mild wording). But \"nonconsenual\" had an unrealistic and far more restricted meaning than it does today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/flowchart.png"]]}
{"q_id": "4eg65i", "title": "The Kurds were split apart after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. How did the Kurds feel about this and is their separate \"autonomy\" enough to keep them satisfied?", "selftext": "I am specifically interested in knowing more about their revolts in the 1920s and 1960s. Who stopped them from becoming a country and why?\n\nDid/do they have a large amount of oil in their defined borders?\n\nIs there anything specific besides land that Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey stand to lose by a separate Kurdish state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eg65i/the_kurds_were_split_apart_after_the_fall_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1zt1ut"], "score": [7], "text": ["On mobile right now I'll try to be more thorough when I get home, but an important thing to note about the Kurdish people is they have never been a unified people under one state. They've faced oppression by basically every empire that has existed in the area, so they're division today can be seen as a modern continuation of that. \nA common Kurdish saying \"No friends but the mountains\" reflects this, as well as the mountainous region that comprises a majority of 'Kurdistan', i.e. not much oil. But if I do remember correctly Iraqi Kurdistan produces a relatively large portion of Iraqi oil. \nUnfortunately a lot of Kurdish groups resort to violence, and are grouped with terrorist groups in the region, inhibiting the compliance of governments, especially Turkey. \nYour last question is more policy all science though. \nCheck this quality [post](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3totqt/who_were_the_kurds_and_has_a_kurdish_state_ever/?u/yodatsracist"]]}
{"q_id": "17ourd", "title": "How did the middle class develop? Has there ever been another society with a middle class, either by their own definition or ours?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ourd/how_did_the_middle_class_develop_has_there_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87hpmm"], "score": [14], "text": ["In European societies, landowners that do not have tenants - ie self-owning farmers have been considered the middle class. These were in ancient times able to afford arms and armour and made up the backbone of the pre-Marian Roman army, of the Greek hoplites and the Swedish medieval peasant militia. Skilled craftsmen with their own business could also be counted to this class.\n\nDepending on the society, the time and how societal development happened, this class increased, decreased or even disappaeared. The Marian reforms came because the Roman society had a tendency to collect land ownership into big estates growing cash crops, and the middle class, the landowners making up the three ranks of the Roman infantry army was reduced in population. \n\nThe industrial revolution created another middle class - foremen, engineers and clerks. But by that time, all (western) nations had armies consisting of the proletariat, as Rome had after the military reforms.\n\nBottom line? All societies have had middle class, the size, who was considered part of it, if it grew or was reduced in size varied."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "y0fyr", "title": "How do results in the Ancient Greek Olympics compare to today's?", "selftext": "I was trying to find this, but I couldn't. I know the sports were different, but some, like running games, are very similar, and I was wondering how different their records were from today's.\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y0fyr/how_do_results_in_the_ancient_greek_olympics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5rawib", "c5rbm3d", "c5rbno5"], "score": [9, 7, 13], "text": ["China used to do *decidedly* worse.", "Just so you're not empty handed:\n\nOne thing to keep in mind is that there is only one winner (as opposed to a first, second, and third place) for each event. As far as I know, they didn't really keep track of times. Nor did they compare athletes based on their performances except in cases where they won multiple games (i.e., if athletes won several events in one games [boxing, pankration, and the hoplitodromos, for example] or won in multiple games). It's also worth noting that there were games every year: Olympian, Delphic, Nemean, and Isthmian. All we have in modern culture are the Olympic games (originally the most important games since they were held in honor of Zeus), which is why we only have the games once every four years. If you're interested at all in how these athletes were celebrated, I would recommend that you read some of [Pindar's Odes](_URL_1_.).\n\n[Source: *Ancient Greek Athletics* by Stephen G. Miller](_URL_0_)", "[Slate](_URL_0_) (so consider the source) tried to answer this a couple weeks back\n > How would the ancient Greeks, who invented the Olympic Games, compete against today\u2019s athletes?\n > \n > Probably not well. Ancient athletes could have held their own in the first modern Olympic Games of 1896. Phayllos of Croton, for example, hurled the discus 95 feet in the Pythian games around 500 B.C. Although that distance is approximate\u2014Greeks measured distance in actual human feet\u2014it would have put him in the running for a medal at the 1896 Olympic competition. Phayllos probably would have bested American Robert Garrett\u2019s 95.6-foot throw if he had used modern tools and techniques. Ancient hurlers likely used a heavier discus and took only a three-quarter turn before releasing it, rather than the two-and-a-quarter turns that modern athletes use. Variations aside, Phayllos wouldn\u2019t have stood a chance against 21st-century athletes: The current world record is more than 243 feet.\n > \n > Historians have puzzled over records from ancient long-jump competitions. Athletes posted distances of well over 50 feet\u2014nearly double the current world long-jump record. Many classicists assume that the event was actually a triple jump, although that still puts the ancients surprisingly close to the modern record. The ancient competition was quite different from the modern version, however. The Greeks probably started from a standstill and swung handheld weights, known as halteres, to provide momentum on takeoff and allow them to extend their feet farther forward on landing.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Athletics-Stephen-Miller/dp/0300115296", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text;jsessionid=AC1986B0E8483DD7CAD25EF3DAF4B96F?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0162%3abook%3dO"], ["http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/explainer/2012/07/london_olympics_would_ancient_greek_athletes_have_stood_a_chance_in_today_s_competition_.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4r25zx", "title": "Did societies in the past understand the problems of hunting animals to extinction?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r25zx/did_societies_in_the_past_understand_the_problems/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4xxh3x"], "score": [4], "text": ["This answer might be more appropriate to /r/askanthropology, but with North American pre-Columbian timelines the line between history and myth is pretty blurry. One of the only sources of Cherokee oral traditions, Mooney's *Myths of the Cherokee* (1900), is [available online](_URL_3_). The fourth chapter, \"[Origin of Disease and Medicine](_URL_0_),\" tells the story of how Little Deer, the chief of the deer people, punishes overhunting with \"deer sickness,\" which is commonly held to be rheumatoid arthritis. The reason why this became necessary is for two reasons (within the story): \n\na) people (i.e., Cherokee) had started to hunt for fun rather than necessity;\n\nb) and new technology (bows, atlatls, hooks, etc.) gave them a huge advantage over other people (the animals).\n\nThis then created a situation where, to quote Mooney (p. 250):\n\n > Man invented bows, knives, blowguns, spears, and hooks, and began to slaughter the larger animals, birds, and fishes for their flesh or their skins, while the smaller creatures, such as the frogs and worms, were crushed and trodden upon without thought, out of pure carelessness or contempt.\n\nThe solution from the council of animals was two-fold: the Little Deer would cripple the hands of hunters with arthritis so they couldn't draw a bowstring; and hunters willing to practice respectful hunting through ceremony could be cured of their arthritis. This is why the title of the story is \"origin of disease and medicine.\" Disease came into being as a result of overhunting animals, and medicine (through ceremony) was a cure by reminding people of their proper place in the world and proper action.\n\nAll of this is a long-winded way of getting around to this: many people consider this story to be an indication that at least some Eastern North American native peoples *were aware that overharvest could lead to negative effects on populations of animals*. As for the validity of the story (Mooney is questioned for many reasons) as history, there is some corroborating (anecdotal) evidence: \n\n1. I was taught a related story from my grandfather in a different language as a part of learning to hunt as a child (he was Shawnee). He was illiterate and would have had no exposure to Mooney or other ethnographers. \n\n2. I've heard the same or similar stories from native students from different tribes (including Cherokee) when I used to teach Native American Studies.\n\n3. I've heard the story of *Awi Usdi* (\"Little Deer\") from native educators and elders in the context of \"this is why we are careful about how much we hunt.\" \n\nI've also heard from white historians and anthropologists that the story is a bunch of bullshit in the finest \"noble savage\" tradition and that everyone knows Indians hunted megafauna to extinction, so they must have been unaware of the consequences. Take that for what it is worth.\n\nMore information on James Mooney and his \"histories\" and myths: \n\n* Project Gutenberg's [online copy of *Myths of the Cherokee*](_URL_1_)\n\n* Elliot (1998). \"[Ethnography, Reform, and the Problem of the Real: James Mooney's Ghost-Dance Religion](_URL_2_)\" *American Quarterly*.\n\n* Again anecdotal, but I've had several Cherokee people (educators and elders) tell me that what James Mooney collected was the stories that children were told, since he wasn't considered an insider or reliable. Anything of sacred or personal worth was not given to him. This actually makes me think that the stories in \"Myths\" are somewhat reliable, at least in the sense that they were common stories used to explain the world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/cher/motc/motc004.htm", "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45634/45634-h/45634-h.htm", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041613?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/cher/motc/index.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3e53bi", "title": "In the novel \"Go Set a Watchman,\" Jean-Louise and her uncle are having a conversation about the causes of the Civil War and her uncle says, \"not much more than five per cent of the South's population ever saw a slave, much less owned one.\" Is there any truth to that?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e53bi/in_the_novel_go_set_a_watchman_jeanlouise_and_her/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctblr1h", "ctbs8po", "ctbsgq4"], "score": [861, 62, 34], "text": ["**No.** It's absolute baloney and incredibly racist.\n\nThe 1860 U.S. Census found that 40 percent of the population of the South *was enslaved.* I'm quite sure that they were aware, every single day of their lives, of their status as a slave.\n\nBut let's take the racist's point of view. Let's say a slave isn't a person and therefore only white people matter. Even then, the assertion is *dead wrong.*\n\nOne-quarter of all free families in the South (note, this category includes black free families) owned slaves, according to the 1860 U.S. Census. One half of this proportion (12.5 percent of the free population) owned five or more slaves. Now, let's look deeper. In the Lower South (seceded before Fort Sumter), 36.7 percent of white families owned slaves. In the Upper South (seceded after Fort Sumter), the proportion was 25.3 percent. In the Confederate states as a whole, it was 30.8 percent. In the border states (which did not secede), the percentage of slave ownership was 15.9 percent. [In two states, South Carolina and Mississippi, more than half the population was enslaved.](_URL_0_)\n\nFrom Armisted Robinson's *Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The demise of slavery and the collapse of the Confederacy*:\n\n > Most Americans, no doubt, imagine the prewar South as a region so thickly dotted with immense plantations on which most of the black and white populations worked and lived. But, on the contrary, while slaves made up 40% of the total population of the South, only 25 percent of free families, most of them white, owned any slaves at all, and fully one-half of this minority (12.5%) held fewer than five slaves. Only an owner of twenty or more slaves, and of substantial land, could qualify as a planter, and fewer than 10 percent of slave-holding families qualified. The plantation elite of the antebellum South made up less than 3 percent of the free population in the region and less than 2 percent of the total free and slave populations combined.\n\nLet's put this into context. You probably own stocks and bonds \u2500 investment documents either through a mutual fund, direct investment, your college fund or a 401(k). A slave was a big investment. On a plantation with 20 slaves, the value of those slaves (in 1860) would be greater than the value of the land and all the improvements \u2500 houses, barns, orchards, fields, irrigation \u2500 on it.\n\n[In fact, the value of a single slave was so great that in 1950, only *2 percent* of Americans held stocks worth more than the *1860* value (inflation adjusted) of a single slave.](_URL_1_) Restated: More than 10 times as many Americans relied on slavery for their wealth in 1860 than relied on the stock market for their wealth 90 years later.", "Another important point is that even if someone never owned any slaves, yet lived in a slave state, they still benefited enormously from slavery. Think of it like Detroit. Only a small percentage of Detroit residents ever worked for one of the big car companies. But they all benefited from them, because a large percentage of the dollars from any business came directly or indirectly from the car companies. There were restaurants that served employees; realtors that sold houses, schools the children of automotive business employees attended, etc. etc. So the Detroit economy has collapsed since the car companies ran into economic trouble and closed factories, even for people who never set foot in a factory. So in the antebellum south, a free person who lived in a town where cotton was grown while slavery was legal, might have a general store that sold to plantations, or maybe was a skilled laborer like a carpenter or blacksmith, whose customers were from cotton plantations. Etc. etc. Slavery pumped a huge amount of capital into any economy it was in.\n\nAnd just to be clear: Harper Lee is putting this argument into the mouth of Atticus Finch but it was and is a common southern apologist argument for slavery.", "[From this about 1 in 4 southern households](_URL_0_) had slaves.  If one were to apply ownership to solely the patriarch of the family, then one would say that about 5% of the south owned slaves.  This argument is technically correct as the kids (and maybe the wife at the time) had no legal ownership of the slave.  However, they lived in a household where there were slaves used to serve them, thus they effectively owned slaves.\n\nThe \"never seen a slave\" part is complete bullshit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/10/opinion/20101210_Disunion_SlaveryMap.html", "http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm"], [], ["http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html"]]}
{"q_id": "30f7a7", "title": "Did everyone get mummified in Ancient Egypt?", "selftext": "I understand that Egyptian theology believed that after Osiris judged a deceased person in the underworld, said person might return to their body, and this is the reason they mummified and created extravagant tombs and pyramids. But my question is, did everyone get mummified? (exceptions being slaves I'm guessing...)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30f7a7/did_everyone_get_mummified_in_ancient_egypt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpuzd2x"], "score": [2], "text": ["No, not everyone was mummified. Simple reason being, mummification was a long and ultimately costly process. Therefore, it's not surprising that most of the mummified remains we've ever found are either royal or of some high political, military or religious official. \n\nThose who weren't mummified were usually buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the desert with their belongings, just like a normal Egyptian burial, just far less lavish. This was actually very successful at preserving the body, due to the dry climate and all. \n\nHowever, a note on those you define as 'slaves' and such: being a slave didn't necessarily make you less of a rightful human being, it was merely your position in life. If my memory serves me correctly, many of the Old Kingdom Pharaohs actually chose to be buried with their officials and 'servants'. Therefore, they were also mummified. So there are exceptions to what I said at the beginning, but these are few and far between. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fbnni", "title": "What was the most powerful military organisation in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fbnni/what_was_the_most_powerful_military_organisation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca8on84", "ca8pxl6"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["I think you need to perhaps clarify your question.\n\nDo you mean relative to their contemporaries?\n\nAbsolute destructive potential?\n\nIf it is the latter the answer is either the Soviet Union or USA thanks in no small part to the stockpiling of nuclear weapons.  I can't say specifically when or which without looking up the numbers, and even then it might be hard to say for sure due to other factors.  But it would clearly be one of those two if for no other reason than they could have eliminated any other military in the history of the world in an absolute slaughter, and render any historical civilization to dust.", "We do not allow 'poll-type' questions in this sub. I've removed this question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1m9rnl", "title": "If you could suggest a single book for someone who wants to learn about the history of the US and US foreign policy what would it be?", "selftext": "I'm currently reading \"A people's history of the United States\" but would like to read a book that covers similar information but perhaps with a different focus/point of view.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m9rnl/if_you_could_suggest_a_single_book_for_someone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc74g9k", "cc74ics", "cc784j0", "cc78unv"], "score": [12, 11, 2, 5], "text": ["[From Colony to Superpower](_URL_0_) by George Herring is pretty hard to beat for a once over of US Foreign Relations.  ", "My suggestion would be George Herring's *From Colony to Superpower*.  It is a very thorough synthetic look at U.S. foreign policy from the Revolution through the Cold War.  This isn't a general history in the way *A People's History* is -- it exclusively focuses on foreign policy -- and it is very long (nearly 1000 pages including notes).  But I don't know of any more complete single volume on the topic.", "Albion's Seed, about the origins of American politics.  At the end of the day, the shortest accurate description of American history is \"The slow process of Massachusetts taking over its region, the nation, and the world.\"", "\"The American Age\" by Walter LaFeber. Very apt analysis on what factors drive American Empire\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books/about/From_Colony_to_Superpower_U_S_Foreign_Re.html?id=fODT-qOVoiIC"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393964744"]]}
{"q_id": "1cw4pe", "title": "Are there any first hand accounts of the British soldiers' journey back to England after the Revolutionary War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cw4pe/are_there_any_first_hand_accounts_of_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9kjprj"], "score": [5], "text": ["There are very few accounts written by common British soldiers of the American Revolution, and those few that exist are very brief about the trips across the Atlantic. Most are fairly bland accounts that amount to little more than simply stating that the ocean was crossed. Don Hagist has edited a definitive collection of primary source accounts by common British soldiers in his *British Soldiers, American War.*\n\nYou'll find better primary source accounts from the officers. I can't recall off-hand any specific sources that devote time specifically to the trip back to England. I would check the Journal of Lieutenant Enys and *John Peebles American War.*\n\nEDIT: Almost forgot, check Thomas Anburey's *Travels in the Interior Parts of America* as well. He was one of the most prolific writers among British officers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "110wnj", "title": "Why did Stalin not fully support Mao in the Chinese Civil War?", "selftext": "Stalin advised Mao to to seek a peaceful resolution to the civil conflict in 1945 with the nationalists .The Chinese Communist Party claim  that Stalin  advocated a division of China at the Yangzi River in early 1949  when the CPC were well on their way to victory. \n\nIt is known that the USSR had strong relations with the Nationalists as they only broke official ties the day after Mao established the Peoples Republic. But wouldn't Stalin have still preferred a Communist government in China or did he really  fear a \"second Tito\".  By 1949 the Cold War  was well under  way  so its unlikely (?) that Stalin was sympathetic to the West's interests in the region.\n\nWhat shaped Stalin's distinctive policies to the CPC during the civil war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/110wnj/why_did_stalin_not_fully_support_mao_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ieaqt"], "score": [11], "text": ["It was mostly putting pragmatism above ideological goals. Partly, he didn't think Mao would win, and partly, he valued his relations with Chiang Kai-Shek as a buffer between Russia and Japan more than he valued his ideological \"allies\" in China. Stalin only decided to help Mao when it became clear he'd win.\n\nThis kinda lines up with Stalin's doctrine of \"socialism in one country\". Strengthen Russia through whatever means necessary, don't worry about revolution in the rest of the world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wn7ka", "title": "Looking for information about Carthage and the Punic wars for research into a screenplay.", "selftext": "Like the title says I am writing a screenplay about the fall of Carthage. There is not a lot out there about Carthage, can you guys point me in the right direction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wn7ka/looking_for_information_about_carthage_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5et8np"], "score": [14], "text": ["What would you like to know more about?\n\nHere's some global info for you right now:\n\n**TLDR: The Carthaginians left behind tons of stuff. We don't know where it is. Ancient written records are thankfully available. Small caveat, absolutely none of these people like the Carthaginians. There isn't enough salt in the world to make anything more then educated guesses. We roughly know what happened. When it could have happened and roughly where it happened**.\n\n\n\nThe bulk of our knowledge of the Carthaginians comes from ancient written records combined with limited archaeology. Of the city of Carthage itself very little remains and the Carthaginians weren't the cohesive Empirebuilders the Romans were. They greatly preferred a sublter touch, leaving local custom and powerstructures in place. They simply assumed soevereignity over the locals by carefully webbing them in to their trade networks. Soon the local elites realized the benefits of offering their fielty to the Carthaginians whilst retaining firm control of their own sphere's of influences.\nThis means that Carthaginian State ( They went through the same strongman/king  >  republic shift as the Romans. They main difference being that power being consolidated in a few hands only started happening in Rome closer to the end of their republic ) only routinely sponsored the funding of outposts and with great exception the founding of cities abroad. Individual commaders in recently \"aquired\" provinces taking advantage of this construct their own cities to control their territories easier. Very few locations of these cities remain unfortunately.\n\n\nFor instance New Carthage is somewhere on the eastern coast of Spain. This could be all the way in up Cataluniya or much lower near Valencia. We simply don't know, ancient written works fail us here and without their guidance archaeologists cannot confirm/add anything of much note.\nHowever Carthaginian presence is notable all throughout the med. , from Sicily to Sardinia. From North Africa to Spain, little inscriptions of this (_URL_0_) pop up. The Tanit symbol, a female goddess-aspect (pene Baal) of their supreme god Ba'al Hammon. She was a war goddess for quite a few soutern med. cultures. Presumably used as a symbol to ensure fertility.\nSo now we know why we know so very little of the exactly geography of the Carthaginian network we have to rely more on the acient written records then other cultures whose own independant work was allowed to survive.\n\n\nThis is why is /love/ Carthage. From early on the Roman Republic there was an inexplicable fascination the Romans had with the Carthaginians. Even when Syrace was still on even footing with Carthage before her Queen of the Med. days. Carthaginians were regarded as strange people. Not quite Eastern. Not quite Western, but entirely Mediterranean nonetheless. The paradox amused the Greeks for they saw a fellow Polis determining their own future. It infuriated the Romans to no end to see the never ending ships that carried North Africas immense agricultural treasures (Oil, various produce and **WINE. YES WINE. THEY SOLD WINE TO THE GREEKS. SORRY FOR THE CAPS BUT OMG. THEY WROTE IN PUNIC ON THE AMPHORAS WHICH HELD THE WINE BUT USED GREEK LETTERS TO DO SO**. Greek wine was one of the finest of its day and in essense the Carthaginians stole the brand-name and claimed this faux-elite wine. Carthaginian wine was being drunk in Athens. Damn.) and hauling back gold and whatever supplies they needed that time of year.\n\n\nThis makes Greek sources slightly more palatable to read if you have any sort of interest in Carthage. Roman sources while initially reading almost neutral go through an interesting process. From the early days of the Republic the closer we get to the Punic Wars the harsher the language yet it still remains fair. Yes the Carthaginians are sneaky but their are succesful. Yes they are treacherous yet they have long term allies.\nDuring the after the three Punic wars the image tearing and building begins. The memory of Carthage is still in everyones mind but now they are still sneaky, treacherous and now losers. The Greeks now join in with the Carthage bashing. After the memory of the Romans own behaviour (breaking agreements/forcing diplomatic incidents etc) leading up to the third Punic war falls into the fogs of time the true denegration can start. Plutarch says in 146BC:\n\" the character of the Carthaginian people \u2026 is bitter, sullen, subservient to their magistrates, harsh to their subjects, most abject when afraid, most savage when enraged, stubborn in adhering to its decisions, disagreeable and hard in its attitude towards playfulness and urbanity.\"\n\n\nHe contrasts them with the tolerant and lighthearted Athenians of old, naturally ignoring Athenian actions like the savagery at Melos, their judicial murder of Socrates, and their fawning over successive Hellenistic monarchs.\n\n\n\n\nThe ancient written records mostly used in rapid succession: Shamelessly copied this from Dexter Hoyos (Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hoyos, B. D. (B. Dexter), 1944- The Carthaginians / Dexter Hoyos. )\n\n\n**Appian: an Alexandrian Greek and imperial bureaucrat of the later 2nd Century ad; wrote a history of Rome\u2019s wars down to Julius Caesar\u2019s time, treating each region in a separate book (that is, book-roll). His book Libyca narrates Rome\u2019s campaigns in Africa against Carthage; Iberica, all their wars in Spain; Hannibalica, the campaigns of Hannibal in Italy. Some books are only partly preserved. Appian is very dependent on earlier histories; his chosen sources for the Punic Wars were often imaginative. His own composition methods, too, left him open to mistakes (sometimes silly ones). Even so, his histories of these confl icts offer useful information, above all on the Third Punic War where he mainly though not exclusively relies on Polybius.\n\n\n**Cassius Dio**: a Roman senator and consul who lived from about ad 163 to after 220, Bithynian by birth; of his Roman History in eighty books from Rome\u2019s foundation to his own times only some books survive in full, as do Byzantine excerpts from his earlier books and a virtual pr\u00e9cis by the Byzantine John Zonaras down to 146 bc, as well as for some later periods. Dio is an intelligent writer, focused on Rome but prepared to be fair to other sides, and important too because he seems to have consulted older Roman sources (of the 2nd\u20131st Centuries bc) along with Greek authors.\nDiodorus: a Sicilian of the later 1st Century bc; author of a Library of History in forty books, which he describes as a compressed world history taken from respected Greek predecessors. He seems to have compressed one at a time for lengthy stretches, though in places adding items from another source. This method can produce an uneven narrative, but Diodorus is still the main source for Greek Sicily\u2019s history and its dealings with Carthage, as well as an important one for Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. His sources for Carthage\u2019s wars in Sicily included Ephorus (4th Century) and Timaeus (early 3rd Century); on the Punic Wars he used Polybius. Of the original forty books, only 1\u20135 and 11\u201320 are now complete; excerpts, some long, others short, survive in Byzantine compilations.\n\n\n**Justin**: a Roman writer of late but unknown date (between the 2nd and 4th Centuries) who made a pr\u00e9cis of the forty-four-book world history by Pompeius Trogus, a Roman from Gaul of Augustus\u2019 time. The Philippic Histories avoid a detailed account of Rome and focus on the rest of the world from the Assyrians onwards, with short but notable treatments of Carthage\u2019s foundation-story and history from the 6th to the early 3rd Centuries. Trogus\u2019 sources are unnamed but no doubt included earlier extensive histories, especially Greek ones. Besides Justin\u2019s pr\u00e9cis, a set of contents lists (prologi) of Trogus\u2019 books survives; at times these throw light on what Justin chose to include and exclude.\n\n\n**Livy**: Titus Livius of Patavium (59 bc\u2013ad 17) devoted most of his life to a monumental history of Rome in 142 books, bringing it down to the middle of Augustus\u2019 reign and consulting a broad range of older histories and other sources, Greek as well as Roman. Conscientious, relatively humane, and strongly patriotic, Livy found his history expanding almost unstoppably as he proceeded (he comments on this at the start of Book 31), while his own critical abilities stayed limited and his bias for Rome\u2019s side of events often over-coloured his narrative. Books 1\u201310 survive (down to 293 bc), then 21\u201345 (from 218 to 167): his history of the Second Punic War (Books 21\u201330) is the longest, and most famous, full-length account, while in later books he gives much information about Hannibal\u2019s later life. For this half-century he draws greatly on both Polybius and Roman authors \u2013 sometimes more or less paraphrasing Polybius while constantly adding details from elsewhere, which can have strange results. Unfortunately he is not that interested in Carthaginian affairs, though what he does narrate is valuable. Useful epitomes (Periochae) of nearly all the 142 books, of 4th-Century ad date, survive; most are brief, while those of Books 48\u201350 (the period of the Third Punic War) are much lengthier and offer important details.\n\n\n**Nepos**: Cornelius Nepos, a contemporary of Cicero, included short biographies of Hamilcar Barca and his son Hannibal among a set of Lives of Eminent Foreign Generals. They provide useful items along with some foolish errors; his sources probably included Hannibal\u2019s literary Greek friends Silenus and Sosylus.\n\n\n**Plutarch** :Greek philosopher and biographer of Greek and Roman leaders, including several who had dealings with Carthage (Dion, Timoleon, Pyrrhus, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus). Plutarch used a range of sources, mostly sound ones, and is important whenever he touches on Carthaginian matters.\n\n**Polyaenus**: Greek writer of the 160s ad, author of eight books on military and naval Stratagems, largely on Greek commanders but with some examples from Carthaginian history. Unfortunately his methods are often careless and some of his anecdotes implausible. Polybius: historian (about 200\u2013118 bc) of the Mediterranean world for the period 264 to 146 bc, a leading Greek of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. During years spent as an increasingly respected political hostage at Rome (167\u2013150), and becoming a close friend of the eminent Scipio Aemilianus and a temperate admirer of Rome\u2019s political system, he composed his Histories in forty sizeable books, analytical and argumentative as well as narrative, to explain how the Romans could make themselves masters of the Mediterranean world in less than fi fty-three years (219\u2013167). He opens with a shorter narrative of events from 264, and later extended the work to end in with the destruction of Carthage; he was an eyewitness of this tragedy. His sources, whom he often analyses and criticises, all wrote in Greek but included pro-Carthaginian and early Roman historians. Like others, Polybius is interested in Carthage largely where she interacted with the outside world, especially Rome. His ponderous style and complex treatment of issues caused only Books 1\u20135 to survive in full, but Byzantine compilers in the 10th Century made lengthy extracts from the rest, while shorter excerpts are quoted by ancient and Byzantine authors.\n\n**Strabo** :Greek scholar of Augustan times, whose seventeen-book Geography of the known world deals with places, peoples, cultures and even economics. Book 17 covers Africa, including a rather short section."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://img.search.com/thumb/9/9c/Tanit-Symbol.svg/280px-Tanit-Symbol.svg.png"]]}
{"q_id": "7dmp9p", "title": "The American \"Rust Belt\" seems to be concentrated in one long strip of territory in and around the Midwest. Why didn't industry and factories spring up in the American south in the same way?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dmp9p/the_american_rust_belt_seems_to_be_concentrated/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpz9xcu", "dpzagvw"], "score": [36, 10], "text": ["Iron ore from Michigan and Minnesota, coal from Pennsylvania and surrounding states, and limestone from Indiana and the Ohio Valley could all be brought to Great Lakes ports inexpensively.  Areas near Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit thus became the center of supply for steel, the primary component of both automobiles and appliances.  (For Pittsburgh, proximity to coking coal outweighed the distance iron ore had to be brought.)  Secondary elements such as hardwood and glass were also available nearby, while the multiple rail lines through Ohio and Indiana converging on Chicago offered competitive transport for components and finished products.  As a result, a crescent around Detroit became the center of the automotive industry. Appliance factories were a bit more scattered, but seldom more than 300 miles from the rolling mills that supplied sheet steel.  As new sectors, such as electronics, grew, they took advantage of the technical skills, machine tool industry, and supply networks already present in the region.  A famous 1943 classification study by urban geographer Chauncey Harris showed [a striking geographic pattern](_URL_0_) for American cities dominated by manufacturing.  Only after World War II did big industrial companies begin to establish branch operations in Sunbelt locations, once large-scale air conditioning made conditions for assembly workers (and delicate components) more tolerable.\n\nIt was the decline of the steel-related industries near the Great Lakes and Northeast in the 1980s that gave us the term \"Rust Belt.\"  The textile industry of the South had its own story of agglomeration near cotton suppliers and decline when faced with low-wage offshore competition, but that took place two decades earlier.", "The answer(s) to this question, like all major historical questions, is very complicated and multifaceted, and I am by no means an expert, but I'll try to offer at least part of an explanation and some useful historical context.\n\nPrior to the American Civil War, the Southern states were *incredibly* wealthy, and needless to say, the basis for this wealth was slavery. However - and this is an important point - most of the wealth (the land and the slaves who toiled on said land) was concentrated in a relatively small number of enormously wealthy and consequently, hegemonically powerful plantation owners who had little incentive to invest in any sort local industrialization (arguably,  quite the opposite; the slave-owning elite not enjoyed social dominance due to the institution of chattel slavery, but their *economic* status itself came from what was very much an agrarian enterprise.)\n\nFurthermore (and related to the above) much of the white population in the antebellum South consisted of poor, unskilled laborers. Those who managed to \u201crise above their station\u201d almost inevitably reached any degree of material affluence and social status from self-sufficient land ownership (the Jeffersonian dream) - self-sufficiency, that is, that owed itself to owning at least some slaves. Indeed, on the eve of the Civil War, as many as 30-35 percent of white households in the South had at least one slave. Slavery *was* the Southern economy, and much more, immediately prior to the Civil War.\n\nNow, fast forward to Reconstruction. The \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d has all but been eviscerated, and thus, the amount of wealth held by white Southerners has declined dramatically. And this unsurprisingly had far-reaching effects throughout all classes of white Southerners, since the very basis of the Southern economy is now gone. So you\u2019d think they\u2019d want to rebuild their economy on different lines, right? \n\nWell, not exactly, or rather: \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d The socially repressive agrarian institution of sharecropping eventually replaced the socially repressive agrarian institution of chattel slavery in the American South, post-Reconstruction. While there certainly was some industrialization occurring in the post-war South (a particularly notable example being the textile industry in North Carolina) it was nowhere near as extensive as the North, which continued to industrialize and urbanize, and had plenty of laborers (skilled and unskilled) on account of not just a growing native-born population (both white and black) but an immigrant population that throughout the Gilded Age and the Industrial Revolution, continued to swell the North - especially the increasingly industrial cities. \n\nThat\u2019s the other thing: in terms of industrialization, the North had a massive head-start going back to its increased urbanization, the growing scarcity of land (which needless to say, reduced the number of people living on the land and being able to make a living from agriculture in the North), and the massive amounts of immigrant labor that could be utilized by industrialists.\n\nI\u2019d also argue that there were some significant ideological dimensions to all of this - remember, the Northern states (especially the Northeast) had valued investing in some form of mass education for years, going back to colonial Puritan days. That, combined with the full-throated embrace of industrialization and mercantile interests by figures like Alexander Hamilton (is it any coincidence that what we refer to as \u201cWall Street \u201c is in New York City, or how heavily and densely populated the Northeast is - and has been, for a long time?) left a major ideological imprint on the Northern population that thought positively of industrialization, and the labor market skills and scientific, technological, and above all economic progress and prosperity that it brought to the population (though clearly there were - and are - massive amounts of inequality and concentration of power and resources that went along with all of this). The South (and the Western frontier), by contrast, was very much of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian persuasion in terms of the importance of economic self-sufficiency (for white people, at least) in a way that was particularly important to agrarian interests - slavery above all, prior to the Civil War. That deeply ingrained imprint of ideology, politics, economics, society, and culture didn\u2019t die overnight - and why would it? The South, after all, is not generally known for being a region that is quick to change its ways\u2026\n\nAnyway, I hope that some of this might be useful to you (and others with the same question).\n\n**Sources:**\n\nBensel, R. F. (2000). *The political economy of American industrialization, 1877-1900.* Cambridge University Press.\n\nPost, C. (1982). The American road to capitalism. *New Left Review*, (133), 30.\n\nWright, G. (1987). The economic revolution in the American South. *The Journal of Economic Perspectives*, 1(1), 161-178."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://slideplayer.com/slide/5271817/17/images/29/Patterns+of+Cities+Chauncy+Harris+maps,+1943.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "2snl6b", "title": "How did allied soldiers get there supplies during the offensive against Germany?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2snl6b/how_did_allied_soldiers_get_there_supplies_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnr69hz"], "score": [4], "text": ["Do you mean after D-Day ?\n\nImmediately after D-Day the allies built two Mulberry Harbours, here is a picture : _URL_0_\n\nThe reason that they were needed is that the Allies had realised after the failure at Dieppe in 1942 that taking an already built harbour was too difficult. So, the invasion was based on beaches. This posed a problem in getting supplies to the invading troops. The Mulberry was the answer, ships could dock, be unloaded and then the cargo driven in trucks from the harbour to land.\n\nThe intention was that the harbours would last 3 months. The one on Omaha beach was destroyed in a storm on 19th June because it wasn't properly secured to the sea bed.\n\nThe one on Gold beach (later known as Port Winston) was secured to the sea bed and was in constant use for 6 months, at which point the Allies had taken Antwerp and switched supplies to there. If you look at the coastline at Arromanches some remains of the harbour can stiill be seen today, in fact at low tide you can walk out to the concrete cassions that made part of the breakwater."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.war44.com/misc/images/5/WWII_Mulberry_harbour.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "bwgxf7", "title": "Why weren't 6.5mm cartridges more popular after WW1?", "selftext": "Why did most modern militaries keep a 7.5+ mm cartridge like the .303 Enfield (UK), .30-06 Springfield (USA), 7.5\u00d754mm French (France) or 7.92\u00d757mm Mauser (Germany) versus a smaller 6.5mm cartridge like the 6.5\u00d752mm Carcano (Italy), 6.5\u00d750mmSR Arisaka (Japan) or 6.5\u00d755mm Swedish (Sweden) after experiences in WW1 taught them the typical engagement distances didn't warrant such a large cartridge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bwgxf7/why_werent_65mm_cartridges_more_popular_after_ww1/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epxjxhz", "epxnpv4"], "score": [11, 7], "text": ["In general, nations retained the same cartridges used in ww1 up until and through ww2. Like with bolt-action rifles rather than semi-automatic ones, this was mostly due to cost during the interwar years, and then the need to maintain production of arms and ammunition during the war.\n\nSeveral countries realised the limitations of the ww1 rifle calibers and  tested or even attempted to introduce new ammunition and/or new service rifles. The British tested .256 (6,65mm) and .276 (7mm) ammunition and the French started a switch from 8x50Rmm to 7,5x54mm. The Italians actually attempted to switch from 6,5x52mm to 7,35x51mm in 1938, but the project did not get far before the war broke out. The US also tested the .276 (7x51mm) Pedersen cartridge and actually adopted it for the new M1 Garand service rifle, but reversed the decision after verifying that the Garand would work with hte heavier .30-06 cartridge.\n\nThere were extensive stocks of earlier rifle caliber weapons left from ww1 - rifles, LMGs and HMGs alike. Adding to that were the fact that production was tooled and streamlined for the older cartridge - setting up new production lines are usually both expensive and time-consuming meant that the older cartridges had to soldier on. \n\nLack of money to re-tool production lines before the war, with demobilisation and then the Great Depression throwing a monkey wrench into military re-armament plans and then the urgent need for arms and ammunition in the field once the war had started prevented most of these projects.\n\nInstead all sides attempted to improve ballistics and reduce recoil by introducing lighter bullets, spitzer bullets and otherwise improve existing cartridges.", "Vague concepts like stopping power played a part, as did concerns over the maximum effective range of machineguns and commonality of rifle and machinegun ammunition. In general, though, it's very much a case-by-case basis, and we see several major powers make moves to adopt smaller-caliber cartridges before or immediately after WW1.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJapan's transition away from the 6.5mm cartridge - which to modern eyes seems ideal - came as a result of experience in China. Unfortunately for Japan, the war in China taught them a whole list of wrong lessons, and among them was the idea that the .303-British-derived 7.7mm machinegun cartridge then in service with some of their heavy machineguns was superior to their 6.5 mm cartridge. The 7.7mm round, as with the German-supplied 8mm machineguns the Japanese encountered, was found to have better performance at long ranges compared to the 6.5mm round, and the added power was considered desirable. Given that light machineguns then in service - the Type 11 and Type 96 - were chambered in the same caliber as the Type 38 infantry rifle, it provided more impetus to switch the entire supply chain to the 7.7mm round. Doing so would simplify logistics and, with the introduction of the Type 99 Rifle and Light Machinegun, continue the practice of allowing riflemen and machinegunners to share ammunition.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nItaly's situation was a bit different - they were seriously lagging behind in ammunition design, still using a heavy bottle-nosed bullet though WW1. The decision early on to use gain-twist rifling that was tailored specifically to the bottlenose bullet 6.5 Carcano was originally designed with helped improve barrel lives and accuracy with the round, but had the side effect of being poorly-suited to use with more modern spitzer (pointed) bullets. Because a transition to spitzer bullets would require re-tooling every factory to use more conventional rifling methods, Italy continued to use bottlenose bullets while every other major nation had already transitioned to spitzer rounds. That left Italy with most of the downsides of small-bore ammunition - shorter range and less power - while the poor aerodynamics and heavy weight of the bullet would further hurt performance at a distance and eliminate much of the flat-trajectory advantage most 6.5 rounds have. Following poor performance in Ethiopia and Libya during the interwar period, Italy finally made an attempt to modernize its inventory. Along with a very modern and utilitarian new rifle, Italy necked up the 6.5mm case to fit a 7.35mm spitzer bullet that was lighter than the 6.5mm round. Here, the result was a more modern cartridge with better aerodynamics, a longer range, and (supposedly) better wounding potential. Unfortunately, this transition started in 1938 and was very quickly cut short by the outbreak of WW2.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nOutside of those two prominent cases, however, we see the US and Britain both make moves to adopt \\~.28 caliber or 7mm rounds at different times (twice in the case of Britain), and France would decide to shift down in size from an 8 mm round to a 7.5 mm round. For the US, the .276 Pedersen cartridge was experimented with and considered for adoption when developing and testing what became the M1 Garand rifle, but it was decided that the logistical strain of switching to an entirely new cartridge was too much at a time when 30-06 was plentiful and Army budgets were limited. For Britain, they had similar designs as the Italians had between the wars in the aftermath of the Boer War - they wanted a modern new rifle with a modern cartridge to replace the flawed Lee-Enfield and its rimmed .303 cartridge, and they developed a Mauser-derived rifle and a .276 cartridge (7mm) to go with it. Unfortunately, the Pattern 13 rifle only came about in 1913 and had to be dropped due to the outbreak of war. It would be rechambered in both .303 British (Pattern 14) and 30-06 (Model 1917) during WW1 for Britain and the US, but it wouldn't make a comeback in the postwar drawdown. The second British 7 mm cartridge attempt happened after WW2 with the development of the .280 cartridge. While the cartridge itself performed well, it was met with resistance from US officials over concerns of power and range (particularly in machineguns) and ultimately was dropped in favor of standardizing NATO over the 7.62x51 NATO cartridge.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFrance had the only successful transition, and that was probably because they had the most glaringly obsolete cartridge. Like the rifle it was designed for, the 8mm Lebel cartridge was a horribly rushed and flawed design, being a heavily tapered rimmed round necked down from the 11mm Gras cartridge. It wasn't particularly powerful compared to its contemporaries, and, as the infamous Chauchat machinegun magazine demonstrates, its heavily tapered design led to issues with the design of magazines. Post-WW1, France made steps towards creating a modern set of weapons, complete with a new cartridge. As this cartridge had to meet both the range and power requirements of the light and heavy machineguns and the performance requirements of the standard rifleman, they ended up with the 7.5 French cartridge - a design roughly comparable to the 7.62 NATO cartridge, but with a lighter bullet and a little less power."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "19co2u", "title": "WWI letter found in cupboard in L\u00fcbeck, Northern Germany. I need your help and knowledge to figure it out.", "selftext": "The letter was found in a cupboard, no context. It is written in S\u00fctterlin script - I'm not that familiar with S\u00fctterlin, but the person does seem to ask of the whereabouts of someone.\n\n[PICTURES](_URL_0_)\n\nThe Stamp on it says \"1. mobiles Ersatzbataillon Inf.-Regts. [Infanterie-Regiments] Nr. 59 Tagebuch Nr. 24\"\n\nI tried to figure out where this military unit operated and when I typed its name in google I hit this website: \n_URL_1_\n\nNot quite sure if this is a definite hit, the military organization is pretty confusing.\n\n\nI'm curious about the detailed content of the letter and any further information about circumstances, places, dates mentioned in the letter. \n\nI tried to blacken out names, if you encounter more please inform me. ;)\n\nEDIT: I study history and therefore have access to a nice library, so book tips etc. could help, too.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19co2u/wwi_letter_found_in_cupboard_in_l\u00fcbeck_northern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8mvzec"], "score": [3], "text": ["I just skimmed through it and couldn't read everything, but here is a short summary:   \n\nOld woman (and her husband) cares for her granddaughter but can barely afford it. Her daughter, the child's mother, seems to be dead and now she searches for her son-in-law, who is at war. There seems to be a problem with the relationship, perhaps they are divorced or weren't married at all. The grandma applied for \"Kriegsunterst\u00fctzung\" (money) but she needs a document (\"Anerkennung\") from her son-in-law.\n\nThe Military answers that he doesn't belong to this Bataillon. \n\n---\nEdit: \n# & nbsp;\n\n    \n    \n    Gehorsamstes Gesuch\n    der Frau XXX\n      in Zinten\n    um Gew\u00e4hrung eines\n    Bescheinigungs(?) ihres\n    Enkelkindes\n    \n    \n    An das hochgeehrte\n    K\u00f6nigliches Ers. Bat. Inft.\n    Regt. Nr. 59\n# & nbsp;\n\n\n\n\n    Zinten d. 24/6. 1915\n    \n    Eurem(?) hochgeehrten K\u00f6nig-\n    lichen Regt. Nr. 59\n    \n    erlaube ich mir  folgendes\n    zu unterbreiten: Da meine\n    XXX mit\n    den Schornsteinfegergeselle\n    XXX\n    umg\u00e4nglich(?) verkehrt hatte\n    gebar Sie von demselben\n    ein XXX\n    XXX\n    \n    Da aber jetzt die Tochter\n    schon \u00fcber ein Jahr tot\n    ist, und der Vater von\n    dem Kinde im Kriege,\n    sind wir alte Leute doch\n    nicht im Stande das Kind\n    zu ern\u00e4hren, mein Mann\n    z\u00e4hlt schon 75 Jahre und\n    Ich 65 Jahre alt wir\n    \n# & nbsp;\n    wir k\u00f6nnen uns selber\n    nicht mehr richtig ern\u00e4hren\n    noch vielmehr das Kind.\n    Und da ich doch auch ...\n    das K\u00f6nigliche Bezirkommando\n    zu Braunsberg(?) geschrieben\n    habe wurde mir die Bitte\n    nicht abgeschlagen zur Ge-\n    w\u00e4hrung eines(?) Kriegs-\n    unterst\u00fctzung. Da nun\n    aber noch nicht genug Briefe(?)\n    sind weil ich XXX nicht\n    verklagt habe, sollte\n    ich am XXX noch schreiben\n    da\u00df er die Anerkennung\n    seines Kindes n\u00e4mlich(?) in\n    paar Worte auch ...\n    lassen soll von seinem\n    Hauptf\u00fchrer, hat sich XXX\n    noch garnicht gemeldet.\n    Und wo doch so lange\n    meine Tochter gelebt hat immer\n    gezahlt hat, k\u00fcmmert\n    er sich doch jetzt garnicht\n    \n# & nbsp;\n    garnicht um sein Kind.\n    Nun h\u00e4tte ich wohl den\n    Hochwohll\u00f6blichen Herrn\n    sehr gebeten und komme\n    mit der hochge...\n    Bitte doch f\u00fcr mein Enkel-\n    kinde die Beglaubigung\n    g\u00fctigst gew\u00e4hren zu wollen.\n    In der Hoffnung keine\n    Fehlbitte(?) getan zu haben\n    zeichnet sich gehorsamst\n    Frau XXX geb XXX\n    in Zinten Kirchengericht 2\n\n# & nbsp;\n    \n    Gehorsamst\n    Bitte mir doch dasselbe\n    zur Empfangnahme\n    \u00fcbersenden zu wollen.\n    \n    Adresse\n    An XXX\n    \n    Ers. Batl. Inft. Nr. 59\n    \n    \n# & nbsp;\nAnswer:\n    \n    den 1. Juli 1915\n    \n    der Einsenderin\n    \n    zur\u00fcck mit dem Bemerken(?), da\u00df XXX dem\n    Bataillon nicht angeh\u00f6rt und auch bisher nicht\n    angeh\u00f6rt hat.\n    \n    Oberleutn. und ...\n    \n    \n# & nbsp;\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/ayw2T#0", "http://wiki-de.genealogy.net/IR_59"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5l8rxm", "title": "What happened to the land and the debris of war such as weapons and vehicles that were left after long and destructive battles like Verdun or Stalingrad? Basically, who cleaned up the mess and how did they do it?", "selftext": " I'm specifically interested in battles that took place in one area for an extended time like first world war trench warfare and urban combat like that which occured at Stalingrad that basically destroyed entire villages and cities.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5l8rxm/what_happened_to_the_land_and_the_debris_of_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbu0w3m"], "score": [200], "text": ["Note that many areas which have seen prolonged fighting in modern wars *haven't* been completely cleaned up, with some still containing dangers such as live explosives.\n\nWith this in mind, I'd like to ask a follow-up question: which areas have seen prolonged fighting with significant leftover debris/ordnance that *was* cleaned up, and why was the decision made to clean up these areas and not others?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fblsdw", "title": "How did WWII Navy pilots find the aircraft carrier after a mission?", "selftext": "How did navy pilots find their way home after a mission without any electronic navigation aids like we use today? I know that the carrier fleets would have had the ability to do a DF Steer, for example, but that would give away the position of the carrier group to the enemy as well. If the fleet didn't move, then I suppose that basic Dead Reckoning works, but how did this actually play out in a combat environment where the ships are moving and the pilots are busy with tasks other than navigation. I'm particularly curious about fighters, since I know the bigger planes often had a dedicated navigator on board.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fblsdw/how_did_wwii_navy_pilots_find_the_aircraft/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj55k03"], "score": [5], "text": ["More input is always welcome; while we wait, you may be interested in [this thread asking the same question](_URL_0_). u/thefourthmaninaboat provides the general overview, while u/DBHT14 provides a specific view at the USN, specifically at Midway. [There's also this prior thread](_URL_1_) with a tick more discussion, also featuring the same two users.\n\nI also highly endorse u/DBHT14's recommendation of Lundstrom's *The First Team*; it's a chunky thing, but there is just no better book for US carrier operations in the early part of the Pacific Theatre."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e7h7f/in_wwii_what_navigational_techniques_were_used_by/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5rtlom/how_did_ww2_pilots_find_their_way_back_to_their/"]]}
{"q_id": "52xry9", "title": "About to begin studying History at University. Anything I should know?", "selftext": "As the title states, I am about to begin studying History at the University of Huddersfield, England. I'm excited, terrified, but very homesick, and I haven't even left yet. \n\nIs there any tips you guys could give to a budding Historian in the works?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52xry9/about_to_begin_studying_history_at_university/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7o77d0", "d7o79rc", "d7o7sbd", "d7ojmuc", "d7owj4r"], "score": [6, 2, 8, 2, 2], "text": ["Start the essays asap, because they tend to creep up quite quickly and then you find the library has been emptied of books\n\n\n\nAlso lots of stuff you learnt in school will be wrong, and what you probably consider a history book is not in fact a history book\n\n\nTake a broad range of modules from a variety of periods in your first year, have fun with it. I went to uni wanting to study the world wars, I left more interested in the 17th and early 19th century ", "Here's [an article about dealing with homesickness at university](_URL_0_). Hope that helps!", "Be prepared to change your major simply because the university experience is all about discovery - including what really sets you on fire. It may be history, but it may be something else. Be agile and flexible. If history is the focus of your passion after the dust settles, that's a great place to put one foot, but since you have two, consider carefully what else excites you. Your ability to carve a unique niche for yourself is not your passion for history (others will have the same for the field(s) of your focus). Rather, it is what else you bring to the table - economics, chemistry, biology, an understanding of culture, sociology, house design, textiles, archaeology, meteorology - you name it, but it will be the combination of things you bring to the table that makes the difference.\n\nAlso, seek out and obtain practical experience. If you are to be employed as historian, there is a better than even chance it will be as a public historian, not as a teacher/professor. Volunteer at a local house museum or at an excavation. Find work on campus in the archive or in town with an architectural firm or construction firm that works with old buildings. Any of these things could be the foundation for a career that in all likelihood you can't even imagine, but which can be rewarding. But as indicated in the first paragraph, prepare to be agile and flexible.\n\nAnd be prepared to be homesick. That's just part of it. It gets better, but it can be miserable for a while. Soldier through. \n\nAnd most of all, best of luck.", "Remember that first year doesn't count, so don't get too stressed about grades. Make sure you get essay and exams skilled nailed down, but don't be scared to experiment, because if you mess up a little now, it doesn't matter. ", "1. Try to put aside things you know by hindsight and place yourself in the position of those making choices at the time.\n\n2. Don't get too radical: it's too hard to defend a controversial position within a word limit and you'll get better marks with fairly conventional analysis.\n\n3. As Eggfibre says, master the skills of argument and essay structure, and using and analysing sources effectively. All the factual knowledge in the world is nothing if you can't argue a case. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.gooutsidebook.com/articles/homesickness.html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6mlye2", "title": "What (specifics) do we know about clothing of Northern/Central European men during the late Bronze- / early Iron-age?", "selftext": "Quick Edit:  I'm not sure how or why this became labeled as Games, or how to change it.\n\nI participate in a combat sport that requires (at least psudo-)historical clothing,and I am currently working on creating some new costume for myself.  I am interested in the clothing of late pre-history and early history, from the peoples the Athenians would have called barbarians in the 6th century BC and lands north and west. I am currently focused on those who were described as clad in furs and skins, but I am interested in whatever information is available.\n\nI realize this is a large area, both in time and geography. My investigation so far has yielded either brief articles with references but only vague descriptions, or illustrations with no supporting evidence mentioned (apart from the Egtved girl, but that doesn't help with men's clothing). Or academic articles behind paywalls.  As such, my scope has increased with the hopes of finding something with enough detail that I can start from a solid historical grounding.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6mlye2/what_specifics_do_we_know_about_clothing_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dk301z1"], "score": [3], "text": ["(Don't worry about the flair, I removed it - the filter picked up on \"sport\".)\n\nI'm not entirely sure of what you mean about a culture generally clad in furs and skins, because textile use was most common by 600 BCE, so I'm going to just look at clothing in general from around this time. The best preserved Bronze Age clothing is, unfortunately, from centuries earlier than you're looking - from graves in Denmark, now held at the National Museum. Instead, let's turn to Hallstatt, Austria, a particularly important site which gave its name as an anthropological label to a European culture, around the turn from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. There are not actual clothes there, thanks to the tradition of cremation, but we do have information about the textiles from scraps preserved in the local salt mine. (We don't know exactly why they're there. Possibly they were leftovers from worn-out blankets and clothing relegated to mine use.) Wool was the most commonly-used textile; typically, coarser wool was used in [plain-woven](_URL_0_) textiles and is seen on sheepskins, while [twills](_URL_3_) and other special weaves used nicer fibers  - instead of using the fleece as it was found on the sheep, which was common earlier in the Bronze Age, they were carding it and sorting the fiber. By the time you're interested in, an even twill was the more commonly-used weave. The sheep were generally light or dark brown, with light brown sheep preferred for dyeing purposes. Blue (woad), red (lady's bedstraw/madder) and yellow (weld/dyer's broom/sawwort) dyes were used in the Bronze Age, made from plants native to the area; later in the Iron Age, the people of Hallstatt started to use dyes that had to have been imported, like kermes and European cochineal (insects that could be dried and crushed to produce a more vibrant red) and saffron, as well as double-dyeing, dipping a fabric in a dye bath of one color and then a dye bath of another, to produce green and a reddish blue.There seems to be some disagreement in my sources about whether madder and kermes could be found in Early Iron Age Hallstatt, but we do know that they started to use more color patterning around that time. Stripes had been used since the Early Bronze Age, because they're pretty easy to produce, but by the end of the Bronze Age more complex patterns appeared, checks and twill plaids that you might see on clothing today.\n\nWe do know that linen was also used in Europe at this time, but unfortunately it doesn't survive as well as wool, so we just don't have quite the same level of understanding regarding weaves and colors. (Silk started to be imported in the Iron Age, but that was just for elites and not something you're going to want.)\n\nWhere these textiles for clothing at Hallstatt were made on large warp-weighted looms, narrower bands were woven with [tablets](_URL_4_) in detailed patterns - with actual design motifs as well as patterns like stripes, checks, and reps (raised stripes). These bands could be sewn as edgings or facings on clothing, or used as belts on their own.\n\nWe do have one shoe extant from Hallstatt! While [this is a link to an image from Pinterest](_URL_1_), it matches the photos I've found in academic publications, so I'll share it with you. The Hallstatt shoe is essentially a shaped piece of leather wrapped around the foot and sewn.\n\nSo back to the basic question - what can I tell you about men's clothing construction to help you make your garb? Those Early Bronze Age men from Denmark were buried in \"wrap-around kilts of various lengths, large oval or kidney-shaped cloaks, footwear consisting of simple hide shoes, strips of cloth, and in one case a cloth shoe with the sole sewn on\" - potentially everyday dress, potentially elite dress, potentially ritual/death dress. Trousers seem to have started to appear in some regions in the Middle Bronze Age, while the amount of bronze jewelry and pins increased. Styles of jewelry and the manner of wearing it differ strongly by region, so there's no general way I can suggest you wear your dress or fibula pins - you'd have to decide on a very specific area. Though a very elite example, the Hochdorf grave in W\u00fcrttemberg (dated to 540-530 BCE) would be quite helpful ... except that all the sources I can find just describe the man in the grave as wearing \"clothing\". Trousers, thigh-length tunic, and cloak were the thing a few centuries into the Iron Age, so that is likely your best bet.\n\nGr\u00f6mer, Karina. \"Textile Materials and Techniques in Central Europe in the 2nd and 1st Millennia BCE\", *Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings* (2014).\n\nGr\u00f6mer , Karina and Helga R\u00f6sel-Mautendorfer. \"The textiles of Hallstatt\", *Colours of Hallstatt: Textiles Connecting Science and Art* (2012).\n\nRebay-Salisbur, Katharina. *The Human Body in Early Iron Age Central Europe: Burial Practices and Images of the Hallstatt World* (2016)\n\nSmith, Heather. \"[Celtic Clothing During the Iron Age- A Very Broad and Generic Approach](_URL_2_)\"\n\nSofaer, Joanna, Lise Bender J\u00f8rgensen, and Alice Choyke. \"Craft Production: Ceramics, Textiles, and Bone\", *The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age* (2013).\n\nS\u00f8rensen, Marie Louise Stig. \"Identity Gender, and Dress in the European Bronze Age\", *The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age* (2013).\n\nvon Hofacker, Racheli. \"Oh Shoe . . .\", *Colours of Hallstatt: Textiles Connecting Science and Art* (2012)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_weave", "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/442056519654530020/", "https://www.academia.edu/1488040/Celtic_Clothing_During_the_Iron_Age-_A_Very_Broad_and_Generic_Approach", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_weaving"]]}
{"q_id": "28sup5", "title": "How true is the statement that England abandoned Australia after the Fall of Singapore in WW2?", "selftext": "My old highschool history teacher said that a reason for our close ties to America came about due to the fact that the USA was the only nation willing to send troops to our aid during the war (also we have ports which was important). How true is this statement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28sup5/how_true_is_the_statement_that_england_abandoned/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciek12e"], "score": [6], "text": ["The  British  released  three  divisions  of  volunteer  Australians  from  the  Western  Desert   to  go  back  to  Australia  in  the  spring  of  1942.  These  troops,  the  6th,  7th  and  9th  infantry  divisions  played  a  key  role  in  driving  the  Japanese  army  out  of  Papua  New  Guinea  in  1942  and  early  1943.  They  contained  by  passed  Japanese  garrisons  in  New  Britain  and  the  northern  Solomon  islands  in  1943  and  1944  and  played  a  role  in  liberating  some  of  the  islands  in  Indonesia  in  1945,  However,  these  were  Australian  troops.  No  British  troops  were  sent  to  Australia,  The  United  States  sent  their  32nd  and  41st  Infantry  divisions  to  Australia  in  early  1942.          \n     The  Royal  Navy  did  sent  the  County  class  heavy  cruiser  Shropshire  to  the  Royal  Australian  Navy,  to  replace  their  heavy  cruiser  Canberra,  that  was  sunk  during  the  battle  of  Savo  Island  on  August  10th  1942.  The  Brits  also  sent  some  Spitfire  fighters  and  Beaufighter  and  Beaufort  attack  planes  to  Australia.  However,  some  of  the  Beauforts  were  built  in  Australia  and  the  United  states  sent  more  than  twice  as  many  warplanes  to  equip  the  Royal  Australian  Air Force  than  the  British  did.   So,  the  British  did  send  a  limited  amount  of  assistance  to  the  Australians,  but  the  Americans  sent  much  more.         \nSources:  \"World   War  II  Airplanes:  Vol.  2\"  by  Enzo  Angelucci  and  Paolo  Matricardi   pages  255-263        \n\"Victory  at  Sea:  World  War  II  in  the  Pacific\"  by  James  Dunnigan  and  Albert  Nofi"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1w69tr", "title": "How much of a presence did the Inca Empire have in the rainforests east of the Andes? What did they call the natives of the Amazon region?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w69tr/how_much_of_a_presence_did_the_inca_empire_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cez3t72"], "score": [4], "text": ["Actually, not as much as you might expect. [Tawantinsuyu](_URL_0_) reached across the whole of western South America, yet its most glaring geographical boundary is not the Pacific, but the Amazon Basin. Groups in the Amazon were known to an extent by Andeans and coastal dwellers, but it is a dialogue archaeologists are still sussing out. It is possible that Amazonian groups could get over the Andes through passes in what is now northern Peru, bringing ceramic technologies to the mountains and western coast as well as their own cosmological input. Sites like Chav\u00edn de Hu\u00e1ntar popularized and spread an ideology that affected some five hundred miles of coastline - with distinctly Amazonian aspects in its icons and outlook.\n\nWe have evidence that many Andean civilizations skirted the Amazon - the Wari made one of their trade routes out of Ayacucho toward Cuzco along the eastern edge of the Andes at some 1000 m above sea level, along the lower *yungas* foothills. Likewise, the Inca named their northeastern quadrant *Antisuyu*, for their allies there the Antis. Undoubtedly elements of the Amazon made their way into Cuzco, the heart of the empire - tropical fruits and plants are accessible today, as then, in the daily markets of the Cuzco Valley. However the Amazon doesn't lend itself to conquest and control like open mountain peaks and passes passes do, or wide coastal deserts and river valleys. The severe altitude difference for Andeans like the Inca meant that pneumonia and sickness could decimate military movements into the jungle. So for the Inca, whose empire was one of the most direct and bureaucratically-driven polities ever to develop in South America, why throw an empire's resources on a space that could never be directly controlled? Many of its resources could be curried through clever agriculture in the yungas or political alliance/marriage with constituent groups of that region.\n\nThe Sacred Valley, which holds Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo, Choquequirao, Pisac and many other royal estates of the Inca, was thus supported as a lush hinterland of the empire, even as it stood at a fringe of the empire. Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo served both as verdant oases for the Inca and his retinue and as excellent defensible fortresses - a conscious projection of Inca dominion on its most consistently vexing frontier. In a way, the strongest presence of the Inca state in the east was after the Spanish arrived and took Cuzco from the Inca. Moving up through the Sacred Valley to the yungas beyond, the Inca established themselves at Vilcabamba, beyond the reach of Spain for some decades. Aided in this by groups like the Antis and Chunchos, the Inca state and its religion persisted until its complete discrediting and decapitation by the Spanish.\n\nNow, I'm not really an expert on Amazonian groups, but I do understand that they were on some level were in contact with coastal and mountain groups in South America. Trade and associated ideas changed hands and minds for millennia - and yet even the Andes' strongest direct power could only work superficially with a whole swath of a continent. The dialogue between the coast, the mountains, and the forest is definitely one of the biggest questions out there for South American archaeology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Inca-expansion.png"]]}
{"q_id": "brddha", "title": "_URL_0_ can draw my family tree back to e.g. Charlemagne, Constantine the Great and Philip II of Macedon. Is this actually a reliable tool?", "selftext": "The tool starts with a person (I started with my great grandfather) , then you can click to show his or her parents, then you can click to show his or her parents as long as it will let you. I am playing with this today, and most branches just come to an end when (apparently) the information runs out. But others lead back through royalty and well known figures from antiquity including those in the title. Am i right to be suspicious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/brddha/familysearchorg_can_draw_my_family_tree_back_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eocwtiu", "eodwd1q"], "score": [26, 10], "text": ["I don\u2019t know that this is strictly a history question. You may want to ask it over at r/genealogy. However, as an avid genealogist I can tell you that you are absolutely right to be skeptical.\n\nStatistically, every person of Western European descent is a descendant of Charlemagne. In genealogy what matters is whether or not you are able to prove it. Do you have actual documentation in the form of historical records (records of birth or marriage specifically, tying your ancestors, all of them, in an unbroken line back to some royal figure)? Documentation is not someone else\u2019s family tree that they uploaded to the internet. \n\nPlaces like FamilySearch and _URL_0_ are rife with false genealogies because many people don\u2019t do proper research and piggy back off of what someone else has compiled, never checking for errors, never bothering to verify anything. People just love to be able to say they\u2019re descended from royalty. This isn\u2019t to say that those websites are useless. They can in fact be extremely useful. But if you see a tree taking you back to some Roman or pre-Roman nobility I would guarantee it is a fake.\n\nThe familial relationship between the Frankish nobility, of which Charlemagne was a member, and the earlier Roman elite is something that is still being debated by historians and genealogists. So any family tree telling you it can connect Charlemagne to the Romans would be cutting edge research, let alone connecting you all the way that far back.\n\nIt should be noted that it actually is possible to connect yourself through the documentation process to old European nobility, including Charlemagne, by means of what are known as \u201cgateway ancestors.\u201d Gateway ancestors were real people, often Europeans who came to the Americas in the 1500\u2019s and 1600\u2019s who were themselves able to prove descent from nobility. It is possible to prove descent from such gateway ancestors and many Americans are able to do just that, myself included. These gateway ancestors are really the only way a modern person could trust their descent from the old nobility of Europe.\n\nAgain though, it requires thorough vetting of the physical records. And even if you have a gateway ancestor or five and can prove it in the records, it is unlikely to be able to go much further back than a few generations before Charlemagne. I do not believe it is possible to document descent from Roman emperors at this time.", "You are quite right, especially when it comes to Ancient figures, as simply put, there are *no* broadly accepted family trees connecting to them. Many legit ones exist for Charlemagne, at least, but plenty more frauds. I wrote about this a long, long time ago... but [the answer from way back then touches on a lot of this for you](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": ["Familysearch.org"], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Ancestry.com"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20pubn/how_reliable_is_ancestrycom_is_it_based_on/cg5u0wo/"]]}
{"q_id": "47su2k", "title": "Why was flanking a larger force (such as during the Battle of Cannae) so effective? Wouldn't the smaller force be worn out by the larger one even if they did encircle them?", "selftext": "I'm confused as to why the Carthaginians wouldn't have eventually been worn out by the Romans, simply because the Romans had so many more fighting men that could jump in fresh and face the already tired Carthaginians when their comrades in front were killed. What made the encirclement such a huge factor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47su2k/why_was_flanking_a_larger_force_such_as_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0flpz8", "d0frb5w"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["In ancient battles, on the whole, the heavy infantry of the main battle line was very much focused on the fight in front of them. The anticipation of having to engage in close combat was mortifying, and the business at hand required their complete attention. In addition, given the minimal technological means of conveying orders, ancient generals rarely issued new orders after the battle had begun, relying on their men to carry out the task that their deployment set before them. \n\nAs a result, when an enemy force suddenly appeared in their flank or rear, they got confused easily, since they no longer knew what was going on; morale would collapse quickly, and men would scramble to take advantage of whichever way out was left to them. If the encirclement was complete, as at Cannae, panic and chaos would soon destroy any remaining capacity of the encircled army to resist.\n\nGood discipline and effective local leadership were decent remedies; veteran Roman armies like that of Caesar were generally able to respond well to being outflanked. Greek hoplites, on the other hand, were much less well-trained than Roman legionaries, and their behaviour in battle was correspondingly fickle. There are many examples of entire armies routing when an enemy force appeared in the flank or rear of the phalanx. It needn't even be a large force. At the battle of Delion, the Thebans sent 200 cavalry to save their crumbling left wing; the Athenians, thinking a whole fresh army had come up to reinforce their enemies, promptly fled.", "Besides the points u/Iphikrates mentions, it also appears that soldiers in ancient battles needed a certain amount of space to be able to fight effectively. If they were clumped together too closely, they would be unable to use their swords, shields and javelins effectively and would find themselves unable to mount an effective defence.\n\n >  Caesar proceeded, after encouraging the tenth legion, to the right wing; where he perceived that his men were hard pressed, and **that in consequence of the standards of the twelfth legion being collected together in one place, the crowded soldiers were a hinderance to themselves in the fight;** that all the centurions of the fourth cohort were slain, and the standard- bearer killed, the standard itself lost, almost all the centurions of the other cohorts either wounded or slain \u2014 Caesar, *Commentarii de Bello Gallico,* book 2, chapter 25\n\nThis is exactly what happened at Cannae. The Roman force was very numerous but not very well trained, on account of it having been only recently recruited, and was deployed in a relatively narrow but very deep formation. \nWhen attacked from an unexpected direction, men's natural impulse is to clump together, to seek safety by the presence of allies, and to shy away from the attack. When attacked from all sides, this led to them being pressed together so closely that they were unable to defend themselves. \n\n >  As long as the Romans could keep an unbroken front, to turn first in one direction and then in another to meet the assaults of the enemy, they held out; but the outer files of the circle continually falling, and the circle becoming more and more contracted, they at last were all killed on the field. \u2014 Polybius, *Histories*, book 3\n\nStill, just because flank attacks could sometimes have a devastating effect, that doesn't mean they always did. Philip Sabin argues that their significance is sometimes exaggerated, citing the Roman victory at Ibera where they easily dealt with being outflanked, or the battles of Telemon and Ruspina, where armies fought well despite being attacked from two sides at once. This ties in to Iphikrates' point about discipline and local leadership being the key to dealing with flank attacks.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "20uvrh", "title": "How can one locate the records of a deceased Red Army soldier in WWII?", "selftext": "Not sure if this is the right place to ask but here goes. My grandmother grew up in Ukraine and her father served in the Red Army. To this day, she has no idea what happened to him. I'm interested to know if it is possible to somehow find any archival evidence of his service. All I know is that he was drafted in 1941. The last time she saw him was later during the evacuation of Kiev. After that she never heard from him again. I guess Soviet records of casualties were not up to par back then but is there any way to find out what happened to him?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20uvrh/how_can_one_locate_the_records_of_a_deceased_red/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg794yq"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's online database \"Memorial\" of all USSR citizens, who served in Soviet Army and who were killed or missed in action during WWII. \n\nIt is in russian and you would need to enter your grandpa names in russian in order to search. \n\nSeveral caveats: \n\n* some russian and ukranian frequent first/last name combination may generate huge lists - e.g. *\u0418\u0432\u0430\u043d \u041f\u0435\u0442\u0440\u043e\u0432*\n\n* many casualty reports were written in haste and spelling of rare names or those with non-trivial spelling might be different from other official papers. If you don't find direct hit, try to modify - for example, *\u0410\u0432\u043a\u0441\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0438\u0439 ~ \u0410\u0432\u0441\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0438\u0439 ~ \u041e\u0432\u0441\u0435\u043d\u0442\u0438\u0439*.\n\n* it is very helpful to know exact date and place of draft, date of birth (again, some reports might misstate those, so look for similar too), which unit he served, rank etc. \n\n* it is ~80% complete (last time I've heard) and there are many white spots - especially from 1941 and 1942, from encircled units with all documents lost etc. The goal is to have it as complete as possible and expand it beyond WWII. \n\n[**OBD Memorial**](_URL_0_)\n\nIf you need any help - please contact me.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.obd-memorial.ru/html/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2o71wi", "title": "Who first thought of stairs?", "selftext": "Who came up with the concept of stairs and when did it happen? How long did it take to become used on a large scale?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2o71wi/who_first_thought_of_stairs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmkcyy0"], "score": [4], "text": ["hi! if you don't get answers here, this question might be worth x-posting to an archaeology sub, or /r/AskAnthropology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k3wf2", "title": "Why is it that some nations within the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Georgia, etc.) received the status of SSR while others (Karelia, Chechen, etc.) were only ASSRs?", "selftext": "EDIT: Oops, that should be \"Chechnya\" and not \"Chechen\".", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k3wf2/why_is_it_that_some_nations_within_the_soviet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbl5xmp", "cblt7b3"], "score": [44, 2], "text": ["It was a perilous issue in the early years of the USSR, and mainly had to do with population and territorial size as well as loyalty to the regime (though in the case of the Baltics, Stalin made each an SSR to characterize themselves as liberators to the rest of the world). Making Chechnya a full-fledged Republic would have been rather politically taboo post-Stalin as well given he deported so much of the population and only many years later were they allowed to return to their homes. Karelia was briefly an SSR after the Winter War, but post-war when Finnish-Soviet relations improved it was downgraded in status.\n\nUnder Stalin in general SSR status was given rather inconsistently, particularly in the Caucuses where he separated, merged, and re-separated many nations into various SSR's. Perhaps the best known example was Georgia, which had the Abkazhian region broken off by Stalin and upgraded to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Abkazhia. This was mainly done because the oft-difficult relationship between the Georgians and the Kremlin, and because Stalin had close personal ties to Abkazhian party boss Lakoba. However when Lakoba had a falling out with Stalin in the early 1930's, Abkazhia was \"downgraded\" to an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.\n\nAfter Stalin however, the administrative organization of the USSR remained much more stable.", "In addition to the good overview that /u/YamiHarrison provided, there was also an mish-mash of ethnicities in the new Soviet state, a reality that was inherited from Imperial Russia. So there was not only the logic of pacifying the new nationalistic consciousness that was becoming ever more prevalent, but also to an opportunity to showcase their ideological victory. In the latter sense, since Communism was being heralded as the liberating ideology, diametrically opposed to imperialism (see Lenin) it sought to in some way empower their minorities. At first there probably was a genuine desire to do so (one of the biggest mistakes is to always take a pessimistic view of the Soviet Union - that everyone in power was in some way abusing the system for their own gain). However, as the USSR progressed along the path of history, noble ideological intentions met with pragmatism and a good deal of political maneuvering (and in some cases the crazies) that often times derailed the projects into what we know of today. Like for instance when collectivization began in earnest, organisations such as the Komsomol sent out cohorts of young urban citizens out into the country to teach the virtues of this new program and to oversee its development and progress. However, in reality it became a fiasco of overzealous intentions so much so that Stalin made a famous speech entitled \"Dizzy with Success\" where he criticized these people that used him as the inspiration and the source of their zealousness (see: Antonina Solovieva - Sent by the Komsomol) where they felt to some degree betrayed by the leader they had trusted so much. \n\nAnyways for an interesting article on the ethnic/minority issue that the Soviet regime tried to deal with I recommend \"An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism\" by Terry Martin. I will see if I can find links to the articles I mentioned here (the Stalin speech can be found on _URL_0_ or with a simple search for \"Dizzy with Success\")."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["Marxists.org"]]}
{"q_id": "50kd7k", "title": "Did the Kingdom of Saxony intend to conquer some or all of Austrian Silesia prior to the annexation of the latter by the Kingdom of Prussia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50kd7k/did_the_kingdom_of_saxony_intend_to_conquer_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d74zuct"], "score": [2], "text": ["There wasn't a kingdom of Saxony before the annexation of Silesia by the Kingdom of Prussia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ssibj", "title": "advances in (metal) armor thourgh the centuries", "selftext": "though Wikipedia details the changes in armor reasonably enough, i can't find any information about the advancements in smithing and metallurgy that allowed those improvements, and whether at all they were the result of such advancements or just cultural changes, necessity, or a better armor construction. sorry if it's a bit broad. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ssibj/advances_in_metal_armor_thourgh_the_centuries/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddiqg8a"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is an important question in the history of armour. In fact, this is a huge question, and there's a lot to say about it.\n\nI will start off with some historiography. The early historiography of armour is saw medieval armour's development as being like that of early 20th century battleships, or 20th century tanks - more powerful weapons necessitated better armour. In this telling, plate armour is a response to the crossbow and the longbow and to various staff weapons. Speaking abstractly, this is a demand-side explanation for the development of plate armour - plate armour develops because soldiers need it. But the chronology of this development does not quite make sense - crossbows appear in the 12th century or earlier, and plate armour does not really take off until the 14th century (after getting its start in the 13th). Moreover, some attacks, like a blow from a mounted soldier's couched lance, are at least as strong as bow-shots, and couched lances have been around for centuries before plate armour is developed. Now, some armour (especially later in the history of plate armour) appear to be responses to more powerful weapons, so we should not discount this demand-side explanation, but it is not the whole story.\n\nAlan Williams in *The Knight and the Blast Furnace* looked at the bloomeries and blast furnaces that produced medieval iron and steel to provide a supply-side explanation for plate armour's origins. He looked at the size of excavated blooms and found that they greatly increase in the later Middle ages. This is important because armour cannot be welded from multiple pieces-each plate of a set of plate armour must be made from a single piece of steel (otherwise the armour is weak where it is welded). Big plates like breastplates must be made from big pieces of steel. This is a contrast to mail or scale armour, which can be made from small pieces of steel or iron (hence why societies with even small bloomeries can make these types of armour). \n\nThis all means that armours made of large (ish) solid places of metal need to start with large blooms of iron or steel in the bloomery. And there is a strong correlation between the increase in bloom size and the size of armour plates - from the introduction of one-piece breastplates to the profusion of single-piece helmet skulls, over the course of the 14th and into the 15th century the general trend is for the big plates of armour to get bigger. So bloom size (which is in turn the result of larger bloomeries) is an important precondition for the development of plate armour. \n\nThe other thing that bigger, more efficient bloomeries and blast furnaces do is make steel and iron cheaper. This causes a profusion of plate armour in various forms across different classes of soldier, until in the 16th century mass-produced 'munition armour' is arming the soldiers of the Early Modern monarchs. Blast furnaces which melt iron and produce pig iron (an iron/carbon alloy with a carbon content higher than steel) are cheaper and more efficient than bloomeries, which further reduces costs. However, pig iron must be 'fined' in order to be forged - it must have its carbon content reduced in order to make it less brittle. This process generally reduced armour's carbon content to little or nothing, which reduced the quality of the armour. This is particularly important because only medium and high-carbon steel can be hardened by heat treatment - 'quenching' hot steel in water to change its crystalline structure. So in the 16th century armour gets cheaper, but in some ways its metallurgy declines.\n\nThere are other technological developments important in the history of armour in the later middle ages. Water-powered trip hammers were used to beat blooms into sheets of steel, which would then be sold to armourers both locally and abroad. Water-powered polishing mills reduced the labor required to polish armour, which was the most laborious and tedious part of making armour. Both of these developments help encourage the spread of plate armour, or at least lowered its cost. But these cannot be taken outside of the larger social context of an increasingly urbanized and organized economy. Making plate armour required sophisticated workshop and guild organizations to divide labor, acquire and use capital and to maintain quality. This social context (which depends upon strong civil government and a codified system of contracts, among other things) is a necessarily precondition of technological developments like hammer-mills and polishing wheels - in many cases, these mills were funded by guilds or other craft organizations, or owned by proto-capitalist merchant-armourers like the Missaglia.\n\nSo plate armour was the product of all these things - larger blooms of steel, water-powered hammer and polishing mills, and more sophisticated social and economic organizations that could support the very sophisticated armouring industry. But we can't forget about the other side of the equation, the soldiers wearing the armour and their needs. As Tobias Capwell has argued, armour is adapted to the way that the people wearing it fight. English armours from the 15th century are meant for fighting on foot, while Italian armours of the same period are meant for fighting on horseback. This is reflected in the form of the armour. At the same time some features of armour - the neckline, the waistline, the shape of the sabbaton and more - are products of fashion. \n\nWhen we see an armour in a museum what we're seeing is the product of all of this - technological developments, ways of war, economic organization and fashion.\n\nIf you are interested in learning more about the metallurgy and manufacture of armour, you may be interested in some of my previous answers:\n\n\n\n* [Manufacturing and Supplying the Armour of Weapons of a Late Medieval Army](_URL_2_)\n* [From Ore to Harness: The Steps of Manufacturing Plate Armour](_URL_3_)\n* [The Importance and Illusiveness of 'Good Steel' in Medieval and Early Modern Armour](_URL_4_)\n* [Why were Milanese armourers so successful?](_URL_5_)\n* [The Armour Industry of Milan, contd.](_URL_1_)\n* [Manufacturing Munition Armour](_URL_0_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ebcwm/during_the_15th16th_centuries_how_was_the_process/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dciyp/how_was_it_that_milan_was_able_to_manufacture_so/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45383c/what_are_the_logistics_of_manufacturing_weapons/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xlm4i/what_were_the_logistics_of_medieval_weapons/d6htk7p", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b49zp/how_important_was_good_steel/d167v2t", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4lwyfi/what_made_the_milanese_guilds_so_successful/"]]}
{"q_id": "3nntj3", "title": "Were swords/bows/etc.. controlled from general masses in any given periods?", "selftext": "It's a general broad question sorry. I was just wondering if various time periods had control issues with weapons and how it was handled? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nntj3/were_swordsbowsetc_controlled_from_general_masses/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvputqp"], "score": [3], "text": ["FYI, you'll find a few examples in the FAQ to get you started\n\n* [Gun (and other weapons) control](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_gun_.28and_other_weapons.29_control"]]}
{"q_id": "2a61uu", "title": "How long would it have taken for a civilian to travel from New York City to Madrid circa 1914?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a61uu/how_long_would_it_have_taken_for_a_civilian_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirwq0a", "cirylu1"], "score": [3, 11], "text": ["Even though planes existed, the fastest transportation would've been by ship since flight couldn't sustain for several hours at a time. The steam-liners were some of the fastest, traveling a maximum speed about 25 knots. \n\nMore than likely, you'd travel via a ship similar to [RMS Mauretania](_URL_2_), which traveled about 24 knots. Assuming it was a straight-line shot not accounting for weather it would've taken close to [5-1/2 days](_URL_3_). \n\nBut, we also have to consider that Madrid is landlocked. Either Valencia or Balboa would've been the normal ports (need a historian on this). It still would've taken about 5-1/2 days. For now, I'll focus on Valencia.\n\nThen we need to consider driving. Valencia to Madrid is about 189 miles directly. Let's assume that you drove straight and it would add an [additional 5-1/2](_URL_0_) hours assuming you were in a Ford Model T Touring, which has a maximum speed of about [40-45 mph](_URL_4_). Assuming it wasn't straight and we'd use a road structure similar to one that exists today (roughly 400 km), then it would add an additional [6.2 hours](_URL_1_).\n\nIn total, it was about 6 days. Realistically, it is probably closer to 7 days accounting for weather, changing transportation, and routes.\n\nEdit: Did some editing for clarity sakes.", "From the 1870s to 1900 the White Star Line had a policy of seeing how fast they could do their Liverpool-New York line. The last record holder was the steam ship SS Teutonic in 1890, who reached New York harbour in 5 days, 16 hours and 31 minutes. In the 1900s White Star changed their policy to comfort over speed, so in 1903 the Teutonic took 6 1/2 days again, becoming the last company record holder.\n\nFor your 1910s range, we can take a look at the SS Finland. In early 1915 she made two consecutive journeys from Genoa to New York over several Mediterranean harbours. The first starting on February 6th, going over Naples (7th), Palermo (8th) and Gibraltar (12th) and arriving in New York on the 23rd of February. The second one started March 24th, went through Naples (25th), Messina (26th), Palermo (27th), Gibraltar (31st) and Fayal on the Azores (April 4th) and arrived in New York on April 11th.\n\nSo if we take Gibraltar as the nearest port the first trip took 11 days and the second one 12 with a stop. Assuming a train or car ride from Madrid to Gibraltar doesn't take more than a few hours you can probably fit the whole journey comfortably into 12 days. Maybe it's slowed down because of the war, but then the Finland's New York-Antwerpen runs the decade before also took about 9/10 days on average.\n\nSources:  \n[SS Teutonic schedule](_URL_1_)  \n[SS Finland schedule](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=valencia%2C+spain+to+madrid%2C+spain+at+40+mph", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=travel+248+miles+at+40+mph", "http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/mauretania-history.html", "http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york%2C+ny+to+madrid%2C+spain+traveling+24+knots", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T_engine"], ["http://www.norwayheritage.com/p_ship.asp?sh=finla", "http://www.norwayheritage.com/p_ship.asp?sh=teuto"]]}
{"q_id": "4xu7el", "title": "Did the culture of Carthage differ significantly from the culture of the older Phoenician city-states in the Levant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xu7el/did_the_culture_of_carthage_differ_significantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6j70tr"], "score": [16], "text": ["According to Richard Miles' *Carthage Must Be Destroyed*, *Qart Hadasht*, or \"New City\" was mainly ~~Tyrrhenian~~ Tyrian in origin; this follows both the foundation myth of the city and the preeminence of Melqart and Estarte, the chief city gods of Tyre, in Carthage.  Tyre was conquered by Hammurabi of Babylon in 572 BCE, and its trade with modern Spain and Italy became less and less lucrative; it's cultural influence waned and Carthage expanded both culturally and economically, in pursuit of trade and raw resources. Unlike the Canaanites, Carthage needed colonies not just for the wealth that comes with trade, but to acquire enough food and raw materials to fuel its large manufacturing sector. \"Punic\" - what historians now Carthage's language- was a dialect of Canaanite that all Pheonicians (who called themselves the *Can'nai*) spoke in different forms; Punic became the dominant language of trade in the Western Mediterranean. \n\nCarthage would change it's Pheonician cultural beliefs in some ways while holding on to other aspects. For example, burial became the main funerary rite (as opposed to cremation), but Carthage held on the the sacrifice of elite children by cremation long after *tophet* sacrifice disappeared in the East. Carthage also had a form of constitutional government with various levels of citizenship for natives, foreigners and slaves. Oligarchs held true executive (financial and military) power, but there was a legislative Council of Elders and an institution of a Popular Assembly present during decision making sessions and with the ability to, at least as time, appoint generals (Miles clearly states that it had little relative power and did not represent a true democratic vehicle).\n\nGreek influence molded Carthaginian culture on islands like Sardinia and Sicily and would make its way back to the city as well. Heracles became conflated with Melqart in a distinct syncretic religion, and Carthaginian sarcophogi adopted Greek statuary. From Miles: \n\n > The emergence of what we might term a \"Punic World\" was not a linear progression from the old Pheonician one, but a complex and multifarious series of hybridizations with other indigenous and colonial cultures throughout the Western Mediterranean.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ntnrp", "title": "Why didn't the straight-pull bolt catch on in military service?", "selftext": "Like the 6mm M1895 Lee Navy rifle, it was in service for a year or two, but fired faster than the Krag, Mauser, or Lee-Enfield.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ntnrp/why_didnt_the_straightpull_bolt_catch_on_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cclxo04"], "score": [7], "text": ["I can speak as to the difficulties encountered with the Ross Rifle, which was a Canadian, straight-pull bolt action rifle used at the start of WWI by the CEF:\n\nThe Ross was an incredibly accurate rifle, and was a fantastic hunting weapon, but the realities of trench warfare meant that the unreliability of the action became an issue.  When it became dirty or muddy, the Ross would misfire and the bolt - which had nothing to prevent it from flying backward - would oftentimes cause horrific injuries to the rifleman using it.  The Lee-Enfield, on the other hand, was a far more rugged and reliable rifle, and was quickly adopted by CEF units.  The Ross was still used by some CEF snipers who preferred the higher accuracy of the weapon, as they generally were able to take better care of their weapons then soldiers whose duties saw them constantly in the mud and muck of the trenches.\n\nMark Zuhelke's *Brave Battalion*, and Pierre Berton's *Marching to War* are both good popular histories of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in WWI, and both have sections dealing with the problematic nature of the Ross."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ai3ue3", "title": "Least Expensive Firearms of the American Civil War?", "selftext": "There are whole shelves of books dedicated to unique and exotic weapons of the Civil War, but one area that seems to receive less attention is the least expensive models. With the advent of mass manufacture and the need to arm and equip hundreds of thousands of men, what was the cheapest firearm to produce? What firearm showed up the least for repairs? What did soldiers in the field prefer for its simple design?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ai3ue3/least_expensive_firearms_of_the_american_civil_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeldvtx"], "score": [3], "text": ["For guns purchased in big numbers, rifled muskets were definitely  cheaper, cheaper to supply with ammunition and more easy to service than breech loading guns ( which maybe is what you mean by \"exotic\"). According to the Ordnance Dept's statement of purchases from 1861-1866, certainly the few million mostly Austrian rifled muskets imported by Herman Boker  &  Co. for the US War Dept.  were cheaper than the more standard Model 1855 or 1861 Springfield rifled muskets.  Springfield was deep into its quest to produce guns with interchangeable parts, and  it came at a cost: each Springfield cost the Ordnance Dept $19.52.  The  \"Lorenz\" rifled muskets were more varied in quality, fit and finish, and were around $13. I say, \"around\" because they first came with fixed simple sights that didn't allow change of elevation, and had to be reamed and rifled from .54 caliber to .58, if they were  to take standard Springfield ammunition.... and I am not sure how and when all that was applied to the cost. One [auction house  website says](_URL_0_)  that the ones fitted with the improved Enfield leaf sights were $15: but I don't know their sources ( though some collector has no doubt done an exhaustive work on the history of Lorenz rifled muskets, I don't have it).   But  the more expensive Springfield musket , with more interchangeable parts, would have been easiest to service.  If a Springfield needed a new lock, it could be simply screwed into place, while a new lock for a Lorenz ( assuming one was available)  might first need some fitting by an armorer. That was, of course, the idea behind interchangeable parts.\n\nAlong with buying  millions of Springfields and Lorenz muskets, the War Dept. discovered that, like buyers of cell phones and computers today, the best deals were for the stuff that was out of date.   They also bought  thousands of miscellaneous old guns,  some already in the US and some that were being dumped out of foreign arsenals at good prices. The Prussians had been winning wars with their Dreyse needle guns, and so it was to be expected that they would sell 81,652 very obsolete  \" smoothbore muskets\" to the US for just  $6.80 each.  The Model 1839 Potsdam musket was .72  caliber and could have used the same buck-and-ball loads that soldiers sometimes  used in the .69 caliber Model 1842 Harper's Ferry musket. But I don't know who got them, and if they were happy to have them: the German and Austrian guns often came with beech instead of walnut stocks, which added some weight for the soldier to carry on his shoulder. And if that shoulder had been feeling the repeated recoil of a .69 caliber buck-and-ball load, it might have been already a little sore.\n\nThe muzzle-loading rifled muskets were cheaper to buy, cheaper to supply with ammunition and  easier to service , but the ultimate economy was to raise the rate of fire per soldier.  Even in 1859 the Secretary of War would note that a soldier with a good breech-loading gun would be the equal to two, possibly three soldiers armed with muzzle-loading muskets. If one breech-loader cost even twice as much as a muzzle-loader ( a Sharps rifle would be $36) that one soldier would consume much less materiel than two:  need only half a tent, eat half the rations, wear out half the boots.\n\nFuller: The Breechloader in the Service\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://collegehillarsenal.com/austrian-m-1854-lorenz-boker-sample-2?tag=I&amp;sort=pd.name&amp;order=ASC&amp;page=7"]]}
{"q_id": "1tk3w2", "title": "Are \"king\" and \"sultan\" completely analogous titles? How would a high medieval king differ differ from a sultan of the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tk3w2/are_king_and_sultan_completely_analogous_titles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce8wwl3", "ce8yo4q", "ce96ulj"], "score": [144, 11, 5], "text": ["My indirect/incomplete answer is of a linguistic nature, but maybe it will be found useful/interesting. It should be noted that the Arabic word for king is not sultan (\u0633\u0644\u0637\u0627\u0646) but *malik* (\u0645\u0644\u0643).\n\nIn Arabic, nouns are (almost always) derived from verbs which go back to (almost always) three letter roots. \n\n* Sultan derives from the verb *salata* (\u0633-\u0644-\u0637) which means to give power or mastery over, or set up as overlord, etc. Sultan means power, might, strength, rule, reign, etc. This is the [definition](_URL_1_) of Sultan found in Hans Wehr (4th edition) on page 493. \n\n* King derives from the same three letters that make the noun, m-l-k (\u0645-\u0644-\u0643). The verb *malaka* (\u0645\u0644\u0643) can mean a variety of things including: to take in possession, take over, acquire, seize, dominate, **control, rule, reign, exercise power, etc.** This is part of the [definition](_URL_0_) of the verb *malaka* found in Hans Wehr (4th edition) on page 1081. (verbs in Arabic can be morphed into patterns which affect their meaning, pattern 1 of *malaka* goes on for nearly an entire page!)\n\nWhile quite similar in meaning, they are somewhat different. Oman, an absolute monarchy, uses the word Sultan for its ruler and its official name is the Sultanate of Oman. Its neighbor, Saudi Arabia, is also an absolute monarchy but it calls its ruler King and its official name is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.\n\nAs for how would a high medieval king differ from a sultan, that is beyond my expertise, but I thought it would be useful/interesting to know the Arabic word for king is not sultan (despite being similar in meaning).", "Historically, up until the time of the Seljuk Turks, the Muslim world was ruled by Caliphs.  When the Turks came into the picture they couldn't really claim legitimacy as Caliphs so instead they got the title Sultan and  would exercise \"temporal\" authority while paying nominal allegiance to the Caliph who exercised \"spiritual\" authority.\n\nInterestingly, this could be considered a historical example of separation of church and state in Islam.", "Actually, Sultan is from the Turkish for \"holder of power\" and was a kind-of second in command under the Caliph. As the Turks took over the Abbasid dynasty, the title came to mean the true leader while the Caliph remained a figurehead - technically the leader and defender of the Faithful, but nothing with real power - in fact, the Turks blinded a Caliph and forced him to beg in the streets of Baghdad.\n\nSultan became nearly analogous to \"Emperor\" under the Ottoman Empire; by the time the Ottomans were on the scene, the two titles had become linked and remained - sort of - until the fall of the Empire in the aftermath of WWI."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/bNEPuJy.png", "http://i.imgur.com/FoeaOUn.png"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "90x527", "title": "The 1934 World Cup was held in Mussolini's Italy and the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany. Was there any controversy over the awarding of these prestigious events?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/90x527/the_1934_world_cup_was_held_in_mussolinis_italy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2tt86p"], "score": [50], "text": ["I can't speak to the World Cup, but I can dwell a little on the Olympics. This is a slight modification to an earlier response.\n\nFor the 1936 Olympics, there was absolutely controversy, resulting in protests and calls to boycott. In the lead up to the games - which had been awarded to Berlin prior to the NAzis taking over in '33 - there were concerns expressed at the international level, but the German organizers made minor concessions in a few places, such as including two 'token Jews' in the German contingent, and backed down from the most serious hurdle, the threat to prevent Jewish athletes from other countries from competing, which did have the potential to see the games taken away. Promises were also made that anti-Semitics rhetoric would be toned down, generally, for the period. This was enough to assuage the IOC and Germany kept the games. \n\nAt the national level, in the US at least there continued to be opposition to participation, and some high-profile members of the athletic community called for a boycott as well as many labor organizations. But Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee, would have none of it, not only denying that there was discrimination against Jewish athletes in Germany, but engaging in anti-Semitic rhetoric himself (and he would join the IOC in '36, to boot). After the games, he would appear at a German-American Bund rally in late 1936, praising Germany and her hosting - unsurpassed in display of \"the Olympic spirit\" and dogwhistling those who had tried to keep the US out as a \"vociferous minority, highly organized and highly finance\", apparently a position which would survive the war, even, in 1971 calling the Berlin games \"the finest in modern history\" and *still* denigrating 'Jewish' agitation against them. Anyways though, with Brundage clearly in support of the games, it was unlikely America would skip them, and by early 1936, members of the Committee who had been against it found themselves being kicked out, mostly on quite specious pretexts.\n\nEven this was somewhat far in terms of discussion at the national level. In Canada, while workers' groups and other Leftist organizations protested involvement, such as through picketing Port Arthur Bearcats games, the team which had been chosen to represent the country, the Canadian Communist Party had been one of the more vocal, giving it little credence, and the Canadian Olympic Committee took little notice of it, themselves influenced by the British Olympic Committee, which had shown little concern either. The most notable opposition there, coming from the British Worker's Sports Association had resulted in a vote by the Amateur Athletics Association for a boycott that was defeated 200-8, essentially ending the matter there. In Canada, one small victory was scored the night before the Winter delegation departed, their ship being vandalized in the night, and sailing with several prominent anti-Fascist slogans on it.\n\nBut while the American Olympic Committee - and other national bodies - might have in the end decided to attend, that didn't mean of course that all athletes were willing to throw politics to the wind and go to Germany. As already touched on, from the very start, the most organized opposition had come from labor groups and Jewish organizations. As a result, there were several 'alternative Olympics' organized for the summer of 1936. In the United States, the World Labor Athletic Carnival was held in August, a two day event timed to occur on the last two days of the games in Berlin, and jointly organized by the Jewish Labor Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union. Additionally, less direct competition existed in the Worker Olympiad, which had been held before. In fact, two different versions existed, one run by the Second International, and the other by the Third International, but they had agreed to combine and host a single one jointly in 1937 in Antwerp, which while not a direct competition with the Olympics, a cooperation spurred by the rise of Nazi power.\n\nThe Winter Olympics too saw some counter-games, such as a festival sponsored by a Norwegian workers' sports group, but they were small, and lacked any major international prominence.\n\nThe most prominent however, and the most direct challenge to the 'real' Olympics, was the People's Olympiad, which was planned to be held in Barcelona (which had lost its bid for the '36 games back in '31), and openly anti-Fascist in its character and billing. In the lead-up to the games, several additional sporting events were organized by the CCEP (Catalan Spots Committee), who had come up with the idea, and the COOP (Organization Committee for the Popular Olympiad), which they created to run the actual event. The first event, a soccer tournament held in April, was named after the German Communist Ernst Thaelmann, a quite obvious and pointed signal of what the aim of the group was. \n\nDelegations from 22 countries - and an 'Emigrant Jewish' team - sent roughly 6,000 athletes to Spain to compete, and 25,000 more people traveled to Barcelona to attend as spectators. Originally planned to start on July 22, so many athletes were attending that several more days were added, but somewhat ironically, the July 19th opening ceremonies never kicked off, as instead, since the day prior the city found itself awash in gunfire, with the opening salvos of the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona itself saw the rebels quickly defeated, and on July 21st the fighting was quieted down enough for the athletes who were still in the city to parade to the stadium, but that was the extent of the games. Most athletes left on the first available ship, although a few remained to become some of the first foreign volunteers in the conflict.\n\nShapiro, Edward S. \"The World Labor Athletic Carnival of 1936: An American Anti-Nazi Protest.\" American Jewish History 74, no. 3 (1985): 255-73.\n\nPujadas, Xavier and Carles Santacana. \"The Popular Olympic Games, Barcelona 1936: Olympians and Antifascists.\" International Review for the Sociology of Sport 27, no. 2 (1992): 139-148.\n\nPhysick, Ray. \"The Olimpiada Popular: Barcelona 1936, Sport and Politics in an Age of War, Dictatorship and Revolution.\" Sport in History 37, no. 1 (2017): 51-75.\n\nKidd, Bruce. \"Canadian Opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Germany.\" Sport in Society 16, no. 4 (2013): 425-438."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cywxa5", "title": "How common were friendships and protection between those of different religions in medieval Europe?", "selftext": "For examples, if Catholics and Jews in central Germany were neighbours, would religion keeping them separate be the norm, or was it reasonably likely they'd form a friendship? Was it relatively common for Protestants to hide Catholic friends during purges?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cywxa5/how_common_were_friendships_and_protection/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eyvcm4x"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is a fantastic question, and one which I can't properly answer by myself. But I got a message from the mods that I might be interested, and I am, so I'll say a few things that come to mind.\n\nFirst of all I consider the protestant reformation (started 1517, give or take) to be after the medieval period. Small quibble in diction and not part of my answer. Also quasi-prostestant or proto-protestant groups like the Waldensians (founded 1173, give or take) existed well before the reformation, so I guess my quibble is pointless.\n\nNow you're probably wondering if the \"Catholics\" (things tend to be defined through contrast and conflict so, even though cognates of \"Catholic\" were used as early as the second century I wouldn't define the medieval Catholic church in the same way that I would define the Catholic church after the council of Trent (1545-1563, their main response to the reformation)) you're wondering if the Catholics and the Waldensians were ever friends. Well honestly now I'm curious too, but I'm not sure where I would look.\n\nFor a more extreme example of religious difference I do know where I would look. The Cathars or Cathari were a gnostic sect in southern France. Stamping them out was the start of the Inquisition (1184). There was even a crusade within European lands to kill them (the Albegensian Crusade, 1209-1229). I have not read the court proceedings that the inquisitors made, I don't even know if or how many have been translated into English (or other modern languages). I do know that they were incredibly one sided and reveal a basic lack of due process. Anyway, I would expect that some \"Catholics\" were brought in on suspicion due to fraternizing with known Cathars. But the extent of \"Catholic\" influence in this region before the crusade wasn't that great to begin with (they made an inquisition and a crusade to assert control after all).\n\nAnyway, this hasn't been helpful yet. Allow me to make a point by analogy and then give a few concrete points. If I remembered a source for this I'd give it but it's been a few years since my undergrad. Anyway my senior project was on marriage and love (and Abelard) and one of the persistent questions regarding marriage in this period was if the lower classes got officially married at all. In fact some household servants might not have coupled. So for instance there are manorial censuses (few and far between) which recount how many serfs and how many servants are on an estate, and every once in a while it will say something like \"cook and his wife\". Does this mean most cooks didn't have wives? That the other servants listed didn't have wives? Many of the servants listed were women. Did the male servants and female servants couple? How often and for how long? Anyway there are no answers to these questions, only rare examples which might be the norm or might be the exceptions. So I'd suspect the question of if a \"Catholic\" serf and a Waldensian serf were friends would be equally hard if not harder to answer.\n\nBy the way, if you go further back from the period I'm talking about you run into pagans living next to Christians, and being that they were often kin they tended to get along (except when they didn't). I.e. a Christian would travel to a German tribe or somewhere and start converting, until a chieftain or king or whomever was in charge converted and then everyone was baptized. But the Roman See had very little influence at this stage, and these people weren't about to abandon their relations based on new conversions.\n\nAnyway, here's something concrete I can contribute. The philospher/abbot Abelard (an extraordinary man who shouldn't be used as an example of a norm for anything whatsoever) wrote a book titled \"Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian\" which, among other things, shows that he probably never himself had a dialog with Jew. I'll note that he was a teacher in Paris in the circles that would eventually birth the University system, so he wasn't always holed up in an abbey away from other religions.\n\nOne last point. European Jews developed dialects of Yiddish during these times. I'd take that as evidence that they were mostly segregated from their Christian neighbors.\n\nI've contributed very little here. The only concrete thing I've said is that Peter Abelard probably didn't hang out with Jews, but that signifies very little. But I would like a username mention or reply if someone has a better answer than mine.\n\nGreat question, sorry I couldn't help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13bym6", "title": "How \"serious\" were religious beliefs in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, and what role did they actually play in everyday life?", "selftext": "A few times now I've heard claims stating that the Greeks didn't \"really\" believe in their Gods, that they treated them more like metaphors for human life, that references in classic philosophic works (especially Plato) are mostly allegorical in nature... and so on.\n\nIs there any truth to this? I figure that the belief must have been \"real\" in pre-Homeric times at least - assuming that Homer *roughly* marks the transition from archaic to classic times, from mythology to anthropocentrism (or even \"enlightenment\", Horkheimer/Adorno) - so I'm mostly interest in the classical era here.\n\nThanks! And sorry for the bad English.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13bym6/how_serious_were_religious_beliefs_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c72m6rg", "c72mhko", "c72mqmg", "c72nv6z", "c72ob31", "c72sniw", "c72sx97"], "score": [160, 34, 22, 4, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["You might find these previous discussions useful:\n\n* [Were there religious fundamentalists in ancient Greece and Rome?](_URL_3_)\n* [Did Romans really believe that Emperors were gods?](_URL_2_)\n* [What did religion mean in ancient greece and rome?](_URL_0_)\n* [Were there religious cults in ancient Rome and Greece?](_URL_4_)\n* [Greek Mythology in Greek Society](_URL_1_)\n\nNinja edit: the short answer is: \"serious, but not particularly important in everyday life\". The Olympian gods were primarily for *state* religion.\n\nNot-so-ninja edit: to put it another way, religion was more about the *observance* than about the *belief*. People didn't generally have a hugh *personal investment* in state gods. Having said that, blaspheming divinities would doubtless have repercussions: example scenario. You go to an agrarian community and blaspheme one of the Olympians. Educated people might still be willing to talk to you, but most people would steer clear in case they got caught in the crossfire when the vengeance of the gods caught up with you. However, blaspheme a *local* divinity, like a local hero or nymphs who had a local shrine, and you could expect to see some serious visceral anger: that's when you'd be run out of town with pitchforks.", "Seneca says this:\n\n > We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. \n\nLetter 41. On the god within us\n_URL_1_\n\n > XII. Neither earth, nor sky, nor the whole fabric of our universe, though it be controlled by the hand of God, it will not always preserve its present order; it will be thrown from its course in days to come.\n\n > XIV. To our minds, this process means perishing, for we behold only that which is nearest; our sluggish mind, under allegiance to the body, does not penetrate to bournes beyond. Were it not so, the mind would endure with greater courage its own ending and that of its possessions, if only it could hope that life and death, like the whole universe about us, go by turns, that whatever has been put together is broken up again, that whatever has been broken up is put together again, and that the eternal craftsmanship of God, who controls all things is working at this task.\n\n > XVI. Let great souls comply with God's wishes, and suffer unhesitatingly whatever fate the law of the universe ordains; for the soul at death is either sent forth into a better life, destined to dwell with deity amid greater radiance and calm, or else, at least, without suffering any harm to itself, it will be mingled with nature again, and will return to the universe.\n\n\nSeneca On the Supreme Good\n_URL_0_\n\nSounds pretty serious to me. You may be confused that he is saying \"god\" and isn't saying \"Jupiter\". Jupiter comes from \"Zeu pater\" which means \"god-father\". Thus \"God\". So, Jupiter they took very seriously. He was the supreme God and they meant it.\n\nMany of the lower tier gods were not taken as seriously. Especially folk gods like Priapus which don't seem to be taken seriously at all.\n\nThe term \"god\" was also a bit of a catch-all term. Today, we use stronger terms to delineate the difference between God, messiah, Holy Ghost, angels, guardian angels, guiding spirits, demons, and saints. \n\nSo it may seem like they don't take their gods as seriously when people are deified and made \"gods\". But a deified person was nowhere near comparable to God Jupiter any more than the Pope is comparable to modern God. \n\nThe controversy over Caligula's deification also indicates how seriously they took there religion. As well as The Pumpkinfication of Claudius, which is a satire of the politicization of religion.", "I definitely recommend looking at the threads rosemary85 linked to, as plenty of people in those threads explain better than I will. While Plato does use metaphor heavily, one thing to remember when reading people such as Plato, Lucretius, and Seneca is that the works of such authors represent the works of the intellectual elite, and that many of their ideas were controversial. The same is also true in the case of the authors of plays.\n\nIn short, depending of course on the person, religion played a large role in the fabric of everyday life for ancient Greeks and Romans, especially peasants - the Roman calendar, for example, had about 1/4 of the days of the year devoted to religious festivals. Everything from the eating of meat to the use of the hearth to sports events to plays were steeped in religious ritual. Cities consulted oracles before going to war or making other important decisions, and agricultural events such as sowing and reaping or drinking the season's first wine were accompanied by ritual. The ancient Greeks were much more superstitious than they are often given credit for, certainly more so than our modern society. One thing to note about ancient religion, though, is it that it was very works-based. The important part of ancient religion was not the conviction of a person's heart, but the actions performed.\n\nAnother thing that I think reveals the depth of the religious convictions of the ancients is mystery cults and other non-state rituals, some of which were extremely popular (for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries). ", "Are we including the Eastern Roman empire as well? Because pre-Theodosius Roman religious belief was an entirely different beast than the Orthodox Christian fundamentalism that dominated Byzantine society.", "Some good stuff has been said already, so, while it's slightly off-topic, I'd like to clarify that Homer is so-called Iron Age (or at the end of it). Archaic comes after him and Classical even later than that.\n\nI can't speak with a lot of surety on the differences between the ages, but *in* Classical times, you had people like Euripides writing. It's impossible to say for sure, but he's often considered fairly... agnostic. He has some real religious bombs like Bacchae, which show for whatever reason a very direct, powerful, and literal belief. Did he hold those beliefs? Maybe not at all. Maybe only at this time in his life. You also have plays like Suppliant Women, which are very flat concerning the actual gods but have an extremely powerful undertone of \"divine laws,\" really the ancient, underlying, universal rites (proper funerals, etc.) which were *definitely* important to these people in everyday life, and can be intellectually detached from the freaky-ass myths which Euripides may have disbelieved.", "Religion, as stated elsewhere in the thread, was intertwined with politics.  It was not uncommon for upper class Romans to doubt the existence of the gods, but it was effectively unheard of for them not to perform the propitiations and rituals surrounding the state religion.\n\nRomans faithfully carrying out their religions and moral duty was seen as THE reason that they won in wars, and the like.  They were favored by the gods due to their faithfulness.\n\nAn example that most Roman historians know and love... one of the Claudii famously became angry prior to a naval battle with the Carthaginians when the sacred chickens wouldn't eat the sacred chicken feed in the proper manner (they were supposedly seasick, which should not be shocking).  He had them thrown overboard, declaring \"If they will not eat, then they shall drink\".  \n\nClaudius lost that battle.  I don't imagine that bit of gross sacrilege went over well with his crews. ", "Seneca the Younger said something like \"Religion is thought by the common people to be true, the educated to be false, and by the rulers to be useful\", for what that's worth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9slp/what_did_religion_mean_in_ancient_greece_and_rome/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t0dk4/greek_mythology_in_greek_society/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11h6ox/did_romans_really_believe_that_emperors_were_gods/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vbol3/were_there_religious_fundamentalists_in_ancient/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tam1d/were_there_religious_cults_in_ancient_rome_and/"], ["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_71", "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_41"], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1mcl5h", "title": "Has any violent international conflict been successfully pacified by transferring aggressions to a sporting event or other non-lethal competition?", "selftext": "I'm aware of a few competitions, existing for the sake of sport and sport-related sentiment rather than for broader cultural and political ends, that are considered historically impotant due to the emotional resonance with which one of more of the competitors imbued the contest.\n\nExamples that come to mind are the [1936 Summer Olympics](_URL_2_) and the defeat of [Max Schmeling by Joe Louis in 1938] (_URL_1_), and the 1980 '[Miracle on Ice](_URL_3_).' A leading interpretation of the [Mesoamerican Ballgame](_URL_0_) provides a more explicit example of an athletic competition serving as a proxy for war. \n\nAre there cases in which the tensions simmering beneath seemingly inevitable violence were rerouted into another sort of competition between the rivals? How about a cycle of violence or long tradition of war that was ended in a similar way? I imagine that this occurs on much smaller scales as well, seeing as groups that support competing teams (schools, cities, neighborhoods, private clubs, religious organizations) can also find themselves in violent conflict with other such entities. \n\nI'm also wondering if the (hypothetically) bloodshed-avoiding powers of competition aren't limited to physical ones; has a chess match, staring contest, army-sized game of 'capture the flag,' Goldeneye/Mario Kart biathlon, competitive engineering challenge, rush to break the land speed record, or flugtag ever kept the guns in their holsters?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mcl5h/has_any_violent_international_conflict_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc7yslp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Google has failed me, but I recall hearing about two villages in Central Asia that used to be violent rivals, but now have a regular tradition of playing against each other in [Buzkashi](_URL_0_) matches. Anyone know anything about this, or am I completely making stuff up?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Proxy_for_warfare", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Louis_vs._Max_Schmeling", "http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005680", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_Ice"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzkashi"]]}
{"q_id": "25ohmv", "title": "Was there truly a dark side to Winston Churchill like this article suggests?", "selftext": "_URL_0_\n\nHave these quotes ever been refuted or proven true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25ohmv/was_there_truly_a_dark_side_to_winston_churchill/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chjdxj8"], "score": [6], "text": ["I hate that \"poison gas\" quote. It is always taken out of context, and it is just a cheap kind of character assassination because it sounds like advocating for deadly poison like mustard gas, when in fact it was _humanitarian_ idea: using _tear gas instead of artillery shells_. You could say Churchill wanted to invent modern tear gas type riot control _instead_ of actually murdering people. Which is a humane thing IMHO.\n\n\"It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases: gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected ... \"\n\nStatement as president of the Air Council, War Office Departmental Minute (1919-05-12); Churchill Papers 16/16, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.\n\nNote: lachrymatory gas = tear gas.\n\n(I am not sure about he rest but it largely can be summed up as racism, which was fairly normal in that age. While mass murder is an absolute evil in every age, racism without the explicit intent to do large scale harm is more of a cultural thing, a relative thing: it was basically normal back then. We condemn it now, but then again we too believe in things people in that age would condemn. There is hardly any historical figure who never agreed with ideas that today would be seen as horribly racist or homophobic or misogynist or stuff like that. Cultures and morals change.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14p3a0", "title": "Was there any important historial texts or artifacts lost or destroyed by the devastation of WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14p3a0/was_there_any_important_historial_texts_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7f49ip", "c7f6bzf", "c7f7rh9", "c7f9610", "c7f9nln", "c7f9ssd", "c7fa4kj", "c7fb92t", "c7fc4z1", "c7feg0k"], "score": [3, 7, 7, 6, 10, 3, 5, 4, 5, 3], "text": ["Oh yes. In my field for example, there was a set of 5 matched ancient boats, whose name escapes me at the moment, several of which were destroyed in the bombings. \n", "The Nazis themselves flat-out destroyed a lot of what they considered to be \"degenerate\" art. Another specific artifact I can think of are [the Nemi Ships](_URL_1_). Lastly, many interesting historical buildings were completely destroyed. Some have been rebuilt, but others haven't. Some, like the [Kaiser Wilhelm Church](_URL_0_), have been left in partial ruin as a memorial.  ", "Oh, I'd say pretty much anything that had been held in the city centre of Dresden, Germany was well destroyed, and from what I understand it was a pretty old and well known cultural centre. ", "The [Amber Room](_URL_0_) comes to mind. The Germans took it as loot, and it's whereabouts became lost in the chaos of war. It's similar to other stories of buried \"Nazi Gold\" but I can't remember any other credible examples right now.", "The loss of [Montecassino](_URL_0_) always makes me sad.  It was rebuilt, but, who knows how many details were lost?  How many little etchings, engravings, how many evidences of hands across a knob or feet shuffled across a floorway?  How many lost or secret passages, nooks, crannies?  How many remnants of how many lives over hundreds and hundreds of years?  How many stowed-away documents, even?", "Probably not what you are looking for but many of the divisional histories of German units were destroyed during the course of the war, which often makes assembling a complete history difficult if not impossible. One of my favorite books is *Soldiers of Destruction* which is a history of the Totenkopf division, unfortunately much of the divisions history post 1943 were destroyed in an air raid and as a result the final two years of the division's history is rather brief. Still an excellent read however for what is in many ways the most infamous of the Nazi divisions.", "The treasury that Schliemann found at Troy is perhaps the most famous example, although luckily it got better. It had been largely acquired by the Royal Museum of Berlin, where it remained until it \"mysteriously\" vanished in 1945 after Soviet forces took the city. I say \"mysteriously\" because there was no official record of where it went, and nobody really knew where it was--although I doubt anyone didn't think it was in Russia.\n\nSure enough, it (mostly) resurfaced in Moscow in the early 90s. This means that the absurd legal wrangling over which of the four (and counting) nations with a stake in it have the strongest claim.", "The archives of Naples were burned, in 1943. What makes it worse is that it was not the accidental result of bombing, but a deliberate action by the Germans, as a reprisal for the killing of German officers by the partisans.\n\nThe Germans 'gratuitously destroyed virtually all the medieval documents in what, till then, had been one of the most magnificent archives in Europe'. David Abulafia, *Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor*, p. 321. ", "The [whole of Warsaw's old town](_URL_0_) was flattened during the uprising of 1944. And this was deliberate.\n", "I'd like to add one little tidbit, because I think OP would find it interesting.  One thing that soldiers on both sides of the battle found fascinating was the resilience of the Medieval architecture of the cathedrals many cities had.  Oftentimes everything surrounding the cathedrals was smashed to bits, but the cathedrals themselves often only sustained superficial damage.  Quite a testament to the people that designed and built them.\n\n[Saint Lo](_URL_3_)\n\n[Cologne](_URL_1_)\n\n[Cherbourg](_URL_2_)\n\n[...but not always.  Kirche in Berlin, modern picture.](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ged%C3%A4chtniskirche", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_ships"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cassino"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw"], ["http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qAV04eNGiK4/TeeVsOGEbtI/AAAAAAAAAo8/w49vMimv4qM/s1600/Berlin%2B-%2BKaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirche.jpg", "https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRkyKD-BYassFfP870auLYT2MrCDMwv-_ItfkEDnA9mWE04-Ojf", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/WWII,_Europe,_Cherbourg,_France,_Civilians,_%22Scene_from_ruins_of_Notre_Dame_des_Voeux.%22_-_NARA_-_196290.jpg", "http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-A-StLo/img/USA-A-StLo-p122.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "20t7mr", "title": "Napoleon once said, \"An army marches on its stomach\". How did he keep his army fed during a campaign?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20t7mr/napoleon_once_said_an_army_marches_on_its_stomach/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg6iwqq", "cg6iy4j", "cg6l5rm", "cg7b7ti"], "score": [56, 26, 6, 2], "text": ["I recall a similar question being asked late last year, and it led me to discover the fascinating \"Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier.\"\n\nIt said that the soldiers in Napoleon's army were expected to purchase their own provisions from local merchants.  This practice worked well in Western and Central Europe, but once the march on Moscow entered Eastern Poland, the massive armies found less and less to eat.\n\nDuring the hot summer march, the soldiers stole and pillaged whatever food supplies they could find from local villages, although they often went days without water or food.  The book describes how Moscow had an abundant supply of food, and many of the soldiers knew that starvation was coming once they left the city during the onset of winter.\n\nDuring the winter retreat from Russia, the soldiers ate anything they could find, which often meant resorting to eating their horses.  The book's author, Jakob Walter, survived on oats, fat, cabbage, dead horse and hog meat, and literally anything that was edible, in order to survive.\n\nI'm not an expert on the subject, but the book gives a very detailed first hand account of the life of an ordinary conscript during Napoleonic times.  I strongly recommend it.", "Safe food meant strong troops and power to Napoleon, who noted aptly that \u201can army travels on its stomach.\u201d His troops suffered more from hunger and scurvy than combat. In 1795, to be sure his men had safe rations, the French government under Napoleon offered a 12,000-franc prize to anyone who could come up with a food preservation method. \n\nNicolas Appert, the Parisian confectioner and distiller who ultimately claimed the prize, spent more than a decade discovering that boiled foods placed in airtight glass containers would not spoil. In 1810, Peter Durand, a British merchant who received the patent for the tin containers that were forerunners of the cans used today, further refined the concept, although controversy remains about that part of canning history, according to an article in the Institute of Food Technologies\u2019 May 2007 issue of Food Technology. \n\nAppert\u2019s discovery provided the first reliable method for preserving many different types of foods for extended periods of time so that they could be used by troops on deployment. Some even say the method gave Napoleon a strategic advantage. \nSource: _URL_0_\n------ \n \nNapoleon, as an artillery officer, was well versed in the importance of logistics in keeping an Army in the fight. On top of encouraging the development of canning, he also kept his armies from advancing faster than supply caravans could support.", "/u/Teenage_Handmodel is correct. Generally the French advantage was in foraging, where they would buy, hunt, or scavenge for food on campaign in order to keep logistics simple. While this sounds very simple, it was a very different thing.\n\nBetween 1648 till 1792, war was a scientific endeavor where bloodshed could be minimized and civilian pain kept at a minimal amount. Thus food was kept in supply wagons as an army marched. While foraging was one topic brought up during the interwar years (1763 to 1789), it wasn't until the Republic was engaging in multiple and costly wars that foraging was brought back.", "To recommend a good secondary source on the subject, you should take a look at [*Supplying War*](_URL_0_) by Martin van Creveld."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.foodquality.com/details/article/1023773/The_Father_of_Food_Preservation.html?tzcheck=1&amp;tzcheck=1"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Supplying-War-Logistics-Wallenstein-Patton/dp/0521546575"]]}
{"q_id": "3izxcb", "title": "How common and/or acceptable was conversion to Judaism in the 19th and early 20th century?", "selftext": "My understanding is that Jewish communities enjoyed some degree of freedom in the low countries, the US, the UK, and British settler colonies during this time (compared to what they had experienced in the past).  There was certainly contact between Jews and Christians in these areas, but I haven't seen any sources mentioning Christians converting to Judaism, only the other way around.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3izxcb/how_common_andor_acceptable_was_conversion_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cul93v9"], "score": [6], "text": ["I can't talk about the US, settler colonies and the rest of Europe, but conversions were definitely happening in Britain- usually as the community bonds from immigrant communities weakened. The majority of converts then, and possibly even now, were women, who converted before marrying their Jewish husband- and for many Christian British makes, the conversion process would have been especially off putting as a circumcision would be required. There are records of mostly Askhenazim conversions- the first convert within a British Sephardic community was in 1877. Previously, converts may have gone abroad for conversion, however. \n\nAn early conversion, the first conversion known in Plymouth, was outside of your time frame, around 1785, the convert was named Abraham the Proselyte. Why he converted, we can't know, but he had a Jewish son named Joseph that year, and it's possible he converted to marry a Jewish woman or the building Plymouth Jewisj community allowed him more exposure to the faith and community which inspired him to convert. However, the first marriage between a born Jew and a Jewish convert to take place in that city which was entered in the Marriage Registers was in 1890. Before then, converts and their spouses would have had a civil marriage before a religious ceremony which was purely symbolic without legal effect.\n\nWe have records of converts within the 19th century across Britain, for example, through 'A List of Converts to Judaism in the City of London, 1809-1816, ed. Barnett A. Elzas', as well as through the London Beth Din records, mentions of conversions in letters to the Chief Rabbi and so on. An idea of a typical convert would be that of Miriam, daughter of Abraham, who converted in Exeter in 1810. 'Bet Abraham' or daughter of Abraham was the patronymic used for converts to Judaism. We know this as it was recorded in a letter to the then Chief Rabbi and it was clearly an event of significance, as all conversions are. Within three years, a family of Jews, also within Exeter, converted within the same congregation. Although we cannot know the full details of their conversion, reasons could be purely religious with all members being converts, or perhaps the father was Jewish, and therefore the mother and children, who needed to convert as they were not born Jewish under Jewish law, converted later. Just a year later, we have records of a Rebecca (daughter of Abraham) who along with her four and two year old daughters, Rachel and Leah, converted to Judaism in September 1814, as she was married to Menahem Mendel Ben Ze'ev Wolf, in Exeter again. Within four years, we have a minimum of two families converting alongside Miriam. The process of conversion is and was a long and difficult process, taking years to complete.\n\nBut the majority of conversions we probably don't have English records for, as they took place abroad- in the Netherlands. Why? Perhaps it was easier to convert as local congregations might have been against converts or at least unwelcoming as some congregations are today, or perhaps it was out of fear of reprisals. Although Britain was certainly less anti Semitic than, for example, Eastern Europe, and you could not expect pogroms or anything similar, that doesn't mean there was no anti semitism. An example would be Martha, the wife of Zvi Ben Isaac, who converted in Holland, the Netherlands, in 1872, before they married. Conversions of course did occur inthe Uk, especially under Solomon Hirschell of. London, up until 1835 especially. The Netherlands was traditionally an accepting and safe place for a Jew, with a strong Jewish community.\n\nMore on British converts, searching the pre 1851 database on JewishGen, there is an Isaac Barnett, born 1801, dying 1851, in the City of London, who has 'Abraham our Father' under the 'father' section of his ID and underwent baptism. He was therefore a convert, married to a Jewish spouse and buried in a Jewish cemetery. On the 1851 Anglo-Jewry database there are 201 known converts to Judaism or suspected converts to Judaism, including Isaac Barnett. This is not an exhaustive list of those who had died recently or were converts and alive and well in 1851, there were probably many more.\n\nI have got an interesting story of converts from outside Britain- and that's from Russia. In 1876, in the small village of Solodniki, 163 villagers converted to Judaism and left for Israel. There are no surviving records of how they converted- presumably in a nearby Jewish community- or of any reprisals the local Jewish communities faced, although the converts themselves faced discrimination and persecution. Supposedly, Abraham Kurakin was ringing the church bells in the village on Christmas Eve when he received a 'divine message' telling him to become Jewish and to convert. People from the village gathered round and heard his story and clearly were convinced, as a total of 37 families converted, including the Kurakin family, before eventually leaving to settle in the Lower Galilee, modern Israel.\n\nWithin Israel, they weren't wholly accepted. Many born Jews disliked or didn't trust them, and they were nicknamed Subbotniks, meaning observers of the Sabbath, forming their own community. Their descendants kept quiet about the conversions and integrated within the community, but the history of their families was rarely or never spoken about, which shows a fear of being unwelcome or not being accepted within the Jewish community.\n\nAnother interesting anecdote is about conversions to Judaism in 20th century Western Europe under. Nazi rule. Yeah, Nazi rule. In 1941, in the Netherlands, a chairman at a forum of Chief Rabbis talked about the influx of applications for conversions, specifically in Amsterdam, with demand existing 'in other regions, as well'. The majority of the forum were opposed to accepting converts- Rabbi Levisohn in particular was recorded as saying to accept converts would be a 'mistake', especially considering the 'German legislation' (the invasion of the Netherlands had happened a year previously and anti Semitic laws were in place and rigid). The chairman is recorded as saying 'the general tendency is to accept very few converts'.\n\nIn Eastern Europe, Jews could expect to face reprisals and attacks after conversions. Perhaps the most famous Eastern European convert to Judaism was outside your time frame, in the late eighteenth century, but the reason I mention it is that the story became especially popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which can tell us about Jewish attitudes to conversions- and their fears of Christian attitudes. Graf Potocki was supposedly the son of Duke, who was a 'ger tsedek', meaning a righteous convert, along with his friend, Zaremba, who also converted. Most of the story is probably legend.\n\nPotocki studied at an academy in France, when he met a Jewish student who was studying the Torah. Interested, he, along with Zaremba, quit the academy to study alongside the Jew. They were good Polish-Lithuanian Catholics- until they began questioning the validity of Judaism after learning about the Jewish faith. Supposedly, Potocki left to visit Rome, to try and renew his Christianity, but upon discovering the corruption rife within the Papal court, he gave up- and decided to convert. He left for Amsterdam, a safe place for Jewish converts, and underwent the process to become a convert. Potocki left to travel Europe- and disappeared.\n\nZaremba had not gone with him to Rome, instead returning to Poland, marrying a noble daughter, promising to join Potocki in Amsterdam for conversion. When he heard of the disappearance of his friend, Zaremba rushed to Amsterdam with his wife and young son- converting to Judaism along with his wife and child. Potocki and Zaremba later met up and left together to Israel. \n\nBut the reason why this legend became so popular was to happen a bit later. Potocki decided to return to Lithuania, where he was quickly arrested and charged with apostasy. Quickly they realised he was Potocki- the missing son of a nobleman. Lithuanian nobles and clergy tried to 'save' him by making him renounce. Judaism and return to Catholicism, but he refused- and was ultimately convicted and burned to death as punishment. Supposedly, the houses of those who had brought wood to lay for the fire were burnt to the ground in holy vengeance- an attractive ending to the story of the local Jews, for sure. According to folklore, you can find Potocki, known by his title Ger Tsedek, in the Jewish cemetery in Vilna (Vilnius).\n\nThe small details developed in the nineteenth century, being mentioned in Jewish literature, told in local folkloric stories, with a known Hebrew, Polish and Yiddish manuscript, dating from the early 19th century, 1841 and 1913 respectively, and there were books based off it- and a popular play by Alter-Sholem Kacyzne, called *Dukus*, in the early 20th century.\n\nAnyway, to sum up, attitudes to converts to Judaism could be somewhat hostile within the Jewish community, and were also somewhat hostile outside of the Jewish community, although less so in Holland. I wouldn't say they were completely accepted within Jewish communities or outside Jewish communities (especially those who converted under Nazism...) and were probably not very common, but were also definitely not unheard of.\n\nMy sources mainly come from the PHC Marriage Register, The Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People, and the *Jewish communities series* by Israel Cohen about Vilna.\n\nSome sources easily accessible at libraries etc about converts to Judaism would be *Sketches of Jewish Life and History* by Gersoni, with a whole sectioned dedicated to the 'Converted Nobleman' story above, along with *Noble Soul: The Life and Legend of Vilna Ger Tzedek County Walenty Potocki* by Joseph H. Prouser, *Halakhah and Practice* by Menachem Finkelstein and *Holy Mystics: Jewish and Christian Dissent in Eastern Europe* by Glen Dynner."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mqbjg", "title": "Bulgaria's Military Role in WWII?", "selftext": "I know they had a few naval skirmishes with the Soviets in the Black Sea, but they actually do something major with their military other than occupy parts of Greece from 1941 to 1944? (I'm not meaning to offend anyone, I'm just inquiring as to what purpose their military served.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mqbjg/bulgarias_military_role_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm6ruu2", "cm70wrr"], "score": [5, 7], "text": ["The interesting thing about Bulgaria in WW2 is that they did not declare war on the USSR. So unlike Germany's other allies (like Romania and Hungary) they did not send troops to fight in the east.\n\nBulgaria did declare war on the UK and US, but geography meant that they were not involved with any fighting against these nations.\n\nWith the German position in the Balkans collapsing, the USSR declared war on Bulgaria in September 1944 and quickly overran the country, (effectively) taking it out of the war.\n\n", "I am not an expert on WW2 or Bulgaria at all but recently Simeon II of Bulgaria, former Tsar of Bulgaria made several interview in various French radio stations and I listened to all of them.\n\nBulgaria's role during WW2 mostly is due to Tsar Boris III's politics. \n\nFollowing Bulgaria's defeat in WW1 and the abdication of Ferdinand I, Boris III came at the head of a country in a disastrous situation, financially mostly and tore between left and right wings extremists. During the first years of his reign, Boris III stayed out of politics ( in general, far from always ) and focused on helping and improving the lives of his subjects ( mainly the poorest ). It gave him an incredible popularity to his people but in 1934, a political and military organization named the Zveno made a coup d'etat and planned to create a Bulgarian military republic. A year later, Boris III regained his power and almost took full command of the country. \n\nBulgaria was a feeble country but with a popular sovereign. Unfortunately, the country  was surrounded by gigantic powers in the name of the Soviet Union, the now Nazi Germany and Western powers. Politically, Boris III hated both the totalitarianism of the USSR and Germany but received no helped at all from the West such as the UK or France who had better to do. Bulgaria quickly became economically dependant of Germany in terms of trade and vital resource supplies. \n\nIn 1939, the Second World War broke out to the great despair of Boris who decided to remain neutral until 1941. As a pacifist, Boris had no choice to accept Germany's terms when its troops gathered at Bulgaria's borders. No need to say that its military would have been crushed in a matter of weeks ( or less! ) by the German machine. \n\nSo Bulgaria agreed to join the *Dreim\u00e4chtepakt* ( the Tripartite Pact ) but both Boris III and his people played the neutrality card. The Tsar invoked the russophile population of his country who would not want to fight the Russians alongside Germany ( they would most likely prefer to do the contrary! ). Also, since the ridiculously severe Treaty of Neuilly of 1919, Bulgaria's army was supposed to be defensive only and Boris also tried to play this card. \n\nAs you can imagine, a trial of strength began between Hitler and Boris III at the difference that one was at the head of a powerful country. After the crossing of Bulgaria by German troops in 1941 and their arrival in Greece to fight alongside Italian soldiers, Hitler gave back Bulgaria parts of its lands lost after the Treaty of Neuilly such as Thrace or Macedonia. Bulgarian troops entered these lands but were barely seen as an occupation force and had very little to do. \n\nIn December 1941, Boris III and his government declared war on the allies but refused to declare war on the USSR. His reasons were that he would not have to fight UK or US troops because of the geography but if Bulgaria was at war with the USSR, the country would risked to be destroyed by the Red Army ( history showed that he was wrong concerning the first affirmation )! \n\nHitler was not very amused and pleased by this \" strange ally \" especially when Boris III refused and forbid several hundreds young men to create a regiment to fight the USSR. In short, Boris did all he could to save his people from a lost war but that did not prevent parts of Bulgaria to be bombed by the allies at the end of the conflict. \n\nAlso, it's not really relevant to your question but another huge part Boris III played in the war was the refusal to deliver Bulgarian Jews to the Nazi machine. In 1940, several anti-Jews laws were voted and the *Brannik*, some sort of *Hitlerjugend* were created. Some 50,000 Jews were to be victims of these laws however, Bulgarian people were not antisemitic and it barely existed in Bulgaria. For a year, these laws were null until 1941. \n\nIn 1942, \" the Jewish question \" is asked to be solved in Bulgaria by Hitler. A SS is sent to supervise it and around 11,000 Jews are deported from the newly annexed territories of Macedonia and Thrace. But Boris III, the people and some members of the government and parliament were not very keen on the arrest and deportation of the Jews living in Bulgaria.  Huge demonstrations in front of the Tsar's palace for the saving of the Jews showed Boris III the popular feeling for the Jewish question.\n\nThe furious Fuhrer asked for an explanation and the monarch said that he needed \" his Jews \" as a labour force. Indeed, they were forced to clean the streets, build roads and whatever but some 50,000 Jews avoided deportation thanks to Boris' role and the Bulgarian people. \n\nIn 1943, Germany suffered Stalingrad and Bulgaria saw the future course of the war. Boris III met ( maybe not in person but through messengers ) allied diplomats. Hitler heard of the rumours and called the Tsar for a meeting. It was not a courtesy meeting as Hitler recalled Boris III all he owed to Germany, mainly the preservation of Bulgarian lives as the only role its military played in the Eastern front was the envoy of a couple of supply convoys ( food and medicine if I understood well ). So the Fuhrer gave Boris the order to send his troops against the Red army. The Tsar refused and left Hitler. Nine days later, Boris III suffered of violent vomitings and died aged 49 despite being a perfectly healthy man. \n\nYou can imagine what was said following the death of the Tsar of Bulgaria, mostly that Hitler had poisoned him. Indeed, Boris was not the greatest allied for Germany and Hitler could very well have hoped for a more \" helpful ally \" in the name of his successor because his heir was in fact 6 years old and in need of a regency. This regency was occupied by Boris' brother the Prince Kiril, a general and the very pro-German minister Bogdan Filov. A more interesting Bulgarian leadership in the eyes of Hitler. \n\nIn 1944, a little more than a year after Boris' death, the USSR declared war on Bulgaria whose military could not do a thing against the Red Army. The communist party of Bulgaria seized power and overthrew  the Prince regent who ended executed by the communists. The young King and successor of Boris III, Simeon II was exiled after three years of being King ( without ruling as he was a child ). \n\nTHis was a very long post, sorry for that. But Boris' role in WW2 and Bulgaria's are barely known while I think that Boris was a great man. Who knows what glorious monarch he could have been should he have reigned in a better period of history. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "c7amdd", "title": "View of the average German on the Holocaust during the war", "selftext": "Did the average German soldier or even citizen during the second world war understand their role in the Holocaust? Was their fight more idealistic and nationalistic without an understanding that people were being killed en masse or did they fight believing that the systematic genocide was part of what they were fighting for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c7amdd/view_of_the_average_german_on_the_holocaust/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esegrn7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not to discourage further discussion, but you might be interested in some of u/commiespaceinvader \u2018s previous answers:\n\n* [How much did the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front know about the German atrocities and the holocaust? For those that were aware of these events (or even participants), how did they rationalize these actions?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [To what extent was the German population aware of the atrocities of the Holocaust?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61a3up/to_what_extent_was_the_german_population_aware_of/dfe5dp9/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vc22s/how_much_did_the_wehrmacht_on_the_eastern_front/de28lf4/"]]}
{"q_id": "3prjji", "title": "Is the concept that people before the advent of Modern Medicine lived near the same length when excluding factors such as Mortality rates before the age of 5, founded in fact?", "selftext": "Or is it complete bullshit which is what I think.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3prjji/is_the_concept_that_people_before_the_advent_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw8v3ra"], "score": [5], "text": ["You might be interested in [this paper](_URL_0_), which reviews life expectancy across different types of cultures around the world. \n\nAs you note, infant and child mortality take a heavy toll on average life expectancy. Among hunter-gatherers, only 57 percent of children live to age 15. Of those who reach that age, 64 percent can expect to reach age 45. At that age, the mean life expectancy is about 21 years. \n\nSo of 100 hunter-gatherers (on average), 57 live to age 15 and 36 live to age 45. 18 of those hunter-gatherers will live to 66. \n\nSo while the odds are against any one person living to become an elder, elders were a fairly common sight even in smaller communities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "223lwt", "title": "What is the history of the United States accepting so many refugees compared to the rest of the west?", "selftext": "Hi! I was doing some reading on South Korea and came across the claim that [South Korea has only ever granted refugee status to 60 people](_URL_0_) (I assume excepting the fact that refugees from the north are granted citizenship automatically, I think). This led me to be curious about rates around the world, and though it's pretty sticky out there (since it's hard to find data on admitted refugees without also getting general data on asylum seekers), I came across the numbers of refugees in the United States and in Europe. Since 1980, the U.S. has admitted [2,671,511 total refugees](_URL_3_), and I've seen government websites stating that over [3 million refugees live in the U.S.](_URL_1_) (which may include assylum seekers who have not yet been granted refugee status - the phrasing is non-specific). The article also states that the U.S. accepts more than half of those refugees resettled into a third country.\n\nIn comparison, there are only [1.5 million refugees living in the E.U., Norway, and Switzerland.](_URL_2_) \n\nThe E.U. overall has a high rejection rate and low acceptance rate ([65% and 15%, respectively](_URL_4_))\n\nSo what gives? Why and how does America accept so many refugees, and why does the rest of the west not even come close?\n\nBefore anyone says that this breaks the 10 year rule, I understand that it does in some ways. But I'm interested in the historical events that got us here, not in current policy.  I assume it all starts in 1980 with the Refugee Act in the U.S. But what is the U.N.'s role in this, and why is the U.S. such a unique case in the west? This has been going on for over 30 years, as far as I can tell.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/223lwt/what_is_the_history_of_the_united_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgj5smf"], "score": [2], "text": ["FYI:  It's a 20 year rule, not a 10 year rule."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2007/08/20/korea-needs-open-its-doors", "http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2013/10/20131023285033.html?CP.rss=true#axzz2xpFMlhYO", "http://www.ecre.org/refugees/refugees/refugees-in-the-eu.html", "https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2012/RFA/table13.xls", "http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/24/us-europe-asylum-idUSBREA2N0MC20140324"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c92mi9", "title": "How did the scholars interpret ancient/extinct language?", "selftext": "To be more specific, George Smith in his epic translation of ancient akkadian language that references the biblical deluge. How did they do it when this language was thought to be extinct?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c92mi9/how_did_the_scholars_interpret_ancientextinct/", "answers": {"a_id": ["estcnjd"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's always more to be said on the topic, but I discussed the decipherment of cuneiform in [When did the modern understanding of the history of Bronze Age Mesopotamia develop?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7crp0n/when_did_the_modern_understanding_of_the_history/dq5tf5e/"]]}
{"q_id": "1agdck", "title": "Is any of this stuff about Martin Luther King Jr. true or based on any historical facts? ", "selftext": "I was having a discussion with another redditor on the subject of racism. Martin Luther King came up and he had this to say:\n\n\n > MLK was a gang leader that specialized in killing white cops\n\n\n > He and his crew were known to ransack white neighborhoods and jump white cops walking their beat at night.\n\n\n > People who heard the gunshot said it came from a good 100 yards away.\n\n\nThat's basically the points he made. I paraphrased because I just wanted to get the points across. His delivery might have provoke unwanted emotional responses. My question is if any of what he said is historical or has ever been mentioned by credited sources. Thank you for your time. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1agdck/is_any_of_this_stuff_about_martin_luther_king_jr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8x6i5f"], "score": [3], "text": ["Did this person provide you with any sources at all? MLK and the black freedom struggle is what I read most about, and I have never come across a source that states this, although such a source might exist.\n\nI think it's highly unlikely though, that he would have acted in such a way - as I'm sure you're aware, MLK's overriding philosophy was one of nonviolence, and remained as such even during his years of radicalisation (so, I guess 1965-68), when he became more concerned about human rights and economic equality, particularly in the North, as well as becoming vehemently anti-Vietnam. \n\nIn a 1961 speech, 'Nonviolence and Civil Disobedience', MLK stated that 'the first principle in the movement is the idea that means must be as pure as the end' - that is, to achieve the end goal of a peaceful, mutually respecting and equal society, they must use peaceful and respectful strategies to achieve it.\n\nEven in 1967, the year before his assassination, he stated that 'nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice' - this is in an essay, 'Black Power Defined', on which he expands in his book, *Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?*. \n\nI understand that if he *were* to have done any of these things that your friend suggested, it's unlikely that he would have spoken about them/written about them publicly. However, having also read testimonies of people who knew him personally, I struggle to believe that it's true. While he did agree with the basic social and political agenda of Black Power, he did not agree with the violent militant strategies that many of them advocated.\n\nFor a pretty good overview on MLK and his philosophy, read Peter Ling, *Martin Luther King Jnr* (London and NY: Routledge, 2002) and Robert Cook, *Sweet Land of Liberty? The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century* (London: Longman, 1998) for a less King-centric read.\n\nMaybe recommend that your friend have a read of them too. Also, *The Eyes On The Prize Civil Rights Reader* has various personal testimonials about the black freedom struggle, if you/he would like to read around MLK a bit more from a perspective of people who knew him."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4s2g7h", "title": "During the Cold War, how freely were military vehicles like U.S. M48 tanks allowed to move to and from West Berlin through East German territory?", "selftext": "During the Cold War, West Berlin was [completely surrounded by East Germany](_URL_0_), so all land travel to and from the U.S. sector would have had to go through miles and miles of East German territory.\n\nFrom what I have read, there was an agreement with the German Democratic Republic that allowed the use of certain rail lines or roads connecting West Berlin to West Germany for transporting food/goods and passengers. However, I wondered just how freely military vehicles would have been allowed to use those same routes.\n\nFor example, during the [tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie in 1961](_URL_1_), where Soviet T-55 tanks faced off with U.S. M48 tanks only a few hundred feet apart over the border between East/West Berlin, were additional U.S. tanks brought in from West Germany as a build up of force? Would that even have been possible on short notice? Or were the tanks already present in the U.S. sector at the time?\n\nIf military vehicles *were* allowed to move relatively freely to and from West Berlin via rail or road, were there agreed upon limits to the number that would be allowed, particularly armored offensive vehicles like tanks?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4s2g7h/during_the_cold_war_how_freely_were_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d56u3ao"], "score": [3], "text": ["Informal agreements with the Soviets in the immediate aftermath of the war allowed for rail and autobahn access for each of the three Allies (US, UK, France) to transverse the Soviet zone to resupply their Berlin contingents. The Soviets and later the GDR honored these agreements in the aftermath of the failed Berlin blockade and this was how the various heavy equipment came into the city. The Western allies were able to get personnel and equipment in a series of scheduled convoys either by road or rail, with heavy equipment favoring the latter mode. he small size of West Berlin placed a natural ceiling on the amount of heavy equipment that could be deployed to the city. The only adequate area for tank training was Grunewald Park and the barracks structures were quite crowded. \n\nThis is not to say that military resupply or reinforcing the city was easy for the Berlin Brigades. Both the Soviets and the GDR sought to mire the convoys in red tape and other delays. The Military Duty Trains  had to stop when crossing the inner German border and have their locomotives changed out for one by the GDR's Deutsche Reichsbahn, a needless waste of time. They were subject to various searches by the GDR's border police and this posed a problem for shipping  new military equipment. When the British deployed their new Chieftain tanks to replace the old Centurions, the British removed top-secret equipment like gunsights, radios, and other sensitive materials before they were loaded on the West Berlin-bound trains. This equipment, along with the tanks' ammunition arrived via an autobahn convoy where the British could keep their eyes on it at all times.\n\nThe autobahn convoys were also the sight of various intimidation tactics and other unfriendly niceties to make resupply of the city less than easy. *Stars and Stripes* has [digitized](_URL_0_) a 1961 account of one such convoy which conveys some of the minutia that typified a convoy. The convoys had to be completely self-sufficient, with the tools to repair any normal breakdown, and could not make any unauthorized detours. One British Berlin Brigade veteran recalled that the drivers for the convoys were all experienced men who were familiar with the route and would not make a wrong turn lest it start a diplomatic incident. The routine nuisances of bureaucracy became much more hostile during times of Cold War crisis, such as the during the erection of the Berlin Wall. David Hackworth's memoirs recalled when his unit was sent in as reinforcements during the erection of the Wall that the Soviet and GDR forces shadowed his convoy creating an apprehension that stopping for a cigarette break could start World War III. But the series of escalating and deescalating crises over Berlin had the advantage of allowing the Berlin Brigades to swap out older equipment for the newer material once their reinforcements left the city.  \n\nThe long and the short of it is that sending in heavy equipment and reinforcements was not an impromptu affair. The equipment followed a pre-set route and Allied logistics made arrangements with their Soviet and GDR counterparts to ensure such convoys were not a surprise. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/s2TDp0r.jpg", "http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/standoff-checkpoint-charlie-1961/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.stripes.com/the-helmstedt-berlin-autobahn-an-adventuresome-strip-of-highway-1.110021"]]}
{"q_id": "9f16rh", "title": "A substantial number of slaves brought to the Americas were Muslim. What remnants of pre-colonial Islam survived in black diaspora communities though colonialism?", "selftext": "When Thomas Jefferson sought to learn about Islam, he interviewed enslaved people under his own control. As late as 1835, members of the Afro-Brazilian community led an Islamic slave revolt. If Islamic belief was able to persist for centuries after the beginning of Transatlantic colonialism, when and why did these practices disappear? What linguistic, cultural, or ideological traces of West and East African Islam managed to survived the long, brutal, and ongoing process of colonialism and cultural erasure?\n\nIn Afro-Diaspora communities such as Haiti, Cuba, and New Orleans, parts and pieces of polytheistic belief systems survive through popular religion. In these communities and others, is there any comparable presence of the more consistent, well-attested, and organized traditions of Islam?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9f16rh/a_substantial_number_of_slaves_brought_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5tiogc", "e5tp9oa"], "score": [105, 56], "text": ["Hey there! Interesting question. I am not qualified to speak on the remenants of Islam and it\u2019s intigration into Caribbean, Centeral American, or South American culture. I am quite familiar with American slavery and Muslims who lived in those communities, so I will primarily address that point. Hopefully someone else can answer other parts of your inquiry.\n\n Also, I did answer a very similar question just a few months ago [which you can check out here](_URL_0_). \n\nIslamic belief in North American colonies did not survive Christian assmilitation (both passive and forced) by their owners who arrived in the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. While it\u2019s true some slaves who came to America belonged to the Islamic faith, many also held a variety of other religious beliefs from African culture. It\u2019s important to stress because overwhelmingly slaves appeared to be practicing Christianity, at least in part throughout the 18th century (but as I\u2019ve pointed out before, actual church participation for both whites and African Americans were extremely low by the 1770s). During America\u2019s \u201cSecond Great Awakening\u201d which started in the 1790s and lasted until the 1830s, mass conversions of folks to newer forms of Christianity overwhelmingly swept across America, and this in particular impacted enslaved and free African American communities. (Nathan Hatch\u2019s *The Democratization of American Christianity* actually researches this Avenue quite a bit).  Black Americans, both free and enslaved found acceptance into some white churches, but there was also a rise of Black preachers during this era, which fostered Christian growth in African American communities like never before.\n\nI mention this because I think you are assuming there were mass amounts of enslaved Muslims in America by the Foundjng era, which the evidence does not support. We know that Founders like Washington and Jefferson did have Muslim slaves (often condescendingly called Mahometans), but the majority of enslaved Africans in the American colonies were not Muslim. This is a key differentiator between enslaved Muslims particularly in the mid Atlantic regions and the 18th century south than the Africans who lived and suffered in the Caribbean, New Orleans, or in Salvador (where the 1835 revolt happened), where larger segments of enslaved communities retained elements of their religious heritage. American slaves converted or died off, especially once the transatlantic slavetrade was cut off at the close of the 18th century. As a result, there isn\u2019t any clear cultural or religious tie-ins between the Islamic faith and traditional African American churches that emerged during this period. Many, instead, had created their own heritage which was built upon centuries of mistreatment. ", "I'm glad you asked this. I happen to have written my thesis on the Islamic influence in African American quilting and as part of that, I did quite a bit of research into the influence of Islam in African American culture. The short answer is, there's essentially NO direct religious influence in African American culture today but there is quite a bit of cultural influence still in African American and Southern culture. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nBefore I get into that, let me point out that slave research is tricky because there was not a lot of contemporaneous research into slave beliefs/religion and while we can estimate about 10 or 15 percent of American slaves may have been Muslim because of where they came from in Africa, quite a bit of their religious beliefs may have been influenced by some other cultural factor. Islam, unlike the Catholic Church, for example, does not adhere to a strict church structure; the faith is passed down by local leaders who can and do (and did) incorporate local beliefs into the faith. This means that not only do local superstitions work their way into Islam, but also it's hard if not impossible to say that Muslims do THIS or Muslims do THAT. Different sects believe and do different things. Have you heard that Muslims don't drink? [Well, some do and for them it's an important component of their faith.](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFurthermore, as Islam is essentially a Western religion featuring the same God as in the Christian Bible, it is easy enough to see how slaves were where Muslim might have converted to Christianity or otherwise given up their faith in order blend in/get by. Finally, in case I wasn't clear above, some of what I am going to tell you is based on conjecture--including my own conjecture. Like I said, nobody really studied slave life at the time (hell, anthropology is more or less a 20th century science) but the conjecture I'm going to put forward it based on research and evidence and so it's not the same thing as me making something up. Feel free to ask for sources and ask follow up questions (for that matter, if you PM me, I'll send you a copy of my thesis, if you like). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, let's get into this. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIslam, like most other faiths, is more than a religion. It is a culture and with it comes a whole host of rituals, practices, aesthetics and so on. Let me start with art and aesthetics (I studied quilting and so that's my strong suit). Blue and green are sacred colors in Islam (it's a desert religion, so small surprise there). In addition, Muslims believe in djinn, AKA genies--minor trickster spirits who make mischief. If you've ever been to the South and seen a bottle tree, that is a remnant of Islam. The blue bottles are supposed to interest the djinn who wander inside and get trapped (Muslims also believe the Hand of Hamsa is meant to keep the spirits away, but we don't see that much in the united states in African American populations.) In addition to this, researchers have found more blue marbles than other colors around slave quarters, so we know the color is and was important to quite a few slaves. It helps that indigo is an African plant, so it is also possible that slaves merely liked blue because they had access to blue dyes and so their native African cultures preferred the color. But the existence of the bottle tree and the blue bottles is very much an Islamic influence. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nMuslims also (tend to) believe that any representational art is forbidden, but they take great pride in geometric, abstract art. We see a lot of West African/Islamic textiles that use geometric patterns and we see this in African American quilting, too. While European quilts tended to feature representational art--people, houses and so on--African American quilts tended to feature shapes and shapes that had meaning to Muslims. Repeating patters is meant as a symbol of the holy to Muslims and we see that all throughout their masjids in the Middle East and we see that throughout African American quilting. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nLet's turn to music. Islam features a very distinctive call to prayer. Google it and listen, and you'll hear something that nearly every pop singer does: Glissando. This is when a singer bends a note or alters the pitch from one to another. Think of a trombone. While this (Italian) term is not unknown in European Music (and, as I said, it's something musicians do with their instruments all the time) its extremely common in the Muslim world and it is a feature of the Muslim call to prayer and it is ALSO heavily featured in African American music, particularly in the blues. Here's a video clip [explaining it and illustrating it](_URL_2_) (I disagree that slaves secretly sneaked Islam in through music, but that's a whole other conversation.)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nFinally, there are pockets in the South where Islam had a longer, more lasting influence. The Gullah people are one example, and I should point out one reason their culture is more intact than that of other African American populations is because they lived on an island, disconnected from the mainland for many many years. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI should also point out that starting in the early 20th Century with the advent of the Nation of Islam, quite a few black people \"discovered\" their religious heritage and re-engaged with Islam though the Nation of Islam is quite problematic as its founder, Wallace Fard/Wallace Fard Muhammad was probably a crank charlatan. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'd like to wrap up by adding also that there is evidence of outdated or \"dead\" remnants of Islam in the South. Some slaves were apparently buried facing toward Mecca; we know some continued to worship according to Islamic traditions by slave interviews during the Depression (the WPA did a good job interviewing what survivors they could find). [At least one slave wrote an autobiography in Arabic](_URL_3_). There's also evidence that some slaves wouldn't eat pork in keeping with the faith, but given the popularity of pork BBQ in the South, that trait seems to have all but vanished. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you have any questions or want to know more about my sources, just ask. [I recommend Sylviane Diouf's book, Servants of Allah for a good history of Islam in the slave population](_URL_1_). \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWith regard to when/why did Islamic faith disappear, I'll answer the why question first. Slave owners in the United States South had a few firm beliefs. One was that Africans were not equal to whites because they were not civilized. However, particularly in the 19th century, slave owners began to see \"conversion\" to Christianity as a benevolent act that in part justified slavery. For instance, white people were RIGHT to own slaves because it meant that the \"savages\" could be saved from eternal damnation. So quite a few slaves got converted and, like I said, Islam being a monotheistic Abrahamic religion, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to just convert. Moreover, Islam makes it very clear that if adherents don't have a choice in the matter, they can eat pork and violate some of the tenants of Islam without fear, so it's not like Islam is all that ironclad. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs far as WHEN did it disappear, I'd say by the end of the transatlantic slave trade, which technically was 1808. Again, Islam was never a majority religion among Africans in the United States and once they got to the United States, whatever Muslims were here were a serious minority. Considering nobody was \"converting\" slaves to Islam in the United States, it was only a matter of time before the old guard simply died out. Or, to quote Kinky Friedman, they ain't making Jews like Jesus anymore. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWith regard to your last question about slavery outside of the United States, particularly in Haiti, do not mistake voodoo for some remnant of Islam; it is not. Voodoo owes as much to Catholicism as it does to any African religion. Islam is fairly monotheistic; it's the Catholic tradition of the saints that really influenced voodoo and the various loa/lwa (gods). So it's no surprise we see that in Catholic places like Haiti, New Orleans and Brazil. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI think I answers your questions, but let me know if you need to know more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8o4jbi/why_didnt_freed_slaves_reject_christianity/e01da71/"], ["https://www.muslimhope.com/Sufis.htm", "https://www.amazon.com/Servants-Allah-Enslaved-Americas-Anniversary/dp/1479847119", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qmO8XouJ2U", "https://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/omarsaid.html"]]}
{"q_id": "y906a", "title": "The pyramids survived but have any of the palaces of the pharaohs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y906a/the_pyramids_survived_but_have_any_of_the_palaces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5tgmi5", "c5tjfhx"], "score": [3, 8], "text": ["Wikipedia has a [list](_URL_0_).", "In general, sites in the Nile valley are poorly preserved, because of the damp environment, continual flooding, and soft loamy soil. In contrast, sites out in the desert are well preserved because of the dry conditions.\n\nTombs tended to be built out in the desert, while palaces (and dwellings in general) would be near to the river. That's why we see so many well-preserved tombs, but not many relics of the \"living\".\n\n[Deir el-Medina](_URL_0_) is an exception. It was a village where tomb construction workers lived, so it was out in the desert. It is one of the few places where ancient Egyptian everyday life has been preserved."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_palaces_in_Egypt"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina"]]}
{"q_id": "bcuxac", "title": "Curiosity question about interracial marriage", "selftext": "When interracial marriage was illegal in the U.S, did that only apply to people who were white and black?  Or did it apply to other races?  I'm curious because my great grandmother was native american, but my great grandfather was white.  They were legally married sometime in the late 1800s.  Why is it that they were able to be legally married, but a white/black couple couldn't be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bcuxac/curiosity_question_about_interracial_marriage/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekut577"], "score": [3], "text": ["Marriage in the United States is largely governed by state laws. Miscegenation, or interracial marriage, was governed by a hodgepodge of laws from every state since the formation. During this time, different states had different races which could be barred from certain activities, and there were various tests to determine race. \n\nIn California, for example, Hispanic people were considered white in many instances, but discriminated against in others. There is the famous brown bag rule used by many private entities, in which anyone darker than a brown bag is barred or offered substandard service. \n\nIn other areas there were rules related to blood ranging from 1/4 black as being white and the one drop rule, in which any non white ancestry barred being classified as white.\n\nWith regard to miscegenation, all such laws were deemed unconditional by the supreme court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which a brave white and black couple openly flouted the law and provoked arrest after many warnings to leave Virginia. By doing so, they could challenge the arrest on conditional grounds under equal protection of the fourteenth amendment, and they won. Thereafter, miscegenation was unconstitutional. Before, however, laws varied from state to state. And, while it is easy to pick on the south for having many of these laws rather uniformly, these laws existed everywhere for far too long."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9pbzaz", "title": "When nationalism was developing in Early Modern Scandinavia, where did the Sami fit in?", "selftext": "Were they seen as \"Norwegians/Swedes with a pastoral lifestyle\", or did nationalist thinkers retroactively re-classify them as foreigners/outsiders?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pbzaz/when_nationalism_was_developing_in_early_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e816ywj"], "score": [13], "text": ["I'm not quite sure what you mean here, since the Early Modern Period would in a Swedish context be defined as the period from the Reformation to 1809. But nationalism as we know it is often thought of as phenomenon that arose in the 19th century. (this is of course very simplistic but not entirely untrue)\n\nAs far back as recorded history Swedes and Sami (Lapps, 'Finns' in Viking Age usage) have been distinct (as were Swedes and Norwegians). The Roman historian Tacitus in _Germania_ writes about the _Suiones_ and _Fenni_ (probably Swedes and Sami) already around the year 100 CE, which is one of the very oldest written references to Scandinavia that has any recognizable and specific information. \n\nIf there ever was a Swedish nation-state (in the true sense of the word) it was before recorded history in _Sv\u00ed\u00fej\u00f3\u00f0_, which was roughly [the yellow area](_URL_0_), maybe a bit smaller. It was not a centralized state in any sense though, just a name for the country where the Swedes-proper (Svear) lived, who in turn were divided into many more local groupings. The blue area is the Geats (G\u00f6tar) By the time you get to the time periods of the Saga literature, there's already some kind of political alliance between the Swedes and Geats, with the Swedes seemingly having power over the common king. Then there was also the Gotlanders. (Gautar) \n\nAfter the Viking Age (i.e. after 1050) the Swede-Geat distinction continues to fade in importance. The term _Sv\u00ed\u00fej\u00f3\u00f0_ gives way to _Sv\u00e6rike_, the kingdom (rike) of the Svear. but at the same time, around 1200 Sweden starts incorporating Finland. Finland was not a state at the time, and like the Swedes had been, the Finnic peoples of the area were split into many groups (Finns-proper, Tavastians, Karelians, Savonians, etc). So Finns as we know them now came about as an amalgamation of those groups that ended up in Sweden, while others (Estonians, Livonians, Veps) weren't. - Much as 'Swedes' in its present day sense is defined by the Norse peoples who ended up under rule of the _Svear_. \n\nLater in the Middle Ages you have the Hanseatic League arising and Visby (Gotland) and to a lesser extent Stockholm become Hanseatic cites. Sweden also enters a personal union with Denmark-Norway under a Danish king. The Swedish spoken and written in the capital around 1400 is a heavy mixture of Swedish, Danish and Low German. To the extent that _Sv\u00e6rike_ gets its present day name _Sverige_ (the Swedish word 'rike' didn't change - it got swapped for the Danish version 'rige' .. in the country's own name!) So anyway, point is that by the time you have the predecessor of today's Swedish state, it's far from a country belonging to a single ethnic group.\n\nNow, in the 16th century Sweden leaves the Kalmar Union under Gustav Vasa and shakes off both Danish and Hansa influence. Being a skilled propagandist (but with a genuine hatred of the Danes) Vasa strongly emphasized the nationalist aspect of his rebellion against Christian II of Denmark. To the extent that he had his court chaplain Peder Swart plagiarize William Tell stories and substitute in Vasa as the hero travelling the countryside leading his rebellion and evading union loyalists out to get him at every turn. (in later versions this was changed further into straight-up Danish knights; rather than admit the existence of pro-union Swedes)\n\nNow, by this point Sweden had been claiming Lapland and even taxing Lapland, through men known as _Birkarlar_. Not so much is known about the Sami at this point in time; but it's around this time that many of them are starting to take up reindeer-herding. Which is well-worth underlining; they were both nomadic and non-nomadic groups of Sami, and reindeer herding is both a relatively speaking recent custom and not one that all of them adopted. In 16th century and earlier there are various groups referred to by Swedes and Norwegians by their lifestyle; Forest Lapps, Coast Lapps and Mountain Lapps.\n\nThe Birkarl system fades out and in the 1600s Sweden gets to work on building churches, extending the government's reach to the northern parts of the country, and converting the Sami. Which is not to say that some conversion had not started already in the Middle Ages; and is in fact quite evident, for instance in that there is a much stronger veneration of the Virgin Mary in Sami culture, to this day, than the strict Lutheranism of the 17th century permitted. Another aspect of this was expanding the borders; Sweden claiming Sami-inhabited territory all the way up to Barent's Sea which Denmark-Norway also claimed. Hence there was something of a Cold War of church-building to stake claims.\n\nSo the persecution of the native Sami religion also began in earnest in this period; although only one for certain and three Sami at most were executed in the 17th century for practicing paganism (as opposed to hundreds of innocent 'witches' among the Swedes, and a half-dozen who'd converted to Catholicism). \n\nFrom a contemporary Swedish perspective though, this oppression was simply demanding from the Sami much of what was demanded from their own people: Loyalty to the king and country, adherence to the Lutheran faith (not entirely distinct from the former), paying your taxes, registering births/deaths/marriages, and by the end of the 17th century, to learn to read, read the Bible and small catechism. There were some privileges too - Sami paid lower taxes, were not subject to conscription, \n\nFinns were also 'other' but to a lesser extent. There were 'Forest Finns' who'd immigrated to the forests of Dalarna and V\u00e4rmland. There were 'Tornedalen Finns' who lived up north and spoke their own variant of Finnish (Me\u00e4nkieli). And there were Finns living in Stockholm; their religious congregation is mentioned from 1533 (and in fact the first sermon in Finnish was held there - not in Finland), the Bible and Catechisms had been translated into that language relatively quickly. It took 100 years until the catechism (as the second book in that language) was printed in Sami. Sweden translated Luther's Small Catechism to all the minority languages of the kingdom in that era (Russian, two dialects of Estonian, Latvian and even Lenape for the Indians living near New Sweden in America). The quality of these translations was often quite poor though.\n\nSo who is a Swede in this multi-ethnic kingdom in the 17th and 18th century? That's a much discussed question without any real consensus. The word was not used in a single way anyhow; it depended on context and who you asked. There's a recorded case from the 1680s of a Gutnish (from Gotland, Swedish since 1645) peasant who claimed to be an \"honest Dane\" and demanded the use of Danish measurements (1 _kande_ = 1.932 liter) for his beer rather than the Swedish standard that'd been created in 1665. (1 _kanna_ = 2.617 liter) Most often the term was used to denote what language one spoke than as a national identity (it seems, other than in cases where it could benefit you legally)\n\nFinns and Sami were still citizens. Both groups had parliamentary representation in the 17th and 18th century. (the population of Swedish _possessions_, such as Estonia, Livonia and Pomerania did not) Yet they were still clearly culturally 'other'. If you look at 18th century Swedish writings, Scania, Halland, Blekinge, Gotland, J\u00e4mtland, H\u00e4rjedalen and Bohusl\u00e4n were all being written about as if they and their populations had been part of Sweden since time immemorial, despite having been part of the country for less than a century.\n\nWith the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, the idea of 'one people, one country' gained currency. Many of the allowances and exceptions the Sami had had allowing for their traditional lifestyle were curtailed, and with public schooling, the Swedish language was made mandatory for them. However, Sweden was more tolerant than the Norwegianization program, in that the principle was adopted that Sami ought to be Sami ('Lapp skall vara Lapp'), although with a prejudiced and narrow view of Sami as reindeer-herders only. Non-reindeer-herding Sami were expected to learn Swedish and assimilate.\n\nSources:\n\nLarsson, Lindberg - Nationalism och nationell identitet i 1700-talets Sverige, 2002\n\nLerbom - F\u00f6r Gud och kung, sl\u00e4kt och v\u00e4nner - Folkliga f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om svenskhet under tidigt 1600-tal, Historisk Tidsskrift, 133:2, 2013\n\nLindmark, Sundstr\u00f6m - De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna, 2016"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Scandinavia-12th_century.png"]]}
{"q_id": "1n0aa5", "title": "Did the inhabitants of a besieged city ever join the army and fight back?", "selftext": "I just finished listening to Dan Carlin's \"Wrath of the Khans\", and tons of times he mentions that the Mongol's with 100,000 men or less are successfully besieging city's with populations over 4 times that number.\n\nWhy didn't the citizens in these cities join the army and fight back? Surely the mongols could not have defeated a force at least 4x their size.\n\nAre there any cases of citizens of cities joining the defenders to push back the enemy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n0aa5/did_the_inhabitants_of_a_besieged_city_ever_join/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccea1yu"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most walled cities had some sort of militia of all able-bodied men, in addition to a formal garrison, to defend their walls. In England they were called \"trained bands\" after 1572. More generally, in a siege, the defending commander would try to mobilise all able-bodied men to defend the walls - which was clearly in their own interest! \n\nHowever, there is a big difference between being well enough trained to stand on a wall and chuck rocks at people trying to climb up ladders (requires basically four limbs and a pulse) and being well enough trained, armed, and disciplined to push back a Mongol army *in the open field*. If the city militia tried to come out to fight without their wall, well, in the first place the Mongols didn't have to accept battle. They would do a classic horse-archer retreat, filling the air with arrows as they left. When the militia got tired of milling about getting shot at, and retreated back behind the walls, the Mongols would return to their siege lines. \n\nIn the more general case, though, yes, citizens were expected to fight in defense of their city, sometimes outside the walls. London's trained bands were important in the early stages of the English Civil War, for example, when they prevented the Royalists from advancing on London (and, presumably, besieging it) at Turnham Green. Here we have a case of non-regular troops advancing outside the city limits to see off an army that would otherwise be laying siege to it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1irlb3", "title": "During the Berlin Wall, what happened with trams/trains, etc?", "selftext": "So I'm assuming tram and train tracks would run across the whole city - when the Berlin was put up, did trains and trams go through the wall or were the routes re-arranged? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1irlb3/during_the_berlin_wall_what_happened_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb7q3vw"], "score": [2], "text": ["There were three tracked transport services in Berlin: regular (longer distance) trains, the Berlin intra-city rail system (S-Bahn) and the Metro (U-Bahn).\n\nThe S-Bahn was under East German management, and continued business in West Berlin with employees from West Berlin and East Berlin management. With the closing of the German wall, most cross-wall connections were discontinued.  Friedrichstra\u00dfe station became the only connection point, with strict border controls. Some West-German lines continued to run through parts of East Berlin, but didn't stop. The Former stations became known as Ghost Stations.\n\nBecause the S-Bahn was run by the DDR, West Berliners started boycotting the trains after the wall was build. Parallel bus lines were introduced and use of the S-Bahn plummeted. Maintenance was neglected and in 1980 the whole West-Berlin part of the network was closed after a strike of the western employees. Negotiations between east and west led to a partial reopening of the western network after 1984 under western management.\n\nIn the East, the network flourished and was extended.\n\nThe U-bahn network was likewise divided in two parts by the wall, with some West-Berlin lines running through Eastern territory without stops. The U-Banh, which was under Western management, profited from the S-Bahn boycott and was greatly extended during the 1961-1989 period.\n\nSome regular long-distance trains kept running through Berlin, but the border controls were long and intensive, requiring halts of up to an hour. The GDR routed their own trains around Western Berlin. There were trains running from West Berlin to West Germany, these so-called transit trains just had passport controls and couldn't stop in East German territory. The US Army Transportation Corps, the Royal Corps of Transport (RCT) and the Train Militaire Fran\u00e7ais de Berlin had their own rolling stock and could also run trains from West Germany. These were checks by the Soviet Army at the border, instead of by East German border guards."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3ns6f8", "title": "Are there any good maps of bronze age Mesopotamian cities (e.g., Uruk, Lagash) based on archaeological reconstruction?", "selftext": "Hi guys, I'm a little obsessed with bronze age near east, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing the layout of ancient cities. If you know of any good maps that show the organization of the city, or floorplans of buildings, I would really appreciate it.\n\nIf anyone is knowledgeable about the organization of bronze age Mesopotamian cities, I'd also love to hear about it!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ns6f8/are_there_any_good_maps_of_bronze_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvqtf3v"], "score": [2], "text": ["Here are some sources that look at a wide variety of Mesopotamian cites from the Bronze Age.  \"Cultutral Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East\" by Michael Roaf (1994) This book is rather pricey, at $70 new on _URL_0_ and one person, who is obviously on drugs, is offering a used copy for $7,777.92. This book has maps of twenty different Mesopotamian and Persia cities, plus Hattusha, the Hittite capital in Anatolia. The maps are usually on the small side, but the book does describe how Mesopotamian cities were organized.     \n      A more recent book is \"Historical Atlas of Mesopotamia\" by Norman Bell Hunt (2004) This book has fewer maps, although the maps it does have are bigger. The illustrations in this book are better than the Roaf book, but it is much shorter and not as detailed. It is lower priced, at $17.99 on _URL_0_     \nYou could also check out the Thames and Hudson books \"The Hittites\" \"The Assyrians\" and \"Babylon\". All three books focus on just one civilization. The maps are better and they delve deeply in to the archaeology that has uncovered the secrets of these ancient civilizations. All three are paperbacks and reasonably priced.   \n     "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Amazon.com"]]}
{"q_id": "6fa1q6", "title": "Why has Vienna, Austria been the home of so many historically significant persons?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fa1q6/why_has_vienna_austria_been_the_home_of_so_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["digo5x2"], "score": [6], "text": ["Dumb question: Have there really been more historically significant people that made Vienna their home throughout history, than other comparable cities (Berlin, Paris, London, Rome)?\n\nIs there some sort of statistic you could give me a link to?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tsm9z", "title": "A Brief History of Romania?", "selftext": "For our Senior Final in my history class we're doing a Model United Nations. Basically we are given a country and are the delegate to that country. Mine is Romania, and I was wondering if there are any good overview lessons out there I could use to help in my research to better get in the shoes of a Romanian. Also if anyone knows anything useful on Mock United Nations would be great too!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tsm9z/a_brief_history_of_romania/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4pfc4u"], "score": [2], "text": ["Oh dear, I used to be incredibly good at Model UN in high school and I still have a drawer full of gavels at my parents' house from it. You don't need to know anything in particular about its history, however, but you do need to know where its policy comes from, which mostly involves learning about its recent, Ceaucescu-era problems and its subsequent rise and sort of fall in the past 10-15 years. Romania's growth in the first part of the 2000s was really incredible, and then the recession hit and all went to hell and they're really in debt to all sorts of people like the IMF. If you can tell me your specific topics/committee/etc, I can probably help a bit more, and I can also tell you about running committees and how we give points and how the format goes, unless things have changed significantly since 2005 when I was last in committee. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "83wsi1", "title": "Louis is the French translation of Clovis/Chlodowig so why does the numbering of the french kings go Clovis IV  >  Louis I?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83wsi1/louis_is_the_french_translation_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvlfve2"], "score": [4], "text": ["Louis is indeed derived from Clovis, which itself is the francicized version of the Germanic name Hlodwig which is Ludwig in modern German.  In France, the name Clovis changed to Ludovic, then Louis.\n\nApart from the fact that Clovis and Louis look and sound different, what makes the separation in terms of numbering is how these names have been latinised on official records.  Kings named Clovis were latinised as *Clodovicus*, and from Louis I on that name was latinised as *Hludovicus* or *Ludovicus*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tg02z", "title": "What would an empty barrel cost in 1860's?", "selftext": "The documentary adaption of The Prize states oil dropped to from $10 to $0.10 a barrel in one year. \n\nThat got me wondering what the cost was of an empty barrel around the same time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tg02z/what_would_an_empty_barrel_cost_in_1860s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce7tmy1", "ce7vuyv"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't \"barrel\" as used to measure petroleum simply a unit of measure and does not imply that there is a physical barrel involved?", "I don't know what an empty barrel would cost, but one thing to keep in mind is that storage containers can be reusable and purchased separately from the contents. The fact that a [cooper](_URL_0_) was a common profession back in the day shows how things must have been pretty different before mass produced disposable containers. There are often modern cases where new containers are more expensive than the contents. For example, if you buy cheap beer, the keg it comes in may be worth more than the beer. You'll probably be expected to pay a deposit, so the distributer can get back their money. Similarly, a CO2 tank is worth a lot more than a tank of CO2 gas. People usually own their own CO2 tanks and pay just to have CO2 refilled. Or there are exchange programs, where you hand over your own co2 tank and you get back someone else's filled up with co2. This works where containers are highly standardized and are all of similar quality and value.\n\n\nTo add to the question, I'd be interested in knowing how many time an oil barrel could be reused and how it was paid for. Did you have to provide your own oil barrels, did you basically buy a barrel as part of your oil purchase, was it just borrowing a barrel with a deposit?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_\\(profession\\)"]]}
{"q_id": "16s7g4", "title": "Modern courts have faced the problem of the \"CSI effect\" (Where jurors expect incontrovertible scientific evidence like they uncover in the show).  Was there a similar problem of high expectations in the late-Victorian age following the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories?", "selftext": "It wouldn't be scientific evidence, but rather logic chains like the fictional detective strings together", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16s7g4/modern_courts_have_faced_the_problem_of_the_csi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ywnbp", "c7yy2rc", "c7yyktp", "c7z04md"], "score": [452, 32, 49, 10], "text": ["In a way, yes. But not exactly in the way you describe. The popularity of Sherlock Holmes and other crime dramas led to more understanding of how to examine crimes. In some cases, it even *improved* the investigations of crime. \n\nMuch as the Sherlock Holmes stories came to the public, so too did the public's investigation of crime: the press. In most cases, suspects were tried and found either guilty or not-guilty in the press long before they were tried in court. The \"gutter press\" was famous for having detailed (sensational) descriptions of crimes, along with theories, diagrams, and eyewitness accounts. People began to understand why, for instance, a Jewish man was not guilty of murder just because he was Jewish. Instead, they were presented with facts that became impossible to dismiss.\n\nOf course, the press wasn't always right in their investigations, and they didn't always lead to more justice. But, their use of the scientific method to try and solve these cases, which was spurred by the popularity of the crime drama, led to much more understanding of the criminalistics and investigation among the public.\n\nSources:\n\nBerenson, Edward. *The Trail of Madame Caillaux*. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.\n\nGray, Drew D. *London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City*. London: Continuum, 2010.\n\nVyleta, Daniel M. *Crime, Jews and News: Vienna, 1895-1914*. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.\n\nWalkowitz, Judith R. *City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.\n\nEDIT: Fixed my dumb grammar.", "It's an interesting question and I'm curious to read the answers, but is there any non-anecdotal proof of the CSI effect?", "There was an interesting bit in \"Bloody Buisness, an anecdotal history of Scotland Yard\", that credited the Holmes stories with changing people's expectations for the legal system and redefining what Justice meant. The writer said that before the Holmes stories, there wasn't much emphasis on justice for everyone - if you were rich you could hire an investigator, if you were poor you pretty much had to get revenge on your own. (They did mention that the Yard was not portrayed in a flattering light in the books, so they weren't as fond of the Holmes stories as normal folks were.) ", "Of course, Holmes could have also helped them get it wrong. I'm reading a lot of the Holmes adventures currently and he does things which I suppose we're acceptable then but would be considered the opposite of science now. He puts faith in phrenology. He declares some people honest because of the shape of their chin, or crafty because of their race. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "dby46i", "title": "Did Ronins lose their 'Ronin' status and become a Samurai if hired?", "selftext": "To word the question more effectively, was a Ronin able to become a Samurai if they were hired by a master or lord? Was them being hired even possible? Or was being a Ronin considered a temporary state of being, like unemployment is nowadays?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dby46i/did_ronins_lose_their_ronin_status_and_become_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f26g3cm"], "score": [30], "text": ["A *ronin* is simply an unemployed *samurai* (i.e., a samurai without a position as retainer to a lord). If they obtain a position as a retainer, they cease being ronin. If they lose their positions, they become ronin. Whether ronin or retainer, they were still samurai.\n\nIn principle, being a ronin was a temporary state. In practice, it was often permanent, or only ceased when the ronin gave up his samurai status. For some - Edo Period samurai who were fired by their lord - it was meant to be permanent; they were forbidden to become retainers to another lord, and it was illegal for daimyo to employ them as retainers.\n\nThe main problem for ronin was that as samurai without positions as retainers, they were without the stipends that came with those positions. Unemployment meant no regular pay. If they could find a new position quickly enough, all would be well. If not, they could starve to death (and some did), or they could earn money as craftsmen, as guards, as mercenaries (including outside Japan), as martial arts instructors, as teachers, or become farmers, or bandits or pirates. Those who became farmers or craftsmen often gave up their samurai status (Edo Period samurai were not allowed to engage in such work, so giving up their samurai status was a way to make their work legal).\n\nThe heyday of the ronin was the end of the Sengoku Jidai and the first half-century of the Edo Period. As Japan was being unified, many daimyo and their fiefs were destroyed, their samurai becoming ronin. In the early Edo Period, there were perhaps 500,000 ronin in Japan. While the country was still at war, there was still demand for warriors, and ronin could join one side or another in a battle, and hope for a position as a retainer if (a) their side won the battle, and (b) they distinguished themselves in battle. With peace, there was less demand for warriors, and ronin often stayed ronin until their deaths. Their deaths (from old age, starvation, and battle - many ronin fought on the losing side in the Siege of Osaka Castle in 1614-1615 and rebellions against the shogunate) and giving up samurai status reduced this number, and the \"ronin problem\" stopped being such a huge problem. However, it didn't go away, and ronin continued to be a problem for local law and order and the shogunate.\n\nIn the peace of the Edo Period, ronin could still become retainers. Talent was one path to a position as a retainer. Another path was purchase/bribery - illegal, but practiced. Indeed, commoners could obtain samurai status, possibly including a position as a retainer, by purchase/bribery. As one samurai, Buy\u014d Inshi, wrote,\n\n >  Some save up a sizable fortune, bid farewell to their hereditary lord, and temporarily become r\u014dnin. They then use their savings to purchase a position as shogunal houseman. Others do the same thing: the sons of unpedigreed townspeople; those who greedily collect immoral amounts of interest by lending money at extortionate rates; the sons of blind moneylenders; and people from distant parts who have performed evil deeds in their own localities and, unable to live there any longer, turn their backs on their parents and head for Edo. Among those who obtain such shogunal housemen posts, are there not men who, having incurred the displeasure of the domain or fief holder who was their original lord, were released from his service with a ban on taking up service elsewhere? There are bound to be as well monks laicized for having breached Buddhist precepts. Perhaps there are children, too, of monks bound to adhere strictly to the precept [of celibacy]. There may also well be, further down the order, pariahs and outcasts and their ilk. The reason for this is that the only thing held to matter is money, and not the caliber of the person.\n\nHe wrote about the problems faced by ronin - poverty, unemployment, starvation - and the problems that resulted for wider society, such as violence, crime, and corruption. A major root of the problem, as he saw it, was the change from society being run by warriors to society being run by money, and the problems of and by ronin were symptoms of this underlying social disorder.\n\n\nReference:\n\nBuy\u014d Inshi, *Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai*, edited by Mark Teeuwen, et al., Columbia University Press, 2014."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2tsx1e", "title": "How was the Soviet Union able to develop such a great spy network before WWII despite being a country less than 30 years old?", "selftext": "Was listening to a Hardcore history episode where Dan Carlin said that the soviets had the most extensive spy network in the world before the second world war and I wondered how they were able to pull that off", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tsx1e/how_was_the_soviet_union_able_to_develop_such_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co23yul"], "score": [8], "text": ["Spy networks don't really have much to do with the 'age' of a country. Britain's Secret Service MI6 was only officially founded in 1903, and until WWI it was mostly concerned with Irish rebels and Fenian terrorists.\n\nThey way the USSR, the way almost any nation builds a spy ring, is recruiting within foreign nations. The way the USSR built up a very successful spy ring within Great Britain, for example, was famously at Cambridge University. You may have heard of the Cambridge Five? They were Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and an unknown fifth man.\n\nPhilby, for example, was a student of history at Trinity College, was a member of the Cambridge Socialist Society, and a card carrying member of the British Labour Party, which made him a prime candidate for Soviet Recruiters in Britain. Later on he learned Russian, and as such was eventually recruited by the British Secret Service during WWII working with Alan Turing's team on the enigma codes at Bletchley Park. He was able to crack German codes, read them for any reference to the USSR, then report that information to his handlers. It's alleged that Stalin received advanced warning of the German Operation Barbarossa this way.\n\nI couldn't really give you much information on recruitment in countries outside of the UK, but I imagine it was much the same.\n\nA couple of good books, especially about the Cambridge Five, are:\n\n* *Spycatcher* by Peter Wright\n* *Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal* by Ben Mcintyre"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qihew", "title": "After being liberated by the Allies in WWII, what did communities in France, Poland and other occupied countries treat women who fraternized with German Solidiers?", "selftext": "In film I've seen some women get their heads shaved and be generally ostracized but I'm curious about the long term repercussions. What about women whom had German children? Curious about the general life after occupation for those women that had relations with German soldiers. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qihew/after_being_liberated_by_the_allies_in_wwii_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdd5jb2", "cdd9goh"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["badly. here's a previous post on this:\n\n[There are pictures of women from France who after their liberation from the Nazi's were publicly shamed with their hair being shaved off and other similar acts for fraternizing with Nazi soldiers... but what happened to these women after the initial shaming act?](_URL_0_)", "From descriptions by Allied soldiers it seems few of these women were murdered or anything especially permanent.  I have read an account by a British officer who was called upon to stand as a judge at a summary 'trial'.  He refused, whereupon a 'trial' was conducted and the women had their heads shaved.  He recorded that hours later they were carrying water and clearing rubble and trying to win back the favour of their fellow villagers.\n\nThe fact that those conducting the trials were usually not resistance 'fighters' but really youths trying to avoid conscription into German factories, and had done little to fight the Germans until the Allies were just up the road, often undermined their authority in the eyes of villagers.\n\nUgly as these incidents were (the reaction in British accounts is always one of disgust), they seem to have been only expressions of momentary anger and most Europeans had the perspective to have some sympathy for the women in question, and understood the real collaborators were going to get away with it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l5z2y/there_are_pictures_of_women_from_france_who_after/"], []]}
{"q_id": "58p3zs", "title": "Why was the Ottoman Empire unable to mass convert Christians in the Balkans like previous Caliphates in the middle east?", "selftext": "Under the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid, entire cultures were integrated and changed by Islam, even previously Christian areas like Syria, Egypt, etc. The Ottomans controlled a large part of the Balkans for centuries, yet were unable to recreate this success. Why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58p3zs/why_was_the_ottoman_empire_unable_to_mass_convert/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d92e8ve"], "score": [6], "text": ["The current makeup of the Balkans is not quite reflective of its demographics during the Ottoman Empire. It's like asking, \"Why was the Ottoman Empire unable to convert the Jews on the West Coast of Israel, but the West Bank of Palestine is almost entirely Muslim?\" The reality is that a huge movement of people occurred in the late stages of the Ottoman Empire and after its fall.\n\nAfter World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, the Greeks and Turks signed the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations. The treaty established a mandatory exchange of citizens between Greece and Turkey according to religious faith, rather than native language, equaling about 1.3 million orthodox Christians from Turkey relocated to Greece, as well as about half a million Muslims  relocated to Anatolia from Greece. This came after and in addition to the natural flows of refugees and immigrants toward the respective religious safe areas. Anatolia had recently been further Christianized by the Armenian genocide. \n\nPrior to this, Turkey had not been so uniformly Muslim, and the Balkans so uniformly Christian. The middle east was also more Christian at the time, with Christians still representing a double digit percentage of the population in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.\n\nThe Ottoman Empire practiced a millet system which segregated its population according to confessions and allowed Christian communities autonomy and exemption from Sharia law, which may have contributed, though that was not unique to the Ottomans. Most likely, the Ottomans just were not in South Eastern Europe for long enough, and the majority of their converts returned to Muslim states either voluntarily or against their will by 1923.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x4vf4", "title": "Why are the chances of War within the Developed world so low?", "selftext": "WWI and WWII happened mear decades after one another, but now the likelihood of total war, or any type of war, within or between mature economies seems so far removed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x4vf4/why_are_the_chances_of_war_within_the_developed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8a043", "cf8aeg5"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["International trade relations mainly. By going to war you starve your economy of billions of dollars which would create a massive anti-war movement. Imagine the recent anti-war movement but with funding and support from large businesses while the war is the cause of unemployment and economic downturn. ", "This is a huge debate in the international relations field known as the [democratic peace theory](_URL_0_). There are plenty of explanations for it but none so convincing to be completely accepted. It could be due to the structure of democracies themselves- leaders are used to negotiation and compromise and are held accountable for their actions by the people. It may also be the nature of the developed world itself- we find trade to be much more favorable than war and prefer more peaceful options of conflict resolution. Or perhaps its a cultural issue- the Western democracies were forced into an us vs. them mentality during the Cold War and our shared culture prevents feelings of aggression and hostility.\n\nInterestingly enough, while democracies don't declare war against other democracies, they aren't necessarily more peaceful than non-democracies. It is up for debate whether non-democracies or democracies are actually more warlike."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory"]]}
{"q_id": "7x5t1d", "title": "What is the history of the Irish Travellers? What writings are out there that pertain to them? Do we know how they came to live a nomadic lifestyle?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7x5t1d/what_is_the_history_of_the_irish_travellers_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du647j3"], "score": [96], "text": ["Traveller history is a highly contentious subject, because it is tied up with their identity and right to continue their itinerant lifestyle. The idea is that if Travellers are really just displaced or dispossessed people (as has been argued), the best \"solution\" is to re-settle them. This was the basic finding of the 1963 Commission on Itinerancy, which started under the assumption (in fairly unfortunate wording) that \u201cthere can be no final solution to the problem created by itinerants until they are absorbed into the general community.\"\n\nNow, the real answer to this question is probably a variety of factors, with no one clear origin. But due to the contentiousness of the issue, certain \"explanations\" have become popular, which I'll outline:\n\n* One traditional view of Travellers is as displaced landowners from the Cromwellian invasions, and similar claims have been made that they are made up of people evicted during the Famine.\n\n* Many Travellers themselves point to a pre-Gaelic origin, asserting that they are the \"original\" inhabitants of the island. \n\n* Connections have been made to the Romani and other itinerant groups on the continent. \n\n* Travellers have also traditionally held professions that would have been conducive to being on the road, prompting a \"chicken-and-egg\" kind of debate (did they take up those jobs because they were on the road, or did they go on the road because of their jobs?).\n\nThe evidence for and against these claims is similarly complicated, but includes\n\n* The traditional Traveller language, known as Shelta, Gammon, or Cant, has many words of Romani origin, but is mainly influenced by Irish and English. \n\n* A 2011 genetic study found Travellers to be a distinct genetic population from settled Irish people, and claimed that the populations split up to 1,000 years ago. \n\n* The popularity of certain surnames such as McCarthy, which also show up among the Gaelic nobility driven out by Cromwell, has been used to suggest the displaced families theory.\n\n* The term \"tinker,\" which describes the metalwork traditionally done by Travellers and has been used as both an endo- and exonym for the group, shows up as \"tynker\" or \"tynkler\" in the 12th century, although whether or not it was linked with a class of nomadic people is debated.\n\nOne issue that we have is that Travellers are not well distinguished from the general settled population in most literature before about the 19th century. M\u00edceal Hayes mentions the issues surrounding the documented history (or lack thereof) of Travellers in his article \"Indigenous Otherness: Some Aspects of Irish Traveller Social History,\" noting that\n\n >  The social history of Travellers remained undocumented under colonialism, as successive British administrations did not distinguish between Travellers and the Irish poor generally. Consequently, there are real limits to what the sources can tell us about the history of the Irish Travellers. Those historical records that do exist simply highlight the relative invisibility of Travellers as a group in Irish society. \n\nReally, the answer is probably a mix of all of the above. In every society, there are people who take to the road due to economic and social pressures, or just because they prefer the lifestyle. The popular song \"O'Sullivan's John,\" written by the Pecker Dunne, tells the (supposedly true) story of a settled man who marries a Traveller woman and joins her. Presumably, whatever their origins, Travellers have picked up quite a few such people along the way, and it may be hard to find the \"original\" Travellers among all the others that have joined throughout the centuries. They have also mixed with other itinerant groups like the Romani, although this is more the case in Britain than it is in Ireland, where Romani populations are fairly low compared to the rest of Europe. \n\nThe \"displaced persons\" idea has been largely discredited, mainly because, while there were indeed many such people during the various invasions, wars, and famines throughout Irish history, there is little contemporary evidence that a significant group decided en masse to stay on the road indefinitely. Again, some of those displaced people probably were absorbed into the Traveller population, but that population seems to have existed long before Cromwell set foot on the island. Other, more fanciful ideas, such as Travellers being a lost tribe of Israelites, have been similarly rejected. The best we can say is that there were probably a combination of factors that have contributed to the Traveller community.\n\nI'd like to plug the [audio documentary](_URL_1_) I made as part of my masters dissertation on singing and music in the Traveller community, which deals with Traveller identity as they become increasingly settled. The accompanying [written commentary](_URL_0_) includes a brief summary of some of the history, and also has a transcription in case the accents are too confusing (they get very thick!)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MEqS1iZ2sze7JNnkSqefRJERqHaomFQMqlGLLXWBcpQ/edit?usp=sharing", "https://www.mixcloud.com/talderson/from-the-road-singing-music-and-the-settling-of-the-irish-travellers/"]]}
{"q_id": "7bw61f", "title": "Did the name \"The United States\" stem from The United Kingdom?", "selftext": "They're both unusual name choices as they don't seem to be names necessarily, but descriptions of what they are.\n\nThis leads me to believe the UK inspired the US's name, considering their interwoven history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bw61f/did_the_name_the_united_states_stem_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpl8dm3"], "score": [8], "text": ["No, it did not -- while the Declaration of Independence (1776) is the \"unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America,\" the term \"United Kingdom\" was not used for the political union of the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland until after the Acts of Union (1800) actually united them. The OED has a reference to a \"united Kingdom\" from 1690 and another from 1737, but it wasn't until the 1800 Acts that the formal name came into being. The prior \"united Kingdom\" was a personal union. \n\nThe OED references for context: \n\n >  1690   tr. G. Petyt Lex Parliamentaria (ed. 2) xi. 217   A like Clause for incapacitating Persons to be elected,  & c. Members of Parliament, and likewise for incapacitating Members of Parliament, with like Restrictions, Exceptions and Penalties (throughout the united Kingdom) as are contained in the Statute 4  &  5 Ann\u00e6.\n\n >  1737   Gentleman's Mag. Oct. 609/1   I have more Reason to oppose it, than any Man in this House, nay perhaps than any Man in the United Kingdom.\n\n >  1800   Act 39  &  40 Geo. III c. 67. 359   The said Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland shall..be united into one Kingdom, by the name of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1q1kce", "title": "I am a sailor aboard a German U-Boat during WWII, What is my daily routine, what is my life like?", "selftext": "What sort of food did I eat, did I have access to medical supplies, what sort of work was I most involved in, how much was I paid, was I at significant risk of death?\n\nEdit: What was done for fun on U-Boats, or was it more or less all work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1q1kce/i_am_a_sailor_aboard_a_german_uboat_during_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd8at8o"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, all of those questions completely depend on the era of the war that you sailed in. In 1940, most patrols were extremely short (at most, two weeks). They were short for a variety of reasons, mainly that Uboats had next to free reign across the shipping routes; most were able to sail out, attack a convoy on the surface at night, and sail back to port within a few weeks. Allied sonar was relatively weak, radar was nonexistent, and most convoys, early on at least, barely had an escort of more than two ships, if they were lucky. \n\nIn this time, food would be relatively fresh for the whole two week patrol. \n\nLater on in the war, once larger uboats became viable, uboats were sent into the Indian Ocean, in Operation Monsoon. IXC and IXD2 type boats would be on patrol for over half a year at times. Wolfgang Luth, the second most successful commander in the war, led U-181, an IXD2 ship, on the second longest patrol in the war. Food never completely ran out; however, after the first month, the fresh food was spoiled, and preservatives were the way to go. Eventually, they had to eat shark (which smelled horrible and tasted bad because they boiled the meat). They were resupplied by a Japanese cargo ship, and the crew was repulsed by the poor quality of food.\n\nAs it goes, the later on in the war, the poorer the food quality became, as it was on every front. Ironically, the XXI class boats were some of the first submarines equipped with refrigerators. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pjqf6", "title": "What is the earliest documented interaction between a foreign country, and Australian Aboriginals?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pjqf6/what_is_the_earliest_documented_interaction/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7dpcb"], "score": [11], "text": ["If by \"documented\" you mean refer only to surviving, contemporary written accounts, then the first documented encounter between Australians and non-Australians occurred on February 26, 1606. On that day, a Dutch expedition led by  Willem Janszoon, made landfall near Weipa, Queensland, in Awngthim country. Hostilities with the Awngthim and the Dutch cut that encounter short, and Dutch continued to face a hostile reaction until the reached the Wik-Mungkana, near present-day Aurukun Mission Station (about 100 km / 62 miles south of Weipa).  The Wik-Mungkana allowed the Dutch to set up a camp on the beach, collect water, and trade tobacco, but this young friendship quickly soured too. In Wik-Mungkana oral history, the cause of the conflict was the Dutch sexually harassing (if not outright raping) the women and forcing the men to hunt for them. The Dutch accounts are less specific - they weren't terribly concerned with understanding the motives of people deemed \"cruel black barbarians.\" After this botched attempt at peaceful interaction, the Dutch turned back and returned to the East Indies. \n\nNow, if by \"documented,\" you mean encounters for which we have evidence for today but weren't necessarily written about at the time, that opens up a whole range of possibilities. I'll work my backwards through time.\n\nPrior to the arrival of the Dutch, there may have been other encounters with Europeans - mainly Portuguese - that were either never recorded or their records have since been lost. [This 1543 map](_URL_0_), for example, shows a peculiar western lobe of South America, which has a coastline suspiciously similar, in broad strokes, to that of Western Australia. It has another landmass south of Indonesia known as Jave la Grande or Java Major, a semi-legendary land mentioned by Marco Polo as a the largest island in the world, which might be a reference to Australia, with this map confusing the two landmasses as separate locations.\n\nPrior to British colonization and probably prior to European contact in general, here's a long history of interaction between people on the Top End of Australia and in the Kimberley with people from Indonesia and perhaps mainland Asia. By the late-1700s and early-1800s, a thousand Macassan fishermen from Indonesia arrived in Arnhem Land each year to trade with the Yolngu and fish for trepang, an edible sea cucumber that was popular in Chinese markets. The Yolngu would work with the Macassans, and some even joined the crews of vessels sailing back to Indonesia. In general, in Arnhem Land the relationship between the Macassans and the local people was quite good. In the Kimberley, it seems that in the historic period at least, the relationship was considerably worse, with the Macassans needing to fortify their camps and the Kimberley peoples accusing the Macassans for violating the wurnan law that governed trade in the region. While the Macassan trade was well established by the 1700s, there's some debate on exactly when it got started. Australian artwork depicting Macassan praus date back to at least 1664 and possibly as early as 1517. Carbon dating on the oldest known trepanger camps indicate that they were established by at least 1520 and possibly as early as 1170 - though it's also suggested that the particularly old dates are due to indigenous activities at the sites which pre-date the arrival of Indonesian fishermen. Also dating to the 12th Century is a coin found on an island off the coast of Arnhem Land. It had been minted in Kilwa, the dominant city-state on the East African coast at the time, though its uncertain whether the coin got to Australia as part of the contemporary Indian Ocean trade network or if it arrived much later via hypothetical Portguese explorers (where were also known to have sacked Kilwa as Portugal asserted its power into the Indian Ocean trading sphere). \n\nYolngu oral traditions also talk about the Baijini, a people who pre-dated the Macassans but otherwise were quite similar. The Baijini came from the north, brought tamarind trees, traded, and fished for trepang. They were also known for being rice farmers and, unlike the Macassans, they seem to have come as settlers too, bringing women too and building houses, rather being seasonal visitors. When they came to Australia, they were met by the Djanggawul - the Ancestors of the Yolngu. There's a lot of speculation concerning the identity of the Baijini. Are they the Ancestors of the Macassans? Are they another group of Indonesians? Are they Chinese? Are they a historic group at all? A lot of questions here with no answers as of yet.\n\nGoing back even further, by 2500 years ago at least, Austronesian-speaking Melanesians arrived in the Torres Strait Islands and began interacting with the Australians in the area. While there was conflict between the group, there was also peaceful interactions too. Historically speaking, spears made in Cape York were in high demand on the islands as the were ideally suited for hunting dugong. The people of Cape York, in turn, learned how to make sailing outrigger canoes from the Torres Strait Islanders, and spread that knowledge even further south. \n\nGoing back even further still, around 4000 years ago, there appears to have been notable migration of peoples from India into Australia, which is still detectable today in Australian genetics. Unfortunately the circumstances surrounding this event is currently unknown. Also around this time, the dingo arrives in Australia from the north. Again, whether these events are related or the timing is coincidental is unknown."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Guillaume_Brouscon._World_chart%2C_which_includes_America_and_a_large_Terra_Java_%28Australia%29._HM_46._PORTOLAN_ATLAS_and_NAUTICAL_ALMANAC._France%2C_1543.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2m5ezm", "title": "How different was the treatment and persecution of witches in areas controlled by the Spanish Inquisition in comparison to the rest of Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2m5ezm/how_different_was_the_treatment_and_persecution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm1b3nt", "cm1fkdm"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Witch hunting was more of a Central-Northern European thing, so the scale of persecution in Spain (with the exception of Euskadi) was much lower than in, say, Germany. See this [map](_URL_0_). The Spanish inquisition main target was, after all, the *conversos* (muslims and jews, forced to convert to catholicism after the Reconquista), and to a lesser extent, Protestants. This was actually the reason that 'propelled' the Crown to establish it in the first place.\n > \"The new tribunal of 1480 soon extended its authority over both Castile and Aragon. Its express purpose was to deal with the religious practices of the \u2018conversos\u2019 of Jewish origin. Virtually all the people it arrested and examined in the first thirty years of its existence were conversos\" Golden Age Spain, Kamen\n\nAccording to Kamen, the inquisition attitude towards witchcraft was fairly progressive for the time. I'd take this claim with a grain of salt though (Kamen do tend to 'overreact' a bit in rehabilitating the Inquisition. But consider that, after all, he's responding to an extreme view as well, that the inquisition was the summum of evil):\n > \"The Spanish Inquisition played a part in prosecuting the phenomenon, but its role was surprisingly enlightened, for it insisted that \u2018witchcraft\u2019 was imaginary and therefore not a criminal offence. Whereas in most other countries witches were executed, the Spanish clergy (like those of Italy) refused to treat their offence as heresy, and clear directives from the Inquisition in 1526 and in 1610 made sure that the burning of witches was virtually unknown. However, the secular authorities in Spain continued to execute witches (by hanging), and the number of their victims may have been substantial\" Golden Age Spain, Kamen", "Given the reputation of the Spanish Inquisition, it will come as a surprise that persecution of witchcraft in the Iberian peninsula was far more 'restrained' than in the northern countries of the same period. This restraint is quantified in the smaller ratio of witches burned to witches prosecuted. There are several reasons for this.\n\nAlthough we envision the persecution of witches as a uniform phenomenon, there was in reality a diversity of expressions of it in the late medieval and early modern periods: secular and religious prosecutions, rural mobs and aristocratic accusations, tribunals and royal assizes. Moreover, what underlay the accusations of witchcraft - not just *maleficium*, but sabbat, devil's pact, devil worship - was not consistent across Europe.  Superficially speaking, this diversity is what actually makes it a challenge to the historian in understanding what lay at the root of the 'sudden' outbreak of persecution of witches. \n\nThe Spanish (and Portuguese and Roman) Inquisitions were centrally controlled within their respective territories, controlled by an office of inquisition. This is important in several respects for controlling the type and methods of persecution: \n\n1. Central policy drove persecution. \n\n  a) The Iberian inquisitions were focused on conversion and exclusion of Jews (and Muslims) in the first half century of operation with focus shifting to other heresies over decades and centuries, such heresies included protestantism and lutheranism; Catholic doctrine refuted the notion of broad based cabals of witches which was the feature and impetus of northern witch hunts;\n\n b) the inquisition was driven by Catholic doctrine of salvation: the objective was conversion and saving of the heretic, of bringing the sheep back into the flock; death, expulsion were technically the last resort. This was policy, if not entirely reality, but by and large the main; \n  \n c) *maleficium* was always a debated issue within Catholic heresiology, and the notions of a devil's pact or collective conspiracy (sabbats) were generally discredited. Here we can look to the influence of 14th c Spanish inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric and his *Directorium Inquisitorum* and other inquisitor's manuals which focused on sorcery and not devil worship. Inquisition literature informed generations of office practice which created a consistency not found in northern persecutions;\n\n d) because of (b)  &  (c) there was less room for exercising local enmities and politically-motivated accusations that featured so much in aristocratic and village persecutions in northern Europe, partly because of:\n\n2. Consistency of investigating and prosecutorial technique. \n\n  We should understand here that despite how the Catholic Church looms large in our imagination as a persecuting institution during this time, that persecution was tempered by innovations in judicial practice often ahead of secular institutions. This lead to a contradictory state (to us) where due process and legal technique resulted in less torture, and therefore less confessions of *maleficium*, or witchcraft - contradictory because we think of inquisition and torture as synonymous. Moreover, the reduced use of torture meant that there were less implicating of co-conspirators, that tinder of large scale burnings:\n\n > The restraint shown by both the Spanish and the Roman inquisitions in the use of torture had a predictable effect upon witch-hunting in the Mediterranean world. It did not completely prevent large witch-hunts from taking place, since local panics and dream epidemics were by themselves capable of supplying large numbers of suspects. But without the unrestricted use of torture the hunts that developed did not produce as many convictions or result in as many executions as the large hunts that occurred in Germany and Switzerland. Even more importantly, the reluctance to use torture prevented the development of extreme, diabolical witch beliefs. Without torture the potential for transforming simple acts of superstition into crimes of diabolical conspiracy was greatly limited, since only through confessions adduced under torture could diabolical beliefs gain the widespread legitimacy that was necessary to sustain further witch-hunting. Without torture it was certain that the learned as well as the popular view of witchcraft would remain essentially an individual moral transgression, not a large-scale attack upon Christian civilization. [Levack, *The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe*, p240]\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257/lawstatejudges/europebig.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "3am3rb", "title": "Why didn't the Nazis use hollow point ammunition?", "selftext": "I was looking through my grandfather's WWII stuff  the other day and was caught by the small case of German 9mm ammunition. It looked like regular 9mm but fittingly painted in a sinister black.\n\nI wondered though, why the heck didn't they just use hollow point ammunition? I mean they were going around invading countries and WWII was a war of war crimes. Wouldn't it have made their weapons more deadly to have used hollow point or dum dum rounds?\n\nOn a broader note why are hollow points against the rules of war? Gas seems particularly horrible but hollow point seems like a matter of degree. It feels like banning rifles with a certain accuracy. Yes it helps your side, but it also hurts it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3am3rb/why_didnt_the_nazis_use_hollow_point_ammunition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cse0qn1"], "score": [4], "text": ["Germany abided the laws of war for the most part. There was a big difference between the Western and the Eastern front obviously.\n\nLike you pointed out this ammunition was banned since the Hague Convention and using this ammuntion would just make the enemy do the same and the advantages would negate each other and it would just result in more suffering.\n\nNobody follows the laws of war because its the moral thing do to you just do it so your enemy does the same. For a country to break these rules there have to be some conditions. The advantages gained should outweight the disadvantages and you should be powerful enough that it doesn't matter what the rest of the signatories thinks.\n\nDuring the Battle of the Bulge the Wehrmacht was using vehicles and soldiers without them being properly marked as Wehrmacht going so far to repaint/rework Panthers as M10s. Why would they do that when it is against the laws? Because they were desperate and the Western Allies reaction would be irrelevant. What are they gonna do? Do the same? Doesn't matter they are winning anyways. \n\n > On a broader note why are hollow points against the rules of war?\n\nThe point of these rules is to minimize the suffering. Dum dum used by both sides would hardly change anything besides more suffering. The casualty ratios would be the same the victor would be the same. There is literally no point that these bullets should be used in war. \n\nLike pointed out before nobody follows these rules out of kindness. Correct treatment of POWs et cetera benefits everybody ( for the most part ). If you obviously plan to exterminate your enemy then these rules are forgotten really fast as we have seen on the Eastern Front where the Wehrmacht straight up killed POWs or sometimes just didn't take any in the first place. The Wehrmacht also used explosive bullets against the Red Army which are prohibited same like dum dum. Soldiers were prohibited to take these bullets with them to the Western Front. \n\nAn example which shows the nature of these rules are the British commando raids. Hitler threatend to execute captured commandos the British replied by stating they would do the same with German POWs. At the end of the day nobody killed any POWs. Laws of war in a nutshell.\n\nIt should be noted that Germany was the first to oppose the usage of these type of ammunitions.\n\nEdit: Irronically only ground troops were prohibited to use these types of ammunition. Aircraft often used explosive bullets for example and they also attacked ground forces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ux2ow", "title": "Is there a 200 year time discrepancy during the middle ages?", "selftext": "During my western civilization class today, my instructor told the class that there was a discrepancy in how European civilizations kept the date and the year could either be in the 1800's or 2200's.  According to him, when the collapse of the Roman Empire occurred, western civilization lost the cohesiveness to keep a calender synced.  I have never heard of this, though I have heard of the phantom time hypothesis.  Is there any veracity in his statement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ux2ow/is_there_a_200_year_time_discrepancy_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemjixu", "cemjkux", "cemtybw"], "score": [20, 58, 2], "text": ["Radiocarbon dating, archaeology, astronomy and dendrochronolgy (dating by tree rings) are very helpful, accurate methods used to confirm our assumptions about the historical record. Among other means, historians also use methods of text analysis, including claimed authorship, linguistic analysis, script analysis (paleography) and secondary testimony (including corroborating artifacts).\n\nWhere did your teacher get this idea from? The internet needs to know. \n\nMy guess: either your teacher is mistaken (too many conspiracy theories and popular history?) or they were trying to see how many of you were awake.", "No. This is a ridiculous theory which, like the Phantom Time Hypothesis, would imply that no other place, like, say, China, in the world was capable of telling or keeping time. I am frankly shocked and appalled that anyone put in front of a class would spout such nonsense.", "Your teacher is clueless. We have astronomical observations from ancient times from around the world which can be precisely dated due to the predictability of certain astronomical phenomenon such as eclipses. Moreover, these and other observations link Chinese and Japanese records, which were continuous through the middle ages, with various events in Europe before and after the middle ages. There simply is no possibility for such a gap."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nw0gc", "title": "In WW2, Why did Germany open a second front with the USSR? Why wouldn't they wait until defeating Britain?", "selftext": "I don't understand why they would have done it. I would feel any military would say its a poor strategy. Is there some context that makes the decision logical at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nw0gc/in_ww2_why_did_germany_open_a_second_front_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmkyu2", "ccml91w", "ccmoxnh", "ccmpr02", "ccmsipv"], "score": [10, 36, 9, 6, 6], "text": ["It has been Hitler's dream for almost 20 years at that point to invade the Soviet Union and take Lebensraum (Living space) for the German people.  Hitler wasn't about making logical decisions, Hitler was about making demands on his flights of fancy, on his whims, on his wishes, on his beliefs, etc and then everyone else trying to make it reality.\n\nThe Germans were also drunk on victory at that point.  They, like the Japanese would later, were convinced that they were invincible and that everyone would fall before them.  Hitler described the attack on the Soviet Union as, \"One kick and the whole rotten structure would come down.\"  He believed that it'd be over almost before it began.  Just a short pause in the war against the West while the USSR was defeated in weeks.  At that time the United Kingdom wasn't in a position to invade France and push into Germany.   ", "Hitler cancelled Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain) in 1940 because after the loss of the Battle of Britain he could never have had the air or naval superiority required to launch a successful invasion. On the other hand, Britain posed little threat to Hitler once he was master of the continent - the RAF and Royal Navy were an annoyance to the Nazi materiel massed in Northern France but Britain was in no position to launch an invasion.\n\nThe 'Western' front, then, had ground to a halt and was unlikely to change at any point soon. Britain was not a serious threat to Occupied Europe and vice versa.\n\nThis allowed Hitler the chance to look east, and the chance to use the Blitzkrieg techniques that had been so successful in overrunning Europe.  He and his staff knew that war in Russia was inevitable. Rather than giving the USSR further time to prepare for war the Nazi hierarchy formulated a plan to strike an enormous and sudden blow - the largest invasion in the history of warfare - on the USSR to stun them into submission. About the USSR Hitler believed 'We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down' - he did not share the same confidence about Britain. With the USSR defeated swiftly and decisively Hitler would be the uncontested dictator of Europe, his flanks secured, which would then allow him to turn his attention to Britain. Had Barbarossa been successful it's likely a renewed invasion of Britain would have been.", "Hitler viewed the Ukraine as the breadbasket that would sustain the German nation, and the Caucasus as the source of oil, an essential commodity for a nation at war. Having lived through WWI and having witnessed the hardships endured on the German home-front, he understood that Germany needed a substantial source of food to prevent a successful blockade from being a devastating economic blow that would starve the Germans into submission. Hitler wanted to build a continental empire that would be self-sufficient, and provide a powerful base for later conflict with America and Britain.\n\nOf course, overconfidence in the Wehrmacht also played a significant role in the decision. It's an oft-repeated point that Hitler did not foresee Operation Barbarossa lasting into the winter, and that German troops were not provided with winter coats or any supplies to help them withstand the Russian winter.", "Because that was the main goal of German expansion. The West was a side show to secure Germany's position in the East.France was attacked to prevent a stab in the back once Germany was fighting Russia. Poland was attacked to open up space for attack and bring Soviet Union close. Britain was never Hitler's target. He did not plan for it and did not really want it because - imagine that - he thought the British empire essential to world order. Hitler also liked very much the deeply racist and segregationist policies Britain had in its colonies. It wasn't Hitler that went to war against Britain - it was Britain that went to war against Hitler. France was the problem because France and Germany had a long tradition of being at each other's throat and Versailles was long one of Hitler's driving factors. However Hitler considered defeating France to be an issue of honour and national pride. He considered defeating Soviet Union to be an issue of national survival and expansion.  The plans were really neat - it's just typically got downhill right from the start of the war.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe image of Hitler wanting to devour all of Europe is a creation of British and American war propaganda and is maintained because the American and British side won the war decisively while helping out the Soviets.\n\nThis is not however how it was taught in former soviet bloc countries where Hitler's focus on the Soviet Union was primary all along.Accidentally - despite soviet history being a lot of fabrications - it was actually true.\n\n", "Adam Tooze's explanation is extremely convincing IMO. He argues that Hitler had an essentially zero-sum view of world history that stipulated that all successful societies are essentially autarkic and the success of the British was that they built a great empire. Hitler also believed that he was on a limited time constraint given America's almost guaranteed entry into the war and the fact that in the long run the British could mobilize their empire. Thus, Germany had to take what he thought was its destiny in his hands and build its empire in the east to exploit their land (because for Hitler fram land was fundamentally power) in order to fight the British Empire and eventually Americans. \n\nLink to the book in question:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweites_Buch"], ["http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Wages_of_Destruction.html?id=8zD1GAAACAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "1m48k4", "title": "What was W. Europe and Britain like before the Romans arrived? Who lived there and how did it change as a result?", "selftext": "I was wondering today about how all of the nations in Europe formed after the decline/fall of Rome, and about the peoples who lived there before Rome arrived. Especially in England as (if I remember right) they never conquered the entire thing, what was the effect of the arrivals of the Romans on the inhabitants immediately and in the future?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m48k4/what_was_w_europe_and_britain_like_before_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5ok87", "cc5ovsd", "cc6ltvt"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["Well, in France, you had the Gauls, who were divided in multiple tribes, like the Arverni, the Aedui and the Belgii who were quite advanced. These tribes were Celtic. Spain had been taken over by Carthage, partially and the rest of it was inhabited by Spanish tribes. Those tribes were Spanish, but there were a few Celtiberian tribes, so mixed. The Netherlands was inhabited by the Frisians and the Batavi, the latter of which became famous for their service in the Roman military. The Frisians and Batavi were Germanic. Britain was inhabited by Celtic tribes as well. Picts in Scotland and Britons in England. I don't know what tribes they had, I only know about the Iceni. Hope that answers a part of your question.", "Thats a very long era your talking about, \n\nIll try and cover between (750 BC \u2013 43 AD) the iron age, upto the Roman invasion\n\nBritain was split into many tribal area's _URL_0_ (map) ruled by cheiften's they mostly lived in hill forts _URL_2_ (which comprised most of wooden defences and earth works).\n\nYou have to bear in mind mind Britain was completely covered in forest back then so living within the forest was dangerous bear, wolves, lynx and boar still lived in Britain also the the danger of cattle raids and near by enemy tribes.\n\nThey hunted and farmed also they kept livestock, Made pottery and could smelt iron for weapons, jewellery and tools.\n\nThey lived in roundhouses and family life resolved around them.\nA fire was constantly lit in the middle to proved heat, cooking and light. _URL_1_\n\nThe Religion was polytheistic they worshipped many deities, some where known completely through Britain like Danu or Brighid and others were known as local deities these deities were known to inhabit rivers/lakes or hills and woods for example.\nMany have been lost to history.\n\nDeath, depending upon the tribe had different rituals some where placed into mounds others left the body to the corvids and some cremated.\n\nSeasonal rituals involved stone circles and fires, Two bonefires where lit and cattle would be drove between them to bless the harvest or the spring and give them good health.\n\nHope this helps a little.\n\n \"Especially in England as (if I remember right) they never conquered the entire thing\"\nTo answer you question the Roman Empire ended at Hadrian's wall, there was enougher wall further north called Antonine Wall but was abandoned after 20 years.\n\nBut it was all of Scotland or Caladonia they never conquered.\n\nIf you have any questions about this period just let me know.\n\n", "One of the biggest effects for the average Roman Briton would have been an improvement in the quality of food. (Insert joke about british cuisine). Prior to the Roman invasion, Britain was relatively isolated, and [whilst some luxury goods were imported](_URL_0_) there wasn't a real exchange of crops.\n\nPre roman food in Britain would have revolved heavily around seafood, meats, grains and \"forage\" foods (the kind of uncultivated or semi cultivated vegetables an fruits you can find in a forest or hedgerow). The Romans brought proper vegetables- carrots, cabbage, peas, turnips, onions, leeks and a range of herbs. Finally you could have a decent stew! These vegetables then spread from modern England to Scotland and Ireland through trade (insert joke about the scots apparently not getting the message).\n\nIn all seriousness, this changed the country dramatically. Along with more productive varieties of wheat, this made nourishment easier and better for the vast majority of people inhabiting the islands. Bread increased further in prominence in the diet, and a wider variety of flavors were accessible even to the poorest who suddenly had rosemary to go with his mutton gristle. It revolutionized what was on the tables across the country, which as far as wide reaching changes go is a pretty large one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.britannia.com/history/celtictribes.gif", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Roundhouse_%28dwelling%29_Celtic_Wales.jpeg/220px-Roundhouse_%28dwelling%29_Celtic_Wales.jpeg", "http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/sarum.jpg"], ["http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/19/olive-stone-pre-roman-britain"]]}
{"q_id": "6qtmw4", "title": "Did Hitler genuinely hold Christian beliefs or were his Christian beliefs solely a political move?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qtmw4/did_hitler_genuinely_hold_christian_beliefs_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dl0a03k"], "score": [2], "text": ["More that can be said, but check out the [Hitler section of the FAQ for some related content.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/wdht#wiki_...of_religion_and_philosophy"]]}
{"q_id": "1vpumt", "title": "Were Ethiopia's rulers Jewish before converting to Christianity? And if not, was there a large Jewish Ethiopian population that in anyway predisposed Ethiopia into becoming Christian?", "selftext": "Also, was Ethiopia or the land that modern Ethiopia occupies or the civilization from which a line of continuity can be drawn back from modern Ethiopia towards into pre-Christian times a Jewish or Jewish-influenced state?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vpumt/were_ethiopias_rulers_jewish_before_converting_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceunyb4", "ceuqinp"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Sorta.  On the first bit, there was a [Jewish kingdom in the region](_URL_0_), but I wouldn't call them the leaders of Ethiopia.  However, there was a large Jewish population in Ethiopia.  They moved to Israel en masse in the early 1990s, but there was a significant population.  And this population seems to have been larger historically--there was much coercive conversion to Christianity from Judaism earlier on.  The relationship of Christianity in Ethiopia with Ethiopian Judaism is evident in works like their respective biblical canons--both Jews and Christians in Ethiopia have bibles written in Ge'ez, which contains books not considered canonical in either Christianity or Judaism elsewhere.", "The rulers of the Aksumite kingdom appear not to have been Jewish at the time that Ezana converted to Christianity in the 3rd century. \n\nAltars, tombs, and stelae at Addi Gelemo and other sites from the 5th century BC all depict a recurring symbol of a crescent and a disc. This crescent and disc symbol also appears in altars and coinage from the contemporary Sabaean kingdom of the southern Arabian peninsula. This symbol is believed to depict a Sabaean lunar deity. \n\nThe appearance of this symbol on both sides of the Red Sea does not appear to be coincidence. The current theory is that there was much cultural, technological and linguistic exchange occurring in the first millennium BC. \n\nWhy is this relevant? Because this disc and crescent symbol continues to appear in temple contexts, as well as in coinage into the early Axumite era (the first and second centuries AD). So, it is this Ethio-Sabaean lunar deity that looks to have been worshipped by the rulers of Axum in the pre-Christian period.\n\nOf course, there are some indications of Judaism in the Horn of Africa region in the time period we are talking about. The Byzantine historian Procopius describes an Axumite expedition against the Himyarite kingdom (in what is now Yemen), and describes the Himyarite leader Dhu Nuwas as being Jewish.\n\nSimilarly, there is popular oral tradition of the queen Yodit (\"judith\") of the Beta Israel, who is remembered as the final conqueror of Aksum and is sometimes credited/blamed for the usurpation of the Zagwe dynasty. \n\n-----\n\nSources\n\n[Aksum, an African civilization of late antiquity](_URL_0_)\n\n[Foundations of an African Civilization: Aksum and the Northern Horn 1000 BC to AD 1300](_URL_1_) discusses the conversion to christianity starting on p.91 \n\n*African Archaeology, 3rd edition* by David W. Phillipson. Discusses the Crescent and Disc symbol starting p.228, with a depiction of an altar at Addi Gelemo on p229."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Semien"], ["http://www.dskmariam.org/artsandlitreature/litreature/pdf/aksum.pdf", "http://books.google.com/books?id=Nx-qYO3zqlIC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=foundations+of+an+african+civilization&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=0MLdUvahCIiqsQSJ1IGABw&amp;ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "20l6k8", "title": "Why in the 19th,20th century or even today autocratic states always have military parade with all the stuffs(Tanks, missiles, choregraphic move) while in the western world its fairly rare and less impressive?", "selftext": "In Canada I never saw that kind of military parade.\n\n German empire, USSR, NAZI Germany, Communist China ect. \n\n\nFrance would be the only exception(Bastille day)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20l6k8/why_in_the_19th20th_century_or_even_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg4g0pd", "cg4gvvf", "cg4iwuk", "cg4j58w"], "score": [43, 17, 44, 4], "text": ["Actually military parades are much more common than you may think, and are certainly not circumscribed to autocratic states. Even though the USSR collapsed, Russia continues to hold a parade to commemorate winning WWII (The Great Patriotic War). [Here](_URL_2_) is a link for the 2013 celebration.\n\nYou already mentioned France, but [Spain](_URL_0_) and [Italy](_URL_1_) also have military parades. Those are the examples than come to mind right now, but there are certainly more. Check [this](_URL_3_) Wiki page which list the Armed Forces Day of different counties, since military parades usually are usually held for that day.", "There may be other answers to this question as well, but in large part it has to due with regime legitimacy. Remember that democratic regimes in general derive their legitimacy from elections. In the modern day, elections have taken on such great meaning that in many authoritarian states (see North Korea), \"elections\" are still \"held\" just to prove regime legitimacy. The fact that elections in democracies are patently more fair and competitive means that democratic regimes generally don't need to rely on alternative sources of legitimacy, at least at first. People elect democratic leaders and give them some leeway. Later, if the regime's legitimacy has been eroded (say because of corruption, poor economic performance, etc.) then a new regime can be elected.\n\nIn autocratic regimes, citizens know that elections are generally not competitive. Without fair elections to provide legitimacy, regimes often turn to other sources of legitimacy. Some of these stem from a regime's ideology. For instance, Baathists may claim legitimacy from policies which support Islamic culture. A common way for any authoritarian regime to prove its legitimacy is to show its military strength. Many of these regimes have arisen in response to some external threat (say the CPC) or in order to export their belief systems elsewhere (say the USSR). No matter what, a strong military shows that the regime is capable of defending its citizens and ostensibly also proves a certain level of economic success (you can't design and pay for missiles without a basic industrial economy, after all). In many regimes, autocrats have a special fondness for military parades because their supporters predominantly reside within the military. In these cases, military parades can also please the generals on whom leaders rely by identifying the military as a prestigious source of national pride.", "For the United States, I can shed some light. The United States Army and other Armed Forces of the U.S. are, at a federal level, heavily restricted from operating as a cohesive force for any purpose (including parades) domestically.\n\nOne thing that's important to understand is how the U.S. Army is organized. While there is a Regular Army and an Army Reserve that are controlled, mostly, at a central, federal level. There is also a large National Guard that is, at least theoretically, the responsibility of each state to raise, maintain, and control, and which is the primary go-to for domestic army needs, *not* the Federal Army forces. \n\nIndeed, the Founders of the U.S. were extremely wary, for obvious reasons, of standing armies of any kind, and especially of the chief executive (in this case, the President of the U.S.) using those armies on U.S. soil for improper purposes under the guise of protecting the people. As such, soon after the U.S. Constitution was passed, the Congress passed the [Insurrection Act of 1807](_URL_2_), which makes it very difficult for the President to use the army domestically, even in the event of an insurrection, rebellion, or foreign invasion, without going through a series of Congressional checks. Likewise, the [Posse Comitatus Act](_URL_1_), of 1878 and 1981, heavily limits the ability of the federal Armed Forces to be allowed to enforce state laws. \n\nTogether, along with other supporting laws, it is very, very difficult to allow the Army to operate in any capacity at all in a domestic way in the U.S. Parades that involve large gatherings of troops and marches would not necessarily be prohibited by any of this, but the troops that would be organized in this way would likely need to come from the various states' individual National Guard units, not the overall Federal Army. States are unlikely to want to send large numbers of their personnel to a single point in the country for a show of force, and the nature of these laws and the philosophy behind them should show that Americans, in general, are pretty put off and suspicious of parades of this nature, to start with.\n\nThat said, such gatherings were not unheard of in the old days. During the Civil War, when States were truly responsible for gathering their own Army units and there was no separate Federal force to speak of, there were parades and shows of force. [The Army of the Potomac](_URL_0_) paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, as seen in that photo, during the [Grand Review of the Armies](_URL_3_) following the end of the war in 1865. In a funny story, during this parade, George Armstrong Custer, in typical fashion, actually paraded twice, just so he could soak up double the adulation from the adoring masses. That egoism would later serve him poorly.\n\nAt any rate, I've sort of rambled around, but the short answer to your question, at least with regard to the U.S. is: Americans are suspicious of domestic armies, and put lots of laws to keep them out of domestic operations in place. That, along with the state-focused organization of the modern U.S. Army makes parades hard. However, they aren't unheard of in the past, even here.", "The Autocratic states of the early 20th century placed a lot of value upon their military might, and as such had regular military parades to showcase that might. \n\n\nThere is a misconception in associating the parade with them alone, however. These regimes may have used parades to the greatest propaganda effect, but many democratic nations have parades as well.\n\n\nThe military parade has been a longstanding tradition in European countries, practically since the creation of national regular standing armies. Until the 20th century, parade maneuvers were actually a practical part of training soldiers. The parade formations you see today, while certainly not intended for combat even in the era of horse and muskets, are very similar to the kind of formations that the soldiers of the day would have had to fight in: Lines and columns of men who would have to move in a very tight formation. Practice on the parade ground fostered company cohesion on the battlefield. (And it payed dividends - at the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, parade style precision allowed the British Highlanders to concentrate fire on a single point from their entire line without worrying about hitting any of their fellows. This concentration stopped a mass Russian cavalry charge)\n\nEven today, parade drill is a part of military training in most nations, as it still helps with discipline and cohesion (though not in the immediately practical way it used to). \n\nThe parade also became a tool for raising the desire to fight at home - the soldiers marching in lock step, wearing stunning uniforms, with flags waving in the wind coming to town was a big to do back in the day. (In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was also a way for commanders, who were often times members of the aristocracy, to show off and gain prestige)  \n\n[Also, Who says the US doesn't have military parades?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Japan has one too.](_URL_3_)\n\n[Even South Korea has a military parade.](_URL_2_)\n\n[And for you Canadians, there apparently was one in Toronto fairly recently.](_URL_0_)\n\nA simple youtube search of \"Military Parade\" will get you quite a few results you might not have expected. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiesta_Nacional_de_Espa%C3%B1a", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festa_della_Repubblica", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Moscow_Victory_Day_Parade", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_Day"], [], ["http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/jb/civil/jb_civil_parade_1_e.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Review_of_the_Armies"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paMLrOf1aPk", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp6AIukSPCA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZSELrA02I", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyWIhMwkESE"]]}
{"q_id": "49zjp8", "title": "What did language education look like in Mesopotamia?", "selftext": "Was it one citizen/noble, or several, who invented the language and taught it to others? Was there a classroom setting?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49zjp8/what_did_language_education_look_like_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0wam5r"], "score": [4], "text": ["The genesis of a language, assuming its organic nature, is something that is still hotly debated among evolutionary biologists, cognitive psychologists, and linguists alike. Conlangs (constructed languages made by individuals or groups) did not really come about until much later in history (medieval times really, like Enochian). I have seen no compelling evidence that Sumerian or any of the other ancient mesopotamian languages were conlangs, so it is unlikely that a single individual \"came up\" with a language here and disseminated it throughout society. Beyond this, I cannot comment on the linguistic evolution of Sumerian, Akkadian, or Aramaic.\n\nI can, however, comment on the way that writing was taught in the Fertile Crescent. The Sumerians had initially developed writing in the city-state of Uruk, where cuneiform evolved past its proto-cuneiform stage. We know that Uruk is the birthplace of human writing because the oldest cuneiform documents can be found there, and the very Sumerian symbol for \"city\" was the same as that used for \"Uruk\" (compare other city-states whose names are differentiated). The ancient Sumerians had a system of schools called *edubba* designed to train scribes (*dubsar*). Writing in Sumeria developed not for religious purposes (at least initially, as it would certainly attain a religious element later on), but rather for accounting purposes; early transactions had merchants send clay envelopes filled with tokens alongside their merchandise to their customers. The tokens would correspond to the type and quantity of goods to ensure that the correct goods were traded, and pictographs detailing the contents of the envelope were stamped on the outside to ensure that the customer knew if goods and their tokens were stolen. Eventually, they did away with the tokens altogether and sent along clay tablets with pictographs instead. The pictographs became more abstract as time went on, resulting in wedge-writing we know today as cuneiform.\n\nScribal *edubba* changed in format over time, and by the Third Dynasty of Ur, schooling was done in a master scribe's home, where his students (*dumu edubba*, \"children of the school\") were instructed in a wide range of topics, including arithmetic, history, religion, and wisdom literature (proverbs, catchy sayings). There was even a recess period and teacher's aides (*shesh'gal*) to watch over students during breaks. \n\nRegarding language, the Ancient Sumerians spoke Sumerian, a language isolate not definitively know to be related to any other language. Their successors, the Akkadians, spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. When Sargon of Akkad forged one of the first hegemonic powers of the Middle East, his people adopted the Sumerian cuneiform to write their own records. This led to some difficulties, as cuneiform was tailored to the structure of the Sumerian language, not Akkadian, so various methods had to be employed to allow Akkadian to be represented well (such as the use of rebus, that is, using homophones, i.e. Eye-sea-ewe standing for \"I see you\"). The Akkadians would actually retain the use of the Sumerian language for religious and scientific purposes, much as how Learned Latin was used in Europe or Sanskrit in India, Classical Chinese in China, etc. It was a sign of prestige (and pretention) for an Akkadian scribe to be able to write and speak in Sumerian, and as such Sumerian was often taught in their scribal schools.\n\nIf you'd like to know more, [here's](_URL_0_) a writeup I did a while ago addressing the structure of the Sumerian education system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/45c2i9/uruktheplaygroundsquare_and_the_sumerian_ivy/"]]}
{"q_id": "5mxucm", "title": "Why are there so few remains of german culture and language in today's USA when german used to be the largest group in terms of ethnic heritage", "selftext": "(Just recently surpassed by 'hispanic')", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mxucm/why_are_there_so_few_remains_of_german_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc7ixtt"], "score": [73], "text": ["(a re-statement of my earlier points without the unnecessary soapboxing--my apologies to the AskHistorians mods.)\n\nI'm not an Americanist, so this will remain a 'holding' point until the Americanists arrive, but:\nThere were intensive efforts to eradicate German language and/or culture during and immediately after the First World War.\n\nIn May of 1918, for instance, the Governor of Iowa issued the 'Babel' Proclamation, stating that \"only English is legal in public or private schools, in public conversations, on trains, over the telephone, at all meetings, and in all religious services.\"  Similarly, in June of 1918, South Dakota made it illegal to 'use' (speak) German at any public gathering.  \n\nNebraska removed German-language books from schools in 1918, and forced the closure of German-language newspapers. They even made it illegal to teach in any foreign language.\n\nBut during the war, the informal attacks on German were much more threatening: American self-styled patriots even went on Dachshund killing-sprees, if you can believe it.  German town and street-names were re-named.   (Berlin, Ohio changed its name to  Fort Loramie, Ohio.) German families changed their name, German breweries changed their brand-name, etc.  \n\nSome words of German origin were changed, at least temporarily.  (Sauerkraut came to be called \"liberty cabbage\"; hamburgers became \"liberty sandwiches\"; and so forth). \n\nAnti-German legislation only intensified after war's end, curiously.  Indiana, for instance, made it illegal to teach the German language in Indiana in 1919.   Ultimately, anti-German-speaking laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1923.  (Meyer v. Nebraska;  Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented.) \n\nThere's been a ton written on this (most of which I've not read myself, sorry!): but one book that leaps to mind is Christopher Capozzola's Uncle Sam Wants You; he talks about anti-German activities for 10 pages or so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1h7qc7", "title": "Before the advent of photographs and film, who were the great female sex symbols and how did people find out about them?", "selftext": "I was watching Shawshank Redemption today, and the poster of Rita Hayworth got me thinking.  Is this idea of having female sex symbols something that only really existed when it was possible to get widely distributed photos of them?  Or did it come into being earlier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h7qc7/before_the_advent_of_photographs_and_film_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["carskju", "caru8fn", "carwruk"], "score": [28, 7, 5], "text": ["Cleopatra was definitely a sex symbol going as far back as BCE times.  In fact, I submit that she intersects exactly with the OP's example of Rita Hayworth as her myth progresses (being depicted by Vivien Leigh in 1945's 'Caesar and Cleopatra' after Hayworth rejected the role)\n\nEarly accounts of Cleopatra set her up to be remembered.  The story of her having her servant Apollodoros wrap her up in a carpet and unroll her for Caesar is referenced by Plutarch:\n > \"The only friend Cleopatra took with her was Apollodorus of Sicily. She sailed in a small dinghy to the royal palace, where she landed at dusk, and since she was bound to be spotted otherwise, she got inside one of those bags that are used for holding bedclothes and stretched herself out to her full length, while Apollodorus tied a strap around the bag and carried her inside to Caesar.\"\n\n-Plutarch. Roman Lives. p. 341\n\nPlutarch also said that she \"had a great personality\" (as opposed to SHE WAS SMOKIN' HOT)\n >  \u201cFor her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased\u2026\u201d\n\nMore recent historians use more brevity:\n > \"Her landing is immortalized by the story, which may well be true, that a Sicilian merchant Apollodorus smuggled her past the coastguards in a carpet or a roll of bedding.\"\n\n-Grant, Michael. Cleopatra. p. 63\n\nAs to what she \"actually\" looked like... it is hard to say:\n\n* [An early sculptural depiction of Cleopatra in the Louvre in France](_URL_12_)\n* [Some other busts](_URL_26_)  These were created during the Roman \"realistic\" period, but it is difficult to tell how accurate these were.\n* [Here is a contemporary coin](_URL_19_) [The coins of the time](_URL_3_) seem to emphasize her \"hook\" nose.\n* [51-30 bce sculpture](_URL_16_)\n* [3rd century bas relief](_URL_11_)\n* [A modern aggregate rendition](_URL_24_) of what Cleopatra might have looked like [from many sources](_URL_22_).\n\nAs time goes on, Cleopatra is represented as being more and more \"beautiful\" as opposed to \"realistic\". Her image over the years is actually useful for understanding what people thought of as \"beautiful\" at the time.  Cleopatra, being a classical figure, was a great outlet for an artist to paint a pretty woman without seeming to be lewd or base.  Her death seems to be an especially helpful vehicle in this regard.\n\n* [S. Netherlands \\[Bruges\\], The Death of Anthony with Sword and Cleopatra with Asps, 1470-1483](_URL_20_) (note the anachronistically comical presence of the very un-Egyptian hennin and the use of asps to preserve modesty.)\n* [Michelangelo Bunnaroti, 1533](_URL_10_) (\"asp as pastie\" again)\n* [Tiepolo's \"The Banquet of Cleopatra\", 1745](_URL_27_)\n* [Cabanel, 1823: Cleopatra testing poisons on the condemned](_URL_28_)\n* [A. Rixens, 'The Death of Cleopatra', 1874](_URL_15_)\n* [John Williams, 1888](_URL_13_)\n* [Reginald Arthur, 1892](_URL_17_)\n\nOnce films and images begin to propogate, the depiction of Cleopatra becomes more homogenized\n\n* [Jane Cowl, 1899](_URL_8_)\n* [Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917](_URL_7_) [And strikingly](_URL_9_)\n* [Claudette Colbert in Cecile B. DeMille's 'Cleopatra', 1934](_URL_9_)\n* [Vivien Leigh in 'Caesar and Cleopatra', 1945](_URL_0_)\n* [Piper Laurie in General Electric Theater's April 1959 production of 'Caesar and Cleopatra'.](_URL_25_)\n*[1962 Fashion Model Cleopatra Costume](_URL_21_)\n* [Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, 1963](_URL_2_) [And](_URL_6_)\n* ['Cleopatra' Japanese Anime, 1970](_URL_29_) (You know you are a sex symbol when the Japanese start drawing you)\n* [Hildegard Niel, 'Anthony and Cleopatra', 1973](_URL_18_) \n* [Jane Lapotaire in BBC's 'Anthony and Cleopatra', 1980](_URL_5_) who (appropos of nothing) bears striking resemblance to Game of Throne's [Caetlyn Tully Stark](_URL_1_) (Michelle Fairley).  I only put that here because the Lapotaire picture is so small.\n* Finally, [Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra \\(2013\\)](_URL_14_)\n\nWith few exceptions (Lapotaire), the modern depictions of Cleopatra tend toward this archetype: Black bangs, silky shift, almond eyes, and an implicitly willing disposition.  Almost all recent \"sex symbol\" models and actresses can be found portraying a sexy Cleopatra-like woman with only a cursory Google image search.\n\n* [Modern Halloween costume for Cleopatra](_URL_4_)\n* [Cleopatra ASCII depiction](_URL_23_)\n\nI therefore humbly submit that Cleopatra was one of the first, and certainly the most enduring \"sex symbol\" memes which Rita Hayworth and others have echoed through the ages. [\\(though certainly not *the* first\\)](_URL_30_)", "This is a tricky question because it depends on what \"sex symbol\" means. Is it someone who is simply famous for being beautiful, whose unknown image people would fantasize about sexually and represent artistically? That definition doesn't seem particularly useful, because one could argue for including gods and goddesses of beauty like Aphrodite in such a group, which date back to time immemorial.  \n\nSemi-mythological figures like Helen of Troy or Lady Godiva might be a step closer to sex symbols. Homer describes her as the most beautiful woman in the world, and says that her beauty directly led to the Trojan War. But was Helen a real person? Was the Trojan War itself even a historically-attested event, if the clearly mythological *Iliad* is the best source we have for it? These are questions on which I am not really qualified to give an answer, but the scholarly consensus seems to be a resounding \"maybe.\" Inasmuch as the historical Helen's beauty might have led to epic conflict, you could certainly argue that she counts as a sex symbol, but the overwhelming majority of troops almost certainly never saw her face. It's also worth noting that in many formal genres of ancient and medieval texts, authors would go to great hyperbolic lengths to convince the reader of the supreme and perfect beauty of a particular woman as a means of raising the stakes of the narrative (and of exemplifying beauty as a symbol for virtue). Consider the description of other major ancient literary female love interests like Sita or Penelope.  \n\nThe groups of women who could be considered potential sex symbols prior to the development of film would thus be either those whose images were widely seen (via painting, sculpture, printing, or some other mechanism) or those who actually appeared in front of large groups of people (actresses, royalty, etc.). Cleopatra, often described by contemporaries as quite beautiful, might qualify, though these accounts are not unanimous and her beauty was exaggerated by Shakespeare and later authors and artists. Various circumstances cast doubt on claims by contemporary authors that certain queens were widely regarded as beautiful. Most royal marriages through history have been concluded for political convenience, leaving the sexual satisfaction of royalty to concubines and courtesans. It would be much more politically dangerous for members of a court to criticize a queen's beauty than a courtesan's; thus, widely-agreed-upon accounts of a particular courtesan's beauty seem more likely to be true.\n\nThus, royal mistresses are a good bet for finding early sex symbols, and boy are there plenty of them. [Aspasia](_URL_1_) is a particularly fascinating early example of the Greek [hetaerae](_URL_4_) (courtesans/prostitutes). The Ottoman harem system, which pitted rival concubines against one another, led to the sultan's favorites gaining great political influence: see, for example, [Roxelana](_URL_5_) or [K\u00f6sem Sultan](_URL_2_). Someone like [Nell Gwyn](_URL_0_), the oft-painted Restoration-era actress and mistress to Charles II of England, would probably fit the bill quite nicely; even Samuel Pepys owned an engraving of her. Similarly, [Madame de Pompadour](_URL_6_), mistress to Louis XV, would qualify. [Here's a decent list](_URL_3_) of famous courtesans.", "Before posters, there were paintings. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries big cities would have annual exhibitions/contests where artists could submit works to be judged for prizes, and to attract new clients. The most famous and important of these for many years was the Paris Salon, which opened to the public in 1737. If your work was accepted for display in one these and made a splash it would help you career a lot. \n\nA good portrait could also help make the subject famous --- Thomas Gainsborough's [portrait of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire](_URL_1_), set off a huge craze for the hat she was wearing in the picture. [John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Madame X caused such a scandal it had to be yanked from the exhibition.](_URL_0_) \n\nObviously, even when these exhibitions were open to the public not everybody got to see them; you pretty much had to be living in the capital and/or have a fair amount of money. So knowledge of these women would haven't been as widespread as that of, say, Rita Hayworth. But I think probably they'd have been recognizable to large swathes of the public in the capitol. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/bGcTRUy.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/fFSrSuo.jpg", "http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/16200000/Cleopatra-1963-elizabeth-taylor-16282207-1196-1800.jpg", "https://www.google.com/search?q=cleopatra+coin&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=ZtnNUempGLHj4AOUqIHACA&amp;ved=0CDAQsAQ&amp;biw=1680&amp;bih=925", "http://img.costumecraze.com/images/vendors/franco/21054-Black-Cleopatra-Wig-With-Headband-large.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/vVWyjiW.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/cBflsBm.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/duX84cp.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/FbD5Xkl.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/xnqoj7A.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/FOBOmY9.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/9W3ApU0.jpg", "http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/imagecache/278x370/medias/medias_images/images/louvre-lagid-queen-isis-cleopatra.jpg?1321828326", "http://i.imgur.com/QondcbO.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/nFcqLKf.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/r3XTj3v.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/jnt6J9W.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/0BhLf8c.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/X2pJlli.jpg", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/cleopatra/bust2.gif", "http://i.imgur.com/z3GYhs9.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/F0ck9VC.png", "http://i.imgur.com/jpjAhut.jpg", "http://www.geocities.com/spunk1111/women.htm#cleopatra", "http://i.imgur.com/zqSCYAg.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/7UxJM9Z.jpg", "http://www.stephaniedray.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cleopatra-busts.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/HD8Y349.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/b7RV5Uv.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/mCqN5qi.jpg", "https://www.google.com/search?q=neolithic+fertility+goddess&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=HczNUa_TI9S00QH-tIHQAw&amp;ved=0CEcQsAQ&amp;biw=1680&amp;bih=925"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nell_Gwyn", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspasia", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6sem_Sultan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesan#Famous_courtesans_in_history", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetaera", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxelana", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_de_Pompadour"], ["http://www.jssgallery.org/paintings/madame_x.htm", "http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2009/01/picture-hat.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4afmbr", "title": "Today is Commonwealth Day. How did the newly independent nations in Africa and the Indian subcontinent view the Commonwealth at its inception? Didn't they see it as the vestiges of colonialism?", "selftext": "Also how has the member nations relations with Great Britain changed over time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4afmbr/today_is_commonwealth_day_how_did_the_newly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1070ta"], "score": [3], "text": ["India saw heated debate on this topic of 'to be or not to be'. It was so heated that it even created a schism within the leading Indian Freedom Fighters party, the Indian National Congress.\n\nThe British Raj had consistently maintained that it (through the British Parliament) reserved the rights to decide when and the extent to which India could have self governance. This was enshrined in the Government of India Act 1919. During this period (till about the mid 20's), the concept of \"Purna (Total) Swaraj (Freedom)\" was very limited in the Indian freedom movement, and the general push was for 'dominion status'. A fully independent state, but one that recognised the supremacy of the British Monarch.\n\nIt was at this stage that many powerful events sort of coalesced together which would about a decade later set the stage for the total unity (for the most part) in the demand for Purna Swaraj.\n\nThe Jalianwallah Bagh Massacre revolted Indians, and this act lead to the most powerful Indian leader of his era, Gandhi to declare that while his (and the INC's) goal was \"Swaraj\" and a political and spiritual freedom from Britain, Britain's behaviour to Indians alone would determine his future course of action. The gauntlet...had been dropped.\n\nIn 1921, another Congress leader, Hasrat Mohani for the first time (for the INC) openly called for Purna Swaraj and a complete breaking of ties with Britain. \n\nIn 1922, Britain constituted (in my own view, a tasteless, and tactless) a Committee to look into India and suggest reforms. The problem was that, the committee, named the Simon Commission was comprised entirely of white men from Britain. This enraged the Indians, who promptly (the INC that is) set up a Nehru Committee comprised of Indians to propose 'counter reforms'. \n\nThis is where the schism starts to form. The Nehru Committee, headed by Motilal Nehru proposed amongst other things that India not push for Purna Swaraj, but for Swaraj, and that it remain a dominion. That is, something similar to Canada or Australia - independent nation, but the Crown is sovereign and the British Parliament would have the ability to intervene in India's constitutional affairs.\n\nThis set the cat amongst the pigeons and sparked a massive row within the INC. M Nehru's own son, Jawaharlal Nehru (the first PM of India) and one of the most powerful INC leaders, Subash Chandra Bose, renounced this report and said nothing less than Purna Swaraj would do.\n\nThe biggest roadblock to Purna Swaraj though was, Gandhi. He totally and completely dominated the INC, and was a total force to be reckoned with, and he wasn't convinced that Purna Swaraj was an acceptable solution. He wanted India to push for dominion status. Gandhi had other reasons for wanting to retain ties to Britain (but that is not within scope for this discussion). In this he had the support of the second most influential party in India at that time, the All India Muslim League who wanted only dominion status.\n\nThis caused a complete break between Subash Chandra Bose and the rest of the INC who, including J Nehru acceded to Gandhi's demands that India retain dominion status.\n\nBy January 26, 1930, the 'hardliners' gained in numbers and strength, J Nehru became the Congress President, the utter failure of the Irwin-Gandhi talks (when Irwin refused to even commit to Dominion status) had all pushed Gandhi away from Dominion Status to Purna Swaraj.\n\nFrom then on, till January 1950, the Indian political movement (and its people) were united in a desire to cut all ties with Britain as they...to answer your question, saw even commonwealth status as a tie into her colonial past.\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c39kv", "title": "How did Africans in the occupied part of North Africa react to WWII fighting between the Axis and the Allies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c39kv/how_did_africans_in_the_occupied_part_of_north/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjc4gpq"], "score": [5], "text": ["Just popping in here to recommend a great Egyptian film called \"Alexandria... Why?\" (\"Iskandariyah... lih?\") (1979) that focuses on Egyptian responses to the threat of a Nazi invasion while living under a British occupation. The big question the movie asks (which I believe is a dominant narrative in much of the French and British colonial world during the war), is one colonizer worse than the other?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45rpgn", "title": "Why is Chinese called Sino", "selftext": "fx. why is it Sino-Japanese war and not Chinese-Japanese. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45rpgn/why_is_chinese_called_sino/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czzzavc"], "score": [14], "text": ["It comes from the Latin word Sinae, Latin for Chinese.  Precisely from this derivation:\n\n >  The terms \"sinology\" and \"sinologist\" were coined around 1838,[2] and use \"sino-\", derived from Late Latin Sinae from the Greek Sinae, from the Arabic Sin which in turn may derive from Qin, as in the Qin Dynasty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "sm3xg", "title": "Good place to find scholarly sources", "selftext": "I need to find some sources for a end of term paper on early 19th century aristocratic culture (think pride  &  prejudice). Does anyone know where I can find a nice hub of history jornals/other scholarly sources? \n\nEDIT: wrong century", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sm3xg/good_place_to_find_scholarly_sources/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4f3kve", "c4f3lxs", "c4f49ax", "c4f549h"], "score": [4, 4, 5, 2], "text": ["Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) would be good for what you're looking for.  Most universities have access to these sites.", "[JSTOR](_URL_0_) and [Google Scholar](_URL_1_) are highly recommended.", "Not to be snarky, but if you had read the sidebar, you'd have seen the handy [list of sources](_URL_0_) there that was recently put together for precisely questions like this.", "Not to be rude, but P & P is early 19th century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.jstor.org/", "http://scholar.google.com"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rylxq/useful_links_for_historians/"], []]}
{"q_id": "15kbmu", "title": "What is an aspect of everyday life in early or late medieval life that is either very interesting and unknown or often overlooked?", "selftext": "This is not about very specific events or specific people. Rather, what is something that most commoners or those in a village or urban areas would experience that is not really depicted in books or television? Preferably something very mundane we don't often think about.\n\nAn example, I was surprised to learn that most medieval inns did not really have many private rooms, but rather a common room that everyone rather piled into. Another would be the fact that glass windows were common in castles very early on. I always wondered how they kept those drafty castles warm with all those open windows.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15kbmu/what_is_an_aspect_of_everyday_life_in_early_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7nfbn3"], "score": [6], "text": ["Here is one.. The 'typical' Medieval European serf ate:\n\nLard\n\nButter\n\nBeer -- The reason for this is not simply they wanted to be drunk all day, but that the alcohol killed the bacteria in the water.\n\nAnd probably a few other things, but those were the staples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25kauz", "title": "Did any Native American cultures practice map making or route recording?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25kauz/did_any_native_american_cultures_practice_map/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chi02wd"], "score": [3], "text": ["While I love talking about this topic, I unfortunately don't have the time for it now. [Hopefully my past self and company from a little over a year ago can handle it for me](_URL_0_). Also, you'd probably be interested in [this section](_URL_1_) of the FAQs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1clgn7/did_native_americans_have_accurate_maps_of_north/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_pre-columbian_trade_and_contact"]]}
{"q_id": "1u2y01", "title": "Were there ever any snake-worshipping cults such as the one in Conan the Barbarian?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u2y01/were_there_ever_any_snakeworshipping_cults_such/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cee7a6h"], "score": [5], "text": ["This one is not very Conan-ish, but Alan Moore has talked a bit about the [cult of Glycon, the snake puppet](_URL_5_). \n\nThere's a better profile about how it worked - why a charismatic puppeteer could attract followers to worship a wig-wearing snake puppet for more than a century - [in a *Fortean Times* profile of Alexander of Abonoteichus](_URL_3_).\n\nA couple of snips from that article: \n\n >  We only have one source for his life story, an extremely hostile attack by the satirist Lucian (c.120\u2013180), who came from Samosata in Syria and may have met Alexander in person, probably about 162.\n\n...\n\n >  Alexander is described as tall, long-haired and good-looking, and Lucian accuses him of prostitution as a youth, through which he became apprenticed to a doctor and magician, apparently taught by the Pythagorean philosopher and wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana (early 1st century\u2013c. AD 98). After the doctor died, Alexander travelled with a chorus-writer from Byzantium nicknamed Cocconas, making a living as quacks, magicians and conmen. Latching on to a rich widow, they headed for Pella in Macedonia, noted for its huge, tame snakes, and bought one for a few coppers. Then, ditching the widow, they decided to set up in the oracle business. \n >  \n >  Heading for Chalcedon, they buried bronze tablets in the temple of Apollo, announcing that the god and his son, the healing deity Asclepius, would soon be moving to Abonoteichus. When these were \u2018discovered\u2019 the news spread like wildfire, particularly to Abonoteichus, where the townsfolk began to build a new temple in readiness. .... \n >  \n >  His status as a prophet and healer foretold by similar oracles, Alexander arrived claiming descent on his mother\u2019s side from the hero Perseus (he said his father was Podaleirius, son of Asclepius), and chewing soapwort so he foamed at the mouth, an obvious sign of the \u2018sacred disease\u2019 epilepsy. Inserting a live baby snake in a blown goose egg, he hid it in a puddle in the found\u00adations of the new temple. Next morning, he \u2018miraculously\u2019 discovered the egg, broke it, and revealed his new deity: snakes being particularly sacred to Asclepius. \n >  \n >  A few days later, Alexander presented his serpentine god to the astounded populat\u00adion, miraculously fully-grown, with a somewhat human-looking head and now called Glycon (\u2018Sweetie\u2019). This, we\u2019re told, was the gigantic snake Alexander had bought in Pella, which he held wrapped round his body with its head tucked under his armpit, while holding a false head supposedly made of linen, with horse-hairs inside that could be pulled to make the mouth open and the tongue shoot out.\n\nBasically, people would come into the sacred space, write down important questions about their lives on scrolls, Alexander would take them overnight and, without unsealing them (ostensibly), come up with answers from Glycon. Or, in personal audiences, Alexander would whisper questions into the snake-puppet's ear, and Glycon would deliver a kind of mystical answer through what Lucian described as a pretty complicated ventriloquist arrangement: \n\n >  Lucian says this effect was achieved by making a long tube of crane\u2019s windpipes, which ran from the linen head of Glycon to an assistant in another room, who then provided the answer. \n\nThe showmanship worked, and Alexander soon became enormously influential. \n\n >  Lucian imputes one more act of hubris to Alexander, which was persuading the emperor to change the name of Abono\u00adteichus to Ionopolis, and to issue coins bearing Glycon\u2019s image.\n\nWe know these things happened - some of the coins are still around. \n\nBut there are some doubts as to the accuracy of Lucian's account overall - he doesn't describe Glycon's iconography that well - and there may have been a more allegorical or metaphorical element to the whole transaction that Lucian glosses over. (That's Moore's contention, basically, although he also likes the idea of worshipping a deity who's an obvious fraud.)\n\n----\n\nBeyond Glycon, further north, J\u00f6rmungandr would be seen as a figure not unlike Rahab or Leviathan in the Old Testament - a reptilian beast that somehow is binding together or identified with the ocean (especially the ocean as a malevolent, destructive force). I doubt there were any shrines to the Midgard Serpent, though. \n\nFurther south, the West African deity who traveled to the New World as the lwa Damballah is strongly identified with snakes, appears as a snake, has snakes around his veves (icons, essentially). Like [so](_URL_4_) or [so](_URL_6_). (He's generally seen as part of a pair with [Ayida Wedo](_URL_1_), his consort, also snaky.)\n\nThe Kongo name for a closely related deity, *Nzambi*, is usually included in etymologies of the word \"zombie\" but really refers to a creator god or goddess who is sometimes associated with snakes - the \"[rainbow serpent](_URL_2_)\" is the typical motif there, and [elsewhere in Africa](_URL_0_). \n\nAnd then, even further south, you'll find Python appearing in many Bantu folk tales - not really as an object of worship, but as someone who can be bargained with to get wisdom, or knowledge how to do something, or new sources of food (or, rainbow-serpent-style, to get it to rain). \n\n\n\n \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/mlb/mlb17.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayida_Weddo", "http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/mind/mind16.htm", "http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/5614/snake_or_fake.html", "http://0.tqn.com/d/altreligion/1/7/z/0/-/-/Damballah-Wedo3-mine.jpg", "http://www.wired.com/table_of_malcontents/2006/11/alan_moore_acol/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VeveDamballah.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "bby9z2", "title": "What was courtship/dating like in 1920s America?", "selftext": "Had dating become more casual as it is today, or was there still a more formal courtship process like in the 19th century? Would it be unusual to simply ask someone on a date? What activities were popular date choices? Was the dating scene very different in the United States compared to Western Europe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bby9z2/what_was_courtshipdating_like_in_1920s_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eknb8n4"], "score": [2], "text": ["There is more that can be said, but I have a few answers on the development of dating culture in the early 20th century:\n\n[What did guys do to express interest in women before telephones became widespread in the 1900s?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Did Flappers use birth control?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7du6r7/did_flappers_use_birth_control/dq0z9bs/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7anfdx/what_did_guys_do_to_express_interest_in_women/dpbhtzi/"]]}
{"q_id": "2l8en0", "title": "What is the earliest philosophical text or oral history that we know of?", "selftext": "I'm assuming it to be African philosophy only because of how humans migrated out from there. However, do any of those texts (?) survive? Do we know of any large figures in the earliest stages of philosophy? \n\nI'm a western classics student, so this question has been nagging me for some time. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l8en0/what_is_the_earliest_philosophical_text_or_oral/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clsjp8y"], "score": [3], "text": ["There is a reasonable amount of surviving Sumerian literature older than 2300 BCE. In particular the Enheduanna hymns are generally considered to be older than 2700 BCE. These are religious and theological texts so I'm not sure if they meet your criteria. \n\nThe Sumerian \"Instructions of Shuruppak\" is dated to around 2600 BCE, and is a collection of wisdom both practical (guidance on where to build roads) and moral (don't sleep with married women).\n\nThere are Egyptian writings from around 2400 BCE (the Pyramid Texts). These are also religious texts, but have some historic elements.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5d2i6p", "title": "Were many scientific discoveries we think were made by men actually made by women they worked with?", "selftext": "The case of Rosalind Franklin makes me wonder how many scientific studies were made by women who were denied credit by men. Is there any evidence of this in the 19th century, and could it have happened earlier? How would we find this out?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5d2i6p/were_many_scientific_discoveries_we_think_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da2abmp"], "score": [18], "text": ["Pickering's Harem comes to mind. I'm not an expert by any means, so I would love to see someone with more knowledge jump into this. \n\nThe basic outline:\n\nPickering was the head astronomer at the Harvard Observatory from 1877-1919. His male assistants were subpar for the work he needed (computations, filing, organizing) so he hired women at half the pay to do the same work. None of his discoveries would have been possible without their work.\n\nSome of the women rose through the ranks to produce their own work. E.g. Annie Jump Cannon produced a system for classifying stars that is still in use today.\n\nQuestions for someone who actually knows about this: \n\n* How much would these women have understood the science behind what they were doing?\n\n* What was the social backlash for this at the time? The name \"Pickering's Harem\" has negative connotations now. I imagine it did then as well.\n\n* How \"progressive' was Pickering for the time? Was he interested in women's rights or cheap labor?\n\n* Just how much does Pickering's reputation rest on the shoulders of these women?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9c8e5l", "title": "Portugese Colonial War", "selftext": "Why, despite being clearly inferior to the US in almost every aspect, why was the Portuguese anti insurgency efforts in Africa far more effective than the US campaign in Vietnam?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9c8e5l/portugese_colonial_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e59ce61"], "score": [10], "text": ["Often lost in the discussion of Portuguese counterinsurgency is that it was not one but three conflicts centered around the major colonial holdings: modern-day Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola. While Angola was certainly a success militarily and Mozambique was going decently, the conflict in Guinea did not go particularly well and, arguably, was not much more effective than Vietnam. Below I'll discuss the Portuguese strategy and then go into some particulars about why some of the conflicts went better than others. \n\nPortugal had been worried about a colonial war for some time. The Portuguese leadership was anxious about the spread of communism and the decolonization process by the other european powers resulting in a loss of their prized colonial holdings. This anxiety the creation of a formal counterinsurgency doctrine in 1960 called *O Ex\u00e9rcito na Guerra Subversiva.* Much like other counterinsurgency doctrines it emphasized population-centric action, a separation of insurgents from the general population via relocation and community self-defense. The doctrine is important to shaping Portuguese action during the subsequent conflicts because it incorporated lessons from the French and British experiences in colonial counterinsurgency and was completed the year before the colonial wars began in 1961. \n\nIn a somewhat ironic twist, Portugal's meagre resources relative to the US, UK, and France actually helped their strategy on the ground. The logic underpinning Portuguese action was to keep costs low enough to sustain the wars as long as necessary. A focus on affordability lead to some interesting efforts, such as the creation of cavalry units to patrol vast distances on the cheap and extensive recruitment of indigenous soldiers and auxiliaries to lower the costs of transporting troops from Portugal itself. The Portuguese also maintained a decent intelligence network that successfully infiltrated a number of rebel groups to spur internal strife and defections.  \n\nThe Portuguese were also pretty successful in some instances of winning - or at least not *losing* - the hearts and minds of the local population. The Portuguese built more schools and medical facilities than they ever had during earlier colonial times. Often army manpower would be used on these projects, and Portuguese soldiers would be instructed to work as teachers, doctors, or construction workers during their off-time. Portugal also could not cause as much collateral damage as the united states did in vietnam because they did not have the airforce or the munitions to fight that way. \n\nAll that said, lets move into the individual cases, where we can look at specific factors instead of making generalizations.\n\n**Angola**\n\nAngola was the most successful example of Portuguese doctrine in action, but there were also favorable external conditions that helped the Portuguese do as well as they did. For starters, the opposition was disjointed. While it was the UPA/FNLA rebel group that had started the conflict, there was also the communist MPLA and the FNLA-breakaway group UNITA. These groups did not get along with each other and had a ton of internal divisions, which made them susceptible to infiltration and exploitation by the Portuguese intelligence services. \n\nAdditionally, the Angolan rebel groups were in a bad neighborhood to wage a counterinsurgency. Portugal successfully used its economic leverage to pressure neighboring Zaire and Zambia to not overtly support the rebel groups, although they were often used as shelter by the rebels. Additionally, South Africa was also waging a counterinsurgency and worked with the Portuguese by using its air power to help patrol southern and eastern sections of Angola.\n\nThese factors all came together in favor of the Portuguese and resulted in them more-or-less having the situation contained by the late 1960s. \n\n**Mozambique**\n\nMozambique was less successful than Angola but is generally considered to have been salvageable. Mozambique also had a disunited opposition that struggled to win over the local population, and neighboring Rhodesia and South Africa actively resisted the rebels using their countries as rear bases. \n\nOne of the main problems with the Mozambique conflict was that some of the leadership was not on board with the low-cost hearts and minds doctrine. While the FRELIMO rebel group had been fairly contained in the north of the country using the established doctrine, in 1970 General Kaulza de Arriaga took command of Portuguese forces and went on a different path entirely. De Arraiga, a giant fan of U.S. general Westmoreland, masterminded operation \"Gordian Knot,\" by far the largest operation by the Portuguese in the Colonial war, which used thousands of troops in an effort to rout FRELIMO and end the conflict. The result was much like Vietnam, tactical success and strategic disaster. FRELIMO didn't do very well but remained intact and many of its fighters were able to slip away and reestablish themselves in central Mozambique. The operation was expensive and displaced a ton of people. By 1974 it was a stalemate, with FRELIMO growing but not exactly beloved by the population, and the Portugese working to get a handle on the situation. \n\n**Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde**\n\nThis conflict was a lost cause for the Portuguese by 1974 and begs the question if their doctrine was actually good or if they enjoyed favorable circumstances in Angola and Mozambique. Unlike Angola and Mozambique, neighboring Guinea and Senegal couldn't care less about Portugal and actively supported the rebels. There was also only one major rebel group, the PAIGC, which was fairly united and pretty well-led, at least relative to the other groups Portugal was fighting. \n\nThey also couldn't move the population away from the rebels. In Angola and Mozambique there was enough space that when the rebels occupied an area, the Portuguese could relocate the population away from the rebels to prevent them from spreading their ideology and recruiting. Guinea was too small for this, so the population was more frequently in contact with rebels. Additionally, the terrain was very difficult for the Portuguese, and flooding and other factors undermined their ability to build infrastructure to win over the local population or effectively supply/reinforce their outposts.\n\nMost agree that even if there wasn't a coup in Portugal in 1974, they would probably have lost this one. In 1973 the CIA drafted a memo to US secretary of state Kissinger on the state of Portugal's counterinsurgency, and claim Portuguese officials were privately admitting that the conflict may soon be lost. \n\n**Conclusion**\n\nI think the last thing that needs to be brought up is that the colonial war put enormous pressure on the Portuguese government and society. Portugal completely reshaped and reoriented its military to fight this war and withdrew most of the troops it had committed to NATO on the border with the Warsaw Pact. To fight these wars Portugal needed to implement extensive conscription and ended up losing five times as many men proportionally as the US did in Vietnam. Spending ballooned even while they were trying to keep costs low, and the coup that eventual ended the *Estado Novo* regime and the colonial wars was led by disaffected junior officers who had in some cases served tours of something like eight years at a time. So while some claim that Portugal did a better job in these wars, we need to consider what it cost them financially and socially to do so. \n\nBibliography: \n\nCann, John P. *Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961-1974.* Solihull:Helion  &  Company. 2012. **If you want a good overview of the conflicts with more details and you don't speak Portuguese, this is the book to get**\n\nCann, John P. \u201cThe Artful Use of National Power: Portuguese Angola (1961-1974)\u201d, *Small Wars and Insurgencies* 22:1 (2011), 196-225. _URL_5_\n\nCann, John P. and Jose Manuel Correia. \u201cAn Unlikely Alliance: Portuguese and South African Airpower in Angola, 1968-1974.\u201d *Small Wars and Insurgencies* 28:2 (2017): 309-336. _URL_4_ \n\nEngelhardt, Michael J. \u201cDemocracies, Dictatorships and Counterinsurgency: Does Regime Type Really Matter?\u201d *Conflict Quarterly* 12:1 (1992), 52-63. _URL_3_.\n\nHenriksen, Thomas H. \u201cLessons from Portugal\u2019s Counter-insurgency Operations in Africa.\u201d *The RUSI Journal*, 123:2 (1978): 31-35. _URL_2_.\n\nHoran, Harold E. \u201cPortugal in Africa.\u201d CIA Reading Room. (1973). _URL_1_\n\nPaul, Christopher, Colin P. Clarke, Beth Grill, and Molly Dunigan. *Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies*. RAND Corporation, 2013.  _URL_0_\n\nReis, Bruno C. and Pedro A. Oliviera. \u201cCutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Counterinsurgency and the Wiriyanu Massacre of 1972.\u201d *Civil Wars* 14:1 (2012):80-103. _URL_6_.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt5hhsjk", "https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/LOC-HAK-538-2-7-5.pdf", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03071847809422892", "https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JCS/article/view/15048/16117", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09592318.2017.1288402", "https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2011.546616", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698249.2012.654690"]]}
{"q_id": "4yrj2r", "title": "WW2: I've heard contradicting reports on how depleted the manpower of the major powers on each side was by the end of the war - How did the manpower situation for each country evolve throughout the war, and what was the situation at the end?", "selftext": "I've heard before that both sides were near the end of their manpower by the end of the war, and was wondering if  \nA: this was true?  \nB: How did the Axis powers manage to cause such a depletion of such numerically superior opponents?  \nC: how the manpower situations progressed through the war to their situations at the end?\n\nI've asked this question twice before on AskHistorians in differing ways and failed to get a satisfactory answer - it's great that this sub keeps its standards so high! Here's hoping it's 3rd time lucky :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yrj2r/ww2_ive_heard_contradicting_reports_on_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6q5t97"], "score": [30], "text": ["The US Army's manpower shortage was largely, but not completely, a result of their own doing and not the result of an actual shortage of bodies. In the Victory Program of fall 1941, the Army had outlined a force of 213 divisions that it would need to take on Germany. This program had hypothesized that Germany would defeat the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain would have to take on Germany alone, which meant a far larger number of German troops would be facing the two countries. Fear of the German *blitzkrieg* (a fear which proved to be unfounded) resulted in a massive expansion of the antiaircraft and tank destroyer arms. This massive initial unit expansion made it difficult to staff them. It was originally planned to have 222 tank destroyer battalions, but this figure was later reduced to 106 in March 1943, and 78 in October 1943. Due to the lack of enemy aircraft in Italy, a provisional infantry regiment (the 473rd) was constituted out of the headquarters of the 2nd Armored Group and the 434th, 435th, 532nd and 900th Antiaircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons battalions.\n\nA major problem which constricted America's manpower during WWII was their industrial and agricultural capacity and its value to the Allies. As a result, in 1942 Army planners shortsightedly estimated the maximum number of men which could be brought into the service of the United States without disrupting these critical areas was about 10.5 million, out of an eligible population of twenty-five million, about 7.8 percent of the US population. In reality, the maximum population of these men which could be brought into service was about fifteen to sixteen million.\n\nOn December 5, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order reducing the draft age from 21-37 to 18-38, and eliminating voluntary enlistment in order to avoid straining the war economy and controlling the amount of men the armed forces received at a time. Men aged 17, and those aged 38-45 could still voluntarily enlist if they met the armed forces' qualifications.\n\nBy the middle of 1943, the Selective Service was falling behind on its inductions (a planned 200,000 men per month). Back in October 1941, 10 million out of 16 million Selective Service registrants were classified as III-A, \"Men with dependents, not engaged in work essential to national defense\" and were deferred. A major cause of this induction shortfall was the continued refusal to draft these men who had dependents. The Selective Service estimated a shortfall of nearly 450,000 if it didn't draft these men. On October 1, 1943, the Selective Service administratively eliminated the III-A classification and began to draft those fathers whose children were born before December 7, 1941.\n\n**Number of Fathers Drafted**\n\nMonth(s)|Fathers drafted|Percent of monthly inductees\n:--|:--|:--\nOctober 1943|13,300|6.8\nNovember 1943|25,700|13.4\nDecember 1943|51,400|26.4\nApril 1944|114,600|52.8\nOctober 1943-December 1945|944,426|30.3\n\nBy V-J Day, of the 6.2 million classified fathers aged 18-37, 20 percent had been inducted. Of those 18-25, 58.2 percent were on active duty.\n\nIn late 1943, the maximum size of the Army was reduced from 8.2 million to 7.7 million and 100-125 divisions. This program was further modified by reducing the number of divisions to the already-activated 88, (three more divisions would later be activated, bringing the final Army total to 91) and deleting 15 divisions scheduled for activation in 1943. Meanwhile, divisions were accumulating in the United States due to the uncertain strategic situation in Europe (the proposed *Operation Roundup*, a cross-channel invasion of France in late 1942 had been cancelled) The Army was struggling to fill the 7.7 million quota, being short nearly 200,000 men.\n\nBy early 1944, the Army Ground Forces was short between 87,000-97,000 men due to the inadequacy of replacement training programs to produce enough infantrymen to refill divisions which had taken casualties. The initial War Department figure for the percentage of replacements that needed to be trained as infantry was 64.3; by April 1944 this had been raised to 70.3 percent. Fighting in Normandy soon proved that this figure was far too low; estimates were that 90 percent of Army Ground Forces casualties occurred in the Infantry.\n\nAlso by early 1944, 100,000 men, mostly service troops, had been \"saved\" by economizing the organization and activation of units, but the needs of the new B-29 program stripped these men away; the Army Air Forces had asked for 130,000 men to staff it. This resulted in a serious shortage of the potential number of service troops that could be deployed overseas. As a result of this shortage, trained divisions in the US that were ready for deployment were used to perform \"housekeeping\", running training camps and the like. In February 1944, the laboring Army Specialized Training Program was cut back from 150,000 to 30,000 men, releasing 120,000 men for overseas duty; many of the later divisions to enter combat had a high percentage of former ASTP men. On January 19, 1944, it was authorized to strip divisions still in the United States for replacements, sending nearly 100,000 qualified men from fully-staffed divisions overseas. Note that the figure for infantry replacements had proven far too low.\n\n**Number of Men Stripped From Divisions, April-September 1944 by Division and Branch**\n\nDivision|Infantry|Field Artillery|Cavalry|Armored|Airborne Infantry|Total\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\n13th A/B|1,172 Pvt.|--|--|--|580 Pvt.|1,652\n8th Armd.|1,150 Pvt.|40 NCO, 420 Pvt.|33 NCO, 207 Pvt.|570 Pvt.|--|2,420\n13th|1,800 Pvt.|40 NCO, 460 Pvt.|9 NCO, 260 Pvt.|610 Pvt.|--|3,179\n16th|1,597 Pvt.|39 NCO, 475 Pvt.|45 NCO, 235 Pvt.|15 NCO, 541 Pvt.|--|2,947\n20th|1,459 Pvt.|49 NCO, 1,450 Pvt.|20 NCO, 208 Pvt.|660 Pvt,|--|2,846\n42nd Inf.|372 NCO, 3,564 Pvt.|69 NCO, 771 Pvt.|45 Pvt.|--|--|4,821\n63rd|278 NCO, 3,290 Pvt.|579 Pvt|5 NCO, 33 Pvt.|--|--|4,185\n65th|5,222 Pvt.|314 Pvt.|45 Pvt.|--|--|5,581\n66th|3,999 Pvt.|840 Pvt.|5 NCO, 38 Pvt.|--|--|4,882\n69th|102 NCO, 4,312 Pvt.|143 NCO, 697 Pvt.|5 NCO, 40 Pvt.|--|--|5,299\n70th|41 NCO, 2,804 Pvt.|6 NCO, 474 Pvt.|5 NCO, 40 Pvt.|--|--|3,370\n71st|3,172 Pvt.|36 NCO, 294 Pvt.|--|--|--|3,502\n75th|4,459 Pvt.|70 NCO, 710 Pvt.|5 NCO, 40 Pvt.|--|--|5,284\n76th|516 NCO, 5,730 Pvt.|69 NCO, 711 Pvt.|5 NCO, 40 Pvt.|--|--|7,071\n78th|4,698 Pvt.|50 NCO, 730 Pvt.|1 NCO, 44 Pvt.|--|--|5,523\n86th|4,050 Pvt.|50 NCO, 670 Pvt.|40 Pvt.|--|--|4,810\n87th|3,850 Pvt.|38 NCO, 680 Pvt.|40 Pvt.|--|--|4,610\n89th|2,700 Pvt.|360 Pvt.|--|--|--|3,060\n97th|5,064 Pvt.|57 NCO, 279 Pvt.|9 NCO, 21 Pvt.|--|--|5,430\n100th|125 NCO, 3,550 Pvt.|--|--|--|--|3,675\n103rd|2,550 Pvt.|--|--|--|--|2,550\n106th|366 NCO, 3,859 Pvt.|57 NCO, 723 Pvt.|45 Pvt.|--|--|5,050\n\nAnother problem bugging the Army from 1942-1944 was the number of 18 year old draftees it was receiving. In May 1943, it was decided that 18 and 19 year old inductees would be assigned to units in training and unlikely to deploy overseas soon only, and inductees 20 or over would mostly be assigned as replacements. As the Italian campaign intensified in late 1943, the need for replacements became acute. On February 26, 1944, the War Department issued a ban on using 18 year olds and \"pre-Pearl Harbor\" fathers as replacements unless they had at least six months' training; men from any other source were to be taken first. On June 24, 1944, the ban became even more rigid, with no man under 18 years and six months old to be assigned to an infantry or armored replacement center, and no man under nineteen to be assigned as an overseas replacement. More than 37,000 men were affected, unable to be shipped outside the United States. As a result, it was necessary to \"store\" these men until they became of age by assigning them to units still in the United States and not likely to deploy anytime soon.\n\nBy August 1, 1944, the ban had proven very problematic, and was rescinded; 18 year olds began to be shipped as overseas replacements again in December 1944. On December 8, 1944, the US Third Army was short 11,000 infantrymen; this was only four percent of the Third Army's total strength, but actually the rifle strength of nearly two infantry divisions.\n\nAnother problem in the Army in the WWII period was segregation. African-Americans made up nearly 10 percent of the US population, and restricting them solely to service units or rejecting them entirely based upon their education or AGCT scores deprived the Army of a large portion of potential combat manpower. \n\nSources:\n\n[US WWII draft classifications](_URL_1_)\n\n[US Army in World War II](_URL_2_), by Rich Anderson\n\n*\"Daddy's Gone To War\": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children*, by William M. Tuttle, Jr.\n\n*The Tank Killers: A History of America's World War II Tank Destroyer Force*, by Harry Yeide\n\n[*The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops*](_URL_3_), by\nhy Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast (Historical Section Army Ground Forces)\n\n[*The 90-Division Gamble*](_URL_0_), by Maurice Matloff"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_15.htm", "https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobjection/MilitaryClassifications.htm", "http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/usarmy/", "http://history.army.mil/html/books/002/2-2/CMH_Pub_2-2.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2z8hq0", "title": "Who were the first settlers of Appalachia and how did they live?", "selftext": "Looking for books or primary accounts to keep looking into this.  Looking to find out how the region was settled, who settled it and what kind of difficulties they had. \n\nReally interested in the building of communities and homes especially. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z8hq0/who_were_the_first_settlers_of_appalachia_and_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpgo8by"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just for clarification, you *do* mean European Americans, right?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "296a00", "title": "Was there ever any significant fighting between Muslim factions within the Ottoman empire?", "selftext": "I've found examples of Muslim vs Christian fighting, but was there ever any between two Muslim factions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/296a00/was_there_ever_any_significant_fighting_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciicay9", "ciiotjc"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This isn't really my area of specialty, but one example might be the Ottoman-Saudi war (1811-1818). Long story short Egyptian troops were sent, at the Ottoman's request, to fight Wahhabi rebels in an area that now forms part of Saudi Arabia.\n\nThis isn't quite an example of Ottoman empire infighting because:\n\n- Egypt's leadership at this point was trying to chart a separate course from the Ottoman empire. It wouldn't be long before Egypt was defacto independant after this conflict.\n\n- The core of the the Emirate of Diryah (the Wahhabi state) wasn't actually in the Ottoman empire (as I understand it). Instead Ottoman involvement came when the Emirate started messing around on their periphery.\n\nSo in a way the war was about two states on the periphery of the Ottoman empire, one of which happened to be a very close ally rather than a feudal property of the Sultan or similar, fighting on the periphery of the empire. Hope that makes sense and I haven't made any major factual errors.", "Shias were persecuted in the Empire, especially after the rise of the Safavids. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "el7tf2", "title": "How Eurocentric is the word \"medieval\"?", "selftext": "I was recently in an interesting discussion about the word \"medieval\" in an acedemic context (I am not an acedemic). I argued that the word \"medieval\" is inherently eurocentric as defined by both the Cambridge and Merriam Webster definitions and that referring to other parts of the world during the \"medieval\" period would be contemporary to the period in Europe. But it was pointed out that the Chinese medieval period seems to have slightly different starting and end points but largely overlap. Does academia ever use the term *their* medieval period in a malleable way like *their* iron age or is inherently bound to events in the European world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/el7tf2/how_eurocentric_is_the_word_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fdihtil"], "score": [7], "text": ["**Short answer:**\n\nThe most literal definition of \"medieval\" is \"between two ages\". Taken that way, the term might be considered \"Roman centric\" ,\"Mediterranean-centric\", and perhaps even \"Asia \\[Minor\\] centric\" -- it refers to the time between the fall of Western European Empire and the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire -- most of which was in Asia, not Europe. But the reason the term continues to be used is because it describes historical dynamics found in many places.\n\n**Discussion:**\n\nFran\u00e7ois-Xavier Fauvelle, an historian and archaeologist of Africa, entitled a recent book \"*The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages\"*. Why did he refer to an \"African Middle Ages\"? Does the fall of Rome or the fall of Constantinople have anything much to do with African history? Not really.\n\nIn his introduction, he explains his choice of the term:\n\n > \\[L\\]et us admit that there can be many reasons to use the term \u201cMiddle Ages\u201d or the adjective \u201cmedieval\u201d that are not particularly related to the way medieval Europe is medieval. There\u2019s also a good reason not to use it; for if its usefulness resides only in designating a period of almost a millennium roughly coeval with the European Middle Ages, one could rightfully ask why we should import a label that conveys unwanted associations with medieval Europe: Christianity, feudalism, the crusades against Islam. True. But despite all this, I think that applying the term \u201cMiddle Ages\u201d to Africa is justified.  \n >   \n > The justification concerns the scale at which we observe the Middle Ages {snip}  \n >   \n > \\[T\\]he physical centrality of the Islamic civilization within this global world, the role of specialized long-distance merchants (mostly Muslims and Jews) as connecting agents between different provinces, or the related significance of a few chosen commodities (such as slaves, gold, china, glass beads, ambergris) \\[is\\] evidence of an interconnectedness of a kind limited to what met the needs and tastes of the elites. In that sense, the broad picture that this book wants to draw, its fragmentary nature notwithstanding, is that Africa also deserves to be considered a province of the medieval world. Not out of a will to \u201cprovincialize\u201d Africa in the sense of making it marginalized or peripheral, but, on the contrary, to make it part of a world made up of other such provinces.\n\nFauvelle thus claims a case for the generality of the term \"medieval\", if we discard its literality.\n\nLiterally, \"medieval\" means \"between two ages\". No one who lived at the time could have made sense of that. They might have known -- and indeed lamented-- the fall of Rome. Christians might have thought of themselves as being \"between\" the appearances of Christ on Earth, but no one could have understood the periodization that the later Italian humanists like Petrarch applied, between the loss of Rome, and the rediscovery of Rome.\n\nSo we leave aside the Merriam Webster definition; its literal, but can't explain why anyone would use the term today. Why does Fauvelle speak of an African \"Middle Ages\"? Why did Gustav von Gruenebaum speak of \"Medieval Islam\"?\n\nFauvelle gives us a clue as to one reason-- it's an age when earlier trade relations have largely collapsed, and knowledge and goods move through the world transported by new agents, Jews and Muslims for example. In the Africa he's describing, the historical record is almost entirely recorded by Muslim  traders, soldiers, missionaries and explorers. Sub-Saharan Africans leave us very little written material from the period; but the institutions of travel in Islam - particularly the *hajj* \\-- mean that not only do we have records of Muslim trade with Mali, we have the pilgrimage of the King of Mali, Mansa Musa, to Mecca.\n\nSeen in this light, the \"Middle Ages\" is a period after antiquity in which the religions we know in the modern world assume roughly their current geographic distribution, and this isn't Eurocentric. Indeed while Christianity may be thought of as a \"European\" religion-- it is in fact an Asian religion which \"conquers\" Europe. Similarly Islam is an Arabian religion which explodes into Africa, Asia, Europe. And Buddhism, which had begun it spread a bit earlier, comes to dominate China, Japan and Korea . . . The Tang Dynasty is often characterized as the age of \"classical Buddhism\" in China.\n\nConsidered as a practical matter, the period \"medieval\" tells you something about the languages you might need to know to study history. A \"medieval historian\" of almost anyplace in the Mediterranean world will often need to read Arabic, Latin and probably Greek in addition to other languages. If you're an historian of 17th century Spain-- you don't particularly need to read Arabic or Hebrew; if you're an historian of 12th century Spain, you do. Similarly a student of medieval Islam may well want to read Greek or Latin, Hebrew, Coptic or Italian, in addition to Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In the same vein, if you're a scholar of \"medieval\" Indonesia-- you're often going to want to read some Arabic to understand the history of the spread of Islam.\n\nSo this is  a period where parallel dynamics of religious and political spread can be seen around the world. The arrival of Islam in what is now Pakistan, the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia-- there are commonalities here. This is a period in which peoples adhere to a world civilization, which shares ideas across thousands of miles. Scholars in Cordoba and Damascus read the same documents and argue fine points of theology and jurisprudence; scholars in Ireland and Constantinople do the same.\n\nSeen in this light, the \"middle ages\" gets another meaning-- its the time of the spread of world religions, the time in which a previously largely polytheistic world is adopting monotheism, and religions that are heavily based on sacred texts, which require literacy and exegesis to apply. Greeks and Romans argued about \"what is a good life\" -- sometimes with a reference to \"the Gods\", but never with a deeply textual codified scholarship.  What we see in the \"Middle Ages\" is the rise of a new scholarship, scholars who engage the scripture to derive rules for living that apply to tens of millions of people-- and which still do today, in the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. Jews in particular had developed this style of exegesis and and application to daily life earlier-- but \"the Middle Ages\" is the period where what had been a kind of analysis and scripture driven policy moves from the practice of a minority religion, geographically quite limited, to the practice of much of the literate world.\n\nFinally, it's a common characteristic of this period that religious doctrine becomes intertwined with political interests in a new way. Looking back to the world of antiquity, we don't have much evidence for religious doctrine as a twin to political interest. Athena was the tutelary deity of the Athenians, but we don't get any sense that they fought the Peloponnesian War to get others to erect statues of Athena; when they put the boot in on Melos, that's not one of their demands. But Christians and Muslims alike -- as they spread their faiths, they have a demand \"tear down your temples to your old Gods, ours isn't interested in company\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4jd414", "title": "How many non-Spartans participated in the Spartan agoge?", "selftext": "Or how common was it throughout its history? And which cities outside Sparta were keen to send their sons to the agoge? I was reading somewhere that apparently the rich families of other cities viewed it as a status symbol to have sons participate in the agoge and vied for the chance to do so.\n\nThis doesn't quite match up with how the Spartans viewed themselves compared to other non-Spartans and so the idea of non citizens participating sounds odd, but still, it's possible right?\nI can't find the source which mentioned this so", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jd414/how_many_nonspartans_participated_in_the_spartan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d35pm4x"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't speak for instances of other Greeks participating in the agoge, but I can at least give you a partial answer. Your post made me think of the mothakes (Doric Greek for \"stepbrothers\"). Essentially they were male members of Spartan society who participated in the agoge and existed outside the privileged homoioi class. They were permitted to fight, however, I'm not quite sure of the extent of their social limitations. There were different individual circumstances, but generally they were the children of poor/disgraced families or the bastards of Spartan father's and Helot mothers. Some Spartan commanders (most notably Lysander who defeated the Athenian fleet) even came from this underclass of the Spartan hierarchy and rose to prominence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2oq8ne", "title": "How accurate is this Gif?", "selftext": "[This](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oq8ne/how_accurate_is_this_gif/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmpl57e"], "score": [13], "text": ["Might be easier if you let the gif run and just screen shot the last segment so the users here can take the time to look at it in more detail"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/BMq7T1t.gif"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6cmtpw", "title": "Monday Methods: A special episode of our podcast and a discussion post regarding: Post-modernism and history. How do we engage with it? Where do we go from here? What is the history of the future?", "selftext": "Welcome to Monday Methods \u2013 a weekly feature we discuss, explain and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.\n\nToday's topic concerns [special episode of our podcast 86A](_URL_0_) where this week's host /u/annalspornographie and /u/tenminutehistory discuss post-modernism, it's impact on history, and how we will write history and approach history in the future.\n\nBrian and Doug already discuss some of the important context [in the episode of the podcast from Friday](_URL_1_) but for those who (for some reason that is beyond me \u2013 because you really should) refuse to listen to the podcast, here is a quick primer on post-modernism and history:\n\nPost-modernism is a major philosophical movement of the second part of the 20th century, that has massively influenced virtually all humanities and social sciences. Post-modernism as advanced by theories of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others holds (simply put) that categories such as ethnicity, nationality, gender, and culture are not eternal, unchanging, and natural but are the result of the process of social construction. What this means is that these things do not exist divorced from the way we talk about them, how we describe them. How we describe culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender constructs them in the first place \u2013 and they only exist in relation to how we describe them. In practical terms, this means that in relation to gender e.g., what Foucault, Delueze and others theorize is that there are no behaviors or traits that are \"female\" and \"male\" in the natural sense, they only become male and female because we as a society describe them as such. We inscribe certain behaviors and traits into the category gender that we then impose and perpetuate in our reality.\n\nFor the historian this is useful and not useful at the same time. It's useful because it lends itself very well to certain things we do. Because we are aware that e.g. thinking about what are male and female traits, what is culture, what it means to be German, American etc. are subject to massively historical change because society's view on what being American etc. entails changes and with it the behavior associated with these categories changes.\n\nOn the other hand, it presents a problem with historians because despite historians writing narratives about the past, we always operate under the assumption that our arguments are based on facts. How these facts are interpreted and connected are all things we argue about but in the end, we always rest on the assumption that what we write about is not mere fictional narrative but has at it's basis things that through our sources we can trace did indeed happen.\n\nHow history engages with post-modernism has and still is a topic that is relevant to many discussions in our profession. Richard Evans tried to so in his very recommended book *in Defense of History* where he writes:\n\n >  We know of course that we will be guided in selecting materials for the stories we tell, and in the way we put these materials together and interpret them, by literary models, by social science theories, by moral and political beliefs, by an aesthetic sense, even by our own unconscious assumptions and desires. It is an illusion to believe otherwise. But the stories we tell will be true stories, even if the truth they tell is our own, and even if other people will tell them differently.\n\nBut additionally to the question of how we as historians write history in the age of post-modernism is also the question, should we move beyond it and if so how? How can the writing of history in the future look like? Will we continue to engage with post-modernism while grappling with it? Is there an alternative that doesn't take us back to models of interpretation of our subject that are outdated?\n\nGive the podcast a listen and add your questions and comments below!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cmtpw/monday_methods_a_special_episode_of_our_podcast/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhvt1sa", "dhwla41", "dhy5s09"], "score": [7, 15, 5], "text": ["As /u/commiespaceinvader pointed out to me while we were discussing the podcast, I am perhaps a bit unfair to Fukuyama in how I discuss him. If you have read [The End of History](_URL_0_) (PDF article-version of his longer book) then you know that he arguing for an essentially Wiggish or Marxian/Hegalian version of history that has reached it's end in the liberal democracies and post-War peace of the 1990s. (of course, the farther we get away from the summer of 89, the less likely we realize that things haven't really reached an End). \n\nIn the podcast, it sounds a bit like I am eliding that and attributing views to Fukuyama that are not his own -- Fukuyama isn't arguing along the same lines as Foucault and others are, that there is never an end to history, that everything is relative and purposeless. However, my larger point is that Fukuyama is an *example* of a type of postmodern history that I very strongly dislike (along with the Focauldians!) and I view as partially responsible for the current rut that the field humanities finds itself in -- a narcissistic  philosophic indolence. ", "The category of postmodernism I spend the most time engaging with (as a historian of science/STS person) is not so much the construction of identity, which I take as sort of a given (it's pretty obvious that national identities are constructed ideas or imagined communities, and it doesn't take much more to go from there to racial identities, gender identities, etc.), but on the broader question of what it means to be a \"fact\" when you lack a \"solid\" reference point. As a historian of science this is always tricky because even the things that some other historians might like to occasionally reference as \"givens\" (like, \"atoms are real\") are things that we tend to argue are also somewhat constructed (what does \"real\" mean in this statement?). \n\nThe epistemology I find most useful in my day to day work is Bruno Latour's as described in his _We Have Never Been Modern_, which basically articulates facts as nodes in networks that need to be continually reinforced as refreshed in their early days of establishment, but at some point become so enmeshed in the network (and future networks) that they become almost invisible and taken for granted (until something comes along and reinterprets the network relationships). \n\nSo for example, one of the examples that Latour discusses is that of Boyle's air pump and the establishment of the idea of a vacuum (which itself is borrowed from Shapin and Schaffer's _Leviathan and the Air-Pump_). Robert Boyle (the 17th century Irish natural philosopher/chemyst) created a new tool (the \"air-pump,\" what we would today call a vacuum pump) that he believed could deploy a kind of mechanical objectivity to create new natural philosophical facts. There was considerable debate in his time as to what exactly was happening when you used it \u2014 was it really leaving a vacuum behind in the chamber, or was it doing something else? For Latour, the key thing here is that to establish the idea that the vacuum was real, you needed a whole lot of things to be working together. First you needed Boyle to actually do quite a lot of not only the creation of the device but the writing that disseminated information about it and interpreted it (as Latour puts it, facts always require \"spokesmen,\" as they cannot speak for themselves and certainly do not write themselves). You need the pump itself (for Latour, non-human actors are members of the network) \u2014 you need it to behave correctly (a non-trivial difficulty), you need it to actually work as it is supposed to. You need the other people, Boyle's gentleman witnesses, to attest to it doing what Boyle says it does, because replication was largely impossible (there were only five or six air-pumps in all of Europe over that time period, and they were finicky and not easy to access). You needed Boyle's compelling explanations of existing phenomena that other natural philosophers were interested in (e.g. the Torricelli experiment). You need Boyle's access to a printing press and the dissemination of the information. And so on.\n\nIn the earliest days of establishing the idea of the vacuum, the network was pretty weak \u2014 vulnerable in places. Do you really trust Boyle's gentleman witnesses? How about people who tried to replicate the work but failed, because their pumps didn't work quite like Boyle's? And there were those (like Thomas Hobbes) who attacked Boyle's claims, dissecting nodes in the network (like Boyle's interpretation of the data). \n\nBut over time, with more and more refinement of the tools, and more and more incorporation of the ideas into other models of the world, the idea of the vacuum moved from being a very weakly established fact, to a very strongly established one. It never crossed some magic line and went from \"non-fact\" to \"fact,\" as a more modernist, positivist epistemology might have it. Rather its \"factiness\" was built up over repeated strengthening of the network, to the degree that to question whether a vacuum exists became completely absurd \u2014 to do so, you'd be questioning a fundamental, \"easy to demonstrate\" matter of the world. \n\nWe might contrast this \"fact\" to the idea of the luminferous aether, which was built up with a very robust network in the 19th century. But in the end, its network collapsed: certain instruments stopped cooperating (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment, where Michelson's interferometer stubbornly refused to show aether drift, no matter how much he tried to coax it into cooperation), various theoretical models stopped requiring it, and finally it found itself not so much overthrown as dissipated. Einstein rejected it, sure, but the aether really fell out of favor because no networks kept requiring it \u2014 it became superfluous more than it was proven wrong. Without correspondence to a network, it just vanished out of \"fact.\"\n\nWhat I like about this approach is that while it never really enshrines \"truth\" as some kind of simple, binary, yes/no status, it also doesn't make it seem like it's totally up for grabs by anyone. It doesn't make it entirely a human process (the non-human actors are very important, and don't always obey!), but it also doesn't pretend like \"nature\" is some kind of easy category to observe, much less some kind of actor that can speak for itself. \n\nWhich is to say, it seems to preserve the best aspects of the postmodern critique, without falling into the pit of sophism or arbitrariness. It allows us to say, for example, that some ideas or facts have more support than others, and have a good, solid definition of \"support\" (the network). It also helps us understand what undermining a fact means (you are attacking the network) in terms that have better historical and frankly practical use that simple notions of proving something \"right\" or \"wrong.\" \n\nYou can take this model and apply it to the other categories mentioned earlier, like, say, nationality and race. You can identify the actors, the network, the nodes, from which these concepts pop out. And it also emphasizes that while, say, nationality or race are \"constructed\" (as is everything in the network, including each and every node that makes up a given network), they can still be as \"real\" in their effects as anything else. \n\nAn additional advantage to this epistemology, as a methodology, is that it makes the job of the historian quite clear: show the development, change, dissolution, etc. of the network over time, and you are doing quite interesting history. \n\nAnyway. Just some stray thoughts. I find this kind of approach gets me more \"use value\" than either the modernist (\"facts are real, you just discover them!\") and postmodernist (\"everything is just stories, man!\"*) approaches. It is also incidentally mostly compatible with both: you end up redefining facts in ways that either, I think, could live with, preserving both the \"hard\" quality of facts that modernists like, yet emphasizing the constructedness that postmodernists like. \n\n\\* Actual quote from a colleague who self-describes as a postmodernist. ", "I had a good time listening to this bonus episode while making my tea this evening. Three things especially came to mind - power, incommensurability and the defence of truth.\n\nThe one thing I thought was really missing from the podcast discussion was power. To me, at least from my reading of Foucault, a central point of postmodernism is how discourse is an exercise and reinforcement of power. \n\nAt the extreme, we're completely enmeshed in these systems of power, and in even attempting to challenge them we tend to validate them or give them power by speaking their language and participating in their systems. To take an example, the recent Monday Methods [Is Research Value Neutral?](_URL_2_) written by /u/snapshot52 makes a case for more diversity in academia, more indigenous perspectives and narratives. But what if these just strengthen the institutions or discourses that excluded them in the first place? If they're co-opted for a dominant power structure? Or a new way for indigenous cultures to open themselves up for examination and dissection? If you decide to avoid this by staying out of the dominant discourse, how do you avoid just being marginalised?\n\nThat's an extreme and pessimistic perspective, but I believe it's one that can come out of Foucault and postmodernism. I don't know if he offers an escape, but as I understand it, that didn't stop him (and other postmodernists) from being politically and socially engaged intellectuals - I'm not sure the charge of \"narcissistic philosophic indolence\" is fair, at least in this case. \n\nThat Monday methods thread is also relevant to something /u/TenMinuteHistory says in the podcast, about everyone having their own history. There's a concept in Thomas Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific Revolutions* of incommensurability. When a new paradigm comes along you can't simply look at the answers it gives to question and declare it better. The new paradigm uses different concepts so it can't be understood or compared in the terms of the old one; putting it against the old one is a bit like arguing in mutually incomprehensible languages (perhaps related language that share *some* words and grammar... but now I'm stretching the metaphor...).\n\nYou can extend this concept to how we view of the past. Can we really comprehend, say, what \"equality\" meant to a 17th century Leveller, or the experience of a Tang era merchant? Do we just impose our own concepts and ideas on to them? (Less of a conversation with the past, more of an exercise of power over it - or perhaps the use of it to exercise power in the present.) There's [an essay](_URL_1_) by Errol Morris about the time Thomas Kuhn (allegedly) threw an ashtray at him. In this, Morris asks the question:\n\n > \u201cIf paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn\u2019t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn\u2019t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn\u2019t it be \u2018incommensurable?\u2019\u201d\n\nLastly, there was a thread posted by /u/King_Pyrrhus a while back - I thought it was recently, but turns out it was five months ago - \"[Is it a historian's duty to tell the truth?](_URL_0_)\" There were some thoughtful and nuanced answers in there, not least from /u/TenMinuteHistory talking about how it's hard to say there is a definitive truth, we can give multiple meanings and interpretations, but we need to base them on evidence.\n\nHowever, given the current climate, I was surprised not to see a more robust defence of truth-telling. If we flipped the question around - \"is it (part of) a historian's duty not to lie?\" - would the starting point be \"of course\"? Or if we removed the definite article and made it \"is it a historian's duty to tell truth(s)?\"\n\nThis seems both a good and a bad thing. A good thing in that perhaps within academic history the standards are high enough that we can have nuanced debated about epistemology without losing sight of the basic need for evidence and honesty. A bad thing because these values are being attacked and we need to be able to defend them robustly, clearly and effectively. How do we translate the academic discussion into one a wider range of people can grasp?\n\nThat's particularly hard with postmodernism, which is can be an especially complex and counter-intuitive set of theories, and one with serious unresolved problems (sometimes I wonder if the complexity is deliberate, to hide the gaps in the arguments (eg. contrast Foucault, who is tricky but I always feel is *trying* to be precise, with Baudrillard, who feels very shifty)).\n\nKudos to both /u/AnnalsPornographie and /u/TenMinuteHistory for doing their best to make this difficult subject comprehensible, while also thinking on the spot."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/webpage/askhistorians-podcast-episode-86a-unedited-bonus-episode-doug-and-brian-debate-postmodernism", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6c3yat/askhistorians_podcast_086_so_you_wanna_be_a/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.embl.de/aboutus/science_society/discussion/discussion_2006/ref1-22june06.pdf"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fpvm8/is_it_a_historians_duty_to_tell_the_truth/", "https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/incommensurability/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a09j9/monday_methods_is_research_valueneutral/"]]}
{"q_id": "54lyp8", "title": "What made Frederick II so unique compared to other rulers? Why was he given titles such as \"the wonder of the world\", or considered by some as the \"first modern ruler\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/54lyp8/what_made_frederick_ii_so_unique_compared_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d83vlsb"], "score": [37], "text": ["I don't think I can do the full question justice, but I can give you a minor, albeit somewhat odd, angle on it: Falconry.\n\n**Frederick loved falconry.** He loved collecting the birds themselves, he loved exotic and rare raptor species, he loved flying them at game, he loved arguing with his staff of falconers over the best training methods, and he loved competing with his court members to see who could take the most quarry in a single day. I assume the smartest among them made a habit of losing to him regularly.\n\n**He wasn't alone in this. This was an era in which falconry, and hunting more generally, played an outsized role in the lives of many royals and aristocrats, to the point of having its own little impact on history.** There's a semi-funny story from the siege of Acre in 1191 in which the French king, Philip Augustus, lost an incredibly valuable white-morph gyrfalcon while hunting a few miles away from the city. (He was likely after the *houbara* bustard, which is the traditional quarry for falcons in the region. Sadly, the bustard's modern population on the Arabian peninsula has been almost completely wiped out by Saudi royals who go hawking with Land Rovers and dozens of falcons at a time.) The bird failed to make a kill, flew over Acre's walls and into enemy territory, and was captured and brought to Saladin. Once Philip figured out where the bird had gone, he sent emissaries to negotiate for its return. Saladin was having none of it, and Philip was reduced to begging and offering a small fortune to try to get it back. This is napkin math and shaky at best, but I think he offered the modern equivalent of $180,000-220,000. Saladin decided to hold onto the bird because: a). gyrfalcons, particularly white-morph gyrfalcons, were huge status symbols: b). it was actually a lowball number for the value of the bird, and c). it was a convenient little fuck-you to the guy who was besieging the city.\n\n**This wasn't the last time that birds of prey played an unwitting role in the region's oft-fractious politics.** In 1396, John the Fearless (son of Philip the Bold, then duke of Burgundy) got himself and twenty four of his knights captured by the Turks either during or immediately after the Battle of Nicopolis. The Turks under Bayezid I refused to give them up until negotiators settled on the eye-popping sum of 200,000 Venetian ducats (napkin math gets shakier here but this could easily be hundreds of millions of dollars) and 12 gyrfalcons. They wanted the birds more than the money; because the gyrfalcon is indigenous only to high northern latitudes, people in or around the Middle East didn't have easy access to them.\n\n**Anyway! The difference between Frederick and most of his noble cohorts was an intense intellectual curiosity -- and of course, the means to satisfy it.** Being as familiar with the sport as he was, he couldn't help but notice that many of the existing scientific treatises on birds of prey, even those by the venerated Aristotle, either didn't match what he saw in the field or were woefully incomplete. He hired scholars to translate Greek and Arabic texts on birds for him. He started dissecting dead hawks and taking extensive notes on their anatomy; a significant portion of his resulting book is about nothing but bird organs and their function. He observed the different species' behavior, both in the wild and captivity, critiqued different training techniques, wrote extensively on the use of gear and strategy in different environments in the field, and wrote detailed descriptions of the various species used in falconry and their traditional prey.\n\n**The end result was an enormous book titled *De arte venandi cum avibus,* or \"On the Art of Hunting with Birds.\"** It is arguably the first modern manual on the sport of falconry, which I know is a very strange thing to say about something that was written in the mid-13th century, but a lot of the practices, observations, and suggestions made in *De Arte* are instantly familiar to ornithologists and falconers today. With the exception of satellite tracking for the birds, the growing use of North/South American species, artificial insemination, and the introduction of Aylmeri jesses in the 20th century, falconry really hasn't changed much since antiquity. What *has* changed is our scientific and factual understandings of the birds and their behavior, and Frederick made an unusually early contribution to this.\n\n**Here's an excerpt.** I had to borrow this from the very few pages available on Google Books; my copy of the English translation has apparently disappeared into a black hole somewhere. Anyway, this is from his chapter on migratory patterns:\n\n*We notice also that when a favoring wind springs up, whether by day or night, migrating birds generally hasten to take advantage of it and even neglect food and sleep for this important purpose. We have observed that migrating birds of prey, that have begun to devour food we have thrown to them, will abandon it to fly off if a favorable wind begins to blow. They would rather endure hunger and travel day and night than forego such an advantageous opportunity.*\n\n*The calls of migrating cranes, herons, geese, and ducks may be recognized flying overhead even during the night, and not, as Aristotle claims, as a part of their efforts in flight; they are the call notes of one or more birds talking to their fellows. For example, they understand wind and weather so thoroughly that they know when meteorologic conditions are favorable and are likely to remain so long enough to enable them to reach their intended haven.*\n\n**This was centuries before the scientific method was a thing, but there's a distinctly modern feel to how Frederick researched and wrote the book.** Not only did he spend a lot of time watching birds (and likely assigned underlings to do it for him and report back), but he also experimented to see if their behavior varied in the presence of food or other incentives. Interestingly, his correction of Aristotle here is also the modern ornithological understanding of migrating bird calls, e.g., geese honk to communicate with each other, keeping the flock in formation at a consistent speed.\n\nI'm hesitant to address why Frederick might be considered the \"first modern ruler\" in a political sense, but you can make a strong argument that his commitment to empirical observation and questioning of scientific orthodoxy in *De Arte* certainly set him apart from most of his contemporaries. However, you can also argue that Frederick's work reflects the huge push in the academic establishment of the 13th century toward logical thought and rigorous observation; he overlaps with such luminaries as Albertus Magnus, Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon. \n\nSo was Frederick ahead of his time, or more a reflection of its best sensibilities? \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ssy6u", "title": "How reliable are battle numbers in Chinese antiquity?", "selftext": "There's a hot thread in /r/history right now on the [Battle of Julu](_URL_0_), and one of the comment threads in it discusses the general unreliability of pre-modern battle numbers, saying that taking off a zero off the figures would be more accurate.\n\nI had an impression that the Warring States period was a period of mass mobilization, so I never thought to question the huge numbers that regularly pop up around battles of the period.\n\nHow accurate are these numbers in Chinese antiquity? If it's too broad a question, how reliable are they for the Warring States period?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ssy6u/how_reliable_are_battle_numbers_in_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlf9tmt", "dlfbzg3"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["It's not an accurate statement to say that one should simply \"lop off a zero\" of Sima Qian's statements to make them approach accuracy... **it's a fun statement, it gets the point across, and I've done it myself in the past... but it's not really accurate... probably.***\n\nSee, there's a couple things anyone looking at that period needs to know about 1) Chinese historiography and 2) Chinese literary conventions o really understand Sima Qian and his numerations...\n\n# 1) Sima Qian's *Records* are pretty much the one-and-only historical text we have after the *Spring and Autumn Annals*\n\nThat means there's A) a 3-400 year gap in historiography, and B) we're forced to rely on *a single source*.  The problems with that single source are several... First, it's written (as with almost every official Chinese history) with a strong narrative bias *against* the dynastic order that preceded it.  In Sima's case, that meant he was writing for the early Han, which had directly ousted the Qin a half-century or so prior.  It's unlikely his account was terribly favorable to the Qin wars, or their wartime conduct... better to paint them as monsters... Sima's career and indeed life may well have hinged on an \"acceptable\" rendition being delivered.  But more than that, there's nothing else in the historical records to either corroborate or disprove his particular telling. That's is **not** to say nothing else was written... quite to the contrary, later Chinese histories are smattered with *references* to other works of Sima Qian's time and before... but they either haven't survived the rigors of time, or perhaps (fingers crossed) just haven't been excavated yet... that's not as impossible as it might sound... a [medical text](_URL_0_) long thought lost was recovered in 2013, and major, systemic excavations of historical sites in China have really only being going on in an organized (read: not-tomb-robbing) sense since the late 70's... *it's definitely possible that more will eventually turn up.*  But the other thing is...\n\n# 2) Chinese literary tradition tends to use large numbers more for *effect* than accuracy.\n\nThe numbers don't even have to be *particularly big.*  But if it looks/sounds nicer, that's what writers have tended to go with... the examples are too numerous to really count (*which is itself soft of... ironic?  Poetic??*)... but everything from the prayer that a dynasty will endure for 10,000 years (meaning: *forever*), to era names (the 16 Kingdoms was more like 20, the 5 Dynasties  &  10 Kingdoms was more like 6.5 and 25 or so...), to the List of \"100 Family Surnames\" (actually a list of 504 surnames)... numbers are used for their emotional *punch* much more than their mathematical accuracy in such literary devices.  This isn't unique to China, by the way... the \"300 Spartans at Thermopylae\"?  (Yeah, maybe 300-ish, but alongside and among some 7k combined Greeks... Herodotus/Zach Snyder lied, I know it's shocking)  The \"million-man Persian army of Xerxes?  What, did someone sit there and count?  Numbers that we've been societally forced to actually come to terms within the modern age... simply meant *less* in ancient eras, where the maximum one might be reasonably expected to estimate was in the hundreds, or thousands.  Above that, we *still* have terminology analogous to what many of the ancient authors used \"hundreds of thousands\" or \"millions\" for... unspecified, hyperbolic words like \"zillion\", \"jillion\", and ~~Brazilian~~ \"bazillion\".  *That's* more akin to what numbers like Sima Qian likes to throw around represent: **\"there were a crap-ton of soldiers in that fight, no way to count 'em all!\"**", "A good rule of thumb when dealing with Chinese military numbers is to be careful of anything over 100,000 and to take with a huge boatload of salt anything over 200,000, with a few exceptions of course.\n\nLike I said in the other thread, with a highly centralized bureaucracy that practiced universal conscription, states such as the Qin and Han had the **potential** to field upwards of one million troops. But it would have been highly impractical for them to do so and so they didn't. \n\nWhen looking at Warring State records, a lot of times politicians during that period will mention how the Qin has one million soldiers and a hundred thousand cavalry, but as the authors of the *Cambridge History of Ancient China* stated, that's more of a rhetorical device, the same way we say, \"I have a ton of homework.\" It's not meant to be taken literally, but rather to show that the Qin state had a lot of troops."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Julu"], "answers_urls": [["https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2013/12/ancient-chinese-bamboo-texts-tell.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "44qhgx", "title": "Were Werner Heisenberg's nuclear capabilities overestimated?", "selftext": "I have just watched \"the Heavy Water Wars\" - a Norwegian/German/British story based around events at Norsk Hydro in WWII. I have read this article [what if Werner Heisenberg had been a nazi](_URL_0_) and briefly read his bio and some of his published works. I don't have an extensive knowledge of WWII events other than the most prominent and undisputed; but with the series and the article which questions Heisenberg's apparent genius, I'm not sure where to search for more of the truth. \n\nIs this a case where actually learning more about quantum physics, nazi programmes, the Manhattan Project and other scientifically verifiable work will ultimately uncover Heisenberg's actions as killing nuclear weaponisation or his ineptitude? Or is there proof to credit him with actions that saved the world from a nuclear nazi state?\n\nThank you in advance for any guidance you mavens can offer :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44qhgx/were_werner_heisenbergs_nuclear_capabilities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czseflf", "czsmsqz"], "score": [2, 15], "text": ["You should probably mention that the series is available on Netflix US\n_URL_0_", "Heisenberg was one of the most brilliant quantum theorists of his generation. Nobody doubts that.\n\nBut making an atomic bomb requires more than one brilliant scientist. The person at the \"top\" of an organization (and Heisenberg, as an aside, _was not that_ \u2014 he was the head of one of two research groups that was working on fission, and had a boss organizing the whole thing: Walter Gerlach, who ran German defense physics research fro 1944 onward) needs other skills as well. That job is partly organizational (they need to know how to manage large groups of people efficiently), part motivational (they need to know how to lead large groups of people effectively), and part technical (they need to have a head that can accommodate the whole range of potential problems that might come up). Separately, there needs to be someone who knows how to _get things done_ \u2014 how to get the materials necessary, how to accelerate the work, how to create factories from scratch.\n\nIn the USA, no single person held all of these functions. Oppenheimer did the job as top scientist, and did a great job of it. He could wear many hats and do many things and talk to many people. He had the intellectual as well as the organizational chops, and his personality was one that most of the scientists found inspiring. Groves did some of the other heavy lifting: he was the man who got things _done_. The US project needed _both_ of them, and arguably needed a few other key figures as well: Ernest Lawrence was quite experienced at large-scale physics machine building (necessary for building the facilities that were used to enrich uranium), Enrico Fermi was a once-in-a-generation jack-of-all-trades sort of genius who was as comfortable with the theory as he was with actually building nuclear reactors by hand, and Vannevar Bush had unique access to the President's ear and could coax entire agencies out of him based on conversation alone. (It is something of a nuclear historian parlor game to consider whether you could eliminate one or two of the major scientists and see if the project would still survive \u2014 I think if you dropped Lawrence, Fermi, or Bush, it would be much harder; if you drop Oppenheimer but not Lawrence or Fermi, it might still survive if one of them ran it; if you drop Groves, the whole thing fails). \n\nSimilar dynamics existed in the Soviet bomb project. Igor Kurchatov played a mixture of the Oppenheimer/Fermi roles \u2014 an organizational scientist who also got his hands dirty. Yuli Khariton picked up the theoretical physics slack. And the \"get things done\" person was none other than the architect of Stalin's reign of terror, Lavrenty Beria. \n\nThe roles don't have to be siloed out exactly like this, but making an atomic bomb is _not_ a theoretical physics project. It is a massive industrial-engineering enterprise that in the 1940s tested and pushed beyond the limits of known theoretical and experimental physics, but also required herculean contributions in the areas of chemistry, metallurgy, and numerous types of engineering. \n\nOK, so let's go back to the German case. What did they have? They had two relatively small nuclear physics research groups. They had a few A-list physicists in there, and a few B-listers. You don't need all A-list physicists to make an atomic bomb, but the more you have helps. In the case of the US, the list of A-listers is staggering: Oppenheimer, Bethe, Fermi, Feynman, von Neumann, Lawrence, Compton, Szilard, Kistiakowsky, Rabi, Bacher, Teller, Smyth, Chadwick, Bohr, Seaborg, McMillan, Alvarez \u2014 just to name a couple who come to mind easily. Each of these people could easily have been chair of a major national physics department \u2014 and some were \u2014 and several of them were either present or future Nobel Prize winners. Imagine plucking up one of these A-listers and giving them a staff of a few dozen B-listers. Could they have built an atomic bomb in 2.5 years? Jeez, of course not. Heck, could such a team have gotten a first-generation nuclear reactor working in 4 years? It would have been hard, especially if you didn't end up with Fermi as your A-lister (and Fermi was, again, unique among his contemporaries in his very wide skill-set, a rare bridge of experimental and theoretical knowledge). And woe to you if the one you picked was someone who didn't work well in groups, like Teller or Szilard, both of whom could be quite brilliant but were interpersonally very tricky and prickly, prone to \"rage-quitting\" whatever organizations they were part of.\n\nHeisenberg was good at theoretical physics, primarily the intersection of mathematical and philosophical aspects that makes up quantum mechanics. No doubt there. Matrix mechanics, his baby, was an intellectual tour de force. But it's not the kind of work that implies he knows much about building _things_. And, indeed, he wasn't great at that. if Heisenberg had been part of Los Alamos, I am sure he could have made some great contributions. But expecting him to carry the burden of an entire program... it's just not his forte. \n\nSeparately, we should point out that there was no Groves or Beria figure on the German program. There was no \"get things done\" person. Gerlach was not that person: he was a physicist-administrator who was not entirely liked and certainly did not have his finger on the pulse of power in the German state. He was no Werner von Braun, to make a German analog \u2014 von Braun was both a hands-on guy, focused on one thing (rockets), and he knew how to get things done (even if that meant doing some things he later found unpleasant to admit to, like becoming a member of the SS and using slave labor in his factories). But he knew how to get things done, and knew what he wanted to get done, and the V-2 program as an aside cost more than the Manhattan Project. Gerlach wasn't a von Braun, much less a Groves or a Beria.\n\nThe Germans never mustered up much enthusiasm about the ability to make an atomic bomb in time for it to be useful for the war. They were not entirely wrong about this: they correctly saw that the odds were long ones, and the expenditures would be big ones. The US was in retrospect over-optimistic about how hard it would be, and they only pulled it off through incredible expenditure and ridiculous amounts of brainpower. The Manhattan Project employed, over the course of its existence, some 500,000 people, nearly 1 out of 100 Americans in the civilian labor force. The German program employed a few hundred people total. \n\nThis was not a \"failure\" of the German program \u2014 by 1942 the German government had decided that it was not worth trying to build a bomb, that they would focus on reactors instead. They didn't even get those working, in part because of the disruptions caused by the war, but also because of fracturing within the organization. \n\nThere were also some technical errors. Heisenberg is to blame for a few of them, others are to blame for others. They are relatively minor errors, though, that would not have \"sunk\" a bigger effort. Because it was a small effort, they bogged it down. \n\nOne can argue (as historians have) about _why_ the Germans didn't make more of an effort. There isn't much evidence they did it willingly to stop Hitler from getting nuclear technology. A more plausible view, in my mind, is that they truly did see it as a technology to be developed in the next 10 years, not the next 3 years. This is not anomalous \u2014 every other government group of scientists who studied the problem of fission came to the same conclusion _except_ those in the UK, who managed to convince those in the US that it would be easy (the US physicists originally came to the same conclusion as the Germans, prior to 1941). So the \"weird\" case to be explained is not the Germans' non-enthusiasm but the British and later American enthusiasm.\n\nAs for whether Heisenberg was overestimated at the time... his contemporaries knew he was very smart. If you combined his intelligence _with the intelligence of others_ and _a very efficient and well-funded organization_, the Germans might have had a shot at the bomb _if_ it had been as easy as the Americans  ended up thinking it would be, when they decided to build a bomb (late 1942). It was actually much harder than that (and cost 5X what they expected it would). Personally I think it would be nigh impossible for the Germans to build a bomb during World War II under almost _any_ circumstances unless they knew _exactly_ what all the \"right\" ways to do things were (and they very obviously didn't, and neither did the USA, because it had not yet been done). \n\nOn the German program, Mark Walker's _Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb_ is very good, as is his longer (and more technical) _German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-49_. I would avoid Thomas Powers' popular _Heisenberg's War_, as it spends a lot of time trying to bend the facts to a very discredited thesis (that Heisenberg was actively trying to sabotage the project). I have written [a bit on my blog](_URL_3_) about what we know about the German program, and also about such questions as \"[When did the Allies know there wasn't a German bomb?](_URL_1_)\" and \"[What did the Nazis know about the Manhattan Project?](_URL_2_)\" as well as [many posts](_URL_0_) about the size and scope of the Manhattan Project as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.historynet.com/what-if-werner-heisenberg-had-been-a-nazi.htm"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80073754&amp;jbp=1&amp;jbr=1"], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/archives/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/11/13/when-did-the-allies-know-there-wasnt-a-german-bomb/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the-nazis-know-about-the-manhattan-project/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/01/07/bad-history-meets-bad-journalism/"]]}
{"q_id": "5l76cl", "title": "Robert E. Lee is lauded as a military genius of his time, but what were his real victories? Most of his 'decisive victories' seemed to have been more of utter failures and poor coordination by Union leadership rather than ingenious use of strategy by confederate leadership.", "selftext": "Look at Robert E. Lee's big two victories, 2nd incident at bull run  &  the battle of Chancellorsville, in Bull Run the Northern leadership working on extremely poor and second-hand intelligence launched very stupid frontal attacks on the rebels on the pretext of \"they got them in a bag\" but their flank was left open and they were simply attacked from that direction and were routed (albeit with ridiculous casualties to the rebels for a decisive victory in the process) And in Chancellorsville he made his classic \"split forces\" decision, which could have been easily punished by the Yankees had they had any form of proper communication and coordination, but the rebel force under Maj. General stonewall jackson casually marched infront of them (they made the effort of getting out of their trenches to skirmish with them, but once they passed, they decided to move back to the trenches and leave that problem to someone else), Jackson simply moved to the flank infront of the entire federal army and attacked them and once again routed them. And from there his big streak of decisive victories simply ends, he made very foolish decisions in Gettysburg and everything that followed was more stupid federal decisions and poor leadership and spending 2 years inside trenches while the yankees try to find a way to brute-force the rebels into surrendering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5l76cl/robert_e_lee_is_lauded_as_a_military_genius_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbtu9an"], "score": [13], "text": ["First, it should be pointed out that historians don't call Lee's victories decisive, even when he won them convincingly, as they didn't decide the war in the Confederacy's favor.  Given the debate about whether Confederate victory was even possible, this isn't a terribly strong strike against his generalship; certainly the war would not have lasted four years and ended with 700,000 dead and 3.5 million people freed from slavery without his leadership.\n\nI challenge you to find a battle in history where the losing side made no mistakes; indeed, a battle where the *winners* fought perfectly is a rare thing.  Being able to take advantage of an enemy's mistakes, while preventing your own from undoing you, is a key element of military tactics.  \n\nFurthermore, it's important to understand the context of the key decisions on the battlefield.  Looking back on events that already happened, we know which hills and ridges will prove decisive, which generals will go left and which right, where this or that unit's flank ends; the commanders at the time had to make it up as they went along, because they fought under conditions of heavy uncertainty, with incomplete information and a rapidly changing situation.\n\nRegarding 2nd Bull Run, you have to remember that the battle unfolds across time as well as space.  It takes time to find the enemy's flank and then to maneuver thousands of men into a position to attack it, and the enemy are using that time to move as well.  John Pope wanted to attack Jackson's right flank, but could not get Porter into position before Longstreet's command arrived to envelop the Union line.  He tried to roll up Jackson's left flank, but Jackson beat him back.  \n\nPope had sound military reasons for attacking at 2nd Bull Run; the enemy's main army was temporarily divided, giving him superior numbers at what he thought would be the decisive point.  It would be inexplicable incompetence for him to pass up the opportunity; one of the basic principles of war was to mass superior forces against a weaker enemy -to throw rocks against eggs is how Gary Gallagher put it- and Lee enticed him to battle by offering the opportunity.  Furthermore Pope had staked his career on giving the administration the vigorous offensive it wanted; given the civilian-run nature of republics at war, it's relevant to note that Lincoln's administration is not commonly convicted by the tribunal of historians for the tactical offensive posture of the Union army at 2nd Bull Run.  \n\nPope did everything he could, but Lee had absolutely outmaneuvered him on the operational level, which I think is something that slips by a lot of newcomers to the ACW.  People have a bad habit of looking only on battles to get the measure of a general, when in reality, wars in the modern style typically came down to what Jomini called the skillful arrangement of marches.  You'll notice that Bull Run isn't so far outside of Washington, when just a few weeks before, the main Union army had been preparing for the siege of Richmond.  Lee had marched circles around Pope, turning him out of his position along the Rapidan River, yanking the leash of his rail lines, so to speak.  Because of skillful and rapid marches, Jackson got to deploy first, shaping the battle to come, with Bull Run anchoring his left flank and Longstreet on the right.  \n\nIf you zoom out even further, though, the greatness of Lee's victory becomes even clearer.  He was faced with two Union armies in Virginia, both of which outnumbered his; McClellan was menacing Richmond from the East on the Peninsula, and Pope's was threatening the Virginia Central Railroad to the north.  Furthermore, he knew from partisan leader Mosby that Pope's army would soon be reinforced.  Lee took advantage of the central position to engage Pope's army while observing McClellan, used a strategic turning movement to bring it to battle on favorable ground, and an operational envelopment to defeat it with the clock ticking.  With the main rebel army just across the Potomac from the U.S. capital, and faith in the Peninsula concept dropping, he didn't even need to turn to face McClellan on the Peninsula.  \n\nFurthermore, I think you misunderstand the flank march at Chancellorsville.  It's important to remember Hooker's concept of operations for the campaign; he wanted to either lever Lee out of his strong position on the Rappahannock or force him to attack an entrenched and more numerous force.  In modern terms, he wanted to assume the position of tactical defense within an operational offensive, which military scientists are generally enthusiastic about, given the advantages of both.  Furthermore, since his approach was coming out of the west, the battle lines were initially oriented north-south, while Lee's line of retreat was towards the south.  \n\nWhen the greater part of Lee's force started marching south, it would have been a reasonable assumption that he was retreating.  After all, his position was being turned and he was outnumbered.  Hooker did however consider that Jackson could be undertaking a flank march.  He ordered Howard to prepare for such an eventuality, and told Sickles to attack and take possession of the road.  His corps, down a division, became hotly engaged with a regiment and two brigades out of the Confederate column; Jackson's corps did not just brazenly march in front of the Union line.  They used their cavalry well to find a route around the Union flank and cover their flank march (one of the riskiest tactical maneuvers), and they went all in.  \n\nThe name of the game here was economy of force.  Lee could recognize where the decisive point of the battle would be and where he could afford to merely delay while preparing to deliver the main blow.  Lee left just 10,000 men to hold back 40,000 under Sedgewick; they eventually gave way, but it didn't matter.  He only had 14,000 men to hold back 70,000 under Hooker, but that was alright, because his main striking force had worked its way around his flank to deliver a terrible hammer blow.  If he misidentified the decisive point of the battle, he might have massed his main force against Sedgewick; after all, his was the weaker of the two wings, why not go after it?  This approach, though, would not have decided the battle in his favor, because nothing he does to Sedgewick's force matters if Hooker succeeds.  \n\nHe had previously displayed this capability in the Seven Days Battles, though adapted to different circumstances.  Because of his astute tactical understanding of the value of fieldworks, he was able to economize manpower south of the Chickahomminy River to mass superior force on the north side, where an isolated Union corps guarded the Army of the Potomac's rail communications with White House.  As a result, McClellan had to abandon that line of operations, and thereafter the campaign, when the administration sought other approaches to the problem.  Thus, the greatest danger to the main Confederate army and the capital until Grant's crossing of the James had passed.  \n\nThis victory also becomes more impressive when viewed in the broader context.  Earlier, Lee had detached two divisions under his best fighter, Longstreet, to secure provisions for an offensive in North Carolina.  Thus, not only did Lee win a battle gravely outnumbered, but because he was even more outnumbered than he could have been, he was prepared to quickly follow up on an impressive tactical victory with a strategic offensive into the north.  While this offensive failed in its main objective of destroying the main Union army, it achieved several secondary objectives.  The Shenandoah Valley had been cleared of Union presence, Lee had resupplied his army off of enemy territory, and bled the Union army so badly it was passive enough for him to send two divisions under his best fighter west to win the Army of Tennessee's only victory.  \n\nEven campaigns that ended in failure typically featured an extremely strong showing from Lee; Harsh's book on the Maryland campaign concludes that Lee made the right decision at every turn until he attempted to invade through Williamsport again, and achieved the largest surrender in U.S. history until the Philippines in WWII at Harpers Ferry.  The Overland campaign is considered very good work from Lee as well, but the thing that strikes me is how quickly the campaign burned through his lieutenants.  Jackson had died the year before.  Longstreet was shot at the Wilderness; Stuart was killed at Yellow Tavern; AP Hill had a flare up of his prostatitis; Ewell had a nervous breakdown.  At the North Anna, with a golden opportunity to strike the divided Union army in the midst of a river crossing before him, Lee fell ill with malaria, and there was no one to strike the blow.  \n\nLee is a bit of an odd duck when it comes to perception.  Most people approach the topic knowing only the bottom line that he was a great general; their perception is positive, but shallow.  As they continue to study, they find that Lee indeed made mistakes, and that his opponents didn't exactly measure up to the same expectations he's held to.  But I've found the more I study military history, the more I appreciate Lee's generalship; it's not quite the infallible marble man you see coming in, but it's far deeper and more profound.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hq682", "title": "Guys, Girls and Sex: A Gender History Panel AMA", "selftext": "Hi everyone! Today's panel AMA will have a bit of a different tone than our regular panels; instead of focusing on a specific period or topic in history, we will talk about our work in a specific *subfield* of history: gender history. My hope is to give some of our flairs with obscure specialties some exposure, while simultaneously introducing many of you to a subfield of history that you may be unaware of. Think of this panel as a half-AMA, half-workshop: we will all be glad to discuss questions about our fields of research, but we will also answer questions about the nitty-gritty of doing gender history: how does a gender historian conduct their research? What makes their methodological approach distinct from other subfields? What kinds of sources do they use, and in what ways do they use them?\n\nSo, what is gender history? To the uninitiated, the subfield may sound like a synonym for women's history, but this is far from the case. In fact, gender history is to an extent antithetical to the practice of women's history because it focuses on all kinds of genders, and studies how gender is socially constructed in contrast to women's history which assumes that a gendered category called \u201cwomen\u201d has existed throughout history. Consequently, gender historians examine gender as a social construct relative to the societies that construct it, but more importantly understand gender as an important factor in social relationships and hierarchies. Joan Scott asserted, in a much more elegant fashion, that \u201cgender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.\u201d So there you have it: gender historians study how gender is constructed in historical societies, and the roles those genders played in historical social relationships and hierarchies. \n\nYour panelists today are:\n\n* /u/TheShowIsNotTheShow: Generally, While I am not a historian of gender, I have read widely in the field. My reading clusters around gender and work in the twentieth century and before; workplaces ranging from factories to fields to white-collar workplaces are all fair game. Plus, I've done a fair bit of thinking about how what counts as 'work' is deeply gendered; 'work' traditionally happens outside the home in the public/male sphere while women's labor within the home has rarely received this value or designation. So, questions about work, labor, employment, and gender. Oh, and food!\n\n\n* /u/caffarelli: I study eunuchs in history. My particular focus is on the Italian Castrati, and how they were understood (and understood themselves!) in the gender paradigm of early modern Europe. However I am comfortable fielding questions about the gender (or social role, or sexual role, or anything else) of other major eunuch traditions, including the Middle East, China, Byzantium and the Ancient world.\n\n* /u/Cephalopodie studies late 19th and 20th century American LGBTQ history. She is particularly interested in activism and the relationships between people in different LGBTQ identity categories. Gender-centric topics that she would be happy to discuss today include (but are not limited to) the rise, fall, and rise again of Butch/Fem(me) lesbian subcultures, the historical concept of \"gender inversion\" and how it relates to early homosexual identities, gender, sex, and sex roles in male homosexual communities (\"trade,\" \"wolves,\" \"fairies,\" \"punks,\" etc), gender presentation and fashion in post-Stonewall gay and lesbian communities, and shifting notions of gender-nonconforming and trans* identities.\n\n* /u/TenMinuteHistory: I am a phd candidate studying the Soviet Union. My work on the arts in the Soviet Union often benefits from using gender as a category of analysis. I am particularly interested in the *meaning* of bodies and movement and their representation in culture.\n\n* /u/historiagrephour holds a master's degree in Scottish history and specializes in the concept of cultural gradation within the early modern Scottish Highlands. Additionally, my research looks at the performance of masculinity and femininity within Scottish Gaelic and Scottish Lowland society and the ways in which these concepts were defined. For the purposes of the AMA, I can discuss gender issues as they relate to marriage, fosterage, divorce, concubinage, education, language, literacy, honor codes, and hospitality among the early modern Scottish elite.\n\n* /u/CrossyNZ has worked with masculinity during the First World War, especially as men negotiated their masculinity with things such as woundings, the static nature of trench warfare, and mental health.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hq682/guys_girls_and_sex_a_gender_history_panel_ama/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu9jhjc", "cu9jmof", "cu9juhd", "cu9k669", "cu9k793", "cu9l0e6", "cu9ld2o", "cu9mfau", "cu9mozw", "cu9mtar", "cu9nnby", "cu9nogo", "cu9o43h", "cu9o83z", "cu9pf8f", "cu9poo5", "cu9pp3w", "cu9pynx", "cu9r8zb", "cu9rnrc", "cu9sfkz", "cu9sfv2", "cu9vck3", "cua1by3", "cua7kg3"], "score": [13, 27, 11, 13, 7, 7, 15, 6, 12, 13, 9, 24, 2, 6, 7, 10, 8, 85, 19, 8, 15, 11, 11, 9, 5], "text": ["The question of whether to include both women's history and gender history in the same panel was a point of contention when I began organizing this AMA. I mentioned it briefly in my rambling introduction, but how would you describe the difference between the two subfields? Do you think that gender history has rendered women's history obsolete or do you believe that it still has a purpose?", "Generally speaking, gender history developed as a way of conveying the \"forgotten stories\" of history - women's history, LGBTQ history, working class history etc. What role do you think gender studies could/should have in more traditional fields such as political and economic history?\n\nIs work being done to apply these methods to the \"great men\" and to genderise the existing grand narratives of history?", "For /u/historiagrephour: how were masculinity and femininity defined and performed in Gaelic society? Was there a significant contrast between Gaelic conceptions of gender and those of Lowland Scots?", "When discussions concerning focusing on the subaltern in history, especially on reddit, you usually see comments that go along the lines of \"why do we need to focus just on women? Why do we need a *Black* History Month? etc..\" How would you answer someone who asked you a similar question, along the lines of \"why do we need *gender* history? Is regular history not good enough?\"", "/u/cephalopodie : what are wolves and punks?", "I was taught in an undergrad anthropology class that early hunter-gatherer humans, before the advent of agriculture, were far more egalitarian than post-agricultural civilizations. Is that generally true? Is there historical evidence or is it based on relating modern hunter-gatherer societies to ancient ones anthropologically?", "Two questions, if I may:\n\n\nFirst, what are your biggest \"pet peeves?\" i.e. misconceptions about your area of study that drive you up the wall?\n\n\nSecond, how difficult is it to identify whether a particular primary source is representative of the overall opinion at the time? That is to say, to establish whether a primary source is unusually progressive, unusually traditional, or simply a reflection of how the majority might have felt at that point. The specifics (i.e. which region, which time period, which authors, etc) are assumed to be your particular field of expertise (e.g. for /u/historiagrephour it would be assumed that I'm asking this question with regards to early modern Scottish sources)", "/u/caffarelli : were early modern eunuchs gendered masculine or feminine, or did they occupy some transient space between the two?", "How are third-gender, genderfluid, and/or other nonbinary people represented/discussed/studied in your area of study?  \n\n(This question brought to you by my head-tilt at the fact that the title of the AMA includes only two genders)", "How did societies which used to have a different number of genders, transition to the number of genders they have now (eg two genders, three genders etc)? I understand how religion could play a part in that, but how did/does going from being known and accepted under one identity and feeling like you are that one identity, to having another identity or different ideas about identity work? ", "For /u/caffarelli I guess.\n\n1/ There are two ways to make eunuchs, removing only the testicles or removing the penis as well.  Have there been societies which used both?  Did it result in different social role?\n\n2/ Your list of eunuch traditions makes me wonder, was there such a tradition in Africa or in America? ", "It's often remarked that applying the terms like \"gay\" or \"homosexual\" to cultures like Rome, Norse Scandinavia, etc. is erroneous, because people back then did not think of their sexual preferences as a defining personal characteristic. I've heard that this practice of defining oneself by sexuality, at least in the western world, began in the Victorian era. My questions is, what can we point to to conclude when people began to identify themselves by their sexual orientation? Also, are there any examples of societies or even individual figures that took sexual orientation to be a defining characteristic that preceded the 19th century? ", "Who are in your opinion the most influential women from the late '700 until the early '900 across the western world?\n\nBy influential I mean politics, sorry Ms Curie. :)", "I also have a question about the field of gender history. I'm aware of modern gender studies or queer theory falling under the philosophy field. Do you think a background in philosophy is necessary to understand gender theory, or are you coming more from historical and factual roots?", "For /u/TenMinuteHistory: what sort of arts policies in regards to gender did the Soviets have? Did they have rules for who could take part in what arts, or what sort of content you could present? ", "Were there any culture that were one gendered?", "For /u/TheShowIsNotTheShow: how do \"pink collar\" jobs fit within your studies, as \"women's work\" that is, in a way, not women's work, in that it happens outside the home for pay, but is still low status?  ", "There's a blog post floating around recently talking about how mass shootings are higher than they've ever been, are higher in America than anywhere else, are almost entirely perpetrated by men, and speculates that this might be related to something particular in American masculinity.\n\nI apologize in advance for the ickiness I'm about to start, but I had some questions.  Answer whatever you can or feel inclined to.\n\n * How has American masculinity changed since, say, the second world war?\n * Have there been places/periods where masculinity was markedly more violent than the places/periods around it?  Where, when, and what came of it?\n * Has there ever been a place/period where *femininity* was marked by aggressive or violent behavior?\n * In places/periods where a third gender was recognized, how did gendered segregation work?  Were the third genders allowed to move freely between worlds?  Was it more or less restrictive?  Could people pass between the two (man or woman and third) at will, or was it restricted?", "I was watching a video on YouTube of (IIRC) Ruth Bader Ginsberg's confirmation hearings, and (again, IIRC) she claimed that she was among the first to use the word \"gender\" to refer to people, rather than as a grammatical artifact in languages other than English. \n\nBecause I'm not certain of this memory, and because it's sort of beside the point anyway, my question is more general: When was the word \"gender\" first applied to people, as a distinct concept from \"sex\" (or in such a way that the multiple meanings of \"sex\" were, to a degree, disambiguated)? Was it a direct borrow/analogy from the grammatical sense of the term, or were the intermediary meanings?\n\nThanks!", "1)Were there any cultures run by a matriarchy? If so, how were the men treated?\n\n2)In what culture were women treated the worst/had the least rights?", "I once asked a question some months back but it was moderated because it was too broad (fair enough!), but this particular AMA seems like the perfect place.\n\nThere are a multitude of examples of organizations throughout history whose name takes the form \" < name >   &  Sons\".  I have never seen a \" < name >   &  Daughters\".  Other than the apparent gender-bias through history, are there any examples of the latter?  \n\nI can fully comprehend that men tended to own organizations more than women back in those days, but I find it interesting that I can't think of any examples of the other sex - even at this day and age where it is commonplace for both sexes to run organizations.\n", "Why did so many young women have affairs with wealthy men during the Middle Ages? Would bearing a noble bastard bring any benefit to the mother, or were these women just scared of the consequences of refusing their lords' advances?\n\n", "Hello. First, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to do this AMA.\n\nSecond, is there any book I can consult as a good introduction to the methodology and great discoveries of this field? My knowledge is basically limited to the lampooned version of gender studies degrees (which, I'm sure, is different from historian specializing in gender) found online. Definitely not an accurate portrayal, I'm sure.\n\nThird, how is sexism treated on a theoretical level by serious historians in your field right now? I'm referring to the often repeated claim made frequently online by some who study gender (though not necessarily as historians), saying that sexism is only defined as a systemic phenomenon and thus only directed at women. Again, I'm not even slightly read up on this and the internet keeps getting flooded by claims that 'academia' is currently stating that the sole definition of sexism is systemic sexism, and thus is never directed at men.\n\nThanks again for doing this. I hope I can come away with a couple of ignorant misconceptions quashed.\n\nEdit: Aaaaand I've been downvoted. I'm posting this BECAUSE I'm admittedly ignorant and want to educate myself instead of believing strawman caricatures online.", "Thanks for doing this AMA! Has honestly been one of the most fascinating threads I've read online in a long time.\n\nJust one question - if it wasn't until the mid twentieth-century that engaging in male intercourse would warrant your being singled out as \"gay\" (thereby implying that the act was to a degree normal before then), than why do we hear of individuals being so heavily persecuted for engaging in male intercourse prior to that time. Like Oscar Wilde, for instance? Surely, if men were having sex with other men in the late nineteenth century and this went uncommented on than it should have been the same for men that saw themselves as strictly homosexual also.", " >  we will also answer questions about the nitty-gritty of doing gender history\n\nHistory has a long history of being manipulated for political reasons, entertainment and personal biases. In a touchy subject like this what steps have you taken to reduce it? Bearing in mind bias could come from fear of sexism as much as sexism.\n\nHow controversial is the following statement?\n\n >  Men are generally physically stronger, this would answer a lot of questions about why men had higher social status in the past due to their greater value as agricultural laborers, soldiers etcetera.. and the basis for prejudices which became entrenched such that less physically taxing but prestigious tasks like being a merchant were mostly men. People are prejudiced because humans are irrational and possibly due to some natural instincts to create a social pecking order (humiliation, hubris). General behavioral differences between hetero men and hetero women may play a role, behavioral differences of course are due to both nature and nurture for which there is an overwhelming amount of [evidence](_URL_0_), also one must be careful not to confuse nurture with nature and likewise nature with nurture.\n\nReddit has a reputation for quibbles and silly rants about feminism and \"SJW\"s. I'd like to avoid this and get to the \"nitty gritty\" as promised. What is the exact state of gender history? Is it littered with this kind of thing as some might fear? Or are you objective and unbiased as I hope?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70"]]}
{"q_id": "435c8v", "title": "During the Early Middle Ages, how did one find a husband or wife given how sparsely populated it was, along with their close ties to the land?", "selftext": "I'm currently taking a course on Europe in the High Middle Ages, and we briefly did an overview of the feudal ystem from the early Middle Ages. My professor emphasized how unpopulated the land was, and how small the villages were, along with how the peasants were very tied to the land. In that case, how did they find someone suitable to marry who was not closely related to them?\nI apologize if I'm making any incorrect assumptions about how sparsely populated the land was, or the size of the villages.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/435c8v/during_the_early_middle_ages_how_did_one_find_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czfuetn"], "score": [10], "text": ["When the Church finally got to issuing particular injunctions about marriage, the prohibited it if the parties were within seven degrees of consanguinity. Even in the highly populated thirteenth century, this was probably not possible to avoid in most villages; the nobility certainly couldn't manage it. So, the answer to one of your questions is that the rules weren't yet actually rules, and were in any case more like guidelines. \n\nA more important point is that just because there was relatively few people per square mile, it didn't mean that the people were evenly distributed. Villages were near each other, and near the surviving Roman roads. Also, a lot of the original assumptions we've made about the \"horizons\" of travel have come under attack. Long distance travel did drop off, but short and medium distance travel continued. Finally, although there were major population collapses, we see signs of recovery shortly thereafter. By 700, population was growing once again.\n\nIn short, it wasn't as bad as all that. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4okzrk", "title": "When televisions began selling in the 1930s until 1950, what programs were available?", "selftext": "In North America or Europe.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4okzrk/when_televisions_began_selling_in_the_1930s_until/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4dj6h0", "d4e5qmv"], "score": [18, 4], "text": ["In 1984, McGraw-Hill published \"The TV Schedule Book: Four Decades of Network Programming from Sign-On to Sign-Off,\" which has charts of the daily schedules of the major U.S. networks (including DuMont) for every season beginning with 1944.  The book also contains explanatory text about the history of TV programming. It's out of print but you can probably find it in libraries, and you can buy reasonably priced used copies.", "British radio and television listings from 1923 have been digitised as part of the [BBC Genome Project] (_URL_7_), searchable by year, channel etc.\n\nExperimental broadcasts started in 1932, and some listings can be found from this period such as, on [8th January 1934] (_URL_4_):\n\n* Cal McCord The Comical, Cordial Cowboy\n* Annette Keith Songs and Dances\n* Syd and Max Harrison Britain's Wonder Tap and Acrobatic Dancers \n\nRegular \"high definition\" (240+ lines) broadcasts begin on [November 2nd 1936] (_URL_3_), programmes including Variety (comedy, song and dance), a 15 minute documentary in the evening about the new service, and Picture Page, A Magazine of Topical and General Interest. The following day you could see \"Alsatians : A Display by Champion Alsatians from the Metropolitan and Essex Canine Society's Show described by A. Croxton Smith, O.B.E\" and \"The Golden Hind: A model of Drake's famous ship made by L.A. Stock, a Bus Driver, who will describe its construction.\" Other programmes in the 1930s included \"plays, newsreels, concerts, opera, ballet, cabaret and children\u2019s cartoons\", and outside broadcasts of occasions such as King George VI\u2019s Coronation Procession and sporting events such as [the boat race] (_URL_2_) (though only the finish could be televised, progress was shown via an animated chart).\n\nBroadcasting shut down over the war from September 1939 to June 1946; \"Mickey's Gala Premier\" was the last item transmitted before the interruption, and was [shown again as part of the reopening] (_URL_6_). \n\nThere's a lot of information available on the [History of the BBC website] (_URL_1_), including timelines with embedded clips of events such as the 1948 Olympics and an early weather forecast test. There's also [a film on YouTube] (_URL_0_) with a selection of clips from Alexandra Palace from 1936-1981, including [a later example of Picture Page] (_URL_0_ & t=0m17s) that featured on the first night of programming."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOQCA0r1PZk", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc", "http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/17e89bc6bf504532aa12cc89760f8e79", "http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctv/1936-11-02", "http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctv/1934-01-08", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOQCA0r1PZk&amp;t=0m17s", "http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctv/1946-06-07", "http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/"]]}
{"q_id": "24rybq", "title": "What is the History of the Handshake?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24rybq/what_is_the_history_of_the_handshake/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cha7hep", "chactjx"], "score": [42, 9], "text": ["Oldest known instance of a handshake that i could find is in this babylonian tablet.  _URL_0_\n\nIts of two different kings (assyrian and babylonian) king hands in public and was to reflect a time of peace. Similar images can be found in other ancient works of art. \n\nIn this piece _URL_1_ theseus is being welcomed by posidon and shaking hands. This is of two different cultures and a few thousand years apart. Suggests the idea of the handshake is a sign of goodwill going back to early history.", "This might be more of a question for [r/AskAnthropology](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/aebp/images/essentials/countries/babylonia2-large.jpg", "http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/P14.3.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/askanthropology"]]}
{"q_id": "76cgsk", "title": "Before \"fire\" was associated with launching ordinance, what were the common English verbs for shooting arrows?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76cgsk/before_fire_was_associated_with_launching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dod5mzk"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi! I've removed this question because it is attracting a lot of short answers that aren't up to the standards of the sub. Indeed, your question would be perfectly suited for our [Short Answers to Simple Questions](_URL_0_) feature - the link is to the current session at the top of the front page. Please post it there - I'm sure one of the helpful contributors to this thread will be able to find it!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75p9tl/short_answers_to_simple_questions_october_11_2017/"]]}
{"q_id": "6an7u2", "title": "A few questions about indentured servants in the early 18th century", "selftext": "Where would a European indentured servant in the American colonies live and what were the living conditions like? Would they be treated differently if they were Catholic? I'm pretty sure they weren't allowed to get married, but what if they were already married and had a family at the time they came over to the colonies? Would just the head of the household work, or would everyone have a job, including young children? Would any of this be different in the Carolinas?\n\nIf you just want to recommend a source that answers these questions (preferably a primary source), that should be fine. Thanks so much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6an7u2/a_few_questions_about_indentured_servants_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhgvj0u"], "score": [3], "text": ["If you're looking for a primary source, I highly recommend William Moraley's [*The Infortunate*](_URL_0_), an autobiography of an indentured servant from the early 18th century - the introduction by Susan Klepp and Billy Smith and should provide you with an excellent introduction to the subject and answer most of the questions you have.\n\nYou also might want to look at Marianne Wokeck's [*The Trade in Strangers*](_URL_3_), which provides an in-depth analysis of migration, mostly from Ireland and Germany, in the 18th century.\n\nRobert Galenson's [\"The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas\"](_URL_4_) is also a good article in terms of providing economic context, although it does not provide any information about the nitty-gritty of the emigrants' lives.\n\nEdit: Also, Bernard Bailyn's magisterial [*Voyagers to the West*](_URL_1_) is an indispensable source for understanding the nature of migration in the 18th century.\n\nIf you're interested in the Southern colonies, [this article](_URL_2_) on migration to 18th-century Maryland might also be useful."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-00828-8.html", "http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7314/voyagers-to-the-west-by-bernard-bailyn/9780394757780/", "http://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/38469/34885", "http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01832-1.html", "https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jcalhoun/Courses/Growth_of_American_Economy/Chapter_Supplemental_Readings/Chapter_02/Galenson-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Indentured_Servitude.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4wssd7", "title": "What was a soldier's life expectancy during the Thirty Years War?", "selftext": "Do we have a ballpark? Are there studies that go into these kinds of statistics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wssd7/what_was_a_soldiers_life_expectancy_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d69notd"], "score": [4], "text": ["Pretty terrible.  The first data that springs to mind, Geoffrey Parker provides in *The Military Revolution,* where he catalogues the astounding wastage of men in the Swedish parish of Bygdea.  In 1620, there were about 400 men of military age, of whom 36 were drafted to fight in Germany.  In 1639, there were still 36 men from the parish in the army.  However, there were only 170 of the original 400 men left in the town.  Besides them and the thirty six in the army, 200 men had died fighting for the king in Germany.  That would be one man dead every 1.1 months for 228 months.  If we assume that the newest soldier will only die after every other man who was sent to fight before him, that gives him about forty months purely as a mathematical average."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1bp37s", "title": "What was American religion like prior to the First Great Awakening?", "selftext": "I know that the Anglicans and Puritans had sizable populations, but what about those who replaced these groups, like Baptists and Methodists? Was religion private or a cultural mark? Were minorities ever full English culturally(as opposed to Spanish or Dutch)? What sorts of denominations existed? Were there non-Christian religions? Any other information is welcome. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bp37s/what_was_american_religion_like_prior_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c990p6a"], "score": [11], "text": ["The growth in the Baptist and Methodist Churches was a product of the Great Awakening, so they're not quite part of this question. As to the rest of it, there is much to say.\n\nFirst and foremost, remember that nothing \"replaced\" the Anglican and Puritain faiths. The Episcopal Church (the name for American Anglicans after the Revolution) is still extant and popular, and the Puritian denominations eventually morphed into the Congregationalist Church (which is, somewhat ironically, one of the more liberal variants of Christianity today). \n\nReligion was one of the many markers of cultural difference in early America. Each group had their own church or churches: French Huguenots, Dutch Reformed, some Irish forced to keep downplay their Catholicism everywhere except Maryland, Germans with their dizzying variety of small experimental church communities. The latter did come to mix with the English-descended majority, particularly after the great awakening. There was not much thought of thinking of these other ethnic and cultural groups as English. For the most part, colonial society was a \"salad bowl\" instead of a \"melting pot\": Each culture and religion tended to have their own communities (if not whole colonies), with little interest in mixing with others. An exception would be some of the French Huguenots living in New York, which produced the powerful and influential DeLancey and Jay families.\n\nBeing that religion was part of one's cultural identity, there was a public component. Well-to-do members of the community across the board tended to keep active membership in their respective churches, regardless of how seriously they took religion. For example, Washington, a Mason and possible Deist, was a financial supporter of the Anglican church throughout his whole life.\n\nThere were some non-Christian religions present, though their numbers tended to be small and their impact limited. There were synagogues in New York City and Philadelphia for those cities' Jewish populations. Some (we have no idea how many) of the African slave population was exposed to Islam in Africa, but most slaves came over with their own animistic religions. Having no official support and often actively discouraged, these died out or were fused with Christian beliefs fairly early on.\n\nThere are a number of good sources for this topic. A handy one that covers these questions (and more!) is Bernard Bailyn's *The Peopling of British North America*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fztey", "title": "What is the historical basis for having the dollar sign appear before the sum where units are standardized as appearing after the quantity?", "selftext": "I mean, it doesn't even make sense when said. One does not say I have a quantity measured in dollars equal to seven. One says, I have seven dollars.\n\nThanks guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fztey/what_is_the_historical_basis_for_having_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cafw2fb"], "score": [11], "text": ["If you write me a check like this 100.00$ then I can easily turn it into 1100.00$ before cashing it.\n\nIt is much harder to employ shenanigans with $100.00"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wd6jt", "title": "What do you think of Guns, Germs and Steel?", "selftext": "Just read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Liked it A LOT. Loved the comprehensiveness of it.\n\nCan I get some academic/professional opinions on the book? Accuracy? New research? Anything at all.\n\n\nAnd also, maybe you can suggest some further reading?\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_do_you_think_of_guns_germs_and_steel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ccalp", "c5ccdvs", "c5ccnt6", "c5ccrov", "c5ccym9", "c5cduh5", "c5cen59", "c5ch8dy", "c5chq6s", "c5cjemy", "c5cjzvr"], "score": [12, 163, 20, 124, 28, 8, 6, 3, 3, 10, 2], "text": ["Former TA here:\n\nI've used it in classes before. It's a nice introduction into explaining a whole lot of things that students might find interesting. If you're looking to get into stuff like hunter-gatherer societies, disease, agriculture, the making of early societies, and the effects of and means to which made European imperialism possible, it's a nice read. The only real big problem with this book is that it's fairly deterministic, almost casting the idea that it was entirely inevitable that Europeans would conquer for so long. If memory serves, he anticipated a lot of criticism of his work, but if you accept his reasons or not is a whole different story.\n\nFrankly, it's a bit outdated (1997), but it's still useful. The material tends to be a bit stale with many young student nowadays, but I think that it's one of those books that interested students can go through with relative ease. I remember a colleague back in grad school who took issue with some of the \"facts\" he presents. I can't quite remember those either (I'll edit this and add them if I remember tomorrow morning), but I believe just a few things here and there. Overall, GGS is a solid book that can be a good introduction into a much larger topic. If you enjoyed it, I suggest looking at the historiography of disease, agriculture, European imperialism, and society making. Give me a day or so and I'll find a few books for you!", "There's a reason it's used so frequently in undergraduate history courses- It's an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history, instead portraying advancement as out of our control. I think most historians would agree that the issue isn't so black and white. \n\n(This topic has come up before, check out these posts if you want a more in-depth analysis than the one I can provide.): \n\n_URL_2_ \n\n_URL_1_ \n\n_URL_0_ \n\n_URL_3_", "I wrote a historiography on the conquest of Mexico and brought up Diamond's work. It is pretty interesting and might have some points, but as mentioned in other comments there is a bit too much environmental determinism. History done by a biologist, you get what you get.", "He's actually a biologist (so am I), and basically uses many of the same basic worldviews that ecologists use when looking at animal ranges and population trajectories to look at human societies.  \n\nI think some of the problems historians have with him comes down to a difference in worldview.  A very common goal of population ecology and biogeography is to look for underlying influences which affect all populations.  For instance, island biogeography (which Diamond has written several papers on) seeks to describe the number of species which would be found on an island based on the size of that island and its distance to the mainland.  It's been quite successful.  Of course, the exact species found on any particular island have arrived thanks to any number of particular events, and islands may differ from their predicted species number thanks to intervening factors.  But this is not seen as a strike against island biogeography.  Instead, the basic equation is seen as valuable precisely _because_ it provides a backdrop unaffected by historical contingencies, a baseline which highlights differences caused by other factors.  \n\nThis is what Diamond was trying to do, in my opinion.  Provide for an underlying set of general factors, extrinsic to the actual people involved.  Based on my reading of that book and _Collapse_, I certainly don't believe he thinks that human culture and actions have no role in the development of societies.  I feel he just wasn't interested in describing the role of individual actions and historical chance, because it's not generalizeable--in the same way that many biologists would think it was less valuable to know exactly how a certain set of bird species got to a particular island, but more valuable to know a factor which plays a role in determining the number of bird species on all islands, even if the role it plays is fairly small.\n\nEDIT:  The book probably has some of the usual benefits and difficulties that occur when an academic crosses over to a different field.  You sometimes get a different perspective and new techniques, but the person often lacks a nuanced understanding of the data they are looking at.", "Man, historians throwing determinism around like it's an insult.  Everything is deterministic barring true randomness on the quantum-level, even then their sum is probabilistic.\n\nI mean, Diamond might be giving too much weight to environmental variables in the equation of human development, but there is an equation and sufficiently advanced computers will someday model it!\n\nAnd enslave us all!\n", "Here's my simplified (semi-inebriated) response.\n\nIf every anthropology course was to be expressed completely accurately, it would be concluded with the statement \"but we actually can't prove anything, so keep hypothesizing, experimenting, and observing.\"\n\nHis book is supposed to be taken with a grain of salt, because he is just formulating a bunch of very interesting ideas which do make some sense, but many of which cannot be proven, but anyone with a background in the scientific method would, and should, seek to form their own conclusions based on evidence, which is continually evolving as new information comes along.\n\nHe makes some very, very interesting points, does that make it authoritative? Hell no. Does it make it interesting? Very. Does it form a base from which other people can make conclusions as new evidence comes along? Definitely.\n\nThe third chimpanzee is another amazing book he hs written which makes a lot of interesting, some very valid, claims to the origin of humans, I'd recommend it to anyone.", "I would like to note that Diamond himself doesnt claim that his explanation is the right one, or that he did justice to all the different aspects of the subject. Rather, he tried to write an easy-to read, quite comprehensive introduction on the subject to lay readers.  \n  \nAnd in this aspect, he succeeded beyond doubt. Guns, Germs and Steel is a great book. Off course its not perfect. But hey, what is?", "I think talking about GGS is a very interesting exercise in the pitfalls of World History.  Certainly this book helps us understand certain aspects of environmental, ecological, evolutionary history, and pre-history and as a non-specialist in those fields I found it rather engaging and enlightening.  I would have been happy enough if the book simply ended right around the time people learned how to write (of course that would have meant a change in title...).  This is my big criticism in that he chose Guns, Germs and Steel, which is in itself fine, but in doing so completely ignored the pen!  And that, I think, is what gets us historians so itchy about his sort of determinism.  He essentially puts down that nothing anyone ever said had any significant effect on the path of world history.  Frankly, I think that is hogwash.  Culture, language and writing are not simply offshoots or side effects of tectonic evolution -- they are forces in and of themselves and a world historian disregards them at his own folly.  \n\nMoreover, there are some morally icky outcomes from Diamond's worldview.  As an example, what is Diamond's response in the face of catastrophic poverty and disease in Africa?  Not much more than \"sorry kid, dems da breaks\".  Why try and help anyone else if it isn't going to really change their situation?  Who wants to go through life believing change is hopeless?  This why I think many historians, especially modernists and cultural historians are put off by this book (even if they enjoy teaching it).", "I'm a political sociologist (focusing mainly on political economy, and thus a heavy historical sociology), but I have to say my main problem with Diamond is that he tends to discount absolutely everything done in the social sciences. It's one thing to provide a novel theory of the interrelationship between certain variables or factors. It's another thing entirely to do that without referencing or looking back on any of the other theories that attempt to provide general 'rules of the game' \u2013 even that of grand theory.", "*Guns, Germs, and Steel* is a nice introductory book to \"big history.\" From what I have read of it, it is a fun read and does a nice job of introducing historical concepts. By some magic, it managed to get a significant chunk of our society talking about Neolithic Revolutions, which is, all things considered, pretty cool.\n\nThat being said, Diamond was trained as a geologist and was attempting to tackle virtually every historical discipline. He makes lots of mistakes. Some of these mistakes are small (I recall his description of the Battle of Marathon to be rather laughable). Some of these are bigger, such as characterizing China as \"stagnant\" before the glorious arrival of the Europeans.\n\nHis brand of environmental determinism is also deeply problematic. For example, he claims that Europe's geography is more conducive to small states while China's is to large empires, to which I respond that he has never looked at a topographical map of China and Europe side by side. Furthermore, any claims about the advantages of \"balkanization\" needs to explain India, which, based on his model, is a place conducive to \"large, monolithic empires.\"\n\nIf you want a \"big history\" book, read *Why the West Rules, for Now* by Ian Morris. It treads a much better balance between big, geographic factors and a nuanced understanding of the specific societies involved.", "If you liked GG & S you should run to the library and pick up \"Why the West Rules .. For now\"\n\nVery Diamondesque in its reduction of human society to a set of algorithms.\n\nFor the record, these are 2 of my favorite books for their clarity and unapologetic 'we are not looking at everything, just what we can, lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater' perspective."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/bmdoc/guns_germs_steel/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/8s2qw/im_reading_guns_germs_and_steel_right_now_and/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/gqp6i/does_guns_germs_and_steel_deserve_to_be_popular/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/lm4no/i_once_heard_a_language_teacher_tell_me_that_a/c2tss7u"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1p3en9", "title": "How successful was African American participation in politics during the post-emancipation period?", "selftext": "After the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War, African Americans finally had the opportunity to participate in politics. However, there must have been some sort of backlash from those still in favor of slavery.\n\nHow smooth was black integration into politics/voting?\nWhat was the political party situation? Which party was more favorable to African Americans?\nDid African Americans directly participate in politics? What problems did they encounter that white politicians didn't?\nWas the situation different in the northern and southern states?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p3en9/how_successful_was_african_american_participation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccykvx5"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a huge question, you're basically asking for an overview of the Reconstruction era. I don't have time to type it all out but since no one else seems to be answering I'll give the cop out answer. People can feel free to downvote it once if/when real answers show up.\n\nCheck out Eric Foner's *Reconstruction.* It answers precisely those questions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nfbne", "title": "Are there any accounts of a battle ending with only 1 or 2 men on both sides?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfbne/are_there_any_accounts_of_a_battle_ending_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cci32cr", "cci640h", "cci6lon", "cci8xmc", "cci91yt", "ccidbjb"], "score": [866, 230, 107, 28, 66, 10], "text": ["There was a battle called \"The Battle of 300 Champions\" which took place between Sparta and Argos in 546 BC. There were only three survivors: two on the Argive side and one on the Spartan side. The two Argives assumed they were victorious and left the field. The sole surviving Spartan claimed otherwise since he had remained on the battle-site whilst the others had retreated. \n\nNeedless to say, no side could agree on who won. \n\nReference:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: Holy Crap! Thank you for all the up-votes, everyone!", "[British East Indian forces were forced to leave Afghanistan after occupying Kabul for two years.](_URL_0_) They attempted to retreat to British held Jalabad but were accosted and shot at by Afghan tribesmen for the entire 90 mile journey. A series of blunders in leadership and unfamiliar terrain ensured that the 16,000 strong column of civilians and soldiers were almost totally wiped out, ~~with just a single survivor, assistant Surgeon William Brydon, reaching Jalabad.~~ with only a single British soldier, William Brydon and \"a few sepoys\" surviving.  \n\nWhilst only one side was massacred it's still very unusual to have just a few survivors after a battle, the loss of an entire army to mere tribesmen shocked the British who ended up flattening Kabul in retribution. \n", "The Sicilian Expedition comes to mind.  Athens had attempted to lay siege to Syracuse, which was the most powerful city on the island of Sicily.  The expedition lasted from 415 to 413 BC.\n\nEventually the tables turned, and [after a naval battle the Athenians decided to retreat by land.](_URL_0_)  40,000 set out, only a few made it home.  The first guy to make it back was punished for spreading lies about the extent of the Athenian defeat, until a few other survivors showed up and corroborated his story.", "I always found [The Combat of the Thirty](_URL_0_) between squires and knights to be an interesting, if strategically unimportant, case of small-scale war fighting during the War of the Breton Succession, part of the Hundred Years' War. Not sure if that's the kind of thing you were looking for.\n\nEDIT:  Grammar and, well, I forgot how reddit works.", "Typically speaking, the main phase of an ancient melee battle ends once the losing side has taken about 5% casualties, upon which it breaks, runs, and suffers many more than the original number of casualties chased down and speared by the opposing cavalry.\n\nIt would be astonishing and highly uncharacteristic for two forces to remain closely engaged while *both* were taking well over 50% casualties.\n\nI could see it happening in some small, contained fight like a naval boarding action, where there's nowhere to run. I could *just* see it happening if two really \u00e9lite forces got into a grudge match (they found 254 corpses at Charonea, right where the traditional accounts say the Sacred Band of 300 chose to stand, fight, and die.) But it's hard to see how a whole battle could go that way.", "there is the famous battle that ended the war between Rome and Alba Longa around 650BC: the two sides decided that since they both had a set of triplets (!?) in their ranks, the Horatii (for Rome) and Curiatii (for Alba Longa), obviously the decisive battle should be triplets vs triplets.\n\nat first it went bad for the Horatii - two were killed, with two Curiatii left. but the last of the Horatii, Publius, managed to get the upper hand and killed both Curiatii. so the battle, and the war, ended with 3/3 dead on one side, and 2/3 dead on the other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ancientgreekbattles.net/Pages/54620_BattleOfChampions.htm"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul"], ["http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=7.75-79"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_of_the_Thirty"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "qfqit", "title": "Why does the UK, for its size, have the largest amount of universities near the top of this list that aren't American?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qfqit/why_does_the_uk_for_its_size_have_the_largest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3x9fb0", "c3x9ut0", "c3xa12j", "c3xb64g", "c3xdzbk"], "score": [55, 13, 15, 2, 4], "text": ["Number of reasons.\n\n1. Language. English is the lingua franca, which means that it's very easy for an english speaking university to \"pull\" people from a HUGE pool. For example I'm Finnish and went to one of the 3 English universities listed there. Why not France? I don't speak French. A lot of the top universities globally are now trying to embrace english speakers to avoid simply being overwhelmed. It's all very nice for a French University with 250 million potential applicants, compared to an English or American one that can pull applicants from a global pool.\n\n2. Money. England has - for much of the past 1000 years - been either *the* wealthiest country on the planet, or one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. It also hasn't been pillaged or suffered a revolution in ages in a marked contrast with its continental competition. England was also more elitist than its competitors (who, with their occasional revolutions, kept confiscating the wealth of the elites) which allowed tremendous wealth concentration particularly in Oxford and Cambridge. With the Empire this phenomena also fed itself quite nicely, as the elites of the colonies were very keen to send their children to study at Oxford/Cambridge... which created wealthy alumni, which created wealth and prestige for the universities, which then fed the process all over again. \n\n(It is not an accident that the first university not from UK/US is from a multi-lingual country of tremendous wealth that hasn't been pillaged in centuries - Switzerland)\n\nEdit: There's another reason, and that is a focus on a steadily educated population in many of the top educated countries. Germany is the most noted example of this, where there are forces acting against a huge concentration of talent in a few universities at the expense of all the others. This has resulted in tons of very well educated Germans, but no real super university (because the top 200 professors are split between 50 universities, not between 3).", "I don't think it does. By \"size\" I'll assume you mean population, because I can't see how the area of a country could be linked to the number of good universities.\n\nIf you look at just the top 20, the US has 0.045 universities per million people and the UK 0.064. They also have roughly the same per capita figure, the UK's slightly higher, for the top 50 and top 100 also, though if you look at the whole top 200 the UK does have a significantly higher number (0.514 versus 0.240). The real high fliers are actually Switzerland (0.127 in the top 20, 0.890 in the top 200) and the Netherlands (none in the top 20 but 0.712 in the top 200). The UK is above average, yes, but at least in terms of good universities per million people there's nothing in particular to distinguish it from countries like Sweden, Hong Kong, Ireland, Denmark and Norway which do equally well on this ranking. The general global pattern is the familiar divide between developed and developing countries. The US stands out as the only high population developed country and so dominates the list. I suppose the UK might appear to be disproportionately well represented because the distribution of its universities in the rankings is more skewed than most other places, with a lot of its top-universities-per-capita \"invested\" in a few very good ones, notably Oxford and Cambridge.\n\nHere, I made a [spreadsheet](_URL_0_).", "TIL about the California Institute of Technology. I'd never heard about that before and apparently it's #1.\n\n- Brit", "Uh, because the list was made in the UK...?", "Ranking universities is a circle jerk. Ivy League universities are just schools that great people put on the map, before that they were just OK schools. University's often tend to capitalize on the fact that certain historic greats happened to attend their university. \n\nThe only reason their is even a top university list is because collectively the ivy league schools need to justify the exorbant tuition fees they extort from their average attendees. The wealthy, notables, and hyper intelligent get to attend for free, and are often faught over. All because their presence at the eduational institution is used as a marketing ploy to draw in a large number of less intelligent, less notable, hopefuls who are willing to throw away their life's savings to be part of the cool crowd.\n\nDeciding on which university it go to based on these lists is the equivalent of purchasing a car based on name alone. It's an empty shallow judgement."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html#score_OS%7Csort_rank%7Creverse_false"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AoGDZ_t1nSp8dG50NFFocWl3OHBtd2piWFBPbUpHZHc&amp;output=html"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2dvuqs", "title": "When did Ukraine become culturally separate from Russia?", "selftext": "I've just finished a 5 week class on Russian history/culture, and I'm confused about what exactly Ukraine is. The class focused more on the rulers of Russia, peasant life,  culture, and European influences over time than territory and war, and the class ended at 1900.\n\nSo I was surprised to learn that Ukraine is made up of most of the Dniepr river and Kiev when, for a good part of \"Russian\" history, Russia is known as \"Kievan Rus\". It'd be like taking a class on early America only to learn that Boston and New York were in a different country in present day. \n\nSo I know there's a date Ukraine became independent, but my question is when did Ukraine become culturally separate from Russia such that there was an organized body to declare independence in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dvuqs/when_did_ukraine_become_culturally_separate_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjtossn", "cjtq8qk"], "score": [19, 9], "text": ["While it's certainly true that many Russian historians like to conceive of an unbroken line of Russianness characterizing Kievan Rus and stretching through various successors to the modern Russian Federation, such a reading is at best lazy and at worst dishonest. As Serhii Plokhy discusses at length in his book *The Origins of the Slavic Nations*, there's nothing really particularly Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian about Kievan Rus'. These identities are largely modern constructions that really began to develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so to talk about Ukraine \"becoming culturally separate from Russia\" presupposes a problematic narrative of a timeless Russian identity from which Ukrainians deviated. Linguistically, at least, we can identify a common Old East Slavic (though classification of the speech of early Novgorod as preserved in the birchbark manuscripts is tricky), characterized by (among other things) relatively faithful orthographic representation of the [yers](_URL_1_), preservation of the [yat](_URL_0_) and by use of the letter *\u0467* (originally representing a vowel like that in French *vin*) for the sequence /ja/, as in *\u0437\u0435\u043c\u043b\u0467* for Modern Russian and Ukrainian \u0437\u0435\u043c\u043b\u044f.\n\nIn the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, while Muscovy was consolidating its power over northeastern Rus', the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was taking control over western and southern Rus' (including much of modern Belarus and Ukraine). In short order the Grand Duchy entered personal union with Poland, and Old East Slavic diverged into Old/Middle Russian and Ruthenian. Linguists generally date Ukrainian and Belarusian as literary languages to the early nineteenth century, but it's important to keep in mind that they did not simply arise fully formed from the pre-modern or early-modern carcass of Ruthenian: Ukrainian and Belarusian were codifications of certain parts of a dialect continuum that had been developing for several centuries.", "As can be seen by the other posts here, the historiography on the question is complex and changing. Depending on who you ask and what their background/bias on the topic is, you may get several different answers. But I will contribute another version, one that is a little more modern.\n\nAfter the fall of Kieven Rus, the territory of what is now modern Ukraine was eventually divided into two spheres: one controlled, and later annexed, by Russia; the other by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, later replaced by Austria when Poland was partitioned. As a result the split Ukrainian territory developed different identities. The eastern, Russian-based one grew a closer identity to Russia, while the west retained a dominant Ukrainian identity. This division lasted a couple centuries, and created a fairly large rift between the two sides (that in part explains the current issues, but we're not getting into that here).\n\nWith the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires at the end of the First World War, changed the design of Ukraine. Between the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the declaration of the Second Polish Republic, the October Revolution and Russian Civil War, and the Polish-Soviet War, everything was happening. Several Ukrainian states were declared at this time, varying from communist republics to more moderate socialist states, and based in both Kyiv and the west. This, I would argue, was the first time a modern, nationalist concept of a Ukrainian state was formed (I say this fully aware that the Hetman and Khmelnitsky's state existed, but predate the modern concept of national identity so don't count them here). \n\nBecause the division between Ukraine had effectively created two different concepts of what it meant to be Ukrainian, as well as the larger wars going on in and around Ukraine (the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War the most notable), there was no chance for any of these states to survive long-term. The 1921 Treaty of Riga that ended the Polish-Soviet War split Ukraine again between Russia and Poland, with the Ukrainian SSR being formed as a result in the former. After the Second World War the remainder of Ukrainian territory in Poland was transferred to Ukraine, forming (along with Crimea) the modern border we know today.\n\nIn short, I'd say that the occupation/conquest of Ukrainian territory by Russia and Poland in the Middle Ages led to a divergence of Ukraine, and that this combined with the turmoil of post-WWI led to the creation of the first ethnic Ukrainian state."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yat", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yer"], []]}
{"q_id": "18pylk", "title": "How accurate is the television series Downton Abbey's portrayal of the Edwardian/Pre-World War I era?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18pylk/how_accurate_is_the_television_series_downton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8h7agk"], "score": [7], "text": ["It's a highly romanticized portrayal.  Popular history broadcaster A. N. Wilson [trashed the show's idealistic portrayal of country life](_URL_1_) on BBC 4's _Today_:\n\n >  We all know that during the years before and after the First World War, life was miserable for most people and we did need a re-ordering of society. And I don\u2019t want to be too serious about it, but the idea that Downton Abbey represents this country\u2019s finest hour is bullshit.\n\nEssentially, his argument is that the rosy picture provided by _Downton Abbey_ doesn't show the serious class tensions apparent in British society on the eve of the First World War.  That, of course, is probably to be expected given the social status of the show's characters.  Professor Alison Light, likewise, had this to say:\n\n >  It is a very liberal fantasy and, if it\u2019s nostalgia, it\u2019s obviously for a time that didn\u2019t exist...It is very paternalistic and benign and generous, and nobody is nasty to anyone. So it is very much of the present moment; it is not a depiction of the Edwardian years....This is fiction. It\u2019s preposterous. It\u2019s a romance.\n\nThere is also the question of language and phrases used in the show that [weren't used at the time](_URL_0_).\n\n >  Footman Thomas Barrow, played by Rob James-Collier, used the words \"get knotted\" in the October 9 episode, while in last Sunday's episode he said: \"I am fed up seeing our lot get shafted.\"\nBoth expressions are believed to have originated in the 1960s.\n\nIt should be noted that there's disagreement over the origin of such phrases (and it's something that's notoriously hard to prove), but these kinds of small errors pop up every now and then. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/8868732/Downton-Abbey-historical-inaccuracies-and-mistakes-plaguing-ITV-show.html", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8769641/Downton-Abbey-is-sheer-fantasy-says-historian.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2lvram", "title": "Is longevity of use a recurring event with military firearms and equipment before the 20th Century.", "selftext": "A recent re-reading of articles and journals reminded me how many military firearms and other military equipment as varied as battleships to aircraft to even helmets during the 20th century experienced decades of use.\n\nFor example, the [M-3](_URL_0_) \"Grease Gun\" was used for 50 years by the U.S. Army.  The [M-2](_URL_1_) is a design that is coming up on 100 years old and is still in service.  The basic design of the B-52 bomber is of a design that goes back to the late 1940's, and no new ones have been produced since the 1960's.  The M114 cannon that is still in service dates back to before WWII.  Even the modern M-1 Tank is a design from the 1970's, and has been in service since 1980, at this point over 30 years!  The classic M1 \"Steel Pot\" helmet of WWII is still in use in many countries around the world, and was used by the US military for over 40 years.  The basic design of the Army \"Jump Boot\" hasn't changed since WWII.  The tin canteen of WWII was design that went back to 1910 and served all the way up to the start of the Vietnam war.  Of course we all know that the USS Missouri, a WWII Iowa class battleship fired it's last cannon shells during the 1990 Gulf War, and the USS Enterprise, the worlds first nuclear carrier, served from the 1960's all the way up to 2012.\n\nWhile this list is definitely Amero-centric, there are other examples such as the MiG-17, being in use for almost 60 years.  The Centurion tank served from 1946 to 2012.\n\nIs there any historical precedent to the longevity of military equipment serving literally decades in active use before the 20th Century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lvram/is_longevity_of_use_a_recurring_event_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clyn7vn", "clyoflh", "clzbknm"], "score": [4, 3, 6], "text": ["Sort of. What you mostly see, at least with 18th through early 19th century small arms, are minor changes made every decade or two to a design that's much older. \n\nThe Land Pattern Musket, famously known as the Brown Bess, was in use in various iterations from 1722 to 1838. The action remained the same; the loading method; the firing mechanism; the caliber; but minor changes were periodically made in length, weight, shape of stock, etc. As these firearms were not mass produced in the way 20th century firearms were, and they lacked interchangeable parts, it was really no problem to make minor tweaks whenever a new model was produced.\n\nThe French Charleville musket has an even more tortuous history. The original model dates from 1717, the last French model to 1777; it would be in service well after the Napoleonic Wars. But the development diverged well before then. The Americans were given significant numbers of Model 1766 Charlevilles during the American Revolution, and a domestic model based on it was later produced, the Model 1795 Springfield, which would form the basis for American musketry for the next fifty years. Subsequent models featured minor improvements: the Model 1816, Model 1835, and finally the Model 1842, which featured a percussion ignition system.", "I'm sure there are countless other examples from different periods that will be brought up, but Ill speak form my experience as a Royal Navy historian. Naval ships in the 17th, 18th and 19th century could and did see decades of use. Take *HMS Victory* as a famous example. She was commissioned during the Seven years war and launched just a few years after its conclusion in 1765. She served through the American War of Independence and then of course famously in the Napoleonic wars as Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar in 1805. She was only withdrawn from active service in 1812, 47 years after she was first launched (and she is still in commission today as a flagship, the oldest commissioned warship in the world, but that's a story for another post). The reason ships like *Victory* could serve as long as they did is that the basic methods of Naval Warfare did not undergo any significant change (yes there were of course small changes) from the 17th to the mid 19th century. During the late 19th and early 20th century, as a counter example, new designs and new technologies, such as that of *HMS Dreadnought*, could render ships obsolete within a couple of years of construction. I don't want to speculate too far on the examples that you mention, as they are outside my range of expertise. However I would guess that the same basic principles apply. As long as there is a military need for the particular type of weapon in question, and the weapon currently in use fulfills the requirements of situation, there is little need for radical design changes  \n\nSources:\nPrecise dates for Victory are from here: _URL_0_\n\nI see you're flared with Caribbean Piracy, so you might know these books already, but some excellent sources on 17th, 18th and 19th century Royal Navy are:\n\nBlack, Jeremy. *The British Seaborne Empire*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004\n\nMarcus, Geoffrey J. Heart of Oak; A Survey of British Sea Power in the Georgian Era. London; Oxford University Press, 1975\n\nO\u2019 Hara, Glen. *Britain and the Sea; Since 1600.* New York: Pelgrave MacMillan, 2010\n\nRodger, N. A. M. *The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy*. London: Collins, 1986\n\nEdit: Formatting  \n    ", "Forgive me kerri; alas! But to answer this question, I must beg that it belies an assumption - ie, that the most important thing in warfare is the quality of your equipment. \n\nSurely it is so that equipment helps the soldier to fight, and some of those things (the jump boot) are marvelously well designed now. But Armies, Navys, and Air Forces standarise the equipment around logistics pipelines for what can be incredibly complex machines, along with all the intricate and interlocking training systems needed for people to build, repair, and use those machines. Cost. Availability. Most importantly though, **doctrine** will affect what equipment is considered good to go and what needs to be replaced lickity-split. Does that make sense? Everything goes in the end, but the stuff that works with current doctrine tends to stay put until it's needful. \n\nHence the jump-boot won't have changed, but you bet your ass the armour-systems on a HUMVEE will have when the Americans switched styles from heavy-vehicle warfighting to light-vehicle patrolling in the Middle East.\n\nTake the Brown Bess musket, talked about further down. It saw over *100 years* of active duty, because it was perfect to equip a large formation of close-moving soldiers battering away as fast as they can at other large formations of close-moving soldiers. Rifles - which had been invented but were limited to skirmishers' weapons - did not support the doctrine of the Force which employed them, and were expensive and difficult to use. The rifle gained many more supporters when those factors were reduced... and doctrine was altered to sui thet new circumstances. But it was only once the doctrine changed - essentially only after certain groups had tried it out on a limited scale - that the rifle saw widespread adoption by militaries. Does that make sense?\n\nOn the other hand, a great example of quality kit **not** working with doctrine and being randomly replaced is the A-10 Warthog. That is a fantastic plane and clearly perfect for its role; CAS. The problem is that the Air Force most decidedly does NOT wish to be strategically subordinate to a ground-role. They wish to be relevant all on their lonesome - flying fighters to gain air supremacy, and then bombing the hell out of things with conventional or Atomic weapons to force a result. Who needs Navy/Army? That strategic worldview is also the only thing justifying their existence as a separate service outside a Corps of the Army. The US Air Force has therefire tried to get rid of the Warthog several times because it doesn't mesh with their conception of what the Air Force *is* and what it should be doing - in fact it is downright dangerous to that vision. Does that make sense?\n\nI am sure I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but I sometimes wistfully think the focus on technology obscures the way that war is fundamentally about human beings. It's worth considering, anyway."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3_submachine_gun", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.hms-victory.com/history"], []]}
{"q_id": "1h21zo", "title": "Question about Nazi nerve gas.", "selftext": "I'm aware this area has been a controversial topic on this subreddit in the past so I'll keep it brief and provide some context. Watching Army of Crime, a French movie about the French resistance, one of the resistance fighters mentioned something about the nerve gas in concentration camps being tested to later use as a weapon.\n\nI was wondering if this was true? \nI'm only looking for a brief on-topic answer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1h21zo/question_about_nazi_nerve_gas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caq2gcb", "caq2nrk", "caq2yrp"], "score": [2, 3, 2], "text": ["Also, what or who are \"Red Spaniards\"?", "most likely they were referring to [Zyklon B](_URL_0_) - it was a cyanide based pesticide that was used to gas large groups of people inside concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Sachsenhausen. some numbers put the casualty count in these camps due to Zyklon B up to 1 or 1.2 million deaths.\n\nIt was not used as an offensive weapon, and Nazi Germany did not use chemical weapons as a part of their arsenal; some speculate because of Hitler's own experience with them in World War I. Zyklon B would not make a very effective weapon on a battlefield because of the time it takes to absorb moisture and begin to spread. It is not adaptable to artillery shells, bombs, munitions like Chlorine / Mustard / VX / Sarin gas is.\n\nRed Spaniards may refer to communist/socialist Spanish fighters and volunteers during the [Spanish Civil War](_URL_1_) ", "During the Third Reich, a German named Schrader was trying to produce new insecticides for IG Farben.  He discovered a compound called tabun.  It was discovered to be extremely toxic to humans by making them dizzy and restricting the ability to breathe and the recovery process was lengthy.  Schrader told the Wehrmacht about his discovery because it could be used as a chemical weapon.  The Nazi's set up laboratories to experiment with tabun.  During their research, they discovered a new compound called Sarin.  It was found to be extremely lethal to humans.  The Nazi's ordered the mass production of Sarin for the German Army.\n\nExperiments with tabun and Sarin were conducted on prisoners in Auschwitz by Kurt Blome.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War"], []]}
{"q_id": "ay2k2m", "title": "The advent of firearms largely made the bow and arrow obsolete, but also the heavy body armor that could defend against arrows. As infantry became increasingly unarmored, was there ever a resurgence of the bow and arrow before firearms became so advanced as to obsolete them entirely?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ay2k2m/the_advent_of_firearms_largely_made_the_bow_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehy66cm", "ehy6ccn", "ehym0i7", "ehz38q0"], "score": [22, 164, 220, 15], "text": ["You should check out u/wotan_weevil\u2019s [recent answer here](_URL_0_) about the use of armor to protect against firearms. It was effective and in use for longer than you might think!", "This prior thread seems to get at the heart of your question:\n\n[With its comparable range and much higher rate of fire over smoothbore muskets, why weren't crossbows ever reintroduced in European battlefields after the disappearance of armor?](_URL_0_) \n\nThere are answers touching on a few points including fire rate, psychological impact, and physical limitations of equipment by /u/vonadler and /u/FrostDuty", "Others have linked to discussions on the shock value of firearms, but I specialize in Tudor and Stuart England, and can speak to the role of heavy armor during the time of transition from arrows to muskets in that respect. Heavy armor actually *did* stand a very good chance at stopping musket fire, particularly pistol fire. It was common to \"proof\" a suit by firing a musket ball at the breastplate point-blank. The reality was that heavy armor was anything but obsolete, rather it was proving to be more useful than ever before, yet it still beat a hasty retreat from the battlefield. The change we see here is not so much the result of evolving weaponry, but more so the changing role of those who fought the battles. \n\n\nThere's a bit of a misconception in your question, that infantry had access to heavy armor. Heavy armor was not ubiquitous in early modern combat. Full suits of armor were exceptionally expensive, and required a skilled craftsman to custom-fit the armor to the individual. The nobles clad head-to-toe in shining armor were the wealthiest members of their societies, and wore their armor as both a status symbol and as a means of protection. You may be aware of a few videos online of people in full metal armor jumping around and being rather agile. This is the armor as a medieval knight, *not* the armor of someone fighting in the days of muskets. Armor ca. the English Civil War could weigh 80 lbs easy. The wealthy men of status that could afford this armor made up heavy cavalry units called Cuirassiers, and played only minor roles in the English Civil War past the first year or so. Not because they weren't effective on the battlefield, but because of the increasing danger they found themselves in. With the widespread use of cannon, prolonged sieges became less practical for defenders as their defenses could be blown away well before the enemy might be hit by supply shortages or disease. This led to more proper battles on open terrain, in which there was a very real chance of a wealthy nobleman being killed, despite their superior protection. The consequences of this being that the men who made up the heavy cavalry outsourced their role to retunines and plied them with cheaper armor, and/or took on more ceremonial roles like guarding the commanders on either side of the battle. \n\n\nThe infantry could never have hoped to afford any sort of heavy armor. It was a luxury reserved for the wealthy and their choicest of men. The best they could hope for in this time was a thick leather buff coat that did well against swords and pikes, but next to nothing against musket balls. \n\n\nSo why no arrows? As I mentioned before, a combination of cost and hazard forced the few men who could afford heavy armor off the battlefield rather early on. Light cavalry of the time continued to wear chest armor which could also stop a musket, but this too would eventually prove too costly. Infantry never had access to anything that could protect against musket fire. Arrows were very effective weapons, but there was little they could do that muskets could not do better. Crossbows were cheap and easy to use, but lacked the range and power of muskets. English longbows recovered from the Mary Rose ca. 1545 had draw weights of up to 180 lbs. and could very well compete with early muskets. But the skill required to use these bows was immense. English archers trained for years to be able to draw that kind of bow. We can identify English archers by their remains because their arms would deform from the force need to draw the bow. In comparison, muskets could be used by any old peasant with little training. If combat in the early days of firearms interests you, I\u2019d recommend checking out Stuart Reed\u2019s \u201cAll the King\u2019s Armies,\u201d and Peter Young\u2019s \u201cEnglish Civil War Armies\u201d for a more in-depth account of the military side of the English Civil War. \n\nEdit: /u/Chickendoodles4u has brought up a lot of great counter points to my last paragraph, please take the time to read through his remarks below. ", "You might be interested in [this](_URL_0_) i wrote on why england gave up the longbow.\n\nIn short the prevalence of armor was already rapidly in decline during the last couple decades of the 16th century and the argument that bows should be getting more effective again as a result was definitely brought up quite a bit during the \"bow vs gun\" debate that started heating up in england at the time. For arquebusiers and musketeers in particular, most military theorists were starting to reccomend that they wear *no* armor at all in order to maximize their stamina and agility on the battlefield.\n\nUnfortunately, even with armor becoming less and less complete, this still doesn't seem to have done very much to make up for firearms other advantages such as range, power, and accuracy in practice. Some pro-gun writers such as Sir Roger Williams even turn the argument around pointing out that though a longbow might be able to shoot 6 times as often as a heavy musket, against unarmored opponents a musket can instead be loaded with 6 pistol bullets per shot.\n\nAccording to Barnabe Rich, a significant number of longbowmen were mustered and sent to ireland at one point during this period, the idea being that they would be more useful there since the Irish tended to be pretty poorly equipped in terms of both weapons and armor. However he says that the Irish soon responded by making large, lightweight wicker shields about the size of a man and carrying them in front of their forces in order to defend against english arrows, which is what finally convinced the English captains there to start replacing the rest of their bows with firearms. At the same time even perhaps the longbow's most ardent defender, Sir John Smythe, kept complaining that all of the English captains who were returning home after years of experience fighting on the continent seemed to despise the longbow.\n\nReccomendations for reintroducing the longbow continued to be batted around for quite a while during the 17th century. During the Ile de Re Expedition in 1627 there were instructions given for at least 24% of the levies raised to be armed with bows and arrows, and while the actual number of archers likely never got that high French sources do mention English arrows being shot into the fort. In 1625 William Neade published a short pamphlet suggesting [pikemen be armed with longbows as well](_URL_1_) which was pretty widely circulated for a while. There are also quite a few scattered accounts of longbows occasionally seeing use during the English Civil War. However again none of these seem to have ever fully succeeded at re-popularizing the bow as a weapon of war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/awn63n/was_there_an_attempt_to_make_bullet_proof_knights/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3oz8ju/with_its_comparable_range_and_much_higher_rate_of/"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kx1uq/why_was_the_musket_used_instead_of_the_bow_and/djpkmcy/", "https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BMBFF4/the-double-armed-man-17th-century-infantry-armed-with-pike-bow-and-BMBFF4.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1nb0o9", "title": "When did it become common to have a calendar in your house?", "selftext": "When did it become specificly usual for the COMMON man to keep a calendar or anything of the like to keep track of days/months/years, when did it become a concern for the common man to keep track of time? How did they do it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nb0o9/when_did_it_become_common_to_have_a_calendar_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccgysgq"], "score": [3], "text": ["It certainly was around in Rome, often for horoscopes and such. Allusions to them are recurrent throughout Roman literature, such as in the Cena Trimalchionis, by Petronius.\n\n > Fragment 30 (translated by JP Sullivan):\n > [In the house of Trimalchio on the walls there was a fixture which] displayed representations of the moon's phases and the seven heavenly bodies. Lucky and unlucky days were marked with different coloured studs.\n\nI don't know by which date Romans had horoscope calendars (this text was written around the late 1st century CE), and Trimalchio is not a 'common man' so to speak, so this does not answer your question exactly. Nonetheless I think you should bear ancient superstition regarding zodiac and whatnot in mind. Older zodiac calendars, like the Egyptian [Dendera zodiac](_URL_0_), survive by merit of being in stronger, larger buildings, while domestic buildings are much less sturdy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera_zodiac"]]}
{"q_id": "2c7j2r", "title": "What problems existed before Matthew Perry's arrival that contributed to the Tokugawa fall?", "selftext": "In The Making of Modern Japan, Jansen says that the arrival of foreigner's were the \"explosives\" for pre-existing tensions- what were those tensions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c7j2r/what_problems_existed_before_matthew_perrys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjcv28d"], "score": [5], "text": ["Ok I hope I can answer your question having read the book by Jansen and many others.\n\nSorry this is all off the top of my head but if you pm later I will be able to send you some other good books to read about this topic.\n\nI find it easier to split it into economic, social and political factors for this.\n\nEconomic: There had been several bad harvests within Japan resulting in famine. (Japan at this point was very reliant on the rice market). \nThe Japanese elite at this point were in debt to some of the merchant houses that had developed. \n\nPolitical: The Japanese Daimyo used an alternate attendance system which meant they were some cases of them not being fully connected with their domains.\n\nSocial: There was a rise in a weathy peasant class in Japan. This was the the first time that a class not born into the elite became important. This created tensions between the wealthy peasants, the samurai (who were facing cuts to their pay) and the peasants. \n\nAlso I would like to point out that foreigners had been in Japan long before the arrival of Perry. So there were groups forming within Japan creating divisions within society.\n\nCurrently on my mobile at the moment. I do have a lot of notes on my computer with references if you want me to continue.\n\nHope I could help. :)\n\nEdit1: There had been 200 or so years of peace since 1600ish. Before this Japan had faced many years of war. During the Tokugawa period it was relatively peaceful. People wanted to keep it that way. One of the reasons why the arrival of Perry was so explosive to Japan was because it forced Japan to change to maintain the stability. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fi2b6", "title": "How did the Norse treat people with dwarfism?", "selftext": "Dwarfs are obviously an important part of a lot of Norse mythology. How did this affect their treatment or attitudes towards actual dwarfs?\n\nEdit: well this has been fantastic, thank you very much everybody! It's cleared up everything perfectly. Askhistorians really is the best subreddit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fi2b6/how_did_the_norse_treat_people_with_dwarfism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caai44p", "caaj3r3", "caajz5g", "caal8wy", "caaprn8", "caarqd6"], "score": [367, 15, 41, 17, 4, 6], "text": ["Dwarfs in norse mythology and people with dwarfism in norse society are not necessarily the same, nor would they have been treated the same. Dwarfs are often portrayed the same height as normal humans, but as ethereal creatures that either lived underground or lived in stones and possessed magical skills or abilities. Later Norse Mythology portrays them as diminutive sometimes, often with a whole host of other afflictions to highlight their demonic qualities. Much like giving a witch a crooked nose emphasizes their evilness. But we are dealing with elements of story telling and the use of stock characters which sometimes gets a bit heavy handed with such details.", "So, the timeline for the meaning of \"Dwarf\" goes as follows:\n\n1) mountain/earth beings associated with forging and craft \n\n2) small, squat, ugly, and generally magical creatures \n\n3) human beings of unusually short stature\n\nThe pre-Christian Norse were at stage 1 and wouldn't have in any way linked short human beings with the concept of \"dwarf\" - although they *might* have linked general physical disability with forging. Think Hephaestus (Greek), Wayland (Norse) ... smithing is a job that a generally immobile person can easily do.\n\nTo answer the question though - throughout most of the ancient world, the response to birth abnormalities was often infanticide.", "Norse mythology is based on oral tradition, but these stories were not written down until the 13th century. The same thing applies for the icelandic sagas. Hundreds of years after the events they depict.\n\nDuring the era of nationalistic history writing in Scandinavia both the myths and the sagas were widely used to explain how norse society worked. But after the Weibull brothers' ideas became widely accepted in Sweden the importance of source criticism meant that no serious historian would make such claims any longer.\n\nSo we're left with runestones, a few external sources (a lot of what is known about the states in the region is based on an anglo-saxon text from the 9th century) and archeological finds.\n\nIt's hard to say anything with certainty when it comes to norse society. For example the idea that they were big on equality between men and women is built around graves found where the woman of the house was buried with the key. It's mostly qualified guesswork.\n\nSo how did the Norse treat people with dwarfism? Nobody knows.\n\n(Source: \"Nordens historia\" Harald Gustafsson 2007)", "**Layman here.**\n\nThere is a series of three lectures about Vikings on YouTube that also covers mythical dwarfs a bit. If I remember correctly, we know very little about their mindset because they didn't put their stories in writing, so we probably don't know how they treated real dwarfs.\n\nIf you have the time (3x1h22m), I highly recommend watching them.\n\n- [Lecture 1](_URL_2_)\n\n- [Lecture 2](_URL_1_)\n\n- [Lecture 3](_URL_0_)", "Great answers here, but one overlooked aspect of the way the folk throughout Northern Europe could look at dwarfism is in the beliefs associated with changelings. There was a widespread idea that supernatural beings would abduct a healthy infant/toddler and replace it with one of their own. This substitute would then manifest all sorts of characteristics viewed as abnormal - often the appearance of a large head and a shrunken body, features that can be associated with the later manifestation of dwarfism. Legends often suggest ways to treat this circumstance that included the abuse of the changeling by placing it in a fire or out on the dung heap. The afflicted parents hoped that this would inspire the supernatural beings to take the changeling away, and they hoped the supernatural beings would then return their own healthy infant. There is no way to be certain, but Northern European folklore hints that this was often practiced for unusual conditions that manifested late (and were not handled, consequently, with infanticide soon after birth). A famous example of the idea of supernatural substitution played a key role in the 1895 murder of Bridget Cleary for example (although in this case, it was a sick woman).\n\nSee Elisabeth Hartmann\u2019s 1936 dissertation Die Trollvorstellungen in den Sagen und M\u00e4rchen der Skandinavischen V\u00f6lker\u2014The Troll Beliefs in the Legends and Folktales of the Scandinavian Folk. Also, the online source by folklorist D.L. Ashliman is excellent: _URL_1_. On Bridget Cleary, pardon the Wiki source but the two sources cited in the article are definitive (although they lack certain perspective since they are not by folklorists): _URL_2_. Also to clarify on a point discussed in the comments: the term \u201ctroll\u201d is used in widely different ways in the various Scandinavian locations. It wasn\u2019t introduced into English until an 1859 translation of Norwegian folktales including \u201cBilly Goats Gruff,\u201d which demanded the term \u201ctroll\u201d for want of a clear equivalent in English. The English term referred, then, to a large ogre-like monster - the Norwegian use of the term. But when troll dolls appeared in the 1960s in North American from Denmark, the term \u201ctroll\u201d in English could also mean a small, ugly creature, consistent with Danish folklore. Off topic for Dwarfs, but to clarify the question on the term \u201ctroll.\u201d \n\nAlso, the conventional plural for the English word \u201cdwarf\u201d is dwarfs; \u201cDwarves\u201d is a recent variant popularized but not invented by Tolkien: _URL_0_\n", "I was taking a look through this thread and noticed that the majority of it focused on the mythology of dwarves in Norse tradition while not touching too much on the other side to the question how the actual humans with some sort of dwarfism were treated.  I only have one example from a documentary, it may not be the typical treatment but still interesting.  The documentary was about Ivar the boneless and they delve into the possibility that he was afflicted with osteogenesis imperfecta a bone disease that causes dwarfism.  It's debatable still where he got the nickname but I would advise a watch as the documentary makes an interesting case. \n\nDocumentary link:\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://youtu.be/7Db9sG1PSsQ", "http://youtu.be/uu2gN8n15_A", "http://youtu.be/nJZBqmGLHQ8"], ["http://grammarist.com/usage/dwarfs-dwarves/", "http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/britchange.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Cleary"], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGWM3Lw5RA"]]}
{"q_id": "9523wo", "title": "Best books to understand how government *really* works and is constrained?", "selftext": "People have a certain idea of how government should work, but from the outside we often don't see the real frictions that drive problems on the inside.\n\nWhat are the best books that show how political dynamics *really* work? \n\nTo take just one example: how decisions in bureaucracies are limited by miscommunication, disorganization, poor record-keeping and other varieties of incompetence that are not typically thought of affect policy... how these issues affect the ability of political leaders to change things for the better.\n\nOr how, in foreign relations, seemingly compassionate moves by one force may provoke counter-moves by other powers in the region... counterintuitively making the problem worse.\n\nThat sort of thing...", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9523wo/best_books_to_understand_how_government_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3rn5oa"], "score": [2], "text": ["The thing is, I don't think this is really a history question; it's more of a political theory or political science question.\n\nThe interaction and interplay of rules and constraints, written and unwritten, legal and customary, that impact the behavior of individuals in government is one of the primary topics of study in the field of political science. And the way these things interact at the highest levels of state, particularly how they condition the interactions between states, is a major concern of the separate field of international relations. History informs a lot of the inferences that political scientists and international relations theorists make, however while historians are typically very concerned with evaluating and reinterpreting details, political scientists and international relations theorists typically try to extrapolate broad universal conclusions. This means that it is very difficult, or even impossible, to answer your questions from a historical perspective.\n\nPolitical scientists and international relations theorists also differ from historians in methodology and approach, even though in the past two decades or so younger scholars have begun looking at smaller and more self-contained topics (sometimes to the displeasure of their older colleagues, who prefer to debate broad universal truths). In any case, a political scientist might begin a study asking a question like \"What are the main questions and concerns behind the implementation of a healthcare policy?\" and from this question will usually try to extrapolate a theoretical framework that policymakers and government workers can use to inform their decisions. A historian would be more interested in asking something like, \"What factors drove a wedge between theory and practice in Italian healthcare policy between 1945 and the reform of 1978?\" In this example, a journalist, politician, bureaucrat, or another academic handling an inquiry in the state of healthcare might do well to read both studies, and both examples certainly have a lot of overlap (if they were working at the same institution, these two hypothetical scholars would probably collaborate or at least inform and influence each other's work). However while the political scientist is interested in asking, \"How does government *really* work?\" the historian is asking, \"How *did* government really work?\"\n\nBut before you repost this to r/AskSocialScience, know that your question is also difficult to answer from a political science or international relations perspective. As you might imagine, focusing on conclusions (or, if necessary, lack thereof) means that there are multiple competing theories and schools of thought in the fields of political science and international relations. While historians also have their differences in ideas and approaches, historians seldom extrapolate views that they hold to be broad universal truths (although I suppose you can always make broad conclusions on human nature, but I digress). Historians are much more likely to qualify that their assertions are only valid insofar as they relate to context of the evidence they have examined. So what is indisputable in the history of the Mediterranean is not necessarily applicable when examining China or India: while scholars ask questions of the causes and qualities of the fall of the Roman Empire and rise of the Frankish Kingdom, these causes and qualities cannot be applied to the Sixteen Kingdoms period of Chinese history. To their credit, political scientists and international relations theorists are typically very careful about precise wording, and often qualify their conclusions with many caveats so that they are aligned with the evidence they present (things like \"this is only valid for democracies,\" or even, \"this is only valid for parliamentary democracies\").\n\nSo you ask for reading material; I can suggest a few books that might interest you. The first part of your question, I think, is most addressed by the discipline of Public Administration Theory within Political Science. I have only really tangentially examined this in the historical setting, and wouldn't really know where to start introduction-wise. Although I'm biased towards my area of study, a book that I really like and recommend is Putnam et al's *Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy* (1992) which draws some general conclusions about civic government based on historical and empirical evidence collected in Italy. I'm actually better versed in the shorter second part of your question, and can recommend a few books on international relations strongly informed by historical analysis. They are: Mansbach's *The Global Puzzle: Issues  &  Actors in World Politics* (1994); Jackson's *Global Politics in the Twenty-first Century,* (2013); and if you can get a hold of it Dehio's *The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle* (1965). Of the three I like Dehio's best, not just because because he's a pure historian. Although his book is old, his views are a surprising reflection of number of theories in the \"Realist\" school of International Relations, which influenced many of the the views inside American academia and government for some five decades after the Second World War."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2pg649", "title": "When did we refer to the Middle Ages as such? What is it the middle of? Eventually we will have a new middle age wouldn't we?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pg649/when_did_we_refer_to_the_middle_ages_as_such_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmwg2l8", "cmwgnvo"], "score": [3, 9], "text": ["The Middle Ages is named so because it's the period of European history that falls between Antiquity and Modernity.\n\nStarting at the fall of the Roman Empire, and finishing sometime around the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery(the period when Europe began to explore the world on a large scale), the Middle Ages are essentially the 'transition' period between the ancient civilisations such as Rome and Greece, and the modern era, where individual states began to emerge. \n\nWithin this period there are further divisions - the early, high and late middle ages. These all refer to different stages of development again. The Early Middle Ages is a period when kingdoms began to emerge in Europe from what was a loosely affiliated society. \n\nIn turn, this centralisation led to the High Middle Ages where technological developments meant that the European economy grew rapidly, and as it did, political systems changed, marking a break from Antiquity. \n\nThe Late Middle Ages was a period of decay through conflict and sickness, specifically wars, religious schisms, and the Black Death. This resulted in the European population diminishing greatly, and a stagnation in the economic and intellectual growth that had marked out the High Middle Ages.\n\nKnowing that the Middle Ages was divided as such, we can reasonably project that at some point in the future, the period named \"the Middle Ages\" could be feasibly extended. It follows that there would be new period divisions inserted to mark out technological advancements in medicine, transport, and science, and separating the 20th century from the earlier periods.\n\n*It's important to remember that the Middle Ages is a eurocentric term. That is to say, it's based around European cultures and development only, and doesn't encompass the civilisations of Asia, Africa or the Americas. For this reason, the same period is called the Post-Classical Era when referring to global developments.*", "Yes. The middle ages are a construct of the renaissance. No one is sure when they start or stop, and they start or stop at different times in different places anyway. \n\nMost historians dislike the term. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3hctdp", "title": "Anglo-Saxon England Books", "selftext": "Just what the title says. Does anyone have any good books on Anglo-Saxon England particularly during the 8th-10th centuries. Also does anyone have any good books after the Norman conquest and how England changed. Thanks for all your help. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hctdp/anglosaxon_england_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu6u8i0"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is pretty much [everything written up until recently](_URL_0_).\n\nYou'll have to hunt for the relevant sections, but its my go-to list for all AS stuff."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCEQFjAAahUKEwiujPaOkrLHAhUjrdsKHWmSALw&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.asnc.cam.ac.uk%2Fresources%2FASHistBib06.pdf&amp;ei=G-PSVe6SC6Pa7gbppILgCw&amp;usg=AFQjCNH0aFmYRAV3l6fo3a_ws8-MVIVAdw&amp;sig2=kejxgNAm-bF6LmXm-T347g&amp;bvm=bv.99804247,d.d24"]]}
{"q_id": "1kedlm", "title": "Admiral Yi Sun-sin is often portrayed as almost single handedly defeating Hideyoshi's invasion force. How true is this? Just how much did his command affect the outcome of the war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kedlm/admiral_yi_sunsin_is_often_portrayed_as_almost/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbocgho"], "score": [9], "text": ["Admiral Yi Sun-Sin was certainly a naval genius and a major factor in repelling the japanese invasion of Korea but he wasn't the only factor that led to a Japanese defeat.\n\nFirst of all hideyoshi never went to Korea himself but rather dekgated the invasion to his generals. What was poor planning on bideyoshi's part however was that he did not establish a chain of command for his generals. Rather the generals were all equal status with each other under hideyoshi. This caused a lack of cooperation between generals as there was no superior officer for them to report to (aside for hideyoshi back in Japan).  This caused generals to focus on personal glory and therefore they rushed the invasion without thought to supply lines or reinforcements.\n\nTwo of hideyoshi's best generals kato kiyomasa and Dom agostino (his christian name after baptism I forget his birth name) were bitter rivals. Kiyomasa was a devout Buddhist of the nichiren sect who despised anything western, especially Christianity, as impure an evil. This ensured that the two generals hurried to conquer as far north as possible by themselves leaving there troops far from reinforcements and resupply.\n\nSecondly, compared to the Korean navy, the Japanese navy was pitiful. Japan had never had a prominent navy as most of their battles were internal. When hideyoshi ordered the invasion it called for a massive undertaking by Japans ship builders unlike ever before and they simply could not keep up. This led to many merchant ships being repurposed for troop transport or battle and they were very I'll fit for open sea naval operations. \n\nJapan's most experienced sailors were also wako, or pirates. These wacko focused o. Small manuverable craft to make a quick approach and board an enemy vessel or for small rading parties. Almost no Japanese sailors had open sea naval expertise.\n\nThe Koreans on the other hand were excellent sailors as sea trade was Koreas lifeblood. Also Koreans had experience with Japanese naval tactics as the wako had raided Korea for many years before hand. \n\nEven the Japanese naval battle tactics were not well thought out. Most ships were nothing more than large firing platforms for soldiers to fire their teppo or arquebus(sp?). Japan never placed high priority on cannons and those generals who had cannons many times reserved them for their personal castles, meaning very few Japanese ships even came with cannon. \n\nKorean sailors understood the value of naval cannons and therefore their largest ships had entire sides covered in cannon with an effective range that dwarfed the Japanese teppo. This forced the Japanese to cross several hundred yards of enemy fire before they could even consider returning fire.\n\nWhat admiral Yu Sun-Sin did was capitialize on his advantages over the Japanese navy to inflict very heavy losses on the Japanese navy. Without a navy Japan had no way of resupplying its much more successful ground forces who had made considerable gains into Korea.\n\nJapans superior land forces were left to wither on the vine with no supplies except what they could gather from the conquered lands. The lack of supplies plus the looming threat of China joining the fray  before the Japanese had secured Korea made the Japanese positions untenable, thus forcing a total withdraw.\n\nAdmiral Yu Sun-Sin was a naval genius however he was fighting any enemy that expected quick and easy victory rather than a drawn out war of attrition\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6wl8h8", "title": "Did germany have a plan to invade the US or they just hoped Japan was enough to invade the US ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wl8h8/did_germany_have_a_plan_to_invade_the_us_or_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmcgmj3"], "score": [2], "text": ["At no point in the war or before did either Germany or Japan in anything approaching a serious manner consider attempting a landing on the US mainland. \n\nThe Kriegsmarine was simply a broken force in so many ways, from design, to organization, to political leadership. It bounced between multiple concepts of operations and never got good at any of them enough to maximize resources expended. And throughout the war its first and in many ways only concern was how to beat the Royal Navy.\n\nBut enough about that small unfortunate force the Japanese at least better understood the requirements of fighting a hemispheric naval war. Fueling, transit time, safe harbor, and ship endurance did more than anything to determine what was within a force's ability to strike at and what was not. \n\nAnd that put the West Coast WELL outside the ability of the IJN to sustain operations there. Submarines are one thing and can be designed for long range raiding cruises and easier to clandestinely refuel and provision. A large task force with fuel guzzling battleships and carriers, short ranged destroyers, and dozens of transport craft would simply not have been able to be sustained. The IJN additionally was relatively inexperienced and underway refueling, having only gotten serious about the practice just before the war, and the need to do so on the way to Pearl Harbor became a motivating factor to learn, and the small number of fleet oilers additionally limited the size of task forces operating far from bases at length. \n\nAnd that makes sense, the Japanese strategy against the US was fundamentally defensive in nature. It was to use the Kido Butai as a perfected raiding force(which also limits its utility in supporting sustained landings and land battles in contrast to late war USN carrier forces) to punch the US in the mouth. If this did not result in peace then the operational freedom bought would allow the IJN and IJA to seize the Southern Resource Area and then fortify a string of island bases. These islands running from the South Pacific up through the Mandate Islands of the GIlberts and Marshalls would provide a series of mutually supporting bases and airfields to bloody US counterattacks. This then would be backed by a second line of bases in the Marianas as their anchor. Once the bloodied US forces would have reached this inner line then the final battle of decision would be sought. The well rested and supported Combined Fleet would seek out and destroy the US fleet as they could. This was at least the mainline thinking inside the IJN. \n\nFor some additional reference on the limited nature of IJN amphibious capabilities and ability to power project ashore we can also turn to _URL_0_. Written by Parshall and Tully two of the leading historians of the Pacific War we have this very topical article. It examines the issues related to just invading Hawaii, both in December 1941, and as a follow up to a reversed battle of Midway. And why it just wasn't in the cards. _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["COmbinedfleet.com", "http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4jk8y4", "title": "Why was Confucius named Confucius?", "selftext": "Tried Google but no solid answer. I am actually Chinese, though didn't grow up in China, have actually never thought of this question until just now. It sounds a bit like the word Confused, which I'm sure it's not related lol. \n\nIn Chinese his name is Kong Zi. His beliefs and teachings we say 'Yu Jia' basically Scholar Family, I always thought it was 'Yu Ke' which means 'Scholar Teaching'. But still I don't see where the term Confucian come from. I feel like as a Chinese I should know this. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4jk8y4/why_was_confucius_named_confucius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d37brz0"], "score": [48], "text": ["Confucius stems from the 16th century latinization of the Chinese honorific \"\u5b54\u592b\u5b50/Kong Fu Zi\" \n\n*Source: 'Catholicism and Confucianism: An intercultural and interreligious dialogue' by Peter Phan*\n\n\nedit: also OP just a bit of a correction, in mandarin the philosophical school of Confucianism is \"Ru Jia\" not \"Yu Jia\". It doesn't mean \"scholar\" per se, it's just that scholars became almost synonymous with Confucians after a while. \"Ru Jia\" translates literally to something like - the family of softness/mediation.\n\nBut many of the other schools survived too in one way or another. Taoist scholars would be said to belong to \"Tao Jia\" - the family of the way. Legalist scholars to belong to \"Fa Jia\" - the family of the law, etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5eqj7f", "title": "[Thanksgiving question] Who invented pie and why don't we honor them?", "selftext": "Okay, being a little humorous with the title. But really, what is the history behind pie? Was it a singular invention or an evolution of similar dishes? And when/where did this occur?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5eqj7f/thanksgiving_question_who_invented_pie_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daf1r22"], "score": [5], "text": ["I believe the general consensus is that it was a Greek invention (Aristophanes mentions pastries in The Clouds, so 5th Century BC at least), but the pastry was used to carry and preserve the contents, rather than being designed to be one edible article. The convention of eating the crust came far later during late medieval times in England where the poor would eat the undesirable (and practically inedible) crust. Americans \"refined\" the pie down to sweet pastries only for some odd reason (perhaps a lack of meat available meant filling pastry with fruit was more cost-efficient?). \n\n\nHere is a long article that covers the history of the pie (not in a very well structured order, unfortunately) which uses sources such as;\n\n- Oxford English Dictionary, Volume III, 1982\n- Pie: A Global History, by Janet Clarkson\n- The White House Cookbook by Mrs. F.L. Gillette, 1887\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nAs a Brit, I have to say that everyone should eat a steak pie at least once. There's nothing better than hot steak pie, chips and gravy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.everythingpies.com/history-of-pie/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ofb78", "title": "How restricted was hunting by ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "I'm assuming that the average person didn't have firearms, but what prevented a Soviet citizen from bowhunting on the weekends? Did wild game play a role in the informal economy? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ofb78/how_restricted_was_hunting_by_ordinary_citizens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvx04u2"], "score": [13], "text": ["People living in the countryside could legally own hunting rifles, particularly after the Civil War. It wasn't necessarily easy to get a permit and you basically had to prove that it was a necessary part of your work/livelihood. It was highly regulated, and there were times (right after the Revolution and later under Stalin) when there were crackdowns on gun ownership include laws requiring people to relinquish weapons (or have them confiscated).  In 1923 the there was a resolution \"On Hunting\" that allowed people to officially register for a hunting license that was issued by the People's Commissariat of Agriculture.  The NKVD was responsible for the permits for the firearms and ammunition.\n\nI have not seen a ton of research on this.  I know that there is a little bit on it in Orlando Figes' *A People's Tragedy*, and even though I am not a huge fan of Figes, I don't doubt this particular research. The specifics also depend on the period of the Soviet Union we're talking about."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "271g1v", "title": "Based on the time periods and geography in the mythology around King Arthur, what type of sword could Excalibur have been if real?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/271g1v/based_on_the_time_periods_and_geography_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chwnnkp"], "score": [10], "text": ["Perhaps a variant of the Roman spatha. The spathas resembled a lengthened gladius, and increasingly supplanted the latter as more and more Franks, Saxons, Goths, etc were recruited in the Western portion of the Empire as auxiliaries and cavalry grew in prominence. In an account of the botched 1st century rebellion of a British chief named Caratacus, Tactius describes the blades carried by Roman forces as [\"spathis\"](_URL_0_) (sec. 35).   \n\nWith early use attested to amongst Roman and auxiliary forces in Britain, spatha-esque weapons would certainly have been in use by the local populace (as well as the Germanic tribes that Arthur is said to have fought) by the time of Roman withdrawal in the early 5th century. \n\nThe attached images courtesy of a historic sword reproduction company and a reenactor, provide an idea of what such weapons may have looked like. \n\n[1](_URL_2_)\n[2](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/tac/a12030.htm", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Spatha_end_of_second_century_1.jpg/223px-Spatha_end_of_second_century_1.jpg", "http://www.albion-swords.com/images/swords/albion/nextGen/decurio/decurio-1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2lto8v", "title": "\"Hannibal was recalled to Carthage when the Romans attacked it\" - how exactly did they 'recall' him?", "selftext": "When reading about the Punic Wars, I encountered the part stating that Hannibal was recalled by the Carthaginians when their city was attacked. I'm curious about the logistics of contacting an army in enemy territory in ancient times - Did the Carthaginian leadership gather several messengers and tell them to sail to Italy, track down Hannibal's army and deliver the message? Did the Romans allow this through some diplomatic immunity or would they have killed such messengers if they found them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lto8v/hannibal_was_recalled_to_carthage_when_the_romans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clya3n5", "clyqes1"], "score": [25, 4], "text": ["Carthage and Hannibal were in contact throughout the war. Hannibal sent his brother Mago back after Cannae to ask for money and reinforcements, both of which Carthage sent and Livy records that Hannibal received them. Hannibal was also aware that Hasdrubal was going to cross into Italy prior to his defeat at the Battle of Metaurus.\n\nThe picture which Livy paints is of messengers passing between Hannibal and Carthage despite the Roman navy. Certainly there does not appear to have been any diplomatic immunity and, given the Roman attitude towards negotiation, it seems highly unlikedly. In all likelihood, Carthage and Hannibal sent messengers to each other whenever they had something to say.\n\nSource: Livy, The War with Hannibal", "I have answered a similar question some time ago [here](_URL_0_).\n\nMy answer is in line with what others have said in this thread, but it includes that little detail which appears to have been overlooked here so far: how did Hannibal get his army safely from Italy to Carthage after being recalled?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b9nlw/hannibal_vs_romans_and_attack_on_carthage/"]]}
{"q_id": "vbqs6", "title": "Where and why did humans start using utensils to eat rather than their hands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vbqs6/where_and_why_did_humans_start_using_utensils_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c533ajz", "c533e2f", "c533pqg", "c534ai6", "c534bgo", "c534vkz", "c53b59a"], "score": [3, 68, 3, 2, 10, 5, 3], "text": ["That's a hard one to nail down, and I'd be very interested to see if anyone knows. I've read that forks are known from ancient Greek times, and spoons from ancient Egyptian. As for knives, they could date back to people first using cutting tools and may have been used to spear cooked meat and prevent a person from burning their hands. I suppose it would depend on the diet, and when the use of anything other than a knife was better or preferable (due to culture, and a desire to appear more enlightened  &  civilized) than just using hands. In certain parts of the rural south (US), we're still trying to convince people that despite the simplicity of eating with your hands it's just not civilized. We'll teach them one of these days. I have faith.", "The Greeks were the first to craft kitchen forks; their two-tined specimens helped them secure meat while it was being cut. By the seventh century, Byzantine nobles had begun to use the fork for dining as well. An oft-mentioned tale in forklore is that of a Byzantine dogeressa of Venice, who brought forks with her to her new home. When she contracted a fatal illness, Peter Damien, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, was quick to write an account entitled, 'Of the Venetian Doge's wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away'. Evidently the adoption of the fork was not a seamless one, the logic being that, if we have fingers, why would we use forks? \n\nBut adopted they were. The fork migrated westward through Europe, spreading from Byzantium to Italy to France and finally to Britain and Germany. Though the fork was not common in Western Europe until the 16th century, it was in use far earlier in the East. Catherine de' Medici brought them to France in 1533 when she married the future King Henri II. Again, adoption was slow: eating with forks was 'affected'; besides, half of the food fell off of the fork on the way to the mouth, anyway. It was not until 1608 that we first learn of many forks in England: Thomas Cayote transported some back after his travels in Italy. Predictably, the English did not immediately latch onto this new utensil, their system having served them well for hundreds of years. The fork served for some time as a means of transporting food from a common dish to one's own plate, and among the wealthy it gained broader use. As late as the early seventeenth century, forks were still regarded as a luxury item, being frequently made of gold or silver.\n\nIf the fork was not adopted into Europe until the late Middle Ages, what was its precursor? As alluded to above: fingers. Solids, especially meat, were taken by hand; liquids with ladles or spoons from a communal dish, or, oftentimes, being simply drunk. In seventh-century England, knives with pointed ends were being developed to serve both as a cutting implement and as a means of conveying food to mouth. Diners were in frequent physical contact not only with their food, but with other people. With the adoption of the table fork (as well as other utensils), Europeans' relationships to each other and their food changed drastically. By 1859, well after the fork had been widely adopted both in Europe and America, eating with fingers was described as 'cannibal'. \n\nInterestingly, the fork's implementation came much later in the American colonies. Apart from one fork owned by Governor Winthrop (of Massachusetts), forks do not appear in archaeological sites until the early eighteenth century. James Deetz, in *Small Things Forgotten*, notes that\n\n > The first mention of a fork in the Plymouth Colony area probate inventories is in 1721, in the estate of a wealthy gentleman in Marshfield, but significant numbers of forks do not show up in these records until the second half of the century. When forks appeared in quantities in England, knives changed in shape, and rounded blade ends replaced the pointed ones, since forks had assumed the function of the pointed blade. However, since most New England knives were made in England, and the fork appear do later in America, this relationship did not prevail in the New World.\n\nThus New Englanders, forkless and with a round-ended English knife, had to make due with their spoons, knives, and fingers. This dynamic is still visible today: whereas European etiquette dictates that the tines of a fork face downward, the American standard is to switch the fork with tines pointing up after the meat has been cut. Deetz points out that, 'if even one generation used knife and spoon in this manner [that is, the manner in which we currently use knife and fork] the fork, upon its belated appearance, would be used in a manner similar to the spoon'. Which is, of course, the case.\n\n---\n\nThe above is modified from a project on forks that I did for a class a few years ago. (I removed citations for formatting's sake but do ask if you have any questions!)\n\nI can't speak much about the origins of the knife--it's been around for ages and I imagine it'd be hard to determine at what point it began to be used while eating rather than just for cutting. Soup spoons, as far as I know, were also a later development since all-liquid foods weren't popular and people would use bread to sop up excess liquid/juices from stews/meats. But I don't know as much about this. \n\nP.S. As for the *why*, I could go much more into that. But, to be brief, utensils and table manners developed in tandem with our modern idea of disgust (I am paraphrasing Norbert Elias here). There is nothing inherently more 'civilized' about eating with utensils rather then one's fingers. Rather, a distancing of eater and eaten (and thus disgust with the eaten) increasingly became a status marker: it was the lower classes who ate with their fingers; the upper classes had forks to distinguish themselves.", "Robert Muchembled (in his book \"The Invention of the Modern Man\") talks about the rise of etiquette in 16-17th century France. He states that the fork started to get used then, because it was more civil than to eat with your hands/cutting things with a knife. ", "There's a lot of talk of Greece, but I was always under the impression that chopsticks were older...", "Chopsticks were said to have been invented around 1000-2000 BCE.  These chopsticks were metal, and likely used for handling hot food while cooking, rather than eating.  Makes sense.", "Probably some kind of primite utensils were used since forever. Some monkeys use sticks to eat termites, so early humans probably came up with using sticks and similar things to eat certain foods, other than that breads' answer seems to be spot on.", "In his book \"The Civilizing Process\" the historical sociologist Norbert Elias argued that the use of utensils was the result of a larger emphasis on manners in early modern Europe (15th-17th cent). Keith Thomas wrote a review of Elias' work, called [The Rise of the Fork](_URL_0_).\nThe increased use and purchase of household utensils were also central to the so-called \"Consumer Revolution\" beginning in the late 16th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1978/mar/09/the-rise-of-the-fork/"]]}
{"q_id": "u9w1l", "title": "I know this question is asked a lot in other subreddits, but I want to hear it from here: what's the most interesting, thought provoking fact you know?", "selftext": "For me, I think it's probably that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the (most famous of the) pyramids. I think that to most laymen a view of history is vastly compressed with respect to the past and expanded with respect to the present, so to put these timescales in perspective is capable of shaking people's minds up in a historically liberating way.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u9w1l/i_know_this_question_is_asked_a_lot_in_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4tkwwk", "c4to7a1"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["The Romans had tacky shot glasses shaped like gladiator helmets.", "Ethnocentrism plagues our accuracy for history.\n\nExample, Okinawan \"[karate](_URL_0_)\" originally meant \"Chinese hand\"  (Okninawans' perspective) and its similarity sound in dialect to Japanese \"empty hand\" is what is its definition today.  Simply the desire of some Okinawan Sensei to keep their traditional art intact led to the assimilation by Japan who wanted to adopt the art (on their terms) for combat.  So, today, Karate is \"empty hand.\"\n\nThis has caused MUCH frustration for historians because of loss of much oral tradition of \"traditional karate\" and its VERY heavy influences from China.  Also, Okinawans had no written language and their native language, Hogan, is obviously not Japanese.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate"]]}
{"q_id": "1uv220", "title": "How'd the Dutch rise, colonize, and build one of the biggest navies in the world while they were constantly fighting the Spanish?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uv220/howd_the_dutch_rise_colonize_and_build_one_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cemkxxc"], "score": [3], "text": ["And where did most of the wood come from to build their ships?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4c6tbr", "title": "In ancient Rome what was the difference between a freedman and a citizen?", "selftext": "How would that compare to modern times? For instance pre 1860 US, pre apartheid South Africa and other colonies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c6tbr/in_ancient_rome_what_was_the_difference_between_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1fu7bx"], "score": [5], "text": ["Many scholars argue that part of what made Rome great was its relatively lenient policies regarding manumission, that is, going from slave to freedman (whose children would then be full citizens) was a great motivator for slaves to be quiet, content, and productive. R.H. Barrow in his work, Slavery in the Roman Empire, went as far as to say:  \u201cThe full opportunities for civilized life could only be fully used in freedom, no doubt, but slavery was an apprenticeship.\u201d\n\nNow as you can imagine, depending on the type of slave, his odds differed greatly depending on location, job, master's favor, etc. A slave in the tin mines in Britannia was likely doomed to an early grave whereas a slave who managed his Master's shop had much better odds.\n\nBut on to the details. What made manumission so attractive was freedman were given rights and privileges (legitimate children, transfers of property, marriage, wills, etc.), but along with these rights came responsibilies (obsequium - a freedman's obligations to preform operae [obligated services and inheritance rights] and maintain relations with his former master, the relationship was not unlike the well-established Roman patron-client system). These *operae* could take many different forms, perhaps, if his master fell on hard times, his former slave would be required to put him up. Generally, the conditions of the *operae* would \"negotiated\" during the manumission process. Although, you can imagine the slave had little leverage in the matter. Former slaves could not be charged in money by their former master, only services, however, if the freedman preferred to give cash he could.  It is also important to note that slaves who had squirreled away enough cash to buy their freedom did not have these obligations.\n\nFreedmen, of course, had some restrictions, most notably not being able to run for public office or access to the prestigious priesthoods. Military service was generally a no-go whether it be in the legions or urban cohorts (A general rule, I am sure the Romans broke it if they were desperate enough). Also, punishments in law were more severe for ex-slaves. Their was also a social stigma attached to a freed slave. He was likely a foreign prisoner of war, separated from country, tradition, his family, and even his given name and birthday. Freedmen were endless ridiculed and mocked for these things by the natural born Roman citizens (often jealous of the ex-slaves connections, wealth, or new found position).\n\nHowever, many ex-slaves also had a host of factors in their favor. Trade and manufacturing were mostly run by slaves or former slaves (tradition forbade good, moral Romans of the senatorial class from taking part, so they sent their slaves to conduct business). Their talents and skills for fabricating goods, importing and exporting, and conducting business served many slaves well in their freedom. The Imperial administration and bureaucracy was, in large part, run by slaves and freedmen. As you can imagine, with these conditions present, some former slaves rose to immense prominence whether by administrative or financial means. Just so some basic searches on Claudius' cavalcade of freedman  (Pallas, Callistus, and Narcissus come to mind although I'm sure there are more for other emperors) and their various schemes for power. However, it is important to remember that many of the accounts of these men are horribly biased and are from men of elite families like Tacitus. These social elites, who had so recently lost a tremendous amount of influence in the collapse of the Republic, were wildly jealous of these former slaves and their meteoric rise to power.\n\nThat went on a lot longer than I intended, but I hope it was helpful. I, unfortunately, can't really tie it to more modern times, but hopefully someone else comes along and can add to this.\n\nSome recommended reading if you have further interest (my post is heavily based off these readings):\n\nSlavery in the Roman World - Sandra Joshel\n\nSlavery in the Roman Empire - RH Barrow (a bit antiquated, but a good read nontheless)\n\nGreek and Roman Slavery - Thomas Wiedemann (fantastic collection of primary sources)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1v19vb", "title": "Have people always thought nature is beautiful?", "selftext": "or did this not become a subject of writing until the modern age?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v19vb/have_people_always_thought_nature_is_beautiful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cenqvjo", "cenri0c", "ceo53o4"], "score": [2, 3, 3], "text": [" I'm not certain exactly what you mean by the modern age but the current trend of art praising the beauty of nature was started by two men, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge when they published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. This kicked off the Romantic era of art, and heavily influenced artists in other genres (Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is one famous early response). If you consider the modern age, at least in terms of art, to have started in the 20th century with Stravinski's Rite of Spring and the painting of Picasso and Dali this becomes more muddled. Depending on who you ask modern art is a completely new and unique age, or the latest offshoot of Romanticism. This is particularly difficult when genre hopping, as modern writers have a great deal in common with Romantic poets and novelists, in music and painting things are a bit more open to interpretation.\n\n To answer your question specifically though the glorification of natural beauty has been a constant theme in all forms of art to their earliest antecedents. The earliest paintings are pastoral scenes, cave paintings of animals in nature. The earliest literature, core mythology contains pastoral elements. The garden of Eden is an idyllic agrarian utopia, the Epic of Gilgamesh describes it's hero as a corrupt urbanite who travels out in nature, meets a man of the wild and through this friendship becomes a better man and better ruler. \n\nWilliam Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, explaining why he and Coleridge chose rustic subjects: _URL_4_\n\nThe Second Chapter of Genesis, The Garden of Eden: _URL_0_\n\nThe Epic of Gilgamesh: _URL_3_\n\nUpper Paleolithic Cave Painting: _URL_5_\n\nThe Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565: _URL_2_\n\nPastoral Symphony, Beethoven, 1808: _URL_1_\n\nThese are just a few basic examples, as I said natural beauty, rustic themes and the Pastoral in all genres is a constant theme of art throughout human history.", "This is going to answer only a small portion of your question, but I can tell you that literary scholars view the Romantic Movement as making definite contributions to Modern European/American understandings of nature as beautiful. Romanticism rose to its peak alongside the industrial revolution and acted as a sort of artistic backlash to a cultural emphasis on capitalism and urbanization. It frequently invoked nostalgic images of agricultural lifestyle (called pastorals) and emphasized the beauty and power of nature over manmade artifice. It also gave us the idea of the sublime, a sense of terror or wonder inspired by a realization of how small you are in light of nature\u2019s majesty.\n\n\nWhile romanticism developed in England as an offshoot of sentimentalism, with the classic examples of romantic works being very English-centric, the movement resonated with, and was appropriated by, pretty much every North American and European culture. There\u2019s a huge amount of romantic literature, art, and music from all over the world during the late 18th and early 19th century. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question that romanticism is at least partially responsible for giving us a general cultural understanding of nature as containing a lot of beauty, and I also think that this understanding is a direct consequence of the modernizing process.\n\n\nTo put it in more clear terms, **while people almost certainly saw nature as beautiful before romanticism/modernity, I don\u2019t think they thought of it in the same was as we do now.** The industrial revolution started a long process that gradually removed the influence of nature from people\u2019s day\u2013to-day lives and consequently it became ripe for artistic pastiche and nostalgia. It\u2019s easy to fantasize about living in a log cabin in the woods when you\u2019re commuting to work in a traffic jam every day, and that distinctly modern circumstance gives such fantasies a power that simply wasn\u2019t present for a lot of pre-19th century people who were stastically more likely to perform agricultural labour and live outside of cities. That\u2019s my personal understanding as a scholar of late 18th century literature anyways.\n\n\nHowever, romanticism is a little bit outside my field so for better information I recommend [this text](_URL_1_) by Michael Ferber, which comes from the excellent \u201cshort introduction\u201d series.\nIt also has a surprisingly comprehensive and well cited [Wikipedia page](_URL_0_).\n\n\nAlso, I can\u2019t emphasize enough that Romanticism is a highly Euro-centric explanation for why we consider nature beautiful. For example, the 17th century Japanese poetry of Matsuo Basho demonstrates an incredibly powerful belief in the beauty of the natural world almost 200 years before romanticism (or Japan's own process of Modernization) came to be. I assume that every culture has its own unique relationship to artistic depictions of nature and I'm sure you could find many examples that have \u201calways\u201d found it beautiful.", "hi! here are a couple of related posts; check them out for previous responses\n\n[Has society always found beauty in nature (mountains, beaches, etc.), or is this a more recent phenomenon?](_URL_1_)\n\n[How has our attitude towards \"Nature\" varied with time and place?](_URL_0_)\n\n(I believe the question was also posted in /r/AskAnthropology)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202&amp;version=NIV", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQGm0H9l9I4", "http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/19.164", "http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/", "http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AltamiraBison.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism", "http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/019956891X"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hr2no/how_has_our_attitude_towards_nature_varied_with/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eour6/has_society_always_found_beauty_in_nature/"]]}
{"q_id": "7tvni3", "title": "In movies, oftentimes a command given to archers is \u201cfire!\u201d I saw somewhere that the command wasn\u2019t actually the word \u201cfire\u201d. What would someone say in order to command an group of archers to shoot arrows at a target?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7tvni3/in_movies_oftentimes_a_command_given_to_archers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtglj3o", "dthl35s"], "score": [33, 8], "text": ["To get the simple things out of the way first, \u201cfire\u201d is generally not considered the proper term for shooting a non-gunpowder weapon. Early gunpowder weapons were triggered by applying a fire source, often a slow-burning wick, into the gunpowder via a hole in the side of the weapon. In the earliest examples this was done manually, but from the invention of the match-lock this was done via a trigger. This literal application of fire to shoot the weapon is generally accepted as being the reason why we use \u201cfire\u201d to mean \u201cshoot\u201d. Since bows, crossbows, slings etc. don\u2019t use fire as an ignition system, it\u2019s generally held to be inappropriate to use the term. I\u2019m of half a mind that the colloquial use of \u201cfire\u201d has sufficiently diverged from its origin that I don\u2019t mind when people do, but some people are sticklers for such things. I don\u2019t find the use of the term \u201cfire\u201d in medieval-esque films to be any more jarring than the use of any English term developed post-1400. For example, I don\u2019t find it weirder than the use of the term \u201ccrusade\u201d in Kingdom of Heaven, even though nobody during the Third Crusade would have used that term. That said, I\u2019m also not here to degrade anyone for nit-picking things in movies, I\u2019m hardly without sin so I\u2019m not about to throw some stones.  \n\nFor much of this answer I\u2019m going to be focusing on longbow tactics used by the English during the 14th and 15th centuries. This is mostly due to that being a high point in both the use of massed archery and in sources talking about archery and archers. Archery was a staple of warfare for the entirety of the Middle Ages, and there were huge differences in its role in different periods and regions. \n\nAs to what would have been said instead, the answer is kind of impossible for a couple of reasons. The most basic reason is that we don\u2019t have a lot of really detailed accounts of medieval battles and tactics, at least not to the degree of detail that would include the instructions individual commanders gave soldiers under their command. When we have detailed accounts of a battle they nearly always come from chronicles, which are not an inaccurate source but are also inevitably a somewhat romantic view of the events (degree of romanticism does vary substantially). Some of these accounts were written by eyewitness, Jean le Bel\u2019s account of Crecy (1346) is perhaps the most famous, but many were not and in both cases the accounts were often written down years after the fact. This means that while the general strokes of these accounts are usually pretty accurate, we should be a little wary of placing too much faith in the finer details of things like who said what and when. On the occasions when we do get a fairly immediate account from someone with a good reason to be informed of the events, they often look like this: \n\n > Because we well know that you willingly will hear good tidings of our Lord the King and of his affairs in Scotland, we give you to understand that on the Monday next before the Feast of Saint James (July 25th), there came tidings unto the Lord the King where he was staying, six leagues beyond Edeneburg, that the Scots were approaching directly towards him.  As soon as he had heard this, he moved with his host towards the parts where the Scots were; and on the morrow the King arrived in good time, and found his enemies prepared to give battle.  And so they engaged, and, by the grace of God, his enemies were soon discomfited, and fled: but nevertheless, there were slain of the enemy in the day\u2019s fight 200 men-at-arms, and 20,000 of their foot-soldiers; wherefore we do hope that affairs yonder will go well from henceforth, by the aid of our Lord. \n\nThat\u2019s a [letter from the Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry on the event of Edward I\u2019s victory at Falkirk in 1298.]( _URL_0_) It\u2019s not exactly brimming with detail. Official, or semi-official, dispatches in the wake of major battles usually look like this. A quick description of the events in broad strokes, and usually a off the cuff figure for how many enemy dead. Sometimes you\u2019ll get a bit more tactical detail, but I wouldn\u2019t hold my breath for it. \n\nWhen we can glean more detail on the nitty gritty details of medieval warfare, such as when we\u2019re using chronicle sources, the picture they paint is very different from what you see in most movies. A lot of films show medieval warfare as much closer to early modern or modern conflicts. You can see this in the idea of a designated archer commander ordering his troops when to fire, sort of like how we imagine the tactics of volley firing in modern black powder warfare (how accurate that image is for that time I\u2019ll leave to someone else). There are inevitably numerous differences between each individual medieval battle, so generalisations are going to be a little problematic, but by and large medieval warfare seems to have been structured around a much higher level of preparation, and an inevitable loss of control during the actual engagement. There isn\u2019t a total loss of control, we know from the Battle of Hastings for example that commanders were able to rally fleeing troops and execute complex cavalry movements in the heat of battle, but by and large medieval commanders didn\u2019t seem to expect that their plans would survive contact with the enemy. \n\nIn this situation, then, much of the available evidence suggests that commanders could control when their archers started shooting their bows but exerting strict discipline onto their rate of fire does not seem to have been a priority. Whether this is a failure of discipline really depends on what you think the purpose of massed archery was. If archers were intended to release killing blows on their opponents, then arguably a more concentrated and controlled system of shooting was better. If instead you agree with Kelly DeVries assessment of the longbow, that it was a tactical tool designed to demoralize and control enemy tactics, then laying down a sustained rain of arrows was the goal, and something akin to volley fire wouldn\u2019t even have been the desired outcome. \n\nAs a case study, let\u2019s consider an account of the Battle of Agincourt (1415) by Enguerrand de Monstrelet. Enguerrand was a French chronicler who wrote a continuation of Froissart\u2019s *Chronicles*, arguably the most influential account of the first half of the Hundred Years War, to cover the period 1400-1444. Enguerrand wasn\u2019t present at Agincourt, he was only about 15 when it happened, but his account is one of the most often cited and while he\u2019s not without his flaws he\u2019s an overall pretty good source. This excerpt begins with Thomas Erpingham, a knight in the service of Henry V who is generally credited with having command of the archers at Agincourt, ordering the attack. \n\n > Sir Thomas, in the name of the king, exhorted them all most earnestly to defend their lives, and thus saying he rode along their ranks attended by two persons. When all was done to his satisfaction, he flung into the air a truncheon which he held in his hand, crying out, \u201cNestrocque!\u201d and then dismounted, as the King and the others had done. When the English saw sir Thomas throw up his truncheon, they set up a loud shout, to the very great astonishment of the French. The English seeing the enemy not inclined to advance, marched toward them in handsome array, and with repeated huzzas, occasionally stopping to recover their breath. The archers, who were hidden in tile field, reechoed these shouts, at the same time discharging their bows, while the English army kept advancing upon the French.\n > Their archers, amounting to at least thirteen thousand, let off a shower of arrows with all their might, and as high as possible, so as not to lose their effect: they were, for the most part, without any armour, and in jackets, with their hose loose, and hatchets or swords hanging to their girdles; some indeed were barefooted and without hats.\n\n\u201cNestrocque!\u201d roughly translates as \u201cNow Strike!\u201d, but there is some room for interpretation. I\u2019ll leave aside debates about exact meaning, and whether or not this phrase was actually used or if it\u2019s an invention of Enguerrand, and focus on the broad point. The archers are given an order to attack, but not detailed instructions on how fast to shoot or targets. We have a few other relevant excerpts from the battle, you can read a full account [here]( _URL_1_), including one ordering the English advance: \n\n > The English loudly sounded their trumpets as they approached, and the French stooped to prevent the arrows hitting them on the visors of their helmets; thus the distance was now but small between the two armies, although the French had retired some paces. \n\nAnd one where the archers discard their bows and join the melee: \n\n > The English took instant advantage of the disorder in the van division, and, throwing down their bows, fought lustily with swords, hatchets, mallets, and bill-hooks, slaying all before them. Thus they came to the second battalion that had been posted in the rear of the first; and the archers followed close king Henry and his men-at-arms.\n\nWe shouldn\u2019t take these too literally, e.g. the fact that the foot received an order by trumpet, but the archers did not shouldn\u2019t necessarily be interpreted to mean that nobody told the archers to engage in the melee, but overall, I think this shows a battle where there are some very general and straightforward instructions given from command to the soldiers, but nothing more detailed. Nobody is standing next to the archers saying \u2018ready, aim, fire\u2019 for every shot. ", "I agree with /u/Valkine. There are occasionally instances where we're given rare insights into how the archers fought, but they are few are far between. Jean Le F\u00e8vre, who was a herald present on the English side at Agincourt, refers to the English archers \"tirer \u00e1 la voll\u00e9e\", which literally means \"shot on the fly\". \"\u00e1 la voll\u00e9e\" is a phrase usually interpreted as \"thoughtlessly/carelessly\", although in this case it could also refer to them loosing their bows while running towards the French as the Chronique de Ruisseauville claims, but exactly how to interpret the \"thoughtless/careless\" aspect depends on your view point. It could mean that the English archers weren't aiming individually and were loosing in uniform volleys, but it could equally mean that they weren't following any commands and picked their own targets. Despite this ambiguity, Le F\u00e9vre's is on of the least ambiguous medieval references to how archery was conducted. The others refer to the archers shooting thickly, strongly or some combination/variation thereof, which only provides evidence of how the effect of the archery was perceived. \n\nThe best evidence for whether or not archers followed commands and shot at a target comes from the late 16th century, where a mercenary captain (I believe it was Barnaby Riche, but don't have my notes right now) wrote that ordering archers to loose in volleys was bad practice as it reduced their effectiveness and spoiled their aim. How relevant this is to the middle ages is hard to guess. \n\nUltimately, my assessment of medieval archery was that the initial flight of arrows was more or less co-ordinated, with the archers already having arrows on their strings and following a command. Afterwards, it would progressively grow less co-ordinated until instead of sudden squalls making up the arrowstorm, you had a steady downpour of arrows. Others, as Valkine pointed out, may well disagree based on the same evidence that I've used to form my opinion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://deremilitari.org/2013/04/letter-from-the-bishop-of-lichfield-and-coventry-with-news-of-the-defeat-of-the-scots-at-the-battle-of-falkirk-july-22-1298/", "http://deremilitari.org/2013/02/battle-of-agincourt-1415/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qpw01", "title": "How different was Mao's communism from Marx's commuism? What about the Russian figureheads like Stalin, Trotsky, or Lenin?", "selftext": "Title basically has it all. How was Mao's interpretation of Marx different from what Marx laid out and Russian interpretations?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qpw01/how_different_was_maos_communism_from_marxs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdfd5gz", "cdfd7yk"], "score": [265, 23], "text": ["One of the biggest difficulties with this is that Marx is a little light on Revolutionary theory, so much so that philosophers and historians still disagree about whether he advocated violent revolution or not. The Communist Manifesto is a slim thing, about thirty or forty pages, and is decidedly inevitablist in its tone. Marx's larger works, like Capital, are longue dur\u00e9e economic histories of the concentration of power into the hands of one class in Europe. Personally, Marx would probably have been deeply dismissive of Maoism--especially for its reliance on the peasantry, a class which Marx viewed as backwards. Marx also believed that Communism would only emerge in countries in the most advanced stages of industrialism--hardly the picture of early twentieth century China.\n\nThe entire transitional stage between capitalism and communism, the stage which the PRC and USSR hypothetically occupied, is often called the \u201cdictatorship of the proletariat\"; Marx says almost nothing about this stage--the theory of a transitional period was largely developed and popularized by Lenin and other Bolshevik thinkers.\n\nMaoism is, frankly, a fairly crude implementation of Marxist (really Marxism-Leninism) theory. Mao does not seem to have been a particularly heavy-hitting ideologist, as opposed to Zhou Enlai. Maoism basically consists of four principles: People's War, New Democracy, Cultural Revolution, Three Spheres (or worlds) theory. Practically, these translate to tight state control of all industry for the purpose of preparation of war against \u201cimperialist\" powers. Maoism departs from other socialist theories by its intense focus on agricultural collectivism and the use of the peasantry, as opposed to the urban working class, as the engine of the revolution.", "Here are some similar questions that have been answered, you'll find much of what you wanted to know in here:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1arigy/what_caused_stalin_to_be_so_unfriendly_to_mao/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16se3w/what_are_the_discernible_differences_between_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "3tqcss", "title": "Good historical movies for ancient/classical times?", "selftext": "They have to be pinpoint accurate historically.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tqcss/good_historical_movies_for_ancientclassical_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx8aszp", "cx8brsc"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["Unfortunately, antiquity is very poorly depicted in television and film. I personally cannot think of any film set in antiquity that accurately depicts it\u2019s setting.  I do apologize for the short answer, but there really are none. Might I ask why you are looking for films that are \u201cpinpoint historically accurate?\u201d In general, film is a rather poor medium to use to understand a historical time period, especially antiquity. As an entertainment medium, plot and character development are normally given precedence over historical accuracy. Your best option are books, and there are numerous scholarly introductory texts for most topics in ancient history. ", "What /u/HatMaster12 says is sadly true - there has never been a \"pinpoint accurate\" film about the ancient world. If you'd like to learn more about what ancient times were like, do as (s)he says and read a book. Broadly speaking, the more recently it was published, the better.\n\nThat said, there are various screen depictions that have at least done some things right. The HBO series *Rome* is rightly praised for its depiction of ancient Rome as a crowded, filthy, noisy, wretched hive covered in obscene graffiti, in which the poor starved in multi-storey hovels while the rich abused their slaves in their walled mansions. The movie *Alexander*, for all its faults, includes a nearly flawless rendition of the Battle of Gaugamela, courtesy of Oxford Professor Robin Lane Fox, who acted as historical advisor. This is by far the most accurate visualisation of an ancient battle in existence.\n\nIn all cases, though, you have to take the bad with the good. Movies are made to entertain, not to satisfy historians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "655v9p", "title": "What was taught at Oxford University during the first few years after it was founded in 1096?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/655v9p/what_was_taught_at_oxford_university_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg7q4ih"], "score": [32], "text": ["[Oxford was not founded in 1096.] (_URL_0_)\n\nThat said, the basic curriculum for the average, bureaucracy-bound medieval university students in the 13th century consisted of the seven liberal arts, the *trivium* plus the *quadrivium*. The trivium was ~~dialectic~~ grammar, logic, rhetoric (essentially, ways of thinking and arguing in Latin); the quadrivium geometry, music theory, astronomy/astrology, arithmetic. Oxford also offered the three major advanced faculties for graduate students: law, theology, medicine. Another major use of medieval universities was to turn out students with a \"license to teach\"--essentially, educating and certifying friars (Franciscans, Dominicans, etc) to preach and teach the laity. They would generally follow their own curriculum."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5d8r64/oxford_university_was_established_c_1096_how_have/da2ph0g/"]]}
{"q_id": "2a0y9b", "title": "I've heard that Russian tanks were immediately sent from the factory to the battlefield with ammo and men inside during WW2. How true is this?", "selftext": "I've also heard that Russia had only on tank factory, so they tore town that factory brick by brick, and rebuilt closer. Is this also true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a0y9b/ive_heard_that_russian_tanks_were_immediately/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciqjw9o"], "score": [5], "text": ["Ok, so here's the list of main Soviet tank producing centers before the war:\n\n* Moscow - plant \u211637 (produced light amphibious tanks - **T-37a**, **T-38**, **T-40**, ~4.500 total)\n\n* Leningrad - plant \u2116174 (in 1931-1941 produced light tanks **T-26**, total production ~10.000, and started light tank **T-50** production in 1941) and Kirovskiy plant (produced medium tanks **T-28** and heavy tanks **KV-1** and **KV-2**)\n\n* Kharkov - plant \u2116 183 - (produced all tanks of **BT** series ~8.000 total, all heavy **T-35** tanks and almost all pre-war medium **T-34** tanks), also have to be mentioned plant \u211675 (produced all diesel engines V-2 - tank engine for **T-34** and **KV** series tanks).\n\nStalingrad Tractor Factory is not mentioned, because it failed to become **real** tank factory before the war (only ~180 T-26 produced in 1933-1940 and ~200 T-34 in 1940-1941)\n\nAs you see, Russia had far more than one tank factory before the war, but wait, it gets more intresting.\n\nSoviets started evacuation of industry, when German troops came close to those cities.\n\nSo:\n\n* Moscow plant \u211637 was evacuated to Sverdlovsk.\n\n* Leningrad plant \u2116174 was evacuated to Omsk, Kirovskiy plant was evacuated in Chelyabinsk\n\n* Kharkov plant \u2116183 was evacuated to Nizhniy Tagil, plant \u211675 - to Chelyabinsk.\n\nDespite the evacuation said factories kept production and repairment of tanks with remaining facilities (for example some T-35 tanks were still repaired in Kharkov, when city was captured by Germans in October 1941).\n\nStalingrad Tractor Factory became important during late 1941-early 1942 (when evacuation of other factories haven't been complete yet) as main production center of T-34's. Leningrad was blocked and it was impossible to send off KV tanks anywhere but to defend Leningrad.\n\nAlso Soviets started production of T-60 tanks (mainly composed from automobile parts) on GAZ car factory in Gorkiy, plus another factory in Gorkiy - \u2116112 started T-34 production in 1942. Uralmash factory in Sverdlovsk started T-34 production, also Moscow plant \u211640 was converted to SPG production.\n\nSo in 1942 there was tank production in:\n\n* Chelyabinsk (Kirovskiy plant + plant \u211675) - **KV** tank series + SPG's.\n\n* Nizhniy Tagil (plant \u2116183) - **T-34** tanks.\n\n* Omsk (plant \u2116174) - **T-34** tanks.\n\n* Sverdlovsk (Uralmash - **T-34** tanks, plant \u211637 - SPG's).\n\n* Stalingrad (Tractor Factory) - **T-34** and **T-60** tanks. Despite German advance, production stopped only in September when Germans broke through to the factory.\n\n* Gorkiy (GAZ - **T-60**, **T-70** tanks and SPG's, plant \u2116112 - **T-34** tanks).\n\n* Moscow (plant \u211640) - SPG's.\n\nI hope it answers the question about \"only one tank factory\", and i'm not even mentioning numerous factories, converted into tank repair plants all over the Russia.\n\nAbout sending tanks from the factories immidiatly to the front line. I hope you understand that before shipment those tanks were properly tested first, each factory had its own shooting range, for example. But sending tanks to the battlefield implies that tank crews patiently waited for these tanks to be produced at the factory, and this is BS.\n\nProbably it was true for Leningrad and Stalingrad - close proximity of the front line kinda suggests it (i'm not even talking about impossibility of sending tanks somewhere else in case of Leningrad and Stalingrad in August-September 1942). It would also be true for any tank-repair facility in close proximity of the front line (it's kinda logical to send tanks in need of repairs there, isn't it?).\n\nNo idea about rebuilding some factory brick to brick though, sorry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15ae3x", "title": "where did Anglo-Saxon churchmen get the red wine they used for the sacraments? ", "selftext": "suppose it's 994 and you're a Norfolk peasant drinking blessed red-wine in church\n\nwhere was it likely produced?\n\nhow did it get to the British isles?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15ae3x/where_did_anglosaxon_churchmen_get_the_red_wine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7knzoj", "c7koaq0"], "score": [2, 21], "text": ["It's a very specific question about a difficult period (not a tonne of sources about this particular aspect, I would guess). So the quality of my response would be doubtful. That being said, it probably doesn't take someone well-read in this period to wager that the wine came from southern France (There was very heavy trading between the Franks and the various kingdoms of Britain) and that it was probably more like sour vinegar than wine, since sour wine stays a lot longer than actual wine. And it's still pretty drinkable, when properly treated (my specialty is the Antiquity and if you want to see what the majority of the Romans drank, just Google 'Posca' - basically wine vinegar-based drink cocktail)", "Actually England had vineyards for quite a long time. The domesday book even noted that there were vineyards in the north. But that wasn't a new thing, they also had vineyards during the roman period.  Monasteries, in particular, had a great deal of wine on hand. \n\nHere are a couple of podcast episodes on the Anglo Saxon drinking culture.\n\n[Anglo Saxon Drinks](_URL_1_) and [Anglo Saxon Drunks](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://thebritishhistorypodcast.com/?p=552", "http://thebritishhistorypodcast.com/?p=533"]]}
{"q_id": "1wydev", "title": "Several times on Reddit, I've seen claims that Johan de Witt was eaten by a mob of angry Dutch. Is there any support in the primary sources for this claim?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wydev/several_times_on_reddit_ive_seen_claims_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf6yc4n"], "score": [3], "text": ["well, there's [this](_URL_0_) contemporary publication of several eye-witness accounts and a letter by a judge. I haven't read the whole thing but it does mention people biting the corpses and cutting off pieces with the intent of eating them (so they said). To say that he was entirely eaten would be exaggeration though (the truth is gruesome enough).\n\n > [...] sneet den Ruaerd een stuck vlees uyt het lyff omtrent sijn heupen, seggende voorgenomen hadt het selve dien avondt met den Chirurgyn Tichelaer noch te gaen braaden ende te eten. (p. 22)\n\nIn (my) translation:\n\n > [...] cut a piece of flesh from the steward's* body, about the hips, saying he planned to roast and eat it that night, with the surgeon Tichelaer.\n\n*Cornelis de Witt, Johan's brother and fellow victim, was steward (i think that's the right translation) of Putten. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.be/books?id=9CdbAAAAQAAJ&amp;pg=PA25&amp;hl=nl&amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;cad=3#v=snippet&amp;q=vlees&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "8qen4d", "title": "During World War II, did the Allies open the western front to prevent the Soviet Union from conquering western Europe?", "selftext": "So I recently finished the series World War II in HD Colour on Netflix. Episode 8 focused on the eastern front in 1943. Something that surprised me was the degree to which the Red Army had achieved dominance over the Wehrmacht by the end of 1943. Notably, the show claimed that the German military command had essentially concluded that they had lost the war against the Soviet Union by the end of the year. \n\n\nI found this interesting because, if true, it would pretty significantly change my interpretation of the Allied invasion of western Europe. The typical narrative is that the Allies invaded France and Italy in 1944 in order to increase the pressure on the Nazis and to relieve the pressure for the Soviet Union on the eastern front. This doesn't really make sense if it was known that the Soviets had essentially defeated the Nazis by the end of 1943. \n\nSo, is it plausible that the Allies invaded western Europe primarily to oppose the Soviets? \n\nParticular in this space I'm curious about are:\n\n- Is it correct that the Red Army had essentially defeated the Wehrmacht by the end of 1943?\n\n- If this was the case, was this widely known? \n\n- What effect did the perception of the intermediate results of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany have on western military planners' goals for western Europe? \n\n- More broadly, to what extent did the western allies (US and UK primarily) treat the Soviet Union as a threat during WW2 and particularly in 1943 and 1944?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qen4d/during_world_war_ii_did_the_allies_open_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0j3qkn"], "score": [5], "text": [" > I found this interesting because, if true, it would pretty significantly change my interpretation of the Allied invasion of western Europe. The typical narrative is that the Allies invaded France and Italy in 1944 in order to increase the pressure on the Nazis and to relieve the pressure for the Soviet Union on the eastern front. This doesn't really make sense if it was known that the Soviets had essentially defeated the Nazis by the end of 1943.\n\nTo say that would change your interpretation would ignore the fact that the Western Allies had been fighting in North Africa (Operation Torch and the ensuing North African campaign) since November 1942, less than a year after the United States had entered the conflict.\n\nAnd it would also ignore the fact that the Allies invaded Sicily in July of 1943, as well as Salerno in September of that same year. The ensuing Italian campaign tied down well over a million men total from both sides.\n\nThus the Allies had been involved in the West in trying to open a second front within a year of the United States entering the war.\n\n*The Second World War in Europe: Second Edition* by S.P. Mackenzie discusses in brief about Operation Sledgehammer - the proposed invasion of Europe in 1942 by the United States which was rejected by the British. The British feared a repeat of Gallipoli of World War I and the weakness of unproven American forces.\n\nKeep in mind too something that we take for granted in the modern age where the United States is a global military power capable of projecting force to any corner of the world: in 1942, the only way to get troops and equipment like tanks and aircraft across the oceans was via transport ships.\n\nTo build up the necessary personnel and equipment - everything from tanks to trucks to oil drums to engineering equipment - in order to sustain a fight on Western Europe that would require *millions* of men would take years to do.\n\nSo the planning and logistics behind such an invasion was already in the works by 1942, before the war on the Eastern Front was decided.\n\nFinally, the Soviet Union didn't have infinite manpower. Keep in mind that on the Eastern Front, the Germans fought all the way to the end in Berlin. \n\nThe Germans, however, were very willing to surrender to the Western Allies. This [AskHistorians thread](_URL_0_) discusses how entire German units fought their way west in order to surrender to the Americans and British.\n\n[This post](_URL_1_) by /u/GTFErinyes has an interesting table at the end:\n\nOver 8,108,983 German prisoners were taken in total by the Western Allies, including 3,050,000 taken before war's end while fighting was still going on in Berlin. That's roughly the same as what the Soviet Union took prisoner in their entire 4 year struggle against Germany.\n\nThat's a *staggering* amount of German forces that willingly surrendered to the Western Allies, and one can only imagine what kind of bloodshed would have happened had the Western Front never been opened and if Germans fought to the last man against the Soviet Union. The Soviets might well have won still, but it would have come at even greater cost and strain on Soviet society."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pv49h/ive_often_heard_the_myth_about_german_troops_at/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vkf9c/in_june_1944_north_africa_had_been_won_the_us_was/cxocmdz/"]]}
{"q_id": "8fuvdi", "title": "During WW2, were there any naval battles in the Atlantic that involved American warships?", "selftext": "Convoy actions don't count, unless that was as far as it went.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fuvdi/during_ww2_were_there_any_naval_battles_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy6p7mq", "dy6vov9", "dy8bmu6"], "score": [6, 3, 2], "text": ["From an [earlier answer of mine](_URL_9_) also look at [/u/fourthmaninaboat's answer to the same question](_URL_10_) for some of the bigger naval actions. \n\nMost of the USN's surface encounters with the European Axis tended to be very small-scale compared to the Pacific battles and often entailed units smaller than destroyers after the North African campaign.  That said, there were some battles that did take place. \n\nA good many of these actions involved German torpedo boats (S-boats, also confusingly termed E-boats in some Anglophone literature and also not to be confused with actual torpedo boats, which tended to be larger than the PT-boat-sized S-boats) or other small craft intercepting Allied naval traffic. The invasion of Southern France did witness two small battles between USN surface units and German ships. The American destroyer *Somers* on 15 August 1944 engaged with two ships the Germans had captured *UJ6081* (the former Italian corvette [*Camoscio*](_URL_4_) ) and *SG21* (the French aviso [*Amiral S\u00e9n\u00e8s*](_URL_11_) and sank them both. An American surface patrol engaged the  Kriegsmarine  two days later off of La Ciotat with the destroyer *Endicott* and two RN gunboats sinking [*UJ6073*](_URL_1_) and [*UJ6082*](_URL_0_). There was a more serious encounter off of Imperia in the Ligurian Sea on 2 October 1944 in which the USN destroyer *Gleaves* tangled with three torpedo boats engaged in offensive mining operations. This night action though was confusing and neither side understood the other's intents; the *Gleaves* captain initially thought fire from the German ships was from shore batteries and the Germans' commander overestimated the size of the Allied enemy they were facing.  \n\nNot all of the American surface actions in European waters were responses to German incursions. There USN was involved in offensive patrols to break up or destroy German sea traffic in France. While RN ships outnumbered USN ones, the Americans were present in these offensive sweeps and interceptions. The Kriegsmarine's 24th Minesweeper flotilla operated in the waters of the Gulf of St. Malo and the German-occupied Channel Islands. The 24th's principle American opponents were PT Squadron 30 and PT Squadron 34 which operated out of recently-captured Cherbourg. These PT boats operated with larger destroyers and destroyer escorts, such as on the  night of 6-7 August 1944 when the DE *Maloy* and PT503, PT500, PT507, PT508, and PT509 tried to intercept German minesweepers off of Jersey. The American attack was not successful and the task force lost [PT509](_URL_8_). Six days later the DE *Borum* and PT500 and PT502 engaged with the Germans again with indecisive results. *Borum* and her PTs took part in a mixed RN force outside of Guernsey on 13-14 August against a small force of four German minesweepers escorting a merchant ship. Again, this battle was indecisive showing the difficulty of engaging in nighttime coastal operations with a veteran force like the 24th. The Channel Islands remained in German hands throughout the rest of the war and its naval forces could still get a few licks in such as when the subchaser [PC-564](_URL_2_) had to flee four minesweepers when its gun jammed and she had to be grounded at Pierre de Herpin 8 March 1945. \n\nPC-564 and PT509 were not the only USN ships lost to German surface attack. One of the more serious battles in the English Channel was the S-boat attack on Exercise Tiger off of Slapton Sands in April 1944. Tiger was part of the training and rehearsal for Overlord and consisted of eight USN LSTs and a RN corvette for   escort. The S-boats attacked the heavily-laden LSTs, sinking two- [*LST-507*](_URL_3_) and [*LST-531*](_URL_6_)- and severely damaging two more. The cost of Slapton Sands was also quite severe with over seven hundred personnel lost and it caused minor concerns over security since some of the dead knew details of Overlord and it was not known if the Germans had picked some up as prisoners. \n\nThe S-boats also engaged with Overlord proper and the Cherbourg flotilla managed to sink a few USN LSTs and some other small craft. These attacks took place at night and were pinpricks to the larger Neptune fleet. Mines and obstacles were a greater threat to the Allied shipping in the region. German shore batteries, which were often manned by Kriegsmarine personnel, were responsible for the loss of the destroyer [USS *Corry*](_URL_5_) off of Utah beach and the same battery likely sunk the patrol craft [PC-1261](_URL_7_), which some historians consider the first Allied warship lost to direct enemy action in Overlord. \n\nOverall, the USN's contributions to the Allied naval effort in European coastal waters was minimal outside of merchant shipping. The USN had some heavy units involved in the main operations, but they supplemented the largely-RN forces which did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Vincent O'Hara estimates of the thirty-eight major engagements (in this case, O'Hara excludes small craft attacks like S-boats), the Americans were present in less than five percent of the engagements, coming behind the Soviet Navy.  But while battles such as Imperia were not nearly on the scale of Leyte Gulf or the Philippine Sea battles, they were real enough for the men who fought them. The battle of Slapton Sands was by some metrics the last significant Axis naval victory of the war; the Kriegsmarine managed to interrupt and Allied training exercise and  extract a high number of dead with no losses of their own. But Slapton Sands remained an exception rather than the rule for the Kriegsmarine's last year and most of their engagements were not as one-sided. ", "During Operation Torch in November 1942, the US fleet escorting the Casablanca, Morocco, landing force (aka Western Task Force) encountered Vichy French ships sortieing from Casablanca to intercept.  The incomplete Vichy French battleship *Jean Bart* was moored in Casablanca harbor and lost a gun duel with the US battleship *Massachusetts*.  The French squadron that sortied lost a light cruiser and several destroyers and submarines to the American task force. Source: Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. II\u2014Operations in North African Waters, October 1942\u2013June 1943. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947.", "As a quick response to act more as a prompt than a full reply, the US Task Force 39/99 and later actions by USS Wasp do play a role in easing the burden on Royal Navy. Late 41 early 42 is a difficult time for the Royal Navy. Prince of Wales and Repulse have just been lost and the Eastern Fleet now has 5 battleships and 2 carriers and is trying to hold on to the Indian Ocean.\n\nCloser to home the German Navy looks like it is trying to muster its capital ship strength in Norway for a concerted effort against the arctic convoys based around the threat of Tirpitz. In the Mediterranean convoys still need to be forced through to Malta.\n\nTF 99 was based around USS Washington and USS Wasp. Placed at the disposal of the British Home Fleet ostensibly to bolster the RN capital units against a major northern sortie at a time when the Royal Navy felt stretched. Later and in addition Wasp ran 2 important convoys of aircraft to Malta. Most of TF 99 rotates back to the US and then onto the Pacific after Coral Sea. But for that short space of time it represents a significant proportional increase in strength at a difficult time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?185061", "https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?17709", "http://www.navsource.org/archives/12/010564.htm", "https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?78321", "https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?138472", "http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/463.htm", "https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?552", "http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/8788.html", "https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?13954", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76o8i5/did_us_navy_surface_vessels_ever_have_major/dohtlpf/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/76o8i5/did_us_navy_surface_vessels_ever_have_major/dofziau/", "http://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/captured/escorts/sg21/index.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8flvbb", "title": "What caused the New England countryside to turn against British authorities in the run up to Lexington and Concord?", "selftext": "Given that the frictions of the immediate run up was caused by mercantile policy (in the standard telling, at least), what caused the agricultural towns to unite with urban merchants?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8flvbb/what_caused_the_new_england_countryside_to_turn/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy4vkt4"], "score": [13], "text": ["As you rightfully point out, the origins of the resistance against the perceived overreach of the British government during the imperial crisis were based in the urban centres of New England where the different acts passed after 1764 had a greater impact. Now, it does need to be said that acts such as the Stamp Act *did* have an impact outside of Boston but not to the same extent. If we look at the simply question *why* anyone would rise up against the crown during the time period in question, we would find a wide variety of motivations in urban centres alone. Urban merchants had their own reasons for resistance against the crown while those of the \"lesser sorts\", whether it be waterfront workers, shoemakers, or apprentices had others that can't be ignored or discounted. Women and other oppressed minorities such as slaves of African or Native American descent had their own agency which they used not only to resist (or support) the crown, but also to resist oppressive structures in their immediate midst. \n\nA good place to start with this inquiry is in the Boston Pamphlet and the creation of committees of correspondence. The Boston Pamphlet comes during a time of increased protest against the crown after two years of moderate hiatus after the Boston Massacre of 1770. For the sake of this answer, we will briefly focus on section B and C of the pamphlet. Section B is an overview of the perceived injustices by the British Parliament towards the people of Massachusetts. Predictably, the first two points in section B makes the claim that Britain is both passing laws and is imposing taxes without the consent of the people of Massachusetts. However, it was point 6 which not only prompted the creation of the Boston Pamphlet but which gives us an insight into what sort of question actually mattered to people outside of Boston: \"Britain has upset the governmental balance of power by usurping the legislature\u2019s authority to pay the salaries of the governor, lieutenant governor, and judges.\" In other words, the British Parliament has prevented the colonial assembly to perform its traditional role of paying the salaries of important officials (and thus making them answerable to the colonial assembly and therefore the people). This, the pamphlet states, \"will, if accomplish'd, complete our Slavery.\" If the colonial assembly doesn't pay the salary for these important officials, including the governor and important judges, what would stop them (the officials) from being held answerable to the people and not take direct orders from Parliament? What would stop them from depriving men from their property, as in point 12 which states that Britain \"has violated colonists\u2019 property rights by granting to others land developed by settlers in the past, and by redefining colonial  boundaries, thus forcing landowners at great inconvenience to recertify their holdings.\"\n\nSection C, \"A Letter of Correspondence to the Other Towns\", suggests the creation of Committees of Correspondence throughout the Massachusetts Bay Province so that Boston could \"communicate with our fellow Sufferers\" about \"this recent Instance of Oppression, as well as the many other Violations of our Rights under which we have groaned for several Years pasts.\" The Boston Pamphlet created a popular response in town meetings throughout the province. Although only men with property could attend these meetings, they made up a big portion of men in rural Massachusetts seeing as many owned farms which were seen as a symbol of self-determination. Hundreds of Massachusetts town answered in the affirmative by creating their own Committees of Correspondence. Lexington for example answered with a statement that stated that they looked \"upon themselves in common with their Brethern and Fellow Subjects throughout the Province, to be greatly Injured and Oppressed in Various Instances by Measures of Government lately adopted.\"\n\n1772 was only the beginning but it established a line of communication between the urban center of Boston with the greater Massachusetts countryside. The crucial year, however, is 1774. Historian Ray Raphael is the scholar who has really explored this particular period out of the perspective of the Massachusetts countryside and I would refer to his book (see sources) for a more in-depth explanation. During the lead-up to the Boston Tea Party, there were already tea boycotts and protests against the unconsented taxation in the Massachusetts countryside. the After the infamous Boston Tea Party in December 1773, the British Parliament introduced a series of acts (The Coercive Acts or, as they were known by some, the Intolerable Acts). Although the Boston Port Act is arguably the most well-known of these, it was the Massachusetts Government Act which would play a vital role in putting the Massachusetts countryside aflame. The Massachusetts Government Act did not only practically revoke the Massachusetts Bay Charter but also deprived the people of Massachusetts from selecting town representatives (who would be selected by the governor and who would also appoint other important officials like judges) and from holding impromptu town meetings (that now required pre-approval by the governor). \n\nDue to the large amount of enfranchised men in the Massachusetts countryside, 90 % in Worcester alone, this meant that a large portion of Massachusetts outside of Boston were effectively disenfranchised. This was not taken lightly by these rural towns. By October 1774, courts throughout the Massachusetts countryside had been forcibly closed down by the town militias. Citizens used intimidation tactics previously used in Boston to force officials to rescind their positions. In the Powder Alarm of September 1774, General Thomas Gage (also governor of Massachusetts) removed the provincial powder that was stored in the Powder House, in modern-day Somerville, in an expedition that triggered alarms throughout Massachusetts and led to the mustering of several militias that all marched towards Boston in belief that the British troops had fired upon colonists. The task of General Gage was to neutralize a rebellion before it happened. His attempt failed. By December 1774, the Massachusetts countryside had taken the initiative away from Boston and were now the leading the resistance against Great Britain. As laid out by many resolves by county conventions throughout Massachusetts, including the more famous Suffolk Resolves, rural Massachusetts were also preparing for war. If Gage once again sent out troops to impose the Coercive Acts on the people of Massachusetts, the men were ready to defend their self-determination through war.\n\n**Primary sources:**\n\n[The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Town Meeting Assembled, 1772 \\[The Boston Pamphlet\\].](_URL_1_)\n\n[The following extraordinary BILLS now pending in Parliament, arrived last Night in Capt. Williamson, in 36 Days from Bristol \\[The Coercive Acts - as first published in Boston\\].](_URL_0_)\n\n**Secondary sources:**\n\nThe Revolutionary Worlds of Lexington and Concord Compared by Mary Babson Fuhrer in *The New England Quarterly*, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 78-118.\n\n*The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord* by Ray Raphael (The New Press, 2002).\n\n*The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War* by J.L. Bell (Westholme Publishing, 2016).\n\n*The Minutemen and Their World* by Robert A. Gross (Hill and Wang, 1976 [2011])\n\n*The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789* by Robert Middlekauff (Oxford University Press, revised 2007 ed.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.masshist.org/revolution/image-viewer.php?item_id=686&amp;img_step=1&amp;tpc=&amp;pid=2&amp;mode=transcript&amp;tpc=&amp;pid=2#page1", "https://www.masshist.org/revolution/doc-viewer.php?item_id=649&amp;old=1&amp;mode=nav"]]}
{"q_id": "w29mw", "title": "How and when did Hinduism start? Does it predate Indus Valley civilization? ", "selftext": "I know it is a fairly broad question but I am interested in understanding the evolution of Indian Civilization. There seem to be a lot of confusion on the origins of early Indian civilization ( Aryan Invasion vs Indigenous Aryans). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w29mw/how_and_when_did_hinduism_start_does_it_predate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c59royi", "c59ulzp"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["\" Until there is sufficient evidence, speculation about the religion of the IVC is largely based on a retrospective view from a much later Hindu perspective.[44]\"\n\n- Wikipedia. \n\n\nIt's mainly Hindu nationalists that like to claim the figure seen in the popular IVC seal as Shiva. If you do not know what I'm talking about I'll source you the image. \n\nWe frankly do not know what the religion of the IVC inhabitants were. ", "In my personal experience, 'Hinduism' is a highly syncretic religion, and you will often see various groups' beliefs represented in a temple. I've seen Mahavir (Jainism), Buddha, Siva and Vishnu all in the same temple. \n\nAs far as predating the IVC, the best answer for now is \"we don't know\". There were some indications that evidence would be found in [Cambay](_URL_0_), but I can't find any recent information about it. \n\nThe 'Aryan Invasion Theory' was a half-baked political idea based on a poor understanding of linguistics. It is the same relationship that \"Social Darwinism\" has to the theory of evolution. There simply is no definitive evidence to say that IVC was overrun by invading 'Aryans' who brought with them a new language and religion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_archaeology_in_the_Gulf_of_Cambay"]]}
{"q_id": "2d7w0s", "title": "Why did Rome never solve the \"Persian Question\" or vice versa?", "selftext": "Here I'm using \"Persian\" to cover the Parthian and Sassanid empires.\n\nThe threat of attack on the eastern part of the empire from Persia seems to have been a major consideration in Roman policy for much of its history, and conversely there were several Roman invasions of Persian territory - apparently Ctesiphon was captured five times by Rome. And yet there was no permanent resolution, and no \"Ctesiphon delenda est\".\n\n I imagine that Rome was simply out of reach of Persia  as it was so far from the borders, but this did not obviously apply to Constantinople, and conversely Ctesiphon could be reached by Roman armies. In some ways it's tempting to compare the situation to the Cold War, with Rome=USA, Constantinople=Western Europe, Russia=Persia, and Vietnam / Korea/ various proxies = Pontus. I'm sure that's wrong in various ways, but I have some understanding of what kept the Cold War mostly cold: what kept the lid on Rome vs Persia and stopped an all out war leaving only one empire or none?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d7w0s/why_did_rome_never_solve_the_persian_question_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjn2bpe", "cjn4t39", "cjn51wp", "cjn80ds", "cjn8rvw"], "score": [9, 9, 3, 15, 8], "text": ["Well, the Eastern Roman Empire did beat the Persians. Emperor Herakleios (610-642 AD) led a campaign against Khosroes II for most of his reign and managed to bring about their surrender and defeat by 627 AD. It's only because of the (first) Arab Spring that we don't hear much about it. The Sassanid/Sassanian Persians that survived Herakleios' invasion were quickly swallowed up into the new Caliphate, and much of the Greek/Roman Levant and Asia Minor followed soon after.\n\nSource: Theophanes, *Anni Mundi, 6095-6305*\n\nEdit: changed 'destroy' to 'beat' after to u/shlin28's correction.", "There aren't any in depth asnwers right now so I will give a short TL;DR.  The actual answer is far more complex and is probably worthy of many a thesis and such.  \n\nEssentially both empires were super powers, and while they fought each other often they usually had much more to gain from peaceful relations that conflict.  They also had other frontiers with less \"civilized\" folk, and so those borders were a lot less stable and required more attention.  It was in their interest for a stable mutual border for trade, not outright conflict.  Most people who tried conquest were glory hungry, like Crassus.  After a while most of the leaders of the empires figured out peace would work out in their interest and for a long period of time all of the fighting between the two states was boiled down in proxy wars essentially in Armenia and other buffer states in the region.  Full scale war for minor disagreements was too costly and both states developped complex, often friendly relationships.  One example is that one particular Sassinid king asked the roman emperor to foster and adopt his heir to protect him from palace intrigue.  It sparked a diplomatic incident when it became apparent that this boy, since the roman emperor was heirless, stood to inherit both empires.  \n\nThis subject is infinitely more complex than I made it out to be, especially considering that almost all of our sources are roman.  What the persians may have written, has almost totally been lost to time.  I welcome someone who is more versed in the subject to expand on what I wrote, and possibly see if they can answer a very specific question I have that my prof couldn't.\n\n", "Yes, the capital was in Ctesiphon. But that was not the center of the Sasanian and Parthian states, which reached eastward to the Oxus basin. Which along with Qadtard's comment answers a great deal of your question-it would have been absurdly difficult and costly for Rome to conquer and hold as large a landmass as the Sasanian Empire, and ditto for the Sasanian Empire. For instance, I'm not sure that any of the major Sasanian cities on the Iranian plateau like Firuzabad, Bishapur, or Ishtakar, were serious candidates for Roman attack.", "They did. In 63 CE the emperor Nero and shahanshah Vologases after an indecisive war in Armenia hammered out an agreement by which the Parthians would select the king of Armenia and the Romans would crown him. This was an acceptable solution to all, as it maintained the Roman fiction of universal monarchy while tacitly acknowledging the closer relations between Armenia and Persia. Nero had correctly recognized that the earlier settlement, in which Rome had a much more direct role in appointing Armenia's ruler, was both pointless to Rome's true interests (ie, maintaining the fiction of universal monarchy) and detrimental to the eastern border, as Armenia had real practical importance for Parthia and, all else being equal, the Armenians rather liked their Iranian brethren more.\n\nThis arrangement worked fine for half a century until the reign of the aggressively expansionist emperor Trajan. technically, the agreement was broken by the Parthians, but I hold with those who think they did so because they saw the writing on the wall and hoped by shoring up Armenia they could force a repeat of Nero's war. That did not happen, but the rather anticlimactic war was followed by Roman mismanagement of the peace, followed by revolt in Assyria and a broader Jewish revolt. The momentum of Roman conquest was then utterly ended by Trajan's death.\n\nIn short, Nero and Vologases had hashed out a perfectly acceptable agreement that was ended through Trajan's aggression.", "I know a bit about wars from the sixth century onwards, so I'll focus my answer on this period, though it might not apply to earlier eras!\n\nAside from two brief periods of contention, the two empires were at peace in the fifth century, mostly because they had other threats to deal with - the Romans had to deal with internal conflict and the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, whilst the Sassanids dealt with the Hephthalite Huns, which intervened regularly in Persian politics, killing one Shah and imposing another, Kavadh, on the throne twice. They played a critical role in the next period of conflict, as it was provoked in 502 by Kavadh to get the fund necessary to pay off his Hephthalite sponsors. Many cities did indeed pay off the Persians rather than fight them to the bitter end, as the Roman response was rather weak. Later, there was a period of stalemate once the Romans got their act together, so peace was made. There was no need for further warfare, as Kavadh got the money he wanted from the Romans.\n\nKavadh re-opened the war in 530 for several reasons - allegedly, the Emperor Justin I refused to adopt Kavadh's son (in order to ensure that he will actually succeed his father), whilst tensions were also high between their many client states, as the king of the Iberians had converted to Christianity following the example of Lazica, both kingdoms in the strategically important Caucasus mountains. Justinian had also resorted to building forts on the frontiers, which was prohibited, so that must have annoyed the Persians too. Hostilities officially began in 530 and the fighting was on a much bigger scale, with proxies such as Huns in the north and Ethiopians in the south (who invaded the Arabian Peninsula) playing important roles in tying down the other empires' clients. Again however, local grievances were at the heart of the conflict - both sides wanted to make sure their interests were protected on their borders. To destroy the other empire was unrealistic and probably not even considered. Like before, there were major Roman victories (Dara in 530) and defeats (Callinicum the following year), though peace was hastened because Kavadh died in 531, which placed his son Khusro I on the throne. Khusro had his brothers to deal with and was an unproven ruler, so a treaty was quickly signed - the Eternal Peace of 532. Cash payments were made to the Persians and status quo restored, suggesting that the Persian situation wasn't that weak after all. The Romans were probably not strong enough to push any further into Persia anyway.\n\nKhusro I launched a sudden invasion of Roman territories in 540, resulting in the Sack of Antioch, an act that sent shockwaves across the empire. There were many reasons for this, including entreaties from Goths in Italy, who were facing defeat at the hand of Justinian and sent an embassy to the east to ask for Persian help. More likely though it was due to general Roman weakness in the area, as Justinian devoted his efforts to his western reconquests. Khusro proved to be an able ruler and centralised the Sassanian administration. According to one of my tutors, it was also a tradition for Persian Shahs to wage military campaigns to demonstrate their strength, so after defeating his internal enemies, Khusro saw a chance to strike at the Roman Near East to demonstrate just that. After his initial successes though, the conflict became a localised war in the north rather than in Syria/Mesopotamia, where truces were repeatedly signed. By 562, both sides were ready for peace, but again the terms were close to the status quo - the Lazis were placed in the Roman sphere of influence again, and both empires' clients were restricted from further warfare and trade. It was an inconclusive end to the war, but at least both sides were satisfied - Justinian was a tired old man by this stage, whilst Khusro was a highly effective ruler and I think he recognised that fighting over Lazica was pointless when he could achieve his goals in peace as well - the Lazis had switched loyalties repeatedly over the past few decades, so there was no reason why they wouldn't do so again (and they did).\n\nThen came Justin II, who decided to back Armenian rebels (against Persia) out of Christian solidarity in 572, provoking a war that lasted until 591. Fighting was mostly restricted to Armenia/the Caucasus, so only a few major gains were made on either side. Stalemate however was broken when a Persian general overthrew the rightful Shah Khusro II, who fled to Emperor Maurice for protection. Khusro II was restored with Maurice's help, and in return Maurice received the bulk of Armenia and the restoration of important border forts. Then followed a period of co-operation, since Maurice and Khusro were on friendly terms with each other, demonstrating how useful co-operation can be for both empires, particularly in oppressing those pesky Armenians.\n\nMaurice's execution by the the usurper Phocas in 602 however changed things, as it provided an excuse for the ambitious Khusro to expand his empire. The course of the war is described in my comment [here](_URL_0_), but I have to emphasise how this war changed everything. Unlike before, Khusro made massive territorial gains and perhaps even thought it possible to fully consolidate them into his empire. It became realistic for the Persians to actually destroy the Roman Empire, since the Romans had lost its richest provinces. Allegedly, Khusro rejected several generous peace overtures from the Romans, including one that effectively made it a vassal-state of the Persians. However, this was not to be, thanks to Heraclius' miraculous victories in 626-8, but it was probably the only war between the Romans and the Sasanians that even had the possibility of ending one empire. The cost was however ruinously high, as both empires exhausted themselves and left them open for the armies of Islam.\n\nSo why were the Romans and Persians unwilling to destroy each other? I think the simple answer is that it just wasn't possible. From our sources, both sides recognised each other' status as one of the premier empires of the world (though obviously they thought of themselves as the best and most important). Their embassy system was surprisingly complex and indicated that if there was a dispute, there was a recognised system to deal with it. Both empires also had plenty of other issues to deal with, so often it was easier to get their clients to do the fighting for them, which in turn prioritised the clients' need - Arab raids was an often cited cause for conflict, since they continued to raid each other even whilst their overlords were trying to make peace. Great victories helped to assert superiority, such as under Maurice and Heraclius, but it was never one-sided enough to dismantle the other empire. Instead, these emperors focused on forging settlements the Romans can live with, ones that will give them the strategic advantage in case war breaks out again.\n\nI don't think I answered the question fully, so feel free to ask any follow-up questions that you have :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d7w0s/why_did_rome_never_solve_the_persian_question_or/cjn63ni"]]}
{"q_id": "3oadr2", "title": "Arabic in Medieval Europe, how common was it and how did people learn it?", "selftext": "During the middle ages in Europe, how common was for Christians to know Arabic? Who would know Arabic; was it only diplomats travelling to the Middle east or also common or learned folk? \nAdditionally, how would one learn it? I know that there were prominent Arab communities in Sicily and Spain and that they remained also after the Reconquista so I'm assuming that one could learn Arabic though these communities. Is that factual?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3oadr2/arabic_in_medieval_europe_how_common_was_it_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvvm1io"], "score": [4], "text": ["tl;dr - Overall, very rare.\n\nThe most important factor to keep in mind is *reason to learn*. For the vast, vast majority of medieval Christians, there was simply no reason to learn Arabic. They might know \"pagan\" Saracens existed, but that would be about it.\n\nAs you mention, OP, there were a few cases where Latin Christians would indeed have exposure to the Arabic-speaking world. The biggest group is probably not diplomats but *merchants*. There were European (mainly Italian) expat merchant communities in quite a few Mediterranean ports--Tunis, Cairo and Alexandria have been the focus of important scholarly work in the last few years. Merchants would likely (almost certainly) not have had formal instruction in Arabic, but it's reasonable to assume they learned enough to get along.\n\nOne case I'm *not* familiar with is the Crusader states in the Near East of the high Middle Ages. There is not a ton of evidence for mixing among the very small Latin populations with the original residents. But again, practicality may have dictated that people learn a few phrases of each other's language. Robert of Ketton was an English scholar who traveled *extensively* through the Near East, learning Arabic quite well along the way. He would eventually settle in Spain and translate the Qur'an into Latin around 1143.\n\nAs for formal instruction, there *were* a couple instances! You mention the Muslim communities on Sicily. It's true that some did remain after the Norman conquest, and indeed, the Normans enjoyed the extra taxes they could levy and didn't try to convert the Muslim population en masse. However, on one level they practiced a policy that led to the gradual isolation of the Muslim community, its eventual mass deportation to a colony on the Italian mainland, and their eventual wholesale expulsion. Alex Metcalfe, probably the foremost scholar on Islamic Sicily, speculates that there were a few bilingual Arabic-Romance communities, but (a) says the evidence is inconclusive and (b) says there is no evidence for what *kind* of bilingualism--meaning, people used one language daily but knew a few phrases in another; people moved in between languages regularly; etc.\n\nThe formal opportunity, though, came at the Norman royal court.\n\nIn the 12th century, the Norman administration in Sicily actually adopted Arabic as a prestige language! They were *very* plugged into the trans-Mediterranean world, drawing a lot more of their influence on governance/bureaucracy from Fatamid Egypt than from their Latin counterparts (twelfth century Europe is juuuust figuring out the business of governing instead of violent marauding). The Norman administration issued bilingual charters, with Arabic used as a show of power locally and also for practical purposes in diplomatic communications. Along with governance, the Norman court was also the site of major scholarly efforts at translating Arabic original and ancient Greek survival texts into Latin. Yes, there were Muslim scholars as well as Christians working at court, fluent in Latin as well as Arabic and probably a handful of vernaculars. /u/caffarelli - many of these \"palace Saracens\" were eunuchs!\n\nAt the same time the Normans were encouraging scholarly efforts at translation in Sicily, the courts of Iberia were fostering the same intellectual life. So you had Latin Christians learning Arabic formally there, too. There are a few hints of formal *studia arabica* (Arabic schools) established. The traditional modern understanding is that these were intended to teach future missionaries Arabic for conversion efforts, but more recent work has sort of undermined that idea--the Dominican and some Franciscan friars in North Africa, for example, were mainly there to minister to the expat European populations, not to convert the local Muslim residents. So if the studia arabica were just meant for people who would be working on translating texts, they'd have even more limited access.\n\nOverall, there were a few formal opportunities for a very few, very educated, very elite Latin Christians to learn Latin. In the Mediterranean zone, exposure to Muslim communities may well have allowed more people the chance to pick up anywhere from a few phrases to practical bilingualism, maybe the equivalent of an English-speaking American with a telenovela addiction. International merchants and dedicated travelers (...mainly merchants, a few missionaries), still a pretty insignificant number overall, would likely have known enough Arabic to get by. But for the average European Christian, especially outside the Mediterranean zone, there was neither the opportunity nor the reason to learn Arabic.\n\nSources of Note: Alex Metcalfe, *The Muslims of Medieval Italy*; Jeremy Johns, *Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan*; Georg Christ, *Trading Conflicts. Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Officials in Late Medieval Alexandria*; Robin Vose, *Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ip5d7", "title": "Did Roman gladiators really promote products from the arena?", "selftext": "There was a mention in a post about the movie Gladiator that said they left such promotions out for fear of it appearing anachronistic, but the link said only that.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ip5d7/did_roman_gladiators_really_promote_products_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d307qwt"], "score": [11], "text": ["I'm not aware of any reference in any ancient source to this sort of thing, although I won't rule it out completely. But let's have a look at where the Wikipedia article on the film Gladiator, which is the linked source to the TIL post, gets its information. Ah yes, that reliable historical source, [IGN](_URL_0_):\n\n >  There's another historical reference that didn't make the transition from the written word to the big screen, and I can see why. In the script, Maximus did a product endorsement for Olive Oil in the ancient Roman City and had his name plastered on billboards across Italy, but this might not be as far off as you may think. Today, in our sophisticated society that has seemingly evolved so far, we find ourselves surrounded by famous people pushing products, and this is actually how it all began. Although now we find ourselves listening to Michael Jordan telling us what shoes to buy and Grant Hill suggesting what we drink, it's the same principle, and it all started way back when. \n\nThis doesn't actually say anything at all. No ancient source is mentioned, it just insists \"this is actually how it all began.\" The idea that a gladiator would promote olive oil seems very dubious to me, because olive oil was such a staple in the classical Mediterranean. It was used for food, medicine, bathing, and lighting, and it has therefore been estimated that each inhabitant of Rome would get through at least 20 litres of the stuff per year, probably more. In the Severan period, shortly after when the film Gladiator is set, oil was added to the state dole, so that any citizen could now claim it for free. Perhaps the article means that gladiators would promote a specific \"brand\" of olive oil, but brands didn't exist in the same way as they do today. Amphorae might be stamped with the location from where the oil came, but there's no indication that the producers went out of their way to promote their own produce as better than the rest.\n\nOf course, it's dangerous to argue from silence. Just because there is (apparently) no evidence that gladiators promoted products, this does not prove it didn't happen. But I remain sceptical, largely because commercial advertisement in general doesn't seem to have been much of \"a thing\" in ancient Rome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://uk.ign.com/articles/2000/02/10/not-such-a-wonderful-life-a-look-at-history-in-gladiator"]]}
{"q_id": "ft05r4", "title": "AITA for leading my people to a new land, and then setting myself and my family up as de facto gentry?", "selftext": "Please understand, this situation was none of my making. I took the hand I was dealt and made the most of it.   \n\n\nI was born a gentleman of my clan, a certain class, as you understand. In the '45, we stood with the Prince and fought for the Stuart cause, and for our rights as Catholics. My ceann-cinnidh, the chief of my people, was a captain and held in great esteem. In his later years, it is true he got himself into some questionable business, but by then it really was enough. My cousin Scotus and I burned his papers, and enough may be said of that.   \n\n\nBut this is where things got bad. His son, his successor, had high tastes and wanted to live like they do in London or on the continent. He mortgaged his holdings to the hilt to compete with these southern grandees. Then he makes that MY problem--my problem and that of the other clan gentlemen. He raised our cash rents so high--all while refusing in-kind--that there is no other choice but to sell our cattle.   \n\n\nOr so he thought. My brothers, John of Leek and Allen of Collachie and I, got together with our cousin John Scotus and several other gentlement and found another way.  We sold up. Our cattle, our other livestock, and our land, even though there was more than a century left on the tack! It was time to escape the harsh yoke of our chief and start fresh in the new world. We were gentlemen and veteran soldiers all, with money to our names. We convinced many of our tenants and subtenants to follow us as well, and booked passage to New York.   \n\n\nWe were happy there for a time, but the people of New York are ungrateful and rebellious and they turned against British rule. We had no choice but to take arms against them and defend our new land. I served in Johnson's Regiment, and proud to say I served as prisoner to the so-called General Schuyler, along with my brothers. After our release, we had the idea to go North, where we were promised new land in a peaceful corner of Upper Canada that is as yet unsettled. Land to clear, a township to found, or perhaps several.   \n\n\nSurely, after all I've been through--after all WE'VE been through, we are entitled to this land. Perhaps we recreate the Highland structures we left behind, but it's not like how it was in the old country. I've seen my nephews rise to high position here, and have taken back my proper place among the elite. We're not exactly a Family Compact, but we know all the right people. We look after our own--even helping other families from Glengarry to settle here. We look after our own, as it should be. We settlers could never be the assholes.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ft05r4/aita_for_leading_my_people_to_a_new_land_and_then/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fm562fv", "fm56rmh", "fm5981o"], "score": [6, 6, 10], "text": ["NTA. You fought for that land, its only right that you get to enjoy it! What do those peasants expect from you!?", "ESH. Obviously your chief's son is TA for refusing to accept cattle as taxes, but my goodness, settlers are *always* TA as well. Props to you and your nephews for your efforts in rising in society, though!", "100% YTA. Just thought you could roll up on someone elses land and claim your in charge eh??! What about the will of the people! At the very least you could have given them a tax breaks."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fc29sf", "title": "What is the most comprehensive, unbiased world history textbook you know of?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fc29sf/what_is_the_most_comprehensive_unbiased_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj8vox8", "fj91sel", "fj9pe9q"], "score": [6, 11, 2], "text": ["Not a textbook, but The Human Story by James C. Davis gives a good, comprehensive overview. I refer to it when I'm trying to quickly make cross-cultural connections. But I'm teaching middle schoolers, and I'm not sure what level of research you're trying to accomplish. The Human Story: Our History, from the Stone Age to Today _URL_0_", "While I'm interested to see what people recommend, you should recognize the challenges of the terms \"comprehensive\" and \"unbiased\" when it comes to something as massive as world history. Contrary to how many people think about history, it is not a list of sequential events liked by a web of cause-and-effect connections.\n\nThe challenge of writing a \"comprehensive\" history is whose standard of comprehensive would you be using? At what point does the discussion of a particular group's experiences get to check the box of being \"comprehensive\"?\n\nFor example, does a comprehensive history of the US begin with the revolutionary war? Or does it begin with the first permanent European settlement? Or does it begin with Columbus reaching the New World? Or does it begin with the Native Americans who lives in what would be the United States for thousands of years before the modern country existed?\n\nFor another example, whose experiences should be emphasized in this \"comprehensive\" historical account? To continue with US history, how much time should we spend on the experiences of different groups at different periods? At what point have we talked enough about the experiences of Native Americans, individuals of African descent (both slave and free), the white aristocratic class, the white working class, British loyalists, men/women, and every else inbetween to say that we have written a complete account of Charleston, Virginia, between 1750-1800?\n\nNow expand that out to the entire world for the entirety of human history.\n\nThis discussion of what to include in a \"comprehensive source\" leads us to the second quality you are asking for: a \"comprehensive\" source that is also \"unbiased\". It's a mistake to think there is a single history book anywhere in the world that is \"unbiased\". Every single text is influenced by the personal perspectives and biases of its author and the context in which it is created. All other things being equal, the writer at some point had to make a decision about whether to include X or Y in their writing, and their process for making that decision is influenced by what they see as important, i.e. their biases.\n\nTo refer to my Charleston example from above, the decision the author makes about which of those experiences to emphasize is the result of their personal biases and the way in which they interpret \"significance\".\n\nHistorical theory is a real thing. Do you subscribe to a Marxist view of history, i.e. (to simplify) that it is a series of conflicts between the haves and the have nots? Do you subscribe to Great Man history, i.e. that history is the result of decisions made by particular people in positions of power? How do you study a colonized people when the majority of written records were created *after* the colonial power arrived by the colonizers themselves? These questions need to be dealt with by the historian when they attempt to weave cohesive narratives.\n\nOf course, bias in the way you're thinking of it does exist: just look at the inherent tension between some Soviet and contemporary American narratives of the Cold War; they read as propaganda rather than an exercise in \"unbiased\" narrative construction. So there are \"degrees\" of bias to be on the look out for.\n\nAs such, good historical investigation does not seek out \"unbiased\" souces (since they don't exist in the way most people envision), but rather recognizes the varieties of bias that exist, identify which are present in a given text, and work to reconcile the information and perspectives with other collected sources.\n\nSo it will be interesting to see what recommendations you get. You'll probably have more luck if you ask for histories of particular times and places than a recommendation based on the criteria you've currently set for yourself. In which case, you should justcheck the recommended reading list on this sub, as that information is already collected.\n\nGood luck with your project.", "This submission has been removed because it violates the [rule on poll-type questions](_URL_1_). These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the \"most\", the \"worst\", or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers.  For further information, please consult [this Roundtable discussion](_URL_0_).\n\nFor questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060516208/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_nUixEbP8STNJG"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48hjn0/rules_roundtable_6_the_no_polltype_questions_rule/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22poll.22-type_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "1yzshn", "title": "How well and what style of swimming did Europeans have in the Medieval periods?", "selftext": "I've been told that the front-crawl was a Native American way of swimming, which Europeans adopted. Apparently, the Europeans of this time used the breast-stroke, but this would've been c. the late 1500s I guess.\n\nBut what about 500 years before that? I would think Vikings or just sailors in general knew to swim, but how would they do so?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yzshn/how_well_and_what_style_of_swimming_did_europeans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfpihch", "cfpwd2o"], "score": [17, 3], "text": ["This is tangential, but it is clear from a copy of Bellisfortis included in Hans Talhoffer's 1459 manuscript on combat arts that human bouyancy was a subject of study; _URL_0_ Notably, an inner tube of stitched leather filled with air.", "Barbara Hanawalt's book *The Ties that Bound* uses a lot of legal documents, especially coroners rolls, to describe peasant life in Medieval England. According to this book, deaths from drowning were relatively common and she infers that most peasants were not able to swim. There are records of some dying in roadside ditches and fishing ponds, which seems to confirm her view. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ms.Thott.290.2%C2%BA_014v.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "967ken", "title": "Why does WWII combat footage seem \u201ctame\u201d compared to reality?", "selftext": "I was up late last night watching combat footage and documentaries from both the Pacific and the European theaters and maybe I am the only one that has this opinion.  I wonder why the footage seems so tame and not graphic compared to reality. For instance, I feel like the troops in the footage are always a little too calm, I never see the enemy in the same frame and never see who the troops are shooting at, and I never see casualties occur such as soldiers being shot or shelled.  Obviously, there is plenty of footage of the aftermath such as the dead and wounded, but nothing actually during the heat of battle.  The only video that I felt came close to depicting the realities of combat was a scene from Norman Hatch\u2019s documentary \u201cWith the Marines at Tarawa.\u201d  There is a brief clip of a dead corpse getting riddled with machine gun fire which is graphic to watch. After having seen films like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and the Pacific, I would expect there to be more footage similar to those combat scenes rather than what is broadcast to us today.\n\nDid the wartime photographers or the US Military edit out the frames that were too graphic for the public to see?  Did the photographers not roll the camera when things got too hot? Maybe I\u2019m not watching the right videos\u2026 Can anybody explain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/967ken/why_does_wwii_combat_footage_seem_tame_compared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3yxvvz", "e3z0wj0", "e4aytor"], "score": [1339, 104, 2], "text": ["The first thing I'd point out is that \"compared to reality\" is something of a strange baseline to make. I doubt that you are a World War II veteran, and neither am I, as you might suspect, but nevertheless, I would note that technically speaking, *actual* combat footage *is* reality, while \"Saving Private Ryan\" isn't. Now, that isn't to say that old newsreel footage is a closer approximation, by any stretch, but it is to say that using Hollywood films is problematic in several ways. They are striving to capture *authenticity*, and in some ways what feels authentic doesn't need to be what is actually accurate. We're getting more into film theory then history, but something like the opening scene of \"Saving Private Ryan\" is trying to transport us there, and this can mean it needs to be more real than reality. There is a quote attributed to Winston Churchill along the lines of *\"There is no feeling more exhilarating than being shot at without result\"*, which I think is fitting here. If you are *actually there*, all you need is a bullet or two whipping by your ear to know you're being shot at, while a film like 'SPR' needs to do a lot more than that to actually transport the viewer and make them feel like they are on the beach themselves. Again though, none of this is to say what 'reality' is, just more like some opening 'meta' commentary to remind you that you need to consider what 'reality' even means, and that one needs to consider the exigencies and aims of filmmakers in this context. Films can be more real than reality in some ways, and in other ways less.\n\n*So*, that having all been pointed out, there are several factors which come into play here. The first is the censorship during the war. Images of dead Americans, or even those whose wounds were 'disturbing' were tightly controlled both by the government, as well as the press' own self-censorship. In fact, for almost the first two years of the war, the publication of images of dead American soldiers was simply prohibited. There was decided caution in the administration about what impact *grim* images would have on public morale. This view slowly was chipped away at, however. Careful, controlled release of images which included the badly wounded was allowed in 1942, and by the beginning of 1943, the negative side of the policy began to be much more closely evaluated. Images of the real war were quite bloodless, and even images of the fake war mostly lacked it too! The Office of War Information evaluated 62 war films released in 1942 and found that a mere *five* of them actually showed American soldiers being killed! \n\nWhile it might have been implemented out of concern that the images could tank public morale, by this point, committed to the war for over a year, the new concern winning out was that the public was now lacked cognizance of the cost of the conflict. The allied countries, mainly the UK and the USSR, had shown considerably more willingness to release some images acknowledging the dead, and in turn it was decided that the US needed to follow suit and show the public images that \"vividly portray the dangers, horrors, and grimness of War\". Hundreds of photos were sifted over to find a set which could be released, including the American dead, and also the truly gut-wrenching injuries.\n\nFinally, it was in September, 1943, that the first batch of pictures were put out. Incredibly, very few papers were willing to start running them immediately, outright declining, or at least refusing the most gruesome. The most famous, and one given credit generally as \"first\", was one in Life Magazine, who published George Strock's photo of [American dead at Buna Beach](_URL_0_) that most members of the public would be directly exposed to the mortal cost of the conflict on their own soldiery, and even then, it is hard not to see the photo and consider how *tame* it is: a fairly artistic composition if you distance yourself from the object of the camera's gaze, with the three bodies at the edge of the shore, one partially buried int he sand, no obvious wounds, let alone mutilation, nor even pooled blood, which no doubt long washed away. It is a picture of serene death, a carefully chosen one intended to show the people back home the cost of war, but hardly any of the brutality. To underline how big a deal the photo was, a full-page editorial on these \"three units of freedom\" accompanied the image, and Life, which would prove to be one of the most open publications in terms of these images for the remainder of the war, still declined to publish more shocking images such as one showing the mangled remains of a foot blown off.\n\nFor the rest of the war, toleration for these images of sacrifice increased with the media, and also became more encouraged by the government. Public opinion showed to be generally positive, and found that they were some of the most effective propaganda images in making an appeal to the population. Concerns about 'good taste', as well as the impact that seeing such images could have on the families of the fallen, remained a concern through the end of the war, and what was and wasn't released was *always* controlled. Many images of the fallen which were released echoed the 'Buna Beach' photo in obscuring the face, generalizing the fallen instead of singling out one man. By the tail end of the conflict, when more graphic material such as actual mutilations were being in limited material such as the propaganda film \"Two and One-Half Minutes\", which showed among other things, a body with a severed arm, the body was at the least not identifiable, being face down and in shadow. One of the first films which would include any actual combat footage would come out in early 1944, \"[With the Marines at Tarawa](_URL_1_)\", and included images of the dead and wounded, and the men in action too, but nevertheless it, and other similar combat footage, never showed the true extremes that the American dead and wounded at times lived.", "Disclaimer: I'm not a trained Historian, and there may be some obscure research I'm not aware of that demolishes this entire post.  That said, I stand by my answer, certainly as being better than speculation, and hope it meets the high effort guidelines.  It's definitely a high effort post for me.\n\nAnd of course /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov snipes me by 40 minutes haha.  I'd still recommend reading both my post and his, since we did both answer in somewhat different ways.\n____\n\nThat's a really good question, with a whole bunch of ways to answer!  I'll start out with the part that most relates to my formal training, there are a number of statistical biases that influence what footage we have, the biggest one being survivorship bias.  In short, anytime you have a situation where there's a difference in probability in observing an event (which is unconnected to the probability of the event itself occurring), you'll observe more of whatever event is more likely to be observed than you'd expect just from the distribution of the event itself.  And so, survivorship bias causes the under-representation of footage that is more likely to run into some kind of hurdle making it from the camera to your computer screen.  Propaganda footage is going to have a much, much better chance of making it back to the archive than footage from the rear, which is more likely to make it back than footage from the front.  There is so much more that can go wrong that could stop a piece of film from making it from an intense combat area to safety.  \n\nThe next thing that I want to briefly touch on are the cameras in question.  Until the Vietnam era, still cameras weren't terribly easy to lug around, video cameras only more so.  While there absolutely were people crazy enough to do it, as you look farther back in history the fewer and fewer people who both able and willing to take video on the front.  Furthermore, the camera operator can only record so much footage and must make snap prioritizations as to when they actually record a given combat engagement.  Also, it's difficult to see humans that are far away in video just in general, even in modern footage.^[3]  For a contemporary example, [here's](_URL_1_) a picture of US troops crossing a street in Germany after being shot at by a sniper.  This is, without a doubt, a close quarters fight.  But you'll note that the window in the right is pretty much completely black, if there was someone standing just inside, would you be able to tell?  How about the farthest house away from the camera, maybe 25 meters away.  It's tricky to make out some of detail, even at that distance.  Could you spot someone 100 meters away trying not to be seen?  Probably not. \n\nSo, there are only so many cameras taking video, of those only so many are actually at the front and see intense combat that can be filmed, of those they must also choose to try and record the engagement, then that footage has to make it back to safety.  That's already pretty rough. \n\nBut don't worry, it gets worse.  \n\nMost infantry combat takes place at 300 meters and in.^[1][2]  Even still, it's hard to see people at that extreme end of that distance, especially if they don't want be seen.  Shooting and hitting a human sized target at 300 meters is difficult for your average soldier to do in calm conditions on the training range, with a known distance target, and a rifle that's far less punishing than WWII era rifles.^[2]  In battlefield conditions, where your enemies are taking cover and shooting back at you, your heart is racing, and your officer is shouting, and your really aren't quite sure exactly your enemy is, you aren't going to be incredibly accurate.  So to answer that part of your question, most of the time when soldiers are shooting, they're trying to suppress the enemy, not pick off a single person they've identified and drawn a bead on.  And of course as I mentioned before, at typical engagement ranges it's unlikely that the camera will be able to easily get both the shooter and enemy in the same frame, even in close combat.  And of course, unless someone is doing something really, really wrong, any casualties caught on film will be pretty much purely be luck.\n\nFinally, I'd like to mention that Hollywood style intense combat was and is rare.  Most battles were certainly intense, but never as fast paced as one may think.  As an example, the following are a few excerpts of a Soviet countercounterattack during a Finnish counterattack on 21 December 1939, from the war journal of the 2nd Sissi Ranger Battalion (the Finnish unit present). ^[4]\n\n > 16:45 following message sent to Group Tavlvela: At 10:00 am a strong and accurate artillery barrage from the enemy began.... After this, the enemy started a strong attack... A flanking attack to the right by our vanguard company (aside, somewhere around 100 men)  forced the enemy to halt for half an hour. \n\n > At 13:30 we received an alarm... that a large enemy formation was advancing [on the depot from which this message came from]... The depot only held light sentries at the time... \n\nThe journal goes on to describe the Finnish response, engaging the Soviet force and pushing them back.  The excerpt ends with \n\n > 19:50 ...Enemy suffered around 50 dead, our own losses for the day are 2 dead and 14 wounded.\n\nAnd this is on a relatively mobile front, over the course of an entire day.  While it certainly does get far more intense than this, such a battle isn't unusual. \n\n___\n\nWhen you consider all these factors (and I'm sure there are more I'm not aware of, such as the possibility of censorship), it's not all that surprising that there isn't much high quality, intense footage from the Second World War.  Hope that answers your question!\n\n___\n\n[1]: [This](_URL_0_)^pdf ^warning! translation of a Soviet small arms intelligence report.  Specifically, look at the \"Small Arms of the Soviet Army\" (pdf page 5), where the 400-600m combat range is cited as being the \"most critical ranges of fire\".  The Soviets have a slightly different way of looking at firearm roles than us Westerners, which could a post in and of itself, but suffice to say that this is the maximum distance they expect their troops to just spot an enemy *in the fields of Ukraine*.\n\n[2] [This](_URL_2_)^pdf ^warning! extremely interesting US Army analysis of the M16A2.  Page 9-11, justifying the Army's interest in ranges inside of 300 meters pretty much exclusively.\n\n[3] /r/CombatFootage, see for yourself...\n\n[4] Finland at War: The Winter War 1939-40 pg. 124", "I'm not a historian - and you've gotten an excellent answer on that front - but I'd like to answer from a filmmaking perspective, as well, as I am a filmmaker.  \n\nWhen you're making a movie, you can put the camera anywhere. There's a beat in SPR where a soldier gets dinged in the helmet by a bullet, takes off his helmet to gape at the close call, and then gets shot in the forehead.  Now, this is probably a bit of dramatic license, but even if this really happened, the camera would never be in that location.  To get that shot you'd have to be in front of the front line, looking back at your own troops, completely exposed to enemy fire. Attempting to get it would be suicidal. \n\nThe first guy out of the boat was never the one with the camera.  And the guy with the camera was never choosing to be between the enemy and their own soldiers. \n\nAlso, good filmmaking gets power out of careful choreography. There's another shot in SPR, where Tom Hanks (IIRC) talks to a radio guy, moves to one side and the camera pans with him, and then moves back to the radio guy, whose face has been blown off. Not only does this have the same \"no real cameraman would be in that location\" problem, but the visceral effect of the shot is created through intentional choreography which requires foreknowledge of the fact that the radio guy is going to get it, so you can choreograph Hank's move away from him and then back towards him.  Documentary filmmakers occasionally get happy accidents like that, but it's rare. Narrative directors like Spielberg fill their films with those moments. \n\nMuch of our emotional connection in filmmaking comes from the cut: see the character, see what they're looking at, see their reaction.  Look at how the tension is created in this sequence:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nLook at the number of different camera locations used to create that moment, and notice how some of them (e.g. the closeups of both snipers) could never been in the same war footage. Notice how many shots are in locations where you could never be, even if you had a GoPro (nobody's going to stand in front of a sniper and shove a camera in his face!)  Notice how the camera is right where it needs to be to capture a perfectly elegant blood splatter, and how the timing of the cut helps add to the percussive impact of the hit. Notice how many different camera angles there are of the dying soldier. \n\nWatch a war sequence with the remote control in your hand and pause it after every cut. Notice where the camera is and how it moves in anticipation of what's going to happen. Even if the exact same events were happening in real life and depicted on film, you'd never be able to capture it with that kind of nuance, detail, and immediacy live. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/wwii-buna-beach-george-strock-01.jpg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JolhiCbU_u8"], ["https://www.forgottenweapons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1978-01-17b.pdf", "https://i.imgur.com/0g9S65w.jpg", "http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf"], ["https://youtu.be/QZv550Ofye0?t=139"]]}
{"q_id": "3drm5m", "title": "What was Byzantine Iconoclasm and what was it's effect on the Orthodox church?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3drm5m/what_was_byzantine_iconoclasm_and_what_was_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct82ewb", "ct8mn4g"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Byzantine Iconoclasm was a period in the 8th and 9th centuries when intellectual discourse and political intrigue in the highest ecclesiastical and imperial circles was dominated by debate over whether icons (depictions of biblical scenes and figures that were meant to be venerated) and religious imagery in other artistic media constituted idolatry or served as intercessors to God. \n\nOne of this period's longest lasting effects was on the art historical remnants of the Byzantine Empire, which are relatively scarce in comparison to textual evidence of the grandeur of the empire. The major repercussion of the iconoclastic controversy was that the  authority of the church in Constantinople over other sees became more of a formality than a reality.", "Byzantine Ironclasm was two periods of Byzantine history when essentially there was a huge disagreement over whether or not it was ok for Religious Images to be used. Emperor Leo III actually for a time banned the use of imagery, as did a few of his successors. It caused a bigger East-West split, as well as the loss of Byzantine Italian territory. The early rise of Ironclasm can be attributed to the rise of Islam, which also viewed such imagery abhorrently. \n\nSources: A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8jnnss", "title": "What was the FBI\u2019s plan when they sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr instructing him to commit suicide? Did they honestly believe he\u2019d do it.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jnnss/what_was_the_fbis_plan_when_they_sent_a_letter_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz1iur0", "dz1msuv"], "score": [149, 1441], "text": ["Why was the link to the letter deleted? ", "It's not every day that I get to answer two questions, one about Israel and the other about MLK, but it turns out I have the sources on this at hand.\n\nThe FBI's main goal was to discredit and shame him, something they had been trying to do for some time. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had sought to discredit King for years with investigations that crossed the line into illegal, but failed to find a way to discredit King. The FBI's head of spying operations, William Sullivan, wrote to Hoover just two days after the March on Washington that:\n\n > We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security...\n\nSullivan was, apparently, the one who wrote the letter to King, seeking to try and make accusations of various indecencies he supposedly had dirt on. Writing as an angry African American, the letter contained accusations that King was a \"great liability to all of us Negroes\", and saying that King was \"finished\". The threat near the end, that King had \"just 34 days\" in which to commit suicide before his \"filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation\", was accompanied by audio recordings made by spying on King's hotel rooms, and were recordings of King talking to women other than his wife.\n\nThe FBI apparently did believe that the threat would lead King to commit suicide, but King rightly suspected that the threat was coming from the FBI, and obviously did not commit suicide. While Hoover loyalists always claimed that Sullivan acted on his own, the complexity of the package's contents, the traces of it in FBI files, and the \"climate of fury\" (according to Taylor Branch's *Pillar of Fire*) all suggest it was an institutional operation, not something Sullivan did on his own.\n\nKing's reaction was notable. Coretta, his wife, read it first, and King himself listened to the tape three times before rushing in his inner circle, for whom he played the tape numerous times. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery, and Bernard Lee \"played the tape over and over\", looking for clues in the wrapping and postmark for where it originated. They all agreed: they believed it came from the FBI. And the FBI knew it had an effect on him. King was recorded saying, for example, that \"they are out to break me\", and he kept word of the package quiet.\n\nKing's friends launched into the fray. They confronted the FBI, discussing malicious leaks and accusing the FBI of malintent. By all accounts, the FBI denied involvement, but still hoped King would be driven to suicide. The House committee, also known as the Stokes Committee, also suggested that it was sent as an institutional operation run by the FBI, but could not confirm it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "27a8d1", "title": "In Game of Thrones, everyone knows The Bear and the maiden fair. Were there any universally popular songs in medieval England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27a8d1/in_game_of_thrones_everyone_knows_the_bear_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chywh1h", "chyx7br", "chz1gti", "chz2qwk", "chz2xs6"], "score": [13, 23, 112, 29, 3], "text": ["Furthermore, were songs like 'The Rains of Castamere' real? As in were songs commissioned to pau tribute to something in particular?", "Related question: isn't it true that they used to recycle a lot of tunes (and put different words to them), and that many national anthems were based off of the tunes old drinking songs?", "In the Continuation of John Fordun's *Scotichronicon* (c. 1440), [Walter Bowers](_URL_0_) notes the popularity of Robin Hood stories among the masses; he may or may not be referring to the rich tradition of Robin Hood ballads in Britain, some of which still survived in oral tradition [last century](_URL_1_). \n\nThere may be some other examples out there that I have never come across, but it's generally difficult to say much before the early modern period. In the last few centuries, there have been songs ubiquitous throughout English-speaking vernacular song cultures in North America and Great Britain (*Barbara Allen*, for instance) \u2013 although I would hesitate to say throughout the English-speaking world. Would this have been the case in the medieval period? Possibly, but I don\u2019t think it likely until the establishment of the broadside ballad trade in the sixteenth century, which provided means of mass distribution. \n\nSimilarly, the representation of vernacular song in A Song of Ice and Fire is absolutely not realistic. GRRM treats songs like we might treat them today -- they have a set tune and a set text, and any deviation from these is in error. In Westeros, an almost entirely oral cultural with no culture of mass print or musical recording, there would be significant variance between different singers' versions, keyed into their own artistry, their source material, and their memory.\n\nWe can see dramatic variations in items from the same song family in the material collected from singers of Anglo-American \"folk\" singers over the last several centuries -- and these traditions have been often mediated through print culture (despite the characterizations of Victorian and post-Victorian scholars), which acts to homogenize texts. But as in medieval England, there\u2019s no broadside trade in the Guttenbergless Westeros. Furthermore, mobile Gipsy and Traveller communities (and their kind) have played key roles in spreading songs in recent centuries \u2013 I\u2019m not sure Westeros has an equivalent of this, either.\n\nWithout these mediating influences, it's not particularly likely that The Bear and the Maiden Fair would be ubiquitous throughout Westeros, *especially* not in a form that would allow someone from the Reach and someone from Winterfell (or even two strangers who only live a town apart) to sing together without first comparing notes.\n", "As always with questions about the Middle Ages, we are limited in what we can say about popular music by the sources available to us (though medievalists are constantly finding new things).  Most obviously, there was not an accurate enough notation for preserving secular music until roughly the 13th century, so we\u2019re at a loss to talk about the popular musical culture earlier than that with any great confidence.\n\nSetting aside that caution, there were clearly popular songs that circulated regionally if not internationally.  The famous 12th-century philosopher-theologian Abelard was as famous for his singing as his thinking.  He seems to have been somewhat of a \u201crock star\u201d in Paris, where he was celebrated for his popular songs, especially love songs, none of which survive.  \n\nThe earliest notated secular song in English is [\u201cSumer is icumen in\u201d] (_URL_11_) (Summer has come) from c. 1250.  [In the manuscript in which it survives] (_URL_0_), it is written above a Latin Easter hymn, with which it shares its melody (which came first is unsettled).  Likewise, the hymn \u201cAngelus ad Virginem\u201d survives in both its [original Latin form] (_URL_1_) and in a [Middle English translation] (_URL_10_).  First composed in c. 1290, perhaps by Franciscans, it was well enough known that Chaucer could reference it in his \u201cPrioress\u2019s Tale\u201d and assume his audience knew it.  (It\u2019s the account of the angel Gabriel\u2019s Annunciation\u201d to Mary of the conception of Jesus.)\n\nProbably many popular songs did what \u201cAngelus ad Virginem\u201d did: take a church melody and adapt it for secular use.  But this was a 2-way street: the composer Guillaume Dufay took the melody of the popular, anonymous  secular song [\u201cL\u2019homme arme\u201d] (_URL_12_) (the armed man) and used it as the foundation for [one of his masses] (_URL_8_), written c. 1450.  Popular songs got preserved locally like the [\u201cCoventry Carol\u201d] (_URL_5_) (still heard at Christmas), first mentioned in 1392 but not preserved until 1529.  There are lots of  [other surviving English carols] (_URL_9_) from the later Middle Ages, including the famous [\u201cAgincourt Carol\u201d] (_URL_3_) that Apocsurvivor mentions.\n\nIt\u2019s safe to assume that minstrels and troubadours, who moved around towns and castles performing, helped spread popular secular music.  Some of these were probably courtly songs, meant only for the upper classes.  An example would be the lament Richard the Lionheart wrote while in captivity pleading for his barons to raise the money to ransom him: [\u201cJa nus hons pris\u201d] (_URL_2_).  There are other well-known secular songs connected with the crusades, such as Guiot de Dijon\u2019s [\u201cChanterai por mon corage\u201d] (_URL_4_). The famous *Carmina burana* manuscript (early 13th century) preserves dozen of [popular songs] (_URL_7_).  And so on, and so on.\n\nCynthia Cyrus has a well-informed online [Introduction to Medieval Music] (_URL_6_) that discusses medieval secular music (and church music too).\n\nEdit: proofreading\n", "There is the Lochamer-Liederbuch, although it is German it is full of popular songs for Lute and voice with recognisable tunes. It might be a good idea to note that many of the tunes that are used in Lutheran hymns were originally popular (sometimes quite saucy) songs. The point of them was to use tunes that everyone would know and thus make it easy for everyone to participate."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bower-continuation-of-scotichronicon", "http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/r_hood.htm"], ["http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/medieval/artmusicliterature/large96674.html", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ith5FF-P9U", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeXBomZACg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW6EhketxYo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOi2Hd49OWE", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmO8cnRkOQ&amp;list=PLsCQ5hYBQ6MNkkxOE8l82nwHlIGNY_JSC&amp;index=12", "http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/music/orbmusic.html#secular", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tCQd1TKsHg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwMEBlBBB4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB5x3dFepn0&amp;list=PLsCQ5hYBQ6MNkkxOE8l82nwHlIGNY_JSC", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyCCQQ94ktQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHNMgDIk1QI"], []]}
{"q_id": "1hqtgq", "title": "How much power did the Queens and Kings in Europe have in the 18th and 19th century when Parliaments were gaining strength?", "selftext": "Was there a radical shift, or was it a gradual erosion and transfer of power from the Royal Family to the Parliaments of Landowners and Nobles?\n\nDisclaimer: I've never formally studied history, so my assumptions about this period of time might also be WAY off. Please correct any assumptions you think I might be incorporating in my question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hqtgq/how_much_power_did_the_queens_and_kings_in_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cax57ap"], "score": [3], "text": ["In England, it varied, really. The story of the 18th century in England is the decline of the powers of the House of Lords and the monarch, but George III took an active interest in playing parliamentary politics and, I think, halted (or at least slowed) said decline for a few decades. \n\nGeorge III was ultimately, a conservative, so, he was in conflict with the more reformist members of the House of Commons for the entirety of his reign. He had his supporters, most notably, [William Pitt \"the Younger\"](_URL_0_) in comparison to more \"radical\" reformists like [Charles Fox](_URL_2_), who George III hated both on a personal and a political level.\n\nSo, to make a very long (and complicated) story short. The monarch in England had not so much direct power anymore, but he could, if clever, wield indirect power through his supporters within parliament. George III was active in politics for most of his life, apart from his bouts of madness (Which led to political crises of their own, such as the [Regency Crisis](_URL_1_))\n\nIt was a very gradual shift, for the most part. There were periods when it shifted radically, most notably, the [Glorious Rebellion of 1688](_URL_6_), which severely limited the powers of the English monarch. But, beyond that, it was gradual changes in Parliament. The House of Commons, throughout the century, slowly began to become more independent of the monarch, even if George III did slow the process throughout his long reign.\n\nThe French Revolution, strangely enough, both accelerated the decline of the monarchy, but also provoked a conservative backlash, too. The revolution encouraged reformists in Britain, at least at first (especially Fox), but once the Terror kicked into full swing and floods of *emigres* came to England, the British (As well as the other monarchies of England) were terrified, and the British feeling about it can most accurately be seen through the writings of [Edmund Burke](_URL_3_), who wrote his [*Reflections on the Revolution in France](_URL_7_) is one of the most important pieces of political writing in the English language, I think, where he lambasted the French revolutionaries for a number of reasons and really set the tone of English conservatism for a good, long while.\n\nI think, though, ultimately, the Revolution did more damage to the monarchy than conservative backlashes against reform could stifle. Parliamentary reform (Such as expanding the franchise, the elimination of \"rotten buroughs\", a written constitution, and so on), was an issue that popped up from time to time throughout the eighteenth century. Supporters, though, were really galvanized by the French Revolution, and I think the powers-that-be were more inclined to give concessions out of fear of the same thing happening at home. So, a number of years later, the British got the [\"Great Reform Act of 1832\"](_URL_4_) which granted a good number of the concessions that reformists wanted. \n\nEngland is a unique case, though. As compared to continental monarchies, such as the pre-Revolutionary French and the various German states, the British monarch was relatively weak and powerless.\n\nIf you are interested in the subject or the period, I would recommend the movie \"The Madness of King George\". It is a great film on its own, and you get to see a good bit of the political wrangling, especially with Pitt the Younger. A personal favorite, too, is [John Wilkes, a prominent radical during the 18th century and an interesting character in general.](_URL_5_)\n\nI don't think I can do the subject justice in such a format as this. There are tons and tons of books written on the subject. Last I remember, there were several rows at my library devoted to the subject. ;) I hope it was coherent, too. I just woke up!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pitt_the_Younger", "http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/constitu/regency.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_James_Fox", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution#Legacy", "http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "5bpfx7", "title": "Why were Charlemagne and the Abbasids able to command huge armies compared to later feudal states in Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bpfx7/why_were_charlemagne_and_the_abbasids_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9qwn0b"], "score": [2], "text": ["Not really an answer, but I'm just wondering where you've got the idea of 'huge' Carolingian armies from? Almost all of what I've read on Carolingian warfare suggests very small army sizes, certainly never really going over 5 figures in terms of manpower. The only scholar who seems to take a different direction is Bernard Bachrach, and his stuff isn't [entirely](_URL_1_) [unproblematic...](_URL_0_)\n\n(Hat-tip to /u/textandtrowel so that the bot doesn't ping me!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://edgyhistorian.blogspot.ie/2015/01/an-old-review-of-bachrach-early.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5aysn0/is_there_any_record_of_middleage_scandinavian_or/d9l90eh/?st=iv9dko9y&amp;sh=4a7718e5"]]}
{"q_id": "1ufb7z", "title": "When and why did New England Puritanism fall out of fashion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ufb7z/when_and_why_did_new_england_puritanism_fall_out/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehpjmo"], "score": [4], "text": ["It was basically driven out of control by commerce and trade. The Pilgrims landed in the New World and immediately decided to set things up how they wanted. They tried to control things with their laws, starting immediately with the Mayflower Compact. For example you had to be a member of their church to be a citizen of Plymouth. There were laws about behavior and certain punishments. This works as long as you don't have rival communities. \n\nRhode Island and Connecticut were founded as refuge communities for people looking for a place to live free of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. Fishing communities in Marblehead, Nantucket, and off the coast of New Hampshire started being created right near the Puritans and were all about trade. Eventually their numbers started growing, along with their wealth and influence and the Puritans lost control. The merger of colonies also hurt their numbers as they had to accept more diverse citizens thanks to the Crown. All of this happened over the course of the 17th century. \n\nPlease see *Conceived in Liberty*, **Vol 1 Part III** *The Founding of New England* which describes the settlement and change in the New England states over the course of the 17th century. It is [freely available](_URL_0_). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20N%20Rothbard/Conceived%20in%20Liberty_Vol_2.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "fcehv6", "title": "Why didn't Hitler invade Iran for Oil instead of the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "Would it not of made more sense to redirect the vast resources from an eastern front to an existing war in Africa with the aim to capture the Iranian oil fields which produced 8 million tons of oil and was vital for the Anglo war effort. It would of resulted in a triple win, direct control over their own supply of oil, denial of a key supply to the allies and change the tide of an active engagement on the African continent.\n\nAfter Germany declared war on the Soviet Union (SU), the SU and UK declared war on Iran defeating the country in days and taking direct control over the oil and the supply route to the SU. so I am making an assumption Germany would of had similar ease in taking Iraq and then Iran.\n\nI hope the question doesn't revert too much to \"Why didn't Hitler redirect the resources to Africa\" so perhaps more simply: **do we know if it was ever a choice between the middle east and the SU and if so why was the SU prioritised?**", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcehv6/why_didnt_hitler_invade_iran_for_oil_instead_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fjav8vk"], "score": [17], "text": ["The short answer would be that the oilfields of Grosny and Maikop, later on Baku were easier accessable than Irans. For this there are two reasons, logistical prakticality and availibilty. \n\nOn the one side the it is the logistical side. We can see in the North African campaign that the Germans were already running on last the reserves. This logistic issues were caused by the Royal Navy dominance of the Medditerreain Sea. Even if the Germans would focus on Middle East they would not have the naval resources to contest British. So the supply situation would be terrible, even worse than the German standard. An option would to go through Turkey. Yet this but Germany in the problem that Turkey might not allow it. They accept the invasion of Greece through Bulgaria but had thier demands and sceptism about the Germans at the borders. So, if the Turks joins axis they have to face Allies (they saw that the axis werent the winning team) and all thier trade, so joing would cost them making it unlikely. If the Turks resited the germans have to fight them through Anatolia and Allies could re-enforce them. Furthermore, Anatolia is hill and mountainous country, not ideal for armoured warfare. If the Germans broke through they had fight further through the middle east to Iran, supplies had to come from Beirut or Palestina, and the infrastructure of the region is worst than that of the soviet union. Taking not away that they had to run thier supplies from Germany over the Balkans, Turkey etc. To supply the front. Than we come the Mountainous region of Iran. Even the British and Soviet with abbanous supplies and logistics system had thier hardships. The Germans haf terrible logistics, not speaking about the lack of material. So, at the end it was not worth the effort extending the fronts to a large extent and weaking thier defense against the soviets in the east and uk/us in the west. Yes, the germans would invade the soviets in this senario but it does not take away that the soviets would invade the germans after 1942/1943. \n\nOn the other side, if they manage it, they would be surrounded by UK territory and airfields given the RAF a field day in targetting German oilsupplies. In theory they could do that too with Maikop and Baku, but the caucasus mountains formed a natural barier that limited its effectiveness.\n\nHowever the bigger issue is that for the Germans, the Soviet were not just another target, they were the big enemy, the large show down of the war. The germans would invade the soviet union, independent of its resources. The invasion was ideologicaly motivated, the lack of resource of the Germans and soviet re-armment forced the Germans to invade earilier. However in the mind of Hitler and rest of the German leadership every thing, every campaign, every invasion had the purpose of making germany ready to invade the soviets. So taking away troops from the east was not an option. Especially as the Germans were already spread thing. Sicily and Normandy, took away little but to much troops from the east weaking the Germans tremendous.  The invasion of the middle east would need a large mount of troop, not only to conquer it, but to hold and defend it. \n\nIt was simple impossible to carry out and even it was successful the costs to hold it to much for thier gains"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3r65bf", "title": "Would it be fair to call the Albigensian crusade a genocide?", "selftext": "History undergrad here, I'm doing a project which includes creating an educational poster on a genocide of my choice. The time period of the module typically ranges from the Armenian Genocide until modern day but after reading \"The perfect heresy\" I've decided that I wanted to go a little outside the box and do a piece on the Cathars and the persecution they faced by the Catholic Church, also a bit of a Francophile so the topic interests me quite a bit more than the other genocides, even if it isn't as well documented. \n\nAs an additional question, are there any books that I can use as source material which address this view point?\n\nThanks in advance guys.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3r65bf/would_it_be_fair_to_call_the_albigensian_crusade/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwlba3f"], "score": [9], "text": ["From a historian's point of view, 'The Perfect Heresy' by Sean O'Shea is considered popular history - and I can see how from that book's spin one could get the idea that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide. But the Crusade really doesn't meet even the loosest definition of the term; it was a war of Christians on other Christians under the claim of 'heresy'. Certainly heresy was persecuted at a mass scale (whether heresy actually existed independent of the Catholic Church's view of what constituted orthodox Christianity in the 13th c is another matter) but I would suggest it was closer to a Red Scare than a Holocaust.\n\nIf you want to pursue this line though, as university-level scholarship goes, O'Shea's book should really be avoided. My [AH wiki page](_URL_1_) has a number of posts on the subject of the 'Cathars' which might give you counter-point for your ideas, and it includes some reading recommendations. This weekend [I wrote extensively about the origins of the medieval inquisition](_URL_0_) which you might find interesting. In terms of the most recent scholarship, you should have a look at R.I. Moore's *The War On Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe* and Mark Gregory Pegg's *A Most Holy War : The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom*. Pegg's book should be interesting to you because he does pursue some questions of cultural difference in the South, mostly in the context of how inquisitor's interpreted heretical activity, but there's no argument even on that foundation for genocide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qyw8y/how_exactly_did_the_papalmedieval_inquisition/cwjh6b6", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/idjet"]]}
{"q_id": "3ve594", "title": "Why is the letter \"S\" so drastically different in 16th and 17th century English? Also, why is there still the \"normal\" s in some words, but the old alteration in others?", "selftext": "I was looking at an opera score on IMSLP [(Julius Caesar by Handel)] (_URL_0_) and noticed that on the first page there is this type which had some of the more \"ancient\" English letter s, and yet the more modern equivalent is also used.\n\nIs there some sort of linguistic difference between the current letter \"s\" and the one shaped kind of like a \"F\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ve594/why_is_the_letter_s_so_drastically_different_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxmsub0"], "score": [5], "text": ["Linguistically speaking, there is an, albeit small, difference between the two different forms of the minuscule S. The long S, '\u017f' is an allographic variant of the grapheme  < s > , which can also be represented as 'S', 's' and so on, depending on language, position and the type of the word. Practically, this makes little difference since they can or could be used pretty interchangeably, depending on language and stylistic considerations. In German, for example, '\u017f' was used for a long time to represent  < s >  unless at the end of a word or a syllable. So it was pretty easy to differentiate Wach\u017ftube from Wachstube (Wach-Stube, guard's office vs. Wachs-tube, wax-tube). Incidentally, this is where the German alphabet got one of its unique glyphs, the '\u00df' from, as a ligature of \u017fs or \u017fz. In English, it was used unless at the end of a word, and sometimes in ligatures such as a\u017fse\u017fs, but the opera score you linked doesn't use the 's' inside of words but only at the end. This is not a 100% rule, as in the beginning the '\u017f' was sometimes used at the end of the word, and by italian printers even later sometimes, but those exceptions are rare. \n\nSuch an allographic difference dependent on the position of the glyph is not unheard of, and any educated European of the time would have known that the minuscule Greek alphabet also makes a distinction between the allographs '\u03c3' and '\u03c2' for *sigma*, the former used word-internally while the latter is used exclusively at the end of a word. \n\nSo where did it come from? Most of our modern alphabets go directly back to the caroligian minuscule, a script that developed out of the earlier Roman cursive forms of handwriting. They gradually developed some elongated forms of the letters with ascenders and descenders. One letter that got elongated in that way was the 'S', which gradually came to resemble a simple, elongated and rather flat angle. [Here](_URL_3_) is an example showing idealized versions of the older (top) and younger (bottom) forms of Roman cursive handwriting, where you can see pretty well how the S became an elongated and barely recognizable version of itself. This development continued in the so-called half-uncial script, which originated in North Africa and was the direct precursor to the carolingian minuscule. [Here](_URL_1_) is an example of blind text comparing the uncial to the half-uncial script; you can see how the uncial, much more oriented on the Roman capital script, keeps the traditional S, while the half-uncial approaches the form used in the carolingian minuscule, the '\u017f'. [This](_URL_0_) is another practical example of the half-uncial script. \n\nThen, you have the [carolingian minuscule](_URL_2_), which uses the long-s. This example actually has the first two lines of the IIII chapter written in an uncial script, so you can see that the practical application left a lot of freedom to the scribe; you can see the long-s in the third line of that chapter 'dum dioceses visitata agebamus', here still used at the end of the word. This is a good example because it also shows where the 's' survived in its more traditional form alongside the carolingian minuscule, and the two were used according to the formula 's' at the end, '\u017f' inside the word from late carolingian and early gothic scripts on, until the 19th and in some cases 20th and even 21st century (especially German 'gothic' Fraktur typefaces, which is where it still survives, as well as in the German '\u00df')."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9/9a/IMSLP279985-PMLP35138-Julius_Caesar__an_Opera__compos_d_by_G_Frederick_Handel.pdf"], "answers_urls": [["http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/109images/Carolingian/Scripts/half_uncial.jpg", "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unziale#/media/File:Lorem_unzial.png", "http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/109images/Carolingian/Scripts/carolingian2.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/CursivasRomanas.png/330px-CursivasRomanas.png"]]}
{"q_id": "16oqh4", "title": "Why is the grade school teacher traditionally a male profession in the UK, and a female one in America?", "selftext": "As an American, this is based on my impression from British books, TV and movies.  Forgive me if this actually wasn't the case.\n\n*Edit: I absolutely understand that these are historical stereotypes that are largely outdated.  My question is why are they stereotypes at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16oqh4/why_is_the_grade_school_teacher_traditionally_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7xx456", "c7xx5px", "c7xyek1", "c7xylqs", "c7xyyg5", "c7xzrm4", "c7y1i44", "c7yef6f"], "score": [16, 46, 3, 18, 6, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["This is an outdated stereotype that may still be true overall in the US but does not necessarily ring true at every school.\n\nPrior to WW2, one of the best jobs an educated woman could get in the US was a school teacher. The size of the draft pushed women into the workforce, but women would still dominate teaching positions for sometime. I'm assuming UK schools have valued the pay of teachers for a long time, and would have made it a competitive job market for both males and females - or at the very least the incentive structure in the UK teacher job market made it just as hard a job to get as any other for women.", "I don't think the British half of the premise is true either. At least not for decades. Not one of my primary school teachers was a man, and I think it's fair to see teaching in general is seen a more female than male profession in the UK today (to the extent that these type of stereotypes still have any currency).", "I know this has been said, but my own experience (and on a quick survey those of my four housemates from disparate parts of the UK) is that male priumary school teachers are incredibly rare.\n\nI also don't think this is a stereotype I've detected myself in British books, TV or films... So I would probably dispute that they were stereotypes held widely in Britain. \n\nWere you thinking of any particular films or books?", "Perhaps the stereotype about Britain is from movies and tv shows about all-boys schools?", "It's not, when I was at school studying politics our teacher showed us the figures for that year, female primary school teachers outweigh men by about 7 to 1.", "I think American stereotypes of the UK education system general present a more accurate view of private education (payed for by the parents rather than the tax payer). These are mostly single sex schools that usually have a majority male staff for boys schools and majority female staff for girls. I am a state educated English however so I could be wrong. If you look at American films the amount of English people shown studying/graduating at Oxford is indicative of the fact that only 5% of Oxford students are state rather than privately educated.", "Very new here. This is from an undergrad paper I wrote.\nIn the beginning of the 1870\u2019s, women were still not considered for jobs that stretched out of their \u201csphere of influence.\u201d At this point in time, a women\u2019s \u201csphere of influence\u201d revolved around the home life. One job that was available to women, outside of some factory work, was that of teaching. Teaching was deemed acceptable for women because it was \u201c\u2026consistent with a women\u2019s genteel and nurturing temperament.\u201d   The low pay that teachers were awarded discouraged most males from that line of work because a family could not be raised on such a minimal amount of money. And so, single women made up a great portion of the school system in New Jersey. The fact that women made up most of the teachers in New Jersey was quite a happy coincidence. \u201cThe feminization of teaching had important consequences for the development of public education. For instance, the availability at bargain rates of a large supply of women teachers made possible the rapid spread of tax-supported secondary education.\u201d   The state board of education had very progressive line of thinking in regards of women teachers. In short, they loved female teachers. For the amount of money that a teaching position commanded, the board believed they could find a first-class female for the job whereas a second or third-rate male would be the best.  ", "There's a lot of comments that state 'I think', 'I feel'...  So I looked up some numbers.\n\nTurns out in both countries, over 80% of primary school teachers are women, and it's been that way since 1993, as long as statistics are recorded.  [Source](_URL_0_).\n\nSomething else I found while looking up the stats: [This paper](_URL_1_) dates the 'feminization' of public school teaching in the US to the 1850s, and puts it (at part) to the fact that they could pay women less than men."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/WorldStats/Gender-primary-education-teachers.html", "http://web.mit.edu/wgs/prize/eb04.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2yzkh7", "title": "Is it truth that Kuomintang did majority of fighting against Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War?", "selftext": "Is it truth that Kuomintang did majority of the fighting against Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War? There are discussion online that talks about how CCP did not contribute its forces as much as the KMT during the struggle. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yzkh7/is_it_truth_that_kuomintang_did_majority_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpep24j", "cpf6pxv"], "score": [13, 5], "text": ["The Kuomintang did the majority of the conventional fighting against the Japanese, whereas the Communists were far more interested in guerilla warfare. One of the main complaints of the US representative in China, general Joseph Stilwell, was that the Kuomintang was actually less enthusiastic about fighting the Japanese than than they were about fighting the communists. Oftentimes, Chiang Kai Shek would refuse to commit his best troops to fighting the Japanese, believing \"the Japanese are a disease of the skin, the communists are a disease of the heart.\" Stilwell went so far as to say that if the KMT had fought as hard as the CCP against the Japanese, that they could have defeated the Kwantung Army.\n\nMy source for this is Stilwell's book on his experiences in China, which for the life of me I cannot find my copy of right this second. ", "This is a highly contentious and politicized issue whose intellectual roots stem back to both the Sino-Japanese War and the aftermath of the CCP's victory over the KMT. The Nationalists popularized a claim during the war that the CCP was devoting only a fraction of its resources towards fighting the Japanese and was building a powerbase to attack the KMT after the war. Conversely, Mao conducted a public relations drive, including the famous Dixie Mission to Yan'an, that argued the CCP had a wide-scale and determined guerrilla campaign against the Japanese, in contrast to the lackadaisical and corrupt KMT. The swift and unexpected victory of the CCP in the Civil War gave currency to the CCP's wartime line. The negative opinions of Chiang Kai-Shek held by many American officers and would reenforce the CCP's contention that the KMT squandered whatever influence it had with the Chinese people because of the Nationalists' rampant corruption and incompetence.  Subsequent commentators in the 1960s and 1970s like Chalmers Johnson and Mark Selden would further argue that the needs of guerrilla warfare created a large-scale peasant force where nationalism coupled with land-reform in turn transformed the CCP into a mass movement led by Mao. \n\nNow each of these broad interpretations of Chinese history has their partisans, current research into the Sino-Japanese War is presenting a more differentiated and less politicized picture of events. One of the basic problems of the CCP perfidy vs. KMT corruption debate is that they are predicated upon the notion that China in the 1930s could have fought and sustained a modern war against an industrial power like Japan. This is built on a number of assumptions about China's actual strength and ignores the real limits faced by the KMT. The NRA's battles around Shanghai in 1937 is a case which has benefited greatly from scholarly reevaluation.  Chiang deployed many of his best troops to defend the city and they were destroyed by the Japanese in savage fighting. Older scholarship, such as Frank Dorn's *The Sino-Japanese War* saw this as a baleful commentary on Chiang's military acumen. However, such condemnation excluded the political ramifications of taking a stand and offering the Japanese fierce resistance. The KMT was on a precarious ledge in 1937 and a strong battle, even if a defeat, was vital to show the other powers like the Soviets that the Nationalists would not wither away under Japanese pressure. The throwing away of precious NRA units was a cold strategy, but it is unlikely they could have achieved different results if better deployed. The KMT's main strategic goal was to outlast Japan and it was one of the few strategies that was viable for Chiang. Criticism of the endemic corruption within the NRA and the overall poor performance of the KMT's military should take this strategic priority into account. The fact that the KMT resisted Japan was a victory of sorts, even if the KMT lost.  Given that the KMT managed to hold out throughout the duration of the war, this strategy possesses some validity. \n\nThe CCP's guerrilla activities has also undergone a similiar transformation in recent historiography. Whereas older scholarship has taken Mao's PR campaign at face value, the general trend among contemporary historians is to be more skeptical of CCP claims. The peak of CCP  activities was Battle of the Hundred Regiments in late 1940 in which CCP Eight Route Army attacked Japanese and puppet-Chinese armies in Central China. Although the CCP would use the Hundred Regiments as an example of its commitment against the Japanese, the Eight Route Army's losses prompted a drawback in massed operations. Japanese counterinsurgency, the Three Alls \"kill all, burn all, and destroy all,\" did pacify the countryside, but limited the extent to which Japanese forces could expand into China. From 1940 onwards, the CCP husbanded its forces and presented its limited operations as part of a larger shadow war against Japan. The Ichi-go offensive in 1944 allowed the CCP to expand into areas the Japanese abandoned in their drive to occupy regions of southern China. This was a winning strategy for the civil war, but not exactly a mobilization of a people in arms as argued by Selden. The collapse of the Japanese military in 1945, which caught Mao by surprise, meant that the CCP was in the right place and time to utilize captured Japanese equipment. The fact that the CCP had preserved its remaining forces allowed it to present itself as a force for order in the resulting power vacuum. \n\nSo this leaves the question of who did the majority of fighting against the Japanese- the KMT or the CCP?. The problem with framing the question in these terms is that both the CCP and the KMT were not fighting a war in the sense that the other Allies were.Of the Allies, Britain's approach most closely resembles the KMT, yet Chiang arguably receives more flak than Churchill even when the latter pursued questionable operations to prove Britain was still in the fight such as Greece in 1941.  Neither the Soviet nor American grand strategies was to hang on and outlast the Axis, but they had the resources to safely rely upon a strategy of total defeat of the enemy. Such an option was not open to either Mao or Chiang, so they pursued different strategies.  Both the CCP and the KMT wanted to survive the war, and they both did, rendering the question of who did the most fighting somewhat moot.\n\n*Sources*\n\nGordon, David M. \"The China-Japan War, 1931-1945.\" *The Journal of Military History* 70, no. 1 (2006): 137-182.\n\nPeattie, Mark R., Edward J. Drea, and Hans J. Van de Ven. *The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945*. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2011. \n\nSpector, Ronald H. *In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia*. New York: Random House, 2007. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "67vpj3", "title": "Shortages and Use of Resources during WWII", "selftext": "I just saw this post: _URL_0_\n\nThe top comment refers to the mass amount of planes lost during WWII. It got me thinking about resource needs and shortages.\n\nI know America had a shortage of copper and the Manhattan project used silver from the reserve instead. I know Japan needed oil and steel. Germany couldn't continue past Stalingrad and Moscow due to supply line issues and oil (simplistic I know).\n\nIs there a book/article/website that analyzes the mass amount of production and the resources needed and possibly how the countries came to get the resources during a shortage?\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67vpj3/shortages_and_use_of_resources_during_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgtk6fl"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hey there -- while our historians here may be able to offer some more suggestions, *A World at Arms* and *Why the Allies Won* jump out to me from our [WWII books list](_URL_0_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/67s5i0/what_historical_fact_blows_your_mind/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/wwii#wiki_general"]]}
{"q_id": "3kks2j", "title": "What does Hollywood get wrong about Historical melee battles.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kks2j/what_does_hollywood_get_wrong_about_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuybho1"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "3xds36", "title": "When did Globalisation REALLY start?", "selftext": "So I'm not gonna lie, I thought 'globalisation' was a fairly new concept, like a buzzword that economists, historians and social scientists use to talk about the next best thing (I'm looking at you China)\nBut I came across an article from the lovely Janet Abu-Lughod (Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350) and she proposed the idea that globalisation has been happening for centuries specifically the 13th century. I find this to be really interesting so then I started reading a mish mash of historians/socialigists ect and I saw a common theme that showed that globalisation started around the 18th century. I mean I guess it makes sense but I kind of lean more with the idea that it started in the 13th century. You know the Middle Eastern and the Asian societies have been trading for years so why doesn't it start there rather than the 18th century? \n\nPlease enlighten me, I'm here to learn and correct any mistakes I make. \n\nThanks in advance ;)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xds36/when_did_globalisation_really_start/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy3t7fi"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, the problem with treating globalization as starting before 1492 is that any system of international trade is necessarily going to be limited to either Africa+Eurasia or the Americas. So \"Global\" is a bit of a misnomer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gyhh0", "title": "Have stories from Greek mythology been directly connected to or metaphorically connected to actual happenings?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gyhh0/have_stories_from_greek_mythology_been_directly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cap2xqz"], "score": [9], "text": ["Warning: long answer coming up. The TL;DR is: sort of, but not the ones you're probably thinking of I'm afraid.\n\nFirst up, myths about the gods. As long ago as the 4th century BCE people started having the idea that the gods of story were heavily mythologised versions of kings of the distant past. The figure who came up with the idea was [Euhemeros](_URL_3_), who wrote up a fictionalised account of his travels, the *Sacred History*, in which he claimed among other things that he had visited a fictional island called Panchaia where he saw a temple of Zeus with an inscription on a pillar recording the transformation of cults to dead kings into cults of gods. In particular, he's famous for arguing that Zeus had been an ancient king of Crete.\n\nEuhemerism is perfectly reasonable as a *possible* account of how myths came to be, but as a methodology it's totally unreliable: there are many possible models for where belief in gods comes from, and euhemerism is just one possibility. That is: myths provide exactly zero evidence in and of themselves. It's not really even a case of needing corroboration to back up a euhemeristic reconstruction: you still need definite evidence.\n\nThose who do like euhemerism tend to follow this procedure: (1) identify a myth; (2) subtract all the completely fantastic bits, like monsters or talking animals; (3) whatever's left over is historical truth. That's a rather unfavourable picture of it, of course. In fact Euhemeros himself had a slightly stronger basis for suspecting a historical reality underlying Zeus: the fact that there was in fact a cult surrounding the supposed grave of Zeus in Crete, to him, implied that Zeus had been a mortal man. (This is moderately peculiar as Greek religion goes, but only moderately, so I'm afraid even here the methodology doesn't work.)\n\nNext, heroic legends. The idea of a historical reality behind these is a little bit more intrinsically plausible, since for the most part they don't feature *too* much of the fantastic. However, the methodology is exactly the same: it's just the fact that heroic legends look a little bit more down-to-earth that lends them some plausibility. As a result, it's exactly as unreliable as the euhemeristic procedure applied to myths about the gods. The myth still provides zero evidence in and of itself; you still need external evidence.\n\nThe Trojan War is a particularly popular one for euhemerists of heroic legend. The fact that Troy happens to have been a real place was enormously overblown by Schliemann, who was a PR master of the first order, and who wanted to take credit for discovering \"Homer's Troy\": he made out that he was fighting against a deeply entrenched consensus that Troy had been totally fictional, so when he presented his discoveries, it was as though the truth value of everything could simply be flipped over: \"Troy is real\", to him, implied \"everything in Homer is true\". I hope it doesn't need to be shown at length that there was, in fact, no such entrenched consensus, and that the site where he dug had always been the usual spot identified as Troy. In reality, all the existence of Troy shows is... Troy existed.\n\nYou don't catch people arguing \"Thebes is real, therefore everything in the Oedipus legend is true\", or \"Nottingham is real, therefore Robin Hood is historical fact\". Schliemann's fallacy is of the same order. It still pops up now and then, though: back in 2008 a couple of astronomers published an argument that *Odyssey* book 21 contains a reference to a genuine solar eclipse that took place on 16 April 1178 BCE. [Here's a news report](_URL_0_) where one of them commits Schliemann's fallacy on top of this supposed finding:\n\n >  \"If we take it as a given that the death of the suitors happened on this particular eclipse date, then everything else described in \"The Odyssey\" happens exactly as is described,\" Magnasco said.\n\nThe eclipse identification is bollocks, as it happens, but that's not the reason why this quotation is wrong. It's wrong because it's the same logical fallacy as \"Nottingham is real, therefore Robin Hood was real\".\n\nSo are there *any* cases of Greek myths matching up to things that are likely to be historical realities? Not until you start looking at foundation legends of the 8th century BCE onwards, I'm afraid. At that time many Greek states started sending out colonies all over Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Italy, France, and northern Africa. The early colonisations often had legends tied up with the founding of cities: for example, [Battos](_URL_1_) the semi-legendary founder of Cyrene, who genuinely did found Cyrene in 631 BCE; [Taras,](_URL_2_) supposedly founded by men born out of wedlock and non-citizen residents of Sparta in 707/6 BCE; and so on. We know of a number of elegiac poems (epic-like, but not epic) that were written about some of these foundations by the poets Mimnermos, Tyrtaios, Semonides, Xenophanes, and Ion.\n\nOften these foundation legends are more myth than reality: for example, in the 6th century BCE the Romans founded the colony of Circeii on the supposed site of Circe's island; Naples was supposedly the site where one of the Sirens washed ashore after committing suicide; and various cities claimed to have been founded by figures out of heroic legends like Odysseus or Diomedes. These ones can be confidently rejected. But there are lots of grey areas where it's hard to tell. Maybe Taras *was* founded by illegitimate children and peroikoi -- who knows?\n\nEDIT: a couple more examples added in a few places."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iOUsgbo-CbfcuK95LWYrbjW2oEgQ", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battus_I_of_Cyrene", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taranto", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerus"]]}
{"q_id": "12oxs4", "title": "How did fascist governments achieve syncretism?", "selftext": "Fascism has a remarkable ability to get people to unify for the State, either through coercion or consent. But they all did it differently; propaganda, terror, imperial loyalty, rhetoric, and more. I'm interested specifically in Italian, German, and Japanese fascisms. Any experts want to tell me why/how these regimes influenced people so differently to achieve national unity?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12oxs4/how_did_fascist_governments_achieve_syncretism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6wxtp1", "c6x0b6c"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["I'm not a scholar of the period by any means, but I think the best and simplest answer is that they didn't, at least nearly as successfully as they would have wished.\nJapan's WWII government isn't widely considered fascist, as far as I know.\nItaly's tried to implement a series of education reforms aimed at creating a new 'Fascist man', but it clashed with the civil-society arm of the Catholic Church (Azione Cattolica/Catholic Action) and even within the Fascist Party, there were factions and divisions, to the point that the Fascist Grand Council threw Mussolini to the dogs in the end. For education, see Mabel Berezin's 'Believe, Obey, Fight.' If you have a JSTOR subscription, a search for 'Catholic Action' will yield some good information. Italy's 'imperial project' in Abyssinia bolstered its popularity and provided a rallying cry (even Pius XII got in on it!).\nFor Germany, Ian Kershaw's 'The Hitler Myth' is a good book on what the Nazis were NOT able to do with regards to 'brainwashing', though they were undoubtedly more effective than the Italians.\n\nI think a large part of the modern myth of fascism is a perception that fascist governments came into power on the back of a massive popular groundswell and governed in the midst of one. This simply wasn't true. Hitler arranged a backroom deal to become Chancellor in the context of rapid reshufflings of the German government, and Mussolini picked the right time to force the King to declare him Prime Minister in a show of force/bluff. They had many opponents, and continued to throughout their periods of rule.", "The genius of fascism is that it recognized that the interests of capital and labor were largely the same, not opposed the way everyone thought. In truth, what both want more than anything is stability and protection from competition, and both were willing to give up almost everything to get it.  fascism met their demands by organizing both large companies and large unions into monopolies or oligopolies, in exchange for putting the government at the commanding heights.  sure profits or wages might be lower, but certainty was worth a lot.  Of course, none of this worked economically in the long run, but it bought peace in the short run, which made it popular.\n\nAs to national unity, people are inherently tribal creatures.  fascism built of loyalty to the state through the traditional means of propaganda, rhetoric, etc, and downplayed other identities that led to conflict by smoothing out the economic issues as described above.  To a modern mind, this seems like a shitty tradeoff, but to places in chaos or close to it, like post colonial or post civil war countries, the order was immensely valued.  fascism seemed to work (and gave a great deal of power to politicians) and seeming is more important than being in politics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ailnjv", "title": "What language(s) did Kublai Khan speak?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ailnjv/what_languages_did_kublai_khan_speak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eeqz7jv"], "score": [9], "text": ["Kublai Khan is thankfully well documented in our history, to the point where some of his writings survive.  Furthermore, the Yuan Dynasty kept multilingual records and with the aid of Tibetan Lamas developed the 'phags-pa phonetic script that was used as a standard for languages within.\n\nAs we all know, Kublai Khan was a Mongol and a high ranking one at that, meaning his first language was Mongolian.  Mongolian at the time was undergoing a radical change from old to middle as we can note from comparing inscriptions and the language in the Mongolian *Secret History*.  As such, he probably used mainly Mongolian for personal matters.\n\nHowever, we have his poetry, which is written in the literary style of Chinese at the time.  The Yuan dynasty and especially Kublai Khan legitimized themselves to the Han by appearing sinicized and adopting Han customs and language to an extent.  Kublai Khan's poetry and court records indicate a strong grasp of the language.  As anyone who studies China will know, however, \"Chinese\" is quite a nebulous termas there are dozens of mutually unintelligable languages within China.  However, we can assume that the administrative language was the Beijing dialect that would evolve into Mandarin and form the basis for modern standard.  It is highly likely his court was expected to know this and Mongolian as well.\n\nThe Yuan Khan's straddled the line between Mongolian, Tibetan, and Han culture with the most successful having fused and adopted elements from each.  In order to properly administer China, they needed to master the prestige Beijing dialect, in order to conduct clan diplomacy, Mongolian was needed.  Some, in order to emphasize they had the mandate of heaven, wrote in literary Chinese.  It is possible that some knew classical Tibetan as well, as it flourished during this period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fmsu4h", "title": "How Far Would Roman Soldiers (mainly non-Europeans) Travel for War/Military Orders?", "selftext": "Me and my friend were watching the trailer of a movie which takes place in Britain during the Middle Ages and there were ethnic minorities in it (mainly black but my question extends to Arabs too). Think of Centurion or Prince Arthur. I argued that there was almost no way for there to be minorities back then, especially among the peasantry and especially if they're just there without context. If, perhaps, they were nobility or merchants then the likelihood would increase but they never are as far as I've seen. My friend thinks the opposite.\n\nI understand that the Roman Empire at it's peak was from Britain to Egypt, but would African/Middle Easterners travel all the way to Britain (or any where else in Europe) for military orders? Surely the Romans would not send people THAT far away considering how long that journey would take? I'm no military connoisseur, but that seems foolish to do considering how stretched thin they already were. If I'm wrong, how common was it to find ethnic minorities all the way in Europe?\n\nThank you in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fmsu4h/how_far_would_roman_soldiers_mainly_noneuropeans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fl8x0jg", "fl9hzxc"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["They would travel quite far actually. During the time of the Republic, the Legions went where they were needed, and you would often end up fighting and garrisoning in regions of the world thousands of miles from home. The Legions that took part in Julius Ceasar's invasion of Britain for example, include not only Italic peoples (from rome and its allies in italy) but also Soldiers from the roman holdings in Carthage and Greece (with Greek, phoenician, and north african ancestry) as well as auxiliaries from both the Gaullic tribes across the channel, and Numidians from north africa (related to modern Berbers).\n\nthe Conquest that occurred in 43AD by the Emperor Claudius used a professional army drawn from all around the intermediate. We don't know exactly which legions were involved, but the policy of the time was for Legions (and their attached auxiliaries) to serve as far from the lands they were first raised in as possible, in order to minimize conflicts of interest in loyalty. so when Claudius drew Legions from Gaul and Germania to invade the British isles, the men of those units would likely have been a mix of men from Italy, Iberia (spain), Greece, Syria, Egypt, Numidia (north africa/libya), and generally from all over the Empire.  Once Britain was conquered, the Auxiliaries stationed there to garrison it came from places like North Africa, egypt, and what is now the middle east, while Auxilaries and later legions raised in Britain were sent off to fight and garrison in places Like Dacia and Panonia (what are now the balkans) and palestine. In 175 AD at the end of the Marcomannic wars, Emperor Marcus  Aurelius even had 5,500 Sarmatian Iazyges Cavalry (a nomadic steppe tribe that had settled in what is today Ukraine) made into auxiliary troops after they were defeated and assigned to Hadrians Wall, which combined with their families would have several dozen thousand people joining the already substantial garrison of the wall. (in fact, it is currently believed by some historians and mythographers that it was the descendants of these Sarmatians, and their Heavy cavalry traditions, that formed part of the basis for the earlier King Arthur tales in later centuries)", "The Roman army was a heterogeneous body, made up of soldiers from across the empire. Although in most places the majority of new recruits would have come from the local populations around bases (at least by the mid-imperial period), that did not stop units or individuals being moved around as needs changed. If an emperor was planning a particularly large new campaign, or if there was a specific emergency in one place, whole legions could be shifted from one region to another. Troops needed for Marcus Aurelius' campaigns in Germany are one of the probable reasons for the abandonment of the [Antonine Wall](_URL_11_) and the re-fortification of Hadrian's Wall. A few decades later, when Septimius Severus was in the province, his death was apparently foretold by a black African soldier serving in Carlisle ([HA. Severus 22)](_URL_6_).\n\nWe have evidence for the movements of individual soldiers from their gravestones and other inscriptions. Although there are problems with these, in terms of the conditions of survival and the fact that what remains is not a representative sample, they nevertheless give a glimpse of what was possible. From Britain (because you mentioned it in your question), we have several African soldiers. Two are known from inscribed altars from near Hadrian's Wall, and are interesting examples to think about. Here's the first ([RIB 897](_URL_13_)):\n\n >  To Jupiter, Best and Greatest, for the welfare of the Emperor Marcus Antonius Gordianus Pius Felix Invictus Augustus and for his wife Sabinia Furia Tranquillina and for their whole Divine House, the Cavalry Regiment, styled Augusta for valour, Gordiana, set this up, when commanded by **Aemilius Crispinus, prefect of cavalry, born in the province of Africa from Tusdrus** under the charge of Nonius Philippus, emperor\u2019s propraetorian legate, in the consulship of Atticus and Praetextatus. \n\nHere we have a man from Africa commanding a cavalry unit, and working directly under the provincial governor. I suppose this is the higher level of individual you might have been thinking about in your question, but our second is a less distinguished example ([RIB 816](_URL_1_)):\n\n >  To Jupiter, Best and Greatest, the First Cohort of Spaniards, part-mounted, which is commanded by its prefect, Lucius Antistius Lupus Verianus, son of Lucius, of the Quirine voting-tribe from Sicca in Africa, (set this up). \n\nVerianus raises an important point. Here is a man from Africa commanding a cohort of Spanish troops, demonstrating that we can't always take the ethnic labelling of Roman military units as indicative of the actual origins of the men serving. Nevertheless, some men within these groups are likely to have come from the home region, even if not all of them did. On Hadrian's Wall, alongside the Spaniards in the previous inscription, we also have mentions of Moors ([RIB 2042](_URL_4_)), Tungrians ([RIB 3326](_URL_5_)), Palmyrenes ([RIB 1171](_URL_12_)), Hamians ([RIB 2172](_URL_3_)) and Asturians ([RIB 1064](_URL_9_)). The Vindolanda Tablets, some of the most incredible surviving evidence for daily life in the Roman army, were predominantly written by members of a [cohort of Batavians](_URL_7_), originally from modern Belgium.\n\nNone of this should be too surprising to us really. The Roman empire was incredibly well connected, with very good road networks and (mostly) peaceful seas, making movement easy. Moreover, as I said at the beginning, the army remained a mobile institution even after the frontiers began to settle down. Talent was drawn from across Roman-controlled regions and applied where it was most needed. If there was a need for cavalry on Hadrian's Wall, why settle for substandard local recruits when you can move the best quality horsemen from Spain?\n\nAs a final note it's worth pointing out that there was a moment of internet controversy on this exact point a few years ago. The BBC released a [video](_URL_10_) depicting a black man in Roman military uniform, which elicited rage from some quarters. Many prominent Roman historians, including [Mary Beard](_URL_0_), [Matthew Nicholls](_URL_8_) and [Neville Morley](_URL_2_) explained why this was perfectly reasonable. Their blogs still make useful reading, even if the heat over the video has long since died down."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/roman-britain-black-white/", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/816", "https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/08/02/diversitas-et-multiculturalismus/", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/2172", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/2042", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/3326", "https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Septimius_Severus*.html#22", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/TabVindol263", "http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/the-forum/2017/07/28/how-diverse-was-roman-britain/", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1064", "https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01zfw4w", "https://www.antoninewall.org/", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1171", "https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/897"]]}
{"q_id": "3ccziz", "title": "What was the organization and centralization of the Han dynasty military?", "selftext": "Was there a state military with formal training? Or did military power belong to warlords who had their own local armies and shifting allegiances? Reading about the Three Kingdoms period it sounds more like 8th century Byzantium where armies were directed by generals who had varying degrees of loyalty to the emperor.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ccziz/what_was_the_organization_and_centralization_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csuk1bm"], "score": [5], "text": ["So the thing about the Eastern Han (which directly turned into the Three Kingdoms) was that it wasn't all that militarized in terms of having massive professional standing armies. The Eastern Han Dynasty specifically did not have large standing armies as it didn't want to recreate the chaos of the earlier Western Han Dynasty where powerful regional rulers (princes in those cases) had huge standing armies with which to threaten the centre.\n\nThe Eastern Han's actual state military was comprised of two parts: the standing \"Northern Army\" of 4,000 professional soldiers split into five regiments (at an early point in his career the warlord and later chancellor Cao Cao was colonel of one of the five northern army regiments, and IIRC the later warlords Yuan Shao and Yuan Shu all held posts in the Northern Army at some point) which were in charge of guarding the capital (the province of Sili, which began in the east at around Capital Luoyang and stretched to the west to around Chang An) and the vast \"Southern Army\" which were disparate volunteer armies raised by regional governors, inspectors, protectors and such who could be raised in times of need (such as during the time of the Yellow Turban rebellion). But they weren't standing armies as, being that their loyalty was to the local gentry and governors, their loyalty was not directly to the court. This system worked as it was supposed to, even the Yellow Turban rebellion was put down with huge success in a short amount of time, and did not lead to any real problems for the stability of the Emperor. \n\nThe *real* problem came when Dong Zhuo's army (which was a small, professional standing army that guarded the north-western borders) was invited into the capital by Yuan Shao (btw, if we had to pinpoint a single person for the fall of the entire Eastern Han Dynasty I'm pretty sure it'd be Yuan Shao, he's not a stupid man in general but in this case he made a monumentally stupid mistake) to deal with the eunuch faction. The rest as you might know is history: the eunuch faction killed He Jin, head of the Empress' household in retaliation, and in response He Jin's followers such as Yuan Shao and Cao Cao purged the Eunuch faction from the capital. What you had in this case was mutual destruction of the two power structures (the Empress' clan and the Eunuchs) who was essentially propping the Emperor up (as their authority derived from the Emperor, all other authority can derive from large gentry families, local governors, border generals etc.). Without any real powerful institutions remaining loyal to the Emperor, Dong Zhuo was very easily able to sieze power with quite a small army of just initially 3,000 (he did this by apparently marching his men into the city, secretly taking them out at night and marching them back in, giving the Capital the impression of a huge army bearing down which the Northern Army could not face - not that they wanted to, they essentially had no command structure by this point due to the aforementioned power struggle between the Empress/Gentry faction and the Eunuch faction).\n\nThe rest is of course history: the governors and large families from the Eastern provinces militarized and rose up to oppose Dong Zhuo in a coalition, they fought to a bloody draw, but without any semblance of Imperial authority and with no institutions left in real support of the (child) Emperor, nobody could safely disband their armies, so the regional governors and such stayed militarized. Power devolved to the local governors and gentry etc. until we just had a fractured \"Empire\" of warlords, and thus began the Three Kingdoms.\n\nSource: \n\n\"Pin Sanguo\" Yi Zhongtian  \n\"Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms\" Chen Shou, annotations by Pei Songzhi  \n\"Later Han Military Organisation\" Rafe de Crespigny  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1iubc5", "title": "How were mixed-blood African American--Native American individuals viewed within both African American and Native American communities/societies prior to the 20th Century?", "selftext": "I'm interested in learning more about histories of mixed African-American--Native American peoples within the U.S. context. Does anyone know of any sources that offer sound contexts to intermarriage/relationships/etc? Or any sources which perhaps look at mixed-blood identity and challenges in a developing \"mixed\" identity/identity consciousness?  If you have information or sources that examine mixed-blood peoples after the turn of the 20th century, that's fine too!\n\nThank you!\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iubc5/how_were_mixedblood_african_americannative/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb8abu9", "cb8dpow"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["This is a great question. I don't have a full answer for you, unfortunately as I'm no expert on this topic.\n\nOne place to start might be investigating histories of slavery among Native peoples. It was not uncommon for male native masters to become involved sexually with their black female slaves. Thinking about Tiya Miles' book *Ties that Bind* about a mixed Native-African American family in the early 19th century, I remember that one of the key points was that the Cherokee people define belonging through clan relationships, which descended (I believe) through female lineage. As such, the relationship of belonging between natives and a mixed-race person, in this circumstance, may have depended on whether the father or mother was a member of the tribe. Additionally, one reason in the antebellum period that relations between natives and blacks were somewhat strained is that tribes such as the Cherokees were attempting to demonstrate their Americanness - which meant being slaveowners, and treating slaves as chattel. Significantly, however, there are several accounts of slaves writing about preferring to live in Indian country, rather than white plantations. One example, I believe, of this is the slave narrative of Henry Bibb, the text of which can be found here: _URL_0_\n\nHowever, as a caveat, I will add that I think historians are only beginning to approach this topic of study seriously, so different tribes and individuals may have entirely different stories. \n\nTiya Miles' book is essential reading on this topic. It's a good read. Also relevant is Christina Snyder's *Slavery in Indian Country* (which is sitting on my bookshelf, unread as of yet. Soon.). ", "Thank you for the recommendations! I think looking at Tsalagi/Cherokee- African/African-American relations via slavery would be an interesting avenue to pursue. I'll definitely check out stuff by Tiya Miles. I'm curious if there has been any research on how mixed-blood people formed, or perhaps fragmented, a bond between two worlds (though I can only imagine how multifarious these relationships were on a case-by-case basis). Thank you again for your help!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "9hmz8m", "title": "Are there any recorded battles of submarines fighting other submarines? Or is that not a thing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hmz8m/are_there_any_recorded_battles_of_submarines/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6dgawd", "e6dsbt5"], "score": [63, 2], "text": ["Submarines were used to fight submarines in both World Wars. In most cases, the targeted submarine was on the surface; only one submarine, *U-864*, was sunk by another submerged submarine. Attacks on surfaced submarines were still difficult. A submarine was a small target, hard to spot or to measure the speed of and with few masts from which the course could be estimated. \n\nIn WWI, submarines formed a significant part of Britain's defences against German U-boats. Initially, British submarines were deployed off the main German bases in the Heligoland Bight. Their main role was to target German warships sortieing from these bases, but were also allowed to attack German submarines when they encountered them. However, this bore little fruit. In 1915, as the threat from German submarines became clear, the Royal Navy began to deploy submarines to counter them. At first, this took the form of Q-ship patrols. A disguised trawler would tow a submerged 'C'-class submarine, with the two vessels also connected by a telephone cable. A German submarine that encountered the trawler would surface to attack it with its deck gun; the trawler would notify the British submarine of the attack, and cast off the towing cable, allowing the sub to stalk and torpedo the attacking U-boat. The first success for this method came on the 23rd June 1915, when the pairing of the trawler *Taraniki* and *C-24* sank *U-40* off the Scottish coast. A month later, *Princess Louise* and *C-27* sank *U-23* off Fair Isle. Following these successes, however, use of the trawler/submarine pairing tailed off, possibly because of fears the Germans were becoming aware of the tactics. British submarine ASW remained confined to the North Sea until the end of 1916, limiting its effectiveness. The advent of unrestricted submarine warfare brought more possibilities for them. From 1917, there were more U-boats transiting British waters, and more engaging unarmed British merchants on the surface, making them good targets for British subs. Two flotillas of submarines were formed to protect merchant shipping. One, using the more modern 'D', 'E' and 'H' class boats, was formed at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland. This flotilla targeted German subs travelling down the west coast of Ireland to the sea lanes running into Bristol and Liverpool. The other flotilla, formed of the older 'C' class submarines, operated in the North Sea, patrolling the U-boat transit routes between Yarmouth and Texel. In March, a third flotilla was formed from 'G' and 'E' class boats, operating from bases in the north of Scotland. These scored the first success, with *G-13* sinking *UC-43* on the 10th March 1917. In April, the flotilla was moved to Scapa Flow, and received three more 'C' class boats. The flotilla at Queenstown was split into two sections, with the 'E's and 'H's going to Lough Swilly and the older 'D's going to Killybegs. While these subs sank several U-boats, they were not immune from attack, with *C-34* being sunk by *U-52* on the 19th July. A further flotilla was established to patrol the English Channel in May 1917, though it would see little success until later in the year. In September, following the introduction of the convoy system and the resulting move of U-boats into the Irish Sea, the Lough Swilly flotilla was moved to Berehaven, to patrol the southern entrances to the Irish Sea. An American flotilla joined the ASW war in January 1918. Over the course of the year, the RN designed a class of submarines for the ASW role. Named the 'R' class, it had a streamlined hull for underwater speed, an effective hydrophone setup for finding targets, and a heavy forward torpedo armament. A flotilla of 'R' and 'H' class subs was formed in October 1918, to attack U-boats coming through the Kattegat from the Baltic. Other 'R' class boats were used to patrol the Irish Sea, but to little effect. Another flotilla was also deployed to Gibraltar. Over the course of WWI, British submarines would sink 18 U-boats, with another 7 being hit by torpedoes, but not sunk.\n\nIn the Second World War, British submarines were typically not explicitly deployed in the ASW role. They were deployed to patrol the North Sea (and later the Mediterranean), and would often encounter and attack German or Italian submarines. In 1939, the RN deployed its submarines in a patrol line off the Norwegian coast; the first encounter between a British submarine and a German vessel came on the 3rd September 1939, when *U-20* attacked HMS *Spearfish*, part of this line. On the 9th, HMS *Ursula* attacked *U-35* and another submarine, either *U-21* or *U-23*, but to little effect. The next day, a British submarine would make the first successful attack on another submarine. Unfortunately, this was another British submarine, with *Triton* torpedoing and sinking *Oxley* as the latter accidentally entered *Triton*'s patrol area and then failed to respond to recognition signals. The first successful attack on a German submarine came on 4th December 1939, when *Salmon* sank *U-36* in the Heligoland Bight. During the Norwegian Campaign, *Thistle* unsuccessfully attacked *U-4* off Utsira on the 10th April 1940, and was sunk by the same U-boat a few hours later. Following the Fall of France, British subs were deployed to the Bay of Biscay, patrolling against U-boats, blockade runners and surface raiders. The first success for these boats came on the 20th August 1940, when *Cachalot* sank *U-51*. On the 15th October 1940, HMS *Triad* was sunk by the Italian submarine *Enrico Toti* in the Mediterranean. Unusually, this was a gun action, with both submarines engaging with their deck guns; the Italian sub won out as its machine guns forced the British crew below decks. Anti-submarine patrol zones were set up for submarines in the northern part of the North Sea, between Shetland and Norway. *Saracen* made the first kill for these patrols, sinking *U-335* on the 3rd August 1942. In 1943, British submarines began to operate in the Indian Ocean, where they scored several kills on German and Japanese submarines travelling between Japanese-held ports and Europe. Following the Normandy Invasion, the U-boats abandoned their bases in France in favour of bases in Norway. In response, British subs began to patrol off the Norwegian coast, with the ASW mission being a key one. On one such patrol, in February 1945, *Venturer* sank *U-864* while both subs were submerged. Over the course of the war, British submarines sank 31 German, Italian and Japanese submarines. In return, five British subs were sunk by their Axis counterparts. ", "[Here](_URL_0_) is an interesting synthesis of a primary and secondary source that details the sinking of the German U-boat u-374 and the Italian Guglielmotti by HMS Unbeaten."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vt45l/torpedo_pins_and_shells_from_hms_unbeaten/"]]}
{"q_id": "9snl6v", "title": "During the passage of the 14th Amendment, what was the understanding regarding 'birthright citizenship'? Did Senators anticipate that it could be used to grant citizenship to children of immigrants? How soon after it's passage was it used to grant citizenship to non-slave immigrant children?", "selftext": "  \n\nIn a recent interview, Trump says he might try to end birthright citizenship guaranteed in the 14th amendment. During the passage of this amendment, what was the understanding regarding this clause? Was it only intended to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves, or did Senators anticipate that it could be used to grant citizenship to children of immigrants? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9snl6v/during_the_passage_of_the_14th_amendment_what_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8ray91", "e8ss49j"], "score": [35, 6], "text": ["Okay, so given that I've been having this conversation with several different people today and have been working on issues regarding immigration and refugee policy for the past couple of months, I can answer this question fairly well, though I welcome anyone else who has different perspectives and additional resources on the issue. This is going to get very long and possibly a little convoluted (as all discussions concerning the intricacies of the law tend to do), so please feel free to ask as many questions as you need to in order to clarify things. I will also very quickly (at the end) address the question of whether Trump even has the authority to \"try and end birthright citizenship,\" because that is an important piece of the overall question (even if it's not really the question being asked).\n\nThe *extremely* short answers to this question are \"yes, senators did anticipate that it could be used to grant citizenship to children of immigrants, and debated accordingly\" and \"immediately after the amendment was ratified, but whether birthright citizenship actually legally applied to immigrants wasn't decided until around thirty years later in 1898.\" The answer to the question you *didn't* ask is \"no, *Trump* cannot end birthright citizenship, as it would be both unconstitutional on grounds of the 14th Amendment and an act of executive overreach.\"\n\n\\-----\n\nThe 14th Amendment was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, three years after the conclusion of the Civil War. What's important to note is that the citizenship clause was put into place specifically to nullify the Dredd Scott decision and ensure that black people (and specifically former slaves) were considered citizens of the United States in the post-Civil War/Reconstruction period (and were thus eligible to vote and enjoy all of the other rights and privileges of citizens).\n\nWhat's also important to note is there is a much more obscure law that was passed four months prior to the passage of the 14A called the Civil Rights Act of 1866, principally written by Senator Lyman Trumbull. [The opening of said law reads as follows](_URL_2_):\n\n > Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, **That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States**; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States to......\\[list of rights and privileges enjoyed by citizens\\]......\n\nThis statute was a major foundational aspect of general federal policy during the Reconstruction era, and would pop up again four months later when senators were drafting 14A. Indeed, Trumbull actually stated that his intention in writing the law was to \"facilitate the passage of a constitutional amendment.\" Putting the text (and the question of applicability to immigrants) aside for a moment, the content of the statute was bitterly debated in the Senate within the context of the Reconstruction era and forcing the South to accept black people as citizens of the United States, with all of the rights and privileges that label contains. The law is actually notable in that it was the first time in the history of the US that Congress overrode a Presidential veto for a major act of legislation.\n\nSo that is the political context of birthright citizenship in which we find the creation of the 14th Amendment: after the passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1866 (passed with some reluctance and with some people fiercely debating that Congress didn't even have the authority to pass and enforce said law), all persons born in the United States not subject to any foreign power, regardless of race and color, were considered citizens of the United States.\n\nQuite a few members of Congress actually supported the passage of the 14A on the grounds that it would clarify and eliminate any doubts about the constitutionality of the civil rights law and ensure that no subsequent Congress could later repeal or alter the main provisions of that Act, so to talk about the political context and history of 14A's citizenship clause necessitates discussion of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The SCOTUS opinion for [Jones v. Mayer](_URL_4_) (1968) has a lot of interesting discussion about the history of the Act and its relation to the 14th Amendment that's worth a look, though said discussion is mostly related to the amendment's discussion of property rights and the equal protection clause (since that's what the case was about). The other relevant place to find information about this is the [Congressional Archives](_URL_0_), which have the minutes and transcripts of the goings-on in Congress at the time via the congressional record.\n\nNow, all of that being said, there was some discussion on the 14th Amendment's applicability to foreigners and the children of immigrants:\n\nWhile the clause was originally intended only to apply to those specifically noted as applicable under the 1866 Civil Rights Act (again, passed just months earlier), the clause's author, Jacob Howard, changed the wording of the clause so as to make it more broad (specifically the qualifications that they had to be \"not subject to any foreign power\" and not \"Indians not taxed\" were combined into a single qualification, that they be \"subject to the jurisdiction\" of the United States). This change was endorsed by Trumbull himself, who considered the two phrasings equivalent to each other. However, some senators (such as James Doolittle) disagreed and pushed for an alternate wording to make the applicability of the clause clearer.\n\nWe have no written record of any debate regarding who is actually encompassed by the phrase \"not subject to any foreign power.\" What we *do* have is a discussion on who is encompassed by the phrase \"subject to the jurisdiction\u201d:\n\n > Mr. Howard: \u201c\u2026This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include very other class of persons.\u201d  \n >   \n > .........  \n >   \n > Mr. Doolittle: \u201cI presume the honorable Senator from Michigan does not intend by this amendment to include the Indians. I move, therefore, to amend the amendment\u2014I presume he will have no objection to it\u2014by inserting after the word \u201cthereof\u201d the words \u201cexcluding Indians not taxed.\u201d  \n >   \n > Mr. Howard: \u201cI hope that amendment to the amendment will not be adopted. Indians born within the limits of the United States and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of the amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being *quasi* foreign nations.\u201d  \n >   \n > Mr. Cowan: \"...I would be glad if the honorable Senator in good earnest would favor us with some such definition. Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? Is the child of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen? If so, what rights have they?......\\[[x](_URL_3_)\\]\n\nUltimately, the answer was decided that children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens are, in fact, citizens. [Via Wikipedia](_URL_1_) (used only because it's the most concise explanation I've found of the debate):\n\n > ...concerning the children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens (and not foreign diplomats), three senators, including Trumbull as well as President Andrew Johnson, asserted that both the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause would confer citizenship on them at birth, and no senator offered a contrary opinion.\n\nSo the answer to your third question, concerning when 14A was first used to grant citizenship to children of immigrants, was \"immediately following its ratification in 1868.\"\n\n(continued below)", "I can't improve on the solid answer by /u/erissays. I just want to add a note about a red herring you'll see circulating in white nationalist circles, to the effect that *The Slaughterhouse Cases* stated that birthright citizenship was NOT the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. A few big problems with that:\n \n* The Slaughterhouse Cases weren't expressly about birthright citizenship or the Fourteenth Amendment's effect on it. As such, any note in the cases about birthright citizenship would be *obiter dicta*, or reasoning peripheral to the case, which is NOT considered binding precedent in future cases. Dicta in a case are distinct from the \"holding\" of the case -- that is, the reasoning underpinning the issue specifically decided by the court -- which IS considered binding precedent in future cases. To put it all together, since anything in *The Slaughterhouse Cases* about birthright citizenship is mere dicta, it doesn't offer any answer to this question. \n\n* Moreover, *The Slaughterhouse Cases* predate *Wong Kim Ark*. So, *Ark* would impliedly or expressly overrule anything to the contrary from *Slaughterhouse*. \n\nSo, don't be fooled by that argument!\n\nOther arguments I've heard are that *Wong Kim Ark* applies only to legal permanent residents, rather than \"illegal immigrants,\" but that's not a distinction that existed at the time. That's where you'd want to look to the *Pyler* analysis noted elsewhere. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Clause", "http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/frohnen-the-american-nation-primary-sources", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&amp;fileName=073/llcg073.db&amp;recNum=11", "https://archive.is/20120712121855/http://laws.findlaw.com/us/392/409.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "8bxiz4", "title": "How libertine was sexuality in the Weimar Republic?", "selftext": "A common talking point I\u2019ve heard from far-right traditionalists and Neo-Nazis is that the Weimar Republic was a period of decadent degeneracy among the masses with unrestrained sexuality running amok, but how true is this in reality? Did the Weimar Republic actually have loose sexual mores in the social and entertainment media sphere?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bxiz4/how_libertine_was_sexuality_in_the_weimar_republic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxaiyc0"], "score": [5], "text": ["This isn't mean to preclude further answers and discussions but /u/kieslowskifan has made several good  points about this [in this thread here](_URL_0_) discussing the research by Magnus Hirschfeld among other things. They correctly point out that the idea of a pro-sex Weimar Republic and an anti-sex Third Reich is unsupported by the evidence given the outlier status of Hirschfeld and his research and the partial climate in Berlin as well as the continuities between Weimar and Nazi Germany in this regard. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/849vpc/did_nazis_persecute_lesbian_females_or_just_gay/"]]}
{"q_id": "zb1pj", "title": "How open were previous civilizations to children about sex?", "selftext": "I was just thinking about the story of the death of Heracles, and how, so the legend goes, his wife Deianira used the blood and semen of the centaur Nessus to make the tunic that eventually killed him. Heracles was also lauded as a great lover of both men and women, and Greek myth in general is full of vaguely bizarre sex (the conception of the minotaur stands out). These stories would surely have been well known to both adults and children, which makes me wonder just how candid the Greeks and other bygone civilizations were to their children about the issue of sex and sexuality. \n\nEDIT: When I asked this question I completely forgot about the Ancient Greek encouragement of pederasty - the sexual and intellectual relationship between an older and younger (early to late teens) man. Nevertheless, the responses have all been great and very insightful; thanks a lot. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zb1pj/how_open_were_previous_civilizations_to_children/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c635gyk", "c636rcw", "c639sgt"], "score": [27, 19, 4], "text": ["Going to throw this out, though it's by nature very difficult to source.\n\nThose who worked in agriculture would be around farm animals...dogs, sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses, etc.  All of these animals would at some point engage in sex or there would be no calves, foals, lambs, etc.  It would not be a great leap of logic for a child to learn the hows and whys of sex in such a world, especially if they were ever called upon to geld a horse or assist in a calf birthing.\n\nCompare this to say, the Subura of Rome.  There were of course multi-room dwellings, but between the relatively close confines and the nature of prostitution at the time, it would be hard to escape first or second hand knowledge even by accident. ", "I would like to throw out, in general, the likelihood that someone had a multi-room house was small throughout most of history. Children slept in the same living space as their parents and it would not be uncommon, so I've heard for the parents to have sex while they were there. ", "I just read in Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem that Hadrian scandalised Rome with his love life. The problem wasn't that his paramour Antinous was male, but that he stayed with him after he grew up. This would indicate a certain level of awareness on the part of young men. See also, Tiberius' minnows.  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "g2tq1g", "title": "In Western cultures, it seems \"normal\" to have a different main meal everyday, but I would think this was not common before refrigeration and when most of society was agrarian. When did this become \"normal\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g2tq1g/in_western_cultures_it_seems_normal_to_have_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fnommc8"], "score": [492], "text": ["You might want to post this question also on /r/AskFoodHistorians  \n\n(Mods, I hope this is not a \"bad\" comment.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dlm8u5", "title": "How were the pre Norman British kingdoms structured?", "selftext": "Hello! I have been curious about pre Norman kingdoms of Britain recently. Partially inspired by The Last Kingdom. In the show they portray the Witan, composed of the lords of the kingdom, advising the king in all manner of ways, from advising to even helping decide the next king.\n\nI'm wondering how accurate is this? Do we know what the actual function of the Witan was? Who was in the Witan? What powers did they have? What was the king's role? Could you consider the structure feudalism? Did lords swear fealty to the king like in a more French feudalism? \n\nOverall I'm just trying to get a picture for what the government and ruling was like in pre Norman British kingdoms. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dlm8u5/how_were_the_pre_norman_british_kingdoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4wqx1a"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hello, I wrote an answer [here](_URL_0_) a little while ago which addresses the how contentious and flawed the idea of **the** *Witan* in; to whit, it's largely an invention of Victorian Whig historians who wanted to create a false history of English Parliamentary democracy.\n\nThe question boils down to whether or not you mean pre-Norman *British* Kingdoms or pre-Norman *English* Kingdoms. By the time of the Conquest of 1066, England had been a unified kingdom for almost 150 years, and working towards unification for over 200.  From the 870s in particular, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms tended to be highly bureaucratic and relatively centralised polities with strong social and governmental hierarchies. Territory was organised at the 'Hundred' level, and then at the county level, where it was overseen by - broadly speaking - *Ealdormen* who owed personal loyalty to the king. A swathe of lesser nobles and community leaders (thegns, hundredmen) and royal officers such as Reeves all then slotted in to fulfil their duties within the system. Royal authority had increased considerably in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, and was built on a combination of land charters and taxation, royally-controlled civic centres, extensive law codes, currency reform and close cooperation with the Church.\n\nIf you want a very good, and very thorough look at the functioning of Late Anglo-Saxon England, I very much recommend Molyneaux's *The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cxzrqh/early_medieval_british_isles_was_there_a/eypaq5a"]]}
{"q_id": "5tl9p7", "title": "Why didn't the European Empires for a collation and try take down the UK during its height?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tl9p7/why_didnt_the_european_empires_for_a_collation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddnu7s2"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think you mean \"coalition\" and will avoid doing the joke about it. But, in short: Why would they have?\n\n(Schematic summary incoming)\nIn 1815, the Congress of Vienna reorganised european politics under the form of the \"Concert of Nations\" - five Great Powers were to dominate the continent: Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia. Asides from them, there were a few \"secondary powers\" (think Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands), and a dust of small states like, say, Switzerland. \nWhat this basically meant was that the 5 GPs would try to solve their disagreements peacefully, through the \"diplomacy of congresses\", for instance, in order to \"ensure peace\"; that is, ensure order on the continent. No GP should be allowed by the others to go on a mad conquest spree like revolutionary France did; liberal, nationalist and revolutionary agitation would be kept carefully in check, and smaller nations would basically be told to keep quiet and let the five GPs take over the world. The arch-example of it was the 1823 intervention in Spain: when the absolute monarchy of Spain was taken down by an uprising inspired by the French Revolution, the Powers met in Congress, France asked permission to go restore the monarch, which was granted - and order was restored.\n\nSo, the situation was that only the GPs could have taken the initiative of such a confrontation. And why would they have jeopardised the whole situation, which was pretty nice for them, by doing so? Of course, the UK was the most powerful of them; but in European affairs, it wasn't much more than a primus inter pares, content to just prevent the emergence of a new continental hegemon while continental powers didn't bother too much with the oversea matters that made much of Britain's business at this point. And coalising against the UK would also have meant putting their own rivalries, which remained real and strong, asides: for instance, France rivaled Germany over the Rheinland, Russia and Austria were facing in the Balkans, etc. Indeed, a few times the continental powers took position together against the UK; but on its own side Britain was both aware of this possibility and content with they dominant position, so took care not to take any action too provocative. That is, the political \"cost\" of banding together to face the UK - troubling the very order they reigned upon, forgetting their rivalries, not to mention, well, facing the greatest world power - was way lower than the potential benefits they could have won from it - since Great Britain's domination wasn't too much of a pain; and they knew that the UK would just have been replaced by one of them anyway.\nIn fact, it was this mecanism - making orderly peace more appealing than a hazardous confrontation to a select few GPs - that kept peace on the continent for a century; until, in 1914, Austria felt threatened to lose their GP position entirely, while more and more rulers considered a war could eliminate newly dangerous rivals, Germany to Britain oversea, Russia to Austria, Germany to France, Britain to Germany...\n\nTL;DR: From 1815 to 1914, European politics were dominated by a handful of Great powers who ruled the continent informally in a complex equilibrum, where rivalries between them were kept to a reasonable level thanks to them having their domination to lose and little more to gain in a war; UK was just the most powerful of them and mostly played by the rules, making it unappealing to attack it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1c1wpk", "title": "Did the NKVD/Red Army actually shoot at retreating troops in WWII ?", "selftext": "Considering the heavy losses at the first stage of the war that would seems utterly dangerous. They were vicious and murderous but not stupid, no ? (question based on the first battle scene of Stalingrad/Ennemy at the Gates film)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c1wpk/did_the_nkvdred_army_actually_shoot_at_retreating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9c82o3", "c9cevp8"], "score": [9, 3], "text": ["Yes they did, there were 10 201 documented cases of russian barrier troops (this is the general term for such units) shooting retreating soldiers.  The vast majority where however merely detained and returned to active duty (~650 000 cases) or arrested (~25 000 cases).\n\nAccording to Stavka order 1919 (September 12, 1941) barrier units were ordered to prevent the disintegration of frontline units by any means, including the indiscriminate use of machine guns against retreating personel without authorization. ", "Order No. 227 and 270 both deal with this and were both issued by Stalin. 227 stipulated that no troops shall take even one step back (it's known as the 'not one step back order') or be faced with a military tribunal. Often in the midst of a battle, tribunals would summarily execute soldiers. 270 stipulated that to remove insignia, rank, or colors and surrender when encircled was malicious treason, and should be dealt with by a military tribunal.\n\nThere are also tons and tons of reports of Soviet soldiers being captured by Germans, escaping or being released, and then being executed for fear of being German spies. The logic essentially was, you never should have been captured if you were fighting to the death, so since you surrendered, you're obviously a traitor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1zv0zk", "title": "Did post-WW2 USSR purchase foreign weaponry in any significant quantity? (not just for reverse-engineering)", "selftext": "The recently delivery of a French-made warship to Russia has made me wonder if the USSR's weaponry was entirely domestic.\n\nI'm aware they acquired plenty of American weaponry during WW2. I just wonder how much if any weaponry from neutral or even western countries they purchased. Even purchases from other Warsaw Pact/Socialist countries would be surprising.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zv0zk/did_postww2_ussr_purchase_foreign_weaponry_in_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxp4fb"], "score": [2], "text": ["The info published by the US government in [1985](_URL_0_) indicates that weaponry accounted for .9% of Soviet imports that year. The table on the next page indicates that between 1981 and 1985, the Soviets imported 2 billion dollars worth of munitions from Poland, and 1.1 billion worth from Czechoslovakia. \n\nI don't know much about the Polish arms industry in the Cold War, but I know the Czechs produced heavy tanks under Soviet license in Slovakia, and had a budding aviation industry in the Czech Republic area. They were also known for their artillery if I do recall, and I seem to remember something about the Soviets importing some of it. Not sure though. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=27oIzZj9C6MC&amp;pg=PA319"]]}
{"q_id": "bsfz18", "title": "African Diet before the Columbian Exchange", "selftext": "Corn, beans, avocado, peanuts, casava, yams/sweet potatoes...these are all major parts of African diet, at least in Cameroon, where I live. People don't seem to eat much else sometimes! Yet all of these are New World foods. What plants did people in Africa eat before Columbus?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bsfz18/african_diet_before_the_columbian_exchange/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eop958l", "eos8f4z", "ep1923i"], "score": [193, 19, 3], "text": ["To start off, I want to clear something up. In North America at least, the terms yam and sweet potato are often used interchangeably. However, botanically speaking, true Yams are numerous species all in the family _Diosocorea_ while sweet potatoes are in the family _Convulvaceae_. \n\nAll this means to say that while sweet potatoes were originally from the Americas, specific species of yams were found throughout Eurasia and Africa prior to the Columbian Exchange. Indeed, White Yams and Yellow Yams were staple crops of Bantu-speaking farmers.\n\n----\n\nFor your broader question....well, it is a _big_ question, potentially covering the eating habits of a continent. I'll try and give a broad overview, but it won't be comprehensive for everywhere.\n\n**Cereals** in the book _African Archaeology; Foods, Metals, Towns_ Jack Harlan lists several cereal crops that were domesticated in tropical Africa. He mentions the following:\n\n* Sorghum\n* Pearl Millet\n* Finger Millet\n* African Rice\n* Teff\n* _Digitaria_ species, including Fonio\n* _Brachiaria deflexa_ a cereal restricted to Futa Djallon in Guinea.\n* Abyssinian oat\n\n**Root crops**\n\nI already mentioned the presence of white and yellow yams as a staple crop. In addition, Taro (also called Cocoyam) was and is an important root crop. According to Bassey Andah in _African Archaeology; Foods, Metals, Towns_ Taro was historically a dominant crop in the Calabar/Cross river region (at least in the 20th century). While to the west in the Niger river delta region, farming relied on mixed crops of yams, taro and cassava (a new world crop).\n\nAside from native yams, there was also the introduction of the water yam (purple yam) from Southeast Asia to the East African coast some time before the 8th century.\n\n**Bananas/Plantains**\n\nBanana species were likely originally domesticated in ~~Melanesia~~ Southeast Asia. ~~The most common theory for how the various Banana species reached Africa is via Austronesian contact with East African coast circa 500 BC.~~ Edit, more recent scholarship has thrown this theory into doubt, and there does not seem to be a clear answer for what route brought bananas to Africa.\n\nHowever, curiously the earliest evidence for banana cultivation in Africa comes from banana phytoliths (essentially a plant fossil) found northeast of Yaounde [dated to 2500 years before present](_URL_0_). Though, there has been some [back and forth](_URL_1_) as to the validity of that dating.\n\nIn any case, banana cultivation was tremendously important as a staple crop among many societies in the Congo rainforest (where it was a more suitable staple crop than Yam) and in the Great Lakes region. In _How Societies are Formed_, Jan Vansina suggests that introduction of plantain and water yams to northern Angola circa the 10th century AD supplemented diets based on staple cereal crops, and thus supported population growth. \n\n**Legumes, melons, etc.**\n\nYou are right that peanuts are a new world introduction. However, West Africa has a native species of groundnut legume commonly called the Bambara nut which grows in a similar fashion to peanuts, and have historically been grown as a food source.\n\nDitto, cowpeas (also known as Black-eyed peas) are a legume native to West Africa, and used as a food source.\n\nAside from legumes, African farmers also cultivated various types of melons, including the watermelon.\n\n----\n\nAs you say, the Columbian exchange had a tremendous impact on food production on the continent. The introduction of new food crops like casava, maize and peanuts allowed African societies to diversify their food sources and hedge against drought or inclement weather. Just like Jan Vansina's example of new crops leading to food surpluses and population growth in Angola after the 10th century, there was a similar impact for these new world crops.\n\n---\n\nFurther reading\n\n_African Archaeology; Foods, Metals, Towns_ edited by Thurstan Shaw, Paul Sinclair, Bassey Andah and Alex Okpoko.\n\n_The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology_ by Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane\n\n_How Societies are Formed_ by Jan Vansina\n\n_Nachitutis Gift_ by David M Gordon\n\n_A Green Place, A Good Place_ By David Lee Schoenbrun", "I had started a (very incomplete) answer to this question myself last evening, but looks like /u/Commustar beat me to it! They got all of the most important African crops down. I'd like to add a bit of additional information on other prominent food sources,\n\n**Ensete**\n\nAlso called \"Abyssinian Bananas\" or \"False Bananas\" in English, biologically speaking these are about as close to bananas as humans are to gorillas, so pretty similar but hardly identical. Much less widespread than true Bananas as their growing conditions are much more specific, and the plants are less adaptable. That said, they still became one of the main staple crops of what is now the SNNPR region of southwestern Ethiopia, and to a lesser extent Oromia and portions of modern Kenya and South Sudan.\n\n**Asian Rice**\n\nNot a typo! By the time Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, Asian Rice had become more common in Africa than Africa rice--at least in the regions adjacent to the Indian Ocean, as well as the Arabized regions of Northeastern Africa. Asian Rice is better suited to food production, with yields averaging 20% higher, such that when it was introduced to East Africa around 1000 AD it began to spread fairly quickly. However, it is a much more labor-intensive crop, which made it less viable than African Rice for early European (and enslaved African) colonists of the New World.\n\n**Foxtail Millet**\n\nWith a lower yield than Pearl and Finger millets, it is no surprise that Foxtail millet was never as common as the other millets. However, it grows well in arid regions, making it a valuable crop for African farmers living on the semi-barren edge of arable land.\n\n**African Eggplant**\n\nAfrican Eggplant, which is very closely related to but somewhat smaller than the much more famous Indian Eggplant, used to be widely grown in West Africa. Many eggplant-based dishes of the region today originally used African Eggplant, switching over to Indian Eggplant when the later became more popular as a result of global trade in the past few centuries.\n\n**Moringa (Cabbage-Tree)**\n\nBiologically a very distant relative to cabbages, this tree is native to the highlands of Eastern Africa and is capable of growing in semi-arid environments with poor soil quality. While the trees themselves look nothing like cabbage, their leaves have similar taste and nutritional value. Much like Ensete, their potential to become popular outside of Africa is neutered by its picky growing conditions and slow growth cycle, which have led to Cabbage-Trees becoming endangered in recent centuries due to increased deforestation and climate change.\n\n**Coconuts**\n\n\nWhile most commercially sold Coconuts in Africa are primarily descended from coconuts grown in India (or from crosses between Indian and West Pacific varieties), wild coconuts can be found growing in Tropical regions worldwide. While never domesticated in Africa, these were almost certainly foraged by nomadic and agricultural societies alike prior to the Columbian exchange.\n\n**Fruits!**\n\nMost fruits sold in Africa today originate from The Middle East and Southeast Asia--just as most other places worldwide. But especially before global trade spread new fruits to Africa, a wide variety of indigenous fruits were grown. By far the most famous are Watermelons (from the Horn of Africa) and Honeydew (from Northwestern Africa), and these are the only two widely grown today. But Baobab, Dika, Carob, and Safou, were all widely consumed at various points and locations in African history. \n\nEven the Osage Orange, which was neither grown by the Osage (an indigenous people from the modern United States), or has any similarities to Oranges (it's more closely related to Mulberries and Figs), was grown for its edible seeds, despite the fruit itself being universally regarded as very tough, woody, and gross.", "I'd just like to mention that the three-volume series, \"Lost Crops Of Africa,\" covering vegetables, fruits, and grains, native to Africa, is an excellent read, and talks about many crops that are little known in the west."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/PL00013367", "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00672700509480419"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bgsujx", "title": "Is it true that during parts of 1942 the entire operational German surface fleet was stationed in Norway?", "selftext": "As the title says this is what I read from a book and I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bgsujx/is_it_true_that_during_parts_of_1942_the_entire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elnebb3"], "score": [9], "text": ["Yes but the operative phrase here is *operational*, the *Sharnhorst* and *Gneisenau* were both damaged during the Channel Dash/Unternehmen Zerberus. After the completion of Unternehmen Zerberus the state of the Kriegsmarine surface fleet was as follows:\n\nBismarch Class Battleships:  \n*Bismarck* \\- Sunk in 41  \n*Tirpitz* \\- In Trondheim\n\nScharnhorst Class Battleships:  \n*Sharnhorst* \\- Damanged (would subsequently transfer to Norway)  \n*Gneisenau* \\- Damaged, effectively out of service permanently\n\nDeutschland Class Battleships:  \n*Hannover* \\- Decomissioned  \n*Schleswig*\\-*Holstein* \\- Decomissioned/Training ship  \n*Schlesien* \\- Decomissioned/Icebreaker\n\nAdmiral Hipper Class Cruisers:  \n*Admiral Hipper* \\- In Norway  \n*Bl\u00fccher* \\- Sunk in 1940  \n*Prinz Eugen* \\- In Norway\n\nDeutschland Class:  \n*Deutschland*/*L\u00fctzov* \\- In Norway  \n*Admiral Scheer* \\- In Norway  \n*Admiral Graf Spee* \\- Scuttled in Montevideo in 39\n\nEmden Class Cruiser:  \n*Emden* \\- Decomissioned/Training in the Baltic\n\nK\u00f6nigsberg Class Cruisers:  \n*K\u00f6nigsberg* \\- Sunk in 1940  \n*Karlsruhe* \\- Sunk in 1940  \n*K\u00f6ln* \\- In Norway\n\nLeipzig Class Cruisers:  \n*Leipzig* \\- Training duties  \n*N\u00fcrnberg* \\- Refit/Transfered to Norway in Nov. \n\nSo yes, during parts of 1942 the entire operational German surface fleet was in Norway *but* only because \"the entire operational German surface fleet\" was a whopping 7 ships (not counting destroyers/torpedo boats or smaller craft). The reason for this was twofold, partly because Hitler suspected an allied invasion of Norway but also because attacking the north atlantic convoys was an attractive prospect, one which could be achieved without the threat of constant allied air attack of port facilities that operations from Brest meant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4d87eg", "title": "How did the majority of young men being war veterans shape society in the 1920s and 30s? Is this thought to have had an impact on the rise of extreme governments in Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4d87eg/how_did_the_majority_of_young_men_being_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1p5ylr"], "score": [5], "text": ["Oh yes indeed. Impromptu militias and the presence of armed political action committees catalyzed the rise of fascism in Italy. \n\nItaly did not come out of the First World War in good shape. Between 1919 and 1920 frustrated (and unemployed) demobilized soldiers who came home from the front to a country in the midst of a deep economic recession aligned themselves alternatively with militant communist groups or militant fascist groups, both of which were bent on shaking up the social order. The socialist-dominated governing coalitions (headed by Nitti between 1919-1920 and Giolitti between 1920-1921) proved unable to deal with the economic and social crisis, and by the end of 1920 army regiments in Central Italy were in open revolt. Communist paramilitary activity was so widespread the years 1919 and 1920 in Italy are called the \"Red Biennium.\"\n\nWith the country on the brink of communist revolution, the Italian Elections of 1921 resulted in a three-way tie, with the Socialists winning 24% of the vote, the Catholics (Partito Popolare Italiano, PPI) winning little over 20%, and the fascist dominated \"Blocco Nazionale\" coalition getting a little less than 20% of the vote.\n\nSocialist leader Ivanoe Bonomi was able to round up a coalition of moderates thanks in part to the expulsion of communist sympathizers from the Socialist Party immediately prior to the election. However, the inherent incompatibility of the Socialist agenda with that of the Catholics (whose voted were necessary to keep the government afloat) as well as Bonomi's tolerance of fascist paramilitary activity against the communists (unpopular within his own party, but arguably necessary to avoid a revolution) meant that this government would lose a vote of confidence in February 1922.\n\nThe liberal Luigi Facta was then prodded to the head of the ruling coalition by the King. However, the Liberals were minority members in the coalition and the larger Socialist-Catholic deadlock was still unresolved while the country continued to spiral into chaos. Facta's cabinet reshuffle on August 1st 1922 did little to improve the situation.\n\nThe day after Facta's cabinet reshuffle fascist party leadership ordered their paramilitaries (the famous \"Blaskshirts\") to occupy the city of Ancona as a sort of experiment to see just how dependent the government had become on the paramilitaries to maintain order.\n\nThe government didn't react. In fact, it couldn't: army regiments in Ancona had been the first to revolt back in 1920, and Italian authorities were fearful that the army, who saw the fascist paramilitaries as allies in the struggle against communist revolts, would defect to the fascist leader Mussolini if they were mobilized against him.\n\nThe fascist show of force in Ancona is not only significant because it marks the first attacks on the government (and not their usual targets, the communists) but because it went so smoothly the Fascist leadership began planning larger shows of force from then on as extension of parliamentary debate \"By Other Means.\"\n\nFour days before the decisive march on Rome, the Blackshirts marched on Naples, occupying the city without government opposition. The government came to the panicked realization that a large-scale confrontation between the government and the fascist militias would be inevitable.\n\nOn October 27th 1922, in cities with large fascist majorities Blackshirt militias occupied major public buildings, while thirty thousand fascist demonstrators boarded trains to Rome (Mussolini stayed behind in Milan, lest something go wrong). The heads of Italian security forces met with the King and prime minister late that evening. The King inquired if the army was inclined to defend Rome, and General Diaz answered, \"The army will certainly do its duty, but it better not be put to the test.\" The hypothesis of declaring a state of emergency was briefly floated, but the consensus seems to have been that most army units deployed would simply defect to Mussolini's militias.\n\nThe following morning, Facta and his ministers tried to prod Victor Emmanuel into declaring a state of emergency, but the King replied to Facta, \"The only thing that can follow a state of emergency is civil war. Now, one of us must be sacrificed.\" It would seem that the king was done with putting together haphazard coalitions to keep extremists out of power, and Facta resigned that evening. By the next day, the fascists were camped outside the city effectively encircling it. It would seem that if the fascists were not given the government, they would seize it.\n\nOn October 29th a series of telegrams were exchanged between the King in Rome and Mussolini in Milan, culminating in an invitation extended to the Fascist leader to meet the King. On the evening of October 30th, Mussolini arrived in Rome, and met with the King for over an hour. Once an accord was reached in order to form a governing coalition, Mussolini gave word to his supporters to enter the city. Only one column encountered resistance from left-wing militants, but otherwise the city was occupied without difficulty. On October 31st, Mussolini's supporters paraded before the king in their iconic black shirts.\n\nHere we can open a whole discussion as to what Victor Emanuel's motivations were, especially because accounts differ with regards to what precisely was said. Victor Emanuel seems to have been doubtful of the army's loyalty, especially because there was whispering of a secret pact to usurp the throne brokered by Mussolini and the King's cousin the Duke of Aosta, for whom the King harbored a near-pathological jealousy, exacerbated by Duke of Aosta's status as a hero of the first world war. The King had always favored tacit support of the fascist militias against the communists, and it would seem that he didn't see any alternatives once the fascists proved to be (according to him) impossible to stop.\n\nIn addition to being first tolerated, then supported, the fascists militias were able to recruit more battle-hardened veterans than the communists, giving them the upper hand in actual fighting. Although early on veterans aligned themselves with both the militant right and militant left, many veterans associations had in fact started out as moderate and pacifist (notably the largest, the ANCR, which largely remained that way). However, many veterans were pushed to the right after the perceived abandonment by the socialist governments.\n\nThe efficiency of the Blackshirt militia in suppressing the communists and the popularity of fascism among the armed forces meant that as soon as the Fascists turned on the government, the takeover seemed inevitable.\n\nThe first cabinet was composed of, in addition to Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister, three fascists, two Catholics, two social democrats, two liberals (from two different parliamentary factions), one nonfascist nationalist, the chiefs of staff of the Army and Navy, and an independent.\n\nOn November 16, Mussolini presented his cabinet to the chambers of parliament, and obtained a vote of confidence (306 in favor, 116 against, and 7 abstained). In January 1923, he institutionalized his Blackshirt militias as the \"National Security Militia,\" significantly facilitating the implementation of policy.\n\nThe following election in April 1924, the fascists obtained 60% of the seats in parliament, and constituted a government without resorting to a coalition. However, the results were contested as fraudulent; as the Blaskshirts had presided over many polling stations, plus a new electoral law passed in November of the previous year was contrived to give a large bonus to whomever won a plurality. Especially harsh criticism came from the leader of the Socialist Party Giacomo Matteotti, who contested the legitimacy of the elections before parliament (Matteotti would later be found murdered on June 10th, 1924).\n\nThe following election in 1929 the ballots listed only fascist candidates and the voting options were \"Yes\" and \"No.\" (in theory, if \"No\" won a second election would be held with pre-approved lists of candidates from other parties). \"Yes\" gained 98% of votes. The next elections were held with the same system in 1935, and 99% of citizens voted \"Yes.\" These two times, there was no opposition to contest the results, however the consensus is that they were fraudulent.\n\nSources:\n\n*Le origini della guerra civile: L\u2019Italia dalla guerra al Fascismo* Fabio Fabbri, (UTET) Turin, 2009.\n\nAs for English Sources I'm not sure how how outdated you consider *Italy from liberalism to fascism, 1870-1925* by Christopher Seton-Watson, but I'd assume it gives a good overview (my textbooks cite it as an english source).\n\nI'm very sorry I don't know of anything newer in English, I'm not active in academia and believe it or not this sub is my primary source of updates on english-language scholarship. The main problem when discussing post-unification Italian history (and why I avoid it) is that interpretations are still very politicized to this day, and good source material is hard to come by."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22usym", "title": "Difference between the Shogun and the Emperor in Japan?", "selftext": "All I know is that the Emperor had no real power except being a role model or symbol as the head of state but the Shogun was the true military dictator. Am I correct? What more is there needed to know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22usym/difference_between_the_shogun_and_the_emperor_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqmgra"], "score": [35], "text": ["What you wrote is a common way the two systems are characterized, but it's vastly oversimplified in a couple of ways.  First, we need to narrow down when we're looking at since the shogun system was around for about 600 years.  Second, we need to define the concept of \"state\" that we're working with, which in premodern Japan is nowhere near our current concept of \"nation state\".  My answer may be a bit round-about, but it's not a straight-forward concept.\n\nTo start with narrowing down when we're talking about, I would love to talk about the whole six hundred years, but my specialty peters out around the 16th century and essentially stops during the 17th.  There were definitely changes in political relationships during this time, but I'll have to hope someone who knows more about the Edo period than I comes around and answers that part.  For the others, we can break it down into two major sections, Kamakura and Muromachi, and several smaller sub-sections within each of those.\n\nRegarding the Kamakura (1189-1333) and Muromachi (1336-1573) shogunates, these are both two separate military governments - named after where they were located.  Within each of these we can break chunks of time down further based on their relationship with the imperial court and relative power, but first I want to go back to the idea of state and say a few words about the court.\n\nWhatever your ideas about states are that at all resemble modern nation states, i.e. defined boundaries, land/human/resource registration, centralized power, generally accepted authority, etc., throw them out when thinking about premodern Japan.  They don't apply.  Yes, the general physical shape of \"Japan\" is and was defined by the shape of the islands, but really there could be (and is starting to be) quite a lively debate on whether or not the political powers-that-be constituted something that could be called a \"state\".  We generally talk about spheres of influence, like the imperial court and the warrior government (shogunate).  The imperial court was made up of the imperial family and hereditary nobles.  Depending on the specific moment, it was headed by either the emperor, a regent from one of the leading aristocratic families, or a retired emperor who was also the head of the imperial family.  \n\nThe reigning emperor's duties were largely ceremonial, which makes them easy to discount when viewed from the 21st century, but here we have to remove our modern lenses.  Ceremony and government went hand-in-hand during the premodern period (any time before 1600, but really even until the 19th century).  Any of the contemporary writings about the court or imperial rule inevitably talked about them in terms of either divine sanction, divine succession, or made some connection to prevailing spiritual beliefs.  A couple of English language resources here would be Varley's introduction to and translation of *Jinn\u014d sh\u014dt\u014d ki* (by Kitabatake Chikafusa), and Brownlee's book *Political Thought in Japanese Historical Writing*, which surveys all of the major histories through 1700.  Even the word for \"governance\" in Japanese (\u653f *matsurigoto*) is directly related to the word for worship (\u796d *matsuri*, current use means \"festival\") and I've seen it written in documents using the same character (\u796d).  So the point of this is to show that, even while to us the emperor's role might seem to be just a symbol or a figurehead, to premodern Japanese, the rituals of the court centered around the emperor were the way governance was done.\n\nSo what about land management, taxation, etc.?  Originally the court based its system on the Tang system in which the emperor owned all the land and granted it piece by piece to individual families, which only lasted a couple hundred years before it broke down, if it ever even spread beyond the capital region.  There's no solid evidence that it was widely adopted.  Instead, aristocratic families, including the imperial family, and large temples and shrines claimed rights to land.  They collected taxes from the capital and rarely, if ever, were physically present on the land.  They instead relied on local martial leaders to administer the lands.  This, while I'm oversimplifying a bit, is where the shogunate comes in.\n\nThe Kamakura shogunate, from its founding in 1189, governed only its own retainers who were the land administrators collecting taxes for absentee aristocrats.  While they were't necessarily liked by the emperors (two openly took to arms against Kamakura), the shogunate received its legitimacy from the court, and during the 13th century, several shoguns were picked from aristocratic families.  But the shogun also didn't necessarily have direct power over the warrior government, which was instead ruled over by the Hojo family acting as regents for the shoguns.  See what I meant by not straight-forward?\n\nSo dividing Kamakura into manageable periods, we have the formation of the shogunate, when they received direct support from retired emperors.  Just before 1221, certain aristocratic families were increasing support for the shogunate and negotiating sending their sons to act as shogun when the retired emperor Go-Toba essentially declared war on Kamakura and lost.  After this, we get a span of time when the Hojo are engaging more directly in court politics, even arbitrating a dispute between two rival imperial lineages.  Then in 1331, reigning emperor Go-Daigo called for an overthrow of Kamakura, and eventually some of Kamakura's warriors turned on them and the shogunate collapsed.  For a while we have direct imperial rule that ultimately was rather unpopular.  \n\nAgain, I'm simplifying a bit, but after a while, the Ashikaga set up another shogunate in Muromachi, a part of the capital.  For the first 50 years they were tied very closely to one branch of the imperial family, but while that branch legitimized them, we get 60 years of civil war that says that not everyone with political, economic, and martial power felt the same.  For one generation, though, during the rule of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, we do see the shogun acting more like a military dictator and the emperor and imperial court basically does what he tells them to do.  He was directly involved in the ritual of the court, which is really important.  Some historians go so far as to say that his line could have become emperors had his heir been as successful as he was.  After this though, that doesn't happen again.  The shoguns, and all the warriors, even the daimyo of the 16th century, get their legitimacy from the imperial court.  Even though by that point the court lost much of its economic power, its cultural power was still enormous. \n\nAs I said, the political relationship between the imperial court and the Tokugawa shoguns was different, but I don't know enough about it to really discuss it.  Hopefully an early modern historian will be able to speak to this for you.  To say an answer in one grossly oversimplified sentence, though, the shogun and emperor were heads of two intersecting spheres of authority.  \n\nI wrote a lot up there with only a few direct sources, but here are some others that users might find interesting.  *Kenmu* by Andrew Goble, discusses the years around the overthrow of the Kamakura shogunate.  *The Kamakura Bakufu* by Jeffery Mass is a collection of translated documents produced by the Kamakura shogunate that give a detailed picture of what they were involved in.  There are also some chapters in *Japan Emerging*, ed. Karl Friday, that give overviews of the imperial court, the estate system, and the Kamakura and Muromachi governments.\n\nEdit: formatting, fixed a couple of sentences to be clearer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "121jnh", "title": "What was the justification for the CIA's coup of Iran in 1953? What benefits, if any, stemmed from this action?", "selftext": "A link to the CIA's documents would be handy as well. From what I understand many were destroyed, but there were some that survived that I had a link handy for. Now it's expired and I can't find it.\n\nI'm ordering Kinzer's book \"All the Shah's Men\" by Stephen Kinzer on the lasting impacts of the move.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/121jnh/what_was_the_justification_for_the_cias_coup_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6reg72", "c6reskc", "c6rg7bg"], "score": [3, 4, 13], "text": ["I think the British asked for help to protect their oil interests in Iran, but I could of course be incorrect.", "I would like to, first of all, say that this entire comment is open to heavy scrutiny because I'm just piecing this together from various sources I've heard that have varying levels of validity. So, be warned.\n\nIt is my understanding that under the old government (the one Mossadegh replaced), the British (and perhaps the French too...?) had bought lots of oil rights throughout Iran. When Mossadegh came to power, he interpreted that as the British/French(?) taking advantage of the Iranian people, so he nationalized the industry. The British/French decided that they were not going to let that stand, so they went to Truman for help. Truman denied them, but, later, when Britain/France went to Eisenhower, Eisenhower decided to help them out. Of course, being the Cold War era and all, Russian influence had plenty to do with it to, so the U.S. wanted an America-friendly person in power. So, they put in the Shah, who was friendly towards the U.S. and towards oil interests, but lacked friendliness towards his own people.\n\nHonestly, there weren't really any benefits that I can think of. The Shah pissed everyone off so bad that it lead to an Iranian revolution, which of course brought out the hostage crisis. If you really want, you can follow that chain pretty far down. In an effort to hedge against the Ayatollahs, the U.S. propped up Saddam Hussein, who in turn used the resources that we had given him to attack Kuwait. We also ended up sending weapons to groups like the Hezbollah. The whole situation was/is a mess.", "Kinzer's book is very good. The central dynamic was economic: the US had established ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, with a 50/50 split of oil revenues, and there was an expectation that Iran should have the same deal. The British, however, were entirely intransigent in negotiations, famously insisting that paying one cent more in royalties would bankrupt the whole enterprise. Truman's cabinet had little sympathy for the British woes, which they saw as entirely self-imposed. \n\n1953 was a special year for the US - not only did it bring about the election of Eisenhower, but Allen Dulles took over the CIA, while his brother was Secretary of State. To a certain extent, you could say that Eisenhower was overmatched by these underlings. Kinzer details an episode where Eisenhower dispatched an emissary to Iran, only to have his man witness a CIA-staged drama involving an uprising and armed repression. Working with British intelligence, the CIA retooled the \"Iran problem\" as one of encroaching communism. Eisenhower took the bait. \n\nAs far as lasting impacts go, Eisenhower was much impressed by the CIA's work, and the Dulles brothers' ambition was equal to the task. The coup in Guatemala in 1954 was, in many ways, conceived as a replay of Operation Ajax. \n\nLooking further ahead, Dulles was a primary proponent of what ultimately became the Bay of Pigs invasion. In his second term, Eisenhower was less enamored with foreign adventures (despite constant haranguing by his VP, Richard Nixon, to \"make something happen\". Like Operation Ajax, the Bay of Pigs awaited a new president to be executed. \n\nOn the British side, they were happy to discover that a strike by their expatriate workforce could cause paralysis (they refused to continue working after Iran nationalized its oil supply). This became a crucial ploy during the early days of the Suez crisis, when British pilots were to refuse work, causing such international chaos that a police action would be required. \n\nOther than buying a market for F15 fighters and coca-cola for a generation, it's hard to see any benefit to Operation Ajax. The US had been well-respected in Iran until 1953, and their fair dealings with Saudi Arabia had bought a lot of sympathy from those who were antagonist to traditional colonialists. The only big \"win\" on the US side was for the CIA - such a cheap and resounding success largely created a new center of power within the Beltway. \n\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1g7ujj", "title": "How did the Greek city states organize, and communicate in order to organize, there collective forces in order to repel the Persian invasion led by Xerses I?", "selftext": "Before any of them sent out armies was there plans for a command structure for the combined forces as a whole, or did the different cities maintain complete control of there separate forces? Was there a meeting that decided what the best way too do this was, or was communication primarily done by messengers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g7ujj/how_did_the_greek_city_states_organize_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cahmvi6"], "score": [14], "text": ["According to Herodotus, the Greek city-states were willing to accept Spartan leadership. \n\nSo even though the Greek navy was at least half Athenian, and the Spartans were not known for their naval ability, and in fact the strategy was set by Themistocles the Athenian, the official commander of the Greek fleet was the Spartan Eurybiades.\n\nThe Spartans commanded the land army as well; at Plataea, when the Athenians and another contingent (let's say the Corinthians; I don't have my Herodotus in front of me) argued about which of them should have the honor of forming the right wing, the Spartans decided. (They decided in favor of the Athenians, because the Corinthians demanded it as their right while the Athenians said, basically, \"we'll line up wherever you Spartans put us.\")"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2eox30", "title": "Is the \"Teddy Roosevelt read 1 book every day\" fact true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eox30/is_the_teddy_roosevelt_read_1_book_every_day_fact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck1mhtq"], "score": [10], "text": ["While there were certainly some days when reading was impossible, he did average several books a day and was considered, along with Jefferson, to be one of the most well-read presidents in American history according to David H.Burton's The Learned Presidency and Edmund Morris' Roosevelt Trilogy comprising The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in his life."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3gi9p9", "title": "How do soldiers know they have been defeated, and what happens to them afterward?", "selftext": "My question is for any modern war (ie: with gunpowder, rifles, etc.), but I'll use the battle of Smolensk in 1941 to further illustrate my question. \n\nI've read / heard that the Germans captured 300,000 Soviet soldiers. At what point do the Soviets know that they've been defeated? Does their leader just decide at some point to communicate to his men to all surrender and they just throw up their hands and hope not to be killed? \n\nNow that the Germans have captured 300,000 men, what do they do with them? That would take a lot of logistics to bring them all to a prison of sorts. Do the soldiers who won the battle take care of this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gi9p9/how_do_soldiers_know_they_have_been_defeated_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctyf2ku"], "score": [46], "text": ["I can speak with regards to current military. There are Standard Operating Procedures with regards to POWs, and in any attack, from 8-man section to a 10,000-man division, the first thing done is called an Ammo/Cas report. That stands for Ammunition and Casualties. This is done by a specific member of each formation, and the information is passed up to higher. \n\nYou find out how much ammo was expended in the attack, the current condition of your soliders (injured or killed), any POWs, condition of your equipment and so on. This information is collected by the section or squad, and passed up to the platoon, then company, then battalion, and so on. There will also be designated CCPs or Casualty Collection Points. Casualties are passed back the lines (or stay in place as the assault moves forward) and are handled by medics, then evacuated to hospitals. \n\nPOWs are sent to a collection area for POWs, and are disarmed and searched, then passed on to a company level, then battalion, and onwards to Military Police. \n\nThe [Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War](_URL_2_) is very specific about what you can and can't legally take from a POW (weapons and ammo: yes, gas mask: no), about treatment, handling, pay (yes, you must pay a POW in your custody) and so on, all of which must be followed. \n\nOnce in the custody of Military Police, they are taken to designated facilities with are usually run by MPs, who also receive more extensive training on POW handling. \n\nSo, yes, soldiers on the battlefield will handle this. It's usually the second in command of a group who is responsible for Ammo/Cas, so the Section 2IC, then the Platoon 2IC, Coy 2IC and so on, and they get collected, passed up, collected, passed up, and so on until they reach a permanent holding area. There are tons of operating procedures that deal specifically with this, and soldiers at the lowest level will know the basic of it. On military leadership courses you get more training about what specifically to do, and you will get more training in your Rules of Engagement (ROEs) about the specifics for that particular theatre of operations before you deploy. \n\nExamples of Ammo/Cas reports: _URL_1_\n\nSOPs for Casualties: _URL_0_\n\nGeneva Convention on POWs: _URL_2_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.armystudyguide.com/content/army_board_study_guide_topics/survival/infantry-platoon-tactical.shtml", "https://rdl.train.army.mil/catalog-ws/view/100.ATSC/04183AF4-34EB-47F0-BCEE-29C93432DA49-1274564010088/3-21.8/chap6.htm", "https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305?OpenDocument"]]}
{"q_id": "14fqq1", "title": "Has three generations of heirs to the UK throne ever happened before?", "selftext": "When the Duchess of Cambridge gives birth, there will be three generations of heirs to the UK throne waiting in the wings. Has there ever been this many - or more - before?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14fqq1/has_three_generations_of_heirs_to_the_uk_throne/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cnlzu", "c7cnnjb", "c7cny6k", "c7codru"], "score": [33, 2, 35, 2], "text": ["Yes, in the 1890s.  Queen Victoria is still the longest reigning British monarch, and in the 1890s there was her heir Edward VII, his heir George V, and his son the eventual Edward VIII all living.", "Edit: sorry, misread the question, my example (Edward III) was only two generations. ", "Do you only want to count strictly vertical inheritance (father to son to grandson and so on) and not horizontal inheritances due to childlessness or abdication? If you counted horizontal ways and other times when power was in contention you'd have far more examples. \n\nFor example, during the War of the Roses there were times when the throne reverted from Lancaster to York and vice versa. During 1470-1471 Edward VI, Henry VI, Edward V, Richard III, and Henry VII were all alive contemporaneously. Edward V was born 1470 to Edward IV. Henry VI was king having gained the crown back briefly from Edward IV in 1470, only to be killed by Edward IV in 1471 and losing the throne to him. Richard III was born in 1453. So for a brief period of time between November 1470 when Edward V was born and May 1471 when Henry VI was killed there were five British monarchs alive at the same time. Edward IV and Edward V both would die in 1843 - Edward IV from a chill and and Edward V from being smothered in bed by Richard III (probably) as one of the princes in the tower. If you want to count heirs then Richard, Duke of York was also in the tower at the time and was once removed from the throne. Obviously he was killed at the same time. Richard III was of course famously killed at Bosworth Fields by Henry VII, who was born in 1457. Unfortunately Henry VIII wouldn't be born until 1491, by whence all but Henry VII was dead.\n\nOf course, Henry VIII had Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (if you count her), Mary I, and Elizabeth I all alive at the same time waiting to inherit. This is between 1537 when Edward VI was born and 1547 when Henry VIII died. That's five monarchs (4 heirs) if you want to count Lady Jane Grey.\n\nThen, we look further, and we can see that between the birth of George II (in Hanover) in 1683 and the death of Charles II in 1685, you'd have even more. Charles II, James II, William and Mary (one or two, up to you), Anne, George I, and George II all being alive between the two years. That's 6 or 7 depending on if you wanna count William and Mary as 1 or 2 monarchs. George II dies 2 years before the birth of George IV the Prince Regent, or you'd have George II, Frederick Prince of Wales, George III, and George IV, which is probably the most classically one-per-generation example.\n\nBetween 1819 and 1820 for half a year, George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria were all alive contemporaneously. For Victoria's heirs, between 1895 and 1901 Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, and George VI were all contemporaneous, so that's five. George V was still alive when Elizabeth II was born, so there would be four kings alive at the same time there.\n\nSo yeah, 2-3 kings alive at the same time seems to be pretty common. Currently it'd be 4 generations (Elizabeth, Charles, William, new baby). Still short of the 6 or 7. Although since horizontal inheritance isn't particularly predictable we can only really determine this kind of stuff in hindsight. You never know who's gonna die and screw up the succession order.\n\n\n\nTo the end of Geroge V's lifetime, Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II were all alive, Edward having abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. At one point ", "Thank you all of you for your answers. This is a lot more common than I thought it was. :-)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "504bpk", "title": "2 people recently died in Italy because of a WW2 unexploded ordnance. Are they eligible to be counted as civilian war casualties?", "selftext": "I'm aware that this question is sort of borderline for the rules of the subreddit, because it's mentioning recent events. It's not a question about current events though, but rather a question regarding philosophy of history.\n\nI'm not linking to the news because I've found no english sources, but I can provide a few in italian language if asked.\n\nFacts in brief are: a man took an unexploded WW2 30mm artillery projectile to his house, the bomb accidentally detonated killing him and his partner.\n\nWhile on one side the deaths can directly be accounted to imprudence and underestimation of risks, to the other side it must be argued that the bomb did what actually was intended for: killing people.\n\nI'm interested in knowing how experienced historians would debate over this.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/504bpk/2_people_recently_died_in_italy_because_of_a_ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7123ki"], "score": [27], "text": ["_URL_0_ This has been answered before, and generally casualties are restricted to the active dates of a war. Credit to /u/DoctorWhoToYou"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35sa5t/if_someone_sets_off_a_forgotten_explosive_device/cr7l0k9"]]}
{"q_id": "64jf8p", "title": "Who was Tito, and why was his death a cause of the break up of Yugoslavia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64jf8p/who_was_tito_and_why_was_his_death_a_cause_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg2rjc0", "dg36lx9", "dg38cm0", "dg40sr9"], "score": [26, 97, 11, 5], "text": ["Follow up question: how do historians generally regard Tito? I've heard some people praise him for both doing his own thing and preventing the ethnic tensions of Yugoslavia from becoming a full war (as it did in the 90's). Do historians agree with that sentiment? ", "Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, was certainly one of the more skilled politicians of the last 75 years and an important figure in European and international politics. While I would contest the direct connection between his death and the break up of Yugoslavia (I'll get to that), it is undoubtedly true that Tito was one of the more important figures of the Second World War and the post-war era in Europe.\n\nTito was born most likely in 1892 (birth dates vary mainly because Tito had been very careful about his public image once in power and not knowing his exact age was part of his projected mystique) in Kumrovec in what was then Crotia under Austro-Hungarian rule. Working as a metal worker in the 1910s, he was drafted into the Habsburg Army in WWI and fought on the Russian front where he became a POW in 1915. Released during the February Revolution in 1917, he went to Petrograd where he eventually joined the Bolshevisks (he had been a member of the socialist party in his homeland before). Subsequently he fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.\n\nHe returned to Yugoslavia in 1920 and was active in the Communist Party. Because the KJP was illegal in the first Yugoslavia, he was imprisoned because of political agitation several times and also through work for the party and his connections to the Comintern and Moscow voted into the Central Committee of the Party. From 1936 to 1938 he was a Comintern agent in Paris, responsible for smuggling Yugoslav volunteers into Spain for the purpose of fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He, through either luck of connections, survived the Stalinist purges of the Comintern parties during that time and after the KJP had been hit particularly hard by a bloody purge from Moscow was made the leader of KJP in 1937 because he was known as good, loyal party soldier in Moscow.\n\nBeing an illegal party the KJP was necessarily conspiratorial and had only a small number of members throughout Yugoslavia in 1940. Tito would have most likely remained a rather inconsequential figure in the grand scheme had it not been for the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. Despite contrary orders from Moscow (who until June still retained its position influenced by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), once the Axis invaded Yugoslavia in April, Tito and the party began preparing for resistance and once they got the go-ahead from Moscow in June, they were able to strike incredibly effectively right away.\n\nOver the summer of 1941 a coalition between Tito's communist Partisans and the remnants of the Yugoslav Royal Army reorganized as the so-called Chetniks were able to wrest control of almost the entirety of Serbia from the Germans. The German Army in Serbia was by August 1941 confined to a small number of Urban Centers and the situation got so bad that there were voices within the Wehrmacht that advocated ceasing control of the country and re-invading at a later point. Now part of this was related to the very thin German troop presence in Serbia but it was this early that Tito made a couple of important choices that would eventually majorly contribute to the Partisan's success in Yugoslavia:\n\nFirst of all, through his previous contacts with people who fought in Spain, he was able to organize a very effective guerilla army. \n\nSecondly, he decreed that the declared parole and goal of the Partisans was national liberation and not socialist revolution. Of course there was no doubt that the movement was controlled by the communists but in their rhetoric aimed at peasants etc. national liberation was always their declared goal. And they didn't limit themselves to one nationality (unlike the Chetniks who were a Serbian movement) but rather embraced the liberation of all Yugoslav peoples thus attracting people as diverse as Slovenians and Macedonians, Muslims and Roma into their movement.\n\nThirdly, he proved quite adept at playing one occupying power against the other, namely Italians against Germans. The Partisans negotiated both ceasefires and passages through Italian occupied territory several times  in order to more effectively strike at the Germans. This tactic was initially not popular int he movement but it was largely thanks to Tito that it prevailed and it paid off several times.\n\nIn 1943 with only tacit support from Moscow, Tito and his communist party was able to pull off another very important victory. The foundation of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, nominally an umbrella organization for all fighting against the occupation but really controlled by Tito and the communists, established a new Yugoslav government under Tito that the Western Allies at least partially recognized as such. Over the further course of the war, the Partisans swelled in numbers, ending the war at 800.000 fighting men and women.\n\nAfter the end of the war, Tito and the now renamed KPJ set to work to pacify Yugoslavia under their rule and establish a Stallin-style socialist dictatorship, including the violent suppression of their political enemies. The Stalinist period of Yugoslavia lasted until 1948 when the Soviet-Yugoslav split occurred. Major factors in the political split between the USSR and Yugoslavia were the support of Greek communists in the Greek Civil War by Tito, which had been rejected by Stalin \u2013 for more context see [here](_URL_1_) \u2013, the talk of a Bulgarian-Yugoslav Federation and generally Tito's independence from Moscow, which he could afford because his leadership of the Partisans in WWII and the liberation of Yugoslavia with hardly any help from the Red Army had lead to Tito having a mythical status among Yugoslavians.\n\nAfter the break, Yugoslav socialism and politics needed to be readjusted. The most important elements introduced under the leadership of Tito were:\n\n* in internal politics, the principle of \"brotherhood and unity\", meaning that within Yugoslavia all the various republics were to peacefully coexist and unlike in the first Yugoslavia no part of Yugoslavia would reign supreme over others.\n\n* within Yugoslav socialism, the principle of worker's self management. Unlike a Soviet style planned economy, the KPJ decided that their socialism would consist of actually turning over the means of production to the workers. Companies and plants were to be managed democratically by the workers who would elect representatives in order to decide on company and plant policy. While this was not radically implemented, it lead to the establishment of pockets of free market within the Yugoslav economy.\n\n* within international politics, a policy of neutrality between the blocs. This importantly enable Yugoslavia to profit from Marshall Plan Aid from the West and invest heavily into its economy laying the ground for becoming the only socialist country with a considerable consumer goods industry that exported into the West.\n\nWhile this international policy initially lead to great fears in the Yugoslav leadership that the Soviets would invade (in 1952 there were talks of a Yugoslav-Greek-Turkish defense pact, which would have made Yugoslavia practically a member of NATO), it later transformed into the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, attempting to establish a third bloc between West and East. While the NAM never gained the importance Yugoslavia wanted it to have, Yugoslavia's neutrality between the blocs brought a very advantageous position: It profited from Tourism from both West and East and also could trade with both.\n\nThese successes together with the mythical status of Tito from his time in WWII and a noticeably cult of personality that developed in Yugoslavia established Tito as the central figure of Yugoslavian politics. Incredibly adept at internal politics, Tito was heavy handed when necessary and backed off when he saw it as opportune. He firmly planted himself as the center of all Yugoslavian politics. And in 1980 he died.\n\nI have written about important factors for the Yugoslav break up just today [here](_URL_0_) and while I won't copy paste it all here, the importance of Tito's death lies in that the people who had served under him basically treid everything they could to what has been described as \"Tito without Tito\" meaning to continue what they saw as what Tito would have done without possessing his adaptability and political cunning. The linked comment goes into more depth concerning the break-up but that is the short of it.\n\nSources:\n\n* Holm Sundhaussen: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten.\n\n* Jozo Tomsevich: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941\u20131945: Occupation and Collaboration.\n\n* Stevan K. Pawlowtich: Hitler's New Disorder.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "I don't think his death was specifically a cause of the break-up of Yugoslavia, but it certainly didnt help. It would probably be fairer to say that Tito was the reason Yugoslavia stayed together. He was a rallying figure that citizens loved (so much so that it gave birth to a later movement, Yugonostalgism). \n\nTito maintained a policy through the communist party of aversion towards nationalism and nationalist groups, citing them as \"dangerous to the state.\" As u/commiespaceinvader points out, he comes up instead with a policy of brotherhood and unity that grants equality to all ethnic groups and republics within Yugoslavia. Tito's time spent as President (up to roughly 1968) was centered around navigating the complexities that come with having constituents made of nationalities with very little in common other than constant fighting. After 1968, Tito begins to slowly remove himself from the responsibilities of daily politics in Yugoslavia, culminating in reforms introduced in the Constitution of 1974 that remove the responsibility of governance from the federal government and grants it to the republics. The federal government existed as an oversight to ensure the collapse of the state could be avoided, but by and large, the responsibility of day to day governing fell to the individual republics. \n\nThat, I believe, is a stronger case for the break-up of Yugoslavia. Republics began using their responsibility to look out for their own interests, rather than the interests of the entirety of the state. This grants more strength to larger republics like Serbia and Croatia over that of smaller ones like Montenegro or even autonomous regions like the Vojvodina. Tito's death exacerbated this and actually left a power vacuum since the Constitution of 1974 ended the office of the Presidency. This vacuum allowed various ethnic tensions to grow unchecked, which is a backdrop of the break-up.\n\nI would say the actions of Slobodan Milosevic, his takeover of Serbia in 1987, and his ethnic wars in the 90s would be more of a cause than Tito's death.\n\nSources:\n        Mocnik, Nena. Tito's Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia and the West Since 1939. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987.\n        Pavkovic, Aleksandar. The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans. New York, NY: St. Martins Press, 1997.\n        Pedro Ramet. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1963-1983. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988.\n\n\nEdit: Added sources for my answer. Was on mobile initially", "Further to the superb points that have already been raised, I would like to raise the factor of Tito and his long-term failure with Yugoslavia's economic policy.\n\nAs has been previously alluded to by others, Yugoslavia's foreign policy was closely linked to its financial policy. The \"West\" (mainly the U.S.) pumped vast amounts of capital into Yugoslavia after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split in the hope that they could gain a foothold in the \"East\". And after Khrushchev's rebuilding of Soviet-Yugoslav ties, investment soon flooded in from the East too. (I won't go into the detail but it's relevant to note that Yugoslavia, aside from straddling the East/West tightrope, had become a founding member of the non-aligned bloc in 1961 and so that altered some of the previous closeness between foreign and economic policy).\n\nI don't believe that Tito's death was the cause behind the breakup of Yugoslavia, but certainly Tito's actions had virtually destroyed the position of relative economic strength that the country enjoyed during the earlier years of Tito's reign. By the time Tito died in 1980, Yugoslav debt had risen to a substantial sum of $18.9 billion. \nThe joke that I gather was told in Yugoslavia during the funeral was that the only reason so many foreign dignitaries and heads of state turned up was so that they could collect the payments on the debt!\n\nFactors such as nationalism, ethnic hatred and governmental instability were (I believe) symptoms of the problem. Although interestingly you could argue that foreign intervention was the cause behind Yugoslavia's breakup, but I'll leave that for another day!\n\nHope that helps,\nSam   (A-level history student, studying the breakup of the \"first\" and \"second\" Yugoslavia).\n\n\n\nSources:\n-John R.Lampe: Yugoslavia as History: Twice there was a country\n\n-Susan L.Woodward: Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and dissolution after the Cold War\n\n-Kate Hudson: Breaking the South Slav Dream: The rise and fall of Yugoslavia"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64i9f6/how_did_the_balkans_become_the_region_of_europe/dg32yu2/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63sv2t/why_didnt_greece_become_a_satellite_state_of_the/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bczdev", "title": "Approximately when, and why/how, did Saturday become a traditional day off from work in North America and Europe?", "selftext": "Sunday, what with the  Christian Sabbath, seems obvious.  But what about Saturday?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bczdev/approximately_when_and_whyhow_did_saturday_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekvr8id"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Saturday day off was first created by the England mill company in 1908 for the Jewish Sabbath which they are not religiously allowed to work but the company that made the 5 day work week a popular thing was most likely ford"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "39z8k6", "title": "How accurate is Downton Abbey?", "selftext": "In comparison to high society England in the early 20th century. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39z8k6/how_accurate_is_downton_abbey/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cs7tmo1", "cs8em6f"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Just a note that not everyone who may know the intricacies of 20th century British life also watches the show. May help to specify particulars you're interested in.", "Until someone else comes along, I made a [post](_URL_0_) in r/BadHistory a while back which you may find interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2n4nsq/meta_what_are_the_most_historically_accurate/cmal4q3"]]}
{"q_id": "1xsqbi", "title": "How were the economic structures during the classical era in the mediterranean cities?", "selftext": "In many European cities guilds used to control most of the secondary sector during the medieval age, effectively preventing competition between craftsmen.\n\nWas there anything comparable in the time before that? Specifically institutions that fixed market prices of goods, limited production output of businesses and controlled who would be allowed to work in a certain sector. \n\nIf not, how was business organized in the time? Was every free man allowed to buy, produce and sell anything he wanted within a city?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xsqbi/how_were_the_economic_structures_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfegyx3"], "score": [11], "text": ["The Roman Empire doesn't seem to have had a formal legal control of business in the same way Medieval cities did with guilds. The question of market fairs is a bit more complex. We know they existed, and were probably controlled through local town governing authorities, but it is difficult to know how this impacted business outside of market days. The undeniable existence of permanent streetfront shops argues against an idea of mercantile activity being overly restricted outside of those days.\n\nThe closest thing to a guild structure you will find are the *collegia*. I'll paste in a discussion I gave of them a few days ago:\n\n > The most well known labor organization of sorts in the Roman world was the collegium, which became prominent and important seemingly everywhere across the empire, although the specific modes of organization seem to have differed. For example, merchants in the East seem to have primarily organized themselves along communal lines (religious, ethnic, familial etc) while evidence from Lyon seems to point towards merchants organizing themselves along specific goods carried. This, of course, is not easily applicable to other professions, but it shows some of the diversity.\n\n > Anyway, collegia seem to have begun as religious and burial organizations, but they quickly acquired commercial and social characters. This is all rather difficult to untangle and requires using a lot of varied evidence. I'll just give three, to give an idea: In Egypt, the environmental conditions allow for the survival of documentary papyrus and so we know an awful lot about collegia there, and we see a great deal of market organization and negotiation in the documents. In Asia Minor, literary evidence allows us to see examples of certain workmen organizations opposing the activity of the imperial elite (specifically the orator Dio Chrysostom) and prevailing, their collective economic interests defeating a very well connected person's political interests. In Pompeii, we see graffiti showing the prominent social role of collegia, and we even have wall paintings of something like festival floats. The problem with integrating is that these are fundamentally different types of evidence\u2014we have no grafitti and wall paintings in Egypt, no papyri in Asia Minor, no literary descriptions for Pompeii. So are the role of collegia the same everywhere, but we just have different sets of evidence? Or are they actually very different?\n\nThe *collegia* do not seem to have had the same sort of legal control over business as guilds did, but they may have wielded extensive social control, and they could directly control the activities of its members. For example, we have papyri from Egypt that describe how a particular *collegium* sold the right to engage in certain types of economic activity to one of its members, and the punishment for those who attempted to engage in that economic activity in competition with the person who bought the contract."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4g3zw8", "title": "In the US during WWII, how did rationing work on the homefront if people went to a restaurant? Did people have to give the ration coupons/cards to the restaurant in addition to payment?", "selftext": "I , for a long time have always wondered about this. It has never been made clear in any books I've read or documentaries I have seen. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g3zw8/in_the_us_during_wwii_how_did_rationing_work_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2ew3h8"], "score": [67], "text": ["The restaurants had to collect points in order to buy more stock for their kitchens. They took the points to the local ration board and exchanged them for vouchers that allowed them to buy quantities of food at a time. \n\nLots more here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hfc/"]]}
{"q_id": "52skvt", "title": "After the Second World War, why did Germany abandon the development of the Panzerkampfwagen VI line of tanks and instead develop the Leopard tanks?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52skvt/after_the_second_world_war_why_did_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7ncfsx", "d7neqpg", "d7q48m7"], "score": [4, 5, 3], "text": ["While there were a lot of problems and drawbacks with the German heavy tanks, the real reason is that armored doctrine simply shifted away from the 'Heavy' tank as an important weapon and towards an all around Main Battle Tank concept. \n\nTo get to the Leopard, weve first got to talk a little bit about how West Germany rearmed following World War Two. This process, for reasons I wont get into here, was very long and drawn out. Negotiations for rearmament didnt really even get started until 1950, when the Korean invasion shocked the world. Even still, foot dragging in Europe prevented much movement on the issue until 1954 when Germany was finally permitted to rebuild her military. At that point, the Germans had to create a completely new organization (the *Wehrmacht* had been completely destroyed after World War Two) and equip it with weapons which didnt yet exist. In the early 1950s this was done primarily through military assistance from the United States. This meant that for much of the 1950s and early 1960s, the German army used second hand American tanks. \n\nBut German designers were looking to build a domestic tank to replace imported materials. And, as you might expect, they wanted to produce cutting edge weapons. The late '50s had seen a pretty big shift in armored theory, especially in the United States. This was the result of decades worth of thinking, but essentially the US Army had slowly  pushed away from an army built up of multiple tank models towards one which used a single design. Rather than have a heavy breakthrough tank (a project which the US never seemed to really get off the ground), a medium exploitation tank, and a light reconnaissance tank, the US began to pair its forces down to one tank. The Patton series of tanks really represented this switch to the MBT role. These tanks had guns which could kill *most* of the tanks in the Soviet armory, had armor which afforded them some protection, and yet maintained enough battlefield agility to relocate quickly.\n\nNow, the Americans did fiddle with a heavy tank and a light tank (the M103 and the M551), but they generally found these tanks unsatisfactory on the battlefield, and quickly relegated them to niche specialist roles. Likewise, the British experimented with also experimented with heavier tank designs as well. But generally these were rejected in favor of lighter MBTs. The Germans realized why when they began to study the problem of the nuclear battlefield. NATO war planners had spent much of the 1960s, with and without German help, trying to figure out how to fight a hypothetical Pact invasion. And the answer they came up with involved a large number of nuclear weapons. Unlike World War Two, were large masses of men concentrated their effort into a narrow section of static enemy defense, the nuclear battlefield was fluid. Forces had to move fast and hit hard, and they especially had to avoid elaborate defensive works which were prime targets for nuclear attack. Heavy tanks simply lacked the speed and mobility to move rapidly across the battlefield and strike the enemy where he was most vulnerable. And this was a problem that wasnt just limited to the West. At nearly the same time the Soviets recognized that their heavy tank designs were simply too large and too good a target to be practical on the battlefield. \n\nSo, I would argue that the Leopard 1 was the German Army's first attempt to solve this question. They attempted to design a weapon which could operate on the nuclear battlefield utilizing a mixture of both off and domestic weapons. While their solution was uniquely German, it recognized the realities of the nuclear battlefield and it conformed to many of the standards set for by their allies. And, to the Tiger Series, unfortunately for such a beautiful tank, time had simply passed the heavy tank by. Had Germany rearmed in 1946, you may have seen a Tiger 3 tank. But by the mid 1960s, when the Leopard entered production, Heavy tanks were simply on the way out. \n\n*A note on Sources*\n\nThis is compiled from a reading of several secondary sources some of which are out of print. The best general summary of tank development at this time would be Richard Ogorkiewicz's books, especially the *Technology of Tanks*. Another good book is [The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War](_URL_0_). Now this book obviously focuses on the US Army, not the German, but it explores many of the problems associated with planning for the nuclear battlefield. It Also talks about the Army's institutional response to those challenges, from strategic and organizational changes, all the way down to weapons development and planning. It also does discuss the Germans extensively as they dealt with the problems of rearmament, and then integration into the overall European command. ", "The original Tiger tank had a very large amount of problems, the greatest of which was that Allied medium tanks had equivalent firepower in 1944, just over a year after the Tiger first saw combat, but at half the weight. The Germans realized this, and the Tiger B/Tiger II/King Tiger, the development of which began before the first Tiger left the factory, had very little in common with the original Tiger tank. However, even the new Tiger tank was vulnerable to the gun of the Soviet IS-2 and American Pershing at its inception, in addition to lighter guns (17 pdr and D-10) mounted on medium tanks and medium tank destroyers, which again caused the Germans to seek a replacement design. The heavy Maus and E-100 tanks that would be impervious (at least frontally) to these guns ended up being cancelled because they were simply impractical. The decreasing quality of German armour meant that armour had to grow thicker and thicker in order to resist Allied weapons, making these superheavy tanks incredibly impractical, even compared to the Tigers.\n\nBy the time the German army was allowed to rebuild after the war, the heavy tank concept has taken enormous steps forward. The Soviets built the IS-7, a heavy tank with the size and weight of the King Tiger and enough armour protection to be impervious to the 128 mm gun of the Jagdtiger and Maus. That wasn't all, the new generation of heavy tanks, the Object 752 and Object 777 had as much effective armour as the E-100 while weighing a third as much. The Tigers, already not exactly progressive designs in the 1940s, looked hilariously primitive by comparison.\n\nSources:\n\n*Interrogation of Herr Stiele Von Heydekampf: German Tank  &  Engine Program*\n\n*Ministry of Supply Armour Branch Report on Armour Quality  &  Vulnerability of Royal Tiger*\n\n*Otchet po ispytnaniyu snaryadnym obstrelom lobovykh detaley korpusa i bashni nemetskogo tyazhelogo tanka Tigr B*\n\nYuri Pasholok, *Panzerkampfwagen Maus*\n\nYuri Pasholok, *Neschastlivye Tri Semyorki*\n\nNikolai Nevsky, *IS-7 Titan Opozdavshiy na Voynu*\n", "While the other posters have discussed the relative technical demerits of the wartime \"cats\", it is important to realize that the Bundeswehr procurement procurement process was a highly politicized one. Under the auspices of *Amt Blank*, Adenauer erected a shadow defense ministry in 1950 under the leadership of Theodor Blank that sought to prepare the way for a West German rearmament. Adenauer saw that rearmament was desirable both as a guarantor of FRG security (especially if the US withdrew into isolation), and as a symbol that the FRG had regained its sovereignty. much of the proto-defense ministry favored a relatively large, sophisticated force that would guarantee FRG security. But *Amt Blank*'s plans had to tread carefully because the issue of German rearmament was such a charged topic coming five years after the war. Much of Western European public opinion was against rearmament, as was a sizable percentage of the FRG's population, and most Western European policymakers favored a very limited form of rearmament.  The British, for example, hemmed and hawed between supporting a limited FRG rearmament and a broader neutralization of both Germanys.   \n\nTherefore the Adenauer government had to thread between two contentious needles of both pushing for a quick rearmament and doing so in a way that did not alienate their would-be allies. Rearmament needed to be quick not only because the outbreak of the Korean War stimulated worst-case scenario thinking, but also a *fait accompli* would prevent any of the FRG's partners from getting cold feet, especially since it was known that the USSR would vigorously protest German rearmament. One strategy to accomplish this was through the European Defense Community (EDC), an attempt to create a common European army. The EDC proved to be a dead end though due to inter-European squabbles, but also because of disagreements over German force levels. Both Paris and London pushed for a much smaller German contribution than what Bonn wanted. Although the EDC proved to be a dead end, it did allow for the FRG to test the waters for rearmament and it found that while many Western European leaders were uncomfortable with the idea, they could stomach it. The result was that the FRG instead formed its own national army, the Bundeswehr, and incorporated it into an organization that had fallen into a degree of disuse during the protracted abortion of the EDC, NATO. \n\nBundeswehr procurement followed a two-pronged strategy under the newly-formed Ministry of Defense under Blank and his successor Franz Josef Strau\u00df. The first part of the stratagem was to gain a maximum, modern force quickly. Termed \"Broad Armament\", this meant acquiring advanced weapons from friendly nations. The initial main partner in this process was the US, and much of the groundwork of supplying the Germans had been laid by US Undersecretary of Defense Frank Nash during the EDC debates. The Nash List provided the Bundeswehr both surplus M47 and M48A3 tanks under the Military Assistance Program (MAP) as well as other sophisticated equipment like F-86s. The Bundeswehr also sought to fill in gaps by tendering orders to Western European states. This not only had the effect of making German rearmament appear \"European,\" but also eased the FRG's trade deficit with Western Europe, which had grown with the export-orientated *Wirtschaftswunder*. Thus the new Bundeswehr was armed  with American heavy equipment, but French Alouette II helicopters, Belgian small arms, Turkish ammunition, and Swiss-designed and British-built Hispano Suiza HS-30 IFV. Israel too was a beneficiary of Broad Armament providing the new German army with mortars and Uzis (built by Belgium). \n\nBut this heterogeneous mix of weaponry was not an end onto itself, but a means for the Bundeswehr to familiarize itself with modern equipment in order to fulfill \"deep armament.\" This policy stressed that FRG defense firms would gradually take over the Bundeswehr's needs and provide its military chiefs with the equipment they wanted. The Germans, most of whom were veterans of the Second World War, were disappointed with the quality of MAP weapons and the US's poor performance in Korea did not make American methods ones to emulate. Blank had tried to get British Centurion tanks, but the British were alarmed that the Bundeswehr was not becoming an infantry-focused defensive force, but was instead developing a strong armored component, and refused. The British concerns proved apt as the Bundeswehr sought with deep armament to create the type of force structure that reflected what it saw as the lessons of the war.  Both Blank and Strauss, as well as the new service heads Spiedel and Heusinger, envisioned a mix of modernized Panzer and Panzer Grenadier formations to be the bedrock for the Bundeswehr.  This meant, for example, developing the IFV concept for mechanized infantry and abandoning the US's concept of a battle taxi. Even though the HS-30 was a substandard piece of equipment, it did provide practical experience that went into the design of the Marder IFV. Deep armament also called for the Bundeswehr to be nuclear-capable, with fighter-bombers and artillery, later missile batteries, capable of deploying nuclear weapons. This issue was too much for other NATO partners to completely stomach, as well as quite unpopular at home, and while the Bundeswehr did evolve a nuclear-capable force, the warheads were strictly under NATO (ie non-German) control. \n\nAs the Bundeswehr's nuclear capability demonstrates, German rearmament was still a political hot potato. This had implications for the development of the first generation of MBTs. Strauss, who hewed towards a Gaullist grand strategy in contrast to the more Atlantic-orientated members of Adenauer's cabinet, proposed a joint Franco-German development for a modern tank in 1960, the *Standardpanzer*30. This was part of Strauss's larger game of building up a closer Franco-German rapprochement, which could have included a French nuclear weapons in exchange for a FRG withdrawal from NATO. The resulting competition had one French firm producing what would be the AMX-30, while two German teams worked on the proposed German design. The two teams were headed by both the Porsche and Henschel firms respectively and included many veterans from those firms' wartime design and production teams. The Porsche design eventually won out over its French and Henschel rivals and became the Leopard I. \n\nAs the above indicates, West German rearmament was not just simply a case of picking up where wartime development left off. Instead it was a tricky process for the Bundeswehr as it sought to navigate various political tripwires to achieve the type of force structure the Germans actually wanted. Fielding a tank force was not just a matter of damaged German industrial infrastructure, but making such a reborn force palatable to the FRG's neighbors to the West. Wartime lessons had underscored the need to have a modern and technologically capable force and despite the Wehrmacht's reputation for scientific *Wunderwaffen*, many of their much-vaunted equipment suffered from bugs and defaults from too hasty of a development  cycle. By the time the political constellations had formed allowing for an indigenous German heavy tank, the modern battlefield had changed so much, especially with the anticipated NBC environment of a war in Central Europe, that a tank designed in 1960 would be a very different animal than one designed in 1943. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBirtle, A. J. *Rearming the Phoenix: U.S. Military Assistance to the Federal Republic of Germany, 1950-1960*. New York: Garland, 1991. \n\nCorum, James S. *Rearming Germany*. Leiden: Brill, 2011.\n\nLarge, David Clay. *Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era*. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. \n\nWenger, Andreas, Christian Nuenlist, and Anna Locher. *Transforming NATO in the Cold War: Challenges Beyond Deterrence in the 1960s*. London: Routledge, 2007.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-U-S-Army-Deterrence/dp/0700615784/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1473908075&amp;sr=8-5&amp;keywords=The+Cold+War+U.S.+Army"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1oibf0", "title": "Was there still any undiscovered land left by the time the aviation age came about?", "selftext": "Put another way, did the human race discover any land through means more advanced than seafaring? Maybe there was even an astronaut on the ISS who peered out the window, spotted a land mass and said, \"Hey, that isn't on any map I've seen!\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oibf0/was_there_still_any_undiscovered_land_left_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccs6mym"], "score": [3], "text": ["[There were islands discovered with satelite imagery](_URL_0_), but I don't think that's really what you meant. You're more talking about significant land masses.\n\nI think the most important would be Antarctica. The Coastlines had (generally) been mapped in piecemeal efforts, but [significant exploration of the inland area was done in modern times](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/26/scientists-discover-657-islands-sitting-under-our-noses/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Antarctica#Exploration_by_air:_1930s_to_1950s"]]}
{"q_id": "909n96", "title": "What factors led to cultures in Mesopotamia to transition from nomadic to sedentary living?", "selftext": "None of my history classes ever covered this transition period. Every culture was \"just there,\" and we moved on with learning history.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/909n96/what_factors_led_to_cultures_in_mesopotamia_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2p9bi3"], "score": [7], "text": ["Before the advent of agriculture most human movements can be roughly explained in terms of climate and resources. The story of our  transition from nomadic to sedentary life is no exception, and in fact begins around the end of the last ice age. \n\nThe cold and dry climate of the Pleistocene Ice Age made resources relatively scarce. With more of the world\u2019s water locked away in glaciers, the river systems that later supported agriculture were not yet the abundant, fertile places we know them to be. Without the pre existing knowledge of agriculture, there simply wasn\u2019t a place bountiful enough in animal and plant life for nomads to settle long-term. They could basically stay in a place until it\u2019s resources were exhausted or their food moved. \n\nBy 11,000 the climate was far more conducive to the proliferation of flora and fauna, especially near the equator. The Natufians of the Levant began to experiment with more permanent settlements. I say experiment because they were still a hunter-gatherer society, but the greater availability of resources allowed them to forage and hunt from central, stationary communities. However, for about 1,000 years beginning in 10,800 Earth temporarily endured a cold swing with cold climates reminiscent of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Global glaciation brought on droughts and the Nartufians, who may have been using wild cereals to make bread as early as 12,000, could no longer depend on an abundance of wild crops and animals to sustain them. To defray the loss of natural resources, they began collecting seeds and clearing out scrub land to plant them in.\n\nThis question is hotly debated within the scientific community and the above is answer is somewhat controversial depending on how you define sedentary living. It\u2019s not entirely accurate to say that the Nartufians were the first domestic farmers, as simply planting and harvesting does not qualify as \u201cagriculture\u201d in the sense that we think of it in Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley. However, they took an important step towards developing a sustainable model for sedentary living.\n\nTo put it more concisely, sedentary communities largely resulted from human response to local climate change. Sedentary life became sustainable when these communities began to experiment with plant domestication, and ultimately became the norm when animal domestication and technological advances gave way to large scale agriculture"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1zebps", "title": "Did the American entry into the First World War have a significant impact on the eventual outcome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zebps/did_the_american_entry_into_the_first_world_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsxzai"], "score": [19], "text": ["Yes, absolutely - though not in the way you might think!\n\nThe US came into the war just as Russia was knocked out of it and the Germany high command realised that with the massive manpower and manufacturing base of the US, it was only a matter of time before the war was lost. It was therefore imperative to try and win the war before the Americans arrived en masse - there would be over 300,000 US soldiers in France by May 1918 and a further million by August.\n\nForces were redeployed from Russia as fast as they could and a massive offensive - Operation Michael - was launched in March 1918. The German spring offensive broke through the British lines on the Somme and succeeded (finally!) in breaking the trench deadlock and getting through into open country, thanks to tactics learned on the eastern front - a short \"hurricane bombardment\" instead of days of shelling, and infiltration and stormtrooper tactics. \n\nWith the British forces reeling back and the French fighting on the flanks, it looked for a while as if the Germans might actually manage to take Paris, and Haig issued a general order that all British forces were to stand firm, backs to the wall.\n\nUnfortunately for the Germans, the offensive petered out short of Paris thanks to a combination of dogged British defence and French attacks along the flanks of the German line; the difficulties the Germans found in advancing over the shell-ravaged Somme battlefields from two years earlier and the tendency of German troops to drop everything and start looting whenever they took a British supply dump.\n\nOnce the German offensive ground to a halt in August, the Allies counter-attacked, pushing the Germans back to the old trench line and then beyond it, in the \"Hundred Days Offensive\" which continued until the Armistice in 1918. These last 9 months of war were a far cry from the trench warfare that is the usual image of WWI and actually it wasn't until the Hundred Days that US forces were engaged in any number, so the American experiences of WWI were in general somewhat different from those of the British and French, with Pershing's American Expeditionary Force deployed along the Ardennes region in the French sector and attacking along the Verdun-Sedan axis.\n\nSo in WWI the American troops played a significant part in winning the war without actually doing a huge amount of the fighting. If the war had gone on another six months or so in the trench warfare phase, we'd have seen huge American armies manning the trenches and probably having their own Sommes and Verduns while they learned the lessons of Trench Warfare, but as it was it was the mere threat of the American arrival that forced the Germans to risk it all on an all-or-nothing attack.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7onxzo", "title": "Are slavs native to Balkans, and if not, who dominated The Balkans before they went there?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7onxzo/are_slavs_native_to_balkans_and_if_not_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsb9npa"], "score": [12], "text": ["The Slavs as a linguistic group didn't arrive in the Balkans until the migration period of the 6th century. Around the same time, the region was also invaded by the Turkic Bulgars, who were gradually Slavicised until all that was left was the name. As to who dominated the Balkans before, the answer is Rome, who ruled the region from around 20 CE until the arrival of the Slavs and Bulgars. The Adriatic coast had been a Roman province for much longer than that, and Emperor Diocletian's palace forms the center of the Croatian city of Split. Before that, the eastern portions, which are now Macedonia and Bulgaria, where ruled by the Persians for a time and subsequently the Greeks.\n\nHowever, the answer to who the dominant population was in the Balkans is very different. In the east, the main groups where the Thracians and the Dacians, who had frequent contact with the Greeks to the south, but spoke a very different language and tended to no organize politically on a large scale. The western Balkans were inhabited by the Illyrians, of who not much is actually known. We know that they were never united as one \"Illyrian\" cultural group, and that the place known as Illyria by the Greeks and Romans was inhabited by numerous tribes who didn't necessarily have a lot in common. Some of them where influenced by Celtic cultures from northern Italy and modern day Austria. Occasionally, one group would rise to become particularly powerful, but no one dominated the whole region politically.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9ycfu4", "title": "A rather short question: How did Australia become a thing?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ycfu4/a_rather_short_question_how_did_australia_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea0jjz3"], "score": [6], "text": ["Well, that's a big question, but the various answers about Australia [in our FAQ on Oceania](_URL_3_) are definitely a good place for you to start, and some answers within that that are directly relevant to your questions include:\n\n* my answer to [Why was Australia colonized? What motivated people to travel so far only to settle in such a dangerous place?](_URL_1_)\n\n* an answer by /u/Algernon_Asimov on [\nWhat would life have been like back in the colonization days for a prisoner shipped from England to Australia once he/she stepped off the boat?](_URL_2_), and\n\n* /u/AbandoningAll's answer to [Were indigenous Australians ever enslaved?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9f4fu7/were_indigenous_australians_ever_enslaved/e5txn7c/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79032k/why_was_australia_colonized_what_motivated_people/doy6cjo/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1havhy/what_would_life_have_been_like_back_in_the/cat42jl/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/oceania"]]}
{"q_id": "23ezg5", "title": "When did testing new hires for drugs become standard practice, and why?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23ezg5/when_did_testing_new_hires_for_drugs_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwgsl9", "cgwke03"], "score": [31, 31], "text": ["Alrighty guys, because I've already had to remove ten comments similar to this, I'm going to leave a top-level mod post here. Please remember when posting here that this is not /r/Politics. We are not interested in contemporary politics, your opinions on current policies of countries, two word answers, one line answers, etc. [For more info on what makes a good answer, please see here.](_URL_0_) If you're interested in our [rules,](_URL_1_) there's a link in the sidebar for your perusal. \n\nHave a great day :)", "Something to keep in mind is practical drug tests didn't exist until the first part of the 20th century. The first drug testing in modern times was probably the Olympics in 1966. And while anti-doping is a fascinating topic, what you are probably asking about is the war on drugs. \n\n1971 - Operation Golden flow, Essentially nixon begins drug testing the military, This is mainly aimed at heroin use and is considered successful.\n\nIt starts in the main stream with the Reagan's war on drugs. he start pushing for workplace testing around 1986, his September speech on the crack epidemic mentions the dangers of taxi drivers and other transportation professionals doing drugs. In 1988 he signs the Drug Free Workplace Act. This really laid the ground work for workplace testing, as it put the imperative on the employer to certify that they maintained a drug free workplace if they wanted to keep federal contracts. \n\nThis was expanded in 1991 to get OSHA involved with the omnibus transportation act. Which basically put anyone in a transportation job that required operating heavy machines like trains, trucks, planes to be tested as well. \n\nThe last little bit of legislative history is the states began passing laws that allowed companies that had drug free workplace policies to discounts on the workers compensation insurance they were required to have.\n\nI'd have to break the 20 year rule to really discuss state legislation in depth.\n\nOne thing that is interesting is the requirements of a \"Drug free workplace policy\" differ, The federal acts are more stringent, whereas the state ones often only require something the along the lines of offering treatment programs and testing when there is an accident. Many HR departments will lead towards a more safe than sorry attitude. \n\nTL;DR: sometime between 1988-1996 depending on what state you are in. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jsabs/what_it_means_to_post_a_good_answer_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], []]}
{"q_id": "5ciq5f", "title": "what were the united states democratic party's general views on gun control in the early 90s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ciq5f/what_were_the_united_states_democratic_partys/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9wuj3i"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not a historian, but they were very pro gun control legislation. \n\nThe Brady Bill finally came into existence in 1993 after a long fight with gun rights opponents over it's provisions. Interesting enough it was the Pro-gun side that wanted the background checks we currently have included.\n\nThe \"assault weapon ban\" was passed in 1994. Some political pundits blame that legislation for the Democrats losing control of congress. \n\nPresident Clinton also signed an executive order that made all gun dealers  \"have a storefront\", thus adding a huge expense to gun dealers and especially gunsmiths who had a machine shop in their basement. FFL's fell Approx. 80% in the decade after this order.\n\nBasically, the views then echoed the recent views held. Although there was a mellowing of the views or at least less of a desire to push them after backlash was felt from the AWB, and that could be a possibility again after the results from the recent election."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bekodu", "title": "Did wooden sailing ships get struck by lightning and catch on fire all the time? Furthermore, later in the age of sail, did magazines explode from this?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bekodu/did_wooden_sailing_ships_get_struck_by_lightning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el924q2"], "score": [15], "text": ["It is by chance I have a paper (which is unfortunately for the rest of you in Croatian language) that tried to round up notes in official chronicles and ships logs of any mention of lighting strikes in the Adriatic sea for the period of 1300-1800. Most of the notes are just mentions of storms in passage, but some are recounts of tragic events like lightning hitting tall buildings like church towers, often with tragic consequences for bell ringers and clergy inside. Forts would also be hit, and occasionally stored powder inside would explode with horrifying consequences for the surrounding area. \n\nA lot of notes are about ships, but most just noting surviving storms unharmed: But luckily (or unluckily for people involved) some do mention ships being directly hit by lightning strikes. Let's recount the mentioned:\n\nIn 1497 a very brief note in a ship's log says lightning struck the top of the mast. The crew despaired and thought the ship would be lost, yet it appears it was successfully managed, even though we have no extra description of what transpired.  \nIn 1501 a note from local chronicles from the island of Hvar said a galley passing by got struck by lightning in the mast and had to get a new mast from the island.  \nIn 1530, location unclear, there is a note that a mast of a ship was destroyed by lightning, and the ship asked to get a replacement mast.  \nIn 1545, events log that a  ship off the coast of southern Italy was struck twice by lightning, but this time in the stern, making it burst into pieces and hit the coastal reefs.  \nAn event near Kotor in 1570 describes an event very close to your hypothetical scenario. An anchored commanding galley was struck by lightning, causing the \"forty-year-old, dry wood\" to burst into flames, spreading to rigging and sails, until it reached powder and ammo and blew the ship up into pieces.\n\nThe crews are recorded as being very frightened of lightning striking, even giving birth to several superstitions, like the recorded belief that striking axes in the mast would protect it from strikes, which was mentioned in these 16th-century notes.\n\n---\nTo move forward in time a bit, there is a paper from 1762, a time of tall ships, discussing ways to prevent lightning strikes. In it, there are few descriptions of lightning strikes. The most detailed is the short description of ship Harriet which apparently got struck by lightning that \"split into pieces\" her main mast, main topmast and topgallant mast, made some damage to the bulk-heads, beams, hull, and other parts, as well as set fire to rigging and created much smoke, making crew believe there was a fire. If there was (it appears not) the crew extinguished it anyway. There is also a short note on a ship Bellona, whose main mast got split into pieces.\n\n\nFor even latter period we have a document by Harris from all the way back 1838. In the paper, the appendix lists damages by lightning to ships of Royal Navy in the years 1793-1830s. It records 174 cases of damage by lighting and concludes:\n\n >  From about one hundred cases in the above list; the particulars of which have been ascertained, it appears that about one half the ships struck by lightning, are struck on the main-mast; one quarter on the fore-mast; one-twentieth on the mizen-mast, aud not above one in a hundred on the bowsprit. \n\n > About one ship in six is set on fire in some part of the masts, sails, or rigging. \nIn one half the cases, some of the crew are either killed or wounded, or both; the numbers are 62 killed, 111 wounded; this is exclusive of one case in which nearly all the crew perished; of twelve cases in which the numbers killed or wounded have been set down as several or many. In these 100 cases there were damaged or destroyed 93 lower masts, principally line of battle ships and frigates, 83 top-masts, 60 top-gallant masts. \nIn one-tenth of these cases, the services of the silips were urgently demanded. \n\nLooking at the list, only one frigate of 44 guns was totally destroyed by catching fire after getting struck. \n\n---\n\nThe above events are hardly enough to paint a complete picture, but we can make some conclusions. While ships more often passed through storms untouched by lighting, it was quite possible to be struck. This would be very dangerous, but it seems most damages to the ship was confined to the splitting (or bursting into pieces) of the mast. A serious setback, but one that could be handled by getting a replacement mast. More threatening for the entire ships was the possible start of a fire, as fire was always very dangerous on a ship, especially wooden ones. Yet in this small dataset, we luckily see very few such cases where fire has spread uncontrollably to destroy the ships. In most cases the fire was contained, or limited to less dangerous parts of the ships. For memebers of the crew, this was a thin comfort as even without fire the damage could be severe enough to wound or kill a considerable number of the men onboard.\n\n---\n\nSources:\n\nKu\u017ei\u0107, K.. \"GRMLJAVINSKE OLUJE, UDARI GROMA I VATRA SV. NIKOLE U HRVATSKIM PRIMORSKIM KRAJEVIMA (14.-18. st.).\" Hrvatski meteorolo\u0161ki \u010dasopis, vol. 47, br. 47, 2012, str. 69-97. _URL_1_.\n\nWatson, William. \u201cSome Suggestions Concerning the Preventing the Mischiefs, Which Happen to Ships and Their Masts by Lightning; Being the Substance of a Letter to the Late Right Honourable George Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, and F. R. S. by William Watson, M. D. F. R. S.\u201d Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775), vol. 52, 1761, pp. 629\u2013635. JSTOR, _URL_0_.\n\nW. Snow (William Snow) Harris. State of the Question Relating to the Protection of the British Navy from Lightning, by the Method of Fixed Conductors of Electricity. 1838. JSTOR, _URL_2_."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["www.jstor.org/stable/105679", "https://hrcak.srce.hr/115914", "www.jstor.org/stable/60206303"]]}
{"q_id": "cintgw", "title": "Why were armies so much larger in the Punic War than they were during the Thirty Years War?", "selftext": "I've been reading about early modern military history and was struck by how small battles and armies were. In the Thirty Years' War, incredibly important battles such as Breitenfield and L\u00fctzen were fought between armies rarely numbering more than 35,000 men each. Whereas the Second Punic War saw numerous engagements between armies ranging from 40,000 to over 100,000 men.\n\nWhy were armies so much larger in the Punic War than they were during the Thirty Years War? Given what limited information I've seen on demographics it seems that the Romans and Carthaginians levied an enormous proportion of their populations during these conflicts, whereas the armies of the Thirty Years War were pretty small relative to the populations of the combatants. More generally, why were classical wars fought on a scale that wouldn't be seen again in the West until Napoleon?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cintgw/why_were_armies_so_much_larger_in_the_punic_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev8plh2"], "score": [25], "text": ["Is there a particular reason you picked those specific conflicts, as opposed to classical vs medieval? For one thing, we could have chosen much bigger Septimus vs Clodius Albinus (estimated 150,000-300,000 on EACH side)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14ep3y", "title": "How profound was the influence of Jazz and Blues on American Culture in the twenties?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ep3y/how_profound_was_the_influence_of_jazz_and_blues/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cibcz"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure how we could give you a gauge of just how profound the impact was, but for reference the death of David Brubeck made the front pages of the both the New York Times and Washington Post among other today.  He first splashed onto the music scene in the 1950s.  Some would argue that jazz music is a uniquely American phenomenon and one of the only thoroughly American forms there is.\n\nThe first thing to consider is that even defining jazz is highly controversial.  Some believe in a broadly inclusive definition of jazz that can even include elements of hip hop.  Others believe that bebop is quintessential jazz music and that music that get labeled jazz that came after is just watered down pop music.  The Ken Burns Jazz series more closely reflected the latter view, which is why I always warn folks that that particular documentary series is too one-sided to consume without also looking into other viewpoints.\n\nIt would be tough to underestimate Jazz's cultural impact because the music often went hand-in-hand with other social and cultural issues.  Jazz music grew up surrounded with controversy and there was a good deal of reactionary push-back against it.  Jazz clubs were among some of the earlier integrated public gatherings.  African American communities used jazz as a form of high art; some wanted to develop a distinct black culture while others thought that jazz as an art form could help break down racial barriers.  Jazz and prohibition were part of a unique subculture during prohibition.  Jazz was highly contentious within the music community because it was a pretty radical departure from the western tradition.  The Nazis thought it was influential enough to label it \"degenerate art\" and prohibit it.  The U.S. government sent jazz musicians overseas as cultural emissaries and it was used as part of the U.S.'s strategy to undermine soviet regimes.  Early in his career Louis Armstrong was labeled by some as an Uncle Tom, but by the 1950s he was a forceful civil rights voice.\n\nThe contemporary literature can give you great insight into some of these issues and Robert Walser's collection of articles in *Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History* is a great starting point to gain a cultural understanding.\n\nedit: This post doesn't really answer the question, but since nobody else answered I was hoping that some of the themes I mentioned could spur some discussion by some professional historians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ueul0", "title": "In 1939, the eastern half of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union. What was life like under the Soviet occupation and what happened to the previously Soviet occupied territories after their liberation from the Germans?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ueul0/in_1939_the_eastern_half_of_poland_was_occupied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dtl9fwj"], "score": [8], "text": ["During the Soviet occupation, one of the first things they did was to eliminate any chance of resistance to their occupation. The NKVD already had a large number of Polish Army officers and enlisted  in prisoner camps, and to these numbers added university professors, lawyers, police officers, priests, politicians, essentially anyone who could become the focal point of resistance or who could inspire others to resist.  Some were just \u201ccapitalists\u201d such as factory owners, but the majority was part of the social and civil fabric and could become potential sources of resistance. The NKVD at one point had approximately 500,000 Poles in prison camps in Poland. The NKVD proceeded to liquidate the most troublesome @22,000m of which 14,000 were captured military or police officers. Enlisted soldiers in many instances were shipped to Siberia to provide labor gangs.  The executed were then collected and buried in several mass graves in the Katyn Forrest.   These graves would remain hidden until the Germans overran the area during their invasion eastward. There are another estimated 130,000 executed by the Soviets during the occupation, on top of the Katyn incident.  The Katyn incident is the most notorious.  The Soviets justified in that Poland was never a country, just merely a rebellious extension of Belarus and Ukraine, so captured Polish army members were not afforded the rights of POWs and were simply criminals. \n\nInitially the occupation was resented by Poles, but welcomed by ethnic Ukrainians and other minorities within the Polish boundaries. This ended quickly as it became clear the Soviets were not going to allow these groups any measure of self-determination, and would be suppressed like the Poles.  The Soviets begain a process of de-Polandizing Poland. Disbanded the government, replaced the currency, the Soviets also engaged in widespread looting of Polish industry, shipping the machinery east, as well as plundering Polish national treasures, as well as petty looting of the populace. No public organizations were allowed to exist,  the university and the school system had any elements of Polish culture stripped from them and were reorganized to be Soviet institutions.  Sexual violence by Soviet troops appears to also have reached epidemic levels among Polish women, but historians have had only scattered and fragmented accounts and cannot accurately place a number, or even really give an accurate guess on the number of victims. (The Red Army would repeat this during their return to Poland as they drove West into Germany years later.)   The Soviets began mass deportations in several cities, as well as deporting those arrested and convicted of anti-revolutionary activity or crimes against the Soviet Union. Roughly a million or so Poles were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The land was reorganized according to Soviet guidelines and collectivized, as were all remaining industries.  Basically, the Soviets were doing everything possible to annex and integrate the captured territory into the Soviet Union.\n\n*Between Nazis and Soviets* -   Jan Chodakiewicz \n\n*Katyn* \u2013 Paul Allen \n\n*Poland's Holocaust* -  Tadeusz Piotrowski\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qrtr7", "title": "How did it came about that we do not call Japan an Empire today even though its current head of state Akihito is still officially referred to as \"Emperor\"?", "selftext": "How did it came about that even though Japan has an Imperial Palace in Tokyo, an Imperial House and the current head of state Akihito is still officially an \"Emperor\", that they are not an Empire? Why didn't they changed the title of Akihito, to like, a King so they are no longer an empire? \nAren't Emperors supposed to be ruling over an Empire, yet in the case of Japan, we have an Emperor ruling over not an Empire? How were the Japanese able to maintain such incongruity throughout history? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qrtr7/how_did_it_came_about_that_we_do_not_call_japan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4vii42", "d4vlk7w"], "score": [29, 7], "text": ["I will speak in very broad generalizations here.\n\nJapan was a very famous, literal empire in the '40s, and after their capitulation in WWII, their empire was dismantled, both their territorial holdings, and most of the functioning government.\nThe emperor was not dethroned, for political reasons. That's why Japan has an emperor \"left over\" so to speak. \n\n\"Empire\" is a vaguely defined word that comes with serious baggage. The big problem is that most emperors and kings of the world aren't actually called \"emperor\" or \"king\", these are translations of foreign titles of foreign institutions. But they're translations of convenience, kings are monarchs that rule big lands, emperors rule even bigger lands. \n\nHowever, Western concept of the emperor is fairly cohesive. We draw our definition from the Roman emperors, who were the martial and administrative nuclei of the overwhelmingly powerful Roman Empire (For the most part). But because the formative years of mass politics were in the 19th and 20th centuries, we also associate the word empire with the vast, powerful, wildly expansionist powers of that era (Who were mostly ruled by emperors using that title to evoke Roman magnificence)\n\nNow back to Japan. Japan has had a figure that we call emperor since at least 500 AD (The earliest emperors are sketchily recorded). While the Roman emperors were below gods and politically dominant, the emperors of Japan were heads of the Shinto faith, and for quite a long time merely figureheads for *shoguns. The Japanese word for the Emperor of Japan is *tenno\n\nQuite obviously, these offices aren't the same. But in the 19th century, a Japanese state became a vast, powerful, expansionist power. It's head of state was the *tenno, who Westerners then called emperor. \n\nWhy are there no more empires in the West? Most of the Western emperors had their empires dismantled, or were replaced by republicans (any non-monarchical governments). \n\nThe British monarch is a secular, apolitical office, and its imperial title was 'Emperor/Empress of India\". When India became independent in '48, they lost that title. No more emperor, and with decolonisation, no imperium to rule.\n\nThe Russian monarch was a semi-religious title with absolutist political power, but the last Emperor was overthrown in violence. The Russian Revolution was organised around explicitly deposing the Emperor of Russia to be replaced by a People's Government, and they succeeded. The great imperium gained by Tsarist Russia was mostly still controlled by Russians though.\n\nThe Japanese monarch is a religious title, with constitutional powers. After WWII the secular governing body of Japan was deposed, and the remaining political power of the emperor was removed. But the US occupying force did not want to depose the emperor, because they believed the Japanese would not accept a foreign power abolishing their Religious leader. The *tenno remained.\n\nFinally, it should be said the empires and imperialism do not require emperors. With Britain and Japan, for example, the administrators and governors of their empire was not actually the emperor themselves. You've probably heard of people referring to an \"American empire\", or a \"business empire\", and these phrases are simply meant to evoke a powerful institution with a heavily centralized nucleus of power. They do not require literal emperors.\n\nBasically, an empire is as much a construct of our thinking as it is an actual title. Japan today does not act like an \"empire\", so we don't call it that. The Emperor of Japan was not the same as a Western emperor, we just translate *tenno as emperor. \n\n", "The Japanese Constitution of 1947, written by the US Occupation (SCAP - Supreme Commander of Allied Powers) of Japan and re-written and approved by a postwar Japanese elected body, formally declared the name of Japan to be the \"State of Japan\" (Nihon-koku) instead of the previous \"Empire of Greater Japan\" ( Dai Nippon Teikoku).\n\nSince the Emperor is formally designated in the 1947 constitution as a constitutional monarch not possessing soverignty, only ceremonial and symbolic importance,  it's relatively easy not to think of Japan as an Empire, since there is no meaningful sense in which the current Emperor rules it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "36ziww", "title": "How was the Dutch military rebuilt after the Second World War and what were the consequences for the Indonesian War of Independence only 2 years later?", "selftext": "I'm curious about the way the Dutch went from no army at all in 1945 to deployment on the other side of the globe very shortly after.\n\n*  Was there a need to rebuild the army from scratch or did equipment and expertise survive the German occupation?\n* What happened with the draft? Were all people that should've been drafted in 1940-1945 simply enlisted all at once when the war had ended? Did this cause any problems?\n* Were there issues with the physical health of soldiers, e.g. because of malnutrition in the Hunger Winter?\n* Were there any combat issues in Indonesia that could be attributed to a lack of training or preparation?\n* Many Dutch veterans of the Indonesian Independence Wars seem to have suffered from psychological issues such as PTSD. Was this war actually particularly hard to cope with for the average soldier, and is there any particular reason for that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36ziww/how_was_the_dutch_military_rebuilt_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crj2jvi"], "score": [17], "text": ["The forces that were used in the Dutch East Indies were part of two groups. There was the \"Mariniersbrigade\" which was trained in the United States during the Second World War. It consisted of a few Dutch volunteers who were preparing for the war versus Japan, their primair goal was to liberate the Dutch East Indies. However, when Japan surrendered in 1945 and Soekarno called for independence, their purpose changed. Now, the brigade was used by the Dutch government for the war versus Indonesia.\n\nThe more famous Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger (KNIL) or in English the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, was used during the Second World War versus Japan, in contrast to the Mariniersbrigade.  Though no Dutch soldiers fought the Germans after the surrender that followed the bombing of Rotterdam, the war in Asia continued, with military oppositon towards the Japanese. Though many KNIL soldiers (they were Dutch but also native men!) were taken by the Japanese as a prisoner of war, many were still able to flee and continued the fight versus Japan, sometimes cooperating with the British, Australians and of course the Americans. \n\nThus the armies that were involved was well trained, it was not necessary to build anything from scratch. Nor did the hunger winter influenced the soldiers, since most were already in Asia when the hunger winter happened. \n\nSources: \nKarel Davids and Marjolein 't Hart, De wereld  &  Nederland (Amsterdam 2011). \nPierre Heijboer, De Politionele Acties (Haarlem 1979).\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18ryla", "title": "Who paid for the early running water and electricity systems in America? How did they work?", "selftext": "Hey r/AskHistorians,\n\nI'm a Peace Corps Volunteer in a country that's struggling to set up working electricity in its major cities, oddly enough has decentralized pockets of electricity in some villages, and has running water almost nowhere (but it does exist). There are problems getting the infrastructure set up, getting the expertise to maintain it, getting people to pay for it...\n\nand I imagine these problems existed before back home too! Does anyone know how the early utilities systems worked? Were they paid for by small communities or pushed through by governments? Did competing companies set up their own infrastructures or did the government start the regional-regulation system we have relatively early? Was it an urban or rural phenomenon? At what point did people have the disposal income to start paying for this stuff?\n\nGive me anything you've got, r/askhistorians.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ryla/who_paid_for_the_early_running_water_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hikdk", "c8hjkhr"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["This is not my area of expertise, but my grandfather had a role in rural electrification in Kansas, so I know a bit. \n\nDuring the Roosevelt administration a program of rural electrification, supported by co-ops (many which still exist in some form today) brought power to the farms of the Midwest.  It was a large undertaking, with one of the aims being to staunch the flow of people leaving rural communities for cities by creating jobs and improving quality if life. \n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "You  will  find  \"Beneath  the  Metropolis:  The  Natural  and  Man-Made  Underground  of  the  World's  Great  Cities\"  by  Alex  Marshall  rather  interesting.  He  looks  at  twelve  cities  and  looks  in  depth  at  the  historical  development  of  their  sewage  and  fresh  water  infrastructure.  From  what  I  remember  about  the  chapter  on  Rome,  the  Imperial  government  would  build  the  aqueducts  to  bring  fresh  water  to  the  city,  and  an  under  ground  sewage  system  to  drain  the  city.  Water  was  distributed  to  public  fountains  free  of  charge,  but  wealthier  Romans  could  build  pipes  to  deliver water  directly  to  their  house.  The  elite  could  have  indoor  plumbing,  if  they  paid  for  it  themselves.  In  the  three  chapters  about  US  cities  and  the  chapters  on  Paris  and  London,  the  water  and  sewer  systems  were  all  government  funded.  Mainly  to  improve  public  health.         \n    Electricity  is  a  much  more  recent  development.  In  the  United  States,  privately  owned  companies  built  and  maintained  the  electrical  generating  and  distribution  systems.  These  privately  owned  companies  were  tightly  regulated  by  Public  Utility  Commissions  very  early.  They  wanted  to  wire  the  big  cities,  where  there  was  a  dense  concentration  of  customers,  but  they  were  reluctant  to  electrify  the  sparsely  populated  rural  areas.  It  took  a  New  Deal  program  to  break  this  log-jam,  the  Rural  Electrification  Agency,  during  the  mid  1930s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm", "http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/221.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3rt1jr", "title": "Why did the British Empire collapse while the Soviet Union remained a superpower after WW2?", "selftext": "From what I understand, the US emerged as a world superpower after World War II in part because the war wasn't fought on the U.S. mainland, so it's infrastructure remained largely intact. \n\nThe same can't be said for other two allied superpowers, the USSR and the British Empire. Both nations were devastated in the war, but following the surrender of Germany and Japan, the USSR seemed to recover quite quickly whereas Britain's empire declined.\n\nGiven the enormous losses by the USSR (including the deaths from the Great Purge), how were the Soviets able to retain such a vast global influence when the British couldn't? \n\nThanks for any answers.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rt1jr/why_did_the_british_empire_collapse_while_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwr5u9u", "cwr9is6"], "score": [10, 15], "text": ["Britain wasn't exactly \"devastated\" by the war in the same way as the USSR. German planes actually did relatively little damage to Britain's infrastructure, which remained largely intact and increased in productive capacity throughout the war. But Britain financed her role in the war by *heavy* borrowing; when the war ended, she could not maintain the expense of an overseas empire and service her now-enormous debt at the same time. So she was devastated financially.\n\nThe USSR was \"devastated\" in the more conventional sense, having an enormous chunk of her agricultural lands taken away and losing 25 million people (the high estimate of the death toll of the Great Purge is about 300,000, so not very significant compared to WWII). But her industrial capacity was not greatly affected, as the USSR managed to evacuate most of their factories to the unreachable Urals early in the war; and the USSR got back all its lost agricultural land and then some when the war ended (they also more than made up for their lost population by absorbing Poland, half of Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe). Moreover, while they did do some conventional borrowing, most of the aid they received from the West was Lend Lease material from the US or outright \"gifts\" from Britain, so they did not find themselves facing a crushing national debt after the war.", "So /u/ThePutback wrote about the differences in how the nations were \"devastated\" in the war, but I wanted to expand on another difference between the British Empire and the Soviet Union:\n\nThe Soviet Union was the ideological leader of an increasingly significant portion of the world in the wake of WW2.\n\nSo while the British Empire physically possessed numerous colonies and protectorates across the world, the Soviet Union had the virtual **ideological ownership** of many nations and revolutionary groups all around the world. \n\nThis only grew as Europe de-colonized rapidly after WW2 when many new governments and revolutionary groups aligned themselves with Eastern bloc (regardless of how much adherence they had to Marxist/communist ideology). \n\nWhether it was the split between the Koreas immediately after WW2, or the ideological struggle between the Vietnams split after the French withdrew in the 1950s, the wave of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s that was closely aligned with the Soviet Union, or the formation of People's Democratic Republic of Yemen after the British protectorate there ended in the late 60s, or the fight over Angola after independence from Portugal in the 70s... the Soviet Union possessed a massive amount of power with a large bloc of nations in the world throughout all the decades of the Cold War.\n\nThe British simply didn't have the manpower or financial situation to maintain such an extensive network of colonies, especially as de-colonization often ended up in bloody affairs in many places around the world. Furthermore, the backbone of the British Empire, the Royal Navy, could no longer compete with the US or even the Soviet navies.\n\nIn fact, by the end of WW2, the UK had already ceded domination of the seas to the United States and navies are very expensive. For instance, the US maintained at times during the Cold War over 16 fleet aircraft carriers simultaneously (over 24 of them in different configurations forms in 1960 alone), and by the end of the Cold War in 1991 had 14 supercarriers in simultaneous service.\n\nIn contrast, the UK retired its last fleet carriers using conventional catapult and arresting gear configurations in the 1970s. No new designs were bought or commissioned, and the UK nearly sold its remaining light carriers using Harriers until the Falklands War stopped their sale. Add on the humiliation of the Suez Crisis, and the UK finally pulling its last carrier out from Hong Kong in the 1970s, the end of the \"East of Suez\" era for British power projection was evident. And, without the ability to project power to defend its colonies and protectorates abroad, decolonization only hastened and many of those protectorates became aligned with the US, which filled in the role that the British once did (such as the end of protectorate status for the Trucial States, which would form Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE, nations that have US military bases/forces stationed there)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2vm3oj", "title": "Why do certain instruments have to transpose to concert pitches? For example, why does a trumpet play a C instead of concert B-flat? Was this some sort of musical evolution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vm3oj/why_do_certain_instruments_have_to_transpose_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coj6mfl"], "score": [11], "text": ["I can answer this for the brass more convincingly than for the woodwinds, perhaps someone else can fill in those blanks.  \n\nBack before the valve was invented, composers would write music in a certain key.  The trombone has a slide which enables it to change length at will, meaning it can play in Eb as easily as in F.  But the Trumpet and Horn couldn't change their length as easily, meaning they only had the notes in their overtone series to work with--major chords built upon the fundamental, mostly.  In order to play more than a note or two in any other key, the music had to either be written REALLY high--where the notes of the overtone series get closer together--or a horn of a different length was needed.  So horn and trumpet players would need several horns to play in any piece that changed to keys that were not closely related. \n\nNow in order to make things the music easier to read, the tradition was that the fundamental pitch of each horn (F on the F horn, Bb on the Bb horn, etc) would be notated in music as a C.  This made it so that the player could easily just pick up a longer or shorter horn, and the written music would look the same, and the physical sensation of playing the horn--such as distance between overtone notes--would be the same (or nearly so), but notes of the correct key would be coming out of the bell.\n\nAs instrument design progressed, horns and trumpets came with extra tuning slides of various lengths, so that a whole new horn was not needed to play in other keys, but rather you could take a short tuning slide out and put a longer one in, putting the horn in a different key.  These slides were called crooks because by the time of Weber and Wagner, composers were changing keys so quickly and fluently, that the slides had to be shaped with a crook in them to hang over the arm of the performer to facilitate quicker slide changes.  \n\nWith the invention of the valve in 1815, and its subsequent adoption/popularization, this practice fell out of favor (much to Brahms' chagrin: he loved the sound of the natural horn, and hated the valve horn). So the tuba doesn't have this tradition of transposition, but rather it reads the notes on the page as they are, and the player will play that note based upon the pitch of their instrument.  The trumpet and horn, though kept the tradition of transposition even after the invention of the valve.  The Bb trumpet became standard.  Modern players play a lot on both Bb and C trumpets and need to be able to read many different transpositions on both instruments.  The horns have kinda settled on the F horn, but need to be able to read in any transposition.   \n\nHowever, one caveat must be included here.  When the valve came to be, inventors like Adolph Sax, created whole families of instruments that were meant to sound the same over the entire range of music.  The saxophone family alternates Bb and Eb instruments (Bb for soprano, Eb for Alto, Bb for Tenor, Eb for Baritone, Bb for Bass, etc).  This made it so that a player of one instrument could pick up another instrument and play the same fingerings for the same written music and be okay.  The third space C is fingered the same on all the saxophones, and depending on which saxophone it is, you'll get either a Bb or an Eb coming out of the instrument.  \n\nSax also invented the saxhorn, which accounts for euphoniums, alto horns, and some tubas, also alternating (Eb for alto/tenor horns, Bb for baritone/euphonium, Eb for bass tuba, BBb for contrabass tuba, etc).  This is particularly useful in the British Brass Band world, where everyone (except the bass trombone for some reason) reads treble clef parts in Bb or in Eb.  Again, the idea here is that a euphonium player can move to tenor horn and read the music the same way with the same fingerings and be in the right key without having to think about the key of the piece AND the key of the horn AND the fingerings that go with both.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "w45af", "title": "Is Civil War revisionist history going on?", "selftext": "The other day, one of my friends told me the North invaded the South over its ports. He told me the South had all the major ports. I called it a load of bullshit and that the north had shipping ports too. From what I've learned war started out to bring the South back into the fold and then slavery became a major issue.\n\nRelevant: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w45af/is_civil_war_revisionist_history_going_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5a49lf", "c5a576x", "c5a5a0g", "c5a5a1t", "c5a8dly"], "score": [8, 2, 3, 9, 3], "text": ["How do you want your question to be answered here?  Are you asking for a run down of the historical threads weaving together?  Are you looking for  a \"proximate cause\"?\n\nDescribing the Civil war as \"about harbor dominance\" is akin to saying WWI was \"about naval dominance\".", "There's a complex set of reasons, slavery foremost among them but hardly in isolation, that precipitated the Civil War. My knowledge of that period isn't as comprehensive as it is for other historical eras, but I've never heard of the Southern ports themselves as a *casus belli.*\n\nThat said, the Union blockade of Southern ports during the war itself was a key portion of the Northern grand strategy. Your friend may have conflated that aspect of the war with the war's origins.", "Actually, this is exactly why the Midwest was willing to fight. It's not that they had all the ports, that's kind of silly, but the Mississippi was the **lifeblood** of the midwestern economy (float the food and livestock down to new orleans), and without that they were screwed (this was also before the trans-continental railroad, which the South also opposed for similar reasons).\n\nOne of the first threats the South made was to shut down or heavily tax the Mississippi, and the Midwest was rather pissed about that (their only real beef with the South I believe), as their livelihoods relied on that trade as much as the South's relied on slavery.\n\nBut otherwise, the civil war had many causes. I like to think of it as the South losing dominance due to a fixed economy, while the North and Midwest were booming due to improved technology, and general growth of trade.\n\nAlso, the constitution was not really capable of handling as many states as were added smoothly. The South needed massive amounts of land for its agriculture, while the North needed much less for its industry. Expanding the number of slave states was actually quite important for its very survival.\n\nFinally, the South was dependent on low import tariffs for finished goods, while the rapidly growing economy of the north required high import tariffs for finished goods to allow them to compete while they scaled upwards. This led to the Treaty of Abominations of .. whenever.. which lead to the First Secession Crisis. Personally I find this to be the biggest giveaway about the real cause of the war, that this was the first thing that truly outraged the South so much it wished to Secede immediately.\n\nBy the way, ironically this whole event was for nothing, because during the Civil War, the main hope of the South was that England would step in, as it was felt England could not survive 3 years without Southern cotton (their industry was largely built upon it). The really funny bit is, England, rather pissed about this situation, ended up shifting its cotton sources to Egypt and India around that time, so given 5 years, the South would have gone into a deep depression either way, and this would have been solved some other way.", "Oh man, the US Civil War has seen revisionism since before it was over.", "Technically both of you are correct in some sense.  Like any war, there are going to be multiple reasons as to why people decide to engage in armed conflict.  \n\nLincoln's stated goal was to keep the South in the Union.  He never saw the Southern states as legally separate, but rather as a group with rebellious leaders who were making an illegal decision based on the Constitution.\n\nJefferson Davis in his inaugural address stated that the war was over slavery.  Something that he changed once the war was a lost cause, which actually is one of the roots to much of the lost cause writings that continue to be popular today. (Some quick quotes follow to show this detail.  At the beginning of the war, states rights meant slavery, of course this changed later)\n\n\"It is not safe ... to trust $800 million worth of Negroes in the hands of a power which says that we do not own the property. ... So we must get out ...\" -- The Daily Constitutionalist, Augusta, Ga., Dec. 1, 1860\n\n\"(Northerners) have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery. ... We, therefore, the people of South Carolina ... have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and other States of North America dissolved.\" -- from \"Declaration of the Causes of Secession\"\n\n\"As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrence ... there can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections.\" -- New Orleans Bee, Dec. 14, 1860\n\n\"Our new government is founded upon ... the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.\" -- Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861\n\nThe midwestern states became interested in the conflict over another multitude of reasons.  Namely the settlers were often very involved with the idea of Popular Sovereignty (a false choice in itself) and often the residents of the states would select their side based on personal convictions.  \n\nNow back to your question, it had nothing to do with Ports.  The ports issue comes into play when discussing operation anaconda.  Which the Union blockaded the Southern Ports and slowly strangled the South with the sweep from the west (Grant's army).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uk4s7/in_the_american_civil_war_why_was_reuniting_the/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3p3gb4", "title": "How did Greece didn't see the impending threat of Roman empire and do something to stop it ?", "selftext": "They were near and they had colonies there. They were more technologically advanced and had a better knowledge of war. They could stop them before they became a big power.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p3gb4/how_did_greece_didnt_see_the_impending_threat_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw3g91x"], "score": [3], "text": ["First off, there was no such thing as \"Greece\" whilst the Roman Republic was on the rise. \n\nThere was a multitude of indepenent Greek city states, such as Athens, Corinth or Sparta. Sometimes, these would align in leagues like the Achaean or Aetolian leagues, to defend themselves against some kind of threat or threaten some kind of common enemy. (Often, another league.) There was Macedon, the homeland of Philip III and Alexander the Great, which had more or less asserted itself as Greece's overlord when those two ruled, but now was just one of many Hellenistic successor states to the great empire of Alexander. It frequently tried to re-assert its dominance over various cities or parts of the Greek peninsula, leading to many a war. There was also Epirus, an up-and-coming kingdom on the eastern coast of Adriatic, which though it had never been a part of Alexander's domain, firmly stood in the influence of Greek and Hellenistic thought and culture. Finally, we must not forget the Greek diaspora: many a Greek colony had been founded even before Alexander started conquering, on the coasts of the Black Sea, Sicily, southern Italy and even as far afield as France (Massilia) and Spain. (Emporion.) \n\nSouthern Italy is particularly relevant to your question: it was so thoroughly dominated by Greek colonies that it was called *Meg\u00e1l\u0113 Hell\u00e1s* or *Magna Graecia*: Great(er) Greece. It was this part of the Greek world that first came into contact with the Romans.\n\nNow, as should be clear, none of these parts and entities I named were united. They were forever fighting one another, or the other Successor Kingdoms, or the Carthaginians, or various local peoples. Alliances and leagues were made and broken with dizzying frequency, and nobody was able to assert himself as the undisputed master of the Greek world as Alexander had been. (And even then, he had not ruled over all Greeks.)\n\nSo who was going to stop the Romans? Not the southern Greek city states, who were far more worried about their neighbours or the Antigonid Macedonians. Not those of Sicily, for they were preoccupied with Carthage. Not the Macedonians themselves, for they were struggling to hold on to their dominions and at times to even survive against Epirus to their west. Let alone the Ptolemies or Seleucids all the way in the east. \n\nFinally, the Greeks in *Magna Graecia* did try to stop the Romans, shortly after they had defeated the Samnites. This was very early on in the history of the Roman empire, you should note. There hardly was an empire to speak of. Rome was a regional Italic power, very successful in conquering and integrating their neighbours, but definitely not something that looked like it could threaten the Greek world as a whole.\n\nDespite this, the city of Tar\u0101s(Tarentum) asked and got the help of Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of the best generals of his day and commander of one of the finest professional armies in the Hellenistic tradition. All that was \"more technologically advanced and had a better knowledge of war\" was represented in Pyrrhus' army.\n\nAnd he lost the war.\n\nPyrrhus beat the Romans twice, but it's those battles that give us the term \"Phyrric Victory.\" He also got entangled with the Carthaginians in Sicily, and the third battle against the Romans at Beneventum, though still not tactically decisive, proved too much. He withdrew to Greece. Rome was left to rule Italy. Despite all his apparent advantages, Greek military sophistication had proven unable to decisively defeat Rome.\n\nThere would be further attempts at intervention. During the second Punic War, when Hannibal was marching up and down Italy, Carthage and Macedon tried to ally against Rome, so as to negate the potential threat. But other Greek cities of the Aetolian League saw Macedon as the greater threat to their survival, and allied with Rome. They occupied the Macedonians until the Romans could win their war against Carthage. Later, when Rome could focus its full attention east, two further Macedonian wars followed and saw the (at this time highly experienced, thanks to decades of war against the Carthaginians) Roman armies again victorious against their Greek counterparts.\n\nWhilst this was going on, the Seleucid empire under Antiochus the Great tried to intervene also. He send armies west to Greece, but the Romans again proved too strong, and his empire was facing many other troubles in the east. Also, the Romans still had other Greeks on their side in all these conflicts. There's a reason that \"divida et impera\" is a Latin phrase.\n\nBy the time Pompey the Great was marching up and down the Eastern Mediterranean, making and unmaking kings and incorporating provinces left and right, it was far too late for anyone to do anything about Rome's rise. \n\nIn summary: \"Greece\" was never united, and never able to truly make a common cause against Rome. Nonetheless, many of the most powerful Greek kings and kingdoms of their day did try to smack down Rome before they became too powerful. All lost.\n\nAs Philip Sabin puts it in his *lost battles:*\n >  Lendon has highlighted very well how Greek authors such as Polybius tended to ascribe military success to better tactics, techniques or equipment, whereas Roman writers like Caesar or Livy were more concerned with the superior bravery and *virtus* of the victorious soldiers. The evidence of both Greek and Roman battles lends much more support to the Roman interpretation.\n\n(The Lendon he refers to here is: Lendon, E.*Soldiers  &  Ghosts: a History of Battle in Classical Antiquity.* New Haven: Yale University Press (1999) )\n\nIn other words: being technologically advanced and having a better knowledge of war doesn't seem to really have helped the Greeks. Roman diplomacy, the quality of Roman armies (at a particular high during this time, thanks to the Punic wars, according to Goldsworthy.) and the reserves of manpower Rome had due to their militia system and many allies proved far more decisive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "lyx2m", "title": "Why did the Great War last so long?  Why did people in the West keep fighting?", "selftext": "This question has a number of different points I feel need to be addressed.  I have been struggling with it for years, so I felt like it would be nice to see what others think.  \n\n1) Why did the civilians at home in democracies continue fighting the war in light of so many terrible casualties?  Related to this, is how were more people not opposed to the war?  Even as early as August 1914, if you were reading newspapers in England or its Dominions or France, you knew exactly how bloody the war was with stories of ditches being crossed with bridges of corpses. \n\n2) Why did politicians in democracies continue fighting the war even when given the chances to end it?  Particularly in December of 1916, when there was a clear chance to end the war through Germany's peace proposals, though not in victory over the Central Powers.  But even examining the reaction to Lansdowne's Peace letter, whether in Cabinet in 1916 or by the public in 1917, demonstrates how much peace without victory was an anathema to civilian leaders.  \n\nI can at least understand why military leaders were obsessed with victory, but what about civilians who both understood the slaughter that was occurring and understood that it could be stopped.  I am almost asking this in a moral sense: how could you be confronted with such brutality, wanton destruction, little gain, and still continue to think that victory would be worth the loss?\n\nWas is something unique to European thinking that had developed in the 19th century? Something unique to civilian/military leaders?  Something unique in the nature of the Great War? To humanity?  All of the above?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lyx2m/why_did_the_great_war_last_so_long_why_did_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c2wpipp", "c2wr4kf", "c2wrs5q", "c2wth4o", "c2wwvf5", "c2wyeq3", "c2wpipp", "c2wr4kf", "c2wrs5q", "c2wth4o", "c2wwvf5", "c2wyeq3"], "score": [6, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3, 5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["Why has any democracy carried on with a war that was going only so-so? Look at the Vietnam war, I think it took 6+ years of fighting before a simple majority of the country thought the US should get out.\n\nTo answer your question in a word, pride. Humans don't do a good job admitting that we might be wrong. Especially when our brother or father or husband might have died at the front. Do we really want to accept that they died just to restore \"status quo ante bellum?\" \n\nPlus I don't think there was ever a point in which there wouldn't be a \"losing\" side in the negotiations. Even if there had been successful negotiations in 1916 or 1917, Germany still would have likely been forced to give up some colonies. Now as a German citizen who's lost loved ones, that's a tough proposition to swallow.\n\nPeople hate compromising and surrendering, no matter how rational it might be. War is like gambling, much to gain, much to be lost, and if you're not careful you'll bankrupt yourself and everyone around you trying to win.", "I'll try to tackle the first question. Most children, in the UK for example, were raised with Victorian and Edwardian values and propaganda, reflecting the times ideology which in turn influenced the officers and privates to think and feel that what they were doing was their duty. To them, they were protecting their family, their homeland and even the allies of their homeland. This was a whole other era than today. Most of the young men had grown up with exaggerated war stories from the past, about kings and generals, redcoats in Africa etc. and that influenced their later way of thinking. Many did this for honor, as they felt it. But there were other factors. Some did it because they didn't want to be condemned by their social circles or to let down their fellow comrades. The actual motivation for the individual soldier on both side is different from individual to individual, of course, but many based it on personal feelings. Not hatred towards the enemy, but for a personal honor and to conquer fear. \n\nThat didn't mean that there weren't any protests or mutinies because of the high amount of casualties. While the British army did reach highs of disappointment and demoralization, it never broke out in a full-scale mutiny. It kept itself disciplined during the duration of the war. The French, of course, had its famous mutiny of 1917, after continuous horrendous casualties during the Nivelle offensives. \n\n >  Even as early as August 1914, if you were reading newspapers in England or its Dominions or France, you knew exactly how bloody the war was with stories of ditches being crossed with bridges of corpses.\n\nThat doesn't mean that everybody read them. The letters soldiers wrote home from the front where usually quite reductive from realistic depictions of life at the front. The soldiers felt a constant isolation and that anyone who wasn't there could never understand what they have to endure. Some felt that nobody even cared in the first place. In England, for example, there was even a remarkable display of ignorance by the relatives to dead soldiers about the actual conditions of the war. They even sent requests to commanders about their dead relatives personal watches, money and other personal items. French and German civilians didn't know that well either. French soldiers could get letters from the home front by concerned old women asking things like \"You don't fight if it's raining, right?\". The people who imagined the trenches didn't see the images that we see today. They often imagined organized, cozy and even lovely trenches. There's a great illustration from *L'illustration* showing the contemporary image of the trenches from the eyes of somebody who hadn't been there. \n\nSources: *Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I* by John Ellis.", "I can speak to the first question from a Canadian point of view.  There are a few reasons I can think of, some obvious, some not so much.\n\nThe first and most obvious reason is patriotism.  Now this will require some deconstruction.  There is two kinds of patriotism I'm talking about.  The \"We must stand up for the British Empire\" kind of patriotism, and the sort of patriotism that is about gaining acceptance into the club.  From Southern Ontario and east there was a very strong British connection, both through settlement and culture.  There was almost an idea among some that Canada had to prove it was almost \"more British than British\", some believed it had to pro-actively support GB to maintain standing in the empire.  In Western Canada there was a different patriotism, a kind that was more about being \"let into the club\" so to speak.  A great many new immigrants enlisted in the armed forces because it was a traditionally patriotic thing to do, and they wanted to join the club, jump in with both feet and all that.\n\nAnother reason is that the horrors of trench life were not as we think of them today.  Yes, it was awful, and yes, many people were dying, but based on letters home and diaries we see that people didn't see war as a constant bloodbath, at least from a personal point of view.  For example, I've read letters home from a soldier who enlisted in 1914, and then spent most of 1915 and into 1916 training, going to NCO school, being an instructor at machine gun school, etc.  The actual time spent in the front accounted for little of the time spent in the forces.  I believe soldiers only spent 2 weeks at the front at a time, and then went through a rotation as reserves, then training, etc.  A lot of people have the idea that young soldiers walked off the boat and directly into the meat grinder, and that simply wasn't the case.\n\nThere was also the idea that Allied soldiers actually were fighting to rid the world of German militarism.  People act as though the First World War snuck up on an unsuspecting Europe and that is simply not the case.  I was reading newspapers from the early 1900s last week and almost every one had some sort of reference to German militarism, or an interview with a German General where he scoffs at the idea of a war, or something of that nature.  After 10-15 years of having it constantly drilled into your head, you're going to believe that German militarism is a real threat and can only be put down by rifle and bayonet.\n\nThere are the age old ideas of young men wanting to go off to war for adventure, looking sharp in a uniform, because their friends were doing it, etc.  This cannot be discounted.  no one would sign their attestation papers if it listed how they would die above where you sign.  \"Hmm, let's see, have my legs/nuts blown clean off then drown in the mud at Passchendaele?  Sounds good, sign me up.\"  That wouldn't happen, people wouldn't stand for it.  No who enlists thinks they're going to die a horrible death.  Those thoughts come later.  Not just that, but many young men in Canadian cities were choosing between their mundane jobs at the bakery and train yard, and with the Canadian Army.  They'd see the soldiers looking tough as hell marching through the streets with the bagpipes going and they wanted to join up.  They were full of piss and vinegar, risks be damned.  There is a reason why the modern Canadian Forces hit their recruiting target for the first time in 30 years during the campaign in Kandahar.  Like it or not, war/risk/\"adventure\" draws people in.\n\nNow, this does not get into the idea of the conscription crisis in Canada, which is a whole other can of worms.  To answer your question though, the fact is, in 1917 many people did refuse to keep fighting, and they voted with their feet by not enlisting.  Long story short, some Canadians wanted to fight, others though it was silly.  It caused a large rift in the country politically, a rift that in many ways we're still dealing with.\n\n", "So people have suggested some answers to the first question, and that's pretty straightforward, because pretty much no one anticipated the war that they actually got. So it's not too tough to explain why people initially thought the war would be fast, even if bloody.\n\nThe other issue is as you pointed out in your question, why they KEPT fighting. I think it's because of a discourse of nationalism in a situation of total war. From at least the late 19th century and maybe even earlier, you see a kind of zero-sum nationalism at work. Each nation tells itself that other nations are out to get them and that the conflicts between nations are essentially fights to the death. For example, advertisements in Britain that say \"Every German job is a British job lost; every German article manufactured is a British article lost.\" The French were terrified of the way that Germany's population was growing faster than their own, and they saw this as leading to their eventual demise. The Germans were terrified of Russia's potential to overwhelm them. In all these cases, nations saw other nations as mortal enemies. Why this is so is a bigger question which we can get into, but let's leave it aside for now.\n\nThe result of this kind of discourse of cataclysmic conflict is that once the war starts, it is sold to people as a total conflict in which victory means ultimate national triumph and a secure and prosperous future, while defeat means utter annihilation. Consider the \"Rape of Belgium.\" British political leaders ostensibly went to war with Germany when Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Britain had promised to protect Belgian sovereignty back in the 1830s (I think), and so was obligated to respond. However, the German violation of Belgium was sold to the British public as a \"rape\" in which German soldiers were utterly barbarous Huns that raped the women and bayonetted babies. This got the British public behind the war--but at the cost of creating a situation that political leaders could not easily undo. If the enemy really is the barbarous Hun out to destroy civilization and everything good, then how can you negotiate with them? How can you make peace with the enemy who is the ultimate Other? In this way, I would argue, the political leadership of many countries talked themselves into a corner. They created the conditions for a war that could only end in total victory or total defeat--but they lacked the weapon systems to achieve this. Thus, we have a long, bloody stalemate.\n\nSome books you can check out:\n\nHow it started:\nJames Joll, *The Origins of the First World War* (1984)\nDavid Herrmann, *The Arming of Europe* (1997)\nNiall Ferguson, *The Pity of War* (2000) (I think Ferguson has become a bit of a hack, but this earlier work is quite useful)\n\nTwo great books on Verdun, Oubsy in particular would be really useful for answering your question:\nAlistair Horne, *The Price of Glory* (1962)\nIan Ousby, *The Road to Verdun* (2002)\n\nSome really important recent scholarship on gender and the war, in particular on things like the \"Rape of Belgium\":\nSusan Grayzel, *Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War* (1999)\nNicoletta Gullace, *The Blood of Our Sons* (2000?)", "All the answers so far have been fantastic. I'm going to look at it from another perspective.\n\nWar is a difficult thing to end. With the build-up of troops, materials, manpower, the industries are booming, money is flowing, thousands of jobs are created. Imagine the number of guns needed to be crafted for the newly raised regiments? That's work for iron miners, lumberjacks, steel mills , lumber yards, and a foundry/craftsman. The bonuses of a war are hard to ignore. \n\nSo with this locomotive of the economy, building up a head of steam, the politicians, who likely own the lumber and steel mills, would have a personal reason to keep the war going.\n\nI especially agree with the idea of patriotism \"We must stand up for the British Empire\". Coming from South Africa, we didn't have to fight. We could have sat back, and watched as Europe tore itself apart. But as of 1910, we had been given near independence, by being named a dominion. This dominionship has a clause in it, that we should come to the aid of the Commonwealth whenever called. That is why we fought.\n\nThis is probably why the Canadians fought, and the Australians and New Zealanders (ANZACs in Gallipoli), and other dominion countries.\n\nOn another tangent, it was a common place situation where entire streets or villages of young men would sign-up together, in Pals battalion as they were called. This was mostly in the beginning, when the call for help had only just been sent out, and pride in the country and the desire to fight was strong. This created a huge draw on the population's desire to fight. Their sons, husbands, boyfriends, neighbours, teachers, were all going off to war, to fight the Hun! Be proud.\n\nAfter this period of time, this pride turned more towards revenge. Thousands of young men, killed in the trenches, in attacks over no-man's land, for some spit of French or Belgian soil. Anger and hatred rose up in the populations. They wanted their side to not only win against, but defeat utterly, their enemy.\n\nIt is my opinion of the people at the time that they wanted the war to end, and the only way for it to end in a sufficient manner would be to destroy the Germans.\n\n(As a side note, I had a great uncle who fought at the Battle of Delville Wood, and was shot through the arm. When he got home, he was given a doubled salary and a hero's welcome. Just an example of the thoughts of the people at the time)\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "Strange that nobody draws the obvious parallel to the American Civil War. Early 19th century military romanticism, mixed with an unfamiliarity with industrial warfare leading to mass casualties, and post-war popular literature that sobers the population up to reality. It was a major reason for American neutrality during the war, and a major reason behind the hesitant response of the western democracies to Germany in the '30s.", "Why has any democracy carried on with a war that was going only so-so? Look at the Vietnam war, I think it took 6+ years of fighting before a simple majority of the country thought the US should get out.\n\nTo answer your question in a word, pride. Humans don't do a good job admitting that we might be wrong. Especially when our brother or father or husband might have died at the front. Do we really want to accept that they died just to restore \"status quo ante bellum?\" \n\nPlus I don't think there was ever a point in which there wouldn't be a \"losing\" side in the negotiations. Even if there had been successful negotiations in 1916 or 1917, Germany still would have likely been forced to give up some colonies. Now as a German citizen who's lost loved ones, that's a tough proposition to swallow.\n\nPeople hate compromising and surrendering, no matter how rational it might be. War is like gambling, much to gain, much to be lost, and if you're not careful you'll bankrupt yourself and everyone around you trying to win.", "I'll try to tackle the first question. Most children, in the UK for example, were raised with Victorian and Edwardian values and propaganda, reflecting the times ideology which in turn influenced the officers and privates to think and feel that what they were doing was their duty. To them, they were protecting their family, their homeland and even the allies of their homeland. This was a whole other era than today. Most of the young men had grown up with exaggerated war stories from the past, about kings and generals, redcoats in Africa etc. and that influenced their later way of thinking. Many did this for honor, as they felt it. But there were other factors. Some did it because they didn't want to be condemned by their social circles or to let down their fellow comrades. The actual motivation for the individual soldier on both side is different from individual to individual, of course, but many based it on personal feelings. Not hatred towards the enemy, but for a personal honor and to conquer fear. \n\nThat didn't mean that there weren't any protests or mutinies because of the high amount of casualties. While the British army did reach highs of disappointment and demoralization, it never broke out in a full-scale mutiny. It kept itself disciplined during the duration of the war. The French, of course, had its famous mutiny of 1917, after continuous horrendous casualties during the Nivelle offensives. \n\n >  Even as early as August 1914, if you were reading newspapers in England or its Dominions or France, you knew exactly how bloody the war was with stories of ditches being crossed with bridges of corpses.\n\nThat doesn't mean that everybody read them. The letters soldiers wrote home from the front where usually quite reductive from realistic depictions of life at the front. The soldiers felt a constant isolation and that anyone who wasn't there could never understand what they have to endure. Some felt that nobody even cared in the first place. In England, for example, there was even a remarkable display of ignorance by the relatives to dead soldiers about the actual conditions of the war. They even sent requests to commanders about their dead relatives personal watches, money and other personal items. French and German civilians didn't know that well either. French soldiers could get letters from the home front by concerned old women asking things like \"You don't fight if it's raining, right?\". The people who imagined the trenches didn't see the images that we see today. They often imagined organized, cozy and even lovely trenches. There's a great illustration from *L'illustration* showing the contemporary image of the trenches from the eyes of somebody who hadn't been there. \n\nSources: *Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I* by John Ellis.", "I can speak to the first question from a Canadian point of view.  There are a few reasons I can think of, some obvious, some not so much.\n\nThe first and most obvious reason is patriotism.  Now this will require some deconstruction.  There is two kinds of patriotism I'm talking about.  The \"We must stand up for the British Empire\" kind of patriotism, and the sort of patriotism that is about gaining acceptance into the club.  From Southern Ontario and east there was a very strong British connection, both through settlement and culture.  There was almost an idea among some that Canada had to prove it was almost \"more British than British\", some believed it had to pro-actively support GB to maintain standing in the empire.  In Western Canada there was a different patriotism, a kind that was more about being \"let into the club\" so to speak.  A great many new immigrants enlisted in the armed forces because it was a traditionally patriotic thing to do, and they wanted to join the club, jump in with both feet and all that.\n\nAnother reason is that the horrors of trench life were not as we think of them today.  Yes, it was awful, and yes, many people were dying, but based on letters home and diaries we see that people didn't see war as a constant bloodbath, at least from a personal point of view.  For example, I've read letters home from a soldier who enlisted in 1914, and then spent most of 1915 and into 1916 training, going to NCO school, being an instructor at machine gun school, etc.  The actual time spent in the front accounted for little of the time spent in the forces.  I believe soldiers only spent 2 weeks at the front at a time, and then went through a rotation as reserves, then training, etc.  A lot of people have the idea that young soldiers walked off the boat and directly into the meat grinder, and that simply wasn't the case.\n\nThere was also the idea that Allied soldiers actually were fighting to rid the world of German militarism.  People act as though the First World War snuck up on an unsuspecting Europe and that is simply not the case.  I was reading newspapers from the early 1900s last week and almost every one had some sort of reference to German militarism, or an interview with a German General where he scoffs at the idea of a war, or something of that nature.  After 10-15 years of having it constantly drilled into your head, you're going to believe that German militarism is a real threat and can only be put down by rifle and bayonet.\n\nThere are the age old ideas of young men wanting to go off to war for adventure, looking sharp in a uniform, because their friends were doing it, etc.  This cannot be discounted.  no one would sign their attestation papers if it listed how they would die above where you sign.  \"Hmm, let's see, have my legs/nuts blown clean off then drown in the mud at Passchendaele?  Sounds good, sign me up.\"  That wouldn't happen, people wouldn't stand for it.  No who enlists thinks they're going to die a horrible death.  Those thoughts come later.  Not just that, but many young men in Canadian cities were choosing between their mundane jobs at the bakery and train yard, and with the Canadian Army.  They'd see the soldiers looking tough as hell marching through the streets with the bagpipes going and they wanted to join up.  They were full of piss and vinegar, risks be damned.  There is a reason why the modern Canadian Forces hit their recruiting target for the first time in 30 years during the campaign in Kandahar.  Like it or not, war/risk/\"adventure\" draws people in.\n\nNow, this does not get into the idea of the conscription crisis in Canada, which is a whole other can of worms.  To answer your question though, the fact is, in 1917 many people did refuse to keep fighting, and they voted with their feet by not enlisting.  Long story short, some Canadians wanted to fight, others though it was silly.  It caused a large rift in the country politically, a rift that in many ways we're still dealing with.\n\n", "So people have suggested some answers to the first question, and that's pretty straightforward, because pretty much no one anticipated the war that they actually got. So it's not too tough to explain why people initially thought the war would be fast, even if bloody.\n\nThe other issue is as you pointed out in your question, why they KEPT fighting. I think it's because of a discourse of nationalism in a situation of total war. From at least the late 19th century and maybe even earlier, you see a kind of zero-sum nationalism at work. Each nation tells itself that other nations are out to get them and that the conflicts between nations are essentially fights to the death. For example, advertisements in Britain that say \"Every German job is a British job lost; every German article manufactured is a British article lost.\" The French were terrified of the way that Germany's population was growing faster than their own, and they saw this as leading to their eventual demise. The Germans were terrified of Russia's potential to overwhelm them. In all these cases, nations saw other nations as mortal enemies. Why this is so is a bigger question which we can get into, but let's leave it aside for now.\n\nThe result of this kind of discourse of cataclysmic conflict is that once the war starts, it is sold to people as a total conflict in which victory means ultimate national triumph and a secure and prosperous future, while defeat means utter annihilation. Consider the \"Rape of Belgium.\" British political leaders ostensibly went to war with Germany when Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Britain had promised to protect Belgian sovereignty back in the 1830s (I think), and so was obligated to respond. However, the German violation of Belgium was sold to the British public as a \"rape\" in which German soldiers were utterly barbarous Huns that raped the women and bayonetted babies. This got the British public behind the war--but at the cost of creating a situation that political leaders could not easily undo. If the enemy really is the barbarous Hun out to destroy civilization and everything good, then how can you negotiate with them? How can you make peace with the enemy who is the ultimate Other? In this way, I would argue, the political leadership of many countries talked themselves into a corner. They created the conditions for a war that could only end in total victory or total defeat--but they lacked the weapon systems to achieve this. Thus, we have a long, bloody stalemate.\n\nSome books you can check out:\n\nHow it started:\nJames Joll, *The Origins of the First World War* (1984)\nDavid Herrmann, *The Arming of Europe* (1997)\nNiall Ferguson, *The Pity of War* (2000) (I think Ferguson has become a bit of a hack, but this earlier work is quite useful)\n\nTwo great books on Verdun, Oubsy in particular would be really useful for answering your question:\nAlistair Horne, *The Price of Glory* (1962)\nIan Ousby, *The Road to Verdun* (2002)\n\nSome really important recent scholarship on gender and the war, in particular on things like the \"Rape of Belgium\":\nSusan Grayzel, *Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War* (1999)\nNicoletta Gullace, *The Blood of Our Sons* (2000?)", "All the answers so far have been fantastic. I'm going to look at it from another perspective.\n\nWar is a difficult thing to end. With the build-up of troops, materials, manpower, the industries are booming, money is flowing, thousands of jobs are created. Imagine the number of guns needed to be crafted for the newly raised regiments? That's work for iron miners, lumberjacks, steel mills , lumber yards, and a foundry/craftsman. The bonuses of a war are hard to ignore. \n\nSo with this locomotive of the economy, building up a head of steam, the politicians, who likely own the lumber and steel mills, would have a personal reason to keep the war going.\n\nI especially agree with the idea of patriotism \"We must stand up for the British Empire\". Coming from South Africa, we didn't have to fight. We could have sat back, and watched as Europe tore itself apart. But as of 1910, we had been given near independence, by being named a dominion. This dominionship has a clause in it, that we should come to the aid of the Commonwealth whenever called. That is why we fought.\n\nThis is probably why the Canadians fought, and the Australians and New Zealanders (ANZACs in Gallipoli), and other dominion countries.\n\nOn another tangent, it was a common place situation where entire streets or villages of young men would sign-up together, in Pals battalion as they were called. This was mostly in the beginning, when the call for help had only just been sent out, and pride in the country and the desire to fight was strong. This created a huge draw on the population's desire to fight. Their sons, husbands, boyfriends, neighbours, teachers, were all going off to war, to fight the Hun! Be proud.\n\nAfter this period of time, this pride turned more towards revenge. Thousands of young men, killed in the trenches, in attacks over no-man's land, for some spit of French or Belgian soil. Anger and hatred rose up in the populations. They wanted their side to not only win against, but defeat utterly, their enemy.\n\nIt is my opinion of the people at the time that they wanted the war to end, and the only way for it to end in a sufficient manner would be to destroy the Germans.\n\n(As a side note, I had a great uncle who fought at the Battle of Delville Wood, and was shot through the arm. When he got home, he was given a doubled salary and a hero's welcome. Just an example of the thoughts of the people at the time)\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_2_\n_URL_3_\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_", "Strange that nobody draws the obvious parallel to the American Civil War. Early 19th century military romanticism, mixed with an unfamiliarity with industrial warfare leading to mass casualties, and post-war popular literature that sobers the population up to reality. It was a major reason for American neutrality during the war, and a major reason behind the hesitant response of the western democracies to Germany in the '30s."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_South_Africa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalion", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_South_Africa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign"], []]}
{"q_id": "1c5t0i", "title": "Fictional historical people", "selftext": "This is inspired by the recent thread about the \"historical Muhammad\" and similar questions about Jesus.  Some people theorize that these people were essentially fabrications, but from reading around here the general consensus seems to be that a real person existed at the focus of both stories.\n\nSo are there cases where this _isn't_ the case?  People who show up in the historical record a few decades to centuries after their \"lives\" who really don't seem to have ever existed? I'm less interested in people from distant, mythic past.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c5t0i/fictional_historical_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9dbnw2"], "score": [4], "text": ["Prester John.  500 years of European stories about a Christian monarch in India, or Central Asia, or Ethiopia.  The Wikipedia entry is pretty good: _URL_0_\n\n(I've been fascinated by that guy since I first heard of him, but can't claim any expertise about him.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John"]]}
{"q_id": "cgt7zp", "title": "Did the Ottoman Caliph actually hold power over the Muslim ummah, or was it just a ceremonious title?", "selftext": "Ottoman rulers claimed caliphal authority in 1517 and it was abolished in 1924. This authority was built off their authority as Sultan of the Empire. But did being caliph meant holding power and leading the whole Muslim community, or was it just ceremonious?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgt7zp/did_the_ottoman_caliph_actually_hold_power_over/", "answers": {"a_id": ["euo31tc"], "score": [8], "text": ["I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you\n\nIt was mostly the latter. First of all. generally speaking (with exceptions, like in the Muslim kingdoms/communities in the Indian Ocean), the classical concept of a single caliph for the whole Islamic community had had no force since the 13th century with the destruction of Abbasid Baghdad in 1258. There were, to be sure, self-aggrandizing rulers from various parts of the Muslim world including who sometimes included \"caliph\" among their list of titles. Yet when they did so, it was in a manner virtually interchangeable with \"sultan\", lacking any implication of descent from earlier caliphs or an exclusive claim to the title or to universal authority. This general disregard for the past prestige of the caliphate seems to have been shared by intellectuals as well as politicians. In the centuries after the fall of Baghdad, Muslim scholars from the extreme traditionalist Ibn Taymiyya to the hyper-rationalist Ibn Khaldun, seem to have reached a basic consensus that the caliphate as an institution no longer had relevance for the times in which they lived.\n\nIt was still quite the case when the Ottomans came along. In the first place, There is no evidence to suggest that Selim aspired to the office of caliph before his conquest of Egypt, remaining silent about both in all of his pre-conquest correspondence with the Mamluks. Nor did he make a visible effort to claim these offices immediately following his conquest, failing to make any systematic mention of them in the various *fethn\u0101mes* sent to announce his victory to officials and dignitaries of his realm, to vassals and foreign rulers, and to his heir, the future Sultan Suleiman. Instead, the title was acclaimed to him by people living entirely outside the territories under his control. The first public acknowledgement of Selim as *Khadim al-Haramayn* (Custodian of the Holy Mosque, an equally prestigious title) would come four years later from the Sharif of Mecca. Immediately following Selim\u2019s conquest of Egypt, while he was still in Cairo, the Sharif sent an official delegation headed by his own son to meet the sultan and, in a gesture heavy with political significance, to hand over to him the keys to Mecca. It was only after this public act that Selim, in a letter to the ruler of Shirvan, seems to have for the first time referred to the \"*khil\u0101fet-i \u0101l\u012bye\"* (exalted caliphate)  and to the insertion of his own name in the *hutbe* of Mecca, reasoning that the failure of the Mamluks to protect the hajj routes had made it incumbent on him to assume this role. Then, in the following year, it was an Indian Ocean Muslim, Malik Ayaz of Gujarat, who as the governor of Diu became the first foreign ruler to spontaneously acknowledge Selim as \u201cCaliph of the Faith\u201d in a letter congratulating him on his victory\n\nDespite its mostly ceremonial title however, The Ottomans did sometimes use it in a politicized manner to mobilize or to correspond with Muslim communities outside the empire. One such example is in the 16th century, when the Ottoman Empire influenced and interacted with Muslim Powers in the Indian Ocean to fight the Portuguese, which i will briefly describe\n\nThe treaty of Tordesillas led to King Manuel I of Portugal claiming a new imperial title: \"Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India\", as he hoped to be recognized as these rulers\u2019 superior, a \"king of kings\" or universal emperor, whose authority transcended the physical possession of any specific territory.  Because Portuguese ambitions were concerned first and foremost with the transit spice trade, and since trade routes to and from the Red Sea were trafficked principally by Muslim merchants, Portuguese claims would be measured in its ability to prevent Indian Ocean Muslims from travelling to the Red Sea for trade and *hajj*. For the first time in history a non-Muslim power emerged in the Indian Ocean that was not only capable of preventing disparate Muslim communities from maintaining contact with one another by means of *hajj* but was actually compelled to do so according to the terms of its own claims to universal sovereignty. The Portuguese then started to raid and blockade parts of the Red Sea, and as a result of this sustained and organized violence, the Muslim Indian Ocean communities was primed for a radical re-politicization of the ideal of the Muslim *Umma.* With this in mind, the spontaneous acclamation of Selim as both \"Caliph\" and \"Servant of the Two Holy Cities\" was a potential two-edged sword. On the one hand, the notion that the Ottoman sultan was now responsible for protecting Muslim merchants and pilgrims throughout the Indian Ocean (and presumably, elsewhere too) implied that his legitimacy could be called into question by events far outside of the empire\u2019s borders, beyond his control, and possibly even unknown to him if he failed to fulfill these obligation. On the other hand, if the sultan were able guarantee the safety of the Indian Ocean hajj, or at least make a credible effort to do so, he might expect a measure of allegiance in return from Muslims throughout maritime Asia, regardless of whether or not they were actually Ottoman subjects. The Ottomans had been nurturing the title caliph since the early reign of S\u00fcleyman. These efforts were directly connected with the consolidation of Ottoman rule in Egypt and were spearheaded by the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, S\u00fcleyman\u2019s closest confidant and a leading proponent of Ottoman military engagement in the Indian Ocean. In 1538, a fleet of  over seventy ships eventually did set sail to India from Suez, beginning the history of direct Ottoman military involvement in maritime Asia. With the departure of this fleet, a full-blown revival of the concept of the Universal Caliphate in a thoroughly Ottoman guise began to take shape in the following decades. The clearest evidence for this dates from the 1560s and emerges from a series of diplomatic exchanges between the Ottomans and the Sultan of Aceh, Ali Ala\u2019ad-Din Ri\u2019ayat Syah. In the first letter of this exchange, sent from Aceh in 1564 and addressed to Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan is repeatedly addressed as \"caliph\" by Ali Ala\u2019ad-Din Ri\u2019ayat Syah and is assured that in this capacity his name is read in the *hutbe* in all the mosques of Aceh. Moreover, the letter indicates that Suleiman is being similarly named in the *hutbes* of Sri Lanka, Calicut, and the Maldives, all places strategically located along the maritime trunk routes to the Red Sea, and these communities\u2019 recognition of the sultan as defender of the universal *Umma* was now expressed in direct expectation of weapons, ships, and technical expertise in return, in order to continue the ongoing fight against the Portuguese \n\n**Sources:**\n\n*Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution* and *The Ottoman Age of Exploration* by Giancarlo Casale\n\n*Legitimizing The Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power* by Hakan T. Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c7ive", "title": "Britons during the Anglo-Saxon period?", "selftext": "I'm curious as to how the Britons interacted with the Anglo-Saxons during the Anglo-Saxon period. \n* Did they retain their own culture?\n* Did they manage to adopt the Saxon's/Jute's/Anglo's Germanic culture? \n* How did the Jutes, Saxons and Angles view the native Britons? \n* Did their quality of life decrease drastically? If so, how drastic was the change and how would it differ following the Norman Conquest? \n* In regards to military service, were Britons allowed to serve alongside ethnic Anglo-Saxons - or were they barred from service? \n\nThanks\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c7ive/britons_during_the_anglosaxon_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjcya3s"], "score": [2], "text": ["A book which will answer most, if not all, of your questions is T.M. Charles-Edwards' magisterial new book (now released in paperback, although it's still something of a doorstop at 795 pages) [*Wales and the Britons 350-1064*](_URL_0_), (Oxford, 2013). As you can see from the contents page, this is a detailed study of what you want to know. Well worth the odd \u00a320-\u00a325 to have at hand."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AK_yn7Q3_x0C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "dqqkuw", "title": "Why were the buildings of a Roman castrum spread out?", "selftext": "Hey, here's a picture for reference.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nI understand that the forts vary on a case by case basis, but they are generally pretty similar. One thing I noticed, in particular, is that all the buildings were spread out within the complex. Why is that?\n\nWhy not just building them as a single building - like a run of the mill castle? It would be a lot more space-efficient and more resource-efficient (I would assume). It may even be more time-efficient when making it, which I think would be very valuable given that lots of these fortifications were made in a hurry - possibly within a day, which I find hard to believe.\n\nAlso, it seems like modern military bases also spread out the buildings in their layouts, so I would guess this is good practice for some kind of reason that has withstood the test of time, but I'm not exactly sure why.\n\nSo, why spread out the buildings inside of the castrum?\n\nThanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dqqkuw/why_were_the_buildings_of_a_roman_castrum_spread/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f69phl3"], "score": [9], "text": ["First: *castrum* is not typically used in Latin, except in very rare cases, and those probably confusion with the similar *castellum,* which does appear in the singular. The Latin noun is always plural, *castra*, though it refers to a single camp. \n\nFor the average run-of-the mill *castra,* there were no \"buildings.\" The structures inside were tents, and the whole thing was put up and taken down in a single night on the march. The more permanent forts, like those along the *limes* in Imperial times, were constructed on analogy with the marching forts, and more or less took the same shape.\n\nThere are practical considerations for both the temporary and the more permanent forts. The spaces between the tents/buildings afforded rapid internal movement from any one side to any other side. Men could move quickly down the \"lanes\" (the Romans called them [*viae*](_URL_0_), 'roads'). Internal mobility was an important feature of successful repulsion of attack, since reinforcements could be moved rapidly from point to point. The lanes also afforded quick mustering and departure from any of the four gates.\n\nYou find it hard to believe that the *castra* could be built within a day, but I think you have the wrong idea about what it looked like. See [here](_URL_1_), though this pic probably gives TOO much space inside the walls. It was not only built in a day, but often within a couple of hours, or even less. Every soldier knew his job, where to dig, where to pile up dirt, and much like ants, and well-trained legion could erect a structure like a *castra* with terrifying speed. And contrary to what you are suggesting, the space between the rows of tents makes construction and organization go faster, because all the tents can be erected at roughly the same time, instead of each row in succession in the case of them \"touching\" one  another. I also don't understand why a Roman army would need to \"conserve space\" on the march. Space from what? When the Romans are building a *castra*, they typically own the countryside far and wide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://i.imgur.com/t2fWvSU.png"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nomenclatorbooks.com/images/inchtuthil.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f3/b2/a7/f3b2a7d1d4bc38cc5eec39093d2bb15d.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "21bdt0", "title": "Can anyone describe the use of and attitude towards marijuana in the German Democratic Republic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21bdt0/can_anyone_describe_the_use_of_and_attitude/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgbgxnn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Since this is such an absurdly specific question I tried to do a little bit of reading to see what I could come up with.  \n  \n\nIn *German Democracy : From Post-World War II to the Present Day* Gert-Joachim Glaessner writes that the idea of drugs, as an example of a decaying or corrupted society, were often used as a tool by the GDR in opposition to the FRG. He says that  \n  \n > The leadership never tired of stressing the social security in which GDR citizens could live, in contrast to the unemployment, material want, and other problems of capitalist society, such as crime and drugs.  \n  \nHe doesn't go into detail on that claim, but I think we can surmise that if the GDR state didn't like it, it was unlikely you were going to be doing it unless you really wanted to stick it to the authorities or were in a *very* priveleged position. The Stasi were not known for their relaxed attitudes toward law-breaking, especially if it makes the GDR look bad, in their eyes, compared to the FRG.  \n    \nIn \"Youth Justice in Germany\" Hans-J\u00f6rg Albrecht claims that there were distinct jumps in crime in East Germany - including cannabis offences - following reunification, to a far greater extent than in the west. He gives a number of theories for this;  \n  \n > Some argue that young people in the east are \nfar more exposed to risks thought to contribute to crime and therefore \nare far more involved in crime-particularly street crime and car theft \n(Frehsee 1995; Kerner and Sonnen 1997, p. 342).   \nPolice and the public \nin the east may also still differ from the west in control styles and crime \nreporting patterns.   \nAnother hypothesis is that children and juveniles in the east are far more visible than in the west because the infrastructure of specially designated places for juveniles is only slowly catching up with the west.  \nAnother hypothesis, not yet examined closely, is that extended group activities (which produce more suspects for a single criminal offense) are more common.  \n  \nHe's more of a sociologist or criminologist than a historian, but it doesn't mean his views aren't valuable. Note that he is talking about both pre and post unification here though, so it's not all that valuable when you're talking specifically about the GDR. It just provides a bit of insight.  \n  \nFrom these limited sources I'm going to go out on a limb and say marijuana didn't really figure in the minds or needs of the people of the German Democratic Republic. Certainly not enough for there to be a distinct cannabis culture or \"problem\" if you want to frame it that way."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ffr8zx", "title": "How/Why did Britain lose the Battle of Hong Kong against Japan in 1941?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ffr8zx/howwhy_did_britain_lose_the_battle_of_hong_kong/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk0g791"], "score": [8], "text": ["**How?**\n\nFor the how part, they were attacked by a much stronger force of far superior quality that enjoyed complete air superiority. To compound problems further the British gravely underestimated the fighting ability of the Japanese and left only three batalions on the Gin Drinkers line. There was just no way that a garrison of \\~14000 men consisting of mostly fresh colonial troops could possibly hold out for very long against a battle hardend Japanese army of 29000 combat troops. \n\n**Why?**\n\nThe why part is a little more complicated and takes us into geo-politics and specifically the balance of power in the Pacific region. So there are basically five major players around the table here we need to keep some kind of tabs on.\n\nGreat Britain - Until the signing of the Anglo-Japanese alliance Britain had largely pursued a foreign policy of non-intervention since the Concert of Europe often called Glorious Isolation. The idea was basically that Britain should avoid permanent alliances with other major powers that risked dragging Britain into continental wars. I won't get into the pros and cons of it but by the end of the 19th century it was becoming clear that while the Splendid Isolation left Britain free of obligations, it also left it without friends or allies in a world where grand alliances were once again forming. \n\nThe USA - For most of the 19th century the US had followed some form of non-interventionalist policy, perhaps most famously the Monroe Doctrine. However, with the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War the USA too was abandoning its isolationist policies. \n\nRussia - Imperial Russia had pursued a policy of imperialist expansion in the east for centuries. Above all else it sought a warm water seaport in the East. The main eastern port of the Russian Empire was Vladivostok but it was not reliably open during the winter months. When Russia intervened in the Boxer Rebellion it effectively occupied Manchuria, after the war Russia held onto Manchuria in defiance of the Boxer Protocol. This was a cause of great concern for both Japan and Britain who had tradtionally been one of the counterweights to Russian expansion in Asia. \n\nJapan - The Empire of Japan had been on the rise as a major power in the Pacific since roughly the Meiji restoration. While it had centralized the government, adopted many western aspects within its military and industry it was not, nor did it attempt to be, a western nation. Imperial Japan was very much looking towards overseas expansion in the wake of the Meiji restoration and did not look kindly on the Russian occupation of Manchuria. This would eventually lead to the Russo-Japanese war. \n\nChina - While large and populous, China under the Qing dynasty was politically unstable and in many ways backwards, however, the sheer size of China always made it a force to be reconned with, at least regionally. \n\nSo, come the turn of the century a few key things have happened. Russia has remained in Manchuria after the Boxer rebellion, Japan has won the First Sino-Japanese war *convincingly*, proving to both itself and the other powers of the region that the Japanese army and navy are a competent force to rival any in the region. France, Russia and Germany have signed the Triple Intervention, forcing Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula but, Britain, while invited, did not sign it. \n\nWe now have a situation where Britain is abandoning the Spendid Isolation and looking for allies while it is fighting the Boer War, Russia is holding Manchuria in defiance of the Boxer protocol and Japan is looking to expand further in the wake of its success in the First Sino Japanese war. The Anglo-Japanese alliance is formed. To Japan, it is a guarantee against foreign intervention by France or Germany in anticipation of its coming war with Russia, to Britain it is a safeguard for its East Asian holdings since Britain is now allied to Japan with its strong Pacific Navy. \n\nThe Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold for 20 years which allowed Japan to kick Russia out of Manchuria and further strengthen its position in mainland Asia. This is relevant because in the years leading up to WW1 and over the course of the entire war, Japan was an ally to Britain. Despite Japanese victories against the Chinese and Russians, Britain still considered Japan something of a second rate army since they had, until this point, mostly fought the Chinese and Russians. \n\nSo, Britain did not really consider Japan a threat to its colonial possesions in Asia until well after ww1 and did not really start to consider the possibility of a Japanese invasion of Hong Kong until the Japanese conquest of Canton. Suddenly Hong Kong was surrounded by Japan. At this point, Britain did not consider Hong Kong defensible. It did not have the Naval power to contend with the Japanese and without that, Hong Kong was always doomed even with the Gin Drinkers Line reinforced the analysis was that Hong Kong could at best delay the Japanese to buy time for Britain elsewhere. Because of this view Hong Kong was relatively lightly defended until 1941. \n\nThe garrison of Hong Kong was strengthend in 1941, in part to act as a deterent to a Japanese invasion but also to show British commitment to its Asian holdings, particularly to the Chinese. However, the garrison was still mostly fresh troops from Canada and the British Raj, it was not nearly strong enough to withstand a full scale invasion and fell much quicker than the British (or the Japanese) had anticipated. You have to view this in light of the global situation in 1940/1941. It was not as if Britain had an abundance of troops available since the war in Europe and Africa was not going particularly well at this point. \n\nTL;DR - Britain never really heavily fortified Hong Kong because Japan was an ally of Britain until \\~ early 1930's and it was hard pressed for troops for other theaters of the war since Britain was effectively the only major power still standing against the Axis in 1940/1941 until the US and Soviet entries into the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "xs93v", "title": "when did the northern European monarchies become \npowerless?", "selftext": "when, how and why did the monarchies of countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, etc become effectively powerless?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xs93v/when_did_the_northern_european_monarchies_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5p9hkm"], "score": [10], "text": ["The Revolutions of 1848 definitely killed the absolutism of the Danish Monarchy and killed off the French one as a whole. It also helped to change the Netherlands to a much more liberal nation under decree of William II (although William III unpopularily attempted to reverse everything). The Swedes went to constitutional monarchy in 1809 after they lost Finland and the nation demanded change. Belgium was never an absolute monarchy to begin with since they modeled their monarchy on the British, although it really took the Royal Question of 1950 to render it powerless. For most of these countries, a liberal revolution or at least a great liberalization happened between 1800 and 1890."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35cxc0", "title": "I'm a poor farmer in France during the revolution. I live far away from any cities or near the frontier. How is my life affected?", "selftext": "Practically all of what I have learned about the French Revolution focuses on Paris, with brief mentions of the cities that rebelled against the rebellion. But the vast majority of French were poor farmers who lived far from cities. How were they affected?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35cxc0/im_a_poor_farmer_in_france_during_the_revolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr3ffkl", "cr3kih9"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["When you say the frontier, do you mean near the border to another country? If you're thinking something like the American frontier to the wilderness,  that hasn't really existed in Europe for hundreds of years. ", "I'll copy a bit from an old post I made:\n\nWhere do you reside? Most specifically, are you from the North or the South? Another question I need to ask is how old are you? What gender are you? Those last two are the most important because, frankly, they determine how likely it is that you live or die. How rich are you, your family? Do you have any royal ties whatsoever? If the answer is yes to the last line this post ends here because you were near guaranteed to be dead flat out as long as you stayed in France.\n\nLet's say you were from the South. The South of France experienced a disproportionately large amount of anti-Revolutionary tendencies and would be considered in \"semi-revolt\" throughout the 1790's. Mayors were extra corrupt and outright ignored calls for conscription. If you were not old enough to be conscripted (unlikely, you'd have to be in your late 30's, 40's, or 50's by this point along with some kind of medical issue to really seal the deal) you would likely be victim at some point or another of a Revolutionary Army -- sans-culottes. This would be initially paraded by our friend Maximillien Robespierre -- the architect of what is called \"The Terror\" between '92 and '93. Almost 3/4th's of those killed in 'The Terror' would be people just like you -- regular working class peasants accused of hoarding grain or anti-revolutionary thought. Frankly, these bands were filled with people who felt it safer and more profitable to wage war on defenseless French civilians than to go out and defend the country. It was full of cowards and, I know this is loaded language, terrorists.\n\nYou would be visited by these sans-culottes regularly and would see either a family member or a friend in town sent to the guillotine most certainly. You may also have witnessed or fallen victim to noyades -- mass drownings -- or mass shootings if your town was deemed as harboring anti-Revolutionary sentiment. Thankfully though if you would survive this period through about 1794 the Terror would end with Robespierre's fall and the rise of the Directory which would dismantle these Revolutionary Armies and scatter them throughout the regular army. Let me reiterate this -- whether you are in the North or South, if you were not in the military, you were subject to seemingly random and completely unregulated murder by Revolutionary forces in the first few years of the revolution. Your chances of surviving this if you had any aristocratic heritage, any anti-revolutionary sentiment or hoarded any food whatsoever was not very high.\n\nIf you were in the North you would experience a life very similar to the South except with slightly less Revolutionary Terror and more death and destruction from war. The North would be subject to constant attacks by the British and Austrians in particular. Remember at this time the area of the Low Countries was held by Austrian nobility and would be a staging area for Austrian offensives into France. Whether it was a British, Austrian, or French army your farm would likely be destroyed entirely. Burned to the ground most likely and all your crops stolen by foraging parties and your soil destroyed by men constantly marching through and fires. I'd also wager it's likely if you have any daughters they would be raped if you were in an area of particular contention.\n\nBasically if you were not drafting into the military your likely options were death, destruction of everything you own, rape and murder of your family, and your town or province being irrevocably destroyed by war or paramilitary Revolutionary forces. It is highly unlikely you would escaped unscathed.\n\nWhat is far more likely (and far more interesting to talk about) however is that you were drafted into the military. All men between the ages of 18 and 25 were to be forcibly conscripted for military service -- all men. Men into their 30's would also regularly volunteer or be called upon as well though. If you were fighting your first few years in the military would be one of utter disorganization and panic. Revolutionary hype would be ripe and you and your comrades would feel it. Any officers living a little too luxuriously? Mob them and send them to the guillotine. Your NCO being a little too harsh on you and your mates? That doesn't sound like liberty or fraternity, I don't like being drilled! You'd probably be part of a mob that killed him or stripped him of his power. It is very likely you would be witness or a participant in the murder of an individual whose only crime was being a bit rich, an aristocratic heritage, or was being a bit too strict with you. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fzyru", "title": "In Battlefield 1 many American troops call German soldier \"Hun\" during World War One. Was that popular slang for German soldiers or is Battlefield taking liberties with history again?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fzyru/in_battlefield_1_many_american_troops_call_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daocexm", "daojypk"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["Yes it comes from a speech made by the Kaiser. I can't get it right now but I'll send you a link in a few unless someone beats me to it.\n\n_URL_0_", "Follow-up: the question about German soldiers being called \"Huns\" is frequently asked and the standard answer references a speech given by the Kaiser in 1900. But this doesn't really answer exactly how an expression from a speech given fourteen years earlier came to be a commonly-used epithet for Germans in 1914 (if that's when the practice started). Was the use of the expression popularized by a famous writer or something at the start of WWI?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1curv9/why_were_germans_called_huns_in_world_war_i/?compact=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "3taim1", "title": "Why was Andrew Jackson against the Bank of The United States?", "selftext": "We are currently learning about this in my US History class, and I found this topic so intriguing, but there's not too many details as to why he was actually against it, other than it was 'unconstitutional.' Is there any more reason as to why he wanted the national bank to end?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3taim1/why_was_andrew_jackson_against_the_bank_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx4pdwh", "cx4rdt2", "cx5disc"], "score": [15, 154, 3], "text": ["Hello everyone, \n\nIn this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, and as such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind [our rules](_URL_0_) concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed. \n\nAdditionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_1_), or a [META thread](_URL_2_[META]). Thank you!", "Henry L. Watson, in his seminal work \u201cLiberty and Power,\u201d extensively describes the politics of the Jacksonian era. He explains how the early republic quickly found itself politically divided among many competing visions of the future. The United States has always been a diverse place with very diverse interests. From the beginning, the federal government acted through a series of rigorous compromises, including the several layered controversy that is the National Bank re-charter. Watson describes that, \"Jackson felt the advance of commerce, banking, and industry tended to undermine the independence, virtue, and equality that made the republic possible\" (Watson p.133). Since the National Bank was made up of many financiers out of London and New York, many Southerners held the same belief as Jackson that this foreign entity had too much influence on the American government. These entities took control over the currency that the Congress was allocated and gave it to a private bank. Not only did Jackson veto the bank's re-charter, he opposed anything that could not be justified unless the strictest reading of the Constitution was used. Jackson opposed popular internal improvements like the C & O canal because they unfairly allocated funds to states and companies. Jackson\u2019s priority as president was to pay off the federal debt at any cost. He saw a dangerous, slippery slope in an open interpretation of the powers allocated to the government in the Constitution.\n\nIf you look, there are only two presidents from the North up to Andrew Jackson. Both have the last name Adams. Politically, the South had more power at the federal level in the early history of the republic. John Adams' late appointments of federalist judges ensured a legal structure that was opposed to the popular position of the Southern political majority. Deadlock ensued. Jackson's election as a member of a single issue political party marks the emergence of social mandates. For example, Jackson\u2019s platform was, \"I oppose the National Bank's re-charter. If elected, I will veto it\". This was a milestone in America's political history. Polarizing issues would now attract people to parties. Well defined regional political identities would begin to be established. People who supported Jackson saw the National Bank as a threat to freedom and individual liberty. The greatest fear of a farmer was to lose his land to the bank. \n\nJackson thought concentrated power like the Bank of the United States was not only corrupt, but dangerous. It was deemed unconstitutional by strict interpreters of the Constitution who carefully read article one, section eight, specifically these lines concerning congressional power:\n\n\"Congress has the power... To borrow money on the credit of the United States;\" \n\n\"To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;\" \n\n\"To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;\"\n\nThe Constitution says that the Congress has the power to do these things, but it does not say how it should get them done. Hamilton, the architect of the National Bank, saw that the only way to effectively regulate the currency was under a British model, which included a national bank. A strict interpreter saw the existence of the bank as a way for a concentrated power, like this national bank, as an entity that takes the power to coin and regulate the value of currency. When the National Bank prints money, Congress and the elected officials acquiesce to the authority of the un-elected bank. \n\nThe other argument concerning federal authority and allocation of funds comes up when Henry Clay (a great rival of Jackson) introduced a bill to build the Mayesveille Road in Kentucky. Originally, Roads had been created and funded with federal monies to facilitate postal delivery between the states. This justification was later used in the construction of the massive C & O canal. The Mayesveille Road was argued as being unconstitutional because the Constitution states that, \"the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.\" The logic being that an internal improvement connecting states falls within this authority. However, one lying within the borders of a single state would not. Jackson saw that federal funding of individual state or local projects went around what he called, \u201cthe authority of the natural Aristocracy.\u201d Jackson believed that if a state wanted an interior road that did not connect to another state, they had to find the funds through state taxes. \n\nWatson argues that Jackson's big victories over corruption, \"did little or nothing to slow the growth and proliferation... [of] trusts and monied corporations emerging in the nation\u201d (Watson 171). So in a TLDR: Jackson was a strict interpreter of the construction who believed that only congress had the authority to print money. \n\nWorks Cited: \n\nWatson, Henry L. Liberty and Power. Hill and Wagg, New York, NY. (1990). \n\nThe Constitution of the United States of America. Applewood Books Ed, Bedford Ma. (1791).", "To add to /u/RMFN's answer: \n\nIn the early days of the republic, many of the political clashes came down to the economic differences between the industrializing north, the plantation owners in the South, and the farmers in the West. \n\nOne of the biggest economic problems in the early US was that land speculation routinely boomed and busted, taking the economy with it. (The Trail of Tears was a result of finding gold in Georgia, for example). The Bank's duty of managing the economy and the money supply directly affected people's ability to get in on land speculation (if you read up on politicians of the time, many of them were involved in one way or another). Prior to Nicholas Biddle's term as president, the Second Bank essentially screwed up by fueling a bubble and then mishandling the bust, cratering the land speculation market. \n\nJackson was a land speculator from 1794, and was one of the investors behind Memphis, TN in 1819, which would have been when the Second Bank was being pilloried for mismanaging the Panic of 1819 and the subsequent recovery. So it may well have also been personal (either for him, or his associates)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title="], [], []]}
{"q_id": "cam36x", "title": "Why were opposite gender friendships less common in the past?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve noticed many pictures of bars in the late 1800s/early 1900s were filled with entirely men. Why was this? Was it abnormal to have mixed gender events or friendships?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cam36x/why_were_opposite_gender_friendships_less_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["etc9a72"], "score": [9], "text": ["So there are a couple of things going on here. One is that women not appearing in photos in bars/pubs/saloons doesn't indicate that women were never friends with men: drinking establishments were often officially or unofficially coded as masculine spaces, particularly if they served a middle-class clientele. (Working-class establishments might still segregate women into a specific area of the building, possibly a room closed off from the main action.) This is largely because it was seen as inappropriate for middle-class women to spend time in public places, drinking alcohol - it was unrefined and unrespectable. Women of this class were supposed to enjoy quieter pleasures in their homes or the homes of their friends, or perhaps in a salubrious location out-of-doors like the seashore or a tennis pitch. It was often assumed that women appearing in respectable eating/drinking places alone were prostitutes looking for customers, so it was in a restaurant or pub's best interest (from the proprietors' perspectives) to discourage them.\n\nBut beyond this, women and men, married and unmarried, certainly had friends of the opposite gender. [The 1858 diary of Stephen DeForest Hopkins](_URL_1_), for instance, describes young women paying calls on his family many times, noting that he knew and socialized with them. Belle Wright came with Bill Peat on August 31, and the two talked to him alone for some time as he rested his injured foot; in the evening, Dick Rice came and played backgammon with Stephen's sister, Mary. Gert Hawley and Minnie Cronkhite also paid a call on the house as a whole and conversed with him alone, a few days later. He regularly referred to young women in his generation by their first names, indicating a degree of familiarity and intimacy, and talks to them at his house, their houses, in public, and at parties. (Lest you think he was just being a player, Stephen was madly in love with his future wife, Lizzie, and regularly agonized over the fact that they couldn't yet marry.) He also corresponded with at least one female friend, a young woman named Fannie (possibly Burnham) who was studying to become a teacher.\n\nAs another example, there's [Florence Ranger's 1879 diary](_URL_0_), in which she discussed much the same sort of social interaction. On February 8th, she wrote:\n\n > After tea Will  &  Lodice came up played euchre all the evening Gertie up to Jennie Wait's Charley Dix came after her to take a ride, about 7.30, went up to Jennie's and took them both.\u00a0\n\nOn the 14th,\n\n >  At three o'clock Nell's father took, Nell, Lodice, Kate Thomas, Julia Parks Jennie Susie Gert  &  Carrie, up to Long Pond. for a short hour's skating, in his three-seated Rig. Charley Dix brought Paul Dakin up in his Cutter  &  the Underwoods came also. home about 5:45, Arthur brought Carrie home in the Cutter Herbert went in the [had?] also Dakin and Lodice rode home with Charley Dix. At seven they all went to their Club Meeting at Willis Haviland they went down in a farm rig, home at 11.15.\n\nDuring the summer, similar mixed-gender groups would attend balls and \"hops\", and go boating and picnicking. (Though I would note that Florence typically was only reporting on the social events her younger sisters, Gert and Carrie, attended \u2013 it's not really clear why she tended to stay home.) While these events offered opportunities for romance to blossom, they weren't inherently romantic. Boys and girls would attend as friends and simply have a good time together. In the case of dances, this was especially important \u2013 typically, a girl's escort was instrumental in making sure that she had many dance partners besides himself.\n\nBy the late nineteenth century, young people were expected to arrange their own marriages/engagements from within the social circle their parents had allowed them to construct. There was always the chance of a parental veto, but adults simply didn't barricade young women in the family home and then let them out once a suitable husband had been selected. Having friendships and connections of their own was an important aspect of creating the next generation of the social circle. (There is more to be said about married men and women, but I simply don't know as much about that as the unmarried/courtship stage.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://chapmanmuseum.pastperfectonline.com/archive/86BFFC4B-CB0F-4830-B20C-722894540246", "https://chapmanmuseum.pastperfectonline.com/archive/39F3622F-961A-4374-B9CA-907192849299"]]}
{"q_id": "1uq25w", "title": "Who were the Philistines of the Bible, and where did they come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uq25w/who_were_the_philistines_of_the_bible_and_where/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cekknn0"], "score": [21], "text": ["This is a rather large question mark in this area.  Based on linguistic evidence (mostly place-names), they don't seem to have been a Semitic people, certainly not a Canaanite group.  Because artifacts recovered from digs resemble those of Greek groups (but not Canaanites), they seem to have been at least from the Aegean, if not Greek themselves.  See [here](_URL_0_).\n\nThe main issue with identifying them is that they integrated into Canaanite society over time, adopting the Canaanite pantheon and eventually a Canaanite language.  The lack of much documentation of their language beyond a relatively small number of names is particularly troublesome--a solid relationship with other languages would aid in the determination of where they came from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/nn/spr95_ash.html"]]}
{"q_id": "8qvysy", "title": "How did Washington and the colonial army pay for the costs of the American Revolution without the ability to levy taxes?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qvysy/how_did_washington_and_the_colonial_army_pay_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0npenc"], "score": [3], "text": ["They borrowed.\n\nFirst,   the individual states and the Continental Congress printed paper money, and as expenses exceeded income, they printed more of it. As a result the paper money depreciated in value to little or nothing, which eventually led to the phrase \"not worth the Continental\". This essentially was a tax levied on,  money borrowed from,  all the people who took the currency in exchange for actual goods- food and firewood for the troops, cloth for uniforms, etc.\n\nSecond, there were wealthy patriots who loaned the government money, like Oliver Pollock and Robert Morris.  They often loaned the government money to buy their own goods.  This would later lead to claims that they were war profiteers, hoping to eventually make huge amounts from these sales when they were repaid. But for the most part they were motivated by devotion to the cause.\n\nThird, they borrowed from the French. That French navy outside Yorktown, blockading the British, was not free. and the French contributed both money and materiel to the colonists. When Morris started the First Bank of the United States, in order to begin to pay down the war debts, the French supplied the start cash.\n\nAt the end of the War the  public debt was $42,000,375. $7,885,008 was foreign, $34,115,290 was domestic. Efforts were made to try to pay down the debt, but often at a discount.  Continental currency was redeemed at 1/40th of the face value.  Whether they thought they might profit from the Revolution, most all of the financiers in the end suffered for it. Pollock never recovered his business.  Morris entangled his own finances with those of the Revolution to a dizzying extent, loaning the Army almost 14 million dollars,  took a great losses.  The repayment of the French with yearly tobacco shipments didn't last, and their unpaid loans to the Continental Congress and contributions to the American Revolution would be a significant part of the huge debt burden that finally collapsed their government and led to their own Revolution.\n\nIt should be noted, though, that part of Washington's success had to have been due to his ability to keep an army in the field despite lacking reliable funding.  It was something he was forced to learn to do in the early part of the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War) when the colonial governments were equally unwilling or unable to provide adequate financial support.\n\nAnderson: Crucible of War\n\nBolles: [Financial History of the United States](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=wWkuAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA317&amp;dq=January+1,+1783+public+debt+35,327,769&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj0xeqYjMfbAhVCyVMKHYBcD18Q6AEILTAB#v=onepage&amp;q=January%201%2C%201783%20public%20debt%2035%2C327%2C769&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2ppalp", "title": "How did the Mongols view sex and virginity?", "selftext": "In Weatherford's *The Secret History of the Mongol Queens* he mentions that Genghis Khan's son was accepted in court despite his questionable paternity because he was known to be the son of Temujin's wife. Was this a common sentiment? Did the Mongols have the same conceptions about chastity, monogamy, and sexuality that the West did?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ppalp/how_did_the_mongols_view_sex_and_virginity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmz6yi3"], "score": [11], "text": ["First of all it would be false to claim that Jochi's paternity caused no issues. While he was afforded respect and authority as Genghis Khan's first born son it appears that the questionable parentage was raised as a point against him by Chagatai when Genghis Khan's was choosing his successor.  \n\nThat said the Mongols attitudes towards sexuality and sexual purity were distinctly different from contemporary European ones. It was common for Mongol men who could afford it to have multiple wives. Of these one would be considered the chief wife who continued the bloodline, only Genghis Khan's sons from his first wife were considered as sucessors, although they all had separate accommodations; and visitors often commented on the surprising lack of disputes that this arrangement engendered. Furthermore Mongol women retained the right of divorce, and remarriage, something that was considerably more different for both sexes at the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2z3k1u", "title": "Slavery during Roman times is portrayed in media as being less of a race issue and more of a \"we conquered you\" issue. How accurate is this and did racism play any part into slavery during that time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z3k1u/slavery_during_roman_times_is_portrayed_in_media/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpfhbzh"], "score": [10], "text": ["While experts prepare more targeted answers, here are some threads with background information on the topic from the FAQ section on \u201c[Racism and Slavery](_URL_8_)\":\n\n\n**Race and Slavery in Antiquity**\n\n\n* [\"I don't think that ancient slavery is really comparable to the chattel slavery that we saw in the Americas.\" How did ancient slavery differ from the atlantic slave trade?](_URL_0_) - 91 comments, over 6 months old.\n * This thread is mostly about Roman slavery including how slaves were acquired, what they were used for, and what ethnicity/race they were and thus allowing comparison with the situations presented in the threads above.\n\n* [\" it should be noted that slavery in the ancient Roman Empire was closer to the modern-day employer-employee relationship, not the slavery of other eras based on kidnapping and racism\" some biblical scholar](_URL_7_) - 47 comments, over 2 years old.\n * Specialists on both eras involved engage in comparisons and debate on ancient and early modern slavery.\n\n* [I've often heard it said that the ancient Romans were so culturally and ethnically non-homogenous that \"racism\" as we now understand it did not exist for them. Is this really true?](_URL_2_) - 137 comments, over 2 years old.\n * This thread dives headlong into the matter, inciting debates over whether the ethnic stereotypes common in the ancient world are of the same kind as modern racism or not while supplying plentiful evidence and analysis for both sides.\n\n* [Was there much racism in the Roman Empire directed at people from other regions?](_URL_5_) - 47 comments, over 1 year old.\n * The commenters in this thread differentiate between the xenophobia present the ancient world from the modern understanding of racism.\n\n* [I know the Romans had no conception of race, but did they view Black Africans any differently than they did the Persians, Libyans, or Celts?](_URL_6_) - 80 comments, over 11 months old.\n * This thread goes into the way Rome interacted with peoples that would be classified in the modern day as being of different races.\n\n\n**Related Threads**\n\n\n* [do historians mean something different then normal people when they use the word \"racism\"?](_URL_1_) - 11 comments, over 2 years old.\n * Commenters here talk about concepts of race as dealt with in Anthropology and other related fields.\n\n* [Racism in the ancient world?](_URL_4_) - 37 comments, over 1 year old.\n * This thread pulls examples from all across the world and its history along with copious amounts of sources for further reading.\n\n* [Did the Romans have stereotypes about the behavior of people from particular tribes or geographic areas?](_URL_3_) - 9 comments, over 11 months old.\n * Several commenters detail the most common stereotypes that Romans held of others at the borders of their empire and beyond."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bapcn/i_dont_think_that_ancient_slavery_is_really/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16oyhd/do_historians_mean_something_different_then/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13tmxl/ive_often_heard_it_said_that_the_ancient_romans/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xiz9h/did_the_romans_have_stereotypes_about_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17r3o2/racism_in_the_ancient_world/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v3q9y/was_there_much_racism_in_the_roman_empire/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ygr46/i_know_the_romans_had_no_conception_of_race_but/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xibxz/it_should_be_noted_that_slavery_in_the_ancient/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/racism_and_slavery"]]}
{"q_id": "4xi8gn", "title": "Question about kingship and the Holy Roman Empire", "selftext": "A brief quote that sparked my question: 'the reign of Maximilian I (as king and co-ruler with is father Frederick III after 1486, as sole ruler from 1493, and as emperor from 1508 to 1519).' This quote suggests someone could be the king of the HRE and not the emperor.  I have also heard of the title 'King of the Romans' used by rulers of the HRE, which again suggests one did not have to be an emperor to lead or rule the Empire.  I was wondering if someone could explain this to me.  How could someone be the king of the HRE and only later become the emperor?  Was there any difference in power and responsibility compared to being king or emperor.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xi8gn/question_about_kingship_and_the_holy_roman_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6fuikz"], "score": [3], "text": ["In a sense, it developed around 1000 A.D. that \"Rex Romanorum\" was the title that the electors confered on the elected, before that it was \"Rex Germaniae\" or even \"Rex Francorum\" - they meant East Francia.\n\nBefore Maximilian it was implied that the elected would have to get the pope to crown him to be emperor. In 1508, Maximilan got the pope, Julius II., to confer upon him that he could call himself \"Elected Roman Emperor\" without getting crowned by the pope. \nHis greatson, Charles V. called himself \"Elected Emperor\" after his election and the pope concured in 1520.\nHowever, Charles still managed to get crowned in 1530 by the pope in person.\nHis successors kept the \"Elected Emperor\" part and weren't crowned by the pope anymore.\n\nThe difference between a crowned and annoited Emperor and the \"King of the Romans\" was prestige; going to Rome and getting the Pope to crown the King of the Romans showed that he was quite powerfull. For example, from 1220 to 1312 there was no coronation.\n\nCompare that to what happened to Sigismund, who had to wait 22 years to be crowned.\n\nMost emperors before Maximilian (his father and the emperors before 1220) and most of his successors sought to have their son crowned \"King of the Romans\" to have a successor to be monarch without another election after their death."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8j8550", "title": "Are there any books on ancient martial arts practices, exercises, and philosophies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8j8550/are_there_any_books_on_ancient_martial_arts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyxrwpx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Two books are:\n\n* Michael B. Poliakoff, *Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture*, Yale University Press, 1987. As the title suggests, this is restricted to sports (mostly wrestling, boxing, and pankration), and focusses on Greek sports. Egyptian stick-fighting is covered in a few pages.\n\n* Peter A. Lorge, *Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century*, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Covers ancient, Medieval, and modern Chinese martial arts, with about 1/4 of the book covering ancient China up to the end of the Han Dynasty.\n\nThe most important and prominent ancient Chinese martial art was archery, and a significant amount of written work on technique, practice, and philosophy has survived. A useful book collecting material on Chinese archery, ancient and later, is:\n\n* Stephen Selby, *Chinese Archery*, Hong Kong University Press, 2000\n\nMoving past \"ancient\", much more material has survived from the late Medieval period and later, from Europe, the Middle East, China, Japan, and Korea (I'm not familiar with Indian martial arts texts). The majority of this material deals with armed martial arts. Some deals with unarmed martial arts, and some is heavy on philosophy/theory. One example of the latter, from the 18th century, is\n\n* Chang Naizhou (original author), Marnix Wells (translator and editor), *Scholar Boxer: Chang Naizhou's Theory of Internal Martial Arts and the Evolution of Taijiquan*, North Atlantic Books, 2005\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ioxc8", "title": "What did soldiers in the Mongol army do in their \"free time\"?", "selftext": "Somewhat inspired by something said in a recent question about mass graves and the Mongols, I'm curious to know what exactly a soldier in Temujin's army did during the \"down time\" between battles and conquests.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ioxc8/what_did_soldiers_in_the_mongol_army_do_in_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb6p0ta"], "score": [21], "text": ["They trained archery, horsemanship and wrestling the three manly skills. _URL_1_. These were important for the Mongols. You can read about the Genghis khan and his empire forging in the book \"Genghis khan and the making of the Modern World\" by Jack Weatherford. Also Conn Iggulden's \"Conqueror\" series is good, albeit not historically accurate, but one gets the broad lines of Mongol conquests. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conqueror_%28book_series%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_wrestling"]]}
{"q_id": "1c4p2p", "title": "Is there historical doubt of the \"historical Muhammad\"?", "selftext": "I just read In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland (a bit disappointing after reading Rubicon, but still decent).  In it, he seems to question the veracity of the historical Muhammad in a way I had never really known.  His claims of the lack of primary contemporary sources kind of floored me, as I had always been under the notion that there was absolutely no question over whether or not Muhammad was more or less who Muslims claimed him to be.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c4p2p/is_there_historical_doubt_of_the_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9d2xtv", "c9d3z84", "c9d4k22"], "score": [56, 37, 10], "text": ["From my Early Islamic History class, what I would say is that there is no doubt that there was a very charismatic man named Muhammad whose general life story (somewhat successful business man, left for Medina, returned to Mecca, etc) is not in doubt.  He died in 632 or so and by 634 you already have the \"Muslims\" (unclear to what extent this was developed as its own religion, my professor actually thought that early Islam was in fact less its own religion rather than a rigorist monotheist apocalyptic movement that embraced Jews, Christians, and newly monotheistic Arabs) attacked Persian and Byzantium/Eastern Roman Empire.  \n\nWhat is in doubt are many of the sayings in the Koran, which were compile in the next century, and especially the hadith, which were the sayings of Muhammad that were collected ~200 years later.  While there is no specific reason to doubt any of these, and they were rigorously examined to prove their accuracy at the time they were collected (they each have a transmission chain of X told by Y who heard from Z who was with the Prophet when...) you do have to deal with the fact that they were collected and written down much later (although, as I said above, this doesn't mean they aren't true).", "Tom Holland's ideas aren't exactly new, since the sceptical approach to Islamic history has been on the rise for a few decades now. I think it was only the fact that it was written for a popular audience that made it anywhere near controversial. As it is, there is a general consensus amongst Western historians that Muhammad existed, but as always there are more interesting theories with less proof (my favourite one is that the Koran was written in Syriac and so can be interpreted completely differently, the virgins promised to martyrs would be er... grapes)\n\nThe main problem is evidence. Islamic traditions are plentiful, but should generally be taken with a pinch of salt, as they are written at the earliest a century later. Obviously there are oral transmissions and some hadiths are no doubt accurate, but most of them were probably altered in some form or other, especially in the highly politicised atmosphere of the first two Islamic civil wars, giving Umayyads, Shiites and Abbasids plenty of reason to alter things (for example, the first surviving biography of Muhammad was written by Ibn Ishaq and you can definitely see him bigging up the role of Ali, the 'leader' of the Shiites, in the earlier stories). One of the interesting things I read lately was that the accounts of the first two civil wars were conflated by the victors, so that Ali's death did not mark the end of the first civil war but instead died during in the war's middle years, and his son's last stand during the second civil war was in fact during the first war too. Not sure what to think of that, but John Howard-Johnston made a good case for it in *[Witnesses to a World Crisis](_URL_0_)*. Generally, if assessed critically, most sources provide very different interpretations. A Christian monk met by Muhammad in his youth called Bahira for instance was either in Syria or Yemen, was a Nestorian or a Miaphysite etc according to different stories. Some (like Holland) would see all of them therefore as pure fabrication, I and my tutors think they are just divergent strands of the same 'core' truth.\n\nTom Holland's solution to lack of accurate written Islamic evidence was to pretty much ignore them, as they are inherently untrustworthy, and use non-Islamic sources instead. There are surprising numbers of them (Robert Hoyland wrote a compilation of all of them in *[Seeing Islam as Others Saw It](_URL_1_)*). But the most common interpretation of the various Christian histories/polemics is that a man called Muhammad existed and did a lot of things that conformed to Islamic traditions, so Holland's interpretation is a bit out there. Even the outliers of these sources, such as Muhammad being persuaded by the Jews to lead them in an attack on the Roman Empire, can be partially corroborated. Within the Ibn Ishaq's biography, there is a detailed agreement called the constitution of Medina that was Muhammad's way to end infighting in Medina. Most historians would say its an authentic document from Muhammad's time, since it was fairly legalistic, depicted Muhammad giving compromises and generally makes sense within the early 7th century context. A key part of this involved the Jewish tribes of Medina becoming part of the Umma, Muhammad's community of believers but still keeping their religion. In effect, we can see that Muhammad dealt positively with the Jews and so its not out of the realm of possibility that Jews were also part of the armies he sent out, especially as Christian sources were written quite far away and won't get accurate information even if they were contemporary. This particular example of Muhammad being persuaded by the Jews is found in an Armenian history, so quite a bit away from Syria, where more accurate information would be available.\n\nSo the barebones outline of Muhammad's life is probably accurate. Other stuff... not so much. The Meccan background for example can be doubted - everyone thought Mecca was a bustling luxury-trading city, but there is very little evidence for that and it is more likely it traded common goods like leather at best. The specifics of Muhammad's life is argued over endlessly, so I won't go into them here. Basically, I think it comes down to how you would reconcile the many many different stories told by the sources - do you think there is a common root, or are they made up.\n\nHope this helps!\n\nEdit: Figured out how to add links :P", "You have to take a guy like Tom Holland with a grain of salt in general. He's not a rigorous historian and he's not interested in writing an academic history. He's interested in writing a piece of popular literature and selling lots of books. That means he cuts corners to keep his narrative going and he hides weak points in his arguments with pretty prose."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.co.uk/Witnesses-World-Crisis-Historians-Histories/dp/019920859X", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Islam_as_Others_Saw_It"], []]}
{"q_id": "4kwrr3", "title": "Do we have any actual clue on what happened to the Vikings in Greenland after 1408?", "selftext": "It's a known fact that, by the end of the XIV century, Greenland's Norse colonies were suffering economically and socially as a result of worsening weather, shift of trade routes, possible conflict with the Inuit and other issues. By 1380 the Western Settlement had already been abandoned, but in 1408 - when the last known account about Norse Greenland was written - the Eastern Settlement seemed to be alive and relatively well.\n\nThen the Norse just seem to vanish from Greenland. \n\nI've read some sources here and there claiming that some archaeological findings, such as the ones at Herjolfsnes, lead to believe that the Vikings inhabited in Greenland at least until around the mid-XV century - which wouldn't answer my question, it would only shift the time limit. There are also other sources, like Seaver's The Frozen Echo, which seem to have much more information about Greenland in the 1400s than what is available to the public. I've even read a story about an Icelandic sailor known as Jon the Greenlander that was blown off-course to Greenland around 1540 and happened to find the dead body of a Viking in a house near the beach.\n\nI'd like to know how much of this is true. Is it possible that the Vikings just died of cold and hunger in complete isolation? Has the archaeological research progressed any further in the last years?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kwrr3/do_we_have_any_actual_clue_on_what_happened_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3ixx2t"], "score": [48], "text": ["There's a Denmark-based international research group that's been pushing *hard* at this question in the last 5-10 years (although the project goes back to 1982 or something nuts like that); *Journal of the North Atlantic* has had a few special issues devoted to archaeological and paleobotanical research from various angles. \n\nEarlier presumptions of a high medieval shift to a marine-based (hunting/fishing) diet instead of livestock have been confirmed, along with some evidence of attempts at cereal agriculture that were similarly abandoned in the 13th-14th century (Ledger et al. 2014). So the Greenlanders were adapting to whatever the changing conditions (environmental, trade) were throwing at them--while it was still useful for them to hold on.\n\nTraditional and bioarchaeological work has shown a couple things that point to Greenland being just \"not worth it\" for 15th century residents. First, we've known for awhile (Berglund 1986) that basically no valuable items (personal seals, rings, weapons) were left behind. Scholars now see this as evidence of purposeful abandonment and taking their valuables with them. \n\nSecond, Lynnerup 2014 argues for gradual decline rather than sudden collapse. That is, that over the course of the 14C in particular, environmental and economic conditions made Greenland less attractive to new immigrants (there are fewer and fewer female skeletons found) and made *emigration* more attractive (new and improved opportunities in Iceland; changing trade patterns and economic conditions after the Black Death and new trade routes)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x4b8k", "title": "When did we move away from the notion of \"primitive\" peoples?", "selftext": "I'm reading a book published in 1971 (Harold Livermore's *The Origins of Spain and Portugal*), and the introduction has a rather superior and arrogant tone regarding the \"primitive\" peoples who occupied Iberia prior to the arrival of *romanitas*, as well as the period of Muslim rule in Iberia. I associate this attitude with an earlier mode of historiography. Am I way off on my timing here, or is Livermore actually out of sync with the academy, clinging to a pre-historicist way of thinking?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x4b8k/when_did_we_move_away_from_the_notion_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf9dgmt"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's interesting to look across historical sub-disciplines, because one of the things you notice is that various fields are at different stages of epistemological and theoretical maturity. For example, western European medievalists often consider the Byzantine field to be approximately 20 years behind in this regard.\n\nThere are many reasons why a field can \"fall behind\" - the Byzantinists, for example, have a significantly steeper learning curve with respect to required languages for study (reading proficiency in at least 8), which sets the bar significantly higher. More important, however, is the silo-ing off of subdisciplines. I just attended a talk in the classics dept, for example, where a person presented her revolutionary thesis on the mental construction of law and social groups in 6th century Constantinople, something that medievalists have been talking about forever. \n\nAll this serves as a long preamble to this: I don't think academia has, as a whole, moved away from the notion of \"primitive peoples\", even if it has become a more marginal view. Different disciplines and sub-disciplines move at different rates.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1n79ro", "title": "Were Greek and Roman males shorter than they would be now?", "selftext": "My brother is a Kinesiology graduate and we always like to talk about anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, etc. One day we were watching 300 and it clicked in our heads that some of these Spartan soldiers were really young, like 12, 13 and 14 years old. \n\nDo we know if these soldiers would have been shorter than the average male due to them enlisting at young ages and having their growth stunted by exercising before their bodies were done growing?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n79ro/were_greek_and_roman_males_shorter_than_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccg35z8"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Romans and Greeks (and practically everyone else before the present time) were [much shorter than us generally](_URL_0_) ('The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia', Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten, European Review of Economic History / Volume  / Issue 01 / April 2005'). \nHowever, [it is a myth that 'exercising before the body is finished growing' causes stunted growth](_URL_1_). There is no scientific basis for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/wwl/koepke_baten_twomillennia.pdf", "http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&amp;ContentID=2381"]]}
{"q_id": "31bysh", "title": "Can an expert on the history of Poland provide an exegesis of this video?", "selftext": "This wonderful animation purports to be a History of Poland until 2010. However, for the uninitiated, some of the events described, particularly the pre-20th Century ones, are unclear.  Would an enterprising soul like to provide a play-by-play?\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso, obviously a video like this is going to spin Polish history in a positive light, but is there anything that stands out as non-historical one way or the other?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31bysh/can_an_expert_on_the_history_of_poland_provide_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq06sng"], "score": [3], "text": ["Please see: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrXgj1NwN8"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/30xen9/the_animated_complete_history_of_poland/cpxqqaz"]]}
{"q_id": "14me6u", "title": "What knockon effects did Edward VIII's abdication have on the British public's perception of royal duty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14me6u/what_knockon_effects_did_edward_viiis_abdication/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7efl8r"], "score": [9], "text": ["I think if you're looking for a concrete \"Edward VIII's abdication resulted in A, B, and C being changed in the monarchical system\", you may be out of luck as this sort of symbolic system is very difficult to pin down.\n\nIn addition to that, George VI who succeeded Edward was extremely popular (obviously not among EVERYONE, but by the general public). Because of this, people could kind of ignore Edward VIII as just a \"bad phase\" which the monarchy grew out of. \n\nFor these reasons, it is very difficult to succinctly nail down any sort of immediate impact it had.\n\nHowever, if we look at Edward's abdication as part of a larger trend in the history of \"royal duty\", it begins to make a clearer picture. In many ways, Edward VIII's abdication was a byproduct of the increasingly public role of the monarch.\n\nThe 20th century really brought an end to the Monarchy as a strictly aristocratic institution. Before the advent of radio, public newspapers, television, etc., British monarchs were really only visible to a small group of wealthy individuals. They would present themselves at royal balls, banquets, showings of the theatre, etc. These were, for the most part, strictly aristocratic events and most common people would never have seen the monarchs or their families in any real capacity. \n\nWhen radio and newspapers were brought into the mix, this started to change. Common people could now here all the \"gossip\" about the monarchy. As the private lives of the monarchy became more and more common knowledge, their role in society changed. They had to start \"representing the spirit of the nation\" (a task which the current monarch Queen Elizabeth II has taken on to heart). \n\nHowever, this role doesn't suit everyone. It is very emotionally demanding and the pressure of this extremely public presence really was too much for Edward VIII. Thus, it wasn't so much that Edward VIII CHANGED the nature of \"royal duty\", he just didn't FIT IN with the new role of the monarchy that had been blossoming since the turn of the century. He was too \"wild\" and \"emotional\" for such a role. \n\nGeorge VI fit this role perfectly; he acted as a stoic defender of Britain. During the Blitz he stayed in London with his daughters to show that the monarch was not above other Britons. He was a king who understood and succeeded in the new role of the monarchy.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "173gll", "title": "How did the Scandinavian welfare state come into being?  ", "selftext": "I ask because Scandinavian countries have some of the highest self-reported happiness ratings in the world. Some of the lowest economic inequality rates and competitive GDP per capita rates. Any economic history of the region is helpful I am most interested in Denmark. Although its not technically a Scandinavian country anything on the Netherlands would also be cool too. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/173gll/how_did_the_scandinavian_welfare_state_come_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c81ya6y", "c8216oi", "c822ly0"], "score": [10, 10, 2], "text": ["~~In short social democracy happened. Denmark have mostly had social democratic prime ministers in socialist/socialliberal coalitions since WWII.~~\n\n The welfare state really started expanding in the 1950s with the danish public pension act of 1956. The public health care system got widely expanded from 1965 to 1976, which also included care for handicapped persons. In the same period, there was a wide range of policies intended to make education available to everyone(with the state paying students money and covering all costs of the university), a minimum standard of living. Kindergartens, after-school programs and similar projects were also implemented that allowed women to enter the workforce.\n\n[Source(in Danish)](_URL_0_).\n\nIf you want to learn more about Denmark, the website _URL_1_ is a great source reviewed and managed by historian at Aarhus University. The site is in Danish though, but the results you get through Google Translate are decent.\n\nEDIT: Please see [Fjosnisse's reply](_URL_2_). This comment regards only the actual policy implementations, not the reasons for their implementation.", "Big question, interesting too. Let's start with establishing something once and for all, while Scandinavia is famous for welfare states today, it isn't where the idea comes from, nor is it were things started. The idea of creating a safe society for your subjects is *ancient*. To call this a welfare state is a bit thin though so let's look at an acceptable definition of what a welfare state really is. \n\nFor simplicity, let's go with EB who defines it as a *\"concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms of economic and social organization.\"*\n\nThe basic ideas of the welfare state are usually attributed to German enconomist/student of the law/historian Gustav von Schmoller who in 1872 founded the *Verein f\u00fcr Socialpolitik*. Six years later, Otto von Bismark proposes the *Sozialgesetzgebung* (roughly, social security system containing financial protection against the adverse effect of illness, accidents, inability to work and a form of pension). The proposition was not accepted right away but most of the ideas contained within were accepted and implemented by 1889. Otto von Bismark called this State Socialism. The ideas were quickly adopted by the liberals in England and the socialist workers movement in Sweden but most countries in western Europe followed not long afterwards. \n\nNow, the Scandinavian (or technically, Nordic) countries followed a slightly different path than most of western Europe. This Nordic model of welfare is generally characterized by a highly unionized labour force (usually around 2/3 of the total workforce), a large public sector, especially in Denmark, with corresponding levels of public spending and a very comprehensive social safety net. There is also a heavy focus on gender equality and transparency in most things along with an almost unique model under which the employers, the unions and the government negotiate the terms regulating the workplace rather than having the government impose them by law.", "One should read about the way Norway take of the income generated by oil and gas. One could say that the norwegian people is the largest owner of stock in Europe, through the goverment pension fund. _URL_0_\n\nStatoil is the biggest Norwegian oil company and is mostly owned by the state. Companys have to pay a considerate amount of tax on their income in norwegian oil and gas fields.\n\nAlthough Norway started building what we could call a welfare state before we had any oil revenue, Norway's success when it comes to creating a country where everybody is guaranteed a minimum can largely be attributed to how Norway have handled it's natural resources. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://danmarkshistorien.dk/perioder/kold-krig-og-velfaerdsstat-1945-1973/velfaerdsstaten/", "http://www.danmarkshistorien.dk", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/173gll/how_did_the_scandinavian_welfare_state_come_into/c824wqo"], [], ["http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway"]]}
{"q_id": "6p3unz", "title": "What's the difference between Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism?", "selftext": "What are the major differences between Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6p3unz/whats_the_difference_between_theravada_mahayana/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dknsfjy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Theravada is the oldest form still around.\n\nThree important main ones is that in theravada, post enlightenment buddhas only retain form for a short while. After that the enter paranirvana and no longer have a causal relationship to anything in reality. The goal of those in theravada is just to likewise enter paranirvana. In mahayana, this is considered a lower goal. The higher goal is to stay in the world helping others get enlightened. And buddhas often stay in their own realms and incarnate repeatedly or bring you there. For this reason mahayana is much more likely to believe that everyone will get enlightened eventually.\n\nA second important distinction is that the concept of emptiness is expanded. Theravada points out that distinct objects and composites are empty. Implying that what exists are just the parts in perpetual flowingness. Mahayana expands this by saying that even the pieces are empty of distinct existence.\n\nThe third is the dharmakaya. Theravada describes very little about what happens when you enter paranirvana. It only describes it by what its not. Like negative theology. Mahayana expands this into a kind of abstract... its not a thing, but an underlying reality. And is the true reality that in a sense \"is\" what buddhas become. Note that point #2 and 3 are not necessarily incompatible with what theravada believes per say, but rather expand on it. There are other things, but those are some major ones.\n\nVajrayana is a bit harder to place, since some consider it to just be part of mahayana. It is like mahayana, but often tries to expand it in esoteric ways, and tries to create special practices for liberation that is closer than the far off ones others hope for. It also sometimes believes in something called an adibuddha which is the closest there is to a monotheistic god in buddhism. Its kind of a collective group mind of all buddhas, but in reverse is the fundamental reality that all buddhas are by virtue of enlightenment. Vajrayana talks about esoteric things like underlying ability to tap into and channel buddhas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "319pqn", "title": "What did people think of William Tecumseh Sherman during and shortly after the war?", "selftext": "I'm doing an essay that deals with primary sources and that we can't use the internet for and my library doesn't have a whole lot on Sherman. I have his memoirs and a few biographies, but nothing else. I figure some of you might have read a book or two regarding these contemporary observations on him, so if you can answer can you leave a book title so I can cite it? Thanks in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/319pqn/what_did_people_think_of_william_tecumseh_sherman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpzsvto"], "score": [4], "text": ["Sherman could quite possibly have been president in the 1880s. The main person stopping him was...William Tecumseh Sherman who rightly realized he would be a terrible president.But he's a beloved figure in the North especially before the southern historians get a hand on him given that he's clearly the #2 general crucial to securing the union victory. \n\nlook at his quotes about the 1884 election in his letters (including his famous \"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.\"\n\nalso the new york public library (and online) as a good collection of old newspapers from NYC. his 1890s eulogies could be an interesting way to get views of him (since you can't use the internet this might only be valid fi you live in nyc. \n\nBrands' **American colossus** has a decent amount about him in it re: shortly after the war. \n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8qia1h", "title": "How are amounts of money from centuries ago adjusted for inflation in today's currency?", "selftext": "I often see in books phrases like \"he paid XXX (in today's money XXX). How are these kind of things calculated if inflation in economic terms is based on a 'basket' of goods and services of today's economy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qia1h/how_are_amounts_of_money_from_centuries_ago/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0jgker"], "score": [2], "text": ["Real wages, prices and so on are calculated on the basis of currency/gold standard. Various datasets have been cropping up in the past two decades that list every conceivable currency's real value over time, generally starting with the late early modern period. See for instance those released by the [Global Price and Income History Group](_URL_1_), or those systhematized by the social history institute in Amsterdam (_URL_0_, datasets section). I know this doesn't entirely answer your question, but I am sure a real economic historian will come along soon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["iisg.nl", "http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Datafilelist.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2b88dw", "title": "How accurate is Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror and/or how much of the Caligula legend is bs?", "selftext": "[Here's a link to the documentary in question.](_URL_0_ ) We're watching it on the teevee right now and some of the stories sound pretty dubious. Also, they referred to a vomitorium as involving actual vomiting, so I have doubts, but it's a part of history I don't really know much about.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2b88dw/how_accurate_is_caligula_1400_days_of_terror/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj390m5"], "score": [5], "text": ["Like with Nero, a lot of the allegations have to be taken with a grain of salt. Although a lot of the things brought up in the documentary are true, many of them are angled to make them look worse than they were. The orgies and such surely happened, but the sleeping around and all that is hard for us to proof and is common slander not only in Roman times, but all through history.\n\nEssentially, figuring out what's true or not is what makes historians specialists. If one reads all of the slander against Caligula and blindly accepts it as true because it's written by contemporaries, he's going to look extremely bad - like he's remembered by many today. However, if you look at who the writers are: Suetonius, a senator, or Tacitus, also a senator, another picture emerges. Some of the stories can surely be accredited to youth (like the throwing coins from a height story), while others are fabricated to make the emperor look bad.\n\nIf you consider who Caligula was (told in the beginning of the documentary) it's not hard to understand that he's not very adept in the politics of Rome. He was brought up as a soldier, so he knows the soldier's life (and he's also very popular with the army). However, having your family eradicated would be a rather reasonable event to become paranoid.\n\nThey tell a story about Caligula ordering his soldiers to march on the sea. That, along with him participating in theatrical plays, is part of a bigger picture. He was brought up as a soldier away from Rome and thus may not fully have understood how unacceptable it was to participate in plays as the emperor. Theatre was for lowly born people, not the leader of Rome. Caligula ordering his soldiers to march on the sea could be complete slander, but there are other similar stories, which suggests *some* truth to it. Essentially, he was unable to differ between himself as the holder of *numen* and himself as an actual god.\n\nTo quote a couple of lines from the documentary:\n\n >  It's really hard to sift through and understand who Caligula was. We do know that he was excessive, we do know that he was vindictive, we do know that he was paranoid. (Darius Arya)\n\n\n >  But the senate is not happy with Caligula at all. He's hanging out with the kind of people that they really don't approve of. He's mixing with actors [...] this is not what they wanted from their emperor. (Valerie Higgins)\n\nThere was a similar question about the vomitorium a few months ago with a [humorous explanation](_URL_0_).\n\nSidenote: Drusilla was NOT the first Roman woman to be declared a goddess. Livia was deified when she died in 27 AD and thus was the first. Drusilla's deification is more for show than anything else, it's scarcely recognized, in part probably because Caligula wasn't deified. One would think that a Yale scholar wouldn't spread false facts...\n\nIf you'd choose to watch the documentary again, I'd suggest you pay close attention to what Valerie Higgins and Darius Arya says, and ignore most of what Amanda Ruggeri says."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlLF8x5x0g"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22flke/what_were_vomitoriums_used_for_in_the_houses/cgmb83l"]]}
{"q_id": "1j4qhq", "title": "What was early Christianity like?", "selftext": "I've always wondered exactly how Christianity was in its early stages; during and immediately after Jesus' time. Was it more similar to Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or neither?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j4qhq/what_was_early_christianity_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbb3k3g", "cbb6g04"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["It was not \"High\" church.  There was no pomp, no celebrating Christmas or Easter.  Until 70 AD, they would still have likely celebrated all the Jewish holidays of course, since the earliest Christians were nearly all Jewish, and important events in Jesus' life occurred on Jewish holidays (i.e. dying on Passover).  \nIt was very countercultural.  There would not be many people of high prominence who would openly identify with them.  \nPicture small groups of 10-20 people meeting wherever they can to study together and talk and share life.  Picture a conversion happening in a storefront while a shop owner and a customer are chatting together.  They might meet in the local Synagogue in one town, and be tolerated well enough, but then in the next town they might be thrown out of that town's Synagogue.\n\nI would not expect the pomp and ceremony to be at max level until around 300 AD when Constantine made the official merger with the Roman religion[s].  \n\nTheologically, I think they were always diverse.  If you read Augustine or Iraneus, or Tertullian or any of those guys, they agree on the basics, but beyond that, all bets are off.\n\nAs far as what it mostly looked like organizationally?  I think structurally (not necessarily theologically) it would most resemble Paganism, New Age, or aggregated Protestantism today.  That is, there is no central authority that presides over everybody.  There may be a general movement as to what is, and is not acceptable.  But most issues would be open ended with only 3 or so issues worth dying over.", "\"Christianity\" when Jesus was alive is a *non sequitur*.  It simply didn't exist.  The movement is predicated on the significance of Jesus' *death*, not his life.  As Ephesians puts it:\n\n > This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.\n\nThis salvific act was the death of Jesus, and through it, salvation, particularly for Gentiles, could be realized.  That this is the significance is borne out by comparison with Romans 11.1--all Israel shall be saved (independently of Christ).  Gentiles are what is new, but they (and therefore the new movement) only exist through the death and resurrection.\n\nSo early Christianity cannot be defined as existing *during* the life of Jesus, only after his death.  And relatively shortly thereafter, we get a window into at least one strain--that of Paul.\n\nPaul is an interesting figure for an awful, awful lot of reasons.  But we're only going to look at a few here, and first his disputes, particularly regarding circumcision, and faith/works.\n\nThe traditional, Augustinian/Lutheran view has Paul espousing Christianity as a religion of faith in Christ against a view of righteousness by works, in which Judaism is legalistic.  By legalistic, it is meant that there is a measuring of sins against transgressions, by God, at the judgment of each soul.  Paul says one is saved by faith, the Jews (or Judaizers--christians promoting the circumcision) say it is by legalistic works.\n\nThis view has largely fallen out of fashion since Sanders' *Paul and Palestinian Judaism* (1977).  Sanders argues--incredibly powerfully, the type of paradigm shifting work that rarely occurs--that legalism never existed in Palestinian Judaism, and therefore cannot have been Paul's opponent.  What exactly his opponents *were* espousing has since been the subject of considerable debate, but most have followed Dunn in suggesting that \"works of the law\" refer to religious boundary markers (circumcision, table fellowship, etc).\n\nI point to this to stress the nature of division in early Christianity.  It was not *eccelesiological*, or related to organized church, it was *theological*, or related to the understanding of God, and *soteriological,* related to the nature of salvation.\n\nIt was also thunderously eschatological, or waiting for the end times.  Perhaps the clearest example of this, when Paul expresses the guarantee for \"those who have fallen asleep\" (1Thess.4.13-15).  That anyone died before the end seems to be a surprise.\n\nIt was also contested.  What was the nature of salvation?  Did Gentiles need circumcision to be saved?  If they didn't, then what of laws regarding table fellowship?  Should Jew and Gentile dine together?  Paul says yes.  His opponents (including Peter, it would appear, said no).  Nobody seems to dispute that Gentiles *can* join Israel, but there appears to be some disagreement as to *how* they are to do so.\n\nDespite this diversity and apparent lack of control there *does* seem to have been have been a central authority.  The Jerusalem \"pillars\" (Gal.2.9).  How much authority they had, or whether they were authoritative in any meaningful sense, is debated.\n\nTheir interest was *christological*, and not historical.  Virtually nothing about the life of Jesus survives in the epistolary record.  A great deal regarding the nature of Christ resurrected does.  This contrasts sharply with the later record, where they were so eager to find out about the life of Jesus that they made things up based on scripture.  This tendency only got worse over time.\n\nI suppose the long and the short of it is that we don't really know what Christianity was like, only what Paul dealt with (and, depending on what dating one finds persuasive, the enigmas of Hebrews and James)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "261nuy", "title": "Why does French use so many silent letters?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/261nuy/why_does_french_use_so_many_silent_letters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chmuyek", "chmvofd", "chn0ke8", "chn1c7i", "chnbnjs"], "score": [38, 216, 36, 29, 11], "text": ["You could try asking /r/linguistics too. ", "The simple answer is that they weren't silent at some point in the past, and spelling didn't change as quickly as pronunciation. \n\nFrench spelling is based on old French pronunciation.  When the spelling of, e.g., *veulent* (Latin *volunt*) was fossilized around 1100-1200, we can see that the vowels were no longer pronounced as o and e were during that time period and were thus changed. The consonants remained the same. Now, despite the fact the *nt* isn't pronounced, we know it was in the Latin and can confidently guess it was in Old French.", "It's the right sub to post it, because it's an HISTORICAL fact.\n\nBasically languages evolve at a faster pace than official grammars do. Academically we refer to the phenomenon you're asking about as \"grafia storica\" in Italian. I am really sorry, but I am not able to find a suitable translation over the internet right now for it.\n\nHow does it work? Let's take English. If you are not native speaker (as me) the first thing you notice is that sometimes there is no clear correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. That's why you need to \"spell\" things (and I guess you have contests for kids about it, as far as I got from The Simpsons, but I digress) sometimes.\n\n\"Borough\" for example has many silent letters. But you can find thousands of instances, and not only in English. You point out French, which is a good example, for instance when looking at d-p-s-t as ending letters, as they do not translate into spoken phonemes. In Persian we write \u062e\u0648 (transliterated KH-W) but we only read \u062e (KH).\n\nWhy is it so, then? \nThe reason is pretty simple usually: we used to read them as they were written. When a spoken dialect became an official language with a standard written system, the words were categorized and written (more or less) as they were heard. Then they became TAUGHT in that way for different centuries. But languages flow, and change. So does pronunciation, like in the Great Vowel Shift.\nBut usually written language is less receptive to these changes, as they are often understood in pejorative terms from the \"old norm\". And so it happened in French: the silent letters were pronounced, then they became standard written in that way, then the letters became silent and they are still standardly written with them.\n\nHope this makes sense!", "The Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise has met several times to ask this question. Simply put, silent letters were kept, despite not being pronounced, to show the etymology and word history. You can think of our English work 'knee' which used to be pronounced WITH the /k/ sound. Compare this with the Monty Python word, 'ni.' I am sure you can see the interest in keeping some history in spelling. Spanish as a counter-example has perfectly phonetic spelling, all ancient pronunciations were simply discarded.", "Beyond the explanations already given, I'd also like to point out that technically, what we consider a \"silent letter\" is based on our bias of how we think letters should be interpreted to sound.  It is necessary to recognize that the correspondences between sound and letter are arbitrary in many ways, and dependent on context.  Think how many English words we do *not* consider to have a \"silent\" letter, when in fact, if we took every letter at face value, we would find that they do-- for instance, when was the last time you pronounced the first \"a\" in \"parade\" the way you normally think an \"a\" should be pronounced? (Assuming you speak some sort of 21st century American English)\n\nMy point is, letters only seem \"silent\" when you take them at a prescribed face-value.\n\nInstead, consider the letters of a word in its whole, in context: \"l'\u00e9tat\" is made of 5 letters that, in that order, produce the sound (rendered in English colloquial spelling) \"leh-tah\". None of the letters in l'\u00e9tat are silent-- for their combination triggers the intended pronunciation, which is all any written word does.\n\nSaying that French has a lot of silent letters implies that the words are somehow incomplete or that there are sounds that are not being said. This is not true-- in fact, all the letters of every French word contribute to the sound that a reader makes when he/she reads it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ncs61", "title": "Did people other than royalty ever really have titles like 'Steve the strong' or 'Craig the wise' and if so, how did they get them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ncs61/did_people_other_than_royalty_ever_really_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcappex", "dcb4dbk"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but in Ireland it was/is very common to identify someone by a nickname that is long the same lines as those in your question. \n\nThis is a practice that starts very early - though I am hesitant to put a date on it we do have records in old Irish with warriors or chieftains having nicknames - and the most recent article I've read about it was published in 2010: Walsh, Colm. \"Nicknames: A Directory of Occupations, Geographies, Prejudices and Habits.\" History Ireland 18, no. 3 (2010): 26-28\n\nEspecially in smaller communities where you would have an overlap of names in people that you knew, people were often given nicknames so that you could distinguish one Patrick from the other, say. Often, these nicknames were determined by physical features, or personal attributes. Colours were particularly common, usually the colour of the person's hair: Black Thomas had dark hair while Red Thomas had red hair. These are the ones that come up the most often, in my experience, but you will get things like Strong Tom or Bold Nora. \n\nMy personal favourite is the surname name Kennedy, which comes from the old Irish *ceann \u00e9idigh* meaning 'ugly head.' \n\nTitles like the ones you describe did occur as well, usually in reference to someone's habit or profession. John the Doctor, Colm the Master, those sorts of things. \n\nOff the top of my head the only article I can think of that discusses things more in depth is: \n\nBreen, Richard. \"Naming Practices in Western Ireland.\" Man, New Series, 17, no. 4 (1982): 701-13\n\nHowever if I can scrounge up any more, I certainly will share.", "Yes, that kind of last name is called a \"byname\" or an \"epithet\".\n\nPeople have been using that kind of last name for thousands of years. Most of the non-Roman last names you see in the Bible, for example, are of this variety, including John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (who is also known as Mary of Magdelena).\n\nBy the Middle Ages in Europe, these type of bynames had become a little bit more formal. Since a lord might have five different \"John\"s living on his manor, these bynames helped avoid confusion when it came to tax collecting and inheritence and other such matters. So, a byname was usually attached to a peasant around the time they became an adult/got married/started their own farm, and that name would be attached to that person their entire life. So even if \"John at the Wood\" later moved to a new farm by the creek, he'd still be known as \"John at the Wood\" for the rest of his life, because that's what the tax collector knew him as.\n\nFixed family surnames didn't arise until the Normans invaded England in 1066. There is some evidence that fixed surnames were in use shortly before that in France and Ireland, but not much longer--maybe a generation or two.\n\nIn much of the rest of Europe, the populations didn't go straight down the \"fixed surnames\" road. Instead, some adopted a \"patronymic\" naming system, such as in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, parts of northern Germany, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere. One by one, these populations adopted the modern \"fixed surname\" system, though that process played out over hundreds of years, and in Iceland, they still use the old  patronymic system to this day.\n\nHow this system worked is that your father's first name became your last name. Your name is John and your dad's name is Peter? Then your last name is Peterson, and your kids' last name will be Johnson.\n\nThe problem with this system was that it led to a lot of people having the same first and last name as someone else who lived nearby, so these societies still kept using bynames as well. A full Dutch name up until the 1700s was something like \"John Peterson the Smith\" (or \"Jan Pietersen de Smid\"). In day to day conversation, people would usually just call you \"Jan Pietersen\", but the tax collector would insist on using your full name because three other \"Jan Pietersen\"s lived in the same town.\n\nThere were three kinds of bynames: geographical, occupational, or physical, e.g. \"John by the Hill\", \"John the Tanner\", or \"John the Red\". \n\nAgain, this byname was given to you around the time you got married or moved out on your own. Until that point, you would be using your father's. You'd be known as \"Peter, son of John on the Hill\" or else \"Peter on the Hill\".\n\nOnce you established your own home and family, your new byname was settled upon by your community. It wasn't something you chose yourself.\n\nAnd you were stuck with it, unless you became very famous and got to be known as \"the Great\" or something, or else if you immigrated somewhere else. If \"John on the Hill\" who lives near Paris moved to London, he'd be \"John of Paris\" by the time he got there. It was *possible* for a peasant to end up with a byname such as \"the Wise\" or \"the Strong\" but it was relatively rare. Most often, peasants ended up with a more conventional geographical or occupational byname.\n\nI have [written on this topic before](_URL_4_) and my previous answer may be of some use as well.\n\nAnd [here](_URL_3_) is a book of transcriptions of documents relating to the King of Scotland in the 1100s and 1200s. Perusing the document, you can see that in the earlier entries, many of the last names still in use were not yet fixed surnames, but bynames. But by the end of the 1200s, at the end of that book, most people in the British isles had made the switch to the \"fixed surname\" system. \n\nSources:\n\n[Personal and Family Names](_URL_6_)\n\n[Family Names And Their Story](_URL_2_)\n\n[The History of the Norman Conquest of England](_URL_1_)\n\n[English Surnames: Essays on Family Nomenclature](_URL_0_)\n\n[The World's Great Classics: The History of Europe In the Middle Ages](_URL_5_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://books.google.com/books?id=RKdVAAAAcAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=B7zZAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA372", "https://books.google.com/books?id=3W0SAAAAYAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=EpYoePRWGAMC", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53v9vi/when_and_where_did_people_start_having_surnames/d7wqhky/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=kJ0CAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA159", "https://books.google.com/books?id=lWwUAAAAYAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "bnsytv", "title": "Need advice on potentially going to grad school for history", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bnsytv/need_advice_on_potentially_going_to_grad_school/", "answers": {"a_id": ["en90pef", "enbddeb"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["I'm just typing this from mobile and will add more to it later, but if you suffer from anxiety and depression, academia may not be the best choice for you. And I say this not to be discouraging, but because it can be *tough*. I'm currently doing my PhD in medical history and definitely wished I listened to everyone telling me that PhD's are incredibly isolating and are emotionally taxing.\n\nI'm in the UK so I can't speak too much about American PhD programmes, but I needed relatively high undergrad grades and a Master's degree with similar grades. If you're able, finding a history-related Master's degree would probably be your first step in pursuing a history PhD. There's always hope of funding, but arts degrees typically have less funding than STEM subjects.\n\nEDIT: spelling", " >  This resulted in me graduating with a 2.7 GPA. \n\nYou can't go to grad school with that. I'm sorry. \n\nGetting into grad school is a matter of winning over your potential advisor, the department/program, and then getting a rubber-stamp approval from the university. *University* policy--regardless of the department or advisor--just about universally includes a minimum 3.0 undergraduate GPA.\n\nThere's also the thing where *there are no jobs* in academia. If you want to teach, go get an MA in secondary ed with a specialty in history. If you want to learn about history, well, the New York Public Library might be the best in the world. People at AskHistorians would be thrilled to help you find or make a bibliography of books to become a grad school-level expert on a topic. Meanwhile, you could be working a job that would actually pay enough money to live on (everyone I know in a PhD program either has help from their parents or is taking out loans).\n\nBut whether you *should* go isn't the question for you right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "67pf9z", "title": "Did Native Americans independently invent agriculture? And what does that mean about human culture before then?", "selftext": "I was reflecting on what I understand to be the common narrative of agrarian civilization--that we were at least semi-nomadic as a species until roughly 10-12K years ago, when some folk living around the Levant adopted agriculture on a societal level, either out of necessity or simple preference.\n\nOf course, there are also plenty of Native American cultures that used agriculture, and some very complex, large-scale societies based on agriculture flourished at various times (Teotihuacan, the Aztec, Inca, Olmec, etc etc).  Yet current understanding is that the last common ancestor between Native Americans and Eurasians lived roughly 20000 years ago.\n\nTo me, that would seem to suggest either (1) contact between those cultures and Africa/Europe/Asia [though wouldn't pre-Columbian contact be reflected in DNA studies?] or (2) that between the invention of controlled fire and the invention of agriculture, there was one (or more) essential (technological, cultural, genetic, ???) prerequisite to agrarian civilization; given that we were wandering around in our more or less current form 100K years ago, it seems highly unlikely that we'd spend the first 85% of that time not creating agrarian civilization, and then independently invent it in several places in the final 15% of that timeline--unless the first 85% of that time was spent slowly accumulating the necessary preconditions to that invention.\n\nWhat are the popular schools of thought here?  Did pottery (or something or multiple somethings like that) enable civilization?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67pf9z/did_native_americans_independently_invent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgsaoyi", "dgte08d"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["/r/AskAnthropology might be a bigger help to you! ", "Yes, agriculture was independently invented in the Americas. \n\nTo copy/paste an answer I gave [previously](_URL_0_)\n\n >  There's a number of factors that can contribute to this answer and the debate has raged on for 100 years. Factors such as population density and a dwindling food supply are often mentioned, but I am of the mind that it was the weather. Up until 12,000 years ago the climate around the world fluctuated from hot to cold and back again in intervals as small as a decade in some cases. This makes it extremely difficult to cultivate plants to grow in a certain climate if the climate is never stable. 12,000 years ago marks the Holocene and we have had a relatively stable climate that allowed people to settle down and begin farming. Whether that is, in fact, the case or not is still up for debate but the fact remains that people just were not able to farm before the Holocene.\n\n >  [Richerson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger\n2001, Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene But Mandatory During the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis. American Antiquity 66(3):387-411.](_URL_1_)\n\nTo quote the source cited \n\n >  \"Might we not expect agriculture to have emerged in the last interglacial 130,000 years ago or even during one of the older interglacials? No archaeological evidence has come to light suggesting the presence of technologies that might be expected to accompany forays into intensive plant collecting or agriculture at this time. Anatomically modern humans may have appeared in Africa as early as 130,000 years ago, but they were not behaviorally modern. Humans of the last interglacial were uniformly archaic in behavior. Very likely, then, the humans of the last interglacial were neither cognitively nor culturally capable of evolving agricultural subsistence. However, climate might also explain the lack of marked subsistence intensification during previous interglacials. Ice cores from the thick Antarctic ice cap at Vostok show that each of the last four interglacials over the last 420,000 years were characteristic by a short, sharp peak of warmth rather than the 11,600 year long stable plateau of the Holocene. Further, the GRIP ice core suggests the last interglacial (130,000-80,000 BP) was more variable than the Holocene, although its lack of agreement with a nearby replicate for for this time period makes this interpretation tenuous. On the other than, the atmospheric concentration of C02 was higher in the three previous interglacials than during the Holocene, and was stable at high levels for about 20,000 years following the warm peak during the last interglacial. The highly continental Vostok site unfortunately does not record the same high-frequency variation in the climate as most other proxy climate records, even those in the southern hemisphere. Some northern hemisphere marine and terrestrial records suggest that the last interglacial was highly variable while other data suggest a Holocene-length period of stable climates ca. 127,000-117,000 BP. Better data on the high frequency part of the Pleistocene beyond the reach of the Greenland ice cores is needed to test hypotheses about events antedating the latest Pleistocene. Long marine cores from areas of rapid sediment accumulation are beginning to reveal the millennial scale record from previous glacial-interglacial cycles. At least the last five glacials have millennial-scale variations like the last glacial. The degree of fluctuations during previous interglacials is still not clear, but at least some proxy data suggest that the Holocene has been less variable than earlier interglacials.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uji41/why_was_there_gap_of_over_100000_years_between/ceipxd9/", "http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/AgOrigins_2_12_01.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1g7njy", "title": "How accurate was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle", "selftext": "I have been reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair this summer and I am curious how accurate it is and, more importantly, how Sinclair was able to gather the \u201cdirty details\u201d that he did. Most of the stuff in there does not surprise me given what little I do know about US history, but a creek that\u2019s constantly bubbling because of chemicals, people somehow working all winter long with ice frozen to their feet, and people picking acid wool off of sheep with their bare hands?\n\nThese are things that seem unbelievable not because they are so atrocious, but because they not seem physically or economically feasible. It also seems like the \u201cpackers\u201d would be pretty reluctant to let a known adversarial author to snoop around their facility. If they could basically keep an entire population placated under the conditions he describes, was it really that hard to keep Sinclair from doing research for his book?\n\nThanks \n\nEdit: I forgot the question mark, seems like that was a big mistake ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g7njy/how_accurate_was_upton_sinclairs_the_jungle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cahkdxi", "cahklte", "cahku30", "cahl2u7", "cahlwgh", "caho2sf", "cahp31p", "cahpcyr", "cahqldm", "cahrf4u", "cahws9g"], "score": [239, 220, 72, 182, 37, 29, 10, 41, 6, 12, 4], "text": [" > ... but a creek that\u2019s constantly bubbling because of chemicals...\n\nChicagoan here.  I can confirm this portion of your question.  \"[Bubbly Creek](_URL_0_)\" is a local nickname for the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River.  As the name implies, it constantly bubbled up methane after being used as an open sewer by the Union Stock Yards.  [Efforts have been made](_URL_1_) in recent years to re-oxygenate the stream.  The smell has been reduced and fish have begun to return.  The city and the Army Corps of Engineers have conducted feasibility studies to improve water flow and restore local wetlands, but local industry fouled it up pretty badly in previous generations (as the book suggests) and restoration will take a lot of time and money.  Luckily the money now exists due to significant residential development in the area.\n\nEdit:  Changed second link to USACE website.  Previously linked to a pay site.", "I can't say as to what the conditions were like outside the packing plants, but after the book was released, President Roosevelt did send some of his executives to conduct an inspection of some of the plants, and for the most part, they found that the conditions were as described in the book (no evidence of grinding up bodies though). Their findings were outlined in the \"Neill-Reynolds Report,\" which enraged the public and (at least partly) led to the creating of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act.\n\nThe New York Times released a detailed description of the report and the surrounding story pretty soon afterwards. [Here it is.](_URL_0_) (Hopefully imgur is fine, i'm not really sure how else to upload the pdf.)", "Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in Chicago meat packing plants. He wasn't particularly well known at the time and given the large numbers of people being employed by the meat packing plants as well as how much more difficult it is gather information on a person then it is today, it is easy to see how Sinclair presence would go unnoticed.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "In a word, very. Yes, the stories of the families are fiction, but they are amalgams of reality. \n\nIf you'd like a fantastic scholarly read on the subject, see Jim Barrett's [*Work and Community in \"The Jungle\"*] (_URL_0_) \n\nAnother, more labor-history look at (more or less) the same time period is Rick Halpern's [*Down on the Killing Floor.*](_URL_1_) \n\nThese books have their own goals of course, but taken together, they echo almost exactly the picture of Chicago Sinclair painted.", "You might want to read this threat where similar questions were already asked:\n\n_URL_0_", "An important thing to remember about the economic factors, employers had almost no responsibilities to employees.  There was no workers comp, you couldn't sue your employer for negligence if you were injured, and there was almost no regulation of business.  This was back when Swift and Co. was the law: _URL_0_\n\nSo basically, it was cheaper to just have a high turnover than to have better employment standards.\n\nThis is still kind of problem, currently in meat packing the turnover is huge for a lot of the same problems b/c it's cheaper than providing decent working conditions. _URL_1_\n\nedit: I mispelled employees.", "Did research last summer at the Newberry Library in Chicago about the Back of the Yards neighborhood; many of the residents worked in the meatpacking plants. While I look at mostly the community dynamics, I did read about the plants and it sounds pretty vile to me. I even read a French report (Chotteau, Leon. *Les Viandes Americaines*. Librairie de Guillaumin, 1887) that proposed a ban on ham from the US in part because of the totally unsanitary conditions the meat was processed in.\n\ntexaround already answered about Bubbly Creek. Besides the waste from the homes in the area, the factories would dump chemicals and offal in the river, as the sanitation dept would throw the dead dogs and cats in there as well. The smell of the whole area was so bad that people passing through on the Ashland streetcars would have to clamp handkerchiefs over their nose and mouth.\n\nAs for the population being placated, they were a \"great mass of unskilled workers.\" (Barrett, *Work and Community in \"The Jungle,\"* 2) It was basically the only job the could get because most of them didn't speak any English.", "\u201cThe Jungle\u201d was intended to dramatize working conditions, NOT food safety. In fact, Sinclair\u2019s fictional claims about food safety were limited to a mere 12 pages, but these pages got all the attention, leading Sinclair to later write, \u201cI aimed at the public\u2019s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.\u201d (Source: Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967, p. 103.)\n\nSinclair\u2019s novel caused a sensation, and led to Congressional investigations, even though many politicians were skeptical of Sinclair. For instance, here\u2019s what President Theodore Roosevelt wrote about him in July 1906 (even though he shared Sinclair\u2019s distrust of big business):\n\n\u201cI have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.\u201d (Source: letter to William Allen White, July 31, 1906, from \u201cThe Letters of Theodore Roosevelt,\u201d 8 vols, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54, vol. 5, p. 340.)\n\nSinclair\u2019s fictional characters talk of workers falling into vats and being turned into \u201cDurham\u2019s Pure Leaf Lard,\u201d which was then sold to the public. This was supposedly made possible by the alleged \u201ccorruption of government inspectors.\u201d (Source: \u201cThe Age of the Moguls\u201d by Stewert H. Holbrook, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday  &  Company, Inc., 1953, pp. 110-111)\n\n- Perry Willis", "This may not be directly relevant, but for similar insight on working conditions and labor relations in a different industry, you might also be interested in reading Lewis's *King Coal* which is, naturally, about the coal industry. I'm not certain it had such a measurable political effect as *The Jungle* but again he tries to document and dramatize the abuses on mine workers, e.g. long hours, company stores, child labor, etc. As a student of literature, I admire works of fiction that not only reflect reality but inspire change.", "My wife's PhD dissertation was on the US food safety regulatory regime and featured some discussion of its history. \n\nI can get her thoughts on it if anyone is interested. ", "A similar thread on *The Jungle* from last month can be found [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubbly_Creek", "http://bubblycreekstudy.org/"], ["http://i.imgur.com/Xuxci6r.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Career"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Work-Community-Jungle-Packinghouse-1894-1922/dp/0252061365", "http://www.amazon.com/Down-Killing-Floor-Chicagos-Packinghouses/dp/0252066332/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1371068324&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=down+on+the+killing+floor"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ykji9/how_accurate_is_the_jungle/"], ["http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_swift.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16419092"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ckjnl/what_effect_did_upton_sinclairs_the_jungle_have/"]]}
{"q_id": "53kxq3", "title": "Would it be more accurate to apply the \"Bloody\" title to Queen Elizabeth instead of Queen Mary?", "selftext": "I heard somewhere that Elizabeth actually had a lot more Catholics die under her reign than Protestants under Mary's. Is this true? How accurate is it to call Mary a bloody queen and Elizabeth a merciful queen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53kxq3/would_it_be_more_accurate_to_apply_the_bloody/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7uaf8g"], "score": [3], "text": ["It's important to consider how long their reigns were. Queen Mary I reigned for 5 years, from 1553-1558. By contrast Queen Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years, from 1558-1603. Even if Queen Elizabeth I was responsible for more deaths, it doesn't necessarily make for a particularly 'bloody' reign.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3toz1k", "title": "What were the strategic interests of France and Britain w.r.t. the Sykes-Picot Agreement? Why did they want spheres of influence in that region?", "selftext": "I'm interested in learning why the two powers wanted spheres of influence there. Was it as a check against the Ottomans? Security in the Mediterranean? Or a check against Russia? Access to other regions? \n\nThanks in advance! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3toz1k/what_were_the_strategic_interests_of_france_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx91ttz"], "score": [2], "text": ["I will have to be brief as I am waiting for guests.\n\nEssentially Britain and France had mutual suspicions of each other's intentions in the Middle East since the 19th Century. The 1904 Entente Cordiale papered over these cracks and pushed the issue into dormancy against a common broader strategic interest.\n\nBritain had been happy to see the removal of the Ottomans from Europe well before 1914, however preferred their status quo domination of the Middle East to avoid opportunistic Germans or Russians taking the land to threaten the trade routes to India or access the maritime frontier of India through the Persian Gulf.\n\nThe stagnation on the Middle Eastern Front following Gallipoli and the subsequent ruminations in Whitehall that some sort of olive branch to the various Arab groups would be required to alleviate the pronounced shortfall in troops in this second-rung theatre brought this back to the table. Certainly a fear was that a victory for the Entente an opportunistic Russia would loot these possessions (particularly Constantinople and the Straits, an avowed objective for generations) and harm Britain's strategic imperial position.\n\nFurthermore with the planned fall of the Ottoman Empire it was recognised, particularly in the British Foreign Office, that this could reopen the stagnant tensions between Britain and France. This was rightly predicted to be less than ideal during the existential threat of WW1.\n\nTherefore a preemptive 'management' of the situation during the war, as to allow little in the way of opportunities of unsanctioned land grabs to chance after the war was preferential. It was assumed that the old imperial rivalries would open up almost straight  after peace so if the situation was agreed while they were allies in such a way and extent to allow little room for subsequent opportunism then Britain's imperial interests would be the most secured.\n\nThe first preference for decentralised zones within a continuity Ottoman Empire was considered too risky by late 1915. To this end the comprehensive Sykes-Picot agreement thrashed out the respective sphere of influence and allocated possessions between the big three powers.\n\nA large part of the logic (evident when you look at the possessions) was that Britain hoped for a 'buffer' of French land between Britain and its greatest threat, Russia. The era of the Great Game was certainly not vanquished from the collective memory of the British diplomats so this arrangement would best suit their true asset, India.\n\nOverall the area was already hotly contested and despite being allies in WW1 imperial tensions between the Entente powers were simmering in face against a collective aggressor. The situation had been kept at bay for decades previously with the existence of the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to wandering expansionist eyes between the major powers. However WW1 made clear that this arrangement would likely be scuppered in the event of a Central Powers victory.  The Sykes-Picot agreement was an attempt by relatively conservative British officials to avoid Russian and to a much lesser extent French expansionism in the face of a collapsed Ottoman Empire post-victory. It was as much an attempt to protect India and its vital trade routes from the Russians than simply a desire to divide the spoils of the Middle East, though it is important not  to understate that this was in itself a nice reward. Overall it is a long-term piece of diplomacy aimed very much at addressing the realpolitik of a future post-Ottoman world while things could be sorted amicably and in a way somewhat controlled by the British.\n\n**Sources**\n\nDarwin *The Empire Project* ISBN 9780521317894\n\nPorter *The Lions Share* ISBN 0582089433"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lz1br", "title": "Can anyone offer any insight into this Nazi identification card?", "selftext": "Hi everyone,\n\nTo celebrate Remembrance Day here in Canada, a co-worker brought in some items her father, a Canadian solider that fought in WWII, brought home with him after returning from the Netherlands.\nIncluded in the collection were these two items, neither of which she knew much about. Unfortunately her father died a number of years ago, and she wasn't able to ask about them. The scanned documents are here: _URL_0_\n\nThe first item appears to be a Nazi ID card, but the odd thing is that it's dated 1946, after the war ended, but it's covered in Nazi stamps. The other odd thing is that both her father, and her mothers name are listed on it. We're guessing it was just a left over ID card that was found, filled out, and kept as a memento, but any insight would be appreciated.\n\nThe second item is some sort of instruction book that was given to Dutch citizens. Her Dutch is shaky, and Google translate isn't really working out. I've posted in /r/netherlands hoping for a translation to give us some insight into it.\n\nThanks guys!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lz1br/can_anyone_offer_any_insight_into_this_nazi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clzhhmv", "clzsr3l"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["This looks like they were both from an exhibiton held in 1945/46 in Amsterdam, called 'Weerbare Democratie', the resilient democracy, an exhibition that apparently dealt with dutch resistance against German occupation. The card reads, essentially, as far as my very limited dutch will carry: \"This is proof that the dutch citizen(s) [Name] [Born] [ID] have visited the exhibition over the resistance 'Weerbare Democratie' on [date]. It has not been possible during the occupation to educate him/her to a National Socialist or Fascist orientation.\" \n\nThe combination of the stamps makes no sense, I'd venture a guess that they are either war trophies or props for the exhibition to make the visitor feel like someone having their papers checked and stamped by the German occupiers. They read (front): Labour Exchange Karlsruhe/Baden; (back) Labour Exchange M\u00fcnster/Westphalia; The Chief of Police, Karlsruhe; The German Work Front (the labour union of the NS-state), Gau-Bureau, Baden [mid, faded], Labour Exchange Karlsruhe/Baden [again]; and finally a field postal address (a kind of zip code for units at the front), 21535B, which apparently belonged to II/JG 52, the second group of Jagdgeschwader 52, a fighter unit; plus a bunch of dutch stamps.\n\nThe second item seems to be a humorous recollection of the ways the dutch people outwitted their occupiers and collaborateurs, such as taking a diamond ring from a soldier, then buying aid packages for dutch PoWs with it and sending them via the Red Cross; marking the progress of the war on maps (this was often done by listening to stations like the BBC, which was heavily punished), hiding and supplying fugitives and the like.\n\nThese are to very interesting artifacts, thanks for posting! I would myself be pretty interested in a translation (I can make out the gist of it, but no more). ", "I'd like to point out that the majority of the Dutch community on Reddit has moved from /r/netherlands to /r/thenetherlands after mod on the former sub went rogue and decided to ruin things for everyone. You are much more likely to get a decent answer at the current sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/knyeJ"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "21itdy", "title": "Puzzle doors are common feature of ancient temples in fiction. Has there been ANY ancient puzzle door found?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21itdy/puzzle_doors_are_common_feature_of_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdm9oe", "cgdnqgr", "cgdpy71"], "score": [85, 53, 23], "text": ["This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but in Cairo there is a Coptic church - the \"hanging church\" I think - whose doors are made of tiny, interlocking pieces that fit only one way. Because wood is expensive in Egypt, and there were occasional attacks upon churches which often included breaking doors down, the church elders constructed those doors so that a) the attackers wouldn't permanently destroy the doors and b) they'd be fooled into thinking they'd done some serious damage.", "Not exactly a puzzle, but Hero of Alexandria claimed to have designed special temple doors that were opened by lighting a fire on an altar before the temple. This was not meant to keep people out, however, but rather served as a means for a priest to open the temple up in a dramatic and mystical way. This trick worked via a clever combination of pneumatics, pulleys, and counterweights hidden beneath the temple.\n\nSource: Pneumatica, Hero of Alexandria", "Again, not exactly what you are looking for, but there was an object shaped vaguely like a double-ended flute which tended to be buried with women in Egypt  from about 2000BC, and the same in Sicily from about 1000 years later. The purpose was completely obscure until in 1907 it was found that they were still in use as door keys in Nubia. Even given that information, I don't think I would be able to deduce how they were used.\n\nSource (and diagram): *Ancient Inventions*, P James and N Thorpe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "15c9xa", "title": "What was life like for the average person in Roman Britain? ", "selftext": "What was the life like for an average British citizen under Roman rule from 43 A.D to ~410 A.D? Were the Romans harsh rulers or did life continue as usual? Thank you! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15c9xa/what_was_life_like_for_the_average_person_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7l6zq1"], "score": [29], "text": ["The Romans were not particularly harsh rulers (in fact within that statement there are several flawed assumptions), but life certainly did not occur as usual. Britain after the conquest in 54 CE (well, really towards the end of the century) underwent a process that has been termed \"Romanization\". This term has been a source of considerable debate since it was coined a century ago by a man named Francis Haverfield, but at its most broad meaning it involved the material replacement of Late Pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA) material culture with Roman material culture. That is to say, LPRIA style housing disappeared and Roman style housing replaced it, settlement patterns switched to the Roman urban/hinterland model as opposed to the nonurnabized (or perhaps more accurately, proto-urbanized) LPRIA model, and the actual LPRIA material, like jewelry, pottery and the like, disappeared in favor of Roman style material. This is as true of the smallest rural hamlet as of the largest city.\n\nSo what happened? This is a matter of enormous theoretical debate, but it would be wise to start out with stressing what did *not* happen: large scale colonization and population transfer, There were a few colonies, but by the early Imperial period this was a matter of status rather than of reality. Being a colony granted important administrative benefits, and so Roman officials would reward communities by granting them colonial status. There were some true colonies which were started as veteran settlements (but the population was probably mostly native) but interestingly, these were not the major cities. London, the largest city, was a trading port which, granted, was heavily inhabited by foreign merchants, but the second largest city, Corinium (modern Cirencester) was native. In fact, its location was deeply situated into the LPRIA landscape, as there was a major \"hillfort\" located nearby. Before you assume this was a matter of control (as it technically started with a transient legionary base), it was deep in the heart of the territory of the Dobunni, a prominent Roman ally. In fact, this non colonian status also applies to the other major Roman cities, such as Verulamium and Silchester.\n\nSo what we have is *not* Romans forcibly displacing a native population, such as what occurs in the Americas, but rather something that one very influential work called \"becoming Roman\". There are many models of why this occurred. Perhaps the most popular one situates Roman material within the political landscape, in which elites shifted their styles of competition and display from the pre-Roman style to a Roman one, a cultural trend that percolated down to the entire population. Another model stresses the essential continuity, arguing that the British became \"part of the conversation\" as to the ever-difficult and multiplicitous definition of \"Roman\". My theory stresses the economic transformation, in which the Roman conquest brought an unimaginable change in the material opportunity of the population, which along with the stability guaranteed by the Roman legions prompted deep rooted changes in the economic strategies of the elite.\n\nIt is worth quickly making a few notes: \n\n* Roman Britain was not rebellious, nor was it particularly difficult to hold. After Boadicea, there was no \"anti-Roman\" rebellion among the population, and Boadicea herself was in many ways more a tribal invader than a rebel. Britain appears to have been largely internally stable.\n\n* This pattern mostly holds true for roughly the southern half of modern England. The norther half was sparsely populated, and Wales also remained at a low population density.\n\n* There are many ways in which Britain retained a distinctive character, which is perhaps different than the problematic notion of \"continuity\". Religion largely remained distinctive, with classical-style temples very rare outside of a purely civic context. The nature of elite competition was also distinctive, with very little notion of \"individual\" distinction--inscriptions, or rather the few that exist, tend to represent groups as opposed to individuals. City structure was also distinctive, with large intramural open spaces.\n\n* Cities did largely develop around military bases, but these forts should really be thought more as catalysts than the raison d'etre for urbanization. These bases rarely lasted any significant amount of time, and so the cities must be considered authentic vases of native urbanization.\n\n* Britain was quite poor. It was probably not a giant money sink, but it was far from the enormous cities of the east or the enormously wealthy elite of Gaul. My region, roughly modern Oxfordshire and Gloucester and centered along the Cotswolds, was perhaps the wealthiest.\n\n* There was a major shift during the third and fourth centuries, with a great deal of rural consolidation, villa expansion, and the transition from major urban centers to \"villages\" and \"small towns\". It is worth noting that in all periods of Roman Britain, the vast majority of the urban population lived in cities of roughly five thousand or less. Diet also changes towards a more \"Roman\" one while the province as a whole becomes less integrated with the wider Imperial economy. The exact details of this transition are complex, to say the least.\n\n* The end of Roman Britain began in the last years of the fourth century and rapidly took place during the early fifth. The military withdrawal was no doubt related, but my model places more emphasis on the general dissolution of the Roman economy.\n\nThe best source on this process is still Martin Millet's *The Romanization of Britain*. Probably the best theoretical work on this process, only in modern France, is Greg Woolf's *Becoming Roman: The Origin of Provincial Civilization in Gaul*. JS Wacher's *Roman Britain* is still a nice introduction with significantly less theory than the other two, if somewhat out of date. In fact, JS Wacher is generally a good bet for anything.\n\nEDIT: New note I thought of:\n\n* The old model of Romanization interpreted it as a strategy of conquest on the part of the Roman authorities, largely based on a single passage in Tacitus and comparisons, conscious or otherwise, with the British Empire. This has largely been rejected, partially for denying British agency, and partially for many bits of evidence I can't list here now. But the one I like the most is the lack of any real administrative involvement in Britain in the form of Imperial temples, official inscriptions, and the like."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "32kj9y", "title": "How did Italian-Americans fighting for the Allies in WW2 feel about the Italy's support of the Germans?", "selftext": "I have been watching Band of Brothers recently and wondered if they felt ashamed of their country of descent's involvement.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32kj9y/how_did_italianamericans_fighting_for_the_allies/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqc87ph"], "score": [8], "text": ["Also on a related topic,  was it common for people with Italian names to \"Americanize\" them? This seems to be fairly common in my area with German names. A common local example would be Young. It is common to see it on old headstones as Jung. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k5rol", "title": "What can I realistically learn about history from reading Asterix and Obelix?", "selftext": "This question came up in the discussion on identifying opposing forces, and it's one I've always wondered.  I learnt most of my Latin from Goscinny and Uderzo, but how much of my similarly garnered historical knowledge is suspect?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5rol/what_can_i_realistically_learn_about_history_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblnflc", "cblyst1", "cbm3jcm"], "score": [21, 4, 4], "text": ["I'm a massive fan of the series, and grew up reading the comics in both English and French.\n\nHistorically, you're not going to learn much other than 1) The Romans conquered Gaul, 2) the Celts had Druids, and 3) Caesar had a kid with Cleopatra.\n\nThe real brilliance of the series is not in accurate presentation of historical fact but rather in its sending up of French education at the time Goscinny and Uderzo were growing up.\n\nBy Toutatis, Muskwatch, these authors are crazy!\n\n*taps temple repeatedly*", "Beyond some general quirks, I wouldn't use it to study for an exam.  However, some plots take place in certain events in the ancient world, such as one of the Roman Civil Wars, as I detailed in my last comment.  \n\nActually, I came to appreciate the series much more after I began to study history more in earnest, as many jokes had previously gone over my head prior.  ", "As a French, bandes dessin\u00e9es aficionado, I am interested in what elements of French culture you find in Ast\u00e9rix and Ob\u00e9lix (regarding mainly Education from what I understood).\n\nOn the same token, as North Americans, what do you guys think about Lucky Luke if you have had a chance to read it?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3swe0k", "title": "How did they replace destroyed planes on WW2 aircraft carriers?", "selftext": "Question see above", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3swe0k/how_did_they_replace_destroyed_planes_on_ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx10swg"], "score": [27], "text": ["Although practice about replacement aircraft differed between navies, there were several methods for replacing damaged or lost aircraft. The most common method was to keep a number of replacement aircraft in storage on the larger fleet carriers. These aircraft were disassembled and required a number of man-hours to put back together.  In the USN, starting with USS *Ranger*, carrier designs to incorporate enough space to stow aircraft in the ceiling of the hangar, as seen in this [photo from Friedman's *US Aircraft Carriers*](_URL_0_). The earlier IJN carriers tended to keep their reserve aircraft in a disassembled state in their lower hangars. The British also adapted a similiar strategy of stowing disassembled aircraft.  During the war, fitters and crewmen would assemble these stowed aircraft to meet the needs of operations. For the Pearl Harbor operation, *Zuikaku*'s crew assembled its three A6Ms to act as a CAP for the fleet given the needs of the strike force had absorbed up most of the fighters of *Kido Butai*.\n\n Yet the growing size and complexity of naval aircraft in the 1940s made this stratagem more problematic. One solution was to plan for carriers t field a larger number of fully functional aircraft that exceeded the number of pilots in their attached airgroup. Staring with *Soryu*, the Japanese planned to keep a number of excess aircraft in readiness so that they could be used as replacements in very little time. however, the persistent shortfalls of the Japanese aviation industry meant that Japanese carriers often went to sea with an understrength airwing. At Midway, *Kido Butai* parted out a number of these spare operational aircraft to other carriers, denuding the IJN's main strike force of a reserve. The USN's *Essex* class, USN fleet carriers started to field a reserve squadron of aircraft kept in near operational readiness. While the Navy Board initially envisioned a homogeneous reserve squadron, wartime experience led to a heterogeneous and truncated squadron of each aircraft type (dive/scout bomber, fighter, torpedo).  Although USN investment in wing-folding technology helped ease the concerns of space, such a situation created a cramped hangar even on the the large *Essex* class ships. One solution to this problem, and one the US was able to employ because of its large industrial base, was to have a flotilla of smaller escort carriers carry reserve planes and pilots. These \"jeep\" carriers would supplement the aviation operations of the task force, but also serve as ferries for aircraft to either the carriers or newly captured bases in the Pacific. The British hit upon a similiar idea, but economized it with HMS *Unicorn*, which was a small fleet carrier designed to be an aviation depot ship. She had various machine shops and excess spare parts for the fleets' damaged aircraft. She carried spare aircraft and a modest complement of self-defense fighters, but was mostly designed for operation at harbors, especially those without advanced fleet facilities. She had cranes and aircraft lighters for ferrying unserviceable aircraft and her flight deck allowed repaired aircraft to take off and return to their ship.  \n\nedit: tidied up language and added a little about the wartime IJN"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ww2aircraft.net/forum/attachments/aviation/249587d1386730647t-usn-carrier-hangar-deck-stowage-carrier-jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3gjpkk", "title": "How likely is it that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented a Soviet invasion and occupation of Japan?", "selftext": "The Soviet Union had declared war on the Japan. The Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo was invaded, and battle lines had been pushed all the way up to the shores of the island nation.\n\nDid the demonstration of atomic weapons prevent a possible occupied red Tokyo?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gjpkk/how_likely_is_it_that_the_atomic_bombings_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctzs872"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  Did the demonstration of atomic weapons prevent a possible occupied red Tokyo?\n\nNo.  While obviously strong, the Red Army stood no chance of invading Honshu.  Simply put, they didn't have the sealift capabilities to pull it off.  \n\nAs the Pacific War drew to a close, the Soviets did invade the Kuril Islands.  They managed to eventually land about 15000 troops there, who were faced with defeating 80000 Japanese troops.  Unsurprisingly, they were having their hats handed to them when the war ended... and thus took possession of the islands.\n\nUnlike the US, who had specialized designs specifically for troop transport and amphibious landings, the Soviet Pacific Fleet had, in comparison, nothing.  They had a handful of landing craft given them by the US, but other than that they used minesweepers, destroyers, torpedo boats, and generic freighters to move their men to the Kurils.  They were then unable to reinforce them with any sort of speed.  It takes very little imagination to see that invasion being defeated if the war had gone on longer.\n\nInvading Hokkaido, on the other hand, would have required many, many times more men and materiel than the Kuril invasion.  And while the Red Army was a force to be reckoned with, it could not walk on water.\n\nHeck, the US was less than sanguine about invading Tokyo.  They would do so if needed, and fully expected to win, but at grievous cost... and they could move their troops in immense quantities with heavy air and sea support. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2182ba", "title": "Portuguese - Japaneese Travel routes the 1500 century", "selftext": "So ive got a task for school where i'm supposed to write about a travel from Portugal to Japan in the 15th century. A few keypoints is how long time these travels would take with boat and what kind of boats they would be using. Ive searched the internet and have found little to nothing about it. Anyone here with this knowledge or some good sources where I could read about it? I know that the Portuguese had established a trading route from Goa in India to Nagasaki in Japan, bud what kind of resources were they trading? Any help from you Historians would be greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2182ba/portuguese_japaneese_travel_routes_the_1500/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgby6dr", "cgcwmxf"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Here are some suggestions for you to look up.  (I won't answer this in full, since that would mean doing your homework for you.)\n\nPortuguese ship ca 1500-1600: I would look up Galleon or Carrack\n\nPortuguese ships sailed down the western coast of Africa and probably stopped at Luanda, Angola to refuel.  They would then round the Cape of Good Hope and sail up the eastern coast of Africa and rest at Mozambique.  From there they would travel to Goa, India.  From Goa they could sail to Malacca in Southeast Asia.  From Malacca they could go directly to Japan or stop at Macau before going to Japan.  \n\nFor the length of the journey I suggest looking at some well known journeys such as Ferdinand Magellan's and then trying to figure out on your own how long a journey actually took from point A to point B.  And then making your own estimates.\n\nFor trading goods between Japan and Portugal I would research \"Nanban\" trade.  That's the Japanese word for the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries.\n", "I wish I had school tasks this cool.\n\nIt worked like this:\nTrade between the portuguese and the japanese started almost immediately after the first portuguese traders \"discovered\" Japan by shipwrecking there in 1543, starting about one year later. Initally traders assembled in Malacca and sailed for Japan, but after the Portuguese settled definitely in Macau in around 1557, all journeys towards Japan would stop there first.  \n\nNow, if you were in Lisbon and wanted to go to Japan, the carracks would leave the city to India in around March/April and take the (in)famous India Run (the Cape Route, known for being very treacherous) towards India and arrive in Goa in around September. When there, you'd have to wait until April/May of the next year to sail to Malacca, a journey that would take about one month, finally arriving in Macau in about August. Once there, traders would meet up with Chinese traders and Portuguese factors to buy goods to be sold in Japan, and decide what the deals would be for the next year. You'd stay in Macau some 10-12 months until the ship departed to Nagasaki the next year, and hopefully arrive there before July and avoid the storm season. In October/November or January/February it'd sail back to Macau.\n\nSummed up, the journey would take you around 2 and a half years to complete! And this assuming there'd be no delays that'd require you to wait another year in whatever city you were at!\n\nThe ships used by the portuguese engaged in trade were mostly carracks, know for their very large sizes for their time, sometimes over 1000-1500 tons. Since only one ship arrived in Nagasaki per year, they were very large and became known in Japan as the \"Black Ship\", for they were painted with pitch (for water-tightening).\n\n[Japanese depiction of a Portuguese Black Ship.](_URL_0_)\n\nMerchandise included indian cloth, clocks, glass and cristal objects, and portuguese wine. Sometimes other more exotic goods were taken as offerings for the japanese lords, but the most important merchandise of them all was Chinese silks, extremely valuable in Japan since the Chinese had cut all trade relations with the Japanese. Aquired in Macau in large numbers, and then sold in Japan for japanese silver, which would then be used back in Macau again to buy silks for the next year."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/NanbanCarrack.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4ol6hh", "title": "Is it true that Iranians knew very little about Persian and Achaemenid antiquity until European historians rediscovered it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ol6hh/is_it_true_that_iranians_knew_very_little_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4e0mrk"], "score": [2], "text": ["It depends a bit on what you mean, so the Achaemenid Persians appear in Tabari's *History of the Prophets and Kings*, the problem is that to my knowledge neither he nor any successive writer in Persian or in Arabic had access to Herodotus, which remains one of the main sources about the history of this period to this day. As far as I'm aware and based on the content of what he's writing Tabari must have been relying almost entirely on the bible, for instance. The Sassanians are better attested to and appear more reliably in the works of Tabari or Ferdowsi's *Shahnameh* (which to my knowledge does not include the Achaemenids).\n\nAs an archaeological exercise, the artifacts and antique sites like [Naqsh-e Rustam](_URL_0_) were not systematically excavated and analyzed until European historians began to do so in the 19th and 20th centuries, as was equally true, say, of archaeology in Egypt or Turkey or Iraq and so on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Rustam"]]}
{"q_id": "7kuq1s", "title": "Hopi and Aztec religions have a lot in common, minus sacrifices. Were any of the Southwestern nations in contact with Mesoamerica?", "selftext": "Both believe in at least three worlds preceding this one, and both prophesied the arrival of a white man, and the languages are related. Were they in contact at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kuq1s/hopi_and_aztec_religions_have_a_lot_in_common/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drhi3je"], "score": [7], "text": ["In regards to the \"prophesied the arrival of a white man\" statement, perhaps these two previous topics from our [FAQ section on Mesoamerica](_URL_0_) are of interest.\n\n* [Did Moctezuma II really believe Cortes was 'an armor-clad God'?](_URL_2_) by /u/Ucumu and /u/400-Rabbits\n\n* [I've heard that Cort\u00e9s arrived in America on the same year that an Aztec prophecy predicted a god was supposed to come to earth. Is this true?](_URL_3_) by /u/military_history\n\nIn regards to your question specifically, perhaps the section [Pre-Columbian Trade and Contact](_URL_1_) will answer your inquiry.\n\nI will comment and say that direct and sustained contact between the Southwest and Mesoamerica was probably fleeting. There are points in history in which contact and trade is much greater than at other points. For example, in the Epiclassic (~550 - 900 AD) in West Mexico, the Aztatlan culture were heavily involved in trade to the Southwest. Being a coastal culture, they produced a lot of cotton and textiles which were presumably traded northward. Along with the textiles, the Aztatlan culture may have also introduced bronze bells to Southwestern peoples. However, the Aztatlan culture is not the only culture to make contact and trade. In the Postclassic, for example, turquoise was traded from the Southwest to Central Mexico. In return, Southwestern peoples may have received cacao. Scarlet macaws are another item traded to the Southwest. These macaws, however, are only found on the Gulf Coast around Veracruz and San Luis Potosi and southward. There is evidence that macaws were not only traded to the Southwest, but were also raised by Southwestern peoples. This would necessitate people having to cross a desert to bring live macaws to the Southwest from the Gulf.\n\nThe reality is that there is no one route that any sort of trade and contact took place between the Southwest and Mesoamerica. Different peoples traded different things at different times. The larger question is whether you had people walking from the Basin of Mexico to modern-day Phoenix or if these goods exchanged many hands through a series of intermediaries who occupied marginal and difficult environmental conditions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/mesoamerica", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_pre-columbian_trade_and_contact", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/345ziu/did_moctezuma_ii_really_believe_cortes_was_an/cqrmxmw/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p78a3/ive_heard_that_cort%C3%A9s_arrived_in_america_on_the/cmu6hlx/"]]}
{"q_id": "4b8ygm", "title": "Trying to remember the name/location of an ancient battle", "selftext": "I read about this some time ago and only remember a few details.  I *think* Hannibal was one of the generals present.  Basically two armies had been facing off for several days.  Every morning each army would form up and essentially have a stand off.  Then after staring at each other for some time they would simply break formation and go about their business.  This went on for several days or weeks.  Then one morning one of the armies formed up in the fog with a completely different variation in their structure.  The opposing army formed up as they had been the whole time, unaware that the opposite army had altered their formations. They went to battle, and were then defeated because they didn't see the difference in their opponents battle formation which gave them a large tactical disadvantage.\n\nSorry if this makes little sense, but any insight to this would be much appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b8ygm/trying_to_remember_the_namelocation_of_an_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d172gr6", "d173d7l"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["You're thinking of the Battle of Ilipa in the Second Punic War, in which Hasdrubal Gisco was the Carthaginian commander, while Scipio Africanus led the Romans.  In the leadup to the battle, Scipio would array his heavy Roman troops in the center, with the more lightly armed Iberian allies on the wings.  Hasdrubal matched this setup: heavy center, light wings.  On the day of battle, Scipio switched it up, deploying his heavy troops to face Hasdrubal's light troops.  Sun Tzu would describe it as hurling a stone against eggs.  With the flanks sundered, the Carthaginians were routed and cut down.", "It's possible you're referring to Marathon. The Athenians were arranged at Marathon for several days, performing sacrifices and sending messengers to call for aid, which the Plateaens responded to with a thousand hoplites.\n\nThe ten generals then held a vote on whether to attack, and the vote was split. The polemarch, after Miltiades - the strongest proponent of attacking - persuaded him, cast the deciding vote in favor.\n\n > ...and when the polemarch's vote was added to the tally, the decision was made to join battle. And afterward, the generals in favor of the battle each in their turn ceded their day of command to Miltiades when the day came around for each to be in charge. But while Miltiades accepted this, he would not make the attack until it was his day to preside. *Herodotus 6.110*\n\nDuring this period of delay, both the Persians and Greeks were maneuvering their auxillary and cavalry units in an effort to exploit a mistake by the opponent. I don't have the other sources in front of me right now, just Herodotus, and although he attributes the specific day battle was joined to favorable sacrifices and a quirk of Miltiades, other sources indicate something was going on with the cavalry units on the day of the battle. It's likely the Herodotus explanations are also accurate, in their way, but there was more going on with the preparations before the hoplites took the field and charged across a mile of empty ground in full armor, without the support of cavalry or archers. *Herodotus 6.112*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "71cyfg", "title": "What do we know about Native American cuisine?", "selftext": "In the US we all learn what sort of ingredients the Native Americans used: Bison, Maize, Squash, etc depending on the area. But what do we know about how these ingredients were prepared? \n\nWhat sort of meals would the average native American prepare and eat? What about the chief and his family? Were there special dishes associated with specific days, like turkey on Thanksgiving?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71cyfg/what_do_we_know_about_native_american_cuisine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn9uz3x", "dn9zf9l", "dna3sjr", "dna4dz6", "dna9szc"], "score": [81, 49, 29, 22, 6], "text": ["I have answered a number of questions on Native American, specifically Mesoamerican, cuisine that you may find informative. Please feel free to ask any follow-up questions.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_6_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_", "I've discovered some interesting things about the diet of the Taino peoples who populated the Greater Antilles, so I can share that.\n\nFirst, while many civilizations were grain cultures (based on wheat, barely, maize, etc.), theirs was based around tubers.\n\nTubers are root plants, such as potatoes, yams, yucca/manioc/Cassava, and other lesser known plants.\n\nThe Taino emigrated to the Caribbean from the Amazon river basin thousands of years ago. They brought to the Caribbean both a language related to that of the Arawak, and the tradition of agriculture based around tubers.\n\nTheir staple good was a variant of yucca. It would be grown in mounds, referred to as 'montones' (which has acquired the popular meaning of 'a lot'). The specific variant they were using around the time of the conquest was actually poisonous, requiring a special treatment before being edible.\n\nThe yucca would be harvested and ground into a messy pulp. The pulp would be placed into what looked like enormous Chinese finger traps so their liquids could be strained and the pulp could dry. The finger trap looking things would be suspended vertically and slowly spun tighter and tighter to extract as much of the liquid as possible. Something about prolonged exposure to air appears to cause some kind of chemical reaction which neutralizes the toxic elements in that variant of yucca.\n\nThe liquids, once extracted and made safe through exposure to the air, could be fermented and drunk. The dried ground yucca left in the 'finger trap' looking thing would be used as the main ingredient to make yucca bread, called casabe.\n\nI talk about this with Professor Antonio Curet in [this](_URL_0_) episode of the AskHistorians Podcast.\n\nWhen Spain first conquered Cuba, they readily adopted Yucca as a staple of their diet. Turned out that yucca survived long voyages at sea longer and better than flour, which had a tendency to rot away given the storage limitations of the time. Casabe bread was a staple of the sailors who passed through Havana on their way to the Americas as bureaucrats or back to Spain as a part of the treasure fleet (Havana was the last stop before crossing the Atlantic).\n\nThe Taino supplemented their agriculture with hunting and fishing, mostly small birds and rodents on land and large fish and turtles along the coasts.\n\nI recommend Levi Marrero's *Cuba: Economia y Sociedad*, volume 1, and Alejandro de la Fuente's *Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century*.\n\nHope that at least partially answers your question.", "I can provide a little information from a non-agricultural perspective on the Southern Northwest Coast from the period of contact. The natives of Northern California and Southern Oregon relied heavily on acorns and anadromous fish. The acorns were shelled and leached. Leaching was required to remove tannin from the acorn meat. [Leaching](_URL_0_) was done by placing the ground up acorn meal in sand basins and pouring hot water into the meal. Once the acorn meal was sufficiently leached, it was heated up and served as soup or a kind of gruel that many referred to as mush. Fish and lampreys were [skewered on sticks](_URL_1_) that were pushed into the ground and sat upright around a fire. Meat from deer or elk was often boiled. Boiling was done by heating rocks until they were red hot and adding them to water in water-tight baskets. Once the water was boiling you added the meat and more hot rocks until done.\n\nSmall game like squirrels and rabbits were often dressed and impaled on a stick set next to the fire. Camas, a small bulb was dried and ground into flour and made into a dense doughy bread by cooking on a hot rock next to a fire. Grubs, grasshoppers and worms were often eaten raw. Some tribes would not, as a rule, eat grasshoppers and worms, but they would when times got tough.", "Hi there! I study plant remains in the highlands of Bolivia, in South America, at sites that date from 200 BC to AD 1,000. The major plant foods that people in this region ate in the past were highland tubers (potatoes, oca, and ulluco), quinoa, and various species of beans. Meat sources were mostly llamas, birds, and fish from Lake Titicaca. \n\n\nBased on a combination of ethnoarchaeological research (working with modern communities to try to understand the past) and ceramic analysis, archaeologist working in this region think that people consumed these foods as soups and stews. There was a study at a site on the western shores of Lake Titicaca that found two compelling lines of ceramic evidence for this type of cooking in the past.^1 The first was that cooking pots at the site had more porous clay than other pots. Porous clay retains heat more than compact clay so it\u2019s ideal for slow cooking over long periods of time, which is usually how soups and stews are made. The study also found that some cooking pots had lines of food residue near the rim, so it\u2019s possible that as soups were simmering, lighter foods were floating to the top of the pots and forming these encrustations. So basically we have some pretty cool evidence that people were using tubers, quinoa, beans, and meat to make soups and stews. Potatoes and other tubers would also have been freeze dried to make something called *chu\u00f1o*. *Chu\u00f1o* keeps for a long time, which is useful and we think it would have been served either in stews or alongside them. \n\n\nTo answer your question about special occasion foods, there's lots of evidence that feasting was an important practice in the region. For the most part, people would have eaten similar foods at feasts as they did in everyday meals, but they may have been prepared differently or been eaten in higher abundance. In modern communities in the area, people will usually roast foods in earth ovens for special occasions and it\u2019s possible that they did in the past as well. Unfortunately, people don\u2019t need to use ceramics or other kinds of durable materials to roast food in earth ovens so it\u2019s a challenge to identify these kinds of events in the archaeological record. In some cases, people would also have eaten food and drink from specialized vessels at feasts. For example, at Tiwanaku, a site that dates from about AD 500-1,000 south of Lake Titicaca, there is a standardized ceramic assemblage that archaeologists associate with feasting.\n\n\nWe also know that maize would have been a special occasion food at these sites. Unlike the plants I listed above, maize doesn\u2019t grow at the high elevations of the Lake Titicaca Basin, so it would have been acquired through trade. We mostly find maize remains in ceremonial contexts, like human constructed mounds or in burials, which indicates that maize consumption would have been reserved for special events. People most likely consumed maize in the form of *chicha*, which is a maize based beer. To make *chicha*, people would have used maize kernels to make flour, which was then fermented over the course of several days^2. It\u2019s probable that people would have added other ingredients near the end of the fermentation process to add flavour or to sweeten the drink. *Chicha* doesn\u2019t keep very well, so it would have had to have been drank in the week or so following its fermentation. Back to that ceramic assemblage a mentioned in the last paragraph, at Tiwanaku (and in later Inca times), people would have drank *chicha* from a special drinking goblet called a [kero](_URL_0_). \n\n\n*Chicha* was an important drink throughout the Andes and was an important part of Inca feasts, rituals, and politics as well. *Chicha* was so important in Inca times that there was an entire class of women, called *aclla*, who brewed *chicha* for the state. A lot of the information that we have about how the drink was made and consumed in the past actually comes from Spanish colonial accounts. \n\n\nLet me know if you have any follow up questions and I'll do my best to answer them!\n\n\n\n1. Steadman, Lee (1995) Excavations at Camata: An Early Ceramic Chronology for the Western Titicaca Basin, Peru. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California. Paz Soria, Jos\u00e9 Luis, and Maria Soledad Fernandez Murillo\n\n2. Jennings, Justin (2005) La Chichera y El Patr\u00f3n:  Chica and the Energetics of Feasting in the Prehistoric Andes.  In Foundations of Power in the Prehispanic Andes. C. Conlee, D. Ogburn, and K, Vaughn, eds. Pp. 241-359.  Archaeological Publications of the American Anthropological Association, Vol. 14. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.\n", "To add on to the other responses you've received, I've [previously discussed](_URL_0_) Southwestern cuisine in this post. \n\nEdit: I also highly recommend the two videos I linked to in that post. They really cover the full range of what we know about Southwestern food culture. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mtfz9/do_we_have_recipes_for_the_fermented_chocolate/dc7edwg/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5i8erd/is_it_true_that_pozole_was_invented_by_aztecs_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23n79x/what_pollinated_north_america_before_bees/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dynjb/what_kinds_of_alcoholic_beverages_did_the_native/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gsorj/how_did_native_americans_eat_pumpkin/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57i18l/what_did_the_average_meal_look_like_in_the_aztec/d8sezwr/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3dfzf2/how_did_they_make_hot_cocoaor_any_other_kind_of/"], ["https://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-085-in-search-of-the-taino"], ["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4mqKx16eYjk/UmboklMnbCI/AAAAAAAADoA/u3g6svBm7ts/s1600/Goddard+1903.+Plate+15+Hupa+woman+Leaching+Acorns.jpg", "http://www.pelicannetwork.net/klamathrc.images/salmon.cook.2.jpg"], ["https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/491877590526727462/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30g7zz/what_was_native_american_cuisine_like_before_the/cpsb3ml/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ypdd0", "title": "Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, when property in Confederate territory was confiscated by the Union what became of slaves which were legally part of confiscated estates?", "selftext": "Were \"confiscated\" slaves freed or were they considered property of the Union like the rest of the confiscated estate? \n\nIf they were considered confiscated property, were the slaves ever sold off to slaveholders in the slave states that remained in the Union? \n\nWas there an early de facto or de jure policy which amounted to an emancipation proclamation for slaves which were part of confiscated estates? \n\n ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ypdd0/prior_to_the_emancipation_proclamation_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpbtmov"], "score": [2], "text": ["Good question. Lincoln was very keen to dampen, not fan, the flames of war during the early years of the Civil War for a couple of reasons. First, border states like Kentucky were still on the fence about whether or not they were going to secede. Lincoln didn't want to give them a push one way or another by acting like the rabid abolitionist the Southern (and Democratic) press made him out to be. Until the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln's policy on slavery was very tame compared to what he endorsed after 1862. If Lincoln's administration confiscated slaves and \"freed\" them by way of not returning them to their masters, Lincoln threatened this tenuous neutrality in the border states. Second, early in the war, before anyone really understood how protracted a conflict it would be, Lincoln was keen to not antagonize the Southern people any more than he had to. Lincoln believed (hoped?) that the war would be over within a year or so, and didn't want to fan the flames of discontent that had, in-part at least, started the war. Thus, the policy in the early days of the war was for Northern (Union) troops to return slaves to their southern masters if a dispute came up. Gen. Benjamin Butler changed all of this when he (all on his own) decided that slaves were contraband of war, and therefore liable for confiscation by the Union forces. Butler was quietly scolded for taking such a sensitive issue head-on without first getting approval from the White House, but his policy largely stood (on an informal basis, anyway) until 1862, when Butler's contraband policy became the de facto policy of the Union forces. The reasoning behind it was that slaves were contributing to the Confederate war effort, and therefore were liable for confiscation by the Union.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22mbz4", "title": "Found brittle WW2 newspapers, Need suggestions re: preservation", "selftext": "Found a stack of WW2 era folded front pages at an estate sale. They were on a table when I found them, not sure how they were stored over the years. The ink has fared well, but the paper itself is pretty brittle.\n\nI'd like to unfold the pages, preserve, and frame some of them. I considered putting them in a small area with a humidifier to help make them a bit more pliable. Is that a good idea? Any suggestions and getting some life back into the pages so I could safely unfold them?\n\nSecondly, would like to do what I can to preserve them and protect against sunlight prior to framing. Any tips?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22mbz4/found_brittle_ww2_newspapers_need_suggestions_re/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgo8yt7"], "score": [7], "text": ["So first off you actually want to maintain a dry environment (35%) humidity or less for the paper. Paper in a Humid environment may actually disintegrate faster. \n\nIt's important that you try not to touch the paper with your bare hands the oil on your fingers can actually cause further break down. \n\nHere are some great resources for saving and preserving documents. \n\n1-_URL_2_\n\n2-_URL_3_\n\n3- (On storing documents) _URL_3_images/stories/documentsarchives.pdf\n\n4- (On mounting and framing) _URL_1_\n\n5- More on preserving and mounting _URL_0_ \n\n6- _URL_4_ \n\nHope this info helps you!! \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/conservation/reports/nytimes_preserving.pdf", "http://www.icon.org.uk/images/stories/guidelines_for_conservation_mounting.pdf", "http://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/newspap.html", "http://www.icon.org.uk/", "https://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/caringfor-prendresoindes/articles/418-eng.aspx", "http://www.icon.org.uk/images/stories/documentsarchives.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1vgn7b", "title": "What capital cities have never been sacked or conquered?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vgn7b/what_capital_cities_have_never_been_sacked_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ces2ifq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, this question has been removed for being a [throughout your era question, which the rules don't allow](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "52qf1v", "title": "How were deserters from the U.S. army punished during/shortly after the revolution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/52qf1v/how_were_deserters_from_the_us_army_punished/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7msjly", "d7msy7e"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["Deserters from the Virginia militias faced the \"general discretion of the court martial\" for the first two years of the Revolution and then a fine not more than two month's pays or imprisonment of not more than one month.  In the fall of 1777, additional months of service was the most common form of punishment.  A bounty was also placed on deserters (of varying amounts, thanks to inflation).\n\nBroadly speaking, Virginia used both the carrot and the stick, proclaiming an amnesty in 1780 for deserters who returned to the fold, but also threatening a punishment of five years of service for those who did not.  The reality of the situation was that the desertion rate was so high that, as a general rule, the punishment could not be exceedingly harsh in practice and the ever-increasing fines and punishments associated with desertion reflect not the hardened resolve of the Commonwealth cracking down, but rather it's powerlessness in the face of a problem it cannot solve.", "A good example of this can be found prior to the Battle of Chippewa in 1814. General Jacob Brown and Winfield Scott had recently been promoted and assigned to the US Army in Buffalo in upstate New York. Scott instituted tough and rigorous training and discipline, which was a change for how things had operated before. This spawned desertions, and six were caught after deserting. One of the six had his ears cropped and the letter \"D\" branded on his cheek. The other five were sentenced to death by firing squad, which was carried out. One of the five was very young, a teenager, and Scott had decided to spare him because of his youth. As a result, the soldiers in his firing squad had been issued blanks.\n\nSource: [The Battle of Chippewa](_URL_0_) by Matthew Seelinger, Chief Historian of the National Museum of the United States Army"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://armyhistory.org/the-battle-of-chippewa-5-july-1814/"]]}
{"q_id": "5vb49k", "title": "What is the correct way for loading a Napoleonic muzzle-loading flintlock musket or rifle?", "selftext": "I've been reading the Sharpe series of books by Bernard Cornwell and I am fascinated by this era, however I find that the way he describes the loading of muskets and rifles by British infantry to be inconsistent, or I'm otherwise misunderstanding.\n\nSometimes he describes them biting off the bullet from the cartridge and then ramming it down on top of the wadding and powder but I thought the whole point of the wadding was to go on top of the bullet in order to stop it falling out of the barrel? And other times he mentions that they prime the pan last, but surely you'd want to prime the pan first because it's easier to prime first and then simply pour the rest down the barrel than trying to estimate leaving enough to prime the pan with? (Unless you're using a separate powder horn to prime the pan, which he does mention with the Baker rifles).\n\nObviously the books are fiction and also men may not follow the drill to the letter during the heat of battle, but is there a book or manual from the time that definitively describes the correct loading drill for flint-lock muskets and rifles circa 1800?\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vb49k/what_is_the_correct_way_for_loading_a_napoleonic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de0sn2a", "de0vksh"], "score": [10, 4], "text": ["First of all, I'd like to state that while I Have read many of Cornwell's Sharpe books, I do not have any copies at hand, so I can't directly reference the details of loading, per Cornwell's descriptions and how accurate they are, so I'll speak generally to the process, and the possible source of the inconsistency you've noted. \n\nAs for the loading process, the manual of arms between the advent of firelocks from the late 17th century through to the late 19th century remained, essentially, unchanged. There were usually ten distinct steps, with several manuals, both American, British, and Continental different primarily in how each step was broken down.\n\nAccording to the 1815 Manual of Arms (Section 29: Platoon Exercise, pp 27-29) there are 11 actions to be conducted. I should note that the 1815 Manual of Arms is a revision of an 1807 Manual, which in turn was a revision of an 1801 manual. It is from the 1815 Manual I'll be detailing the processes, however I've also listed a few other manuals (namely the 1764 British manual, as well as several American ones) for you to cross-reference.\n\nIn British line combat, the first command given upon firing is the order to \"Load!\" At this point, it is an order for the unit to shift stances. The firing stance involves the instep of the right foot being posted at a 90 degree angle from the left heel at about a half step back.\n\nWhen the Load order is given, the feet return to a resting position from the firing stance, and also announce that the loading drill will now be conducted.\n\nThe next order to come is \"Handle Cartridge\". The gun, now supported by the left hand, is balanced between the upper arm and torso of the right arm, the butt seated firmly as the gun is balanced and suported by the left. The arm remains stiff and serves as a balance while a cartridge is withdrawn from the cartridge pouch, usually laid slightly right of centered upon the right buttock. With just thumb and forefinger, the snap on the box is removed, and the leather lid lifted, a cartridge removed. Palming the cartridge, thumb and forefinger are again used to snap the cartridge box once again, securing it. The second stage of the order involves the movement of the paper cartridge to the mouth. The cartridge, held in thumb and forefinger, is bitten by the paper tongue. \n\nThat position is maintained until the order \"Prime!\" is given. Then, gently, thumb (capped over the tear, to prevent the loss of powder from the hole) and forefinger are squeezed at the torn cartridge top. It is then tipped into the pan, a small pinch of powder deposited. As the cartridge is lifted from the pan, the wrist turns, three fingers closing the pan in the process. This secures the pan and the priming powder, to allow for the loading of the barrel.\n\nLater Manuals will ordain that the firearm is rested by the butt upon the toe of the right foot or upon the ground. However, the 1815 manual suggests that the firelock is maintained at a height of two inches, held in the left hand when the order \"Cast About!\" is given. The muzzle of the firearm should be level with the breast. The firelock is turned such that the lock is pointed away from the loader's body. That is, the trigger guard of the musket was pointing towards the loader. The left hand now grips the barrel and stock at the same point as ever. At this stage, the cartridge has been seated into the barrel. The firelock is the dropped those two inches to the ground between the feet. This shakes the powder out of the cartridges into the barrel. The paper cartridge itself, as well as the ball, are not yet loaded. The cartridge thus seated, thumb and forefinger grab the ramrod by the head.\n\nRamrods are then drawn with the order \"Draw Ramrods!\" as the rod is lifted most of the way out of the barrel. The soldier grabs the rod midway along the length, gripping the ramrod backhandedly - that is, wrist turned, thumb pointing downward, as though giving a \"thumbs down\". Once fully extracted, the wrist is rotated and the ramrod put one inch down the barrel. This pushes the paper cartridge and ball down the barrel, but does not fully seat it. That will occur in the following action.\n\n\"Ram Down Cartridge\" was the ninth command. The ramrod is then pushed down the barrel, forcing it down. The ramrod is continuously forced down the barrel. As it slides, the soldier adjusts his grip again to grab the ramrod by the end now protruding from the barrel. Once properly seated, the cartridge is given two firm taps and the ramrod remains at the base. Thumb and forefinger remain on the ramrod tip. The hand then palms with the remaining fingers the mouth of the barrel.\n\nThe tenth order barked \"Return Ramrods!\" involves the retrieval of the rammer. In as few motions as possible, the soldier grabs the ramrod and thrust it upward to retrieve it from the barrel. He then grips the rod by the midway point of its length, backhanded in the same way he gripped the ramrod while drawing the rammer. The ramrod is then lifted from the barrel entirely, the hand returned to the normal forehand positioning while still gripping the ramrod. The ramrod is then returned to the sleeve beneath the barrel. Once the ramrod is replaced, the firelock is lifted from the ground and the weapon is pivoted so that the top of the firelock now faces the soldier. \n\nAt this point, the weapon is loaded. The only thing remains is to \"Shoulder Arms!\" by ensuring ramrod and bayonet are fixed securely in their proper places with a \"strike\" by the right hand at the muzzle of the musket. Once secure, and in the same motion, the right foot comes from its perpendicular position. As the right foot comes into the position of Attention, that is 45 degrees with left and right heels touching, the firelock is shouldered in a single fluid motion, the toe of the right foot being used to nudge the butt of the firelock to initiate the smooth movement of the weapon.\n\nFrom here, soldiers await the firing drill. When it comes time to fire, the traditional three-step orders of \"Make Ready\" \"Present Arms\" and \"Fire\" are used. \n\nWhen ordered to \"Make Ready\" the musket is brought from the position of Shoulder Arms, trigger guard facing forward. The left hand grabs the firelock just forward of the trigger and lock, the right elbow raised and prepared for firing. The thumb is used to bring the firearm to full cock. \n\nThe order \"Present\" is an order of movement. The firelock is leveled with the enemy into a firing position. In doing so, the left hand slides foward from its position just forward of the trigger guard to a point further along the barrel. The exact point is different depending on the firearm, but often the trigger-most sling ring or the first barrel band closest to the musket's flintlock along the forestock are the preferred resting place. The whole body moves in one action in this order, and the right foot is shifted back by six inches. Further, the left hand does not actually grip the barrel, so much as simply hold it, hand flat, palm-up with the barrel resting across the palm.\n\nFinally, when \"Fire\" is commanded, the trigger is pulled and the firelock is engaged. Until and unless a further order is given, the weapon is to remain leveled in the position of Present.\n\n(Part 2 incoming)", "I shall, if it is perfectly fine, give the French version thanks to John Elting'a amazing *Swords Around a Throne* which details this in rather great detail. I would suggest you look at [this previous post](_URL_0_) where I go into detail about French musketry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51pcj9/18th_century_prussians_firing_6_times_per_minute/d7e7wj6/"]]}
{"q_id": "726mqy", "title": "How come there are no famous or well-known Civil War songs from the North?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/726mqy/how_come_there_are_no_famous_or_wellknown_civil/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dngge36"], "score": [8], "text": ["So... this is one of those questions where I'm hard pressed to answer exactly as asked, as the premise is somewhat leading. When a question is \"Why don't I know about [X]?\", \"Why wasn't I taught about [Y]?\", and so on, the answer is often less about an overarching narrative than it is about your specific circumstances and what you were exposed to. If you grew up in Alabama, I would expect that you are well aware of \"[Dixie](_URL_0_)\", and if you grew up in Maryland, we can throw \"[Maryland, My Maryland](_URL_5_)\" into the mix, but growing up in New England, if you asked me to play \"song association\" with the American Civil War, I would probably tell you \"[Battle Hymn of the Republic](_URL_4_)\", a song I learned the lyrics to when I was quite young. I knew the words to Dixie too (I was a weird child! Don't judge me!), but that is somewhat beside the point.\n\nI don't want to play 'which is more famous', as I'm not sure how easy it would be to measure that with precision here, but the point I do wish to make is that the North absolutely produced some recognizable songs. I would even be willing to make an argument that, while \"Dixie\" may have been propelled to immortality die to its association with the Confederacy, for which it served as an unofficial Anthem, it predates the CSA, while the abolitionist Julia Howe wrote \"Battle Hymn\" quite specifically in light of the war already commenced. Of course, Howe only wrote the lyrics, and she borrowed a tune from another song which is closely intertwined with the North, \"[John Brown's Body](_URL_2_)\"\", which was more popular with the soldiers of the time, even if we remember Howe's more somber and religiously infused lyrics today. \"John Brown\" was a much more organic song, as well, with lyrics varying from unit to unit, and it isn't even entirely clear to to credit with originating it. The melody is even older, and likewise in question, although ironically at least one possible origin of the arrangement is a South Carolinian, William Steffe.\n\nDixie is also ironic in that regard, since it was likely written by a *northerner*, Daniel Emmett, for a minstrel show put on in New York City in the late 1850s, although there is question as to whether he was influenced by tunes he heard from a free black family that liked in his Ohio town growing up. In any case, itss popularity with the Confederacy irked Emmett, who would be a staunch supporter of the Union during the conflict. In any case though, the only main point I am making here is that Dixie predated the Confederacy. It is up to you how that affects its standing as a \"Civil War Song\".\n\nI would, however, bring up one more Northern tune I feel has endured, \"[When Johnny Comes Marching Home](_URL_1_)\". Again, it comes down to a matter of exposure, but I think that it also stands as a tune which has survived to today, and as with Battle Hymn, it is both a song written during the war - not simply one which gained popularity during the time - and also likely not an original melody, as there is less clarity in the exact origin of the original tune here. \"[Johnny Fill Up the Bowl](_URL_3_)\", with basically the same melody, was more popular during the war (just like with \"John Brown's Body\", but \"Marching Home\" - certainly a commonly heard tune during the conflict - weathered time better in the years beyond, and gained new popularity a few decades later during the Spanish-American War.\n\nThere are other songs which were popular, and you might find reference to here and there, such as \"Marching Through Georgia\", but I think it is fair to say that \"Battle Hymn\"/\"John Brown\" and \"When Johnny Comes Marching Home\" are the ones which endured best, and which are most likely known to modern audiences. I can't say why *you* haven't heard them - although perhaps you have and didn't realize their origins - so could only speculate it to be some combination of geography and interests, but I certainly don't think it is fair to say the North left us with no famous songs from the war.\n\nChristian McWhirter's \"Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War\"\n\nSteven H. Cornelius's \"Music of the Civil War Era\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__kQX12S9YI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tIsXLyZcWI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSSn3NddwFQ", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrA1-zfdV1E", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy6AOGRsR80", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZzUD0jx0iY"]]}
{"q_id": "f8alsy", "title": "Why did Carthage rely on mercenaries so heavily, while other Mediterranean powers of the same time seemed to be drawing more from their citizenry?", "selftext": "Throughout the history of Carthage it is often talked about how their armies were primarily mercenaries. But in conflicts with Syracuse and especially Rome, they both seemed to have been capable of continually drawing troops from citizen bases and allied cities.\n\nWas their citizen base just very small comparably? Or was there something in their early history that made them prefer to pay people to fight instead of fight themselves?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f8alsy/why_did_carthage_rely_on_mercenaries_so_heavily/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fil1gnq"], "score": [4], "text": ["More input is always welcome; for the meantime, this answer by u/Jollydevil6 [on the Carthaginian army](_URL_0_) may be of interest to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/esuwlr/how_did_carthage_raise_an_army_if_they_nearsolely/"]]}
{"q_id": "5gxedo", "title": "Why has Texas become so much more prosperous than its Great Plains counterparts?", "selftext": "Perhaps my ignorance about the Lone Star state has skewed my perception of its geography and history, but it seems as though the land of central and east Texas is mostly grassy plains. Why, then, has Texas's population burgeoned and how has it become the economic powerhouse it is today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gxedo/why_has_texas_become_so_much_more_prosperous_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daw4ng9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Central Texas is largely covered with cedar trees and oak groves (in the Hill Country), with large Cypress along the rivers. It can look Savannah-like when landowners clear all of the cedar in these places. Central Texas contains an abundant number pecan trees and other hardwoods, with large bald cypress along rivers. At least too abundant to be considered grassland, especially in populated areas.\n\nHouston and much of the eastern third of Texas is more like Louisiana and other gulf states. this is generally seen from Dallas to the LA border, and all the way down to the gulf itself. Lots of forests, and some swamps. Forests here are mostly pine, mixed with hardwood forests as you go west. \n\nSo  overall, Central and East Texas consist of landscapes that just don't fit a grassy description. What you're thinking of is the Panhandle, and that's a totally different landscape/climate, and is actually a part of the great plains. The state is so large that it also has desert areas in the far west (though some mountains in these areas have trees)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "rvx4k", "title": "What are some examples of 1920's swing-dancing clothing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rvx4k/what_are_some_examples_of_1920s_swingdancing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c494itz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Skirts, trousers, shirts...what exactly are you looking for, here? [this](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://lmgtfy.com/?q=1920+swing+fashion"]]}
{"q_id": "bs7xy1", "title": "Nazi literature, poetry, films or other artistic works?", "selftext": "I AM NOT A NAZI SYMPATHIZER. \n(TL/DR at the bottom)\n\nI believe it is necessary to preface this post as it might become controversial and I don't mean it to be. In school one of the most talked about topics in history class has always been WW2 and in particular the Holocaust. We read dozens of books from Holocaust survivors like \"The Diary of a Young Girl\" by Anne Frank and the \"Night\" series by Elie Wiesel. We were also given memoirs by American soldiers like \"If you survive\" by George Wilson and excerpts from journals and newspaper interviews regarding their experiences in the war. Something I eventually noticed is that we never read any primary source material from Nazis or even former Nazis reflecting on the war. Now, my first assumption was that the topic was simply too controversial for school and I decided to research on my own to try and discover more material created by them in order to understand their nature, but I found it difficult to find anything aside from the obvious: \"Mein Kampf\". Literature was not the only thing that was difficult to find. I looked for any cultural creation by Nazis and could find almost nothing except a book of poetry from one young Nazi soldier who praised the regime and demonstrated his almost God like worship of Adolf Hitler.  My main question is\n1. Where are all the books, pieces of art, movies (even propaganda films) or any other cultural or artistic creations that came out of a period of rule that lasted over a decade (not even counting the lead up to the take over of the Nazi party)\n2. If they simply did not create anything, is that simply because of that type of authoritarian governent, the massive war they faced or something unique to the Nazis in history?\n\nTl;DR: where are all the cultural creations of the Nazi party?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bs7xy1/nazi_literature_poetry_films_or_other_artistic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eoor9tz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Though it doesn\u2019t get into what ultimately became of Nazi books, films, and artwork after the war, you should definitely take a look at u/commiespaceinvader\u2019s in-depth response to [Were there any truly talented Nazi artists, musicians, or writers who would be renowned if not for their political views?](_URL_0_), where he discusses and gives examples of Nazi art and aesthetics, and talks about what happened after the war to some of the artists associated with the ideology."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/87z25l/were_there_any_truly_talented_nazi_artists/"]]}
{"q_id": "q8szb", "title": "What are the other names for \"The Great War\"?", "selftext": "While World War I was on-going, the English language name was, I believe, \"The Great War\".       \n\nWhat did the French, Germans, Italians, Russians and other combatants call the war?   (at the time, of course)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q8szb/what_are_the_other_names_for_the_great_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vnfk1", "c3vnl0g", "c3vnoew", "c3vo9xd", "c3vw320"], "score": [2, 5, 3, 2, 3], "text": ["from Wikipedia: The Second Fatherland War was the term given by contemporary Russians to both the Eastern Front of World War I and the Eastern Front of World War II. Both terms attempted to link the current war with the French invasion of Russia in 1812, which had been termed the \"Fatherland War\" and later the \"First Fatherland War\". Both the \"First Fatherland War\" and the \"Second Fatherland War\" are used very rarely, with popular terms being \"Patriotic War\" (Russian: \u041e\u0442\u0435\u0447\u0435\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0432\u043e\u0439\u043d\u0430) and \"Great Patriotic War\" (Russian: \u0412\u0435\u043b\u0438\u043a\u0430\u044f \u041e\u0442\u0435\u0447\u0435\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0432\u043e\u0439\u043d\u0430) describing the wars against the armies of Napoleon and Hitler respectively.", "It was in the early days called \"the war to end war,\" or \"the war to end all wars\" - in optimism that it would be the last. However (even during the war), as it became apparent WWI would not, in fact, end war, the term became used more sardonically.", "In Germany, there was no special name for WWI - it was generally simply referred to as \"war\".\n\nThe first use of \"world war\" I could find were a book and a postcard printed in 1915 with the words \"Weltkrieg 1914-15\". Similar books, booklets, postcards, awards and other references can also be found for 1916 and 1917.\n\nThe use of \"Weltkrieg\" continued after the war ended, but it was always referred to as \"a world war\", not as \"the World War\", and the dates 1914-1918 were added to make clear which war they were referring to.", "I know that during WWI and until 1939 it was called \"The War\". In the same terms as we now say \"The War\" to mean WWII. ", "Actually, prior to and during WWI the expression 'The Great War' typically referred to the Napoleonic wars.\n\nWhile 'The Great War' did eventually transition into referring to WWI, this phenomenon was more closely related to the latter parts of the war and post-war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1kj056", "title": "Did the ancient Romans probe far beyond the borders of their empire?", "selftext": "I know that the Romans did partake in armed expeditions beyond the Rhine into Germany, and even invaded Sudan at various points in history, but are there are records of individual Romans (either by themselves or in groups) who explored Eastern Europe, Africa, India, or China?\n\nI know that records are scarce, but even apocryphal anecdotes to this question would be welcome. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kj056/did_the_ancient_romans_probe_far_beyond_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbpgcyb", "cbplkpn", "cbppewg"], "score": [50, 7, 2], "text": ["Yes, the Romans were quite nosy.  I've made a couple of comments on this subject ([1](_URL_0_), [2](_URL_1_)).  To reiterate myself (sorry for this comment being a bit of a mishmash):\n\nThe Romans actually invaded Arabia during Augustus' reign, under a commander named Gallus, and even besieged the city of Ma'rib in Yemen.  The expedition was a failure (mainly due to lack of water), but we have a good record of it because Gallus was friends with the historian Strabo.  \n\nThe Romans were also quite active in trade, particularly the Indian Ocean trade network.  To quote myself:\n\n > The Romans traded extensively in the Indian Ocean Trade Network, as detailed in *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* (The Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean).  Roman coins have been [found in Madagascar and several other sub-Saharan African places](_URL_3_), which goes to show how extensive the ancient trade networks really were (the link I give suggests that the coins were brought by Arab traders, as the Romans traded extensively along the Red Sea).  [There were several trade posts detailed in *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* along the Somalian coast that traded up the Red Sea with Rome](_URL_2_). \n\nThere's also been Roman pottery found in India, and Strabo talks about the Indian-Roman trade:\n\n > As for the merchants who now sail from Egypt by the Nile and the Arabian Gulf as far as India, only a small number have sailed as far as the Ganges; and even these are merely private citizens and of no use as regards the history of the places they have seen. But from India, from one place and from one king, I mean Pandion, or another Porus, there came to Caesar Augustus presents and gifts of honour and the Indian sophist who burnt himself up at Athens, as Calanus had done, who made a similar spectacular display of himself before Alexander.\n\n > *Strabo, Book XV: On India*\n\nThere are also *possible* Roman trading posts in India.\n\nHere's Cassius Dio on Indian ambassadors traveling in the Roman Empire and seeking an audience with Augustus (I know that's technically the opposite of what you're looking for, but oh well, it's interesting):\n\n > [...] and he [Augustus] also attended to many matters of business. 8 For a great many embassies came to him, and the people of India, who had already made overtures, now made a treaty of friendship, sending among other gifts tigers, which were then for the first time seen by the Romans, as also, I think by the Greeks. They also gave him a boy who had no shoulders or arms, like our statues of Hermes. 9 And yet, defective as he was, he could use his feet for everything, as if they were hands: with them he would stretch a bow, shoot missiles, and put a trumpet to his lips. How he did this I do not know; I merely state what is recorded. 10 One of the Indians, Zarmarus, for some reason wished to die, \u2014 either because, being of the caste of sages, he was on this account moved by ambition, or, in accordance with the traditional custom of the Indians, because of old age, or because he wished to make a display for the benefit of Augustus and the Athenians (for Augustus had reached Athens);\u2014 he was therefore initiated into the mysteries of the two goddesses, which were held out of season on account, they say, of Augustus, who also was an initiate, and he then threw himself alive into the fire.\n\nSpeaking of China, Homer Dubs proposed a quite radical theory (dismissed by nearly everyone, as far as I know) that hypothesizes captured Roman legionaries from the battle of Carrhae were used as mercenaries by the Parthians on their eastern frontier, where they skirmished with the Chinese (one of Dubs' sources is a Chinese account which mentions soldiers fighting in a \"fish scale\" formation; aka testudo).\n\n", "It's some time ago, but we had [a little digression](_URL_0_) about Roman expeditions to sub-Saharan Africa. We didn't go into detail unfortunately, but the names might point you into a direction for your question -- for example Gaius Suetonius Paulinus who might have reached Senegal or Septimius Flaccus who ventured across the Tibesti mountains allegedly to the Niger river.", "Yes, Plinius gives one reference to a Roman eques/adventurer during the first century AD who tries to find the source of North European amber, and ends up on the shores of the Baltic; probably somewhere in modern Lithuania/Latvia.\n\n > DC M p. fere a Carnunto Pannoniae abesse litus id Germaniae, ex quo invehitur, percognitum nuper, vivitque eques R. ad id comparandum missus ab Iuliano curante gladiatorium munus Neronis principis. qui et commercia ea et litora peragravit, tanta copia invecta, ut retia coercendis feris podium protegentia sucinis nodarentur, harena vero et libitina totusque unius diei apparatus in variatione pompae singulorum dierum esset e sucino."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hqe1l/feudalism_was_arguably_a_logistical_disadvantage/cax0ohi", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gwoet/what_did_europeans_and_north_africans_know_of/caon7cb", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Map_of_the_Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea.jpg", "http://books.google.com/books?id=ISg9AAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA69&amp;lpg=PA69&amp;dq=roman+coins+in+zimbabwe&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=NmOBi4s86p&amp;sig=27TAbXPoatKtzkxKC58hr5LkJC8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=_SvHUfLyD47y9gSE-YG4AQ&amp;ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=roman%20coins%20in%20zimbabwe&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13v1sc/since_parts_of_africa_were_taken_over_by_the/c77lisx"], []]}
{"q_id": "5fmrqd", "title": "What did the Romans think of Stonehenge?", "selftext": "Stonehenge has been around since 2200 BC. So when the Romans first visited Britain, and later conquered it, it was *ancient*. \n\nDo we have any records of what they thought of Stonehenge? Did they hypothesise as to its use? Or did they just go \"Locals worship these huge bunch of stones. No idea how they were built. Moving on.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fmrqd/what_did_the_romans_think_of_stonehenge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dalnfyq", "dalnryy", "daluydk"], "score": [493, 52, 400], "text": ["[A similar question was asked a couple of years ago.](_URL_0_) I second u/QVCatullus in that I don't believe there are any Ancient Roman mentions that we know of currently. Not saying that there aren't any, but we presently don't know what they thought of it.", "Follow up question: When would have the Romans have conquered the area around Stonehenge?", "u/TheLadyMay and u/QVCatullus are correct in saying that no certain Roman-era reference to Stonehenge survives.\n\nAntiquarians have sometimes claimed to see a reference to the site in the works of the Sicilian Greek writer Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in the first century BC \u2013 before the arrival of the Romans, but at a time when Britain was nonetheless part of Europe's Iron Age trading network, not least thanks to its exports of Cornish tin. Diodorus draws on a lost account by one Hecataeus of Abdera dating back a further 300+ years to the 4th century BC, and perhaps on others, to note that the \"Hyperboreans,\" in their northern island adjacent to Gaul, worshipped Apollo in a temple there. What excited the antiquarians was the description of the temple; Diodorus described it as \"spherical,\" but some translators hazarded \"circular\" as a translation instead, seeing in this a reference to Stonehenge.\n\nu/Tiako excerpted Diodorus's passage here [a couple of years ago as follows:](_URL_0_)\n\n > Now for our part, since we have seen fit to make mention of the regions of Asia which lie to the north, we feel that it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss the legendary accounts of the Hyperboreans. Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. **This island, the account continues, is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind (Boreas) blows**; and the island is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year. Moreover, the following legend is told concerning it: Leto was born on this island, and for that reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo, after a manner, since daily they praise this god continuously in song and honour him exceedingly. **And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds.**\n\nIt's very much a matter of speculation as to whether Diodorus and his predecessors were onto something here, and were muddling accounts of a circular temple and turning them into one that was spherical, or whether the passage refers to some other site entirely. But it's well worth pointing out that, even if the original report was of a circular temple, it might refer to a number of sites other than Stonehenge. \n\nAnyway, for the Roman period, that's all we've got.\n\nThe earliest *definite* surviving reference to the stones can be found in Henry of Huntingdon\u2019s *Historia Anglorum*, dating to c.1130. In this work, Henry lists *Stanenges* (a word that etymologists inform us is derived from the Old English *stan* (stone) and *hengen*, hanging - perhaps from the resemblance of the trilithons to gallows) as the second of the four wonders of England. The first of these wonders is the great cave of Wookey Hole in the Mendips; the other two are natural phenomena, one being a wind that emerges from certain caves in the Peak District and the other an atmospheric phenomena of some sort. So by the Norman period at least, Stonehenge was recognised as a remarkable, and in many ways unparalleled, achievement. \n\nIt's also interesting to note that Henry describes the site straightforwardly, without the sort of accretion of myth we might expect:\n\n > \"The second marvel is at Stonehenge, where stones of amazing bigness are raised in the manner of gateways, so that gateways appear erected over gateways; nor can any one find out by what contrivance stones so great have been raised to such a height, or for what reason they have been erected in that place.\"\n\nFor the first stages in the construction of a legendary Stonehenge, we need to turn to that well-known myth-maker Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose 12th century *Historia Regum Britanniae* discusses the site as a monument to the ancient British history he was at such pains to construct. \n\n\"At Amesbury,\" Geoffrey Grigson summarises Monmouth's work, \n\n > the Saxon Hengist traitorously murdered an assembly of British notables. Later, when he had defeated the Saxons, the British king Aurelius Ambrosius determined to surround these noble dead with a monument. Merlin advised him to fetch from Mount Killaraus in Ireland a marvellous mystic and healing structure of stones which set, up again around the dead, would stand for ever. The stones were fetched, Merlin using his magic in dismantling them and re-erecting them. Within this Stanheng, this *chorea gigantum* [Giants\u2019 Dance], Aurelius was buried, as well as Uther and Constantine.\n\nSo for Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stonehenge was a tomb, the burial site of Constantine, Arthur's successor as King of the Britons, and two of Constantine's sons: Uther and Aurelius Ambrosius.\n\n**Sources**\n\nAubrey Birl, *A Brief History of Stonehenge*\n\nLewis Gidley, *Stonehenge Viewed by the Light of Ancient History and Modern Observation* [an 1873 work useful for the antiquarian perspective]\n\nSamuel Ferguson, [\"On a passage in the 'Historia Angolorum' of Henry of Huntingdon relative to Stonehenge.\"](_URL_1_) *Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy* 9 (1864-66)\n\nGeoffrey Grigson, \"Stonehenge and the imagination,\" *History Today* 1 (1951)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xa8q2/when_is_stonehenge_first_mentioned_in_history_did/"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i9ln4/did_the_romans_know_about_stone_henge_did_they/", "https://ia801702.us.archive.org/23/items/jstor-20488901/20488901.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5o1bp6", "title": "Are there any statements or interviews by the pilot/plane crew who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki", "selftext": "I'm looking for articles or anything were they spoke about it. I'm just interested. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o1bp6/are_there_any_statements_or_interviews_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcgekmz", "dcggwmx"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Brigadier-General Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the *Enola Gay*, gave interviews to the *Columbus Dispatch* and some of them are quoted in [his obituary](_URL_1_).\n\nHere's [another interview](_URL_0_) from a documentary he did.", "There have been many, many interviews with these people since 1945. They have not been, on the whole, reclusive. The Atomic Heritage Foundation has a [great oral history website](_URL_0_) of people who were involved in the development and use of nuclear weapons during World War II. If you click \"filter by subject\" and select \"Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions\" and then click \"apply\" you will get a lot of them. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/general-paul-tibbets-%E2%80%93-reflections-hiroshima", "http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2007/11/02/tibbets.ART_ART_11-02-07_A1_L48BME5.html"], ["http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories"]]}
{"q_id": "1j04oy", "title": "How were monarchies first established after the fall of the Roman Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j04oy/how_were_monarchies_first_established_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb9t4b7", "cb9tq11", "cb9yli6"], "score": [39, 16, 15], "text": ["The early feudal-type system ('feudalism' as an all-encompassing description of medieval society is a disputed subject these days) that the later monarchies rose out of largely came out of the late Roman Empire's villa system (which involved a landowner and hired 'peasants' working said land). In an effort to keep the production of food steady, emperor Diocletian had peasants tied to the land so they (and their descendants) had to continue farming - they couldn't choose a different profession. Other emperors added further laws that solidified the state of affairs.\n\nAfter the fall of the Roman Empire, some of the landholders changed but the underlying social condition stayed the same. Over time, powerful individuals and dynasties collected the motley assortment of fiefdoms and manors under single rulers. A great example of this is Clovis, who consolidated the many Frankish \"kings\" (who were, for the most part, tribal chieftains) under a single ruler which would eventually become the basis for both France and the Holy Roman Empire.\n\nIn other areas, like Wales, people who had comparably less Romanization reverted to their historical tribes and formed kingdoms out of their ancestral lands (ironically, the infighting between these Welsh kingdoms was partly responsible for their failure to stop the Anglo-Saxons from setting up their *own* kingdom in Britain).\n\nFor the most part, the early monarchies rose out of families/tribes/peoples who were already powerful during the last days of the Roman Empire (even groups who were affiliated with the Roman state) who were able ride out the collapse of the Western Empire and then consolidate their power and expand to encompass less powerful groups/tribes.\n\n[Edit] For an even clearer explanation of how these Germanic rulers worked from within the Roman system, both before and after the 'collapse', see /u/bitparity's comment below.", "Also, it is very interesting to witness the intellectual perception towards methods of government having changed.\n\nIn the late Roman Empire, the role of the emperor became profoundly altered. Diocletian/Constantine oversaw the evolution of the Emperor from the principate (first amongst equals, Augustus Caesar) into the dominate.\n\nThe title \"dominus\" means master in Latin. It had been used by many emperors in the past but no one really took it seriously. Similarly, divine status of an emperor was often an honor conferred by the Senate after death. However, following the crisis of the 3rd century, Diocletian change the role of the emperor (it was already changing but we attribute it to him). Following Diocletian, the emperor became much more despotic, he became a living God, to be honored and obeyed with no questions (like a master!). Dominus was often used in reference to the emperor. Even when the Empire converted to Christianity, the Emperor's divinity and stewardship of the Church and of the Christian Flock was above that of a mere ruler. \n\nThis is a part of an almost universal shift towards monotheism and monarchy seen in late antiquity in much of the world at the time. There were many examples but for the most part, it seems that most thinkers and intellectuals at the time perceived monotheism and monarchy to be the teleologically \"best\" method of belief/rule. This was most likely due to changing economic and social realities experienced in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Perhaps it had to do with the climate? I can't really answer but there are many components to it. To bring it to the contemporary era, in our world, it is often seen as obvious that free market capitalism/democracy is the best way of doing things in a globalized and industrialized world , at least by many states or people, and if not the \"best\" way, it is the most \"civilized\" way, or the most \"humane?\". In a similar fashion, Byzantine and late Roman thinkers thought that pseudo-democratic tribal societies or councils were, to be frank, retarded and barbaric. And the sidelining of the Roman Senate was seen as a necessary stepping stone towards what God wanted (monarchy, and Christianity!) \n\nThat's also why the Islamic Caliphate very quickly turned from an elective tribal council to a monarchy. The ruling style of bedouin Arabs was not seen as conducive to civilized society in a land just formerly ruled by the monotheistic and monarchial Sassanians and Byzantines. \n\nIn post-Roman Western Europe, similarly, tribal chiefs who initially ruled without the despotism seen in the late Roman Empire, usually adopted a more rigid monarchy soon after \"settling down\" and becoming the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, etc. They looked to the Roman Empire as a source of guidance when it came to ruling. ", "With the exception of Britain, the Germanic monarchies which overlaid the former western Roman Empire basically reinserted themselves at the upper level of former Roman administration, with kings essentially taking the place of what would previously have been the Praetorian Prefect of a region/province.  \n\nDepending upon the kingdom and the timeframe, some showed nominal deference to the (eastern) Roman emperor as suzerain, which creates a grey area of de facto / de jure authority over whether or not those kingdoms were nominally viewed as \"part of the empire\".  \n\nThis is important because people have a tendency to view the fall of the Roman empire as \"the germans took over from the Romans, and the kings and kingdoms of the feudal era began.\"\n\nBut in reality, most of the germanic kingdoms, even the ones not swearing loyalty to the eastern empire (because by the death of Theodoric, none of them would be) were working within the Roman framework, and viewed themselves as sort of independent Roman regional administrators, except that the ruling elite consisted of Germans, rather than the former elite of Roman senatorial aristocracy (many of whom were still around, sometimes co-opted, sometimes co-operating with the new Germanic elite).  \n\nThe proper feudal era didn't start until around a hundred years after Charlemagne, when the Roman framework that the early Germanic kingdoms had been operating under finally vanished (due to the Carolingian Empire's inability to maintain centralization of its disparate parts for a variety of complex reasons which require separate elaboration), to be replaced by the hyperlocal authority of the medieval era we all know and love.  I wish I could elaborate more on the feudal revolution of the post-ottonian era, but this is slightly out of my knowledge base.\n\nNow obviously there were significant differences, especially as the disintegration of the empire lead to the decline in trade and specialized production, as well as a switch to land as the basis of wealth over cash and civic office.\n\nBut the basic framework for these kingdoms was relatively familiar, for the Germanic monarchies to continue as a sort of disunited sub-Roman empire.  Which would be the tl;dr of your question as to how the first monarchies of western europe were established.  They took over the top slot formerly held by Romans to become a sort of collection of independent Roman provinces."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a0fg91", "title": "How important was the Eichmann Trial in public awareness of the Holocaust?", "selftext": "After seeing ads for the movie about the capture of Eichmann, I picked up a (lay audience) book about the capture of Eichmann, *Hunting Eichmann* by Neal Bascomb. At several points, both the author and those who spoke with him emphasize the importance of the capture and trial of Eichmann in raising awareness of the Holocaust, both inside and outside of Israel. How cognizant of the Holocaust was the general public prior to his capture and trial? Were survivor accounts of the Holocaust uncommon prior to the trial?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a0fg91/how_important_was_the_eichmann_trial_in_public/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb3q4lz"], "score": [3], "text": ["I know this is over a week old, but I didn't want to leave this question unanswered. \n\nFrom the end of the war until the Eichmann trial, the world obviously knew of the Holocaust and the general horrors that had occurred. Perhaps they knew someone that had been a victim of the Holocaust and so they knew some specific details. Other than that, they knew details primarily from news stories. However, many survivors of the Holocaust (and perpetrators/bystanders) preferred to keep quiet about what had actually occurred. Understandably, the survivors did not want to relive their trauma and they generally wanted to rebuild their lives. While some survivors were telling their stories and recording what had happened, the general consensus was to focus on the present and the future, not the past. \n\nA bit of a digression here, but I think its important to point out why survivor testimony is so essential. Until this point, most factual records of the Holocaust were coming from the Nazis themselves. This was putting the story of the murder of millions into the hands of those that had done the murdering, not the victims/survivors themselves. Also, when a survivor tells their story, it can also be therapeutic (commonly accepted practice in psychology). So while it may be uncomfortable for other to hear the experiences from those who lived it, is is extremely important. Finally, survivor testimony is essential to serve as proof for the horrors that had occurred. For example, its pretty hard to deny the existence of gas chambers when hundreds (thousands? millions?) of people reported seeing and smelling them with their own eyes (sorry conspiracy theorists!). \n\nNow as to whether or not survivor accounts were common before the war. Nowadays, rather than simply relying on survivor testimony to learn what had happened, we also have diaries, artifacts, records, etc. However, these things take time to come to light and so were not immediately available after the Holocaust. Again, many people wanted to try and simply forget about these events and move forward with their lives. People maybe spoke about what had happened to friends/family, but it was not as widespread as it is now.\n\nYad Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Israel) was founded in 1953 with the mission of commemorating and documenting what had occcured in the Holocaust. It's important to point out the work done by Rokhl Auerbakh, the director of  Yad Vashem's Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony which was founded in 1954. Rokhl was a contributing member of the Oyneg Shabbos archive in the Warsaw Ghetto that recorded events in the ghetto as they were happening. Auerbakh valued recording events by those who lived them, and was doing so after the war. She helped gather witnesses to speak at the Eichmann trial, and she spoke at the trial as well. \n\nSo I would say that survivor accounts before the Eichmann trial were not too common, but there had been a movement to begin collecting them with the establishment of Yad Vashem and the work of Auerbakh, which began in 1953.\n\nI could go on about the \"Eichmann Effect\" and how the trial was an impetus for the classic Holocaust survivor testimony, as we know of today, but you asked specifically about survivor testimony before the trial. \n\nI know you posted this a bit ago, but feel free to ask any follow up questions and I'll do my best to answer them!\n\nSources:\n- _URL_0_\n- I saw the movie adaptation of Who Will Write Our History by Samuel Kassow and he did a Q/A session following the movie. Much of my basic info about Auerbakh comes from that conversation.\n- _URL_1_\n- I have worked with Holocaust survivor testimony professionally"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/awareness_of_the_holocaust.asp", "https://www.academia.edu/2916940/Rachel_Auerbuch_Yad_Vashem_and_Israeli_Holocaust_Memory"]]}
{"q_id": "3aoewi", "title": "Was there any damage to the Vatican City during WWII?", "selftext": "I'm just curious, because although they remained neutral, they are in Italy, which was bombarded during WWII. I was wondering if they took any damage (accidental or otherwise).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3aoewi/was_there_any_damage_to_the_vatican_city_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csf2fms"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Vatican was hit by bombs twice during the war, once in November of 1943 and again in March of 1944.  The second bombing was done by an Italian plane, it killed one person and damaged the Pontifical Urban University and the Palace of the Holy Office with small bombs.  \n\nThe 1943 bombing damaged the Vatican Gardens but caused no casualties.  The supposition for years was that it was a lost American bomber.  A 2010 book alleges that it was an attack on Vatican Radio made by fascist (and anticlerical) Italian forces.  This book has not been reproduced in English, but there were contemporary rumors that an Italian plane was to blame.  The RAF has also been blamed.  The Vatican investigation into the bomb fragments yielded no clear culprit.  \n\nIn any event, neither bombing caused major damage apart from the single death and another person wounded.  It remains unclear whether the attacks were purposeful or accidental.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9d7dbf", "title": "\"Eight million horses and countless mules and donkeys died in the First World War. \" \"The WWII German Army was 80% Horse Drawn\" Is this accurate? How did Germany recover it's horse pop. by the 1940? Did they rely on conquered nations stock?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9d7dbf/eight_million_horses_and_countless_mules_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e5ggpf5", "e5ghf8z", "e5gvbgt", "e5igc6f"], "score": [15, 136, 26, 12], "text": ["FYI, you might get better answers if you provide the source of those quotes. History and historiography are inextricable.", "When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Germany was one of the least motorized societies in Europe. Hitler idolized the motorcar and devoted a considerable drive to increase production, constructing the *Autobahns*, and propagandizing to the population in order to ingrain motorcar ownership and use as German cultural value. However, due to the contradictory nature of the Nazi \"economic recovery\" and rearmament campaign between 1933-1939, the motorization of Germany, including the army, was nowhere near complete by the eve of WWII:\n\n >  As a result of such interventions [in favor of rearmament], the motorway linking Hamburg to Basel was not actually completed until 1962. Moreover, few people had the means to enjoy them before 1939, since Germany was one of the least motorized societies in Europe. In 1935, only 1.6 percent of the population in Germany owned motor vehicles, compared to 4.9 percent in France, 4.5 percent in Britain, and 4.2 percent in Denmark. All these figures were dwarfed by vehicle ownership in the USA, which stood at 20.5 percent, or one in five of the population.\n\n >  In his [1933] speech at the Berlin motor show, Hitler announced not only the inauguration of the motorway building program but also the promotion of motor sports and the reduction of the tax burden on car ownership. The result was a 40 percent increase in the number of workers in the motor vehicle industry from March to June 1933 alone. Motorcar production doubled from 1932 to 1933 and again by 1935. Well over a quarter of a million cars were now being produced every year, and prices were much lower than they had been at the end of the 1920s.\n\n...\n\n >  Despite the spread of car ownership, however, the motorization of German society had still not got very far by 1939, and to describe it as a powerhouse behind Germany's economic recovery in these years is a considerable exaggeration. By 1938, to be sure, Germany's vehicle production was growing faster than that of any other European country, but there was still only one motor vehicle there per forty-four inhabitants, compared with one for every nineteen in Britain and France. The vast majority of personal travel and the movement of bulk goods was still accounted for by Germany's railway system, Germany's largest employer at the time...\n\nWhen I speak of the contradictory nature of the Nazi \"economic recovery\" and rearmament campaign, I speak of how the Nazis focused almost exclusively on rearmament during the period of 1933-1939. It was prioritized above all else, and the industrial demands of meeting the Nazi production targets rapidly exceeded and soon utterly dwarfed available resources. The Nazis pursued a policy of \"Autarky\", or economic and resource self-sufficiency; but at the same time, the drive to rearmament by 1942, the original goal, to fight a prolonged and potentially two-front war, made Autarky impossible. Such contradictions in both ideological doctrine/rhetoric and in practice were a very common feature of National Socialism.\n\nThe production targets set by the Nazi Party grew larger and larger while simultaneously the target date for total rearmament drew nearer and nearer, such as to 1940. The Nazis had to print enormous amounts of currency to run the deficit spending required to import the resources they needed for the rearmament campaign, and this was still not enough. As Hitler had constantly preached about the need for conquering \"living space\" in the East by invading the Soviet Union, German government finances were pushed to such a disastrous brink that the necessity of launching an aggressive general European War became not only completely inevitable, but always loomed closer and closer, which was the driving force for the Nazis moving the target date for total rearmament closer.\n\nAs a result, by the eve of WWII the drive to motorize the Wehrmacht (much less civilian society) was nowhere near complete. The German military still relied extremely heavily on rail travel and horse-drawn vehicles for their logistics. As a result of this in turn, the German military was ironically woefully unprepared to fight a prolonged war of attrition against its enemies, especially the Soviet Union; it was from this logistical and industrial inadequacy that the doctrine of *blitzkrieg* sprung. The entire grand strategy of Nazi Germany going into its invasions of France and then the Soviet Union utterly relied upon the extremely rapid decapitation and capitulation of those enemies - if the invasions bogged down at all, the German economy would either catastrophically collapsed within a relatively short period of time (in the case of France) or would rapidly become completely outclassed by the enemy's industrial capacity and manpower (in the case of the Soviet Union). While the *blitzkrieg* against France worked beyond all expectations and allowed Nazi Germany to compensate for its catastrophic fiscal policy through plundering the majority of the European continent, the invasion of the Soviet Union stalled short of its goals, and the tide soon turned against Germany by early 1943 if not earlier.\n\n >  Whatever propaganda messages about the battle for work might claim, Nazi economic policy was driven by the overwhelming desire on the part of Hitler and the leadership, backed up by the armed forces, to prepare for war. Up to the latter part of 1936, this was conducted in a way that aroused few objections from business; when the Four-Year Plan began to come into effect, however, the drive for rearmament began to outpace the economy's ability to supply it, and business began to chafe under a rapidly tightening net of restrictions and controls...\n\n >  What Hitler wanted to ensure, however, was that firms competed to fulfill the overall policy aims laid down by himself. Yet those aims were fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, autarky was designed to prepare Germany for a lengthy war; on the other hand, rearmament was pursued with a headlong abandon that paid scant regard to the dictates of national self-sufficiency. Measured by its own aims, the Nazi regime had only succeeded partially by the summer of 1939. Its preparations for a large-scale war were inadequate, its armaments program incomplete; drastic shortages of raw materials meant that targets for the construction of tanks, ships, planes, and weapons of war were not remotely being met; and the situation was exacerbated by Hitler's program. The answer was plunder...The enormous stresses and strains built up in the German economy between 1933 and 1939 could, Hitler himself explicitly argued on several occasions, ultimately only be resolved by the conquest of living-space in the east.\n\nSource: *The Third Reich in Power*, by Richard Evans", "The German Army was overwhelmingly an infantry-based force.  In 1939, the German Army consisted of 85 infantry divisions and three Mountain divisions (infantry with mountaineering training and gear).  [The typical infantry division of first wave](_URL_0_) (the best equipped of the initial four \"waves\" of mobilization) had authorized strengths of 17,734 men, and 4,842 horses.  There were only about 1,500 motor vehicles (about a third were just motorcycles) in each division.\n\nCompared to these 88 divisions, the *Panzerwaffe* consisted of 5 and a partial sixth Panzer divisions, 4 \"Light\" mechanized divisions (former cavalry divisions), and 4 motorized infantry divisions- about 13 1/2 divisions total.  More divisions of all types would be raised during the war, but the ratios wouldn't vary much, even though the plundering of conquered territory included the confiscation of just about anything with a motor (or hooves, for that matter).  In fact, by the final two years of the war (late 43 to May 1945), many units were \"demotorized\" due to wartime losses and petrol shortages.", "Others have answered the part about most of the German army being horse-drawn. Regarding the livestock size, Germany did kill many of them during WW1, but economic censuses indicate that pre-WWI levels (adjusted for territory loss) was achieved during the early 1930s.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nGo see figure 9 of this paper about German agriculture. During WW1 the Germans slaughtered officially 5 million pigs (this event is labeled  Shcweinemord), yet the pre-war level of pigs was achieved in 1933. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.niehorster.org/011_germany/39_organ_army/39_id-1_welle.html"], ["http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Grant.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2sn7bt", "title": "Why did Irish monks play such an important role in the christianization of Europe?", "selftext": "I mean, why were they Christians before all the others, even though they were so geographically remote?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sn7bt/why_did_irish_monks_play_such_an_important_role/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnr7q8d", "cnr8urc"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["From what I was taught recently, and if I'm wrong I'd love to be corrected:\n\nIn Ireland there developed a tradition focussed on rural areas, and evangelising such areas first. In the traditional 'Roman' areas the norm was to focus on the cities and evangelising outward from there.\n\nSince in the early medieval period there weren't many cities outside of Roman Europe, there wasn't as much evangelising from the traditional, Roman, heartland. Instead it were the Irish who'd go out to the rural areas of 'barbarian' Europe and found monasteries and spread the faith from there.\n\nAgain, this might be wrong, but if so I'd love to be corrected too!", "The easy answer is that they believed in mission and did go out and talked about God..\n\nBut that is probably not the answer you are after.\nWestern christianity formed and was culturally relevant to the postlatin world. But north of europe was never part of the roman empire and they did not share all the cultural references.\n\nIn Ireland a monastic movment begun with St:Patrick during the 5th century (note that it\u00b4s been 100 years of christian statechurch in the Roman empire, the church there has in many ways stoped in it\u00b4s development). The irish movment did become culturaly relevant in a celtic culture, a thing that nearly all succesfull missionary movments have. The movment also had mission as a big part of it\u00b4s movment so they did continue to spread christianity.\n\nThe monks did begun to leave Ireland to Scotland/England and continued to found monastaries that did spread christianity. From these places visionaris did come that walked out to europe to revitalise the church in France and to spread christianity in northen europe.\n\nAnd u/NFB42 is totaly correct that one of the culturally relevant things was that they didn\u00b4t focus on cities, instead towns formed around the irish christian centers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5nkb1h", "title": "How did sailor manage navigation, back in the day?", "selftext": "Hi all! I was reading something about maps and navigation, and couldn't help but wonder:\n\nHow did sailors navigate the vast oceans? They surely used compass for directions, and speed for distance. But how did they achieve such unbelievable accuracy? A deviation of 1\u00b0 when stretched across oceans could lead to a place miles and miles away.\n\nSecondly speed, how did they accurately measure speed on oceans?\n\nAnd thirdly, if sailors got lost, how did they get their bearings with no idea where they are? How accurately could one know one's position from looking at the stars?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nkb1h/how_did_sailor_manage_navigation_back_in_the_day/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcc892h"], "score": [3], "text": ["Navigation can be done with the stars, and the use of a sextant, which was in use from about 18th century onwards. This method can be very precise, but is reliant on clear skies. Navigation becomes super-precise when a clock that is powered by an internal spring mechanism is invented. This was John Harrison, in the 18th century. He made the marine chronometer. Up until then clocks had a pendulum. The pendulum could be affected by the three-dimensional movement of the ship, which would throw the mechanism off and make it inaccurate.  \n\nPrior to this, there was the backstaff, which is a reflecting instrument that could be used to determine the height of the sun or moon and angles and such (I am not sure of the exact method). The technique has a long history, and many variations, like the cross staff and the qudrant, but can be verified from the 17th century onwards. There is also the astrolabe (which also a long history), which is used to measure and calculate the position of celestial bodies. It was adapted to be used at sea from the 17th century onwards. \n\nTher are also different types of chart. Portlan charts are charts made by estimated distances between certain landmarks, rather than detailing the coastal topography. Experience was crucial factor in navigation, and when approaching a port or harbour a ship could expect to hire a local 'pilot', who had expert knowledge of that particular area, to navigate them through those waters. \n\nSpeed was be measured with a chip log. This is a board that is attached to a length of string on a reel, which has knots on it at regular intervals. The board is thrown overboard, the idea that is dragged behind as it resists the water. How much string is payed out in a certain amount of time while tell you how many knots per hour you are travelling. \n\nThere are many methods for navigation, and some are more accurate than others. Celestial navigation can be very accraute, but it would also depend on the quality of the instrument, the weather and the qaulity of your reference material - your star chart of sea chart. for a period, sea charts were very expensive and some were practically state secrets in the effort to keep certsin locations and trade routes  from being exploited by rival nations. \n\n \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "258ak7", "title": "What would the outcome of the Crittenden compromise be if it went into effect?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/258ak7/what_would_the_outcome_of_the_crittenden/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chepl7w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi OP! I've removed this post since it asks respondents to speculate, which is [against rules of this subreddit](_URL_0_). Do consider x-posting to the creative minds over in /r/HistoricalWhatIf"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_speculation"]]}
{"q_id": "7pb9qy", "title": "When did the right-wing become associated with better management of the economy?", "selftext": "From what I can tell, the common perception across the Western world - or at least across the Anglosphere - is that right-wing politicians and political parties are better \"economic managers\". Even commentary that challenges this notion usually acknowledges that this is the existing presumption. \n\nHow old is this notion, and why did it arise? Does it pre-date the Cold War, or did the failure of communism to deliver economic prosperity discredit other left-wing ideologies?\n\nDid the perception arise uniformly across the West, or begin in one country and spread? \n\nThank you. \n\n---\n\nEdit: A commentator has suggested that this is not a common perception. Here are some recent examples of Australian commentators talking about the perception as if it is ubiquitous. Of course, they may be wrong - I'm hoping that historians can shed light on that. \n\nIn Australia, the notion that the right-wing is/conservatives are better managers of the economy has been described as a [\"truism\"](_URL_3_), [\"supported by many media commentators and also by the public\"](_URL_0_), [something that \"voters instinctively believe\" across the Western world](_URL_2_) and [\"conventional wisdom\"](_URL_1_). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pb9qy/when_did_the_rightwing_become_associated_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsg6c54"], "score": [6], "text": ["This begs the question. I don't believe that's a common perception at all, except within the right wing itself, of course."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://johnmenadue.com/john-menadue-are-conservatives-better-economic-managers-2/", "https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/idea-conservatives-are-better-economic-managers-simply-does-not-stand", "http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-19/lewis-woods-tories-are-the-better-economic-(mis)managers/5681088", "http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/dunlop-the-myth-of-coalition-economic-management/6308704"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dsjlxc", "title": "In this picture (link below) hanging up in my town's town hall showing an American colonist and some Native people in the mid 1600s, how accurately depicted are their clothing?", "selftext": "[This](_URL_0_) picture is hanging up in our town hall in Natick, Massachusetts (a suburb west of Boston). It depicts the town's founder, John Eliot preaching to Native people around 1651.\n\nHow historically accurate are the clothing depicted in the picture--both Eliot's clothes and the Native people? If the clothing is not accurately depicted, why might the artist have chosen to depict them that way anyway?\n\n\\[Trying again since I didn't get a response earlier this week\\]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dsjlxc/in_this_picture_link_below_hanging_up_in_my_towns/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6qjbyw"], "score": [11], "text": ["It is entirely inaccurate. The depiction of the Puritan colonist instructing and evangelizing the compliant, submissive Natives is little more than a fantasy. \n\nBut more on the clothing. New England colonists often commented on how the Natives there wore less clothing, but they only wore less clothing when the climate merited it. You would not likely see a loincloth-clad Native in the freezing New England winter. And neither would you see many Puritan settlers wearing stifling dress in the summer either. And it would have rarely gotten so hot that the Native men would only wear a loincloth.\n\nPuritan settlers also wore more than just gray and black and white. Their attire tended to be more colorful day to day. They would not likely have worn the buckles as they would have been seen as too ostentatious to daily wear. Any Puritan missionary would almost certainly be attired differently from the norm, more likely to wear the deerskin breeches and shirts of their Native audience than their Sunday best. That's mostly because the Natives were rarely willing to venture far away from home just to hear a preacher speak. It was more likely the preacher would head out into Indian country.\n\nPuritan elites may have dressed in a similar manner on special occasions, but not often. The majority of non-elite Puritans would have dressed in a far more relaxed manner to better facilitate their labor. Pilgrim attire is not well suited to cooking, woodcutting, farming, fishing, sailing, or blacksmithing.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n- Sargent Bush, \"America's Origin Myth: Remembering Plymouth Rock\"\n\n- Paul Heike, *The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/8uT4J7M"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dfu17u", "title": "In 1975, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was \u2018dismissed\u2019 by the Governor-General. How much evidence is there that both the CIA and the Nixon/Ford administrations played a significant role in the dismissal, along with Rupert Murdoch? If so, why?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dfu17u/in_1975_australian_prime_minister_gough_whitlam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f35zpwk"], "score": [44], "text": ["So firstly, some background: Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972, and became the first Labor Prime Minister since 1949. Labor, as a result of being out of power for over two decades, had a progressive legislative agenda which they were eager to enact, and which they wanted to do without delay after 23 very, very, very long years of conservative government. \n\nIn order to fund this agenda, the Whitlam government attempted to circumvent the Loans Council (which it considered very conservative and likely to run interference for the conservatives) and borrow around 4 billion dollars via a London-based commodities dealer, Tirath Khemlani, who claimed to have access to vast Middle Eastern funds (and who had apparently arranged government loans for the UK, France, and Italy in the previous year). The mooted deal with Khemlani ended up falling apart once it became the focus of public scrutiny, which neither party really wanted. Deputy Prime Minister/Treasurer Jim Cairns tried pursuing other avenues for fundraising, and it apparently happened that Cairns (whether freely or as a victim of subterfuge) signed a deal with a Melbourne businessman, George Harris, which promised Harris a 2.5% brokerage fee for securing a loan for something up to $500 million. \n\nCairns then, in parliament, denied having signed anything like this. A photocopy of the deal was promptly leaked to the News Limited newspapers (which is where Rupert Murdoch comes in; the future Fox News owner was perhaps unsurprisingly not a supporter of the Whitlam government's progressive agenda at this point).  This is also where the CIA come in; Jenny Hocking in *Gough Whitlam: His Life* quotes a CIA daily report prepared for President Gerald Ford as saying that 'some of the evidence had been fabricated', though it's unclear who exactly fabricated the evidence. In any case, Cairns misleading parliament meant that Gough Whitlam sacked him as Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, which is the kind of internal scandal a government does not want. \n\nWhitlam as Prime Minister had told parliament that the Labor Cabinet was no longer in touch with Tirath Khemlani. However, the Melbourne Herald (which was *not* a Murdoch publication) dispatched a reporter to London to investigate, and found that indeed the Labor government's Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor turned out to be continuing to communicate with Khemlani, despite his authority to negotiate on such matters being revoked in May. Though nobody could find evidence of Whitlam knowing anything about this (with journalists and the opposition definitely trying), this meant that Whitlam had mislead parliament, and so in October 1975 he sacked Connor.\n\nThe Liberal/Country Party Coalition, who were in opposition, took this as a justification to block Supply (effectively, the government legislation that allows the release of funds to pay the government's bills) from the 16th of October 1975 in the Senator. Initially, at the 1974 election, Labor had 29 Senators, and the Coalition had 29 Senators, with 2 independents. One of these independents joined the Liberal Party in February 1975. A Labor Senator resigned to enter the judiciary, and was replaced (against previous convention) by an independent. Then, a Labor Senator passed away, and was replaced by a nominally Labor Senator who was nominated by Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson, Albert Field, who was vocally anti-Whitlam. When Field joined the Senate in October 1975, he was prepared to vote against Supply, thus enabling the Coalition to have the numbers in the Senate to outright block Supply, and thus cause a crisis which necessarily would have to end in a new election. \n\nWhen political circumstances changed, it was the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, that changed them. In Australia, the Governor-General is, effectively, the representative of the British monarch, who has the power to sign Australian legislation into law (but who, as with the Queen, is usually apolitical in how they discharge their duties). Gough Whitlam had requested that Kerr call a 'half-Senate election' to resolve the issue (i.e., to elect a new Senate, rather than, at most elections, the House of Representatives and the Senate), and his understanding was that Kerr was planning to do this.\n\nHowever, on November 11th, 1975, Kerr dismissed the government, sacking Whitlam and installing the Opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, as the new Prime Minister in the interim period before an imminent new election. Whitlam was, shall we say, unimpressed by this, as John Kerr had a Labor background, and was someone he had advised the Queen to install as Governor General. Thus Whitlam's famous quote: *well may we say, God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor General.*\n\nThese events have, perhaps unsurprisingly, long been the source of controversy politically, and thus conspiracy theories (both legitimate and more far-fetched). Re: the CIA, it's a matter of record that they were upset by some of the Whitlam government's actions. In particular, in March 1973, Lionel Murphy, the Attorney-General (and the Senator who quit parliament in 1975 to join the High Court I mentioned earlier) had 'raided' ASIO (the Australian spy agency), demanding to see the relevant files on right-wing Croatian separatists involved in bombing Yugoslavian interests in Australia (Murphy had heard that ASIO were downplaying these activities). US intelligence agencies, as a result of this 'raid', promptly cut off their flow of information to ASIO (something that Whitlam amended by providing reassurances relatively shortly afterwards). Relations between ASIO and the Whitlam government had been troubled from the start - ASIO had for a long time monitored Labor members they suspected of being communists, including Jim Cairns (mentioned earlier), and the ASIO official history by John Blaxland mentions that ASIO acted as a conduit to transmit American concerns about the Whitlam government to the political and military establishment. The US establishment was also apparently concerned with Jim Cairns becoming Deputy Prime Minister (as he did at the 1974 election), partly for this reason - they saw him as being unacceptably left-wing, and perhaps even a secret communist. The ASIO official history also provides evidence that US embassy officials had warned ASIO at least twice during 1975 that the Labor government was a potential threat to their willingness to share information.\n\nIn late October 1975 - a few weeks into the Supply crisis - Gough Whitlam demanded of ASIO a list of all CIA officers active in Australia in the last 10 years. The Prime Minister then *publicly* accused an official at Pine Gap of being a CIA operative who had been collaborating with the Opposition. This received a lot of attention in the media, as you can imagine, further escalating the political crisis. This led to, essentially, the local CIA chief relaying to ASIO's senior liaison officer in Washington that further publicity would lead to...changes. Whitlam was spooked by what he thought was a rather sinister threat, but sought to appease Washington that he would behave in future. \n\nDespite what are *clearly* quite tense relations here, John Blaxland, in the official ASIO history, claims to have found no evidence that the CIA played any role in Whitlam's removal. This is of course an official ASIO history, and so while John Blaxland is a diligent historian who has unparalleled access to documents, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that it might sometimes tell an official story rather than the truth (e.g., by shredding particular documents before providing access to Blaxland, as a paper in the *Alternative Law Journal* by Michael Head argues). Head also brings up the claims of Christopher Boyce that the CIA referred to Kerr as 'our man'; Boyce was a young American intelligence analyst who was convicted for selling secrets to the Soviets. He is sometimes seen by leftist types like John Pilger as a hero who was framed by the Americans for spilling their secrets. As anyone who's read a John Le Carre novel would be very aware, espionage is not exactly somewhere where information is reliable; it's certainly possible that Boyce's claims are true, but it may well be the case that they're someone's misinformation. For what it's worth, Boyce's claims don't figure into Hocking's portrayal of events at all, and Blaxland sees Boyce as fundamentally untrustworthy. \n\nAs to what caused Kerr's actions, Hocking argues that Kerr had a stronger relationship with Malcolm Fraser than Whitlam realised, that Kerr had very little trust in Whitlam, and that Kerr ultimately sided with a legal opinion (one he'd in fact previously told Whitlam was 'bullshit', giving Whitlam a false sense of security) that the dismissal was the correct legal way to resolve the constitutional crisis. Kerr, the Governor-General, had also previously worked for military intelligence and had many contacts within the intelligence community. Kerr, according to Jenny Hocking, *had* sought advice from ASIO about the CIA threats which happened after Whitlam named a Pine Gap official as being CIA (despite that person not being on the official list he demanded, apparently). It\u2019s not inconceivable that Kerr had come to the conclusion that Whitlam's behaviour ultimately threatened Australian interests."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ov5b0", "title": "How did redlining in the United States create the racial make up of the suburbs?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ov5b0/how_did_redlining_in_the_united_states_create_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsckoxm"], "score": [5], "text": ["Play around here.  \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis is my city, and I\u2019ve researched the topic of redlining after this map came out.  I\u2019ve also talked to the author of that project.  Redlining happened in the late 30\u2019s.  \n\nSo Louisville is an old city and a river city.  Most of the early economy was based on the river and most jobs and houses were close to the river.  We also had segregated neighborhoods that were spread out in a few different areas, but mostly they were the south part of the west side of town and on the eastern edge.  The center was downtown and south of that was a very rich Victorian neighborhood.  \n\nSo all this changed in 1937, the year of the Great Flood.  This flood ravaged the Ohio river valley and may be the highest water the Ohio river has ever seen, even in prehistoric times.  This flood caused complete losses of houses and businesses.  \n\nSo redlining was started as a way to protect banks from making bad loans and losing money and causing another financial crisis.  This happened at a time where the US was coming out of the Great Depression and this was a very real threat.  So they made maps based on race, income, etc... but in Louisville they also made decisions based on potential for flooding.  \n\nThe Great Flood created a mass migration out of the city into the suburbs, that also happened to be the high ground.  People that couldn\u2019t afford to leave, stayed in the flood prone area west of downtown.  Because of redlining property values also dropped, meaning some couldn\u2019t sell their houses.  Businesses closed or moved out leaving many people jobless.  \n\nThrough the war there was great growth in our city.  Factory jobs were plentiful and whole industries sprung up over night almost.  Because of the flood, no factories were built near the river.  They were built outside the city, thus furthering the migration.  Subdivisions were going up on farm land and other vacant land.  And were outside the city proper and therefore didn\u2019t get city services.  So they formed their own cities.  We have 81 in the county, some were whites only, but others were just exclusive to keep blacks out.  \n\nSo effectively half of the town lost high earners, lost jobs, and lost property value the other half moved away and formed their own cities and neighborhoods shutting out the rest.  \n\nSo what\u2019s interesting in Louisville is that redlining caused a lot of problems for black people, but it mostly affected the entire west side of the city, regardless of race.  Because of the flooding, white only neighborhoods were also redlined causing them the same fate.  Currently the neighborhood I work in is demographically still 78% white, but suffered the same fate as the black neighborhoods south of it.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a73ce5ba85ce4c3f80d365ab1ff89010"]]}
{"q_id": "17d66p", "title": "was Aristotle held in high regard by roman/Greek philosophers in AD250?  ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17d66p/was_aristotle_held_in_high_regard_by_romangreek/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c84gfzt"], "score": [6], "text": ["Yes.  The Peripatetic School, founded by Aristotle, was still around in 250.  It was in decline by that point, and its members focused more on preserving Aristotle's own work than expanding on it, but the vital thread of Aristotlean philosophy was picked up by the Neoplatonists (who, despite their name, were a quasi-mystical synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, and held the latter in high regard), and by Christian philosophers (Origen, for example) who drew on Aristotlean (and Platonic, and Neoplatonic) concepts to shape their understanding of the divine.  \n\n(We're dealing here with mostly Hellenistic schools and philosophers, by the way; Rome itself was never a center of philosophy like Athens or Alexandria.  They left that sort of thing to the Greeks.  But that's another topic entirely.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4hybq5", "title": "Why were there no eunuchs in the Japanese court?", "selftext": "In China and Korea, eunuchs were employed to safeguard the emperor's harem, did the Japanese court not see any problems with males interacting with the emperor's concubines? Related to this, were there any precautions taken to prevent sexual encounters?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hybq5/why_were_there_no_eunuchs_in_the_japanese_court/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2tq6q2"], "score": [2], "text": ["[This was asked once before!](_URL_0_) My answer was not very satisfactory though, but it's the only thing I've ever read that approached the question. I'd caution you not to make too much of the concubines and sexual access though. Sterility is a red herring! Eunuchs are more than castration! So don't automatically assume sexual control = eunuchs and eunuchs = sexual control, because as you can see, it doesn't work as a cultural universal! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39nqc4/were_there_eunuchs_in_premodern_japan/"]]}
{"q_id": "400506", "title": "Why weren't air rifles more widely used in the American Civil War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/400506/why_werent_air_rifles_more_widely_used_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyqeh4w"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can you elaborate?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "26l4ae", "title": "Was \"boiling oil\" ever regularly used in siege warfare, or is this a myth, or something that only happened a few times?", "selftext": "In the past year I've toured several of the Vauban citadels in France and have gotten contradictory information about this. Many of the guides say oil was too valuable, this never really happened, or maybe happened once or twice and became a legend. Others say that pouring hot oil, water, or waste through the murder holes was, if not routine, at least an established defensive technique that was taught to soldiers.\n\nI'm interested in this in terms of general history but particularly about whether or not this would have happened in France between say 1600 and 1800.\n\nI did a search on this sub but the only answer I found was before our glorious mods cracked down, so it was mostly \"oh yeah it happened\" or \"totally did not happen\" with no citations.\n\nEDIT: I did some cursory googling, and I saw various opinions, still contradictory. I'm really looking for a primary source here, or at least a reputable academic reference.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26l4ae/was_boiling_oil_ever_regularly_used_in_siege/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chs3wyh", "chs9mhk"], "score": [657, 41], "text": ["From the point of view of European medieval siege warfare, there are instances of a whole host of things being thrown by defenders over walls, through machicolations and down murder holes, or via siege engines by attackers. These include everything from rocks and pitch, to waste and effluent, to human corpses and animal parts. Considering that chroniclers were not very interested in recording all details of all sieges, we are left with a patchwork of insights. The other sources are manuscript images, some bas relief sculpture and other artworks, themselves a patchwork. So, one couldn't simply say \"it's a myth\" or \"it's true\".\n\nWhat the chronicles and artworks do give us a sense of is the amount of tactical preparedness *and improvisation* that went on in siege warfare. The best for this, from early to late medieval, are the following, all making tremendous use of primary sources that you can refer back to:\n\n* Bradbury, Jim. *The Medieval Siege* (Boydell  &  Brewer, 1992)\n\n* Purton, Peter Fraser. *A History of the Early Medieval Siege, C. 450-1220* (Boydell  &  Brewer, 2009)\n\n* Purton, Peter Fraser. *A History of the Late Medieval Siege, 1200-1500* (Boydell  &  Brewer, 2010)\n\nNeither of these authors give credence to 'vats of oil' poured over the walls, generally because of \n\n1. expense/availability, \n\n2. logistical difficulty of getting and handling large quantities of heated oil on the parapets, and, \n\n3. tactical ineffectiveness except *perhaps* against mining cats and mantelets. \n\nHowever a small pot of hot oil would be very, very effective through a murder hole or machicolation, which Bradbury in particular found some evidence of.", "Piggybacking on this, I recall reading about the Phoenicians attacking Greeks with pots of heated sand at the Siege of Tyre because it was hell on the eyes and got in under armor. \n\nAnyone able to tell me more on that?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ndkka", "title": "Did any of Leonardo Da Vinci's research actually lead to technological advancement, or was it all lost until it became irrelevant?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ndkka/did_any_of_leonardo_da_vincis_research_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmd10t6", "cmdnk61"], "score": [1459, 24], "text": ["I actually wrote a paper on this last year, which allows me the delicious pretentiousness of quoting myself.\n\n**TL;DR:** His rediscovered papers helped design a surgical robot in the late 1990s, and improved a specific type of heart surgery in the early 2000s. (**Edit:** And, as others have pointed out, not much else.)\n\n**On the subject of Leonardo's research being lost until too late, for those unfamiliar:**\n\nUpon Leonardo's death in 1519, his student Melzi took possession of his notes but the dense content proved impossible to prepare for publication. No small part of the blame here may be laid at the doorstep of the master himself, for Leonardo\u2019s style was difficult at best.\n\nHe is well-known for his \u201cmirrored\u201d handwriting, with the notes moving from right to left across the page, but that was only the first layer of the problem. He used no punctuation, invented his own shorthand as well as compounding and dividing words at apparent random, and even formed letters of the alphabet in his own personal way. Oftentimes he eschewed the written word completely in favor of multi-page sequences of hand-drawn images, which like his writing ran backwards from right to left.\n\nAnd of course the knowledge contained within this labyrinthine set of documentation was revolutionary for the time: in scientific terms only a few others on the planet would have been able to follow along Leonardo\u2019s path of analysis with true understanding and comprehension, and even thirty years after Leonardo\u2019s death the scholar Vasari referred to him as heretical.\n\nIt would have taken a unique person to decipher Leonardo\u2019s notes, make sense of the findings within, organize and compile them into something suitable for publication, and then have the bravery to publish in an inimical political and religious climate\u2014and perhaps in the end there was no one better suited to accomplish this than Leonardo himself. Our best hope at the time was the aforementioned student, Francesco Melzi, who made a valiant attempt but found himself adrift in the eighteen volumes of notes Leonardo left him. Even with two assistants to help process the deluge and forty years of effort, he was overwhelmed, and upon his death in 1568 the studies ended up passing from person to person throughout the centuries, never fully appreciated or understood, until finally being published in 1900 after the surviving folios made their way to London and the Royal Collection.\n\nTheir significance was immediately recognized, but \u201cby then, their power to affect the progress of anatomical knowledge had long passed.\u201d \n\n**On the subject of whether or not any of it is still useful:**\n\nOne of Leonardo's modern-day proponents is a British heart surgeon, Francis Wells. Doctor Wells specializes in mitral valve repair operations. Typically, this type of repair is accomplished by narrowing the valve\u2019s diameter to restrict backflow, but after studying Leonardo\u2019s anatomical analyses of the heart, the surgeon discovered there was a better way, thanks to Leonardo\u2019s identification of the opening phase of the valve\u2019s movement as crucial to the overall cycle. With this new knowledge, Doctor Wells has modified his mitral valve repair procedures and successfully treated 80 patients (**Edit:** /u/ItsAConspiracy found a [more recent source](_URL_1_) upping this number to 2,000+), restoring them to a quality of life previously not possible. He suggests, \u201cLeonardo had a depth of appreciation of the anatomy and physiology of the body\u2014its structure and function\u2014that perhaps has been overlooked by some,\u201d and is studying the rest of Leonardo\u2019s anatomical work in hopes of finding other refinements to modern procedures.\n\nEven more compelling is Leonardo\u2019s influence on the cutting edge of modern medicine\u2014the development of precision robots to assist in surgical procedures. Leonardo himself, despite his prescience in so many other technological areas, may have been surprised to learn that since 1983, some surgeries have been accomplished with robotic tools.  There is some reason to think Leonardo may have anticipated this eventuality, however; in 1495, Leonardo designed and built one of the first humanoid robots, a mechanical knight capable of sitting up, turning his head, and waving his arms, all in time to the sounds of artificial drums. When modern-day robotics expert Mark Rosenheim set out to duplicate this robot, it took him five years of work, and in his research he discovered:\n\n > Leonardo\u2019s anatomical drawings were unique and gave him the information needed to emulate the complex joints and muscles of the human body. The wrist joint, which is one of the body\u2019s most complicated joints, presented challenges to robot design. However, Leonardo\u2019s principles enabled engineers to construct a suitable model. It is from these and other experiments that the first prototype for robotic surgery was developed.\n\nAnd so in 1998, the first da Vinci robot-assisted surgery, a heart bypass, was performed, inaugurating a career for the telepresence tool that has resulted in over 200,000 surgeries performed by a robot designed in part with the help of Leonardo\u2019s anatomical studies. Each of these procedures was safer, faster, and less invasive compared to the non-robotically-assisted alternative, and each patient has Leonardo\u2019s work to thank for their speedy and comfortable recovery. As of 2009, there are over 1,600 da Vinci robots installed worldwide, performing minimally-invasive laparoscopic surgeries to treat heart, prostate, kidney, bladder, and testicular issues, from malignant tumor removal to complete organ transplant. \n\n**Sources**\n\nKeele, Kenneth D., \u201cLeonardo da Vinci\u2019s Influence on Renaissance Anatomy,\u201d Medical History 8, no. 4 (1964): 362, doi:10.1017/S0025727300029835\n\nClayton, Martin, \"Medicine: Leonardo's anatomy years,\" Nature 484, no. 7394 (April 19, 2012): 314, doi:10.1038/484314a\n\nDa Vinci clue for heart surgeon, BBC News, last modified September 28, 2005, _URL_0_\n\nYates, David R., Christophe Vaessen, and Morgan Roupret, \"From Leonardo to da Vinci: the history of robot-assisted surgery in urology,\" BJU International 108, no. 11 (December 2011): 1708-1713, doi: 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2011.10576.x\n\nA. R. Rao, et al, \"Leonardo da Vinci and His Contribution to Medicine and Urology,\" Auanews 14, no. 5 (May 2009): 25-26, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost.\n\n**Edit:** Corrected a typo in a year-old paper. Sigh.", "He designed a bridge to cross the Golden Horn in Istanbul, but it wasn't constructed at the time because the Sultan thought it would be impossible. \nLo and behold, in 2006 a bridge with Leonardo's exact measurements, based on his design, was finally built and is currently in use. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4289204.stm", "http://www.imaginemedicine.com/francis-wells/4582367406"], []]}
{"q_id": "3acvbd", "title": "Armistice was 11 o'clock on the 11th of November. How widespread (immediate) among the trenches was this, and is there any evidence that commanders ordered unnecessary assaults?", "selftext": "Title should be sufficient", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3acvbd/armistice_was_11_oclock_on_the_11th_of_november/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csbhd51", "csbi3ql"], "score": [11, 9], "text": ["The armstice was actually reached at 5am in the morning that day, to be enacted at 11am. So there was a 6 hour delay to allow the implementation of the truce. The armstice was announced in Paris at 9am, and in London around 10:20 am. Allied artillery continue to fire on the Germans even after the truce was announced, so that they would be in better positions should the fighting restart. \n\nThe last soldiers killed were, as per the wikipedia article:\n\n >  > Augustin Tr\u00e9buchon was the last Frenchman to die when he was shot on his way to tell fellow soldiers that hot soup would be served after the ceasefire. He was killed at 10:45 am. The last soldier from the UK to die, George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, was killed earlier that morning at around 9:30 am while scouting on the outskirts of Mons, Belgium. The final Canadian, and Commonwealth, soldier to die, Private George Lawrence Price, was shot and killed by a sniper just two minutes before the armistice to the north of Mons at 10:58 am, to be recognized as one of the last killed with a monument to his name. And finally, American Henry Gunther is generally recognized as the last soldier killed in action in World War I. He was killed 60 seconds before the armistice came into force while charging astonished German troops who were aware the Armistice was nearly upon them.", " >  How widespread (immediate) among **the trenches** was this\n\n/u/DeSoulis has covered when the armistice was received, but it's worth pointing out that aside from the lines south of the Argonne Forest, where there had been little major fighting since 1914, there were no more trenches. Fighting had become mobile once again, and the Allied armies were barrelling towards the German frontier.\n\n >  is there any evidence that commanders ordered unnecessary assaults\n\nA controversial topic, but considering that there were fears that the armistice might not last, or that the fighting would not stop, Allied commanders wanted to inflict as much loss on the enemy, and recover as much occupied territory as possible, before the German Armies (hypothetically) stood down and 'were allowed to go home.' Most commanders gave notice of the Armistice time, and advised that attacks should be avoided if they promised to involve heavy losses; for example, Arthur Currie, GOC Canadian Corps, at Mons."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "yd6zd", "title": "In your opinion at point had the Roman Republic irrevocably fallen?", "selftext": "I'm currently doing an Ancient History course and one of my topics is the \"Fall of the Roman Republic\".\nI was simply interested at this subreddit's thoughts on the matter and when it was that you guys feel the Republic had passed the point of no return to becoming an Empire. \nThoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yd6zd/in_your_opinion_at_point_had_the_roman_republic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5um0xk", "c5uoay2", "c5upd5c", "c5urzt0", "c5utyd0"], "score": [5, 4, 4, 3, 5], "text": ["The Roman Republic wasn't a singular entity, it was a collection of laws, customs, and institutions that together formed a government. Some of these were ended fairly early--Sulla's march on Rome, for example, or Cicero's execution of citizens without trial. Some of these were ended late--it wasn't until 69 CE that an emperor was made outside of Rome without the official backing of the Senate. It was a process.", "When Sulla set the precedent of marching on Rome, taking power, and purging the opposition.  From then it was just a matter of time until someone did it again, but bigger and more thoroughly.", "I'd put my money on Actium, from that point forward resistance in the name of the Republic ended. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that the republic would go back to normal with the death of Julius Caesar, after all Rome had had a dictator for life, Sulla, before. However when Augustus became the sole ruler of the Roman world, it established a precedent of succession since Augustus's only real claim to power when Julius Caesar died was that he his heir. ", "I mark the end of the Republic as the creation of the first Triumvirate ending with the constitutional settlement of Augustus.  The First Triumvirate marked when an entity outside of the Republics traditions institutions took and kept power.   There had been extra-contitional breaks before with Marius and Sulla, but with the Triumvirate, Caesarians, and the 2nd Triumvirate was the final push that moved Rome to Empire.", "There are lots points along the way where the Republic can be seen to change:\n\n* When Marius became consul unconstitutionally for 7 times.\n\n* When Sulla became the first person to march on Rome.\n\n* When the first Triumvirate (Caesar, Pompey, Crassus) created itself to run Rome outside of convention and the constitution.\n\n* When Julius Caesar was declared dictator for life.\n\nHowever, you're looking for *the point of no return*, and none of these fit that description:\n\n* Marius never got absolute power. He bent the constitution, but didn't break it.\n\n* Sulla tried to re-constitute (pun intended) the traditional Roman constitution, and make things the way they were. \n\n* The Triumvirate fell apart. \n\n* Even Caesar got killed.\n\nSo, all these actions were reversible.\n\nTo me, the point of no return was when the assassins did not stand up and take responsibility for their action in killing Caesar. They should have stood up and declared themselves as king-killers. This was supposedly their reason for killing Caesar: because they believed he was setting himself up as king in everything but name. They even included Brutus in their conspiracy, as the descendant of the earlier Brutus who had killed the last king of Rome, to give themselves legitimacy as king-killers. If they had stood on the steps of the Senate and proudly declared \"The King is dead!\", they would have had public acclaim and support. \n\nThey could then have gone back to the way things were before (or, at least, made their best attempt to do so). Consuls could have been appointed/elected, the Senate could take back its authority, and the Republic could have limped along for a while longer until the next crisis.\n\nHowever, by hiding and/or fleeing, they left a power vacuum in Rome. No previous action in the past few decades had left Rome so much lacking a leader or leaders. This vacancy invited - almost *required* - someone to fill it. And, rather than merely replacing a consul, the competing factions now knew they could replace a *dictator*. The prize was bigger and more attractive.\n\nAnd, *that*, I believe, is the moment that Rome could never return to being a Republic: when the liberatores didn't declare themselves king-killers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "8c6uzl", "title": "How inaccurate is this \"Adam Ruins Everything\" video about the history of Anatomy?", "selftext": "The [video](_URL_0_) in question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8c6uzl/how_inaccurate_is_this_adam_ruins_everything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxgamq0"], "score": [6], "text": ["Just a brief response -- despite the host's claim to \"ruin everything\" by giving counterfactual stories, he's actually delivering a very mainstream hagiography of Vesalius that would have not seemed out of place in the 19th century (though still is popular today, especially in the medical field). The actual history -- both of Vesalius' accomplishments, the long-running influence of Galen, and the birth of scientific medicine -- is much more nuanced. \n\nSo just briefly -- human dissection was picked up again by Europeans in the 13th century in Italy, influenced by Arab medicine. When the host talks about \"Galen\" he's talking about Arab text books translated into Latin like \"The Canon of Medicine.\" By Vesalius' time (16th century), Galen would have also been translated directly from the original Greek into Latin, but Arabic translations were still a large part of the curriculum (and remained that way in some areas into the 19th century). Arab physicians were greatly influenced by Galen, but more recent scholars have shown that there was also a great deal of innovation in this period as well. Al-Nafis, for example, largely described the pulmonary circulation based on dissection, and had already corrected some of Galen's misconceptions, including that the septum of the heart was fully porous.\n\nMondino is probably one of the first European Arab-inspired physicians, and who most inspired Vesalius. His \"Anatomy\" was basically a dissection guide (the spiritual predecessor to the disgusting formaldehyde-covered guide that I used and ruined in my first year of medical school). It was based on his observations rather than old text books, though was not illustrated (since it was a guide). Vesalius used his book when doing his dissections. \n\nSo here's the biggest misconception that the video probably advocates -- while *we* see Vesalius as the father of anatomy, *he* most certainly did not see himself in that way. Galenic medicine (or what we should probably call something like \"traditional Western medicine,\" though \"humoral theory\" is usually used) is an all-encompassing explanatory model. Anatomy and physiology are not seen as separate disciplines. Vesalius clearly thought of himself as participating in this tradition, and thought that his findings would help shore up this model by improving on Galen -- and then, most importantly, disseminating this information.\n\nThe hagiography about the challenge to Galen is a creating of 18th century doctors who wanted an origin story (and one that would conveniently create a link between the Greeks and European physicians and cleverly cut out the Arabs).\n\nSo that was a bit longer than I intended. The history of science and medicine is fascinating, and I think helps us understand trends today. **BUT** repeating simplified stories like the one in the video do little to help us understand how scientists and doctors think, or the complicated, messy tale of scientific advance. I'll get off my soap box now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr31EjCEuek"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "14g3ve", "title": "Just to add more to the current discussion on beer, I have a few questions inside", "selftext": "1. When did it become common to drink water instead of beer, i.e., when was water safe enough to drink regularly?\n\n2. It was mentioned by one comment that small beer, because of it's low alcohol content, was actually safer than water. If this is true, why do we not still have small beer as a health drink today?\n\n3. Did any other society other than medieval Europe commonly drink beer or a similar equivalent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14g3ve/just_to_add_more_to_the_current_discussion_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cr30o"], "score": [5], "text": ["1. Water was always an option. Drinking water from sources or even collected rain wasn't that unhealthy. Pure water could become a problem in medieval cities due to the population density and the disposal of waste in natural bodies of water. But as stated in one of the answers of the post you're referring to water from wells, springs and collected rainwater was always reasonable safe to drink.\n\n\n2. There are malt drinks on the market as health drinks [vitamalz](_URL_1_) for example. But most health drink fixated types will shun the connotation with beer and will take their hop extract and beer yeast pills with a gulp of mangosteen juice  or whatever fad there happens to be the next fad. Shame really, a nice trappist ale will provide them with most of whats in there.\n\n\n\n3. Making beer was invented in Mesopotamia (persia) about the same time as humans transitioned from hunter/gatherer lifestyle to a farming based society. Writing and mathematics were a direct result of that transition as stocks needed to be kept and the farming surface needed to be measured. Beer made us in the people we are. [See this doc, for example](_URL_0_).\nNote that we live closer to the time of cleopatra than cleopatra lived to the first mesopotamian settlers. So we've been drinking beer for a LONG time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/how-beer-saved-the-world/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamalz"]]}
{"q_id": "b95yqn", "title": "Where does Cicero talk about \"a certain Roman praetor, Cassius\"?", "selftext": "I am a Hobbes scholar and I am working on an extract where Hobbes raises a discussion by Cicero. I have two questions that I am struggling to find an answer to. 1 is, who is this Cassius? Is it Gaius Cassius Longinus or someone else? 2 is, where in Cicero is this discussion? Any help on either would be amazing. This is the original extract -\n\n\"Cicero maketh honourable mention of one of the Casii, a severe judge amongst the Romans, for a custom he had in criminal causes (where the testimony of the witnesses was not sufficient) to ask the accusers: cui bono?\" (1ch47, Leviathan)\n\nIn his Latin edition he changes this slightly to:\n\n\"\u201cCicero somewhere makes honourable mention of a certain Roman praetor, Cassius, because in deciding criminal cases, when the testimony was not sufficient, he was accustomed to ask the accuser for what advantage the accused acted. [\u2026] For being a prudent man he thought that no one is evil gratuitously, but that whatever a person does voluntarily, he does for the sake of some good for himself. [\u2026] Therefore we shall use the same criterion to seek out the authors of doctrines which for so long now have disturbed the peace of Christian commonwealths: For what Profit?\u201d \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b95yqn/where_does_cicero_talk_about_a_certain_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek2qf9n"], "score": [13], "text": ["It's at Cic., *Pro Rosc.*, 84:\n\n > L. Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat 'cui bono' fuisset.\n\n >  > That great L. Cassius, whom the Roman people considered the truest and wisest judge [i.e. juror], who was accustomed to asking in court cases over and over 'to whose benefit' it was.\n\nL. Cassius was consul 127, censor 125, and was best known for his involvement in the prosecution of the Vestals in 113 and especially for his tribunate in 137, during which he promulgated a *lex tabellaria* on the secret ballot (Cic., *Brut*., 97; 106; *Leg*., 3,35 -37)\n\n > where in Cicero is this discussion?\n\n~~I'm not sure what you mean. Cicero had not been born yet~~ [Never mind, I read you wrong]. He refers to L. Cassius' principle because the whole point of the speech is that Magnus and Capito stood to gain the most from the death of Roscius' father, and that it doesn't make sense to charge Roscius when all fingers are really pointing at Magnus and Capito. \n\nI also don't understand why Hobbes singles L. Cassius out as a praetor. He held the praetorship, but his was fairly uneventful--his tribunate and time as *iudex* over the Vestals is what he was famous for, and what Cicero singles him out for. Hobbes may be thinking that since praetors often presided over civil courts, Cassius must have been praetor when he made his pronouncement. But Cicero clearly calls him *iudex*, and the praetor would not have been a juror at the same time. Further, Hobbes incorrectly associates the praetorship with criminal courts, which is erroneous."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11ppxm", "title": "Help explaining some of the pockets of Europe NOT hit by the Black Death", "selftext": "I got linked to the wikipedia article on the [Black Death](_URL_1_) through another post on askhistorians where I found [this GIF](_URL_0_) outlining the spread of the disease in Europe from 1346 - 1353. I find the three primary gaps in the spread of the disease curious and was hoping somebody could help provide an explanation of why the areas around Milan, around Cracow, and the pyrenees are indicated as disease free.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11ppxm/help_explaining_some_of_the_pockets_of_europe_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ojky2"], "score": [9], "text": ["Krakow and Milan both instituted very draconian quarantine procedures early on.  I have no idea what happened in the Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es, but it could easily be related to lack of travel in that relatively sparsely populated and mountainous area."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackdeath2.gif", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdeath"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7fwtp0", "title": "How did Jim Crow laws effect Mexican Americans in the American Southwest?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7fwtp0/how_did_jim_crow_laws_effect_mexican_americans_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqfs7yw"], "score": [2], "text": ["More of course can be said on this, but [this older answer](_URL_0_) on Jim Crow laws regarding other minorities might be of interest for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ix499/how_were_nonblack_minorities_treated_in_the_jim/"]]}
{"q_id": "3l33cv", "title": "What is known about population dynamics of any American Indian tribes between years 1-1492? Birthrates, infant mortality, lifespans, cause of death, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l33cv/what_is_known_about_population_dynamics_of_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv2rbvi"], "score": [2], "text": ["That is a rather broad time period spanning two continents. Is there a more specific time frame, group, and region you are interested in?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5pa8w2", "title": "Did the French Revolution have any influence on tsarist Russia?", "selftext": "Did the tsar and governing elite feel that their position was threatened by the political upheaval of the French Revolution, and did the Russian peasantry have any awareness of the events? \n\nThank you ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pa8w2/did_the_french_revolution_have_any_influence_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcpx8fp"], "score": [4], "text": ["The immediate impact of the French Revolution upon the tsarist state and society is difficult to parse out. News of the events in Paris often happened at a distance, and in a *ancien regime* society with low levels of literacy and strong divisions between those who were literate, news of the Revolution was akin to  game of telephone. The \"French Revolution\" thus often had a different meaning to different individuals and groups within the Empire. Hostility to the Revolution was also tempered by fascination with French culture, especially among the elite.  The net result was there was an ambivalence about the French Revolution that grew over time and was directly related to Russia's increasing entanglement in \nEuropean affairs because of its military involvement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.\n\nThe response of the Russian executive towards the Revolution illustrates this ambivalence.  On one hand, Catherine II and her successor Paul I tacked to an anti-Revolutionary bent in their foreign policies and rhetoric. Catherine II perceived the Revolution as part of a larger process of the Enlightenment going too far, and she tended to lump it in both with the American Revolution and the Pugachev Revolt. The Russian interventions against France came with a larger clamping down on radical ideas and censorship. Likewise, Paul I initiated greater Russian intervention in Central Europe and Italy when the French disbanded the Knights of Malta. \n\nThe actions of these two heads might give the impression that a reactionary Russia was hellbent upon strangling the Revolution in its cradle, but the actions and motivations of Catherine II and Paul I were more complex than a knee-jerk reaction to the politics of 1789. Russian intervention against France often meshed with other geopolitical goals and concerns of the Romanovs. Intervention and playing a key role in the various coalitions gave Russia a voice in other matters concerning Europe such as Poland or the status of the German states. This was one of the reasons why the coalitions against the Revolution were so dysfunctional and fell apart in light of French resistance. Austria in particular was leery that Russia would gain at the Habsburg's expense and the dilemma for Austrian diplomats was that a successful French war might leave France in too weak of a state to be of aid against Russia. Clamping down on the press and letters was also logical given that the Romanovs relied upon a large number of non-Russian servitors for the bureaucracy and the army leadership. Tadeusz Ko\u015bciuszko was not that different in terms of social background and milieu than other servitors of the Romanov state, but he led a revolt in Russian Poland that had to be crushed by the Romanovs in 1794.\n\nThe wars against the French did not necessarily mean that the Empire's elite did not see any value in the new course of French politics. The success of French arms and the restoration of order by Napoleon seemed to validate the strength of constitutionalism and Enlightenment ideals of a rational society. The Romanov state structure was still predicated upon the idea of Enlightened despotism and a number of post-1789 theorists sought to square new innovations with the established political culture.  Catherine II tended to view the Revolution not as ideas spiraling out of control, but rather as evidence that the Bourbons had failed to contain and contour them. More importantly, during Paul I's reign there were a group of young men  around the *tsarevich* who saw the Revolution as a pretext to get rid of the dead wood that had accumulated in Catherine II's long reign and which her son did little to remove. These reformers built on long-standing calls for a more modernized and European Romanov state, but repacked them to still suit Romanov needs. Alexander I implemented some of these liberal reforms after his father's assassination. His leading advisor on domestic reform, Mikhail Speransky, looked towards French models and examples to streamline and centralize the Russian bureaucracy. In doing so, Speransky was influenced by the example of Napoleon, who took late Enlightenment principles of rational hierarchies and twisted them to suit his own dictatorship. Although Speransky fell afoul of anti-French factions at court, some of his ideas lived on in Congress Poland. This post-1815 entity was in personal union with the Tsar and had a constitution and other facets of French methods to guarantee a degree of moderate loyalty to the Romanovs among the Polish elite. \n\nBut threading the needle between Enlightenment ideals and Romanov autocracy was going to be difficult prospect among any imperial reformer, and the French 1812 invasion only compounded these difficulties. French methods soon became associated with French invasion and foreign influence. One of Speransky's great enemies at court, the Governor-General of Moscow Fyodor Rostopchin, accused Speransky of being the leader of a wider Free Mason plot to undo the foundations of the Romanov state. The wider Napoleonic Wars also ensured  whole generation of Russian officers came into contact with a wider European world and inculcated among mid-level officers a belief that Russia could achieve a similar result of 1789 without the negatives of the Terror  or Napoleon. \n\nThese Revolutionary ideas percolated among various secret societies and forms of noble socialization in the years after Waterloo. Especially as Alexander I walked away from liberal ideas and gravitated more towards the reactionary, pro-Russian elements of the state, these societies and network began to envision a kind of Russian 1789. Revolutionary reform's moment seemed to have arrived with the death of Alexander I in December 1825 and the messy transition of power towards his son Nicholas I. Although the revolt of mid-level officers in Saint Petersburg was crushed, the Decembrists became enshrined in both Russian revolutionary circles and within the USSR as an abortive attempt to bring the Revolution into Russia. \n\nSuch a mythology surrounding the Decemberists obscures the important and quite real divisions within them and the different paths they saw towards reform. The Decembrists counted among their ranks individuals like Pavel Pestel who envisioned a republic for Russia and an end to the monarchy. But Pastel was something of an outlier for the Decemberists. The Union of Salvation, or of the Faithful and True Sons of the Fatherland, which was a secret society for various disaffected elites, had split along geographic lines into Northern and Southern wings. Members of the Northern Society tended to favor a constitutional monarchy and a more go-slow approach to revolution and change. Their methods tended to hew towards that of a palace coup rather than an immediate change. In contrast, the Southern Society, influenced by Pavel, favored more extreme measures. Pavel himself argued for an immediate regicide, but this was too far for some of his compatriots. Thus the Decemberists entered into 1825 split between a Jacobin/Girondist faction and a  Monarchiens wing, while both sides favored Bonapartist tactics in which the Army would act as a praetorian instigator of change and transition. \n\nSuch splits in the 1820s should come as no surprise as the events of 1789 had occurred at such a historical remove that would-be revolutionaries could style themselves as successors to various movements of the Revolution. This is one of the ironies of the French Revolution in Russia: its main political impact was not among the masses, but upon a very narrow clique of elites and the privileged. Although there was a persistent fear that Russia's serfs would be infected by Revolutionary ideals and revolt, such fears reflected Russian elites' own misgivings about serfdom than the realities of peasant life. Serfs tended not to participate in eighteenth century revolts like Pugachev's and serf commune was in many ways a world apart from other aspects of Russian political life. Even though the serfs were in human bondage, it was a form of bondage in which they often regulated on a day to day basis. The future Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin offered his serfs the option of renting his land in 1819, but his serfs refused his offer claiming that while \"we are yours, but the land is ours.\" The ideas of human liberty, nationalism, or even meritocratic despotism associated with the Revolution consequently did not register with larger population in a deep way, but instead took root in a very narrow segment of the populace that were already an elite. \n\n*Sources*\n\nLincoln, W. Bruce. *In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861*. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982. \n\nMadariaga, Isabel de, Roger P. Bartlett, and Janet M. Hartley. *Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment: Essays for Isabel De Madariaga*. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. \n\nO'Meara, Patrick. *The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia's First Republican*. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. \n\nStone, Bailey. *Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective*. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "x42ep", "title": "Which military battle has the biggest whitewash?", "selftext": "Okay, so I was think which battle resulted in one side inflicting catastrophic damage on another side? What are the reasons behind this whitewash?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x42ep/which_military_battle_has_the_biggest_whitewash/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5izie8", "c5j5cu4", "c5j8hku", "c5ja5dd", "c5jevwx"], "score": [13, 8, 2, 5, 2], "text": ["The one that occurred prior to 1992 that immediately comes to mind is Operation Desert Storm. Coalition forces had massive advantages in air power, technology, sea power, and supply. I don't remember the exact casualties but coalition forces suffered only a few hundred killed compared to tens of thousands for the Iraqis. ", "Er, can you define \"whitewash\"?  I use it as a synonym for \"coverup\", but you appear to be using it as \"drubbing\". Is this a use I'm not familiar with?", "The Battle of the Pyramids (21 July, 1798) comes to mind. 25,000 French fought against 6,000 mamelukes and 15,000-40,000 (more likely on the lower end) fellahin. The mameluke's medieval tactics and technology went up against a prime late 18th century European force. As a result, Bonaparte suffered merely 29 killed and 260 wounded, while the Mamelukes lost 2,000 and several thousand fellahin.", "Much older than the other examples here, but I've always been a fan of the Battle of Watling Street (_URL_0_). Basically, a British popular uprising disrupts Roman governance of Briton, destroys a few cities and routes a legion. \n\nUltimately, the commander of Legion XIV, plus some scavenged unit elements make a stand against Boudica's mob. That's 10,000 Romans v. 100,000 to 230,000 Britons. \n\nIt was a bloodbath; according to Tacitus, the Romans suffered 400 casualties to the 80,000 the Britons took and decisively ended Boudica's uprising.", "The one that is probably closest to my expertize is the Battle of Sand Creek which was perpetrated by Rev. Col. John Milton Chivington on November 29th 1864. Chivington came home to a hero's welcome, and his company promenaded down Denver streets with the trophies they took, scrotums amongst other trinkets. Eventually, Silas Soule--because no one would listen to Native Peoples--spilled the beans, and the horrors of the massacre of 300 (conservative number) unarmed men, women, and children became known. Soule would get a bullet to the back of his head for telling what actually happened. Chivington was disgraced, but he was still celebrated for a number of years amongst Methodists. The massacre is still sometimes, though this is fading, still portrayed as a battle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Watling_Street"], []]}
{"q_id": "80p47a", "title": "What issues led President Harry Truman to relieve General Douglas MacArthur of command in April 1951", "selftext": "The consensus has been presented as MacArthur not being responsive to civilian control of his command. Is this true, or were there other reasons?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80p47a/what_issues_led_president_harry_truman_to_relieve/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duy7qh1"], "score": [45], "text": ["Well, when you say \"not responsive to civilian control\" you're kind of glossing over a lot.  MacArthur had given Harry Truman a string of deliberate insults, and repeatedly brushed up against  insubordination.  At the Wake Island conference he failed to salute the President, and generally treated him as contemptible.  Things never really improved from there.\n\nThe biggest issue with MacArthur's behavior was that he couldn't accept that the President set policy, not MacArthur.  This is where he really showed that he was 'not responsive to civilian control.\" MacArthur was told by the Executive branch that Chinese territory was not to be attacked, but rather than accepting that and moving on, MacArthur *repeatedly* asked for it to be changed, incited congressmen to cajole the President about it, and even sabotaged potential peace talks by broadcasting a demand for Chinese surrender without consulting the State Dept first. \n\nAnd there was also the war situation on the ground.  At the Wake Island conference, MacArthur had repeatedly assured the President that China would not enter the Korean war.  MacArthur then defied instructions to use only S. Korean troops near the Chinese border, but rather used UN (mostly american) soldiers and marines.  This of course provoked China into handing the US it's worst battlefield defeat since First Mananas. \n\nIf you want more detail about the MacArthur/Truman conflict, I'd suggest \"The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War\" by H.W. Brands.  If you want more info on the military history of the Korean War, a good recent book is \"The Coldest Winter\" by david halberstam. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6h11h4", "title": "The new Assassins Creed game is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, and yet the Pyramids are shown in their pristine form with white slopes and gold caps. Is this an accurate representation?", "selftext": "We see the Lighthouse of Alexandria and Roman armour clad warriors, so the exact time frame shouldn't be too hard to narrow down. What did the Pyramids of Giza look like around that time? When would they have appeared similar to how they are today? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6h11h4/the_new_assassins_creed_game_is_set_in_ptolemaic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["diur0x2"], "score": [86], "text": ["Herodotus indicates, in his *Histories* (c.430 BCE) that the casing stones were present and had inscriptions of strange characters on them.  He doesn't seem to mention the presence or absence of a cap/capstone, which suggests that something may have been there but that it may not have been the original--assuming that we take his account as eyewitness and not merely a traveler asking about objects in the distance.  If the casing stones were pitted or worn, cracked, or what have you, that seems to have not been noted.\n\nDiodorus Siculus 370-ish years later (60 BCE?) noted that some fragmentary stones laid strewn around the bases, but that most were in place, save the apexes.  If they're Romans, they'd be closer to this era.  It's noteworthy that the third pyramid's casing was supposedly half darker granite, not limestone, per William Flinders Petrie's (really old, and deeply Orientalist-tinged, but detailed) notes in [*The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh*](_URL_0_) from his fieldwork ca. 1882; this may be the \"Black stone from Ethiopia\" that Strabo in his Geography mentions in 20 BCE as covering the lower half, but Pliny's Natural History in 20 CE claimed that it was covered in marble then.\n\nAs to when the casings vanished, that's a matter less certain, and it may have [e: probably did, really] happened over an extended period.  Flinders Petrie in his *History of Egypt* states that the 12th century saw the cannibalization of various stones from the pyramids for some construction in Cairo, but for the casings (see p.203). I see the earthquake of 1303 cited as a key moment for loosening many stones but also destroying or damaging many buildings in Cairo, and Sultan an-Nasir's construction of mosques up to the 1350s (which incorporate many of these stones) as a key culprit, with signature works of later rulers of Egypt as further collecting these stones. \n\nWFP's *Pyramids and Temples* (217) of course channels the old canard of Oriental Despotism in characterizing the destruction of the casing (\"The history of the destruction of the Pyramids really begins with the Arabs\") which should urge a big grain of skeptical salt in taking him at face value.  It's also worth noting that Britain had effectively just taken control of Egypt (in all but name) when Petrie did his work and published it, so he's operating as a cataloger of conditions that British civilization would investigate and arrest, in a mould not wholly unlike Napoleon's encyclopedists.  Imperial reach as a mode of salvation from cultural degeneracy for \"shared heritage\" (Biblical or Classical) is a common theme of the 19th century, from this to the Elgin Marbles and everywhere in between.\n\nMore recent chronologies may differ on the timing and extent of teardown of the casings, but I'd suspect that the presence of the stones at the end of the Ptolemaic era is believable--if only because the importance of the Pharaonic position would have precluded dismantling more so than, say, the Roman or Caliphate (or later) rulers who had no investment in that line of legitimacy.  The golden apex may be the stretch, and the condition of the stones was not likely to have been perfect--many could be chipped, cracked, and broken, and a few perhaps removed (as noted by visitors).  \n\nPlease, Egyptologists [and Classicists of all stripes], if you've got something more recent than an imperial archaeologist to provide fine grain of the casing's loss, bring it here and correct me!  I'd love a more recent omnibus to reference.  After all, a lot of people seem to think the Turks alone ground it up for mortar or gunpowder after 1517, because that's what a bygone era would expect the \"unspeakable Turk\" to do--but the reality is clearly more complicated even by the Victorians' own reckoning.\n\n[edit @ 7 mins - As a bit of background: the reason I go to Flinders Petrie is because his world is the one I know--he's an imperial scientist who corresponds a lot with those who work in Africa in the same era, which is also the era/region/subject I work on as a historian. But this question was one of many in the era of Biblical and Classical archaeology that many dwelt upon in the late 19th century.  He was, like almost all such figures, deeply prejudiced and invested in Empire to one degree or another, which has various effects on their work that we must read around.]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=sx0GAAAAQAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "2khnt8", "title": "Are there any reliable sources regarding the nature and extent of slavery in West Africa before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade?", "selftext": "The Atlantic slave trade is well documented, but I'm trying to find more information regarding the nature of slavery BEFORE the Europeans began participating in it extensively.  It seems like there are a lot of conflicting viewpoints from various historians regarding the extent to which contact with Europeans was driving the slave trade, or if the European slave trade market served as an outlet for trade that was already going on.\n\nAs a follow up to that, to what extent were West Africans willing participants in the slave trade with European partners?  Or was it more of a case of domination of the Europeans that led to the burgeoning slave trade, rather than a mutually beneficial economic relationship?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2khnt8/are_there_any_reliable_sources_regarding_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cllh46a"], "score": [3], "text": ["Slave trading was already going on in West Africa by the time Portuguese Explorers began going on slave raids into the Senegambia coast in 1444. Keep in mind the \"slave trade\" we think of today, with a well assigned system, rules and way of treating slaves already in place. Slaves where gained by raids and through war, to which they where often put out to work, though treated much better than the Europeans did, most slaves where used as servants and used for manual labor, though given much better nourishment and treatment.\n\nMany slaves would be treated as part of the family once enslaved, and would be allowed to eat and stay in the house of whoever family they where with. Slaves would be traded though, usually to lend off their talents or to just gain money.\n\nWhen the Portuguese arrived in 1444 they sent out slave raids on the Senegambia coast, somewhat successfully until West African (Mali) forces began naval scrimmages against the portuguese vessels, often using much lower quality boats, yet, due to their skill with poison arrows where able to put the Portuguese in an increasingly tough situation until in 1456 they send Courtier Diogo Gomes to establish peace between Portugal and the Senegambia coast ruling Mali Empire (though the empire was in its decline, soon to transform into the Songhai empire)\n\nin 1462, after peace was established, Portugal shifted its focus from raids and battles to trade with the Africans. Still desiring the original recourse they came for, slaves, they heightened demand greatly. The West Africans, seeking the valuable European goods began heightening their slave trade, taking slaves from rival nations and villages to be sold to the Europeans.\n\nThe Africans (those not being enslaved) and Europeans both prospered off of this, West Africans became wealthy off of the trade of rival nations and slave trade blossomed as a great new economic tool was established. \n\nIn short, the modern thought that Africans where \"Enslaving their own\" is incorrect. Slaves came from enemy and warring clans and nations, as separate culturally and individually as, say, Vietnam and China. This meant west african nations could now profit from war and battle with their rivals, and that they did. They where quite willing to trade with European partners due to the great goods the Europeans offered, and they traded slaves by their own free will. It was like any other business in a sense. Slaves already owned where traded to Europeans and more where captured after that. It was a mutually beneficial economic relationship, though it damaged the relations in west Africa greatly, throwing the nations into a time of constant tension.\n\n---\n\nSources:\n\n[The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa | by Patricia McKissack and Fredrick McKissack] (_URL_1_)\n\n[The African Slave Trade | By Basil Davidson](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/African-Slave-Trade-Basil-Davidson/dp/0316174386", "http://www.amazon.com/Royal-Kingdoms-Ghana-Mali-Songhay/dp/0805042598/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1414292037&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Mali+%28Empire%29"]]}
{"q_id": "1emny8", "title": "What was the American reaction to the Argentine invasion of the Falklands?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1emny8/what_was_the_american_reaction_to_the_argentine/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca1sinh", "ca1sv2a"], "score": [16, 2], "text": ["While this is not my area of expertise at all, IIRC the US was certainly less-than-thrilled to have to choose a side in that conflict. While with Gr. Britain the US had the \"Special Relationship\" and long-standing partnership, the Argentine military Junta was a nominal ally in the region. Furthermore, the British invasion was technically a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which, believe it or not, remains in effect and has rarely been violated (the last time was in the 1860s). Secretary of State Alexander Haig, while seeking a negotiated truce, even suggested backing Argentina. [source](_URL_0_)\n\nUltimately of course the US backed Britain, based on their long-standing relationship and hostility to the military dictatorship in Argentina, but this period was one of serious turbulence in US-UK relations, since the next year the US invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth nation under Queen Elizabeth II, which in the UK caused similar hand-wringing as the Falklands Crisis had in the US. It was not until later in the decade that the famous Reagan-Thatcher partnership took off, with all the attendant consequences of that relationship. ", "According to [this source](_URL_0_) the US sold sidewinder missiles to the Brits and after the conflict flogged us some cheap Phantoms. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577313852502105454.html"], ["http://www.academia.edu/367903/Significant_and_Surprising_American_Assistance_to_Great_Britain_in_the_Falklands_War"]]}
{"q_id": "5ptcez", "title": "How did copyright violation come to be known as \"piracy\"?", "selftext": "This dates back to at least the 18th century, when actual pirates were still a real problem to plenty of English speakers. So who first used this metaphor? Was it seen as excessive of exaggerated at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ptcez/how_did_copyright_violation_come_to_be_known_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcu8fpz"], "score": [4], "text": ["The term \"pirate\" has long been used in a very broad sense for a private, illegal activity. \"Pirate buses\" existed in the 19th century (illegal, unlicensed, privately-run buses), and \"pirate radio\" in the 20th. The analogy here is about \"literary piracy\" or \"print piracy.\" The terminology in English came shortly after stories of pirates were becoming quite famous, and was applied broadly to many areas of illegal and unsanctioned activity. In the case of its earliest uses (print and pharmaceuticals, i.e. \"patent medicines\" and their counterfeiting) it was meant to imply that the \"pirates\" (who were the _producers_ of counterfeit products, not the _consumers_ of them like we think of it today with regards to the Internet) were outsiders to the correct social order, an order that needed to be defended.\n\nAnd it should be noted: the question to ask here is when the term _copyright_ became known. Because _that_ was the late-comer, it is a _response_ to piracy, an establishment of a legal right where one did not exist previously, and did not show up until the late 1730s. Intellectual property was a legal invention meant to \"protect\" printers and authors against piracy. \n\nA great book on the subject: Adrian Johns, _Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates_ (University of Chicago Press, 2009), esp. chapter 3 for the early history of the term."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ox0wn", "title": "What happened to Arianism in North Africa?", "selftext": "I've done a bit of research on the subject (just a bit), but am at a loss as to what happened to Arianism and Arian followers after the Vandals were taken over by the Byzantines.\n\nHere are some things I know/were led to believe:\n\n-Many Germanic Kingdoms following the Roman Empire were Arian.\n\n-Most Arian Kings had converted to something else by 700 AD\n\n-The Vandals were rather Zealous, actively trying to spread Arianism in their own kingdom and abroad, and remained Arian (with some exceptions) pretty much up until 534\n\nThinking about it, I'm not certain what Christian beliefs were common in North Africa between 534 and, say, 734. The area went from Arian Vandal control, to Orthodox Byzantine (though I know the schism hadn't officially happened yet), and then to Sunni Caliphate. In my research, it seems that after the Muslim Conquest the majority of Christians in North Africa answered to The Pope. But even so, I haven't found much information about what happened, demographically, in those 200 years.\n\nSo, in short, how long did it take for Arianism in North Africa to truly die out, and where in that area were the final vestiges of the faith?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ox0wn/what_happened_to_arianism_in_north_africa/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmrao9d", "cmrd67q"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I would look at the Ecumenical Councils, particularly the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Second Council of Constantinople in 502. The First Council of Nicaea anathematized Arianism, making it pretty unpopular for fourth century Christians to harbor any sort of Arianism. This is when the decline really started. Around the year 400, Theophilius, along with Jerome and Epiphanius of Salamis, went on a campaign to rid the Mediterranean of Arianism and Origenism (metaphysics in Christianity), opting for Scripture-based Christianity. Because they had Church authority at their back, they were able to really stomp out a lot of it by the time they were both formally anathematized (again) at Constantinople II.\n\nI study the history of theology and deal mostly with the application of Greek thought onto Christianity, so my knowledge in this area is somewhat limited, but if I understand correctly, the Arians were pretty unpopular to both Latin and Eastern Christians and the Caliphate didn't really like them too much, either, so they were kind of a minority from the fourth century until they eventually disappeared.\n\nIt's also worth noting that the term Arianism became pejorative after Nicaea I, so the labeling of some group or individual as an \"Arian\" might not be as accurate as we might like...\n\nI hope this helps.", "There are several clues to the presence of Arianism after the Byzantine reconquest, but we can say nothing definitive about their popularity or influence. Despite North Africa being a relatively wealthy province, we have very few literary sources from that region. I think the only major sources written in Africa in the Byzantine period are a chronicle by Victor of Tunnuna, a poem by Corippus and some letters by Maximus Confessor. They were all written by Nicene Christians, and Victor and Maximus both fulminated against heretics, but their targets were not Arians, but the Byzantine state for making compromises with Miaphysite heretics, which was an issue that arose out of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Indeed, if we are to look at the Byzantine period as a whole, it would appear that North Africa was firmly Chalcedonian in allegiance, which caused a whole host of issues with the emperors Justinian I (527-565) and Constans II (641-668), the two emperors who tried the hardest to unite the divided Christian communities within their empire (spoiler alert, both failed). \n\nSo what do we actually know about African Arians? Apparently soon after the reconquest of Africa Justinian was keen to keep the locals happy, which meant the toleration of Arianism. Nicene Christians however responded in force and held a synod condemning this, demanding that Arians (along with Donatists and Jews) should not be allowed to hold public office. I'm not sure how to interpret this, since we have no idea about how many Arians there were even under the Vandals and this may just well be a rhetorical thing from Nicenes eager to secure their own position after being persecuted for decades (maybe, the extent of the Arian persecution of Nicenes is I think also debatable). In any case, Justinian responded with a law in 535 that accepted their demands. \n\nThere was also a mutiny by Byzantine soldiers in 536 that was possibly sparked by Arianism, as allegedly Byzantine soldiers who married Vandal women thought that they were being cheated out of their property (Justinian had issued a law that returned land to anyone deprived of property during the Vandalic period). This didn't involve just the Vandals though; many Byzantine soldiers were Arians too, as the army often recruited auxiliaries from outside the empire. This was a practise followed until at least Tiberius II (574-582) and their Arian faith was tolerated, albeit uneasily during periods of religious tension, so it is possible that Arian soldiers of all ethnic backgrounds found the discrimination against the once-powerful Arian Church distasteful, causing a military revolt in North Africa. As for the mutiny, it triggered a series of revolts in Africa for the next decade, but there were no more mentions of Arianism. Again I'm not too sure of what this means. It could be that the sources were silent on this because they tried to airbrush the Arians out of history, or it may simply because Arianism had lost its prominence in a world dominated by Nicenes; the dominant theological debate in the sixth century had shifted to that of Chalcedonianism versus Miaphysitism after all.\n\nArianism did live on in other regions of the empire though. As I said, there were Arian Gothic soldiers in Constantinople under Tiberius II, whilst Byzantine Italy had been invaded by the Lombards in 568, who were a mixture of Arians, Nicenes and pagans. Ravenna, the bureaucratic centre of Byzantine Italy, still had Arian churches until the 560s, suggesting that local Arians reached an accommodation with the new regime. So even without any literary evidence, I think I would be correct to say that many Arians remained in Africa - it was simply impossible for them to disappear so quickly, especially as Donatism, a heresy with an even older pedigree, survived in North Africa until at least the time of Gregory the Great (590-604). As for how long they lasted for, I don't think we'll ever know, though archaeologists are always finding more stuff, so we might be able to have a better idea about when and where they flourished in the future.\n\nNow to address a few of /u/DenysTheAreopagite's points:\n\nYou are right that the Ecumenical Councils were important, but they didn't really matter with regards to Arianism after Constantinople I. Ephesus dealt with Nestorius' followers, Chalcedon with Ephesus' consequences and Constantinople II with the fallout from Chalcedon. Each of these councils dealt with issues within the Eastern Roman Empire, and as Arianism was never a big movement in the east after Theodosius I, it wasn't a priority there. In the west though, Arianism continued to be a force to be reckoned with, as aside from the Vandals, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Burgundians all followed this brand of Christianity - even the Franks may have experimented with it, as there are grounds to doubt the Frankish claim that Clovis converted from paganism straight to Nicene Christianity. The Ostrogoths and the Vandals were defeated by the Byzantines, but the Visigoths only converted under King Reccared I (586-601) after his father had persecuted the Nicenes. The Lombards meanwhile were partially Arian until the eighth century. You are probably correct to say that the Arians were a minority in the west, but it definitely wasn't a slow decline from the fourth century onwards - by the end of the fifth century Arian kingdoms dominated Western Europe, with nary a Nicene king in sight.\n\nYou are also right that Arian isn't the best word to use to describe their version of Christianity. I know that Homoian describes the brand of Christianity that Valentinian II (375-392) followed, but I still haven't found out what the appropriate term for Arians in the fifth century and beyond is yet. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know! :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4mzcv2", "title": "Was Hannibal Barca black?", "selftext": "[The History Channel's 'Barbarians Rising'](_URL_0_) portrays Hannibal as having a darker complexion than I am used to seeing him typically depicted.\n\nThis video is being spammed around reddit by a user claiming this is part of a Jewish war on white history (obviously ridiculous), and saying this portrayal is akin to depicting a Viking as black. \n\nI understand race is a social construct and 'Blackness' as we know it today did not exist in the 3rd century BCE. But in terms of complexation, how justifiable is *Barbarians Rising*'s depiction of Hannibal? Is it really comparable to having a black Viking? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4mzcv2/was_hannibal_barca_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8peit5", "d3zijf1", "d4kkomk"], "score": [2, 84, 2], "text": ["Coins.\nWe have coins which are apparently presenting the image of Hamilcar (Hannibal's Father) and Hasdrubal (Hannibal's brother.) The coin presented does not appear to favor the features of either. Suggesting that the old coin depicts Hannibal simply because the back depicts and elephant seems like wishful thinking. The coin, apparently with Hannibal's Father's features also has an elephant on the back. Consider the impressive nature of the elephant, the animal need not reference the elephants taken by Hannibal into the Alps. His brother-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair, has a bust which also doesn't seem to be a match for the coin the video suggests depicts Hannibal. \n\nHamilcar ( _URL_3_ )\nElephant ( _URL_5_ ) \nHasdrubal ( _URL_3_ )\nHasdrubal the Fair ( _URL_2_ ) \nSuggested Hannibal Coin ( _URL_0_ ) \n\n\n\n\nWords:\nThen we have words. Apparently, the type of \"African\" the History Channel has decided to use would have been called Ethiopian. This is a sub-Saharan, not someone from Carthage. \n\n\"Misconceptions about African Blacks in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Specialists and Afrocentrists\" (Frank M. Snowden Jr.; Arion Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter, 1997), pp. 28-50)\n_URL_1_ (under section title Vol 4.3 Essays)\n_URL_4_\n\n\"The only Greek or Latin word, and I emphasize only, that most frequently referred to a black or Negroid type from the sixth century BC onward is Aithiops or Aethiops (Ethiopian), literally a person with a burnt face. These Negroid peoples, who exhibited various shades of pigmentation and whose facial features encompassed a variety of types, came from either the south of Egypt (Kush, Ethiopia, Nubia) or the interior of northwest Africa. Ancient sources also differentiate clearly between people who lived along the coastal areas of northwest Africa (i.e., modern Libya to Morocco) and those who inhabited the interior. \"Aethiops,\" it should be emphasized, with few exceptions, was applied neither to Egyptians nor to inhabitants of northwest Africa, such as Moors, Numidians, or Carthaginians.\" \n\nInterestingly enough, the author also talks directly about Hannibal. \n\n\"All the inhabitants of northwest Africa have been and are black. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, for example, has been described as a black and, like many of the blacks in Afrocentric studies, appears as such in Rogers's publications. In his discussion of Hannibal, Rogers states that the Carthaginians were descendants of the Phoenicians, a Negroid people, and that until the rise of the doctrine of white superiority Hannibal was traditionally known as a black man. Van Sertima accepts this myth; refers to Carthaginians as Africoid peoples; publishes some illustrations of coins depicting Negroes and elephants; and, though he cites no proof, states that these coins indicate the Africoid ancestry of the Carthaginians (misspelled four times on two pages). Coins with realistic portraits of Hannibal's family, the Barcids, however, depict them as obviously non-Negroid. Furthermore, there is no classical source which describes the Carthaginians who came from Phoenicia at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea as Ethiopians, i.e., Negroes or blacks.\"\n\nIt appears that we cannot ascribe race to Hannibal other than Phonecian. Also, this scholar's article seems to have neatly referenced the curiosity of the coins that my own research on Wikipedia suggested. \n\n", "Apart from the \"war on white history\" which I won't even dignify with recognition, I'll start by saying that there is no surviving physical description of Hannibal Barca, so if History Channel wants to depict Hannibal as being darker skinned they're free to; plus I'm more concerned with their classification of Carthaginians as \"Barbarians\" as at the time of the Punic wars, Carthage was a much older and more cosmopolitan city than Rome! If anything, the Romans were the \"Barbarians\"!\n\nPatrick Hunt at UCL affirmed in a paper in 2014 that not only are we unclear of Hannibal's ethnicity, it can't even be framed within modern concepts of race and ethnicity. \n\nThere might be coins depicting [Hannibal's father minted in Carthaginian colonies in Iberia](_URL_0_) which we can use to get an idea of what he looked like (we also have coins depicting his brother [Hasdrubal](_URL_1_)). But as for his skin color? Hunt affirms that the Barcids were said to descend from Phoenician aristocracy, but affirming that Hannibal would look like the inhabitants of modern-day Lebanon might be problematic; as they had been living in Africa for centuries by the time he came around. Conversely, we have absolutely no indication as to what extent the Barcids or other members of the Carthaginian aristocracy intermarried with the indigenous Garamantes (the predecessors of the Berbers). My guess? He probably looked something like Zinedine Zidane with a beard, as Zidane is an ethnic Berber. \n\nEdit: I don't even remember where I first read Hunt's analysis, [this is all I could find written by him](_URL_2_) that pretty much sums everything up. \n\n", "Legend has it that queen dido, alyssa as we call her, came as a phenician refugee to today tunisia. (My country) to create carthage. She was welcomed by the numedian inhabitants and told she could have a land as big as the skin of a bull. So she threaded the skin of a bull and created carthage. More realistically speaking phenicians came to North africa to create an outpost. They were granted land by the numedian inhabitants and there was carthage. Phenicians created outposts all over the Mediterranean up to Barcelona.\nSo at the basis we know original inhabitants were numedian but carthage was a phenician outpost. Carthage thrived and after the fall of its home country Tyr. BecAmerican a city state of its own. Carthage had outposts all over the Mediterranean from sickly to Spain.\nCarthaginians didn't mix much with the local people. They kept their phenician language and writing and customs (including child savrifices). They were traders and owned the Mediterranean which is why Rome hated them so much. They were not warriors in nature but when the punic wars started with Rome they had to recruit an army. It is known that carthaginian armies were not made up of carthaginians but of people from the surrounding areas. Hence the carthaginians army was mainly made up of Libyans numedians iberians and Gauls each outpost hired the locals. Only the generals and higher ranking people were carthaginian. Including hannibal. Hannibal is considered to come from the carthaginian nobility. His father was a famous general hamilcar. Who spend his life in iberia. Which is why most historians will say that Hannibal mother was iberian. Carthaginians interacted more with iberians than with surrounding populations. If you want more information on his family look up hamilcar, hasdrubal, mago. At certain points through history, the surrounding populations, numedians, sometimes sided with carthage and sometimes with Rome. Until the numedian unified came along. The berber king Massinissa. You can research himethods and see what he looked like. Tunisians today are very close to carthage (that's where I live) other north africans mainly Algerians are closer to massinissa as the berber king. At the end of the day we are all north African.\nThe difference is if you were from carthage you were phenician (lebanese) if you were not carthaginian you were numedian berber. But we claim both. So where were these people from? One thing we know. Phenicians were not black Africans but neither were the numedians. Today in North africa we have what's left of all this mixture. The kabyle berbers. They didn't mix with anybody. They have their pure north African language and customs. They have nothing g to do with Arab invaders or European colonisers. They are just north African.\nAnd finally thanks to genetic testing we know where we came from. _URL_0_ As you can see the north African gene has been there for 30,000 years. People think that africa was all subsaharan africans but the Sahara desert created a boundary that was thicker than the sea. 30,000 years ago Asiatics decided to go there rather than into Europe. And they settled as a caucasoid people. After that people came and left between the Arabs the Europeans etc.. but north africans are still the same. 2 conclusions to this; north africans are not white because of Europeans invasions North Africans are not black either the genetic markers are clear\nWe are who we are because we settled there thousands of years ago. And no hannibal was not black."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfIe9P13X8s"], "answers_urls": [["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PSI6ERA5zfA/T_T_3Y231oI/AAAAAAAABOE/-qzGcWP7GIc/s1600/Hannibal.jpg", "http://www.bu.edu/arion/archive/volume-4/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasdrubal_the_Fair#/media/File:AsdrubalBusto.jpg", "http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/images/hamilcar.jpg", "http://www.michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabble/Snowden%20Misconceptions.pdf", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Dishekel_hispano-cartagin%C3%A9s-2.jpg"], ["http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/images/hamilcar.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Hasdrubal_coin.jpg", "http://www.britannica.com/topic/Hannibals-ethnicity-and-physical-appearance-2020107"], ["https://www.upf.edu/cexs/news/africansdavid.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4qw7mf", "title": "What was the motivation behind American Indian boarding schools?", "selftext": "I have heard on many occasions that American Indian boarding schools forced native children to adopt American culture, and leave their tribal identity behind.  This is often expressed as a colonial effort to peacefully destroy the Native American tribal identity, sometimes with the term \"cultural genocide\" used.  \n\nAs someone that was raised Catholic, who always liked reading stories about saints and historical converts, I know that missionary work is generally portrayed as an enlightening and uplifting effort, with purely wholesome intentions. \n\nWhat I want to know is, what was the actual intention of these schools? Was it us attempting to help the American Indians get a real education to help them advance their own society? A way to destroy them culturally? The better alternative to outright extinction from repeated wars? Or was it the way we would \"make up\" for past instances of violence and resettlement? \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qw7mf/what_was_the_motivation_behind_american_indian/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4x2lpm"], "score": [4], "text": ["Thank you for asking this question. Far too often I see people making the boarding schools out to be something they are not.\n\nFirst, let me inform you that they were, for the most part, **not** peaceful. The actual intention of these schools was as you stated in your first paragraph: a colonial effort to destroy the Native American tribal identity. It was to force assimilation into American society and the churches, including the Catholics, were often instrumental in this process. The BIA own ups to this at the end of [their FAQ page by saying](_URL_5_) \"The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 introduced the teaching of Indian history and culture in BIA schools, which contrasted with the federal policy at the time of acculturating and assimilating Indian people through the BIA boarding school system.\" (Third paragraph from the bottom.) And even though the IRA of 1934 tried to stop this, the horrible boarding school experienced continued on for a number of decades. Even today, many natives still suffer from the time spent in those schools.\n\nNot only is this cultural genocide, [but it is legitimate genocide as well.](_URL_9_)\n\nThese schools did numerous things in order to erase the Indian culture of their students. Indian children were forcibly sent to these schools after the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Daniel Browning, decided that Indian parents did not have the right to choose their child's education in 1896. Upon arrival, children were stripped of their native dress and given western clothing. They were given Christian names and were forbidden from speaking in their native tongue. If they did, they were beat. They were not allowed to practice their traditions or religion, but had to follow Christianity. Often they were severely punished for even the slightest error. They had to cut their hair and have a Christian style. This short paragraph does not do justice in describing what happened. And all of these happened often at the hand of Christian teachers, whether they be Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, or whatever.\n\n[**Children died at these schools.**](_URL_8_)\n\nWhat was the motivation? [I speak about the role Christianity played in another comment here.](_URL_4_) Christianity was used in multiple ways, but the goal was the same as the U.S. Government's goal: assimilate the Indian heathen. For the churches, it was so they could saved. It was to fix the so called \"Indian Problem.\" We can verify the motivation by looking at the words of figures during this time.\n\nThe main guiding principles used for the schools came from one man. His name is Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School.\n\n > \u201cKill the Indian, and save the man.\u201d\n\n[--U.S. Capt. Richard H. Pratt, 1879, on the Education of Native Americans](_URL_6_)\n\nAs put by this article that speaks on the boarding schools, [\"Carlisle Indian Industrial School was created in Carlisle, Pennsylvania under the direction of Richard Henry Pratt, a former Army officer. In a 1977 American Indian Law Review article, \u201cThe Evolution of the Termination Policy,\u201d Charles Wilkinson and Eric Biggs give a brief insight into Pratt\u2019s opinion on Indians; they recount that he once stated that \u201c\u2018a great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.'\u201d\"](_URL_7_)\n\n[The Meriam Report of 1928](_URL_1_) exposed the high rate of neglect and abuse going on in these boarding schools. Evidently, these Christians were not so Christ-like. On pages 397-398, it makes these remarks about the role of Christian education in these schools (bold mine):\n\n > \"Pioneer Indian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, were conspicuous for their ability to live with the Indian people, know the lives of individual Indians, and build on what they found. This is the reason, doubtless, why some of the best missionary education still seen among Indians is the direct continuation of their work. Judged educationally, current religious efforts among Indians fall down at precisely this point; **knowing little of Indian religion or life, many missionaries begin on the erroneous theory that it is first of all necessary to destroy what the Indian has, rather than to use what he has as a starting point for something else.**\"\n\nAnd yet, Christianity is what was beaten into these children throughout their boarding school experience. [You can listen to natives who survived these schools and hear their experiences with your own ears. They suffered at the hands of Christians.](_URL_2_)\n\nSo, to break it down:\n\n > What I want to know is, what was the actual intention of these schools?\n\nAssimilation and extermination.\n\n > Was it us attempting to help the American Indians get a real education to help them advance their own society?\n\nThese schools did offer practical education in western ways. There are some reports of native children benefiting. However, the majority did not have a good experience. In the end, it wasn't to \"help them advance their own society.\" It was to suit the agenda of the U.S. It was to conquer a people they did not want. It was to \"solve\" the Indian Problem.\n\n > A way to destroy them culturally?\n\nWhen you ban their entire way of life and force them to live by your ways, yes.\n\n > The better alternative to outright extinction from repeated wars?\n\nThey were already doing that. Fortunately, we were resilient enough to cause some people to change their minds and others to just change their tactics.\n\n > Or was it the way we would \"make up\" for past instances of violence and resettlement?\n\nThese schools were one of the worst instances of violence and resettlement. If you want a good paper that provides *many* resources to study this further, I suggest these papers [here](_URL_0_) and [here.](_URL_3_)\n\n**Edit:** Added an additional reference point from the Meriam Report of 1928."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&amp;context=chc_theses", "http://www.narf.org/nill/documents/merriam/o_meriam_chapter9_part2_education.pdf", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tiQB8gt5g", "http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED311990.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4psafl/panel_ama_empire_colonialism_and_postcolonialism/d4o5nsv", "http://www.bia.gov/FAQs/index.htm", "http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/", "http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/30/bias-impact-indian-education-education-bad-education-75083", "http://www.mintpressnews.com/american-indian-boarding-schools-a-legacy-of-pain-enters-a-phase-for-healing/205433/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/wiki/faq/genocide#wiki_1..29_what_is_classified_as_.22genocide.3F.22"]]}
{"q_id": "48kfx5", "title": "Historiography of Early Modern German Executioners", "selftext": "Hi all!\n\nI'm currently researching [Franz Schmidt,](_URL_0_) the executioner of Nuremberg between 1578 and 1617. Having read a diary he left behind of his executions and mutilations I am ready to dig into the historiography surrounding crime, punishment, and execution in early-modern Germany but I'm finding it somewhat difficult to get started. (I've found plenty of info on crime and punishment, but it's rather late for what I'm looking for-- late middle ages to the early part of early modern)\n\nI will soon begin reading Richard van D\u00fclmen's \"Theater des Schreckens,\" but I fear that this will put my German close to its limit. Are there any English-language classics about this subject? I'll take anything on crime, criminals, punishments, or executioners you could recommend me.\n\nWorks I'll already be reading include: \n\n*The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century* by Joel Harrington\n\nand\n\n*Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany* by Kathy Stuart\n\nThanks a lot for your help, I'm a bit out of my usual field here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48kfx5/historiography_of_early_modern_german_executioners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0kcvb4"], "score": [3], "text": ["Harrington's major secondary sources are nearly all in German (except Stuart). Still would be worth a perusal.\n\nSome stuff I can think of offhand in English:\n\n* Ulinka Rublack, *The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany* - bibliography is primarily German on Germany, but supplemented with English sources on Italy and England\n* Richard van D\u00fclmen, *Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany* (will not be as up-to-date as the 2010 edition of Theater des Schreckens, but hey, English!)\n\nAnd then work on specific crimes: sodomy, banishment, witchcraft, infanticide - using terms like those plus \"early modern germany\" in your searches will help flesh out your bibliography!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schmidt_\\(executioner\\)"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7n52i1", "title": "What do you feel are the best books on modern Orientalism, other than Edward Said's? Also on that point, what is your view on his book?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n52i1/what_do_you_feel_are_the_best_books_on_modern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["drza90d"], "score": [11], "text": ["Among historians, Said's critiques were generally taken to heart, and actually a lot of historians were already working to correct the field along the lines of Said's criticisms before Said even published *Orientalism*. The introductory chapter of Marshall Hodgson's *The Venture of Islam* (published in 1974, four years before *Orientalism*) jumps to mind.\n\nThe result is that I don't think you really can speak of a \"modern Orientalism\" (I assume you mean contemporary) after Said in the historiography of Islamic studies.  Oriental Studies Departments (now often Islamic or Arabic studies departments) are far less white, male, and protestant than they would have been when Said was writing 40 years ago, for example. \n\nYou can certainly find books after Said that take much of the same approach to Orientalism and colonialism more generally. Timothy Mitchell's *Colonizing Egypt* jumps to mind.\n\nThere are, however, elements of Said's criticisms that I think have been rejected. His views on 19th and 20th century philology are misguided. However much Edward William Lane's views may have been incorrect, or his work misused by other's, *Lane's Lexicon* remains the best available classical English-Arabic dictionary 150 years later, for instance. The accusation that he ignored German Orientalism also hits home.\n\nThe result is that I think his greatest ongoing influence isn't in history at all, but as a literary critic, which is really what he was, a professor of Literature. So there are plenty of articles (scholarly and otherwise) written each year about Orientalism in contemporary popular culture, but they're not really about history or written by historians.\n\nIn general, the result is that I don't think Said is all that useful for studying Middle Eastern history. It's good to be aware of his arguments, and to think about them especially when you read older, sometimes explicitly colonialist sources, but unless you're really into Foucault and Derrida and post-colonialist literary theory and that kind of thing, I'm not sure Said is all that interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62lfsf", "title": "How much time, money, and effort, went into making the elaborate clothes of the Marie Antoinette period?", "selftext": "The late 18th Century era of French royalty is known for it's extremely elaborate, ornate, and arguably almost decadently fancy clothes such as the famed powdered wigs, the huge voluminous  [robe \u00e0 la fran\u00e7aise](_URL_0_) best associated with Marie Antoinette, make up, guilded shoes, ruffled shirts and robes. They were also known for being extremely trendy and constantly updating and changing the styles, cuts, materials of these clothes and often had numerous pairs of shoes and outfits.  Because of this ostentatiousness some have argued that it was one of the sources of anger and resentment that helped fuel the French Revolution.\n\nOf course everyone focuses on the end product, but few know about all the work it took to make them, the costs of the work, and the number of people in the clothing industry that went into making them, which is what I would like to know more about.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62lfsf/how_much_time_money_and_effort_went_into_making/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfo8921"], "score": [23], "text": ["\"Marguerite!\" Nicholas, Comte d'Ogeras, stalked into his wife's dressing room. She did not pause, continuing to apply pomatum as he came to stand next to her toilette. \"Marguerite, what is this bill?\"\n\n\"*Je n'ai aucune id\u00e9e*,\" she murmured. \"You ought to show it to me before you demand that I explain it. It's most unjust of you to expect me to describe a little piece of paper that you've crumpled up in your hand.\"\n\nWith some effort, Nicholas smoothed it out, then held it up to the light. \"From Bertin's workshop \u2014 for one of your *robes \u00e0 la turque* to be trimmed, she is asking for two hundred twenty-four *livres*. Two hundred twenty-four! Trimmings of blonde lace, pink and white satin, and pearls \u2014 rows and rows of pearls! Sixteen *livres* for more blasted blonde lace on the gown! And fifty-six \u2014 *fifty-six* \u2014 for those little ruffles on your elbows!\"^1\n\nFinishing her task, Marguerite suddenly swung around to meet Nicholas's eyes. \"And?\" she demanded. \"I am not buying more than anyone else in our circle. Do you want me to look like a mere *bourgeoise*?\"\n\n\"Marguerite, these are excessive sums! Rose Bertin may be the queen's *modiste*, but her work is not worth so much.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is! You know nothing of fashion, obviously!\"\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen the comtesse's striped velvet turque had arrived at *Le Grand Mogol*, it made very little impact on the majority of Rose Bertin's workers. Masterpieces of their art came in and out every day, and while one particularly hungry *modiste* might feel a pang of jealousy over the fact that just adding some ribbons and spangles to a worn gown could grant her employer more money than she herself would see in months, for the most part they were simply used to the finery they handled every day.\n\nJeanne was the hand assigned to sew a new lace edging to the gown. The work went fast, as she gathered the strip down the center and attached it as she went, although her tablemate, Marie, managed to finish the entire cap she was making in the same time.\n\n\"That looks very nice,\" Marie noted, snipping the end of a linen thread. \"What else is to be done with it?\"\n\n\"Just some pearls put on over the satin bands, I think. That's Annette's department, though \u2014 she has the eyes for it. I thought I'd do the satin petticoat next, but I can't see where it got to.\" She stood up and gazed around the room, at the other sets of girls working at tables strewn with bits and pieces of ribbon and gauze.\n\n\"Lise was given it, I think. Should I put a second set of ruffles on this?\"\n\n\"If you like, but it's fine as it is.\"\n\n\u2014 \n\nThe *robe \u00e0 la turque* had been made months before in a workroom on the second floor of a shop that was much less well-regarded than *Le Grand Mogol*, a fact which never ceased to irritate the proprietress. The *ouvri\u00e8res* sewed at a table in front of the one window, making use of the daylight as they bent over to make rows of neat, tiny backstitches through vibrant velvet and linen.\n\nDespite the technical skill Mme Oudot's workers required in order to put together gowns and caracos of varying styles, it was their lot to be considered only artisans, while Bertin and her ilk were \"artists\" whose mere suggestion and addition of excess frippery was worth, financially speaking, as much as the hours her girls spent at their tasks. It didn't matter that they had to fit a bodice to a woman, matching the height of her waist and the fullness of her bust, making allowances for thin arms and sloped shoulders, or that their work had to be strong enough to allow a gown to be worn over and over while the modistes' work was basted on and ripped off after a season.\n\nIt was true that the *marchandes des modes* weren't allowed to have a guild and weren't promised the same kind of legal protections as the seamstresses \u2026 but one of those protections was supposed to be that the *marchandes* had to be married to and working with husbands who were mercers! And was Bertin married, let alone to a mercer or even a draper?^2\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen Marguerite visited the mercer's shop, the owner himself waited on her, which was most gratifying.\n\n\"*Madame la comtesse*!\" He wore very good selections from his own stock of silks, which was also pleasing \u2014 how could you be served well in matters of fashion by someone who dressed poorly? \"What sort of goods can I bring out for you today?\"\n\n\"I am in need of some new winter clothing before the snows hit,\" she announced. \"Perhaps something in that so-fashionable canary yellow.\"\n\n\"Ah, the yellow? In a satin, I suppose \u2014 so suitable for the season.\"\n\nMarguerite nodded as an assistant brought forth some samples. \"And some in puce, perhaps, to contrast with it.\" The mercer nodded, and more bolts of fabric were brought out to compare. \"Yes, I'll have these two. The yellow will make for an excellent pair of shoes as well. I don't suppose you have anything else to tempt me today, do you?\"\n\nHe looked around the shop, then leaned in conspiratorially. \"*Madame*, something very special has just come in, and I have set it aside for one of my most discerning customers.\" Intrigued, she smiled, and he sent the assistant to the back room with a wave. \"The only thing better for winter than satin \u2014 a most extraordinary velvet striped with pink and black. And the pink just so happens to happens to *exactly* match another satin I've got in stock. Perhaps for a redingote and petticoat \u2026 or something more exotic?\"\n\n1. Actual prices/items from a bill from Rose Bertin to the Comtesse d'Ogeras, February 1786, as reprinted in the 1912 edition of *Galerie des Modes*.\n\n2. For more on the sewing guilds and regulations, check out *Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France* and *Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France* by Clare Haru Crowston. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack-back_gown"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4t9zm9", "title": "What were the \"mystery religions\" of antiquity, specifically those practiced in the Greco-Roman world?", "selftext": "I've heard quite a bit about the Eleusinian Mysteries, wherein the participants would reenact the mythical Rape of Persephone, focused on the eventual salvation by symbolically \"emerging from the underworld\" and experiencing the move from Winter to Spring. I've read about it a bit in Carl Jung's \"Man and His Symbols\", so I'm fascinated by it as well, on more than just historical terms. I hear many a Roman, including the handful of Grecophile emperors like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius would participate in the mysteries.\n\nMy question is, were there any other mysteries that we know about? What did they focus on? I just came across the wiki page for the Mithraic Mysteries, focused on the Persian sun god Mithra. In my reading, especially about the Eleusinian Mysteries, they are analyzed to be ancient people's way of \"visceral, tangible\" worship, where one can individually participate in the themes and morals of the myths, but did ancient people see them that way? Were they taken uber-seriously like they are portrayed, or did people just use them as an excuse to party, get drunk on some wine, and bone one another?\n\nBut mainly, I'd just love to know about any other mystery. I'm trying to compile a list for myself.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t9zm9/what_were_the_mystery_religions_of_antiquity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5fshln", "d5fyqx3", "d5g9k88"], "score": [33, 9, 7], "text": ["It's difficult to say anything definitive about mystery cults compared to other ancient religions like Christianity or Judaism, because these cults did not leave much documentary evidence behind. The mystery was a central part of the ritual, and so we have passing comments from ancients about them and archaeological evidence from shrines, ritual sites, etc. So, in the case of Mithraea, scholars believe that (in the absence of literary evidence, which historians tend to value over archaeological evidence, but that's a post for another day) this cult found widespread acceptance among the Roman military, since mithraea are found near military camps and fortresses. \n\nI'll add a few mystery cults to your list: the cult of Magna Mater (Cybele) at Rome, the cult of Orpheus, the cult of Bacchus/Dionysius, and the cult of Isis. I'll add in detail about the first one, since that's the one I know most about; hopefully others can chime in as they see fit. \n\nThe cult of Magna Mater as it was celebrated at Rome was due to the Second Carthaginian War. Traditionally, the Romans encountered a series of prodigies (such as falling rocks) and decided to consult the Sibylline Oracles. The Oracle informed them that the \"Idaean mother\" could help defeat Hannibal, who was currently terrorizing the Italian countryside. The stone which represented Cybele was imported from the east, the Romans ended up defeating Hannibal and Carthage, and Cybele was enshrined within the *pomerium*, Rome's religious boundary denoting the sacred space of the city. The goddess was honored during the Megalesia, traditionally dated to April. There would be games honoring the goddess as well as processions through the streets of Rome by the goddess' priests. These priests, the *galli*, were ritually castrated during an ecstatic rite (so in this case, no, this mystery cult wasn't an excuse to bone). Roman citizens, while pleased with Cybele's intervention with Hannibal, were not allowed to become *galli* until Claudian lifted the ban (which Domitian reinstated). \n\nFinally, there is every indication that these religious cults were taken seriously. In 415 BCE, right before Athens launched an expedition to Sicily, a \"double sacrilege\" was committed: the herms were mutilated and the Eleusinian mysteries were somehow profaned. According to Thucydides (6.27-30), the mutilation of the herms was seen as an extremely bad omen for the expedition. The further revelation of the mocking/profaning of the mysteries by young men, including Alcibiades, the general in charge of the expedition, added more anxiety. He ended up being convicted *in absentia*, sentenced with death with his property seized, and while in exile, defected to the Spartans. (And then he came back, but that's a different story altogether). \n\nEdited to clean up 415 section. ", "Two good books for further reading might be Marvin Meyer's *The Ancient Mysteries,* which gives short summaries of the different cults accompanied by a few selections from ancient sources dealing with each cult; and Jan Bremmer's recent *Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World,* which he [published as an open-access ebook through de Gruyter press](_URL_0_). \n\n", "I recommend to you the second chapter of Hans-Josef Klauck's The Religious Context of Early Christianity (English translation by Brian McNiel; T & T Clark, 2000). Although now a few years old, Klauck's study provides a convenient brief summary of the evidence for several cults (Eleusis, Dionysius, Attis, Isis, and Mithras), a general survey of the phenomenon, and helpful bibliographies for further research. Klauck mentions but does not discuss at length other mystery cults of which we have some evidence (e.g. Cabiri, Zeus Panamaros, Andania, etc.). You'll find much here to populate your list. \n\nIn his introductory comments (please forgive the simplified paraphrase that follows), Klauck contends that mystery cults are generally characterized by secrecy (albeit with imprecise boundaries), sequences of ritual performance and initiation, and the promise of some salutary benefit through participation in a mythical re-enactment. These myths refer not to historical events but to eternal patterns that recapitulated throughout history. \n\nYou asked about the specific aims of participation in these cults. Here's a passage that provides some answer to your question: \"Every cult is based on its own divine myth, which narrates what happens to a god; in most cases, he has to take a path of suffering and wandering, but this often leads to victory at the end. The rite depicts this path in abbreviate form and thus makes it possible for the initiand to be taken up into the story of the god, to share in his labors and above all in his victory. Thus there comes into being a ritual participation which contains the perspective of winning salvation (Gk. soteria). The hope for salvation can be innerworldly, looking for protection from life's many tribulations, e.g. sickness, poverty, dangers on a journey, and death; but it can also look for something better in the life after death. It always involves an intensification of vitality and of life expectation, to be achieved through participation in the indestructible life of a god\" (p. 88).\n\nIf Klauck's summary and the scholarly evidence on which it draws is accurate, it's safe to say that participation in these cults was taken seriously (perhaps even \"uber-seriously\"), though it's likewise safe to suppose that some were attracted to the \"intensification of vitality\" (which is one scholarly way of re-writing your less ethereal \"party, get drunk, and bone\"). \n\nI hope that helps. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/185838?format=EBOK"], []]}
{"q_id": "8qn79y", "title": "Could Ancient Greek women in Athens work as mercenaries?", "selftext": "The new Assassin's creed Odyssey game got me curious on how free the birthplace of western civilization Athens, really was for women. Could they work as soldiers, bakers, craftsman or where they made to stay home? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qn79y/could_ancient_greek_women_in_athens_work_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0ktcwp"], "score": [6], "text": ["A simple answer would be that no they could not. Athenian women typically were always relegated to a domestic role in daily life. The Athenians were very conservative in regards to how they treated their women. Women were not allowed to be in public without male supervision nor allowed to attend plays at the amphitheater.\n\nIt was very taboo for Athenian women to interact with public life, even to the point that Athenian men would avoid even talking about their wives to men who were not relatives in order to protect their wives' virtue. However, an Athenian women would typically manage the domestic affairs of the household. She would be in charge of the slaves, and the daily management of the house; but the husband would have the final say even domestically if he disagreed with his wife. The only occurrences of an Athenian woman working out in the Agora would be if the family were extremely poor, and even this would be seen as great embarrassment for the husband or father. With that being said, Athenian women were extremely encouraged to take up the art of weaving, as she would be responsible for creating the clothes of her family, and the husband would frequently sell the works of his wife and daughters. Socrates famously told an Athenian man who had to care for several female relatives to \"put the relatives to work making and selling clothes\" to offset the cost of his care for them. Weaving also played a large role in an Athenian girl's religious life. A major festival called the Panathenaea featured an intricate woven cloth created by a couple of Athenian girls who were chosen for such an honor. The cloth would be draped over the statue of Athena on the Acropolis until the next festival.\n\nFor non-Athenian women living in Athens, lesser social constraints existed. Foreign women could market goods in the Agora without extreme social stigma. Female slaves also frequently went out in public running tasks for their masters such as getting water or delivering messages. Foreign women could also become Hetairai, high-class courtesans. This type of profession allowed foreign women to be rather economically successful and socially fluid. They often were companions of wealthy Athenian men and frequented symposiums with them. The most famous Hetaira was Aspasia, a woman who was the mistress of Pericles and mother of Pericles the Younger. Her home was famed for attracting the intellectual elite of Athens. Historians have argued about the political influence of Aspasia and how much she influenced Pericles decisions as Strategos. However, we cannot know what the Hetairai thought of their social position. They may have eagerly gave up their material wealth and social mobility in order to become an Athenian citizen and a domestic wife. One of the hardest parts of history is knowing what people thought and how they saw themselves in society.\n\n  - Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, 1995\n  - Peter Action, Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens, 2014\n  - Lysias, On the Murder of Eratosthenes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "77wsgh", "title": "what did Victorian prostitutes wear or look like?", "selftext": "Does anyone know any sources of photos or historical artwork of what Victorian prostitutes wore, colours,  or looked like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77wsgh/what_did_victorian_prostitutes_wear_or_look_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doqndr8", "doqwd26"], "score": [3, 10], "text": ["One interesting account that answers your question, at least for London, at least for some time in the period c.1870, comes from the infamous work by \"Walter\", *My Secret Life*, which discusses the author's extensive experience with prostitutes in the Victorian period. The original work was printed in a very short run by an Amsterdam pornographer in 1888.\n\nWhat makes this particular account interesting is that, while \"Walter\" has been considered a highly unreliable narrator, and possibly an out-and-out fantasist, in this instance it's possible to penetrate the author's usual maze of teasing references to identify some real people, significantly raising the likelihood that the interaction actually occurred - [see here for the step-by-step](_URL_0_), which is worthy of attention.\n\nAnyway, on to the description:\n\n > Going along L* * c * * t * r Square one evening I saw a shortish female in front of me. She had short petticoats (worn then), Balmoral boots, a small foot, and shapely calf. \u2014 The movement of haunches and legs told me she had the class of form I loved; I can tell by the pose of the foot, and the swing of the bum, what sort of thighs and rump are moving underneath petticoats \u2014 I passed and looked at her. She had a quite young, modest face, white and pink complexion, dark eyes, and looked healthy, fresh and enticing. I stopped, turned, and she passed me. She is modest I thought. \u2014 Bah! what does modesty do here by itself at eight o\u2019clock p.m.? \u2014So I accosted her, wondering at her steady bum swing which looked twenty-one at least, whilst her face looked but seventeen or thereabouts...\n", "Television and movies warp our image of women who engaged in sex work historically (and probably in the present day, but I don't know much about that) - the stereotypical Victorian prostitute on film is a haggard and often drunken woman in a tattered d\u00e9coll\u00e9t\u00e9, often sleeveless dress and an excess of makeup, cackling in a doorway, or alternatively a pretty girl in a corset and anachronistically filmy underthings residing in a high-end brothel. The reality was, as usual, more nuanced: prostitutes were not immediately marked out from the women around them. While they were considered outside of good society, they were not necessarily as hypersexualized as we imagine them to have been.\n\nThe basis for this depiction has its roots in Victorian fiction and illustrations, where prostitutes were shown as having a kind of uniform of \"showy finery inappropriate to their class, and flowing hair\".^(1) Thomas Hardy's poem, *The Ruined Maid*, states some of this quite explicitly:\n\n > \u2014 \"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! \n\n > Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? \n\n > And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?\" \u2014 \n\n > \"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?\" said she. \n\n > \n\n >  \u2014 \"You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, \n\n > Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; \n\n > And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!\" \u2014 \n\n > \"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,\" said she. \n\n(Read the whole of it [here](_URL_1_).)\n\nIt has to be noted that what was important to the Victorian reader was the fact that the prostitute was attracted to a style of clothing that she was not entitled to wear. Flowing hair was the province of little girls; teenagers started to wear their hair partially up or styled, and then wore a fully-up adult hairstyle when their parents felt they were eligible for courting. Etiquette books, advice in magazines, and fiction all made the point that dressing neatly within your means was preferable to wearing expensive clothing obviously unsuited to your surroundings. Inappropriate finery also played off the popular (and still extant) stereotype that women were frivolous and cared too much about dress, and the supposition that young women who worked long hours for dressmakers and milliners for low pay were seduced into prostitution because they so longed for the fancy garments they made and handled every day. \n\nWhile I'm not sure about the long, loose hair, over-fancy dress was also associated with prostitutes outside of fiction. Commentators complained about the presence of these women, poorly imitating the upper middle classes in \"dirty white muslin and greasy cheap blue silk,\" with cosmetics and without bonnets or shawls.^(2) Outside of respectable society, looking \"fine\" was more important than being \"neat\" - and of course catching the eye of men interested in their services was key, hence the lack of enveloping shawls and bonnets that hid the face from view at certain angles. In general, there was (had always been) a lot of concern about \"telling the mistress from the maid\" because of high-status clothing coming down in price, being purchased second-hand, or simply being bought new with money that \"should have\" been responsibly saved or spent on something more necessary; telling the *lady* from the *prostitute* was even more serious, because while it might be embarrassing to mistake a maid for her mistress, it would be disastrous for someone to be seen treating a prostitute as a lady and for a lady to be treated as a prostitute. And while for most the imitation of lady-hood would come off as a paltry failure, at least to an audience used to seeing women of the middle and upper classes, there certainly were more successful prostitutes who could imitate them to a much greater degree, leading to situations that seem unbearably fussy to us: for instance, in the 1883 novel *Wilfred's Widow*, the woman pretending to be Wilfred's widow turns out to have visited the opera without a male escort or group of friends, and even though she outwardly appears to be every inch the lady, her solitude is treated as highly suspicious.\n\nThat all being said, we have to remember that prostitution was not always a permanent occupation, and that \"prostitute\" isn't a simple category. Nineteenth-century physicians Alexandre Parent-Duch\u00e2telet and William Acton and the writer Bracebridge Hemyng, all of whom conducted research among these women, found that in Paris and London, prostitution would often be an occupation for a short period of time, after which they would marry live as respectable housewives - as with every other feminine job.^(3) Many prostitutes also only worked seasonally: in the fashion industry, there were periods when more workers were needed (at the beginning of the social season, for instance), and when they were let go in the fallow times they had to do something to bring money in. Many came to it following domestic service, or used it to supplement their income from tending bar, cleaning houses, doing laundry, or factory work.^(4) My point here is that while \"tawdry finery\" is a well-attested common type of dress for nineteenth century prostitutes, there would likely have been a range of clothes representing the range of backgrounds and lifestyles of the women involved.\n\nAs to \"color\" ... there's very little evidence of specific colors being specific to prostitutes' dress, and none that I'm aware of in the nineteenth century. Sumptuary legislation for respectable vs. disreputable women dates back to the Middle Ages, for the reasons I explained above: it was vital for people to be able to tell them apart so as not to treat street-walkers as matrons and vice versa. In 1351, London prostitutes were banned from wearing fur linings in general, and the 1419 English book of common law prohibited them from wearing fur hoods: they were supposed to wear unlined hoods of striped fabric, a standard that was widely adopted across the country. Early sixteenth-century legislation prohibited workers in the Southwark stews from wearing aprons.^(5) Prostitutes in medieval Arles and Avignon were not allowed to wear veils, and those in P\u00e9zenas were not allowed to wear gowns with trains; in Castelnaudry, they had to wear cord belts, and in Castres, they had to wear a man's hat and a red belt; in Beaucaire and Toulouse, a mark on their left arms; in N\u00eemes, one sleeve of their gowns had to be made of a fabric of another color.^(6) By the nineteenth century, this kind of sumptuary legislation was long gone. Stories that yellow stockings, red shawls worn low on the arm, or the color green indicated a prostitute are reenactorisms that spring from misunderstandings and potentially a confusion of fact and fiction.\n\nThere are a lot of images of prostitutes from this period. [The Empty Purse](_URL_0_), by James Collinson ca. 1857, is generally considered to depict a working girl, and you can see that she looks much like any other woman of the period. [The works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec](_URL_2_) also frequently depict prostitutes. I'd recommend checking out the book *Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era*, by Hollis Clayson, which contains a lot of reproductions of paintings and prints; many of them are nudes, which are beside the point, but the images of the women fully-dressed out-of-doors just look like ... women. They're dressed like any other ladies.\n\n1. C. M. Jackson-Houlston, \"The burial-place of the fashions: the representation of the dress of the poor in illustrated serial prose by Dickens and Hardy\" (*Textile History*, vol. 33, 2002)\n\n2. Judith R. Walkowitz, *Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State* (Cambridge University Press, 1982)\n\n3. Deborah Epstein Nord, *Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City* (Cornell University Press, 1995)\n\n4. George Rosen, \"Disease, Debility, and Death\" (*The Victorian City: Images and Realities*, vol. 2, reprinted 2001)\n\n5. Ruth Mazo Carras, *Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England* (Oxford University Press, 1996)\n\n6. Leah Lydia Otis, *Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc* (University Of Chicago Press, 1985)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.strangehistory.net/2015/04/30/searching-for-the-mysterious-mrs-sknus/"], ["http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/collinson-the-empty-purse-replica-of-for-sale-n03201", "https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44332/the-ruined-maid", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec"]]}
{"q_id": "1kzk9w", "title": "How did Carter's foreign policy on human rights increase tensions and undermine vital alliances?", "selftext": "I'm doing a report on this topic and I wanted to get just a brief summary first before I delve deep into research. Just a simple explanation is fine.\n\nAlso, any tips on what to focus on for this topic and any other things to be wary of when writing this.\n\nOf course I'll reference this as part of the bibliography. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kzk9w/how_did_carters_foreign_policy_on_human_rights/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbu8r3h"], "score": [2], "text": ["There was a thread about his attempts to keep the world peaceful.  It should be a good jumping off point for you. \n\n[\"We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war\" - Jimmy Carter. Is Carter's assertion true? Was his administration as peaceful as he claims?\n](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d3k4z/we_never_dropped_a_bomb_we_never_fired_a_bullet/"]]}
{"q_id": "2p2rox", "title": "When were the economies of the USSR and the US most equal?", "selftext": "I read somewhere recently that by the time the USSR collapsed, it only had 1/8th the GDP as the United States. This struck me as somewhat humorous and revealing, as it really dispels the notion that the Cold War was between \"two equal powers,\" at least towards the end of it.\n\nSo in that regard, when WAS the economy of the USSR as close to the US's? Was this considered a legitimate problem by the US government, or was it mainly their military and nuclear capabilities that scared them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p2rox/when_were_the_economies_of_the_ussr_and_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmsshgj", "cmt31aq", "cmta7ic"], "score": [30, 11, 2], "text": ["Well, let's take a look at some graphs!\n\n[Here](_URL_1_) we have the USSR's economic history from 1970-1990.  They peaked at ~1 trillion dollars ~1980.\n\nThis is lower than any point of the US during that same period.  [Same source](_URL_0_).\n\nAt no point in time was the economy of the USSR close to that of the US during the Cold War.  They peaked below the GDP of the US in 1970.  ", "At no point in time was the USSR's economy equal in any way to that of the US.\n\nBut in many ways, the threat to the US, from an economic point of view, was the pace of growth and the \"sturdyness\" of the Soviet economy. The two sweetspots when these advantages were more evident were during the Great Depression and during the first two decades of the Cold War. From 1970 onwards the USSR started to falter and falter with regards to the US economy, until its final demise in 1991.\n\nThat being said, it would have been nothing short of a miracle for the Soviet economy to match the US one, considering how the latter has a higher population and started its industrialization centuries before Russia did.\n\nDuring the Great Depression what was surprising was how all of the staunchly capitalist Great Powers (US, UK, France) were basically on their knees, with incredibly high unemployment, virtually no growth and the social maladies that appear whenever these two are present.\n\nMeanwhile, the USSR was posting gains and beginning its brutally harsh industrialization. The Soviet economy, completely isolated from world markets, was able no navigate the 1930's untouched by the troubles that the capitalist countries were experiencing. It is worth noting, that underscoring the improbability of the Soviet industrialization is the fact that a mere 10 years before, Russia was in the midst of a bloody and brutal civil war in which (to Russia's humiliation) all of the (now ailing) powers had participated (US, UK, France, etc) against the Bolsheviks.\n\nThe second sweet spot was during 1945-1970 during which Russia continued its heavy industrialization, and helped its Eastern European clients do the same. In fact, in Europe the communist economies as a whole grew faster than capitalist ones. Such growth was what attracted a lot of leaders of third world countries to the communist camp. Many of these leaders were heads of recently independent countries, and they were eager to industrialize and modernise their economies.\n\nUltimately, the Soviet economy's strength was also its weakness. In many ways, the USSR froze after the death of Stalin and remained in that form until its collapse. Its economy was centrally planned and decision making power was concentrated in a single authority. And while this made it very forward-driven, it also meant that it was very inflexible and unable to adapt to changing circumstances.\n\nWhile during the first two decades of the Cold War, the USSR mainly exported capital goods and manufactured products. By the time the 1970 came it was mainly exporting fuel (gas, oil) due to the rising oil prices (courtesy of OPEC), its manufacturing sector being unable to compete even against the industries inside its own block. It started exporting what usually third world countries export: raw materials.\n\nAll in all, the threat to the US came, after the 1970, solely from the Soviet military. The Stalinist centrally-planned economy was woefully inadequate to compete with a capitalist one.\n\nSource: Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.", "As a curiosity point, was the economy of *Russia* ever matched with that of the early U.S? If so, when did we overtake them?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/gdp/gdp_usa.html", "http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/gdp/gdp_ussr.html"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1j8iy9", "title": "Day of Reflection | July 22-28", "selftext": "Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Day of Reflection. Nobody can read everything that appears here each day, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week \u2013 an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j8iy9/day_of_reflection_july_2228/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbc6fwd", "cbc8oyw", "cbc9zb5", "cbccnhi", "cbcda4c", "cbcg2iv", "cbch52z", "cbchago"], "score": [28, 12, 11, 10, 10, 6, 3, 8], "text": ["Woo, Day of Reflection! I was waiting for this, cause I just found a new guy on here who's my new BFF! (Sorry Arty. I'm breaking up with you and taking the cat and the house and the car. You can have the couch though!) \n\nSo I noticed a user I'd never seen before in a [couple](_URL_1_) of [threads](_URL_0_) this week, and I was all o.o Cause honestly, this guy makes me feel crazy inadequate. So I went ahead and checked out /u/ScipioAsina's post history, and I was *completely blown away.* He sources EVERYTHING he says rather extensively, he makes EXTREMELY good, involved posts, and they're never less than interesting! If you have some time, I *highly* recommend heading to his profile and just giving it a read, or if you're more interested in the specific threads, the two that I linked earlier are as follows :)\n\n[What Were the Factors that Lead to Rome Completely Destroying the City of Carthage, when it Could Have Been an Asset?](_URL_0_)\n\n[What are our primary sources for the history of Carthage?](_URL_1_)", "I enjoyed the [back](_URL_0_) and [forth](_URL_1_) between /u/yodatsracist and /u/gent2012 in this week's Theory Thursday post. It was a great example of how a simple question... isn't simple.", "I, too, thought /u/ursa-minor-88 knocked it out of the park [on The Art of War](_URL_3_).\n\n/u/MomsChooseJIF did a stellar job [detailing Italian martial successes in WWII.](_URL_2_)  The three part answer was excellent, and the answer to the followup question proved a septh of knowledge on the subject.\n\n[In a thread about losing your mainmast](_URL_4_) there were two stellar answers.  One from /u/kombatminipig and another from /u/jschooltiger.  Both answers were excellent, and they each took the time to answer followup questions that showcased their depth of knowledge.  As I knew very little on the subject, both users enlightened me.\n\nI also thought /u/agentdcf gave a good answer to the [question regarding sweets for dessert](_URL_0_).  \n\nFinally, /u/TheTheoryJackBuilt and /u/Assorted_Bits give some [excellent tips on using reverse image searching to assist your research.](_URL_1_)  If you are not familiar with this process, I urge you to go check it out!", "I thought /u/Ambarenya totally killed it in [this thread](_URL_0_) about medieval cities with his or her description of the city of Constantinople. Stellar work, and followed up really well on all the questions.", "I'm gonna shill for my fellow /r/linguistics mod /u/l33t_sas and shamelessly promote [his answer on the origins of the Polynesians](_URL_0_). It's good stuff.", "* *Algernon_Asimov* on [Why is the year divided in 12, awkwardly arranged months instead of 13 months with 28 days each based on the lunar cycles?](_URL_0_)\n\n* *snickeringshadow* and *Qhapaqocha* on [Were there any areas in which the New World civilizations were more technologically advanced than the Old World civilizations?](_URL_3_)\n\n* *Bufus* on [When the Motion Picture Production Code (1930) and the Comics Code Authority (1954) began regulating the moral content of so much American popular culture, did anyone strongly object?](_URL_4_)\n\nAs a bonus, my Day of Reflection **NSFW** edition:\n\n* *1Tw03Four* helps out with pictorial evidence in [How did girls of the 60's avoid flashing in their miniskirts?](_URL_2_)\n\n* *LordKettering* over in /r/badhistory reviews [the adult movie \"The British Are Cumming\"](_URL_1_)", "There's been a couple of Swiss threads that have been fun.  As someone on their way to becoming naturalised in Switzerland, I'm always amused when the place pops up, and there were two good threads this week.  Some interesting points came up in [this thread on neutrality in WW2](_URL_1_) and the more recent [clock making thread](_URL_0_) was a great read.", "I can't believe no one commented on the best comment of the week, /u/itsallfolklore commenting on [on miniskirts in the 60's](_URL_5_).\n\n[The funniest moment](_URL_10_) of the week had to be /u/NMW interacting with /u/ablatner.\n\nMore serious goodness:\n\n * /u/irishfafnir describes [what was offensive in the early American Republic](_URL_9_).  He also gave a [pithy but informative answer](_URL_7_) on alternative names that were considered for the US.\n\nI want to bring attention to two \"feature\" threads this week: I loved **[Theory Thursday](_URL_6_)**, and I really appreciated my exchanges with /u/gent2012 (already pointed out) and with /u/Abaum2020, which were brought on by good questions by /u/abuttfarting and /u/caesar10022, respectively.  Similarly, I thought the **[Monday Mysteries](_URL_2_)** thread this week was just outstanding.  There are 49 comments on that thread and it looks like I upvoted about 90% of them.\n\n * Holy crud was /u/restricteddata's [AMA](_URL_1_) good (so I guess three great feature threads this week).  Here are [two](_URL_1_cb9hp2s?context=1) of the [many](_URL_1_cb9ghzo?context=1) answers I found interesting.\n\n * Though I've never seen the show, I thought /u/GeeJo's [reflections on](_URL_11_) on what time periods various aspects of *Game of Thrones* are taken from was quite interesting.\n\n * /u/volt-aire's pretty straightforward answer to [what caused the dramatic rise of violent crimes and urban decay in the mid-to-late 1960s?](_URL_4_).  They dealt with a sensitive topic quite well, and the only way to do that is thoroughly.  (did /u/volt-aire used to have flair and ditch it, btw? Or are they just an unrecognized quality contributor?)\n\n * I can't remember if this was mentioned last week, but /u/Whoosier (who I am always a fan of) wrote a short piece on [Medieval border crossings](_URL_0_) (check out the daughter comments as well for at least three interesting follow ups)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j7mz5/what_were_the_factors_that_lead_to_rome/cbc55b2", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6l0r/what_are_our_primary_sources_for_the_history_of/cbbryhk"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j1nym/theory_thursday_professionalacademic_history/cbaeh6r?context=1", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j1nym/theory_thursday_professionalacademic_history/cbafmc4?context=1"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ivxq1/why_is_the_main_course_usually_savory_and_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iwety/can_anyone_tell_me_more_about_this_birth_control/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j2gkn/any_interesting_or_remarkable_tales_of_wwii/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j37co/when_how_and_why_did_sun_tzus_the_art_of_war/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ixwd4/just_how_detrimental_was_losing_your_mainmast_to/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iyf6e/what_was_the_difference_in_quality_of_life_in/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j5jdo/where_did_the_polynesian_peoples_likely_come_from/cbbcuxs"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iwqu2/why_is_the_year_divided_in_12_awkwardly_arranged/cb8yd1u", "http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1j7l8n/nsfw_the_british_are_cumming_pt_1_its_like_they/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6jp2/how_did_girls_of_the_60s_avoid_flashing_in_their/cbbqeut", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ivukb/were_there_any_areas_in_which_the_new_world/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j12ke/when_the_motion_picture_production_code_1930_and/cbaiz7g"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j8bg7/why_is_the_clock_industry_so_strong_in_switzerland/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j2ja2/what_were_some_of_the_downsides_to_swiss/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iqpgd/what_were_medieval_european_border_crossings_like/cb77boe", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iyjak/ama_i_am_alex_wellerstein_historian_of_science/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1itbtx/monday_mysteries_difficulties_in_your_research/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iyjak/ama_i_am_alex_wellerstein_historian_of_science/cb9hp2s?context=1", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1it6s9/what_caused_the_dramatic_rise_of_violent_crimes/cb7tfcj", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6jp2/how_did_girls_of_the_60s_avoid_flashing_in_their/cbblmin", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j1nym/theory_thursday_professionalacademic_history/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j2xrq/were_other_names_considered_for_the_13_colonies/cbakvgs", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iyjak/ama_i_am_alex_wellerstein_historian_of_science/cb9ghzo?context=1", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6aop/were_people_less_easily_offended_in_the_past_as/cbbomfz", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ivxq1/why_is_the_main_course_usually_savory_and_the/cb8pc3x?context=1", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1it10m/given_the_technology_political_institutions_and/cb7rts9"]]}
{"q_id": "2gw184", "title": "How long did it take the population of the USSR to recover after the Second World War?", "selftext": "Either a breakdown by country, or the USSR as a whole would be interesting.  \n  \n  In fact, the statistics for all of Europe and the Far East would be fascinating.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gw184/how_long_did_it_take_the_population_of_the_ussr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cko0uxy"], "score": [2], "text": ["[Here](_URL_0_) is the data for the Soviet Union for the 20th century. (Second link in contents will take you to a graph and a spreadsheet)\nYou can see the effects of the Russian revolution and subsequent NKVD purges. And you can see the effect of WWII.\nHowever, the figures for recovery might not be exactly fair as the USSR expanded its borders during WWII.\n\nSo [here](_URL_1_) (third link in contents will take you to spreadsheets the first two columns of which show year and respective total population) is similar data for Russia alone. Again, the impact of WWII is pretty noticeable and as you can see the population recovers in number sometime in the mid 50s. \n\nHowever, due to the sheer volume of wars and other shit that Russia went through during the 20th century, the population is still plagued by a gender imbalance, so in that sense, you could say it's still recovering."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/\u041d\u0430\u0441\u0435\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435_\u0421\u0421\u0421\u0420", "http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/\u041d\u0430\u0441\u0435\u043b\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435_\u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u0438"]]}
{"q_id": "14mrmi", "title": "Are the Bosnian pyramids man-made or nature-made?", "selftext": "Seems like there are mixture of \"expert\" opinions online regarding the Bosnian pyramids.  Some experts have dismissed it as a natural phenomena and some experts think otherwise.\n\nDoes anyone know if there is a real verdict out there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14mrmi/are_the_bosnian_pyramids_manmade_or_naturemade/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7ei5p4"], "score": [3], "text": ["None of the actual experts take it seriously.  It's a natural hill, and the people who in their ignorance refuse to accept this have wrecked genuine sites of archaeological interest in their random digging.\n\nThere's nothing to this claim, it is pseudo-archaeology of the rankest sort.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1tqt6u", "title": "How accurate is the history in the Master and Commander Series?", "selftext": "I have been reading the series of books by Patrick O'Brien from which the movie *Master and Commander* was created and have wondered if the history is accurate.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tqt6u/how_accurate_is_the_history_in_the_master_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceaprpo"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! not discouraging anyone from contributing any more info - especially a general assessment - but FYI, there have been several questions on various aspects of this series. Check out these posts for previous responses\n\n[What would happen if you are a PoW during the Napoleonic wars and escape, go back into service, and then captured again?](_URL_7_)\n\n[How were 18th/19th century marines kept separate from sailors?](_URL_6_)\n\n[How much did the officers of Nelson's Navy actually eat?](_URL_5_)\n\n[How did banks work before telegraphs/phones became available?](_URL_0_)\n\n[What sort of treatment could an impressed American sailor expect in the Royal Navy?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Why did mutinous sailors in the 18th-19th century British Royal Navy roll cannonballs?](_URL_3_)\n\nthe film\n\n[How accurate is Master and Commander's portrayal of 19th century naval warfare/life at sea?](_URL_4_)\n\n[How accurately do movies such as \"Master and Commander\", portray naval combat in the late 1600- early 1800s? What was naval combat like from a crewman's perspective and was it really as deadly as the movies?](_URL_2_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a56ef/how_did_banks_work_before_telegraphsphones_became/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1amxim/what_sort_of_treatment_could_an_impressed/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iztzd/how_accurately_do_movies_such_as_master_and/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cd085/why_did_mutinous_sailors_in_the_18th19th_century/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s4gfj/how_accurate_is_master_and_commanders_portrayal/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13m94v/how_much_did_the_officers_of_nelsons_navy/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15orn1/how_were_18th19th_century_marines_kept_separate/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p172b/what_would_happen_if_you_are_a_pow_during_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "q451w", "title": "Book/online resource request for learning historical evolution of technology and culture", "selftext": "Came across this AskReddit thread from over a year ago and would like to know if there are any good resources which elaborate on various eras a bit more _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q451w/bookonline_resource_request_for_learning/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3ump73"], "score": [3], "text": ["If you have specific interests in the History of Technology I would be happy to suggest things. Most of the very broad histories of technology I find to be severely lacking and I have little patience for these books that attempt to apply a sweeping theme to the technological history of a whole era.\n\nFor example if you are interested in the history of nuclear power look at Hecht's work. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/esid8/from_sex_to_phones_to_star_wars_what_would_older/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aiuo9h", "title": "What methods are used by historians to answer counterfactuals?", "selftext": "There is a genre of fiction where the setting is in a world historically similar to ours up until some divergence point. It explores a narrow topic, such as what happens if the American Revolution was won by the British instead of the Revolutionaries. What would that world look like in the 1780s, the 1800s, or even the 1900s?\n\nThis came about while reading a book (*An Era of Darkness* by Shashi Tharoor) and wondering what would have happened had the East India Company had never gotten a foothold in India, and whether or not the scenario could have fit historically.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aiuo9h/what_methods_are_used_by_historians_to_answer/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eetv62t"], "score": [3], "text": ["Historians generally do not try to answer such sweeping counterfactuals. There are too many \"variables\" in such approaches, and you end up in totally speculative territory.\n\nNarrow counterfactuals are much more common, and are arguably implicit in every statement of causation (if I say _X_ was important, I am implying things would be really different in some way without _X_). These are still arguably speculative, certainly interpretive, and work best when they are aimed at pointing out the historian's view of contingency and chance. They are arguments, not proofs.\n\nA small example: I found it interesting, awhile back, to ask, \"[if Albert Einstein had never been born, would it have affected the date that the atomic bomb was created?](_URL_1_)\" The stakes for asking this question are fairly clear: most people associate Einstein with the atomic bomb's development for several reasons (E=mc^2 and his letter to FDR). My argument, which you can read, instead tries to look at what specific scientific developments led to the atomic bomb, and conclude that Einstein's absence probably didn't matter (nuclear fission was the result of a very different set of discoveries and scientific \"path\" than the one Einstein had been on, and it is likely that many of Einstein's key insights would have been worked out by others in the intervening time anyway since they were \"in the air\" already). I also conclude that the US bomb project was less affected by Einstein's letter than most people realize, because its real impetus came from elsewhere (the MAUD report). So my basic answer is to say: Einstein's life or death mattered less for this than you might think, so I doubt it would have changed historical trajectories much.\n\nThis is, again, an interpretive argument. Other historians might disagree with me. But you can see that I'm not just making it for fun, and in trying to answer the counterfactual I'm trying to isolate a specific historical trajectory, and what I think \"mattered\" for it. So it is really a complex argument about causation, when phrased this way. \n\nAs you move to scenarios with greater and greater numbers of variables, of divergences, of possibilities, it starts to get more and more disconnected from any specific facts. It doesn't mean you can't do it, but it does mean that your interpretation will be less grounded and less persuasive, and look more like a product of your own imagination than a work of actual historical engagement.\n\nThere is no really rigorous way of doing this, but there isn't for really anything historians do. We are highly interpretive. For better and worse.\n\n[This review of a book on counterfactual history by Cass Sunstein](_URL_0_) makes for interesting food for thought on this topic, I think. I haven't read the book he reviews."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://newrepublic.com/article/119357/altered-pasts-reviewed-cass-r-sunstein", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/06/27/bomb-without-einstein/"]]}
{"q_id": "fph9b5", "title": "What, aside from knowledge of how to use/extract coal and oil, prevented an industrial revolution from occurring earlier in history?", "selftext": "I\u2019ve heard (and I\u2019m not sure if this is reliable) that in the late Roman Empire, technology was reaching a point that an industrial revolution of sorts could have happened, and that it was the turmoil following the fall of Rome that prevented it. Regardless of whether that is true, what historically did keep such a technological boom from occurring before the 19th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fph9b5/what_aside_from_knowledge_of_how_to_useextract/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fllwy4w"], "score": [2], "text": ["There's always more that can be said but while you wait you might enjoy some of these older posts on the topic. As you'll quickly see, its actually a pretty complicated discussion.\n\n/u/Daeres and a deleted user discuss [Why didn't we get an industrial revolution during Antiquity ?](_URL_2_)\n\n/u/AlviseFalier talks about [Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in the UK and not elsewhere? I have seen several theories, including colonialism, natural resources, Protestantism, capitalism and the rule of law. Is there any historical consensus on this?](_URL_1_)\n\nand a particularly good post from /u/LuxArdens on [Why did the industrial revolution happen so late in civilization?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f6aair/why_did_the_industrial_revolution_happen_so_late/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75ywnb/why_did_the_industrial_revolution_begin_in_the_uk/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/119wcv/why_didnt_we_get_an_industrial_revolution_during/"]]}
{"q_id": "543hhf", "title": "Question about Hungarian Military Uniforms of World War II", "selftext": "One of my former teachers posted this to Facebook earlier, was hoping someone might have some insight? \n\n\"I'm working with a wonderful Holocaust Survivor on her memoir. She mentioned that  rowdy Hungarian soldiers that were on her train en route in 1945 from a DP camp to her former home, were wearing uniforms that included the tall, plumed head-gear typical of Hussars. In my research, however, I find that this head-gear wasn't worn after WWI. Was there a modified version that some might have held on to and worn for special occasions? Does anyone have any info/input on this?\"\n\n~cheers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/543hhf/question_about_hungarian_military_uniforms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7yu5tb"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just to clarify your question, do you mean a Shako like [this](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/MuseeMarine-ShakoMarine.jpg/220px-MuseeMarine-ShakoMarine.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1mxpz3", "title": "How common was it for girls under the age of 15 to get married to men before recent times?", "selftext": "I'm just wondering what kind of ages throughout time women were to get married by.\nFor example, the Prophet Mohammed married a 6 year old but they didn't consummate the marriage until she was 9. From what I've read she was going to be wed off to another man. So either way some people label him as a pedophile for this but was marrying a young girl/pre-teen common for most of history? \n\nWhile I know nothing on this, I'm guessing it was not uncommon in Europe for young girls to be wed off to older men. I'm taking this idea from Romeo and Juliet. Yes I know it's a play and the events didn't happen.\n\nI'm personally giving an uneducated guess it wasn't until sometime in the 20th century that America labeled 18 as adult, therefore making it to where a 18 year old having sex with a 16 year old technically a pedophile.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mxpz3/how_common_was_it_for_girls_under_the_age_of_15/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccdp3j6"], "score": [7], "text": ["From the medieval period, the church said you could be betrothed before puberty, but you could not be married until both parties could assent to it, which coincided with puberty - generally assumed to be 12 for girls and 14 for boys.  That was a minimum however, and there was a fair amount of commentary which said that you shouldn't get married at the earliest age possible as your 'seed' wasn't strong enough to create good quality babies.  \n\nThe barbarian tribes tended to put marrying age around the 20s, so the concept of child marriages is not really a viable argument, at least in the mediaeval period.\n\nStill, our records of the period are very poor, and it's the early modern period is when we tend to have the beginning of proper records that would tell us something about it, and even then, they were generally well over 13."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1gs0gx", "title": "Were slaves in Haiti aware of the French Revolution, and perhaps influenced by it?", "selftext": "The dates of these events seem to coincide, with the French Revolution starting a little earlier.  Are there any primary sources confirming the awareness of Haitian slaves of the events taking place in France?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gs0gx/were_slaves_in_haiti_aware_of_the_french/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cancqcp", "caneue3"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["David Geggus has written a lot about Haiti specifically - you might be interested in an essay collection Geggus compiled with David Gaspar, titled *A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean*.\n\nYou're correct, the dates are no coincidence but - according to Geggus - in only 40-50% of the slave revolts were the ideals linked to the French Revolution. In general, Geggus seems to take the approach that the influences shouldn't be overstated.\n\nThis is a powerful statement in its own way, because it stresses that slave revolts also developed organically.", "In terms of the Haitian Revolution, very much so at a senior level. In the case of other slave revolts, I am not particularly sure but I see no reason to dispute the claims of Geggus as described by /u/amplified_mess - after all, there were widespread rebellions well before the French revolution, so its impact does have limits.\n\nIn terms of the Haitian Revolution itself, however, the French Revolution was critical. I'm not sure how much of the revolution was actually inspired by the ideals of the French revolutionaries - I doubt, judging by what I have read, that slaves in Haiti needed any encouragement to seek out their own emancipation - but the French Revolution certainly weakened the Haitian colonial government to enable the Haitian Revolution to take place. Insofar as I can make out of a deeply complex moment, the French Revolutionaries initially issued proclamations freeing the slaves of Haiti. The Haitian colonial elites viewed these proclamations with horror, and through a series of political negotiations attempted to maintain slavery. The weakness of the institution of slavery, however, left slaves - especially the more educated and mobile slaves - with space in which to foment revolt. The language of the revolution also proved very useful, providing a vocabulary to discuss emancipation in terms used by the French government itself.\n\nIn terms of specific primary sources, I don't speak any French so I can't advise too precisely (if there are any, I imagine they'll be in Port-au-Prince or, possibly, Paris - if the former, they may not be easy to get hold of), but amongst the secondary literature, C.L.R. James's *Black Jacobins* is a great place to start, followed by perhaps a few of the more general texts on Caribbean history to round out the narrative. I found the essay on Haiti in *The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its People* (Stephane Palmie and Francisco Scarano eds.) to be particularly well-written and concise, so I would very much recommend that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1mjduj", "title": "What are the major cities that no longer exist or have decreased dramatically?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mjduj/what_are_the_major_cities_that_no_longer_exist_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc9s9ai", "cc9t22c"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["I can think of Chernobyl, Ukraine, because of radiation, of course.\n\nPompeii and Herculano, Italy, because of a volcano.\n\nI heard about Cordoba, Spain, that used to be a city with more than a million inhabitants.", "Antioch. Founded by Seleucus Nicator, it was the capital of Syria during Roman/Byzantine rule and one of the major centers of Christianity. Declined and virtually disappeared during the times of crusades."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b96z56", "title": "How common was it for people in ancient civilizations to just travel for leisure?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b96z56/how_common_was_it_for_people_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek3681b"], "score": [14], "text": ["Not to discourage any further answers, but you'll probably find these older posts helpful:\n\n* [Did tourism exist within the Roman Empire? I assume that most of the lower class could not afford to go visit another city, but what about the richer population?](_URL_1_) by /u/bitparity\n\n* [Do we know if ancient people (thinking the Classical Mediterranean world) \"made up\" things to attract tourists?](_URL_0_) by /u/XenophontheAthenian"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dmh6k/do_we_know_if_ancient_people_thinking_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9wkaee/did_tourism_exist_within_the_roman_empire_i/e9m5kkz/"]]}
{"q_id": "2j7y0d", "title": "How have check marks come to represent 'right' while Xs represent 'wrong'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j7y0d/how_have_check_marks_come_to_represent_right/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl9kps6", "cl9y3nh"], "score": [12, 5], "text": ["There are quite a few theories floating around out there, but as it's not a universal standard and mainly contained within Western Europe and cultures influenced by Western Europe, I'm inclined to go with the tick / cross system being distributed by the Romans, especially given the amount of bureaucracy they bought to the world.\n\nCommon theories:\n\nThe Roman \"Veritas\" (truth) being the origin of the tick, cross is just a handy symbol / easy to make with a stylus / origin unknown.\n\nThe Greek \"Nikas\" (\u03bd\u03b9\u03ba\u03ce) for win and \"Haneis\" (\u03a7\u03ac\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03c2) for lose.\n\nI personally like the Greek theory as it accounts for the cross and the Romans did appropriate an awful lot from the Greeks. But that's 100% conjecture.\n\nBe interesting to see if any of the real historians out there have access to Roman or Greek documentation :)", "In Italy crosses represent correct answers. In questionnaires we put a Xs beside the correct choice and, when casting our vote during elections, we cross with a giant X the party symbol we want to choose.\n\nSo check marks did not come to represent 'right' while Xs represent 'wrong' everywhere."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "di4qw1", "title": "How did Egypt become a client kingdom of Rome?", "selftext": "So, when Caesar arrived in Egypt, he said that it was his job as Dictator of Rome to settle a royal dispute between Ptomely and Cleopatra on who sould be pharaoh. He even stationed himself at the Palace of Alexandria as a judge to hear the case made by both parts. Did he claim that right because Egypt was a Roman client state? If so, when did Egypt become a client kindgom? How?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/di4qw1/how_did_egypt_become_a_client_kingdom_of_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3ugj9o"], "score": [10], "text": [" > So, when Caesar arrived in Egypt, he said that it was his job as Dictator of Rome to settle a royal dispute between Ptomely and Cleopatra on who sould be pharaoh. He even stationed himself at the Palace of Alexandria as a judge to hear the case made by both parts\n\nThat isn't right. Caesar at no point in the B.C. mentions his role as dictator, nor do the other sources. An invocation of Caesar's role as dictator would not have made very much sense: the Alexandrians were not a province, and therefore their affairs could not be ordered by a Roman magistrate except in his role as ambassador for the senate. It is in this capacity that Caesar interfered in Alexandrian politics. He specifically in the B.C. cites his role as *consul* (in 59, not in 47), not dictator, which would have made much more sense given that he also notes that the Alexandrians in killing Pompey and being unable to solve their succession crisis were potential threats to the Roman people. Moreover, Caesar notes that Alexandrian affairs had been made a concern of his personally already, since it was during his consulship that an SC, later ratified as a lex, had been passed binding the Alexandrians to the Romans as allies. No source mentions Caesar setting up court in the royal palace; this detail is not particularly believable. Indeed, none of the sources even mention Caesar entering the palace yet at this point, and the ones which describe his location in the city seem to suggest strongly that Caesar had never left the seashore. Plutarch mentions the story of Cleopatra taking a little boat to visit Caesar, Caesar says that he decided because of the fragility of the situation and the small size of his forces to remain within the area of the city that his troops controlled (the waterfront) until he could figure out what Achillas intended, and Appian speaks of fighting along the shore and of Caesar escaping at one point by swimming into the harbor. Only Cassius Dio, whose famed unreliability was the object of great (and often undue) scorn in the early twentieth century, says anything about Caesar's being in the palace. Dio says that Cleopatra snuck into the palace (also a rather unbelievable statement) to meet Caesar, who only then decided to bring the rival claimants to him to plead their cases. This doesn't make very much sense internally, since Dio then says that Caesar, who already possessed the palace, assaulted the palace (what?), and it doesn't work with the sequence of events that the other sources give.\n\nI think you're somewhat misunderstanding the way the Romans of the Republic understood their relationships with other states. By any reasonable modern understanding the Ptolemies were clients of the Romans, and had been since the late third century. However, the Romans understood such matters in the way that Caesar describes: the Ptolemies had, in 59, become allies of the Romans, allowing them to resolve Alexandrian disputes in their own interest and according to the customs of the Alexandrians wherever possible. Similar agreements had been made earlier, but there was no permanent state of clientela that existed between the two great states. In a very real sense Caesar, as the consul who had been responsible for the most recent agreement, had a personal duty to see to it that it was respected, and being the commander on site he also was placed in a position to resolve a further agreement, since as he himself notes the agreement of 59 had been made with the last king, and technically the Alexandrians were not in a state of legal alliance anymore. \n\nThe Alexandrians had for some time been subordinate to the Romans in international affairs. In the late third century what Eckstein calls the \"Ptolemaic collapse,\" begun by a serious of native rebellions and followed by the accession of a child king in Ptolemy V resulted in political chaos in Egypt. It was a major event for Polybius, such that he focuses nearly an entire book to it, instead of giving a broad view of Mediterranean events generally the way he usually does. By 201 warfare with the Seleucids added to the Ptolemies' woes, and Philip had begun advancing through Asia Minor, in Polybius' opinion to overthrow the Ptolemies entirely. The massive war brewing caused two traditional rivals, Pergamum and Rhodes, to conclude an alliance against Philip, and though they managed to hold out for a little while things eventually became too hot for them--in 201 the Pergamenes (friends of the Romans) and Rhodians (decidedly not) sent embassies to the Romans to ask for their aid or arbitration. Also in 201 the Athenians executed citizens of Acarnania, a Macedonian ally, and were met in response with an attack by the Macedonians. The Athenians revoked the tribes that they had long ago named after Antigonus and Demetrius, symbolically throwing off the yoke of Macedonian dominance, and appealed to the Ptolemies for aid. The Ptolemies had their hands full (Eckstein thinks they had already sent an embassy to the Romans by this point). The view from the Roman senate, which would have received these embassies, would therefore have been one of total chaos in the eastern Mediterranean. Four embassies, three of them from powerful Greek states and one from the Athenians in revolt, would have reached them within a single season, and Polybius describes the affair as confused and disordered--this was certainly the most chaotic the eastern Mediterranean had been since the death of Antigonus. The Romans, Eckstein has shown, learned (according to Polybius) of a pact between Philip and Antiochus during this time, and became worried about a total destabilization of the eastern Mediterranean. As a result, Roman attention was drawn to the region. Several decades of warfare by the Ptolemies resulted, in 170, in the deposition of Ptolemy VI, who had also succeeded as an infant, by Antiochus IV, and with Roman aid Ptolemy VI was eventually installed. In any case, the first few decades of the second century are marked by political chaos in and around Egypt, and by Roman intervention into this political shitstorm, particularly in keeping the Alexandrians propped up, such that by the first century the Ptolemies were bound closely to the Romans by a series of multi-generation treaties and friendships, and had long since stopped being able to maintain their aid without Roman power. Caesar's troops were not the first, even within his own lifetime, to interfere in Alexandrian affairs by force of arms. In 55 Gabinius, proconsul of Syria, marched into Alexandria to restore Ptolemy XII. His campaign was rejected by the senate, on the grounds that he had left his province illegally (plus while Gabinius was away Syria had been destabilized by a revolt of Alexander) to enter another independent kingdom, but the charge of maiestas failed. In particular Roman arbitration in the Ptolemid succession was a long tradition going back to the early second century, and by 47 it was almost expected that Roman arbitration would settle any succession dispute"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19wjk4", "title": "Did the ancient Romans have any ideological or moral reasons for why they ran gruesome gladiatorial combat? Was it truly only for public pleasure or was there more to it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19wjk4/did_the_ancient_romans_have_any_ideological_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8s1szk", "c8sa6dr"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["The origin of Roman gladiatorial combat was probably [some form of ritual combat](_URL_1_), linked to funerals or religious festivals; the death of one (or both) of the combatants would then be a form of human sacrifice.  The oldest *recorded* gladiator fight in Rome was in honor of the funder's dead father.  (The Greeks, too, had [funeral games involving violent combat](_URL_2_), so we might want to see this as a general Mediterranean trend, possibly Indo-European - though this is sheer speculation.)\n\nOrigins aside, though, the public loved these sorts of games, so by the late Republic, gladiatorial combats were routinely funded by candidates for public office, and in the High Empire, gladiator fights - along with public executions, fights with wild beasts, and various other hideously creative spectacles - had evolved out of their original religious/festival context to become sheer popular (very popular!) entertainment, funded by Emperors to keep the *plebs* happy and loyal.  Seneca deplored them:\n\n > I turned in to the games one mid-day hoping for a little wit and humor there. I was bitterly disappointed. It was really mere butchery. The morning's show was merciful compared to it. Then men were thrown to lions and to bears: but at midday to the audience. There was no escape for them. The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain. \"Kill him! flog him! burn him alive\" was the cry: \"Why is he such a coward? Why won't he rush on the steel? Why does he fall so meekly? Why won't he die willingly?\" Unhappy that I am, how have I deserved that I must look on such a scene as this? Do not, my Lucilius, attend the games, I pray you. Either you will be corrupted by the multitude, or, if you show disgust, be hated by them. So stay away...\n\nand [many of our Roman sources](_URL_0_) were disgusted by the violence and waste and the popularity of low-born slave gladiators, and saw the games as nothing more than crass entertainment to curry the favor of the degenerate urban mob.", "Aescolanus gives a good answer about the origins of the games and how they existed initially exclusively in a funerary setting.  However, over time, funerals became just a pretext for the games, and eventually they became stand alone events.  One theory about the meaning behind the games was that they were meant to be displays of virtue, specifically that of the military.  Cicero seemed to be making connections between the shared honor between gladiators and soldiers (see de Oratore 2.84, Tusculanae Disputationes 2.41 and Philippics 2.35).  This theory I think is further supported that the rise of games in prominence coincides with major military leaders like Julius Caesar and Augustus in charge.  It would seem to be to their benefits, as successful generals, to reinforce military virtues through the games as a way to solidify their power during uncertain times."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abacus.bates.edu/~mimber/blood/gladiator.sources.htm#Seneca", "http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/945159", "http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/trojanwarinlit/a/IliadXXIII.htm"], []]}
{"q_id": "2xf62c", "title": "was there anyone prominent in classical times, in Greece or Rome, who believed there were other inhabited worlds in the universe? if \"yes\" how did other people take the idea?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xf62c/was_there_anyone_prominent_in_classical_times_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cozm6bn"], "score": [3], "text": ["Epicurus was a fairly prominent Greek philosopher (founder of the philosophical school of Epicureanism) of the 4th-3rd centuries BCE.  The doxographer [Diogenes Laertius records a letter from Epicurus to Herodotus](_URL_0_), in which Epicurus says [Loeb translation]:\n\n >  Moreover, there is an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it.  For the atoms being infinite in number, as has just been proved, are borne ever further in their course.  For the atoms out of which a world might arise, or by which  a world might be formed, have not all been expended on one world or a finite number of worlds, whether like or unlike this one.  Hence there will be nothing to hinder an infinity of worlds.\n\nThe idea of infinite worlds is a well-known Epicurean theory, also found in the Epicurean poet Lucretius (1st century BCE) in [his epic poem *De rerum natura* (*On the Nature of the Universe*)](_URL_1_) [Loeb translation]:\n\n >  Now since there is illimitable space empty in every direction, and since seeds [atoms] innumerable in number in the unfathomable universe are flying about in many ways driven in everlasting movement, it cannot by any means be thought likely that this is the only round earth and sky that has been made, that all those bodies of matter without do nothing: especially since this world was made by nature, and the seeds of things themselves of their own accord, knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways,  heedless, without aim, without intention, until at length those combined which, suddenly thrown together, could become in each case the beginnings of mighty things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.  Therefore again and again I say, you must confess that there are other assemblages of matter in other places, such as this is which the ether holds in greedy embrace\n\n >  Besides, when abundant matter is ready, when space is to hand, and no thing and no cause hinders, things must assuredly be done and completed.  And if there is at this moment both so great store of seeds as all the time of living existence could not suffice to tell, and if the same power and the same nature abides, able to throw the seeds of things together in any place in the same way as they have been thrown together into this place, then you are bound to confess that there are other worlds in other regions and different races of men and generations of wild beasts.\n\nIt is also referred to briefly in Cicero's *De natura deorum* (*On the Nature of the Gods*), in the mouth of an Epicurean spokesman [Loeb translation]:\n\n >  For he [Epicurus] who taught us all the rest has also taught us that the world was made by nature, without needing an artificer to construct it, and that the act of creation, which according to you [Stoics] cannot be performed without divine skill, is so easy, that nature will create, is creating and has created worlds without number.  You on the contrary cannot see how nature can achieve all this without the aid of some intelligence, and so, like the tragic poets, being unable to bring the plot of your drama to a *denoument*, you have recourse to a god; whose intervention you assuredly would not require if you would but contemplate the measureless and boundless extent of space that stretches in every direction, into which when the mind projects and propels itself, it journeys onward far and wide without ever sighting any margin or ultimate point where it can stop.  Well, then, in this immensity of length and breadth and height there flits an infinite quantity of atoms innumerable, which though separated by void yet cohere together, and taking hold each of another form unions wherefrom are created those shapes and forms of things which you think cannot be created without the aid of bellows and anvils, and so have saddled us with an eternal master, whom day and night we are to fear; for who would not fear a prying busybody of a god, who foresees and thinks of and notices all things, and deems that everything is his concern?\n\nEdit: typos"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D10%3Achapter%3D1", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Lucr.+2.1048&amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0131"]]}
{"q_id": "1gdhxv", "title": "Why don't we consider the Romans to be a cruel in the same light as other civilizations?", "selftext": "It seems the Romans were a very cruel society.\n\n- They enslaved people for construction and mining\n- They were seemingly in a state of war constantly with other civilizations\n- They enslaved men and trained men to be gladiators\n- They had cruel methods of punishment (nailing people to crosses, as well as stories of pouring gold down peoples' throats)\n- They had Christians fighting lions and other gladiators for entertainment\n\nI'm sure they had other cruelties that escape my current thoughts.\n\nI'm not particularly well-read in their history, but it seems like we rank them above other civilizations in terms of their civility.\n\nI'm wondering what the historical consensus is about the cruelty they seemingly inflicted on a day-to-day basis and why lay people see them in a different light than, say, the Mongols or Persians.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gdhxv/why_dont_we_consider_the_romans_to_be_a_cruel_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caj69js", "caj6hsg"], "score": [6, 25], "text": ["They certainly were cruel by modern standards. However, they also had a huge hand in defining western civilization, and brought an era of relative peace and stability to the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They gave us our legacy of literature/art/law/science/technology along with the Greeks. When historians from the middle ages/renaissance looked back to this era, they saw a people that carved civilization out of an area awash with savage barbarians, the people who brought Christianity to the forefront. It's no surprise that they looked back at what they saw with admiration, as they too lived in cruel times and understood slavery/warfare. \n\nAs for why others are viewed more harshly? The mongols destroyed some truly great empires and centers of learning, and were direct antagonists to western Europe and the middle east. They are pretty much universally reviled despite the good they did. The Persians were almost always antagonists of the west's forefathers, and were seen as a strange foreign threat, or decadent heathens by Muslims and Christians alike. The Arab uprising after Mohammed's death involved a violent overthrow of \"Persia\" at the time, so the great Islamic scholars looked upon them with disdain as well. Neither of these people were less cruel than the Romans, but they didn't have the added benefit of being the forefathers of the people writing the history.\n\nAs for the pouring of gold down throats. I know of two romans that were given this treatment. Manius Aquillius in the first century B.C. was killed by Mithradates via gold down the throat, and Crassus after Carrhae reportedly received the same punishment but post-mortem. I'm not familiar with the Romans themselves dealing out this type of punishment, but I haven't read enough to have an informed answer either.", "Seems like your perception might be a bit skewed by pop culture here! You have some truths here, but they're mixed up with misconceptions (If that makes sense), so I'll go down your list, then do a bit of chattering (cause I seem to like doing that bit ;) )\n\n---\n\nFirst off your points. They seem to all be centred around slavery (for context, the lack of slavery is a very modern thing - and even then, there are more slaves now than at any other time in human history) or Christianity, with the war bit thrown in (For modern context, the Romans were at war less than the United States has been.) So let's go down the points.\n\n* They enslaved people for construction and mining / they enslaved [people] (women too!) to be gladiators. \n\n**They did indeed! As did most other civilizations throughout history. To be fair, gladiatorial contests WERE especially sanguinary and brutal, and the life of a slave in the Roman mines sorta sucked. BUT, Roman slaves also (depending on their luck and pedigree) had the chance to buy their own freedom, as they were often paid (Most especially post-Republic.)**\n\n* They were seemingly in a state of war constantly with other civilizations\n\n**As I pointed out above, [the United States has been at war far more constantly than the Romans.](_URL_0_) While that may not be a waiver for their warlike nature, it's context - they're certainly not the only nation that's been warlike, or even the most brutal when they were. Certainly, Caesar's conquest of Gaul was considered one of the harshest of the ages, with an estimated 1 million killed in combat and another million enslaved. Compare that to the Mongols, who killed over a million people in ONE siege. While the Romans loved their wars (Their economy was sorta based around them), they weren't the most warlike OR brutal rulers the world has ever seen. \n\n* Cruel methods of punishment:\n\n**By who's standards? Today's standards, you must remember, are very modern. Secondly, people generally weren't nailed to a cross in a crucifixion - they were tied there and left to die (I'm not gonna get into Biblical debates :P). Some other punishments that I would consider on par with crucifixion (though it's DAMNED hard to really try that - I mean, think about it. Crucifixion lasted for DAYS, and was one of the simplest, cruelest ways to die that I can imagine.) would be perhaps [drawing and quartering](_URL_4_) which involved being dragged behind a horse to your place of execution (in front of massive crowds), hung until you were half dead, then being unmanned (either by crushing or by chopping off your bits), disemboweled (your guts would be pulled out, with great care to keep you alive, and they were generally burned in front of you), then finally beheaded and dismembered (or vice versa if they REALLY hated you), and your pieces would be sent to the corners of the realm. (That was a primarily English punishment - famous example is William Wallace. Braveheart censored a lot of it.) Or, you could die the [Death by a Thousand Cuts](_URL_6_), which was Chinese - it's exactly what it sounds like. Needless to say, cultures worldwide have examples of extreme cruelty. Also, pouring gold down people's throats were stories of what was done TO Romans, not BY them.**\n\n* Christians dying in the arena:\n\n**Christians weren't the only ones - and they were executed in this fashion because they (essentially) broke the law, despite the Romans really not caring too much about their religion. The Romans were legally supposed to pay obesquience of some sort to the Emperor, and the Christians refused - leading to their punishment (The sources make it sound almost exasperated.) The stories of Nero burning Christians for torchlight is *probably* an exaggeration. However, as per always, we're not sure on that front.**\n\nThey had plenty of other facets that you might consider cruel, such as [what they did to Carthage](_URL_3_), or (as I mentioned), Caesar's conquest of Gaul, or [the things that lead to Boudicca's uprising](_URL_2_), or [their handling of the Goths' crossing of the Danube that I explained here.](_URL_5_)\n\nHowever, alongside their harshness (which...how can we truly rate them, with our modern context looking back? If you were living in that society, and were threatened at every turn, would you not do the same? Would you not respond to THEIR harshness with your own? It's impossible to say.), they WERE also one of the most influential societies in Western history. Many modern governments today are based on theirs, their architecture that *still stands today* is absolutely breathtaking, their empire, their power, and...I think most influential...their sheer RELATEABLENESS. We have so many surviving records from their time, we can really RELATE to them as people. Heck, if you look at [the graffiti from Pompeii](_URL_1_), it's the same thing that you would see today!\n\n \"O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin.\"\n\n\"Auge loves Allotenus\"\n\n\"Romula hung out here with Staphylus.\"\n\n\"Blondie has taught me to hate dark-haired girls.  I shall hate them, if I can, but I wouldn\u2019t mind loving them.  Pompeian Venus Fisica wrote this.\"\n\nSee what I mean?\n\n---\n\nFinally, it really depends on who you ask concerning the Mongols and the Persians. If you ask most people (who aren't 300 :P ), they'll straight up tell you that the Persians were an awesome, extraordinarily cultured and open-minded society - /u/Daeres could give you REAMS of posts concerning that one. They practiced freedom of religion, were very ordered, and really weren't half bad to live under.\n\nConcerning the Mongols, there are many historians who believe today that the impact they had was absolutely worth the millions that were butchered in their conquest. Again, that's all opinion (And mine is the other way, so I don't want to present their argument for fear that my own bias would show too much.), and each historian has their own ;) \n\n---\n\nTo wrap it up: Could the Romans be cruel? Yes. But they were also people, just like you and me. They were a culture, and two thousand years ago, life in general was far harsher than it is today. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations", "http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%20pompeii.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_(c._149_BC)", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_and_quartering", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1flnwp/did_german_iron_age_barbarians_migrate_or_invade/cabijwz", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_slicing"]]}
{"q_id": "2am4oz", "title": "Did the Red Army really use human-wave tactics in World War II?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2am4oz/did_the_red_army_really_use_humanwave_tactics_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwj95k"], "score": [29], "text": ["Borrowing from the answer I provided last week for the [Eastern Front AMA](_URL_0_)\n\n >  It isn't *not* true, but it didn't happen like you see in Enemy at the Gates.\n >  \n >  There are three principle ways that human waves were utilized during the war.\n >  \n >  * In the very early months, the fight was exceptionally desperate and the Red Army often found themselves with no alternative, as they lacked heavy support, and in some cases even enough rifles. Massed charges happened, and there are even accounts of Soviet soldiers charging with their arms linked in solidarity (or to ensure no one chickens out if you are cynical) as they lacked rifles. Wasting trained soldiers on this makes little long term sense though, and it wasn't utilized in latter phases of the war.\n >  \n >  * The second, and more common use at least through Stalingrad, were the citizen levies (Narodnoe Opolcheniye). There weren't soldiers, but civilians pressed into service and thrown against the Germans to buy time. Some were armed, some weren't. In some cases they were forced at gun point. Most members of the Opolcheniye had no training, and survival rates were low, to say the least. those that did you be absorbed into the Red Army eventually. To quote from an instance outside Leningrad:\n >  \n >   > \"Altogether over 135,000 Leningraders, factory workers as well as professors, had volunteered, or been forced to volunteer. They had no training, no medical assistance, no uniforms, no transport and no supply system. More than half lacked rifles, and yet they were still ordered into counter-attacks against panzer divisions. Most fled in terror of the tanks, against which they had no defence at all. This massive loss of life\u2013perhaps some 70,000\u2013was tragically futile, and it is far from certain that their sacrifice even delayed the Germans at all on the line of the River Luga.\"\n >  \n >  The scene in Enemy at the Gates is *possibly* inspired by the workers from the Barrikady Ordnance Factory, the Red October Steel Works and the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, who were press-ganged and charged at the German troops on August 25th, 1942.\n >  \n >  \n >  * The final type we see is with the shtrafniki - soldiers put into punishment battalions. They were soldiers who had committed crimes, or political prisoners of the gulags, or kulaks, and other undesirable elements, who were atoning for their crimes (real or imagined) with service in the worst position in the army - in many cases the alternative was a death sentence anyways. Service would be for about three months, and if you survived, you would return to a normal unit. But survival wasn't easy. These units would be used for such wonderful roles as human mine-clearers, or in the parlance of your era - \"Forlorn hopes\". Some units would have 100 percent mortality rates, although the overall survival rate wasn't quite that high! Close to 500,000 soldiers would service in the Shtrafbat by war's end.\n\nHope that answers your question, but if anything needs clarifying, just ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29yute/eastern_front_ww2_ama/cipx6t8"]]}
{"q_id": "1ecvcj", "title": "What was Hitlers policy towards Freemasons, and were any masons in his administration?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ecvcj/what_was_hitlers_policy_towards_freemasons_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9z46to"], "score": [4], "text": ["Hjalmar Schacht was the only freemason in the 1933 Nazi government. The Nazi's associated freemasonry with international conspiracies and denounced it in their propaganda. Freemasonry in Germany was targeted immediately after the Nazi's came to power in 1933 and became illegal in 1935, after most of the lodges had already dissolved themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "41tvzi", "title": "Recommend me a good book covering Europe in the period after the Roman Empire and before the turn of the millenium (1000AD)", "selftext": "Specifically I'm looking for a narrative history that will cover in broad strokes, how various powerful families in Europe came about leading to Dynasties we all learned about in school and beyond. In other terms, the collapse of the Roman Empire at roughly 400AD must have left a giant power vacuum throughout Europe. How was this filled. By about 1000AD or thereabouts there are established nations, Kingdoms, dynasties with different names and languages from those seen in Roman times. What is the narrative of that 600 year period.\n\nObviously the whole of Europe is a rather large subject - I wouldn't mind books with a bias towards England / the UK but Europe as a whole would be good too.\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41tvzi/recommend_me_a_good_book_covering_europe_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz537y8"], "score": [6], "text": ["Chris Wickham's *The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000* (2009) sounds like the book you are looking for. Wickham is an excellent historian and his breadth of knowledge really shines in this book, it's not often that you can find a medievalist just as comfortable talking about Anglo-Saxon England as the Abbasid caliphate! It was also written for the general public, so it's a very engaging read. In case you are interested in church history as well, Peter Brown's *The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000* (2003/2013) is a great introduction to that topic and covers the same time period. For books with a narrower chronological focus, I recommend Guy Halsall's *Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376\u2013568* (2005) and Peter Sarris' *Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700* (2011). Both are more detailed, but they are written by two experts in their respective fields, well worth a read if you want to know a bit more than Wickham's overview. Robin Fleming's *Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070* (2010) is a wonderful and up-to-date survey of early English history, but does not approach it through a straightforward narrative, so it might be a bit harder to get into - I'm not sure what would be a good alternative though, so you might have to wait for someone else to recommend a book on early medieval England :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fqi5bl", "title": "What characteristics made Sparta an environment where women could be so much more powerful, confident and autonomous than in other states of the ancient world?", "selftext": "[This video](_URL_0_) describes Spartan women as being highly liberated and autonomous for their time in history, that they wore revealing clothes and often did sports naked in the presence of men. He also says that women in Sparta were permitted to have two husbands, so that their children could have two inheritances.  What features of life ancient Sparta would have made this female empowerment possible?  Was it simply the absence of men, since men were away fighting wars?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fqi5bl/what_characteristics_made_sparta_an_environment/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flrby5j", "flrwdfv"], "score": [8, 49], "text": ["Spartan women do seem to have enjoyed a considerable degree of social and economic freedom as compared to other contemporary societies such as Athens. We should not overstate their power and suggest that this was an egalitarian society when it came to gender, however I think it is unfair to characterise Sparta as solely a brutal and oppressive regime. \n\nOne of the biggest factors that contributed to female empowerment in Sparta was the problem of \u201cOliganthropia\u201d - this is referred to by Aristotle meaning (I think though my Ancient Greek is awful) \u201cfewness of persons\u201d. We are not entirely sure exactly why this became such a problem in Sparta but essentially the issue was that as Spartan society progressed the system could not produce enough citizens to replace their population - some have pointed to natural disasters and continuous Warfare in the 5th century BC (such as the earthquake that rocked Sparta in 464 BC and caused a Helot revolt) whereas others (linking to Aristotle\u2019s original point) point to the land distribution in Sparta - because land could be inherited by both men and women and because land was not redistributed as happened in the original Lycurgan revolution some time in the 6th-7th centuries BC, over time the land \u201cpassed into fewer hands\u201d as Aristotle tells us and \u201cmany invariably became poor\u201d. Because in Sparta to become a full citizen you needed to be able to contribute produce from your Kleros (allotment of land) to your mess hall (which Spartan citizens were required to attend) - the result was that many Spartans could not meet the mess hall commitments and could not become citizens. Aristotle tells us that Lycurgus encouraged the begetting of children and so women became increasingly important in Sparta for this reason: firstly because they had to produce the next generation of warriors, and then when the population declined (from roughly 10,000 citizens at the start of the 5th century to 4,000 by the Peloponnesian War) their importance increased as the need for new citizens increased. This explains some of their rather odd policies such as women having multiple lovers (not husbands as the YouTube vid suggests) to encourage childbearing which may have developed into response to this decline. The importance placed on childbirth is emphasised by the fact that in Sparta to gain a headstone on your grave as a man you had to die in battle, as a woman in childbirth - both are seen as dying in service to the state. \n\nAs to what you stated in your original comment, certainly the men being away at war does contribute to their power, Aristotle says that they became independent due to their husbands\u2019 \u201cfrequent campaigning\u201d but this does not explain the full picture when you compare Sparta to other societies who were also at war for successive generations. As to why they exercised naked Plato suggests this is sexual in nature and essentially it was to increase the passions of the men, but Plutarch also suggests it did away with prudery - and the men exercised naked to encourage maintaining healthy bodies; so we can guess the intention was partly the same for women. Xenophon tells us the Spartans believed physically healthy mothers would produce healthy children so it was to ensure the women could endure childbirth more easily\n\nWith regards to why they enjoyed such relative freedom (such as being able to own land) in the first place a more pessimistic interpretation would be to set the bar very low and suggest the freedom they did enjoy was only impressive relative to other contemporary societies. That approach definitely has some merit: as I originally mentioned it was certainly no feminist paradise, but you need only read the quotes of Spartan women as preserved by Plutarch or the maiden songs of Spartan poet Alkman to see the Spartan women taking a fair degree of pride in their position within the Spartan system (most famously, though perhaps the reliability of the origin of the quote may be questionable the quote attributed to Gorgo when asked by an Athenian women why Spartan women are the only women to lord over their men, her response was \u201cbecause we are the only ones to give birth to men\u201d) - the evidence we do have from Sparta shows a relative degree of respect between the two sexes that is certainly surprising. \n\nThis partly could be due to the collective responsibility placed in Sparta on instilling and maintaining Spartan values within the community. Aristotle tells us that Lycurgus tried to \u201cdiscipline\u201d the women but gave up when he could not control their \u201cconsiderable licence\u201d, but Plutarch directly refuted this and he and Xenophon tell us women had a range of roles that benefitted the state beyond their primary role of bearing children. In public they informally policed Spartans on a local, we are told they would sing songs that praised the most successful Spartans and ridiculed the others to encourage competition, A Spartan nurse alongside the mother would raise the boys up to the age of 7 to prepare them for the agoge, and they would help keep a watch on the Helots, particularly whilst the men were away on campaign. Thus in order for Sparta to be successful everyone had to \u201cbuy-in\u201d to the system so to speak; and this couldn\u2019t be confined just to the men. Their respect and importance therefore came from the fact that they were perceived as equally important to maintaining the success of the state and its collective values.\n\n\n\nEdit: an extra paragraph and some books that may interest:\n\n\n_URL_0_ a \u201ccompanion\u201d to Women in the Ancient World which covers a broad range of studies and societies - one of which focused on the role of Spartan women as perceived by Athenian men. \n\nA companion to Sparta _URL_1_", "*CW: sexual violence, humiliation and oppression of women*\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**(1/2)**\n\nThere are many problems with the claims in this video. This is probably because it's based on the scholarship of Sarah Pomeroy (1975), who broke new ground by studying Ancient Greek women in their own right, but mostly did so in an excessively optimistic way that isn't very well supported by the sources. More recent work is more careful in its judgment of the position of Spartan citizen women. The main source for this answer is Ellen Millender's chapter on the subject in Anton Powell's *Companion to Sparta* (2018).\n\nThe critical point is that the supposedly liberated and empowered position of citizen women in Sparta is part of the so-called \"Spartan mirage\", the fictional version of Sparta imagined by outsiders in the centuries after Sparta had faded as a prominent state in the Greek world. In that sense the myth of the powerful Spartan woman is as little grounded in fact as the myth of the invincible Spartan warrior or the myth of a moneyless society that cared only about honour and valour in combat. This is not what Sparta *was* but what others *liked it to be*. All of these concepts make Sparta into the Other against which outsiders could contrast their own societies. But the way in which Sparta was sketched as different wasn't always the same. Where non-Spartans painted Sparta as the perfectly ordered society in order to push ideas about education and virtue, they painted Spartan women as free and licentious in order to warn others about the corruption that came with the notion of women's rights. They leered at the bodies of \u201cthigh-flashing\u201d Spartan girls and characterised them as promiscuous and unfaithful. They ascribed the downfall of their great society to the greed and political power of women.\n\nTo get at the truth about Spartan women, we need to try and get behind this moralistic agenda of our sources. The real question is not \"What made Spartan women better off?\" but rather \"Were Spartan women really better off?\"\n\nFirst of all, of course, I should stress that I\u2019m referring here to the very select group of Spartiate citizen women. Spartan society included many groups that were excluded from power, and while we know virtually nothing about the status of women in those groups, we can assume that they would be no better off than subordinate groups elsewhere in the Greek world. The freeborn but disenfranchised *perioikoi* likely upheld laws similar to those of other Greeks; the unfree helots were an enslaved labour force, and both men and women were subject to the outrageously violent whims of their Spartiate oppressors. When we speak of Spartan women being better off, we are talking only about those who were born as citizens, the children of citizen parents \u2013 at most a few thousand women, at the height of Spartan power, in a population of a few hundred thousand.\n\nAnd even when we\u2019re talking only about these women, in most ways the answer to our question is No. From what we can tell, where the married life of elite Spartan women was different from the lives of women elsewhere in the Greek world, it was actually worse. In Sparta as elsewhere, citizen women were primarily regarded as baby factories, whose primary duty as citizens was the production of more citizens. Women grew up under the control of a male guardian (their father or close male relative) who decided on their behalf to whom and when they would be married. They had no say in their choice of husband. After the wedding, their husband became their new guardian. They could not instigate divorce. But Spartan customs made this whole experience even more difficult. The [particularly traumatic Spartan marriage ceremony](_URL_0_) involved women having their heads shaved and being dressed as men, since their husband's sexual experience up to that point would have been exclusively with boys, and the idea of having sex with a woman might scare them. And the Spartan rule that younger men had to spend their days with their messmates meant that husbands and wives might not actually see each other in daylight until years into their marriage.\n\nThe linked answer above further discusses the wife-sharing practices that Spartans introduced, either to increase the number of babies or to concentrate inheritances; in each case, control of the woman's sexuality was entirely in the hands of men, with the woman having no freedom of choice and no ability to protest her guardian's decisions. In other words, women were not \u201cpermitted to have two husbands\u201d, as you put it. Rather, two (or more) Spartan men were permitted the use of the reproductive capacity of one woman. There is really no way to spin this as a matter of female empowerment (though Xenophon tries, by claiming that women enjoy the opportunity to run two households at the same time). As far as we know, the practice was unique to Sparta.\n\nIt is true that the life of Spartan *girls* was different. Their unique upbringing prompted many comments from ancient authors on the fact that they \u201cwore revealing clothes and often did sports naked in the presence of men\u201d, as you say. But, first of all, these things applied only to girls preparing for the transition to womanhood. As far as we know, Spartan women stopped doing exercise once they got married, and were expected to live indoors like the wives of other Greeks. Secondly, they would only have been a *part* of the girls\u2019 upbringing, the rest of which would have focused on learning to spin and weave and other things common to girls\u2019 education in other Greek states. Thirdly and most importantly, we may wonder if the athletic exercises should be seen as a form of liberation or empowerment. After all, they were not optional, nor were they private. We can therefore interpret the practice in different ways. There is a world of difference between \u201cgirls were allowed to go out in public wearing little to nothing and do sports\u201d and \u201cyoung girls were forced to give evidence of the strength and beauty of their bodies by exercising naked while closely observed by teenage boys and adult men.\u201d \n\nWe should never forget that the purpose of making girls exercise, as several sources attest, was eugenic. Spartans believed that strong and healthy women produced strong and healthy babies. In other words, girls did not exercise because it was fun, or because they wanted to; it was not a right they claimed for themselves but a duty that was imposed on them. They did it in order to meet the demands of the state, and they were constantly scrutinised and held to account for the extent to which they lived up to Spartan standards. Plutarch adds that their public performance was also intended to \u201cencourage young men to desire marriage\u201d, which is a really euphemistic way to phrase the way teenage boys typically react to the sight of lightly dressed or even naked teenage girls. It cannot be stressed enough, then, that girls\u2019 sports at Sparta were not a matter of women doing what they wanted. They were part state-enforced eugenics and part striptease, and girls had no choice but to take part in it. The only perk was that they got to return the leering and vicious criticism of male bodies when the boys did their performative athletics in turn.\n\n**(continued below)**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/hc5Pp3fuyp8"], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0NYdCgAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=woman+in+the+ancient+world&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjP4d354L3oAhXQDOwKHeiZAzEQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QqA6DwAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=powell+sparta&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiB056E473oAhXLsKQKHViJDmoQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c3qsil/did_the_spartans_suffer_from_demographic_decline/ervjm9y/"]]}
{"q_id": "276ty7", "title": "During the American Civil War were the tactics used really as far behind the technology as stated in many documentaries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/276ty7/during_the_american_civil_war_were_the_tactics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chy8l93"], "score": [2], "text": ["The mass fire tactics used with muskets with ball shot were developed in part because of the relative inaccuracy of a single shot from the weapons. The development of the minie ball made each individual capable of hitting his target over 100 yards away. So you go from people shooting at masses of people and *hoping* that they might hit *something* to masses of people who all can hit within around 12 inches of what they are aiming at *every time.*  \n\nBefore the minie ball each grouping of men was like a giant shotgun with each man shooting one of the balls in the hopes that enough would hit to cause some damage. Now each SOLDIER is capable of doing the damage that it might have taken up to 10 (maybe more depending on the range) soldiers to inflict.\n\nI found the following article to be a decent synopsis of the minie ball's effect.\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rossfordschools.org/vnews/display.v/ART/4ea1872c97a49"]]}
{"q_id": "323xwx", "title": "Why did Musket and bayonet era troops (1600-1800+) Why bright colorful clothes? most notably the British redcoats?", "selftext": "All I know is that it helped commanders command on the battlefield but was this worth having soldiers running around in bright red? especially in harsh wooded terrain where local militia and indians easily blend in and often snipe them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/323xwx/why_did_musket_and_bayonet_era_troops_16001800/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq7n30y"], "score": [7], "text": ["[There are](_URL_0_) [several](_URL_2_) [answers about this](_URL_1_) [in the past](_URL_3_). I'd recommend going through them. If you have any other follow up questions, I'll be happy to answer but the simple answer is that they're like that to create a regimental unity and to show which side they're on."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/160esl/how_did_18th_century_armies_decide_what_color/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dojwc/why_were_the_uniforms_of_the_american/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ggul/the_concept_of_camouflage_seems_pretty/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uvlzi/is_it_true_that_during_the_18th_and_19th/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ft7et", "title": "Why is Michigan one state and not two separate, smaller, states?", "selftext": "I know that California has come close to splitting into two different states (so I know states can), but I am curious as to why Michigan started out in two different sections and never separated.\n\nAnd yes I am aware they are only separated by a small gap, but we've made state lines from smaller waterways.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ft7et/why_is_michigan_one_state_and_not_two_separate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cadl5t4", "cadocmf", "cadu4fn"], "score": [59, 27, 5], "text": ["This was asked and answered last week: [Why is Michigan's Upper Peninsula part of Michigan and not part of Wisconsin (or even its own state)?](_URL_0_)", "Just FYI, your \"small gap\" is spanned by a bridge approximately 26,000 feet long. It's actually the third longest suspension bridge in the world.\n\nI totally understand your point about the \"smaller waterways\" thing, but the Mackinac Straits [aren't actually all that small.](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: added image", "I've been a Michigan resident all my life; born and raised near Detroit and currently live in the UP, I'm surprised to see this on r/AskHistorians.\n\nThe lower peninsula is well off economically, both in terms of population (and thus tax base) and varied job fields.  The UP, in contrast, is mostly logging and mining (along with tourism), with a few universities thrown in there as well (Finlandia, Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan).  There have been various movements for the UP to break away and form it's own state (\"Superior\"), but the UP lacks the economic diversity and tax base to make any legitimate movement towards statehood.\n\nAnd the Mackinac Bridge is (or is nearly) five miles long, so the straits between St. Ignace and Mackinaw City are quite large."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fc2af/why_is_michigans_upper_peninsula_part_of_michigan/"], ["http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lki3q243wx1qf231mo1_500.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "2izv71", "title": "Did any non-European powers ever engage in colonialism or become an overseas power?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2izv71/did_any_noneuropean_powers_ever_engage_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl72h7b"], "score": [3], "text": ["Yes, absolutely. Since I assume you're referring to the 'age of imperialism', the first and foremost example would be Japan.\n\nThroughout the Tokugawa Shogunate, from 1600-the mid 1800s, Japan had been in relative self-imposed isolation. Large scale trade continued with other east-asian countries, most prominently Korea and China (though the latter was, from China's perspective, illegal). The only contact with Europeans was through a small, tightly monitored trade post in Nagasaki that was granted to the Dutch. The reason for all of this was, largely, to keep out Christianity, as well as to maintain control over the various semi-autonomous realms within Japan (the Tokugawa system is complicated, and deserves its own question) by preventing them from getting outside help.\n\nHowever, despite the very small amount of Western contact, there was still some knowledge of the west. This came primarily in the form of scientific and medical knowledge maintained by a group of scholars who studied 'Rangaku', or 'Dutch Studies'. The main focuses lay in things like gunnery or science that could be practical for defense or other purposes.\n\nUltimately, Japan was coerced into opening more to Westerners over the course of roughly a decade and a half following the arrival of US Commodore Perry in 1853. Over the next fifteen years several ports were opened to western trade. The reaction to this in Japan, though, ultimately led to the downfall of the already declining Tokugawa system and the restoration of the Emperor as the center of power (again, this is a lot of history that could go into another question). The ensuing period is known as the Meiji Restoration, and though many of its initial sentiments were reactionary and anti-western, the leaders at the time realized that the best way to combat the west was to adopt its technology and, ultimately, a lot of its culture and institutions.\n\nJapan began a rapid period of industrialization over the next few decades, overhauling its entire social and governmental structure.\n\nDuring this era, imperialism and the acquisition of colonies was seen by many as the epitome of an advanced nation, and further it would allow Japan to project its power beyond its borders. The first full on act came with the First Sino-Japanese war from 1894-95 in which Japan stunned much of the world by soundly defeating Qing Dynasty China. The result of this was the acquisition of Taiwan (then called Formosa), along with some other territories, and further it moved Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence into the Japanese.\n\nAnother major indicator of Japan's rising power came during the Boxer Rebellion in China, an uprising against rising western control. Japan was included among the 'Eight-Nation Alliance' that put down the rebellion.\n\nJapan's first war against a European power came in 1904 when the Russo-Japanese war broke out. The impetus for the conflict was, essentially, conflicting interests around Manchuria and Korea. Japan struck first and, by the end of the war, had soundly defeated Russia by annihilating both Russia's far east and Baltic fleets, and also winning a handful of costly land battles. The end result was a massive increase in Japan's prestige, as well as some territorial gains.\n\nFive years later Japan formally annexed Korea and would hold it for the next 35 years until the end of World War II.\n\nAfter World War I, where Japan had fought with the Allies in both conquering Germany's far east colonies and also in some minor Mediterranean actions, the Washington Naval Treaty set strict guidelines on the size of various navies. Under the treaty terms, Japan would have the third-highest number of battleships in the world, after only the US and Great Britain, and furthermore their fleet was concentrated in one ocean, unlike the two larger navies.\n\nJapan's government ultimately became more militaristic and, in the 1930s, went to war with China, first conquering Manchuria and then continuing to push inward. This and other actions led the US to cut off oil exports to Japan, a major catalyst for Japan's greater involvement in the Second World War.\n\nDuring WWII, Japan for a short time controlled not only most of the Pacific, but also a large chunk of China (including major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai), and a sizeable amount of Southeast Asia stretching through Burma (now Myanmar).\n\nSo yes, Japan was a perfect example of a non-European power. IF you're interested, I'd highly recommend *The Making of Modern Japan* by Ken Pyle, or, for an interesting read from one of the foremost Western oriented thinkers in early-modern Japan, the autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa (though it really only covers the late  Tokugawa era and Japan's early push into Westernization)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3phqmo", "title": "What culture was the first to create candy? How did that happen?", "selftext": "Big candy fan, but it just dawned on me that the entire concept is very strange - especially the fact that a lot of candy is just flavored rocks. \n\nAre there any old records of candy that is similar to what we eat today like gum, skittles, jolly ranchers, et cetera that people would chew on/enjoy back in the day?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3phqmo/what_culture_was_the_first_to_create_candy_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6ofey"], "score": [22], "text": ["The practice of eating raw honey and honeycomb is so old it predates history, and possibly even humans in the sense of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Does your definition of \"candy\" mean the sugar has to be cooked?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "89fgue", "title": "Why did the Allied Strategic Bombing campaigns of 1942-45 help break Axis civilian resolve while German \u201cBlitz\u201d of 1940 helped strengthen British civilian resolve?", "selftext": "According to Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy, strategic bombing proved to be decisive element in the Allied victory. \n\nI am aware that there is a considerable debate over the effectiveness of strategic bombing; however, this question concerns the Luftwaffe\u2019s terror bombing of 1940 and why it was or is considered less effective against civilian morale than the later Allied bombing of Germany, for example. \n\nWas it a matter of sheer volume of attacks, bombing tactics, timing, or a fundamental difference in implementation or motive that made the Allied bombing campaigns far more effective at destroying countries\u2019 abilities and will to wage war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/89fgue/why_did_the_allied_strategic_bombing_campaigns_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwqr9rg", "dwr9lhn"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["Does this question assume facts not in evidence?", "The bombing didn't break axis morale.  The bombing was decisive because it imposed enormous costs on germany.  By 1944, the defense of the reich was consuming something like 1/3 of all the ammunition germany produced, virtually the entire air force, and most of the artillery pieces.  Every plane and gun shooting at allied bombers was one that wasn't shooting up Allied tanks and soldiers as they pressed ever closer.  German air superiority was absolutely decisive for them earlier in the war, and the bombing campaign destroyed it.  Even before you take into account disruptions to production that bombing caused, the loss of efficiency from the need to de-centralize production, and the sheer cost of rebuilding after the destruction, it's hard to overstate how immense those costs were.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "vmbk7", "title": "When does \"simplifying\" history for children in text books become falsifying history or misinformation?", "selftext": "The higher my education got, the more I learned that the simplified tales of history I was told in elementary and middle school were usually romanticized and sometimes downright false. For example: Christopher Columbus was painted as a hero in American Elementary Schools when his intentions and actions were much less noble. I realize that the stories need to be dumbed down a little and made a little more entertaining but not everyone that goes to elementary school will grow up to take a history course in Uni to get the whole story. I think kids deserve and can handle a little more honesty. What do you think?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vmbk7/when_does_simplifying_history_for_children_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c55qmxj", "c55qt7y", "c55ucqa", "c55x8j9"], "score": [4, 22, 15, 3], "text": ["When I went to school in Germany, there were no history courses in elementary school. They only started after grade 5, when everyone was grown up enough to grasp basic concepts of history. \n\nA lot was still dumbed down, of course, but probably not to too basic a level.\n\nPerhaps it's better just not to teach elementary school children false history that they have to spend years unlearning.", "It all depends on what you want to teach. What is your goal for the students to reach?\n\nQuick example:\n\nIf I teach about Rome, I want them to see the class struggle, the legitimate grievances the peasants had, what the reforms were tried, and why they failed. But I have neither time nor the capacity for understanding on my students' side (this all is taught in 6th grade, to 12 year olds!), to differentiate extensively between the time of the Gracci and that of Sulla. It's simply not important enough if I'm teaching the basics of class struggle.\n\nIf I teach the Cold War, I only have time to include the Korea War and the Cuba Crisis, then Vietnam. I won't get into all the factors that lead to the US involvement into Vietnam, neither will I include the French colonial past. I won't teach intricacies of communist dogma, or the atrocities committed by the South Koreans. Again: No time, and it doesn't fit the goal.\n\nEdit:\nThat being said, I don't ever teach things that are factually wrong, no matter how convenient they'd be. It's *not* Gracchus vs. Sulla, they just fought the same fight. But does every student need to know their exact (= time-accurate) opponents? No.", "History teacher here. The thing people need to realize (which I think OP does) is that it's not so much us wanting to romanticize or promote our opinions as much as it's just an overwhelming issue of lack of time. \n\nHere's an example: If you're going to teach the American Revolution, what do you teach? There are numerous things you'd probably prioritize as absolutely necessary (*British Acts/Proclamations and the protests in response, Declaration of Independence, American leaders, British views of things vs American views, major battles*). To teach each one of these necessary things you'd like to spend a few days to give background information, use primary sources and some type of assessment to make sure the students know it. Now that's just the \"have to teach\" it category, not the stuff you want to teach. \n\nNow understand that I have 8 days in the curriculum to teach it. A class period is 45 minutes (it's a magnet school so it's shorter than most). Before going into any primary source accept that you're going to have to spend time breaking down the language. That's going to cut into your time. Since these are kids you're teaching (at least if you teach middle school in a low socio-economic/urban area like myself), you're going to spend some time getting everyone settled, dealing with the students who didn't bring their supplies, collecting homework and reminding them of upcoming tests. \n\nYou're time to teach these topics is ridiculously short, especially to teach it in a way that shows the complexities that make history such a rich subject. Even then, I haven't even hit on weaving women's and African-American history in all these topics. \n\nMy point I guess is not that we don't want to teach a complex history, it's just next to impossible with a curriculum that goes from Pre-contact Columbus to Present day in 10 months. ", "Former teacher here.\n\nThe effort to simplify history is based in the effort to teach towards standardized tests. The result is simple lists of facts which can only be learned by rote memorization, and it ends up making students hate history. \n\nWhen I did my undergrad in History, it was no longer about list of facts and dates, but about how to parse secondary sources for bias, and how to seek out primary sources. \n\nSimplifying history: let's say No Child gets repealed, now you can change curricula from teaching to a standardized test to a system centered around teaching students the method to study history. That's simpler and more effective in the long run. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3jlwhs", "title": "What were stone age civilizations like?", "selftext": "The term stone age brings up a mental image of small groups of hunter gatherers wearing animal skins, perhaps living in caves. I was wondering how far from the truth this is.    \n\nAs far as I'm aware, Meso American cultures had not yet developed metal working (other than gold) by the time Europeans arrived, so they were essentially still in their stone age, yet their civilization knew large cities with advanced infrastructure, agriculture, water management, astronomy and writing. Were there any stone age civilizations of this level in the old world?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jlwhs/what_were_stone_age_civilizations_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuqja0w"], "score": [187], "text": ["So, Stone Age is a tricky term that a lot of archaeologists don't use anymore. Part of the reason is that a lot of public perception is that societies had a unilineal evolution or development that progressed through a Stone Age to a Bronze Age to an Iron Age and so on towards modern Western civilization. The implication being then that societies that didn't develop metalworking *didn't* develop. As you point out though, you have Mesoamerican cultures that developed many kinds of technologies we associate with more \"advanced\" societies, but not metalworking (besides gold and copper). \n\nSo the problem with a term like \"Stone Age\" is that there isn't one linear progression for societies to develop through. There isn't anything inherent to human societies that means a \"Stone Age\" is followed with a Bronze Age or Iron Age. \n\nModern archaeologists use terms like \"Stone Age\" or \"Iron Age\" as *descriptive* labels for different periods of time in the development of certain societies across the world. They are not universal labels that can be applied to every society. As you mention, for societies that never developed metalworking it doesn't make much sense to even talk about a \"Stone Age\" because there is no following \"Bronze Age\" or \"Iron Age\" to contrast with. For instance, in the American Southwest you would have a \"Stone Age\" that lasted from about 12,000 years ago up to 1540 and the discovery of Europeans by native people in the region. That is a \"Stone Age\" that lasts almost 14,000 years, which isn't really helpful for understanding the changes in the native societies of the US Southwest over that time. The entire reason archaeologists divide up time into \"ages\" is to help understand the changes society goes through. Certainly, societies in say New Mexico in 1540 look nothing like societies in the same area in 10,000BC, so we shouldn't use a single descriptor like \"stone age\" to describe all of that time, even if the tool technology never changed from the use of stone tools. \n\nThat said, for areas of the world were a \"Stone Age\" *is* a useful way of splitting up time (for instance, Mesopotamia where the terminology originated), archaeologists generally make a distinction between the Paleolithic (\"old stone\") and the Neolithic (\"new stone\"). The distinction between the two is based primarily on the kinds of stone tools being used and the way people fed themselves. The Paleolithic, in most places, more or less corresponds with the Pleistocene geologic epoch (the last series of glaciations, or \"ice ages\") from about 2.6million years ago up to 12,000 years ago. This more or less corresponds with the migration of *Homo sapiens* out of Africa and into the rest of the world, so you could argue that a Paleolithic extends further into the past in Africa alone. \n\nOut of this time period we usually subdivide the Paleolithic into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic (Upper being the most recent). These subdivisions are usually based primarily on major climactic changes, but there are some attendant cultural changes. The important thing that characterizes all of these time periods is that societies live as small bands of hunter-gatherers producing stone tools primarily for hunting animals and processing their meat, bones, fat, and hides. So you get tools like spear points (and maybe arrowheads), scrapers (for processing hides), and a variety of stone blades. \n\nThe end of the Pleistocene (and so the end of the Paleolithic in most places) and the beginning of the Neolithic is primarily characterized by continued use of all the tools mentioned above, but also by the addition of groundstone tools. These tools are primarily grinding stones used to process wild grains like wheat or barley. At the same time we also see increasing sedentism. You don't necessarily have completely sedentary populations in early Neolithic societies, but you do have more evidence for more permanent structures. This increasing use of wild grains (and other plants) also presages the domestication of these plants and the beginnings of agriculture. The traits that usually characterize later Neolithic cultures are then the continued use of groundstone, but often also full commitment to agriculture for subsistence, fully sedentary villages, and importantly the invention of pottery. \n\nIf you have ever heard the term \"Neolithic Revolution\", that is referring to the invention and adoption of agriculture in the late Neolithic. You see this most strongly in the Levant (at sites like Jericho), but it matches the sequence more or less in other parts of the world. The important thing to remember is that the \"Ages\" system (including the Paleolithic and Neolithic) was developed to describe Fertile Crescent region (including the Levant, parts of Anatolia, and Mesopotamia). Because of that, it needs to be modified to fit the particular circumstances of other places that experienced similar developments. For instance, while we can talk about a \"Neolithic\" in the US Southwest (when groups started using groundstone tools, agriculture, and pottery), stone tools didn't stop being used in the US Southwest even up into the colonial period. Calling all of the period after about AD500 \"Neolithic\" is ignoring the major changes that happened to societies in the US Southwest, and so we have to come up with other ways of dividing time that are not based only only the kind of material tools are being made out of. The same is true of any other \"Stone Age\" societies. Compare this [\"Neolithic\" homestead](_URL_1_) from the US Southwest to [Pueblo Bonito](_URL_0_) in Chaco Canyon nearly a 1000 years later. Both are \"Neolithic\" if all we look at is the material used to make tools, but there are clear differences not captured by just looking at materials and tool technology. \n\nTo summarize: dividing up the development of societies into \"ages\" is only useful if those ages accurately describe changes in that society. For some societies, particularly in the Levant and surroundings (as well as Europe and China), a \"Stone Age\" (really the Paleolithic and Neolithic) is helpful to describe a change from using primarily stone to using primarily metals for making tools. In other areas of the world, metal was never adopted but significant social changes still occurred so we shouldn't use the same divisions of time to describe those societies. We should make the divisions of history match the development of each region or society rather than trying to shoehorn those societies into a single universal system of cultural evolution. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://scotthaefner.com/photos/images/fullsize/kap/chacoCanyon02.jpg", "https://www.crowcanyon.org/EducationProducts/peoples_mesa_verde/images/BMIII_site_map.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "64ftyj", "title": "Would a woman be allowed to become a blacksmith in Medieval Europe?", "selftext": "So the other night I was rewatching the movie \"Knight's Tale\" (Very historically innacurate, I know.) and it got me wondering, would a woman be allowed to become a blacksmith in Medieval Europe?\n\nMy area of expertise is Military History, and I know jack shit about gender roles during the time. \n\nSo, would a Woman A: Be allowed to become a blacksmith\n\nB: Ever be successful?\n\nC: Be able to be educated sufficiently on the subject?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64ftyj/would_a_woman_be_allowed_to_become_a_blacksmith/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg26cca"], "score": [29], "text": ["The Holkham Bible (British Library Add. MS 47682) from 14th century England isn't a \"Bible\" in the standard sense. It's more like a biblically-based storybook, combining prose and poetry narratives that weave apocryphal legends into bible stories. This sort of narrative or historiated Bible isn't unusual for the later Middle Ages, nor is its vernacular (in this case, Anglo-Norman/a variety of French) language. What sets the Holkham Bible apart is its cycle of illustrations depicting everyday life in contemporary England along with biblical story depictions plus some whimsical imagery.\n\nThe blacksmith? [Is female.](_URL_0_)\n\nWomen were *generally* prohibited from owning their own businesses by the late Middle Ages, although there were exceptions such as the all-female cloth-trade guilds of Rouen. However, there were certainly situations in which women worked in artisans' shops and could even own them. It's a fairly standard assumption that, if the husband/father of a family owned a shop, his family members would compromise some or most of his labor force. That would include wife and daughters. It was an important enough role for wives, in fact, that widows could sometimes inherit a shop directly from their deceased husband and own/operate it in their own right."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/images/holkham2_x.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "b1ckqg", "title": "How and why was what constitutes a deck of playing cards decided upon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b1ckqg/how_and_why_was_what_constitutes_a_deck_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eikxo25"], "score": [6], "text": ["Hey there - while you're waiting for an answer for your question, here are some related topics that you might be interested in:\n\n/u/AshkenazeeYankee discusses the traditional colors for playing cards: [Why are playing cards red and black?](_URL_1_)\n\n/u/Vox_Imperatoris talks about the original games: [What games were playing cards developed for?](_URL_0_)\n\n/u/Argos_the_Dog posts about the basis for the artistic designs on playing cards: [Where do the designs on cards come from?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eaxtc/what_game_were_the_standard_playing_cards_we_use/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iw77f/why_are_playing_cards_red_and_black/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65hasf/i_recently_learned_that_the_kings_on_the_deck_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "5kxbvi", "title": "Did the US really save UK's ass in WW2?", "selftext": "This is one of those classic Murican overpatriotic statements, how much merit is there to it? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5kxbvi/did_the_us_really_save_uks_ass_in_ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbre9w4", "dbrh6q1"], "score": [5, 12], "text": ["This is just a short answer but, kinda. The supplies being sent across the Atlantic were incredibly benefitial to the British, as was the numerical support given by the American troops. \n\nHowever, Britain was for the time being relatively safe from an all out land assault after the Battle of Britain solidified the RAF's dominance over the skies.\n\nIt's probably safer to say that without one of the three major allied players - the US, the British Empire and the USSR - the outcome of the war would have been up in the air rather than  certain and would have lasted alot long. (Without America Britain wouldn't have had the numerical advantage it needed for Operation Overlord. Without Russia all Germany's forces would have been focussed on the western front. And without Britain America would not have been able to reach Europe and all of Germany's forces could have been focussed on Russia).\n\nBasically the three major allied players were all important. \nAmericans often claim to have saved Britain, but the British would respond that they should've joined the war effort from the start...\n\nHope that helped to some degree\n\n\n\n", "There's lots of different opinions on this and lots of valid reasoning for all conclusions.  However, I will say that the one thing everybody should agree on is this:  The US entry into WWII drastically shortened the war and saved an untold number of British and Commonwealth lives.  And for that matter, the bravery and determined fighting of the British and Commonwealth soldiers and civilians saved an untold number of American lives; both in the war and from the eventual conflict that would have resulted had the Germans dominated much of the Western world.  \n\nIn short, we were and are allies...united in common beliefs and causes.  We won the war together, and together managed to keep the Western world largely at peace since then.  That's what really matters."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4m7ql7", "title": "To what degree was Manifest Destiny religious in its origin?", "selftext": "Hi. I'm not American, and I'm pretty unfamiliar with the subject at hand, so I'm sorry if this is an ignorant question!\n\n\nTo clarify, the point of my question is *not* to ask, 'was manifest destiny supported by biblical teachings?' or anything along those lines.  That would be more a theological question than historical one.\n\n\nRather, I want to know whether proponents of manifest destiny during the 19th century supported Manifest Destiny because they felt God had willed it.  Compare, for example, manifest destiny to the Jewish notion of a 'promised land', which is obviously highly religious.  How similar/dissimilar are they? Is that a very stupid comparison to make?\n\nThanks in advance to anyone who might take the time to answer!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4m7ql7/to_what_degree_was_manifest_destiny_religious_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3tfje5"], "score": [4], "text": ["The answer, in my view, is both *entirely yes* and *not really* at the same time. Here's why:\n\nThe United States of the nineteenth century was an overwhelmingly religious country. Even compared to today's US, which is much more religious than most of Europe, people *believed* during the nineteenth century. In particular, they believed that America was a moral exemplar to the rest of the world. The Puritan leader John Winthrop famously coined the description of America as \"a city on a hill,\" meaning an example of a society that would model proper morality, which meant religion, for the rest of the world, much of which was mired in hopeless sin and depravity. Now, the America of 1845 (the year of the coining, or at least popularization, of the phrase \"Manifest Destiny\"), was very different in many ways from the America of 1620. The history of the development of the religion of the Puritans into the religious and philosophical movements of the early nineteenth century are interesting in their own right, but perhaps a bit extraneous. What matters is that Americans still saw themselves as the \"city on the hill,\" the exemplar of virtue. This exemplary status was derived from God, and it required Americans to spread their own exemplary culture around the world, enlightening others to be the same as the perfect society they had created.\n\nAnd yet, you could also say that this was not the case. For while Americans of the time were much more devout on a day-to-day basis than we are used to today, they were by and large not religious zealots in the same way that the Puritans were. The country also by the 1840s began to absorb large numbers of European Catholics via immigration from Ireland, Germany, and other countries, somewhat limiting the effects of Protestant dominance. Manifest Destiny was (is) an ideology, and ideologies have a slippery way of purporting to be about one thing, but rather being about something else. For one thing, many proponents of Manifest Destiny were Southern slaveholders, who sought to increase the number of slave (or slavery-friendly) states in order to ensure the continued survival of the \"peculiar institution\" in the face of mounting Northern censure. Some of these people--and others--were also motivated by a racist belief in the inferiority of Indian, Hispanic, and other non-Anglo peoples. They saw the triumph of the white race as natural and inevitable. Other supporters of Manifest Destiny, whatever their racial views, were naked capitalists, who sought to leverage the natural resources of the continent to their own personal advantage. They may or may not have been personally racist, but they were personally ready to expand the United States for financial gain.\n\nTo summarize: as an ideology, Manifest Destiny was undoubtedly descended from a religious ideal of a virtuous, exemplary society. But it was also flexible enough to accommodate supporters for whom religion was not a terribly important aspect of life, and who supported the expansion of the American state for other, mostly non-religious reasons.\n\nSources:\n\nWeeks, William. *Building the Continental Empire*\n\nMay, Robert E. *Manifest Destiny's Underworld*\n\nAnd finally, I recommend as I always do, Daniel Walker Howe's *What Hath God Wrought* as the premier synthetic account of American history before the Civil War. The chapters near the end of the book on westward expansion and the Mexican War, will present a useful summary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1me86t", "title": "Were puritan women permitted any rights?", "selftext": "To clarify, could they own property? Were they allowed to have hobbies? What sorts? Or were they simply limited to taking care of the home?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1me86t/were_puritan_women_permitted_any_rights/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8d23o", "cc8ebnr"], "score": [6, 17], "text": ["This is something I might well be able help you with, but I need more information about what you mean. The answer will depend more on the law in the particular time and place you're talking about than on a given woman's religious commitments. \n\nDo you mean women in Oxfordshire in the 1590s, or women in England during the Commonwealth, or women in the Connecticut River valley in the 1720s? Or something else? \n\nThe short answer is yes, they had lots of rights. Exactly what those were depends, though.\n", "One of the greatest debates between historians of the reformation is whether or not it was a was a positive movement for women.  It's difficult to say whether it was entirely positive or negative, but I'd have to agree more with the side claiming that it was on the whole a positive movement for women.  Protestants valued literacy, including women's, because they put a lot of stress on Bible reading.  This was obviously a positive for women.  Protestantism also stressed the idea of marriage as a companionate partnership, and urged men to treat their wives fairly and respectfully.  In stressing the idea of freedom of conscience (i.e. that people were only accountable to God) a lot of women must have found a great deal of freedom. Many radical puritan women argued that this meant that they did not owe obedience to their husbands - although this usually meant that they didn't owe obedience to their husbands in light of their religious choices, there is still a lot of personal power behind this sentiment.  As for married women owning property, in both America and England, this would not have been allowed until the 19th century.  \n\n[This](_URL_1_) book is a good overview of the subject.  If you're interested in the radical puritan woman, chapters 6 and 7 of [this](_URL_0_) book should give a nice overview.  Both should be available in any university library."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/History-Womens-Political-Thought-1400-1700/dp/0521888174/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379195881&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=a+history+of+women%27s+political+thought", "http://www.amazon.com/Women-Religion-England-1500-1720-Christianity/dp/0415016975/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379195815&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=women+and+religion+in+england"]]}
{"q_id": "a55rfe", "title": "Curiosity on Support for Nixon during the Nixon Presidency", "selftext": "Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 until 1974, the only president to resign the office. He had previously served as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961, and prior to that as both a U.S. Representative and Senator from California. (from Wiki) \n\n & #x200B;\n\nI'm curious about what things people defended from his tenure as well as things that people might point to as making up for his crimes. \n\nNot only towards the time of his resignation, but as the investigation rolled on (I see it began in 1972; his resignation occurred in 1974.) did he still have many staunch supporters stating he was innocent? were there still people trying to claim that his words/actions were being misinterpreted, misunderstood, or twisted to fit a narrative? Was there any theory involving the deep state trying to besmirch his name? Are there still people trying to suggest such a notion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a55rfe/curiosity_on_support_for_nixon_during_the_nixon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebkhkx1"], "score": [3], "text": [" > Not only towards the time of his resignation, but as the investigation rolled on (I see it began in 1972; his resignation occurred in 1974.) did he still have many staunch supporters stating he was innocent?\n\nTaken from an earlier answer:\n\nMost Republicans stuck out with Nixon to the end. In August 1974, a week before his resignation, a Gallup poll found 57% of Americans supported impeaching and removing Nixon, while 31% opposed. Among Republicans, 59% said they do **not** think Nixon should be impeached and removed from office while 31% thought that he should. Despite plummeting approval ratings and economic problems on top of the scandal, around a third of the country stuck with the president through the entire Watergate scandal."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3v8hg7", "title": "How large were the Greek Colonies in the Mediterranean?", "selftext": "How large where some of the more notable colonies that the Greeks had established throughout the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea at their height?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v8hg7/how_large_were_the_greek_colonies_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxlknty"], "score": [29], "text": ["They were some of the largest cities of the Greek world. Herodotus tells us that Cyrene (in modern Libya) could field 6000 hoplites in the mid-6th century BC, which means it would be outmatched only by the biggest communities of the Greek mainland. In the Classical period, Syracuse (in Sicily) was the second largest Greek city after Athens; by the later 4th century BC it may have been the largest altogether.\n\nThe main thing about Greek \"colonisation\" is that it was nothing like modern colonisation, where a wealthy and powerful centre extracts wealth from a relatively underdeveloped periphery. The Greeks simply founded new and autonomous communities overseas in areas that seemed fertile or strategically placed. There was no functional difference between these settlements and the city-states of the homeland. At most, there was a loose connection of patronage between a colony and its mother city (*metropolis*), meaning that each could rely on the other's support in war, but this was only invoked when it was expedient."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "c95t6w", "title": "I am a proud member of the Soviet Union, and I have answered the call to defend the Mother Land against the Facists in WWII. What is the extent of my training, and what is my fate?", "selftext": "In Western Media we often see the average Soviet soldier as severely under trained, under supplied, and just generally not at all bright. So a couple of questions regarding such:\n\n & #x200B;\n\n1. What is the extent of Soviet training? We usually see a truck full of fresh recruits unloaded about  300 feet or so from the front line where they undergo very brief training on the basics of using a rifle and that is it before they run straight to the battlefield. Was there no basic training? Was there no military organization into Companies, Squads, Fire Teams, ect.? Or was this a rare event that happened in desperation (such as the Siege of Stalingrad) and then has just been portrayed as being the norm throughout the entire war?\n2. Were Soviet troops really that under supplied? A somewhat famous quote from a popular video game goes something along the lines of: \"One man gets bullets, the other man gets a rifle! When the man with the rifle dies, the man with the bullets picks up the rifle!\" Did the Soviet Union really not have enough weapons to supply the army? I personally find that hard to believe considering there are literally millions of authentic Mosin Nagant rifles still in circulation today, some even unused. Furthermore if they really did not have enough weapons for the whole military did they honestly just send unarmed soldiers out to die instead of putting them to work in a logistics unit or something instead where they can still do something to benefit the army without needing a weapon?\n3. Now, onto the infamous suicide charge. We have all seen it, hundreds of men bravely charging across an open area towards a fortified position at the sound of a whistle blow, only to be cut down by machine gun fire with no survivors. Was this a legitimate Soviet tactic? Did commanders really throw hundreds of lives away with a single charge with no real plan in mind other than \"Get over there and kill the enemy!\"? Or again is this just a case of it happening maybe once or twice and it being turned into a stereotype and generalized as being a constant thing that happened throughout the war?\n\nThanks in advance for any answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c95t6w/i_am_a_proud_member_of_the_soviet_union_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["esu053c"], "score": [13], "text": ["Ah, the popular view of the Red Army; questions along these lines pop up every now and then.\n\nYou'll be most interested in u/Georgy_K_Zhukov's [answer on blocking detachments](_URL_1_), which also addresses several other matters along the way - namely, your question 2 and part of your question 3. The remainder of your question 3 is addressed in this [answer regarding 'human wave' attacks](_URL_2_), also by Zhukov, including his reply to a question beneath. For your question 1, u/kieslowskifan covers [training in this answer](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ytfwh/how_did_the_soviets_train_during_wwii/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pcjfv/one_gets_the_gun_the_other_gets_the_ammo_did_this/cw54qf3/?context=3", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2am4oz/did_the_red_army_really_use_humanwave_tactics_in/"]]}
{"q_id": "7onlbb", "title": "History questions about the medieval period", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7onlbb/history_questions_about_the_medieval_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsavk06"], "score": [6], "text": ["I think a good place to start for you would be Ian Mortimer's *The Time Traveller's Guide to Fourteenth-Century England* (or, if you prefer early modern, *The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England*--you might find that some of the issues you're asking about are more relevant later). It's a solid, well-sourced book but written with a light and very readable tone that provides a great overview of what it was like to live back then.\n\nGreenwood Press also has a series of \"Daily Life\" books, some of which might be of interest--Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Daily Life during the Black Death, Daily Life in Chaucer's England are the major later medieval ones. There are also more specialized volumes dedicated to topics like sports  &  games.\n\nHappy researching!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d3xs0", "title": "Does a map of North and/or South America pre-colonialism exist?", "selftext": "Did the Incas/Mayans/Aztecs (for instance) have maps of the whole of the American continent, with names for the areas that we now call Canada, USA, Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.?\n\nSurely these places had names before 500 years ago?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d3xs0/does_a_map_of_north_andor_south_america/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjltxst"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are some old petroglyphs and other items you may find interesting here:\n\n'Maps, mapmaking and use of maps by native North Americans'\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V2_B3/HOC_VOLUME2_Book3_chapter4.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "xofj7", "title": "[Opinion]How has the American Civil War and Reconstruction affected the forming of the two modern political parties and modern American politics in general?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xofj7/opinionhow_has_the_american_civil_war_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ocez1"], "score": [3], "text": ["In my opinion, the modern condition of the two parties is a result of things much more recent - Nixon's Southern Strategy and the rise of Fox News.  The Civil War and Reconstruction certainly played their part, see the Civil Rights Act, but in terms of meaningful effect I would still focus on more recent times.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "36bg0e", "title": "What would be the first language of the Irish who arrived in the United States in the 19th century? What impact or relation did it have to their relation to society?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36bg0e/what_would_be_the_first_language_of_the_irish_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crcjw5l"], "score": [6], "text": ["By far the majority of the Irish who arrived in the US in the 19th Century spoke only English, or were bilingual in English and Gaelic.\n\nThe 1861 census of Ireland (a few years after the large potato famine immigration, but the best data I could find, and unlikely to have been much different in 1846) found that only 2% of the Irish population spoke only Gaelic.  By far the majority spoke only English, and most that spoke Gaelic also spoke English.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs the Irish were one of the few immigrant groups arriving in the US in the 19th century already speaking English, this, of course gave them numerous advantages over immigrants who could not speak the language.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=Ziooyzo7x7YC&amp;pg=PA62&amp;lpg=PA62&amp;dq=Language+spoken+by+Irish+immigrants+to+the+US&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=lMmLhZevfe&amp;sig=pPi449wfXuWN-eD9GcTcHha_ZDU&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=k0pZVaLROsbVsAWg8oGwBg&amp;ved=0CF4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=Language%20spoken%20by%20Irish%20immigrants%20to%20the%20US&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "26frj2", "title": "Where there any proposals to create an African nation in America?", "selftext": "I was thinking about how America isn't really one nation but more two, and how this has affected the social fabric and cultural ideas over the 150 years since slavery.\n\nAnd I got me thinking - if whites were so adamant about not wanting to give blacks equal status, yet were still against slavery and proposal such as returning them to Africa, then were there any attempts to create a nation from African-Americans, as it were? Similar to attempts to place Natives on localized reservations, but instead for the now-free African minority? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26frj2/where_there_any_proposals_to_create_an_african/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chqovue"], "score": [20], "text": ["There were black communities set up by African Americans in the late 1870s-80s, but they weren't protected by the government like Native American reservations.\n\nThe people participating in the communities were called [exodusters](_URL_1_) because of the exodus from the south to states like Kansas. One of the more well known exoduster communities is [Nicodemus, Kansas.](_URL_0_)\n\nAfrican Americans in the south first wanted these communities so they could get away from the persecution of the whites in the south during reconstruction years, where they were still subject to persecution and violence despite their new found freedom."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicodemus,_Kansas", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodusters"]]}
{"q_id": "6d9gbp", "title": "Were ancient Greek statues really coloured like this?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6d9gbp/were_ancient_greek_statues_really_coloured_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di180il"], "score": [5], "text": ["There was a good discussion about the specifics of the color recreations on the sub a few weeks back; you can read it [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/M1aRME2.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69qpla/why_do_marble_busks_of_roman_emperors_have_blank/"]]}
{"q_id": "9gzodh", "title": "Regional Differences in US Soldiers' Placements during WWII? Regional Differences in War Coverage?", "selftext": "Were there notable regional differences in where US soldiers fought during WWII (controlling for branch of service)? For example, would a naval officer from Connecticut be more likely to serve in the European theatre than the Pacific? Same with an Oregonian in the Pacific? Were Easterners more likely to fight in Europe, and the same for Westerners in the Pacific?\n\nMy understanding is that different parts of the US focused more heavily (i.e. more news stories, more analysis/opinion) on different places during the war. So, the Pacific Northwest and California were more interested in the Pacific theatre relative to the rest of the country. (I acknowledge this may be inaccurate). But, were servicemen from the PNW more likely to actually serve in the Pacific Theatre, i.e. did the regional focus of their home states overlap with the location of their actual wartime experiences? Very longwinded Q, I know. And I know this may vary dramatically by service branch, so again, a bit wordy and confusing, but I hope I'm clear enough.\n\nReturning to my perhaps faulty premise; has anyone done a study of how the war was reported on in different regions of the US? Was a Wisconsin farming family reading news about one area of conflict more or less so than, say, shopkeepers in Savannah, GA? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9gzodh/regional_differences_in_us_soldiers_placements/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6883j5"], "score": [3], "text": ["For the U.S. Army, generally no, [as I've elaborated on before](_URL_6_), although there were a few interesting exceptions. \n\nOne circumstance that could have large numbers of men from the same area fighting together in the same unit in the same theater was if they were members of the National Guard. I wrote previously about the origins of the National Guard [here](_URL_2_); \n\n >  The [Militia Act of 1903](_URL_0_) established the **National Guard of each State**, or the organized militia, and the reserve militia. When the National Guard of each state was formed into units, they would need to be organized along the lines of units of the Regular Army and submit themselves to the federal government if they wanted to receive funding. The Militia Act also set the number of yearly exercises, and codified the circumstances under which the National Guard of each state could be federalized; by the president, and for a maximum period of nine months and not outside the United States. In [1908](_URL_1_), the Militia Act was amended to allow the president to set the term limit for federal service as he saw fit, and allow the National Guard to serve outside the United States. \n\n...\n\n >  Exactly how the National Guard fit into the structure of the Army in war was not really considered until the [National Defense Act of 1916](_URL_7_). The act provided that the **Army of the United States** would consist of the **Regular Army**, the **Volunteer Army**, the **Officers' Reserve Corps**, the **Enlisted Reserve Corps**, the **National Guard while in the service of the United States**, and **such other land forces as are now or may hereafter be authorized by law**. The act said that members of the National Guard, when called into the service of the United States, would lose their militia status and become members of the Volunteer Army. The organization of the National Guard was also modified; the president had the sole responsibility to delegate the types of units and number of men for each state, rather than the states themselves. The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) was also established.\n\n >  The [1920](_URL_3_) amendments to the National Defense Act of 1916 provided that the **Army of the United States** would consist of the **Regular Army**, the **National Guard while in the service of the United States**, and the **Organized Reserve Corps**, which included the **Officers' Reserve Corps** and the **Enlisted Reserve Corps**.\n\n >  In [1933](_URL_4_), another amendment to the Act established the **National Guard of the United States** as a legal entity, and provided that federally recognized National Guard men and officers of each state take a dual oath, and be considered members of the Army of the United States at all times. Officer commissions into the NGUS were technically considered reserve commissions under the amendment. This established the National Guard as the federal reserve component we know today. You will notice that the 1920 amendments to the National Defense Act got rid of the \u201cVolunteer Army.\u201d Its equivalent, first codified in [1940](_URL_8_), was that any enlistments into the Army during a time of national emergency or war as declared by Congress would just be in the \u201cArmy of the United States,\u201d and would be for the duration of the emergency or war plus six months. Later, in [1941](_URL_5_), the status of personnel who were drafted into the Army under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was clarified.\n\nNational Guard units were state-based, with the major units being infantry divisions;\n\nDivision|Allotted states|Campaign participation credit\n:--|:--|:--\n26th|Massachusetts|Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe\n27th|New York|Elements participated in various campaigns in the Pacific, but not the entire division\n28th|Pennsylvania|Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe\n29th|Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C.|Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Central Europe\n30th|Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee|Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe\n31st|Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi|New Guinea, Southern Philippines\n32nd|Michigan, Wisconsin|New Guinea, Southern Philippines, Luzon\n33rd|Illinois|New Guinea, Luzon\n34th|Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota|Tunisia, Naples-Foggia, Rome-Arno, North Apennines, Po Valley\n35th|Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska|Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe\n36th|Texas|Naples-Foggia, Rome-Arno, Southern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe\n37th|Ohio|Northern Solomons, Luzon\n38th|Indiana, Kentucky. West Virginia|New Guinea, Southern Philippines, Luzon\n40th|California, Nevada, Utah|Bismarck Archipelago, Southern Philippines, Luzon\n41st|Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming|Papua, New Guinea, Southern Philippines\n43rd|Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont|New Guinea, Northern Solomons, Luzon\n44th|Delaware, New Jersey, New York|Northern France, Rhineland, Central Europe\n45th|Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma|Sicily, Naples-Foggia, Anzio, Rome-Arno, Southern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, Central Europe"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/57th-congress/session-2/c57s2ch196.pdf", "http://legisworks.org/congress/60/publaw-145.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pxt1p/why_was_the_army_during_the_us_civil_war_split_by/", "http://legisworks.org/congress/66/publaw-242.pdf", "http://legisworks.org/congress/73/publaw-64.pdf", "http://legisworks.org/congress/77/publaw-338.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8b9uoo/were_americans_who_enlisted_or_were_drafted/", "http://legisworks.org/congress/64/publaw-85.pdf", "http://legisworks.org/congress/76/publaw-513.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "a59fzo", "title": "Why on Wikipedia list of top WW2 Ace pilots are above 50 almost only marks only German Luftwaffe pilots?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a59fzo/why_on_wikipedia_list_of_top_ww2_ace_pilots_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebmczod"], "score": [4], "text": ["1. ***Luftwaffe*** **personnel policy** \\- The Germans tended to keep pilots in combat for as long as possible. In general, German *jadgflieger* only stopped flying combat missions if they were killed (Walter Nowotny), badly wounded (G\u00fcnther Specht, although he eventually returned to service), captured (Ulrich Steinhilper), or promoted (Adolf Galland). By contrast, leading Allied pilots were often promoted to non-flying jobs leading operational units, put on staff duties, or sent to help train up new pilots. Battle of Britain ace \"Sailor\" Malan became Biggin Hill's station commander in 1942, which limited his ability to fly on operations. U.S. Navy ace \"Jimmy\" Thach, the inventor of the famous \"Thach Weave\" maneuver, was transferred to training and staff duties after he'd scored only six kills. \n2. **Length of time in combat** \\- Virtually every high-scoring German ace flew their first missions over Poland in 1939 or France and Belgium in 1940. Some pilots, like Adolf Galland (96 kills) and Werner M\u00f6lders (102-108 kills) had flown with the Condor Legion in the 1930s. M\u00f6lders, for example, already had valuable combat experience and several kill claims from the Spanish Civil War before WWII even began. By contrast, Soviet pilots didn't enter combat until June 1941. It wasn't until 1943 that USAAF operations in the ETO began to kick into high gear. And it wasn't until mid-1942 that the USAAF and USN were able to really contest the Japanese in earnest. In short, German pilots had a head start over the pilots of nearly every other Allied nation, with the exception of the RAF. According to Trevor Constable and Raymond Toliver: \"One American pilot with 254 missions actually fired his guns at an airborne target only 83 times, and this may well be the best record of any American pilot. In gaining his 352 aerial victories, which establish him as the leading fighter ace of the world and of all time, Major Erich Hartmann flew 1,425 missions. Many times Hartmann flew from two to seven missions a day ... He was involved in more than 800 actual aerial combats.\" They go on to point out that the ***average*** German pilot flew around 1,000 to 2,000 combat missions. Meanwhile, the most active Allied fighter pilots flew only from 250 to 400 sorties.\n3. **Quality of the opposition** \\- I don't want to give an unfair impression of the Soviet Air Forces, but I think it's fair to say they weren't ready for war in 1941. The VVS operated a large number of obsolete aircraft like the I-153 biplane and the I-16, with its open-cockpit. Other early-war aircraft like the LaGG-3 also had serious issues (poor build quality, underpowered, etc.). The Germans were able to destroy nearly 4,000 Soviet planes in the air and on the ground during the opening week of Operation Barbarossa. By 1943, the Soviet Air Forces were a much more formidable opponent and by late 1944, they could serious contest air superiority on the Eastern Front. But in 1941-1942, German pilots had a real chance to run up the score against the Soviets. You can make a similar case that the Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Hurricanes of the RAF offered similarly-vulnerable targets for German pilots in North Africa during 1941.\n4. **Number of opportunities** \\- By 1943 and 1944, the *Luftwaffe* was getting increasingly outnumbered in the skies. That meant relatively few chances for Allied pilots to get kills and that those kills would get spread out over a larger number of pilots. It also meant the reverse for the top German pilots, who had a target-rich environment with lots of chances to get kills. Gunther Rall mentions this in his veryz-enlightening interview here: _URL_0_\n5. **Lying,** **over-claiming, and wishful thinking** \\- I don't want to single German pilots out too heavily for this one, since aircrew on both sides often wildly-inflated kill claims. Part of this is a product of the confusion and stress of combat. By comparing kill claims to actual loss records, it's cleae pilots often counted damaged planes as \"destroyed\" or double-counted another pilot's kill. For example, on September 15th, 1941, JG27 claimed 20 kills against RAF and RAAF aircraft over North Africa. However, Christopher Shore, who has written extensively on the air war in the desert, has found that Allied records only report 5 losses on that date. In other words, JG27 had a 3:1 bogus claim to real claim ratio. This is one reason why gun camera footage of a plane exploding or a pilot bailing out was so helpful in verifying a kill claim. \n6. **German \"one pilot, one kill\" accounting rules** - *Luftwaffe* kill counting gave only one pilot credit for each destroyed aircraft. It's not hard to imagine how this \"one pilot, one kill\" system advantaged higher-ranked veteran pilots over more junior fliers. By contrast, the Commonwealth and American kill systems allowed for fractional kills credits. Credit for one victory could be split between multiple pilots. This is why RAAF ace Cive Caldwell has 28.5 victories and Mustang ace George Preddy has the even-odder score of 26.83 victories.\n7. **American claims given more post-war official scrutiny.** - In the 1950s, American kill claims were evaluated by the USAF's Fighter Victory Credits Board. This Board used information only available after the war (ex. German loss records) to reevaluate American wartime kill claims. This was followed by another board in 1978. In 1945, Mustang ace George Preddy had 27.5 kills. After the 1950s Board, he was credited with only 25.83 kills. And after the 1978 Board, he had 26.83 kills. To my knowledge, the *Bundswehr* has never subjected WWII German kill claims to the same level of post-war scrutiny. \n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STFdRrWBW2w&amp;t=1m0s"]]}
{"q_id": "504v9y", "title": "I'm the head of a Roman family during the height of the Imperial Period and the Tax Collector asks for the taxes, and I refuse for one reason or another. What happens next?", "selftext": "Are there official channels in which the government can get their money from me? Would they send troops to forcibly take the money from me? Does this process differ in the urban centers (think Rome or Alexandria) vs the farming countryside? One last random question, once taxes are collected, where are they stored? Are there official money holding centers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/504v9y/im_the_head_of_a_roman_family_during_the_height/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d719fdb"], "score": [8], "text": ["The head of a *Roman* family? Or a provincial? A Roman wouldn't have had to pay taxes, Roman citizens were exempt from all taxes except the vectigals, a broad class of duties levied generally on trade. Most Roman citizens would not have paid any taxes at all, except for those few who engaged in some sort of merchant trade and therefore needed to pay vectigal duties. Other than that the only real tax that most Roman citizens paid was the inheritance tax, a subset of the vectigals, which was paid only by a relatively few and only once, when inheritance was passed on--failure to pay the inheritance tax was a big deal, it would get the emperor breathing down your neck. It really depends on what you're looking for--the answer to the question as you've phrased it is that our hypothetical *pater familias* (what constitutes the height of the Imperial Period exactly?) probably wouldn't pay anything"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cotft", "title": "\"It ain't over til the Fat Lady Sings\"", "selftext": "Can anyone shed light on the origin of this phrase?    ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cotft/it_aint_over_til_the_fat_lady_sings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhjwlk"], "score": [20], "text": ["This quote is supposed to be about Brunhilde singing her final aria at the end of Gotterdammerung, which is the last opera in the Ring Cycle (four total operas) and is about 6 hours long. (!!!) Brunhilde is often a larger woman, and her [traditional costume has her in a chestplate and a winged hat](_URL_0_) - she's actually the source of that hoary old image of opera singers. \n\nThe phrase is very modern, a lot of it has to do with Wagner's domination of the opera canon in the 20th century, as well as his domination of what people think opera is in American popular culture. Baroque operas and early classical operas typically ended with a chorus, not an aria, so the phrase couldn't come from that time. Some late classical/Romantic operas have soprano aria finishes, but it's not really common enough to get you the phrase \"it ain't over till the fat lady sings.\" Fair amount of opera singers have always been fat though, I'll give you that one! :) But they just don't *always* finish operas, not even close. \n\nWagner's operas inspire some funny quotes though. Here's a few:\n\n\"The opera started at 8pm. At midnight I looked down at my watch. It said 8:15.\" -- attributed to Billy Wilder, but dubious. \n\n\"After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.\" -- alleged to Tchaikovsky\n\n\"Monsieur Wagner has good moments, but awful quarters of an hour!\" -- Rossini \n\n\"In the evening we went to see Tristan und Isolde. That was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen or heard in my life. To be forced to see and hear such crazy lovemaking the whole evening, in which every feeling of decency is violated and by which not just the public but even musicians seem to be enchanted - that is the saddest thing I have experienced in my entire artistic life. I remained to the end since I wanted to hear the whole thing. During the entire second act the two of them sleep and sing; through the entire last act -- for fully forty minutes -- Tristan dies. They call that dramatic!!!\" -- Clara Schumann (this one is not dubious at all!) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://rbkclocalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/mrs-leslie-as-brunhilde-page-148.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "23f36b", "title": "Question Regarding Radar Fire Control in WWII", "selftext": "I've read about the allies and Kriegsmarine ships having this capability. Did the Japanese always rely on optical gun directors or were they able to use the late-war, retrofitted radars to guide their guns? I know some of the more advanced IJN ships like the Akizuki class had radar installed as a part of standard design. Were they used apart from simple surface/air detection?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23f36b/question_regarding_radar_fire_control_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwl753"], "score": [5], "text": ["Some Japanese vessels, like the new Akizuki class as well as larger capital ships like the Kongo, Haruna, Yamato, and more, were equipped with a surface-surface radar (Type 22) that could be used to provide information to the fire control systems. It was fairly standard equipment by early 1944 or so, and entered service in early 1942. However, this was not the same as dedicated fire control radar; the radar set simply found the range and bearing to a target and fed those to the guns; there was no shot correction or blind fire capability. The Japanese navy was in the process of developing dedicated fire-control radar, but the war ended before they could be put in service. [This](_URL_0_) is a good and sourced online resource for the Japanese navy during the war, and [this](_URL_0_radar.htm) subpage outlines the various Japanese radar types in service.\n\nIn comparison, most contemporary Allied ships at the time had a fully blind-capable fire control with a PPI scope (i.e. the spinning lines with dots that show target positions like you see in movies). These more advanced radars, such as the American Mk. 13, had a much higher resolution and were able to detect the shell splashes and correct their fire, making them much more accurate. Their effectiveness over Japanese radars was seen in the action at Surigao Strait at Leyte Gulf, one of the few times where American and Japanese battleships directly engaged one another."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.combinedfleet.com/", "http://www.combinedfleet.com/radar.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "6yov6l", "title": "What was the first country to have an accurate map of the whole world?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6yov6l/what_was_the_first_country_to_have_an_accurate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmp586v"], "score": [11], "text": ["Maps are still being refined.  What do you intend with \"accurate\"?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c5ms6", "title": "How was bronze-/iron age metal mined, what types of metals where mined.", "selftext": "I am not familiar enough with history to search for this type of information myself. Would love sources: books, sites and videos are all welcome! \n\nEdit: Found a nice [link](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c5ms6/how_was_bronzeiron_age_metal_mined_what_types_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjc9ws1"], "score": [2], "text": ["hi! not discouraging anyone from providing more info, but FYI, you may be interested in previous posts on mining from the FAQ (link on sidebar):\n\n[Mineral resource extraction](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://neon.mems.cmu.edu/cramb/Processing/history.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/economics#wiki_mineral_resource_extraction"]]}
{"q_id": "9r2fi6", "title": "Did the average American see the Civil War coming?", "selftext": "If I asked Americans in the 1850s if there would be a civil war in the next 10 years what would they say? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9r2fi6/did_the_average_american_see_the_civil_war_coming/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8dmu1f"], "score": [10], "text": ["Adapted from a previous answer:\n\n**1/2**\n\nDid anybody see the Civil War coming? The answer there that it depends what one means by \"see the Civil War coming\" and also what \"the Civil War entails\" in their minds when they do or don't see it. So let's open the box on Schroedinger's Antebellum American for the firm yes and firm no that are both correct. \n\nPredictions of *a* civil war are almost as old as the Republic, regularly raised as the obvious result of an attempt at breaking the Union. These largely take the role of a general fear and warning, rather than a specific thing people expect to happen in the immediate future. So in the most permissive sense we can say that many people saw it coming, but that papers over a lot of important nuance. A theoretical civil war is, most of the time for most Americans, not a major concern. When tensions over slavery rise -and it's always slavery that brings things to this point- there's a sense that Something Must Be Done or the whole nation may explode. That Something is basically to give slavery extra protections and advantages beyond its already extraordinary protection granted by the Constitution, guarantees which considerably exceed any later provided for freedom or equality. There's usually also a fig leaf for free state pols so they can say they didn't *totally* betray their constituents (at least the ones who dislike slavery) but those concessions are insbustantial and never remotely commensurate with what the enslavers got.\n\nUntil the late 1840s, the steady give (to enslavers) and take (from the enslaved) is the general outline of American politics without major exception. The conflict over the spoils of the Mexican War marked an important departure from that norm and things never quite get back to the status quo ante. There's always been conflict over slavery's future in the nation, but coming into the 1850s the usual rounds of heavy capitulation to the enslavers don't do the trick anymore. Partly, it's that they've gotten so extreme that ordinary whites across the North now feel personally implicated in slavery in ways they were not before courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Act but there's also a general trend of lesser known proslavery provocations that slowly added weight to the antislavery case in the decades prior. The two trends feed on each other in important ways, but most white Americans outside the general evangelical reformist movement of the era don't consider themselves primarily antislavery in their politics until the last antebellum decade even if they do oppose the institution. The big reactions to the Compromise of 1850, followed up by the realization that it really settled nothing, a series of daring rescues of fugitive slaves from their would-be captors, and similar genuinely popular resistance to slavery kick off the decade.\n\nThe tension only ratchets up from there, with a new provocation in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law opens vast new territories to slavery, where American law had previously forbade its entry for thirty years. That whether or not slavery will go into Kansas will be settled on the ground leads to a fair bit of actually fighting it out during small-scale violence that erupts for a while into a little war within the territory. Seeing this as their chance to put right what went wrong with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, antislavery Northerners are eager to fund settlement by their own people in the territory. Proslavery Missourians view this as stealing \"their\" turf and respond with semisecret paramilitaries, massive vote fraud, and a fair bit of violence around polling places. All of this keeps the issue in the news and at the center of American politics past the middle of the decade. \n\nThis is all way too much for the systems built up in the 1820s and 1830s to muzzle antislavery whites and defend slavery to handle. The biggest of those are two national parties, with enough constituency and power in each section to act as effective pressure on antislavery members in their own ranks to keep in line *and* to a lesser degree to force other issues which divide antislavery men between the two parties. As long as antislavery whites are divided between Whigs (mostly) and Democrats (an important minority) and other issues on which they disagree (the tariff, internal improvements, the national bank) remain the focus of politics, all this can keep puttering along. When slavery takes center stage and becomes *the* issue, then who cares about the bank, some roads, or a duty on whatever? In that environment, being antislavery counts more and the party coalitions fracture.\n\nThat happens in every sectional clash, which is why more conservative types understand them as so threatening. What happens in 1852-5 is a lot worse than usual because the dispute over the Mexican Cession went on for literal years and the solution kept the issue alive. That solution was a Whig program, roughly, originally managed by the party's chief founder Henry Clay. Clay's solution did not get through Congress with mainly Whig votes because the party's antislavery wing would not accept it and their proslavery wing was lukewarm at best. Instead it's managed by Stephen Douglas, the Democracy's rising star. In the South, that means that the Democrats can deliver for slavery and the Whigs cannot. Until this point, Whiggery has been the South's second party and genuinely competitive in some states. The fallout from 1850 is a lot of Whigs staying home and Whig pols being pounded at the polls. At the same time, Southern Democrats are adopting a still more radically proslavery line...and they were already incredibly proslavery. Lower South Whiggery collapses.\n\nWhat's that do to the Whig Party? It had a bit of a northern tilt to begin with. It's just lost a lot of its voices in the Lower South which tend to be more compromise-minded toward the North as well as an important counterweight on the strong antislavery wing up in the North. The result is a party that's somewhat more antislavery (although still not primarily so) which makes the problem for Southern Whigs worse still. But there are enough conservative, proslavery Whigs in the North to maybe even some of that out. The thing is, they're all tainted by the fact that they voted for hated elements of the Compromise of 1850, particularly the Fugitive Slave Act and their leaders insist that that most odious law must be zealously enforced.\n\nMaybe the Whigs could have recovered from that had the Kansas Question not opened when it did, but that kicks up in 1853 (a little) and then goes huge in 1854. With those conservative Whigs still around making the party look bad, actual antislavery Whigs have a sense that the party is not going to ever come around their way and that it may not be a longterm viable vehicle for them. The fallout from this is that the Whigs contest the presidential election in 1852, lose, and never do another. By the time 1856 rolls around, antislavery Whigs have gotten together with antislavery Dems (who are getting out of their own party for its more radical proslavery turn) to form the Republicans. Because it's a heterogeneous group of people united only on opposing slavery, the GOP is fundamentally an antislavery party first and everything else question mark. That makes it by default a Northern party, though there are some important players from the least enslaved slave states among the lot.\n\nWe can flip the script and do the same for the South, where the Democrats are now absolutely the Southern party and the question is how Southern they will be. Their dispute, internally, is over how far to go with slavery in the territories just as the GOP's uniting issue is that slavery will go no farther. These divisions harden steadily over the 1850s, particularly in the decade's back half when the Dems have two important crack-ups of their own. The first of these is over whether to accept the obviously fraudulent proslavery government of Kansas as a state (remember the proslavery guys cheated *massively*) or instead take on the antislavery Kansas government which is *technically* illegal and *possibly* treasonous but actually has the solid support of a majority of white Kansans. This is the point where the big names lay into each other, with James Buchanan on one side going his all for slavery as he has done for an entire long and miserable career and Stephen Douglas (him again) insisting that none of what shook out in Kansas was what he intended when he started the whole mess, the antislavery guys started it, but in the end you gotta give it to their government.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b5yo7r", "title": "Is it true that Mahatna Gandhi used to sleep with two girls, naked and told people that he's learning self control?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5yo7r/is_it_true_that_mahatna_gandhi_used_to_sleep_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejhmbuw"], "score": [562], "text": ["You may be interested in [these two](_URL_0_) previous [answers](_URL_1_) on Gandhi by /u/CogitoErgoDoom and /u/barath_s, respectively. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7i3h4m/is_this_vice_article_about_gandhi_accurate/dqw108s/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zvgh4/per_russell_brands_standup_did_gandhi_let_his/"]]}
{"q_id": "3fqg8l", "title": "How did one join the ranks of Praetorian Guard, back in ancient Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fqg8l/how_did_one_join_the_ranks_of_praetorian_guard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctr4rkl"], "score": [485], "text": ["The Praetorians actually began their existence as the personal bodyguards of Republican generals; the name of this corps was the \"cohors praetoria.\" Augustus took the men from this corps in order to form the modern image of the Praetorian Guard; as a result, Praetorians were initially a general's personal bodyguard, probably drawn from his best legionaries, and were then transformed into a large corps (most estimates stand at 10,000) that was also probably mostly drawn from provincial legions who had seen their fair share of combat.\n\nSource: Sarah Bingham's *The Praetorian Guard: A History of Rome's Elite Special Forces*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5mz6ya", "title": "Did the Allies in World War II ever entertain the idea of offering a conditional surrender to Nazi Germany before the end of the war? Do we know any details on what the conditions of these offers might have entailed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mz6ya/did_the_allies_in_world_war_ii_ever_entertain_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc7sglo"], "score": [101], "text": ["The Allies had different goals of victory for the end of the war, so a discussion of conditional surrender has to take this into account. Churchill, coming from a more traditional British school of thought, was primarily focused on restoring the old European balance of powers system of international governance which relied on equilibrium. It would have seemed natural and logical to allow the Germans to negotiate a conditional surrender on the Western front while rebuilding the Western world (including Germany) to balance the ever growing Soviet Union. However, President Roosevelt had a colliding viewpoint. He instead imagined a 'new' world order, one that was based upon international harmony and cooperation rather than the somewhat anarchic balance of powers system. Kissinger quotes the US Secretary of State:\n\n > ...there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for allies, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.\n\nThe balance of power and the new world order were in direct conflict with each other, and, as mentioned in /u/orincoro's comment, Churchill did not want to 'push his luck' with the American aid he was now dependant upon. Even in 1944, before the Americans had landed, Roosevelt was already expressing ideas associated with American isolationism, and regretting that America had to come to the aid of Europe:\n\n > As I suggested before, I denounce and protest the paternity of Belgium, France and Italy. You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children. In view of the fact that they may be your bulwark in future days, you should at least pay for their schooling now!\n\nStatements like these would have been extremely worrying to Churchill, who at this point was the head of a tired British war effort. He simply could not risk pressuring Roosevelt too hard at the risk of losing the war. In order for Roosevelt's vision of the Four Policemen to come to fruition, a complete removal of Hitler and disarmament of Germany was required. This put an enormous emphasis on an unconditional surrender from Nazi Germany.\n\nStalin's peace goals were instead based entirely on Realpolitik. The more land Stalin could acquire, the larger the security-belt or buffer zone would be to protect Russia. Roosevelt's unconditional surrender proposal was therefore very appealing since it would remove the Axis from peace negotiations entirely, allowing for a great deal of flexibility and exploitation at the negotiating table for Stalin.\n\n---\n\nKissinger, Henry. \"Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II\" in *Diplomacy*. New York: Simon  &  Schuster, 1994."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "e1xfv0", "title": "Were the Reserves for Native Americans in Canada Inspired by the Reservations in the United States?", "selftext": "I only recently learned that Canada has \"reserves\" for Native Americans, which appear generally equivalent to reservations in the United States; were these deliberately modeled on or inspired by the US, or did the Canadian government arrive at this system independently? Were indigenous nations forcibly removed to and kept within these reserves, as in the US, or was it a more peaceful process?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e1xfv0/were_the_reserves_for_native_americans_in_canada/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8t3gg4"], "score": [14], "text": ["Kwe,\n\nReserves in Canada were created before the first US reserves, even before the US themselves. The first to establish reserves were the French when what is now Eastern Canada was New France (1534-1763).\n\n Most Indigenous peoples living on the territorie claimed by the French were nomadic or semi-nomadic. Algonquian peoples usually aggregated in villages at strategic locations during Summer. It was during that season that most missionary work was made (it was easier to find people to convert when they were in villages). Missionaries were mainly Jesuits. They translated the Bible, they studied the peoples, they learned the languages, etc. But, in their mind, a true Christian is sedentary. As such, they looked at the work of their brothers in the Spanish colonies. In South America, they created reductions were the ''Savages'' could be ''civilized''. So, they created the r\u00e9duction of Sillery near Qu\u00e9bec in 1638. It was the first reserve in today's Canada. This model was used again and again, in places like Oka or Sainte-Marie-des-Hurons. \n\nWith the British conquest, Catholicism was, for a short time, illegal. Furthermore, in the years after the conquest of New France, the Indigenous peoples were seen as a buffer to control colonists of the Thirteen Colonies, and after the independance of the US, of the Usanians. Most of the lands South of the Great Lakes were reserved for the Indians with the Royala Proclamation of 1763 and the Queec Act. The Royal Proclamation also enshrined the need to make treaties with the Indians before taking their lands. Things changed with the Western expansion. Indigenous peoples were now a problem and they created reserves. Canada inherited of this method and officialized it with the Indian Act (1876). This is one of the reasons why you see way more reserves in Western Canada than in Eastern Canada. Even though the creation of most reserves in the West were agreed upon with treaties, the legitimacy of the treaties can be argued.\n\nThe reserves were more peacuful integration with the Jesuits, as the French had relatively peaceful relations. The goal was to assimilate the ''Sauvages''. However, the British were far more violent. Sometimes, reserves were created after wars, other times, with economic, social or political pressures. But the Catholic Church (mostly French/French Canadian or Irish) participated in the creation and mangement of the reserves, so the Church was not that peaceful. Today, reserves are still created, but usually it is by the Courts forcing Canada to reserve some lands to Indigenous peoples.\n\nIn conclusion, Canada was not inspired by the US for the creation of reserves. They were reserves ultimately,inspired by the Spanish Jesuits. However, the process was similar to the US, as you had Spanish missions and more ''Anglo-Saxon'' reserves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22ng86", "title": "NSFW How did Ancient cultures deal with sex crimes?", "selftext": "NSFW - This is a sensitive topic.\n\nAre there records detailing incidences of sex crimes or related to rape/pedophilia/incest in the Ancient world? I know that girls becoming brides at a young age was common and that young boys were also often used by older men, but what about the socially unacceptable (for the time) sex crimes? Was rape despised as much has been in the last century or so? With girls marrying as young as 12, what age would it be considered child molestation? Etc..\n\n\nEDIT: Sorry, I didn't mean to be so vague with the \"Ancient cultures\" thing. I'm not asking about any particular region or culture, but I am more interested in records from before 2nd century AD. My interest was sparked by [this thread on young women traveling alone in 19th century Europe](_URL_0_), and it just kind of spiraled off from there. Anything interesting would be welcome!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22ng86/nsfw_how_did_ancient_cultures_deal_with_sex_crimes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgopxyf", "cgox8az", "cgpdv17"], "score": [111, 13, 2], "text": ["I can comment on the issue of rape in ancient Greece. My main source being Lysias 1 in which Lysias (a logographer) writes a defence speech for Euphiletos who has just killed a man named Eratosthenes after catching him sleeping with his wife. Lysias was considered on of the greatest \"lawyers\" Athens had ever seen. Given that, remember that it would not be likely that a great lawyer as Lysias would use anything outside of social norms to defend his client. By this I mean he would only use principles that would appeal to the jury (white, Athenian citizens). In this defence speech there is a portion where Lysias writes:\n[32] You hear, gentlemen, that it lays down that if anyone rapes a free man or child, he owes double the damages. If he rapes a woman, in those cases that carry the penalty of death, he is liable at the same rate. Thus, gentlemen, rapists are thought to deserve a lighter penalty than seducers, because the law condemned the latter to death, but assigned double the amount of the damages to the former.\n\nThis is in fact not true, as rapist have to pay double the fine of a seducer (someone who sleeps with your wife or concubine). But what is interesting here is that the social implications of what Lysias attempts to do. The idea of inheritance of land from father to son in ancient Greek culture is so engrained in society such that the paternity of a child is of outmost concern, i.e who the real father is or has the mother slept with another man. Lysias thinks that although the law gives rapists a harsher punishment, the social norms of society at the time believe that seducers (the people that ruin inheritance and debase society) are of more law breaking behaviour than rapist are. This idea is an interesting one as it pits social norms of the time against what the law actually says. We do not know if Lysias client was found guilty or not (although he did admit to the murder quite bluntly). You may also want to refer to Draco's homicide law which gives some exceptions as to when a man can kill another man.  Note: I am not a historian, but I have taken numerous classical courses and am currently taking Ancient Crime and Punishment. ", "I can answer for Rome. There are two major sources for roman attitude toward rape the first is the rape of Lucretia by Livy. Now there is some debate as to the veracity of the story however it is still illuminating on the attitudes of Romans on that era. In that story. Rape is described as an unspeakable crime against both the woman and her husband. Since in that story the rape of a woman leads to the overthrowing of the last king of Rome. The other major source is the works of Quintellian which is one of the only surviving roman legal textbooks for lack of a better word. The rape of a man is the very worst crime according to him put up there with parricide and robbing a temple. The other thing to remember with rape in Rome is that it was one of the few crimes were the death penalty was applied. However it must be kept in mind that this only applies to highborn people raping slaves if you were not the owner was a form of property crime with the punishment a fine. If you were a prostitute there was no case where you could be raped. It was thought that you had given up your rights by prostituting yourself. ", "Not sure if this is ancient enough but in the 1400's, specifically England, one of rape's definitions was 'adultery with a woman of station without her husband's will or knowledge.'\n\nThe logic behind it was pretty simple. No married noblewoman could possibly commit adultery of her own free will. So if you had sex with a noblewoman in that fashion, you had to have taken her by force. Obviously this is sheer nonsense but it was a good way to save face for the people involved. The husband got to avoid being known as having been cuckolded, the woman avoids the stigma of adultery, and the only loser here is the one imprisoned.\n\nA pretty famous case of this was Thomas Malory, the man who would be known for writing *Le Morte d'Arthur*, a compilation of various stories about King Arthur. He was imprisoned for 'raping' Joan Smith (or Smythe) not once but twice. It's a bit of conjecture, but some people like to think the reason he wrote a lot about Lancelot who is famous for his moment of weakness with Queen Guinevere was because he emphasized with the Knight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22lne2/how_would_a_young_woman_travel_alone_by_train_in/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1efujn", "title": "Why have countries prevented their citizens from leaving? (Russia, E. Germany, China,...)", "selftext": "To us it seems only to be an incredible admission of failure to satisfy the inhabitants. What was the rationale behind forcibly retaining people who clearly don't want to be part of your society? Were those in charge simply afraid the place would empty thus removing their underlings?\n\nEDIT: Not \"Russia\", I meant USSR, sorry.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1efujn/why_have_countries_prevented_their_citizens_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca07k1e"], "score": [2], "text": ["The rationale was that people were treated very much like kids who could not be trusted to make the correct choices on their own. \n\nBecause free will was uncacceptable. Free will means that every person can make any decision (well, in the developed society of today there are some limits to this but generally there is quite a wide choice). \n\nBut those countries had one ruling political party which was considered infallible and always correct, and was supposed to create all the major decisions for the people. And thus a person had only one option - to follow what \"the party\" decided for them. In this case, the Party had decided that people should be loyal to their country and should not leave it. \n\nAnd people were not trusted to simply go abroad because the ruling Party was afraid they may leak government secrets and important secret information to the \"enemy\". There was a strict vetting process involving checks and unreliable individuals were not allowed to go abroad (in case they decided to stay there and leak secrets). \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "av2izq", "title": "Cold War Propaganda Posters?", "selftext": "I\u2019m an AP US History teacher and I\u2019m trying to find some kind of digital collection of Cold War propaganda posters. I can find a lot of the Russian ones but not many of the US ones. Is this because there weren\u2019t a lot? Does anyone know where I can find some? Thanks in advance. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/av2izq/cold_war_propaganda_posters/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehct8zf"], "score": [2], "text": [" You can find a good digital collection of propaganda posters from Mao-era China here: _URL_0_\n\nThe editor, Stefan Landsberger, is a really reputable historian. Each poster has an English translation and a little bit of historical context, too. There are a few from after Mao, such as Hua Guofeng, too. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://chineseposters.net/themes/mao-cult.php"]]}
{"q_id": "2gy6jj", "title": "What sort of buildings would be found in a roman town? How would a hamlet, town and city differ regarding types if structures?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gy6jj/what_sort_of_buildings_would_be_found_in_a_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cknqmj3"], "score": [7], "text": ["For a largish Roman city of the early Imperial period, you should imagine a \"civic package\" of buildings: a theater, an arena, a forum-basilica with temple, aqueducts, sewers, and a stadium. Not every city had every building: for example, in Britain it was very rare to have a temple connected to the forum, Carthage didn't have aqueducts until relatively late (but did have massive cisterns), in Syria everything can be kind of weird, arenas are relatively rare in Greece, etc. Starting in the third century or so city walls and elaborate gates become more common, which used to be connected to the turmoil of the day but an equally good explanation is that walls were traditionally a privilege granted to *municipia* and so were an important status symbol--likely either factor played a role depending on the specific situation of the city.\n\nSmall towns are rather more complicated because it is rather common to define a \"small town\" as essentially a settlement without the civic package, and frequently without planned out grid streets. Some archaeologists use complicated and rather arbitrary numbers games to make the distinction eg, (a city is a settlement with more than x inhabitants), some prefer to use administrative distinctions (city's have major administrative functions) and some simply wing it and don't worry about coming up with rigorous distinctions. It is not terribly uncommon to find a small town without much in the way of civic structures at all, on the other hand, there are small towns in North Africa with extremely sophisticated and elaborate hydrological structures. So, again, it depends.\n\nA hamlet, more or less by definition, its basically a small collection of domestic and agricultural structures with no civic buildings. They can be extremely complicated--are we looking at a hamlet? Agricultural sheds? A single house with dispersed structures? Would one family or multiple families live here? We can't really know. Trying to recover the Roman peasant is increasingly popular in Roman archaeology, however, so perhaps in a decade or so there will be a better answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xq5ro", "title": "In the past, farmers were far more numerous than smiths, so why is Smith a more common name than Farmer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xq5ro/in_the_past_farmers_were_far_more_numerous_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy6y9u1"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi, there's always room for more discussion on this, but thought you might be interested in a couple of earlier posts about \"Smith\"; the first one does discuss \"Smith\" vs \"Farmer\" also\n\n* [Why is Smith the most common surname?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Why are there so many \"Smiths\" out there? Were there just a shitload of blacksmiths in Medieval times or did the blacksmiths just produce a prodigious amount of progeny? OR Why is Smith such a common surname?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jn623/why_is_smith_the_most_common_surname/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3rdms4/why_are_there_so_many_smiths_out_there_were_there/"]]}
{"q_id": "4wnnf1", "title": "Why do chefs wear those tall white hats?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wnnf1/why_do_chefs_wear_those_tall_white_hats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d68t8j7"], "score": [47], "text": ["The traditional chef's hat or a \"toque blanches\" was developed in 16th century France as a means of symbolising your status in the kitchen with chef's hats being the highest. The pleats in the hat were also a way of showing how experienced a chef was. Traditionally, the toques had a hundred pleats for senior chefs, some still have a hundred but it has become less common in modern kitchens. They are generally white as it is supposed to denote cleanliness and hygiene.\r\n\r\n Interestingly, the hundred pleats are representative of the hundred ways a chef can cook an egg. \r\n\r\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "62ortl", "title": "What do we know about childhoods of The Beatles' members?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62ortl/what_do_we_know_about_childhoods_of_the_beatles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfojmwv"], "score": [28], "text": ["*To be sung to the tune of the [Crash Test Dummies' 'Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm'](_URL_0_)*:\n\n\nOo-once there was this boy^1 who\n\nGrew up with his Aunt and never knew his Mum^2\n\nAnd wh-ee-en she finally came back\n\nShe got run over by a policeman^3\n\nIt really might explain why \n\nThe kid could be soooooo meeeaaann^4\n\n & nbsp;\n\nMmm mmm mmm mmm\n\n & nbsp;\n\nOnce there was this kid^5 who\n\nDid quite well at school and was on track to be a teacher^6\n\nBut wh-ee-en his mother Mary passed away^7\n\nHe began to hang with the wrong crowd^8\n\nHe couldn't quite explain it\n\nHe just wanted to rooooock and rooooll\n\n & nbsp;\n\nMmm mmm mmm mmm\n\nMmm mmm mmm mmm\n\n & nbsp;\n\nBut both John and Paul were glad\n\nCos one kid had it worse than that\n\n & nbsp;\n\nCause then there was this boy^9 who\n\nGrew up in the shittiest slum in Liverpool^10\n\nAnd whe-en he was growing up\n\nHe spent years sick in hospital^11\n\nHe couldn't quite explain it^12\n\nHe just wanted to play the drums^13\n\n & nbsp;\n\nMmm mmm mmm mmm^14\n\nMmm mmm mmm mmm\n\n & nbsp;\n\n...\n\n & nbsp;\n\nFootnotes:\n\n1. John Winston Lennon\n\n2. Lennon's father was at sea in the merchant navy when he was born, and by the time Lennon was born, his mother Julia was 'living in sin' with someone else (John Dykins), and Lennon was sleeping in the same bed as Julia and John Dykins. After Julia's sister Mimi complained to Social Services about this situation, Julia gave up John to Mimi, who was childless, and not by choice.\n\n3. Julia became more of a part of Lennon's life again when he was a teenager - to him she seemed almost like a cool older sister - but passed away when she was hit by a car in July 1958 driven by an off-duty policeman near Mimi's house. \n\n4. Everyone in the Beatles' circle lived in fear of Lennon's mouth - it was almost certainly why Pete Best basically only turned up to gigs and left straight afterwards when he was in the band, for example.\n\n5. Sir James Paul McCartney\n\n6. Unlike Lennon, he passed the 11-Plus exam (designed to detect students destined for university), and attended the Liverpool Institute, a grammar school. His family expected him to become a teacher.\n\n7. Mary McCartney, a nurse who actually was the primary breadwinner of the family, passed away in 1957, when Paul was 14. She and Paul's father had kept her illness something of a secret, and so it was a great shock to Paul when she passed away quite suddenly.\n\n8. i.e., John Lennon, who was universally hated by his friends' parents\n\n9. Richard Starkey, aka Ringo Starr\n\n10. John grew up in Aunt Mimi and Uncle George's very solidly middle class house (when I visited as part of a Beatles tour in Liverpool, I was actually impressed by how nice it looked). Paul grew up in government housing, but then reasonably new and spacious government housing on what was then a fancy, country-ish council estate. Ringo - known as Ritchie as a kid - grew up in the Dingle, which was widely considered the worst slum in Liverpool. This is likely why he contracted tuberculosis as a teenager in the 1950s. Like John, he had very little contact with his father, who preferred to go drinking rather than bring up his son.\n\n11. At age six, Ringo contracted a very serious case of peritonitis, and was in a coma for the best part of two weeks; his mother thought he was going to die. He was in hospital for a year recovering. In 1953 he came down with tuberculosis and was confined to a hospital sanatorium for months.\n\n12. Ringo's sicknesses and the general desultory atmosphere of the Dingle, living with parents who he later said were basically alcoholics, meant that he was actually illiterate at age eight, and only became somewhat literate because a neighbour tutored him. After returning home from the sanatorium he didn't bother to go back to school\n\n13. It was at the sanatorium that he discovered his great love for the drums, playing in a band of kids at the sanatorium.\n\n14. Sorry, George fans, there's only three verses in 'Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm'.\n\nFor further reading: Bob Spitz's *The Beatles* and especially Mark Lewisohn's *Tune In* are the books that go into the most detail on their early lives; both books have a good sense of social context and Lewisohn especially is good at explaining their lives as they were rather than with their not-necessarily-destined future careers in mind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaUqpnHvua8"]]}
{"q_id": "bz4grt", "title": "We often cite Rome as an example of a great empire. At Rome's height, what did Romans cite as an example of a great empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bz4grt/we_often_cite_rome_as_an_example_of_a_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqrgxyj"], "score": [47], "text": ["This is a really complicated question on one level, if we are to get too deep into the various ideological constructs that surrounded the Roman notion of an \"Empire\" was. But there is at least one polity that I can point to some direct attestations of as being described as vast and powerful (if not in all other respects admirable): what we today call the Achaemenid Empire.\n\nPlutarch's Life of Artaxerxes:\n\n >  6.1 Nevertheless, restless and factious men thought that affairs demanded Cyrus, a man who had a brilliant spirit, surpassing skill in war, and great love for his friends; and that **the magnitude of the empire required a king of lofty purpose and ambition**. \n\n > 20.1 Nevertheless, he could not capture them, but though they had lost Cyrus their leader and their own commanders, they rescued themselves from his very palace, as one might say, thus proving clearly to the  p175 world that **the empire of the Persians and their king abounded in gold and luxury** and women, but in all else was an empty vaunt.\n\n > 28.3 However, it was **the greatness of the empire** and the fear which Dareius felt towards Ochus that paved the way for Teribazus although, since Aspasia had been taken away, the Cyprus-born goddess of love was not altogether without influence in the case.\n\n(The term translated \"empire\" here is _basileia_)\n\nThese discussions - including Plutarchs' moralistic remarks on the vauntness of the polity beyond its vast wealth - tie into something I have previously argued. Namely, that there seems to be a thread starting in the Classical era and carried on through authors like Plutarch and Arrian, that sees the ancient kings of Persia as highly emblematic of the institution of _monarchy_. You can see this among other things in the frequent usage of titles such as simply \"the King\" (ho basileus) or \"the Great King\" (ho megas basileus) rather than \"the King of Persia\" even in circumstances where it would not necessarily be unambiguous, something that I know is remarked on in the Landmark edition of Arrian's Anabasis. There's a sort of preoccupation with the quaintness of court ritual and intrigue (real or otherwise) evident from Ctesias' _Persica_ (4th c BC) and carried on by authors like Diodoros and Plutarch. Here's one example of Diodorus emphasizing the vast reach of the King's dominion:\n\n > 22.1 King Artaxerxes had learned some time before from Pharnabazus that Cyrus was secretly collecting an army to lead against him, and when he now learned that he was on the march, he summoned his armaments from every place to Ecbatana in Media. 2 When the contingents from **the Indians and certain other peoples were delayed because of the remoteness of those regions**, he set out to meet Cyrus with the army that had been assembled\n\nAnd in another part of his World History, Diodoros discusses the court intrigue of Persia:\n\n > 17.5.3 As our narrative is now to treat of the kingdom of the Persians, we must go back a little to pick up the thread. While Philip was still king, Ochus15 ruled the Persians and oppressed his subjects cruelly and harshly. Since his savage disposition made him hated, the chiliarch Bagoas, a eunuch in physical fact but a militant rogue in disposition, killed him by poison administered by a certain physician and placed upon the throne the youngest of his sons, Arses...\n\nThe story of Bagoas seems to have been popular, and it suggests to me an idea of how these authors viewed Persia - it was vast and powerful, but still \"weak\" in that it was subject to the whims and intrigues of its decadent, effete court life. This particular narrative ends with the appointment of Dareios III, the last Great King and one with a much weaker claim to the throne than his predecessors, who ends up turning the tables on Bagoas and killing him. On a side note, Arrian cites a supposed letter by Alexander claiming that in fact Dareios III had had his brief predecessor Artaxerxes IV murdered, which is another example of the predominant relevance these anecdotes had in the minds of the authors who kept them alive (as opposed to mundane matters of administration and regular rule in the dominions subject to the Persian monarch, which they appear to have been pretty uninterested in!)\n\nUnfortunately, there are only a few major stories that get repeated over and over with slight variations by Roman-era authors (mainly the life of Cyrus the Great, Xerxes' invasion, Cyrus the Younger's rebellion, Alexander's invasion), so we only get a limited view, and it is not really clear to me how Roman subjects would relate the Kingdom of the Persians to the polity they themselves lived under. However, even from these few examples, we have some idea: these authors clearly possessed an awareness of the Persian Empire as an incredibly vast and powerful dominion that had existed well before Rome's rise to prominence in later centuries, and still regarded the tales of its court intrigue and the character of its rulers as relevant and instructive topics of discussion."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8uiq6a", "title": "What is the origin of the \"International Jewish Conspiracy\"? Have the rise of international banking families as Rothschilds fueled the belief that \"Jews rule the World\"?", "selftext": "Obviously, I refer to it as a conspiracy as in made-up things. In the Medieval era, Jews were scapegoated for harvest failures and diseases. Yet as they lacked substantial power, it would have been ridiculous to claim that they rule the world. Industrialization and capitalism expansion gave a pathway for Jews to excel with aforementioned Rothschilds becoming the richest family (outside of monarchies) at one point. *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* may have crystallized the belief, but I doubt it was the source.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8uiq6a/what_is_the_origin_of_the_international_jewish/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1gdlxj", "e1gnej1"], "score": [60, 3], "text": ["The origins of the \"international Jewish conspiracy\" can be traced to the Middle Ages. The stereotype of Jews working with money has very real foundations in the ways in which Jews were generally forced to make their living in Medieval Europe. Jews were subject to a whole host of laws and decrees which limited the ways in which they could earn a living. Among these restrictions included prohibitions against owning land, joining artisan\u2019s guilds, selling new merchandise, and even working on Sundays and Christian holidays. These laws were not limited the Medieval period and can be found in the Early Modern Period as well. Frederick II of Prussia issued a charter in 1750 that placed these very restrictions on the Jews of his kingdom. \n\nOn its own commercial business was generally not considered troublesome and most Jews made a meager living in some sort of mercantile business. What most non-Jews in European society found morally suspect was moneylending; a profession that many Jews were forced into by circumstance. Since the Middle Ages Jews had been the main source of financial credit to the European populace due to religious prohibitions against Christians participating in usury. Jews were not alone in practicing moneylending, of course Christians engaged in the practice as well. However, they rarely received the same levels of disdain that the Jewish moneylenders did. \n\nSo why could Jews not become artisans? Well in order to be an artisan (in the city anyway) one generally needed to join a guild. Guilds, being religious organizations, almost always forbade Jewish members so Jews resorted to forming their own, such as the Barber\u2019s Guild at Krakow in the early seventeenth century. However, Jewish guilds often played no significant role in the economic lives of their members and quite often found themselves in competition with Christian guilds. With farming and crafting out of reach for most Jews, peddling second-hand goods was the most readily accessible form of work available to Jewish men.\n\nAt this point, I will focus on late 18th - 19th century France, since I am most comfortable speaking about that region. Most Jewish merchants conducted business with Christian peasants in the countryside and at the marketplace in the cities and many had amassed enough money to add loan-making to their r\u00e9sum\u00e9. These Jewish moneylenders played an important role in the rural economy of northeastern France. In a society with little to no banks, Jews provided a ready source of agricultural credit to the non-Jewish peasants. As a result of this the Jewish community was often blamed for the indebtedness of the Alsatian peasantry and their image as recalcitrant and parasitic businessmen persisted throughout the nation. The combined economic tensions and underlying religious animosity fueled popular hatred and distrust that bubbled under the surface of French society. \n\nYou mention the Rothschilds, and I am glad you did. The French branch of the Rothschild family heavily invested in building Paris during the Second Industrial Revolution and many Jewish investors poured money into many of the volatile new industries of the industrial revolution (and made a lot of money in the process). Jews in France found themselves integrating more easily into French society at a time when Jewish and Non-Jewish French people were asking themselves if the Jews could in fact be Jewish and French (This was a debate happening across Western and Central Europe). In my opinion, the point when the \"International Jewish Conspiracy\" hit French society was the failure of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War and the economic recession that followed. Anti-Semitic publications such as Edouard Drumont's *La France Juive* emerged and were very popular (100,000 copies were sold in its first year of publication). Antisemitic publications alleged that Jews across Europe were more loyal to each other than to the nations in which they lived. In *La France Juive*, Jews are portrayed as \"Christ killers, economic vampires, subhumans, masters of France, reptiles dripping with slime and engorged with their victims blood.\" [Simon Shama, *The Story of the Jews* (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 640] The Dreyfus Affair later cemented the idea for the anti-Semites of France that Jews were not loyal citizens and were internationalists. Here are some images published by *La Libre Parole* in the late 1890s depicting common anti-semitic tropes. [Here](_URL_1_) [Here](_URL_2_) and [Here](_URL_3_)\n\nAdmittedly I am less knowledgeable about the impact of *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* and would defer to someone more informed on the subject. I can say that it was widely popular and the themes written in it reinforced many of the Antisemitic ideas that were already present in European society. Daniel Pipes writes in *Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From*:\n\n > The great importance of The Protocols lies in its permitting antisemites to reach beyond their traditional circles and find a large international audience, a process that continues to this day. The forgery poisoned public life wherever it appeared; it was \"self-generating; a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.\" The book's vagueness\u2014almost no names, dates, or issues are specified\u2014has been one key to this wide-ranging success. The purportedly Jewish authorship also helps to make the book more convincing. Its embrace of contradiction\u2014that to advance, Jews use all tools available, including capitalism and communism, philo-Semitism and antisemitism, democracy and tyranny\u2014made it possible for The Protocols to reach out to all: rich and poor, Right and Left, Christian and Muslim, American and Japanese.\n\nOther sources:\nThe Jew in the Medieval World A Sourcebook: 315-1791, ed. Mark Saperstein (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999)\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n", "You may also be interested in my previous answer:\n\n * [Were there any 'real' factors that contributed to the rampant anti-semitism in 1920/30 Europe?](_URL_0_) \n\nSeveral links in that answer are also worth clicking for additional context."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/dreyfus/intro/anti-semiticpress", "http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/dreyfus/intro/item/20981", "http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/dreyfus/intro/item/20977", "http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/dreyfus/intro/item/20979"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tc0zk/were_there_any_real_factors_that_contributed_to/cx6h9mx/"]]}
{"q_id": "61n56z", "title": "This week's theme: Oral History", "selftext": "Current: Oral History\n\nOn Deck: Ships and Shipping\n\nIn the Hole: The Balkans", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61n56z/this_weeks_theme_oral_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfpyfzb"], "score": [2], "text": ["Wew, not a whole lot of answers this round. Shame too, a lot of these questions were pretty good :\\"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d4lxh", "title": "When and why did trousers become the standard garment for European men?", "selftext": "In the middle ages, would leggings or tights most often be a one piece garment or just long socks? By the sixteenth century, did most men in England and France wear trousers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d4lxh/when_and_why_did_trousers_become_the_standard/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjm77jj"], "score": [3], "text": ["My knowledge doesn't go back as far as their invention, but there's a great deal of discussion over the ancient usage of split leg garments in the other links already provided. As for trousers as we know them today, they begin to appear around the early 18th century. Prior to that you have hose, a fitted full leg garment that is more like a pair of non-stretch tights that have two separated legs. By the mid 16th century you see things like pumpkin hose, or what will develop into breeches in the late 17th century. Essentially a separation of the leg covering to sections above the knee and below the knee.\n\nTrousers themselves start out as a [sailors garment](_URL_2_). A very common runaway ad will read that they wore a \"sailors jacket and trousers\", a dead give away as to where they came from. Around 1750 trousers begin to show up more commonly in written references like court documents, without reference to sailors. Used mostly by the laboring class or military (gaiter trousers, for example), they really weren't accepted to be \"fashionable\" until the very late 18th century. While there is a lot of speculation that the French Revolution and the Sans Culottes (those that did not wear breeches, but trousers) caused this shift, it's very likely it would have occurred regardless. There was already a strong trend for country dress than began occurring in the 1780s with chemise gowns and other, almost nostalgic, clothing styles. While British and French fashion were closely tied, one did not ever wholly change the other. An exchange of ideas constantly occurred and each made the concept their own. To be honest, with as much distaste of French fashion as you see in British satire of [rich](_URL_3_) and [poor](_URL_1_), it's hard to believe that they would take up trousers solely because of the revolutionaries trends. Those that did take up French fashions during this time were [even mocked](_URL_0_). The British are still wearing breeches above all else in the 1790s, trousers becoming more common for day wear in the 1810s. It isn't really until the 1830s that breeches fade out (with the exception of court wear) and trousers are accepted in most situations, formal or casual, in both England and France."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr00180", "http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr03064", "http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr04743", "http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr04929"]]}
{"q_id": "ahop5t", "title": "In Medieval Europe, women were considered inherently lustful and prone to sexual sin. Would modern stereotypes of male sexual appetite apply to them?", "selftext": "\nAs I understand it, women in Medieval Europe were thought of as the more problematic sex when it came to sexual sins and there was intense pressure on them not to seduce and corrupt men. Today the stereotype is that men are the ones obsessed with sex, and there are a lot of notions attached to relationships that emphasise that. Tropes like women not keeping up with their partners sexual appetite or withholding sex, and the man generally being the 'getter' of sex and the woman being the 'giver.'\n\n\nWould these notions have been reverses in the middle ages? Were women seen as the proactive party, trying to constantly get laid, and men being the ones constantly being propositioned?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahop5t/in_medieval_europe_women_were_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eehiebo"], "score": [801], "text": ["No. Latin medieval culture could, and did, spin a fancy tale of the devil seducing Eve seducing Adam, and the humoral composition of women making them \"leaky\" and \"open\" to demonic influence. They made up theological and biological backing for this teaching.\n\nPopular comic literature came down equally hard on both sexes, each in their turn. Canon lawyers ruled that husbands and wives owed each other sex on demand ([within Church limits, of course](_URL_0_))\n\nBut when it came down to actual, on the ground practice: women might well be accused of being sluts, sure. In one of the texts I work with, widow Katharina Tucher has a vision of Christ calling her, essentially, a ho. Men, on the other hand? Could be *rapists*. Of course, the standards for conviction were ridiculously and hatefully high. This does not change that medieval people understood the force to come from men in cases that they did see as rape.\n\nThomas Aquinas wrote that prostitution was sinful but women prostitutes might well be tolerated, *because men can't control themselves* and otherwise would corrupt good women. His words can't be compartmentalized off as \"normative,\" either. Legal brothels in late medieval cities hosted women prostitutes, not men.\n\nThe medieval stereotype of the lusty women was a convenient veneer for and form of for misogyny. The late 20th-century figure of the \"player\" is aspirational."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/flowchart.png"]]}
{"q_id": "eo8cly", "title": "What caused Celtic languages in the British Isles to develop phonemes like Bh (V), Mh (W), and Y in place of U, when their conquerors who exposed them to the Latin alphabet didn\u2019t?", "selftext": "Specifically concerning Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh\u2014how did these spellings come to be? With contact from the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Normans over time, I would have thought these languages would develop a written language with less strange (sometimes seemingly nonsensical) lettering choices. Since many of these sounds already exist in the Latin alphabet, what influenced them to adopt such odd spellings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eo8cly/what_caused_celtic_languages_in_the_british_isles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["febj66a"], "score": [4], "text": ["The use of the 'h' to represent a *s\u00e9imhi\u00fa* (the lenition of a consonant) is relatively new. Traditionally Irish was written in Gaelic script (which some enthusiasts still use) which, while still clearly based on the Roman alphabet, is different enough from regular letters to take a while to get used to. Traditional Gaelic script does not use the 'h's, it instead uses a little dot above the consonant in question. Irish went through a spelling reform in the late 1940s and a move to using modern script happened more or less at around the same time - the letter 'h' was a convenient option to replace the dot. To consider this nonsensical, if I may, is somewhat anglo-centric. More on the 'h' later.\n\nThis [story](_URL_0_) was written down as part of the 1931 Schools' Folklore Collection. (A fascinating project in itself, but somewhat outwith the scope of this question). You can see several instances of the use of little dots (the dot is called a *buailte*) on the first line. For comparison, there is a transcription (using the 'h's and modern lettering) on the right hand side. There are many other examples (and many English-language texts also) if you have a browse around the website.\n\n[This](_URL_1_) link should take you to an Old Irish manuscript (circa 14C). I cannot understand it (it is significantly different from modern Irish), but you can see that, to complicate matters, some of the 'dots' look like little 'h's - the sound mutation involved is sometimes described as a 'softening' of the consonant, but is mostly more of an 'aspiration', a breathing-through of the letter, so using a little 'h' actually kinda makes sense."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.duchas.ie/ga/cbes/4428278/4391190/4463798?ChapterID=4428278&amp;LangID=ga", "https://www.isos.dias.ie/libraries/NLI/NLI_MS_G_2/tables/2.html#021"]]}
{"q_id": "2kbnia", "title": "Did Romans know about elephants before the Punic Wars, or were they a completely new animal to them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kbnia/did_romans_know_about_elephants_before_the_punic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cljt2l0"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Romans faced war elephants a few years before the First Punic War. In 280 B.C. Pyrrhus brought 20 war elephants from Greece to Rome. As Cassius Dio (via Zonaras) reports in [book IX](_URL_0_):\n\n >  Now Pyrrhus set out, not even awaiting the coming of spring, taking along a large, picked army, and twenty elephants, beasts never previously beheld by the Italians; hence they were invariably filled with alarm and astonishment.\n\nBefore the battle, the Roman consul Laevinus made a speech to alleviate fear among his legionaries, fear caused by the reputation of Pyrrhus and the presence of elephants. Pyrrhus kept his elephants in reserve initially. During the battle he used them to counter Roman cavalry which was threatening his rear. The account Cassius Dio / Zonaras gives is quite something: \n\n >  Then, indeed, at the sight of the animals, which was out of all common experience, at their frightful trumpeting, and also at the clatter of arms which their riders made, seated in the towers, both the Romans themselves were panic-stricken and their horses became frenzied and bolted, either shaking off their riders or bearing them away. Disheartened at this, the Roman army was turned to flight, and in their rout some soldiers were slain by the men in the towers on the elephants' backs, and others by the beasts themselves, which destroyed many with their trunks and tusks (or teeth) and crushed and trampled under foot as many more.\n\nKeep in mind that Cassius Dio wrote his history in the 2nd century AD, more than four centuries after the battle, and this part was excerpted by Zonaras 1000 years after that. So this shouldn't be taken too literally, but the takeaway is that the Romans didn't manage the first encounter with elephants very well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/9*.html"]]}
{"q_id": "s2rm8", "title": "Did America ever steal tech or knowledge from the Soviet Union?", "selftext": "I know that it had worked the other way around a couple times. Was this something that went both ways?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s2rm8/did_america_ever_steal_tech_or_knowledge_from_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4am4iz", "c4appvn", "c4au6iz"], "score": [4, 3, 2], "text": ["In the first several years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the leading Russian export was... patents and inventions.  Sorry, don't remember the source. \n\n\n\n", "As a layman\n\nWell, I don't know if you could really say the US stole technology from the Soviets or vice versa. Both sides were heavily engaged in espionage, but the real world isn't a game of of Civilization. Just because a spy gets you a blue print doesn't mean you suddenly have a new technology or the ability to immediately begin producing it.\n\nA big part of espionage was understanding the other side's military/economic capabilities so you could prepare strategically to counter it. The closest thing I can think of off the top of my head to the US \"stealing a tech\" is when Viktor Belenko decided to defect and take a MIG-25 with him. At the time Western intelligence had completely and utterly failed to assess the MIG-25 correctly. Belenko dropping the jet in our lap corrected this. It's not like suddenly we started producing MIG-25s though.", "The US did capture several MIG 15's at one point, but they were from defectors IIRC. By that time they were mostly only useful for comparison to the F-86 Sabre. \n\nThe one incident that was really incontestably stealing was the Glomar Explorer. [Link](_URL_0_) where the US custom built a ship to recover a sunken Russian nuclear missile Submarine. It did not go as planned, only about a third of the submarine was recovered. Eventually the US had to admit they had it and return it because there were bodies aboard the recovered section. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer"]]}
{"q_id": "10pq5r", "title": "Can you identify what decade this picture was from based on the clothes worn?", "selftext": "[This is a picture taken at Santa Monica, California.](_URL_2_)  (It hangs in a coffee shop now).\n\nIt's at the Santa Monica Rings (aka the Original Muscle Beach) right on the sand.  The earliest it can be would be from the 1930's as that's when the adult playground was built.\n\nFor those interested in what is actually happening in the picture: The guy is swinging on the Flying Rings.  If you take the gymnastics [Still Rings](_URL_0_) and swing with them the sport is called flying rings.  (you could either pump yourself up to those heights, or get a push and then pump yourself up further).\n\nThe flying rings were banned in the Olympics (and many other competitions) by the early 1960's due to the great dismounts/flyaways the swingers could achieve (up to 20 feet high) and the chance of hurting themselves or dying is very high, especially in a competitive setting.\n\nWith that said though, that doesn't mean people don't play on them.  The flying rings are alive and kicking to this day at the santa monica rings, and I play on them as well.  [Here's a buddy of mine](_URL_1_) demonstrating what it's like just a few weeks ago at the setting.\n\nNow, back to the picture.  Other than the clothes people are wearing, if somebody knows what buildings exist/didn't exist in this picture, then maybe that's another way to figure out what decade or year it's from.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10pq5r/can_you_identify_what_decade_this_picture_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6flyev"], "score": [26], "text": ["The buildings are probably a better bet.\n\nContext: The image is looking roughly south (the Pacific -- west -- is to the right, Santa Monica -- east -- is to the left). The rings are just south of the famous Santa Monica Pier.\n\n* The two tall buildings by the acrobat's hands look to be the Santa Monica Shores buildings. Note the \"3-2-2\" pattern of windows/balconies. They're a few blocks south of the Santa Monica Pier. They were built in 1965 and 1966 according to [Emporis](_URL_0_).\n* The pier extending out to the ocean would then probably be [Pacific Ocean Park](_URL_1_), which opened in 1958, closed in 1967 and was demolished in the mid 70s.\n\nGuess: No earlier than 1966 and no later than 1975."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--U_mgXrYbY&amp;feature=related", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBrv6SvueaQ", "http://i.imgur.com/2xKLz.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.emporis.com/complex/the-shores-santa-monica-ca-usa", "http://wikimapia.org/116577/Pacific-Ocean-Park-Pier-site"]]}
{"q_id": "99rwz8", "title": "My high school history teachers always said that the Manhattan Project scientists had some degree of not knowing what was going to happen during the Trinity Test. How much of these allegations, specifically that some thought they'd light the sky on fire, were true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99rwz8/my_high_school_history_teachers_always_said_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4qi03y", "e4qyth6"], "score": [2, 7], "text": ["More can be written, but you might like to start with [\"Was there really any fear during the development of the atomic bomb that it could detonate the atmosphere?\"](_URL_1_) by /u/restricteddata.\n\nIf you're also interested in post-war calculations, a later discussion by the same is [\"I just read that, when they tested the atomic bomb, there was a belief it might light the atmosphere on fire. If they believed this, why did they still test it?\"](_URL_2_).  I hope that I can also point to his recent blog post -- not in AskHistorians -- [\"Cleansing thermonuclear fire\"](_URL_0_).\n\nThis is not to discourage discussion.  More questions, data and debate are welcome.\n", "There was certainly a lot of uncertainty, but the uncertainty was bounded. Here is a _very_ abridged rundown of what I think the interesting areas of uncertainty were:\n\n* To get it out of the way, _very minor_ uncertainty about whether the test might ignite the atmosphere in a giant fusion reaction. Which is to say, they were almost totally sure that wouldn't happen. [_Almost_ is not _100% certain_](_URL_0_), but they did not really think it was a realistic possibility. But it isn't as uncertain as it sometimes is portrayed. \n\n* They had _considerable_ uncertainty about the efficiency of the implosion mechanism being tested, which meant they had considerable uncertainty about the explosive power of the bomb. The \"solid\" bet was around 4-5 kilotons of power. The pessimists thought it might not work at all. The \"optimists\" thought it might be several tens of kilotons. In the end, it was 20 kilotons, which is 4-5X more powerful than they expected. That's not _terrible_ (especially since damage is mostly an issue of order of magnitude; you have to increase the explosive power by a factor of 8 to increase the damage by a factor of 2), but it's still an uncomfortably large factor to be off by when we're talking about a nuclear weapon.\n\n* They had _a lot_ of uncertainty about where the radioactive cloud would go, or how intense it would be. They had monitors and soldiers in nearby towns, ready to evacuate them if the radiation levels got unacceptably high. They didn't end up evacuating anybody but [a considerable area was exposed to fallout](_URL_2_).\n\n* They had a _lot_ of uncertainty about how nearby people would react, whether they would buy their \"an ammunition dump\" exploded story, and so on. Would their secrecy hold? They hoped so, but there wasn't much they could do about it beyond what they did.\n\n* They had a _fair amount_ of uncertainty about the actual effects of the weapon. They could guess how some of the effects (blast, radiation, pressure) would scale up to kiloton ranges, but they really didn't know. They tried to use instrumentation to gauge it; some of it succeeded in getting good data, while some of it failed (a bunch of it was destroyed by the test itself). This means they went into the bombing of Japan with only a rough idea of what was going to happen to the cities they were dropped on (destroyed, yes, but there are a lot of other details \u2014\u00a0they [didn't expect so many people would be exposed to acute radiation and survive the initial attack](_URL_1_), for example). \n\nThere are other areas one could probe for uncertainty (if you or anyone else have questions, feel free to ask them), but this I think gives a gist of what they were thinking. I think it's important to note that uncertainty exists on a scale, which is to say, it's not all or nothing. In some areas you might have a little uncertainty, in some areas you might have a lot, in some areas you might have none, etc. Separately there are the areas where you don't even know you have uncertainty (the oft-mocked but not-dumb idea of \"unknown unknowns\"), which can be their own sources of deep uncertainty (an example from Trinity might be, \"were there any spies at the Trinity test?\", which nobody appears to have even considered at the time; at least one spy, Klaus Fuchs, was present). \n\nThe best overall book on the Trinity test is F.M. Szasz, _The Day the Sun Rose Twice_, which has a _lot_ of detail in it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/06/29/cleansing-thermonuclear-fire/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d2ptv/was_there_really_any_fear_during_the_development/ct28hpr/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7rnp9j/i_just_read_that_when_they_tested_the_atomic_bomb/dsyytcn/"], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/06/29/cleansing-thermonuclear-fire/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/10/18/who-knew-about-radiation-sickness-and-when/", "http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Trinity-fallout.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1lp52f", "title": "How widely used was the French Revolutionary Calendar?", "selftext": "I'm talking about the new Republican calendar adopted by the French government during the revolution. Brumaire, Thermidor, etc.\n\nWikipedia tells me it lasted from 1793 to 1805, but how widely would it actually have been used by everyday people? Was the average person on the street all like \"My birthday is the eighth of Germinal\"? \n\nWhat about the ten day weeks, and all the special fruit/tool date correspondences? Did anybody care, or was it a bit like modern day Britain under the metric system, with people still ordering pints?\n\nBonus question: how effective was the new calendar at making the general public less religious? Was that even the intent?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lp52f/how_widely_used_was_the_french_revolutionary/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc1ion1"], "score": [3], "text": ["It was VERY widely used. All government documents from that period bear the Republican calendar date. Passports issued use that calendar. Birth certificates. \n\nPeople were quick to adopt it, too, because it signified that you were favorable to the new Republican regime. Using words like \"citoyen(nne)\" (\"citizen\") to address a stranger or as an honorific (\"Citizen Boulanger\") was another way to show that you were most definitely not monarchist, nope no way. \n\nYou can still see some buildings in Paris that have their erection date displayed in Republican calendar terms.\n\nWhen Paris declared itself independent from France in 1871 during the Commune, they briefly switched back to the Republican calendar to show their ideological roots as from the Revolution. \n\nAs for your bonus question... I don't think it was ever intended to make people less religious. I'd love to see contradictory evidence, but I think it was partially symbolic and partially to develop a new labor schedule that was more fair to more people. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "47ikxb", "title": "When did the Bishop of Rome become the Pope and primary figure of the Christian faith?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47ikxb/when_did_the_bishop_of_rome_become_the_pope_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0donox", "d0drtxj"], "score": [4, 27], "text": ["That's a hard one to answer in a way that's going to satisfy everybody,  since the question itself is kind of hard to pin down and narratives can be easily, even unconsciously, twisted in favor of an agenda. This is an excerpt from a post I wrote on BH.\n\n > *Papal Supremacy*\n\n > The doctrine that the Bishop of Rome has authority over the rest of the Bishops. While the modern Church holds that bishops are appointed by the authority of the Pope, this is quite a modern practice. The earliest bishops were chosen by the faithful, by the priests over whom he'd have authority, by secular rulers or simply chosen by the bishop they'd replace. The Investiture Controversy wasn't fully settled until the middle of the 19th Century, which event probably had more to do with secular authorities generally adopting a separation of Church and State rather than the Papacy imposing itself.\n\n > The doctrine of Papal Supremacy is canonically based on a reading of [Matthew 16:17-19](_URL_0_). However, the earliest Bishops of Rome seem to have made no such claim, and authority over the Nicene Church (to which the Bishops of Rome belonged pre-schism) was held by a mix of clerical and temporal powers, importantly the Byzantine Emperors. From 537 to 752 the Bishops of Rome depended on Byzantine Imperial approval for episcopal consecration (selection of bishops) even for parishes directly dependent on the Pope. Constantius II went as far as to exile Pope Liberius (ruled 352-356) from Rome, as happened again to Martin I in 653 and several others. Damasus I (ruled 356 to 384) was named \"Bishop of Bishops\" by the Emperor, which may speak to the authority of the Bishop of Rome, but *also* speaks to the authority of the Emperor over him. The first claimant of Papal supremacy as we understand it seems to have been Innocent I (ruled 401-417), but this was not generally accepted within the Church. From 476 Rome was generally ruled by so-called heretics, occasionally occupied by Byzantine troops who had no interest in undermining Imperial authority, and overshadowed by more important parishes within the Church. Only in 616 did a Catholic inherit the throne to the Kingdom of Lombardy, and the struggle with the Emperors for supremacy within the Church would continue until the Great Schism in 1054.\n\n > This is not to say that the Bishops of Rome did not hold a position of honor among other Bishops. The point here is that for about half of Church history, the Pope was *not* the boss.", "It is tempting to create a narrative of papal history that marches inexorably towards the monarchical papacy of the High Middle Ages and its role at the center of Latin Christianity. However, the question is a bit problematic\u2014what elements we decide are essential or fundamental to the office of the papacy will ultimately determine when we decide the papacy \u2018began\u2019. I am not sure that is as useful, as it superimposes onto the past our image of what a pope \u2013medieval or modern\u2014 ought to be. I realize that comes across as a bit pedantic, and maybe it\u2019s not completely necessary, but I hope it will help illuminate the special role the *papa* of Rome has held for most of the position\u2019s history.\n \nI am happy to leave the early histories of the bishops in Rome to other, more qualified posters, but by the fifth century, the bishop in Rome held the title of *papa*. The title was not unique to the Roman see, and was commonly used to refer to a senior bishop who was to act in an advisory position to other sees in his sphere of influence. The title would, however, become unique to the apostolic see by the eighth century. The apostolic see was also one of five patriarchs (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem) that placed them atop an admittedly decentralized ecclesiastical hierarchy. Even among these, Rome was singled out as special\u2014it was after all the resting place of not one, but *two* apostles, on top of countless* martyrs. The legacy of the city as the old capital of the Empire was also hard to shake. Even Constantinople was willing to recognized Rome\u2019s special preeminence among the episcopal sees, but it's worth pointing out that this garnered no additional jurisdictional or theological clout. \n\nThe papacy of the earliest medieval period was largely oriented towards the East and Constantinople, and as a result was often caught up in the theological disputes and politics of the Eastern Roman Empire-- central and southern Italy were part of the Empire for much of the period. Until the papacy of Zachary in 741, the election of a new pope required confirmation from the Emperor. As the only Latin patriarch, the pope represented the West (in theory) in eastern affairs, but in terms of real, enforceable authority, the pope exercised little to no control over the western bishops. Like other patriarchs, the pope had a number of civic responsibilities. The sees of Ravenna and Rome paid the imperial armies in Italy and Rome fed the poor of the city from its estates. The acquisition of civic and administrative duties was not itself unusual, but among the metropolitan bishops of the West, Rome was particularly wealthy; the patrimony of St. Peter during the papacy of Gregory the Great numbered over 400 estates, many of which were located in Sicily.\n\nDespite its eastern orientation and the increasingly fragmented condition of the western churches, the apostolic see was still held a position of special deference. During the fifth century, bishops from Gaul would occasionally petition Rome (addressing him as *papa*) or, as in the case of some African bishops, seek intervention in local conciliar affairs. This \", however, was not regular, and more often than not the bishops involved were in trouble back home. As the western half of the empire continued to disintegrate, regional bishops became increasingly focused on the affairs of the various successor kingdoms to which they belonged. With the conversion of the Visigothic nobility from the 'Arian' heresy, the ecclesiastical life of that kingdom became increasingly centered on Toledo. The bishop of Arles in Gaul, theoretically and at times functioned as the papal representative in the region, but Rome lacked real jurisdictional authority over the bishoprics of the West.\n\nAgain, it's important to emphasize the slow and incremental changes in papal prerogatives in the West. Fifth century popes like Leo and Gelasius both emphasized the importance of their spiritual authority, but it's hard to gauge the extent of their vision for the role of their office; they were certainly unable to impose their will on the Latin bishops. Gregory the Great at the close of the sixth century certainly grew the prestige of the office, and while there was indeed an expansion of the papal bureaucracy over the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, the authority of the popes rarely extended beyond Rome, the surrounding territories and at times in Northern Italy.\n\nI suppose most people conceive of the pope as the head of a centralized Latin church. In that respect, the eighth century, during which the papacy began to look north to the Carolingian Franks rather than East to Constantinople.^1 The Franks increasingly looked to Rome in matters of the liturgy and instruction. Even still, the real authority of the papacy was limited--but it was growing. Beginning with Louis the Pious,^EDIT the pope would ~~periodically anoint emperors~~ take a more prominent role in the anointing of emperors, a reversal of the days when the Eastern emperor confirmed the pope\u2019s position (though the Frankish emperors were still *usually* notified of the election of a new pope). Over the course of the ninth century, archbishops in greater numbers sought the conferral of the *pallium*, the ceremonial woolen vestment symbolizing the authority of their office, from the pope. It was an old practice^2 , but the increased frequency speaks to the extent to which the ecclesiastical leaders of Francia were beginning to look towards Rome for legitimacy, even if the pope as of yet was unable to dictate who was elected. \n\nThe tenth century saw the continuation of several trends established in the preceding centuries and the papal offices were quite busy, even when the popes themselves were rather lackluster. Charters connecting the papacy to various corners of the Latin West are a testament to the increasingly centrality of Rome. Monasteries in particular sought the protection and patronage of the apostolic see^3 \u2014and it is out of these relationships that we witness the birth of the reform movements that would characterize the papacies of the eleventh century. Otherwise the eleventh century would look back on the tenth with not a little disdain. Papal election had always been a political affair, but the tenth century is notorious for the contests between leading Roman families, West Frankish rulers, and German kings\u2014though the condemnation of the period overlooks continuity and consistency with earlier papal models. It is also at the end of tenth century that we witness the first \u2018official\u2019 papal canonizations. These, however, would not become a sole papal prerogative until the thirteenth century. \n\nIf there is a case to be made for when the pope emerged as *the Pope*, or at least what modern folks imagine when they picture the medieval papacy, it would be during the great reform movements of the eleventh and subsequent centuries. For the sake of brevity, the reforms championed among popes, monastic foundations and other centers would attempt to unify and regulate the far-flung communities of believers and establish papal authority in the farthest reaches of Christendom. It is under the reform popes that we see our first \u2018crusades\u2019 and stronger appeals to a universal Christian community. Excommunication and the suspension of the sacraments \u2013long-standing papal prerogatives, if rarely used\u2014were also utilized more frequently and papal insistence on investing bishops with the symbols of their office, as opposed to the temporal princes of Western Europe, would spark its own controversy. It was not an easy transition and the conflicts between popes and princes that would play out over the next few centuries would see emperor\u2019s excommunicated, popes bloodied, anti-popes raised, and much angst and gnashing of teeth all around. Papal developments beyond the eleventh and twelfth centuries, including the crystallization of canon law, are a bit outside of my wheelhouse\u2014I will leave that to hopefully another poster who might be able to elaborate further. \n\nAny time you cover six centuries worth of history things are going to be left out\u2014I have tried to stick to general trends, but even then some things are inevitably left out (so please follow-up!) What I have attempted to demonstrate, however, is that the papacy as an office and institution evolved over time, reacting and adapting to various circumstances within the spheres of influence it found itself. Like any long-standing institution, it will only become more recognizable to us over time, and for me at least, some of those familiar kernels are recognizable quite early.  \n\n----\n\n^1 I don\u2019t quite want to get into all the complexities, but the weakening presence of Constantinople in its Italian holdings and increased Lombard hostilities \u2018encouraged\u2019 the pope to look elsewhere for a protector. \n\n^EDIT As noted below, Charlemagne was crowned by the pope in 800. Carolingians had also been anointed by the pope at various points prior to this event. ~~While I am having trouble tracking down the reference~~ (FOUND IT: in McKitterick's chapter in vol. 3 of the New Cambridge Medieval History), the emphasis on the anointing of Louis the Pious is ~~probably~~ with regards to the pope's insistence that he anoint the new emperor at Rheims in 816. Other than that, please excuse the lazy writing on my part. Whoops! \n\n^2 Pope Marcus (d.336) conferred the pallium on the bishop of Ostia, and Symmachus on Caesarius of Arles in 513; Augustine received the pallium before his mission to Kent\u2014in fact, I have not mentioned it above, but the burgeoning English church looked to Rome in a way that Gaul and Hispania were not during the seventh century (but hey, there\u2019s only so much of 600+ years of history that one can cover, right?)\n\n^3 For ex: the foundation at Cluny\u2014the Starbucks of medieval monasticism. The monastery would produce a couple of popes over the next century, including Gregory VII and Urban II\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.drbo.org/x/d?b=drb&amp;bk=47&amp;ch=16&amp;l=17-19#x"], []]}
{"q_id": "1f3lvf", "title": "What can we do to help future historians?", "selftext": "I study history and focus on ancient Rome, and there is a huge lack of primary sources and data in that field. Will future historians face the same problem when they study 2013? Assuming for example Facebook and Wikipedia are archived, future historians will have much more insight in our day-to-day life than we have in the lives of our ancestors. \n\nBut is it enough? Historians who focus on modern history; are you content with the amount of sources you have? What kind of sources would you like to have that are currently unavailable? Are things like time capsules useful? Can we, both as societies and as individuals, do something to help future historians? \n\nI'm sorry for not strictly following the rules, but I don't think any other subreddit would be more appropriate for this question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f3lvf/what_can_we_do_to_help_future_historians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca6hkmk", "ca6i6nf", "ca6ms07"], "score": [3, 36, 6], "text": ["I've been curious about that myself. I think we need to make sure a good amount of human readable records are preserved. We have ancient books, but floppy discs from thirty years ago are obsolete and difficult to find readers for at best, or damaged and unreadable. It's important to make sure our records and media will be accessible a thousand years from now. ", "Preserving our own digital cultures is incredibly important, but I'm going to address this question from a slightly different angle. One of the other things we need to do to help future historians (and present-day historians too) is embrace an open-access philosophy when creating digital archives of *existing* historical materials. A lot of sources that were once available freely through public libraries and archives are currently being digitised by commercial publishing companies and then placed behind a paywall. In the process, the original documents are being put into storage, sold off, or (in some rare cases) even destroyed in the expectation that we'll all use the digital surrogates instead. I work in the digital humanities, so I'm certainly not adverse to promoting this kind of research - but I am concerned about how our past is being privatised in the process.\n\nIn Britain, the most obvious example is our newspaper archive. The British Library's flagship digitisation program feeds content into the [British Newspaper Archive](_URL_0_), which is owned and operated by a family history company named Brightsolid. You need to take out a subscription in order to use the archive - not an *enormous* amount of money, but enough to restrict the archive's use in schools and for speculative research. Once this company scans a newspaper, they hold long-term copyright over the scanned images (even if the copyright on the original texts has long-since expired). This becomes particularly problematic if access to the original documents is restricted. They also control the future of the archive - if it ceases to be commercially viable in a few decades' time, then how will we access these sources? The choice of materials for digitisation and the design of the archive's interface is also influenced by commercial rather than academic aims - I can't take their data and do something else with it because they control access.\n\nThis isn't just happening with newspapers. Loads of our archives are being broken up into small chunks, sold off to digitisation companies, and then placed behind separate paywalls. This process is creating an increasingly fractured archival environment - everything is held within its own walled-garden. This, in turn, is creating a divide between researchers who can afford the necessary subscriptions (either  personally or through their institution) and those who can't. I'm an enormous fan of digitisation, but in our rush to fund it we've sacrificed control over our archives and erected barriers to access that will be extremely difficult to pull down. \n\nSo, what can we do to help future historians? We could start by making sure that the records we have *already* been trusted to protect remain in public control, and adopt a flexible, open-access approach to digitisation that doesn't require us to sell-out to commercial publishers.", "The science fiction writer [Charlie Stross](_URL_0_) did think a bit of history of the near future. And he notes that the availability of cheap storage means that future historians will likely see a boundary around our time. Before they have only information, that is deemed valuable enough to warrant the labor and expense to write it down. Afterwards they will have everything. ( The current cost to store 1 year of DVD quality video (~30 TBit) is roughly $300, less than $1000/yr including backup.) \n\nSo to think a bit of what a historian of 2050 (or someone with access to the Facebook database today) could do with the Facebook Database: It would be possible to look at the subset of users who did identify themselves as Obama voter in 2012 and Republican voter in 2016. Then this future historian could look at the \"Likes\" and groups these users have joined and try to identify important correlations about these. In addition, depending on the state of natural language parsing, the historian could try to sort through the messages the user has send or received. It is at least possible to count the frequency of certain words. For example the use of 'Gun control' indicates that the user is thinking about 'Gun control,' a more sophisticated approach would try to extract enough meaning to identify if the user is concerned about guns or concerned about too much gun control. (None of this is speculative, [source for stuff Facebook stores.](_URL_1_) )\n\nOn the other hand, for high level decision making the sources would likely be not much better than today. The social media profiles of many politicians are created by PR companies, and as such are written with a lot more bias than a supposedly private conversation at Facebook. So for an important meeting during the financial crisis, the historian may or may not have access to the protocol of that meeting, but it is unlikely that the thought process is documented in a similar way as the thought process of someone who discusses openly on Facebook. \n\nSo to finally discuss the question, the two preceding paragraphs assume that the Facebook database survives. This is by no means a certainty. And the database needs to be readable, so future historians need to be able to read the file system of the hard disks and the format of the database. And in addition, they need to be able to judge the bias introduced by reconstructing new media: Most of the world population is still off line and  my parents use email only for work related stuff. And of course the historical fashion may change and future historians may only be interested in the story of kings, just like many past historians. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/"], ["http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html", "http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html"]]}
{"q_id": "304unr", "title": "Why were ship designs so different in Asia compared to Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/304unr/why_were_ship_designs_so_different_in_asia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpp5dyj"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're going to need to clarify a few things: what parts of Asia/Europe? Time period? Are you referring to hull design or rigging? Warships or merchantmen? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z9dm0", "title": "During the late 19th century, why was Japan able to modernize its military better than China?", "selftext": "From the limited understanding I have, both countries tried to reform their military to Western standards during the late 19th century. However, the Japanese reforms seemed to succeed better as they were able to defeat the Chinese in the first Sino-Japanese war despite numerical inferiority. Later, in the 20th century, the IJN grew into a force that could threaten the US Navy while the Chinese navy remained relatively small. The Japanese army remained qualitatively superior to chinese ground forces as well for most of the war. What were the reasons for China's military ineptitude?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z9dm0/during_the_late_19th_century_why_was_japan_able/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfuzux4"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is an age old topic.\n\nMy answer is pretty simple. Japan could modernize because it became a nation-state by using ethnic nationalism.  Qing China (1644-1911) could not modernize because it was multiethnic empire ruled by the minority Manchus.\n\nSo in Japan's case, the new Meiji state (1868-1912) could rely upon the age-old imperial family (going back to at least the 500sAD) and a relatively quick construction of Japanese identity based upon a shared language and culture.  So despite the massive changes brought upon by Westernization, they could say that they remained Japanese and continue to swear loyalty to the new Westernizing government.\n\nIn Qing China's case the imperial family was Manchu.  These Manchus were a non-Chinese people who came from north of the Great Wall and conquered the Han Chinese in the 1600s.  The Manchus spoke and wrote in their own language, they were Tibetan Buddhists, and culturally they were semi-nomadic.  The Chinese wrote in classic Chinese, they were a fusion of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and they were agriculturalists who practiced foot-binding.  To govern this China (that also included other minorities like the Mongols, Tibetans, and central Asian Muslims) the Manchus set up a system of diarchy where top government posts in China proper were divided evenly between Manchus and Han Chinese.\n\nThe only thing that really bound the Manchus together with the Chinese was Confucianism.  The Manchus adopted Confucianism as the philosophy to govern China and continued to use it as the basis for the Civil Service Exams that selected government officials.\n\nFast forward to 19th century and the need to reform.  One of the things that both countries needed to do was learn Western technology and adopt schools that taught many of the Western sciences.\n\nIn Japan, adopting that Western curriculum to modernize its military did not endanger Japanese identity nor endanger the basis of Meiji government.  (Because of the ethnic nationalism mentioned above.)\n\nIn Qing China, however, if you adopted the Western curriculum you were abandoning the Confucian curriculum and the Civil Service Exams.  It took a bright person at least 20 years of studying classical Chinese and Confucianism to pass the Civil Service Exams.  It was unrealistic to add another 10 years of Western education.  So if you pull out Confucianism from the curriculum, then what binds the Manchu people with the Han Chinese people?  Very little I'm afraid.  So when members of Qing China's leadership realize this, they pull back from full scale Westernization and reforms.  Chinese students who study a Western curriculum instead of the Confucian curriculum also begin to question why they have to have an alien Manchu emperor in China.  Thus it wasn't accidental that the father of the 1911 Revolution in China, Sun Yat-sen, got his education in the West (Hawaii and Hong Kong).  And that the 1911 Revolution starts right after the Manchus abandon diarchy and staff 80% of the top government posts with Manchu princes in 1910.\n\nTL:DR Japan could push through the necessary reforms to learn how to use ships and guns they bought, but also to eventually make them.  Qing China could only buy ships and guns but not teach the students how to make them.\n\nThis also explains why once China became ruled by the Han Chinese, they could do lots of reforms (particularly social reforms) in the 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1d8ld0", "title": "How did Portugal (as a fascist state under the Estado Novo) manage to stay non-belligerent in World War Two?", "selftext": "I can understand how they leaned towards supporting the Allies near the end, but how did they not ally themselves with the Italians and/or Germans at the beginning? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d8ld0/how_did_portugal_as_a_fascist_state_under_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9nz8sd", "c9nzaq1", "c9o6mz1"], "score": [15, 4, 2], "text": ["Because Estado Novo is a very peculiar fascist state. We didn't had 90% of the ostentation of Italy and Germany, and Salazar didn't want to recuperate the Portuguese Empire as the Italians want to bring back the Roman Empire or the German the Reich, Salazar wanted his people poor, traditional and in the countryside.\n\nOur natural enemy has always been Spain, so the 1st thing Salazar did was make the Iberian Pact where both of us decided to have a neutral position in the war. But Franco gave a lot of support to the Axis and ended up not having his position recognized as Portugal had, this was signed by the same time the Italians invited Portugal to join the Axis.\n\nJoining the Axis was entering some european politics that he saw unrelated to Portugal, and his focus was on the colonies.\n\nPortugal was at risk of invasion only two times: Operation Felix, the ideia of invading Gibraltar with the support (or not) of Spain, if the allies interfered ocupying Portugal. This made Salazar plan to move the government to Azores, so he send a lot of trops to the islands.\n\nThe second one was a plan by UK to invade Azores and use the islands since it's strategic location, but the trops there from the Felix operation made them think twice because Portugal would defend the islands.\n\nBut we were alone, not very well armed, and Salazar was a very lucky bastard.", "This paper looks at the state of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance during WWII and gives some good in-depth answers. \n\nSome key points: \n\n* Despite the fact they were both anti-democratic, Salazer and Hitler weren't naturally allies and neither were their political followers.\n\n// the British Embassy in Lisbon considered the head of the\npolitical police \"impartial,\" and out of eight superior officers only\none was considered \"pro-German.\" // \n\n* The regime in Portugal wasn't anti-Semitic and accepted many Jewish refugees \n\n// Many refugees, especially Jewish refugees, have mentioned the\nwarm welcome they received from the Portuguese population in general.2 It appears, the Portuguese government was free from antiSemitism. The Portuguese Jewish community was very small but It\ncounted very influential members, among them a personal friend of\nSalazar, Moses Bensabat Amzalak\" //\n\n* The Anglo-Portuguese alliance, which goes back to 1373 and is the oldest still existing such alliance in the world, was not something to be lightly cast aside. This alliance had survived many, many prior upheavals in European history and was hugely significant for Portuguese foreign policy and trade. \n\n* Portugal had fought on the side of Britain against the Germans in WWI and many still considered the Germans to be the enemy. \n\n* Portuguese non-Belligerency was a key part of British foreign policy as it was feared that Portuguese involvement could trigger Spain to join on the side of the Axis powers.  ", " >  how did they not ally themselves with the Italians and/or Germans at the beginning?\n\nThe government, while fascist, didn't think it was in their best interests to join, so they stayed out. It's as simple as that.\n\nPortugal was reasonably far away from the rest of the Axis, so they couldn't threaten her with invasion to force her hand (and wouldn't get much out of it if they did, anyway) and it was not in the best interests of the Allies to invade (as that might push the Spanish into bed with the Germans). So when they decided not to join a side that was that.\n\nNo offence, but this question is a little like asking \"how did the Americans stay out of WW1 for so long? They were a democracy like France, so why weren't they forced to join/sucked in in the beginning?\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "26lpwy", "title": "How was oil obtained in the middle ages?", "selftext": "There was another post about use of oil in siege warfare. How and where did the oil come from?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26lpwy/how_was_oil_obtained_in_the_middle_ages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chs85w9", "chs8ezs"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["They got them from oil wells near the surface. Herodotus describes oil pits near Babylon, for instance, where they dug for oil much like you'd dig for water.\n\nMore specifically for the Middle Ages, Marco Polo -for instance- describes oil springs in Baku (Azerbaijan):\n\n >  bordering upon Armenia, to the south \nwest, are the districts of Mosul and Maredin, which shall be \ndescribed hereafter, and many others too numerous to parti \ncularize. To the north lies Zorzania, near the confines of which \nthere is a fountain of oil which discharges so great a quantity \nas to furnish loading for many camels. 2 The use made of it \nis not for the purpose of food, but as an unguent for the cure of \ncutaneous distempers in men and cattle, as well as other com \nplaints ; and it is also good for burning. In the neighbouring \ncountry no other is used in their lamps, and people come from \ndistant parts to procure it. \n\n(Travels of Marco Polo, chapter IV)\n", "Hi! FYI, you'll find some additional information in the FAQ (link on the sidebar) \n\n[Mineral resource extraction]( _URL_0_) - see under *Petroleum*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/economics#wiki_mineral_resource_extraction"]]}
{"q_id": "8am62d", "title": "Why did it take so long to unify Italy again (1870s) after the collapse of the Roman Empire? how did countries more technologically backward such as England, France and Castile/Spain unify more quickly than what was previously the most advanced empire in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8am62d/why_did_it_take_so_long_to_unify_italy_again/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwzq4ce"], "score": [6], "text": ["This question takes in the best part of a millennium and a half of West European history, and I was aiming to find 3-4 earlier answers that might address parts of it.  \n\nHowever, it turns out u/AlviseFalier has written an epic answer to a very similar question: [It seems odd that the Italian peninsula could give rise to the Roman Empire and then largely resist political unification until 1870. How have historians explained Italy's extended political fracture after the Western Empire fell?](_URL_0_)  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vba8z/it_seems_odd_that_the_italian_peninsula_could/"]]}
{"q_id": "1e2qyd", "title": "How did music originate?", "selftext": "I'm a working musician who loves what he does. I'd like to know how what we consider \"music\" (melody and rhythm) originated. What do we know with reasonable certainty? Are there any general theories that are considered credible? Or is any answer to this utter guesswork? \n\nThe origins of spoken language are shrouded in mystery, and I strongly suspect the origins of music (a sort of language in of itself) are cloaked in guesswork. Do we even know enough about prehistoric times to make reasoned guesses at the answers here? \n\nSuggestions for further reading would be welcome, of course, but I think at this point I need to know just enough so I can pose some interesting questions about the origins of what I hold dear. \n\n(This is my first post to this subreddit, have been lurking and reading for a while. As per the rules, I've attempted to pose a reasonably targeted question about this very broad... thing. Suggestions for further targeting are welcome.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e2qyd/how_did_music_originate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9w9fbn", "c9wd6sh"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["You might have better luck asking an anthropologist than a historian.", "As hangarninetysix points out, this is probably a better question for anthropologists than for historians. And, while we do have some anthropologists here, you'll also find some in our sibling subreddit /r/AskAnthropology.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "16bw9v", "title": "What kind of measures were taken to combat disease during military conflicts, especially for soldiers in campaigns?", "selftext": "It's often mentioned that throughout history disease was often more likely to kill soldiers (and civilians) in warfare than violence was.  I'm ure inelligent military commanders were aware of this and took steps to protect themselves and their men.  This, however, almost never makes it into media portrayals of the time and is largely absent from our collective cultural impression of those periods, so naturally it's something I'm very curious about.\n\nHow many of those illness-related deaths were caused by the enemy (biological warfare, etc.), and how much of it was run-of-the-mill poor sanitary and nutritional conditions?  What kind of precautions, training, and logistical support was given to preventing and fighting illness throughout history?  How quickly did medical advances have an impact on military policy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16bw9v/what_kind_of_measures_were_taken_to_combat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7umuvb"], "score": [3], "text": ["Until relatively recently the causes of the diseases were not known. They couldn't effectively fight diseases because they didn't have the necessarily scientific knowledge. The Greeks and Romans held to the [Four Humors Theory](_URL_0_) and it remained the leading knowledge of medicine up to the 1800s. \n\nBy the time of the American Civil War (what I have been studying recently) this idea was out of favor, but the germ theory had not been developed. It was thought that sickness like malaria was caused by bad air, but that didn't stop the commanders from camping their men in swamps if that was the military necessity. Sanitation and cleanness were not thought necessarily, expect by a few commanders who figured it out just by trial and error.\n\nThe Civil War did result in a large advance in medicine. The wounds and cases were recorded and published after the war, giving doctors a huge resource to study. An ambulance system was developed, as was triage, field hospitals and more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism"]]}
{"q_id": "788jme", "title": "Were the witch hunting trials by throwing people into water real? How were the deaths of innocents justified?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/788jme/were_the_witch_hunting_trials_by_throwing_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dosnfut"], "score": [9], "text": ["Trial by water was one option available under trials by ordeal in Medieval Europe. Trials by ordeal, like trials by combat, come from ancient Germanic law customs. I'll mostly write here about its use in the High Middle Ages in Britain.\n\nTrials by ordeal generally came in two forms: trial by fire, or trial by water. In the case of trial by fire, the accused held a red-hot iron for a prescribed length of time, after which the healing wound would be examined to determine guilt. Similarly, in trial by water, the accused would be thrown into a body of water: sinking meant innocence, and floating meant guilt. The concept behind trials by ordeal were that God would intervene to display the guilt or innocence of the accused party. Invoking the sacred would often include a priest exorcising or blessing the iron or water to be used in such trials.\n\nTrial by fire was considered the more prestigious of the ordeals: it was used for women, and more accused males of higher social status. Trial by water was more often used on serfs (but likewise seems to have been the vastly more common type of ordeal, on the scale of something like 83% to 17% trials by fire in England in the 12th century. Trials by ordeal were not used specifically in witchcraft cases, which in the High Middle Ages were practically nonexistent anyway (witchcraft hysteria is more a product of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period). As Robert Bartlett describes it:\n\n >  Unlike trial by battle, the unilateral ordeals of iron and water were employed in England only in criminal cases ... Henry II made widespread use of them in the drive against crime initiated by his Assize of Clarendon in 1166. According to this enactment, juries of twelve men of every hundred and four men of every township were to supply the names of anyone who, within the last twelve years, had been accused or was suspected of robbery, murder, or theft, or of harbouring robbers, murderers, or thieves. The sheriffs were to seize those accused or suspected and bring them before the royal justice. Unless they had been caught with stolen goods and were of bad repute, they could undergo trial by cold water. If they failed, they lost a foot (and, after 1176, their right hand too). If they passed the ordeal but had a bad reputation, they had to go into life-long exile from the kingdom.\n\nInterestingly, the records from this period in England indicate that something like two thirds of those subjected to trial by water passed, ie they were judged to have sank, and therefore were not guilty.  Bartlett, however, notes that what passes as \"sinking\" or \"floating\" can be very arbitrary concepts: \"To place the case before God was also to put it into the hands of a small body of men with opinions and feelings of their own.\"\n\nI cannot really speak to how common the practice was for witchcraft trials, as those tended to be more common in later time periods (and mostly in other parts of Europe, such as the Low Countries, that used civil law and inquisitorial prosecution). Nor can I speak to when the idea became a common modernist myth that witch trials involved trial by water (usually with the Catch-22 idea that an innocent person would sink and drown, while a guilty person would float and then be executed). But it seems to be mostly that. While trials by ordeal are very foreign to modern people, and invoke the supernatural to a degree that would make us comfortable, there were rules behind their use, and most of those who submitted to such trials appear to have been acquitted.\n\nMostly from Robert Bartlett, *England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "307zv8", "title": "Were Native Americans ever taken back to Europe, as slaves or to be assimilated into European society?", "selftext": "I've been reading a book lately, \"The Illustrated History of Canada\" and it has sparked a question.  A passage I was just reading explained that Cartier took two sons of a chieftan back to Europe and returned them promptly the next year.  Though it did not go into any further details.  Are there any other accounts of natives being taken back, and what was the reaction from both sides?  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/307zv8/were_native_americans_ever_taken_back_to_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpqawe3", "cpqkzbo"], "score": [12, 12], "text": ["The famous Native American Squanto was an example of this. He was captured as a young man in 1605 by the British, enslaved, and taken to England where he was taught English so he could be used as an interpreter. 9 years later he returned to New England as part of one of John Smith's expeditions. He tried to return to his people, but was then kidnapped again, got taken to Spain where he was almost sold into slavery again, got out of that situation, then went to England, went to Newfoundland on an expedition, came back to England, and then finally was allowed to return to his true home (this is almost 15 years after being abducted originally). He gets back to New England with another Jon Smith expedition... and then finds out his entire village was obliterated by a Small Pox outbreak a year earlier...\n\n2 years later he gets into contact with the Pilgrims who have just gotten through their first winter in the Americas. They were a little worse for wear to put it mildly. He showed them native farming techniques including how to cultivate maize, helped them learn the land, and acted as an interpreter and diplomat of sorts for them with native tribes in the region. He died a year later, but in that year he saved the Pilgrims expedition from failing like so many similar ventures in the New World did. He had crossed the Atlantic six times.", "The traditional narrative of the Americas after contact grossly neglects the influence of abduction and slavery on Native American populations. Both small scale abductions, and large scale slaving raids, were used by European populations to turn a profit, reduce resistance to territorial encroachment, and as a tool of war.\n\nBefore first contact with officially sanctioned *entradas* to Florida in the early 1500s, unofficial traders and fisherman plied the Atlantic and Gulf Coast. These unofficial voyagers routinely augmented their stores with unwary captives, either for sale as slaves in the Caribbean or Europe, or to serve as translators for later voyages. During the first official *entrada* to Florida in 1513, the Spanish encountered Native American populations along the coast that already understood a few words of Spanish, and fled from the new arrivals, leading Juan Ponce de Le\u00f3n to assume slaving raids preceded his arrival. When Verrazzano explored the Atlantic Coast in 1524 he encountered coastal populations who refused to trade directly with Europeans, preferring instead to exchange goods boat to boat across a line, possibly in an attempt to keep their distance and prevent abduction. As another user mentioned, Tisquantum/Squanto was likely subject to several of these small-scale abductions along the coast.\n\nAbductees were routinely sold in either the Caribbean or Europe, or trained as translators for future conquests. Accepted Spanish policy for new *entradas* included an initial journey to abduct a few young men, train them as translators, and return a few years to conquest and establish missions. This method was used to great success in Peru, when Pizarro captured two young boys from the coast in 1528. One of the young men, Martinillo, served as a translator during the famous showdown in Cajamarca in 1532 that resulted in the capture of Atahuallpa. In another example, Don Luis, a young man abducted by Spanish missionaries in 1561 from the Virginia tidewater region, returned in 1571 with a party of Jesuit fathers hoping to establish a mission near the James River. He escaped, organized the martyrdom of the Jesuits, and later advised Wahunsenacawh/Powhatan to expand the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom to oppose Spanish encroachment. Wahunsenacawh/Powhatan\u2019s daughter, Matoaka/Pocahontas, would later travel to England in 1616 where she was presented to the King James and Queen Anne as the daughter of \u201cthe most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia.\u201d\n\nLarge scale slaving, and slaving raids, became a tool of war for English once they began to establish permanent settlements in the New World. The peace established between Plymouth and the Wampanoag lasted a generation. Massasoit\u2019s son, Metacomet/Phillip, succeeded his father as sachem and due to a variety of factors organized the hostilities now known as King Phillip\u2019s War. When the dust settled more than 3,000 Native Americans were killed and hundreds of survivors who were not professing Christians were sold into slavery in Bermuda.\n\nThe Carolinas used slaving raids as a tool of war against Spanish Florida, as well as a means of raising capital. Traders employed Native American allies, like the Savannah, to raid their neighbors for sale, and groups like the Kussoe who refused to raid were ruthlessly attacked. When the Westo, previously English allies who raided extensively for slaves, outlived their usefulness they were likewise enslaved. As English influence grew the choice of slave raid or be slaved extended raiding parties west across the Appalachians, and onto the Spanish mission doorsteps. Slavery became a tool of war, and the English attempts to rout the Spanish from Florida included enslaving their allied mission populations. Slaving raids nearly depopulated the Florida peninsula as refugees fled south in hopes of finding safe haven on ships bound for Spanish-controlled Cuba ([a good slave raiding map](_URL_0_)). Gallay, in *Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717*, writes the drive to control Indian labor extended to every nook and cranny of the South, from Arkansas to the Carolinas and south to the Florida Keys in the period 1670-1715. More Indians were exported through Charles Town than Africans were imported during this period.\n\nIn both acts of small-scale abduction, as well as organized large-scale slaving raids, slaving often served as the first shock of contact between coastal Native American populations and European arrivals. The repercussions of slaving raids spread far in advance of European settlers, shattering previous lifeways, and sparking the rise of powerful confederacies like the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee to combat slaving raids. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://uwf.edu/jworth/spanfla_retreat.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2og7xa", "title": "Panel AMA \u2013 East Asia in the Early 20th Century", "selftext": "The first half of the 20th century was a busy time in East Asia. For this AMA panel, we're looking at the period from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. It's a period that involves wars, occupations, foreign sttlements and extraterritoriality, imperialism, and the creation of new nations, just to name a few of the highlights. Our panelists for today's AMA are:\n\n* /u/an_ironic_username is a naval historian who will be discussing Japanese navalism in the 20th Century and the maritime conflicts in the Pacific during this period. He'll be popping in and out during the AMA.\n\n* /u/Beck2012 will be addressing topics on Southeast Asia and Korea\n\n* /u/churakaagii is a half-Okinawan who lives in Okinawa, and has an interest in the history of an area that has had a historical impact out of proportion to the size of its land mass.\n\n* /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov is a military historian here to talk about Warlordism, the Civil War, and the Second Sino-Japanese War.\n\n* /u/keyilan is an historical linguist based in Taiwan and East China. His areas of interest are: national language policy  &  planning; Japanese-occupied Taiwan  &  Korea; Shanghai in the 20th century. \n\n* /u/thanatos90 is focusing on Chinese intellectual history, particularly the New Culture and May Fourth movements and the rise of communism.\n\nWe'll be addressing a wide range of topics, so don't feel limited to the specific subspecialties listed above.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2og7xa/panel_ama_east_asia_in_the_early_20th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmmud9z", "cmmun0y", "cmmupm9", "cmmvve3", "cmmyl6f", "cmmynua", "cmmzoln", "cmn0bxe", "cmn1dom", "cmn1x9r", "cmn2vjw", "cmn3473", "cmn51b7", "cmn5mi2", "cmn6kg3", "cmn796v", "cmn7fbd", "cmn7k2q", "cmn84le", "cmn8l01", "cmnf768"], "score": [2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5, 3, 7, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 4, 5, 6, 5, 3], "text": ["Have any of the Austronesian languages left a substrate in the Sinitic languages of Taiwan? If so, what does this substrate tell us about culture, history and influence in the island?", "Do western, professional historians specialized in modern Chinese history actually consult works by Chinese historians based in China, and if they do, to what extent?", " How does Japanese feels about the independance of their ex-colony after the war?\n\nIf it is possible, I want to ask about Konfrontasi. [This video](_URL_0_) said that Indonesia reason to start the low intensity war is more about pumping nationalism rather than gaining new territory. What is your thought about that and konfrontasi in general.", "What are some good books on the Japanese student protest movements during the early 20th century which eventually lead to the formation of the All-Japan Federation of Students' Self-Governing Associations and widespread violent conflict between students and police in the latter 20th century?", "Would you consider Ho Chi Minh more of a nationalist or a dedicated Communist? Or did he evolve his philosophy over time?", "How much did General Joe Stillwell's dislike of Chiang Kai-Shek influence the outcome of the Civil War? He seemed to really hate Chiang (calling him nicknames like \"Peanut\"), but would a theater commander with a more positive opinion have helped the KMT win, or were their institutional problems likely too much to prevent the CCP's victory?", "What was life like for a foreigner in Shanghai's International District from 1937-1941?  Were they directly impacted by the war at all?  Were there Chinese or Japanese actions taken against them?  Were they encouraged to return to their home countries?", "The Russo-Japanese war is sometimes cited as an example of the brutal effect of modern industry and weaponry upon warfare. How violent was the Russo-Japanese war?", "- How was Henry Puyi's day-to-day life when he ruled the Manchukuo under Japanese in Tianjin? What kind of duties did he do? What kind of freedom was allowed him? \n\n- A lot of Chinese migrated from Meixian to my country in 1930s, my grandfather included. My mom always said it was because a lot of people wanted to avoid \u5f53\u5175 (dunno what the English term is), is it true or is there any other cause? \n\nSorry if my question is too far away from the permitted topics but I'm curious nonetheless. Thanks in advance! ", "How did the late Qing and early republican government and military overcome the various dialect/language differences?  If I was an aspiring foot soldier from Fujian or Guangdong would I have to take courses in Mandarin before joining the military?  ", "I have several questions (mostly on China in the '20s and '30s), so this might take a bit: \n\n1.  How widespread (outside of student and intellectual circles) were the ideas of the New Culture and May Fourth movements? \n\n2. What allowed the Chinese Communist Party to grow so quickly in the '20s? Was it a result of the United Front with the KMT, or was it something else? \n\n3. How important was the Chinese market for the foreign powers? It looks like the Chinese economy essentially collapsed during the warlord period, but it somehow remained a big consumer of imported goods. Was this just because of sheer population size, or what?\n\n4. What allowed the KMT to be so successful in the Northern Expedition? \n\n5. How on Earth were the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army able to gain so much autonomy and power over the Japanese government? Half the time, it looks like the military were the ones running the show. \n\n6. How effective was the KMT's rule up until the Sino-Japanese war? On the one hand, it does look like there were genuine efforts to industrialize and modernize the army, but it seems that quite a few of the Warlords stuck around and stayed in power, and Chiang's rule seems dictatorial. ", "What led to the cooling of German-Japanese relations in the beginning of the 20th century, culminating in the Japanese entry into the Entente? Our two countries had had largely friendly relations up to that time, the Japanese even adapting our civil law (BGB), if I understand it correctly. Did Wilhelm II's chauvinistic rhetoric (\"Gelbe Gefahr\", the Yellow Peril) have much impact (another thing that interests me, how was that received in Japan and China at the time?), or was it mainly power politics?", "To what extent after Sino-Japanese war was the Qing reform movement doomed to failure? In a number of the narratives of I have read, the defeat created the impetus to  finally overthrow the Qing. Were all attempts at reform, after 1895 merely delaying the inevitable? ", "Did the idea of a rural \"village\" as an intermediary between the family farm unit and the market exchange hub of town/city still exist in early 20th century China?  Or was there now only the hub and the family farm?  Or was the rural economic structure dynamic something completely different?\n\nIf possible, can you compare with the situation now, or if too recent, at least post-cultural revolution?", "Did the discontinuation of the imperial exams in China (and elsewhere, for that matter) have a noticeable effect on the quality of Literary Chinese writing thereafter? I know it was in general abandoned and replaced with vernacular writing, but in cases when people educated in post-exam East Asia *did* write in Literary Chinese, is there a noticeable difference in quality or style?", "Why did pan-East Asian nationalism decline? It appears to have been more common at the turn of the century (i.e. the 1900s) than today. Even An Jung-geun, the Korean who assassinated the former Prime Minister of Japan in 1909, was an advocate for a pan-East Asian monetary union and combined armed forces.", "What is special about the May 4th movement exactly? As I understand it, it's a backlash against western betrayal at Versailles, but I don't quite understand why it has such cultural gravitas. Surely, after all the various defeats suffered since the first Opium War, educated folks understood that something was very seriously wrong with the country, right? What is so special about the 1919 movement? What differences did it have with reformist / revolutionary thoughts and movements that came before? Why did it take Versailles to instigate such a radical departure (if it indeed is one) ?", "What's the history behind the development of zaibatsu? Did they form as organically in the private sector then became coopted as vehicles of policy or did government policy explicitly facilitate their formation in the first place? What is the intellectual history behind the idea? Why did people think it was good to have an economy dominated by large conglomerates, and, to the extent possible, what do we know about their actual effects on the economy?", "Why does it seem like Taiwanese don't feel the same animosity towards Japanese as say the Chinese or Koreans? My family (Taiwanese) seem to have always said things like \"even though the Japanese were strict and harsh, they were fair.\"\n\nAlso, how integrated was Taiwan into Japan at that time, economically and politically. Would the average Taiwanese person think of themselves as Japanese/would the average Japanese think of a Taiwanese person as a true Japanese?", "1. In *China: a new History* Fairbanks quotes a defector from the CCP as saying that Mao's strategy in WWII was to focus 70% of his efforts on building power bases, 20% on fighting the Nationalists, and 10% on fighting the Japanese. Does this claim hold up?\n\n2. Why did the CCP move the capital back to Beijing? It was and still is a terrible location.\n\n3. What were major differences between the actions and operational proceedings of the Eight Nations during the Boxer Rebellion? I have heard, for example, the American leaders tended to be less rapacious.\n\n4. Do you think Cixo really murdered the Guangxu Emperor? If so, why do you think she did so?\n\n5. There are significant elements that believe that the CCP reforms implemented after 1949 were responsible for the enormous economic progress of the 1950s. Others believe that it was merely a continuation of trends seen during the Nanjing Decade before they were interrupted by war. Do you believe that the KMT government was making the sort of real progress seen in the 1950s?\n\n6. How did ethnic tensions play into the convulsions of the early twentieth century? For example, did ethnic minority groups tend to favor one or the other side in the civil wars?", "Can I just ask each of the panelists to give a book list that would be a good \"101\" into thier respective areas of studies? \nAlso let me state my profound admaration and gratitude for all you posters of knowledge. I have learned more in the past year of lurking on this subreddit than I ever did in public school. You guys rock!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkhzudQiIiw#t=234"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1jzevz", "title": "Why is the interior of the great pyramid in Egypt not covered in paintings and ancient Egyptian writings or reliefs like all the other supposedly older pyramids found in Egypt?", "selftext": "They build these huge structures in Giza dwarfing they're previous buildings and they leave little to no clue as to why they were built. How much evidence is there really for the claim that the great pyramid was built as a tomb for the Pharaoh Khufu?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jzevz/why_is_the_interior_of_the_great_pyramid_in_egypt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbjw5yj"], "score": [3], "text": ["Just like today's tombstones are not burried with the deceased, in ancient egyptian times paintings and relief decorations were usually reserved for places where others (mainly relatives and priests) could see them, in the accompanying chapels and temples.\n\nKhufu's pyramid complex is in very bad condition but those of chephren and menkaure leave no doubt that the pyramids and their temples were meant to serve a death cult.\n\nIf you want me to go into anything specific just ask.\n\nP.S.: I am not aware of any extensive decorations in any older pyramid so if you could point me to them it would be appreciated."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mjymt", "title": "Are there any examples of successful opposition to Jim Crow in the segregated South before Brown v. Board?", "selftext": "I was reading through 100 Years of Lynchings by Ralph Ginzburg, and was wondering if there were any accounts of people standing up to that culture from within the Jim Crow South.  Does anyone know of any?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mjymt/are_there_any_examples_of_successful_opposition/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm614at"], "score": [3], "text": ["Good question. We often think that African American protest and the Civil Rights Movement began with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This is usually the beginning marker because it was the first successful legal battle for de-segregation. However, do we define successful opposition to Jim Crow as only legal battles? \n\nThe current scholarship is leaning more and more to the answer \"no\". Opposition can take many forms, individual, silent protest, labor agitation, organizing community councils, boycotts, etc. This type of African American protest has existed as long as there have been African Americans (this is not my specialty, but slave narratives are a good example of the small and large ways blacks protested oppression). In terms of the 20th century, African American protest began to organize more and solidify into a coherent argument during the labor agitation of the 1930s, and there you can see many instances of successful challenges of Jim Crow.\n\nInterlude: Jim Crow didn't exist only in the South. My current research is on Depression-era blacks in the Midwest, and often the conditions and social treatment of African Americans outside of the South was comparable. For more, see Thomas Sugrue's [*Sweet Land of Liberty:: The Forgotten Struggle of Civil Rights in the North*](_URL_2_) and Kimberley Phillips' [*AlabamaNorth African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland*](_URL_0_).\n\nOk, back to the South. So how do we define \"successful opposition\"? Robin D. G. Kelley argues that opposition to racism is not always obvious. In [\"'We Are Not What We Seem:' Re-thinking Black Working Clark Opposition in Jim Crow South](_URL_3_)\", Kelley talks about how workers would sing hymn and spirituals while they worked in dismal factories. While employers thought this was a simple show of religion, in fact it held deeper meaning for the black workers. It was a recall to the days of slavery when slaves used hidden meanings in spirituals to give hope (as well as clues) for escape. Kelley also talks about silent protest, like slow-downs, where workers would intentionally work slower to delay production. Outside of work, African Americans in the South would also participate on small, unorganized levels of protest. Kelley tells of the story of a particularly racist bus driver would drew his gun several times on black women riders, and how he would intentionally miss blacks' stops. The riders responded by ringing the bell for stops and not get off. Is this a successful protest?\n\nOne last example of protest was the [\"Don't Buy Where You Can't Work\"](_URL_1_) movement, which had several iterations across the country, both northern and southern cities. There were many businesses, large and small, that would not employ blacks. African Americans in cities like Chicago would organize and decide to boycott businesses that would practice this, until the businesses would hire black employees. This also promoted black businesses in the community. Is this a successful protest?\n\nI know answering a question with more questions is such a typical historian move, but  I do think it's important to challenge what we mean by protest. I definitely recommend you read Kelley's article (and really anything by Kelley- he's superb). But in short, I would argue yes- there were many ways African Americans successfully protested Jim Crow, in the South and North, prior to Brown v. Board. They might not be forms of protest we are familiar with, but it was brave all the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/AlabamaNorth-African-American-Community-Working-Class-Cleveland/dp/0252067932/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1416325985&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=alabama+north", "http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?zid=c2c7a4847dc21fd128d52a29c49b930c&amp;action=2&amp;documentId=GALE%7CBT2338230739&amp;userGroupName=k12_histrc&amp;jsid=355f6cff3a94198b092d0a770ba50edd", "http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Land-Liberty-Forgotten-Struggle/dp/0812970381/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1416325907&amp;sr=1-3", "http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/kelley.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2o7fzf", "title": "When/how did we begin to view the Earth as a planet in a solar system of multiple planets? In other words, at what point in time would you be able to ask \"What planet are we on?\" and people would begin to understand what you're talking about? [X-post to no stupid questions]", "selftext": "I watch a lot of Star Trek and it seems like they are frequently asking questions along the lines of \"What planet are we on?\" or \"What planet are you from?\" I can't remember the episodes well enough to remember if any of them ever respond with \"wtf are you talking about?\", but it got me thinking. Surely not all these cultures would have a concept of their home being a planet, because *we* haven't always had that concept. Sure, many of the early cultures had some knowledge of various heavenly bodies, but that's distinctly different from having the understanding that we are *ON* one. If we went back 100 years, would they understand that concept? 200 years? 500?\n\nDoes anyone know the history of our understanding of the Earth's relation to the universe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2o7fzf/whenhow_did_we_begin_to_view_the_earth_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmkhz0c"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! other responses are welcome (especially to represent various other cultures), but you can get started here\n\n* [When did humans become aware that they were on planet Earth, in a solar system, and part of the Universe?](_URL_0_)\n\nIt might also be worth x-posting to /r/AskScience (astronomy)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gz1pd/when_did_humans_become_aware_that_they_were_on/"]]}
{"q_id": "118iwx", "title": "what kind of things would people have worn during beheadings in 17th Century France? ", "selftext": "Like, everyone in attendance. Police/military, political figures, commoners, etc. What was the color of the french military's cloths? Did they wear Tricorner hats, etc. I need the info. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/118iwx/what_kind_of_things_would_people_have_worn_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6k8y0k"], "score": [3], "text": ["Do you mean 18th century? Beheading by guillotine saw widespread use from 1790ish onward, not the 1600s. \n\nAssuming that you do, revolutionary fashion tended to involve plain, close-fitting shirts for men, somewhat influenced by the english landed gentry. Frenchmen would also wear a plain frock or riding coat, short waistcoat or high leather boots, again due to English fashion, which became very popular in France.\n\nSimplicity came to be seen as progressive in the early 1790s, but the *bonnet rouge* (red bonnet) also became popular, as did the colours of red, white and blue. The tricolour cockade was worn often, and clothes often had those 'revolutionary' colours.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) is an example of French soldiers, dressed in the revolutionary tricolour. [Here](_URL_1_) are male *sans-culottes*, dressed in revolutionary colours, but less colourful clothes (as I mentioned above) were also common. [Here](_URL_4_) is the female version.\n\n[Here](_URL_2_) is a painting of the execution of the king, and [here](_URL_3_) is one of some other poor sod."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/89867105-uniforms-of-french-army-national-guard-18-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&amp;c=IWSAsset&amp;k=2&amp;d=X7WJLa88Cweo9HktRLaNXvDZxRwgY7%2BfkQ3zKtboESWdhwStSKODISzbITu4zUzD", "http://images.nypl.org/?id=812248&amp;t=w", "http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ARCoN5M_Jw4/UCaSz9tG5vI/AAAAAAAAEyg/dFMxgQbVrLI/s1600/2a7debcd1037ccb655ac4dbe2569fa2e.jpg", "http://historywallcharts.eu/resources/uploads/thumbs/_DSF1021-Edit-Edit__685x0__.jpg", "http://images.nypl.org/index.php?id=1642640&amp;t=w"]]}
{"q_id": "x4wkk", "title": "Books on Jewish American history", "selftext": "Hey Reddit, can you guys point out some great books in Jewish American history? I'm looking to learn a bit more about my heritage.\n\nThanks!!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x4wkk/books_on_jewish_american_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5j79nr", "c5j7q5i", "c5j8i24"], "score": [6, 9, 3], "text": ["One book that helped my immensely during my undergrad and beyond was [The Jew in the Modern World](_URL_0_) by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. I'm not too sure what type of book you are looking for but this is a fantastic documentary history. It's a collection of primary sources organized by topic. It doesn't focus specifically on American Jews but I'm confident there would be enough material in there to satiate you for a while. ", "[How The Jews Invented Hollywood](_URL_0_)", "It should be relatively easy to find information about Jews in New York and the Northeast. For history specifically about Jews in the West/South:\n\n*Jewish Life in the American West*; *Jews of the Pacific Coast*; *Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail*; *The American Jewish Experience*\n\n\nFor race and the Jewish community, check out *The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity*; *How Jews Became White Folks*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/The-Jew-Modern-World-Documentary/dp/019507453X"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Empire_of_Their_Own:_How_the_Jews_Invented_Hollywood"], []]}
{"q_id": "625aca", "title": "How did San Francisco get the reputation as America's \"gayest\" city?", "selftext": "San Francisco has a reputation in America as being among its most socially liberal and accepting of LGBT people. Given that most major metropolitan areas tend towards social liberalism as a general rule, and that LGBT people had communities in most if not all major American cities, why did San Francisco get singled out as being \"gayer\" than the others? What made it stand out in this regard?\n\nWhy not, for example, New York, home of the Stonewall Riots? (New York, of course, is also seen as \"pretty gay,\" but not to the same extent as it seems for San Francisco.)\n\nAnd for bonus points: if any other cities had the reputation as the town where there was an unusual number of LGBT persons, what were they, and when did they hold this title?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/625aca/how_did_san_francisco_get_the_reputation_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfkfs6m", "dfkhqo1", "dfl3cly"], "score": [29, 81, 5], "text": ["Some helpful geographical context for your question.\n\nWhile the SF Bay Area is a massive metropolis, San Francisco never absorbed the surrounding areas in the way that New York City and Los Angeles did.  (Metropolitan consolidation failed in 1912 after Oakland's voters, across the Bay, axed an annexation referendum.)  This means that SF proper is a small portion of the urban core, and has no large, traditional suburban neighborhoods within its 7x7 which would tend to dilute the percentage of gays and lesbians living within the \"city,\" who tend to congregate in urban cores.  \n\nAs of 2015 (I don't have the old Census data in front of me), the City and County of San Francisco had about 850,000 people out of a metropolitan population of 8.7 million.  That's under 10% of the metropolis.  And this is quite different from other major cities.  (LA is 4 million out of a metropolis of 18 million; NYC is 8.5 million out of 23m.)  But LA has the postwar suburbia of the San Fernando Valley; same for NYC, which has eastern Queens, the streetcar suburbs of outer Brooklyn, and most of Staten Island.  This means that the LGBT percentages in other major cities are relatively diluted compared to San Francisco, which has kept its boundaries since the county lines were last changed in 1856.  ", "SF has a history of being very progressive on many fronts. As for the LGBT part I believe the most important factor that solidified SF as a community of LGBT acceptance was the election of Harvey Milk. Milk came to SF from NY during a time when many gay people were moving to the Castro district to set up a sanctuary community for gay people. (This is also why The Castro is seen as the epicenter of gay culture in SF). He wasn't the first gay man to be elected, but he was the first non-incumbent openly gay man to be elected in the US. This basically means he was the first person that Americans elected for office with the prior knowledge of him being gay.  During his tenure as a board member of SF city supervisors, Milk passed some progressive gay rights legislation, leading to SF being a city known for their acceptance of gay people. Milk only served for 11 months before being assassinated along with Mayor Moscone of San Francisco. This tragedy solidified Milk as a martyr of gay rights not only for San Francisco, but for America as a whole.", "In [How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood](\n_URL_0_), Moskowitz talks about how SF got their LGBT community because the military would discharge gay servicemen at pacific coast bases. He doesn't get into specifics about the base or whatnot, but cites that as the beginning of the gay culture in SF that allowed for a concentration and shift in culture that eventually allowed for the election of politicians like Harvey Milk and the rise to national prominence as a gay friendly city. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MXXCDVV/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1"]]}
{"q_id": "61tpf6", "title": "Victor Davis Hanson and the question of the middle-class infantrymen", "selftext": "Specifically a question to /u/iphikrates from his [earlier critique](_URL_0_) of VDH's work. \n\nI just recently got into VDH's work and have been reading \"Carnage  &  Culture\". Upon first read it seems that VDH has quite a strong argument to the power of the army being superior when its filled with free-men (mainly middle class) vs. men living under subjugation (Persian / Xerxes men)\n\nI noticed last year you gave a harsh critique of VDH's work and basically dispelled his notion that the Greek's idea of open battles was a byproduct of the middle-class rising up together to defend their land etc. I have one question for you. I noticed that you said \"The middling farmer on which he based his entire theory is neither archaeologically nor textually attested until the late 6th century BC. \" I noticed that VDH says that this shift in warfare happened during or after Salamis (480BC) which would put it a few centuries after when you said the middle class was even a thing.\n\nI'm curious what historical evidence you have to back up the claim that the middle class wasn't a thing until the late 6th century BC. Or if you have any reading recommendations to dispute this claim I'm all ears as well. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61tpf6/victor_davis_hanson_and_the_question_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfhncqg"], "score": [14], "text": ["Thanks for the follow-up! I'm glad to see people are still reading my older posts :)\n\nBefore I get down to answering your question, there's one thing I'd like to clear up:\n\n >  I noticed that VDH says that this shift in warfare happened during or after Salamis (480BC) which would put it a few centuries after when you said the middle class was even a thing.\n\nI just had a look at *Carnage and Culture* to make sure I got this right. What VDH actually argues in the book is that, after Salamis, the poor who manned the ships began agitating for greater influence in politics, starting Athens on the road to radical democracy. This entailed a shift *away from* the kind of warfare that VDH idealises. He repeatedly praises the notion of a state ruled by landowners, who had a personal stake in the defence of the territory. In his view, the inclusion of the landless poor in the democratic franchise meant that the interests of the \"middling farmer\" were no longer the exclusive focus of Athenian policy. They became more imperialist, more expansionist, and more naval. The \"hoplite\" outlook that had previously defined them was lost.\n\nGenerally, this analysis fits with his usual argument (expressed in numerous earlier publications) that the Greeks adopted \"hoplite warfare\" around 700 BC, when their city-states came to be dominated by a new class of small farmers who fought as hoplites. The methods of these \"middling\" hoplites remained unchanged until the Persian Wars introduced the Greeks to warfare on a larger scale. VDH usually holds that warfare nevertheless remained dominated by the \"middling hoplite farmer\" through most of the Classical period, at least outside the major imperialist city-states.\n\nFor this theory to work, there must be evidence of the rise of a new socio-economic \"middle class\" in the late 8th century BC. There must also be evidence of a dramatic shift in civic ideology around the same time, from the strict hierarchy and individual glory-seeking found in Homer to the egalitarianism and shared interests of citizen farmer-hoplites. When he is not busy describing the grim realities of hoplite combat, VDH mostly seeks to establish that such evidence indeed exists.^1 This brings me to your question.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe main argument against the notion of an Archaic \"middle class\" was given by Hans van Wees.^2 He specifically attacked a lot of the evidence cited in support of the notion of an idealised \"middle\". Archaic poets' comments about wanting to belong to a \"middle\" are often about avoiding the violence between two sides in a civil war, if not simply versions of a general philosophical ideal that favoured moderation over extremes of any kind. The notion of a \"middle\" doesn't overlap in any way with a defined socio-economic group; at one point, Aristotle describes a leading Spartan general as a member of the \"middle\" on the grounds that he wasn't a king. For reasons like these, mentions of \"the middle\" in Greek sources can't simply be taken at face value. They don't mean what we might instinctively assume they mean.\n\nSo what evidence remains? The argument in favour of an Archaic middle class often hinges on the Solonic property classes. In the early 6th century, Solon introduced a system of property classes at Athens, which counted 4 tiers: those who owned land sufficient to produce 500 measures of barley a year, those who owned 300, those who owned 200, and those with even less (called *thetes*, labourers). The top 2 tiers were clearly the rich, but it's often argued that the 3rd level, the *zeugitai* or yoke-men, formed a middle class, and that this level should be identified with the hoplite class. However, both Hans van Wees and Lin Foxhall^3 have separately argued that a yield of 200 bushels of barley required so much land that every single man who fit into the 3rd level of Solon's property classes was, in effect, rich. Indeed, using an estimate of the crop yield per acre, Hans van Wees has also pointed out that it is impossible for the territory of Athens to accomodate anywhere near as many hoplites as it had in the 5th century if all of them are supposed to have met the property requirements for the *zeugitai*. In other words, Solon's reforms only subdivided the leisure class; many hoplites will not have owned enough land to count among the *zeugitai*; and the Solonic system actually *breaks up* rather than unites the broad \"middle\", by assigning some of them to the *zeugitai* (with significant political rights) while dismissing others as *thetes*.\n\nRecently, Lin Foxhall has added another significant point to the discussion by looking at the archaeological evidence.^4 VDH claims that there was a notable shift in the early Archaic period from land being dominated by large landowners to an intensification of agriculture led by small independent farmers. This ought to be visible on the ground, either through major traces of occupation (farmsteads) or through the sort of traces found in surface survey archaeology (land use revealed by pot shards etc). However, it turns out that nowhere in Greece is this supposed shift to small farms and \"middling\" farmers visible before the end of the 6th century BC (that is, a few decades before the Persian invasion). Throughout the Archaic period, the land of most Greek states is largely unused, and activity is focused on small settlements and major farmsteads, suggesting a society dominated by a wealthy elite. Only from the 6th century onwards is there a growth of smaller farms and an expansion into marginal ground.\n\nThere are other arguments to be made, but I think the overall point should be clear: it cannot be shown that a Greek middle class existed in any form before the late 500s BC. Ideologically, this group, when it finally did emerge, was not united; it had no shared political motives and never acted as a political body or pressure group. Greek society remained fundamentally divided between the rich (who could afford a life of leisure) and the poor (who had to work to survive). Militarily, the \"middling\" group did not dominate a particular form of fighting, either; it shared its hoplite equipment with the very wealthy and with many of the less well-off too. Even in the shifting ideological context of egalitarian democracies of the Classical period, Greek societies remained dominated by the wealthy few, who tended to control access to political and military office, and whose means allowed them to stand out as horsemen in war and as benefactors to their city in peacetime.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nVDH's point about free men being superior to unfree men in war is extremely weak for other reasons, and it may be unwise to treat it casually. Suffice to say that we may question both the \"freedom\" of the Greeks and the \"subjugation\" of the Persians; that a society as utterly dependent on slave labour as Ancient Greece could scarcely claim to be a bastion of freedom; that the unusual freedom of Athenian adult male citizens seems to have come at the price of a particularly oppressive unfreedom for the city's slaves and women; that the very notion of \"freedom\" may not have developed as strongly as it did in Classical Greece if it hadn't become part of how the Greeks began to distinguish themselves from the Persians *after* the invasion of Xerxes; and so on and so forth. Generally, I believe *Carnage and Culture* was the point where VDH lost what standing he had in serious academic circles outside of Classics; his standing within Classics had by that point already suffered significantly from his consistent output of ideologically motivated distortions of the past.\n\n\n---\n\n1) See his 'Hoplite ideology in phalanx warfare, ancient and modern', in VDH (ed.) *Hoplites* (1991); *The Other Greeks* (1995); 'Hoplite battle as ancient Greek warfare: when, where, and why?', in H. van Wees (ed.) *War and Violence in Ancient Greece* (2000); 'The hoplite narrative', in D. Kagan/G.F. Viggiano, *Men of Bronze* (2013).\n\n2) in 'The myth of the middle-class army', in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), *War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity* (2001), and more recently in 'Farmers and hoplites: models of historical development', in Kagan/Viggiano, *Men of Bronze*\n\n3) in 'A view from the top: evaluating the Solonian property classes', in L.G. Mitchell/P.J. Rhodes (eds.), *The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece* (1997)\n\n4) in 'Can we see the \u201choplite revolution\u201d on the ground? Archaeological landscapes, material culture, and social status in Early Greece', in Kagan/Viggiano (eds.), *Men of Bronze*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/how_is_victor_davis_hansons_work_on_greek_warfare/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2lgskp", "title": "How popular was Uncle Tom's Cabin in the south?", "selftext": "Particularly among slave owners? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lgskp/how_popular_was_uncle_toms_cabin_in_the_south/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clumgj5"], "score": [6], "text": ["Another question: Were there any contemporary reviews of the book published in Southern Newspapers that criticized it as a lie/slander?\n\nI'm imagining something along the lines of how Pravda's review of Solzhenitsyn's  \"The Gulag Archipelago\" had the title \"A vile slanderer seeking to earn filthy capitalist lucre by besmirching the homeland that nurtured him\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4objz8", "title": "When designing Second World War era tanks how much consideration went into crew survival once the tank was hit?", "selftext": "Looking at pictures of tanks from that era a lot of them must have been an absolute nightmare to escape from.  Hatches that could be blocked by the gun, for instance.  \n\nObviously there were many different designers and manufacturers of tanks in that era but how much thought did they put into crew survival?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4objz8/when_designing_second_world_war_era_tanks_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4b803n"], "score": [10], "text": ["Several pivotal design changes on the M4 Sherman tank were sparked by complaints about crew survivability, as well as general comfort for the crew. \n\n[Wet ammunition stowage](_URL_4_) reduced the risk of flash ammunition fires after a Sherman was hit from around 80 percent to 5-10 percent and in theory gave crews a couple more seconds to abandon the tank.\n\nEarly 75 mm turrets lacked an escape hatch for the loader. This crew member had to exit through the commander's hatch after he and the gunner had disembarked. If the commander's hatch was blocked for some reason, he had to worm his way out of the turret and make his way out of the tank through the driver or assistant driver's hatches. In the case of a flash ammunition fire where the crew had only seconds to escape, this could be fatal. In October 1943, a new turret entered production that incorporated a loader's hatch. The [76 mm turret](_URL_2_) incorporated a loader's hatch from the beginning, however.\n\nInitially, the driver's and assistant driver's hatches of the Sherman were particularly small, and men had to turn almost sideways and move awkwardly in order to get in or out of the tank. This also made the evacuation of wounded or unconscious men more complicated. The small hatches also did not initially have a lock, and many crew members suffered injuries from falling hatches. A combination hatch lock and equilibrator spring were devised and installed at the various factories throughout the spring of 1943, with an Ordnance Department document stating that \"no tank without this item to be accepted after 4/15/43\".\n\nMeanwhile, a more fundamental redesign of the Sherman was taking place that incorporated larger hatches. In February 1943, dimensions for the new hatches were submitted, but they could not be incorporated into the current [56-degree angled \"small hatch\" glacis](_URL_3_) of the Sherman. \n\nChrysler had developed a [cast front upper hull section](_URL_1_) for the Sherman that sped up production, and this design was tested as a possible solution. Another design, submitted by Fisher, consisting of a [47-degree angled flat plate](_URL_3_), was found to be ballistically superior, and was selected for production starting in November 1943. After November 1943, all Sherman types incorporated this new large-hatch hull design. The new large hatches incorporated internal springs and locking mechanisms.\n\nInitially, the turret basket of the 75 mm turret was surrounded by a perforated steel mesh that made escape and retrieval of ammunition from the sponsons difficult as it only had a single exit hole. If the turret was turned just right and the commander's hatch blocked, the loader and gunner could be trapped in the turret. In order to retrieve ammunition from the sponson racks, the turret often needed to be turned to allow the loader access to the ammunition, wasting vital seconds in combat. One good example is the story of tank commander Lieutenant Raymond E. Fleig. Faced with a Panther tank rumbling toward him in the H\u00fcrtgen Forest, he ordered his gunner to fire the round already in the chamber, not realizing it was high explosive. The round did no damage, but the frightened Panther crew abandoned their tank. The enemy crew soon re-entered their tank, and fired a round at Fleig's tank, which missed. Fleig ordered his gunner to traverse the turret so his loader could reach the armor-piercing ammunition stored in the sponsons. The first round miraculously sliced off part of the Panther's gun tube; three more rounds destroyed the enemy tank.\n\nThe mesh was mostly removed from tanks that had it as part of the preparation for the D-Day invasion, and new \"large hatch\" 75 mm and 76 mm Shermans \"skeletonized\" the turret basket and did not have the mesh to begin with.\n\nSources:\n\n[Sherman Minutia Website](_URL_0_)\n\n*A Dark and Bloody Ground: The H\u00fcrtgen Forest and the Roer River Dams 1944-45*, by Edward G. Miller\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/index.html", "http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/manufacturer/m4composite/m4_composite.html", "http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/turret_types/76mm_turrets.html", "http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/vocabulary/vocabulary.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kdbx6/tanks_what_exactly_is_a_wet_ammo_rack_are_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "3j33s8", "title": "Has a US President ever not been to one of the States at the time of his Presidency?", "selftext": "I spent some time trying to word this in the clearest way I could, but to expand on it a bit, has any of the US Presidents never been to one of the states that existed at the time of his presidency either before or during his time in office?  So of course George Washington had never been to Alaska, but had he visited each of the first 16 states?  Had Kennedy been to all 50 states?  Per subreddit rules, we're only talking up to H.W. Bush, or Clinton if you like to play with fire.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j33s8/has_a_us_president_ever_not_been_to_one_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cumkta6", "cum4hcu"], "score": [5, 10], "text": ["You can add Eisenhower to /u/boneisspirit 's list of 5 non-visitors. (Don't even have to rely upon the dodge that he may just have missed AK or HI because they weren't states during most of his presidency. Eisenhower visited both in the Summer of 1960--while they were states and he president. So he missed some of the other 48). Also G.W. Bush.\n\n[President Hayes visited Oregon in 1880](_URL_0_) during the trip when he was the 1st sitting President to visit the West Coast. California being a state for 30 years by then, there are *a minimum* 6 Presidents--Fillmore thru Grant--who never went to CA. A few of them also not doing extensive Southern tours--for obvious reasons.\n\n[This unfortunately murky NatGeo map](_URL_2_) indicates Geo. Washington never in his life entered KY or TN (which both became states while he was in office).\n\n[Jefferson never traveled South or West of Virginia.](_URL_1_)\n\nIt would have been physically impossible for *any person* to travel to all 26 states during W.H. Harrison's month in office. And practically so to get to 38 during Garfield's 6 months.\n\nThat's 17 \"no\" from a (admittedly selective) sample of 21. Quite adequate to conclude that most did not.\n\nIndeed the more germane question would be if anyone achieved this prior to Nixon. I'd bet not.", "When Barack Obama recently visited South Dakota, it was widely reported that he is only fourth President to visit all 50 states. The other three [were](_URL_0_) Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. That means that Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter and Reagan have not been to some states. But I don't remember if any of the articles said something about Presidents before there were 50 states."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/hayes_rutherford_b_visit_to_oregon_1880/#.VeUJgvZVhBc", "https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/extent-jeffersons-travels", "http://www.allposters.com/-sp/1932-Travels-of-George-Washington-Map-Posters_i5157049_.htm"], ["http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/11594285/Barack-Obama-joins-50-Club-as-he-ticks-off-all-states-with-South-Dakota-visit.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4ohkdv", "title": "Why is the king James version of the Bible considered by a lot of churches to be the best version?", "selftext": "I notice a lot of churches state that they use the KJV of the Bible because they think it's the best version. \n\nI don't see churches claiming other versions of the Bible (are there other versions?) so I was wondering why they seem to be so zealous about tje KJV. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ohkdv/why_is_the_king_james_version_of_the_bible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4cp8o6", "d4crwrz"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["We tend to call this \"King James Version Only\"-ism. The [wikipedia](_URL_0_) page is reasonably well-written, if you want an overview.\n\nAt its heart it's a view of both the textual tradition of Greek and Hebrew texts that undergird the KJV, usually coupled with a view of the process of translation that led to the KJV's translation in the first place.\n\nOn the textual side, KJVO advocates usually view the 'Received Text' (Textus Receptus) which underlines the KJV as superior, faithful, and sometimes divinely protected from corruption. They view with disdain and rejection the discipline of modern textual criticism, and tend to favour simple majority of manuscripts, vs. genealogising and 'weighing' manuscripts.\n\nOn the process side, some believe that the KJV is an divinely authoritative translation for English and remains so for all time. \n\nThe best introduction to this issue is, in my view, the extensive work of Christian Apologist, James White. I suppose you might go around trying to find a secular take on this issue, but quite frankly secular scholars have rarely found the issue interesting enough to do some of the work White has. \n\nThere certainly are other translations, a great deal of them. As far as I know, while some argue that particular translations are 'best' on the market, there are not churches functioning in English that have similar views to KJVO in regards to another version.", "The KJV of the Bible was the first authorized English translation of the Bible; earlier translators, such as William Tyndale, were hunted down and executed. The translation also has something to do with the idea of allowing more people to more easily read the Bible and come to their own interpretation, rather than relying on the clergy to interpret it for them (though there was backlash against this-primarily from the clergy and others higher up on the social ladder).\n\nFor comparison, Gutenberg printed a Latin version of the Bible and the first German version of the Bible came out in 1466. King James, by comparison, didn't ascend to the throne until 1603, so you're talking nearly ~150 years in between. By 1483, for further comparison, there were 9 different German translations of the Bible.\n\nIn 1407, Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, banned English translations of the Bible; six years later in 1413, under the reign of Henry V, English (which had previously been the language used to address social inferiors; French was the language of nobility) became more respectable, particularly after the Battle at Agincourt. \n\nFast forwarding, the 16th Century's Reformation helped with the push for an English Bible. In Germany, the Reformation under Martin Luther was propelled by religious belief from within (see the 95 theses); in England, by contrast, the Reformation is caused by Henry VIII (notorious for his wives) and is as a result of political and pragmatic reasons, rather than theological ones.\n\nTo provide some back information about the English Reformation: around this time period, a strategic alliance between England and Spain is considered very important. In 1525, however, Charles V, the King of Spain, refuses to marry Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary), the daughter of Henry VIII; he has also surrounded Rome, where the Pope, Clementine VII, resides. So, when Henry VIII tries to get divorced from his wife, Catherine of Spain, who is the aunt of Charles V, the Pope refuses.\n\nMakes sense: no reason to let Charles' uncle-by-marriage divorce his aunt and alienate Charles V, who is sieging the city he lives in. So, in retaliation, Henry VIII breaks off and forms the Church of England, but even he is not a fan of an English translation. Thomas More (author of *Utopia*), for example, is executed for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII's religious supremacy to the Pope. \n\nFollowing this, there are a series of translations: Tyndale's, and  1526 edition from Worms that is smuggled into England. Tyndale goes into hiding, then is strangled and burned in 1535. Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII's wives who favors an English translation, is executed in 1536, which is a setback. In 1537, Richard Grafton publishes his Matthew Bible: this combines Tyndale's translations with those of Myles Coverdale to complete what Tyndale couldn't. Interestingly, this also includes the Apocryphal books, which are typically *not* included in most modern day Bibles, so far as I'm aware. (*Bel and the Dragon* isn't in most editions, for example).\n\nTo avoid wading too deep into too much detail, it was proliferation of these frowned-upon Bibles that led to the decision by King James to create an authorized translation to counter these smuggled-in English Bibles, particularly the Geneva Bible, which James was not a fan of.\n\nThere are several other versions, however: the Geneva Bible and the Douay-Rheims version are just two translations. Among Protestants, the King James Bible is more popular. The Latin Vulgate Bible is more favored by Catholics, as I understand it.\n\nBacktracking to the beginning for an attempt at a summary that more directly addresses your question: the popularity of the KJV among Protestants has to do with the fact that they made the first publicly, easily available Bible for English-speakers (meant to supplant previous ones, particularly the Geneva Bible, which had begun to get more popular in England prior to the KJV translation), whereas among the more traditional Catholics, the Latin Vulgate Bible is the preferable edition, as I understand it. In addition, the reason it's considered the 'best' version has to do with the attempt at a beautiful, poetic writing style for the writing by the translators.\n\nSource:\n\nAlister McGrath, *In The Beginning*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement"], []]}
{"q_id": "2l2i91", "title": "Did Joseph Kennedy lobotomize his daughter, Rosemary Kennedy, to preserve the reputation of his family?", "selftext": "Is the allegation as detailed in this [post](_URL_0_) true?\n\n > This may be old news to some but the story is just so bizarre. Rosemary was the prettiest of the kennedy sisters, but was also mentally slow. Some argue her handicap was the consequence of her parents being second cousins. After being hidden from the public her whole life, she became jealous of her siblings accomplishments and began to \"act out\". Fearing \"pregnancy, disease, and disgrace,\" her father Joe Kennedy decided to give her a labotomy which turned her into a vegetable.\n > \n > \n > The transcript from the surgeons was especially chilling. \"We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch.\" The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. \"We put an instrument inside,\" he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing \"God Bless America\" or count backwards. ... \"We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded.\" ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.\n\n________\n\n\n**Edit:** \n\nI found a [previous thread](_URL_2_) from this subreddit on the topic. Keeping this in mind, is there any evidence to prove that Joseph Kennedy's decision was either malevolent or benign? Lastly, [it was also asserted](_URL_1_) that lobotomies were used to suppress potentially promiscuous female behavior by families. Are there any sources to prove this phenomenon? If so, how widespread was it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2l2i91/did_joseph_kennedy_lobotomize_his_daughter/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clqw4vg", "clr8cln", "clr8f7i", "clra5qa", "clrd4ou", "clrdkdk", "clrgck4"], "score": [160, 8, 417, 16, 7, 94, 155], "text": ["Found a [source](_URL_0_) describing the lobotomy on p. 179 of Personality Theories: Critical Perspectives.", "I guess I'm just ignorant on the subject, but is lobotomizing someone else (like getting your daughter lobotomized because you fearcher acting out) even legal?", "Short answer is yes. In his book, *An unfinished life*, Robert Dallek gives this explanation for the lobotomy.\n\n''After years of effort that had produced small gains in her ability to deal with adult matters, Rosemary turned violent at the age of twenty-one, throwing tantrums and raging at caretakers who tried to control her. In response, Joe, without Rose's knowledge, arranged for Rosemary to have a prefrontal lobotomy, which contemporary medical understanding recommended as the best means for alleviating her agitation and promising a more placid life. The surgery, however proved to be a disaster, and Joe felt compelled to institutionalize Rosemary in a Wisconsin nunnery, where she would spend the rest of her life.\n\nPart of the family's impulse in dealing with Rosemary as they did was to hide the truth about her condition. In the twenties and thirties, mental disabilities were seen as a mark of inferiority and an embarrassment best left undisclosed. Rosemary's difficulties were especially hard to bear for a family as preoccupied with its glowing image as the Kennedys. It was one thing for them to acknowledge limitations among themselves, but to give outsiders access to such information or put personal weaknesses on display was to open the family to possible ridicule or attack from people all too eager to knock down Kennedy claims of superiority. Hiding family problems, particularly medical concerns, later became a defense against jeopardizing election to public office.'' \n\n**SOURCE** : Robert Dallek, *An unfinished life : John F. Kennedy*, Back bay book, New York, 2003. p.72-73\n\nI'd like to add that Dallek's book is a thoroughly written one and I trust his explanation.", "The Lobotomist by Jack El-hai tells the story of the Walter Freeman, the guy who invented prefrontal lobotomies and performed thousands of them (usually with ice picks). The operation on Rose doesn't sound that far from the usual range of lobotomies performed during the operation's popular period either in terms of the patient or the actual procedure (according to the extensive sources, including Freeman's journals and notes, cited in the book). I highly recommend it the book.", " >  I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer.  \n >   \n > Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer  \n  \nHow does this fit together?\n\n\n\n", "I am by no means an expert on history, but I can provide a little bit of context on the psychological side of things here. Rosemary had her lobotomy performed in 1941. The procedure was still relatively new then, but was quickly becoming a mainstream treatment for mental disorders. In fact, in 1949 the pioneer behind lobotomies was given a Nobel prize in medicine for the procedure. I can't speak as to Joseph's motives one way or the other, but I can say that getting a lobotomy performed in Rosemary's situation made sense in the context of mental health knowledge and procedures of the early 1940's. It was not, at the time, considered a radical or dangerous procedure.", "I have never commented in this sub before, but I feel compelled as a medical historian to point out the fact that during this pre-psychopharmacology era, lobotomy (and other somatic therapies like insulin coma and electroshock) was a widely accepted clinical practice and was considered state of the art care for severe cases.  It only declined in favor quite a while after Kennedy had the procedure done, after significant changes in the field of psychiatry itself. And, of course, after a number of negative portrayals in the media in the 60s and 70s. \n\nThe standard book on this topic, if you're interested, is Jack Pressman, *Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine*.\n\nAs for the idea of lobotomies being performed for things like female promiscuity, some historians would agree -- but being historians, they would also point out that it was very complicated and was not just about that one thing, but a whole constellation of issues relating to the cultural/temporal context in which those practices were occurring. See Elizabeth Lunbeck, *The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America*.\n\nIn my personal opinion, I don't think the Kennedy family did anything intentionally malevolent. As I said, Rosemary was receiving pretty top-notch care for the time. And if they were so concerned with legacy, then the family's later involvement with things like the Special Olympics and championing public and mental health policy issues doesn't make a lot of sense. Just my two cents."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1qu46d/til_that_rosemary_kennedy_jfks_sister_was_given_a/cdgiedd", "http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1qu46d/til_that_rosemary_kennedy_jfks_sister_was_given_a/cdgyeke", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26b6tj/putting_rosemary_kennedys_lobotomy_what_followed/"], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=W1d4ZhzC1VUC&amp;q=p.+179#v=snippet&amp;q=p.%20179&amp;f=false"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6dufjm", "title": "What is the insignia on this cannon??", "selftext": "[Cannon](_URL_0_) \nI was in Vieques, Puerto Rico. I was at the : Conde De Mirasol  Museum  and they had a lot of cannons on display but this one cannon was different to all the other because it had that insignia. \n\n\nEdit: The cannon had the date : 28-2-21 ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dufjm/what_is_the_insignia_on_this_cannon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di5fsgm"], "score": [2], "text": ["a Cannon bearing a Crown symbol and the initials GR for Georgios Rex reference to the reigning monarch King George.\n\nIt's a British cannon, i think the actual fabric was in scotland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://imgur.com/a/i3JzH"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kgbn6", "title": "How did apple pie become an icon of American culture, even inspiring the phrase 'as American as apple pie', when it's a popular pastry in several European countries. Especially when it's also an icon of Dutch culture, even appearing in a Dutch cookbook in 1514.", "selftext": "EDIT: I'm sorry for forgetting the question mark..", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kgbn6/how_did_apple_pie_become_an_icon_of_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djm33o7", "djmehfr", "djpg6gy"], "score": [271, 83, 5], "text": ["/r/AskFoodHistorians might be a good place to cross-post this", "Can you give a source on the dutch cookbook?", "Sorry to see no answer incoming, but there is [this old thread](_URL_0_) I found. Unfortunately a bit earlier in the sub's history so not quite as tight a standard as we now have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ikogm/why_is_apple_pie_so_synonymous_with_america/"]]}
{"q_id": "b65xd4", "title": "What was life like in areas of France occupied by Germany in the First World War?", "selftext": "We all have *some* idea of what life was like in occupied France during the Second World War, no doubt due to the many depictions of this period in film and other media. When it comes to World War One, most people have heard of atrocities committed by the German Army in occupied Belgium. But it seems like occupiedbFrance in this period is somewhat of a blindspot, at least to some of us in the English-speaking world.\n\nWhat was life like in those areas of France occupied by Germany in WWI? Were similar atrocities carried out against the civilian population? Was there an equivalent of the famous French Resistance of the later war? Did this have a lasting effect on the culture and the economy of these regions after the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b65xd4/what_was_life_like_in_areas_of_france_occupied_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejixrer"], "score": [3], "text": ["There wasn't actually that much of France under German occupation during the war. After the breakdown of the Schlieffen plan and the race to the sea, the front line more or less stabilised, although there would be shifts as various offensives took place. You can see on [this map](_URL_0_) that most of the occupied territory is on the Belgian border. This territory was mainly two thirds of the Department (a French administrative area) of Nord, which was home to roughly 1.176 million French citizens. Altogether, parts of ten Departments were occupied, with a total population of about 2 million. As many men had fled before the German advance or been mobilised into the army, a majority of the population was female.\n\nUnfortunately for the French, this strip of land was one of the most heavily industrialised in the country, producing 60% of its iron, a quarter of its steel and up to 40% of its coal. This was very useful to the Germans, who had found themselves deprived of seaborne imports by the British blockade. Increasingly, raw materials and industrial machinery were taken to Germany to assist with the war effort. The entire area of occupied France was also close enough to the front lines that they fell under military, rather than civil, administration. There was widespread requistion of food, and civilians were increasingly forced to work for the occupiers, building fortifications and carrying out duties usually reserved for pioneer units. Those who refused to work voluntarily were forced to work in Civil-Worker Battalions, which were generally brutal, with poor rations. There were high mortality rates and the workers were interned in special camps. In summer 1916, 20,000 workers were deported to the Ardennes to work on the harvest, although this practice was stopped after widespread international protest.\n\nIn terms of administration, French authorities were mostly sidelined. Instead, the occupied zone was divided into various divisions called *Etappen*, under the control of an Inspector, with subdivisions under the control of the area Commandant. The army in the area at the time was responsible for providing administrators to oversee each Etappe, and when the armies were redeployed, so were their administrators. The subdivisions could vary in size, with the largest, such as the city of Lille, being administered by a high ranking officer and dozens of soldiers, whereas small villages could only have an NCO assigned to them. Each citizen was issued an identity card, and if they were found outside their Etappe then they could be faced with a fine or imprisonment. It was possible to obtain a pass from the area Commandant, but this was a difficult and complicated process, and the passes generally only lasted a few days. While a military necessity from the perspective of the Germans, this system led to increased frustration among the French population. The French police were left to deal with crimes against other French people, but the Germans had their own military and police force.\n\nCorrespondence with anyone outside the occupied zone was initially punishable by death, but the punishment soon decreased and there was in any case a thriving underground post network, often via neutral countries or the Red Cross. The German Army also produced a newspaper, called the Gazette des Ardennes, which provided reports on news from the front and extracts from British and French newspapers. As the French also had access to German language newspapers, it was important that the Gazette didn't appear as overt propaganda. As such, it was more or less factually trustworthy, but had a heavy pro-German perspective. It's difficult to tell exactly how popular it was. Whilst circulation reached 180,000 by January 1918, accounts by French citizens mention that much of the time it wasn't actually read. In an effort to counter this, the British and French airdropped newspapers and pamphlets over the occupied territories. There were also a few underground newspapers, and while owning a radio was illegal, those who had one hidden were able to listen to radio stations on the other side of the front line. The French also conversed openly with soldiers billeted in the area, allowing them to gain information in that way.\n\nIn terms of resistance, there was very little that the French could do to actively resist the occupiers. Those who refused to carry out work or were found guilty of carrying out resistance were conscripted into labour battalions. Underground newspapers and networks to help escaped prisoners were made very difficult by the tight grip of the German army, although they did exist. For example, in June 1915 a German sentry was shot by a Frenchman near Roubiax. However, several spies and saboteurs were shot by the German army in response. Many ordinary French people limited themselves to symbolic acts of resistance, such as refusing to shake hands with Germans, wearing the national colours and writing letters of protest. There is some evidence to show that letters of protest actually had a negative effect on the war effort, as area Commandants had to spend a lot of their time responding to the letters, and became increasingly irritated as a result of them. The French also refused to give the Germans lists of military age men and the civil authorities were generally obstructive towards the Germans, relying on legalistic interpretations of international law on what occupying armies were allowed to requisition. In response, the Germans would threaten the authorities with various fines or harsh punishments. \n\nHowever, the close proximity in which the Germans and French lived and worked meant that contact and co-operation, if not collaboration, was commonplace.  A number of French women had relationships and even children with German soldiers, and accounts of the occupation accuse a large number of both working and middle-class women of having sexual relationships with the occupiers. A report for British intelligence in 1918 listed 362 women who had relationships with Germans, ranging from prostitution to having children with them, and the number of women treated for sexually transmitted diseases rose sharply with the arrival of the Germans. Women who did not have relationships with Germans, but interacted with them socially, were often the subject of disapproval, and gossip could easily overstate the nature of their relationships. This disapproval was also extended to some men who were socially friendly with the Germans. A number of high ranking civil servants were accused of being too friendly with the Germans, although evidence that this was true is lacking. Angry mobs would occasionally form, such as in Lille where a woman was pelted with stones and called a whore by a crowd of almost 500 people. It took the German police firing above the crowd to disperse them. After the war there was little done to 'punish' those who had been seen to collaborate with the Germans, although some trials took place. \n\nSources:\n\nBernard Wilkin, 'Isolation, communication and propaganda inthe occupied territories of France, 1914\u20131918', *First World War Studies*, 7:3 (2016).\n\nJames E. Connolly, 'Mauvaise-conduite: complicity and respectability in the occupied Nord, 1914\u20131918', *First World War Studies*, 4:1 (2013)\n\nJames E. Connolly, 'Notable protests: respectable resistance in occupied northern France, 1914\u201318', *Historical Research* 88 (Nov 2015)\n\nJens Thiel, 'Between recruitment and forced labour: the radicalization of German labour policy in occupied Belgium and northern France', *First World War Studies*, 4:1 (2013)\n\nIf you're looking for a book about the occupation, then take a look at:\n\nHelen McPhail, *The Long Silence: The Tragedy of Occupied France in World War I* (2014)\n\nLet me know if you have any more questions!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Western_front_1915-16.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5oj2i6", "title": "During the late Medieval and Renaisance period, when Kings derived their right to rule from divine mandates, how did people view republics  &  elective monarchies? Were they seen as less legitimate than herditary monarchies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5oj2i6/during_the_late_medieval_and_renaisance_period/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcnnwtt"], "score": [2], "text": ["For most of the medieval period, in Italy at least, republican governments could only guarantee an uneasy peace between dynasties, and at best institutionalized warfare. I have a very specific example of fighting consequential to Republican government [here](_URL_0_). However, other republics were seen as just as legitimate than monarchies; and at times even more so, as I described [here](_URL_1_). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zq1vk/askhistorians_podcast_069_milan_in_the_era_of/d6xu59y/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lpf2s/the_fourth_crusade_was_famously_known_for_the/dc49qam/"]]}
{"q_id": "4j2wyb", "title": "Was it ever a common military tactic to aim for the horses instead of the riders in medieval combat?", "selftext": "First time posting, so forgive me if I did this wrong or it's a bad question.  I watch a lot of shows that are based in a medieval or fantasy settings with knights and warriors riding on horseback.  I don't think I've ever seen foot soldiers ever targeting the horses instead of the riders.  I don't know if it's because of filiming it, so you don't hurt the animals, or if nobody actually did that.  I'm thinking that they would aim for the rider so they could steal the horses or something.  Is there a definite answer though?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4j2wyb/was_it_ever_a_common_military_tactic_to_aim_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d34h988"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes. Many people aimed for the horses instead of the riders. \n\nRoman writer Vegetius wrote this in his text on Roman warfare:\n\n >  The armed chariots used in war by Antiochus and Mithridates at first terrified the Romans, but they afterwards made a jest of them. As a chariot of this sort does not always meet with plain and level ground, the least obstruction stops it. And if one of the horses be either killed or wounded, it falls into the enemy's hands. The Roman soldiers rendered them useless chiefly by the following contrivance: at the instant the engagement began, they strewed the field of battle with caltrops, and the horses that drew the chariots, running full speed on them, were infallibly destroyed. A caltrop is a device composed of four spikes or points arranged so that in whatever manner it is thrown on the ground, it rests on three and presents the fourth upright\n\nBasically, the Romans would little the field with small spikes that would break the hooves of the horses. The horses would fall down when they stepped on them, the charioteers would fall out, and the Romans would kill them and take their chariots.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_) we see a spike horse bit (the thing that goes in their mouth). These bits were fairly common, and they existed primarily to keep the enemy from grabbing the horse by the bit and pulling it down or out, thereby removing the rider's ability to control the horse. Here is a picture of just the [bit](_URL_1_).\n\nSpear equipped infantry would almost always aim for the horse- it just makes more sense to do so. This is why horse armor existed- if it wasn't common or likely, people would not have spent marge sums of money to armor a horse.\n\nEven in Xenophon's text, *On Horsemanship* (the first book on riding that we have, from about 400BC), talks about way to protect the horse from enemy attacks.\n\nAnyway. Your question was more directly focused on the Middle Ages... yes. Medieval armies still used and carried caltrops. They also used spears, and would use spears against horses at pretty much any given opportunity.\n\nSometimes, like in the battle of Chaumont in 1098, apparently William II lost some 700 horses to archers who were told specifically to shoot for the horses.\n\nSo, yes, in Medieval combat, losing your horse to warfare was very common.\n\nNow, sometimes it did make sense to only kill the rider to seize the horse, but taking horses as prizes usually was only a concern after the battle. During a battle, where your life was at risk, your priority would be to kill your attack and not to take a prize."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_C6_DXX4pkmQ/S_tM2lJT-9I/AAAAAAAAAYE/E5P0HSjYCH0/s1600/P1010063.JPG", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9d/3a/64/9d3a6450d2946cb5073543344dbbf139.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2uwr8b", "title": "Along with rationing what strategies were used to address shortages of materials during wwI and wwII?", "selftext": "Things like oil products and metals were rationed during the wars to free them up for military use.  What other strategies were used to increase the supply of these materials?  Were existing vehicles stripped and recycled for their metal or re-purposed for military use?  Were mining and refining facilities targets for capture by advancing forces? Were previously protected forests allowed to be cut down?  I'm interested in the topic in general so book or article recommendations would be very welcome! :)\n\nApologies if this has been asked previously, my searches gave little other than food rationing questions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uwr8b/along_with_rationing_what_strategies_were_used_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cofh0v9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Germany heavily tried to synthesize rare materials with varying success. Stuff like rubber for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "209pgl", "title": "Was there much tension between Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democratic party before the Southern Strategy, LBJ, Nixon, etc.?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/209pgl/was_there_much_tension_between_dixiecrats_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg176vf"], "score": [3], "text": ["There  was  a  lot  of  tension  between  the  Dixiecrats  and  the  mainstream  of  the  Democrat  Party  in  the  late  1940s.  They  walked  out  of  the  1948  Democratic  Party's  National  Convention  and  organized  a  third  party.  It  is  best  known  as  the  Dixiecrats  today,  but  its  official  title  was  the   States'  Rights  Democratic  Party.  Strom  Thurmond  was  their  presidential  nominee  and  he  won  39  electoral  votes  in  the  1948  election,  almost  costing  Harry  Truman  the  election.      \n      \nAfter  1948,  the  New  Dealers  and  establishment  members  of  the  Democrat  party  scaled  back  their  civil  rights  agenda  in  an  attempt  to  mollify  the  Dixiecrats  and  prevent  them  from  forming  a  more  serious  and  long  lasting  third  party.  That  changed  after  JFK  and  RFK  began  to  show  renewed  interest  in  Civil  Rights,  after  1960.       \nSource:\"1948:  Harry  Truman's  Improbable  Victory  and  the  Year  that  Changed  America\"   by  David  Pietrusza"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x5dx6", "title": "Who lived in Britain before the Celts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x5dx6/who_lived_in_britain_before_the_celts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf8hbjr"], "score": [25], "text": ["Although I'm not sure how far back you're looking, I'll start with the Bronze Age immigrants to Britain known as the Beaker People. Originally from Spain, these travelers ventured over in approximately 2500 BC, and flourished on the British Isles. They constructed elaborate gold and bronze jewelry, as well as detailed stone circles, the best known of which is Stonehenge. There were two waves of Celtic immigration to England. The first is popularly known as the Goidelic Migration, which occurred between 2000 and 1200. The next is known as the Brythonic migration, which most likely took place between 500 and 300\n\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/directory/beaker-people-parkerpearson"]]}
{"q_id": "17zztg", "title": "How common was casual sex throughout history?", "selftext": "The conversation started [here](_URL_0_), and I decided that it probably deserves it's own thread.\n\nIn particular, during WWII, was there more casual sex, due to the large number of transient men in some locations, and the dearth of them in others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17zztg/how_common_was_casual_sex_throughout_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8adq2l", "c8adw6n", "c8adwpd", "c8aebx3", "c8af781", "c8afmt7", "c8afwdd", "c8aj86z", "c8al3av", "c8argph"], "score": [1132, 14, 82, 28, 4, 11, 40, 15, 10, 6], "text": ["Just ignore pretty much everything said in that thread. The idea that sex is a purely biological urge, and thus it occurs in the same frequency throughout time and space, is absurd. I can be sure of this because it [varies a great deal based on country today](_URL_0_). Sex is highly culturally specific, and I think the people in that thread don't realize just how much their reaction to it is influenced by their specific cultural surroundings.\n\nThroughout history it is rather difficult to answer your question because it varies so much based on region, class, and time period. Looking at Ovid and Catullus, for example, we can see that sex certainly wasn't nonexistent in their lives, but looked at another way, the sexual relations they describe tend to be fairly personal. That is, they do not describe going to the local club, picking up a random girl, sleeping with her, and parting the next morning. Instead, there are fairly elaborate courtship rituals, with go betweens, wax tablets, secret messages, and the like. The big difference here, I would argue, is female freedom. For a pre-modern society Roman women were quite liberated, but that doesn't mean they could stay out all night and come home the next morning with nothing but an eye roll from their household. Of course, this applies to the upper class of the late Republican/early Imperial city of Rome. It would probably be very different for an innkeepers daughter in second century Autun, but in *what way* is impossible to know.\n\nHowever, there is one other major factor: prostitution. The Romans didn't seem to think there was anything at all unseemly about going to a brothel, and prostitutes were a part of everyday life.\n\nOne other thing, because someone had to bring it up: **Roman orgies were NOT orgies**. They were lavish quasi-religious banquets involving elaborate food preparation, music, and dancing. Sex might be involved, but when might it not?", "Thank you so much for asking this, OP, I've wanted to know this for years. And I'd like to expand (or maybe define) casual sex for the purposes of this thread. There is sex between people who aren't close and met that night. There is also fooling around between young unattached people. In the liberal arts world, a lot of the academics are in my circles have been of the opinion that all pretenses of monogamy and chastity have always been false, and are so everywhere, and that the only difference between modern western culture and former or distant cultures is that the other ones are lying. As someone who really did have a super-chaste conservative religious upbringing, I know first-hand that something like the traditional conservative ideal of sexuality is possible, but I don't know if my single self-sample is adequate grounds to build a theory. I'd love to know about hooking up, and I'd love to know about the spectrum of sexual behaviors between that and no-sex-till-marriage. ", "It is hard to give specifics in things like this because sex has often been a taboo subject and so even if casual sex were common, nobody may write that down. \n\nFrom my own area of expertise, one of the deciding factors was class and wealth. The more wealthy were concerned with being a gentleman or a lady and the scores of books written on the subject seem to imply that casual sex was heavily frowned upon (however it was generally accepted that men had sexual urges while women didn't). These ideas wouldn't apply to lower income people, but for many their religions would hinder this. \n\nThen again- humans are always human so the urges would still be there. Prostitution in the U.S. was seen as something of a necessary evil in many places- as long as it was confined to a certain district in a city it was basically legal. Add in the fact that alcohol consumption was probably pretty high and I'd say casual sex in 19th century America was almost as common as it is today. However this wouldn't apply to homosexuals, unfortunately, since sodomy and the female equivalent (given various names) were often illegal and very much against societal norms of the time. That isn't to say homosexuals weren't having sex, they were, it just would have been riskier.", "Sex has been seen as something history abhorred, but this idea really only came about due to the prudishness of the Puritanical period, if we go back to Ancient Greece we see sex talked about a huge amount, Eros the God of Love was a major god, [Here's](_URL_3_) a Guardian article about a museum exhibition. This idea persisted into Roman culture, as Ancient Rome as usual copied the Greeks in this regard.\n\nWe really see casual sex as banned since the rise of the Catholic Church, to some even maritable sex was sinful if it was for pleasure, but even so this was incredibly hard to enforce, I mean there's usually only 2 witnesses both of which are guilty to these crimes, so it's difficult to prove one's guilt, not to mention many clerics and other clergymen engaged in these practices. It was only in the [Third Lateran Council](_URL_2_) in 1179, that there were specific Canon law on how to deal with sex within the clergy\n\n > Canon 11 forbade clerics to have women in their houses or to visit the monasteries of nuns without a good reason; declared that married clergy should lose their benefices; and decreed that priests who engaged in sodomy should be deposed from clerical office and required to do penance - while laymen should be excommunicated.\n\nThis is the first documentation by the Catholic Church that really decreed that adultery and sex outside of marriage was punishable, previously it was a sin, but not one that many outside of the zealous cared about.\n\nThe next period I'll look at is Protestantism. One of the major reforms of the German Reformation and the spread of the teachings of Luther, Calvin and so on was that clergymen were allowed to be married. Whilst this obviously isn't general culture, it's religious in nature, it does suggest that sex in the Protestant culture is becoming more mainstream. \n\n > Clerical marriage necessitated a reconsideration of one of the oldest Christian conundrums, the relationship between the holy and the body\n\nFrom *Oedipus and the Devil witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe* Lyndal Roper, 1994. Page 80.\n\nHowever, sex outside of marriage was still strictly denied and policed too, the Puritan Reformation of Britain increased this, going so far to make actions like buggery a capital offence, and adultery sometimes carrying a lifetime sentence. The [Economist](_URL_5_) has a good article on it.\n\nThe exception to the rule was a group in England during the 17th Century called the [Ranters](_URL_0_) whilst not long-lived nor that popular were associated strongly with a casual sex and nude society, to the Government they were seen as a genuine threat to the societal order, again showing how the society cracked down on this sort of activity.\n\nThe Puritanical faith loses a lot of steam in the second half of the 18th century though, especially among the upper classes we see a rejection of the Calvin leaning faith within England. Whilst a bastard was looked down upon within the poorer classes as he was seen as a drain on resources, in the upper classes visiting brothels, whorehouses and the like, this is exemplified by Samuel Johnson, a high Anglican Tory:\n\n >  \"every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience\"\n\nBacking this up, in the 18th Century we see one of the oldest sex guides surviving today and popular all the way to the 1930s, it's earliest date is 1766 and was banned in Britain up till 1961, [Here's](_URL_1_) a tad more information on it.\n\nThis suggests a sort of revolution, which however only applied to men, mainly refined to the upper or middle classes too. Women were still expected to be virtuous.\n\nVictorian Britain, and the 19th Century as a whole for Britain was a time of industrialisation, which is important as it meant a rise in population within cities. This leads me onto my point about this period and it's the rise of prostitution, and casual harlotry. Whilst it was seen as socially depraving, we do see a rise in it, even so far as the British government to issue a [Contagious Diseases Act](_URL_4_) in 1864. This Act was put in place to prevent the spread of sexual diseases, especially syphilis that was prevalent in this period. It basically gave the police the right to arrest prostitutes and give them compulsory examinations, which ironically instead of subjecting prostitutes to abuse it actually helped women. Josephine Butler, leader of the CD movement argued that public vices were the product of male lusts rather than a lack of feminine purity, this was later encouraged in the 70's and 80s by a lot of writings suggesting male lust was a biological imperative, and as a man they should be able to overcome animalistic tendancies. [Source](_URL_6_)\n\nBasically my argument is that sex has been fairly prevalent all the way through history, however the Catholic and later Protestant churches did demonize sex, especially outside of marriage it didn't have a lasting effect, with brothels and the like persisting throughout these periods and flourishing within the Industrial Revolution. \n\nSorry for using Wikipedia for a few sources, as I'd read them in university textbooks that I didn't have in front of me I couldn't easily source them. \n", "There was a UK documentary on specifically this subject a few years back. Not an academic source, but plenty of personal testimony suggesting that the turmoil of the war did lead to a sexual revolution.\n\nThe series in question: _URL_0_", "There's some great commentary about casual sex incidences between opposite-sexed partners throughout history, with nice explanations taking into account class differences, older/younger (and/or prostitution/temple rituals), pre- and post-Christian dominance, and other great differences raised. I especially like how historians here point out the difficulty of there not being a lot in the written record for what might be viewed as illicit activities, with all the cautions we in our age should recognize.\n\nThat said. And I know it's hard. But... \n\nAnyone care to do the same for casual sex incidences between **same-sex** partners? Both male/male and female/female (the latter seems to be the most undocumented). I'd be more interested in peer/peer, versus prostitution/temple rituals (wait: did for instance the Roman temples even have male acolytes?), since the OP's question concerned casual, social sex versus formalized, ritual-based encounters.\n\nI'm also assuming (uh oh) that, in regards the OP's curiosity about the 1940s, that it was more  or less like pre-Stonewall activities. Is this a reasonable assumption?\n\nAnd, I also know that the vast majority of surviving documents concerned the wealthy, but what of the non-elites?\n\nAnd, if more ancient eyes viewed same-sex activities as an act versus an orientation, were there different rules/expectations among youth, young adults and \"settled\" older adults. It seems even recently (WWII era Britain and below), the wink-and-nod attitude towards same-sex activities during one's youth in say, boarding schools for the elites \u2013 contrasted with the draconian rules against same-sex activities done by adults \u2013 suggests a shifting set of rules. Well, and rank hypocrisy. \n\nWere Lesbian women's preferences/activities largely ignored since, so long as they performed a biological role, men were indifferent (i.e., what women did absent men were \"too insignificant\" to rate a mention), or would these incidences be too scandalous to be part of the surviving record?\n\nAnd related to this last point: is it credible that male/male same-sex incidences were roughly similar but due to the post-Christian (in the West) prohibitions, it was simply hidden better, and thus absent from the *documented* record?\n\nThanks!\n\n(Mods, let me know if this is off-topic and I'll gladly delete)", "Well, I can't quite say much about heterosexual casual sex during World War II, but I can remark on homosexual casual sex in the era, referencing two very fascinating books. The first is [*Coming Out Under Fire*](_URL_1_) by Allan Berube, and the second is [*The Straight State*](_URL_0_) by Margot Canaday.\n\n*Coming Out Under Fire* remarks with incredible detail the opportunities that World War II provided young Americans to discover their sexuality and encounter other likewise-oriented people. Most of the book follows homosexual men, but a few significant chapters focus on women in the Women's Army Corps. Berube moves through basic training all the way to the combat zone, and shows that homosexual acts happened at every step along the way. He states that in basic: \"They usually didn't experiment sexually with other men until they learned how to bend the rules or until they found themselves paired up in secluded situations.\" Both straight and gay men avoided intimate friendship and close physical contact in basic because of the fear of being accused of homosexuality. But increasingly, as training went by, men found themselves more often in secluded situations with each other. My favorite part of the book - besides Berube's wonderful work on gay men in combat - is the sleeping accommodations on Pullman train cars during troop movements and the hotel / private home accommodations in towns during overnight passes. Pairs of men slept together in one bed in these situations, and physical affection appears to be common, from what we can tell from personal/private sources. The best line is this one, from a Navy man going from San Diego to Madison, Wisconsin: \"At the end of some of the cars, there were little compartments that would sleep maybe four. I think four of us had the same idea when we got on the train. We just rushed for those compartments and all of us were gay. So it was something that night when we closed that door.\"\n\n*The Straight State* is definitely less positive about World War II for gay men, and it covers three distinct themes (immigration, the military, and welfare) in two eras of American history. Canaday makes it clear that lesbian women, their relationships, and their acts were not a priority to the state, who regulated them very little but kept a very watchful eye on them at points. The state's main concern was young homosexual men, who they started trying to weed out at the turn-of-the-century with immigrants (screening for \"perverse\" or \"sexually inverted\" bodies at Ellis Island) and continued desperately to find by not allowing transient single men during the Great Depression / New Deal to have certain rights and freedoms. In terms of the military, the state implemented an increasingly intense series of policies aimed to keep homosexual men out of the military service and World War I and World War II. However, Canaday shows very clearly that scandals emerged in both wars, as young men did experiment with each other sexually both in training and overseas, and that the state responded harshly to these events by removing them from service and stripping them of their rights by giving them a \"blue discharge\" (which disallowed them any benefits from the G.I. Bill). The excessive amount of transient men who wandered the country post-WW1 led to the development of the G.I. Bill, which, as one reviewer has put it, was and is \"the most massive federal welfare program in U.S. history\" and is primarily \"designed to create settled, married, and yes, heterosexual men.\" The rewards went to heterosexual men and homosexual men who kept their identities secret and their acts few to none. That isn't to say that casual homosexual sex didn't occur during World War II - Allan Berube's book proves that it did - but it does suggest that homosexual sex during this time period was quite risky. \n\nI don't mean to leave out lesbians and their casual sex, but both Berube and Canaday admit rather despondently there is a decided lack of sources regarding lesbian subculture during World War II. There were scandals, of course, especially in W.A.C. where women were caught together in sexual situations, but they were treated very differently than homosexual men. Only so many were given blue discharges, and few left the military service with the stigma of homosexuality. Possibly a great deal of lesbian casual sex occurred during World War II due to the opportunities of sex segregation, but this has been less apparent in the archives than the homosexual male counterpart.", "My mother was a love child in post WW II \"holy catholic Ireland\" - my grandfather was in the army, the 2nd youngest of 10, granny was in service (a maid) and the eldest of 13. They were no longer in touch and Grandad was seeing someone new when granny found out she was pregnant. She only had his name. Her employer contacted the army and they gave him two (well three) options: abscond the army/country, pay her an allowance (deducted from his wages) or get married. He chose the latter. My mother only found this out after my grandmother died. She didn't believe it - granny was a decades-of-the-rosary, mass every day, four priests at her funeral sort of catholic. Grandad softened the blow by telling mum about how many other instances of premarital sex occurred - basically other uncles, aunts, cousins etc. who had been in roughly the same boat. It didn't sound endemic, but it sounded common.\n\nSo here's my askhistorians question: the choice grandad was given by the army, to pay for the upkeep of an out of wedlock child, I don't know if that was a formal arrangement through the army. Does anyone know? If so, could records of such payments from old salary records be used as a proxy for guesstimating a rate of premarital sex? Could digitized birth and marriage certificates be used to identify (say) six month or less gaps between wedding-with-a-bump and first baby? I realize this is just relating to premarital sex, but at least with granny and grandad there is a hint of casualness - she only knew his name and job, not where he lived.", "When Paul Revere married his first wife Sarah Orne she was pregnant (the baby came 8 months after the marriage). David Hackett Fischer says that this was a common occurrence at the time (1750s or so) and place (New England). According to him up to 1/3rd of New England brides were pregnant on their wedding day. \n\n\n(From *Paul Revere's Ride*)\n\nApparently this wasn't exactly casual sex, but a philosophy that it was not immoral to have sex as long as you were engaged. Cohabitation was also apparently quite common in both North and South during the early to mid 18th centuries with preachers being upset at the state of affairs and also upset that nobody seemed to care. A man named John Miller traveled through New England at the beginning of the 18th century and was appalled at how many people cohabitated. He reported that people would live together for a period of time and then break up without any sense of moral wrong. He also saw that pre-marital sex among engaged couples was quite common. \n\nThere's a letter from a man named John Updike who wrote to the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and he claimed that the people of North Carolina were among the most notorious prolifigates on earth. Pre-marital sex was common, cohabitation was common, and often he found that newly arrived immigrants had abandoned spouses and were committing adultery. Another Anglican minister wrote that \"polygamy was common, concubinage general, and bastardy of no disrepute\". (*Sexual Revolution in Early America* Richard Godbeer). ", "My view of sexuality comes through art and music. What about all of those lovely English ballads about \"going a-maying\"? Or strolling through the *bonnie broom*, or down by the *rushing stream*?  \n\nThere are hundreds of songs about young lads entreating young lasses to disappear somewhere private, and the lasses responding no (for the sake of their father dear, or dead mother, or honor) until they finally say \"yes\". Were they just hiding in the haymow for some heavy petting? I've always rather assumed they were going for the whole deal, otherwise why the concern about honor?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17yut3/what_was_nightlife_like_for_young_men_who_stayed/c8aa8f2"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-3051.html"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranter", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9778640/18th-century-Aristotle-sex-manual-to-be-auctioned-next-week.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Council_of_the_Lateran", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/dec/09/museums-greece", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_Diseases_Acts", "http://www.economist.com/node/21547230", "http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/sex-and-sexuality-19th-century/"], ["http://uktv.co.uk/yesterday/item/aid/576565"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Straight-State-Sexuality-Citizenship-Twentieth-Century/dp/0691149933", "http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Under-Fire-Allan-Berube/dp/0743210719"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1pycmi", "title": "Who were the local law enforcers in Medieval Germany?", "selftext": "Were there ranks? were they simply militia? I'm talking around the 1000 AD period.\nWhat was their name?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pycmi/who_were_the_local_law_enforcers_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd7i3kk"], "score": [3], "text": ["Law enforcement was mostly organized on a local level, in towns or small villages. In the villages mostly by the \"owners\" of that villages, the lower nobility or the owners of the farms.\n\nThe Lower Law (niedere Gerichtsbarkeit, don't know if the translation is correct), also called *Thing* or patrimonial Law, was enforced by the local officers. They were called *Schulthei\u00df* or similar in the local dialects, like *Schulze*, *Schulte* or *Schultes*. Schulze is still one of the most common names in Germany. The polish So\u0142ectwo is derived from the German term, the English equivalent is bailiff or mayor. \nThe were not allowed to torture, maim or kill someone. The could only sentence lighter punishments, like monetary punisment, pranger, scold's bridle and such. \n\nThe Schulthei\u00df office later evolved and turned into what is a mayor in modern days. The term was used in W\u00fcrttemberg until 1930. \n\nHerebord von Bismarck died in 1280 in Stendal and was a Schulthei\u00df there. He is also the oldest known ancestor of Otto von Bismarck. \n\nHere is a pic of a Schulthei\u00df from the 16th century: _URL_0_\n\nThe *Blutgerichtsbarkeit* (ius gladiim, law of the blade) was a criminal court that could inflict bodily punishment. These officers were usually noble and called *Vogt*, *Voigt* or *Voight*, which is also still a common name in Germany. The term itself is derived from advocatus and the English equivalent is the reeve. \n\nThe Vogt was also responsible to organize the defense of the county and he had to lead the feudal levy/array. \n\nCarolus Magnus installed a lot of *V\u00f6gte* in 802, who later (11th/12th century) evolved into heritable fief offices. The *V\u00f6gte* became *Grafen* (counts) and were now high nobility. \n\n\n\n \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Schultheiss.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2ws3ty", "title": "During WW2, was there an Allied equivalent of doctors Josef Mengele or Shiro Ishii (of Japanese medical experimentation Unit 731?)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ws3ty/during_ww2_was_there_an_allied_equivalent_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cou3rv3"], "score": [19], "text": ["There was lots of human experimentation by the Americans during World War II, but most of it was much more consensual, less horrific. [Volunteer conscientious objectors were used for research on a starvation study at the University of Minnesota](_URL_0_), for example, as part of research funded by the Office for Scientific Research and Development.\n\nThe most problematic work though was in the area of nuclear technology. It was new, there were key safety questions to be asked, the whole thing was being massively expedited, and yet it was all kept secret to an unprecedented level. This meant that informed consent was not seen as an option.\n\nSo at several sites, coordinated by of the Manhattan Engineer District (the Manhattan Project) there were human radiation experiments that involved injecting terminally-ill patients with substances like plutonium, to see how it was excreted by their systems. It also involved passive monitoring of people working with plutonium, uranium, and polonium to see how their bodies were processing the toxic and radioactive metals. There were concerns, shared amongst people working on the project, that this work was in many ways unethical, because they did not have any intention of telling people if they had gotten too-large doses, especially in places where the workers in question did not have knowledge of what they were handling. \n\nSeparately, there is also the issue of testing a surface-burst nuclear weapon, knowing it will produce downwind fallout, in an area that had low population density but not zero population density. The scientists and security agents of course had no intention of telling the surrounding populace that they were being silently irradiated at low levels. The scientists were acutely aware of the possible dangers, and stationed MPs and scientists in nearby towns with Geiger counters, hoping for the best. \n\nThere were other issues of this nature, this bad mixture of secrecy with safety. The small \"water boiler\" reactor at Los Alamos, for example, vented radioactive gases into a canyon nearby, but its vent carried no warning labeling on it or restrictions \u2014 something that made the safety officers very uncomfortable.\n\nEileen Welsom's _The Plutonium Files_ talks about the plutonium injections, and the reports by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, from the early 1990s, contain discussion of other WWII-era unreported exposures. Most of the exposures were pretty low, but it is still pretty unethical. The people who took over the atomic work in the mid-1940s explicitly talked about this as having violated the Nuremberg conventions, and kept it secret explicitly in order to avoid causing scandal.\n\nAll that being said, in my view this is pretty piddling compared to Mengele and Unit 731 \u2014 unethical, but it lacks the horror. And there is a \"great good\" being sought-after here; knowing how plutonium was excreted helped set safety standards, for example, for the thousands of workers who had to deal with it. It wasn't arbitrary, in the way many of Mengele's sadistic experiments were, trying to sew together twins and the like. But it was still unethical, still a dirty deal made under the cover of war, and this is not just the judgment of hindsight, but how many people who knew about it thought about it at the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment"]]}
{"q_id": "5pzfbv", "title": "Bounties and sniper combat during the Vietnam War", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5pzfbv/bounties_and_sniper_combat_during_the_vietnam_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcv2apm"], "score": [2], "text": ["I think the fundamental question you need to ask yourself when considering the concept of bounties is the following: Was it actually a reality during the Vietnam War? \n\nThe truth of the matter is that there simply isn't much evidence supporting the existence of bounties beyond field reports and the testimonies of American soldiers. /u/Lich-Su [answered this question the best way possible a few months ago](_URL_0_) and the conclusion that Lich-Su reaches is one that I fully agree with."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51auq1/my_father_told_me_he_had_a_500_bounty_on_his_head/d7arobh/"]]}
{"q_id": "66a2pv", "title": "At r/TIL, there is a post trending with people in the comments section saying the FBI sent a letter telling Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself and the FBI/CIA later killed him. Is this true?", "selftext": "The post in question is [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nSo, is the evidence the comments gave that the FBI/CIA killed MLK credible? Here are comments that showcase the main points.\n\n[1](_URL_1_)\n\n[2](_URL_2_)\n\nThanks!\n\nPS - As a followup question, is the quote that the TIL was originally about legit? [Though it appeared in a newspaper, it could still be apocryphal.](_URL_3_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/66a2pv/at_rtil_there_is_a_post_trending_with_people_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dghpaif"], "score": [15], "text": ["While the letter is anonymous (in the sense that it's not signed and it's not on any letterhead), [a complete copy was found in J. Edgar Hoover's files](_URL_0_) and a congressional investigation verified that it was sourced from the FBI. Whether Hoover himself wrote it is apparently unclear, but he almost certainly knew about it, given where the unredacted letter was found. The phrasing of the letter does not directly call for King to commit suicide, but it ends saying in part, \"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.\" King believed that it called for his suicide, and many others have agreed.\n\nHis death is a different story. Blaming an assassination or even an attempt on the US government has a long and storied history. Some of these are accurate (Castro was long a target of the CIA), some are not (evidence strongly ties JFK's death to Oswald), and some are in between (Salvador Allende almost certainly committed suicide in the midst of a coup that was probably backed by the CIA).\n\nBut the evidence that it was carried out by the US government is basically nonexistent, and those comments don't provide any evidence besides the equivalent of a knowing nod. King had a lot of enemies, including a large portion of the white population but also some in the black population who disagreed with his nonviolent ways. James Earl Ray was convicted for King's death based on reasonably strong evidence, but over the years, various claims have been made that King was killed by others for various reasons, mostly having to do with racism or anti-communism, carried out by the Mafia, the KKK, or some other loner at least as often as the government is claimed to be involved. To my knowledge, the claims are backed by little or no physical evidence and mostly involve people long dead who cannot confirm or deny the claims.\n\nThere's probably more doubt about James Earl Ray than there is about Oswald, but not a lot more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://redd.it/6677ch", "https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6677ch/til_that_after_the_assassination_of_john_f/dggjdk0/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6677ch/til_that_after_the_assassination_of_john_f/dggiqt8/", "https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZrYlAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=8_QFAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=3439%2C4781621"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?mtrref=undefined&amp;gwh=179501884D97D94A10B01B2901176AF7&amp;gwt=pay&amp;assetType=nyt_now&amp;_r=0"]]}
{"q_id": "3d3kz2", "title": "How did the Mongols achieve crazy speed from their multiple horses?", "selftext": "I read that they typically had three or four horses following them whenever they march so they can easily change--but wouldn't the horses, which are also riding with them albeit without a passenger--also be tired once the riders change their mounts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d3kz2/how_did_the_mongols_achieve_crazy_speed_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct1jem8", "ct1jhjy"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["There's a big difference between carrying a rider and following along unmounted; the steppe mares favored by the Mongols weigh in at about 600 lbs, so a 180 lb man with some basic provisions is going to be a third of their body weight.  It's much more efficient to shift the weight between your string of horses; imagine going on a hike with four friends, but you need to carry a single 60 lb pack.  Everyone's going to tire out over the day, but it'll be much faster for the person carrying the load, so it makes sense to share it among the group.", "Not necessarily. For example, imagine you are in a field running. Your body is designed to carry your flesh over your bone, and not much else. The same goes for a horse, and they can run for hours on end, but when you stick 150 pound lump of anger in human form on top, plus 50 pounds of laminar in addition to whatever marching kit and such an ostensibly nomadic fighting force will be carrying on their person, it naturally cuts down on how long they can endure a full out sprint, while the harem of horses they may be leading behind them will be a few degree's more rested."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3brtx8", "title": "When did the Arabs become known as \"Arabs?\"", "selftext": "I've been curious about this recently. I think there's a second question here, too, because I'm betting the Arabs got that name because the place they lived was called Arabia (I presume by the Romans). If so, why did the Romans call that area Arabia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3brtx8/when_did_the_arabs_become_known_as_arabs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cspa5nk"], "score": [13], "text": ["Arabs were first mentioned in both Biblical and Assyrian texts of the ninth to the fifth centuries BC where they appear as nomadic pastoralists inhabiting the Syrian desert. The fact that the name begins to be used by both cultures during the same period suggests that \"Arab\" was how these pastoralists designated themselves. What its original significance was we do not know, but it came to be synonymous with desert-dweller and a nomadic way of life in the texts of settled peoples.\n\nSource: *Arabia and the Arabs. From the Bronze Age to the coming of Islam*, by Robert G. Hoyland."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5j4rfp", "title": "After Stalin died, were there any measures taken by the Soviet government to avoid someone amassing power on scale like his?", "selftext": "After Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress passed the 22nd ammendment, limiting presidents to two consecutive terms. This was to prevent a leader from dominating the executive office like he had, and to prevent any potential abuse or misuse of power.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5j4rfp/after_stalin_died_were_there_any_measures_taken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbdzxgv", "dbe78z4"], "score": [30, 74], "text": ["follow up question. What, if any, affect did these measures have on Nikita Khrushchev coming to power 3 years after Stalin's death?", "Although it is difficult to say whether there were distinct policies in place to prevent the future build-up of power in such a tyrannical fashion, the tone of the government definitely changed. Instead of the  government of personality that had prevailed previously, the Soviet government was replaced by a troika of Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Between the three of them, they came to more consensus decisions with the Presidium and Supreme Soviet. This post-Stalin government would initiate a campaign of \"peaceful coexistence\" with the West, and cut back on repressive measures. One exeption was the East German Uprising of 1953 after which Beria was charged with treason for his brutal treatment of East German protestors. Eventually, Nikita Khruschev would become Soviet Premier. He initiated a series of \"de-Stalinization\" measures. These measures as he explained in his \"secret speech.\" Khruschev \"condemned Stalin for irrationally deporting entire nationality groups (e.g., the Karachay, Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar peoples) from their homelands during the war and, after the war, for purging major political leaders in Leningrad (1948\u201350; see Leningrad Affair) and in Georgia (1952). He also censured Stalin for attempting to launch a new purge (Doctors\u2019 Plot, 1953) shortly before his death and for his policy toward Yugoslavia, which had resulted in a severance of relations between that nation and the Soviet Union (1948).\" None of this sat well with Molotov, a close friend of Stalin and his foreign minister, but Khruschev's words seemed to ring true for the rest of the Presidium. Subsequently, when Khruschev's domestic popularity waned, he would be removed from office peacefully and Leonid Brezhnev would become First Secretary of the Central Committee.\n\nSources:\n\nStalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts\n\nMolotov Remembers by Felix Chuev and Vyacheslav Molotov\n\nEncyclopedia Britannica for the exact quote above _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.britannica.com/event/Khrushchevs-secret-speech"]]}
{"q_id": "4qwdyb", "title": "Why do we not hear about the 6,000,000 Jews who were about to die in Russia?", "selftext": "I found via an online newspaper database that there are literally dozens of reports of 6,000,000 Jews facing threat of extermination in Russia or starving in various east European countries.  This was taking place from around 1905 to about 1930.  What was happening during these times?  Is there any relationship between the 6,000,000 in Russia and the 6,000,000 who died during the holocaust?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qwdyb/why_do_we_not_hear_about_the_6000000_jews_who/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4wgcjn", "d4wgkph"], "score": [10, 94], "text": [" > I found via an online newspaper database that there are literally dozens of reports of 6,000,000 Jews facing threat of extermination in Russia or starving in various east European countries. This was taking place from around 1905 to about 1930. What was happening during these times?\n\nLarge amounts of pogroms and anti-Semitism were forcing Jews out of these areas. More than 2 million fled West between 1880 and 1920, seeking better lives. Pogroms like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 killed over 40 Jews in a matter of a few days at most, and left hundreds of homes looted or destroyed. The 1905 pogrom in Odessa killed hundreds of Jews, and destroyed thousands of homes.\n\nThese were not the only persecutions Jews faced that caused them to flee. Jews were limited in where they could live (think Pale of Settlement) and heavily concentrated in the areas they lived in.\n\n >  Is there any relationship between the 6,000,000 in Russia and the 6,000,000 who died during the holocaust?\n\nNo. This belief is a common conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact. The estimate of 6 million Jews in Russia and 6 million killed in the Holocaust is not connected, and the estimate of 6 million made back then may even be an incorrect exaggeration from my understanding.", "The website you linked and all the other websites out there who cite real and alleged news paper articles referring to this number are all Holocaust denial sites and they represent a classic tactic of Holocaust deniers. They go: \"Well here are some real newspapers and some I made up who mention six million Jews being in peril before WWII. Isn't that ~weird~? It can only mean that obviously the Holocaust is made up!!!1!!1\"\n\nThis tactic which works with the assumption that if doubt can be cast upon a certain detail through real or made up evidence, the whole Holocaust is somehow in doubt is what is deployed here. Two things about this though:\n\nFirst of all, the number of victims of the Holocaust is estimated as accurately as possible going through mounts and mounts of evidence, most of it produced by the Nazis themselves. How that works, I explain [here](_URL_0_) and here is a table for the number of victims:\n\nCountry| Est. Pre-War Jewish pop. | Est. Jewish population killed | Percent killed\n--------|--------|---------|---------\nPoland | 3,300,000  | 3,000,000 \t | 91\nBaltic countries | 253,000 | 228,000 | 90\nGermany Camp; Austria | 240,000 | 210,000 | 88\nBohemia Camp; Moravia | 90,000 | 80,000 | 89\nSlovakia | 90,000 | 75,000 | 83\nGreece | 70,000 | 54,000 | 77\nNetherlands | 140,000 | 105,000 | 75\nHungary | 650,000 | 450,000 | 70\nBelorussian SSR | 375,000 | 245,000 | 65\nUkrainian SSR | 1,500,000 | 900,000 | 60\nBelgium | 65,000 | 40,000 | 60\nYugoslavia | 43,000 | 26,000 | 60\nRomania | 600,000 | 300,000 | 50\nNorway | 1,800 | 900 | 50\nFrance | 350,000 | 90,000 | 26\nBulgaria | 64,000 | 14,000 | 22\nItaly | 40,000 | 8,000 | 20\nLuxembourg | 5,000 | 1,000 | 20\nRussian SFSR | 975,000 | 107,000 | 11\nDenmark | 8,000 | 120 | 2\nFinland | 2,000 | 22 | 1\nTotal | 8,861,800 | 5,933,922 | 67\n\nNow, when reviewing the above table, the answer to the question why these newspapers mention six million Jews especially in the timeframe of 1905-1920 should almost become apparent: Six million was the approximate number of Jews living under Tsarist Russian rule in the so-called pale of settlement and Congress Poland.\n\nWhat here is represented through interwar Poland, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belorussian SSR, the Baltic countries, Finland and the Russian SFSR is taken together roughly the number of Jews living in Tsarist Russia before 1917 and in the areas affected by the Russian Civil War until its end in 1921.Taken the numbers from this table, that adds up to 6,405,000, although in the case of Poland, some need to be subtracted since not all the areas that constituted interwar Poland were part of Tsarist Russia. According to sources like Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Nora Levin, the number of Jews in Tsarist Russia were somewhere around 5,7-5,9 million people. So when these newspapers refer to 6 million Jews in peril, they refer to all Jews in Tsarist Russia and later the areas affected by the Russian Civil War.\n\nNow, why they were in peril changes somewhat in this time frame. Between 1903 and 1906 Tsarist Russia saw a wave of bloody anti-Jewish pogroms sweep the land. It was the second wave of such pogroms after those in 1881-1884. The 1903 and 1906 pogroms were heavily related to the political struggle in Tsarist Russia at the time and the growing tide of nationalism of all varieties. Anti-Semitism ran high since it had become somewhat customary to associate Jews either with liberal ideologies or with foreign influence in Russia. Unsurprisingly, the forgery *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* were produced in Russia right around that time, these pogroms erupted where people blamed Jews for political reform or lack thereof. Pogroms in Kishinev, Odeassa and about 660 other cities cost over 2000 Jews their lives and the international press saw pretty much the whole of Russian Jewry -- approx. 6 million -- in danger.\n\nA similar situation arose in the Russian Civil War. While Jews found themselves on both sides of the Civil War, the found themselves often on the receiving end of violence perpetrated by the White and other anti-Bolshevik faction during that time. The trope of the \"Jewish Bolshevik\" originated in the Tsarist empire and figures such as Leo Trotsky were used as \"evidence\" for its truth. White and other anti-Bolshevik factions often turned against the Jews they perceived as the fifth column for the Bolsheviks. Most of the pogroms during the Civil War took part in Ukraine and several authors estimate that more than 100.000 Jews fell victim to them (127.000 according to the NYT article you linked).\n\nSimilarly, after Revolution and during the Civil War, a famine affected a lot of areas in newly created Soviet Union and the areas adjacent to it. Droughts, problems with early Soviet Policy (War Communism and NEP) combined with the Civil War lead to this so-called Povolzhye famine, which killed somewhere around 6 million people in the years 1920-1921. It was so severe that an international relief effort was organized among others by the United States in form of the  American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover. This received a lot of press coverage and once again, international media outlets also reported on the situation of the Jewish population, which had been hit hard by this famine.\n\nSo, the TL;DR of this whole thing is that 6 million Jews, about half the world's Jewish population lived in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century and especially in areas which were hit hard with pogroms and later the Russian Civil War and the famine that followed it (Poland and the so-called pale of settlement, the area where the Tsar had allowed Jews to settle). This is the origin of the six million number in these newspaper reports.\n\nLater when the Nazis marched into Poland the USSR, these Jews were of course hit particularly hard by Nazi genocidal policy. The Nazis didn't get them all, in part because Stalin evacuated/deported a lot of them in the beginning of the war to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian SSRs but in combination with the Jews killed from Western Europe, the number of murdered amounts to approximately the same number of Jews living under Tsarist rule in the early 20th century.\n\nSources:\n\n* Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. 2014.\n\n* Nora Levin: The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival. 1988.\n\n* Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917\u20131920. 1999.\n\n* Oleg Budnitskii: Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. 2012.\n\n* Moshe Lewin: The Soviet Century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gmxqm/why_the_count_six_million_still_persists_when_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "fncf1z", "title": "How important was honour in Tokugawa Japan? Could it have possibly weakened rule e.g Ako incident and seppuku after the death on ones lord?", "selftext": "# How important was honour in Tokugawa Japan? Could it have possibly weakened rule e.g Ako incident and seppuku after the death on ones lord?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fncf1z/how_important_was_honour_in_tokugawa_japan_could/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flsqjvd"], "score": [2], "text": ["There isn't a simple answer to this question. Tokugawa Japan was not a monolithic society. There were diverse people living in Japan in this long period, separated by wealth, location, social status, gender, occupation and so on. Honor was certainly an ideal of the small but powerful samurai status group. But it was not necessarily the guiding imperative of other parts of the population. It was often parodied in plays, questioned in fiction, mocked in poetry, and celebrated in moralistic writings."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "86g9de", "title": "Did Isaac Newton know how big the Earth is? How?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/86g9de/did_isaac_newton_know_how_big_the_earth_is_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dw5f7wd"], "score": [5], "text": ["Almost certainly. The circumference of the Earth had been known for nearly 2000 years before Newton was born. In about 250BC, the head librarian of the library at Alexandria (Egypt), [Eratosthenes of Cyrene](_URL_1_), came across an interesting account in one of the library's manuscripts.\n\nIt observed that in the distant southern city of Syene, at noon on the summer solstice vertical columns would cast no shadow, and the sun would shine all the way down a deep water well. That means the sun was directly overhead at that time, but no other. Eratosthenes had never observed such an occurrence in Alexandria, but set about to test it.\n\nOn the summer solstice, he placed a stick in the ground plumbed vertically, and watched to see if it would eventually cast no shadow. But it always cast a shadow, first getting shorter, then longer as the day wore on. The shortest shadow would have been cast at noon, when the sun was highest in the sky.\n\nEratosthenes was a mathematician and also knew the sun was very far away. He made the assumption that the sun's rays that struck the earth were largely parallel. If not, sharp shadows would not be cast. He knew that at noon in Syene, the difference in the angle between a vertical column and the sun was 0 degrees. Measuring the shortest shadow in Alexandria, he calculated the difference in the angle between the vertical shaft and the sun was 7.2 degrees (actually described as 1/50 of a circle).\n\nIf the Earth were flat, the column (or well) in Syene and the stick in Alexandria would have cast no shadows at noon. But if the surface of the Earth was curved, the sun could be directly overhead at one spot (Syene), but not another (Alexandria). Given the difference in angles (1/50th of a circle), and the distance between Alexandria and Syene, the actual circumference of the Earth could be calculated using simple trigonometry.\n\nApocryphally, Eratosthenes paid someone to measure the distance between Alexandria and Syene by walking there and back with a camel. However, the empire's cartographers tended to make annual measurements and that is most likely the metric Eratosthenes used. The distance between the two cities is about 800 km\\*. That gives the estimated circumference as 50 x 800 km = 40,000 km. The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,800 km.\n\nSo why is the sun overhead one day a year in Syene, but never in Alexandria? Because of the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth (the angle between the axis of rotation and the plane of revolution around the sun), the sun is only ever directly overhead between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (23.5 degrees above and below the equator) and only directly overhead on the summer solstice at each of the Tropics. Outside that region, the sun can never be directly overhead, and Alexandria is outside that region, whereas Syene is located very near the Tropic of Cancer.\n\n\\* At the time, Eratosthenes used a measure of distance that had not yet been fully standardized, stadia, and Alexandria is not directly north of Syene, so the original computed circumference may be off by as much as 17 percent.\n\n[Video of Carl Sagan on Cosmos](_URL_0_) describing this using a much better voice than mine."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://vimeo.com/78787366", "https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eratosthenes"]]}
{"q_id": "901g1g", "title": "Is there any doubt that the Colossus of Rhodes existed?", "selftext": "I've heard a lot about how building the Statue of Liberty, an offspring idea of the OG Colossus, was quite expensive and hard to build. Plus it was apparently super tall, how could a people with worse metallurgy, probably not as many funds as 19th century NYC/France build a very similar statue and have it survive until an earthquake did it in?\n\n\nWouldn't rust screw it over way before it could've fallen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/901g1g/is_there_any_doubt_that_the_colossus_of_rhodes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2nqigj"], "score": [2], "text": ["Strabo states with a degree of certainty that the ruins of the Colossus were visible when he wrote the *Geography* (English version [here](_URL_2_)) at around the turn of the 1st century AD, and Pliny the Elder's [Natural History](_URL_0_) goes into considerable detail about the construction of those ruins.  We also have a fragmentary epigram dated prior to that appears to be [a dedication of the Colossus](_URL_1_), or at least of a giant statue of some kind at Rhodes.\n\nAs to its construction, I offer nothing beyond noting that there has been academic discussion that have reverse-engineered its construction (see [here](_URL_3_) if you have access).  I do not know if Pliny (or Philo, who also attests to seeing its ruins) is accurate in regards to the estimate of its height - much of the time I mentally replace specific measurements in Classical texts with vague ones - but it could be plausible nonetheless."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D34%3Achapter%3D18", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Anth.+Gr.+6.171&amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0472", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/14B*.html#ref9", "https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/1-4020-2204-2_7"]]}
{"q_id": "b5991h", "title": "Did the Ottomans refer to Istanbul as Konstantiniyye?", "selftext": "Curious if they referred to as Constantinople still. If so, when and why did it change to Istanbul?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5991h/did_the_ottomans_refer_to_istanbul_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejcx16n"], "score": [10], "text": ["The official name change was after the Ottomans.  It took place in the 20th Century.\n\nThere is a nice discussion anchored by /u/spoonfeedme at [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28ppbd/was\\_there\\_any\\_international\\_criticism\\_against/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28ppbd/was_there_any_international_criticism_against/"]]}
{"q_id": "2h4iih", "title": "I have seen footage from World War I and there were two soldiers carrying big, round thing, what could it be?", "selftext": "Sadly I'm not able to give You a link to the video, I have seen it on tv some time ago.\n\nTwo soldiers were running through the field and each on of them held it from one side. It looked kind of like dark-coloured hula hop-like thing. I'm aware of how it may sounds, but this thing seemed to be important equipment. So do You have by any chance an idea what could be this thing?\n\nedit: Crappy-looking sketch: _URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h4iih/i_have_seen_footage_from_world_war_i_and_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckphj8p", "ckpi2bo", "ckpjhws"], "score": [3, 8, 20], "text": ["Did it look like anything on this page?\n\n_URL_0_", "Some more details would help. Was it smooth or did it have a rough shape? How thin was the tube compared to the hole? Did it look heavy or just unwieldy? Was it one solid thing or a composite? Did it have handles mounted? How big was it in relation to the soldiers? Where were the soldiers, near trenches or somewhere else? Were they under fire or just hasty?\n\nMost obvious in WW1 is a roll of (barbed) wire.", "It's a roll of Concertina Wire.  Effective barrier against infantry and vehicles.\n\nBasically it's barbed wire rolled in a circle to make it hard to ignore and easier to set up.  3 of them in a pyramid shape are the standard configuration.\n\nSource: I've set up plenty of this\n\nAdditional Source: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/ngYpTqj.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?q=demolition+wire+reel+world+war+I&amp;safe=off&amp;espv=2&amp;biw=1325&amp;bih=741&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=g2EgVJqKA8qQyATHuoCYCQ&amp;ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg#safe=off&amp;tbm=isch&amp;q=demolition+wire+reel"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concertina_wire"]]}
{"q_id": "38683b", "title": "In films like \"The Pianist\" and \"Schindler's List,\" German guards seem able to kill prisoners at any time without restriction. Did concentration camps and ghettos have rules stating when and how soldiers could kill inmates?", "selftext": "It seems like these random executions could be carried out by even the lowest ranked soldiers. Did the commanders of these soldiers encourage acts like these or were there limits to when and where prisoners could be shot?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38683b/in_films_like_the_pianist_and_schindlers_list/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crsokhg", "crt0c58", "crtg7gk"], "score": [1894, 31, 11], "text": ["The problem with camps was a lack of oversight once the initial responsibilities had been established. Meaning the answer to this question depends largely on who the camp commandant was and how tight a ship they wanted to run.\n\nLet's start, not with concentration camps, but with Soviet POW camps. Soviet POWs were kept in horrible conditions, and German guards often tormented them. A common practice was siccing guard dogs at prisoners and betting on which dog would do the most damage. Guards also liked to use Soviet POWs for \"target practice.\" So needless to say random killings of prisoners was a common practice, at least among certain aspects of the army.\n\nNow moving to camps, as said above it depended on the camp commandant. Majdanek stands out in this regard. It's two successive commandants, Karl Koch and Hermann Florstedt, stole from the camp massively and instituted a regime of terror in the camp. It became notorious for its corruption and brutality at every level. So in this case random murders of inmates was a common feature of life in the camp. The guards were also Romanian and Croatian, they developed a reputation for savage cruelty and brutality, as well as being difficult to control. Eventually both Koch and Florstedt were arrested for wastefulness. Koch was particularly famous for an event, where in he selected a group of Jews marched them in front of a gate and had them executed; later claiming they tried to \"escape.\"\n\nSo there wasn't a time when you could just kill whenever you wanted, but if a guard did just randomly execute an inmate, depending on the camp the punishment would range from nothing, to a slap on the wrist. Radicals on the bottom worked to satisfy the whims of those at the top. Take low ranking SS lackey Gustave Sorge. He enjoyed beating defenceless prisoners to death in Buchenwald. He later would testify: \"We believed that we were helping state and leadership when we abused prisoners and drove them to their deaths.\" \n\nThis violence wasn't just during the later periods either. In early 1933, when groups of Jews were temporarily sent to Dachau, hundreds died from abuse/murder by the guards despite the Nazis not yet wanting to kill Jews. Another example is the case of four Jews in Dachau, Erwin Kahn, Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn. They were made an example of by the newly inaugurated SS leadership. However, the SS commandant had worked his men into a frenzy, and one day a group of SS guards took it upon themselves to lead the 4 Jews out to the woods and execute them. A wave of killings by power hungry SS guards followed after that.\n\nHere is what a Czech prisoner, named Karel Ka\u0161\u00e1k, wrote in his observations while spending time in one of the camps:\n\n > May 9 [1941]. Again a Jew shot in Freiland II. He started to run. The sentry told us that although he has instructions to shoot without warning, he shouted twice. The [prisoner] stopped and just exclaimed: \u201cI want to go there\u201d and fell after two shots \u2026 Again they have put a group of lifeless and unconscious Jews on the cart. Human flesh, the bodies of these sons of God, stacked like logs, arms and legs swaying limply\u2014a horrendous picture that we witness daily \u2026 \n\n > May 14. In the afternoon they again shot a Jew in Freiland II \u2026 \n\n > May 15. Again a Jew shot. They threw his cap behind the sentry and the Kapo forced him with a truncheon to fetch it. Complete exhaustion has made [the Jewish prisoners] unrecognizable, like in a trance, with a far-away gaze \u2026 \n\n > May 16. At nine in the morning two more Jews shot in Freiland II. They threw the exhausted men into the water and held them under water until they had almost lost consciousness, and definitely lost their minds, and Kapo Sammetinger hit them with the spade until he had forced them to cross the sentry line, whereupon they were immediately shot.\n\nNow Ghettos were worse for this type of behaviour. The liquidation of the Ghettos was an orgy of violence. In one roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto during 1942, 10,000 people were shot. Mostly because the soldiers later claimed they were \"resisting\" or they were trying to send a message to get the other Jews moving faster. A similar story is told in other ghettos. In Luniniec ghetto around 2000 were shot during the liquidation. During the liquidation of Yanov another 2000 were shot. Liquidations were never pretty, and by their nature very chaotic. \n\nA source I would recommend if you want some reading. Check out *KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps*\nby Nikolaus Wachsmann. ", "It highly depends on the camp and you cannot really generalize it. I did some research and some (pregrad) papers on the Mauthausen concentration camp ( _URL_0_ ), which was one of the worst ones (but not as horrible as Auschwitz). \n\nMauthausen itself also went through different phases ... in the beginning it was meant as a work camp with \"only\" the ones who were not able to work any more being murdered, but over the time it basically changed into a death-camp where the guards were basically allowed to do whatever they want with them (it's recorded that they led them outside in the winter to shower with cold water and then let them freeze). \nIn the sub-camps (those were camps that were basically founded to give companies that helped the Nazi government) there was an astonishingly high survival rate and the prisoners actually did not get shot or tortured, but what happened often is that the ones who were weak or old were deported to the main camp in Mauthausen to die. \n\nSo yeah as very often in history I would say the answer to your question is: partially. \n\nSorry if it is written in a confusing way ... pretty much everything I have done about this topic was in German. If you have any specific questions I will try to answer in more detail. ", "Sid_Burn's answer is great. \n\nJust want to add that it also VERY much depends on the year.   The regime radicalized after 1936, and especially after 1939/40.  And this meant that commandants, police supervisors, etc., who may have been more \"legalistic\" and kept a fairly tight reign over their men--not uncommon in 1934--were often eased out, replaced by more radical (and brutal) officials in the late '30s, and especially after the war began.   Some of this radicalization was due to the internal politics of the SS, under Himmler. \n\nBut most importantly, as the complexion of the camps changed, so too did the \"allowable\" treatment of prisoners change. \n\nTo give a famous example:  Dachau. \nDachau was established right after Hitler came to power, in 1933.  Originally, in 1933-34, it held mostly socialists and communists (rounded up after the Reichstag Fire, in a massive purge of the left.)  Many of these Socialists were only interned in Dachau for a few months--they were released (with the threat of a return always hanging over their heads, ensuring their good behavior). \n\nAfter 1936, more so-called \"undesirables\" were sent there, such as homosexuals, criminals, vagrants  &  beggars (rounded up during the pre-Olympics sweep), and Jehovah's witnesses.  These non-political prisoners made up more than 50% of the camp population by 1936;  they were generally NOT released, and treatment of them was far harsher. \n\nIn 1938, in the days after the mass-arrests Krystalnacht, 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps;  many Jews ended up in Dachau.  \n\nHere's the thing:  \nIn Dachau, in the mid-1930s, the official number of deaths (caveat:  the OFFICIAL, i.e. SS-recorded deaths) were about 40 people a year, with the causes listed from disease or \"shot while trying to escape.\"  Many of these deaths were sheer brutality--prisoners beaten to death, though this was usually not listed as the cause.  \nBut after Jews arrived in Dachau in large numbers in 1938, this number jumped to about 2,000 in 1939. (with the same alleged reasons for death--disease, escape attempts--listed).  \n\nClearly, as the camp makeup changed (from political prisoners, to \"undesirables\", to Jews) treatment of prisoners became harsher and more lethal. \n\nAfter 1940 or so, of course, everything changes again, as Jewish prisoners were deported in large numbers to ghettos and (after 1941) death camps in Poland. \n\nAnd conditions in (and treatment of prisoners in) camps in Germany also became far, far worse after 1940.  \n\nOne of the other commenters used Mauthausen, in Austria, as a prime example of this\u2026 from a work-camp in 1938, to a brutal work-camp in 1941, to a brutal work-camp that, by 1944, so starved its prisoners to death, that it might as well be considered an extermination camp in all but name and method (namely, starvation instead of firing squads or gas chambers).  \n\nClearly, the \"rules\" (especially the unwritten rules of what was allowable or desirable) changed dramatically over time. \n\nEdit:  grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "2hlqa2", "title": "Was the Catholic Church founded by St Peter or Constantine?", "selftext": "First I am Catholic and nothing said here will offend me or take me away from my faith. I ask this because there did not seem to be a single authority or church for years after Jesus died, as far as I know the gospels were not written until at least 30 years after his death. \n\nSo how can the Catholic Church claim they were founded by St Peter or be more authentic than other churches? I know the religion lasted through various saints who were martyred but it doesn't seem until Constantine that the religion had one voice. Could it be argued that Constantine was the real founder of the Church and not St Peter? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hlqa2/was_the_catholic_church_founded_by_st_peter_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cktxpk1"], "score": [22], "text": ["Well, neither is probably the best answer.\n\nThe claim of the Roman Catholic Church is founded on basically two things: a documentary tradition that claims Peter was the leader of the church in Rome and passed on his authority to its bishop as a passing on of apostolic *authority* as well as *primacy*. However that documentary tradition is itself a development of the idea of Roman primacy that takes place over several hundreds of years. One cannot trace this idea, or at least the fullness of the claims of the RCC, back to surviving 2nd century documents, let alone 1st century ones.\n\nIt is complicated by the claim that there was always an unwritten tradition that accompanied the New Testament documents, an unwritten apostolic tradition that was authoritatively transmitted by the church, and that the RCC itself is the authoritative arbiter of such pronouncements.\n\nYou are right that the first Gospel text probably didn't appear until at least the 60s AD. Paul's earliest letters probably were written in the early 50s. \n\nHowever Constantine is not really a good contender either. By the time Constantine emerges on the scene, there already exists a large, connected network of churches that recognise each other and have a concept of unity. Indeed, Constantine does not establish that at all, rather they appeal to him to deal with the problem of the Donatists, a separatist group dominant in North Africa. In that issue you already see a church that considers itself both unified and universal attempting to deal with a group of believers that the mainstream considers outside the church.\n\nFurthermore, a very great deal of Constantine's dealings with the church take place in the Eastern half of the church, which down the track will comprise the portion that begins to be identified as Eastern Orthodox in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic Church dominant in the West.\n\nWho founded the Roman Catholic Church is not actually that helpful an historical question to ask. As a *tradition*, the RCC can legitimately claim a historical continuity that goes back to the earliest period. But so can several other branches of Christianity. Furthermore, what exactly 'historical continuity' guarantees is not so certain. There was historical continuity between the Roman Empire in 1453 and the Roman Republic in 100 BC, but they were vastly different things. The RCC has a long and involved history in itself, and it's difficult even to decide when we should start talking about the RCC as something distinct from other 'Church' entities. Personally I wouldn't distinguish the Western church as \"Roman Catholic\" before the 5th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7ztam8", "title": "My professor told me that one of the worst mistakes a historian can make is to engage in a teleological reading of history. What is that, and why is it so bad?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ztam8/my_professor_told_me_that_one_of_the_worst/", "answers": {"a_id": ["duqw4fg"], "score": [56], "text": ["Going back to the philosophical debates of the ancient Greeks two of the most prominent competing overarching theories of the nature of the Universe in general were teleology vs. mechanism. Teleological beliefs are those that say that things exist or happen for a reason. For example, the idea that the reason clouds exist is to provide rain to water crops so that humans can grow food for themselves. It elevates \"purpose\" and indeed the concept of sentience or conscious thought to the level of fundamental force in the Universe. Competing against that is the theory that the underlying structure of the Universe is fundamentally mechanistic, based on simple rules and brainless processes without underlying final purpose. Things such as conscious thought and human life aren't planned for integral aspects to the Universe, rather they are emergent accidental phenomena. The process of science has over time settled on a decidedly mechanistic view of the Universe.\n\nIn other words, your professor is warning you against the idea that things happen in history purposefully to enable other things in the future that result. For example, it has been very common to elevate the early democracies in Greece by seeing them as intentional ancestors of modern westernized democracies. To see Charlemagne as the creator of France. Or view WWI through the lens of WWII. Especially since so much of history comes down to the actions of individuals acting on their own motivations it's very easy to cast new motivations on them based on what was happening elsewhere or what would happen later. A lot of history comes down to things happening by accident combined with very complex motivations by numerous individuals some of whom are acting together or at cross purposes. Even when you have a lot of detailed information on a historical event it takes a lot of work to understand exactly why some outcome was achieved vs. some other outcome, and it's very easy to ignore all of that and think of history as inevitable or happening within some constraint of a larger purpose or larger system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2w34rk", "title": "Are the busts of Roman leaders like Caesar taken from death masks or are they impressions crafted from contemporary descriptions?", "selftext": "Basically I am asking how accurate the busts of figures like Sulla, Marius, Pompey, and Caesar are. Is there a definitive answer or is it more speculative?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w34rk/are_the_busts_of_roman_leaders_like_caesar_taken/", "answers": {"a_id": ["conntvv"], "score": [5], "text": ["Follow up query; Octavianus, Trajan and even Constantine I had a bust, however Basil II did not. At what point did they stop producing busts for each emperor and move towards using mosaics like that of Zoe and Constantine IX or Ioannes II Komnonos at the Hagia Sofia?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s5qs7", "title": "What was the Cuban side of the Missile Crisis?", "selftext": "What was the reasoning behind the stance of Castro, Che, etc? What about the Cuban people? Was there any opposition to having Soviet missiles and/or starting a devastating war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s5qs7/what_was_the_cuban_side_of_the_missile_crisis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdu87o5"], "score": [43], "text": ["Leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even throughout the crisis and for a time after it was concluded, the CIA was carrying out acts of sabotage and terrorism in Cuba. This was called the [Cuban Project](_URL_0_) (alternatively, Operation Mongoose). While the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs was approved under the Eisenhower administration, the Cuban Project was authorized by Kennedy. \n\nIn [this article](_URL_2_), Noam Chomsky talks about the crisis, I wouldn't say from a Cuban side, but rather from a side that challenges the prevailing orthodox view of Kennedy bringing back the world from the brink of annihilation and being a saviour. \n\nKeeping in mind that the United States had once before attempted an invasion of Cuba in 1961, Kennedy seriously contemplated a military invasion of Cuba to eliminate the missile threat.\n\n > From the ExComm records, Stern concludes that on 26 October President Kennedy was \"leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles\" in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans. \n\nBut Khrushchev sent two messages to Kennedy, the first of which offered that \"The missiles would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba.\"\n\nSubsequently:\n\n > Kennedy also made an informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just withdrawal of the missiles, but also termination, or at least \"a great lessening\", of any Russian military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia's borders, where nothing of the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is no longer an \"armed camp\", then \"we probably wouldn't invade,\" in the president's words. He added also that if it hoped to be free from the threat of US invasion, Cuba must end its \"political subversion\" (Stern's phrase) in Latin America.\n\nSo Cuba had to quit political subversion in Latin America (stop spreading communism) but the US had to abide by no such restraint. Still, the continued existence of Castro was still seen as a threat that was needed to to be taken care of:\n\n > In the case of Cuba, the State Department policy planning council explained:\n\n > \"The primary danger we face in Castro is \u2026 in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries \u2026 The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.\"\n\nAnd the Cuban Project continued:\n\n > The crisis, however, was not over. On 8 November, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet missile bases had been dismantled. And on the same day, Stern reports, \"a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory,\" though Kennedy's terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of the crisis. The 8 November terror attack lends support to Bundy's observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey \u2013 where the Russians were not continuing a lethal assault. Not, however, what Bundy had in mind, or could have understood.\n\n > More details are added by the highly respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had a great deal of experience within the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On 8 November, he writes, \"a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,\" killing 400 workers, according to a Cuban government letter to the UN Secretary General. Garthoff comments that \"the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba\"\n\nSo, while the intensity of attacks lessened during the crisis, they were quickly resumed:\n\n > Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination, he approved a CIA plan for \"destruction operations\" by US proxy forces \"against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships\". A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but \"one of Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba,\" Garthoff reports.\n\nThe American government was still dead-set on overthrowing the Castro regime. Although it had promised not to invade, it kept up attacks from inside Cuba by exiles and CIA operatives. \n\nSo that gives a general idea of what Cuba was going through at the time. It was besieged, subjected to sabotage and was threatened with invasion twice. There is an interesting documentary on Robert McNamara called The Fog of War, and in it he gives an account about the time he met Castro after the crisis. [This is the specific part.](_URL_1_) The impression you get is that Castro urged Khruschev to fire the missiles at the United States in some state of madness. What he actually meant was that he urged Khrushchev to fire the missiles *if Cuba was invaded again*. Given the circumstances, it was understandable. Cuba was, and saw itself, as under existential threat.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUfBc4qQMg", "http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-missile-crisis-russian-roulette"]]}
{"q_id": "5zrb1d", "title": "How did Western Europian Socialist Parties view the USSR?", "selftext": "I'm primarily asking about from the end of the Russian Revolution to before the start of World War Two.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5zrb1d/how_did_western_europian_socialist_parties_view/", "answers": {"a_id": ["df16twf"], "score": [2], "text": ["With regards to Italy, the matter is very complicated. \n\nThe Italian Communist party had a love-hate relationship with the USSR. \n\nThe Italian Socialist Party was a generally capitalist-oriented, pro-European, \"Third Way\" party, although when he was Prime Minister, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi enjoyed a cordial working relationship with Ronald Regan. \n\nAnd lastly, the Italian Social Democrats never got enough votes for anyone to ask them for their opinion, but they entered in a number of coalitions with the pro-American Christian Democracy party.\n\n**Il Partito Comunista Italiano** (Electoral Range: fluctuating between 22% and 30%)\n\nThe Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the spiritual successor to the Communist militias which had taken up arms against the Fascist Regime between 1944 and 1945. Although these militias were composed of existing anti-fascist activists as well as returning soldiers/deserters, they received small albeit perceptible amounts of aid from the Soviet Union. The \"Sovietization\" of these militias, and by extension the \"sovietization\" of opposition to the dying regime, definitely was tangible. Although he's not a historian, in Hemingway recalls the mood of the moment in *Across the River and Into the Trees*  by recounting that the owner of Harry's Bar in Venice has bought an equal number of cases of Whiskey and Vodka, being unsure of who would liberate Venice first. \n\nIn its early days, the most members of the Italian Communist Party leadership were definitely pro-USSR, and the General Secretary Togliatti had a direct line to Moscow. However, by the 1950s it became increasingly difficult for the PCI to justify increasingly evident oppression in the Eastern Block, culminating in the Hungarian Revolution of 1958. Togliatti began advertising \"The Italian Way Towards Socialism\" in the 1958 election, signaling that the pro-USSR faction within the party was definitely in the minority. By the 1968 Prague Spring, the PCI was actively condemning the Soviet Union. By 1976, the General Secretary of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, declared in a high-profile interview in the *Corriere della Sera* newspaper that his \u201cEurocommunism\u201d was unconditioned by the regimes behind the Iron Curtain, and that at any rate he felt safer living under the umbrella of NATO than he would be in a Warsaw Pact country. A vaguely pro-American declaration, although Berlinguer wasn't by any means supportive of US policies in Europe and the world. \n\nIn spite of Berlinguer's official line, there remained a backbone of pro-USSR administrators in the Italian Communist Party such that when Berlinguer suffered a fatal stroke at a rally in 1984, the Communist Party leadership sought refuge in pro-Soviet nostalgia, only to lose any ability to form coherent policy after Michail Gorbachev\u2019s reforms within the Soviet Union gained steam.\n\n\n**Il Partito Socialista Italiano** (electoral range: between 7% and 15%)\n\nThe Socialists were in great part perceived as \"Diet Leftists,\" seeing as the Italian Communist Party itself was founded as a direct reaction to the 1921 PSI congress when Socialist Party leaders denounced the use of arms. In fact, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was only ever the \"Younger Brother\" of the Italian Communist Party until the 1960's, when youth activism revealed the ruling Christian Democrats (DC) were very unpopular with younger voters, pushing together center-left coalitions. Prior to then, there had been a \"Unity of Action\" between the Communist Party and the Socialist party, and this had extended to foreign policy: the Socialists opposed Italian entry into NATO in 1949, but also began to denounce the Soviet Union in the 1950s. \n\nHowever, unlike the Communists, in the Socialist party the pro-Soviet faction was only small (albeit vocal) and rapidly evaporated. By the time the Socialist-led governing coalition of the 1980s came to power, the Socialist Party was committed to a strong pro-European line. Relations with the USSR were non-existent, while relations with the US were pragmatic: most prominently, Craxi affirmed Italian sovereignty during the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship \u201cAchille Lauro\u201d off the coast of Egypt by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. Already peeving Italy\u2019s NATO allies by negotiating with the terrorists, after the hijackers\u2019 getaway plane was coerced by American fighter jets to land on a NATO base in Sicily, Italian *Carabinieri* (the national Gendarmerie) impeded a detachment of American Special Forces operatives to apprehend the four hijackers, so that they could be tried in Italy. In spite of not realizing that one of the negotiation aids sent by the Palestinian Authority had been intimately involved with the hijacking, Craxi\u2019s firm stance during the crisis strengthened his public image.\n\n**Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano** (electoral range: between 2.5% and 6%)\n\nThe Italian Social Democrats had originally been founded as a splinter group of the Socialist Party in 1947. The Socialists had proven to be too centrist for some important members of the party. However, their focus on social welfare policy quickly led them to be perceived as a single-issue centrist party, seeing as the ruling Christian Democrats were also not opposed to generous welfare policies. Their impact on Italian foreign policy was negligible, although they did act as important scale-tippers in numerous governing coalitions. \n\nSources on European Political History you might be interested in:\n\n*The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?* (1995)\n\nand \n\n*European Integration: A Concise History.* (2012) \n\nBoth by M. Gilbert \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3nmc7q", "title": "Did Vikings have music and/or art (paintings, sculptures, etc)?", "selftext": "I saw the series Vikings and Athelstan (catholic priest) sais that there is no music nor art. Is that true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nmc7q/did_vikings_have_music_andor_art_paintings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvr7ufm"], "score": [3], "text": ["Art is so much and hard to define. I would argue that the Vikings were very artistic. Look at their wood carvings on boats especially. There are some very fine details you can see this very day on the well preserved **Oseberg Ship** for example. \n\nThe Vikings worked with material they had plenty off. Therefor is there no marble statues you find south in Europe for example. What they did, beside carving tree, was decorating stones and stone walls. Not only did they carve illustrations on stones (Hunnestad Monument in Sweden), they wrote heathen poems and songs on them. An example is **R\u00f8ksteinen** (R\u00f6k Runestone) in Sweden. This stone is actually the first piece of Sweden litterateur and tells stories from Norse mythology. \n\nYou ask for music. And there was music. They made songs at feasts, after battles, before battles and when heroic people passed away or were killed in battle. Our problem is that they did not write lyrics (as we know of) and neither did they know about notes. What we do know is what instruments that were used because we have found them preserved in burial grounds and such. Mostly instruments you blow in to make sound, flutes like pan flutes and *blokkfl\u00f8yte*, lur/lure/lurr, (a long blowing horn), wooden lyre (Greek string instruments) and horns of different sorts.\n\n**Sources:**\n_URL_2_ a very good source for information about the Vikings available in English, Norwegian and some articles are in Danish.\n\nNorwegian:\n_URL_2_s/life/music/n-music-iceland.html (Viking music with focus on Icelandic music)\n\nDanish:\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.viking.no/s/life/music/d-musikk-mogens.html", "http://www.viking.no/s/life/music/instrumenter/index.html", "http://www.viking.no/", "http://www.viking.no/s/life/music/n-music-iceland.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5ealz2", "title": "Books on Finland During the Cold War", "selftext": "I recently stumbled upon the term \"Finlandisation\" and wish to know more about the  path it took to survive. \n\n\nThe term is heavily political but the writing does not have to be regarding the politics. Anything regarding Finland during that era is welcome.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ealz2/books_on_finland_during_the_cold_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dabtt2e"], "score": [3], "text": ["You could look at *Urho Kekkonen: A Statesman for Peace* edited by Keijo Korhonen, written in 1975. \n\nThe book focuses on the long-term president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen, and his policies with respect to foreign relations with the Soviet Union and with Western Europe. It includes contributions from Finnish, American and other international scholars. Since it was written in 1975, it is written in the context of an ongoing Cold War. So, it lacks information that has become available since the opening of the Soviet archives in the last 25 years. Also, it can't discuss the last 10 years of the Kekkonen presidency (until 1986), which were still to come when the book was published.\n\nWith all those caveats, I think the book is highly relevant to the question of Finlandization."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "20ipl3", "title": "Why were there no medieval Eropean cities with a population as a high as first century Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20ipl3/why_were_there_no_medieval_eropean_cities_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg3qazp"], "score": [38], "text": ["Because a city so large needed a massive amount of land and the centralization of power to control what happens on that land to feed it.  The *annona* was, among other things, the tax with which the Roman empire fed the city of Rome.  There was a Prefect of the Annona whose sole job was to oversee the supply of grain to the city (and later, another Prefect of the Annona was established for Constantinople).  \n\nBecause of the way it was conquered by Julius Caesar, and passed down to Augustus, the Province of Egypt had the odd position of being the personal possession of the Emperor, as opposed to a province in the way we would recognize it.  Egypt, thanks to the Nile and its flooding, was one of, if not *the* greatest breadbaskets of the Roman Empire, and large portions of the grain grown in Egypt were shipped to Rome, where the Prefect of the Annona was in charge of getting it made into bread and handed out to the people of Rome.  Any person who was a Roman Citizen in the city of Rome was allotted a certain amount of bread, though often if a citizen didn't need it, they would sell their allotment of bread to poor non-citizens.  This is part of what Juvenal was mocking when he coined the term \"bread and circuses\" from this passage: \" for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions \u2014 everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses\".\n\nEDIT: I'm rereading the paper I wrote on this in undergrad, and realized something I said above wasn't quite right- in the 1st Century AD, when OP was asking about, it was given out as grain, and only the rich could afford to bake it into bread.  The poor ate it as oatmeal.  In the 3rd century, Septimius Severus and Aurelian added olive oil and wine to the *frumentatio*, and Aurelian started giving the grain out prebaked into bread, which required the construction of massive bakeries in Ostia, Rome's port.  It was important enough that to ensure things went smoothly, various emperors offered tax breaks and citizenship to the people involved in the process, the ships captains who transported it and the millers and bakers in Ostia.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n Garnsey, Peter. *Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity*.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.\n\nGarnsey, Peter.  *Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.\n\nSirks, Boudewijn.  *Food for Rome*. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1991.\n\nBowman, Alan and Andrew Wilson.  \u201cQuantifying the Roman Economy: Integration, Growth, Decline?\u201d in *Quantifying the Roman Economy*, edited by Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson, 3-84.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1s4tge", "title": "Were the founding fathers radicals?", "selftext": "Mounting a revolution seems radical, but the form of government they developed borrowed a lot from ancient Athens. By modern standards, how radical were the founding fathers? And does it make sense to think about them on any sort of progressive/conservative spectrum?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s4tge/were_the_founding_fathers_radicals/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdtxdkb"], "score": [3], "text": ["The most radical of the generally-recognized \u201cfounding fathers\u201d was Thomas Paine\u2014his views on politics and religion, and his bitterness at what he felt was betrayal by other revolutionaries, eventually made him an outcast in American society.\n\nPaine also took an active part in the French Revolution\u2014but by French standards he was only moderately radical, and his opposition to the more-extreme Montagnards almost cost him his life. So using Paine as a yardstick, the American revolutionaries weren\u2019t terribly radical even for the time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7640s3", "title": "Why is the French Revolution (1789) is considered much more important than English Revolution (1649)?", "selftext": "Both resulted in somewhat republican state, both killed their kings, both ultimately failed but changed their countries.\n\nYet if you look at various timelines or important dates lists French Revolution is always there and English one is rarely ever mentioned. Why? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7640s3/why_is_the_french_revolution_1789_is_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dobepj4"], "score": [207], "text": ["There are a number of contributing factors to this disparity. First and foremost is the wider global impact of the English Revolution, or rather the lack thereof. The French Revolution is particularly unique among revolutions(other than the Russian Revolution, but I won't get into that) in that the ideas of it spread throughout all of europe, and thus the world. When looking at a single point to mark the beginning of the modern world, the revolutionary period (marked as 1789-1815) is one of the most important transitionary periods(at least in terms of the society, modern tech seems to have made another change on that scale...). Looking at areas where you wouldn't expect much rest-of-world impact, such as Latin America, we can see the direct impact of the French revolution (more on that later). Secondly it's about the final state of these periods. When everything settled out, Parliament being the dominant power within England had been settled, but it had been the de facto case for decades before that - hence why the parliament was able to challenge the king successfully in the first place. In France on the other hand, it was something of a shock that something like this could have taken place, one of the best analogies I've ever heard for grasping this is \"Imagine if the modern United States were overthrown by Maoists [communists]\", France under the bourbon's had been one of the most autocratic governments in Europe, and the legacy of the Sun King made France the most important nation in European politics, so when France of all places was overthrown by an enormous burgher revolt it was quite shocking to everyone. Although there was a king again at the end of the period, it didn't last and France ended up settling out as a Republic so it's not accurate to say that it ultimately failed to change (though if you don't count the whole period it's understandable that you'd believe that). The final major factor involved is the nature of the revolution. In England it was largely a question of religion and of who has authority, it was never a question of what form society should take. In France on the other hand, as things spiraled out of control and more heads started being taken during the terror, the whole structure of the society began to be under question - the peak of this being all that silliness around changing the calendar to 'Thermidorian'. This meant that the French revolution had a much broader range of thought, and the notions of freedom would later go on to infect everywhere that napoleons troops went as he conquered most of Europe(the Napoleonic ideas ended up being the largest influence on Sardinia-Piedmont when it started marching to unite Italy, and for that alone it would be important).\n\n1) Global Impact:\nThe list of places impacted by the French Revolution is too long to reasonably mention if it's explained (which I intend to do). The list ranges from the USA - the Louisiana Purchase would never have happened without it. To Latin America(something of a pet focus of mine) where the independence of the entire region, from Mexico to Argentina happened directly as a result of the Revolution. The important thing to understand about the independence revolutions of the various latin american states is that they were fundamentally run by local Creole elites, quite different from other independence movements. The revolutions all had the same casus belli, the restoration of the 'Desired One' which was the heir to the King of Spain that had been deposed by Napoleon. Here we see the link. Napoleon deposing the king of spain and putting his step-brother Joseph on the throne directly led to the independence of Latin America. This is just one of the many Global reasons why the French Revolution is much more important than the English one.\n\nThe next two are closely linked so I'll actually discuss them as one.\n2) Long-term results:\n3) Intellectual Nature:\nIn the long run, France settled out as a republic, as I said before, whereas we see that England still has a monarchy, power reduced though it might be. The Ideas of the French Revolution and the societal changes, particularly to the idea of war, are unmatched in any other revolution of history(Except maybe the Russian Revolution, but this is something that is under much discussion these days in the post-Soviet world). The change in armies from a small professional group to an entire society at arms is crucial to understand the gap between pre-modern warfare and early modern warfare. In addition to this, the soldiers of Napoleon's armies mingled with people all across europe as he marched around taking stuff, which spread the ideas of the revolution which were FAR from unified. Everything from Liberal Democracy to Communism that we see in the modern world has some roots in the French Revolution, and it was spread all over the place as a result of it, so the long term impact is undeniable. It's quite possible, though this part is debatable, that Unified Germany was strongly impacted by the experience of the Napoleonic Wars, which are linked intrinsically with the revolution by most historians - the process of divide and conquer that allowed Napoleon to steamroll the Rhine made it a much easier to argue that Germany should become one state with one policy to defend against 'the vile french'.\n\nIn conclusion, the English revolution ended merely having codified the de facto laws that existed before, whereas the French revolution was a fundamental change to the way France worked. In addition to this, the scope was much larger, with the French revolution impacting places all across the globe in both the short and long terms. Finally, the nature of the Revolution was much more intellectual and helped give birth to many modern ideologies and setting the roots in place to the others.\n\nThis was just a basic overview of the reasons, but I hope it answered your question satisfactorily.\n\n\nSome of my Sources: (I was mostly drawing from memory and don't have specific page numbers for my facts without tracking down each book again)\n\nSmall unprofessional note: WHY ARE ALL FRENCH REVOLUTION BOOKS SO BORINGLY NAMED????\n\nConnolly, S. (2003). The French Revolution. Chicago, Ill.: Heinemann Library\nA good timeline orientation with some pleasant asides. Rather standard as I recall, but fairly good for further reading nonetheless\n\nKates, G. (1998). The French Revolution : recent debates and new controversies. London: Routledge. \nI think there's a newer version of this but I can't vouch for anything about it. I'd also tend to read this one last as it's at times a bit preachy but gives an important unusual perspective to some of the discussions that few other books give.\n\nLefebvre, G. (2001). The French Revolution: from its origins to 1793. London: Routledge.\nI'd recommend this alongside others since it's originally a French Source, though it introduces a few associated biases, it still offers some good perspective.\n\nMelton, J. Van Horn. (2001). The rise of the public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\n\nThis book was one of the first books I had to read for a class in undergrad, the chapter on the rise of the public in France is CRITICAL to my own understanding of the societal changes associated with France during this period.\n\n\nThere's one other book that's on the tip of my tongue as it were and I'll add it here once I've found it...\n\nEDIT: Here it is: (if i recall correctly, which it's possible that I don't) this book provides some nice details on how the Latin American revolutions were different, including the impact of the French Revolution on it, which has a special place in my heart.\n\nGraham, R. Independence in Latin America : CONTRASTS AND COMPARISONS. THIRD edition."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pj2xl", "title": "Which civilization in the ancient (latest being Early Middle Ages) world held the highest literacy rate? Were there any authors who weren't scholars in that civilization?", "selftext": "When I'm reading about history I hear all of these names of scholars that are always mentioned (For good reason) but I was wondering if there were any lesser known authors who wrote joke books, creative writing or even gossip-type documents? \n\nI'm hoping for books written by people from all of the ages, whether it be on a stone tablet that had a joke or whole books dedicated to something novel. Sorry if it's too loaded of question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pj2xl/which_civilization_in_the_ancient_latest_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd2w8rv", "cd2w9a9", "cd2xly5", "cd2yqva", "cd2z5gu", "cd30pd0", "cd30tz0", "cd31yl1", "cd3319s", "cd331hw", "cd34lmg", "cd34q10", "cd357pe", "cd35wna", "cd395sk"], "score": [18, 68, 12, 231, 19, 8, 71, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["**EDIT** Okay, pretty much everything I've written here is contradicted by u/Silence_Dobetter's below comment and source.  Further digging suggests that high literacy among ancient Jews is something of a myth.  I'll take this up with my source.\n\n**********\n\nPerhaps the Israelites?\n\nI took a class on the history of anti-Semitism where the prof ([a well known jewish scholar](_URL_0_)) postulated that the Israelites created the earliest form of socialised education in 1300 BCE because of rules laid down in the Torah:\n\nNumber 10 - To read the Shema` twice daily, as it is written \"and thou shalt talk of them . . . when thou liest down, and when thou risest up\" (Deuteronomy 6,7).\n\nNumber 11 - To learn Torah and to teach it, as it is written \"thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children\" (Deuteronomy 6,7).\n\nNumber 17 - For every man to write a Torah scroll for himself, as it is written \"write ye this song for you\" (Deuteronomy 31,19). \n\n[from the wiki article: History of education in ancient Israel and Judah](_URL_1_)\n\nBasically, in order to follow God's law, men had to be able to read, and this led to high literacy rates.\n\nMy prof also postulated (although I've never found other sources on this) that this commitment to education had a lot to do with the staying-power of the Jewish people.\n\nEDIT typo\n\nEDIT 2 I took a class which touched on this subject, I claim no other expertise in this area.", "I can't address the literacy issue, but if you want gossip and slander from 6th century Byzantium, you need look no further than [Procopius of Caesarea](_URL_0_).  For example, when describing the Blues (the faction backing Justinian):\n\n > Next they decided to wear the purple stripe on their togas, and swaggered about in a dress indicating a rank above their station: for it was only by ill-gotten money they were able to buy this finery. And the sleeves of their tunics were cut tight about the wrists, while from there to the shoulders they were of an ineffable fullness; thus, whenever they moved their hands, as when applauding at the theater or encouraging a driver in the hippodrome, these immense sleeves fluttered conspicuously, displaying to the simple public what beautiful and well-developed physiques were these that required such large garments to cover them. They did not consider that by the exaggeration of this dress the meagerness of their stunted bodies appeared all the more noticeable. Their cloaks, trousers, and boots were also different: and these too were called the Hun style, which they imitated. ", "Actually early writing was used primarily for buisness and government, not schololary works. Some of the Athenian plays fit what you're looking for.  Aristophanes, a Greek playwrite, wrote subversive satire filled with toilet humor and slander (according to Plato) about the leading figures of his day.\n\n", " > a stone tablet that had a joke\n\n > gossip-type documents\n\nYou might be interested in [graffiti from Pompeii](_URL_0_). Warning, a lot of this is explicit and NSFW! \n\n* *Theophilus, don\u2019t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog* \n* *Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men\u2019s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity*\n\n* *Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates*\n\n* *Lovers are like bees in that they live a honeyed life* \n\n* *I screwed the barmaid*\n\n* *If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girlfriend*\n\n* *Secundus likes to screw boys.*\n\n* *I screwed a lot of girls here.*\n\n* *To the one defecating here.  Beware of the curse.  If you look down on this curse, may you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy.* \n\n* *Gaius Valerius Venustus, soldier of the 1st praetorian cohort, in the century of Rufus, screwer of women*\n\n* *We have wet the bed, host.  I confess we have done wrong.  If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot*\n", "One of the main problems in defining literacy is how differently modern society views 'literacy' as opposed to ancient societies. Generally, it is expected of a 'literate' person today to be able to read general literature, like newspapers, textbooks and novels. This is in stark contrast to what can be perceived as 'literacy' in somewhere like ancient Rome during the Principate. Were people able to read poetry or literature? Could they read simple sentences but not complex ones? Were they able to read quietly or did they have to sound out their writing? \n\nA prime example of this would be the Res Augustae. It is attested by Suetonius that the deeds of the emperor Augustus were published on a golden plaque that rested on the Mausoleum of Augustus (although unfortunately this is said nowhere else in contemporary latin). These were simple phrases, using lots of numbers and possible colloquialisms (utilizing phrases like \"at the city\" as opposed to the more specific \"at Rome\"). Later, the Res Augustae were translated into Koin\u00e9 Greek and inscribed on temples around the ancient Roman world. But really, how can scholars tell what segment of the population was able to read this? Why would Augustus and later emperors inscribe these writings if the vast majority of the population couldn't read? \n\nThis is a fascinating question, but ultimately plagued by a very difficult assessment of not only how to assess what literacy entails, but how exactly modern scholars are supposed to draw out a statistic on a subject that is little documented in archaeology or literature. ", "Literacy has been high with the Bamar people in Burma since the introduction of Buddhism. Traditional monastic learning mandated that young boys and girls should learn to read and write. Upon independence, Burma had a literacy rate of 82% (which went higher in the Bamar people once you disregard the other ethnicities). The government schooling system has, for the most part, replaced traditional monastic learning, so the literacy rate is much higher now.\n\nBuddhism became the dominant religion in the Irrawady valley around the 4th century. I have no idea when monastic learning became prominent, but I would assume a century or two later. I don't know the literacy rates for the period back then, but British visitors claimed that nearly half of all adult males and 5% of adult females were competently literate in around 1830.", "Although I don't know about the literacy rate in China or Persia (pre-Arab Invasions), I can say with certainty that the civilization with the highest literacy rate in Europe during the Late Classical/Early to High Medieval period (5th-12th Centuries AD) was in the Byzantine Empire, where estimates of literacy range anywhere from 30-50% (*Brownworth*, *Magdalino*, etc.). Most, if not, all of the upper and middle classes had at least basic reading and writing, and during certain periods of ascendancy, the Empire boasted primary education for most of its inhabitants (even in small towns and villages), as well as secondary, and even tertiary education for city and town dwellers. And not only that, but highly unusual for the time, women were also allowed to pursue their education, as evidenced by Anna Komnene, and Styliane, the daughter of Michael Psellos, and the need for female physicians in the Imperial *xenonia* hospitals.\n\n*Well, you might be asking, what did these people study in schools?*\n\n Much of the primary education (generally for children) pertained to the ability to read/write scripture and nursery rhymes or famous folk tales, but there was also rudimentary education in mathematics, history, and philosophy. Secondary education, which was to be found in moderate sized cities and towns in the Empire (and designed for older children and teens), generally moved on to things such as public oration, study of the classical epics, and things such as law, observational science, and theology. Tertiary education was found only in the largest cities, but could be attended by really anyone with the drive and aptitude (and the pockets) to do so, although, it seems that especially gifted students from less affluent origins could attend if they were deemed important enough. The Pandidakterion, or University of Constantinople, was perhaps the most prominent of these, and offered over 40 different degrees in the fields of medicine, mathematics, theology, oration, law, and many others.\n\n*And finally, how do we know this?*\n\nThere is a lot of primary source evidence which supports the existence of public education within the Empire. For example, in Michael Psellos' ode to his daughter, Styliane, (who tragically passed away at the age of 20), he remarks that she was \"throughout her life, the best and brightest among her class of pupils\", telling us that there was an organized educational system for non-royalty during his lifetime. \n\nAdditionally, the presence of several novels (like *Drosilla and Charikles* and *the Two-Blood Border Lord*) support the existence of high literacy rates within the Empire, as they were obviously written to be popular amongst a wide range of peoples and classes, otherwise, I cannot see why they would bother to invest so much time and effort in crafting such elaborate and detailed works. \n\nAnd finally, the fact that Emperors and prominent generals wrote many tactical and strategic manuals (such as Leo VI's *Taktika* and the *Praecepta Militaria* of Nikephoros II Phokas) for use as \"reference manuals\" for other generals and officers in the Imperials Army and Navy tells us that the authors expected these manuals to be read and understood by their underlings. ", "I cannot back this up with anything but my vague memory of a Swedish documentary where they had found small wooden pieces with short messages written in runic scripts in either Scandinavia or a norse city in Eastern Europe from the middle ages/\"the viking age\". My memory holds that the messages read things like \"Mom says you should come home\" and \"x fucked y\". However, as I said, I don't have more info on this. Hopefully, someone on this sub perhaps has?\n\n**Edit:** Only found some casual educational pages in Swedish. [Page 1](_URL_1_), [page 2](_URL_0_). A message quoted in both pages is a short love poem:\n\n >  Love me\n\n > I love you\n\n >  Gunnhild\n\n >  Kiss me\n\n >  I feel you\n\n(Translated by me from Swedish, so keep in mind that this is a secondary translation as it has been translated from Old Norse/Old Swedish to modern Swedish.) The second page quotes more short runic messages found on various objects, all of the following are translated by me from Swedish, I'll add the time period the page says the objects were found:\n\n* \"Torkjel Coin Master sends you pepper.\" (ca 1200)\n\n\n\n* \"Ragnar owns this yarn.\" (ca 1200)\n\n \n\n* \"Likko owns the knife.\" (ca 1100, carved on a knife.)\n\n\n\n* \"Margareta owns me.\" (1300s. \"Me\", in this case would probably be the object this was carved on. The site doesn't state what the object is.)\n\n\n\n* \"Ingeborg loved me while I was in Stavanger.\" (1100s)\n\n\n\n* \"Jon Velvet Pussy owns me, Guttorm Pussy Licker carved me, Jon Pussy Ball(?) deciphers me.\" (1100s)\n\n\n\n* \"Ole is shieldless, he was fucked in the ass.\" (ca 1200)\n\n\n **Edit 2:** /u/grantimatter knows more about this, see below.", "Ancient literate not-exactly-scholars brings to mind the [Shang dynasty oracle bones](_URL_0_), which are some of the oldest known examples of written words anywhere. They go back to 1600 BCE. \n\nThey were being used in divination - toss a bone or turtle shell into a cooking fire, then see if the cracks spell any messages out. \n\nSome of the questions preserved along with the old bones (some carved into the bones themselves) are things like: \"The king dreamed of white cattle - shall there be a disaster?\" and \"The Wife Hao shall give birth - will it be a happy event?\"\n\nDiviners asking questions of bones were in all likelihood from an educated class and functioned like professionals or specialists in court, so were something like scholars. But the questions and answers are not scholarly writing - a whole other kind of way to use letters. \n\nThough if you read ahead a couple of pages in that linked source, you'll find some ways the diviners were writing something like histories. Narratives about specific events. \n", "there is a Roman comedy written in the mid second century called the Metamorphoses by Apuleius, today we call it the Golden Ass. it is pretty good. it is also the only Roman novel that survived in its entirety.\n\n ", "you might be interested in Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84\u201354 BC). He was a Latin poet that is known for his vulgar poems.\n\nBelow is a link to the translation of one of his most famous (and also vulgar) poems. \n\n_URL_0_", "FYI, there are more responses in this post from a few weeks ago. It also includes links to several more:\n\n[What was the literacy rate of nobles, kings and Emperors in Europe during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages?](_URL_0_)", "I can't believe nobody has mentioned medieval Islam. From [Wikipedia](_URL_0_): \n\n\"In medieval times, the Caliphate experienced a growth in literacy, having the highest literacy rate of the Middle Ages, comparable to classical Athens' literacy in antiquity.\"\n\nMost of the knowledge we have of ancient literature was preserved by Islamic scholars.\n\n[edit] To answer your question though, non-religious poetry was popular during the Abbasid period. They were clever and relied on puns, but not quite \"ha-ha\" funny.", "The archeological site at [Deir el-Medina](_URL_0_) (*Set Maat*) provides exceptional insight into the living conditions of skilled craftsmen during The New Kingdom of Egypt (1550-1069 B.C.E.). The finds there suggest that the majority of adults of both sexes were sufficiently literate; they wrote letters, had copies of popular literature, collected spells and incantations, wrote receipts for goods, etc. \n\n > The surviving texts record the events of daily life rather than major historical incidents. Personal letters reveal much about the social relations and family life of the villagers. The ancient economy is documented by records of sales transactions that yield information on prices and exchange. Records of prayers and charms illustrate ordinary popular conceptions of the divine, whilst researchers into ancient law and practice find a rich source of information recorded in the texts from the village. Many examples of the most famous works of Ancient Egyptian literature have also been found. Thousands of papyri and ostraca still await publication.\n\nOne has to keep in mind, however, that the people populating Set Maat were not necessarily a representative sample of the population as a whole. These were mainly skilled artisans and their families. Some undoubtedly kept slaves, who would have been poorly literate, if literate at all. ", "Silence_Dubetter [argues that the Jews](_URL_6_) were not the first to achieve universal Jewish literacy because in the 1st century CE Jewish had about a 3% literacy rate.  The 1st century is the exact wrong place to take this measurement, because scholars only claim widespread Jewish literacy after the second century CE.  Let me explain.  The high priest [Joshua ben Gamla](_URL_3_) is the one who is supposed to have established \"a universal system of education after all previous attempts failed. He evolved a system whereby 'teachers of young children be appointed in each district and each town,' whereas previously they were to be found only in Jerusalem.\"  ben Gamla died in c. 65-70 C.E., so the *2nd* century is when you start having claims of universal Jewish male literacy.  Here's the [Jewish Encyclopedia](_URL_0_) page on him, Nut the name source we have on him is in the Talmud on *Baba Batra* 21a, which is available [here](_URL_1_).  Commentary from the [Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud](_URL_4_) by [Adin Steinsaltz](_URL_2_) adds: \n\n > Yehoshua ben Gamla is most likely one of the last kohanim gedolim (=high priests) of the second Temple period, who is mentioned in Josephus as Yehoshua ben Gamliel. If this identification is correct, he was appointed to this position by King Agrippas II.\n\n > Yehoshua ben Gamla is praised by the Sages for a number of things, among them donating golden plates for the Yom Kippur lottery, but chiefly for instituting a formal elementary school system in every city in Israel. This led the sages to say about him, \"were it not for him, the Torah would have been totally forgotten.\"\n\n**Anyway, it is generally said that only through ben Gamla's innovative school system, which only started in the second half of the first century CE, that gave Jews achieved near universal male literacy**, perhaps starting as early as the 2nd century.  \n\n[*The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History 70-1492*](_URL_5_) by Maristella Botticini  &  Zvi Eckstein (2012, Princeton University Press) adds on page 72:\n\n > Although Josephus solemnly claimed at the end of the first century CE that \"children's' education is the principal care among the Jews\", there is no direct evidence that primary education became universal within either the large Jewish community in the Land of Israel or the Jewish communities of Mesopotamia and Egypt.  In fact, the vast majority of the Jewish population in the Land of Israel during the first two centuries was probably illiterate.\n\n > The slow implementation of Josha ben Gamla's ruling regarding children's instruction is understandable if one remembers the historical context in which the new religious norm came into existence.  The Pharisaic high priest issued this ruling at a time when the Jewish leadership was split between Sadducees and Pharisees.  Joshua himself was forced out of the post of high priest after one year.  There is no evidence that Sadduccees' high preists, who were then in power, accepted and supported this ruling.  In his detailed historical accounts, Josephus, who called Joshua ben Gamla his friend, did not report any information regarding the establishment of primary schools in his time.  Moreover, the first Jewish-Roman war, which broke up within a few year of Joshua ben Gamla's ruling, would have made it difficult to immediately implement the educational reform envisaged by the Pharisaic high priest.\n\n > Whether or not the ruling of Joshua ben Gamla was swiftly implemented into world Jewry in his time is irrelevant for the theory we present in the next chapter.  What is important is that this ruling was issued in the form a *takkanah*, a legislative religious enactment that every Jewish had to obey.  Religious instruction (i.e., learning to read and study the Torah) for both children and adults became a religious norm that grew to be the \"lever of Judaism\" in subsequent centuries\n\nThis obviously became particularly important after the Temple was destroyed and R. Johanan ben Zakkai, founder of the academy at Javneh, declared that animal sacrifice on the altar had to be replaced with prayer.\n\n*ibid*. pg. 75,\n\n > At the institutional level, the legacy of the Pharisees [*effectively the founders of Rabbinic Judaism*] was to transform into reality the religious norm of Joshua ben Gamla by making primary education almost universal in world Jewry.  The authority of the rabbis of the Land of Israel deeply influenced, and was accepted by, the Jewish communities in Mesopotamia and the rest of the Diaspora.\n\npg. 100:\n\n > The growth of the academies in Mesopotamia documented in many passages of the Talmud indirectly suggest that more Jewish children must have received some primary education--a perquisite for entering the secondary schools and then the academies.\n\n > Both the Talmud of the Land of Israel and the Babylonian Talmud [*there are two versions of the Talmud, don't worry about it, we usually talk about the Babylonian Talmud*] are filled with discussions and ruling regarding schools, synagogues pupils, books, duties and wages of teachers, duties of parents to provide for their children's Torah study, and duties of pupils towards their teachers.  Such issues were unheard of in other rural civilizations of the time.\n\n > The picture that emerges from this enormous body of discussions and rulings is one of a farming society that was setting up economic, legal, and social tools to implement the religious ruling of Joshua ben Gamla and to make primary education universal among Jewish boys.  For example, the Talmud of the Land of Israel reports that Hillel, the son of Gamliel III and grandson of Rabbi Judah haNasi, worked to establish an educational system despite the financial difficulties of his times.  To accomplish his goal, he asked three distinguished scholars to travel to many locations and to appoint teachers of children in many towns and villages.  Some debates and rulings in the Talmud regulated the practical organization of primary instruction.  One ruling, for example, established a communal tax to provide for the wages of teachers of the Torah and Mishna.  Another ruling required that unmarried people with no children who resided in a town had to pay for the wages of teachers.  A third ruling allowed the community as a whole to fire a teacher if he did not follow the parents' instruction.\n\nPg. 111:\n\n > The four centuries spanning from the redaction of the Mishna circa 200 to the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century witnessed the implementation of Josha ben Gamla's ruling and the establishment of a system of universal primary education centered on the synagogue.  This sweeping change completely transformed Judaism into a religion centered on reading, studying, and implementing the rules of the Torah and the Talmud.  A Jewish farmer going on pilgrimage to and performing ritual sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem was the icon of Judaism until 70 CE [the destruction of the Temple]. In the early seventh century, the emblem of world Jewry was a Jewish farmer reading and studying the Torah in a synagogue and sending his sons to school or the synagogue to learn to do so.\n\nTL; DR: That 3% Jewish literacy in the 1st Century CE may well be true, but it's before the time most scholars claim that Jews had universal male literacy.  What you'd like to see is data for Jewish literacy *after* c. 200 CE, which seems to suggest that Jews *were* the first people to achieve universal male literacy.\n\n*edit*: as for the second part of your question, \"I was wondering if there were any lesser known authors who wrote joke books, creative writing or even gossip-type documents?\", that I don't know about.  I'll message the /u/koine_lingue, /u/gingerkid1234, and /u/SF2K01 as they're more likely to know than me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://liberalartscollege.concordia.ca/faculty-and-staff/krantz.php", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_ancient_Israel_and_Judah"], ["http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/procop-anec.asp"], [], ["http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%20pompeii.htm"], [], [], [], ["http://www.multiart.nu/grimner/svenska/texter/runhist.html", "http://litteraturbanken.se/#!presentationer/specialomraden/RunornasLitteratur.html"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=IE-u0zSrZ84C&amp;lpg=PA10&amp;dq=shang%20dynasty%20oracle%20bones&amp;pg=PA10#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], [], ["http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e37.htm"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nscus/what_was_the_literacy_rate_of_nobles_kings_and/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maktab"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina"], ["http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8912-joshua-jesus-ben-gamla", "http://www.on1foot.org/text/talmud-bavli-baba-batra-21a", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adin_Steinsaltz", "http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0011_0_10355.html", "http://steinsaltz.org/learning.php?pg=Daf_Yomi&amp;articleId=1696", "http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9744.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pj2xl/which_civilization_in_the_ancient_latest_being/cd2yh47"]]}
{"q_id": "2szczh", "title": "My grandfather was a German soldier in WWII and I found this map in his old Atlas.", "selftext": "First of all I hope this is the correct Subreddit for this.  \nSo I was browsing threw some old family books when I was home for Christmas and stumbled upon my grandfathers old school atlas. I was flipping through the pages until I came across a [map](_URL_0_) of Poland and noticed handwriting on it. I knew my grandfather joined the German army at the age of 17. After I asked my dad about it he said his father never really talked about the war and destroyed all his fills before passing away. All we know is that my grandfather was involved with tanks, he said he used to look out the top of the tank, so maybe a tank commander? So I guess im asking if anyone could help me find out what division he was in or something like that.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2szczh/my_grandfather_was_a_german_soldier_in_wwii_and_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnud5fd"], "score": [88], "text": ["The retreat from Warsaw that's plotted on the map corresponds in time and places to the so called \"wandering cauldron of Kielce\" of parts of the 342 Infantry Division - more specifically the XXIVth Panzerkorps.  \"Cauldron battle\" is the German term for an encirclement battle - the troops were encircled by the Soviet troops and fought themselves free along Petrikau, Shiraz, Kalisch and Lissa on to Glogau in Germany. These places are all marked on the map in a dashed line, most likely to mark a retreat (opposed to the straight line marking the march to the front to Warschau/Warsaw).\n\nWhile I haven't been able to pinpoint any more specific units your grandfather may have fought in, I hope this might serve as a first pointer to someone more versed in these matters than me. It's late here and I need to go to bed, but I'll have another look at it tomorrow and try to find out about these battles around Warsaw to further narrow down which unit your grandfather may have belonged to.\n\n\nEdit: Had another quick glance at the map - the unit your grandpa was in seems to have ended the war near the town of Budweis/Bud\u011bjovice. (From the location on the map, even though it is not mapped itself. But if you'd draw a triangle between Budweis, Prague and Pilsen, and put it on the map from your grandfather, you'd get approximately the same area that he plotted). The XXIVth Panzerkorps ended the war in this area and was dissolved there, so it seems very likely that your grandfather volunteered/got drafted, trained in Germany and sent to Warsaw where he joined the XXIVth Panzerkorps, fought in the retreating battles of the Eastern front and then saw the end of the war in the Czech Republic."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/DFJz9kX.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3pmr95", "title": "What determines whether the country uses its indigenous language as the main language or a foreign language as the main language?", "selftext": "An example is Finland and American countries. Finland was Russian for more than 100 years. The Russian language is not a main language of Finland. All American countries use languages which are not indigenous as the main languages.\n\nWhat determines whether the country uses its indigenous language as the main language or a foreign language as the main language?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pmr95/what_determines_whether_the_country_uses_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw7me1b", "cw7q471"], "score": [5, 4], "text": ["The Finns always remained in Finland, even when they were under Russian occupation. Similarly when the Swedes owned the land the language never \"died out\" as such, as it was still spoken by the majority of people - Swedish became Finland's second language however, as the nobility spoke it.\n\nOn the other hand, the Americas saw huge swathes of native people dying due to disease and/or conquest, and colonialism took root. The modern nations are mostly based on the colonies that founded them, and so the languages spoken by the colonists have become the main ones, in almost all countries except Paraguay (where Guaran\u00ed is still the most spoken language).\n\nThe main difference is the fact that Finland was never a colonial nation, that is, it was always in Europe and therefore was never exposed to the difficulties nations that were not European (e.g. Native American peoples) had. Africa is an interesting thing to think about here - although it was colonised to a similar extent to the new world, the native languages remained. People did not die from diseases in the same way that they did across the Atlantic, as traders would already have brought the diseases millennia ago.", " > All American countries use languages which are not indigenous as the main languages\n\nSlight nitpick: Guaran\u00ed is more widely spoken in Paraguay than Spanish (though both are spoken as a first or second language by  > 85% of the population), and both are official languages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3cslm7", "title": "How bloody was the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands?", "selftext": "Did the people buckle under the weight? Was dissent routed out and crushed? Did revolutionary groups form? Were there mass-roundups similar to the horrors of the 20th century?\n\nOr was it relatively orderly which much of the bloodshed done on the battlefield?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cslm7/how_bloody_was_the_spanish_occupation_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csymkkg", "csz4g3e"], "score": [18, 5], "text": ["Considering the revolt of the Netherlands lasted 80 years, this varied greatly by period. Regents such as Mary of Hungary was able to increase the wealth of the region through trade, although she was over-ridden by Charles V who captured and executed leaders of the Ghent revolt to discourage further objections to higher taxation. \n\nMargaret of Parma was a weak regent, which saw the rise of further objections to taxation and the rise of Calvinism. She also saw a power struggle between herself, the clerics, the magnates, the council of state, and Protestants. Her alarming letters, warning of hundreds of thousands of rebels, led to Philip II sending the Duke of Alba at the head of tens of thousands of Spanish troops. \n\nOf course, the reign of the Duke of Alba itself started with the Council of Blood that saw strong repression of rebels, both Catholic and Protestant. Most importantly, those executed include Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency, both heroes of Philip II's army. Instead of pacifying the region, this fortified the belief of local nobility that their king was out for blood and revenge. Further, the presence of such a large body of troops led to increased tax and burden to local towns. The Duke of Alba was mostly victorious in battle, but the locals increasingly turned against him. \n\nHis replacement, Don Luis de Zuniga y Requesens preferred compromise. He recommended amnesty to all except the most ardent heretics. He led armies to victory in battle. However, when money failed to come from Spain, he was forced to negotiate and worse some of his troops mutinied and sacked towns. \n\nKing Philip II's illegitimate brother Don Juan of Austria, fresh off his great victory at Lepanto, was sent to the low countries to be regent, however he died and was replaced by Alessandro Farnese, son of Margaret of Parma. Farnese was able to rally the catholic rulers, mostly in the south, behind him. With local support he was able to win back cities that had been lost: Tournei, Maastricht, Breda, Bruges, Ghent, opened their gates to him rather than risk a protracted and bloody siege. He laid siege to Antwerp and won that city. \n\nWere the Spanish the only ones who tortured and murdered dissenters? Not even close. As an example, Calvinists tortured and murdered  Catholics in Brielle. Watergeuzens captured civilians and sold them to Mediterranean slavery. \n\nThis is a very big topic that is best answered if you specialize your question to certain periods, groups, or regions. \n\nLastly, you have to keep in mind that the first half of the conflict saw Spanish troops largely winning field engagements, as they had much higher quality troops. Their main challenge was money and local politics. This results in sackings and mutinies. This is not to say that the other side is innocent, but this impacts portrayal especially in English language historiography.\n\nEdit: if you can read only one paper on this, I highly recommend: G. Parker, \"Why Did the Dutch Revolt Last Eighty Years?,\" Trans. Royal Historical Society, vol. 26, December 1976. It covers the outbreak and development really well, and in good context.", "There wasn't really a \"Spanish occupation\" akin to the Nazi occupation where \"the Spanish\" took over the country. The Dutch provinces, at the time, were simply another part of Philip II's domain, and when unrest was on the rise he used Spanish and Italian troops to try and restore order.\n\nThe Dutch revolt was one of open resistance, mostly by defiant cities, rather than a guerilla campaign or insurrection. Only at sea did privateers such as the Watergeuzen and the Dunkirkers wage irregular war on eachother's merchant shipping, but that was pretty much par for the course in those days. On land, it was a tale of siege and counter-siege, not of the Resistance skulking about in the dark.\n\nNow, these sieges and counter-sieges could be very bloody. There were a number of violent massacres enacted by both sides, which did include mass-executions on occasion. On the Dutch side the massacre of the Martyrs of Gorkum is particularly infamous. [u/Itsalrightwithme](_URL_0_) referred to this incident when mentioning the killings of Catholics at Brielle/Den Briel.\n\nIn typical Dutch histories, the command of the duke of Alba is considered infamously violent and bloody. The duke is depicted as a bloody tyrant who ordered massacres at Mechelen, Naarden and Zutphen, typically called \"bloodbaths\" in Dutch.\n\nNow, Spanish troops in the Low Countries regularly sacked cities they captured, but that was in part because they were perpetually underpaid and mutinous. This was the case at Antwerpen, and at Haarlem, where the Spanish commander proved unable to honour his agreement that the city would not be sacked. (Though Alba did deliberately execute the entire 2000 strong garrison at Haarlem.)\n\nAt the other sackings mentioned, however, Alba deliberately instigated massacres as a terror-tactic. In a letter to Philip II he boasted that \"Not a man born escaped\" the sack of Naarden. His bloody sack of Zutphen indeed succeeded in intimidating many other settlements into surrender, though the massacre at Naarden had the opposite effect.\n\nIt should be noted that the Dutch and Spanish depictions of these events do differ in some aspects: the Spanish claim that the Dutch civilians never offered surrender at Naarden, whereas contemporary Dutch histories claim the massacre came after the town had opened its gates in what they call an example of Spanish treachery.\n\nThe Dutch used events like these heavily for propaganda purposes throughout their history, lending their cause an air of righteousness. To illustrate: the later 17th century historian P.C. Hooft accused the Spanish of practising cannibalism at Naarden. \n\nThen again, cardinal de Granvelle did think call Alba's use of violence extreme, calling it \"counterproductive\" in one of his letters. Eventually, after many complains and limited results, the duke of Alba was recalled and replaced.\n\nThe Dutch also didn't depict other Spanish commanders in the same light as Alba. Alessandro Farnese, the duke of Parma, for example, has a quite favourable reputation in Dutch history books, despite coming much closer than Alba did to stomping out the Dutch revolt."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/user/Itsalrightwithme"]]}
{"q_id": "1huqtq", "title": "How strong/muscular were ancient warriors? Did they know enough about muscle growth to be the same build as many athletes/bodybuilders now? When did humans start becoming adept at bodybuilding?", "selftext": "If a modern army still fought only in close combat would we generally be trained much fitter and stronger than our historical counterparts or were Romans/Vikings/Normans/Hun/Crusaders still very muscular?\n\nAlso when did Humans really start understanding and start to practice growing muscle size?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1huqtq/how_strongmuscular_were_ancient_warriors_did_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cay4mqq", "cay4ovw", "cay6dcn", "cay8iib", "cayb4en", "cayb4q1", "cayg8gk"], "score": [110, 35, 13, 4, 13, 6, 7], "text": ["In general, the population today is much larger than they were during ancient or medieval times. Better access to food, especially rich in protein and fat has allowed the human population (at least in the western world) to become much taller.\n\nThat said, the population back then were much more accustomed to hardships and laborous work. The Athenian army that fought at Marathon marched out about 42km to fight the Persian army, donned their armour (the full equipment of the hoplite would weight about 60 kg) and charged the Persian army and forced them to retreat to their ships. Then they turned around and ran back towards Athens as they feared that the Persians were attacking the city in their absence.\n\nIt is not entirely certain if the Athenian hoplites all had heavy bronze armour, or if a majority of them were rich enough to have servants carry their equipment for them while on the march (the Spartans often had Helots do this for them), but almost none of them would have been professional soldiers, yet they had the stamina to march 42km, charge and fight the Persians and then RUN back to Athens, with all their equipment (regardless if someone else carried it for them or not).\n\nSomething that was trained a lot in ancient armies was an inverted tug of war, where two sides would form lines and try to push each other back (to be strong and coordinated enough to break the other side's line), somthing I suppose would train your strength and dexterity - and your stamina, doing that all day in the sun - a lot.\n\nFit is of course a relative term. A viking *Hirdman* would spend his days training, but also eating and drinking. Providing good food and drink and getting your *hirdm\u00e4n* large was a matter of prestige. On campaign, food could be scarce, and having a reserve layer of fat for less bountiful days was seen as a wise precaution for soldiers, as long as they kept their strength and stamina up. A heavy soldier is also in a better position to push when the shield walls meet.\n\nRoman gladiators were known to consume huge amounts of barley gruel in an attempt to develop a thick layer of underskin fat, which would protect the muscles and organs beneath from superficial cuts and wounds.\n\nSo, to answer your question, most soldiers from those times would be strong, have a great stamina, be very much used to harships and hard labour, but would not necessarily look fit as we define it in modern terms.", "I can't directly answer your question about 'ancient warriors', but what I will give you is a short history of modern bodybuilding and weightlifting. (**Edit:** and the reason I'm doing that is to answer how and why humans got adept at bodybuilding, and how that doesn't really apply back in pre-modern times)\n\nHistories of weightlifting and strength training often point back to Ancient Greece, but the fact is we don\u2019t really know as much as we\u2019d like about ancient strength training and military practice. It seems that the \u2018ancients\u2019 tended to do lifting with stones, although early forms of dumbbells seem to have existed as well (I\u2019m think Halteres, which Gardiner *Athletics in the Ancient World* and Pearl *Gettering Stronger: Weight Training for Sports* both mention. Galen seems to have mention of weight training regimes, which is noted in medieval texts such as Camerarius 1544 *Dialogue de gymnasius* and also de Montaigne in the 16th mentions filling objects with lead to use as weights.\n\nIt\u2019s not, however, until the late 19th century that you get the development of the barbell. And it\u2019s not until much later that you get the use of stands that enable things like modern benchpressing or the squat (prior to that you had techniques like the Steinborn Lift, which is basically holding the barbell vertical and then letting it half-fall onto you as you lift it up).\n\nIn the mid 19th century you get the growth of strongmen as travelling performers. This created greater interest in \u2018physical culture\u2019 and a Prussian named Friedrich Muller, later known as Eugene Sandow, became well known as a travelling strongman, in both Europe and America, but also actively promoted \u2018bodybuilding\u2019, through designing equipment and a magazine (at first \u201cPhysical Culture\u201d, later \u201cSandow\u2019s Magazine of Physical Culture\u201d. 1891 there were World Weightlifting Championships, and at the 1896 Olympics there were 2 weightlifting events (a clean and jerk, and a one hand lift which was kind of like the snatch, but done one handed, and had to be matched with the other hand. WL was omitted in 1900, appeared in 1904, again omitted in 08 and 12, and resumed in 1920. The 1920 games introduced weight divisions. In 1928 there were 3 exercises: clean and press, snatch, and clean and jerk, but the clean and press was dropped in 1972.\n\nIn the 1900s-1930s figures like Bernarr Macfadden (originally \u2018Bernard\u2019) and Charles Atlas promoted bodybuilding and the like. Atlas in particular promoted bodyweight training. Throughout these first two periods the main emphasis is on aesthetics, symmetry, and the \u2018Grecian\u2019 ideal of physique. \n\nIn the 1930s you see the emergence of physique competitions, but most of the competitors come from other athletic divisions. 1939 is the start of Mr America competition. Weightlifting is still not really thought of as a sport, but its importance to building muscle mass is beginning to become apparent.\n\nIn the 1940s John Grimek dominates the Mr America competition, and is primarily a weight lifter. You also see the split organisationally between bodybuilding and weightlifting, with the formation of the International Federation of Body Builders in 1949.\nThe public exposure of bodybuilding grows greatly in the 50s, in large part due to Steve Reeves, who won Mr America in 47, 48, and 50, and became a star actor. \n\nThe 60s represent a new stage, as better understanding of bio-science and nutrition leads to much bigger body builders. You also see the Weider create Mr Olympia in 1965, creating an ongoing competition for bodybuilding of the highest caliber. Furthermore there is a greater emphasis on sheer muscle mass. \n\nI\u2019ll leave off the history of bodybuilding after the 70s, but basically this is the history of its development into a \u2018sport\u2019. You do see the influx and influence of anabolic steroids in the late 70s. But to go back to some of your other major questions, there\u2019s no doubt that ancients understood basic nutrition and basic exercise well. But modern biochemistry and sports science, not so much. You also need to realise that becoming a mass monster involves a lot of luxury \u2013 your society needs to be producing quality caloric excess for you to be able to eat a lot, and you need to be free from other labour to exercise fairly relentlessly. At the same time, historical counterparts generally had much more physical and enduring lifestyles, which modern militaries do not attempt to emulate (because they obviously do not fight hand to hand all the time. If they did we would train our armies differently).\n\n\n", "Modern weight training requires fairly specialized equipment; well-made iron barbells and plates that can handle heavy (and often dynamic) loads, for example, as well as iron plates (although early barbell training used globes filled with sand or shot instead of heavy plates), or at least a selectorized machine capable of mimicking correct joint functions. This is equipment to which the ancients did not have access.\n\nThe ancients also likely did not understand the proper role of strength training (indeed, many modern coaches do not), which is to provide \"general physical preparedness\" on top of which sport- (or combat-) specific conditioning and skill training can be applied, not something that should be done at the same time and in the same way as sport- or combat-specific training. This is not an obvious intuition at all, but it is backed up by modern research showing that (for example) basketball players who train with a weighted ball, or boxers who train with weighted gloves, actually tend to perform worse than athletes who do not. It's why baseball pitchers train by bench pressing and practicing their throwing technique with a normal ball rather than merely practicing with a weighted ball (trying to combine strength and skill training and ruining both in the process)\n\nModern bodybuilders apply this in a direction that would have been further alien to the ancients; for example, a big, muscular chest can most easily be developed with benching exercises (barbell or dumbbell bench presses or chest flyes), but a flat bench is a piece of equipment that did not begin to feature prominently in weightlifting or sport training until the mid-20th century (and arguably did not really take off until the rise of bodybuilding and powerlifting, and decline of weightlifting, in the '70s and '80s). So it's unlikely that Roman gladiators had massive pecs; even early 20th century weightlifters didn't have those. Furthermore, training for muscular size, muscular strength, and explosiveness are not the same thing (the rep ranges, rest intervals, timing of workouts, training volume, and training intensity are totally different). So even an unusually strong warrior wouldn't necessarily have been comparable to a modern bodybuilder.\n\nHowever, they did understand the concept of progressive overload. The earliest mention of this concept comes from the (embellished) story of Milo of Croton, a 6th century BC Greek wrestler born in Italy. As the legend goes, Milo lifted a calf over his shoulder every day; as the calf grew larger, so did he, until he could shoulder a full-grown ox. He allegedly subsisted on a daily diet of 20 pounds of bread, 20 pounds of meat, and 18 pints of wine. Sadly, no food logs or YouTube videos from the period catalogue these feats of muscular and digestive fortitude.", "A related question to this : Tacitus, when he talks about the germanians, says that their \"free way of life, unburdened by any laws and rules, lead to them being of great physical stature\" (not the exact quote, but you get the idea). Many historians have dismissed the idea that the \"barbarians\" would be bigger than the romans/greeks (as most movies like to portray them), because most of the time they didn't have enough food. \n\nIs Tacitus right in that \"free\" societies such as the barbarian tribes produced more muscular/taller men, even though it should be physically improbable?", "I do not know if they were of the same build as bodybuilders, but both the ancients and the medieval people understood the importance of endurance,strength, agility and flexibility. \n\nOne of the ancient military manuals - Vegetius' De Re Militari spends some time on the physical training of soldiers. \nHere is something from the [1940's reprint](_URL_0_)\n\n > But the young recruits in particular must be exercised in running, in order to charge the enemy with great vigor; occupy, on occasion, an advantageous post with greater expedition, and prevent the enemy in their designs upon the same; that they may, when sent to reconnoiter, advance with speed, return with greater celerity and more easily come up with the enemy in a pursuit.\nLeaping is another very necessary exercise, to enable them to pass ditches or embarrassing eminences of any kind without trouble or difficulty. There is also another very material advantage to be derived from these exercises in time of action; for a soldier who advances with his javelin,.running and leaping, dazzles the eyes of his adversary, strikes him with terror, and gives him the fatal stroke before he has time to put himself on his defense. Sallust, speaking of the excellence of Pompey the Great in these particulars, tells us that he disputed the superiority in leaping with the most active, in running with the most swift, and in exercises of strength with the most robust. Nor would he ever have been able to have opposed Serrorius with success, if he had not prepared both himself and his soldiers for action by continual exercises of this sort.\n\nLater texts also pick up on this - for example Machiavelli's book \"Of the art of war\". These manuals also include recommendations for the qualities of the soldiers - including size, build and which people are good for where...\n\nMedieval and Renaisance fencing manuals while not that directly also address manners of physical qualities - for example the Segno from the manual of [Fiore dei Liberi] (_URL_2_) where each animal represents strength, agility, braveness, etc.  \n\nHere is another image of people [training](_URL_1_) from the XV-th century\n\nSo they did know the importance of certain qualities, and how to improve them trough training. \nPerhaps modern soldiers are not stronger, but are on equal grounds. I would argue that modern soldiers would have better diet, but I have no idea how that would factor, and do not have the data to make the argument. ", "For more info, you may want to reference past questions on this topic found in the \"[Did people in the past exercise/work out/lift weights?](_URL_0_)\" section of the FAQ, to which this question has been added.", "Medieval illustrations are not as detailed at times as we would like them; of the instances where we have bare bodies protrayed, they can be [difficult to scrutinize for physique](_URL_3_). \"Herr Jacob von Warte\", Manesse Codex, 1340. \n\nMaster Fiore dei Liberi wrote in 1409 that wrestling is the beginning of studying the arts of war, and that wrestling calls for 8 qualities. The very first that he mentions is *sforteza*, strength/fortitude.\n\nNotable illustrations from the 14th and 15 centuries show warriors training in numerous ways, as seen in the [Wolfegg Hausbuch](_URL_1_). There are sizable rocks being lifted, but also wrestling. Wrestling builds an incredible amount of strength and stamina, as well as coordination and balance. \n\nDi Grassi wrote in his fencing treatise of 1594 \"Therefore let everie man that is desierous to practise this Art, indevor himselfe to get strength and agilitie of bodie\". It seems clear that he felt that strength and agility were qualities that could and must be cultivated.\n\nCapo Ferro published a fencing manual in 1610, with figures [more or less nude.]( _URL_0_) One can see that these fencers have [well-toned musculature](_URL_2_). While this might seem like splitting hairs, rapier is a weapon that was used in a manner very different from the swords that preceded it, necessarily cultivating a different physique. For one, wrestling was essentially eliminated from the historical rapier curricula, aside from the occasional throw. Consider that modern Olympic fencers tend to cultivate a very different physique from modern wrestlers. While they are not the same systems as the men-at-arms of the Middle Ages used, historical fencing researchers have shown that rapier vs previous swordsmanship systems encourage very different builds.\n\n*edit: formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.digitalattic.org/home/war/vegetius/", "http://fortezafitness.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/training.jpg", "http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources/liberi/images/segno_getty.jpg"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/health#wiki_did_people_in_the_past_exercise.2Fwork_out.2Flift_weights.3F"], ["http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120627003809/princessbride/images/c/c8/Lunge_with_Capo_Ferro.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Hausbuch_Wolfegg_14r_Sol.jpg", "http://duello.tv/assets/capo-ferro-plate-92-600x360.jpg", "http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0088?sid=60be281522126e926c27458bebb814b0"]]}
{"q_id": "ec5532", "title": "I just read in a wikipedia page on Roman food that rations of wheat were distributed by the Roman state to as many as 200,000 individuals per month (1st century). What other kind of welfare programs did Rome have in place?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ec5532/i_just_read_in_a_wikipedia_page_on_roman_food/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fb97j3n", "fbc383o"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["[The Roman grain distributions were not, and should not be thought of, \"welfare\" in any really recognizable sense. Nor was the Augustan roll of 200,000 really particularly impressive, even compared to earlier grain distributions](_URL_0_)", "Speaking about the republic and earlier empire, and quoting Greg Woolf (Food, Poverty, and Patronage: The Significance of the Epigraphy of the Roman Alimentary Schemes in Early Imperial Italy), \u201cneither charity nor state welfare can be shown to have been significant sources of assistance to the poor in the ancient world,\u201d and as u/XenophonTheAthenian noted above, you have to squint very hard at the Augustan grain dole to make it resemble modern welfare systems. \n\nSince you asked about other kinds of welfare, though, let\u2019s at least go over a few other kinds of not\u2011welfare-except-if-you-squint. Alimentary schemes and public distributions provided by wealthy individuals are noteworthy among other Roman customs and institutions that might have been beneficial to the destitute. However, both are subject to basically the same type of caveats as the grain dole: there is not much evidence that they were specifically aimed at the lowest strata of society, and there is even contrary evidence, namely, that higher-status beneficiaries customarily were given more.\n\nPublic feasts and distributions of food or money were often paid for by wealthy members of a community (for instance, a certain town) for the benefit of other members, and in addition to being paid for as one-off gifts or to mark certain celebrations (weddings, holidays, etc.), were frequently set up in a wealthy individual\u2019s will, by establishing a foundation to provide public giveaways in the deceased\u2019s memory on recurring occasions. These foundations often functioned by being initially endowed with a lump sum of capital and then lending it out at interest, over time recycling the initial capital into new loans and using the interest to fund the benefit that had been set up. The benefit to the giver essentially lay in the purchase of prestige, influence, and/or remembrance.\n\nWhile such distributions of food and money were benefits to the donor\u2019s community, they weren\u2019t welfare and they weren\u2019t even specifically aimed at the poor (which makes sense considering the aim to gain prestige in life or to be remembered after death; neither of these goals required, or was helped by, focusing particularly on the destitute.). The most that can be said of them from a welfare perspective is that a meal or a money gift might have been more important to the very poorest than to others who received it. But these feasts and distributions were occasional events and often offered smaller gifts to the poor than to the influential, whose gratitude was more valuable.\n\nSecond, there were various alimenta. An alimentum was a fund set up to benefit (typically) children of a certain community by paying for their subsistence until they come of age. We know of various privately funded alimentary schemes, often aimed at supporting a certain number of children in the donor\u2019s home community. In the reign of Trajan (or possibly his predecessor Nerva) in the early second century A.D., the emperors got in on what had previously been a private and localized game, with numerous large alimenta schemes aimed at children in various communities in Italy. \n\nThese alimentary schemes often, though not always, had a very similar financial basis as that of the feast-providing or gift\u2011providing foundations: an initial endowment of money is loaned out at interest, and the interest income pays for the benefits. Next to the grain dole, these funds for the benefit of children are the Roman institutions that superficially most resemble modern welfare, and they very likely did help some destitute children, but we have the exact same caveats: there is not a lot of evidence that they were specifically for poor children (or even, in the case of the Imperial alimenta, specifically established in poorer communities and regions), and we do have some evidence that the payments were influenced not by how needy the child was but by their status in the eyes of society \u2013 such as boys receiving more than girls.\n\nWhile the grain dole was an enduring institution, these alimentary schemes generally do not seem to have lasted through the Crisis of the Third Century, which is not surprising considering what the crisis meant for the general Roman economy. There were general shocks to the economy and diminished prosperity during the period of military anarchy, which certainly decreased the resources available to set up these foundations and funds, likely reduced the opportunities for profitable loans for established funds, and likely increased the risks of failure to repay the loans at all. Also, for alimenta that relied on paying out interest while preserving and recycling a fixed sum of initial capital, the high inflation of the crisis years would have been even worse than it was for the economy as a whole.\n\nOther sources of financial aid\u2026 well, there were other Roman social institutions that may have been relevant to mitigating financial distress \u2013 colleges and societies prominent among them, such as the well-known burial societies \u2013 but these operated more along the lines of insurance. Members paid regular dues in return for the institution\u2019s covering sudden, major expenses such as funerals. These have their own histories, being both socially and financially important for their members, but they were even less a form of welfare than the institutions discussed above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4w40z0/roman_welfare_system/"], []]}
{"q_id": "12z94r", "title": "Historically, what has been the most successful form of government for an empire?", "selftext": "In this sense, I'd consider success to be a measure of the longevity of an empire, its abilities to expand and repel invaders, and the dissemination of its culture. (Would this be a valid definition of success?)\n\nWhat form of government ran the empire? What policies did they have in place to promote their success? What external forces allowed them to be as successful as they were?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12z94r/historically_what_has_been_the_most_successful/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6zeu2m"], "score": [6], "text": ["This is hard to answer because most empires changed government over time. The Roman Republic lasted centuries, and the Empire lasted over a millennia if you count Byzantium. The Holy Roman Empire did too, but how it was run changed over time. It's impossible to find an unchanged system for any length of time, even if the State or government continues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8jgp99", "title": "During the American Civil War, was Washington D.C. actually the \"most fortified city on earth\"?", "selftext": "Also, did foreign observers comment on the city's defenses and whether they were unusually strong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8jgp99/during_the_american_civil_war_was_washington_dc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dz0h3nt"], "score": [5], "text": ["Follow up question, what would these fortifications look like?  How large was DC's Garrison?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33clc4", "title": "Why didn't China save Pakistan from India in 1971?", "selftext": "Given that both China  &  Pakistan have been against India in builtup history to 1971; and as Pakistan Radio just reported Chinese president: [Pak-China friendship is higher than Himalayas, deeper than oceans and sweeter than honey]( _URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33clc4/why_didnt_china_save_pakistan_from_india_in_1971/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqjuudr", "cqjw39q"], "score": [2, 13], "text": ["India had built up its forces on the Indo-Chinese border after the 1962 war.  This being the height of the Sino-Soviet split also aggravated the concerns there.  Following the Border Conflict in 1969, the Soviets had built up their troops along the Chinese border and there would certainly be concerns of a flare up again in the case of overt Chinese action to support the Pakistanis.", "China wanted to avoid the war in South Asia as much as they could. They wanted Pakistan to come up with a political solution and to end it as soon as possible. Furthermore the Chinese realized that a war with India would not be as easy as it was in 1962.\n\nIndia had a 'friendship treaty' with the Soviet Union, meaning that \"Moscow and New Delhi [were] obliged to consult when either [was] threatened with attack. Since the Russians [were] known to want no part of a conflict that could bring China in on Pakistan's side, they [had] thus suggested that India move with care.\" \n\nIndia was advised by the Russians to try its best to not provoke the Chinese into joining the war. And of course this treaty meant that the Russians were now involved in the war (In a limited support and advisory role, but still involved) so the Chinese were also being cautious not to escalate.\n\nOne of the reasons why the Chinese were so successful during their war with India was because the Indian army was caught by surprise. This was no longer the case in 1971, as India had fortified the border with China and were preparing for a possible Chinese retaliation. On top of this the Himalayan region was facing heavy snowfall, which would have made a Chinese advance into India much more difficult.\n\nAnd finally, India's official involvement in the war only lasted 13 days. The Eastern Pakistan forces surrendered less than 2 weeks after Pakistan attacked India. A relatively short time for a war. The Indian army did not continue with its advance into West Pakistan. However, if it did and chose to continue the war, I doubt the Chinese wouldn't have stepped in.\n\nSource: Time. 12/6/1971, Vol. 98 Issue 23, p34. 7p. _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://twitter.com/RadioPakistan/status/590384889247051776"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,910155-1,00.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2zab42", "title": "Was Atahualpa immune to smallpox?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zab42/was_atahualpa_immune_to_smallpox/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cphhn2o"], "score": [2], "text": ["Could you elaborate a bit? Are you asking if he contracted smallpox prior to Cajamarca?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "11csxc", "title": "How did medieval Russia interact with its nomadic Asian neighbors prior to the Mongol invasion?", "selftext": "I'm particularly interested in a group called the Chernye Klobuki, or Black Hoods, who were elite cavalry units descended from the nomadic Pechenegs / Kipchaks that allied with princes of Kievan Rus around the 12th to 13th century. What were the relations between these people like? Even beyond the Black Hoods, how much contact was there between Russia and Central Asia? Did Russian society or culture change in response to these people? \n\nThis is a very difficult topic to research since much of the information remains locked in the Russian language. Any help would be tremendously appreciated. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11csxc/how_did_medieval_russia_interact_with_its_nomadic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6lcyus"], "score": [6], "text": ["I have a great deal of information on the subject, but I'm a little busy looking for information on another subject right now. Reply to me and I'll get back to you after I've gotten some work done on my paper.\n\nHere's the real quick and dirty of it: Russian principalities interacted with steppe nomads a lot like how the nomads interacted with each other. There was a lot of raiding back and forth, some trade and diplomacy, and even intermarriage. Things were complicated by the fact that the Rus' were predominantly Christian and the steppe nomads were mostly Muslim. Russian writers of the time characterized any conflict, including the most bold-faced \"for profit\" raids, as holy war against infidels, and the trading and intermarriage was ignored as much as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3yj8rp", "title": "Who actually wrote the Magna Carta?", "selftext": "On the internet, I see a lot of references to Stephen Langton and how he \"brought about\" or \"collaborated\" on the Articles of the Barons. All of these are very vaguely phrased and I'm curious to know if mainstream historians actually believe that Stephen Langton wrote the document himself, or if most modern accounts are circumspect because we just don't know. \n\nHas anyone done any analysis comparing the work and phrasing to other things Stephen Langton wrote? If we don't think he wrote it, do we know who did? Do we perhaps think someone else invented the content and Langton just sort of made notes?\n\nI hope this doesn't count as trying to ask multiple questions in the same post, I guess I'm just trying to find out if we know where the actual content came from.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yj8rp/who_actually_wrote_the_magna_carta/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cye2up7", "cye8mzs"], "score": [7, 12], "text": ["I think that the first problem would be which Magna Carta--I'm assuming you mean the 1215 one. I just went to see an exhibit at the Alberta Legislature with the Magna Carta from 1300. There was also one in 1297 and the first one 1215. Many replicas were made. If no one knows here, perhaps you could contact the Alberta Legislature since it is finishing up there tomorrow, or you could contact one of the Cathedral's that own a copy: Durham and Salisbury are two that I remember reading. ", "I was going to summarise [this lecture](_URL_1_) from May but fortunately _URL_2_ has it online! The person giving this paper is one of the leads on the AHRC-funded [Magna Carta Project](_URL_0_), which represents the culmination of several years of study by scholars from the University of Easy Anglia and Kings College London including several notable authorities on thirteenth-century England such as Nick Vincent and David Carpenter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://magnacartaresearch.org", "http://www.medievalists.net/2015/05/23/who-wrote-magna-carta/", "medievalists.net"]]}
{"q_id": "1zmtlx", "title": "Accessible Viking Primary Sources", "selftext": "I browsed through the Viking-related questions, but didn't find anything particularly useful (maybe I just didn't look hard enough). \n\nI'm interested in online and fairly accessible (read: short) primary sources of the Viking invasions, raids, and commerce from Vikings' perspective. Anything that documents their travels (though I'm not especially interested in the New World), their settlements, their combat, and/or their social life. I know we have plenty of their sagas, but I'm having trouble finding a collection of them that is focused enough to be useful for an in-class exercise. Any suggestions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zmtlx/accessible_viking_primary_sources/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfv1ylv", "cfv219j", "cfv4rr8"], "score": [8, 9, 3], "text": ["There are several possibilities; many translated sources are available [here](_URL_0_). Unfortunately, it does not include famous hagiographic reports (such as the Frankish *Life of St. Philibert*), which often make for the most vivid descriptions (more vivid, at least, than the dry annalistic style of St-Bertin or the ASC). For an introduction to the problems we have with the source material, any description of over-the-top violence by horrified churchmen can do (Alcuin's letter about Lindisfarne is a classic, but it is also kind of boring). For more original choices, you may be interested by Abbasid sources (esp. [Ahmad ibn Fadlan](_URL_1_)); since they describe events in \u201ceastern Europe,\u201d they give a good sense of how far-reaching Viking incursions were, and are probably our best primary description of the relation between commerce and war.\n\n/e sorry, I overlooked the idea of a \u201cViking perspective\u201d. In this case /u/Mediaevumed summarizes nicely the most exploitable sources we have.", "So the problem with the \"from the Viking's perspective\" part is that they were pre-literate during much if what we call the \"Viking Age\" (c.800-c. 1050).  All of the sources from this time period are thus written by Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Arabs, etc.  The sagas and later stuff are all pretty far removed from the period of most activity.  \n\nFor documents from this period, you can check out [Viking Sources in Translation](_URL_0_) for an online source-book.\n\nThere are a few documents which may be especially useful to you:\n\nThe [Account of Ohthere and Wulfstan](_URL_1_) is an interesting source.  It comes from an Anglo-Saxon translation of Orosius' *Historiae Adversus Paganos* but the Anglo-Saxion \"author\" added two brief accounts by two Norse captains about their voyages.  They are short and they are probably the closest we have to an actual first person account.\n\nThe [Vita Anskarii](_URL_3_) is a saint's life of the so-called Apostle to the North, Anskar, written shortly after his death by his pupil Rimbert.  It is super Christian and long and boring for the most part But there are a few interesting tidbits in there about life in Scandinavia.  See esp. chapters 10, 19, 27, and 30.  Anyway a quick skim might locate some stuff for your students.\n\nThe [R\u00f6k Stone](_URL_2_) is an *actual* viking \"document\" and you might be able with a bit of searching to find more rune stone transcriptions online.\n\nIn terms of sagas and later work someone else can hopefully answer that, as they fall outside of my time period and I don't have them immediately off my head.  I'll think a bit more and see if I can find/think of anything useful.", "I cant find it online I'm afraid, but *The Viking Age: A Reader*, by Andrew McDonald and  Angus A. Somerville is an excellent collection that comprises several of the sources mentioned elsewhere in this thread, depictions of runestones and short saga extracts, organised thematically. [Its on google books](_URL_0_), though the preview function dosent appear to be working for me, but it's definetly the best viking primary source collection I know of."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/index.html", "http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml"], ["https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/index.html", "https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/voyagers.html", "https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/Rokstenen.html", "https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/Life%20of%20Ansgar.html"], ["http://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN9781442601482&amp;redir_esc=y"]]}
{"q_id": "8ozons", "title": "Were the German bunkers on Omaha beach much further from the shire than popularly dramatised in thr film Saving Private Ryan?", "selftext": "I ask as the famous Into The Jaws Of Death photos demonstrates the bunkers much further away. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ozons/were_the_german_bunkers_on_omaha_beach_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e07kwmk"], "score": [16], "text": ["One of the historical 'inaccuracies' about Saving Private Ryan is that the film does shorten the beach considerably. Omaha Beach has a very shallow slope and the distance between the low tide and high tide marks can be as much as 400-500m. The landings were timed to start at low tide in order that the various beach obstacles would be exposed. This would both allow the obstacles to be avoided and for the engineers to blow them in order to clear lanes for the follow on waves.\n\nHowever this meant that the assault waves had a considerable amount of open beach to cross before reaching even the limited cover of the shingle line just above the high tide mark. The German gunner Heinrich Severloh notes that after the troops left their boats he had to wait a while for them to reach the 400m mark which was his range for opening fire. The film fails here by showing German gunners firing down on US troops emerging from boats at what seems to be just 100-200m away. In reality the firing angle would have been much shallower.\n\nVery few, if any, US troops attempted to fight from the open beach. To do so was suicide. Instead they re-grouped and began reducing the defenses from the shingle and rocks at the bottom of the bluffs. In this respect the film does a decent job of showing how the fight went. The bunkers themselves were very close to the high water mark.\n\nPrimary source : Joe Balkoski, *Omaha Beach*\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qr2xm", "title": "Has any other ancient civilization/Empire other than from India come up with the Philosophy of Nonviolence?", "selftext": "Pre WW2 is there any record of any philosophy which advocates non Violence(Ahimsa) as a way of life. Various instances in Indian History are Mahaveera, Buddha, Ashoka, Gandhi. And also a stress on vegetarianism.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qr2xm/has_any_other_ancient_civilizationempire_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdfmahq", "cdfmihl"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["Well, sort of. In Java we have this guy, [Surontiko Samin](_URL_0_), who in early 1900s created non-violent traditionalist movement that was against Dutch colonialism and \"fought\" by refusing to pay tax and refusing to acknowledge the Dutch East Indies government, especially Dutch forest laws, which deprived traditional community of their livelihood that depended on teak forest.\n\nTheir beliefs are sort of mix of Ludditism, proto-Socialism, non-violent anti-tax resistance and mysticism. They survived to present day, and they mildly annoyed the Indonesian government because they still refuse to pay tax and acknowledge government even after the Dutchs were overthrown in 1940s.\n\nMore on this: \n\n* [In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History](_URL_2_)\n* [Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java](_URL_1_)", "Gandhi's own belief in non-violence was strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy's, expressed in his book *The Kingdom of God is Within You*, whose pacifism is credited to his religious views as a Christian. Tolstoy wrote in *A Confession, The Gospels in Brief, and What I Believe*:\n > The passage which served me as key to the whole was Matthew, v. 38, 39: \"Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil\" ... These words suddenly appeared to me as something quite new, as if I had never read them before. Previously when reading that passage I had always, by some strange blindness, omitted the words, \"But I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil\", just as if those words had not been there, or as if they had no definite meaning.\n > Subsequently, in my talks with many and many Christians familiar with the Gospels, I often had occasion to note the same blindness as to those words. No one remembered them, and often when speaking about that passage Christians referred to the Gospels to verify the fact that the words were really there. '\n\nGandhi was quite receptive to Tolstoy's book, and praised it by writing:\n > Tolstoy's *The Kingdom of God is Within You* overwhelmed me. It left an abiding impression on me. Before the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness of this book, all the books given me by Mr. Coates seemed to pale into insignificant\n\nPacifist philosophy did exist as a movement within Christianity, with Tolstoy being its most famous advocate. Pacifism was also present in pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy, but someone more knowledgeable on that topic will have to elaborate on it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saminism_Movement", "http://books.google.co.id/books?id=75wtk5jRKlAC&amp;pg=PA69", "http://books.google.co.id/books?id=jzUz9lKn6PEC&amp;pg=PA248"], []]}
{"q_id": "2n4w62", "title": "Why is the ethnic majority of China referred to as \"Han Chinese\"?", "selftext": "IIRC, Han refers to the Chinese dynasty that ruled after the Qin dynasty and before the the Warring State period. After that, there were so many different dynasties that ruled China, so how come the Han name stuck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2n4w62/why_is_the_ethnic_majority_of_china_referred_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmahnhe"], "score": [6], "text": ["You're right in thinking that the Han was a dynasty of China. It lasted from 206BCE to 220CE, and was an incredibly important dynasty in Chinese history in terms of scientific, cultural and political developments. Think of it as the Classical Chinese period.\n\nThe reason that we talk about 'Han Chinese' is because of the Han Dynasty's prominence in international and so people began to call themselves '\u6f22\u4eba' (h\u00e0nr\u00e9n), 'The People of Han'.\n\nSome groups of Southern Han peoples use a different phrase however, '\u5510\u4eba' (t\u00e1ngch\u00e1o) which means 'People of Tan' in reference to the later Tan Dynasty (618-907CE) which was another very important Dynasty."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "57t84w", "title": "I've just read a very short article about Old French Sign Language. What we do know of deaf life, culture and community in 18th century Paris? How was deafness depicted in general in France in this period?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57t84w/ive_just_read_a_very_short_article_about_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8vfqbd"], "score": [2], "text": ["Do you have a link to the article?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "cii5jc", "title": "During the California gold rush why didn't the American government at the time leave it for other immigrants", "selftext": "Why didn't the government just take the gold for itself and use it on buying resources and stuff wouldn't that have been a better idea?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cii5jc/during_the_california_gold_rush_why_didnt_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ev5u54a"], "score": [11], "text": ["The gold of the California gold fields - as it was understood in 1849 and the early 1850s - was an extensive resource, meaning that it was broadly distributed in small amounts. It took tens of thousands of people to process hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt to find the gold they were seeking, and at that, $4 - roughly a quarter of an ounce - was considered a good day.\n\nThe General Government (as the US federal government was known) did not have the resources - human or otherwise - to work the gold fields and process all that material. Most miners were only making a living wage to do the work and very few people ended up with surplus wealth. If the government had nationalized the gold fields, which is what you're suggesting, it would have had to pay all those workers, and it would not likely have profited much.\n\nBy the mid 1850s, California miners were seeking underground \"intensive\" gold deposits in the form of gold veins. These were concentrated, but their retrieval required a great deal of technology and supplies as well as skilled labor. Again, the government could have nationalized the mines, but it would have been a tremendous challenge to harness the people and to find the money to invest in a highly speculative, risky undertaking. It was best left to the private sector to shoulder the cost and to take the risk.\n\nBecause of all this, the national mining acts of 1866 and then, 1872, outline an approach to mineral resources, particularly on federally managed land. Because the risk of failure was so great, the federal law basically offers the resource to anyone who can find it and develop it. The perceived common good was in the mineral wealth being pumped into the economy and in the development of remote locations in North America. Although there have been many attempts to amend the generous aspects of the 1872 Mining Law, it remains the statute that governs mining to this day: it has not been possible to built a consensus around any alternative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ddo4cp", "title": "Were there any European explorers prior to 1700 who attempted to cross the pacific ocean from Asia?", "selftext": "I was reading that the crew of a Russian ship in 1741 were the first Europeans to arrive in Northwestern North America, almost 250 years after Columbus sailed to the New World. While I know many explorers crossed the Atlantic looking for a northwest passage to Asia, were there other notable persons or journeys that tried going the other way, beyond Asia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ddo4cp/were_there_any_european_explorers_prior_to_1700/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f2m7kqj"], "score": [8], "text": ["If you are asking if Europeans had been crossing the Pacific before 1741, the answer is a ***clear yes***. Magellan's expedition in 1519-1522 was the first to cross the Pacific in from east to west direction, going from Magellan's straits to Phillipines. And it was followed up by many more till 1741  \n\nIf you are asking if other Europeans had been crossing the Pacific in  a specifically from west to east direction - from Asia to Americas - prior to 1741, the answer is ***also a clear yes***. In the follow up to Magellan's voyage, Spanish sent numerous expeditions to try to establish a commercial route from Americas to Asia, with the problem being that contrary winds prevented an easy return to American continent. \n\nIt wasn't until 1565 when following the conquest of Philippines by Miguel L\u00f3pez de Legazpi, ships under Alonso de Arellano and Andr\u00e9s de Urdaneta returned to America by first going north to 38th parallel where they found (as they had expected to find) winds blowing in the eastern direction which they used to steer the ships back to America. Sadly I do not know enough information about the expedition to go into more details, but suffice to say the ships headed from the Philippines, steered north to 38th parallel, then changed course due east, reaching first California and then heading south to Mexico where Spanish settlements were to be found. The discovery of this route was then been immediately taken advantage of by the Spanish. For the next several centuries, pretty much every year several ships were crossing the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila and then back, carrying New World's silver to be exchanged for Far Eastern goods. A system which is nowadays most commonly referred to as \"Manila Galleons\" and on which plenty of literature exists.\n\nSo the answer is that without any doubt, Europeans were regularly crossing the Pacific from Asia for almost two centuries before 1741. The reference you quote, of a Russian ship being the \"first Europeans to arrive in Northwestern North America\" can then only be considered serious if we limit the scope to just Northwestern North America (whatever that means) and definitely not implying they were the first to go from Asia to Americas"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2i7ijq", "title": "How important was the Act of Union (1707) to the growth of the already existing English empire? Would England itself have had a comparable empire in size to the British Empire had it not formed the Kingdom of Great Britain with Scotland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i7ijq/how_important_was_the_act_of_union_1707_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl04ik1"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question would be better suited to /r/HistoricalWhatIf "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "darqv0", "title": "With the massive influx of gold miners immigrating to California during its gold rush, was there enough food and water grown locally for them? Was food sent in? The miners obviously weren\u2019t growing their own food.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/darqv0/with_the_massive_influx_of_gold_miners/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1ubty5"], "score": [10], "text": ["Water was usually not a problem - the California Gold Country has plenty of streams and rivers. During the drier times, miners had to wait for enough flow to \"wash dirt\" - the method used to expose gold, but there was always enough to drink.\n\nMiners spent a lot of time hunting. I co-edited the [letters of the Grosh Brothers](_URL_0_) - placer miners in the California Gold Rush. They described how two of their group would wash dirt while one or two others would go hunting. They would then share everything that each was able to produce during the day - food and gold. That was the typical approach for the first miners in the Gold Country.\n\nThere were also those who farmed. The Grosh Brothers gave up mining at some points and took up agriculture, but the lure of gold always brought them back (and they eventually died in the effort). There was also a great deal imported to California. Ships were repeatedly making the trip to Mexico and South American, bringing back passengers (and the mail!), but also a great deal of food grown in those areas. Costs were inflated in Gold Rush-era California, but acquiring food was not difficult.\n\nAs the Gold Rush went through its cycle of initial rush, depletion of gold, and then retreat from the Gold Country, infrastructure improved and more people were involved in agriculture, exploiting the rich natural resources of Northern California, which continue to feed the nation. Acquiring food was never that big of a problem; the real question was a matter of distribution and cost, but since the first years were \"flush\" with gold, money was no object."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Allen-Shepperson-Nevada-History/dp/1943859019"]]}
{"q_id": "1sjqgz", "title": "How did the Merchant Republics in Italy arise in isolation while the rest of Europe seems steeped in Feudalism?", "selftext": "Did they have any long term effects on the rest of Europe? Why does there seem to be little connection between these early Republics and later ones? Why didn't or did other feudal lords view them as competition and dangerous to their position?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sjqgz/how_did_the_merchant_republics_in_italy_arise_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdy9dm1", "cdyb2lk"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I'm not sure the question as it's posed will yield a satisfactory answer.  Feudalism and a republic aren't mutually exclusive, as the former isn't a type of government.  Besides, the republics present in Italy weren't the kinds of republics we think of today.  They were essentially city-states dominated by elites and ruled by particular noble families (e.g. the de'Medicis in Florence).  The Dutch republic and the state of Novgorod functioned in much the same way.\n\nFor more info, I'd check out Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean, [_The Italian City-Republics_](_URL_1_) and Perry Anderson's [_Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism_](_URL_0_).\n", "A big question, particularly around the 90's (after the fall of one of the last multi-ethnic empires: the Soviet Union), was how the world came to be entirely divided in nation-states as it seemed right then. Was it coincidence? Was there something inherently more effective about nation-states? Fukuyama famously declared it the end of history, others were more reserved, but there was a general agreement that it was in fact the case now, but clearly it had not always been like that.\n\nAnd this is the context that generated a lot of interesting literature on the structure of medieval politics. One of the most interesting ideas imo, comes from Charles Tilly in his work \"Coercion, Capital, and European States\". He argues that European history (after 990 AD) essentially knows two bases for political power: a concentration of capital, and a concentration of potential for coercion (money and swords, so to speak). Capital, he argues, tends to be concentrated in cities. So, is his notion, during most of the middle ages in rich, urban regions of Europe (most notably northern Italy, but later also the Low Countries and parts of north Germany, I think) monied elites formed the basis of local regimes, whereas in other parts of Europe power was based on control over the military class, with a lot of pressure on regimes to get control over both sources of power.\n\nHe leaves lots of room for criticism, at least partially by being very thin in the specifics, but I think he makes a strong point for the fact that the presence of lots of money hugely impacted the course of history for northern Italy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=NE9qw3_yCRgC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=CQbdAAAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "2wt17g", "title": "Education in post war Germany?", "selftext": "In the UK we're taught about how Hitler planned to continue his Cult of Personality by teaching the Nazi Party ideals in schools (Jews are evil, Arians are superior, Hitler is sehr gut, this is what -insert race here- look like). But what happened after the war to everyone who had been socialised into believing this? How valued were their qualifications?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wt17g/education_in_post_war_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotxydn"], "score": [2], "text": [" > How valued were their qualifications?\n\nIn West Germany the folks behind the racial science of the nazi regime [kept teaching their subjects](_URL_0_) using their skills to, for example, measure the skulls of the Canary Islanders. The continuity of West German elites would be a major issue both to East Germany and in the West German public.\n\n > But what happened after the war to everyone who had been socialised into believing this?\n\nwhat was done to \"reeducate\" or \"denazify\" Germans has been asked before so here's a primary source on the opinions immediately thereafter:\n\n > Report No.12 (28 June 1946) \n > ATTITUDES OF SOME BAVARIAN SCHOOLCHILDREN\n > Sample:250 schoolchildren between the ages of 12 and 18 in\nRegensburg, Weilheim, Pirkensee, and Burglengenfeld\nInterviewing dates:not specified. (6 pp.)\nAlthough 88 per cent of the children had belonged to Nazi youth\norganisations, only 12 per cent were members of a new youth\norganisation. Thirty-seven per cent of their parents had belonged\nto the NSDAP,a figure about average for the American zone. Eightyfour per cent of the youth were Catholic. Most (48%) would vote\nfor the CSUif they were old enough, 18 per cent for the SPD, and\nthree per cent for the KPD. Almost a third (29%), however, said\nthey would not vote even if they could.\n\n > Their principal concern was obtaining food. Thirty per cent said\nthat the type of aid Germany needed most was food, and 26 per\ncent reported that their greatest wish was for more food. They also\ndesired peace and freedom for their brothers who were prisoners\nof war. Their secondary concern were jobs, clothing, and shoes.\nThe children seemed to be in good health. Reading, sports, and\nhandicrafts provided recreation.\n\n > Almost all the children (98%) claimed to like school. Most (66%)\nthought themselves to be average students. About one-third\nconsidered themselves to be good students. Only a few (3%)\nadmitted that they were bad students. Although they were interested\nin a wide variety of subjects, they liked best mathematics, German,\ngeography, history, biology, and English. Seventy-four per cent\npreferred to learn English rather than some other foreign language.\nThe employment aspirations of the youth were generally low.\nThe girls wanted to be saleswomen, dressmakers, clerks, teachers,\nor hairdressers. The boys wished to be bakers, electricians, or\ncarpenters. None of the boys wanted to teach. More girls (7%)\nthan boys (3%) hoped to become physicians or dentists.\nThe most common reason given (36%) for Germany\u2019s loss of\nthe war was the overpowering strength of the enemy. Second\n(30%) was Germany\u2019s lack of material. When asked to name the\nthree greatest Germans, about ten per cent named Hitler, a\nquarter mentioned monarchs, and a third poets. When\nquestioned as to what the respondent would do if he alone knew\nthe secret of the atom bomb, the most common answer given\n(36%) was to keep it a secret. Democracy to these youths meant\nfreedom for the people (23%) and government by the people\n(10%). Forty-eight per cent, however, had no opinion when\nasked what democracy meant.\n\n > Almost as many (35%) liked the American soldier as disliked\nhim (39%). More than half of those who disliked the American\nsoldier mentioned his general behaviour as a reason.\nMost of the youth expected a good, lasting, or just or wise peace\nfrom the Allies. Fifty-nine per cent did not expect another war\nsoon. Of the 41 per cent who did expect war, most thought it would\nbe with the Soviet Union."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Schwidetzky"]]}
{"q_id": "8p8ln3", "title": "When was the highest % of the global population enslaved and did ancient societies with more slaves have an economic advantage over their rivals?", "selftext": "I'm not asking anyone to put forward any arguments for slavery, I think the moral arguments against it are obvious enough.\n\nNonetheless my question more or less has 2 parts:\n\nA) What was greatest % of the human population that was enslaved at any one point in history?\nand\nB) Did societies that had more slaves have an economic advantage over those that had less? If there was a strong advantage, then surely every nation would seek to acquire as many as possible in an endless quest to gain an competitive edge over their neighbors.\n\nThank you for your help :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8p8ln3/when_was_the_highest_of_the_global_population/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e09o6di"], "score": [10], "text": ["Follow-up: Did areas with high percentages of slaves have poor freemen angry over economic woes? It seems like there would be a shortage of paying jobs when the wealthy could simply buy slaves to fill almost every role from farmhands to pedagogues."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58gmu0", "title": "Like Google Maps...but for History", "selftext": "Since it's Thursday again, I have yet another question about teaching tools.\n\nI teach World History. My students are first year undergraduates from many different countries. This week I have learned the hard way that even 'obvious' historical facts, like say, what the Roman Empire was, is not obvious to all my students who after all come from all over the world.\n\nI have found Google Maps an immensely useful tool. Now I can simply point to a place on the globe, and explain that during this period that empire ruled over roughly that territory.\n\nThere are of course several problems with this approach: The globe has modern states and modern borders on depicted on it, and my hand-waving is vague at best.\n\nSo my question is, is there some kind of historical globe that I can use? Ideally one where I can set the date and show (roughly) what the world looked like during various periods of time. I know several computer games by Paradox can do this, but booting up EU IV in class is hardly professional (aside from not being 100% accurate).\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/58gmu0/like_google_mapsbut_for_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d90f823", "d90f8ri", "d90r4zn", "d90uv9o"], "score": [25, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["The website [GeoCron](_URL_1_) is a good place to start. You can skip to any year and it will show you roughly what the world looked like. It is not entirely accurate at some points, like sometimes the author just places a circle and the name of the civilization where he may not have much information. However, it is a good place to start and gives a good visual of empires, the first civilizations, and the such.\n\nOf course, more detailed maps can be used in collaboration with GeoCron to give your students a better understanding. I have found  [Euratlas](_URL_0_) to be a decent sources for maps of different European regions in 100 year increments. So a bit of big stretches between maps, but decent if it has one near the year you are interested in.", "Chapel Hill has the [Ancient World Mapping Center](_URL_0_).  It's a little tricky to use - I've been able to generate maps for one of my chapters, but I haven't figured out how to get a persistent link and I have no bloody clue what the citation will be.  Right now they're jpgs of screenshots.  Should be fine for lecture though.\n\nSometimes the names of places are tricky.  I think it prefers Rubico to Rubicon for some reason; some other places prefer to use the Latin or Greek forms in idiosyncratic ways.  Probably fine for your needs though.", "I find that [Talessman's Atlas](_URL_0_) maps are very good for teaching about the ancient and medieval periods indeed. Hope they can be of some use for you, too!", "Google Earth has a [timeline feature ](_URL_0_) in the top bar.  It only goes back to the 1940's in most cases and generally only in urban centers. \n\n[How To](_URL_1_)\n\nIt uses early aerial photography from the 1930's to the late 1990's, at which point satelite imagery kicks in.  The oldest shots are in Texas around Spindletop, mapping oil fields.\n\nI use it to research  &  demonstrate growth and historic context of neighborhoods we do projects in.  You can literally pick a spot, scroll back  &  forth watching change happen decade by decade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://euratlas.net/", "http://geacron.com/home-en/?&amp;sid=GeaCron70960"], ["http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/"], ["http://www.worldhistorymaps.info/maps.html"], ["https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en", "https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148093?hl=en"]]}
{"q_id": "458msk", "title": "Before French and Latin, has there been any other lingua franca?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/458msk/before_french_and_latin_has_there_been_any_other/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czw0fwy", "czw0y59", "czw0yma"], "score": [56, 26, 12], "text": ["Greek! The Romans themselves were Grekophiles, and most well-educated Romans would be expected to know Greek. Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean (and was also widely spoken in many western mediteranean settlements like Massalia and Emporion) and continued to be the primary language of communication there up to the fall of the Byzantine Empire. [You can read more here](_URL_0_).", "Imperial Aramaic would be an example of a lingua franca pre-dating the use of these two languages in that capacity.\n\nAfter and amongst the disruptions of the end of the Bronze age Aramean semi-nomadic tribes migrated throughout the Near East establishing new kingdoms and often overrunning existing ones. Babylon was sacked at one point and the Hebrew Bible is replete with references to Aram-Syria menacing Israel and Judah. They never were able to conquer Assyria (northern Iraq) though and ultimately Assyria brought most of the Near East under its control. As also referenced in the Hebrew Bible the Assyrians were quite fond of forced deportations and ultimately a lot of Aramean speaking peoples were settled in areas like Mesopotamia that already had a strong Arameans influence in certain areas. Ultimately, the dialect of Aramean spoken in Mesopotamia (Imperial Aramaic) became the \"lingua franca\" of the (Neo) Assyrian Empire. Assyria fell and was briefly replaced by a resurgent Babylon, which didn't knock Imperial Aramaic off of its pedastal since the Babylonians were speaking Aramaic by that point anyway. Once Cyrus the Persian overthrew the Babylonians and the Medes, he and his successors were practical enough to continue using this dialect in the administration of their empire. Koine Greek would steal some of the thunder of Aramaic after the conquests of Alexander the Great, but it was still widely used in the Near East at the beginning of the Common Era (the Christian Bible, while written in Koine reflects that Jesus spoke a form of Aramaic) and only stops being used as a lingua franca in parts of the Near East after the \"Arabization\" associated with the Muslim Conquests.", "Yes, actually. One such language was Koine Greek.\n\nOne consequence of Alexander's conquests of Asia and Egypt was a process called Hellenization, the transference of Greek culture into the newly conquered territories. Greek architecture, philosophy, technology, literature, and religion were spread throughout the kingdoms that emerged in the wake of Alexander. \n\nKoine Greek became a *lingua franca,* though obviously that term would not have been used. In the Middle East, Koine Greek was even still used as a common language after the arrival of the Roman Empire. This is actually the reason that the New Testament was written in Koine Greek: anybody who could actually read could probably read Greek, and those who couldn't read Greek would still have understood it when it was read aloud. It was this common language that helped spread Christianity throughout the Empire.\n\nAfter the fall of the Roman Empire, Koine Greek continued to be used in the Byzantine empire as a written language (although at this point, the language was in a period of transition between Koine and Modern Greek, a period called Medieval Greek). It would only be a few centuries after that before Arabic was introduced to the region and Koine's dominance came to an end.\n\n---\n\nNikolaos P. Andriotis, *History of the Greek Language.*   \nElizabeth Pollard, *Worlds Together Worlds Apart.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22lf33/why_are_there_so_few_countries_that_speak_greek/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "53uhvi", "title": "How different were the peoples of northern Spain culturally, linguistically etc from people in southern Spain during the rule of the Umayyads?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53uhvi/how_different_were_the_peoples_of_northern_spain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7xejox"], "score": [4], "text": ["So what you're talking about here is a really long period. I happen to have a decent source that discusses this topic at length in some parts, but I might wander a bit here and there.\n\nSo to the beginning. If we look at the early days of conquests in the 8th century, even then the actual conquering force of al-Andalus wasn't uniform ethnically at all. When they crossed the straits of Gibraltar in 711 the troops were mainly composed of Arabs and Berbers, being ruled from Damascus by the (Umayyad) Caliph. They were *very* much a Berber-dominated force, and Maribel Fierro (p8) reports that the number of actual Arabs among them was pretty small, and they had a fairly privileged status being Arabs. At that time there was a fairly strong link between being Muslim and being Arab which was broken down over the years, but in those days it was still quite strong. This meant that people who weren't arabs adopted the status of clients (mawali) of an Arab tribesman or of another convert who already had a patron. Freed slaves were clients as well. So in these days islamicization went hand in hand with arabicization but there were still distinct Berber and Arab cultures. \n\nIn 739 there was a pretty big Berber rebellion in northern Africa and the Caliph sent some troops to put an end to it. Without getting too much into detail about this - it led to a big influx of Arabs around Ceuta as a Syrian commander named Balj ibn Bishr al-Qushayri, initially refused passage, managed to negotiate with an Andalusi military governor who was attempting to deal with his own Berber rebellions. I could go on and on about the political consequences of al-Qushayri arriving in al-Andalus for an entire post , but suffice to say they brought their division of Qays and Yemen (northern and southern) arabs with them, although the precise meaning of this conflict in the islamic world back then is still debated. Again, without going into too much detail they were settled (with a lot of argument and dispute) in Granada (Elvira), Seville  &  Niebla, Malaga, Jaen, Algeciras, Sidonia, Beja and Tudmir. \n\nSo the Berbers also had their own culture and existence and how arabicised  &  islamicised they were depended on whether they were urban or not. So the real cultural divide at that point wasn't necessarily *just* northern/southern, but also urban/rural. The Berbers did however mostly settle in tribal groups in rural areas along the frontier. Please remember that when I say \"frontier\" here it's in the context of the early 8th century, where the frontier was in what we would consider to be fairly southern in modern Iberia. From what we understand they were mostly autonomous although it's difficult to pull the details out of obscurity with limited archaeological work. But for example, Fierro points out that some patterns of irrigation we find can potentially be linked to Berber tribal organisation, and the existence of these tribal, autonomous Berbers in the northern rural regions is highlited whenever they rebelled against the Cordoban ruler or representatives below him. \n\nSome of these tribal berbers in al-Andalus actually continued their existence well into the Umayyad era of al-Andalus and actually outlived it - some of the taifas after the fitna of al-andalus (the huge civil war that caused the Cordoba Caliphate to collapse from around 1009-1031) were ruled by those who gained power because of Berber tribal military resources  &  organisation - i.e. the Zirid taifa formed by Zawi bin Ziri. From what I understand, most of these guys survived even the reconquista and the inquisition and although they eventually lost their unique cultural identities, their descendants still live in Spain  &  Portugal today. But, if you were an urban Berber, you were much more likely to have been a state administrator or a scholar and thus very arabicised and islamicised. \n\nNow, if we look briefly at the christians - sometimes you see them called in secondary sources as \"mozarabs\" (as arabicised christians) but really I don't like this term, especially because they certainly didn't identify as this and afaik none of the actual Andalusi literature ever uses that term. This term appears in the very late Christian sources as a term they used for Christians who emigrated to the north of Iberia but who spoke Arabic and culturally resembled Arabs rather than those with Visigoth ancestry. But it's not an accurate label as it lumps them all together culturally and linguistically, when in reality a lot of them didn't really share those histories or backgrounds. \n\nAnyway, the vast majority of the Andalusi Christians, like the Berbers, lived in rural areas with fairly limited contact with the Arab settlers  &  conquerors. Ibn Hawqal in the 10th century, translated by Fierro, wrote an interesting section about these relatively autonomous Christian Andalusis:\n\n > In al-Andalus there is more than one agricultural property on which dwell thousands of people who know nothing of urban life and who are Hispano-Romans professing the Christian religion. There are periods in which they rebel and some of them take refuge in fortresses. They put up a stiff fight, for they are fierce and stubborn. When they cast off the yoke of obedience, it is hard to make them return to it, unless they are exterminated and that is a difficult, prolonged process.\n\nSomething I'd like to point out about the \"extermination\" here that needs to be understood with context is that the history of al-Andalus is also the history of a series of governments dealing with a long series of rebellions. These included arab muslim rebellions, tribal berber rebellions, and many others - so they weren't trying to 'exterminate' Christians per se, Ibn Hawqal is more referring to rebels that can't be negotiated with and so must be defeated by conquest. \n\nNow, Ibn Hawqal doesn't speak about what language the rural Christian spoke but it was likely a Romance language descended from Latin since the local Andalusis weren't monolingual until the mid-to-late 11th century, and even then it wasn't truly monolingual demographically until the 12th century. So yes, between urban and rural areas, and the south to the frontier, there were certainly linguistic divides - with Romance/Arabic bilingualism being common for Christians. Indigenous Christian converts were often called muwalladun - in the way it was used then it referred mainly to people who weren't Arabs ethnically, but were born into Arabic culture and were raised as Arabs. That could be anybody, without a specific indication of religion. Jews in al-Andalus were also very arabicised and in their case, it enabled them to flourish and also paradoxically to preserve their language and ethnic identity. \n\nDespite the rural/urban divides in culture and language throughout the early centuries of al-Andalus, by the time of the establishment of the Caliphate of Cordoba under the reign of Abdul Rahman III, an era that was one of stabilising and unifying the region, a common Andalusi identity finally emerged through the work of scholars but also through the fierce advocacy of the muslim traditions of egalitarianism which Abdul Rahman III was a particularly big supporter of. In those days there was a concerted attempt to eradicate the idea of Arab supremacy (particularly in politics), although it was an uphill battle and never quite manifested in the way that was hoped and muwallads hardly ever managed to maintain the power or positions that they were given by Abdul Rahman III in place of ethnic Arabs.\n\nThis is already a pretty damn long post, so I'm going to cut it off here. I would close by saying that yes, the frontier - that changed over time - certainly did see an impact culturally but I would argue that just as big was the divide was between rural and urban areas."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "58z8bx", "title": "This Week's Theme: The 14th Century, AD", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=flair%3A14th+century&amp;restrict_sr=on&amp;sort=relevance&amp;t=all", "answers": {"a_id": ["d94chsy", "d94d7do", "d94g1qa"], "score": [3, 3, 3], "text": ["\n**Current**: 14th Century AD\n\n**On Deck:** Resistance and Conformity\n\n**In the Hole**: Propaganda", "*I send a pestilence, a plague*\n\n*Into your house, into your bed*\n\n*Into your streams, into your streets*\n\n*Into your drink, into your bread*\n\n*Upon your cattle, upon your sheep*\n\n*Upon your oxen in the field*\n\n*Into your dreams, into your sleep*\n\n*Until you break, until you yield*\n\n*I SEND MY SWARM*\n\n*I SEND MY HORDE*\n\n*THUS SAITH THE LORD*", "Oh cool! The 14th century is such an interesting time in Mesoamerica. You have the Mexica arriving in the Basin of Mexico, the uacusecha (I think) arriving in the Patzcuaro Basin, the Caxcanes, who also worshiped Huitzilopochtli and spoke Nahuatl, arriving in Jalisco, the end of Chichen Itza and the rise of Mayapan in northern Yucatan. Maybe someone will ask questions about these topics or others. \\*hint hint, nudge nudge*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "22ve03", "title": "Do the descendants of the major Japanese clans (Tokugawa, Oda, etc) still have influence or command respect? Are their any clans that still 'exist', so to speak?", "selftext": "I was wondering because their have been so many events in Japanese history that could erase these clans and their descendants, such as the Meiji Restoration and even World War Two. Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22ve03/do_the_descendants_of_the_major_japanese_clans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgqvju5", "cgqwcaw"], "score": [39, 335], "text": ["According to popular belief, The Meiji Restoration was an effective wipe out of samurai nobility. Instead, the surviving samurai heads (that is, the heads of all the major clans excluding the Hojo, Takeda and Chosokabe) accepted the new order of the emperor. The 15th shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, wanted to reform the shogunate and began the Boshin War, which also marks the beginning of the Meiji Restoration. Following the shogun's surrender and resignation, he retired and disappeared from public view for the majority of his later life. While the Emperor allowed him to create his own house for his family, his descendants do not retain the influence of their clan.\n\nOda Nobunaga's death at Honno-ji by the hands of his general Akechi Mitsuhide was the start of the end of the Oda clan. Central Japan soon fell into the control of another general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. This left no substantial record available to prove bloodline, similar to many other clans that existed before the Meiji Restoration. \n\nWhile there have been many claims of relationship to the major clans, another note to bear in mind is that over a long period families tend to create a new name for themselves after a fall from grace or due to an unknown heritage - a good example of this is the widespread family name of Takeda and Suzuki.", "After the Meiji restoration, the clans were [converted into noble families](_URL_1_), along the lines of European nobility. Their domains were [converted into prefectures](_URL_0_), with a centralized authority, though they were allowed to keep 10% of the province's revenue. If you're interested in this time period, there's a great biography of Saigo called (unfortunately, due to the horrible Tom Cruise Movie) *The Last Samurai*, by Mark Ravina. It's a really good read.\n\nThe nobility was finally eliminated in 1947, though their descendents continued to do pretty well for themselves. ([This book](_URL_2_) is pretty much exactly what you're looking for.) After WWII, they maintained an elitist status, referring to non-former-nobles who became rich as *nariagari* (upstarts) or *narikin* (nouveau riche). They were criticized for being ostentatious with their wealth (austerity was a virtue in old money families, with many boasting their maids wore better kimono than their own daughters).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazoku", "http://f3.tiera.ru/ShiZ/Linguistics/japanese%20books/Above%20the%20Clouds%20-Status%20Culture%20of%20the%20Modern%20Japanese%20Nobility.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3vll58", "title": "Why does some music just sound... Old? Is it recording quality, or were instruments constructed differently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3vll58/why_does_some_music_just_sound_old_is_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxojj75"], "score": [6], "text": ["Can you shoot some examples of what recorded music you're thinking of? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dhsz8", "title": "Historical Fencing in the US of A", "selftext": "I am a practitioner or historical European martial arts (HEMA), and have been attempting to research the historical use of swords and bayonets in the USA, but so far lack the academic tools to do so; I have only found one manual online on the use of the saber from the early 20th century.\nI am interested primarily in fencing manuals from any point in US history (say, pre 1917), as well as historical accounts of hand to hand combat in 18th and 19th century America. Does anyone with a background in any of these periods either have any sources like this or any advice on where and how to look?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dhsz8/historical_fencing_in_the_us_of_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di2sf9c", "di2sy4y", "di2u00t"], "score": [5, 4, 3], "text": ["Matthew J. O'Rourke, a captain of volunteers on the Union side during the Civil War, published a treatise on the use of the saber in 1872, which was adopted as the Army's standard. You can get a free ebook of the manual here: _URL_0_\nThe first half of the the book is \"the Manual,\" regulations for how to draw a sword on parade, etc. The Part you're probably interested is the second half, \"the Exercise,\" which contains the actual fencing. If you're familiar with other 19th century military sabre systems, say from the U.K.,  its fairly similar, but with a few differences.\n\n", "There are few resources over on r/Hemascholar that might be in the area you're interested in, although the materials there tend to be eclectic. You might also ask over at r/wma.\n\nSome resources from the US military side of things:\n\n- Matthew W. Berriman's [The Militiaman's Manual: And Sword-play Without a Master : Rapier and Broad-Sword Exercises](_URL_2_) (1861)\n\n- William Gilham's [Manual of Instruction for the Volunteers and Militia of the Confederate States](_URL_3_) (1861)\n\n- Philip St. George Cooke's [Cavalry Tactics; Or Regulations for the Instruction, Formations, and Movements of the Cavalry](_URL_5_) (1864)\n- A. J. Corbesier's [Principles of Squad Instruction for the Broadsword](_URL_1_) (1869) [PDF]\n\n- A. C. Cunningham's [Sword and Bayonet](_URL_4_) (1906)\n\n- [Provisional Regulations for Sabre exercise](_URL_0_) (1907)\n\n\n", "I thought I should add that Captain O'Rourke published a previous version of his work during the civil war itself.\n\n Some more sources for 19th American military fencing:\n\nMajor Wayne, a former fencing instructor at West Point, published a manual intended for military use, unlike O'Rourke he includes a section on fencing with foils in preparation for a more \"thrusty\" weapon, as well as a broadsword or sabre section.\n_URL_0_\n\nThe Militiaman's Manual (Full title:  The Militiaman's Manual: And Sword-play Without a Master : Rapier and Broad-sword Exercises, Copiously Explained and Illustrated : Small-arm Light Infantry Drill of the United States Army : Infantry Manual of Percussion Musket : Company Drill of the United States Cavalry\"), a work intended for Militia officers, contains fencing lessons for both thrusting and cutting weapons, perhaps intended, as the subtitle suggests, for people without access to a fencing master. The book sandwiches fencing instruction in with drill and the manual of arms for percussion musket, basically everything a militia officer would need to know.\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=M-ksAAAAYAAJ&amp;rdid=book-M-ksAAAAYAAJ&amp;rdot=1"], ["http://www.anesi.com/prsefs.htm", "http://www.navyandmarine.org/cutlassmanual/1869cutlass.pdf", "https://books.google.fr/books?id=3moDAAAAYAAJ", "https://books.google.fr/books?id=TPwlU_S_02YC", "http://www.scribd.com/doc/14747784/Sabre-and-Bayonet-by-A-C-Cunning-Ham-USN-1906", "https://books.google.fr/books?id=SjtFAAAAYAAJ"], ["https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Sword_Exercises_Arranged_for_Militar.html?id=zS8PAQAAMAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Militiaman_s_Manual.html?id=3moDAAAAYAAJ"]]}
{"q_id": "fhvfuu", "title": "In high and late medieval Europe, German  &  Yiddish-speaking Jews had very high rates of literacy. However, was this isolated to Hebrew literature or could most Jewish people also read the Latin alphabet?", "selftext": "It's 1300. A German-speaking Jewish man is shown a phonically similar sentence rendered in Yiddish with Hebrew characters, and in German with Latin characters. Can we reasonably expect him to comprehend both?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fhvfuu/in_high_and_late_medieval_europe_german/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fke9vp8"], "score": [3], "text": ["Gotz Aly (Why the Germans, why the Jews) explained that having extremely limited opportunities, European Jews invested heavily in and prioritized education. Whether their own religious education or secular education. As a result, they often had a mastery or at least understanding of multiple languages.\n\nBeing persecuted and discriminated against, Jewish people needed the ability to communicate with the Non Jews they were living with. Accordingly, they had to be able to read and talk in the language of their neighbours."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2byil2", "title": "Atlatls VS bows in the Americas", "selftext": "I've read that bows were late on the scene for many NA indian tribes.\nCan anyone supply a time-line for the introduction and spread of the bow in the Americas?\n\nAlso: was the atlatl wide-spread before the introduction of the bow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2byil2/atlatls_vs_bows_in_the_americas/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjags0d"], "score": [2], "text": ["[This post](_URL_0_) has it that bows and arrows emerged between 3-4 thousand years ago, probably independently, in a number of locations in North America. To my knowledge, atlatls were widely spread throughout North America both before and after bows were in use.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i1y9d/did_the_native_americans_have_bow_arrows_by_1000bc/"]]}
{"q_id": "1eejcg", "title": "What are some good books about US Armored Forces in WWII", "selftext": "I recently read \"Death Traps\" by Belton Cooper, which is a memoir of his role as an ordnance officer in the 3rd Armored Division. In it, he talks about how woefully inadequate the M4 Sherman was. The US had already developed the M26 Pershing, and according to Cooper could have replaced the M4 as the main battle tank in time for the invasion. He blames Patton for rejecting the M26 in favor of the M4 based on a strict interpretation of Armored Forces Doctrine. I was wondering if there is a book about the strategic and tactical histories of the US Armored Forces in WWII. Not necessarily as the main focus, but similar to \"Masters of the Air\" or \"Shattered Sword\" if you are familiar with those works. I know what I'm asking for is kinda vague so anything you can suggest would be greatly appreciated.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1eejcg/what_are_some_good_books_about_us_armored_forces/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9zkq9x"], "score": [3], "text": ["More generally Band of Brothers and Citizen Soldier are two great books if you want more of a narrative than a by-the-numbers historical account. Do realize that with books by Steven Ambrose you would do well to research what may or may not have been plagiarized. The core message is still solid even if Ambrose had sticky literary fingers.\n\nSteven Zaloga (being lazy, linking wikipedia for a book list here _URL_1_) is a good source for discussion of US tank tactics and strategy in WW2. \n\nForty too. _URL_0_\n\nTo elaborate a bit on the M4 and the M26, Patton personally had very little to do with the delay- he was no stranger to the inadequacy of the M4 and even ordered his own troops to engage in on-field modifications to effectively upgrade M4's to their Jumbo Sherman counterpart. He wasn't even in a position to decide what did and didn't get built. \n\nUnfortunately US tank doctrine was decided by a career artilleryman, and intended as a reaction to Blitzkrieg tactics; dedicated tank fighting groups were separate from the main US forces and intended to move from fire fight to fire fight (which explains why the US was the only major nation in WW2 building tank destroyers with very light armor, fully operational turrets *and* open tops) while the M4 Sherman was intended as an infantry support tank. In that sense it was a fantastic tank- it excelled at the same role that the Panzer 4 was intended for (the soviets and the British had no clear contemporary tanks) but was grossly inadequate at fighting late war tanks like panthers and tigers. That was a job intended for the M10, M18 and M36.\n\nUS tank doctrine was largely inflexible because everything had to be shipped 3000 miles from US factories to the European front. Which is why the M26 joins a laundry list of potent tanks that never made it past prototype phases or saw only limited production. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/george-forty", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Zaloga"]]}
{"q_id": "14y0p2", "title": "I'm interested in the history of the addition of Hawaii to the United States. What was the reasoning behind it? Did the people accept it with open arms?", "selftext": "This is something that has bothered me for a long time, and I don't really see it being talked about in too many mainstream History textbooks, as they more-or-less gloss it over and just accept it as thought it was destined to happen. What was the real story?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14y0p2/im_interested_in_the_history_of_the_addition_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7hifnm", "c7hixr8", "c7hk94i", "c7hkpng"], "score": [58, 14, 14, 10], "text": ["Hawaii was a major importer of sugar to the United States in the mid and late 19th century. However, after the McKinley Tariff (1890), which raised taxes on imports significantly, the sugar growers realized that they could bypass the costly tariff by becoming annexed into the US. They staged a rebellion against the local regent, Queen Luliokalani (who was staunchly against foreign influence in Hawaii), and with the help of US marines, forced her to abdicate. President Grover Cleveland, however, had not authorized the action, and after various inquiries into the legitimacy of the uprising (and as something of an anti-imperialist), refused to annex the ripe territory. Hawaii, despite pressure from the US to reinstate Luliokalani to the throne, remained the Republic of Hawaii (ruled essentially by the American sugar plantation owners) until in 1898 William McKinley signed an annexation treaty, largely motivated by Hawaii's usefulness as a staging area in the Spanish-American War. Hawaii remained a US territory until 1959 when Eisenhower signed it into the union as a state, and the residents of Hawaii accepted accepted the referendum nearly unanimously. ", "Besides the obvious economic interest, Hawaii was geopolitically important as the last major piece of land that a naval fleet attacking the  West Coast of the United States would have to pass. Thus after the acquisition of Alaska, getting Hawaii all but secured the US from Pacific assaults. \nSource: _URL_0_", "To add to KingCharlesMarlowes' answer, the sugar plantation owners formed the Annexation Club and a Committee of Safety.  This group lobbied the US to annex Hawaii.  Not all sugar plantation bosses were enthusiastic about annexation because at the time the contract labor regime was still in place and would probably be outlawed if Hawaii joined the US because it violated the constitution as a form of slavery.  Nevertheless, on Jan 16, 1893, Minister Stevens landed troops in Honolulu.  The Monarchy was easily overthrown.  There were unsuccessful counter revolts attempted.  On February 1, 1893, Minister Stevens declared Hawai'i to be a protectorate of the US.  The \"revolutionaries\" sent a delegation to Wahington to negotiate an official treaty with the US, which was signed by lame duck President Harrison.  However, President Cleveland withdrew the treaty and disavowed the annexation when he took office in early March of 1893.  Cleveland then appointed James Blount to conduct an investigation of the overthrow.  He concluded US diplomatic and military reps had abused their power.  Annexation was temporarily put on hold.  In 1896 McKinley defeated Cleaveland.  On June 16, 1897, a new annexation treaty was concluded, but it could not get the 2/3rd approval of the Senate.  The opposition was slip into differing groups.  Some thought the initial overthrow of a sovereign government was an injustice, others felt the US had enough trouble dealing with the mainland Native Americans and weren't enthusiastic about adding more indigenous.  The Senatorial and House debates are a fun read if you're looking for contemporary accounts.  \n\nThe Spanish-American war began in 1898 and the military advantages of annexing Hawai'i became clear.  While it was unlikely necessary votes for a treaty could be obtained, a straight majority was possible.  So, on May 4, 1898, nine days after fighting began in the war, Rep Newlands of Nevada introduced in the house a joint resolution to annex Hawa'i.  This only required a simple majority in both houses to pass.  It passed the house by a vote of 209 to 91 and the Senate by a vote of 42 to 21 with 26 abstentions.  President McKinley singed it into law on July 7, 1898.\n\nI'm on my IPad right now and about to eat.  I'll add sources later and edit grammar.  Was just really excited to finally be able to contribute to my favorite subreddit.", "u/KingCharlesMarlow and u/dumbassthenes have provided the details here, and they look fine to me. \n\nBut I would add that the annexation of Hawai'i needs to be understood as a part of the larger, contemporaneous groundswell for overseas expansion and what we now call the new imperialism.  So the actions of the White House and Congress here should be understood in the same political moment that produced American interest in trade with China, expansion of merchant and military coaling stations throughout the Pacific, and the Spanish-American war.  A meaningful number of congressmen, foreign policy intellectuals, and the general public were supportive of actions that seemed to support the expansion of trade overseas, including both access to resources and access to potential markets.\n\nN.B.; I am not saying that the annexation of Hawai'i is a *part* of the Spanish American War; instead I'm saying that the mindset and rationalization behind the annexation has roots in the same set of ideas.\n\nOn this, I like Michael H. Hunt's *Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy*.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBut there are certainly other works on the same topic; I think that Michael Krenn has something that's similar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire"], [], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=pgDioChXoMgC&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "ezbl6h", "title": "During the decolonization of Africa, was there any serious discussion/suggestions for the redrawing of colonial borders? (3rd try)", "selftext": "And by that I mostly mean in the sense of redrawing to better fit pre-colonial and/or ethnic lines.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ezbl6h/during_the_decolonization_of_africa_was_there_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgnnydj"], "score": [25], "text": ["I touched on this answer in [this thread](_URL_3_), and I discussed the [OAU charter and Cairo Declaration here](_URL_2_). [This thread](_URL_4_) focuses mainly on the formation and adjustment of borders in french Africa, but I do touch on origins of anti-colonial nationalism in the WW2 era.\n\nThose answers amount to this observation: the leadership of newly independent African states were interested in either promoting a coherent Nigerian or Tanzanian  & c. national identity, or were interested in a pan-african unionist project. By and large, political leaders feared and opposed \"tribalism\" and sought to equate it with backwardness, while multi-ethnic nation-state and cross-ethnic national solidarity were vehicles to modernity.\n\nAt the same time, Marxist or Maoist revolutionaries also condemned tribalism or ethnic chauvinism. For example, here is a Muleleist manifesto from _les Cahiers de Gamboma_, from 1965:\n\n > Tribalists think, more or less consciously, that the men and women of\ntheir tribe and clan are superior to others, and that as a result the others\nshould serve and obey them. The tribalist tries to impose the hegemony,\nthe predominance ol his tribe and his clan. In practice, tribalist ideas and\nfeelings are used most often to create a clientele who can help them to\nsatisfy their selfish interests and ambitions. Tribalism is expressed in\ndifferent forms, of which the following the main ones:\n\n > 1 The tribalist constantly exaggerates and boasts about the qualities,\nmerits and good deeds ofthe people ofits tribe and its clan; on the\nother hand he refuses to recognise their faults,and even tries\nsystematically to hide them. With respect to other tribes, exactly the\nopposite attitude prevails [...].\n\n > 2 The tribalist indulges freely in liberalism and favouritism towards the people of his tribe and his clan [...]. By contrast, he is in general very\nsectarian towards people of other tribes and other clans [...].\n\n > 3 The tribalist tries to grant all the privileges and posts of responsibility\nto the people of his tribe and his clan [...].\n\n > 4 Conversely, the tribalist seeks to exempt his own people from their\nduties and obligations, from any difficult work, or from the most\ndangerous, difficult or humiliating missions\n\n > 5 The tribalist practises this favouritism in the division of material\nbenefits and the distribution of services [...].\n\n > 6 Occasionally, the tribalist even believes that those who are not of his\ntribe and his clan are too rich and fortunate to deserve his help [...]\n\n > 7 Some extend tribalism as far as preferring marriage between black\nwomen and white men to marriage between tribes [...].\n\n > 8 In politics, the supreme expression of tribalism consists of demanding\nthe formation of so-called independent republics which in fact have a\ntribal basis; failing this, tribalists demand \u2018federation with regional\nautonomy\u2019 with the distribution of political and administrative power following tribalist lines.\n\nSo, you have both Nationalist leadership and Marxist/Maoist revolutionaries condemning tribalism as obstacle in the path towards liberal nationalist or socialist modernity (respectively).\n\nNationalist leaders adopted a variety of strategies to contain or channel ethnic consciousness. For example, colonial Northern Rhodesia the territory of the Lozi monarch (Barotseland) was treated as a protectorate, associated with Northern Rhodesia but granted substantial autonomy. When Northern Rhodesia gained independence in 1964, President Kenneth Kaunda quickly negotiated the Barotseland treaty of 1964 which amounted to continuing recognition of autonomy of Barotseland.\n\nOn the other hand, in Algeria, the 1962 constitution declared the national language to be Islam. This led to a systematic program of enforcing Arab language education in schools, and use of Arab language in public life. This program led to the \"Arabization\" of the substantial Berber minority, and a backlash in the 1980s with the rise of Berber rights movement.\n\n---\n\nSo, all of this is to say that despite efforts of Liberal Nationalist,  Maoist or Marxist Leninist governments to get beyond tribalism, and encourage people to think in terms of national or class consciousness; ethnicity continued to have a political logic. With the ratification of the OAU charter and Cairo declaration, national governments pledged themselves to the principle of only adjusting national borders through mutual agreement from the respective states involved. No military conquest to adjust borders. \n\nIn that scenario, the process of negotiating border adjustments to either bring the territory of an ethnic group into the state, or to cede territory (thus excluding an ethnic group from your state); would have been seen by the public through the lens of ethnic political calculus.\n\nTo use a hypothetical example: the state of Cameroon entered independence with a heavily Muslim population in the north, and a Christian or Animist population in the south of the country. At independence, leaders from the Northern, muslim portion of the country had power in the country.\n\nNow, let's imagine that the [Fang population](_URL_1_) in the south of Cameroon would like to live in a state with kinsmen in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are on board to adjust the borders. \n\nHowever, the non-Fang population in the south, and their politicians, all oppose the deal in Cameroon. They decry it as a trick by Northern politicians to weaken the southern opposition, and castigate their Fang colleagues for leaving them out in the cold.\n\nThe deal goes through, but now with a politically weaker Southern population, the [Baka and Gur](_URL_5_) also want to exercise the \"exit option\" and become part of the Central African Republic. But let's imagine that the government of Central African Republic is uninterested in negotiating, because Baka and Gur are opponents of the current government and that would strengthen Baka and Gur power. \n\nWhat are the Baka and Gur to do now? Do they secede? OAU and Cairo declaration pledge African states to oppose secessionism. And there is some doubt about how viable such a small secessionist state could be.\n\nOr, from a completely different perspective. What are we to make of populations like the Fula/Fulani? They are primarily herders, and their populations and herds move, and cross borders. Ditto, the Tuareg exist across borders in Mauritania, Mali, Algeria and Niger.\n\nThere is also the issue of what to do about ethnic diasporas who live in cities. Immediately before the start of the Nigerian Civil War, there were pogroms against Igbo bureacrats and merchants who lived in the Middle Belt and in northern Nigeria. In an imagined scenario where Biafra seceded peacefully, what would be done about this Igbo commercial diaspora living outside Biafra? Would they be repatriated? We can look to the historical example in Uganda and Tanzania where South Asian merchant communities were persecuted or forced into exile for being \"outsiders\" who threatened African merchant enterprise.\n\n---\n\nSo, that is the logic of the Cairo declaration of accepting existing borders, and many African leaders probably supposed that seeking border adjustments might inflame tribalist sentiments.\n\nHowever, there is the example of Somalia, which is the big exception. Somalia sought to encourage secessionist movement of ethnic Somalis in northeast Kenya from 1964-1967 in the Shifta war. Later, in 1977 Somalia invaded Ethiopia in order to annex the Ogaden region which had an ethnic Somali population. Both of these actions were in pursuit of the idea of [Greater Somalia](_URL_0_). However, these actions managed to anger Kenya and Ethiopia over Somali expansionism and drove those two countries into alliance with each other to thwart Somali aims.\n\nBoth Kenya and Ethiopia wished to keep Northwest Territory and Ogaden region as part of their states, despite viewing the Somali population of these regions as subversive elements. Partly this was a concern with natural resources in the region, partly it was a belief that the population *could* be Kenyan or Ethiopian as long as they kept in line. Partly it was a matter of national honor, where Haile Selassie or Jomo Kenyatta would not want their respective countries to be smaller. In the case of the Derg in Ethiopia in 1978, their Marxist-Leninist reaction to socialist Somalia invading was 1) feeling of betrayal that a socialist neighbor would put the Derg's nascent revolution in danger by invading. 2) that Siad Barre was a national chauvinist who would suborn the greater goal of spreading socialism in East Africa to the lesser goal of creating a larger Somali state. In the Derg's analysis, nationalist chauvinism was a deviation from the goal of transcending ethnicity and achieving socialism for all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Somalia", "https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/peoples/show/Fang", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cmwvl/why_havent_borders_in_africa_changed_since_the/dhw9qf0/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b9u4y7/why_didnt_more_postcolonial_african_leaders_try/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7tmhe/why_are_former_french_colonies_in_north_africa/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages#/media/File:Map_of_the_Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages.svg"]]}
{"q_id": "18yvyf", "title": "What did Lucifer, as a Roman God, represented for the people of Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18yvyf/what_did_lucifer_as_a_roman_god_represented_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8jea9k"], "score": [13], "text": ["Lucifer was not a Roman god."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "55n7k7", "title": "How easy was to get new identity and \"vanish\" at the end of WW2?", "selftext": "How easy was to \"vanish\" at the end of WW2 in Europe? Let's say its year 1945 , end of war in Europe and i need new identity. \nIf I just throw away my documents, pick new ones from a nearby corpse and start a new life what will be the chance i am ever discovered?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55n7k7/how_easy_was_to_get_new_identity_and_vanish_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8c6pkc", "d8czbqm", "d8d76dj", "d8do2ik"], "score": [453, 30, 8, 10], "text": ["Follow up: If there were people that did this and were caught, what would the punishment be? ", "Follow up: How plausible would it have been for an American to do this, during the Korean War, a la Don Draper from Mad Men?", "Were there cases of Allied solders vanishing to avoid criminal charges at home or bad marriages for example?", "Kathrine Hulme mentions in \"The Wild Place\" that they had Russians pretending to be Poles in the displaced persons camps. They were able to get DP papers because \n\na) there had been ethnic Russians in the old borders of Poland, so it was a bit easier to blend in, and there were similarities of language \n\nb) with the Soviet occupation of Poland, there was no way to check to see if they were who they claimed to be,  & \n\n  c) those few Russians in the camps got along well with the Poles, and so the Poles covered for them. \n\nFrom this, 1) you had to be plausible for that ethnic/social group. (Can't claim to be French and not speak it.) \n\n2) The harder it was to check out your new identity, the better. (The Nazi party archives were captured intact, with member photos. Hunted groups like the SS had unique blood type tattoos under their arms, and allied soldiers almost always checked prisoners for those. \n\n3)You better have sympathetic locals willing to hide you or at least overlook any discrepancies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2kwo7h", "title": "Did any groups still cling to the Roman deities after the fall of Rome?", "selftext": "Even though Rome had been technically Christian for a century or so prior to its collapse (western empire at least). I assume it would have still been some time before Chrisitianity was universal around the empire? \n\n\nWere any peoples or groups known to have held on to the belief in the roman deities post-collapse?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kwo7h/did_any_groups_still_cling_to_the_roman_deities/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clpmt7m"], "score": [13], "text": ["The Roman Empire was of course not entirely Christian by the end of the fifth century, but it was pretty close. Pagans were never wiped out, but pretty much all our sources for this period and later were written by Christians, so we can't be entirely sure if they are accurate in their accounts of surviving pagans or not. I've written fairly detailed answers on paganism in the later Roman Empire and the early Byzantine empire [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_), outlining in broad terms the evidence for pagans in a Christian empire. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs9zl/when_christianity_became_dominant_in_the_roman/cj8gvv7?context=10000", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bs9zl/when_christianity_became_dominant_in_the_roman/cj91m8a"]]}
{"q_id": "95jj8g", "title": "How did the ancient Romans think of what we today call race?", "selftext": "I understand that the Roman empire was a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic empire, and that as time went on, more and more people in the empire were integrated and granted citizenship. How did the Romans conceptualize race? I'm asking this in the broadest sense -- any information you have on it. Other questions: did they have any conception or prohibition against miscegenation? Was Rome itself open to all peoples across the empire, or strictly for the residents?\n\nI remember reading a while ago a post here or in /r/history about how colonizers viewed race. I can't find it now, but it had to say that one view was that race was emergent of the food that locals vs foreigners ate. I'd like to reference that post, but I can't find it anywhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/95jj8g/how_did_the_ancient_romans_think_of_what_we_today/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3tdbqm"], "score": [10], "text": ["Some previous answers to this question while we wait for any further answers: \n\nfrom /u/cleopatra_philopater -\n_URL_3_\n\nAnd another from cleopatra_philopater with further links to the origins of race perception -_URL_0_\n\nFrom /u/medieval_pants - \n_URL_2_\n\nAnd some consolidated links from the FAQ - _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6w5xda/when_romans_conquered_africa_did_they_see_blacks/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z3k1u/slavery_during_roman_times_is_portrayed_in_media/", "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gzfbf/how_true_is_the_statement_race_is_a_modern_idea/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6s918x/given_the_recent_furore_concerning_dr_mary_beard/dlb36xx/?st=j6i9x7qd&amp;sh=3a7e9ee3"]]}
{"q_id": "4qnfeo", "title": "Why were siege engines not used more often in ancient times?", "selftext": "I've recently started reading a book about Roman generals and breaching into a city seemed a real problem (I'm thinking Numancia,  Alesia, Cartago Nova, etc). If defenses were such a problem why didn't they destroy them with siege engines? Specially in cases where diplomacy failed several times why did they choose to starve the enemy out instead of just destroying the city from the outside?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qnfeo/why_were_siege_engines_not_used_more_often_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4uh8k5"], "score": [4], "text": ["Siege engines were expensive in terms of expertise to design, materials to gather for construction and (for some types) ammunition, time to build, and men to operate. They were also difficult to move and ranges were limited. [This interview with Peter Vemming](_URL_1_) discusses his work recreating a 22-ton trebuchet that was expected at the time to have a range of about 300m (about 328 yards). His was not the first attempt to recreate a medieval trebuchet, either, suggesting that despite our knowledge, authentic trebuchets required a great deal of knowledge to build properly.\n\nOn the topic of the range, a siege engine in the wrong place might be targeted by archers either trying to pick off crew or to damage or destroy the siege engine. CJ Longman wrote in 1894 of [attempts to replicate claims of longbow ranges above 300 yards](_URL_0_), and while he never quite reached it, he opined that a trained longbowman could probably reach 350 yards. Add in a little more distance due to shooting from a height (either a wall or a tower) and the range of the trebuchet suddenly becomes a potential problem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.archerylibrary.com/books/badminton/docs/chapter24/chapter24_1.html", "http://archive.archaeology.org/online/interviews/vemming/"]]}
{"q_id": "2cgde6", "title": "What would happen if a soldier in the U.S. military from the south, was stationed in the north during the start of the civil war, but he support the confederacy and wanted to go fight for them? Would he be arrested or allowed to leave?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cgde6/what_would_happen_if_a_soldier_in_the_us_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjf8353", "cjffele"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Some of them were allowed to leave at least.\n\nLewis Armistead for instance, resigned his commissioned in late May 1861, a month after the bombardment of Fort Sumter. His fellow officers knew full well that he was doing so to join the South. He traveled to Texas and was commissioned a colonel in the Confederate army.", "Fun fact, only officers really defected to the Confederacy. I am aware of no rank and file soldier defecting after secession, and even if one or two did, there was no mass exodus out of the Regular Army.\n\nThats important, because Officers were held to a different standard. Firstly, many of the men who became prominent officers during the war were civilians during the secession movement. Obviously, in that weird political limbo, it was pretty easy to slip away to their state of choice. But for active officers even, there was a different code of \"honor\", and many of these men knew each other socially. Its not like today, where tens of thousands of officers served in active duty in the Army. With a small army, the officer corps naturally grew intimate in a way were not familiar with. And when your friend, a drinking buddy, a West Point classmate, a social acquaintance said they were heading south, it was a lot harder to arrest them for treason. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4eyb38", "title": "What was life like in Rome's provinces? How different would life be in a province compared to Rome itself?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eyb38/what_was_life_like_in_romes_provinces_how/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d24dtxt"], "score": [4], "text": ["This is a very, very vast and complicated question. Not only does the meaning of what a province actually *is* change considerably over the course of Roman history, but the provinces themselves have an internal history and considerable variation, from Britannia to Egypt or Baetica to Syria. There can be more variation in a provicne itself than between Rome and a province, meaning, life in Augusta Treverorum/Trier in the 3rd/4th century would be more similar to life in Rome than to life in a small village 10 km away, or a villa rustica outside the gates of the citry. \n\nIf you could narrow it down to an area or time-frame that interests you, that would be very helpful since otherwise this is just too vast a question to answer easily (to give you an idea consider a modern analogy - switch provinces with U.S. states and Rome with Washington, even if it's a poor analogy - and try to answer that question over only some 300 years of history)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22joy9", "title": "Historic Document Translation?", "selftext": "I am having trouble translating a document from 1865.  I have the beginning: \"the following is a list of the sales of the personal estate of ______  ______ deceased sold by me as administrator on the 21st day of June 1865 on a credit of 6 months\"\n\nThe document then has three columns with items, titled \"names\", \"articles\", and \"amounts\".  \n\nThere is a reoccurring item that says \"do\" and I cannot figure out what they mean by this. It occurs in both the \"names\" and \"articles\" columns. And has prices associated with it. I was thinking it might be similar to saying ditto, same as above (SAA), or using the  \"     \".\n\nHere is an example of how \"do\" would occur in a row:  \n    name: Mrs. Smith, article:  1 do do do, amount: 170.00.\n\n\n\n\n\nAnyone ever seen this before? Thanks for any help :-)\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22joy9/historic_document_translation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgnhs1k"], "score": [2], "text": ["You are correct, it means 'ditto'\n\nIt shows up very commonly in passenger and freight manifests for ships. Other things said would be 'same', 'above', 'SAA', a single or double quotation mark or a carrot.\n\nSource: Pg 4, [Immigration Research Guide from _URL_0_](_URL_1_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Ancestry.com", "http://c.mfcreative.com/email/newsletters/amu/092010/ImmigrationResearchGuide.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "4x8m8n", "title": "Why were there so many different names for the ancient greeks? Lacedemonians, hellenes, etc...", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4x8m8n/why_were_there_so_many_different_names_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6dkmdl"], "score": [13], "text": ["In the Classical period, there is only one name for the Greeks: *hoi Hell\u00eanes*, the people of Hellas.\n\nThere were, however, numerous ways to refer to the Greeks in earlier times. In the works of Homer, the most common name for the Greeks is *hoi Akhaioi*, the Achaeans; this may have been an archaising way to refer to the Greeks, which originally dates back to the Mycenaean period. In Classical times, the name referred only to the people of Achaea, an unremarkable region in the north of the Peloponnese.\n\nAdditional names found in the Iliad and Odyssey are *hoi Danaoi*, the Danaans, and *hoi Argeioi*, the Argives. Like \"Achaeans\", the latter is a *pars pro toto* elision - the name of one part is used as a name for the whole. The city of Argos was one of the largest and most prominent cities in mainland Greece, and so its people were apparently used as a shorthand to mean all the Greeks.\n\nNone of the Homeric names remained in widespread use. For most of Antiquity, the standard Greek name for the Greeks was *hoi Hell\u00eanes*. However, the Greek world consisted of many hundreds of smaller states, regions, and dialect groups, all of which had their own names (and sometimes several names). Your example, \"Lacedaemonians\", does not mean \"the Greeks\" as a whole - it is the name for the inhabitants of Lacedaemon, a region in the southeastern Peloponnese of which the main urban centre was the town of Sparta.\n\nThere are certainly many names for the full citizens of Sparta. As citizens they were known as Equals and as Spartiates; as inhabitants of their region they were called Spartans and Laconians and Lacedaemonians; as speakers of Doric Greek, they were called Dorians; and finally, as inhabitants of Hellas, they were called Hellenes. But only that final word described the ancient Greeks as a whole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6jcbjc", "title": "Why don't Americans eat very much sheep?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jcbjc/why_dont_americans_eat_very_much_sheep/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djdsk8h"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi, not discouraging further contributions here, but you may be interested in some previous threads on sheep in the USA\n\n* [If sheep were so numerous and popular in medieval times, why do we use so few sheep products now? What happened to the sheep?](_URL_0_), with a few follow-on comments here [Why do I not eat mutton?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Why/how did North Americans stop eating lamb in favour of other meats?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wiexg/if_sheep_were_so_numerous_and_popular_in_medieval/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vwnjt/whyhow_did_north_americans_stop_eating_lamb_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/406uqn/why_do_i_not_eat_mutton/"]]}
{"q_id": "6hbhd8", "title": "Hello. I would like to expand my knowledge about the general history of Europe", "selftext": "Hello, my name is Rigmar, I live in the Netherlands  and I am currently 15 years old. I'm hoping to become a historian in my adult life. This is my first post here so I am quite nervous. I never got proper history lessons at school, and to make things worse I am unable to go to school at the moment. \n\nHistory has been a huge interest if not passion of mine ever since I was 9 years old. I have always struggled to find good sources of information. \nI know there are plenty of books out there, but I simply do not know where to start.\n\nI was wondering if anyone can give me some tips on where to start, because I'm very eager to learn.\n\nThank you for reading my question!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hbhd8/hello_i_would_like_to_expand_my_knowledge_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dix2md1", "dix3dla", "dix3uxa"], "score": [9, 9, 7], "text": ["Hi! Glad you're taking an interest in history. SO, you like Europe but don't know where to start. I'll give you a good list to get started but we have to cover two things first: Historical Interpretation and Historiography.\n\nHistory isn't an exact retelling of the past, instead, it is an argument about the past; this is because we only have a certain number of sources and they don't all line up perfectly and they are all biased. Therefore the historian's job is to take a look at these sources and compare them to one another and tease out the truth as best as possible. The facts and truths are just that--facts and truths--they don't mean anything on their own. Julius Caesar is assassinated in 44 BCE. Big deal. What does it mean? This what the historian tries to explain! After uncovering facts and truths from the sources, these are then lined up into a narrative of whatever event they are studying, and in the process of creating a narrative, the historian interprets the facts in a way that makes sense.\n\nIn the process of interpretation, the historian has an argument about the past they are trying to make: Edward Gibbon looked at the third through sixth centuries and to him, the facts made it evident that Rome was collapsing. Therefore this is what stands out to him and this what he writes about. Peter Brown took another look at it and while he saw decay, he also saw growth, so that is the argument he made.\n\nThere are all of these different arguments, and that is what history is characterized by--this isn't something fully touched on in school until the college level. As more evidence and sources are uncovered these arguments and views change over time. To re-use my previous example, the standard view of what happened to the Roman Empire--that it declined and fell in fire and blood and war and whatnot--comes from Edward Gibbon's work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because this was what the evidence available at the time (1700s) led him to believe. More evidence is uncovered and debates move forward until, in 1971, Peter Brown writes The World of Late Antiquity, which challenges the notion of a decline and fall, and which emphasized the cultural legacy of Rome and revitalization of Europe in that era.\n\nThese arguments and the state of the field of history is something called Historiography: how historians have seen a certain event or era over time, as well the general written body of works on a given topic (anything written on the Roman Empire is part of Roman Historiography, for example).\n\nNow that that's out of the way I'll give you a list of works, and I'll explain how to read the works like a historian!", "I'm going to give you a small list of European history books that try to cover as much history as possible. Once you read...five or six of these, you will have a decent enough background in general history to be able to pick a subfield--like the Roman Republic, or the Viking raids--to start going in-depth.\n\nEurope: A History--Norman Davies\n\nA History of Modern Europe--John Merriman\n\nThe History of the Ancient World--Susan Bauer\n\nThe History of the Medieval World--Susan Bauer\n\nThe History of the Renaissance World--Susan Bauer\n\nA Short History of the Middle Ages--Barb Rosenwein\n\nNow for how to read like a historian. So, these are general histories, they're not really going to have an argument about the past, just trying to lay out some general facts. Once you get through these, pick a field that has sparked your interest and start reading through that stuff. \n\nOpen up an Excel spreadsheet if you have a Windows computer, or a Numbers spreadsheet if you have an Apple. Create four columns, with the last being very wide. I know Roman stuff very well so we'll use that as a guide for how this is going to work. Title the spreadsheet Roman Historiography (or Norse, or German, or Medieval, or whatever you choose to read at that time). Far left column: Title of the book. Next column is the author. Next is the year of publication. The far right column will be titled Historical Argument/Interpretation. In this one you will summarize what the book was about and what the main argument the book was trying to make is (the book's thesis is usually in the introduction). \n\nNot everyone uses this method, but I find it a useful way to keep track of everything I am reading--be sure to organize it by publication year so you can easily find stuff!\n\nWhen you are actually reading the work, keep a pen or pencil handy, or a notebook if you prefer. Be sure to make a note of any interesting points or comments the historian makes (if they describe someone as a really good guy, for example, you may wish to make note of this, read some other stuff on whoever that historian was writing about, and come back to it and make your own judgment as to whether or not so and so was actually a \"good guy\" and hence form your own opinion on history).\n\nI'm going to give you one more list.\n\n", "This last list is on Historiography and Historical Interpretation. It's somewhat advanced, but if you really do have a passion for history you should have no trouble!\n\nA Student's Guide to History--Jules Benjamin\n\nHistory on Trial--Gary Nash\n\nTelling the Truth about History--Joyce Appleby\n\nThe Landscape of History--John Gaddis\n\nHistoriography--Eileen Cheng\n\nThe Story of Historiography--Jeremy Popkin\n\nAn Introduction to the theory, method and practice of History--Peter Claus\n\nHow to Study History--Norman Cantor\n\nThe Essential Historiography Reader--Caroline Hoefferie (this is a VERY good book)\n\nThe Philosophy of History--Mark Day\n\nThe Lessons of History--Will Durant\n\nWhat is History--Edward Carr\n\nI hope I helped! If you have any questions about books for particular areas, please feel free to message me or check the booklist on the sub!\n\nAlso!!!! Since you want to pursue this professionally, a tip: If possible, study both history and archaeology, as it will help give you a versatilty in the field!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1aa3rq", "title": "how old is the notion of the political party?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1aa3rq/how_old_is_the_notion_of_the_political_party/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8vh4qk", "c8vl6pg", "c8vlw6s"], "score": [4, 12, 11], "text": ["UK perspective here. It's important to note that the ideal of personal independence - moral, financial and political - was paramount as parties took shape in the late 18th and early 19thC. To be dependent on some kind of party line was seen almost as disreputable. You're into the 1830s and 40s before parties mean something other than a very loose collection of interests.", "Many of the answers that have been given focus on the machinery of the modern political party, but the question is about the *notion* of the political party, which is rather different. As with many of the central ideas of modern liberal-democratic politics, this concept can be traced, broadly speaking, to 17th and 18th-century England. It's no surprise that David Hume, writing in the mid-18th century, comments on the novelty of the concept, listing beside \"factions of interest\" and \"affection\" the \"parties from principle\":\n\n >  Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable ph\u00e6nomenon, that has yet appeared in human affairs. [[Source](_URL_0_)]\n\nHenry Bolingbroke was instrumental in formulating the idea, being one of the first figures to argue for the need for a systematic opposition. In his *On the Idea of a Patriot King*, Bolingbroke argued for a formal opposition party to scrutinise and oppose government policies. He used this argument to support the unity of the so-called \"Country Party\", a coalition that was formed to oppose the government at the time. \n\nBy the time of Edmund Burke in the later 18th century, the idea of the party had been firmly established: \"a body of men united ... upon some particular principle\".\n\nThis idea is closely linked to, and to a large extent enabled by, the development of British liberalism. The Enlightenment liberals essentially upheld the idea that it was possible to reasonably disagree on the common good -- this was rather in contrast to many previous arguments which had seen the definition of the common good as an inherent function of sovereignty (Hobbes, for instance, thought along these lines). On this basis it was possible to articulate the idea of factions of people united not because of venal interest or obligations, but because of their principled agreement on some particular issue. \n\nIt is interesting that in more recent history the idea of the party has swung back in the opposite direction, becoming seen not as a mechanism for legitimate disagreement but, as Hume would put it, a \"faction of interest\" (Marx, of course, was instrumental in triggering this change with his reduction of all political discourse to an economic 'base').", "You can find political factions and movements wherever you have a democracy or a vocal aristocracy with rights.  These factions are sometimes called parties (I've seen the Roman [*optimates*](_URL_4_), \"the best men\", and [*populares*](_URL_3_), \"of the people\", called \"parties\" before), but these were often orientations, common bases of powers and interests, sets of alliances and affiliations, political philosophies, etc. rather than political parties as we think of them today (for me, the best comparison for these is the orientations within a party, like the factional jockeying within the Politburo of the USSR).  People could and did switch between the two (Pompey, for example).\n\nThe United States, Revolutionary France, and Constitutional UK are where most people start seeing \"factions\" becoming \"parties\" (what this means depends, and I don't claim enough knowledge to give the competing standpoints).  In the United States, you have the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, but again these were more factions than centrally organized parties (while the Federalists were somewhat united and networked, it is my understanding the Anti-Federalists were not).  In the UK, fairly well organized and established factions had a long, illustrious role dating at least back to the [English Civil War](_URL_0_), though the boundaries kept shifting (as in Revolutionary France) as more and more people got kicked out.  In Revolutionary France, you get the terms \"left\", \"right\", and \"center\" coming about *based on where they actually sat in the constitutional assembly* (a fact which I always thought was so cool).  The constant meeting for government affairs allowed the establishment of more or less fixed blocs, proto-parties if you word, but the unstable political situation meant these blocs were changing.  From [Wiki](_URL_2_):\n\n > The terms \"left\" and \"right\" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville explained, \"We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp.\" However the Right opposed the seating arrangement because they believed that deputies should support private or general interests but should not form factions or political parties. The contemporary press occasionally used the terms \"left\" and \"right\" to refer to the opposing sides.\n\n > When the National Assembly was replaced in 1791 by a Legislative Assembly composed of entirely new members the divisions continued. \"Innovators\" sat on the left, \"moderates\" gathered in the centre, while the \"conscientious defenders of the constitution\" found themselves sitting on the right, where the defenders of the Ancien R\u00e9gime had previously gathered. When the succeeding National Convention met in 1792, the seating arrangement continued, but following the coup d'\u00e9tat of June 2, 1793, and the arrest of the Girondins, the right side of the assembly was deserted, and any remaining members who had sat there moved to the centre. However following the Thermidorian Reaction of 1794 the members of the far left were excluded and the method of seating was abolished. The new constitution included rules for the assembly that would \"break up the party groups.\"\n\nThis institutional impetus against parties was actually common.  See above, with the new French constitution trying to \"break up the party groups\". In the American context, [George Washington's Farewell Address](_URL_1_) famously condemns political parties, saying that they will lead to \"despotism\".  Jefferson's Republicans were becoming organizationally opposed to Hamilton's Federalists, so it wasn't like this was idle speculation about a situation that \"might emerge\". \n\n > In contemplating the causes, which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by Geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavour to excite a belief, that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. [...]\n\n > All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle [that \"a Government for the whole is indispensable\"], and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests. [...]\n\n > I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.\n\nIt goes on from there.  Those are three paragraphs, but [most of at least paragraphs 15-26 is about parties](_URL_5_). I feel like every high school U.S. history textbook covers speech and then finishes this section with some sentiment like \"But it was already too late.\"\n\nNone of these are parties (except maybe the ones Washington is railing against).  None of them have central offices, united platforms, fixed formal affiliation, party names on ballots, etc., but I thought it was useful to give some sense of what existed before parties to better help understand them.  \"Political clubs\" of the late 18th and early 19th century in all three countries probably help establish parties, as it ties voters to institutional political identities in a different way.  There's a lot more, of course, that turns factions to parties, but I just wanted to give a little bit of background to the whole debate.  I hope someone will help pick up where I left off (or correct any overly broad brush strokes)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL8.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address#Political_parties", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_politics", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populares", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimates", "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address"]]}
{"q_id": "1myvmv", "title": "Why did the pikemen of the Hellenistic phalanxes carry shields, while the medieval European pikemen didn't?", "selftext": "Just a little question that has been bugging me for some time. The pike phalanxes of the antiquity and the pike formations of the middle ages were very similar, so why this difference?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1myvmv/why_did_the_pikemen_of_the_hellenistic_phalanxes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cce0q7c", "cce1t1j"], "score": [22, 7], "text": ["I don't know a ton about ancient pikemen, but as for the Swiss:\n\nThe massive pikes they used required two hands to use effectively, but that still could have allowed the use of a small shield. The Swiss pike formation adopted very aggressive tactics - the goal was to use a combination of speed, surprise, and shock to overrun the enemy force before they knew what hit them. Still, this doesn't necessarily preclude the use of a small shield.\n\nI think a better answer would note that shields in general were in decline in European warfare at this time, or at least radical transformation when it came to their traditional function. First, the introduction of steel plate armor made shields increasingly redundant, as anything capable of getting through your breastplate would probably pierce a shield. Men-at-arms began to use two-handed weapons almost exclusively, and shields like the buckler became more associated with light armor. Second, the increasing use of firearms made the anti-archery function of shields less useful and prompted a focus on thick armor to deflect bullets over large shields to catch arrows.\n\nSo, in the time that the pike were rising (mid 15th to early 16th centuries) shields were on their way out due to better armor and a change in the likely threat from ranged attacks. The pikemen of the era wore plate corselets (and possibly more, up to three quarters or full plate armor if they could get it) to defend themselves, which provided more protection than shields were likely too against gunfire and enemy blades and gave them good protection while keeping their hands free.\n\nNote that this is simplified - this is also the era of the buckler and Spanish \"sword and buckler men\" (who, despite the name, used full shields rather than bucklers). But the shields of that time focused more on complementing a maneuverable soldier who could use it in melee against a close-quarters opponent - not exactly a situation a pikeman is likely to find himself in.\n\nInterested in anyone's comments, especially someone familiar with Hellenistic phalanxes - I'd love to compare and contrast.", "It's all about the specifics, but I'll try here. \n\nAny military is going to be the product of its time and circumstances. On one hand, yes, the spear was shorter and therefore lighter, enabling the use of a shield, but the Macedonian phalangite formations used a massive pike, comparable to the Swiss, but had a small shield they slung over the shoulder and strapped to the forearm. \n\nThe Mediterranean phalanxes really saw their major actions against the Persians. The Persian armies used massed archers as a large part of their tactical toolbox, and an effective counter to these archer blocks was the shielded, armored phalanx. There were societal and technological forces at work as well (later Persian generals went so far as to import Greek mercenaries to train 'imitation' hoplites, which met with little success), but facing an archer with a shielded formation is an effective means of defeating that archer. \n\nThe Swiss pike blocks evolved around pressures of facing heavy shock cavalry charges instead of massed archery. Since the main threat to the formation is a heavily armored charging knight, the Swiss formations were built around repelling that threat. The pike and the mobility and discipline of the men wielding that pike was a weapon system that suited its time period. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3qdgf6", "title": "Who is the current \"Lineal Champion\" of military history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qdgf6/who_is_the_current_lineal_champion_of_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwe8vls"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't think this is answerable (even if it didn't break the rules).\n\nThe greatest military minds in history are by definition generals who performed exceptionally well. They won wars after wars, beat all those around them, and by these feats are labelled as exceptional military leaders. In this sense they are considered exceptional military minds because they are the champions of their place and time.\n\nThat means there's no way to have a show down between these metaphorical champions. Alexander the Great, Bai Qi, Caesar, Ashoka, Napoleon, Uesugi Kenshin, Genghis Khan and a whole bunch of talented generals and admirals did not fight each other. They existed at different times and/or places. So there is simply no way to answer your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "786z5b", "title": "Why is Hitler's Muder of USSR Civilians never talked about?", "selftext": "So I was reading a long and found some Statics that really shocked and quite confused me. So we all know that the Estimated for Jews killed by Hitler is approx 6 Million right. But I just looked and everywhere shows me that when The Nazi's invaded Russia, they murdered 7 million Soviet Civilians as well as 3 Million Soviet Prisoners of War., as well as another 2 million civilians who died in forced labour camps sent in Germany. So if The Nazi's killed 9 Million Innocent USSR Civilians why does nobody mention that but only mention The Jewish deaths. My parents are both Russian and grew up in the U.S.S.R and I never knew any of this, all everyone knows is Hitler kills Jews. Why is this never talked about, if it was objectively worse?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/786z5b/why_is_hitlers_muder_of_ussr_civilians_never/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dorlsa9", "dornzwo", "dorpmb6", "dos0wek"], "score": [11, 72, 57, 6], "text": ["Related to your question, you might be interested in [this](_URL_0_) earlier answer by u/commiespaceinvader, which doesn't specifically focus on Soviet civilians, but does explain why there's a tendency to highlight the fate of the Jews in particular.", "[This thread](_URL_1_) from /u/commiespaceinvader discusses Generalplan Ost, which is the larger planned campaign of murder in the East, beyond simply the Holocaust. It doesn't specifically address \"why is it never talked about\" in the way you might be wondering, but I would caution you about *any* question which is premised in that way, as the answer is rarely one that can be approached entirely objectively, as it, in reality, says more about where and when you were in school, and what kind of media you generally have been exposed to, so the answer can vary wildly for, say, someone with a basic high school education who graduated in 1960, and someone like this /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov guy who has read extensively about the Eastern Front of World War II. [This answer I wrote a little while ago](_URL_0_) is *not* about Generalplan Ost, but it is about another topic on the Eastern Front, and I think is relevant for you here. The sum which carries over is that, while Generalplan Ost *is* a bigger deal than the Night Witches, it still is something which brief  coverage - if any - is the best I would expect to see in a high school environment, and given how cursory education of even the Holocaust often is at that level (I'm failing to find it, but there have been some useful discussion chains between myself, /u/kugelfang52, and several others, about the poor quality of Holocaust education in the American school system, which perhaps he can remember the thread for), skipping over it is not at all surprising.", "/u/Iphikrates already linked my [previous answer](_URL_2_) related to this subject (thank you!) but there are some problems with your premise:\n\nFirst of all, both the number of civilians killed in the USSR (7 million) and the number of killed Soviet POWs (3 million) include the number of Jewish victims that are also counted towards the approximately 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In this case they represent 1.3 million in case of the civilians and at least 50.000 (in case of the POWs) respectively.\n\nSecondly, \"objectively worse\" is not a category that can be applied here, in my opinion. There is no scale of mass atrocity. Both the murder of millions of Jewish victims in Europe and the murder of millions of Soviet civilians and POWs (including the Jewish ones) are crimes that are just beyond imagination for us and any scale applied here about which was worse, is basically useless because it doesn't contribute in any meaningful way to our understanding of what these crimes meant or why they were carried out. Simply put, as I have written before, when you deal in the category of Nazi atrocities against all its victims \"worse\" is not really a category that can cover it anymore.\n\nThirdly, that the crimes of the Nazis against the population of the Soviet Union are not talked about is simply not the case in any meaningful sense. Various institutions charged with remembrance and research into the crimes of the Nazis deal quite extensively with the atrocities in the Soviet Union. E.g. the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum makes specific mention of the Soviet POWs in their [Intro into the Holocaust](_URL_1_) and deals with both the Einsatzgruppen shootings, the hunger policy, and the crimes committed in the course of Partisan warfare extensively in their exhibition.\n\nSimilarly, both German and English language academia has produced a wealth of books that could fill whole libraries about the crimes committed by the Germans against the Soviet populace. This goes as far back as the late 70s with Helmtuh Krausnick's publication about the Einsatzgruppen but also includes Christian Streit's *Keine Kameraden*, which is still the definitive book about the crimes committed against the Soviet POWs but also more recent publications such as Omer Bartov's books about the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union. Crimes against the Soviet populace even took center stage in one of the most hard-fought historiographical debates in recent German memory in the form of the so-called \"war of annihilation\" debate.\n\nIn 1991 various German scholars put together the so-called Wehrmacht exhibition, which premiered in 1995. It dealt with the various criminal activities of the Wehrmacht and thus focused mainly on the Soviet Union. Not only was this exhibition seen by thousands upon thousands of people in subsequent years, it also sparked a debate among German and also English language historians, namely, did the Wehrmacht set out with plans for annihilator warfare into their war in the USSR or was this something that arose from the situational circumstances of the war. Historians such as Manfred Messerschmidt and also the aforementioned Omer Bartov posited that the Wehrmacht was fighting a \"partisan war without partisans\", meaning that they employed brutal and ruthless policy against Soviet civilians, regardless if they were involved in partisan warfare or not, simply because they were Soviets. And while this did receive some backlash, mostly from conservative historians, by now, this has become a pretty accepted model with which to explain the German crimes in the Soviet Union \u2013 as motivated by racism, hatred and Nazi ideology.\n\nAdditionally, it ought to be kept in mind that virtually all of the scholarship produced in the former Eastern Bloc during the period of existing socialism (and some of that is still surprisingly useful and therefore read today) placed a strong emphasis on the plight of the Soviet people \u2013 to such a degree in fact that other victim groups unrelated to socialist political activity were left out or subsumed in official political memory of the Nazi crimes: Within this nexus of memory, places like Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor were not remembered as places where people were killed because the Nazis persecuted them for being Jewish but places of socialist Soviet suffering. This was a problem within itself from a historiogrpahical standpoint (and a political one seeing the continuation of such trends under new auspices today in many formerly socialist countries) but it goes to show that there was and is a lot of research and dealings with Nazi crimes against the Soviet populace.\n\nWhile I can't address the American school curriculum and its probable shortcomings (where I suspect there are many concerning WWII and the Holocaust), as I've said, there are various institutions out there who make the effort to deal with German crimes against the Soviet Union and its populace and there is far from a dearth of information out there \u2013 rather the opposite.\n\nFor more information, I'd suggest the following books among others:\n\n* Omer Bartov: The Eastern Front, 1941\u201345 : German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 2001.\n\n* Richard Evans: The Third Reich at War.\n\n* Waidman Beorn: Marching into Darkness (Beorn did an AMA with us [here](_URL_0_))\n\n* Edward B. Westerman: Hitler's police battalions.\n\n* Stephen G. Fritz: Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, 2011.\n\n* J\u00fcrgen F\u00f6rster: \"The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union\".\n\n* Alex J. Kay: Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political And Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941. 2011.\n\n* Lee Baker: The Second World War on the Eastern Front. \n\n* Ben Shepherd: Hitler's Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich.\n\n* Mark Mazower: Hitler's Empire.\n\n* Dieter Pohl: Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht in der Sowjet Union.\n\n* Christian Gerlach: Kalkulierte Morde.\n\n\n\n\n", "It is also worth pointing out that the traditional, Soviet portrayal of German crimes during WWII was to focus on crimes against all civilians, downplaying the particular suffering of Jews (what we would today refer to as the Holocaust) by calling victims \u201cpeaceful soviet citizens\u201d or \u201cpeaceful soviet residents\u201d. This trend of subsuming Jewish suffering into a wider story of people who died in bombings, as  a result of German reprisal killings in response to partisan activity, from illness, or as part of other campaigns of German violence (which did exist, and were directed against so-called \u201cgypsies\u201d, the mentally ill, Communists, etc) began in 1943 and continued until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Gorbachev came to power and *glastnost\u2019* began. So OP, when your parents were young, if they were growing up in the USSR, they would have heard no public discussions of Jewish suffering, and only broader descriptions of German crimes against the Soviet people as a whole.\n\nIt is important to remember that the way we commemorate and remember events today is not necessarily the way it has always been."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/564gvm/eli5_when_people_discuss_the_holocaust_why_do/d8g92dz/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72w8v1/why_arent_the_night_witches_thought_in_schools_in/dnly8mj/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6eqm99/why_is_the_generalplan_ost_considered_different/dicrr5p/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qhz7o/ama_the_german_armys_role_in_the_holocaust/", "https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/564gvm/eli5_when_people_discuss_the_holocaust_why_do/d8g92dz/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1a9x19", "title": "Did any countries in the Middle East play any roll in WWI or WWII? If so, what?", "selftext": "I've never heard anything about the Middle East being involved at all in WWI or WWII. Did any Middle Eastern country play any roll in any of these wars? If so, which country or countries? And what did they do and for which sides?\n\nI know that the UK and Germany fought in certain parts of Africa, though I don't know if it had anything to do with any muslim factors.\n\nWhat are some other countries that had no roll in WWI or WWII and why did they stay out of it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1a9x19/did_any_countries_in_the_middle_east_play_any/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8venmn", "c8veo92", "c8vf6bl", "c8vg4je"], "score": [4, 3, 2, 2], "text": ["There were a number of allied invasions in the region during 1941, as Britain pre-emptively dealt with potential threats to their oil supplies and lines of communications.  At the time, the British position in North Africa was looking somewhat dire, as German forces under Rommel started to advance into Egypt itself.\n\nIran (formerly Persia) was occupied by Britain and the USSR from 1941 through the end of the war, and the Shah was forced to abdicate in favour of his son.  Iraq was also invaded by Britain in 1941 after a military coup there lead the British to worry about the safety of the oil supply.  During that conflict, German and Italian aircraft were given permission to aid Iraq by staging through the Vichy French territories of Lebanon and Syria, leading to an allied invasion of those two.\n\n[edit] I missed the fact that you were also asking about WWI.  My mistake.  As others have already covered that, I'll leave it at that.", "The Ottoman Empire was one of the [major belligerents in WWI](_URL_2_).  There was a lot of fighting on various fronts, ranging from a British-French-Anzac attempted invasion of the Dardanelles (the sea route to Istanbul, connecting, ultimately, the Mediterranean to the Russia Black Sea ports), the Russian invasion of Eastern Anatolia, and [Arab nationalist revolt](_URL_3_) against the Ottoman Empire sponsored by France and especially Britain (this is where T. E. Lawrence, \"Lawrence of Arabia\", got famous).  [Wikipedia puts it this way](_URL_2_):\n\n > There were five main campaigns: the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, the Mesopotamian Campaign, the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign, and the Gallipoli Campaign. There were the minor North African Campaign, the Arab Campaign, and South Arabia Campaign. \n\nTurkey stayed neutral in WWII, until the very end. Iran was neutral, but was [invaded](_URL_4_) by the British and the Soviets to make sure it stayed out of the war, because it had a leader who sympathized with the Axis powers.  Much of the rest of the Middle East was under French or British mandates so these were not that many independent countries that could play independent roles, really. [*edit*: Egypt and Iraq were independent, but I believe both of their military affairs were forcefully taken over by Britain]. There was a good bit of fighting in North Africa, famously featuring the [Afrkia Korps](_URL_1_) commanded by [Erwin Rommel](_URL_0_) (\"the Desert Fox\").", "During WW1, Max Freiherr von Oppenheim led the Intelligence Bureau for the East and was closely associated with German plans to initiate and support a rebellion in India and in Egypt.\n\nLast year, two books about him were published in Germany, but I could not google any English language sources. \n\nAlexander Will: Kein Griff nach der Weltmacht. Geheime Dienste und Propaganda im deutsch-o\u0308sterreichisch-tu\u0308rkischen Bu\u0308ndnis 1914-1918. Ko\u0308ln: Bo\u0308hlau 2012, 339 S.\n\nStefan M. Kreutzer: Dschihad fu\u0308r den deutschen Kaiser. Max von Oppenheim und die Neuordnung des Orients (1914\u20131918). Graz: Ares 2012, 191 S.", "The Middle East had already started to become a key oil territory by World War I through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which later became BP). As the main supplier of oil to the Royal Navy, the Allies, the Germans and Ottomans all saw the region as a key strategy territory - probably the first time that oil supply became a vital war aim. \n\nThe Brits launched a pre-emptive strike against the Ottomans, landing at Basra, mainly to protect the pipeline out to the Euphrates and the weakest point in their war supply chain.  \n\nHad they lost this, the Brits wouldn't have been able to supply oil to the navy which had been converted from coal to oil only a few years earlier. There would have been no way the Royal Navy could then have maintained itself against the German, coal burning, High Seas Fleet .\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrika_Korps", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Eastern_theatre_of_World_War_I", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2r91i0", "title": "Were there other attempts at peace during World War 1?", "selftext": "Often a conflict isn't ended the first time a party attempts to negotiate peace. Given the massive casualties on all sides during the conflict, were there any attempts at peace prior to the final settlement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r91i0/were_there_other_attempts_at_peace_during_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cndmik7", "cndsay4", "cndu8kp"], "score": [15, 5, 3], "text": ["There were two notable attempts by the papacy to broker a peace deal.  In January of 1915, Benedict XV sent a papal diplomat as an envoy to Austrian emperor Franz Joseph.  That diplomat was Eugenio Pacelli (who in 1939 would be elected pope and would take the name Pius XII).  The goal was to try to keep Italy out of the war by having Austria agree to Italian territorial demands.  This initiative was a failure.  \n\nIn 1917, Pacelli was again selected to try to get Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany to agree to Benedict XV's 7-point peace plan.  As Robert Ventresca says, \n\n > [i]n the end, the discussions of the summer of 1917 went nowhere.  Benedict XV's peace plan was effectively dead in the water.  Despite some promising starts made by Pacelli in his first meeting with the German chancellor, the German military high command was in no mood for the concessions Bethmann-Hollweg had seemed ready to accept earlier that summer.  (*Soldier of Christ*:  The Life of Pope Pius XII*, pg 48)\n\nSo, early papal efforts to call for peace and keep the war from expanding were unsuccessful, as was the 1917 7-point proposal by Benedict XV.", "Woodrow Wilson made a number of attempts to mediate some sort of peace agreement between the Entente and the Central Powers.  This ran into obstruction and denial of varying levels from both sides.  Wilson (never a fan of Britain or placing much emphasis on US-UK relations) abandoned any hope of constructing peace on a basis of close relations with the UK and apparently even toyed with an alliance with Germany simply to fight the UK.\n\nLloyd George also attempted to make peace a number of times over the course of his wartime coalition government, but never with Germany.  Instead, given his preference for attempting to avoid bloodshed on the western front as much as possible to preserve the state of the British arm for the final, victorious campaign, he hoped constantly to sway Bulgaria, or the Ottoman Empire, or Austria-Hungary to make peace.  In this he was obviously unsuccessful.  However, at times the British (largely the Foreign Office, of whom Ll.G. tended to act independently as he loathed diplomats) still considered peace with Germany, sometimes on the basis of accepting (some) German territorial claims in the east (such as Latvia and Lithuania but not Estonia or Finland) in return for ceding Alsace-Lorraine back to the French.\n\nSource: *British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918*, Victor H. Rothwell.\n\nUltimately, the nature of coalition warfare means that coalitions tend to fail only when their strongest member capitulates.  In WW1, that was Germany for the Central Powers and Germany was only willing to capitulate (rather than impose terms) after the hundred days and the collapse of the German army in autumn 1918.", "It may not be quite what you mean, but there were attempts to *avoid* the first world war by diplomats on both sides of the conflict. The time between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the cascading of war declarations in August is known as the July Crisis. During the July Crisis, efforts were made by Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, to mediate the Austro-Serbian dispute. He proposed that Austria-Hungary occupy Belgrade as a temporary solution without declarations of war or ultimatums. He also was hoping for international cooperation in this. \n\nSource: *Great Power Diplomacy*, Norman Rich"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1tw16s", "title": "During the Cold War, why was it necessary for the USA and the USSR to build arsenals of literally thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy all human life multiple times over?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tw16s/during_the_cold_war_why_was_it_necessary_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cec0xus", "cec2gge", "cec3jqb", "cecfr7m"], "score": [76, 33, 21, 3], "text": ["This is more of a question about nuclear war strategy than history but here goes:\n\nThe buildup has to do with theories on nuclear war that require establishing enough of a strategic nuclear force to ensure a second strike capability. Theoretically, one side would attempt a counter-force first strike to nullify enemy strategic nuclear assets, which would leave the enemy country at the mercy of the aggressor. As a result, each side would have to build up enough of a strategic deterrent, through land based silos, SLBMs, and strategic bombers, to ensure that it would be able to reciprocate to any first strike with massive nuclear retaliation, hence the second strike. Since building up additional nuclear assets would require additional weapons to destroy them, both sides were caught in an arms race that resulted in many thousands of nuclear weapons. Arsenals basically kept growing until the introduction of the SALT I (1972) and SALT II (Effectively 1979) treaties and eventually the START (1991) treaties. You should keep in mind that the vast majority of nuclear warheads are tactical warheads which would be deployed on the tactical or operational level rather than the strategic warheads equipped on the ICBMs. ", "CountrySteakSauce captured a major strategic driver for the arms race, but there a number of other factors worth highlighting:\n\n* It's important to realize that nuclear weapons are not weapons of absolute destruction, contrary to many people's impression.  It can actually be much harder to destroy a specific target than you might expect.  CountrySteakSauce mentioned that the vast majority of warheads were tactical--one reason is that it takes a lot of weapons if you are trying to destroy tank units.  Of course, using that many weapons on the battlefield introduces a lot of other operational and strategic issues that the US never solved, but the US built a sizeable tactical arsenal by the time folks began to internalize that.\n\n*  At a strategic level, weapon effects, targeting strategies and technical factors also drive what we know as overkill.  Again, to dramatically over-simplify--Say you have three command bunkers around Moscow.  Military planners might determine each requires a direct hit to destroy.  Given US missile accuracy, you might need to target two warheads against each bunker to enusre one direct hit.  The Soviets have missile defense around Moscow that will destroy half of the incoming warheads--now you need four against each target.  Say that this warhead has a reliability problem, so only 2/3 of them will reach the target.  Now you need 6 against each target.  So now we're firing 18 warheads at Moscow to destroy three targets.  Maybe planners want the option to choose between ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles and bombers to attack the target.  That might mean buiilding 54 warheads, even when you only plan to launch 18 to ensure that three land exactly where you want them to.\n\n* Institutional factors--such as inter-service rivaleries, the nuclear development complex, Soviet bureaucratic politics, etc--also drove weapons production, as well as domestic politics (the non-existant \"missile gap\" for example). \n\nAgain, it's known as \"overkill\" for a reason and many recognized early on that the numbers were absurd.  But most of the decisions at the time that led to the increases had specific justifications that seemed sensible to those making the choices.\n\nEdit:  [Origins of Overkill](_URL_0_) is a good history of US nuclear planning in the '50s available for free on JSTOR that covers how strategic thinking, operational planning and institutional factors interacted to drive the growth of the US arsenal.  If any has anything similar for the Soviets, I'd love to read it.", "The calculation for how many nuclear weapons one needs works roughly like this:\n\n* Let _A_ be the total number of strategic or military targets. How many there are depends on the adversary in question, and what one defines as a strategic or military target. Some options include the obvious ones like centers of population, centers of industrial or military production, or bombers/ICBM bases whose destruction would reduce the total retaliatory capability. Less-obvious but perhaps important options would include forward radar bases, SAM sites, communications centers, or bunkers full of politicians. At different points in the Cold War, US policy embraced some of these options more than others. As a rough estimate for how many targets there might be, in the late 1950s the US war plans considered there to be roughly 1,000 strategic/military targets in the USSR and China that would be hit in an all-out nuclear war. \n\n* Let _B_ be the percentage of weapons that you think will not get to their target, not detonate correctly over the target, or be destroyed before launching.\n\n* Let _C_ be any other tactical weapons you may want to use in the field against troops, tanks, etc.\n\nSo your final, minimum warhead count looks something like: \n\n* A * (1/B) + C \n\nSo with some example numbers, let's say that we assume we have 1,000 targets, that we assume that only one half of the warheads will successfully detonate over their targets. Plugging those numbers in, we get 2,000 strategic weapons as a minimum strategic requirement, which is a sensible number for a US-USSR all-out nuclear confrontation. During the Cold War, the US fielded between 1,000-2,100 strategic bombers or missiles, though note that by the later Cold War both could carry multiple bombs or warheads, so their total destructive power could be a multiple of those numbers. \n\nAs for tactical weapons needed, it depends on the scenario. During the late 1960s the US had many thousands of tactical weapons. Today it has very few in a tactical role. \n\nYou might feel that these numbers are far lower than the traditional \"total numbers of warheads\" cited. This is because not all warheads are fielded. Many are kept in storage, not ready for use. Total warheads possessed _is_ a meaningful number, because it does tell you about capabilities and intent, but it does not tell you how many would _actually be used_ in a nuclear war.\n\nEven so, the US deployed nuclear forces are pretty overkill. There are many historical reasons for this, including inter-service rivalry (the Air Force, Army, and Navy each had their own nuclear arsenals that were redundant and not coordinated), overly pessimistic estimates of the USSR's capabilities (the US was notorious for over-estimating Soviet military strength), and theoretical models that assumed a much higher rate of failure than was likely, among other factors. \n\nBut I would note that while the layman might think that one or two nukes, much less a hundred, much less many thousands, would be enough to deter an enemy, this isn't how a military planner thinks of it. They really think that you have to plan to _use_ the weapons, and that means not just blowing up one or two major population centers but possibly waging an all-out, destroy-all-infrastructure war of strategic attrition. They also really believe that the difference between an 80% confidence level and a 90% confidence level could mean the difference between war and peace. (This applies even today \u2014 I have had military analyst types tell me that whether they think North Korea had a 60% chance of being able to nuke Seoul or a 80% chance would really, really affect how they dealt with them, whereas I think most people would, like myself, think that even a 25% chance to lose a city of 10 million would be too high to mess with.)\n\nIf you want to see some of the logic played out \"in real time,\" as it were, I have found [the document I uploaded here](_URL_0_) to be a good, rare glimpse into actual military reasoning about the number of nuclear arms to have, even though it is quite early. Things get much more complicated when you take into account tactical weapons, hard and soft military targets, submarines, ICBMs, \"use it or lose it\" tactical weapons, and so forth.", "Just for general knowledge:\n\nThe first legitimate policy of this was seen during Eisenhower's presidency with his doctrine of \"massive retaliation.'\n\nIn time, this policy became know as \"Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD),\" which was used as nuclear deterrence under the presidency's of Kennedy to Carter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2626731?uid=3739256&amp;uid=2460338175&amp;uid=2460337855&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=83&amp;uid=63&amp;sid=21103175700171"], ["http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/09/weekly-document-the-first-atomic-stockpile-requirements-september-1945/"], []]}
{"q_id": "29f45q", "title": "What was the Value of a Knight and other warriors?", "selftext": "Assuming a Knight had a War Horse with armor for it, Full Plate Armor Covering the most it can, with Chainmail covering the not plated portians, A Sword and Shield, and a mace incase of Knight vs Knight combat. How much would that be in Medieval Cost; and if it can be equated to todays prices, how much in todays USD? Also, what would the prices equal for say, a Viking with a Hauberk an Iron helmet, a Seax, a shield, a 7-10 foot spear, and a Yew Bow (and or Sling). And if they were wealthy enough, a sword.                                                                        \nThe Time scale of this is: Knight, 1300-1400 AD; Viking 800-1000AD.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29f45q/what_was_the_value_of_a_knight_and_other_warriors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cikcpqe", "cikl87t"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["The main issue with your question is the range. The medieval time period lasted a LONG time. Also, the quality and locaton of the armor and knight affected a lot. Europe had many vast economies. If you could narrow down the question, I'm sure the question could be answered.", "This is a very complicated question to answer, and there isn't really a definitive price-list for armor and weapons. I'm not sure that there is an answer at all for the Viking, as we don't really have financial records from Vikings. \n\nFor the knight, the availability of materials and quality of materials and craftsmanship would factor into the price quite heavily. There was new armor intended to be sold to average soldiers and old armor that was still being worn second-hand, and these could be quite cheap. On the other hand, the fine parade armor worn for display by the kings and great magnates of Europe was incredibly expensive. The type and amount of armor that you've described here would have been at the high end of armor intended for use in battle, which means that it would be quite expensive.\n\nThat said, it's nearly impossible to provide an itemized accounting of how much these items would have cost. This is because usually if we have records for how much somebody spent on armor, it's all jumbled into one amount. So it's not very easy to tease out what the individual pieces cost. Take for example Joinville's accounting of how much his armor cost. He remarks in the *Life of Louis* that he would need 800 pounds to mount and arm himself and feed himself and two knights. A livre is a monetary unit like a dollar or a pound. However, this doesn't really help us figure out how much the armor itself or any particular piece actually cost! It's not easy to find the range of the cost of armor, either, but I can try to give you some touch-stones.\n\nFirst, a word on currency. Medievalists work in solidi, pounds, and livres for the most part. These are all kind of sort of equivalent such that a livre in France in 1350 was probably roughly worth a pound in England in 1350. It's a lot harder to account for inflation/deflation across time.\n\nIt's easiest to tease out numbers on the horse. In the fourteenth century, a good horse fit for battle would cost around 25 pounds. On the other hand, in the mid 13th century Joinville remarks that Louis wouldn't give him the horse of a disgraced knight because it was still worth \"eighty to a hundred pounds, which was no small sum.\" In 1337 Edward III paid 168 pounds for a warhorse, and that seems to be at the very high end.\n\nThe average knight would have purchased a hauberk or mail shirt, a sword, and a horse in preparation for battle, along with other necessary items. Andrew Ayton estimates that the average cost for a simple knight to outfit himself during the hundred year's war was approximately 40 to 50 pounds. The list of armor you've given far exceeds this. It would probably cost, including the horse and horse's armor, between 100 and 150 pounds, at the low end.\n\nNow, the final part of your question is the hardest! It's nearly impossible to calculate an exchange rate between medieval currency and modern currency. Too many economic and social factors have changed. Instead, we tend to make comparisons to things like income from land (via rents). So, the 40 pounds that it would take the average knight to equip himself is actually roughly equal to the amount of income the average knight would receive from land rent in a year! You could think of this like the average middle class person in the US going to buy a new, mid-range mercedes. It's going to cost them their entire salary for the year so they'll either have to save up for it or take out a loan. Comparatively, a peasant family would earn somewhere around 2 pounds per year, and could never afford a war horse or armor.\n\nOf course, some knights were wealthier and therefore could afford more expensive sets of armor. There was a trial by combat in 1386 between a knight and a squire, and we know that the knight had a set of armor similar to what you've described. Although we don't know how much the knight's armor cost, we do know that his estates produced roughly 400 to 500 livres in a year. That's ten times what the average knight would earn and more that 200 times what the average peasant family would!\n\nsources:\n\n[Memoirs of the Crusades](_URL_0_) by Jean de Joinville and Geoffroi de Villehardouin\n\n[Medieval Warfare: A History](_URL_3_) by Maurice Keen. I especially quoted from Andrew Ayton's article *Arms, Armour, and Horses*.\n\n[Medieval Weapons: An Illustrated History of their Impact](_URL_2_) by Kelly DeVries and Robert D Smith.\n\n[The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France](_URL_1_) by Eric Jager."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.worldcat.org/title/memoirs-of-the-crusades/oclc/346844&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/last-duel-a-true-story-of-crime-scandal-and-trial-by-combat-in-medieval-france/oclc/54806068&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/medieval-weapons-an-illustrated-history-of-their-impact/oclc/163587639&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/medieval-warfare-a-history/oclc/41581804&amp;referer=brief_results"]]}
{"q_id": "1uom8z", "title": "What did knights/lancers do with their lance after a successful charge?", "selftext": "I imagine that they'd drop it and use a different hand weapon, but I just got really curious after playing more Mount and Blade and running riot with a lance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uom8z/what_did_knightslancers_do_with_their_lance_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cekcf4r"], "score": [2], "text": ["Typically a lance is used once in a battle, you charge, the lance either becomes embedded in your target, breaks or misses, in either case you drop it and draw a sidearm for close quarters fighting. There have of course been cases where lancers or knights have wheeled around, gone back to their original starting point, rearmed and charged again but I would consider this an exception to the rule. Typically a charge was intended to be the deciding move in a battle, shattering all or a crucial part of the enemy formation and thus ending the battle. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8y246v", "title": "After the Stanford Prison Experiment, what happened to all the \u2018prisoners\u2019 and \u2018guards\u2019 who were involved? Did any of them sue/have long term mental health issues from what went on in there?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8y246v/after_the_stanford_prison_experiment_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e27giiu", "e2847es", "e28yfs2"], "score": [2, 3, 7], "text": ["Any interveiw sorces would be greatly appreciated if anybody has any", "Although Zimbardo did not conduct an immediate debriefing, which could have uncovered harm caused by the experiment, none of the prisoners displayed long-term mental health issues. In the years following the experiment, the participants engaged in post-experimental questionnaires and interviews that (according to Zimbardo) confirms this. \n\nTo my knowledge, none of the participants sued or took any lethal action. The intense 6-day ordeal did cause signs of depression in one participant and severe emotional distress in others, but it seems that most of those involved have lived relatively obscure lives since then. \n\nSource: McLeod 2008", "I think it's well worth pointing out here that the Stanford experiment is highly controversial among psychologists, and the high reputation it has among the general public is by no means reflected in its reception by professionals.\n\nThere are numerous critiques of the experiment from the point of view of its design and, perhaps more seriously, several recent \"expos\u00e9s\", and a film, [based on interviews with participants, ](_URL_5_)which contain significant charges regarding the degree to which the results were deliberately engineered by the \"prisoners\" and \"guards\", out of boredom or mischief.\n\nIn addition, the psychologist responsible for the experiment, Zimbardo, has been attacked for [giving out incorrect information about the trial design and the conditions under which the student participants took part](_URL_2_).\n\nFnally, [an attempt by a team of British psychologists](_URL_4_) to replicate the experiment under the same conditions that Zimbardo asserts he applied [failed miserably](_URL_1_).\n\nAs a result of all this, the Stanford experiment is actually not very widely taught in psychology classes and d[oes not appear in quite a number of standard textbooks](_URL_0_).\n\nAll of these charges would tend to suggest not only that the famous experiment was, at best, severely comprised, but also that it was much less likely than you might expect to inflict long term damage on the participants. For balance, you might like to know that Stanford maintains a resource that links to both [major critiques of the study](_URL_6_), and Zimbardo's [defences of it](_URL_3_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201310/why-zimbardo-s-prison-experiment-isn-t-in-my-textbook", "http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/pdfs/bjsp(2006)tyrannny.pdf", "https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/subjects-infamous-stanford-experiment-human-cruelty-admit-acting/", "http://www.prisonexp.org/links/#responses", "https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/16/medicalscience.realitytv", "https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/magazine/philip-zimbardo-thinks-we-all-can-be-evil.html", "http://www.prisonexp.org/links/#criticisms"]]}
{"q_id": "1l919g", "title": "Were there \"baby boomer\" generations as a result of large armies returning from battle in ancient times?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l919g/were_there_baby_boomer_generations_as_a_result_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbx55zp", "cbx63fe"], "score": [11, 4], "text": ["Its important to remember that the Baby Boom in 1950s America was not simply caused by troops returning from WW2. Remember there was no real Baby Boom in Britain or France in response to WW2 and even within America after WW1 there was no real \"boom\" in population. David Faber in *The Age of Great Dreams* argues that the boom was more caused by availability of housing in the suburbs and widespread consumer goods in the  economy which  a huge amount of  young couples feel confident enough to start families at the same time especially when you consider many of them came through the Great Depression. They saw the new opportunities as a great chance also considering the uncertainty in America due to the Cold War starting.\n\nI know I did exactly answer your question and I don't have much data on battles in ancient times, but I would answer no since even America's baby boom was not the result of a large army returning, that is just an oversimplification of history.", "Information on the ancient period isn't available to me, so please pardon the reference to Modern History.  \n\nWhile a somewhat contentious source, Simon Huntington makes reference to the demographics inherent in warfare.  He draws points to the correlation between 'youth bulges' (where groups of fifteen to twenty four year old males exceed 20% of the nation's population) and ensuing warfare.  For example, the collapse of the Lebanese government in the 70's is attributed to the rise in Shi'ite birthrates about 20 years before.  \n\nDrawing from memory, Dupuy's *Evolution of Weapons and Warfare* refers to the boom in population following the First World War and cites it as a contributing factor to the Second.  Unfortunately this book seems to have escaped from my living room after multiple rooms, but perhaps another can cite directly?\n\nInterestingly, this assertion runs contrary to your question.  Baby booms may not be the result of wars, but rather a structural cause.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "162w76", "title": "Were there black KKK members?", "selftext": "Just a question that popped up in my randomly. I know it sounds ridiculous but were there any black KKK members? Why did they join? How did they justify being in the KKK while being black? How were they treated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/162w76/were_there_black_kkk_members/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7s7reg", "c7s8i3p"], "score": [7, 16], "text": ["The KKK had membership rules which prohibited blacks, Jews, homosexuals, atheists and Catholics from joining.  Or to be more exact, they only allowed white, protestant, Anglo-Saxon men to join.  Later, in the 1920s, they did start a women's organization that allowed only WASP women to join.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n > Here are Twenty Reasons WHY you should, if qualified,\njoin, aid and support the White Knights of the\nKU KLUX KLAN of Mississippi:\n\n > \\10.    Because it is composed of native-born, white, gentile and protestant American citizens who are sound of mind and of good moral character.\n\n > We are looking for, and enlisting ONLY:  Sober, Intelligent, Courageous, Christian, American, White men who are consciously and fully aware of the basic FACT that the physical life and earthly destiny are absolutely bound up with the Survival of this Nation, under God.  Our governmental principles are precisely those of the ORIGINAL U.S. Constitution.  Our members are Christians who are anxious to preserve not only their souls for all Eternity, but who are MILITANTLY DETERMINED, God willing, to save their lives, and the Life of this Nation, in order that their descendants shall enjoy the same, full, God-given blessings of True Liberty that we have been permitted to enjoy up to now.\n\n > We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ, and, through the machinations of their International Banking Cartel, are at the root center of what we call \"communism\" today. \n\n > We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator, in direct violation of the First Commandment, and the True American Spirit of Responsible, Individual Liberty. \n\n > We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tarters, Orientals, Negroes, nor any other person whose native background of culture is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon system of Government by responsible, FREE individual citizens.", "Maybe. Take a look at this 1920s [application](_URL_0_)(warning, PDF) to join the order. Note question 9: \"are you of the white race or of a colored race?\" Keep in mind that these forms are for vetting members. However, the question is tantalizing when we realize that the 1920s Klan, which has received the most scholarly attention, had several auxiliaries. The only auxiliary that has received any sustained attention is the Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), beginning with Blee's work. But there are references to other Klan auxiliaries. There was the Junior Ku Klux Klan, Tri-K Girls, the American Krusaders, and the Ku Klux Kiddies. However, there are also references to another Klan auxiliary, the Klan's Colored Man auxiliary. It is unclear how successful the Klan was at organizing this auxiliary. One should not take the lack of archival deposits as evidence of their inability to organize the auxiliary; the Klan was very secretive and destroyed many of their documents. There are scattered references about membership, especially secondary resources, but it is uncertain how reliable these sources are. One such compendium of references is [this](_URL_1_) Klan website (WARNING: NSFW, KLAN WEBSITE). So, I'm afraid we cannot answer your questions right now. It is a big maybe.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&amp;bowers/klan.html"], ["http://www2.bakersfieldcollege.edu/jstratton/Outside%20documents/KKK%20Application%20from%201920s.pdf", "http://www.kkklan.com/negroklan.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1gwnwf", "title": "AMA: Vikings", "selftext": "Vikings are a popular topic on our subreddit. In this AMA we attempt to create a central place for all your questions related to Vikings, the Viking Age, Viking plunders, or Early Medieval/Late Iron Age Scandinavia. We managed to collect a few of our Viking specialists:\n\n* /u/einhverfr, Anglo-Saxon England and Northern European Prehistory\n* /u/eyestache, Norse literature and weapons\n* /u/wee_little_puppetman, Viking Age archaeologist\n* /u/Aerandir, Danish Late Iron Age archaeologist\n\nFor questions about Viking Age daily life, I can also recommend [the Viking Answer Lady](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gwnwf/ama_vikings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["caok0eh", "caok3xd", "caoka7c", "caokbla", "caokcg6", "caokfr5", "caokg13", "caokjy4", "caokkgj", "caokkrz", "caokoxe", "caoks37", "caoky2h", "caoky6s", "caol02q", "caol6yd", "caol859", "caolank", "caolbq9", "caolde4", "caolh90", "caolhx9", "caollmr", "caolpxx", "caols40", "caolwis", "caolwqa", "caolxlm", "caolxu0", "caolzos", "caom0yg", "caom421", "caom4pi", "caom4sn", "caom5yv", "caom6c4", "caom6y3", "caom7jq", "caom7mb", "caoma1v", "caomied", "caomikz", "caomipd", "caommck", "caommh1", "caomnkb", "caomp9x", "caompi7", "caomu4d", "caon66y", "caon8bp", "caonbf6", "caonbxa", "caonfzi", "caonj0v", "caonjyy", "caono7w", "caonpgn", "caonutn", "caooa4x", "caooalw", "caooaxy", "caooddi", "caoog5f", "caooxo7", "caop4du", "caop7ky", "caop7zj", "caopaft", "caopjdr", "caoprgz", "caoq0yb", "caoqvmm", "caou7f3", "caow8mr", "caowi9d", "caowk89", "caox0yz", "caoz7os", "cap1msz"], "score": [103, 91, 168, 57, 54, 54, 19, 16, 5, 35, 2, 29, 4, 6, 10, 9, 22, 5, 5, 12, 9, 8, 2, 4, 14, 2, 7, 8, 13, 3, 11, 3, 11, 10, 2, 4, 2, 2, 13, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 7, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 2, 13, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 6, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["As I'm sure you all know, pretty much everything we know about Norse mythology comes from Christian sources, written hundreds of years after its practices had been banned (eg. the Edda and the Codex Regius).\n\nDo you think Norse mythology as depicted in the literature we have is reflective of how the belief structure was like at the time it was actually being practiced? To what extent do you think it has been modified by Christianity (eg. Baldur as Jesus, the second-to-last verse of V\u00f6lusp\u00e1)?", "How far the stereotype of the bearded berserker with an axe and a horned helmet is accurate ?", "How far east did the Vikings go? I'm aware of the Volga Vikings and their visits to Baghdad but did they go further east? How accurate is Ibn Fadlan's description of the Ship Burial he described?\n\n\n\n", "What's the most surprising piece of Viking technology that has ever been found?", "How accurate is the portrayal of viking culture in the History channel show \"vikings\"?", "The *Annals of Ulster* record that in 845, M\u00e1el Sechnaill mac M\u00e1ele Ruanaid had the viking chieftain Turgesius drowned in a lake, and later the same High King has the rebellious petty king Cinaed of Cianacht (who hired Scandinavians to aid his rebellion) drowned in a pool as well. \n\nThese deaths were pretty much unprecedented in Christian Ireland (the entry for Cinaed's death makes this clear, and stresses the cruelty of the act and the revulsion of Irish nobles  &  Armagh), and I've heard it suggested that death by drowning might have been a conscious insult to pre-Christian Scandinavians, because it would have prevented them from going to Valhalla while Cinaed's execution might have been an insult by comparing him to a foreigner  &  a pagan. Is there any basis in that statement? Did death by drowning have any significance in Norse religion? I've literally been wondering this for a year.", "What did Vikings tend to think of other cultures and ethnic groups? Did they view themselves as superior to other cultures they came into contact with? ", "I've always seen Vikings associated with a particular time period (maybe 800CE-1200CE), but was there a longstanding sea-raiding culture in Scandinavia before this period? Were there \"Vikings\" or similar predecessors during Roman or pre-Roman times?", "How common was the knowledge of runes? I know they were used for short messages and name tags later on, but would the average male farmer know them? ", "1)Did the vikings have a ritual towards manhood?Something like \"after this the boy becomes a man\".  \n2)Did they have strict training regimens?  \n3)what did the guys eat to be strong?did they have some \"power dish\"?(like the spartan broth)  \n4)how did they prepare physically and spiritually before a battle?  \n5)did they had the notion of brotherhood amongst the warriors?  \n6)how did they celebrate after a great battle?  \n7)How did they view aggression and blood lust? I've read about the greeks/spartans that going crazy in battle was viewed as a dishonor.  \n8)did they view conquering/war/aggressiveness as part of their heritage?Did they actually enjoy these acts or where they forced by the climate/circumstances?  \nI've got more,i'm really interested in this subject.I hope I didn't ask to much,good luck with the ama!", "Quick question, would the TV Vikings be an accurate description of viking times?", "1) How much better would an Ulfbert (ULFBEHRT? ULFBE+RT? I can't remember) sword be than an average sword made in Scandinavia? Would they be used in battle, or were they mainly ceremonial or for personal defence? What is the leading theory on who made them and where they came from? Is it even a real thing or just something people would scratch onto their swords because it was popular?\n\n2) What effect did they have on Scotland, specifically the east coast and lowands? Colonies, trade, conquest, etc. I've often heard they mainly left the east coast alone and concentrated on Ireland and England, but I'm not sure why (or where I heard it).\n\n3) Do we know of a real immediate ancestor to what we know as Viking culture? What was happening in Scandinavia before they built longships and started trading with half of the world?\n\n4) Were there any specific battle tactics that the Vikings often used? The Romans fought in maniples (among other things), the Greeks fought in phalanxes (among other things). What was the classic Viking battle formation?\n\n5) What was the daily (or weekly, whatever, disregarding things like annual holidays) religious life of a Norse family at home in Scandinavia? Did this differ much from Norway to Sweden to Denmark? Was their a priestly caste?\n\n6) I often hear of exotic goods from the Med or Persia being found in a Viking village, but what is the furthest afield expensive Viking artifacts have been found? Did any jewellery trickle it's way to China or India?\n\n7) Sorry for asking so many questions, but Vikings are awesome.", "[Rebellion - Runes](_URL_0_)\n\nAs I understand it they sing about a story where odin was pierced by his own spear for 9 days, died and was reborn to discover runes or something. Is this how the story goes, where runes seen as magical ancient things or just like letters. \n\nAlso, is there any good webbsite for finding these old storys in normal english?", "Did the vikings bring women from raided lands back to Scandinavia? If so did they discriminate by appearence?", "What's the lowdown on bloodeagles? If they were used as a punishment, what sort of crimes were involved? How did they fit into the Viking view of discipline?", "What are viking notions of morality? Good and evil? Are they all pirates? What sort of weapons do they prefer? \n\nYes, I know little of Vikings. ", "In crusader kings 2, when playing as a norse nation, you have the option to hold a ceremony called a blot. As far as I can tell it was a feast with sacrifices. Can you elaborate on,exactly what a blot was and why it was held?", "If the Vikings visited North America, why didn't they stay there? It must've been much nicer than their homeland. ", "What are the best historical sites to visit in Norway and western Sweden related to the viking period.", "Just how mighty were the Vikings? I used to always hear about how they were unstoppable warriors, second to none and striking fear into everyone. Later history professors have told me that is entirely not the case, and the Vikings were more like cowardly bandits than bloodthirsty raiders, only targeting weak, undefended villages and monasteries and fleeing at the first sign of armed resistance. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.", "Did any vikings have elective monarchical institutions like Germanic peoples did?", "1. On campaign how did a viking army supply itself?\n2. How was a viking army formed? Were they very much feudal in nature?\n3. What was the social hierarchy like? How important were their priests, merchants, artisans, farmers, etc?\n4. What were the important roles of women in their society?\n5. What did the average viking eat?", "How much have the Vikings influenced today's culture and how much of that is still present in the different parts of Europe?\n\nAlso, are there any good documentaries (I don't mind subtitles or French/German audio) about Vikings?", "How prevalent were occupations besides raiding, farming, and skilled labor? Were there any Norse natural scientists or philosophers? How advanced was their medicine?", "Is it true that vikings probably landed in North America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus?", "is there any indication as to how aware vikings were of their reputation as bloodthirsty raiders?", "If I were to be interested in learning about vikings, where would be best to start? (Like what books?)\n\nAre there any important Viking Sagas that I should read, or learn about? ", "i heard viking swords used crucible steel which was the strongest steel at the time and steel of equal quality would be seen for 100s of years.\n\nany truth to that?", "What do you guys think about neo-paganism, specifally \u00c1satr\u00fa. Do you consider it a real religion and do you think it's alright for U.S. veterans putting Mj\u00f6lnir on their gravestones.\n\nBasically, do you think there is any merit to \u00c1satr\u00fa or do you think it's only used for a \"coolness\" factor.\n\nFollow up question: Being here on Reddit and sometimes here on r/askhistorians it seems to me that Snorri gets a lot of bad rep. Do you think he deserves it?\n\nEdit: /u/einhverfr, I assume you're using old norse here but, do you know what your username would mean in modern Icelandic?", "Is it true that Vikings sometimes used crystals that were sensitive to the polarized light of the sky for orientation, when other means of orientation were unavailable?\n\nAlso, what was Viking religion like?", "How much do we know, if anything at all, about Ragnar Lodbrok as a historical figure?  I've read about him and his purported progeny only in passing, and it seemed to me there isn't much consensus.", "This might be on the periphery of the subject, but a Dr. Patricia Boulhosa has advanced the theory that the Old Covenant between Iceland and the Norwegian king was essentially a 15th century fabrication after the formation of the Kalmar Union, rather than a historical document from the 13th century. Are her observations warranted, or what's up?", "Do we know of any primary source or archeological evidence of Viking mead production in the early middle ages?  (aside from Beowulf)", "1) How significant culturally and militarily was it for a man to have a hauberk of ringmail?\n\n2) Are there any cases of Vikings using partial plate or scale armour?\n\n3) Where did the (edit: incorrect) association of horned helmets with Vikings originate?", "Are there any lasting cultural impacts of the vikings in northern Scotland? I know there are lots of linguistic carryovers from the Vikings in the British Isles, but especially in the main island, are there cultural differences because of Viking rule? ", "How big were Viking political units?  Were there a lot of \"kings\" ruling small groups or just a few ruling large groups?  Did the various Viking groups see themselves are a larger culture or was it like the gaulish celts who were basically just related by language and material culture but were different groups?", "As I understand it, \"viking\" originally comes from a word meaning \"a raider or a pirate\".  So, it originally referred to a *what* rather than a *who*.   However,  \"Viking\" evolved into a term referring more to a *who*--how correct is that?  Were Vikings a homogeneous cultural and linguistic group that would have viewed *themselves* as mostly similar/related?  ", "What is the strangest custom in Norse culture that you know of?", "did the Varagian Guard adopt a fighting style that was different from their kinsman back in Scandinavia?", "What is the predominate theory of what a Berserker's 'trace' is? Why?", "As far as I understand many Norse were switching back and forth between trading and raiding. Are there any Christian sources reflecting on the possibility that christian merchants were trading with people that might very well return as raiders the following year?", "Fascinating reading thus far!\n\nNot quite about the Vikings but could you recommend good general reading on the Nordic bronze age and early iron age? ", "1.what advice would you give to someone who hopes to have a career in archeology specifically in the viking age?\n\n2.A mod for a game i play called Vikingr depicts the seax being worn on the back of the outfit, the creators of the mod strive for historical accuracy, but books i have read depict the seax being worn on the front which depiction is correct, or more correct?\n\n3.\n What books would you say contain the most accurate information that a regular person would be able to buy?", "How culturally similar was early midieval Viking society, to early medieval society in general in the former western half of Roman Empire?\n\nWhat are the earliest intact pieces of norse literature? How does Beowulf relate to earlier norse myths and what does it say about how the English in that period saw themselves in relation to the norse?\n\nHow did the norse interact socially with the Irish when they had their long ports their?\n\nSuggestions of books on early medieval norse, and any age related to them before that?", "After a lot of the Scandanavian lands became Christian, did people try to retain their Viking heritage and culture, and remained fearless warriors?", "Why did Norse religion fall? Is there still people who practice it?", "What are, in your opinion(s), the best introductory-ish texts to Viking history? I see the sidebar has Brink's *The Viking World* and Hall's *Exploring the World of The Vikings*, but are there any others that you'd recommend? I'm not a historian (but still an academic) and so semi-difficult texts are welcome.\n\nAlso on that note: could you recommend some of the best translations for the key texts, e.g. the Eddas? By \"best\" I have in mind not only readability but also commentary, notes, etc.", "As the Varangian guard was made almost exclusivly of Scandinavians, how common was it for young men to leave home with the intention to join up with the Varangians, and was there ever any attempts to stop this practice? \nAfter all, Scandinavia was not very densely populated, and it is not hard to understand how even small groups of men leaving could damage smaller communities.", "I once heard the claim that Tir was a god of ritualized battle whereas Thor was largely a god of disorderly battle and raiding. It was claimed that Tir used to be the most popular god of battle, but that he fell out of favor during the viking age.\n\nIs there any evidence to support this claim?", " Did the Vikings ever raid the Arab world? If so, how did they fare against the local tactics and weapons? ", "Can you point me in the direction of where to find a Viking period mead recipe? ", "Do we know what kind of interaction the vikingr had with the sami people? (trade/warfare)", "In Harold R Foster's comic book Prince Valiant, there's a native american woman traveling with a group of Vikings. I know they landed on North America, but are there any evidence that they \"brought home\" some native american people with them?", "A question for every one of you in the panel; What is your favorite book in relation to your topic, and where would it be found? (I've noticed it's incredibly hard to find books on the subjects of Vikings and mythology of that area of the world) .", "Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\n\n* In Scandinavia, surnames like Eriksson and Svensson have been common through history. Was it common back in the Viking age as well? Did surnames have the same role as today?\n\n\n* I live in Sweden and my family have lived here for centuries. I have traced the family history as far as the 1400's. How likely is it that I have Viking-age heritage? \n\n\n* How common was it to be able to read runes? Did they serve any political purpose?\n\n\n* Were there any ethnical/cultural differences between Svear, Geats and Danes?\n\n\n* Was pagan priests common at the time? Did they hold any political power?\n\n\n* Scandinavia is known for being one of the least religious regions today. Was it common for people in the Viking-age to be atheists/not believing in the gods? ", "This is my kind of AMA.\n\nI don't have a question, but because of my username, perhaps you could bestow upon us some informaiton about their drunking habits? Was mead really a big thing for them?", "I would like to know more about the relationship between Scandinavian vikings and Estonians. \n\nA bit of back-story about a theory Lennart Meri, the late president of Estonia, had which he described in his book H\u00f5bevalge (Hopeanvalkea in Finnish language version, means silverlight in English): \n\nAbout 3-7 thousand years ago (some studies report more recent, 7th century BC) [Kaali meteor](_URL_0_) crossed on low orbit the whole Estonia from east to west (we know because bits fell off over the course of the flight) and landed in Saaremaa, the most western island of Estonia, in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It is one of the largest meteors that has landed to Europe (especially so recently and to a populated areas) and it is considered huge. With impact energy of about 80 TJ (20 kilotons of TNT), it is comparable with that of the Hiroshima bomb blast. The largest crater it created is 110 m wide with a depth of 22 m. Vegetation was incinerated up to 6 km from the impact site. Estimated to have been heard and seen for hundreds of km-s, the dust it sent to the atmosphere is thought to have covered the sun for at least a day in the whole of Baltic Sea region. Late Estonian president Lennart Meri believed that this major event helped give birth to many aspects of the Norse mythology regarding fire, thunder, lightning and iron.\n\nThe meteorite is estimated to have been about 60-80 tonnes in total mass, but only 1.5 kg of iron has been found. On Iron Age a wall was kept around the whole crater and updated regularly. Estonians were described as very good with iron, but the only natural iron ore in Estonia is located in swamps, making it very inaccessible. Many Northern European iron artifacts have been found to be made of a meteorite origin iron. Estonia (like Gotland) has a much higher rate of silver treasures found compared to neighboring countries. He also suggested that Finno-Ugric people were a very important part of a heavily used trade route to the east through Volga river. \n\nIn Estonian mythology there's a god called Taara, which is believed to have a connection with Thor. In Norse mythology Thor travels in a flying chariot that brings brings fire, thunder and loud noise when it rides over the sky. Finnish mythology has stories that may originate with the formation of Kaali. One of them is in runes 47, 48 and 49 of the Kalevala epic: Louhi, the evil wizard, steals the Sun and fire from people, causing total darkness. Ukko, the god of the sky, orders a new Sun to be made from a spark. The virgin of the air starts to make a new Sun, but the spark drops from the sky and hits the ground. This spark goes to an \"Aluen\" or \"Kalevan\" lake and causes its water to rise. Finnish heroes see the ball of fire falling somewhere \"behind the Neva river\" (the direction of Estonia from Karelia). The heroes head that direction to seek fire, and they finally gather flames from a forest fire.  \nAccording to a theory first proposed by Lennart Meri, it is possible that Saaremaa was the legendary Thule island, first mentioned by ancient Greek geographer Pytheas, whereas the name \"Thule\" could have been connected to the Finnic word *tule* (\"(of) fire\") and the folklore of Estonia, which depicts the birth of the crater lake in Kaali. Kaali was considered the place where \"The sun went to rest.\"\n\nLennart Meri based many of this ideas on the linguistic evidence and folklore he gathered while visiting the ancient native Finno-Ugric tribes, now my question is: how does this somewhat unknown and controversial theory fit in to the currently accepted history, 1) the possibility of the meteorite having a huge impact on Norse mythology and 2) Gotland and Estland (Estonia) being part of a very important a busy trade route to the east through Baltic Sea and Volga river?", "Can you tell me anything about traditional Viking-age tattoos?  ", "This is more of a pre-Viking question, but it fits into the establishment of Vikings and the people along the Volga river.\n\nMy question is related to the Great Migration following the collapse of the West Roman Empire and invasion of the Huns into the Balkan region.  Where were the Slavs during this period, and what were their migration patterns, and what Germanic groups migrated to the east and north into the Volga region?  Basically, what ethnic group inhabited the Volga during the Viking Age?\n\nFeel free to ignore/downvote if too irrelevant.  It was my understanding that the Slavs were originally in the Balkan Peninsula, and I was unsure of how/when they spread up through Russia.", "How come Columbus has been given all the credit for discovering America in 1492, when the Vikings discovered it first?", "What modern representation of the vikings in the media is the most accurate?", "How different are old Norse languages from modern Scandinavian languages? ", "I would be very interested to hear an objective assessment from a non-Norwegian historian about the city of Trondheim/Nidaros and the Jarls of Lade.\n\nHow important was Nidaros in the viking age? How much power and respect did the Jarls of Lade have, were they know all across the Norse world (perhaps even as far away as Jorvik, Holmgard and Miklagard)?\n\nTrondheim as a city was founded in 997 by Olav Tryggvason but I understand that Lade and other areas pre-dates the formation of the city? For instance; Harald Fairhair was crowned King of Norway (a tradition still in use today) in Trondheim in 872?", "Besides the character assassination of Aethelred of Merica, how accurate is Bernard Cornwell's Saxon series?", "How accurate are most viking metal lyrics to viking life or more commonly mythology. Specifically Amon Amarth because I am a fan of them. [Here](_URL_1_) is a good example of Amon Amarth. [Here are the lyrics if you prefer to read them](_URL_0_).", "Is it true that Vikings bred dogs with short legs and stout bodies that later became the modern day Welsh Corgi?", "What can you say about Viking culture and having -son tagged on to the end of your name? (Erikson, Johnson, Olson). Is this a product of that culture or just Scandinavian in general?", "What really happened with the abolition of slavery in Iceland? Wikipedia gives the date as 1117. My memory is a bit sketchy but I think that I read that the law passed by the Althing was more a reflection of the state of affairs that slaves were no longer so needed than a noble and tolerant action. Earlier in the commonwealth, land for grazing or some industries more suited to slave labor was more available, but later on there was enough non-slaves to do the work. Is that correct?", "This might be a bit obscure, but how accurate are the Hrafn Gunnlaugsson Viking films (Shadow of the Raven, The White Viking, When the Raven Flies)?", "As I've oft heard it, Viking is a profession, not a race! So my question is, what is the potential for non-scandinavian Vikings? \n\nFor instance, Tyrkir the German that accompanied Leif Erikson. Or- and this is what I'm really curious about- could Sami folk have potentially joined a Viking raid? ", "How religious were the Vikings? Were there severe laws predicated on religious beliefs?", "This is a question I've had for a long time that I'm still trying to get answered.\n\nI'm lead to understand that sacrifice was not uncommon among the Norsemen, both of animals and of humans. What did they believe about their sacrifices and how did they practice them??", "I have a few questions.\n\nFirst, hungarians:\n\nLooking at maps, it seems there was about a century when both vikings and hungarians did raids in western europe. Is there evidence they ever met? If yes what kind of interaction they had?\n\nIn western europe did any source make connection between the vikings and hungarians. The totally different culture, transportation, etc. was enough to distinguish, or to put it in another way: as they might have been both seen as god's revenge for being sinful (by the way were they seen this way or is it a later addition by scholars?), was a connection made between them by western europeans?\n\nI read somewhere that a few hundred viking warriors served in Stephen I.'s court. Any of you know, whether it is true, and if yes were they bodyguards, elite soldiers or something else? How did they end up in Hungary?\n\nThe second topic is about the eastern mediterranean. Vikings reached Byzantium and Sicily. Did any group ever ventured further west/east and ended up meeting other vikings? And if yes how was the relationship between them? And in general how was the relationship between vikings from different areas meeting in far away lands? Cultural similarities were sufficient to keep an amicable relationship or to give an example, someone from Gotland seen others from the Fer\u00f6es as alien as someone from Egypt?\n\nAnd a long shot for the end: was there ever a viking circumnavigation of Europe? If yes, was it an \"accident\" or a conscious decision to do it?\n", "Who and when was the last practitioner of the Norse religion? Not the new reborn one, \u00c1satr\u00fa.", "Were there people from north Germany going on vikings as well? Would one be justified to call them vikings? Would they use the same term or is viking a word of Scandinavian origin.", "Ah yes! I have been waiting for this. Thank you so much for doing this ama! \n\n1. How important was Charlemagne in making scandinavia poor due to charlemagne warring with countries that the norse traded with?\n2. How strong is Sverres claim to being of Harald fairhairs descent?\n3. Were the longboats as impressive as they were made out to be, or was it the crew steering them?\n4. Is the assumption about the four stages of the viking age correct(Exploration/early raids, more organized raids, settlement and colonization, unification and king raids and invasion) and when in your opinion, did each stage begin and end?\n5. When did vikings start to loose their edge militarily? At what point were they no longer considered a threat?\n6. Why did the vikings not succeed in neither conquering england, scotland or ireland considering at various points they would have been able to do so. Was the attention split that much?\n7. How much infighting was there among the vikings overseas, did they believe in the common enemy and avoided attacking eachother, or was viking towns free game aswell?\n8. The skald culture was very important, but how many skalds were there at any time, my impression is that there was only a few skalds traveling internationally(In gunnlaugssaga \u00e6lthered 'the unready' gives his cloak to gunnlaug, and i would assume he couldnt do that if there were too many). Were most simply court poets, and if so, how did they react when traveling skalds were visiting, did they envy those in higher rank much?\n9. How true is that the vikings were more clean than those they conquered, could they be compared to those living in say greece or italy?\n10. Why did the vikings never continue west further south into mainland us? Why wasnt there any more exploration sparked like it did with colombus?\n11. When did the viking age truly end in your opinion? For me i would say 1066/1067 with harald hardr\u00e5de and the danish king(Cant remember his name)  since after that, the vikings didnt undertake any more king raids that were significant and europe had become alot more guarded against viking attacks. \n\nThank you for the answers, hope it wasnt too much(And considering its 4am in CETland, this might not go answered :( )", "How did the general population and the ruling authorities of Scandinavia during the Viking age view Iceland?\nAnd directly related to that, when did the Scandinavian people who immigrated to Iceland start identifying themselves as Icelandic?\n\nAnd on a completely different note: Could any of you give me some examples about Vikings who joined the Varangian guard and became *v\u00e6ringjar*?", "Really bad question but: A history told my class a story when we were about 11 to try and show how different morals and culture were in different times. \n\nShe told us that there was a myth about a Viking boy who was playing with his friend. The friend starts annoying him and says dishonourable things his family. The boy went home, picked up an axe and then beheaded his friend. Apparently most Vikings thought this was a noble thing to do. \n\nDoes anyone know the source for this story or anything about it? ", "What weapon did the Viking use most often?\n\nWere Estonians Vikings?\n\nHow often did Vikings raid each other?", "Might not be completely relevant, but I got this pendant from my dad after he went to a viking-fair and I was wondering about the historical authenticity of the design. What he was told was that it's a Thor's Hammer in the shape of an upside-down cross. It was supposedly used as a resistance symbol against the christians. Found an image: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXZnVhHVbQ"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaali_crater"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.metrolyrics.com/twilight-of-the-thunder-god-lyrics-amon-amarth.html", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3WJX1cIuY4"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MTOxGf03jK8/TatniPOhQrI/AAAAAAAAAK0/_V5-fEdiQ9o/s1600/Thor%2527s+hammer+pendant+from+Fossi%252C+Iceland.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7bba6o", "title": "Were people in Victorian times actually as weak health-wise as they are portrayed in novels from the time period?", "selftext": "I'm currently on a Victorian era fiction binge, and it seems like every book has women fainting left and right, perfectly healthy people dying from getting rained on, being overwhelmed to death from emotion, and other seemingly ridiculous maladies.\n\nDid people during this time period really have such weak constitutions? If so, was it just from harsh their living conditions? Or, since most novels tend to portray upper class characters, was their poor health related to all of the basically inbreeding going on between well-off English families? Or is it all just a literary trope from the time?\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bba6o/were_people_in_victorian_times_actually_as_weak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dphb3yw", "dphoqum"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["I cannot speak to the actual, physical health of Victorians, but I did once write an answer on the related subject of why one shouldn't take representations of fainting in period fiction as just a reflection of what people were actually doing:\n\n[How did fainting in the Victorian era become so gendered? What social conventions led to the loss of consciousness to be so strongly identified with women?](_URL_0_)", "Part of the answer to your question is that it really was quite easy to fall ill and die in the Victorian period, certainly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, before the development of germ theory and well before the arrival of antibiotics. But of course this applied to every previous period \u2013 and yet we do seem to hear more about the weakness of women in Victoria's time than we did before.\n\nThe explanation for this lies in the medical theories of the age, which viewed women's bodies as especially problematic. I wrote about this in [an essay about Philippa Fawcett](_URL_0_), who astounded her contemporaries and gave many people pause for thought by becoming the first woman to take first place in the Cambridge mathematics tripos - then widely viewed as the most demanding intellectual test that could be sat anywhere in the world. The whole essay is, I hope, worth reading (and it has a nice punch-the-air conclusion), but the portion that helps to explain your observation is this one:\n\n > To be a woman in the Victorian age was to be weak: the connection was that definite. To be female was also to be fragile, dependent, prone to nerves and\u2014not least\u2014possessed of a mind that was several degrees inferior to a man\u2019s. For much of the 19th century, women were not expected to shine either academically or athletically, and those who attempted to do so were cautioned that they were taking an appalling risk. Mainstream medicine was clear on this point: to dream of studying at the university level was to chance madness or sterility, if not both...\n\n > Today, the science that underpinned those views seems crackpot. To the Victorians, it was breakthrough stuff. Central to the 19th-century concept of human development was the idea that the adolescent body was a closed system; there was only so much energy available, and so a body in which resources were diverted to mental development was one in which physical development necessarily suffered. This was thought to be a particular problem for women, because their reproductive system was far more complicated than men\u2019s and so consumed a greater proportion of the body\u2019s resources. A young woman who studied hard during puberty was believed to be taking special risks since \u201cthe brain and ovary could not develop at the same time,\u201d as historian Judith Walzer Leavitt points out. \n\nThe same problem very much applied to illness; women were considered to be more prone to disease than men because their bodies devoted a higher proportion of their limited energies to the demands of motherhood."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5a0pyc/how_did_fainting_in_the_victorian_era_become_so/d9d5am5/"], ["https://mikedashhistory.com/2011/10/31/above-the-senior-wrangler/"]]}
{"q_id": "1iilko", "title": "I read about children working underground in coal mines during the Industrial Revolution. Is that accurate?", "selftext": "I read elsewhere that children were only used for coal breaking, and that they weren't allowed underground at all until they were 18.\n\nEDIT: I should mention that I want to know as much about child labor in coal mines as possible.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iilko/i_read_about_children_working_underground_in_coal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb4te55"], "score": [6], "text": ["Until 1842, children did work underground in substantial numbers.\n\n[An accident at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone](_URL_1_), near Barnsley in 1838 clearly shows this.  A stream overflowed into the ventilation drift after violent thunderstorms causing the death of 26 children; 11 girls aged from 8 to 16 and 15 boys between 9 and 12 years of age.\n\nThe Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children\u2019s Employment of 1842 found that  over 5000 children were employed for underground work, some as young as four years old.\n\nYou can read the conclusions on employment of children in mines [here](_URL_0_)\n\n* Children (mostly boys, but also girls) did work underground from a very young age.\n\n* The youngest often worked opening and shutting ventilation doors, a job where they spend almost the entire working day alone and in the dark.\n\n* From the age of six, they would be employed hauling coal carriages, sometimes in very low tunnels.\n\n* Working days were 11 to 14 hours. The better-regulated mines had some breaks, the worst not at all and many children complained of a constant, often painful fatigue.\n\n* In case of mine accidents, young children died in explosions, were crushed under tonnes of stone or drowned. Entrusting jobs essential for mine safety to young children was actually a cause of accidents.\n\n[This list of mining accidents 1820-1839](_URL_2_) shows many teenage and younger workers killed.\n\n\n\nAll this led to the Mines and Collieries Act 1842:\n\n* No female was to be employed underground (as women miners wore trousers and shifts or even went topless, this work was an affront to Victorian sensibilities)\n\n* No boy under 10 years old was to be employed underground.\n\n* Parish apprentices between the ages of 10 and 18 could continue to work in the mines.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/2191/", "http://www.dmm-pitwork.org.uk/html/daz.htm", "http://www.cmhrc.co.uk/cms/document/1820_39.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "17zu41", "title": "Reading about the WWII pacific theather. Why the huge difference in losses?", "selftext": "I finished reading the book (With the old breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa)[_URL_0_] and was baffled by the losses the japanese had.\n\nAn example is the battle for Okinawa, JPN had 95k dead while U.S. had 12,513 dead. A 7.6 to 1 ratio.\n\nWhy the japanese took such a beating(sorry for the expression), didn't they rule the pacific some time before, what changed so much that they couldn't handle?\n\n\nEDIT: Thanks for all the great infos.\nIt seems to me now that what afflicted the Japanese was poor outdated tactics and a sense of impending success, due to the early ones.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17zu41/reading_about_the_wwii_pacific_theather_why_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8aby68", "c8ackut", "c8aicpa", "c8bhkox"], "score": [9, 7, 2, 2], "text": ["A fast deteriorating supply situation for the Japanese and the industrial might and adaptibility of the US happend. What followed was what always follows when ideology, honor culture and courage clashes with superior firepower. \n\nQuite simply, the IJN didn't surrender when almost any other force would have. They fought until they ran out of everything. Food, ammo, equipment, reinforcements. Usually, being cut of and running out of things it what makes a normal army surrender. The IJN fought on, sometimes even resorting to \"banzai tactics\" (in essence, a suicide charge) rather than surrender.", "By Okinawa, a late war battle, the technological difference between the US and the IJN/IJA was *massive*.\n\nThe IJA was just barely beyond a ww1 era army, they were not mechanized in a meaningful way, they used bolt-action rifles, had minimal amounts of light tanks, and no air cover. Even their MMG's and HMG's were fed by small capacity stripper clips, where the american browning 1919 could use a belt with bullets in it that was something like 300 rounds before having to reload.\n\nBy contrast, the US army was using sqaud automatic weapons (the BAR), submachine guns (the thompson) and even the basic infantry rifleman had a semi-automatic rifle in the M1 garand. This translates to a single american infantry section having a massive advantage in volume of fire against a single japanese infantry section. What this means in practical terms is that a bayonet charge at american lines was tactical suicide, as even a lowly private could still bang out 8 7.62mm rounds from the hip in close quarters before engaging with his own bayonet. I don't need to get into the effect the thompson and the BAR have on a line of charging infantry, do I?\n\nWhy did the japanese use the \"Banzai tactic\" of bayonet charges so often? For a number of reasons: 1) against an undisciplined enemy, it works brilliantly. 2) when backed into a corner, out of ammo, out of food, out of time, it's the only thing you can do 3) even on a level playing field the japanese knew their weapons were outmatched at every single level from the private to the tanks to the artillery. Closing with the enemy and forcing hand to hand combat neutralizes all of this. The artillery wont bomb it's own soldiers, neither will the tanks, and the automatic weapons can't be fired if their crews are fighting with bayonets to survive. The problem is you still have to get across that field/river/rice paddy/etc to get into the melee.\n\nSo in theory it makes sense, get in close where the enemy's advantage is neutralized, and go to work. However, the american infantry happens to be really, really good at adapting. It didn't take long for tactics to evolve overlapping fields of fire, coordinated fall back positions, pre-sighted light artillery (mortars, etc) zones, and all sorts of things that really just nullify an infantry charge by turning large amounts of territory into shrapnel filled exploding fiery death. The problem: the japanese didn't have any other choice. They *had* to charge. It was the only chance they had, even though they knew it was near suicide. The end result being that the banzai charge almost always resulted in massive losses for the japanese as they would send wave after wave after wave at the american lines.\n\nThen there is all the other stuff in war. The japanese on any given island would suffer through days of unending naval bombardment by some of the biggest guns in the war. Air raids were a constant threat. Starvation and disease are an ever present danger that claim many lives on both sides.\n\n\nBut ultimately? The japanese didn't surrender. They just chose death before dishonor, and didn't have the firepower to stagger their enemy. So they hid in caves, they raided at night, they starved, they never gave up, and they died.", "At the Kokoda Track the Japanese figured that since they had the advantage early on in numbers that they would conduct frontal charges against the Australian positions to hold the Australians and then they'd send troops around the Australian flanks.  The Australians though would fall back if they were in danger of the flanking attacks getting around them and fought a fighting withdrawal for months along the Kokoda Track.  This meant the Japanese suffered huge casualties compared to the Australians.\n\nLater on in the battle the Australians took the initiative with freshly arrived soldiers while the Japanese were exhausted from months of fighting and were also running out of food and other supplies.\n\n", "[New Guinea campaign also shows this:](_URL_0_)\nApproximately 202,100 Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen died during the New Guinea campaign. The largest number of deaths, 127,600, occurred in Papua and New Guinea with a further 44,000 dying on Bougainville and the remaining 30,500 dying on New Britain, New Ireland, and the Admiralty Islands.\n\nApproximately 7,000 Australian  and 7000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen died during the New Guinea Campaign.\n\nThat's a 14.4 to 1 ratio.\n\nMany Japanese died of disease and starvation during this campaign. Japanese logistics were sparse at the best of times, and supplying the large army on the island became increasingly difficult.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/0891419195"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/Web-Printer/58EBD6D993E15CE8CA256D05002671FD?OpenDocument"]]}
{"q_id": "2wcs9f", "title": "\"Blacks\" or \"African-Americans\"?", "selftext": "for context, i'm writing a paper on the reconstruction era. are both terms okay to use, or is \"African-American\" more correct? thankz!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wcs9f/blacks_or_africanamericans/", "answers": {"a_id": ["copq13d", "copvpfd"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["You might split the difference and go with Black Americans. No one is likely to get mad about that sort of thing in an undergrad paper so long as you're making a good faith effort. Also the general trend is to [capitalize the B in Black Americans](_URL_0_) these days, though that is a hot topic. ", "Just be consistent. Most writings on race use black with little to no qualms, but I think it comes down to your own stylistic decision. To me, African American or Black American is quite clunky, and if the paper is on America, highly unnecessary unless your work is transnational in nature. In regards to the last comment, if you do capitalize the B in black you need to capitalize the W in white, in my opinion for consistencies sake, and I haven't read anything convincing on why one would be capitalized while the other not. I don't capitalize either when writing, but ultimately that is your decision to make. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "xww2c", "title": "How certain are we of what year it is?  Were there every any disagreements, like during the Dark Ages or afterwards, of the exact year?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xww2c/how_certain_are_we_of_what_year_it_is_were_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5qb6vs", "c5qbb79", "c5qbfpf", "c5qcs5k", "c5qhqie", "c5qiezf", "c5ql0uo"], "score": [39, 164, 14, 28, 14, 2, 3], "text": ["On the subject of disagreeing about the year, an intriguing, if grossly flawed, fringe theory about chronology: _URL_0_", "Well, it's one thing to be off by a day or so, but by a year? That's a massive mistake for an entire population to make.  But it wasn't until 525 AD that the AD numbering system began.  And there are a couple discrepancies in figuring out when Jesus was born, to start counting.  The gospels (for those who take them literally) describe two things that are mentioned elsewhere and let us date it.  Matthew says that after Jesus was born, King Herod (the Great) is still alive, because he massacred children in an attempt to kill Jesus.  (There's no evidence of any such massacre, though Herod was very bloody).  Luke says that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem only because of the Census of Quirinius.  (That they would have to travel to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem instead of staying in Nazareth makes no sense.  The Romans would never have demanded that, and it's completely impractical.)  ANYWAY... King Herod died in 4 BC, and the Census took place in 6/7 AD.  So one, if not both of these is wrong.  And if either of them is right, then our AD 1 is wrong.  Basically, though the modern consensus is that Jesus was a real person, any attempt to figure out what year he was actually born in is a shot in the dark.  So in that sense, we don't know if this really \"should\" be 2012 or not.  But since 525, when they started the AD system, no. No, there's no doubt that it's been kept correctly.  And there are enough documents and histories for the previous thousand years that when we label something \"44 BC\" we're confident that they didn't miss a year.\n\ntl;dr- Year 1 AD is arbitrary, and frankly just a guess as to Jesus's birth year, but accepting that, yes, this is 2012.", "The seven-day week cycle was propagated throughout Eurasia in the early centuries AD, and nobody [edit: meaning no culture or civilization which was keeping track of the days, often for astrological purposes] anywhere in the world ever lost a day. It stands to reason that there was no time in written history when an entire year was lost.\n\nThis is separate from debates over the dating of the Anno Domini calendar, and disputes over the month when the year began (January, February, or March depending on who you ask).\n\nedit: Oops! I forgot about the great Gregorian calendar dispute, which was indeed a big disagreement over what day it was. Also, the old Roman and Arabic calendars had big problems which caused issues like this:\n\n >  If too many intercalations were omitted, as happened after the Second Punic War and during the Civil Wars, the calendar would drift rapidly out of alignment with the tropical year. Moreover, because intercalations were often determined quite late, the average Roman citizen often did not know the date, particularly if he were some distance from the city. For these reasons, the last years of the pre-Julian calendar were later known as \"years of confusion\". The problems became particularly acute during the years of Julius Caesar's pontificate before the reform, 63\u201346 BC, when there were only five intercalary months, whereas there should have been eight, and none at all during the five Roman years before 46 BC.\n", "Does anyone else remember that episode of Duck Tales where Scrooge McDuck accidentally says it's Wednesday when it was actually Tuesday, and since he was so influential, everyone just agreed with him, and it spread from there until everyone in the town just accepted that it was Wednesday?\n\nI think what OP is asking is: Could this happen?", "We're 100% sure. Most of the arguments in this thread are based on agreements between different civilizations and consistency within civilizations, but there's a stronger argument: astronomy. \n\nAstronomy is incredibly precise. Like mind-blowingly precise. We can easily figure out based on the laws of physics and the current positions of the planets exactly where they were and will be, at any time up to around 40 million years from now (I believe that's the limit, but I might be off by a bit.) So if the written history says that there was a lunar eclipse in 320 BC during the harvest in Greece, and that during a speech in Rome in the spring of 372 BC there was a solar eclipse, we can just run the motion of the planets and figure out exactly when those things happened. And in every case, the written dates line up exactly with what astronomy predicts.", "akyser has already explained how the Anno Domini calendar started, being invented by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in what we now call 525 AD. This \"Anno Domini\" (\"In the Year of Our Lord\") year-counting method was invented to assist with the calculation of Easter each year. In fact, Dionysus went so far as [to calculate the dates of Easter for the next 532 years](_URL_0_) (ending in 1057 AD).\n\nSo, even though it wasn't used for date-keeping across much of Europe until hundreds of years later, it *was* used by monks and Christian scholars to keep track of the most important festival in the Christian calendar. By aligning the actual dates of Easter with the dates in Dionysius' tables, we know which year is year, from 525AD to 1057AD - by which time the Anno Domini calendar was widely used across Europe. \n", "This has nothing to do with actual history, so please don't upvote me, but if you want a fun read and a good laugh, look up the [Phantom Time Hypothesis.](_URL_0_)\n\nThis is one of the most fun conspiracies ever, it holds that the years between roughly 600 and 900 AD, and all the events therin, were complete fabrications after the fact, and we're actually only in the 1700s currently."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=calhistory/easter/addating"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis"]]}
{"q_id": "2s3k3a", "title": "Why did Britain/USA not just colonialize Saudi Arabia?", "selftext": "Some half-cooked answers I've found are that, by the time they had interest in the region (oil in the 1920's, moreso in the 30's) coloniazation was frowned upon. but the King Saud at the time was the king of a desert, with nothing in the way of an army by and stretch of the imagination?\n\nSo instead of royalties and generally caring about what the Saudi's thought, why didn't COSAC/ARAMCO/USA/UK just take power, it would have made things simpler, no?\n\nI've been reading a lot of Saudi and the birth of their country, and noone has approached the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2s3k3a/why_did_britainusa_not_just_colonialize_saudi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnm5zsm", "cnm7azd"], "score": [10, 15], "text": ["Just finished reading Daniel Yergin's \"The Prize,\" and it goes into a very oil-slanted history of the kingdom. In short (and I'm sure others here can add more), after WWII, the British empire was receding and the Brits saw a large presence in the Gulf as unsustainable. The US, at least under Truman, saw direct involvement in the Gulf states as \"a little far afield\" of the nation's policy and instead encouraged private business to take the lead, especially in getting energy to Europe in a somewhat circuitous application of the Marshall Plan.", "You've pretty much answered your own question. Invading and controlling countries was not the preferred method ot at least was losing favour. That doesnt mean that some control was entirely off the books (vis a vis Persia and the Brits), but that it wasnt the ideal way of gettings one way. It was clear that a pro-western government could be dealt with via treaties, bribes  and business arrangements rather than unpleasant invasions and occupation. The fact that Saudi Arabia has remained western aligned and at least partly benign for 80 years odd is evidence it was a reasonable plan. British expansionism had largely stopped at this time and was indeed receeding.\n\nAdditionally the US had never, as OlfactoriusRex suggest, ventured too far into interfering directly in these regions, partly as a matter of policy but also as a matter of practicality. US power projection capabilities at that range were fairly poor until post WW2. Some military bods would know more on that than I. The UK of course was the most expert nation at that sort of thing around this time.\n\nThe question is thus not so much why didnt they, but why would they?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b1y23z", "title": "Which part of China did Han people originate in?", "selftext": "They were called Huaxia at the time of their ethnogenesis (as well as other names at different points in history) AFAIK, but they're still the same people in question.\n\nSo which region of China did Hans originate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b1y23z/which_part_of_china_did_han_people_originate_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiw7xmf"], "score": [5], "text": ["The earliest that \"ethnic Chinese\" can be placed with certainty is the 13th century BC, when the Shang were writing divination records in what was clearly an ancestral form of the Chinese language. Shang materials have been found over a large part of north China but concentrated around Yinxu in Henan, identified as their last royal capital. We can confidently identify the late Shang as \"ethnic Chinese\" because their language shows continuity with later forms of Chinese; their material culture shows continuity with Zhou and later cultures; and Zhou and later texts explicitly refer to them as Huaxia.\n\nEarlier cultures in north China, like the Erligang (15th century BC) and Erlitou (19th-15th centuries BC) are ancestral to the Yinxu culture in the material sense, but they lacked writing and therefore we can't be certain whether they spoke Chinese, another language, or a mix of languages (in the better-documented Zhou period, for example, we know that South China and the northern steppe were each home to numerous distinct language families- the same could have been true of early North China). So while many Chinese archaeologists and historians identify these material cultures with the Xia and early Shang and therefore as ethnic Chinese, this is not widely accepted outside of China due to the lack of written evidence produced by the cultures themselves.\n\nIn short, we can be very confident that there was a Huaxia ethnicity at least by the 13th century BC, and at least around the middle reaches of the Yellow River, but because of the nature and availability of evidence the further back you go in time, or the further you get from Yinxu, the less certain things become.\n\n- *The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective* by K. C. Chang, Xu Pingfang et al"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17apqx", "title": "When in the past did year abbreviations switch over (ex, '90s to 1890s vs 1990s)?", "selftext": "This is an [EXTEMELY unhistoric example.](_URL_0_)\n\nWas there a point in the past century (and in centuries past, if applicable)\nwhere certain decades ceased to refer to the historical decade and rather to a different (projected or current) decade? \n\nedit: I hope my reply below clarifies my question:\n\n1. To take the 'Gay Nineties' as a 20th c. example, when did people in society stop referring to these as just the \" '90s \" instead of qualifying them as the '1890s' or any other nicknames firmly in the domain of history ?\n\n2.  Are there specific examples historically when people stop referring to the old decade as just the 'xx's? We in 2013 still refer to 19xx as the '20's, '30s, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's.\n\nedit 2: I think the question I'm really asking is, did people in 1913 use the \"'20's, '30s, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's\" as we do today? I am focusing on things that reflect popular culture, more popular media like newspapers and letters and less academic articles of the time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17apqx/when_in_the_past_did_year_abbreviations_switch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c83sotj"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure what question you're asking.\n\nThe 1890s will always be the \"Gay Nineties\", as per your link (or [The Mauve Decade](_URL_0_)), just as the 1920s will always be the \"Roaring Twenties\", and the 1960s will always be the \"Swinging Sixties\".\n\nHowever, if you refer to the \"nineties/'90s\" *now*, most people will assume you mean the 1990s - which don't yet have a \"tag\" like the 1890s.\n\nWhat are you trying to learn?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheGayNineties"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890s"]]}
{"q_id": "1g21kl", "title": "What is a good (modern) book on the Battle of Passchendaele?", "selftext": "I'm trying to gain a deeper understanding of Passchendaele (1917) and I was wondering if any of the historians in this fine subreddit could suggest a good modern read on the battle. By 'modern', what I mean is something post 1980s based upon the 'revisionist' school of WW1 studies rather than the blood and guts and oh woe is me 1960s school of thought. I'd be especially interested in any works that explicitly tie the battle into the 'learning curve' theory and reject the conventional idea that it was a waste of a battle. Failing that, anything that applies the modern methods rather than 'lions lead by donkies' agenda would do.\n\nAny help would be much appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g21kl/what_is_a_good_modern_book_on_the_battle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cag29sm"], "score": [3], "text": ["These may be of some help:\n\n- Your first stop should be John Terraine's *The Road to Passchendaele: the Flanders Offensive of 1917* (1977); while not \"modern\" in the strictest sense, Terraine is very much reliable on these matters and is one of the fathers of the \"learning curve\" school to begin with. He doesn't put up with any Lions/Donkeys nonsense.\n\n- Peter Barton and Jeremy Banning's *Passchendaele* (2007), put out by the IWM, is a remarkable piece of work. It's not so aggressively within the \"learning curve\" school as other works might be, but both Barton and Banning are serious-minded scholars and the quality of their work is enormous.\n\n- Osprey's guide to the campaign (*Passchendaele and the Battles of Ypres 1914-18*, 1997) would be worth checking out just for being an Osprey, but Martin Marix Evans, its author, has supported something like the \"learning curve\" school elsewhere in terms of the Somme.  I don't know if he takes the same line on Passchendaele, but it might be worth checking out.  He has another book on this subject (*Passchendaele: The Hollow Victory*, 2005), but I cannot speak to its quality or contents either.  The title does not inspire delight, for our purposes, but it could be worth a look.\n\nIncidentally, it would probably be best to avoid Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's *Passchendaele: The Untold Story* (2003); as much as I've enjoyed their work in other capacities (they penned a legendary take-down of Paul Fussell, for example), this particular book is pretty much everything you are NOT after."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7bi0es", "title": "How similar is present-day Judaism to the Judaism of the 1st and 2nd centuries?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bi0es/how_similar_is_presentday_judaism_to_the_judaism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpjw3bu"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is not really a simple question to answer.  There's no way to really define how similar things are over time.  Additionally, the 1st-2nd centuries were a time of incredible amounts of change in the Jewish community, and neither ancient or modern Judaism are homogeneous.\n\nThe foundation texts that define modern Jewish practice were not written yet in the 1st-2nd centuries.  The first text that goes into the canon of Rabbinic literature, the Mishnah, was compiled in the mid-2nd century.\n\nThe Mishnah does not seem to be a legal code exactly, but it is a compendium of opinions of things in Jewish law of sorts.  Its content serves to illustrate some of the similarities and differences.  For the similarities, the holiday schedule, basic form of the liturgy, practices like blessings on food, some elements of theology, etc are present in the 1st century.  Though it's important to note that this is the similarities specific to the 2nd century forerunner of modern Judaism--these similarities would not be present for groups that did not evolve into modern Judaism.  And of course some modern Jewish groups have altered these things, though they still exist in some form today.\n\nBut the content also shows how different the Jewish world was.  Agricultural laws were an important part of the laws it contained, but not many modern Jews work in agriculture.  States of ritual purity/impurity were a huge part of what the Jewish experience was in the Second Temple era and immediately after, but it is not today in the same way.  The Temple and the laws and rituals surrounding it were important parts of Judaism then, but are only theoretical now, and only their study is part of the Jewish experience (and even this is limited compared to practical things)  Jewish courts enforcing tort law is a major point of discussion, and while Jews do still sometimes have their financial disputes settled by Jewish law, this is not nearly such a significant part of what the Jewish communal authorities are doing.\n\nReally, modern Judaism itself is similar to its ancient ancestor in important ways.  But what the Jewish religious experience looks like is really drastically different, because life in general is.  And that's only comparing to the predecessor of modern Judaism, we have much less textual material left over from other groups.  And nothing in history is truly static, so Jewish law has developed over the past two thousand years. Depending on your perspective, that could be \"very similar\" or \"very dissimilar\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5usv8q", "title": "Biography recommendation(s) on the space/arms race during the cold war.", "selftext": "I'm currently on the second semester of (contemporary) European history and will have to present and defend a paper for this course. I plan on doing an analysis of a biography of one of the prominent figure of the space/arms race, ideally a person who's neither American nor Russian by birth.\n\nBut given the vast array of biographies on Von Braun alone (not to mention others of his no less brilliant contemporary) I'm thoroughly lost as to whom to chose and which book to read. And as much as I wish I could read them all, I regrettably have deadlines to contend with.\n\nSo you (yes: YOU!) who has already finished their degree in modern/contemporary European History: what do you recommend. Is Von Braun overdone? Should I go for the Ukrainians or is there not enough translations of it? Should I have chosen a course with better employment perspectives?\n\nThank you any help you can provide!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5usv8q/biography_recommendations_on_the_spacearms_race/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddx83wx"], "score": [2], "text": ["Von Braun is kind of overdone \u2014 you're not going to find anything too new or interesting. If it were me, I would seek out other, often-overlooked, plenty interesting figures. Theodore von Karman comes to mind. Qian Xuesen is also an interesting case (though not European...). There were Germans who were taken to the USSR as well \u2014 their cases make for interesting contrasts with the ones who were taken to the USA. If you are willing to avoid rockets, and look to atoms instead, the case of Nikolaus Riehl is quite interesting and there is a translated autobiography available. Gernot Zippe is another interesting figure, and one that gets you into many other countries (he is the one who \"exported\" the gas centrifuge to many European countries in the later Cold War). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "221ver", "title": "When did Europeans start to refer to themselves as Europeans?", "selftext": "By the mid 18th century people in America were beginning to refer to themselves as Americans. \n\nWhat are some of the earliest references to Europeans in this sense?\n\nWhen did it start to become common for people to refer to themselves as European?\n\nWere there any parts of Europe that significantly resisted this sort of movement?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/221ver/when_did_europeans_start_to_refer_to_themselves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgizf7g"], "score": [5], "text": ["People identifying themselves as European? That's still rather a strange thing to do for anyone. Only a few people who are seriously supportive of the EU would do that. Most others would either identify mostly by their national identity or even by a regional identity, like Scottish, Catalan or Occitan.\n\nAnd if one would connect to a larger entity, most people would see little reason to then limit themselves to 'European'. People might call themselves \"world citizen\" to emphasize their international outlook, or \"Western\" to emphasize their economic and political privilege. This is partially a remnant from the Cold War, in which Western Europeans tended to see themselves as part of the NATO block more than as part of the EU, for better or for worse. It's possible that in the former Warsaw pact states the self-identification as European is easier nowadays, I don't know.\n\nSo is there resistance to self-identifying as European? Yes, almost everywhere in Europe this resistance exists. People are anxious to retain some significance in their national or regional identities, as small as the importance of their governments might be to their daily lives. Although most Europeans are reasonably accepting of their European neighbours, and in practice quite supportive of European cooperation, a large part of the European population is very resistant to Europe as an idea. Self-identifying as European would need to overcome that resistance.\n\nAnd frankly while I personally am quite in favor of further European integration, I would rarely if ever self-identify as European. It just rarely seems relevant."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "22xub7", "title": "It's often stated that the U.S. has been at war for most of it's history. How does this compare to other states, past and present?", "selftext": "For example, of the Roman Empire's total life, how many years of peace versus war in some form did it have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22xub7/its_often_stated_that_the_us_has_been_at_war_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgrh7dp"], "score": [37], "text": ["So the question we really need to tackle is: What do you mean by \"been at war\"? The United States has not *legally* been at war since 1945, which means weve had nearly 70 years of uninterrupted peace since the end of World War Two. Infact, in its history the United States has only issued 5 declarations of war, so (again) *legally*, weve only been to war 5 times. But that doesnt count that thing in Vietnam, the thing in Korea, or either thing in Iraq.  But what are *those*? Youd likely suggest that they were *undeclared* wars, but they were still wars. Id agree with that, but it raises a stickier question. We could all accept that conflicts like Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq are *wars*, but what else? Is the 1989 invasion of Panama a war? What about the intervention in Afghanistan? What about Operation Gothic Serpent, which spawned the Battle of Mogadishu and the famous Black Hawk Down incident? How small a conflict can I find that still constitutes a war? What about during Hurricane Katrina, [when there were reports of sniper fire against National Gaurd Units](_URL_0_)? And how do we classify the Civil War? Surely its a war, but the United States never recognized the CSA. Then theres the KKK and its guerilla war against federal troops, whats that? And what of the Cold War, and our (continued) impending deaths in a great nuclear holocaust?\n\nSo, there is a *lot* going on in this question, including producing a workable definition of what a war is, exactly. To then compare that information with *another country*, youd have to create a robust definition which fits both nations peculiar histories, no small feat! And a country like Rome is doubly difficult, with so much of its history shrouded in the past. We really have very few sources which detail the history of Rome, and even fewer ever discuss the micro-wars which were fighting over. So in that case, itd be next to impossible to create a definition of war that would work between the two nations, *and* that would include every \"relevant\" American conflict, *and* that would produce useful results. Its like comparing apples to onions, you could call both \"food\", and both \"round\", but they have very little else in common. \n\nAnd then we have to figure out what is an *American* war? What about the Pequot war of 1634, fought between Massachusetts Indians and colonists of Massachusetts Bay. \n\nThats maybe not the answer you were looking for, was it? Well, heres as close to an answer Ill probably give: The United States has been at war for virtually all meaningful periods of time throughout its history. Between the decades long Indian Wars, a conflict which lasted most of the 18th and 19th centuries, the American interventions in Latin America, the European Civil War, the Cold War, and the Post-Cold War, you can always find some kind of conflict, large or small. Some American soldier, somewhere, has always been in a combat zone. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://abcnews.go.com/US/HurricaneKatrina/story?id=1123495&amp;page=1"]]}
{"q_id": "9njuwu", "title": "Why was property ownership a requirement for voting in early US history?", "selftext": "Since the establishment of the US government was deeply rooted in the enlightenment ideal of rational thought is there a clear rationale for why the states required voters to own property in order to vote?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9njuwu/why_was_property_ownership_a_requirement_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7n5hxc"], "score": [19], "text": ["Hey, this can be traced to the English traditions and views on voting rights. Though, it has to be said, we have to make a distinction between three phases: pre-Revolutionary structures, the 13 states under the Articles of Confederation and Post-US Constitution in 1789.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nPre-Revolutionary structures varied greatly between colony to colony, since each operated under its own Charter, rules and traditions. Think of them as 13 independent countries that just happen to be next to each other and share a language. Under the Articles of Confederation, this degree of political independence is also maintained, the only exceptions being military and foreign policy matters. (not that it worked anyway\u2026 ) So each one had a different electoral policy.   Examples from 1763 show the variety of these requirements. Delaware expected voters to own fifty acres of land or property worth \u00a340. Rhode Island set the limit at land valued at \u00a340 or worth an annual rent of \u00a32. Connecticut required land worth an annual rent of \u00a32 or livestock worth \u00a340.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI assume that your question is about the Post-Constitution voting policies of 1789 so really early Federalist era. The property requirements remained in the electoral system as a holdover from the English voting traditions and views on voting rights of the 18th century. Many Founding Fathers viewed that individuals who did not posses wealth were inherently unworthy of voting because their poverty made them vulnerable to political manipulation. Only vested members who were financially responsible were immune to such populism. Likewise, they believed that women, children, African Americans and Native Americans were incapable on handling such responsibility in politics.\n\nEnglish jurist William Blackstone wrote in the 1700s that \u201cThe true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.\u201d\n\nLikewise, John Adams affirms in 1776 that \u201cDepend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.\u201d\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWe have to keep in mind, our Founding Father did not intend for a direct democracy, but a Representative Republic, which is a very different proposition.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDITED thanks to the input of [dhmontgomery](_URL_2_)\n\n**Sources:**\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nKeyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2009). Basic Books, Revised Edition.\n\nMurrin, John M.; Johnson, Paul E.; McPherson, James M.; Fahs, Alice; Gerstle, Gary (2012). Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (6th ed.). Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring07/elections.cfm", "http://www.ushistory.org/documents/confederation.htm", "https://www.reddit.com/user/dhmontgomery"]]}
{"q_id": "65gqbi", "title": "Are there any good books or sources to read up on the mid to late pueblo people of the mesa verde region?", "selftext": "see title. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65gqbi/are_there_any_good_books_or_sources_to_read_up_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgazmgm"], "score": [3], "text": ["Unfortunately, there aren't too many good and accessible sources on Mesa Verde meant for more general consumption (as opposed to very technical archaeological material). \n\nIf you are interested in Ancestral Puebloan archaeology generally (and not just Mesa Verde), then there are three good overviews of Pueblo archaeology, any of which would be a good primer to Pueblo archaeology (including Mesa Verde). \n\nThese three are the [Cordell and McBrinn](_URL_0_) book, the [Plog](_URL_1_) book, and the [Kantner](_URL_5_) book. Any of the three is acceptable and covers more or less the same information. \n\nFor Mesa Verde specifically, unfortunately (though understandably), most of the archaeological work (including accessible books) has centered on researching the very sudden and very thorough depopulation of the Mesa Verde region around A.D. 1270, wherein nearly the entire population of the area moved southwards into the northern Rio Grande. Explaining this sudden and complete depopulation is a major topic of research in Southwestern archaeology. For this, I would recommend two books. The first, [Leaving Mesa Verde](_URL_6_), takes a very ecological and environmental approach to the problem, positing that environmental changes in the 13th century was both a stress on corn-farming agriculturalists like those that lived in Mesa Verde, but also compounded other social problems. The second book, [Winds from the North](_URL_3_), takes a very different approach to the problem by looking at linguistic, genetic, and ethnohistoric evidence from modern Pueblos in New Mexico to discuss their connection with the Mesa Verde region. \n\nI wouldn't say either is \"complete\" in the sense that both take a very specific approach to answering the issue. If you wanted to read either, I would say \"Winds from the North\" is the most accessible to  a non-archaeological audience since it doesn't get as lost in the weeds of environmental reconstruction like \"Leaving Mesa Verde\", but neither was written for a popular audience (like the three overview books I linked to above). Both are also quite expensive, so check your local libraries! Might want to skim online previews before committing to one or the other. \n\nYou should also take a look at the [Crow Canyon Archaeological Center website](_URL_2_). They aren't focused exclusively on Mesa Verde (they do a lot of work on Chaco-related sites in northern New Mexico/southern Colorado), but they are focused on public outreach and making archaeological research accessible to the public. \n\nFinally, I've written a little bit about Mesa Verde before on /r/AskHistorians, in [this](_URL_4_) and [this](_URL_7_) answer. \n\nHope that helps, and happy to field any other questions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=bvX6ygAACAAJ&amp;dq=cordell+archaeology+southwest&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjjyqLWiafTAhXHhVQKHQkXBpsQ6AEIJDAA", "https://books.google.com/books?id=k9sMAQAAMAAJ&amp;dq=cordell%20archaeology%20southwest&amp;source=gbs_similarbooks", "http://www.crowcanyon.org/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=PVv5ygAACAAJ&amp;dq=winds+from+the+north&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjKqcqwm6bTAhUqsFQKHZqqAxgQ6AEIJjAB", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cyo18/is_there_any_connection_between_the_exodus_of_the/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=EkS2EpDK1qMC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=kantner+archaeology+southwest&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiC6PDjiafTAhVlilQKHbzCBakQ6AEIIjAA#v=onepage&amp;q=kantner%20archaeology%20southwest&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=RxlpCqSBVKcC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=leaving+mesa+verde&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiiqPi4m6bTAhXLrlQKHS-sDzUQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&amp;q=leaving%20mesa%20verde&amp;f=false", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kq4hl/are_there_any_patterns_of_fracture_on_skeletal/"]]}
{"q_id": "1rw69q", "title": "How did ancient archaeological sites like the Palace of Knossos and Troy (but not limited to) get buried?", "selftext": "I'm only using Palace of Knossos and Troy as examples, but any ancient historians who can provide an explanation to another buried site would be appreciated.\n\nVolcano ashes covering Vesuvius I can understand.  Places in deserts where winds blowing sands eventually covering up buildings I can imagine.  Where did all this material that buried these supposedly high walls and large palaces come from?  And what are these materials?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rw69q/how_did_ancient_archaeological_sites_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdrorxi"], "score": [2], "text": ["Most ancient cities quite honestly get torn or burned down due to accidents, conquests, or natural disasters and are subsequently built over.\n\n\nTenochtitlan was the Aztec capital. The Aztecs had built and modelled their city over the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan. After the Spanish Conquest and the fall of the Aztec Empire, the capital of New Spain was built over the foundations of the razed city. After the Mexican Revolution, the site now stands as Mexico City.\n\n\nYou listed Troy, which was rebuilt so many times due to war or fire that historians have labelled the various iterations with numbers (Troy VI, Troy VII, etc). Heinrich Schliemann infamously destroyed several layers while searching for Homeric Troy.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/teno_1/hd_teno_1.htm", "http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/849"]]}
{"q_id": "38l4gf", "title": "Why were the soldiers after WW1 seemingly so much more traumatized than the soldiers after WW2?", "selftext": "In media etc. there is often the image of the \"broken WW1 soldier\", having flashbacks, nightmares, not being able to function properly in society anymore. And when you learn about WW1 in school, I am sure it will almost always emphasize how terrible the war was for the soldiers in the trenches.\nBut at the same time, I can't think of any depictions of the same for WW2 veterans. \n\nWere the two wars so different that it, for lack of a better word, \"broke\" many of the soldiers in WW1 but not so much during WW2? Or is this a misconception? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38l4gf/why_were_the_soldiers_after_ww1_seemingly_so_much/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crvu3ew", "crwrajd"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["I'd say it's a difference of depiction more than anything else. The fact that more armies and more soldiers fought in WWII than in WWI, the new weapons available, the extent of the destruction caused by the war, and the extent of the atrocities committed in WWII, the trauma of the second world war was probably of a much greater scale than WWI; including civilians, the Second World War far out does the first in terms of the trauma.\n\nOf course trauma is hard to quantify exactly, but it must be said that despite the reputation for horror attached to WWI, nothing in my mind at least can compare to the Second World War in terms of sheer human suffering. ", "I'd argue that it is a misconception, but that it is depicted like that in the media. The reason for this is that World War 1 was the first war of that scale, the first total war, where everything in a given country was mobilized for war. Also, generally spoken, there were less civilian victims than in World War 2, meaning that the media focus was on the troops. Several countries where baffled and unable to cope with the vast amount of crippled and injured soldiers (physically and mentally).\n\nThe crimes against humanity during World War 2 overshadowed anything directly war-related, and the memorial is very focused on the murdered civilians. Without this, we might have had a deeper media look at suffering soldiers. If you ever watched documentaries with contemporary witnesses you will see a lot of broken people who never processed what happened during the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "b1aeai", "title": "Wikipedia says that when Constantinople fell and the Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque, the mosiacs depicting Jesus were either covered or destroyed. Since Muslims believe in Jesus, why were these mosaics covered or destroyed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b1aeai/wikipedia_says_that_when_constantinople_fell_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiktn0a", "eilsdbt"], "score": [28, 61], "text": ["While waiting for an answer to your specific question to come in, here are a couple of posts with in-depth answers which discuss very similar topics:\n\n[Post regarding portraits of Ottoman Sultans](_URL_1_) (credit /u/Polgara19)\n\n[Post regarding depictions of the prophet Muhammed](_URL_0_) (credit /u/Labrydian)", "Well the thing is, that during the first centuries of Hagia Sophia's history as a Mosque the mosaics were infact uncovered and were still prominently on display. When Cornelius Loos made his engravings of Constantinople around 1710, he documented the mosaics [pretty clearly](_URL_0_) (this example is particularily striking as it shows the Virgin Mary, still prominent over the Islamic Mihrab). Some of his engravings even show mosaics that have now been [completely lost](_URL_1_). \n\nShortly after Loos made these engravings, the mosaics of the mosque were covered up and [replaced with white plaster](_URL_2_). We don't know for sure when this happened as there is no official proclaimation, but the interior of the Hagia Sophia was renovated in 1717, so it is quite possible that this is when the mosaics were covered up, just 17 years after Loos made his drawings. \n\nSo what took the Ottomans so long, and why did they make the decision to cover these mosaics up by almost 400 years after they took the city? There were several renovations to the Hagia Sophia after the conquest, so why did they not cover them up?\n\nThe preservation of the mosaics seem to have been an intentional choice. For example, the windows, altar, bell tower and Patriarchate of the Hagia Sophia were all destroyed or replaced. The Ottoman Sultans could have easily also destroyed the mosaics or covered them up, but they didn't for whatever reason. Here are a few theories I have heard for why the mosaics may have been preserved and later covered up:\n\nIt may be that these mosaics were preserved to serve as trophies of the conquest. The Hagia Sophia was itself preserved partially for this reason. The presence of the mosaics next to the Islamic calligraphy and Mihrab would remind the visitor of what used to be, and clearly signal the appropriation and reconversion of this former church.\n\nAnother theory might be that the Ottomans, despite being Muslim, wanted to emphasize some degree of continuity, or respect with the past. That these mosaics were to be admired for their beauty rather than for their religious significance, and give the Ottoman Sultans legitimacy as protectors and successors of the Roman imperial past. Mehmed II did proclaim himself Caesar of Rome after all, and specifically decided to have the Hagia Sophia converted from Imperial Church to Imperial Mosque to bolster this claim. \n\nBut if any of these were the case, why were these mosaics later covered up? Well for one, the Ottoman Empire in 1717 was in a very different place compared to earlier centuries. Ottoman Sultans no longer really took their claims as Caesar of Rome seriously (After Suleiman the title seems to have faded into obscurity). The Ottomans were also slowly being encroached by the Habsburg and Russian Empire to its north and west. The Empire would manage to survive this encroachment, but the sudden losses to Christian states may have provoked a defensive attitude among some Ottomans, which may have made these Christian mosaics in the Imperial Mosque somewhat uncomfortable. Several other former churches in Constantinople, like the Zeyrek Mosque and the Little Hagia Sophia also had their mosaics covered in plaster during the 18th Century aswell. Which implies that it may have been a larger ideological change that caused this.\n\nIt is also important to point out that by the 18th Century these mosaics were in very poor condition and were probably falling apart. Some of the broken tesserae from the mosaics were even stolen by local salesmen, who would sell them as \"gemstones\". So the mosaics may simply have been covered up because they were falling apart, which accidentally saved many of them and allowed them to be uncovered much later. \n\nIt is tempting to want to look for theological reasons for why the mosaics were covered up. But it becomes difficult to reconcile such arguments with the nearly 400-year long preservation of the mosaics in the mosque. \n\nI hope this answered your question in a satisfactory manner. If you want me to elaborate more, just ask."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2skmn9/what_is_the_history_or_exceptions_to_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5493et/considering_that_it_is_frowned_upon_to_display/"], ["https://www.pallasweb.com/p/1-2018-loos-eastern-nave.jpg", "https://www.pallasweb.com/p/1-2018-loos-5.jpg", "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFzUdgHWAAADgXw.jpg:large"]]}
{"q_id": "501ve3", "title": "How did ancient/medieval wars lasting for dozens, hundred+ years work?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/501ve3/how_did_ancientmedieval_wars_lasting_for_dozens/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d71y288", "d721ury"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["The Peloponnesian War lasted over two dozen years (431\u2013404 BC). Think of it as being something akin to the Cold War (the modern one between USA and Russia) where it is mostly political maneuvering and proxy wars. However unlike the Cold War, direct and intense fighting between the two biggest warring states (Sparta and Athens) did also break out with multiple cities being captured or destroyed. But there would also be times of relative peace after armistices or peace treaties were signed. However, the peace treaties were not enough to stop the conflict from continuing, if they were ever intended to. For instance, the Peace of Nicias, at the time called the \"Fifty-Year Peace\" was intended to last 50 years. It lasted about 5 years. The Athenians' main goal of the treaty was to have Amphipolis returned to their control, but that was negotiated out of the treaty. So it was pretty much determined that the fighting would definitely resume and the Fifty-Year peace was just an indefinite armistice. \n\nYou might ask, five years is a long time, shouldn't that be called a different war, then? Yes and no. The two phases of the war between the Peace of Nicias are called the Archidamian War and the Ionian War. However because it is essentially the same conflict with mostly the same parties involved, fighting for the same reasons, it is all considered one war even though there were long periods of relative peace. When it comes to two major expansionist powers that are close to each other, it is often just a matter of perspective as to when one war has ended and another has begun. Some historians would say that WW1 and WW2 were really just one long war and it is possible that future historians will give them just one name which everyone will commonly refer to them by. This is called periodization: picking a start and end point for a given series of events in order to facilitate study and discussion. You can't really study The Ionian War without also studying the Archidamian War. Thus we have the Peloponessian War.\n\n So you have something like The Hundred Years' War, which you probably had in mind when you asked this question, which could also be considered three separate wars: The Edwardian Era War (1337-1360), the Caroline War (1369\u20131389), and the Lancastrian War (1415\u20131453). So The Hundred Years' War is \"war that lasted 116 years\" but during that time there was 35 years of truce.", "Generally, such \"wars\" are a sequence of conflicts spread out over a long period where each individual conflict does not resolve the overall state of hostility between the opponents. They would specifically not be one long ongoing \"war\" with battle occurring constantly for a series of years.\n\nSome modern examples might include the WWI + WWII series of wars, or the Cold War. One could easily consider the two World Wars as part of a larger conflict, and if they had happened farther back in the past it's likely there would be more historians arguing they be treated that way. As for the Cold War, there were several \"hot\" wars during it (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, lots of smaller wars without direct involvement of a major power, etc.) over a period of nearly half a century.\n\nGoing back farther, there are many similar examples. In the Napoleonic wars you have multiple different campaigns over the course of a decade. But each one was in itself not that long and the overall conflict can be broken up into about 6 or 7 different individual wars, combined with the overall conflict between France and Britain (which normally didn't involve full-scale armed conflict between the two powers). You have the hundred years war, which saw individual conflicts intermixed with periods of stalemate or hostile but mostly passive co-existence and periods of peace.\n\nA good modern example would be the Arab/Israeli conflict, which has persisted for over 60 years. At no point in the ongoing conflict was one side or the other defeated to the point of losing their sovereignty. Every war has resolved in a way that has left the belligerents in a condition to continue the conflict in the future and retain their hostilities toward one another. That's what an extended war typically looks like. A series of battles or even a series of wars over a long period of time, where none of the individual battles resolves the underlying conflict or results in a change of the conditions which allow the conflict to continue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4avf9x", "title": "Did the Communist party have any chance of success in the post WW1 world?", "selftext": "Watching Peaky Blinders (not sure how good their accuracy is) and couldn't help but notice the cops and government seem to be really worried about the Communists in their country. And I remember somewhere learning about in America people, mostly the elite, were very worried about the Communists and Unions in post ww1 society. Did they ever have a chance of making a headway or progress in those capitalist countries during that time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4avf9x/did_the_communist_party_have_any_chance_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d142p1w", "d14caef", "d14ubpg"], "score": [12, 3, 2], "text": ["In hindsight, they probably did not have much of a chance of success.  Electoral Communism had its high-water mark on the Continent as minor coalition partners to much-farther-right, distinctly-anti-Soviet labor and social democratic parties in proportional representation nations.  (It never had more than one or two MPs in first-past-the-post Britain.)  Revolutionary Communism was DOA almost everywhere it wasn't imposed by Soviet occupiers.   The closest Communism got to power in the West was Republican Spain, and that through a lot of clever backstabbing in the chaos of the Civil War, with the end result not of victory but of enabling Franco to mop up rather more easily than he might have against a unified center-left coalition.  \n\nThe rather more interesting question is, with the evidence then available, were those fears reasonable.  I think that here you would say, \"somewhat so, at least.\"\n\nData points supporting this:\n\nThe Soviet revolution was truly shocking, a new thing on the face of the Earth.  If the French Revolution and the Terror had been a passing fit, this was the chronic disease.  It was not unreasonable to believe the Soviets would export revolution or that a sufficiently motivated Communist movement, supported by the Soviets, might powerfully try to execute something similar given a sufficient background of disorder.  (Indeed, the Spanish Civil War proved those fears entirely right, even if the effort still fell short).\n\nWorld War One had created death and dismemberment, industrialization, economic mobilization and privation, and social tumult quite unlike anything Britain, France and Germany had experienced.  It was not at all unreasonable to expect worker militancy and political mobilization.  And, indeed, that happened.  Unionization exploded, political parties favoring or favored by unions grew dramatically, etc.  Electoral and revolutionary Communism were not able to catch the benefit, but the property-owning establishment couldn't have known that more centrist parties and labor organizations would be the beneficiaries.  (In the UK, Labour surpassed the Liberals first in 1922, and were in government, albeit short-lived, in 1923.)  That the post-war environment would be generally fruitful for unions and their political parties was re-demonstrated in 1945 by Clement Attlee's Labour victories coming despite Churchill's personal popularity.", "I cannot speak for the entire world, but in Germany Post-War Communism did not have any chance of actual success. \n\nThe November Revolution, from the outside, may sound like (as it was meant to) a Bolshevist styled uprising like in October in Russia, but the extreme-Left of the social-democratic party was a minority, uncertain of how to go about a revolution, but definitely wanting to avoid violence. \n\nTo avoid a lot of perhaps unecessary detail it can be framed this way:\nIf the  extreme-Left of the Social-Democratic party (which subsequently formed the German Communist Party KPD) was not only already a minority, but also ideologically split themselves, *and* if violence was to be avoided *and* the entire nation was shook to its core from the worst war in human history *and* a moderate party representing a good portion of the German civilian population and the officers of the army has most of the power, the KPD never really stood a real chance.\n\nMost Western Governments at this point were already aggressive towards Bolshevism, meaning domestic leftist movements were stigmatized through association. Thus, with few exceptions, Communist Parties never really had much of a chance post WWI. \n\nIf you are curious I could be more specific, but I hope this helps!", "Certainly the belief in the possibility that communists could come to power -- if not via the ballot box then via the bayonet -- was widespread.\nFirst a bit of background information (jump to the last two paragraphs for a tl;dr). Since around the turn of the century, it was clear that a split had emerged among social democrats regarding the means to best ameliorate the lives of the proletariat. \"Social democracy\" itself was a nebulous concept: for example, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks existed together, if uneasily, in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party for a decade and a half, although using contemporary terms we would call the former \"communist\" and the latter \"social democrats\".  In other words, Communists (Marxist-Leninists) advocated for the need for sudden revolutionary action, while Social Democrats (Marxists) had acquiesced to political reform via gradual, parliamentary change. (Although, based on responses to Eduard Bernstein during the Revisionism crisis beginning in 1896, social democrats were not willing to admit this themselves -- the German SPD did not formally abandon class struggle versus capitalism until the Godesberg Program of 1959).\n\nA quick look at the progression of the Three Internationals showing the winnowing of socialist ideas shows how we got to the post-WWI environment:\nThe First International (1864-76) contained a broad spectrum of leftist schools of thought, including anarchism and trade-unionism, and is best known for the struggle between Bakunin and Marx for intellectual leadership of the movement.\nThe Second International (1889-1916) was marked the ascendancy of German Social Democracy in international socialism, in part due to its vibrant presence while outlawed (1878-1890) and impressive showing Reichstag elections. Though ultimately torn asunder by the inability of social patriots and anti-socialists to reconcile with one another over World War I, this period marked the high water point for \"classic\" international social democratic thought. \nThe Third International (1919-1943), by contrast, featured explicitly communist parties as participants. Revolutionary violence was considered acceptable in the fight for human emancipation and world communism. \n\nThus in addition to the Russian Civil War and German examples already provided, one could look to the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and attempted coups in Georgia (May, 1920), Bulgaria (September, 1923) and Estonia (December, 1924). Except for the victory of the Bolsheviks, none of these Reds ultimately prevailed. The next time, however, they might. It was in this sense that the specter of communism haunted the minds of many in the immediate post-War years and led to widespread red-baiting throughout the interwar period.\n\nIt is sometimes difficult to appreciate (then and now) in Western Europe and North America how notoriously unstable parliamentary democracy was in the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe. Their fortuitous emergence from the ashes of the continent's empires meant that they were unprepared for the challenge of democratic governance, not to mention foreign policy questions regarding border and extra-territorial co-nationals, and thus most vulnerable to radical political change -- and not just communist. In fact, if the years through 1925 were marked by communist coups, then the years 1926-1939 (beginning with Poland's May Coup) were marked by authoritarian counterreactions, often \"justified\" by the putative threat of further communist unrest. (The First Czechoslovak Republic and Finland are notable exceptions to this regional trend.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7sioii", "title": "Did the Rome begin what we now understand to be civilisation?", "selftext": "Was everyone in rural tribes before Rome conquered or was there anything more?\n\n[Edit] In relation to Europe I mean- I realise civilisation basically basically spread from China towards Rome already (at least I assume)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7sioii/did_the_rome_begin_what_we_now_understand_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dt5mry2"], "score": [6], "text": ["So, \"civilization\" is a pretty terrible term.  It seems to be ranking different people in a way where \"civilized\" is good and developed and \"uncivilized\" is bad and primitive.  In addition, by selecting some traits as necessary traits for a \"civilization\" we exclude people who might suit the term in other ways.  For instance when I was an undergraduate the definition of \"civilization\" included writing, which excludes a lot of people we might want to let it.  The Inca didn't have a writing system in the sense of making marks to transmit language, but they had a system of knots that transmitted information.  By the time I was in graduate school I saw \"writing\" replaced by \"complex record keeping\" which is a little better.  But you can see how drawing up a checklist of what qualifies as \"civilization\" is problematic.\n\nWith that said, when I was a teaching assistant for Early World History classes we used this list:\n\n* monumental (or civic) architecture,\n* complex record keeping\n* complex social structure\n* division of labor\n* agriculture\n\nMonumental or civic architecture indicates some kind of communal awareness.  Complex record keeping means things are organized and the organization is preserved.  Complex social structure means we can see that some people had more importance than others, and there are multiple ranks - whether in government, religion, military, whatever.  Division of labor and agriculture go together in that agriculture allows people to do things other than grow food, like build the monuments, keep the records, be the priests etc. \n\nWe also made the distinction between pristine civilizations and secondary civilizations.  Pristine civilizations are communities that can check all the boxes without known contact with another civilization.  The textbook we used (*Worlds Together Worlds Apart*) I think gave five pristine civilizations:\n\n* Sumerian\n* Chinese (I can't remember the precise name for this civilization)\n* Harappan\n* Olmec\n* Chico\n\nSome people like to list Egypt in there too.  For your question, there are two important points.  All of these developed more or less independently (so it's not the case that civilization began in China and spread west), and these developed a **long time before Rome!**\n\nSumerians show up around 4000 BCE.  The Harappan cities around 3000 or so.  The Chinese civilization I can't remember the name of sometime around 2000.  The Olmec around 1600.  The Chico, 3000.\n\nRome, by contrast, wasn't founded in tradition until 753 BCE.  Archaeology shows us settlement a little before 1000 BCE.  By the time the Romans showed up, the Sumerians were long gone, the Minoans had failed, the Mycenaeans collapsed, the Hittites were forgotten, and that's just civilizations geographically near Rome.\n\nRome itself developed its civilization from contact with the Greeks, from whom they got their alphabet among other things, as well as other cultures.  The Greeks were heavily influenced by contact with Anatolian cultures that developed out of the Bronze Age Collapse, and so on.  Rome is very much a late comer to the civilization game.  Rome existed in a Mediterranean surrounded by people with different levels of civilization.  Phoenicians (including Carthage), Greeks, Persians certainly rate the term \"civilization.\"  I would include the Celts, the Celtiberians and Iberians as well, and numerous other European populations.\n\nAgain, \"civilization\" is a terrible idea to apply to people, especially when we can't have a good understanding of a given group.  For instance, if we stress the \"complex records\" thing, we are claiming to know complex records when we see them, and we might not, and it might be a bad thing to measure in the first place.  But I think I've described the sort of taxonomy that shows up in books that do that sort of thing and given some direction for your specific question about Rome.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2nri53", "title": "Solar thermal farms are 19th century technology, why isn't the US full of them?", "selftext": "You have hoover dam, why not death valley solar farm?\n\n[**For the confused.**](_URL_0_) Solar thermal farms **don't use semiconductor PV cells**, but **fields of mirrors that heat water** in a heat engine (just like nuclear and coal power plants, that only work when the sun is up).\n\nThe US has enormous spaces of empty sunny desert and has a history being the largest, most advanced economy in the world with a culture of massive civil engineering projects like roads and rail networks that span the continent. The whole night/day thing is an issue but it's solvable with day/night prices and large scale storage. Also HVDC across 100s of miles of desert and ocean has been a thing since the 50s. ([Source](_URL_2_), ch.25)\n\nEdit: [Better example,](_URL_1_) doesn't require automatic mirror adjustment or workers manually adjusting mirrors in deadly conditions, at the expense of capturing less light per mirror.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nri53/solar_thermal_farms_are_19th_century_technology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmg8tnm", "cmgqg1n"], "score": [28, 3], "text": ["This chart from the Energy Information Administration shows the levelized cost of energy from various renewable and non-renewable sources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEssentially, solar thermal is among the costliest sources of generation, even when compared with other renewable alternatives. Still, it has had some success in California's renewable energy marketplace.\n\nTo your point on the death valley solar farm, the nearby Mojave desert is one of the most active solar development regions in the world. Since death valley is a national park, it's pretty doubtful that there will be any development there.", "I know your question has been answered, but I'd just like to pipe in and talk about energy storage. \n\nRight now the technology to store enough bulk energy to last all night - making a solar power source have an effectively continuous output - doesn't exist yet. It can be done, but nobody is going to flush their money away on a venture such as that. \n\nThere are a few places where large amounts of power for a short time can be stored for later use. This is when they use stuff like pumped hydro. Those are typically for really short term demands, like when everyone in London turns on their electric kettle at the same time. A pumped up reservoir will last you long enough to get a gas turbine up to speed, but not all night(unless you've got a bigger system than has ever been built or only a handful of customers). And pumped hydro is out of the question in the desert(do you ship the water in on a fleet of trucks? Evaporation?) \n\nThere are other uses for utility scale energy storage, like peak shaving, but storing enough energy to make a desert sized solar farm work through the night isn't currently feasible. \n\nA lack of utility scale energy storage is one of the things that makes it really difficult to implement all the wind and solar that idealistic high school kids would like. Currently, we basically need enough spinning reserve to cover a sudden drop in output from renewables. Fwiw, I think pumped hydro, compressed air and flywheels are neat, but I think the breakthrough in energy storage will come from a new battery chemistry. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.solarpowertoday.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Gemasolar.jpg", "http://www.solarfeeds.com/wp-content/uploads/solar-thermal1.jpg", "http://www.withouthotair.com/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/electricity_generation.cfm"], []]}
{"q_id": "6curfg", "title": "Did people living in the Roman Empire call it the \"Roman Empire\"?", "selftext": "I'm listening to The History of Rome and as I move into the 3rd century and Rome, as a city, becomes less and less important to the Roman Empire the question popped into my head.  If I were to walk up to someone on the outskirts of the Empire in say the late 200's and asked them where they live would they, as part of their answer, say \"The Roman Empire\"?  What did an everyman living under Roman rule call / consider it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6curfg/did_people_living_in_the_roman_empire_call_it_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhxwxe3", "dhyopnf"], "score": [31, 35], "text": ["Why are all the comments getting deleted?", "It was more common to refer to people ethnically rather than in terms of a kingdom, although \"Romans\" often referred to themselves as *Romani*.  So you had Etruscans, Etrurians, and so on which made up the body.  All people could collectively be referred to as *The Populus*, however that's not really the name for the empire.\n\nEDIT: I believe that, distinctly, populus refers to a man who is of fighting age, not just 'anyone'.\n\nOlder (BCE) coins can be found stamped with SPQR, *\"senatus populus que Romanus\"*, i.e. 'the Senate and People of Rome' but this is obviously from very early on in the empire.\n\nShortest, cleanest answer is: There wasn't a proper name for the empire, but there was a proper identity shared by citizens used to identify themselves."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "fa8atj", "title": "Any sources for reading about CIA, NSA, or just secret intellegence over all? Good non fiction.", "selftext": "I am very interested in learning the goings on of intellegence agencies. Historical or current is fine with me", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fa8atj/any_sources_for_reading_about_cia_nsa_or_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fiwkznf"], "score": [2], "text": ["Look for James Bamford's books:\n\nThe Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence\n\nBody of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency\n\nThe Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America\n\nI've read and enjoyed the first two, didn't read the third, yet. Remember the first rule about fight club."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a6q0qi", "title": "How did the introduction of the pocket watch effect surveying?", "selftext": "I've noticed that in the US, states created before the Civil War had north-south borders defined by geographic features, and afterwards, had borders defined by what appear to be latitude.\n\n[Animation](_URL_1_)\n\nI know from the history of longitude, that knowing one's east-west location generally requires measuring the time the sun is at it's zenith.  And I've heard while visiting the [Museum of Industry](_URL_0_) that the Waltham Watch company had a large effect on the availability of timekeeping devices starting in 1850, and really kicking off in 1860.\n\nIs there modern scholarship or contemporary reports on the effect of readily available pocket watches allowing US surveyors to accurately define north-south lines, or lawmakers taking this into account as new state borders were being drawn?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6q0qi/how_did_the_introduction_of_the_pocket_watch/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebxtc5s"], "score": [2], "text": ["Finding longitude and latitude were  very big problems for a ship out on the ocean. It was impossible to precisely measure the distance from one day to the next with no hard and fast landmarks, and the actions of currents and imprecise speed gauges made it hard to correlate knots with actual travel.  Use of navigational tools like sextants and chronometers were key. However, for surveying on land, that was not the case.  From a precisely measured  base line, triangles could be laid off to map any piece of ground. The typical tools of chain, plumb bob, and transit would suffice. Sightings of the sun would not be needed, or precise time measurement.  They would of course be needed to place continents and islands in the correct distance from each other."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.charlesrivermuseum.org/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_states_by_date_of_statehood3.gif"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5mhz08", "title": "What social opportunities would be available to a free black family living in the antebellum deep south?", "selftext": "Hey folks!\n\nAs the title says, I'm interested in learning about the social and economic opportunities free black families had in the pre-war South. While Southern society was incredibly oppressive for people of colour, and indeed built on the institution of racialised slavery, my limited understanding is that some opportunities for prosperity and power did exist. Where and how were free black families able to distinguish themselves throughout this period? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mhz08/what_social_opportunities_would_be_available_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc6enzr", "der0avh"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["This is what my master's thesis was on, so buckle in, I love to talk about it. It was specifically about a wealthy Tuscaloosa, Alabama man named Solomon Perteet. He was by no means the most successful person of color in the antebellum South, but he's the one I know best. That said, let me give you a short bio of his life, before I move into what the literature as a whole says about your question.\n\nSolomon was born in 1789 to a wealthy white woman in Georgia. His father was most likely a slave, based on the sparse population data that survived the War of 1812. He was raised by his mother, and was apprenticed to a wealthy plaster worker at the age of eleven. He moved to Tuscaloosa in the mid 1820s, and received a lucrative contract to do the plaster work in the new Tuscaloosa capitol building.\n\nHe was already a slave owner by the time he arrived in Alabama, and married one of his slaves, Lucinda, soon after his arrival. He petitioned and paid for manumission for Lucinda and their eldest child, Andrew Jackson. (Interestingly, Solomon also paid for the manumission of Lucinda's son from another relationship, but he was only to be freed when he turned 21.)\n\nSolomon branched out into real estate, partnered with a white man to open a tannery, kept a medium-sized farm, owned a store, and got into money lending. He did most of his business with white clients, and successfully took debtors to court when they were unable to pay him back. I even found multiple instances of Lucinda appearing in court on his behalf, with an equally impressive success rate! As to the scale of his holdings, he owned at least forty city lots (10 city blocks), several rural plots of land, and large reserves of specie. According to English geologist (and Darwin's mentor!) Charles Lyell, Perteet loaned 17,000 dollars to a debtor who was unable to repay the money, and Solomon emerged relatively unscathed by the loss. Lyell traveled to the South in the 1840s and wrote about his trip, including meeting Solomon in Tuscaloosa.\n\nSocially, his family was well-integrated into elite white society. The Perteet family lived in the most fashionable neighborhood in town. They had their own pew at the Episcopal church, and held weddings, baptisms, and funerals in the white sanctuary, while also retaining access to the black chapel. Solomon, Lucinda, two of his children, and two of his grandchildren, are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, right in the middle of his rich white neighbors. After his grandchildren were orphaned in 1869, they were informally adopted by a former CSA officer, lived in a mansion, and were sent to college. \n\nThat said, racism was still fundamental to the legal and social order of the South. In my work, I found two boundaries that Solomon was unable to cross, even with his substantial wealth. The first is a concrete one. He was unable to have his son admitted to the University of Alabama in the early/mid 1840s. I have no evidence of social pressure in either direction, but there were laws expressly prohibiting higher education for people of color at the time.\n\nThe second barrier was an intangible one.  Solomon was unable to escape from the the conflation of blackness with poverty and servitude in public discourse and consciousness. Even though Solomon bought his wife and daughters $300 silk dresses, silk gloves, and velvet cloaks, ads for \"negro clothes\" ran in the paper. Lucinda's glowing obituary ran in the same 1869 Tuscaloosa Monitor that bore the headline, \"Lo, the lazy negro.\"\n\nThis is probably a bit of a jumble; I've been working on it off and on today. However, this is my take on the boundaries of race and class in the Old South, based on my own research. Once I post this, I'll post a follow-up comment giving you a rundown of the literature.", "This as incredibly helpful. I'm doing my master's thesis on the historical memory of free black societies in the north. Could you suggest anything worth reading on that subject? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5ivehr", "title": "How were cartoons (political or otherwise) printed in newspapers during the age of movable type?", "selftext": "Surely the artist didn't sit there copying their cartoon onto every single copy, but I don't understand how these cartoons could have been reproduced on each copy otherwise. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ivehr/how_were_cartoons_political_or_otherwise_printed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbbadn5", "dbcf7hb"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["By no means an expert on this but as far as I'm aware the most common techniques included [etching](_URL_0_), wherein an acid was applied to a metal surface which was then used as a printing plate and [woodcuts](_URL_3_) or [engraving](_URL_1_) which were done by carving the image into wood or metal, respectively. A later technique was [lithography](_URL_2_).", "What /u/CptBuck said. Also, cartoons don't really appear in newspapers until the 19th century, first in the form of lithographs; *Punch* in Britain and *La Caricature* and *Le Charivari* in France in the 1830s. Before that they exist as stand alone sheets. What we would recognize as political cartoons, employing caricature, don't really appear until around the 1770s in Britain, printed as etchings, usually hand-colored."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etching", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engraving", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodcut"], []]}
{"q_id": "6kh8eg", "title": "How did tall ships and the like leave port before the advent of modern engines?", "selftext": "Like, how did they get out of port? Just wait for the wind to change? Or did they hook up smaller boats that were rowed? I'm just trying to imagine such large ships pushing off, and it confounds me how they would do it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kh8eg/how_did_tall_ships_and_the_like_leave_port_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djm3i8o", "djmyrrg"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["Most of the time tall ships aren't docked, they're moored in a more accessible area and then when they push off, it's mostly a question of letting the wind and the tides do the work.\n\nHowever, if that's not good enough, there is also a particular anchor called a kedging anchor which is taken out by longboat in the direction the ship wishes to go and dropped as far as they can get it away from the ship, and then the ship is warped, or pulled, over to it by hand. Rinse lather repeat until the ship is where you want her. It's a similar process if the ship does actually have to be docked - a rope is wound around something solid onshore on one end and the ship's capstan (a large drum that can be turned by hand) on the other, and the ship is warped in and out.\n\nI had to actually do this as a trainee sailor. If you would like to learn more about it without having to pull a ship by hand, however, you can do so [here](_URL_0_). ", "Hi, you'll find an answer by /u/DBHT14 and more links here \n\n* [During the age of sail, how did large ships manoeuvre in ports?](_URL_0_)  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://h2g2.com/entry/A1084484"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36isas/during_the_age_of_sail_how_did_large_ships/"]]}
{"q_id": "3loccg", "title": "What was the first event in recorded history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3loccg/what_was_the_first_event_in_recorded_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv87pd1"], "score": [4], "text": ["There's a discussion of dated events at _URL_0_. I was taught at school that Egypt's unification around the 32nd century BCE was the first specifically recorded \"event\", though the precise date is unknown. I'm not sure if we've found earlier ones in the interim - shameful, I admit! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19pgf6/what_is_the_earliest_recorded_date_that_we_can/"]]}
{"q_id": "ag5u86", "title": "How effective was armor in medieval battles?", "selftext": "Generally in movies and tv shows (i'm mainly thinking GoT, Lotr, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin hood etc.) set in this sort of medieval era armor seems to do basically nothing. Often characters wear very light looking armor and cl;eave through any heavily armored enemies like they're wearing nothing. Lotr seems to be the worst offender due to just how many times it looks like the characters whack swords straight into heavy plate armor and still insta kill the orcs/uruks.   \n\n\n  \nHistorically do we know how effective  light, medium and heavy were armor at resisting arrows and sword/spear/axe blows and generally keeping the wearer alive? And how useful would it be in battle to wear the fairly light but mobile armor you see characters in these sorts of movies/tv shows wear?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ag5u86/how_effective_was_armor_in_medieval_battles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ee6jyzg"], "score": [14], "text": ["Alright there's a lot to unpack here.  But the short answer is: armor is amazing, that's why the wealthiest people and elite fighters wore it.  What sane person would choose to wear 30-60 lbs of steel on their body if it didn\u2019t do anything but slow you down?\n\nFirst things first, light, medium, and heavy armor isn't really how people thought of armor during the medieval periods.  It's, I believe, in invention of D & D, though I could be wrong on that one.  In any case, it's usually easier to conceptualize armor as being either soft armors or hard armors.\n\nSoft armor were like gambesons or aketons, basically thick layers of cloth and/or leather on top of each other (interesting tidbit, among the historical recreators and scholars there\u2019s a debate going on about how prevalent leather actually was in armor.  While I\u2019m personally on the rare side of the debate, depending on time period of course, it was used in armor.  Didn\u2019t look like biker jackets and fetish gear though, unlike what many games and shows would have you believe).  \n\nDuring the medieval period these gambesons were often the first real line of defense people had, it was cheaper to make, much easier to mass produce, so you\u2019d see some of the common soldiers wearing it.  And it could definitely save their life.  Layers of padded cloth could turn a killing blow into a scratch, or even stop an arrow if you\u2019re lucky.  There\u2019s an account of the 3rd Crusade that compared the infantry after being harassed by the Saladin\u2019s forces as looking like pincushions as they moved with arrows sticking out of their armor.  Though it\u2019s ambiguous if they\u2019re referring to the low infantry that could only afford the gambeson or the more wealthy who likely had cloth armor worn overtop their mail.\n\nThere have been a lot of tests in the last few decades to determine the effectiveness of various weaponry on armor.  Unfortunately, a lot of these tests were done by people to \u201cprove\u201d how one weapon was better than another, or how one weapon could beat all armor without much in the way of unbiased scientific research.  You\u2019ll see someone use a longbow and punch through some thin piece of cooking metal and claim that therefore a longbow could punch just as easily through armor.  That is not the case.  \n\nOne has to remember that weapon technology and armor technology went hand in hand.  As armor got better, weapons changed to match them, which then changed armor to deal with the weapons and so on.  But as a general rule, the best armor of the day made you impervious from anything but the most direct blows toward the weak points in the armor.  \n\nWhile armor technology went through a lot of development over the period of time that we consider the medieval ages.  I\u2019m going to limit myself to full body mail that we see during the crusades, and then the full plate armor that isn\u2019t really invented until the very end of the medieval period, but is what most people think of when talking about knights.  \n\nMail, is largely immune to any weapon that cuts: swords, one-handed axes and the like.  And with extra padding from the gambeson the mail has a pretty good cushion against a lot of bludgeoning weapons and piercing weapons like maces and daggers.  Though these weapons could still wound or even kill.  Despite the padding a solid hit with a mace or hammer on the head, could potentially bring the entire force of the blow down into the opponent\u2019s neck.  It would need to be a pretty direct hit, though.  While a dagger or other such weapon could stick in between the rings of mail, or get pushed into a weak point where the mail isn\u2019t as strong.  Possibly going up under the neck armor to pierce into the throat.  Or into the eye holes of the helmet to stab.  \nArrows were a bit more of a problem than most melee weapons.  One of the quick and dirty ways to see how effective armor was is to see what kind of weapons they had and when art depicts them as using some weapons.  One of the easiest examples to illustrate this point is the huskarl of Norse and English fame.  Now, huskarls were the wealthiest and theoretically the best warriors in their respective armies.  In art they are depicted as being covered almost completely in mail armor and holding onto large shields when advancing toward the enemy, where they are in danger of being fired upon by their enemy.  However, when actually engaged in melee combat, they would sling their shields on their back and fight with large two-handed axes as an anti-armor and anti-cavalry weapon.\nNow I want you to picture standing in the middle of a violent battle.  Weapons are flying everywhere, swords, axes, spears, everything is whirling around much too quickly and chaotically for anyone to truly make out and keep their focus on.  Someone attacking just out of eyesight could kill you before you could even know what\u2019s going on.  In such a situation any means of protection against this combat would be what you kept with you at all times.  So to see them disregard their shield, one of their best forms of defense, and rely entirely on their armor to protect them.  That speaks volumes about what they were worried about.\nEventually armor, and weaponry got better, and we get to the High and Late Medieval period where plate harnesses were fully or at least almost fully developed.  \n\nYou have heard of the battle of Agincourt.  Where English and Welsh longbowmen beat back the advancing armored French knights.  A lot of people have taken this to mean that the longbow could pierce through the armor like it was nothing.  That isn\u2019t really the case.\n\nThere are plenty of tests some of dubious quality to show that, some use the wrong arrow, some use the wrong bow, some the wrong armor.  None are perfect, but this is the best one I\u2019ve seen: _URL_0_\n\nSo if longbows didn\u2019t pierce through armor, how did the English win?  Well, while one hitting a breastplate wouldn\u2019t do much, an entire army of arrows can theoretically get into the weakpoints in the armor.  There are accounts of the French knights lowering their heads as they charged because the volume of arrows shot at them would otherwise stick into their visors or breathing and eye holes.  It\u2019s also worth noting, that many of the French knights did make it to the English line, where they were stopped by the English knights fighting on foot, who hadn\u2019t just charged over rough terrain into a constant rain of arrows.  \n\nIn the terms of melee fighting, we see special anti-armor weapons being constructed like the pollaxe, one of my favorite weapons.  It was designed specifically to be used while in full armor against opponents in full armor.  And even then we have accounts of duels with the weapon continuing for long stretches of time where the armor of both contestants became battered beyond recognition but the men underneath were still fighting strong.  The other powerful anti-armor weapon was the couched lance, being charged on horseback where the full weight of the horse and rider is placed on a single point to punch through the armor as best it can.  This was so deadly that tournaments with these lances pioneered a thicker type of armor to protect the tournament knight.  These armors could be twice as heavy as the usual field armor, and often didn\u2019t allow much of the movement that would have been necessary to survive a battlefield, with pieces that restricted the arm and neck to move at all, all for the safety of the tournament knight.\n\nBut by this point the time of the near impenetrable armor was coming to an end.  Now guns had lived concurrently with armor for hundreds of years, but as the power of guns grew, more and thicker armor needed to be developed to stop it.  This was when the concept of bullet-proof came about.  In order to prove an armor was immune to these weapons, the armor-smith would show off the armor take a pistol and shoot it point blank in the chest.  The small dent the bullets made was the proof that the bullet couldn\u2019t penetrate it.  Here\u2019s an example: _URL_1_\n\nBut we start to see armor getting thicker and heavier during this period to continue its dominance to the point that only the wealthy could afford it at all.  And medieval style armor slowly disappeared, though armor itself isn\u2019t gone.  Even our current soldiers and police forces wear armor to defend against shrapnel and small arms fire.  \n\nBut in brief.  No.  A movie or tv hero placed into an actual medieval battlefield would have their sword bounce off their opponent\u2019s armor, and then they\u2019d die.  Likely from an attack they never even saw coming.  Because they didn\u2019t wear any real protection, and if they couldn\u2019t afford it, weren\u2019t standing in a protective line with their friends holding up their shield to protect them.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej3qjUzUzQg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d1/ce/c4/d1cec4d92b9afc9a92494fac016226e9.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9jlgkd", "title": "How did Buddhist communities in East/SE Asia perceive the decline of Buddhism in India?", "selftext": "Buddhism today is extremely marginal in India, despite having originated there, having lost ground firstly to Hinduism and later to Islam. Were Buddhist communities in East and Southeast Asia conscious of this decline? Was/is it lamented, akin to Christian and Jewish lamenting the loss of their holy land?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jlgkd/how_did_buddhist_communities_in_eastse_asia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6sksfq"], "score": [4], "text": ["We actually have some decent contemporaneous accounts of Chinese pilgrims visiting India during Buddhism's stable phase and then further accounts during the terminal phase. \n\nFaxian describes his experiences in India in his text *Foguoji (A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms)*. He departed China in 399 as part of a pilgrimage mission. He observes that there were apparently thriving monastic communities at Kusinagar (where the Buddha attained *parinibbana*) and other Buddhist sites. He observes that at this time Kapilavastu (Buddha's home city) and Lumbini (his birthplace) are desolate and dangerous places. If you visit Kapilavastu today I would say it is pretty similar to when Faxian visited. All that is left are some crumbling walls. We also see evidence in his records of Buddhist sites that were in a state of degradation - he describes how a holy site built over a place in Rajgir where Buddha preached Dharma was basically destroyed.\n\nFaxian describes his visit to the temple site in Bodh Gaya where the Buddha attained enlightenment. He notes that the temple is well looked after by Buddhist families and that monks who live in the area observe the precepts carefully. (Eventually this site is reclaimed by the Hindus - when it is basically discovered again by Buddhist missionaries in the 19th ce it is heavily overgrown and the Buddha image has been replaced with Hindu iconography. Anagarika Dharmapala - a Sinhalese Buddhist missionary - describes his experiences of this rediscovery in his biographical writings). \n\nNext we have Xuanzang who visits India in the 630s. He recorded his observations in the text *The Great tang Records of the Western Regions*. We learn from him that, at this stage, the situation was quite perilous and we get this very clearly from his writings. He reports that when he visited Jetavena it was basically in ruin. This was previously a major Buddhist site. Kapilavastu is predictably empty. Interestingly his visit to Kusinagar reveals an empty city with few inhabitants - just a few hundred years prior Faxian reports that there was a thriving monastic community. Again, at the city of Vaisali - previously having a community of monks - he finds \"very few monks.\" When he does find monastic communities he describes the conditions in negative terms - very often the monks are deprived and without lay support. The temples are usually dilapidated. \n\nXuanzang does complain about the fact that many of the monastic communities are Hiniyana and notes especially that they eat \"the three kinds of pure meat\" which he regards as evidence of not elevating themselves to a higher interpretation of scripture (i.e. the type of Buddhism he is familiar with in China). It is a subtle way of suggesting that they are pious but misguided. \n\nIn general, we get a sense from Xuanzang that Buddhism in India is in a pitiable state at this time. So in answer to your question, yes, there are historical accounts of Buddhism where we get a direct description of the condition of Buddhism in India and the impressions of the Buddhist pilgrims. \n\nIt is very interesting to note just how rapidly (comparatively speaking) things had degraded between Faxian's initial visit and Xuanzang's visit a few hundred years later. By the 9th ce Buddhism is all but completely destroyed in India. In fact many of the Indian Buddhist texts that we currently have only exist because they were kept in Tibet and translated to Tibetan during the initial dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet. Likewise, we also have surviving manuscripts kept in Chinese recensions. But major Indian Buddhist institutions of learning such as Nalanda were basically annihilated and the texts there lost. \n\nThere are many reasons for the decline of Buddhism in India. Hindu revivalism is one cause - Buddhism just ultimately became obviated by this more popular religion. Another important factor was a lack of state sponsorship - Buddhism originally thrived under state patronage and there was a long tradition of Indian rulers supporting many different religions, including Buddhism. But it seems that at some point this support ended. We also have to consider the fragmentation of the Buddhist tradition in India. After the Buddha's death the *sangha* broke up into many competing factions. This rivalry was probably not very healthy for Buddhism's longevity in its home nation as resources were stretched thin. Probably the least important aspect is the foreign invasion factor - while Muslim incursions into India was an issue for Buddhism (and all the native religions), Buddhism was virtually already destroyed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5ea2cy", "title": "Did modesty in clothing (particularly covering the genitalia) originate from one culture or did cultures develop this fashion concurrently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ea2cy/did_modesty_in_clothing_particularly_covering_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daax59z", "dab08rd"], "score": [3, 58], "text": ["Followup:\n\nMy guess was that it's mainly to keep your core war, but then why do some peoples living in already warm environments cover up that area?", "Perhaps this is a question more suited for r/askanthropology? I'd suggest cross posting this there."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "us460", "title": "How did the religious class view Benjamin Franklin's scientific experimentations during his retirement?", "selftext": "I'm watching a documentary on Benjamin Franklin and they mention how the religious viewed lightening as a punishment of God, and not as electricity. It was also implied how Franklin's experimentation on these matters were an affront on the popular religious view. What other dissenting views were prevalent during his tenure as a citizen scientist?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/us460/how_did_the_religious_class_view_benjamin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4y1t6s", "c4y4fec"], "score": [2, 4], "text": ["Great question. Franklin was (along with Jefferson) a really fascinating man. I hope someone has a good answer for this.", "I'd suggest that that documentary was probably lying, or at least misrepresenting things.  People have offered naturalistic explanations of lightning for as long as people have been writing about lightning, and I don't think they would have created a dichotomy between \"God did it\" and \"lightning is a result of X natural process,\" that's more of a modern hang-up.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "325zwf", "title": "Why is history's calendar based off a religion that not everybody follows?", "selftext": "Like I know there were a lot of Christians and what not, but didn't this offend other peoples of other faiths?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/325zwf/why_is_historys_calendar_based_off_a_religion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq89p03", "cq8hrhn"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Well it has been the tradition, and from a long history of western colonial dominance it has become (generally) the worldwide norm, the same way that western dress and the English language have become dominant in governments worldwide. Some countries, (Saudi Arabia is the best example) don't use the Gregorian calendar, and have their own variants, often based on the local majority religion.\n\nThat's not to say there haven't been major attempts to change the calendar and use a secular one. After the French Revolution, as part of a massive Enlightenment effort to secularize and rationalize the state, a secular calendar was created that lasted until 1805. (Another, much more successful product of this effort was the metric system.) The calendar featured a ten day work week, and had days and months named after the natural world at that time of year. Year one in the calendar was 1792, the year the French Republic was declared. It's pretty interesting, and the wikipedia article is pretty good: _URL_0_.\n\nThe calendar was brought in mainly for, as you mentioned, a desire for a secular calendar not based on Christianity. The main problem was that the calendar was poorly designed, and unpopular. It featured a longer working week and was relatively awkward to use, so many people opposed it.\n\nWhile we basically use a Christian calendar because it's what's easy and no one really wants to undertake a massive effort to change it for no major benefits, it's not outside the realm of possibility that had a more popular universal calendar been adopted in the French revolution, we might all be using a secular calendar.", "In fairness, most historians now use CE and BCE instead of AD and BC.  I suspect that's as much change as we're likely to see.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar"], []]}
{"q_id": "1i81ad", "title": "What speed and distance units were used to measure speed before cars?", "selftext": "Was watching Back to the Future III and there was a part where Marty and Doc ask a train conductor how fast he had gotten a train. The conductor said he had gotten it up to 55 mph, but had seen 70..blah blah. But it made me wonder whether speed was even measured in miles per hour back then since mph may not have been the most useful for horses/trains/etc. used at that time. Couldn't find anything on google and r/askreddit wasn't helpful so thought I'd see if anybody here knew.  Thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i81ad/what_speed_and_distance_units_were_used_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1vkjs"], "score": [10], "text": ["Speed limits for horses were often expressed in terms of the horse's gait: walking only, no trotting or running, etc.  Certainly by 1905, towns were posting speed limits for autos in mph.\n\nBut miles per hour were certainly well known for trains, and speeds for ships were similarly measured in knots.  It's just that steam engines didn't commonly have speedometers, so an engineer interested in his speed had to count telegraph poles or mileposts passed in a certain amount of time.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "thdfx", "title": "I have an AP US History exam tomorrow, what is one bit of US History you feel is important for me to know?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/thdfx/i_have_an_ap_us_history_exam_tomorrow_what_is_one/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4mma6y", "c4mmklm", "c4mmkx6", "c4mmqr4", "c4mn070", "c4mnr4v", "c4mnxi0", "c4mo1j8"], "score": [11, 2, 5, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Alexander Hamilton shows up all the time.  On every practice exam I took, he was on it.  So I'd know who he is and why he's important (and why he's the most awesome founding father ever, but that's just me.)\n\nThe other guy who will show up all the time is Henry Clay.  That dude lived for a long time.", "If you're taking the apush test tomorrow then you should be good if you've studied and payed attention but if you haven't then be prepares for a bad time because no one piece of information can save you.", "Alright it's been 4 years since I've taken the AP test but from what I remember:\n\n-night-hawks is correct in saying Alexander Hamilton. You should also know about Thomas Jefferson as well.... and why those mothafuckas didn't get along \n\n-William Jennings Bryan. Very prominent figure in politics from the 1890's to the 1920's (too bad he blew it with the Scopes trial)\n\n-The Gilded Age of Politics, I had a tough time with this because many of the Presidents had very similar qualities of laissez-faire politics. Know who it started with and who it ended with. Know who Boss Tweed and Thomas Nast are as well.\n\n-Know about the two prominent times of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's \n\n-Know about the various Great Awakening Periods in the United States \n\n\nI think the biggest way to approach to test is to try and study the things that would be important in the time period. Obviously wars like WWI and the War of 1812 are big deals. But in the periods between huge events like these, focus on what was important, scandalous, culturally significant, etc and you'll be golden. \n\nI did all this and I got a 5 so you can too!\n\nEDIT: cause I'm drunk and made errors\n", "Not really any advice here, just a fellow test taker. My problem is that I did not actually take a history class this year, and last year I only took honors history..only reason I'm taking this exam is because my school has a program where they'll pay for your 4th exam, and I was already taking 3.\n\nLast year's DBQ was over Nixon and the free response was comparing Civil Rights from 1920's to 1960's, so focus on other topics.\n\nedit: fixed DBQ/free response mix up", "Tea Pot Dome Scandal was big on the test when I took it, and the Alien and Sedition Acts.", "There was a crappy question about pop-art on mine. Caught me by surprise.", "James K. Polk. Elected in 1844. Completed his four goals in one term. 1) got the southwest from mexico. 2)Settled the Oregon boundary dispute. 3)Lowered the tariff and 4) re established the independent treasury system. ", "My AP US teacher told us to really look over our notes on William Jennings Bryan, the Populists, and the progressive movements in the late 1800s. The APUSH testers just really love the Populists. I'm pretty sure the DBQ the year I took it was on the Populists, too! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "20wufa", "title": "What is the history of coal and coal mining?", "selftext": "How did coal become such an important source of fuel? I know it was important during the industrial revolution and such, but who thought of burning rocks? How did mining coal begin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20wufa/what_is_the_history_of_coal_and_coal_mining/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg7seo7"], "score": [4], "text": ["Well, I can't give an in depth review of the importance of coal, but I can say this-\n\n\n1: Coal was important because it was commonly found in Europe and abroad, but where as something like oil took a fair amount of processing to take from initial substance to a workable product (mining might seem expensive, but so was tracking a whale on the other side of the globe, or traveling to the icy waters of the north to hunt seals, and if you wanted to use it for something other than heating and lighting, you needed to refine whatever you gathered. The infrastructure simply wasn't there to make much of oil and oil products till the start of the 20th century) coal was fairly simple. There was such a thing as poor quality coal though. Forget what they called it- brown coal or lignite or peat coal or something- but basically it didn't burn as well and was a lot messier. \n\n\n2: Coal was important because it could attain, and hold very high temperatures. The development of pre-industrial steel owes a lot to coal. The wider industrial revolution was entirely dependent on coal, especially high quality coal. One of the reasons that Britain was a major player in the Industrial Revolution was because of it's ability to gather large amounts of it. Coal was a primary indicator of a nation's wealth throughout the Industrial Revolution.\n\n\n3: Coal isn't a rock. And while it's purely conjecture, I'm sure someone who had seen mined coal, and had ever worked a fire would have looked at the embers after a fire, looked at coal, and drawn the connection. Regardless, the answer for the earliest usage of coal is lost to history. We have reason to believe the Chinese were mining it up as early as 1000 BCE to smelt copper. We've found trace amounts of coal used in bronze age funeral pyres in the British Isles, which was probably harvested from outcroppings. The Romans extracted coal from Germany (Rhineland, specifically) for use in iron smelting.  \n\n\n\nCoal is important because its *easy* to work with. Compared to other common heat sources you simply didn't get much simpler than the usage of coal from initial harvesting to final product without giving something up. Wood might have been replenish-able and (arguably) easier to get, but it didn't burn as hot. Oil may have been able to burn hotter and / or longer, but was also far more involved to harvest. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2wfmkb", "title": "How did Harald Hardrada escape from Constantinople?", "selftext": "If I remember right, the Basilus ordered that the chain in the harbor be raised, so I'm curious as to how Hardrada got out of there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wfmkb/how_did_harald_hardrada_escape_from_constantinople/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coqj2ug", "cor3aw1"], "score": [40, 11], "text": [" > The same night King Harald and his men went to the house where Maria slept and carried her away by force. Then they went down to where the galleys of the Varings lay, took two of them and rowed out into Sjavid sound. When they came to the place where the iron chain is drawn across the sound, Harald told his men to stretch out at their oars in both galleys; but the men who were not rowing to run all to the stern of the galley, each with his luggage in his hand. The galleys thus ran up and lay on the iron chain. As soon as they stood fast on it, and would advance no farther, Harald ordered all the men to run forward into the bow. Then the galley, in which Harald was, balanced forwards and swung down over the chain; but the other, which remained fast athwart the chain, split in two, by which many men were lost; but some were taken up out of the sound. Thus Harald escaped out of Constantinople and sailed thence into the Black Sea...\n\n\n\nFrom \"Heimskringla; Or, The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway\" by Snorri Sturluson (~1230) _URL_0_ ", "They rowed as hard as they could at the chain, while everyone who wasn't rowing ran to the back of the longship, basically popping a wheelie, raising the prow of the ship.  When the front passed over the chain they all ran to the fore of the ship and the chain slid along under the keel.  Whether or not this actually happened . . .\n[Norwegian viking site explaining the maneuver](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/598"], ["http://www.viking.no/e/people/hardrade/index.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4by2um", "title": "In his time was Shakespere's writings difficult to understand?", "selftext": "I ask because we have all had some reading in school. We slowly proceed and break down what is being said sometimes. Would it have been as difficult at the time of writing to understand? I know of course language evolved and words come in and out of favor, but I feel like the common man may have been just as confused as most of us are. Was he writing, maybe, for the higher class? Thanks for the help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4by2um/in_his_time_was_shakesperes_writings_difficult_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1dkmyq"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, FYI there have been some earlier posts asking this question\n\n* [When Shakespeare's plays were first performed, was the average theater goer able to sufficiently understand the dialog to be able to follow the plot and understand the character's motivations?](_URL_0_) - featuring /u/texpeare \n\n* [Did people actually talk how Shakespeare wrote?](_URL_1_) \n\n* [Could the average person in the Globe Theatre during the Elizabethan era literally understand Shakespeare?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2csbct/when_shakespeares_plays_were_first_performed_was/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34rcaq/did_people_actually_talk_how_shakespeare_wrote/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1le3te/could_the_average_person_in_the_globe_theatre/"]]}
{"q_id": "62lrw6", "title": "Did nativism play a significant role in the American prohibition movement?", "selftext": "I recently watched a PBS 'American Experience' documentary on prohibition, and it noted at some point that some prohibiton advocates hoped that outlawing the consumption of alcoholic beverages (e.g. beer) would encourage German immigrants to leaves the states. I had never heard of this argument befire, and I'd be curious to know how wide spread this feeling was held among prohibition advocates in the early 20th century.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62lrw6/did_nativism_play_a_significant_role_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfo331z"], "score": [3], "text": ["There was indeed a great deal of overlap between the nativist and prohibitionist movements. The Anti-Saloon League, the most vocal prohibitionist organization in the country, was led mainly by Protestant ministers, most of whom were concerned that the religious and moral character of the United States was in peril.\n\nIt was not only the pernicious effects of alcohol that concerned them, but also that alcohol was of central importance to the social life of the millions of Catholic immigrants who had come to the country since the mid-19th century. The urban saloon was not merely a retailers of beer or rum \u2013 it was a place for the working man to socialize, and an arena where immigrants could organize themselves politically.\n\nIn particular, the tavern was associated with Democratic urban political machines such as Tammany Hall. The advocates of prohibition, meanwhile, tended to find their home within the Republican Party, and viewed the cause of temperance as being inextricably tied together with attempts to clean up corruption in urban politics \u2013 which was in turn caused by the clannish tendencies of immigrants and the degrading effects of drinking.\n\nOnce the Volstead Act was introduced, furthermore, it highlighted the status of immigrants as law-breakers while also infusing nativism with an added moral dimension. Various immigrant organizations had opposed Prohibition \u2013 notably the National German American Alliance, which represented German-American brewers (and which was tarred with the brush of disloyalty because of World War I) \u2013 and Catholics and Jews were disproportionately involved in rum-running and clandestine sales of alcohol.\n\nGiven the difficulties of enforcing the Volstead Act, many of its supporters turned to vigilante action, which was typically directed toward immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan was revived as a fraternal organization in the 1920s, choosing Catholics and Jews as its main targets. This reborn Klan was strongest in areas where Prohibition had the greatest support \u2013 not merely in the South, but also in the West and Midwest.\n\nThe Klan supported both immigration restrictions \u2013 culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively put an end to the period of mass migration that had begun in the 1880s \u2013 and tighter enforcement of Prohibition regulations. Chicago Lawyer Clarence Darrow told the Baltimore Sun in 1924 that the \u201cfather and mother of the Ku Klux is the Anti-Saloon League. I would not say every Anti-Saloon Leaguer is a Ku Kluxer, but every Ku Kluxer is an Anti-Saloon Leaguer.\u201d\n\nGovernor Al Smith of New York came to a similar conclusion about the Democratic Party convention of 1924: \u201cthe Klan and the anti-saloon forces in the convention were practically identical.\u201d\n\nNot all supporters of Prohibition were necessarily nativists, but given their ideological similarities they made natural allies.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19lft4", "title": "What are some examples of artwork by historical leaders?", "selftext": "I was just reading the thread about Hitler's motivations and came across multiple mentions of his artistic career. It got me to thinking about how intriguing George W. Bush's [recently leaked paintings](_URL_0_) were, and I wondered what other historically significant political figures dabbled in the fine arts and had some of their work survive to the present.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19lft4/what_are_some_examples_of_artwork_by_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8p3dk8", "c8p3k8k", "c8p41x2", "c8p5n6k", "c8p6u6w", "c8p7593"], "score": [7, 3, 5, 5, 3, 3], "text": ["Winston Churchill did [a lot of painting](_URL_0_) too.", "Stalin's also a famous Georgia Poet e.g. Morning or To the Moon", "This is more literary art than visual, but I think you might be interested in the *Illustrissimi* of Albino Luciani, who would (however briefly) become Pope John Paul I.  \n\nCardinal Luciani produced these documents during his tenure as the Patriarch of Venice.  They constitute about forty \"letters\" addressed to various persons -- some major historical figures, and others actually fictional or non-human characters.  Intriguing addressees include:\n\n- Jesus Christ (somewhat obviously)\n- Mark Twain\n- Penelope (Odysseus' wife from *The Odyssey*)\n- The members of the Pickwick Club, from Charles Dickens' *The Pickwick Papers*\n- Sir Walter Scott\n- Christopher Marlowe\n- The English novelist/poet/theologian [G.K. Chesterton](_URL_0_)\n- Pinocchio\n- Goethe\n- A bear belonging to St. Romedius\n- Guglielmo Marconi, the father of early radio\n\nThere are many more, but the above should give you a sense of the breadth of the thing.  These letters addressed each recipient on a matter of philosophy or theology that was intimately tied to their particular exploits, and not all of them are entirely positive in tone.  \n\nThe most regrettable feature of the experiment is that no replies were possible.", "Frederick the Great composed music for the flute. [Here](_URL_0_) is one of his compositions.", "Emperor Huizong of Song was a quite noted painter, and enough of his work survives to the present to give a clear idea of his very high artistic abilities-he was at any rate a far, far better painter than emperor.", "While he was in Vienna, Hitler produced hundreds of paintings.  They were mainly for postcards and were lost but quite a few survived and fetch a pretty penny at auction these days.  Here are a few of them.\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://prospect.org/article/critical-look-art-george-w-bush"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=667"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16ftk1/was_gk_chesterton_a_particularly_influential/c7vs0dw"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foIIbU8qadQ"], [], ["http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/hitlerpaintings.htm", "http://books.google.co.il/books?id=NEEEAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=PA42&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "24iu9t", "title": "Who was General Tso?", "selftext": "Was he a real person or a caricature created to market a certain type of chicken to Westerners?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24iu9t/who_was_general_tso/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7m91i"], "score": [7], "text": ["[Tso Tsung-t'ang](_URL_1_) (alternately Zuo Zongtang) was a Chinese general during the late Qing dynasty, most famous for helping to quell the Taiping rebellion.\n\nI'm about to commit a horrible sin for /r/AskHistorians by linking to a TED talk. Nevertheless, this [talk by Jennifer 8. Lee](_URL_0_) (coincidentally titled \"Who was General Tso?\") is actually rather informative on the subject of American \"Chinese\" cuisine.\n\nTo answer the sub-question, \"General Tso's chicken\" is an entirely American invention."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6MhV5Rn63M", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tso_Tsung-t%27ang"]]}
{"q_id": "9z5wm3", "title": "How do we have so many pictures and videos of the treatment of Jews in europe during the Nazi-era?", "selftext": "Who was taking these pictures/videos? Were they documenting the events to show the horrors to the world? Were the nazis okay with this happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9z5wm3/how_do_we_have_so_many_pictures_and_videos_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ea6mm4x"], "score": [6], "text": ["Much of the footage that you see was done by the Nazis themselves. Their plan was to destroy the Jewish people and wanted to have evidence of how they had done so in a very thorough and efficient way. There was also a plan for F\u00fchrermuseum - a museum whose purpose was to display a selection of the art bought, confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe during World War II. While ultimately the war ended before they could wipe out the Jews and build a museum, they had created a very significant amount of visual evidence of what they had been doing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7n0h8s", "title": "Is there any evidence suggesting that the Roman origin myth, that it was settled by emigrees from Troy (or the Trojan war), had any basis in fact?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n0h8s/is_there_any_evidence_suggesting_that_the_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dryh3zi"], "score": [12], "text": ["The Homeric epics and Virgil's Aeneid, the telling of the myth of Rome supposedly founded by the descendants of Troy, are, well, myth. The Iliad tells us more about the culture of Archaic Greece at the time that the epic was put in writing than it does about the mythical time of Greek Gods and Heroes that is narrated in the epic. Same with the Aeneid, which is more about Rome and the way Rome saw itself than it about the actual historical origins of the Romans.\n\nThis said, is there evidence that could theoretically link the Latins of the time of the founding and early days of Rome with the Greek world? Let's look at a couple of objects from the archaeological record, the Corinthian Chigi Vase and the Laconian Arkesilas Cup.\n\nThe [Chigi Vase](_URL_0_) is an \"olpe\", a wine jug that in Archaic Greece could have been used to serve wine to aristocrats getting together for a \"symposion\", the custom of elite men getting together to drink wine and enjoy dance, music and poetry. The Chigi vase was made in Corinth, and its protocorinthian style allows us to date its manufacture to about the year 650 BCE. It famously depicts a battle between hoplite forces, but it also includes images of young men hunting lions and riding horses, and of children hunting rabbits with dogs. Seen as an overall narrative, it tells how to become proper Greek heroic men through the stages of youth to the adulthood as warriors. The imagery is very much a product of Greek culture of its era. And yet, it was excavated in Veio, an Etruscan city that was just north of Rome. How did it end up there? It is unlikely that it was brought to Etruria from Greece by someone hoping to find a buyer for such an unique, high-end artifact used in the Greek symposion and depicting Greek culture. It is more likely that it was commissioned by someone from Etruria who was familiar with Greek culture and customs of that time. \n\nThe [Arkesilas Cup](_URL_1_) is a xylik, a vessel used by the Greek elite for drinking wine at a symposion. It is from Laconia (Sparta), and can be dated to about a century later than the Chigi vase. It depicts a very Greek imagery, the loading of agricultural cargo in the Laconian colony of Cyrene, in North Africa. Again, like the Chigi vase, the Arkesilas Cup is very much a product of Archaic Greek culture and elite customs. And yet it was excavated in Etruria, in Vulci, about 100 km north-west of Rome. \n\nTaken together, these two objects tell us that the culture and customs of Archaic Greece were known and sought after in the area surrounding Rome, in a period ranging from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the sixth century. There is no reason to think that this would have started suddenly in the year 650, so it is likely that there was commercial and cultural contact between the Etruscans and various parts of the Greek world in the early seventh century and possibly mid to late eight century. These are the years that are traditionally given for the founding of Rome (753 BCE) and the time of the seven kings of Rome. So while the founding myth of Rome in the time of Heroes and Gods, is just a myth that is designed to connect the history of the city to the great epics of the Greek world, it is not completely impossible that there was some actual human or cultural Greek DNA in the very early days of Rome, passed through them by the elite Etruscans.\n\n**Sources**\n\nHurwit, Jeffrey M. \"Reading the Chigi Vase.\" *Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens* 71, no. 1 (2002)\n\nOsborne, Robin. *Archaic and Classical Greek Art*, Oxford: Oxford University Press"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hoplites_Chigi_Vase.PNG", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arkesilas_Cup_Cdm_Paris_DeRidder189_n2.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "28357h", "title": "Was it common for WW2 fighter planes to shoot for wing-mounted bombs?", "selftext": "If possible at all, I seem to suck at googling. And was, say, a B-17's bomb bay as armored as the rest of the plane? Would it be easier to just shoot the plane itself? (not taking escort planes into account)\n\nWhat about rockets?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28357h/was_it_common_for_ww2_fighter_planes_to_shoot_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6yftc", "ci741ns"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["Such precision gunnery was nearly impossible with WWII fighters.  Shooting for the bombs would be a much more difficult target than the engine, cockpit, or wing root (where the wing meets the fuselage).  There were largely two types of guns in WWII fighters.  The first type was wing-mounted guns that were generally configured to converge at a given distance for maximum firepower.  Most American and British designs featured this setup, with machine guns being the primary armament.  Planes like the Spitfire and Hurricane for the British as well as the Mustang, Lightning, and most US naval fighters for the US.  The second type of gun mount was in line with the pilot either through the propeller hub or through the propeller arc.  These guns fired straight ahead and often included a cannon through the propeller hub.  Many axis planes featured this alignment, though US planes like the P-38 and P-39 also had this type of arrangement.\n\n > And was, say, a B-17's bomb bay as armored as the rest of the plane? \n\nNo, there was little armor at all on a B-17 or most other bombers.  To attack from below was difficult but possible.  Also, most heavy bombers of the time used internal bomb loads--wing-mounted bombs were generally featured on dive bombers and fighters outfitted for ground attack.\n\n > Would it be easier to just shoot the plane itself?\n\nYes, yes it would.  In either configuration accurate gunnery was difficult at any kind of range.  Even bombers were moving in three dimensions through the sky and were varying their path--to avoid flak if nothing else.  So you had to predict where your target would be by the time your bullets or shells reached it, maneuver yourself into position to make the shot, avoid incoming fire from the bomber and its escorts, *and* provide the right amount of lead for your shots to hit your target.  None of these were easy to do.  If your shots converged at a point out in front of you due to having wing-mounted guns your fire was much less concentrated at any other distance.  You may have been firing six or eight machine guns, but the sky is still a very large place and it becomes an incredibly busy place during combat.  Even if your guns fired straight ahead it was still difficult to produce accurate gunnery.  Gyro-gunsights were available in WWII in some fighters and they did help, but later improvements like radar-assisted range finding would help even more.  Even then, targeting the engines, cockpit, or wing root was much more likely than trying to pinpoint a relatively tiny bomb.\n\n > What about rockets?\n\nThe rockets mounted on planes in WWII were smaller than the bombs were.  Most of them were mere inches in diameter, which would make them even more difficult to target than bombs.\n\nAs always, followup questions by OP and others are encouraged.", "In  the  book  \"General  Kenney  Reports\"  George  C  Kenney  says  in  the  summer  of  1942, the  woefully  out  numbered  Fifth  Air  Force  had  a  serious  problem.  Its  bomber  pilots  thought  their  bomb  payloads  were  extremely  vulnerable  to  exploding  if  hit  with  a  bullet.  So  when  a  Fifth  Air  Force  pilot  or  air  crew  saw  any  Japanese  planes  in  the vicinity,  they  dropped  their  bombs  right  away  and  headed  for  home.      \n       Kenney  put  a  stop  to  this  by  telling  them  that  bombs  don't  explode  until  their  fuses  activate  them.  Bombs  have  to  fall  several  thousand feet  before  the   fuses  activate  them.  The  pilots  did  not  believe  him,  so  he  had  to  show  them,  by  having  a  P-39  shoot  at  a  pile  of  500  pound  General  Purpose  bombs,  from  a  distance  of  500  feet.   The  bombs  did  not  explode,  but  the  pilots  could  see  the  evidence  that  fifty  caliber  and  even  37  millimeter  shells  were  hitting  and  ricocheting  off  of  the  bombs.  That  put  an  end  to  the  early  dropping  of  bombs,  by  Fifth  Air  Force  bomber  pilots.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2i6lwa", "title": "Is anything still named after Hitler?", "selftext": "I saw a photo once of a U.S. soldier replacing a German street sign which read \"Adolf Hitler St.\" with a painted one that said \"Roosevelt Blvd.\" \n\nDid everything that was named after Hitler get renamed or demolished? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i6lwa/is_anything_still_named_after_hitler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckzchi6", "ckzcsde", "ckzd8uv", "ckze1jp", "ckzirgw", "ckzm59a"], "score": [252, 871, 546, 41, 22, 80], "text": ["Please, stop posting one sentence answers. If the OP was looking for links to websites without further context, he or she would go to /r/history or /r/askreddit. This is /r/AskHistorians and we have [rules](_URL_0_). Keep in mind that if you keep posting *bad* answers in this sub, you will be banned.  ", "Maybe not entirely irrelevant to your question would be the story of the Viale delle cave ardeatine in Rome.\n\n\nYou might have guessed this road was formerly named  'Viale Adolfo Hitler'. And was part of the greatest charm offensive in history.\n\n\nMussolini wanted to impress Hitler so badly that he invited him over on a tour of Italy that took almost 2 years in preparation. The enitire length of railroad Hitler would travel in Italy was meticulously checked for buildings that weren't up to standard. Shabby looking houses were torn down or obscured from view by massive posters. Every town the train went through was adorned with Italian and Swastika flags and thousands of people were recruited to cheer at Hitlers train in every town.\n\n\nIn Rome Mussolini had roads specially constructed that would appeal to Hitlers love for wide boulevards and because the Termini train station was in an area surrounded by 19th century housing blocks Mussolini built an entire railway station, Roma Ostiense, in an area that showed Italy's new industrial zone and that had an appealing route into the city that passed all the great monuments.\n\n\nThe entire city was all flags and every monument was lit up using gas lamps and airial search lights. The road from the station Ostiense towards the ancient city gate Porta Sao Paulo was named after Hitler himself.\n\nAfter the war it was renamed after the Cave Ardeatini, the location where the biggest massacre inflicted by German forces on Roman citizens had taken place. 335 Citizens where massacred as retribution for a bomb attack on a German army collumn. The Germans tried covering their deed up by blowing up the cave.\n\nSo it's not really named after Hitler anymore. The station still remains as a piece of History that is hidden in plain sight, though.\n\n\nSource: *Capturing the Fascist Moment: Hitler's Visit to Italy in 1938 and the Radicalization of Fascist Italy* by Paul Baxa.\n\nFor anyone that wants to see a good movie about the visit of Hitler to Rome I can advice watching 'Una Giornata Particulare' (or 'A Special Day' in English) it makes use of acutal newsreel footage of Hitlers entry into Rome. _URL_0_\n\n\n*Edits* Spelling is hard.", "The only thing I know of that's named after Hitler from before WWII is a [particular sort of beetle](_URL_0_) discovered during Hitler's rise to power.  Its name hasn't been changed on account of tradition: you don't change a species' binomial name unless it's miscategorized. \n\nOther than that, you'll find things named for Hitler as a joke, like the tongue-in-cheek logical fallacy Reductio ad Hitlerum.  I don't know how quickly things were \"de-hitlerized,\" but dismantling such a well-developed cult of personality takes time.  The Soviet union spent decades in de-stalinization, which was an effort specifically geared toward taking apart the image and legacy of Joseph Stalin, even changing the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd.  ", "There's one building that is somewhat relevant to your question, but maybe not exactly what you were looking for. It's the building in Braunau am Inn Hitler was born in. In 1938, it was bought by a high-ranking Nazi official and converted into a cultural centre. In 1945, shortly after Braunau was liberated by US soldiers, an attempt by German soldiers to demolish the building was foiled. The building has since been rented by the City of Braunau and the Austrian government, and used for various purposes or sublet to charitable organizations. Of course, all of the parties involved want to prevent the place from becoming a nazi pilgrimage site. As part of a historic ensemble, the building has been under protection for a while. It is officially being referred to using it's address, \"Salzburger Vorstadt 15\".", "How common was it for things to be named after Hilter in Germany? Was there a Adolf Hitler Road in every town, or was it only saved for special buildings/addresses? ", "I think this is the photo OP is referring to:\n _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"], ["http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076085/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anophthalmus_hitleri"], [], [], ["http://imgur.com/QAfHE"]]}
{"q_id": "4ssyqq", "title": "Why was American Revolution helped by European powers, but French Revolution was feared?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ssyqq/why_was_american_revolution_helped_by_european/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5c7hxh"], "score": [19], "text": ["The reason is that the American revolution wasn't viewed as a revolution. The American revolutionaries legitimised their actions by claiming that the England had encroached on their traditional rights as Englishmen. The monarch had acted as a tyrant and rebellion could therefore be defensible, if the aim was to *restore* their rights. The French revolution was a true revolution; society itself was transformed. The sovereign, the King ordained by God, was replaced by a new sovereign, the nation. The American revolution did not change the basis for society itself (atleast until the constitution was ratified); the French revolution overturned the ideology of the ancien r\u00e9gime itself, threatening every society in Europe. One way to exemplify this is to look at the foreign policy of the United States and revolutionary France. The former never tried to export its ideas, but many of the most outspoken proponents of the latter wanted to spread the ideas of the revolution throughout Europe by force. \n\nI hope that makes sense. \n\nSource: Max Edling, 2009: \"Den konstitutionella revolutionens startskott\",  in *Maktbalans och kontrollmakt*, eds. M. Brundin  &  M. Isberg. Edling is the foremost Swedish expert on the American revolution and a researcher at King's College, London. His dissertation, \"A Revolution in Favour of Government\", is an eminently readable revisit of the American revolution from a state formation perspective. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21jd0a", "title": "Why is South Africa the most developed African country?", "selftext": "I ask this as I know other countries in Africa have more natural resources and oil etc, and I know some of the Northern African countries have been  superpowers since ancient times but aren't now, so why is South Africa the most developed now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21jd0a/why_is_south_africa_the_most_developed_african/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdnxow"], "score": [4], "text": ["This might be better suited to /r/asksocialscience.\n\nAlso, you might want to re-frame the question - by any metric of development I'm aware of (for example, [HDI](_URL_0_)), South Africa *isn't* the most developed African country."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index#List_of_countries_by_continent"]]}
{"q_id": "w91we", "title": "Why was the Soviet military so ineffective in the first half of WW2? ", "selftext": "After the battle of Stalingrad and Kursk, I know that a new method of warfare that they called Deep Battle was implemented which better leveraged their strengths.\n\nBut in the beginning of WW2, they invaded Finland and lost 200,000 troops, and Finland was tiny and isolated. Terrain favored the defenders, and the Finns were determined, but when the American military fought determined Japanese defenders, they destroyed them - and the Japanese were much more powerful than the Finns. How was this possible? And how was it possible that the Soviets lost so much of their army during the initial German invasion? \n\nSo why was the Soviet military so incompetent? \n\nEdit: I want to thank everyone for taking the time to reply. Russian history is an area of great interest to me, and with such a complicated, large institution as the Soviet Union, it's often difficult to really piece together exactly why things happened as they did.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w91we/why_was_the_soviet_military_so_ineffective_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bbbm3", "c5bbnxc", "c5bckry", "c5bcop2", "c5bcrwy", "c5bd43j", "c5bdq8t", "c5bfb7r", "c5biv3u", "c5blw5c"], "score": [2, 2, 4, 11, 36, 130, 3, 12, 3, 2], "text": ["I've been wondering this for a long time. Thank you in advance for anyone who takes the time to answer this question. You guys are the best!", "Stalins purges destroyed all competent Red leadership. Also, Stalin refused to mobilize or move troops to defensive positions when it was clear the Germans were up to something. No red air force probably had an effect as well.", "There is the mostly, but not entirely, tinfoil hat theory that the soviets were getting ready to attack the Germans.  But mostly it was the purges, combined with the fact that all armies in ww2 needed time to learn modern warfare.", "As a disclaimer, this isn't my particular area of expertise regarding the Soviet Union. These are more educated guesses than previously verified facts.\n\nAside from the purges of the Red Army from 1937-1938 which we're mentioned in previous replies, the Soviet Union's industrial situation and tactics likely had a hand in it. If you look at casualty numbers, the Soviet Union had absolutely enormous casualties in the Second World War. Stalin and the Soviet leadership had little regard for loss of life, and thus a simple quantity over quality approach was often acceptable in warfare. Throw bodies at the problem until it eventually goes away. This is, however, directly related to the state of the Soviet military and industrial sector.\n\nThe Soviet Union, it must be remembered, had only just begun industrialization shortly before the Second World War. Although the Soviet Union's Industrial Revolution took place at an absolutely unprecedented rate, this was not enough to adequately transform the Soviet military into a modern fighting machine like that of Nazi Germany. Upon the outbreak of war, the Soviet Union was at a distinct disadvantage in regards to the quality and quantity of their weapons, armoured vehicles, and so forth. \n\nThis situation began to change as the war progressed. As Total War set in, the full human, technological and material resources of the Soviet Union's vast territory was now directed toward the war effort. In addition, the Soviet Union received material aid from the United States after 1941 in the form of the Lend-Lease agreement. This aid totalled 11.3$ billion, or about 140$ billion dollars in today's terms. Taken from Wikipedia, examples of American aid to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease agreement: \"2,000 locomotives and 11,000 railcars were supplied under Lend-Lease. Likewise, the Soviet air force received 18,700 aircraft, which amounted to about 14% of Soviet aircraft production (19% for military aircraft).\"\n\nI'm by no means an expert on this, however these factors are a good place to start.", "Stalin conducted a huge purge of senior army officers in the mid to late thirties. This had a catastrophic effect on the Red Army, especially as political officers were sent in to examine the decisions (and political reliability) of serving officers. This created a sense of paranoia, and was a damper of creativity and morale plummeted. These problems led directly to a poor performance against the highly motivated Finns.\n\nAfter this, Stalin realised that it was time to start undoing the damage that had been done. Some officers were returned to service from prison. However, this process of healing the Red Army had hardly begun by the time of the German invasion. Stalin kept his troops close to the border, thus permitting the Germans to use the element of surprise, and allowing his troops to be encircled with ease.\n\nSo now you have the situation where poorly led, poorly trained troops were put into a losing battle by incompetent higher ups against troops who were highly motivated, and much better armed and far more numerous than the Finns. Initially the troops were (in a manner similar to what happened to the French troops) given out of date and often conflicting orders, to hold objectives already far behind the fast moving German lines. Depleted units were ordered to attack, etc. It was, just like the French experience, the perfect storm of military incompetence. \n\nWhat is surprising is how quickly the Soviets bounced back. There were some very panicky moments in the high command, and a lot of troops were almost openly used as fodder to slow the German advance, but really the German invasion failed against stiffening Soviet resistance. If the snow hadn't fallen when it did, I doubt the Germans could have advanced much further anyway. They had been worn to the nub by ever increasing Soviet resistance.\n\nStalin reduced the power of the political officers and hastened the return of experienced officers from the gulags. Equipment was improved, supply was improved, and the call to arms for the motherland focused the energy of the people. Although there would be many setbacks along the way, after the first few months it was essentially all upwards for the Red Army, while the German army had started their slow decline.\n\nSo yeah, the Soviets sucked mightily at the start, but they learned fast and overcame their many problems in a most astonishing manner. I'm not sure that many armies could boast of such a turnaround in such a short time.", "This is a very complex and complicated subject - probably hundreds of books have been written about this both inside and outside of the USSR. Essentially, the reasons could be put into 2 categories:\n\n**First Reason**: The Soviet Union was simply not ready for war when Germany invaded. During peacetime, the military of any major country works on a skeleton crew. It is simply too expensive to maintain a war-time full size army in peacetime. As soon as the war starts, the country will call up reservists, troops will assemble in cities all over the country, get on trains (or ships/planes whatever) and then be transported and deployed to face the enemy. This is call mobilization. For a country the size of the Soviet Union, this process takes a long time - more than a month. When Germany invaded the SU on June 22, 1941, the Red Army was still largely a peace-time army - it wan't mobilized or it was perhaps only partially mobilized. The troops in the interior of the country have not yet joined with those at the border. This gave the German army a significant advantage. The German army could concentrate an overwhelming amount of troops at the key points of their advance. This allowed them to quickly surround and destroy many of the Red Army units facing them. This meant that the mobilizing RA units arriving from the interior could no longer join with anybody and had to make a new front. Essentially, the defeat at the border created a cascading domino effect where the Germans would never really fight the RA at full strength and instead defeat it peace-meal. \n\nYou might ask \"Well, why didn't the SU mobilize sooner? Couldn't they have seen this coming?\" There is a lot of misinformation out there that basically says that Stalin was given accurate intelligence that the invasion was pending but refused to believe it. Actually, intelligence reports he received were contradictory and not reliable. There was no conclusive evidence that war was indeed imminent. However, the Soviet leadership became very concerned about the threat in the early June (about 2-3 weeks before the invasion). Even if mobilization was declared then, it was already too late, since at least 30 days were needed. But more importantly, they reasoned that a mobilization would be provocative to Germany and make war a certainty rather than merely a threat. \n\n**Second Reason** is the difference in troop quality. The the few years before 1941, the RA had grown by nearly 5 times. Soviet military academies had difficulties meeting the demand for qualified new officers. On a more theoretical level, the RA didn't really have a clear and effective doctrine that it would put into use. Senior officers understood that the nature of war had changed dramatically since the days of WWI, especially with the advent of the tank. However, it was not very clear what was the best way to use armor, and without concrete experience it was hard to determine. (The terrain during the war with Finland was not very suitable for armored warfare). To give an example, originally the Soviets had their tanks spread across the infantry. However shortly before the war, in 1940, they decided to organize all the tanks in to 19 mechanized corps. Each corps would have hundreds of tanks. However as experience showed, these mechanized corps, while looking formidable on paper, were actually too big and too difficult to control. Also, as experience showed, tanks actually need a lot of infantry and artillery support - something that these mechanized corps didn't have enough of. Finally, the mechanized corps didn't have sufficient transport which limited their mobility, which is a key feature of armored units. \n\nThe Germans, on the other hand, probably had the best and the most complete doctrine on how to use armor at the beginning of the war. During the interwar years, they put a lot of thought into how armor should be organized, what the proper ratio of tanks to infantry is, and so on. The campaign in Poland was just about the ideal scenario to test their doctrine - it was a real war with a real enemy but still forgiving enough that mistakes would not lead to a disaster. The Polish campaign was also one of several opportunities for German officers and soldiers to gain valuable experience. Thus the German military was well ahead of the RA qualitatively. \n\n**Re: Stalin's Purges**: The misfortunes of the Red Army are often explained by Stalin's purges. However these claims are usually exaggerated. Overall, only about 4% of Red Army officers were killed as a result of the purges. The majority of those affected were returned to the army either before or immediately after the war began. Several of Red Army's very senior officers were killed but there is no indication that they were more talented or capable the the ones who replaced them. Also, while it is true that the RA had a deficit of junior officers, the purges were very top heavy. Of course, the purges didn't help the situation but it would be incorrect to say they were the main or even a very significant reason for RA's defeats of 1941. \n\nSorry for the wall of text but this as I said earlier, it is a rather complicated subject. \n\n**TL;DR** - The Soviet Union was not ready for war operationally - the Red Army wasn't mobilized or deployed at the start the war. Also the Soviet military planners, nor the officers in the field, had sufficient experience with modern warfare (contrary to Germans, which had a ton).\n\nEDIT: Formatting and grammar", "If I'm not mistaken it was Gen. Zhukov (the same one that defeated the Japanese at Khalkin Gol) that was among the pioneers of \"Deep Battle\" which today's planners basically call \"operational\" planning - somewhere between \"tactical\" and \"strategic\" planning. First implemented at Stalingrad but really really put into effect at Kursk (largest battle of all time!).", "Why did the Winter War last as long as it did? Some reasons:\n\n* Soviet military leadership: See grond's comment about the purges.\n* Adaptation to the weather: Finnish soldiers grew up and lived in cold climates for their entire lives. By contrast Stalin didn't trust any Russians living near the border/Stalingrad area and decided to bring in troops from the warm south. A Finnish platoon had only to destroy a Soviet field kitchen and thousands would freeze to death.\n* Suomi KP/-31 SMG (later copied as the PPSh-41): Many theorists believed that a clumsy soldier would shoot off all their ammunition in battle if had an automatic weapon. Nobody told the Finns about this though, and their infantry were able to mow down the advancing waves of Soviet troops.\n* Improvised explosives: The Finns had to wait until Molatav cocktails (name comes from the Soviet foreign minister) and AT mines were introduced to effectively counter tanks. These improvised explosives enabled any individual soldier to set up ambushes and eliminate armor (if he was brave enough), and it turned out that enemy tanks with tunnel vision were especially vulnerable to this sort of behavior.\n* \"Blitzkrieg\"-esque school of thought: The Russians fought the war like Fuller would have imagined: massive tank thrusts paving the way forward with infantry bringing up the rear. Unfortunately, like the Americans discovered in France and Italy, and Germans in Africa and Kursk, armored 'thrusts' don't fare vary well against hardened defensive positions and difficult terrain.\n* Finnish tactical flexibility: This is an especially lengthy topic. Check out Battle of Suomussalmi for an interesting case study.\n\nIf western powers had actually backed up Finland with proper weapons and ammunition instead of believing the nation would crumble after a few weeks I think there's a good chance that the Soviets would have bowed out.", "I might be going a little away from topic but I would argue the Red Army was never an effective army. While other people are correct as to why they were ineffective and got better, they had from 8-10 million casualties during this war. Axis armies from the start of Barbarossa only had less then 4 million. \n\nEven during the battle that marked the official turning of the tides (IMO), Operation Uranus, they won due to having many more men and the Germans low of resources. Poor reactions of German command also failed to recognize the threat of encirclement at all till it was far to late (Though yes it could easily be argued with Hitler controlling form afar it wouldn't of changed the outcome). Many of their first waves were pushed back with high casualties against frankly crappy Romanian soldiers. Why were they able to encircle the 6th army? Because they had a 1 million man offensive directed in two spots. One attacking SE, the other NW. Then after that Germany just had absolutely nothing left through a war of attrition for two years. Proven by the lackluster performance of Operation Winter Storm to free the 6th army, and the following counter attack by the RA in Little Saturn.\n\nWhile the courage of the Russian soldiers is undeniable the military was never effective. They valued their men next to zero, and won through sheer number. While it may look like the second half was different it really was not. Like stated earlier it was just two years of suicidal tactics that lead to Germany being beaten into the ground. Their highly trained German troops were at an end by when the Soviets started advancing west. The Battle of Stalingrad, quiet possibly the most brutal battle to happen on the face of the earth, nothing was pretty but if you send enough men into a meat grinder for long enough. Your under-supplied enemy about 1000miles from home, doesn't stand a chance when they do not get more men of matter. Hell in the Kessel they were using 10s of thousands of Russian men to defend the lines even. Hiwi's I believe they're called.\n\nThey used the same tactics as before. It was just against a different German army now.\n\nNow in their defense now. Stalin was able to wait more than 10 seconds before beginning a new offensive. Thus during counter attacks/attacks they were actually supplied now. Now they had many T-34's which German Panzors could not effectively pierce their armor. Though it should be mentioned Germany didn't have much armor left that was supplied well enough after Feb. 1943. And their communications system while not great it improves drastically. Lastly, great winter gear.\n\nBut still, I would never say they were effective fighting against a shadow of their former enemy. It just looks more effective because Germany was out of men, supplies, and will. They used the same strategy as before\n\nTL;DR *More* effective? Yes without a doubt. An effective army? No. Never ever start a land war in Asia against an enemy that has far more resolve then you could ever dream of.\n\nSorry if this is hard to follow I just sort of started typing. I could write about this for days so this is kind of a skeleton of my full argument. ", "A Russian historian has written a book on the first ten days of the war on the Eastern Front.  Read it, and you'll better understand why the Red Army did so poorly. \n[link](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Folly-Tragic-First-Eastern/dp/0618367012"]]}
{"q_id": "23fxfb", "title": "Who do you think is Jack the Ripper?", "selftext": "I really just want to know what the historians think who he is", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23fxfb/who_do_you_think_is_jack_the_ripper/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgwqq0x", "cgwuodq", "cgx5zuv"], "score": [90, 157, 9], "text": ["I found patricia Cornwell's case for Walter Sickert pretty compelling [Link to book if you want to check it out.](_URL_0_) Things like details in his paintings that a person uninvolved shouldn't have known as well as paper matching to the letters from jack the ripper to police are interesting ideas as well as her creating a physiological profile that fit him and the ripper. \n\nBut there are a few holes in her case as she is piecing together a 100+ year old crime. Nothing can every be conclusively proved or disproved so any real accusation is basically a highly educated guess.  \n\nAt this point in history the only concrete thing to say is that nobody will know conclusively who Jack the Ripper was. \n", "Academic historians tend to be fairly unconcerned with who the murderer really was. This is partly because we'll never know for sure, and partly because the myth of the Ripper is far more interesting than any reality. As a cultural historian of late-Victorian Britain, I'm fascinated by the response to the murders and what it reveals about British culture and society at the time. The failure of the police to apprehend the murderer created a void; a blank space into which people poured their fears and fantasies. It's a great way to explore ideas about gender, race, crime, the city, and the press. This is much more interesting (to me at least) than desperately speculating about the identity of the killer. Historians tend to leave this stuff to the Ripperologists...", "A sort of followup question: I'm reading about H.H. Holmes right now and came across a mention that some people believe he was Jack the Ripper. Something about him being in London at the time. Can anybody offer a more scholarly analysis of this theory? It didn't seem particularly sound to me, but he did do some pretty nasty stuff in Chicago at the Colombian Exposition so maybe....\n\nIs this a theory that has ever been taken seriously by anybody? What is the likelihood of it being true? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Portrait-Of-Killer-Ripper-Berkley/dp/0425192733"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "sru7h", "title": "[Meta] Can we start a FAQ link of Recommended History Books?", "selftext": "It might be nice to start to compile a list of recommended books, I know we've had a few posts about it, but it would be useful to have them easily accessible. My thought is we can start a section on the [FAQ](_URL_0_) that has books, and with each book we can link to the recommendation from each of the threads. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sru7h/meta_can_we_start_a_faq_link_of_recommended/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4ggvfi", "c4ghe8r", "c4gi5ov", "c4glwsc"], "score": [7, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["we have a link on the sidebar for finding good resources, however compiling a list of books can get unwieldy quick.  WARFTW alone would contribute like 40 books just on the Battle of Kursk.", "We would need to start a whole wiki, and even then it would just turn into a list of books that would be so long it that people would feel buried.\n\nLook at US History:\n\n-Age of Exploration\n-Colonizaton\n-The Colonial Period\n-The Revolutionary Period\n-The Early Republic\n-Age of Jackson/Antebellum America\n-The Civil War\n-Reconstruction and Industrial America\n-The Progressive Era\n-World War War I\n-Interwar America\n-World War II\n-Post-War World II\n-Modern America\n\nThen you get specific, and stuff gets crazy. This is for a country with a hsistory that spans 500 years. When you're covering 10,000 years of history, it gets insane.\n\nIf you got a bunch of US Civil War buffs together, we might be able to agree on a general history of the war, but I doubt you could get a bunch of us to agree on five specific books that everyone should read. If you expand that to cover all of US history, I really don't know what to tell you, except avoid Howard Zinn. \n", "I think a collection of those \"recommend me books\" threads in one, updated post would be a nice addition to the sidebar. I could do this, if someone wants me to.\n\nBut there is a problem with the big list of recommended books you want: There are too much of them! Most people asking for books here will only read a few of them. I have read many books on World History and often recommend some of them here. Most of the time I ask the OP to be more specific or what subject/time period/geographical area he is interested in, because \"tailor-made\" recommendations are much more helpful.", "Very difficult, because books on historical topics are rarely *definitive*, and if they're not definitive, the precise angle they take is more important than the coverage of the topic itself.\n\nAlso there's a big problem with books that are *important* but *not necessarily right*.\n\nBooks like Syme's *The Roman Revolution* and Finley's *The World of Odysseus* are undoubtedly terrifically important and influential books, but there are probably not many people today (or at least I hope not) who would subscribe to the detail of much of what they say.\n\nI'm really not sure that such a list is possible, unless it's simply a list of \"[/r/askhistorians](/r/askhistorians) regulars' favourite books\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/AskHistorians"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3eg3w5", "title": "How did Buddhist-majority nations reconcile state violence (wars and so on) with Buddhist precepts of non-violence? Did they bother to do so?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3eg3w5/how_did_buddhistmajority_nations_reconcile_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctetize", "cteugq8", "cteutea", "ctexmif", "ctf9yey", "ctfd07m"], "score": [305, 517, 57, 14, 6, 2], "text": ["A really interesting case study on this is japan during WWII and Zen Buddhism.\n\nTwo important works on this topic are \"Zen at War\" and \"Zen War Stories \" by Brian Daizen Victoria. These books examine how Zen Masters justified and contributed to pro war propaganda.\n\nHere are some quotes from Zen masters during WWII:\n\n > \"[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].\" - Harada Daiun Sogaku \n\n > \"Showing the utmost loyalty to the emperor is identical with engaging in the religious practice of Mahayana Buddhism. This is because Mahayana Buddhism is identical with the law of the sovereign.\" -- Seki Seisetsu \n\n > . \"I wished to inspire our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so as to enable them to die on the battlefield with confidence that the task in which they are engaged is great and noble. I wish to convince them.... that this war is not a mere slaughter of their fellow-beings, but that they are combating an evil.\" -- Shaku Soen \n\n > \"In the present hostilities, into which Japan has entered with great reluctance, she pursues no egotistic purpose, but seeks the subjugation of evils hostile to civilization, peace and enlightenment.\" -- Shaku Soen  \n\nSo what we are seeing are men who are just as susceptible to nationalism as anyone else who are able to justify aggression using twists of Buddhist logic.  Its the nature of belief structures that they can always be twisted to support a world view.\n\nAlso, understand that not every \"Buddhist\" \"takes the full precepts\".  The full precepts would only be taken by Buddhist monks and nuns who \"renounce the world\". The average soldier would not have necessarily taken any preceipts personally.  Even if a soldier has received something like the Soto Bodhisattva precepts which includes instructions not to kill, these types of things can be twisted subjectively.\n\nFor example:\n\n > \"\"It is just to punish those who disturb the public order. Whether one kills or does not kill, the precept forbidding killing [is preserved]. It is the precept forbidding killing that wields the sword. It is the precept that throws the bomb.\" -- Sawaki Kodo \n", "Interestingly enough, I did a paper on this very question in my bachelor (comparative religion). My case study was Sri Lanka, but I'll give examples from other nations here as well, for a more 'universal' approach. \n\nThere are three means of reconciliation of violence and Buddhism I will distinguish here. Incidentally, these are not unique to Buddhists. Other religions handle their formal rejection of violence in a similar manner. \n\nFirst, Buddhism, like other religions, is linked to cultural and national identity. Buddhists would fight in protection of their nationstate and what they perceive as the \"keepers of the tradition\". They apply a larger-than-life mentality to the warfare. That is to say, the importance of continuing the tradition outweighs the views on morality they hold. (Daniel Kent (2010), 'Onward Buddhist Soldiers, Preaching to the Sri Lankan Army' in: *Buddhist Warfare*)  \n\n >  Soldiers don\u2019t shoot the enemy out of personal anger. If they shoot they do so for the common good. This war is on behalf of the country, people, religion, region, and motherland. It would be negative karma to shoot one\u2019s neighbor over a land conflict, but the intention here is a good one.\n\nSecond, there are attempts to de-humanize the opponents. This is very similar to Christian and Islamic justification of violence. Opponents are represented as possessed by demons, thereby transforming the violence from a mortal to a sanctified action. (in: Michael Jerryson (2010), 'Militarizing Buddhism, Violence in Souther Thailand' in: *Buddhist Warfare*)\n\n >  [B]ecause whoever destroys the nation, the religion, or the monarchy, such bestial types [man] are not complete persons. Thus we must intend not to kill people but to kill the Devi [Ma\u0304ra]; this is the duty of all Thai. \n\nThird, karmic sacrifice. This is a classic case of multiple interpretations of (somewhat) ambiguous theology. Some individuals are considered such sinful beings, that they will only commit more crimes the longer they live. Killing these individuals can be considered a heroic act, because the killer will sacrifice his own karma in order to prevent the victim from committing more crimes and going to hell. (in: Derek Maher (2008), *The Rhetoric of War in Tibet*)\n\n >  [K]illings [can be] undertaken in order to preserve sinful opponents of Buddhism from committing worse crimes that could be expected to earn them more severe karmic retribution than if they had not been killed.\n\nLastly, on a more personal note (hope that's allowed) there are some understandable misconceptions about Buddhism. (these same misconceptions incited my initial question for the aforementioned paper). Buddhism has many forms. And the majority of those forms has aspects similar to other religions. Please don't believe that \"Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion\". Many forms of buddhism have gods, demons, heaven, hell, prayer for help, and rituals with magic properties. Therefore, evil and violence toward perceived evil is not at all uncommon among buddhists. If someone tells you that that is not real Buddhism, that would be a theological belief, not a statement supported by scholars. ", "One of the more interesting one cases of Buddhism and war is Japan.\n\nHistorically Buddhism in Japan has being subordinated to the state and began as a religion of the upper classes. between the 10th and 17th centuries Buddhism temples and monasteries were incredibly powerful and military orders of warrior monks (not unlike Christian military orders like the knight templar), known as the Sohei. Those orders fought both to defend their own temples and in attacking rival sects. They eventually grew so powerful that they were viewed as major threats by would be unifiers of Japan during the Sengoku era. Nobunga, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa defeated them and banned them under in Tokugawa Japan.\n\nThat did not end the relationship between the state and Buddhism became a defacto state religion in the Shogunate, where families had to associated themselves with a nearby Buddhist temples. Buddhism in Japan was therefore subordinated to the state.\n\nZen Buddhism had always being favored by Japan's warrior classes, the sect advocated indifference between life and death, and stressed the importance of discipline and that of an austere life style. During the 20th century Zen Buddhism became actively involved in promoting war, especially during WWII.\n\nThey justified it by:\n\n1) Religion must support the state at all costs, because should the state ever collapse then the chaos it produces would in turn produce far greater violence than otherwise\n\n2) Killing could be justified if the people killed are \"evil\", and that failure to kill evil men actually constituted a breach of Buddhist beliefs. It is not compassionate, for instance, to let an evil man live so that he can harm others later on.\n\n3) The war being fought in East Asia was a \"just war\" based on eliminating western colonialism in Asia and the establishment of a greater Asian co-prosperity sphere, and hence on the long run, eliminate war.\n\n4) The emperor is an ultimate enlightened being and thus deserves special moral authority.\n\nThere were of course, dissidents to militaristic interpretation of Buddhism, but as religion was subordinated to the state, views favoring the needs of the state tended to be much more popular.\n\nSources: Critical Buddhism: Engaging with Modern Japanese Buddhist Thought By Mr James Mark Shields\n\nZen at War by Brian Victoria", "This is fascinating and a question I'd wondered about myself -- particularly as I'd mostly fallen for the sanitized version of Buddhism popular in the West.  \n\nOn the one hand, these explanations indicate that Buddhism is largely like other religions in formally eschewing violence, but finding convenient exceptions when necessary. \n\nGiven the great commonality among religions in this regard, I wonder if a further question might be whether there are any *differences* between Buddhist-majority nations and other-religious-majority nations on this subject -- and differences that might plausibly be attributable to Buddhism itself (and not merely attributable to common geographical or historical circumstances).\n\nFor example, is there anything in the ongoing rapid reconciliation between Vietnam and the United States (particularly as compared to the ongoing wars in the Middle East or Nothern Ireland, etc.) that is attributable to Vietnam's majority Buddhism? Or is that simply a red herring that merely clouds the decisive role of historical circumstance?  \n\nAlso, I recall that in China, some of the early Qing emperors, I think, were devout Vajrayana Buddhists, but also were quite militaristic and violent -- responsible for just as many atrocities as other emperors. I would be grateful if anyone knows of this and could elaborate?  Thanks!", "Are we allowed to discuss the Burmese's treatment of the Rohingya here?  Or is that too recent, even though it goes back to 1948?", "Anyone know of good books on king ashoka rule over india, that was a buddhist kingdom "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3m6vov", "title": "What was the siege of Malta significance in WW2 and what are some good sources to read on the subject?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3m6vov/what_was_the_siege_of_malta_significance_in_ww2/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvcicfe"], "score": [7], "text": ["Malta had a great strategic significance for the British in the Mediterranean, as a result of its geographical position. Being in the centre of the Mediterranean, aircraft, ships and submarines based there could interdict any shipping trying to move past it. This proved to be especially valuable, as it controlled the shipping lanes from Italy to North Africa. The RN based two main forces there - Force K, and the 10th Submarine Flotilla. Force K was a surface force, based around two light cruisers, *Penelope* and *Aurora*. It destroyed several Axis convoys, before increased German and Italian bombing forced a retreat. The 10th Submarine Flotilla was based in the old lazarette on Manoel Island in Marsamxett Harbour. Composed mainly of small U-class submarines, it was highly effective at interdicting shipping to and from North Africa. The flotilla produced some highly successful submarines, including HMS Upholder, which sank ~120,000 tons of shipping, making it the most successful British sub of the war. It provided a base for the RAF to launch raids on the Italian coast, and for repairing ships damaged in the waters around it. The British carrier *Illustrious*, heavily damaged by Stukas while escorting a convoy to Alexandria, received major repairs in Valetta's Grand Harbour. Aerial reconnaissance from Malta also proved useful. For example, Martin Maryland recon aircraft from Malta were able to confirm the presence of the Italian fleet at Taranto before the RN  launched their raid. Once the siege had been broken, Malta also provided an excellent base for offensive operations against Sicily and southern Italy. The Italians and Germans were, of course, trying to prevent the British from using all of these functions. As far as books go, the big recommendation is James Holland's *Fortress Malta*, which is an excellent popular overview of the siege. Bradford's *Siege Malta 1940-1943* is also worth a read. If you can find them, the British official histories *The Air Battle of Malta 1940-1942* and *The Mediterranean Fleet* will give a good overview of the British side of the battle.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "67ed2o", "title": "Why does Israel exist?", "selftext": "I will fully admit I am coming from a place of relative ignorance here but my uninformed understanding is that sometime following WWII, the U.N. created the state of Israel. My question is why.  Was it just so western nations could have an ally in the region?  Why is it a traditional ally of the U.S. and other western nations?  And what happened to the people who claimed that territory already?  I am assuming the creation of Israel is only one part of the continual Middle East conflict, but didn't its sudden creation make a complicated situation infinitely more complex?  Why would claiming that your ancestors owned the land thousands of years ago hold any weight in geopolitics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67ed2o/why_does_israel_exist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgpt8kk"], "score": [13], "text": [" > I will fully admit I am coming from a place of relative ignorance here but my uninformed understanding is that sometime following WWII, the U.N. created the state of Israel\n\nThe UN did not create Israel. It proposed a partition of what was known as the British Mandate for Palestine, originally envisioned as a Jewish state someday to come, where Jews and Arabs would get a state apiece. When this proposal passed the UN General Assembly, which was *nonbinding*, a civil war was launched between Jews and Arab Palestinians. The civil war turned into an international war when, in May 1948, Israel declared independence and the Arab states around it invaded (they had previously only been contributing resources and personnel more covertly in the civil war). This war is what Israel rose out of, not a UN decision.\n\nFurthermore, Israel was conceived of well before the 1947 partition proposal. Jews had been pushing for a state in the area since the 1880s, and the British proposed a Jewish state there (and partition) for the first time in 1937. It was not a new, or post-Holocaust idea.\n\n > My question is why. Was it just so western nations could have an ally in the region?\n\nThe reason behind supporting the creation of Israel was moral and strategic. Morally speaking, the Holocaust absolutely contributed. But there was also a moral imperative because of the feeling that permeated the world that self-determination should be given to all peoples, a theme that animated the creation of many new countries around then. Coupled with the belief by many that Jews simply deserved a homeland of their own and had none, the moral case was made. The strategic case was less clear, since it was unclear which side a Jewish state would take in the brewing Cold War over time, but both superpowers chose to support one, believing it might ally with them. The US was the first to *de facto* recognize Israel when it was created, for example, choosing to issue such a recognition 11 minutes after Israel's declaration of independence. The Soviets issued a more forceful *de jure* recognition a mere 3 days later, well before the US did. Israel eventually gravitated towards the west, but it's worth remembering that many of Israel's founders were very far-left, to the point of being socialist in many regards.\n\n > Why is it a traditional ally of the U.S. and other western nations?\n\nThis began with the shift of the Arab states to rely on the Soviets for arms. Israel was seen as a counterweight when the West could no longer rely on Arab allies, who the US had tried to entice as well. Israel's success since then made it a powerful strategic player in the region.\n\n > And what happened to the people who claimed that territory already?\n\nWhich? Are you referring to Palestinians? Arab states?\n\n > I am assuming the creation of Israel is only one part of the continual Middle East conflict, but didn't its sudden creation make a complicated situation infinitely more complex?\n\nDepends who you ask. That's kind of a difficult counterfactual to figure out, though.\n\n > Why would claiming that your ancestors owned the land thousands of years ago hold any weight in geopolitics?\n\nSee above."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1x0m5l", "title": "On average, how accurate is the modern ascribing of medical conditions to historical figures?", "selftext": "Some sufferers of fibromyalgia have postulated that Florence Nightingale was also a sufferer, based on (I believe) accounts of her symptoms in her diary. I can't find much serious research backing this particular example up, but it does seem that the application of modern medical knowledge to contemporary accounts of historical figures and their illnesses is reasonably common. How accurate is this? And how does it change our understanding of the historical figures involved?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x0m5l/on_average_how_accurate_is_the_modern_ascribing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf76bly"], "score": [3], "text": ["Even in situations where an accurate diagnosis can be made, the utility of this kind of diagnosis can be questionable.\n\nAll diseases are, to some extent, culture-bound. How we interpret and feel about symptoms and treatments, and how those feelings and interpretations inform our actions are directly tied to what we believe to be happening. For example, there was a time and place in which finding suppurating sores on one's skin would be a relief (it means that the bad stuff is coming out!). \n\nWhile there's perhaps some ways that knowing what a historical figure \"really\" was suffering from might help us better understand the past, it can also get in the way of understanding it if you apply it too rigidly. \n\nSometimes it works best to accept that what someone was suffering from was exactly what they and their contemporaries believed it to be, even if it's not a real thing anymore. If there's no context to understand, say, fibromyalgia, in the 19th century, declaring that a case of hysteria was 'really' fybromyalgia might obscure more about lived experience and context than it reveals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "q9jz1", "title": "Darwin's use of \"Natural Selection\"", "selftext": "History prof recently mentioned about the **importance** of Darwin's use of Natural Selection. I had never thought about the use of natural selection to describe his theory as a big deal, but apparently it had some conflicts with his peers and long lasting ramifications in his field. We don't have time to go into great detail in the course.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q9jz1/darwins_use_of_natural_selection/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c3vtfu2"], "score": [3], "text": ["Is there a question here?  I'm having a little trouble figuring out what kind of answer you're looking for."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ae808", "title": "Roman (and other classical) political graffiti--what's the deal with it?", "selftext": "So I've read and I've loved the graffiti from Pompeii ([read it for yourself if you haven't](_URL_1_); it's full of classics like, \"Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men\u2019s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity!\" and \"Let everyone one in love come and see.  I want to break Venus\u2019 ribs with clubs and cripple the goddess\u2019 loins.  If she can strike through my soft chest, then why can\u2019t I smash her head with a club?\").\n\nBut I'm asking here about specifically **political** graffiti. I've seen it in movies (*Life of Brian* and at least one more serious place, maybe *Spartacus* or HBO's *Rome*).  In *I, Claudius*, I think there's a major plot element where Claudius freaks out about seeing his name written upside down (I've never read the book--I only know this because Les Savy Fav had an EP called *Rome Written Upside Down*, and that's how they explained what their title).  I never thought about it as a major historical thing until /u/LegalAction mentioned in the Ides of March thread that [people encouraged Brutus to kill Caesar by writing graffiti \"along the lines of 'Brutus are you sleeping?' and 'Brutus remember your ancestors'\"](_URL_0_).  So what's the deal with Roman (and other classical) political graffiti?  Was it common?  Is it mentioned much in the sources?  Did it change over the course of the Empire?  Was it mainly written to encourage the populace to have certain implications?  Was it that important what they thought?  None of the Pompeii graffiti seems that political.  Quick Google Scholar and JSTOR searches showed no articles on the subject.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ae808/roman_and_other_classical_political_graffitiwhats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ws9kq"], "score": [3], "text": [" > In I, Claudius, I think there's a major plot element where Claudius freaks out about seeing his name written upside down\n\nNot quite. Part of the plot involves Germanicus, Caligula's superstitious father, being terrorised by defacements of his name and other omens, which turn out to be the doing of Caligula."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1achhk/happy_ides_of_march_how_does_the_story_of_the/c8wfdu2", "http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%20pompeii.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "248vhd", "title": "Why was Unit 731 commissioned and did Japan ever intend on using their \"research\"?", "selftext": "I just read the book [Island 731](_URL_0_) and am quite interested to know more about the Unit.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/248vhd/why_was_unit_731_commissioned_and_did_japan_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch54jf7"], "score": [3], "text": ["You can get the US gov't documents here.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nPages 32-34 and 46-49 gives summaries of the activities during the investigation.\n\nPages 53-55 gives a Q & A of Unit 731 in 1995.\n\nIt's a US gov't report so it's very concerned about what happened to US PoWs.\n\nYou should read the documents for yourself but here's my summary:\nUnit 731 began experiments in 1932 on Biological Warfare in order to defend against a possible BW attack.  This phase included human experiments such as figuring out the minimal dosages necessary for infection and for lethality.  (The BW experiments were not conducted on US PoWs, but rather on Chinese criminal sentenced to death, at least 3000 were subjected to these horrific experimentations.)\n\nUnit 731's General Ishii Shiro then began to experiment on possible uses of BW as an offensive tool.  This phase (1940-1941) starts the field tests, such as artillery shells and bombs with BW agents and crop destruction in China.  So Chinese civilians (!) and soldiers are subjected to these tests a total of 12 times.  Mostly unsuccessfully, thankfully: a total of 25946 people were infected after 6 tests according to data from the papers of Kaneko Junichi, a Japanese doctor who was part of Unit 731.  [I don't know how many of them subsequently died.]  \n\n_URL_1_\n\nTo me it seems clear that this is following a very similar pattern to many military research.  \"The enemy has a devilish plan!  We must defend against it by making our own!\"  You make out the enemy to be inhuman, and in the process you yourself become inhuman.\n\nFinal point: Some people have accused the US of using BW during the Korean War and that because of this, there's massive cover up of the activities of Unit 731 even today.  (The US government gave Unit 731 immunity from war crime prosecutions in exchange for their data.)  There's no way to know for sure if the cover up is still going on or if all the information has been released, so for now I will only go with the documentary evidence that we have available instead of the hearsay that may or may not be accurate.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/Island-731-Jeremy-Robinson/dp/0312617879"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/select-documents.pdf", "http://www.anti731saikinsen.net/nicchu/bunken/kanekokaisetu.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2g74tv", "title": "In general, how were utilities (plumbing, electricity, gas) handled in the United States during the late 19th and 20th centuries?", "selftext": "I was watching Boardwalk Empire last night and a poor character bought his wife a \"vacuum sweeper\" and everyone was excited.  Girlfriend chimed in saying, \"won't that just increase their electric bill when they're struggling for money?\"  I figure back then you just paid a flat fee (maybe monthly) for access to electricity and plumbing and such.  Anyone have any insight into how it has worked through time, eventually getting to the status quo of paying for metered amounts?\n\nThanks very much!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g74tv/in_general_how_were_utilities_plumbing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckgewtb", "ckgqn1v"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["The modern induction type electromechanical watt-hour meter was invented for the Westinghouse corporation in 1894.  Prior to that there were several different designs for metering electricity running back to Samuel Gardiner who invented a meter that measured how long electricity was applied to the load (it didn't measure how much power was used just when power was used) and to Thomas Edison who in 1881 developed a meter for his DC power system.\n\nRead all about it [here](_URL_0_)", "In the US metering began very early, coin operated meters were not uncommon and were popular in older urban buildings for sub-metering purposes. The utility meter reader would collect the coins on his rounds. \n\nUtilities were very 'consolidated' the company I currently work for grew by developing trolley lines to new suburbs, running the gas and electric to the area, financing home building then selling appliances, electric, gas and transportation to those new homeowners.\n\nFor what its worth unmetered, flat fee service still exists for niche markets (area lighting and various body politic services). On the other side of the spectrum you have interval billing which fluctuates minute to minute and measures not just total KWH but capacity factors as well net billing which allows selling back into the grid.   \n\nWhat has definitely changed is the format of the bill. I've seen many 60+ year old electric bills (apparently at one time it was fashionable for people to save the first electric bill after they bought their first home). They would just display your current and previous reading and the total amount owed. No rate breakdowns, no explanations or long complex fee structures just a simple PAY X by Z. They are about the size of a postcard.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.metering.com/the-history-of-the-electricity-meter/"], []]}
{"q_id": "2gz1gu", "title": "Why does traditional Japanese architecture only rarely use stone structures?", "selftext": "I noticed that most buildings in Japan from all pre-modern periods were entirely build from wood. Even military installations.\n\nIs there a historical reason for foregoing stone entirely? The castle walls themselves look to be very high quality stone work (suggesting availability of stone an the skill set to work it effectively) - so why not build the central keep and the wall towers from stone as well?\n\nWood seems to have a rather obvious disadvantage as a building material for military installations - wooden buildings burn easily. It is almost comical to read about various Japanese castles or temples, because inevitably there will be a point in history were the structure burned to the ground - sometimes for reasons easily avoidable, like Nijo Castle in Kyoto, which central keep burned to the ground because of a *lightning strike*.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gz1gu/why_does_traditional_japanese_architecture_only/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cknt69z"], "score": [4], "text": ["hi! additional input is welcome, but meanwhile, you may be interested in responses to these earlier questions\n\n* [Why are Japanese castles built of wood as opposed to stone?](_URL_5_)\n\n* [What military value did Japanese castles have, compared to European castles?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Why didn't Asians build castles like the Europeans?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Why didn't Europe adopt Japanese castles?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Why don't we restore ancient ruins?](_URL_6_)\n\nsiege warfare in Japan\n\n* [What were some defense tactics used in castles?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [How did the Japanese lay siege to their castles?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1udrlt/how_did_the_japanese_lay_siege_to_their_castles/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u305c/why_didnt_asians_build_castles_like_the_europeans/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pkoc2/why_didnt_europe_adopt_japanese_castles/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6atc/what_military_value_did_japanese_castles_have/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13bmeu/what_were_some_defense_tactics_used_in_castles/c72ml8a", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ih4r9/why_are_japanese_castles_built_of_wood_as_opposed/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cd4g7/why_dont_we_restore_ancient_ruins/c9fjcj3?context=1"]]}
{"q_id": "dvbgwf", "title": "Is the expansion of Soviet influence and creation of the USSR considered imperialism?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dvbgwf/is_the_expansion_of_soviet_influence_and_creation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7h1and"], "score": [14], "text": ["It's generally (though not universally) accepted that the Soviet Union behaved in the manner of a traditional empire, however calling the Soviet Union 'an empire' is a bit of a loaded statement-- especially in the context of the 20th century when the British Empire and French Colonial Empire were either alive and well or living in the not-so-distant memory of the peoples of the world. Thus, the short answer to this question is yes-- the Soviet Union is (rightly) considered to have been an imperial power but no-- the term \"Soviet Empire\" is not appropriate to throw around without qualification. I talk about the USSR's transition from its revolutionary origins to a more traditional international actor in [this answer](_URL_3_) which I think provides a good lead-in to the kinds of issues that need to be understood when answering this question, I'd recommend you give it a read-- the following excerpt summarizes the key point though which is this:\n\n > \\[A\\]t its inception the Soviet Union tried to style itself as a sort of 'post-nation-state' nation-state but was forced to behave more and more like a traditional international actor as time progressed.\n\nThere are plenty of examples of the Soviet Union evincing traditional imperialist tendencies, no matter how much they tried to dress it up as Revolutionary Internationalist policy or how loaded the term 'empire' may be. This is a country (or collection of countries) which:\n\n* Expanded its borders by force, against the will of those whom it was absorbing.\n* Established puppet regimes in areas not contiguous to its quote-unquote natural borders which acted at the behest of their Soviet overlords' faraway capital.\n* Used [propaganda](_URL_1_) to define and beatify a 'Soviet way of life,' as a model which could (and more importantly, *should*) spread the across the globe. (Translation of the poster text: *Leninism is our banner-- the future is on our side!*)\n\nThose are the big ones, and just to be clear-- I'm defining 'imperialism' in the most reasonable way I can here using Harrison M. Wright's guidelines for doing so in his 1967 essay *Imperialism: the Word and its Meanings*^(\\[)[^(1)](_URL_2_)^(\\]): the process by which a nation uses military force, coercion, and propaganda to gain territory and influence. If you have a *very specific* expression of imperialism that you want to understand with respect to Soviet policy, I'm all ears and will try my best to answer any follow-up questions.\n\nIf you don't have time to read Wright's whole essay linked above, allow me to summarize: the author talks about the inherent pitfalls of using words like 'imperialism' in the post-imperial modern world when the word has become a pejorative and its meaning has been obscured to the point of near-ambiguity and certainly diminishing returns on any actual substantial definitional power, which is why I'm spelling it out so explicitly-- it doesn't come from a place of condescension or abject pedantry.\n\nAll that disclaimed though, this conversation becomes infinitely more interesting when you start asking *why* the Soviet Union behaved imperially. Here, there are two conflicting schools of thought which I'll personify with Professors Robert Service and Richard Pipes (RIP). Service argues that the impetus for Soviet imperialism lay within communism (and to a lesser extent Marxism) itself and therefore Revolutionary Internationalist policy is an inevitability in any nation which claims to be striving toward those outcomes. Pipes argues that there was something authentically Russian about the expansionary policy of the Soviet Union and the banner of Marxism-Leninism was more like a placeholder than a rallying ideology-- that is, maybe communism was nominally the justification Moscow was using to push its borders further and further west, but in fact, that desire was rooted in Great Russian territorial ambitions to the core.\n\nNeither Service nor Pipes is 100% in either camp-- of course. They are just convenient proponents for each of these respective hypotheses so I've chosen to use them in that manner.\n\nFrom Pipes' *Survival is not Enough* (1984):\n\n > The decisive factors \\[for Soviet authoritarianism\\] are not the ideas but the soil on which they happen to fall.\n\nCompared to a 1993 political opinion piece Service wrote for *The Independent*:\n\n > \\[T\\]he Orwellian maxim that he who controls the past also controls the present still holds true. \\[...\\] historians who once lauded Lenin now proclaim that he was a mass murderer. The entire Marxist-Leninist experiment is denounced. The blame for all Russia's ills is placed squarely on the Communist Party. \\[...\\]  \n >   \n > Yeltsin and his supporters are not totalitarian in aspiration; but they recognise that, in Russia's present turmoil, a new identity has somehow to be formed. The main problem is that, until recently, Russians were encouraged to think of themselves as the main constituent segment of 'the Soviet people'. This was Stalin's way of conferring a quasi-imperial role upon them.^(\\[)[^(2)](_URL_4_)^(\\])\n\nBut what about contemporaneously? Both of these historians are looking backward and assessing the events after the fact. Can we know what the Soviets were thinking at the time? *Why did they* think they were expanding?\n\nAt this point, the most valuable contrast to answer this question is the one between Lev Trotsky and Iosef Stalin. Trotsky, the inveterate revolutionary, is going to play the role of Service here (that is, the USSR is expanding to further the cause of worldwide communism) and Stalin, the inveterate pragmatist, is going to be our Pipes (that is, the USSR is expanding to further its superior Russo-centric culture and/or 'protect' Russia proper). I'm going to use the Winter War as the backdrop for this conversation since we can almost all agree that the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 was about as pure an act of imperialist expansionism by the Soviet Union that you're going to find (which doesn't seek to belittle the invasions of Poland, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, China, Iran, or any others-- I just find this example to be the most fitting for my own purposes here).\n\nFrom Trotsky's *Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events* (Trotsky gets a gold star for euphemism on that title):\n\n > \\[T\\]o approach the question of the fate of small states from the standpoint of 'national independence,' 'neutrality,' etc., is to remain in the sphere of imperialist mythology. The struggle involves world domination. The question of the existence of the USSR will be solved in passing. \\[...\\] So far as the small and second rate states are concerned, they are already today pawns in the hands of the great powers. The sole freedom they still retain, and this only to a limited extent, is the freedom of choosing between masters.^(\\[)[^(3)](_URL_0_)^(\\])\n\nHis justification for the invasion of Finland (in which he played no part remember, Trotsky is writing here from exile in Mexico) is, 'well they've got to be someone's lackey so they may as well be ours because communism has the best interests of the working man in mind.' That opinion in and of itself epitomizes the imperialism of 20th century grand narrative: the 'inevitability' of the subordination of small nations to their more powerful neighbors as justification for their subordination to their more powerful neighbors was the generally agreed upon talking point that the great powers used to more or less arbitrarily adjudicate the lines on the map against the will and without the consent of entire nations of people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/04/finnish.htm", "http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/images/cache/cache_4/cache_b/cache_c/CCArtPoster9Courtesy0218-4bd7acb4.jpeg?ver=1519245113&amp;aspectratio=1.4860681114551", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970749?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cvxmw4/why_didnt_the_soviet_union_annex_the_warsaw_pact/", "https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-country-in-search-of-its-soul-russia-has-lost-its-soviet-empire-but-may-still-harbour-imperial-1495150.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2yoitc", "title": "Searching for books about Current Elites in Korea (~ <  50 yrs) for research. Any recommendations? (x/post /r/korea)", "selftext": "Hi, a redditor friend has told me this might be a good place to ask for guidance for a **research** I want to do on **Korean Elites (Rise to power or the way they currently are)**.\n\nThe **book/text/paper** can be **sociological, anthropological, from political science,  historic, journalistic (If it's a detailed analysis)**\n\nThe text can be in English/Spanish/French/German because I don't know Korean, unfortunately.  I have no preference about the nationality of the author, everything is welcome :)\n\nFYI, I live in Argentina so recommendations will probably have to be in electronic format, I don't think I'm going to be able to bring books from abroad due to the high cost and import restrictions.  \n\nThank you very much.\n\nI'm already browsing through the [/r/AskHistorians book master list thread](_URL_0_) to see what applies but it will be good to have insight and guidance from people with experience.\n\nedit: ~ < 50 yrs meant post WWII/Korean War period.  Not the age of people.  My bad.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yoitc/searching_for_books_about_current_elites_in_korea/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpbqmby"], "score": [3], "text": ["I've done research on Korea from an economic perspective (looking at how political changes and actions were central to development), but there's some overlap with you want so here's a few papers that might be a good starting point. If you are looking for specific individuals then these papers won't be much help, but if you want an idea of what sort of groups elites belonged to then I think they will be helpful. The links are mostly about how economic and political elites were both focused on growth and development, with political favorites and corruption being part of the relationship.\n\nI also don't know how much basic info you have about the Park government but I would definitely start by researching the dramatic changes Park introduced into the country and economy because they form the basis of Korea in the second half on the 20th century.\n\n[Corruption and NIC development: A case study of South Korea](_URL_1_) Looks at how corruption between Korean conglomerates (the Chaebol) and the government was intertwined with development.\n\n[Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines](_URL_2_) Compares crony capitalism in the two countries. Useful because the corny capitilists were the economic elties, andf worked with political elites.\n\n[The Treatment of Market Power in Korea](_URL_0_) About how Chaebols are entrenched in Korea, and how they were even more entrenched previously. Shows the entrenchment of the economic elites who head them.\n\nI don't have time to track any more links down now but if you let me know what specifically you are looking for or are interested in I can check again later and hopefully find some more relevant sources for you!\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1403l7/askhistorians_master_book_list_ii/"], "answers_urls": [["http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1019617325739", "http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008344718274", "http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=im465FAopWMC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PP8&amp;dq=park+korea+corruption&amp;ots=RxAbGt5yDW&amp;sig=NAssD2o6XhstjpQTThQSyjlqobo#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "3kqgpd", "title": "Did the U.S. experience any diplomatic fallout due to non-Japanese casualties of the atomic bombs?", "selftext": "And the corresponding premise: were there any third-party nations who had a notable number of citizens perish in the blasts?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kqgpd/did_the_us_experience_any_diplomatic_fallout_due/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv08zwr"], "score": [5], "text": ["I haven't really looked into the diplomatic fallout, though the issue did surface from time to time in the press. I know of nothing specific on this, but that doesn't mean anything (other than, maybe, the idea that it isn't something that has been written a lot about \u2014 but that doesn't mean it didn't exist). \n\nAs for \"third-party nations\" \u2014 the main non-Japanese victims of the bombs that come to mind are POWs (British, American, and Dutch), Koreans (laborers), and Germans (the Jesuits at Hiroshima, and maybe others). Of these groups, the ones most represented in American media are the Germans, who were featured quite prominently in John Hersey's _Hiroshima_, among other sources. The Koreans were by far the largest group of victims, of those groups."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7qumum", "title": "Does anyone have book recommendations covering the Battle of the Aisne (WW1)?", "selftext": "I've found great recommendations in the sidebar for the Battle of the Marne but can't find anything too helpful on the Ainse. \n\nI'd love to learn more about the battle and welcome any resources whether in books or online somewhere.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7qumum/does_anyone_have_book_recommendations_covering/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dss9x73"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Aisne is at the center of my research, and I feel your pain. There's not much out there. \n\nIn the grand scheme of things, overviews of the 1914 campaign tend to view the Aisne as the final stage of the Marne. To historians of the French and British armies, it represents the Entente's inability to exploit the gap between German First and Second Armies. Some trenches were dug, and the battle stabilized before both sides started swinging around the northern flank. To German historians, the Aisne often comes off as Moltke's last act and the final death of the Schlieffen Plan. He ordered his forces do dig in, and then he was out. Falkenhayn picked up and turned his attention to the northwest.\n\nI've found one English-language book on the Aisne: Paul Kendall's *The Aisne 1914: The Dawn of Trench Warfare.* It's not very good, and it's not an academic history by any means. There are lots of pictures, lots of talk about operations and the movement of units, and short biographies of some of the British officers, but it breaks no new ground in terms of what it says about the battle. Yes, the Aisne was the start of trench warfare (for the British), but it doesn't drive at what the battle says about the army, its preparedness, or its ability to cope with the demands of the fighting in 1914. \n\nIf you want to know the operational side of the battle, the first volume of the British official history is still your best bet (Edmonds, *Military Operations: France and Belgium 1914*, volume 1). You can download it for free, I believe, on _URL_0_. Though a bit stale and lacking interpretation or critical assessment, the narrative is richly detailed and dense. \n\nIf you are more interested in analysis of the battle, Nikolas Gardner, in his *Trial by Fire,* has a chapter on the Aisne that I'd highly recommend. Gardner addresses the operational hazards of the Aisne and how the British army adapted to the changing nature of the fighting there. It's a proper academic study that actually looks at the Aisne in the context of the army's performance and development in 1914. \n\nAlong those lines, my paper (Dykstra, \"'To Dig and Burrow Like Rabbits': British Field Fortifications at the Battle of the Aisne\") looks at how the British army handled the transition from mobile to trench war at the Aisne from the defensive perspective. There isn't a ton of operational info in there, but it gives a good sense of how the army prepared for defensive trench war and how its trench systems performed at the Aisne. It's due to come out in October 2018, but Chapter 2 of my MA thesis has much of the same info. You can get that [here](_URL_1_). \n\nOther than that, the Aisne, like I said, is usually glossed over as being either an addendum to the Marne or the first stage of the Race to the Sea. Personally, and this is probably because I've spent most of my academic life studying it, I think that the Aisne was an important moment for the British army: the point at which it learned, for the first time, the true power of modern artillery, particularly howitzers. The battle also conditioned the army to large-scale entrenchment and afforded commanders the opportunity to refine their field fortification system, something that helped, to some extent, later at Ypres. \n\nHappy to answer any follow-up questions you have. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Archive.org", "https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/11023/1538/ucalgary_2014_dykstra_bodie.pdf?sequence=2"]]}
{"q_id": "3l7v9m", "title": "When Did Black Canadians Gain the Vote in Canada?", "selftext": "I've done a little bit of digging on the matter, but I'm having difficulty finding anything about voting legislation with regards to Black Canadians. \n\nI'm aware Asians and immigrants were denied entry and/or voting privileges during the early 20th century, but I'm not finding anything else. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l7v9m/when_did_black_canadians_gain_the_vote_in_canada/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv42phh"], "score": [5], "text": ["I've found a bunch of sources saying it was on the 24th of March 1837, at least for Lower Canada, but none of them tie into usable  links, actual documents or even elaborate..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ybgv7", "title": "How did the KKK become anti-semitic? I've read before that older members of the KKK claim that it wasn't anti-semitic initially, but that became part of the organisation's ideology over time. How and when did this happen?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ybgv7/how_did_the_kkk_become_antisemitic_ive_read/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp80mvo", "cp8x4h9"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["Follow up question:\n\nCould this have been influenced by Nazism?", "There have really been 3 distinct KKKs over time. The first one was created in the wake of the Civil War by Nathan Bedford Forrest and others, and its target was blacks. That KKK attacked, terrorized, and killed former slaves until Jim Crow laws created a more legal venue with which to oppress blacks. Then the KKK's size waned.\n\nThe second KKK was created in Georgia by William Simmons in 1915, shortly after Birth of a Nation was released and a few months after Leo Frank (a Jewish man) was lynched in Georgia by \"the Knights of Mary Phagan\" (made up of core members of what would become the 2nd KKK). In brief: Mary Phagan was a young white girl who was raped and murdered in Atlanta. Leo Frank was fingered for the crime despite lack of evidence, and anti-semitic comments were trotted out at the trial.  Also, there was a large wave of immigrants to the US from Eastern and Southern Europe and Ireland that began a bit before the second Klan was founded, and a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment followed. Birth of a Nation is all about the founding of the original Klan after the Civil War, and how glorious and wonderful and necessary it was. It was by far the most popular and profitable film of its time and it inspired a lot of people to talk about/believe in the glory days of the Klan. This attitude tied in with then-popular eugenics ideals and the popular anti-immigrant ideas. Plus the  Mary Phagan situation became a lightning rod for antisemitism in the US, and a large percentage of Atlanta's Jews were driven out of the state at this time. And hostility came to be directed against the immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland. This KKK became somewhat of a social club in some areas, while being a terrorist organization as well. Like, in Indiana, a large percentage of prominent white, non-Catholic men became members. The second klan also began adopting some of the elements of the Klan on display in Birth of a Nation that were artistic license by D.W. Griffith's but that the first Klan had not used. For example, the first Klan did not burn crosses. But crosses were burned in Birth of a Nation and so the second Klan did that, too. Because this all happened before there were Nazis, there was no influence by Nazis on the second Klan's anti-semitism. It was all American-grown. However, the second Klan died out a bit after World War II. Then, the third Klan was founded as a reaction to the civil rights movement. Their anti-semitism had a lot of influence from Nazis and the white supremacist movement. \n\nI should mention, though, that Birth of a Nation has an intertitle (the text on the screen that silent movies have instead of speech) that can be misleading in this regard. It says \"The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.\"\nNowadays, \"Aryan\" is closely associated with Nazis and white supremacy. but in 1915, Aryan referred to Europeans in general, not specifically blond-haired, blue-eyed northern Europeans only. So it was used in the film in a white supremacist way, but no specific reference to Nazis occurred."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5tnn88", "title": "Why were most of the popular ancient literature written in verse?", "selftext": " The Bible , Dante's Divine Comedy, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Homer's Iliad, etc.  \n\nWas it only because it was easier to memorize, or was \"normal\" prose frowned upon? Verse nowadays seems confined to music, theater and poems. What is an explanation for such change?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tnn88/why_were_most_of_the_popular_ancient_literature/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddnt3rk"], "score": [3], "text": ["I think there is a flaw in your question, or at least several problematic assumptions about literature, ancient and modern.\n\nLet's take your examples. Firstly, the Bible contain significant portions of poetry (Psalms, large portions of the Prophetic books), but it is not all poetry, and it is not even mostly poetry. \n\nHomer's Iliad is verse, because it emerges in the context of a pre-literate society. Generally, highly oral cultures tend to maintain a high value on poetry and song, because those forms of composition do indeed lend themselves to memorisation. It's much harder to memorise long prose texts, and it's much less interesting to hear long prose texts \"performed\". Sticking with ancient Greek literature, though, plenty of non-verse material was produced. Herodotus, Thucydides, etc.. The prose genre of history, among others, was \"popular\". You just have selected a poetic example.\n\nA very similar thing could be said about Ovid's Metamorphoses. Yes, it's poetry. But Romans produced plenty of prose literature - philosophy, for-publication epistles, history - that was popular. At least as much as poetry was.\n\nDante, I will skip, since it's much later than your other examples of \"ancient\" literature, and the context of its composition is a different literary world to antiquity.\n\nI think the flaw in your question can be demonstrated simply by reversing the examples: \"why was so much prose written in ancient times? The Bible, Livy, Herodotus?\"\n\n >  Verse nowadays seems confined to music, theater and poems.\n\nWhich is exactly the same. Your examples are all poetry, that's why they are written in poetic forms. Similarly, plays tend to be written in verse as well (in antiquity). Songs, too, obviously, though our knowledge of ancient melodies is severely limited."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8n8oge", "title": "When did people start to identify more with skin color rather than language/culture.", "selftext": "The Ancient identity system was more about language. Romans saw Celts as barbarians, for example, even though they were both European and had the same phenotype. I know the modern terms and understanding of race comes from the Colonial era, but why did it shift? And what caused this? Any works written on this subject would be much appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8n8oge/when_did_people_start_to_identify_more_with_skin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dztnr5l"], "score": [9], "text": ["Hi there -- you may be interested in [this recent answer](_URL_0_) from u/sowser, in which they go into some detail about how race is constructed through the experience of the Transatlantic slave trade. The whole thing is worth a read, but constructions of race are in part 4. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8n19s0/suffering_slaves_and_suffering_serfs_whats_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "9h1v9j", "title": "During the height of the Cathar movement, what were gender relations like among the Cather Christians? Did their theology translate into women having a more equal status in society?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h1v9j/during_the_height_of_the_cathar_movement_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6aiy55"], "score": [8], "text": ["Catharism is a well-studied topic, and while you are waiting for fresh responses to your question, it is well worth reviewing [this earlier thread](_URL_0_), led by u/sunagainstgold, which looks at the the history and historiography of the supposed heresy, and points out that our understanding of \"Catharism\" is really a construct imposed by the outsiders who persecuted it, adding that \"medievalists today are pretty unanimous that there was no such thing as 'Catharism' in southern France in the 12th-13th century.\"\n\nSun does also touch on the specific area of gender relations in the time and place that you're interested in.\n\nMeanwhile, and in the same thread, u/idjet (who was writing a dissertation on the Cathars) pushes back in posts that argue for something more approaching the old standard view of Catharism as a distinct set of real beliefs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/49rn50/how_did_catharism_start_develop_and_become_so/"]]}
{"q_id": "69kf9y", "title": "What did Paul Mattick mean when he said that Marx was a Socialist and not an economist?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69kf9y/what_did_paul_mattick_mean_when_he_said_that_marx/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh7qw3f"], "score": [2], "text": ["I am not Marxian nor Marxist in anyways so my views would not be reflective of these sorts of views.  That being said... the context of this quote and of the author is important.  \n\n > It is often asserted that while Marx's theory transcends bourgeois economic theory in order to solve \"economic problems\" that cannot be satisfactorily dealt with by bourgeois price theory, it must, for that reason, be as empirical as any other science. It is assumed, in brief, that Marx's Capital is a better part, but still a part, of the \"positive science\" of economics, whereas it is actually its opposition. Marxian theory aims not to resolve \"economic problems\" of bourgeois society but to show them to be unsolvable. Marx was a socialist, not an economist. In Marxian theory the concrete phenomena of bourgeois society are something other than they appear to be. Empirically discovered facts have first to be freed of their fetishistic connotations before they reveal empirical reality. The abstract generalizations of value theory disclose the laws of development of a system that operates with a false comprehension of the concretely given facts. The inductively won data do not correspond with, but camouflage, the real social relations of production. Bourgeois economy is not an empirical science but an ideological substitute for such a science; a pseudo-science, despite its scientific methodology.  \n\nIn other words: the author argues that despite the perception that Marx's work Das Kapital was a work of economic theory (compared to for instance Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, and others), Marxist thought rejects outright the constraints of economics.  In effect the author argues that economics is a false discipline with no basis in reality.  Incidentally, Paul Mattick Jr, the son of the more famous Paul Mattick Sr, is the one that made this quote.  \n\nEssentially, modern economics relies on two key ideas: a) people in aggregate are rational (meaning that they will seek (in the aggregate) to pursue their best interests) and b) that we can use math and statistical data to help model these out.  Mattick Jr. rejects the use of math as he argues that the assumptions that economics rely on are false and are a construct of our \"money-based\" society.  \n\nNow whether or not his allegations have any actual basis behind them is uncertain, but suffice to say that this was published in 1983 and economics is still going strong.  If anything, the discipline has become even more quantitative.  Make of that what you will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fi53z3", "title": "Why were entertainers looked down on in Ancient Rome?", "selftext": "From what I understand one of the big ways in which Nero shocked proper Roman society was by personally performing on stage, which I'm told was treated with about as much respect as prostitution.\n\nBut everyone likes music and to be entertained, and in the days before TV and recordings I would have thought entertainers would be MORE treasured than today. Why did Romans looks down their noses at musicians and actors?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fi53z3/why_were_entertainers_looked_down_on_in_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkpes3z"], "score": [2], "text": ["First, disclaimer: Ancient Rome is not my area for this (China is) but I have dug into this a little in my reading.\n\nBoth prostitutes and actors were classified legally as *infames*in Augustus\u2019 moral legislation. This was in part because they were viewed as faking emotions for money, and both groups also engaged in cross-dressing. The root of your question comes down to the phenomena described by Bakhtin as \u201cthe low-Other\u201d in society which was further refined by Stallybrass and White as a commodification of desire for the low-Other by those at the top of the social hierarchy in their bid to maintain social control. \n\nThat is, prostitutes and actors were on the same social level, and playwrights took inspiration from the work of prostitutes as that of equivalent to actors and repackaged them for consumption by the masses as both entertainment and cautionary tales. The stock character in Roman Comedy of the *meretrix* is almost always either a \u201chooker with a heart of gold\u201d type or \u201cheartless man-eater only out for the money\u201d type, and are either commended in the text of plays as support for the main male or denigrated as villainous. There were even direct comparisons between acting and prostitution as professions that fake emotion in the plays. \n\nIn Roman cities neither actors nor prostitutes were segregated from the rest of society\u2014unlike in Renaissance England, or China and Japan. Actors could be legally subjected to being beatings in the streets by Roman citizens, though this was later restricted to only while they were on stage. That actors would satirize powerful political or social figures did make them entertaining to the general populace, but it also was extremely risky. Gladiators were also classified as *infames*, and their audience was highly entertained, but this doesn\u2019t mean they were of high social standing like members of professional sports today. So, too, with actors and prostitutes.\n\nAnd that\u2019s what Stallybrass and White point out: the top of the social food chain will co-opt the figures of the lowest classes for entertainment value initially and then will strip those figures and art forms from that low-Other and realign them with the upper class paradigm. That the 19th century and early 20th century changed the view of acting from a low-class activity and divested it of much of its relationship to sex work and transformed it into an elite class of celebrity has more to do with the growth of capitalism and industrialization than it does the craft itself. \n\nSources:\nFaraone, Cristopher, Christopher A. Faraone, and Laura McClure. Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. \nStallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5tgcdd", "title": "How were the Romans able to field much larger armies than Medieval Europe?", "selftext": "Edit: Because I've gotten a lot of PMs about it, the podcast is by Mike Duncan. It's a full, comprehensive history of Rome, and if you're not a fan of hours long podcasts, the episodes are fairly short. \n\nI'm currently listening to the History of Rome podcast (if you haven't listened to it yet, do it right now), and I'm still in the Roman republic era, yet Rome is shown to have fielded massive armies. The typical army was 40-80 thousand (depending on how many consuls were commanding an army) and sometimes armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands were raised. And this didn't just include Rome. There are multiple times where outside powers engaged Rome with armies just as massive, such as the Gauls and I believe Carthage, who engaged with massive armies numbering up to 100 thousand. \n\nNow because I know this subreddit prefers specific times, for a point of comparison I'll look at England during the Hundred Years' War era, while searching for an answer here, I found a comment saying the English armies were rarely higher than 15 thousand. I'm on mobile so I'm unable to link the comment at the moment. \n\nSo my question: What the hell happened? Comparing the middle Republic era of Rome (not even the height of their power), to one of the more well known series of conflicts of the late medieval era, and Roman armies, as well as a few other ancient armies, were way more massive. Though if there are any experts on other times and places in medieval Europe, I'll take answer on that as well. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tgcdd/how_were_the_romans_able_to_field_much_larger/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddmijot"], "score": [652], "text": ["Firstly, keep in mind that the ancient armies you are describing were fielded by what were essentially ancient superpowers. At the time of the Punic Wars, the Carthaginians held an empire that controlled the western Mediterranean, spanning much of North Africa and Spain. Similarly, when you look at the various Persian Empires, they controlled vast territories and had a large population base to draw upon (consider Thermopylae, where the smaller Greece was only able to assemble a few thousand men against the hundred thousand of Persia). The size of the ancient powers' armies was larger than those of medieval kingdoms in part because the ancient powers were simply larger than medieval kingdoms.\n\nWith the Gauls and other European barbarians that the Romans encountered, often the Romans were encountering an entire society of people who were living there (Gaul) or an entire society that had picked up and migrated (Cimbri, Teutones). The size of their armies gets blurred a bit there, since numbers may include civilians as well as soldiers.\n\nAnd lastly, at least later in the Roman Republic and through the Empire, the army consisted in large part of *auxilia,* or foreign auxiliary forces drawn up from allied and conquered territories, which included most of the European countries you are comparing the Roman Army to. So, the reason the Roman Army was so much larger than the English Army is in part due to the fact that the English Army was just one part of the Roman Army."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4f3gx9", "title": "Did the UK have any options at the start of World War I other than to commit a land army?", "selftext": "I mean couldn't the UK have simply limited their commitment to a naval one? Blockading Germany and preventing the Germany Navy from intervening in the war?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4f3gx9/did_the_uk_have_any_options_at_the_start_of_world/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d25kyri"], "score": [16], "text": ["Not really; for one thing, with Britain now at war, the staff talks with the French Army came into play, wherein the British would despatch an expeditionary force to assist them in fighting the Germans. Plus, the immediate reason for British involvement was the Invasion of Belgium, so the British could hardly be seen to sit around and do nothing while there was serious fighting taking place across the Channel.\n\nYou also have to take into account the fact that it took until November 1914 for the Blockade to actually be in place, and it wasn't until March 1915 that it became much stronger (and also borderline illegal). The British did not have the time to wait around for two months doing nothing, while their now-allies the Russians and the French bore the brunt of the fighting. It's also important to consider that a more 'material' contribution by the British, ie actually sending ground forces to fight instead of just relying on their Navy while the French and Russians absorbed casualties, would give the British greater influence in negotiations when the war was over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3bpfy3", "title": "When and why did the \"corporation\" become the dominant business entity in America, when all of the great gilded age companies were organized as \"trusts?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bpfy3/when_and_why_did_the_corporation_become_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csoovo7", "csoutrj"], "score": [35, 11], "text": ["I'm not sure I agree with the premise.  The corporation's popularity spread with the growth of railroads: large undertakings, needing lots of investors, operating over large areas, usually with some years before any dividends would accrue\u2014and most importantly, whose operations were inherently dangerous.  Investors naturally sought to be shielded from personal liability for wrongs done by some remote employee.\n\nTrusts arose much later, as a way to get around the early restrictions on corporations.  State laws often did not allow corporations to own stock in other companies, to operate in more than one state, or to undertake activities (such as owning an office building not entirely for their own use) even slightly peripheral to the powers enumerated in their charters.", " > when all of the great gilded age companies were organized as \"trusts?\"\n\nThis is a misunderstanding.  The trusts were mechanisms to consolidate and streamline control of the vast web of corporations that made up the great \"Gilded Age\" business empires, they weren't the operating businesses themselves.\n\nFor example the first such 19th century business trust was established by Standard Oil in 1882, in which the individual shareholders of the many separate Standard Oil corporations agreed to convey their shares to the trust.  The trust was governed by a board of  9 trustees, with John D. Rockefeller owning 41% of the trust's certificates.\n\nYou can see how this makes governing the corporate empire much easier than having to deal with the individual stock and governance of each corporate entity separately."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1t8t8e", "title": "Who decided that north was up?", "selftext": "And have there been peoples/societies/civilizations that looked at the world or the poles oppositely? Have any maps been discovered that showed the south pole at the top? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t8t8e/who_decided_that_north_was_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5ibpq"], "score": [10], "text": ["Great answer to this question from /u/khosikulu [here](_URL_0_).\n\n > Historian of cartography (among other things) here. The northward orientation has a great deal to do with the importance of northward orientation to compass navigation. Portolans, and later projections aimed at navigation purposes (e.g., Mercator), made note of latitude and direction much more reliably than longitude, so the coastline was easier to fit to an evolving graticule that way (plus it worked better relative to sun- and star-sighting) while the east-west features were still of uncertain size and distance. Smileyman is right that cartographers often didn't put north at the top before the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras and the flowering of European navigation, and that Claudius Ptolemy is probably a big culprit for why it's north-up and not south-up--the power of classical conventions at that moment is hard to deny. It also helps that we're very clearly north of the Equator in the European Atlantic, so that would be the first area depicted to the terminus of navigation.\n > \n > Have a dig in volume 1 of the monumental History of Cartography Project and you may find a bit more. Volume 3 would also discuss some of the specific developments of the Renaissance era but that's still in print only; I'm not even sure Volume 4 is close to release yet.\n\nThere's some more good threads about this topic listed in the [FAQ](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ywxgz/why_have_cartographers_always_pictured_north_as/c5zqlph", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/maps#wiki_why_is_north_shown_as_.22up.22_on_maps.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "1pxzpq", "title": "How was bidirectional travel handled on the transcontinental railroad?", "selftext": "It was an impressive undertaking to build rail track across the United States. For a time though, there must have been only one track for both directions. How did the rail companies direct traffic such that trains could travel in both directions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pxzpq/how_was_bidirectional_travel_handled_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd78s2u"], "score": [22], "text": ["Many, many rail lines have only one track.  Passing sidings are installed at regular intervals, and the train orders specify things like \"Train #97 take siding at Danville to await passage of eastbound train #38.\"  Unlike earlier railroads, the transcontinental was accompanied the entire length by extension of telegraph lines.  Thus revised train orders\u2014using updated info about the location of other trains on the line\u2014could be given the conductor at any staffed station.\n\nIn earlier decades, some lines used \"timetable control:\" during a certain period only the eastbound train had authority to use a certain stretch of track.  In later decades, electric-light signaling systems would be installed showing whether the \"track block\" ahead was clear, and usually the status of the block beyond that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2v4qtx", "title": "How muh gear would a WWII British Commando carry into the field? Also: beret or helmet?", "selftext": "As the title says; I'm just wondering how much equipment a WWII Commando would actually carry on his person during a conflict? \n\nI recently saw a piece of artwork featuring the Commandos in a combat situation; the bullets were flying, men were running around fighting, and yet every single guy had his backpack firmly on. \nTo me this seems a little far fetched - surely if you came into a live fire situation like that you'd take the earliest possible opportunity to drop your heavy bag and lighten yourself up? \n\nIn the same image, it shows the soldiers fighting whilst wearing their distinctive berets rather than a tin hat. Again, this seems strange; I don't quite find it believable that some of the most professional and pragmatic soldiers in the world would choose to wear a beret instead of protective headgear. \n\nMaybe it's just an artists interpretation, or maybe my thoughts are completely wrong. Either way, I'd be interested to know. Cheers guys! :) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v4qtx/how_muh_gear_would_a_wwii_british_commando_carry/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coernfh", "cof8a99"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["Not sure about the packs, but the steel helmet protects against shrapnel, not direct hits from bullets. Since the commandos were involved in small raids and unconventional warfare, it's not unreasonable that they would have preferred to save on weight when shrapnel would have been unlikely.\n\nSee this youtube video for a steel helmet penetration test:\n_URL_0_", "Helmet, absolutely a helmet; berets in combat are the realm of video games, 1960s Hollywood, or a particularly poor NCO.\n\nCommandos standard combat load would not differ greatly from that of a British rifleman. \n\n > I recently saw a piece of artwork featuring the Commandos in a combat situation; the bullets were flying, men were running around fighting, and yet every single guy had his backpack firmly on\n\nCommando units raiding at night, perhaps not, but many of the 4 and 40 series units fought during full spectrum operations in 1944, such as in the Sword and Gold sectors; Lord Lovat's being a prominent example. Infantry fight with their packs, especially if they intend to *hold* the seized ground. Entrenching tools, ammo, rations, medical supplies; these are not things the [standard British webbing](_URL_1_) could carry without the aid of a pack. As I said at the start; with the exception of low-light raids, a helmet would always be present, or at least with them on their kit. A wool cap would be evident in matters of stealth, to prevent the rattling of the helmet or the sheen of one that hasn't been properly dulled in moonlight, otherwise, if bullets were expected to fly hard and often, a tin helmet would be worn.\n\nIn addition to the standard combat load (100-120 rounds, per man,  [.303 British](_URL_0_), several Mill's bombs, bayonet, knife/gravity knife, entrenching tools, 3 spare BREN magazines, and so on... ) a Commando on a raid may have tools for sabotage, additional radio equipment, ammunition, rations or packages for *liason* with Resistance Forces, demolitions...the list is nearly endless. A pack would be absolutely necessary and a unit that is designed to operate well beyond the scope of logistics would indeed require to take all their equipment with them.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEYXFGhIpJ0#t=135"], ["http://media.midwayusa.com/productimages/880x660/Primary/131/131830.jpg", "http://www.geocities.ws/sabresquadron/PM13008.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "476umw", "title": "Are there any biographies available about Native North Americans who lived before 1492?", "selftext": "In other words, is there a specific person who lived out his/her entire life in North America before European involvement, for whom there exists a written biography?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/476umw/are_there_any_biographies_available_about_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0ayvz3", "d0b0env"], "score": [12, 10], "text": ["Because of the strong oral traditions in many Nations, it is difficult to find records of individuals, and the ones who do get recorded are those who have done something great, and they get wrapped into lessons and tales that it becomes hard to tell if the person existed at all. \n\nWere you looking for a story of the life of someone, or how someone would have lived before European contact? ", "Well this may not fit your criteria very closely (or even at all, since his life was post-contact and you may or may not include Inuit in Canada under the term \"Native North Americans\"), but [Peter Pitseolak](_URL_0_) wrote a memoir that may be of interest. He opens with stories of his father's life pre-contact, contact, and the impacts of contact throughout his own life. The book is [*People From Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs and Oral Biography*](_URL_2_), co-authored by [Dorothy Harley Eber](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pitseolak", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Harley_Eber", "http://www.mqup.ca/people-from-our-side-products-9780773509962.php"]]}
{"q_id": "2wswt4", "title": "Did Moses exist and was there an exodus of people from Egypt corresponding to the story?", "selftext": "Forgo all the mystical events I.e. the plagues and the parting of the sea etc.  Just focusing on historical facts and records.  Was there an event in or around Egypt that corresponded to the exodus?\n\nIf this is not the right venue then could you please point me to a subreddit where I can ask that question?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wswt4/did_moses_exist_and_was_there_an_exodus_of_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotvdai", "cou2dkv", "coulqlt"], "score": [14, 42, 2], "text": ["This has previously been addressed.  _URL_0_", "I strongly recommend (edit: [this video lecture](_URL_1_) is better than the one I initially recommended) [this video series](_URL_10_) for a synopsis of what's currently known and believed about the exodus and the hebrews. \n\nAs for further reading, try /r/AcademicBiblical:\n\n* [The Exodus (please help!)](_URL_13_)\n\n* [Did Moses write the Torah and why do atheist argue he didn't exist?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Is the scholarly view about the authorship of the Pentateuch and Isaiah due to a bias against prophecy? Or are there valid reasons why Moses or Isaiah didn't write](_URL_6_)\n\n* [Scholarly consensus (or majority belief) on the Bible authenticity?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [J, P, E, D, etc. is it still the scholarly consensus of the Pentateuch's composition?](_URL_14_)\n\n* [How do scholars determine the age and origins of Old Testament stories?](_URL_17_)\n\n* [Isaiah was written by multiple authors. How many other Biblical texts have multiple authors or which texts do you suspect have multiple authors?](_URL_8_)\n\n* [Was the Exodus a real historical event or how are we generally meant to understand it?](_URL_16_)\n\nThere's also a lot on /r/AskHistorians:\n\n* [Does the Egyptian history record the ten plagues mentioned in the Bible?](_URL_15_)\n\n* [Historicity of Moses and Abraham](_URL_11_)\n\n* [Is there any reference to Moses, the plagues, or the Exodus in Ancient Egyptian writings?](_URL_5_)\n\n* [It's often said that the Pharaoh in the book of Exodus is Ramses II. How accurate is this, and why is Ramses II the go-to for our conception of the historical Pharaoh in the Exodus?](_URL_18_)\n\n* [My Orthodox Jewish Rabbis, insist that the torah scrolls they read from (five books of moses) are exactly as they were written when given to the Jews by God on Mt. Sinai. Is this possible?](_URL_9_)\n\n* [Do we know who the 13 tribes of Israel were?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [Besides the Bible, are there other historical records of the Jewish being enslaved by the Egyptians?](_URL_7_)\n\n* [What is the oldest Biblical story that is also mentioned by non-Jewish primary sources?](_URL_3_)\n\nWhen you search a topic, use google instead of reddit. Try \"site:_URL_12_ searchterm searchterm\". You'll usually get a few hits. (Obviously substitute \"askhistorians\" with whatever sub you're searching.) And please pop in over at /r/AcademicBiblical if you have further questions! We only bite a little.", "Ultimately you aren't going to get a satisfying answer because the sole piece of evidence is the biblical book itself, and so your take on the historicity of the sorry is more or less entirely dependent on your take on the historicity of the text, or even ancient texts in general. One person may consider important events like that would be remembered, and this we can take it as broadly accurate. Others think that such tales from very distant times are invented to serve the purpose of the tellers. Others think there is a kernel of truth surrounded by embellishment.\n\nPersonally I like Ian Morris' take: there is a memory of the highly multicultural world of the late bronze age, but we can't really say anything about the event itself"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1grzha/the_reality_is_that_there_is_no_evidence/"], ["http://redd.it/2rl5ff", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6TsppQ5UNY", "http://redd.it/1w14og", "http://redd.it/1zg4n7", "http://redd.it/16cod5", "http://redd.it/22fdp5", "http://redd.it/2oqgdv", "http://redd.it/2npt9q", "http://redd.it/2tmewj", "http://redd.it/2eyq82", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wNyDP5N1HU&amp;spfreload=10", "http://redd.it/1cgw8l", "reddit.com/r/AskHistorians", "http://redd.it/2vmc2v", "http://redd.it/1fhm2g", "http://redd.it/1tvwsg", "http://redd.it/2q19yt", "http://redd.it/2q8479", "http://redd.it/2sk7kk"], []]}
{"q_id": "1o37wh", "title": "Did the Japanese ever repulse an island invasion by the US during WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o37wh/did_the_japanese_ever_repulse_an_island_invasion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccofhzw"], "score": [131], "text": ["No. After the initial Japanese victories in the Pacific War, the United States won every major campaign and battle it entered. Even those cases where the Japanese scored tactical victories were strategic losses. Japan lacked the steel to make good its naval losses, and its cadres of experienced pilots were consumed in battle, making its carriers steadily less effective. The tensest point might have been the Japanese naval victory in the Battle of Savo Island, two days after the Allied landing on Guadalcanal; however, the Japanese did not press their advantage. They might have pulled off a victory there with luck and determination. Even so: it wouldn't have delayed the war long, because a Japanese victory at Guadalcanal would have simply fed the Allied strategy of attrition. \n\nThroughout the Pacific war, the United States brought to bear significant and growing advantages in resources and technology. Japanese air and naval forces became increasingly unable to contest American mobility and logistics. The Americans had the ability to dictate the day of battle, with combined-arms support that the Japanese simply could not respond to. \n\nThe Americans were also able to bypass or \"leapfrog\" many of the more difficult targets; thousands of Japanese soldiers were simply stranded across the Pacific. For instance, the island of New Britain was held by 100,000 Japanese soldiers. An invasion would have been risky and extremely costly. Allied bombers neutralized the island's ports and airfields, leaving it surrounded by a ring of air bases. Limited offensives continued throughout the war, and the Japanese bases there were bombed in training missions for new Allied aircrews. When Australian troops accepted the island's surrender at the end of the war, there were still almost 70,000 Japanese soldiers there.\n\n*Edit: conflated Rabaul with New Britain*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2k42hf", "title": "What were the geographical boundaries of the \"Old West?\" Would we see \"cowboy culture\" in Canada? Mexico? The Caribbean?", "selftext": "I use \"cowboy culture\" for lack of a better term, but I don't necessarily mean actual cattle drovers. I mean (to the extent the following examples even properly define the \"Old West\") the boomtowns and settlements, the six-shooters and ten-gallon hats, the conflicts with/fear of natives, and the trade with more cosmopolitan areas. I'm relatively aware of what was going on in the mid-late 19th-Century in the Southwestern U.S., but how far did that culture extend? Would it be similar in a rural town in, say, Cuba?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k42hf/what_were_the_geographical_boundaries_of_the_old/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clhroy5"], "score": [5], "text": ["I can speak for Canada a bit, having grown up in a cattle town. We have plenty of cowboy culture, especially in my home province of Alberta.\n\nFor most of the our province's history, our main industries were agriculture and ranching, and even today, they are second only to oil and gas.\n\nAlthough a lot of the cowboy culture has faded, many of the values remain. Rodeo still thrives in Canada, centred around the Calgary Stampede and many other rural rodeos. We also have our own rodeo sport, chuck wagon racing, which I actually have a lot of family competing in. It's the main event here, but to my knowledge, has never caught on elsewhere.\n\nFor the most part, Canada's cowboys resemble the American variety. This is because borders were basically meaningless back in our frontier days. One big difference might have been gun laws. In Canada, the North West Mounted Police (the first mounties) enforced strict laws on where guns went. It was illegal to carry a gun in most towns, especially during the Klondike gold rush. Another difference was the lack of Mexican cultural influences, slavery, and the American civil war. The first cowboy in Alberta, the man who brought cattle to the province, was actually a freed slave from the states named John Ware.\n\nThe native population was never as violent as it is depicted in the states. They were relegated to reserves fairly early. When the Calgary stampede first opened, the natives were actually included in the festivities and events. Before that, their admission into the city was very regulated.\n\nThe gold rush in the Yukon and the whiskey trade brought a lot of 'old west' culture to Canada as well. Canadian prohibition was never as strict as it was in the states, so lots of boot leggers out west here smuggled whiskey and rye across the border to serve Americans.\n\nSmaller populations and in turn less government and industry meant that the cowboy era in Canada started and ended a little later than in the states, but it was basically a branch of the same tree. It was all the frontier 'old west', and then somebody drew a line through it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3g8p4m", "title": "How did the Native American tribes in the western portion of the U.S. get firearms, and when did these tribes first come into contact with firearms?", "selftext": "I know the tribes on the eastern seaboard got them from the British. From whom did the western tribes get them? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g8p4m/how_did_the_native_american_tribes_in_the_western/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctw3o5n"], "score": [7], "text": ["With the exception of the unwieldy, unreliable early firearms that might have been brought to the Plains by the Coronado *entrada*'s [search for Quivira in 1540-1542](_URL_0_), the Plains nations would have started to regularly see firearms in the mid-seventeenth century. While horses flowed up from Mexico, or through mission communities in New Mexico, the Spanish tended to avoid supplying their Native American neighbors with firearms. When Iroquois raids caused the westward Algonkian-Huron diaspora, the refugees and their French allies brought firearms to the Upper Mississippi watershed. The French provided firearms to the Algonkian and Huron, who then used them to carve out some territory among the Quapaws, Poncas, Omahas, and Eastern Sioux. While the Sioux naturally fought against the Fox, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Kickapoo, and Miami immigrants, the Hurons tried to stem the flow of firearms to the Plains in an effort to maintain their advantage. They nurtured hostilities between the Plains nations and the French to maintain their favored trading status, though gradually the weapons made inroads into the interior of the continent. \n\nFurther south the Osages, pushed west by the reverberations of contact, remade themselves as the trade middlemen on the doorstep of the Plains. They used an alliance with the French to secure firearms, then used those weapons against Wichitas, Pawnees, and Caddos further west to raid for horses and captives. They blocked the westward expansion of firearms, in 1719 a visitor to the Wichita saw only half a dozen firearms even though the residents were eagerly trying to purchase more. The Osage were so powerful they even started attacking French traders when they encroached on their lands. When the Comanches-Wichita-Pawnee peace was struck in the late 1740s they were able to purchase weapons and go on the offensive against the Osage. The overall access to firearms on the frontier decreased during the Seven Year's War, but many of the shocks of contact, including the introduction of the horse, the gun, and the displacement of nations to the east, were already transforming the Eastern Plains. \n\nObviously, this is just a brief introduction to the politics of trade on the doorstep of the Plains. Calloway's *One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark* is a great resource if you would like to learn more."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_V%C3%A1zquez_de_Coronado#/media/File:Coronado_expedition.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5z4hza", "title": "Why does there seem to be such a lack of emphasis on the Pacific Theater of WWII in American pop culture and History?", "selftext": "I've been reading a number of books lately on the Pacific theater. The fighting was intense, perhaps even more so than the European theater. The Japanese atrocities on the conquered peoples and POW's were eye-opening to me largely because in history classes we focused mostly on Hitler and the holocaust and glanced over America's role in the Pacific. Since reading about various battles I've also started looking for movies and TV shows, but they seem to be few and far between post 1950's. So my question to the historians here is why is the Pacific theater seemingly glossed over in terms what is taught in schools and what is represented in popular film and TV?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5z4hza/why_does_there_seem_to_be_such_a_lack_of_emphasis/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dev9jsn"], "score": [11], "text": ["I would wager it has partially to do with the different racial components of the two theaters, and the subsequent disparity in the \"goodness\" of the war in each.\n\nThe fight against the Nazis has been continuously held up since the 1940s as the epitome of a \"good war.\" American soldiers fought and died to liberate Western Europe from a Fascist anti-democratic foe, which has been consistently depicted in propaganda and pop culture as evil incarnate (an example of the latter might be the frequency with which Nazi soldiers are the bad guys in FPS video games, whose deaths in the games are never controversial). The eugenicist and genocidal practices of the Nazis lend greater support to this idea of the European theater being a fight between the forces of good and evil (this is helped by the fact that American eugenicist and anti-Semitic policies in the 1930s and 1940s are largely unknown or under-known by Americans today). \n\nMeanwhile, the American war in the Pacific is not nearly so easily depicted in stark moral terms. Although the war was initiated by a sneak attack carried out by Japan on the US, the American response to that attack was to corral the West coast's Japanese American population, citizens and noncitizens alike, into concentration camps. Furthermore, American propaganda throughout the war depicted the Japanese in explicitly racist terms; while the war in Europe was depicted as a fight between freedom and fascism, the war in the Pacific was depicted as a fight between white democracy and Oriental despotism. Finally, anti-Japanese sentiment lingered for decades after the war ended, while anti-German sentiment almost immediately disappeared at the beginning of the Cold War.\n\nIn short, it has been relatively easy to depict WWII in Europe in terms of stark moral and political contrast (good vs evil, democracy vs fascism, liberty vs tyranny), while America's war with Japan was much more controversial, both in terms of its conduct (concentration camps, racist propaganda) and its aftermath (lingering anti-Asian sentiments and violence). Given this state of affairs, pop culture more readily focuses on the European Theater while paying much less attention to the Pacific. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fkazw", "title": "In the American Civil War, was the Union victory at Vicksburg of equal, lesser, or greater significance than Antietam and/or Gettysburg were to ending the war?", "selftext": "More generally speaking, is the Eastern campaign of the Civil War overemphasized? Are there other battles or campaigns that don't receive the attention they deserve given their level of significance?  Thanks for any answers!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fkazw/in_the_american_civil_war_was_the_union_victory/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cab8emi", "cabwcvf", "cac7fj0"], "score": [4, 2, 2], "text": ["This is a good question and difficult to asses still nowadays.\nFirst Antietam, I believe it was never considered a big victory like Vicksburg or Gettysburg. It was still considered a victory, and good enough for Lincoln to issue his Emancipation declaration, but for the public in general it was obscured by the fact it was the bloodiest day of the war up to then, and Lee left the field by extricating his troops over night which made a Union victory for the standards of the time. But it was an inconclusive victory anyway.\nReaction to Vicksburg and Gettysburg was quite different. On one hand Vicksburg was well documented and expected, Grant had put the city under siege for months and everyone expected the outcome, the campaign was well covered by the newspapers. \nGettysburg on the other hand just happened, and engagement was foreseen sooner or later as soon as both armies were set in motion, they should clash at one point.\nReaction to both victories varied however. Grant's victory was much praised, Meade's victory in Gettysburg however seems to have received some criticism specially from President Lincoln himself. Meade was criticized for not counterattacking and pursuing Lee's army to destroy it. Pemberton's army at Vicksburg collapsed and surrendered, the place was lost and the Mississippi river closed to the Confederacy. Gettysburg on the other hand represented no territorial gains, Lee's army retreated (with heavy losses and never to regain the initiative) but kept its cohesion to fight again for 2 more years, the Union army of the Potomac was heavily battered too after 3 days of fighting, and overall the South did not seem to have perceived it as a major defeat. Yes, Lee was repulsed and it was a setback but he was not bowed. \nAt the end after all these battles nobody could see a clear end to the war, and they were right as the war went on for 2 more years. Professor Gary Gallagher argues around it extensively.\nAnswering your question, Vicksburg seem to have had a greater impact on the American public in terms of victory perception. Vicksburg would also precipitate the rise of Grant as military commander in chief of all Union armies bringing a much needed change in the chain of command and a badly needed change in the Eastern theater and the overall Union strategy.\n", "The Vicksburg campaign was absolutely huge for the Union victory.  What it essentially did was cut off vital sections of the Confederacy from the rest of it.  Furthermore, the fall of Vicksburg gave the Union a much easier route into the South in the western theater of the war.  Think of the Mississippi River as a huge road into the South with Vicksburg as the largest defense of it.  Once the city fell, the Union now had free reign to use the river as it pleased to get South.  The victory was also a significant blow to the Confederate fighting force as 30,000+ soldiers surrendered and were no longer able to fight.  In addition to this, Vicksburg was a huge morale blow to the Confederacy.  The city of Vicksburg was one of the most heavily fortified cities in the Confederacy with several natural barriers that gave it the reputation of being impregnable, and when did fell, a huge blow morale-wise was felt in the CSA.\n\nThe importance of Gettysburg truly lies in the fact that it was the last time that Lee was able to take the war to the North.  While Meade was not able to completely destroy Lee, the CSA would not be able to invade north anymore, and ultimately, the war became defensive for them.  Furthermore, the idea that Robert E. Lee was an invincible general no longer remained intact, and the Union became encouraged to launch offensives on Southern soil in the east.\n\nImo, both battles act in conjunction as one giant turning point, as they take place only a day apart.  I will say that Vicksburg holds a bit more significance militarily and strategically, in that the victory split the Confederacy in 2 and cut off vital supply lines from Texas and Arkansas. Aside from this, the victory and disabling of the Confederate army, gave Grant a huge amount of prominence which eventually led to him becoming chief commander of Union forces. Ultimately, Vicksburg split the CSA, cut CSA supply routes, and gave the Union an easy road south, while Gettysburg changed the complexion of the war from the North being on the defensive to quickly taking the offensive.", "In recent decades there has been a torrent of criticism regarding the emphasis of ACW military studies. Shelby Foote for instance has repeatedly criticized historians for focusing far too much on the Army of Northern Virginia. Foote has also repeatedly said that the Confederacy itself focused far too much on Lee's army and not enough on the west, where the confederacy repeatedly met with defeat. Foote famously said that Lee \"was marching the wrong way\" when he set out for Gettysburg noting that Lee should have moved to relieve Vicksburg, or redeployed forces to Johnson's army. It is notable that the major Confederate Victory to occur in the West, Chickamauga, occurred with Longstreet's Corps having been redeployed to the West."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "40sdzi", "title": "When was the last time a president was elected who was \"filled in\" during local ballots?", "selftext": "I am under the assumption that is how it was done before. When did it become commonplace for a National Committee to tell me who they think the president should be?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40sdzi/when_was_the_last_time_a_president_was_elected/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cywofxr"], "score": [2], "text": ["Just to clarify, as I think I understand what you're asking about, but I want to be sure, you're talking about a 'straight ticket' ballot [such as this one](_URL_0_)?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/5JSCffJ.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5r1uc6", "title": "Did the people actually believe that World War I would be over by Christmas when it started or is that a common myth originated after the war?", "selftext": "Much like Titanic being deemed \"unsinkable\", which was something that had become popular no earlier than 1930s.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r1uc6/did_the_people_actually_believe_that_world_war_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dd3vlgv"], "score": [31], "text": ["Not my area of particular expertise, but the answer to this is, perhaps annoyingly: \"yes and no.\"\n\nTo my reading the \"no\" camp-- that is, those who thought that a great power conflict in Europe would be a long, protracted conflict-- was relatively small but included some incredibly influential people involved in war strategy and planning on all sides including Kitchener, Haig, Falkenhayn and Joffre.\n\nThose who thought the war would be over quickly, I think, have actually been widely misunderstood. \"Over by Christmas\" was not some pie-in-the-sky, chauvinistic belief in victory for one's own side; it was the necessary outcome given the strategies and assumptions employed on all sides about the consequences and nature of the coming conflict.\n\nThe German strategic necessity for a short war is perhaps the best illustration of this. The logic of the German Schlieffen plan was that the war *had* to be over quickly. That Germany *had* to knock out France and then pivot to knock out Russia because a protracted two-front conflict implied a German defeat once its much larger neighbors were able to reach full mobilization. Adding Britain to the side of the entente made that logic even clearer. A British naval blockade of of Germany would not be sustainable.\n\nThe assumptions of British war planning was a precise mirror image of that German concern. British war planners believed that a kind of \"economic warfare\" would devastate Germany. That lack of access not only to global shipping but to global *capital* out of the city of London would rapidly leave Germany impotent.\n\nThinking from a more global perspective there were also influential thinkers who thought that the devastation involved in a great power conflict would be so great as to not be possible to continue for more than a few months. British Admiral Beatty wrote: \n\n >  There is not sufficient money in the world to provide such a gigantic struggle to be continued for any great length of time.\n\nHe thought the war would be over by winter.\n\nJan Bloch's *The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations*, the abridged English translation of which was titled *Is War Now Impossible?* argued among other things that a great power war would bring about a kind of financial and economic apocalypse, and therefore couldn't be sustained. \n\n(Mind you, he wasn't entirely wrong on that front. Britain had to back away from aspects of economic warfare plans when it became clear that it would be economic suicide. The outbreak of war nearly destroyed global financial markets and easily ranks alongside 1929 as one the great financial crises of the 20th century.) \n\nIn that sense many British thought that the war would be short, but knew that the longer it went on the more assured of victory they would be.\n\nPolitically, as Hew Strachan writes in his chapter on \"The Short War Illusion\":\n\n >  Both armies feared that general mobilization would give rise to strikes and demonstrations. They expected domestic disaffection to deepen rather than dissipate. After all, in the 1880s Engels had anticipated with relish the possibility of a war lasting three to four years precisely because it could create the conditions for the victory of the working class.\"\n\nLogistically it was not thought that basic supplies could be long enough maintained. Strachan again:\n\n >  [The German general staff's] focus was less on the raw-material needs of the war industries than on the maintenance of food supplies. The initial involvement of the general staff in the issue of economic mobilization was motivated by the need to feed the army. Of related concern were the problem of liquidity (as cash was needed to buy food, fodder, and horses), and the interruption to civilian transport.... The possibility of domestic opposition to, and disruption of, its plans for war fed on the fear of socialism. \n\nI'm less familiar with the popular understanding of a short war at the soldier's level, but Strachan writes that it was pervasive, and actually continued throughout the war, such that the end to the war was perpetually thought to be only months away even years into the conflict and that this attitude was nearly universal. This was not the result of kind of war enthusiasm or innocence that was then supplanted by disillusionment, however, so much as popular inability to conceive of the long war.\n\nI think you'll agree that it's easy to see how many of these arguments might have seemed compelling, so I think it's also worth examining why they were wrong. As I already mentioned, one reason was that actually going ahead with total economic war nearly proved to be economic suicide for Britain and could not actually be carried out. German access to capital was reduced, but still possible via banking houses in neutral countries, which thrived during the war. Likewise, British shipping to neutral countries which then ultimately ended up in Germany was extensive.\n\nVirtually all of the \"knockout\" war plans or battles on all sides failed, including the Schlieffen plan, the British attempts to force the Straits at Constantinople, the confrontation between the British navy and the German High Seas Fleet, and so on. In the case of the Ottoman campaigns which I'm most familiar with, the British simply constantly underestimated Ottoman capabilities and overestimated their own.\n\nMichael Neiberg also makes what I think is a [great point](_URL_0_) which is that because virtually all sides viewed the conflict as defensive, there really were no clearly articulated strategic goals in the conflict. In Germany the scale of the conflict meant that in order to compensate for its losses, its war aims had [ballooned to such proportions that only a total defeat of the enemy could possibly accomplish them](_URL_1_) and made compromise impossible. It also explains why virtually every socialist party in Europe actually backed the war, thus delaying or averting the socio-political socialist nightmare that conservative war planners so feared.\n\nSource wise:\n\nHew Strachan's *The First World War*, specifically as I said the section on the short war illusion.\n\nNicholas Lambert's *Planning Armageddon*, and his lecture [\"The Short War Assumption\".](_URL_2_)\n\nThat Michael Neiberg lecture that I linked too is excellent and that entire YouTube channel, the WWI Museum and Memorial, is great.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMBD71SB10E&amp;t=43m0s", "https://books.google.ae/books?id=2yYFn-SzIyQC&amp;pg=PA125&amp;dq=michael+neiberg+war+aims&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj9_8jhuOrRAhWB2xoKHT4cAlwQ6AEIMjAF#v=onepage&amp;q=michael%20neiberg%20war%20aims&amp;f=false", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7jJ-POo90"]]}
{"q_id": "10fd3t", "title": "Historically, have we ever hit a \"peak oil\" like situation with other commodities? What should we expect? ", "selftext": "I was watching a [documentary](_URL_1_) over at [r/documentaries](_URL_0_) which talked about how people don't understand the concept of exponential growth, and the coming oil crisis. In the documentary the professor said that we have already reached peak oil, and to expect things to get much worse from here on out. Are there any historical case studies of a life-blood economic commodity like oil running out, and if so what were the repercussions of the event? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10fd3t/historically_have_we_ever_hit_a_peak_oil_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6czw3a", "c6d16hb", "c6d1720", "c6d177g", "c6d2jej", "c6d3g39", "c6d4d0u", "c6d4ojf", "c6d70nx", "c6d78j8", "c6dceix", "c6dd519"], "score": [39, 222, 20, 44, 2, 11, 21, 31, 3, 2, 2, 3], "text": ["Jareed  Diamond  wrote  a  book  \"Collapse\"  that  provides  some  case  studies  on  similar  situations.  Deforestation  caused  enviromental  problems  that  led  to  the  collapse  of  the  Mayan  civilization.  The  Mayan  city  states  fought  harder  wars  with  each  other  as  the  competition  for  scarce  resources  was  racheted  up.  Water  shortages  also  caused  other  civilizations  to  collapse.  The  Moche  and  Teotihucan  civilizations  both  ended  around  750 AD  when  both  regions  experienced  decade  long  droughts.   ", "The belief in peak 'x' has been very common in history.  However what actually occurs isn't 'peak x', it's that innovation drives the search for substitutes and/or making the original issue irrelevant. \n\n\nFor instance, here's an extremely well written essay from Victorian times about their concept of peak coal: \n[The Coal Question](_URL_2_) 1865\n\n[The Limited nature of Coal in Great Britian](_URL_4_) 1798\n\n\n[A general view of the coal trade](_URL_5_) 1812\n\n\n\n\n\n > It chanced one day that Spilett was led to say, \"But now, my dear Cyrus, all this industrial and commercial movement to which you predict a continual advance, does it not run the danger of being sooner or later completely stopped?\"\n > \"Stopped! And by what?\"\n > \n > \"By the want of coal, which may justly be called the most precious of minerals.\" \u2026\n > \n > \"Oh! the veins of coal are still considerable, and the hundred thousand miners who annually extract from them a hundred millions of hundredweights have not nearly exhausted them.\"\n > \n > \"With the increasing consumption of coal,\" replied Gideon Spilett, \"it can be foreseen that the hundred thousand workmen will soon become two hundred thousand, and that the rate of extraction will be doubled.\"\n > \n > \"Doubtless; but after the European mines, which will be soon worked more thoroughly with new machines, the American and Australian mines will for a long time yet provide for the consumption in trade.\"\n > \n > \"For how long a time?\" asked the reporter.\n > \n > \"For at least two hundred and fifty or three hundred years.\"\n > \n > \"That is reassuring for us, but a bad look-out for our great-grandchildren!\" observed Pencroft.\n > \n > \"They will discover something else,\" said Herbert.\n > \n > \"It is to be hoped so,\" answered Spilett, \"for without coal there would be no machinery, and without machinery there would be no railways, no steamers, no manufactories, nothing of that which is indispensable to modern civilization!\"\n > \n > \"But what will they find?\" asked Pencroft. \"Can you guess, captain?\"\n > \n > \"Nearly, my friend.\"\n > \n > \"And what will they burn instead of coal?\"\n > \n > \"Water,\" replied Harding.\n > \n > \"Water!\" cried Pencroft, \"water as fuel for steamers and engines! water to heat water!\"\n > \n > \"Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements,\" replied Cyrus Harding, \"and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some inexplicable laws, appear to agree and become complete at the same time. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.\"\n > \n > \"I should like to see that,\" observed the sailor.\n > \n\nJules Verne, [The Mysterious Island, ch. 33 ](_URL_1_)\n\nWhile I'm on the subject of coal, early coal adoption itself was a response to the growing scarcity of wood in pre-industrial Britain.  There weren't enough resources to support academics with peakesque theories back then, but if there had been there would undoubtedly been numerous papers outlining the vital problem of 'peak wood'.\n\nTo answer your question, while we have many, many fears of 'peak' like events occuring for various commodities ('Peak' Salt, Cotton, Indigo, Tin, Copper, Gold, and etc,) there never has been an actual coming true of the fearful predictions.  I'd recommend you read [The Prize](_URL_0_), the Pulitzer winning history of the oil industry, to judge for yourself how likely the predictions of global doom as a result of 'peak oil' is.  \n\nMore recently, Paul Ehrlich's 70s bestseller 'The Population Bomb' predicted peak just about everything.  He was predicting peak copper, tin, grain, etc etc.  Just as an example, he was predicting food riots in Kansas by 1985, and 'Great Britian will have ceased to exist as an entity' by 1990.  His bet with Roger Simon, or the [Simon-Ehrlich bet](_URL_3_) proved rather disastrous for his own peak theories.  But he's back, and peddling a remixed version of the Club of Rome's 1950s version of 'peak everything' last I heard. \n\n", "There is also a discipline called resource economics that studies this. Basically don't take \"doomsday\" predictions of resources running out too seriously because:\n\na) These predictions are based on estimates of natural resource levels which invariably turn out to be wrong. We should have run out of oil several times already according to past predictions. Realistically people actually have no idea how much oil there actually is in the world.\n\nb) We cannot predict technological trends. In the 1800s many states planted a shitload of forests because they were sure they would run out and wouldn't be able to build ships. Wooden ships became steel 100 years later and it turns out those forests were a waste of time.\n\nNot that depleting our resources shouldn't be a major concern. These kinds of doomsday predictions are however, taken too seriously. They make good sensationalist documentaries - shrouding the issues in misinformation.\n\n\n\n ", "[Easter Island.](_URL_0_)  The natives overexploited the forests and fish stocks, leading to general ecological collapse, famine, civil war, and depopulation.  By the time the Dutch arrived in the 18th century, most of the island was barren and uninhabited; all that was left was a single small village whose people had forgotten their history.", "i am not a historian, nor do i consider myself to have expert judgement on resources, but a book that i've been really enjoying that you might be interested in is Collapse by Jared Diamond. it's got descriptions of lots of failed civilizations that collapsed often due to the unintended abuse of natural resources and how once that resource ran out it was in some circumstances too difficult for the society to recover.\n\nit seems that in the course of most of the failed civilizations that have existed, most food resources weren't irreplaceable, but wood is and has been for most civilizations--without it, your society isn't able to do lots of things it tends to want to do, even though the people can survive. even though wood can replenish itself pretty quickly if you let it, the inhabitants of Easter Island actually killed off the native tree species, and because of it they couldn't escape the island when it became a death trap (as Diamond's thesis goes, i understand there might be some debate on exactly what happened there). the Anasazi in the American Southwest also destroyed their surrounding forests but didn't collapse for a few more centuries. \n\nwhat we *don't* want to happen is for oil to suddenly run out and to have no alternative around as a replacement, but i think others have addressed the relationship between availability of the resource and technological progress better than i can.", "Mercury: I understand that there is only one mine in Spain still producing it.\n\nHelium: this is a bit artificial because of the stock-piles of helium which are now being exhausted, but economically relevant anyway. Important for superconductors, and probably no viable substitutes.\n\nPerhaps the one we should most be concerned about is phosphorus which is needed for fertiliser. We are not at peak phosphorus yet, but it is in sight. There is no substitute.", "Yes. We have hit 'peak food' several times in history and several different locations (China has peaked at 100m several times coming down to closer to 50m afterwards, Europe has done the same).\n\nWhat typically happened:     \n**1**) Good times, so everyone is making babies and things are going great. Productivity is very high because everyone is getting great new land to occupy.       \n**2**) Century or so has passed and now all the good land has been taken. Innovation keeps occurring, but not as fast as the population is growing so the production by the 10,000,000th farmer is less than by the 1,000,000th, regardless of technological advances (because the latter farmed a plain next to a river, the former is on a shady side of a mountain in a desert - there's only so much technology can do).      \n**3**) There's a sharp divergence in the population, as the excess growth in population starts to create a lower class - the total GDP simply isn't growing fast enough to deal with the population.      \n**4**) The Empire is doing fine, as the cheap lower classes (the 20,000,000th would-be farmer etc, who has to choose between farming the bloody Sahara or whatever work he can get) come to the cities to serve whoever can feed them. The biggest symptom is the average salaries to the bottom 50%.        \n**5**) The elites can not grow much more either because of the GDP, and the elites children find themselves without access to the next generation of the elites despite having good education etc. Meanwhile the situation among the lower classes has started approaching starvation.      \n\n\nHistorically this has happened a number of times, and often with de-stabilizing effects. Often with even a minor external nudge, the situation descends to chaos. For example the elites getting wealthier towards the end in the past often attracted neighbors (most famous and most often repeated act of this show: Mongols to China) who started stalking the border looking for any sign of weakness.\n\nNow add to this the high likelihood of elites-without-a-future turning to the starving masses and starting a rebellion, and suddenly you have a central government besieges by uprising AND incursions.\n\nFarming output drops by, say, 20% in all the chaos and suddenly there is true famine everywhere. This gets people moving en masse to places where they think there might be food, and standards of hygiene drop, which helps diseases (which were often happening due to the cramped conditions already). Now you have a mixture of war/civil war/famine/plague. Not good.\n\nThis type of combination dropped China's population from nearly 120m in 1200 to around 65m in 1350. \n\n\nThese 'peak foods' have been pretty much the only times that human ingenuity has not found a way through, and even in those cases we have typically postponed the inevitable longer than anyone would have thought.", "I find it interesting that the top voted comments in this thread insist that humanity will always have cheap energy sources, because by nature we innovate. The common adage is: \"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones\".\n\nOf course it is true that technological solutions might be found as the age of cheap oil fades (it is already pretty much over). But to insist that we will *inevitably* employ a new source of cheap energy is simply faith-based reasoning.\n\nBelievers refer to past innovations, but ignore past collapses. \n\nHuman civilisations in the past have collapsed and have gone backward in their use of technology.\n\nDon't mistake me for saying that total catastrophic collapse is inevitable. I think it's likely, but I don't know everything. \n\nHowever, to insist that there is only one possible outcome, and that it is a favourable one, requires blind belief combined with a limited set of experiences about the world.\n\nMake no mistake: we are out of cheap fuel,  and continuing to exploit the reserves that remain [puts our life-support system at risk](_URL_0_). If you think that as a species that we can sit back and let the scientists sort it out, you are living in a bubble seperate from reality.", "It's not quite what I'd call a natural resource, but the Romans liked using [Silphium](_URL_0_) as a medicine and contraceptive so much that they harvested the plant until it went extinct.", "The lost city of [Iram](_URL_0_) was an important trade crossroads, but at some point in history they ran out of water and the city was abandoned.", "If Professors didn't have things to warn us about they wouldn't have jobs.\n\nIn grade school I learned that we would run out of oil in the 1990s.  Fool me once.  \n\nNot saying that they're wrong, I'm just no longer invested in worrying about it.", "One of the competing theories for the Bronze Age Collapse, that affected the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Middle east around 1200 BC was an exhaustion of easily available tin to make Bronze. The rising cost of bronze, the highest quality metal available at the time, lead to the rise of Iron as the chief metal of War. The decrease in Bronze production (a complex and centralized process) erased the technological advantage of the primary civilizations and made them vulnerable both economically and militarily to the various \"hoards\" that prey on a weakening empire. The ability of strong central governments to control the tin trade was one of their cornerstones, and without that fragmentation occurred.\n\nThis does not necessarily have any directly applicable lessons to the oil crisis, but it does answer the first part of your question.\n\nEdit: It is worth noting that when those civilizations recovered from their 'Dark ages' they came back more technologically and scientifically advanced as a general rule. Just as technological advances continued through Europe's middle ages, paving the way for the renaissance. The broad view of history  has shown that it is civilizations that exist in isolation that are the ones that are vulnerable. Those of the mound builders, Easter Island, and Tazmania. When Humanity is consided as a whole, were millennia mark the passage of time; we may stumble, we may fall, we may slaughter ourselves by the hundreds of millions, but we will always rise stronger, further, and with more shiny toys to play with. I trust that whatever shortages lay ahead, that trend will continue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ&amp;feature=youtu.be"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=WiUTwBTux2oC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=The+prize&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=_1z1u5d23X&amp;sig=gvSW8F_eiO_XaylDfMFD_YVZ-0s&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=rSthULfpCI2C9QSbnIDwAQ&amp;ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=The%20prize&amp;f=false", "http://www.online-literature.com/verne/mysteriousisland/33/", "http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&amp;staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=317&amp;Itemid=27", "http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html", "http://books.google.com/books?id=YdFNAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA723&amp;lpg=PA723&amp;dq=%22The+Limited+Quantity+of+Coal+in+Britain%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=zXgy-9m0We&amp;sig=5--H8OE35iGIgwMqNNWwWHkdzm8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=GyphULLIEIXk8gSo54G4BA&amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%22The%20Limited%20Quantity%20of%20Coal%20in%20Britain%22&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books/about/A_general_view_of_the_coal_trade_of_Scot.html?id=GikBAAAAQAAJ"], [], ["http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27864/1/WP117.pdf"], [], [], [], ["http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "e9ruqs", "title": "common themes in latin american colonialism", "selftext": "In latin american history, there were many periods where foreigners tried to control the governmental systems of the native peoples. In what ways would a historian most directly compare the actions of early conquistadors and the american government's interventions into south american politics during the latter half of the 20th century?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e9ruqs/common_themes_in_latin_american_colonialism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fangc7x"], "score": [2], "text": ["The comparison between the late 20th century and the early 16th century is quite difficult to make. For earlier periods, there are individual cases (such as William Walker in Nicaragua in the 1850s) where so-called \"filibusters\" behaved almost exactly like conquistadors. They came from abroad with a small but well equipped military force, tried to overthrow the existing political structure. None of them were nearly so successful or enduring as the original Spanish conquest, but the behaviours and general strategy were not so different. In the early 20th century, the US more officially occupied many Central American and Caribbean nations, ostensibly in order to force the repayment of their bonds, but also to install US-friendly governments, force unequal treaties, and in one case, build a strategically and economically relevant canal through the Isthmus of Panama. This is the era of gunboat diplomacy and the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine. But none of this very direct intervention is in the time period you asked about.\n\nPost-WWII, the United States has made plenty of attempts to influence the government of Latin America ranging from subtle pressure to direct military and intelligence support for a coup d'etat, either in the style of Pinochet overthrowing Allende in Chile, or the Bay of Pigs invasion (See: John Coatsworth, \"Liberalism and Big Sticks\" for a good overview). However, it has refrained in basically all cases from either direct invasion with American troops or direct governance of any Latin American territories. Insofar as what the conquistadors did was show up with an army, use a combination of violence and manipulating local politics to establish control, then rule in perpetuity as the new colonial elite, this is not something that has happened anywhere since WWII.\n\nIf one were to try and draw similarities, I suppose one could say that supporting one friendly local faction against another rival faction by giving them the advantages of cutting-edge (literally, in the conquistators' case) weaponry and tactics is common between both eras. Otherwise, the ways in which the United States exercised its influence in the region is almost entirely distinct from how the conquistadors did it five hundred years ago. Indeed, many of the most important channels of US influence (intelligence, debt negotiations, trade negotiations, foreign investment, military advisers) were basically unknown or irrelevant at the time of conquest. Overall, I would be very hesitant to make this comparison at all.\n\nEdit: It is worth noting that there are a few exceptions here: the invasions of Panama and Grenada, the intervention in the Dominican civil war in the 1960s, and the US occupation of Haiti in the 1990s. All of these were relatively brief interventions, and were justified to the world as humanitarian in nature. And, of course, the US never did stop governing Puerto Rico, which remains a US dependency today, though it was not acquired in the late 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3mcbng", "title": "Did the U.S. have any election irregularities in its early days?", "selftext": "Sometimes I hear on the news about countries with electoral irregularities. An international observer sometimes reports that there were suspicious circumstances during an election. I'm wondering if a well developed democracy, like the U.S., used to have election irregularities?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3mcbng/did_the_us_have_any_election_irregularities_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvdumsn"], "score": [10], "text": ["The Broad Seal War comes to mind. In the election of 1838, there was a difficulty with the election results from New Jersey. At the time, elections for New Jersey congressional representatives were determined by vote taken from the entire state. NJ had no congressional districts and no electors. The election results that year for the US House of Representatives between the Democratic ticket and the Whig ticket were very close--something like only 100 votes. \n\nIt was discovered later that the one of the county clerks in NJ threw out the election results for a couple of towns (thus favoring the Whigs) because they hadn't been properly sealed by the town clerks--some said he threw them out on a technicality that would normally be overlooked and others claimed that the votes had been opened and tampered with.\n\nSo when it came time to seat the members of the House of Representatives in December, the clerk began to call the roll and then everything got into an uproar when he reached New Jersey and he couldn't figure what names to call because both delegations from the Democrats and the Whigs had come to the House to be seated. Not counting the NJ delegation (6 seats), the House consisted of 119 Democrats and 118 Whigs. Needless to say, the NJ delegation would tip the balance of power. \n\nThe dispute grew so heated that the House was unable to organize itself and couldn't even manage to elect a speaker of the house for a couple of weeks--business that's usually over and done the first day of the session. Once the House finally organized, neither NJ delegation was seated while the matter was investigated. Basically, NJ remained unrepresented in the House until March when the NJ Democrats were seated and served the remainder of their terms.\n\nSo, in that case, anyway, there wasn't anything like an international observer around, and it doesn't seem that there was wide-spread national irregularities, but apparently the actions of relatively few people within a single county in New Jersey had a significant national consequence in the election of 1838.\n\n[Source (warning, pdf file)](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=webhp&amp;cd=8&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CDkQFjAHahUKEwiQh9SOv5LIAhWIuYAKHSojA40&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fjrul.libraries.rutgers.edu%2Findex.php%2Fjrul%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F1618%2F3057&amp;usg=AFQjCNHC7NZz5OjByDxzoambr_yXECk3zA&amp;sig2=rzOkhLIQfucBRcxUslpnWQ"]]}
{"q_id": "2sqvn2", "title": "Were stone carvings in ancient, medieval, or renaissance sculptures painted or colored?", "selftext": "I recently visited Seville and Granada and it made me wonder if the carvings we see all over the outside and inside of these structures was originally colored or decorated somehow. [Here's an example of some carvings I saw on the outside of Granada Cathedral](_URL_0_), for example.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sqvn2/were_stone_carvings_in_ancient_medieval_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cns3yai"], "score": [2], "text": ["Frequently, yes.\n\nAncient sculptures were almost always painted. Here's an article about how traces of this paint can be detected scientifically: _URL_3_\n\nHere's a reconstruction of what classical sculptures might have looked like originally, when painted: _URL_4_\n\nAnd here's an older article with some history about the rediscovery of paint on ancient sculptures: _URL_0_\n\nThis holds true in the middle ages as well.\n\nFor example, the stone crosses you see in parts of England from the anglo-saxon period were entirely painted, and fitted with metal and glass inserts to add sparkle as well as color.\n\nHere's a good article about one such cross: _URL_5_\n\nAnd here's a reconstruction of the paint on another cross: _URL_2_\n\nSometimes traces of the medieval paint survive. More frequently, they were cleaned off of medieval buildings and sculptures because, as the paint aged and started to flake, people decided it was unattractive. Sometimes paint was stripped from a decorated building because it was thought to have been a later addition, and the building would look more 'original' without the paint (sometimes, original medieval paint was removed by such well-meaning restorations!).\n\nThere are a few interesting restoration projects in the UK right now which are repainting medieval sculptures and buildings their original colors (when evidence survives) - [Stirling Castle](_URL_1_) in Scotland is great example. The result looks very different from the grey middle ages we usually imagine!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/2zCrern.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/30103116", "http://www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/story", "http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/contributions/369", "http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090615/full/news.2009.574.html", "http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11945940/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/scientists-retrace-parthenons-brilliant-hues/", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/125057"]]}
{"q_id": "3nhbha", "title": "Did the Norse colonies of Greenland make contact with any Inuit tribes? If so were there any records of interaction? Conflict? Trade?", "selftext": "I know Erik the Red made contact with Natives in the Americas, I'm just wondering more so if there was a long term relationship between settlements in Greenland and native (sortof, they migrated there) tribes.\n\nEdit: Lief, the son not Erik", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nhbha/did_the_norse_colonies_of_greenland_make_contact/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvoaqcp", "cvooun0", "cvoqfuc"], "score": [24, 3, 9], "text": ["Yes, the Norse called them *Skraelings*. The relationship between the Norse and the skraelings appears to have been mostly belligerent until the abandonment of the Greenland colonies.", "You'll probably find [this post](_URL_0_) interesting; it contains a summary of a few Inuit stories concerning the first Norse settlers of Greenland. ", "Quoting myself from a previous answer to a similar question:\n\nThe Norse likely interacted with three different groups of Native Americans: the Dorset Paleo-Eskimo people, the Thule Eskimo people and the ancestors of the Beothuk people. They called the people of North America 'Skraelings'.\n\nThere are very few accounts of their meeting, though we know that the Dorset and Thule lived in Greenland during the same period that the Norse had colonies there (even in the same fjords) so they likely interacted somewhat beyond what we know from the sagas.\n\nThe Greenlander's Saga and Erik the Red's saga both tell pretty much the same story, with some minor differences. They reference a few meetings (most not very pleasant) between the natives and the Norse. They say that Lief Erickson's brother, Thorvald, and his men killed eight men they found in Markland and were subsequently attacked by men in skin boats, during which Thorvald himself was killed by an arrow.\n\nA few years later an Icelander, Thorfinn Karlsefni, while setting up a colony in Vinland (maybe modern-day Newfoundland), were approached by people who came out of the forest to trade furs for weapons. Thorfinn refused to trade them weapons, trading only with milk. The natives returned to trade a year later, but one of them was killed by the Norse when he tried to steal a weapon. The natives then attacked and forced Thorfinn to abandon the colony. We are told that Thorfinn's crew captured two native boys and brought them back to Greenland to be baptized.\n\nAnother (mostly fictional) saga relates a tale of two Norse men who encountered some (likely Dorset) people in eastern Greenland. Starving, the Norse encountered two \"witches\" butchering a sea mammal they pulled from a hole in the ice and attacked them and stole the animal for food.\n\nAll other references that records make to native North Americans were from later and likely refer to Thule Eskimo immigrants to Greenland. Most of these records show conflict more than cooperation; a chronicle mentions an attack on a Norse settlement in 1379 in which 13 Norse were killed and two boys and a woman captured. But, it must be said, they did live fairly close to each other for quite a long time, so there was some contact that wasn't violent. One story tells of a Norse man saving two Skraeling children who then served him faithfully for two years but then killed themselves when he departed for Iceland. There is actually a shared traditional story (which includes an Eskimo girl working on a Norse farm and friendly archery contests) between the Norse and Thule people, as they lived side-by-side for over a century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1skwfh/do_any_native_americanfirst_nations_peoples_have/"], []]}
{"q_id": "84lozz", "title": "For Scandinavians' and Germanics' mythology:", "selftext": "Hallo everyone, I want to learn more about Scandinavian and Germanic mythologies. What all books, epics, etc could be useful to me? Can I get a PDF of them?\n\nAlso, I have some questions:\n\n1) If the Jotunn are personification of evil, why many \u00c6sir have marriages with them? Odin's mother was a Jotunn.\n_URL_0_\n\n2) How much does skyrim depict the life and culture of Scandinavians? Is there an alternative to it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/84lozz/for_scandinavians_and_germanics_mythology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvvxz0t"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can't really help with your questions, but I can definitely give you some recommendations: you'll want both the Edda and the Poetic Edda for Norse/Scandinavian mythology as well as historical epics like Beowulf and *The Saga of the Volsungs* translated by Jesse L. Byock. The prose Edda is on Project Gutenberg, though I prefer the current Penguin edition; you'll probably have to find the Poetic Edda in a library or on Amazon (I've been told Lee Hollander's translation is excellent). I recommend finding Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf if you can, as it is truly excellent, though Tolkien's translation+commentary is also really good. \n\nFor retellings of Norse myths that provide a little more ease of access, Neil Gaiman's *Norse Mythology* is amazing. I'd also recommend *The Penguin Book of Norse Mythology*, *The Norse Myths* by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Pantheon Library), *Myths of the Pagan North: Gods of the Norsemen* by Christopher Abram, and *Gods and Myths of Northern Europe* by HR Ellis Davidson. Also anything Tolkien wrote on the subject that you can get your hands on (*The Legend of Sigurd and Gudr\u00fan* and \"Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics\" are particularly good). Actually, on a related topic, you can find out a *lot* of really fascinating things about Scandinavian mythology, the Vikings, and the Anglo-Saxons by reading Tolkien's lectures, letters, notes, and discussions on his influences for the history and mythology of Middle Earth.\n\nAnglo-Saxon mythology's enduring legacy is Arthurian legend, which is an entire basket of books, poems, and epics all on its own (including all of the various Medieval Arthurian romances). There's...quite frankly a *ton* of Arthurian legend variants and media, as the Arthurian romances were incredibly popular in the Medieval period, but here's a quick rundown of the \"big\" ones:\n\n* History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth (the first full narrative account of Arthur's life, from Uther's reign to post-Arthur's death)\n* The Lais of Marie De France (particularly Lanval) \n* Chr\u00e9tien de Troyes' works:  Erec and Enide; Clig\u00e8s; Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart; and Perceval, the Story of the Grail. de Troyes' \"Lancelot\" is the first major work to feature Lancelot as a character, and \"Perceval\" introduces Perceval as well as the story of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King\n* Tristan and Iseult\n* The Vulgate Cycle/Lancelot-Grail Cycle\n* The Gawain Poet: Gawain and the Green Knight\n* Le Morte D'Arthur, Thomas Mallory\n\nIn modern times:\n\n* Tennyson's various poems (\"The Lady of Shalott\" and \"Idylls of the King\" being the most famous)\n* Tolkien's unfinished poem \"The Fall of Arthur\"\n* The Once and Future King, T.H. White\n* The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley\n* The Dark is Rising Sequence, Susan Cooper\n\nFor History of the Kings of Britain and Marie De France, I recommend *The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Medieval Period* (which has a lot of other excellent pieces besides); you can also find Marie De France's lais [here](_URL_0_). You should be able to find *Le Morte D'Arthur* on Project Gutenberg, but I'm 100% positive it would be at your local library if it's not online or in PDF form somewhere. de Troyes' works are a little harder, but there's a truly excellent Penguin edition of his works available, either in your local library or cheaply on Amazon (Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances, translated by William Kibler). \"Gawain and the Green Knight\" should be online, but if it's not *The Gawain Poet: Complete Works* is your best source. The rest of them can be found in various places: the Vulgate Cycle is hellishly long and unless you're *really* into Lancelot I wouldn't recommend it, but if you do want to read it I'd find Sommer's or Lacy's translations. For the more modern works, check your local library. Tennyson's poems are all available online, as far as I'm aware. \n\nFor a more scholarly look at mythology in general, I'd take a look at Edith Hamilton's *Mythology* and Joseph Campbell's *The Power of Myth*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://odindevoted.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/mother-of-odin-bestla/"], "answers_urls": [["http://users.clas.ufl.edu/jshoaf/Marie/"]]}
{"q_id": "d9r0ti", "title": "What did contemporary political maps of Warlord era China look like? Did they just mark the Republic of China, with pre-warlord borders, or did they update it at all? Did this vary depending on where the map was made?", "selftext": "I'm asking this because there's a debate on r/TNOmod about how an in-world map of a completely shattered post-nazi-victory Russia would look like. The state of Russia in the HOI4 mod is very similar to/based on China during the Warlord Era, so this would be the best example to look to for precedence.\n\nDid contemporaries just mark it as being part of the Republic of China?\n\nDid any states recognize different parts of China than the ROC, and mark them accordingly?\n\nWould maps made in states closer to the conflict (i.e. Japan) have marked down regions of control?\n\nHow much was known about internal politics by outsiders at the time, aside from it being a mess?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9r0ti/what_did_contemporary_political_maps_of_warlord/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f1kx4x6", "f1lysh2"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["So, I wont be able to answer this question in full, mainly because anyone is gonna have a hard time finding maps of warlord-era China. It's just, as you said, a period of total chaos where China really is a failing state. I tried looking into it quickly online, but to no avail - I couldn't find any contemporary maps. I'm lead to believe that the best bet for anyone would be Japanese-based sources because, as I'll explain, Japan had a heavy hand in the chaos that engulfed China during this time. Unfortunately, I do not read/speak Japanese well enough to launch into that. That being said, I can answer parts of your question, especially the last \"How much was known about internal politics by outsiders at the time?\" \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen the Qing dynasty fell apart in 1911, the rest of the world did have an eye on China. China was a key region for European goods such as silk for clothings and soybeans for farmers, kind of like it is today. The nation with the most interests in watching this progress (and influencing it) was Japan, which for all intents and purposes by this point in history was considered Western by many Chinese nationalists. By 1922, another nation which was born into the world also looked down upon its southern neighbor with interest - the USSR. I'll break this response into two seperate parts dealing with Japanese interest and Soviet interest, and how they played an influential role in the way China would be formed.\n\n**Japan**\n\nIn 1895, Japan defeated China for control of Korea, Taiwan, Qingdao and Port Arthur (Lushun). The event would lead directly to the outrage of a patriotic Chinese citizenry and the downfall of the Qing. From the moment the Qing fell apart in 1911 up to the beginning of WW2, Japan had a keen interest in keeping China isolated and dissolved. Japan's ultimate goal was, at this time, the unification of a pan-asian front, and China was the largest region to this ideological alliance. In the Northeast, or Manchuria, Japan directly played a role in politics by giving material aid to a bandit named Zhang Zuolin. Zhang would become the biggest puppet in Northern China for Japan until his assassination (by Japanese officers) in 1928. From there, Japan was successfully able to control the valuable soybean trade that exported massive amounts of beans to the West. In 1926, when the Northern Expedition kicked off in earnest, Japan deployed additional troops to Shanghai and Jinan, resulting in the Jinan and Shanghai Incidents (1928  &  1932, respectively), where Japanese forces attacked Chinese troops. After the KMT takeover of most of China, Japanese influence generally degrades in most areas, although in 1931 the Japanese do outright invade Manchuria. From 1928-1945, it really does become an off-and-on battle between the Republican KMT and the Japanese who are attempting to take control of China. Some speculate that later defectors of WW2, such as Wang Jingwei, may have been in contact with Japanese officials much earlier than one could assume.\n\n**USSR**\n\nThe birth of the USSR meant the opportunity to export the revolution. Sun Yat-sen himself was somewhat of a socialist, but he never did identify fully as a communist. Most importantly though, both the USSR and the KMT were anti-imperialist organizations defending their homelands from what they saw as attacks by the West. From its founding to the end of WW2, the KMT would receive an egregious amount of materiel aid and funding from Stalin, as Stalin saw the KMT as a good way to protect Russia's flank from Japanese invasion. The USSR was also involved with direct invasions of Xinjiang after the near defeat of their puppet, Sheng Shicai, in 1934. So both the USSR and Japan, both ideologically believing to be helping China (though in very different ways) held Chinese puppets that supported their direct interests. Even after the 1928 Purge of the Communists by the KMT, Stalin continued to support the KMT as he knew only Chiang Kai-shek would be apt for the job of defending Russia's rear, which was most important to Stalin, especially after the Nazi takeover of Germany.\n\n**Other Powers**\n\nThe USSR and Japan were the largest influences on Chinese politics in the warlord period, but other powers were certainly aware. In fact, Germany allowed several officers to be sent to China in order to train Chinese troops on modern weapons tactics. There is a flurry of correspondence between the UK and US about Japanese aggression against China, especially as it becomes more apparent that Japan will stop at nothing to unite East Asia. Everyone knew there was a huge power vacuum in China, that the KMT was mostly corrupt and weak, and that Japan was lurking at any moment to stab China in the heart. It was a dangerous time, with dangerous consequences.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nI know this doesn't answer your questions about the maps in full, and that may not be answerable on a community like this, as primary sources from this time are rarely translated into English or available. Such was the chaotic nature of China where so many crucial historical documents are unnoticed, lost, or were destroyed. However, I do hope I did a good enough job answering some of your other question, particularly on foreign influence.\n\nSo in conclusion, yes the outside world knew very well what was going on in China during this period. The two major powers influencing these politics were the USSR and Japan. But after 1937, most of that didn't matter, as China was left to face Japan on its own for four years.\n\nSources:\n\n*Biography of Zhang Zuolin* by Xu Che and Xu Yue (In Chinese)\n\n*Diplomacy and Deception: The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1917-1927* by Bruce Elleman\n\n*Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931-1937* by Parks Coble", "/u/Drdickles and I had actually been discussing this question by PM, and at the time we both hit the same obstacle \u2013 it's really bloody hard to find contemporary maps of China! But since then, I've had a bit of a eureka moment and traced an alternate lead: world maps. In turn, this has led me to the [David Rumsey map collection](_URL_3_), an open-access database of high-quality digital map scans, including from several major atlases of the period. In turn, I was able to locate the specific China maps within those atlases, and one freestanding one. In all, I turned up 3 maps of China and 6 world maps printed between 1919 and 1928 (no doubt, there must have been more, these were just the ones I could find in around 45 minutes.) These were, in chronological order:\n\n* ['The Official Map of the World'](_URL_4_) by L. V. Crocker, published by the National Survey Company in Chester, Vermont in 1919;\n\n* ['The World, Prepared Especially for The National Geographic Magazine'](_URL_1_) by Gilbert Grosvenor, published in Washington D.C. in 1922;\n\n* ['World - Political'](_URL_0_) and ['China - Southern Section'](_URL_8_), published by the Institute of Social and Religious Research in New York in 1923;\n\n* ['2. Weltkarte' (Map of the World)](_URL_10_) and ['74. China'](_URL_2_) by Hermaan Haack and Adolf Stieler from the second edition of *Stielers Handatlas*, published in Gotha, Germany in 1925;\n\n* ['The World Showing Principal Nations' Colonial Possessions'](_URL_9_) and ['China, Japan and Mongolia'](_URL_7_) from *Atlas Of Prince Edward Island, Canada, And The World*, published by the Cummins Map Co. in Toronto in 1925; and finally\n\n* ['The New Map of the World'](_URL_5_), published by the Washington Square Book Shop in New York in 1928.\n\nFrom the world maps, it's readily evident that they weren't just marking pre-Warlord borders, they were marking *Qing* borders! World maps produced during the late 19th century typically marked a clear internal border between China proper (the eighteen provinces as established by the Ming) and 'Chinese Tartary' or what have you \u2013 take [this American nautical chart currently in the Hong Kong Maritime Museum](_URL_6_). (Side note: if you're ever in Hong Kong, visit the Maritime Museum. This isn't an invitation, this is an imperative.) World maps of the early Republican period show the entirety of the Qing Empire as it stood in 1910 continuing to be lumped under the 'Chinese Republic', irrespective of actual separatist movements in Tibet, Mongolia and to a lesser extent Xinjiang, yet at the same time retain the marking of internal borders within the broader former empire. Hence Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Manchuria are generally marked out as sub-units of the whole. This continuity reaches somewhat absurd extremes, with the three world maps from 1925 and later showing Mongolia as part of China, despite it basically having become a Soviet satellite state since 1924. The sole exception to the trend of including Mongolia is the specific China map in the 1925 Canadian atlas, which shows it as a separate entity (also, interestingly, controlling the former Northern March of Xinjiang, which is now PRC-ruled), but Stieler and Haack's map of China marks only an internal border, as does the 1928 map from New York. Tibet, which was *de facto* independent until the 1950s, remains part of China on all three.\n\nIrrespective of which map you look at, though, individual warlord cliques are never marked out. This is in part because while warlords exercised *de facto* regional military hegemonies and there were functionally no centralised government bodies to speak of, there was a relatively cohesive civilian world in the early Republic, and a continued diplomatic recognition of a central Chinese state based in Beijing, even if the specific government running it tended to be a little volatile. China ultimately became a belligerent power in WWI and dispatched the Chinese Labour Corps under the auspices one such Beiyang-backed figure, the old revolutionary leader Li Yuanhong. Basically, these maps seem to have been conveying *de jure* territorial claims as proclaimed by the (somewhat ephemeral) Republican governments, rather than seeking to convey the *de facto* political realities on the ground, and this manifested both at the broad geopolitical level as regards 'imperial' territories of the old Qing empire, and the smaller-scale clique politics below those top-level divisions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~268457~90042767:Frontispiece--World-Political-?qvq=q:pub_list_no%3D%222030.000%22;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&amp;mi=4&amp;trs=67", "https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth493548/m1/1/zoom/?resolution=2&amp;lat=3685.8453670909184&amp;lon=638.9314833310589", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~265632~90040075?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%227839.000%22%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&amp;mi=155&amp;trs=228", "http://www.davidrumsey.com/", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~302661~90073385", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~260724~5522993", "https://imgur.com/a/vlFeQjp", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~259270~5522425", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~268478~90042748", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~259196~5522401", "https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~265488~90040219?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%227839.000%22%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&amp;mi=8&amp;trs=228"]]}
{"q_id": "3xz7rg", "title": "How acceptable was it to support the IRA in America around 1981?", "selftext": "Obviously, a huge number of movies have been made that paint the Republicans in a sympathetic light. Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of sympathy for them nowadays, after the Good Friday agreement. But how publicly could one express sympathy for the IRA during the hunger strikes? Was it portrayed as a tragedy? Any sort of insight would be hugely interesting, thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xz7rg/how_acceptable_was_it_to_support_the_ira_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy9fy4y"], "score": [24], "text": ["Thanks to the strong tradition of free speech in the US, of course one *could* express any number of opinions. But I get the sense you are asking what the range of expressed opinions was. \n\nWith regard to the hunger strike itself, there was support for the hunger strikers at a relatively high level of US politics. The legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (home to many Americans of Irish descent) unanimously passed a resolution condemning prison conditions and asking the British government to recognize Bobby Sands as a political prisoner. A handful of US congresspeople from both parties signed on to a telegram asking President Reagan to urge Margaret Thatcher to action. \n\nOther action occurred as well. The International Longshoremen's Association boycotted British ships for 24 hours after Bobby Sands' death. I don't get the sense they found many ships to boycott, but the gesture stood. \n\nThat's not to say there was unanimous support. The Boston Globe, in an editorial upon the death of Bobby Sands, noted the \"American reflex to transfer automatic blame to London,\" but concluded that \"the government in London to which Bobby Sands was elected is innocent compared to the organization in which he is a commander, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army.\"\n\nThe Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein were regarded as terrorists by many in the United States. But political support for them during the hunger strikes of 1981 was a mainstream view in the US, and was freely expressed. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3w35y5", "title": "Why did 4 year liberal arts educations become popular in the United States?", "selftext": "I'm an American that is going to graduate school in Argentina. One thing that I noticed about the university where I'm studying is that there is no \"liberal arts\" education. If you are in school to study architecture then you study architecture, if you're studying translation then you study translation and as much law as you have to in order to translate legal documents, if you're studying medicine then you study medicine, etc. My girlfriend is from Brazil and she was telling me that it is the same way in Brazil. \n\nAlso, it seems like the equivalent to a bachelor's degree takes longer to earn here. For example, getting a bachelor's degree in economics would take 5/5.5 years of study.\n\nI also believe that Bachelor's degrees didn't even exist in a lot of European countries until the Bologna Process was implemented to try and standardize education across Europe.\n\nSo I'm wondering, how did the 4 year liberal arts degree where you spend half of your time taking classes in things that have nothing to do with your chosen area of study become the norm in the US?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3w35y5/why_did_4_year_liberal_arts_educations_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxt5gkl"], "score": [103], "text": ["Your question actually needs to be flipped around: when did other countries *stop* insisting upon a liberal arts foundation.\n\nThe modern university system was born in the Latin (European) Middle Ages, in Paris and Bologna. The medieval curriculum was founded on the liberal arts: the *trivium* of grammar, rhetoric, logic; and the *quadrivium* of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy/astrology, and music. Only upon completion of those would a student advance to study the higher faculties: law, theology, or medicine.\n\nFor their part, the tradition of founding one's studies in the liberal arts goes back to ancient Greece.\n\nYou might be find these answers helpful:\n\n* [How did the descriptors Bachelor and Doctor come to signify a person's completed level of education?] (_URL_0_)\n\n* [Humanist vs. liberal arts education: were they different in the Renaissance?] (_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n27cn/how_did_the_descriptors_such_as_bachelor_and/cvkf9de", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3olhdz/humanistic_vs_liberal_arts_education_were_the_two/cvyc3yk"]]}
{"q_id": "1wbcg6", "title": "For Americans in WWII, did your geographic location determine which front you were sent to? For example, were Californians sent to the Pacific while New Yorkers sent to Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wbcg6/for_americans_in_wwii_did_your_geographic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf0l85a", "cf0ln7m"], "score": [27, 9], "text": ["Nisei (American of Japanese heritage) were regularly deployed to the European theater out of a fear that the troops would turn against the U.S. if deployed in the Pacific. While National Guard units were often kept together, everything else would routinely be pulled from all over the country.", "No, perhaps to our detriment. In the German army of the same time, men in an individual infantry division were drawn from the same military area (wehrkreis). There were something like twenty of these in Germany, so they would be quite small areas. Think: recruiting men from greater Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. This system may have broken down at some point during the war, but that was the ideal. The US Army dispersed draftees and wartime enlisted among units without any geographical basis. This, along with the combat replacement system, may have led to the bewilderment and isolation of new men."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "eshees", "title": "What did happen to the Lincoln Battalion survivors when they came back home in 1939?", "selftext": "I know the FBI spied on them and the Army denied them promotions or any other kind of benefits. However, how was this put into practice? \"you can't be promote to captain because you already fought Fascism somewhere else?\". Did it make sense at the pre-WW2 time? \n\n\nAlso, how were they treated at their home towns? Were they straightforwardly out casted or did they have some recognition? How much of it reached the media and what do we know of the popular opinion back then?\n\n\nSorry for English, not my first language.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eshees/what_did_happen_to_the_lincoln_battalion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffa4v52"], "score": [26], "text": ["First things first - on the question of how the volunteers were received at home, I have written [this answer previously](_URL_0_), which I think covers most of your second group of questions.\n\nThe first set of questions isn't really covered there though, and is interesting ground for me to write on because I have researched - and published for that matter - on this exact question of how low-grade discrimination actually worked, but in a British context. While I'm familiar with existing literature on the American side of things, I don't know the sources directly.\n\nThis is a problem because the available scholarship on this question in an American context is... not great. Peter Carroll is probably the best-known scholar to work on the American volunteers, and has devoted a substantial amount of his writing to documenting their treatment by the US Government in the 1940s and 1950s. Carroll, however, writes as both a scholar and as someone who has long been intimately involved in the commemoration of the American volunteers, and writes with barely-concealed disdain and fury regarding how they were treated by the government as so-called 'premature anti-fascists'. He may well be right to do so, but is to my mind a little too willing to take their version of their treatment during the Second World War at face value. Not that I think that Lincoln veterans were lying, but rather that they naturally had limited insight into how they were being discriminated against. I also suspect - and this reflects my own research in a British context - that there is an important question of source representation here. Simply put, the Lincoln veterans whose discrimination is best-known and whose stories appear most prominently in Carroll's account tend to be those who were heavily involved with the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB), and tended in turn to also be heavily involved in the Communist Party of the USA. In other words, it can be difficult to disentangle the discrimination faced by Spanish veterans with the discrimination faced by prominent communists.\n\nThe other side of the literature has its own problems. Carroll's narrative has been challenged particularly by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, two more conservative scholars of American communism. They attacked the 'premature anti-fascist' narrative in a very literal sense - they question the origins of the phrase, arguing that rather than being a label used by the government to identify and discriminate against Lincoln veterans, it was made up by them in the 1940s as an ironic label and as a way of securing sympathy, noting that no official documents actually using the phrase in this period have ever been found. The whole thing was a ruse, according to Klehr and Haynes, to disguise the fact that between 1939 and 1941, the communist-aligned Lincoln veterans had changed tack in line with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and opposed US involvement in the Second World War, a position they equate to pro-fascism.\n\nAs noted subsequently by Carroll, the lack of documents bearing the phrase is not conclusive proof (most military personnel records were lost due to a fire in the 1970s, and the FBI and other intelligence agencies aren't exactly forthcoming with releasing these kinds of documents). However, his own rejoinder - based on some scattered allusions to the term made by sympathetic politicians and veterans in 1945 - is hardly all that convincing either. \n\nThis historiographical diversion aside, how did the discrimination actually work? Owing to the lack of records it's hard to say for certain, but like any large organisation, the military is concerned with human resources, and keeps tabs on its members. NCOs and commanders could be notified of any 'problem' soldiers under their command, and could restrict their duties and opportunities accordingly - either willingly, or as ordered to. They might not be trusted, for instance, to receive certain types of training (one reported being refused radio training, for instance) or the opportunity for promotion or field service. They might even be rejected for service or not drafted in the first place. Naturally, of course, bureaucracy is fallible - plenty of Lincoln veterans fell through the cracks and served in any number of capacities, or managed to pull strings to get reassigned where they wanted to be.\n\nHow far this made sense is an inherently subjective question. The whole 'premature anti-fascist' label became popular as it seemed to epitomise the ridiculousness of not trusting the group of people who had shown the greatest desire to confront fascism before the war. However, reality is, as ever, somewhat more complicated. Most Lincoln veterans were members of the CPUSA, who up until mid-1941, were officially against the war effort (though individual veterans naturally had their own, widely-varying views). There was a not-unreasonable suspicion that communists in the military would try to sabotage or subvert their units, or carry out espionage for the Soviet Union. Even after 1941, where communists became very keen on fighting fascism again, there was a lingering suspicion of their motives, and the institutions involved - the military and the FBI in particular - hardly needed much encouragement to view communists and communist sympathisers with suspicion. While there may have been some rational basis for the original suspicion, that it lasted so long is testament to the ingrained anti-communist cultures of certain American government agencies.\n\nInterestingly, one area where this didn't apply was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency that would later become the CIA. Its founder, William Donovan, sought out Lincoln veterans with experience of guerrilla campaigns in Spain, to act as both agents and trainers, proving crucial in setting up the OSS's guerrilla warfare school. Not only were these veterans some of the only people in America with recent experience of irregular warfare, many were European immigrants who spoke relevant languages, making them ideal for the role. Moreover, as Spanish veterans were often very prominent in resistance movements in occupied Europe, their time in Spain made for some useful connections, particularly in North Africa, Italy and Yugoslavia. While those recruited by the OSS were only ever a tiny minority of the Lincoln veterans, their skills and knowledge were certainly appreciated in this context at least."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a1xb4c/how_were_units_like_the_lafayette_escadrille_wwi/"]]}
{"q_id": "27iap6", "title": "Artisans in the early middle ages", "selftext": "It's a fairly well established fact that the early middle ages were a period of intense deurbanization in most of Europe; the first major population recoveries did not begin until the 11th century, though they quickly built up steam. So: my question is, during a period in which cities basically do not exist, and the largest settlements in a given kingdom are a handful of towns of 1,000-10,000 individuals, and the vast majority of the population lives hand to mouth in agricultural settlements, how did skilled craftsmen function? \n\nA sword, for instance, is a very specialized tool, requiring advanced knowledge far beyond that which a common blacksmith would possess. Would these bladesmiths cluster in the few towns, and anyone who wished to purchase one would have to make the trip in from the countryside?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27iap6/artisans_in_the_early_middle_ages/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci161t6"], "score": [5], "text": ["Military equipment crafting is definitely something that didn't die out because of the necessity, even in places like Britain where civilian production of what was previously common items like wheeled pottery disappeared.  The increasing militarization of society in all levels in Europe and the needs of the social economy dictated the survival of particular crafted goods.  The need for elites to provide for the defense of themselves and their warbands/retinues never declined though the need for say, monumental building construction did.  \n\nA rough contemporary analogy can be made with Afghanistan in the aftermath of its civil wars but before the US invasion, in that there were still workshops producing and repairing AK-47s (on a rather crude but functional basis) even though they weren't manufacturing much else as a primarily agrarian economy.  \n\nHowever for other artisanal manufacturing, the question is still up in the air.  For example, the restart of church construction in Italy in the 8th century points to a surviving artisan community which could furnish those churches with mosaics, light fixtures, decorative work, as well the knowledge of how to build new churches in stone (most new buildings were built out of wood at this time in Italy).  However the more than 100 year gap between new church construction raises the question of how exactly those artisans survived that dormancy.  One possibility being they may have been imported from the eastern empire, or they may have come from merovingian france, but those are just possibilities.  No one is quite sure who those artisans were or where they were from, whether they were in fact local or foreign.\n\ntl;dr - Don't assume technological decline was uniform in all things.  The skills that were needed by the society of that day flourished.  Those that weren't, withered.\n\nSources:\n\n* Christie, Neil. The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995.\n\n* Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "53pn4r", "title": "Did the British paratroopers use a different helmet than regular infantry during WWII?", "selftext": "I came across [this picture](_URL_1_) of British paratroopers in Arnhem during Operation Market Garden today, and I noticed that the helmets they're wearing are different from the ones I thought the Brits normally used during World War II. That is, [these ones](_URL_0_). Did the whole British army change the helmets they used, or was that just a paratrooper thing? If it was just the paratroops, why didn't the rest of the arym follow suit? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53pn4r/did_the_british_paratroopers_use_a_different/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7vs50v"], "score": [2], "text": ["British airborne forces did indeed use a different helmet design, starting with a small number of [\"P\" Type helmets] (_URL_2_) in 1942 followed by  the \"[Helmet, Steel, Airborne Troops Mark I] (_URL_4_)\" and [Mark II] (_URL_0_).\n\n(Photos from ParaData, which has [a page on airborne headgear] (_URL_1_) including other examples such as the 'Flash Gordon' safety helmet used in training.)\n\nThe British helmets were similar in design to the [German M1938 paratroop helmet] (_URL_3_), in both cases cut-down brimless helmets better suited to parachuting than the more cumbersome standard infantry helmets. They didn't offer quite as much protection, though, particularly around the side and the back of the head, hence not being adopted army-wide."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/yhpaa", "http://imgur.com/a/Z9JK6"], "answers_urls": [["https://paradata.org.uk/media/50587?mediaSection=Photos&amp;mediaItem=50595", "https://paradata.org.uk/content/airborne-and-para-helmets", "https://paradata.org.uk/media/50587?mediaSection=Photos&amp;mediaItem=50592", "http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30100775", "https://paradata.org.uk/media/50587?mediaSection=Photos&amp;mediaItem=50594"]]}
{"q_id": "21cybr", "title": "At the beginning of WWI, why was the German army so much more professional/organized/effective than the French or English armies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21cybr/at_the_beginning_of_wwi_why_was_the_german_army/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgbxtv1", "cgc3h5f"], "score": [21, 2], "text": ["There's no denying the efficiency of the German mobilization which is likely what you're referring to. To understand this you have to understand the Schlieffen Plan. The Schlieffen Plan was the plan created out of necessity because of Germany's position in the early 20th century. They were essentially encircled. British blockades to the North, French to the West, and Russians to the East. Their only plan, or rather their best, in the event of war was a quick strike. According to Schlieffen the German army would have to mobilize and strike out France through Belgium within 900-950 hours (~40 days) before the Russians would be mobilized and attacking East Prussia -- the heartland of German and Prussian culture and nobility.\n\nThe speedy mobilization that was organized down to the 't' was born out of necessity, basically. They were on such a tight time frame that Schlieffen, who already had quite the eye for detail, planned said mobilization and attacks to the minute. This culminates in 1.6 million soldiers of the west army -- almost 1000 infantry battalions -- rolling across the Rhine River at the rate of 560 trains of 54 cars per day. Another form of the swiftness of the mobilization was the public support. Abysmally small numbers of men dodged conscription. I do not have precise numbers for the Germans in front of me but for the French the number was 1.2% of the 1914 conscripts failed to report for duty. That gives you an idea of what I mean by \"abysmally small\". It went so well that Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg was allowed to shelve multiple plans to arrest unpatriotic dissenters, mostly Socialists. The Social Democrat Party, one of the major anti-war parties in Germany, even voted to give large amounts of funds to the mobilization effort.\n\nThis is a bit of a loaded question though. It tries to paint that the Germans were inherently superior to the French (who I'll be focusing on particularly) during the onset of the war which is patently false. The Germans fell into the same trap as the French, believing that infantry were the primary fighting force still. Charles Repington of *The Times of London* in October 1911 said after watching German military maneuvers that *\"No other modern army displays such profound contempt for the effect of modern fire.\"*^[1].\n\nAnother glaring area of neglect was modern communications.  This is something I really want to emphasize here -- the Germans had nothing short of contempt for electronic communication. During their tenures and even during the war for the latter Schlieffen and Moltke alike were content to deliver orders manually via horseback. On the outset of the war the Germans only had a planned 40 telephone companies but most were still being created so their reserve of 21,000 carrier pigeons were used in their stead. Yes, on a modern battlefield.\n\nWhere the German success' come is not in an inherent German advantage but an inherent French disadvantage -- the cult of the offensive as it is commonly called. For example, in December 1913 regulations it said *\"The artillery does not prepare attacks, it supports them.\"*^[2] Less mobile artillery was thrown out for things like the 75mm rapid firing field gun which was used because it could keep up with rapid infantry maneuvers. I do not think I can stress enough about the French's war plan of offensive first before anything else. It was ingrained in their military doctrine and as we'll see later it costs them dearly. \n\nThis was born out of General Joffre's vow to never allow the French army to be encircled and destroyed as it was in the Franco-Prussian war just decades earlier which allowed the formation of Germany. *\"The French Army, returning to its traditions,\"* he wrote in the aforementioned regulations, *\"accepts no law in the conduct of operations other than the offensive.\"*^[3] Few officers appreciated the gravity of the situation that the 120 75mm guns in the French arsenal might get outmached in an all out offensive slugfest against the Germans armed with 108 77mm guns, 36 105mm guns, and 16 150mm guns.\n\nA few days after the declaration of war, the French attacked the city of Bonneau in the Alsace-Lorraine region -- their shared border with Germany. On the 9th of August the counter attack from the Germans commenced. The orderly, shoulder to shoulder advance quickly fell into absolute chaos. Fighting ensued in a heavily wooded vineyard and fighting was close quarters. Heat and exhaustion were primary combatants. Men were dropped off in roadside ditches. Men fought in building to building fighting and many companies fired off over 15,000 rounds blindly and friendly fire among the Germans and French alike was rampant. Night warfare was something very new but something that would become very prevalent in this upcoming war. \n\nThe Germans, who were unique in that they used their reserve troops on the front lines, sent their troops in against the French at the Rhone-Rhine Canal. The French unloaded on the Baden Landwehr (reserves/militia, basically) with machine guns. Retreating got so bad that Major Otto Teschner only stemmed the tide by threatening to shoot deserters on sight. From this point on the Germans would also face a familiar foe -- francs-tiereurs. Regular people with hunting rifles firing on the Germans from concealed positions, and it ravaged them. To the point where the Germans were going around burning down villages, executing civilians, and holding priests hostage.\n\nThe German early war was one plagued with incompetence. The Southern forces on the shared border with France and Germany near Alsace-Lorraine served one purpose -- defense. They were to hold the French in place while the Hammer swung down through Belgium and surrounded the French. That was their job. Well, Von Moltke the Younger would learn that the strategy of allowing a loose command structure became less plausible on the modern field with hundreds of thousands of men over a multiple hundred kilometer wide front. \n\nGeneral Krafft and Crown Prince Rupprecht, the leaders of the Southern forces, were insistent on taking matters into their own hands. They intentionally retreated onto German territory to goad the French into a pocket and try and encircle them. When it did not work they told the central command, *\"One either lets me do as I want or one gives me concrete orders\"* in regards to their request for a direct offensive into French territory. What's even worse is that not only did they do this with their own men, the campaigns in Belgium were going so well Von Moltke even diverted troops down to the Crown Prince to assist his offensive which would only bleed and distort the German plan even more. They would be later explicitly blamed with taking Bavarian noble interests over the interests of the German people as a whole and those accusations would not be far from the truth.\n\nTheir attack disintegrated into a mess almost immediately. Although they routed the French back to their defensive fortifications at Nancy, the attack was still a blunder of epic proportions. Low level guerrilla warfare by francs-tieruers dominated German morale. Hills and vineyards and hills and fallen trees became holes for marksmen to pick off hundreds of Germans. Paul Pouradier of the 58th RID infantry brigade describes the chaos: *\"The wagons bump each other and collide. Shafts splinter. Horses spook and collapse. Oaths and agitated cries ring out into the arkness. One artillery piece even falls into the stream alongside the road. Suddenly, shots rang out. Now, the disaster is complete. Whoever has a rifle or can lay their hands on one begins to shoot about wildly.\"*^[4] It took several hours to restore order.\n\nSo basically, the Germans weren't any more inherently organized or professional than the French. Sure they were drilled and marched in lockstep but at the end of the day everyone was taken by surprise by the devastation of the First World War. The French charged into artillery with their smaller, maneuverable cannons and cavalry thinking maneuver warfare was still the key and the Germans marched shoulder to shoulder in line formation into French machine guns at Morhang-Saar, Luneville, and the Siege of Liege. \n\nWere they more organized? Well that argument can certainly be made for the *mobilization and deployment*, in the execution and the combat itself I don't think that would be a fair generalization to make. Unfortunately, for both the Germans and your claim that they were 'more effective', when you plan everything down to the minute when anything goes awry things get thrown into quite the mess right away. Fortunately for the Germans, the French were even more disillusioned about warfare because of men like Joffre and also charged headfirst into artillery and machine guns and completely ignored the idea of a German invasion through Belgium until it was too late. \n\nBy the time the Germans had rolled over Belgium and were tearing apart Northern France and Joffre realized that the German attack would not be coming through the center it was too late and the French would be forced to retreat until they reached a collection of rivers that would empty into a larger river named the Marne where they would dig in, fortify, and beat the Germans back and send the war into what we now know as \"trench warfare\".\n\n**tl;dr:** \n\nThe reasons for German effectiveness in the war was the French insistent on maneuver warfare gave them a significant disadvantage in the artillery department which would come to dominate the war. Joffre's obsession with the cult of the offensive sent the French into unnecessary meatgrinders, weakening them with their already significantly lesser manpower reserves and perhaps most importantly the General Staff's refusal to take any action against the German advance in Belgium until it was far too late.\n\nThe German being more 'professional' and organized was born out of the Schlieffen and later Schlieffen-Moltke plan which called for a rapid defeat of the French combined with Schlieffen and Moltke's obsessive attention to detail. Other than that however I do think it's unfair to classify the Germans as somehow inherently more organized, professional, or efficient than the French. \n\nIt was the Germans who sent wave after wave of Landewr militia troops against French machine guns. It was the Germans, never the French or Belgians, who responded to defeat by burning entire villages and punishing guerrilla's by slaughtering and deporting thousands of French civilians and committed what is now known as the \"Rape of Belgium.\" (for very good reasons) They were not robots of professionalism. They were human beings just like you and me and they acted on emotion and fear and anger once the bullets started flying.\n\n--------\n\nNotes:\n\n[1] Hew Strachan, *The First World War*, p.239\n\n[2] Robert Doughty, *Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War* p. 27\n\n[3] *Ibid* p.26\n\n[4] Deuringer, *Die Schlact in Lothringen*, p. 544\n\nEverything else: Holger Herwig, *The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World* and the aforementioned Robert Doughty, *The Pyrrhic Victory*.\n", "The UK Ground forces were essentially an international police force used to maintain its position in its various empires. The UK at that time spent the vast majority of its time and effort on the Navy, as dominance of the seas was pretty much mandatory due to the size of the Empire.\n\nThe UK's main fighting force was the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) which was about 200,000 strong. This was arguably more professional, more organised and more effective that the German Conscript army. There is a famous story of the Germans believing they were up against machine gun fire at the Battle of Mons due to the intensity and accuracy of the British fire, however it was just very well trained men with bolt action .303s.\n\nThe problem was the BEF was that it was much smaller than the German force, and nearly wiped out in slowing the German armies advance to Paris.\n\nIts worth remembering that the UK was not accustomed to European land wars. They were more accustomed to watching the French and Prussians kick lumps out of each other and ally with who-ever looked like losing.\n\nSource: Hobsbawm's Age of Extreme's"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4ypi0k", "title": "Why was Nestorianism so readily accepted by Churches in the East, yet rejected to the West?", "selftext": "The Council of Ephesus decreed Nestor's views to be heresy, is hardly died out. What appealed about Nestorianism in the East that was rejected elsewhere, or visa versa?\n\nAdditionally, why was the duality of Jesus advocated by Nestor so controversial as to eventually be deemed heresy in the first place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ypi0k/why_was_nestorianism_so_readily_accepted_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6pp011", "d6q4gpu"], "score": [9, 7], "text": ["This is a great, but really big question! I'll attempt an answer here, but with the understanding that the acceptance and rejection of Nestorianism goes along lines both theological and political. \n\nFirstly, some background for those unfamiliar. Nestorios was installed as Patriarch of Constantinople in 428 by the Emperor Theodosius II. He had previously lived as a monk and was a student of Theodore of Mopsuestia, one of the most famous Antiochene theologians. \n\nNestorios entered into a controversy that was already live by the time he got to Constantinople (Grillmeier, *Christ in the Christian Tradition*, Vol. 1, 451). The controversy was over whether it was appropriate to call Mary the \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u03c4\u03cc\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2 (*Theotokos*, 'God-bearer' or, less literally, 'Mother of God') or the \u03c7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c4\u03cc\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2 (*Christotokos* or 'Christ-bearer'). This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it was one that had major theological implications. For one, if Jesus Christ is fully God (as the Nicene Creed of 325 affirmed) and is a single person, then we must affirm that Mary is the Theotokos, or else we sacrifice either His divinity or unity of person. Nestorios isn't so interested in defending this - though he claims he affirms both Christ's divinity and that He is not two persons - but is rather more interested, like the Antiochenes in general, in defending the Middle Platonist conception of the impassibility of God (cf. O'Keefe, \"Impassible Suffering? Divine Passion and Fifth-Century Christology,\" *Theological Studies*, 58 (1997): 39-60). But Nestorios here makes a mistake, I think, in that he forgets that the ultimate subject in a rational being is the person, not the nature. So when he wants to protect the impassibility of the Logos *in His divinity* (a perfectly orthodox statement to which all parties involved in the Nestorian controversy would agree), He makes the divinity - the nature - the ultimate subject of attribution and thus constrains his own ability to speak about Christ as a single person who is both fully God and fully man. \n\nNow, Nestorios later says later in the *Book of Heraclides*, which he wrote after his exile in 431, that he never had any issue with the term *Theotokos*, but we know this is untrue as we have a sermon of his dating from 429-430 where he explicitly takes issue with the word (cf. Loofs, *Nestoriana*, Sermon 9). \n\n\nI think what appealed to the East and not the West with respect to Nestorianism is the sort of soteriology put forward by Nestorios. Donald Fairbairn in his *Grace and Christology in the Early Church* splits Christologies up into two camps: those who see Christ as the one who comes and saves us from the muck and mire of our sins and thus stresses the presence of God with us in the person of Jesus Christ; and a Christology that sees salvation as a work of human effort in which God assists and cooperates (p. 12). The more pessimistic theological anthropology is characteristic of Western soteriology. One only needs to do a cursory read of St. Augustine's writings to see a representative example. But the East tended to have a more positive theological anthropology. Man was not thought of as so damaged and thus was more capable of virtue, even salvific virtue (for an example, look to Gregory of Nyssa's *De Hominis Opificio*). \n\nWhat's all this got to do with Nestorianism? Nestorios' Christ, according to his critics (like John Cassian), at least, is one who merits his identity. The Logos knows beforehand how virtuous the human Christ will be and thus cooperates with him in order to achieve salvation (which, again according to Nestorios' critics, is primarily by way of example - and thus verges into Pelagianism)(cf. Nestorios' teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestia, *De Incarnatione* 7 for this teaching explicitly - cited in Fairbairn 181). The West had already rejected Pelagianism, in large part due to its theological anthropology, and so a Christology which lent itself to a Pelagian soteriology was already suspect. Rather, Cyril of Alexandria (Nestorios' most prominent Eastern opponent - for a good overview, cf. John McGuckin, *St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy* -  and the Western Fathers (Leo, Cassian, etc) stressed the fullness of God's presence in the person of Christ and the impact the Incarnation had on human nature without any prior merit or virtue. If Nestorios could not say that Mary gave birth to the mother of God, could he say that God became man (as Athanasius) or that God died on the cross? If not, then his soteriology would be radically different from that espoused by both Eastern and Western fathers up to that point.\n\nSomeone else ought to field the political side of this question, but I know the Church of the East (often dubbed 'Nestorian' erroneously, as they are considerably more Theodorean than Nestorian) thrived in the Persian Empire if only for the fact that they were anti-Roman. \n", "To clarify some of the political dynamics that /u/GregoireDeNarek didn't (in an otherwise excellent answer).\n\nFirstly, *all* theological debates in the 4th and 5th century interacted with both political activity within the church (theology was never apolitical), as well as access to and support from the Emperor and his court. \n\nFor the Nestorian controversy, this polarised in the first half of the period with the political rivalry between Antioch (with whose theology Nestorius was associated) and Alexandria (where Cyril was a dominating influence).\n\nIt's worth nothing two things about Cyril. (1) He wasn't a very nice guy. Cyril was, in my view (and not mine alone), a belligerent bully. He utilised Egyptian monks as a form of organised mob violence, and was a repeated source of problems. (2) Cyril's theology comes very close to the opposite problem of Nestorius'. Indeed, the language Cyril used strongly suggested the combination of the divine and human natures into a new single *nature*, a *tertium quid*, which view later came to be termed Monophysitism and was itself the cause of significant fracturing in the churches of the Eastern half of the empire, and led to both ongoing controversies and schismatic churches.\n\nAs for the 'Nestorian Church'. It's widely acknowledged that this is a misnomer. To understand the political dimensions of what happened to 'Nestorianism' as a movement after its rejection, we need to keep in mind a few other facts: (1) the 'Church of the East' existed as a fairly autonomous entity *outside* the (Roman) Empire, and given the extent of the Sassanid empire, and this Church's geographical and numerical success, they were perhaps rivals in number to the church within the Roman Empire. (2) The eastern 'border' of the Roman empire shifted, and those border territories were a mixing point between Greek-speaking Christianity, and Syriac Christianity. Syiac was the dominant language of the Church of the East. (3) theological controversies in the Greek-speaking churches (in the 4th and 5th century) turned heavily upon technical theological discussions reliant upon Greek philosophy and Greek terminology. Terminological distinctions that were vitally and fiercely contested in Greek, were often difficult to translate and explain in Syriac (and Latin, for that matter).\n\nSo, the ultimate rejection of Nestorianism displaced communities and believers who were adherent to this theology. And they tended to be on the eastern edges of the empire anyway. So they went further east and found a ready acceptance in the Church of the East.\n\nThe Church of the East's own history is complicated by the fact that the Persians, in their various incarnations, were locked in a dualistic political struggle against the Roman empire that ebbed and flowed. The ascendancy of Christianity within the R. Empire caused Christians within the Sassanid territory to face greater opposition. \n\nThe perception and labelling of the CotE as 'Nestorian' is misguided because it presumes that the influx of Nestorian christians theologically determined the CotE. But, it's more accurate to understand that the CotE existed as an independent church with a long history of its own, which although it subscribed to Nicaea, didn't feel compelled to accept Ephesus in 451, and welcomed Nestorian believers as compatible with their own tradition.\n\n5th century stuff isn't my forte (4th cent. is), but I have a educated interest in CotE stuff and de-stabilising the very Greco-Roman centric version of church history that is the prevalent narrative."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5q5bj1", "title": "What was Nazi Art and Architecture like in the 1930's?", "selftext": "How did the totalitarian state manifest itself in the art and architecture of the period? I hear a lot about Nazi's collecting and hoarding art but I rarely hear about the art they actually produced", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5q5bj1/what_was_nazi_art_and_architecture_like_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcwm8ll"], "score": [2], "text": ["Architecture was an important part of the representation, with a goal to impress by ever larger plans, most of which never saw fruition due to the start of the war.\n\nHitler was especially interested in architecture and formed a close bond with Albert Speer (who would later become a cabinet member in charge of coordinating the war effort), who would design buildings in a classicist style with a dash of Renaissance whose impressions of monumental size would often be amplified by very muted, almost nonexistent, decoration of the facades. Prime examples of finished buildings can be found by googling for the Neue Reichskanzlei (New Reich Chancellory) or the (partly finished) Reichsparteitagsgel\u00e4nde (Party Rally Grounds). Plans for the \"Welthauptstadt Germania\" (World Capital Germania), fundamentally transforming Berlin, never went out of the planning stages; one of the few remains is a massive concrete Cylinder designed to test in situ the stability of the ground and its feasibility for monumental buildings.\n\nArchitecture was also used to represent Germany and its new political direction on the international stage. Most famous is probably the German pavilion at the World Fair 1937 in Paris (see [here](_URL_0_) to the left and [here](_URL_2_)), especially considering the striking contrast to the Weimar-era German pavilion of 1929 (see pictures of a reconstruction [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_3_)).\n\nThere is ample literature available, especially about the buildings and plans designed by Speer. I'm not sure I can suggest anything in particular, but if you have a large library close by, it's probably worth a try just hitting their catalog for photobooks or heavily illustrated books on the topics of Albert Speer, any of the buildings named above, or Nazi architecture in general.\n\nI'll leave the question of other art for other people to answer who are more knowledgeable than me. I will simply point out that the favored style of sculpturing likewise followed a classically-inspired style. You can see a couple of examples in the picture of the pavilion above. Searching for works produced by Arno Breker between the mid-1930ies and 1945 will give you a rough idea."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/La_Tour_Eiffel_en_1937_contrast.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Barcelona_mies_v_d_rohe_pavillon_weltausstellung1999_03.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Paris-expo-1937-pavillon_de_l%27Allemagne-02.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Pavell%C3%B3_Mies_20.JPG"]]}
{"q_id": "1ty8lw", "title": "Are battle depictions of one or two extremely skilled swordsmen that kill dozens of men, while thousands of poorly trained infantrymen that usually die true?", "selftext": "There are scenes and descriptions of battle, usually during medieval times and before, where there is one very skilled ~~swordsman~~ or fighter (that never dies or is very hard to kill) that slays dozens of men, while the rest of his comrades easily fall dead. Is this accurate?\n\nEdit: Doesn't have to be swordsmen, but any soldier yielding any common weapon of the day, that the opponent yields as well, that mows through others.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ty8lw/are_battle_depictions_of_one_or_two_extremely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cecsvzu", "cecvjs6", "cecwjed", "cecxz4y", "ced2i57"], "score": [151, 98, 27, 5, 12], "text": ["The most important things to remember about battles is that if you're alone you're dead. Skill definitely plays a role, but so does morale, equipment and luck. The last two I think are most important - a good armour allows one to face many opponents and deal with them. And will save you when a bunch of people start hitting you at the same time. \n\nRober De Clary describes such an event in his account on the fall of Constantinople. There one of the crusader ships manages to latch on a tower and assault it. The first person over the wall is a venetian man who is quickly slaughtered by the defending Greeks. The second person however is a well armed knight. The Greeks bring him to the ground and shower him with blows. Our fella being well protected by his shield and helm manages to get up and drive the defenders away. \nOn the other hand - if you are overwhelmed and cannot make a good use of your armour and skill you get killed. Examples are the Battle of Odrin from 1204, where the Latin emperor Baldwin managed to get separated from his main forces and overwhelmed by the forces of Ioannis of Bulgaria. \n\nIt seems that the overall skill and resolve of the army is way more important. For example in the battle of Philipoppolis in 1207 the Latins managed to defeat the Bulgarian army that outnumbered them vastly. The battle of Azincourt is a famous example of what happens when you cannot make a good use of the situation - the french knights got so bunched up that they could barely fight effectively and managed to get slaughtered by the English... ", "There is the tale of a single Norse warrior at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 who stood alone on a bridge across the river and defended it against the entire Saxon force. \n\nThe bridge was narrow so one imagines only one Saxon could fight him at any time. Some sources claim he killed 40 Saxons before one enterprising warrior floated underneath and dispatched him with a spear rammed up through his groin. \n\nThis story is mentioned only in Scandinavian sources, and not in the English and may be more legend than fact. But it is possible that it is based in truth.", "A lot of this is going back to earlier ideals of heroic combat. Whether or not it actually ever existed in practice, the idea of picked individuals battling for the honor of their respective armies/kings/states what have you was very much remembered. So even though Medieval warfare is really a team sport, being about 90% raiding and besieging strongpoints, 10% fighting in close formations, you still see picked champions dueling each other before the start of battles as late as the High Middle Ages.\n\nThen you have the whole other issue of some men seemingly being more able to kill at will. It's quite muddled up - a fellow named S.L.A. Marshall did a study on it, interviewing combat veterans in WWII and Korea, but he kept no documentation and his findings can't be confirmed. The study reports that only about 15% of any body of (modern) fighting men actively try to kill their enemies, but this is very disputed, as we're basically relying on the (deceased) author's word.", "Skill and armor can only get you so far. An army depends on the cohesion of its units and their resolve. A single highly skilled warrior could do well in battle if he fights with a strong and well-organized army at his side. Battles are chaos, it's impossible to cover every angle and depending on the location in which you are fighting it could be very easy to lose you footing. A could example of this was during the 100 year war between France and England when the long bow was first introduced. The French got slaughtered partially because of the superiority of the long bow over the French crossbow but also due to the muddy terrain that tripped the soldiers and made it difficult to reload. However take a case like the battle off Thermopylae where you have a bottleneck situation and it one with skill could definitely shine ( perhaps the Thermopylae is a bad example considering the Greeks were slaughtered but in a case where the armies are more evenly sized such a situation could potentially allow for such heroics).\n\n", "I asked a [similar question recently here](_URL_0_) concerning martial skill in combat; I do not wish to hamper further discussion, but I wanted to share some of the excellent answers already received."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1st3ii/historically_how_much_did_martial_skill_in_combat/"]]}
{"q_id": "2ehlua", "title": "Why arent steering wheels in the middle of vehicles???", "selftext": "What made people put them on the sides?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ehlua/why_arent_steering_wheels_in_the_middle_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjzp8p7"], "score": [6], "text": ["Passenger space, putting the driver's seat off-center lets you add a rear view mirror (and prior to that being a thing, the ability to look over your shoulder- placing the driver in the middle gave them a rather bad blind spot right behind them) which has a better view of what's immediately behind the car. You also have to consider that, traditionally, the engine *must* be placed in the center of the car, given that it's the heaviest thing *in* the car. There isn't a lot of good ways to have the steering column fit *around* that without putting the engine on a mount *behind* the car, which can add cost and complexity. \n\n\nThen again, some of the first cars where rather *out there*:\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\n_URL_3_\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.automotoportal.com/media/images/vijesti/070516008.jpg", "http://www.speednik.com/files/2013/02/1905.jpg", "http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/es/in/es_in_elwood_1_e.jpg", "http://www.buzzle.com/images/autos/cars/car1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "12ws7k", "title": "Did black politicians elected to office during Reconstruction attempt to stop disenfranchisement efforts?", "selftext": "I was recently reading about the [proportion of black officeholders](_URL_0_) in the US during Reconstruction. When Jim Crow laws/disenfranchisement began, did any of these politicians attempt to stop it? Would they have had the power to do anything? More broadly, how were these officeholders treated and did they have any legislative accomplishments?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ws7k/did_black_politicians_elected_to_office_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ysa4q", "c6yuof2"], "score": [13, 10], "text": ["While there were a significant number of black politicians elected during the Reconstruction period, they really never had a chance of stopping the wave of sentiment in favor of Jim Crow and other \"separate but equal\" legislation.  In addition, despite blacks accounting for 40-70% of a state's population in the south, that same ratio didn't carry over to local, state, and federal representation.\n\nBy the time Jim Crow Laws were actually implemented towards the tail end of Reconstruction and beyond, southern Democrats had become so entrenched that it was pretty much an unstoppable force.  \n\nIronically, it was two white politicians (Sumner and Ben Butler),that helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in a last-ditch effort to prevent these types of laws from being implemented.  However, the Supreme Court ruled most of this law unconstitutional in 1883, and rest is history.\n\n", "Southern state governments began passing the Black Codes, as discriminatory laws directed black citizens were called, in 1865. [Here](_URL_2_) is an example of Mississippi Black Codes passed in November 1865. These, like most, were primarily intended to curtail black freedom in the labor market. \"Vagrancy\" laws made it illegal for able-bodied people, even children, *not* to be employed. This meant that if they did not have a job, they could be arrested and fined $150-$200 - a vast sum at that particularly cash-strapped time. Jailed men, women and children then became cheap and convenient convict labor. As time passed, the scope of Black Codes broadened to legalize discrimination in other areas of life.\n\nDuring Reconstruction, black politicians attempted to stop discrimination. However, they did not hold the majority (they came closest in SC). In Georgia, the legislature simply decided that the constitution did not confer office-holding rights to blacks so all elected black legislators were expelled in 1868. One fourth of Georgia's black legislators at the time were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. This was not unique. Politically active black people throughout the South were attacked, sometimes killed for their beliefs. [Here](_URL_0_) is an account of the Camilla massacre, in which at least nine blacks were killed and 25 wounded at an 1868 Republican political rally.\n\nBlack officeholders attempted different strategies in their attempt to shape laws to help black citizens. Some fought back, others attempted to be conciliatory, and some did both. [Hiram Revels](_URL_1_), the first black member of the U.S. Congress, elected in 1870, successfully appealed to the War Department on behalf of black mechanics from Baltimore who were barred from working at the U.S. Navy Yard in early 1871. He supported black Georgians who argued for federal intervention into the 1868 ouster of black legislators. The Georgia legislature eventually agreed to a congressional mandate reinstating the legislators as a requirement for re-entry into the Union in July 1870. Revels had it easy compared to southern Republicans, who did not have the support of a Republican-leaning majority.\n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era_of_the_United_States#African-American_officeholders"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-639", "http://baic.house.gov/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=14", "http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/recon/code.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1lwcxp", "title": "A book about Hypatia of Alexandria", "selftext": "This does not seem like the right place to post this, however, I'm not sure where else to go. I'm looking for a book about Hypatia of Alexandria that is more or less historically accurate. If this is the completely wrong sub feel free to downvote me!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lwcxp/a_book_about_hypatia_of_alexandria/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc3jnqg"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're indeed in the right place.  Fear not!\n\nI'm not sure if there is a recent comprehensive academic study of Hypatia of Alexandria out there, but [here's](_URL_3_) a very long list of books either on her life or incorporating her into the history of mathematics.\n\nI would caution, however, that a lot of the stuff written about her life recently has been skewed to fit the antiquated [Conflict Thesis](_URL_0_).  There have been publications - some inspired by the [recent and largely fictionalized film](_URL_1_) about Hypatia - that depict her as a martyr for \"science,\" \"reason,\" or whatever else people want to attach to her.  Avoid [books like this](_URL_2_), which have a clear ideological bias."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis", "http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2010/05/hypatia-and-agora-redux.html", "http://books.google.com/books?id=P6X1DJ7UIb4C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=hypatia+of+alexandria&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=TDErUv7lM8GtqgGEvoHQCw&amp;ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=hypatia%20of%20alexandria&amp;f=false", "http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Hypatia/books.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1ym4yf", "title": "Was Marx racist?", "selftext": "I've heard him being accused of this and read some quotes that sound racist by him and Engels, and I was wondering if there was any validity to this.\n\nedit: spelling", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ym4yf/was_marx_racist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfltjyl"], "score": [9], "text": ["The problem really is the time period, as there wasn't a concept of \"racism\" in the 19th century. [(Oxford dictionary cites \"racialism\" as the first use in the early 1900s.)](_URL_1_) Basically, from what I've read, Marx uses the word \"nigger\" as a descriptive term, and there is little concept for a kind of supremacy of whites over blacks. He often supports black people while using the word, so this is clearly not damning evidence of a racist Karl Marx.\n\n >  Mr Johnson\u2019s policy is less and less to my liking, too. Nigger-hatred is coming out more and more violently, and he is relinquishing all his power vis-\u00e0-vis the old lords in the South. If this should continue, all the old secessionist scoundrels will be in Congress in Washington in 6 months time. Without coloured suffrage nothing can be done, and Johnson is leaving it up to the defeated, the ex-slaveowners, to decide on that. It is absurd. Nevertheless, one must still reckon on things turning out differently from what these barons imagined. After all, the majority of them have been completely ruined and will be glad to sell land to immigrants and speculators from the North. The latter will arrive soon enough and make a good number of changes. I think the mean whites will gradually die out. Nothing more will become of this race; those who are left after 2 generations will merge with the immigrants to make a completely different race.\n\n > The niggers will probably turn into small squatters as in Jamaica. Thus ultimately the oligarchy will go to pot after all, but the process could be accomplished immediately at one fell swoop, whereas it is now being drawn out.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n\nAs far as I understand it, many who campaigned for black rights in the 19th century, including Lincoln, did not desire full equality between the races. Accusing someone of racism from the 19th century is anachronistic, and it is better to evaluate someone by their actions and ideas towards black people at the time, rather to take a modern perspective.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_07_15.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#Usage_of_the_term_and_related_terms"]]}
{"q_id": "2lupqb", "title": "Was there ever any domestic opposition to imperialism in Europe?", "selftext": "Obviously many opposed their government holding onto empires that were uneconomical and going through vicious civil war but was there ever domestic opposition on the basis of its morality? Eg. Were there British Parliament members who advocated for the abolishment of the empire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2lupqb/was_there_ever_any_domestic_opposition_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clych75"], "score": [7], "text": ["Actually, New Zealand is an almost perfect example of this. Australia had been set up as a penal colony in 1787 when the \"First Fleet\" arrived, and much persecution of native Aborigines followed. At this time Britain had recently lost the American Colonies, and though there had been a lot of domestic support for the American revolution, the feeling was still very much that colonies fared better under British influence. By the 1830's however attitudes began to change. Britain abolished slavery, repealed many oppressive laws designed to keep Catholics down, and the idea of Humanism was beginning to establish itself in London. The topic of New Zealand cropped up a lot in parliamentary debates, many Radical members (Forerunners of the Liberal Party) thought something out to be done to protect Maori interests and sovereignty.\n\nNew Zealand, by 1835, was essentially a lawless land where merchant ships often traded muskets or alcohol with local Maori for women and land. So in 1835 New Zealand was declared independent from Australia (previously it had been under the jurisdiction of the government of New South Wales) and formed a colony in it's own right. People debate the reasons for this, but it's generally accepted this was a measure to reduce lawlessness and protect Maori from getting swindled. Certainly the first two governors, Hobson and Fitzroy, did a lot of work in protecting Maori interests as well as preventing tribes from warring and the French attempting to establish a colony on the South Island.\n\nIn 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the British Crown and many Maori chiefs (Though certainly not all, and controversy surrounds the Maori translations of the English text). One of the main clauses of the treaty was that Maori would only be allowed to sell land to the Crown and any and all previous land deals were considered void.  Prior to this and for a long time after Maori chiefs travelled to London, held audiences with British Royalty, and were basically treated as 19th century celebrities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3l23b9", "title": "When, and why, did the US close its borders to Mexico.", "selftext": "I've looked around a bit, but only come across \"Regan did it\" as an answer without much to support it.  From what my mother mentioned, immigrants from Mexico had a day of registration every year, and that was it. What changed?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l23b9/when_and_why_did_the_us_close_its_borders_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv2ldn9"], "score": [3], "text": ["Around Reagan's presidency, drug trafficking was popular. Pablo Escobar and the rest of the Medell\u00edn cartel were bringing 15 tons of cocaine to America a day. Many of their trade routes went through the Mexican-American border. This was a big factor to having heavy control over the border during Reagan's War on Drugs.\n\nBut even in the past we see that the border has been in constant dispute. The annexation of Texas led to the Mexican-American War, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) where America also gained New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Then the U.S. bought Tucson and Sierra Vista in the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 to build a railway. America gained a lot of land and it's kinda been America's mission to keep it for ourselves, away from the Confederate States during the Civil War, the French, and the Mexicans."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a24fp7", "title": "According to the BBC, the average life expectancy for an Allied pilot in 1915 was just 11 days; how were they able to recruit pilots? Was it understood just how hazardous a posting it was? What major technical advances (if any) were made through the course of the war to make it safer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a24fp7/according_to_the_bbc_the_average_life_expectancy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eawyhm6"], "score": [15], "text": ["Was that 11 days on which combat occurred or 11 days in a row? I ask because I once read something like the average life expectancy of American bomber crews in combat in WWII Europe was something like 35 seconds, but this was because of the strict definition of what constituted \u201ccombat\u201d and the funny ways averages sometimes behave in certain datasets."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6pzd49", "title": "How common were fighting churchmen in Medieval Europe?", "selftext": "By \"fighting churchmen\" I mean ministers like priests/bishops, monks, and friars who took active roles (i.e. fighting and killing) in battles. I know there were monastic orders of knights like the Hospitallers and Teutonic Order so I'm not asking about those (correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is most of the actual fighters in those orders were laymen anyway).\n\nAnd yes, I know \"Medieval Europe\" encompasses a lot of people, places, and wars over a long stretch of time so if the experts wish to speak specifically on one or two times and places that's fine, or just a general overview is fine too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pzd49/how_common_were_fighting_churchmen_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dkuep3w"], "score": [4], "text": ["In Spring 1218, an Oeselian army, a pagan people of the Baltic, marched upon the Christian settlements in Metsepole, a region in Latvia. A parish priest, Godfrey, mounted his horse and rode to the surrounding villages, summoning help from the German bishop of Riga. The next day, the Christians faced the pagans in battle:\n\n\"There were only seven of the servants of the German bishop and the eighth was the priest Godfrey, who belted on his weapons for war and put on his breastplate, like a giant, desiring to save his sheep from the jaws of the wolves. They rushed valiantly upon the Oeselians from behind, killing some of them most bravely.\"\n\nThis account is taken from the chronicle of Henry of Livonia, himself a parish priest. Clerical armsbearing certainly did happen though it is difficult to state exactly how common it was. Canon law had repeatedly condemned clerical violence in the eleventh century. From 1049 to 1079 twelve church councils or synods, seven under the direct auspices of the papacy, forbade clerical armsbearing in some form, suggesting it was relatively common, or at least the church thought it was. However, by the late medieval period this opposition had shifted. The advent of the crusades, military orders like the Knights Templar, and new developments in just war theory all contributed to more lax rules on clerical violence as did the conclusion that by natural law priests had the right to defend themselves. A late fourteenth century canon lawyer in Bologna, Giovanni da Legnano, assessed a series of instances to decide when it was acceptable in canon law for priests to fight and kill. These scenarios included:\n\n* When attacked whilst baptising a dying child\n\nAnswer: yes, but only if the child will survive the time it takes to kill your attacker. Otherwise you need to baptise them whilst you're being murdered.\n\n* Killing someone in self-defence whilst celebrating mass and then continuing with the ceremony?\n\nAnswer: Yes, but only if you are in mortal danger and there was no other way to defend yourself and continue the mass.\n\nAfter the eleventh century clerical violence was no longer repeatedly condemned as it had been. Of the seven ecumenical councils from 1123 to 1311, five did not mention the matter at all. When armsbearing was condemned, it often seemed contradictory, as at the council of Vienne in 1311-2. The same council ordered that Benedictines could not bear arms in their abbey precinct without the permission of their abbot, suggesting that they could bear arms outside. In 1289, Nicholas IV allowed the Franciscans to carry weapons 'in defence of the Roman Church, the Christian faith, or their country, or with the permission of their ministers'.\n\nSenior clergy were sometimes freed from restrictions on armsbearing. The Carolingians tacitly exempted bishops and abbots from the definition of 'clericus', allowing them to serve militarily. The 1050 council of Coyanza ruled that priests and deacons in the Castillian diocese of Oviedo, were barred from 'arms of war'. Bishops were not mentioned, possibly deliberately as such senior ecclesiastics could often be found serving as royal commanders. For example, Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham, was with Edward I when he put down a Welsh uprising in 1295, participated in the English invasion of Scotland in 1296, and fought at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. In 1300 he besieged and stormed his own cathedral of Durham following a dispute with the prior over the right of visitation. An anonymous poem of the event recounts that:\n\n\"From boyhood Bishop Anthony  \nHad learned to fight most readily,  \nAnd in violence trusted more  \nThan in the texts of canon law\"\n\nBut such violence was not universally condemned. The Pope made Bek patriarch of Jerusalem in 1306. When he died in 1311 Bek was buried in the same cathedral he stormed and whose monks he attacked. He became the first bishop of Durham since St Cuthbert to be buried there.\n\nIt is likely that frontier areas like Livonia and the Crusader States were where clerical violence was most common and perhaps the most tolerated. In 1119 Bernard, patriarch of Antioch, defended the city with a force of 'armed clergy and knights' until Baldwin II of Jerusalem arrived with a relieving force. In January 1120 a church council at Nablus, held by Baldwin II and the patriarch of Jerusalem, allowed clergy to bear arms for defence. \n\nHenry of Livonia's chronicle has several instances suggesting that priests in the Baltic had to be prepared to fight at short notice. The passage above states that Godfrey's weapons and breastplate are 'his', suggesting that this parish priest had his own weaponry and armour. Henry also appears to have approved of Godfrey's actions. 'like a giant, desiring to save his sheep from the jaws of the wolves' are references to passages from Maccabees and elsewhere in the Bible. \n\nAnother passage describes an attack by the pagan Kurs on Riga: \n\n\"The citizens, the Brothers of the Militia [the Sword Brethren], and the ballistarii, few though they were, together with the clerics and the women, all had recourse to arms\"\n\nHenry even mentions an anecdote featuring himself ready to fight. He and his fellow priests were interrupted whilst baptising a man called Kyriawan:\n\n\"While we were on the point of annointing him with the holy oil, a great clamour arose and a rushing of our army through all the streets and everyone ran to arms, crying that a great host of pagans was coming against us. We immediately put down the holy chrism and the other holy articles, therefore, and hurried to the ministry of shields and swords.\"\n\nSources:\n\nJames A. Brundage, *The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia* (Chichester, 2003).\n\nLawrence Duggan, *Armsbearing and the Clergy in the History and Canon Law of Western Christianity* (Woodbridge, 2013).\n\nT. E. Holland and F. W. Kelsey (eds), *Tractatus de bello, de represaliis et de duello* (Oxford, 1917)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2gp0by", "title": "In the middle ages, was romantic love between spouses encouraged or considered profane?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gp0by/in_the_middle_ages_was_romantic_love_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckllcn8", "cklmh3n", "ckmcjju"], "score": [3, 2, 2], "text": ["\"Middle ages\" covers a huge amount of time; could you be more specific? Also, where?", "As stated by /u/EyeStache, the middle ages is huge and \"8th-16th century\" does nothing to narrow it down.\n\nTo give you a general/generic answer to a vague question: At least in Western Europe, the more \"noble\" you and your bloodline was, the more \"practical\" and arranged your life+marriage was, especially if you were prime (or close to it) inheritor of a dynasty. Lowborn and common people were free to marry based on love and did so, though there was often some interaction from the family, especially for women.\n\nTo directly answer the spirit of your question - there's no evidence that \"romantic love\" was considered taboo or odd, but it would be found to be impractical if you were in any position of nobility. Outside of dynastic relations, that mattered much less. People married often with and against familial wishes and for self-interest. This is evidenced somewhat in the copious amount of romantic literature and plays based on love.", "If your interest is captial-R Romantic love then yes, it was condemned by members of the Church on occasion (not that the armed martial elite of the High and Late Middle Ages seemed to care!). If you mean the more intimate and personal love of two individuals then no - not as long as it didn't contravene whatever particular sexual regulations the Church was imposing at that particular juncture. Unfortunately this is was the crux of Romantic love, it tended to exist outside of the bonds of marriage (this could be acceptable to both sides if it remained unconsumated).\n\nI've written on marriage and adultery and the [tension between chivalric society and ecclesiastical admonitions before](_URL_1_) and [above/below](_URL_0_) I've expanded on how even a supposed argument in favour of love might be perceived as perverting the natural order. This is, of course, a rather select case study of late twelfth-century texts. The wider debate stretched across centuries and was affected by many different variables which do make a general answer impossible.\n\nLove was a powerful driving emotion in the Middle Ages but remains one of the most difficult emotions to articulate. There are some excellent studies available on love in the Middle Ages and if you'd like a shortlist of some of them then I'd be happy to provide one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gp0by/in_the_middle_ages_was_romantic_love_between/ckmagxm", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a7bsk/how_ethical_were_the_knights_of_the_late_middle/cj1cith"]]}
{"q_id": "5n9mnr", "title": "Is Soviet-style command economy really a bad economic model or is the disparity a result of western sanctions?", "selftext": "Given that the vast majority of the world's wealth before the rise of communism was already concentrated in the West? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n9mnr/is_sovietstyle_command_economy_really_a_bad/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dca2rdq", "dca5tj6", "dcaa6g2"], "score": [86, 17, 25], "text": ["Back in the 1920s the effectiveness of socialism (in the sense of a planned economy - \"collective ownership of the means of production\") was a topic of live debate, with Ludwig von Mises and later Frederick Hayek arguing that a command economy couldn't work out what goods and services needed to be produced due to the knowledge problem - planners wouldn't know what opportunity costs producers faced, or what end consumers wanted. \n\nTo illustrate, say there's a big fire at an aluminium plant, and thus total aluminium output falls. Under a market economy prices rise. So every aluminium user starts looking for ways to reduce their aluminium use. Perhaps it's easy to convert to using wood for window frames instead of aluminium, while aluminium is very useful in food and drink containers. Under a market economy, the higher prices would lead the substitution to mostly be made by window frames, not food. (I have no idea about the relative value of the two uses in actuality, the point of von Mises' argument is that I don't need to know.)\n\nAgainst that, Oskar Lange and others argued that a central planning board could bring production in line with that of a market system by 'trial and error'. I don't have the quote to hand but I recall once Hayek noting in a book I was reading that the socialist economists had gone from arguing that socialism could beat market outcomes to arguing that socialism could equal them. \n\nFrom the free-market side, however, Bryan Caplan has pointed out that history hasn't proved it was the calculation problem that made socialism (remember I'm defining it as a centrally planned economy) impossible, after all the USSR and Eastern Europe did function for several decades under communism, and socialism has a number of other problems (eg motivation). \n\nSo the topic isn't finally settled, but there are theoretical reasons to think that a centrally planned economy has fundamental problems. \n\nAs for the importance of Western sanctions, when I hear this argument I always wonder what the proponents mean by it. If trade is so important that Western sanctions wrecked a country's economy, doesn't that imply that trade with Western countries is pretty vital for growth?  \n\nSources:\n\nMoss, Laurence, The Economics of Ludwig von Mises: Toward a Critical Reappraisal, [Chapter 5, Ludwig von Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism](_URL_0_ 5) by Murray N. Rothbard, 1976\nMurray N. Rothbard\n\n[Len Brewster on \"Towards a new Socialism? by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell, Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman Books, 1993\", Review Essay] (_URL_2_), The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol.7, No.1 (Spring 2004): 65-77. (Note this has a succinct summary of the calculation debate.)\n\nBryan Caplan, [Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist](_URL_1_)", "Let me try and get your question right. If Russian Empire hadn't been poorer than the West before the revolution and if the USSR hadn't had to spend so much on military (it actively traded with Western nations even during the Cold War) and its satellites, would its economy have kept up with the West?\n\nThat's two very big ifs for a history question. I doubt you'll get a definite answer.\n\nIf you really want a clean slate comparison between  market and planned economies,  history won't give you that.", "The economic historian Robert Allen wrote an interesting reassessment of the Soviet economy's performance in *Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution*, which is summarised in [this paper](_URL_0_). He argues that the Soviet economy performed fairly well until about 1960-70, and its economic growth was faster than most other countries starting at a similar point; in 1917 Russia's economy was not comparable to countries in western Europe. During the 1930s he says that the command economy was effectively able to move workers from rural to urban areas, where they were more productive, and create capital to increase productivity, with the result that consumption increased along with output in heavy industry. But by the 1960s the plans made did not support high growth any more, and led to stagnation. The easy part of development was over as there wasn't a lot of surplus labour in rural areas that could be put to more productive use, and the planners failed to adapt to new industries, instead putting resources into renovating old plants. Military spending during the Cold War also diverted resources from civilian economic development.\n\nGeneral lessons - I think China's development performance shows something similar, though I don't know as much detail about that - are that (a) command economies can outperform capitalist economies in the early stages of development if the planners have the right ideas, but if the planners are misguided they can underperform capitalist economies (compare China under Mao to China under Deng), so in a sense capitalist development might be more reliable, and (b) it's much harder for command economies to outperform capitalist economies in the later stages of development where growth is more about innovation than just accumulating capital."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.econlib.org/library/NPDBooks/Moss/mslLvM5.html#Essay", "http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm", "https://mises.org/sites/default/files/qjae7_1_6.pdf"], [], ["http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.507.8966&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "3d0hw7", "title": "Did the Nazis ever seriously consider invading Ireland?", "selftext": "In light of its strategic position with regards England", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d0hw7/did_the_nazis_ever_seriously_consider_invading/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct0pt9z", "ct0swrt", "ct0v2zp", "ct0vcq9", "ct0wrsi", "ct0xsfh", "ct1266g", "ct17w6s", "ct1gdpa"], "score": [87, 212, 8, 526, 8, 4, 143, 2, 3], "text": ["So, how \"serious\" was Operation Green, then? I mean, the whole job of a General Staff is to come up with contingency plans for pretty much everything, right? So was there ever real consideration given to doing it, was it more a theoretical exercise?", "This thread seems to be accumulating multiple below standard posts. Remember, if you can contribute nothing more than your skills at using Google to find an article, please don't post.\n\nAsk yourself these questions:\n\n* Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?\n\n* Have I done research on this question?\n\n* Can I cite my sources?\n\n* Can I answer follow-up questions?\n\nIf you answer \"Yes\" to all of these questions, then proceed. If you answer \"No\" to one or more of these questions, seriously reconsider what you're posting. For more clarification, see [our rules](_URL_0_).", "\"Serious\" is difficult to quantify.  Were mobilization plans ever executed upon?  No.  Were there German agents operating in Ireland and some studies a la \"Operation Green\" type research?  Yes.\n\nAs you touch on in your question... Ireland was considered an appetizing strategic position for the Germans against the British, as it would open up a western flank against Great Britain, and provide a superior base of operations for naval support and aerial patrols in the North Atlantic.  That's not to mention the anti-British sentiment among a great number of Irish citizens (not the majority, but enough to provide a significant native support network).\n\nAs far as exploration of a real plan, the IRA did share intelligence with the Abwher.  Mark Hull wrote a fantastic book on the subject; [Irish Secrets and German Espionage in Wartime Ireland](_URL_0_).  But Germans were more afraid of a counter-offensive - knowing the British could quickly counter-invade, and probably occupy / control / defend Ireland far easier than they could.\n\nAlong the same lines, Britain actually wanted Ireland to join the war on their side - going as far as offering Northern Ireland be united with the Irish Republic if there was an Irish Declaration of War against Germany and Italy.  de Valera rejected this, there's not a lot of great sources on the matter, but my understanding is that he feared the offer was not genuine - and Ireland would need to commit troops to a conflict while the unification would not be clearly part of the deal until after the war.\n\nOn the German side, many officials resisted the idea because any slight step towards an alliance with or an invasion of Ireland would justify the British to do the same.  Much as with their hope for the U.S. - the Germans saw an alliance as unlikely and problematic for a variety of logistical reasons, and felt neutrality was the best possible outcome for Germany.", "I don't think so.  Because the German Navy suffered such heavy losses to the Royal Navy in the Invasion of Norway in mid 1940, the Nazis never again had the power to contest the Allies at sea.  To somewhat circumvent this, the Blitz was meant to gain air superiority over a potential invasion of England over the English Channel.  Operation Sea Lion, however, was postponed on September 15, 1940 when the Luftwaffe incurred a particularly heavy defeat at the hands of the Royal Air Force.  By October, Operation Sea Lion was called off completely by Hitler.  So as to a potential invasion of Ireland, The Luftwaffe could not support any potential sea landing because it would be outside of their range and the Nazis also did not have a Navy that could contest the Royal Navy.  One of the United Kingdom's greatest strengths in World War II turned out to be its island nation that the Wehrmacht could not take advantage of.\n\nZeiler, Thomas. \"Annihilation A Global Military History of World War II\". Oxford University Press, 2011.", "Would Ireland's neutrality have worked as a deterrent of sorts? Also, was there ever any sort of evidence of the Germans trying to get the Irish on their side?", "As a follow up question: I always heard that Ireland was moderately supportive of Germany, providing some volunteers and resources.  Is that just an urban legend?", "Well, the thing is, you could almost as easily ask why the British didn't invade! Irish neutrality during the war is interesting, to say the least! /u/Nonstr isn't wrong about the logistical shortcomings of any attempt to invade. Although Hitler commented on how wonderful a base Ireland would offer for bombing the UK, if Germany couldn't manage to cross over to the English coast, Ireland would be considerably harder, even given their meager defenses. Operation Green, the planned invasion of Ireland, even existed on paper, but importantly, it was only envisioned in conjunction with Operation Sealion at best (it was hardly a necessary component and wouldn't necessarily have happened even if they did invade the UK), not as a standalone matter. So the very short answer is that German consideration of an invasion of Ireland was at best serious only insofar as an invasion of Britain was, and when that didn't materialize, the invasion of Ireland became a pipe-dream at best. But just because the chance of invasion was slim doesn't mean that we don't have a ton to talk about!\n\nPrior to the war, as war looked more and more likely, the Irish were willing to throw their weight around, comparatively. In 1938, PM de Valera insinuated that if Britain went to war with Germany while still still occupying Irish territory, it would engender hostility from the Irish, and as such as able to secure the British removing themselves from the Treaty Ports, three ports in Ireland which the British still occupied, and would have used to station escort destroyers had war broke out. And after that concession, the Irish only continued to press, now focusing on the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland. As such, when war broke out, relations between the UK and Ireland were not their best.\n\nThe Irish Defense Forces had 6,000 active men in the army, *almost* doubled with reservists and Local security services when war broke out, as well as a few poor quality planes, and no navy at all. Initially, the Irish pushed a hard neutral stance. They did nothing to hamper the status of German nationals, and rebuffed British attempts to gain transit rights, let alone return use of the Treaty Ports as many expected. Churchill, being then in charge of the Admiralty, was livid, privately was accusing the Irish of provisioning German U-Boats, and trying to push for the taking of the Treaty Ports by arms. It didn't happen though, and although the ports did not return to British control, secret negotiations did result on concessions towards clandestine cooperation. British officers worked with the Irish for a joint defense plan against German invasion, and Irish coast-watchers, although not linking directly to the British, would transmit reports in clear, rather than code, purposefully allowing the British to easily intercept and use any spottings of German ships and subs. There was also unspoken approval to allow British \"hot pursuit\" into Irish waters. Churchill still wasn't happy, but his armed trawlers patrolling the Irish coast never spotted a single German sub reprovisioning...\n\nChurchill's rise to PM of course did nothing to assuage Irish concerns about the British, and negotiations with *both* sides were going on, demanding Germany promise to respect Irish soil, and that if Germany won they would respect an independent and united Ireland (Which Germany happily hinted at), while at the same time seeking promise from the UK that they would rush troops to the defense if Germany invaded - but of course not a moment before a German boot hit the shore (and hinting that were they given Northern Ireland, maybe they would even join the war, which while tentatively explored, never resulted in anything).\n\nBritish concerns reached a boiling point in November, 1940. Churchill gave a firey speech about how Ireland refusing to cooperate hurt British interests before Parliament, and in response, while the Irish 1st Division remained guarding the coast, the 2nd Division now began guarding the northern border (although it was more a political message of defiance than any actual fear the British were going to invade). The Germans, seeing an opening, offered to ship military equipment to bolster Ireland's meager forces, and in a perhaps not so subtle message, the equipment offered was British made arms that had been recovered at Dunkirk... Additionally, an \"expanded military mission\" was going to be seconded to the Embassy in Dublin. Realizing that while he wanted to be prickley, this would be an insult too far for the British, de Valera did not accept the German offer, and even ordered that if the German military mission flying into Dublin on Dec. 24 landed, they were to be arrested. So only a month after trading barbs with Britain, it was now the Germans who the Irish were faced off against, and the military was put on alert (\"Which side?\" was the supposed question of the Chief of Staff upon being informed). A plane did in fact show up, but never tried to land.\n\nThe Germans were pissed, and the German Ambassador alluded to consequences. A week later, bombs fell on Ireland two nights in a row, killing three and wounding twenty-four. Ambassador Hempel probably did not know this was what would happen, and on his counsel, nothing further happened, and the Germans in fact withdrew their offer of arms, as well as their general campaign to force Ireland into their camp.\n\nAs for the British though, Churchill was willing to keep playing hardball, proposing that the \"400,000 tons of feeding-stuffs and fertilizer\" shipped to Ireland could no longer be undertaken. Although part of a trade where wheat and fertilizer was exchanged for beef and beer (seriously), Churchill believed that the UK could do fine without the Irish side of things. Simply put, the pressure didn't work. The Irish were able to put up with some hardship, and make up for others, including imports from other neutrals like Portugal and Spain. And they could always point out that while the British civilian was rationed heavily on meats, butter and eggs, they were able to enjoy theirs with minimal trouble.\n\nNow, there is an irony here. The Irish were neutral, and as noted, not trusting the British, but in the end, it would be wrong not to say that they were, in the end, at least *slightly* favoring of the Allies, if only for their own ends. They continued to try and expand their military, by 1941 with 40,000 men under arms and five times that as reserves, so arms and equipment was needed, and the UK and US obliged, including torpedo boats (essentially their entire navy), a few planes, and rifles. Even as they were negotiating for the arms though, namely a large shipment of rifles from the US in early 1941, Minister Frank Aiken bluntly (to FDR's consternation) asserted that they were to repel aggression, whether British or German. \n\nBy 1942, Ireland seemed less important. The US was in the war, and the benefits of bringing Ireland in as an ally, or at least a leaning non-belligerent, became less and less important. Sure, there was still attempts to undermine de Valera, but they were not as harsh or public as in 1939-1941. There was still distrust, but on several key matters, there was understanding and cooperation anyways. Allied and Irish counterintelligence officers worked jointly to monitor German military personnel in the Dublin Embassy. The last serious \"attack\" on the Irish came from US Ambassador David Gray and British Ambassador John Maffey, although it was hardly necessary at this point and speaks more to settling a score for earlier slights. Despite the aforementioned cooperation, which they of course knew about, they wanted to publicly embarrass de Valera's government, sending him both \"notes\" in Feb. 1944 requesting the expulsion of all Axis diplomats. \n\nThe Irish were of course seriously offended by what he took as a threat and undermining of sovereignty, and once again the Defense Forces were put on high alert. Rumors of invasion soon came up, and de Valera did little to quell them in his speech a week later, noting \"at any moment war may come upon us\", only feeding concerns. Instead of embarrassing de Valera by either a) Forcing him to comply or b) Publicly state he was \"hostile to Allied interests\", he had called their bluff, and now it was the Anglo-Americans who were embarrassed, since they certainly weren't going to follow through and do anything. Churchill of course, never one to back down, responded by curtailing exports to Ireland further, which just looked like more bullying and cooler heads had to issue a statement assuring the Irish that it was a temporary measure as the Allies built up their forces for the invasion and would be ended as soon as possible. \n\nDe Valera's popularity only went higher and higher, having stood up against the Brits and not flinched. And then he almost screwed it up! Having shepherded Ireland through the way safely, on May 2nd, he personally visited the Irish embassy to offer his condolences for the death of Hitler... The Irish people may have enjoyed seeing him pull the British lion's tail, but they certainly didn't like that, just when the World was learning of the true extent of Nazi horror. Churchill of course could not leave it unremarked, noting in a May 13th speech that the Irish \"frolicked with the Germans and later the Japanese representatives to their heart's content\". Had Churchill just let de Valera's words stand, maybe he would have finally won the \"victory\" he craved, but this simply opened a window for de Valera to respond, giving a stirring radio address, both reminding the people of Britain's hostility, but also praising Britain's victory where she stood alone against Germany for a time, comparing it to a similar, nearby island which also 'never accepted defeat nor surrendered her soul'. The Irish ate it up, and his misstep was soon forgotten. (EDIT: [Link to the speech](_URL_0_), thanks /u/International_KB)", "Naval invasions are incredibly hard.\n\nThink about D Day: the allies had complete air control, complete naval control, and the vast majority of german troops (including the best forces) were involved on they Eastern front.  Still it was considered a risk.\n\nNow consider a situation where the English would have control of the airspace (because of the large distance for the German airforce), near complete control of the seas, and the ability to reinforce Ireland MUCH easier than Germany.  If the German's somehow managed to have a force land, then it would be: Cutoff by a superior British navy, without supplies, under constant aerial attack, without heavy armor, and without retreat.  Even in a best case scenario, the German's would have not been able to reinforce any footholds they got.", "Kind of unrelated, but how did the nazi racial ideology view the Irish as a race? I've seen a few examples of \"racial science\" from the late 19th century that tried to present the Irish as sub-humans. I'm interested in whether or not the Nazis incorporated this kind of thinking into its ideology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_answers"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Secrets-Espionage-Wartime-1939-1945/dp/071652807X"], [], [], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbgPpG8pO8U"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2hgqxx", "title": "Why did Pope Alexander II give approval to William's conquer of England", "selftext": "Why did he send his approval to William before the invasion, what was his hate towards Harold. \nSources would be much appreciated", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hgqxx/why_did_pope_alexander_ii_give_approval_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cksuu7r"], "score": [19], "text": ["He didnt hate Harold, was probably barely aware of him. Simplistically put however there had been an ongoing dispute over who was Pope,  Alexander II or Honorius II. The former elected by the Church, the latter elected by the German court of Henry IV, via his mother as he was still a kid. The Sicilian Normans, once in disagreement with the Papacy, were now aligned and supportive of Alexander II. Its therefore no surprise that when the Norman Normans turned up wanting a favour that the Pope would agree. Firstly because it kept the Sicilian Normans onside and secondly because it 'proved' that he was the Pope with Authority, unlike that other Pope. Additionally when you only hear one side of the story you may be more inclined to believe it.\n\nTheres no primary source I've come across that will say 'and so Pope Alexander II, who hated the Anglesaxon King...', as its more inferred by surrounding issues and events. However this is a start.\n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Sf8-AQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA206&amp;lpg=PA206&amp;dq=%22pope+alexander+Il%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=J1UzfTM8Nh&amp;sig=2uaprlwj5mm2p7ReiPbtkCBoMIw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=nuokVJamNIvjoATEmIHABw&amp;ved=0CDkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;q=%22pope%20alexander%20Il%22&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "sypfk", "title": "Why is China considered the oldest continuous country when thorough it's history it's been shattered and conquered?", "selftext": "When Italy was invaded by barbarians the western roman empire ceased to be, even though the rulers said they were the new kings of Rome. Yet, when the Mongols invaded china and took over it was still considered Chinese.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sypfk/why_is_china_considered_the_oldest_continuous/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i3233", "c4i35mi", "c4i372v", "c4i69da", "c4id5zn"], "score": [51, 13, 13, 4, 2], "text": ["Because the Roman Empire wasn't just taken over wholesale by one barbarian tribe - then it probably wouldn't have been considered to have fallen completely. Instead, it splintered and the government and culture gradually faded away and ceased to exist. China, from the Qin dynasty to the end of the Qing, always had a more or less consistent culture among its people, a consistent (written) language, a consistent form of bureaucracy, and at least among the citizens, a consistent national identity. Outsiders conquer and replace the Chinese government, but they get assimilated into Chinese culture rapidly. As for Roman culture? When the Visigoths and the Vandals and whatnot came in, it splintered and basically ceased to be. They didn't keep a consistent cultural identity with Rome, instead brought in new institutions and new traditions that's inconsistent with Roman traditions. Latin also became a dead language. The Mongols as well as the Manchus and Jurchens and whoever else took over \"China\" quickly reverted into using Chinese bureaucracy, the Chinese language, the Chinese system of everything, and more importantly, considered themselves as a direct successive dynasty to the last Chinese dynasty. \n", "Two reasons: One, there was never the sort of large scale cultural replacement that happened after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Europe in 1000 CE was more Germanic than Classical, while the Mongols (and later Manchus) were almost entirely absorbed into Chinese culture. the other reason is that the invasions of China never \"stuck.\" The Mongols and Manchu, as well as other groups that occupied northern China after dynastic collapse, were expelled.", "I'm not an ancient historian, but I believe the problem is that you're thinking about ancient and early modern history in terms of modern concepts.\n\nWhen barbarian tribes invaded the Roman Empire, the empire itself didn't \"cease to be,\" even in the West.  It was simply transformed over time into something new.  True, the empire in its old form no longer existed (a process that took centuries), but Rome was still Roman.  It was now the center of \"Christendom\" instead of the old empire.\n\nThe same holds true of the Mongols and China.  What we call the Chinese empire has changed significantly over the course of several millennia.  At times, it has only included what is considered \"Han\" China, or present-day southeastern China.  Manchuria and the western lands were at various points imperial possessions, protectorates, autonomous territories, or otherwise in some kind of diplomatic and administrative relationship with the imperial government.  When the Borjigin and Yuan Dynasties ruled the empire, it was still the Chinese empire, just with a different ruling family.\n\nIt's important not to think of ancient and early modern empires as modern-day nation-states; they need not necessarily be ruled by someone who's from that empire.  The Hapsburgs in Europe, for example, sat on the thrones of Austria, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire at one point.  Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was known as Charles I of Spain until he abdicated to take a new throne.  \n\nAristocrats didn't think of themselves as \"Spanish\" or \"German\" as much as they identified with a house or a family.  Many kings and queens didn't even speak their region's own dialect as a first language.  The imperial Russian court, for example, used French to converse with one another.  Like the Austrian empire, the Chinese empire was multi-ethnic and multilingual.  Chinese emperors didn't think of themselves as ruling a single people, but rather an empire of peoples.\n\nIn this sense, China didn't \"fall.\"  What fell when the Mongols invaded was the ruling dynasty.", "The key point here is definitely that even outsiders who managed to invade China converted to Chinese customs instead of forcing their own upon the Chinese.  Even the Mongols adopted Chinese governance, rituals, etc.  Chinese culture and bureaucracy was always so ingrained and seemingly intransigent that it really couldn't be overcome or destroyed.", "If you're talking oldest nation state, I don't think anyone considers it the oldest. Its borders have changed over the centuries, its rulers have changed, but every time a new conqueror comes into China, they adopt Chinese culture as their own so it has remained relatively unchanged. The Mongols adopted Chinese Culture, so did the Qing. Essentially when Rome got conquered, Rome was over, a new culture was brought in with the new dynasty and it led to fragmentation so that while the city of Rome survives, the culture of ancient Rome is long gone. In China, the Mongols came in and started a new Chinese dynasty. I guess that is the main difference. there are other things you could point to like the longevity of the Chinese language for example, but I think the main thing is the dominance of Han Chinese culture in general, language being part of that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2f5l58", "title": "In the early 1900's ,Were there any religious or cultural resistance towards the use of flying machines such as Bi planes?", "selftext": "Humans were not supposed to fly", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f5l58/in_the_early_1900s_were_there_any_religious_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck7bftr"], "score": [7], "text": ["There was no widespread \"flying is evil! down with planes!\" movement in the early 1900s... but by then, humans had been flying for [more than 100 years](_URL_0_). \n\nThe airplane had to have shown up in a few sermons in the first decades of the 20th century, but was generally treated more like a novelty - not so many hymns as funny songs like [\"Come Josephine in my Flying Machine\"](_URL_2_).\n\nPerhaps it helped that the Wright Brothers' [father was bishop in the United Brethren](_URL_1_)...."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon", "http://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Facts/Wright_Family/Milton_Wright/Milton_Wright.htm", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C71EmjRtiH0"]]}
{"q_id": "4ak6u2", "title": "After throwing out monarchy (and then dictators) in favor of the republic hundreds of years before, how did Roman contemporaries react to its fall and the institution of the empire?", "selftext": "I know they were proud of the more \"evolved\" nature of the republic. Did people notice or write about the parallels as it happened? After it happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ak6u2/after_throwing_out_monarchy_and_then_dictators_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d123r29"], "score": [5], "text": ["I might be able to answer this one! Well at least give insight. But I'm no historian and merely an enthusiast of Roman history. If my answer is not within guidelines, please mod let me know! \n\n**Short Answer**: Most of the Roman people actually didn't mind or even cared. Continuous blood shed from civil wars and numerous political upheaval exhausted Rome's citizens and they just wanted stability. \n\n**Long Answer**:\nThe start of the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire arguably came from Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Sulla is considered to be one of Rome's greatest generals, having never been defeated in battle and even successfully attacked Rome.. twice! Sulla during the climax of his career (a little after 100 B.C. Note that Julius Caesar was a teenager around this point) had a dispute (understatement) with another well known Roman general, Gaius Marius. Long story short, Gaius Marius wanted command of the eastern armies that was legally given to Sulla by the Senate; Sulla gets backstabbed politically; Sulla becomes angry; Sulla uses his loyal Marius reformed army (ironically) to take back command and defeats Marius in battle. \n\nMarius having been beaten, was exiled to Africa while Sulla finally returns his attention to the east. Though successful in his campaign, his absence allowed Marius to consolidate his power and returned to Rome. But again, in conclusion, Sulla attacks Rome a second time and becomes dictator. Sulla leaves his legacy for having set precedent of Caesar's march to Rome and to his dictatorship. Unlike Caesar, however, he actually gave up his power as dictator and retired to his villa until his death. Interesting man, that Sulla.\n\nAnyway, that was the \"First\" and \"Second\" Civil War of that era. \n\nNow in comes Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar, in 50 BC after having successfully subjugate Gaul, was ordered by Pompey to disband his army and return to Rome. Fearing that he'd be prosecuted after relinquishing his title as governor, he crossed the Rubicon river with his army and marched towards Rome causing yet again another Civil War. Caesar defeats Pompey and declares himself dictator. The senate wouldn't have any of that and so they decide to backstab him.. literally. \n\nAnother Civil War.\n\nBut this isn't about Antony and Octavian (Augustus) vs Brutus and Cassius just yet. This is actually Antony and Octavian duking it out before they formed the Second Triumvirate. Well they didn't go to war, but Octavian was recruiting Caesar's veteran soldiers to his side with some even defecting from Antony's forces. Antony did come to blows with the Roman Senate and was defeated in the Battle of Mutina. \n\nWhat about Caesar's assassins? Well, Antony and Octavian (and Lepidus) finally reconciled and created the Second Triumvirate. With their combined forces, they went to war (Yep! Again!) against Brutus and Cassius (the leaders of the Liberators) and defeated them in the battles of Philippi. Julius Caesar was avenged and the Caesarian faction was the sole ruler of Rome.. Until everyone became power hungry.. again. \n\nOne more Civil War. \n\nWith Octavian ruling the West, Antony ruling the East, and Lepidus being an afterthought, Octavian and Antony co-ruled with a delicate alliance with one another. By 33 BC, despite Mark Antony being married to Octavian's sister, Octavia, Antony was having an affair with the Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. Now this isn't much of a problem since it was just a political marriage and everyone and their mother cheated on their wife/husband, but after Antony's successful invasion of Armenia, he declared his and Cleopatra's son Alexander Helios the King of Armenia. In addition, he awarded the title of \"Queen of Kings\" to Cleopatra. \n\nThis was enough for Octavian to try to convince the Senate that Mark Antony was not looking at the best interest of Rome. And even more, Octavian found Mark Antony's will stating that his sons will inherit Roman conquered kingdoms and for Mark Antony's body to be buried in Alexandria. Now this is important because this was used as propaganda that Antony is no longer considering himself Roman. \n\nThe Roman Senate ended up declaring war on Cleopatra and Egypt. Mark Antony laid his loyalty to Egypt. In a similar fashion to Caesar's and Pompey's Civil War, Octavian (or really, Marcus Agrippa) defeats Mark Antony's Army in Greece and finally Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt, thus making Octavian the single ruler of Roman Republic. \n\nOctavian, now known as Augustus, ruled while upholding republican traditions. He still gave the Senate power with acts like relinquishing his control of provinces and armies. But really, Augustus couldn't give up his authority for fear of another power struggle among generals. The \"republic\" was essentially Augustus' empire. \n\nWith Augustus however, over 100 years of political strife and civil wars had essentially ended. After 100 years of bloodshed and political instability, Augustus created an empire that achieved internal peace and prosperity known as the Pax Romana. So despite of them being proud of being a republic, peace is definitely better than endless war. \n\nSource: *Caesar* by Adrian Goldsworthy; *Augustus* by Adrian Goldsworthy "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "azahog", "title": "Why does the devil play the fiddle? Where did that idea come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/azahog/why_does_the_devil_play_the_fiddle_where_did_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ei7xxq1"], "score": [20], "text": ["Music's etherial power over the emotions has a long and storied history. Traceable as far back as the mythological story of Orpheus and the lyre that could hold the Gods in sway, or Pythagoras who could change the temperament of a raving man by playing songs in certain modes. The point is, music has a hold over our souls that we have long struggled to find an adequate explanation for. So, as we often do with phenomena that escape our explanatory power, we attribute that power to supernatural forces.\n\nMusic enchants, mysteriously so. This is a problem for many church fathers. St. Augustine (in the *Confessions,* see the excerpt translated in *Struck's Source Readings in Music History*) has a veritable crisis over music, wrestling with the fact that music at its best can give the word of God greater lustre, but at the same time that music incites pleasure, and pleasure is a sure path to weakness of spirit and, thence, sin. Music's place in the church was thus complicated, the subject of much debate, and ever-shifting. But to cut through this interesting and multifaceted history with the bluntest of machetes, music was fine so long as it amplified text and was therefore subservient to the word of God. Music for its own sake was not. Practically, this means that singing (and lightly accompanied singing) was good. But instrumental music existed to give *pleasure* and to incite revelry through practices like dance, and such things were no bueno. \n\nThus, music has a powerful effect on our souls that we have attributed to supernatural forces. Secondly, instrumental music, through its associations with pleasure and dance, were seen as temptuous and therefore sinful. The next step in our history is the personification of sin in the Devil, who is seen as an agent in the world actively impinging upon human existence. While Satan is of course a figure in the medeival church, he did not exercise a whole lot of power. The satan-as-master-villain view arises more as a fixture of protestant theology. Accompanying this growth in Satanic agency is the mounting fear of his alleged earthly conspirators: that is, witches. \n\nAnd it is here, around the 16th century, that we begin to see the violin associated with demonic forces. It is precisely the violin's role as a dancing instrument that is at stake here, it starts to appear in artistic representations of witches sabbaths, like the [following](_URL_0_) from the *Compendium Maleficarum* (the 1626 edition). In its role as a dancing instrument, the Violin was in many ways the polar opposite of the human voice. Singing alone is capable of giving life to musical sound and words at the same time, and thus singing was easily interpretable as an *elevation* of speech toward the divine. But the violin glorified sound for it's own sake, it tempted its hearers to dance, and thus it became viewed as a way of conjuring Satan as sin personified.\n\nThe rise in witch panics over the 15th and 16th century likewise points to an emerging attitude that viewed apparently supernatural abilities as evidence of a pact between that individual and the devil. This in turn is the origin of the \"deal with the devil\" view of musical virtuosity, the lengthy history of associating dazzling musical talent with satanic origins. In truth, this attitude is not necessarily violin-specific, though the 19th century virtuoso Paganini is one of the most iconic examples of this myth, it was also attached to, say, guitarists like Robert Johnson. What is important is that the tongue-and-cheek accusation called out virtuosic *performers* (it wasn't typically applied to composers, unless they were also performers), and it called attention to a kind of \"sinful\" excess in the playing, something so excessive that it didn't seem humanly possible. \n\nLastly, and returning to the violin, one aspect of this instrument that is special is that it has deep connections to both high and low art. The violin, after all, is perhaps the most central instrument in the symphony orchestra, and it remained an important instrument for social dancing well into the 20th century. This is important because it means that the violin is one of the only instruments capable of carrying both aspects of the \"satanic\" legacy traced in this post: its \"low culture\" association with revelry and dance and its \"high culture\" association with seemingly otherworldly virtuosity. \n\nI am less familiar with the history of actually representing the character Satan: ie, *Paradise Lost* or *Faust.* So I do not know precisely how the jump was made from \"violin conjures Satan\" and \"violinists make pacts with Satan\" to \"violin is played by Satan.\" But hopefully this post has helped you understand why the association of violin with Satan makes sense within the European mythos!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HHEDWD/woodcut-depicting-a-group-of-witches-and-warlocks-dancing-with-the-HHEDWD.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "bxz3h7", "title": "Art History question: Was 'modeling' a profession or was there a modeling industry pre-19th century in the Middle, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo eras? Were there famous, sought after models who commanded higher prices? Were there agents and managers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bxz3h7/art_history_question_was_modeling_a_profession_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqgukzi"], "score": [2], "text": ["*pauses* \n\nThis is actually a lot trickier than my initial \"no\". Mostly no. There were \"allegorical\" portraits. Elisabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, commissioned a few of these. One was to showcase the plight and what she saw as inevitable triumph of her dispossessed children. Agnes Sorel, one of the earliest known mistress of the King of France, was painted as the Virgin Mary. Wedding paintings could also be allegorical. \n\nWhich in turn leads to Botticelli and the great debates of model attribution. Simonetta Vespucci is one of the more persistent names to be a model in both Primavera, which was probably commissioned for a wedding, and Birth of Venus. This is a bit doubtful, but we can blame Ruskin. (Ruskin was awful to his wife, I don't feel bad about this.)\n\nBut it also points to a massive problem- you can't always tell who a model is. Famous subjects are probably more likely to have a definite answer for this. Even then, it can be doubtful. Read any biography of Anne Boleyn, and they should include a lot of the very different paintings that \"might\" be her. Even the famous portrait is a later copy of an original.\n \nBut for the most part, artist's models were usually... not considered all that respectable. The hired models were usually sex workers of some kind, and are patchily known. Usually, better known subjects were women who were well off, had relationships with the artist, or mistresses of well off men. Even then, the attribution issue will haunt them. Emma Hamilton is probably something a bit closer to what you wanted- the subject of a number of portraits by George Romney, but he was commissioned to paint by her then-lover, so not quite. You need to get to the 19th century before you can start getting more information.\n\nSo it's less famous model than \"I really like this person, so I'll paint her when I have a chance\"/\"I am paid to paint this person\".\n\n_URL_1_\n\nEttle, Ross Brooke. \u201cTHE VENUS DILEMMA: NOTES ON BOTTICELLI AND SIMONETTA CATTANEO VESPUCCI.\u201d Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 27, no. 4, 2008, pp. 3\u201310. JSTOR, _URL_2_.\n\nDaughters of the Winter Queen by Nancy Goldstone.\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caravaggio", "https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/heritage_floor/agnes_sorel", "www.jstor.org/stable/23207901"]]}
{"q_id": "12uazu", "title": "In terms of physique, would real gladiators have been more similar to Andy Whitfield of TV's 'Spartacus' or to Russell Crowe of the film 'Gladiator'?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12uazu/in_terms_of_physique_would_real_gladiators_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6y5pcr", "c6y6lxp", "c6y86qs"], "score": [2, 7, 2], "text": ["They look pretty beefy in contemporary Roman mosaics and statues. \n\n[Example](_URL_1_), [Example](_URL_2_), [Example](_URL_3_)\n\nAnd here's a recently discovered statue of a [female gladiator](_URL_0_).", "_URL_0_\n\nApparently, they wouldn't have looked beefy at all.\n\n > **New evidence indicates gladiators may not quite match Hollywood's interpretation.**\n\n > The researchers expected gladiators would need a protein-rich diet to build muscle - however their analysis of the bones in fact suggested a vegetarian diet...\n\n > Plants contain higher levels of the element strontium than animal tissues. So, people who consume more plants and less meat will build up measurably higher levels of strontium in their bones. Levels of strontium in the gladiators' bones were two times higher than the bones of contemporary Ephesians...\n\n > This agrees with some historical reports of gladiators eating a diet of mainly barley, beans and dried fruit, says Grossschmidt.\n\n > It would have given them a lot of strength, but may also have contributed to the tooth decay found in teeth in the cemetery and **potentially made the men fat.** However, a little extra weight could actually have had benefits in protecting vital organs from cutting blows during fights, argue the researchers.\n\nBasically, gladiators would have had great muscle strength and exceptional muscular endurance. But they also would have had quite a bit of fat, caused by a diet that was really high in carbohydrates.", "They were fatter than depicted in those shows for one, it was better to have some fat to take blows and cuts and live then to be chiseled and spilling your entrails the first time you're cut. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120419-female-gladiator-statue-topless-science-ancient-rome/", "http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/People-And-Beasts-on-the-Roman-Arenas-3.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Borghese_gladiator_1_mosaic_dn_r2_c2.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Astyanax_vs_Kalendio_mosaic.jpg"], ["http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1369"], []]}
{"q_id": "3a5yan", "title": "How long did it take for the relations between England and America to recover after the revolutionary war? And what were some significant milestones in that process?", "selftext": "I was wondering about that after reading about the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt during the second world war.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a5yan/how_long_did_it_take_for_the_relations_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csa4qtv", "csa7mvw"], "score": [26, 2], "text": ["On a government level, we signed the Jay Treaty during the Washington administration which gave favorable trade terms to the British.\nUnder John Quincy Adams, we drafted the Monroe doctrine (JQA doesn't get credit for it since he lost re-election soon after it was ratified) which told Europe to stay out of the western hemisphere. Since we really had no army or navy though, we couldn't enforce it. The British navy was the enforcer, less because they felt the need to back our tough words and more to keep their rivals from gorging and enriching themselves in any more new world colonies. \nAs far as reestablishing relations on a social level, where the hoople-heads weren't damning England in the streets, I don't know.", "hi! you may be interested in this section of the FAQ\n\n* [Anglo-American Relations](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_anglo-american_relations"]]}
{"q_id": "2ywedq", "title": "Were presidents Garfield and McKinley \"sainted\" after their assassinations in the same way as Lincoln and Kennedy?", "selftext": "There is much talk about how Kennedy would have been regarded if he had lived, and how Reconstruction might have been different under Lincoln, but I rarely hear much about Garfield or McKinley. \n\nSo, did their reputations change much in the aftermath of their deaths, or were Lincoln and Kennedy exceptions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ywedq/were_presidents_garfield_and_mckinley_sainted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpdl1tn"], "score": [29], "text": ["Garfield was already a beloved national hero due to his service in the American Civil War.  He was only president for a few months before his assassination.\n\nSource: Destiny of the Republic\n\nThat being said, I believe his reputation has actually suffered due to his assassination.  He wasn't in office long enough to create any sweeping legislative changes like Kennedy or Lincoln, so there is less memory of his achievements.  Any that were made have certainly not been as long lasting.\n\nI made short write up of it here as well.  _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2n6r0t/why_are_the_assassinations_of_jfk_and_lincoln/cmay88r?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "fvxol5", "title": "How did the fallen angel Lucifer end up as Satan/the Devil - red-faced, horned, hooved and not what he originally was?", "selftext": "ELIF please? I didn't grow up in a religious community so whenever I try to research this I have no idea where to even start because everyone says different stuff!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fvxol5/how_did_the_fallen_angel_lucifer_end_up_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmmrg5f"], "score": [3], "text": ["Different people say different stuff because it's a form of Christian mythology, and different people have different explanations depending on where they were raised, the denomination or congregation they attend. It's the same reason why folk songs have many different lyrics, e.g. whether Barbary Allen's boyfriend is named William Green or Jimmy Green or Johnny Green, and whether the rose grows from his grave or her grave. Another popular example would be how the four Gospels do not tell precisely the same Passion story or Nativity -- in no gospel do the \"three wise men\" and the shepherds appear at the same time.\n\nLast year, I addressed this question as [How did the mythology of the Bible develop...?](_URL_2_), also featuring the work of /u/sunagainstgold, /u/lcnielsen and /u/idjet.  You might like [this thread about whether to take Dante seriously.](_URL_0_)\n\nI have not encountered more answers addressing *Paradise Lost* since then, so an answer derived from Milton in particular would be good.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDIT: This is not /r/eli5, others may go into greater depth than I, aiming for nuance and rich detail.\n\nEDIT2: Found [another answer about Paradise Lost/Lucifer](_URL_1_) by sunagainstgold"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8m5ddi/should_dantes_divine_comedy_be_read_as_a_story/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7zl4wk/dantes_satan_is_guilty_of_treason_miltons_satan/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d7gkk9/how_did_the_mythology_of_the_bible_develop_not/"]]}
{"q_id": "5t34aj", "title": "Just how much of an impact did Alexander Hamilton have?", "selftext": "I'm asking this in regards to both the revolutionary war itself and the proceeding governmental debates. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t34aj/just_how_much_of_an_impact_did_alexander_hamilton/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddkcq17"], "score": [4], "text": ["Although I'm not an expert on the American Revolutionary War, I am an economic historian and have extensively studied Alexander Hamilton's absolutely pivotal role in the creation of the modern american political and economic system. \n\nHamilton's close personal relationship with Washington and his role as Secretary of the Treasury (the government's money guy) led several scholars to call him Washington's \"Prime Minister.\" In spite of opposition by the likes of influential figures like Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton managed to construct a large, powerful Federal government to  the detriment of individual states, with a consolidated national debt structure and a standing army. John L. Harper in his \"The American Machiavelli,\" concludes that Hamilton not only was a central, indispensable figure in the construction the apparatus of the American government, but also lay the foundation for the underlying philosophies which would guide American foreign policy: opportunistic but pragmatic, both imperialist and isolationist, \"strength through peace and peace through strength.\" \n\nI'm sorry if this sounds vague, but Hamilton's exploits has filled entire volumes, like Harper's book cited above. Is there anything specific you're interested in? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5e9c1x", "title": "How bad was the economic/social state in Britain before Thatcher?", "selftext": "So, I'm having this debate with my friend who says that Britain was in complete economic turmoil and socially destabilizing on all fronts. He says that Britain was headed towards a potential anarchy if it wasn't for Thatcher's administration and her economic reforms, which he claims it basically saved Britain and elevated them back up to a status of prominence in the international stage. Was Britain in such a bad situation before Thatcher? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5e9c1x/how_bad_was_the_economicsocial_state_in_britain/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dab1tut"], "score": [4], "text": ["The problem we get before going into the question is that we need an adequate benchmark to judge the economic performance be it by economic growth, productivity, macroeconomic parameters, competitiveness, social indicators of Britain. I think the most relevant comparison would be Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and France. By using this metric, I think it would certainly be fair to say that economic state of Britain was poor. Again, I would want to stress that this is relative because Britain being an Industrialized country offered a better quality of life than most other countries.The roots of the problem goes much deeper than merely economic policy that was adopted by the previous Government.\n\nThe most important factor was that the quality of technical management was much poorer in Britain than in other advanced European countries. One of the reasons for this was that people who would normally go into Industry in France or Germany would choose instead to enter into financial services or in public service which placed British Industry at a major disadvantage as compared to their peers. Part of the reason was that salaries for a person in middle management was almost half of France and Germany adjusted for cost of living. Britain did not stress upon the quality of technical, engineering and scientific education as did France (the Polytechnique and the Ponts et Chaussees, etc). The effect was this most noticeable in transportation. The British Government had undertaken two large public projects in 1960's but had to cancel both.\n\nThe second was the organization of trade unions with respect to their management. In Britain, there were 115 trade unions as compared to 6 major trade confederations in France and 17 major Industrial unions that were integrated into DGB in Germany. This prevented one craft in Industry to pursue it's interests as against others. Closed shops was illegal in both France and Germany as it was against the Constitution. In Germany it was illegal to go on a strike before the wage agreement had expired. This  further compounded the problem in securing Industrial development in Britain. British trade unions had played a very key role in securing safer conditions for workers but they had not secured higher wages (as productivity was lower) nor shorter working hours.\n\nBritain also made a very major mistake in it's foreign policy. After World War 2, Britain wanted to be an independent power that was separate from USSR and the United States by associating itself with the Commonwealth. This was supported as early as 1920\u2019s by Ramsay MacDonald by stating that he supported free association between free people as the model of relationship between the colonies and Britain. The Labour Party actually tried their hardest to keep colonial powers within the British sphere of influence and declared that they felt closer to Australia, New Zealand and US rather than Continental Europe. Britain had hoped to be the chief power in Europe and organize it along a British-French axis. It was for this reason that Britain refused to join the European Single Market in 1954. However, Britain continued to lose it's influence because of Suez Canal misstep and the and consequent decolonization. When Britain had finally joined the Single Market, Europe had reconstituted along a German-French axis.\n\nBritain had over extended and over estimated itself economically by refusing to join Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Netherlands who created the Treaty of Rome. Hence, it missed the opportunity to use it for it's advantage.The six participants of the Treaty were able to increase their trade with each other while Britain was left out and thus British Industry could not face the discipline of market forces and the high standards of quality control for Industries which would have forced it develop further particularly in high technology products. Britain's offer for a free trade deal with Canada was also turned down by Ottawa.\n\nUltimately, this made the crisis in 1970's much worse and contributed to the general sense of Britain's decline.\n\nReferences:\n\nBritain's decline; its causes and consequences by Nicholas Henderson\n\nRelative Decline and British Economic Policy in the 1960s by Hugh Pemberton\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3hagj5", "title": "What are some examples of historic deals which were done over beer?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hagj5/what_are_some_examples_of_historic_deals_which/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu5ppkh"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "3f76tn", "title": "Female Suffrage in France", "selftext": "I'm in class about WWI, and we're currently discussing its democratizing effect on society and how it was a catalyst for women finally gaining the right to vote in America in 1919. What I don't understand is why women's suffrage took so long in France. At the time, France was was known as very socially progressive, and they were one of the first countries in Europe to introduce universal male suffrage. So why did female suffrage take so much longer than the US or Britain? I know the Napoleonic code stripped women of  virtually all rights, but there was a flurry of social change around WWI, and the term \"feminism\" even started in France. Why also is it that up until the 1990s women had very little representation in French politics?\n\nEdit: 1990s not 1890s.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3f76tn/female_suffrage_in_france/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctmj2ru"], "score": [2], "text": ["There was actually quite some activity towards women's suffrage in interwar France; for example, L\u00e9on Blum's government made a proposal for this (L\u00e9on Blum had probalby the best feminist pedigree in that time period), which was voted by the (left-wing) Assembl\u00e9e nationale, but rejected by the (right-wing) upper house (this being one of the few ways it could actively impede government policy). There were other propositions, coming from the far-right, such as giving the vote to war widows (as a compensation for the vote of their defunct husband).\n\nA standard argument against women suffrage was that:\n1) men were better educated than women (this went back to the late XIXth century and had, among other, military reasons),\n2) women were thought to be more church-going than men,\n3) therefore, the Radicals (= anticlerical - but socially conservative - center-left, and in control of a lot of parliamentary majorities) thought that women would at best vote like their husbands - and, at worst, like their priest."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fm1tn", "title": "Before the American war of independence, did the residents of the colonies consider themselves American, or as British colonists living in America?", "selftext": "In popular culture, the war is portraying is often portrayed as being about the British oppressing the Americans, and the Americans break away from their cruel masters. But I feel it makes a difference in how we see history if we see it as some British people rebelling against their British government.\n\nSo: what did the residents of America consider themselves at the time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fm1tn/before_the_american_war_of_independence_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cabk8sg", "cabkbv5"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Many of them considered themselves to be British before and during the American Revolution, and actively fought against the Colonists on the side of the British.  These people were known as Loyalists.  The others did not view themselves as Americans either though.  They identified themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians or Georgians ect. depending on which colony they were from.  This mentality carried on long after the Revolution for many Americans too.  Even during the Civil War there are examples of this such as When Robert E. Lee declined the offer to lead the Union Army in favor of leading the Army of Northern Virginia on the side of the Confederacy.  He did so even though he was strongly opposed to the idea of slavery, due to the fact that Virgina had seceded from the Union and he considered himself a Virginian before anything else.  ", "Modern estimates for the number of loyalists in America at the time are 20%. So one in five Americans at the time of the war considered themselves as much British as American. That figure was likely higher in the decades previous to the outbreak of hostilities.\n\nA favorite tidbit of history of mine is, after the fall of Quebec to the British in 1759 which was received with much celebration in Britain itself, Americans in the northern provinces celebrated just as much as their brothers over the ocean with bonfires, bell ringing and sermons of thanksgiving. \"...I am a Briton\" said Benjamin Franklin in a letter to the Scottish Lord Kames a few months after French surrender. Some even contributed to memorials for fallen heroes of the battle such as one in Westminster Abbey for Brig.Gen. Lord Howe payed for by the people of Massachusetts in recognition of the role the British army played in the defeat of the hated Roman Catholic French. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "23kaa4", "title": "What were Louis XVI's plans of counterrevolution and were they realistic?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23kaa4/what_were_louis_xvis_plans_of_counterrevolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgxx7fl"], "score": [3], "text": ["I believe that I can only answer the first half of the question - I feel as though I am not competent enough to expound on the second.\n\nIt is without a doubt that Louis XVI's plans of counter-revolution were in fact  due to his disaffection with the changes to the Church, the limitations of his power, and  the support from the aristocrats who supported counterrevolutionary activities. After all, the aristocrats wanted to restore the old social privilege that was dismantled during the 'peaceful' (as I will say it) years of the revolution - which they were only concerned with the fate of the King. \n\nSo the plans of the counterrevolution was this:  On June 20 1791, the King was to escape from the Tuileries to Montedy near the Belgian border, part of the Austrian empire at that time. It is only from there onwards that with the aid of Marie Antoinette's brother, Joseph II the Holy Roman Emperor and the supporting \u00e9migr\u00e9s would they initiate a counter revolution. Norman Hampson says that the aristocrat, especially those who supported counter revolution were primarily the \u00e9migr\u00e9s, and that they were prepared for civil war and foreign invasion. Of course, as we all know how the narrative goes, a series of mishaps and failures lead to the royal family being recognised by Douret, the postmaster from Ste Menehould. After witnessing the King did he dash to Varennes to warn the guards to get him arrested.\n\nA primary account of the escape can be read [here](_URL_0_). It also gives you a path of where they will be taking.\n\nHowever, I think the most beneficial and necessary part to understand in this event is seismic repercussions it generated. Different historians give a similar, yet different response when it comes to the significance.\n\nWilliam Doyle for instance, states that:\n >  \u201cThe flight to Varennes opened up the second great schism of the revolution. There had been hardly any republicanism in 1789, and what there had been abated once the king was back in Paris and accepting all the Assembly sent to him. But after Varennes, the mistrust built up by his long record of apparent ambivalence burst out into widespread demands from the populace of the capital and a number of radical publicists for the king to be dethroned.\u201d\n\nSimilarly, Hampson states that:\n\n >  \"The point at issue, itself primarily constitutional, in act divided Parisian opinion along social lines, with the wealthier and more educated supporting the Assembly in its fiction that the king had been 'kidnapped' and those whom their opponents were beginning to call sans-cullotes demanding the kind of clear and forceful measures that corresponded to their view of the situation. Inevitably ,therefore, the pursuit of a compromise with the king led the Assembly to prepare for conflict with the sans-cullotes, who were organizing petitions against any hasty rehabilitation of Louis XVI.\" \n\nOther effects was the repudiation of the direction of the Revolution and many of the acts Louis XVI previously endorsed. Louis XVI himself was humiliated, compromised ad discredited Louis XVI. It showed not only did he misread the political situation of France, but one may also argue that it was the first steps into Republicanism and radicalism. After all, it was at this point at time that ministers became divided over the punishment of the King. Others called for Republicanism, others still wanted to maintain a sense of monarchy, and others called for his abdication.\n\nOne of the reactions can be seen in writing expressed by figures such as Abbe Greogire, who was in the now torn-apart Jacobins, argued that Louis XVI should be forced to abdicate:\n > \"The premier public servant abandons his post; he arms himself with a  false passport; after having said, in writing to the foreign powers, that his most dangerous enemies are those who pretended to spread doubts about the monarch's intentions, he breaks his word, he leaves the French a declaration which, if not criminal, is at least -however is envisaged - contrary to the principles of our liberty. He could not be unaware that his flight exposed the nation to the dangers of civil war; and finally, in hypothesis that he wished only to go to Monmedy, I say: either he wanted to content himself with making peaceful observations to the National Assembly regarding its decrees, and in that case it was useless to flee; or he wanted to support his claims with arms, and in that case it was a conspiracy against liberty.\"\n\nSo evidently, the effects  would only lead to one even to another. After this issue would this lead to the Champ de Mars massacre - something that would generate a deeper schism between the nation. It is noted that the outcome of Louis XVI's plans to escape were far more traumatising than what I wrote above, but, if you were to put the effectiveness of the plan in terms of the context of what the King faced back then, it proved to be not realistic at all. After all, Louis XVI's miscalculations accentuated any sense of antagonism against the monarchy, and it would only be his downfall. He will be later be known as 'Citizen Louis Capet' in the minds of the many. More importantly, a betrayer to his country and the revolution.\n\nIf you were you view if it was realistic in contemporary sense however, I think that can be answered by other more competent historians here.\n\nSources:\n\n1. Doyle, W 2002, *The Oxford History of the French Revolution* \n\n2. Hampson, N 1963, *A Social History of the French Revolution*\n3. McPhee, P 2002, *The French Revolution*\n\nedit: Just a question I wanted to ask the others reading (since I wanted some feedback) - is there any way you suggest for me to improve an answer? I'm learning to how write more academically as a high school student here. It's definitely not as top notch as compared to what goes on here, but I'm eager to improve. Hope this question doesn't derive the question OP asked!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/France/_Texts/CROROY/Fuite_de_Varennes*.html"]]}
{"q_id": "31hfcr", "title": "Were there any volunteer gladiators?", "selftext": "From my understanding all the gladiators were slaves but I was wondering if there were any free men who trained and fought as a gladiator or if there was someone who sold themselves to a doctore just for the glory of being a gladiator?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31hfcr/were_there_any_volunteer_gladiators/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq1r5k3"], "score": [3], "text": ["One exceptional example would be the Emperor Commodus, as depicted in the movie Gladiator. Commodus believed himself to be the reincarnation of Hercules and sought to imitate his martial accomplishments before the eyes of the Roman public. He, of course, was never in any real danger from his human opponents who (as recorded by Dio Cassius) would yield to him after token resistance rather than fight seriously, or were infirm and could not put up a fair fight in the first place. He also enjoyed killing exotic animals, such as leopards and ostriches, from a safe distance; Herodian writes that he had a circular platform built in the arena from atop which he would throw javelins at them.\n\nCommodus was assassinated not long after rumors spread that he intended to appear before the Senate in animal skins, the attire of a gladiator, and be sworn in as consul (after arranging for the death of the currently elected consul.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3jfwtg", "title": "Does the concept of religion differ outside of Abrahamic religions?", "selftext": "For example does the idea of \"religion\" exist in every culture in approximately the same way or do concepts of religion differ drastically? For example did Chinese and Indians view Confucianism and Hinduism the same way Christians and Muslims viewed their religions? Did they understand the distinction from one religion and another, such as Confucianism or Taoism? Do connotations of \"religion\" differ elsewhere so that they view religion as essentially different entities altogether from what we mean when talking about \"religion\" in English?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jfwtg/does_the_concept_of_religion_differ_outside_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuow9bz"], "score": [2], "text": ["This isn't really a history question, but some here may want to answer. Meanwhile, you might consider x-posting this question to r/AskReligion, r/AskAnthropology, or r/AskSocialScience "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "an7lgu", "title": "I always hear how \"Wilt played against milkmen\" or \"NFL players had day jobs as oil workers\". How did sports contracts go from the equivalent of a second job to multi-million dollar deals?", "selftext": "I know inflation plays a role, but what are the other factors? Things like rule changes or popularity.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/an7lgu/i_always_hear_how_wilt_played_against_milkmen_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["efsvqjd"], "score": [5], "text": ["The answer boils down to about two points: Market size and collective negotiations. \n\nBack in the day, sports athletes were considered amateurs and were more motivated by passion to engage in a hobby more than working a primary job for earning income. As time went on through the 30s and 40s, competition and swelling audience sizes encouraged the development of a more professional caste of athletes who were naturally a bit better paid than their amateur predecessors, but we\u2019re still not close to the modern multimillion dollar contract. \nBy the 1950s broadcasting emerged as the big game changer, catapulted by effective collective action. With broadcasting the audience size increased exponentially, and earning of the overall sport. As owners and broadcasters made more and more, players increasingly organized to bargain for better pay. Through the 1970s and onward, as player organizations and unions became powerful and ubiquitous, and rating soared to higher and higher levels, players\u2019 salaries ballooned.\n\nKeep in mind, though, players\u2019 salaries vary wildly even with the same league or even the same team. \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mentalfloss.com/article/84792/11-things-you-might-not-know-about-athlete-salaries", "https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.firmex.com/thedealroom/when-did-athletes-start-getting-rich/amp/", "https://operations.nfl.com/the-players/evolution-of-the-nfl-player/"]]}
{"q_id": "b17v4i", "title": "Vikings and winged helmets?", "selftext": "I know vikings didn't have horns on heir helmets but what about the popular depiction of them having wings on them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b17v4i/vikings_and_winged_helmets/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eik3bxa", "eikmy74"], "score": [11, 2], "text": ["You could really cover all the basics of Iron Age Norse helmets in a few paragraphs. There are a few helmets from fancy ship burials in Sweden from the Vendel Age (550-800), the centuries preceding the Viking Age. Examples would be [Vendel I](_URL_8_) from Vendel (these very finds gave name to the age), [Vendel XIV](_URL_13_), [Valsg\u00e4rde VII](_URL_7_) and [Valsg\u00e4rde VIII](_URL_10_) from Valsg\u00e4rde. The numbers are which grave they're from; the two sites are about 25 km from each other, both not far north of Old Uppsala in Uppland, Sweden. There's also the [Ulltuna helmet](_URL_0_) which is a bit different but with some common features. It's often remarked upon that these also have many similarities to the [Sutton Hoo helmet](_URL_16_) from England, which is contemporary Anglo-Saxon one, also from a fancy grave. This right here is most of the reasonably-complete helmets contemporary with the Vendel Age. For instance from Norway there are only 3 confirmed helmet fragments from the era. \n\nAs these are elaborate grave goods from elaborate royal tombs (that contained ships, animal sacrifices and lots and lots of other stuff), they probably don't represent what the average Sven was wearing at the time. It also seems a bit unlikely someone would go into battle with a garnet-encrusted helmet like Valsg\u00e4rde VII. Which hasn't stopped plenty of Viking fiction for utilizing the designs though.\n\nThere are also decorations from the Vendel Age such as the [Torslunda plaes](_URL_11_) which depict apparently-ceremonial helmets with boars and animals on them, and one guy with big horned helmets and a bear-like warrior. (we don't really know exactly what these depict, although there's no shortage of theories) A similar picture of guys with big-horned helmets holding spears, is on the Sutton Hoo helmet. Together these are called the ['dancing warrior'](_URL_17_) motif. It's possible this referred to some kind of ceremonial helmet that actually existed in the Vendel Period, but we haven't found one. (it's not the source of the horned-viking helmet idea though) The type of helmet with the boar has been found in England, with the [Benty Grange helmet](_URL_3_) (7th cent). Again showing cultural connections between the Norse and Anglo Saxon world.\n\nBut from the Viking Age, there is only a single helmet fragment that's reasonably whole, which is the [Gjermundbu helmet](_URL_12_), dated to the 950s. It's a simpler and less design than the Vendel helmets but similar, and was formerly decked out with gold, and likely had the same ceremonial purpose. The [Lokrume fragment](_URL_2_) from Gotland and [Tjele fragment](_URL_15_) from Denmark. Both fragments are of the characteristic 'eyebrow' bits which is how they could easily be identified as helmet fragments.\n\nThere are a couple more fragments but this is basically it, all the known helmet and helmet fragments from Viking Age Scandinavia and the preceding three centuries. \n\nSo not only no horns nor wings, but not a heck of a lot of evidence they even wore helmets _at all._ Now, the Sagas and Eddas do mention the wearing of helmets here and there. Some of them are even made of gold. And that's the thing; the stories are about kings and heroes and gods, so again we can't expect them to tell us much about the regular people. \n\nThere _are_ Viking Age artistic depictions of helmets though; such as the [R\u00e4llinge statue](_URL_4_). This figure, which has been suggested to represent Freyr (on the basis of him having an erection, ergo fertility god) is wearing a pointy helmet with a nose guard. You can find a similar helmet depicted on the 11th century [Ledberg Stone](_URL_1_) (which has been suggested to be Odin despite the cross on the stone, mainly on the basis of him holding a spear). These kinds of helmets - [nasal helmets](_URL_5_) did exist in contemporary Europe. Quite famously there's a lot of them on the [Bayeux tapestry](_URL_14_) illustrating William the Conqueror's conquest of England (so, 1066). \n\nBut as we've seen, if vikings had nasal helmets, they've not left any concrete trace of it. (by comparison, there have been thousands of spear-tips and hundreds of swords found) So if you assume they did have these helmets, the question is why they're not here. (not least when there's often so much other stuff in graves)  And that just requires further assumptions so you don't really get anywhere. \n\nSo there's no real consensus about actual Viking helmets; whether they had any or what they looked like if they did. One narrative is that they may have had less-ornate versions of the Vendel/Valsg\u00e4rde helmets in that period, and Gjermundbu being end-of-the line model as they shifted over to nasal helmets. At the opposite end of the spectrum, one could imagine they had no helmets at all, except for these ceremonial/status-symbol ones.\n\nThe portrayal of Vikings as having horned helmets as well as winged helmets are thus not based in history at all but 19th century Viking-Romantic imagery. For instance, the Swedish painter August Malmstr\u00f6m's paintings [illustrating Frithiof's Saga](_URL_6_) he gave the hero a winged helmet. Otherwise _horned_ helmets seem to belong mainly to the English Viking-Romantic art, such as [Dicksee's \"Funeral of a Viking\"](_URL_9_). (also illustrating the burning-ship-burial trope) The costume design for Wagner's Ring Cycle is often credited with creating the horned-helmet trope, and if so it likely created or contributed much to the winged-helmet trope as well, as there are plenty of winged helmets in it too. (e.g. Brunnhilde often has one) \n\nSo anyway, we know so little that if you've read this far, you too are now a bit of an expert on Viking Age helmets. But there's every reason to hope and believe another find will be made some day that'll advance our knowledge on the topic. (actually so many large burial mounds remain unexcavated it's practically a guarantee another helmet find will be made, some day)\n\n", "Thank you so much, especially for all the links! I swear reddit is way more helpful than the entirety of the rest of the internet."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://i.imgur.com/Y7R6IIW.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Ledbergsstenen_20041231.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Lokrume_helmet_fragment_-_1907.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Benty_grange_helm_crop.png/1024px-Benty_grange_helm_crop.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Frej_R%C3%A4llinge.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_helmet", "http://blog.europeana.eu/2015/11/a-viking-love-story-the-saga-of-frithiof/", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/14/38/eb/1438ebb9e3aac962352f62333f952a06.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Vendel_I_helmet_456058.jpg", "https://d3d00swyhr67nd.cloudfront.net/w1200h1200/GMIII/GMIII_MCAG_1928_13.jpg", "http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/viking/valsHelmetOverall.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Torslunda_plates.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Gjermundbu_helmet_-_cropped.jpg", "http://earlymedieval.archeurope.info/uploads/images/vendal_helmets/vendel_14_1_l.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Odo_bayeux_tapestry.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Tjele_helmet_fragment.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Sutton_Hoo_helmet_2016.png", "http://www.ealdfaeder.org/imy/spearsource.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "fxnvov", "title": "How did Hitler finance the industrial build up to WW2? The story\u2019s of wheelbarrow bread buyers would make one assume it be impossible to ramp up such huge industrial undertaking... where did the money come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fxnvov/how_did_hitler_finance_the_industrial_build_up_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fmvk7ks"], "score": [28], "text": ["He did the same thing most modern economies do. Deficit spending. \n\nHitler and his Finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, knew that simply printing money to pay for rearmament would lead to inflation, so they decided to re-finance industry by using credit. Schacht and the largest German industrial firms teamed up and issued \"Mefo\" bills. Mefo was short for \"Mettalurgische Forschungsgesellschaft\" - Mettalurgical Research corporation.\n\nSimply put, they used these bills instead of money. They were guaranteed by the state and could be exchanged for Cash at the Reichsbank. They also regulated the Mefo bills so each bill issued was tied to a batch of newly produced goods. This way, they were able to avoid inflation. Unfortunately, this eventually led to a huge amount of internal state Debt, which was fine for Hitler. His end goal was to expand his \"German Reich\" by invading Europe, and debt gave him the opportunity to make everyone see things his way.\n\nTo make the most of the opportunities presented by the Mefo Bills, Hitler also instituted other controls. First and foremost, Hitler cracked down on labor unions not affiliated with the Nazis. This was intended to stop unions from advocating for rights and benefits for workers, which allowed Employers and Big Businesses to spend more money on investing to expand their businesses, since they could cut down on their Employees' wages and other assorted benefits. Also, in order to be able to participate in the Mefo scheme, Businesses would have to agree to re-invest most of their earnings (62%) into rearmament and the economy.\n\nIn summary, the money came from thin air. Hitler and Schacht issued Mefo bills that were essentially promissory notes/IOUs, which German big businesses used as credit to finance rearmament. \n\nReferences\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nETA: links and spelling fixed"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj/vol16/iss1/5/", "https://voxeu.org/article/macroeconomics-germany-forgotten-lesson-hjalmar-schacht"]]}
{"q_id": "1v0lpe", "title": "Why did the Neanderthals (200,000 BCE - 30,000 BCE) start burying their dead?", "selftext": "This question came up in my history class. Some simple answers were brought up, but I think there is more to it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v0lpe/why_did_the_neanderthals_200000_bce_30000_bce/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cenjg6m"], "score": [7], "text": ["Not to discourage any responses, but this is more of a question for /r/askanthropology/ since it pre-dates written history. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72fyow", "title": "Sensitive, somewhat weepy male characters abound in late 18th c. Gothic novels and are not presented as unmanly or unattractive. Is there any truth in the claim I've occasionally seen that men's crying was more socially acceptable before the Industrial Revolution than it has been ever since?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72fyow/sensitive_somewhat_weepy_male_characters_abound/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dniq0ej", "dnit9ds"], "score": [62, 1441], "text": ["Hopefully it is acceptable to ask for context? Which characters and novels specifically are you thinking of?", "I was hailed by a mod. I have barely posted here in years, but this is fun and I love this stuff. Forgive my rustiness, I am in another career field now.\n\nLet's go!\n\nAll this socially acceptable crying is part of a movement called Romanticism. \n\nRomanticism comes to us on the heels of the Napoleonic challenge;  Napoleon Bonaparte has gone and overthrown the balance of Europe, and the region is righting itself again after war. Decades of it. Three million people in Europe are dead because of the French Revolution and Napoleon's grab for power, you've got conservatism rising to denounce revolution as anarchy, you've got a demand to return to \"property rights, prejudice, and tradition.\" (Thanks, Edmond Burke.) And you know what prejudice is? Old traditions. Burke says things based on thousands of years of tradition deserve respect! The throne and the altar are important pillars of strength, and by going against them, you've undermined all of society! If we're going to restore the countries of Europe to some sort of stability and power, let the old traditions be our moral compass!\n\nYou know what that means?\n\nConstitutional monarchy is back! So the monarchies have been restored, most based on legitimacy, including the French one. \n\nDo we have the order that everyone wanted? \n\nNo! It's never that easy!\n\nThe British aristocracy doesn't want to loosen its grip; they suspended habeas corpus so they could war with France, suppressing their own population with the abolishment of rights of man and freedom of expression, as well as the criminalization of demands for political reform. (This is where the Peterloo Massacre happens.) And over in France, Napoleon has left a power vacuum of censorship, and the revamped education system has kicked out any trace of liberalism, giving the Church serious power. And if you keep going East, it gets harsher; Austria is laying down the Metternich system in the Germanic states, which will rule for the next forty years, blacklisting anyone who speaks in the behalf of nationalism, and blacklisting means you'll never find a job in any German state. University students and professors are by far hit the hardest, particularly as the tiny educated minority group. Russia has Alexander wiping out any trace of liberalism to the point that liberal roots *still* haven't taken much in Russia even today. The more East-ward you go, the more authoritarian and tight the regime.\n\nPlease, God, who will help us in this age of stodgy, unthinking, unfeeling tradition that wants to shove us all back in our little boxes after years of revolution had promised us FREEDOM?! \n\n**ARTISTS!**\n\nArtists become the main social voice criticizing social order, and they make up Romanticism. And Romanticism *is* liberalism; it's fighting all the things that tie down literature and art and society, and well, it's romantic \u2013\u2013 it's about *feelings*, one's mood!\n\nThink of the artists from this time period. Musicians like Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini, Liszt. Writers like Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Byron, Hugo! And the visual arts \u2013\u2013 Friedrich, Turner, Delacroix! Art can be passionate in any time period, but now the Feelings are out. It's dialed up to 11 at all times. Even a painting of a shipwreck is *actually* about destiny and what nature decides and how no man can guarantee his actions because life is unexpected! (The Shipwreck by Turner.) And you're not just marching to liberate your country, you're marching with Liberty herself, a beautiful naked woman who is the purity of your revolution, your demand for a better society! Everything is dramatic! (Liberty Leading The People by Delacroix.)\n\nAnd literature! One particularly popular piece of literature is \"The Sorrows of Young Werther\" by Goethe. It is exactly as the title suggests, about how crap poor Werther's life is, particularly due to unrequited love, and then he \u2013\u2013 spoiler alert! \u2013\u2013 kills himself and nobody even goes to his funeral! This book is an immediate success, to the tune of inspiring hundreds (if not thousands) of young men to kill themselves because of their own tortured love affairs. It even prompts a fanfic in response that rewrites the ending so Werther lives, and lives happily at that, and Goethe isn't very pleased and it's all crazy. Crazy passionate.\n\nAnd Byron \u2013\u2013 oh lord, Byron. Despite Britain being home to some of the coldest and stiffest lips, Byron and his crowd make up the best of the Romantic writers, and Byron writes with *feeling*, and he demands open hearts of young men. He writes his teenage boys with emotional turmoil, and the love letters pour in from fangirls; imagine that, men with feelings! And when Byron's passion leads him to sleeping with people you weren't supposed to be sleeping with in that time period, he has to flee to avoid execution, and he decides to just make lemonade out of lemons and travels to Italy and Greece to take up the cause of liberalism! (He died doing this; tragic and romantic in life and death, which netted him a massive funeral attended mostly by young women.) And his good pal Percy Bysshe Shelley, also an incredible poet, has decided to denounce the church and promote atheism, and write essays criticizing British society! He dies in a shipwreck, hunted out of Britain, tragic and romantic.\n\nAnd Beethoven, Beethoven who had liked Napoleon, until Napoleon decided to go and declare himself emperor, the ultimate of selfish power grabs. Beethoven scratches out the dedication to Napoleon on his symphonies. Fuck megalomania, right?\n\nAnd Chopin, a man of Polish descent when Poland is now largely under Russian control; he felt the only way he could keep his prestige and the spirit of Poland was to bring Polish elements into his music, and so his music includes those elements to piss off the Russians *as a rebellion.*\n\nAnd have you ever heard of that song, Lisztomania by Phoenix? It's great, and very catchy. It's referencing Lisztomania, a hysteria for the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, whose mere presence could drive people into an emotional mania. Even the fellow who coined this term, writer Heinrich Heine, noted this hysteria to be politically motivated: \"I shrugged my shoulders pityingly [...] [I] looked on it as a sign of the politically unfree conditions existing beyond the Rhine...\" And yet he, too, was swept up in the audience's applause and outpouring of emotions at the concert.\n\nSo that's what you're seeing: art meet politics often, and it offered a new interpretation for life. Enlightenment promoted the mind, but without a heart you\u2019re a robot. And at this point in history, you might as well throw everything to the wind and put all your feelings out there. Fucking cry, Werther!\n\nTL;DR: Nothing is more manly than crying during a revolution.\n\nSources:\n\n* John Merriman, Modern Europe vol.2\n\n* T.C.W. Blanning, The Nineteenth Century\n\n* Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders, Europe 1800-1914\n\n* And some old-ass lecture notes from the wonderful V. Dimitriadis of the University of Toronto's Department of History. :')"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "f0kd8o", "title": "Pre 1800s how was money transferred between bank accounts across different countries?", "selftext": "For instance, if I was an American businessman planning a trip to Italy would I have to physically bring all of the money I wanted to spend with me?  Additionally, what measures were put in place to avoid fraud?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f0kd8o/pre_1800s_how_was_money_transferred_between_bank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgy6rsn"], "score": [7], "text": ["I answered a very similar question [here](_URL_0_)\n\nIn your specific case of traveling to Italy from the US pre-1800, I am not sure. But, generally,, you would look to find and pay a merchant or bank that did enough business there to make up a letter of credit that said, essentially, pay John Smith  1,000 ducats. When you arrived, you would go to that other merchant or bank and present your letter. There would be signatures on file and on the document to be compared, that could discourage fraud. There would be a discount- i.e. they might only pay you , say, 950 ducats. There might also be a delay: they might hold the note and ask for someone to vouch for you. You might also get a couple of letters, for different banks, etc., as you might not know until you got there really whether a note/letter was  good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e3hiet/how_did_renaissanceera_banks_prevent_fraud_from/"]]}
{"q_id": "1i5tg1", "title": "How 'German' was Eastern Prussia under Frederick the Great?", "selftext": "So looking at a [map](_URL_0_) of Prussia the Eastern half encompasses what would now be the Baltic states. \n\nAnd to clarify by 'German' I mean would they have spoken a dialect of German and would they have had what we would recognize as German customs.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i5tg1/how_german_was_eastern_prussia_under_frederick/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb19uj5"], "score": [9], "text": ["Just to correct a few things first: That doesn't correspond to the modern Baltic states, which are further northeast, that's broadly the north and west of modern Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, formerly K\u00f6nigsberg. It's also a map of Prussia under the German Empire (1871-1918), not a map of Prussia under Frederick the Great ([see here](_URL_0_) for the latter).\n\nEast Prussia corresponds to the original Duchy of Prussia, or so-called *Altpreu\u00dfen* (Old Prussia). From the 13th century, this area had been colonised by Germans, originally under the aegis of the Teutonic Order, which had aimed to convert the region to Christianity. The Teutonic state *did* extend up to the modern Baltic states, but these areas, then known as Courland and Livonia, were culturally mixed -- though after they were subsumed by Russia, they remained dominated by a German aristocracy until the fall of the Russian Empire.\n\nThe area that became Ducal Prussia was more firmly Germanised, and certainly by the time of Frederick the Great in the 18th century there was little doubt that it was, essentially, German. K\u00f6nigsberg was the capital of East Prussia and became a seat of German-speaking culture under Frederick, paying host to philosophers such as Immanuel Kant.\n\nThis situation prevailed more or less up until the end of the Second World War, when the Polish borders were rearranged by the victorious Soviets, who incorporated the eastern territories of Poland while compensating the Poles by awarding them eastern Germany. A process of ethnic cleansing then took place whereby Germans were forcibly expelled and Poles resettled in the area. At the same time, K\u00f6nigsberg was annexed to the Soviet Union and renamed Kaliningrad, again coupled with a policy of ethnic cleansing and resettlement. That area remains a Russian province to this day, despite having been cut off from the rest of Russia by the fall of the Soviet Union."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-DR-Prussia.svg"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.zum.de/whkmla/histatlas/germany/prussia17401763.gif"]]}
{"q_id": "6jysf0", "title": "If Einstein hasn't came up with relativity was anyone else working on the similar theories?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jysf0/if_einstein_hasnt_came_up_with_relativity_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djign1q"], "score": [11], "text": ["(As a warning, I got slightly jargony in this post. \nSR = special relativity\nGR = general relativity\nc = speed of light\nEM = electromagetism\nB-field = magnetic field)\n\nFirst off, SR probably would have been developed within a few years of Einstein's publication. This is because the root problem that Einstein was trying to address using SR was actually very well known to the physics community at the turn of the last century, and had to do with the behavior of Maxwell's Equations near the speed of light. Maxwell's Equations are the set of four equations that completely describe electromagnetic interactions and wave propagation in free space, and are one of the intellectual triumphs of physics (SR/GR being one of the others).\n\nThe problem facing physicists around 1900 was that Maxwell's Equations begin to break as you approach the speed of light. Specifically, an observer traveling at a substantial fraction of c with some EM system in front of them (at the same velocity) would see completely different system properties than a stationary observer watching the same system. As one example, the stationary observer would see an electric current in the system (due to the system's velocity), which would generate a magnetic field, but the traveling observer would see a set of stationary charges and hence no B-field. The is physically impossible, so people recognized that something was wrong somewhere.\n\nThe initial solution was created by Hendrik Lorentz, who devised a set of frame transformations, now known as the \"Lorentz\" transformations, that allowed Maxwell's Equations to act correctly near the speed of light. These are in contrast to the Galilean transformations that govern our day-to-day lives, and which were being applied previously.\n\nSo that's the background. The crucial insight that Einstein had that led him to SR was the physical interpretation of the transformations. Namely, that they implied that the speed of light is the same for all observers, the speed of light is a sort of universal speed limit, and that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial (non-accelerated) reference frames. Since the Lorentz transformations also change the relative passage of time between two reference frames traveling at two different velocities, Einstein also realized that the \"distance\" between two events needed to be described using a single \"spacetime\" distance, rather than separate distances in space and in time. That got him to treating space and time as a single 4-dimensional construct.\n\nThe experimental, theoretical, and mathematical basis for SR were thus all pretty well established when Einstein came along. All he needed to do was to assemble all of the disparate pieces and assemble them into a unified system of thought. So it seems very reasonable to suppose that if Einstein had not developed SR in 1905, some one else would have gotten there within a few years.\n\n(N.B. - I say \"all he had to do,\" but that in no way is meant to trivialize what Einstein accomplished. As was demonstrated 20 years later in the development of Quantum Mechanics, the experiments and the math are often the relatively easy bits. It's figuring out what it all actually means that is hard.)\n\nOnce you have SR developed, getting to GR is the next logical step. Recall that SR deals with inertial (non-accelerating) reference frames. GR is the extension of SR to also account for accelerating frames (both via gravity and via something like rockets). This makes GR considerably more complicated than SR, but the basic ideas behind it, or at least the idea that you need to figure it out, are all in place once you've got SR worked out.\n\nOnce major practical difference in GR that would probably arise of Einstein had never existed is the notation used to do the calculations and display the results. Einstein actually invented his own new mathematical notation to help with GR calculations, and this is now known as \"Einstein\" notation. It allows one to compactly write out and work with linear algebra operations.\n\nWithout Einstein, it seems reasonable that this specific notation would not have been developed. Insofar as a notation system influences how we think about what we're working with, this would have then changed how people dealt with and interpreted the results of alternate-GR. A nice example of what I mean here would be to look at the different views of Calculus coming from Leibniz's and Newton's notation for the same problems.\n\nSource: I have a PhD in astrophysics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "119dcv", "title": "If Ulysses S Grant was such a bad president why is he on the $50 bill?", "selftext": "My history professor was talking about how historians rank presidents. He said that Lincoln and Washington were always on the top followed by Jefferson and FDR. Afterwards I was curious about the bad presidents and i found that Grant was consistently ranked in the bottom 10. What did he do that was so bad to deserve the bottom of the list? and what did he do that was so good that put him on the $50 bill?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/119dcv/if_ulysses_s_grant_was_such_a_bad_president_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6kg7zj", "c6kgars", "c6kim14", "c6ksvx0"], "score": [25, 49, 5, 7], "text": ["His administration was prone to charges of corruption. Certainly, he showed bad judgment in the political realm and was easily influenced by some unsavory characters.\n\nAs for his popularity, he was the most famous General in U.S. history, save for Washington himself. And he was considered the military leader who saved the union during the Civil War. That reputation got him elected twice and got him studied in military academies and got him forever on the $50 bill.", "It's less to do with the substance of his Presidency, and more to do with him winning the Civil War for the United States as a General, and then being elected to the Presidency.  When Grant first appeared on a $50 gold certificate in 1913, he'd been dead for nearly 30 years: long enough to forgive some of the bad things, and recent enough to remember the hero. ", "You need to realize just how wildly popular he was at the time.  Grant was [first featured on US Currency in 1886](_URL_0_), only one year after his death.  I remember watching [an episode of American Experience on PBS that featured Grant](_URL_1_) in which they describe him, not Lincoln, as being the most popular American of the 19th century.  While modern historians are able to point of his lack of accomplishments after the Civil War, he achieved this rockstar status among his contemporaries who credited him with saving the union.  Today, Lincoln receives most of the \"credit\" and Grant is largely remembered as one of Lincoln's employees.\n\nBy the way, I have to disagree with your professor's opinion of other historians.  While Washington and Jefferson and pretty much universally adored among historians, FDR and Lincoln are an entirely different story.  FDR is an especially controversial president.", "Grant was a terrible politician because he was too good a human being. I know this sounds ironic because of his role in the Civil War but it's true. His biggest fault was an abundance of trust and loyalty towards his friends. This worked well in combat but not in political office. Rather than assist investigations of alleged corruption within his administration, Grant chose to fiercely defend his friends and this has haunted his reputation ever since. \n\nHere is a quote from Jean Edward Smith's biography on Grant that illustrates his \"flaw\" as President:\n\n\"Once, Grant offered an appointment to a man who had befriended him when he was down and out. When the man pointed out he was a Democrat, the president brushed it aside. \"Just before the Civil War, when I was standing on a street corner in St. Louis by a wagon loaded with wood, you approached and said: 'Captain, haven't you been able to sell your wood?' I answered, 'No.' Then you said, ' I'll buy it and whenever you haul a load of wood to the city and can't sell it, just take it around to my residence and throw it over the fence and I'll pay you for it.' I haven't forgotten it.\"\n\nThis is off topic but personally, I think Grant is one of the greatest Americans to have ever lived. Ever. I read his Memoirs and thought those were fantastic. Then I read a biography on his life and... wow. General. President. World Traveler. Best Selling author. Humble. Loyal. Remained in love with one person from youth until death. What an inspiration!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/US_%245_1886_Silver_Certificate.jpg", "http://video.pbs.org/video/1691431382"], []]}
{"q_id": "wze84", "title": "To what extent did the typical 15th/16th century European peasant know about/be affected by the Age of Exploration?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wze84/to_what_extent_did_the_typical_15th16th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5hu2p7"], "score": [10], "text": ["Well, there was the introduction of the potato, sugar (in loaves) from canes (as opposed to beets) and coffee. Oh, and tobacco. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5viqw8", "title": "What is the current Academic consensus - Anglo-Saxon Invasion, Anglo-Saxon Migration or none of the above?", "selftext": "I've been researching this topic a bit. It seems that the 'old' view of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, derived from Gildas, Bede and The Anglo-Saxon chronicle has now fallen out of favour? (Vortigern hiring Saxon mercenaries lead by Hengist and Horsa to fight off Picts and Scotti, then switching from mercenary ally to full out invaders,etc...)\n\nSo was it more of a migration over hundreds of years, and not the 'Adventus Saxonum' that started all at once in the first half of the 5th century? Especially if you consider the possible settlement of earlier Germanic people in Britain who were part of the Roman defense of Britain when it was still part of the empire. I've also hear it argued that there may not have been this strict ethnic devide with Celtic-Romano Britians on one side and Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians on the other.\n\nI'm a bit loss, possibly because I'm Canadian and this wasn't part of a standard education in elementary/high school.  For reference I'm currently reading a book by Guy Halsall - Worlds of Arthur.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5viqw8/what_is_the_current_academic_consensus_anglosaxon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["de2rntt"], "score": [57], "text": ["'It's complicated.'\n\nThere are a few different ways to approach this question.\n\n**Textual accounts**\n\nThe first, and the method longest favored, has been to trust the written sources. These include Gildas' sermon, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and other later texts. Each tells a slightly different version of the arrival, in boats, of Saxon mercenaries who turn on the hapless Britains, conquering and/or enslaving and/or driving them from England into the hills of Wales.\n\nYou are correct that these texts are no longer trusted, however. Why? First, scholars have done a lot of legwork to track down Bede's sources, and it's very clear that Bede based his account of the Anglo-Saxon arrival directly on Gildas. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which, remember, was written 400 years after these events) gives no indication of having any other unique sources either. Hence, these are not actually three separate accounts that agree, but one story, repeated two additional times. If we read Gildas, we're on the same footing as Bede.\n\nSo what happens when we read Gildas? Late Antique historians have, for the past 30 years, done a lot of really good work studying the genre and literary function of ancient and early medieval texts. What I mean by this is that we've come to recognize that ancient texts weren't written by people who necessarily were interested in telling the same kinds of stories we assume they are. A modern historian would, for instance, be interested in knowing precisely what people did, and how these actions influenced the events that followed. Late Antique authors, however, were often much more interested in how people's actions communicated their *moral* virtue, and hence tend to write stories where our ability to understand whether someone was good or bad is privileged over strict attention to causality. The author of the Historia Augusta doesn't tell us about Elagabalus' kinky sex life so we know *why* he was assassinated; he tells us about it so we know that the emperor *deserved what he got*. The things that authors emphasize vary by genre, by the author's context, by the objectives of the piece they were writing -- lots of factors. So just as a good literary scholar much think hard about how to distill meaning from a work of fiction, we must approach our historical texts with great care if we want to know what they're really on about.\n\nGildas wrote a sermon, and the central theme is about the consequences of rebellion against God. He uses examples from the scriptures to warn of the consequences of sin, goes through a list of corruption practiced by five bad contemporary kings, criticized the contemporary church, and calls his listeners / readers to repent. He also uses a long example from history to set this up, and this comes at the beginning of the sermon. It's easy to read this example from history as an objective account, but we have to remember that it's actually an introduction meant to get us to the real issue Gildas cares about, which is the consequences of rebelling against God.\n\nIn this historical story, Gildas rattles off the history of Britain, and he frames it as a sequence of rebellion vs submission. The Britons were weak by themselves, but Rome conquered them and made them strong. They rebelled, which made them weak, but the Romans conquered them again and this was actually good because submission to Rome made them strong. Then the Romans gave them Christianity, and they got even stronger. But they rebelled *twice*: against the Romans (by sending a usurper, Magnus Maximus, to the Continent with their armies), and against God (by embracing the Pelagian heresy). And that made them weak.\n\nThis is where we get to the part that historians of the Anglo-Saxon conquest care about. Britain was being raided in the fifth century, and they asked for help -- Rome sent it, they were saved, but then the Romans left because the soldiers were needed elsewhere. Before they left, the Romans built a wall in the north (Hadrian's Wall?? Only, that was built 300 year earlier). Britain was raided a second time -- the Roman army came and saved them again, building another wall (the Antonine Wall? Again, the chronology is way off -- but ok). A third time, Britain called for aid -- and Rome was fighting off the Huns and could spare no men. So the British asked for Saxon mercenaries, and they came, and they stayed. Shortly thereafter, these mercenaries were burning down Romano-British towns, killing their inhabitants, and Britain was ruined. But GOD sent the last Roman, Ambrosius, who beat the Saxons at Badon Hill. The moral? Britain never should have rebelled in the first place. But GOD *will* help you get back on the right path after you've sinned. So repent now, before it's too late!\n\nSo -- what do we do with this as a historical document? It's actually very vague on details. There's no mention of Hengist or Horsa, the two brothers (both named 'horse') who supposedly led the Saxon mercenaries. Gildas, in fact, is talking about events as though he expects his audience to already know what's going on. And he's clearly embroidering the story to make it work for his story, adding dramatic elements like the construction of Hadrian's Wall in the fifth century to make the narrative more compelling. His real goal isn't to tell us what happened; it's to get his kings to repent and turn back to God. But there are some details lurking in the text that are probably true. So let's leave Gildas with a ?, and look at the next source of evidence.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2601fs", "title": "Do we know of any contact between Ancient Egypt and East Asia ?", "selftext": "Hello,\n\nSo I started reading *Myths of China and Japan* by Donald A. Mackenzie and although I am not finished yet, something bothers me.\n\nIn the book, he makes the claim that Ancient Egyptians were the pioneers of seafaring and that it is likely that Ancient Egyptian ships (not necessarily men, that is to say, Egyptians high-sea ships manned by other people) made it to East Asia and influenced the East Asian and notably Chinese and Japanese but also Polynesian ship architectures.\n\nHe also claims that some parts of the Egyptian mythology such as the fight between Horus in a bird form against Seth in a snake form influenced the creation of the East Asian Dragon myth.\n\nI know this book is quite old and dates from the beginning of the 20th Century, however, have those theories been refuted since ? Or are they simple some kind of far-fetched assumptions ? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2601fs/do_we_know_of_any_contact_between_ancient_egypt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chmf80u"], "score": [12], "text": ["Ah. I enjoyed that book and it does an excellent job of telling stories, but yes, it's age shows in quite a few places. Short answer: no.\n\nEssentially, the book is proposing a model called diffusionism, although hyper-diffusionism might be more accurate. This was a theory, or more accurately a methodology, that proposed singular origins for practically everything, thus, if something appears in two places, it necessarily moved from one to another. Independent development is generally rejected. Add to that, there is a longstanding tradition in European thought called *ex orientia lux* that tends to view everything a arising in the Eastern Mediterranean region, particularly Egypt, and spreading from there. These can lead to conclusions that can sometimes seem a bit absurd, such as the one you give--Austronesian ship design, from materials used to the rigging used, has practically no similarity with Egyptian design.\n\nToday, diffusionism is rejected as a default explanation. It happens, certainly, but is to be demonstrated rather than assumed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2to4k3", "title": "What is the place of the battleship Yamato in the Japanese consciousness/culture?", "selftext": "Has the battleship Yamato been mythologized/romanticized in Japan? I have the impression that it has, though if I am mistaken, please explain why.\n\nAnd if the Yamato has been romanticized, well. Why? Is it just because of the cultural weight of the name \"Yamato\"? Because, from the documentaries I've watched, the actual warship had little positive military impact, if any, during WW2. I don't get it. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2to4k3/what_is_the_place_of_the_battleship_yamato_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co10i28", "co14e0y", "co17mbf", "co1cj7t"], "score": [23, 10, 2, 7], "text": ["I would definitely say the Yamato has some sort of place in the hearts of the Japanese people even today. In the late 30s, when it was laid down it was praised for being the biggest battleship in history and at the time many people still thought that size was the most important feature for these kind of Battleships.\nIn theory it outgunned and outranged any US or British Battleship it would have faced, which in the thinking of WW1 or the Russo-Japanese War was the key to victory. \nHistory taught us that it wasn't enough, although the Yamato also had design flaws, as [/u/kieslowskifan](_URL_0_) pointed out in this earlier [thread](_URL_1_).\n\nWhile the Japanese were proponents of naval aviation themselves, they  underestimated just how vulnerable giants like the Yamato would be to attacks from the air.\n\nThe whole concept of Battleships proved to be flawed in WW2, as can be seen in many other exemplary cases like the Bismarck, the Roma or the Sinking of the British ships 'Prince of Wales' and Repulse (by the Japanese themselves).\nAnd although many famous ships were essentially a waste of resources there is often still an almost mythological meaning to them in their respective countries, just for what they represented at the time and how tragic their loss was. ('Bismarck' for Germany, 'Hood' for Britain, 'Arizona' for the USA ...)", "The Yamato and the Mushashi were huge battleships, dubbed unoffically \"superbattleships\" because  of their 60k+ tonnes displacement and hugely powerful armament.  The Ultranationalists of Japan, while not restricted by the League of Nations' naval treaties, greatly pushed for the expansion of the navy, including the creation of the Yamato-class battleship. Thanks to its size, power and speed, it's a no brainer that such gigantic and impressive looking ships came to represent the might of Imperial Japan, especially with the Empire's fierce defiance to the Western powers, obviously the US being the big one. It became a symbol of pride for all Japanese people\n\nThe Japanese knew that they couldn't go against the US naval output, so the Yamato was designed to be a hugely powerful battleship that could engage multiple targets.  But as history has shown, battleships were in their twilight, this was the era of aircraft carriers.  Both the Yamato and the Mushashi were sunk by aircraft carriers, and the Shinano, the third of its class, was in the middle of being converted into an aircraft carrier. \n\nEven decades later, the symbol of Yamato remained strong. One of the most popular animes, Space Battleship Yamato, obviously being named after the ship. Thanks to the popularity of the series, the name Yamato was immortalized for another generation.", "Maybe im a bit too late but I can try my best to give out a few answer.\n\nAs you said, the name *Yamato* or in kanji, *\u5927\u548c* carried a bit of cultural weight as it means Big Japan. As what the other users in the thread has pointed out, the super size of the battleship is the personification of the national pride. The Japanese navy played the important part of its propaganda.\n\nJapan, being an island nation similar to Britain knows that having a strong navy means they are pretty much living in a fortress. Of course times changed and the nature of navy fighting has already evolved. \n\nThe modern culture of Japan still revered greatly at *Yamato*. Example is the anime, [Space Battleship Yamato](_URL_0_).\n\n", "The short answer is yes, this particular battleship has been romanticized in postwar Japanese. The mystique of the *Yamato* is partly a function of its size, which is also a draw for non-Japanese audiences as well. However, the *Yamato* taps into a number of important postwar Japanese cultural archetypes that give the ship a unique staying power in public consciousness. \n\nAlthough the ship itself had little military impact on the war, the *Yamato*'s historical narrative meshes well with the larger historical narrative of Japan's defeat. The IJN intended the ship to be the expression of Japan's technical expertise and ability to transcend superior numbers to achieve victory. In this goal, the IJN clearly failed and *Yamato* paid the price. The *Yamato* became an analogue of sorts for the postwar memory and interpretation of Japanese defeat: Japan thought it had the means to win, but discovered its reach far exceeded its grasp. While other IJN ships had a more colorful service, few match this specific narrative. Films  like 2005's *Otoko-tachi no Yamato*, based upon a bestselling nonfiction book, hew to this narrative, where its main protagonists, boy sailors, genuinely believe that the *Yamato* will lead Japan to victory and most of them die during the ship's sinking. In this way, the ship acts as a metaphor for Japan's whole wartime effort and erases some of the uncomfortable portions of its wartime aggression by recentering a narrative upon Japan's hubris (which can be hoisted on a few military leaders) and eventual victimhood. \n\nIn Ivan Morris's 1975 classic, *The Nobility of Failure* he argues that Japanese culture celebrates heroes who fail and yet stay true to their spirit and goals. While this is only one strain of Japanese culture, the story of the *Yamato* meshes well with this cultural archetype. In the aforementioned *Otoko-tachi no Yamato*, the ship's officers have an acrimonious meeting with the ship's commander over Operation Ten-Go. Many note, with great justification, that the ship's mission to Okinawa is a waste and the stuffed shirts at headquarters will not be called upon to make the same sacrifice. The ship's commander quiets down these objections by noting that the sacrifice of the ship will be a lesson for the Japan of the future, much like how late-Tokugawa samurai who encountered Western guns showed that the old samurai ways were not effective, so to would *Yamato*'s sinking. The ship's crew bonds over the course of the film and most die in the end. There's a similiar narrative in the flashback portions of the anime *Space Battleship Yamato* where the crew stoically face defeat. \n\n*Space Battleship Yamato* brings up another aspect of *Yamato*'s postwar cultural transformation: the ability of fiction to transform defeat into a victory. In this particular anime, the wreckage of the *Yamato* become a starship that saves the earth multiple times. William Ashbaugh cogently argues that this particular anime refights the war in a way that Japan wins, albeit in this case Japanese stoicism and technical expertise saves humanity rather than advances imperialist goals. The animation of the final space battle mirrors the animation of the ship's 1945 one, although this time, the *Yamato* triumphs over superior odds. Similarly, the technothriller anime/manga *Silent Service* has a JMSDF nuclear submarine named *Yamato* go rogue and triumph over the more numerous American and other antagonists. In this way, fiction is reversing the trauma of defeat and crafting an alternative narrative wherein defeat led to a new victory. \n\nAlthough the *Yamato* has a certain cachet in Japanese public consciousness, it is important to realize the caveat that reception is a different animal than transmission. The symbolism of turning defeat into victory of *Space Battleship Yamato* might be irrelevant to Japanese audiences who simply enjoyed a rollicking space opera. There is also a degree of apathy among the wider Japanese public about the Second World War and its relevance to contemporary Japan. *Otoko-tachi no Yamato* had a respectable box-office run but came in well behind Western films like *Revenge of the Sith* and *Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*. There's a clear Japanese market for *Yamato* merchandise, as evidenced by [HobbyLink Japan's search result for \"Yamato\"](_URL_0_) or videogames like [Kantai Collection](_URL_1_). Yet what *Yamato* means for the larger Japanese population as a whole in 2015 is somewhat nebulous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/u/kieslowskifan", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e71a9/would_wwii_japan_have_done_better_without/"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato"], ["http://www.hlj.com/scripts/hljlist?Word=yamato&amp;DisplayMode=images&amp;Dis=2&amp;Sort=std&amp;qid=7M8KNQP6SQLQ&amp;set=1&amp;q=1&amp;GenreCode2=nav", "http://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/Yamato"]]}
{"q_id": "3ai7kn", "title": "Going into the Korean war, did the US ever have the goal of completely absorbing the north into the south, or was an eventual retreat from the Yalu planned?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ai7kn/going_into_the_korean_war_did_the_us_ever_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csd16wr", "csd5ymj"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["Going in was long before the Yalu. The intent was simply to keep the south from being incorporated into the north.  Americans' concern was not to be embarrassed by having to retreat from Pusan. There was no UN mandate to do more which is why it was a UN police action, not a US war. Anyway, America was war weary after WW II and had disarmed. Civilians could buy jeeps and M-1s. Optics for Norden gun sights were available in the first simple catalogues of Edmund Scientific. The focus was on Europe and we certainly didn't want war with the new Communist regime in China. ", "To add to /u/ApuleiusBooks' answer, before the war broke out, the U.S. was in the process of withdrawing its soldiers and heavy equipment from the peninsula in reciprocity for the Soviet draw-down in the North in (IIRC) 1947-8. If Kim il-Sung had twiddled his thumbs for another few months to a year, it's possible that no serious U.S. presence would have remained on the Korean peninsula at all. The U.S. already had expensive obligations to worry about in West Germany and Japan, and there was never as much domestic support for the Korean occupation as these. (Korea had been part of the Japanese empire during World War II and not a belligerent.) Moreover, part of the reason for the withdrawal was to deny Syngman Rhee (then president of South Korea) access to weapons and equipment that he wanted for a possible invasion of the North. The U.S. didn't want to antagonize the Soviets or the Chinese, and wanted to stick to the Korean reunification process that it was then pursuing through the U.N. \n\nInvading the North to repel the invasion and deter Kim il-Sung from future attacks was one thing (that was the subject of the U.N. mandate that the U.S. had anyway), but *occupying* and rebuilding the country would have been something else altogether. Again, the Korean occupation was already a domestic political issue in the States and would not in any way have been improved by adding to it. \n\nAnd finally, if the U.S. had forcibly reunified the peninsula under one government, a U.S.-occupied territory would then directly share a land border with China (hostile) and the U.S.S.R. (hostile). Nobody wanted that."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "frtb4m", "title": "Just how long has vinegar been around in any form?", "selftext": "You can blame my mom for this one. We bought a ton of vinegar because we're having a stray cat problem and trying to drive them away from the place without too much harm, and apparently vinegar is a good cat repellent.\n\nBut that aside, when is the first evidence of vinegar ever being made?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/frtb4m/just_how_long_has_vinegar_been_around_in_any_form/", "answers": {"a_id": ["flyehzo"], "score": [2], "text": ["Vinegar is created by *acetobacter,* a kind of bacteria that is naturally occurring- notably, occurring in the guts of fruit flies.  When yeast ( a fungi) encounter sugar, they will start to ferment it into alcohol. If *acetobacter* bacteria are present ( and, of course, that can occur because fruit flies are going to be drawn to the smell of fruit juice) and conditions are right, they will begin to ferment the alcohol to acetic acid.\n\nWhenever wine, beer, hard cider etc are made, there is a chance that it will be turned into vinegar accidentally. But if , say, a farmer had vinegar in a barrel, adding wine or cider to it would result in more vinegar being produced.\n\nSo, essentially, your question is , how long have people done fermentation, made beer or wine? That's going back to [at least 7,000 BC , for China.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219134133.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2oc4vz", "title": "When was the second first developed as a unit of time? Were there any areas where a different standard was used?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2oc4vz/when_was_the_second_first_developed_as_a_unit_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmlsd5c"], "score": [3], "text": ["hi! I've got a pile of links for you, so settle in...\n\nFirst up, the FAQ has a couple of posts on [Hours, minutes, and seconds](_URL_11_)\n\nOrigins\n\n* [Has everyone always used a 24 hour day?](_URL_5_)\n\n* [As far as I can tell, nearly all of the world divides a day into 24 hours, each of which in turn divides into 60 minutes. When and how did this come about, and were there any radically different systems of time that we've now lost?](_URL_6_) - Sumeria, also China, Japan, Scandinavia\n\n* [How did people decide on how many seconds there would be in a minute, how many minutes in an hour, and how many hours in a day?](_URL_9_) - Babylon\n\n* [How/when did we develop measurements of time?](_URL_13_) - Babylon\n\n* [When did the hour-minute-second system of measuring time (in particular, using base 60) become the world standard, and what other ways of measuring times of less than one day have been common?](_URL_1_) - Babylon\n\n* [What is the history of time(keeping)?](_URL_3_) - Mesopotamia, also Mesoamerica\n\n* [When was our concept of time developed? How did other cultures in the past measure time? When did the world agree to the 24 hour day?](_URL_7_) - also Inuit\n\n* [How did an hour become an hour?](_URL_12_) - Europe\n\n* [In a world that can't agree on anything else, how did we all come to use hours, minutes and seconds?](_URL_0_)\n\nOther systems\n\n* [What were the common ways of time measurement in ancient Egypt and Mesopatamia?](_URL_10_) - Egypt\n\n* [Have we always used a 12 or 24 hour clock for measuring time? [x-post from /r/AskHistory]](_URL_2_) - Rome, China, Japan, Maya\n\n* [Did Far East Asia use the same standard units of time measurement (seconds, hours, days) that we use today?](_URL_4_) - China\n\n* [Did/Do native Americans have their own time system ?](_URL_8_) - Alaska\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u7rsq/in_a_world_that_cant_agree_on_anything_else_how/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i8pp4/when_did_the_hourminutesecond_system_of_measuring/cb23glx", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14jqag/have_we_always_used_a_12_or_24_hour_clock_for/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1746ek/what_is_the_history_of_timekeeping/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r6q5p/did_far_east_asia_use_the_same_standard_units_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28ed0a/has_everyone_always_used_a_24_hour_day/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nsc33/as_far_as_i_can_tell_nearly_all_of_the_world/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14sht9/when_was_our_concept_of_time_developed_how_did/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mnb7u/diddo_native_americans_have_their_own_time_system/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k2608/how_did_people_decide_on_how_many_seconds_there/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1u4kzk/what_were_the_common_ways_of_time_measurement_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_hours.2C_minutes.2C_and_seconds", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1116t9/how_did_an_hour_become_an_hour/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ew7u0/howwhen_did_we_develop_measurements_of_time/"]]}
{"q_id": "sx9ji", "title": "When, how, and why did sports (in general) become such a high-dollar enterprise in the United States?", "selftext": "I'm also interested in when sports (again, in general) simply became so wildly popular in the US.  Contrasting with other countries would be interesting, too.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sx9ji/when_how_and_why_did_sports_in_general_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4hrgzp"], "score": [3], "text": ["( I'm typing this on my phone, so please excuse any grammar/spelling mistakes)\n\nAlthough I'm not an expert, I would have to guess this happened around the late 1800s/early 1900s. During this time Americans disposable incomes and leisure time increased due to achievements by unions and other average Americans. Major league sports was a new way to pass the time. The  earliest specific example of major-league organized sports would be (Vincent?) Spaulding, the baseball magnate after whom his baseball brand was named. He was the first to realize how much money could be made in organized sports, and his league included teams like the Black Sox.\n\nSports entertainment became really popular because it was a cheap alternative to things like going to the opera, museums etc.. So it appealed to many poor/working class people. It was a way to relax on the weekend after a long week of manual labor. To cater to this crowd, games were made to be a lot more rowdier and beer was sold at events. Later, to make baseball appear to more rich folks, the stuff I mentioned before was removed from games.\n\nAlso, speaking about other countries, I cant really think of any example of major organized sports before my previous example. I would guess that with increasing Americanization around the world, American culture seeped into foreign cultures, and sports was a part of it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1texlf", "title": "What were the casualties expected in an invasion of mainland Japan and how did they compare to the actual casualties caused by using nuclear weapons ?", "selftext": "As a bonus question how accurately were casualties calculated during World Wars prior to invasions ?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1texlf/what_were_the_casualties_expected_in_an_invasion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce79t9n"], "score": [2], "text": ["The atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed at least 150,000, and probably more than 250,000 eventually died as a direct result of the bombings.  Just to keep things in perspective, neither the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were individually as deadly as the March 9-10 1945 firebombing of Tokyo (100,000 dead).  The invasion of mainland Japan was estimated to cost at least million casualties on both sides - the U.S. military ordered so many Purple Hearts that they're still handing out them today.  I'm afraid I can't comment on the accuracy of their casualty predictions, but they were based on four years of brutal warfare, and both the Japanese military and civilians had proved more willing to die than accept defeat or surrender (for example: on Iwo Jima, the Japanese commander ordered his men to kill ten Americans *before they died* - not \"kill ten and you can go home,\" or \"kill ten and we'll win,\" but \"you're going to do die and you need to kill as many of the enemy as possible;\" the U.S. took 218 prisoners of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers present; civilians on Saipan and Okinawa committed mass suicide); I see no reason not to accept the military's prediction of over 1,000,000 dead and wounded Americans (and equivalent or greater numbers of Japanese) as at least a probable outcome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13y7y3", "title": "Wednesday AMA: I am Mr_Bimmler, ask me anything regarding WWII Weapons or Vehicles. ", "selftext": "Hello historians! The time is now 9 pm and I'm ready to answer questions all night long. I would like to start with saying thanks to all the moderators and users for making this my absolute favorite sub-reddit. \n\nAnyway. Today's subject is weapons and vehicles in WWII. Ask me anything about world war 2 warfare, infantry weapons, AFV:S, airplanes, or battleships etc. I *could* answer other questions regarding WWII too but I would prefer that we keep focus on weapons and vehicles. \n\nI will answer questions for about 6-7 hours and please don't hesitate to ask if you wonder something. I will answer **all** the questions. \n\nEdit 1: Taking a small brake for food. Be back in 20.\n\nEdit 2: Back to answer more questions. Please note that **all** the questions will be answered. Some questions require a more in depth answer and I need some time to write the answers because my English is not the best.\n\nEdit 3: So many questions. I just realized that I may not have enough time to answer them all.\n\nEdit 4: The time is now 04:30am and I'm off to bed, I will answer the rest of the questions when I awake. Please don't stop asking questions.\n\nEdit 5: Back to answer questions.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13y7y3/wednesday_ama_i_am_mr_bimmler_ask_me_anything/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c787pam", "c787uio", "c787zcs", "c7884k3", "c788eve", "c789b6s", "c789jg4", "c789shr", "c789zf0", "c78a26c", "c78a6ue", "c78ao54", "c78ay9l", "c78b2br", "c78b4li", "c78b9jw", "c78baev", "c78bn0g", "c78bnak", "c78conw", "c78cxs8", "c78czuw", "c78czx2", "c78d40o", "c78da6y", "c78dbdm", "c78deoi", "c78dibe", "c78do3q", "c78dw6n", "c78e31k", "c78ebou", "c78ef6t", "c78eszx", "c78f6nx", "c78f7dx", "c78fqf0", "c78fvjt", "c78fx90", "c78hs3g", "c78hxnh"], "score": [12, 6, 16, 11, 2, 6, 6, 19, 3, 10, 2, 5, 2, 8, 2, 4, 10, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 4, 6, 2, 3, 2, 6, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 7], "text": ["Let's talk about the Thompson M1928 in British and early American service, pre-M1 models. How many of this particular model was fielded and how much of a bother was the front grip to those who used it in action? I've heard accounts of the front grip getting stuck in webbing or pulling on uniforms when pulled from the back/from the side into action or carrying it.", "Does it need to be military vehicles? \n\nBecause I'm extremely interested in wood gas (or wood burning) automobiles and there use in both a civilian and, if applicable, military capacity. ", "In the United States we have done a generally good job at preserving many of the 20th century era American battleships all of the Iowa class ships are still preserved ( and well worth seeing) and several of the Carolina class ships as well. However I have always found it curious that Britain didn't preserve any of her battleships especially given the strong connection of the country to her navy. Obviously economically Britain was weak after the war, but was there a movement to preserve any of the ships?", "I've been waiting for this AMA for two weeks. So thanks for your time and effort. \n\n1) I recently read [this](_URL_0_) about the T-34 being overrated. What are your opinions? Were they really as influential as (amateur?) historians seem to think? I actually have a ton of questions about tanks and tank design but I will spare you from a wall of questions. \n\n2) I bought a Enfield no.5 mk.1 Jungle carbine a few weeks ago. Did these see widespread action in WWII? Do you know of any accounts or memoirs of a soldier who used one? Did the troops like them or prefer the standard longer barreled version? Hell, any info you have on the jungle carbines is appreciated. ", "I recently purchased a Colt Commando Revolver. Just a couple of days ago I received my letter for it from the Colt historian indicating that my gun had been shipped from Colt to the Boston Police Department(BPD) in 1943 \n\n_URL_0_\n\nPrior to this it was my understanding that all of the production from Colt of that model was under control of the Springfield Ordnance District, who would have been the recipient of the shipments. Yet my gun was specifically engraved by Colt for the BPD, and shipped directly to the BPD. Can you explain how/why this would have occurred? I should note that while I have just started going through the records of the BPD, I have yet to find anything in the budgetary statements that would indicate a payment to Colt. Would this be a case of the War Department paying for the guns and having them directly shipped?", "Were there any weapons fielded that were great from a psychological warfare perspective? The only thing that comes to mind are the V rockets, but were there others?", "Assuming we're counting the pacific theater, How much of a role did battleships play in the war? I know that we eventually switched to Aircraft Carriers, but I am curious to what role they played in WWII.", "I have a question regarding the general reliability of military ground vehicles in WWII.  How often would a German Tiger tank or an American Sherman need to be serviced?  Could a Jeep travel thousands of miles with nothing more than filling it up with gas?  Who would perform the actual maintenance if something were to fail in the field?  It seems like you would need some pretty heavy duty equipment to repair a tank especially if the repair was somewhat serious.  Thank you.", "How reliable (i.e. how often did the tank break down/need repairs) were T-34's in comparison to the Sherman?", "How was it decided what type of weapon a soldier would carry into combat?", "1. Why did the Germans \"Usually\" never recover or try and repair vehicles lost or heavily damaged in battle?\n\n2. Also which do you think is better the M1941 Johnson Rifle or M1 Garand?\n\nEdit-Can you recommend any books?", "Hi - thanks for availing yourself for questions! Any specific and easy to digest books that you recommend to learn more about WWII weapons and strategies? Also, would love to learn more about specific \"game changer\" weapons or vehicles (e.g. Japanese Zero) used by the various countries in WWII. Thanks!", "What WW2 era Rifle, Subgun, and Pistol were the most effective?    Assuming you had to survive a wide variety of tactical and environmental situations and wouldn't have reliable ammo and logistics support.\n\nI might choose an M1 garand except it would rip my finger off trying to load it under stress.  Not kidding!  And the 30-06 may be a bit much for closer fighting.", "Forgive the banal, unacademic questions, but I'm always interested in the personal element when it comes to things like this...\n\n1. What WWII-era vehicle (preferably combat-related) would you most like to experience first-hand yourself?  Sitting in it, I mean -- even operating it.  My own would be the Ju-87, though I am considerably hampered in that I have no idea how to fly a plane.\n\n2. What's the most interesting one you *have* personally experienced?\n\n3. How did you come to have such a specific area of interest?\n\n4. What's something that people keep saying about [WWII Vehicle X] that you wish they wouldn't?\n\nThanks again for volunteering.", "As a child, my father took me to the Polish films *Ashes and Diamonds* and *Kanal.*\n\nI forget which one, but one of them had a scene with a Nazi small, squat, tank-like machine with a mounted machine gun. The thing that left a real impression was that it was operated by a cabled remote control.\n\nWas this a real thing? And if it was, was it effective at all? Was it particularly rare?", "How critical was the Lend-Lease Program's vehicular aid to the Red Army?  I've read bits of Mawdsley's *Thunder in the East* and Glantz's *When Titans Clashed* that suggest the Lend-Lease vehicles, particularly trucks, were important in helping the Red Army get back on its feet logistically after Barbarossa.  I'm also aware that many early Katyusha launchers were mounted on Studebaker trucks.  Conversely, many Russian commanders were, after the war, dismissive of the role of Lend-Lease.  ", "[Jack Churchill](_URL_0_) seems to come up on Reddit at least once a week, and this doesn't surprise me.  With his purported longbow and claymore, he cuts a very romantic figure in a war that was so often brutal and disgusting.\n\nI have two questions for you, pursuant to this:\n\n- What is your opinion on Churchill, if you have one?\n\n- Was he an isolated incident?  Or were there others like him (fighting for whatever side) who also went beyond the expected bounds of available weapons technology to achieve weird or interesting things?", "I have a question about lucky vehicles, planes or ships in WWII. I recently read about the IJN destroyer [Yukikaze](_URL_0_) and I wanted to know if there were similar units with other combatants who had unusual luck in surviving or accomplishing their mission? Thanks for doing the AMA.", "How do you think the Australian Cruiser IV would have fared against similar opposition?", "MP40 or Thompson > ", "Thanks for doing one!\n\n1) Do you have a favorite superweapon?  (I love the [Schwerer Gustav](_URL_0_), myself)\n\n2) How much money was put into giant weapon development, compared to small arms development?", "How far were really the Germans of detonating a nuclear bomb?\n\nDid Heisenberg deliberately made a mistake when he calculated the necessary amount of enriched uranium?\n\nWhere would have Germans used a nuclear bomb? London? New York?", "What would the performance of the German E-Series tanks been like? Were there any prototypes built? Was there anything groundbreaking in their design or construction? Thanks!", "Somebody asked earlier what the best small arms of WW2 would be - what about the opposite? What would be, say, the five worst small arms that saw reasonably widespread use?", "Hey, thanks for doing this AMA! Could you explain the difference between the planes built in the RAF and the LuffeWaffe and why the RAF managed to hold back the LuffeWaffe? ", "Which WW2 tank would be the most comfortable to have sex in?", "I've been waiting for this AMA :D. Thanks for doing it!\n\nI've read a lot about the lack of a true long-range, heavy bomber on the German side. What's the difference in range and payload between the Luftwaffe bombers versus the USAAF heavy bombers? \n\nIf Germany did have heavy bombers at their disposal, how do you think it would have affected bombing campaigns of London or Stalingrad?", "How did a typical tank battle play out? For example, when Panzer IVs and T-34s engaged each other on the battlefield, from how far out would the firsts shots be fired from? How close would they get to each other? Did the tanks stay together in large formations, or did they break up into small groups? \n\nHow mobile were they? Did opposing tanks attempt to flank or encircle each other? Or did tanks fire from a primarily static position? How often were infantry used in tank battles, and what role did they perform? \n\nHow many hits could a tank take before being knocked out of the battle? How often were tanks knocked out due to mobility kills versus being completely destroyed? \n\nWere there significant differences in German tank doctrine versus Soviet doctrine? Did the Germans or Soviets change their tank tactics over the course of the war? \n\nThanks again for doing this AMA, and feel free to ignore any of my questions if I asked too many :)", "So apparently my girlfriend's father has an original Arisaka (I believe, a Type 38). I was looking at info on them on Wikipedia, and I noticed this:\n\n*\"Post-war inspection of the Type 38 by both the U.S. military and the National Rifle Association showed that the Type 38's receiver was the strongest bolt action of any nation and capable of handling more powerful cartridges.\"*\n\nIs there any truth to that? I'm having a really hard time believing that an Arisaka action would be more solid than a Mauser action, mostly because the Mauser-derived rifles are still in production, but I don't exactly see a whole bunch of Arisaka clones floating around.", "Comparing stats.. which bomber was better? A B 17 flying fortress or a B 24 Liberator? Ive always admired the B 24 but my friends say its a B 17.", "What was the oldest specific weapon still in use?  Like a model of pistol, or type of bayonet?", "I heard or read somewhere that surprisingly few died of gun shots compared to the amount of shots fired. Is this true? If so, care to elaborate? What did most soldiers die from?", "Okay, so I play World of Tanks, the tank fighting MMO.  Now, I like a lot of people have been told time and again that Russian tanks were the absolute indisputable best of the war.  Now, I know the game is nerfed and tweaked to make it competitive, but I have found German tanks tend to be rolling metal tubs that are just plain nasty to fight; great range, high penetration and rate of fire, great armor, but of course they are about as maneuverable as a slug of lead.  \n\nMeanwhile Russian tanks are quick, reactive, maneuverable, fast on the reload, but squishy and give poor penetration.\n\nI have also found that American tanks are better than they are perceived to be.  They are quick, the turrets can take a beating, spry, but are weak in the hull and the guns are mediocre at best.  But they aren't the death traps we are lead to believe.\n\nHow accurate is this assessment to the reality of WWII?", "Why did Australian infantry forces seem to achieve so much success with the outdated SMLE? Also, how effective was the Bren gun compared to Japanese (woodpecker or something?) light machine guns given its small magazine size. Cheers for the AMA", "I actually have a question regarding your account name, it being a Python reference and all. Might it be safe to assume as a Python fan and a historian you're familiar with Terry Jones's work as a presenter of historical documentaries? If so, what's your opinion of his perspective? He's crafted a specific voice as a dispeller of historical misconceptions, but do you find his editorializing to be overstated or off base at all? I realize this has nothing to do with the topic and I don't expect you to have an opinion if you're not familiar with it. ", "I remember reading one of the biggest advantages the Russians had in tank warfare was the complete lack of variety in their tanks which meant they always had the compatible parts available for repairs to their tanks as opposed to the many German varieties that often didn't have the right type of parts due to the ever changing tank designs.\n\nCan you shed any light on the issue, the advantages and disadvantages of variety or lack thereof in tank divisions and how it impacted the eastern front for each side?", "In WWII films, namely Saving Private Ryan, shooting a flamethrower gas tank yields a fiery explosion and a gruesome death for the operator. I've always wondered if this would actually happen in the real world, or if it would just be an anticlimactic pffft of fuel with no ignition. Can you comment on this topic?", "So this is a longshot and I can't remember the details but I remember hearing a story about a US Marine in the pacific that took a machine gun or cannon off of a crashed fighter plane and converted it into an infantry weapon with a shoulder stock and everything. I remember thinking the story was pretty incredible at the time. Have you ever heard of anything like this or know the story yourself?", "I was told that the WWII Jeep had a camshaft that ran in the iron block without bearings, because that would give an engine life of 1500 miles, Normandy to Berlin about 2-3 times. Any truth to this old soldier's tale?", "It's \"common knowledge\" that in WW2 the equipment profiles of the belligerents looked like what i list below. I realize that what I'm saying below is far from the complete picture but I'd like to hear about the stereotypical view.\n\n- Russia, Reliable if unsophisticated weapons and vehicles.\n- Germany, high-tech, limited numbers (german engineering etc.).\n- USA, massive quantities optimized for mass production, not always the most advanced.\n\nTo what degree do you think these stereotypes are true?\n\nAnd if the stereotypes are true, to what degree was there an overall \"national strategy\" for production according to these stereotypical principles?\n\nI guess what I'm as asking is did eg. Albert Speer sit down with Hitler one day and go \"right, we're going to make some really advanced tanks, lets not consider if they can be built in mass quantities or what they cost or how easy they are to maintain\". The same goes for the other major belligerents, did they have an overall strategy for wartime design and production?", "I cannot not do this! It's against everything, but..\nDid you have fun in Stalingrad, Mr. Bimmler? \n\nOn a serious note, do you know about the dog-bombs and the like? And did only the soviets use them?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-Busters/MythBusters2.html"], ["http://imgur.com/a/HCxBi"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_destroyer_Yukikaze"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6k4psl", "title": "Cathedrals are large and ornate, necessitating significant investment to construct. Did Cathedrals they serve any practical purpose for the village/town/city aside from hosting religious proceedings.", "selftext": "Inspired by [this](_URL_0_) post, I'm wondering if cathedrals served any practical purpose for the community which helped construct it aside from mass. If not, what was the benefit to the community of having these large, expensive, structures. I'm mainly wondering about the middle-ages but open to any time period in which you may have expertise. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6k4psl/cathedrals_are_large_and_ornate_necessitating/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djjxq3t", "djk7ve4", "djk9kys"], "score": [9, 13, 7], "text": ["For clarification, is there a specific time period or geographical area in which you are specifically interested?", "There actually are a few ways that churches functioned aside from housing worshipers for Mass, but these are, of course, directly related to the church\u2019s larger spiritual aims which took precedence in the Middle Ages. I can\u2019t demonstrate every way that the space of the church was used at this time but I can give a few specific examples. Incidentally, both of these also relate to how churches raised funds for their own repairs and construction. \n\nPerhaps one of the more prominent practices that became widespread during the range of dates you specified was the practice of pilgrimage in which devout churchgoers would visit the shrine of a saint or holy person\u2014this could consist of their physical remains or some object that they had touched worn, etc\u2014and pray in the presence of these objects so that they could for example, be forgiven for their sins, or be granted a miracle. Over time, some of these objects gained a reputation for being miraculous and thus attracted the attention of more pilgrims. This led not only changes to in the physical structure of the church itself but also alternative uses for its space. A well-known example of this is the Church of Santiago de Compostela, completed in 1211, and built to house the relics of St. James. As it was made for the benefit of pilgrims rather than local parishioners, this church had a prominent ambulatory with small chapels around it so that visitors could venerate the relics without interrupting mass [(floor plan)](_URL_0_). They could enter through the transept (side-entrance), explore the space of the church, and visit the relics located around the perimeter without disturbing the activities taking place in the nave and high altar. This practice became fairly widespread and even became the impetus for a sort of economy with hostels, pilgrimage churches and other forms of proto-tourist infrastructure popping up along major pilgrimage routes. \n\nAnother example of the popularity of pilgrimage can be seen with Chartres Cathedral [(floorplan)] (_URL_4_) [(exterior)] (_URL_1_) and, incidentally, it is also an interesting example of how major construction projects came to be funded. The relic it contained was purported to be a shift worn by the Virgin as she gave birth to Christ. This particular relic had healing powers attributed to it which made Chartres a major pilgrimage destination. In fact, during its rebuilding in 1145, wagonloads of donors arrived with food and construction materials to sustain the builders and in return were allowed to see the relics (Freeman 115). In yet another creative way of raising funds (in addition to those from  bishops, church officials, and aristocratic patrons, of course), the churchmen at this cathedral played on the public\u2019s particular interest in this relic and sent it on tour as a way to generate money for the construction of this church. This practice positions pilgrimage as a major factor in a sort of medieval proto-tourism and an influence on the economy of Europe. \n\nAnother more peripheral way that the church functioned during the medieval era was as the base for larger monastic communities. Although here the space was still used in largely the same way, it did spur the construction of supporting communities of monks whose interactions with the surrounding community broadened the ways that individuals could interact with the church. For example, if you look at the [St. Gall plan] (_URL_3_), a plan of what an ideal monastic space should look like, you can see that while the church forms the bulk of the architectural space, it also contained a hostel, guesthouse, school, and infirmary. While this particular plan was never executed, (it represented an ideal layout of space) it does show how monastic communities provided public services that could be later associated with the church. \n\nSources consulted:\n\n* Charles Freeman, *Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe*\n\n* Carolingian Culture at Reichenau  &  St. Gall: _URL_2_", "Let me start of by saying that I'm probably not the most qualified person here to answer your question. But i really like the question and i think it deserves an answer. I'm not a church or social historian. I'm a medieval historian that focusses on the northern low countries mainly in the period between 1100 and 1500. This means that first of all my answer is going to mainly be true for that period and that area, when i give examples that aren't found in the norther low countries i will specifically mention place names. It also means that i wont be able to provide a proper source for most of this, since it is quite general information that i picked up at lectures or symposiums. If anybody would like a source on something i said, please let me know and ill try and find it somewhere.\n\nIf i may, i would like to change the question a little bit. A cathedral isn't a big or ornate church, it is the seat of a bishop. Not every cathedral was big and ornate and not every big and ornate church was a cathedral. I would like to answer the question for any big ornate urban church in the high till low middle ages. One of the reasons for this change is that my area of expertise, the norther low countries, only had one cathedral in Utrecht but many more big urban churches.\n\nSo the question would be. What were the practical functions of big urban churches between 1100 and 1500? There are a couple of uses and functions big urban churches would have during the middle ages and i think the following 6 points are the most important out of all of them. But this is by no means an exhaustive overview.\n\n* Prestige\n* Tourism\n* Capittel/Collegiate churches\n* Schools\n* Lay involvement\n* Social center\n\n**Prestige**\n\nIn the middle ages being part of an urban community meant something to the members. Cities in the northern low countries were still real communities. The norther low countries had many small till medium sized cities. The biggest city being Utrecht, having around 10.000 inhabitant, most cities having around 3000 people living in them. The people living in those cities were burghers of these cities and as such had certain rights and privileges within the medieval world. They were proud of these privileges and freedoms and as such the city was often the highest unit of government they felt a real loyalty to. For the burghers having a big church that would rival a cathedral even though there was no bishop was a point of pride. Having a big altar stone made of foreign rock, a full time choir that fills the church with song or the highest tower of the region was a real concern and something they were prepared to spend a lot of money on. If a rival trading town would build a church more ornate then the one of their own community, the civil leadership would sometimes attempt to raise money to one up them.\n\n**Tourism**\n\nThat's right, medieval tourism. Well maybe it would be more accurate to call it pilgrimage. Anybody who has read the Canterbury tales is probably familiar with the concept of tourism in the middle ages. Some people would have been moved by spirituality or the need to heal a certain ailment other just wanted to see the sights and drink beer. Having a big ornate church with relics could help attracting pilgrims to the city who would in turn spend money on food, drink, bed and souvenirs. Some extreme examples of cities that had a real tourism industry would be Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela. But every city had their regional legends and saints. (This was before the papacy regulated sainthood) Even relatively small towns could try and attract pilgrims. Most wouldn't be on a European scale, but having a famous relic or miracle would even attract pilgrims to small town or village churches on a regional scale.\n\n**Capittel/Collegiate churches**\n\nThis is were we venture in a little bit of less known territory. By the late middle ages every city of some importance would have had at least one church with a capittel. Utrecht besides their cathedral had 5 churches that had a capittel staffed by cannons. Being a canon was a particular lucrative ecclesiastical position often staffed by university educated career clerics and the low nobility. Having some level of learnedness was often required and this was a way for the patrons of the church may they be nobility or as was often the case civil to bind influential or skilled clerics to them. The position of canon was particularly lucrative because they were more often then not connected to a prebend. A prebend is a collection of land or other goods that would produce the income of the canon. This college of cannons were headed by a deacon or provost (sometimes both) who often head a very substantial prebend. This meant that big churches were often also administration centers for big estates and sometimes even had lordly rights over villages or areas. In cities with a bishop the canons would also be officially responsible for choosing the new bishop, so they would have to be bribed by anyone or their patron aspiring to that position.\n\n**Schools**\n\nCapittel churches often had schools. Before there was the university there was the capittel school and in western Europe many Universities have their roots in capittel schools. The professors were often canons, giving out lucrative prebends with these canonships was a way to bind professors to the school or attract more learned and famous ones. While classes and lectures would often be held outside of the church itself, these professors and students were bound to the church and therefor to the city. While especially in the late middle ages when Universities and secular latin schools started to gain ground, in the high middle ages these were some of the most important cultural and knowledge centers of Europe. (Along with a handful of really important monasteries) Having a capittel church with lucrative prebends would have been a way for a town to attract both professors and students. While students would often bring trouble, they would also bring money.\n\n**Lay involvement**\n\nFrom around 1300 onward lay involvement in churches would flourish in the northern low countries. Lay brotherhoods were founded for people wishing to get spiritually involved, but not able or willing to take the vows. Guilds also played a big part spiritual revival of sorts in lay culture. Both these lay brotherhoods and guilds payed to have chapels build inside or next to big churches. They would furnish and decorate these chapels, bury their important death in them and pay for a chaplain to perform services in these chapels. These chapels were more then just spiritual places for these brotherhoods and guilds. From these brotherhoods in the low countries would form so called \"rederijkerskamers\", these were brotherhoods of lay people that were amateur writers, musicians and stage performance. These were the first real clubs for amateur artists in the low countries and the civil expression of culture that would displace the courtly literature that was popular during the high middle ages. These clubs gave the burghers a cultural voice and are regarded as being very important by scholars of Dutch language literature, these clubs were really just lay brotherhoods based out of churches.\n\n**Social center**\n\nFrom the smallest parish church till the biggest urban cathedral. The church was a place for the community to gather. Churches were not just open during mass or sermon, but were often open during the day. People would come in to pray, listen to the choir, look at art or in the northern low countries even read sermons pinned to the wall or pillars. But there weren't just spiritual reasons to visit the church. Often merchants would conclude business deals in the church. It was a public place, often very central and maybe even more important; who would try and cheat or lie about a deal in a church? But people could also come in and converse. Urban churches were full of life, not only during mass. They were often quite busy the entire day. There were priests, chaplains, canons, students, singers, musicians, merchants, guild members, lay brothers, normal townsfolk and often even cats and dogs in the church. \n\n\nI hope this answers most of your questions about how these big ornate buildings were practically used in day to day life. If you want i can tell you a little bit about how the medieval theologians felt about the buildings beings so ornate if you're interested, but i would type that up some other time.\n\n**Some sources:** (I'm sorry that i cant do better)\n\nAbout the role of capittel churches in medieval education: Charles Homer Haskings, *The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century* (Cambridge 1927).\n\nAbout capittels in the northern low countries general: A.J van den Hoven van Genderen, *De heren van de kerk : de kanunniken van Oudmunster te Utrecht in de late middeleeuwen* (Zuthpen 1997).\n\nAbout medieval society: W. Blockmans and P. Hoppenbrouwers, *Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500* (Routledge 2007).\n\n\n\n\n "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6k0h8o/celtic_cathedral/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Santiago_de_Compostela_plan_vertical.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Chartres_Cathedral_000.JPG", "http://www.stgallplan.org/index.html", "http://www.stgallplan.org/en/index_plan.html", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Plan.cathedrale.Chartres.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "1e9el2", "title": "Monday Mysteries | Ancient Ruins", "selftext": "**Previously:**\n\n- [Decline and Fall](_URL_2_)\n- [Lost and Found Treasure](_URL_3_)\n- [Missing Documents and Texts](_URL_1_)\n- [Notable Disappearances](_URL_0_)\n\n**Today:**\n\nThe \"Monday Mysteries\" series will be focused on, well, mysteries -- historical matters that present us with problems of some sort, and not just the usual ones that plague historiography as it is. Situations in which our whole understanding of them would turn on a (so far) unknown variable, like the sinking of the Lusitania; situations in which we only know that something did happen, but not necessarily how or why, like the deaths of Richard III's nephews in the Tower of London; situations in which something has become lost, or become found, or turned out never to have been at all -- like the art of Greek fire, or the Antikythera mechanism, or the historical Coriolanus, respectively.\n\n**This week, let's talk about ancient ruins that present some sort of problem.**\n\nAre there are any archaeological sites out there that still don't make a whole lot of sense to us?  Structures that should not exist in their time or place?  Massive things of which no record in the surrounding culture seems to exist?  Buildings with purposes that remain unknown?\n\nHow were these places discovered?  What are the leading theories as to their origins or purpose?\n\nConversely, is there anything we have reason to believe *should* exist, but which has nevertheless evaded our efforts to find it?\n\nI ask these preliminary questions with a hopeful spirit, working as I do in a field where discoveries of this sort would be absurd.  Many of those reading this are focused on the much more distant past, however, where mysteries like this become compounded by the gulf of ages -- I'm hoping some of you will be able to take us back and show us something interesting.\n\nAs is usual for a daily project post, moderation will be relatively light.  Please ensure as always that your comments are as comprehensive and useful as you can make them, but know that there's also more room for jokes, digressions and general discussion that might usually be the case.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e9el2/monday_mysteries_ancient_ruins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9y3g7y", "c9y3qyy", "c9y3w9d", "c9y51qj", "c9y5gp1", "c9y5vkx", "c9y6ari", "c9y6p5t", "c9yb94e"], "score": [7, 10, 3, 19, 4, 35, 7, 38, 13], "text": ["Ok, what stuff on Ancient Aliens really is a mystery?\n\nI'm not asking about the alien stuff, just if a ruin that they've talked about really is a complete mystery and we don't know why or how it's there.", "Since it was the first thing that popped into my head, and then you went ahead and mentioned it, what *is* the deal with the Antikythera mechanism? I understand that it's relatively explainable for the technology of its time, and that [recent research](_URL_0_) suggests it most likely has some kind of astronomical function. \n\nMy question is about the context in which it was found. Do we have evidence of any kind of mechanical devices anywhere as complex as this device? Do we know why it was found on this one shipwreck, what it might have been used for?\n\nI've also heard it described as a primitive analog computer. Do we have any evidence that the ancient Greeks understand the theory behind how it worked? Or does it exist in some kind of vacuum?", "Also...who *were* the Huns, really? Last I heard, the idea that they were the descendents of the Xiongu is out of fashion. Do modern scholars have any idea where they came from?\n\nIf not - if the word \"Huns\" just described a loose collection of tribes from north of the Black Sea - then what's up with the Hunnic Empire? Was it dominated by any one culture or ethnic group? Why did it seem to vanish so completely after Atilla's death?", "The problem is that, at least as it is often stated, the designation of an archaeological remain as \"mysterious\" is entirely exogenous and thus archaeologically incoherent, a revelation not of the structure but of our own basic ignorance as to the culture. Many people describe Stonehenge as \"mysterious\" but to the builders it was not mysterious at all--imagine someone who, say, doesn't know about McDonalds remarking on these mysterious structures, seemingly containing their own distinct iconography and widely spread through zones that are neither geographically or culturally contiguous. Mysteeeerriioouus. In fact, the description of certain remains as \"mysterious\" is rather problematic, and contributes to the exoticisizing discourse around, eg, the \"unknowable and inscrutable oriental\".\n\nBuzzkill aside, the Eumachia structure at the southern end of the western side of the Pompeii forum has not, as of yet, had its function positively identified by archaeologists. It seems to have had some connection with the wool industry, but it is a bit atypical for a collegia office and is not in a particularly logical position to be a \"sheep processing unit\".\n\nEDIT: Not that there *are* not structures that we can, to a certain extent, deem \"mysterious\". But it is often used to shift the onus of ignorance onto the culture that produced it. It would be like, for example, me saying that the Spanish language is \"mysterious\".", "I've been curious about the Japanese Yonagani Monument, which appears to be some sort Japanese Atlantis that some believe to be part of the mythical lost continent of Mu. ", "I've long been fascinated by [brochs](_URL_0_), an odd sort of dry-stone circular building found mainly on the coast of Scotland but also in one or two places well inland. They have two walls, separated by corridors or voids, and taper inwards above ground. The doors are low so that one has to stoop to hands and knees to get in to most of them. Some of them still intact enough to have internal above-ground corridors which can be walked through. There are no external windows (there are slits on the inner walls), and although it's difficult to be sure, it seems that it would have been difficult to get on top of them from the inside to defend the buildings.\n\nThere still seems to be little known about them: the best estimate is that they were built from 1C BCE to 1C CE. They are often built with a view of the sea (not always), but they might have been built more to be seen *from* the sea as prestige objects - but since they might have been as common as every couple of miles, prestige would not have been that great.\n\nI'd be interested in anything anyone can add to this brief summary. For instance, why did they seem to have no provision for defence once the door was closed? Why were they sometimes built close together (Dun Telve and Dun Troddan are 500m apart)? Why were they sometimes built out of sight of the sea (these two again)?", "The [Longyou Grottoes](_URL_1_). Its 24 massive caves that have been excavated by hand. It was discovered in 1992 in China.\n\nCan anyone share more info on the Longyou Grottoes? (why did they make it?, who made it?). I can't find much information on it. Except for [this](_URL_0_)", "One particularly bizarre (to our eyes) archaeological feature are the mosaics found in Olmec cities like *La Venta*. [Here's an example](_URL_0_). These large patterns are made from serpentine (a kind of green stone considered to be a precious mineral by Mesoamericans). The weird thing about them is that they were buried immediately after construction. To us, this seems incredibly bizarre given how valuable serpentine was to Mesoamerican cultures. It would be like paving a large plaza in silver and then immediately covering it with cement. \n\nThese days archaeologists often say these mosaics are \"ritual features.\" Which is a fancy way of saying that we have no idea what they were for. Most likely, they weren't meant to be seen by mortals. It was probably enough that the Olmec priests *knew* the mosaic was there so that they could invoke it in some kind of religious ritual. But what exactly this ritual was and why it needed a massive hidden mosaic face made of pure serpentine is completely unknown to us.", "I am quite fascinated by the G\u00f6bekli Tepe temple and what it signifies for early humans.\n\nWhat's the significance of such a structure and how does it fit into what we understand about our ancestors?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ce73h/monday_mysteries_notable_disappearances/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cvbaz/monday_mysteries_missing_documents_and_texts/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dslor/monday_mysteries_decline_and_fall/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dcbb3/monday_mysteries_lost_and_found_treasure/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/4/"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broch"], ["http://en.minghui.org/emh/articles/2000/9/11/8273.html", "http://www.quzhouhotel.com/UploadFile/20120816112629857.jpg"], ["http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NJsg6G2vsbA/TW1SEJNTC5I/AAAAAAAACBQ/bGxOzJOXyus/s1600/P1010413.JPG"], []]}
{"q_id": "3n0fjs", "title": "What did a Civil War \"supply line\" actually look like?", "selftext": "I understand the concept of a supply line (a fixed route for a military incursion to exchange men and materiel back and forth with the home base), and I understand that some generals maintained them while others preferred to live off the enemy's land, but how did you maintain one?  Did you have to leave troops behind to hold the land all along the route, or just a token presence?  If you crossed a general's supply line, would you know it?  If you wanted to break a supply line, what would you do? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n0fjs/what_did_a_civil_war_supply_line_actually_look/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvjrlsq"], "score": [13], "text": ["So let me first explain a little bit as to what a supply line would have looked like. It would have been a massive wagon train, stretching out across the road filled with laboring beasts, sweating workers, and stench of feces and a great unwashed mass. Jostling underneath wagon covers would be every conceivable item needed for war, from ammunition and food to water, boots, hats, coats, blankets, haversacks, bayonets, swords, guns, picks, shovels, wooden planks, *replacement parts for other wagons* and literally every implement soldiers needed to stay effective in the field. Even soldiers themselves, destined for the frontline armies, used these routes to move from supply areas in the rear to the armies up front. But, like the armies of the time, these wagon trains were pinpricks in a vast arena. And they werent the only way armies transported goods. \n\nSo whats a supply line? Its best to think of them as major highways for moving men and materiel from depots in the rear to the armies up front. These supplies were usually transported in one of three different vehicles: trains, boats, or by foot power (either a beast pulling a cart, or a man carrying goods, and himself!). The Civil War was the first major conflict fought which was aided by the use of steampowered locamotives. In the realm of tactics and operations, these trains allowed armies to quickly shuttle forces across the vast American theater. They also allowed armies to reinforce and resupply quickly as supplies moved away from rear area depots to the railheads, which were the closest railway point to the front line, adjusting for the conditions of other transport mechanisms. \n\nRailways also are the easiest supply line to understand. You have a thin ribbon of steel across which the lifeblood of armies transit. Where the railways were well developed, like in the East, transit was quick, efficient, and voluminous. But in less developed areas, or where the rail line decayed through overuse, volume quickly outstripped capacity, and prevented the free transit of supplies. Imagine what a damaged bridge, a wrecked train, or a separate rail might do to a busy rail schedule. Now imagine that same scenario in an area which was poorly developed, where that accident could block a critical passageway, and could entail rerouting traffic many hundreds of miles to reach the same destination.\n\nRoad and river traffic was more secure and less prone to accident, sabotage, and blockage. But thats not to say that there werent chokepoints and vulnerabilities across all forms of supply traffic. Each individual supply column was hard to find without the effective use of spies, scouts, and intelligence organs. Cutting a supply line rarely entailed the actual physical destruction of supply convoys and depots (though that did happen, especially in the case of raider warfare). Rather, armies would attempt to lay themselves across the enemy's supply lines, garrisoning key junctions and preventing the free flow of materiel. This would have one of three effects. If the enemy army kept on attacking, it would do so using only what goods it had with it. In that situation, most armies would simply shrivel up and die. Instead, the enemy army could pull back, attempt to outmaneuver their attacker, and reunite with supply lines. This is a dangerous move, however, because the enemy already controls some of the best routes back to base. Finally, the enemy could turn and attack, attempt to dislodge the blockage and reunite with supplies. No matter what strategy a general picked, he would have to do so with only what was available at that moment. Further, the general doing the cutting would be the one calling the shots. He controlled vital points on the map and narrowed down the possible responses greatly. \n\nOutside of the major campaigns and set piece engagements, Raiders also plagued Union supply lines. As the Union army moved into the Confederacy, they moved away from their bases. In many cases, this led to a long and perilous supply chain which had multiple vulnerabilities. Confederate raiders, usually cavalry, would circle around the Union armies (again, pinpricks in a much larger theater) and move up the supply line. There they did as much damage as they could. Rivers were the hardest to plug up, but sunken ships and steaks could block river travel. Felled trees, burnt  bridges, and roving gangs all plagued back area roads. Railways were the easiest to destroy, however, because men could easily pull apart miles worth of track, and even the removal of one rail could stop an entire train until it was repaired. All the raider's had to do was ensure that enough damage was done that could not be easily or quickly repaired. To counter this threat, the Union expended vast amounts of manpower to secure their supply lines. Between half an armies paper strength or more could be devoted just to securing the supply lines or rear areas. These forces were used in a variety of ways. Some marched with convoys to repel raiders, while others patrolled road and rail hoping to catch saboteurs in the act. In other places, they occupied garrisons to provide refuge for traveling wagons and convoys. But in every place, raider still had success. Further, rear area work could be dangerous. Confederate raiders were especially nasty, and regularly picked off isolated Union patrols.\n\nLogistics and supply are one of the unsung elements of modern war. When we think of great military victories we rarely remember the supply clerks and logisticians who enabled that victory. Even armies which lived off the land still consumed some supplies. Men and ammunition were always in high demand. So the armies and commanders of the Civil War constantly considered where there army would get its next meal, and where it would get its next bullet. The supply side of the war was just as revolutionary, and just as important, as the major engagements.\n\nSources:\n\nRussell Weigley, *A Great Civil War*\n\nGordon Rhea, *The Battles for Spotsylvania Courthouse and the Road to Yellow Tavern*\n\nMartin van Creveld, *Supplying War*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16hsr7", "title": "To what extent did resistance groups in WWII fight each other?", "selftext": "While I've read references here and there to various groups resisting the Axis in WWII having conflicts with each other (for example, I recall there was no love lost between the French communists and the Free French), I was wondering whether resistance groups both within occupied countries actually fought each other while, at the same time, maintaining their mission to eventually defeat the Nazis, or whether the threat of the invading regime caused them to put aside their differences, at least for a little while, and if not work together than at least resolve to stay out of each other's way. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16hsr7/to_what_extent_did_resistance_groups_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7w5p9j", "c7w84q1", "c7w90t5", "c7w9m8v"], "score": [3, 8, 3, 2], "text": ["This applies specifically to the danish resistance groups, since i really don't know that much about other countries' groups. \n\nIn Denmark, there were to my knowledge no actual fights between groups. All the groups were dependent on supplies from England, and the communist groups received much fewer supplies than the non-communist groups. The danish army(in charge of the drops) decided early on to limit supplies going to communist groups, in order to make sure that there would be no major changes to the power balance, when the war ended. The result was that communist groups had to carry out raids on Germans in order to get the needed supplies, and that kind of offensive actions against an army was much more dangerous than the sabotage actions that the resistance primarily carried out. \n\nEdit: There weren't any fights, but there were a lot of heated arguments on this policy, especially after the war. ", "I am familiar in detail only with Yugoslav resistance groups. The two main resistance groups, Chetniks and communist partisans waged a civil war parallel with the war against occupying and quisling forces. Far from just occasional skirmishes this civil war in many ways determined the strategy of both, to the extent that Chetniks mostly turned collaborators as early as 1942 and almost completely by 1943 and stopped really being the resistance group. Partisans, while not turning to collaboration considered Chetniks their main rival for post-war power and acted accordingly. ", "Western Europe: in general there was no actual fighting between resistance groups.\n\nPoland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Eastern Europe in general: Sometimes armed fighting between Communist and non-communist resistance groups, for example  ELAS and EDES in Greece or Armia Ludowa and Armia Krajowa in Poland. \n\nIn China, there was a civil war raging before the Japanese invaded between the Communists and the Nationalists and this continued partly during the war.", "Gwardia Ludowa (from 1944 Armia Ludowa - commies, Soviet collaborants) in Poland fought Armia Krajowa (the good ones) with every means. In 1943 Marek Spychalski from GL reported 50 people from AK to Gestapo. Since 1944 Narodowe Si\u0142y Zbrojne (rightists) started reporting communists on Gestapo too. \n\nBut communists killed themselves too. First leader of GL, Boles\u0142aw Mo\u0142ojec, was accused of killing Marcel Nowotko (he was the first leader of PPR, Soviet satellite party) and killed by Jan Krasicki, by a direct order from Ma\u0142gorzata Fornalska, partner of later president of Communist Poland, Boles\u0142aw Bierut.\n\nOnce GL reported on Gestapo an illegal printing press in Warsaw. Afterwards they realised that it was their own press...\n\nDirectly after the war polish non-communist resistance groups were persecuted. Most members were imprisoned, a lot of them killed."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4kdyen", "title": "What differences, if any, were there between Soviet and Western (American, British, French) tactics in countering Blitzkrieg tactics in WW2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kdyen/what_differences_if_any_were_there_between_soviet/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3eqb4p"], "score": [2], "text": ["Follow up. Was Blitzkrieg even a real German doctrine in WW2?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qivbe", "title": "Are Southern Chinese really Han Chinese?", "selftext": "I read on Youtube comments section and other Asian-focused forums that Southern Chinese (like Cantonese) are related to Vietnamese, and were descendants of Baiyue tribes, and are not really \"original Chinese blood\" descendants from the heartland of China (Yellow River basin)...\n\nPlease excuse me, since I'm just an Cantonese-Chinese person raised in United States, so my knowledge about Chinese history (thus migration patterns) is very poor.\n\nSo is Cantonese/Southern Chinese really Han Chinese, or are they like Vietnamese/Barbarian/Baiyue descendants? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qivbe/are_southern_chinese_really_han_chinese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdd9rt7", "cdfh3fp"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Now firstly it must be made clear: \"Southern Chinese\" is not a single homogenous group. There are several major ethnic group that usually called Southern Chinese. These are:\n\n- Hokkien/Fujuanese: people from Fujian. This province is the most mountainous province in eastern China. During early Han period this period are mstly out of government controls and still un-Sinicized\n- Cantonese/Yue Chinese/Guangzhou people: people native from Guangdong, the province near Hongkong and Macau and to the south of Fujian. This province is less mountainous and rather easily accessible via a river route from Hunan. Even since Qin dynasty this place is already have a Chinese garrison\n- Hakka: these people are recent migrant from northern China. There are good record of their migration southward and these people are undoubtedly Han\n- other non-Han ethnic group sometimes also called \"Southern Chinese\", especially the Zhuang, who are linguistically closer to the Thais, and various Hmong/Miao people who are likely indigenous in the place\n\nJudging from its history, the Yue/Cantonese are likely have Han descent, as it is already an important commandery since the first dynasty of China, most likely, the men from these garrisons married local women, who were as you said were of various tribes like the Baiyue.\n\nThe question whether people living to the south of Yellow river valley really Chinese is not new. In fact during the Warring States period, the State of Chu, which located in central Yangtze basin, is considered at least partially barbarian. And songs of Chu, along with its other cultural practices, were considered \"exotic\" by the other six warring states.\n\nIt should be noted however, that there are well-recorded migrations of Chinese from Yellow river basin whenever northern steppes nomads invaded. The migrations happened during An Lushan rebellion during Tang Dynasty, he was half-Turkic half-Sogdian. Many Chinese also fled the invasion of Jurchens invasions of Song Dynasty which later followed by the Mongols under Kubilai Khan. So saying that that Southern Chinese are less Chinese is rather inacurate based on these record of migrations.\n\nIn fact, there is this theory that it was Northern Chinese who are *less* Chinese, since North China Plains was historically invaded multiple time by barbarians from the north.", "As /u/reddriper excellently pointed out, \"Southern Chinese\" is not a homogenous group, and I will add that \"Northern Chinese\" is not a homogenous group, either. This idea of \"original Chinese blood\" or \"different Chinese races\" is completely outdated. A glance through Chinese history will show that migration and mixing of populations was far from uncommon. Of course there are genetic differences and even distinctive physical characteristics between different regions -- but you'd expect that over any geography of comparable size and terrain, and China is huge. If anything, it's a miracle in a way that there has been as much political and cultural unity over such a large span of land for millennia. The North/South \"divide\" is perhaps accentuated really as a consequence of cultural and political history more than anything. The South had been quite stable politically compared to the North, where there were large scale northern invasions over a millennium and which caused repeated waves of some migration from north to south.\n\nSo yes, Southern Chinese populations may have more genetic material from populations in Southeast Asia. Northern Chinese more genetic material from populations in the North, and the West and Southwest with populations they were in contact with in their respective regions. To deny that would be crazy, but to go the other end and claim or imply that there is no significant shared ancestry would be even crazier."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "12v2oa", "title": "To what extent did the Axis power coordinate their actions/strategy in WWII?", "selftext": "It's always intrigued me that the Germany, Italy, and Japan decided to take on the world \"together\". How much did they coordinate and plan together? Was simply being in the war and diverting resources from the Allied war effort enough?\n\nYesterday it was mentioned that the Russian-Japanese anti-aggression pact may have saved Russia from defeat in 1941. It seems odd that Japan would agree to leave Russia alone at the same time that Russia was being invaded by Germany. Did the Germans try to do anything about that?\n\nObviously Italy and Germany are slightly different, being so close, and because Germany essentially coopted the Italian military once things went south. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12v2oa/to_what_extent_did_the_axis_power_coordinate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6ye2b4", "c6yeamx"], "score": [3, 7], "text": ["There was little to no military cooperation between Berlin and Tokyo, but some cooperation between Berlin and Rome, as well as the other German allies.  However, Hitler did declare war on the US in 1941 following Pearl Harbor, and not the reverse.\n\nThe Hungarian, Romanian, Finnish and Italian armies participated quite a bit on the Eastern Front.  In addition, Italy's participation in North Africa is well documented, as was the German defense of Italy against the US and British forces in later in the war.\n\nThe effects of a Japanese declaration of war on the USSR rather than the US in 1941 wander deeply into /r/historicalwhatif territory, but are interesting to ponder.  Japan was already deeply embroiled in China and Burma at that time, so any consideration of war with the Soviets would have needed to include settling these conflicts first.", " >  How much did they coordinate and plan together? Was simply being in the war and diverting resources from the Allied war effort enough?\n\nWell the German-Italian cooperation through the war, which was characterised mostly by Germany bailing Italy out of trouble and diverting precious resources from more important theaters, is quite well known and well documented.\n\nThe German-Japanese relationship during the war was obviously quite limited simply because of the geographical factors which made direct communication and military cooperation pretty difficult. Before Operation Barbarossa started Germany and the Soviet Union were technically allies which enabled Germany to send a small naval vessel east along the northern coast of Russia all the way to the Pacific, but it was withdrawn soon after. The best example of direct German-Japanese contact was through the German U-boots, some of which managed to make their way to Batavia in Japanese occupied Dutch East India (Indonesia). But those were all minor incidents of course with no real effect on the war. \n\nA more interesting story are the plans the German and Japanese leadership had for the Soviet Union after the war. IIRC the Japanese were prepared to join the war against the Soviet Union once Moscow had fallen. Now Hitler's plans for the Soviet Union changed quite a few times: At one points he wanted all Soviet territory west of a line going from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan while leaving the rest for the Soviet government, while later in the war there were talks of basically dividing the whole of Eurasia between the Axis powers.\nThe Soviet Union would be divided between Germany and Japan, with the border starting at the most western part of Mongolia and then going north along the Yenisey river, China would go to Japan while Germany would have gotten Central Asia, and finally Japan would have gotten India and Germany Iran and possibly also Pakistan.\n\n\n\n >  Yesterday it was mentioned that the Russian-Japanese anti-aggression pact may have saved Russia from defeat in 1941. It seems odd that Japan would agree to leave Russia alone at the same time that Russia was being invaded by Germany. Did the Germans try to do anything about that?\n\nWell there were several reasons why Japan didn't intervene in German-Soviet war.\n\n1) **Manchurian Incidents**\n\nJapan has always been quite poor in natural resources and this was the primary reason why they decided to take control of Manchuria in north China. Manchuria had most of the resources Japan needed to keep it's industries running without having to rely on imports from potentially hostile nations.\n\nAnyway Manchuria borders eastern Siberia and throughout the 30s the Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria and the Soviet forces in the far east engaged in a series of border skirmishes that cost both sides relatively high casualties, but which never escalated into full-scale war. Most of these skirmishes ended in Soviet favour primarily because of their heavier equipment and larger tanks which the Japanese had a hard time dealing with. The Japanese never really took serious steps to mend this deficiency, not because they were too conservative or incompetent, but because lighter armed infantry formations were much more efficient in the territories the Imperial Japanese Army fought in. The very hilly low-infrastructure areas of south and central China, the jungles of Indochina, Burma, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands were, contrary to the large open fields of eastern Europe and north Africa where the Wehrmacht's Panzers had free reign, not suited to armoured forces.\n\nThe last of these border skirmishes took place in early 1939 IIRC and the Japanese army leadership came to the conclusion that fighting the Soviet Far Eastern army could very well become a disastrous experience for the Imperial Army. Thus they decided to secure their northern border with a non-aggression pact. The Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact, just like the Molotov-Ribbentorp fact, was also very much in Stalin's interest as, even though the Soviet armies had performed quite well against the Japanese, he was quite worried of Hitler's Germany and thus needed time to build up the armed forces of the Soviet Union.\n\nSo, the Japanese knew their forces were inferior to the Soviet ones which greatly decreased their desire for a war in Siberia.\n\n2) **The Chinese Campaign**\n\nAfter 1937 the Japanese also found themselves embroiled in a war in China which required considerable amounts of troops, supplies etc. The leadership of the Japanese Army expected a relatively swift victory but soon found themselves bugged down in the war with no prospect of a fast victory. Now they obviously still controlled huge amounts of territory, including most of northern China and the entire coast line, which also required considerable resources to be kept under control.\n\nSo yea, while they still maintained a somewhat considerable force in Manchuria the Chinese front swallowed a lot of the resources available.\n\n3) **Divided Leadership**\n\nThe Japanese government was not centralised in the same way Nazi Germany for instance was, and there were several factions fighting for power. The navy and army were fierce rivals for the resources available and the leadership of both organisations had their own plans and ideas for how to win the war. The invasion of China, for instance, was not a decision made by the Japanese government, but rather by local army leadership in Manchuria who had great interests in a war with China. So once the Marco Polo Bridge Incident had occurred and the Japanese Army leaders had started sending forces into China, there was little the actual government could do about it.\n\nAnywho after the failure of Japanese army to secure a quick victory over China, the navy faction's plan for achieving Japanese hegemony over East Asia through an attack on the European colonies to the south gained popularity. The Japanese war in China meant the European powers and the US refused to sell oil and fuel to Japan, which forced the Japanese to attack south to gain the resources they needed. The swift occupations of the Dutch East India and the other European colonies meant Japan was bogged even more down, and had yet another war to fight and allocate resources to, which made an intervention against the Soviet Union even more unlikely.\n\n\nNow as to weather Hitler tried to get Japan to join the war against the Soviet Union. Yes, he did. One of the primary reasons why Hitler declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbour was he wanted the Japanese to join his war, which never happened.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ym1zx", "title": "What set the precedent for the \"campy\" style of early superhero pop culture? As opposed to the gritty/realistic style we see today.", "selftext": "When was this precedent set?  What started the trend?  Why would this style make sense given the historical context of the time?\n\nWhy didn't it start gritty/realistic like we see superhero movies today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ym1zx/what_set_the_precedent_for_the_campy_style_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpb96py"], "score": [3], "text": ["can you clarify the timelines you are thinking about? The really campy stuff doesn't start until the 60s after the pushback from the book \"seduction of the innocent,\" (where criticism of superhero books was included along with other violent comic books) sparking a moral panic and the comics code. As a result of the code we see for example the classic campy Adam West Batman of the \"silver age\" (which was significantly less dark than some of the early \"golden age\" Batmen\") before the gritty turn in the \"bronze age\".\n\nMy hunch is your mental model starts in the silver age which would be a mistake since the campy superheros were a reaction to earlier comics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2blqsb", "title": "Was there ever a time and place, before alcohol regulation, where it was acceptable for children to get drunk regularly?", "selftext": "Has drinking Alcohol always been seen as an \"adults only\" hobby, or have there been societies in history that would allow children into pubs/establishments and serve them, or which normalized giving alcohol to children in familial and social settings?\n\nTo be clear, I'm not talking about weak beer or slightly alcoholic drinks where fermentation occurred to kill off bacteria and to improve water quality. I'm specifically curious if it was ever considered OK to provide alcohol to children for the purpose of them getting drunk, to the point where it was a common occurrence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2blqsb/was_there_ever_a_time_and_place_before_alcohol/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj6xq74"], "score": [3], "text": ["You seem fairly familiar with the common practice of giving smaller children beer before potable water was widely available, and the idea of \"drinking water\" would have seem foreign to adults and children alike. \n\nThere is another practice that might interest you, which involves giving a baby a small amount of brandy or whiskey to stop it from crying and make the infant sleep more soundly in the night.  The alcohol was often dabbed on the baby's lip, put into their milk or on the tip of their bottle.  This is a folk medicine practice that has been common in many cultures that continues, in some places, to today.\n\nWhat your question seems to be getting at, however, is the stigmatization of alcohol and the connection between \"getting drunk\" and adulthood.  There would obviously be a different answer to your question for every single chronological and geographic framework that might interest you.  However, in general, it might be interesting to consider the types of terms you are using and the distinctions you are drawing.  \n\nFor example, has \"alcohol\" always been a universal category?  In our culture, we are able to easily define what constitutes an alcoholic beverage, but this is not a historically universal definition.  For example, in some cultures, there might be fermented substances that were given to children and adults as part of religious or spiritual rituals that had the effect of \"getting them drunk\", but that did not have the same connotations as being an \"alcoholic\" or \"adult\" beverage. \n\nAnother term to consider is the idea of \"getting drunk.\"  You say you are interested in situations where it was \"OK to provide alcohol to children for the purpose of getting them drunk.\"  Yet you rule out situations where children were given weaker beers.  Consider the effect of even a weak beer on a child.  You are right in saying that water was not a commonly consumed substance because of potability, but there are examples of children being given beer (or babies being given brandy) to make them go to sleep earlier, while adults would drink caffeinated beverages like tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.  The effect on the children is essentially getting them drunk, and the intention of the adults would have been to make them drowsier so they would behave better and go to bed earlier. \n\nTL;DR: The historical conceptions of what constitutes \"alcoholic beverages\", what the \"symptoms\" of drunkennness are, and why a person would want to be drunk or want their child to be drunk, are all shifting definitions that would be very specific to a certain social, cultural, and historical context.  \n\nA cursory glance of the scholarship on the history of alcohol and alcohol culture shows that much of the research tends to be localized to a specific country or region, so it might be in your best interest to decide if there's a specific area of time period that interests you so you can focus your reading.\n\nSome sources that stuck out to me:\n\nIain Gately, *Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol,* New York: Gotham, 2008.\n\nEric Burns, *The Spirits of America:  A Social History of Alcohol,* Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. \n\n*Altering American Consciousness:  A History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800-2000,* ed. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker, 2004. \n\nThomas Brennan, \"Towards the Cultural History of Alcohol in France,\"\n*Journal of Social History*, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 71-92\n\nRobin Room, \"Alcohol, the individual and society: what\nhistory teaches us,\" *Addiction*, Volume 92, Issue 3 Supplement 1. \n\nTheresa D. O'Nell and  Christina M. Mitchell, \"Alcohol abuse among American Indian adolescents:  The role of culture in pathological drinking,\" *Social Science  &  Medicine*, Volume 42, Issue 4, February 1996, Pages 565\u2013578\n\nAkyeampong E. Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times. 1996.\n\nDavid G. Mandelbaum, \"Alcohol and Culture,\" *Current Anthropology*, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jun., 1965).  (This source is a little dated, but it appears to apply a macrohistorical, anthropological lens you might be interested in.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3emnnf", "title": "Why didn't Einstein get a Nobel prize for Relativity? Was the paper on the photoelectric effect really more important?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3emnnf/why_didnt_einstein_get_a_nobel_prize_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ctgijj0"], "score": [25], "text": ["The first thing to remember about [Einstein's Nobel Prize](_URL_1_) is that it was given for \"his service to Theoretical Physics, and especially for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect\"  So it was not strictly given to him for the photoelectric effect.  But to understand why that theory was highlighted above others, it is important to consider the timeline.  \n\n[Einstein published the photoelectric effect in 1905.](_URL_3_) along with several other papers, including Relativity and Brownian motion.  At the time there was great interest in Black Body radiation, various spectra from excited atoms and many other phenomenon that we would now consider quantum mechanics.  But at the time the complete framework was not known and these things were very mysterious. We know see the photoelectric effect as mathematically simple compared to relativity, but for many years after 1905, very little actual progress was made in what would later become quantum theory.  \n\n[Rutherford scattering was not discovered until 1911](_URL_5_) and the [Bohr model of the atom](_URL_0_) was not published until 1913, and we know it was not a complete theory of the structure of the atom.  That's six to eight years of little progress, where the only known thing about quantum physics was Einstein's work.  Throughout all of the quantum revolution, Einstein's work served as a 'north star' for other developments. It would take until 1926 for [Schrodinger's equation](_URL_2_) to be published, which is five years after Einstein's prize was awarded.  So yes, Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect was very important and opened up many avenues of inquiry that ultimately gave us the quantum revolution of the 1920s and beyond.  At the time, it was considered extremely important.  While Relativity was also important, it didnt have any serious applications until the splitting of the atom in [1938](_URL_4_).\n\nEdit:  I am not a professional historian, but I do have a PhD in physics.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_model", "http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/", "http://www.abcte.org/files/previews/chemistry/s1_p6.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_scattering"]]}
{"q_id": "1c8eda", "title": "What were the relative advantages and disadvantages of varying melee weapons during the middle ages?", "selftext": "I'm not too sure if this is the proper subreddit to post this question seeing as it's more about the mechanics of historical weapons rather than specific cultural usages of them, so please point me to the right place if this is not appropriate for here.\n\nBased on what I've heard, spears and polearms tended to be the most popular war time weapons. This is due to their relative cheapness and ease to wield especially in formations. \n\nAlternatively, swords seem to be the most versatile weapon but not everyone would be able to afford one.\n\nWhat about warhammars, axes, maces, moringstars, staffs, scimitars, and other various melee weapons? What are the comparative strengths and weaknesses and in what situations would one fare better than another? \n\nIe, when would it better to bring a sword rather than an axe? When would you want a mace instead of a spear? etc", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c8eda/what_were_the_relative_advantages_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9eelhc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Since a historian hasn't responded to your question, I hope I can post these video links from a TV show that looked at \"alternative\" weapons such as a flail, mace, falchion, etc. :\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe host discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of these weapons. Hope this post is OK, I can edit or delete if necessary."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CpleQ-rv7Q", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF0JpDiW33c", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmDER4qovS8"]]}
{"q_id": "8dykbf", "title": "Josip Broz Tito spoke Kyrgyz?", "selftext": "Dear friends,\n\nI recently came across this sentence:\n''Besides his native language, Tito also speaks perfect German, Czech and KHIRGISIAN , which is a central Asia Mongolian tongue'' [1]\n\nThis literally blew my mind, resulting in me doing several quick google searches, only to come across a similar claim; ''Josip Broz Tito learned to speak Kyrgyz perfectly'' [2]\n\nCan someone please shed some more light on this? When, why, and most important how did Tito even learn this language? It seems incredibly strange to me.\n\nHope to hear from y'all.\n\n[1] _URL_0_\n\n[2] LIFE Magazine, August 14, 1944, Page 38", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8dykbf/josip_broz_tito_spoke_kyrgyz/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxr1gql"], "score": [30], "text": ["Tito did spend some time in what is now Kyrgyzstan during the Russian Civil War. From 1918 to 1920 he was hiding out in a village near Osh, the main city in the south of Kyrgyzstan, and eventually married an ethnic Russian from there.\n\nHowever it should be noted that the region is, and was, mainly full of ethnic Uzbeks, who obviously don't speak Kyrgyz but rather Uzbek (and unlike Kazakh, I do believe Uzbek and Kyrgyz are quite different). Then there is the matter that I don't know how much interaction Tito would have had with locals, meaning ethnic Kyrgyz: they would have largely been nomadic herders at the time, largely illiterate, while the ethnic Russians (which wouldn't be many) would be more urban and literate. The Kyrgyz, like other Central Asian groups, were also rather indifferent to Bolshevism/Communism as a whole, so it further seems unlikely someone who was leaning towards that ideology would have worked close enough with the locals to learn their language. a 1953 biography by fellow Yugoslav Communist official Vladimir Dedijer also notes Tito spoke \"Serbo-Croatian ... Russian, Czech, Slovenian ... German (with a Viennese accent) ... understands and reads French and Italian ... [and] also speaks Kirghiz,\" so he very well could have. But based on my own understanding of Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan, I would question his skills in Kyrgyz, if they did exist at all, though it would not be impossible of course."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.marxists.org/archive/fast/1944/tito-people/ch23.htm"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vvtzk", "title": "How did the titles of \"Roman Emperor\" and \"King of the Franks\", both held by Charlemagne, become separated?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vvtzk/how_did_the_titles_of_roman_emperor_and_king_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewjmcc"], "score": [3], "text": ["So [this excellent post](_URL_0_) a week ago by /u/idjet explains the circumstances of the passing on of Charlemagne's imperial title, as well as whether he intended to do so or not.\n\nHowever, whatever the details were, after the division of the empire after the death of Charlemagne's surviving son Louis the Pious, the title was passed to Louis' son Lothair because in the triparte split of the empire, Lothair possessed the core Frankish lands in middle francia as well as Italy and Rome.  And since it was understood that in order to be emperor, one needed to be in possession of Rome, Lothair was thus designated the emperor.  \n\nThis continued on after his death with his son Louis II, who was emperor even though he possessed no part of the former frankish homelands, and only retained the title King of Italy.  Though the empire, the imperial title, and the frankish royal title would be reunited again under Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat, after the latter's deposition, you would see a similar situation as to what happened with Charlemagne.  The various component kingdoms of the Carolingian Empire would be divied up (although this time the inheritors would not necessarily be Carolingians), and it only took someone in possession of the title of King of Italy to be crowned emperor (although not all kings of italy would be crowned emperor).  And they would only be crowned because there was a need for legitimation or other political concerns, local entirely to Italy, as opposed to the rest of the former Carolingian Empire.  \n\nWhich is how, the titles of \"King of the Franks\" and its successor titles, King of the West Franks (West Francia), Middle Franks/Francia (Lotharingia/Lorraine) and East Franks/Francia came to be split from the imperial title.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tw02w/what_did_charlemagne_envision_for_the_future_of/"]]}
{"q_id": "1riwc2", "title": "How did the wives of roman soldiers learn of their husbands deaths?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1riwc2/how_did_the_wives_of_roman_soldiers_learn_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdo10lp"], "score": [1362], "text": ["Alrighty, 'cause I just noticed this thread, I'm going to go ahead and do a writeup on this. I'm going to try to address all of the questions already asked in the body, so bear with me (barring the question that's outside the purview of my specialty). \n\nFirst, I'm going to confirm a simple fact. Roman soldiers were not allowed to get married. That changed depending on rank, but the rank and file were not legally allowed to get married - so there weren't any wives at home that had to get that painful letter (for the standard legionaries). However, men are men, and people are people- and the vast majority of the time a legion was just garrisoned in a province. People in that situation, naturally, develop relationships, and those relationships were tactfully ignored by the officers, who totally understood the situation these men were in. They weren't allowed to get married, but they WERE in love - the great rock and hard place argument :) The thing about being in the Legion (I'm assuming we're talking about the Principate here - that would be ca. 0-300ish CE) was that once you were in, it was a 25 year commitment. While you got great benefits, those 25 years could be hard on a man - especially when that man wanted a family. So, the natural solution? \"Civil unions.\" \n\nThose civil unions were essentially the same as marriage, just without any of the legal entitlements that they would otherwise have- so pretty much, it was marriage. Just without the government recognition. Confusing, eh? :)\n\nOne big issue with this was that many of the women that the Romans took to wife were natives of the area they were garrisoned in, or even former slaves (The soldier would buy them and promptly free them). Those families would, of course, also go on to have children - and those children called themselves \"*in castris*\" - or \"born in  the camp.\" They generally went on to join the military, just like their parents, and there's a tombstone outside the fortress of *Legio II Augusta* that commemorates a woman, her soldier son, and her husband. The monument itself was erected by her daughter. \n\nHowever...the unfortunate bit is that there are always those damn legalities. We have evidence of seven cases that deemed children born during their father's terms of service to be \"illegitimate.\" Didn't matter if they were citizens or anything - if they were in the legions or *auxilia*, that child had no claim to be the heir of their father, his will, etc. Same with the wives - except the wives *also* couldn't get their dowries back (Legal wives could). \n\nNow, on to the husband dying! It's hard to say exactly how they were informed - however, if they were one of these quasi-wives, it would have fallen to the man's tent group (*contubernium*) - who would have known about the quasi-marriage - to let the woman know. The wives either lived right outside the fort in the *canabae*, or even in the room with the rest of the *contubernium*. A quick note here - privacy wasn't such a huge deal until recently, most especially regarding situations with large families (All in one room) or in these cases (8 men in one crowded room - it would have been relatively common for at least one to have a woman in there with him). \n\nI do want to stress though (regarding another question in this thread) that the legionaries still maintained strong family ties with both their quasi-wives and their \"illegitimate\" children. The vast majority of tombstones near military encampments are commemorations by the wife or \"unrelated heirs\" (coughchildrencough). We have multiple declarations by these soldiers declaring these children to be their heirs, the children are explicitly mentioned in the wills, and provided for them. As for notifying family (such as parents, siblings, etc), I have no source on that one - I can only speculate that the *contubernum* would send a letter to them as well.\n\n---\n\nFinally, onto one last question that was addressed - \"Could officers and commanders be married?\" The answer to that is **yes....ish.** The senatorial and equestrian officers were certainly allowed to be married. Legionary centurions were also exempt, however, we have no sources regarding the auxiliary centurions or the decurions - we can *assume* that they would also be exempt, but it's no guarantee. Their wives and children would also have accompanied them, but they (The senators and equestrians, at least - the centurions could and did) were forbidden from marrying *local* women. The senatorial and equestrian officers also spent far less time in the military - it was generally just a step in their career. \n\nNow, finally, on to what happened when a soldier died! One of the (many) deductions from the soldier's pay was a contribution to a \"burial fund\" that was organized per century. It wasn't much - it would only cover the costs for a basic funeral - but it was something. I'll go ahead and just quote straight from Goldsworthy for the next bit:\n\n >  A funeral procession, carrying the corpse on a couch, would leave the fort or camp, for like many contemporary societies the Romans insisted that burial take place outside the settlement. Once outside, and often on a site running alongside the main road leading to the fort, the corpse would be laid on the couch on top of a funeral pyre, There it would be burnt and, once consumed by the flames the ash of both corpse and pyre gathered into a funerary urn, made sometimes of marble or metal, but most often of glass or pottery, which was then buried. Around the grave site the mourners took part in a funeral banquet.\n\n >  [...] The chief mourners were a man's comrades and, as the practice of taking an unofficial wife became widespread, his family. It is doubtful that the burial club paid for more than the most rudimentary of markers for the grave, but many soldiers set aside money to pay for expensive stone monuments. Many tombstones state that they were erected by a man's heirs in accordance with his will. \n\nI sincerely hope that helps :) If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask them!\n\n**Sources:**\n\n-Goldsworthy, Adrian - *The Complete Roman Army*\n\n-Scheidel, Walter - [*Marriage, families, and survival in the Roman imperial army: demographic aspects*](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110509.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "241eky", "title": "To what extent was Stalin responsible for the Korean war?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/241eky/to_what_extent_was_stalin_responsible_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2nelw"], "score": [4], "text": ["According to Halberstam's \"The Coldest Winter\" page 49\n\n\"Stalin was playing a delicate game, flashing a half-green, half-amber light on the invasion.\"\n\nHalberstam later states that Stalin gave Kim permission, but kept his involvement to a minimum and told Kim to rely on China for any material support. There's later an assertion on page 345 that Stalin had promised air cover to Chinese troops, but reneged on his promise. \n\nThis sounds like the mainstream theory, I'm unaware of any alternate theories.\n\nEDIT: Spelling"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6wix89", "title": "What warcrimes did the Dutch commit in the Indonesian Independence war in 1945-1949", "selftext": "Hi, firsttime here.\n\nLet me just add some context to my question. My great-grandfather was a career soldier up untill he retired. He started his career by volunteering as one of the 10000 Dutch marines for the first political actions in 1947 and 1948 in Dutch Indonesia. Still today very little in my country is being taught about this war as it's kind of a black page in our history.\n\nMy great grandfather would never speak about what he had done in Indonesia but it is a well known fact that most soldiers there, especially the marines, were ordered to perform warcrimes. Now the current information I do have of him was that he was part of the motorised armor division of the marines. On one of the pictures that I own of his, that he took in his time in Indonesia, he is in some kind of scout car and on the other he photographed a tank called 'Harssens', a 105mm howitzer tank of the marbrig (marine brigade in Dutch)\n\nI thought I'd add some more specific details near the end there. The tanks can easily be traced since there were very few of them that we received as surplus right after the war so maybe the information will help. I know that this tank is now in the armor museum in Overloon in a restored state.\n\nI am currently in the process of getting my great grandfathers military records from the ministry of defence. I'm submitting a few pieces of information so that I'll be allowed to access his records.\n\nBack to the point; I'm trying to find out what warcrimes were committed by the Dutch, if I can be specific, the marines. Because he never told us anything, which is understandable, I'd like to connect the dots as some kind of closure. \n\nI've already reviewed a couple of pictures online and seeing similarities in pictures, he may or may not have been a part of the rawagede massacre.\n\nHope someone can help me out more and shed some light on the topic, thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wix89/what_warcrimes_did_the_dutch_commit_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm8fwvn"], "score": [14], "text": ["The Dutch historiography and research into war crimes conducted by the Dutch army during the Indonesian independance war is not very well researched. This because it was 'actively forgotten' by the Dutch governement in that no serious research was conducted , people involved were encouraged to remain silent about it and the image of The Netherlands as tolerant and 'clean' colonists was protected. \n\nAt first the intervention was seen not as a war, but as an action against internal terrorists. The term 'politionele actie' was used, for a very long time, to avoid speaking about the Dutch intervention as being a war. Veterans were asked in loyalty to the Dutch Queen to 'keep all secrets inside the Dutch army'. And any appeal for political introspection and claims for reparations were subdued. A striking example is liberal politician and member of the Foreign affairs committe of the Tweede Kamer claiming as late as 2007 that: 'The Dutch military personel have generally behaved with utmost decency... No excuses shall be made' he even likened the proposed reparations to 'The Dutch paying reparations to the king of Spain for cuelties conducted during the Dutch independance war' (this is a comparison of striking sarcastic nature).\n\n\nMost current research is centred around the Rawagede-debate. Rawagede was a massacre of over 430 indonesian males on 9 december 1947. The photos of this masascre were published in the NRC Handelsblad in the '90s and sparked the historical research into Dutch atrocities. Dutch historian C. Lorentz says that this might far from be an isolated case as 'Rawagede might be the tip of an iceberg'. Aside from Rawagede, though, not much of this history has been researched yet.\n\nI am not involved in said research, as my thesis is on pre-war Dutch-Indonesian history, so I can't really comment on the role of the MarBrig or your great grandfathers regiment. I can give you some pointers to start looking. The books *Generaal Spoor: triomf en tragiek van een legercommandant* by Jaap de Moor and *De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor* by Remy Limpach are a good starting point. You can find them at the Amsterdam NIOD, the Dutch research institute for War and Genocide studies. The NIOD also employs most researchers that are currently working on the case of Dutch atrocities in Indonesia and has a huge archive. If you ask around there might be people who can point you in the right direction of finding more about the history of your great grandfather. The NIOD has a library that is open to the public and contains most books that will be relevant to your case.\n\nI hope that helps you on your way. Good luck!\n\n\nSources:\n\n* Lorenz, C. (2015). 'De Nederlandse koloniale herinnering en de universele mensenrechten'. *Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis*, 128(1), 109-130.\n\n* Eickhoff, M. (2015). 'Weggestreept verleden: Nederlandse historici en het Rawagededebat'. *Groniek*, 45(194).\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2x5aps", "title": "Is it possible to estimate the cost of constructing one of the great pyramids (adjusting for inflation)? If so, how expensive of a project was it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x5aps/is_it_possible_to_estimate_the_cost_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cox89l4"], "score": [9], "text": ["Ancient Egypt didn't have a monetary system until 2000 years after the pyramid's construction so it is probably better to use work hours and the cost of employing workers as a comparison, especially because the value of today's money is heavily warped compared to a barter system.\n\n--------------------------------\n**How many people worked on the Great Pyramid?**\n\nExcavation of the pyramid town south of the Sphinx have revealed galleries that could house about 4000 workers. At the start of the construction however it is likely that several more thousand workers were hired to clear the perimeter of sand and smooth the bedrock, and complete the first few layers of the pyramid.\n\nTo provide for those workers a brigade of tailors, bakers, sandal- and wig makers, butchers, and many other people that transported or provided goods and helped logistically.\n\nWorkers were well cared for, and received benefits such as:\n\nMedial care, tax exemptions, cloths and housing, food for their families, usually 1 day off per week (5 day weeks), beer (which was a very common drink with low alcohol content), beef (cows had to be imported from other parts of the country), wigs, makeup, all kinds of fruit and vegetables and of course bread, amongst other things.\n\nAll in all most of the time about 6000-8000 people worked directly or indirectly on the monument's construction.\n\n--------------------------------\n**How long did it take?**\n\nThe Great Pyramid was not the only thing being constructed by those workers. A mortuary temple and a valley temple with a harbor had to be built with a causeway of several hundred meters connecting them. In addition 3 Queen's Pyramids, a satellite pyramid, 12 mastabas that were later joined and expanded to 8 twin-mastabas and giant perimeter walls had to be built as well.\n\nThe majority of stones was local limestone that came from the east side of the plateau, only a few hundred meters away from the pyramid. Under 1% was hardstone such as basalt and granite that was imported from upper Egypt and the rest, the white limestone was imported from Tura in the north-east. \n\nIn total about 2.5 million m\u00b3 of local limestone had to be quarried and transported. In contrast to popular believe the vast majority of those stones were not neatly cut, square blocks but stones of all sizes and shapes. We know this because Vyse blasted a hole into the south side of the pyramid. \n\nTo cut (mostly stone tools were used) and transport 1m\u00b3 of the local stone approximately 40-80 work hours had to be spent depending on the stone and location (2 people quarrying for a day, 2 trips \u00e1 1 hour with a 10 man team to transport).\n\nIncluding the other stones it would have taken 150,000,000-200,000,000 work hours to complete the pyramid and the adjacent buildings.\n\nWe don't know how many people only worked seasonally and how many all year, so completing the pyramid would have taken between 10 and 20 years with an average of 5000 workers (assuming 10 hour days, 150 or 300 days of work a year).\n\n----------------------------------\n**How much did it cost compared to today?**\n\nOnly a few percent of the workers had to be highly skilled (architects, stonemasons, foremen, etc.) but most workers were well cared for (even by today's standards).\n\nSince it was a royal project the Pharaoh didn't have to pay for land and most resources but they still have a value. To translate that value to modern money is difficult however since goods like grain can not be stored and easily exchanged as money on a bank account can.\n\nBut to put a price on it: Assuming 5% of the workers were highly paid: 50$/h and the rest moderately well: 20$/h it would cost around **5 billion dollars** to pay for ~200 million construction work hours and the people providing for them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b6alcn", "title": "Why do depictions of American Indians never show men with facial hair?", "selftext": "Was no facial hair a part of their culture or were they incapable of growing facial hair??", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b6alcn/why_do_depictions_of_american_indians_never_show/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejjcgc8"], "score": [83], "text": ["You may be interested in the older post:\n\n * [Native Americans generally didn't have beards. Do we know what they thought of the bearded and mustachioed Europeans and their decedents?](_URL_0_)\n\nMany groups plucked facial hair, with wooden or shell or even bronze implements. Others apparently singed hair off. In some groups, certain types of people did not remove hair\u2014people in mourning among the Yurok, or possibly the old among the Aztecs, to give two examples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18wdf0/native_americans_generally_didnt_have_beards_do/"]]}
{"q_id": "fh6po0", "title": "Do historians generally believe that terracotta army found near Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum were made using imported 'Hellenistic' expertise?", "selftext": "The BBC documentary 'The Greatest Tomb on Earth: Secrets of Ancient China' claims that Qin sculptors weren't capable of creating the terracotta army or the more recently excavated acrobat sculptures, and argues that Greek experts were likely present to teach the local craftsmen the necessary techniques.  \n\nAre these claims as conclusive and irrefutable as the documentary suggests? And can anyone comment on how difficult it would really have been for Chinese sculptors of the time to create these works without outside help? As a lay person in both history and sculpture, the idea that lifelike sculptures would be impossible to create just because prior to that time the dominant form of sculpture in the region were small and heavily stylized figures seems absurd.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fh6po0/do_historians_generally_believe_that_terracotta/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fka5731"], "score": [9], "text": ["There was a great answer on this question about a year ago by u/kungming2 in response to someone who watched the same documentary:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8kvhlw/what_is_the_current_thinking_of_greek_style"]]}
{"q_id": "b45v11", "title": "Did any military powers use light (most likely the reflection of it) in military tactics in an attempt to blind or burn the opposition?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b45v11/did_any_military_powers_use_light_most_likely_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej4e9je"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"example seeking\" questions](_URL_0_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. \n\nFor further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22example_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "2j7n9g", "title": "Historians, how do you feel, in general, the accuracy and completeness of wikipedia entries compares to High School history textbooks?", "selftext": "For a timely example: [Christopher Columbus](_URL_0_). ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j7n9g/historians_how_do_you_feel_in_general_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl99pub", "cl99twq", "cl9f5f3", "cl9fwgt"], "score": [11, 16, 3, 10], "text": ["James Loewen's *Lies My Teacher Told Me* is an indictment of the high school history textbook, including on your chosen topic of Christopher Columbus. He'd picked old textbooks and criticized them for outdated scholarship (which is one of several issues I had with his book), but apparently the situation has not improved a whole lot since then.\n\nThe problem essentially boils down to a flawed textbook writing system that is based on incremental change that only allows new scholarship to slowly percolate into the books.\n\nWikipedia pages, at least in theory, can be updated every time a new paper or book comes up.", "It depends on the article, especially on how popular the topic is. I'd say, in general, that wikipedia articles are more complete than a typical textbook. This is due to space more than anything. A textbook can't spend 1200 words on Julius Caesar's [early career](_URL_0_) before becoming consul. But the rest of his career is pretty comparable to what you might find in a textbook.\n\nThankfully you do not have to rest on my anecdotal data. Check out this [study by Roy Rosenzweig on Wikipedia](_URL_1_). This is widely read by teachers and professors and informs many opinions on the website. He concludes that Wikipedia is just as accurate as a comparable encyclopedia, a tad less accurate than a topical encyclopedia, but more exhaustive than either. The issue is that the articles often focus on material that many academics would consider \"beside the point\" for a person looking for an overview on a topic and its importance to historians.\n\nEdit: the study is about Wikipedia, not at Wikipedia.", "I think a big difference is Wikipedia encourages you to easily look further at subjects.  That was a big part of why I went into history, and also helps the development of history as a long tapestry of interrelated events, not a series of dates to remember.", "This is a little bit of an unfair comparison, because most high school textbooks (at least American ones) are pretty terrible, even when they try to get things right. So in areas where Wikipedia articles even have a reasonable stab towards neutrality, recent scholarship, and so forth, they automatically win, hand's down, because the textbooks are so poor. \n\nIt's also a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because Wikipedia articles are not so limited in brevity as a high school textbook, and brevity is responsible for a lot of the worst aspects of textbooks in my view (when you cannot say much about something, and cannot provide evidence, then you end up with the kind of mealy-mouthed summaries that make textbooks boring and vague). \n\nAn example: textbook coverage of the use of the atomic bomb in my experience is limited to a brief account of the end of WWII, a brief framing of the \"decision to use the bomb,\" and then say it was used and the war ended so hurrah. Wikipedia, by comparison, has separate articles about all aspects of this matter, and even discusses the more recent (e.g. last decade or so) historiography of the bomb which has generally rejected the idea that there was a distinct \"decision\" to use the bomb and has cast doubt on whether the bombs actually were responsible for the Japanese surrender. Now, it's not impossible for a textbook to cover at least _some_ of what it does better (it could, for example, at least acknowledge that the timing of the atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war were identical, and the latter may have been at least as influential, if not more so, for the Japanese), but no matter what it does it is going to be a lot more limited in its coverage because it only has maybe one or two paragraphs to devote to the subject, as opposed to Wikipedia's pages and pages."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar#Early_life_and_career", "http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1r8l2n", "title": "What would be considered the greatest political \"blunders\" of U.S.'s 1st President, George Washington?", "selftext": "After seeing an earlier submission about another idealized President, JFK, I started to wonder that same question about one of the most idealized of Presidents. The founding father of the United States of America, George Washington.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r8l2n/what_would_be_considered_the_greatest_political/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdkpdcr"], "score": [5], "text": ["Over reliance on Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton and Washington's relationship is well known and predates his time as President but it was his over reliance on Hamilton during and after his Presidency that greatly increased political tensions, contributed to the rise of the Republican party and contributed to Adams loss in 1800. \n\nInitially Washington had leaned very heavily on James Madison, who was the most effective politician in the house, but Washington eventually turned to his cabinet largely out of constitutional reasons. His cabinet was initially a good mix of geography and political persuasion.  The political arguing between Jefferson and Hamilton is known well, but initially Washington was far less biased than one would think, for instance he very nearly vetoed BOTUS I. As political tensions mounted Washington increasingly relied on Hamilton at the expense of the moderates and what would be Jeffersonians within his cabinet. For instance the negotiations between Jay and the British were run through Hamilton( the secretary of the treasury) and not state. Edmund Randolph (the secretary of state) was left almost entirely in the dark and consequently so was the ambasaddor to France, James Monroe. Jay and Hamilton's working around of the Pro-French Virginians  put both Monroe and Randolph into the near impossible position of attempting to explain the Jay Treaty to their still nominal allies in France which contributed to the more famous hostilities of Adams presidency.\n\nAfter Jefferson's departure there was no remaining Republican leaning members of Washington's cabinet, only Randolph and mostly high federalists. In 1795 a letter written by Edmund Randolph to France had been seized by the British who turned it over to Alexander Hamilton, who informed Washington that it contained treasonous material to the United States. Washington, never actually read the letter nor did he have someone else read it relying solely on the opinion and word of Hamilton. He confronted Randolph in a cabinet meeting forcing him to resign. Within the 18th century society of honor, Washington's actions were highly offensive made evident by Randolph taking the unusual steps of publicly attacking Washington in his [A Vindication of Mr. Randolph's Resignation](_URL_0_) at about the same time Monroe was also removed from France. These removals meant that there was now no Republicans holding high office within the United States, and only one moderate Federalist(Lee). Jefferson and Madison in particular saw the removal of Randolph as the last straw, and any lingering sentiments towards reconciling with the Federalists was highly unlikely. Jefferson in a pained letter even wrote to Washington, telling him of how dangerous he felt Hamilton was to Washington. \n\nAdams too many problems during his presidency to get into at any length but one of the ones not of his creation was because of Washington. Adams had expanded the armed forces of the United States (either to oppose France or as some Federalists hopped to stop domestic violence ie: Republican). At this highly partisan time Adams thought that only Washington could be offered command of the army to ensure that the army held the support of all Americans. Perhaps showing the severity of the time, Washington actually accepted but refused to have anyone other than Hamilton as his second in command. Adams huffed and puffed but was left with little choice but to accept Hamilton. Hamilton was not the man to bring the nation together, especially at the head of an army one of his best friends Gouvernor Morris wrote of Hamilton\n\n\"Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself.. He well knew that his favorite form (of government) was inadmissible, unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an 'approaching crisis' arose from a conviction that the king of government most suitable in his opinion, to this extensive country, could established no other way\".\n\nHamilton's appointment panicked Republicans even more so, many who now openly thought that the army's purpose was to crush the Republican movement. Jefferson sent out letters to Republican leaders imploring them to avoid giving the Federalists any reason whatsoever for using the army against them. In doing so Jefferson allowed the public to arrive at their own conclusion regarding the army, which contributed to his victory in 1800. Adams had planned to appoint moderates in Pennsylvania and New York to high offices within the army (the two states he needed to win to secure his election) but Hamilton ensured that only high federalists and no Republicans were appointed to command, again reinforcing the Jeffersonian fear. It was at this point that Adams realized he had lost complete control of the Federalist party and he attempted to reassert his authority through sacking his cabinet(minus Lee) and negotiations with France, causing a civil war within the party.\n\nHad Washington continued to rely on moderate Republicans like Madison and appointed a bi-partisan cabinet much of the political infighting that resulted in the two party system could have been lessened or delayed.\n\noutside of that I'm not sure what else you can really hold Washington accountable for major political mistakes. Ellis in *American Creation* holds the entirety of the founding generation responsible for failing to find a solution for the natives and slavery. However Ellis notes in the book (for the Creek confederacy for instance) the Federal government held few tools on hand to deal with many of the issues affecting the Creek. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=JzZcAAAAQAAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Edmund+Randolph#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "7bypun", "title": "Does anyone know a good read on snipers in WWII?", "selftext": "I am writing a research paper on snipers in WWII for my history class. I was interested if anyone knew any good books or web articles I could reference.\n\nI was hoping to learn about how Soviet, American, and German sniper units operated, and how they could have changed strategy throughout the war.\n\nAlso, I am doing an engineering perspective and comparison on the design of snipers during the war, such as the Mauser Kar98k, or the Springfield '03. This will be a majority of the paper.\n\nAny references you might know that I could use would be greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bypun/does_anyone_know_a_good_read_on_snipers_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpm0hf9"], "score": [2], "text": ["Karabiner 98k by Karem and Steves is a great resource for K98k snipers, particularly Volume IIa.  There are currently 3 volumes, Volume 1 covers pre-war (banner model, standard modell, etc) to 1938 rifles at Mauser-Oberndorf, JP Sauer, Mauser-Borsigwalde, Ermawerke, Berlin Lubecker, and BSW.  Volume 2 covers wartime production, and Volume 3 covers the Kriegsmodell.  2A specifically has a lot of info regarding sniper rifle development at Mauser-Oberndorf, specifically the ZF-39 (low and high turret), the ZF-41, and the Jung Prismatic Optics prototypes.  The 3 book set is an excellent resource for the history and engineering of the German K98k.  The only downside to the books is that they are pretty pricey, at $345 for the 4 book set (Volume 2 is so large that they had to split it into 2 volumes).  \nLink:  _URL_1_  \nThe only other \"WW2 German Sniper\" book I know about is Backbone of the Wehrmacht Vol 2.  \nLink:  _URL_0_  \nI personally do not own volume 2 (I own volume 1), but it seems to be a decent source on the rifles.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.amazon.com/Backbone-Wehrmacht-Vol-II-Variations/dp/0889352224", "http://www.thirdpartypress.com/category-s/1632.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "42xszv", "title": "Iroquois vs. Haudenosaunee", "selftext": "As a child I learned about our local Native Americans, the Iroquois.  However, recently I've heard the term \"Iroquois\" may be considered offensive because it means something rude in Algonquin.  Would it be more correct then to refer not to the Iroquois but to the Haudenosaunee, as this is the league of six nations they created?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42xszv/iroquois_vs_haudenosaunee/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czdwkdb"], "score": [4], "text": ["The exact etymology of \"Iroquois\" is debatable, and there are plenty of Iroquoian people who use it and related terms for various purposes. If you're talking about an individual person, it's best to go with their specific nation. Joseph Brant is Mohawk (or *Kanien'keh\u00e1:ka* if you're feeling particularly ambitious). Haudenosaunee is the accepted English variation for the name of the confederacy itself, based on the Mohawk name (*Rotinonshonni*). As such, it's reserved of usage for the political entity or its citizens as a whole. Joseph Brant was a defender of *the* Haudenosaunee, but he was not *a* Haudenosaunee.\n\nIroquois is used more generically, to refer to people culturally but often outside the context of the Haudenosaunee as a political entity. After the revolution, Joseph Brant led many Iroquois refugees to Ontario and helped found the Six Nations of Grand River (now home to the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team) as one of the successors to the Haudenosaunee. In the derivative form \"Iroquian\" is extends to cover culturally and linguistically related peoples including the Wendat (Huron), the Chonnonton (Neutral), and the Cherokee. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2xh2ow", "title": "How did the various Viking colonizers of parts of Britain react to different forms of Paganism in the areas they commanded?", "selftext": "First of all apologies if using the term Viking is considered bad here as I know obviously that isn't the actual name for the people but more of  a generalization of the Nordic people who left their countries to raid and plunder.\n\nI just wondered that in the areas that they held dominion over, say parts of Ireland and Scotland. What was the Norse peoples reaction to the fact that they had a different form of Paganism? Was it looked down on as bad how Christians looked down upon Vikings or were they cohesively allowed to live on without trouble?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xh2ow/how_did_the_various_viking_colonizers_of_parts_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp01g11"], "score": [4], "text": ["They didn't react to them, because as far as we can tell, there were no surviving population groups practising pre-Christian religions in the British Isles when the Vikings first began making incursions in 793. Ireland and Scotland had fully Christianised over the course of the fifth to seventh centuries and developed pervasive Christian identities of their own right -- especially so in Ireland, where sharing religion and language across the many hundreds of small states across the island facilitated a degree of common ethnic consciousness that made Norse settlers initially quite unwelcome. When the Vikings began appearing at the end of the eighth century, there were no pagans left in the British Isles, or at least any remaining communities were small enough to escape documentation and to leave no trace in the archaeolgical record.\n\nIf you're interested in how Scandinavian pagans interacted with other polytheistic communities, it might be smart to direct your inquiries into their early voyages into Eastern Europe, especially the Kievan Rus. I haven't studied that part of the world to the extent I've studied Ireland (and to a lesser extent, Scotland), so I can't speak with any authority there, nor can I recommend you any texts.\n\nSources: Stefan Brink and Neil Price (eds.), *The Viking World*, various articles\n\nJ. H. Barrett (ed.), *Contact, Continuity and Collapse: The Norse Colonisation of the North Atlantic*, various aritcles\n\nClare Downham, *Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ivarr*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6kfnbt", "title": "According to a History Channel documentry, during the Vietnam war, US ground troops would face 240 days of combat a year, versus 11 days of combat a year during WW2. Is this claim true?", "selftext": "On average per soldier, that is. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kfnbt/according_to_a_history_channel_documentry_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djlxf31"], "score": [64], "text": ["I just recently [made a post](_URL_0_) concerning the psychological effects of long-term frontline service in the U.S. Army during WWII.\n\n >  Being assigned to the Infantry branch (as roughly half of all men entering the Army were in mid-1944) was an assignment fraught with danger;\n\nDeployed overseas|Total battle casualties|*Deaths among battle casualties*|*KIA*|*DOW*|*Died while MIA*|*Died while POW*|WIA|MIA|POW\n:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--\n757,712|661,059|*142,962*|*117,641*|*19,613*|*1,795*|*3,913*|471,376|15,830|56,212\n\n >  There was no such thing as a \"tour of duty\" for U.S. soldiers during WWII; those on the front lines saw service until they were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, disabled, or otherwise too mentally broken to continue. It was estimated that a soldier began to lose his effectiveness after about 90 combat days (American troops were often on the front lines for as long as two months without a visit to a rear area rest center; the British had a policy of allowing four days of rest for every twelve days of combat) and was completely ineffective after 200-240 combat days. After 180 combat days, less than three percent of the original men in a unit remained, the rest lost to various causes. Neuropsychiatric casualties accounted for 15 to 25 percent of all non-battle losses (the Army hospitalized about 900,000 men for neuropsychiatric reasons during the war, a number Eisenhower demanded not be released to the press) and it was estimated that for every ten days of combat, three to ten percent of men in a unit became neuropsychiatric casualties. The \"rate of replacement\" for men varied wildly; many were killed nearly immediately, while others made it through the entire war without suffering any bodily harm whatsoever. \n\n >  Men who showed particular aptitude for certain tasks were often sent back to the United States on temporary duty to attend specialist schools; they then returned to their units. Week-long passes were often offered to rear areas such as London or Paris. Combat veterans who had been made unsuitable for frontline service through wounds or other causes were often assigned to apply their expertise in training new soldiers at replacement training centers stateside. \n\n >  In early 1945, to improve the morale of replacements (by now called \"reinforcements\"), General Joseph Stilwell proposed that they be pre-designated for assignment to certain units while still in the United States, and shipped in groups. Four men would form a squad, four squads a platoon, and four platoons a company. Companies and platoons would be broken up as needed, but the basic unit of four men would always remain intact. The plan was begrudgingly adopted by theater authorities in Europe in March 1945, and it is not possible to tell how effective it was since it only operated for a short time. The Surgeon General of the United States proposed that soldiers be given a six-month non-combat furlough after 200 to 240 days and have the option of serving it in the United States. \n\n >  Before the invasion of Japan, it was proposed that infantry divisions be augmented with a fourth regiment (many being the \"orphan\" regiments detached from divisions when they moved from a \"square\" to \"triangular\" structure in 1940) so that one could be shifted completely out of the combat zone, as well as a policy that soldiers only serve 120 combat days before a substantial rest. As Japan surrendered, this was never implemented. A proposal was also made to rotate divisions completely out of the front line to rear areas, something done in the German *Heer*.\n\n >  The replacement system in the *Heer* operated differently than in the U.S. Army, and it can be argued that there was an effect on morale. Divisions in the German Army were raised in certain geographic areas (not dissimilar to U.S. National Guard units) known as *wehrkreise* and men were assigned to divisional replacement units and took their training together, shipping to the front in groups, where they received more training before being assigned to their unit. The U.S. replacement system was rather impersonal. Men from all over the country (remember that the United States is massive; Germany is only about the size of Montana) were shipped to replacement training centers to receive instruction, and then shipped overseas to wherever they were needed, be it Europe or the Pacific. A port of embarkation (many replacements were assigned to augment divisions less than a month before they shipped out; the only significant small-unit training these men received would be combat) gave way to a trans-Atlantic or -Pacific voyage, intermediate and then field army replacement depots, replacement battalions, and then final units, each step of the way another obstacle to unit cohesion. Men often arrived scared and isolated, having little, if any, training upkeep offered along the way.\n\n >  **Sources:** \n\n >  * Atkinson, Rick. *The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945*. New York: Picador, 2013.\n\n >  * Ruppenthal, Roland G. *United States Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations, Logistical Support of the Armies Volume II: September 1944-May 1945*. Washington: United States Army Center of Military History, 1959.\n\n >  * United States. United States Army Adjutant General's Corps. *Army Battle Casualties\nand Nonbattle Deaths in World War II Final Report, 7 December 1941-31 December 1946*. Washington: Statistical and Accounting Branch, Office of the Adjutant General, 1953.\n\n >  * United States, United States Army Medical Department. *Neuropsychiatry in World War II Volume I, Zone of Interior*. Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1973.\n\n >  * United States, War Department, *Army Ground Forces Historical Study No. 7: The Provision of Enlisted Replacements*. Washington: Army Ground Forces Historical Section, 1946.\n\nThis is a very interesting claim that is supposed to have originated in a speech given by Army general Barry McCaffrey to Vietnam War veterans at the Vietnam War Veterans' Memorial in 1993. Was raw data collected from a sample of a large enough number of men to form a representative conclusion, or an assertion made based on interviews with just a few veterans? The method of data collection is thus unknown, and calls the results into question. The possible decision to include rear-echelon service troops in the World War II situation and not the Vietnam War one (as that average appears *very* high in comparison) makes the average significantly smaller; frontline infantrymen in the ETO were routinely in the line for as long as 30 days (and sometimes up to 60 or 90 days) at a time without relief, and never truly left as divisions were not moved completely to the rear (\"in reserve\" often meant only a mile or two from the front) except in extraordinary circumstances. In the Pacific it might have been a little different, as the number of pitched battles (i.e. Kwajalein or Saipan) were relatively spaced out and divisions were often moved back to Hawaii or Australia for several months of rest and refit. What criteria were used to obtain a definition of what \"combat\" was, and were they applied relatively equally in both scenarios?\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kcw4y/how_often_were_soldiers_in_the_us_army_during_ww2/djl510s/?utm_content=permalink&amp;utm_medium=user&amp;utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_name=frontpage"]]}
{"q_id": "3pin59", "title": "Did the Byzantines ever consider building a 'Great Wall' of their own to repel the Arabs and Turks?", "selftext": "While reading through the recent forum about the Great Wall of China I saw a few parallels between China's dilemma contending with the Mongols and The Byzantine struggle against similar foes in the Arabs and Turks. China chose a to put up a big wall which despite some limitations did offer some decisive advantages such as control of the battlefield and early warnings. What I want to know is did the Byzantines consider the advantages of long fortifications on its eastern borders? Were there any Byzantine 'Great Wall' projects in planning or put into practice?\n\nI wouldn't be surprised if Byzantium was well acquainted with concept since they had a historical precedent with the Roman walls, they had diplomatic and trade relations with China and may have had knowledge of the Great Wall and had already proved themselves accomplished wall builders after putting up the Theodosian Walls.       ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pin59/did_the_byzantines_ever_consider_building_a_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cw6va8o"], "score": [13], "text": ["The situation for the Byzantines was very different.\n\nIn the cases of the Romans versus the Picts/Germans/other peoples, or the Chinese versus the various nomadic peoples to their north, you have a big, strong, rich, centralised empire that has to deal with endemic raiding from less organised but mobile and elusive enemies. These states have resources to throw at the problem (though not infinite ones) and have border control as their main priority.\n\nThe Byzantines, on the other hand, were a regional power sitting right next to, depending on the timeframe, far greater world-class empires. \n\nSure, the Arabs would raid Byzantine territory year after year in the 7th and 8th century. But it was a different kind of raid: the Byzantine problem wasn't finding the raiders and delaying them until overwhelming force could be brought to bear against them. They didn't have overwhelming force. The Caliphate was much bigger and stronger. The Byzantine priority was survival and minimising the damage they suffered.\n\nThey were never in a position to expend the massive resources it would take to create giant walls. At times their enemies were weaker and divided, but that usually prompted the Byzantines to try and re-take their lost territory rather than construct big static defences. \n\nThat said, in the Balkans they did construct the [Long Walls of Thrace](_URL_0_) in the 5th century, a 56 kilometer stretch of wall west of Constantinople, protecting its peninsula from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. These defences don't seem to have been very effective."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://mybyzantine.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/anastasian-walls.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "267ke7", "title": "Any recommendations for a good espionage book?", "selftext": "I have to write a book report for class on an espionage book and was hoping someone would have a good book for me to read. I do really like WWII but if there are really good books out there that aren't WWII I would be good with that too. Something exciting would be nice.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267ke7/any_recommendations_for_a_good_espionage_book/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chog6pz", "chogveg", "chohvyh", "choidbi", "choslrv", "chotc18"], "score": [15, 10, 3, 2, 5, 3], "text": ["I'm a fan of the atomic spies myself. Some favorites that focus on individuals (which often makes for better stories than big, all-encompassing books on Soviet espionage, like _The Haunted Wood_): \n\n* _Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy_. This focuses primarily on the spying of Ted Hall, a Harvard undergraduate who worked at Los Alamos. The guy is barely out of high school and he decides to spy on the atomic bomb for the USSR. Why'd he do it? How'd he do it? And why did he never go to jail, even though the FBI figured out he was a spy? The book gives interesting answers to these questions.\n\n* _The Catcher was a Spy_. Moe Berg was a Princeton-educated catcher for the Boston Red Sox. He was also a spy for the US during WWII. One of his jobs was to decide whether or not he should assassinate the famous German physicist Wernher Heisenberg who was thought to be working on an atomic bomb for the Nazis. \n\n* _The Invisible Harry Gold_. Gold was not a spy himself per se, but he was part of the Rosenberg/Greenglass/Fuchs network that got a lot of information out of Los Alamos, working as a courier. What makes him a great study is that he is not some kind of trained agent or even an ideological die-hard, but just a psychologically kind of messed up guy who falls in with \"the wrong crowd\" and aims to please. A much more nuanced story than you usually get with spy accounts, a great psychological portrait.\n", "I would recommend *Agent Zigzag* by Ben McIntyre. It's a biography of a gangster from the east end of London who ended up serving as a m & amp;s agent for the Germans... And then the British. McIntyre writes ridiculously well, and Eddie Chapman's life was like a thriller anyway, you'll finish it in a day or two, and wish it was longer.\n\nFavorite example of Chapman's ridiculousness: he was parachuted by his German spymasters into England (oxfordshire, I think). He landed in a field, and walked up to an old stone farmhouse with two spinster sisters inside. He knocked on the door, and said (paraphrasing): \"hello. I'm a German spy. Would you please call to police\". That was how he came to work for the British.\n\nChapman almost single-handedly save central London from the blitz. He reported back to the Germans that all their bombs were falling on hampstead and kilburm (north-west London), so the Germans dialed down their V2 range, obliterating south-east London (and many innocent people), but leaving the seat of power in central London *relatively* unscathed.", "Also if WWII is your thing, still in the historical fiction area I'd suggest Robert Harris' [Enigma](_URL_0_).\n\nFor non-fiction: \n\n[The Defense of the Realm](_URL_2_) is a fascinating, if incredibly long, history of MI5. Bear in mind it is an \"authorized\" history.\n\n[The Puzzle Palace](_URL_1_) comes highly recommended by people I know in the intelligence community, though I have not read it.\n\n", "maybe not as exciting as some other books listed here, but Steve Coll's *Ghost Wars* is an excellent (and Pulitzer prize winning) description of the CIA's efforts in assisting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Taliban - and the subsequent intelligence operations and failures that led up to 9/11. Fascinating depiction of how intelligence organizations work to achieve goals in very difficult fields of operations having to negotiate with tenuous allies - like communist China", "\"Spycatcher\" by Peter Wright - Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer of British MI5 1954-1965. It contains a great mix of personal struggles, technical details, overviews of (and some nitty gritty details of) specific surveillance and counter-surveillance operations, spy-turning, detailed accounts of double-agents, and the technology employed in espionage and counter-espionage, it doesn't touch particularly heavily on any one subject, but it's generally a very fascinating read. \n\nBut most of all it was known for it's controversy in exposing just how *astonishingly* (and I can't emphasize this enough, you need to read the book to understand) badly infiltrated by Soviet Counter-Intelligence MI5 were (and to lesser extents MI6 and GCHQ) back in the early days of the cold war. \n\nThe book was officially banned from sale in England by the government of the time before the books first attempted publication in 1985, at the time of it's first actual publication 1987, English newspapers were banned via gag order from even mentioning the book, and it was difficult to get hold of for at least a few years [untill 1988.](_URL_0_)\n", "Ken Follet writes some great spy stuff.  The Eye of the Needle immediately comes to mind.  Jackdaws is also very good."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_%28novel%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm:_The_Authorised_History_of_MI5"], [], ["http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/13/newsid_2532000/2532583.stm"], []]}
{"q_id": "2dib9v", "title": "Have the Amish always been significantly different than other rural Midwestern farmers? At what point did technological and societal changes really set the Amish apart?", "selftext": "Also, has there ever been anti-Amish sentiment? They aren't evangelizing like the Mormons, but I wonder if their business practices provoked some ire.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dib9v/have_the_amish_always_been_significantly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjpru9x", "cjqi0a8"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["From the time they first settled in the US, the Amish have been different. They spoke German and eschewed the clothing that was popular. They had specific rules about dress and behavior, like no buttons, which set them apart even before modern technology. They also have their own religion that is a branch of Protestantism.\nAs a result, they'd be going to their own church and hanging out in their own social circles.", " > Also, has there ever been any anti-Amish sentiment?\n\nBackground: I grew up Mennonite (similar to Amish), and I have Amish in my extended family.\n\nBefore I go trying to pass off family anecdotes as history, here is a source with more info and examples: _URL_0_\n\nNow, you asked whether there has ever been any anti-Amish sentiment, the answer is yes, particularly in WW1.\n\nTwo things to understand about Amish:\n\n1. Amish don't believe in going to war. Conscientious objectors, in other words.\n2. Amish to this day speak a dialect of German.\n\nSo in WW1, you have Amish and Mennonites who speak the enemy language, and on top of that they're refusing to join the military and go fight. It was not uncommon for them to be viewed as traitors because of it.\n\nThere are a number of stories in my family of people getting tarred and feathered, jailed, or even killed. Some of it is no doubt exaggerated with the passage of time, but the sentiment certainly existed for a time.\n\nFor WW2, I don't have any sources so I can't say anything definitively...that said, I've certainly been told by my older relatives that the sentiment was much reduced compared to WW1. Why, I have no idea"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-mob-violence-and-kansas-mennonites-in-1918/13278"]]}
{"q_id": "2yg287", "title": "Who is the Japanese military leader in this picture?", "selftext": "My grandfather obtained this picture in the Pacific Theater.  He took many photos, but this is not one of them. He traded lots of photos and this is one he got through a trade. The family legend is that this picture shows American soldiers around some high-ranking Japanese military leader who killed himself just as the Americans were about to reach him. \n\nI would like to know if anyone can help nail down more information. Who is he?  Where was this?  Perhaps a similar picture exists where we know who is shown?\n\nMy own investigation of Jappanese military leaders who killed themselves in circumstances where the Americans might quickly find their body makes me think it could be either Isamu Cho or Mitsuru Ushijima.  The picture of Cho kind of looks like the picture I have. \n\n(_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yg287/who_is_the_japanese_military_leader_in_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp95v8i"], "score": [5], "text": [" > My own investigation of Jappanese military leaders who killed themselves in circumstances where the Americans might quickly find their body makes me think it could be either Isamu Cho or Mitsuru Ushijima. The picture of Cho kind of looks like the picture I have.\n\nRight idea, but wrong guy, mainly because this is a suicide attempt, not a successful one! Hideki Tojo was seen as one of the principal war criminals of Japan by the Allies, and when American MPs went to arrest him in early September, he attempted to shoot himself in the heart, but missed and only wounded himself. He was arrested, and successfully treated by American medical personnel so that he could stand trial for war crimes, be found guilty, and finally be executed by hanging a few years later.\n\nNow of course it is possible Im wrong, but based on what I can see of the face, [with that trademark mustache](_URL_1_), as well as the apparent location of the wound based on the bloodied garments, I feel confident in my deduction here.\n\nEdit: reverse Google search failed, but \"Tojo suicide photos\" turned up a few that [look very similar](_URL_0_), although that specific one does not seem to be online (which would make it pretty interesting for a collector!)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/Id7d4LL.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://worldwar2database.com/sites/default/files/wwii1145.jpg", "http://jto.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/nn20130216a3b.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "bd2ouf", "title": "Was suicide among \"commoners\" normal during time periods like the renaissance? Or is it something that became more prevalent recently?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bd2ouf/was_suicide_among_commoners_normal_during_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekvjifq", "ekvuxns", "ekw7chr"], "score": [519, 906, 62], "text": ["I have an earlier answer on [suicide in the Middle Ages in western Europe](_URL_1_). If you don't mind, I'll copy-paste it here for now so people have something to read while I work on one that extends into the Reformation/later Renaissance era. (Normally I'd just wait, but the topic seems to demand it.) ([Now posted!](_URL_0_))\n\n~~\n\n[1/2]\n\n*I'm borrowing some pieces from earlier answers [here](_URL_3_) and [here](_URL_2_), but it's mostly new.*\n\nIt's impossible to calculate the rate at which medieval people in the Latin West killed themselves or tried to. First, for the usual reasons--lack of records, bias of records that do survive in favor of focus on specific groups, the sketchily-drawn nature of calculating medieval demographics in general. Equally important, however, are the immense social, legal, and Christian religious consequences not just for the ones who killed themselves, but for those staring numbly at their loved one's body. While we can't say \"how commonly did medieval people kill themselves,\" it is evident that suicide was not only a common problem for survivors, but became an even bigger emotional burden over the course of the Middle Ages.\n\nThe central drumbeat of any examination of suicide in the Christian Middle Ages must be: suicide was a sin. And not just any sin, but an absolutely, fundamentally unforgiveable one. It was understood that the act of self-murder was the last thing that a person would do; there was no time for confession and absolution. No cleansing purgatorial fire awaited those who killed themselves: they were eternally bound to hell. As early as 570, Gregory of Tours writes that the body of a nobleman who had killed himself was taken to a monastery by his survivors, but the monks could \"not put [him] among the Christian dead, and no Mass was sung for him.\" The refusal of burial with the Christian community in consecrated ground is an earthly symbol of the theological belief that the count was separated from the Christian community in the afterlife.\n\nThis story shows us two further things. First, the intimate relationship of suicide and death means the theology of suicide was doctrine that wrapped itself around every level of Christian society. Even if not every single person over a thousand year span was excited to hear every last sermon or could recite the Paternoster (prayer) without prompting at their goddaughter's baptism, everyone dealt with death, whose aftermath was the domain of God and the Church.\n\nSecond, it shows the desperation of the count's family. They still took his body to the monastery even knowing he had killed himself, holding out some shard of hope for his soul, that the holy men might still be able to help. Already in the earliest years of the Middle Ages, we witness the desperation of the survivors.\n\nThe fallout of this desperation--even a generalized sadness of pious writers upset at the consignment of *any* soul to hell--permeates the medieval source record on suicide. As with Gregory, it's not that suicide isn't mentioned. We hear about it in monastic chronicles: a 12th century monk and prior of Le Dale monastery named Henry fell in love with a local woman and, officially absent from his house to earn money for it, moved in with her. When his affair was discovered and he was forced to return to the convent, \"Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and by way of spontaneous, or rather foolish, death he put an end to life.\" From late medieval England, we have cases mentioned in coroners' rolls: A man sentenced to sit in the stocks overnight is found dead in the morning, having stabbed himself. \n\nMiracle stories attached to saints and shrines describe people who attempted suicide, maybe even appeared to have killed themselves, but were (literally) miraculously revived: a young woman was raped repeatedly by her uncle, who forced her to have an abortion each time she became pregnant. The third time, she did so directly, by ripping open her stomach with a knife. But when she cried to the Virgin Mary--here as both mother and *mediatrix*--Mary healed her external as well as internal wounds, and the woman took vows in a Cistercian convent to spend the rest of her days in praise of Mary/out of sight of mainstream society. And fictional literary sources talk of suicide, too: Boccaccio's *Elegy of Lady Fiammetta* describes a woman who decides to kill herself by jumping from a tower, because the people who find her body won't be able to tell whether it was suicide or an accident.\n\nBut in these stories, a clear pattern emerges: an emphasis on secrecy, privacy, and shame. A traveler who drops back from the group; a nun who barricades herself into a room for \"private prayer\" but slips out the window. Fiammetta (who is ultimately rescued) wanted to camouflage her death as an accident; the noblewoman in Gerard of Frachet's miracle tale hid herself away in the aftermath.\n\nThis only increases as one moves up the social scale in considering cases. Although typically we'd say the source record is *radically* denser for religious and the upper class than the small but growing middle class and peasants, with suicide this is not so. Alexander Murray, who composed the most important study of suicide in the Middle Ages (and to give you an idea of the weight of this project: he only ever made it through two volumes of a planned three before it was too much), instead says we must look to \"whispers\". \n\nThe sources ideologically and personally closest to a named noble or royal will shy away from mentioning suicide or suicidal ideation; those further removed in time and alliance will be less reticent.  One example of this in operation is the possible attempted suicide of Henry IV, 11th (mostly) century Holy Roman Emperor. A lot of chronicles discuss his wars with the pope and his own son. But it is only one account, by known opponent Bernold of Constance, who includes this detail:\n\n >  He betook himself to a castle and there remained without any regal trappings. He was in a state of extreme dejection and, as they say, he tried to give himself over to death, but was prevented by his men and could not bring his wish to effect. *(trans. Murray)*\n\nWhile the modern reader will recongize circumstances of deep depression and suicidal desire that feel all too familiar, there is an even darker angle in play. A given \"mental illness\" is of course a name attached of a web of symptoms that frequently travel together, manifesting slightly differently in all cases; but even the concept of *illness* is a cultural-scientific attachment. *Tristitia*, *acedia*, *melancholia*, and their fellows in medieval writings appear to aligns with different manifestations of what we call major depressive disorder today. But in the Middle Ages, they were sins. Even before one stepped onto the tower window ledge or threw the rope over the rafters, sorrow over worldly matters like *your own son leading an armed rebellion against you, nbd* was a sin that divorced you from other people and from God. It's not an accident that so many accounts of suicide attribute the act to possession by the devil or the influence of demons, and describe the victim's diabolical fear or behavior in the days or years beforehand.\n\nIt's no wonder, then, that even an anti-Henry partisan like Bernold can only bring himself to write \"As they say\" (*aiunt*). It's a common pattern. Dante Alighieri refused to identify thirteenth-century king Henry Hohenstaufen as one of the inmates of the seventh circle of hell in *Inferno*, despite rumors to the effect he was among those violent against themselves. It's not agreement or disagreement with this decision that is picked up by commentators, it's the *debate*: \"but others write,\" hedges Bevenuto da Imola, and \"if this is true.\" \n\nThere was good reason for those left behind to be cautious. As laws and legal systems coalesced over the course of the Middle Ages, death by suicide came to have extensive legal consequences for one's heirs (and whatever a grudge against the dead, might not be good to antagonize the living). Laws permitted or mandated the \"ravage\" of the property of someone who committed suicide: that its, its seizure by the lord or city rather than passing down to one's heirs. This could extend all the way to the home that a house-owner's family was *still living in*, throwing them onto the street. \n\nA 1280 case from England illustrates these laws in action. Upon the death of one of his tenants, a lord had claimed it was suicide and thus her property reverted to him. Her heirs had sued to get the property back, claiming his \"presumptions\" were (a) wrong and (b) even if they were right, presumptions weren't strong enough to be evidence of suicide. Notably, the judge ruled in the lord's favor because one of the 'presumptions' was the dead woman's threat to do something to shame her friends. Suicide was shameful for the immediate victim, but it also smade victims of the survivors who had to deal with public shame and material loss in the midst of private grief.", "It is *also* impossible to calculate a suicide rate for early modern western Europe. The difficulties with identifying modern victims of suicide come into play--people who try to cover up their own actions, families who don't report it. For the early modern era, the usual problem with surviving sources compounds these problems exponentially. \n\nBut it's also harder because of much darker cultural beliefs about suicide. It was a matter of deep social shame for the survivors and the memory of the victim. It was a legal crime that punished survivors through state seizure of the victim's property. And in Christianity, it was a sin that sent one's soul straight to hell.\n\nThis was true on all sides of the Reformation. In Catholicism, suicide offered no time for repentance between act and death. According to Protestant beliefs, suicide was an act of the reprobate. \n\nSo with so much societal push against suicide, combined with the usual narratives of the early modern era as the \"rise of social discipline,\" who would get to the point of actively trying to kill themselves? Through the difficulties in the sources, one thing has stood out in multiple studies. \n\nSuicide was often, though obviously not always, a sin and a crime of social and economic outcasts. People who perceived they had nowhere to turn or would have nowhere to turn in the future; people who faced a really awful future.\n\nLegal records are where most of our data on suicide in early modern Europe comes from--actual court cases, records of deaths in a city, investigations of violent death and accidents in general. But studies of England and northern Germany show some of the problems with using these records straightforwardly. \n\nFirst, it's generally considered fact that people sought desperately to cover up the suicidal death of a family member for three reasons: their own social shame, refusal of Christian burial rites, and seizure of property. In England, laws mandating almoners and coroners investigate *all* suspicious deaths were codified around 1500, which you would think would eliminate some of the chances of a cover-up. \n\nBut as R. A. Houston showed for 16th century England, cases taken to the courts often ended up more as a mediation in how to divide a deceased person's assets than outright forfeiture. And they might not end up in court until *decades* after a death. At the same time, there's plenty of evidence of families indeed trying to cover up someone's suicide. And people who committed suicide themselves might also have taken care. So we're definitely still dealing with very selective reporting and recording.\n\nIn northern Germany and Scandinavia, so-called \"suicidal murder\" became a major problem in the 16th-18th centuries. This involved a person who despaired to the point of suicide actually murdering someone else, a victim and in a manner that made capital punishment inevitable (usually a child not related to them). Arne Jansson traced this horror to a local folk belief that a violent death of any kind--including execution--sent one to heaven. This would presumably constitute a small number of cases of suicide overall. But it's a useful, if tragic, reminder that suicide doesn't always look like \"suicide.\"\n\nAnd of course, a major difficulty is that sources don't always agree--and that they disagree in really significant ways. Through 1646, Laura Cruz observed 38 suicides recorded in court records for Leiden; Jeffrey Watts observed 41 in Geneva through 1650. This seems quite ordinary until you realize that Leiden was about twice the size of Geneva.\n\nHowever, Cruz and Watts found agreement in their sources on a crucial point: suicide was overwhelmingly an act of the socially marginalized. Cruz observes a strong link between economic difficulties and suicide. Even as Leiden prospered dramatically, not everyone came along. Those excluded from guild membership as temporary workers (the adjunct professors of early modern trades, if you will) or those still trying to earn their way in as apprentices (the grad students) constituted 20% of the people \"convicted\" of committing suicide in court records. \n\nFeeling a full sense of belonging and community in a church was also insulation from actually committing suicide, although there is no information on attempts. Cruz found only 2 cases out of 38 who were full members of a Calvinist or Anabaptist church (about 40% of the population overall).\n\nFor Geneva, on the other hand, Watt identified surprisingly specific groups as those most likely to commit suicide: suspected witches, prisoners, and people previously considered violently insane. 9 out of the 41 pre-1650 victims of suicide had been accused or suspected of witchcraft.\n\nStudying England, Houston cautions that the predominance of social outcasts in statistics about people who committed suicide, likely reflects source bias to some extent. MacDonald and Murphy in *Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England* highlight the presence of nobles and wealthier burghers among the registers of suicide victims. But they still point out that based on assets uncovered for forfeiture, more than half of victims of suicide would qualify as poor or destitute. \n\nSharon Strocchia, meanwhile, studied suicides and suicide attempts among nuns in early modern Italy--what more tight-knit community than a convent? It's impossible to reconstruct the complex social, medical, and personal reasons that any one person committed suicide. But looking at the circumstances of these nuns, she detected two patterns at work in many (not all) cases. First, some of the nuns were noted as suffering horrible verbal and even physical abuse. (And this does not seem to have been an exaggeration--one nun, who reported the suicide of her sister to local authorities, also sought permission to transfer to another convent because of the terrible environment.) Second, many nuns who attempted suicide, or had sisters desperately concerned that they would, were among those forced into monastic life by relatives. In both those cases, there was sharp displacement from these women's desired community, whether that was within the convent or outside.\n\nAnd Houston offers a poignant reminder that \"social outcast\" could come in many forms. From 17th century Shropshire (the year isn't clear), a man named John Gossage committed suicide by taking arsenic. He had spent time in jail for counterfeiting money and was accounted an alcoholic by survivors. When his body was found, the only person the town could find to deal with his burial was his landlord.\n\nAnd the nameless woman who threw herself into the Nor Loch in Edinburgh in 1665? She was buried right next to where she drowned herself--she had no family or friends to claim, move, or take care of her body. We only know her from a brief reference in the city treasurers' records of the need to supply a coffin.", "As a follow up question: *why* was the punishment for suicide so harsh and *why* did it get harsher over time? Why did it extend to living relatives? Wasn't eternity in purgatory punishment enough? Was it just about money - i.e. seizing the property of the suicidee?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bd2ouf/was_suicide_among_commoners_normal_during_time/ekvuxns/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7e013q/was_suicide_a_common_issue_in_the_middle_age/dq1vrz7/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/50zlpb/were_the_bodies_of_suicide_victims_decapitated_in/d789rbw/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43u90l/how_prevalent_was_suicide_in_medieval_europe/czl6tlw/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "ekwx4r", "title": "Was there any condemnation in the 1500s towards Luther's piece on the Jewish community?", "selftext": "I actually posted this about a year ago and forgot about it, and unfortunately it didn't get answered then.  But with all the recent anti-Semitism on the rise I want to ask this again:\n\nIn 1543, just a couple years before Luther's death, he published a regrettable piece, *On the Jews and their Lies*. Did any scholars of the day condemn that piece, or was Luther's words the prevailing opinion of the day?\n\nThanks for any insight.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekwx4r/was_there_any_condemnation_in_the_1500s_towards/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fekzv29"], "score": [9], "text": ["I wasn't active here for a while and am looking through the backlog of Judaism related questions, and think this is a great one.\n\nLuther's views on Jews in that essay were by no means universal and perhaps more vitriolic than the average, but they did reflect his era's view on Jews in general, were not considered particularly unusual, and were very influential. \n\nHis attitude in general toward Judaism was very much shaped by the prevailing Christian beliefs in Judaism as the antithesis to Christianity, in supersessionism (the idea that with the New Testament, Christians had become the \"real Jews\"), and in Jews as a malevolent force. It's unlikely that Luther himself ever met more than a few Jews in his life, despite living among them; however, he would have had plenty of material, theological and otherwise, on which to rely in his formulations here. For centuries, Jews had been used as examples of veniality, heresy, blindness to reason and truth, falsehood, and arrogance. Martin Luther simply continued in this tradition in many ways, in that he used his perception of Judaism and Jews as a foil for how he saw Christianity to be, as in the much older comparison of the frail, blindfolded Synagoga with the youthful, forward-seeing Ecclesia. However, it is undoubted that these feelings about Judaism went beyond a rhetorical device and were instead an actual sentiment felt about actual Jews.\n\nSome draw a sharp distinction between early Luther and late Luther in terms of his antisemitism, saying that he was actually somewhat friendly to Jews in his early life and only in his later years grew virulently antisemitic. However, while there is certainly a difference in the level of the rhetoric regarding Jews, the actual feelings were essentially the same. As I mention in [this answer](_URL_0_), no matter how benevolent Christian theologians and academics ever were toward Jews, it was nearly always from a position of superiority and disdain and often with an eye on conversion. In fact, a main feature of Luther's early writing about Jews is his opinion that if Christians treat Jews badly then they won't want to convert. However, it seems that later in his life he became less tolerant, and soon raged against Jewish practice of Judaism as a heresy against Christianity but no longer believed that conversion was possible.\n\nIt was at this point that his statements about Jews became far more violent than merely advocating for conversion. He made recommendations like \"... first to set fire to their synagogues or schools ... to raze and destroy their houses ... to take all their prayer books and Talmudic writings ... that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb ... that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely ... that that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping...\" In these recommendations he was NOT necessarily supported by other Christian scholars of his era; however, this was because of the violent nature of his statements rather than a fundamental disagreement between him and them about the role of Jews, their inferiority, and their heresy. These scholars would have preferred something of a benign disdain, enlightened curiosity, and subtle (or not so subtle!) attempts at conversion. Luther was seen as vulgar in his recommendations by other theologians, not necessarily as wrong in his opinions about Jews from a theological perspective. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nBell, \"Martin Luther and the Jews: Context and Content\"\n\nRudnick, \"Early Modern Hate Speech- Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism Responses and Reactions\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eb4xax/floating_feature_fly_on_in_and_share_the_history/fdk33pn/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "20nx01", "title": "How did medieval leaders get their armies to fight against the pope?", "selftext": "This question has been asked before, but it hasn't been answered. Christian countries have been at war with the Papel army, but how could you inspire your army to fight them. After all, it would look like they had God on their side.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20nx01/how_did_medieval_leaders_get_their_armies_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg59lab"], "score": [17], "text": ["In some cases there were Antipopes - that is, a rival claiming to be the true pope. Of course, each declared the other to be the Antipope! This was the case during Roger II of Sicily's disagreements with the papacy. In Roger's case the hostilities were usually initiated by the pope rather than the king, which might have helped. Regardless, one of the greatest disputes Roger had with the papacy revolved around the new Pope Innocent II's refusal to acknowledge him as king of Sicily, and the equally new Pope Anacletus II's promise to support him if Roger returned the favour. At this point, Roger was one of the most powerful rulers in Italy and his backing would be invaluable to Anacletus. Roger, for his part, wanted simply to have his newly assembled kingdom recognised as such, and the anti-Norman Innocent II had no intention of doing so (Houben, *Roger II: a Ruler between East and West*). In this type of case, both sides have an equal claim to righteous conviction. \n\nAs might be expected, a papal schism is not the norm when disputes between secular rulers and the papacy arise, but I think these unusual cases serve as illustrations of a more broadly applicable principle - that clergy, including even popes, can be considered illegitimate. The claim of a pope to divine correctness isn't necessarily swallowed without question. Any pope could be painted as a fraudulent pope. Remember also that God's will is in action. If a ruler goes against the pope and wins, then it was God's will all along and the pope was being ungodly. \n\nIndeed, Helene Wieruszowski argues (in a 1963 article that makes some very valid points despite its age) that the widespread support of Sicily's social elites, magnates and so forth could be taken as evidence that God was speaking through the actions of these powerful citizens - who, naturally, had themselves risen to prominence on the back of God's good will (Wieruszowski, 'Roger II of Sicily, *Rex-Tyrannus*, in Twelfth-Century Political Thought', *Speculum* 38:1). Near-universal acclaim by the divinely appointed influential elites is a ringing endorsement of the king's legitimacy and a condemnation of the pope's ungodly error. \n\nTo further muddy the waters, the pope was also ruler of a material realm in his own right, and could muster armies and negotiate treaties like any other ruler. The 1156 Treaty of Benevento between Pope Adrian IV and William I of Sicily is an interesting example. Although the concessions that it requires from Pope Adrian are ecclesiastical - that is, it demands papal recognition of the Hauteville kingdom of Sicily in perpetuity - in most respects it is like any other treaty between two rulers. (ed. Enzensberger, *Guillelmi I Regis Diplomata* and, for an English translation, ed. Loud, *The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by 'Hugo Falcandus' 1154-69*). Clearly the popes were treated as susceptible to mundane negotiation like anyone else. \n\nMy point here is there's evidence that popes weren't thought to be unassailable and so defying them wasn't necessarily as unthinkable as we might imagine. \n\nOf course, the best we can do here is to speculate based on limited evidence. There's very little record of what an 'average' citizen, soldier or otherwise, thought about anything during the middle ages. They didn't govern and they weren't literate, so couldn't write their own letters or diaries. The lesser nobility who followed the kings most likely did so out of self interest, which brings me to my final point. \n\nI want to throw in a thought that one of my undergraduate professors always reminded us of: people are always people. In the present day, many of us would be more likely to follow our immediate ruler over a lofty figure from hundreds or thousands of miles away, someone who is more an abstract idea than a tangible, real person. If we stand to gain (or simply to avoid hardship) by following our king or government to war against a faceless abstract concept who we have never seen and who doesn't even know we exist, many of us will go with the tangible, the things that are real to us. People are always people; follow your king against your pope because he's here and his best interests probably overlap with your own. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2c5no9", "title": "I'm watching English period pieces like The Tudors and Elizabeth. Did monarchs have titles like Lord Burleigh to give out? What did that entail?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c5no9/im_watching_english_period_pieces_like_the_tudors/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjcaklw"], "score": [4], "text": ["If you're just talking about titles rather than estates and incomes, yes. The sovereign is the [fount of honour](_URL_0_), i.e. has the exclusive right to confer titles of nobility and orders of chivalry."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fount_of_honour"]]}
{"q_id": "1n40e9", "title": "What is the best referencing/organizing software you use to write history and why?", "selftext": "Feel like I need a few good opinions before I buy.  Endnote, Masternote, Citavi, Pages?  something else?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n40e9/what_is_the_best_referencingorganizing_software/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccf7uj1", "ccf7w1g"], "score": [4, 4], "text": ["Not history specific, but OneNote works REALLY well for writing initial drafts.  You can organize your work far beyond anything else I've used, and can include text clippings, photos, videos, and links out to the side.  It eschews the \"page\" construct and is more like a whiteboard.\n\nOnce you get down to doing a final draft, you'd be better to switch to something designed to nicely handle notations, footnotes, and all that.", "If your research project includes lots of references and if you're looking for an advanced reference manager, I would recommend [Citavi](_URL_0_). I have yet to see a reference manager that comes close to it. I can't really name that *one* feature that makes Citavi special, it's the overall product and attention to detail that makes it worth the money (~$140; it's free if your university has a licence!). There is a [trial version](_URL_1_) which works for up to 100 references if you want to have a look at it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://citavi.com/en/index.html", "http://citavi.com/en/download.html"]]}
{"q_id": "920t84", "title": "Wool as a materials for uniforms: why? And why into WW2?", "selftext": "I\u2019m a military uniform collector, and one (perhaps foolish) thing I\u2019ve always wondered is why wool persisted so long as a main material for military field uniforms. It doesn\u2019t seem too durable, or comfortable. Even in countries with abundant cotton (the United States), we see wool shirts, pants, and jackets being worn in the field even in WW2!\n\nThe Germans, the Brits, The French, etc all wore primarily wool tunics and trousers. Was this due to tradition? Wool\u2019s inherent properties? Availability? \n\nPost war, we see a lot of nations transitioning to cotton-based uniforms, many based on the M43  and fatigue uniforms the United States had developed. Why did everyone suddenly shift? Had they finally accepted that cotton was the future? Was civilian fashion and technology an influence?\n\nSorry if this is a bit rambly, but I just find it strange to compare the rapid shift from pre-war heavy wool, to the lightweight camo cottons of the cold war!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/920t84/wool_as_a_materials_for_uniforms_why_and_why_into/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e337gbs", "e34y2vs"], "score": [4, 27], "text": ["Delving at little further into OPs question I'm curious if there was a transition period at all where there were wool uniforms for some environments and cotton uniforms for others? Did the layering of uniforms change to mitigate the loss of advantages wool offers, such as wool or (eventually) synthetic undergarments?\n\n \n\nI'm basing this follow up question on the belief that is common within the outdoors community that wool offers a lot of advantages over cotton.", "Alright, since no good answer has come up yet, I'll field this one. \n\nThere are a lot of misconceptions about wool, and they mostly stem from the horrible synthetic blends that parade around as \"wool\" in cheap suits, cheap coats, cheap socks, and cheap blankets. If your only personal experience with wool is with something like that, of course it seems like a horrifying material to wear, especially in a military uniform. \n\nBut wool was used for hundreds of years, if not thousands, because it was one of the most widely available, inexpensive, and versatile fabrics available to humanity until the last 40 years or so. Depending on the weave and thickness, wool could make quite comfortable blankets, coats, or cloaks, and was even used for athletic clothing and swimwear. Wool wicks moisture away from the body, making it an ideal fabric for cold weather wear, since the material will keep sweat from staying on the body and will prevent outer moisture from penetrating. Outdoor wear, even today, is highly dependent on wool as an inner layer, especially in socks, because other fabrics (like cotton) will swell with moisture and, once wet, will get extremely cold and make the outer layer essentially useless in preventing cold-weather fatigue and injuries.\n\nWool also stretches, and is extremely pliable and durable. Medieval hose, which were often meant to be skin-tight, were generally made of wool and were expected to last a year or more of continuous use. Heavier upper-body clothing, like doublets and coats and overcoats, et al, were often made from a heavier weave and were similarly durable and long-lasting.\n\nSo for military uniforms, wool is beneficial in cold climates because its moisture-wicking properties, and is also not as uncomfortable as you might imagine in hot climates. Wool breathes, it's part of the same microscopic geometry that makes it wick moisture, and so in even direct sunlight it does a good job of blocking sunlight while allowing fresh air to penetrate. An undershirt of cotton with an overshirt or blouse of wool was a standard of the US army, even in the west, where temperatures could fluctuate wildly.\n\nSo there's no reason that wool was holding anything back or was somehow sub-standard. Cotton blends became less expensive and as uniforms changed it was simply a better option for hard-use field uniforms, but wool remained the main component of dress uniforms for a very long time.\n\nIt's honeslty hard to find sources that argue all of this of any quality, partly because wool's ubiquity is itself a weird paradox; when it was the only choice no one wrote about it because it was obvious. Nowadays the assumption is that wool is terrible and scratchy and bad, thanks to synthetic blends. And now, of course, there *are* better options for many things. Performance fabrics and the like. Much of my familiarity with it is wearing wool uniforms at a working historic site, and just realizing that I was fairly comfortable even when the temperatures reached the 90s F, and when I changed back into modern t-shirt and shorts it made very little difference to my personal comfort.\n\ntl;dr, though: wool is extremely versatile, and until the mid 20th century or so was abundant and inexpensive, and made an ideal choice for all sorts of uses."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "96tf3v", "title": "During the time of the moon landing did people get upset about the governments space race and the mission to the moon?", "selftext": "I just really am curious if the general population had any problems with the American governments insistence on going to the moon at the time. Did people worry about the financial implications? Were they upset the money could have been spent elsewhere?\n\nTldr; was there opposion in the general public to the moon landing, and it's associated missions?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96tf3v/during_the_time_of_the_moon_landing_did_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e43c0iu"], "score": [9], "text": ["Absolutely. In fact, at no point prior to the first Moon landing did the program receive a majority of support by the public at large. Indeed, there were several notable very vocal public opponents of the program because they felt it drew funds away from or was a distraction from now important work (such as poverty reduction and anti-segregation).\n\nAnd in some regards they had a solid case to make. In the 1960s the per capita gdp of the US was considerably lower than today. There was a level of common poverty that existed then that today exists mostly in the developing world. Remember that in the 1960s the whole country didn't even have indoor plumbing, electricity, or phones. And, of course, this was also the peak of the struggle against Jim Crow. Many people, correctly, saw the moon race as a geopolitical struggle and lamented the waste of resources for what was effectively war making on another front. Even more so while the Vietnam War was raging.\n\nIt was only after the fact that the Apollo program became more closely associated with peace, science, and the inchoate environmental movement. And, of course, for the spending to become a sunk cost that couldn't be undone or diverted elsewhere.\n\nSources  &  further reading:\n\n* [Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight pgs. 12-17 particularly (25-30 in the pdf)](_URL_3_)\n* [Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight](_URL_0_)\n* [Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program](_URL_2_)\n* Gil-Scott Heron (of \"the revolution will not be televised\" fame): [Whitey on the Moon](_URL_1_)\n* [The Apollo Disappointment Industry](_URL_4_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222859179_Public_opinion_polls_and_perceptions_of_US_human_spaceflight", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4", "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/", "https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/historical-studies-societal-impact-spaceflight-ebook_tagged.pdf", "https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/the-apollo-disappointment-industry-113352455/"]]}
{"q_id": "3ux7lu", "title": "When and how did Boston, Massachusetts first become so heavily associated with Ireland and Irish culture?", "selftext": "From the Boston Celtics, to the stereotypical Irish cop on the streets, to the countless movies and TV shows portraying Irish Bostonians with their typical Southie accents and shamrock tattoos, to the many Celtic Rock bands from the Boston area, it seems this phenomenon is well understood. Does Boston simply have an extremely high proportion of Irish Americans? If so, when did this immigration occur, and why Boston, as opposed to any other major American city?\n\nIf this is a phenomenon that has occurred within the past 20 years, please feel free to remove this question. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ux7lu/when_and_how_did_boston_massachusetts_first/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxjcmyo"], "score": [10], "text": [" > Does Boston simply have an extremely high proportion of Irish Americans?\n\nYes, historically Boston was a site of major Irish immigration, beginning as early as the beginning of the 1800s but massively increasing from 1840-1870 as the influence of the Great Famine was felt in Ireland. \n\nIn the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the general contours of Irish immigration was to first stop off in the ports of Atlantic Canada (Halifax, Montreal, Quebec) because the shipping rates to those ports were cheapest^1. After a few years, they would then move south to American cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In this period from 1800-1820, the majority of immigrants from Ireland tended to be Irish Protestants, owing to the fact that Protestants tended to have greater resources to manage the trip across the atlantic.\n\nIn the period from 1820-1840, the demographics and contours changed, with greater numbers of impoverished Catholics leaving Ireland and heading directly for Boston or New York. This immigration of Catholics did prompt hostility from a Protestant Yankee native population, and this period saw some notable anti-Catholic riots. The most notable event in Boston was the [burning of the Ursuline convent](_URL_3_) in 1834. Another famous confrontation was the [broad street riot](_URL_0_) in 1837.\n\nAs the Great Famine ravaged Ireland from 1845 to 1849, massive numbers of Irish people left the island, far greater in scale than previous migrations. 200,000 Irish immigrated to America in the decade of the 1830s. In the 1840s, 780,000 Irish came to America, mostly after 1846. At the outset of the Famine, Boston had a population of approximately 115,000 residents. In 1847, the first year of major migration due to the famine, 37,000 Irish arrived in Boston^2. \n\nLike the earlier immigration from 1820-1840, this influx of Irish Catholics into a Protestant Yankee majority led to anti-immigrant hostility in the 1850s. In that decade, Know-Nothing politicians filled the State Senate, State House of Representatives, served as Governor and as Mayor of Boston^3.\n\nAs others have said in this thread, migration tended to flow towards established communities of Irish-Americans, where a migrant might have family or friends already living there. Thus, in the post-Famine period, Boston continued to see heavy migration of Irish people into the 1870s, and lower levels of migration into the 20th century.\n\n > and why Boston, as opposed to any other major American city? \n\nAs I said above, other cities like New York, Philadelphia, Savanna and New Orleans all saw migrations of Irish into their cities in the 1840s and 1850s. The immigrant vote was quite important to the functioning of New York's Tammany Hall political machine in the later decades of the 1800s. Additionally, New York City saw severe Draft Riots in 1863, and newly naturalized Irish-Americans played a large part in these riots. They were partly motivated by resentment of exemption provisions, when working-class immigrants could never afford to pay the $300 required. Partially too, the Irish and German immigrant workers were driven by fears that abolition of slavery would result in labor competition from free Blacks.\n\nIn any case, New York City did not become as closely tied to Irish identity as Boston did for a variety of reasons. In the late 1840s and 1850s, New York saw German immigration at the same time and in similar numbers to Irish immigrants. Also, New York has hosted subsequent waves of Italian, Jewish, Balkan, Chinese, and other ethnicities, which made the city a patchwork and prevented New York from being associated with any one community. Boston, in contrast, did witness large Italian immigration into the North End, but not a similar scale and variety of immigration as New York did.\n\nOf course, cities like Philadelphia and Chicago continue to have notable Irish-American communities, and noteworthy St Patrick's day parades. \n\n----\n1) [Enclyopedia of American Immigration](_URL_1_) pp 154.\n\n2)_URL_4_\n\n3)[Hidden History of the Boston Irish](_URL_2_) pp 21"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.celebrateboston.com/strange/broad-street-riot.htm", "https://books.google.com/books?id=VNCX6UsdZYkC&amp;pg=PA154&amp;dq=irish+immigration+to+boston&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiDpe_kkbvJAhWTPB4KHaCYCAE4ChDoAQg8MAI#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=dnudkswMjAwC&amp;pg=PA21&amp;dq=irish+immigration+to+boston&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjBhc3WkbvJAhXB2R4KHXIJBtkQ6AEITjAG#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "http://www.celebrateboston.com/crime/ursuline-convent-destruction.htm", "http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/america.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1g4qv5", "title": "TIL about the Phaistos Disk and Linear A and I'm curious, what other languages are still undeciphered? What are the chances that they will be deciphered?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g4qv5/til_about_the_phaistos_disk_and_linear_a_and_im/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cagt8d5"], "score": [4], "text": ["Indus script, inscriptions left by the Indus Valley Civilization, has yet to be deciphered. The language appears to use short strings of symbols. For the past few years, researchers have attempted to decipher the language but the chances of Indus script being deciphered is very low. A big reason is that inscriptions of Indus script are short (Average length: 5. Longest on a single surface: 17). We also have no idea what language the Indus Valley people spoke and there is no artifact like the Rosetta Stone that we can refer to.\n\n[Most of these numbers were pulled from this paper on page 796](_URL_1_)\n\nEDIT: I did some more searching and found a [TED Talk](_URL_0_) by one of the guys who contributed to the paper I listed above"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script.html", "http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_c_00030"]]}
{"q_id": "1mgndj", "title": "When did the notion of American exceptionalism first take root?", "selftext": "I understand there are several unique aspects of the U.S. that sets it apart from other nations; but when (and how) did the notion of American exceptionalism propagate?\n\nWas it before or after globalization?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mgndj/when_did_the_notion_of_american_exceptionalism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc92otj"], "score": [5], "text": ["An early advocacy of American exceptionalism came with the Puritan colonizers of Massachusetts.  Here is some of the text of John Winthrop's sermon to the Puritan colonists while still on the ship \"Arabella\" as they were about to land in the New World.  It is known as the \"City on a Hill\" sermon, referencing Jesus in Matthew 5.14, in the sermon on the mount, when he tells the audience, \"You are the light of the world.  A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.\"\n\nPart of Winthrop's sermon:\n\n\"The God of Israel is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse  and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: The Lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.\"\n\n(Source: _URL_2_) \n\nThe \"City on a Hill\", has been referenced many times by American politicians, perhaps most famously by Ronald Reagan in his 1989 farewell speech:\n\n\"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life....in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.  That's how I saw it and see it still...\"\n\n(Source: _URL_1_) \n\nReagan was referencing an earlier famous speech of his in 1974.  In that speech he quoted John Winthrop, and closed with:\n\n\"We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so.  The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall in Philadelphia.  In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of the United States was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, \"The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions.  Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.\n\nWe are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.\"\n\n(Source: _URL_0_) \n\nAmerican exceptionalism - there at the beginning - still there today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://reagan2020.us/speeches/City_Upon_A_Hill.asp", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill", "www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/Winthrop.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "2bb1es", "title": "How did the US Government get all of the Native Americans to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears? What happened to the people who refused to leave?", "selftext": "Also, I was curious as to what happened to the Native American's land when Oklahoma reached statehood. Were they compensated at all?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bb1es/how_did_the_us_government_get_all_of_the_native/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cj42jt6"], "score": [5], "text": ["Basically the tribes were coerced by violence to relocate to Indian Territory. Some tribes were able to hide out and they later became their own tribes in their original homelands. Famous examples include the Poarch Band of Creek Indians of Alabama, Seminole Tribe of Florida (who were never militarily defeated by the United States), Sac  &  Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, and Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.\n\nA band of [Nez Perce](_URL_2_) were forced from Washington to Indian Territory in 1878. Basically they said hell no and returned back to the NW in 1884. Same with the Northern Cheyenne, who returned to Montana on foot in the winter of 1878.\n\nThe Dawes Commission, led by Senator Henry L. Dawes (still hated today by most Oklahoma Indians), oversaw destroying tribal governments and landholdings in Indian Territory. The Curtis Act of 1898 dismantled tribal governments, courts, and school systems (many of these buildings were stolen from the tribes). The Dawes Severalty Act called for lands collectively owned by the tribes to be broken up into small individual allotments to individual Indians and Freedmen/Freedwomen. Then the so-called \"Surplus\" land was opened up to non-Native settlements in lotteries and [land runs](_URL_1_).\n\nWhen the idea of combining Oklahoma Territory, Indian Territory, and the \"unassigned lands\" was proposed, traditionalists fought it legally and even by force (see the Four Mother's Society, the Green Peach War). Politicians from the NE tribes tried to promise a separate [State of Sequoyah](_URL_0_) to be separate from Oklahoma (it breaks my heart that this didn't happen). \n\nSome tribes have recovered stolen public buildings from the state of Oklahoma in recent years. The tribes had to reorganized their governments under the [Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936](_URL_3_) and rebuild their infrastructure in ensuing decades. Some have repurchased important lands, but compensation, no."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/S/SE021.html", "http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/L/LA016.html", "http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/N/NE015.html", "http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/o/ok059.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1e4m8j", "title": "Was 200,000 Jews really conscripted into the German Wehrmacht during WWII?", "selftext": "I was wondering if the Jews really did fight for Nazi Germany, as I've read that the Nazis conscripted them to fight.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e4m8j/was_200000_jews_really_conscripted_into_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wrtlp", "c9ws3rx"], "score": [10, 12], "text": ["The actual number is disputed and other historians gave much lower estimates. But even if that number of Jews in the Wehrmacht was technically true, it's more complicated than it looks like. The problem is the definition of a 'Jew' in Nazi Germany: If your parents (or even grandparents) were Jewish or you were married to a Jew, you were considered 'a Jew', no matter your actual religious orientation. During the war, the number must have been even lower as most 'Jews' were discharged from the Wehrmacht in 1939/40.", "It did happen however the number is closer to 150,000. It should also be noted that they were not outright \"Jews\" but rather \"Mischling\" by German Law. \nHere it how it works. In Nazi Germany the Nuremberg Laws (1935) defined \"Jew\" as someone who, regardless of religious affiliation had 3 Jewish grandparents. You were also considered a Jew if you were a \"Geltungsjude\" or \"Jew of Legal Validity.\" This was determined if you met any one of the following:\n\n- You were enrolled as member of a Jewish congregation when the Nuremberg Laws were passed, or after they were passed\n\n- You were married to a Jew\n\n- You were the offspring of a Jewish parent \n\n\nSo what is a Mischling? A Mischling is a \"mixed breed.\" If you had two Jewish grandparents you were a Mischling of the first degree, and if you had one you were a Mischling of the second degree. You were then put through the Mischling test who's second part had the above standards (religion, marriage, etc). If you met any of those you were no longer a Mischling but rather a Geltungsjude. \nMischlings, though no preferable to Aryans *could* live and work in German culture and according to [this source from the University of Kansas](_URL_0_) about 150,000 of these Mischlings actually fought in the Wehrmacht.\nI would compare life as Mischling to the life as a half-white/half-black individual in the American South. Sure you could own property and hold a job but the jobs you could work would be very limited because people wouldn't hire you, police would discriminate against you, etc. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/righit.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ajkoci", "title": "Slavery seems to have a very prominent role in the popular conception of the Roman Empire, then sort of seems to fade away and become relevant again during the 17th-19th centuries. To what extent and how was slavery practiced in Western Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman State?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajkoci/slavery_seems_to_have_a_very_prominent_role_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eexbmqn"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hello, [here](_URL_0_) is a post I wrote a little while ago about post-Roman slavery in the British Isles.  I hope it's useful and I'm happy to answer further questions :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/80a0jl/what_happened_to_slavery_at_the_end_of_the_roman/duuimqe"]]}
{"q_id": "5u7w85", "title": "I've read that nazis' hate for jews derived of the fact that they were a race without a nation, and as a result were considered \"parasites\"[sic] of other nations. Would nazis then have approved of the construction of a jewish state like Israel?", "selftext": "Let me first mention, in case it's not obvious, that I don't agree with any views expressed by nazis.\n\n I was just wondering if the removal of that concept of \"nationless culture/race\" would have been considered a solution for nazis, instead of eradication.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5u7w85/ive_read_that_nazis_hate_for_jews_derived_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dds79ms", "dds7xae"], "score": [883, 27], "text": ["Not really, no.\n\nWhat is important to understand regarding the Nazi world view is that not only were Jews regarded as an existential thread due to their \"international character\" but also that Nazi policy did undergo an evolution during the Nazis' tenure in power.\n\nAs for the first factor: Rather than thinking of the Jews as \"parasites\" and dangerous because they didn't have a state/homeland, the lack of a Jewish state/homeland was seen as an expression of their \"parasitic\" and dangerous character. Within the formation of modern anti-Semitism in the 19th century, the fact that Jews were regarded as different because they had no nation/homeland quickly was turned upside down and what had been one of the initial causes for the construction of difference quickly became a viewed as a symptom of an alleged \"racial character\".\n\nIn the tradition of v\u00f6lkisch thought as formulated by thinkers such as Gobineau and Houston Steward Chamberlain races as the main historical actors were seen as acting through the nation, the latter being basically their tool or outlet to compete in Social Darwinist competition between them. The Jews thought of as a race had no nation - seen as their own race, which dates back to them being imperial subject and older stereotypes of them as \"the other\" - but were a \"race\" that acted internationally rather than nationally \u2013 the absence of a nation both evidence and symptom of this. In order to be able to compete within the racial conflict them having no nation were seen as acting in a conspiratorial manner. Chamberlain e.g. made them out to be the controlling parasites behind political action and order that was seen as anti-national such as the Catholic Church or the Habsburg Empire. The anti-Semitism that formed here in the later stages of the 19th century is in effect a ideology of conspiracy, alleging a Jewish conspiracy in order to weaken their racial competitors.\n\nThe clearest example of such a way of thinking can be found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a political treatise produced by the Tsarist Secret Police at some point in 1904/05 that alleges to be the minutes of a meeting of the leaders of the Jewish world conspiracy where they discuss their plans to get rid of all the world's nations and take over the world. Despite these protocols being debunked as a forgery really quick, they had a huge impact on many anti-Semitic and v\u00f6lkisch thinkers in Europe, not at least for some in the Habsburg empire such as J\u00f6rg Lanz von Liebenfels and others which were most likely read by the young Hitler.\n\nThe whole trope of the Jewish conspiracy as formulated by v\u00f6lkisch thought took on a whole new importance with the end of WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, and the subsequent attempts at revolution in Germany and elsewhere.\n\nThe defeat of the Central powers were seen by many of its soldiers and ardent supporters not as a military defeat but as a \"stab in the back\". The way the war ended in Germany with revolts of soldiers and the deposition of the monarchy by Social Democrats was the foundation for this myth that in essence revolved around Germany not being defeated by the Entente but by the enemies within. The trope of the enemy within being Jews and leftists had been brewing for a long time (see the Jew count of the German army in 1916/17) but really came to the forefront with the defeat. What follwed compounded this further. The violence of revolution and counter-revolution as well as the treaty of Versaille lead to many v\u00f6lkisch inclined thinkers and political actors believing that Germany's defeat and the subsequent peace terms could only be explained by a concerted act of the jewish conspiracy leading to internal enemies stabbing Germany in the back, threatening the very German way of life through Bolshevism and preparing the Jewish-Bolshevik takeover of Germany by making it defenseless through the Versaille treaty.\n\nDemocracy seen as faulty and antithetical to the German racial character and communism as an essential anti-national movement were both shunned by these v\u00f6lkisch ideologues and explained through a concerted effort by a conspiracy of the anti-national \"race\", the Jews. This was the very core idea of v\u00f6lkisch thought and of Nazi Weltanschauung. In the end, for Hitler and many of his followers it was the only way to explain the state of the world because it hinged on this Social Darwinist, ultra-nationalist view of history being a history of races competing for power and supremacy.\n\nWithin this matrix of ideological delusion, the effort of the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish national homeland in Palestine were not seen as an attempt to overcome this assumed \"international character\" of Judaism but rather as a further ploy in its international machinations to fight the \"Aryan race\". Rather than being welcomed by v\u00f6lkisch ideologues, Zionism was condemned as \"unnatural\" for there was no traditional, bllod-and-soil homeland of the Jews and \"artificially\" creating rather than having one through racial tradition was seen as dangerous rather than welcomed. Thus, the Nazis very explicitly did not approve of any such initiatives to create a state like Israel or the Zionist project as a whole, because no matter where they were, the Jews were always regarded as a danger and a mortal enemy.\n\nBut the Nazis once in power were also following a path of what was possible and thus an internal, ideologically constraint pragmatism. Once in power, what seemed possible was to rid Germany of the Jews. Not having had concrete plans of physical annihilation, the program that seemed viable was to rid all of their controlled territory of Jews. Thus, the frequently cited Haavara agreement between Zionist organizations and the Third Reich represents an outcome of this ideological pragmatism in the sense that while for the Zionists it was a way to save Jews from German discrimination, for the Germans it was a way to reach their intermediate goal \u2013 ridding Germany of Jews \u2013 and profiting economically from it. Rather than an endorsement of Zionism, it represented a policy of what was possible at the time.\n\nThe same applies to the Madagascar Plan, meaning the plan to deport the Jews in Europe under German rule to Madagascar after the capitulation of France. I've written about this before [here](_URL_0_) but it is imperative to recognize the plan for what it was: A proposal that already contained elements of genocide.\n\nRather than envisioning a Jewish state on the Island, the proposal for the plan made it out to become what was basically a large scale concentration camp: Deporting 5 million people toparts of the island that could only support \u2013 according to their own estimates \u2013 7000 families. They designed the whole thing basically like a ghetto and assumed the Jews would succumb to the harsh conditions as they were already in other German Ghettos.\n\nSo, in short, the creation of a Jewish homeland was never planned nor welcomed by the Nazis. Rather, it was regarded as dangerous and any plans made by the Nazis themselves such as the Madagascar Plan did not want to establish a Jewish state, rather planning a huge ghetto/concentration camp where the Jews would die slowly under German supervision. \n\nSources:\n\n* Chrisoph Dieckmann: J\u00fcdischer Bolschewismus 1917 bis 1921. In: Fritz Bauer Jahrbuch 2012.\n\n* Robert Gerwarth: The Central European Counter-Revolutionary: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War.\n\n* Andre Gerrits: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism in Easter Europe.\n\n* Peter Pulzer: The rise of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. ", "Yes, there was a lot of varied thought about this and many proposed solutions during the 1930s-'40s, the \"Madagascar Plan\" being one of the most well-known, and probably the best example of attempts to remove Jews from Europe. In the '30s there were some limited proposals for removal of Jewish families to Madagascar but plans were actually drawn up in 1940. Franz Rademacher wrote a memorandum that called for \"all Jews out of Europe\"; he believed Madagascar was more suitable than Palestine (which, after the war, became the location of the new Jewish state of Israel) since it was a possession of France rather than Britain and that Germany could better leverage the relocated Jews for political reasons. Adolf Eichmann, who dealt with 'Jewish affairs', called for a million Jews to be relocated each year to Madagascar, for four years. They intended to negotiate with France for Madagascar after the war, then use the British fleet to transport Jews to the island, which would then be controlled by the SS. The British fleet being an important part of the plan meant that after the invasion of England was made impossible following the Battle of Britain, the Madagascar plan was postponed, eventually being largely abandoned after Madagascar was taken from Vichy France by the U.K. in 1942. As relocation plans became decreasingly viable, the Jews were sent en Masse to the camps in what is commonly known as the Holocaust.\n\n\nSources:\n\n\nShirer, William L. (1960). *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.* Simon and Schuster.\n\nLongerich, Peter (2012). *Heinrich Himmler: A Life.* Oxford University Press.\n\nBrowning, Christopher R. (2004). *The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 \u2013 March 1942.* University of Nebraska Press.\n\nHilberg, Raul (1973). *The Destruction of the European Jews.* New Viewpoints.\n\nThe actual plan:\n\nRademacher, Franz (1940). *The Madagascar Plan: The Jewish Question in the Peace Treaty.* Jewish Virtual Library. \n\n\nEdit: Removed possible inaccuracy."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hkvcr/what_were_the_nazis_planning_to_do_with_the/"], []]}
{"q_id": "4sx33g", "title": "How did the Bismarck compare technologically to the allied fleet?", "selftext": "I know it was made hastily, so there had to be shortcomings. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4sx33g/how_did_the_bismarck_compare_technologically_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5d86ae"], "score": [3], "text": ["It was essentially a 1915 design copy pasted to the 1930s. With a newer model of gun, and some new engines.\n\nWhat that meant was she was still hindered by the expectation of a short range brawl in the North Sea. Where stopping shells coming horizontally was the key. But even during WW1 increasing ranges meant that fire would be coming down at a very steep plunging direction.\n\nBut her double armoured deck and turtle back scheme was problematic. It meant that while certain key areas were protected, the top armor might deflect a shell into other key areas which would then be penetrated and destroyed. There was also the problem that a small volume was protected this way than peer ships. Meaning that she had less reserve buoyancy. In general German heavy ships were hard to sink by gunfire, but could be made impotent quickly. And as soon as they started to flood it was all over.\n\nThere were also serious issues with her ability to handle after a problem to a propeller or rudder that were demonstrated on her final voyage. And concerns about the placement and forget if her armour belt on the sides. And her fire control scheme, and poorly placed radar position. \n\nAnd finally her armament didn't help her. While all ships in 1941 were light on AA, Bismarck's reliance on a mixed battery of single purpose guns meant she was getting less bang for her buck and thus less protection.\n\n/u/fourthmaninaboat and /u/jschooltiger actually had a wonderful conversation on this topic in a thread last week."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "733pj1", "title": "I'm a king in an average sized European castle in the Middle Ages. How do I get candles? Surely my candle use would be enormous. Do I have a guy whose sole job is candle maker, or do I have to import them from somewhere else?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/733pj1/im_a_king_in_an_average_sized_european_castle_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnnyir4"], "score": [199], "text": ["I completely love this question.\n\nThe courts of the late Middle Ages used an absolutely *mind-blowing* amount of lighting--individual tapers, full candelabras and chandeliers, larger torches when brighter light was culturally significant. (For example, on either side of the altar at Mass, or using twice as many to light the duke of Burgundy's dining table as the table of his relatives/rivals.) To give just one example, when Edward I lay in state following his death in 1307, the royal household purchased *843 pounds* of wax for candles to surround his body. A *minor* court official under him would still receive a candlelit wake of 300 candles. Yes, supplied by the royal family--in fact, distribution of candles as gifts/livery to court members was a *major* drain on medieval royal wax resources.\n\nWhen it came to acquisition of necessary goods in late medieval royal courts, Malcolm Vale argues that it was almost always the case that the king relied upon a group of outside merchants for the supply, rather than having designated \"court artists\" to provide e.g. furniture or tapestries. (Often, though, the same names appear in records at numerous points in a king's reign, suggesting the existence of favorites/known reliable workers to turn to). It was little different with candles.\n\nResponsibility for the acquisition of candles and related goods in the court culture orbit of late medieval Burgunday-France-England generally lay with a designated official of the king's household. Often candles, specifically, were the responsibility of someone with another central task--but not always the same task. French king Philip the Fair, for example, had a specific staff dedicated to making sure fruit, dates, and nuts appeared on all tables at meals. One or more of these *fruitiers* was responsible for the acquisition of \"candles and wax\" and \"great torches.\" And not just for meals, either. Household accounts often add \"for the chapel\" or \"for the Mass-altar\" or some such.\n\nMeanwhile, under Henry III of England, a *goldsmith* actually seems to have been in charge of candle selection! Edward Fitz Odo was an \"ascended craftsman\" of sorts--he was actually responsible for overseeing a *lot* of the artistic-type needs of the court. He would find and hire painters for ever-more elaborate decoration of the royal chamber (four Gospel authors for four walls, amirite?)--and sometimes, it seems, for new *construction* on the castle. Among Odo's responsibilities was, you guessed it, acquiring the candles needed to put on the proper show.\n\nOne thing I'm really intrigued by is the way many of the primary sources (quoted by Vale, and then a few I found via typing phrases in Google because *that is how I roll*) distinguish between \"candles\" and \"wax.\" I'm not sure if this means that lump beeswax was acquired, at which point the household organizer would also have to have hired chandlers to finish the job; or if we are to make a distinction between *wax* candles and *tallow* candles. I would honestly assume the latter, except tallow candles are generally associated with middle/lower classes, being cheaper but less user-friendly. And if we're dealing with people who can burn down *843 pounds of wax* for a *dead body*, cost is probably not the first factor on their minds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6hj84s", "title": "When did China start having conceptions of race? What is the history of race in China?", "selftext": "Obviously, China could be thought to have racial divisions within its own culture from the very beginning, for example Xunzi lists off a few near the beginning of his essay \"On Learning.\" However, it seems he would believe these races to all be equal, as he notes that they all have the same nature at birth, while learning makes them distinct. However, fast forward to the China near the end of the 19th century, and you have people like Kang Youwei who believed that certain races were of lesser intelligence. Hence, we can see a huge difference in understanding of race from Xunzi to Kang Youwei.\n\nHowever, I have been taught (informally) that race is sort of a western invention, or at least distinctions based on race (i.e a racial hierarchy). Would it be fair to say that Kang Youwei would have adopted his views on race from the West, or could it be said that China has its own distinct evolution of view on race?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hj84s/when_did_china_start_having_conceptions_of_race/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dizgbra"], "score": [3], "text": ["This doesn't answer your historical question, but it might be worth clearing up what people mean today by saying that race is a social construct.\n\nThere are different ethnicities in the world, but our decision to group different ethnicities together into large umbrellas of \"race\" is the social construct that most people are talking about.\n\nWe put Ashkenazi Jews, Greeks, Germans, Basques, and Slavs in the same \"white\" category. Are they so similar to each other, and so different from Arabs, Persians, and Kurds, that the categorization makes sense? Or does it all descend from somewhat arbitrary line drawing?\n\nDoes the U.S. Census Bureau's categorization of South Asians, East Asians, and Pacific Islanders as a single category of \"Asian/Pacific Islander\" follow some kind of principled system, or is it an arbitrary categorization that makes sense only in the context of American society?\n\nIt's also worth noting that we tend to account for shared culture and language when drawing the lines of ethnicity in the first place. So meaningfully separating culture from race is difficult to begin with, and I'm not sure what you'd be able to do with the isolated variables."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "eopv8w", "title": "What period in human history have literacy rates been the highest as a percentage of the worlds population?", "selftext": "According to Our World In Date literacy rates in 2016 are the highest since the year 1800 with it now standing at 86.25% for over 15 year olds.\n\nWhat were the literacy rates from let's say 1000 years ago? Have literacy rates just been steadily rising over the past 1000 years are has it been continuously rising and falling thought the course of human history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eopv8w/what_period_in_human_history_have_literacy_rates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["feflp6c"], "score": [5], "text": ["It may safely be assumed that today's literacy rates are unprecedented: Unesco reports that \"Since 1950, the adult literacy rate at the world level has increased by 5 percentage points every decade on average, from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2% in 2015\" (*Reading the past, writing the future*, Paris 2016) - and most of the 1950 total represents European and north American countries with rates in excess of 90-95% (Unesco, *World literacy at mid-century*, Paris 1957), a condition that certainly doesn't apply in earlier centuries. \n\nThere's really no reliable way to measure global rates before the 20th century, except to say they were lower than today's or even the 1950 level - inevitably given the spread of education in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even in Europe, barely half of the population seems to have enjoyed functional literacy as late as 1850, and fewer still could read earlier in the century. The US seems to have been a 19th-century leader with extensive schoolong, but even there a fifth were illiterate in 1870, more than a tenth in 1900. \n\nRates doubtless had their downs as well as their ups, as conditions for written communication became less or more favourable in particular periods, as reflected in the varying availability of written sources over time. But the long-run trend has certainly been upward with the spread of writing itself and later of general basic schooling and printing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3c7lg6", "title": "How much of a concrete operations plan was \"the Schlieffen Plan\"?", "selftext": "A while ago I read John Keegan's *The First World War*, in which he goes into great detail on Schlieffen's 1905 \"Great Memorandum\". Keegan's text implies, to me at least, that the Great Memorandum outlined a supremely-detailed plan of operations for the rapid defeat of France, down to the bridges to be crossed and the roads to be followed, but one that couldn't have worked: according to Keegan, Schlieffen knew that Belgium and France's road network wasn't extensive enough to deploy the huge number of troops he needed to defeat France, and that he literally made the divisions required magically appear at the decisive point on his maps. Nevertheless, the plan was approved for use out of a collective obsession among the German General Staff to rapidly defeat France before turning on the Russian Steamroller inexorably closing on East Prussia.\n\nHow accurate is this? I am told that recent research has discredited the notion that there actually was *a* Schlieffen Plan to defeat France and more of a series of deployment plans to which were appended recommendations to commanders for operations, but I have had difficulty finding anything that might reconcile this with Keegan's thesis, if it can be reconciled at all. Enlighten me, /r/AskHistorians!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c7lg6/how_much_of_a_concrete_operations_plan_was_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cstdb00"], "score": [5], "text": ["I'm not an expert, I only know what I had to do on a bit of work over a year ago, but I remember getting a good mark on it:\n\nWell the Schlieffen Plan relied on 5 *huge* assumptions in order to be successful:\n\nInvading Belgium would cause no issue with the UK, or France.\n\nBelgium would not resist, or be unable to delay, German invasion\n\nParis would be captured in a matter of days\n\nWithout France, the UK would sue for peace,  if they even got involved\n\nRussia would take at least 6 weeks to mobilise troops en masse, and could not stand against Germany\n\nBasically the entire thing just seemed like it would be more accurate if it were a tactic of pre-Industrial Revolution era (though Germany was a relatively recently industrialised nation). Germany had great military minds in command, so the idea they'd rely on such a plan seems disingenuous, there were probably *similar* plans, and that a best case scenario would play out similar to the Schlieffen Plan, but I doubt this was what they were expecting.\n\nBear in mind, the Schlieffen Plan is not the plan that was shown in WWI anyway. The Schlieffen Plan is actually a collection separate war plans. One for a simple Franco-German war, one for Entente v Germany focused in the West, one Russo-German war, and another Entente-German war. Then both of the Entente plans were plans within plans, based on the participation (or lack thereof) of the UK and other European nations. So your reading of a \"Schlieffen Plan\" not truly existing are pretty accurate. The final war plans were a bit of a combination of plans, also from what I understand, the plans were not all that detailed.\n\nIgnoring the practical limitations of getting the German forces through to Paris, which could be possible, just not in the timeframe dictated, but the plan failed on a political level with the invasion of Belgium, which is typical of Wilhelm's Germany and his fundamental misunderstanding of the Great Powers and their interactions.\n\nHere's a couple readings:\n\nInventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871\u20131914 (Zuber)\n\n1914-1918: the History of the First World War (Stevenson)\n\nAlso, my favourite Reddit post, a huge repository of free ebooks:\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/hrgmv/tracker_with_pdfsebooks_of_college_textbooks/c1xrq44"]]}
{"q_id": "10ke85", "title": "What did people in your focus culture make of dreams?", "selftext": "I'm interested in where they thought dreams came from and what they meant. General cultural perspectives or specific stories of historical figures' reactions to their dreams are both welcome.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10ke85/what_did_people_in_your_focus_culture_make_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6e7s76", "c6eg6bz"], "score": [4, 2], "text": ["This is a topic of particular interest to me! I do Viking-age Scandinavia, and dreams were a big deal to this particular culture, if the sagas are anything to go by. I wrote a paper on this subject, the general conclusion of which was that dreams represent a kind of liminal meeting-place between the human and supernatural realms. People are frequently visited by ethereal figures in their dreams, who may be able to share knowledge with the dreamer; this pops up in Gisli Sursson's saga, for example. Interestingly, the supernatural prophetic figures in dreams are very often female, which has led some scholars to attempt to draw some link between them and valkyries. Of particular interest to my paper was the idea of dream as a more literal neutral ground - there's one fascinating little \"thaettur,\" or short story, called \"The Mound-Dweller,\" about a farmer who stumbles across a burial cairn. He finds a sword underneath it and takes it home with him. In the sagas, this kind of thing often serves as the set-up for a conflict between humans and the dead; there are lots of stories of heroes going down into burial mounds to steal treasure and fight the undead inhabitants. In this story, though, the farmer is visited in his dreams by a strange man, the inhabitant of the mound. The mound-dweller tells the farmer, in verse, that he will be his ruin, to which the farmer replies that he will repay any injury the mound-dweller does him \"blow for blow.\" Impressed by his poetry and bravery, the mound-dweller tells the farmer that \"no other answer would have been appropriate\" and vanishes. So, what we have is the dream as a meeting-place to resolve conflicts between the supernatural and physical worlds. The sagas are fascinating stuff.", "You might want to check out *The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire* by Paul Dutton, if you have access to a good library it shouldn't be hard to track down.\n\nIt is a great look at the way dreaming, and the depiction of dreaming, were used as political tools."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "esnpet", "title": "Is it true that the Soviet Union gave food aid to Americans during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/esnpet/is_it_true_that_the_soviet_union_gave_food_aid_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffd26v3"], "score": [16], "text": ["I'm searching around, and I can't find *any* sources that make the claim that the Soviet Union provided food aid to Americans either in the Dust Bowl, or the Great Depression more generally. I would actually be curious where and who is making this claim. \n\nI can provide a little context for where Soviet - US relations were in this period. The United States had withheld official diplomatic recognition of the USSR from its founding until 1933. While much of this was due to the bad blood around US and foreign [intervention](_URL_2_) in the Russian Civil War and the 1919 Red Scare in the US, a major stumbling block was the [issue](_URL_0_) of unpaid tsarist-era debts - the Soviets refused to honor them, and the US insisted on repayment to bondholders.\n\nThe new Roosevelt administration was open to re-establishing diplomatic relations, however, and did so after a series of negotiations with Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov in November 1933 (the issue of debt repayments was pushed off to be settled at a later time). William Bullitt, who had led a negotiating team to talk to Lenin on Wilson's behalf in 1919, assumed the post of US ambassador in December. \n\nSo right off the bat, I can't imagine that there would be *any* sort of aid traveling from the USSR to the US before December 1933, and thus not for the worst parts of the Great Depression. \n\nBut in addition, Soviet foodstuffs were not something that would be easily parted with. In no small part this is because the USSR had its own issues with food supplies, especially in 1930-1934, when famine conditions killed something like 5 to 7 million people across the USSR (especially in Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor). Much of the grain that the state did collect was for use as exports, as the Soviet government relied on selling grain on the international market in order to earn the foreign currency it needed to pay for imports of industrial materials and to pay for contracts with Western firms for the development of industrial facilities. Indeed, starting in 1929 the Soviet government had already signed agreements with such companies as Ford Motor Company, Caterpillar and DuPont for the construction of industrial production facilities in the USSR. \n\nWhile Russia had been the largest single exporter of wheat until 1914, during World War I, the Revolution and Civil War, wheat production had collapsed - the American Relief Administration was in fact allowed by Lenin's government to provide aid in the country from 1921 to 1922. Soviet wheat exports began to recover on the international market after 1926, and rose from 1.3% of total exports to 7% by 1931, but collectivization, famine and political crisis largely halted this growth. In the meantime, the major international wheat producers of the Interwar period - the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia - accounted for some 90% of total exports. With the economic downturn, there was, if anything, a world glut in wheat and prices fell (this was particularly hard on the Soviets, as they continuously needed to sell more wheat to earn a steady amount of foreign currency). \n\nNow, US production of wheat in particular was hard hit during the Dust Bowl and associated drought conditions on the Great Plains - the Department of Agriculture provides the following data for winter wheat:\n\nYear|Production (1000s of bushels)|Price per bushel ($)\n:--|:--:|--:\n1915 | 640,565 | na\n1916 | 456,118 | na\n1917 | 389,956 | na\n1918 | 556,506 | na\n1919 | 748,460 | 2.10\n1920 | 613,227 | 1.48\n1921 | 602,793 | 0.945\n1922 | 571,459 | 1.04\n1923 | 555,299 | 0.945\n1924 | 573,563 | 1.32\n1925 | 400,619 | 1.48\n1926 | 631,607 | 1.21\n1927 | 548,188 | 1.16\n1928 | 579,066 | 1.03\n1929 | 587,057 | 1.04\n1930 | 633,809 | 0.694\n1931 | 825,315 | 0.382\n1932 | 491,511 | 0.391\n1933 | 378,283 | 0.777\n1934 | 438,683 | 0.844\n1935 | 469,412 | 0.827\n1936 | 523,603 | 1.02\n1937 | 688,574 | 0.977\n1938 | 685,178 | 0.574\n1939 | 565,672 | 0.694\n1940 | 592,809 | 0.69\n1941 | 673,727 | 0.957\n1942 | 702,159 | 1.11\n1943 | 537,476 | 1.39\n1944 | 751,901 | 1.43\n1945 | 816,989 | 1.50\n\nYou'll have to excuse this data dump - I mostly just want to show where wheat production hit its low in the mid-1930s, and show how prices collapsed with the onset of the world Depression. The Dust Bowl is connected with these events, but for what its worth that is more specific to droughts in 1934 and 1936, and major dust storms in 1935. It's worth noting that the US went from making up a quarter of world wheat exports in 1930 to a tenth of exports during the 1930s, and during the worst of the Dust Bowl years was a net importer, importing some 3.9 million bushels of wheat during 1934-1935 - but was able to import wheat nonetheless. In fact, attempts by a 22 countries to stabilize wheat exports and prices through price stabilization measures and export quotas under a Wheat Advisory Committee (formed in 1933) had largely come to nought, and the market mostly stabilized from the US needing to import wheat during the Dust Bowl (and the major wheat producers obliging in providing exports). \n\nSo in summation - it seems very unlikely to me that the USSR provided any substantial food aid to the United States during the Great Depression. Perhaps some nominal amount would have been provided for propaganda purposes, but even in the 1930s, the Soviet embassy in the United States was more interested in attracting skilled American workers to move to the USSR, and was more interested in attracting US corporate investment, than in providing something for free to people in the United States. What foodstuffs the USSR did put on the international market faced strong price and production competition from other countries, and also were meant to be sold for desperately needed foreign currency.\n\n**Sources**\n\nKotkin, Stepthen. *Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941*\n\nUS Department of Agriculture. \"Crop Production Historical Track Records\", April 2018. Available as pdf [here](_URL_1_).\n\nWay, Wendy. \"The Wheat Crisis of the 1930s\" in *A New Idea Each Morning: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in One International Organisation*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a7whps/during_the_aftermath_of_the_russian_and_french/ec6r8he/", "https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/croptr18.pdf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3q4r0/after_world_war_one_the_allies_gb_france_us_japan/ej1um8m/"]]}
{"q_id": "29bc68", "title": "Is Gavrilo Princip a \"Yugoslav nationalist\" or a \"Serbian nationalist\"?", "selftext": "Today's Wikipedia \"On this day\" describes Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as \"Yugoslav nationalist\". However, most of times, from what I remember, he was described as a \"Serbian nationalist\". So which is the better description for him?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29bc68/is_gavrilo_princip_a_yugoslav_nationalist_or_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cijchte"], "score": [12], "text": ["I think it really depends on how you conceptualize the Serbian nationalist movement in the early 20th century. \"Yugoslav\" means \"south Slav\" and a Yugoslav nationalist would be someone who supported the unification of southern Slavs - Serbians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Bosnians, etc - into one state. This is the geopolitical result of Pan-Slavism.\n\nOn the other hand, a Serbian nationalist would have seen Serbia as the protector of the Slavs in the Balkans. As a newly founded state which had won substantial victories in 1912 and 1913, Serbia could rightly hope to woo the Balkans' Slavic populations away from the existing Empires there: namely Austria-Hungary. A Serbian nationalist would have supported the idea of a Serb-dominated Southern Balkans in which Slavic lands were incorporated into Serbia or Serb-friendly governments installed.\n\nSee how those can be pretty confusing? They both stem from the idea that together, the Slavs of the southern Balkans are strong and can defend themselves against the various Empires which had dominated them for so long. Yugoslav nationalism is interesting because it necessarily involves the breakdown of the barriers which already existed within the South Slavs themselves - Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Kosovar, etc. Serbian nationalism is more outright nationalism, in that it supports the idea of a strong South Slavic people, but a South Slavic people under the direct guidance of a strong Serbia.\n\nI think Princip was more of an outright Serbian nationalist, in that he saw the Bosnian Serbs living under the domination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as being rightfully Serbian. As in, the lands inhabited by Bosnian Serbs should rightfully be attached to Serbia. That's why the 1908 Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria drove the Serbian nationalist absolutely *nuts*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1me8mw", "title": "When the Roman Empire began to collapse, the Saxons invaded England. Were they united in doing so, or was it one tribe that invaded, or many? What happened to those that stayed behind in Germany?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1me8mw/when_the_roman_empire_began_to_collapse_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc8eslq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Invasion is a loaded word that really does a poor job of describing the Saxon's role in England. Many, many individual tribes traveled across to England and began settling the eastern coast. While there was some conflict between the native Britains and the Saxons it was largely a peaceful transition. \n\nThere was really no unity in the immigration. It really seems like the Germanic tribes came over as opportunists; seeking land. When they found open land they invited more tribes to come over. It was largely a familial affair. It was much more immigration than invasion.\n\nDue to the breaking of Roman trade ties the entire island (well, south of Hadrien's Wall) was thrown into a total upheaval. The culture from the early 5th century to mid 7th century saw a lot of transition and combining of the Roman, British, and English cultures. \n\nThere are theories that the early immigrants rose to economic supremacy due to their relationship with the Germanic mainland. Being the first to arrive, they had the opportunity to set up trade networks with the mainland. Those left in the mainland often moved island-side due to the economic opportunities. We know that at least until the mid 7th century there was frequent trade with the mainland. Change in jewelry culture in the mainland manifested itself in England, for example."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3esg2l", "title": "The Cold War was a time of incredible technological achievement. How did that directly impact ideas of national defense for both NATO and the Warsaw Pact?", "selftext": "I've always been interested in the Soviet Union (and by extension, the Warsaw Pact) since I lived in Russia while studying for my MA in Soviet military history (specifically the civilian contributions to the Siege of Leningrad).  The Cold War saw humanity make the quickest leaps of technological progress we have seen to date - ten years from the time of the first artificial satellite to reach the Moon until Neil Armstrong set the first human foot on a celestial body.  We went from rudimentary V-2 rockets in 1945 to nuclear ICBMs.  We went from the first model of jet-powered fighters to U-2 spy planes.\n\nHow did the invention of things like ICBMs impact the planning of national defense for the two main belligerent alliances in the Cold War?  Here are some more specific questions that will help me get the answers I am looking for (also, being a fellow historian, the more primary sources the better!!)\n\n* Can anyone tell me more about the proposed defense plans involving the Fulda Gap?  I know that NATO considered that the prime choke point to defending Western Europe from a Soviet tank invasion, but I haven't found much more information on that.  Were the NATO plans to hold the Soviets at the Gap or to launch a counter-attack through something like a tactical nuclear weapon (thinking the Davy Crockett nuclear artillery here)?\n\n*  How did Civil Defense work for the Soviet Union?  I can find absolutely loads of information for the US but finding USSR information is substantially harder since I no longer have access to the (limited) Russian archives.  How did the Soviets plan to attempt a defense of their cities and civilians in the event of a nuclear first strike by the US?  By and large, I know that civil defense doctrines are more for the population's psychological benefit, but did the Soviets have anything like Duck  &  Cover or other similar programs?\n\n* What kind of Last-Resort weapons were planned or in existence at the time of the USSR's dissolution?  I know about the Dead Hand/Perimeter system, which is supposedly still receiving system upgrades (I saw what I believed to be the radar stations for it when I was travelling to Moscow), but were there any others besides a generic arsenal launch of ICBMs and strategic long-range bombers and MRBMs launched from subs?  \n\n* Some of the planned US weapons were absolutely insane.  Rods from God, the Project Pluto nuclear ramjet that would power ballistic missiles while spraying everything below it with radiation from its unshielded reactor, which was part of the SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) project.  SLAM itself would carry a payload of multiple nuclear warheads, and coupled with the Pluto ramjet, would circle the planet dropping the payloads on targets before proceeding to fly over populated areas for several weeks, irradiating as much enemy territory as possible.  Keep in mind that SLAM was also travelling at supersonic speeds so in addition to the radiation, the shock waves would also be damaging to the enemy.  Did the Soviets have anything on the order of this magnitude except Perimeter?  Obviously the US never proceeded with developing this project beyond a prototype, but did the USSR have anything like it planned?  What were some of the more extreme, crazier defense plans for the Soviets?\n\n\nSorry for the giant wall of text!  I have been waiting to post this until I felt I had enough questions to warrant a decent discussion, and I tried to keep it all on-topic as much as possible.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3esg2l/the_cold_war_was_a_time_of_incredible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cthyh91"], "score": [3], "text": ["I've forwarded your question to a colleague who is a specialist in this area. I too am very interested to know more. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "45ato2", "title": "Sailing Speeds", "selftext": "I'm currently writing some historical fiction and I'm wondering how fast people would have been able to sail in a typical galley during the Middle Ages. I understand that there would be a range--good wind, bad wind, etc. Does anyone have any thoughts?\n\n\n\nThanks!! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45ato2/sailing_speeds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czzitj3"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is an area of interest to me, but finding actual speeds is like digging a ditch with a teaspoon. You find a bit here, a bit there, and once in a great while, how many days it took to press on from one port to another. Due to the recreated ships, you can find out more hard data about Classical galleys in the Mediterranean and Norse ships crossing the Atlantic than about medieval ones.\n\nIn general, figure a Venetian galley, under sail with a quartering wind, does 12 kn. They did usually sail, and only took down the mast and rowed when battle offered, or when it was dead calm, or they had a contrary wind.\n\nRodgers says of Mediterranean galleys \"In the thirteenth century the ordinary galleys were about 128 feet long and 17 feet wide with a deep draft of 4.0 to 4.5 feet when they displaced about 130-145 tons. ... Each carried one mast which was usually struck when clearing for action.\" This would have about 120 rowers, free men who fought for the ship. Sizes ranged down to the \"vachette\" (little cow) with 8 oars (16-32 rowers), about 23 feet long and 6 feet wide.\n\nBesides the rowers were a captain, steersmen, officers, and an unspecified number of marines, especially crossbowmen.\n\nIn a 1313 Genoese law, merchant galleys of large size had to be manned with \"12 crossbowmen, 4 pilots, and 162 rowers and seamen, all armed with helmets, cuirasses, darts, swords, maces, and other weapons.\"\n\nIn 1203, Rodgers notes, it took a Venetian fleet under sail 31 days to sail 700 miles, though that includes 8 days at Abydos to wait for stragglers. So let's say 700 miles in 23 days. This is over open sea, not stopping each night along a coast, so it's 24 hr/day, meaning they covered 30-31 miles per day, which is kind of pitiful.\n\nIn 1284, the Genoese fleet sailed in pursuit of the Pisans, from Genoa to Porto Pisano in 5 days.\n\nSources: *Naval Warfare Under Oars, 4th to 16th Century* by Rodgers. He admits he uses some galleasses in the Spanish Armada as an excuse to be able to include the Armada Fight.\n\nGardiner, Robert (Editor) *The Earliest Ships: The Evolution of Boats into Ships*\n\nParker, Foxhall A., Commodore USN, *The Fleets of the World: The Galley Period*\n\nThis makes me want ebooks of Rodgers, so I can Search rather than eye-scan around the Crusader battles."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "54wur1", "title": "I have read that Crete produced some of the best quality archers in the ancient Mediterranean, what was it that set them apart from other archers of the time?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/54wur1/i_have_read_that_crete_produced_some_of_the_best/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d85ts1b", "d85u3gk"], "score": [13, 136], "text": ["I believe you may be interested in [this post](_URL_0_) by one of our moderators /u/Iphikrates, who comprehensively answers a similar question, but in a bit larger scope - concerning also the Rhodians and Balearics.\n\nIn their conclusion, they state that Cretans are not necessarily better archers, but had branded themselves as such in the mercenary market. Therefore, that is how they became well-known for their archery. Of course, Iphikrates' own conclusion goes in much more depth than I have given here and the post as a whole is very interesting.", "Mostly the fact that they were Cretan. I've written about Cretan archers at length recently - see [here](_URL_0_). While Cretans were known to specialise in ranged combat due to the rugged nature of their homeland, their reputation as mercenary archers was largely self-sustaining. Cretans offered their services as mercenaries; since Cretans were available, those looking to hire archers would hire Cretans; the Cretans therefore became widely known as useful mercenaries, increasing demand; the Cretans realised that service abroad was a good way to make a living, and offered their services; and so on. Effectively, the Cretan archer was a brand. While skilled use of the bow certainly took a lot of practice, there is nothing in the literary evidence to suggest that Cretans had special skills that others couldn't replicate.\n\nThe Cretan archer would likely have been indistinguishable from other Greek light infantry in dress and equipment. They would wear tunics, but no body armour; on their heads they might wear a felt cap or a loose wide-brimmed sun hat. Their bows were probably short composite bows, expensive and delicate; the maximum range of these bows was perhaps 150 meters, their lethal range much less than that. Those who could not afford composite bows would have used simple bows with a smaller effective range. Xenophon once mentions that the Cretans of the Ten Thousand carried small bronze shields, but it is difficult to picture how such a shield would be wielded by an archer. Either some of the Cretans with this army were not in fact archers but peltasts, or they carried the bronze shields purely for the occasion Xenophon is describing (they were meant to flash their shields in the sun to make the enemy think there was a large force waiting in ambush).\n\nThe only distinctive feature of Cretan archers was that they sometimes used arrows with very large bronze tips. These were so much larger than the average arrowhead that it is difficult for archaeologists to distinguish between Cretan arrows and the bolts of the [*gastraphetes*](_URL_1_) or belly-bow, the earliest piece of proto-artillery. However, I can't think of any scholarship that has examined the impact of this large arrowhead on the Cretan archer's range and potential armour-piercing capabilities."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yn0mt/why_is_it_that_mediterranean_islands_such_as/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4yn0mt/why_is_it_that_mediterranean_islands_such_as/d6pddb2", "http://kotsanas.com/photo/1402001-01.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2vtujz", "title": "(xpost /r/askhistory) When the first recordings of someones voice were made, did people think it was flawed without knowing you sound different in your head then to other people?", "selftext": "Like when you hear a recording of yourself and you think it sounds nothing like you because you hear your voice differently. Did people think the recording device had a flaw when they didn't take into account this? \n\nSomeone said to post here, so here I am! (also sorry for poor wording) \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vtujz/xpost_raskhistory_when_the_first_recordings_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["col5ogl", "col7yr6", "cold0ez"], "score": [68, 44, 14], "text": ["Guys, we get it. They could have asked someone else.\n\nIf you have something to say based on historical records about people's reactions to hearing their voices recorded, please feel free to give OP an answer. If you don't, please refrain from commenting because your comment will probably end up deleted anyway.", "Hopefully I'm not side tracking too much for this sub, but your question presents a bit of a trick because early sound recordings in fact sounded very little like the speaker in terms of reproducing their vocalizations with any accuracy.\n\nFidelity, in terms of frequency response, signal-to-noise ratio, and aural accuracy were sorely lacking in early reproduction mediums. \n\nThe earliest known (and surviving) sound recording of the human voice available for play back is [Au Clair de la Lune](_URL_1_), recorded by \u00c9douard-L\u00e9on Scott de Martinville using his invention, the \"phonautograph\" in 1860. You will notice that the voice and ambient sound are plagued with distortion and, to the observer, sound \"weird\".\n\nOther early recording mediums were also severely lacking in their attempts to reproduce full spectrum frequency response in relation to human hearing, often making the human voice sound shrill and \"high pitched\" through their inability to reproduce low frequencies (bass). \n\nSo, in short, a recording of your voice truly *didn't* sound much like your in-person speaking voice at all until the art and science of sound reproduction really got \"rolling\", if you'll excuse the pun.\n\nEdit: More listening available [here](_URL_0_) for any of those interested.", "Here's one historical anecdote by famous opera singer Adelina Patti--\n\n > \"The release of her records was accompanied by advertisements in 200 British newspapers; record shops announced \"Patti is singing here today\" (Gelatt: 86). This quotation represents a dramatic shift in how we listen in relation to these recordings. In 1906 the recording was considered to be a true representation of a famed voice, the voice of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and people wanted a part of it for themselves. Patti herself, according to Landon Ronald, who accompanied her recording sessions, recognised the truly representational quality of the recordings:\n\n > She had never heard her own voice, and when the little trumpet gave forth the beautiful tones, she went into ecstasies! She threw kisses into the trumpet and kept on saying \u2018Ah! Mon Dieu! maintenant je comprends pourquoi je suis Patti! Oh, oui! Quelle voix! Quelle artiste! Je comprends tout!\u2019 [\u2018Ah! My Lord! now I understand why I am Patti! Oh, yes! What a voice! What an artist! I understand all!\u2019] (Ronald quoted in Cone 1993: 103-104).\"\n\n_URL_1_\n\nTo contrast, here's Maria Callas' reaction, via Wikipedia, but the source is a primary one-- an interview that's available on YouTube. \n\n > Yes, but I don't like it. I have to do it, but I don't like it at all because I don't like the kind of voice I have. I really hate listening to myself! The first time I listened to a recording of my singing was when we were recording San Giovanni Battista by Stradella in a church in Perugia in 1949. They made me listen to the tape and I cried my eyes out. I wanted to stop everything, to give up singing... Also now even though I don't like my voice, I've become able to accept it and to be detached and objective about it so I can say, \"Oh, that was really well sung,\" or \"It was nearly perfect.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nI know it's not perfect, but I didn't see any more relevant answer so far."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune-05-09.ogg"], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCyVOGIMNVU", "http://www.zainea.com/patti.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "3wr137", "title": "Are there any rich or powerful families who can trace the origins of their wealth/power back to Roman times?", "selftext": "I'm curious because I know that by the time the Empire started to crumble the majority of the social elite hailed from a plebeian origin, and most of the original patrician families had died out. I know the Rothschilds are an old family, but I'm wondering if there is one that is truly ancient in terms of its origins.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wr137/are_there_any_rich_or_powerful_families_who_can/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxysiyd"], "score": [3], "text": ["Although the declining Roman empire left lots of room for non-patricians to make a name for themselves (especially in the army, more on that [here, aren't self-plugs fun!](_URL_0_)) many old Roman families were alive and well (albeit often refreshed with new blood. As stated in the link above, the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus was himself half-roman, half \"Barbarian\"). \n\nHere are some anecdotes of interesting families I'm familiar with (adapted from an earlier answer): \n\nThe Visconti, lords of Milan from the 13th to the 15th century (and active in Lombard communal politics since the 10th century) claim to have been landholders in Massino on the shores of lake Garda since the land was granted to an ancestor in the days of Imperial Rome. They also claim descent through the Roman era from Eneas, the ancient Trojan hero (mind sources on this are questionable and propagandistic, many conveniently having appeared when a match was being made between Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Isabel of Valois, daughter of the King of France. The most complete chronicle was written in the 14th century by the Milanese chronicler Galvano Fiamma, who spends a great deal of time on the Visconti's great exploits in his Politia Novella, or modern history of Milan, today stored in the Ambrosian Library. The tone he takes when speaking of the Visconti is unsurprising given he was Duke Giovanni Visconti's personal chaplain).\n\nAlthough the main Visconti line died out in the 15th century (and the throne passed to the Sforza, a cadet branch that later went extinct) a couple of cadet branches continued to exist in obscurity as small landholders in the Lombard countryside. Many are involved in business and real estate in North Italy up to this day, the most easily traceable being the line of the Visconti of Modone, descendant of Vercellino Visconti, younger brother of Matteo Visconti (1250-1322) who was the Duke of Milan from 1294 to his death (with an eight year-exile after the Della Torre seized back the lordship, but that's a story for another time). The family was clever with their allegiance even after the throne of Milan slipped from their family, and several members were modestly important diplomats and civil servants in the court of the Sforza Dukes. They themselves were elevated to the title of Dukes by Napoleon in the early 19th century. The family count among their number Lucchino Visconti (1906-1976) and his brother Erpirando Visconti (1932-1995), both successful film directors. For a while I thought that this was the last branch of the Visconti to go extinct, but I just checked and it turns out I was wrong; Erpirando does have descendants, and they live in a modest villa near Bologna. It appears they do not own any more land near Modone, but have significant wealth managed privately.\n\nAnother cool example are the Obertenghi, who descend from Boniface, a Bavarian ennobled with significant lands in Northern Italy by Charlemagne (he was granted nearly all of modern Tuscany, Emilia, Lombardy, Peidmont and Liguria). The Obertenghi saw their lands reduced to Lombardy and Emilia by the eleventh century, and finally split into three cadet branches by the twelfth century: the Estensi, Pallavicini, and Malaspina, all three mildly influential during the communal era and increasingly obscure when the communes were consolidated into the dozen Italian states of the renaissance. The Estensi, who became lords of Ferrara, are the most illustrious and are related to nearly every royal house in Europe. They were also the first to go extinct. The Malaspina, the Tuscan branch of the Obertenghi, became Marquis of Massa-Carrara, but had their holdings progressively reduced under the Florentine Republic and subsequent Grand Duchy of Tuscany. They split into various branches living along the Tuscan-Ligurian border and as far as I know all went extinct (although I don't know as much as I'd like on Tuscan history). The last branch are the ones who answer your question: the Pallavicini, already active in Emilia and Lombardy in the communal era, became powerful vassals of the Duke of Parma, but wisely allowed themselves to slip into obscurity during the Italian Wars. To this day there are Milanese and Emilian (based in the town of Zibellio) branches still in existence, both are active real estate developers in the Emilia-Romagna region.\n\nI'd also like to mention the Dandolo, a family that gave the Republic of Venice four Doges. A branch of them is still extant today and inhabits one of their original palaces along the Grand Canal in Venice. The Dandolo family traces their lineage back to the Roman gens Ursia, who arrived in Venice in the eighth century from the Pentapolis (the last five Roman cities to be abandoned by the withdrawing Byzantine empire). However, I am not sure they still hold the deed to the other palaces previously owned by the family (I know of two; one is a hotel, the other holds Venice's city hall) or what sort of activities the descendants partake in. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3onoja/demographics_of_dark_age_to_medieval_italy/"]]}
{"q_id": "w94gv", "title": "Can modern Turks trace their origins to ancient Anatolian peoples like the Hittites and the Trojans?", "selftext": "\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w94gv/can_modern_turks_trace_their_origins_to_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bcelh", "c5bcfel", "c5bcg16", "c5bco88"], "score": [6, 3, 5, 2], "text": ["Probably not.  Turks, as an ethnic identifier, are connected to central Asia (e.g., Turkmenstan) and were part of the [expansion of peoples prior to the Mongol invasions](_URL_0_).  Those in Ionia might have some extra-Turkic connections that can be traced, but further inland, it becomes murkier owing to displacement, migration, religious change, and limited records.  If someone is from those regions they might be able to say something with more certainty, but most Turks I know identify first as Turks (in the sense of the Republic), then as Muslims, then as residents of wherever they're from.  But I am of course an outsider.", "I'll preface this by saying that I am someone who just likes to read about history and do not have a degree in the area so take what I say with a grain of salt. Anyway, culturally speaking, hell no. Turks originated in Central Asia and probably speak a language very different than that probably spoken by the Hittites and are also separated by the Roman and Greek Eras of Anatolia in which the remnants of the Hittites and Trojans were sort of wiped out/forgotten. Biologically, maybe, the people that formed all of these civilizations did not just disappear and there is likely a large degree of genetic similarities due to mixing of different peoples. Though I feel like modern Turks would rather take pride in the ancient Turkic people of of Central Asia than the Hittites or Trojans.", "It depends on what you define as \"origins.\" Genetically, it is very likely that the vast majority of Turks are related to the civilizations that came before them, such as the Hittites, the Greeks, and the Romans. Culturally, however, Turks trace their origins to the people of the Central Asian steppes, who did not come to Anatolia until the 10th or 11th century CE. \n", "Edit: I mean genetically."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_migration"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1zd79w", "title": "How is a historiography written?", "selftext": "what exactly is a historiography and how do historians write them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zd79w/how_is_a_historiography_written/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfsngyj", "cfsoc57", "cfsr6z7", "cfsxi2o"], "score": [13, 35, 5, 3], "text": ["Here's something I wrote a few months ago in response to a graduate student looking for guidance in putting together a historiography paper:\n\nIt sometimes seems as though there must be only one way to write a historiography paper -- as if anyone can just describe the entire state of a field somehow -- but there are actually several ways to do this well. Also, not everyone's reading of the shape of a field or its most pressing issues will match up. Historiography papers will all be slightly different, in other words.\n\nDepending on what issue you're addressing, one of several approaches may be most appropriate. Sometimes you may want to describe the field as a puzzle that's been pieced together over time. Every text is a contribution that makes the picture clearer.\n\nSometimes, a chronological approach is best. So, for example, scholars of Reconstruction in the 1920s put forward a compelling, field-defining theory to explain Reconstruction that was also extremely racist. That framework was poked at and partially deconstructed over the following decades, but wasn't really displaced until Eric Foner's Reconstruction in 1988. Scholars of Reconstruction afterwards branched off into many different directions, feeling less constrained to continue arguing against the scholarship of seven decades earlier.\n\nThere may be factions that have debated a particular key issue over time, and you may way to track the shape of that debate and the way it's impacted the scholarship produced over a certain period of time.\nA thematic approach can work, but only if the paper remains focused. No one wants to read a historiography paper that identifies 10 themes, three of which drop out as 15 more are added -- after which 5 more drop out again.\n\nThe important thing is that your historiography paper have an argument. It's not enough simply to describe the state of a field or how it got to be the way it is. What does it mean? What are the key issues or critiques that historians need to focus on? And in what direction should future research go?\n\nThe information you need to put this sort of paper together virtually always comes in the introduction and conclusion to a historical monograph. If you're in a history graduate program, you must know this already -- but that really is the place where the big ideas of the text are laid out, and it's those big ideas that you'll set in relation to one another in your historiography paper. It's especially useful when the literature review in those monographs gives you a sense of the state of the field that author saw at the time he/she published. State of the field essays are published from time to time as well, and those can also be helpful.\n\nOh, and one more thing. These papers can be a pain, but they can help you figure out where you own work fits within the larger field -- and that's a question that everyone has to answer. Hope that helps.", " >  what exactly is a historiography\n\nHistoriography is the history of history. So what you're doing, in essence, is talking about how historians talk about history. (Sometimes I've found that undergraduates decide that \"historiography\" is just a more fancy-sounding work for history. It isn't, and misusing it doesn't make you seem smarter. And despite what Microsoft Word's spellchecker says, historiography _is_ a word...)\n\nA practical example. Let's say I'm interested writing a _history_ of the atomic bomb. A straight history of the atomic bomb would be about the scientists who built it, the political decisions that went into its production and use, the consequences and so on. Pretty straightforward. My primary sources are going to be things like interviews with people involved, government documents from the time, and maybe press coverage afterwards to talk about how the news was received. \n\nLet's say I was writing a _historiography_ of the atomic bomb. Now I'm writing about _historians_ and my primary sources are _historical works_. So I'm going to talk about how Herbert Feis, a foreign relations historian, wrote his book _Japan Subdued_ in 1966, and how his take on the history of bomb different from that of Robert Jungk, whose _Brighter than a Thousand Suns_ came out in 1958. I'm going to talk about how Gar Alperovitz's _Atomic Diplomacy_ (1965) put forward the thesis that the atomic bombs were just meant to scare the Soviet Union, whereas Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's _Racing the Enemy_ (2005) argued that it was the Soviet invasion, not the atomic bombs, that led to Japan's defeat. I might talk about how Richard Rhodes' _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ (1986) relies upon \"genius\" narratives for telling its stories of the scientists, but nonetheless is ambiguous about the morality of the bombing. I could mention that Ruth Howes' _Their Day in the Sun_ (1999) is the only book that really takes into account female contributions to the bomb project (which were substantial), but that it has been more or less ignored by most subsequent histories of the bomb written by males (hmm). I might even blur the lines between history and historiography by talking about how the original historical actors \u2014 like General Groves or Secretary of War Stimson \u2014 were very deliberate with regards to manipulating what was known about the atomic bomb, and in the process ended up writing the \"first draft\" of the history of the bomb (and many of their key arguments continue to be points of discussion by modern historians). Ultimately it can be quite wide, but what I'm looking at is how we talk about the history in question has changed over time \u2014\u00a0history itself becomes historicized. \n\nSo you can sort of see the difference here in my examples. What's the value of historiography, you might be asking? For one thing, it helps us see, at a glance, what different types of arguments and interpretations have been put forward. It can help us see the production of history as a product of its time, as well. It helps us be more critical about works of history, because we see that _they themselves_ are products of their time and context \u2014 they don't sit \"above\" anything like that. \n", "In addition to the answers already provided, I want to add that a historiography can also address gaps in research. Or rather, provide an analysis of where the research has *been* and how your analysis will provide a different approach. In this regard, chronological is often a good approach, but so is categorical.\n\nUltimately, what you're trying to do is provide your reader with a snapshot of the research so far and how you plan to expand upon or argue against that current line-of-thinking. In addition to giving you a focus, it demonstrates you have a masterful command of the topic so far. It's a good opportunity to convey to the reader that, quite simply, you know what you're talking about.\n\nSource: MA in history; wrote a thesis", "Most of the posted comments provide good information, but I'd suggest narrowing your subject matter to specific areas. Instead of writing a historiography of WWII, examine writings about the Battle of the Bulge; instead of the Cold War, write about the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Berlin Air Resupply missions. The tighter your paper's focus, the better it'll appear to a reader. Finally, always approach your readings by focusing on the differences between authors' approaches or methods. In many ways you're writing a series of book reviews on a single historical event. If you need help choosing the books to include in your historiography, begin with the most contemporary historian's writing on the subject and use his/her bibliography to identify the historical works they relied upon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "fgcpb9", "title": "Why has no country ever tried to emulate the succes of the roman republic, and why did it take european countries so long to get rid of their kings when all it took the romans was one bad king?", "selftext": "You often hear about empires claiming to be the succesor to the roman empire, ive never heard about countries trying to follow in the footsteps of the roman republic when that was arguably their best period. Why is that?\n\nThe romans had 5 kings the last one was so bad they got rid of him and instead of getting a new king they instated a republic, why did it take so long for later european countries to do the same when they had far worse kings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fgcpb9/why_has_no_country_ever_tried_to_emulate_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fk45zt5"], "score": [13], "text": ["Though not an exact emulation, both the French and American revolutions were directly influenced by the Roman Republic and the ideals of Libertas achieved by the early Romans, as Sellers writes (reference at the bottom): \n\n\u201cA new \"Senate\" would meet on the \"Capitol\" hill, overlooking the \"Tiber\" river (formerly \"Goose Creek\"), as in Rome, to restore \"the sacred fire of liberty\" to the Western world. The vocabulary of eighteenth century revolution reverberated with purposeful echoes of republican Rome as political activists self-consciously assumed the Roman mantle. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the primary authors and advocates of the United States Constitution, wrote together pseudonymously as \"Publius\" to defend their creation, associating themselves with Publius Valerius Poplicola, founder and first consul of the Roman Republic. Camille Desmoulins attributed the French Revolution to Cicero's ideal of Roman politics, imbibed by children in the schools. At every opportunity, American and French revolutionaries proclaimed their desire to re-establish the \"stupendous fabrics\" of republican government that had fostered liberty at Rome. The Roman name of \"republic\" evoked first and above all the memory of government without kings. Roman authors dated their republic from the expulsion of Rome s last king, Tarquinius Superbus, and mourned its fall in the principate of Augustus. \n\nAs French and American politicians came increasingly into conflict with their own monarchs, they found a valuable ideology of opposition already fully formed in the Roman senatorial attitude towards Caesar and his successors. The guiding principle of this republican tradition, as remembered (for example) by Thomas Paine, was government for the \"res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good,\" perceived as naturally antithetical to monarchy and to any other form of arbitrary rule. Paine and other eighteenth century republicans viewed the individual and collective well-being of citizens as the only legitimate purpose of government. Their rallying cry of \"liberty\" signified subjection to laws made for the common good, and to nothing and to no one else. Statesmen traced this principle to the frequently cited passage in Livy that attributes the liberty of Rome to Lucius Junius Brutus and to his introduction of elected magistrates into Roman politics, constrained by the rule of law\u201d\n\nAs Sellers suggests, it is not that they directly tried to \u201ccopy\u201d exactly the Romans (though in many ways they did - hence for example the movement itself being called Republicanism!) but that the foundation of the Republic served as an ideological benchmark through which they could express their desires for liberty and self governance. This is why for example during the time of the French Revolution there was an increase in paintings and art that recalled famous events from Rome\u2019s early history (Jacques-Louis David is perhaps the most famous, such as the Oath of the Horatii). Both in France and America, intellectuals were consciously linking themselves to the Romans to both help justify and inspire their contemporaries into moving away from monarchy and towards Republicanism and they saw the Roman Republic as both their symbolic and literal predecessors. \n\nThough not as overt, this can be seen in the artistic and intellectual culture of the English Civil War. For example John Milton\u2019s \u201cParadise Lost\u201d draws mainly from the inspiration of Virgil, who\u2019s often-conflicted portrayal of Aeneas as an effigy of Rome\u2019s first emperor Augustus has led many scholars to believe that Virgil\u2019s work is more subversive of Augustus due to Virgil\u2019s own conflicted opinion of one-man rule under the newly established Principate - rule by the \u201cFirst Citizen\u201d. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost begins with Satan, cast out from heaven for his rebellion against God, the king of heaven. Some of Satan\u2019s sentiments (\u201cbetter to reign in hell than serve in heaven\u201d) reflect a rejection of absolute monarchy that was beginning to take hold within western intellectualism. \n\nAs to why it took so long for more modern countries to reject monarchy I am no expert, but the enlightenment was built off of the back of the Renaissance - which was a \u201crediscovery\u201d of Greek and Roman ideals - so you could argue that it is no accident that rejections of monarchy began to take root directly after European intellectuals began to study Rome\u2019s republic (as well as Athenian Democracy and Sparta\u2019s mixed constitution) in a more widespread way. \n\nAs to why Rome rejected their kings this is still a source of debate, as Livy (the main source for Rome\u2019s early history) acknowledges himself that the stories passed down are more \u201cpoetic tales than history\u201d and so most of the stories are more than likely legendary fables. My own guess based on studying/teaching the Roman King\u2019s and Rome\u2019s early republic is that there was a cultural shift within Rome that had begun before the rejection of Tarquinius Superbus. For example Rome allegedly always had a Senate, and under the Etruscan Kings there was an increasing importance placed on the increased political participation of Rome\u2019s citizens. For example the 6th King Servius Tullius reorganised Rome\u2019s citizens so they voted according to their property value - landowning citizens had more of a say in the political life of Rome but the burden for military service was placed on them. When the King\u2019s were thrown out we are told by Livy that Brutus and the first republicans decided not to change too much of Rome\u2019s constitution, but instead to dissolve the power of the Kings and divide their roles among the pre existing political bodies, such as the Senate and Popular Assemblies. Livy also tells us that the earliest Kings used to be elected, rather than it being a hereditary monarchy in the strict sense of the world. Therefore it was not an absolute monarchy like many medieval kingdoms. \n\n\nFurther reading:\n\nSellers, M. \u201cThe Roman Republic and the French and American Revolutions\u201d in: Flower, H. I. (2014).\nThe Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic.\n Cambridge University Press.\n\nLink to book: \n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHope this helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.academia.edu/17175334/The_Influence_of_Ancient_Rome_on_the_French_Revolution_and_its_potential_for_class_analysis", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i1rQqJo_flwC&amp;pg=PA357&amp;lpg=PA357&amp;dq=sellers+the+roman+republic+and+the+french+and+american&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=h9_xWJ0--a&amp;sig=ACfU3U0zZ3EdZyKgMHf-2cBgPWzyNLXa-A&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwj0lvTAm5DoAhWPa8AKHVb5AyMQ6AEwBnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=sellers%20the%20roman%20republic%20and%20the%20french%20and%20american&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "2v65yd", "title": "What is the earliest date I, an English speaking American, could effectively communicate with other earlier English speakers?", "selftext": "Sorry for the title gore. I suppose if my question doesn't make sense to you, please answer me this instead: When did modern American English develop, and what are the similarities and differences between it and old English? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2v65yd/what_is_the_earliest_date_i_an_english_speaking/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coetbsi"], "score": [4], "text": ["hi! fyi, you'll find a few previous posts in this FAQ section\n\n* [How far back could I go and still communicate?](_URL_0_)\n\nAs you'll see in those threads, the differences between Old English and modern American (and every other variety of) English is extreme. But on the off-chance that your last question is asking about the divergence of British and American Englishes, there's another FAQ section that may be of interest\n\n* [American and British accents](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_how_far_back_could_i_go_and_still_communicate.3F", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/language#wiki_american_and_british_accents"]]}
{"q_id": "2a3raz", "title": "Are there better job opportunities for historians depending on which history they study? Which fields have more demand?", "selftext": "As in are you better off studying Asian history rather than American history, for example?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a3raz/are_there_better_job_opportunities_for_historians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cirhi4k", "cirjxm0"], "score": [10, 2], "text": ["I can't grab a link right now, but the American Historical Association publishes a report once in a while evaluating the field.  Their last was in 2013 and it showed that you do have slightly better odds with an Asian History focus, but if I remember correctly you still have less than a 50% of finding work in academia.  Outside of academia, there aren't really any ways to track job success accurately.  But in American non-academia there probably isn't great demand for an Asian historian.\n\nSo basically its a huge risk no matter what you choose and you can't really \"plan\" a history career anymore. It sort of depends on who you know and your timing, which no one can predict.", "Here are some links of value, OP: \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2014/the-2013-jobs-report-number-of-aha-ads-dip-new-experiment-offers-expanded-view", "http://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-resources/data-on-the-history-profession"]]}
{"q_id": "2rut9h", "title": "Accuracy of 'Romance of The Three Kingdoms'", "selftext": "Most of how I envision life in ancient China to be is mostly influenced by Wuxia serials and the few Chinese classics such as Water Margin, Journey to the West and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. \n\nOut of all them, I feel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of, if not the most, popular source of information a layman might have about 170-280 medieval China. Considering that the writer, Luo Guanzhong wrote said novel almost a thousand years later, how accurate is his portrayal of the times?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rut9h/accuracy_of_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnjhdi8", "cnjlr0n"], "score": [15, 4], "text": ["Note that the Romance of the Three Kingdom is different from simply Three Kingdoms. Luo's portrayal of the time period and accuracy of important events are right on the spot - it's other aspects of the novel that deserves the attention.\n\nEasily the first thing you would spot is the author's bias in favour of Shu Han. I have mainly criticized the novel based on his favouritism, and not of historical accuracy, but there are things that are contested. For example, Guanyu's weapon the guandao wasn't invented during his time. In more accurate texts, Guanyu is described to have kill his opponents by 'piercing', which is a word attributed to halberds or spears. Halberds are more common among generals during the Late Han-Three Kingdoms. He also made up a significant amount of fictional characters that doesn't have any historical backgrounds. The obvious one is Diao Chan. Some of the personalities attributed to certain figures were completely skewered for Luo's own purposes. Such one would be Zhang Fei. In fact, the historical Zhang Fei came from a prestigious background. He was well educated and a brilliant thinker and is also an artist. He authored a piece of art depicting a peach garden which inspired Luo to come up with 'the oath of the brotherhood in the Peach Garden' although in reality the brotherhood was only shared between Guanyu and Zhang Fei. Luo was however correct about Zhang Fei's ill-temper. Many other more problems but I don't think this is what you're mainly asking for.\n\nI fail to recognize any inaccuracy in terms of time and significant events.\n\nSpeaking of Water Margins, the first 36 characters were indeed inspired by people who may have existed, bu the following 72 are completely made up and never existed. Water Margin has no background context to support its story other than general facts, such as Song fighting against other rebellious states and that the government was highly corrupted. The novel was in fact authored by two persons - Shi Nai An and his student, well again, Luo Guanzhong. Shi wrote up to the amnesty of the bandits, and from then Luo wrote the rest.\n\nI understand that these are huge influences of the Chinese culture, but its portrayal are far from accurate. Let's not get into the Wuxia genre or Monkey King.", "I'm sure you're aware of the adage regarding ROTK, in that it's 2/3 history, 1/3 fiction. As a segue, I notice that the Chinese seem to love that formulation because that's how they characterize Mao, as 2/3 good, 1/3 bad.\n\nThat said, there are definitely a ton of small anachronisms in Luo's version with what's known of the history at the time.  I remember raising an eyebrow when I saw a mention of a character who was a \"failed examination\" candidate.  The examination system, which was so prevalent in Ming times, got its start in the Tang Dynasty (though restricted to the aristocratic families) and really took off as we know it in the Song Dynasty.\n\nBut with that said, I don't know think that Romance (or even Records) of the Three Kingdoms is \"that\" accurate if you want to take a deeper historiographical look, rather than taking even Chen Shou (author of Records) at face value.  The events as recorded in the chronicle likely happened, but its the meaning (always the meaning) of those events as interpreted by Chen Shou and later historians that is subject to scrutiny.\n\nIf you want the best history we have so far on the subject, check out this article written by noted post-Han scholar Rafe de Crispigny, which is luckily available for free on the internet.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis was originally written for what was supposed to be the Cambridge History of China vol 2., covering the post-han pre-sui years, but for some odd reason, that book has still not been released.\n\nIt's a bit more thorough, and leaves as many blanks as it fills, but it'll give you a better grasp of what historians, as opposed to romanticists (of which you have to be careful of with regards to mainland Chinese scholarship) actually think of this era.\n\nHis section dissecting \"what really happened\" at Red Cliffs is fascinating, and worth the price of the read alone.  If you want the tl;dr version, basically Cao Cao was defeated at Red Cliffs in what might have been a far smaller skirmish.  Over time, the contemporary chroniclers played it up in order to suit their politics."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/html/1885/42048/3KWJin.html"]]}
{"q_id": "9szfwq", "title": "Was it legal for a husband in medieval England to kill his wife and/or children? What social consequences, if any, would a man face for committing such an act?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9szfwq/was_it_legal_for_a_husband_in_medieval_england_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8usith"], "score": [3], "text": ["Cold-blooded murder was always illegal and carried with it legal punishment, from the earliest surviving medieval law code we have through the entirety of the medieval era. A person would be acquitted if the murder was found to be done in self-defence. One could also be found innocent on grounds of insanity and usually if the murder was ruled to have been committed by accident or through negligence. The legal concept of manslaughter developed quite a bit over the course of the medieval era, so as far as that goes, it really depends on what point in the Middle Ages you are considering.\n\nThe medieval period in England spanned around 1,000 years, and as one could expect, law codes and the legal system as a whole underwent significant changes and development over ten centuries. The consequences for being found guilty of murder were quite different in the early 7th century law code of King \u00c6thelberht from those attendant to the laws which were in place when Henry Tudor (Henry VII) ascended the throne in the late 15th century.\n\nIn \u00c6thelberht\u2019s law code, a person would be fined a substantial amount of money, either 50 or 100 shillings, if found guilty of murder. Keep in mind, most day labourers were paid in what amounted to pennies per week. The law code uses the term \u2018man\u2019 (\"If a man slay another\u2026\"), but \u2018man\u2019 is gender-neutral in Old English (see citation below of Anne Curzan\u2019s book).\n\nUp to the 13th century, a man accused of murder could face trial by jury or trial by ordeal, the latter of which could very well kill him in the process. After the 13th century in England, trials were conducted by a jury of twelve men. Women were not permitted to be jurors. Depending on the jury\u2019s sympathy, a man convicted of murder could face the death penalty. If a woman were to murder her husband, however, she would be tried not for \u2018simple murder\u2019 (as would a man accused of murdering his wife) but for \u2018petty treason\u2019 after the enactment of the Treason Act of 1351.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCurzan, Anne (2003).\u00a0*Gender Shifts in the History of English*. Cambridge University Press.\n\nOliver, Lisi. *The Laws of \u00c6thelberht: A student edition*, Louisiana State University, at [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nBriggs, John (1996), *Crime and Punishment in England: An introductory history*, London: Palgrave Macmillan.\n\nBlackstone, William; Christian, Edward; Chitty, Joseph; Hovenden, John Eykyn; Ryland, Archer (1832). *Commentaries on the Laws of England*, vol. 2, (18th London ed.), New York: Collins and Hannay.\n\nGreen, Thomas A. (1976). *The Jury and the English Law of Homicide, 1200-1600*. University of Michigan Law School.\n\nGreen, Thomas A. (1972). *Societal Concepts of Criminal Liability for Homicide in Medieval England*. University of Michigan Law School.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: grammar"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/print.php/essays/oliver38_1/Array", "http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/print.php/essays/oliver38\\_1/Array"]]}
{"q_id": "ak9709", "title": "It's 1925 and money is no object for me, I want to travel between America and Europe what are my options?", "selftext": "What is the fastest way? What is the most luxurious? What would it cost and how would I go about booking the trip? Since it is international would I need a passport (we'll say I'm American) or visa?\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ak9709/its_1925_and_money_is_no_object_for_me_i_want_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef2psp8"], "score": [7], "text": ["You're pretty much limited to traveling by ship. Daring individuals have starting making transatlantic flights, but you're still three years away from the first east-west non-stop transatlantic crossing, and also three years away from the first regular transatlantic travel by commercial airships, which will enjoy a brief period of popularity before being replaced by commercial airliners. Ironically, the airship that would make the first commercial passenger flight, the Graf Zeppelin, would also be the one to arguably spell the end of luxury airship travel when it comes crashing to earth in a fireball in 1937. You won't really be able to take a cross-Atlantic trip on an aircraft (A seaplane) until around 1937, when Imperial Airways will start making regular scheduled flights. Having said this, if you are just spectacularly wealthy, you might be able to simply purchase one of the new flying boats, have it fitted with extra fuel tanks, and just about make it from the west coast of Canada to the closest parts of Ireland.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYour only realistic way of getting to Europe from America, or vice versa, is sea travel. You're in luck, however, because you're still in the heyday of luxury cruises! The crossing will take you a few days, maybe a week, but you'll be crossing in style, with your own state room and attendants, or if you want to slum it for some reason, you can buy a ticket on the lower decks and just wait to get there. The Titanic went down horribly in 1912, but that's in the distant past now, so you don't really need to worry about that, and the War to End all Wars ended in 1918, so you don't need to worry about the fate of the poor  Lusitania, who was torpedoed off Ireland in 1915. All in all, you're relatively safe, relatively certain to make it to your destination, and you'll be doing so in style.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI don't know much about passports at the time so someone else will have to answer that, but I hope this helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9k86gd", "title": "What kind of swimming techniques would people in the 17th and 18th century use?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9k86gd/what_kind_of_swimming_techniques_would_people_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e6y8zom"], "score": [18], "text": ["European and Euro-American sources from the 16th-19th centuries, which here include travel accounts and treatises on how to swim, unanimously agree on several points: (a) they swim badly (b) the people of basically every other culture they encounter swim better (c) there is apparently no reason for the white people to go, *Huh, maybe we could learn a thing.*\n\nGeorge Catlin, who traveled the Upper Plains in the 1830s, distinguished Euro-American swimming style, at least of trained swimmers, from that of the Mandan (Numakaki or Nueta):\n\n >  The mode of swimming amongst the Mandans, as well as amongst most \nof the other tribes, is quite different from that practiced in those parts of the \ncivilized world. The Indian, instead of parting his hands simultaneously under the chin, and making the stroke outward, in a horizontal direction...throws his body alternately upon the left and the right side, raising one arm entirely above the water and reaching as far forward as he can, to dip it...whilst \nthis arm is making a half circle [underwater], the opposite arm is describing a similar arch in the air over his head, to be dipped in the water as far as he can reach before him, with the hand turned under, forming a sort of bucket, to act most effectively as it passes in its turn underneath him. \n\n >  *[Letters and Notes on the Manner, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians](_URL_1_)*\n\nCatlin contrasts the European style of swimming, a rudimentary breaststroke, with what is a decent approximation of modern freestyle (forward crawl). At least, with respect to the arms. The form of kicking is not often described in travel accounts and letters, which is interesting.\n\nA similar distinction is noted by Portuguese and other European slavers and visitors to West Africa. French slave trade agent Jean Barbot in the 17th century described swimmers of the Gold Coast:\n\n >  The Blacks of Mina [Elmina] out-do all others at the coast in dexterity of swimming, throwing one [arm] after another forward, as if they were paddling, and not extending their arms equally, and striking with them both together, as Europeans do.\n\n >  *[Description of the North and South Coasts of Guinea, 1732](_URL_2_)*\n\nOnce again, the contrast is made between essentially freestyle and essentially breaststroke (unless the French are doing fly, which...no). Barbot does observe that African nations from further inland are not so practiced at swimming, preferring not to swim (for pleasure or for food and travel) in their rivers. This inclusion is actually kind of a change of pace for Euro-American accounts. With respect to the people of Elmina, he further notes a couple of different manners of swimming besides a single stroke variety to propel themselves forward:\n\n >  ...playing on the surges of the sea, about the shore, some on pieces of timber, others on bundles of rushes, made fast under their stomachs, the better to learn how to swim; others ducking under the water, and continuing there for a considerable time\n\nBarbot associates these rafts with learning how to swim, although the description makes it seem like they are also a prop or toy used by experienced swimmers. The idea of lightweight wood as a beginner's tool *might* reflect European practice. For his *Early British Swimming*, Nicholas Orme turned up a wild reference in a London chronicle from the 1420s:\n\n >  Diverse persons of low estate of the city of London, assembling one day on the wharf...wished and desired they had the person of my lord [the bishop] of Winchester, saying they would have thrown him into the Thames to have taught him to swim without wings.\n\n >  *[Chronicles of London](_URL_3_)*\n\nOrme takes this as a reference to water-wings, better known today as \"floaties\" (the inflatable things you see kids wearing around their upper arms). Even though, as he points out, there isn't another known reference to \"water-wings\" as the name for a swimming tool until the 20th century, his conclusion about a device of some sort seems more plausible to me than this being a metaphorical reference akin to flying without wings or some such.\n\nBut not all Europeans made the same connection, or rather, some were confronted with evidence so strongly to the contrary that they couldn't plausibly believe instruction the only use worth mentioning. Charles Warren Stoddard, adding a bit of LGBTQ diversity to the Dead White Dudes' Club of this answer, described Native Hawai'ian swimming--or rather, surfing--in 1874:\n\n >  Kahele, having been offered a surf-board that...was itself as light as cork and as smooth as glass...seized his sea-sled, and dived with it under the first roller which was then about to break above his head, not three feet from him. *[does the same with more waves]* ...Again Kahele dived and reappeared on the other side of the watery hill...turned suddenly, and, mounting the towering monster, he lay at full length on his fragile raft, \nusing his arms as a bird its pinions...As it rose he \nclimbed to the top of it, and there, in the midst of foam seething like champagne...He leaped to his feet and swam in the air.\n\n >  *[Summer Cruising in the South Seas](_URL_0_) - I hope you'll check out this whole passage*\n\nLater on, he mentions swimming that seems more like *swimming* as such, but doesn't provide any descriptive details.\n\nOur white explorers almost unanimously emphasize two further points that intersect with debates in modern scholarship (mostly on different subject matter) over pre/early modern Euro-American swimming. First, they stress that *everyone* swims, even children (\"These islanders are amphibious. The little bronze babies float like corks before they can \nwalk half the length of a bamboo-mat,\" writes Stoddard). Second, they stress that \"everyone\" includes (!!!) women.\n\nThe first point, about the extent of swimming ability among white men, has several points to the contrary: a lot of people (including, by the way, Stoddard) explicitly say they can't swim; in the later 19th century, there's a whole panic among naval officers and commentators about the lack of swimming ability even among midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy; swimming treatises are not only prescriptive but aimed first exclusively and second mostly at the noble/upper classes.\n\nWhat seems more likely, from other accounts of sailors and sailing, is that there wasn't much *formal* swimming instruction, as in the strokes or freediving technique, and no training in swimming endurance. However, sailors at least would be able to tread water and other things to keep from drowning if they went overboard in port or some such.\n\nThe question of women swimming has a couple of points against the possibilit as well: (a) they are hardly ever mentioned (b) there's often a distinction made between \"bathing\" and \"swimming,\" in which men swim while women bathe, *or* religious leaders are like \"women can be in the water only to bathe\", (c) in early medieval-16th century sources, there is a strong association of swimming and military practice, and (d) most people swam naked.\n\nIn medieval sources, at least, there are a few references to women bathing while wearing some sort of smock, and Orme observes that men in Norse sagas (who are very often strong swimmers--see Beowulf) sometimes strip down to their undergarment but no further to swim. In general, however, swimming for recreation follows along with seafarers realizing their ship is about to capsize--the first thing they do is strip.\n\nThere don't seem to be that many references to what people wore to swim in the Euro-American travel accounts. The exception in the ones I looked at for this answer is again Stoddard, who is writing after the invention of swimsuits in the west:\n\n >  One after another, they came out of the sea like so many mermen and mermaids. They were refreshingly innocent of etiquette--at least, of our translation of it...With uncommon slowness, the mermaids donned more \nor less of their apparel, a few preferring to carry their robes over their arms; for the air was delicious, and ropes of seaweed are accounted full dress in that delectable latitude.\n\nThe reference to mermen and mermaids isn't unique; it probably reflects the ease and skill with which the Euro-Americans see people from other cultures swimming, in comparison to their own. This is not a unanimously positive thing. As I mentioned at the beginning, none of these accounts feature the author saying, \"Hey, maybe teach me?\" Kevin Dawson, who has published some version of the major article on early modern swimming about eight different times, observes that a lot of white authors in the 17th-mid 19th century make a strong connection between swimming ability and animal/natural traits: \n\n >  Man cannot swim with the same faculty as many of the inferior animals, which seem to be led by instinct to use the proper action for their preservation, while rational creatures, being aware of their danger, grow fearful or impatient, and begin to struggle.\n\n >  -*introduction, 1840 edition of Benjamin Franklin's letter/treatise on swimming*\n\n(Note that Franklin, for his part, advised everyone learn to swim). Dawson thinks that probably Europeans applied this dichotomy to the people of color they encountered. That, though, presents a really interesting contrast to what we see in medieval sources, which is a strong connection between swimming and knightly prowess. It would be fascinating to trace whether, when, how, and to what extent that shift actually occurred.\n\nI know this has ranged further afield than the original 17th-18th century time frame. However, I hope the general similarities in accounts over the time span help justify that extension--as well as, quite frankly, how awesome these sources are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/summercruisingi01stodgoog/page/n240", "https://archive.org/stream/lettersnotesonma00catl#page/n167/mode/2up/", "https://archive.org/details/descriptionofcoa00barb/page/266", "https://archive.org/details/chroniclesoflond00kinguoft/page/80"]]}
{"q_id": "6amj48", "title": "Why was Bill Clinton's approval rating so low in the first few months of his presidency?", "selftext": "According to Gallup []() Trump is currently enjoying a 42% approval rating, and his approval ratings have been called historically low among modern presidents. And indeed, the average approval rating for a President in May (from Ike to Obama) is about 62%. However, we have had one President who polled within a margin of error of Trump - William Jefferson Clinton, at 45%. \n\nSo here's the question - what were the circumstances of Clinton's first 100 days that led to such low ratings?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6amj48/why_was_bill_clintons_approval_rating_so_low_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhftmlf", "dhgeq57"], "score": [1571, 104], "text": ["As you said, at this point of his presidency a few months in, in early May of 1993, Clinton was at a 45% approval rating. Clinton's lowest approval rating then actually slipped to 37% - a low-point mark I believe he reached in early June of 1993.\n\nThe reasons for these low ratings early on were largely tied to what many deemed to be Clinton's poor handling and implementation of his domestic agenda out of the gate. His initial attempts at implementing his early economic policies after taking office were quickly called out very effectively (largely by the Republicans of course) as being something that would raise taxes for the bulk of Americans, and that was deemed very troublesome by many of the population, as Clinton initially failed to counter those claims very efficiently or effectively. \n\nClinton's support of the \"Brady Bill\" (aka the *\"Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act\"*) early on into his presidency when it was initially introduced by Chuck Schumer in February of 1993 also hurt Clinton's numbers badly amongst 2nd Amendment advocates in the next few months. \n\nThe whole \"gays in the military\" and the plan for the *\"Don't ask, don't tell\"* Clinton/Democrat policy also is deemed to have hurt his polling numbers early on amongst a considerable number of the electorate (both Dems and Republicans). He also took some early flak for his health care reform ideas (championed in large part by the then First Lady Hillary Clinton), and his early plans and support for NAFTA (the *North American Free Trade Agreement*) brought him a lot of heat from both sides of the aisle (and from Ross Perot supporters as well).\n\nOf course, there was also the crazy *\"HairGate\"* scandal in early May of 1993, where Bill Clinton infamously received an hour-long haircut aboard Air Force One while it was parked on the tarmac at LA International Airport, where the delay caused by him getting his haircut was said to have forced the closure of two runways at the airport for security reasons for about an hour (said to have resulted in huge delays for many passengers on other flights inbound and outbound from the airport). That did not play well in the media at all, and was made by many in the press to initially have Clinton look like an entitled ass who cared little for the average traveller, even with some press calling it *\"the most expensive haircut in history\"*. It was later revealed a couple months or so later that no flights were actually affected by Clinton's desire to get a trim that day aboard Air Force One on the tarmac at LAX, but the initial damage had been done and that hurt his May (and June) 1993 polling numbers as well. \n\nBasically, it was a host of all those things that affected domestic policies that served to drop his early poll numbers quite low. As we know though, Clinton later rebounded quite well, and even survived the Monica Lewinsky affair and impeachment proceedings to emerge to be recognized as quite a popular President after his two terms in office were complete in 2001.        ", "Im surprised no one has mentioned the three-candidate nature of the election. Clinton only won the election with 43.01% to start with. Bush had 37.45% and Ross Perot 18.91%. Clinton never really had a majority to start with. Others have commented on why he slipped but I think it's important to remember he never started over 50% really in the first place. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2yh4p6", "title": "Questions regarding Moses  &  Pharoah and the timeline", "selftext": "Recently watched \"Exodus - Gods  &  Kings\" and I started to question lots of things (not from religious perspective). I did my research and i am not satisfied with whatever i found, so probably you guys can lead me to right direction or answer the questions  ?\n\n1. What was the Timeline of Moses ? Was it 1200 B.C or something else ?\n2. Based on the above question, Who was the pharoah at the time of Moses ? \n3. Are there any historical (archaeological) proofs about the Red Sea partition (I read it on quora during the research that it wasn't the red sea, it was perhaps one of the lake which has dried up now ? But regardless are there any proofs ?)\n4. I have seen lots of muslims sharing a pharoah's (Rameses II) mummy which (as per the post they shared) is the one found from the bed of the Nile and they quote a verse from the quran which says that we (God) has mummified the pharoah for later generations. But I couldn't find any reference in any of archaeology journals that if a mummy was ever found in Nile or anywhere ? Moreover, Rameses II was actually died of natural causes (as per wikipedia). \n\n\nPlease don't make this post a religious post, All the questions that i am asking are from historical/archaeological point of you. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yh4p6/questions_regarding_moses_pharoah_and_the_timeline/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp9i7ab"], "score": [2], "text": ["Check out our [FAQ](_URL_0_).  Lots of threads there already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/religion#wiki_do_we_know_if_the_exodus_happened_the_way_it.27s_told_in_the_bible.3F_if_at_all.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "bb4c25", "title": "During the California gold rush, was selling shovels really a better way to make money than searching for gold?", "selftext": "I work in the tech startup industry, where a common saying is that the real way to make money during a gold rush is to sell shovels (the message for tech startups is that the best way to make money is to make a product to sell to other tech startups).\n\nIs there any truth to this saying? During the California gold rush, was selling shovels (and other related equipment) more likely to provide a solid financial return than mining for gold?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bb4c25/during_the_california_gold_rush_was_selling/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekid9jf"], "score": [38], "text": ["The short answer is we really don't know. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nOutside of word of mouth and the strikes that were notable enough to make news, we don't have a good idea of how much gold was really found as the lack of law enforcement and the hardships in filing a claim meant that miners were tight lipped about the locations and size of any strikes they might have made. There are estimates based on assayers records when they purchased gold, but that is limited as gold in itself was a currency and not always exchanged for cash or credit.  We don't have any accurate numbers on how many people made a fortune, or even just made enough to come out ahead outside of journals and newspaper articles. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe second real problem in this question is that there wasn't just one California Gold Rush, there were multiple ones. By the standards of Gold rushes just few years later, Sutter's Mill (the first one,) is positively puny. In the first gold rushes most people definitely made money off mining. But a lot learned quickly that good money was made selling goods and services to miners and less than two years later merchants were setting up shops near major gold strikes within days of one being reported.  \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAdditionally, there are stories of farmers taking herds of cattle and sheep, wagons of wheat and even eggs from Oregon's Willamette Valley to the California gold fields and making lots of money that way. Later on timber was another big export, creating the Pacific Northwest's early Timber Industry. Lots of coastal towns exported fish and dairy products to the gold fields. Some people even made money off building wagons and ships to transport all these goods. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nWithin a pretty short amount of time an industry sprung up around reselling claims. People would search one out, pan or mine them long enough to confirm it was a good place and then sell the claim to another miner or mining company. This is still an actual business methodology here in the United States BTW as the demand for gold in electronics keeps increasing. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe other places to make real money in those days was in prostitution and taverns. Stories abound of both arriving before merchants were even able to setup shop near gold strikes. I even have family stories of an ancestor who made his \"fortune\" just sweeping up the town's two taverns early in the morning and then panning the dust for gold. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAnother place that people made money directly or indirectly off of mining in those days was selling land. People would make a land claim, hold and then sell it as little as a month later. Or they would sub-divide it to sell pieces to newcomers, or even incorporate a town on a portion of it. Many of these towns disappeared quickly, leaving only a place name, but the larger portion of cities in California and Oregon were built directly or indirectly off of gold mining. Early investors in successful town sites made money buying and selling town lots. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nTo answer your question more directly, I think the real answer is the best way to make money is by identifying a niche and filling it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bdt3m8", "title": "Just watched lindybeiges video about fire arrows, I have a small question", "selftext": "Here's a link to this video _URL_0_. \n\nSo well, I agree with all he said.  \n But I was playing a game in medieval climates (stronghold crusader, it's not so historically accurate game since armored guys walk so slow and you can destroy walls with swords, but... Yeah it's an awesome game) and I saw that there were pitch ditches which could be set on fire by fire arrows. And I wonder if its true? Could it be? Were they used in any castle or defensive structures?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bdt3m8/just_watched_lindybeiges_video_about_fire_arrows/", "answers": {"a_id": ["el0mftg"], "score": [8], "text": ["I actually wrote a little bit about fire arrows just a few days ago [here](_URL_0_). Like literally every historian I maintain that fire arrows are not meant for battlefield use. They are, as stated the, absolute last resort for a besieging force to set something on fire if you have nothing else available. \n\nSo what about a pitch ditches? \n\nNo. I have never ever heard of a pitch ditch used defensively. Why? Well... why would you ever do that? It would be *immediately* apparent to any attacker who could just throw a torch in it, wait for it to burn out and then step over it. Also you'd have to know almost exactly when an attack is going to come or whatever flammable substance you fill it with is just going to soak into the ground and even if you somehow managed to magically get tons and tons of flammable substance, undetected, into a trench just before an enemy attack and set it ablaze at just the right moment... then what? You'll burn at best a few dozen men at the cost of enormous quantities of flammable substance. A much more effective use of it would be to pour it from the walls already ablaze whenever someone tries to climb said walls or knock very forcefully on your gates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/zTd_0FRAwOQ"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bapvwe/why_would_medieval_armies_use_regular_arrows_over/"]]}
{"q_id": "4t1c7r", "title": "Was a blade poisoning a thing ?", "selftext": "Did it happen on battlefield or only on assassinations ( if it happened on assassinations ) during Medieval times or before.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t1c7r/was_a_blade_poisoning_a_thing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ef9kb", "d5ehnty"], "score": [5, 64], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nThis older thread was the closest I could find that might partially answer your question and mostly focuses on whether poison arrows -  not blades -  were a thing, the consensus seeming to be that they were. ", "I'm going to try and give an answer as serious as possible, but I'm no expert.\n\nYou separate battlefield and assassinations for the use of poisoned blades, but you have to remember that poisons in general have very different objectives in both cases. In the latter poisons were common, but usually left in food or wine, possibly even coated bed cloths. The objective in this case would be to take out a key figure. Poisons were also very commonplace in warfare, as were other forms of biological warfare, but rather than targeting a single individual, they more than often were a tool of psychological warfare. Greek generals encouraged the projection of snakes by catapults (Hannibal had apparently used a similar technique to cause chaos in Eumenes the IInd's ships) because of how fearful men were of their bite. Far more common was the poisoning of wells and food supplies. This has occurred throughout history, possibly dating back to tribal warfare in our pre-civilizational history. The objective wasn't always to kill, but rather than weaken the opponent, to sap them of their strength for the fight to come. Honor wasn't as widespread as it is in our romantic perception of antiquity and medieval warfare. The reason why I'm not yet taking about weapon poisoning is because poison was a huge part of warfare, whereas blade poisoning is the niche.\n\nThe \"poisoned weapon\" trope is a rather common one in literature, one could almost believe that every major villain and their grandmothers coat their blades in some foreign poison originating in a Latin-american backwater. Yet in reality while poisons were fairly commonplace (or as commonplace as they could be), they had a far more local point of origin. In Europe one of the most common poisons was cyanide, and could be extracted from apricots. But cyanide couldn't be coated onto weapons, it would most likely just cause an irritation of the wound which wouldn't be fatal. As a matter of fact most poisons couldn't be applied to weapons, as a penetration of the blood stream was neither guaranteed (slashes are rather ineffective in actuality) or were simply ineffective in such a use. As such when weapons were coated with poison it was most likely venom. Viper venom was most common in Europe, while in Latin America, Curare was a common plant-based poison that led to a slow death by paralyzing the nervous system. Most areas in the world had access to poisons that could enter the bloodstream that were know to them during the Middle-ages.\n\nThis leads to the most important question, which weapon was poisoned ? Honestly, the poisoned dagger shoved in someone's back was rather rare. The most poisoned weapon was always the arrowhead. Arrows (unlike the popular misonception) rarely killed, they just don't pack the punch bullets do, and do little damage beyond simply puncturing holes, possibly in vital organs. They were usually used to incapacitate or stagger. But poisons could finish the job. This wasn't that common in medieval Europe, simply because of the cost (how impossible it would be for a Capetian king to tip every arrow in Viper venom, when he has 20 000 archers, some Genoan crossbowmen, and most of them have quivers with 30~50 arrows or bolts because they can't hit anything in the chaos of warfare) although it did occur to a certain degree in Antiquity. Add to that how slow poisons do kill. Venom can lose it's potency rather quickly, and if your poison takes 30-40 hours to kill someone then it's useless for open warfare (if the arrow can deliver a dose that can cripple someone before he dies, then the arrow would have crippled him in the first case, and the victim will only die once the battle has already ended). In the cases of tribal warfare across the African and American continent though, it was a perfect tool for short skirmishes that mainly left wounded men rather than corpses in it's wake. Scythians used to poison their arrows, but they mainly pushed their reputation as poison-users as a scare-tactic. North-Western Indians also used Viper poison (as far as I can remember) on their arrows during their battles with Alexande, as did Romans in particular cases. But these are more often than not the exception rather than the norm. In truth, unless you were expecting a long attrition war, the tactical advantage given by poisoned arrows on the battlefield was minimal at best.\n\nNow comes the question of poisoned blades in general, since it's the true heart of your question. It simply wasn't used in assassination, if you can't land a strike with a knife that would be fatal to begin with, then it probably wouldn't deliver enough poison to be fatal either (but if you could, then the poison is useless, this is the problem with poisons on weapons). Blades have limited space, and you can't just dip your blade into a sugar frosting of arsenic and allow it to get over all your clothes before you fight, and then scratch someone with it and watch them fall over. The poison loses it's potency rather quickly in open air and allowing it to drip everywhere is more than unsafe. Depending on the origin of the poison, it was usually applied so as to dry on the blade rather than be a liquid ooze that covered it. The Indonesian Kris was actually forged with poison infusions, and was used in semi-open warfare (although today it's mostly traditional, and it didn't have much reach). Swords were often poisoned, as were spears, but this was in primitive warfare, and as war evolved, they were discarded, for more effective weapons that killed instantly. Most poisoned weapon tales are derived from archaeology since by the time written accounts arose, they had already passed out of use. \n\nSo was blade poisoning a thing ? Not really, be it for warfare or assassination, it's just impractical, the doses delivered were too light to have any effect unless you just shoved the full extent of the blade into your opponent (if he isn't already dead that is). Arrows were used, but honestly, a pile of dung to fester an infection was both cheaper and as effective. I'm sure there were minute cases, and it was common in primitive forms of warfare, but it would have become obsolete by the time we reached the Medieval Era in the 400s, let alone the Game of Thronesian 13th century you were probably thinking of."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rx5o2/did_poisoned_weapons_especially_arrows_ever_got/"], []]}
{"q_id": "7b3pkx", "title": "Did ancient Romans have some kinf of pockets in their clothes? If not, how did they carry small things around?", "selftext": "And also, what was the usual \"every day carry\" like?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7b3pkx/did_ancient_romans_have_some_kinf_of_pockets_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpftu4h"], "score": [4], "text": ["Not as such.\n\nThe garments of the Romans were generally loose fitting and simply sewn, both of which don\u2019t work well with the concept of pockets as we know them. However, the looseness of the garments also meant that it was relatively effective to simply use the folds of these garments to carry small items. Indeed, this method was prevalent enough that such a fold was even given a name\u2014*sinus*. The image here shows it in use by a slinger for slingstones: _URL_0_\n\nApart from this, pouches and sacks were typically used to carry things more securely. The *marsupium* _URL_2_ and *pera* _URL_1_ are relatively well known, but there were many other names and descriptions.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Funda.html", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Pera.html", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Marsupium.html"]]}
{"q_id": "3b0rsp", "title": "What caused the Middle/Far East to use bowing as a greeting while the Western world chose the handshake?", "selftext": "As a child of the east and the west, I always wondered why half of my family always shook hands and the other half bowed.  So does anyone have a reason why one half the world has no problem touching strangers and the half refrains?\n\nEdit:  I think that the impression I got for bowing in the Middle East is because of watching the news, where people in official capacities are meeting, thus a bow being a more formal greeting.  \n  \nEdit 2:  everyone is focusing on the Middle East, I did also say Far East where it was super common when I lived there (Japan and Korea) to bow rather than shake hands.  This was 30 odd years ago, so handshakes are probably more common in the Far East now, but my question still hasn't been addressed.  Thanks ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3b0rsp/what_caused_the_middlefar_east_to_use_bowing_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cshy2lv"], "score": [13], "text": ["Could you give example of the Middle East using bowing as a greeting?  I am familiar with the far east using bowing but I haven't experienced anyone from the Middle East doing the same."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ijdmw", "title": "What were the reasons that people of your time period and region believed one contracted various illnesses and diseases?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ijdmw/what_were_the_reasons_that_people_of_your_time/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb51c2a", "cb51l2z"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Before the HIV virus was discovered there were many theories about what could be causing AIDS. Some of these theories continued to circulate after the discovery of the virus, and a few hardcore AIDS denialists still believe in alternate theories.  \nDuring the very early years of the epidemic there were more questions than answers. No one was sure if AIDS was caused by an infectious agent, environmental factors, or if there was something about gay male sexual practices that was making gay men sick. In an essay entitled \"We Know Who We Are\" in the *New York Native,* Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz put forward the theory that AIDS was caused by repeated exposure to common viruses. Both gay men with AIDS, they blamed AIDS on gay male promiscuity.  \nThe best way I can describe the multiple theories and the confusion it cause is by letting someone else describe. This is from Larry Kramer's play *The Normal Heart* which tells the story of the the founding of Gay Men's Health Crisis during the early years of the epidemic.  \nMickey: \"I can't take any more theories. I've written a column about every single one of them. Repeated infection by virus, new appearance by a dormant virus, single virus, new virus, old virus, multivirus, partial virus, latent virus, mutant virus, retrovirus...And we mustn't forget fucking, sucking, kissing, blood, voodoo, drugs, poppers, needles, Africa, Haiti, Cuba, blacks, amebas, pigs, mosquitos, monkeys...What if it isn't any of them?...What if it's monogamy? Bruce, you and I could actually be worse off because of constant bombardment of the virus from a single source - our own lovers! Maybe guys who go to the baths regularly have built up the best immunity! I don't know what to tell anybody.\"  \nNow over thirty years into the epidemic, when the knowledge that HIV causes AIDS is practically universal, it's easy to forget that there was a time when there were all sorts of weird theories. ", "Ohhh, I have a good one. One belief that arose in the last couple of centuries BCE in Judaism(s) is that various conditions - well, mainly *demonic possession* - were caused by the infiltration of the (evil) spirits of deceased giants from primeval times, themselves the [hybrid offspring of angels and humans](_URL_2_). Several texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls support this idea (which [originates in the Book of Enoch](_URL_3_)) - and myself and scholars like Archie Wright (among others) have [argued](_URL_1_) that this is the implied background to some of Jesus' exorcisms in the gospels. \n\nThis later becomes explicit in Christian sources like the [Testament of Solomon](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Solomon", "http://www.academia.edu/1403086/Enochic_Evil_Spirits_in_Mark_5", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim", "http://www.neno.co.ke/bible/book/Book%20of%20Enoch/15/9"]]}
{"q_id": "5rzhrx", "title": "At what point did Salt become so devalued, and why?", "selftext": "I have heard that Roman soldiers were paid in Salt, and we still have phrases like a man \"worth his salt\". In ritualism around the world as well, salt also seems represent something rather valuable.\n\nMy basic understanding is that Salt was a precious commodity in Ancient times, was valuable during the height of the Spice Trade, and then became mundane in modern times.\n\nSo what happened to change that, and when? \n\nWas Salt ever particularly valuable?\n\n(Yes, I'm sure its a large global industry so its not exactly \"devauled\", but my understanding is that it certainly used to be much more valuable per pound)\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5rzhrx/at_what_point_did_salt_become_so_devalued_and_why/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddbewqc"], "score": [10], "text": ["All 4 of these r/AskHistorians posts will answer your question. Hope the mods will consider this an adequate response (I'm not from around here:)!\n\n[Why was salt so scarce and valuable when it is in the ocean everywhere?](_URL_2_) (16 days ago, from /u/bucko9765)\n\n[I'm given to understand that in the pre-modern world salt was a very valuable commodity. If you lived near a coast line what (if anything) was to stop you just making unlimited salt by boiling sea water?](_URL_1_) (8 months ago, from /u/grapp)\n\n[How could a Polish salt miner become rich by getting a handfull of salt each day, while poorer people used salt by the kilo in producing food for the winter?](_URL_3_) (11 months ago, from /u/Toasterlad)\n\n[Salt was once incredibly valuable. But when and how did salt go from an expensive commodity to a common appearance on our every day dinner tables.](_URL_0_) (3 years ago, from /u/Africa_Whale)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nbccf/salt_was_once_incredibly_valuable_but_when_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kz3le/im_given_to_understand_that_in_the_premodern/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5opntw/why_was_salt_so_scarce_and_valuable_when_it_is_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45xfn2/how_could_a_polish_salt_miner_become_rich_by/"]]}
{"q_id": "445g3l", "title": "It is often said that middle age era male English skeletons are deformed due to excessive archery practice, are examples of such deformities found in warrior cultures as well? (Mongols, Huns, Spartans, etc)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/445g3l/it_is_often_said_that_middle_age_era_male_english/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cznlqbt", "czo6ktl", "czon6oz", "czoo8dv"], "score": [201, 61, 8, 5], "text": ["To be clear before we start, \"deformed\" isn't exactly how I'd describe *os acromiale*, which is the condition you're describing. Very briefly, what happened to longbowmen (and current competitive archers, etc) was that the growing point (growth plate) on the scapula does not fuse with the bone itself; appearance of that in the left side seems to indicate that arm was taking strains consistent with holding a bow. \n\nThere's an interesting chapter on this in Fury (ed) *[The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649](_URL_0_)*, concerning the archaeology of the *Mary Rose*. ", "This whole thing about the \u201cdeformed\u201d skeletons of English longbowmen is a much repeated factoid that comes from a serious misunderstanding of anatomy and work-related remodeling of human skeletons.\n\nThe original work is a paper by Rhodes and Knusel in the *American Journal of Physical Anthropology*, in which they reported their findings on skeletons from a couple of medieval cemeteries in Towton and Fishergate in England. These skeletons belonged to two populations \u2013 archers using longbows, and infantry using swords and shields. They simply reported that it was possible to distinguish these two populations from their skeletons alone.\n\nSpecifically, they reported that:\n\n*\"Many of these individuals may have participated to some degree in weapon-related training during the key juvenile development period, when bone is most responsive to phenotypic plasticity, yet there does not appear to be a single signature to indicate such training. This may relate to changes in training or technology through time or simply individual preference in weapons.\"*\n\n*\"The men of the Towton population appear to have been engaged in a habitual activity that preferentially loaded the left humerus when compared with the right. This disparity is strongest in the distal humeral shaft. The loading pattern varies such that it creates significant differences between limbs in diaphyseal shape from the mid-distal to midproximal shaft. These changes may relate to a type of weapon requiring both hands, possibly a longbow.\"*\n\n*\u201cThe Fishergate blade-injured men appear to have been engaged in a habitual movement pattern that created right-side dominance in cross-sectional geometric properties. This is carried through all slice parameters and may relate to weapon use, most likely a right-handed, unimanual weapon.\"*\n\nThis relatively innocuous conclusion, that there are skeletal differences between people using a two-handed weapon (\u201cpossibly a longbow\u201d) and a one-handed weapon such as a sword, has been repeated often and grown in the telling, so now you hear it as \u201cwow, these English bowmen used such *powerful* bows that their skeletons are deformed!\u201d No, their skeletons are not deformed, it\u2019s just that certain bones have adapted to their task of increased weight bearing, which happens to everyone who does any kind of repetitive physical activity over a period of time.\n\nAnd yes, we find skeletal changes related to occupation in all kinds of warriors, ancient and modern. For example, here\u2019s a paper about archers living 7,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa with similarly remodeled skeletons:\n\n* Dutour, O. (1986), Enthesopathies (lesions of muscular insertions) as indicators of the activities of Neolithic Saharan populations. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., 71: 221\u2013224.\n\nAnd here\u2019s the longbowmen paper by Rhodes I mentioned above:\n\n* Rhodes, J. a.,  &  Kn\u00fcsel, C. J. (2005). Activity-related skeletal change in medieval humeri: Cross-sectional and architectural alterations. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., 128: 536\u2013546.\n\nThere are dozens of similar examples from different periods and different times. It would be surprising if this were not the case.", "Some pacific islanders had massive buildup of their OSS at the base of the skull, due to stone working, and also where the biceps connect. I know the ancient Chamorros of Guam had this regularly, and I believe the Tongans had it as well. ", "The Spartans did not practice weapon proficiency, so their skeletons do not show any deformities due to repeated forceful motion of a particular kind. Their physical training consisted of generic athletic exercises like running, discus-throwing and the like (and apparently they liked ball games).\n\nFamously, the remains of 13 or 14 Spartans who died during the fighting in Piraeus in 403 BC have been found in a marked grave monument in the Kerameikos at Athens. There is nothing remarkable about [the skeletons](_URL_0_) except the fact that one of them had a spearhead logded between the ribs, and another had several arrowheads stuck in his leg."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=Zt5_no6uC8IC"], [], [], ["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/67/5b/e7/675be7143190cd628eb8118bec860117.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3hu8x6", "title": "Why were medieval cities in England smaller than ancient Mesopotamian cities?", "selftext": "At the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the largest city in England, London, had a population around 20,000. The largest cities in ancient Sumer reached  > 40,000. How can it be with the superior farming technology of the medieval world those people couldn't create larger farming surpluses and thus facilitate the growth of significantly larger cities? Why does the medieval world appear to be so rural when many times and places that preceded it seem to be able to create large urban populations? \nThanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hu8x6/why_were_medieval_cities_in_england_smaller_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuan59r"], "score": [12], "text": ["Apples and oranges, my friend. \n\nIf you look back to [Roman London in the 2nd century, the population was about 60,000](_URL_0_). After the fall of the Roman empire, London continued to function as an Anglo-Saxon city but it didn't have the benefit of a major empire controlling and trading from it. It was a relatively busy port, but it was repeatedly attacked by Vikings. By the time of the Norman Conquest, it was much smaller than it once was, but if you look forward about 200 years, the population of London was probably around 80,000 and continued to grow.\n\nIn comparison, you can look at [a city like Uruk](_URL_1_) which grew from a fairly small farming village into the center of government and society for a major civilization over about 800 years.  The population grew exponentially as the city grew, because that is where the jobs and food and money were.\n\nThere were times when medieval cities were large and when Sumerian cities were small. If you want to compare both cities at the height of their prominence, Uruk had about 80,000 residents during the \"Uruk Period\" of Sumer when it was the most influential city. London in 1914 (I'm gonna call that the height of London's power, but feel free to dispute it) had about 4.5 million in the official city, but 7.1 in the \"greater London area\". \n\nEdit: added some sources"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm", "http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=uruk_mod._warka"]]}
{"q_id": "2iz5v9", "title": "How long have humans been using knots?", "selftext": "And how do we know?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iz5v9/how_long_have_humans_been_using_knots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl6u26o", "cl6ucqh"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The knots are definitely prehistoric, the oldest fish net is over 9000 years old. The net was practically modern \u2013 instead of nylon, it was made of willow bark \u2013 so the earliest knots are probably quite a bit older. Chimpanzees are known to make knots in wild, so a good guess is that humans have been using knots as long as there has been humans.", "hi! this question would be worth x-posting to our sister sub, /r/AskAnthropology, since there are a few more anthropologists  &  archaeologists over there"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a30sy4", "title": "In Ancient Rome how difficult was it communicating with new tribes/kingdoms that spoke different languages? Would it take weeks, months or years to be able to understand each other enough to conduct trade, form alliances or negotiate peace?", "selftext": "This question can also apply to Europeans making contact with the people of the New World and other such first encounters.\n\nI've been listening to the History or Rome and History of Byzantium podcasts and whenever the Romans would first meet a new tribe/kingdom it seems that they were able to communicate with them fairly easily. Were their languages similar enough to barely understand each other or was it extremely hard with a lot of miscommunication, and as a result consequences, due to the language barrier?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a30sy4/in_ancient_rome_how_difficult_was_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eb2s822", "eb3roff"], "score": [22, 4], "text": ["I can only speak for the Roman Empire - and fortunately (since I answered a similar question last week) I can copy and paste an earlier reply:\n\nIn the eastern provinces, where knowledge of Greek was widespread, Roman generals and their staffs (who, as members of the elite, were usually conversant in Greek) had no problems. In the west, the Romans typically relied on bilingual locals.\n\nDuring his conquest of Gaul, Caesar seems to have had a staff of interpreters (probably from Cisalpine Gaul), whom he supplemented with Romanized local notables:\n\n\"Therefore, before attempting anything in the matter, Caesar ordered Diviciacus to be summoned to his quarters, and, having removed the regular interpreters, conversed with him through the mouth of Gaius Valerius Procillus, a leading man in the Province of Gaul and his own intimate friend, in whom he had the utmost confidence upon all matters.\" (*BG* 1.19)\n\nProcillus (who may have been the son of a Gallic chieftain) is representative of the class of men who tended to spring up on the margins of the Roman Empire. A complex array of sociopolitical motives encouraged local potentates on both sides of the border to learn Latin, or have their sons learn it. Sometimes, the process was actively encouraged by Rome, most famously by the general Agricola in Britain:\n\n\"\\[Agricola\\] likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. \" (Tacitus, *Agricola* 21)\n\n(Tacitus' reference to the \"industry of Gauls\" refers to the schools of Latin rhetoric already widespread in Gaul a century after Caesar's conquest. )\n\nMore generally, however, locals learned Latin on their own initiative, even beyond the Roman border. In the imperial era, the existence of large permanent garrisons on the frontiers created a thriving economic zone that drew in local populations on both sides of the border - and encouraged them to learn Latin, if only to profit from the legions. Extensive recruitment of auxiliaries from beyond the frontiers, likewise, spread a working knowledge of Latin far beyond the border zone.\n\nWhen the Romans expanded into new territory, in short, they usually found locals fluent in their language already there.", "If you're interested in first contact historical stories you might enjoy reading the travel diary of Marquette when he traveled through Wisconsin to get to the Mississippi River for the first time.   He details several encounters with natives who'd never met a European.     I think he had someone from the Illinois tribe who spoke French and then that person was able to talk to someone from a small village who knew a little of their language and communicated to the chief that way.   It's a fascinating read, I wish I knew of more stories like that for my own reading but I only know Marquette because he traveled through my area of Wisconsin and it was fascinating to read.  [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) is the one I usually use when I clip out interesting quotes."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.americanjourneys.org/pdf/AJ-051.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "5q20wg", "title": "Why were so many willing to fight for and defend the institution of slavery, even when they owned no slaves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5q20wg/why_were_so_many_willing_to_fight_for_and_defend/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcw0ngc"], "score": [127], "text": ["So when speaking about Southern society in the Antebellum period, what is important to understand is that the South was *not* simply a society in which people owned slaves, but rather it was a *slave society*. I hope that the difference is appreciable, but to make it clear, what I mean to say is that slavery permeated it at every level, from the richest of plantation owners with hundreds of slaves working their fields, to the lowliest backwoods 'cracker' barely scraping sustenance from their small patch of dirt. I'm incredibly fond of this quote from Bertram Wyatt-Brown in describing what a slave society means, as it also will be of the utmost importance in the next point:\n\n > Policing one's own ethical sphere was the natural complement of the patriarchal order. When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to self-determination of one's place in society, not the freedom to defy sacred conventions, challenge longheld assumptions, or propose another scheme of moral or political order. If someone, especially a slave, spoke or acted in a way that invaded that territory or challenged that right, the white man so confronted had the inalienable right to meet the lie and punish the opponent. Without such a concept of white liberty, slavery would have scarcely lasted a moment. There was little paradox or irony in this juxtaposition from the cultural perspective. Power, liberty, and honor were all based upon community sanction, law, and traditional hierarchy as described in the opening section.\n\nThe point is, the slave was a *foil*, of sorts, something which any whiteman could hold himself up against, and in fact, in many ways it was the *non*-slave owning whites who felt invested in the system. Not only was \"slave owner\" something to which a poor whiteman could aspire to, but the slaves provided him with someone who, no matter how low he might sink, he still could look down upon. The thought of a blackman outranking him would be an abhorrent thought to a poor white man. One very interesting aspect which Wyatt-Brown talks about in \"Southern Honor\" is the slave patrols, which would generally be made up of lowerclass whites, and led by *slightly* better off Yeoman farmers, and often found themselves in conflict with slaveowners, especially those who were seen as too lenient and lacking in discipline. The men of the slave patrol had a vested interest in ensuring the blacks remained the lowest rung of society, and they felt threatened by masters who, to quote one incident \"upheld his negroes in their rascality\" - in this case didn't whip one of his slaves enough for a perceived transgression.\n\nThe fear of a post-slavery society was a terrifying prospect, and one which was played upon heavily in the bid to 'sell' secession. The best example of this comes from the Southern Commissioners, men who were sent by the earliest states to secede to other slave states then 'on the fence' in an effort to sway them. In their speeches and correspondence, they make apple reference to the basest of fears of what free blacks, unfettered from the institution of slavery by Northern abolitionists, will unleash. They don't only speak to the possibility of black persons  negatively affecting the labor market at the expense of poor whites, or of the 'negroes' elevating themselves above whitemen, \"the slaveholder and nonslaveholder sharing the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes\", a prospect that was bad enough, but speak of whitemen being murdered in their sleep, \"*wives and daughters [subjected] to pollution and violation to gratify the lusts of half-civilized Africans*\", and in the end, an \"*eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the countr*\". \n\nSo the point is that slavery, and the desire to protect it, was far more than simply about the economic interests of the planter class with their plantations, or the small farmer who could best afford one or two. The very structure of Southern society was in too many ways focused around slavery, and what it meant to be free, to be white, to be a *man*, were all set up in explicit opposition to the enslaved blacks. To be sure, we can find an unending parade of Southerners, both slaveowner (roughly 1/3 of Southern soldiers came from slaveowning families) and nonslaveowner  (roughly 2/3 of Southern soldiers came from nonslaveowning families) alike, who echo the sentiments of one Kentuckian in his desire to emulate Washington in \"*bursting the bonds of tyranny*\" or a Texan enlisted man who wrote home that \"*Liberty and freedom in this western world [...] so we dissolved our alliance with this oppressive foe and are now enlisted in 'The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence' again*\" . If I had the time or inclination I could find thousands of those, as we have no shortage of letters and diaries preserved from this period, but we must return to Wyatt-Brown above in understanding what *Liberty* meant to a Southerner. To them *Liberty* was a very different concept than what it is to us today. *Liberty* was part of slave society, and defined by slave society. They were going to war in the name of *Liberty*, but that *Liberty* was not only the *Liberty* to own slaves, which many of them could only aspire to, but to define oneself in opposition to a slave, which was available to every white man.\n\nTo be sure, not all necessarily expressed themselves in such 'high-falutin' terms - and we can find our fair share of grumblings that \"*this is a Rich mans Woar But the poor man has to doo the fiting*\". In his study of letters and diaries, James M. McPherson notes that it patriotic and ideological sentiments were more common with soldiers from slaveowning families, or from states with high slave populations (he notes the most interesting difference being \"82 percent from South Carolina avowed patriotic convictions, compared with 47 percent from North Carolina\"), as well as a similar split with soldiers who joined in the first year, and those later on, but but even those who saw their need to fight as a more basic defense of home and family from Yankee aggression were fighting for a way of life which they saw as threatened, and one which would be irreparably changed with abolition. \n\n\"Apostles of Disunion\" by Charles Dew\n\n\"Southern Honor\" by Bertram Wyatt-Brown\n\n\"What They Fought For, 1861-1865\" by James McPherson\n\nEdit: Formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "uhoju", "title": "What can you tell us about the formation of national identities?", "selftext": "I had to phrase it as a question, but this is more to invite discussion than expecting a single good answer. In the thread about cultural quirks, we were discussing the difficulty Tsarist Russian commoners had in understanding politics ([permalink](_URL_0_)), and I said that:\n\n > abstract nation-states didn't really exist until a few centuries ago - Rome being the obvious exception - and that most nations were really just very extensive family businesses belonging to the ruling family.  \n\nAnybody care to comment on the formation of the modern, abstract nation-state, and the transition from family/feudal systems?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uhoju/what_can_you_tell_us_about_the_formation_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4vgqqt", "c4vhzd7", "c4vmwxr"], "score": [14, 3, 2], "text": ["[Imagined Communities](_URL_0_), you can start there.", "Well, there are two significant events that develop, one for the idea of the modern state system, and another for national identity.\n\nFor the modern state system, you want to look at the [Treaty of Westphalia](_URL_1_), signed in 1648. This treaty introduced the policy of state sovereignty, essentially the belief that states should be able to guide themselves, and that they have an innate existence given to them by the recognition of other states. This was the birth of the modern state system.\n\nFor nationality, the first display and arguably its first use is with the French Emperor Napoleon I, and the levee en masse. Napoleon was the first to weaponize nationality, where before people would typically signify themselves with their family or perhaps county, Napoleon had men identifying with the nation of France, making it a point of pride and honor. This led to the mass recruitment of millions, which allowed him to drive into Europe the way he did.\n\n[For a source on Napoleon and Nationalism, i found this website, which provides a nice, brief explanation.](_URL_0_)\n\nI am sure there are some better resources out there, perhaps someone would be wiling to delve into it more.", "I'm obviously no expert--would love to read responses from some medievalists in the subreddit!--and I realize this is sloppy, so caveat lector....\n\nYou can see hints of nationalism cropping up as early as the Hundred Years War (if not earlier--but I dont know much about that), and language is a good lens through which to see this. Up until Henry V (r. 1413-1422), English was an acquired tongue for the English monarchs [can anyone verify this? I know I have read this but I can't find a reputable site to back me up], French being the primary language; in fact, the first English king to even be born in England was Richard I in 1189, but he grew up in Aquitaine.  With the ongoing  conflicts with the French came the rise of national unity (clearly I am oversimplifying this), and I can imagine monarchs wanting to distance themselves from their French ties (which they did, but gradually). In 1362, Edward III adopted a law that declared that all government affairs had to be conducted in English. And with near total loss of land on the Continent, I feel that'd be the (or a) nail in the coffin: the French are different; we're over here, they're over there, we speak different languages, and they suck. Here's an [an old-ass article](_URL_0_) that probably says something to the same effect but much more eloquently and intelligently (though I don't have access to it at the moment).\n\nSo, by the mid-15th century, it seems that French and English national identities were established. I don't have any specific quotations for you at the moment (though could investigate if you're interested), but you can see in [Joan of Arc's trial documents (1431)](_URL_1_) that there are nationalistic sentiments at play. They speak unabashedly of 'the French' and 'the English', and it's no accident that she's a national hero.\n\nI would imagine this will have played out very differently in, say, Italy, where there were numerous city-states with their own regional pride at stake."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uf4cz/what_are_some_weird_cultural_quirks_trends/c4ux4ol"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Imagined-Communities-Reflections-Nationalism-Edition/dp/1844670864/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1338674426&amp;sr=8-1"], ["http://www.flowofhistory.com/readings-flowcharts/the-early-modern-era/the-age-revolutions/fc106", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Westphalia"], ["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3678656?uid=3739568", "http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/joanofarc-trial.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "3i540k", "title": "The extent of the roman empires trading influence.", "selftext": "How far would a roman coin travel?\n\nWhere would the goods brought into the empire come from?\n\nWhere would goods be sent out to?\n\nWhat sort of goods could survive travelling such distances, and how would they be conveyed over such vast distances?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i540k/the_extent_of_the_roman_empires_trading_influence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cudpl5n"], "score": [2], "text": ["We do know that Roman coins and Indian goods have been found in South India and Rome respectively.\n\nIndian traders used to trade till Egypt directly and Roman traders would take over from there and this process worked in the reverse.\n\nIndian export guilds actively traded in Indian luxuries AND Wootz Steel with Egypt, Rome and China to the east."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qkjxn", "title": "what are some civilizations that rose to a peak and than to a downfall?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qkjxn/what_are_some_civilizations_that_rose_to_a_peak/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwfz62o"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_1_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "1klwho", "title": "How prominent were gangs and outlaws in the wild west?", "selftext": "Were they a big issue for everyday life in the west? To expand, were there any well-known or important gangs of outlaws?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1klwho/how_prominent_were_gangs_and_outlaws_in_the_wild/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqc2zn", "cbqf0xz"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["I'm not really a historian or qualified to answer this question on my own; however, I would point to Pierre Berton's book *Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush* as an excellent read. The Klondike gold rush is later and far removed from what we typically think of as the wild west. Nevertheless, a lot of the actors in the Klondike gold rush drifted west over time and have history in earlier frontier areas.\n\nOne notable figure who had a prominent role in Skagway, Alaska during the gold rush and other places earlier in his life, is [Soapy Smith](_URL_0_), the so-called dictator of Skagway. He and his gang had the town firmly in his grasp to the misfortunate of those who were unlucky enough to be caught up in his many confidence-games. His era in Skagway is a very entertaining read (as is the rest of the book).", "Here is a article that lists several sources that claims that the entire pop culture idea of the wild west is completely overblown by Hollywood \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith"], ["http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/opinion/25tierney.html?_r=0"]]}
{"q_id": "57gi6g", "title": "How were voters made aware of U.S. presidential candidates before radio and television?", "selftext": "What would influence voters to vote for a particular candidate?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57gi6g/how_were_voters_made_aware_of_us_presidential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8rsau3", "d8shxc5"], "score": [40, 6], "text": ["I've [written about this before](_URL_0_), but essentially, newspapers both shaped and were shaped by early political parties, and a national network of subsidized distribution through the postal service meant that most towns had access to multiple newspaper titles. To quote from that earlier answer: \n\n >  Anyhow, in the years after Freneau and Fenno, partisans would often organize them around newspapers, and printing presses were some of the first things to arrive in new towns. The way that the system generally worked was that each party might find an enterprising local person to serve as editor of the paper, and a skilled printer to actually produce the paper (printers themselves, being ink-stained wretches who often had deformities related to the physical difficulties of printing, were not often party leaders). The editor/printer would print political news, party platforms, and write screeds against his opposing editor, and they would often be rewarded (if the party was in power) with patronage, in the form of postmasterships and printing contracts. Newspapers also printed party ballots, which was crucial in an era before standardized ballots provided by the government.", "I asked a very similar question a month ago and got a good answer from u/lord_mayor_of_reddit\n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xozr6/in_early_us_history_how_people_made_decision_of/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4zr9pr/prior_to_radio_and_television_how_did_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "54ryjb", "title": "Sex positions names in the last centuries (1200-1800)", "selftext": "I've been wondering about the evolution of sex positions names. I do not know enough books and pieces of writing of that time countaining such names, so I really have no idea. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/54ryjb/sex_positions_names_in_the_last_centuries_12001800/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d84vuqa"], "score": [9], "text": ["Let me offer a small window into the names of sex positions as one guide called them c. 1500.\n\nIn the summer of 1524, an artist named Giulio Romano was working on painting saints in the Vatican. In the spirit of bored workers and doodling schoolchildren everywhere, he decided to dash off 16 sketches of obscene character to amuse his friends. In the words of one contemporary, these sketches \"dealt with the various attitudes and postures in which lewd men have intercourse with lewd women.\" Had this been a century beforehand, a good number of rich and powerful nobles would have had a laugh at the sketches, passed them around to their friends, and then they would have disappeared forever. However, along with the printing press, another German technology with great and terrible potential had filtered down into Italy\u2014engraving.\n\nInspired by the printing press, artists looking for mass reproduction had turned to carving a block of wood, filling the gaps with ink, and then pressing them on paper, resulting in what was called a 'woodblock print.' These woodblocks were capable of several thousand impressions, and were often colored in with watercolors or by hand. In fact, woodblocks were most often used to create playing cards. The downside to using wood was that the images would begin to fade and wear down after a few thousand impressions. Additionally, like with the printing press, demand very quickly outstripped supply, and an alternative method was needed. This alternative was found in copper, first by goldsmiths (who had a right to metal engraving under feudal law), and then by painters, the most famous and influential of which was Albrecht D\u00fcrer. D\u00fcrer, much like Aretino, realized that the developing middle class could not yet afford to own beautiful paintings or decorations, but they could afford copper engravings, which could be sold by the hundreds of thousands. \n\nAlthough D\u00fcrer was the first to realize the potential profits and fame, he was not the only one. One Marcantonio Raimondi (who drew our picture of Aretino above)\t, from Bologna, stole D\u00fcrer's engraving technique and used it to print a few hundred copies of Romano's dirty pictures, arguing in a letter to his friend that \"they will circulate, and [you and I] will at the same time become both rich and famous.\" And they did. However, Raimondi perhaps sold the engravings far too eagerly and recklessly, to every possible customer, which, even in Rome, led to his arrest and imprisonment by Clement VI. In a lucky break, his friend Pietro Aretino managed to secure his release. The thankful Raimondi showed Aretino the engravings that he had been imprisoned for, and Aretino declared that he was inspired by them, and wrote 16 sonnets to go along with them, dedicating them in a letter to \u201call hypocrites [such as Giberti], for I am all out of patience with their scurvy strictures and their villainous judgment and that dirty custom that forbids the eyes to see what most delights them. What harm is there to see a man possess a woman? Are the beasts freer than we?\u201d The pairing of the engravings with Aretino\u2019s dirty poems created something really unique\u2014perhaps the first Playboy Magazine in all of history. \n\nThe combined work of these three men was a work called *I Modi* and it was explosive in its success, crossing Europe like wildfire and being translated and spewed into new editions for centuries. The origanls are largely lost, the British Library has the only recorded surviving ones from the second edition--you can see a picture here of the remainders:_URL_0_\n\nHowever in 1602, one Agostino Carracci made copies of the originals for a French translation. These editions that he captioned with the names of various Greek and Roman figures and god(desse)s are the versions that come down to us today. Their subtitles would go on to describe some sexual positions for the next century or so. For example, the position that we call wheelbarrow was termed the Bacchanal style in later pornography. Another, the Herculean described what we might call a standing position. I've compiled several of these in this imgur album [super NSFW]\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/I_modi_raimondi.JPG", "http://imgur.com/a/ehusq"]]}
{"q_id": "5b6dkl", "title": "Did Hispanics go to segregated schools in the southwest prior to brown v. Board?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5b6dkl/did_hispanics_go_to_segregated_schools_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9m68c8"], "score": [13], "text": ["Yes.  But Brown v. Board of Education was not the ruling that ended the segregation.  There are two types of segregation.  One is \"de jure\" or by law segregation, meaning segregation based on laws on the books.  The other is \"customary\" segregation, or segregation that was not based on laws but custom.  California had de jure segregation, and was one of the earliest states to grapple with segregation, which makes sense since it had a large population of Hispanics.  In Mendez v. Westminster, a 1945 case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision that segregation of schools was unconstitutional.  Brown v. Board of Education quoted Mendez and adopted much of its reasoning.  In 1947, California's segregation of Hispanic schools ended.  Following Mendez, a case in Texas, Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District, led to a ruling that customary segregation was unconstitutional (Texas did not have de jure segregation).  I am less familiar with the histories in the other states.  I will note that the Treaty of Guadalupe required that Hispanics be classified as white in the Soutwest, which is why most segregation was customary, not de jure."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3tdz29", "title": "How were illegitimate children viewed in medieval China?", "selftext": "I'm putting together a backstory for a D & D character who comes from a region analogous to China (Tian-Shu from Pathfinder in case anyone is wondering).  My current backstory is that she's the illegitimate daughter of an upper class family and I'm just looking for a bit of real world history to flesh that out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tdz29/how_were_illegitimate_children_viewed_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cx5jsrc"], "score": [17], "text": ["It depends on situation to situation. However, since your character is a female, she would be suffering a fair bit.\n_________\n\nIt ancient China, bloodlines are very important, and it links directly to the status of a person (as well as the inheritance that may come with it).\n\nA son born to the legal wife of a man would be considered the proper heir \u5ae1\u5b50, and would have first consideration in inheriting all estates and titles when the man passes away. This status would be irregardless if the age of any of the other sons the man may have with other women. As such, the proper heir would be pampered the most in the family, and given all the best benefits possible. Only when the proper heir has brothers by the same parents, would there be a question of inheritance.\n\nA son born to a concubine of a man \u5eb6\u5b50 would be considered part of the family, but would not stand to inherit anything. If his mother was especially pampered, he may be allowed certain privileges, but these would still be considerably less than that provided to the proper heir. However, if the man has no son with his legal wife, the concubine's son may be promoted to be the heir, often through having the legal wife adopt the son as her own.\n\nA son who was illegitimate, however, would not be treated as part of the family at all. Although the term \u5eb6\u5b50 was also used to describe such sons, if their mother was not married to their father, they would be regarded as outcasts, and most would not be even allowed to enter the family home. Even if the birth father did show some concern for the child by bringing him into the family, the boy would often be mistreated. As such, they would have no chance of inheriting anything from the family. The only exception would be if none of the man's wives or concubines have sons, in which case the illegitimate son would be adopted, but would have to cut off all ties to his birth mother.\n\nThe most famous examples would probably be the uncle-nephew pair Wei Qing \u536b\u9752 and Huo Qubing \u970d\u53bb\u75c5. Wei Qing was the illegitimate child of Wei Ao \u536b\u5aaa and Zheng Ji \u90d1\u5b63. Wei Ao was married to another man, and life was difficult enough for the family's existing children (Wei Ao already had one son and three daughters with her husband), so she sent Wei Qing to live with his father instead. However, Wei Qing's father made the young boy shepherd sheep, and the legitimate children in the Zheng family bullied him, ordering him around like a slave. Thus he decided to go back to his mother's family, and was employed as a stable boy by his mother's mistress (princess Pingyang \u5e73\u9633\u516c\u4e3b).\n\nHuo Qubing was the son of Wei Qing's sister Wei Shao-er \u536b\u5c11\u513f and Huo Zhongru \u970d\u4ef2\u5b7a. Huo Zhongru was fearful of acknowledging his son (most probably because Wei Shao-er was a serving lady to princess Pingyang, and he might be punished for being with her), and so Huo Qubing had to grow up being part of the servants in the princess' house. More fortunately for him, his auntie Wei Zifu \u536b\u5b50\u592b soon won the emperor's favour, and he was brought to court to be brought up and became a general at the age of 19.\n_____________\nThese information would only apply to sons, because sons were the ones who stood to inherit family estates. Taking your backstory into  consideration, a daughter born to an upper class family would be reasonably well brought up as a lady, and would be married off at a suitable age to be a bride to a (hopefully) rich or powerful family. However, an illegitimate daughter would not be accepted into the family at all, and would have to live off whatever her mother's family could provide for her.\n\nIf her mother's family had enough money, she may still have a relatively easy life, but would not be permitted much freedom as it would be considered a family shame to let her be seen on the streets. She would also be married off as soon as possible to cut off her ties to the family.\n\nIf her mother's family did not have money to provide for her, she would probably be sold off - if fortunate, to a family that has no children and are looking to adopt; if unfortunate, to the brothel so that her mother could gain some quick cash. The family would not want to keep her, since an additional person means an additional mouth to fill.\n\nHopefully, these information helps out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1k5fz7", "title": "Baghdad was one of the biggest centers of learning of its time. Because of items like the Baghdad Battery recently being found, how advanced was this city before the Mongols burned it to the ground?", "selftext": "Was anything else similar to the Baghdad Battery recently found in excavations?\n\n [Baghdad Battery](_URL_0_)\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5fz7/baghdad_was_one_of_the_biggest_centers_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cblpehj"], "score": [3], "text": ["I terms of macro technology, and the technology most people had access to Baghdad would have been about equal to most of the other cities around. Technology spreads quickly. It is likely that various things would have been more prevalent there because it was an extremely wealthy city as well as a trade and governmental center. But it is unlikely the city itself had many things that would not have been found elsewhere.\n\nI am not an expert in the Baghdad battery and as I understand it, the recent political upheavals have taken a serious toll on the amount of archaeology happening in the region."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "17akvw", "title": "What's the oldest prepared drink that could still be safely consumed?  What's the oldest food?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17akvw/whats_the_oldest_prepared_drink_that_could_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c83qmfl", "c83qp9t"], "score": [6, 6], "text": ["The oldest food?  36,000 year old bison, if Dale Guthrie is to be believed (*Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe*, 1990).  That is however an anomalous condition--fast-frozen in ice, and only a few morsels edible.\n\n[edit: and no, we have no reputable accounts of people actually eating unfrozen mammoth in recorded history.]", "Oldest food? Honey wins out over every other known food. Edible (though crystallized)  Honey has even been found in ancient tombs. \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://ancientstandard.com/2011/05/16/the-sweet-history-of-honey/"]]}
{"q_id": "36cl0v", "title": "What strategic threat did Nazi Germany actually pose to the United States before December 7, 1941?", "selftext": "And what great strategic threat did a victorious Germany actually represent to United States interests that the US was willing to undertake a war across the Atlantic which it knew would be massively costly in blood and treasure?\n\nFor that matter, what reasons beyond benevolence did the United States have for aiding Britain and France with programs like Lend-Lease before its entrance into the war?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36cl0v/what_strategic_threat_did_nazi_germany_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crdxgpw"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hitler's immediate aim was dominance of the continent; however, once this had been achieved, it us unlikely that Germany would have tolerated the United States as a rival for 'weltmacht', or world power. Between the u-boat menace, the German naval plan Z, and other potential threats (ie Amerika Bomber project, German nuclear programme), even if the United States did not face an immediate threat, it was a threat that would rear it's *very* ugly head in the future. \n\nThere were also distinct fears that the Germans would attempt to influence Latin America, such as Juan Peron's Novo Estado in Argentina. There were various American war plans for intervention, in Brazil as one example, to head off Nazi attempts to carve out a sphere of influence.\n\nHence the lend lease program. By strengthening Germany's enemies, the united States could prevent the need for intervention, unlike in WWI. This proved not to be the case however, and involvement in a second, more terrible world war would be required.\n\nThat answer your question? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "350eha", "title": "Why did European explorers translate the titles of the rulers of China and Japan as \"emperor\" but translate titles of the rulers of other East Asian countries as \"King\"?", "selftext": "Also, I remember reading that European explorers compared the relationship between the shogun and the emperor of Japan as analogous to the pope and the holy roman emperor, with the pop being similar to the Japanese emperor and the shogun being similar to the HRE. If that's true, then why not translate shogun as emperor? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/350eha/why_did_european_explorers_translate_the_titles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqzwuqb"], "score": [8], "text": ["hi! not discouraging other responses, but you might get something out of these earlier threads\n\n* [Why the title of the Japanese monarch is translated as \"Emperor\", and the Thai monarch is called \"King\"?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [What is the difference between a king and an emperor? Why were there empires in Rome, Japan, and China, but kingdoms in Africa and Europe?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Who were Emperors and who were Kings?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ygnra/what_is_the_difference_between_a_king_and_an/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27pk5z/who_were_emperors_and_who_were_kings/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2xz021/why_the_title_of_the_japanese_monarch_is/"]]}
{"q_id": "1qvvds", "title": "Who would like to discuss Foucault to me?", "selftext": "Not exactly an historical question, so I hope it doesn't fall out of the mode too much, but as I am confronted with Foucault in some of my historical research, I would love to hear a variety of perspectives on discourse theory. Anyone up for a discussion?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qvvds/who_would_like_to_discuss_foucault_to_me/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdh2d9x"], "score": [2], "text": ["Interesting!\n\nFoucault essentially suggests that we can use history and 'genealogy' to study certain institutions of contemporary/modern society and that this can give us a sense of their true purpose. One claim is that there is a distinction between truth and appearances, though this is as ancient as philosophy itself. Another claim is that 'ways of thinking' can imprison people through their very worlds of possibilities. \n\nAt the heart of his work is a claim that the ways in which people make sense of 'true' or 'false' or 'correct' or 'wrong' or 'logical or 'illogical' is formed through certain historical and philosophical processes that ultimately result from political considerations that are arbitrary but appear legitimate, natural, and rational. He is not saying that we don't have truth in our world (penicillin works!). \n\nI think discourse theory is useful in understanding contemporary and modern societies. It is not the be all end all, but as with Descartes and Locke, Foucault provides tools which are uniquely suited for his society. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3n577p", "title": "In the Game of Thrones TV series (and book) bastards from different regions all share a common surname to identify them, Snow or Flowers for example. Does this system have any evidence in history or was it invented by the author?", "selftext": "Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n577p/in_the_game_of_thrones_tv_series_and_book/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvkwodh", "cvlkk1c", "cvlo251"], "score": [91, 10, 12], "text": ["Responses covering more regions/cultures of Medieval Europe are welcome; meanwhile you may be interested in these\n\n* [Bastard names](_URL_0_)\n\n* [During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, how was the surname of illegitimate children determined?](_URL_1_)", "There's a sports reporter called Dan LeBatard and I've always wondered if his ancestor was a Bastard. Does anyone know anything about this name?", "In Denmark-Norway there was a tradition in the 1500s-1600s to name the illegitimate sons and daughters of the king Gyldenl\u00f8ve (literal translation to english would be \"Golden Lion\".\n\nChristian IV, Frederik III and Christian V of Denmark all had several children by various mistresses who all carried the surname Gyldenl\u00f8ve.\n\nSo at least for Danish royalty there at one time was a \"system\" of naming bastards if you will."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uzngr/bastard_names/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rt40t/during_the_middle_ages_and_the_renaissance_how/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "23e4ur", "title": "When was music viewed as a popular way of protesting government actions?", "selftext": "For example, War Pigs by Black Sabbath, and Ohio by Neil Young, being written as songs protesting wars/acts of aggression by governments. Was music always viewed in this sort of way, or was there a certain time period where people decided to start using music as expression a distaste for government actions (I.E laws, wars, hostile acts, etc?) Sorry if I'm not clear enough in my wording", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23e4ur/when_was_music_viewed_as_a_popular_way_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgw3qdh"], "score": [2], "text": ["One of the first instances I can think of is the [Carmina Burana](_URL_1_) - no, not Carl Orff's 1936 work, but rather the 11th and 12th century text that he drew his lyrics from. The Carmina Burana contains songs by the Goliards, a sect of the clergy who we see were very critical of the Catholic Church, particularly in their abuse of simony and penchant for greed.\n\nA more mainstream example that comes to mind is probably the emergence of [opera buffa](_URL_0_) (comic opera) in the early 18th century.  Because the intended audience of opera buffa was the middle classes (as opposed to opera seria, which was created largely for the aristocracy and royalty), librettists (story writers) often strongly satirized political conditions of the day.  Since the scathing, lightly veiled commentary was couched in music, humor, and costumes, the underlying message was able to slip past typical censorship and into the mainstream."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_buffa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana"]]}
{"q_id": "427mp1", "title": "The Roman Republic and Greek(Athenian) Democracy are traditionally dated to 509 BC and 508 BC respectively. Is this a coincidence or could they have possibly drawn inspiration from the same root cause?", "selftext": "First off, I would like to say that my knowledge of history consists of a bunch of Wikipedia binging at work so please correct me if I'm wrong in my dates. That being said, I always found it extremely coincidental that Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic were founded within a year of each other. I know each respective culture has it's own explanation for over throwing a tyrant king and subsequent formation of the new government. However, Greek trade with Italy as far as I know was occurring at this time and I'm sure they were exchanging/discussing ideas on government. Is there a possibility that the Romans influenced the Greeks or vis versa regarding the development of their respective governments?Could they both have possibly developed the idea of meritocracy from the same root cause?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/427mp1/the_roman_republic_and_greekathenian_democracy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz8ext8"], "score": [30], "text": ["It's not a coincidence at all, but not for the reason that you think. The traditional date if the expulsion of the Tarquins *must* be a later tradition attempting to imitate the Athenian one. That Rome had kings and that some of these kings were probably Etruscan is pretty certain, but the precise dating of the expulsion of the kings and the exact events as described by later sources like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and of course Livy are certainly an invention. The expulsion of the kings by two leaders, one of whom is incited by sexual assault (Collatinus for the Tarquins and Harmodius for the Pisistratids) against a female relative by a younger relative of the tyrant (Lucretia by Sextus Tarquin or Harmodius' sister by Hipparchus) is simply too obviously an imitation of the Athenian story to be accurate, and generally scholars dismiss the story as it is presented. I mean, for Christ's sake the Tarquins were expelled in exactly the same year as the Pisistratids, 510. This isn't the only time when we see obvious attempts to link the pre-Republican or earliest Republican traditions with Greek traditions of about the same period. Stories like Horatius Cocles and the sacrifice of the 300 Fabii are both quite obviously influenced by the defense of Thermopylae. These stories probably are based on something real (obviously the expulsion of the Tarquins is based on something that actually happened, as the kingship at Rome ended after all) or at least are based on older native traditions, but the Greek influence of obvious and very much there"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ne3hs", "title": "Did the Mongols leave any long-term institutional or cultural legacy in the places they conquered?", "selftext": "There's a lot of talk about how Alexander hellenized the places he conquered. Did the Mongols have a similar effect?\n\nEdit: What I mean is peoples becoming more like the mongols not unintended consequences of their rule.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ne3hs/did_the_mongols_leave_any_longterm_institutional/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cchsdb3", "cchu7x3", "cchyznp"], "score": [7, 7, 2], "text": ["one point of reference: in his book \"Russia and the Golden Horde\", Halperin concludes that while the Mongols had a traumatic effect on the Russians, they left surprisingly few traces of their culture or language, considering that they were the overlords of Russia for centuries. the Russians had to pay their taxes and toe certain lines, but their main interaction with the Mongols was paying taxes or tributes or being raided as punishment for disobedience. at least that's how Halperin tells it. he did note details on legacies when they came up, maybe aspects of court etiquette, but i can't remember.. i'll look it up if no one else knows.\n\nand I don't have a particular source on it, but I've read many times the claim that the Mongols had similarly little effect on China - their interaction with the populace was focused on extraction and security, aspects in which they were completely replaced when they were driven out of the country.", "Jack Weatherford in his work : \" Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World\" outlines that the Khan and his Horde spread policies of religious tolerance to every region they conquered. While this would not be a long standing practice after the fall of the Mongol Empire, it was a piece of Mongol Culture carried to the realms it touched during their period of imperial influence.", "In Rene Grousset's Empire of the Steppes, Rene points to the mongolian conquest of Russia being the first step in the nationalization of Russia away from principalities.  Moscow benefited greatly from this because they got special treatment from the Mongols for one reason or another.  Kiev, the historically greatest city of Rus.  When the Mongols sacked Kiev, something like 2,000 people survived from a population of 60,000.  This happened across Rus and Moscow capitalized with trade and became a rich city.  So when the Mongol military might weakened, Ivan IV (the terrible) capitalized by defeating the remnants and taking over basically the modern day borders of Russia as we know it.  This likely would not have happened without centuries of Mongol rule as Muscovite's are ethnically nothing like people across the Urals, so it was the Mongolians that first brought a sense of nationality to Russians."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "14tyk0", "title": "When/How did the idea of citizenship first develop in (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) Athens?", "selftext": "Were people gradually given de facto positions which then became obvious citizenships once the idea fully came about and was codified, or was there a bit of a process in the beginning to decide who would be a citizen and who wouldn't be? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14tyk0/whenhow_did_the_idea_of_citizenship_first_develop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7gicun", "c7gzkek"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Unfortunately, Athenian/Attic identity develops during a period of time when our sources are scant. However, most scholarship today tend to emphasize the role of the Peisistratids of forging the disparate regions of Attica into a single entity. Archaeological evidence shows that period as one of religious consolidation, as large pan-Attic monuments appear on the Acropolis, and the Panathenaic games forged a common identity.", "The evolution of citizenship was not particularly linear. You are right that ancient Greece and Rome had \"citizens\" as a social class, but those groups were still very different than what we would today call citizens. For one they were limited in various ways, wealth, place of birth, gender, etc. In Athens, only about 20% of the total population qualified as citizens. Roman citizenship was particularly complicated especially after the rise of the empire. There were not only rules as to who could become a citizen but several different levels of citizenship for individuals living in different parts of the empire.\n\nThen there is the problem of continuity. After the fall of Rome, Roman citizenship did not retain much meaning in most of Europe. Nevertheless, some places kept at least the idea of citizenship alive. For example, in Visigothic and medieval Spain (the Christian parts anyways), cities retained a notion of citizenship within the concept of vecinidad. Individuals who qualified for vecino status were considered citizens of that city. Depending on how the city was governed, that could include voting rights for the cabildo (city council). But even in this example, there was no concept of citizenship to the kingdom. Thus, one might be a vecino of Toledo, but they were still a subject of the king of Castilla. \n\nIn most parts of medieval and early modern Europe, most of the populations were considered subjects of the king not citizens of the nation. It really isn't until after the rise of liberalism in the late 18th and early 19th c. that political thought began to conceive of national citizenship to be the core of political life. Again the evolution is not even. For example, the English Civil War of the 17th c. drastically changed the relationship between the monarchy and its subjects (particularly wealthy powerful subjects). The monarchy became more dependent on support from certain sectors of the population and lost power vis-a-vis the Parliament. On the other hand the 17th c saw the rise of French Absolutism. Even as the rest of Western Europe began to adopt ideas of citizenship in the early 19th c., Spain was a holdout. The liberal Constitution of 1812 included discussions of citizenship, but was only in force for several short periods. \n\nTL;DR Although Greece and Rome had citizens our notions come more from 18th c. political philosophy than ancient traditions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ozdme", "title": "When did doctors and psychologists begin to see sex as part of a healthy lifestyle and even necessary? Was there open debate about it?", "selftext": "Today, most doctors and psychologists will tell you that sex is healthy and even necessary for reasons wholly aside from procreation. Surely most Victorian era doctors would not have said that. Right? So how did that idea emerge?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ozdme/when_did_doctors_and_psychologists_begin_to_see/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccxbv13", "ccxcycw", "ccxdtc7"], "score": [8, 3, 3], "text": ["The one time there's a question I can tanswer, and I do not have my sources on hand, curses. With that said, there are actually a few names like Kinsey, Masters  &  Johnson, and a few others that come up, with Kinsey and Johnsons making the claim the claim that sex was not just for procreation. Kinsey, if I'm not mistaken, was the first to suggest treatment for transgendered individuals. Unfortunately, I do not have my text with me, but if you like I can elaborate more, later tonight? \n\n[this wiki article provides some basic info] (_URL_0_) but the text I am using for my course on human sexuality has way more information, and it's truely fascinating how sexuality is treated and how we see a change in attitude through the late 19th and 20th centuries.But again, the wiki, of course, does not have all the information\n\nedit: If promises of explanations are not acceptable, I apologize and will just elaborate later tonight ", "In the US, the major issue regarding sex was Anthony Comstock.  The view of sex as healthy did not emerge until the \"Chastity\" Laws pushed through by Comstock began to erode.  Comstock began his anti-obscenity crusade in the 1860's in New York City.  Appalled by what he saw in the city, he began ratting on sex trade operators to the police.  This was small-time.  In 1873, he convinced the US Congress to pass what became known as the Comstock Act.  The law made it a federal crime to ship contraceptives through the mail or across state lines.  Everyone wasn't onboard with Comstock.  Margaret Sanger opposed Comstock's crusade.  In 1936 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case of United States v. One Package. The court ruled that physicians could distribute contraceptives across state lines. The Kinsey Reports were published in 1948 and 1953.  Kinsey's work was soon followed by Masters   &  Johnson.  The watershed event was probably the FDA approving \"The Pill\" in 1960.  Horney Baby-Boomers were coming of age and with the pill to prevent pregnancy and penicillin to cure then known STD's it was Katy Bar the Door.  \n_URL_0_", "Well, in a lot of religions, for example Judaism and Islam, sex is seen as part of healthy lifestyle *for married couples* (which is supposed to be the \"normal state of things\" in those faiths). I'm not a medical historian, but I'd be shocked if Jewish and Islamic doctors haven't been said sex is part of a healthy lifestyle, since the beginning of those faiths. As for psychologists, perhaps the closest thing we have are the mystics, and they were really into sex (generally!! obviously there are exceptions)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexology"], ["http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/peopleevents/e_comstock.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "3ho6t7", "title": "META: Can we talk about the clear increase in \"throughout history\" or trivia-seeking questions?", "selftext": "_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ho6t7/meta_can_we_talk_about_the_clear_increase_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu92v0a", "cu93y40", "cu94fdu"], "score": [2, 6, 5], "text": ["You're becoming more popular. The more casual people that join the group, the more superficial questions it receives. ", "nsdwight has the gist of it. As the sub grows, we attract a larger audience, an audience that, unfortunately, contains more people who don't know the rules and don't bother to read them. We do our best to filter vague and low-effort questions, but can't catch all of them. If you see them, report them! Everyone can contribute.\n\nUnless you're talking about submissions that are not being removed- if that's the case, care to provide examples?", "I just hit report when I see these types of questions on this subreddit. It usually gets taken down within 15 minutes after that. If it's been up for a while, I send a moderation message to make sure the report gets seen (partially because \"ignore reports\" is a thing and partially because it's pretty difficult to accidentally miss an orange-red message indicator).\n\nAlso, yes, it's likely just growing pains. People often don't read the rules thoroughly before posting. That's why moderators are here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "10t6ge", "title": "Istanbul to Ankara: What factors were involved in the switch?", "selftext": "I would be very interested in some information that could help me understand what factors ultimately led to the Turkish government in moving their capital city status to Ankara. I think the Middle East is sometimes overlooked in an ever increasingly Eurocentric/Sinocentric world that I see, so I think it would be helpful for me to learn some of the fundamentals before digging deeper. Thank you for your time.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10t6ge/istanbul_to_ankara_what_factors_were_involved_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6genmh", "c6geruy", "c6gewcd", "c6gex6l", "c6ggc17", "c6ggxka"], "score": [24, 36, 8, 3, 2, 6], "text": ["Ankara became the capital because it was used by Atat\u00fcrk as his headquarters while Constantinople/Istanbul was occupied by the Allies.  The Grand National Assembly was established there.  That's the main reason.", "In addition Istanbul (or Konstantiniyye) had for long been the symbol of the multi-cultural ottoman empire (and ofc. the greek, byzantine empire), containing significant amounts of non-turkish elements (specifically Greek) which Atat\u00fcrk despised. \n\nWhen Atat\u00fcrk wanted to create his new turkish national state Istanbul simply had too much history behind itself to be used as the symbol of a revolutionary nationalistic and modern moment. Ankara were thus preferred.\n\nIn addition the aforementioned \"occupation\" of Istanbul by the allied powers greatly influenced the decision as you cant really lead the struggle against the greeks from occupied territory. \n\n", "It seems very similar to the switch from Petrograd to Moscow ", "I've also heard it said that Ankara was preferable because it was in land; making it less susceptible to attack.  ", "I suggest reading Reset: Iran, Turkey and America's Future, by Stephen Kinzer. It goes into great detail surrounding Istanbul to Ankara and how Turkey became the first secular muslim state.\n\nIf you're interested in the middle east and how it is over looked throughout much of history, I suggest reading Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tanim Ansary. It is one of my favorite books.\n\nThey are both really easy reads and seriously have changed my outlook on the middle east, how the west interprets middle eastern history etc. I highly suggest them!", "It\u2019s interesting, reading these responses, to see that Istanbul/Constantinople lost its status as a capital for many of the same reasons Constantine made it a capital to begin with: the \u201cnew\u201d capital was in a more central location, the \u201cold\u201d capital was geographically isolated and vulnerable, and the new regime wanted to make a cultural break with the past."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "805noh", "title": "Questions regarding nicknames", "selftext": "Why were the north Vietnamese called Charlie in the Vietnam war", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/805noh/questions_regarding_nicknames/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dutf4ts"], "score": [4], "text": ["The Viet Cong were referred to using the military phonetic alphabet (V-C = Victor Charlie) shortened to Charlie."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5k35nw", "title": "What was the mindset for veterans who lived through both WW1 and WW2", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5k35nw/what_was_the_mindset_for_veterans_who_lived/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbl6anw"], "score": [4], "text": ["What was the \"mindset\" for them? And are you looking for generalities, because there were a LOT of veterans with a lot of different thoughts about a lot of different things. What does your question actually mean? I don't think you can possibly get a substantive answer to this question, as vaguely worded as it is.\n\nThis subreddit needs an FAQ on how to write a question about history that can actually be answered in the way the subreddit itself demands answers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "zxa7f", "title": "Wondering about the origins of current Japanese cultural norms", "selftext": "Today, I hear consistently about how strict Japanese cultural norms are and that very little emotion is shown, even in a typical familial relationship.  To my naive, untrained self, this seems somewhat similar to Victorian culture. I'm curious as to the origins of this culture, and how long it has been the case.  Unless I'm completely misinformed, in which case, please let me know!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zxa7f/wondering_about_the_origins_of_current_japanese/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c68io77", "c68iu3m", "c68j3r1", "c68viyq"], "score": [6, 2, 3, 2], "text": ["Japanese people show emotion... they're just more subdued about it, and you need to look for non-verbal clues a bit more than you're probably used to.\n\nIt was considered a loss of face to show strong emotions in public, if you're asking about the origin of this.", "This is conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if the severe homogeneity of their culture and population makes it a great deal easier to pick up on nuanced social cues and empathise with one another without overt displays of emotion like a more mixed population tends to produce.  Probably talking bollocks, but it gave me pause for thought.", "As ShakaUVM suggested, there's simply a lot of non-verbal or non-explicit expression. Some of it will also play out more explicitly in word choice, as word choice is a bit less ambiguous in Japanese than in English with explicit degrees of politeness by conjugation and word choice. That said, there's a lot of value placed on being essentially 'psychic' and picking up contextual clues well enough to not be told something explicitly.\n\nMy hypothesis as to the origin of this is that a resource poor nation aspiring to Imperial China seeks minimalism/nuance as day to day expression rather than grandiosity (comparatively) and it begins to infect other parts of culture and language.", "Misinformed - totally. There's a very healthy and life-affirming display of emotion in Japan, in and out of families. Lived there for 20 years, so have some experience.\n\nEnglish speaking individuals tend to communicate emotions verbally. They get a bit buggered when they come across people who don't just use verbal, and even more buggered when they don't speak the other language reasonably fluently too.\n\nEnglish speakers convey a vast range of subtle emotions with their language -  imagine speaking another language to that level of fluency. That needs to be done before emotional communication can be asessed - and that's without the nonverbals."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "35gcv2", "title": "Looking to learn more about Canadian History", "selftext": "This is my first question on this forum, so I apologize if I have worded this incorrectly or in the wrong forum. As a Canadian, I did of course learn about my own history throughout public and high school, however all we really had were textbooks that didn't go into the full details of history (essentially a summary), so that in the next grade you could learn more about it.\n\nIs there any specific books, documentaries, or websites where I can find more information? Ranging from pre-colonial times to Modern times if possible, of any topic (warfare, architecture, daily life, ect.)\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35gcv2/looking_to_learn_more_about_canadian_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr45lor"], "score": [5], "text": ["From my perspective \u2014 and it's biased toward the Yukon/Alaska \u2014 I'd recommend working your way through Pierre Berton's bibliography. While he wrote some duds here and there, most of his 50 titles are pretty good.\n\nI'd recommend *The Klondike Fever*, *The Promised Land: Settling the West* and *Marching As To War* as three to get you started. Those three condense a lot of his bibliography. Once you've gotten through those, grab his two volumes on the War of 1812 (one covers 1812-1813, the other 1814-1815) his two volumes on the Canadian Pacific Railway, *The Arctic Grail*, *Vimy*, *Niagra* and *The Great Depression.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "calzmf", "title": "Were wolves domesticated only once, with all dogs descended from that single progenitor population, or did the process of domesticating wolves occur independently in different societies?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/calzmf/were_wolves_domesticated_only_once_with_all_dogs/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et9t25y"], "score": [12], "text": ["While we have a fair bit of overlap, given that this predates written history, you may want to consider X-posting this to /r/AskAnthropology as well as this falls within their purview. And for that matter, I would note that /r/AskScience would also be an appropriate venue given the biological science aspects of the question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7uy952", "title": "What were the predominant armor types worn in ancient southwest Asia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7uy952/what_were_the_predominant_armor_types_worn_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dto7vz7"], "score": [4], "text": ["The most common armour was scale body armour with a helmet of approximately conical or hemispherical shape. Surviving scales are commonly bronze, but bronze has an advantage in survival over rawhide and iron, which were also used. Descriptions of metal armour often describe it \"gold\" or \"silver\", which might refer to bronze and iron, respectively. Scale body armour could be either short, to the waist or hips, or long, covering to about knee level. Most armours appear to have been sleeveless or with short sleeves.\n\nNext most common would be lamellar, either short or long, and sleeveless or short-sleeved, like scale armours. Again, surviving lamellae are often bronze, but rawhide and iron were used too.\n\nMail probably appears in the region in late antiquity, and was in use by the early 3rd century AD. The first major users of mail in the area appear to be the Sassanids.\n\nThere are some armours with long sleeves for the arms, notably cataphract armours. Scale sleeves were used, and art suggest lamellar sleeves. Sassanid armoured cavalry would typically have long mail sleeves. Horse armour was also in use. I don't recall seeing mail horse armour, but both scale and lamellar horse armour were used.\n\nThere was some use of plate armour, from the mid/late first millenium BC. Body armour included round plates used to protect the torso, and more complete plate cuirasses, but these seem to be much less common than scale/lamellar/mail which appear much more often in art. Plate greaves were used; this was quite likely Greek/Hellenistic influence.\n\nH. Russell Robinson, \"Oriental Armour\" covers antiquity in the first chapter."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2d1h2q", "title": "How did knights poop?", "selftext": "So say we have a fully suited up knight, all ready to go to battle, when he is hit by the sudden urge to take a dump.\n\nWould his armor have flaps? Could the bottom be easily removed? Or did he just poop his armor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d1h2q/how_did_knights_poop/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjlafp4"], "score": [980], "text": ["I'd like to make it clear before I post that I'm not an academic historian, however I've done a fair bit of reading on medieval arms and armour as I'm a practitioner of HEMA and re-enactment - I've also worn, sparred and occasionally even pooped in various types and combinations of chain and plate.\n\nBased on research by [Jones](_URL_3_) (2011), the term 'knight' has been used to describe a large and very diverse range of people. Medieval writers even referred to Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great as knights. I'm going to assume for the purposes of this answer that you're referring to knights in the sense of the martial elite of the middle ages/medieval period. The types of armour worn by knights between the 11th and 16th century varied quite dramatically - technological developments meant that armour changed significantly and quickly in that period. The precise types of armour that were commonly worn until the mid 14th century are hard to ascertain as pictorial sources are very open to interpretation - hardened leather and metal are difficult to differentiate from illustrations and this is compounded by the fact that fabric surcoats were commonly worn over armour, meaning that the armour underneath was seldom shown. Archaeological evidence also suggests that many knights used armour that was out of date - knights and men-at-arms, especially those who weren't very wealthy,  commonly wore armour that was around 50-60 years old. \n\n\nEvidence on metallurgy technology suggests that metal plate armour wasn't in common use until the late 14th century. The chain/ringmail, padded clothing and leather armour preceding that wouldn't have been hard to remove if you needed to urinate/defecate. Operating under the assumption that when you refer to knights being 'suited up' you mean suits of plate armour worn by European knights and men-at-arms I'll focus on that. By 1400 or so metal plate armour began to be worn in the form of breastplates and faulds (articulated plate skirts) covering the torso, rebraces, vambraces and pauldrons covering the arms  &  shoulders, sabatons, greaves, cuisses and poleyns protected the legs and feet - all of these would have been attached to padded clothing worn underneath. The groin was still protected by a mail skirt - meaning that it could be easily lifted and padded undergarments pulled down in order to defecate.\n\nPlate armour of the type you're most likely thinking of was developed in the 15th century, when it diversified into Gothic and Milanese styles. Gothic armour emphasised mobility and flexibility with a more articulated design and used a mail skirt or underpants (braies) to cover the groin. Gothic gauntlets typically featured individually articulated plates for each section of the finger, meaning that the wearer would still have sufficient dexterity to lift up a skirt and/or pull down the padded cloth or chain underwear covering the arse. Milanese plate was typically heavier and less articulated, but still had a short, articulated skirt at the back meaning that the undergarment could be pulled down. Milanese 'mitten' gauntlets didn't have individually articulated fingers but wearers still retained dexterity as the finger and thumb plates were attached by a single leather strap just below the knuckle with a leather glove underneath (see [here](_URL_1_) for an example).\n\nIn the 16th century 'Maximillian' plate was developed - it was lighter, more highly articulated and sometimes [gorgeously decorated](_URL_5_). Gauntlets remained largely the same and plate skirts and codpieces became more common (chain was still used at the rear in some cases), although the arse was still accessible due to plated skirts being either flared or shortened at the back, meaning dropping trou and pinching one out could still be done relatively easily. By the mid/late 17th century plate armour was mostly obsolete due to firearms becoming more and more common.\n\nThe reasoning behind the derri\u00e8re being so accessible in plate armour designs wasn't just to make taking a dump easier - in order for your legs to have proper freedom of movement you can't just strap a plate to it. Similarly, if you want to ride a horse (as was common for knights) then having metal plates between you and the saddle makes riding much more difficult and incredible uncumfortable. It would also make sitting down a rather problematic experience.  Sources are Jones (as linked above), [Lawrence](_URL_4_), and [Clayton et al.](_URL_0_). If you're interested in medieval knights and their arms  &  armour then Jones is definitely worth a read. [This Channel 4 Documentary](_URL_6_) is also  very informative and is really enjoyable; I highly recommend checking it out. \n\nWhen you're in a stressful situation (such as being in or gearing up for battle) then the body's adrenal response as a 'fight or flight' mechanism [stimulates your colon and rectum to contract](_URL_2_), meaning you're unlikely to need to drop a deuce when you don't have the time to pull up your skirt and drop trou. Accidents probably happened if the individual was experiencing 'digestive discomfort', but that's purely conjecture.\n\nThat's the limit of my experience and reading on the issue, I hope it helps!\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-042008-164934/unrestricted/aa_final_document.pdf", "http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q162/davehyena/ArmourDraw/armordia.jpg", "http://acccn.net/bio/book/bio50/lecnotes/lecnot26.html", "http://brego-weard.com/lib/newosp/Osprey%20-%20General%20Military%20-%20Knight%20-%20The%20Warrior%20and%20World%20of%20Chivalry.pdf", "http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=11455762171&amp;searchurl=curl%3D%26%23x2F%3Bisbn%26%23x2F%3B0312307373%26%23x2F%3B", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Medieval_armour_Vienna_museum.jpg", "http://youtu.be/pqoh0okQ6Ho"]]}
{"q_id": "1uvbja", "title": "The maya treated the lower classes extremely poorly for over 2000 years, why was there no successful rebellion?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uvbja/the_maya_treated_the_lower_classes_extremely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cem23py"], "score": [3], "text": ["Can you elaborate? In what way do you think the Maya lower class was mistreated (and consistently for so long at that)? Is there some particular piece of evidence that led you to that conclusion?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "95yjal", "title": "Why were the Turkish states able to assimilate Anatolia so quickly? Why didn't Persia or the Balkans assimilate?", "selftext": "I understand that the process was not quick and it consisted of suppression of minorities, Turks had greater economic and political opportunity. However, why did this only happen in Anatolia (particularly the Eastern part)? Why didn't this happen in Persia where the Seljuk Turks ruled for over a century or in the Balkans/Mesopotamia under the Ottoman Turks?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/95yjal/why_were_the_turkish_states_able_to_assimilate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3wobgt"], "score": [12], "text": ["I'll start off my answer by pointing out that significant parts of Iran and Afghanistan were in fact Turkified; Azerbaijan, parts of Fars, northeastern Iran, and northern and central Afghanistan. The main reason this happened, I would argue, is that the climate and habitat of these regions were (similarly to Anatolia) suitable to Turkish nomads. [I'm not too knowledgeable on Ottoman rule in the Balkans, so I'll leave that to someone else.[Though I would hazard a guess that Ottoman government was considerably more sedentary than their earlier Turkic colleagues and so were less concerned with the settlement of migrating Turkic tribes.]]\n\nThe reason for this suitability lies in the mix of mountainous and flat terrain. The Turkic nomads who invaded Iran from Central Asia, and eventually moved further into Anatolia, practiced vertical transhumance. This involved the seasonal migration of the nomads' animal herds: down into the valleys/plains during the winter, and up into the lower reaches of the mountains during summer. \nThe reason for the noticeably smaller degree of Turkification in Iran and Afghanistan compared to Anatolia is due to the presence in Iran/Afghanistan of competing groups. Kurds, Lurs, Pashtuns and many other Iranian groups already engaged in forms of nomadic pastoralism and so would have provided competition for space with the incoming Turks. \nAnatolia on the other hand, was populated mostly by urbanised, sedentary Greeks, Armenians, and Syriacs. There likely were some native nomadic groups, but certainly not to the same degree as Iran and Afghanistan. Consequently, the migrating Turks faced relatively little competition during their settlement of Anatolia.\n\nThere were obviously other factors involved, such as the power vacuum in Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert as the regional nobility fled to Constantinople to take part in the Byzantine intrigues (pun definitely intended) to select a new emperor, or in the remarkable ability of these Turkic tribes to assimilate Islamic and Christian ideas into their pre-existing pagan-influenced governing ideology. However, to reiterate it is the suitability of the terrain that I find to be the most important factor in the Turkification of these regions."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ivwrw", "title": "Besieging castles (pre cannons)", "selftext": "1. How long was an average siege \n\n2. How long did it take trebuchets, catapults and ballistae to penetrate a section of wall.\n\n3. If a castle didn't have a moat and undermining was a prospect, how far could sappers dig per day, how close to the wall would they start the project.\n\n4. How many men could adequately defend a castle to make assaulting an unlikely consideration for the attackers. Probably more a ratio of defenders to attackers question.\n\n5. What sort of defenses did the besieged have against such things as siege towers, battering rams, trebuchets and the like.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ivwrw/besieging_castles_pre_cannons/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb8mfke", "cb8n3w2"], "score": [6, 3], "text": ["I'm not an expert on sieges, but here's what I can offer:\n\n1. It would depend entirely on the technology available to both besiegers and besieged, as well as what was besieged. The First Siege of Rome  during the Gothic war lasted a little over a year. When the Mongols under Batu Khan besieged Kiev in 1240 it took about a week. Another factor would be how much help the people inside the castle had on the outside, the size of both forces, morale, etc. I don't think there can be an average.\n\n2. If you're hitting a wall with a trebuchet, then you are most likely aiming it wrong. These were designed to launch objects over walls, not into them. The projectile had a very high arc and could easily clear walls several stories high. For the other two, it would depend on the wall thickness/build, the number of siege weapons attacking a section, and the objects being used. Again, I wouldn't say there is a set time to penetrate a wall. Too many variables.\n\n3. Again, a lot of variables make this hard to quantify. I'm sure there are treatises available in which people set a science to determining this, but those would just be theories based on exhaustible circumstances. Nothing could cover every siege. A main factor would be the technology available. If the attackers could easily create several points of entry into a fortification, then they might not strive for as large of a numerical advantage then if the defenders could easily turn away the siege engines. Another could be morale. A large defending force that has been out of food for weeks could perform much worse than a smaller force with plenty of provisions. In addition, a group of people that have been trapped in poor conditions for over a year might not have that same spirit as men who have only been there for a week.\n\n5. Fire was a pretty nifty thing to use. Siege weapons were built of wood and other flammable materials, so unless they were protected very thoroughly (covered with animal hides, for instance) they could easily go up in smoke. Using fire would be easiest against towers and rams, since they actually came up to the walls and gates. In order to reach the ranged siege weapons, however, the defenders would most likely have to launch a sally. Some men from inside would exit the fortification under favorable circumstances (night time, through a gate people weren't watching very well, etc) and try to cause damage amongst the siege lines. They could burn tents and siege weapons, kill men who weren't aware, and in general make a lot of chaos arrive in already tense conditions. This of course did not always work, and could easily end with the death or capture of all defenders involved.\n\nI'm sure more people could expand on this, or correct me where I'm wrong. I'm just drawing from some general knowledge of the subject, so if you need specific sources I can't help you there.", "1.  A siege went on as long as it needed to.  The two main limiting factors were A) food - both those inside and outside and B) reinforcements arriving.  As long as a fortification can maintain a food supply, they are in great shape to continue withstanding the siege.  The sieging force would be able to last due to living off the land or merchants/hunters showing up with food for sale/barter.  Now, another limiting factor on average siege length is reinforcing numbers.  A sieging army would generally retreat and break off the siege in the event another force showed up.  Remember, the goal is to take the keep/castle/fort but leave it intact for future use as well as to ensure you take as few casualties as possible.  You don't want to lose troops forcing a siege if you can avoid it.  Capitulating was a more common reason for a siege to end.\n\n2.  The ultimate goal of these engines, while destructive, was not necessarily aimed at penetrating and taking down sections of the wall.  While this may be the case in many games, it is not advantageous to destroy a fortification/wall just to gain access.  Many things would be launched within the walls to demoralize the enemy forces, attempting to push them towards capitulation.  There are excerpts that show that the Mongols would launch dead animals or fallen soldiers as a form of mental warfare as well as throwing the threat of disease and plague.  \n\n3.  While undermining was a prospect, it isn't going to be as popular a method unless you want to force the fortification sooner rather than starve them out.  As u/GaiusCassius stated, many variables need to be taken into account.  One of the main things to remember is that castle walls should have foundations that go down pretty far - I know a lot of Czech castles would have the foundations 10-20 feet under the surface.  Now please note that a lot of keeps/donjons are preferred to have foundations built on solid bedrock (Pernstejn castle is an example regarding the keep).  And you have to take into account the soil composition as well as the availability of lumber to shore up the tunnel walls from collapse.\n\n4.  There is no set number to make this a 'golden rule' for defense.  A lot has to do with the design of the castle, the number and type of towers, food stores and resources available, is there a barbican or a moat (wet or dry) as well as the proximity to additional friendly troops.  It is accepted that you could defend a fortification with fewer people than the sieging force, you still have to have enough to defend all possible avenues of breach - is there only one approach for a ram, or do you have exposed walls that could be reach by tower or ladder?  Spearmen would be the most prevalent forces to repel attackers OVER walls because of the additional reach.  Halberds, spears and pole arms would see extensive use in fortification defense due to ease of use and simple construction.\n\n5.  Defenses available would depend upon the time period, but generally the best things to have would be food and clean water.  As long as you can outlast the besieging force, you were able to repel many attacks.  Trebuchets and catapults are best defended against by trying to hide and avoid the projectiles.  Rams would be restricted due to fortification design to reduce the number and direction of approaches to any gates.  Castle design works to make sharp turns, under barbicans with murder holes, all in an attempt to destroy the ram before it made it all the way to the keep.  Siege towers, while popularized by the Total War series and RotK, are expensive to construct, bulky and difficult to keep moving.  The best defenses available would be a combination of catapults to throw boulders, fire arrows as well as boiling oil to set the base on fire.  Again, some form of pole arm is best to repel attacks that make it to the wall.  \n\ntl;dr - there are easy things that can be done to protect against sieges but they get glorified by Hollywood and games to make it seem easy and a fast thing.  Remember, sieges take time and had fewer forced/pitched battles and more breaking-off of the siege or capitulation by the defending force."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "ch7j4u", "title": "Why do we discuss Ancient Greece in terms of city-states?", "selftext": "Athens was the capital of Attica with many other cities in it. Similar for Sparta.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ch7j4u/why_do_we_discuss_ancient_greece_in_terms_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eur0mpf"], "score": [5], "text": ["Many Greek city-states had slightly different setups, but their basic structure was the same: a single *astu* (city-center) with administrative control over a *chora* (territory). Athens controlled a large *chora* (Attica) as the result of *synoekismos,* or synoecism as the Brits would say. This is the process by which, usually early on in the Iron Age, various smaller population centers came together (literally \"housed\" together) to form a larger political unit: a *polis*, comprised of *astu* and *chora.* Why one center became the *astu* vs another was usually dependent on population, military might, religious importance, or the like. In Attica, the smaller population centers were organized into districts (\"demes\"). Some examples are the Piraeus (the harbor), or Sunion (a temple center in the south of Attica). These were not \"cities\" in that they had no independent authority in the business of Athens the polis. You should think of them as neighborhoods within a modern city, with some localized civic or religious structures."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7xthvq", "title": "How did Multi-track sound recording come to be and subsequently widely used?", "selftext": "I also am interested into how this shaped the set up of the typical recording session. How did this affect the way in which sound engineers would rig up the equipment and if so, what were the knock on effects of this?   \n\nThanks :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xthvq/how_did_multitrack_sound_recording_come_to_be_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dubbk18"], "score": [3], "text": ["During World War II, some technically-minded people listening to German radio were puzzled: was Hitler really demanding that the Berlin Symphony Orchestra play Beethoven symphonies at 3am in the morning? It was a puzzle, because the sound was pristine, without the clicks and pops you get from a vinyl disc - at that time, the only option for playing pre-recorded material that the Americans and English knew about. They couldn't figure out how the Germans were doing it until, after the war had been essentially won, and the Allies gained access to the premises of Radio Frankfurt in Bad Neuheim, which had been broadcasting the Beethoven symphonies. One American Major who was a classical music fan and curious about German radio, Jack Mullin, decided to head to Bad Neuheim, and discovered that they had a new method of recording to Magnetophon - to magnetic tape - which crucially had an AC bias that enabled almost pristine recording quality.\n\nPrevious to this, recording had essentially been straight to vinyl disc, which was more limited in a variety of ways - once the groove had been laid down by the transcription needle, it was that way forever. However, magnetic tape could be altered - you could tape over it. \n\nAfter the war, Mullin worked with the company Ampex to replicate the technology they'd seen in Frankfurt. Initially using reels of tape taken from Bad Neuheim, and on prototype technology, they pre-recorded radio shows for Bing Crosby, a major star at the time; after Crosby gave the company $50,000 with no strings attached to perfect the technology, they released the first commercially available American tape recording devices in 1948, which basically instantly became the standard. \n\nCrosby gave an Ampex tape machine to his friend Les Paul, a jazz guitarist (and inveterate tinkerer who worked with the Gibson guitar company on the guitar brand that bears his name). Paul, like Mullin, had noticed the German broadcasts at 3am; he was working at Armed Forces Radio in Europe during the war, and he couldn't figure out how the Germans were doing it. So upon getting an Ampex tape machine, Paul was very keen to play with the technology, and discovered that 'overdubbing' was possible; you could record yourself playing along with a previous recording - as a singer you could harmonise with yourself. So you get recordings like Les Paul's recordings with Mary Ford (e.g., ['How High The Moon' from 1951](_URL_0_)), which were exceptionally popular, and which showed Paul playing several guitar parts at once, and Ford harmonising with herself. \n\nThis was effectively multi-track recording in one sense - there are multiple tracks of music recorded one after another - but it's not multi-track recording in the modern-sense, because there weren't multiple separate tracks of tape for each instrument - there was just one tape, with different performances literally dubbed over pre-existing performances.\n\nAn Ampex employee, Ross Snyder, heard these Les Paul and Mary Ford records and thought that the overdubbing method they used lead to a decline in sound quality, and so he aimed at developing a tape machine that had multiple tape heads that were in sync with each other; this was a complicated project with a lot of technological constraints - getting different tracks to line up with each other and making sure that the tape was at the right speed etc was something of a problem. But in 1956, the Ampex Sel-Sync was put on the market, an eight-track recording device. The Sel-Sync itself was generally seen as impractical for recording studios (it was enormous and heavy and glitchy), but other multi-track recording devices came into vogue in the late 1950s. \n\nIn England, someone at EMI who had seen the Magnetophons at Bad Neuheim had also had the same idea as Mullin, and they had unveiled the EMI BTR1 in 1947, a single track tape machine. After some improvements to the design (the BTR2 in 1952), and due to the coming demand for stereo recording, EMI put together a BTR3 in 1956 which had two tracks; however, these were not used for multi-track recording, per se, until just before the arrival of the Beatles in 1962, when a modified BTR3 at Abbey Road dubbed the 'Twin-Track' was used in order to do rudimentary multi-tracking. However, in late 1963 the Beatles began using a Telefunken M1 four-track recording machine made in Germany (which had been on the market since 1957, but which EMI experimented with extensively before allowing its use (Telefunken had also built the Magnetophons in WWII). In 1965 the Beatles started using a Studer J37 four-tape track recorder which was more suited to studio multi-tracking experimentation, and (a modified version of which) was used on *Revolver* and *Sgt Peppers* - the albums where multi-track recording most obviously became an artform in itself, with musicians creating sounds using the studio and the multi-track recorder as an instrument in itself.\n\nEdit: To deal with your second question - for a sound engineer it would have depended on what kind of music they were recording. Firstly, in the mid-to-late 1950s, Frank Sinatra was still recording basically on a single microphone, with the orchestra simply softer than him in the background. In contrast, in more or less the same time period, there was a maze of cables on the floor of the Motown studio at Hitsville USA (thus why the studio was dubbed the 'snakepit') indicating that there were leads and microphones going to different instruments set at different volumes - recording desks that mixed the volume and frequency of different instruments with each other already existed and were more common in pop rather than in orchestral contexts (especially because the levels of rock instruments could vary so much, and needed further control). Basically, once multi-track recording became a thing, it enabled engineers to record as pristine and perfect a sound of an individual instrument as they could, and multi-track recording multiplied the time it took for a band to record a song in the studio, with each part being looked over in detail to try and perfect it; often, when a band was playing together before the era of multi-tracking (or in the early years of multi-tracking), the band recording was basically it, perhaps with overdubs. But as things progressed, musicians would first lay down a basic track and then elaborate on it later, or record instruments one by one. So this meant that the original basic track didn't have to be as perfectly balanced and mixed as it had to be in the pre-multi-track days, as it was likely going to be elaborated on, and that musicians and producers could think more carefully about how the music sounded on record in context, and arrange the music accordingly. Geoff Emerick, who was the engineer on much of the Beatles' records, speaks of his disillusionment on working on the Beatles' stuff in the later era when multi-tracking was a thing in his book *Here, There And Everywhere* - he thought that the broad array of possible options and the pursuit of perfection led to a sort of paralysis, and made working in the studio with the Beatles much more difficult.\n\nSources: \n\n* *Recording The Beatles* by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan\n* *Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story Of Recorded Music* by Greg Milner \n* *Here There And Everywhere* by Geoff Emerick"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkGf1GHAxhE"]]}
{"q_id": "a4crh2", "title": "Were people in the old west (1865-1890) able to listen to classical music? would the average joe be familiar with composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin etc...?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4crh2/were_people_in_the_old_west_18651890_able_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebduezz", "ebdul9l"], "score": [50, 2], "text": ["Depends on who that \"average joe\" was. People played much more music for their own pleasure than we do today; small towns did have \"opera houses\" -- which while they didn't often play Verdi, did have aspirations to European culture.  So, for example, we have records that in 1877, an opera by Balfe, *The Bohemian Girl,* was performed at the Belvidere Theatre in Central City, Colorado. This today little known light opera seems to have been a favorite in the old West opera houses, along with *The Mikado.*\n\nConsider the piano player-- he might be self taught, or he might be an Eastern swell who'd come out west, doing his Teddy Roosevelt.  A remarkably diverse range of men and women sought adventure and fortune on the American frontier-- the French nobleman, the Marquis de Mor\u00e8s, a graduate of St Cyr (the French military academy-- he was a classmate of Petain)- came to the Dakotas to make a bundle in cattle ranching. He and his wealthy American wife would have been familiar with the \"greatest hits\" of contemporary European culture; you can say \"he's not an 'average Joe\", but . . .\n\nWhat I'd say is: revisit your idea of who \"average Joe\" is in the \"old West\". He might be a former Confederate soldier. He might be a former slave. He might be a Chinese railroad worker. He might be British with a fancy title. He might be a Methodist who'd know all the verses of popular hymns but have no idea of Mozart. He might be a Mexican or South American working on ranches (essentially all of the ranching technology and terminology that we think of as \"western\" is Spanish in origin, that \"buckaroo\" is actually a *vaquero)* and playing guitar for himself and his friends.\n\nSome of these people couldn't read . . . some of them could play Chopin. It's a very diverse crew, much more so than legend would have it.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nsources:\n\n[Marquis De Mores: Dakota Capitalist, French Nationalist](_URL_4_)\n\n[Chateau de Mores State Historic Site](_URL_3_)\n\nPrairie Fever: [British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830\u20131890](_URL_2_)\n\n[Kwangtung to Big Sky: The Chinese in Montana, 1864-1900](_URL_5_)\n\n[Colorado's Historic Opera Houses](_URL_1_)\n\n[Spanish Influence in the United States: Economic Aspects](_URL_6_)\n\n[The History of the Vaquero](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;", "Thanks this helps a lot!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.americancowboy.com/ranch-life-archive/history-vaquero", "http://www.operapronto.info/mementos/exh_houses/exh_houses.html", "http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1698&amp;context=annals-of-iowa", "http://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/chateau/index.html", "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6028873-marquis-de-mores", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/4519115", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/2507307"], []]}
{"q_id": "avvo8z", "title": "Why were there only two American Aces in the Vietnam War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/avvo8z/why_were_there_only_two_american_aces_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ehi4mwi"], "score": [42], "text": ["Remember that becoming an ace requires downing five enemy aircraft, and to down enemy aircraft the enemy needs to have some in the first place.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe VPAF had only started to receive jet fighters in 1964, and their aircraft were generally less numerous and less capable than what the Americans were fielding. Because the aims of the VPAF were exclusively defensive in nature and their supply of both manpower and materiel was very limited, they would deploy their aircraft very conservatively. They generally would only sortie their fighters when the situation was very much in their favor, and tactics were designed around ambushing strike formations, with forcing the attackers to drop their ordnance early and abort the mission being just as effective as downing an American aircraft. A more typical tactic involved having fighters appear away from a strike package to draw away escorts and then having another group pop in under the radar and make a pass on the strike aircraft themselves. While the typical strike aircraft (F-105) was nominally faster than the MiG-17, it could only outrun the MiG-17 once it had jettisoned its payload and thus ruined the mission. The MiGs, on the other hand, didn't exactly stay around to fight - all they had to do was ruin the mission, so a typical \"attack\" could consist of one pass on the strike aircraft followed by a rapid withdrawal by both the attacking and decoy aircraft.\n\nBecause of that, opportunities for American fighters to actually engage the VPAF were few and far between. Making this worse, particularly early on, was the tendency of American forces to rotate pilots through the theater to spread experience and the generally poor air-to-air combat training provided early in the war. So while encountering an enemy fighter was already a rare thing for American pilots in Vietnam, the rotation of aircrews meant that it would be rare to stay in the theater long enough to encounter enough VPAF fighters to even have the potential to make ace, and poor air-to-air combat training meant that you were less likely to be successful at downing an enemy fighter before it was able to disengage and escape."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bftfgp", "title": "What should one look out for when selecting historical works to read, especially ones on controversial matters?", "selftext": "Hello, as of late I have broadened my reading from my own fields into history a bit, and while I am enjoying it I am faced with a new challenge; When you read various books on controversial figures such as, say, Lenin, its hard not to feel that the biographer's opinions are always going to get in the way of the ideal goal of objectivity, sometimes more so, sometimes less so. What should I look for when choosing books? The authors academic credentials? Because it seems as if a lot of historical works are written by journalists and the like who don't necessarily have those. Is that always a de-merit? \n\nOr, basically: How does one effectively go about judging the accuracy of a historical work? (Preferrably *before* reading them)\n\nSorry if this question is outside the boundaries of the subreddit's rules.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bftfgp/what_should_one_look_out_for_when_selecting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["elgaya1"], "score": [3], "text": ["Brilliant question. \n\nSo it can often be very hard to know quite what to look out for with works of history, particularly when you are new to the field and can\u2019t spot the problems. \n\nAcademic qualification is perhaps a good starting place, yet, as you note, many books are written by journalists without formal training in academic history. This is not in itself an indicator of bad history as many such writers do produce very high quality work (Max Hastings for example). Instead I would look more broadly for what I suppose you could call the competency and dependability of the writer. \n\nThere are a number of ways you can check this. Firstly, reviews are brilliant. I would recommend checking feedback a particular book has received since publication, academic journals, and some websites newspapers will run review sections which can often prove helpful. Often books will also feature appraisals on the front/rear cover of the text itself, however I would approach these with caution - remember this is advertising, and I would be sceptical of such appraisals unless you are familiar with the quality of work of the individual writing it. \n\nNext, it is worth considering various matters, publisher, format, style, quality of print, etc. These are all often overlooked but can indicate the quality of a work of history.  It has become increasingly easy to self publish bad history in recent years, either online or in print, so it helps to be wary. If something looks off, be wary. \n\nIn a similar vein, read the synopsis of a book, this will usually give you a condensed view into the book, its themes and central arguments. Do these seem plausible? Well presented? \n\nTry reading the introduction. This is of course not always possible, especially if not buying a book within a physical bookshop, but is very handy. The introduction, like the synopsis, will offer a glimpse into the soul of the book. Here you should be able to see the quality of the writing which will be displayed throughout, and this can be a brilliant test of character. \n\nAt the end of the day, these tips can help, but are not full proof. There is always going to be bad history out there which is not that credible. Often it can sneak through undetected, and can appear entirely legitimate to the untrained eye. In fact, even \u2018good history\u2019 is not without its flaws sometimes, and often a brilliant work may be betrayed by its style. It is often hard to tell, and if you are to spend much time reading history, you will certainly come across some questionable, however, there are some general rules which you should consider when reading which may help when you do come across such things. \n\nAlways engage critically when you read history. Remember that the author is constructing an argument when they write, and has a point of view they want to convince you of. When writing history, the historians can choose which facts to select, and how to present them, all history is biased and subjective in some way. However, this does not mean all history is created equal, some is better than others. Some writers will make their subjectivity clear, and acknowledge their role in constructing the narrative you will be reading, while others will not, they may present as objective undeniable fact that which they have subjectively interpreted. Keep this in mind while reading. Ask questions of the author, does a claim make sense? Is it backed up convincingly? Does the evidence they cite actually support their claims? Why have they portrayed something in a certain light? Personally I make notes in the margins of history books I am reading through to aid in this process. These issues can at first be tough, but as your wealth of knowledge grows, it does become easier. If something sticks out, pick at it much like a loose thread, and see where it leads. \n\nWith this in mind I would like to note that having a particular stance when history is not necessarily a bad thing, it depends upon how this manifests itself. Objectivity relates more to being \u201cfair to the evidence\u201d than being neutral to the topic, if you catch my meaning. To be fair to a figure like Lenin does not mean to be without judgement, but rather to have an opinion predicated upon the evidence. However, evidence is often complicated and vast, and can support many conclusions. One could be positive, or negative, about Lenin, and while neither can be considered undeniably true, both can \u2018objective\u2019. \n\nAs I hope to have pointed out, it can all be rather complicated, and it\u2019s something we all struggle with. Good luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ib0ed", "title": "Were number systems written down before words and language?", "selftext": "For instance, did the Sumerians or Egyptians develop a written numeral system to keep track of money and transactions before they started writing down cuniform? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ib0ed/were_number_systems_written_down_before_words_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb2rn4r", "cb2x4at"], "score": [6, 7], "text": ["OP, if you don't get a satisfactory answer here, try cross-posting to /r/AskAnthropology", "Sumerian cuneiform has its origin in accounting systems, particularly those used by temples to keep track of goods like cattle and grain. A sign could represent a type of good, and the number with a system of tick marks next to it. Cuneiform symbols originated as mnemonics/pictograms, which were subsequently abstracted, and the representational/mnemonic function of the symbols became more sophisticated over time, developing into a more complete system. [This website](_URL_0_) has a more detailed explanation of how the system developed.\n\nSome kind of abstract numerical representation system does seem to predate what we think of as written language, but the development of written language was very gradual--it wouldn't be accurate to mark a strict cutoff before which proto-writing could be considered merely a mnemonic system and after which it could be considered \"fully-fledged writing\". John Hayes, in the *Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts*, points out that written Sumerian in all likelihood is an incomplete representation of the language as it was spoken, especially phonologically.\n\nWriting may have developed quite differently when it arose in other places--the earliest Chinese writing is from inscriptions on bones used in pyromancy, not accounting. The exact relationship of Egyptian hieroglyphics to cuneiform is still debated, and I don't know if anything is known about the development of Mayan writing, so it's hard to say if the method of development of writing in Mesopotamia out of an accounting system represents a general tendency or a peculiarity.\n\nAnd, of course, the written accounting tools used by the ancient Mesopotamians were still pretty basic--mathematical notation and double-entry bookkeeping are both much more recent inventions. What they had were pretty much just counting systems.\n\nHope some of that helps."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html"]]}
{"q_id": "dhgpfg", "title": "Why was Iran/Persia never colonized?", "selftext": "I know the british had a monopoly over the tobacco trade in the region, but why was it never invaded by the British or the French or another colonial power and made an actual colony?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dhgpfg/why_was_iranpersia_never_colonized/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f3ogaqd"], "score": [112], "text": ["While the area that is modern day Iran was indeed never colonized the way that India was, the country was picked apart bit by bit in the 1800s and what was left was more or less defacto colonized by Russia and Great Britain. Although there were resources to be had, nothing was quite so valuable as to engage a Great Power in a series of costly and strategically risky colonization efforts.\n\nAs a starting point, a huge area of the middle east, centered in Persia, was controlled by the Safavid Empire through much of the early modern era. Similar to the Ottomans or the Mughals, they had a strong government, a standing army made of slaves similar to the effective Ottoman Janissary system, and in the later years a modern gunpowder based musketeer force.\n\nDuring the early to mid 1700s, Persia was on a decline. Indian silk was booming in Europe (and drawing some uncomfortable looks from colonizing powers), causing disruption to the economy. Huge swaths of Safavid territory were lost to the Ottomans and to Russia, in a series of wars launched by Peter the Great. A brief resurgence in the mid century would actually see the territory reconquered, but the country subsequently declined again after their ruler was assassinated, their economic woes continued, and the Safavid dynasty ended. By the turn of the century, as the colonizing powers strengthened their hold on India and the East, what would become modern day Iran was much diminished compared to it's past Imperial self.\n\nThe 1800s weren't all that great for Iranian empires either. More wars with the Russians would lose them most of the Caucasus, Amernia, and some northern cities. A series of wars with Great Britain would lose Herat and eastern territories which were heavily populated and filled with useful agricultural products like saffron. At this point Iran could more or less see the writing on the wall.\n\nIn response to Iran's growing losses and the obvious influence of Britain and Russia, the new Qajar Dynasty ended up more or less acting as puppets to the great powers. Colonization was costly and intensive, and intervention by any power in Iran could have drawn a response from one of the other powers. With this knowledge, and with new diplomatic ties to the west, successive Qajar monarchs sought to modernize Iran, and play western powers off each other, to varying degrees of success. Iran would remain nominally independent, but more or less entirely existing because it lay in both Russian and British spheres of influence. Neither Power willing to commit to an invasion, but both with significant influence in the region.\n\nIran's situation was precarious, but hadn't changed for generations of Qajar rulers. Just to make things interesting, as the world rapidly approached the end of \"classical\" colonization coming after World War II, oil was found in the Middle East in the early 1900s (again drawing those uncomfortable looks from hungry Western powers). Almost concurrently, several terrible famines struck the region and millions of Iranians died. The hundred years of more or less \"stable\" rule quickly crumbled in a rapid-fire series of events.\n\nIran found itself under (mostly neutral) occupation by British, Russian and Ottoman forces during WWI. The Russians suffered their own revolution, the Ottomans collapsed, and the British unsuccessfully tried to setup a protectorate. The resultant interwar years were filled with several internal revolutions and coups, a brief constitutional monarchy, a military dictatorship, but ultimately independent, Iranian rule. After several hundred years of conflict with western powers, Iran was finally occupied in WWII by a joint invasion of the Soviet Union and Great Britain. I do find it somewhat telling that the only time an occupation like this happened was with the agreement of both British and Russian forces.\n\nHowever, this wasn't an occupation with the intent to colonize. Iran had just made it just under the bar for that particular form of control. Instead, Iran got to be the very first theater in a different kind of geopolitical power game, the Cold War. The resultant Iran Crisis of 1946 over the withdrawal of the Soviet forces would end up with the eventual relinquishing of Soviet control in the area, and (with some words from the USA) the Iranians would even get to keep their oil.\n\nI would tend to frame what happened to Iran, not as \"avoiding\" colonization, but merely getting by until colonization wasn't the preferred method for influence in a country. Iran suffered a CIA lead Coup in 1953. To this day, even after the Revolution of 1979, Iran continues to walk a line between spheres of power. It's not \"free\" from them, no country is really, but it maintains independence by being costly to invade, and being willing to push and pull a little to play the major powers off each other. I don't find it hard to think of some topical examples where this continues right into modern day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4531yj", "title": "What was Moscow's relationship with Ceausescu before the Romanian revolution? What role, if any, did they play in the revolution?", "selftext": "I have a Romanian friend who grew up in the 1980's outside of Timisoara. His parents were dissidents who had been involved in the opposition to Ceausescu for many years. He tells me that the Romanian revolution was really a coup d'etat orchestrated by the second-level officials with the support of Moscow--and most of what we saw on TV in the press was actually orchestrated by westerners. What was Moscow's relation with Ceaucescu at the time? Did Moscow play a secret role in organizing the revolution? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4531yj/what_was_moscows_relationship_with_ceausescu/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czuyzpb"], "score": [5], "text": ["Ceausescu was something of a maverick in the Eastern Bloc, which is why your friend probably thinks that. Relations between Brezhnev/Andropov and Ceausescu were cool at best and outright frigid at worst, although they never reached the point of de facto breaking off relations, unlike in Beijing. He denounced the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He kept relations with both Israel and the PLO and helped push for peace between Israel and Egypt. He kept up cordial relations with the Chinese, much to the extreme irritation of the Kremlin-Ceausescu personally modeled his personality cult off of Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung. He openly recognized West Germany and was the first Warsaw Pact country to independently invite a US President to visit. (Nixon would later use Ceaucescu as a conduit for backdoor negotiations with the Vietnamese and while in Bucharest, consulted with him on his desire to open relations with China.) He refused to endorse the invasion of Afghanistan, and participated in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which the Soviet Union boycotted. \n\nWith that being said, however, I don't find it quite plausible. To be sure, if there is one intelligence service in the world which **nothing** should be put beyond, it's Russia's, no matter who rules in the Kremlin. Westerners often have a hard time grasping just how tactically skilled and utterly amoral they are. But Moscow wasn't able to react in places with a much larger KGB presence and more strategic value, like East Germany, in 1989, as none other than Vladimir Putin points out quite vividly. (\"Moscow was silent.\") I don't think they could have orchestrated a coup in a place like Romania where the security service in practice watched out for the KGB as much as anybody else. Moreover, the 1989 Romanian Revolution wasn't a reaction against just Ceausescu, in contrast to previous coup attempts such as that in 1984(I think), but against Communism as a whole. No matter how many Communists joined the opposition, the ideology was strongly discredited all over the Warsaw Pact by 1989. Gorbachev thought he could keep the genie in the bottle. But the Romanian Communists who joined the Revolution didn't, as seen by their subsequent economic and social liberalization policies. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "z2fs9", "title": "How Accurate/Bias was \"Century of the Self\"?", "selftext": "I've just recently watched \"Century of the Self\" about Edward Bernays influence on 20th century America in business and politics and the field of psychology.  I feel like I know everything about the false dichotomy of party polarization and the current political atmosphere now.  THEY'RE ALL LYING PROPAGANDA MACHINES!\n\nOr... did I just drink a film-maker's kool-aid?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z2fs9/how_accuratebias_was_century_of_the_self/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c60vyj5", "c60xhhg", "c60yvf1", "c60zcsj", "c610ujk"], "score": [9, 3, 3, 13, 2], "text": ["I eagerly await the more informed responses here, but a key aspect to this history is the role Bernays played in the cult around his own personality. What I mean by this is that as a master of PR, Bernays was very willing and adept in talking up his own influence. I'd take the depictions of Bernays with a grain of salt, but it's a fantastic documentary. ", "Not really one to comment on this, but if you haven't seen his (Adam Curtis') other more recent works The Trap and The Power of Nightmares you absolutely should.  Excellent stuff.  ", "Have you read Propaganda? It's pretty damning. There's a link to a free PDF copy if you follow the bibliography/works cited section at the bottom of the Wikipedia page. ", "Not commenting directly on \"Century of the Self\", but Adam Curtis:\n\nMost all of his documentaries start with \"This is a story about...\"\n\nKeep that in mind. It's a story. It's a particular account of events too complex to explain otherwise. It may be compelling, even undeniable. It may be well researched, he may have universal consensus backing his thesis or smoking gun evidence to back it up.\n\nBut it's just a story.\n\nI like Adam Curtis, I think he illuminates interesting aspects of our culture and recent history. I agree with him on a lot of his views. But I'd still endorse some healthy scepticism when watching his work. There's often a lot he overlooks or neglects (because if he included it, his \"story\" wouldn't run).\n\n(I really wanna make a documentary about Adam Curtis that starts with \"This is a story about a documentary maker who believed the chaos of historical events could be explained in a simple way, and the key to doing so lay in understanding the ideologies of those involved...\")", "Why don't you tell us you own opinion in more detail? Just because you aren't a \"pro\" doesn't mean you can't think. Also, please consider posting a review to /r/HistoryResources"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1aep2u", "title": "In the 60s, was japan's economy expected to overtake the usa's by now? ", "selftext": "Much like china's is expected to take over the us as world's largest economy by 2050\n\nThis is probably more of an economic question but thought I'll try my luck here anyway", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1aep2u/in_the_60s_was_japans_economy_expected_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8wq96n", "c8wroz9", "c8wrv85", "c8wsmlc", "c8wstcc", "c8wu0l1"], "score": [25, 2, 3, 28, 3, 8], "text": ["In the 1980's, this was certainly a thing, but not in the 1960's. See for example [this book](_URL_0_) (from 1993, when the Japanese bubble had already burst.) The subtitle, The Myth of the Invincible Japanese, indicates that fear of Japanese power was a theme at the time. You don't write a book to counter a myth when there is no myth.\n\n", "When developing countries are rapidly industrializing and coming from far behind, they can enjoy  from rapid growth rates and their productivity can grow in huge leaps. When they get close to the level of western economies, their growth and competitive advantage will slow down. \n\nJapan reached the western level of economic development but it has has smaller population than US and it's shrinking. Only way they could have overtaken US would be if their competitiveness and productivity would have kept increasing much faster rate than US once they  reached US level of sophistication. That did not happen. There was widespread fear of Japanese economy back in the 70's and 80's when they seemed to out-manufacture US in all important sectors. They were first to  use robots in large scale and they had huge government projects like [Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS)](_URL_0_) that were supposed to revolutionize computing. That fear was overblown.\n\nChina is different story. They have bigger population than US. Once their economy develops even close to the level of western economies, they will be bigger than US. China will be bigger than US unless something bad happens. \n\nps. European Union has been the  the biggest economy in the world since 2007. ", "No, it was not in GDP, but definitely in GDP Per Capita, Japan's population isn't and has never been big enough (In the past 100 years) to take over the US in total GDP, it's population just isn't big enough.", "One minor note: Realistically, China will probably become the world's largest economy much sooner than 2050. The OECD thinks it could be [within the next 4-5 years](_URL_0_), although that's almost certainly jumping the gun. The U.S. National Intelligence Council [thinks it'll be around 2030](_URL_1_) if present trends hold. \n\nThey're by no means guaranteed to -- there are a lot of problems in China's economy that are currently being hidden by their growth rate, and the U.S. is likely entering a natural resources boom -- but either way, 2050 is probably unrealistic. All other things being equal, China and India *should* be the largest economies on the planet if for no reason other than the size of their internal markets. I feel like India gets lost in this debate a lot.\n\nAnd all of this might turn out to be yet another prediction that never comes true. Macroeconomic tea-reading has never been humanity's strong suit.\n\nEchoing the others here, [predictions about Japan's overtaking the U.S.](_URL_2_) were more a feature of the late 1970s and 1980s. The Harvard professor Ezra Vogel's [*Japan as Number One: Lessons for America*](_URL_3_) was published in 1979, for example, and is a somewhat entertaining read in hindsight. Not because Vogel got everything wrong -- a lot of his analysis is spot-on -- but because it's a decent warning against academic overconfidence. ", "Besides what people before me have already said, an interesting side bit: the USSR was expected to overtake the US because they had rapid industrializatrion. In the standard economic textbook of the time, by Samuelson, it was predicted that the US and USSRwould achieve equal GDP by between 1977 and 1995 depending on assumption. Subsequent edition kept pushing the date further and further", "As LaoBa said, this was an expectation of the 1980s, not so much the 60s and 70s. It peaked roughly from 1982-1992, cycling through an initial long phase of \"The Japanese are infiltrating our political and economic system and/or buying it wholesale,\" hit several notes of \"We beat them, this is a betrayal of the rightful outcomes of conquerors,\" and finally was heading into \"Japan and the United States will inevitably go to war with one another over domination of the pacific/world/etc.\" in current events pseudo-academic literature (journalists, mid-grade military officers, etc as authors) and news articles until the Nikkei crashed.\n\nSources: I put \"Japan\" into the Washington Post, LA Times, and New York Times archives and read most of what was published from 1980 to 1992 for my Historical Research Methods thesis, \"US Perceptions of Japan in Newspapers, 1980-1992\", and then expanded on it for my East Asian Studies thesis \"Comparative Jingoism: Pseudo-Academic Literature on the threats of Japan 1980-1992 vs China 1997-2009,\" both undergraduate works (my BA is in Polisci and East Asian Studies with a minor in History). Also, Amakudari by Colignon  &  Usui; MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson; and Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Industrial Policy for High Technology by Daniel Okimoto from my highly Nihoncentric East Asian Politics  &  Society course taught by an eccentric former salaryman that used to joke about what we were drinking according to time of the month."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/Japanophobia-The-Myth-Invincible-Japanese/dp/0812919076"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer"], [], ["http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/09/china-overtake-us-four-years-oecd", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/10/chinese-economy-america-tectonic-shift", "http://travel.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/weekinreview/03port.html?_r=0", "http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Number-One-Lessons-America/dp/1583484108"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3iybpu", "title": "Why did none of the southern states have ballots for Lincoln in the 1860 election?", "selftext": "I found something odd [here](_URL_0_) where it looks like that none of the states that later became the CSA had the option to vote for Lincoln, why is that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3iybpu/why_did_none_of_the_southern_states_have_ballots/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cukrkyd"], "score": [4], "text": ["Something to keep in mind is that printed, government-supplied ballots happened relatively late in our political process. In 1860, one would vote by writing out a ballot for a candidate or slate of candidates, or alternatively by using a ballot that was printed in a newspaper or similar publication or handed out by a candidate's supporters at the polls. So Lincoln not appearing on ballots in the South is fairly normal; he was so unpopular there that few people would have dared to write him in or publish a ballot for him. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860#Results_by_state"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "295ex1", "title": "What unified the Austrian-Hungary Empire - Religion, Culture, etc.?", "selftext": "It certainly wasn't linguistics, and I'm suspecting that it was religion. The Austrians and Hungarians were Catholic, and so were the Croats who were part of the Empire. Bits of Italy and other Catholic nations were as well. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/295ex1/what_unified_the_austrianhungary_empire_religion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cihstdc", "cihtdke"], "score": [20, 5], "text": ["It was conquest! Always conquest.\n\n The Austrian Empire, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had its roots with the Habsburgs, and the Duchy of Austria. Austria and Vienna lay on trade roots coming east out of Italy, North out of the Balkans, and South and East out of the Baltics/Ukrainian steppe. Throughout the Renaissance and Early Modern period, this made Austria wealthy and powerful. The Habsburgs, Austria's ruling family, also gained tremendous political power across most of Germany, they became the Emperor of all of Germany. Austria used this power and prestige to spread their rule across southern and eastern Germany. They joined the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary to the Austrian one, giving Austria de facto rule over the area, while northern Italy was drug into Austria through a series of wars, and an advantageous marriage in Spain, which for a time unified the Austrian and Spanish thrones. \n\nBut all this power, wealth, and prestige also made Austria a target. It waged several notable campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, who after toppling the Byzantines continued to push north through the Balkans. Austria continued to strengthen its southern border, as well as Hungary's southern border, to prevent [serious Turkish invasions](_URL_0_). Thus Austria began to see itself as the traditional defender of Christianity in the Balkans, as well as the defender of Europe against the Islamic Turks. \n\nSo really, Austria, and later Austro-Hungary, was a polyglot empire because Austria expanded in such a haphazard and seemingly random way. The most important connecting thread was always \"what is best for the Habsburgs?\" who sat at the top of the whole pyramid. In the Renaissance, it made Austria a dynamic political and military power, which hung a curtain across southern Germany. But following the Thirty Years Wars, and especially after the Napoleonic Wars, the multitude of nationalities, religions, political and social ideas, and ethnic alignments all made Austria a strange and unhealthy nation. The Habsburgs continued to rule as if the Austrian Empire were still the \"Habsburg Lands\", which you sometimes see printed on older maps of the Renaissance. This led to the breakdown of Austria, which really culminated in the July Crisis of 1914, which directly caused the conflict which would destroy the Austrian (at that point Austro-Hungarian) Empire in 1918. ", "Are you talking about the 16th century event of \"unification\" under a Habsburg monarch, or the event of the 19th century organisation of the Empire into Austria-Hungary?\nOr maybe are you asking in general what was the reason why so many different nations stayed together for so long?\n\n\n(I just want to here mention that i can't speak for the Bohemian part of the Empire, but mostly for the Croatian and i suspect Hungarian part.)\n\nWell anyway, generally speaking one of the main reasons is the threat of the Ottoman Empire. After the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 Turks conquered a large part of the then independant Kingdom of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia and the last Hungarian king died without an heir. With the prospect of the Ottoman (Muslim) conqest, the nobles in the wesern parts of the Hungarian Kingdom elected Ferdinand Habsburg of neighbouring Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor)  as the king to protect them. (Not to say that all Hungarians chose Habsburgs over the Ottomans. Quite the opposite, many supported the Ottoman backed Hungarian king in a kind of civil war)\n\nWhat followed were several centuries of fierce continuous wars, skirsmishes and border conflicts between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans for the area. For the nations on the borders, the Empire's  protection was desperatly needed despite all the bad things it brought with it, and as such few attempts of splitting up were ever considered.\n\nIt lasted until around beginning of 18th century (e.g. we can take the marking point the 1699 treaty of Karlowitz)  when the Ottoman threat was almost gone and most of the areas of old kingdom back in Habsburg hands, and by then we already have a well established state that the strict feudal system of law and inheritance made de jure right of Habsburgs which few had the power, legality or will to attempt to dissolve.\n\nSince then fast forward couple of decades and with Enlightment, Apsolutism, rise of citizenry and later nationalism, Napoleon, ( and with the outside threat of Ottoman Empire gone) the Empire entered into a series of years of political turmoil, which eventually resulted in formation of Austro-Hungary dual empire. Still then and there, as you noticed, were not so many common factors between the nations in the Empire and I would say the long tradition of the Empire had been the main reason why no main political party thought about dissolution of the empire (together with the fear of being fiercly prosecuted for the mention of it of course) It needed a world war to finally break it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vienna"], []]}
{"q_id": "9h1sio", "title": "Do we know why there is nothing left of the Circus Maximus in Rome when compared to many other structures from the area?", "selftext": "While most buildings from that era are literally in ruins, some have survived remarkably well. So why is the Circus Maximus so completely gone when it was such a popular place? Or is it gone *because* it was such a popular place?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9h1sio/do_we_know_why_there_is_nothing_left_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e68kmsw"], "score": [27], "text": ["Contrary to popular belief, more of the Circus Maximus survives than one might think.  The \"floor\" level of the race track is now about 10 meters below ground level, and has never been systematically excavated.  The *spina* (the central median of the track) was partially dug in 1587 on the orders of Pope Sixtus V. They were looking for the great Egyptian obelisks which had once adorned it, and found two of them: the bronze age granite obelisk taken by Augustus from Heliopolis, which now stands in the Piazza del Populo; and the massive, 522-ton obelisk originally quarried under Thutmosis III (1500-1450 BCE) for the temple of Amon at Karnak, and now standing in the Piazza S. Giovanni in Laterano.  In modern times, the starting gates at the west end were briefly excavated (1908) and then reburied. \n\nThere have been two major excavations of the still-extant seating on the east end (1930 and again 1979-88), which revealed a confusing series of Trajanic and later rebuildings.  It was, apparently, a structure which underwent frequent renovation. From those excavations it also seems apparent that the vast majority of the highest banks of seats, which remained above ground level, were robbed out in the early Medieval period and taken elsewhere, probably for building material. Seats for 250,000 spectators' backsides is a lot of marble, after all. \n\nThe last races were held in 549 CE by the Ostrogoth Totila.  Thereafter, the structure seems to have fallen quickly into disuse. In the early Medieval period, the area was used as grazing and farmland, and the seating structures were converted into a variety of industrial works.  The whole area was cleared out and put in its present, relatively cleared state in the early 20th century.\n\nWhy hasn't Italy excavated more of the Circus?  First, there is not much new to discover there which is easily accessible.  Second, money, which Italy does not have much of these days, especially for archaeology. Third, the space is popular and frequently used (I saw Sting perform there in 2004).\n\nWhy do [some structures](_URL_0_) survive so well, while others virtually disappear?  The christian church played a big role in the preservation or destruction of many ancient monuments.  If it became sacred to the christians, it generally survived and was maintained; if not, then most places lacked the will or the funds to upkeep large and useless old pagan edifices.  The local attitude towards preservation, for whatever reason, also played a role, as well as their access to sufficient building materials.\n\nUnfortunately, two of the best and most recent sources are not in English. One is Marcattili, *Circo Massimo : architetture, funzioni, culti, ideologia* (Roma : L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2009); the other is Polt, *Circus Maximus : das gesammelte Werk ; Geschichten, St\u00fccke, Monologe und Dialoge* (Z\u00fcrich : Kein  &  Aber, 2002)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.google.com/search?biw=1904&amp;bih=962&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=1&amp;ei=zMuhW6PMLYXosAevh5qABw&amp;q=maison+carree+nimes&amp;oq=maison+carree+nimes&amp;gs_l=img.3..0l2j0i8i30j0i24l2.4037.4659..4755...0.0..0.196.764.0j4......1....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i67j0i30j0i5i30.itVBFr_1gtg"]]}
{"q_id": "3midoi", "title": "Did Vikings prefer sword and shield or two handed in the battlefield", "selftext": "What did Vikings used in the battlefield more and why?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3midoi/did_vikings_prefer_sword_and_shield_or_two_handed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvf9kfj"], "score": [39], "text": ["The favorite weapon set would be spear and shield, usually with some sort of knife or - if you could afford it - sword in case you needed to get more up-and-personal.\n\nFighting in the Viking Age relied heavily on shield walls - tight lines of men standing close together and protecting each other with their shields, much like the earlier Greek hoplite phalanx. And just like a hoplite phalanx, the most useful weapon was a spear - it gave you reach, was ideally suited for quick hard stabs, and could (depending on the size of the spearhead) be lighter and quicker than a sword (Viking Age swords tended to be about 2.5lb / 1.1kg; a spear with a moderately sized head and a light ash or hazel shaft could weigh less and be balanced more ideally for a thrust). Most importantly, spears gave each fighter the reach to support the person on either side, and to reach gaps between shields to the right and left instead of being forced to try to get around the shield immediately in front of him. Swords are much less useful in this style of fighting.\n\nThe goal of a shieldwall, however, was to push through the other side's formation and get them broken into smaller groups (and hopefully terrify them into running away), at which point swords and long knives (seaxes) might become more useful (though I've seen a fair number of early medieval wounds in the back from spears, so even then they continued to be useful).\n\nAnd of course, spears can also be thrown. Some were designed specifically to be javelins, but many more appear to have been rather versatile (so you could use it either way). And we have textual accounts of warriors starting off a battle by throwing spears, but keeping one back to use when the fighting became hand-to-hand (the [Battle of Maldon](_URL_0_) is particularly worth a look, if you want to read a great war poem with good descriptions of Viking Age fighting).\n\nSpears were so common that viking age stories like Beowulf refer to especially reliable soldiers as aeswiga ('spear warrior'), and whole people groups as the 'Spear Danes.'\n\nThere were other options besides spear and shield - we have people buried with axes that were pretty clearly designed to work better as weapons than tools (some made for use in two hands, toward the end of the Viking Age), and there's a Pictish stone carving showing a warrior with a spear in two hands instead of the more typical one. You don't really see 2-handed swords in this period, however, perhaps because the metallurgy required to make such a long and strong piece of steel was still in its infancy in western Europe, but likely also because the shield remained such an important point of a warrior's social status, enabling him to fight in the shieldwall and, in some early medieval law courts, a required proof of his good social standing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.battleofmaldon.org.uk/poem_0.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "19itto", "title": "in the 1960s did most normal Russians still claim to believe in communism's superiority?   ", "selftext": "\"claim to believe in communism\" I phrased in that way so people wouldn't go on my back about how Stalinism isn't really communism in the answers ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19itto/in_the_1960s_did_most_normal_russians_still_claim/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8ogtm7", "c8ojukh"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["When talking about Russian perceptions of Communism you have to be careful who you're talking about. I think at no point besides perhaps late 1917 would peasants have positive opinions of Communists, and that was simply because they weren't the Provisional Government. The Peasants, like most of the Russian Empire, did not get along very well with the Bolsheviks during their rise to power and the 1921-1922 peasant revolts against Lenin were particularly brutal affairs. The status of workers is more controversial, they by and large believed in Communism but not Bolshevism and this brought the Workers Soviets into a series of brutal confrontations with Lenin's forces during and after the Civil War. What the former ruling elite, nobility, clergy, and conservatives thought of Communism is rather obvious.\n\nStalinism and its measures such as forced collectivization and the great terror undoubtedly contributed to mass resentment against Communists, particularly among those ethnic minorities that suffered the worst under Stalin (Ukrainians, Baltics, Belorussians). These regions became hotbeds of anti-Communist activity, so much so that they initially welcomed the Germans as liberators (though life under German occupation was soon discovered to be hardly preferable). \n\nI think the heyday of Communism among the Soviet Empires various populations would have been the Khrushchev era in any regard, particularly the early 60s. De-stalinization, economic improvement, a spirit of national unity (not achieved among all obviously) following their victory in WW2, and relaxing repression. I wouldn't say this meant the majority of the population \"believed\" in Communism, past experiences with Communism always made the Soviet people weary of Marxists. However there was certainly a spirit of \"things are getting better\", which unfortunately was undone with Brezhnev and the era of stagnation.\n\nThough it needs to be said Khrushchev was hardly a messiah or a liberal-democratic ruler. He was a Stalinist who renounced Stalinism mostly because of his own personal trauma/disdain for Stalin and never lost the thuggishly banal ruling policies of Stalins inner circle. He did however make a number of wise decisions (along with other unwise ones, such as the invasion of Hungary and Cuban Missile Crisis) which probably helped him rule during the Soviet Unions peak.\n", "This is not exactly the answer, but looking at Russia's \"performance\" might tell us something about how the state was appreciated by Russians, and where the image of \"stagnant crappy Russia\" comes from. \n\n**1921-1960**\n\n[This graph](_URL_13_) shows the development of both the US and Russia from 1921 to 1960. In 1921, most of Russia wasn't industrialized and living conditions were much lower than conditions in the US. But in the next couple of decades, life expectancy and income per person rise dramatically. In 1960, the average Russian has a life expectancy and income per person that is similar to Italy and Israel, and close to Belgium and France. The difference between the US and Russia is way less than it was in 1960. \n\n\n**1960-1982**\n\n[The next graph](_URL_1_) shows the development of Russia, compared to Italy and Israel. Israel is the small green dot. Life expectancy keeps rising in Italy and Israel, but it stagnates in Russia. Income per person increased way more in Italy in Israel (and income per person is measured on an exponential scale in the graph!). \n\n**1989-1999**:\n\n[Here you can see](_URL_2_) that many countries all over the world keep 'progressing', while Russia falls back, eventually resulting in living conditions similar to those in Turkey, completely incomparable with Italy and Israel, while they were once 'equals'. \n\n**Conclusion**\n\nUntil the 1960s, Russia was actually a very dynamic place that showed lots of progress, and I'm sure it impressed a lot of Russians. People became wealthier and healthier. The country left the pre-industrial paradigm where most people were farmers, and they encountered cars while they followed the space race. \n\nBut while the rest of the world 'continued', Russia was 'stuck'. The country would start stagnating in the 60s. The stagnation turned into outright regression in the 90s: while it was similar to 'developed countries' in 1960, it was incomparable to the West in 1990 and the following decade. \n\n**Source**\n\nI used [Gapminder](_URL_8_) for the data, it's very useful to take a look at the 'trajectory' of Russia. \n\n**TL;DR:**\n\nRussia in the 1910s: [A crappy pre-industrial place](_URL_0_)\n\nRussia in the 1960s: [A](_URL_3_) [relatively](_URL_15_) [modern](_URL_9_) [place](_URL_10_)\n\nRussia in the 1980s: [Hurray](_URL_4_) [for](_URL_11_) [thiry](_URL_14_) [years](_URL_5_) [of](_URL_7_) [stagnation!](_URL_6_)\n\n**Disclaimer**\n\nI know the images are exaggerating. \n\n**Justification for spending too much time and energy on this post**\n\n[Procrastination](_URL_12_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/prokudin_08_20/p19_00021065.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/3pS3YTB.png", "http://i.imgur.com/dlTGaBI.png", "http://i.imgur.com/tE2QR80.jpg", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-40.jpg", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-32.jpg", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-38.jpg", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-36.jpg", "http://www.gapminder.org/world/", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7E9nhQ5x7D8/TpHy88YDuuI/AAAAAAAAQqY/wKwTuxSFJbI/s1600/Moscow+1960+%252811%2529.jpg", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H3QNzuIZiQc/TpHy_XB75sI/AAAAAAAAQqk/wL5QE2fjsGU/s1600/Moscow+1960+%252814%2529.jpg", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-21.jpg", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk", "http://i.imgur.com/MdUbfEf.png", "http://media.englishrussia.com/112012/russianvillageoftheearly1980s/russianvillageoftheearly1980s-29.jpg", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ioUDekIjQO0/TpHy0hF9k6I/AAAAAAAAQp0/LVWX9ykfH48/s1600/Moscow+1960+%25282%2529.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "esskzv", "title": "Commercial kitty litter was invented in 1947. Where did house cats pee and poop before then?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/esskzv/commercial_kitty_litter_was_invented_in_1947/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ffc8s33"], "score": [41], "text": ["If your cat was an indoor cat, you would likely provide them some sort of absorbent material. In the 1922 *Feeding and Care of the Domestic and Long-Haired Cat*, the following advice is offered:\n\n > Each room should also contain a fair sized granite pan, partly filled with sand or sawdust. I prefer saw dust as it does not hold moisture as long as sand and is free from fleas. \n\nSimilar advice was offered in the 1921 *Your Dog and Your Cat, How to Care for Them: A Treatise on the Care of the Dog and Cat in the Home*, with the author writing that:\n\n > A pan of sawdust, sand, or torn bits of paper should be kept in some convenient place for their use in attending to their functions. They must have free access to this if they are to be clean with their habits.\n\nLikewise, the 1889 *Our Cats and All About Them* reminds readers that:\n\n > Always have a box with dry earth near the cat's sleeping place, unless there is an opening for egress near.\n\nI do find amusing how much the authors of these old manuals strive to *avoid* directly stating what these are for. It is clear enough, of course, but the language is still euphemistic, speaking of 'their functions' and 'moisture'. Vague allusions to the 'cleanliness' of the cat are common too, such as the 1895 guide which notes:\n\n > The cat is an excessively cleanly animal, and when housed should be provided with means for remaining so. A small box, or -- what is better, as it can be well washed -- a galvanized flat pan such as used for roasting meat, should be placed in some well-ventilated corner out of sight, and kept filled about an inch deep with sand, clean earth, or sawdust. Perhaps the latter is preferable, as it can be burned. The litter should be changed frequently.\n\nAlso going on to note that for kittens, a bed of peat-moss litter has the \"desired effect\" of teaching them cleanliness, when changed at least once a day.\n\nWhile hardly a scientific survey of the literature, I found in only a single book, 1887's *The Cat* , reference to actual product in noting that the creature is \"*guided by a peculiar instinct to scratch up earth for the purpose of hiding their excrements*\" and that indoors even will do their best to avoid the carpet, \"resort[ing] to cinders or coal-dust\"*. They go on to note similar ways to accomodate this as others did, writing that:\n\n > It is a good plan to have a large flower-pot saucer - the larger the better, but not less than fifteen inches in diameter - kept in some suitable corner, with a little clean garden-earth or sand in it. It need not contain much earth and it can be changed at will; but should not be allowed to become foul as to offend the cat.\n\nWriting advice for owners of \"catteries\", that is, breeders with large collections of cats, the most practical advice in 1901 *Domestic and Fancy Cats* is simply that:\n\n > Sanitary arrangements in these catteries are not so difficult, for the free access to the outside runs, if cats have been trained to habits of cleanliness, will be readily sought for and discovered by them.\n\nBut recognizing this isn't always possible, the author continues:\n\n > Still it may be desirable to provide receptacles, and I know of no better than the large stoneware pans supplied by Spratts Patent, or zinc trays can be mate whatever size and shape is desired. Opinion varies as to what these are to be filled with. I have from the earliest period, and down to date, been an advocate of dry earth; some however consider sawdust as far and away the best, and only a few years ago I was informed by a large breeder that if earth and sawdust be placed in separate receptacles, sawdust will be selected by the cat. Be this as it may, I am still open to conviction of is efficacy, over Nature's deodorizer. An efficient deodorizer or disinfectant should always be kept at hand, such as Izal, Sanitas, Jeyes', or Lawes', which rank above most others. \n\nGoing back further into the 19th century, there is even stronger emphasis on the *cleanliness* of the cat, with an author in the 1870s writing that:\n\n > Cats of the right sort never fail to bring their kittens up in the way they should go, and soon succeed in teaching them all they know themselves. They will bring in living mice for them, and always take more pride in the best warrior-kitten than in the others. They will also inculcate the doctrine of cleanliness in their kits, so that the carpet shall never be wet. I have often been amused at seeing my own cat bringing kitten after kitten to the sand-box, and showing it how to use it, in action explaining to them what it was there for. When a little older, she entices them out to the garden.\n\nOf course, they later go on too note that a cat will *literally die* if they get too dirty, writing:\n\n > I have known cats take ill and die from having their coats accidentally soiled beyond remedy.\n\nThis might be a bit excessive, but this emphasis on the 'instinctive cleanliness', as countless guides in the late 19th to early 20th century noted, was the \"natural virtue which renders pussy so generally a favoured intimate of the household\".\n\nSo the sum of it is that there was no one solution offered, but there was certainly a general consensus on the necessity of providing an indoor place for relief, and while the advice varied as to the specific material, be it sawdust, earth, or otherwise, it ought be something absorbent and changed frequently.\n\n**Sources**\n\n*Feeding and Care of the Domestic and Long-Haired Cat* by Ellen V. Celty and Anna Ray\n\n*Your Dog and Your Cat, How to Care for Them: A Treatise on the Care of the Dog and Cat in the Home* by Roy Henry Spaulding\n\n*The Cat, A Guide to the Classification and Varieties of Cats and a Short Treaties Upon Their Care, Diseases, and Treatment* by Rush Shippen Huidekoper\n\n*Domestic and Fancy Cats: A Practical Treatise on Their Varieties, Breeding, Management and Diseases* by John Jennings\n\n*Cats: Their Points and Characteristics, with Curiosities of Cat Life, and a Chapter on Feline Ailments*\n\n*Our Cats and All About Them: Their Varieties, Habits, and Management, and for Show, the Standard of Excellence and Beauty* by Harrison Weir\n\n*The Cat: Its Natural History; Domestic Varieties; Management and Treatment* by Philip M. Rule\n\nThis is just a sampling of texts out there, but you can find them and more on _URL_0_, HathiTrust, and Project Gutenberg.\n\nAfterward: Looking through a lot of old books about cats and trying to find more references, I had to share one false positive hit for \"sawdust\" which ended up being about a ship's cat:\n\n > Tuesday was flogging day; and to add, if possible, to the terror of the condemned wretch, after the gratings were rigged and the man stripped and lashed thereto, sawdust was sprinkled on the deck all round, to soak up the blood. But at every flogging match\n\n >  > \u201cThere sat auld Nick in shape o\u2019 beast,\u201d\n\n > at least in the shape of Tom the cat, who would not have missed the fun for all the world. There on the bulwark he would sit, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction, his mouth squared, and his beard all a-bristle. He seemed to count every dull thud of his nine-tailed namesake, and emitted short sharp mews of joy when, towards the middle of the third dozen, the blood began to trickle and get sprinkled about on sheet and shroud. Though I never disliked Tom, still, at times such as these, I really believed he was the devil himself as reputed, and would have given two months\u2019 pay for a chance to brain him. When the flogging was over, Tom used to jump down and, purring loudly, rub his head against his master\u2019s leg.\n\nTom seems like *kind of a dick*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["Archive.org"]]}
{"q_id": "2fqp0o", "title": "Thoughts on \"The Forge of Christendom\" by Tom Holland?", "selftext": "I've recently read through The Forge of Christendom and while I found it an extremely enjoyable read I do wonder how reliable it is as a work of history. This could just be a lack of experience but I've found that narritive driven histories aren't as accurate and work better as introductions/ sparks of interest to the scene than detailed looks at the period. \n\nWhat is the general consensus on this book and Holland as an author (assuming he's done more works of history)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fqp0o/thoughts_on_the_forge_of_christendom_by_tom/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckcm9nj"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm working through Tom Hollands 'Persian Fire' and he is very honest in the forward about the amount of embellishment and speculation in the work.\n\nI'm reading this with a few other people, and while they find it significantly more enjoyable to read, we all feel that we're reading exactly what he said, speculation and embellishment.  I don't know if that helps here at all.\n\nHopefully a historian will hop in."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "19h9wp", "title": "Considering the length of time the Basque area was under Roman rule why is their culture/language so different from their neighbors?", "selftext": " ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19h9wp/considering_the_length_of_time_the_basque_area/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8o2luu", "c8o5fbe", "c8o6lnz"], "score": [14, 4, 9], "text": ["In Mark Kurlansky's \"The Basque History of the World\" he argues that Basquelands were less fertile and less valuable to Romans and Basques were often rebellious. Therefore, he argues that the Romans were more accommodating of the Basques. Notably Basques didn't pay tribute and were allowed to govern themselves under their own laws. This would seem to be a basic justification for why Basques were never pushed to assimilate as closely to Roman law and therefore are rather different from their neighbours.\n\nThat said Kurlansky is not a historian, but a journalist, and i am an ex-history student and not a historian.", "Without know much about Basque country, my assumption is that the region could not economically support wide scale Romanization. There were several areas with \"internal barbarians\" so to speak, such as Wales and eastern Anatolia. Basque country could have been like that.", "While Basque is a common example in these sort of things, it's not *that* unusual for an isolated language to survive under foreign rule for millenia. Berber languages are still there, Breton is going through a revival, the Caucasus mountains have some weird-ass languages etc. Simply put, they got lucky geographically, and it was not worthwhile for the Romans to attempt to heavily Romanise the area."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ju1eo", "title": "Assistance wanted to help identify these WWI Australian ANZAC items [x-posted]", "selftext": "I hope a request like this is allowed.\n\n\n[Link to album of items.](_URL_0_)\n\n\nAll of these items belonged to an ANZAC soldier who was in the Australia Artillery, WWI. They have been donated to a small private museum I work at. I don't normally deal with these types of items so I don't know terminology and am looking for assistance with that. Thank you.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ju1eo/assistance_wanted_to_help_identify_these_wwi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clf7ji9", "clfbopw"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["From first glance number 7 is an epaulette, and 2 and 12 are shoulder pips, which would be worn on the epaulette (one can even be seen on it) \n\n4 is a rising sun badge, but It looks a little small for the slouch hat. so perhaps it was used on the tunic? It does look like the third pattern, used from 1904 to 1949.\n\n8 seems to be the Retired Member Insignia, but I'm not sure sorry.\n\nI will have a closer look at some of the other stuff and try to get back to you soon.", "Regarding 18: All I can tell you is that it from a ~35mm weapon of some sort, which means it is more likely an autocannon like the 37mm COW Gun or a Breech loader like the Vickers Q.F Mk II\n\n15 is a badge and would usually be worn on a tunic or coat. The placement shouldn't really matter, but would most likely have been near the breast.\n\n17 is similar to 15, and should have a date of issue in the red of the crown, however I cannot see one which would make me guess it was a very early one. \n\nI'm not sure what the chains are, they could have been attached to the base of a revolver, but once again I am not sure.\n\n5 is unusual, it seems to be a Gloucestershire Regiment rear cap badge- definitely not Australian Artillery. The Sphinx and Egypt represent the regiments actions in 1801 where they faced the French at the Battle of Alexandria, where on 21st March 1801 they defeated a major French push which like many other British regiments, won them the honour of having the sphinx and Egypt included. \n\nThat's about it from me I'm afraid, I hope this helps.\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/rvGLU"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "6zc5yz", "title": "If both parties viewed war as almost inevitable, why would they both accept the German\u2013Soviet Commercial Agreement (1940); the sale of raw materials from the USSR to Germany?", "selftext": "I'm more so curious about the Soviet logic. They sold thousands of tons of grain, oil and ore to Nazi Germany. Weren't there fears that this could be possibly used against the Soviet Union?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zc5yz/if_both_parties_viewed_war_as_almost_inevitable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmuj2ay"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'll answer this looking moreso from the USSR's point of view. The main reason is neither side wanted to fight each other right away - they needed time to prepare or had other issues to deal with. Stalin reputedly told Kaganovich that he was only buying time by making the deal with Nazi Germany. There is also the argument that Stalin attempted to form an alliance with the West but this was ultimately unsuccessful. But for the purpose of your question that kind of doesn't matter - after all the question is why Stalin and Hitler thought this was a good idea at all. Otherwise there would have been no viable alternative.\n\nAlso keep in mind it isn't as though the Soviets didn't get anything out of the deal. The secret bits of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact also resulted in territories going into the Soviet sphere of influence/control. In exchange for raw materials, which for Nazi Germany were fairly important for sustaining their war effort and home front, the Soviets received various military and industrial items. Particularly naval weapons designs/gear which in hindsight was probably a bad trade. But at the time the means of building up a modern navy and shoring up key areas of industry probably seemed like a good move for long term power politics etc."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8j0qjq", "title": "Why did crime drop in the middle of the great depression and onwards?", "selftext": "Crime peaked in 1933 but steadily decreased after. Whats the reason?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8j0qjq/why_did_crime_drop_in_the_middle_of_the_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dyw52f1"], "score": [2], "text": ["What's your source on crime rates during that time period?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "27jh11", "title": "Were the Bohemian nobility treated differently within the Holy Roman Empire?", "selftext": "Since the HRE was mostly German, and especially after they lost most of Italy, and considering that Slavs haven't always been viewed in the most favourable light in Western Europe, were there any negative perceptions of Bohemia among the mostly German nobility within the HRE? And if there were, did this change at all after the Habsburgs absorbed the kingdom?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27jh11/were_the_bohemian_nobility_treated_differently/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci4b0tr"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Bohemian nobility were treated differently, yes. However, this treatment had nothing to do with their ethnicity, which was all but irrelevant, and everything to do with the unique religious and political privileges the Bohemian nobility earned over the centuries. The Bohemians, in fact, *required* that their king treat them differently, and led major rebellions roughly once a century for four hundred years to protect and expand their privileges. You're asking about other nobles, however.\n\nA brief note before I go on: \"Czech\" and \"German\", as such, didn't yet exist as distinct, important cultural or ethnic markers until the 19th century. Germans themselves were (and still are, though very much less so) divided into several large linguistic and cultural subgroups. \n\nMore broadly, cultural and linguistic differences were relatively unimportant to the Holy Roman Empire's nobility. Their shared class and knowledge of Latin, French and/or German allowed them to communicate with ease, and they certainly had far more in common with one another than they did with most of their subjects. The *most* important difference, by far, was in fact religious\u2014the Bohemian nobility was distinct in this way after the Hussite Wars, although the resolution of that conflict made the Utraquist Church into an accepted part of the Catholic Church, minimizing the importance of this distinction.\n\nThe Bohemian nobility took to the Reformation very readily, and roughly 90% of them were non-Catholic by the (Second) Defenestration of Prague. They vigorously defended their right to practice the new religion, which set them at odds with the Catholic Habsburgs and their Jesuit-backed re-Catholicization efforts. This same defense, naturally, earned them respect from the rest of the German nobility (which was, itself, majority Protestant before 1610).\n\nAfter Ferdinand II decisively defeated the Bohemian rebels and their Winter King, the make-up of the Bohemian nobility (and, increasingly, its lower classes) became more German-speaking, subjugated to their prince, and entirely Catholic. By 1648, then, they were very similar to the nobility of the Southern half of the Empire by virtually ever barometer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aabfwu", "title": "What are some good academic books/articles to consider when looking at intellectual history?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aabfwu/what_are_some_good_academic_booksarticles_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecqi8fg"], "score": [3], "text": ["Have you checked out [this section of our books list?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/culturalhistory"]]}
{"q_id": "e86scd", "title": "Why did the ancient Roman pantheon mostly consist of assimilated Greek gods?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e86scd/why_did_the_ancient_roman_pantheon_mostly_consist/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fabu2ya"], "score": [2], "text": ["The FAQ has answers to a [similar question](_URL_0_), courtesy of /u/idontplayoboe and /u/cleopatra_philopater"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4u6bdw/were_the_roman_gods_literally_transplanted_from/d5nelxu/?utm_content=permalink&amp;utm_medium=front&amp;utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_name=AskHistorians"]]}
{"q_id": "5dg493", "title": "[Serious] do we know if Jefferson raped \"his\" slaves at any point in his life?", "selftext": "My girlfriend is really trying to figure out if this really happened at any point and if so if it has any citation. Thank you! (sorry if this is against any rules I don't frequent here often but have seen a lot of great answers before.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dg493/serious_do_we_know_if_jefferson_raped_his_slaves/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da4cqvs"], "score": [15], "text": ["One way of answering this question is in terms of consent as we understand it today. Thomas Jefferson *literally owned the bodies of all his slaves*. It's hard for modern people to conceive of that sort of power relation in any way, but that's what it was. He completely owned them; they had no power of consent over any aspect of their lives. In such a situation, *any* sexual encounter between master and slave is coercive, and meets the definition of rape. Therefore, Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemings, repeatedly and over a number of years. In this view, to talk of different degrees of rape, whether the rape was \"violent\" or \"forced\" is abhorrent, and can't be countenanced. I admit, there's a lot of power in this perspective, not least because it foregrounds the immoral criminality of slavery in absolute terms.\n\nAnnette Gordon-Reed, in her fascinating book *The Hemingses of Monticello*, which seeks to pull away from the larger history of slavery to understand one family (Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and their descendants), takes a somewhat more nuanced perspective. Reed, of course, acknowledges the monstrosity of slavery and its sexual power relations on a world-historical scale, but finds that perspective inadequate for her more targeted, micro-historical approach. Such a perspective, in her view, completely obscures the agency that enslaved women had--or may have had--over their own sexualities. It makes sexuality an entirely male-focused affair, rendering the question entirely \"Did so-and-so have sex with a slave?\" \"Yes? OK, it's rape.\" It leaves no room for the possibility that Hemings or another enslaved woman might have had a real emotional and physical interest in an owner. Put another way, it renders entirely ideological (masters vs. slaves, in never-ending war), a relationship that surely must have had more nuance. To take the first view I enumerated, ultimately, in Gordon-Reed's view, serves to blot out the real lived experiences of enslaved women. These experiences are very hard for us to understand today, given the sheer paucity of literary and archival sources that directly convey the experiences of enslaved women. So she's hesitant to paint with the broad brush, because ultimately that brush serves to obscure understanding, not enhance it. It can even serve to render enslaved women eternally childlike, which itself was a goal of the ideology of slavery.\n\nYou might be interested in reading Gordon-Reed's book to further tease out the nuances of her argument. It's a really great book, though Gordon-Reed is trained as a lawyer and not an historian, and other historians have had various issues with the book's methodology.\n\nThere's no evidence that Thomas Jefferson, a refined and charming man who considered himself a statesman, ever held an enslaved woman down at knifepoint and raped her. Given the power relations between him and his slaves, it's doubtful he ever would have had to. So, I believe you are on firm historical ground if you want to claim that Jefferson raped Hemings. But there is at least one decent argument to say that the answer is more like \"we don't know, and probably never can.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3cbbhn", "title": "How accurate is Chapter 1 of Inglorious Basterds?", "selftext": "I know this movie is fictional, but still.\n\n- Did the Nazis have time and resources to go around France \"hunting\" Jews?\n\n- If so, would they really search this thoroughly? I mean, they're way out in the country, where there's only the one house as far as you can see. They spend a lot of time just talking to the guy, and they're pretty polite to him too. They also are going through records of known people. **Is this related to why it's illegal in France for the government to collect religious demographics today?**\n\n- If the hider gave up the hiding Jews, would he really be \"rewarded\"? Would he actually be marked down as someone to watch closely? Would he be killed along with the Jews? What if some of the Jews then escaped like in the movie?\n\n- Is it likely that a French dairy farmer and a German soldier would really have English as their best common language? Since it's an American movie, I wouldn't be surprised if all the dialog was in English with no mention of it at all, but they begin in French.\n\n- Are the clothes and house accurate? What about the Nazi's pipe?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cbbhn/how_accurate_is_chapter_1_of_inglorious_basterds/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csulgax"], "score": [12], "text": ["I cannot answer the other questions but if you are curious about the pipe, that is a Calabash Pipe, popularized in media because of Sherlock Holmes. [Quentin Tarantino specifically used it for narrative purposes]( _URL_0_) to portray contrast against the farmer's smaller pipe and to accentuate his detective skills."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://youtu.be/q_g7O7W-IUg"]]}
{"q_id": "1t7h8a", "title": "When was the first time an extensive/university education was available to anyone who was willing to pursue it and work for it (not just the elite)?", "selftext": "Also, in the middle ages, who was allowed to attend university?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t7h8a/when_was_the_first_time_an_extensiveuniversity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce5a07r"], "score": [2], "text": ["hi, this thread from the FAQ* may have some interesting information\n\n[How has admissions worked at historical universities and schools?](_URL_1_)\n\nand I believe there are more smatterings regarding admissions throughout this section in general\n\n[Life at University](_URL_0_)\n\n*see the \"popular questions\" link on the sidebar or the \"wiki\" tab above"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_life_at_university", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15er3e/how_has_admissions_worked_at_historical/"]]}
{"q_id": "ad15tn", "title": "I've heard some say that the Arab slave trade was far larger and more damaging than the Atlantic slave trade ever was. Is this true, or a false/misleading statement to advance political ideology?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ad15tn/ive_heard_some_say_that_the_arab_slave_trade_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eddr02u", "eddwdkf"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["_URL_0_\n\nAnswer by u/paxottomanica", "While you wait for an answer to your question you might be interest in [these](_URL_0_) [previous](_URL_1_) answers regarding the slave trade conducted by Arabs and others across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. The first notes that many claims about the Arab slave trade beong larger or more damaging rely on distortions and outright falsehoods about the Atlantic slave trade in order to make the comparison. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a9ea5/how_brutal_was_the_arab_slave_trade_in_comparison/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sfu7q/why_is_their_a_relatively_small_african_diaspora/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3a9ea5/how_brutal_was_the_arab_slave_trade_in_comparison/"]]}
{"q_id": "bc1isj", "title": "After the conquest of Gaul by Rome why did none of the surviving tribe's try to rebel during the numerous civil wars following the conquest.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bc1isj/after_the_conquest_of_gaul_by_rome_why_did_none/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekock97"], "score": [4], "text": ["Roman influence was already significant before the Roman conquest, roughly since the late IInd century BCE (a bit before the conquest of the *provincia*).Treaties were passed with Gaulish states and coalitions, especially with Aiduoi who controlled not just their confederation and the road from Rhone to Seine but also had a certain dominance over Celtic Gaulish states, in order to ensure a flourishing trade (tableware, oil, wine) to the point eastern Gaulish coinage seems to have been indexed on half the value of a Roman denarius.\n\n\"Tribe\", in the anthropologic meaning of the word (human groups tied by familial, imaginary or not, ties with a fluid social organisation) can't be attributed to late Gaulish culture : we'd be rather talking there about decentralized states (Caesar's civitates, including several pagi which might be identified with Gaulish *teuta*, tribe/citizenship) themselves held regionally trough coalition or assembly patronage.These complex state structures (Aiduoi,for instance, had the equivalent of a constitution and institutional rules) knew factional development of their politics, as Caesar accounted for.\n\n > *In Gaul  there are factions not only in all the states, and in all the cantons and  their divisions, but almost in each family, and of these factions those are the leaders who are considered according to their judgment to possess  the greatest influence, upon whose will and determination the management  of all affairs and measures depends. And that seems to have been instituted  in ancient times with this view, that no one of the common people should  be in want of support against one more powerful; for, none \\[of those leaders\\]  suffers his party to be oppressed and defrauded, and if he do otherwise, he has no influence among his party. This same policy exists throughout  the whole of Gaul; for all the states are divided into two factions.*\n\nUntil the IInd century BCE, Druids seems to have enjoyed a great political role, not just amongst their own people, but as part of some sort of political-spiritual pan-Gaulish confraternity which regularly assembled. It's still debated what lead to a decline of Druidism in Gaul at this point (a conjunction of the damages of Cimbrii and Teutoni in Gaul; and the Roman influence from the South, possibly), and how much this decline was important (did Diviciacos stressed being Druid or not in this period?) but their traditional role of diplomats and intermediaries seems to have suffered some backlash and to have been more localized to their own states, making relations between them more likely to escalate.\n\nWhile Gaulish factions took a lot of forms and were primarily functioning trough inner politics, one obvious polarization was a pro or anti-roman approach depending. Practically every Gaulish state we have a glimpse of their policies did have such opposition, Aiduoi included (Diviciacos, pro-roman and his anti-roman brother Dumnorix) and during the war (for Aruernoi, pro-roman Epasnactos and anti-roman Vercingetorix). Again, this polarization wasn't set in stone : out of opportunism, pressure or to Roman presence threatening local interests, people changed sides, radicalized or compromised, _URL_3_ a sense, pro and anti-Roman policies could be similar to the opposition between Optimates and Populares in Rome, owing to other matters and whom differences could be sometimes superficial.\n\nPro-Roman Gaulish elites were,thanks to their relations with Romans (Diviciacos was hosted by Cicero probably because both knew each other indirectly trough wine trading), could set up an efficient patronage and political networking, or at least hoped obtaining a similar position Aiduoi had (Arvenrs attempted without success to be considered \"blood-brothers\" of Romans as their rivals were considered). Rome, on the other hand, did intervened in Gaulish matters before Caesar by considering Ariovistos as a friend of Rome (possibly due to his opposition to Sequanoi, then foes of Aiduoi, this support fading when Ariovistos clashed with the latter).More or less anti-Roman did preexisted to Caesar's campaign, hinted by the alliance between Sequanoi and Eleuetoi, which were at least considered hostile and threatening to band with others.\n\nCaesar eventually supported his interventions in Gaul trough the assembly of Celtic Gaul,and the assembly of all Gaul, dominated by Aiduoi which gave the general the protectorate of Gaul,more or less, making his intervention gaining a legalist veneer.\n\nRight from the start of Roman conquest, some peoples and among them the more important, were ready to accept a Roman protectorate out of interest or pressure. Vercingetorix himself most probably was an auxiliary of Caesar at some point. Until -56, without being a constitutional walk, Gaulish opposition was relatively _URL_0_ Roman fiscal,commercial (increasing importance and monopoly of Roman traders), military and political pressure (especially as Caesar set up client kings against the wishes of the population) was felt more seriously, however, a general anti-Roman feeling appeared (at first in peripheral regions where Roman influence never was that strong). Caesar almost systematically dealt with this by heavily punishing revolts (killing off their senates and enslaving when not massacring the population). The general Gaulish revolt of -52 was a mix of disappointed nobles having hoped their alliance would have owed them something, people seeing in Romans an obstacle to their interests, people politically opposed to a Roman protectorate and (such as Aeduoi) some playing both sides.Their defeat meant an almost literal beheading of anti-Roman forces in Gaul.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nStill, you ***did*** have local revolts after -51. We don't know much about them, however.\n\nIn -46, Bellovacoi revolte against Romans. Giving that they participated to every major revolt before, it could point to a permanence of previous _URL_1_ -39/38, revolts happened in Rhineland (allied with Germans) and Aquitaine, without any mentioned people. The definitive settlement of Ubii in Belgica could be interpreted as being ordered to watch over the region as allies.Again in -30/-29, Morinoi and other Belgians possibly supported by Germans revolted _URL_2_ -29, Aquitains and Treviroi rebelled and after their defeat, Gaul was re-organized in provinces.\n\nAfter that, troubles and revolts have a distinct anti-fiscal stance, as soon as Licinius' abuses against Gaulish elites (such as \"adding\" two fiscal months) or Sacrovir's revolt,which concerned more romanized Gauls striving for fiscal liberty firstmost.\n\nAs most opposition to Romans was crushed,and elite benefiting from Roman alliance remained, there was nobody left to really manage and to officer another armed opposition in Gaul in a regional scale, especially as peoples traditionally more or less hostile to Rome were ravaged. We're talking of ten years of war, including political strife and quasi-civil war, with ten of thousands of victims on battlefield or due to massacres, and probably the same being enslaved. Anything that could have represented a possible new rebellion was utterly broken (especially after the wake-up call of -52), when pro-Romans flourished,which supported an already present political romanization,which happened fairly quickly compared to Africa or Hispania.\n\nSimply said, most of remaining Gaulish elite after Caesar, with noted exceptions, continued their Romanising policies as was their broad interest; adopted more and more Roman features and by the late Ist century CE, not much of Gaulish civilization remained.\n\n**Sources**\n\n*Vercing\u00e9torix* \\- Jean-Louis Brunaux  \n*La vie politique des Gaulois* \\- Emmanuel Arbarbe  \n*Vercing\u00e9torix, chef de guerre* \\- Alain Deyber"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["meagre.As", "feelings.In", "anew.In", "etc.In"]]}
{"q_id": "1i71v3", "title": "What are the earliest End of Days/Apocalypse Myths?", "selftext": "I'm sorry if this isn't the right subreddit. Basically I'm interested in old End of Days myths/prophecies  & c. Is this something that's a cross-cultural phenomena or do we even have the resources to know that? \n\nThanks in advance for any help. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i71v3/what_are_the_earliest_end_of_daysapocalypse_myths/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb1v0qe"], "score": [2], "text": ["Though I do not hold a lofty degree in history, social science or anything similar, I feel I may be able to add a small amount of perspective to this original question.\nThe concept of the Apocalypse is very old and is mentioned a number of times throughout the old and new testament.  [The book of Job mentions it, as well as the books of Matthew, John and Revelations.](_URL_3_)\n\nIn addition to the Bible, Norse mythology gives mention to [Ragnarok](_URL_1_), which holds its own when compared to what was being said in the old and new testaments. \n\nThe [Messianic Age](_URL_0_) is also a concept of the Apocalypse but generally one viewed as a favorable change over a violent one.\n\nAlso it should be noted that the ancient Hindu texts of [Puranas](_URL_2_) mentions what they would consider an \"apocalypse\" in that it'll be the reintegration of Vishnu into the universe.  Kali Yuga is the current time frame we live in in relation to the Hindu apocalypse, there's more in that wiki link about it.\n\nAs far as finding a specific date, I cannot.  But the concept of the apocalypse has been around for a very long time, and could be argued by psychologists as being a mental manifestation of death that inevitably takes us all."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Age", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puranas", "http://www.openbible.info/topics/the_apocalypse"]]}
{"q_id": "24aouq", "title": "What did people use bread for before the sandwich was invented/became commonplace?", "selftext": "I've been thinking on this a while. The sandwich came around in 18th century Europe. Bread was invented around 30'000 years ago. How did people eat bread during that gap? I kinda feel like this is a stupid question, I may be missing something.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24aouq/what_did_people_use_bread_for_before_the_sandwich/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch594rv"], "score": [12], "text": ["Bread was typically eaten with some kind of moistener, usually based on an oil or sugar. \n\nBread or some other staple starch formed the foundation of the diet, and the term was sometimes used as a synecdoche, in which a part of something (bread) was used to refer to the whole (diet). \"Give us this day our daily bread,\" for example, refers generically to food, and not merely to bread on its own. However, as Sidney Mintz discusses in his wonderful history of sugar, *Sweetness and Power*, while the main starch could be the food itself, it often couldn't culturally count as a proper *meal* unless it had the right accompaniment. Historically, in the West where bread was the starch, this has been some kind of moistener: in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, olive oil is the standard; in northern Europe, it was frequently butter; with the development of plantation sugar production in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and industrial food in the nineteenth century, jam became a very popular food for this role in Britain. In other cases, it might be \"drippings,\" a generic term for the fat or moisture produced by cooking meat in certain ways. Of course, bread was also a ubiquitous accompaniment to all kinds of other dishes. Soup, for example, always comes with bread, to the point that in some situations, soup alone might not be considered an actual meal. \n\nI should note that I specialize in the study of wheat, flour, and bread in modern Britain. And, while the sandwich was invented famously by the Earl of Sandwich in the eighteenth century, I actually come across very few references to it before the invention and proliferation of sliced bread. While not unknown before the 1930s, I think the sandwich as the staple form of making a meal out of bread is really a postwar development. In the period that I study, mostly 1750 to 1950, the standard is bread and butter, bread and jam, or bread and drippings.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ba5s3y", "title": "How was Napoleon able to advance his rank in the French military so quickly?", "selftext": "Napoleon was promoted all the way to General by age 24. How did this happen so rapidly?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ba5s3y/how_was_napoleon_able_to_advance_his_rank_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ek9nyzv"], "score": [35], "text": ["The short and snippy answer to why Napoleon advanced so quickly is because of the French Revolution. But for all the brevity, such an answer is not facetious. The Revolution created a series of unique conditions that allowed a man of Napoleon's talents to vault quite high at a young age. \n\nFirst off, and most obviously, the Revolution did create a shortage of officers within the French armies as the pre-1789 institution was dominated by the nobility, especially its upper echelons. Although Revolutionary zeal did not eliminate all nobles serving under French colors, the Revolution did decimate the officer corps. Some of the pre-1789 officers were executed during the Terror while other officers abandoned their commissions and fled the country. The outflow of officers meant that there were now positions open for men from the technical services or middle classes and the minor nobility. Napoleon belonged to the latter category, but he was not alone in this regard. His great Marshal Davout also came from the minor nobility and Napoleon's future chief of staff Berthier came from an established military family with close connections to the old nobility. These relative outsiders managed to seize the opportunity presented to them by the Revolutionary upheavals within the officer corps to advance their positions. \n\nBut opportunity was only one factor in climbing atop the greasy pole. The Revolution may have stressed meritocracy, but the politics of the Revolution could not eliminate patronage completely. The shifting factions within various Revolutionary governments meant that politicians often cultivated their own generals. In Napoleon's case, his connections with Antoine Salicetti led to the young man's advancement early in his career. But political patronage was a double-edged sword in the tumultuous politics of the Revolution. Napoleon's connection with Jacobins made him politically suspect in the Thermidorian reaction after the Terror. But Napoleon was lucky in his choice in political friends. Salicetti was able to save Napoleon from house arrest and later managed to cultivate a relationship with Paul Barras. These networks helped Napoleon gain commissions in what were subsidiary theaters for the French Revolutionary Wars, Italy and Egypt. \n\nNapoleon managed to make the most of these appointments. Although Italy lacked the prestige of Germany, Napoleon succeeded in Italy while his compatriots in Germany failed. The military successes helped connect Napoleon to one of the Revolution's popular elements, military *gloire*. Generals and military exploits became one of the legitimizing components of the Revolution, especially as the more radical social levelling had led to the Terror. So military generals assumed a greater deal of political capital in the closing days of the Revolution than they possessed at its strat. Emmanel Siey\u00e8s, one of the key plotters in Brumaire, would famously quip, \"I need a sword,\" in other words, a man who could command the loyalty of one of the few powerful institutions that possessed a great deal of popular legitimacy within the Republic, the army.\n\nNapoleon was only thirty years old when he became First Consul, but many of his own contemporaries were not that much older than Bonaparte. His main military rivals to be the Brumaire coup's \"sword\"- Bernadotte, Jourdan, Hoche, and Moreau - were all born in the same decade as Napoleon. The youthfulness of this cohort underscores how the French Revolution created the right constellation that meant a young man with the right talents and connections could advance farther and faster than he could in the pre-1789 military. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6ddg3k", "title": "Did Hitler have any plans to eventually invade France and/or Britain if they did not declare war when he invaded Poland?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ddg3k/did_hitler_have_any_plans_to_eventually_invade/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di220nh"], "score": [3], "text": ["The memoirs of the German Foreign Ministry interpreter Paul Schmidt relates an illuminating anecdote about Hitler's reaction to Britain's war ultimatum delivered to Hitler on the morning of 3 September 1939. According to Schmidt, Hitler read the ultimatum and angrily turned to his Foreign Minister on Ribbentrop and said \"What now?\"\n\nAlthough Gerhard Weinberg doubts the veracity of Schmidt's account and Ian Kershaw believes that Hitler was prosaically asking what the French response would be, this particular anecdote illustrates the hazy and muddled German response to the expansion of the war. Although it was logical that an expansion of German force on the continent would inevitably lead to another war with France, the Germans did not make any systematic plans to defeat and occupy France. Although *Mein Kampf* had asserted that France was an eternal enemy of Germany, Hitler was remarkably lax in actually planning for this eventuality. When it was clear that the British and French would not be brought to accept Germany's dismemberment of Poland, Hitler summoned his service chiefs to the Reich chancellery on 27 September to tell them he intended to smash France and bring her to heel through swift military action between October and December 1939. \n\nMuch of the OKW leadership was aghast at Hitler's accelerated timetable and engaged in a degree of strategic footdragging to encourage Hitler to postpone what later became known as *Fall Gelb*. Although OKH was relatively enthusiastic about the Polish war, many commanders in OKH had believed that a political solution would prevent the need for an offensive in the west. Prior to Hitler's 27 September meeting, OKH had issued its *Directive for Reorganization of the Army for Defensive War in the West* on 17 September which stressed training for a defensive response to a Franco-British offensive. The resulting plans for an offensive  in France and the Low Countries produced on 19 October were unimaginative frontal attack on a broad front. Hitler was unimpressed by these plans, but continually reaffirmed his commitment to an offensive despite the constant postponement of *Fall Gelb*. \n\nHitler's dissatisfaction with the conventional plans of attack, coupled with the Mechelen incident in which a plane carrying the current *Fall Gelb* plans accidentally landed in Belgium, gave an ideal opportunity to revamp the operation into something far more dynamic. The resulting Manstein sickle plan through the Ardennes is well-known, but even this firm operational plan created much dissension within the German ranks. Whether or not the panzers would need to be accompanied by the infantry or strike out on their own to swiftly close the trap in the Low Countries was fiercely debated in wargames prior to May 1940. \n\nLooking at this chaotic and almost dysfunctional military planning, the German success in 1940 was all the more remarkable. The delay in operations proved indirectly quite valuable as it did allow the German forces to reequip and engage in training that would allow them to improvise at key points in the campaign. The German command at various points in the campaign seemed to be amazed and almost skeptical of the success of the sickle cut. Hitler's  Fuhrer Directive No. 6 of 3 October stated German goals were:\n\n > to defeat as much as possible of the French Army and of the forces of the allies fighting on their side, and at the same time to win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England and as wide protective area for the economically vital Ruhr.  \n\nThat the German offensive had quickly achieved these relatively limited objectives and the door was seemingly open to the conquest of the whole of France shocked the German high command. The stiffening of French resistance along the newly-formed Weygand line during the wider offensive into France in June, *Fall Rot*, summoned up uncomfortable memories of a reversion to the static warfare of the First World War. The encirclement of the French armies in Lorraine and the French appeals for an armistice dispelled these fears, but they were operative through much of the campaign. \n\nThis muddled planning and the self-doubt that pervaded the German planning and execution of the invasion of France suggests that the Third Reich had no firm plan for an occupation of the entirety of France. It should be noted that this was all too typical of the planning culture within the Third Reich and the fact that there was no concrete plan for the occupation of France is somewhat irrelevant. Hitler created a geopolitical situation in 1939 in which it became essential that Germany completely neutralize France if Hitler was to realize his long-cherished vision of an empire in the east. \n\n*Sources* \n\nFrieser, Karl-Heinz. *The Blitzkrieg Legend The 1940 Campaign in the West*. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2013.\n\n Milita\u0308rgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. *Germany and the Second World War / Vol. 2, Germany's initial conquests in Europe*. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1z8yk8", "title": "Can history be effectively taught by teaching effect before cause and slowly progressing backwards into history?", "selftext": "To further explain what I mean is instead of just picking important dates through history and working towards today is it reasonable or is anyone trying to teach from current events backwards into the past?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1z8yk8/can_history_be_effectively_taught_by_teaching/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfrmfqw", "cfrnyx8"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Are you talking about serious academics only, or including elementary school?", "I have a bachelor's in history, and obtained a Master's in Teaching, and then focused on teaching mathematics rather than history. \n\nThere's actually a lot of really good reasons, not so much the 'effects before cause', but because everyone who is born suffers from a necessary 'flattening' - the world that I was born into simply 'is' the world, another way of saying 'presentism'. \n\nSo by teaching history from the present backwards, we can constantly reference the world that the students know, and build up a backstory that explains the world they can see. \n\nThe reason this doesn't happen a lot more often is because state standards call for state history to be taught often in the 9th grade, and American history to be taught often to Juniors. There's this idea that we want citizenry and civics to be taught to the strongest reasoners. \n\nThe approach that you take has a certain beautiful symmetry to it - we could teach citizenry and civics to 7th and 8th graders, contextualizing the world they are in, and the move backwards to American history in the 8th and 9th, move backwards through America's foundation and European expansionism, and then finally land in the ancient world. \n\nAnother problem with this approach is that you're asking students to understand local history - but it's not as if you're really going to get into any solid international politics. So when you get to the part of the ancient world which is relevant to modern politics, you don't really have the time and scope to have covered enough of the arab or chinese world to make ancient history's explanatory power relevant. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8mpebv", "title": "Were there any transgender people in the Holocaust?", "selftext": "I know that in 20s / early 30s Berlin there were transgender and gender non-conforming people, and it would stand to reason that they would have been persecuted by the Nazis.\n\n\nHowever, in my research I've not found any evidence of them being persecuted. I know many victims of the Holocaust weren't able to be placed into certain categories so were deemed \"asocial\" which is how I would guess as to the lack of evidence.\n\n\nAs a transgender person this question has always fascinated me, and not being able to find any evidence has really bothered me.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8mpebv/were_there_any_transgender_people_in_the_holocaust/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzv85te"], "score": [3], "text": ["From an older answer:\n\nResearch into this area has only begun in recent years and very little is known at this point.\n\nThe Weimar Republic had allowed people to officially change their sex officially. People who wished to do to had to appear before a judge, undergo psychiatric evaluation, an operative sex change and were then issued a so-called Transvestitenschein (a transvestite certificate or pass). This practice continued under the Nazis and we know of a case where a person had their sex changes as late as 1940.\n\nAll in all, historical research so far has turned up about 25 biogrpahies of transgender persons in the Third Reich who have official documentation attached to their names, i.e. appeared as people petitioning to receive a Transvestitenschein or came in contact with authorities while already having a Transvestitenschein from the Weimar Republic. Of those individuals, seven transitioned Female to Male, the rest Male to Female. Of the F2M individuals, we can trace one case of persecution: A person born Erna Kubbe who for reasons not entirely clear had their Transvestitenschein revoked and was imprisoned in the Ravensbr\u00fcck Concentration Camp for women. There however, he received permission to wear men's clothing and have his surnamed changed again to Gerd as it had been before he was imprisoned. The other six cases show a fairly normal existence, one person appearing in the historical record to have adopted a child together with his girlfriend in 1943.\n\nOf the F2M cases, seven were persecuted in some form, almost solely because of homosexual acts they had committed while cross dressing as a woman. In their cases, the cross dressing was viewed as resulting from their homosexuality but not as prove of it. They were brought to a Concentration Camp for homosexuality. The other eleven F2M individuals we know about, experienced problems but no persecution per se. In the case of an Austrian maid, she had undergone the operation but not changed her personal status with the courts yet, so when she was called up for the Wehrmacht, she was fined for draft evasion initially but otherwise left to lead her life.\n\nWhat is curious is also that it appears that in 1940 so-called Transvestiteballs were still held in Berlin and enjoyed over 300 visitors, all of them cross-dressing apparently.\n\nSo as far as we can tell, as long as the suspicion of homosexuality could be evaded, trans individuals who had gone through the channels set up by the state were not specifically persecuted. The discrimination and bureaucratic hurdles they had to undergo where not specific to the Nazi state, had been put in place before and continued afterwards. E.g. sending children who experienced trans feelings to psychiatric facilities is a practice that continued in Germany and Austria well until the 90s. What their experiences in Nazi psychiatry might have been, we don't know since we don't have any records of this happening at the moment.\n\nSimilarly, we don't know how the Nazi authorities dealt either with transgender people in the occupied and controlled territories or with individuals who identified as transgender but did not want to undergo reassignment surgery. The Uckermark Camp Memorial has produced some research lately that their camp was also used to imprison young women who displayed sexually and gender non-conformist behavior, what today would be called queer, but that has remained controversial within the academic community because some felt projected queerness back unto people before the concept existed is a form of presentism.\n\nAll in all, a lot of research is still to be done and a lot of sources still to be uncovered before a comprehensive picture of the situation of transgender individuals in Nazi Germany can be painted. In my professional opinion, one reason why in the cases known to us, we see no systematic persecution is because the number of people who openly identified themselves as transgender was comparatively small so that the Nazis never really thought up a all encompassing policy but rather continued what had been the status quo before.\n\nSources:\n\n* Volker  Weiss  (2010), \u201eEine  weibliche  Seele  im  m\u00e4nnlichen  K\u00f6rper; Arch\u00e4ologie  einer  Metapher  als  Kritik  der medizinischen Konstruktion der Transsexualit\u00e4t\u201c. Dissertation FU Berlin.\n\n* Rainer Herrn (2013), \u201eTransvestitismus in der NS-Zeit \u2013 Ein Forschungsdesiderat\u201c. Z SexFo 26.\n\n* Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal (2014);  \"Geschlechtswechsel unter der NS-Herrschaft. 'Transvesttitismus', Namens\u00e4nderung  und Personenstandskorrektur  in  der  'Ostmark'  am  Beispiel  der  F\u00e4lle  Mathilda/Mathias Robert S. und Emma/Emil Rudolf K.\"; Beitr\u00e4ge zur Rechtsgeschichte \u00d6sterreichs, Bd 1-2014"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vahdj", "title": "Where does the term \"Roma\" for the ethnicity come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vahdj/where_does_the_term_roma_for_the_ethnicity_come/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cog0hxd", "cog5613"], "score": [8, 4], "text": ["The term Roma is plural for man (Rom in Romani)", "_URL_0_\n\n\netymological dictionaries are your friend\n\nEDIT: since you probably don't have access to OED he's what they say\n\n >  Etymology:   <  Romani rom man, husband, Rom (plural rom\u00e1 ), of uncertain origin, probably  <  Sanskrit \u1e0domba lower-caste person working as a wandering musician (probably  <  a Dravidian language; compare Kannada domba , \u1e0domba , caste of acrobats, jugglers, clowns, Tamil dommara caste of jugglers, dommari member of this caste, and perhaps also Tamil tumpai crowd, Telugu dommi rabble, Kannada tombe , dombi , \u1e0dombi crowd, rabble), but also influenced by or partly  <  Byzantine Greek \u1fec\u03c9\u03bc- (in e.g. \u1fec\u03ce\u03bc\u03b7, a name of Rome and Constantinople (see Rome n.), \u1fec\u03c9\u03bc\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 citizen of the Byzantine Empire (in \u03bf\u1f31 \u1f11\u1ff7\u03bf\u03b9 \u1fec\u03c9\u03bc\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03b9 the eastern Romans; earlier (in Hellenistic Greek) denoting a Roman), use as noun of \u1fec\u03c9\u03bc\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 , adjective; compare Persian r\u016bm\u012b and its etymon Arabic r\u016bm\u012b Roumi n.), since the Roma formed into a distinct ethnic group within the Byzantine Empire. Compare earlier Romany n.2, Romany adj.2, and also Romanian adj.2 Compare earlier gipsy n., Zingano n., Zingaro n., and also Zigeuner n.\n\nand the earliest english source they give is from 1840s. \n\nso initially India referring to wandering musicians"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=Roma&amp;searchmode=none"]]}
{"q_id": "3hmz82", "title": "How extensive and fatal was Anti-Loyalist violence during the American Revolution?", "selftext": "I understand mobs of Patriots would harass, and at times inflict injury upon Loyalists throughout the Revolution but it is difficult to find any kind of statistics on number of occurrences and fatalities. How often did they outright kill Loyalists? Was this widely reported / hidden?\n\nAs a bit of unnecessary background on my question, I'm locked in debate with a friend who believes that the American Revolution was bloodier and more cruel to civilians of both sides than the French Revolution. I have not found many sources to indicate that the American Revolution saw the same kind of widespread killings as we saw in Paris.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3hmz82/how_extensive_and_fatal_was_antiloyalist_violence/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cu92l79"], "score": [2], "text": ["I would not say that it was more bloody than the French Revolution, but there was more fighting than is popularly portrayed. T.H. Breen's American Insurgents, American Patriots offers a compelling read as to this issue."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b3siuk", "title": "Were black people allowed to vote during segregation?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3siuk/were_black_people_allowed_to_vote_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ej1tztk"], "score": [11], "text": ["*Officially*, yes. Their right to vote was constitutionally protected, and could not be denied on the basis of race. However in practice, the right to vote is not actually that well defined under the Constitution, and there were many different ways that the white supremacist regimes in control of the segregationist states used to suppress or control black and poor white votes, some of which were nominally legal, others not so. Although the focus here is on the 19th century so leaves off a good deal of the time span in question, [this previous answer of mine](_URL_0_) does cover some of these issues. I'll quote the core excerpt for you here:\n\n > [....] With the end of Reconstruction and the triumph of 'Redeemer' governments, just about any possible barrier to the voting by African-Americans was implemented. Most famous, perhaps, being literacy tests, but plenty of other mechanisms, including more expansive registration requirements that could be a bureaucratic quagmire for even a quite literate person to navigate, such as requiring documentation of voting history, and subjective tests that could be failed at the whim of the man conducting them. Even though they were clearly targeted primarily at the black population, being as written race neutral (the laws, after all, did impact many poor whites, a not-unwelcome byproduct for the white elites), the laws didn't violate the 15th Amendment as passed, although whether courts would have been forceful in upholding the Constitution with the draft language we can only speculate, given that even the ratified language was hardly well enforced (See Giles v. Harris or US v. Cruishank, among others), and registration requirements were waived or ignored in many cases for white persons, such as small-time felons, or with blanket \"Grandfather Laws\" which ensured that they needed to meet none of the requirements, essentially.\n\n > Instances are known where certain requirements were waived for African-American men, but always in situations where the man was willing to vote Democrat. Holloway notes the case of Silas Green, who had committed some small time crime, who had been allowed to vote when he balloted Democrat, but upon switching his affiliation, was challenged by the Democratic election officials. It is important to note that in 1880, Reconstruction had only just ended and while ascendant, the Redeemers didn't necessarily feel quite in total control, so as Holloway aptly describes, this form of waiver for specific black persons was \"particularly effective because they offered Democrats a flexible but effective way to manipulate the vote when a close race was at hand.\" They quite literally could create voters if needed, but immediately prevent further voting if they believed that person would no longer support them. This would, of course, become less necessary and less common as the Jim Crow laws were passed and the white ruling elite came to feel more secure in power, and there was no longer any need to court any black voters.\n\n > The impact of such laws is stark. During Reconstruction, in Louisiana, 130,000 black men were voters. After the state was \"redeemed\", 5,000 black voters were registered. And even those few who were able to get through every hurdle thrown their way still had to contend with the intimidation and threats that would be directed their way for daring to make use of their right. Other states saw similar declines in the late 19th century (although by the early 20th century numbers would again rise as black community organizers worked to fight back and take back the vote). [....]"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qjfjm/in_the_united_states_we_have_to_register_to/e8ar8pj/"]]}
{"q_id": "160pi1", "title": "Would the royal women of the medieval ages really have the flawless features that we see in movies?", "selftext": "Example [Daenerys from Game of Thrones](_URL_0_)\n\nObviously, movies and art take a lot of artistic freedom, and Game of Thrones is a fictional world, but how well-kept would the people of this time have been, even the royalty? \n\nWhat things would have been used to clean themselves, and how well did these things work compared to all of the products we have available today? How was dental hygiene?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/160pi1/would_the_royal_women_of_the_medieval_ages_really/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7rmktc", "c7rmkxj", "c7rmqct", "c7rn6cl", "c7rne4v", "c7ro5v4", "c7rptzy", "c7rrhig", "c7rspta", "c7ruy2v"], "score": [42, 69, 15, 22, 17, 954, 100, 7, 11, 19], "text": ["Well first of all, judging by the art from the middle ages in Europe, the beauty ideal for women was quite different from the one today, so if the person was widely regarded as handsome then, I'd guess they wouldn't look like Kate Winslet exactly. ", "The most glaring difference between female appearence (even the royal ones) between now and then was the state of skin. Firstly, washing, even your face, was frowned upon by the Church and medics. Secondly, different diseases, the most prominent being smallpox, left heavy scarring on the face. Thirdly, as a result of bad hygiene, pipmples were the bane not only of teenagers but adults too.\n\nSo how have they dealt with it? First method was to heavily cover your face with lead paint (makeup nowadays). Since lead poisoning can happen through contact with lead, you can imagine their overall health. Second, fake beauty spots, made of paper or leather, were used to cover the most prominent pimples. And third, at the dawn of medieval times, fans were introduced and instantly became a good method to somehow hide your flawes of the face.", "I'm not sure if this is even my place to speak since I'm only semi knowledgable. In Victorian times lye soap was used as a soap along with animal fat. I don't know if this was also used in the time period you are looking for. Basically it is an acid and was quite harsh for the skin, it would often burn and sting. (Believe me I've used a similar type of soap and it was not fun) It would clean out pores and in some cases would help acne if it was bad enough, also remember they took less baths. Powders were used for complexions and hair. Powders take moisture out of hair making it look cleaner, if it had a scent that's only a bonus. Smelling good was more important than actually being clean.\n\nEdit: Told you it wasn't my place to say anything.  ", "One also has to remember that the perception of beauty in royalty has changed over time. While we may not see her as such today many considered Queen Elizabeth I to be quite beautiful with her chalky white skin and good birthing hips. So I don't believe a girl as skinny as Daenerys would even be considered healthy looking in Elizabethan England. ", "Sorry? It's a fictional world, as you correctly state. So what period do you actually mean? If you do mean the \"for real\" Mediaeval period, why not check out the numerous portraits extant to check whether or not you think the beauties of the time would appeal to modern audiences? Add in the meat-rich/vegetable-poor diet of the aristocracy, the lack of exercise, other than equestrian activity, poor dental hygiene (Elizabeth I used brick dust and honey), internal parasites, scars from fleabites, skin infections and smallpox and infrequent bathing - and see what you get. Later than the Middle Ages, I know, but Diane de Poitiers' legendary beauty well into (at the time) old age was probably due to nothing more than fresh air, exercise, good food and lots of sex. ", "Echoing others here, generally not. \n\n[This is a great article](_URL_1_) on the history of cosmetics for a general overview. If nothing else, the long history of \"corrective aids\" to appearance suggests that very few people in any age believe they are naturally flawless.\n\n**Pock-faced Elizabeth**\n\nThe most famous example is probably [Elizabeth I](_URL_0_), who was said by court ambassadors (who were writing home to their own nations -- they would never have written this to be seen in England itself!) to be covered in smallpox scars. She popularized the use of white paint in order to cover them up, but unfortunately it contained lead. Over time, this led to severe hair loss at best and death at worst. Elizabeth had already lost a great deal of hair due to the scarring on her scalp from smallpox, but lost still more to the face-painting, and was said to be almost entirely bald by her forties. \n\nWhile Elizabeth is an extreme example, she's not an entirely unrepresentative one. Noble women were only less susceptible to diseases like smallpox in the sense that noble families often moved around to avoid outbreaks (a group of young people fleeing a plague outbreak in Florence is the context for [Boccaccio's *The Decameron*](_URL_6_)), but they weren't any more immune to scarring illnesses or conditions than anyone else was. Between the lack of access to modern dentistry and orthodontia, lead-based make-up, diseases like smallpox, the ubiquity of fleas, and the inability to correct congenital deformities, I suspect people tolerated a lot more \"imperfection\" in pursuit of beauty.\n\nSome fashionable practices didn't improve the situation much. The elaborate wigs and hairstyles favored during the 18th century were so difficult to put together that you'd have it done in a day's time and then try to maintain it for the next 2-3 weeks. The lard and greases used to keep the hairstyles in place attracted vermin, and the lack of brushing meant that any lice infestation wouldn't encounter any serious opposition. The [Duty on Hair Powder Act of 1795](_URL_2_) helped to kill off the mania for wigs in England, but I don't know when their popularity declined elsewhere.\n\n**Flawless features are a lie anyway**\n\nSecond, and on a more modern note, even the women of *today's age* don't have the flawless features that we see in movies. Emilia Clarke has excellent skin, but in every shot, she's slathered in make-up and lit to advantage. In publicity shots and sometimes even production stills, you should always assume that the unseen hand of PhotoShop is at work. \n\nBig movies even have the budgets to digitally alter key shots to still greater advantage. Remember the FX artist who worked on *Transformers* and did an AMA on Reddit? And the now-infamous scene with [Megan Fox and the car](_URL_3_)? It isn't real. Well, it's real in the sense that Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf were both in front of a camera saying lines. It isn't real in the sense that Fox's body was digitally augmented, and in pretty much the places you'd expect. If you listen to the commentary tracks on a variety of movies, directors will usually point out the scenes where computers were used to hide something, from things as small as a pimple that Cameron Diaz had on a given day of shooting, to splicing in Natalie Portman's mouth and dialogue from a good take to a Natalie Portman in a take where the lighting was better.\n\nAs much as we can rail about the murky ethics behind it, it's the latest in a long tradition of artistic fakery. Portrait artists in earlier ages left out \"imperfections\" and accentuated good traits in order to keep clients happy. The camera had been invented for all about five minutes before [people started to screw around](_URL_5_) with the resulting pictures. Now PhotoShop is brought in to create an image of people that simply does not exist. And in the meantime, we keep trucking along with our pimples, cellulite, chipped teeth, pores, uneven eyes, varicose veins, and errant hairs, convinced that reality is a lesser version of what we should actually be.\n\nPerfection is literally inhuman, but it's all we seem to want. Sorry to be maudlin, but threads like [this](_URL_4_) are starting to kill my soul.", "In my period, luckily, we do have some more unflinching accounts of how women looked. A tip: when you want to see how a woman looked, see if there are any busts of her rather than portraiture - it's a tad harder to be flattering and accurate at the same time with busts. Compare [this](_URL_1_) bust of Marie-Antoinette, in which her negative features (high forehead, aquiline nose, slightly protruding 'Hapsburg' bottom lip) to [this] (_URL_2_) portrait of her, which, does display these features, but makes them far less harsh to the eye of the audience.\n\nThose noblewomen and royal princesses that were disfigured, disabled or otherwise invalid were often left unmarried, where they would remain at the court of their brother, or joined the church in the role of Abbess. There are, however, many cases of men being rather repulsed by their royal wives. The Comte de Provence did fervently find himself repulsed by the Savoyard Comtesse de Provence, despite the fact that [portraits](_URL_0_) of her don't hint at the fact that she was apparently, according to the libellous and often very wrong court gossip of Versailles, dirty and unkempt.\n\nI am sorry that this is not strictly medieval, but I think you will find that these policies do go back towards the times of Elizabeth I of England and beyond.", "As an interesting note on disease and royalty...it is believed that often major pathogens (for example yersinia pestis also known as the bubonic plague) like most others bacteria, require an adequate amount of iron.  Thus it often struck families with money harder because they were much more well fed as opposed to the malnourished lower class peasants. ", "Some, not all. One of my personal heroes, [Diane de Poitiers](_URL_0_), was famous for her beautiful skin, even until she was 50. She reputedly bathed in milk, and drank gold.", "Medieval ideals of beauty were much different than they are now, as I'm sure has been pointed out to you already. The most important factor in a medieval woman's beauty was probably her skin, which marked her as noble or aristocratic. Due to widespread disease and filth, clear skin was a rarity, and therefore highly desirable. A truly important factor when it came to beauty, as well, was the woman's \"evenness of features\". A medieval man may not have found modern actresses/models very attractive; they preferred a woman to have rounded and *even* features, while the ideal of modern beauty focuses on sharp, exaggerated features.\n\nedit: I feel I should add to my comment since I'm getting questions about what I meant. I hope this clears things up a bit! In another reply I linked a [Raffael painting](_URL_0_) which I feel embodies the general ideals of beauty in medieval Europe, which I will elaborate on. The medieval ideal of beauty seemed to be more concerned with if a woman had these specific features, rather than whether she was actually *pretty* in the face, per se. A woman's personality and status could make up for conventional prettiness if she had these, what they thought of as, *regular* features.\n\n* Clear and pale skin. Darker skin tones were not exactly considered ugly, but paleness was preferred, probably because only wealthy people could generally have such light skin. In some instances, darker appearance could  be viewed as exotic and worked to one's advantage, as in the case of Anne Boleyn.\n* A woman's hair was a large factor in her beauty. Due to the same health reasons as clear skin, long and healthy hair was considered beautiful. Only a wealthy person could afford to take care of so much hair, as lice and other such pests were commonplace, and bathing was a rarity even among nobility. A woman's hair color was not as important as its length and health, though light color was generally preferred as the ideal.\n* An oval or rounded face with soft, even features. Any sort of pronounced or non-regular feature, such as high cheekbones or skinniness, was not considered beautiful. The sharp chins and strong jawed models in modern fashion magazines would have not been attractive to many medieval men.\n* Large eyes (with lighter colors preferred), a long nose, and small mouth all in appropriate proportion. During the early and high middle ages, an *extremely* high forehead was the ideal; noblewomen would pluck their hairlines to make their foreheads appear larger. This desire for a large forehead persisted, though to a lesser extreme, at least until the Renaissance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.lv3.hbo.com/assets/images/series/game-of-thrones/character/s2/daenerys-targaryen-1024.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England", "http://www.asiapharmaceutics.info/article.asp?issn=0973-8398;year=2009;volume=3;issue=3;spage=164;epage=167;aulast=Chaudhri", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_on_Hair_Powder_Act_1795", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ch0Hu917CQ", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen/comments/1605hz/guys_would_you_date_have_sex_withdate_younger/", "http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/10/13/the-surprisingly-old-art-photo-fakery/1s6A05EM9Xt1DJYqPjlpNP/story.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Comtesse_de_Provence,_\u00c9lisabeth-Louise_Vig\u00e9e-Le_Brun.jpg", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DzskcQgu3L4/TGFNOWEZ2GI/AAAAAAAAC7k/UfeIRFSGVmM/s1600/Marie+Antoinette+louvre+marble+1783.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Marie-Antoinette,_1775_-_Mus\u00e9e_Antoine_L\u00e9cuyer.jpg"], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_de_Poitiers"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Raffael_046.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "4ccxv3", "title": "How were Viking and Spartan warriors that survived battles and wars seen once they made home?", "selftext": "From what I remember from my history courses, it was honorable to die in combat and; dishonorable to be captured.  How were those that fought in battles and wars treated if they managed to make it home alive? Would Vikings still make it to Valhalla? How would they be treated in daily life? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ccxv3/how_were_viking_and_spartan_warriors_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1hhwid"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure about Vikings but elderly Spartan men could be elected into the Gerousia,  a council of elders made up of 30 men over 60 years old who typically held office for life.\nThere were also the Ephors, 5 elected high officials who aside from the two kings held the most power. While I'm not sure if there was an age limit to this group they were likely often older, well known men.\n\nIn short elder Spartan men, essentially all of them by then being veterans of many battles (there were long stretches when the Spartans weren't warring with anyone however) could enter high governmental offices. They were an influential and respected part of society.\nIt is possible that there may still have been something of a stigma towards these men as they were no longer prime fighters in a society dedicated to producing prime fighters, but even if there was the society still held these men in high esteem."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2sr0h2", "title": "How much communication and collaboration was there between American and Soviet scientists and academics during the Cold War?", "selftext": "Did scientists and academics in the two countries have any direct contact with each other? Did they work jointly on projects? If so, to what extent? Did the level of communication/collaboration vary based on the field of study?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sr0h2/how_much_communication_and_collaboration_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cns2job"], "score": [2], "text": ["It probably did vary based on the field. In linguistics, communication theory and anthropology, for example, there was little official communication, but some little did pass through. The Soviets often managed to smuggle in the most important works of Western scholars and unofficial translations circulated among secret scientific societies (e.g. the Tartu-Moscow School of semiotics). Since they had to stave off KGB and their informants, outside information was often distributed in 18th century salon gatherings (which were very popular and influential in Russia especially), e.g. a distinguished person invited friends and acquaintances to his or her home. The reverse is also true - Soviet manuscripts were often smuggled out to be translated and published in Western journals. More often than not, though, they were published in departments of slavistics, so that Soviet film studies, for example, didn't actually have much influence on Western film studies. It was also the case that the French were much more it tune with Soviet humanitarian fields, perhaps because they were more openly Marxist, so that the French were often mediators between America and Russia. For example, the concept of \"intertextuality\" was originally Mikhail Bakhtin's term but gained notoriety through Julia Kristeva. So, too, with structural anthropology, which is attributed to Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, but only came to be because of the influence of Roman Jakobson. There are countless such examples, but they are easier to trace on the Western side, because the Soviets didn't cite or reference their Western sources. Also, during the Khrushchev Thaw, some few Western academics did get to travel into Soviet countries, especially for conferences, but were kept on a tight watch and driven around by KGB officers. \n\nSource: am Estonian, e.g. from an ex-Soviet satellite country. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21iqwe", "title": "What is the current historical understanding of how Native Americans developed corn (maize)?", "selftext": "I was re-reading [Charles C. Mann's 1491](_URL_0_) the other day, and the question of how maize was developed from teosinte has stuck with me. \n\nIn the book, Mann references the fact that no one was quite sure how Indians developed the various species of corn that were widespread in the Americas, given that the ancestor of corn plants (teosinte) has a hard covering over its kernels and produces only a few seeds per plant. Mann's book was most recently updated in 2006, so I'm wondering if there has been any new scholarship on the subject in recent years. \n\nThanks in advance for any help!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21iqwe/what_is_the_current_historical_understanding_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdkvje"], "score": [3], "text": ["Actually just this past February a study was [released](_URL_0_) in which the climate at the time of the end of the last Ice Age was recreated in a greenhouse. They discovered that teosinte looks remarkable more like maize in the past than it does today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://books.google.com/books/about/1491_Second_Edition.html?id=vSCra8jUI2EC"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/to-decode-mystery-corn-smithsoniain-scientists-recreate-earth-ten-thousand-years-ago-180949708/?no-ist"]]}
{"q_id": "6jl80a", "title": "What is the craziest story from history you have encountered in your research?", "selftext": "Now and then, we like to host '[Floating Features](_URL_0_)', periodic threads intended to allow for more open discussion that allows a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. \n\nToday's topic is 'Crazy History'. In every field of study, there's a story that makes you shake your head and say \"what?\" In this thread, we invite users to share what weird and wild stories they've encountered in their study of history, and hopefully give us some context as to why it's unusual!\n\nAs is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat then there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith.\n\nFor those who missed the initial announcement, this is also part of a preplanned series of Floating Features for our [2017 Flair Drive](_URL_4_). Stay tuned over the next month for:\n\n* **Sat. May 27th**: [What is the happiest story from history you have encountered in your research?](_URL_6_)\n* **Thu. June 1st**: [What is the saddest story from history you have encountered in your research?](_URL_5_)\n* **Tue. June 6th**: [What is your 'go to' story from history to tell at parties?](_URL_7_)\n* **Sun. June 11**: [What story from your research had the biggest impact on how you think about the world?](_URL_2_)\n* **Fri. June 16**: [What is the funniest story from history you have encountered in your research?](_URL_1_)\n* **Mon. June 26th**: [What is the craziest story from history you have encountered in your research?](_URL_3_)\n* **Sat. July 1st**: Who is a figure from history you feel is greatly underappreciated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jl80a/what_is_the_craziest_story_from_history_you_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djf7i1t", "djfctq7", "djfhog0", "djfmmt9", "djfqeff", "djg87ge", "djgbgfy"], "score": [34, 21, 14, 8, 13, 11, 3], "text": ["Just a few small stupid castrato stories... \n\n* Pasquale \"Pasqualino\" Tiberti, born probably in the decade of 1710 in Citta Ducale, Italy, hired onto the Sistine Chapel in 1743, and fired 11 years later for stabbing a priest in a fight, the priest died of his injuries. Apparently suffered no real setbacks for this, as he shows up in an opera cast in Macerata's 1757 carnival festivities.\n\n* Giuseppe Belli, had a promising opera career, but was murdered in 1760 at age 28, legendarily by a jealous husband. \n\n* Andrea \"Andreini\" Martini: the last boy the Siena Cathedral officially paid to have castrated, age 14, in the year 1775, in payment he sang there for 4 years after. Good opera career. \n\n* Francesco Bardi, was apparently  so amazing that in the 1620s he was \"kidnapped\" from his conservatory by the San Pietro cathedral. Furious, the conservatory later compelled them to return him to school to finish his contract. The school had probably paid to have him castrated and that is not cheap. After that a good mixed career for the 17th century, splitting between church and opera work. \n\n* Giuseppe \"Gioseppino\" Ricciarelli and Gaspare Savoy: two names otherwise entirely unpaired in history, except for the fact that Giacomo Casanova took the time to record that he found them sexually attractive. There are more castrati in his memoirs, of course, but these are the two he wanted you to know were hot. But only because they were dressed like women and it was so *very convincing.*  Honestly I'll just quote his whole description of Savoy because it's June still: \n\n > He was enclosed in a carefully-made corset and looked like a nymph; and\nincredible though it may seem, his breast was as beautiful as any\nwoman's; it was the monster's chiefest charm. However well one knew the\nfellow's neutral sex, as soon as one looked at his breast one felt all\naglow and quite madly amorous of him. To feel nothing one would have to\nbe as cold and impassive as a German. As he walked the boards, waiting\nfor the refrain of the air he was singing, there was something grandly\nvoluptuous about him; and as he glanced towards the boxes, his black\neyes, at once tender and modest, ravished the heart. He evidently wished\nto fan the flame of those who loved him as a man, and probably would not\nhave cared for him if he had been a woman.\n\nIF GOOD DRAG DOESN'T GET YOU HOT, YOU'RE A GERMAN. - man whose name has become a byword for aggressive male heterosexuality \n\nGiuseppe Ricciarelli was also sworn in as a Freemason in 1774, apparently. Strange times. \n", "There are a whole bunch of insane situations in Italian history, but I would say my absolute favorite is the War of the League of Cambrai: the closest thing History has ever gotten to a war being fought over \"Causus Belli: Coalition\" like in the strategy video game Europa Universalis. However, unlike in the video game, the dynamics and relationships between the participants were constantly in flux, to the point that upon arriving on a battlefield outside of Ravenna in 1512, the Duke of Ferrara Alfonso D'Este tore at his hair, stamped his feet, and sat behind his cannons while indiscriminately shooting into the melee, having decided that telling friend from foe was insurmountably difficult and altogether useless. \n\nSo in the spring of 1509 Pope Julius excommunicated the Republic of Venice, and French army immediately marched out of Milan. Venice was up against a coalition consisting of France, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Mantua, Ferrara, all assembled by the Papacy. This did not look good.\n\nThe two Venetian captain-generals, d'Alviano and Orsini, immediately distinguished themselves by being completely at odds in every conceivable way.  The result was that the Venetian armies were defeated in detail, and d'Alvaino was captured by the French. The Venetian senate, in a panic, voted to \"jettison the cargo to save the ship,\" and dissolved the Venetian cities of all ties of fealty. The Lombard cities submitted to the King of France, while Orsini, in full retreat until he could regroup the Venetian forces in Treviso, did nothing to stop the cities of Verona, Vicenza, and Padua from welcoming imperial emissaries.\n\nBy early summer, Orsini withdrew to a perimeter around the old watchtower at Mestre, the Republic's medieval border on the edge of the lagoon. It would seem that the Republic's days as a power in Italy were over. However, by midsummer the tide was already changing. The emissaries sent to the Emperor by council of the city of Treviso were mobbed in the street before they could leave: the citizens would rather stand and fight than surrender. Orsini sent seven hundred footmen marching down the Terraglio Road in double time so that the walls of Treviso could be manned, and the citizens began gathering stockpiles for a siege.\n\nThe siege never came: Imperial garrisons in the Veneto were too busy fighting a losing battle to maintain order in the cities they occupied. In Padua, the city's rebellious citizens had kept the gates open (Norwich narrates that this was done by way of an Oxcart crash) such that a small company of Venetian Knights headed by the *Proveditore Generale* Andrea Gritti could enter the city. Now riled by mounted men at arms, the Paduan mob expelled the Imperial Landsknechts. Gritti, at the time little over fifty years of age, as *Provveditore* was something of a cross between a procurement officer and a political officer; he had spent the better part of the past few years overseeing the fortifications in the Friuli. However, he had elected to personally oversee the dangerous sally to retake Padua: a testament to the fact that in spite of the Senate's inaction, some elements of the Venetian ruling class still had some fight left in them.\n\nEmperor Maximillian felt obliged to respond: he believed Padua would have been an invaluable addition to the Austrian demesne and he was set on taking it back. An Enormous imperial army set forth from the Brenner to take the city. After linking with French and Spanish regiments, by September of 1509 the city was encircled. However, taking the city would be no picnic: Gritti had convinced Orsini move his headquarters up to Padua with the bulk of his forces. Although the Imperial artillery breached the walls, the ferocious defense mounted by the Venetian army supported by the citizenry meant that by the end of September, the Imperial forces had no choice but to withdraw for the winter. \n\nOrsini, unexpectedly reversing his position on the usefulness of taking the initiative, pursued the withdrawing Imperial forces. He found the Vicenza in total rebellion against the Imperial occupation and entered the city with minimum fuss. However in spite of the bulk of the Imperial forces withdrawing to the Tyrol, the detachment left in Verona kept the city subdued and supply lines into Italy open. A siege would have to be mounted mounted. Although initially promising (Orsini even managed to beat back the Papal relief expedition) upon spotting French reinforcements on the horizon the Venetian army withdrew back to Padua. The Venetian fleet, which had kept the cities of Dalmatia well-supplied in spite of Hungarian incursions, attempted to cut off the French and Austrians from their Italian allies by establishing dominance on the River Po, however the fleet proved no match for Ferrarese artillery on the higher ground. A small victory did come when a detachment of Venetian soldiers seized the stronghold at Este, not only securing the lower river Adige, but also humiliating the ruling house of Ferrara: Este is their ancestral home. But overall, in the winter of 1509, the conflict was at a stalemate.\n\nAll the while, the Venetian diplomatic machine had been meticulously working behind the scenes: Pope Julius was told horrifying tales of the massive size of the Austrian and French armies, and the Venetian ambassador in Rome whispered that the cities of Bologna and Perugia were in endemic revolt: what if the Emperor chose to seize those too? Perhaps the Austrians had come to an agreement with the Aragonese, and were discussing Julian's downfall and the partition of the Papal States this very minute. In fact, it would make perfect sense for them to seize Emilia and Umbria, now that they already held half the Veneto, wouldn't it?\n\nPope Julius was convinced, but drove a hard bargain. Not only would Venice have to abandon all claims in the Romagna, the Republic would allow the Papacy to appoint bishops in its cities. The terms were humiliating, but by February of 1510 the Senate accepted.\n\nA Venetian separate peace with the Papacy royally pissed off King Louis of France. Louis was already annoyed by Maximillian's insistence on organizing big showy actions that invariably ended with him withdrawing to Tyrol, probably to check on the progress of his absurd funeral monument. This was the last straw: as per usual, La France was going to have to take matters into her own hands! However, a successful French offensive in March to re-take Vicenza resulting in the death of Orsini only catalyzed a new uprising in favor of the Republic by November. Plus, now Andrea Gritti was left as the highest ranking officer in the Venetian army, which was another kind of defeat altogether.\n\nPope Julian, unfazed by the quagmire he had sunk the Veneto into, happily organized an expedition against the Duchy of Ferrara while all this was going on. The reason, much like his reason to declare war on Venice, was probably driven by his own megalomania (and the desire to extend Papal territory even further north, seizing the profitable salt plains on the Po delta). He convinced the Swiss Cantons to organize an expedition against Milan, while a Papal army seized Piacenza, Reggio, and Parma (Ferrarese possessions in the Emilia). However, the Swiss raid was quickly turned back at the gates of Milan by King Louis, who promptly organized a punitive expedition into the heart of Italy: by mid October 1510, the French army was within striking distance of the Papal headquarters in Bologna. By May of 1511, the French army occupied the city, while the Papal HQ, headed by Pope Julian himself, evacuated to Ravenna.\n\nBut French advantage would soon be undone: seeing the French push forward without the Austrians, the Spanish convinced the English to come to an agreement so that king Louis would be stopped from getting too powerful in Italy. Betrayed, the French moved quickly, consolidating control over Venetian Lombardy by committing troops to put down a revolt in Brescia, while the French commander Gaston de Foix-Nemours moved rapidly against Ravenna by the Spring of 1512. He did not move rapidly enough however, and a Spanish relief force engaged the French south of the city on May 11th. The Duke of Ferrara also arrived onto the battlefield with an army, but this point had lost track of who was and who wasn't on his side, so he resolved to sit some ways from the battlefield and ordered his artillery to shell both armies indiscriminately.\n\nI suppose the moral of the story is that if the Italian wars get too crazy and confusing, don't worry: it was just as crazy for those taking part in them. ", "There was a popular martial arts style that arose in the colonial US South and persisted through the antebellum period that consisted of trying to maim your opponent as horrifically as possible, typically by gouging out their eyes but also tearing off ears, noses, lips, fingers, testicles, etc. The only rule to this style of fighting was that no weapons were allowed. It was known by a number of different names including gouging, rough-and-tumble, \"boxing,\" and others. These gruesome fights weren't just matters of last resort but could be started over almost any insult to one's wealth or birth, no matter how seemingly petty to outsiders. Southern culture was defined by face-to-face interactions, kinship ties, and acts of hospitality; all of which placed great importance on spoken words. Like dueling \",To feel for a feller's eyestrings and make him tell the news\" as one participant put it, was a way of asserting your honor; a critically important concept for one's image in that rural reputation-obsessed culture. One's honor was frequently correlated to how hard you were willing to fight to defend it, and to surrender before being maimed was considered cowardly. The fights were major social events and frequently carried out in full view of the public during court days, fairs, and after church which had the effect of maximizing their exposure. Outside observers to these fights were frequently horrified by them, and several wrote of how they were evidence that exposure to the frontier had turned white Americans into savages. While rough-and-tumble fights were most common among poorer sorts in the hinterlands, planters in the Tidewater region and elsewhere were known to participate in them until the practice was largely replaced among the wealthy by the more genteel-but-deadlier pistol duels in the late 18th century, though there were notable exceptions such as Georgia senator James Jackson's gouging match with a rival politician. \n\nThe practice began to disappear as the South became more settled and personal feuds grew less important in determining status. The Second Great Awakening's evangelism reached the South's non-wealthy communities and emphasized moderation and self-control. In the frontiers the decline in rough-and-tumble fighting began to disappear as deadlier weapons such as revolvers, capable of being hidden in one's pocket for use as a last resort to save one's eyes or as revenge against winners of fights, became more widespread.\n\nmain source: Elliott J. Gorn, \"'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry\"", "A Monkey, a squirrel, and a dog walk into a bar...\n\nAn unlikely set of companions, yet low and behold they were three of the animals kept by the crew of the Victoria when it arrived in Adelaide in 1933.  The ship arrived in Adelaide with a cargo of phosphate rock from Makatea Island, the French mining outpost 125 miles off Tahiti (the connection explaining how I came across the amusing story).\n\nThe trio of bizarre pets made for a motley crew.  Two of them originated in Costa Rica, Communist the spider-monkey and the Squirrel, Fritz.  Finally, Tuborg was a black and white terrier of unknown origin-- but whose name reflects the Danish origin of the Captain and flag of the ship.\n\nThe story is an interesting example of the sort of transnational voyaging common among large cargo ships, especially those who specialized in moving raw materials like coal, or in this case phosphate rock.  The pets illustrate some of the connections that could be made between a crew and the ports they visited-- or of the sort of biological exchanges that were possible even during brief exchanges.", "\u201cCraziest\u201d for its sheer over-the-top lavishness would be the \u201cFeast of the Pheasant\u201d that the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, held in 1454 at Lille to commemorate the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and stir crusading fervor to rescue it. There are several accounts (as Catherine Emerson explains, see below). Jules Michelet and Huizinga both discuss it in their important medieval histories. This one is a conflation of details from a few of them quoted from Jesse D. Hurlbut\u2019s 1992 paper, [\u201cFrom Functional Feast to Frivolous Funhouse: Two Ideals of Play in the Burgundian Court\u201d](_URL_0_). The main eyewitness account is by Olivier de La Marche (and pardon the length):\n\n > The banquet was served on three tables--one large, one medium, and one small.  On the medium-sized table, there was a church with bells, stained-glass windows, and a working pipe organ and choir, which provided musical interludes throughout the evening. On the same table, a *mannekin pis* [statue of a little boy pissing] kept a silver ship filled with rose water.  There were, in addition, a model of an anchored freight ship and a glass fountain which featured Saint Andrew, Philip's patron saint, with water spewing from the X-shaped cross of his martyrdom.\nThe large table was far more elaborate.  Eight-and-twenty musicians, baked in a giant meat pie, accompanied the interludes of the church choir on the previous table.  In addition, the towers of a castle squirted orange punch into its moat; archers tried to catch a magpie perched on top of a windmill.  A trick barrel could give either sweet or sour wine: \"Take some, if you want!\" was written on the scroll of a man standing nearby.  There are no dimensions or proportions mentioned in the chronicles, but it is a reasonable assumption that with the exception of the meat pie, all of these \"entremets\" (as they were called) were scale models.  Practicality and the chronicler's amazement at the attention to minute details support this impression.  Five more \"entremets\" adorned this same table: a tiger fighting a serpent; a wildman on a camel; an amorous couple eating the birds that a man was beating out of a bush with a stick; there was also a jester on the back of a bear and a ship floating back and forth between cities.\n\n > There was room for only three \"entremets\" at the small table: a forest with wild animals that moved as if alive; a man hitting a dog in front of a lion attached to a tree; and a street merchant carrying his wares on a harness.\n\n > Elsewhere in the hall, a living lion was chained to a pillar protecting a statue of a nude woman who served \"hypocras\" [spiced, sweetened wine] from her right breast.  Above the lion, it was written, \"Ne touchez a ma dame.\"\n\n > Once the guests, most of whom were in disguise, were seated and in their places, the real spectacle began (\"entremets vivants, mouvants, et allants par terre\" Coussy [Mathieu d'Escouchy] 101).  This included an assortment of musical numbers and acrobatic acts, interspersed with three scenes of a play relating the story of Jason.  At one point, two falcons, which had been released in the banquet hall, captured and killed a heron, which was presented to the duke as a trophy.  Later on, a dragon is reported to have flown from one end of the hall to the other.\n\n > The climactic event, and presumably the justification for the entire affair, was the sudden arrival of a giant, dressed like a Saracen.  On a leash, he held an elephant.  On the back of the elephant was a castle, and in the castle was woman dressed like a nun.  The giant led the elephant to Duke Philip's table, where the disheveled woman introduced herself as Holy Church. She relayed the dangers she had endured since the Turkish invasion of Constantinople.  She then asked the duke for his assistance in restoring peace by taking up the cross and restoring her honor.\n\n > At the conclusion of this speech, a contingent of ladies and knights approached the duke lead by the King of Arms, an officer of the Order of the Golden Fleece, named Toison d'Or.  He was carrying a live pheasant in his arms, which was richly decorated with a golden necklace of pearls and jewels.  He invited the duke to make a vow in the presence of the bird according to the tradition of noble courts (no doubt a reminder of the Peacock oaths of Alexander's court as found in French romances of the 13th century).  Conveniently enough, the duke had a vow written down, which he delivered to the King of Arms.  He then pronounced a brief promise to do what he had written in the letter.  Toison d'Or read the letter out loud, which included the duke's vow to undertake, God willing, a crusade to restore Constantinople to the Christians.  Holy Church, overcome with joy, expressed her gratitude and left the same way she came in.\n\n > In an enthusiastic outbreak, knights, squires and trenchermen in turn pronounced their own oaths to join Philip on the crusade.  The chronicle of Mathieu de Coucy, in which the description of this whole event is preserved, records the vows of 99 men after Philip.  Not all of these vows were delivered at the banquet, however.  Always sensitive to the attention span of his court, and seeing that \"la chose eut este merveilleusement longue\" (Coussy 118), the duke ordered that the vows stop and that the remainder be recorded the following day and be valued just the same.\n\n > The evening's entertainment continued with an allegorical play in which The Grace of God addressed the duke and awarded him with twelve Virtues to aid him in the fulfillment of his vow. The roles of the Virtues and their escorts were played by the highest members of the court, with the exception of the duke (who played himself).\n\n > After the play, they all danced and ate.  In all, 48 different dishes had been served. [Some accounts add that food was lowered from the ceiling by a crane!]  A prize for that day's tournament was presented to Philip's son Charles, who proclaimed a new joust for the next day.\n\nSee: Catherine Emerson studies the ms tradition of the feast in \u201cWho Witnessed and Narrated the \u2018Banquet of the Pheasant\u2019 (1454)? A Codicological Examination of the Account\u2019s Five Versions\u201d *Fifteenth-Century Studies* 28, 124-137.\n", "There was a \"Lover's suicide craze\" in Japan in 1932-33 in which *hundreds* of young couples committed suicide \u2013 mostly by throwing themselves in Satakayama Volcano. A film version, *A Love That Reached Heaven*, was quickly released in the summer of 1932, and apparently \"at the movie theaters, usherettes now patrolled the aisles, for young couples had taken to drinking poison during the showing.\" By the time the \"craze\" wore off, 944 young people had died in the volcanic crater \u2013 not to mentions those inspired to suicide in theaters and elsewhere.\n\nFrom Peter High, *The Imperial Screen*,  27-29.\n\n[Edit addition:]\n\nAlso, Charlie Chaplin came very close to being murdered by Japanese ultranationalists while visiting Tokyo. In fact, the [May 15 Incident](_URL_0_) was timed to coincide with his well-publicized visit to the country. As it happened, though, when armed assassins burst into his hotel room, they found he was out \u2013 a last minute scheduling change meant he was attending a Sumo match (with the son of Prime Minister Inukai, it turns out, who would end up the most high-profile victim of the murderers).\n\nDetailed in Miriam Silverberg, *Erotic Grotesque Nonsense*, 1-3.", "The main screenwriter for the Shaw Brother's production company was a man by the name of Ni Kuang (also known as Ni Cong (given name), I Kuang, Ni Guang). In a fifteen year period, he is recorded as having over 220 writing credits, possibly with more. That's mind-boggling to me. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/floating", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hn5j3/what_is_the_funniest_story_from_history_you_have/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6glbwe/what_story_from_your_research_had_the_biggest/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jl80a/what_is_the_craziest_story_from_history_you_have/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dh5xx/historians_of_reddit_raskhistorians_wants_you/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6emm9h/what_is_the_saddest_story_from_history_you_have/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dnigu/what_is_the_happiest_story_from_history_you_have/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6fllxc/what_is_your_go_to_story_from_history_to_tell_at/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://toisondor.byu.edu/perform/hurlbut.html"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident"], []]}
{"q_id": "15vzl3", "title": "Approximately how many people would Mark Antony have ruled over in his time as a triumvir?", "selftext": "I know the population of the entire Roman empire at 25 BC was about 56,800,000, however, this is a few years after and Mark Antony only ruled over a third of this. I did find [this map](_URL_1_) which shows where each of the triumvirs ruled over, I'm not sure if that helps at all though. \n\nI am focussing mainly on the year 33 BC but I don't mind if your answers are a little inaccurate.\n\nThank you.\n\nEDIT: It seems my map was incorrect (sourced from a deviant art account, not my own map). [Here](_URL_0_) is a more correct piece. Thanks very much to svarogteuse for pointing this out.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15vzl3/approximately_how_many_people_would_mark_antony/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7qc5t8"], "score": [17], "text": ["I can't even guess the number but your map has problems. It lists 3 Triumvirs: Antonius (Marc Antony), Lepidus (Marcus Aemilius Lepidus) and Brutus? Who is this Brutus? The 3rd person in the 2nd Triumvirate was Octavian, later known as Augustus. Is it referring to Marcus Junius Brutus, one of Ceaser's assassins? If so he was most defiantly not part of the Triumvirate. The division of the empire was Octavian the West, Antony of the East, and Lepidus Hispania and Africa not what is shown. I don't believe that Media and Mesopotamia are under Roman control at this point and parts of Asia Minor that are shown as not Roman were Roman. \n\nI think you found some alternate history map. [Here](_URL_0_) is a correct map."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mladjov/files/romanabc31.jpg", "http://th03.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2011/137/5/4/37bc___the_second_triumvirate_by_edthomasten-d3gkqqh.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mladjov/files/romanabc31.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2iiom3", "title": "What sort of evidence is there of the interactions early modern humans had with other species of archaic humans that were alive at the same time?", "selftext": "From what I understand, human evolution involved the emergence of many species that at times co-existed, before most eventually becoming extinct until we are left with just us. I know it is believed that early humans interacted with neanderthals in possible violent conflicts and displacement, but what about other species? Were there any significant conflicts, or co-operative efforts between the different early species of humans? Or did they for the most part just leave each other alone?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2iiom3/what_sort_of_evidence_is_there_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl2inqk"], "score": [3], "text": ["There are a few anthropologists in this sub who might take a run at this post, but fyi, the question would do better in /r/AskAnthropology. In fact, there have been many posts in that sub asking related questions"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d11a5g", "title": "Are/were there any ancient tombs that resemble ones depicted in the Indiana Jones series?", "selftext": "For example, the ancient Incan (I believe) tomb in the beginning of the first film is quite expansive and enigmatically ethereal; adorned with excessive daunting cultural decor, religious artifacts and symbols, and lethal \"booby traps.\"\n\nWhile I definitely am not asking if there were any tombs with 15 foot boulders (lol), I am curious if this level of intensity in a tomb is accurate to any degree. When I look online for videos of ancient meso-american tombs they seemingly look nowhere near as dramatic as hollywood has led me to believe. Any insight is greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d11a5g/arewere_there_any_ancient_tombs_that_resemble/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ezirc38"], "score": [2], "text": ["It seems this question is asked fairly regularly in some form or another. A search of r/AskHistorians gives [quite a selection.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search/?q=indiana%20jones&amp;restrict_sr=1"]]}
{"q_id": "1x8spg", "title": "How many revisions of the bible did it take to get to the current, most widely accepted English version?", "selftext": "Watching Bill Nye the other night debate Ken Ham was great. But he kept referencing that the Ken Ham model of creation is dependent on the countless - er - NUMEROUS retranslations that have occurred. My questions is: How many scribes played Biblical telephone and what could have or is verifiably lost due to the translations? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1x8spg/how_many_revisions_of_the_bible_did_it_take_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cf95hq4", "cf9blv2"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["The answer: not many, and not much.\n\nVarious sects have their own bible preferences, of course, but the the best translation from an academic point of view is currently the NRSV. This edition was created from the Greek and/or Hebrew text, and we have copies of (almost?) all of these at least from the 3rd century. While any manuscript tradition will show some variation due to scribal error, interpolation, etc, modern scholarly techniques for creating a critical edition, that is, an edition which shows the most probable original text with major variations, are highly advanced. Thus, the Greek and Hebrew from which the NRSV is translated is considered to be highly accurate.\n\nWhile the NRSV was translated to English by competent scholars, translation will always be an act of interpretation. For example, the NRSV translators decided to represent the Greek word *eccles\u00eda* as \"Church\", a meaning it would not have had for the actual authors of the New Testament, for whom it meant \"community.\" \n\nMost of these translator judgments are, however, relatively minor and only of interest with respect to intricate points of theology, and not of any practical consequence for most believers.\n\nSo, while I like Bill an awful lot, his point doesn't really stand up. ", "The textual basis of the Bible is fairly stable, current critical editions are the work of sifting through hundreds of texts, and the amount of overall variation is relatively minor, and the point of meaning up for grabs in textual variations is also relatively minor (there's only so much you can make of a difference between 'Jesus Christ' and 'Christ Jesus' in a verse, for instance).\n\nThe idea of numerous retranslations is a bit misleading. I don't know the context of the comment, but all major modern English translations are based on a translation of our critical editions of the Greek and Hebrew. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "aklogb", "title": "If the goal was to win WWII, why on earth would the American military segregate white and black soldiers?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aklogb/if_the_goal_was_to_win_wwii_why_on_earth_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef6ekdo"], "score": [27], "text": ["By the start of WWII, the U.S. Army had been segregated since the Civil War, nearly 75 yeard ago. The Army had fought and won the Civil War, the Plains Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and WWI as a segregated force. From the Army's point of view, segregationist policies hadn't been an obstacle to victory in 1865, 1876, 1898, or 1918, so why change in 1941? Granted, that attitude would start to change by 1945.\n\nNow, the Army saw black manpower as highly useful in wartime, but often utilized black soldiers in non-combat roles. During World War I, the vast majority of the 367,410 blacks drafted were used as manual laborers or sent to service units. In WWII, much the same thing happened. Of the 922,965 black soldiers in WWII, most spent the war working in segregated rear-area service units. The all-black 2nd Cavalry Division was sent to North Africa and Italy, only to be broken up and used to provide troops for labor units or replacements for an all-black infantry division. The 555th Parachute Infantry Regiment wasn't ever sent to fight the Japanese, instead they spent the war as smokejumpers fighting forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. The U.S. Army had a huge need for laborers and support personnel to move supplies, build airfields, and do other vital work in rear areas. Although there was unquestionably a racial tint to the Army's choice, there was a certain half-sense to it - many black soldiers were undereducated and it would have been difficult to train them for other roles. \n\nSome Army officers believed there were racial differences between whites and blacks that justified, nay, demanded, segregation. This attitude, perhaps unsurprisingly, was prevalent amongst southern-born officers. Now, the U.S. Army deliberately assigned white officers from Southern states to command segregated black units. The theory was that Southern officers would have more experience dealing with blacks and would know how to handle them.\n\nThis lead to some ... issues. \n\nTake Virginian Ned Almond, for example. As a Brigadier General, Almond was made the assistant divisional commander of the all-black 93rd Infantry Division.* His divisional commander, Mississippi native Major General Charles P. Hall, was assigned to the unit for similar reasons. Later, Almond was promoted and given command of the 92nd Infantry Division, the \"Buffalo Soldiers Division\" before it was sent into combat in Italy.\n\nAlthough Almond had excellent paper qualifications, he was a terrible choice for the job. Almond was virulently racist (during the Korean War he called Chinese soldiers \"laundrymen\") and loathed his assignment. He went so far as to say:\n\n > \"No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn't care .... people think being from the South we don't like Negroes. Not at all, but we understand his capabilities. And we don't want to sit at the table with them.\"\n\nMany of Almond's white officers felt the same way. Being assigned to an all-black division was seen as a career-killer. Turnover rates were high, as some white officers schemed ways to get out of black units. Training and readiness suffered, especially since many black soldiers from Jim Crow areas could barely read or write. When the 92nd went into combat in Italy, it's combat debut went badly. Badly-lead and badly-trained soldiers failed to take objectives and took heavy casualties. Many black soldiers deserted or broke down. In fact, desertion became a chronic problem for the unit. Despite the fact he was partly to blame, Almond blamed his black soldiers and cursed his hard luck at getting the assignment.\n\nInterestingly enough, the combat failures of segregated units like the 92nd Infantry Division in WWII and the 24th Infantry Regiment in the Korean War spurred integration efforts in the late 1940s and 1950. Limited experience with integration in WWII had suggested mixed-race units did better in combat than segregated ones. \n\nDuring WWII, there had been some experiments with partial integration. Between June and January 1945, the Army had lost 430,000 troops in Europe. In January 1945, the Army desperately needed more troops. Lieutenant General John C.H. Lee suggested the Army send more black troops into combat. Lee was the Service of Supply (SOS) commander in the ETO, so he'd had extensive, often positive experiences working with all-black service units.\n\nThe Army accepted Lee's suggestion. To help fill the manpower demands, the Army sought out volunteers from all-black units. Initially, the Army only took 2,000 men (the maximum number that could be simultaneously trained at the Ground Forces Reinforcement Center (GFRC) in northern France). The spots were quickly filled with volunteers, many of them long-serving NCOs willing to be reduced in rank for a chance to fight in the rank. The Army now had enough manpower for 53 all-black rifle platoons. By March 1945, 37 platoons were ready. Some were formed into all-black company-sized units and attached to the 12th and 14th Armored divisions. Others were attached to all-white infantry companies to form a 5th rifle platoon (usually, rifle companies had three rifle platoons and a heavy weapons platoon).\n\nWhite officers were generally assigned to lead these new all-black platoons while they were in training at the GFRC. Some resented the job. Others, like combat veteran First Lieutenant Richard Ralston were more sanguine. He recalled:\n\n > \"There was a learning process on both sides ... They were pretty ginger about me because I was white, but once they were convinced that I was talking serious stuff and wasn\u2019t racially prejudiced, they got down in the dirt and did what they had to do. They knew then I was talking survival.\"\n\n\"We kept training in earnest ... I exaggerated considerably about how many of them were going to die to try and scare them out of the unit. I only wanted the best and bravest. But nobody quit. They were pretty darned good.\" \n\nRalston's 5th Platoon was assigned to K Company, 394th Regiment, 99th Infantry Division. They were thrown into combat in March 1945. In the fighting around the Remagen bridgehead, the platoon took its first losses. It spent the rest of the war in the advance into the Rhineland. Another black platoon in the 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division did so well it was regarded as one of the best platoons in the regiment\n\nOther all-black platoons did similarly well. Brigadier General Edwin F. Parker, the  78th Infantry Division's commander, asked for more black platoons after the fighting around Remagen. \n\nThe 104th Infantry Division reported:\n\n > \"Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the country.\"\n\nThe 1st Infantry Division observed:\n\n > \"White platoons like to fight beside them because they laid a large volume of fire on the enemy positions.\"\n\nPost-war interviews revealed more. In mid-1945, the Army interviewed 250 officers and 1,700 enlisted men who had fought with or near the black soldiers. The results were promising. 84 percent of the officers said the black soldiers did \"very well\" in combat. The other 12 percent said the black riflemen had done \"fairly well.\" A mere 5 percent of officers thought black troops were inferior infantrymen to white soldiers. Race relations had also been better than expected. 73 percent of officers and 60 percent of NCOs thought black soldiers and white soldiers got along well with each other.\n\nIt is important to consider that the black soldiers in many of the 5th Platoons weren't representative of the average black soldier or the average Army infantryman in 1945. They were relatively older, longer-serving, and all were volunteers. That doesn't in any way diminish their combat performance or their service. It's just important context to consider when we evaluate their performance.\n\nOne company commander reported:\n\n > \"They were the best platoon in the regiment. I wish I could get a presidential citation for them. They are very aggressive as fighters \u2014 really good in woods and at close-quarters work.\"\n\nAnother officer had only one complaint:\n\n > \"The only trouble is getting them to stop; they just keep pushing.\"\n\nAfter the war, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) dissolved the black platoons and most of the men were forced to return to their original units. However, the experiment had been instructive to the Army. It had certainly given civil rights leaders lobbying for integration in the Army.\n\nIn July 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which read:\n\n > It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.\n\nThis integrated the U.S. Armed forces, although it would take years before the effort was complete. The need for troops, any troops, to provide casualty replacements in the Korean War really shoved forward integration.\n\n*The 93rd was nicknamed the \"Blue Helmet Division\" and had a blue French Adrian helmet on its shoulder patch. Partly for racial reasons, it hadn't fought under direct control of the U.S. Army, but had been attached to the French army. The blue helmet was a token of this history.\n\n\nSources: \n\n\"The 93rd Infantry Division: The Only African-American Division in the Pacific Theater\" by Stephen D. Lutz \n\n\"Bring on the Buffalo\" by Michael Lynch \n\n*The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Ital y, 1943-1944* by Rick Atkinson\n\n\"African American Platoons in World War II\" by David P. Colley"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "wq8z7", "title": "How many WWII draftees were working in the CCC before they were drafted?", "selftext": "If it's a significant sum, would the physical fitness developed during their CCC years have a significant effect on the military's overall readiness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wq8z7/how_many_wwii_draftees_were_working_in_the_ccc/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5fis4a"], "score": [5], "text": ["The  Civilian  Conservation  Corps  was  far  and  away  the  largest  of  the  make-work  projects  during  the  New  Deal.  It  was  operated  by  the  US  Army,  since  they  were  the  only  government  organization  in  1933  that  had  the  ability  to  handle  such  a  large  number  of  men.   The  CCC  workers  were  civilians,  so  the  army  could  not  boss  them  around,  using  army  regulations.  The  army  NCOs  and  lieutenants  had  to  develop  real  leadership  skills,  to  get  the  CCC  workers  to  do  their  jobs.  That  was  far  more  valuable  for  the  military's  overall  readiness  than  any  physical  fitness  benifits.  CCC  jobs  were  also  temporary,  and  the  turnover  each  year  was  enormous.  There  must  have  been  at  least  a  million  CCC  alumni  in  the  World  War  II  US  Army.  During  the  nine  years  the  CCC  was  in  operation,  2.5  million  different  men  were  on  its  payroll,  although  never  more  than  375,000  in  any  one  year.     "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9qcogy", "title": "If hitler was arrested what crimes would he be charged for?", "selftext": "Assuming that he didn\u2019t commit suicide and was captured at the same time when he would have died", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qcogy/if_hitler_was_arrested_what_crimes_would_he_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e88bv48"], "score": [15], "text": ["*Borrowing from a previous answer I have written, with some minor addendum*\n\nSo obviously, we can't *know* what would happen, but as has been noted by several mods, we can say what was discussed in the event that Hitler was captured. In the tome \"*What If?*\", Roger Spiller's chapter, \"The F\u00fchrer in the Dock\", focuses on this very scenario, and while he goes on to contemplate various scenarios as they may have played out, he spends much of the chapter establishing how he arrives at those conclusions, and looking at how plans progressed up until Hitler's hypothetical capture in the Spring of '45.\n\nTo start with, there was considerable disagreement on just what would be done, although punishment for war crimes was essentially assumed by all - see the St. James Declaration of early 1942, which stated \"*international solidarity is necessary to avoid the repression of these acts of violence simply by acts of vengeance on the part of the general public and in order to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilized world*\". The Moscow Declaration of late 1943 would further solidify that sentiment, but while it directed 'minor' war criminals would be tried in \"*the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of those liberated countries and of the Free Governments which will be erected therein*\" it continued to leave open the situation with the 'big guys', explicitly noting that \"*major criminals whose offences have no particular geographical location*\" would be \"*punished by a joint declaration of the Governments of the Allies*\"... but no agreement on what that punishment would be had yet been hammered out! It didn't even spell out whether or not they would be granted trials.\n\nWinston Churchill, contemplated several possible scenarios through the years. Early in the war, he considered exile for the high-leadership of the Party, similar to the treatment of Napoleon, placing them on a remote island (although he specifically stated he would not desecrate St. Helena by doing so). He also proposed a rather gruesome end for Mussolini at that time, proposing that he be strangled in the same manner the Romans (who Il Duce sought to emulate) had killed the Gallic leader Vercingetorix. As the war progressed though, he became more amenable to summary execution. In a meeting of the War Cabinet in 1942, he stated:\n\n > If Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death. [He is] not a sovereign who could be said to be in [the] hands of ministers, like [the] Kaiser.\n\nOthers also seemed to support a similar approach. FDR seems to have liked the very harsh proposal made by Henry Morgenthau for mass executions of Nazi \"archvillains\", possibly numbering in the thousands (And apparently joked [?] once or twice about mass castration of Germans to boot). Cordell Hull proposed a similar idea, executing Hitler within hours of his capture, noting:\n\n > I would take Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their accomplices and bring them before a drumhead court martial, and at sunrise the following morning there would occur an historic incident.\n\nIn the US, calmer heads prevailed though, and in discussions on the matter in October, 1944, Henry Stimson would have none of it. He was insistent that an international tribunal of the Nazi leadership was the only method of dealing with Hitler and his ilk while remaining true to the moral justifications that the Allies gave for the war, noting \"*the punishment of these men in a dignified manner will have all the  greater effect upon posterity\", which did in the end win Roosevelt over. \n\nInterestingly, Stalin was also in favor of trials, although it is safe to say that a trial, as envisioned by him, was little more than a rubber-stamp show trial that was already typical of him. While earlier in the war, Stalin had expressed a desire for blood, toasting to \"*the quickest possible justice for all German war criminals*\" at the Tehran Conference in '43 for instance, although his accompanying suggestion that this would mean 50,000 executions might have been a joke. Certainly it shocked all present, but either way, he seems to have mellowed a year later. While Churchill might still have had bloodspilling on his mind, and certainly wanted execution to be meted out as punishment in the end, it was Stalin who turned him, during their Moscow meeting in 1944, where Stalin insisted that \"*There must be no executions without trial otherwise the world would say that we were afraid to try them.*\"\n\nIt perhaps went even further than that. When the first reports of Hitler's suicide were coming in, and Stalin heard of it, he was reportedly put out by the fact, and it seems to have been quite clear that he considered taking Hitler alive to be part of his victory, a trophy, and putting him on trial a means of displaying his achievement.\n\nTo be sure, that isn't to say, of course, than anyone necessarily *wanted* to deal with a trial of Hitler. A month before Hitler's demise, Anthony Eden remarked that were a Tommy to have the opportunity to capture Adolf, \"I am quite satisfied to leave the decision to the British soldier concerned\". And while Stimson might have won the debate in the US Cabinet, the concerns that he had fought against, namely that giving Hitler *any* sort of platform to defend himself was dangerous, never entirely went away. It is doubtful you can find very many leaders at the time who were put out by the fact Hitler escaped trial, as his death put the nail in the coffin of a debate that not everyone saw eye to eye on.\n\nIf you are interested in what such a trial might have looked like, well, I recommend you look for the book, but simply put, we can only guess.  What we can say though is that while there were variances within the Allies about what to do, and some voices in the leadership would have liked nothing more than to dispose of Hitler and the Nazi leadership with \"no fuss\", by the last days of the war, the agreed to policy would be to put Hitler on trial for his life if captured. The charges would certainly have been the same four counts that the other principal defendents at Nuremberg had to face, as laid in the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal:\n\n > Article 6. The Tribunal established by the Agreement referred to in Article 1 hereof for the trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.\n\n > The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:\n\n > (a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;\n\n > (b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;\n\n > (c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.\n\n > Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.\n\nThese were charges which were successfully prosecuted against key figures of the Nazi hierarchy who survived, most importantly perhaps, given their proximity to Hitler, Goering (guilty on all counts), Hess (guilty on A, not guilty on B/C), as well as Martin Bormann (guilty on B and C, not guilty on A) who we know know to have been dead by then, but at the time, this being unconfirmed, was tried in absentia. There is no reason to believe Hitler would not have been found guilty on all charges, and hanged in due course, but any specifics are, again, speculative.\n\n-----\n\n*London Charter of the International Military Tribunal*. Aug 8, 1945.\n\nSpiller, Roger. \"The F\u00fchrer in the Dock.\" In *The Collected What If?: Eminent Historians Imagining What Might Have Been*, edited by Robert Cowley, 744-65. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2001.\n\nThompson, Jonathan. \"Churchill Wanted a Captured Hitler to Die 'like a Gangster' in the Electric Chair.\" December 31, 2005. Accessed October 10, 2016. _URL_0_.\n\nTusa, John  &  Tusa, Ann. \"The Nuremberg Trial\", New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/churchill-wanted-a-captured-hitler-to-die-like-a-gangster-in-the-electric-chair-6112926.html"]]}
{"q_id": "wx3e2", "title": "Why was there such a backlash against disco?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wx3e2/why_was_there_such_a_backlash_against_disco/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5h7d2i", "c5h7z3r", "c5h8lun", "c5h98dn", "c5hah9v", "c5hb418", "c5hbpie", "c5hbxps"], "score": [11, 29, 16, 5, 3, 5, 2, 4], "text": ["I think that the backlash against disco came from a number of different factors at different times. This is because disco was not one homogeneous music and culture. The original disco came out of soul and funk. This party scene music was embraced by a gay subculture which obviously was hated upon by homophobes. The \"four on the floor\" rhythm was then co-opted by any number of producers who just wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Eventually there were many novelty hits e.g. Disco Duck and then you had The Bee Gees and Cliff Richard *et al* all cashing in upon it.\n\nSo in the first place homophobia and then after when it became the dominant pop culture there was a lot of derivative dross floating about being danced to badly by a lot of posers.", "I was trying to get into the music biz around then, as a rocker.  Although I didn't hate disco, I could under stand why mt friends didn't get into it.  It's  over-produced and most of the \"artists\" were just singers put up to sing someone else's music. And the lyrics were almost universally uninspiring, and mostly sounded like a narration of a night at a club. Pretty silly to anybody who takes music seriously.\n\nThe backlash caught on when disco had overwhelmed all other pop music. And like all pop phenomenons, it became over-exposed. I admit I got pretty sick of it, too, towards the end.\n\nThe music producers hastened the end by abruptly abandoning all disco in an over-reaction to the haters and made it seem as if the haters could take credit for ending disco suddenly with one punch.\n\nFor quite a while, dance music artists could only survive by clearly distinguishing themselves as apart from disco.", "The answers so far are incomplete, disco was overexposed and it did come in for a lot of criticism for being production heavy, but the viciousness of the backless stemmed from the fact that as a genre it grew out of the gay and black subcultures. In the 50s and 60s you'd be running grave risks if you were openly gay, with discos in the 70s gay people started not only being open about, but celebrating, singing and dancing about their sexuality and a lot of people didn't like that. \n  ", "It's like baseball in New York. You can't be a Mets and a Yankees fan. Punk music came of age at the same time. You couldn't be a punk and a disco fan. Their ethos were in stark opposition to each other, although eventually their styles were more or less melded together to create what is known as \"post-punk\" or \"new wave\" in the mid-80s, sometimes by groups like Talking Heads and Blondie who were staples of the New York punk scene in the late seventies.\n\nYou can't ignore, as well, the third movement that started at this time - hip-hop, which took a little longer to catch mainstream attention or really produce a lot of really interesting music. (Note the \"a lot,\" there were a few really great early hip-hop artists in this time period).", "There was also a big falloff in record sales as people didn't need to buy the records to hear the music - they went to clubs instead. So, part of the backlash came from the record industry, hoping to get people to buy music again, rather than gathering to hear it in discos. \n\nHere's a podcast from Stuff You Should Know that talks about disco (direct link to the podcast itself: _URL_0_\n", "I remember reading once that Disco was the unholy union between gay culture and black culture. Also that the original Discos were more similar to modern day raves than the shit that was made up by Saturday Night Fever (which was written by people who had never even been to a Disco at that time).\n\nThis was probably the reason that a lot of \"Middle America\" didn't like it.", "Disco lives.  They just call it EDM now.", "If you want a more detailed explanation then check out 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life' by Bill Brewster  &  Frank Broughton. It chronicles Disco and a lot of other genres. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2012-07-17-sysk-disco.mp3"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3nya76", "title": "Suppose you visited Ireland in 1415, what would the farmland that would later be used for potatoes, have been used for at that time before they were brought back from the Americas?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nya76/suppose_you_visited_ireland_in_1415_what_would/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvscvzm"], "score": [33], "text": ["You'll expect a sizable arable farming component, based on wheat, barley, some oats, probably still rye in areas with monastic influence. Rye was big in the Early Christian Period and associated with monasteries. Some peas and perhaps other crops as well. However, Ireland's farming economy has always been (since the start in the Early Neolithic c. 3800 BC) predominantly based on pastoral activity. You will expect a lot of grazing (cattle, sheep) throughout the country. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4a6pjf", "title": "Gilgamesh in Cuneiform", "selftext": "Could anybody tell me where I could find The Epic of Gilgamesh in cuneiform? Ideally side-by-side with an English translation? Possibly a long shot, but Google isn't giving me much. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a6pjf/gilgamesh_in_cuneiform/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0xxz1c"], "score": [23], "text": ["What you are asking for is the two-volume [*The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic* by A. R. George](_URL_0_). This masterful work includes the editions of all of the known tablets of the Gilgamesh epic (except for [the most recenly discovered tablet](_URL_1_)), an English translation, and images of the cuneiform tablets. These aren't side-by-side like the Loeb Classical texts, but it's the best you will be able to find. The set is expensive, so you will likely need to find an academic library in order to use it. It also may not be suitable for non-specialists. The work was published mainly with Assyriologists in mind, so if you cannot read Akkadian, looking at the editions and the tablets won't be of much help."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=21xxZ_gUy_wC&amp;dq=editions%3AFr2Fwz2MwJEC&amp;source=gbs_book_other_versions", "http://www.livescience.com/52372-new-tablet-gilgamesh-epic.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1olp6w", "title": "When did local lords lose their political authority in England?", "selftext": "In the whole ideal feudal hierarchy, all the land is divided up by various lords, who have lesser lords under them, and they all have political and judicial authority over this land.\n\nWhen and how did lords begin to lose this power in England?   I've read that many noble families actually still own the land in England, but they obviously don't rule it anymore.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1olp6w/when_did_local_lords_lose_their_political/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cctao5b"], "score": [18], "text": ["I asked a related question (about when making knights became a royal monopoly rather than something any lord could do) about a month ago, and despite a very courteous effort by a mod, it wasn't really his field  and I didn't get a satisfactory answer.\n\nHowever it prompted me to do a bit of research and the answer is 1504.\n\nHenry VII passed a law restricting non-royal retainers. This effectively restricted and regulated the swearing of fealty to anyone but the king. Thus the nobility (peerage rank) were unable to rely on the social and military support of their local gentry. \n\nFew lords personally owned all the land in the territory they controlled. However they were able to effectively control the middle-sized landowners in their locality through personal ties, diplomacy and the offering of political protection. Think of the Roman patron/client system rather than the lord of the manor/serf relationship, personal and economic ties rather than legal ones. \n\nThrough this system prominent nobles would have been able to call on the services of every landowning family in their area, and field a much larger army than through arming their own tenants and peasants alone.\n\nHenry VII, having successfully exploited this system to win the crown, didn't want anyone else to do the same. Hence the 1504 act of parliament. NB: gentry is a purely English term, the equivalent on the continent would be the lower nobility (nobility in England being tied to the peerage and thus restricted to those with actual titles).\n\nYour question wasn't phrased too well though, I almost answered 1998 since that was when Tony Blair kicked all but 90 of the hereditary peers out of the House of Lords.\n\nedit: added an interesting but a bit pop-historyish link _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/henry_vii_retaining.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "1ubpbw", "title": "How accurate is the TV series \"Rome\" in depicting the daily life of both plebians and patricians?", "selftext": "I'm extremely impressed by the first battle scene in the show, where instead of a bunch of soldiers fighting you can actually see the extreme discipline of the Roman legions. Looks like the producers did their research in regards to the army.\n\nMy question is how accurate was their depiction of city life in Rome itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ubpbw/how_accurate_is_the_tv_series_rome_in_depicting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cegi0h1", "cegmzlk"], "score": [21, 120], "text": ["This has been discussed a few times before. Here are a couple answers I've found that might answer your questions.\n\n/u/Taiko offers their opinion on the accuracy of the show [here](_URL_0_). \n\nAnd /u/peripatos offers their take [here](_URL_1_).", "Alrighty, first off - I'm going to preface this with a couple of disclaimers. Or a few. Whatever :P\n\n* **I LIKED *Rome*. What I say below doesn't change that.**\n\n* **The show is more accurate than most movies that are \"based on history.** \n\n* **Obviously, there are spoilers. I've only seen most of the first season, and I'm basing this off of what I've seen.** If you want to continue watching the show in blissful ignorance of the stuff that makes me go \"Well that's not quite right...\", then please, don't read any more! \n\n---\n\nOkay, now that the prelims are done with, I'm going to address the idea that the producers did their homework regarding the Roman army. Honestly, it's better than *most* (They're not wearing *lorica segmentata*, for one thing), but again, it's not quite right. I love how they showed the discipline of the Roman army, however, again, it was not quite right. For example, Pullo, when he breaks formation and strikes a superior officer, would have been executed on the spot. No questions. The Roman army had *extraordinarily* strict discipline and specific, harsh laws regarding their behaviour. Pullo should not have survived the first episode. Speaking of the first episode, the show depicted a battle - however, I'm not sure WHAT battle it was, even though they claim it was Alesia (By Vercingetorix being captured afterwards). The Battle of Alesia was a totally different beast - it was a desperate siege, with the besiegers themselves being besieged, and an incredible display of Julius Caesar's brilliance as a commander, as well as an indisputable example of Roman engineering at its finest. I didn't get that from the show :/\n\nThen, one little nitpick that would have been a HUGE deal. Caesar (and others) rode through the Roman camp. Again - seems like a funny thing to nitpick, no? The thing is, *no* one, not even kings and commanders, were allowed to ride through the camp - it was considered extreme bad luck, and at least one Roman loss that I've read about was blamed partly on a couple of individuals riding through the Roman camp. Caesar, a man who publicly based his reputation on his fantastically good luck, would never *ever* have committed such a *faux pas*. \n\nOh right. Speaking of Caesar and *faux pas*-es. Another thing he would never have done is shown that much favour to the Thirteenth Legion over all of his others - his favoured legion was the *Tenth*, and he spent the vast majority of his time with that legion, as opposed to the others. The *Tenth* went with Caesar almost everywhere he went (The only exception being the one legion he took with him when he went to Rome, crossing the Rubicon - which WAS the *Thirteenth*). When Caesar fought the Alexandrian Civil War, the *Thirteenth* wasn't originally with him, as shown (poorly) in the show - that was the *Sixth* and the *Twenty-Eighth*. But they did get the armour right, and it's absolutely possible that they rotated their ranks like they showed in the show, even if we have no proof of it! :)\n\n---\n\nNow, on to non-army things. As /u/Tiako noted so well [here](_URL_0_), with broad strokes, the show is pretty solid. Showing street life is fantastic, showing the colours of the city, rather than the blase, stolid marble that we're used to is utterly gorgeous. But then there are the little things - and I'll just give you a couple of examples of those.\n\nFirst of all, Caesar's...uh....sleeping around was rather well known. He'd slept with half of the married women in the Senate, it seems, and Servilia was Cato's (Who was FAR too old in the show, and would NOT have worn a black toga in the Senate) half-sister. Also, she had a daughter - who Caesar also slept with. Cato's wife? Yeah, Caesar slept with her too, I believe (He divorced her for sleeping around). Caesar's legionaries sang songs about how much Roman tax money was spent on Gallic women. My point to all of this is that *Caesar's wife would not have been surprised at his propensity to bang everything with boobs and two legs.* She certainly wasn't about to divorce him over it. \n\nThe one big one that ground my gears a bit - they got housing completely wrong. The vast majority of Romans would have lived in houses called *insulae*, which were essentially big tenement complexes. Rooms were small, shoddily built, and they were generally five stories tall or so. Contrast that with Lucius' lodgings - the room is relatively comfy, larger than you would get from one of these *insulae*, and, most of all, it had something that those tenements would NOT have had - a kitchen. Funny how we just take that bit for granted, eh?\n\nAnd then, of course, the excessive incest and random sex between Servilia and Octavia, Octavia and Octavian, Atia being batshit loony, etc etc are completely ridiculous. If you have specific questions about what you're looking for, please, feel free to ask them :) The issue with this question is that it's extremely broad - but in general, this all sums up to **NOT ALL THAT ACCURATE.** Compared to other Hollybood butcheries? It's amazing. Compared to reality? Not all that true.\n\nIf you'd like an amazing overview of life in the Late Republic, feel free to check out Adrian Goldsworthy's *Caesar: Life of a Colossus*. If you'd like some other book recommendations, just let me know and I'll provide :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w6ih7/how_accurate_is_the_tv_series_rome/c5ap81l", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f4a1y/what_do_roman_historians_and_history_buffs_think/ca6tbog"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w6ih7/how_accurate_is_the_tv_series_rome/c5ap81l"]]}
{"q_id": "8qsj1y", "title": "Ancient Greek helmets on heads", "selftext": "Why did ancient Greeks wear helmets on their head like from some [sources](_URL_0_)? (e.g. Pericles)\n\nIs it just because they were too lazy to hold them with hands?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qsj1y/ancient_greek_helmets_on_heads/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0mvigl"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hi, not discouraging direct answers here, but you may be interested in some earlier threads: \n\n* /u/Iphikrates in [Is it true that those helmets of the kind Pericles is shown wearing in the now famous bust never \"closed\"? If yes, why? Is it supposed to represent an owl or was it an intimation thing?](_URL_2_)\n\n* Iphikrates and /u/XenophonTheAthenian in [Why do many Ancient Greek sculptures of Gods and soldiers depict their helmets atop their heads, rather than over their faces?](_URL_0_)\n\n* /u/Deirdre_Rose in [Why is the Corinthian helmet being worn over the forehead so common in Greek art?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/pericles-bust-ancient-marble-portrait-greek-statesman-45126192.jpg"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3wuaqp/why_do_many_ancient_greek_sculptures_of_gods_and/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6niib0/why_is_the_corinthian_helmet_being_worn_over_the/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xyfrw/is_it_true_that_those_helmets_of_the_kind/"]]}
{"q_id": "2uv4ys", "title": "Why was Shakespeare not knighted?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uv4ys/why_was_shakespeare_not_knighted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cobyby2"], "score": [57], "text": ["Most knights were either of low noble background, or knighted after making their fortunes. Most also had done governmental or military service to the crown; the modern practice of recognizing the arts with a knighthood simply didn't exist.\n\nFrancis Drake, for instance, was already a successful privateer in the service of the crown before he became a knight. Walter Raleigh had first been introduced at court as a child, but wasn't knighted until after he helped suppress Irish uprisings against England. As an arbitrary example of a non-military knight made by Elizabeth I, Nicholas Mosley started off his career as a weaver of wool cloth, but was knighted only after serving as Lord Mayor of the City of London.\n\nShakespeare was never in government, never a military officer, and poor. Knighting him wouldn't have made any sense to the monarchs of his day."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "247zwr", "title": "Why are there so many variations of some names? For example: Edward, Edwin, Edmund, etc.", "selftext": "Just curious, thank you for any answers ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/247zwr/why_are_there_so_many_variations_of_some_names/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch4jj17"], "score": [4], "text": ["In this case, this is due to the nature of ancient Germanic personal names. They were \u201cdithematic,\u201d *i.e.* composed of two meaningful elements (though there were \u201chypocoristic\u201d names, of which only one element was commonly used; over the course of time, these monothematic names became normal names of their own right\u2014cf. Hugh/Chuco, Charles/Karl or Otto). This onomastic structure became very common in Europe as a result of the Germanic take-over of the majority of the former Roman West. These elements were transmitted within family groups and recomposed to form new names ([here is an example](_URL_0_) [1] of the transmission of a few elements in a 7th-century Frankish family). The choice of these elements was precisely made to emphasise one's position within a family group. Over the course of time (in royal families at first, and then in the aristocracy), recomposition stopped and was replaced by transmission of names (something historians link with the transformation of family structure: belonging to a (paternal) line became more important). But these names were still inherited from the previous system; therefore, the plurality of Ed- names reflects the relative frequence of the theme \u201cEad\u201d in Anglo-Saxon royal onomastics. Similarly, several continental names were formed with the component Adal- (A(da)lbert, Ad(al)olf), whose Old English equivalent was \u00c6thel- (\u00c6thelberht, \u00c6thelbald\u2014though its influence was not, in this case, paralleled in modern personal names).\n\n[1] from R\u00e9gine le Jan's *Famille et pouvoir dans le monde Franc*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://uppix.net/Ishef2.png"]]}
{"q_id": "2e8hak", "title": "Why did Greek cuirasses and Roman-style plate armor disappear from Western Europe?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e8hak/why_did_greek_cuirasses_and_romanstyle_plate/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjx8do6", "cjxaf5t", "cjxbmin", "cjxbqj1", "cjxdmqp"], "score": [3, 12, 2, 2, 4], "text": ["Follow up question: How did plate armor go from basic infantry armor in the form of Greek cuirasses and grieves to the most expensive and protective armor [like that used by Henry VIII](_URL_0_)?\n\nEdit: Added detail.", "By \"Roman plate\" I assume you mean lorica segmentata, which is what you tend to see a lot of in popular culture.  We're not exactly sure which Roman troops used it, or even how the Romans themselves called it, but it was used from 1st - 3rd century AD.  Lorica hamata (mail armour) is what most Roman troops wore throughout Roman history.  As for why, it's because it is more costly to build and maintain than mail armour.  After the crisis of the 3rd century there wasn't enough economic power to sustain it.  ", "All \"plates\" are not made equal. Just because the Romans use a type of  solid metal armour does not make it immediately similar to late medieval plate, as the technology involved had advanced quite a bit. The invention of the blast furnace in Europe allowed armourers to produce high quality plates cheaper and in a fraction of the time it took to produce a maille shirt. It's economics basically, when the Roman slave factories could no longer produce lorica segmemtata at a profit they fell back on the time consuming lorica hamata. A slave's time is a lot cheaper than a armourers.", "As others have noted it was mostly a change to large scale use of chain mail (which the romans also used). This has several benefits over plate: It can be easily \"tailored\" to fit different wearers without losing integrity, even by people who don't know how to work a forge, it can make use of relatively low quality iron an still be effective (to make large pieces of strong plate you need relatively pure steel, not just iron), it is excellent at protecting against slashing weapons and missiles, perhaps even better than plate at protecting against stabbing weapons since it doesn't have joints, and it is much lighter.\n\nThe main reason the high middle ages turned to solid, largely steel plate, was because of improvements in missile technology most notably the bodkin arrow and the crossbow. These were designed to pierce mail, so if you were going to war and could afford it you now wanted solid steel plate to stop some peasant from killing you with an arrow you as you charge.\n\nAdditionally, technology did develop over the course of the period in question say 0-1600AD, such as the blast furnace, bloomery furnaces for iron tools, which made steel more accessible and mines more productive.", "There was less continuity between Greco-Roman arming traditions and the Medieval period than there was between Germanic and later Carolingian arms and Medieval Christendom. \n\n Late Roman armies mostly used chainmail, as well as their Germanic successors. \n\nThe early middle ages was dominated by chain mail, and plate armor didn't become common until after the high middle ages- around the 14th century. Complete plate- covered joints and the like- wasn't even a thing until the late 1400's. \n\n[Timeline of the development of Western armor from 650-17th century.](_URL_1_)  \n\nPlate armor developed because of advances in metal shaping technology and novel weapons developments- particularly more devastating missile fire (longbows could pierce chainmail in the 1300s, steel-string crossbows in the 1400's+, and finally gunpowder). Hand-to-hand combat also changed, with short swords meant for thrusting ([an extreme example](_URL_0_)) eventually becoming the norm by the late medieval period (two handed swords remained but were developed for specialized uses in pike combat). Rapiers and other piercing swords became more common, though some larger cutting swords made a comeback in the 17th century. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/oXwbb6I.jpg"], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinquedea", "http://www.thortrains.com/uniforms/medtime.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "8drzz7", "title": "Why is Rhode Island a state?", "selftext": "It seems like it could\u2019ve easily been slotted into Connecticut or Massachusetts. Why was it separated?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8drzz7/why_is_rhode_island_a_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dxqcw87"], "score": [24], "text": ["The United States isn\u2019t a country divided into states; it\u2019s a country formed when states joined together.  So your question is a bit like asking why Luxembourg wasn\u2019t simply slotted in with Germany or Belgium.  Who would do the lumping together?\n\nRoger Williams and others who had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious reasons in the 1630s took up residence on coastal land controlled by local Indian tribes, and got an English royal charter for a new colony.  More than a century later, the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was one of the colonies who broke away from Great Britain and then joined together to form a new nation.\n\nYou can read the royal charters on p. 106 of *Boundaries of the United States and the Several States,* a US Geological Survey book [available as a PDF here.](_URL_0_)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/b1212"]]}
{"q_id": "1hg1g8", "title": "Basques in North American prior to Columbus?", "selftext": "In on of his books ([\"Cod\"](_URL_0_) I think), Mark Kurlansky either heavily implies or states outright that Basque fishermen already knew about the New World (and were fishing there) prior to Columbus.\n\nSearching the AskHistorians popular questions, I found [this reference](_URL_1_) but nothing else.\n\nIs there any evidence that the Basques knew about the New World, pre-Columbus? Even if there's no evidence, is it reasonable that such a thing could have occurred? To put it another way, would it have been possible for, let's say, a group of experienced fishermen from a relatively insular ethnic group to decide to do some exploring with part of their fleet, chance upon a great discovery, and then reasonably keep it a secret for at least a few decades?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hg1g8/basques_in_north_american_prior_to_columbus/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cau0a9o", "cau18jt"], "score": [3, 4], "text": ["It's possible but there is little evidence. Some argue that John Cabot discovered Newfoundland in 1497 and lured the Basques there, while other believe Basques were there well before that time. What we do know is that by 1534 ,when Jacques Cartier claimed the land and named it Canada, hundred of Basque fishermen were already working the surrounding waters. As for your following questions, sure its possible but that's nothing more than speculation since we have little evidence of such an occurrence (to my limited knowledge at least).\n\nSource: *Atlantic* by Simon Winchester (282-285)", "I am almost done reading his book \"The Basque History of the World\" in which he discuses it in a bit more detail.\nFlavored_crayons is right in that there is little evidence but after having read Kurlanksy I have come away with the impression that they did: in the book (which I encourage you to read if you enjoyed \"Cod\") he explains how the Basque were the first major whalers in Europe - this was due to the fact that only did there used to be many whales off the Bay of Biscay but because of the unique trade tariffs in the Basque land that allowed them to import to the rest of Europe without having to pay Spain taxes for the importations.\nBack to North America though; the Basque's had contact with the Vikings and were known to make trips across the sea to the Faeroe Islands as early as 875 - this was a 1,500 mile journey and this tied in with the fact that they provided so much whale material to Europe (which would have needed extensive fishing locations) leads to deductive arguments about how they were there before or around the same time as the Vikings.\nKurlanksy also notes that \"numerous reports claim that Cabot and other early explorers arrived in North America [and] encountered native tribesman who spoke Basque.\"pp 58 - 59\n\nAll of this is without concrete evidence and more sources should be looked into but you should definitely read this book!\n\nI am continually surprised at the influence on the world that this small, and very old (the most ancient language still spoken in Europe today) people have had on the world.\n\nSource: *The Basque History of the World* by Mark Kurlansky (43 - 64)\nThe Gernika chapter is depressing as hell but I really enjoyed reading the book while I was in Bilbao the past week.\n\nEdit: weird that I came across this post as I was using the book to keep my hot laptop off me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0140275010", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wuxal/question_about_unofficial_first_contacts_in_the/c5gxnt5"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "9pqzkw", "title": "It is the year 900 in the kingdom of Wessex. What\u2019s for dinner?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9pqzkw/it_is_the_year_900_in_the_kingdom_of_wessex_whats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e840zhk", "e855vnu"], "score": [20, 8], "text": ["Who's eating? The average peasant, a petty noble, or the King himself?", "So, my answer is actually from Mercia, since it's based on archaeological evidence from the *burh* at Stafford built by \u00c6thelfl\u00e6d in 914, but cross-border culinary differences in the intervening 15 years are unlikely to have been that noticable.\n\nCentral to the diet for any class is bread. A common feature of both West Saxon and Mercian *burhs* built in rhe late ninth and early tenth centuries are bread ovens. At sites like Wallingford, Stafford and Eddisbury, bread ovens were built as permanent structures near to the settlement ramparts. For the wealthier classes, and perhaps luckier members of the *fyrd* garrison, the bread is likely to have been a loaf of bread made from wheat flour as we might recognise it today. For the lower classes and particularly for labourers, 'bread' is likely to have taken the forms of 'bannocks' made from oat or barley. These are essentially like baked loaves of porridge - oatmeal to an American audience - with a much rougher grind and much more chaff than the wheat bread, but also much more calorie-dense.\n\nMeat was also an important part of the diet, in increasing proportions as one moved up the social scale. Excavations at Stafford have found vast amounts of animal bones dumped in what was a swamp from the *burh*'s butchery district. Compared to under the strict forestry laws which came in after the Norman Conquest of 1066, hunted game was an important part of the supply and constituted up to 30% of the meat diet. The principle meat among the nobility was beef from cattle, although venison and game fowl were also common. Before the Conquest, hunted game was an important if occasional source of meat for the peasantry. Mutton was typically eaten rather than lamb, but this would have been largely as a by-product of the wool trade - a significant part of the Anglo-Saxon economy - rather than sheep raised for meat. Pork would also have been commonplace.\n\nDepending on your location in the country, dairy products, especially cheese, would have also been commonplace as an important source of fat and also of calcium. Near the coasts, fishery was also popular. The keeping of bees was a popular monastic pass-time, so honey would have been available at least in these communities, and possibly used as a payment in kind for peasant labour on monastic land.\n\nThis food would have been accompanied by a variety of root and other vegetables. Cabbage and other leafy greens would have been common in the UK, and sources suggest that nettles - often used to brew medicinal drinks - may also have been eaten. For the lower classes, meals are likely to have taken the form of a pottage or stew, most likely left almost constantly slow-cooking over a hearth and simply topped up when necessary. This had the benefit of not only eking out a more meagre supply of meat and making less choice cuts far more palatable, but was also highly calorific. For the upper classes, meat is likely to have been spit-roasted over a hearth. For all classes, meals are likely to have been washed down with ale, although this was likely to have been both weakier and 'breadier' than our modern ales. For the wealthier and for religious communities, wine is likely to have been a more common feature. Mead, which has entered popular culture as **the** medieval drink of choice, is distilled from honey, and as such is more likely to have been the preserve of monastic communities, although would likely have also been enjoyed by the local elite, and perhaps by wealthier freemen."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2pidww", "title": "Was the Southern Defensive War really that crucial to the South's early wins?", "selftext": "The turning point of the Civil War is usually considered Gettysburg but before then, the south was winning the war. After Grant and Sherman, the war was tilted to the North but under McClellan the North didn't win many battles because of his reluctance to push forward and fight the offensive.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pidww/was_the_southern_defensive_war_really_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmxr9rx"], "score": [2], "text": ["I disagree entirely. While the Confederacy won an early initial victory at Manassas/Bull Run, the overall picture for the South for much of late 1861 and 1862 (the period in which the South stood on the strategic defensive) was incredibly gloomy. Let's run through the list of disasters briefly. November 7 1861: the US Navy seizes Port Royal, South Carolina, thus driving a wedge between Charleston and Savannah. January 19, 1862: the Confederate army in eastern Kentucky is routed at Mill Springs, opening the way for a Union invasion of Tennessee. February 6: Fort Henry falls to US Grant, opening the Tennessee River to the Union. February 16: Fort Donelson is surrendered, opening the Cumberland to Union troops and gunboats. April 6: the combined western Confederate army fails to break Grant's army at Shiloh, and with the arrival of Don Carlos Buell's forces, are forced to withdraw, making the fall of Corinth inevitable. Finally, McClellan, despite his flaws, comes within a few miles of Richmond before being driven away by an inferior, but very aggressively commanded Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.\n\nIt is true that a period of Confederate superiority followed *in the east*. But even for the year or so that the Army of Northern Virginia was dominant, the Confederacy continued to collapse steadily in the west."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kl9op", "title": "How did the Seven Years War begin?", "selftext": "I understand there was a multitude of factors that led to this conflict, that it was fought by different nations at different times and at different places, and that its consequences were felt by a great portion of the world (the influence on the American War for Independence being, perhaps, the most known). But one thing that escaped my understanding is: how did the war begin, and why did it involve most of the Great Powers of its time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kl9op/how_did_the_seven_years_war_begin/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbqayqm"], "score": [3], "text": ["In 1740, a new king came to power in Prussia, Frederick the Great. His predecessor built a large, well-organized army, and Frederick immediately used it to defeat Austria in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740-1748. By doing so, Prussia became a great power in Europe, attracting the suspicions of other nations such as France and Russia. In 1756, Austria's queen, Maria Theresa, used diplomacy to unite France and Russia against Prussia. England naturally joined in against France, her biggest rival. The immediate cause of the war was a French assault of a British base in Minorica. Prussia quickly took to the offensive, and the war continued from there. \n\nIn North America, the war began in 1754 as a result of land disputes between New France and the Thirteen Colonies over the fertile Ohio Country. France had long standing claims over the area, but pioneers in the British colonies kept moving west, settling in any land they could get their hands on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bxys1w", "title": "Why did Republicans become so conservative so suddenly in the 1920s?", "selftext": "Overnight, they switched from the party of LaFollete, Lincoln and Roosevelt to a party that's espousing some early version of supply side economics.\n\nWhat happened?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bxys1w/why_did_republicans_become_so_conservative_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqcc20y"], "score": [8], "text": ["/u/Samuel_Gompers has your number. He previously answered:\n\n* [Can someone address a brief history of Democrats vs Republicans, specifically the change in Dems from the early 1900s being against civil rights to a more progressive party in the 50/60s leading much social change in the U.S.](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Why was there such a huge shift in the core viewpoints of the Republican Party in the past 100 years?](_URL_1_)\n\nI hope you find those answers helpful, but an answer related to conditions in the decade specified would be welcome."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_someone_address_a_brief_history_of_democrats/c5ui4pm/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_was_there_such_a_huge_shift_in_the_core/cckrkh5/"]]}
{"q_id": "6xvter", "title": "If someone were to die today because of an accident involving an unexploded WW2 bomb, would they be added to the list of WW2 casualties?", "selftext": "This is in reference to the evacuation at Frankfurt.\n\nWould a death in this scenario count as a WW2 casualty?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6xvter/if_someone_were_to_die_today_because_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmjjui3", "dmjmqyu", "dmjp6fd", "dmjtlgh"], "score": [143, 15, 316, 2], "text": ["I am not a historian and I've never posted here before. Please let me know if I've done anything wrong mods. \n\nLet's start with who is considered a causality. That alone doesn't have an easy answer and is considered a controversial subject. Groups like the US Military, UNICEF, and [WHO](_URL_4_) all have their own definitions. Then to make things more confusing further distinctions are made like 'civilian casualties' and 'casualties of war'. [This is one of the reasons you'll see different estimates for the same wars.](_URL_3_) (p. 16) \n\n[I am not able to properly source this but it seems UNICEF counts after the war deaths as civilian casualties, like in the case of landmines](_URL_2_). According to wiki (I know!) \"3. Those dying, whether during or after a war, from indirect effects of war such as disease, malnutrition and lawlessness, and who would not have been expected to die at such rates from such causes in the absence of the war;\" are included in their counts. I only include this because the numbers UNICEF releases don't make sense unless they are counting indirect after the war causes. \n\n\n[The nato definition for casualty is as follows:\n ](_URL_5_)\n > In relation to personnel, any person\n >  who is lost to his organization by\n >  reason of having been declared\n >  dead, wounded, diseased, detained,\n >  captured or missing.\n >  Related terms: battle casualty; died\n >  of wounds received in action; killed\n >  in action; non-battle casualty;\n >  wounded in action.\n\nThe definition for non-battle casualty is (same source): \n > non-battle casualty / perte hors\n >  combat\n >  A person who is not a battle\n >  casualty, but who is lost to his\n >  organization by reason of disease\n >  or injury, including persons dying\n >  from disease or injury, or by\n >  reason of being missing where\n >  the absence does not appear to\n >  be voluntary or due to enemy\n >  action or to being interned.\n >  Related terms: battle casualty;\n >  casualty; died of wounds received\n >  in action; killed in action;\n >  wounded in action.\n >  01 Sep 2003\n\nThere is an in-depth paper discussing the increase of civilian casualties of war [from a professor at the University of Oxford and it seemingly includes civilians killed by landmines after the war as casualties](_URL_0_). \n\nThe definitive answer seems to be that they can be, but most organizations do not include after battle casualties unless their injuries were sustained during the war. From the definitions I read it seems that social type groups include them ([as evidenced with mines casualties which is a large problem even today](_URL_1_)) and government groups do not include them. \n\nEdits: Added more sources.", "It might be hard to give a singular answer to this question, since even now different sources have varying definitions of what they consider a casualty of war and what they attribute the death to.\n\nOne source in which such deaths might be counted towards the WW2 death toll is \"Wars and Population\" by Boris Urlanis.\nIn it the author classifies bombing deaths as not only those inflicted directly by an explosion, but also deaths from homelessness caused by bombings *even past the surrender of Germany* through causes such as disease (but not hunger).\nHowever, in the book only deaths that have a statistically significant impact on the population are discussed as examples and since none such death is described and classified in it, a clear answer cannot be given in relation to this source.\n\nAs an aside the insurer \"Techniker Krankenkasse\" in Germany classifies the deaths of bomb squad members while disarming unexploded ordnance as work accidents. By their own definitions the death of unrelated personnel through such unexploded ordnance would also be classified as an accident. While this holds no historical significance, it is important in practice, which can sometimes influence sources being written today.\n\n**Edit**: I'm leaving my post up, but by now there are better and more in-depth answers in this thread, so refer to those instead.", "So I considered taking a stab at this question last evening, and while there are a few comments which do strike in the direction of an answer, I think that a META answer is also in order here. \n\nFirst, and perhaps most important, there is no \"list of WW2 casualties\", at least in the sense of an official, agreed upon one. In fact, only a few countries can even provide more than generalized estimates of the number of their citizens killed in the conflict. [Here is a table from John Ellis' \"Statistical Survey\" book on the War](_URL_0_), and you'll notice everything is in nice, round numbers. So my point here is that if the recent bomb in Frankfurt went off and killed someone, Ellis isn't going to be going back to edit the next edition of his book from 2,050,000 civilian casualties to 2,050,001 civilian casualties in Germany. And of course, the estimates themselves vary, so you won't always see agreement on some statistics across various works, depending on what method a given historian uses, and/or what primary sources they give more weight to.\n\nSecondly though, is the fact that there isn't going to be an Official *Universal* Definition of who gets to be a casualty and who doesn't. These statistics are originating from a wide variety of persons, groups, and governmental organizations, and while there will be a general consensus on the main points (i.e. someone killed in action is definitely a casualty), *there is no world law* preventing Dr. John Smith from writing a book in which he includes deaths from exploded ordnance decades later as part of the total casualty numbers. That doesn't mean that other works need to agree with him though. I have not, nor am I capable of, doing a survey of every work on World War II which touches on tabulating casualty numbers so while I suspect Dr. Smith is in the minority, I couldn't say quite how much he is, although it is likely safe to say he is in a small one, as no works come to mind which make a point of arguing for it.\n\nSo finally, the closest thing we're going to see to an *answer* is less about how historians will judge the deaths in terms of \"how many died in World War II\" and instead how the death is treated in practical terms. If someone is killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, how does their insurance policy classify the death or injury, for instance, assuming it includes any sort of provision that touches on armed conflict. In all honesty I can't say, but that is a question for a lawyer, or perhaps an underwriter, not an historian. Likewise, presuming the government has any sort of compensations which were tied to war deaths or injuries, it would be a matter of what their written policy is on that matter, which will vary country-to-country. There may be other practical considerations that I'm missing, but again, that isn't a question for an historian, as it has little bearing on casualties *as an aspect of historical study*. It is a question for someone who is versed in the German *Sozialgesetzbuch* or another appropriate law/program/group/etc in which practical effects are relevant, so again, a lawyer or a government official (and likewise for France, Belgium, Poland, etc. and so on). They might be able to give some semblance of an answer, but for an historian, there is no \"official rules\" on this, so it is a matter of opinion and argumentation.", "I would like to add to what /U/Georgy_K_Zhukov mentioned in his post to expand and look at modern unexploded ordinance, and used the following sources for my points:\n\n[Legacies of War](_URL_0_)\n\n[Washington Post long read](_URL_1_)\n\n*Aftermath: The Remnants of War: From Landmines to Chemical Warfare--The Devastating Effects of Modern Combat* by Donovan Webster\n\nAfter the first explosive ordinance was used during the American Civil War, there have been casualties amongst farmers, children, bomb disposal experts, and other unfortunate victims of these 'iron harvests'. It appears from the reading and research I have done that these victims are not counted as victims of the conflict the ordinance was utilised in, rather, they treated as modern victims of the ordinance outside of the realms of a specific conflict.\n\nTwo major examples of this, the Vietnam war and World War I (which I linked to in my sources), show that despite major efforts to clean up the battlefields, these are still millions of shells left in the ground waiting to be 'harvested', and that the legal liability for that ordinance has passed from the belligerent force who discharged or placed the shell/mine, into the hands of the government who controls the land. As /U/Georgy_K_Zhukov points out, there are issues such as indemnity and legal liability for the death/mutilation of the victims of the ordinance, and as such insurers are highly unlikely to insure an individual if the risk of an accident happening is high, which is where government/foreign aid steps in to ensure that the victims of explosions are compensated.\n\nAll of that brings me back to your point, which is that it appears to me through the research that while technically those deaths are directly related to the conflict in which the original belligerent utilised the weapon, unless there is a concerted effort by historians to reclassify the victims as part of the original conflict, those victims are treated as victims of an act of god, separate and unique from the original war.\n\nTo expand on the point about how historians measure war victims, there is nothing stopping a historian reviewing the death/injury figures in 200/300 years time and correlating the deaths from unexploded ordinance as part of the original war. /U/Georgy_K_Zhukov's point about the round figures stands, and while it is unlikely you will ever see an explicit figure, you could theoretically see a war memorial to the long tail victims of WW2, Vietnam, or Iraq who died decades and even centuries after the initial war being commemorated. This would boil down to a matter of scholarly insight, political will, and societal understanding, as it would probably happen after a shift in the perception of war and historigraphy. An example of this is how [animals in war](_URL_2_) were commemorated with a stature in London in 2013; the nature of sacrifice and the victims of war shifted as British culture changed, and memorial stands as an example of a deeper understanding of war.\n\nUltimately, I would argue your question is possibly 50 or 100 years too early, and that when the last ordinance is removed from the effected cities we may see a cultural shift that sees the modern victims of the original conflicts as victims of the original war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/access/content/user/1044/survival_jun-jul_2010_-_ar_on_lives___statistics_-_non-printable.pdf", "http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/home.aspx", "https://www.unicef.org/graca/mines.htm", "http://cow.la.psu.edu/COW2%20Data/WarData_NEW/COW%20Website%20-%20Typology%20of%20war.pdf", "http://www.who.int/whr/2004/annex/topic/en/annex_2_en.pdf", "http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/other/aap6.pdf"], [], ["http://imgur.com/a/7dutT"], ["http://legaciesofwar.org/about-laos/secret-war-laos/", "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/13/the-bombs-beneath-us-unexploded-ordnance-linger-long-after-wars-are-over/?utm_term=.8ce6b40da377", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_War_Memorial"]]}
{"q_id": "4hdbhv", "title": "Is it possible to 'write' in Cuneiform?", "selftext": "Hi /r/askhistorians!\n\nI was wondering if it was possible to write new documents in Cuneiform.  obviously it's vocabulary is limited, but would it be possible to pull from a vocabulary to craft new 'sentences' or phrases in Cuneiform, similar to the way we can with Hieroglyphic and Latin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hdbhv/is_it_possible_to_write_in_cuneiform/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2padqq"], "score": [7], "text": ["Keep in mind that cuneiform, as a script, is not identified with any single language or language family, but was rather adapted via Sumerian origins to write a collection of Mesopotamian languages, some of which belong to extinct families and none of which are related to Sumerian itself. Which is to say, familiarity with Sumerian offers precisely nothing whatsoever toward the comprehension of any other language written using cuneiform script. In the same way that our ability to decipher Linear B as a script, via Greek, offers nothing to our comprehension of syllabic Linear A (whose language appears to be non-Indo-European, but is otherwise a mystery). \n  \nThis being the case, the answer to this question is *entirely* dependent on which language is being spoken of.  Akkadian is very well understood, as it offers an extremely large and well-studied corpus, and belongs to an otherwise well-understood language family (Semitic).    Elamite is poorly understood by comparison, as it is, like Sumerian, a language isolate, but lacks Sumerian's central importance to the study of human language history.  \n  \nSo can we write *new* documents in these languages, *analogous to the documents which have survived in them, from the ancient period?*  Yes!  But therein lies the caveat.  Eblaite accounting ledgers may give scholars a good understanding of Eblaite names for various commodities, and means of enumerating values.  But they do not instruct one in how to say \"How is your mother doing these days?\"  A 1000 word historical record may tell us a great deal about how events can be described in the past tense third person indicative, but provide us not a single second person inflection or phrase in the imperative mood.  The genre of a text frequently dictates what it can teach us and what it cannot, leaving inflectional paradigms a messy, incomplete patchwork.  And ancient corpora are seldom diverse in their genre content.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4c7ui8", "title": "Did the Roman Empire have its own Urban Legends, and if so what were they?", "selftext": "Our society is pervaded by persistent urban legends such as \"Walt Disney was cryonically frozen in waiting of medical advances susceptible of reviving him\" or \"Baby alligators sold as pets in Florida were flushed in New York toilets and are thriving and breeding there\".\n\nDid the Roman Empire have its own Urban Legends, and if so what were they?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c7ui8/did_the_roman_empire_have_its_own_urban_legends/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1fszoq"], "score": [4], "text": ["The term \"urban legend\" was created to describe modern, traditional stories to be believed. Legends have always fallen into several groups, but the genre hangs together as stories that are generally intended to be believed. Not all of the stories are traditional (even if they employ traditional beliefs). \n\nFor example, if I tell someone, \"you wouldn't believe what I saw last night. It was really weird and I think it was... [fill in the blank with an entity that is regarded as possible by modern standards - including, an angel, a ghost, an extraterrestrial].\" That story may not be repeated so it ends with that. It is what the great folklore theoretician Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952) called a \"memorate\" - a personal account that may employ traditional beliefs but does not rise to the level of becoming a traditional story by being repeated. Probably all cultures tells these short forms of stories, so we can imagine the Romans did as well.\n\nOther legends consist of traditional stories and beliefs. In pre-industrial cultures, we generally refer to these as migratory legends. The first to catalogue these stories was the great Norwegian folklorist Reidar Th. Christiansen (1886-1971). These tended to die out with modernization. When folklorists recognized that modern society had legendary-like stories being told over distance and time, they arrived at the term \"urban legend\" in recognition that these stories were modern and they thrived in an urban setting. There is a flaw in the distinction implied by this name since migratory legends could also thrive in a pre-modern urban setting. In fact, the term \"urban legend\" is unfortunate because it implies that \"our\" folklore is different from that of pre-industrial people. \n\nThe only significant difference between an urban legend and the migratory legend is that the former tends to be debunked quickly, so its life is often shortened. Also, some of these legends are dependent on technology, and so when technology changes or becomes general accepted and understood, the urban legend fades. Thus, when I ask my folklore classes if anyone has heard the story of the poodle in the microwave or of the foreign tourist misunderstanding how cruise control works while driving on an LA freeway, students younger than 40 tend to have never heard the stories, while those older remember them very well. These were very popular in their time, but they quickly become obsolete and so they faded away.\n\nWhich gets us to the Roman Empire and the question of migratory legends. These would be what people in the empire would have told to be believed - the counterpart of today's urban legend. Since we have a great many sources from the period, we can recognize many stories that were captured in Roman literature that were repeated until the nineteenth century, and we can glimpse stories that may not have survived but were likely traditional for at least a while even if they did not survive.\n\nFor example, the first-century \"Satyricon\" includes two legends, one involving the supernatural abduction of an infant and the other a man transforming himself into a werewolf. Motifs associated with both stories are recognizable in European folklore collections from the nineteenth century. Other stories appear in primary sources involving Roman-era mythology, and these too (they were stories told generally to be believed) are often echoed in pre-industrial migratory legends.\n\nSo the answer to your question is that people in the Empire did indeed tell stories to be believed that echoed what we know today as urban legends. The traditional European migratory legend typically lasted longer than an urban legend, but it behaved in much the same way. These were entertaining stories that were thrilling to hear and imagine to be true. Skeptics in any century may ruined the fun but the genre continues to thrive."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25pd6s", "title": "What side of the road did traffic drive on in allied occupied France in WWII?", "selftext": "So I'm on my phone right now and can't link to the picture but on the Wikipedia article for Pegasus Bridge it shows traffic driving on the left after capture by the British, however surely it would have been in the allied interest to have all traffic on the continent on the right? Sorry if I'm speculating but could anyone shed any light on this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25pd6s/what_side_of_the_road_did_traffic_drive_on_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chji1oz", "chjkrx0"], "score": [3, 5], "text": ["They drove on the right, as did the French.\n\nOf course, when a small area was under the total control of the British, practices may have varied\u2014and a convoy of right-hand-drive vehicles proceeding across a bridge might find it easier to judge clearances if they drove on the left.", "Practice varied dependent upon the formation. 21st army group's (Anglo-Canadian and polish forces) area of operations had left hand drive, the American sector was right hand. This was due to an inability to agree on which side was the correct side, and was responsible for a significant amount of rage and confusion at all levels during the war."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1si0v8", "title": "The Western Way of War: How true is the assertion that the Greeks preferred pitched phalanx battle and despised cavalry, missile troops, and most of all, archers?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1si0v8/the_western_way_of_war_how_true_is_the_assertion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxs4ou", "cdy2d3t"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["In respect to cavalry and missile troops, it isn't true.\n\nCavalry had been used to cover the flanks of armies on the battlefield but due to terrain, cavalry wasn't heavily used until Philip II. As for missile troops, slingers and peltasts are commonly used after the Persian Wars to skirmish and soften up the enemy but there is a distaste for archers. Archers don't have a strong tradition in the Greek or Roman armies. ", "Just as a follow-up comment to /u/DonaldFDraper, the \"Western Way of War\" is classically understood to be not related to technology at all (although modern American military scientists continue to insist on technology's inclusion). In the classic sense, it a theory which posits the success of \"western\" cultures on the battlefield relies on an understanding of war which enables killing on a much grander scale than other cultures. \n\nSince the 1950s, modern American military science has started to suggest three elements (technology, willingness to kill (also sanitised as \"destructiveness\"), and \"whole of societal approaches\") are characteristic of the west, although this is disputed in the rest of the world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "35llio", "title": "What was Nazi Germany's attitude to the former German Royal Family?", "selftext": "What was Hitler and the Nazi Party's attitude towards the Kaiser? Did they like them, dislike them or was it more of an indifferent response?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35llio/what_was_nazi_germanys_attitude_to_the_former/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5jx5i"], "score": [87], "text": ["Hitler and the Nazis took a very dim view of the German monarchy and were quite hostile to monarchist sentiment and supporters. That being said, he did allow the younger generation of nobles to serve as officers, seeing that they were more open to national socialism than their predecessors and seeing that they were invaluable as officers. Many of Kaiser Wilhelm's sons had children serving in the army, and many royals died in service to the Wehrmacht. But most royals were kicked out of the army as the war went on and Hitler grew increasingly paranoid about a possible monarchist coup. He held Bismarck in quite high esteem, and he saw the Monarch, specifically Kaiser Wilhelm as being the main stumbling block to Germany's success. This quote from Hitler during a meeting in 1941 is quite illuminating:\n\n > The injustice committed by the Kaiser at Bismarck's expense\nfinally recoiled upon him. How could the Kaiser demand\nloyalty from his subjects when he had treated the founder of\nthe Reich with such ingratitude? The shameful thing is that\nthe German people allowed such an injustice to be committed.\nThe generation of 1900 was lost\u2014economically, politically and\nculturally.\n\nHe also spoke critically of the Kaiser's ability to command troops (with no sense of irony):\n\n > Apart from the great victories, like the battle of Tannenberg\nand the battle of the Masurian Marshes, the Imperial High\nCommand proved itself inadequate.\nThe Kaiser put in an appearance on one single occasion,\nbecause he believed that all would go well. During the great\noffensive of 1918, it was trumpeted around that the Kaiser was\ncommanding it in person. The truth was, the Kaiser had no\nnotion of command.\n\nHitler, at a dinner party in May of 1942, again went on a long rant about the Kaiser:\n\n > The behaviour of Wilhelm II in society was unworthy of a\nmonarch. Not only did he consistently ridicule the members of\nhis immediate entourage, but also fired a constant stream of\nironic remarks at his guests for the amusement of the remainder.\nHis bad taste and familiarity with other monarchs\u2014backslapping\nand the like\u2014robbed Germany of much sympathy.\nA monarch must learn that self-restraint and dignity must be\nobserved in everyday life.\nThe example of Wilhelm II shows how one bad monarch can\ndestroy a dynasty. In the same way, those who wish to play\ntheir parts in history must understand that one single bad\ngeneration can cause the ruin of a whole people.\n\nNow Hitler didn't hate monarchy as rule of thumb, indeed there were many German Kaisers and monarchs he respected, but he held dim a view of the Kaiser Wilhelm's monarchy. \n\nHimmler had a different view of the nobility, while Hitler saw them as needlessly decadent and incompetent. Himmler saw their years of selective breeding as being a good thing, assuming it would produce great racial qualities. As a result many young nobles joined the SS. By 1938 a fifth of the top SS officers were nobility. Many like Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (who played a key role in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising) found a home in the upper ranks of the SS. \n\nSo moving on from the military, things were not good for monarchists on the home front. In 1934 the Brownshirts and the Gestapo began cracking down on displays in favour of the monarchy. For example private celebrations of the Kaiser's birthday were banned, and celebrations were ruthlessly broken up. Hitler lavished bribes upon old monarchist officers like August Von Mackensen in order to drive them away from Monarchist sentiments. This particular case caused a bit of a ruckus because Von Mackensen wrote to the Kaiser asking if it was okay to accept a gift from Hitler. This show of respect managed to anger both Hitler and the former Kaiser. Finally, with the death of Hindenburg and Hitler's ascension to absolute power, many Monarchist organizations were banned and any hope of a restoration was gone completely.\n\nAmong the monarchists opinion was divided over the Nazis. During the Wiemar years a clear generational gap had emerged. During the Wiemar years many aristocrats had been deprived of their estates and had grown impoverished and had been politically marginalized by the Republic. They longed for the return of the good ole days of the German Empire. To the monarchists the Nazis plans of conquering and colonizing the eastern territories appealed to them and reminded them of their German ancestors who had done the same in Pomerania and Prussia. But to the older monarchists were also familiar with extremist groups. They viewed the Nazis with distrust and saw their fanaticism as being a fatal flaw. The Nazis racial speeches and violent tactics did little to win over the old monarchists. \n\nHowever, the generational gap had created a group of young, radicalized nobles. These nobles, many of whom belonged to the former royal family held much the same views as Hitler with regards to race and foreign policy. Much like Hitler, these young nobles despised the older generation for surrendering in 1918. This group of young nobles supported the Nazis. And the Nazis made great use of these supporters during election time, using them to win votes from conservatives who otherwise would have been put off by the Nazis fanaticism. Prince August Wilhelm of\nPrussia and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm were both early supporters of Hitler. \n\nSo how did the Kaiser himself react to Nazism? Well he held much the same view that the older generation did. He initially supported the Nazis assuming that they would restore the monarchy, but once the Nazis made it clear that wasn't going to happen, he turned against them. He viewed things such as the night of the long knives, where the Nazis purged many monarchist supporters among others, as \"gangster tactics\" that had no place in Germany. \n\nKaiser Wilhelm in his later years kinda waned between being a supporter of Nazi racial doctrine, and being against it. He would often complain of a Jewish plot against Germany, with Jews manipulating Britain against Germany. But he also opposed the violence of things like the Night of Broken Glass, where Nazi supporters and angry German citizens attacked Jewish shops and synagogues. He said \"What would people have said if I did such a thing?\" \n\nThere was an incident before WWI, where Kaiser Wilhelm's son was given a book, written by a nationalist author named Konstantin von Gebsattel, called \"If I were Kaiser\" which argued for harsh measures against the Jews and the Social Democrats; as well as authoritarian rule by the Kaiser. The author forwarded his ideas to Kaiser Wilhelm's son, a known nationalist. The Kaiser shot down his son's and Gebsattel's ideas as \"Childish\" and \"potentially destabilizing.\" Furthermore Gebsattel was regarded as a \"Weird Enthusiast.\" None the less the Kaiser did read the book \"Foundations of the Nineteenth Century\" by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and looked fondly on its anti-Semitic stereotypes. But the Kaiser never dreamed of actually acting on those ideas, and didn't dream of seriosu restrictions on the Jewish population. \n\nWhen the Nazis took over the Netherlands, Kaiser Wilhelm was given a permanent SS guard and people were forbidden from visiting him to pay respects. Even Hermann Goering, the number 2 man in Nazi Germany, couldn't visit the Kaiser. Which speaks to Hitler's irrational fear of Monarchist sentiment.  \n\nEdit:\n\nFor the quotes I drew directly from Hitler's Table Talk and Mein Kampf. For the Nazis smashing of the Monarchist movement I recommend Richard J. Evans' treatment of the Nazi political movement in his book \"The Third Reich in Power.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dv2gjz", "title": "How did debtors\u2019 prison work?", "selftext": "How could one possibly acquire the funds necessary to get out of prison while being locked up? Unless someone came to bail them out, I see no other way. Is it possible perhaps that they were forced to work in the prison? Even then I am curious to how this would work, because the person owed money and the person keeping one captive were not the same. This would mean that one could not pay off his debt by simply working at the prison, they would have to work for money to then pay off the person they owed. What type of work would be done in these prisons anyhow? Also, the function of debtors prison is unclear to me. If you were owed money, would you be able to turn in your debtor and have them imprisoned by force?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv2gjz/how_did_debtors_prison_work/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7c3at1"], "score": [7], "text": ["The assumption by the creditors, in having a debtor put into a prison, was that the debtor's friends and family would step forward and pay the debts, that  the debtor would somehow  find the money somewhere...and that, unless the debtor wasn't put in jail, they would never step forward and do that. It is a pretty bizarre notion to our modern minds, but you have to remember that , for most people England in the 18th - early 19th. c., the world was structured into family units. Farms, businesses, great houses and estates of the nobility were generally all owned by families. If, as a young adult,  you learned a trade or simply  learned to serve, as an apprentice or a servant, you would move from your family household  into another family household. So, the idea that a family would come to the rescue of a debtor in prison was not as far fetched as it seems now.\n\nIt was also easy to get into debt. There was a generally a scarcity of currency, and lots of people would also have a seasonal income, so most merchants ( if not all) would carry purchases on their books- if they approved of you , you'd stop in, buy something, and have it added to your account. Then periodically you'd pay your account ( and there might be some trading, here- like, bringing the merchant a few geese, instead of a few shillings). It was therefore comparatively easy for people to fall into the trap of living beyond their means. Of course, it was readily seen that some fault therefore lay with the merchant, and the merchant might also be more than a little aggressive ( he , too, would likely have debts to pay). With a lawyer  he could swear out an affadavit that the debt was owed, that could b presented to the judge, and if the debt was over a certain amount ( 2 pounds, in England) the debtor could be arrested- he would not be asked for records of his own , before he was detained. He might be able to get someone to bail him immediately- accept paying for his debt. But otherwise, he was on the hook.  As Samuel Johnson wrote ( in his *Idler* essays)\n\n > The confinement ... of any man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For, of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs to others. The rest are imprisoned by the wantonness of pride, the malignity of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation\n\nJohnson was imprisoned for debt a couple of times, his friend Oliver Goldsmith as well.  It was a common theme in Hogarth's paintings and etchings.  [Here](_URL_1_) in the Rake's Progress you can see the Rake finally getting arrested for debt, with an officer of the court standing off and letting the rough-looking bailiffs handle the apprehension. Later, you can [see him in the  prison](_URL_0_), with both jailer and a serving boy from a tavern wanting to be paid. Nothing was free in debtor's prison: a criminal had his basic needs met, but not the debtor. Though, interestingly, in England after 1759 the creditor had to put up a very small amount of money for the debtor- basically, so they would not just starve.\n\nHow could you work off your debt? If you were lucky, you might write a play or something that could be sold ( notice that's what the Rake seems to be doing) . Or you might simply beg. Or your wife: just as married men were responsible for the debts of their wives, wives had no immunity from the debts of their husbands. While not being locked up, they could stand outside and appeal to passersby. The debtors ( in England) could not be made to work, however. Of course, if the debtor was well-connected, had wealthy friends, they could pay for much better lodgings for him, more decent food. If the debt was huge, that could be preferable to paying it. But the well-connected would often simply abscond to someplace like France, where the creditors couldn't reach them. The poor had little chance of that.\n\nJerry White: *Mansions of Misery*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake%27s_Progress#/media/File:William_Hogarth_018.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake%27s_Progress#/media/File:William_Hogarth_026.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1g9q0s", "title": "How important was the Carolingian Renaissance?", "selftext": "I've been reading online, but most of the info is pretty vague. I was just surprised that there was a Renaissance in the middle of the dark ages.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g9q0s/how_important_was_the_carolingian_renaissance/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cai424p", "cai4ofi", "cai4xto", "cai5zgf"], "score": [6, 9, 5, 11], "text": ["Renaissance is perhaps not the best word to describe that period because our modern connotation of the word involves a general flaring of interest in cultural matters. The Carolingian Renaissance depended wholly upon the \"interest and and driving force of one man, the ruler\" or the Carolingian emperors like Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. However, the movement was not \"provincial\" but rather \"its participants were drawn from every quarter of the Latin West\" which meant that although it was centered in one area it drew from a broad base. Charlemagne wanted to educate people to service and help govern the empire so he encouraged cathedral schools to expand but this also caused the flourishing of intellectual life as well. When it comes to actual products and benefits of the Renaissance there a few. Many Latin manuscripts were copied and stored and scholars attempted to standardize the Bible. A number of histories were written like *History of the Lombards* by Paul the Deacon and *The History of the Sons of Louis the Pious* by Nithard. In art and architecture there was a blending of styles as evidenced by the palace church in Aachen. \n\nThe quotes come from *Europe in the Middle Ages* by Hoyt and the rest is summary.", "[We've pointed out before](_URL_0_) that the term \"Dark Ages\" is a gross misrepresentation of the European Middle Ages.  There were numerous intellectual and cultural revivals before the \"Renaissance\" with a capital-R.  The Carolingian Renaissance is one such revival, which entailed an increase in literacy, a flourishing of poetry, and an expansion of institutions of higher learning.\n\nA good source on this is [_Renaissances Before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages_](_URL_1_), ed. Warren Treadgold (1984).  John Contreni has an essay in that collection specifically about the Carolingian Renaissance.", "Yes, it was absolutely important, and there were multiple \"renaissances\" during the Middle Ages, depending on how you want to define the term (the other most famous one being the 12th century renaissance [of course, the notion of renaissance is problematic itself, as is the time period we generally call the \"Renaissance\" since it is extremely vague])\n\nMuch like bowies4 said, Charelmagne and the other Carolingian rulers made a real effort to sponsor learning in their courts and promote the spread of cathedral schools.  They also instituted a number of reforms with wide ranging effects.  For example, the Carolingians developed a [new, easier to read, style of writing](_URL_1_), which was the standard for much of the Middle Ages.  They were responsible for enshrining Benedictine Monasticism as the dominant form of religious expression for a huge chunk of the Middle Ages.  Carolingian ideas about kingship, about saints, relics, about the state, the monastery, were all hugely influential on Medieval thought.  There were also many economic reforms, establishment of currency, that had wide ranging effects on later centuries.  There's a lot more.  Bartlett's [*Making of Europe*](_URL_0_) is an excellent book that touches on this subject and also gives a wider perspective of the influence of the Carolingians (and more generally the Franks) on the formation of Europe.  ", "Perhaps the most important aspect of the Carolingian \"Renaissance\" is the issue of uniformity.  All the individual accomplishments that wedgeomatic, bowies4, and others have touched on were all attempts at creating a single unified way of doing things.  After Charlemagne had come to dominate such a disparate area, it became quite clear that each city, province, abbey, etc. had its own way of saying the liturgy, writing, using coinage, etc.  Charlemagne gathered together the brightest minds he could and had them work through these.  \n\nHandwriting, for example, was radically different in the different centers, so a single common minuscule form was developed which is still largely what we use today.  Jerome's Vulgate bible had taken on many idiosyncratic readings and so these were standardized into a common bible.  The Latin language itself was standardized and remodeled in terms of spelling and grammar along the lines of ancient grammars, helping to distinguish it from the Latin spoken by the common person (which was approaching what we would call French, Spanish...).  Monastic centers had numerous rules and practices they followed and so they picked one rule, the Benedictine Rule, somewhat augmented and adapted, to be used throughout the empire.  Churches too had grown up over the centuries with their own ways of saying the mass and performing the sacraments and these were standardized.  Coinage was too, I think.  It could be argued that the notion of Europe as a single entity is something of the product of these attempts at unification, though I wouldn't want to press these claims too far.  \n\nSo the answer is yes, the Carolingian Renaissance was very important, although Renaissance might not be the best term for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/middleages#wiki_the_.22dark_ages.22", "http://books.google.fr/books?id=2TGsAAAAIAAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;hl=fr&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Europe-Robert-Bartlett/dp/0691037809", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule"], []]}
{"q_id": "1g64rh", "title": "Was Joseph Smith a convicted con-man?", "selftext": "Apparently the founder of Mormonism [was convicted of disorderly conduct](_URL_0_). Is this true? (not sure about reliability of the site and I'm having trouble finding other sources) If so, what does this indicate about Smith? Also, how common was this sort of behavior ('seer stones')?\n\nThanks, and let me know if anything needs clarifying. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g64rh/was_joseph_smith_a_convicted_conman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cah847n", "cahgxze", "cahhm3t", "cahhrrv", "cahi6a7", "cahizyh", "cahnasi"], "score": [36, 18, 12, 22, 6, 12, 7], "text": ["Disorderly conduct is a really broad charge in NY, even today, where it's defined as \n\n > A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof:\n\n > 1. He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or\n2. He makes unreasonable noise; or\n3. In a public place, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture; or\n4. Without lawful authority, he disturbs any lawful assembly or meeting of persons; or\n5. He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or\n6. He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or\n7. He creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose.\n\nIt's a bit hard to gather case law from the 1820s, but in that period of time, anything that causes excessive noise (see Conrad v. Williams, 6 Hill 444 (1844)) or causing public strife (see Duffy v. People, 6 Hill 75 (1843), Cowden v. Wright, 24 Wend. 429 (1840)) have been considered as disorderly conduct. With such broad common law examples, it would not be amiss that a lot of people's conduct fell within the prima facie definition. So the mere fact that he has been convicted a disorderly conduct charge doesn't say a whole lot about him. I can't comment as to how it ties into the greater scheme of things during his rise.", "The following links trace back and use quotes from [Fawn Brodie,](_URL_2_) in her seminal biographical volume focusing on Joseph Smith, *No Man Knows My History.*\n\n* Smith was put on trial for cheating a man named Josiah Stowell in 1826 in South Bainbridge, New York. The result of the trial remains opaque and hard to know for sure.^[1](_URL_4_) It is clear they took statements from the people involved. Smith addresses it in his own history that is part of the LDS canon.^[2](_URL_0_) \n\n* Smith's quasi-banking institution, the [Kirtland Safety Society,](_URL_1_) went bankrupt in 1837. He had a warrant for his arrest, but obsconded 800 miles away into the western frontier of the United States. If he hadn't have left Kirtland in January 1838, he would have faced charges for running an illegal bank.^[4](_URL_3_),[5](_URL_5_)\n", " >  Also, how common was this sort of behavior ('seer stones')?\n\nIt wasn't that uncommon. According to [D. Michael Quinn](_URL_0_) folk magic practices were used for all sorts of things by the people of that era and locale. Besides seer stones the use of dowsing rods has numerous references among early mormonism. There is evidence that leaders would use seer stones and dowsing rods in a ouiji board like fashion.^[1](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso, Smith used a seer stone placed in a hat to translate the golden plates,^[2](_URL_2_)\n claimed as the basis for the Book of Mormon, which were hidden somewhere in the woods. The plates were not usually in the same room, nor placed in the hat.", "**TL;DR - We know he practiced glass looking and was brought to trial.  We do not know if he was convicted.**\n\n----\n\nHere are the facts as I understand them:\n\n* In 1825, 19 year old Joseph Smith Jr was asked by Josiah Stowell to scry for a lost spanish silver mine via Joseph's seer stone.  [Stowell sought out Joseph](_URL_1_) based on his reputation as a scryer and his purported ability  to find \"hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth\". \n\n* For a period of one month, Joseph and his father worked for Stowell.  No treasure was found.  Instead, Stowell was told that the treasure seeped back into the earth or was otherwise hidden by spirits (depending on the account). \n\n* Joseph continued to work for stowell until 1826, when then 20 year old Joseph Smith Jr was brought to court under the charge of \"Glass Looking\".\n\n* Judge Neely oversaw the trial.  As this was a misdemeanor, no record of the verdict is available; however, we do have [this bill for services rendered](_URL_4_) from the judge.  [Legible version here](_URL_3_).   \n\n* The result of that trial is up for debate.  Some argue [the mittimus](_URL_5_) is not authentic, while others argue it's [proof of conviction](_URL_0_).  \n\n* Historical testimonies tend to fall along religious lines as well.  Leading authorities in the fledgling church state that he was acquitted, while those outside claim he was convicted.  [Read the testimonies here](_URL_2_)\n\nIn the end, the conviction is the unknown factor; however, Joseph Smith's history and the modern mainstream LDS church agree that Joseph was paid by Stowell for the purpose of scrying treasure he never found.  \n\n----\n\n*Edit*: Apologies to the mods for linking to partison sites.  The matter of a conviction has just enough unknown to spark intense debates on both sides, and the topic of conviction is mostly irrelevant to those without intrinsic interest in the religious authenticity of the LDS church. ", "Here is a [peer reviewed article](_URL_0_) on the trial. People may try and dismiss it as a BYU journal, but BYU studies is a peer reviewed journal refereed by people in and out of BYU.\n\nOne of the things your link is conveniently not telling you is Joseph never went to a real trail. Such a trial requires a verdict signed by official witnesses which if you look at the documents was *not* the case. This was a pre-trial hearing to see if there was anything to these complaints.\n\nInstead of fraud, Joseph was charged with a misdemeanor called \"glass-looking\" (again, your link won't mention the actual charge nor admit it was only considered a misdemeanor). This is the modern day equivalent of being charged with playing with a Ouija board.  \n\nThe judge decided Joseph should just be fined the daily court fee of $2.68 and be on his way, with no need to to face a more formal trial. (Something else your link fails to mention)\n\nOne seriously has to ask themselves, in if the judge felt Joseph was defrauding these people, why not send this to a more formal trial. Why only accuse of \"glass-looking\" and nothing further and just fine the daily court fee and send him on his way?  I am pretty sure, if you examine the evidence you will find that's because the judge realized Joseph is really guilty of nothing worse then playing with a Ouija board and so sent him on his way without the need for a more formal trial.  You can decide for yourself if this makes Joseph a convicted con-man.", "Even as an ex-mo, I don't like the phrasing of the question. It doesn't separate two different questions, each which can be answered differently than the other.\n\nJoseph Smith could have been convicted for fraud, but may not have been a con-man, and he may have been a con-man, but was never convicted, or both, or neither.\n\nJoseph Smith was convicted for destroying a printing press as mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, after which he was killed in jail once the accusations against him by the printing press were brought to light.\n\nWas he a con-man? That's the messier part.\n\nIf you believe that he was commanded by God to do all the things that he claimed God told him to do, and that the world wasn't ready to accept what he had done, then, no, he was not a con-man.\n\nIf you use the evidence that Joseph Smith falsified the existence of Golden Plates to write a story about Jews who built boats and sailed to America and were later turned into Native Americans, despite opposing DNA test results, whose story contains anachronisms such as the inclusion of chapters form the Book of Isaiah which wasn't written until 100 years after these Jews left Jerusalem, along with the translation errors that have since been discovered in the King James Version, as well as the claims of translating papyri written by the hand of Abraham, which were later translated by professional Egyptologists and found to not be about Abraham at all, then, yes, he was a con-man.", "Joseph Smith, in 1827, was convicted, at preliminary hearing,  of being a disorderly person.  Specifically, there was enough evidence of him being a disorderly person and glass-looker for him to be tried in a regular court.  Joseph Smith jumped bail, and had the equivalent of an arrest warrant issued for him.  He never appeared in the regular court, though, for reasons that are unknown - an off-the record deal with the judge is suggested.\n\n[This is a link to the authoritiative paper on the matter](_URL_0_) by the historian Dan Vogel, who walks the reader through the maze of historical documents and contemporaneous legal procedures.\n\nHere's a bit of the article:\n > \u00b65 The court record shows that Smith was arrested and brought before Justice Neely as a result of a warrant issued by Peter G. Bridgman, Josiah Stowell's nephew, who charged Smith with being a \"disorderly person and an Impostor.\" While \"Impostor\" is not a criminal offense, as Gordon A. Madsen has noted,[12] it points to a specific section of the New York statute that describes various kinds of offenses under the definition of \"disorderly persons.\" The section of the statute applicable to Bridgman's charge states: \"All jugglers [deceivers],[13] and all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found ... shall be deemed and adjudged disorderly persons.\"[14] This was probably the statute Joseph Knight, Sr., referred to when he said, speaking of Smith's 1830 trial in South Bainbridge, that Smith had been arrested for \"pretending to see under ground\" and that his prosecutors were motivated by \"A little Clause they found in the york Laws against such things.\"[15] John S. Reed, Smith's legal counsel during his 1830 trials, remembered that Smith had been arrested \"for the crime of glass looking and juglin fortune telling and so on which the State of New York was against it and made it a crime and the crime was a fine and imprisonment.\"[16]\n\n > \u00b66 Despite Walters's discovery of the Neely and DeZeng bills, the outcome of Smith's pretrial hearing is a matter of continued debate, much of which has centered on the court record's concluding statement, \"And therefore the court find[s] the defendant guilty.\" Mormon writers Gordon A. Madsen and Paul Hedengren have argued similarly, but for different reasons, that the court's judgment was \"a later inclusion\" or \"an afterthought supplied by whoever subsequently handled the notes.\"[17] Madsen points to the record's consistent reference to Smith as \"prisoner\" except for the judgment where he is called \"defendant,\"[18] while Hedengren believes it is inappropriate for pretrial hearings to pronounce judgment.[19] Without the original court record, this theory cannot be verified. However, Neely's use of the term \"guilty\" does not necessarily imply a judgment had been reached in Smith's case, only that Neely had found sufficient evidence against Smith to proceed with a formal trial. Regarding pretrial hearings, the Revised Statutes of the State of New York for 1829, for instance, instructs:\n\n > If it shall appear that an offence has been committed, and that there is probable cause to believe the prisoner to be guilty thereof, the magistrate shall bind by recognizance the prosecutor, and all the material witnesses against such prisoner, to appear and testify at the next court having cognizance of the offence, and in which the prisoner may be indicted.[20]\n\u00b67 An 1820 Ohio statute is even clearer on this matter:\n\n > Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That if the judges upon examination find the prisoner guilty of a bailable offence, they shall recognize him or her ... and in case the prisoner fails to give security, he or she shall be remanded to jail, and in all cases where the prisoner is found guilty, it shall be the duty of the judges to recognize the witnesses on the part of the state, to appear at the next court of common pleas ...[21]\n\u00b68 Thus Neely's use of the term \"guilty\" in the record of his preliminary examination of Smith is consistent with early-19th-century terminology.[22] And although the issues are complicated, there were good reasons to support Neely's finding Smith guilty of \"disorderly conduct\" and binding (or recognizing) him and three material witnesses over to the next Court of Special Sessions.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.mormonthink.com/QUOTES/js1826.htm"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/100yhw/a_timeline_perspective_of_some_critical_events_in/c6d63ps", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Safety_Society", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawn_M._Brodie", "http://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/wg9e6/is_there_a_follow_up_to_this_the_shields_article/c5d7s0w", "http://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/wm0i4/court_notes_from_1826_in_bainbridge_new_york_the/", "http://np.reddit.com/r/mormon/comments/1g601p/salt_lake_city_cemetery_luke_s_johnson_a_memeber/cahauni"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Michael_Quinn#Early_Mormonism_and_the_Magic_World_View", "http://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1fsvt0/walking_canes_casket_sticks_dousing_rods_and_more/cadjwo7", "http://np.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/xlhws/translated_from_a_hat/c5nk2u2"], ["http://www.ldsorigins.com/morehistory_9sept2010_final.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith&amp;oldid=555565338", "http://www.omninerd.com/articles/The_1826_Trial_of_Joseph_Smith_Jr", "http://i.stack.imgur.com/9rCAP.gif", "http://www.utlm.org/images/newsletters/no68highlightedbillwholep1.gif", "http://byulaw.blogspot.com/2005/09/joseph-smiths-arrest-records-found.html"], ["https://byustudies.byu.edu/PDFLibrary/12.2HillJoseph-4b6c221e-f738-4111-bc66-6b60309a27b8.pdf"], [], ["http://mormonscripturestudies.com/ch/dv/1826.asp"]]}
{"q_id": "ac9cib", "title": "I've heard a lot that pre-modern soldiers generally did not aim to kill, or would purposefully miss their target so-as to not kill. Was this also a problem when melee weapons and archery was the dominant means of warfare?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ac9cib/ive_heard_a_lot_that_premodern_soldiers_generally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed6ffw4", "ed6w7zv"], "score": [2, 6], "text": ["To clarify, are you asking about similar phenomena in historical periods (such as men refusing to charge/engage the enemy, routing, etc.) Or are you asking specifically about intentionally missing an attack in combat?", "You may be interested in a [previous answer](_URL_0_) I wrote to a similar question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j6m6t/the_effectiveness_of_hand_to_hand_combat_or_how/ds9jfzv/?context=3"]]}
{"q_id": "70wkcu", "title": "Why was Gustav III of Sweden so determined to aid Louis XVI during the French Revolution?", "selftext": "I have been reading a few texts on the French Revolution, particularly a [collection of translated letters of Axel von Fersen the Younger](_URL_0_).\n\nFrom what I've read, among all the powers of Europe at the time, it seems Gustav III was one of the most dedicated to the cause of aiding Louis XVI. But the reason for this isn't entirely clear. Did he have something to gain?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70wkcu/why_was_gustav_iii_of_sweden_so_determined_to_aid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnp22gg"], "score": [2], "text": ["Multiple reasons. First Gustav III was a king who believed in the idea of 'Enlightened Absolutism'. He'd instituted absolute monarchy (one of two quite short periods of that in Swedish history) in a coup d'etat, inspired strongly by Louis's absolutism, and Gustav in his coup strongly curtailed the power of the Swedish parliament. Gustav wanted to be hip to his age ('enlightened') but firmly believed in his - and other kings' - divine right to rule. (and indeed a huge stickler for rules and traditional formality in general, to the extent that other rulers like his cousin Catherine the Great found him annoying to deal with) His 'enlightened' ideas were - for instance - things like abolishing torture, but not popular rule.\n\nSecond, Gustav (as many others in Europe at that time) was a huge Francophile and admirer of France and the French monarchy, Versailles and all that. His court used French a lot more the Swedish language. (and the late 18th century is the one period in Swedish language history when loanwords from French dominated)\n\nThird, per the above he didn't have so much to gain from aiding Louis as he stood to lose by _not_ doing so. Louis's downfall started earlier but Gustav III still ended up with the dubious honor of being murdered first.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://archive.org/details/diarycorresponde00fers"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qhex6", "title": "Is the term \"Cultural Marxism\" actually historically related to a fascist reaction against Critical Theory?", "selftext": "I've noticed a number of right-wing folks (Reddit's own KiA, for instance) seem to be trying to bring back the term \"Cultural Marxism\". Part of this, from what I've seen, involves claiming that Cultural Marxism is a real academic term applied to critique a contemporary ideology. I have heard in the past that the term was used to vilify the Frankfurt School by the Nazis - but I don't know the context of that, either. What's its specific origin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qhex6/is_the_term_cultural_marxism_actually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwfk0ve"], "score": [56], "text": ["Yes, that would be the idea that the term \"Cultural Marxism\" comes from the 1920s German concept of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus - _URL_6_) - which along with \"Jewish Bolshevism\" (originating in pre-war Poland as \"\u017bydokomuna\" _URL_2_) was claimed to be the secretive and hidden attempt of Bolshevists to bring down Europe's \"beloved\" Nazi culture via the slow introduction of an insidious \"degenerate culture\" (a term you may have heard of already).\n\nThis is of great irony as the currently much accused Herbert Marcuse of The Frankfurt School was actually employed for a short time near the end of the war by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services - _URL_3_). Where some say he was involved in attempting to Americanize Bolshevist culture (_URL_5_). But I'd take that last part with a grain of salt.\n\nHowever according to Richard R. Weiner the English rendering of the term dates back to Trent Schroyer's 1973 The Critique of Domination - in which Schroyer is arguing that Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism must adopt MORE of Marx's historical materialism if it is to have an impact on society (although I doubt given Schroyer's tone that he came up with the term).\n\nSchroyer was as radical if not more radical than Fredric Jameson who straight up wanted Cultural Studies to be renamed \"Cultural Marxism\" (creating further confusion around the term).\n\nOf course, then cold-war era politicos like William S. Lind (_URL_1_) emerged during the 1990s Culture Wars (_URL_4_) and once again made the claim that these Cultural Theorists and Sociologists were actually trying to destroy his particular version of American Western Christianity by introducing a degenerate cultures. In 2002 he reportedly spoke on this topic at a holocaust denial conference - _URL_0_.\n\nSo the term has changed hands so often that it's fairly null in void today (with most understanding that criticism of all persuasions should remain part of a free society)... and it goes without saying that The Frankfurt School's (now 50 year old) model of hegemonic culture hasn't been nearly as influential as movements like The Chicago School of Sociology (fond of using statistical and demographic proofs) and The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (who promoted the idea that all readings of culture come from specific cultural contexts), both of which have had more impact on Today's academic and intellectual landscape."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/%E2%80%98cultural-marxism%E2%80%99-catching", "http://www.marylandthursdaymeeting.com/Archives/SpecialWebDocuments/Cultural.Marxism.htm", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse#World_War_II", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_Wars#1990s", "http://www.the-atlantic-times.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=233:herbert-marcuse-and-the-cia&amp;catid=30:life&amp;Itemid=55", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism"]]}
{"q_id": "96qt31", "title": "High heels were primarily worn by men for the first 700 years after they were invented, changing to being primarily worn by women in the 17th century. What triggered this change? Was there a time when both genders commonly wore them?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96qt31/high_heels_were_primarily_worn_by_men_for_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e42rao4"], "score": [99], "text": ["I've actually got a past answer that deals with this question: [How did heels became a purely feminine thing, after it was first used on shoes in the 16th century by noble or rich men?](_URL_0_) (For more on the Great Masculine Renunciation I mention in it, try [here](_URL_1_).) It's on the short side, though, so there is certainly room for someone else to write a fresh response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/69qa0n/how_did_heels_became_a_purely_feminine_thing/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tlr6k/how_much_did_the_regency_era_and_george_brummell/ddnr1uf/"]]}
{"q_id": "2y4fpw", "title": "What was the draw weight of a historical Yumi (Japanese bow)?", "selftext": "And if data is available, what would be the point blank kinetic energy of the arrows? I assume there will be a discrepancy in the generated energies between English bows and Japanese bows because the release method of Kyudo is supposed to increase arrow velocity beyond what draw weight alone would suggest.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y4fpw/what_was_the_draw_weight_of_a_historical_yumi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp654t1"], "score": [9], "text": ["You would do far better to search on military forums, as there are no historical records of an actual number to it. There is no direct data that is reliable enough to draw a conclusion, unlike Chinese, Turkish and Middle Eastern, and European bows that still survive or were measured with quantitative draw weights. Not to mention that there are so many variables such as arrowtip, armour, range, penetration of various materials, the ability to wound v. kill, and so on. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "463az4", "title": "Louis XIV and absolute monarchy", "selftext": "Wiki is vague on how Louis and his mother Anne centralized the power of the king in france.  So, how did they go about it?  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/463az4/louis_xiv_and_absolute_monarchy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d02hfhi"], "score": [6], "text": ["The standard Europe 101 argument (and I just gave a lecture on it last week) is:\n\n- by building a state bureaucracy of non-noble, paid staff (instead of offices that would be handed to aristocrats) \n\n- by having loyal administrators, *Intendants*, travel to distant areas and keep an eye on things;\n\n- and by building Versailles... a huge symbol of status and power... and then inviting the most powerful nobles in the realm to come live there.  (and distribute \"favors,\" such as the opportunity to dress him in the morning, which translated into access.) \n\nBut a cooler, much more sophisticated argument--too complex for my 101 class, unfortunately-- is in William Beik's book on Absolutism, which basically shows how it's just as much a *bottom up* process...  namely, all the aforementioned things (bureaucratic state-building, Versailles) were going on, of course, \n\n... but the key factor became when the great nobles (Anjou, Berry, etc) started to perceive this growing \"state\" of Louis XIV's monarchy as an *opportunity*--as an avenue to advance their own interests. \n\nSo, imagine the Duc de Berry in competition with the Duc d'Anjou;  instead of a futile (and often deadlocked) direct struggle of rallying their own supporters, resources,  etc., the could now turn to the growing state--and use it to press their own claims to their own advantage.  \n\nShort version:   once the great nobles saw that they could *use* Louis XIV for their own interests, they increasingly made Louis the de-facto \"center\" of power...  and thereafter could be increasingly coopted *by* him...  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ydyxj", "title": "Regarding the media treatment of President Kennedy's affairs in the 60's. Is this really accurate?", "selftext": "Hoping it is appropriate to post this here...\n\nPeople say it was basically public knowledge that John F. Kennedy had an affair with Marilyn Monroe and many others...but that \"back then\" people just didn't talk about that kind of stuff. The media gave the President respect or privacy because it was a classier time.\n\nI have heard this brought up when talking about President Clinton and \"gotcha\" journalism today with our politicians.\n\nThis seems pretty hard to believe, I'm skeptical. Wondering if any historians can give an accurate analysis about the validity of this idea.\n\nI hope a related Wikipedia page is acceptable, as (their) claims are supposed to be sourced. In this article it is stated that [Mary Pincho Meyer](_URL_0_) had about \"30 trysts\" with the President and often brought pot and LSD. It is claimed that this was told to the media but no one reported it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ydyxj/regarding_the_media_treatment_of_president/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ux9mp", "c5v07fp"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["A lot of it was that the press really, really liked Kennedy.  You don't smear people you like.  No president since has been anywhere near as popular with the press, not even Obama, though he has come closest.  ", "In the old days, the media could not be scooped by some blogger or kid with an iphone. The rules were different.\n\nThe media hid Roosevelt's disability (and affairs) it was not just Kennedy, it was a different mind set. Reporters pretty much followed the administration's story lines.\n\nI don't think this changed until Watergate  &  Pentagon Papers in the 70's"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pinchot_Meyer"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5mpi1g", "title": "To what extent was the spread of Islam bloodless?", "selftext": "When Islam first came around it spread amazingly quickly, at least in the sense that a lot of territory came under caliphate control very quickly. Was this purely through military might or was it not uncommon to see people newly brought under the caliphates convert without a fight?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mpi1g/to_what_extent_was_the_spread_of_islam_bloodless/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc5e4io", "dc5gsp7"], "score": [5, 5], "text": ["You're absolutely right that the expansion of territory under the control of Muslims happened very quickly and through military conquest! However, scholars differentiate between *Arabization* and *Islamicization* (or Islamization) of conquered territories. It generally happens that conquest preceded the gradual acculturation of Arab culture which preceded the bulk of local conversions to Islam.\n\nHere are three earlier answers of mine that address the complexity of Arabization, Islamicization, the status of \"peoples of the Book\", and the possibilities of forced conversion:\n\n* [What does it mean that the Middle East was 'Arabized' over the course of history?](_URL_0_)\n* [How much of a financial burden was the jizya on non-Muslims?] (_URL_1_)\n* [Can we blame the West for radical Islam/its ideology? Has Islam always been violent?] (_URL_2_)\n\nHopefully this will get you started!", "(1/2) Great question!  The expansion of Islam came in several different stages, so I'm going to address those each in turn.  The short answer is that when Islam came to newly conquered lands, they often left the population to their original beliefs, not requiring conversion (notably for the People of the Book - Christians, Jews, at times Zoroastrians, etc).  However, the population normally found it within their interests to convert on their own, leading to a gradual \"Islamization\" of the Middle East.\n\n**From Revelation to Medina**\n\nThe phrasing of your question implies that you're asking about the spread of Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula, but we may as well start at the beginning to gain a comprehensive picture.  \n\nIn 610AD, when Muhammad was 40, the Revelation of the Qur\u02bean began.  This revelation would continue until his death in 632 with two distinct phases: the Meccan Phase and the Medinan.  The Meccan verses were revealed between 610 and 622, when Muhammad was just beginning to preach in his home city of Mecca.  At this time, Muhammad was in a socially weak position.  Despite belonging to the Quraysh, the ruling tribe of the city, Muhammad\u2019s ideals threatened the livelihood of the city.  Mecca, and the Ka\u02bfba in particular, was a pilgrimage hotspot for the Arabian polytheists, yielding quite substantial tribute as well as making Mecca a trading-hub in Arabia.  At this time, Muhammad was largely protected by his Uncle, Abu Taleb, and first wife, a rich merchant named Khadija.  \n\nConversion to Islam at this point in time was entirely voluntary.  This is reflected in the parts of the Qur\u02bean revealed when Muhammad was in Mecca, which emphasize the Will of God, moral values, and takes a generally non-combative tone.  The surahs are typically shorter, then to not contain rules or calls to struggle (*jihad*), and are rather overarching calls to faith.\n\nMuhammad was increasingly persecuted by the inhabitants of Mecca and began to look outward for another city in which to live and preach.  In 622 AD, after several failed attempts (such as being laughed out of the oasis town of Ta\u02beif) and having to flee an assassination attempt at his home in Mecca, Muhammad was invited to settle in a town called Yathrib, which would later be known as Medina.\n\nThe inhabitants of Medina at this time were a mix of polytheists, Jews, and some Muslims (during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Muhammad converted a group from the Banu Khazraj in Yathrib, and they continued to spread Islam within their own town).  It was a group of these Muslims who invited Muhammad to their town to act as a judge and arbitrator between the tribes.  The tribes of Yathrib had been warring on an off for over a century, with a large battle having taken place just 2 years before in 620 AD.\n\nShortly after arriving in Medina, Muhammad drafted what is known as the Constitution of Medina.  This treaty united the differing tribes of Medina into a single community, an \u02beUmmah.  It gave freedom of religion to the residents (including the 8 Jewish tribes), established rules for peace such as blood money payments, and established Muhammad as an arbitrator for tribal disputes.  For the first time, Muhammad was in a position of relative power and importance, and an Islamic state began to form.\n\nSo in conclusion, this period could be seen as almost entirely bloodless.  Indeed, Muhammad acted as an important figure in preventing tribal disputes and establishing a relatively stable, multi-religious society in Medina (but which was not to last).\n\n**From Medina to the Arabian Peninsula**\n\nOnce in Medina, the tone of Islam began to change.  Revealed surahs tended to be longer and entailed more obligations and punishments than mere calls to faith.  This is also when other faiths began to be overtly mentioned, in particularly the People of the Book.  However, Muhammad was feeling increasingly threatened by the Jewish tribes and desired to assert himself and Islam as an independent religion.  Wael Hallaq posits that this was because the Jews were regarded as the guardians of monotheism.  In any case, stricter rules were layed down, the direction of prayer changed for Jerusalem to Mecca, and slowly tensions grew between the Jews and the Muslims.\n\nAround 624 Muhammad began to lead armed excursions against the Meccans.  These were not wars of conversion, but rather raids against caravans.  The Muslims who followed Muhammad to Medina had to leave behind many of their possessions and so the overall community was rather poor.  The Battle of Badr ended up being a turning point for Islam.  Despite being outnumbered 3 to 1, the Muslims handily won the battle against the Meccans, giving impetus to Muhammad\u2019s claims that he was a prophet of God.  Shortly after this battle, Muhammad expelled one of the Jewish tribes of Medina, the Banu Qaynuqa, allegedly on charges of dealing with the Meccans.  Thus the first \u201cpurge\u201d happened.  It was however still rather bloodless.  The battles against the Meccans were par for Arabia and the Banu Qaynuqa were not killed off. Another Jewish tribe, the Banu Nadir, was expelled later that year, after the Muslim defeat at the Battle of Uhud.   \n\n627 was the next turning point for Islam, with the Battle of the trench.  The Meccans, along with the Banu Nadir, laid siege to Medina.  However, they too failed.  The failure of the coalition led to the slaughter of the last great Jewish tribe of Medina, the Banu Qarayza.  In the first truly bloody act of Islam (although again, influenced also by economics and politics), the men of the Banu Qurayza who did not convert were beheaded and the women and children sold into slavery.  This act is often brought up as \u201cproof\u201d that Islam has been inherently violent since its conception, but there was much more at play than religion.  The Banu Qurayza were economically powerful within the city, and Muhammad had a political excuse to get rid of them following the Battle of the Trench.\n\nIn 628, the Treaty of Hudaybiyya was made between the Muslims of Medina and the polytheists of Mecca.  This treaty lasted for 2 years until a tribe allied with the Meccans attacked a tribe allied with the Medina.  Following the broken truce, Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630.  He did destroy the shrines at the Ka\u02bfba, however all but 10 men and women were spared and many converted.  Those who were killed did so because they had openly mocked Muhammad in the past.  Muhammad proceeded to rule from Mecca until his death in 632, spreading his power throughout the Arabian Peninsula.\n\nThis is the second stage of Islamic spread.  It was more bloody than the first, involving several wars and the massacre of the Banu Qurazya.  However, it wasn\u2019t *excessively* bloody.  \n\n**To the Levant and Beyond**\n\nFollowing Muhammad\u2019s death in 632, he was succeeded as Caliph by Abu Bakr.  Abu Bakr\u2019s rule is characterized by the *Wars of Ridda*, or Wars of Apostasy.  These wars were fought against Arabian tribes who claimed that their allegiance to Islam and to Mecca was given to Muhammad alone, and thus after his death they should be free of Islam and the tribute they had to pay.  Abu Bakr, in launching these wars, set the precedent that de-version away from Islam was not to be tolerated.  Thus the Islamic state began to act cohesively to not only spread Islam but ensure that it remained the dominant faith within its borders.\n\nAfter these wars, Islam began to spread Northward.  I believe this is what primarily interests you (I got a bit carried away writing the background. Sorry about that).\n\nThe conquering Arabs initially intended for Islam to be the religion of the military conquers, but for the conquered to retain their original religions.  For this reason, people were not forced to convert even when militarily conquered.  Instead, they had to pay that *jizya*, or poll tax and lived as *dhimm\u012bs*, or a protected class.  I\u2019m going to quote below something I wrote up on the jizya before.\n\n >  One key aspect about the early expansion of Islam is that it did not attempt to force its way of life upon other people. Under the Caliph 'Umar, it was envisioned that Islam would be for the Arabs, who would exist as a sort of military caste above the conquered people. This meant that the conquered populations were disturbed as little as possible, and conversions were only on a voluntary basis. This precedent was set with Muhammed allowing the Jews and Christians of Arabia to keep their religion if they paid the Jizya (poll tax). This payment would make a member of the religions of the book - Jews, Christians, and later Zoroastrians - members of the protected class, or dhimmi. These people would be reserved from having to pay the aforementioned Zakat tax and from military service within the empire. This isn't to say that taxes wouldn't get absurdly high though, as Ira Lapidus notes that taxes on peasants could reach upwards of 50% of the value of the goods. It does, however, mean that the Muslim invaders were not hated. In fact, some Christian tribes had allied themselves with the Muslims against the Sassanians or Byzantines. \n\n >  Oddly enough, the Religions of the Book flourished in the early days of conquest with Islams coming. Many previously repressed sects were able to abound, and apocalyptic messages were numerous. This changed though as time went on. 'Umar II (r.717-720) forbade Christians to hold powerful government positions. Other successive rulers forbade minority religions to ride horses, bear weapons, or show outward religious symbols in public. Repression came in waves, as one Caliph would crack down (Such as Yazid II destroying churches and animal sculptures) and then others relent. Keep in mind through all of this that from the 7th to the 11th century, upwards of half the world's Christians lived under Islamic rule, yet they were not forced to exile or forced to convert by force (at least in large-scale).\n\n**Hitting the character limit. Finished up in a second comment**\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xgwey/ive_often_heard_that_the_middle_east_was_arabized/", "https://redd.it/3u2bts", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p2vz6/can_we_blame_the_west_for_the_ideology_of/d4hq843/"], []]}
{"q_id": "8bpfb3", "title": "In 1095, the First Crusade is called to aid Byzantium, a Christian power, against their Muslim enemy. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade conquers the capital of Byzantium. How on earth did this happen?", "selftext": "Why did relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches decline so much?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bpfb3/in_1095_the_first_crusade_is_called_to_aid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx90k8h", "dxahp0j"], "score": [134, 5], "text": ["While it is true that the relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox churches did decline this isn't them main reason for the 4th Crusade conquering Constantinople. The 4th Crusade wasn't called against the Byzantine Empire, infact the pope excommunicated the participants of the 4th Crusade because they weren't fighting against the target the pope had intended.\n\nThe 4th Crusades' original target was Egypt, the Crusaders planned to capture Egypt, and then move on to the holy land, in order to prevent a counterattack from Egypt against the Holy Land when the Crusaders left, as happened after the 1st and 2nd Crusades.\n\nThe Crusaders decided to travel by boat because they were heading to Egypt, and because previous expeditions by the German and French contingents that travelled by land through Anatolia during the 2nd and 3rd Crusades had suffered high casualties.\n\nTherefore the Crusaders commissioned Venice to build a fleet for them, promising to pay them 85,000 marks when the crusade began, however when the Crusaders showed up they only had 35,000 marks, and since Venice had made a huge investment in building the fleet they weren't willing to reduce their price by that much.\n\nInstead Enrico Dandolo, who was the Doge of Venice said that they would transport the crusaders, if the crusaders would help the Venetians recapture the city of Zadar(also known as Zara), which had rebelled against Venetian rule in 1181. Doge Enrico also prevented food from being transported to the island the Crusaders were stationed on until the crusaders agreed to the deal. Therefore the crusades' leaders agreed, despite the fact that Zadar was a Catholic city, and under the protection of Emeric I, King of Hungary and Croatia. \n\nIn October 1202 the Crusade left Venice and they besieged and captured Zara in November 1202, in response to this King Emeric asked Pope Innocent III to excommunicate the Crusaders, which he did, although most members of the Crusade didn't hear about this fact.Since the siege had ended on November 24, by which time the weather wasn't suitable for sailing, the Crusade had to spend winter in Zara. \n\nMeanwhile Boniface I Marquess of Montferrat who was one of the leaders of the Crusade had left to visit his cousin Philip the Duke of Swabia, and King of Germany. Philip was married to Irene. Irene had a brother, Alexios IV (who wasn't emperor at this point I'm just including his regnal number to avoid confusion) who was living at their court. The father of Alexios IV was overthrown imprisoned and blinded in a coup carried out by his older brother Alexios III, in 1195. Ever since this Philip had supported Alexios IV claim on the Byzantine throne and they plotted to place Alexios IV on the Byzantine throne. When Boniface went to Swabia he met with Alexios IV, and they presumably reached an agreement, although we don't know exactly what happened at their meeting due to a lack of primary sources.\n\nIn January 1203 Boniface arrived at Zara alongside envoys from Alexios IV, Alexios IV offered to give the crusaders 200,000 marks, as well as pay off all of their debts to the Venetians, give 10,000 men to the crusade and permanently maintain 500 knights in the holy land, have the Byzantine navy transport the crusaders, and mend the great schism of 1054 by placing the Byzantine Church(Eastern Orthodox) under the authority of the Pope. This offer was strongly supported by Boniface, Doge Enrico, and Louis I Count of Blois. The other leaders of the crusade eventually agreed to the offer as well. This prompted a few of the crusaders to leave the Crusade, however the vast majority of the crusaders remained with the crusade.\n\nWhen the weather improved and the crusade gathered supplies, in April 1203 the crusade left Zara alongside the Venetians, at this point a majority of the Crusading force was Venetian. With there being 14,000 Venetians and 10,000 \"regular\" non-venetian crusaders. The Venetians relationship with the Byzantines was much worse than that of other Catholic countries. Since Venice made a large amount of its wealth by trade, and the Byzantines were rivals to the Venetians, and through their competition and their favourable treatment to Byzantine merchants were harming Venetian profits. Also in 1182 after Alexios II was overthrown by Andronikos I, the supporters of Andronikos I performed a massacre of Catholics who lived in Constantinople, which resulted in over 10,000 Catholics dying (there is a wide number of estimates for the death toll ranging from 10,000-80,000). Before 1182 there were a large number of Venetians living in Constantinople, and many soldiers in the Venetian navy had lost relatives in the massacre, causing the Venetians to hate the Byzantines a lot more than average Catholics hated them.\n\nIn June 1203 the crusade arrived in Constantinople . The Crusaders had hoped having Alexios IV with them would convince the garrison to defect, but that didn't happen. During the siege in July Alexios III, after a failed sally attempt fled the city prompting the people of Constantinople to release Isaac II from his imprisonment and proclaim him as Emperor, the Crusaders then demanded that Alexios IV should be proclaimed as Emperor as well, at which point they stopped besieging the city.\n\nAt this point the Crusaders didn't control Constantinople, instead it was in the hands of their ally Alexios IV. In August 1203 another smaller massacre of Catholics happened in Constantinople, due to the Crusader army being away fighting against Alexios III in Thrace. Meanwhile Alexios IV was trying to fulfil the promises he had made to the Crusaders. Placing the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Pope was very slow, however even this little effort annoyed a great many Byzantines. The main promise Alexios IV tried to fulfil was the financial one, however even after melting down statues to make money he could only raise 100,000 of the 300,000 marks he needed to make the payment.\n\nHis attempts to fulfil his promise to the Crusaders made Alexios IV very unpopular with the people of Constantinople, who overthrew and killed him and his father on February 1204, and named Alexios V as Emperor instead. The crusaders still demanded that the promise of Alexios IV should be fulfilled, however when they realised that Alexios V wasn't going to abide by the deal the Crusaders besieged Constantinople, sacking it in April 1204.\n\nIn summary political upheaval in the Byzantine Empire resulting in the massacre of Catholics soured the relationship between the Byzantines and Catholics, leading to the Venetians hijacking an indebted Crusading force and taking it to capture Constantinople. The pope had called the 4th Crusade against Egypt, not the Byzantines.\n", "u/wowbuggertheinfinite has a great discussion of the Fourth Crusade and how it all went so off the rails, but I want to highlight another important part of this whole incident: relations between the Latin West \\(and Crusaders in particular\\) and Byzantium were on rocky footing well before the Fourth Crusade.\n\nRelations between Byzantium and the West deteriorated significantly in the Central Middle ages. One major contributing factor was the Norman 'conquest' of southern Italy. I say 'conquest', because it was more like a slow edging out of the previous political elites and replacing them with newly arrived Normans \\(initially hired as mercenaries\\) than an out and out brutal conquest, and in that way very different from the more famous Norman Conquest in 1066 \\(which is not to say it was entirely peaceful either, it was still pretty violent\\). Byzantium ostensibly ruled over southern Italy and the previous rulers had sworn allegiance to the Empire. The new Norman nobility were less interested in paying their respects to a distant power and Byzantium lacked the strength to force them to, especially after the disastrous defeat at Manzikert in 1071.\n\nThings took a significant turn for the worse in the 1080s when the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard a prominent leader in the conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily, invaded the Balkans \\- lands definitely under Byzantine rule. This conflict lasted from 1080 until Guiscards death in 1085 \\- which roughly coincided with a major Byzantine\\-Venetian victory against the Norman forces. Somewhat ironically, many of the Norman participants in this invasion would go on to join the First Crusade, most notably the future Prince of Antioch \\(and Robert Guiscard's son\\) Bohemond of Taranto.\n\nThe First Crusade had a rocky start to Byzantine\\-Crusader relations \\(the presence of his Norman former enemies was not exactly something Alexios I loved\\), but mostly everyone got along reasonably well until the siege of Antioch. This is one of the major events of the First Crusade, and literal books have been written about it, so I'm going to limit myself to the big picture and skip over many very important and complex details. The short version is that the Crusader forces pushed ahead of Alexios' armies and besieged the stronghold of Antioch, at the same time the Atabeg of Mosul, Kerbogha, was summoning a massive Muslim army to crush the Crusade. The siege of Antioch dragged on for months, things were looking dire for the Crusaders. Bohemond managed to get a local resident to betray the city and let in a small force one night, and the Crusaders took the city just in time for Kerbogha to surround it and put them under siege. Alexios was supposed to come relieve them, he didn't \\(much ink has been spilled over this decision\\), it looked like the Crusaders were all about to die, but in a rather miraculous turn of events they road out of the city to fight Kerbogha and won. The First Crusade was triumphant, and feeling like they were betrayed by Alexios and the Byzantines. Bohemond was given control of Antioch, and declared that he didn't have to turn it over to the Byzantines despite previously have agreed to do so because they had abandoned the Crusade in its time of need. Alexios didn't really see things that way.\n\nThe relationship between Byzantium and Antioch would continue to be fraught for the next two centuries. Bohemond actually assembled another army while touring Europe promoting his success on the crusade and used it to invade Byzantium **again**, this time with disastrous consequences. He was roundly defeated, captured by Alexios, and forced to pledge his loyalty to the Byzantine Empire. He died without returning to Antioch, and his son \\(now Prince of Antioch\\), decided that his father's oath to Alexios didn't apply to him. Relations continued to be problematic after that.\n\nRelations between Byzantium and the Latin West continued to be problematic through the Second Crusade, although they again mostly cooperated but there were a lot of hard feelings after the Crusades failure and a strong desire in parts of the West to blame that failure upon the 'treachery of the Greeks'. Relations took an even worse turn in 1185 when the Angelos dynasty deposed the last Komnenoi emperor and then pretty much refused to help with the Third Crusade at all. The Angelos dynasty was marked in particular by strong anti\\-Latin sentiments, and were eventually deposed as part of the Fourth Crusade.\n\nThis has been a super broad survey of a very complicated topic, but I think it is important to keep in mind that throughout this period relations between Byzantium and the Crusaders were not all rosy, and while the Fourth Crusade is arguably an extreme result, it is not entirely without precedent.\n\nPeter Frankopan's *A Call from the East* is a good history of the First Crusade from the Byzantine perspective and covers the fraught relations beforehand pretty well.\n\nThomas Asbridge's *The Crusades* is a great survey of the whole period.\n\nAndrew Buck's *The Principality of Antioch and its Frontiers in the Twelfth Century* is a serious scholarly work, and not one I'd recommend a beginner jump in to, but has some great detail on the complicated relationship between Antioch and Byzantium in the century before the Fourth Crusade."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "82ced7", "title": "In video games and popular media, the Sengoku Period of Japan are often characterized as a period of conflict between Japanese clans which were small but were of equal economic or military strength with each other. Was this accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/82ced7/in_video_games_and_popular_media_the_sengoku/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dv98ymi"], "score": [14], "text": ["Well...it really depends on the specific clan, battle, and war. When we are talking about local strongman vs local strongman, it's probably not too far off to assume each side only had a few hundred, or at most a couple of thousand. However, things could be quite large and lopsided. For instance, the overall engagement at Nagashino was, according to the Chronicles of Lord Nobunaga, 38,500 for the Oda and Tokugawa and 15,000 for the Takeda, with the decisive engagement at Shitaragahara 32,000 vs 12,000. And this is the *lower* end of pre-modern sources. And engagements after Yamazaki got stupidly large because of the wide range of resources and clans mobilized.\n\nOn the other hand... it's my experience that media often *exaggerate* the strength disparity to make for a better story, so I'm not sure which media you're referring to."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4khyuz", "title": "How common were certain Roman names, and are there any reliable statistics on this?", "selftext": "I know that in Ancient Rome, there were some names which were so common they had abbreviations, e.g. C for Gaius, Cn for Gnaeus, M for Marcus, etc. My question is, how common were these names as compared to other, less common ones. How big was the selection in possible names? Was it mostly just a \"pick your favorite of the top 20\", or were more diverse names common as well? And apologies, but I don't have any specific period in mind; Republic, Empire, even Kingdom would be fine. Basically any Latin-speaking society in what is considered the \"ancient world\" would apply to my question.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4khyuz/how_common_were_certain_roman_names_and_are_there/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3f5fre"], "score": [13], "text": ["The traditional Roman male *tria nomina* were made up of three elements. The *tria nomina* was a symbol of Roman citizenship and quite often thought as the 'classic' form of Roman nomenclature, but in reality, it was actually used for a relatively short amount of time in Roman history and all sorts of other formulas and variations were popular at different times, but maybe there's no need to go into that just now. Benet Salway's 1994 [article](_URL_1_) offers a classic review of changes in Roman onomastic practise if someone's interested. \n\nWe can take Cicero's, that is, Marcus Tullius Cicero's name as an example. There is the *praenomen*, which was the first name that originally was used as the main diacritic within family (Marcus). Then, there's the *nomen gentilicium* or sometimes called just *nomen* (Tullius), which was basically the family name that showed which *gens* you belonged to. The Romans had laws for protecting these *nomina*, and using an Italian *gentilicium* even when you were not a citizen was a punishable offense. The *gentilicium* always passed from father to sons and daughters, and the *praenomen* almost always, so that the sons of the family often had the same first name. The last element, the *cognomen* (Cicero), then was originally used as an added personal touch that could differentiate males in the same family or family line. In reality, these were often hereditary as well, which can make it very difficult to differentiate between generations. *Cognomina* could for example differentiate between the sons in the family and mark the order of birth; Primus, Secundus, Tertius etc. were very popular. They could also have something to do with the characteristics or achievements of the individual - Plutarch says that Cicero (which means 'chickpea') had gotten his name from an ancestor who had a small nose that looked like a chickpea. \n\nSo, to go back to your questions, are you only interested about the *praenomina*, i.e. the first names? If yes, the Romans had a *very* [limited repertoire](_URL_0_) of *praenomina*, some three dozen. *Praenomina* practically always passed from father to sons, and freedmen usually took their old master's *praenomen*. So, \"what should I call my son?\" was very rarely a puzzle for Romans. The Wikipedia article says that about a half of those in the list were in popular use, but I could limit the names that were really popular to an even smaller number; the most common one's you'll see are Gaius, Gnaeus, Lucius, Marcus, Publius, Quintus, Sextus, Tiberius, Titus - perhaps Statius and Servius can make that list as well. *Praenomina* other than these are pretty rare. I'm pretty sure I've seen statistics for different Roman regions about how popular each *praenomen* was, but, sorry, I can't remember on my feet where I could find one just now :P There will be regional variations, and I don't think anyone has done a survey for the *whole* Roman world, since we have tens of thousands of inscriptions and therefore personal names from the Roman era!\n\nIf you're interested how common some *gentilicia* and *cognomina* are, that's a more difficult question because there are huge amounts of them. Study of Roman personal names, known as onomastics, is a big academic field of its own. People who work on this field, among other things, make lists of *gentilicia* and *cognomina* and track how popular certain names are in certain regions and eras. These can be used to make some guesses about where any individual came from the Roman world. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praenomen#Masculine_names", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/300873?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "2mnn6f", "title": "Russian roulette - what is the origin? Has it actually been played? Are there testimonials from survivors?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mnn6f/russian_roulette_what_is_the_origin_has_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm5y0wf", "cm5y1i8", "cm65c5w", "cm69hdz", "cm6dmpz", "cm6n0yb", "cm6t69q"], "score": [677, 200, 82, 41, 12, 3, 5], "text": ["One of the first mentions of Russian Roulette in literature was in a 1840 novel by Russian poet Lermontov \"Hero of Our Time\" (Full ebook available on [Gutenberg Project](_URL_1_), scene is in the last chapter of the book).\n\nSince Lermontow was a Russian officer who served in Caucasus and at least some facts\\stories in the novel (which is a work of fiction) were autobiographical, the Russian Roulette story might have some real background behind it.\n\nEDIT: I did some additional research and found some obscure references in a biography of Russian general Mihail Skobelev (russian only, Google Books link [here](_URL_0_), unsure if it was ever translated), who lived 1843\u20141882 and was famous due to his service in one of many Russian-Turkish wars in 1870-s. The books mentions that Skobelev was aware of the risky game his officers played, unofficially approved it as a display of valor and bravery, but was forced to punish it severely due to special order from Emperor Alexander II by demoting involved officers to common soldiers (officers were mostly nobility, soldiers were mostly peasants, so this demotion would be quite shameful). Book fails to reference any sources though, and I also was unable to find any traces of such law or order.\n\nBut if those facts are true, it all fits quite well. Early 1800s during Lermontov time the Roulette appeared among officers on Caucasus (note that Lermontov describes the game, but never actually calls it Russian Roulette), late in 1870s it is well known, has its official name \"the Roulette\" and is popular enough to requite special actions from Emperor and generals to stop its spread among officers.", "The concept may stem from a story in Collier's in 1937, per the Oxford English Dictionary,  (G. Surdez in *Collier's* 30 Jan. 1937), which describes the practice as it's come to be known.  A search of the New York Times turned up dozens of references prior to the 1960s (65 between 1942-1959 in fact), most of which are death notices involving young men to have been killed in the U.S. playing the \"game.\"\n\nThe earliest examples:\n\n* \"Gamble With One Cartridge in Revolver Costs Life of Fordham Sophomore, 20\"\n*New York Times*  02 May 1942: 15.\n\n* \"RUSSIAN ROULETTE' FATAL: Boy, 12, Is Killed by the One Cartridge in Revolver\"\n*New York Times* 27 Feb 1949: 36.\n\n* \"RUSSIAN ROULETTE FATAL: Youth, Exhibiting His Luck to His Brothers, Is Killed\"\n*New York Times*  28 Dec 1953: 28.\n\nInterestingly, the first of these explains the term by noting it was \"said to have been practiced in the army of the Czar\" while the second speculates that it \"originated in the movies.\" The third doesn't bother to define it at all, so one might assume that by 1953 the writer believed his audience to know what Russian roulette meant and did not require any additional explanation.\n\nIn all of these stories young men/boys (the youngest victim was 12) die playing the game with friends.", "Of course \"Russian Roulette\" became popularized in the late 1970s after the release of Michael Cimino's Oscar Winning Film \"The Deer Hunter\".\n\nIn the film American prisoners of war are forced to play the game while their North Vietnamese captors bet on the outcomes.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nI believe Cimino made it clear in later interviews (I will try to find a source) that the scenes were to be taken metaphorically; indicative of the impossible state these prisoners found themselves in. And there were no true reports of prisoners of war being forced to play Russian Roulette.\n\nBut this did not stop many people (typically kids) from playing the game themselves. [This report from the Christian Science Monitor](_URL_1_) in 1981 reports that 15 people had died from playing the game, apparently inspired by TV showings of the Deer Hunter that year.\n\nIt's an excellent, long article. Well worth reading.\n\n\n\n\n", "Frank Andersson - A Swedish Olympic wrestler have played Russian roulette, I have translated what he said about it in an interview by Expressen, a Swedish newspaper: \n\n\u201cI have played Russian Roulette. It was a late night in 1985. I was the only one who tried it and I won 50 000 SEK since there were nobody else that dared\u2026It happened, of course, at a boozeroo [party with loads of alcohol. My not.], says Anderson and laughs. \u2013You don\u2019t think. You just pull the trigger. And everything went fine so there was nothing more to it. \u2013Your chances are good if you think about the statistics. Says Andersson and continues. \u2013I\u2019m not sure if it was a challenge, but I have always sought thrills my whole life. But I would never redo it.\n\n[Link to the interview, in Swedish.](_URL_0_)\n", "Malcolm X claimed to have played a game of Russian Roulette in his lifetime in his [autobiography](_URL_1_), but the [reporter who helped him write it later claimed](_URL_0_) he had palmed the round, ensuring his safety.", "Since there was a question about testimonials from survivors: It's too recent to qualify as \"history\", but in June of 2014 the journal *Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery* published a case study of a 20-year-old Albanian man who had survived a through-and-through gunshot wound to the head from a .22 revolver during a game of Russian Roulette. The article indicates that the authors were able to find only one other published case study involving a survivor of a Russian Roulette-related gunshot wound to the head: an Italian man whose case was described in that same publication in 2009. A citation for that piece is provided at the end of the article. I mention this article and its conclusion in order to provide an explanation for the apparent lack of cases falling outside the 20-year window that defines eligibility for this subreddit.\n\nThe article can be read [here](_URL_0_). Please bear in mind, however, that it includes some extremely graphic images of pre-surgery facial injuries, and as such is NSFW (unless, of course, you work in reconstructive surgery or a similar field).", "If you're looking for references of it actually being used I can suggest the book Can't Stop, Won't Stop by Jeff Chang which describes the beginning of the Hip Hop culture in Bronx and other New York suburbs in the 60's and 70's. In the book he has gathered testimonials of gangs at the time with a lot of information about their perspective of what they experienced (mostly as a result of the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway). Some of the testimonials include former gang members' recollecting their initiation rites; some which included, among other things, performing a russian roulette."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.ru/books?id=qehNAgAAQBAJ&amp;dq=%D0%93%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D1%8B+%D0%A1%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2.+%22%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B9+%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%22&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/913"], [], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCW9NsrV6VM", "http://www.csmonitor.com/1981/0205/020562.html"], ["http://www.expressen.se/sport/jag-har-spelat-rysk-roulette/"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBxXUEZ13EC&amp;pg=PA138&amp;lpg=PA138&amp;dq=alex+haley+malcolm+x+russian+roulette&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=Gmgw5VFmG-&amp;sig=_7slCUC3KImAqhNbvvCtSC5kQNw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=BcNrVLGAMcSLyATVrILQCQ&amp;ved=0CDsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;q=alex%20haley%20malcolm%20x%20russian%20roulette&amp;f=false", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/autobiography-of-malcolm-x-with-the-assistance-of-alex-haley/oclc/219493184"], ["http://mobile.journals.lww.com/plasreconsurg/_layouts/oaks.journals.mobile/articleviewer.aspx?year=2014&amp;issue=06000&amp;article=00060"], []]}
{"q_id": "sug2n", "title": "Any book recommendations on the history of contemporary music?", "selftext": "I'm not a scholar of history but I do enjoy reading history and biographies.  Historians seem to like creating a narrative out of the events of history and relating the story that way.  I'm also a music nerd and I definitely think that it is possible to take this historian's approach to writing about the history of contemporary music.  It seems to me that there's a narrative there and I'd like to read about it.  Could anyone recommend books on the history of contemporary music (since the 60s or so)?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sug2n/any_book_recommendations_on_the_history_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4h9ggm", "c4hzqx5"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["First off, because you mention the 60's as your starting point for learning about the history of music, I am going to assume your focus lies in the British reinvention of rock and roll and the countless genres spawned by this event.  This happens to be an area with which I am familiar. However, our culture glorifies the 60s and \"classic\" rock.  This doesn't mean that all of a sudden there was a huge burst in creativity untapped by mankind previously which resulted in rock and roll music.  On the contrary, rock is a development in an ongoing series of musical developments (by no means linear).\n\nMy quasi historical approach to music would be to appreciate it as a series of movements.  These movements originate because of artistic desire, which seeks originality.  Nobody wants to sound stale.  Important musical groups in history synthesize various musical influences into a \"fresh\" sound:  for instance, Nirvana \"created\" grunge music.\n\nThere is an inherent problem in this model in that it gives far too much credit to individual artists.  Usually, these artists operate within a musical scene.  For Nirvana, they came from Seattle in the late 80s, which was frustrated with the glam-metal that reigned supreme at that time.  These artists didn't care about apperance (shaggy hair, thrift store flannels and jeans, et cetera) and wrote music, well, I can't really define grunge (this isn't my area of expertise as far as music history goes).  Anyway, this music became popular with Nirvana's breakthrough album \"Nevermind.\"  Therefore, by reading biographies of Nirvana, you will gain information on the particular variables that lead to the creation of grunge music.  This gives you an insight into the overall progression of musical development.\n\nBut what do I know? [ Here](_URL_0_) (scroll down a tad) is the famous chalkboard from the movie \"School of Rock\" in which Jack Black instructs his students about the history of rock music since the 50s.  That chart is pretty helpful in showing the major movements as well as the most important innovative artists.  \n\nAs for choosing particular biographies based on my approach... Good luck with that.  I would suggest doing a search on amazon and then checking out the reviews.\n\nHopefully, one of our peers can provide a more effective method to understanding this music.  If I ever happen across a worthwhile book on the subject, I'll shoot you a pm =D", "I haven't seen too many good scholarly works on the history of music since the 60s. There are lots of history of rock and roll books out there, and many are interesting but I can't pick out a specific one for you. \n\nBy far my favorite work about American music is about early Jazz. It's \"Cuttin' Up\" by Court Carney. A good entertaining read about the development of jazz music in America. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://mailemusicproject.com/about/"], []]}
{"q_id": "5ob6a6", "title": "After WWII, what did the International Red Cross conclude, in it's investigations into the holocaust?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ob6a6/after_wwii_what_did_the_international_red_cross/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dchy55t", "dchydo3", "dcifhbm"], "score": [8, 5, 10], "text": ["Hi! As this question pertains to basic, underlying facts of the Holocaust, I hope you can appreciate that it can be a fraught subject to deal with. While we want people to get the answers they are looking for, we also remain very conscious that threads of this nature can attract the very wrong kind of response. As such, this message is not intended to provide you with all of the answers, but simply to address some of the basic facts, as well as Holocaust Denial, and provide a short list of introductory reading. There is always more than can be said, but we hope this is a good starting point for you.\n\n##What Was the Holocaust?\n\nThe Holocaust refers the genocidal deaths of 5-6 million European Jews carried out systematically by Nazi Germany as part of targeted policies of persecution and extermination during World War II. Some historians will also include the deaths of the Roma, Communists, Mentally Disabled, and other groups targeted by Nazi policies, which brings the total number of deaths to ~11 million. Debates about whether or not the Holocaust includes these deaths or not is a matter of definitions, but in no way a reflection on dispute that they occurred.\n\n##But This Guy Says Otherwise!\n\nUnfortunately, there is a small, but at times vocal, minority of persons who fall into the category of Holocaust Denial, attempting to minimize the deaths by orders of magnitude, impugn well proven facts, or even claim that the Holocaust is entirely a fabrication and never happened. Although they often self-style themselves as \"Revisionists\", they are not correctly described by the title. While revisionism is not inherently a dirty word, actual revision, to quote Michael Shermer, *\"entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust.\"*\n\nIt is absolutely true that were you to read a book written in 1950 or so, you would find information which any decent scholar today might reject, and that is the result of good revisionism. But these changes, which even can be quite large, such as the reassessment of deaths at Auschwitz from ~4 million to ~1 million, are done within the bounds of respected, academic study, and reflect decades of work that builds upon the work of previous scholars, and certainly does not willfully disregard documented evidence and recollections. There are still plenty of questions within Holocaust Studies that are debated by scholars, and there may still be more out there for us to discover, and revise, but when it comes to the basic facts, there is simply no valid argument against them.\n\n##So What Are the Basics?\n\nBeginning with their rise to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party, headed by Adolf Hitler, implemented a series of anti-Jewish policies within Germany, marginalizing Jews within society more and more, stripping them of their wealth, livelihoods, and their dignity. With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the number of Jews under Nazi control reached into the millions, and this number would again increase with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, the Germans started to confine the Jewish population into squalid ghettos. After several plans on how to rid Europe of the Jews that all proved unfeasible, by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, ideological (Antisemitism) and pragmatic (Resources) considerations lead to mass-killings becoming the only viable option in the minds of the Nazi leadership.\nFirst only practiced in the USSR, it was influential groups such as the SS and the administration of the General Government that pushed to expand the killing operations to all of Europe and sometime at the end of 1941 met with Hitler\u2019s approval.\n\nThe early killings were carried out foremost by the *Einsatzgruppen*, paramilitary groups organized under the aegis of the SS and tasked with carrying out the mass killings of Jews, Communists, and other 'undesirable elements' in the wake of the German military's advance. In what is often termed the 'Holocaust by Bullet', the *Einsatzgruppen*, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the SD, the Security Police, as well as local collaborators, would kill roughly two million persons, over half of them Jews. Most killings were carried out with mass shootings, but other methods such as gas vans - intended to spare the killers the trauma of shooting so many persons day after day - were utilized too. \n\nBy early 1942, the \"Final Solution\" to the so-called \"Jewish Question\" was essentially finalized at the Wannsee Conference under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, where the plan to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe using a series of extermination camps set up in occupied Poland was presented and met with approval.\n\nConstruction of extermination camps had already begun the previous fall, and mass extermination, mostly as part of 'Operation Reinhard', had began operation by spring of 1942. Roughly 2 million persons, nearly all Jewish men, women, and children, were immediately gassed upon arrival at Be\u0142\u017cec, Sobib\u00f3r, and Treblinka over the next two years, when these  \"Reinhard\" camps were closed and razed. More victims would meet their fate in additional extermination camps such as Che\u0142mno, but most infamously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where slightly over 1 million persons, mostly Jews, died. Under the plan set forth at Wannsee, exterminations were hardly limited to the Jews of Poland, but rather Jews from all over Europe were rounded up and sent east by rail like cattle to the slaughter. Although the victims of the Reinhard Camps were originally buried, they would later be exhumed and cremated, and cremation of the victims was normal procedure at later camps such as Auschwitz.\n\n##The Camps\n\nThere were two main types of camps run by Nazi Germany, which is sometimes a source of confusion. Concentration Camps were well known means of extrajudicial control implemented by the Nazis shortly after taking power, beginning with the construction of Dachau in 1933. Political opponents of all type, not just Jews, could find themselves imprisoned in these camps during the pre-war years, and while conditions were often brutal and squalid, and numerous deaths did occur from mistreatment, they were not usually a death sentence and the population fluctuated greatly. Although Concentration Camps *were* later made part of the 'Final Solution', their purpose was not as immediate extermination centers. Some were 'way stations', and others were work camps, where Germany intended to eke out every last bit of productivity from them through what was known as \"extermination through labor\". Jews and other undesirable elements, if deemed healthy enough to work, could find themselves spared for a time and \"allowed\" to toil away like slaves until their usefulness was at an end.\n\nAlthough some Concentration Camps, such as Mauthausen, did include small gas chambers, mass gassing was not the primary purpose of the camp. Many camps, becoming extremely overcrowded, nevertheless resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of inhabitants due to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus, or starvation, all of which the camp administrations did little to prevent. Bergen-Belsen, which was not a work camp but rather served as something of a way station for prisoners of the camp systems being moved about, is perhaps one of the most infamous of camps on this count, saw some 50,000 deaths caused by the conditions. Often located in the Reich, camps liberated by the Western forces were exclusively Concentration Camps, and many survivor testimonies come from these camps.\n\nThe Concentration Camps are contrasted with the Extermination Camps, which were purpose built for mass killing, with large gas chambers and later on, crematoria, but little or no facilities for inmates. Often they were disguised with false facades to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security, even though rumors were of course rife for the fate that awaited the deportees. Almost all arrivals were killed upon arrival at these camps, and in many cases the number of survivors numbered in the single digits, such as at Be\u0142\u017cec, where only seven Jews, forced to assist in operation of the camp, were alive after the war.\n\nSeveral camps, however, were 'Hybrids' of both types, the most famous being Auschwitz, which was a vast complex of subcamps. The infamous 'selection' of prisoners, conducted by SS doctors upon arrival, meant life or death, with those deemed unsuited for labor immediately gassed and the more healthy and robust given at least temporary reprieve. The death count at Auschwitz numbered around 1 million, but it is also the source of many survivor testimonies.\n\n##How Do We Know?\n\nRunning through the evidence piece by piece would take more space than we have here, but suffice to say, there is a lot of evidence, and not just the (mountains of) survivor testimony. We have testimonies and writings from many who participated, as well German documentation of the programs. [This site](_URL_5_) catalogs some of the evidence we have for mass extermination as it relates to Auschwitz. I'll close this out with a short list of excellent works that should help to introduce you to various aspects of Holocaust study.\n\n##Further Reading\n\n* \"[Third Reich Trilogy](_URL_4_)\" by Richard Evans\n* \"[Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution](_URL_1_)\" by Ian Kershaw\n* \"[Auschwitz: A New History](_URL_3_)\" by Laurence Rees\n* \"[Ordinary Men](_URL_0_)\" by Christopher Browning\n* \"[Denying History](_URL_2_)\" by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman\n* [AskHistorians FAQ](/r/AskHistorians/wiki/wwii#wiki_nazi_germany)\n", "Also, since your question specifically focuses on the Red Cross, [this older thread](_URL_0_), specifically the answer by u/commiespaceinvader, may be of interest to you. ", "From an [older answer concerning this specific claim about the ICRC](_URL_2_). And for good measure one on the actual death toll [here](_URL_3_)\n\nWith regards to the documents by the International Committee of the Red Cross:\n\nThis myth of a Red Cross document originates with famous Holocaust Denier Richard Harwood in his propaganda book *Did Six Million really die*, which has not only been disproven several times \u2013 among the most famous incidents at the trial of Ernst Z\u00fcndel \u2013 but also by the International Committee of the Red Cross itself.\n\nHarwood is in typical fashion for deniers twisting evidence and words in this case. He cites a document by the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross compiled in response to a query regarding the number of deaths in concentration camps they had so far recorded based on surviving documents from the various camp administrations. Given the practice, as the Nazis themselves described it, that the majority of Jewish prisoners send to camps like Auschwitz or the Reinhard Camps were not even registered in those camps but rather killed immediately upon arrival and that a lot of the documentation of the Nazis was destroyed by the same Nazis before the end of the war \u2013 see also my answer concerning the [Auschwitz Death books here](_URL_1_) \u2013 this document was never intended or claimed as numbering all the victims of the Nazi killing spree. Yet Harwood and other deniers ignore this and base their dubious and politically and morally abhorrent claims on the falsification of this document among other things.\n\nThe ICRC published [a refutation of said claims](_URL_0_) in a 1979 bulletin where they write:\n\n >  A machination initiated years ago has gone so far that the ICRC is now entangled in its mesh. Its object is to whitewash the National Socialist system in wartime Germany of the accusation of genocide. (...) Consequently the ICRC considers it must make clear the fact that is has never published \u2013 or even compiled \u2013 statistics of this kind [meaning statistics of all victims of the Holocaust] which are being falsely attributed to it.\n\nAs to the ITS document numbering 271.000, they write:\n\n >  The same propaganda scheme has recently been making use of other figures, namely the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service on the basis of documents found when the camps were closed. Obviously this number bears no relation \u2013 though the authors of the propaganda pretend otherwise \u2013 to the total deaths in concentration camps; firstly because a considerable number of documentary material was destroyed before the departure of the Nazi administration, and secondly because many deaths were never recorded, such as those which occurred in the extermination camps where records were generally not kept. \n\nThey end with this very true statement:\n\n >  There is, incidentally, something revolting about this arithmetical controversy as if such a tragedy could be reduced to mere figures.\n\n\nSources and further reading:\n\n* Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2002).\n\n* Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah Lipstadt (1994).\n\n* History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. by Deborah Lipstadt (2005).\n\n* Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial by Richard J. Evans (2002). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=HFB-dkuZzSwC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Z7FiPwAACAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Q-0B9-D5Vz4C", "https://books.google.com/books?id=bx-dZEV228QC", "https://books.google.com/books?id=HZmXOPGTGjIC", "http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.de/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4958qm/how_was_it_that_the_red_cross_was_so_deceived_by/d0pkdt5/"], ["http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322X.1978.9969431", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4d2qrf/in_auschwitz_did_more_catholics_than_jewish/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ccjw8/so_how_many_jews_died_in_the_holocaust/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5od6oj/where_did_the_6_million_jewish_deaths_fact_come/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ossb5", "title": "The United States Second Amendment starts with \"A well-regulated militia...\". What was intended by the phrase \"well-regulated\" if the right extends to gun owners who are not part of an organised group?", "selftext": "As I understand it (and forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not from the US), the 2nd Amendment was created so that there would be a standing army of the people to combat threats from outside (like the British) and inside (like a tyrannical government, or a military coup). However nowadays it only seems to be exercised by private gun owners, and organised militia groups are rare and generally frowned upon in a stable country like the US. I guess I'm asking if the right always extended to private individuals, and whether this wording has been contested.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ossb5/the_united_states_second_amendment_starts_with_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4fe4zp", "d4felht", "d4uppd2"], "score": [1912, 290, 5], "text": ["Looks like I am a little late to the party, however, I just answered a very similar question a few days ago, so [I will copy and paste it here:](_URL_3_)\n\nSpecific question I answered: \"Why would Thomas Jefferson write in, and founding fathers put their signatures on, the 2nd amendment after Shays rebellion?\"\n\nThis is an incredible question and I'm very glad you asked.  Before I answer it, I'd like to briefly describe what Shay's Rebellion actually was:\n\n**Context:** \n\nShays' Rebellion was an armed uprising led by former Massachusetts Militiamen and Veterans of the American Revolution which took place between 1786 - 1787.  Daniel Shays led several thousand \"rebels\" to fight against the economic injustices that were facing farmers and agrarian peasants all across America.  These farmers were experiencing extreme poverty following the end of the Revolutionary War.  All across Massachusetts (and the rest of America) farmers saw their lands foreclosed on in unfair property seizers, and they wanted to fight back, which they did here.  They were also trying to fight taxes which were beginning to be levied against them.  They fought this in many ways, but among them was closing and obscuring roads so that government agents couldn't reach rural parts of the state.  Shays' Rebellion would ultimately be put down, but it startled the gentry who feared further uprisings throughout the United States. \n\nI also like to point out that the naming of this event is really interesting.  The people who did this, called themselves Regulators ( [modeling off of the North Carolina Regulators](_URL_2_) who also fought against economic injustices before the start of the American Revolution.).  The idea of Civilian Regulation was a popular idea that sought to end government corruption and stamp out the overwhelming power of the gentry.  They believed that if the government wasn't regulating itself on behalf of \"We the People\", then \"the People\" had the right to regulate, or take back the government -- to take it back and do what they believed was right.  They didn't see themselves as a rebellion, but rather the gentry labeled them as such in order to de-legitimize their cause.  The gentry didn't want to call these men \"militiamen\" or \"regulators\" for this reason (which they clearly were), but instead, branded them as \"rebels\" who needed to be stopped.  \n\nVeterans like Benjamin Lincoln would raise militias on their own and mounted their own assaults against the \"rebels.\" They call themselves the \"the Massachusetts Militia\" even though it was the former militias who they were fighting!  So as they begin to debate this on the national stage, especially in 1787 at the Constitutional convention, the gentry singled out Daniel Shay (even though there were actually many other leaders), and they said he was crazy and people were only following a demagogue.  They hailed The Massachusetts Militia as the victors and saviors and asserted that militias are what will save America in the future against such madness.\n\n**Answer:**\n\nAlthough the Constitution was drawn up in 1787 and ratified in 1788, the Bill of Rights was not ratified until December of 1791 when the Bill of Rights was finally agreed upon.  Whether or not to include the Bill of Rights (and what to include inside it) was a matter of extreme contestation between the Founders and everything within it was deeply fought over.   \n\nWhen we look at the Second Amendment specifically, we should look at a few things before hand.  First, by the 1790s, other small rebellions had popped up all over the country.  Terry Bouton's article \"A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania\" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887) masterfully explains the fighting and rebellion that took place in the rural countrysides of Pennsylvania that mirrored what had happened in Massachusetts with Shays' Rebellion.  Simply put, the gentry were terrified that they were losing control of rural America, and as a result they would not be able to seize foreclosed land and collect taxes, which they deeply wanted.  Empowering militias to be trained and carry firearms allowed the gentry to call up these men in times of need and suppress these rebellions that were taking place.  \n\nNow there was already precedent in existence for protecting militias and their rights to bear arms in many states. Multiple other bills of rights from other states had already protected a militia's right to bear arms (such as [Section 13](_URL_1_) of Virginia's Declaration of Rights) and many of these states were fighting to have the federal government protect this as well.  \n\nNow, look at the very wording of the [Second Amendment](_URL_0_).\n\n > A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.\n\n\"A well regulated Militia\"  is the key phrase. They are referring to the militias led by people like Benjamin Lincoln and his Massachusetts Militia not Shays and his \"rebellion\".  The initial goal was to protect a state's right to call up arms against rebels, not to arm the masses.  The Founders feared that in some states (like Rhode Island) that were already being drastically controlled by the poor (rather than the gentry), that local governments would start being able to choose who could keep and bear arms, and that by creating the Second Amendment, the gentry would always have the ability to call up and arm militias in times of need. \n\n**Clarification:** I also need to stress that this question mentioned Jefferson by name, however he was not a signer of the Constitution, but did certify the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1792.\n\nTl;Dr: The second ammendement wasn't passed *in spite of* Shays' Rebellion, rather it was passed *because* of Shays' Rebellion.\n\n**EDIT: 1**\n\nWow, what a response from everyone! I started posting responses to people below, but alas it is Father's day and I am heading out with my family to do some fun stuff for the day. I will do my best to answer questions I wasn't able to answer when I return tonight and will also answer any news ones that I can.  I would like to say thank you to /u/DBHT14 , /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov , and /u/FatherAzerun who have helped me answer many of these follow ups (and given some pretty fantastic answers themselves)\n\n**EDIT: 2**\nThank you to everyone for your patience. Sorry for the delay.  Father's day and then NBA Finals and then Game of Thrones -- busy day!  \n\nHere are some great secondary sources that many of you have requested from me.  I will post some more by tomorrow evening.  Please let me know if you have any follow up questions. \n\n Shalhope, Robert.\"The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment\" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 599-614. \n\nBouton, Terry. \"A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania\" *The Journal of American History,* Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887\nI always recommend starting with this one.  It's an excellently written article that is extremely well-respected in the field. It helps set up a much broader perspective for what was going on in the rural countryside with agrarian peasants who were rebelling during this time period. \n\nParker, Rachel. \"Shays' Rebellion: An Episode in American State-Making\" *Sociological Perspectives*, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 95-113\n\nKonig. David. \"The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical Meaning of 'The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms'\". *Law and History Review,* Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 119-159\n\n**Edit 3**\n\nOnce again, thank you to everyone for your patience. I am still getting PM requests for books, so I am adding two plus a few more articles.  If would you like the articles emailed to you, please PM and I will send them to you.  **Please be aware** that I am posting books that are on **both** sides of the gun control debate because **both** sides pretty much universally agree that regardless of what the founders' original intent was, a major (if not the major reason) for including the Second Amendment for the Bill of Rights were the incidents of rebellions, insurgencies, and regulators. \n\nIf anyone has more questions on this, I am perfectly willing to discuss them.  Just ask the question in /r/AskHistorians and feel free to tag me. \n\n\nCress, Lawerence. *Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812* The University of North Carolina Press; First Edition edition. 1982\n\nMalcolm, Joyce. \"To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right* Harvard University Press.  1996\n\nCress, Lawerence, *An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms\" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jun., 1984), pp. 22-42\n\nHigginbotham, Don. \"The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship\" *The William and Mary Quarterly,* Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 39-58\n\nShalhope, Robert.  \"The Second Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms: An Exchange\" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), pp. 587-593\n\n", "This is both an important question, and, as many other respondents have noted, also a thorny one.  While I appreciate the citation of Heller as a strong indication of modern interpretations of the history of the phrase \u201cwell-regulated militia\u201d as seen through legal eyes, both the controlling and dissenting opinions have found dissent.  Since much of the origin of that dissent falls outside of the historical realm (and long discussion of it would violate our 20 year rule), I\u2019d rather leave that for now and look to some historian\u2019s interpretations, and see if that helps illuminate your question.  \n\n(Apparently I was had typed this up this morning that comment may have been removed for that reason, so sorry if I am responding to a phantom post now)\n\nJust as a caveat, though: Clearly this is a question that has sharp divides, and the context of the way the question is framed today might itself be seen as ahistorical.\n\nAs noted above, there is a well-established concern that a militia stood in contrast to a Standing Army, which was seen as the \u201ctool of a tyrant.\u201d  But one of the ways to answer this question about the militia specifically is to examine the historical context of what constituted a militia (and here I am focusing on the period before the Revolution) versus what did not at the time, since colonials did react to armed citizens taking up \u201cdefense\u201d differently in different contexts.\n\nIn general, for a militia to be \u201cwell-regulated\u201d it would have to have been mustered out by colonial authority, specifically the colonial Governor.  Other groups that owned individual weapons and \u201cmustered out\u201d on their own \u2013 even if was regional and massively popular \u2013 were seen not as proper militias but as illegal actors or vigilantes.  On the eve of the American Revolution in South Carolina, there was a set of vigilante groups in the western backcountry that eschewed the courts and decided to muster themselves out and attack outlaw gangs.  This \u201cRegulator Conflict\u201d of 1767 was not seen as a proper use of militia but instead as a criminal activity, although people in the Western backcountry saw it as simply a necessity due to lack of governmental protection afforded to people by the governments along the coast.  (I should note that western backcountry uprisings and \u201ctaking law into their own hands\u201d is a subject worthy of an entirely other thread, one can go back to Bacon\u2019s Rebellion as an example.) The eerie parallel is that the regulator conflicts presaged some of the complaints American Revolutionaries would have after the implementation of smuggling offenses being tried in the military Vice-Admiralty Courts \u2013 there were too few courts, too far away, although in some ways the complaints were polar opposites \u2013 the backcountry decried the lack of convictions of criminals, whereas the Vice Admiralty Courts were seen as tools of oppression, placing colonials who (in the colonials minds) were doing minor civilian infractions being sent to military Tribunals.\n\nSo not every group of citizens arming themselves and engaging in \u201cdefense\u201d was seen as well-organized.  Also, some historians have argued there is evidence in the early Republic that the second amendment was not seen as an individual right.  I am specifically thinking of an essay in the collection edited by Saul Cornell, Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? \u2013 and I apologize as I do not have the book on hand and a quick google search didn\u2019t help me find the list of essays, but I\u2019ll come back later and append if there is interest \u2013 but one of the early essays in the book cited the example of George Washington\u2019s experience with the Whiskey Rebellion \u2013 not only, as mentioned in a previous response, drummed out the militia to deal with the uprising, but he also ordered disarmament of the Rebels.  Therefore, the author concluded, the second amendment was not was not intended to reach beyond the militia mustered by the government.  However, the point of that text was also to show other historians who had differing interpretations as well.  It\u2019s a good resource to examine some of the historiography of the debate.  One of the co-editors, Cornell, is famous for making an argument that the two legal methods of viewing the second amendment (individual or collective) are both not quite right, and there is a third view entirely.  Since I have not read his book on the matter \u2013 only an abstract and reviews \u2013 I cannot comment on its veracity, but as he is a rather esteemed scholar on this debate you may find it of interest as to how the framing of the debate today may be in and of itself flawed when we ask these questions.\n\nHowever, one needs caution.  I want to point out that some historical books need to be avoided.  I myself was influenced at one time by a book that was highly lauded but ended up being upended.  One of our great modern scandals involving the Bancroft Prize happened when in Emory professor Michael Bellesiles published Arming America, which tried to argue that the American value of gun ownership was more a locus of Pre-Civil War America and not a phenomena rooted in colonial, Revolutionary, or Early National America.  As a new Assistant Professor, I personally tailored some of my lectures around what was seen then as groundbreaking new scholarship.  As you might guess, it ended up that the book was an embarrassment \u2013 indeed, a lot of the evidence was simply fabricated \u2013 and it led to the Bancroft Prize being rescinded.  (I think this is the only time that has happened.)\n\nOne other area worthy of investigation is to recognize that the idea of what constitutes a militia evolves as well over time in America.  Since this goes beyond my period of expertise, and I am not specifically a military historian, I will let my colleagues tackle this if they wish, but I would point to the fact that Congress has defined the militia differently over time, and as pointed out in another response, the rise of the National Guard codified the militia in a way that was clearly different from colonial understandings.  You might wish to look at the The Efficiency in Militia Act of 1903 passed by congress to get one such example.\n\nOne last note:  Because of the politicization of the gun issue, the diminishing role of the militia in United States defense and the rise of the Professional (standing) Army has often been treated in a bubble.  But I would argue that you can see parallels in other American institutions as well, where previously services that were volunteer or privatized and sometimes scattershot begin to be seen as disorganized, unresponsive, or ill-equipped to handle the challenges of an expanding population and urbanization over time (and particularly by the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and that expanded roles for government organization and professionalization are called for:  The evolution of city watch and Sheriffs to the Robert Peel model of policing that is the foundation for much of our structure of modern police forces; there is a similar evolution from volunteer firefighters into modern professional Firefighters.  Since Police, Military, and Fire response all entail safety and all have had somewhat similar evolutions into professionalization and government institutionalization, looking at the way who is tasked to do these behaviors \u2013 and who is prohibited \u2013 may provide insight into how control over these institutions have evolved without stepping on the second amendment political landmine.\n", "The Bill of Rights did not just happen over night. There was an exhaustive debate that took place in the public forum over many months in newspapers, journals, letters, and essays. The purpose for the 2nd Amendment was laid out for us in writings by the very men who wrote and ratified our nation's founding document. One such argument was laid out by James Madison on January 29, 1788.\n\nYou might remember Madison as the 4th President of the United States. What you may not remember is that Madison also penned the Bill of Rights. One of his arguments for ratification of the 2nd Amendment was published in the form of Federalist Paper #46 (an excerpt of which is provided below). Madison argued that the standing army of our newly formed nation should not exceed 1/100th of it's overall population, or 1/25th the size of the armed civilian population. In no uncertain terms, he states the reason for this as: \n\n\"It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.\"\n\nMadison was not concerned with hunting nor the self defense of ones home. He was concerned with the people not having the ability to form militias in a manner capable of fending off a standing army following the orders of a future tyrant. It is interesting how James Madison's math has held up over time:\n\n1788 Figures\nUSA Military Personnel: 25,000 (1/100 of 2.5M)\nArmed Militia Potential: 625,000 (25x Military)\n\n2016 Figures\nUSA Military Personnel: 2.1 Million (1/150 of 315M)\nArmed Militia Potential: 100 Million (50x Military)\n\nMany who are opposed to guns describe as \"ultra-right fringe\" those who believe the 2nd Amendment is intended to ensure the public can defend itself against a future tyrannical government. Laid before you is evidence to the contrary. \n\nPeople on both sides of the debate are entitled to their opinions. However, during the course of the debate we must ensure that we do not engage in intellectual dishonesty. If you believe the 2nd Amendment is an outdated right, then make the case that it should be repealed. However, please do not attempt to rewrite history in order to circumvent original intent in an effort to impose laws that violate our Constitution in its current form.\n\n***** Excerpt from Federalist Paper #46 *****\n\n\"Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. \n\nThis proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. \n\nBesides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.\"\n\n***** End of Excerpt *****"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html", "http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/virginia_declaration_of_rights.html", "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/542884.Breaking_Loose_Together", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4obrjg/why_would_thomas_jefferson_write_in_and_founding/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5ic0o4", "title": "Has David Irving contributed anything positive to Holocaust academia? Or have his contributions worked to purposefully obfuscate real Holocaust research? Additionally, are there any other examples of well-known \"researchers\" to watch out for?", "selftext": "This is a question based on the excellent Holocaust-denial post made by /u/commiespaceinvader back during a Methods Monday. I watched a documentary made by NOVA about his trial, and it seemed like a lot of his \"research\" was subject to confirmation bias and not conducted comprehensively. I'm wondering if he's done anything useful for this field. In addition, are there other examples of famous \"alternatively-motivated historians?\"\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ic0o4/has_david_irving_contributed_anything_positive_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["db7nbeo", "db821m7"], "score": [8, 2], "text": ["Personally i have a lack of knowledge on the work by David Irving. What i can talk about is other Holocaust research and academia. Due to battery life, this will have to be a tad limited, sorry for this.\n\nYou ask for \"well-known\" researchers, then i will give you three.\n\n* Raul Hilberg \n* Christopher R. Browning\n* Daniel J. Goldhagen\n\nStarting with Hilberg, the so called \"Grandfather of Holocaust studies\" creating what can be deemed to be the basis of all modern holocaust research. His magnum opus \"The Destruction of the European Jews\" is 1273 pages.\n\nVery noteworhy is Christopher R. Browning, famous in the field of Holocaust research, especially for his book \"Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.\" What makes Browning so interesting is his work with the 101 police battalion, showing the people behind the killing. He conclude with the same fact that Hilberg does in his book, that in fact that it was 'ordinary Germans' that were the perpetrators of the Holocaust, not just SS-troops or the Einsatzgruppen. \"*They did not kill because they were coerced by the threat of dire punishment for refusing*\"^1. Browning argues that the 'ordinary Germans' became killers based on basic obedience to authority and peer preassure, not based on bloodlust or primal hatred. \n\nLast, as you mention people that have \"prevented\" Holocaust research, you have the obvious name of Daniel J. Goldhagen with his, New York Times Bestseller \"Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans of the Holocaust\". This book is an indirect response to Brownings book on the Police Battalion, where Browning argues the fact that even if the perpetrators were Ordinary Germans, they did not kill the Jews out of their own will, Goldhagen argue that due to the German Phenomenon, mentioned a few lines down, the perpetrators were willing executioners. His book takes the stance that the Holocaust could only happen in Germany based on a German Phenomenon called \"Eliminationist Anti-Semitism\". Goldhagen argues that this was the sole motivation for the Holocaust and comes often with outlandish and overconfident statements. \"*With regards to the motivational cause of the Holocaust, for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice.*\"^2 and \u201c*their[German people] approval[of the holocaust] derived in the main from their own conception of Jews is all but certain, for no other source of motivation can plausibly account for their actions.*\u201d^3\n\nAfter Goldhagen became a massive commercial success, increasingly many scholars started writing reviews and essays explaining how Goldhagen was wrong. Hilberg goes as far as to outright dismiss the work of Goldhagen. Notable reviews and Essays regarding the book: Yehuda Bauer \"On Perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Public Discourse\", Hilberg \"The Goldhagen Phenomenon\" and Browning \"Daniel Goldhagen's Willing Executioners\".\n\nGoldhagen is an important example of someone using the same sources as others (Browning) yet reaching comepletely different conclusions, although his work was dismissed by most scholars, it is an important lesson to learn from, do not only pick information that help your case.\n\n1. Christopher R. Browning \u201cReserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland\u201d, 1998, p.191\n2. Daniel J. Goldhagen \"Hitler's Willing Executioners\", 1996, p.416\n3. Goldhagen, 1996, p.416\n\nSources: \n\nBauer, Y. and Finkelstein, N. G. (1998), The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 89, No. 1/2 pp. 123-126 \n\nBauer, Y. (1997) On Perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Public Discourse. The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 87, No. 3/4, pp. 343-350\n\nHilberg, R. (1997) The Goldhagen Phenomenon. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp 721-728\n\nBrowning, C. (1996). Daniel Goldhagen's Willing Executioners. History and Memory,  8(1), pp.88-108\n\nGoldhagen, D. (1996). Hitler's willing executioners. 1st ed. New York: Knopf\n\n\nEDIT: Goldhagens' book is a very interesting read where he bring up case studies like the death marches, I would definitely suggest reading up on the \"duel\" between Goldhagen and Browning", "Irving's early works including *Goering* and *The War Between the Generals* were considered scholarly and well-researched.  This was a period when a lot of the first generation of postwar history was being questioned, and certain myths brought into question.\n\nIt was in the 1980s that Irving became more and more associated with Nazi apologists, emerging from his willingness to criticise the Allies.  His book *The Destruction of Dresden* is unquestionably the result of original research, but his methodology to arrive at a casualty figure of 135,000 is highly dubious.\n\nHis trial showed this. Close analysis of his writings didn't completely discredit him, it found a tendency, increasing over time, to interpret his findings in a subjective way.\n\nI consider AJP Taylor to be of a similar ilk, but because he's not a Nazi apologist its much less of an issue.  Some of his statements, his sweeping dismissal of contentions, are astounding. This is especially so in relation to his treatment of First World War Allied commanders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5smz92", "title": "Info on English Lancegays seems to be impossible to find on, are there any sources that I can be pointed towards as to how these were used? Any treatise or manuals as to how they'd be used in combat?", "selftext": "I see them described as 8 foot spears that were useful on horseback or on foot, but that's practically all I can find", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5smz92/info_on_english_lancegays_seems_to_be_impossible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ddgbt4b"], "score": [3], "text": [" >  [...] there is no identified archaeological evidence: nothing that can show us exactly how long or heavy a lancegay was, what the diameter of the shaft was, what shape of head it had, or whether it had heads at both ends, as is sometimes claimed. There is also no detailed description of a lancegay in any known written source; and there is no instance in any of the visual media that can indubitably be identified as a representation of the weapon. As is so often the case with weapons terms in the Middle Ages, writers of literature and other documentary sources assume that one knows what technical words denote, making it unnecessary for them to supply explanations or descriptions. As a result, everything we believe we know about the lancegay has to be *deduced* from what is said about it.\n\n-David Scott-Macnab, [Sir John Fastolf and the Diverse Affinities of the Medieval Lancegay](_URL_0_)\n\nThere are no surviving fectbuch or manual involving a section on the lancegay, although there are surviving treatises (or sections thereof) on spears and lances, such as [Fiori de'i Liberi](_URL_1_), and the techniques involved would presumably have been similar."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Scott-Macnab/publication/236870083_Sir_John_Fastolf_and_the_Diverse_Affinities_of_the_Medieval_Lancegay/links/5658870f08ae1ef9297dd28f.pdf", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fiore_de%27i_Liberi"]]}
{"q_id": "1mixh6", "title": "What would Gettysburg battlefield have looked like in the 1950s? (story behind question inside)", "selftext": "Hello everyone. I'm asking this in the hopes that someone can either confirm or deny a story that my father has been telling for the past fifty years. \n\nPrior to giving it away (which is a bad story in it's own right), my dad had this cannonball. He had it since before I was born, and it had always been in the garage by his tool box. If you google \"civil war cannonball\", all of the top image results look pretty much exactly like it.\n\nHe claims that, as a boy, he found this cannonball on the Gettysburg battlefield during a school trip and snuck it back out with him. This would have been some time in either the late 1950s or very early in the 1960s. \n\nI've tried doing a little research and this thing looks, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a union cannonball. However, my dad is kind of an alcoholic and has a habit of making up stories about his life. I'm trying to figure out whether this one has a greater likelihood of being true or false, and whether the cannonball might actually have come from Gettysburg. What would the likelihood have been of a school child finding an artifact like this during the 50s/60s? Had they all been removed by then, or would there still have been some in the ground that could have been easily removed and taken away? \n\nProbably a silly question and not the kind you are used to, but I appreciate your taking the time to read. Have a good day!\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mixh6/what_would_gettysburg_battlefield_have_looked/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc9qs2d"], "score": [12], "text": ["The Gettysburg National Military Park was established and gained it's initial protection status in 1863, about a hundred years before you father visited. The park received federal protection in 1893, was designated a National Park in 1895, and added to the National Register of Historic Preservation in 1966. Keeping in mind that the park had been established and protected in some fashion or another for at least 90 years before you father visited, it's extremely unlikely that he found a canon ball just resting on the surface somewhere and absconded with it.\n\nThere were a variety of different field guns deployed by both sides during the battle, and the size and composition of the ammunition used is likewise diverse. Shot and bolts used in the battle would have been composed of solid iron or bronze, and would have weathered pretty poorly in the open.\n\nI suppose it's possible he could have lifted a ball from a stacked display, but I'd count it as unlikely that a school aged boy could effectively remove and conceal a canon ball successively. They can be quite heavy.\n\nOn the off chance that your father did remove a canon ball from the field, or from a display, it would have been a punishable violation of the National Historic Preservation Act after 1966, the Historic Sites Act after 1935 and the Antiquities Act after 1906. More than likely it would have been a violation of any number of local laws as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "tme6i", "title": "Does the US meet traditional definitions of an empire?", "selftext": "NOT POLITICALLY MOTIVATED. I notice how many of the historians here refer to their specialties as based on the study of an empire. There is much discussion here about the merits and costs of imperialism at various times, and on the cultural ramifications of a given empire. Ignoring the use of the term as an attack on modern corporatism and American diplomacy, does the US today meet whatever criteria are generally accepted for branding a cultural / political center as an empire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tme6i/does_the_us_meet_traditional_definitions_of_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4nuik5", "c4nupby", "c4nuwyt", "c4nv0sr", "c4nxs4k", "c4nzwkv"], "score": [6, 3, 22, 16, 10, 4], "text": ["I would say that most historians would characterize the US as an empire.  Quite simply, I really can't see why the most powerful nation in the world who has military bases throughout the globe and routinely wages war on other countries could *not* be considered an empire.", "Seems we have changed the language enough in discussing US actions/politics/influence/wars that the perception of empire is avoided. \n\nDoesn't make it any less true of course.", "It depends on what qualities defines an Empire, really. This is quite a hard question to answer for sure.\n\nThe element that is most iffy is the central idea that an Empire not only has the original culture subjugate others, but then attempts to create a state that actively manages all of those cultures at once. In the case of the USA, it never began as a single-culture enterprise at the time in which it was integrating other cultures, it seems to me. Almost like the Imperial part was done in reverse order.", "A couple of factors that I think define an empire:\n\n1) Unifying Ideology for Conquest - Why is the mother country conquering other states? Is there some overarching narrative or is it simply resource extraction? (See: White Man's Burden)\n\n2) Serious Resource Extraction - Has the mother country begun extracting  large scale amounts of resources from the subjugated country?\n\n3) Creation of an Imperial Bureaucracy - Has the mother country created an extensive network of diplomats, soldiers, and tradespeople who facilitate the empire?\n\n4) Conflict with other Empires - Does the mother country's holdings bring it into tension with other large political bodies?\n\nI don't think its possible to say definitively that the US is or isn't an empire but I think there's compelling arguments for both sides. I'd personally be more fond of calling it a hegemony given that over the last 50-60 years it's made extensive use of both hard and soft power.", "No, the US does not meet the traditional definition of Empire. Traditionally when thinking about an Empire we have thought of a single government that rules over a large amount of territory that has no say in how it is governed. With the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq coming to a slow and painful end, there really isn't any area in the world that the US so dominates. There are a few areas that don't enjoy full representation in the US, but are controlled by it. Namely: the Virgin Islands, American Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. However all of these territories enjoy some level of political representation in the US, and have local political control, also (as far as I know), none of those areas have serious pro-indepence movements suggesting they are comfortable being part of the US. \n\nGiven these circumstances I don't feel that you could realistically define the US as an empire in the traditional sense.", "No. The US no longer wages aggressive war for the purpose of territorial expansion; doesn't create colonies out of and/or exploit the natural resources of places it has captured; doesn't treat foreign peoples in less developed countries as barbarians in need of civilizing (racism as policy); doesn't use its military superiority to give itself an unfair advantage on the international market.\n\nThe US gave up imperialism when they granted their only major colony, The Philippines, independence in 1946."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6967yg", "title": "Why was there such a regression in technology from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages?", "selftext": "Okay, first off I want to just preface this by saying I'm not really that well versed in history at all, so I apologize if I mess any facts up.\n\nFrom what I understand, ancient Greeks and Romans were much more advanced than the majority of Europe in the middle ages. Not only did they have a working sewage system through the use of aqueducts, but they also developed a number of pioneering medical practices, and were able to engineer complex machines such as the Antikythera mechanism. But then 800 years later, all of a sudden people are just living in their own filth and bleeding themselves to get rid of headaches.\n\nWhat happened to cause such a regression?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6967yg/why_was_there_such_a_regression_in_technology/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dh43737"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hiya, not discouraging any new answers coming in, but I think you might find the [part of our FAQ about the so called \"Dark Ages\"](_URL_0_) helpful and interesting. Scroll down a tiny bit when you open the link:)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/darkages#wiki_the_.22dark_ages.22"]]}
{"q_id": "azogum", "title": "In medieval times, was it common for average citizens to go about their daily lives with weapons?", "selftext": "Hollywood depictions of medieval life seem to feature a lot of people casually walking around with swords/other weapons, was this actually common? Would the average Joe make sure to bring his sword if he were just going down to the pub? Would he even own a sword? \n\nThank you for your insight! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/azogum/in_medieval_times_was_it_common_for_average/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eiacauu"], "score": [17], "text": ["The answer to this somewhat depends on your meaning of 'armed'. For example, early medieval English fashion called for the carrying of a *Seax*, a long, single-bladed knife that was worn horizontally hanging from a belt on the waist, roughly the size of large kitchen knife. The Saxons derive their demonym from this, but it was carried by Angles as well. Early medieval English culture is essentially one of ostentatious display; from horse tackle, to brooches, to jewellery, wealth and status are displayed in personal ornamentation and the Anglo-Saxons are famed for their metalwork featuring ornate patterns and inlaid gems. For those who could no afford gold and gems, burnished brass and glass could be used, much like costume jewellery today. Part and parcel of this culture of display, therefore, would have been the regular wearing of a *seax*, both as an indicator of wealth, but also as a practical tool for everyday life.\n\nWhile the *seax* was technically a weapon, it was predominantly a hunting or utility weapon; in warfare the main weapon of the Anglo-Saxons would have been the spear or javellin, and these are unlikely to have been carried socially. Swords are a slightly different beast again; although they are weapons of war, the time and skill necessary to make a sword means that they are largely constrained to the nobility, and as such once again become an object indicative of wealth and status. As such, we might not expect to see a *thegn* or *ealdorman* \"casually\" wearing a sword, but we might if he was performing a civil action - presiding over a trial, say - as a signifier of his status."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1w7hd6", "title": "Were there any examples of Fascist states before 1930's Europe?", "selftext": "Also along those lines: I know a large belief in Fascism is the acceptance of inequality. Does the \"inequality\" in a Fascist state always equate to racism? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w7hd6/were_there_any_examples_of_fascist_states_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceznlg5"], "score": [2], "text": ["Fascism at the best of times is a vague description.  As a Marxist, I see fascism as being a reaction to a crisis of state brought on by a crisis of capitalism, as such, to argue that fascist states existed before capitalism wouldn't make sense.  The goal of a fascist state then is to try and maintain capital as a mode of production, even if this is an unconscious and only historical role.  Have there been dictatorial states and rulers before fascism?  Yes, but I think to describe them as being fascist would be taking fascism out of the specifics of the 20th century.  A nice pamphlet you can read would be Gilles Dauve's [When Insurrections Die](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.prole.info/texts/insurrectionsdie.html"]]}
{"q_id": "308cdo", "title": "Clarification of the disputed status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region", "selftext": "At the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, why was the region under Armenian control not formally annexed by Armenia (especially given Armenian forces retain control over the region until today)? I only have minimal understanding of the conflict but was under the impression that by the end of the war, the Armenian forces had gained an upper hand. If that is the case however, why was Armenia not in a position to dictate more favourable terms for itself?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/308cdo/clarification_of_the_disputed_status_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpq1plf"], "score": [13], "text": ["International norms.  Since roughly WWII, it's been very rare for international organizations like the UN or NATO to recognize territorial changes adjudicated through conquest.  Look at North Cyprus, or Western Sahara--they've been under the control of Turkey and Morocco, respectively, for decades but few countries formally acknowledge it.  When you see a UN health statistic map, for example, you'll see that Western Sahara has \"no data\" even though Moroccan data includes data from Western Sahara and it is made to appear like the data from Cyprus covers the whole island.  [Look at this map for example](_URL_0_) (you can't really see Cyprus, but trust me, it's undivided in that map).\n\nSecond, the norms of how states change borders have become fairly firm.  Other than colonial possession, you see states can split up (as in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, most famously, but also East Timor from Indonesia, Singapore from Malaysia, Eritrea from Ethiopia, and South Sudan from Sudan), and you see them combine (as in Vietnam, Tanzania, Germany, Yemen, Sikkim going in India), but I can not think of a single case since 1946 where a significant part of one state broke off and was allowed to join another, other than a few random post-colonial cities like Ifni or Pondicherry or Hong Kong.  There have been many attempts that have failed, like Iraq's attempts to annex parts of Iran and all of Kuwait, but I honestly cannot think of an example that has succeeded.  You see small border adjustments here and there, but they're mainly technocratic things that affect few people--nothing like before WWII when you'd see Alsace go to France, and then the Sudetenland go to Germany, and then Germany and the USSR split Poland, etc.  Kosovo is 90% ethnic Albanian, but when it broke off from Serbia, it was explicitly not allowed to join Albania.  Furthermore, when 10% of Kosovo that is ethnic Serb lives next to Serbia, but they're not allowed to split off from Kosovo and join Serbia.  The international community is also generally very reluctant to recognize split-off claims at all without the state they're splitting off from approving, which is why we have a laundry list of things like Transnistria, Abkhazia, Puntland, Somaliland, Tamil Eelam, North Cyprus, Palestine, Daesh, and even Kosovo itself (Serbia officially only recognizes Kosovo as having a \"special status\" within Serbia--Kosovo was a weird precedent for NATO to set, but they haven't really followed up on it).  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.undispatch.com/un-content/uploads/2014/09/suicide.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1dx9jy", "title": "Were their any non-medieval jousts, for example in Japan or Ancient Rome?", "selftext": "[Jousting](_URL_0_) seems to be confined to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But did the aristocracies of earlier or non-Western societies also engage in 'sport-combat'? I know the Romans had gladiators, but gladiators weren't aristocrats. I can imagine that the Japanese samurai had something similar to jousting but I don't know if it really happened. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dx9jy/were_their_any_nonmedieval_jousts_for_example_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9vvyp0"], "score": [2], "text": ["OP, I was waiting for 3rd or 4th level comments to mention this, but since there aren't any responses... \n\nI actually saw a jousting tournament at a marina in southern France (Nice?) but rather than two knights on horseback, it was two teams of two in small boats: one standing on the prow with a sheild  &  jousting pole, the other rowing. Per Wiki, I find that *[joute nautique](_URL_1_)* has not only existed in Southern France for centuries, but traces back to ancient [Egypt](_URL_0_), Greece and Rome. I'll leave further searching for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/IH019988/egyptian-relief-depicting-joust-on-the-water", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_jousting"]]}
{"q_id": "110wx9", "title": "What were the economic causes of the Hundred Years War. And are there any parallels today?", "selftext": "I was watching a doco on youtube, linked to from reddit. The doco was called \"masters of money\", and is a multipart series. The first series is about John Maynard Keynes.\n\nTowards the end of the documentary, an expert is asked what Keynes would think about the state of the world today. I'm not sure exactly when the doco was made, but the question is definately about the context of the 2008 crash.\n\nThe person answers that Keynes would be very concerned about the state of the world, and that he would see the (paraphrased quote) \"the causes of the 1418 war happening in slow burn\". \n\nThe guy also mentioned another war, but I couldn't quiet hear the dates he was saying.\n\nHere is the section from the documentary: \n_URL_0_\n\nI figure that the guy was talking about the Hundred Years War. That's the only one I can think of that started about then.\n\nSo, what were the economic causes of the Hundred Years War. And are there similarities between the state of things then and now?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/110wx9/what_were_the_economic_causes_of_the_hundred/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6icdl8", "c6ifast"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["Man I really wish I could give you a clear and direct answer but it has been a while since I spent any time on the 100 Years' War.  \n\nI'll try to sketch out some of the basic economic aspects of the war but a real late Medieval or Early Modern person can probably go further and do better.\n\nFirst off, 1415 is not the beginning of the 100 Years War but rather the beginning of its last phase, marking the resumption of hostilities after a peace which had lasted since 1389.  1415 is the year that Henry V invades Northern France and things get rolling again.\n\nSome economic aspects:\n\n* The Wool Trade.  England's economy was heavily dependent upon the wool trade which was intimately connected with Flanders (Belgium, the Netherlands and Northern France).  Control or easy access to this area was essential to both the merchants in England and the Crown which taxed those merchants.\n\n*  Chevauch\u00e9e.  Much of the 100 Years War was in reality a series of ongoing raids by the English, rather than attempts to conquer and hold land.  These raids allowed for the taking of booty, the sacking of town and were generally about making a profit and earning praise.  The fact that these had ceased when peace fell was extremely unpopular among the aristocratic classes (both high and lower) who had a lot to gain from these military ventures.  Moreover even the 'yeoman' class, the typical class of everyday soldiers, could stand to make a living off these events.  \n\n* Ransom.  While war could certainly be bloody the 100 Years' War is more known for the number of nobles (including a French king) who were captured than who were killed.  Capturing a noble was a great way to make bank.  I recall reading a court case where a French night found himself captured three times in one day and the various claimants of his ransom were disputing in court.  Warfare could be a great way to bring in money to the English economy in this way as well.\n\n* Banking.  While warfare could generate income for nobles it was, in fact, incredibly expensive for the Crown overall.  Edward III pawned the crown jewels to Italian bankers, for instance, in order to raise cash to campaign in Northern France.  Credit certainly became scarce and there was always a fear that the crown would default on its loans or worse that race-riots would target Italian bankers (as happened under Richard II). \n\nSo those are some of the economic elements.  I would imagine that the issue of credit and banking is what the lecture was talking about but again a real expert would probably be able to answer you.\n\nSome other places to look would be:\n\nJonathan Sumption's *The Hundred Years' War* is huge (3 BIG volumes so far) but it also narrative and a good read.  The caveat, it is not complete yet, which means it doesn't actually get up to 1415! \n\nC. T. Allmand's book *The Hundred Years War* (noticing a trend?) is much smaller and easier to read but not nearly as exhaustive.\n\nFor a great primary source check out Jean Froissart.  It is in translation in penguin, cheap.\n\nGood luck!", "The causes of the 100 years war were political rather than economic.\n\nIt was the appreciation by the French Kings of the reality that France was not a big enough country for two Kings and so the English one had to go.\n\nAn appreciation as accurate as it was trenchant.\n\nThe 100 Years War should be seen as a continuum of the policies of Philip Augustus that ejected the English from Normandy and Anjou at the beginning of the 13th century.\n\nBy the early 15th century the war was already some 60 years old and by that time the economics were very much to the fore, with the English wool trade to Flanders and the Bordeaux wine trade to England central to everyone's considerations.\n\nThe best source for this is of course Sumption's masterful history.   This guy is not only an excellent historian but also an English supreme court judge and he brings his lawyer's intimacy with the frailties and fundamentals of humankind to his work.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=3rIs5YF5gqw#t=3330s"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1cg7es", "title": "I just read that major works by Cicero, Aristotle, etc. are missing. How often do these things get found? Any hope of excavating a library? ...", "selftext": "Oh and I am familiar with how Catullus's works were discovered but I won't object to having it retold here because it is such a good story ... :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1cg7es/i_just_read_that_major_works_by_cicero_aristotle/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9g8dsh", "c9gb8lb"], "score": [29, 3], "text": ["Absolutely there is - hope of excavating a library, that is - and new works continue to be discovered, not on a timetable, but regularly.  The Greeks and Romans generally used papyrus scrolls to record works of literature, and, in most places where the Greeks and Romans lived, papyrus and linen don't preserve well - but there are some major exceptions.  One is in Egypt, where the dry desert preserves practically everything; tens of thousands of documents and literary works have been dug out of [a rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus](_URL_7_) - and there's no reason to think that Oxyrhynchus is in any way unique - and Egyptians tended to reuse scrolls, including literary works, to wrap mummies, which preserves the text quite well indeed.  The most important recent discoveries I know of came from mummy cartonnage:  a [fourth poem by Sappho](_URL_5_), published in 2005, and a large fraction of a [book of poetry by Posidippus](_URL_6_), published in 2001.\n\n(Edit:  I just saw an article in /r/archaeology discussing [a new discovery of 4500-year-old papyrus texts in Egypt](_URL_2_), including a *diary* from one of the builders of the Great Pyramid.  This may not be as exciting as finding Euripides' lost *Telephus* would be, but it's still really neat - and suggests what other sorts of things are still out there beneath the sands.)\n\nAnother exception is Pompeii and Herculaneum, where [we did excavate a library!](_URL_3_)  The papyrus scrolls - burnt and charred - survived under the volcanic ash; it was once thought impossible to unroll and read scrolls like that, but science finds a way.  Since many wealthy Romans had private libraries, further excavations in those cities - if Italy can find the funding, [which is doubtful](_URL_1_) - are very likely to dig up more collections of this sort.\n\nA third way new texts can be discovered is by using modern technology to read *erased* texts from existing parchments that were cleaned off and reused for other purposes.  An example of this is the [Archimedes Palimpsest](_URL_0_), a medieval prayer book which reused pages from (lost, and now rediscovered) treatises from Archimedes, speeches from Athenian orators, etc.  \n\nSo yeah, tl;dr:  new texts are appearing all the time, and the development of new *technologies* for reading burned and erased texts means that we're entering into a new age of textual discovery.  [Science!](_URL_4_)", "there is also _URL_1_\nthat was a big coup for the development of epicurean philosophy\n\n_URL_0_\n\nanyone know of a place online that reports new findings? i find it very interesting but whenever i hear of something to that effect it is just by random luck."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/11/the-second-fall-pompeii", "http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/15/17767610-4500-year-old-harbor-structures-and-papyrus-texts-unearthed-in-egypt", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri", "http://xkcd.com/54/", "http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jun/24/gender.books", "http://blog.ancientlives.org/2013/01/31/posidippus-the-milan-papyrus/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri"], ["http://www.classics.ucla.edu/index.php/philodemus", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri"]]}
{"q_id": "832yja", "title": "What was the medical process like when an organ displayed symptoms (e,g gall or kidney stones, liver disease, stomach ulcers) back in the Medieval times?", "selftext": "Hi. I recently had gallbladder surgery, and living it being bad inside me before the surgery was pretty terrible and made me have a restrictive diet. I was wondering how they would handle someone back in the medieval days having symptoms of an organ being bad, and what that was like on the person displaying symptoms. Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/832yja/what_was_the_medical_process_like_when_an_organ/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dvfpcmj"], "score": [3], "text": ["One of our most interesting sources for medieval medicine is *Bald's Leechbook*, an Anglo-Saxon medical textbook of sorts, likely dating from the late ninth century and potentially a result of Alfred the Great's literary and educational reforms. The book itself is the only surviving copy, and was written by a scribe called Cild on Bald's behalf.\n\nThe text itself is split into two sections, dealing with external and internal maladies and afflictions respectively. As one might expect from an early medieval source, much of the 'medicine' therein is of a 'folk' nature and involves ritual almost as often as it does actual remedy, coming dangerously close in some places to the kind of 'witchcraft' proscibed by contemporary penitentials like the *Scrifboc*. Some afflictions, for example, may be caused by Elves and cured by carving runes into a ceremonial dagger hilt. However, we must as always be wary of presentism and accusing the Anglo-Saxons of a 'primitive' or even dangerous superstition or lack of medical awareness. The *Leechbook* appears to be the result of a genuine attempt to compile the best and most effective medical treatments from a variety of Anglo-Saxon, British, Roman and Greek sources, and we must assume that the cures it provides appeared to be in some way effective at the time, even if only through the power of placebo. Indeed, the text gained some passing fame in 2015 when researchers at Nottingham found that one of its cures for dealing with an eye infection was surprisingly effecacious against antibiotic-resistant MRSA.\n\nMany different afflictions of organs are discussed, particularly of the *maw* and *wamb* (stomach and intestines) and the liver, which is discussed in surprising detail. Many remedies appear designed to flush out an organ, or to reduce swellings. Crushed poppy seeds in wine or in a poultice are regularly prescribed as a painkiller. Wormwood is a particularly popular panacea, one which is somewhat born out by modern medicine, as is vinegar. Refined honey mixed with vinegar is prescribed for an 'evil humour' of the upper belly, which may indicate ulcers. For symptoms of 'maw' pain which may be gallstones, great importance is made of diet: fatty meats are to be avoided, bread and water and fruit should be eaten instead. Vinegar and oil should also be ingested.\n\nIn cases of liver disease, the *Leechbook* recommends forgoing medical treatment until diet is properly examined, and especially until fat is given up. Then a medicine of dill, wormwood, marchseed, pepper and costmary should be taken. Vinegar and wine and other 'cure-alls' should be avoided.\n\nAn online archive of the *Leechbook* can be found [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://archive.org/details/leechdomswortcun02cock"]]}
{"q_id": "5m8pi2", "title": "I'm going to jail tomorrow and I want to read the best nonfiction books about History. What do you suggest?", "selftext": "I love 20th century history, but I'm a little burtn out on WWII. I'm interested in learning more about WWI, the Roman empire, and the civil war.\n\nI don't read at all, so please tell me what the MUST READS are.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m8pi2/im_going_to_jail_tomorrow_and_i_want_to_read_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1o5gy", "dc20dof", "dc21vrm", "dc238h7", "dc26nvk", "dc271d1", "dc29mjv", "dc2ddsi"], "score": [60, 18, 7, 13, 9, 3, 3, 6], "text": ["I'm sorry to hear that. Are you planning to buy your books on the outside or use the library system?\n\nFor the Civil War, I would start with either (or both) James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Shelby Foote's The Civil War. Those are two mainstays that you should be able to find relatively easily. If either of those piques your interest, I can make further recommendations based on what you're interested in. Battles and campaigns? Politics and diplomacy? Economics and organization?\n\nIn any case, feel free to PM me if you'd like to discuss it more.", "More recent history and so interesting - I recommend \"Under the Banner of Heaven\" by John Krackhauer. True crime story plus the history of Mormon polygamy, which is so compelling on its own. I hope this isn't an inappropriate recommendation, but it's one of my favorite nonfiction books. ", "You might like Erik Larson's book about the Lusitania, *Dead Wake*, or *Thunderstruck*, which is about the development of wireless communication and how it was used in a murder investigation.", "The Silk Roads byPeter Frankopan.\n\nIt is a history of how trade and the worlds centre of commerce has changed through history. It covers from well before Christ all the way to the modern day. It covers how wars and political events changed economies and ultimately how we in the west became so powerful so quickly.\n\nIt may sound dry but it is an excellent read.", "I can help with the Roman Empire ones, and I see in a comment you said that you're interested in the Middle Ages too.\n\nSo for the Early Roman Empire, I'd recommend Robin Lane Fox's \"The Classical World\". For the Later Roman Empire, I'd recommend Terry Jones' \"Barbarians\", which is a bit biased but very readable.\n\nFor the Early Middle Ages, I'd recommend Robin Fleming's recent \"Britain after Rome\" and Michael Wood's \"In Search of the Dark Ages\" which was a great documentary series which was then adapted into a book. I was quite surprised when my professor asked me if I'd read it during my interview, but it really is very respected. I'd also recommend Chris Wickham's \"Framing the Middle Ages\", or if you can't get hold of that cheaply then \"Inheritance of Rome\" is pretty great too. For the Late Middle Ages, I'd recommend Thomas Asbridge's \"The First Crusade\" as well as the ones that u/Rittermeister has already said.\n\nAlso, don't shy away from things written in ancient and medieval times! A very short list of interesting ones would be: Xenophon's The Persian Expedition, Herodotus' The Histories, Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars, Procopius' The Secret History, Asser's Life of Alfred, Einhardt's Life of Charlemagne and Anna Comnena's The Alexiad. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations might be of interest too, but it's written *by* an emperor rather than *about* an emperor. \n\nSome other random interesting things that come to mind are: Neil Macgregor's \"A history of the world in 100 objects\", Orlando Figes' \"A People's Tragedy\" and (as mentioned in other comments) the very recent \"Napoleon the Great\" by Andrew Roberts and \"The Silk Roads\" by Peter Frankopan are standout modern popular history books. \n\nI really wish you all the best.", "I will recommend a WW2 one, that might be somewhat different then the usual WW2 stuff:\n\n- The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy\n\nIt looks at a lot of the same question we always ask on the Nazis and gives interesting answers.\n\nThere are of course a lot of WW1 books, but you can't go wrong with\n\n- The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914\n\nI will give quite extensive background on all the political, social, cultural movements in all countries going further back then books of its type. That was welcome because most people (me included) grow less informed walking backwards from WW1.", "Not a history so much as a journalist's thoughts on the area he covered throughout his life, but Robert Fisk's *The Great War for Civilization* is great!\n\n*Berlin 1961* is also a wonderful read.", "Some of my favorites in rough chronological order.\n\n\n\nBarbara Tuchman, *A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century*\n\nMike Davis, *Late Victorian Holocausts: El Ni\u00f1o Famines and the Making of the Third World*\n\nCasper Olusoga, David Erichsen, *The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism*\n\nAdam Hochschild, *King Leopold's Ghost*\n\nRobert K. Massie, *Dreadnought*\n\nRobert K. Massie, *Castles of Steel*\n\nAlistair Horne, *The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916*\n\nMark Thompson, *The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919*\n\nDavid Stevenson, *Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy*\n\nDavid Fromkin, *A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East*\n\nMargaret Macmillan, *Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World*\n\nSean McMeekin, *The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power*\n\nAdam Tooze, *The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*\n\nGotz Aly, *Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State*\n\nNikolaus Wachsmann, *KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps*\n\nChristian Ingrao, *The SS Dirlewanger Brigade: The History of the Black Hunters*\n\nJohn Toland, *The Rising Sun: The Decline  &  Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45*\n\n\nI also highly recommend Gibbon's *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*, DeQuincey's *The Caesars* and Prescott's *Conquest of Mexico* and *Conquest of Peru*, because although there's better history I don't think there's better writing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "a6a9ka", "title": "When did English change its method of counting numbers above twenty?", "selftext": "Old poems/songs etc feature things like 'four and twenty blackbirds' which match other languages like German's 'vierundzwanzig' (and I think French does the same?). When did English swap to counting numbers as 'twenty four'? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6a9ka/when_did_english_change_its_method_of_counting/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebvf8ls"], "score": [9], "text": ["French does not follow this pattern. 22 is vingt-deux (twenty-two). This pattern is typical of Romance languages, for example Spanish 22 is viente dos and Italian is ventidue. Both Aldi following the \"twenty two\" pattern. \n\nFrench is different for numbers 70 tp 99 but the spoken order persists, still with the same pattern with the larger number first. 77 is soixante-dix-sept (sixty-seventeen).\n\nWhere you've possibly been led astray is that 80 is specifically quatre-vingt or four-twenty. But numbers above 80 still follow the \"twenty two\" pattern, so 99 is quatre-vingt-dix-neuf\u00a0(ie four-twenty-nineteen).\n\nFor our purposes we can ignore those higher numbers because it's the numbers 20 to 69 that are important. It was probably French influence which introduced the modern pattern of speech, but still slowly and with a long period of co-existence, and indeed with expressions in the older form still surviving.\n\nIt appears to have begun displacing the older \"two and twenty\" form around the 1500s, which is several hundred years after the Norman French conquest of England, suggesting a pretty slow march:\n\n >  A perhaps more signicant change in English is the ordering of expressions including both units and tens. Whereas German and Dutch and the older forms of the Germanic languages form such expressions with the units first and the tens second, as in *ein und zwanzig* in German, English has *twenty one* (*twenty and one* in earlier stages of the language).\n\n >  This change appears from OED citations to have begun around the 1500s and may be a result of the Romance inflence on English (mirroring for example the French *vingt et un*). This is a change which has not come easily and examples of the previous Germanic form still exist in English not only in such contexts as old nursery rhymes (*four and twenty blackbirds*) but in time expressions, at least in older speakers and some regional speakers of English (*five and twenty past*). Frisian follows Dutch and German in this which is not surprising if the Romance inuence on English is the reason behind the variance.\n\nThat's from *A lexical analysis of numeral expressions in Dutch, English* and German by Lynne Cahill and Gerald Gazdar. University of Sussex, 1997.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5hajp1", "title": "Indo-european and Peppers ? How is Sanskrit connected to European languages and what is up with ancient Indian peppers ?", "selftext": "I have a coworker who is Indian and recently I was chatting about history and two things came up that made me question what I know about history. \n\nFirst, I said that Sanskrit was connected to European languages and that there was a migration of peoples from the Caucasus into the Indian subcontinent.  He said that this theory was a product of British imperialism and completely false and had been disproven.  What is the truth of this?\n\nSecond, I mentioned that Peppers were from the new world exchange so they had to come over at some point after contact with the new world.  He said that Peppers have been in India forever and their most ancient texts talk about them.  How is this possible if Chili Peppers are from the new world ?  Was India trading with the new world prior to European arrival ? \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hajp1/indoeuropean_and_peppers_how_is_sanskrit/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dayq1zf", "daz2hdd"], "score": [7, 3], "text": ["Yes, Sanskrit is part of the Indo-European language family, and yes, its speakers migrated there from the steppes of what is now Ukraine and Kazakhstan. However, Indo-Iranian moved into its modern range by way of Bactria, not the Caucasus. There are libraries of literature on Indo-European, and the idea that it is \"false and disproven\" is itself a myth perpetrated by Hindu nationalists. Indic languages are very clearly part of the Indo-European family--this is obvious to anyone with some basic acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and has been known to scholars since the late 18th century. We also can be sure that Indo-European did not originate in India for a few reasons. First, India contains only one branch of Indo-European, while linguistic homelands generally contain or are proximate to several different branches. For example, Taiwan, the homeland of Austronesian, contains anywhere from 4 to 9 separate branches. Second, Indic languages (and this dates back as far as Sanskrit) contain features clearly derived from contact with Dravidian languages, like a distinction between dental stops (made with the tongue on the back of the teeth) and retroflex ones (where the tongue is curled back towards the hard palate) or a historic confusion of /l r/. Third, there's a pretty clear relationship between where language families show up geographically in the historic record and the features they share. [This map](_URL_0_) gives you a good picture of that. There's basically no linguistic evidence consonant with the idea.\n\nI'll let someone who knows more about the Columbian Exchange tackle the question about peppers.", "I'd like to summon someone better qualified to talk about this, but it's possible the idea about \"pepper\" is based on some sort of misunderstanding.  Maybe.\n\nThe genus that contains all the \"chile peppers\" that people eat is *Capsicum*.  Despite some confusing naming conventions, all the species in this genus are native to the Americas, and were introduced to Asia sometime in the early 16th century.  In the hundreds of years since then, chile peppers have been wholeheartedly adopted by local farmers and chefs, and new varieties better suited to local conditions and needs have been developed.\n\nSome species of chile pepper like *Capsicum chinense* have Linnean names that are a artifact of where they were first described by scientists, but that's not where they are now known to have originated.\n\nIn contrast, the black pepper, *Piper nigrum*, is a flowering vine in a totally differnent family and order, but which is native to the Indian subcontinent.  Today black pepper is still widely used in the cuisines of India, and it's believed that it's use was even more widespread before the introduction of chile peppers to South Asia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indo-European_isoglosses.png"], []]}
{"q_id": "2p4g0j", "title": "How historically accurate is the quote: \"The war wasn\u2019t only about abolishing fascism, but to conquer sales markets. We could have, if we had intended so, prevented this war from breaking out without doing one shot, but we didn\u2019t want to.\"?", "selftext": "I've seen this attributed to Winston Churchill to Truman (Fultun, USA March 1946), however I am having difficulty tracking down the source. \n\nThere's been a recent wave of these sorts of quotes on reddit, and I'm finding myself skeptical as the only places I'm finding these quotes elsewhere are on sites that are vaguely apologetic of nazis or outright denying the holocaust with such buzzfeed worthy headlines as \"the hitler speech they don't want you to hear\". \n\nI'm hoping someone a bit more credible can: \n\n1. verify the quote,\n\n2. explain the context in which it was made, and \n\n3. also explain how historically true it was.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p4g0j/how_historically_accurate_is_the_quote_the_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmtdq0h", "cmti3x1", "cmtlet2"], "score": [105, 30, 7], "text": [" >  verify the quote\n\nThere's zero evidence that this was ever said by Churchill, Truman, or anyone else involved in WWII. If one is to presume that the premise of the quote is accurate (that is to say, the war was fought by the allies to \"conquer sales markets,\" why would they admit that after years of propaganda stating that the war was a war for freedom?\n\nIt's hard to source a negative, of course (aka, come up with a source saying that someone *didn't* say this particular line). The fact that there are no reputable sources that point towards Churchill or Truman actually uttering this line, however, should dispel its credibility.\n\n >  explain the context in which it was made, and\n\nPresumably by some Neo-Nazi, though I can't say who first created this statement. It fits in well with the Nazi idea that the Germans were the target of an international Jewish financier conspiracy.\n\n >  also explain how historically true it was.\n\nCompletely false. It makes no sense - if Britain and France keen to \"conquer\" the sales market that was Germany, why would they follow a policy of appeasement throughout the 30s? Why wouldn't they have just conquered Germany in the 20s, when they were weak - say, just extend the [occupation of the Ruhr](_URL_0_) to the entirety of the German nation?\n\nThe notion of one nation conquering another for economic gain is not absurd. After all, economic exploitation is one of the key features of imperialism. To portray Nazi Germany as a victim of imperialism, however, is absurd. The British and French were highly reluctant to go to war with Germany, but ended up doing so to prevent Germany from establishing hegemony over Europe. They couldn't have just pulled some strings and prevented Hitler from invading Poland without firing \"one shot.\"\n\nYour skepticism is well justified, and the fact that the quote only appears on site that are apologetic to the Nazis or based on attention-grabbing headlines is telling. It's not history, it's fiction.", "[Here's the text of Churchill's March 1946 speech at Fulton](_URL_0_), called the \"Iron curtain\" speech because that was what popularized the phrase.  Churchill doesn't even talk about the reasons for WWII, much less describing them as \"to conquer sales markets.\"  Instead, he focuses on the postwar situation, especially Anglo-American friendship and the Soviet threat.\n\nAs /u/EighthGear explains, that's not a statement Churchill would have said, both because it was inaccurate and because it would have contradicted his longtime position.  But even beyond that, Churchill was a Nobel-prize-winning author and a longtime journalist who spoke with just pride of his grasp of English.  He would've never used awkward phrases such as \"conquer sales markets\" and \"without doing one shot.\"", "Maybe the good people at /r/badhistory can help you ?\n\nI agree with the other comments that the quote sounds like something that an apologist would create."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr"], ["http://www.historyguide.org/europe/churchill.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "24nqcn", "title": "When we look back at ancient cultures we always try to estimate what year those people would have been in an area, doing a certain thing, etc. Would those people have known what year it was?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24nqcn/when_we_look_back_at_ancient_cultures_we_always/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch91qxv", "ch945hw"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["How are you defining year? Plenty of cultures used their own calendars to keep track of years, many of which we have coordinated with our own to determine dates. Care to elaborate?", "hi! you're basically asking about all people that ever existed anywhere. This kind of \"throughout history\" question is against the rules here (because there are an infinite number of answers, so no-one can fully answer it), but rather than remove it, I'll direct you to these sections of the FAQ*, which can get you started:\n\n* [Other dating systems](_URL_0_)\n\n* [How did the world agree on what year it is?](_URL_1_) - includes a link to a recent  AskHistorians podcast\n\nIf you still have questions about a specific ancient culture (or people living in a region during some period), consider posting a new question, so it will catch the eye of someone who specializes in that subject.\n\n\n*see the link on the sidebar or the wiki tab"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_other_dating_systems", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_how_did_the_world_agree_on_what_year_it_is.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "7ch77c", "title": "This Week's Theme: Oral Traditions", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=flair%3AOral%20Traditions&amp;restrict_sr=on", "answers": {"a_id": ["dppt64r"], "score": [3], "text": ["**[Previously](_URL_1_)**\n\n**Current**: Oral Traditions\n\n**Upcoming**: Substance Abuse\n\n**In the hole**: Sovereignty\n\nRemember to ask theme-related questions in [a new thread!](_URL_0_)! If your submission doesn't get automatically flaired, [send us a modmail](_URL_2_) with a link!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/themes", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians"]]}
{"q_id": "65a3ip", "title": "In the U.S., why are many major cities governed by their own counties or parishes, yet surrounding suburbs tend to be comprised of many cities and towns under a common county or parish?", "selftext": "My hunch tells me it has something to do with white flight, but still can't figure out exactly why multiple small towns and suburbs joined forces under one government. \n\nWas it mandated by the federal government? What's the reasoning behind the difference? Today, two neighboring towns can be in different counties or parishes or the same one. What made them end up like that? Can a small town switch their county or parish association \u2014 a miniature Brexit, if you will? \n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/65a3ip/in_the_us_why_are_many_major_cities_governed_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg9nav7", "dg9qgl1"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I'm assuming that you are not from the United States. First the federal government has no oversight into how the States organize their local entities. Second county organization has nothing to do with white flight as county organization occurred well before.\n\nEach state is different in how it organizes villages, towns, cities and counties. This also reflects the state's unique history. For example we'll take my home state New York. New York has 57 counties excluding New York City, which just complicates matters. Each county and its boundaries are decided by the state legislature. Now cities, towns and villages separating from one county to join an adjoining one or form an entirely new one has happened. For example the towns cities and villages of the current Nassau County were apart of Queens County. Queens County became a part of New York City and those towns and villages who did not want to be a part of New York City were allowed by the state legislature to form Nassau. However, this had nothing to do with \"white flight\" at all since this occurred in the late 19th century. Indeed most county organization has occurred before white flight was a phenomena in the U.S. There are exceptions for example La Paz County in Arizona was formed out of the northern parts of Yuma County in 1983. However, it took time for this to happen mainly because there wasn't enough of a population in northern Yuma County to support a county government and afterwards Arizona made it much more difficult for counties to separate since then. \n\nAnyway back to NY, each county can decide a method of governance whether it be a County Administrator, a County Legislature or a county charter. New York's counties were given delineated powers by the state legislature. Counties are municipal divisions that contain villages, towns and cities. Some county organization is historical, like in the lower Hudson Valley (their shapes, names etc). Counties cover large areas, Westchester County in lower NY cover 450 sq miles, Orange County cover 839 square miles, Essex County in upstate NY covers 1916 square miles. So as you see there is a big difference in county size. Mainly this has to do with population size but not always. Westchester is right above New York City with a population of just under a million while Essex has 39,000.\n\nTowns cities villages can switch to another county. However, it is not easy to do. Since counties are merely administrative divisions it doesnt make much sense to switch. I'm not sure why there is some confusion as to why neighboring towns could be in two different counties things work differently in the U.S. and terminology is different. As I said county boundaries are historical, geographical, or are drawn to divide population administratively. There arent many instances where it matters if you are in one county or another. Like I said taxes, funding or maybe a certain law but otherwise there isn't much difference. If your town borders on Westchester County and you want to join Putnam County (which is right above) you would actually lose more than you gain. Westchester receives different funding from the state due to its high population and needs but it also doesn't mean a town can just decide to leave Putnam County and join Westchester. If a town or a group of people want to change something in their county they do it via the county government or state legislature.\n\nNow New York City is a whole another monster. Due to its immense economic power and high population different rules apply to it. For example New York City contains 5 counties that we call also boroughs. New York County (Manhattan), Queens County, Kings County (Brooklyn) Richmond County (Staten Island), Bronx County. New York had for a long time been trying to combine the outlying areas which is another history lesson. New York is unique in that it incorporated Brooklyn (Brooklyn at the time was the third largest city in America), the towns and villages of Queens County, the towns and villages of the Bronx (which was a part of Westchester County, the Bronx was not a separate city when it combined with NYC but a collection of towns and villages), and the towns and villages of Staten Island in the late 1890's. However, New York City and its boroughs are not governed by a county government there are borough offices which influence policy, administer city services etc, but they do not govern.\n\nI hope this helps and let me know if you need any further clarification!", "So couple things. States define counties not the feds. So most of this will differ in a state by state basis. Now in states that started out as territories generally used the public land survey system. Which was much more uniform than the original colonies. Some states in the West like Texas and Louisiana are more based on other systems. But in many cases the counties are older than the cities. Now something else to consider is the structure of state governments can differ widely, the civil war and reconstruction influanced changes in many southern states constitutions.\n\nSo you end up with counties being often defined in the constitution of the state. So your question could be seen as asking why the Kansas/Missouri border isn't shifted over so all of Kansas city is in Kansas.\n\nNow in some states the city is actually cut out of the county, this is more common in New England. It's more common for cities and counties to share jurisdiction. \n\nSo what does a city do, in my stae we have weak cities, essentially its a tax district. It provides police, fire, water, drainage, contributes to roads. The county provides police outside the city, and most importantly the state constitution requires it to handle the courts. This is why the city doesn't tend expand outside the county. So they only have to deal with one  counties court system. \n\nOutside of this we have other tax districts like MUDs that provide services like water/fire. In the 90s the city almost annexed a part of the teritory but they would have to of taken over the mud that carried that areas debt. These special tax districts aren't limited to one county, school districts famously cover many in sparse areas.\n\nThe cities can have their own laws(called ordinances here) so suburbs in neighboring counties often set them up, but often times these satellite cities doen't cover the same services and leave it to MUDs. But sometimes another small city will grow in size to fill the role.\n\nCity politics is complicated, we have enclaves and areas we've annexed than de-annax later. Counties are meant not to change. Part of this is we have vincinage requirements. When you break a law you have to be tried in the county the crime occured. This would be complicated if the county changed.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "10fspq", "title": "What are the most genius political power plays in your period?", "selftext": "Just as the title says, what are the political powerplays in your era of study that were brilliant but most peoplr don't no about? Or those that we may know something about, but the mastery behind it has remained somewhat overlooked by most people? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10fspq/what_are_the_most_genius_political_power_plays_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6d66en", "c6dc0dy", "c6dc6qt"], "score": [6, 6, 2], "text": ["I honestly believe the first triumvirate between Caesar, Crassus, and Pompeius has to be one of the greatest political power plays of all time. The length of time they managed to keep it a secret, and then the way in which they revealed it was so theatrical it genuinely thrills me. Caesar had just made his first public blunder in the senate. The oligarchs rallied together against his agrarian reforms, then Caesar goes before the tribal assembly flanked by Crassus and Pompeius. One man was worth $180 billion dollars, the other was the (currently) greatest military leader and had the most loyal and trained legions at his command. Three men who should have had nothing in common but mutual enmity shook the republic to its core.\n\nJust brilliant. \n\n", "Otto von Bismark once played a game of poker with his rival, the Austrian ambassador, exceedingly recklessly so that the guy would think he was a loose cannon not worth worrying about.  About a year later, Prussia was running the german league and austria was out on its ass.", "FDR is known for the failure of his Southern party purge during the 1938 midterms. What is much less known is that this was an attempt at a repeat of something Woodrow Wilson *successfully* did in 1918. Wilson, though no civil rights hero, was tired of the way the most vicious race-baiters hurt the Democratic Party in the North and how, particularly in the Senate, their ultraconservatism blocked progressive legislation. \n\nWilson, as a native of Virginia, was able to intervene in Southern Democratic primaries in a way Roosevelt, a New Yorker, never could. I'd have to look up the exact numbers, but Wilson was able to take down some exceedingly powerful people, basically ending their careers, see James K. Vardaman, senator and former governor of Mississippi as an example. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7pft8c", "title": "In the film 'Inglorious Basterds' the French citizens under Nazi occupation are portrayed as more or less continuing their daily lives, just with Nazi soldiers everywhere. Is this accurate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7pft8c/in_the_film_inglorious_basterds_the_french/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dsgv1q5", "dsi7222"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["I get that Quentin Tarantino wasn't exactly setting out to make a documentary, I just found his portrayal of Nazi-occupied Paris as fairly regular French life with some Nazi officers overseeing things as taking some serious liberties.", "You might be interested in this answer by /u/commiespaceinvader:\n\n[In Inglorious Basterds France is portrayed relatively peaceful although uneasy, it seems so much different then how Poland was occupied for example. How accurate is the portrayal of Vichy France, and how if at all was the everyday Frenchmen affected by the occupation?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/77rojl/in_inglorious_basterds_france_is_portrayed/"]]}
{"q_id": "2tpgnu", "title": "Why did US coinage transition from generic symbols of liberty to presidents and people?", "selftext": "Designs like the Walking Liberty half dollar and Peace dollar all seemed to fade from the early to mid 20th century. What happened? How did such a short termed President like JFK end up dominating a US coin?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tpgnu/why_did_us_coinage_transition_from_generic/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co2n09x"], "score": [4], "text": ["The 20th Century had three distinct eras of coin design. The first was the Golden Age marked by the work of famous sculptor August Saint-Gaudens gold issues but also included the coins made during the 1910s. The end of the Golden Age was marked by the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s Executive Order 1602, the government\u2019s reacquisition of gold by making it illegal to own numismatically and historically insignificant coins. Both the coins OP mentioned the Peace Dollar and Walking Liberty were made during this Golden Age. However, about half of the redesigns are the next era, the Modern Era\n\n**The (Saint-Gaudens) Golden Age:**\n*The Era of Lady Liberty, Native Americans and Americana*\n\nMany coins saw one design change; the change took place in the 1830s. When the first American coins were made artistic images were not a top concern. Then when artist were consulted during the 1830s Lady Liberty was placed on nearly every single coin. The nation had changed a lot but the coins have stayed the same and people were ready for something new. The Coinage Act of 1890 stated that any coin design, after being minted for 25 year, was eligible to be redesigned. This act was to encourage coins to be redesigned. \n\nAugustus Saint-Gaudens won the competition to design the President Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration medal. Roosevelt very impressed by the submission charged with redesigning the American Gold coins, [$10](_URL_4_) and [$20 coin](_URL_9_). At this point all of these previous coins had circulated with the same design for at least 50 years. The bust of Lady Liberty was \"antiquated ... and an embarrassment to aesthetes and to the U.S. Mint itself.\u201d The design at the time was popular and America did not want to have living people on coins like the monarchs of England and France notably King George V and Napoleon III who had their image on every single coin. \n\nGold coins were used in important transactions, to be kept in banks, or as a collector\u2019s item, the average person did not see or use them. Important Americana ideas were kept on coins, an Indian Head replaced Lady Liberty on the obverse and the eagle was repositioned on the reverse. Saint-Gaudens designs were heavily influenced by the popular art movements at the time, Beaux-Arts, Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Deco and largely by Art Noveau.\n\nWhile President Roosevelt was redesigning coins, he hired Victor David Brenner in 1909 to commemorate Abraham Lincoln on the centennial of his birth, based on a design VDB had already made into a series of plaques and medals. The previous penny, the [Indian Head penny](_URL_14_) had first started circulating in 1859 but looks like was a new early twentieth century coin. The coin featured an Indian head, not Lady Liberty, on the obverse and a wreath wrapped around the words \u201cone cent\u201d on the reverse. [The \\(uniquely right facing\\) Abraham Lincoln](_URL_11_) that replaced the Indian Head on the obverse was the predecessor for the Presidents Jefferson, Roosevelt, Washington and Kennedy to appear on coins. \n\nThe [Buffalo \\(or Indian Head\\) Nickel](_URL_13_) was one of the first coins to replace a Lady Liberty design. The Indian Head is no stranger to American coins, appearing on the $10 gold coin and the aforementioned Indian Head Penny. The previous design was [Liberty Head Nickel](_URL_15_) that started circulating in 1883. The obverse of course, featured Lady Liberty\u2019s head and the reverse featured the words \u201cUnited States of America\u201d and \u201cCents\u201d wrapped around a wreath wrapped around a large \u201cV\u201d the Roman numeral five. The Buffalo nickel featured a composite of three major Indian chiefs. The buffalo is also purportedly a composite of buffalos but is commonly believed to be Black Diamond of the Bronx Zoo.\n\nThe [Mercury Dime](_URL_2_) replaced the French styled Liberty head [Barber Dime](_URL_6_) in 1916. The Barber dime, named after designer Chief Engraver of the United States Mint Charles Barber started circulating in 1891. The Barber Dime obverse featured Lady Liberty\u2019s head while the reverse featured a laurel wreath wrapped around the words \u201cone dime\u201d. The Mercury Dime, mistakenly named after the Roman Messenger god in fact features the Roman god Liberty. As such it is rightly known as the Winged Liberty Head but the inaccuracy persists. The obverse features the goddess\u2019s head with word \u201cLiberty\u201d and the reverse feature a fasces, a bundle of sticks, with an olive branch wrapped around it. This symbolizes war and peace preparedness after World War One. \n\nThe [Barber Quarter](_URL_16_) was also replaced in 1916 after being circulated just the 25 years needed before being able to be redesigned. The Barber Quarter featured the same obverse design, the same head as the Barber Dime. The reverse was quite different than that of the dime and patriotically featured the Great Seal of the United States and the words \u201cUnited States of America\u201d and \u201cQuarter Dollar\u201d on the reverse. The new [Standing Liberty](_URL_12_) design featured, as the name would suggest, Lady Liberty standing, looking off to the right on the obverse and a soaring eagle on the reverse. \n\nThe [Barber half dollar](_URL_5_), also minted during the same time as the previous two coins, featured the exact same design on the obverse and reverse as the Barber Quarter. The mint directors were especially eager to change the designs and make each denomination their own unique design. The half dollar, like the other Barber coinage kept Lady Liberty, only modernizing her style. The [Walking Liberty half dollar](_URL_0_) feature Lady Liberty beckoning, walking towards the sun while the reverse features an eagle that looks ready to flap off and leave his perch.\n\nThe dollar coin was reintroduced in 1921 with the [Peace Dollar](_URL_1_). Production of dollar coins stopped in 1904 after the long declining popularity of the coin and lack of use. Production resumed because of the increase use of coins for technology such as vending machines and slot machines. The coin was meant to commemorate the victory of World War One and compared to other coins was minted in much smaller numbers. The coin continued to be minted until 1935 until the dollar coin ceased to be produced again. \n\n**The Modern Era:**\n*The Age of Presidents and Politics*\n\nThe Modern Era started off in the Great Depression and went until largely unpopular Susan B. Anthony dollar. One by one every coin got redesigned, the next redesign becoming more popular than the last. It was during this time that America stopped fearing placing its political identity on the international stage. America would soon become the major military and economic power and American coinage would circulate more widely than ever before depicting the great men of a great country.\n\nThe first president to emerge on a coin in the modern era was George Washington. The [Washington Quarter design](_URL_7_) started circulating in 1932. Congress wanted George Washington on a coin for only 1932 to celebrate the bicentennial of his birth. However due to the popularity of the coin Washington remains on the quarter today.\n\nAfter the Buffalo nickel design had been minted for the required 25 years a new design quickly replaced it in 1938, the nickel design still used today, the [Jefferson Nickel](_URL_8_). After a competition was held, a design featuring Thomas Jefferson on the obverse and his house, the landmark Monticello on the reverse was chosen as the winner. \n\nAfter President Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s death in 1945 Congress called for a replacement of the Mercury Dime with Roosevelt\u2019s image. The Mercury dime had been circulating for 30 years at this time and was a stereotypical art style of the late 1910s and 1920s, making the coin due for a redesign. In 1946 the [Roosevelt dime](_URL_3_) started to circulate and despite some bogus Communist complaints against the design, it proved popular enough to continue circulating to today. \n\nThe [JFK half dollar](_URL_10_) has much the same story, JFK was assassinated and Congress immediately chose to honor him on a coin. The previous half dollar, which replaced the Walking Liberty half was the Franklin Half. Despite replacing a revered forefather, the Kennedy half was released to unprecedented public demand.\n\n\n**TL;DR Lady Liberty had her day, now it is the Presidents turn.**\n\n**Edit**: Added pictures\n\nSources:\n\nThe End of the Modern Era of United States Coins by Charles Morgan and Robert Walker\n\nChange in the Air by Andy Smith\n\nThe coins of 1916 by David W. Lange\n\nTransitional Pairs, Part 5 by David W. Lange"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://websitepicturesonly.coinauctionshelp.com/New_US_COIN_IMAGES/HalfDollar/1917walkinghalfdollar.jpg", "http://peacedollars.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Peace-Dollar.jpg", "http://coins.silvercoinstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Silver-Mercury-Dime.jpg", "http://rooseveltdimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1946-Roosevelt-Dime1.jpg", "http://www.usacoinbook.com/us-coins/indian-head-gold-eagle-no-motto.jpg", "http://websitepicturesonly.coinauctionshelp.com/BarberHalves_grading/MS65.jpg", "http://www.coincommunity.info/coin/0010/1909-d-barber-dime.jpg", "http://washingtonquarters.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Washington-Quarter3.jpg", "http://www.dsscoinandbullion.com/dka/imageScroller/images/scroller/jeffy.jpg", "http://www.coinsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/gaudens1.jpg", "http://www.usacoinbook.com/us-coins/kennedy-half-dollar.jpg", "http://0.tqn.com/d/coins/1/S/n/W/-/-/US0001-Lincoln-Wheat-1909-S-MS66-RD.jpg", "http://standinglibertyquarter.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/standing-liberty-quarter1.jpg", "http://buffalonickel.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1937-buffalo-nickel.jpg", "http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.thefuntimesguide.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/64/files/1860-Indian-Head-Penny.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http://coins.thefuntimesguide.com/2009/03/indian_heady_penny_value.php&amp;h=403&amp;w=800&amp;tbnid=yj2EXa8orY5NxM:&amp;zoom=1&amp;docid=CEhuk5BfCYD-BM&amp;ei=jwzNVISiAcirogSqjoKYAw&amp;tbm=isch", "http://websitepicturesonly.coinauctionshelp.com/New_US_COIN_IMAGES/Nickels/1866vnickel.jpg", "http://barberquartercoins.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/1907-barber-quarter.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "5ecezc", "title": "What were the Origins of the Seljuk Dynasty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ecezc/what_were_the_origins_of_the_seljuk_dynasty/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dabuxha"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'll begin in what's known as the Islamic Golden Age under Haroon. Haroon, while leader of the Abbasid Caliphate, brought his empire to unprecedented heights, but \"he may have undermined its strength by over-taxation, the unvarying disease of old empires.\"* After he died in 809, his son Mamoon was able to wrest control. It was Mamoon who formally founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which contributed greatly to advancements in mathematics and astronomy. But Mamoon also allowed Khurasan to become autonomous. Because of this, when Mutasim took over after Mamoon, he could no longer rely on army recruits from Khurasan as his predecessors had done. So he brought in slave boys from Turkestan. These turks would end up becoming the bulk of the empire's military. To quote Glubb again, \"the Turks were mostly heathen, did not even trouble to learn Arabic, and were hated by the public.\" Mutasim would also move the capital to Samarra, a move that angered the Arabs in his empire as it suggested a preference on Mutasim's part for the Turks. \n\nAfter Mutasim died, his son took over. He would rule for six years and die, and the next Kahlif would be Mutawakkil. Mutawakkil chose to remain at Samarra surrounded by his Turkish guards. His son, the heir-apparent, lost his title after messing around with a Greek concubine, but a high-ranking Turkish slave talked Muntasir into having his father murdered. Muntasir was then named Khalif. And so begins the disintegration of Arab hegemony and the rise of a Turkish military order. We would see the capital returned to Baghdad in 892, but by this time \"the Arab Empire had virtually ceased to exist.\" The glue had had help the empire together was claimed descendence from the Prophet, but the population soon realized the khalif was now a mere front, and that Turks were exercising the real power, and so provinces began to fall away. Mutahdid took over in 892, but by this time he was only able to collect taxes from a small area in central Iraq, and simply lacked the funds to maintain a sufficient mercenary army.\n\nAn event that illustrates the severity of the rift between Arabs and Turks was the Carmathian rebellion. The Carmathians arose out of the Arabian peninsula, and were Shiites, yes, but their motive for rebellion was most likely anger at foreign influence in the empire, notably Turkish militarism. The khalifate did not seek to reconcile with these Arabs but labeled them enemies. Due to Turkish and Persian influence, the khailfate held no respect for Arab tribes anymore.\n\nFast-forwarding, we see the khalifate become ,at one point, a puppet of the Shiite Dailamites. The Abbasid Empire was effectively no more. Baghdad devolved into chaos and there were multiple coups de'etat. The khalif in Baghdad would become a principally religious figure. We also see the Byzantine Empire becoming much stronger around this time.\n\nFast-fast-forwarding, the founder of the Seljuk Empire was Tughril Beg. He was a grandson of Seljuk, and before establishing his empire, he was a chief of the Ghuzz. The Ghuzz \"were a tribe of primitive Turkmans, who grazed on the steppes north of the Aral sea.\" Apparently \"Their principle occupation was war and their killing weapon was a short bow, which they used on horseback at full gallop.\" Tughril Beg was Muslim, despite the fact that most of his tribesman were not, and also, the khalifate in Baghdad had by this time regained some respect as a religious institution. The khalifate had no army, however, and Tughril Beg moved into the palaces, while the Ghuzz \"scattered over the fertile valley of Iraq, plundering and killing, and carrying off all the young women.\" \n\nTughril Beg dies in 1063, childless, still illiterate, the founder of an empire. He was succeeded by Alp Arslan, an energetic ruler who loved knowledge and diligent administration.\n\n*A Short History of the Arab Peoples, by Sir John Glubb\n\ntl;dr: Arabs come to rely on Turks in their military. Turks seize influence, undermining credibility of the khalifate. The khalifate was the glue of the empire, and so the empire begins to disintegrate. This disintegration coincides with a height in Byzantine power, which only contributes to an already chaotic power struggle/vacuum. A weakened Baghdad eventually falls to a Sunni Turk."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1b4x6f", "title": "Did the American military expect/plan for an attack from Mexico during world war 1?", "selftext": "I know about the Zimmerman Telegraph and was wondering if the Mexican's could have/would have attacked the United States. Did Mexico have a strong military at the time? Did the United States have a plan if they did invade?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b4x6f/did_the_american_military_expectplan_for_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c93n6zu"], "score": [3], "text": ["Mexico was undergoing a multi-sided civil war, and they were in no position to fight a war against anyone outside their borders. As for the US military, the so-called \"Punitive Expedition\" saw about 5,000 US troops chase one of the combatants, Pancho Villa, around Mexico for a year with the intent to kill or capture him, which was not successful. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "496kdz", "title": "My friend says, that during medieval times 90% of an army would consist of drafted peasants with no prior fighting experience and sub par equipment (like sharpened pieces of wood as an improvised spear) is this true?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/496kdz/my_friend_says_that_during_medieval_times_90_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0pk5gv", "d0prqpd"], "score": [9, 7], "text": ["A reply to /u/themantheycallsven\n\nYou may want to read /u/mi13 's answer here\n\n_URL_0_?", "Well, it depends on what you mean by \"medieval times.\" In the early middle ages, then yeah, most armies were primarily made up of militias. For instance, in Anglo-Saxon England (I've got a friend who does Anglo-Saxon history, so I've heard a lot about this!), the bulk of the military was made up of the [fyrd](_URL_3_) who were for the most part, conscripted peasantry. The experienced nucleus of the army were the [comitatus](_URL_2_) who were the professional retainers/bodyguards/goons of the noble class. (See also: [thegns](_URL_0_) or [housecarls](_URL_1_)) but they were relatively few in number compared to the militia. For example, at Hastings, Harold's housecarls fought to the death, even after their king died.\n\nBasically, you only start to see professional armies in the later middle ages because earlier governments were too decentralized to support them, and a centrally organized army was something that local nobility had no interest in seeing (After all, it could be used against them!)\n\nNow, whether the peasantry had no experience is hard to say, but it'd be likely that some would, just because they survived past campaigning seasons.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4248f4/if_peasant_conscripts_made_up_the_bulk_of_armies/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thegn", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housecarl#The_housecarls_of_Harold_Godwinson:_Stamford_Bridge_and_Hastings", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comitatus_%28classical_meaning%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyrd"]]}
{"q_id": "18q097", "title": "The Black Death as the crucial factor that ended feudalism and began the Protestant Reformation - accurate? too simple? both?", "selftext": "Hey all, first post and maybe this might be a little broad but...\n\nHow important a factor was the Black Death in many of the changes that occurred in the late Middle Ages? Because I've read a lot of comments (on Reddit and other non-academic settings) that the Black Death was basically responsible for:\n\n-the end of feudalism because of the massive depopulation of serfs, increasing their economic/political clout and\n\n-the Protestant Reformation (and the Great Schism before it) because of disillusionment about the Catholic Church's power,\n\nwhich seems overly simplistic, even though I'm just an uninformed redditor. It just seems like it divorces these huge, historic changes from any sort of historical trends and basically says: \"This one event/thing basically changed the entire world.\"\n\nBut maybe it's not simplistic - is such a statement accurate?\n\nOr is it possible to look at the years previous and say these things might unfold anyway? Say, developments in the Middle East, or the Mongols, or other demographic trends.\n\nMany thanks in advance.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18q097/the_black_death_as_the_crucial_factor_that_ended/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8h2d6g", "c8h4bs7"], "score": [8, 5], "text": ["It is too simplistic. No major world events can be boiled down to one cause. For example, World War I: The popular answer to \"what caused it?\" is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. However, such an answers ignores other factors such as increased colonial aggression and the naval race.\n\nFor your question, saying that Black Death was the cause of the Reformation is entirely too reductionistic. It may have had an influence, but there are a variety of other factors which helped to cause the Reformation, such as indulgences and general corruption within the Roman Catholic Church. Basically, the Reformation was the result of approximately a century of build-up pre-Luther of discontent within the Church and had many contributing factors.", "Hi! I'm studying for a history degree at the moment, and two of my papers are the high/later middle ages in Britain, so if I may have a swing at the feudalism aspect I would enjoy that.\n\nAt the start of learning about medieval society, I was expressly told that I was never to use the word 'feudalism'. A feudal relationship is one in which land is exchanged for military service; in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, William doled out land to his followers on the condition that in times of war they provide a certain number of knights- naturally round numbers. However, even then, this type of landholding relationship was far from ubiquitous- there were financial arrangements, exemptions, urban landholding relationships and the like. Furthermore, William was very keen on making sure that the knightly subtenants knew that he was ultimately the one in charge, and that all land derived from him eventually; he made all, not just his barons but also the 'landholding men of any account (source: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, can't remember which version) swear fealty to him above all others at Salisbury in 1086. As such, 'feudalism' is really an inappropriate way of talking about the social system even then.\n\nNow, before we get to the Black Death, we should pitstop in the reign of Henry II. By this time, landholding was even more complex. The institution of 'scutage', or shield money, allowed landholders to provide money for mercenaries instead of direct military commitment. This had evolved for two reasons- first of all, often the knights provided were of variable quality. The archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, in the reign of William Rufus eventually exiled himself after being accused of providing 'substandard knights'. From the king's point of view it was usually better to take the money and hire rather than use knights of unknown quality with a time limit- usually forty days per year. A partial response to this was the Assize of Arms of 1181, but it shows the cracks in the feudal systems in place. Secondly, if you have a landholding that owes one knight to its landlord, and sell half of it, what happens? Especially this soon after the Anarchy of King Stephen, many barons argued over what they owed or owed 16 and 1/3 knights or some similarly unworkable number. Equally, if a knightly subtenant owns land from two barons, who does he go to war with? These kind of problems inherent in the system again lead to a system of scutage and the decline of feudal relationships. Furthermore, the institution of the Common Law put the king's justice at the hands of all free men for a very affordable price, thus effectively invalidating the baronial court- seeing as a royal judgement would over-rule a baronial one; why go to a local court when the loser would inevitably appeal to the King's justice anyway (Source: Glanvil)?\n\nSo by the Black Death, military feudal relationships (which is what feudalism actually refers to) were limited already. However, the impact of the Black Death on serfdom and the end of unfree tenancies is huge, as you rightly identify. The Statute of Labourers in 1351 was intended to combat the new power gained by labourers who for the first time really had some worth. There's an excellent quote from an article called 'England in the Aftermath of the Black Death' in Past and Present by J. Hatcher saying that 'in the aftermath, even the smallest of the poor had been imbued with value'. Ultimately labour legislation failed for a variety of reasons, and the decline of villeinage in the late 14th and early 15th century was gradual but had so much momentum at the time it must have seemed inevitable. One of my favourite historical anecdotes comes from the 'Good Parliament' in 1376 where a commons petition to arrest and imprison any new labourer in an area on principle until it could be investigated whether or not he had illegally left his last manor. Where they were planning on putting these people, who was going to do the investigation and most importantly how on earth they were going to pay for it I have no idea, and apparently neither did the leaders of the commons, who threw it out.\n\nI can provide sources for most of this stuff if you would like, though it would take quite a lot of digging! I'm afraid some, especially the earlier stuff is from lectures but I reckon I can find it out from somewhere. Any further questions on any of this from anyone I would be very happy to answer to the best of my ability!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "a7xphd", "title": "What were Catherine the Great favourite books from Voltaire?", "selftext": "Hello fellow History Nerds :)\n\nAs I am currently learning French and also have a huge interest in Europe during or shorlty before the enlightement, I tought, why not combine these 2 fields. So I decided that I would read some Books from Voltaire. But since he has over 700 Books I have to decide wich one I should read first. \n\nI heard that Catherine the Great took inspiration from Voltaire's books and also recommended them to the Russian Nobels so I figured these would be good books to start.\n\nSo is there a Record wich books she did recommend? \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThank You", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a7xphd/what_were_catherine_the_great_favourite_books/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ec6ywca"], "score": [6], "text": ["Hi! This is a great question. My name is Lena and I work on Voltaire and his library. Here are some examples from their correspondence of Catherine's favourite works by Voltaire, by no means an exhaustive list (she specifically ordered that all of his published works be sent to St. Petersburg along with his private library after his death). One would have to do a bit more digging to see her letters specifically to other Russian nobles, but I would hazard a guess that she did not keep these works to herself :-) She also admired Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois and used it in drafting the Nakaz, Russia's reformed legal code (which she then sent to Voltaire for feedback).\n\n* September 16 1763 CII writes to V:  \"By chance your works fell into my hands, I could not stop reading them, and I wouldn't want book that wasn't as well written, and from which so much could not be profited.\"\n* June 1765: Looks like Essai sur les m\u0153urs was a big one: \"She \\[CII in 3rd person\\] has read this great book from one end to the other with much pleasure...She is persuaded that this book will prove her thoughts, it will be purified by fire, in Paris, which will give it an even greater shine.\"\n* October 17 1771: Questions sur l'Encyclopedie, in particular the article on fanaticism, \"which I read with the greatest satisfaction in the book of the Questions sur l'encyclop\u00e9die.\"\n\nIf you have a university subscription, I would recommend searching through their correspondence on [Electronic Enlightenment](_URL_0_). *Ecrasez l'infame*!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.e-enlightenment.com.stanford.idm.oclc.org"]]}
{"q_id": "1566st", "title": "Where did the Etruscans come from?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1566st/where_did_the_etruscans_come_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7jmruu", "c7jmu78"], "score": [11, 24], "text": ["Possibly from the [Villanovan culture](_URL_0_). The further back you go, though, the less clear history becomes, so I don't know if we can definitively trace where the Etruscans came from. ", "No one really knows, there are two main theories, either they developed in Italy, or they developed in Anatolia prior to coming to Italy. I generally subscribe to the latter as the Etruscan language is not Indo-European, as well as genetic evidence from several studies that show that that modern people from Tuscany have different genetics than other Italian people around them, and that they share a certain similarities with modern day Turks. This is all very speculative, as people have been moving around since far before written history and the genetic make-up of people changes throughout history because of migration, war or other social reasons. The best we can do is guess. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villanovan_culture"], []]}
{"q_id": "1trz3q", "title": "During WW2, how was the traffic between Switzerland and other countries handled?", "selftext": "As with so many questions, this one holds many more, not limited to:\n\nDuring WW2 films, it's often mentioned that getting to Switzerland for escaped Allied POWs was as good as getting as getting home. How was this handled? It can't have been a joyous occasion for The Third Reich, and their allies completely surrounding it, just to let anyone, even potential spies, get home completely free, without any inspection. What measures did they take to avoid such things?\n\nDid the Swiss, as the neutral country they were, intern any soldiers from either country crossing their borders? To me, it would seem that such action would be a natural one, eg. like the Netherlands did during WW1. Did they take active actions to make special exceptions to either side?\n\nHow free was civilian travel to and from Switzerland during the war? both by plane, train and other land activities, both to parties involved in the war and those neutral to it. Were countries like Spain and Sweden treated much differently?\n\nWhile I don't expect that Switzerland would have allowed any German or other Axis military units to pass through their borders during the war, were there exceptions made for such things, such as if they were unarmed or so?\n\nFeel free to add anything more to this. I know that remaining neutral during either world war, as it was almost impossible for any country to remain somewhat neutral. Eg. both Sweden and Switzerland co-operated much with at least individuals from the Axis powers, and at the very least indirectly with the nations themselves, just as the US did with the Entente powers in WW1 while remaining neutral. Are there any specific interesting examples of such neutrality being tested and even broken by either side, both by threat of force or otherwise?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1trz3q/during_ww2_how_was_the_traffic_between/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceb3dhx"], "score": [36], "text": ["At the \u00c9vian Conference the Swiss stated that they can just be used for transit emigration. Fugitives were temporarily tolerated. Since the outbreak of war all foreigners required a visa to enter Swiss territory. Excluded from this were political refugees, but this status were not given to Jews. Illegal immigration were nontheless well known.\n\nAll in all the Swiss handled soldiers from other countries according to the Hague Conventions. Between 1939-1945 there were more than 100'000 army members interned (34'500 French, 24'400 Italians, 17'100 Poles, 7'200 Germans und Austrians, 5'800 Brits, 2'100 Yugoslavs, 1'600 Americans an 8'400 Sowjets + others) Only members of the SS troups were rejected by swiss authorities.\n\nInterment camps were established in B\u00fcren an der Aare, Girenbad, Adliswil, Wauwilermoos and elsewhere. Others were held in disused hotels. Conditions were not the very best, especially some were overcrowded and not well planned.\nShort news about american pilots being shot down over germany and landed in neutral switzerland. Don't know how biased this is. [CBSNews](_URL_2_)\n\nI hope some historians with experience can elaborate in depth.\n\nSources (in german):\n_URL_1_ (Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz: Internierungen)\n_URL_0_ (HLS: 2. Weltkrieg - Fl\u00fcchtlinge)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D8927.php", "http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D8704.php", "http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-airmen-imprisoned-in-switzerland-during-wwii-are-finally-recognized/"]]}
{"q_id": "1m1v5i", "title": "What is the best Frederick the Great biography?", "selftext": "Hello, I've asked this [before ](_URL_0_)to no avail.  Like previously stated, I don't see anything about it on the book section here.  Books I have spotted on amazon have mixed reviews, so I figured I'd get some advice from you guys!  I'd prefer one that reads easily, but without sacrificing historicity! Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m1v5i/what_is_the_best_frederick_the_great_biography/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc4ynfy", "cc5207b"], "score": [4, 5], "text": ["I'm actually not aware of too many scholarly biographies of Frederick the Great in English.  [Gerhard Ritter's](_URL_1_) biography is a translation from German that's a bit older, but does a good job of putting Frederick's life into the context of European state absolutism and international relations.  \n\nI do know that [Nancy Mitford](_URL_0_) wrote a biography of Frederick the Great that focuses much more on his private life, but I haven't read it.", "Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark is more the general history of Prussia in 800 pages, from the Hohenzollern family all the way to the post-WWII division of Germany.  While not specifically about Frederick the Great, it includes lots of material about the man and his rule.  Great citation material for projects about Germany.\n\n_URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ka8uo/recommendations_for_books_on_frederick_the_great/"], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=cRt0rz7jqmoC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=frederick+the+great&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=RB8uUqiWBIXMyQHgv4HoBA&amp;ved=0CGQQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&amp;q=frederick%20the%20great&amp;f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=2dvKLNxwVSkC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=frederick+the+great&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=RB8uUqiWBIXMyQHgv4HoBA&amp;ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&amp;q=frederick%20the%20great&amp;f=false"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962"]]}
{"q_id": "7fimel", "title": "Song Dynasty China was said to be close to an industrial revolution. Was there anything \"lost\" during periods afterwards? Was the Song really more likely to industrialize than it's successors?", "selftext": "The Song dynasty is said to have been approaching an industrial revolution, with the implication that possibility for a full blown industrial revolution ended with the fall of the dynasty. However, my understanding is that many technologies pointed to as evidence of an industrial revolution such as printing presses and mass produced iron remained after the fall of the Song. Are there any factors that are pointed to as reasons why the Song could have undergone an industrial revolution that disappeared upon the collapse of the song?\n\nShould be obvious that the successors I'm refering to in the title are the Yuan, Ming, and Qing. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7fimel/song_dynasty_china_was_said_to_be_close_to_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqck4xg"], "score": [28], "text": ["I would point you to the answers that others and I made in this [thread](_URL_0_) regarding Song state institutions, the role it played in the Song's tremendous economic growth, and how later dynasty's diverged from the Song model. \n\nI would also add that the Song was birthed from a unique period of time in Chinese history - the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. After the Anshi Rebellion, the military governors (*fanzhen*) carved out semi-independent fiefdoms for themselves and deprived the central government of the land tax revenue. This forced the state to become more creative in its taxation policies and the state began to rely increasingly on indirect taxation. The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, during which China was divided into several competing states, accelerated this process. Much of the Song's policies and practices can be traced from this period in time. Interstate competition did not disappear with the rise of the Song, as it faced strong enemies to the north and west (Khitans, Jurchens, Tanguts), and this competition paved the way for innovations in finance, economic policy, and military technology. By contrast, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties never faced strong adversaries and therefore lacked the need to innovate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/700tbq/were_the_forms_of_state_institutions_a/"]]}
{"q_id": "cqkrcl", "title": "Is there any historical documents or autobiographies of what it was like being a king?", "selftext": "We\u2019ve seen many famous rulers of empires and powerful countries throughout history. Is there any documentation of what it was like being one? The stress? The emotions behind it? Any Kings or emperors that wrote about their own experience?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cqkrcl/is_there_any_historical_documents_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ewz9r5o"], "score": [3], "text": ["I immediately thought of the \"political last wills\" or \"political testaments\" that have been written by various rulers throughout the ages. Depending on the individual text they fluctuate between self-justification, political autobiography, philosophical musings about the nature of monarchical rule and recommendations/suggestions for their respective successors. Most of the examples I am familiar with hit all four of those to varying degrees. I'm haven't read yet any scholarship that tries to take a general look at those testaments as a genre, however, so I can't really comment on anything they might have in common. I'll quote short excerpts out of three early modern examples, however, which I feel show well what these documents' intentions were and what you can find in them.\n\n*Meine Gedanken* (My Thoughts) by Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar and Eisenach, c. 1758. Anna Amalia was only eighteen years old when her husband's sudden death forced her to take the throne; she wrote the following shortly afterwards:\n\n > *When I look back at my childhood, that springtime of my life, what do I see? An ever-recurring round of sacrifice made for others. I was not loved by my parents, who on every occasion kept me in the background, my brothers and sistes being always considered first. I was treated, in fact, like an outcast, and yet Thou, O my Creator, hast endowed me with a sensitive, loving heart, which suffered misery from this want of tenderness and pined for affection. I was starving for love, and I reveived the hard crust of mere duty. \\[...\\] Never did I pray with such devotion as I did in this my hour of need. I believe I might have become a saint. The situation was indeed peculiar. So young to be regent, to command, to rule, I, who all my life had been humiliated, depressed. I am afraid that after a little time I began to look upon my position with a certain amount of vanity. But a secret voice whispered: \"Beware!\" I heard it, and my better reason came to help. Truth and self-love struggled for the mastery, and the truth prevailed \\[...\\] I longed for success - for praise. I also felt the absolute need I had of a friend, in whom I could place entire confidence. IThere were several who sought to be my confidants or my advisers. Some tried flattery, others commended themselves by a show of sincerity, but in none could I detect the ring of true affection which is above all temptations. If a prince and the individual he selects as an intimate or confidant are both noble-minded, the sincerest affection may exist between them; and this is the only way to answer the question, \"Can kings have true friends?\"*\n\nArchduchess Maria Theresia of Austria wrote her political testament at about the same time, but her situation was very different. She took office in 1740 after her father's death when she was 23 years old and almost immediately found herself embroiled in a series of devastating wars which directly threatend her realm's very existence. Eighteen years later she put some of her thoughts about that crisis to paper (translation is mine):\n\n > *Out of motherly care and for the benefit of my posterity written Points of Instruction, which I divided in various chapters depending on their importance.*  \n >   \n > *The first chapter is to describe the domestic and foreign political state of the monarchy, as I found it to be when I began my rule.*  \n >   \n > *The second describes the abuses which gradually built up in this Austrian monarchy under the rule of my ancestors.*  \n >   \n > *The third chapter deals with the nine year long and burdensome war and why I decided to eventually bring it to an end.*  \n >   \n > *The fourth tells about the changes I effected at court and in my realm after said peace.*  \n >   \n > *The fifth shows the great benefit and use of those changes, as those are the only way to strengthen the monarchy and keep it for my successors.*  \n >   \n > *The sixth chapter describes the necessity to keep those changes in order to avert your own downfall, and what my successors should pay attention to to that end.*  \n >   \n > *The unexpected and sorrowful death of my father was that much more painful for me not only because I venerated and loved him as a father, but also because I saw myself as his lowest vassal and him as my lord and ruler and therefore felt twofold loss and pain. Back then I lacked the experience and knowledge to rule this large and widely spread realm, since my father had never thought to involve me in the domestic or foreign policy of his or at least inform me of it, and so I suddenly and all at once found myself bereft of money, troops and good counsel.*\n\n\\[She goes on to tell in great detail of how dependent she was on the counsel of the ministers she had inherited from her father, and how lacking she found it in many aspects, and then proceeds to the next chapters\\]\n\n > *Sixth Chapter*  \n >   \n > *\\[...\\] I can give my successors no other advise than to not let themselves be led into confusion, as many advisors are in fact led by their own interests. I myself would have been led astray while implementing aforementioned changes due to so many interjections and news if I hadn't taken great efforts to learn about and truly understand the affairs myself; for this reason I find it necessary to ask my successors to not change anything about the changes I implemented and instead protect and conserve them for the best of the monarchy and for its continuing existence. To that end they should especially pay attention to find honest and qualified people as well as teach young people so that those can learn about the affairs of state themselves and will be able to faithfully serve the prince and the people, and to do so well.*\n\nAnd the last one is a short excerpt from the political testament of Maria Theresia's greatest enemy, King Frederick II of Prussia who was the first to invade her realm not even three months after she had taken the throne. Frederick wrote this testament in 1752 and again rewrote and extended it in 1768 (again my translation).\n\n > *Every citizen's foremost duty is to serve his fatherland. I tried to fulfill this duty througout my life. As the person with the highest authority in the state I had the opportunity and the possibility to make myself useful for my fellow citizens. My love to them instills in me the wish to continue serving them even after my death. But I am not so arrogant as to think that I myself should be the only ideal my successors should try to emulate. I know, that death destroys man all as his plans, and that everything in the world is subject to change. With this political testament I only try to tell my experiences to those who follow me, akin to a captain who knows the stormy areas in the sea of politics. I shall detail the cliffs which are to be avoided, and the harbours where my successors can find safety. \\[...\\]*  \n >   \n > *Amongst all provinces in Europe there are none which would be a better fit for our state than Saxony, Polish Prussia and Swedish Pomerania, as all three would fill the gaps in our borders. \\[...\\] \\[Polish Prussia\\] separates Prussia from Pomerania and prevents us from protecting the former due to the difficulties provided by the river Weichsel there, as well as the possibility of Russian attacks via the Danzig harbour \\[...\\] I don't think that war would be the best way to add this province to our kingdom, and I tend to tell you the same what King Victor Amadeus of Sicily told Charles Emanuel: \"My son, you have to eat Milan like an artichocke, leave by leave.\" Poland is an elective monarchy which always falls into disorder when its king dies. This is the time to benefit from that, and to win by virtue of our neutrality here a city, there a district, until it is swallowed in its entirety. Those lucky enough to bring that acquisition to its end will without doubt want to fortify Thorn, Elbing and Marienwerder as well as found smaller towns and places along the Weichsel, which shall thwart any attempts Russia makes against us. It is true that its regular troops needn't be feared, but its Kalmyks and Tartars are murderous and savage hordes which rampage through the lands and take entire peoples into captivity \\[...\\]*\n\nI hope that helps a bit! Political testaments are certainly a fascinating source, but like everything else they need to be read carefully and between the lines and they are always to be seen both as an attempt of a monarch to control his or her public image even after death as well as direct advice intended for their successors so that they might continue what the author had begun."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2rkxgq", "title": "Why are there so many books on Rome, Greece, and Egypt, but hardly anything on Persia?", "selftext": "There's tonnes of stuff on those three, but I have never even so much as seen a book dedicated to Persian society or culture. It's like a total blank comes up unless it's related to the Greco Persian war. I have a rough idea of what Rome, Greece, and Egypt were like because of the amount of art and books I find on them, but I know nothing about Persia. Also there are tonnes of stuff on Greek and Greek philosophers and historians, but I don't know anything about Persian ones. Is there any source dedicated to Persian history?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rkxgq/why_are_there_so_many_books_on_rome_greece_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnh391b", "cnh9x9m"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["Part of this is simply what we find in popular literature. Because the classical past is very prominent in western memory and is a \"prestige\" topic it is easier to sell and publish books on the topic; in addition there are simply more people out there with the background needed to write on Greece and Rome. Egypt is less prominent in the \"Western Past\"(a terrible term but we'll use it) but its monumental architecture and spectacular funerary practices have given the subject a considerable public appeal as well. Having said that, there are a considerable number of very fine books on Persian history before the Islamic conquests. Weishofer's _Ancient Persia_ is a commonly recommended general overview of Persian History from the Achaemenid Empire to the Islamic conquests. For further reading on the Achaemenid Empire in particular, Briant's _From Cyrus to Alexander_ remains so far as I know the standard treatment of the subject, with a extensive bibliography on more detailed topics in the field.  ", "I don't have sources for this answer, so feel free to delete, but here are some general possibilities:\n\n1. Linguistical access. Roman texts were written in Latin, a lingua franca in Europe for a longtime. Scholars would have been familiar with Latin and this helped some of the revivals of interest in the Romans that occurred during various periods of European history. I am speculating, but I am guessing a European monk/scholar would be more likely to be able to read a Latin text than one written in a Persian script. \n\n2. Another linguistical point- Greek. Many early New Testament accounts were written in Greek. A familiarity with the language was important to many European scholars in a way that is not the same with any Persian script.\n\n3. Cultural continuity- Many western cultures have seen themselves as extensions of the Romans or Greeks. In the United States, the Founding Fathers were very interested in the classics. This is reflected in the Neoclassical architecture of the time(See Monticello or the Capital) and even the United State's motto was in Latin originally. The sense of being connected to the Romans or Greeks I think has generated more interest and scholarly work in the west than the Persians.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1ji6i5", "title": "What are the earliest examples of a North/South divide in England?", "selftext": "By this I mean the notion of an administrative/cultural centre in London that is separated meaningfully from the northern parts of the country? Examples of early resentment, if any can be found, would be appreciated.  ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ji6i5/what_are_the_earliest_examples_of_a_northsouth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbf1yzi"], "score": [2], "text": ["This cultural / administrative divide can be traced back at least as far as 11th Century. \n\nIn the reign of Edward the Confessor, Northumbria was regarded as a bit of a wild backwater and was never visited by Edward in his entire reign. Indeed, their own Earl Tostig Godwinson spent a large part of his time in Southern England, at court. Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs was unpopular with Northumbrians, who eventually mounted a minor rebellion that resulted in the death of some of Tostig's lieutenants. Eventually Northumbria chose their own earl: Morcar. After some bargaining, Edward was grudgingly forced to accept this, as there was little appetite for a civil war. \n\nWilliam the Conqueror famously 'harried' the North, which obviously caused some resentment to say the least. \n\nNorthumbria continued to be a problem for William for years after the initial invasion in 1066 with at least one of Williams local lords being murdered there.\n\nHere is what I believe to be a source: _URL_0_\n\n(I am new to AskHistorians so please tell me if I have broken any rules or if this post is bad in some way. Thanks)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comin,_Robert_de_(DNB00)"]]}
{"q_id": "w7ke4", "title": "What was the effect of marijuana on the ancient world?", "selftext": "did any other cultures criminalize it? did it help with scientific advancements? i never hear about weed in school other than health class and wonder if Historians can give some more context to its impact.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w7ke4/what_was_the_effect_of_marijuana_on_the_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5bav61"], "score": [3], "text": ["I don't actually know if they criminalised the drug or not, but the origin of our word cannabis is from the Akkadian word *qunubu*, meaning that in the Near East at least they had been aware of cannabis for a very long time. At least in a religious ritual context, it's clear that the Assyrians and Babylonians used cannabis, but it is entirely possible that it was *only* used in this context and there is no evidence for common household useage. You can detect chemical traces of drugs with modern archaeology, we've used it to detect opiate traces in a few containers (the ones i'm familiar with are from Bronze Age Cyprus).\n\nI'll be honest- of all the drugs that can be seen throughout history (rather than just the last 100-200 years) Cannabis does not seem to have made a big impact anywhere. Hemp was used as a material for weaving and clothing, so it was certainly useful to people. But off the top of my head, Opium certainly had more impact. It doesn't really seem to have been any more important than many other herbs and plants, and was certainly less important than grain, barley, olive trees, opium and salt in history to name a few natural products off the top of my head.\n\nI am less familiar with its recent history, i.e the Industrial Revolution and onwards, and someone familiar with that area may give you a different answer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1kffht", "title": "When did owning swimming pools become fashionable?", "selftext": "In other words...\n\nWhen did owning pools specifically for swimming at your home become a popular thing to spend your money on?\n\nDid the Romans go pool hopping? Did Charlemagne go skinny dipping in the backyard? Did one throw pool parties in one's manicured English garden? \n\nThanks!\n\n \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kffht/when_did_owning_swimming_pools_become_fashionable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbotx8w"], "score": [3], "text": ["In Rome and Greece, swimming was part of the education of elementary age boys and the Romans built the first swimming pools (separate from bathing pools). The first heated swimming pool was built by Gaius Maecenas of Rome in the first century BC. Gaius Maecenas was a rich Roman lord and considered one of the first patron of arts - he supported the famous poets Horace, Virgil, and Propertius, making it possible for them to live and write without fear of poverty. However, swimming pools did not became popular until the middle of the 19th century. By 1837, six indoor pools with diving boards were built in London, England. After the modern Olympic Games began in 1896 and swimming races were among the original events, the popularity of swimming pools began to spread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "61zs5d", "title": "Why did Hitler declare war on the US?", "selftext": "I understand the alliance stuff, but Japan made a dumb move considering their lack of resources. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/61zs5d/why_did_hitler_declare_war_on_the_us/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfikc0f"], "score": [26], "text": ["Modified from an [earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nAlthough it was in many respects a foolish blunder in hindsight, there was a lot of strategic calculation that went into German declaration of war on the United States. Hitler and the Germans did not so much see the declaration of war as the start of a *quid quo pro* process with Japan leading to a Japanese invasion of Siberia, but rather an opportunity to gain time and militarily isolate the United States by giving German armed forces a free hand in the Atlantic and encourage the Japanese to keep fighting in the Pacific.   \n\nBoth Hitler and German military planners were not on board with the bombing of Pearl Harbor itself mostly because they were completely ignorant of Japanese the scale and extent of Japanese planning. Although the Japanese occupation of French Indochina and the resulting US blockade of strategic raw materials  made it apparent that war in the Pacific was imminent, German leaders were in the dark about future military operations. Two days before Pearl Harbor, the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop actually hoped that America would be the one to instigate military aggression against Japan. \n\nVon Ribbentrop's thoughts on the situation in the Pacific was emblematic of much of German geostrategic thought in the winter of 1941. The actions of the USN in the Battle of the Atlantic in which US ships jettisoned most pretensions of neutrality indicated that the US was readying to enter into the war. Although an expansion of the war carried with it new uncertainties, a number of German military planners mistakenly concluded that Japan's entry into the was in the Pacific was largely beneficial to Germany's strategic interests. \n\nPart of this miscalculation stemmed from the dire situation Germany had found itself in at the end of 1941. Although Barbarossa had achieved spectacular gains, the German invasion had not achieved the desired result of a complete collapse of the Soviets. The strengthening Soviet resistance and counterattacks was a bitter pill for the Germans to swallow. Moreover, the strengthening of the British military position in North Africa and the Atlantic seemed to threaten German-occupied Europe's southern and western flanks. German planners hoped that Japanese conquests in East Asia and the Central Pacific would rectify this global strategic balance by forcing both the British and Americans to reorient their military resources to the Pacific. An OKW strategic assessment produced on 14 December outlined their expectations for the British response: \n\n > Securing her position in the Middle East has gained even greater importance for Britain since Japan's entry into the war-not only because of the Persian and Mesopotamian oil, on which the British navy in the Indian Ocean must depend once the oil wells of Borneo and Sumatra are lost to it, but also because of the especially important maintenance of sea communications through the Suez Canal and because of the air communications, based upon this region, between the mother country and India, East Asia, and Australia. Execution of this strategic task will no doubt be seen by Britain to be just as vital as the maintenance of her Indian-Malayan position, which is crucial for the safeguarding of India, Australia, and New Zealand. \n\nIn OKW's estimation, the Japanese conquest of SE Asian rubber, tin, and oil sources would deprive the British and Americans, and by extension the Soviets, of this strategic war material. The *Kriegsmarine*, facing its first serious reversals in the Battle of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, welcomed the thought that both the RN and USN meeting the Japanese naval challenge would give German and Italian naval forces time to regroup. The declaration of war gave the *Kriegsmarine* a free hand to attack American shipping without as much interference from the USN and RN. According to the Naval Staff's estimation, expanding the war would divide Allied naval power, which prior to Pearl Harbor was in seeming danger of uniting.  \n\nUnderlying this German enthusiasm for Japanese belligerence was the hope that the Japanese would present enough of a strategic diversion to allow German military forces to complete the job in the USSR they had begun the previous June. The defeat of the USSR remained the main strategic priority for Germany military planning. Only the *Kriegsmarine* evinced any great interest for a grand military hookup with the Japanese in India. Although both the Navy and von Ribbentrop urged Hitler to agree to a joint Axis declaration on India, the German leader refused on the grounds that such an anticolonial measure was not in the strategic interests of Germany. Hitler held out hopes that an anti-Churchill faction would come to the fore once Stalin had been beaten and threatening India would supposedly undercut support for a separate peace.  OKW began in 1942 tentative plans for a wider invasion of the Middle East, but only after the success of Blue's offensive in the Caucasus.  \n\nHitler's declaration of war on America gave German military much greater latitude to plan for a western defensive barrier. Expanding the war would also cow the various neutrals on Germany's flanks (Turkey, Spain, and Sweden) to accede to German demands. German entry into the war on Japan's side would also prevent the latter from making a separate peace prematurely. Although Hitler's government did not want to give sanction to Japan's anticolonial pretext for the war, it was sympathetic to Tokyo's request on 2 December for the Axis partners to never hold a separate peace, which culminated in the 11 December declaration for no separate peace. This was in keeping with the Third Reich's strategic thinking with regards to the Anglo-American powers in that it was in German interests to keep them preoccupied outside of areas controlled by Germany. So long as Japan was stiffened up to resist the Anglo-Americans, Germany strategic interests would be secured. OKW's 14 December report claimed the prognosis for the following year good for these four reasons:\n\n >  I) Within the period left to it before the full mobilization of the American war machine, Germany would reach its military objectives in the east, in the Mediterranean, and in the Atlantic.\n\n >  II) Germany would succeed, by political means, not only in inducing its allies to intensify their war efforts, but also in securing the periphery by bringing the flanking powers-hitherto neutral-of Turkey, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden into the continental defensive bloc.\n\n >  III) The Japanese offensive would have enough endurance and momentum to tie down a substantial part of the Anglo-American potential in the Pacific for a considerable time.  \n    \n > IV) Under these circumstances the United States would not be able to conduct an offensive two-ocean war in the foreseeable future.\n\nThe experience of 1942 would prove each of these suppositions unduly optimistic. In short, the Germans believed that they possessed both the time and the resources to meet the new strategic challenge. They fundamentally underestimated America's industrial capabilities and overestimated the ability of Japan to act as a sink for Anglo-American resources. Even more fatally, both Hitler and OKW overestimated both Germany's own ability to deliver a fatal blow in Operation Blue and their chances of securing their strategic flanks with secondary forces like DAK and the *Kriegsmarine*. \n\nThere was also a domestic component to Hitler's decision to declare war. One of the central mythologies at the center of National Socialism was that Germany was at the cusp of a victory in 1918 until stabbed in the back by the \"November Criminals.\" While much of the public invective of the NSDAP was directed at the Judeo-Bolshevik instigators of the November Revolution, there was a considerable concern behind the scenes that the German civilian population were duped into following peace. In this schema, Wilson's promise of an honest peace proved to be a siren call for the German public that had suffered greatly during the war. Consequently, the Third Reich devoted considerable resources to mollify domestic public opinion during the opening stages of the war. Goebbels's diary entries consistently noted an acute attention to German public opinion and disgruntlement. By taking the initiative out of the US's hands and declaring war on them, the declaration of war was being proactive by preventing another iteration of the 14 Points. Hitler's public declaration at the Reichstag went to great lengths to highlight America's Rainbow Plans and the pre-existing belligerency of the US in the Battle of the Atlantic. Hitler's speech troweled on a great deal of antisemitism as well, differentiating a strong Europe from an allegedly Jewish global conspiracy that stretched from Moscow, to London, and Washington. By painting the US as a self-interested power in thrall to Jews, Hitler was cutting off a possible redux of 1918 where America's offer of a geopolitical moral alternative ate away at German civilian support for the conflict. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3i6lg0/was_germany_onboard_with_the_japanese_plan_to/"]]}
{"q_id": "2dk7wd", "title": "What was Damascus steel?", "selftext": "I would like to know more about Damascus steel and have found two very different explanations for what it was. The first is that it was a form of pattern welding. The other is that it was a crucible steel. What actually was it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dk7wd/what_was_damascus_steel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjqhi92", "cjqln4i"], "score": [89, 23], "text": ["Truthfully, we are still trying to understand the process of Damascus steel! We still don't know how the ancients did it.\n\nIt's widely believed to be the process of tempering steel to make it stronger, studies have shown Damascus steel to contains nano-fibres which greatly increased it's strength and durability compared to other metals of the time.\n\nHowever we've only recently been able to duplicate the steel with modern techniques, as said we don't know how the it was actually done. And only in modern times have we had the technology to see and know that nano-fibres were the reason that made it stronger.", "It was both!\n\nThere's two types of steel called Damascus steel, you can't see a difference with your naked eye.\n\n  The first (pattern welding) is a folded steel, with two initial layers of high and low carbon steel.  This is not actually remarkable other than its appearance compared to other steels of the time.\n\nThe second, which the legends come from (its not up to that level, but the stuff *is* unique), is a crucible steel.  With and low carbon steel that contain one of vanadium, molybdenum or a third I forget.  Very very small amounts of these elements are needed, around 100 parts per million, the technique was likely lost because the iron mine the crucible version was being made of was shut down, and it was actually budget concerns that led the metallurgist who discovered this to use an ore with appropriate impurities, he knew they were in the wootz damascus steel but thought them too trace to be significant.\n\nSource: \nThe key role of impurities in ancient damascus steel blades    J. D. Verhoeven,    A. H. Pendray,    W. E. Dauksch \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.html?ref=Klasistanbul.Com"]]}
{"q_id": "42okwp", "title": "How legitimate are China's claims in the South China Sea?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42okwp/how_legitimate_are_chinas_claims_in_the_south/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czcdxks"], "score": [20], "text": ["Disclaimer: I am a Filipino poster, but I am of Chinese ethnicity. I'm just calling it as I see it based on my knowledge of international law.\n\nIf we're going to go by the Nine-Dash Claim then quite frankly the claims are a whole bunch of nonsense.\n\nFirst of all, territorial waters are only supposed to extend 12 nautical miles from a nation's coast line. To claim the South China Sea would require China to massively increase this internationally agreed limit. Even using the Exclusive Economic Zone definition - which extends 200 nautical miles from the coast, simply isn't enough to cover the South China Sea. At this point China's attempt to claim the entire sea already falls apart. Here is a map showing the Exclusive Economic Zone limits versus China's claim to the entire South China Sea:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever, some \"geniuses\" in China claim to have unearthed ancient documents that \"prove\" that the South China Sea was always Chinese along with the Spratley Islands. The problem is that these map actually date only from 1947, published by the Republic of China (Taiwan). Additionally, the Nine-Dash line is reliant on using reefs as the basis for extending territorial waters; which isn't recognized by international law.\n\nUnfortunately certain Chinese officials were apparently undeterred by the legal impossibilities, and instead had the reefs expanded using concrete until they could be considered real \"islands\" that could be considered for the purpose of counting territorial waters. This was why there was all this recent concern about Chinese construction in the South China Sea.\n\nAt this point the Philippines decided to literally take the Chinese to court at the UNCLOS (United Nation Convention on the Laws of the Seas) to stop the Chinese plans. And the Philippine team, to a lot of people's surprise, are actually winning the case handily at this point; by focusing on the \"ownership\" of a number of reefs in the Spratleys (e.g. Scarborough).\n\nTo elaborate, the Philippine government showed the records of several ships which were wrecked on these reefs in the late 1800s - and how _all_ of them chose _Manila_ (capital of the Philippines) as the court of arbitration when it came to resolving the insurance claim. These records were verified by neutral third parties (e.g. Lloyd's of London, which handled the insurance claims).\n\nHence, the Philippine government had _demonstrated_ that they they were already exercising legal jurisdiction over the disputed reefs since the late 1800s, or decades before the Nine-Dash Map was published. \n\nHad China really been serious about owning these reefs, then it should have filed complaints back in the 1800s protesting the arbitration in Manila courts. They never did, and thus by extension waived their own jurisdiction. And if you don't have jurisdiction over a piece of land, you certainly can't claim to have sovereignty over it.\n\nThis was why the general Chinese reaction to the hearings had been to snub it entirely and called for a return to negotiations. They knew they had been completely outfoxed on the legal front. That doesn't mean China is going to stop trying however; but it's certainly more cautious now as it does not want to be seen as breaking international law.\n\nEdit: Added a map."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://globalnation.inquirer.net/files/2014/03/South-China-Sea.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2pdjpf", "title": "What did people in ancient times think of dreams?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2pdjpf/what_did_people_in_ancient_times_think_of_dreams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmvpzce"], "score": [3], "text": ["Well, at least in ancient Egypt, eating feces in your dream meant you were going to become wealthy.  B. E. Shafer, ed., Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).\n\nIn Mesopotamia, dreams were usually matters of interpretation.  Some advanced scribes who had enough training would go on to specialize in dream interpretation.  I haven't spent much time with those texts, but (suffice it to say for an only mildly helpful answer), some thought they were a big deal and had a significant impact on the religion and politics of their time.\n\nWe could also readily consider Joseph from Genesis 37-50, who had several dreams which were then interpreted as being portentous about things to come involving him and his family.  Similarly, we see Daniel interpreting dreams for Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2vfjsf", "title": "When the Titanic sunk due to hitting an iceberg, how iceberg filled was that part of the ocean?", "selftext": "Were they in iceberg teratory or was it a berg that had drifted south and was reasonably unexpected? \n\nWas this a common thing? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vfjsf/when_the_titanic_sunk_due_to_hitting_an_iceberg/", "answers": {"a_id": ["coh6svh", "coh8png"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["The Titanic had taken a somewhat more northerly route than most liners normally had, and it was also sailing into an area (near the Grand Banks) where it had received warnings of floating bergs. At the time, no large ship had been lost to an iceberg, and it was thought that bergs did not pose a large danger to contemporary ships. (A similar passenger liner had rammed an iceberg in 1907 and was able to complete its voyage, though with damage.) \n\nSo yes, the ship was in known iceberg territory, which was not uncommon, and cutting the corner slightly closer to Newfoundland than most ships did, but there would not have been a sense on the ship that the situation or those waters were unusually dangerous. ", "not saying this isn't an r/askhistorians thing (it definitely is!) but are you cross posting this at something like r/askscience? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "985l7t", "title": "Any studies of the changing preferences for androgyny vs. polarized masculinity and femininity through history?", "selftext": "Topic. I\u2019d love any recommendations for books or articles on the subject!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/985l7t/any_studies_of_the_changing_preferences_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4dfvcf"], "score": [2], "text": ["if the topic is overly vague: specifically I\u2019m interested in any correlations between a timeline of these trends and the corresponding social moment, especially in terms of the political economy"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "bywccq", "title": "Collapse of the Tatars", "selftext": "I\u2019m aware that the Tatars were remnants of Genghis Khan\u2019s Mongol Empire and that they spent decades preying on the Russian Principalities but how did they all die? Because I feel like they did not last for that long. Did Russia conquer them all? Were they destroyed by rebels? Did something else I\u2019m not aware of happen to them? What was their fates?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bywccq/collapse_of_the_tatars/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eqofsnq", "f363boa"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I wrote an [answer](_URL_0_) on the history and idea of Tatars a few months ago, that might be of interest.\n\nThe rough idea is that a Chingissid state called the \"Golden Horde\" , which in turn broke up into a number of successor states, that were conquered by Muscovy/Russia in the 16th-18th centuries.\n\nBut Tatar people didn't \"all die\". There are still millions of ethnic Tatars! There are a number of different Tatar communities, the largest being the community in Russia that largely lives along the Volga River near the city of Kazan. Volga Tatars are the second-largest ethnic group in Russia after ethnic Russians, and have their own autonomous republic known as Tatarstan.\n\nAnother significant community of Tatars lives in Crimea, currently under Russian control. Large numbers of this community emigrated to Anatolia in the 19th century, when they stopped being a majority of the population, and the whole community was deported to Central Asia by the Soviet government in 1944 (they were allowed to return in 1991). \n\nThere are smaller communities of Tatars in Siberia, and in Poland-Lithuania, the latter known as \"Lipka Tatars\". This group is mostly assimilated into the local population (although some remain practicing Muslims), but have played a role in Polish history, notably aiding in the Polish defense of Vienna against the Ottomans in 1683. Some more famous people of Polish heritage who have Lipka Tatar ancestry include Charles Bronson and Martha Stewart.", "Many make a mistake by putting an equal sign between the Tatars and the Mongols. We have not only different languages \u200b\u200b(Tatars belong to the Turkic group and are therefore closer to Turks or Uzbeks), but also the origin itself. Tatars went from the Turkic people of the Bulgars, and the Mongols have a completely different ethnogenesis.\n\nTatars themselves suffered from the Mongols as well as the Russians. The ancient city of Bulgar was destroyed by the Mongol conquerors, and its inhabitants conquered. But later, due to the small number of Mongols, they assimilated with the local T\u00fcrks and formed khanates like the Golden Horde, which had some of the attributes even from the Mongols and where Genghisides ruled, that is, descendants of Genghis Khan. And initially it, and then other khanates on its land, kept Russian principalities and surrounding peoples at bay, but over time they weakened due to internal unrest, which resulted in the conquest of Muscovy (I personally hold the view that Russia essentially became the heir Golden Horde and other khanates, as she subjugated all the former khanates and headed for a similar policy.)\n\nWhat happened to the Turkic peoples conquered by the empire of Russia? They still live, some got freedom, some, I hope, will get it in the future."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/akql3m/what_is_tartary_does_it_exist/ef7b5ro/"], []]}
{"q_id": "aasfr1", "title": "The Goonies got me to wondering -- was there ever any actual piracy along America's Pacific coast? If so, what was it like?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aasfr1/the_goonies_got_me_to_wondering_was_there_ever/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecwrkqx"], "score": [7], "text": ["Most of the piracy along the America's Pacific Coasts were privateers, not piracy, and were limited to the South American Coast. It tended to not be as blood thirsty and prisoners were routinely released. And it was nowhere near as common as it was in the Atlantic, Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico and African coasts. \n\nKeep in mind that Spain had a pretty good strangle hold on Pacific Ocean and guarded the Southern Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean's pretty heavily between Drake's voyage and into the 1800s. On top of that, the Spanish didn't like to advertise that ships had been lost so they tended to keep things quiet when they were. They routinely surpassed ships logs and maps created by even their own explorers in an attempt to keep the \"undiscovered\" \"Northwest Passage\" a secret from other European powers. But even in the Pacific Ocean and with all their military might they still ran huge heavily armed Galleons and trade fleets to discourage piracy. \n\nThe other huge problem is logistics. From the 1500s through to the 1750s or so, Spain ruled the Pacific Coast and many the coastal cities there. From about the area of San Francisco northward was \"unsettled\" land populated only by Indians. If you were a pirate there were few places to go to get supplies or sell the treasure so you had to attempt to cross the Atlantic to China or India, or sail back around through the Southern Passage. There are some rumors of Spanish Pirates working the Pacific Coast, which makes sense as they would have been able to hoist up the Spanish flag before sailing into port to sell their goods. \n\nThe most famous privateer was Sir Francis Drake. He was involved in several expeditions as early as 1563 on the African Coast and in the Caribbean. In 1572 he commanded an expedition that successfully raided around Panama in 1572-73, and even captured the Spanish Silver Train at Nombre de Dios. That success led to Elizabeth I sending him to the Spanish owned Pacific Coast and in 1578 he captured a Spanish ship near Lima, and then chased down and captured the treasure ship Cacafuego. From there his travels are murky, speculation is that he may have sailed as far north as 55 degrees Latitude before turning around due to the cold weather. That would have put him somewhere about the Alaska Peninsula. He definitely claimed land for England. The exact location he did so is still unknown but today is generally accepted as being Drake's Bay in California. He might have even planted a colony there, an fact that is supported by how many less men he had later on. But the English falsified Log books and maps to keep Spanish spies from getting them. And all of them from this expedition were lost in a fire in 1698 at Whitehall palace. \n\nFrom there out most piracy was at the hands of Privateers actively challenging Spain's military might and supporting various South American countries in their attempts at independence from Spain. In the late 1700s England was directly challenging Spanish control of Pacific Coast between Northern California and Alaska. The Russians were pushing down the Alaska coast, and Spain was still dealing with rebellions through out South America which had severely sapped their military might in the previous centuries. A lot of these privateers were working incognito to dodge Spanish Spies in Europe, and again records were still routinely falsified so concrete evidence is hard to find. \n\nThe Spanish pushed back at these incursions. In 1789 the Nootka Incident happened after Esteban Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez seized two British and two American ships in order to strengthen Spanish Claims on Nootka Sound. The ships were later returned, and a treaty between America, Britain, and Spain established a trading zone that all three countries violated years later. Two of the ships involved in this incident (but not seized,) are still well known. One was the Columbia Ridiviva, of which the Columbia River was named after. The second is the Lady Washington, who's replica is a well known tall ship used in the Pirate of the Caribbean Movies.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut.... \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere are also tantalizing Native American legends all up and down the Pacific Coast that tell tales of what can only be ship battles and ship wrecks. Stories of huge \"war canoes\" crewed with light skinned men and creating clouds from their decks are a common tale. Men landing on beaches, killing captives and then burying them and heavy chests on the beach. Early explorers running across extremely fair or dark skinned Natives who must have taken ship wrecked crews into their tribes, Chiefs of tribes who are of obvious African decent, and even an occasional gold or silver trinket. Many of these legends still fuel rumors of pirate treasure,  one of the most famous being of a location called \"Neahkahnie Mountain.\" [Here is a copy of the legend I picked up many years ago for those who want a flavor of the tale](_URL_1_). I personally know people who still travel here after every major storm with metal detectors and shovels. \n\nIt doesn't help that for many decades [huge slabs of beeswax were found washed up on shore nearby](_URL_0_) directly fueling further speculation of treasure. \n\nThere are enough tales that I find it hard to believe that a portion of them aren't true, even accounting for people stretching the truth.  \n\nAnother tale surrounds Iron Jim Sallow, who was said to have buried treasure somewhere around what would become Seattle. But any information about him is of the same, rumors and uncertain stories with no evidence to back them up. In fact I can not find a single primary source for him, and suspect he may be a creation of one of the local \"Pirate\" groups that put on shows throughout the summer. \n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/beeswax_shipwreck/#.XCldQy3MyL4", "http://pnwphotoblog.com/legend-of-treasure-on-neahkahnie-mountain/"]]}
{"q_id": "2i5dao", "title": "What was religion like in the Palmyrene Empire?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2i5dao/what_was_religion_like_in_the_palmyrene_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckznolz"], "score": [2], "text": ["Like other religions of the Near East of the time.  The polytheist religion of Palmyra worshiped a number of gods and goddesses.  There was the triad of Beelshamem, Aglibol, and Yarhibol- who represent storm god, moon god, and sun god.  Other gods worshiped there include Baal Hammon, Manat, El, Allat, Poseidon, Shamash, Bel, Arsu and Azizu (the twin gods of morning and evening stars).\n\nCheck out 'The Pantheon of Palmyra' by Javier Teixidor.  There's plenty of information in there about the various gods and goddesses worshiped by the Palmyrenes.\n\nAs for the empire itself under Queen Zenobia, it would include the local cults of the gods of the people conquered, as well as Jews and Christians, in addition to the gods worshiped in Palmyra itself."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ue9mk", "title": "Were civilians able to cross \"borders\" during the US Civil War?", "selftext": "Suppose I live in the Confederacy. I'm planning to travel (business or pleasure), and I say to myself, \"Well, I've been to Richmond and Atlanta. How about New York City?!\" What would have happened had he tried to cross a border and visit New York? Would he have been allowed to do so? Let's say he makes to to New York (or any Union city). Would he have been arrested just for being there?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ue9mk/were_civilians_able_to_cross_borders_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5q5wzh"], "score": [2], "text": ["It was definitely possible, though it wouldn't have been without considerable hassles, and a few favors cashed in along the way. So, I assume by the way OP phrased the question that they are referring to sanctioned crossings through enemy lines (and not stealth missions where permission wasn't granted). In this case, yes, it was possible for civilians to cross from the Confederacy into the Union (and vice versa). We definitely have some examples of this, too. What was needed in most cases was a pass (a letter, really), granting specific permission for one person to move through a military district or region. These would have been written personally by the military commander in charge of that area, or someone very near the top of the military pecking order in that region. Yet even this would have only helped a person get out of an area, and would have done only so much to get them into the OTHER \"enemy\" region. For example, British observer Arthur Fremantle arrived in Texas in March 1863, and worked his way all the way to Richmond in time to move with Lee's army towards Gettysburg. Strictly an observer, Fremantle had managed to get permission from various generals along the way to move freely through the Confederacy, until he got a pass from Robert E. Lee himself attesting to his neutral status (the note essentially promised that Fremantle was not a spy). This pass allowed Fremantle to travel north into Union lines to continue observing (though it wasn't without some suspicion...however, Lee's note actually got him pretty far). The fact that Fremantle had several notes from high ranking Confederate officers attesting to his neutral status (and the basic fact that he was British) surprisingly got him into the Union, so it shows that such movement was possible under the right circumstances and with the right people attesting for them. \n\nOn the flip side, Mary Todd Lincoln had a half-sister named Emilie Todd Helm, which made her Abe Lincoln's step half-sister.  Emilie Helm's husband fought and died for the Confederacy, and Mary Todd asked Abe to grant Emilie a pass north so that the woman could visit for purely social reasons after the death of Helm's husband. Lincoln granted the request, and after the visit, wrote a pass for Emilie to go back south, which was honored. Obviously, if the president gives the okay, soldiers manning checkpoints are obliged to allow passage, so again, it wasn't without precedent for such a request to be granted. \n\nThis was not a normal occurrence, however, and would have required a high-ranking individual to sign the pass allowing movement, and some level of trust on the other side to recognize the validity of the enemy pass, and accept that the person was not a spy (so, a pass signed by Lincoln or Robert E. Lee would have been looked upon as fairly safe, as their \"word\" on the matter was seen as somewhat sacrosanct). \n\nA normal person without political connections on the level of Lee or Lincoln would have needed a pass from the commanding general in the area to get out of that side's lines, and would have needed some pre-arranged agreement to get into the other side's lines (so a parlay would have needed to have been called, where it was established that a person was coming through, and agreements would have been made to allow it based on extenuating circumstances). \n\n[Sources: Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'Team of Rivals'; Bruce Catton, 'Glory Road']"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "93a4mp", "title": "Can anyone recommend a good book of world maps with political borders from various periods throughout history?", "selftext": "I think this question fits this subreddit, but if it doesn't can someone suggest a better fit?\n\nI am looking for a gift for a child who is fascinated with what the political borders of the world were at different times and how they evolved into what they are today.\n\nI have looked a various listing of books, but it is often unclear exactly what maps are in the books or what the quality is (full page? Color?). I am hoping someone here can vouch for a book they think would be a good fit from personal experience. \n\nA specific request from the kid is a world map predating the formation of the USSR. I tried to find a globe of that, but they all seem so expensive. It seems the best bang for the buck would be a book. (although I would rather have a globe to avoid issues arising from projections).\n\nAny help is appreciated.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93a4mp/can_anyone_recommend_a_good_book_of_world_maps/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3chken", "e3dm9tg"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I can't give you any advice on the pre-USSR map specifically, but one I can personally vouch for is [this book](_URL_1_) called *Great City Maps*. It's a full-color collection of various surviving maps of great cities dating from Roman times up until about 1900. There are a couple of maps of Moscow and a couple of maps of St. Petersburg in there.\n\nI have it and it's a pretty great coffee table book. You're not going to get a huge in-depth study of any particular city, but the maps are all big and colorful, and are full reproductions of the originals. So you'll see stuff like a map of London in 1572, and the text will point out some of the highlights on the map from then, and what still exists and what doesn't and, to some extent, what happened. It also serves as a good overview of the history of maps, as you can see how much more detailed and accurate they got over the centuries.\n\nYou can see the table of contents in the link above, and a few more pages can be seen in [its Amazon preview](_URL_2_). Hopefully, that gives you enough to see if it's worth it. It should be said that the pages in the preview are from the first pages in the book, which are the oldest maps. As they move into the 1400s and later, they begin to have the detail that we're now used to. The dimensions of the book are large, so it looks better in real life than it does in the preview.\n\nBy the same publisher is [*Great Maps*](_URL_4_) which seems to be basically the same thing, except the maps are mostly country-wide, or continent-wide instead of city maps.\n\nFor the Russian maps, though I can't vouch for them myself, it looks like [*Restless Empire: A Historical Atlas of Russia*](_URL_0_) from Harvard University Press and [*The Penguin Historical Atlas of Russia*](_URL_3_) from Penguin Publishing are going to be two of your best bets. They both have smaller dimensions than the *Great Maps* books, but the *Restless Empire* book is 8.5\" x 11\"--the standard size of a sheet of paper. The Penguin book is smaller.\n\nI hope this helps. Good luck!", "The Cultural Atlas series has come out from several publishers, including Stonehenge, Facts on File, and Time-Life. *The Cultural Atlas of Russia and the Former Soviet Union* would be your target. It would have maps as the primary source of information with photographs and short essays on the development of countries in this area. I don't have this particular volume, but among the modern ones, I've found China  and Japan good. (There are historical atlases in the series, like Ancient Egypt or The Greek World.)\n\nLook for it at Amazon, _URL_0_, and Ebay to find best condition at best price.\n\nGenerally, what you're looking for is called an historical atlas. That is, it shows the world as it was, like pre-Revolutionary France or colonized Africa, rather than the present day. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674504677", "https://books.google.com/books?id=j4CNDAAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover", "https://www.amazon.com/Great-City-Maps-DK/dp/146545358X/", "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235017.The_Penguin_Historical_Atlas_of_Russia", "https://books.google.com/books?id=0HkRBAAAQBAJ"], ["Alibris.com"]]}
{"q_id": "1syh0s", "title": "How did the Romans brush their teeth", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1syh0s/how_did_the_romans_brush_their_teeth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce2xbai"], "score": [2], "text": ["The Natural History by Pliny the Elder is a very good source for this. \nA substance called *dentifricium* which was quite similar to our toothpaste was produced from powdered pumice [Plin. HN 36.42](_URL_1_) (\"Considered medicinally, pumice is of a resolvent and desiccative nature; for which purpose it is submitted to calcination, no less than three times, on a fire of pure charcoal, it being quenched as often in white wine. It is then washed, like cadmia,5 and, after being dried, is put by for keeping, in a place as free from damp as possible. [...] dentifrices, too, are prepared from it\"), or the calcinated bones of several animal species (e. g. the ashes of deers horns, wolf's heads, heads of mice, the pastern-bone of an ox). The latter are mentioned in [Plin. HN 28.49](_URL_0_) which is generally a good read on roman dentistry. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D28%3Achapter%3D49", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D36%3Achapter%3D42"]]}
{"q_id": "8aaly5", "title": "When did rhyming in poetry start? What culture implemented it, and how did it get passed on to the way we view rhyming poetry today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8aaly5/when_did_rhyming_in_poetry_start_what_culture/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwxn1qb"], "score": [3], "text": ["I will presume you're thinking of European poetry of Dante, Cavalcanti and Petrarca in particular as rhyme is found across the world, [including pre-Columbian America](_URL_0_) and [Ancient China](_URL_1_).\n\nUntil a better answer comes around I'll discuss the academic opinions known to the modernist poet Ezra Pound way back in the beginning of the century. \n\nThe problem with writing a narrative is that we will have to connect dots of poetry different times and in different languages and these dots can be connected in different ways.\n\nWell, the Florentine language poets explicitly harkened back to the troubadours of the Provence (Jaufr\u00e9 Rudel, Bernart de Ventandorn, Daniel Arnaut...). Their culture and language came to a downfall with the Cathar Crusade in the 13th century, but, presumably, *their* example has also been followed in Germany (Minnesang) and went, through France (Trouv\u00e8res), to England, with the Anglo-Norman poets Maistre Wace, Richard the Lionheart and Tumas de Britanje. For some reason, they are rarely even mentionned as *English* poets, so that you get a gaping nothingness between the Middle English of a Geoffrey Chausser and the Beowulf. \n\nSpeaking of which: one of the academic opinions mentionned by Pound seeks the roots of a troubadour's rhyme in such Germanic staff rhymed poetry as Beowulf and the Ludwigslied. Here academics (mostly German ones) count the lines that rhyme and come to the conclusion that a fashion is arising to rhyme together with the middle ages. The French academics instead sought the beginning of troubadours in North Africa (which happened to be French at that time), by drawing parallels between Andalusian Arabic poetry (such as that of ibn Zaydun) and, through christian Spanish folk poetry (such as the cantigas de Santa Maria), to Southern France. Pound finds the French position more convincing than the German one but we still have no explicit credit given by any of the troubadours."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/aztec-poetry-2-three-poems", "https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry"]]}
{"q_id": "24j50j", "title": "Does World War I actually deserve the title of World War?", "selftext": "My vague impression of it is that it was contained to Europe and parts of the Middle East.   Was there major fighting in the rest of the world that actually warrants the name?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24j50j/does_world_war_i_actually_deserve_the_title_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch7o52h", "ch7okkl", "ch7styc", "ch7to32"], "score": [21, 13, 3, 2], "text": ["The UK in 1914 was a world power having bases and territory directly and indirectly under its control on every continent. \n\nGermany also had land (though much smaller then the UK) on several continents.\n\nThere where battles that took place outside of the trenches and the middle east. For example the [Siege of Tsingtao](_URL_1_) was in the Pacific while the [Battle of Coronel](_URL_0_) was in South America.\n\nThus we can see Battles taking place in South America, Africa, China, Europe, and the Middle East. By any definition that is world wide combat. \n\nHowever it is also considered a world war because it involved thanks to Empire every continent and almost all the major power of the day. The US, Russia, Germany, France, UK, Italy, and Japan where all involved.", "The majority of the fighting took place in Europe (the Western and Eastern fronts, Italy, the Balkans, Gallipoli), but non-European Ottoman territory saw plenty of combat, too (Egypt/Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus).  The naval war stretched around the world, with German commerce raiders active in the Pacific and Indian oceans early in the war, and major battles at Coronel and the Falkland Islands.  On land, the German colonies saw varying degrees of conflict: most of Germany's colonies fell very quickly, but Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck led a successful guerilla campaign in German East Africa which lasted until the end of the war.\n\nStill, *most* of the fighting was in Europe.  But there's another reason to call WWI a *World* war--belligerents from all over the world participated.  Tens of thousands of soldiers from the British Commonwealth, as well as the British and French colonial empires, fought in Europe and elsewhere.  Other belligerents included Japan, the United States, and a [long list of others](_URL_0_).  \n\nReally, I think the question to ask is whether the First World War actually deserves the title of *First*.", "The term 'world war' only entered English, most likely from the German term 'Weltkrieg', which means world war, a handful of years before the First World War.  Contrary to what the term would lead you to think it  didn't mean a war fought across the globe.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of world war was a war involving the world's major nations.  Under that definition it was obviously a world war as the world's major nations were involved.  \n\n\n", "/u/winterking07 touched on this a little bit, but there was significant fighting in Africa. German Southwest Africa (Namibia) was invaded by the British, which was initially repulsed before finally succeeding. In German East Africa Paul Von Lettow Vorbeck beat the British at Tanga and then ran circles around an invading South African Army. \n\nThe Japanese attacked Germany's colonies in the Pacific and occupied them. The other instances have been touched on by the other posters.\n\nHowever, there's another reason that I haven't seen why WWI is a global war. Even if most parts of the world didn't see fighting, the vast majority of the world was mobilized for war production, and sent millions of men to fight in Europe. This was because to have the resources to fight such a massive conflict all the major powers had to lean on their Empires, which gave the entire world at least some stake in the conflict.\n\nThe First World War Episode Two: Global War, has a great overview of this. Also, chapter two or three of Peter Hart's \"The Great War\" has a great overview of the naval warfare in a global context."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Coronel", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tsingtao"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_World_War_I"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "27yirw", "title": "How did the lion, an African animal, come to be so prominent in Chinese art and sculpture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27yirw/how_did_the_lion_an_african_animal_come_to_be_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci5mhod", "ci5mk4o"], "score": [9, 10], "text": ["Not a direct answer to your question, but just to point out that historically, the range of the lion extended across much of the Near East and well into South Asia. See [this map](_URL_0_).", " > an African animal\n\n I can't comment on why Chinese culture focuses on lions, but it's worth pointing out that lions once ranged throughout much of Asia as well. Although by now the only Asian lions left are in the Gir forest in India. \n\nConsidering their [historic range]( _URL_0_), it's not surprising that they could have a significant influence on a lot of Asian cultures"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion#mediaviewer/File:Lion_distribution.png"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Lion_distribution.png"]]}
{"q_id": "5m9kum", "title": "Old paintings and portraits", "selftext": "Always wondered this and thought I'd ask, how come in nearly all older paintings dating back pre 1700's people just look... so weird. Was everyone terrible at painting or did people look a lot different. I know people say it's the style of paint but surely with mirrors around people would look at the paintings of themselves and think 'god thats ugly' just figured I'd ask anyone's insight to this year long mind boggle ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m9kum/old_paintings_and_portraits/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dc1zsug"], "score": [2], "text": ["Could you specify what you mean by \"weird\"?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "70pz3i", "title": "What did being wealthy look like in the bronze age?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/70pz3i/what_did_being_wealthy_look_like_in_the_bronze_age/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn5ibf5", "dn6kzip"], "score": [954, 2], "text": ["This is a pretty broad question both geographically and chronologically, so I'll limit my answer to Middle and New Kingdom Egypt and can provide comparisons with other regions and time periods if necessary.\n\nTurning first to houses, the site of Lahun provides examples of houses of different sizes and levels of complexity. Lahun was founded as a pyramid town of Senusret II and flourished during the Middle Kingdom; a town plan can be seen [here](_URL_16_). Domestic space at Lahun consists of the \"mayor's house\" on the acropolis, five northern mansions, three southern mansions, eastern housing, and western housing. The latter two were fairly simple compared to the mansions; comparative floor plans [can be seen here](_URL_24_). A mansion at Lahun consisted of a reception hall, sleeping quarters, an office, servants' quarters, and workshops and food preparation areas. Egyptian tomb models depict many of the parts of the house of an elite Egyptian family, including the [granary](_URL_25_), [butchery](_URL_7_), [livestock pens](_URL_13_), [weaving workshop](_URL_9_), [baking and brewing facilities](_URL_11_), and [carpentry workshop](_URL_3_). A [garden and pool](_URL_19_) formed the center of the house. Finally, the exterior of the house contained porticoes used for public appearances and [cattle counts](_URL_5_). \n\nWealthy Egyptians had many different ways to entertain themselves. [Banquets](_URL_8_) were quite popular, and [musicians and dancers](_URL_10_) as well as [harpists and storytellers](_URL_14_) were hired to entertain guests. To relax and escape the heat, wealthy Egyptians often took boat excursions into the marshes for [fishing and fowling](_URL_2_). These [boating excursions](_URL_17_) often involved numerous people. \n\nAncient Egypt had several grades of linen, including \"royal linen\" (*s\u0161r nsw*) and \"fine linen\" (*\u0161mat nfrt*). Elite clothing was therefore distinguished from the clothing of commoners by quality as much as complexity. For a comparison of the clothing worn by commoners and the clothing of the Egyptian elite, see this [New Kingdom tomb painting](_URL_27_); note the quality of the sheer linen worn by Nakht, the tomb owner. Egyptian male nobles sometimes received the [gold of honor](_URL_6_) from the king as a sign of favor, and elite Egyptian women wore elaborate [jewelry](_URL_21_) and [wigs](_URL_20_) as a mark of their status. The elite also used [makeup](_URL_15_) and [perfume](_URL_23_), which was indicated in art as a cone atop the head.\n\nMany, but certainly not all, wealthy Egyptians were literate. The [Heqanakht papyri](_URL_22_) provide a rare glimpse of literacy within a middle class family during the Middle Kingdom. The papyri, written in a lovely hieratic hand, are the remnants of a correspondence between a priest and his family. Heqanakht seems to have been a rather irritable fellow, and his letters are full of indignation and criticisms on how the household is being run in his absence. One of his sons, for example, seems to have been harassing his father's new wife.\n\n > As this man lives for me - it's Ip l'm referring to - whoever shall make any sexual advance against my new wife, he is against me and I against him. Since this is my new wife and it is known how a man's new wife should be helped, so as for whoever shall help her, it's the same as helping me. Would even one of you be patient if his wife has been denounced to him? So should I be patient! How can I remain with you in the same community if you won't respect my new wife for my sake? \n\nEgyptian status was in many ways tied to literacy, and the \"Satire of the Trades\" notes the benefits of being a scribe while denigrating other professions.\n\n > See, there's no profession without a boss, \n\n > Except for the scribe; he is the boss. \n\n > Hence if you know writing,\n\n > It will do better for you\n\n > Than those professions I've set before you,\n\n > Each more wretched than the other.\n\nElite Egyptian men were responsible for producing and copying almost all surviving Egyptian literature, such as the [library of Qenherkhopeshef](_URL_0_) at Deir el-Medina. \n\nWhen wealthy Egyptians died, they were buried in elaborate tombs that they prepared before their death. Burials typically consisted of a [rock-cut tomb](_URL_26_), a [painted coffin](_URL_4_), and [canopic jars](_URL_12_) for internal organs. Elite burials of the 18th Dynasty often included [food and furniture](_URL_18_) as well. Tombs often contained lengthy biographies outlining the career of the tomb owner. For example, the tomb of Weni contained an autobiography shedding light on Old Kingdom history. An excerpt:\n\n > When there was a secret charge in the royal harem against Queen Weret-yamtes, his majesty made me go in to hear (it) alone. No chief judge and vizier, no official was there, only I alone; because I was worthy, because I was rooted in his majesty's heart; because his majesty had filled his heart with me. Only I put (it) in writing together with one other senior warden of Nekhen, while my rank was (only) that of overseer of royal tenants. Never before had one like me heard a secret of the king's harem; but his majesty made me hear it, because I was worthy in his majesty's heart beyond any official of his, beyond any noble of his, beyond any servant of his.\n\n > When his majesty took action against the Asiatic Sand-dwellers, his majesty made an army of many tens of thousands from all of Upper Egypt: from Yebu in the south to Medenyt in the north; from Lower Egypt: from all of the Two-Sides-of-the-Houses and from Sedjer and Khen-sedjru; and from lrtjet-Nubians, Medja-Nubuians, Yam-Nubians, Wawat-Nubians, Kaau-Nubians; and from Tjemeh-land.\n\n > His majesty sent me at the head of this army, there being counts, royal seal-bearers, sole companions of the palace, chieftains and mayors of towns of Upper and Lower Egypt, companions, scout-leaders, chief priests of Upper and Lower Egypt, and chief district officials at the head of the troops of Upper and Lower Egypt, from the villages and towns that they governed and from the Nubians of those foreign lands. I was the one who commanded them - while my rank was that of overseer of royal tenants - because of my rectitude, so that no one attacked his fellow, so that no one seized a loaf or sandals from a traveler, so that no one took a cloth from any town, so that no one took a goat from anyone...\n\nFor further reading, I highly recommend [*High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt*](_URL_1_) by John Baines.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "Related question: would the Iliad and Odyssey provide a partial answer to OP's question? The events take place during the Bronze Age in Greece, and the main characters are wealthy people. The issue that remains is how accurate those depictions are."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/library/dem.html", "https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Experience-Ancient-Studies-Egyptology/dp/1845533003", "http://www.irequireart.com/i/artwork/710-image-1600-1600-fit.jpg", "http://www.touregypt.net/images/touregypt/workshop.jpg", "http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/eg/original/DP342608.jpg", "http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/egyptian-civilization-middle-kingdom-xi-dynasty-wooden-model-the-of-picture-id122213982", "https://scontent-sea1-1.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/s480x480/e35/16583620_1706958369334185_1778633810829639680_n.jpg?ig_cache_key=MTQ0ODg2NzM0ODg3NzgwNTQ4NQ%3D%3D.2", "http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/eg/original/DP351556.jpg", "http://www.top10n.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Top-10-Most-Famous-Ancient-Egyptian-Feasts-.gif", "http://www.eloquentpeasant.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/weaving-1024x658.jpg", "https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/c4/ee/67c4ee43c72c651c4175a342790fc77f.jpg", "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-U732jCS5CAY/WbDR1UH9pwI/AAAAAAAAJ8w/GQ6O80uRWuYexzBiOZURoDqW1bNnvMz9ACLcBGAs/s1600/AncientEgyptianBakeryBrewery.jpg", "https://cowofgold.wikispaces.com/file/view/ps317224_lll.jpg/151612101/299x182/ps317224_lll.jpg", "http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/eg/original/DT234927.jpg", "http://www.touregypt.net/images/touregypt/music8.jpg", "https://hairanddeathinancientegypt.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/woman-with-mirror-papyrus-of-torino-ancient-egypt-e1405099505989.jpg?w=300&amp;h=201", "http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/lahun/townplan.gif", "http://maritimehistorypodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/DT1529.jpg", "http://www.deirelmedina.com/lenka/TurinKha.html", "https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/historyofegyptone10/files/11990382.jpg", "http://solarey.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Princess-sit-hathor-yunet-01-e1471790896857.jpg", "http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/hb/hb_16.1.3_av2.jpg", "http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/eg/web-large/DP351757.jpg", "http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/images/incensecone.jpg", "http://slideplayer.com/slide/9481022/29/images/5/Plan+of+the+Northern+Section+of+Kahun,+1880-1874+BCE,+modern+el-Lahun.jpg", "https://traveltoeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wpid-Photo-201410180837459.jpg", "https://describingegypt.com/tours/sennedjem", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Tomb_of_Nakht_%282%29.jpg"], []]}
{"q_id": "8wjd2x", "title": "AskHistorians Podcast 115 - The Friends They Loathed - Quaker Religion and Persecution in the American Revolution", "selftext": "[**Episode 115 is up!**](_URL_2_/askhistorians-podcast-115-the-friends-they-loathed-quaker-religion-and-persecution-in-the-american-revolution)\n\nThe [AskHistorians Podcast](_URL_2_) is a project that highlights the users and answers that have helped make r/AskHistorians one of the largest history discussion forums on the internet. You can subscribe to us via [iTunes](_URL_0_), [Stitcher](_URL_9_), or [RSS](_URL_2_/rss), and now on [YouTube](_URL_11_) and [Google Play](_URL_5_). You can also catch the latest episodes on [SoundCloud](_URL_1_). If there is another index you'd like the cast listed on, let me know!\n\n**This Episode:**\n\nToday we talk with /u/UncoveredHistory, better known as Jason Aglietti. He is a public librarian in Baltimore and he just finished his Master\u2019s thesis from University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he wrote and defended his thesis The Friends They Loathed: The Persecution of Maryland Quakers During the Revolutionary War.\n\nJason will tell us all about the lives of the Quakers in the American colonies from their founding to their persecution in the revolutionary war. This is NOT the history you usually hear about the revolutionary war, and Jason gives us a lot of new things to think about!\n\n \n\nFinding The Maryland 400, the history project Jason worked on and talks about [can be found here](_URL_7_). Jason's blog is [here](_URL_10_).\n\n**Questions? Comments?**\n\nIf you want more specific recommendations for sources or have any follow-up questions, feel free to ask them here! Also feel free to leave any feedback on the format and so on.\n\nIf you like the podcast, please rate and review us on [iTunes](_URL_0_).\n\nThanks all!\n\n[Previous episode and discussion](_URL_4_).\n\nNext Episode: /u/thucydideswasawesome is back!\n\nWant to support the Podcast? Help keep history interesting through the [AskHistorians Patreon](_URL_3_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8wjd2x/askhistorians_podcast_115_the_friends_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e1vwo3j", "e1w2yoa", "e27y18u"], "score": [4, 4, 2], "text": ["Thank you as always to the incredible podcast team and all of you who participate on it! Looking forward to sitting down and having a listen. ", "I\u2019m happy to answer any questions!", "This was really interesting.  You mentioned briefly that by the 1760s, Quaker dominance in Pennsylvania was declining.  Can you tell us anything more about the changing religious demographics of Pennsylvania in the mid-to-late 18th century?  Was this shift due mostly to immigration or because people were converting to other religious communities?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-askhistorians-podcast/id812302476?mt=2&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ign-mpt=uo%3D8", "https://soundcloud.com/user679855208", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com", "https://www.patreon.com/askhistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8pk9ip/askhistorians_podcast_113_the_history_of_medicine/", "https://play.google.com/music/podcasts/portal#p:id=playpodcast/series&amp;a=100831514", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/rss", "https://msamaryland400.wordpress.com/", "http://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-115-the-friends-they-loathed-quaker-religion-and-persecution-in-the-american-revolution", "http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tas-stacey/the-askhistorians-podcast", "https://jasonaglietti.wordpress.com/", "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJudPwztZyg2BQjhetw_bww"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nmyx0", "title": "Did Ancient Greece ever have sectarian conflicts? What were the major religious lines of division?", "selftext": "I'm wondering if Ancient Greece ever saw sectarian conflict on the scale that we have in recent(ish) history - I.e Catholics v. Protestants or Sunni v. Shia - and if so, what were the major areas of division? Or did everyone largely get along in an inclusive polytheistic system?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nmyx0/did_ancient_greece_ever_have_sectarian_conflicts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cckbnjm"], "score": [2], "text": ["By Sectarian, I\u2019m taking from your question that you mean religious and not territorial sectarian violence. Because the Greeks had a whole lot of territorial violence that could be defined as Sectarian. Religions could be used as a spark for a conflict but there wasn\u2019t constant sectarian religious warfare like the Catholics/IRA v. England, Catholics v. Protestants, Muslim v. Christian,Muslim v. Hindu,etc...\n\n While we rattle off names like Zeus,Ares,Artemis,Hera,etc\u2026 the various city-states had their own interpretations of each usually. The Idea of Ares in Sparta would be different than the one in Athens or Argo. They\u2019d also often have their own holidays/festivals/holy days. The Spartans were famously late for the Battle of Marathon because they had a religious observance(The Carnea festival honoring Apollo) and couldn\u2019t march until it was completed. Athens didn\u2019t wasn\u2019t beholden to the Carnea so they marched to Marathon to meet the Persians.\n\nAlso, cities and areas would have their own preferred gods like Athena and Athens, Helios for Rhodes,etc.. As to them fighting over their various interpretations, it was never a primary reason. It may have been thrown out as a secondary reason but the Greek City-States fought amongst themselves over the normal things: Land, Supplies,Money or Insults.\n\nI think a big reason for a lack of large-scale religious sectarian violence is that there were just so many different religions,cults, mystery cults,etc\u2026 floating around Greece. The island of Delos was a major port for trading so it came in contact with the levant, north Africa, Italy,etc\u2026 It had Greek religious temples, a temple to the Philistine god Baal and even a synagogue. It\u2019d be real hard to fight solely from a religious sectarian view when your neighbors,family members,etc.. have different religions. It\u2019d be exhausting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3x0brs", "title": "If you're breed into a war driven society like the Spartans, Mongols, Romans, etc. Is it a highly likely chance the soldiers still experience PTSD.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x0brs/if_youre_breed_into_a_war_driven_society_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy0f372"], "score": [2], "text": ["Insofar as PTSD is the result of neurological changes due to overexposure to traumatic situations, there is no reason why conditioning and training should make anyone less susceptible to it. Arguably the training itself, depending on the methods used, could become a cause of PTSD in itself.\n\nIn any case, I'm not sure to what extent the societies you mention were \"war driven\". Recent work by Stephen Hodkinson has shown that Sparta, for one, was not a militaristic society at all. It did not even have a military. Its social conditioning was focused on fostering obedience and endurance, and the outward features of its culture were intended to minimise and hide differences of wealth and status within the citizen body. The purpose of this entire system was not to create perfect soldiers, but to create a perfectly stable society, in which neither the destitution of the common people nor the rivalries of the elite would lead to an overthrow of the established political and legal institutions, as it did everywhere else in Greece on a regular basis. Sparta was not a military powerhouse but an elaborate and remarkably successful experiment in social engineering.\n\nThe Roman approach to warfare became more organised and disciplined during the mid-Republic, but I doubt the average Roman citizen would regard himself as bred for war. Most of them were farmers and labourers who were called to arms only at need. The rise of the professional army went hand in hand with the release of ordinary citizens from military duties, allowing them to focus entirely on their normal everyday activities as war became the business of those who chose a career in it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6cqnyj", "title": "When PTSD was officially recognized as mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, were there a substantial amount of people that denied PTSD's existence/credibility? and why?", "selftext": "In recent years, there have been many issues where the public has debated on if an idea is credible science or pseudo-science. To keep this politically neutral I won't list any of the present issues, but we should have at least heard of them.\n\nHowever, when PTSD was officially recognized as mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, were there a substantial amount of people denying PTSD's existence/credibility? I ask this because before PTSD was recognized, it seems like many people condescended and ignored people with shell shock, as it was called back then, as Virginia Woolf's *Mrs. Dalloway* shown. So when PTSD was diagnosed as a mental illness, did some people deny its status saying *\"people don't have PTSD. They are just cowards!\"* and how numerous were they?\n\nI'm sorry if this post has some misconceptions about PTSD and its history. I was born in 1998 and most of what I know about PTSD comes from *The Legend of Korra* and [these](_URL_1_) two [posts.](_URL_0_)\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cqnyj/when_ptsd_was_officially_recognized_as_mental/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dhxgqa6"], "score": [4], "text": ["The profession of clinical psychology in America actually came into being specifically because of soldiers suffering psychological distress as a result of their wartime experiences in World War II. In America during World War II, psychologists were seen as valuable by the U.S. military; of the ~4000 psychologists in a 1942 survey, about 25% were employed by the military. However, at this point, professional psychologists were either researchers or people who performed psychological testing or applied psychological principles in a broad sense. So, for example, a professional psychologist in the U.S. military might administer IQ tests or other suitability tests for the military, or might serve in advisory capacities on how to best increase the speed of production on factory lines (and so forth). Psychologists in 1942 weren't sitting in rooms with people talking about their problems. Instead, that was what psychiatrists - medical doctors specialising in mental illness - did.\n\nHowever, at the end of the war, there were 44,000 hospitalised veterans who were hospitalised for psychological reasons, presumably many of which had symptoms of what we'd now call post-traumatic stress disorder, though it wasn't called as such at the time. As a result - and because there just weren't enough psychiatrists to keep up with demand - in 1946, the VA set up clinical psychology training institutions at many major U.S. universities, who aimed to turn out graduates who could apply psychological theory to the art of therapy. \n\nIn general, the early clinical psychologists did not seem to spend much time arguing that their military psychiatric population had something like post-traumatic stress disorder which manifested differently in some people but was basically the same; a [very early 1946 paper by Abraham Luchins](_URL_0_), for example, trying out a group psychotherapy on his patients doesn't try to classify the disorder at all, or divide patients into different groups. That said, there's a ['War Bulletin' in a 1946 issue of the *Journal of Clinical Psychology*](_URL_1_) which lists a variety of different psychological conditions. In this war bulletin, the conditions that seem most like PTSD to me, judging by their descriptions, are divided into three conditions: 'transient personality reactions to acute or special stress', 'combat exhaustion', and 'acute situational maladjustment' (you can see the descriptions on the preview page on the link - they're obviously more general guides than the bullet point 'must have 6 or more'-style lists of the DSM-III from 1980). So clearly, at an institutional level in the U.S. military post World War II, there was an awareness that soldiers were being hospitalised for being unable to cope with the stress of their war experiences, and their re-integration into society. \n\nOne of the things to point out here, therefore, is that both psychologists and psychiatrists in the mid-20th century were generally unconcerned with diagnosis in the systematic way that we would now understand a diagnosis like PTSD. Instead, in general, there's much more focus on the cause of the symptoms rather than the broad pattern of symptoms. In American psychiatry this speaks to Freud's influence - he was less concerned with differentiating between anxiety and depression, and more concerned with the childhood issues that might be causing the symptoms. In clinical psychology, this likely spoke to the influence of behaviourism, an influential theory within psychology at the time, which argued that environmental stimuli played a large role in behaviour (and that, as a result, you could alter the environmental influences to alter the behaviour); clinical psychologists at this point, therefore, would in general focus more on the environmental stimuli connected to the upsetting emotional disturbances of soldiers, and less on the taxonomy of those disorders (PTSD treatment still does focus on identifying environmental stimuli that might be triggering flashbacks and the like).\n\nThe difference between 1946 and 1980 is that, within psychology, the influence of behaviourism waned, replaced by cognitivism (which argued that internal psychological modules that were often domain-specific played a large role in behaviour - cognitivism was much more inclined to seeing a *thing* called PTSD inside the mind than behaviourism was). Similarly, in psychiatry, the Freudian influence waned as psychiatrists became able to prescribe reasonably effective drugs for many disorders. Freudian ideas were replaced by more obviously medical ideas about psychiatric disorders being caused by, say, imbalances in brain chemicals like serotonin.\n\nThe DSM-III in 1980 - where post-traumatic stress disorder was first named as a specific disorder - was influential precisely because it reflected this new *medical* understanding amongst psychiatrists; it's fundamentally designed to look for constellations of symptoms that commonly occur together, so that psychiatrists can get a sense of what medications work best for what constellations of symptoms. It's safe to say that the disorders in the DSM-III do broadly reflect conventional wisdom amongst psychiatrists on what disorders were important to treat. These days, when new disorders are added to the DSM, it generally denotes awareness amongst psychiatrists that people are coming to them with distressing symptoms that do not neatly fit into existing categories.\n\nOf course, in an age where Freud's influence was waning but not entirely absent, not all psychiatrists were particularly happy about the medical slant of the DSM. Michael Trimble, writing a 1985 book chapter about the history of the PTSD concept, complains that 'post-traumatic neurosis' - which psychiatrists had been using previously to the DSM-III - is a perfectly fine term that the compilers of the DSM-III had avoided because it was too Freudian in its implications. Nonetheless, while Trimble grumbles about the DSM-III concept of PTSD somewhat, he ultimately thinks that the PTSD diagnosis is a good thing, because it means that there will be wider recognition that there are sometimes long delays between traumatic events and PTSD symptoms, and so sufferers will be more widely able to get treatment and insurance funding for that treatment - the DSM-III diagnosis at least seems very scientific and medical.\n\nThe question of how the wider culture reacted to psychological disorders in general is almost another topic on its own - but there was a slow increase in how sympathetic wider Anglophone culture was towards people with psychiatric disorders which started in the 1960s. The hippie movement famously flouted society's expectations, and seemed to enjoy the use of brain-altering chemicals and thus had a certain degree of sympathy for other people who also flouted society's expectations because of altered brain chemistry, such as schizophrenics. Similarly, people in the hippie movment like John Lennon of the Beatles played a role in the popularity of psychological fads like primal scream therapy. In the 1970s, the therapy session was a common trope in, say, Woody Allen movies, and of course the 1975 movie *One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest* (based on a book originally written in the 1960s by Ken Kesey, a prominent figure in the hippie movement) portrayed the inmates of a psychiatric hospital in a more flattering light than psychiatric nurses, at least. By the 1990s, you had an influential, popular band like Nirvana with songs called things like 'Lithium' and 'I Hate Myself And I Want To Die', and much of the alternative movement in rock music wrestled with mental illnesses like depression, addiction, and anxiety; Chris Cornell of Soundgarden sadly comes to mind here as just one example of a prominent rock star of the era who was open about suffering from depression.\n\nI've taken the broader context route here rather than the specific answer to your question, but if there was pushback against the DSM-III amongst the public, it largely wasn't particular to DSM-III, but instead was about the medicalisation of mental illness in general. After all, acceptance of mental illness was associated with the hippie movement, and the hippies were not popular in some quarters of American society. For some people, mental illness is fundamentally not medical, because it's a disorder of a fundamentally non-material soul; they instead might believe mental illness as being fundamentally a sign that the person needs to accept Jesus into their life. And for people with right-wing authoritarian personalities, for whom strength is an important marker of a person, mental illness is often considered shameful because it's indicative of fundamental weakness. There was talk in the 1970s of 'post-Vietnam syndrome', whereby PTSD seemed to sometimes have an onset delayed by years, which previously hadn't been discussed much. There was also some speculation that 'post-Vietnam syndrome' might be related to the ambivalent-at-best way that soldiers who fought in Vietnam were often treated, in comparison to returned soldiers from previous wars. This certainly would have been a current in popular culture as the concept of PTSD was debated and codified in the DSM-III in the late seventies."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://redd.it/1ke4z8", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63ujea/are_there_any_examples_of_ptsd_from_early_wars_or/"], "answers_urls": [["http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1097-4679\\(194607\\)2:3%3C231::AID-JCLP2270020305%3E3.0.CO;2-K/full", "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1097-4679\\(194607\\)2:3%3C289::AID-JCLP2270020316%3E3.0.CO;2-O/full"]]}
{"q_id": "ei21fz", "title": "Adult adoption seems to have been very common by the late Roman Republic; was this a political development, driven by social forces, or interpersonal ones (or something else)? Was it particular to the aristocratic class or common in general? Do we know how it developed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ei21fz/adult_adoption_seems_to_have_been_very_common_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fcn7xru"], "score": [547], "text": ["On his 62nd birthday, the emperor Hadrian - tormented by an illness that had crippled him and left him subject to bouts of murderous rage - convened a council of advisers at his bedside. Painfully shifting his dropsy-stiffened limbs, he delivered a short address about his succession plans. The historian Cassius Dio (who wrote nearly a century later) gives this version:\n\n\"I, my friends, have not been permitted by nature to have a son, but you have made it possible by legal enactment. Now there is this difference between the two methods \u2014 that a begotten son turns out to be whatever sort of person Heaven pleases, whereas one that is adopted a man takes to himself as the result of a deliberate selection. Thus by the process of nature a maimed and witless child is often given to a parent, but by process of selection one of sound body and sound mind is certain to be chosen. For this reason I formerly selected Lucius before all others...But since Heaven has bereft us of them, I have found as emperor for you in his place the man whom I now give you, one who is noble, mild, tractable, prudent, neither young enough to do anything reckless nor old enough to neglect aught, one who has been brought up according to the laws and one who has exercised authority in accordance with our traditions, so that he is not ignorant of any matters pertaining to the imperial office, but could handle them all effectively...\" (69.20)\n\nThus Hadrian announced his plans to adopt the man we know as Antoninus Pius, who would succeed him a few months later.\n\nRoman adoption might best be conceptualized as an oligarchic society's response to demographic realities. Thanks largely to cripplingly high rates of child mortality, many Roman families failed to produce a male heir. Adoption allowed a childless man to perpetuate his family- a concern to all classes, but most pressing and visible among the aristocracy. There were two legal forms of adoption - one for those who had previously paterfamilias of their own family, another for those who had been under the paternal power of another - but the upshot in each case was to make one man the legal son of another.\n\nLegal adoption seems to have developed fairly early - probably by the fourth century BCE. It was certainly well-established by the middle Republic, when the general and statesman Aemilius Paulus negotiated the adoption of two of his sons into prominent families:\n\n\"So then Aemilius, having divorced Papiria, took another wife; and when she had borne him two sons he kept these at home, but the sons of his former wife he introduced into the greatest houses and the most illustrious families, the elder into that of Fabius Maximus, who was five times consul, while the younger was adopted by the son of Scipio Africanus, his cousin, who gave him the name of Scipio.\" (Plut., *Aem*. 5.5)\n\nThe institution of adoption was famously abused / creatively applied by Cicero's nemesis Clodius, who had himself adopted into a plebeian family to make him eligible for the tribunate. We also hear more and more about testamentary adoptions (posthumous adoptions by will) in the late Republic, which (unlike the two legal forms of adoption) entailed only taking the name of one's new \"father,\" not formally joining his family. The most famous instance of this is of course the future Augustus' adoption by his great-uncle Julius Caesar. Adoption continued to evolve in the imperial era, when women were allowed to adopt for the first time. It also became, as we have seen, a principle of imperial succession - though no emperor ever passed over his natural son in favor of an adopted one."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cdbe3", "title": "How would a Medieval castle's garrison (say, 1300's) work? How would one join it and how many would be employed at peace?", "selftext": "I know ASOIAF gets mistakes when it comes to some medieval aspects, but lords and kings did have standing garrisons, right? I wonder how one would join this garrison if you're *not* a knight, and how would one be trained? Why didn't *everyone* join one if it meant pay, food, and shelter? (if it was voluntary)\n\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cdbe3/how_would_a_medieval_castles_garrison_say_1300s/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjelw9w"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most castles did not have \"garrisons\" per se.  The average castle in Europe was the home of a knight.  The \"garrison\" would be the knight, any of his family (sons or brothers) who still lived at home and were of fighting age, and his servants and retainers (cooks, grooms, falconer, huntsman, etc.) who could be armed in case of need.  In times of danger, the villagers would take refuge in the castle and would be armed with the weapons stored there.\n\nLarger royal castles or fortress castles, or the castles of great nobles might have had a garrison in peace time.  Even so, these garrisons were often surprisingly small.\n\nFor example, here are some of the garrisons for important castles guarding the Welsh Marches in about 1160 (a little earlier than the period you are looking for).\n\nThe Pipe roll entries show that Oswestry Castle had a garrison of one knight, two porters and two watchmen between 1160 and 1165 (William Fitz Alan was the lord of the castle, but he was a young child and was a ward of the king.  The King appointed Guy Lestrange to administer the Fitz Alan lands, and this is the garrison which Lestrange paid for as shown in his accounts of his guardianship).\n\nThe two other Fitz Alan Welsh border castles of Clun and Ruthin seem to have had the same peacetime garrison of 5 men.\n\nThe Welsh border castles of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth, seem to have had even smaller garrisons.  Shrewsbury was a royal castle, but about 12 miles from the Welsh border and shielded by intervening castles such as Oswestry.  It had a garrison of one porter and one watchman.  Bridgnorth, another royal castle, slightly further from the border had a garrison of one permanent year round porter.\n\nIn time of danger or war, the troops in these castles would be increased.  In the summer of 1165 Henry II used Oswestry Castle as his base for a campaign against Owain Gwynedd (an unsuccessful campaign), and during this summer 200 soldiers were stationed at Oswestry and Knockyn Castles.\n\nAgain, in 1166-67, the border was troubled and 40 soldiers were paid for at Oswestry Castle for two years.  For 158 days of one of these years another 60 soldiers, paid for by the local barons, not the King, were also stationed at Oswestry Castle.  By 1168, the soldiers at Oswestry castle were reduced to 20 and that garrison seems to have remained until 1174.\n\nSource:  \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=m-TqPC6cRNYC&amp;pg=PA69&amp;lpg=PA69&amp;dq=castle+garrison+size&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=7Gx2JWLr8U&amp;sig=TaP-HLuPzEDuyLjfbOR1AV74Wto&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=plTcU4quDsKGyATZmYKADg&amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&amp;q=castle%20garrison%20size&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "33tiu4", "title": "Looking for a couple of good books for two exams I have coming up. British society 1900-1950 ish", "selftext": "Need one for social  &  economical impacts of world war one. (mainly social)\n\nand need one based on the suffragettes and and pre suffragettes movements.\n\nI just need to get a grasp of the time around those periods, any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33tiu4/looking_for_a_couple_of_good_books_for_two_exams/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqoc298"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'd recommend Peter Clarke's *Hope and Glory* (2nd ed, 2004) as a good overview of social, political and economic history of Britain during the 20th century. Based on your interest in sufferage and the impact of the Great War, Id also recommend Nicoletta Gullace's *The Blood of Our Sons* (2002) which looks at how the war impacted the relationship between gender and citizenship. \n\nThat said, as a teacher myself, if this is for an exam I'd recommend focusing first and foremost on the readings assigned for the class. That's the material that you will be directly graded on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "badhr2", "title": "In the movie Kingdom of Heaven, Saladin is depicted as having a chest full of ice in his tent in the middle of the desert. How would he have gotten ahold of ice and preserved it?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/badhr2/in_the_movie_kingdom_of_heaven_saladin_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ekb02v1"], "score": [140], "text": ["This has been asked a few times before:\n\nlike [here ](_URL_1_) with an answer by /u/Eireika\n\nand [another one](_URL_0_) with a nested comment by /u/Valkine adding the the scene was probably a creative freedom, mixing a historical known ice gift from Saladin elsewhere into the movies setting.\n\ntl;dr: ice could be harvested and transported isolated with hay and sawdust and stored in specialized buildings and pits but conditions of practicality and cost apply."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bhgyi/ice_for_drinks_in_history/cj5ie4i/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/287ppm/in_kingdom_of_heaven_you_can_see_at_one_point/"]]}
{"q_id": "1524kz", "title": "How much autonomy did the Republics of the USSR have?", "selftext": "The obvious answer from a geopolitical perspective would be \"not very much\" but I'm wondering about the internal politics. Did constituant states hold over much, if any, of their former political and judicial structures, converting/adapting them to Socialist structures or was everything replaced by Moscow?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1524kz/how_much_autonomy_did_the_republics_of_the_ussr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7irpxo", "c7isakm", "c7j21bc"], "score": [3, 8, 6], "text": ["I think as a follow up thought, how much does autonomy matter if you don't use it? When it got interesting in Eastern Europe (Prague Spring) things went badly for them as the Soviets brought the hammer down. You could be promised a great deal of autonomy, but in practice the threat of everything coming down on your head meant you had none.", "The Republics had varying degrees of autonomy. Never much. Citizens of the Republics had varying degrees of rights. Thus it was possible for the residents of some Republics to easily visit Moscow, while a citizen of Moscow might have trouble visiting the same Republic.", "When? It was a vastly different situation in 1922, 1935 and 1990. The USSR didn't exist as a single entity till 1922, and the Civil War had multiple theaters in the vast regions of the former Russian Empire. After 1922 and up to the beginning of WW2, there was a massive consolidation and centralization of power in Moscow. The 1922 Treaty of the Creation of USSR included Russia, Ukraine, Belorus and Transcaucasia (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan) and other areas were absorbed later.  \n\nThe various representatives of the republics had considerable power and influence in the central government in Moscow, but they couldn't unilaterally set policy (aside from local policy that didn't impact the overall state). The 5 Year Plan was dictated from Moscow and was the policy for the entire nation and all the republics complied. So, while there was definitely influence, there was no sovereignty. This obviously changed in the late 1980s when various movements to separate from the USSR began in every single republic. \n\nHere is an example - Eduard Shevardnadze was the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party (head of Georgia). He then became the equivalent of the Foreign Minister of the USSR. After the dissolution of the USSR, he became the Head of State in newly independent Georgia under various titles (eventually the President). \n\nNone of this applies to the satellite state in the Warsaw Pact.  \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1m6d5h", "title": "Wednesday Week in History | Sept. 11 - Sept. 17", "selftext": "After a two-week hiatus, we're back!\n\nThis feature is to give our little community a chance to share interesting occurrences from history that occurred in this coming week. So please, dust off that 1913 swimsuit calendar you found in your grandfather's attic or calculate some Maya Long Count dates, and share some notable events that happened this week in history.\n\nAs a preemptive reminder, please limit discussion to pre-1993.\n\nTo help generate some conversation, here are a few events that occurred this week. Feel free to elaborate any of the historical context of any of these, explaining their causes and their effects or the legacy of the individuals involved. This list is by no means exhaustive. I deliberately left out events from WWII, for example. I figure that's a popular enough topic that I wouldn't need to prompt anyone.\n\n##Sept. 11th\n* 1541: Conquistadora In\u00e9s de Su\u00e1rez leads a Pyrrhic defense of Santiago, Chile against indigenous forces led by Michima Lonco (who, in turn, attempted to liberate several captive chiefs held by the Spanish).\n* 1565: The Great Siege of Malta ends with the Ottomans' retreat.\n* 1609: Henry Hudson arrives at Manhattan Island.\n* 1776: The Staten Island Peace Conference fails to resolve the American Revolution.\n* 1792: The Hope Diamond stolen.\n* 1852: The State of Buenos Aires secedes from Argentina.\n* 1897: Gaki Sherocho, last king of Kaffa, captured by Imperial Ethiopian forces.\n* 1919: The United States invades Honduras.\n* 1973: General Pinochet leads a coup against Chilean President Allende.\n* 1978: Janet Parker dies, the last victim of smallpox.\n\n##Sept. 12th\n* -490: Athenians and allies defeat the Persians at the Battle of Marathon.\n* 1492: Lorenzo de' Medici born.\n* 1683: Battle of Vienna begins.\n* 1848: Switzerland federates.\n* 1933: Le\u00f3 Szil\u00e1rd realizes the potential of nuclear chain reactions.\n* 1940: Lascaux Cave Paintings discovered.\n* 1974: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie deposed.\n\n##Sept. 13th\n* 1229: \u00d6gedei Khan becomes the Great Khan.\n* 1848: Phineas Gage survives an infamous accident.\n* 1953: Nikita Khrushchev becomes secretary-general of the Communist Party (Also this week, he becomes the first Soviet leader to visit the US and dies... different years of course). \n* 1971: Fleeing after a failed coup, Mao's successor Lin Biao dies in a plane crash.\n* 1989: Desmond Tutu leads the largest anti-Apartheid march.\n\n##Sept. 14th\n* 786: The Night of Three Caliphs. \n* 1180: Future shogun Minamoto Yoritomo commands his first battle, the Battle of Ishibashiyama.\n* 1752: The British Empire skips eleven days.\n* 1812: The French army enters Moscow.\n* 1847: The US army takes Mexico City.\n* 1901: US President William McKinley following an assassination; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President.\n* 1917: Russia becomes a Republic.\n* 1960: Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko seizes power in a US and Belgian-backed coup. \n\n##Sept. 15th\n* 1254: Marco Polo born.\n* 1440: Gilles de Rais, an early serial killer, arrested.\n* 1762: The Battle of Signal Hill, last battle of the French-and-Indian War.\n* 1821: The Federal Republic of Central America declares its independence from Spain.\n* 1835: Charles Darwin arrives at the Galapagos Islands.\n\n##Sept. 16th\n* 1386: Henry V born.\n* 1498: Grand Inquisitor Tom\u00e1s de Torquemada dies.\n* 1701: Jacobite line of succession for the throne of Scotland and England falls to James III and VIII.\n* 1920: Unknown perpetrators detonate a bomb on Wall Street.  \n* 1955: Coup against Argentinian President Juan Per\u00f3n begins.\n* 1975: Papua New Guinea gains independence.\n\n##Sept. 17th\n* 1630: Boston founded.\n* 1683: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovers protozoa.\n* 1849: Harriet Tubman escapes slavery.\n* 1916: Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, wins his first aerial combat.\n* 1948: Folke Bernadotte assassinated by the Lehi.\n* 1976: *Enterprise,* the first Space Shuttle, unveiled\n* 1978: The Camp David Accords signed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m6d5h/wednesday_week_in_history_sept_11_sept_17/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc66jx2", "cc66qf3", "cc6eo9x", "cc6ga2j", "cc6gbba", "cc6h9oi", "cc6jwfk"], "score": [2, 18, 3, 22, 7, 7, 8], "text": ["No love for the War of 1812?", "I REJECT YOUR SUGGESTED HISTORICAL EVENTS AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN. \n\n**September 17, 1787: Copyright clause was added to the Constitution.** \n\nThe clause is so very small: \n\n > The Congress shall have power to [...] promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries [...]\n\nAnd yet it has had so many far reaching effects on our arts and literature, or patent system, on every day at work for me in the archives, and near and dear to most of us, on the process of doing academic research. And its smallness has also made it ripe for lots and lots of interpretation that keeps lots of lawyers busy with things like interpreting Fair Use. (And my dad works in patent law, so thank you copyright clause for round-about paying my college tuition and allowing me to type this today!) \n\n****\n\nAnd as nobody posted Week in History last week, doing to too many exciting AMAs going on, I\u2019m going to sneak in one I wanted to post for that week: \n\n**September 4, 1720: [*Angelica*](_URL_0_) premiered, Farinelli and Metastasio met** \n\nThis was Pietro Metastasio\u2019s first public performance of his poetry in music, AND it was also the first public singing performance for a young castrato named Carlo Broschi. And not only was the performance a great success, those two immediately got along like a house on fire! A little bitty \u201cHappy 293rd Anniversary\u201d to mark the start of [a very special relationship of some sort between two of the most important men in of the baroque period.](_URL_1_) ", "Wow, TIL that smallpox is a completely eradicated disease. Thanks for the list!", "On 11 September 1973, the Chilean coup d'\u00e9tat left democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende dead, a military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet in power, and thousands of Allende supporters, including famed *nueva canci\u00f3n* singer V\u00edctor Jara, rounded up, tortured, and murdered.\n\nThe coup was a long time in the coming, and was orchestrated by the Chilean right, the CIA, the U.S. Department of State, and various multinational corporations, including copper mining companies like Anaconda, Kennecott, and Cerro Grande, and, perhaps most significantly, the ITT Corporation, a communications giant. The ITT Corporation cut Henry Kissinger a blank check, to be used to destabilize Allende, though it's unknown how much Kissinger took from them.\n\nSalvador Allende had stood for election several times before his victory in 1970, and was President of the Senate at the time of his election to the presidency. Allende headed the leftist *Unidad Popular* coalition. The two other political groups of note were the National Party and the Christian Democrats. Immediately after Allende's election, the CIA attempted a two-pronged plan to block him from assuming power. Phase I entailed bribing and threatening Chilean congressmen to get them to block Allende's election, while Phase II entailed CIA agents impersonating Department of Defense officials and threatening the Chilean military with a complete cutting-off of aid if they didn't violently stop Allende. Both plans failed, and Allende assumed office as planned.\n\nSalvador Allende's presidency was characterized by the nationalization of key industries, the collectivization of factories directly by workers, the expansion of labor rights, and the building of programs meant to radically decrease poverty and inequality. It was also characterized by a series of economic crises, provoked by U.S. President Nixon's program of trying to make the Chilean economy \"scream\" and an opposition trucker strike (funded by the ITT Corporation and the CIA). As Allende ran into more and more roadblocks, workers began collectivizing factories themselves. As the military acted independently, it went around harassing and repressing these factory workers.\n\nThe serious economic crises were meant to disillusion the Chilean people with Salvador Allende and the UP. However, the 1973 parliamentary elections showed a marked increase for the UP, from Allende's 36.63% of the Presidential vote in 1970 (in a three-way race) to 43.7% of the vote in the Chamber of Deputies, to the 29.2% of the Christian Democrats and the 21.7% of the National Party. The UP, as a coalition, consisted of several parties, most significantly the Socialist Party and Communist Party, under Allende's banner. The U.S. Department of State saw this as critical, warning that the UP would likely win the next presidential election as well; evidence that Allende needed to be stopped immediately.\n\nWhen the coup came, on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military began to shell the Presidential Palace. Allende was called upon to surrender, but he refused to do so. He ordered others to leave, and then gave his final speech, under fire, in which he remained defiant. His now famous ending, \"Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!\" was the last the people would ever hear from their President. Allende was killed by a shot to the head in controversial circumstances. The official account (of the coup perpetrators) was that he shot himself in the head with an AK-47 he had been given by Fidel Castro. Many dispute this, saying that he was murdered, but the position of the current government of Chile is that he shot himself. In either case, he can be said to have been killed by the coup, I would say, as if he killed himself, it was only to avoid torture and murder at the hands of the military.\n\nThe coup enjoyed the support of the leaders of the National Party and the Christian Democrats, as well as their delegates and senators, though it was certainly not within any representative's electoral mandate to overthrow the democratically elected president. The coup, from its first moments, was accompanied by rounding up Allende supporters. Many were taken to the National Stadium, as well as other football stadiums and various military institutions, where they were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and murdered in their thousands. Among these was V\u00edctor Jara, Chile's most famous musician and noted Allende supporter, who sang for his fellow prisoners, even after his hands were broken, until he was tortured to death. What followed was a regime of complete repression of all socialists, communists, and other dissidents. Despite the initial support of the coup by the political elite, Pinochet dissolved the political parties and ruled as dictator.\n\nPinochet was eventually removed from office by national plebiscite, and a few years later ceased to be the head of the military. He took shelter in Britain, which protected him from international prosecution for crimes against humanity. While electoral democracy has returned to Chile, the scars certainly remain for many people, including PTSD for survivors of the torture and those who lived in fear of it every day for years. Much of the legacy of the coup remains unresolved, and the Chilean government prefers not to speak of it. The victory of the coup and dictatorship can be seen in the fact that the socialist movement in Chile was effectively destroyed, and remains smaller and in more disarray today, after so many years of repression.\n\n**Suggested Reading**\n\n* Harmer, Tanya. *Allende\u2019s Chile  &  the Inter-American Cold War*. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.\n\n* Qureshi, Lubna. *Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile*. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. \n\n* [National Security Archive - Documents](_URL_0_) (Hit \"Latin America\")\n\n* [The Kissinger Cables](_URL_1_) (Search \"Chile\", \"Allende\", or \"Pinochet\")", " >  1541: Conquistadora In\u00e9s de Su\u00e1rez leads a Pyrrhic defense of Santiago, Chile against indigenous forces led by Michimalonco (who, in turn, attempted to liberate several captive chiefs held by the Spanish).  \n\nDuring the attack her role was of mending wounds, bringing water, giving support to the defenders. But when all hope was lost, she thought that their only way to win was killing the captive chiefs and trowing their heads to the attackers to cause panic. This was rejected by most of the men, that seeing the hopeleness of the situation thought that keeping the chiefs alive was the only way to survive.   \nShe went with her plan anyways, went to the house where the chiefs were imprisoned, and told the guards that they needed to kill the seven chiefs. One of the guards out of fear of the situation asked her, \"how shall I kill them?\" She said \"This way\" and grabbed her sword and beheaded the first one. She then proceeded to behead the other six with her own hands, and then told the guards that since they haven't done anything the least that they can do is to take the corpses out to the square so the attackers could see them.\n", "September 16th, 1810. Mexico declares its independence. But not from Spain, but France! Priests Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Morelos, along with a crowd of farmers and citizens, somehow said something that made everyone rise up against the Spaniards. I am being intentionally vague because this period (and much of Mexican history) is full of nationalistic myths and all that stuff. All that is known is that he was the one who started the movement.\n\nIt took 11 years and 11 days to achieve independence. A lot happened in that period. Hidalgo died, and Morelos took the lead from there, moving towards independence from *Spain*, not France, anymore.\n\nHow did Hidalgo die, you ask? Well, this war was full of plot twists. Spies, battles lost and won. Anyway, he was captured as he was on his way to the USA to buy weapons, thanks to a spy which told royalist forces about it. He was shot in Chihuahua, and beheaded. His head was taken to Guanajuato, and exhibited in public at the *Alh\u00f3ndiga de Granaditas*, place of an important battle in the beginning stage of the war, in which the Mexican (then just creoles or mestizos, as Mexico did not exist!) people took the fort from the royalist forces after a siege.\n\nAfter his death, Morelos took over, but he was captured and killed in 1814. After this, other experienced military leaders, like Vicente Guerrero, continued the fight against the royalist forces. One of the royalist generals was Agust\u00edn de Iturbide, who fought against Guerrero for years, but decided to join him in 1920, after political troubles in Spain concerning Felipe VII and the Constitution of C\u00e1diz.\n\nThis new army, called *Ej\u00e9rcito Trigarante* (this means, loosely translated, \"Army of the three guarantees\") promised three things: the Roman Catholic religion ad the only one to be tolerated; independence from Spain; and union between the factions fighting for it. Afterwards, Agust\u00edn de Iturbide crowned himself \"Emperor of Mexico\" but he didn't last long, as he was exiled, and Guadalupe Victoria took charge as the first president of the Mexican Republic.\n\nThis is a huge day for Mexicans, more than 5 de mayo, which is not really celebrated AT ALL down here, and people drink a lot of tequila, and gather round in the city centers, in front of the municipal palace, where they recreate Hidalgo's disputed \"Grito de Dolores\", with the mayor (or Governor, or President, depending if it's a capital or not) leading the celebration.\n\nAlso, I get the day off for school!", "**Sept. 11**\n\n\u2022 In 1865, Wilford B. Hoggatt, who became the sixth Governor of the District of Alaska, was born in Indiana.\n\n\u2022 In 1958, poet Robert W. Service died in Monte Carlo at the age of 85.\n\n\u2022 In 1979, a patrol plane used by Rangers at the Wrangell-St. Elias National Monument was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected.\n\n**Sept. 12**\n\n\u2022 In 1882, construction started on the first building on the campus of the Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka.\n\n\u2022 In 1900, a storm in Nome caused a million dollars in property losses along the waterfront.\n\n\u2022 In 1940, artist Sydney Laurence announced he was going to die. After a shave, haircut, and a negotiation of a painting deal, he admitted himself to the Anchorage Hospital and fulfilled his prediction.\n\n\u2022 In 1969, Valdez celebrated as the Alaska Maru arrived with the first shipment of trans-Alaska oil pipeline from Japan.\n\n**Sept. 13**\n\n\u2022 In 1905, fire destroyed 43 business buildings in Nome.\n\n\u2022 In 1906, the steamer Oregon wrecked at Cape Hinchenbrook, at the entrance to Prince William Sound; all 121 aboard were saved.\n\n\u2022 In 1913, concrete is poured for the first story of Juneau's first city hall. The Alaska Office Building now sits at that location.\n\n\u2022 In 1955, in a special election, Alaskans sent 55 delegates to a Constitutional Convention.\n\n\u2022 In 1979, Anchorage's teacher strike ended after a week when an acceptable negotiation plan was agreed to and signed by Judge Victor Carlson.\n\n**Sept. 14**\n\n\u2022 In 1834, Alfred P. Swineford, Alaska's second governor, was born in Ohio.\n\n\u2022 In 1871, a 32-ship whaling fleet from New England was abandoned at Wainwright Inlet when ice cut it off from open water. The 1,200 crew members used whale boats to reach safety at Icy Cape on the Chukchi Sea coast. No lives were lost.\n\n\u2022 In 1884, Alaska's first governor, John Kinkead, appointed by President Chester Arthur, arrived in Sitka to take up his duties. \n\n\u2022 The first meeting of the presbytery of Alaska was held in Wrangell.\n\n**Sept. 15**\n\n In 1885, Alfred P. Swineford took office as the second governor of the District of Alaska.\n\n\u2022 In 1913, Cordova residents formed the Alaska Good Roads Club with the goal of promoting a road from Fairbanks to Chitna.\n\n\u2022 In 1959, Everett Benson was convicted in Spokane, Wash. on five counts of grand larceny in connection with the financing of an Alaska mine venture.\n\n\u2022 In 1959, the Bureau of Land Management paid Alaska nearly $4.4 million as the state's share of oil and gas lease revenue on public lands in Alaska.\n\n\u2022 In 1986, the 5 billionth barrel of oil to travel down the trans-Alaska pipeline arrived in Valdez.\n\n**Sept. 16**\n\n\u2022 In 1901, Professor Leonard, the aeronaut, performed acrobatic feats on a horizontal bar suspended from a large balloon over the Bering Sea near Nome.\n\n\u2022 In 1925, the Southeast Alaska Fair opened in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall in Juneau.\n\n\u2022 In 1947, bidding was opened by the U.S. Forest Service on 1.5 billion cubic feet of timber in the Ketchikan area. This was part of a plan to establish five or six large paper mills in Alaska.\n\n\u2022 In 1974, the U.S. Army provided Kodiak with three emergency generators to give the Kodiak Electric Association a chance to repair broken equipment.\n\n**Sept. 17**\n\n\u2022 In 1868, the Alaska Commercial Company was incorporated in San Francisco, Calif.\n\n\u2022 In 1873, Thomas Riggs, Governor of the Territory of Alaska from 1918 to 1921, was born.\n\n\u2022 In 1934, fire swept through Nome, nearly destroying the town.\n\n\u2022 In 1946, a $6 million contract was signed to reconstruct the Alaska Railroad facilities in Seward that were damaged by the Good Friday earthquake. It was the largest single earthquake reconstruction contract."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://archive.org/details/langelicaserena00metagoog", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hhv5p/tuesday_trivia_historys_greatest_bromances_and/caunf7s"], [], ["http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/index.html", "http://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7yb15f", "title": "When did Norman England no longer associate with the French monarchy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7yb15f/when_did_norman_england_no_longer_associate_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dujg7a9"], "score": [2], "text": ["So, basically, it depends on what you mean by \"associate.\"\n\nThe Kingdom of England was never considered part of the Kingdom of France or subordinate to it. English kings and property owners were not bound to the king of France under any kind of \"feudal\" ties. The Anglo-Norman, Angevin, and Plantagenet kings of England, however, were also major landowners *within* the Kingdom of France. Obviously William the Conqueror was the duke of Normandy, but his descendants acquired a vast swathe of western France through inheritance and marriage, becoming also the dukes of Aquitaine and Gascony and the counts of Anjou, Maine, Nantes, and Poitiers. The English kings (theoretically) owed fealty to the French kings for their French lands, but in practice a state resembling the Cold War prevailed throughout much of the second half of the 12th centuries. \n\nOn the lower level, during the 11th-12th centuries, almost all major English landowners were of Norman, Breton, Flemish, or French origin and owned property on both sides of the channel. Because they were subjects of both kings, they theoretically owed loyalty and service to both kings; in practice, these great men were out for their own ends and were more than willing to manipulate, quarrel with, scheme against, and sell out their kings when the situation called for it.\n\nThe English kings lost most of their French possessions in the first two decades of the 13th century. Following the death of Richard I, the French invaded and seized Normandy and Aquitaine. Anglo-Norman lords were faced with a choice: abandon their French property and keep their English, or the opposite. At the conclusion of the war, the English crown was left only with Gascony and a bit of Poitou, and the permanent connection to Normandy was severed. However, the English aristocracy would continue to speak Anglo-Norman (a dialect of old French) for at least another century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5bfp1u", "title": "Who was Mikhail Kalinin and how did he survive Stalin's purges as the Soviet head of state?", "selftext": "During the thirties and fourties, Stalin seems to have removed or killed literally every significant member of the old Bolshieviks- even his allies- except Mikhail Kalinin, who was a pre-revolution Bolshievik, the former Mayor of St Petersburg, a longstanding member of the Politburo and the Soviet head of state.\n\nWouldn't he have been a prime target for Stalin given his stature and position? How did he survive?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bfp1u/who_was_mikhail_kalinin_and_how_did_he_survive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9q4xn4"], "score": [2], "text": ["Mikhail Kalinin certainly was something of an odd-duck in the Stalinist state apparatus. Despite the massive cult of personality surrounding the General Secretary, Kalinin was nominally the head of the Soviet state. His Old Bolshevik background was also atypical by the late 1930s as some of the more prominent veterans of the RSDLP died during the Purges. But in this regard Kalinin was not alone; Kagonovich, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan were also Old Bolsheviks and survived the Purges. These men were a part of what the historians Stephen Wheatcraft and Sheila Fitzpatrick have termed \"Team Stalin,\" a circle of Bolshevik veterans and  managers that cut their teeth in the Lenin period and managed to ensconce themselves into Stalin's decision-making process. Rather than act as a tyrant, Stalin often preferred pushing a consensus among informal meetings in his offices and then delegating to his team to carry out the consensus he had forced. Although the Stalinist decision-making process was capricious and missteps could be fatal, it was not that much different from the type of collective leadership of the Lenin era where Lenin as the first among equals would bend decisions towards his own ends. Kalinin owed his survival both to the dynamics of Stalin's executive system and the role he played inside of it.\n\nFor the Team, Kalinin was a source of both stability and consensus-building among Stalin's servitors. Although Kalinin, like Voroshilov, had toyed with Bukharin's plan to oust Stalin as General Secretary in, both men backed out at the last minute. Since this abortive maneuverings in the mid-1920s, Kalinin became less active in internal political debates and his peasant-background meant he often dispensed folky wisdom in meetings rather than hard policy.  Kalinin's own advanced age and sociability helped further endear him to members of the Team as a force that brought much needed social lubrication to a tense and informal situation. Kalinin emerged as something of a village peasant elder in these meetings, giving his assent (in practice meaningless in light of Stalin's power) that managed impart a homespun quality to these decisions. \n\nBut beyond the internal politics of the Team, Kalinin was also useful for the wider project of Soviet power. Not only did his titular head of the Soviet state deflect charges of an individualistic dictatorship, albeit imperfectly, but his  age and peasant ways was a popular form of politics in the 1930s. After Stalin, Kalinin received the greatest volume of personal petitions from Soviet citizens. His persona as the \"all-union peasant elder\", carefully cultivated by both Kalinin and the Soviet state, meant that a good number of the peasantry saw him as a friendly voice in the corridors of Soviet power. This popularity was obviously of great utility for Stalin as it gave sanction to his various collectivization initiatives since the state's \"first peasant\" agreed with them. Additionally, Kalinin's role as the titular head of state allowed him to act in a ceremonial position for dignitaries in Moscow when Stalin was unable to meet with them His affability and age lent lent a degree of dignity to the Kremlin and Supreme Soviet, and masked the increasing cult of personality that Kalinin rubber-stamped. \n\nThis does not mean that Kalinin operated without any fear of Stalin in the 1930s. He had earned a public rebuke from the dictator during collectivization and the *Holodomor* for being too close to the peasantry in 1930. More dangerously, Beria had Kalinin's wife, Ekaterina Lorberg, arrested in the fall of 1938 on charges of anti-Soviet activity and received a 15 year Gulag sentence. Lorberg's arrest was likely a fishing expedition on Beria's part to gain ammunition against Kalinin, but Loberg had little in the way of a formal relationship with her husband. The couple had lived apart for years and whatever material Beria obtained remained in his files. \n\nKalinin remained as titular head of state through the Second World War. His age and eventual blindness further restricted his activities in this period, and it became obvious to many that he was nowhere near the levers of power. While he may have posed a threat to Stalin early on in the dictatorship, such a threat had rapidly decreased with Kalinin's own infirmities and level-headed recognition of Stalin's ascendancy. Other Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin were not so old as Kalinin and were thus were a threat that Stalin needed to eliminate or neutralize. \n\n*Sources*\n\nFitzpatrick, Sheila. *On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics*. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2015. \n\nGetty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. *The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939*. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999. \n\nKhlevniuk, O. V., and Nora Seligman Favorov. *Master of the house: Stalin and his inner circle*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. \n\nWheatcroft, Stephen G. \"From Team-Stalin to degenerate tyranny.\" In *The Nature of Stalin\u2019s Dictatorship*, pp. 79-107. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5fnen9", "title": "When did Latin and Old French stop being mutually intelligible?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fnen9/when_did_latin_and_old_french_stop_being_mutually/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dalo359"], "score": [46], "text": ["At the third Council of Tours, the priests were ordered to preach in vulgar Latin, as the common folk could no longer understand formal Latin. This was in 813 CE. While it may still have been Latin in name, this language would likely have been significantly different from the VL at the fall of the Western Roman Empire.\n\nVulgar Latin, particularly in outlying regions of the former Roman Empire tended to be influenced by the local languages, as is usual. For instance, the formal Latin *equus* for horse was replaced by *caballus*, a word originating in the Gaulish tongue.\n\nThe other major factor that would have changed in the intervening centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Council of Tours is pronunciation. Old French in particular was guilty of significant vowel breaking - where a monopthong is broken into a dipthong or further e.g. the Latin short /e/ in *mel*, became /ie/ *miel*, or honey. Of the original dozen or so vowel sounds found in Latin, all were changed.\n\nMost significantly, vulgar Latin, and subsequently Old French placed more emphasis on stressed syllables, which tended to shift pronunciation and resulted in the now standard dropping of final letters when pronouncing French words. This shift lowered the morpheme:word ratio of OF/VL due to the end-conjugation of many Latin words. This meant that OF/VL relied significantly more on context that did formal Latin.\n\nFrom all this we have a date of certainty (813 CE), but indications exist that the loss of mutual intelligibility could have occurred significantly earlier, as language undergoes speciation in much the same way that living organisms do, on a continuum.\n\nEDIT: You might consider posting this same question over in /r/linguistics for a more in-depth response."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "64m6tm", "title": "How were lances used before the invention of stirrups?", "selftext": "I'm assuming that using a \"jousting\" attack would be impractical  so how did cavalry use their lances in battle?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64m6tm/how_were_lances_used_before_the_invention_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dga73sp"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm not sure that your assumption is entirely correct (remember, the impact when hitting someone will come from in front): older books I've read, like Oman, tend to believe this, state that the development of the stirrup essentially lead to feudalism, and put a lot more significance on pictures like [this](_URL_0_) one from the Psalter of St Gall, with his stirrups and couched lance, than they probably deserve (for one thing, he's only transporting the lance). That idea is disputed now (and by the 'experimental archeology' types, fwtw) but I'll mainly just point out how pre-stirrup people depicted lance use (mostly visually, which of course has its problems, such as artists not usually being warriors). The most common pose by far is an overarm blow, which is also shown on the [Bayeux tapestry](_URL_9_) alongside couched lances. There's a certain amount of ambiguity in the tapestry, as it also shows spears being [thrown](_URL_8_), so it's not certain which is being represented, but there are [other](_URL_3_) works where the pose is clearly meant to depict an impact with the enemy. This pose is very old, and can be seen all the way back to [Assyrian](_URL_5_) art. The other common pose is underarm, with the hand at about the hip, as seen in the well-known [Alexander mosaic](_URL_2_) ([here](_URL_1_)'s a pot showing the same thing).\n\nThere was also a kind of very large lance used in antiquity, originating in the steppes before spreading to Persia, and then Europe. It was called the kontos by the Greeks ('oar' or 'barge-pole'), and it was used like one, two-handed, as seen in [this](_URL_4_) relief. This sounds rather precarious, however [Persian](_URL_7_) art [shows](_URL_10_) quite considerable impacts, which are backed up by written sources, such as Plutarch's [claim](_URL_6_) that the Parthian spear often had the impetus to pierce two men at once.\n\nFinally, the (probably) 4th century novel 'Aethiopica' by Heliodorus describes the heavily armoured Persian cavalry attaching their lances directly to the horse, so that they only have to aim it, with the impact taken by their horse. Given that this is the only place this idea shows up, I don't find it particularly plausible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://manuscriptminiatures.com/media/manuscriptminiatures.com/original/1076-3.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Thracian_cavalrymen_vs_an_armored_Greek_food_soldier_-_Getty_Villa_Collection.jpg/1280px-Thracian_cavalrymen_vs_an_armored_Greek_food_soldier_-_Getty_Villa_Collection.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Battle_of_Issus_mosaic_-_Museo_Archeologico_Nazionale_-_Naples_BW.jpg", "http://manuscriptminiatures.com/media/manuscriptminiatures.com/original/921-25.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Knight-Iran.JPG", "https://i1.wp.com/members.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/Iron-Army.jpg?w=525&amp;ssl=1", "http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0038%3Achapter%3D27%3Asection%3D2", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Tabriz_Sasanian_Plate_2.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/BayeuxTapestryScene51b.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/BayeuxTapestryScene52b.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Ardachir_relief_Firuzabad_1.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "7ruj29", "title": "What does the coronation of Charlemagne as Roman Emperor suggest about attitudes towards the Roman Empire at the time?", "selftext": "My query is fairly multi faceted. Was it viewed as a resurrection of the old Western Empire, or was the Western Empire viewed as having existed all along, and this was just the end of a very, very long interregnum? In terms of Rome as a source of political legitimacy, does this represent a continuation of the tradition seen in the reigns of Odoacer and Theodoric? Am I over thinking this and it was just a power grab without much consideration of 'Romanness'? What role, if any, has the coronation played in arguments about when exactly the peoples of western Europe considered the Western Empire to have ended?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ruj29/what_does_the_coronation_of_charlemagne_as_roman/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dszp4bt"], "score": [3], "text": ["I partly answered your question [here](_URL_0_), although admittedly that answer focuses mostly on England in the period. Nonetheless, the answer isn't *radically* different in that early medieval political aspirations hinged on *Romanitas* less as an immediate continuation of Rome, but as a valid successor through the continuation of the facets of Rome which had been worthy of admiration.\n\nIt was well known that Rome had failed and there was no way for Charlemagne to claim that he was simply the *next* Roman Emperor, but there was tremendous prestige in resurrecting Rome, reforging the empire and being the *new* Roman Emperor. It's worth mentioning, of course, that Charlemagne crowning himself as Emperor was not taken well by the Byzantines, who had been maintaining the Roman Empire perfectly well all this time without him, thank you very much."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72f794/in_the_tv_show_vikings_both_common_and_noble/dnim2vu"]]}
{"q_id": "421m96", "title": "How were large, dangerous animals like bears hunted in the Middle Ages?", "selftext": "I'm a fantasy writer, and while I'm not trying too hard to be realistic about the setting, knowing history is never a bad thing. For the world I'm currently working on, dragons aren't particularly intelligent or anything, they're just large predatory animals.\n\nI wanted to draw from real methods of bringing down large dangerous animals in figuring out how they would be hunted, though naturally it'll have to diverge a bit from that. A basis is always good, though.\n\nFor tech-level reference, the earliest guns have been invented in this world, but they haven't yet reached the country in which I'm telling stories.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/421m96/how_were_large_dangerous_animals_like_bears/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz6xoeh"], "score": [3], "text": ["Unfortunately there isn't a lot of source material on bear hunting as a lot of our late medieval 'hunting manuals' were produced in England...when the bear had been long extinct. However, the very famous 14th c hunting manual by [Gaston F\u00e9bus](_URL_0_), the [*Livre de chasse*](_URL_3_), features a chapter on hunting bear.  In fact, Gaston is said to have died of stroke while washing his hands of bear blood; this would be a classic example of how we can't take the words of medieval writers about aristocracy at face value - they are always burnishing the image of the subject.  As the count of Foix Gaston would have hunted in the Pyrenees where bears have roamed even until recently (and there is in fact a protest by farmers now against the planned re-introduction of bears). I don't know if his book has been translated to English - I've only seen editions of the various manuscript images with summaries.\n\nGenerally speaking, large animals were harried by horseback riders and hounds and driven into places that could be controlled: pits and traps. Hunters were on horseback and on foot, using weapons at a distance: bows and spears. It seems aristocrats were less interested in demonstrating strength than an ability to outwit their prey, whether bear, stag or wolf.\n\nIf you want to write about medieval hunting, try to find these two books:\n\n* [John Cummins, The Art of Medieval Hunting: The Hound and the Hawk (Castle Books, 2003)](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Richard Almond, Medieval Hunting (The History Press, 2011)](_URL_1_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_III,_Count_of_Foix", "https://books.google.com/books?id=c007AwAAQBAJ&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false", "https://books.google.com/books?id=qkDYxipafCkC", "http://library.nd.edu/medieval/facsimiles/daylife/chasse.html"]]}
{"q_id": "10hjf9", "title": "Movies always make out ancient warriors to be these huge guys with huge muscles that you'd have to get in gyms. Basically what I'm asking is, on average how buff or big were spartan warriors or a knight in the crusades?", "selftext": "Thanks everybody got some good answers", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10hjf9/movies_always_make_out_ancient_warriors_to_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6djy05", "c6djzjn", "c6dk38u", "c6dk5et", "c6dk6o3", "c6dk75w", "c6dkfsq", "c6dklmp", "c6dlrfo", "c6dlrzy", "c6dm1id", "c6dmx0o", "c6dnany", "c6dosts"], "score": [24, 10, 4, 396, 3, 254, 27, 53, 3, 9, 4, 50, 10, 2], "text": ["I don't think they were heavily toned, ripped dudes. But like in the case of the Spartans, those guys trained from a young age to be warriors. I'm sure you build some serious muscle mass with that.\n\nIn the middle ages there were different kinds of soldiers. If you're talking fully suited knight on a warhorse. Consider the fact that the suit of armor quite heavy and holding yourself on a galloping hose probably isn't too easy. Then there's a nicely forged broadsword you gotta wield, yank it out of guys' chests, then lift it up and strike again. That takes a lot of strength. So I'm sure they had some serious muscle. But again, not ripped, but pretty huge...", "You can get pretty ripped with a good diet and bodyweight exercises. I'm no historian so I can't say whether they did push ups or lifted weights or things like that. But it's possible to get pretty big. Although I'd be surprised if they got anywhere near body-builder status. That's just.....unnatural. *shudder*", "I would tend to think that they aren't going to look exactly like your typical gym rat since bodybuilders do a lot of ultra-specific stuff to get the ripped look they have. Having said that, what these guys did was pretty brutal and taxing so they where likely in good shape, but good *functional* shape which does not look the same as what a bodybuilder looks like in most cases. ", "They were indeed strong, but not with the sort of big bulky muscles Ahnold and his ilk have.  Big muscles are developed through short movements such as lifting weights, which would have been seen as quite strange for a soldier of the past.  Warriors had to be able to march for long distances bearing their combat load and then some, and still be able to fight at the end of the day.  That sort of activity makes a body strong, but not with huge bulging muscles.  Think of the difference between football and futbol players.  The former can perform powerful actions, but typically over a shorter time span, while the latter can run around a field for 90 minutes straight.  Both are powerful in their own right, but the wiry guy with the endurance is a closer somatotype to historical warriors.\n\nThe Greeks, since you mention the Spartans, have helpfully provided us with many examples of their warriors' body shape in the form of [statues](_URL_0_) and [muscle cuirasses](_URL_2_).  As you can see in those examples, Grecian warriors were muscular, yet quite lean.  \n\nThe Crusaders would have likely been primarily of the same body type, though I'm sure certain nobles and wealthy folk that were able to afford horses and didn't spend all of their free time fighting and training would be exceptions.  Forensic analysis of medieval remains like [this poor chap here](_URL_3_) tells us that medieval knights were indeed quite strong.  However, effigies like [these](_URL_1_), and there's hundreds more just like them, show us that the average knight was equally as lean as his ancient counterparts.  ", "_URL_0_ and _URL_1_", "For the most part, many of China's ancient warriors were peasants. Of course, standing armies did exist, and there were professional soldiers, but that grew over time, and in ancient times farmers and the like would have made up much of the army.\n\nNow then, many of these peasants would have been malnourished, and would have lived very difficult lives. But if you work all day, every day, cultivating the land, you end up being pretty strong, even if their muscles don't bulge out like they would after a serious workout.\n\nThe professional soldiers would spend much of their lives training, and would likely have a good physique as a result.\n\n(I know you didn't ask about China, but... hey! More knowledge.)", "Not a historian, but calisthenics enthusiast here.\n\nThey wouldn't be *bodybuilder* big, but that's because bodybuilders use an assortment of isolation exercises to condition very specific muscle groups to hypertrophy (the science word for making muscles visibly bigger).  This is why Arnold looks like Arnold; he makes (made) a living by working out muscles in a very specific, regimented manner to make as many muscles as possible *appear* as large as possible.  So many isolation exercises are required that the ancient Spartans (or any other ancient warriors) would not have thought/not have the equipment/the will to work for appearance.  This brings forth the second point that's important to make regarding ancient fitness vs. modern fitness:\n\n**SIZE =/= STRENGTH**\n\nConsider that, in ancient times, man did not have wide access to barbells, dumbells, etc., let alone modern fitness machines.  They would have had to use the only real practical form of exercise known back then; calisthenics (i.e.: bodyweight training).  Calisthenics, which relies on leveraging the body's weight to produce resistance, requires no equipment whatsoever.  Unless an actual historian can prove me otherwise (in which case, please ignore the proceeding, as I am absolutely *not* a historical authority), it stands to reason that ancient warriors must have practiced this kind of training to improve their strength.  Thus, even though they might *look* puny compared to Arnold, functionally speaking, they'd be much *stronger*.\n\nConsider the physical appearance of a *powerlifter* versus a *bodybuilder* (Mark Ripptoe vs. Arnold, sorry for lack of image links, I'm really tired, but a quick Google search should prove my point).  You would think that Arnold could best Ripptoe in terms of pure strength, but you'd be wrong.  Arnold has geared his body to *look* nice, rather than for pure strength.  Ripptoe has developed his physique *as an indirect consequence of*, and not as a *direct result of*, working for real-world strength.  This is the attitude the ancient warriors had, ''why would I work to *look* nice, while I could work towards getting better at functionally defending [era's nation here]?''\n\nWhich brings me back to the conclusion of this little tirade: assuming a lack of specialty  equipment, the common warrior, regardless of era, should look like a gymnast, as they work nearly solely with their bodyweight for resistance, thus producing said look, appearance-wise.  ", "[Weight training is old](_URL_1_). Touring old castles and museums you see weight training gear.\n\nStanding armies tended to be smaller than they are now, but the soldiers would train (as they do now). \n\nWhile modern training techniques are almost certainly more efficient than medieval/ancient regimes, there was considerable incentive to have stronger soldiers. \n\nStronger soldiers can walk with heavier loads, wear heavier armour, wield heavier weapons, throw and shoot dangerous weapons further and more accurately. Where soldiering has some prestige or privilege, there would be a tendency for tall, muscular men to be chosen. \n\nBasic training often consisted of drill wielding heavy weapons and armour, and marching wearing armour, carrying weapons, and carrying the equivalent of up to ten days of food (not modern dried food; heavy old food). Soldiers have always been required to do labour (building impromptu fortifications, shifting heavy weapons, etc.). The work of soldiering, in a serious army, would resemble heavy labour. \n\nMost men will get quite muscular if they work hard for a few hours every day. Some will get ripped. \n\nAll up, you could expect pre-modern soldiers in a standing army to be taller than average, and quite muscular. Some will be really quite ripped. This will be much more the case for elite units. \n\nSource: Lots of reading, but [this](_URL_0_) more recently than anything else.", "There was a similar discussion here: _URL_0_", "As a lot of of folks here have already pointed out, training for war tends to favor stamina and overall fitness over pure bulk, which bodybuilders shoot for. Even if a knight of the crusades traveled on horseback, and bore heavy arms and armor, his physique would tend towards toned rather than bulky musculature. \n\nConsider: riding on horseback for many miles a day is easier than marching on foot for that distance (if that distance is even possible on foot), but still requires an enormous amount of cardiovascular stamina. In addition, as many bodybuilders can tell you, lifting a lighter weight for many repetitions builds tone; heavier weight at fewer repetitions builds bulk. Medieval armor and weaponry is not quite as heavy as many people imagine: the combat armor and guns that infantry carry today is often heavier than ancient weaponry. Battles could last for hours, and would require many lifts, swings, etc. of shield and sword (or axe, or mace, or whichever you prefer.) Ditto for fighting in phalanxes, as the Spartans did.\n\n**However.** I am not a professional historian, merely a hobbyist, but I believe that if you are looking for stereotypically bulky/buff warriors, you can find examples. More specifically, Welsh/English longbowmen needed incredible upper body strength; some estimates put the draw strength of a warbow at upwards of 120 pounds (estimates of draw strength are still [controversial](_URL_0_)). The practice of \"bending\" rather than \"drawing\" such bows also means that the entire upper body would have to be quite strong, including the muscles of the chest and back, which are often especially favored by modern amateur bodybuilders (professionals don't skip leg day!). Even so, there would be no reason to isolate specific muscles, as bodybuilders do, so it is debatable how \"ripped\" such soldiers would be, even if they were quite broad, so to speak. Hope this helps!", "People who are very muscular spend all their time working to get those particular muscles, in particular areas of their body for show, not for practical usage.\n\nWarriors spent all their time practicing how to fight and kill people. They most likely had toned muscles, good physiques, stamina and perhaps a totally righteous set of abs, yo, but that was a side-effect of training, rather than the end result.", "When I was excavating a Roman-age Danish sacrificed army, all bones were very solid, with very pronounced muscle attachment, some even with extra bone growth around the biceps tendon attachment on the humerus. This would suggest that these guys, at least, would have been quite Arnoldesque. This is confirmed with warrior burials in Denmark, which also show much more muscular physiques than the average person from the same period.", "If you take a look art ancient statues they seemed in pretty good shape. Idealised, perhaps, but an ideal that wasn't just invented from whole cloth. And if you take a look at a statue like the [**Boxer of Quirinal**](_URL_0_), which has cauliflower ears,  scars and blood that demonstrate a serious effort at realism, then it suggests that professionals could be quite well-muscled.\n\n", "I remember seeing an article somewhere related to Spartacus:Blood And Sand that talked about how actual gladiators would've likely had a decent layer of fat due to the type of food they would've had access to (mostly grain/bread/etc) and that the layer of fat would actually serve good purpose in keeping them alive as a slice through fat isn't nearly as bad as a slide right into your organs."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.flickr.com/photos/baparis/2091921703/", "http://www.essential-architecture.com/DAVINCI/4detail_of_ten_knights.jpg", "http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1992.180.3a", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/5687262/Skeleton-reveals-violent-life-and-death-of-medieval-knight.html"], ["http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/040902090552.htm", "http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-457506/Myth-debunked-Our-medieval-ancestors-just-tall-says-new-study.html"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/A-History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/0679730826", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_training#history_of_weight_training"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yqqw9/how_fit_was_the_average_spartan_soldier/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Draw_weights"], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_of_Quirinal"], []]}
{"q_id": "2wtklv", "title": "Why were the Germans in WWII so much more scared to surrender to the Soviets?", "selftext": "I always hear a lot about Germans choosing to flee west and surrender to the Allies rather than the Soviets, but why is this? \n\nAlso, did this have anything to do with Communism, because I have also heard that going through the 30's into the 40's there were Communist sympathizers in Germany at the time, were they afraid of the Soviets as well though?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wtklv/why_were_the_germans_in_wwii_so_much_more_scared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cotz0w6", "couhpry"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["They were taught, brainwashed, in to believing that the soviets were sub-human savages. Barbarians. They put out a lot of propaganda about Russian soldiers raping and pillaging and ignoring laws in order to improve the moral while fighting them.\nBut it worked so well that many of them genuinely believed it. Maybe they were right in some cases, too. They thought they'd be tortured and executed by the Soviets immediately. ", "Well in addition to any brainwashing there is the simple fact that Germany slashed and burned their way into Russia. Tens of millions had died and many homes and cities were destroyed. Germans feared reprisal for their own conquests and actions. The allies on the other hand, led primarily by America and Britain hadn't faced the same level of destruction "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5fqm9a", "title": "Did Arian Christians accuse \"Orthodox\" Christians of heresy?", "selftext": "If so, did they punish them for it? And did they call themselves orthodox?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fqm9a/did_arian_christians_accuse_orthodox_christians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["danetzt"], "score": [2], "text": ["In short, yes.\n\nRemember, \"Arian\" is two sorts of label used to describe a number of groups in the fourth century. Firstly, it's a label used by Athanasius from the 360s onwards to describe a number of groups that he opposes, and to attempt to *taint* them through guilt by association with Arius, who had already been condemned. \"Arians\" by this measure did not consider themselves \"Arian\".\n\nSecondly, it's a label used by later historians to name a number of these same groupings, but it's largely falling out of disfavour in recent years since it is problematic.\n\nThat said, groups that we call \"Arian\", considered themselves to be \"orthodox\" (though they did not necessarily use that word in the way that we do), and when they held sway they would bring ecclesiastical power to bear on 'orthodox' believers.\n\nI'll give some links to translated creedal documents to illustrate. At the Council of Antioch in 341, mostly composed of non-Nicenes, they swore til they were blue in the face that they were not disciples of Arius. ([First Creed](_URL_2_)). They also describe their faith as in conformity to the \"evangelical and apostolic tradition\", which is the kind of language marker we mean by \"orthodox\" ([Second Creed](_URL_1_)).\n\n[Sirmium 357](_URL_0_) very explicitly speaks *against* using the language of 'essence' to talk about the Father and Son, and is aimed squarely at rendering the Nicene creed and its adherents as unorthodox.\n\nCoupled with these credal statements, councils dominated by non-Nicenes would regularly depose bishops of other theological persuasions, exiling them or otherwise punishing them. This explains, for instance, why Athanasius is continually deposed from Alexandria and goes into exile so often. His case is not isolated.\n\nRemember, 'heresy' is, from a historical perspective, a post-factum description of the losing side. 'Heretics' didn't think they were heretical, but that they were right and the other guys were wrong.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/second-creed-of-sirmium-or-the-blasphemy-of-sirmium/", "http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/second-creed-of-antioch/", "http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/first-creed-of-antioch/"]]}
{"q_id": "42ei0g", "title": "USSR Causing Ukrainian Genocide, Mao Responsible for Famine, and Stalin Creating Consideration Camps: Did Any of These Happen?", "selftext": "Many people on the internet, who happen to be communists, have told me that all the historical moments that I've listed in the tile are all fabrications. I'm a bit skeptical and feel like they're synonymous with holocaust denial. Are these fabrications?\n\nEDIT: *Concentration camps*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42ei0g/ussr_causing_ukrainian_genocide_mao_responsible/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz9rdqt", "cz9s16t", "cza0k2k"], "score": [16, 12, 3], "text": ["They aren't fabrications. \n\nThe Soviet Famine of 32-33 (what you refer to as the Ukrainian Genocide) was an actual famine caused by a massive drought throughout the major wheat production centers in the Ukraine and North Caucuses. The debate lies in whether or not the drought was deliberate or not and the extent to which the Soviet government knew about it/was slow to react. More modern evidence points to poor relations between the Party and the peasants, and a total hatch job by Soviet scientists on actually studying the soil conditions, as central to understanding why the drought occured. Calling it solely a Ukrainian genocide would mean ignoring the affected regions of the North Caucuses, and the general impact on the country as a whole as a result of having much less wheat output. \n\nI know there is a book that some like to cite which claims the famine was made up by Nazi's and Harvard as anti-soviet propaganda, but that argument hold little to no water. As an aside, especially with soviet history, stay far away from one Grover Furr. He isn't an historian, he's a nut who cares more about trying to protect the image of Stalin than actual research.\n\nFurther reading: [jstor link to paper on party-peasant relations](_URL_1_)\n\n[paper on soil conditions and harvest statistics during the famine years](_URL_2_)\n\nThe Chinese Famine that resulted from Mao's Great Leap Forward had similar issues. Local party members lied about how much grain the villages could produce and vastly over estimated the yields. This lead to grain requisition quotas  that had devastating effects, as the higher members were unaware of how little was left after taking the amount of grain that was proportional to the amount that had been reported. This was coupled by a large drought. In short, people had less food due to faulty reporting, and not enough water to grow food even to just feed themselves.\n\nFurther reading: [Jstor paper on grain quotas and procurements](_URL_0_)\n\nStalin and the camps. I think you meant to say concentration camps, not consideration camps. I admittedly am not an authority on the GULAG system, but it has been covered here before.", "The Holodomor, the term for the famine in Ukraine, is seen by many as a deliberate attempt by the Soviet regime to kill off the Ukrainians. They were quite adamant about not joining the Soviet Union, and thus it is argued that Stalin (or those close to him) ordered grain to be withheld from the peasants even when famine hit, as a means to punish the Ukrainians for their actions against the Soviet state. There is considerable evidence towards that being true, and like I noted most scholarship seems to support the view, but others do note that droughts were also a factor, and it wasn't just limited to Ukraine. But I tend to lean towards arguing that the Holodomor was, at least in part, a deliberate action (though I'm admittedly biased, as I have Ukrainian ancestry). \n\nAs for the Gulag system, Stalin didn't exactly found it, as a similar system had existed during Tsarist Russia (and Stalin himself had been exiled to Siberia on multiple occasions). Prisoners being internally exiled to Siberia, or elsewhere in the USSR, began almost as soon as the Bolsheviks took control of Russia. But Stalin definitely saw over the greatest numbers of people imprisoned in the camps, numbering in the tens of millions over his time in charge. ", "Mao being responsible for the Famine was somehow affirmed in the \"Resolution on certain questions in the history\nof our party since the founding of the People\u2019s Republic of China\" adopted by the sixth plenary session of th eleventh central committee of the CCP. \n\n\"*More important, it was due to the fact that Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades, both at the centre and in the localities, had become smug about their successes, were impatient for quick results and overestimated the role of man\u2019s subjective will and efforts. After the general line was formulated, the Great Leap Forward and the movement for rural people\u2019s communes were initiated without careful investigation and study and without prior experimentation. .....It was mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and of the struggle against \u201cRight opportunism\u201d together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961, which caused serious losses to our country and people.*\"\n\nAnd \"*Likewise, responsibility for the errors committed in the work of this period rested with the same collective leadership. Although Comrade Mao Zedong must be held chiefly responsible, we cannot lay the blame for all those errors on him alone.*\"\n\nSource: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.unh.edu/stable/10.1086/430804?Search=yes&amp;seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/20171073?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger,%20Natural%20Disaster%20and%20Human%20Actions.pdf"], [], ["https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "19rda9", "title": "Are there any people alive today that can trace their ancestry back to ancient history?", "selftext": "If not, then who/what family has the furthest recorded lineage? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19rda9/are_there_any_people_alive_today_that_can_trace/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8qog0k", "c8qxqyc", "c8r5vr7"], "score": [9, 2, 3], "text": ["There are plenty of people/dynasties that claim they \"descend from antiquity\" but there are no 'Western' claims that are accepted by historians and genealogists.\n\nThere are a number of 'Eastern' claims that might one-day be accepted, the oldest of which is Kung Tsui-chang who claims to be the 79th-generation male descendant of Confucius (though, probably with some adoption involved).\n\nThe Japanese imperial family also has a reasonably strong claim, though their surviving records don't go back as far as their claim does.", "Plenty of people can trace their lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. Of course, there're *plenty* of false claimants to that, but definitely many that can be verified. Genealogy has always been a strong part of Islamic tradition and so we can accurately trace back certain lineages to Muhammad. Tarim, Yemen is said to have the highest concentration of his descendants today. ", "In India, the Pandas (Brahmin Pandit) of Haridwar keep detailed genealogy records going back centuries. These are, of course, for Hindus only.\n\nEach Panda caters to only one caste from one district of the country. The records are written on thick paper, in ink and kept in piles of loosely bound ledgers. \n\nWhen a sheet of paper is damaged, they meticulously copy the information over to a new sheet and reinsert in the same place in the ledger. \n\nUnfortunately, since these records are scattered across different Pandas, and aren't computerized, it's very hard to trace back different genealogies, but this is one of the best places where you might be able to trace a lineage back to antiquity.\n\nThere other locations which keep similar records. Unfortunately none of them appear to have been studied systematically. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "6zzki0", "title": "Why were the Mormons driven out west and why did they settle in Utah of all places?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zzki0/why_were_the_mormons_driven_out_west_and_why_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dn0b34q", "dn0b34q"], "score": [9, 9], "text": ["The Mormons, especially their leader Joseph Smith, tended to run into legal problems wherever they landed. That makes a consistent narrative hard to compile.\n\nLet's start in upstate New York. As a teen Smith engaged in the profession of using a peep stone to look for buried treasure. He and his band of treasure hunters would hire themselves out to various people to dig for treasure on their land. Smith's role was that of the seer who would tell them where to dig, placate the spirits protecting the treasure, and to offer the excuses when no treasure was found. He was (likely) convicted at least once basically for being a disreputable character during this period. Well, the word \"conviction\" is disputed. But he was taken to court, and paid a fine to the court. The records are spotty. Before leaving New York he escaped from jail at least once, and was brought up on charges related to fraud and sexual misconduct... both of these will reoccur.\n\nIt's around this time he claimed to have found the gold plates. He then published the Book of Mormon as a translation of those plates, and founded what would become the LDS Church. It didn't take long before he was forced to flee to Ohio. Ultimately his \"persecution\" in this period came from three quarters\n\n1. His band of treasure seekers. They took him at his word that he had found gold, and they wanted their cut as had been previously agreed. He came to understandings with a couple of them. But the rest were left in the cold. They resented that and made multiple attempts to steal the gold plates. \n3. His creditors. Smith in the period was a great borrower of money (and other things). He tended to be less good at returning what was lent. He was living and farming on borrowed land, planted with borrowed seed, using a borrowed magical peep stone, to translate his book, which was published with borrowed money. None of these (except the land) was ever returned. And the lenders were getting in some cases murderously impatient. \n2. His family and neighbors. He had a rep as a disreputable character. He was known as a shiftless layabout always working on some get rich quick scheme. He was also known as a no-good rake who was \"ruining\" the local girls. Founding a church was a bridge to far for a lot of them. His father-in-law, the relatives of the Stowe girls, and others first tried to get him in court, and when he skated the charges they were gearing up for a good old fashioned lynching of one type or another. So he skipped town.\n\nAnd... went to Kirtland Ohio. There he met up with a Campbelite preacher, Sydney Rigdon. They became best friends and Kirtland became the church headquarters. Shortly after Missouri became another center of the church, but we'll get to Missouri in a bit. In Ohio Smith started a lot of different projects including an anti-bank (a quasi-legal non-chartered pseudo-bank) after his attempt to charter a real bank was denied by the Ohio authorities. He didn't have enough assets. This was known as the Kirtland Safety Society. Using funds from the anti-bank, Smith and Rigdon engaged in land speculation using other church member's funds to buy and sell land... just in time for the Panic of 1837. This left many church members, and a lot of local non-members, destitute. \n\nA bit before this time his wife found Smith having sex with their maid, Fanny Alger, in their barn. And other rumors of sexual misconduct also swirled. He was beginning to at least think about the doctrine of polygamy, even if he hadn't fully developed it yet. This apparently included some sort of inappropriate conduct with the teen girl Marinda Nancy Johnson and proposed to 12 year old Mary Rollins Lightner. He would later marry both girls. Between the financial problems and the accusations of sexual misconduct tensions rose between the core faithful members, those who split from the church, and their non-Mormon neighbors. Smith was even tarred and feathered, and almost castrated, by a mob led by Marinda Johnson's uncle and at least one brother. So Smith decided it was high time to move to Missouri. The state of Ohio would pursue him legally for the rest of his life, with him regularly dodging process servers and bounty hunters. He was eventually convicted in absentia for fraud. But he never repaid his fine, debts, or served his sentence.\n\nSo we move on to Missouri. This will overlap with the Ohio period for a while. The first Mormon settlers moved into the area in and around Jackson County. Smith had revealed that it was the site of the Garden of Eden, and more importantly would be the location of Jesus Christ's second coming. So the Mormons move in. This caused tension among the existing settlers who were largely slave owners from the South. The Mormons were largely vaguely abolitionist New Englanders. They also were largely buying land with questionable titles, usually on credit, or backed by the Kirtland Safety Society. They also formed a tight-knit community that tended to vote as a block. The Missourians formed their own counter community and voting blocks to counter. Pretty soon tensions boiled over. At one point Smith even raised an army in Ohio of several hundred men and marched to Missouri. A ceasefire agreement of a sort was declared delineating a separation between the Mormons and non-Mormons.\n\nThroughout this period the church in Missouri was being run by members of the Whitmer Family. They considered themselves co-founders of the church. Son-in-Law Oliver Cowdrey was Second Elder of the church and had been the Scribe for the Book of Mormon. They were increasingly unhappy with Smith's increasingly hierarchical organization. They also disapproved of Smith's financial dealings, and his sexual misconduct (as they saw it) and had set themselves up as something of a counter movement within the church. When Smith fled to Missouri he quickly took control of the church there. The Whitmers, Cowdrey, and their supporters were excommunicated and driven from their homes. Rigdon even gave his infamous Salt Sermon declaring a \"war of extermination\" between the faithful and any who would oppose them.\n\nOf course the only place the newly minted excommunicates could go would be to their non-Mormon neighbors. They appealed to the government and the general populous for aid. This ratcheted up tensions a great deal. That fall it spilled over into open violence in what was basically a riot over access to polling booths. The so called Battle of Gallatin was the starting point that saw both sides attacking the outlying settlements of Mormons and Missourians alike. And the Missouri-Mormon war was on. It even had a set piece battle, the Battle of Crooked River, between the militias. The end result was that the Mormon leadership was arrested as the instigators, and agreed that the Mormons would leave the state. Governor Boggs even signed an infamous order known as the Extermination Order to make sure to drive the Mormons from the state.\n\nThe rank and file members spent the winter of 1839-1840 moving to Quincy Illinois (later renamed Nauvoo). The leadership spent the winter in pretty horrid conditions in the ironically named Liberty Jail in Missouri. After a few changes of venue they escaped and followed their fellows to Illinois. From this point on Smith was also on the run from Missouri for treason and murder.\n\n", "The Mormons, especially their leader Joseph Smith, tended to run into legal problems wherever they landed. That makes a consistent narrative hard to compile.\n\nLet's start in upstate New York. As a teen Smith engaged in the profession of using a peep stone to look for buried treasure. He and his band of treasure hunters would hire themselves out to various people to dig for treasure on their land. Smith's role was that of the seer who would tell them where to dig, placate the spirits protecting the treasure, and to offer the excuses when no treasure was found. He was (likely) convicted at least once basically for being a disreputable character during this period. Well, the word \"conviction\" is disputed. But he was taken to court, and paid a fine to the court. The records are spotty. Before leaving New York he escaped from jail at least once, and was brought up on charges related to fraud and sexual misconduct... both of these will reoccur.\n\nIt's around this time he claimed to have found the gold plates. He then published the Book of Mormon as a translation of those plates, and founded what would become the LDS Church. It didn't take long before he was forced to flee to Ohio. Ultimately his \"persecution\" in this period came from three quarters\n\n1. His band of treasure seekers. They took him at his word that he had found gold, and they wanted their cut as had been previously agreed. He came to understandings with a couple of them. But the rest were left in the cold. They resented that and made multiple attempts to steal the gold plates. \n3. His creditors. Smith in the period was a great borrower of money (and other things). He tended to be less good at returning what was lent. He was living and farming on borrowed land, planted with borrowed seed, using a borrowed magical peep stone, to translate his book, which was published with borrowed money. None of these (except the land) was ever returned. And the lenders were getting in some cases murderously impatient. \n2. His family and neighbors. He had a rep as a disreputable character. He was known as a shiftless layabout always working on some get rich quick scheme. He was also known as a no-good rake who was \"ruining\" the local girls. Founding a church was a bridge to far for a lot of them. His father-in-law, the relatives of the Stowe girls, and others first tried to get him in court, and when he skated the charges they were gearing up for a good old fashioned lynching of one type or another. So he skipped town.\n\nAnd... went to Kirtland Ohio. There he met up with a Campbelite preacher, Sydney Rigdon. They became best friends and Kirtland became the church headquarters. Shortly after Missouri became another center of the church, but we'll get to Missouri in a bit. In Ohio Smith started a lot of different projects including an anti-bank (a quasi-legal non-chartered pseudo-bank) after his attempt to charter a real bank was denied by the Ohio authorities. He didn't have enough assets. This was known as the Kirtland Safety Society. Using funds from the anti-bank, Smith and Rigdon engaged in land speculation using other church member's funds to buy and sell land... just in time for the Panic of 1837. This left many church members, and a lot of local non-members, destitute. \n\nA bit before this time his wife found Smith having sex with their maid, Fanny Alger, in their barn. And other rumors of sexual misconduct also swirled. He was beginning to at least think about the doctrine of polygamy, even if he hadn't fully developed it yet. This apparently included some sort of inappropriate conduct with the teen girl Marinda Nancy Johnson and proposed to 12 year old Mary Rollins Lightner. He would later marry both girls. Between the financial problems and the accusations of sexual misconduct tensions rose between the core faithful members, those who split from the church, and their non-Mormon neighbors. Smith was even tarred and feathered, and almost castrated, by a mob led by Marinda Johnson's uncle and at least one brother. So Smith decided it was high time to move to Missouri. The state of Ohio would pursue him legally for the rest of his life, with him regularly dodging process servers and bounty hunters. He was eventually convicted in absentia for fraud. But he never repaid his fine, debts, or served his sentence.\n\nSo we move on to Missouri. This will overlap with the Ohio period for a while. The first Mormon settlers moved into the area in and around Jackson County. Smith had revealed that it was the site of the Garden of Eden, and more importantly would be the location of Jesus Christ's second coming. So the Mormons move in. This caused tension among the existing settlers who were largely slave owners from the South. The Mormons were largely vaguely abolitionist New Englanders. They also were largely buying land with questionable titles, usually on credit, or backed by the Kirtland Safety Society. They also formed a tight-knit community that tended to vote as a block. The Missourians formed their own counter community and voting blocks to counter. Pretty soon tensions boiled over. At one point Smith even raised an army in Ohio of several hundred men and marched to Missouri. A ceasefire agreement of a sort was declared delineating a separation between the Mormons and non-Mormons.\n\nThroughout this period the church in Missouri was being run by members of the Whitmer Family. They considered themselves co-founders of the church. Son-in-Law Oliver Cowdrey was Second Elder of the church and had been the Scribe for the Book of Mormon. They were increasingly unhappy with Smith's increasingly hierarchical organization. They also disapproved of Smith's financial dealings, and his sexual misconduct (as they saw it) and had set themselves up as something of a counter movement within the church. When Smith fled to Missouri he quickly took control of the church there. The Whitmers, Cowdrey, and their supporters were excommunicated and driven from their homes. Rigdon even gave his infamous Salt Sermon declaring a \"war of extermination\" between the faithful and any who would oppose them.\n\nOf course the only place the newly minted excommunicates could go would be to their non-Mormon neighbors. They appealed to the government and the general populous for aid. This ratcheted up tensions a great deal. That fall it spilled over into open violence in what was basically a riot over access to polling booths. The so called Battle of Gallatin was the starting point that saw both sides attacking the outlying settlements of Mormons and Missourians alike. And the Missouri-Mormon war was on. It even had a set piece battle, the Battle of Crooked River, between the militias. The end result was that the Mormon leadership was arrested as the instigators, and agreed that the Mormons would leave the state. Governor Boggs even signed an infamous order known as the Extermination Order to make sure to drive the Mormons from the state.\n\nThe rank and file members spent the winter of 1839-1840 moving to Quincy Illinois (later renamed Nauvoo). The leadership spent the winter in pretty horrid conditions in the ironically named Liberty Jail in Missouri. After a few changes of venue they escaped and followed their fellows to Illinois. From this point on Smith was also on the run from Missouri for treason and murder.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "277jfj", "title": "Why were Quakers banned from the Massachussetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/277jfj/why_were_quakers_banned_from_the_massachussetts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chy7l45"], "score": [6], "text": ["Quakers were a persecuted group even back in the UK- they emphasized a more personal, direct relationship with God, unmediated by clergy, which was viewed as blasphemous and a threat to the established power of the Church of England. Because the monarch was the head of the church, denying one's allegiance to the church was akin to disloyalty to the state, and so 'nonconformists' like the Quakers were heavily proscribed.\n\nNow, whereas 17th-century England was a state in which political and religious authority were heavily entwined, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was essentially a theocracy- although it was organized on republican lines, the franchise was limited to freemen, and one of the requirements for being a freeman was being a member of a Puritan church. This, too, was in the days when becoming a church member was a very serious business that involved an interrogation by the pastor to hunt down any hints of heterodoxy. \n\nBecause of the religious dominance of the government, the code of laws was heavily based off of Puritan beliefs. People could be prosecuted for crimes as various as playing dice or breaking the Sabbath (to say nothing of people executed for 'witchcraft'). Christmas and May Day were banned. \n\nBack in England, the Quakers had been persecuted for their beliefs because blasphemy was seen as a threat to the social order. However, in the environment of Puritan New England, blasphemy was not just a religious injunction, but a civil offense. Simply by being within the colony and holding beliefs that were at odds with the established doctrine there, one was actively committing a crime, and it was on this basis that Quakers were banned.\n\nThey took no half measures, either. Any Quakers found on a ship coming into the colony were immediately imprisoned before being banished. There were a number of individuals who persisted in coming into the colony over a period of years in the middle of the 1600s, and four of them were eventually publicly hanged for their beliefs. This was seen as the last straw by the authorities in England, who revoked the ban on Quakers and, not long afterwards, ended the colony's de facto independence by sending over a royal governor to enforce the Crown's laws."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "44wwi0", "title": "Did the concept of zero exist in the Roman era?", "selftext": "I was half-watching a Christopher Hitchens debate and he discussed how roman numerals didn't have a zero and the concept was seen as a scary thought from pagans. Is this true?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/44wwi0/did_the_concept_of_zero_exist_in_the_roman_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cztmxkx"], "score": [39], "text": ["The Romans didn't have a _number_ for zero. They definitely had the _concept_ though.\n\nThey just used the word \"nulla\" to mean nothing. Either you had something, or it wasn't worth counting. \n\nRoman numerals are almost useless when doing math. Even simple addition and subtraction is clumsy and slow. I've heard it speculated (but don't have a source) that they did most calculations with abacus-like frames, where the numbers remained abstract, and then wrote down the result of their math in the traditional Roman numerals. That is, the numerals were for records, not arithmetic, making a numeral for \"zero\" even more useless. Why record the transaction if nothing happened? \n\nIn modern systems, zero can be an important placeholder (think \"100\") but practical, day-to-day situations involving a true zero are pretty rare and most of those cases can be covered with nulla or maybe \"free.\" \n\nAs in all things, the Romans were also heavily influenced by Greek thinking and the Greeks liked to debate the \nphilosophical nature of zero (\"how can anything truly be nothing?\"), which again shows that everyone was aware of the concept, just not sure of its utility. \n\nI've never heard anything about the Romans fearing pagan mathematical concepts. Until Constantine and Christianity, Romans wouldn't have even thought of other people as \"pagans.\" Barbarians, certainly, but when you live in a polytheistic culture, pagan doesn't mean much. \n\nP.S. If someone has an example of a Roman source working out a sum, I'd really like to see it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ic213", "title": "Was there any actual proof of genocide in Srebrenica and Zepa?", "selftext": "Having read some articles on the net about the Bosnian War, it seems to me (or I could have read incorrectly) that some of the evidence in the trials were misused/fabricated? So is there any actual credible evidence of genocide happening?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ic213/was_there_any_actual_proof_of_genocide_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl0wscd", "cl0zdo7"], "score": [3, 3], "text": ["Discovery and excavation of mass graves in the region has been [going on for years.]( _URL_0_)", "The Srebrenica is a relatively well documented event. I really wish someone with extant expertise in the disintegration of Yugoslavia would pick up your question.\n\nIn the meantime, although not my favorite source, the [Wikipedia entry](_URL_0_) is surprisingly detailed and informative, and might offer a good starting point on the topic.\n\nAnther document you might find useful is:\n\nthe report by [THE COMMISSION FOR INVESTIGATION OF THE EVENTS IN AND AROUND SREBRENICA BETWEEN 10 th AND 19 th JULY 1995 THE EVENTS IN AND AROUND SREBRENICA BETWEEN 10 th AND 19 th JULY 1995 ](_URL_2_);\n\nAnd the [Addendum](_URL_1_)\n\nHowever, the actual admission of genocide is a highly sensitive political issue and there are a horde of denialists.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/29/magazine/srebrenica-life-in-the-valley-of-death.html?_r=0"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre", "http://balkanwitness.glypx.com/srebr_final_e.pdf", "http://trial-ch.org/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/trialwatch/Srebrenica_Report2004.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2fyr09", "title": "Was Ludwig van Beethoven black?", "selftext": "A friend of mine posted this, and this perplexed me. I have an Associate's of Arts in Music Performance and Education (before I switched majors) and have studied more Beethoven than I care for; while it doesn't exactly matter to the field, I've never heard anything like this.\n\nSo, was Ludwig van Beethoven black?\n\n[Article](_URL_0_).", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fyr09/was_ludwig_van_beethoven_black/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cke4z1m"], "score": [7], "text": ["My vote is for \"this is bullshit.\"\n\nBeethoven was well known in his life. After his death, he was pretty much considered the model of what the composer should be and his music became gospel. He was pretty much canonized in the 19th century, and his image is still VERY strong in the world of classical music. His music was used by the nazis for several reasons, it was still a symbol and they tried to use it for their agenda.\n\nHe was an extremely well respected  musician, during and after his life people tried to be associated with him. As far as I can tell, this theory is just another example of somebody with an agenda.\n\nBeethoven was apparently nicknamed The Spaniard as a boy. There is a case of description of him as an adult telling us he was \"short in stature, broad in the shoulders, short neck, large head, round nose, dark brown complexion; he always bent forward slightly when he walked.\" He lived at this house people have called Das Schwarzspanierhaus (literally \"house of the Black Spaniards,\" which I think arises comes from some association of this place with some Spanish friars who wore black robes).\n\nThat is what I know that is related to dark-coloured and Spanish. I don't know of solid evidence that could indicate he was black, a moor, or from Spain. The Beethoven Center at San Jos\u00e9 State University [agrees there is no evidence supporting this](_URL_1_).\n\nDo you want to know about a black musician who lived in Europe during Beethoven's life? [Joseph Antonio Emidy (1775 \u2013 1835)](_URL_0_). \n\nThere's no conspiracy here, this is something we would know for sure. The academic world would have no reason to force the idea of a \"white\" Beethoven, we would just not care now... Classical music made it to a hell of a lot of countries, we (non-Europeans) have assimilated it, it is no longer an exclusively European thing. We wouldn't care to find out he was a black transexual Mexican woman who was formerly a shaman and ended in Europe because of alien experiments. But you can be sure we would be VERY interested in evidence for such a discovery.\n\nA lot has been discussed about Beethoven, probably more than about any other famous musician. I remember reading this theory that \"he wasn't actually that good,\" that his fame was just the product of a bunch of situations... \n\nWhat's next, \"was Beethoven an alien with 2 brains\"? (Like Bach)\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://open.salon.com/blog/ronp01/2009/09/27/the_african_heritage_of_ludwig_van_Beethoven"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/964272", "http://www.sjsu.edu/beethoven/research/faq_beethoven/"]]}
{"q_id": "8pocws", "title": "How did the Russians manage the logistics of redeploying their Baltic fleet to the Far East in 1905?", "selftext": "As the battleships of 1900's probably didn't have the endurance to make the whole trip in one go, and the Russians didn't have any colonies of their own in Africa or the Middle East, where the fleet was able to coal? I mean, wouldn't it be basically an act of war against the Japanese to allow an enemy fleet to stop in your harbor? Were there some diplomatic maneuvers to help or hinder the fleet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8pocws/how_did_the_russians_manage_the_logistics_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0cstl7"], "score": [8], "text": ["Expanded [from an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nThe process of coaling was an arduous and backbreaking task in the early twentieth century. This was doubly true for the fleets commanded by Zinovy Rozhestvensky and Dmitry von F\u00f6lkersam which had to make a long journey to Asian waters. The journey was a logistical nightmare for a Russian navy that was largely designed to fight in European waters. The inexperience of the fleet, coupled with panic over Japanese sneak attack led to various scares during the travel that the fleet was under attack. But the Russians were able to take advantage of the emerging international maritime law that allowed belligerent warships to coal and take on water in neutral ports. \n\nThe Russian fleet mostly sought shelter in friendly French ports like Dakar, Madagascar, and Camn Ranh Bay. International maritime law allowed for belligerent warships to stay 24 hours in neutral ports for coaling, but the Franco-Russian alliance meant that the French officials often turned a blind eye to the Russians overstaying their limit, much to the chagrin of Japanese diplomats. The Russians also contracted out to private French and German civilian companies for colliers. In the latter case, the Hamburg-Amerika line's colliers further strained Anglo-German relations, and Chancellor von B\u00fclow wanted the company to cancel the contract, but Kaiser Wilhelm II sided with Hamburg-Amerika as it fit into his conception of using German support for Russia as a wedge against the Franco-Russian alliance. In this instance, the French desire to keep the alliance alive and the German desire to undermine it actually both worked in the Russians' favor, making the fleet's voyage possible after the Dogger Bank incident alienated an already cold Britain.  \n\nRear Admiral F\u00f6lkersam's newly-christened Third Pacific Squadron though had a slightly-shorter trip than the main force as it made the transit via the Canal. One rationale was that  F\u00f6lkersam's ships were both lighter and unable to carry as much coal as the main battle line under Rozhestvenskii's flag. There was a fear that these smaller ships would hamper the already complicated logistics of the voyage. Moreover, there was also a fear that the heavily-laden battleline might also find itself aground in the narrow waters off Suez because the amount of coal taken aboard had increased their draft. \n\nBut it was more than just practical matters of logistics that underlay the division of the fleet. The same fears that inspired the Dogger Bank incident were still at play and there was  a fear that the Japanese could have naval forces in the restricted waters of the Mediterranean. F\u00f6lkersam's ships were not only a tad more maneuverable, they were also expendable for the whole fleet. His ships were either older ones or auxiliaries. \n\nThe expendable nature of Third Pacific Squadron also reflected the fear that Britain could prevent the whole enterprise. Rozhestvensky was afraid that the British control over the Canal meant they could use whatever pretext to detain or even seize the battlefleet. The 1888 Convention of Constantinople sanctified the Canal as an international waterway and guaranteed rights of access.  But the Convention also had provisions governing the transit of warships and ships of belligerent powers that limited their loiter times in the Canal or coaling at Canal ports. The British, as the *de facto*  controlling power of the Canal, had the power to interpret the Convention's provisions. They had already done so during the Spanish-American War when they narrowly interpreted the Convention to minimize the time Spain's warships spent coaling and refitting while making a transit to the Philippines. The Dogger Bank incident certainly did not endear the Russian fleet to the British and there was a fear that the British could interpret the Convention against Russia's interests. Moreover, the Convention was  still a relatively untested treaty and it was unclear from Rozhestvensky's perspective whether or not the British would abide by it or if the Egyptian government would alter the rules for coaling. \n\nSo even if Dogger Bank did not alter the Convention, the bad blood the incident created between Britain and Russia had the *potential* for British to use the Convention against Russia. This, coupled with the already severe logistical problems of the fleet, meant that sending F\u00f6lkersam's more expendable and lighter ships to transit the Canal was a calculated risk on the part of Rozhestvensky and one that paid off. The Third Pacific Squadron was able to rendezvous with its colliers and then link up with the main force after the Canal transit. The British did not unduly delay or pester F\u00f6lkersam's detachment and the transit showed Britain's commitment to the Convention.  Unfortunately, the subsequent Japanese triumph at Tsushima negated the herculean effort that had gone into supplying the fleet for its transoceanic voyage. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8556v6/why_did_only_a_portion_of_the_russian_navy_travel/"]]}
{"q_id": "dkl842", "title": "What did Classic, Country Music stars like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and the like, think of the Woodstock Music Festival?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dkl842/what_did_classic_country_music_stars_like_johnny/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f4jby9s"], "score": [16], "text": ["In 1969, both Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash were both fairly unusually aligned with the American youth counterculture than the average country musician. Kris Kristofferson's 1970 debut album *Kristofferson* features the track 'Blame It On The Stones', which satirised bourgeois hypocrisy about the counterculture and its drug use: \n\n >  Mister Marvin middle class is really in a stew\n\n >  Wondering' what the younger generation's coming to\n\n >  And the taste of his martini doesn't please his bitter tongue\n\n >  Blame it on the Rolling Stones.\n\nKristofferson's tune 'Me And Bobby McGee' was also covered by San Francisco counterculture star Janis Joplin soon before her death in 1970, suggesting at least that his songwriting was attractive to the counterculture (especially after it had moved into a more folk/country mode after the success of The Band around 1968). \n\nJohnny Cash, circa Woodstock, was probably most prominent as the host of *The Johnny Cash Show*, on the ABC network in the US, a variety show; he had relatively recently had some of his biggest success with the live albums recorded at Folsom Prison and then at San Quentin, and as such was perceived as somewhat sympathetic to the counterculture, if not a part of it. On this show, Johnny Cash featured a variety of music along the lines of folk and country, broadly defined, and this included Woodstock performers like Creedence Clearwater Revival, and folkies like Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger who had explicitly made anti-Vietnam statements (alongside more classic country artists like Merle Haggard and Marty Robbins, and more showbiz types like Pat Boone and Peggy Lee). The first show featured (counterculture icon) Bob Dylan dueting with Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash at one point in the run of the show famously performed Kristofferson's 'Sunday Morning Coming Down', prominently not bowdlerising the word 'stoned' for the mainstream audience.\n\nSo both Cash and Kristofferson were very likely comfortable with Woodstock. They also both represent the more progressive side of country music, as both were definitely influences on the 'outlaw country' movement of the 1970s (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, etc), which contrasted itself with the Nashville mainstream.\n\nThe Nashville mainstream was less enamoured of the hippies. In the month after Woodstock, Merle Haggard released the single 'Okie From Muskogee', which started with the lyrics:\n\n >  We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee\n\n >  We don't take our trips on LSD\n\n >  We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street\n\n >  We like livin' right, and bein' free\n\n >  We don't make a party out of lovin'\n\n >  We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo\n\n >  We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy\n\n >  Like the hippies out in San Francisco do\n\n >  I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,\n\n >  A place where even squares can have a ball\n\n >  We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,\n\n >  And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all\n\nThis quickly became a number one on the Billboard country charts, which at that time was strongly based on radio airplay of the singles on country radio stations, suggesting the message of the song was one strongly approved of by country music gatekeepers and the Southern country audience (Haggard himself and his relation to the Nashville mainstream was more complex, as the song was originally meant as satire - or so he claimed later). Johnny Cash also had Haggard on his show playing the song.\n\nBroadly speaking, in the 1968 election, several country music icons endorsed conservative politicians at some level. George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama who ran on a segregationist third-party platform in the 1968 election, won the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the hope of being able to negotiate with the eventual winner on implementing very racist policy. Wallace Tammy Wynette sang 'Stand By Your Man' at a George Wallace appearance (and which became an unofficial Wallace anthem) and Hank Snow ('I've Been Everywhere') went on tour with Wallace during his Presidential campaign. Roy Acuff, one of the biggest figures in Nashville, was a prominent supporter of Richard Nixon during the 1968 election. Nixon ran ads on Porter Waggoner's television show during the campaign, warning that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Hubert Humphrey, the (Northern, Establishment) Democratic candidate.\n\nWallace, in 1968, was fond of joking about long-haired hippies as they were protesting him, saying things like: \n\n >  That\u2019s alright, that\u2019s alright honey \u2013 that\u2019s right sweetie-pie \u2013 oh, that\u2019s a he. I thought you were a she\n\nand \n\n >  You come up when I get through and I'll autograph your sandals for you. That is, if you got any on . . . You need a good haircut. That's all that's wrong with you. . . There are two four-letter words I bet you folks don't know: 'w-o-r-k' and 's-o-a-p.'\n\nThis is probably a fairly good representation of the attitudes towards the hippie counterculture that was epitomised by Woodstock, amongst the more conservative Nashville country music stars who might have been comfortable with endorsing a George Wallace (unlike Haggard or Cash). After all, in 1972, after Wallace had been seriously injured after being shot, a crowd of 7,000 gathered at 'Wallace's Woodstock' at the Old Plantation Music Park near Highland City in Florida (basically part of George Jones and Tammy Wynette's property) to hold a benefit for Wallace, which featured performances from Jones and Wynette, Ferlin Husky, Del Reeves, and George Wallace Jr."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2cp0jb", "title": "How does the majority of historians view Julius Caesar? A great leader or an evil one?", "selftext": "I'm somewhat of a beginner of a student of ancient Rome but I've realized in my studies that I can't seem to find a general consensus on the way history views Caesar. Depending on who you talk to he was a vicious tyrant who deserved what he got and that his assassins were hero's. Others, however, praise all he did and believe him to be one of the greatest people to have come out of Rome and those who assassinated him were cold blooded murderers.\n\nSo, how do you people see it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2cp0jb/how_does_the_majority_of_historians_view_julius/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhm5l9"], "score": [17], "text": ["The issue with this question is that it is completely variant on a subjective viewpoint. Judging whether or not a person as famous as Caesar was \"good\" or \"evil\" is a truly impossible task, not only because of the differences in morality between the ancient era and the modern one, but also because of the different nuances of character that an individual has. Julius Caesar was undoubtedly a great man who left his mark on history. Whether or not \"great\" means \"good\" or \"evil\" is, again, up to individual interpretation. \n\nStarting off that examination, I'll suggest you go ahead and read [this excellent introduction](_URL_1_) to *Life of a Colossus*. Honestly, I recommend you read the whole book, but for our purposes here, the introduction answers your question perfectly, and far better than I can, myself. To know more about Caesar as a person, read the entire book - it's the best biography I've found of the man, and gives an excellent accounting with a neutral viewpoint on the person himself.\n\nThe long story short is that Caesar was as amoral as anyone else has ever been. He wasn't good or evil; he was simultaneously neither and both. He did great things for Rome, for the poor, and when it benefited him. He also was in charge of the hugely destructive Gallic War, which was incredibly popular with the Roman people, who considered it a good thing. The modern eye would consider it less so, with a (probably exaggerated) total of one million people killed and another million enslaved. Again, whether or not the Gallic Wars made Caesar a \"good person\" or \"bad person\" is entirely subjective. For the Romans, he offered civil peace and a pretty good deal for the common people, even if the aristocrats couldn't stand him. To our modern view, he made himself an autocrat in all but name. While he wasn't emperor, he consolidated power and kept people he didn't like from getting anywhere; but his reforms were good ones, and some of them lasted for centuries, despite Caesar's extremely short rule. \n\nHe was ruthless in his own way, but he also offered clemency when it suited him. He offered friendship when he saw it to be beneficial, but he also offered enmity when that was more in his favour. So the answer to your question, I suppose, would be \"both and neither.\" He was a person, and no person is black or white - we're all shades of grey.\n\n[I actually examined a rather similar question to this one a bit ago](_URL_0_); I'll paste what I wrote then in the comments below :)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21574z/why_when_people_hear_julius_caesar_do_they_think/cg9rpbn", "http://books.google.com/books?id=aSmr_bVR2-kC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=life%20of%20a%20colossus&amp;pg=PA1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "40hefi", "title": "How did the four Sunni Islamic school of thoughts settle to the current geography? Could this change in the future?", "selftext": "[The map of the Muslim world shows the geography of four Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)](_URL_0_)\n\nEach of the schools is predominant in the following regions;\n\n* Hanafi : Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Central Asia, Chechenya, Tatarstan, Balkan peninsula, Afghanistan, South Asia, Uyghur\n* Hanbali : Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar\n* Maliki : North Africa, Saharan region, West Africa, Kuwait, Northeastern Saudi Arabia, West part of UAE\n* Shafi'i : Southeast Asia, East Africa, Kurdistan, Southern Iraq, Eastern Egypt, Yemen, Coastal area of India, Maldives", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40hefi/how_did_the_four_sunni_islamic_school_of_thoughts/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyu6mrq"], "score": [2], "text": ["Mod mote to OP and potential respondents: just a reminder that this sub *does not permit speculation*, so discussion here will have to exclude the last question (re possible futures) . "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Madhhab_Map3.png"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18rshl", "title": "Were there Prisoner of War camps in the American Civil War? If so, what were they like? How were the prisoners treated? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18rshl/were_there_prisoner_of_war_camps_in_the_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hfgz7", "c8hi7b6"], "score": [9, 2], "text": ["It was bad in the South as the war dragged on.  The North was very effective at limiting the South's ability to supply their troops and civilians.  PoWs are pretty low on the list when you're rationing.\n\nAndersonville, by far the most notorious Civil War prison, housed nearly 33,000 men at its peak\u2014one of the largest \"cities\" of the Confederacy. Inmates crowded into 26.5 acres (11 hectares) of muddy land, constructing \"shebangs,\" or primitive shelters, from whatever material they could find. Lacking sewer or sanitation facilities, camp inmates turned \"Stockade Creek\" into a massive, disease-ridden latrine. Summer rainstorms would flood the open sewer, spreading filth. Visitors approaching the camp for the first time often retched from the stench. The prison's oppressive conditions claimed 13,000 lives by the war's end.\n\nThat's not to say that the North was much better:\n\nPrisons often engendered conditions more horrible than those on the battlefield. The Union's Fort Delaware was dubbed \"The Fort Delaware Death Pen,\" while Elmira prison in New York saw nearly a 25 percent mortality rate. The South's infamous Camp Sumter, or Andersonville prison, claimed the lives of 29 percent of its inmates.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's a good article.", "There was a POW camp on Belle Isle here in Richmond, VA.  The conditions were horrible and disease, starvation, and privation ran rampant.  Many froze to death in the open field that served as their home.\n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/07/0701_030701_civilwarprisons.html"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Isle_(Richmond,_Virginia)", "http://www.mdgorman.com/Prisons/belle_isle_prison.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "4ktj6l", "title": "What were the consequences of Athens\u2019 decisions, and how did their downfall effect Greece and ultimately leave it open for Phillip II to conquer.", "selftext": "What I am really curious about is, well mainly what allowed Phillip II to come into Greece, and conquer what was almost a unified force, prior to the collapse of the Delian League. (Also apologies if my question is poorly informed, I am recently interested in ancient Greek history and this is what I have kind f pieced together)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ktj6l/what_were_the_consequences_of_athens_decisions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d3hs1p4"], "score": [8], "text": ["There is a significant amount of time between the dissolution of the Delian League (404 BC) and the conquest of Greece by Philip II (338 BC). In fact, there was time enough for the Athenians to start a Second Delian League (probably in 378 BC) *and for that League to fall too* (after the Social War of 357-355 BC).\n\nHowever, Athenian decisions certainly did play into Philip II's hand. Firstly, from 368 BC onward, the Athenians waged a costly war to recover the strategic city of Amphipolis in Thrace, which they had lost in 424 BC. They failed to take it, but antagonised the Macedonians in the process, and Philip eventually did conquer the town (and its mines and vast resouces of timber).\n\nSecondly, the Athenian attempt to recover their power in the Aeagen was initially successful, but their continued campaigning against Amphipolis made their new allies feel used for the sake of Athens' interests, leading to the Social War I just mentioned. This war was extremely costly for Athens, and decisively ruined its chances of uniting the Aegean in a new Athenian empire.\n\nThirdly, Athens spent a great deal of resources trying to set up a pro-Athenian government on the island of Euboia, which brought it into conflict with the Thebans through most of the 340s BC. The Thebans themselves were already extremely weakened by the ongoing Third Sacred War (356-346 BC) against Phokis, in which Philip II became more and more involved after he conquered Thessaly.\n\nAll of these wars and alliances are very complex, but the main point is that only major states like Thebes and Athens had the strength to form an alliance capable of stopping Philip, and thanks to their constant warring no one trusted them to have the interests of Greece at heart. Meanwhile, Philip encroached on Central Greek affairs more and more, while also expanding into the Hellespont, which was a direct threat to Athenian interests. In the war that followed, Athens' only major ally was actually Thebes, but their joined army was defeated at Chaironeia in 338 BC, and Philip made the mainland Greek subject to Macedon."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "35p93t", "title": "Any good non-Roman sources on the Roman military? Talking about tactics, formations, appearance, etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35p93t/any_good_nonroman_sources_on_the_roman_military/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr6liqo", "cr6mukr"], "score": [9, 16], "text": ["In Plutarch's *Life of Crassus*, the author likely uses a first hand Mesopotamian source to describe the battle of Carrhae. This is because his account goes into great detail about the battle and aftermath in Ktesiphon. ", "Polybius is a Greek writing to Greeks trying to explain how Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean.  His 6th book is an analysis of Rome's political and military practices systematically including the structure of the legion, recruitment, provisioning, layout of the camp etc.\n\nThe rest of it is a military history starting with the 1st Punic War down to 146, the year in which Rome destroyed Carthage and Corinth.\n\nPolybius lived for years in Rome as a hostage in the house of Paulus and apparently traveled widely in Italy and was friends with Scipio Aemelianus, so he probably has a fairly good idea what he's talking about.\n\n[LacusCurtius](_URL_0_) has the Loeb translation up."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/home.html"]]}
{"q_id": "201rqg", "title": "How much of an impact did the ending of slavery have for the emancipation of women and women's rights in general? (USA)", "selftext": "Reposting a rephrased version of the original question that came off as hypothetical:\n\nIn the book \"Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a fully loaded cost accounting\" by Painter, Nell Irvin - 1995\" It is noted that slavery and women's position in society was intertwined with many core beliefs i.e. Submission and Obedience overlapping in regards to women and slaves.  \n\nSo basically how much of an effect did the ending of slavery have on women's rights?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/201rqg/how_much_of_an_impact_did_the_ending_of_slavery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfzsnqd"], "score": [2], "text": ["Well, the idea of giving black *men* the vote gained traction pretty quickly; this was actually used to try and suppress the Women's Rights groups by telling them that they should be quiet and wait as this was \"the Negro's hour.\" Elizabeth Cady Stanton took a somewhat dim view of this idea on the grounds that black *women* were going to be denied their rights, and expressed her views on the matter in [a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard](_URL_0_) (scroll down; it's the third document in the PDF.) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://people.hofstra.edu/alan_j_singer/Gateway%20Slavery%20Guide%20PDF%20Files/5.%20Abolition_Complicity%201827-65/3.%20Activity%20Sheets/a33.%20Elizabet.%20Cady%20Stanton.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "1vf4s2", "title": "What did the ancient people that built Stonehenge do when it was cloudy on the Solstices?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vf4s2/what_did_the_ancient_people_that_built_stonehenge/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cervfqy"], "score": [2], "text": ["Since this involves a time before written records, this may not be the best subreddit for the question. At the same time, since it is involves a time before written records, it is largely impossible to answer your question. I can say that with my experience involving winter in Britain and Ireland, the average day was indeed cloudy, but the sun more often than not appeared on the horizon as it rose, shined for a few minutes, and then rose into the bank of clouds. Stonehenge only \"works\" at the solstices at the moments of sunrise and sunset; not later when the sun is behind the clouds. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "aebvc0", "title": "Why did the crafters of the various U.S. State Constitutions (except Nebraska) choose to create bicameral legislatures? Was this simply a matter of mirroring the federal Congress, or was there a prevailing political theory that suggested bicameralism was better than unicameralism?", "selftext": "As I understand the Founding documents as taught to me in high school, the Fathers created Congress as a bicameral legislature as part of the Connecticut Compromise to balance:\n\n- The need to balance the interests of smaller, less populous states with their larger brethren, and;\n- The need to balance the interests of the people with the interests of the states themselves, as directed by the state legislatures (as Senators were not directly elected by the voters until the early 1900's)\n\nAs neither justification would have applied at the state level, why was it that 49 States nonetheless adopted bicameralism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aebvc0/why_did_the_crafters_of_the_various_us_state/", "answers": {"a_id": ["edon94t"], "score": [24], "text": ["Political Science major, worked in my college's Political Science Department performing spatial analyses of electoral data for professors studying electoral malapportionment. \n\nOriginally state legislatures were designed similarly to the federal legislature, with lower house districts based on population while upper house district based on territory.  For example, the 1901 Alabama State Constitution divided the Alabama state legislature as such:\n\n > The legislature consisted of 106 representatives and 35 senators for the State's 67 counties and senatorial districts; each county was entitled to at least one representative; each senate district could have only one member; and no county could be divided between two senate districts.  \n\nThis setup eventually led to some pretty egregious cases of malapportionment as rural areas depopulated and legislators proved unwilling to update electoral boundaries.  In Alabama the most populous district was 41 times larger than the smallest district.  These levels of malapportionment were by no means unique to Alabama, in an October 14, 1964 report to his constituents, Congressman Morris K. Udall of Arizona wrote of other outrageous cases of electoral malapportionment in other state legislatures:\n\n >  \\*\\* In Connecticut one House district has 191 people; another, 81,000.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* In New Hampshire one township with 3 (three!) people has a state assemblyman; this is the same representation given another district with 3,244. The vote of a resident of the first town is 108,000 percent more powerful at the Capitol.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* In Utah the smallest district has 164 people, the largest 32,280 (28 times the population of the other). But each has one vote in the House.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* In Vermont the smallest district has 36 people, the largest 35,000 a ratio of almost 1,000 to 1.   \n >   \n >  \\*\\* In California the 14,000 people of one small county have one State senator to speak for them; so do the 6 million people of Los Angeles County. It takes 430 Los Angelenos to muster the same influence on a State senator that one person wields in the smaller district.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* In Idaho the smallest Senate district has 951 people; the largest, 93,400.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* Nevada's 17 State senators represent as many as 127,000 or as few as 568 people -- a ratio of 224 to 1.   \n >   \n > \\*\\* In Arizona, Mohave County's 7,700 people have two State senators; so do the 663,000 people of Maricopa. The ratio is 86 to 1 \n\nThese state legislative districts were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in *Reynolds v. Sims, 1964*.  Following the principal of \"one man one vote\" previously established under *Baker v. Carr, 1962*, the Court found that \"legislators represent people, not trees or acres,\" and deemed that state legislative districts should be constructed to be roughly equal in population.  \n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964)\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_) (Rep. Morris K. Udall's report to his constituents)\n\n[_URL_3_](_URL_3_) (1901 Alabama State Constitution, Article IX concerns representation of the state legislature)\n\n[_URL_2_](_URL_2_) (A nice little summary of Reynolds v. Sims, 1964)\n\nEdit: Deleted the second instance of \u2018egregious\u2019"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/377/533.html", "http://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/files/original/11ac559f0063813f0a80bed401b4597f.pdf", "https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/23", "https://codes.findlaw.com/al/alabama-constitution-of-1901/#!tid=N16816FB0BAB511DB8E46AD894CF6FAAB"]]}
{"q_id": "3yivel", "title": "Why have infirmaries at Auschwitz?", "selftext": "I just read Primo Levi's \"If this is a man\" and he talks about how it was actually a plus to get certain diseases, because you could rest in the infirmaries for a while.\nThis brings up the question - Why didn't the Nazis send all the sick people at Auschwitz to the gas chamber? Why have infirmaries at all?\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yivel/why_have_infirmaries_at_auschwitz/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyedfu2", "cyesjwk"], "score": [10, 72], "text": ["The same question was asked a few months ago where I answered the question.\n\n_URL_0_", "I'm a licensed tour guide at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. Not Auschwitz, but the general policy for the infirmaries was the same throughout the concentration camp system.\n\nThe purpose of the concentration camp infirmaries was multi-faceted, and they were used both as sites of convalescence and healing, as well as murder and torture.\n\nThe SS doctors who ran the infirmaries were often poorly trained or not very well qualified (a notable exception being Mengele, who was a respected figure in his field at the time), and in any case had little to no interest in treating ill or weak prisoners. The day-to-day seeing of patients was actually done by prisoner-doctors. In many concentration camps (certainly in Sachsenhausen), for a number of years it was strictly forbidden for any prisoner who had actually been a doctor to work in the infirmary as a prisoner-doctor. This meant that the \"prisoner-doctors\" often had absolutely no clue what they were doing. In Sachsenhausen and throughout the concentration camp system that policy would change in 1942, when the war was turning against Germany and the slave labour was suddenly not as disposable as it had once been. From 1942, prisoners who had been doctors before their lives in the camp (often much more competent and qualified than the SS doctors) were allowed to work in the infirmary. They had to tread a fine line between helping prisoners to survive and not being seen by the SS to be too soft on other prisoners, keeping them in the infirmary when they could be out doing slave labour. Even after 1942, the level of medical care was nowhere near adequate and the shelves were rarely stocked with enough essential medicines. Furthermore, in the second half of the war the camps became increasingly overcrowded, compounding the problems of unhygienic conditions, malnutrition and debilitating slave labour which caused the disease and illness within the camp to ratchet upwards. At this point, even if the SS had wanted to give proper medical care to all the prisoners (which they did not), it would have been very difficult to do so. The best care generally went to well-connected prisoners within the camp hierarchy, i.e. the Kapos who ran the camp. As Primo Levi mentioned, many prisoners did not necessarily want to go into the infirmary to get adequate medical care, but to get out of doing a day's slave labour - which could be life-saving.\n\nThe infirmaries also had a propaganda purpose for the Nazis, who would occasionally allow visitors into the camps, either from Axis nations or even from neutral or enemy countries. They would often carry out staged tours for visitors in which they would be led to select areas of the camp. The infirmary could be used to try to prove that, actually, these camps were \"normal\" places of detention where inmates could receive medical care.\n\nThe SS doctors were perhaps more likely to kill patients than they were to help them. As the camps became increasingly overcrowded, they became full with Muselm\u00e4nner (the concentration camp slang for prisoners so ill and weak that they were no longer really human anymore but walking skeletons. The translation is \"Muslims,\" apparently in reference to the fact that hunched-over, crawling prisoners resembled Muslims at prayer). Heinrich Himmler's solution was Action 14f13, a program to murder prisoners that were, in Himmler's words, \"excess ballast.\" In other words no longer able to work because of the debilitating conditions within the camps. This operation began in 1941, originally carried out by the same doctors who had been murdering mentally ill and disabled Germans during Action T4. Later the Camp SS doctors carried on this procedure of their own initiative, murdering primarily through lethal injection.\n\nThe infirmaries were places of quarantine when deadly diseases broke out, e.g. typhus, tuberculosis, and other diseases which could affect not just the prisoners, but the SS guards as well. Often prisoners were shut away in a certain wing of the infirmary (although sometimes they were locked in a few specific barracks within the camp) and left there to die.\n\nThe infirmary would also be used by the SS to carry out gruesome medical experiments on human beings. They were additionally used to castrate homosexual prisoners.\n\nTo answer the question of \"why didn't the Nazis send all the sick people at Auschwitz to the gas chamber?\" The fact is that often they did. The SS would sometimes go to the infirmary and select every prisoner that was no longer capable of work and send them to their deaths. But policy fluctuated with the changing circumstances of war and the various (often contradictory) policy goals of leading figures in the SS, e.g. Himmler, Oswald Pohl, Theodor Eicke. Sometimes they were more worried about preserving their labour force, or at least keeping them alive to get just a bit more labour out of them. Sometimes they were even thinking about perhaps retaining some prisoners so they could hold them as hostages to make some sort of deal with the Allies. The fate of the prisoners inside the infirmary often depended on events that were taking place far outside of the infirmary's walls.\n\nThe best book about the concentration camp system, and one which spends a good deal of time talking about the infirmaries, is Nicholaus Wachsmann's \"KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.\" It just came out this year and I really can't recommend it highly enough. A more Sachsenhausen-specific source (not what you're asking for but where I've gotten some of my information for this post) is \"Medical Care and Crime: The Infirmary at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp\" by G\u00fcnter Morsch and Astrid Ley."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31hpm2/why_did_auschwitz_have_infirmaries/"], []]}
{"q_id": "9mx5yt", "title": "Is the Revolt of 1857 a War of Independence or just a major insurrection?", "selftext": "I see this debate everywhere. Some people argue it is not, as they were not lead by the goal of national unity and some kingdoms even sided with the British. Also the fact it was mainly confined to North India. Others argue it is because of the mass insurrection throughout the country. But what exactly is it, if it can be classified as such at all? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9mx5yt/is_the_revolt_of_1857_a_war_of_independence_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e7idcz0", "e7ilm93"], "score": [4, 6], "text": ["I recently wrote a multi part [answer on 1857, it's historiography and the different interpretations](_URL_0_) \n - hopefully it's interesting for you. Should questions remain let me know and I could get back to it a bit later today (due to travels).\n\n*Edit:* The very short takeaway would be that the rebellion of 1857 was a complex war that engulfed different parts of South Asia, and so can't be redused to only one interpretation. And that most later interpretations of the event reflect interests of the groups that put them forward  : With e.g. the \"insurrection\" narrative tied to British colonial views, and the \"war of independence\" one to certain strands of Indian nationalism going back to the early 20th century.", "The problem with the violence of 1857 is that it had so many meanings, so many in fact that categorising it as one thing or another is almost impossible. Indeed, Chris Bayly, one of the most prominent historians of the mutiny has stated \"it was not one, it was many,\" which in some respects might seem to be an admission of defeat but does help to do justice to the sheer variety of the characterisations of the rebellion. It was constitutional, racial, religious, the first modern war of information and a way of economic dislocation all at the same time. \n\nThe first thing I will say is that one thing it certainly was not was a war of independence. The argument that the rebellion represents the first flowering of Indian nationalism and leads directly to the independence of India in 1947 is a long one. Probably the most influential statement of this would be from V.D. Savarkar in his history of the rebellion \"the First Indian War of Independence\". He argued as early as 1909 that the mutineers of 1857 might be regarded as noble patriots, fighting in a good cause, pro rege and pro patria, for the king and the motherland, for swaraj and swadesh,\" while drawing on the writings of European nationalists like Mazzini. He chose to see the mutiny as a moment when Indians regardless of race and caste recognised their Indian-ness chose to make common cause to drive the British from India. While that is all well and more recent historians have, in my view wisely, decided to look at the above statement as an ideological statement of the Indian independence movement in 1909 rather than a statement of historical reality.\n\n\u200b\n\nThis then begs the question, where did the impression of the mutiny as a nationalist struggle come from in the beginning. The answer is actually quite simple -- it came from the British themselves. The summation of the British judge at the trial of Badhur Shah (the last Mughal and leader of the rebellion) sums this up. That British rule had created the conditions for European style national consciousness -- \"Brahman and Mussulman met here as it were on neutral ground; they have had, in the army, one common brotherhood of profession, the same dress, the same rewards, the same objects to be arrived at by the same means\u201d. This argument was then picked up by people like Sayyid Ahmad Khan (an Islamic Indian philosopher) amongst others.\n\n\u200b\n\nIt would therefore seem that we have reached an impasse. If the rebellion was not India's first nationalist uprising, then what was it? That is a question that any historian could write a very long book on, but I will put forward one interpretation made by Faisal Devji about what the rebellion meant to the troops that participated in it. He argues that the revolt of the sepoys was a legitimist revolt which can be attributed to the feeling that the British had broken their moral obligations as Indian rulers.One way that this can be viewed is through a concept called the \u201cempire of Distinctions.\u201d Whereby the just ruler was meant to preserve and contain the distinctions within a deeply heterogeneous but just society. The soldiers believed that the British were trying to impose cultural and religious homogeneity on them. One thing that particularly drew their ire was the aggressive Christian preaching \u2013 something that Charles Grant (a missionary) characterised as \u201cthe introduction of light,\u201dto darkened Asiatic despotism. This, was received especially poorly by the soldiers, with one officer commenting that his troops believed that they would \u201cbe compelled to eat the same food\u2026 that they would likewise be compelled to embrace one faith.\u201d Such a status which the soldiers viewed as being little different from slavery and at least partly explains the position of Bahadur Shah at the head of the revolt, as an exemplar of a religiously tolerant and therefore legitimate constitutional ruler. Therefore, the decision to revolt was based on the idea that they would suffer for each other even though they had no intention of sharing religious or cultural practices. An example of this can be seen in the probably apocryphal story about the greased gun cartridges, which, it could be argued, only exists so as to establish an equivalence and commonality between the Hindus and Muslims.\n\nThe final bit that I will discuss here is economic dislocation. British rule from men like James Mill (the father of J.S. Mill was predicated on improvement) and a large part of this assumed that if British conditions were introduced then the Indians would begin to behave more like the British -- i.e. rationally. One of the main ways they did this was through the introduction of British style single title to land. This often had interesting consequences for the Zamindar class in general. For instance when proprietary title was introduced in Bengal it paved the way for many Zamindar Rajputs to be unable to charge rents as they had before. The problem with this is that they did not have enough land themselves to live on comfortably, and if they began to farm they would sink in caste status. As such the rajput class of north India became increasingly dependent on remittances from their sons in the army, but even then this source of income was threatened by the introduction of Sikhs into the army after the annexation of Punjab in 1842. While this community was relatively small in number they are disproportionately important because they were the local magnates in their communities. They provided the organisational know how to make the rebellion self sustaining while at the same time providing a link to their sons who were involved in the Dehli mutiny.\n\u200b\nNow these are just two isolated but linked case studies, but there are many more out there, and an illustration of how the violence of 1857 defies categorisation. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://de.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99zkgu/how_have_historians_interpreted_the_indian/"], []]}
{"q_id": "13rtp4", "title": "Coin from 1919; can somebody identify?", "selftext": "So, my roommate and I were doing laundry today and almost mistook this coin for a 5p coin (about same size, though this one is a lot thinner). Can you tell us something about it? Is it worth anything beyond the material it is made of?\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rtp4/coin_from_1919_can_somebody_identify/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76lhqp", "c76mzvh"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["That's a British 3 pence coin featuring king George V. It appears to be of fine condition and could probably fetch anything from a pound up to 3-4 pounds at the most. An uncirculated version of the same coin would have been worth around 10 pounds.", "Looking at [this website](_URL_0_), it's probably not worth anything.  (Scroll down to George V, 1919).\n\nIf it was extra fine or EF (in other words, barely touched) you could buy it for \u00a33 from a dealer, and uncirculated or Unc would be about \u00a310.  Coins like this aren't normally particularly valuable: after all, nobody throws money away, and people always keep coins that go out of circulation if they've got any left over because they think they'll be valuable one day.  They won't be, because people think like this.\n\nOn the other hand, decently old silver sixpences can be worth a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/j7ush,4uLPa#0", "http://imgur.com/j7ush,4uLPa#1"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk/values/three.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1l84p5", "title": "A question about how colonization affected the languages of Africa.", "selftext": "I know that the French colonized a large portion of Africa, but I think Britain held about the same amount of territory. It seems like a lot of people from Africa that I have met in the USA speak French as their primary language. I'm looking for some insight into why French seems to dominate English or Dutch as the primary language. Also, if anyone would like to answer about how the native languages of Africa are fairing and being preserved, I'd love some insight into that as well.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l84p5/a_question_about_how_colonization_affected_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbwrs1s"], "score": [2], "text": ["This is in reference to the \"how the languages are faring\" question only, and is currentish info; if it's violating the 20-year rule too badly, my apologies (I trust it will meet a speedy end in that case!):\n\nThere are many, *many* languages in Africa; some of them are thriving (e.g., Yoruba, Kinyarwanda), others not. For *basic* information about current language situation, you might find the [Ethnologue section for Africa](_URL_1_) useful -- while the specific population figures for many of the languages will be off a bit (because of sampling error, the agenda of the organization (missionaries), and some out-of-date-ness in some cases etc.), it'll give you a general idea. If you move the cursor over regions of the map, it'll give you pop-up boxes with relative \"vitality\" counts for languages, and you can drill down to individual countries, etc. The [World Atlas of Languages](_URL_0_) may be useful as well, although it's focused more on specific linguistic characteristics.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://wals.info/", "http://www.ethnologue.com/region/Africa"]]}
{"q_id": "9kt809", "title": "What did the diet of North American 19th century lumberjacks consist of?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9kt809/what_did_the_diet_of_north_american_19th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e72d7ft"], "score": [5], "text": ["from  Roy B. Clarkson's description of a logging camp in West Virginia circa 1909:\n\n > A typical evening meal consisted of boiled or roast beef or pork or steak, turnips, hanovers, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, hash, \"light\" bread or corn bread, and two different kinds of pie ( quartered) and cake and cookies. The men were encouraged to eat all they wanted, and at the end o a hard day's work their appetites were prodigious...  \n >   \n > A typical breakfast consisted of hot biscuits, steak ( well done or rare) fried eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, cake, donuts, prunes or other fruit, and coffee. It was not uncommon for a man to eat half a dozen eggs along with generous helps of other \"vittles\"...  \n >   \n > One of the ways the men had of relieving the boredom of their existence was to invent nicknames for each other and for the objects around them. Thus, biscuits were \"cat-heads\", donuts were \"fried holes\" or \"doorknobs\", meat was \"sow-belly\" or \"long-hog\", light bread was \"punk\", milk was \"cow\" or \"white line\", sugar was \"sand train\", prunes were \"Rocky Mt. Huckleberries\", coffee was \"java or \"Arbuckles\", apple butter was \"Pennsylvania Salve\", cooks were called \"boilers\", women cooks were rare but were called \"she-boilers\" or \"Open bottom cooks\".  \n >   \n > *Tumult on the Mountains* (1964)  p.63-65\n\nClarkson said nothing about lunch, but you suspect that there was enough consumed in two meals to equal three, and that if a man stuffed something into his pocket at breakfast for a noon break nothing would be said.. He also noted that a good cook made about $3.00 a day, and the loggers $1.75 to $2.00: but the cook worked seven days a week.\n\n & #x200B;"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "engu40", "title": "Floating Feature: Close Up Shop and Celebrate History Coming to an End as 'The Story of Humankind' Concludes With Volume XIII from 1947 to 2000 CE!", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://i.redd.it/fonm48tm39a41.png", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgbdqgu", "fhhhdq8", "fg736z3", "fg7q0ix"], "score": [5, 9, 12, 10], "text": ["**The Agony and Exidy**  \n\n\nVery few people know the name of Harold Ray \"Pete\" Kauffman. He ran what was a relatively obscure video arcade company who's heyday was in the 1970s, failing to make a major impact even as it persisted into 1999. However, the very fact that it persisted so long is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of the coin-op industry. Amidst rapid rises and falls all around them, the story of Exidy is an exemplary story of doing a lot out of passion in the face of horrid market conditions.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nExidy was always a technologist-driven company. Kaufmann himself was an engineer, and he first got his taste of video games from their very beginning. When Atari placed it's first unit of Pong on location in California in 1972, one of the owners of that bar was a man named Tom Adams, financial officer of a monitor company called Ramtek. Kaufmann was among the people who saw that very first unit there and he was behind the idea of Ramtek entering the business, which they did shortly thereafter. However, for reasons of ambition, Kaufmann decided that he could go it alone. With a few co-founders he started Exidy in October 1973, possibly the very first company post-Atari founded largely (though not exclusively) to create video games.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSomething which isn't well remarked on by some scholars of the early video game period is just how much of a shakeup the video game was in personell terms. While many companies were able to create video games, a sustained output depended largely on having a solid state engineering staff. California had become one of the centers of the military industrial complex in the United States - largely due to it's advantageous location for aircraft operations against the Japanese during WWII. Out of that came not only Silicon Valley but hundreds of second generation engineers stifled by the purpose of that work which they saw as directly immoral. Many of them would not move from California either, meaning that much of the new opportunity for this coin-op business was rooted in California.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBeing a new company wasn't all great however. One thing which Exidy never did was seek outside investment which would diminish Pete Kauffman's personal majority ownership in the company. This in part is why the company lasted for so long, and also why it never was able to achieve major success, lacking capitalization. In the very beginning, Exidy decided to supplement it's own light manufacturing by selling some game designs to the venerable Chicago Coin, who had far greater capacity and connections than they. The relationship was quite fruitful, and so it was proposed by top CC salesman Ken Anderson that the larger company could purchase Exidy and make the video game arm of the company. However, Chicago Coin could only see video games as a fad. They didn't want to invest in anymore than they had to in order to ride the wave. Solid state was not seen as the future.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe last positive benefit of this relationship was a co-design between the two companies on a driving game called Destruction/Demolition Derby (the game was named differently by both of them for release). Chicago Coin's machine shop helped create a cabinet with two sets of driving controls where players would mow down other vehicles for score. The agreement allowed both companies to sell their own version, but Chicago Coin started not paying Exidy as their mounting bankruptcy began to build. It's not quite clear as to why they needed to change the game - something to do with the contract - but they made a slight alteration and created a new game: The infamous Death Race.  \n\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) \n\n & #x200B;\n\nDeath Race probably didn't sell more than 3,000 units - in a time when Atari's Breakout sold 11,000 - yet this boost created a ten fold increase to the company's sales. Even without robust capitalization, Exidy started exploring new areas for expansion. They began creating non-video arcade games like Old Time Basketball and even took on the idea of releasing a home computer: The Exidy Sorceror. They weren't the only arcade company to do this as Gremlin Industries had released the Noval desk computer, but the Sorceror was an actual personal computer and one they intended to support as a separate business. Programmers were hired in for both creating arcade games and stocking the Sorceror library, with ports and original games. This was further supplemented with contract development in the form of the hit Star Fire and even purchasing the flagging Vectorbeam company.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWith great success though came a necessary weight to carry. Pete Kauffman was renowned through the industry as a gregarious personality, a true stand-out figure comparable to a Nolan Bushnell in terms of his likeability and drive. Unfortunately, he also had a love for the bottle. In the later hours of the day he was an absentee CEO hooked to the bar in his office. These stupors were impossible for anyone to penetrate through and so the company simply had to support itself during his absences. While a man who made many brilliant decisions and connections, Kauffman didn't know when to stop with anything.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nForward through the 80s, Exidy never had any monumental hits, but they always had interesting games. Chief among these were their light gun series of video games starting with Crossbow. They created the technology necessary for a non-cheatable light gun which established the way to do it through the entire CRT era as well as the gameplay one could get out of that.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nDespite surviving the massive downturn in the arcades suffered in the mid-80s, after the flagging period was over Exidy found itself on it's last ropes. While there was company investment from outside sources, Kauffman maintained his majority and did not bow to outside forces looking to acquire him. Sega was looking at making Exidy it's American arm at one point, but that deal did not happen (though people from Exidy would migrate to Sega over time). The competitive arm of video games had shifted to the Japanese and they simply could not compete anymore.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nKaufmann - who by this point had brought in his daughter Virginia - moved to the newly emerging field of redemption games. They mainly severed their ties with the fast excitement to fill the increasing needs of ski-ball, basketball, and novelty amusements which had less intense play value but more utility for the new arcade model. Exidy always remained small though, and the frequent offset of high-level work due to Pete's personal problems were always an impediment to staying ahead of the larger competition.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nAbout 26 years on from the company's founding, before the dawning of the new millennium, Exidy finally wrapped up it's operations. Kaufmann went to a quiet retirement before passing away in 2015. Exidy never had a name brand or solid franchise potential to keep itself relevant or memorable through the ages. It was a company built on new experiences and technology, sometimes decently successful and other times just behind the curve. It showcased the true relevance of the arcade at a critical juncture for the industry and what California truly meant for the emerging video game scene.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n\\----\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI hope this was a decent post. I hope I brought in greater relevant points rather than just point to point. The variety in these Features is very broad so I can only hope I made something with useful questions to further explore. Best of to all!", "So I thought I'd contribute a fascinating piece of history which highlights the relationship between academia and the \"real world\". It also gives me a way to discuss palimpsests of history.\n\nOn the 17th of May 1980 members of the Maoist group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) burned ballot boxes in their first major public appearance. This date was the 199th anniversary of the death of Tupac Amaru, leader of the largest indigenous revolt against Spanish colonial rule in the Andes. The importance of this date is paramount as it shapes the ideology of many in the region even today; for example during the reign of Evo Morales in Bolivia he would reference myths surrounding Tupac Katari (one of Amaru's generals).\n\nSendero Luminoso operated from 1980 to 1999 until internal divisions caused by the arrest of their leadership in 1992 split the group. At their peak in 1991 they controlled almost all of south and central Peru, and almost all of the highlands; effectively more of the country was in Shining Path's hand than the Government's. \n\nThe issue here is that the region before it became a hotbed for revolutionaries is that it was a hotbed for anthropologists. Key figures like Zuidema and Isbell had been working the region in the years before the revolt yet their works mention nothing of hostility towards the government or any Marxist influence. So why then did they fail to predict this? After living for years in these villages why did they fail to report on what was happening? \n\nI think its' worth approaching these questions from several angles. Firstly, to what extent was Shining Path actually present?, Secondly,  was there methodological restrictions that failed to produce the information?", "**The 1980s neo-liberal reforms as an attempt to eliminate the military-industrial complex: part 1**\n\nNow that should be a provocative title!\n\nOver the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, there were pro-market reforms across much of the world. These reforms were and are highly controversial. My purpose in this post is to give a high-level description of the reforms and of the economic theory and practical experiences that motivated them, followed by what I think are the strongest criticisms of them. \n\nA bit of background, I\u2019m a New Zealander, and thus this description will be somewhat biased towards New Zealand as an example. My interests are in economic history and the history of economic thought. Combined, this means that I don\u2019t know much about the politics behind the reforms in most countries, including the USA, so I will probably struggle to answer follow-up questions that focus on the politics.\u00a0\n\n*What we can agree on*\n\nThey say that when writing a persuasive essay on a provocative topic, you should start with outlining areas of agreement. (I will be a bit lazy and use terms like 'no one' 'everyone' and 'all' in a loose sense, I\u2019m sure you can find someone on reddit who disagrees on something!)\n\nWe all agree that markets fail from time to time. We all agree that governments fail from time to time. No one has blind faith in markets, no one has blind faith in governments. And, while we're at it, we all agree that non-government, non-profit institutions have their uses. Different people do tend to be more inclined to view particular institutions as useful in more situations than other people do, but even Communists agree that people should be able to hold personal possessions as their own property, and only the most thorough-going libertarian would deny a role for government in services like military defence, or, to pick a NZ example, biosecurity (keeping out foreign pests). The relevant question is, for a given economic problem, which type of institution is best at solving it, or, for a more pessimistic view, least-bad. I presume a thorough pessimist would declare that it doesn't matter, whatever the problem, the worst possible institution will be picked for it.\u00a0\n\nWe all agree that people do not always behave rationally, and people always have limited information to base their decisions on, and that this is true both of people acting in markets and people acting in government.\u00a0\n\nWe also, I think, mainly agree, that within the things that fall in the scope of government, different types of structures might be useful for different problems. Most democracies insulate judges of criminal and civil matters from direct democratic pressures (the USA is unusual in that many states elect at least some judges). Public healthcare systems like the UK\u2019s NHS mainly leave medical treatment to be decided by the relevant doctors and their patients. Etc.\n\nEveryone agrees? Onto the history.", "**The Later Life and Works of Ding Ling: Controversy in the Field of Feminism**\n\n[Ding Ling](_URL_5_) (Born Jiang Bingzhi, 1904-1986) was a Chinese writer and socialist revolutionary, but above all, an avowed feminist. She rose to international fame among the socialist states in the East first, and then her works became famous during the counter-culture movement in the West during the 1970s. Yet in 1942 fellow feminists decried her beliefs and unwavering support for the male-dominated CCP as traitorous, and in 1957 she was labelled as a \"righist\" by the CCP. Then, in the later 1960s to her death, she was labelled as a traitor to feminism as a movement. What led to Ding Ling's fall from grace as one of the greatest feminists of the 20th century? This post will explain the early life of Ding Ling, with the second part discussing how her life took a turn towards controversy.\n\n**Ding Ling the Feminist**\n\nDing Ling was born like many other [May Fourthers](_URL_4_); into a declining gentry class in the middle of an identity crisis for the Chinese people. When she was three her father died, leaving large sums of money to her mother. This would change Ding Ling's life forever. Her mother proved to be unusually rebellious and after the father's death she used the money to educate herself in teaching, and began a career shortly after in one of China's newly reformed schools. Nothing of note happens in Ding Ling's life next until 1922 when Ding Ling comes of age. In order to escape a pre-arranged marriage to her cousin, Ding Ling's mother helps her escape Hunan to Shanghai, giving her enough money to survive on her own and enroll in a newly established women's school founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao (the founders of the CCP).\n\nWhile in Shanghai, Ding Ling fell in love with Western literature. By the 1850s a new genre of literature became somewhat popular in the West, and that was the feminism found in works such as *Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert, and most importantly for many Chinese literati, Henrik Ibsen's *A Doll House*. By the 1890s artists and writers such as Aubrey Beardsley began popularizing more erotic works. All these would come to influence Ding Ling tremendously.\n\nIn 1927 Ding Ling published two successful short stories, the first was *Mengke*, and the second was *Miss Sophie's Diary.* Both works focused on the psyche of young educated and urban women, and *Miss Sophie's Diary* especially focuses on the issues of women's erotic thoughts and perverted behavior of men towards women in public. In a revolutionary act, Ding Ling wrote about such controversial things like bisexuality, free-willed sex, and other erotic topics that could lead towards the psychological liberation of women.\n\n**Ding Ling the Socialist Revolutionary**\n\nThroughout the 1930s, Ding Ling becomes heavily involved in several left-wing writing circles. As early as 1931 her husband, Hu Yepin, was captured and then executed by the KMT. In 1933, she herself was captured and put under house arrest in Nanjing. She escaped in 1936 and fled to Ya'nan, smack dab in the middle of the Communist movement lead under Mao. She began teaching Chinese literature at the Red Army Academy. Yet despite her allure towards the legendary aura surrounding the CCP at this time, she quickly became critical of the treatment of women in the CCP. It was quite clear that despite all the theory and speeches given by prominent Party members, there were really no high ranking women. Women were still treated with contempt by men. It was all wrong, and not what Ding Ling envisioned true socialist feminism to be. She set herself to work, writing two of her most famous leftist works in 1941,  \"[When I was in Xia Village](_URL_1_),\" and \"[In the Hospital](_URL_2_),\" both critiques of the treatment of women in the CCP. In 1942 she suffered her first serious censorship from the party after writing \"[Thoughts on March Eighth](_URL_0_),\" a critique that even in areas where class oppression has been lifted, gender inequality still existed. The essay did however have one lasting influence: along with other critical works, Mao responded by convening the \"[Yan'an Talks](_URL_3_),\" in 1942, a forum where all cultural critiques of the party would be solved once and for all. There a lot of stuff in this, but whats important for us is that Mao urged writers to \"overcome their petit-bourgeoisiness\" and place literature and art subordinate to politics. \n\n**Ding Ling the Controversial Figure**\n\nOK, SO, here's where the 1947+ dates become relevant (sorry about that long intro). \n\nIn 1948, Ding Ling wrote her first major socialist-realist novel: *The Sun Shines over Sanggan River* (the novel would take second place in the 1951 Stalin Prize for Literature). Her novels stopped focusing on one main, disenfranchised female character. Rather, they focused more heavily on how individuals could help **the state.** After the founding of the PRC, she held a high place in many literary cliques in Beijing and enjoyed a career writing propaganda and literature for the CCP. She expressed a love of China's new socialist policies and life under the CCP.\n\nIt is under these circumstances that Ding Ling becomes a controversial figure. Many fellow feminists were perplexed as to how one of the greatest feminist figures of the 20th century could have made such a deep 180 in writing and opinions. Everyone knew that the ill treatment of women didn't stop overnight with the Yan'an forum, so what led to her deciding to act as a female mouthpiece for Mao and the CCP afterwards? We don't exactly know, as she never came out and told anyone. During the Great Leap Forward she was labelled as an anti-Party leader and sent to Northeastern China to partake in hard labor on a farm due to her earlier anti-Party writings in the 1930s. \n\nUpon returning, she was once again imprisoned in Beijing for five years as she landed right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Through it all, however, she survived, and after her release and \"rehabilitation\" in 1976, she began to write essays and voice opinions again. She publishes her only work since Yan'an focusing on an individual woman, the novella *Du Wanxiang.* The story focuses on a model socialist woman, influenced by Ding Ling's years on the Northeastern farm, who selflessly works hard and is both considerate and accommodating. Again, a total 180 from the independent and rebellious women of her pre-1942 works. Instead of the main character focusing on destroying traditional values, this one works to reinforce them. \n\nThe work was also heavily criticized by Western feminists as well. Feminism in the West at its very core was individualist. And here was a once prominent feminist writer telling the tale of a conformist woman who sacrificed herself for the betterment of the commune/the state. It was totally against the basic principles of feminism. It was, to them, a total joke. \n\nIn the later years of her life, Ding Ling fought against what she saw as the encroachment of Westernism on Chinese society. In 1983 she supported the CCP's campaign against \"spiritual pollution\" in China. It puzzled many people as she remained a consistent vocal opponent to her death in 1986. \n\nBut some historians argue Ding Ling never fundamentally changed. Once introduced to communism, Ding Ling disregarded the individualism of feminism, and believed that true female liberation could only be achieved through national liberation. Feminist literature was a conduit for her to fulfill important political and social goals for women. In this sense, Ding Ling's various imprisonments and mistreatment by the CCP did not outweigh their contribution to the nation and to females all across China. In the words of [Jingyuan Zhang](_URL_6_), \"Ding Ling remained committed to the cause of revolution and feminism, a path on which she traveled and suffered, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, for more than sixty years, insisting to the end that in comparison with her cause, her personal sufferings were insignificant.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://gamehistory.org/media-vs-death-race/"], [], [], ["https://libcom.org/library/thoughts-8-march-women%E2%80%99s-day", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/women-sexspies-chastity-national-dignity-legitimate-government-and-ding-lings-when-i-was-in-xia-village/0CB9289A19AC70089A7D1009578F888E", "https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03064228008533022", "https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm", "https://www.britannica.com/event/May-Fourth-Movement", "https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ding-Ling", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/most11314.71?Search=yes&amp;resultItemClick=true&amp;searchText=Ding&amp;searchText=Ling&amp;searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DDing%2BLing%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&amp;ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_SYC-4946%2Fcontrol&amp;refreqid=search%3A007a9bb98d1550fe845941722d0beeab&amp;seq=6#metadata_info_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "szd6q", "title": "Can someone lend a neutral analysis of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and the Great Leap Forward?", "selftext": "I spend a lot of time on /r/communism and recently [this](_URL_1_) was posted there. Now, this is par for the course over there as many posters are very personally invested in both refuting and/or justifying the mainstream criticisms of, primarily, Stalin and Mao. \n\nI have very leftist tendencies myself but I've never viewed Stalinism or Maoism as admirable policies because of their authoritarian nature that, essentially, forces communism on their people by silencing opposition and demanding conformity. However, if I said that on /r/communism, I'd be crucified as a bourgeois, anti-revolutionary revisionist. According to them, the mainstream criticisms are pure fiction; propaganda created to turn people away from communism.\n\nSo, I guess my question is: Are there any valid reasons to deny the mainstream views of Mao, his policies and the apparent atrocities that occurred under his leadership? Are the supposed facts, such as the ones in the article I linked, worthy of believing? Or are they just justifications of genocide, created in hindsight in order to defend very deep held political beliefs?\n\nI've heard both extremes of the arguments, the mainstream and the revolutionary, but I am at a loss when I try to determine which is more worthy of believing. It wouldn't be the first time I've come across mainstream history that was less than accurate, but it also could be very true. Honestly, I would love it if it turned out that the so called genocide that occurred under Mao turned out to be mere lies, but I'm not willing to forget or forgive factual history if it turns out to be true. So please, if someone has a neutral analysis, it would be of great help for me.\n\nThank you in advance. \n\nEDIT: I didn't check before I posted this but [this post](_URL_0_) was recently put up and asks a similar question. However it's not exactly the same and I would like a little more detail than that OP was requiring. I would just like to point out that I acknowledge that that post exists and that it is similar.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/szd6q/can_someone_lend_a_neutral_analysis_of_mao_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4i90jb", "c4iaden", "c4ic9bj"], "score": [12, 11, 4], "text": ["Well I will be honest I don't have anything more than an undergraduate's understanding of China, having taken a few classes on the subject, but I have a few things to say here.\n\nFirst the problem with the article you linked is that it is overwhelmingly arguing from a position of \"well the evidence that this happened might not be true.\" The problem with that tactic is that it is sort of a rabbit hole, you can basically argue almost anything from that position but it doesn't prove the reverse happened.\n\nAdditionally, even if the numbers of people who died in the famine are disputed (they typically range from 30-50 million in most things I've seen), there does seem to be a general agreement that such a famine occurred. \n\nBasically I would say that unless some smoking gun evidence appears that suggests this massive famine didn't occur, it would be reasonable to assume it did.\n\nOh and Mao is still on the hook for the nightmare that was the Cultural Revolution.  \n", "While I cannot really answer your question, what I will say is that you are specifically looking for evidence to show something that supports your ideology, and that is a terrible idea. You shouldn't let your beliefs influence the evidence that exists. You don't have to be maoist or stalinist to be communist, in fact, I would imagine Marx would be horrified with the \"communism\" of the 20th century and view it for the totalitarian horror that it was. So I would ask you to accept that yes Mao was terrible, and that Stalin was terrible and because of Soviet influence most communist regimes of the 20th century were terrible. But this doesn't mean communism as an ideology is terrible.\n\nAlso I just checked out /r/communism again, and wow, that place is probably the worst political community on Reddit, I mean most political subreddits are filled with rhetoric and circlejerkery but the people posting there truly terrify me.", "Disclaimer: I am no historian and my only credential is being a younger generation Chinese whose parents lived through that era. I am a little surprised that you used the word \"genocide\". I have always viewed the great leap forward and cultural revolution as major fcukups, especially the former. It's not like Mao was out to systematically eradicate millions of his own countrymen, is it? The famine is very real but I don't know if we will have an accurate death toll. A lot of atrocities were committed during the cultural revolution and obviously Mao is responsible. But from my understanding,  the situation is very different from the Holocaust where the higher level officials laid out a plan to kill people and the soldiers just carried out orders. My impression is that a lot of ordinary Chinese people, swept up in a frenzy, made conscious decisions to actually commit cruelties against their neighbors, coworkers, etc. For example, there were large scale armed conflicts between different factions of revolutionary guards and many people died from this. I honestly think this is more human stupidity than genocide. On a side note, the article you linked mentioned a book by Jung Chang(author of Wild Swan). I'd be cautious about any claim she makes because I recently saw the play Wild Swan and got the impression that the author is a little disingenuous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sy3wq/how_do_we_know_how_many_people_died_under_stalin/", "http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward#.T5wbUSfm_x8.reddit"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ue67t", "title": "Foggy London vs polluted Beijing", "selftext": "We read about how in the past London had thick fogs created by air pollution from burning coal.  These days we see air pollution from coal in Beijing.  Was air pollution in London or other European cities in the past worse than in Beijing now? Or is Beijing the worst pollution the world has ever seen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ue67t/foggy_london_vs_polluted_beijing/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co7rl1q"], "score": [3], "text": ["fyi, you'll find some previous discussions on this in the FAQ\n\n* [Air pollution](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/economics#wiki_air_pollution"]]}
{"q_id": "1dnk8z", "title": "Did the Barbarians of the Classical Roman Era field any navies and if so was there ever any engagements between them and the Roman Empire?", "selftext": "I was curious about the Naval doctrines of Barbarian states during the Roman era. Its known that they were actually fairly organized and thriving groups that even had their own sprawling cities and trade networks, but I have never heard much about their naval military power if they even had one. Would it be just maybe a small group of raiding or pirating vessels? What type of ships did they use if any? Any elaboration would be great thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dnk8z/did_the_barbarians_of_the_classical_roman_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9s1gco", "c9s2kom", "c9s7qwg"], "score": [37, 18, 2], "text": ["The Veneti, a Gallic tribe from Brittany in modern France, posed quite a naval threat to Caesar during the Gallic Wars.  They had several coastal citadels that couldn't be sieged out, as the strong Venetian (no, not *that* Venetian) navy protected the supply ships from across the channel in Britain.  A fascinating aspect of these coastal cities was the fact that at high tide, they were islands, and at low tide, peninsulas, creating a problem for Caesar.\n\nAt this point, the Romans had absolutely no naval power in the English Channel.  To combat this, Caesar constructed a navy.  However, the stormy seas of the English Channel and the oak ships of the Veneti were difficult to overcome for the Romans.  The Romans did eventually, in the Battle of Morbihan, defeat the Venetians by cutting their halyards, causing their mainsails to fall, in turn leaving the ships as sitting ducks for the Romans' excellent boarding capabilities. ", "Yes! Sort of. During the Third Century Crisis the Goths, who had settled on the north shore of the Black Sea, attacked mainland Greece and Aegean Anatolia by sea. They had probably managed this by commandeering the vessels from the Hellenistic cities on the north shore.\n\nTo give an idea of the effect of this, it had been well over three centuries since any of those regions had seen war.", "'naval doctrine' and 'barbarian states' are fairly strong (and teleological) terms to describe what existed, particularly in north-west Europe. The Cultures of the late Hallstatt and early La Tene are complex but archaeological theory cannot place them into the modern conceptions of a politically centralised or ethnically organised group in that way.\n\nAnyway...\n\nCaesar's Gallic War 3.8 references to the Veneti (see here: _URL_0_), and as has already been mentioned, they posed the greatest naval difficulty to the Roman expansion into that area. Apart form that, the Roman's were generally pretty shocking at the whole naval shinannigans as a whole. Sextus Pompey, son of Pomey Magnus did cause some trouble for the new principate for some time, before being eventually captured. The Egyptian navy was also impressive (but did them little good at Actium). "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.3.3.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1rllwb", "title": "Who were Turkish Sultans descended from?", "selftext": "Forgive my ignorance, I don't know much about this time in history but as I understand it, Turkish Sultans and a lot of middle eastern kings rather than having politically important wives to have their heirs had a lot of concubines who could have been anyone (foreigners, slaves, etc.) and their sons could inherit the throne. If I'm wrong about that I guess that's my answer, but if not, were the Turkish emperors eventually (after a few generations of interbreeding) descended mostly from hot, foreign, lower class women? \n\nAlso, a lot of the slaves were from the Balkans or Eastern Europe I think, were the emperors white?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rllwb/who_were_turkish_sultans_descended_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdogvm1", "cdohrhg"], "score": [6, 2], "text": ["As strange as it may seem, your story is essentially correct. Ottoman Sultans didn't marry, and instead had lowborn concubines. I'm not sure how many of the Sultan's mothers were European, but some were, yes. And indeed since only the direct male line is the family of the Sultans, the vast majority of later Sultans' ancestors would have been commoners.\n\nAs to whether the Sultans were white... I think this sort of shows your nationality, if I'm guessing right that you're American. In the Old World Turks would generally be considered white. And to those who don't agree with that, they wouldn't really think Bulgarians or Romanians are white either! As the old proverb says after all, the \"wogs start at Calais\".", "The House of Osman was certainly very ethnically diverse. \n\nLet's look at Sultan Mustafa II (1664-1703) as a random example. His [mother](_URL_4_) was a Greek from Crete and his [grandmother](_URL_2_) was Ukrainian. \n\nThe mother of Mustafa's grandson, Osman III, was a [Serb](_URL_0_), and the mother of Osman's successor was [French](_URL_1_)\n\nSo after taking a random sample of just three generations we've found French, Greek, Serbian and Ukrainian 'blood'. \n\nI know what you're trying to say and I'll spare you the lecture on why 'Were the emperors white?' isn't a historically sound thing to say. Yes, of course some would have been rather 'European' in appearance, though the turban and beard is going to throw you off if you look up some of their portraits. [Look at Abd\u00fclmecid I for example](_URL_3_) - ignore the costume and you'd have a hard time telling me where in the world this guy is from."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehsuvar_Sultan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emine_Mihri%C5%9Fah_Sultan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turhan_Hatice", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Sultan_Abd%C3%BClmecid_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah-Para_Ummatullah_Rabia_G%C3%BCl-Nush"]]}
{"q_id": "5nc6h6", "title": "The origins of the Abrahamic religions.", "selftext": "I've found that the origins of Judaism are nowhere near as simple as I thought. How did the religion begin, what came before it, how did it happen and how did this contribute to the differences between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nc6h6/the_origins_of_the_abrahamic_religions/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcb8cft"], "score": [2], "text": ["Can I ask a clarification question before my answer gets deleted? Are we allowed to use religious texts such as the old testament or Koran as sources while we acknowledge the disputed historicity? In particular, the book of Joshua?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "d302ov", "title": "What was the journey to Auschwitz like?", "selftext": "I'm writing a story and have been doing some research about the holocaust, and found an article about Fabrikaktion. It was an an event during which many jews were rounded up, and put on good wagons and sent to a camp called Auschwitz. I was wondering how long the journey there was, and if there were any Nazis patrolling the wagons making sure no one got away, and if there were any wagons that crashed, or any jews who escaped on the way to the camp. \n\nHere the original website I found if it is of any importance: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d302ov/what_was_the_journey_to_auschwitz_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f8afjqm"], "score": [3], "text": ["What they were referring to as \"goods wagons\" were likely the trucks which were in this case used to take people from factories to centers from which they were deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars. The Nazis usually deported Jews to extermination camps such as Auschwitz Birkenau in cattle cars with very horrible conditions. Auschwitz was a large camp complex with concentration camp, labor camp, and extermination camp sections. Most of the German Jews deported in February of 1943 were murdered in the gas chambers in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. About 4000 people escaped the Aktion, and about 1500 of these people survived in hiding. However there were no escapees once people were put on the trains.  Some of the deportees from the Fabrikaktion survived because in Auschwitz they were selected for forced labor, a very small number of people, mostly able bodied young men and young women without children were chosen for forced labor and so were not immediately gassed as most of the deportees were. Most of these forced laborers were eventually killed, but some did survive.\n\nMost of the other Jews in Berlin had already been deported and murdered, most of the people deported in the Fabrikaktion were the spouses of non-Jews or were children of interfaith couples, or else were skilled workers or forced laborers in war production. Up until then these people had avoided deportation, however at the end of 1942 the Nazis decided to deport and murder these last Jews in Berlin by the end of March of 1943. This particular Aktion is well known historically because it was the day of the Rosenstrasse protests of women married to Jewish men occurred. This was particularly significant because it was the only mass demonstration against the deportation of Jews in Germany.  \n\nThe deportations were ordered by the RSHA, and were organized by various groups, mainly the SS but also others, including local police.  The deportations themselves were extraordinarily brutal. Usually between 75 to 100 people were stuffed in a cattle car, without windows, with no food, with no room to move or even sit down. Some cars had a bucket of water and an empty bucket for a toilet, but many did not even have these. The trip from Berlin to Auschwitz usually took a a day or two, sometimes longer.  Many people died during the journey. These trains were heavily guarded, often with a guard with a machine gun on top of each car. Very few people escaped and almost all who did were murdered. Thousands of railway workers, and the Deutsche Reichsban were also complicit. The trains then arrived at Auschwitz and the prisoners underwent selection, a few able bodied prisoners were chosen to live and the rest were murdered and their bodies burned within a few hours.  \n\n\"The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943: Sixty Years Later\" by Wolf Gruner and Ursula Marcum \n\n [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) \n\n\"An Underground Life\" by Gad Beck, Beck's description of the Aktion is particularly heart wrenching because he remembers losing his first love, Manfred during the Aktion (though not the one on feb. 27).\n\n [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://ww2today.com/27th-february-1943-the-jews-of-berlin-are-rounded-up"], "answers_urls": [["https://deportation.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&amp;itemId=5092745", "http://sfi.usc.edu/tags/fabrikaktion"]]}
{"q_id": "3kbt3w", "title": "Was American Artillery more effective and decisive than German Artillery in WW2? If so, why?", "selftext": "Scattered paraphrases of German war memoirs give me the impression that American Artillery was incredibly effective and greatly feared by German units.  Was American artillery more effective than German Artillery?  Why was this?  What weapons, organization and tactics made it so?\n\n[This response](_URL_0_) has good information about targeting practices, but whatever other things were factors, if any?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kbt3w/was_american_artillery_more_effective_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cuwd1kk", "cuwfh7v"], "score": [9, 11], "text": ["I'll let others cover all of the other reasons why it was so, underlying everything was simple logistical superiority. The Americans not only had the capacity to lean on artillery heavily as a weapon of war, they had the willingness to do so. Artillery is expensive, and getting artillery shells from a US factory shipped to the Western Front even more so. But the US had the industrial capacity, the logistical capability, the wealth, and above all that the knowledge that they had such and the willingness to make use of it.\n\nThe US built more *new* merchant tonnage during the war than, for example, the Japanese had at the start of the war. Despite incredible losses of merchant marine sailors and ships the US was able to pump more artillery rounds into Western Europe (logistically and literally) from across an Ocean than the Germans could across a much shorter supply chain.", "[This response by /u/vonadler is exactly what you are looking for.](_URL_0_)\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ptn4a/over_time_the_idea_that_british_artillery_during/"], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3ixrvq/did_the_semiautomatic_m1_garand_give_the/cukognb"]]}
{"q_id": "2jp937", "title": "Why does it seem like early American civilizations' (Maya, Olmec, Aztec) art/architecture is much less developed or much less impressive than that of early Europe and Asia?", "selftext": "I was recently at the Museum of Science Boston's exhibit on the Mayan culture, and while it was a very interesting exhibit full of new knowledge, for me the artifacts just didn't compare to ones I've seen from Ancient Greece or the Roman Republic, or even from ancient China and India. Why is this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jp937/why_does_it_seem_like_early_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cldv0bc"], "score": [30], "text": ["This is a common misconception, in truth mesoamerican and south american cultures were very advanced, just in ways that were different than what is typically thought of as \"advanced\". Early American civilizations had very complex construction and architecture techniques as well as metallurgy and textiles. \n\nWhen people say that \"they weren't that advanced\" people are usually referring to the fact that the Incas didn't use wheels. Long story short; They did. But American cultures didn't use extensively for a couple of reasons, namely they didn't have any draft animals. Cattle and horses simply didn't exist in the american continents at the time. [Llamas](_URL_0_) aren't very strong, and the [American Bison](_URL_4_) was never tamed. This, in combination with the many steep, rocky, mountainous regions of the american continents meant that the wooden cart wheels of the time simply weren't useful to them on a large scale.\n\nAnother reason they tend to be thought of as less advanced is that the american cultures tended to favor natural defenses instead of the artificial method of castle building. See [Machu Picchu](_URL_1_) and the [Cliffdwellers](_URL_5_). Those, and many construction sites like them had very advanced construction and carving techniques employed throughout them. \n\nThere was also [Tenochtitlan](_URL_2_) the capital city of the Aztecs that was built in the middle of a lake using a combination of natural and artificial islands, complete with huge drawbridges that could be raised in case of an attack. This wasn't just one fortress either, the entire city was built like this. And in some places there was even running water thanks to two large aqueducts flowing into the city.\n\nAnd then we come to [Teotihuacan](_URL_3_) a *massive* city that existed centuries before the aztecs built Tenochtitlan. It is thought to have housed at least 125,000 people during its height making it the 6th largest city in the world at the time. These were the people the Aztecs worshipped as gods!\n\nThere are a couple of other reasons why they aren't thought of as \"advanced\" including their highly fragmentized cultures, their lack of large scale warfare (there are exceptions, but most ancient american conflicts were relatively small and over pretty quickly compared to the grand battles of european military history), and the difficulty of obtaining certain materials made certain tasks more difficult for the people of the american continents. \n\nTL;DR The many American cultures were advanced, in some cases just as much or moreso than their european counterparts. But due to differing circumstances and environments, they never developed, or never needed to develop those technologies in the first place. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_peoples"]]}
{"q_id": "6wrafd", "title": "In late medieval England, how were MPs chosen for the House of Commons?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wrafd/in_late_medieval_england_how_were_mps_chosen_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dmaonsd"], "score": [9], "text": ["Ah the pre reform house of commons.\n\nAs always the answer is it depends which ones. \n\nEssentially you had 2 main forms of MPs. The knights of the shires that represented counties and those that represented urban centres. Then you had varies other MPs such as those that represented the Cinque Ports (University constituencies though cam rather later.\n\nNow we've got that out of the way it depends on the date. 1430 is a critical year as is when the 40 shilling freeholders act was passed. After that date you needed to have a freehold worth 40 shillings a year in rent in order to vote in county elections (prior to that point is possible that all freeholders had the vote in theory). One big catch was that you had to vote in the county court. This meant if you didn't live near it voting wouldn't be very practical. An exception was Hampshire where you could vote in Newport on the Isle of Wight as well as Winchester. Voting was public so you might want to stick to candidates that the great and good of Winchester were happy with. So in practice such MPs were selected by who met the voting requirements, were able to get to the county town and  were prepared to openly support them.\n\nFor MPs that represented towns the system was largely left up to the authorities of the town in question and a range of approaches were taken from giving the vote to most householders through just those that paid certain taxes to just the members of the borough corporation.\n\nOf course this assumes that any MP was chosen at all. Southampton for example repeatedly failed to provide an MP (at the time it was expected to produce two). This makes more sense when you realise that Southampton was frequently a poor town and parliaments could be held in some fairly random places."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3zk8vt", "title": "Navigation in bombers during world war 2. Were the navigators able to compute the route on their own or their work was mostly handled by electronical devices?", "selftext": "I'm in a phase where I'm very interested to read about air warfare in western Europe in world War 2 (hopefully I will expand to the eastern front as well in the future). I read on secondary sources that often navigation in bombers was difficult, there were electronical devices to improve the navigation, but still mistakes were committed. \n\nThe navigator in the airplane had only to handle the electronical devices or also had accurate maps, rulers, and so forth to establish the position of the plane on a map through computations? \n\nCan anyone explain their procedure (or link it) if they had to determine manually the position of the plane or if they relied on devices and precompiled tables? (like 'if you get the signal x, look in the precompiled map that we'll tell you the position related to the x signal' )", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zk8vt/navigation_in_bombers_during_world_war_2_were_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cymzdan", "cyn6eds"], "score": [6, 5], "text": ["Mostly map work and instruments - at least early on - which is why the Blackouts actually worked as a measure to reduce the accuracy of Bomber attack. There are examples of long-range guidance by electronics; however, the Luftwaffe used radio transmitters and modified Lorentz blind-landing sets (short range radio receivers designed to guide pilots in to land in poor visibility) to produce the 'knickerbine' bomber guidance system.\n\nThe system essentially consisted of a radio that would pick up either dots or dashes if you strayed too far left or right of your flight path and a final beam that told aircrews they were over their targets. The system relied upon the fact Germany controlled France and Norway, so they could properly cross all the beams of radio signal required. The system was not incredibly successful because local interference (such as falsifying the signal for 'you are too far right' at the rightmost edge of the lane) could cause it to mislead the pilots it was supposed to lead, and it was rather expensive (directed high-power radio transmitters aren't cheap).", "Early war navigation was a manual affair in the RAF using techniques such as astronavigation (taking a fix on celestial bodies with a sextant) and dead reckoning (using airspeed and direction). This wasn't particularly accurate at night, meaning RAF bombing was inaccurate;  the Butt Report of 1941 report famously concluded that only one in three bombers got within five miles of their target.\n\nThe Luftwaffe had adapted the Lorenz blind landing beacon into a navigational aid for bombing called *Knickebein* used during the Blitz, with one beam guiding bombers towards a target and a second intersecting beam indicating the bomb dropping position. As noted, when the British learned of *Knickebein* they began a programme of jamming or bending the beams to limit their usefulness. The Germans developed improved beam guidance systems, *X-Ger\u00e4t* and *Y-Ger\u00e4t*, though they in turn were also jammed.\n\nRAF navigation steadily improved, with devices such as an electromechanical Air Position Indicator for more accurate dead reckoning, and their own beam navigation systems: GEE, Oboe and Gee-H. They also employed H2S, centimetric ground scanning radar that gave a crude picture of terrain.\n\nThere was an RAF Historical Society seminar on [A History of Navigation in the Royal Air Force that may be of interest] (_URL_3_). *Most Secret War* by R V Jones is also a very readable account encompassing the \"Battle of the Beams\", though focused more on the technological side of things rather than the navigational.\n\nSome other useful material on the web:\n\n* [A US Dead Reckoning Procedure training film] (_URL_0_)\n* [Navigating in the Air] (_URL_2_) from the Smithsonian Time and Navigation exhibition, with examples of instruments and charts\n* [The Battle of the Beams] (_URL_1_); though the site design is a little dated, it has some interesting bits such as the audio examples of *Knickebein* tones"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEatUIZzO_o0", "http://www.duxford-update.info/beams/beammain.htm", "https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/navigating-air", "http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/Research/RAF-Historical-Society-Journals/Journal-17A-Air-Navigationin-the-RAF.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "26e0qv", "title": "Why did Staten Island remain mostly residential, and not develop more like Manhattan did?", "selftext": "Geography? Luck?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26e0qv/why_did_staten_island_remain_mostly_residential/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chq8ygg"], "score": [114], "text": ["Totally got this one. Native Staten Islander here, who has done research. I'm on my phone, so I cannot provide links at the moment though.\n\nFirst, one has to realize that Staten Island is the least populous borough--I think the current population is only about 500-600k. Staten Island historically has also been sparsely populated in relationship to the rest of the city. This is very much a result of the geography of the island. While not a problem now, Staten Island had difficult terrain to live: rocky hills (made of Serpentine rock) and wetland/marshland further south. This made it very difficult for many people to have farms, and the surroubdi by waterways (Arthur Kill and Kill van Kull) would have been too narrow and shallow for large scale exporting. \n\nStaten Island, therefore, remained as a sparsely populated farmland for a long time. Similarly, it's distance from Brooklyn and Manhattan made it difficult for regular travel and inter-county trade. There were ferries (such as Cornelius Vanderbilt's, which started him on to his fortune and later evolved into the Staten Island Ferry), but they were not as many as would have been needed for large scale trade.\n\nThat being said, Staten Island was always integrated with New York rather than New Jersey. Fort Wadsworth was paired with Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn to protect the harbor. Staten Island served as a quarantine for sick immigrants. It's proximity to the harbor allowed it to profit from New Yorks trade as well.\n\nWhen New York became a city, Staten Island was the last to join in 1898. Many Staten Islanders were not happy (and many are still not to this day).\n\nThe first easy access to the borough came in 1963, when the Verrazano Narrows bridge was completed. That started Staten Islands population growth. New Yorkers saw the free land and the proximity to the city (now with bridge access) and began to move there for residential purposes, while working in the rest of the city."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1m4zpb", "title": "Was there any presidential republics like the United States before the United States existed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1m4zpb/was_there_any_presidential_republics_like_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc5vaa4", "cc5zr64"], "score": [9, 4], "text": ["There were prior examples of mixed regimes.  Aristotle advocated for them and the Roman Republic may be an example with its consuls, senators and assemblies.  However, no prior regime deeply resembled the US.\n\nThe US arguably drew more on ideas than examples in its creation.  The separation of powers, of which the US president is a product, was an Enlightenment idea perhaps inspired by Aristotle and Cicero but articulated more recently (and perhaps with greater influence on the US) by Locke.  The framers also drew the constitution against things that they feared, the tyranny of monarchy and the tyranny of the majority.  And they also had to reconcile their government with the conditions that already prevailed in their newly independent land: sovereign states.  This meant that many executive powers would be reserved not for the president but the states.  Lastly, much of the nature of the US presidency has evolved over time with gradual developments in the constitutional interpretation of presidential powers.\n\nOverall, then, the US presidential system was rather new to human experience and a product of its era and location.  It has served as a model for others but did not really have close models itself.", "Other than Classical Greek and Roman models, the more recent \"democracies\" and \"republics\" studied as models by the founding fathers included the Venetian Republic, and Swiss cantons, as well, of course, as the British parliamentary system, and particularly the British parliamentary system under Oliver Cromwell, when there was no king."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8p9je7", "title": "I know that in the middle ages many towns were rather small (often the largest still only consisting of tens of thousands of people). How vital to the national economy were towns? What sort of professions were people practising there and were there any that weren't as common in more rural locations?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8p9je7/i_know_that_in_the_middle_ages_many_towns_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e09s45i", "e09v2wm", "e0am60s"], "score": [370, 42, 3], "text": ["\"How important were towns\" is kind of a tough question to answer, because the existence/increase of towns is both a sign and a cause of overall exonomic restructuring over the later Middle Ages. Towns were essential to the economic system they were a part of/helped create. You can say something like by 1300, about 65% of England's economic production was shipped overseas, which meant it came through market towns, but obviously this was heavily agricultural/pastoral commodity. And of the 35% or so internal trade, that would be intimately bound up in a market/rural/urban web.\n\nAs Christopher Dyer neatly sums it up, by the late Middle Ages, tow key developments had happened. First, lords were thinking about economic productivity and how to get *more* out of their land. (But at the same time, we are in the days of the moral economy as well--fixing bread prices to make sure everyone can afford at least A Loaf of bread each day, even if it was a smaller load when grain prices rose). Second, the transition from crop to cash rents, which would be accelerated by the Great Famine in1315-1322, was already underway.\n\nThus, lords expected income in cash from their peasants, paid it in tax, and sold their share of crops on their land for cash. Day laborers in the countryside were paid in cash and needed somewhere to buy the necessary goods to stay alive. Conversion of crops to cash meant longer distance trade, which meant traders--and the people to support them. Who, in turn, produced more refined goods and services for each other, and maybe for rural dwellers who might spend more time gearing up for production of what brought them cash (either their own crops or as mill workers, harvest laborers, miners).Talking about towns is inseparable from talking about long-distance economies overall. (Since \"national\" can be a questionable term still at this time. Centralized/royal authority isn't even always an aspiration of rulers, much less a fact.)\n\nBut there are a couple of things we can look at to get a bit deeper. First, towns enabled specialization of profession--the ability to make a living from a very narrowly focused line of work which, overall, meant a greater variety of goods being produced in abundance. Secondly, towns were vital to economic *growth*.\n\nTowns were signs and causes of specialization in profession. And medieval people could be very, very specific about what constituted a \"profession.\" In Rouen, for example, the guilds for women (yes, women!) who made clothes out of new fabric versus those who made clothes out of secondhand fabric were not only separate but often at war in the courts for encroaching on each other's territory. Nuremberg had a dedicated craft (Nuremberg's formal guild system was abolished around 1348) of *gingerbread baking.*\n\nThe Nuremberg *Hausb\u00fccher* are a great example of how specialized professions could be. You can navigate around the site--I've sorted it by \"profession\" for you--and click through to see illustrations of the different jobs or people who did them in late medieval/early modern Germany.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nProbably the most important urban profession was not unique to towns, but it illustrates well the central role that towns played in economic development. In northwest Europe, it was increasingly popular for teenage men but *especially* women to move to cities and work as servants for a period of time, saving up money for marriage or to start a singlewoman's household. (The medieval demographic imbalance between women and men was heightened by the fact that a higher proportion of women moved to cities and stayed; a higher proportion of men stayed in or went back to the countryside.) \n\nWhat Hajnal originally identified as the \"European marriage pattern,\" of women and men both marrying later in northwest Europe connected to which countries' economies grew relatively stronger in the early modern era, isn't quite a *marriage* pattern. Women in Eastern Europe show a wide variety of ages at first marriage; even in Italy many women married later than we are often given to assume. Instead, it seems to be a *women's wages* pattern. Places with towns where women worked--acquiring cash income, spending cash income--generally speaking saw more economic growth from the late Middle Ages on.\n\nI'm still struggling to say \"how important were towns\" because without them, the late medieval economy would have had to look completely different. This would have been true at the local level, the regional level, the \"national\" level, and the international level. But within the system that existed, specialized professions and their products would seem to be a good illustration of the economic contributions of cities to local life rather than just long-distance trade.", "I am not a historian, but have studied a decent amount of economic geography and I think the \"central place theory\" may provide a theoretical explanation of the importance of small towns in the middle ages. The wikipedia article on central place theory provides a pretty decent breakdown of the important components, but I will provide some explanation of why I think it's relevant.\n\nAgriculture provides an important foundation for all societies and economies. This is true today and it was true in the middle ages. Farms require relatively large plots of land with relatively few residential premises. The people who who farm the products on that land require non-farm goods and services as well as markets to sell their agricultural products. The distance between the farm and these service centres and markets has an impact on the efficiency of the farm/farmer. It takes time to cover distance, and in that time the farmer could be doing other things and at a certain point their produce will go bad if it takes too long to get to market. Towns naturally develop because they act as aggregation centres for agricultural production. Larger towns develop because they act as the next level of economic aggregation, and this pattern of increasing settlement size goes through iterations until you get cities. This is why there are loads of small towns relative to cities; the small towns can provide a number of lower-tier functions for local residents, and large urban centres provide regional functions for dozens of small towns and rural areas. Agriculture was certainly more important to the national economic system hundreds of years ago than it is today, so there is no doubt that those small towns were critical components of the national agricultural economy. I would imagine that towns also played a crucial role in defending the nation from intruders. It's much easier to defend your agricultural land if it's occupied than if you need to march an army across the country to push your foe back across the border. I gather that's why there are so many castles in the UK, but here I'm only speculating based on my pop-culture knowledge of medieval history.\n\nAdam Smith, the \"father of economics\" provides a number of potentially relevant insights in his book the Wealth of Nations. I have not completed the book, but he essentially explains how an \"economy\" works from the ground up, and agriculture and distances between places play very important roles. The concepts he discusses kind of feed into the central place theory that I mentioned. He does mention that in the 1700s many of the jobs in small towns were also present in great towns, but the wages were almost always lower in the small town. This is primarily because rents are also lower, so the trade off between the two results in essentially a similar quality of life across space. I would assume that the case was similar in the middle ages because the book is very theoretical and the concepts still hold fairly consistent today. Obviously there would be unique instances of towns with specializations due to their geography, such as mining towns. \n\nI don't know if I directly answered your question, but your question kind of pokes at some major theories in economic geography, so hopefully the things I mentioned are somewhat informative.", "Follow on question for the OP - did the advent of modern last names arise with urbanization where first names would have required family last names?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nuernberger-hausbuecher.de/index.php?do=list&amp;tt=prs-jobnorm"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1nw9mg", "title": "How did someone such as Ibn Battuta (practically and logistically) travel, and keep travelling?", "selftext": "Hi Askhistorians, long-time reader, occasional contributor, and first-time asker!\n\nI often raise Ibn Battuta as an example of \"unknown\" explorers that should be more known when I talk about the Age of discovery and/or Marco Polo/Christopher Columbus/and all that with my students. Today it struck me I have no idea about some more practical details.\n\nSome of the facts of his life suggests to me that he came from a decently wealthy background (legal scholars, and he got to study), so it is not surprising that he would manage to undertake a pilgrimage. The travels to Mecca took 16 months (mainly due to detours) and I guess it is at least feasible that a sum of money that will last that long can be taken in normal travel luggage. However, when he arrived in Mecca and was \"done\", instead of travelling home, he decided to keep traveling, and did so an enourmously long time. Whatever leftover cash was intended for the journey home can't have lasted long, the amount of enlistment possibilities (working as a caravan guard or aboard a ship) mostly covers travels expenses, so ... what gives?\n\nFinding a place to sleep without paying is one thing, but how did he afford food, and presumably, travel costs, and as the travels dragged on, new clothes and such? He even married!\n\nEDIT: I should clarify that I am mostly interested in the 1328-1330 time frame, as his later travels mostly were done while being employed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nw9mg/how_did_someone_such_as_ibn_battuta_practically/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccmq4t9", "ccmuejx", "ccncqpp"], "score": [98, 5, 3], "text": ["While I cannot speak for Ibn Battuta's case (I think he is a really interesting figure though), you need to break away from the 20-21st century capitalist mentality that every service is paid for using cash currency. My guess (and I will defer to scholars of the Islamic world) is that given his high status he would have likely benefited from the hospitality of other high status individuals. He very well might not have needed to pay for lodging or food he might have been welcomed into someone's home. He could have become a dependent of that household (which is different than a servant). \n\nedit: punctuation", "Battuta largely depended on the charity of other Muslims who were obliged to help a fellow muslim on his journey.  This is a major reason Battuta largely stuck to densely Muslim areas.", "Other posts have touched on Ibn Battutah's religious learning and his reliance on the Islamic communities, large or small, wherever he went. In the case of China, if I remember correctly, he stuck to trading/port towns like Guangzhou that had a sizable Muslim community.\n\nI want to offer an example of how his learning and status as a learned man got him places. He traveled into Asia Minor in the 14th century which was, at that time, a patchwork of principalities, beydoms, and tribal states. Many of those were ruled by recently converted Turks, referred to as the Turcoman. Many of the settled towns did not yet have a proper mosque and the worshipers gathered outside for friday prayers. As Ibn Battutah goes around, bouncing from Khan to Sultan to Bey, he gets gifts of horses (especially when his ride gets jacked which seems to happened regularly) and hospitality gifts including money, silk robes, and slaves. He could always exchange these valuable commodities down the line for whatever travel expense he encountered. Generally, it was considered a cool thing to have this well-traveled Islamic scholar around, a guy who had been to the Holy Cities and seen more of the world, especially to the recently-converted. He usually lodged in hospices for religious pilgrims or funded by eminent men of the city. The important people he would meet were particularly impressed by his fluent Arabic. He recounts amusing anecdotes of meeting local holy men who claimed to be able to speak Arabic, but could only utter a few phrases.\n\nOn a side note, he indeed was married and he married a lot. How THAT happened is still a mind boggling to me. On another side note, if you want to give your students an interesting travelogue to read that's a bit later than the Age of Discovery, but still pretty damn awesome, I'd recommend recommending the highly recommended Seyahatname of Evliya Celibi. Overlaps a lot of the same geographical space that Ibn Battutah journeyed over centuries previous. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1i2ip0", "title": "What are the origins of Goebbels' Nazi identification?", "selftext": "When and why, and other things, perhaps.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i2ip0/what_are_the_origins_of_goebbels_nazi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cb0org5"], "score": [2], "text": ["This requires a few different answers in order to get to Nazism. For the TL;DF crowd - just check out the links if you're curious and here's your sum-up: Spengler's German Socialism stands *very* apart from Marxism and Stalinism  &  even Nazism (due to racism in nazism); Eugenics became an obsession for the Third Reich; Versailles left the German people in a vindictive mood *AND* the German Unification was the basis for Klein- vs Gross- Deutschland and a part of the NSDAP identity (National Socialist *German* Workers Party) which led to expansionism coinciding with territorial reacquisition and revenge.\n\n**I**. German Socialism can be dated back to German historian [Oswald Spengler](_URL_3_) who wrote *[Preu\u00dfentum und Sozialismus](_URL_4_)*, a book dedicated to the betterment of the German people using Prussian values in connection to socialism: self-sacrifice, discipline and concern for the greater good (the values) are the core tenets a national community must embrace to better the nation (socialism). The Marxist-Leninist revolution in Tsarist Russia the year before scared Spengler, because he felt Marxism was wrong: \"Marxism is the capitalism of the working class\" and not true socialism.^1 Again, socialism for Spengler was a self-sacrificing act, not a selfish act; Therefore, he argued that all Marxism did was reverse the capitalist scales, serving no purpose other than to rob the businessmen in the same way businessmen robbed the working class, which would only train the proletariat to exploit the wealthy, resulting in stagnation and laziness. His approach towards nationalist socialism also stood as a conservative basis for the value of the individual, something the Bolshevik uprising greatly differed in (there's more, but the answer would get too disparate. I'd check out the wiki pages on Fascism and Communism to springboard your question)\n\nHis belief in the betterment of mankind and therefore the nation was a proactive approach that many intellectuals and individuals were attached to in the '20s and *early* '30s. I say *early* because while Spengler was a German Socialist, he was critical of national socialism, he was unimpressed with Hitler, and he believed anti-semitism  &  racial supremacy based on dodgy studies in Eugenics were wrong. As a result, he was effectively gagged and shunned by the German media after Hitler came to power and then died of a heart attack in '36.\n\n**II**. I wrapped up with Eugenics, because that's where a lot of the elements that make Nazism stand apart from Fascism come from. Eugenics stems from [Francis Galton](_URL_2_): He's the 19th century guy who coined the phrase \"Nature vs nurture\" in the modern sense, which is the hereditary nature vs the personal experiences (nurture) and how they impact the individual. Eugenics is the principle that desirable traits are heretical (read: natural), which is largely inspired by contemporary Darwinism. What's important to take away from Eugenics is the concept that racially, some races are inferior to others; This principle was co-opted by nationalists to argue that their race of people was superior to those not of their nation-state. When developing the fascist ideology of the NSDAP, eugenics was very popular because it was used to explain why Germans were superior to non-Germans like gypsies, Jews, blacks, Russians/Bolsheviks. William Shirer's [Rise and Fall of the Third Reich](_URL_0_) has a very good^2 section on the beginnings of the Nazi movement and the initial laws passed, which coincides with the racist agenda of Nazism.\n\n**III**. When discussing Nazi Germany, it's also important to note that Nazism used anti-semitism to scapegoat the Jews in order to press their agenda; Eugenics was a part of this, Jewish businessmen and bankers that survived the economic downturn following Versailles was another; Communist Jews from Russia was also a big issue - Hitler *hated* communists as much as he hated Jews... imagine both in one, which was a thing in Russia because the Bolsheviks gave the Jews rights that the Tsar did not (Pogroms were kind of an issue). One of the primary tenets of the Nazi party greatly sought the redemption of Germany following the very humiliating Treaty of Versailles; Article 231 stated that Germany was responsible for the war (\"war guilt clause\") and as a result, Article 232 forced the Germans to pay war reparations to the Entente.\n\n*Revanche* was one of the leading battle cries of the Germans going into the '30s as the Weimar Republic floundered. Since Alsace-Lorraine, the Polish Corridor (Danzig) and other parts of the *Kaiserreich* were taken apart at Versailles, the NSDAP under Hitler sought its reclaim. The Annexation of Austria is important for the Nazi identity because it follows the eugenics and nationalist paths towards their blood brothers; But here's the largest context: During the Unification Period, there was a question regarding which power in greater Germania - Prussia or Austria (This was \"The German Question)? A great, but long, read on the entire context and timeline of Unification is James Sheehan's [German History: 1780\u20131866](_URL_1_). The core concept of the time is this: Prussia was Protestant, Austria was Catholic. Otto von Bismarck argued for *Kleindeutschland,* a smaller Germany under Prussian guidance as a predominantly Protestant state; This was partially because Austria, as a Catholic nation, was under the influence of the Papacy in Rome. In 1866, Prussia and Austria went to war and Prussia won; Ergo, *Kleindeutschland.* The reason the papacy was an issue dates back to Martin Luther. Technically this is relevant, but I'm passing over this because I'd have to write a book to cover it all.\n\nSo, Nazi Germany looked back at Bismarck and said \"you know what, we're going to include our brothers this time, because they are ethnically German. The emphasis in Hitler's time wasn't on religion, but race. So, between seeking to reclaim lost lands, Hitler sought to creation of a greater German empire that would last a thousand years.\n\nIn conclusion, the Nazi identity is more than just anti-semitism. It largely draws from nationalism as well as recent German histories from the Unification to the failures of the Weimar Republic in the advent of Bolshevism.\n\n1. [Here's](_URL_4_) Spengler's book in English for those who missed the above link.\n\n2. I say \"good\" because while it's relevant for context and history, the book's section on early nazism is limited to the first portions of the book. The rest covers wartime Germany itself. Any additions that would add to a more timely context would be great! I can't find my books on the subject."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&amp;linkCode=qs&amp;keywords=0671728687", "http://www.amazon.com/German-History-1770-1866-Oxford-Modern/dp/0198204329", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler", "http://ia700302.us.archive.org/6/items/PrussianismAndSocialism/PrussianismAndSocialism.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "6m3blf", "title": "Woodrow Wilson had a PHD. Was he addressed as Dr. President?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6m3blf/woodrow_wilson_had_a_phd_was_he_addressed_as_dr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djz6d9w"], "score": [760], "text": ["No\u2014\"Mr. President\" is not just the name of the job preceded by the traditional male English honorific. It's the actual title of the sitting president, the way something like \"your majesty\" might be used for a monarch. *Edit:* /u/The_Alaskan's [comment reply](_URL_4_) notes that \"Madam President\" would be used by a female president, and that a formal decision to that effect was made in advance of the 2016 U.S. general election.\n\nSo did this hold true for Dr. Wilson? Yes! From my own study of America during that time period, I recalled seeing Wilson addressed as Mr. President in print, but I wanted to confirm that by finding a verifiable example with a source. The best I've got for now is a reference to a sign carried in the NAACP's 1917 \"Silent Protest Parade\" that read \"Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?\" [Source: Alan Dawley, *Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution.*](_URL_5_) *Edit again:* /u/Lo-Jupiter pointed to additional, earlier examples of Wilson being addressed as Mr. President in [this comment reply!](_URL_2_)\n\nBut why is Mr. President the title, and not something else? Initially, after the formation of the young U.S. government, there was a bit of a debate over how to address the president. Some in the early U.S., including the first president and vice president, favored a more exalted title. VP John Adams suggested \"his highness,\" and George Washington preferred \"his mightiness.\" Adams believed the executive ~~was~~ appeared too weak in comparison to the other branches of the new government, and sought to ~~consolidate presidentail power~~ boost the appearance of the president's power by way of a grandiose form of address.\n\nHowever, there was vehement opposition to this style of address among many other leaders, who felt it was a bit too reminiscent of the monarchy they had all just worked so hard to escape (Thomas Jefferson said an exalted presidential title was \"the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of,\" and Benjamin Franklin called Adams' stance \"absolutely mad\"), and ultimately Washington and Adams yielded and accepted the title \"Mr. President.\" *Edit a third time:* /u/yodatsracist points to a source in [this comment reply](_URL_3_) suggesting that Washington himself never actually went by Mr. President. My sources (listed below) suggest that the title was adopted through common usage because the House of Representatives opposed anything more elevated than that, but don't say whether or not Washington himself ever used it.\n\n*****\n\nI'm not an expert on the American Revolution or its aftermath, and I'd be happy if a real expert could flesh out or correct any aspects of that hurried section of this explanation! Here are the sources I used for my quick study on it:\n\n- [James H. Hutson, *John Adams' Title Campaign*](_URL_0_)\n\n- [Albert Hart, *Formation of the Union, 1750-1829*](_URL_1_)\n\nEdits for clarity, and to add additional info!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/363331?origin=crossref&amp;seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://books.google.com/books?id=n41HAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA143&amp;dq=%22title+of+Mr+President%22&amp;hl=en#v=onepage&amp;q=%22title%20of%20Mr%20President%22&amp;f=false", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6m3blf/woodrow_wilson_had_a_phd_was_he_addressed_as_dr/djzk7x6/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6m3blf/woodrow_wilson_had_a_phd_was_he_addressed_as_dr/djz8wr5/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6m3blf/woodrow_wilson_had_a_phd_was_he_addressed_as_dr/djz7wkp/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=rYMASq481ZYC&amp;q=Mr.+President+why+not+make+america+safe+for+democracy#v=snippet&amp;q=Mr.%20President%20why%20not%20make%20america%20safe%20for%20democracy&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "31onno", "title": "Have any of the works of Greek  &  Roman Antiquity been recovered in contemporaneous form, and turned out to differ from their Renaissance-era translations?", "selftext": "That is, maybe at Herculaneum or Pompeii, more modern archaeology uncovers something like \"first editions\" of the works of the more famous Greek and Roman philosophers or historians, and it's been found that the transcribed versions that became famous again in the Renaissance were not the same.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31onno/have_any_of_the_works_of_greek_roman_antiquity/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cq3jg78"], "score": [9], "text": ["Not \"first editions\" (haha), but ancient copies, certainly. The most common avenue for finding ancient copies is via papyri preserved in Egyptian rubbish dumps, or turned into papyrus-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 and used in sarcophaguses, though papyri have certainly turned up elsewhere too (e.g. in Herculaneum, as you mention).\n\nThey're nearly always very fragmentary. Often the surviving fragment preserves no more than a few letters. But yes, they're important sources of textual variants. They're not always *better* than the mediaeval manuscript tradition: transmission errors happened in antiquity too. But earlier witnesses always add more information, so even if there are errors, they're always *informative*.\n\nThe number of papyri that have been found varies depending on how popular the text was. For things like the New Testament and Homer, we have thousands of papyrus fragments. For example, we have fragments of at least 136 separate papyri of Euripides, 36 of Sophocles, and 32 of Aeschylus. For early epic, we have 1569 papyri of the *Iliad*, at least 252 of the *Odyssey*, 58 of the *Catalogue of Women*, 40 of the *Theogony*, and 32 of the *Works and Days*.\n\nA very few are relatively intact. There's one 5th/6th cent. CE papyrus that preserves substantial chunks from every book of the *Iliad*, and one 3rd/4th cent. CE papyrus that preserves most of 11 books of the *Odyssey*. A very few texts are known only from papyri: the main ones I know of are Aristotle's *Constitution of the Athenians*, the majority of what survives of the *Catalogue of Women*, and the Derveni papyrus.\n\nAs to how they shed light on surviving texts, [I wrote an old post here](_URL_0_) which gives one example of how a papyrus reading affected our understanding of the correct reading of a text. Papyri are and will always continue to be an important avenue for finding new corrections to ancient texts, which is why there are a few journals specifically devoted to papyrology. In a modern critical edition of a text, papyrus readings will normally be annotated in the apparatus (the list of textual variants at the bottom of the page) with the letter *p*, though the exact typography varies from edition to edition (e.g. sometimes an edition will use a lower-case italic *p*; some older editions use a capital *P* in blackletter script)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10tvqa/reliability_of_medieval_manuscripts_of_classical/c6gtwlw?context=1"]]}
{"q_id": "5owall", "title": "Why did China recieve Veto-power at the creation of the SC of the UN?", "selftext": "China was not industralized and severely weakened after the war. Why were they deemed important enough to recieve such great powers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5owall/why_did_china_recieve_vetopower_at_the_creation/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcmnhdk", "dcmyml6", "dcnnv9j"], "score": [1187, 115, 4], "text": ["They were 'granted' this at the Conference of Cairo in 1943 by FDR and Churchill. The Americans needed the Chinese to continue the fight against the Japanese on the mainland, since most of the Japanese armed forces were occupied fighting the Chinese United Front (Both the Kwomingtang and the Communists). At Cairo FDR also was already preparing his 'New Order' by trying to get all allied powers to sign off on the United Nations Idea, and by giving China the seat they also participated in the United Nations.\n\nIt's also important to note that FDR and Churchill negotiated with Chiang Kai Shek, and as such the veto power in the Security Council went to the Kwomingtang, even after they were forced in exile to Taiwan. Only after the thaw in the '70s did the Pernament seat at the Security council and veto-right go to the Peoples Republic of China, instead of the Republic of China (Taiwan). \n\nSource:\nKERREMANS, B. and LAENEN R., International Politics since 1945, Leuven, 1999.\n\nEdit: Spelling Errors", "FDR's post-war vision is very different than the what the policy Truman implemented after FDR's death. FDR imagined the UN would be policed by the worlds 4 major powers: the US, USSR, England, and China. Together, these 'Four Policemen' would actively prevent conflicts around the world to prevent a future World War. They would lead the UN and give it real power to stop conflict- a direct contrast to the failed League of Nations. FDR saw no interest in SE Asia (Indochina specifically) and thought it belonged in China's realm of influence, and did not support France's effort to regain it's lost colony.\n\nAs the other post mentioned, China was not communist at this point in history. However, FDR's post-war vision did not include an idealogical battle against Communism. Lasting peace was his objective, not a Cold War with USSR, which led to comprise (critics would describe it as capitulation)  with Russia over the issue of Poland soviergnty and USSR's declaration of war on Japan. So, the fact the China might fall into the hands of communism was not a deal breaker for FDR. \n\nTo answer your final question about China's weakness: China had existed as the major power in the region for thousands of years. However, due to European and Japanese imperialism in the last 200 years, China's position had fallen immensely. But it's size, population, and potential for economic growth and military growth made it a realistic choice to become the future power in the region. \n\nSource: His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt\nBook by Joseph Lelyveld\n", "This eventually happened in october 1971 when the US and decrease that of the advisors who were in his book Nehru The Invention of India."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1lhlgn", "title": "How did the Jewish working rise to prominence so quickly in the USA after WWII?", "selftext": "*working class", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lhlgn/how_did_the_jewish_working_rise_to_prominence_so/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbzep3o"], "score": [9], "text": ["History minor focusing on Jewish History (Post diaspora, pre WWII) here.\n\nThis is on the periphery of my studies, but here it is:\n\nFirst some nomenclature: There were, at the time of WWII (and still are) several different types of \"Jews.\" The Jews of Poland and Lithuania were most likely Hasidic. If you have no experience with Hasidic jews, think of them as similar (not really, but for the purposes of analogy...) to charismatic christian churches. \n\nThe other big group were the so-called Ashkenazi Jews, or \"German Jews.\" Keep in mind at this time, the concept of \"nationality\" was an evolving one, and most people, pre WWI thought of themselves less-so as members of a particular nation, than as citizens of a country, so them being \"German\" had less to do with Germany and more to do with the language they spoke, and having a generalized western culture similar to that of christians of Western Europe; this lies in contrast to the distinctly eastern european culture that was prominent in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and the other Eastern European/Ural/Baltic states. When I say \"German Jew,\" think Western European.\n\nWith that out of the way, lets get some historical context. Laws limiting Jews to particular professions and trades were quite common, and had been around for centuries. So too had the practice of the State, at the behest of nobles or merchants, seizing resources from the Jews, burning their homes, and running them out of the city, only to realize in a few years that the reason they had so much stuff is that they were good at what they did and their services were in demand. So, eventually they would be ushered back in, even sometimes being offered incentives (protection, tax breaks, etc) for returning.\n\nThe end result of this is that Jews couldn't really become farmers, since farmers can't take their land and crops with them when they flee town. So what jobs were left? How does a Jewish man feed his family in 1900's Europe?\n\nMercantile and Professional jobs. You either become a trader/retailer, or a doctor/lawyer/etc. Reading was not a common skill even a few decades ago. In the 1900's it was not at all common for the general public to be well read. Ashkenazi Jews, on the other hand, studied their religious texts obsessively. They would be able to read and write in two languages by 10, with formal training beginning around 5 years of age. As a result, their cultural practices lent themselves to scholarly pursuits.\n\n*****SIDE NOTE*** I want to be clear here. This is not a racist \"jews make good lawyers Hyuck!\" argument. They started their children reading in Hebrew at a young age, and taught them the local language as well. This familiarity at a young age with reading and writing primes a young child's brain for such pursuits, and it will (and does) when anyone, not just the Jews does it. ***END SIDE NOTE*****\n\nSo as a scholar or a merchant with a portable trade, what do you do when anti-semitism begins to rise? You do the same thing the Jews had done for centuries, and you leave your current home for a nearby land where public sentiment lies more in your favor. Many Jews left Europe for the United States. (though nowhere near the numbers we saw in four decades) Keep in mind this is even pre-wwI. \n\nThe next thing you have to understand about European Jewry is that there was always a sense of community toward other Jews (not counting the Hasidim; their relationship with the Ashkenazi is more... complicated.) to the point that supporting a traveling scholar was considered a *mitzvah* or religiously obligated good deed. The Jewish community would take up alms for those among them that could not, for whatever reason, support themselves. \n\nSo lets take a quick inventory of what our context has created:\n\nWe have a community of people with a long history of relocating, engaged in trades that are lucrative wherever you go, who believe strongly in the importance of charity.\n\nNow, getting to your actual question:\n\nAfter WWII, when the horrors of the holocaust had been revealed, the surviving Europeans Jews made a choice. Many (more than you might think) stayed in Europe. Some left for Israel after it was founded a few years later, and some headed to the United States. Those Jews not directly affected by the holocaust engaged *heavily* in charities benefitting its victims. Additionally, Many were business owners who could easily give a job to a jewish immigrant just off the boat from Europe. \n\n\nSources: \n\nDubnow's History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Link:_URL_2_\n\nBartal's \"The Jews of Eastern Europe: 1772-1881\" Link: _URL_1_\n\nStow's \"Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe\" Link:  _URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://amzn.com/0674015932", "http://amzn.com/0812219074", "http://amzn.com/144004239X"]]}
{"q_id": "1hkfty", "title": "Do we know when certain food and drink pairings first became popular? Eggs and bacon? Wine and cheese? Etc", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hkfty/do_we_know_when_certain_food_and_drink_pairings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cav7699"], "score": [2], "text": ["This question has been removed because it's [an \"in your era\" or \"throughout history\" question](_URL_0_), which are not appropriate for this subreddit.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "64g5bx", "title": "Why was Yugoslavia formed after WW1, rather than re-establishing the Kingdom of Serbia?", "selftext": "Was there a strong local desire for such a state? Or was it more to do with geopolitics?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64g5bx/why_was_yugoslavia_formed_after_ww1_rather_than/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dg2vlfh"], "score": [6], "text": ["My first comment here. Hope my answer will suffice! \n\nYes, there was strong local desire for such a state before the First World War. Yugoslavism became a distinguished segment of the wider Pan-Slavic movement around the 17th century. It was popularised by the Illyrian movement in the 19th century and afterwards, throughout the territories populated by South Slavs, the idea of Yugoslavism was growing strong, helped by the general dissatisfaction with the Austro-Hungarian government. \n\nIn Croatia, the Serbs and Croats who lived under Austro-Hungarian thrall were often grouped together as they considered one another to be cast in the same mold. In the early 20th century, these stances were most explicitly espoused by the disciples of Svetozar Pribi\u0107evi\u0107, the leader of the Serb Independent Party (Serbo-Croatian: *Srpska samostalna stranka*) who advocated for the creation of a Yugoslav state, thus welcoming collaboration with Croatian politicians, which resulted in the SIP merging into the Croat-Serb Coalition. The joint interests and friendship between the two parties culminated in 1905 when two documents were signed - the Rijeka Resolution and the Zadar Resolution, which both proclaimed solidarity and equality between the Croats and the Serbs. On the other hand, the Croatian Party of Rights, led by the likes of Ante Star\u010devi\u0107 and Josip Frank, opposed the idea of Yugoslavism with zeal.\n\nIn the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, following the Bosnian Crisis, the locals were very much dissatisfied with B\u00e9ni K\u00e1llay's administration, and the Bosnian intelligentsia rallied behind pan-Serbian and anti-Austrian publications like *The Bosnian Vila* and *Zora* (Dawn), which helped preserve Serbian national identity. Such a sentiment was supported by many eminent authors, politicians and poets of the time, with the poet and politician Osman \u0110iki\u0107, a Serb Muslim, being an example. This was the ideological basis of the Young Bosnia organisation, frequented by many young intellectuals of the time, an organisation now famous primarily for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand. \n\nIn the independent Kingdom of Serbia, the Yugoslav nationalists were influenced by the *Risorgimento* (Italian unification) and considered Serbia to be responsible of emulating the Kingdom of Piedmont by uniting all South Slavs into one state henceforth known as Yugoslavia. Slovene nationalists like Anton Koro\u0161ec espoused pro-unification ideas, believing the unification to be a means of freeing Slovenia from Austro-Hungarian control. How deeply ingrained the idea of Yugoslavism was within the nationalist sentience of the time is best exemplified by this Gavrilo Princip quote: *'I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.'*\n\nSo, that said, the idea was rooted within the collective conscious of a majority of South Slavs of the era, but after the Great War, Yugoslavia wasn't immediately formed. The Corfu Declaration made the Serbian pro-unification intentions rather clear, and once the war ended the Kingdom of Serbia merged with the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and once the pro-Serbian Whites have outnumbered the pro-independence Greens in the Podgorica Assembly, so did Serbia merge with the Kingdom of Montenegro thus creating the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, separated into nine *banovinas*. The newly-formed state was no stranger to separatist and nationalist turmoil, which is why King Aleksandar I changed the name of the country to Yugoslavia in 1929, and started working on eradicating the national identities of Yugoslav peoples from existence for the sake of creating a unified state, not separated by neither religion nor ethnicity. This process was later continued by the communists but has evidently failed to take hold, as shortly after Tito's death, Yugoslavia again found itself divided by separatism and nationalism promoted by all the parties involved in the conflict. \n\nSources:\n\nV. \u0106orovi\u0107 - *Istorija Srba*\n\nJ. R. Lampe - *Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country*\n\nZ. Pavlovi\u0107  &  J. Bosni\u0107 - *Mozaik pro\u0161losti* \n\nLj. Anti\u0107 - *Prvi svjetski rat i Hrvati*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1fpso6", "title": "During the period of westward expansion, were there any U.S. or European leaders arguing against the appropriation of the land or taking up the cause of indigenous peoples?", "selftext": "We all learn about the idea of manifest destiny, but I am curious to know about dissenters who may have tried to oppose westward expansion and their reasons for doing so. I'm specifically interested in whether there were any theological or humanist arguments for respecting the peoples and cultures already present in the new world.  Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fpso6/during_the_period_of_westward_expansion_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cacp1r4"], "score": [7], "text": ["In the 1832 Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall, in the majority opinion, ruled that the Cherokee nation was its own distinct community and not subject to the laws of a particular state. How, Andrew Jackson chose not to enforce that ruling, thus paving the way for the Trail of Tears. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4ipmx5", "title": "Are there any records of black people in medieval Prussia/Czech Republic? If so, are there any records of how they were treated?", "selftext": "I recently stumbled upon this thread: _URL_0_\n\nIn it a video game designer defends their decision to not include any black people in their game. \n\nHe cites that he works with historical experts, but since he names no direct sources and I kind of doubt there were absolutely no black people in that region at that time, I thought the best bet would be to ask here. \n\nBy treated, I mean were they tolerated? Were they shunned? Were they seen as some sort of demon, similar to red haired people? \n\nImportant: I am not interested in the slaves that were used by the Moors or the Ottomans. \n\nThanks a lot. \n\nEDIT: Just as a preemptive statement: I don't really agree with everything the developer said, but I am just really interested in that specific topic. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ipmx5/are_there_any_records_of_black_people_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d30edqp"], "score": [3], "text": ["[There you go](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/4ion56/video_game_designer_daniel_v\u00e1vra_is_called_racist/"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ipxz3/is_it_plausible_for_moors_or_other_blackskinned/"]]}
{"q_id": "1on64f", "title": "Folk, Baroque, Classical, Rock  &  Roll... how much have musical genres varied amongst any one culture throughout history?", "selftext": "Any musical genre will fit for this question, I imagine there are many that do/have existed that I have never even heard of.\n\nThere is an unspoken assumption in modern mainstream culture that during specific historical periods, different cultures listened to specific musical genres only - that the musical diversity that exists in modern culture is specific to us. But for as long as there have been cultures, there have been individual preferences. Was there simply not enough choice in musical selection before the 19th and 20th centuries? Or are there any examples of a diverse musical pallette ranging back further?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1on64f/folk_baroque_classical_rock_roll_how_much_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cctlxbd"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm only qualified to give a response for european music, so I hope there is someone out there who is learned in asian and african music who can contribute as well. There were definitely different \"genres\" of music as far back as the late medieval period. The split between sacred music and court music is a perfect example. Consider the difference between chant and plainsong (sacred) and early lute based songs.    \n\nDoes anyone have expertise in early medieval music? I am aware of the sacred musical tradition in this period, but when did folk music and dance music begin to appear?   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2f29ib", "title": "What would a battle during World War II really be like? Do any video games actually simulate this?", "selftext": "I don't particularly mean the emotional and psychological trauma associated with warfare, but rather the actual order of battle.  \n\nI know there are games like Red Orchestra that are said to simulate weapons, uniforms, and cover accurately. However, would the actual battle be executed in a way similar to how these games portray it? From what I have encountered, there is a huge emphasis on the significance of infantry combat with troops engaging in combat only occasionally receiving support from armor, air, or artillery.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2f29ib/what_would_a_battle_during_world_war_ii_really_be/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck5ayl2", "ck5c7gh"], "score": [19, 71], "text": [" >  there is a huge emphasis on the significance of infantry combat with troops engaging in combat only occasionally receiving support from armor, air, or artillery\n\nArtillery is in a completely different category from armor and air here and rare would be the battle in which neither side drew on artillery support. WW2 armies were equipped with mortars at the company or even platoon level, so even if a unit were completely isolated they'd have *something*. And in normal circumstances, \"real\" artillery pieces would be firing on both sides. Particularly in the attack, going in without artillery support against a prepared position is just suicidal.\n\nWhile I'm sure that the absence of armor and air support is more a function of technical limitations or design choices in the video games you're thinking of, it *is* true that the importance of armor and air on the WW2 battle is easy to exaggerate. Keegan's *Face of Battle* has some good remarks on this in the concluding sections. Most of the fighting men of most \"armored\" divisions, especially in the later war, were actually foot-slogging infantrymen, and \"tank\" battles were \"heavily intermingled with confused infantry combats of a kind little different from those with which soldiers of the First World War had experienced in many of the great offensives.\"", "I think one thing which many downplay was just how static the soldier's experience of WWII could be. It was not all, or even mostly, aggressive attack and counterattack like popular culture implies. German offensive successes in 1940-42 (what most people call Blitzkrieg, although the Germans never called it that) and the Allied breakout from Normandy have both given the impression that such sweeping moves were routine, but attacks were almost always slow and grinding. In fact combat in WWII in my opinion bears much more resemblance to the stereotypical view of WWI than the view espoused by films and games set in WWII. It's inarguable that the belligerents of WWII went into the war with methods that had been developed in the latter stages of WWI--in particular WWII re-emphasized the necessity of tremendous amounts of supporting artillery fire to neutralise enemy defences and 'shoot' the attacking troops into enemy defences. What's more, the pattern of fighting became more slow and grinding as the war went on--the Germans abandoned anything resembling Blitzkrieg and began to build their tanks as mobile bunkers and emphasize flexible defence by groups of heavily-armed infantry; the Allies relied more and more upon the brute fire-power that their industrial superiority could supply. British troops eventually became so reliant on this support that the routine reaction to coming under fire was to go to ground and wait for fire support. The same kind of tactics used in Normandy, with any attack supported by tons of shelling and any enemy counter-attack smashed by artillery as soon as it began, resemble closely those developed on the Somme, where artillery was used in just this manner--the effect on the landscape was similarly destructive. In WWII soldiers fought in basically the same way their fathers had fought in 1918, with the addition of more mobile tanks (of which there were always relatively few compared to infantry), portable radios, reliable motor vehicles (though the only fully mechanised army at the beginning of the war was the British Army), and larger firepower.\n\nThis continuity is summed up really well by John Ellis in *The Sharp End of War*, which is a great book on the soldier's experience which I'd recommend you read if you can.\n\n > Above all, perhaps, the two world war have in common the shovel and the entrenching tool. From 1914 onwards the paramount fact in war was firepower of such intensity that only in holes in the ground could the front-line soldier even begin to feel relatively secure. Armoured vehicles briefly robbed defensive tactics of their supremacy, but by 1941 at the latest anti-tank gun, the mine, and a little later the bazooka/PIAT/Panzerfaust, had done much to restore the balance. Attacking remained a hazardous and slow procedure, only to be undertaken when necessary and with the maximum amount of fire support...though World War II never had trench systems as static or elaborate as those on the Western Front, the individual soldier nevertheless spent much of his time burrowing into the ground...if defensive firepower was no longer sufficiently predominant as to make only the most trivial gains possible, it was still quite enough to make progress agonisingly slow and to necessitate constant retrenchment after each desperate bound. Even when troops were not themselves on the defensive, actual advances across the battlefield were sporadic and slow, each attack a frenetic spasm in the troglodyte routine. In the front line at least 90 per cent of the infantryman's time was spent under cover either on the defensive, often under bombardment, awaiting an enemy attack, or nerving himself to the prospect of going forward.\n\nI'd also recommend *Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945* for excellent, more academic assessments of the key belligerents. Otherwise there are countless works which look into the minutiae of how individual armies operated and how the precise forms of battle differed greatly, as others have pointed out."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "5djpuq", "title": "When and why Viet Nam and Korea (both North and South) abandoned Chinese characters?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5djpuq/when_and_why_viet_nam_and_korea_both_north_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da53tkc"], "score": [5], "text": ["North Korea made the shift starting in the late 1940s. 1949, officially.\n\nSouth Korea was still using them quite frequently as late as the 1990s, and you can still find plenty of examples of mixed script Korean in academic texts today. In the early 90's newspapers finally switched over to Hangeul. However Chinese characters (*hanja*) are still used for abbreviations and some technical terminology where they can clear up ambiguity. Officially, the teaching of *hanja* stopped in 1971 in South Korea for younger students. In both Koreas, *hanja* are still taught to high schoolers, but in limited number. It's also worth mentioning that prior to this, hangeul was only really standardised in the 1930s, and then again in the 1980s. \n\nIn Vietnam, Chinese characters (ch\u1eef n\u00f4m) were replaced in the 1920s. The system that replaced it wasn't too new. It was developed and in use by missionaries in the mid 1800s.\n\nWhy, for both languages, is a little more complicated. A big part of it had to do with national identity. A big part of it had to do with efforts to improve literacy. On those grounds even Mao Zedong made early pushes to replace Chinese characters with an alphabet, though this ultimately never happened (though it got close in some places).\n\nAnother significant factor is that at this time (early 20th century) the practice of writing all formal texts in Classical Chinese was falling out of favour across Asia. People were starting to use the vernacular to write, rather than an archaic form of another language entirely. If you're going to write the way you speak, then there's less perceived value in using an old foreign orthography to do it, especially when the list of perceived shortcomings is quite long when it comes to how that script can represent your language.\n\nSimply put, one could say that the sort of nationalism that was developing at the start of the 20th century across the region (e.g. \u4e94\u56db\u904b\u52d5) was really the key factor."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2sfkbv", "title": "Many technological advances in the past decades can be attributed to NASA. How much (if any) technological advances can be attributed to the Soviet space program?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2sfkbv/many_technological_advances_in_the_past_decades/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnpk7kz"], "score": [3], "text": ["I know it may not be what your looking for but I think a lot of your answers will inevitably be in regards to rocketry. \n\nOn that front, the Soviets developed a number of advanced rocket engines, some of which are still some of the best in the world. The [RD-170](_URL_1_) for instance maintains the title as the most powerful rocket engine in the world. Most people believe this title goes to the American F-1 engine which was used for the Apollo program. However the F-1 is only the most powerful single cone engine, and comparatively the RD-170 outputs over 1,000,000 more Newtons of thrust. \n\nSecondly the [NK-33](_URL_0_) rocket engine which was originally developed for the Soviet Moon program has the second highest thrust to weight ratio of of any rocket. Similarly, it also has a very high specific impulse. It's only other contender is the SpaceX Merlin 1-D which was developed very recently. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-170"]]}
{"q_id": "46fvpp", "title": "Why is the myth that conscripted make up the bulk of medieval armies so prevalent?", "selftext": "Am I allowed to ask this? I just saw a thread in another sub where the highest rated comment is that peasant soldiers were the bulk of the medieval army. Why is this myth still being perpetuated? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46fvpp/why_is_the_myth_that_conscripted_make_up_the_bulk/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d05ccco"], "score": [14], "text": ["I have a theory that the reason for this is fairly simple: miscommunication.\n\n\"Medieval\" usually refers to the European Middle Ages, a period that stretched from the Fall of Rome in 476 until the Fall of Constantinople in ~~1492~~ 1453. There are about a thousand differing start and end dates, but using the demise of two Roman empires is convenient and a little poetic -- because, unlike dating it to Gutenberg's printing press, we don't have to quibble over whether to point at when he started or the vague \"c. 1525\" figure that better represents the spread of the printing press. But what's important here is that, no matter the exact start and end dates, the period corresponds to a stupidly long period of time. If we go with a more conservative figure of dating the start to 800 when Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire, we're still looking at a period of nearly 700 years from start to end. More time separated a Genoese soldier on the walls of Constantinople in 1492 from Charlemagne than what separates this sub from Columbus himself. That's the first thing that makes communicating on this subject rather difficult at times.\n\nThere's also the matter of nomenclature. How do you define \"peasant,\" exactly? For most people, especially those who don't study medieval history, a peasant is probably just someone who occupies the second lowest strata of society (being just one step above slaves). A farmer, basically. Maybe a fisherman or hunter. \n\nIf we look at the English at Agincourt, 5/6ths of their army could probably be classified as \"peasantry.\" Yes, the longbowmen absolutely did go to war with a fairly extensive kit and a very specialized skillset. Yes, those longbowmen had to meet various requirements to actually qualify for service (like actually being able to draw and fire one of those massive warbows). Yes, those longbowmen would have been paid for their time and entitled to various rights while on campaign (most notably looting). But they weren't men at arms (who could very well have held sizable tracts of land) and they absolutely were not of the proper nobility (who comprised, perhaps, 100 of the 6,000 English soldiers at Agincourt). \n\nNow let's return to the first sentence in this post. Even if we get past all the traps above, the miscommunication *still* arises from the fact that when I say the English army was largely comprised of the peasantry, I'm referring just to social standing. If someone who is not as well informed on the subject were to then read that part of my post and see me classify the English army as peasantry, said person could, not knowing any better, simply conjure up the stereotypical image that Hollywood likes to give us of the peasant: dirty, dressed in earthy tones (bonus points for dirty brown), and probably featured on a set that is just as drab-looking as they are. \n\nThere are probably another half dozen factors that would contribute to the miscommunications that seem to breathe new life into these misconceptions on a regular basis, but I think that you've got the idea. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "usj0f", "title": "Books about Diogenes of Sinope", "selftext": "Can anyone recommend a good source on this guy? Someone on this subreddit posted a quote of his recently (\"In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.\") and I found it amusing enough to look him up. He seems like a really interesting dude. I'm interested in a blend of what is known about his philosophy and what is known about his life.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/usj0f/books_about_diogenes_of_sinope/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4y9a2p"], "score": [2], "text": ["*Diogenes the Cynic*, L. Navia (2005)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3310dz", "title": "Weapon ownership in Medieval Europe", "selftext": "Was it common for farmers and those not in the noble classes to have weapons for self defense?\nmaybe a farmer having a bow and arrow to defend against wolves?\nAnd were some weapons exclusively for the nobility?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3310dz/weapon_ownership_in_medieval_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqgpq8u"], "score": [4], "text": ["In Iceland it certainly, from a Saga perspective (from the viewpoint that they reflect society in the Sturlung period, that is from about 1200 onwards) does not seem uncommon for 'farmers' (in Medieval Iceland nearly everybody was a farmer, as there were not urbanised areas/ towns|), or lower class landowners, to possess an axe or spear at least.\n\n\n\nAxes and spears have the virtue of being relatively cheap to make; only a small amount of poor quality iron was necessary, and although I am not convinced by the argument axes did have utilitarian purposes.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2amzfe", "title": "Why didn't the Jews attempt to rebel or \"rise up\" in WW2 against their Nazi captors?", "selftext": "A friend of mine was discussing this and asserted that the Jews \"outnumbered\" the Nazi's and proposed that, \"They knew they were going to die anyway so why didn't they try to take a stand and rebel/fight against the Nazi's?\"\n\nI personally don't think it's that simple. Thoughts?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2amzfe/why_didnt_the_jews_attempt_to_rebel_or_rise_up_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciwtm8h"], "score": [25], "text": ["You are right, it isn't that simple.\n\nFirst of all, the nazi persecution of the Jews happened incrementally, not all at once, and it was by no means clear that \"they were going to die anyway\". It is clear to us in hindsight, but you have to keep in mind that the concept of rounding up men, women and children, putting them on trains, unloading them at a purpose-built death camp, and gassing them, was never before encountered in the history of the world. It was so novel and alien an idea that hardly anyone at the time believed it was happening *even when they were told about it by eye witnesses*. Escapees from Auschwitz and Treblinka told their fellow Jews and were disbelieved initially. The same escapee reports were relayed through the Polish government in exile to the Western allies, and they disbelieved it too.\n\nSecondly, \"the Jews\" were not a nation with an army. They were a people who were a small to tiny minority in a number of separate occupied countries. They had no governing structure or access to arms. They were not unified structurally in any way.\n\nThirdly, and most importantly, there *was* Jewish resistance, what's more, it even arose  in the most dire and impossible of circumstances.\n\nThere were uprisings in several Polish ghettos, most notably those of Warsaw in January and April-May 1943, and in Bialystok in August 1943. They were of course brutally suppressed and everybody to the last child was carted off to Treblinka and killed.\n\nThere were Jewish partisan groups fighting the Germans in Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. The reason there were separate Jewish partisans is, by the way, is that often Polish and Baltic partisans refused to admit Jews as members and even went so far as to kill them...\n\nLastly, there were uprisings in the death camps themselves. \n\nThere have been three large-scale uprisings in Nazi death camps. As the odds were stacked heavily against the inmates, these stories make for some bleak reading.\n\n**[SonderKommando revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau](_URL_0_), October 7, 1944**\n\nThe Sonderkommandos were groups of Jewish prisoners charged with processing the belongings and handling the cremation of other prisoners. They knew that they would not be allowed to survive the war and had gathered some makeshift weapons and explosives. On the fateful day, they managed to set Crematorium IV on fire and kill three SS men. Some of them escaped briefly but all were recaptured and killed. In all, the revolt cost the lives of 451 members of the Sonderkommandos.\n\n**[Treblinka uprising](_URL_1_), August 2, 1943**\n\n300 inmates of Treblinka managed to escape, of whom 200 were recaptured (sometimes with the help of the Polish inhabitants of the region) and killed. According to various estimates, about 60-70 of the Treblinka escapees were still alive at the end of the war. Three guards were killed in the uprising, as well as about 600 of the 800 to 900 inmates. After the uprising, two more transports of Jews arrived and were killed. Shortly afterwards, Treblinka was dismantled, ploughed over and turned into a farm. The remaining inmates were killed at Sobibor.\n\n**The Sobibor Uprising on October 14, 1943**\n\n12 German officers were killed in the revolt as well as a number of Ukrainian guards. As Sobibor was strictly an extermination camp, where those that arrived by rail were immediately gassed, the number of prisoners was very small, just enough to keep the camp running. 300 out of 700 inmates managed to escape during the revolt. Many were recaptured and killed rather quickly, others were killed by the Polish resistance they met in the forests around the camp, still others were betrayed by Polish inhabitants of the region. Some were helped by the Poles, though, mainly in return for money and valuables belonging to gassed Jews that they had smuggled out of the camp. It should be remembered that to harbour Jewish refugees meant an almost certain death sentence at the time. Only about 50 of the escaped survived the war.\n\n\n\nImmediately after the revolt, all remaining prisoners in Sobibor were killed and the camp was dismantled.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/sonderevolt.html", "http://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/miles-lerman-center-for-the-study-of-jewish-resistance/medals-of-resistance-award/treblinka-death-camp-revolt"]]}
{"q_id": "1zx7iq", "title": "How well accepted is the theory that the Minoan civilization was devastated by a massive tsunami and that this event lead to the the myth of Atlantis?", "selftext": "I saw this on an [episode of Secrets of the Dead](_URL_1_) \n\n[Full episode](_URL_0_)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zx7iq/how_well_accepted_is_the_theory_that_the_minoan/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfxxbjw"], "score": [12], "text": ["Not even a tiny little bit.\n\n* Just to be clear, strictly speaking \"Minoan\" is the name of a style of material culture. It is often dangerous, and often wrong, to equate that with a particular ethnic group, language, or political entity. Certainly by the historical period Crete had a very diverse ethnic composition. Having said that, it is very possible that \"Minoan\" does equate to a single political entity controlling the island from Knossos (there's some archaeological evidence suggesting that; but it's not crazy to disagree with that conclusion and see Minoan Crete as a group of autonomous palace cultures).\n* As a bit of background, the so-called \"Old Palaces\" of Crete were destroyed in the mid-18th century BCE, and it is often supposed that earthquakes were the cause. This destruction did not interrupt ongoing development, however, whatever the real cause.\n* The palace (i.e. \"Minoan\") culture of Crete didn't come to an end until ca. 1450 BCE.\n* There have been attempts to pin this on the eruption of Thera/Santorini, to be sure. Geological evidence of a powerful tsunami has been found at various points on the coast of Crete.\n* However, these attempts are just a tiny bit flawed by the data we have relating to the date of the eruption. Dating by pottery evidence is extremely contested in terms of absolute dates, but relative dates are secure; the eruption belongs to the period known as Late Minoan 1A, yet we know there was a building boom in the Late Minoan 1B period. Even without absolute dates, that's fairly damning. Moreover, radiocarbon dating has pointed to an earlier date still, in the late 17th century. Even before that, some archaeologists had already been arguing for a 17th century date (Stuart Manning's 1999 book on the subject argued for 1628/1627, based partly on ice-cores taken from Greenland, evidence that has subsequently been challenged); one olive branch that was buried alive in the eruption has been radiocarbon dated to 1627-1600 (95% confidence). Even without consensus on the dates of pottery styles, there's a pretty good consensus putting it, if not before 1600 BCE, then certainly not much later. You can't blame events in the 1400s on an event with that kind of dating evidence.\n* (Having said that, it is moderately safe to say that the Minoan settlements on Thera itself were wiped out by the eruption.)\n\nInstead, evidence of destruction caused by human agency in the LM 1B period, followed by evidence of Mycenaean material and textual culture on Crete in the LM II and III periods, points to Mycenaean invasion as the occasion of the downfall of the Minoan palace culture. Attempts to drag Thera into it are unnecessary and unfounded.\n\n\"Atlantis\" doesn't even enter into it. That's a \"legend\" that was invented for a specific occasion by a 4th century BCE philosopher, and which he set in the Mesolithic (in the 10th millennium BCE, to be specific). And in myths recorded after 800 BCE, it takes some believing to see historical events even in the Iron Age, let alone in the Mycenaean period, let alone in the Minoan period.\n\n**Edits:** formatting error; added a bit more detail about Manning's book."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://video.pbs.org/video/1204753806/", "http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/features/sinking-atlantis/the-fall-of-the-minoans/61/"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "40bycm", "title": "Why have the majority of governments adopted parliamentarian republicanism rather than presidential republicanism?", "selftext": "Were there historical pressures which caused the majority of governments in post-WW1 western Europe, postcolonial Africa, Asia and Latin America, and post-communist eastern Europe to adopt this style of governance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40bycm/why_have_the_majority_of_governments_adopted/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyt65uj"], "score": [18], "text": ["The premise of this question is rather flawed.  In democratic Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, Westminster-style systems are the distinct minority.  Far more common in the aggregate are three other systems: strong Presidents (i.e., not only executive Presidents in the US sense but possessed of significant legislative power exercisable by decree), US-style systems, and French-style hybrids, with an executive President who shares authority with a Prime Minister and Cabinet somewhat or entirely responsible to the majority of the lower house of the legislature. \n\nWhere Westminster-style systems prevail, it's for one of three reasons.  Mostly commonly, because the state was a former British colony, felt comfortable with that system, and never had a post-democratization crisis which required (or permitted) a strong Presidency to take shape.  Secondly, because the state wanted to become a constitutional monarchy (such as the Commonwealth states which retained the Queen, or Japan or Thailand) and the Westminster system is the obvious solution to the state having, by definition, a head of state who is both non-elected and required to be above partisan politics.  Third, pretty much only in Eastern Europe, because a state had a legacy of mistrust of authoritarian leaders and wanted to emulate the Westminster style systems prevailing among their western European (new) peers."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "a9v4mu", "title": "Tell me about ANZAC soldiers roles in WWII", "selftext": "I\u2019ve been reading and watching WWII documentaries lately and as an American, I\u2019ve been surprised about some of the awesome heroism and tales of the ANZAC soldiers and commandos I\u2019ve read about, and who I never heard mentioned in my HS and college history courses. \n\nCan someone explain to me what the specific roles the ANZAC troops were used for in WWII and any other notes or anecdotes about their significance in the war as a fighting force? Thanks. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9v4mu/tell_me_about_anzac_soldiers_roles_in_wwii/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ecnbbpt"], "score": [4], "text": ["ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) is actually mostly a WWI term which didn't have a whole lot of application to WWII. However, it is commonly used as a moniker for all Australian and NZ land forces in WWII.\n\nAs part of the British Empire, Australians and New Zealanders were deployed alongside other Commonwealth forces, mostly in two theatres: they served in North Africa with the Eighth Army and then in Italy with the same unit. They served in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, the latter theatre mostly being in defensive dispositions. \n\nSome major and famous battles involving large ANZ forces are:\n\n(1) Tobruk: the Australian 9th Division was surrounded by the German Afrika Korps in the harbour town of Tobruk where it survived a seven month siege April 1941 - November 1941.\n\n(2) Battle of Second El-Alamein: the above Australian unit and the New Zealand 2nd Division were closely involved in major parts of this battle, in which British General Montgomery broke through Rommel's (Stumme's) defences and reversed the Axis offensive momentum in North Africa. \n\nRommel was very complimentary to the New Zealand troops in North Africa, and the Australians too. They say that Rommel said that if he had to capture hell, he would use Australians to take it and New Zealanders to hold it. But I am not sure if he ever really did say that. \n\n(3) Battle of Greece. Big disaster, but not their fault. It was a bad move.\n\n(4) Australian troops were deployed to defend Singapore from the Japanese. These units did not perform very well. Many were captured with some dishonour (if you want to think about it that way). The Australian commander in this battle escaped Singapore while his troops marched into captivity and became quite an unpopular person for this. \n\n(5) Australian troops protected the city of Port Moresby in New Guinea, which was the closest port facility to Australia that Japan could reasonably occupy. When US carrier units forced the Japanese away from an amphibious landing, they went overland, through dense jungle, along the Kokoda Track. Australians repulsed them in very difficult fighting.\n\nA lot of people seem to be prone to saying that Australia/New Zealand troops were the \"shock units\" of the British Empire (they also say this about Highland troops, Gurkhas, Canadians, et cetera). There's not a lot of evidence to support this. If you look at the Australian Army in WWII you find units of varying calibre. Some were excellent, some were not. The British deployed the Australians and New Zealanders were they were needed and they went to those places and fought the Germans, Italians, or Japanese there. \n\nHowever, as Japan got closer to Australia, significant Australian units were withdrawn to protect Australia, a military decision the British were not too happy with but that they couldn't politically resist. Australia raised large military forces, but many were simply used for the defence of Australia against a potential Japanese invasion.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9qulgw", "title": "What makes James Dean an icon?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9qulgw/what_makes_james_dean_an_icon/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8cc9wc"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might get a good answer on r/truefilm as well."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dmsp5", "title": "How successful was Friedrich Engels as a businessman? And how were the living conditions of his employees?", "selftext": "I just noticed that although I heard and read a lot that Engels' first-hand experience managing his father's business influenced his ideals, and that later it was from this business that he could draw money to support Marx financially during the writing of Das Kapital, I don't really know much about Engels the businessman. Do we have any records of that?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dmsp5/how_successful_was_friedrich_engels_as_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di3vhgo"], "score": [12], "text": ["Engels was not in charge of the business he was sent to Manchester to join - a cotton thread factory. It was majority-owned, and run, by his father's business partner, Peter Ermen.\n\nErmen suspected that the younger Engels had been sent to spy on him, so he refused to place him in positions where he had much responsibility or participated in strategic decision-making. Engels was largely restricted to mundane clerical duties in what he called \"the bitch business\", spending 20 years maintaining an extensive correspondence with suppliers and clients, while systematically raiding Ermen's petty cash box for some of the funds he passed on to help support his colleague Marx.\n\nAs for the living conditions of employees, it was horror at the appalling slum conditions that he found in Manchester that prompted Engels to write his first book, *The Condition of the Working Class in England* and which inspired much of his radicalism. It's well worth mentioning in this connection that, while Engels had the money to live comfortably, and from a social point of view was expected to do so, he actually preferred to spend most of his time living in cheap lodgings under an assumed name with his mistress, an Irish worker named Mary Burns.\n\nI have written in much more detail about Engels's time in Manchester, conditions in the city, and his relationship with Mary Burns, [here](_URL_0_). It's a fascinating story."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://mikedashhistory.com/2013/08/02/friedrich-engels-irish-muse/"]]}
{"q_id": "5ax8bq", "title": "Was there ever an official reason as to why the Confederate Army chose not to invade Washington DC in the beginning days of the Civil War when the city was completely unprotected?", "selftext": "I've read numerous accounts about Lincoln peering out over the city from the White House and asking \"why won't they attack, why won't they attack?\". He was certain the city was doomed. The Union Army was delayed in their reaching Washington and the Confederacy was right across the Potomac in a perfect position to cross over and do as they wished to the capitol, but they never did. They allowed the Northern army to enter and secure the city, thus giving up their best chance of preventing a long drawn out war AND making their secession official. I've read numerous accounts of how they didn't invade, but I've never read an account as to why. Was there ever an official statement made by the leaders of the Rebellion that explained their decision to remain neutral?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ax8bq/was_there_ever_an_official_reason_as_to_why_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9kab8e"], "score": [78], "text": ["Your question presupposes a couple of things that aren't necessarily true. First, the Confederates weren't in any better position to just storm \"Washington City\" (as it was known then) than the Union was to march straight into Richmond. The early months of the war saw both sides consolidating and, even more importantly, drilling the civilian-soldiers pouring into the respective capitols. Moving an army en mass is an extremely complicated undertaking, and neither side (but especially the Confederates) had the infrastructure in place to get their armies and supply trains organized for a major offensive (let alone a siege). If nothing else, the timeline illustrates this clearly. The war started in April 1861, and the first major clash of the armies came at Manassas/Bull Run in late-July of that year. If it was as easy as just sprinting the 100 or so miles to take the other city, both sides would have tried to do so: but it just wasn't feasible. Either side trying such a thing so early in the war would have been playing with an all-in proposition with extremely green troops (and with no one left behind to guard the capitol just abandoned in case things didn't work out). So in the Spring of 1861, it was a risky proposition at best, and a reckless one at worst.\n\nSecond, Lincoln was keenly aware of the strategic and symbolic importance of holding Washington, and some of the first actions he took when assuming office was to reinforce and fortify the city. The accounts you mention of Lincoln saying \"why won't they attack\" sound vaguely familiar, but I don't immediately recall a source for that. Do you have one? To my mind, that conversation or recollection had to do with the period immediately after 1st Manassas/Bull Run, when the Union was on its heels a bit (though never in any real danger of losing Washington). \n\nThe truth of the matter is that both sides in the Spring of 1861 had extremely raw armies with little formal training outside of the officer corps. The armies had neither the infrastructure, numerical strength, or knowhow to pull off so audacious and difficult an operation as sacking the other side's capitol. Even in 1862, when McClellan had a well-trained, sizable army at his disposal, he was unable to take Richmond (a city with far fewer defenders and defenses than Washington). To think that the Confederates could have sacked Washington so early in the war just doesn't jive with the facts and what leaders then (and historians now) understood about the actual capabilities of the Confederate army, such as it was.\n\n[Sources, Bruce Catton, 'Mr. Lincoln's Army'; James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'; Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'Team of Rivals'] "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "192nbq", "title": "What were the scale of the battles in both the world wars? I have a hard time imagining millions, plural, dying. ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/192nbq/what_were_the_scale_of_the_battles_in_both_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8k8ksm", "c8kahxf"], "score": [22, 12], "text": ["OK, here are the top ten deadliest battles of both wars. You have to remember that these \"battles\" were often more like \"offensives\" or \"campaigns\" - they could last up to several weeks or months (in WWI), and weren't settled in a day like most medieval battles. People died in their thousands or tens of thousands in a daily meat grinder.\n\n**WWI**\n\n1. The Hundred Days Offensive (1,855,369 casualties), 1918\n\n2. The Spring Offensive (1,539,715), 1918\n\n3. The Battle of the Somme (1,219,201), 1916 (The British lost 60,000 men in a single day, more than the Americans lost *in all of Vietnam*).\n\n4. The Battle of Verdun (976,000), 1916\n\n5. Battle of Passchendaele (848,614), 1917\n\n6.  Serbian Campaign (633,500+), 1914-1915\n\n7.  First Battle of the Marnes (483,000), 1914\n\n8.  Battle of Gallipoli (473,000), 1915\n\n9.  Battle of Arras (278,000), 1917\n\n10.  Battle of Tannenberg (182,000), 1914 (The only one on the Eastern front)\n\n**WWII**\n\n1. Battle of Stalingrad, 23 August 1942\u20132 February 1943: (1,250,000\u20131,798,619)\n\n2. Battle of Berlin, 16 April\u20132 May 1945: (1,298,745)\n\n3. Battle of Moscow, 2 October 1941\u20137 January 1942: (1,000,000)\n\n4. Battle of Narva, 2 February\u201310 August 1944: (550,000)\n\n5. Battle of France, 10 May\u201325 June 1940: (469,000) \n\n6. Battle of Luzon, 9 January\u201315 August 1945: (332,330\u2013345,330) \n\n7. Second Battle of Kharkov, 12 May\u201328 May 1942: (300,000)\n\n8. Battle of Kursk, 5 July\u201323 August 1943: (257,125\u2013388,000)\n\n9. Battle of the Bulge, 16 December 1944\u201325 January 1945: (186,369)\n\n10. Battle of Monte Cassino, 17 January\u201318 May 1944: (185,000)\n\nSo, if you're wondering why we Europeans aren't all that gung-ho about wars and invading Irak and bombing Iran and having civilians running around with assault rifles, you can read the reason in the numbers above. Most of us our countries were invaded (or were attempted to) and people died like flies and lay rotting in the streets and in fields and in the forests. It's sickening and there *has* to be a better way.", "A huge factor in the casualty figures of early 20th century wars versus Vietnam and onward, is the lack of body armor.\n\nThe easiest part of the human body to hit when you shoot at someone is the torso, from belly button to clavicle.  This is because its at barrel height when you raise your weapon to fire.  It is also the biggest body area, everything else is an appendage or the teeny tiny head.  This area of the body was completely and utterly unprotected amongst normal soldiers in WW1 and WW2. \n\nIn the US Army, I spent a year in Iraq in 2005.  Everytime I went off base, I wore full body armor.   Ceramic ballistic plates in a kevlar flak jacket,  protecting my back and torso.  I had kevlar pads protecting my sides (where the vest buckled together), protecting my throat, and protecting my groin.  My helmet was layered kevlar, not stamped steel.  \n\nThis level of personal protection has led to an extremely high percentage of combat injury survival.  While I was there, it blew my mind that in the world wars, young soldiers just like me went up against the strongest armies in the world wearing basically street clothes.  Combat injuries were far more lethal back then.  Thousands (millions?) of brave young men died in battle in those wars where they would have survived today.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1kexms", "title": "Is there any historical/archeological record regarding the beginnings of widespread hair styles? If so, where and when did it begin, and which gender was more likely to participate?", "selftext": "I was thinking about getting a haircut, and I began wondering what my options would be if I lived in Ancient Rome, Egypt, or Babylon. I don't know if this would be something that would be referenced in any sort of historical record, but any information you have on the topic would be appreciated. Thanks! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kexms/is_there_any_historicalarcheological_record/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cboln8g"], "score": [2], "text": ["It's not like people were putting together catalogs of what was in style for the season, but ideas and styles were communicated visually as well as aurally. Men and women would have both been interested in hair styles, but in the West women's styles were often more elaborate. There is actually a really great record just in the art that each culture left behind, but it is notable that there are much fewer depictions of the working classes than upper classes. I personally like sculpture for hair styles since you get to see things all the way around. I love [this Minoan fresco](_URL_1_) but it's hard to tell exactly what is going on, compared to this [Etruscan sarcophagus.](_URL_0_) One of the more notable hair styles in ancient Roman art is the [bust of a Flavian woman](_URL_2_). I also took [this picture](_URL_3_) at the Getty Villa (which is all antiquities) earlier this year because of how well it shows all the detail, but I'm kicking myself for not getting the information on it.\n\nAnyway, to answer your question, there is a MASSIVE record of hair styles from Mesopotamia to the renaissance. Let me know if there's any culture or time period or region or kind of style (mens/long/braids etc.) that you're more interested in and I'll try to find you some sources! "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Louvre%2C_sarcofago_degli_sposi_00.JPG", "http://www.ancientgreece.com/media/img/Minoan_Queens_Fresco.jpg", "http://www.xtimeline.com/__UserPic_Large/36744/evt090926115000072.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/JuhX1sq.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2hc8rp", "title": "AMA: The Economy of the Ancient Roman Empire", "selftext": "I like to think of the study of the ancient economy as the study of what the Romans were doing when they weren't giving speeches, fighting wars or writing poetry. Broadly speaking, it is concerned with the same issues of distribution, exchange and consumption as studies of the modern economy are, but given the scattered nature of the evidence one must be rather expansive with what it means to study the economy, and so one is just as likely to deal with military logistics or mining technologies as with port tariff policies. I will attempt to answer any question regarding the broad topic of economic activity within the Roman Empire.\n\nA few fairly non-controversial notes on the Roman economy while you are thinking of questions:\n\n1. The Roman economy was an *agricultural* economy: This does not mean that cities were unimportant, that there was no development or change, or that all non-subsistence activity was nothing but a thin veneer over the mass rural reality. But rather the simple fact that the large majority of the population lived in a rural environment and labored in agricultural employment.\n\n2. Rome was an *imperial* economy: The Roman economy functioned very differently than the modern national economy. This is primarily visible in the core-periphery dynamics and the blurring of private and public the farther up the social ladder one goes, but also in matters of the administrative interaction with economic activity, which was far looser than in a modern state.\n\n3. Rome was a *complex and multifaceted* economy: Related to the above, but the Roman empire as a whole was composed of many different economies, which did or did not interact with one another to varying extents. The \"friction of distance\" in an ancient imperial setting was very high.\n\nEDIT: OK, that is pretty much all I can do for now, but this thread isn't going anywhere so I will be dropping in to answer the questions I haven't gotten to when I can. Don't be shy to add more, technically the thread isn't archived for six months.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2hc8rp/ama_the_economy_of_the_ancient_roman_empire/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckrb13m", "ckrbauu", "ckrbcx4", "ckrbd0a", "ckrbfoo", "ckrc309", "ckrc3yg", "ckrc4zj", "ckrc5j7", "ckrc5jf", "ckrcq8e", "ckrctjf", "ckrcy0y", "ckrd23a", "ckrd4go", "ckrd62v", "ckrdpri", "ckrdy9k", "ckrdzf7", "ckrdzqy", "ckre6h4", "ckrf9g3", "ckrfk0o", "ckrflgk", "ckrg3o9", "ckrg3s0", "ckrgwx7", "ckrieoq", "ckrijfs", "ckripk7", "ckrk86t", "ckrkfdf", "ckrkhdb", "ckrlexr", "ckrmfc6", "ckrmlvd", "ckrmmyy", "ckrnlsx", "ckrocji", "ckrq6p2"], "score": [15, 17, 4, 3, 26, 3, 14, 3, 4, 47, 9, 8, 5, 11, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 5, 12, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["Two questions:\n\n1) are you familiar with how prostitution and the economy of it worked in Rome? What would be the cost if a prostitute? Were they individuals or were they housed in a brothel?\n\n2) how would a poet go about seeing sponsors for his work? I'm thinking like Catullus or Virgil or the like. Would a rich patrician support them in exchange for laudatory words?", "Lets say I want to buy a house. Was there anything similar to the concept of a mortgage that I could get to finance my purchase?\n\nIf so, how did mortgages and other securities function? I mean, at its core a mortgage is really just a loan using the property itself as collateral, so it doesn't seem like an alien concept, but was there any of the complexity that we have now present in that part of the financial system?\n\nAlso, how available would this be to someone?", "how much of a thing was free enterprise in ancient rome? Would we recognize the economy if were dropped from 2014 America into 100 AD Rome?", "1. How much does the Roman roads benefits the economic of the Empire? \n2. How does the people in Rome get rich? Does being a general in post-Marius Reformation helps?", "A few questions that've been bugging me lately.  \n\n1. To what degree was the high Roman Empire a \"capitalist\" economy?  I understand there is a world of hurt involved in defining what capitalism is, or what constitutes a capitalist economy, as well as the fact that clearly the bulk of the economy of the whole empire did not operate primarily from a capitalist/wage-labor mode of production, but I am interested in your personal perspective on to what extent it existed and where. \n\n2. What is the current thinking (and who are currently the major historians/archaeologists dealing in the subject matter) on what role the Roman city played on the economy?  I believe you've mentioned to me that the idea of the Roman city as a parasitic entity (I think this is Moses Finley) is out of date.  I'm wondering who replaced Finley, and who I should be reading as of now?\n\n3. How different would you categorize the late Roman economy (i.e. that suggested by Wickham) from the high Roman economy?  I know that the late Roman economy seemed marked by greater command after Diocletian, with much revolving around the twin grain doles of Carthage-Rome and Alexandria-Constantinople.  Whereas it seems the high Roman economy was much more free floating, though much revolving around the central wheel spoke of the city of Rome itself.  \n\n4. Which would mean a corollary question (I have asked this previously, but I'm not sure if I got your thoughts on it), how necessary was Rome itself to the high Roman economy?  Could provincial markets exist robustly on trade to other far flung provinces without Rome as the hub?\n\nThanks a bunch.  ", "I was just thinking about these questions in the context of Caesar's (and others') land laws: in brief: \n\n1. Caesar's law redistributed \"public\" land. Does this mean the land in question had no private owner prior to redistribution? How did this land come to be public in the first place? What was it used for if it had no private owner? \n\n2. If I recall, other laws redistributed land in *latifundia* -- that is, large privately owned parcels of land. Is my understanding of the term and the laws correct? How was that accomplished? Was there a concept in Rome analogous to eminent domain? \n\nThank you in advance!", "1. Was there a middle class?\n\n2. When the Romans conquered a territory, how did they go about integrating it into the economy? How did they make sure currency was distributed for example?\n\n3. What did the Romans export, and to whom?", "if I understand the Roman's view on economics, they had no concept of debt?  Or was it interest? How did that function when the government was low on funds?  No money, just debase the coinage until you get what you need?  What about a private person, how would they come up with funds to purchase something?", "How would someone receive the grain dole? Was there a kind of application process for it? Were there any concerns in the Roman world about \"welfare fraud\"?", "This is something I've long wondered:\n\nDuring the height of the Empire, Rome had a population close to a million people, and most of those people lived in apartment blocks. They presumably didn't have any arable land as part of their personal property. So what did those people do all day? Did they work 9-5s like we do today? Did they leave the city to work in agriculture? Did they just not work in an organized fashion?\n\nTL;DR What was the typical job of a city dweller like?", "1. I've heard it said that one of the important differences between economies of the ERE an its western counterpart was the relative proximity of the former to other wealthy empires (Persia, India, China etc). How true is this? It seems to me, at least, that long distance trade could only be in very luxury items and thus would only affect the super-rich, if anyone at all. Bulk items (grain, livestock, wine etc) which were the bread and butter of the Roman economy couldn't really be transported except via the Mediterranean and its river systems given the technology limitations of its day. So basically I just want to know how important was external trade for the Roman economy.\n\n2. How efficient was the Roman economy and did it degrade substantially as a result of the transformation from the predominantly middle-income, family farm model, to a more plantation-oriented one with the super-rich landowners and poor tenant farmers, with seemingly almost nothing in between them. \n\n3. How developed was banking in the roman world? Of course there were private lendors. But say I am a mercant/businessman/landowner operating in Italy and North Africa, possibly Hispania. What options do I have? Can I write a check to someone without needing to physically transfer gold coins from one place to another? How did Roman banking compare to medieval Italian ones? How were ledgers maintained?", "How flexible was the labour force? Were most people highly trained from childhood/adolescence and at risk of unemployment? Or would the average worker change their job based on economic changes?", "Thank you for the AMA.\n\nWhat sorts of data are available on wages, prices, incomes, and land rents during Roman times? (To fix a time scale, say 100 BCE through 500 CE, but most interestingly for me roughly 80 CE to 180 CE.)\n\nTo what extent was the Roman military an important element in building infrastructure, both in the core and on the periphery?\n\nIs there anywhere I can go to get a monetary history of ancient Rome? Basically a discussion of the stock of money and the level of prices from (say) 100 BCE to 500 CE? ", "David Graeber, in his book \"Debt: the first 5000 years\", characterizes the Roman state economy as a \"military-mining-slavery complex\". I'll summarize his argument below (I hope fairly) for any readers who are not familiar with it. \n\nMy question is, is this interpretation of events accurate? If so, how large was the \"money\" economy, ie based on coin, compared to the non-money economy? How did exchange work without money during the Roman Empire?\n\n___________________________________________\nGraeber argues that Rome introduced coinage as a kind of \"trick\" to feed it's massive armies: By paying the army in coin and requiring the taxes to be paid in coin, the elite obliged all tax payers to find something to do that soldiers would pay them for, whether supplying goods or services. This obligation did away with the need of supporting a vast system of logistics to feed otherwise hungry soldiers, and allowed for the provision of far larger armies than would otherwise be possible. These armies were engaged in constant expansion and enslavement of subject peoples, who worked the mines, from which the metal for coinage came from in the first place. ", "The Roman Empire is often touted as being a progressive high-point on the historical arc of the ancient world. Are there any instances of progressive populist tendencies in Roman economic policy? How would leadership respond to a large disturbance in agricultural production caused by disease or conflict? ", "How did the Roman economy help unite the empire as a whole, did domestic trade help bring the empire together? \n\nDid other places 'Romanize' to take part in the Roman economy, or did many pre-empire market customs persist in trade? \n\nHow much Roman trade took place with foreign markets was it a significant part of economies, did it only really affect frontier provinces or the empire as a whole?", "To what degree was there a concentration of wealth to fewer and fewer individuals and if so what part did this play in the fall of the Roman empire?", "Your comment about public amenities being funded by tolls makes me wonder-did the Roman world have a comparable institution to the _waqf_(that is, a legal mechanism for endowing a public amenity or charitable service in an inalienable manner with a specific source of revenue)?", "In the first century BC, after the end of the Cimbrian War and up to the Principate:\n\n* How widespread was currency and currency use in rural areas, especially between farmers independent of the larger latifundia? \n* I remember hearing that an urban prole might subsist almost entirely on donations from various patrons, even spending their mornings going practically door-to-door. What forms did patronage take between rural patrons and clients (for example, between Pompey Strabo and his Picentine clients)?\n* How much of the Italian agricultural sector was dedicated to the growing of grains, versus \"non-staples\" like olives, wines and livestock? \n\nAs for Rome herself:\n\n* Were there licenses required to run businesses within Rome, or any other limitations that we know of? What about craftsmen in general? \n* Were there any economic limitations to the Pomerium? I.e. were there any trades or crafts that were illegal to ply inside/outside of its boundary?\n* Was the Tiber ever used to transport goods to and/or from Rome?", "How liquid was capital in the Roman economy? How would one go about cashing in one's property, or say borrowing against anticipated revenue, if most wealth was tied up in land and its products? \n\nHow much did Romans understand about the law of supply and demand? Were there large price spikes or drops in markets, and were those taken advantage of by speculators? ", "So, I've been thinking of something to ask you about, and I have something!\n\nWhen the Romans absorbed other polities, be that via the medium of conquest or peaceful annexation, by default that includes inheriting the pre-existing economic system within those polities. Are important socio-economic roles consistently usurped by Romans in their new acquisitions? Were those economies Romanised over time, to fit with the expectations of Roman economic oversight (and maybe ethics)? Or would places like Nabataea, or Utica, or Massalia have retained distinctly individual organisation? ", "I've heard alot of theories regarding the Roman taxsystem and how it played a role in the downfall of the empire, that the size of the empire made it impossible to collect taxes due to rampant corruption and rebellions over taxation. \n\nHow was taxes collected in the Roman empire and how effective was the collection? \n\nDo you have any examples of what type of taxes that was collected (salestax, tariffs, incometax etc) and high/low it was? \n\nHow did the structure of collection system look like? Did they use local rulers to collect in client states and conquered areas who then later paid a % of it to Rome or did the Roman senate/the Emperor appoint someone from Rome?\n", "I had heard that the amount of early Roman coins had a lot of gold in them and that over time, less and less gold went into the coins with hardly any gold in them at the collapse of the western empire.   Is that true?  ", "Interesting AMA!\n\nCan you explain briefly how their currency was developed and what they defined as wealth?", "Thanks for hosting this! I have a bit of knowledge in feudalism, but translating that into an understanding of the Romans can get a bit fuzzy.\n\nHow much control did peasants/farmers have in in their labor? Were their crops or construction projects dictated by government officials / nearby patricians, or were they largely just restricted by tradition and necessity?", "Was there an organized black market of any kind? What objects would it sell? How did the empire deal with it?  ", "Interesting idea for an AMA. Thanks for doing this. I have two questions, both about physical currency:\n\n1. Who controlled the money supply? Was there an official \"mint\" that produced all of the coins in the empire, or did different areas mint their own local currency? Was there an idea (like today) of limiting the amount of coins in circulation?\n\n2. To what degree was counterfeit currency a problem? I mean, we have examples of counterfeiting from ancient China to the Aztecs, so I assume there had to be some. Do we know what methods were used? Did they have controls or safeguards in place to prevent or detect counterfeit coins? Were there specific laws in place to punish people for doing this?\n\nForgive me if these questions reflect a gross misunderstanding of Roman economics, since my knowledge on the topic is close to zero.", "Was there anything resembling medieval guilds or later trade associations in Roman times?", "Thanks for doing this AMA!\n\nWho was the richest Roman ever. I was thinking crassus but I heard that emperors controlled insane amounts of the GDP at times.\n\nAlso when was Roma at her most economically stable/rich. Was it during the reign of the Antonines?\n\nWhat is your favourite aspect of the Roman economy?\n\nThanks!", "Thank you for doing this AMA; this is such a fascinating topic! \n\n1. What was the nature of economic interaction between urban and rural zones?  \n\n2. What was settlement like outside of Roman cities? Would most rural inhabitants have been tenant farmers, or small freeholders? What were the mechanics of this type tenancy? \n\n3. To what degree did \u201cregional specialization\u201d exist within the differing regions of the Empire?\n\n4. What resources would you recommend as an introduction to the Roman economy?\n", "What do you think of the level of monetization?  I've met several numismatists who argue 1) ancient governments including Rome were not interested in coins as primarily an economic tool, and 2) most people would not have dealt very often with coins.  I have a hard time buying either of these claims.", "1. What were the major advancements in agricultural technology during the course of Rome?\n2. Did the extensive use of slaves damage the economy with less jobs open to plebs? I believe that Caeser tried to introduce reforms to make it so every farm had a certain percentage of free men working.\n3. How did the Romans manage to work out taxes for such a vast empire? Did they delegate it to governors and if so then what was the extent of the corruption?\n4. Finally I was told by my teacher that Southern italy's economy was permamently damaged due to Hannibal's scorched earth tactics is this true?\n\nThanks for all the time you are giving :)", "Were there jewelers? If so, what kinds of people would be able to afford even the most basic jewelry, and where did it come from?", "Hi,\nthanks for making this AMA!\n\n**Introduction**\n\nCurrently I write a paper about the inclosure of the commons in England in the Late Medieval an stumbled upon the social stratification of England. So I'm also interested in the poulation of the roman empire. There is at least one point in english medival history where we have very good numbers for the number of people who where slaves, cottagers, tenants-in-chief, freeholder and all the other kinds of dependent people. ([Domesday Books of 1086](_URL_0_)).\n\n**Question**\n\n*Do we have some kind of social statistics of a certain point of time of the whole Roman Empire?* How many people belonged to the nobilty (of Rome),  were slaves, were of Latin/Itallic origin, were foreigners, were soldiers, were freeholders of land ect. \n\nAdditional Question: Is there a book you can recommend about this topic?\n\n", "Ooooh, I've got a question I've been wondering about for ages! I'm curious what the economic fallout of the Punic Wars was like. My understanding is that Carthage was the biggest trading hub in the western Mediterranean, and I'm wondering what happened to all that port traffic after it fell. Was there a net decrease in trade across the Mediterranean? Did the merchants just all start operating out of a different home port? And if trade did decrease, did it ever pick back up to its pre-war levels? Actually, do we even have any data to answer these questions?", "Hope I'm not too late to this thread! I have two questions, each with multiple parts. I hope they're not too tedious! \n\nI remember having read that Rome, as a city, had an big issue with chronic unemployment. How large was the segment of the population that was directly dependent on the *panem* part of *panem et circenses*? And was this unemployment issue also a problem in other large cities of the Empire? And when the empire began to decline and the capital was moved, was this problem still present? I know it was an issue in Constantinople, but was there a similar problem in Mediolanum and, later, Ravenna?  \n\nYou point out that the Roman Empire had an economy mostly based on agriculture. I remember reading that many wealthy Romans had large agricultural estates, which were often located in many different places, as wealthy Romans liked to diversify their portfolios. However, how did they stop things such as embezzlement or theft when they were absent from such disparate estates? Even if they had overseers and administrators, I imagine it must be difficult to make sure they're not taking advantage of you. So my question is: What was the state of financial/fiscal law enforcement and how did it work?", "What regions were the most important for the economy of the Roman empire (agriculture, mining, slavery, tools ...)? Who did own the ships for the commerce in the Empire (individuals, family, association...)?", "Could you recommend a good book(s) on this subject?  Seems quite fascinating.", "How did the trades work? Were there just small shops with one or two craftsmen, or big factories with more? How were people trained? Were the craftsmen self-employed or might they just work in a shop owned by a senator? \n\nAlso how were grand public building projects like aquaducts or temples organized? Were there contractors who submitted bids like today? Would the work be done by free men or slaves?", "Was mass slavery beneficial to the economy at large at any point or did it cause more unemployment problems than it solved? I feel I should know this so I can prepare for the day when robots are doing all the future jobs. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book"], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ko9zx", "title": "How did Michelin, a tire company, become the creators of the definitive guide to fine dining?", "selftext": "and when did getting a \"3 star\" rating become a nearly impossible feat?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ko9zx/how_did_michelin_a_tire_company_become_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clnbjcc", "clnhmw4"], "score": [1743, 311], "text": ["As it should be when connecting tire companies with restaurant reviews, the Michelin Guide's popularity started to rise with the innovation of the \"motor tourist,\" the vehicle-toting traveler.  The Michelin Tyre company made its first *Guide Michelin France* in 1900.  The first Michelin Guides were just driver's handbooks, with tips for vehicle maintenance and nearby petrol stations.  These pocket Michelin Guides were given out freely for \"l'instruction sur l'emploi des pneus Michelin pour voitures et automobile\" (instructions for the use of Michelin tires on cars and automobiles).  The ultimate goal was to reassure new drivers that, even if they left town in their new motor vehicles, they could still find petrol stations, mechanics, and even post offices.   As Kory Olston points out in her study of *Michelin* maps, the guide's popularity was indebted to the rise of motor tourism in turn-of-the-century France.  The *Michelin* maps were designed differently than standard travel guides; town plans were relatively sparse and two-tone, with major roadways taking the focus instead of urban landmarks.  The guide catered to bourgeois drivers, offering a \"more restrained number of tourist venues\" with a \"clarity of display to make it easier for their readers to traverse unfamiliar municipalities easily.\"\n\nIn 1926, these \"tourist venues\" finally included restaurants for motor tourists to frequent on their holidays in the countryside.  The *Guide* of 1926 included a \"restaurant star,\" or a single star to denote a particularly special dining experience.  A decade later, the second and third stars showed up, along with a criteria: one star for \"Une tr\u00e8s bonne table dans sa cat\u00e9gorie\" (a good site in its category), two for \"Table excellente, m\u00e9rite un d\u00e9tour\" (an excellent site worth a detour), and three for \"Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage\" (one of the best sites, worthy of a trip).  Within three decades, the *Guide* had gone from a mechanic's handbook to a special purchase for rich motor tourists looking to get the best out of their journeys.\n\nThe three-star feat is more difficult to explain.  One possible reason for its \"impossibility\" may come from the fact that the third star didn't exist during the WWII era.  During the War, the *Guide* was simply reprinted from its 1939 edition, and then post-war shortages forced Michelin to put a halt on three-star ratings until 1950.  *Guide* critics are anonymous, so there's not much testimony on the elusive three-star review--but we can guess that the restaurants that *do* have three stars have supreme quality of ingredients, consistency between visits, and head chefs with dedicated personalities.\n\nSources:\n\nKory Olson, *Maps for a New Kind of Tourist: The First Guides Michelin France (1900\u20131913)*.  Available [here](_URL_2_).\n\n*Michelin Guide History*.  Provence and Beyond. [Here](_URL_1_).\n\n*The Michelin Guide: Over 100 Editions and a Century of History*.  ViaMichelin.  [Here](_URL_0_).\n\n", "It's also worth noting that Michelin is a family-owned company with a very peculiar business philosophy. They believe that their core product is mobility, rather than tires, and they have showed time and again a strong commitment to promoting easier ways to travel, which in the early 20th century was indeed a main obstacle to the auto industry as people did not projected themselves traveling long distances on a daily basis. The Guides were intended to facilitate road travelling; as were a series of road milestones that Michelin helped installed in France throughout most of the 20th century in order for drivers to locate themselves in their maps. Another example was their decision in the late 40's to invest heavily in the radial tire, which was consider a more reliable tire as it lasted longer and was safer than the industry's standards for the time. To many competitors, the radial was a nonsensical investment, as it implied redesigning factories for a product that would last longer and therefore sell less. The company has retained this approach and in many ways it helps explain why a small family company in the middle-of-French-nowhere could become a world leader.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.viamichelin.co.uk/tpl/mag6/art200903/htm/tour-saga-michelin.htm", "http://www.beyond.fr/food/michelin-guide-history.html", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085691003747142#/doi/full/10.1080/03085691003747142"], []]}
{"q_id": "4dgddg", "title": "Tuesday Trivia | Where Are they Now? Surprising Legacies of Historic Places and Things", "selftext": "[Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.](_URL_0_) \n\nToday\u2019s trivia theme comes to us from /u/sunagainstgold! \n\nThis thread is for us to share **the unusual afterlives of historic buildings, places, and things!** Know some old post offices turned into office-offices? Gone out to eat in a very old building that was certainly not built as a restaurant? Made a trip to find a famous battle site and been dismayed to find a hog farm on it? This is the place for these stories. \n\n**Next week on Tuesday Trivia:** as it falls on Russian Cosmonaut Day, we\u2019ll be talking about the tales behind other famous firsts in history. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dgddg/tuesday_trivia_where_are_they_now_surprising/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1qnx5i", "d1qvfp9", "d1r2jic", "d1r77qz", "d1rb7rh", "d1rkaou"], "score": [22, 16, 16, 4, 6, 6], "text": ["On the main square of the old centre of the Sicilian city of Syracuse stands the [Duomo di Siracusa](_URL_0_). On the outside, it is a beautiful 18th century High Sicilian Baroque church. \n\nOn the inside, it is a [Greek temple](_URL_1_).\n\nThe columns that still support the roof of the church date to the 5th century BC. The building was originally a temple to Athena; it is mentioned in the writings of Plato (who lived in Syracuse for a while) and Cicero.", "One of the more interesting examples of this, encompassing both my hobby and day job, is the case of the HMS Revenge and *Royal Sovereign*. Construction of the ships started in late 1913 and early 1914, and they were finished in 1916. They saw service in both World Wars. *Revenge* fought at Jutland, while *Royal Sovereign* missed it. In the Second World War, *Revenge* saw service escorting convoys, while *Royal Sovereign* was transferred to the Soviet Union as the battleship *Arkhangelsk*. In 1944, *Revenge* was disarmed and used as a training ship, while *Royal Sovereign* would be returned to the UK in 1949. The ships were both scrapped in 1948-49. However, much of the machinery from their gun turrets would be saved. In 1949, Bernard Lovell at the University of Manchester wanted to build a massive radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. This telescope had to be steerable, so they needed two big motors to rotate the telescope in elevation. The turret motors from *Royal Sovereign* and *Revenge* were cheap and easy to acquire, given that they were lying around after the battleships were scrapped. The telescope ended up being built around these two motors, and they're still in place in the telescope today.", "The oldest building in Virginia actually dates to the late 15th century. Not possible, you say? It was originally constructed in Lancashire, England but was carefully dismantled, shipped, and reconstructed in Richmond in the 1920s. So this [English Tudor manor](_URL_0_) is now a 17th century museum in America.", "The Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg was transformed into a [Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism](_URL_0_) in the Soviet period. Needless to say, it did not present religion positively. It was transformed back into a church in the post-Soviet period. Now people line up for ages to kiss the Orthodox icon (Our Lady of Kazan) within the church.", "Since moving to Brussels, I've noticed quite a few surprising uses made of older buildings here. There's a even a verb made up from the city's name that designates buildings whose interior has been exchanged, leaving only the historical facades intact.\n\nA good example of such change is the former hippodrome, the [Hippodrome de Boitfort](_URL_2_) near the forest, which I visited only to find a golf course on the former racecourse. The golf course was founded in 1988 (featuring nine holes), while the hippodrome itself goes back [to 1875](_URL_4_).\n\nI was also impressed to find the [Comic Strip Museum](_URL_3_) inside a large building by famous Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta. It was designed in 1905 and originally housed the textile department store *Magasins Waucquez*. The building was left to abandon since the 1920's, and only saved through an initiative started by an architect and a few well-known cartoonists (including Herg\u00e9) after 1980. Similarly the current [Music Instrument Museum](_URL_1_) is housed in another Art Nouveau building from 1899 , the former Old England department store.\n\nTo finish up I thought I'd mention the world's only streetcar traversing a forest, the [tram 44](_URL_0_). Its rails were originally built in 1897 to connect two parts of an international exhibition, the palais du Cinquantenaire and the ch\u00e2teau de Tervueren \u2013 all three constructions started by Leopold II. The rails are still in use today, using historical streetcars in summer.", "This isn't that interesting, but I have to talk about it because I was there yesterday.\n\nAfter the USS *Nautilus* was decommissioned she was painstakingly preserved and turned into a living [museum of naval history.](_URL_0_) Obviously the boat is small so it's built around a whole complex, but the *Nautilus* is definitely a centerpiece.\n\nOne interesting thing about the museum is that it's run directly by the U.S. Navy, which of course has access to the entire naval history of the nation. It's a very educating visit, even for someone like me who knows too much about submarines already."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/SiracusaCathedral-pjt1.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Syracuse#/media/File:0778_-_Siracusa_-_Duomo_-_Navata_destra_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto_-_22-May-2008.jpg"], [], ["http://www.agecrofthall.com/View.aspx?page=home"], ["http://saint-petersburg.guide/didyouknow/kazansky_cathedral_st_petersburg_russia_museum_of_atheism_in_soviet_russia"], ["http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/Tram_Brussels/7500_090320-3038_b.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Musical_Instrument_Museum_exterior.JPG", "http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/frwiki/80/Pesage_de_Boitsfort.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Comic_Strip_Center#/media/File:Etage_MBBD.jpg", "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-04TONFe_q_w/VW6U-IsL0II/AAAAAAAAP_k/3ttj2qbjV_k/s1600/PBIBL-PH-BRUX-PATR-Hippodrome%2Bde%2BBoitsfort-Compo-13.png"], ["http://www.submarinemuseum.org/aboutus.shtml"]]}
{"q_id": "7g3rua", "title": "Why did the Danube valley fail to produce a great early civilisation, like the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Yangtze etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g3rua/why_did_the_danube_valley_fail_to_produce_a_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqgiozc", "dqgjwy3"], "score": [14, 3], "text": ["/u/cthulhushrugged is right on here.  The question can't be answered, and if it could, it would be an anthropological question just as much as a geo-climactic one.  \n\nA note on the latter, though: the Danube watersheds were largely primeval forests in prehistory (though this is a gigantic region and can't really be so easily categorized in any period).  The others you mention (Nile, Mesopotamia, China, Indus) were naturally more predisposed to farming for surplus, which is the key to \"getting ahead\" (as Diamond might put it).  \n\nAnd a second note: as attractive as they are, arguments based on geographical determinism are almost always flawed.  They work well on paper, but not in practice. ", "As someone who studies Ancient Mesopotamia, I might be able to give a partial answer to the question.\n\nThe area that is known as the \"Fertile Crescent\" comprises the Levante, as well as the Taurus and Zagros Mountains. this area contained perfect conditions to allow hunter-gatherers to transition from migrating tribes into permanent settlements. Marc Van De Mieroop states, \"The process took several millennia and involved the domestication of plants, primarily cereals, and of animals. The archaeological sites where we see these changes happen are usually located at the borders of different ecological zones, whose occupants took advantage of varied plant resources and hunted different animals.\" The idea is that the Fertile Crescent sat in a zone where dry-farming (rain-fed agriculture) could take place. But the other essential ingredient is the availability of domesticable plants and animals.\n\nArcheological digs at the city of Jericho show a city wall dating back to around 9000 BCE. It is one of the earliest sites showing a transition from moving with the supply of food and water to a permanent community. Jericho had plentiful fresh water and plants and animals hunter-gatherers could use for food. Van De Meiroop again states, \"Selective hunting of wild animals also replaced previous indiscriminate killing. People culled wild herds to procure a proper age and gender balance, and protected them from natural predators.\" This is the slow transition from hunting and gathering into a more sedentary life. These tribes no longer needed to move with the herd as the availability of resources allowed the tribes around the Fertile Crescent to settle down permanently. \n\nIt was a slow process. \"Direct control of the food supply via cereal agriculture was achieved through a series of probably inadvertent steps from the eleventh to seventh millennia as humans became more practiced at sowing, husbandry, harvesting, and storage.\" The tribes of the Fertile Crescent stumbled onto an area perfect to experiment and perfect the tools necessary to form permanent communities. \n\nEssentially, it is not only the fertile soil and climate that determined where civilizations began but the availability of domesticable plants and animals. \n\nBibliography:\n\nVan De Mieroop, Marc. *A History of the Ancient Near East*. West Sussex: Blackwell, 2016. \n\nAn interesting read:\n\nWilkinson, TJ. \"The Structure and Dynamics of Dry-Farming States in Upper Mesopotamia [and Comments\nand Reply].\" *Current Anthropology* 35 No. 5 (Dec. 1994): 483-520"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "537iqy", "title": "Besides Market Garden, what are some other notable and interesting Allied failures of World War 2?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/537iqy/besides_market_garden_what_are_some_other_notable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d7qxzz7", "d7qzazz", "d7rjthd"], "score": [8, 19, 4], "text": ["[Here's a great thread on this topic, which includes an answer from yours truly.](_URL_0_)", "While this might be a bit of a stretch since in the end it is billed as an Allied  military victory, I think the Battle of Anzio and its after effects failed to accomplish their primary objectives.\n\nAt the end of 1943/beginning of 1944 the Allies were bogged down assaulting the Gustav line, a series of German defensive works that spanned the Italian peninsula west to east, with its anchor in the town of Monte Casino. Churchill's idea was to land two infantry divisions to the northwest of the Gustav line near the city of Anzio. According to Rick Attkinson's book *The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943\u20131944* this attack appeared to demonstrate two benefits, it would either force the Germans to divert troops from the Gustav line, making an Allied breakthrough there more likely, or the troops at the Anzio beachhead could advance inland and trap the defenders between several Allied Divisions.\n\nThe first landings took place in January 22, 1944, and at first things looked great. The Allies managed to land 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles without any casualties at all and the American General in command at the beach, John Lucas, quickly consolidated the beach head. Unfortunately, after this, things just got worse and worse for the Allies. With only two infantry divisions and no supporting armor, it was important for Lucas to advance rapidly inland, as the Anzio beachhead was surrounded by high ground, perfect for the defensive mastermind Albert Kesselring, who commanded the German forces in Italy. According to Lloyd Clark\u2019s book *Anzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944.* Lucas considered his force too small for his mission, and worried about Kesselring\u2019s inevitable counter-attacks that would feature heavy artillery and tanks, he also declined the aid offered to him by Italian partisans, who claimed they could help his divisions navigate the local, hilly terrain. \n\nThus, Lucas spent too much time consolidating the Anzio beach head, and Kesselring could move minimal reinforcements to the hills and mountains surrounding it, and a long battle of attrition that resembled the stalemate at Monte Casino grinded on for about four months. In the end, the Allies took the town and Abbey of Monte Casino after assaulting it directly 5 times, and it was only after Allied armies began marching north that Major General Lucian Truscott, who had replaced Lucas coordinated a successful breakout of the beachhead. Clark\u2019s book also points out that in the aftermath of Anzio yet another Allied failure shows it head; as Truscott was driving east to capture retreating German division from the Gustav line, his commander, Lieutenant General Mark Clark ordered Truscott\u2019s corps northward to liberate Rome, in what is widely considered a purely symbolic victory for the Allied armies. This decision by Clark allowed thousands of German soldiers and their equipment to withdraw to the Gothic line, another set of defenses similar to the Gustav line that was towards the north of Italy.\n\nThus we see not only did Anzio not directly lead to the Allied breach of the Gustav line (you could even argue the troops who breached the Gustav line were the ones that allowed the Anzio breakout), but the Allied divisions that landed failed to trap retreating German forces. So despite the fact that the Allies eventually \u201cwon\u201d the battle of Anzio, the poor planning and decisions made would help the Germans keep the fight up in Italy until almost the last days of the war in Europe.\n\nSources:\n\nThe Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943\u20131944; Rick Attkinson\n\nAnzio: The Friction of War. Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944; Lloyd Clark\n", "A non-exhaustive list:\n\n1. Norway 1940: the British and French fail to hold Norway against a fairly light Wehrmacht force, despite maintaining a hold on the important port of Narvik for some time.\n\n2. Greece and Crete 1941: stripping forces from the armies that had just trounced, but not finished off, the Italians in North Africa, Wavell and Churchill attempt to defend Greece from Italian and German attack. The defence is a farce against strong German mobile- and air forces and an undignified evacuation ensues.  The Germans then attack the island of Crete with an air-mobile force. Allied mistakes and weakened air power (because of losses associated with Greece and the refusal of the British high command to allow quality Fighter Command units to leave Britain) see this very close-run battle turn to victory for Germany.  The German force did however suffer heavily though in the ensuing evacuation the Commonwealth army and naval units suffered heavily as well. \nThis represented a regrettable waste of forces that could have been useful in...\n\n3. Malaya/Singapore/Burma 1941-2:  A large Commonwealth force, given time to prepare and what should have been ample resources, is trounced out of the Malay peninsula by a much smaller Japanese force. Two British capital ships, which could have stopped the seaborne component of the attack and against which the Japanese had no available comparable ships, are sunk.  The highly defensible island of Singapore is easily accessed by the Japanese army.\nThis defeat is probably Britain's greatest ever, and represented the end of British, and indeed European, power in Asia forever.  The Japanese force rolled on into Burma where they defeated the Commonwealth armies present, stiffened with forces sent in response to the initial attack.  A counteroffensive in the Arakan Peninsula in 1942 made no progress whatsoever, took heavy casualties, and the British forces had to evacuate precipitously to avoid being encircled. \n\n4. Philippines 1941-2: While the British Commonwealth forces in Asia were suffering their calvary, US Forces under Douglas MacArthur were attempting to defend the Philippines. Warned, prepared and well-equipped (like the British, this refers to resourcing in general, in both cases the forces were not balanced and much equipment was not good enough), MacArthur's inept leadership, bad luck and the skill and detailed planning of the Japanese saw the US-Filipino force routed from their best positions and driven down the Bataan Peninsula.\nMacArthur's propaganda machine was so effective in making ordinary Americans believe in his skill and tenacity that Roosevelt was unable to slate to him responsibility for ultimate failure (FDR was probably also happy to have MacArthur 'busy' in the Pacific, rather than plotting against him at home).\n\n5. The Channel Dash, 1941: after a raiding cruise in the Atlantic, three German heavy ships retired to the French port of Brest, where they were held by a British blockade. Here, they were bombed repeatedly by British aircraft and although Bomber Command was not very effective in 1941, occasional hits were obtained. \nIn early 1941 the Germans executed a plan to sail the ships *straight up the English Channel* to safe harbours in northern Germany.  Due to good luck and British ineptitude, all three ships pulled off the escape without suffering a scratch. \n\n6. Dieppe 1942:  A mostly Canadian force was landed on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942 for a sort of large raid.  The idea was to test attack and the German defence of a coastal port, expand on the commando raid technique, and probably to placate the Soviets' demand for a Second Front. \nCo-ordination failures, rapid German response, and a multitude of small failures (for instance many tanks simply couldn't advance on the beach, which consisted of small, smooth stones) led to something of a disaster.  The sheer difficulty of the mission was known, and was also a factor.  Many of the lessons were applied to the D-Day landings.\n\n7. The Dodecanese Campaign, 1944: Churchill was obsessed with Greece, and was the impetus behind this plan which landed Allied troops on Greek Islands.  The British command failed to rapidly secure Italian co-operation, losing the chance of gaining support from the large Italian garrison. Also, the US government refused to take part, denying the support of American units including, crucially, long-range fighter aircraft.\nOut of range of meaningful support, especially air support, and with other higher priorities the Germans were able to marshall strong forces including paratroopers with lavish support by otherwise-obsolete Stuka dive bombers, to smash the British (and Greek loyalist) units, which had no hope of evacuation.  The famous, elite Long Range Desert Group was squandered in this operation.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3my48t/we_often_hear_about_the_great_battles_the_allies/"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2jj3d3", "title": "What is wrong with the \"Black Legend\"?", "selftext": "As I basically understand it, the Black Legend formed as the rest of Europe learned about how oppressive the Spanish were to indigenous peoples.  Why is it considered to be an unfair representation of Spanish colonialism when objectively speaking the Spanish were very oppressive to indigenous peoples?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jj3d3/what_is_wrong_with_the_black_legend/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clc8m4d", "clce286"], "score": [16, 5], "text": ["Here's three things:\n\n1. Most of the perpetrators of the Black Legend weren't simply saying \"the Spanish are very oppressive to indigenous peoples.\" The Pope called them \"the scum of the Earth.\" Immanuel Kant, in *Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime*, calls the Spaniard cruel, centuries behind in science, lazy, ignorant of reform, and un-European (derogatively). These are not objective utterances. Pope Paul IV, for instance, had what you might call a personal vendetta against the Spanish, having hated growing up there and being a political opponent of its royalty. Black Legend wasn't always a criticism of deeds, but the defaming of a people.\n\n2. In modern popular accounts, criticism of the Spanish is typically tied with a hidden \"noble savage\" motif. The narrative is as follows: the Inca are living their happy peaceful life in the Andes. They've got a lot of cool things: roads with regular storehouses/rest stops, a diverse religious culture, nifty stoneworking techniques, etc. Then the white man comes with his horses and guns and tramples over them, forcing them to near slavery in tin and silver mines. Poor Inca! That was rightfully their land, and they never did anything to deserve that!\nWhat's wrong with this? Any time you see this story, the Inca are the good guys and the Spanish are bad. As targustargus tried to point out, this completely lacks nuance and knowledge of Andean prehistory. For instance, the Inca were only native to the Cuzco area. They had conquered the rest of the Andes within the past hundred years, and they were still conquering places in the far north when the Spanish first arrived. Like the Spanish, they were a small ethnic group with big ambitions for conquest who laid their own culture and infrastructures on top of subjugated groups and who appropriated resources, culture, and religion for their own goals.\nAdditionally, the mit'a system you bring up was in fact an effective method of creating an infrastructure. In the Inca empire's brief existence though, this was often an infrastructure for conquest, with roads to facilitate troop movement and storehouses to extend campaigns. If a people joined the empire through treaty, then such a taxation might be reasonable. But if you're a former citizen of the enormous city of Chan Chan, defeated by Topa Inca Yupanqui's army ~1470, being forced to help replicate your own destruction is unspeakably humiliating. As an archaeologist of pre-Inca cultures, I am regularly frustrated by how much cultural knowledge has been lost due to the Inca conquest.\n\n3. In addition, popular accounts focus on the Spanish actions and downplay native agency. It's always \"The Spanish conquered the Inca\" and it's never \"The Inca attempted political intrigue and military outmanuevering against the Spanish, but failed.\" The conquest changed the Spanish as it did the Andeans.\n\n**TL;DR Popular narratives downplay any benefits of the Spanish conquest and romanticize the prior Inca conquerors.**\n\nSome good sources for complex looks at the conquest period:\n\nGose, P. (2008). Invaders as ancestors: on the intercultural making and unmaking of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.\n\nMumford, J. R. (2012). Vertical empire [electronic resource]: the general resettlement of Indians in the colonial Andes. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.\n\nRamos, G. (2010). Death and conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.\n\nWernke, S. A. (2013). Negotiated settlements\u202f: Andean communities and landscapes under Inka and Spanish colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.\n", "CommodoreCoCo has brought up some good point, but one thing I'd add is that the Black Legend is not about the brutality of European conquerors in the New World in general, but claims the Spanish were uniquely bad.\n\nThe Spanish did some bad things, but were they so much worse than the Dutch? The English? The French? The Portuguese?\n\nIn some ways, I would say they took different approaches. For example, the English were more likely to regard American Indians as being foreign states, while the Spanish were more likely to regard them as being Spanish subjects. Although thanks to the power differences, bigotry, etc, the Spanish authorities treated their Indian subjects worse than they treated, say, the typical Castilian peasant, and the English treated the Indian foreigners with more cruelty in war and less respect in peace than they did with, say, the Dutch when fighting the Anglo-Dutch wars or the treaties ending them. (This isn't to say that, say, the English never engaged in outright conquest, or that the Spanish never recognized the sovereignty of American Indian powers or signed treaties with them; just that the general patterns varied to some degree.)\n\nCan we say the Spanish were *worse* though? That's a tougher call. From a sort of \"international law\" perspective, the Spanish approach of outright, often unprovoked conquest seems worse, but bringing people under the authority of the crown did give them some rudimentary sense of responsibility, whereas, say, the English coercing an Indian tribe into signing a \"cede your land to us, and move somewhere else and starve to death\" treaty felt much less responsibility.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2s0dgr", "title": "Why did the Japanese stop wearing kimonos?", "selftext": "Why did the Japanese stop wearing their traditional clothing? Many other cultures have kept their traditional clothing to this day, so I am confused as to why they would stop wearing them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2s0dgr/why_did_the_japanese_stop_wearing_kimonos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnlbxhu"], "score": [12], "text": ["Well some people actually do still wear kimonos as a part of their everyday. \n\nBefore we start, we should define what kimono are. In Japanese, \u7740\u7269 *kimono* literally means 'thing you wear'. In other words, for Japanese people, kimono literally just meant 'clothes'. Anything you wore was a kimono. This only changed with the introduction of Western clothes which were called \u6d0b\u670d *youfuku*, literally meaning 'Western garments'. Now a days, when someone says kimono in America, it conjures up images of [elaborate traditional dress](_URL_8_) and [images of elegant women or high quality dress](_URL_4_).   \n\n[But everyday clothes were also called kimono](_URL_0_). And kimono are not exclusively worn by women. The [traditional clothes of Japanese men can also be called kimono](_URL_10_). Pop media has contributed to the image of 'exotic' Asian women or geisha and the kimono has taken almost fetish like levels of sexual association by some people (in a similar way the china dress is).   \n\nIn my post, when I talk about kimono, it is generally inclusive of all traditional Japanese clothes, as worn by men, women and children, as well as the different clothes worn by elites in the capital as well as the farmers in the fields. Now let's begin. \n\nThe first shift from kimono to western dress began with the Meiji Period during the mid 19th century, after the opening of the ports by Perry. It was a part of the large importation of various technologies, knowledge  &  information, methods, foods, and various other things from the West. \n\nA big proponent of adopting Western clothing was **military dress**. \n\nThe Japanese government were moving away from the feudal samurai - lord system of military power in favor of establishing a central, government funded and nationally associated professional military in the style of [Prussia or the British Empire](_URL_1_). \n\nThe government forbid military men from wearing kimono to any official functions and/or while on active duty, forcibly committing a massive organization in Japan to the Western dress. Government officials were also bound by similar rules put forth for the bureaucrats.  \n\nYou can see here an illustration of what the average officers and line infantry would have looked like in the newly formed [Japanese Imperial forces](_URL_7_). \n\nThis was a time of many firsts for the Japanese military, including the first time they had a really unified command and a standardized uniform, uniting the armed forces of Japan in mind and body. \n\nThe other big driving force of adopting Western clothing were **Japanese elites**. \n\nTo see how rapid the changes made during the Meiji Restoration were, look no further than the Emperor himself. This is what [Emperor Meiji looked like in the early days of 1872](_URL_5_). \n\nLater that year, he would cut off his top knot, a sign of hundreds of years of tradition, and adopt Western dress to symbolize his support for progress, pragmatic adoption of Western things, and a new Japan. [This is what the Emperor looked like just one year.](_URL_6_)\n\nThe Meiji Restoration was a top-down movement to rapidly industrialize Japan and to make the transition smoother, the ruling elites of Japan believed that they needed to be able to absorb Western culture, language, science, and ways if they were to also be able to rapidly learn Western medicine, military strategies, economic systems, and earn a strong position in global politics. \n\nThis led the elites of Japan to lead the way and pioneer adoption of all things Western. Western food, Western entertainment (to put the Meiji Restoration in context, Western composers like Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, Saint-Sa\u00ebns, and Dvo\u0159\u00e1k were all alive and making music during this time. Mozart and Beethoven had only been dead for maybe 20 years), Western literature, and of course, [Western dress](_URL_9_).\n\nMost notably, *men adopted suits* rather quickly and it became the norm to wear a suit to work for the upper and middle class. Lower class citizens generally kept wearing their kimono, especially farmers. The Meiji Restoration mostly focused on urban populations, while rural areas generally just kept going about daily life as they always did as the gap between urban and rural areas grew wider and wider. \n\nAnother notable thing is that **women generally did NOT adopt Western dress**. Many new ideas and ways of thinking were being born in Japan but gender equality was not one of them. Female participation in the labor market did not change a great deal during the Meiji Period and most women remained the masters of the home and hearth. This meant that they still spent the majority of their day at home, child rearing and maintaining the household. \n\nWomen quickly found that western dress was incredibly impractical for the inside of the average Japanese home. So the vast majority continued to wear kimono at home. As a matter of fact, most men also continued to wear the kimono at home as well. They would wake up, change into their suits, go to work, then come home and change into more comfortable kimono as home wear. \n\nFor elites, some women would also wear Western style dresses outside but many continued to wear kimono even outside. One of the big reasons was that for the first time, sumptuary laws from the Edo period that forbid the common people from wearing kimonos with silk or ostentatious colors, designs, etc. were repealed. The average Japanese women could now wear glamorous kimono that were previously only permitted on those of incredibly high status or even restricted to only the Imperial court. \n\nThe design of the kimono changed quite a bit. To the outside world looking in, one may not be able to tell the difference but for the average Japanese woman, the changes were huge. They were suddenly allowed to buy (and able to afford!) silk, they could pick and choose designs that previously would have literally been forbidden to someone of low status. It sparked a massive uptick in the domestic textile industry and helped propel a major part of Japanese light industry development during the time period. \n\nThe design of the kimono also changed. [For example, the *obi*](_URL_2_), the sash that is tied around the waist that holds the kimono together while also being decorative. Because of the repealing of sumptuary laws and a general change in the way society thought about clothes in public spaces, the way one could wear a kimono was relaxed quite a bit during the Meiji Period. For example, in this picture, the obi is tilted and simply tucked as opposed to being tied in a more complex and 'proper' way that would have been necessary for clothing etiquette during the Edo Period. \n\n[The obi was also featured lower and 'boxier' than in previous designs](_URL_3_), as a result of the influence of Western dresses. [With lower, boxier obi](_URL_12_), the sillouhette of a woman's kimono now looked similar to that of a Western dress worn over a corset that accentuated the bust and hips into an S curve.  \n\nAfter the Meiji Period, Japan enters the Taisho Period, between World War I and World War II. Japan experiences even more freedom and liberation of clothing culture and more people wear Western clothing during everyday moments, including casual Western clothing. Western clothing is no longer something simply worn at work. This is also a period of a rise in **Western architecture**(_URL_11_) that further facilitated the wearing of Western dress (particularly in the home). \n\nThe kimono becomes increasingly out of fashion when worn outside of the home and adoption of Western clothes steadily increases. Western clothes are associated with progress, civilization and modernity while kimono are symbols of the past. That being said, there were reactionaries that disapproved of the rapid changes of Japanese society refuse to adopt Western ways and Western clothing. \n\nBy the time World War II ends and Japan begins to rebuild, Western clothes are a dominant part of Japanese clothing culture. In most work places, especially corporate office jobs, the business suit is standard and often required. Many uniforms are Western style. And casual Western clothing like shirts, pants, etc. are everywhere. By the 1950s and 1960s, much of Japan is wearing Western clothes on a near constant basis, with traditional dress being taken out during the summer for festivals, religious ceremonies, holidays, etc. \n\n_URL_11_ To say that people have 'stopped wearing' kimono is a little misleading. The vast majority of Japanese people wear kimonos several times a year, especially during summer. It's not uncommon to see Japanese people wearing kimono on the streets, even in major metropolitan cities.\n\nDuring the summer time, which is unbearably humid and hot in Japan, many people wear simple kimono because they are cooler and light, helping people deal with the heat. \n\nAnd it's almost a staple to wear kimono to festivals throughout the year in Japan, whether they be children, teenagers, or adults. \n\n**If anything Japanese people wear their traditional dress a great deal more than most other cultures.** "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.meijishowa.com/images/3723.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Hohenfriedeberg_-_Attack_of_Prussian_Infantry_-_1745.jpg", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/40/85/9c/40859c16f8cf16d164213318a350cbc1.jpg", "http://traditionscustoms.com/sites/default/files/obi_kimono.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/NKQlVaB.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Meiji_tenno3.jpg/408px-Meiji_tenno3.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Meiji_Emperor.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/JapaneseArmy1900.JPG", "http://www.spectrum-art.com/artists/haruyo/Twelve-Layer-Kimono_350.jpg", "http://www.meijishowa.com/images/3752.jpg", "http://www.meijishowa.com/images/253.jpg", "http://markystar.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/053.jpg", "http://image.webftp.jp/shopimages/mamechiyo/3_020008000034.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3cpo5l", "title": "How/why did the tribes who took over areas of the old Roman empire go from speaking Germanic languages to Romance ones? And why not in England?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cpo5l/howwhy_did_the_tribes_who_took_over_areas_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csy2pes"], "score": [8], "text": ["One must remember that when Rome fell, the people in the provinces did not simply disappear. They, for the most part, stayed right where they were. The people of Gaul spoke a vulgar form of Latin, but it had become region specific, displacing much of the Celtic languages that were there before. \n\nA linguist might be better suited to answer this question.\n\nHowever, once Rome fell, the provinces were open for invasion. Here is where your tribes come in. Let's take, for example, the Franks. The Franks raided into Gaul even before Rome fell. Some of them stayed. Various people who were called Franks were some times enemies and some times allies of the Roman. When Rome fell there were Franks in the Roman army. Thus it can be assumed they spoke vulgar Latin, or something very similar.\n\nSlowly the Franks gained control of much of Gaul and there developed Old French, which was based completely in Latin, thus a Romance language. \n\nEngland did not have as long a period of assimilation with Rome. Rome was not as entrenched and so Latin did not become as wide spread. The same goes with Germany. If the average person did not speak it, it did not last. \n\nOf course Latin remains an important language in England, as in the rest of Europe, partially because of its ties with the Catholic Church.\n\n\n------------------------------------------\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)\n\n[Gregory of Tours History of the Franks](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.asp", "http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/joseppri/oldfrench/langue.html"]]}
{"q_id": "1jchu2", "title": "How much would the Roman Colosseum cost if it were to be built today?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jchu2/how_much_would_the_roman_colosseum_cost_if_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbdad3r", "cbdan4j", "cbdbsx5", "cbdci9i", "cbde6o8", "cbdfii4", "cbdio71", "cbdk971"], "score": [59, 121, 113, 4, 6, 830, 2, 8], "text": ["I'm not qualified to answer this but are you asking what it would cost to build with modern equipment, techniques and resources or an exact replication of the way that the Romans did it(obviously without real slaves)? \n\nThere is also the added problem I believe of the exact formula used for the concrete that the Romans used, still needs to be rediscovered for a perfect replica to be constructed.", "You might want to post this to [r/estimation](_URL_0_)", "The book *The Colosseum* by Kieth Hopkins and Mary Beard apparently has an estimate from a surveying company on how much it would cost today to build the foundations alone for the Colosseum. Came in at $57 million. \n\nHere's the [review](_URL_0_) of the book where I found the figure.", "We don't know how much marble was used in the seating and facade, which would be a large part of the cost if you were to build one today.", "I think the more interesting question would be the following:\n\n\"In terms of relative cost, what modern sports stadium is roughly equivalent to the Roman Colosseum?\"\n\nThe underlying question would be how exceptional is something like Wembley Stadium in England compared to that classic beauty", "Woah something I can answer. I work at an architecture firm, so I can give some insight but I've never worked on a stadium. I mostly work on large higher ed. and hospital projects.\n\nThe Colosseum is a load bearing masonry structure. Large scale projects stopped being built this way around 1900. The last great examples in my city, Chicago, are the [Monadnock Building](_URL_1_) and the [Auditorium Theater](_URL_4_) (bonus trivia, this is where Frank Llyod Wright started practicing architecture under Louis Sullivan).\n\nThe reason almost no one builds this way anymore is that it requires a lot of labor and as a very rough rule of thumb labor makes up about 2/3's of the cost of a building project (applies in US anyways, in China it's 1/3 labor 2/3 material). I mention this because the final number I come to will be lower than it would be to build this out of brick and stone. I'm not sure what the premium would be, 50% maybe?\n\nHere's the size from [Wikipedia](_URL_2_):\n\n > It is elliptical in plan and is 189 meters (615 ft / 640 Roman feet) long, and 156 meters (510 ft / 528 Roman feet) wide, with a base area of 6 acres (24,000 m2). The height of the outer wall is 48 meters (157 ft / 165 Roman feet). The perimeter originally measured 545 meters (1,788 ft / 1,835 Roman feet). The central arena is an oval 87 m (287 ft) long and 55 m (180 ft) wide, surrounded by a wall 5 m (15 ft) high, above which rose tiers of seating.\n\nThat gives you an area of about 246,340 SF or 22,900 m^2 . This completely ignores the fact that the actual area is not two dimensional (multi-story). I can't find a resource to provide this info which is definitely a limitation of this answer.\n\nI'm taking the area:cost ratio for recently constructed stadiums from this article in [The Atlantic](_URL_3_). I made a [quick spreadsheet](_URL_0_) to come up with a cost of $473/SF or about $5,100/m^2.\n\n246,340 SF x $473 = ~$166,500,000\n\nAgain, this ignores the fact that the area is much larger than this. The Colosseum held 50,000 people which is about the size of a modern baseball park in the US. The ranges in the spreadsheet go from about 1 million to 1.3 million SF (about 93,000 - 120,000 m^2). This would give us:\n\nLow\n1,000,000 SF x $473 = ~$473,000,000\n\nHigh\n1,300,000 SF x $473 = ~$615,000,000\n\nSo $500-600 million plus a huge premium for the fact that it's load bearing masonry. You're probably looking at a **$750 million to $1 billion building** (570-750 million euros) if you were to build this today.\n\n**Edit:** formatting and forgot to divide by four for the equation of an ellipse which is (A x B x 3.14)/4 with A and B being half the long and short axis.\n\nAt the risk of being incredibly facile I will mention that, to a large extent, the construction process and methods used to build the Colosseum would be very familiar to us today. Obviously the tools have changed but the guy laying the stones? Basically the same. On a much smaller scale this is how many buildings are still built today in the developing world.\n", "Sorry if this was already asked but I didn't see it in the existing comments. Do we know how much the Colosseum cost to build in Roman currency at the actual time it was built? I can't imagine records weren't kept for its costs somewhere. If we do know, just out of interest how does that translate to, say, present day Euros?", "Can I ask a similar question? Was the arena used after Rome's collapse? Today it's just sitting there, when was it stop being used?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/estimation/"], ["https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.journalofromanarch.com/lancaster.pdf"], [], [], ["https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aljj79ehE3zVdHZac1RwMlRVNlJJQ2MyQTNZQXgxVWc#gid=0", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadnock_Building", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum#Physical_description", "http://www.athleticbusiness.com/articles/article.aspx?articleid=3893&amp;zoneid=27", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditorium_Building"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1e4ujc", "title": "Why was the center of the Arabian Peninsula ignored by so many conquerors?", "selftext": "Looking through some maps, it seems that the Persians, Ottomans and even Alexander the Great all ignored the territories of the inland Arabian Peninsula. Why exactly was this land area left untouched?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e4ujc/why_was_the_center_of_the_arabian_peninsula/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wu6bb"], "score": [29], "text": ["The other responses in this thread have it basically correct.\n\nThe interior of the Arabian peninsula is not a hospitable place. It is [very dry](_URL_0_), and isn't traversed by any permanent rivers. This affects both the *why* would people conquer it and the *how* would people conquer it.\n\nThe climate meant that the few people who did live in the interior of the peninsula were small groups of nomadic herders. These groups neither posed any significant threat to larger polities, nor had much in the way of cities and wealth worth taking. \n\nEven if people did want to add the peninsula to their domains, there really wasn't any feasible way to march or garrison any significant number of troops across/within the desert. The land isn't fertile enough for an army to forage or for a garrison town to plant gardens. There aren't rivers to drink out of or ship food to garrisons in the interior. \n\nConversely, the coasts of the Arabian peninsula have long supported agriculture, fishing, and mining economies. Coastal population centres were well integrated into East African and south Asian maritime trade networks, and the rise of Islam and its tradition of the Hajj provided major financial, political and religious incentives for empires to control Mecca and Medina.\n\n*Edit:* I see the other comments are now dropping like flies. If there's part of this answer that doesn't meet subreddit standards or needs elaborating, please mods, let me know and I'll do my best. But please keep in mind that this question is a counterfactual one, and it's difficult to provide sources, documentation, and explanation of things that *didn't* happen. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.glaphyridae.com/Biogeografia/img/Lev/middle_east_rainfall1973_b.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "1sec5n", "title": "Was Mao's \"Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom\" campaign a genuine attempt to engage the intellectual community, or a means to flush out dissidents?", "selftext": "This question came up in a class on Authoritarian and Single Party States, and we didn't come up with one conclusive answer. What were the motives of Mao? Was it one of the two above reasons, or even something else entirely different? \n\nOn a separate point, it feels like Mao's relationship with Marxism and his distaste for intellectuals seem rather contradictory. How did Mao reconcile these? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sec5n/was_maos_let_one_hundred_flowers_bloom_campaign_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdxcyv2"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm cautious to comment, because my main impression of this period of Chinese history was formed through reading Jung Chang's autobiographical/biographical *Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China*, and her later work with Jon Halliday, *Mao: The Unknown Story* (both are available from Amazon). You need to understand that Chang did not have a pleasant experience during the Cultural Revolution, and developed a strong antipathy towards Mao as a result of this. That said, her work in *Wild Swans* is sourced directly from interviews with her mother - it is primary material.\n\nWith that in mind, Chang relays the experience of her mother, then a ranking official in the Communist Party's Chengdu Education administration when she was told of the Hundred Flowers campaign:\n\n > When my mother\u2019s level was told about Mao\u2019s speech soliciting criticism of officers, they were not informed about some other remarks he had made around the same time, about enticing snakes out of their lairs - to uncover anyone who dared to oppose him or his regime.\n\nAfter about a month of the campaign, in June, \"Mao\u2019s speech about \u2018enticing snakes out of their lairs\u2019 was relayed down orally to [Chang's] mother\u2019s level.\"\n\nBoth of those extracts are from *Wild Swans*. In *The Unknown Story* Chang and Halliday are direct:\n\n > On 27 February 1957, Mao delivered a four-hour speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council announcing that he was inviting criticisms of the Communist Party. The Party, he said, needed to be accountable and \u2018under supervision\u2019. He sounded reasonable, criticising Stalin for his \u2018excessive\u2019 purges, and giving the impression there were going to be no more of these in China. In this context, he cited an adage, \u2018Let a hundred flowers bloom\u2019. \n > Few guessed that Mao was setting a trap, and that he was inviting people to speak out so that he could then use what they said as an excuse to victimise them. Mao\u2019s targets were intellectuals and the educated, the people most likely to speak up.\n\nChang and Halliday then tell us that\n\n > On 12 June, Mao issued a circular to the Party, to be read to all members \u2018except unreliable ones\u2019, in which he made it explicit that he had set a trap. He did not want his Party to think he was a liberal \u2013 in case they themselves should turn liberal. In this circular, Mao set a quota for victims: between 1 and 10 per cent of \u2018intellectuals\u2019 (which meant the better-educated), who numbered some 5 million at the time. As a result, at least 550,000-plus people were labelled as \u2018Rightists\u2019. While many had spoken out, some had not said anything against the regime, and were pulled in just to fill Mao\u2019s quota.\n\nIn *Wild Swans*, Chang notes that her mother faced enormous pressure to make the quota of around 5% of intellectual dissenters.\n\nBased on this, especially the timing of Mao's speeches and the selective way in which the circular was distributed, it's fairly apparent that Mao's only goal with the Hundred Flowers campaign was to tease out potential dissidents and then neutralise them. But if I was you, I'd check additional sources besides Chang/Chang and Halliday.\n\nRelating to your second question, Mao made a lot of noise about Marxist/Marxist-Leninist thought - I have a copy of the *Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung* (the famous \"Little Red Book\") somewhere (for a political history course at University), and there were quite a few lines about how Marxism or Marxism-Leninism was the foundation of all their efforts and ideals, as well as numerous references anyone familiar with communism would recognise; this book was studied assiduously in China during his life. Chang notes in Wild Swans that her brother was praised by his commanding officer in the People's Liberation Army for having \"studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously.\"\n\nChang and Halliday also contend that his disdain for intellectuals was selective:\n\n > To Mao, writers, artists and historians were superfluous. Scientists and technicians, however, were largely exempted from persecution \u2013 \u2018especially those who have major achievements\u2019, a September 1957 order decreed; these \u2018must be absolutely protected\u2019. Scientists who had returned from Europe and America, in particular, were to be \u2018neither labelled nor denounced\u2019. Nuclear physicists and rocket scientists were treated extra well. (Throughout Mao\u2019s reign, top scientists were given privileges superior even to those enjoyed by very senior officials.)\n\nBased on this, it seems that Mao reconciled his distaste for intellectuals with Marxism by turning the latter into a doctrine - \"Mao Tse-Tung Thought\" - a sort of sanitised, approved, orthodox intellectualism, where critical thought is reserved for criticism and condemnation of \"class enemies\". There's no conflict there at all - that kind of constrained thinking is the opposite of intellectualism.\n\nHope that provides you with some clarification; like I said, I'm drawing on two sources, and although one is direct primary material, they are both subject to a certain bias. With luck, someone here with a wider background will be able to provide better insight."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6knat3", "title": "What is this weapon? Are there any historical records of it's usage?Any famous historical or mythological users?", "selftext": "Link:_URL_0_ I'm talking about the weapon in the guy's hand. It's a panel from a korean comic. The weapon looks like a fauchard but I'm not sure.Can anyone identify it?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6knat3/what_is_this_weapon_are_there_any_historical/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djng35b", "djocxjf"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["It looks like [a guandao](_URL_0_). According a legend it was invented Guan Yu (~200 AD), but there is no evidence it existed before the 11th century.", "Yes, it is real. However, it's not sure if it's practical weapon or just ceremonial weapon like other oversized weapons in history. In the historical book of three kingdoms, Guan Yu used a spear, not this thing. Here is the 500 years old Vietnamese guandao belonged to an emperor:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nIts length is 2.55 meters. Human for scale:\n\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://imgur.com/a/Ecxo4"], "answers_urls": [["http://mandarinmansion.com/antique-chinese-yanyuedao-aka-guandao"], ["http://imgur.com/a/mJjbT", "http://imgur.com/a/AYHzk"]]}
{"q_id": "2a2iek", "title": "If a duke in medieval England, France, or Germany wanted his second son to inherit his lands and titles, would he have any way of disinheriting his oldest son?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a2iek/if_a_duke_in_medieval_england_france_or_germany/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cir5up1"], "score": [6], "text": ["In England, it would depend on  a couple of things.\n\nIf the real property were held in fee tail (Entailed)   a person would need the agreement of the heir to break the fee tail.\n\nIf a tail could not be broken, the  ancestor/father could  leave all of his personal property,money or unentailed real property any way that he chose. Theoretically an heir could inherit  a parcel of land/estate and have no financial means to keep it up.\n\nAn heir could voluntarily abjure a title. _URL_1_.\n\nI am not aware of a means to force an heir out unless the parent filed a writ to have him declared a bastard. Until the 20th century bastards could not inherit a title or take from a parent who died intestate.\n\nOn teh Continent, in  what we call France and some of teh German principalities, Sa;ic Law governed  civil law issues including inheritance.\n\nI am less familiar with Salic Law provisions\n\n_URL_0_\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salic_law", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjuration"]]}
{"q_id": "36kie0", "title": "What kind of spices did the ancient Mesopotamians use?", "selftext": "I made some Mesopotamian bread from a recipe I found online and it tastes a bit bland. I put in a bit of sumac when I was making it (evidently not enough) and I was wondering, would they have used sumac? What other spices would they have used?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36kie0/what_kind_of_spices_did_the_ancient_mesopotamians/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crezfm4"], "score": [2], "text": ["From what we know (from texts and palaeobotanic studies), there were many spices that are also used in modern Middle Eastern cuisine, such as onion, garlic, coriander, cumin, fennel, cress, dill, mint, thyme, cardamom... \n\nIn addition, we have words for spices attested in the texts where we are not entirely sure what plant/spice they refer to.\n\nI'm not a 100% sure that the word for sumac has been correctly identified, but it is a fair assumption that it would have been used in cooking."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1qe0xp", "title": "How did WW1 armies know when individual soldiers died on the battlefield?", "selftext": "In films and books about WW1 there is often a scene with the postman delivering the fateful telegrams informing family members that a soldier has died. The western front was huge, with millions of soldiers and lots of attacks and counter-attacks - how did the army manage to know who to send telegrams to?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qe0xp/how_did_ww1_armies_know_when_individual_soldiers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdbv43w"], "score": [17], "text": ["They kept records of these guys and their families. Each soldier wears tags identifying them, find a body with tags a telegram is dispatched. If they don't find a body but the soldier fails to appear or report in they are missing and after a while missing and presumed dead."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "95d6b2", "title": "How many people were really being sacrificed every year in the Aztec Empire before the Spanish arrived? I\u2019ve heard claims it was in the tens of thousands or much lower.", "selftext": "If it was a large amount if prisoners of war (for example) I\u2019m also interested in the logistics of how this was done. All I really know is from Mel Gibson\u2019s *Apocalypto.* Were the prisoners kept in cages awaiting sacrifice? Was its purpose to be a public spectacle like the Roman arenas? Was cannibalism of the victims really a significant source of food as I\u2019ve sometimes heard?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/95d6b2/how_many_people_were_really_being_sacrificed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e3rsmuo", "e3w87bi"], "score": [5, 270], "text": ["There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Human Sacrifice and Blood Sacrifice](_URL_0_) in the Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) portion of our FAQ will answer your inquiry.", "I'll try and cover a few of your specific points, starting with the fact *Apocalypto* did not intend to portray the Aztecs, but the Maya. The film does (poorly) mash in some aspects of Aztec sacrifice, if only to further its goal of being colonialist apologia and torture porn. Fortunately, the sheer awfulness of the movie makes it a good jumping off point to talk about actual practices of sacrifice.\n\nTo start with, there were slaves in the Aztec world and a portion of them did come from slave raids. The whole notion of actual warriors going out to get slaves for sacrifices, however, is a bit ridiculous. While slaves would sometimes be used for sacrifices in particular circumstances, the majority of sacrifices stemmed from war captives. Taking a captive was considered a rite of passage for a young warrior and a requirement for military and social advancement. Note, however, that simply snatching up some schmuck from a podunk village was not a standard practice; the expectation was taking a captive *in battle*. Also, later in the Imperial phase of the Aztecs, certain opponents became so little regarded that even taking several of them in battle earned little more than a shrug, as this passage from Sahagun illustrates:\n\n >  And if six, or seven, or ten Huaxtecs, or barbarians, were taken, he gained thereby no renown. \n\nConversely, taking captive from more formidable opponents, such as those from Atlixco and Huexotzinco (which were coincidentally in the hard-fought borderland with Tlaxcala), earned great acclaim. So the notion of Aztec warriors raiding villages too small to apparently even have maize fields does not make sense. \n\nOnce captives were taken there are some scant mentions of using cages. From the same book of Sahagun:\n\n >  And there in battle was when captives were taken. When it had come to pass that they went against and conquered the city, then the captives were counted, there, in wooden cages: how many had been taken by Tenochtitlan, how many by Tlatilulco...\n\nSo using cages was a real thing, but there's no indication they were anything but temporary measures. For instance, they were also used during the sale of slaves, or when holding prisoners during trials. Captives were not simply rounded up and kept indefinitely like cattle in pens. Instead, captives were treated, well, like slaves, to be housed by their captors until the time of their sacrifice.\n\nWere those sarifices a public spectacle? Well, yes and no. Many of the sacrifices were public events, and some specifically so in a way that demonstrated the power of the Aztec state. Rulers and dignitaries of foreign, even enemy, nations would be invited to witness these displays as a form a intimidation.*Apocalypto* portrays these sorts of events as a wild bacchanal of primitives gyrating in a wild, unhinged frenzy. In fact, if we turn to sources like Duran or Sahagun, we see that even the most public and bloody ceremonies were highly regimented rituals of specific songs, dances, offerings, and adornments, each with its own meaning. There was an aspect of spectacle, but ultimately these were religious rites.\n\nWe can see the combination of somber and spectacle in accounts of the \"gladiatorial\" sacrifice which took place during Tlacaxipehualiztli. After weeks of preliminary rituals, captors would bring their captives to a particular *calmecac*, Yopico, in the Sacred Precinct. There the captor would lead his captive up to a raised platform upon which lay a large heavy stone. Tied to the stone and armed with a macuahuitl whose blades were feathers, the captive would face up to four elite warriors (and a fifth left-handed one if he managed to \"defeat\" the four), but would ultimately be sacrificed on that stone once he faltered.\n\nSo there's certainly some spectacle there and the whole notion of \"gladiatorial\" combat evokes the Colosseum, but there's some substantial differences. For one, there's some dispute as to the \"public-ness\" of this event. Sahagun mentions no one but the priests and the warriors, which does not preclude the presence of others. Duran, meanwhile, says the \"entire city was present,\" although the location of the particular calmecac where the combat took place was a smaller building off in one corner of the Sacred Precinct, which present problems for mass viewing. \n\nMore importantly though, the intentions were different. Even this particular sacrifice, which was among the largest (dozens are mentioned as sacrificed over the course of a day) and the combat making it among the most dramatic, the core aim was not to provide tititallation, but serve both as a sort of graduation ceremony for warriors who had taken a captive and also a way of providing \"sustenance\" to the gods. On that latter part, just as important as the actual combat was the captor taking the blood of his sacrifice, collected by the priests in a bowl, and going from idol to idol having them take a \"drink\" from the bowl. Considering the symbolic impetus of Aztec warfare was to engage in battle in order to \"feed\" the gods, this act not only completed that divine onus, but the entire gladiatorial spectacle re-created the process of warfare/capture/sacrifice. This was not just bread and circuses, in other words.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/mesoamerica#wiki_human_sacrifice_and_blood_sacrifice"], []]}
{"q_id": "4a05t6", "title": "[Meta] Some thoughts on warnings", "selftext": "A week ago, I received a **(EDIT: third)** warning and a subsequent seven day ban for not breaking any rules, as I was informed by a moderator:\n\n > You reposted a removed answer. There's no specific rule against that. It's common sense that you should not do that. Answers get removed for a reason, so don't repost them.\n\n > This settles the conversation, as far as I'm concerned.\n\n > See you next week!\n\nBefore this I had received a **(EDIT: second)** warning for not answering the original poster's question. This was expanded upon in a PM from another moderator, saying that my post had been removed for the following reason:\n\n > Our rules requires that top-level answers address the question comprehensively. It is of course fine to point out misconceptions in a question within the context of a broader answer. Your post did not respond to OP's question in a manner one would expect from someone \"reasonable degree of expertise in specific areas of the past.\"\n\nMy subsequent ban derived from having reposted my original post by adding it to a second comment. The comment in question was written in response to a comment chain on my original post, and I added my original post with a disclaimer saying:\n\n > I will put my top-level answer here to provide context, since it was removed for not answering the original question:\n\nThis addition was clearly separated from my response and was in no way an attempt to somehow sneak it past the rules. I was operating under the provided assumption that only top-level answers required to address the question at hand, which I interpreted as permitting me the freedom to respond to a question about my (removed) original post. I was later informed otherwise:\n\n > Saying \"top-level comment\" was my mistake. In fact, AskHistorians rules have not differentiated between comment placement within a thread in 3 years.\n\nThis was six hours after I had written my post. Since my response directly expanded upon what I had written in my original post, I felt that my original post, no longer being a top-level answer, still was relevant to my response. It was for this that I received a warning and subsequent ban. This being despite me not violating any rules, as explicitly made clear by the moderators.\n\nI feel that warnings and bans shouldn\u2019t based on common sense, particularly not given the aforementioned misunderstandings, which is all this really is. As with all unspoken guidelines, common sense is open to interpretation. What one individual considers common sense might not correspond to another, and it doesn't necessarily take the situation into account. \n\nThis is by no means an attempt to disparage the moderators of this subreddit or the work they do. Their dedication to this subreddit's rules is a large part of why the quality is so high, but that doesn't mean the outcome always is positive, which I feel is the case here.\n\nThe obvious way to proceed is to add a sentence to the rules about contributors under no circumstances reposting removed answers, in full or in part. In addition, I feel that moderators should avoid issuing warnings and subsequent bans for things that are not rule violations, regardless of whether or not it goes against common sense. In this incident neither my actions nor intentions were disingenuous, and a comment or message saying \"please do not re-use removed content\" would have sufficed.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a05t6/meta_some_thoughts_on_warnings/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0waqfp", "d0wb0bq", "d0wdb86"], "score": [8, 11, 7], "text": ["Would you mind if someone from the modteam provides screencaps of your ban messages? You were temp banned as your third warning in this subreddit, not your first. ", "Rule #1 of reddit: Mods are dictators by nature of the system. \n\nThis sub understands that better than any around. Sounds like you were being a bit stone-minded about reposting an already removed comment. That *does* make perfect sense, and doesn't merit an extra rule in the list, as far as I'm concerned as a non-mod. The rules list is not meant to be a \"Here is a point-for-point explanation of what is and is not appropriate\". Else it'd be filled with every little arbitrary rule they could think of. \n\nThat's ridiculous. Rules of subreddits are not *laws*. They don't have to be enforced to the letter, or even posted at all. \n\nI get that you think that it should be simple enough for a mod to simply message and ask courteously, but compound that by a thousands. That's how often they'd have to do it. Because you're just one user among thousands. When you've received two warnings already, I think a temp ban for the third is totally justifiable. ", "Welcome back :)\n\nr/askhistorians, much like the academic discipline we strive to emulate, is a community, and like all other communities there are occasional unpleasant interactions as our ~~cruel overlords~~ gentle moderators do their best to keep things working smoothly.\n\nI'm sorry you were temporarily banned, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that I hope you stick around, learn from your interactions with the mod team about r/askhistorians's unique customs and querks, and continue to enjoy this sub."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2z507y", "title": "What was European cooking like before the introduction of Asian spices?", "selftext": "From what I understand, most spices came from outside of Europe. So, before the creation of the spice trade, what was traditional European food like? How was it flavored?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z507y/what_was_european_cooking_like_before_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpg2jiu", "cpgf7zi"], "score": [58, 15], "text": ["While you wait for more qualified people to answer, here's a section of the FAQ that may tide you over:\n\n_URL_5_\n\n\nAlso, you'll need to be a little more specific about time frame and/or location within Europe, as well as which level of society you're asking about. My understanding is that in 12th-century England and northern France, for the lower classes, they ate a mostly vegetarian diet of barley, rye, beans, and leafy vegetables like kale and spinach. Herbs like rosemary, lavender, basil, sage, thyme, and garlic were all available through foraging. People also ate flowers, something we don't do much nowadays. People drank water, small beer (produced on a household level, often by women), cider, mead, and whey. Meat was rare, especially beef since cows needed a lot of food. Pork was relatively common since people could let their pigs wander and feed in the woods for most of the year. Hunting and fishing were tightly regulated by the local lord, who also usually had a monopoly on millstones and ovens for making bread. Overall their diet was pretty good, lots of high quality protein and fiber.\n\nReading you may be interested in:\n\n[Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society](_URL_0_) (Examines cultural attitudes toward food.)\n\n[Food in Medieval Times](_URL_4_) (More focused on what was generally available to the average person.)\n\n[The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages](_URL_3_) (This is more focused on the upper classes.)\n\nEDIT: Here is some information concerning [forest laws](_URL_1_) and [charters of free-warren](_URL_2_), which should help cast some light on the kinds of restrictions that common people faced in finding food.\n\nAlso, as mentioned below, I forgot to say that dairy in general was pretty important. It was a good source of nutrition, especially since cheese keeps forever. Cows were generally more valuable alive and producing milk than dead and eaten.", "Half of getting a good answer is how you ask the question.\n\nThere was never a wall between Europe, Asia, and Africa. The various seas and gulfs were more like highways than barriers. Mesopotamia and East Africa traded with the Indus and Saraswati river valleys before history. Southern Europe traded with North Africa. The Bell Beaker folk came out of the Mediterranean and settled the Atlantic coasts, even unto Britain, while penetrating deeply into modern France. They foreshadowed the later spread of the Phoenicians/Carthaginians.\n\nDid spices travel along these trade routes? We know the Greek states supported a huge trade in expensive silphium from Africa, and one of the few Sumerian-based words in English is \"cumin.\" (Via Akkadian, Greek, Latin). Cumin originated in the Eastern Mediterranean and was traded  &  eventually grown as far as India, and into Europe.\n\n(Silphium is an unknown bitter/hot herb that later fell out of cultivation or became extinct. The flavour has been likened to horseradish or asafoetida.)\n\nSo, \"before Asian spices\" is really prehistoric, and archaeologists can tell you what people were eating from what the paleobotanists identify.\n\nThat being said, I think what you're trying to ask is something like, \"before the spice trade I heard of in school, that happened in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages (or at least early Middle Ages), what was eating in Europe like? What tastes did they have?\"\n\nAs pointed out, that depends on where in Europe you are, and what your income is.\n\nIf you're a fisherman, you eat more fish than an inland farmer, and you also get shellfish, and even have edible seaweeds. Your cash crop is salt fish, sold inland and to the cities, especially once the Christian business of Lent settles into the culture. You catch fish and you boil out your own salt. On the other hand, the pagan Britons didn't eat fish, apparently through taboo.\n\nYour poor peasant farmer doesn't eat anything he doesn't grow or forage in the woods. But that's quite a bit! The list from fyreNL is good, because onions are a big flavour boost. The average peasant ate them like apples, just peel them and bite in. \n\nWitch trials often list what was served at supposed midnight feasts, and they amount to a peasant's idea of good things. Most notable is that butter is served in big hunks and eaten, not as a thin spread on bread, but in quantities like it was a soft cheese. The meat your peasant eats is probably bacon, the current flitch hung in the chimney to keep it smoked, the rest out in the smoke house. This is added to the daily soup, so it adds a smoky/salty flavour to the collection of beans and greens in the pot. \n\nOnce late in the year was the big hog slaughter, and they made blood sausage and head cheese, black broth and chitlins, and undoubtedly roasted the pig's ears like some of my neighbors do. No middle or upper class person would eat this, or record this, but I can't imagine it being let go to waste.\n\nSoup is what your peasant lives on.\n\n \"Soupe la soir, soupe le matin,\n\n  C'est l'ordinaire du bon chretien.\"\n\n  (\"Soup in the evening, and soup in the morning,\n\n  Is the everyday food of a good Christian.\")\n\n(and notice that they eat basically two meals a day.) Another rhyming proverb:\n\n  \"Lever a six, diner a dix,\n\n  Souper a six, coucher a dix,\n\n  Fait vivre l'homme dix fois dix.\"\n\n  (\"To rise at six, dine at ten,\n\n  Sup at six, to bed at ten,\n\n  Makes man live ten times ten.\")\n\nSoup is important, because it is boiled water, and safe to drink. They did not value the thick stew, as a result. They needed to rehydrate.\n\n > As the Gauls, according to Athenaeus, generally ate their meat boiled, we must presume that they made soup with the water in which it was cooked. It is related that one day Gregory of Tours was sitting at the table of King Chilperic, when the latter offered him a soup specially made in his honour from chicken. The poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mention soups made of peas, of bacon, of vegetables, and of groats. In the southern provinces there were soups made of almonds, and of olive oil. When Du Gueselin went out to fight the English knight William of Blancbourg in single combat, he first ate three sorts of soup made with wine, \"in honour of the three persons in the Holy Trinity.\"\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/fast-and-feast-food-in-medieval-society/oclc/2213221&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.medievalhistories.com/medieval-forest-laws-in-england-and-normandy-in-the-twelfth-century/", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/40274574?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/art-of-cookery-in-the-middle-ages/oclc/32132932&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/food-in-medieval-times/oclc/55738647&amp;referer=brief_results", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/dailylife#wiki_food_seasonings"], []]}
{"q_id": "wze97", "title": "What was the mainstream Roman take on the god of the Judeans?", "selftext": "Did the Romans see the Jews as just another cult like the ones around other Roman pagan gods? Did they recognize Yahweh in the Roman pantheon in some way or another? Or did they see Judaism as its own unique religious tradition?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wze97/what_was_the_mainstream_roman_take_on_the_god_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5ht6oy", "c5hwcjl"], "score": [30, 3], "text": ["The average Roman didn't think much of Judaism, because they didn't think of them at all. Among those who actually cared about such matters, Judaism was likely seen as another weird Eastern cult, but with respectable venerability. Jews themselves had a poor reputation, at least going by Tacitus, who stereotyped them as bandits, essentially. However, I should note that this is not particularly unusual of Tacitus, who was pretty grumpy.\n\nEDIT: I should probably provide quotes. Two lengthy Tacitus quotes, followed by a quick Juvenal and a Varro that is quite interesting:\n\nGreat, irrelevant quote from Tacitus: \"This force was accompanied by twenty cohorts of allied troops and eight squadrons of cavalry, by the two kings Agrippa and Sohemus, by the auxiliary forces of king Antiochus, by a strong contingent of Arabs, who hated the Jews with the usual hatred of neighbors...\" Some things don't change. More relevant quotes:\n\nTacitus (again) \n\n > \"Moses, wishing to secure for the future his authority over the nation, gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practised by other men. Things sacred with us, with them have no sanctity, while they allow what with us is forbidden. In their holy place they have consecrated an image of the animal by whose guidance they found deliverance from their long and thirsty wanderings. They slay the ram, seemingly in derision of Hammon, and they sacrifice the ox, because the Egyptians worship it as Apis. They abstain from swine's flesh, in consideration of what they suffered when they were infected by the leprosy to which this animal is liable. [etc]\"\n\nMore pointedly,\n\n > This worship, however introduced, is upheld by its antiquity; all their other customs, which are at once perverse and disgusting, owe their strength to their very badness. The most degraded out of other races, scorning their national beliefs, brought to them their contributions and presents. This augmented the wealth of the Jews, as also did the fact, that among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies. They sit apart at meals, they sleep apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women; among themselves nothing is unlawful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of difference from other men. Those who come over to their religion adopt the practice, and have this lesson first instilled into them, to despise all gods, to disown their country, and set at nought parents, children, and brethren. Still they provide for the increase of their numbers. It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant. They hold that the souls of all who perish in battle or by the hands of the executioner are immortal. Hence a passion for propagating their race and a contempt for death. They are wont to bury rather than to burn their dead, following in this the Egyptian cus tom; they bestow the same care on the dead, and they hold the same belief about the lower world. Quite different is their faith about things divine. The Egyptians worship many animals and images of monstrous form; the Jews have purely mental conceptions of Deity, as one in essence. They call those profane who make representations of God in human shape out of perishable materials. They believe that Being to be supreme and eternal, neither capable of representation, nor of decay. They therefore do not allow any images to stand in their cities, much less in their temples. This flattery is not paid to their kings, nor this honour to our Emperors. From the fact, however, that their priests used to chant to the music of flutes and cymbals, and to wear garlands of ivy, and that a golden vine was found in the temple, some have thought that they worshipped father Liber, the conqueror of the East, though their institutions do not by any means harmonize with the theory; for Liber established a festive and cheerful worship, while the Jewish religion is tasteless and mean.\n\nFrom Juvenal (VI.542-547):\n\n > No sooner has that fellow departed than a palsied Jewess, leaving her basket and her truss of hay,[68] comes begging to her secret ear; she is an interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem, a high priestess of the tree,[69] a trusty go-between of highest heaven. She, too, fills her palm, but more sparingly, for a Jew will tell you dreams of any kind you please for the minutest of coins.\n\nBy Juvenal's standards, that is fairly tame. I think that sums up the \"weird eastern cult\" aspect.\n\nVarro's opinion was rather higher. Transmitted through Augustine:\n\n > For more than 170 years, the Romans of old worshipped the gods without an image. If this practice had remained down to the present day\u2019, he [Varro] says, \u2018the gods would have been worshipped with greater purity\u2019 (castius dii observarentur). In support of thisopinion, he cites, among other things, the testimony of the Jewish nation\n\n > (frg. 18Cardauns; Aug.,The City of God 4.31).\n\nAdd that to the long list of why I want to read Varro's *Divine Antiquities*.", "Rome was a hodgepodge of religions, and most people didn't care who you worshipped in private as long as your publicly paid lip service to the official state religion of Jupiter and the like. \n\nJudaism was seen as just another such religion. Many roman soldiers converted to middle eastern religions during wars there and spread them around the empire.\n\nBut where Judaism ran into problems was that it mingles government and religion. Their king was chosen by god, so pledging loyalty to another leader and religion was tantamount to blasphemy, which led to plenty of political problems for both sides. Hence Jesus' call to render unto caesar what is due or however that passage goes. \n\nThis also explains why christianity was pretty much ignored and tolerated when it was still a small religion; it was just another cult. But when it became large enough and its followers refused to publicly worship the traditional roman gods, they clashed with the government. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "46o166", "title": "In \"The Dialectic of Sex,\" Shulamith Firestone claims that childhood was essentially an invention of the 15th century, and that before that point male children were treated as adults and functioned perfectly well in adult society. Is this true?", "selftext": "I've really enjoyed the book but a couple of her assertions didn't sit right and this in particular seemed honestly kind of absurd. Someone who could address this would be very much appreciated. Also, just as kind of a side thing, what's the current thought on this book? I know it was pretty influential back in the day and I've liked a lot of it but it does definitely date itself at times", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46o166/in_the_dialectic_of_sex_shulamith_firestone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d06ncd7", "d06r31r", "d06z2yx"], "score": [3, 3, 8], "text": ["Is she focusing on a specific area?  I doubt \"childhood as an invention\" in the 1400s was a global phenomenon.", "Hmm... I was sure there were several great threads on the development of the ideas of childhood, teenagers, etc, but have only been able to find one. Hopefully this is useful to you: an old thread with a response by /u/melaniedaniels\n\n* [Childhood - How  &  Why Invented](_URL_0_)", "I'm not familiar with Firestone's book, but I've written a few times on childhood and adolescence in the premodern world here on AH.\n\n* [Historiography of children and childhood](_URL_0_)\n* [Is adolescence an invention of the 20th century?](_URL_1_) (This has more to do with teenage-hood as a distinct life stage)\n\nMentioned in the second post, Shahar and Hanawalt provide some of the clearest evidence that medieval boys, specifically, were not merely \"little men.\" They show how boys (into teenagehood!) did spend some of their leisure time engaging in some activities practiced by men--but they were still excluded from some, and they still spent some of their time in children's/women's activities. Latin chroniclers also distinguish between youths and boys of \"full maturity.\"\n\nParents writing letters to their sons at university (think ages 15-20) seem quite sure that those sons are not ready to be fully functioning adults, what with how they throw money away on frivolties and neglect their studies and brawl violently at bars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wyynl/childhood_how_why_invented/"], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_are_some_good_histories_of_childhood_and/cz0xth9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pode8/is_adolescence_an_invention_of_the_20th_century/"]]}
{"q_id": "2kgr77", "title": "What rank would a soldier have to be to avoid going 'over the top' in WWI?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2kgr77/what_rank_would_a_soldier_have_to_be_to_avoid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cll7ktl", "cll7otc", "cllbh4a"], "score": [103, 23, 4], "text": ["That's a very interesting question, and relates a lot to a common perception that, once a certain level of authority is reached, the individual is less likely to participate in combat.\n\nThat is a very generalised view, of course, and as such not entirely correct.  An army is a very rigid organization and must be tightly controlled and led.  The closer that leadership is to the fighting, the more effective it can be.  The balance, of course is to not expose high ranking leadership to the dangers of the front unnecessarily.  Also, the larger formation one commands would dictate having to be further removed from the front on the basis of the scale of numbers a Division, Corps or Army commander would be dealing with.\n\nThere also lies a difference in the role of particular persons-what is known as \"the Divisional Wedge\"- which describes the ratio of those engaged in combat to those supporting combat operations.  A Lt Col as a battalion commander would very likely advance with his men, while a Lieutenant assigned to General Headquarters might not ever hear a shot fired in anger. Likewise for NCO's.  A farrier Corporal would be well removed from fighting, performing his job of shoeing horses, whilst a Sergeant in an infantry platoon would certainly see his fair share of the war.\n\nMaj Gordon Corrigan illustrates that even high rank did not exempt one from the dangers of the war: \"Altogether four British lieutenant generals, twelve major generals and eighty-one brigadier generals died or were killed between 1914-1918. A further 146 were wounded or taken prisoner.  Whatever else the generals were doing, they were certainly not sitting in comfortable chateaux.\" *Mud, Blood and Poppycock* Cassell Press, 2003.  ", "I don\u2019t think there is a simple answer for this question.\n\nCertainly battalion commanders would be expected to participate in an attack, while a Lt. General would almost certainly be at Corps rather than participating in the fighting. Between the two \u2013 brigade and divisional command \u2013 the activity of the commanding officer would vary according to the local situation and the practice of the officer himself.\n\nBut it wasn\u2019t unknown for higher ranking officers to be killed in action. Even being a Field Marshall was no guarantee of safety \u2013 Field Marshall Lord Kitchener was killed when his ship struck a mine and Field Marshall Lord Roberts of Khandahar VC died of pneumonia he contracted this when visiting Indian troops. He refused a great coat, insisting he should not be more comfortable than the troops he was inspecting (As an aside, Roberts career was quite amazing as it encompassed the Duke of Wellington, through to aeroplanes, chemical warfare, and armoured cars).\n\nSome 78 British Generals were killed in action during the war (See Bloody Red Tabs by Davies). The breakdown is given as roughly 40% to shellfire, 30% to small arms fire (half of whom at least half were to snipers) with the rest down to accidents, drowning, or not determined.\n\nThe stats are interesting as overall casualties tended to be much more heavily weighted towards artillery (usual figure given as c60% to artillery), whereas Generals seemed to suffer far more small arms fire and particularly sniper fire. This may just be a statistical artefact due to the low sample size, but it\u2019s likely that Generals visiting the front were prime targets for snipers who could identify them by their clothing and other accoutrements. \n\nOn the other hand, you could be a plain old Lieutenant at GHQ in mid 1915 and never see the front. Staff officers were strongly discouraged from visiting the front as the casualties they incurred early in the war were unsustainable and qualified staff officers were a rare commodity indeed (See Gary Sheffield \u2013 Command  &  Control on the Western Front). \n\nOverall, you were probably better off as a private soldier than an officer.\n\n\n\n", "As an addendum to my answers below, and a helpful guide to remembering what unit is larger than the other in organisational tables is this mnemonic:\n\n\"Such Pleasant Company Being Right Beside Dedicated Comrades Always\"\n\nfor\n\n\"Section Platoon Company Battalion Regiment Brigade Division Corps Army\" \n\nFor a more detailed treatise on organisational structure, including approximate numbers in a particular formation [please see my essay posted here](_URL_0_)\n\nedit:formatting"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://ifyebreakfaith.blogspot.ca/2011/08/order-of-battle.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4b2jk6", "title": "What was the video-recording format in the USSR/Ex-socialist countries ? Was there an equivalent to VHS ?", "selftext": "I figured the West has unified its format by only using VHS, and producing VCR to fit one model, though produced by multiple companies. While this is the result of Japanese predominance in electronics manufacturing from the 50's to early 1990's, I believe the USSR didn't have something quite like it. So was there a \"electronic\" country ? (I remember reading about Yugoslavia having been a leader in Socialist-countries computing). What were the means of recording in the USSR, and were there available ? The \"consumer\" market was very different and products were basic (mostly), but I can't picture a European country with no civilian appliance for taping things.\n\nThanks for your answer ! (and also, applies to audio cassette. Were these available in the USSR ?)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4b2jk6/what_was_the_videorecording_format_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d15u0g6"], "score": [3], "text": ["I'm not an expert on The Soviet Union but I have a strong interest in and experience with tech. So a Soviet expert may be able to add a lot to the discussion. But to quickly answer your main question, the main format used popularly in the USSR was VHS and the VCR.\n\nThere were other forms of magnetic  recording devices used mostly by professionals but I don't know much about them. You seem most interested in personal use though. \n\nAccording to several US news articles the machines first appeared by being brought back by those who had travelled to the West. Demand for the devices began to grow and video parlors had opened by 1985 using the VHS format. \n\nHere's a [link](_URL_0_) to a book called \"Split Signals\" by Ellen Propper Mickiewicz. \n\nThis book was published in 1988 and she wrote about television in the USSR during this time and has a section just on VCR production and usage. Highlighted is a reference to the Elektronika VM-12 which was one of the first Soviet produced VCRs. \n\nElectronika is a brand name used to describe consumer products created by Soviet military industrial engineers. It's still in use today in Belarus. Although according to Mickiewicz the VM-12 was produced in Voronezh a Russian city south of Moscow. \n\nUnfortunately I'm unaware of the ability of these Soviet produced machines to record as well as playback. The way Mickiewicz describes the machines it seems like the government wanted to be able to control what was available and supplant a growing black market for video watching with approved materials. \n\nLinks to contemporary news articles:\n\n\n*[Chicago Tribune](_URL_1_) Discusses early use and has some pretty slanted views on Vodka vs Video as a hobby. \n\n\n*[LA Times](_URL_2_) Discusses copy protection and privacy. \n\n\n*[Baltimore Sun](_URL_3_) Written by a Soviet immigrant to America, it has an interesting personal perspective on the format and the exchange of culture it allowed. \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com/books?id=JpzVaLjRqqcC&amp;pg=PA11&amp;lpg=PA11&amp;dq=elektronika+vm-12&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=N0u_5SjAIO&amp;sig=GcjR2TdpDrwQd_RTOpbETXXH87s&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjs7qmwmM3LAhUPx2MKHcPJAScQ6AEISDAL#v=onepage&amp;q=elektronika%20vm-12&amp;f=false", "http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-12-27/entertainment/8503300057_1_soviet-vcr-video-recorders-komsomolskaya-pravda", "http://articles.latimes.com/1991-06-15/entertainment/ca-528_1_video-pirates", "http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-01-04/features/1991004130_1_soviet-union-hippies-movies"]]}
{"q_id": "1ggik8", "title": "What were the different techniques used for making swords across different cultures and time periods?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ggik8/what_were_the_different_techniques_used_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cak1on6"], "score": [3], "text": ["You're not the only one who loves swords! I was just saying the other day how much I miss the old *Highlander* TV series, but anyway... here's my quick round-up of posts discussing sword-making techniques. If anyone remembers any more, add the link as a reply  &  we'll create an entry in the \"popular questions\" wiki. - thx!\n\n[How quickly did swords become too blunt to be effective during battle?](_URL_6_) (probably my all-time favourite post)\n\n[what is the most effective sword/swordsmithing process that history has seen?](_URL_4_)\n\n[Did any nation/culture even begin to approach the level of sword-making of Japan?](_URL_0_)\n\n[What would be the primary differences between a cheap sword and an expensive sword, taking into account different time periods and methods of manufacture?](_URL_3_)\n\n[Thursday Focus | Weaponry](_URL_1_)\n\n[I just watched a NOVA episode on Ulfberht viking swords. There doesn't seem to be much about them elsewhere. Does anyone know a bit more about them, and maybe others like Ingelrii swords?](_URL_5_)\n\n[Armor and/or weapon making resources? (Books, webpages, documentaries, articles?)](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13pr8b/did_any_nationculture_even_begin_to_approach_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zgiqx/thursday_focus_weaponry/c64j4kt", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xp0ox/armor_andor_weapon_making_resources_books/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dxnak/what_would_be_the_primary_differences_between_a/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bl53n/what_is_the_most_effective_swordswordsmithing/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12nono/i_just_watched_a_nova_episode_on_ulfberht_viking/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1avgu4/how_quickly_did_swords_become_too_blunt_to_be/"]]}
{"q_id": "8mpo3x", "title": "Did 13th century English knights fight on foot?", "selftext": "I know there was a similar post like this made about 5 years ago, but that post was regarding 14th century and onwards. Because apparently the practise of knights fighting afoot started in 14th century, but I want to know if 13th century English knights fought on foot too. Like in Battle of Lewes, Battle of Evisham, Battle of Falkirk etc. Because in the illustrations/manuscripts of all knight battles (including 14th century and onwards) I always see the knights on horseback. Obviously if they got knocked-off their horse or if their horse was slain they would have to fight afoot, but did 13th century English knights fight afoot commonly/occasionally? Or only when they had to? And if so, how often did they get knocked off their horses?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8mpo3x/did_13th_century_english_knights_fight_on_foot/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dzq14qd", "dzr54tj"], "score": [15, 5], "text": ["This answer focuses on the Anglo-Norman period, so earlier than the 13th century. But since OP was interested in English knights fighting on foot before the 14th century, I guess this will still be of interest.  \n  \nIn \"Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings 1066-1135\", Stephen Morrillo argues that combined arms tactics was central to many battles in this period, and also points out that sometimes dismounted knights played the part of the heavy infantry. In particular, dismounted knights appear in the Battle of Tinchebrai (1106), the Battle of Br\u00e9mule (1119) and the Battle of Bourgth\u00e9rolde (1124), although often along mounted knights and other infantry. Although the example of three battles seems to be quite small, considering the fact that battles were rare in this period (Morillo counts 7 battles, C. W. Hollister counts 5 battles of significance), this actually accounts for a significant number of Anglo-Norman battles.  \n  \nSo why did this dismounting occur? A knight on horseback can easily retreat, while a knight on foot has less chance of escaping a rout unharmed. Forced into this situation, a dismounted knight must either conquer or die. Indeed, this is often the reason given in the sources for the dismounting of knights. Dismounting has a psychological effect, helping to counteract the fear of harm and death that pervaded every battlefield. In particular, having the knights, the military elite, join the battle lines on foot seems to have been massively encouraging to the common infantry as well. Leaders would often be part of the dismounted to further boost morale. For example, King Henry I seemed to have been on foot in the Battle of Tinchebrai and Br\u00e9mule, and at Bourgth\u00e9rolde, Odo Borleng was dismounted with the knights under his command. In this case, dismounting can be done to reinforce and stiffen an existing infantry line, instead of making up the entire infantry line themselves.  \n  \nAs for how the Anglo-Norman army was able to put this into practice, Morillo argues that it stems from the relatively more centralized nature of Anglo-Norman government. He argues that the superiority of medieval cavalry actually stems from the inferior quality of medieval infantry, which requires cohesion brought about by a strong military tradition and/or professional training, both of which were hard to provide in medieval Western Europe. However, due to the more centralized nature of the Anglo-Norman realm and the professionalism of the Famillia Regis (the king's household), there was a strong core force of knights who could function as effective heavy infantry when dismounted.  \n  \nOn the other hand, in the article \"Battles in England and Normandy, 1066-1154\", Jim Bradbury argues that the dismounting of knights wasn't unique to the Anglo-Normans, but was in fact common in Western Europe. He cites several earlier examples of dismounted knights (such as the Battle of the Dyle in 891) and argues that it grew out of ordinary Frankish tactics, as part of the combined arms response (along with archers and mounted knights) to the threat of a cavalry charge.  \n  \nThis suggests that the practice of dismounting was not uncommon amongst English knights before the 14th century, an might not even be unique to the English. Dismounting was done as part of a wider combined arms battle plan, and deliberately organised. In these cases, the knights would've fought on foot even when not knocked off their horse, since their horse might not even be on the battlefield to begin with.  \n  \nSources:  \n  \n* Stephan Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings 1066-1135  \n* Stephan Morillo, [The \"Age of Cavalry\" Revisited](_URL_0_)  \n* Jim Bradbury, Battles in England and Normandy, 1066-1154 (Part of \"Anglo-Norman Warfare\", edited by Matthew Strickland)  ", "As /u/darthturtle3 has written, knights fighting on foot was very nearly the rule in English warfare from the mid 11th to the mid 12th centuries and was probably part of a larger trend that dates back several centuries. The Anglo-Norman knight, as were their contemporary counterparts and ancestors, was a highly versatile warrior who chose to dismount or charge according to the circumstances he faced.\n\nHowever, by the middle of the 12th century, this had changed substantially. The Battle of Lincoln, in 1141, is probably the last battle of any significance where substantial elements of the army dismounted to fight, though there were obviously some exceptions to this rule as circumstance dictated. However, on the whole, the trend was overwhelming towards knights fighting battles exclusively on horseback.\n\nWhy this occurred is much harder to answer. The tournament began some time in the very late 11th or early 12th century, and reached the height of its popularity in northern France in the 1160s to 1170s. The increased focus on horsemanship and the change in tactics from multiple styles of lance use (over head thrust, uncouched underarm thrust, throwing and couching) a single form (couching) that required considerable training to use properly, in addition to the increasing chivalric tradition, may have reduced the prestige and focus on fighting on foot in general warfare.\n\nAt the same time, there was increasing use of town militias for infantry, and some of these forces became quite skilled at warfare during the period. The arms requirements for service in a town militia, combined with the increased number of men who could afford the equipment due to the increased money economy and overall economic boom may have resulted in sufficiently large bodies of well equipped infantry that dismounting knights to supplement their numbers was no longer considered necessary. Civic pride, the close relationships between the townsmen and the use of town banners could also have increased their willingness and ability to stand up and fight that the morale boost of having knights in the line with them was considered unnecessary. \n\nHowever, these are just theories. We have no clear indication of why fighting on foot was abandoned by knights, just that it occurred. In all the battles fought by the English in the 13th century, knights did not dismount and fight on foot, except during sieges. Even when faced by Welsh and Scottish pike formations, English knights preferred to stay mounted and try to either charge in the hope that the enemy would dissolve in panic or wait until their archers or crossbowmen had thinned the enemy ranks out enough that a charge became viable. It wasn't until after the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 that the English knights began to dismount with any frequency (such as Boroughbridge in 1322). \n\nThis was not yet universal, though, and the initial intention of the English during the Weardale Campaign was to charge the Scots on horseback. Only the treacherous terrain and lack of room to make a charge cause the English to dismount and prepare to fight. Though no battle was fought, this suggests that fighting on foot was not yet the primary mode of fighting for English knights. It wasn't until the Battle of Dupplin Moor in 1332 and Halidon Hill in 1333 that we see dismounted men-at-arms as the primary mode of warfare for the English.\n\nAs for your other questions, I'm afraid that I'm also not able to provide an adequate answer.\n\n**References**\n\n*The Great Warbow*, by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy\n\n*Tournaments*, by Richard Barker and Juliet Barber\n\n*The Art of Warfare in Western Europe*, by J.F. Verbruggen\n\n*The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel*, tr. Nigel Bryant\n\n*Infantry Warfare in the Fourteenth Century*, by Kelly DeVries"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.academia.edu/439213/The_Age_of_Cavalry_Revisited"], []]}
{"q_id": "2og2ge", "title": "In what year and battle did the last recorded charge of knights in heavy armor occur? What conflict last saw widespread use of knights in heavy armor?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2og2ge/in_what_year_and_battle_did_the_last_recorded/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmmue8l", "cmmumbe", "cmn9sar"], "score": [29, 42, 3], "text": ["The latest charge by armoured cavalry that I know of occurred during the Battle of Mars-La-Tour in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. These were a mixed force of Curassiers (armoured cavalry), Dragoons (mounted rifle men) and Uhlans (light cavalry), who participated in what is today known as Von Bredows death ride. \nThe Curassiers in question wore a half breastplate, which was the common armour for units of that type during that period. Armour weights had been declining in European armies since the 30 years war when The House of Orange and the Duchy of Savoy fielded very heavily armoured \"Totenkopf\" contingents in large numbers.", "If you by \"knights\" mean armoured cavalry consisting solely of noblemen, then the charge of the Polish crown army consisting of mostly [Polish winged hussars](_URL_0_), although they had stopped wearing the wings at that time, in the Battle of [Kliszow 1702](_URL_1_). The Polish cavalry threw the Swedish cavalry into disorder and then charged the Swedish infantry twice, but was repulsed both times. The Swedish cavalry then attacked and drove the Poles from the field.", "There really wasn't a \"last charge by knights in armor.\"  Armor simply became (and was perceived as) less effective, and over time, people just left more and more parts of it behind in camp or at home when they went out to fight.  Classical, full-body, articulated plate armor was pretty much out of fashion in western Europe by the second quarter of the 1500s, but people kept wearing various bits and pieces of it [right up to and during the beginning of the first world war.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Polish_Hussar_half-armour_Winged_Riders.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Klissow"], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/French_heavy_cavalry_Paris_August_1914.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "3cs5lp", "title": "Another military or logistics question, how does an army pass a mountain, whether it's supposedly impassable or passable?", "selftext": "Like how Hannibal Barca led his men to/through the Alps to surprise the Romans.\n\nI never gave much thought to it until now. I mean, do they climb the mountain up and down or just find some passes to go through?\nHow do they pass the baggage train?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cs5lp/another_military_or_logistics_question_how_does/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csyx2o6"], "score": [2], "text": ["They (typically. Some people tried some crazy things) just went through known passes, which is why mountains are such great natural defenses. If there are only a small number of passes the defending army knows exactly where their enemy is coming through and can wait for them. Many mountain passes (esp. high mountain passes) are not very wide, either, meaning that armies could only pass through slowly and with great care. It is a pretty dangerous business. \n\nI've been talking about the Mongols too much in this sub recently, but they were going on a raid against Russia and decided to cross the Caucasus Mountains in the middle of the winter. Unfortunately there was only one real passable spot, at Derbent. So they had to \"hire\" (bribe/threaten) guides, but the guides were able to run up ahead and warn everyone on the other side of the mountain that the mongols were coming for an invasion. (Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine By Chris Peers). Don't worry, the Mongols win and then kill everyone and terrify all of the Russian Princes for years, but the Mongols also REALLY want to find a better way to get through (they eventually just take over the city of Derbent, which makes it easier). \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "34u1uc", "title": "How did the Roman people handle military defeats?", "selftext": "I'm a Rome enthusiast, gradually educating myself on my own.  \n\nWe've all read of the triumphs, and of course a victorious general would be popular.  Something I've started to wonder about was the sentiment of the average citizen when Rome was defeated on a large scale, for example at Arausio or Teutoburg.  \n\nI realize it was a different time and completely different mindset, but it still strikes me that military defeats tend to make a leader and a war unpopular in modern times and I wonder if that carries back to more ancient times.  \n\nDid the news just spread so slowly that the impact on the people was minimal?  Were such losses accepted as part of life back then?  Or did popular resistance start to develop?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34u1uc/how_did_the_roman_people_handle_military_defeats/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqy59qh"], "score": [6], "text": ["How would we know what an \"average citizen\" thought?  Every text we have is produced by the elite class.  Whether people lost friends or family is impossible to know in the specifics.\n\nWe do know that military disaster did not affect the political careers of the generals involved.  Rosenstein in *Imperatores Victi* demonstrates very well that statistically military defeat had little or no impact on the further career of a general.  Losing, as long as you got out alive, simply didn't matter.\n\nOn the personal level, among the elite, we do have evidence for friends and family grieving for loved ones.  Both Catullus and Propertius write about that.  Logically you would by extension think the \"average citizen\" would have similar feelings.  There might be stele that can give more of a middle class view of the matter, but I don't know them and I don't have the resources to get them right now."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "449mbw", "title": "Why did the Japanese attack the United States to bring the US into WW2? Were they completely the aggressors or had some US policy given them reasons to attack?", "selftext": "I'm wondering what was going into the thought process of attacking the US. Was it completely to conquer? Were there any US policies or actions that might have made it feel to the Japanese that attacking was necessary?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/449mbw/why_did_the_japanese_attack_the_united_states_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["czolbar"], "score": [8], "text": ["For about 40 years the US and Japan had been on a collision course. A whole host of factors made it so that the nations and populations felt each other was a natural foe, and that when war came it would be particularly brutal. \n\nTo go through a few:\n\n1. Residual Colonialism clashing with Japan's desire to make good its industrialization and ascendancy. The US and UK were still committed to the \"Open Door Policy\" and Western domination of Chinese and nearby markets, while Japan sought a greater sphere of influence itself after smashing Russian power in 1905, and proving itself able to be a colonial power in its own right. \n\n2. Race based policy and rhetoric on both sides. California for instance had some particularly heavy handed anti Asian policies,a nd immigration was severely limited. And deeply held beliefs that immigrants owed allegiance to the Emperor over Washington. Meanwhile 3 generations of Japanese were fed the nationalist narrative of the Yamato Race, one people focused on greatness brought together under the Divine Emperor, and who would replace the Colonial powers as the new dominant power of the Asian peoples. \n\n3. The feelings of dishonor and anger over the Naval Treaties. In the 20's and 30's at the Washington and London Conferences Japan was pressured into accepting a 5:5:3 ratio in Battleships and in general naval tonnage compared to the US and UK. That was seen not as a recognition of global vs regional interests, but as a move to hinder the growth of the rising sun of Japan. There was then national rage and mourning when multiple unfinished battleships were taken from the dockyards and scuttled. \n\n4. Progressive tightening of economic screws by FDR. When Japanese officers in Manchuria repeatedly either acted without prior approval or created crisis, Japan found itself in its long awaited  move to conquer China. In response FDR went through a series of restriction to prevent the US from feeding the war machine for a conflict he was against. Items such as scrap metal were not allowed to be sold to Japanese customers. Finally Oil was embargoed, and this then would have either forced an end to the war, or the IJA and IJN would have ground to a halt. \n\n5. Prevailing thought on how to fix that weakness was to snatch up the Dutch East Indies, and Malaysia from the Netherlands and the UK. However the US controlled Philippines stood in the way, and even without a direct attack the fear was that the US would come to its allies aid, and either way a general war would commence. \n\nSo the key becomes, with a smaller navy, how do you secure the resources needed to wage war, while also fighting off an enemy fleet equal your own?\n\nFrom that problem was born the plan to attack pearl Harbor and try to remove one of those considerations for a time. Thus the war would go A. Knock the USN off balance and freeze them B. Seize the resources you need to keep going in the South pacific. C. Prepare a string of Islands through the Pacific to use as bastions to bleed the USN when it did come to fight, then a giant climactic battle could be joined to sink the rest of them. D. Then hopefully the US would be tired of war and open negotiations which would leave Japan with the territory it needed to be resource independent. \n\nExcellent Sources: War Plan Ornage by Edward S. Miller\n\nPacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll\n\nand Shattered Sword by Parshall and Tully"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1j9vrc", "title": "How did gunpowder weapons change siege tactics?", "selftext": "I appreciate that I'm asking quite a big question, but I'm interested in knowing how sieges changed with the introduction of gunpowder weapons to the battlefield. Before they were used, it's my understanding that a siege could last for months while they starved a city out, and siege weapons might be constructed from nearby timber; in the last century or two, walled cities have become virtually nonexistent and the only real sieges I know of were in WWII, where cities where bombarded by planes and artillery.\n\nI'm interested in the time in between: have there been any examples of gunpowder weapons being used to besiege a city or a fortress? I'd imagine that they'd be rather short affairs, as a couple of cannons could presumably take out pretty much any gate in a matter of hours. It's my understanding that cannons were around before handheld gunpowder weapons, and were used in Europe as far back as the 1300s, so I'm hoping there must be *some* examples of sieges using these weapons.\n\nOn a related note, I'm also interested in learning about military strategy and tactics from the introduction of gunpowder weapons up until the 1800s, so are there any books or other resources that would help me out? I'm looking for a fairly general overview of how gunpowder changed warfare, especially in Europe, and while I appreciate that this is a very big field I'm quite keen to learn about it, so any books or other resources would be a great help.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j9vrc/how_did_gunpowder_weapons_change_siege_tactics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbcjw4d", "cbcnt69", "cbcp5jj", "cbcr1c1", "cbcyab0"], "score": [18, 26, 2, 4, 3], "text": ["A great example of gunpowder changing siege warfare, in my opinion, is the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Sultan Mehmed used a corp of cannons to weaken and bring down the walls, ending the reign of a fortress that had only been taken once before. (The Fall of Constantinople, by Nicolle, Hardon, and Turnbull - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon)\n--Also, the mere fact that gunpowder weapons were more powerful than the previous incarnations of siege weapons changed the face of warfare. What's the point of having massive walls around everything that are expensive to make and maintain when the enemy can roll up with some cannons and knock them down or severely damage them? The entire culture of warfare shifted once gunpowder became more prevalent. ", "They ended up not changing the strategic nature of siege warfare that much at all, except perhaps making the defender even stronger then they had been in previous centuries (how much so varies). Siege tactics, however, changed much more - but less than you'd expect.\n\nThere was a brief period from about the late 14th century to the early 15th century in which advanced cannon (corned powder, bronze barrels, iron shot) were sufficiently new that they let badly-built castles fall quickly, but it was fairly soon after their introduction that defensive countermeasures were introduced.\n\nBut even without those countermeasures, writers of the era noted that *the defender will always bring more guns to bear*. Any castle or fortification is going to be able to outrange and outgun any attacker, as the attacker will only have so many cannon that he can bring into firing range. When you combine this with how incredibly close the attacker needs to bring his weapons to have any effect on the massive walls, this creates a situation that is hugely tilted to the defender's advantage.\n\nDefensive tactics became concerned with overlapping fields of fire, angled walls to deflect cannon balls, and secondary defenses to fall back too. The attacker would have to fight their way up a horrific outer killzone in which any given approach would have the defender's full firepower focused on them (usually by constructing trenches and earthworks inch by inch in a process that might take weeks or months), try their best to knock out the defender's well protected guns near the section of wall they sought to breach (if they didn't, any attack would be blown to shreds), make at least three breaches in the wall, and then launch a simultaneous assault - one that was usually unsuccessful.\n\n[A comparison of pre and post gunpowder \"ideal\" fortifications from David Eltis' *The Military Revolution in Sixteenth Century Europe.*](_URL_1_)\n\nIt was unsuccessful because the defender at this point would have built the famous \"semi-circle\" around the breach points - a massed amount of artillery, arquebusiers, musketeers, and pikemen with their weapons aimed at the small breach in the wall and ensconced safely behind cover. When the enemy troops charged in, everyone would fire. And keep firing. Once the smoke cleared, the pikemen would charge the disoriented enemy and rout them - and the process would begin again.\n\nEven the most outdated of castles could be decently well defended in this situation, by allowing the attacker to breach the walls and killing him when he got in. Custom designed fortifications were even more impossible to take - I'd recommend reading up on the Second Siege of Rhodes and the Siege of Malta to see exactly what faced an attacker who assaulted a fortified position with a determined defender.\n\n**Bibliography:**\n\nEltis, David. *The Military Revolution in Sixteenth Century Europe.* New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1998. Print.\n\nHall, Bert. *Weapons  &  Warfare in Renaissance Europe.* London: The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., 1997. Print.\n\n**Other comments:**\n\n > It's my understanding that cannons were around before handheld gunpowder weapons, and were used in Europe as far back as the 1300s, so I'm hoping there must be some examples of sieges using these weapons.\n\nA common opinion, but it's actually unclear. The current historiography has \"handheld\" (two man) weapons as the first to emerge, which makes sense when you think of how complicated it is to cast the barrel for/successfully use large gunpowder weapons.\n\n > On a related note, I'm also interested in learning about military strategy and tactics from the introduction of gunpowder weapons up until the 1800s, so are there any books or other resources that would help me out? I'm looking for a fairly general overview of how gunpowder changed warfare, especially in Europe, and while I appreciate that this is a very big field I'm quite keen to learn about it, so any books or other resources would be a great help.\n\nHa, I came to this subreddit with almost the exact same question about 8 months ago. After I had learned a lot about the subject, [I answered my own question here] (_URL_0_) along with some other ones that I had. You might be interested.", "Some good sources that immediately spring to mind:\nSiege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494-1660 by Christopher Duffy.\nMilitary Architecture by Quentin Hughes.\nThe Fortress series by Osprey books covers pretty much everything, and several books in the series cover the time period in which you're interested (I own nearly all of them).\nArcher Jones and Bert Hall are both excellent.", "Disclaimer: I am not a professional academic but I have written a senior paper on the subject, no access to it now but I can remember most of how it went. \n\nThis is a pretty complicated topic, certainly things changed in terms of the mechanics of how sieges worked logistically. The thing is that this really gets a bit muddled because almost as soon as guns came into general use defenders began adapting to them. This culminated with the invention and adoption of the Trace Italienne which, as others have indicated, would end reversing the advantage in sieges from the attacking to the defending forces. \n\nLet's start at the beginning, around the Hundred Years' War, which saw the first widespread use of cannons in the West. It is possible that cannons were used earlier, at the Siege of Cordova in 1280, but devices at this event are not certain. In any event, the practice of bringing cannons to sieges became commonplace around 1370. Clearly these weapons demonstrated their advantage quickly, in at least one instance, at Ardres in 1377, Phillip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was able to force a surrender just demonstrating that he had cannons. In other cases as few as 3 shots would have been needed, not necessarily even hitting the walls of the fortification.  I should, at this point, mention the fact that even bringing cannons to a siege, while common, was a big deal. It was really hard to move these gunpowder weapons around in the 14th century, and they were prone to failure (catastrophically in fact); cannons were also incredibly expensive. So expensive that they were only affordable to the richest men in Europe (I believe there are paper relating the expenses of gunpowder to centralization in Europe but I can't recall any specific authors). \n\n\nSo this sounds like a pretty big game changer right? We all know how the story ends, with Italians inventing the Trace in the second half of the 15th century, but was there nearly 100 years of irresistible sieges taking place in the interim?  The answer is no. Almost as soon as guns started knocking down walls military planners started devising defenses. Interestingly Kelly DeVries (one of my favourite scholars of the period) argues that these advances took place mostly in France and the Low Countries than in Italy since they were constantly at war in the period. \n\n\nWhat features were common on these proto Star Forts? Mostly gun ports, artillery towers, boulevards, brickwork construction  & c. \n\nSo, in closing, while the Vauban and his forerunners were able to neutralize the impact of gunpowder in the length and outcome of sieges there are a number of curious side effects. My favourite of which is the fact that fortifications prudently became very, very expensive. So expensive that many states literally could not afford them. The fortifications of Antwerp cost over 1 million florins during this period, and the Republic of Siena met its demise when fortifications were so expensive that it could no longer pay for an army. Some scholars view the need for these fortifications as one of the major motivators away from the medieval system towards early modern states. \n\nI have to apologize that I only have some brief notes on my work computer from a paper I once wrote, no access to the sources here. I'll remember to add some links in a few hours, although almost all of them will be on JSTOR and behind the paywall. If you are interested in the military history of this period I can't recommend papers written by De Vries, who was mentioned above, enough.   ", "There's a general misconception that cannon instantly changed siege warfare, made castles useless and thereby made minor feudal lords powerless to oppose their cannon-owning lieges, and made battles more common than sieges. This isn't really true; it took a long time for siege warfare to change and, if anything, they lasted longer and became more difficult, expensive, and common. What is true is that cannon were adopted very quickly and were used wholeheartedly. Even though there was chivalric and religious opposition to gunpowder, this didn't prevent it being used by pragmatic rulers. Cannon were used on the battlefield at Crecy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356, mere decades after the technology had appeared. They were a staple of siege warfare by the start of the fifteenth century, used extensively in (and to a large part responsible for) Henry V's successful invasion of Normandy in 1417-19 and by the French in their counter-invasion. Several key English commanders were killed by cannon, and they were instrumental in French victory at Castillon. Developments in fortification also advanced quickly, with gunports appearing in conventional fortifications around the 1370s and trace-italienne fortifications--of the type which would become ubiquitous into the 19th century--becoming increasingly popular  around the end of the fifteenth century. It was seen as a sign of prestige to own a large artillery train, despite the fact that, as we will see, they probably didn't justify the expense. So there was very little hesitation in using gunpowder to the fullest extent possible.\n\nHowever, it's doubtful whether it had as meaningful an influence on warfare as some have assumed. The initial vulnerability of fortresses led to a brief renaissance for heavy cavalry, which were naturally restricted in wars which were primarily siege-based, but sieges quickly became common once again when fortification technology caught up. The Charles V of France's campaign to Naples in 1494-5 provides a good case-study of the effectiveness of artillery in sieges. Chronicler Guicciardini  made much of the size and modernity of Charles' artillery train, claiming that 'such artillery rendered Charles' army very formidable to all Italy'. This view wasn't borne out by events. Two modern fortresses, incorporating deep, wide ditches, round bastions for artillery and triangular outworks to enfilade the walls, stopped the French army in its tracks. Its attacks made no headway before a diplomatic solution was reached which allowed Charles to advance south by another route; his artillery hadn't been able to defeat modern fortifications. Even Naples, which was protected only by essentially medieval fortifications with minor modifications (such as a firing platform round the base of the walls of the Castel Nuovo, the main fortification), proved a tough nut to crack. The siege was fairly rapid by medieval terms, less than a month long, but considering that the French employed a constant bombardment by around 70 guns, day and night, the performance of the artillery wasn't especially impressive; after 10 days of bombardment only superficial damage had been done to the Castel Nuovo. The indifferent performance of the guns caused the French to resort to frontal assaults, and the castle eventually fell because an ammunition explosion (a fluke event, which could have been caused by accident rather than as a result of the bombardment) broke the shaky morale of the Aragonese defenders. Given a more resolute garrison the city could have held out for longer, as is indicated by the five-month siege that took place when the French were themselves besieged there two months later. The Aragonese artillery was also unsuccessful in dislodging the defenders and they too resorted to conventional methods--assaults and a mine dug under the castle. This was filled with gunpowder and blown up in conjunction with an infantry assault--possibly the first time in history this method was used. If this shows that gunpowder had useful applications in siege warfare, it also shows that older methods were still viable, and that artillery didn't revolutionise siege warfare. It was conventional escalade and mining, not artillery bombardment, which captured Naples on both occasions. The prestige granted by cannon, and their percieved effectiveness (Charles' artillery probably caused artillery and fortification development in Italy to accelerate) were not really matched by their effectiveness, and sieges were, certainly for the first couple of centuries in which cannon were used, usually concluded by older, proven methods.\n\nTL;DR: Cannon weren't as revolutionary as everyone thinks.\n\n**Sources**: \n\n* Simon Pepper, Castles and Cannon in the Naples campaign of 1494\u201095, in David Abulafia, *The French Descent into Italy 1494\u201095* (1995), pp.263\u2010293.\n* J.R. Hale, Gunpowder and the Renaissance, J.R. Hale, *Renaissance War Studies* (1983), pp.389\u2010420.\n\nBert S. Hall, *Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe* (1997) is a great in-depth study of how gunpowder weaponry developed and how it influenced tactics. Also very useful is Thomas Arnold, *The Renaissance at War* (2001), especially the chapter on 'The New Legions'. Keep in mind when you're reading that gunpowder weaponry went hand-in-hand with other developments (perhaps most importantly the formation of standing armies emulating Swiss pikemen, which led directly the the introduction of drill). Gunpowder was never the only (or even the most important) factor, even though you might get that impression since it tends to be the focus of most works."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i58ys/friday_freeforall_july_12_2013/cb16qss", "http://imgur.com/B0dyLz0"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "87bczk", "title": "Palestine to Israel", "selftext": "Why was Palestine suddenly renamed to Israel after the British withdrawal in May 1948? Did this have any significance?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/87bczk/palestine_to_israel/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwbq72h"], "score": [9], "text": ["Do you mean, why did the State of Israel call itself \u201cIsrael\u201d and not \u201cPalestine\u201d? The end of the British mandate on 14 May coincided precisely with the declaration of the State of Israel, which was made that evening. A few minutes later the United States recognized Israel. Recognition from other countries would arrive in the coming hours and days.\n\nOther than that I\u2019m not sure I understand the question?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "15ogth", "title": "Why was Australia not fought over the same way as Africa?", "selftext": "I would have assumed that a shiny new continent being found in the late 18th/early 19th century would be fought over and carved up between the powers, but it wasn't. It just changed hands once(between European powers), and rather peacefully, correct?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15ogth/why_was_australia_not_fought_over_the_same_way_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7obpl3", "c7oefps"], "score": [14, 68], "text": ["No-one wanted it, no-one wanted to move there. The Portuguese, who were there first, described it as the worst place imaginable. At that time, there were lots of places to go if you wanted to leave your homeland, like the freshly depopulated Americas. Even the British didn't see much more use in it than to punish convicts by sending them there. Some of the best places were also protected by the Great Barrier Reef and the likes. Also, there was very little actively planned colonisation efforts, it was more about establishing trading outposts and getting resources. Australia was too far off to do either economically.", " >  It just changed hands once(between European powers), and rather peacefully, correct?\n\nIt never changed hands between European powers. The Dutch, who were the first Europeans to map Australia, never claimed it. They mapped it and named it (New Holland), but nothing more than that. The first \u2013 and only \u2013 European power to make any claim to the continent of Australia was England.\n\nAnd, the reason the Dutch didn\u2019t make a claim to Australia was because the part they saw \u2013 the western and north-western coast \u2013 was mostly uninhabitable. The north-west portion of the continent is mostly arid land or desert. There was no benefit to be seen in this land. The logs of the ship *Duyfken* [described what they saw in 1606](_URL_0_):\n\n\n >  for the greatest part desert, but in some places inhabited by wild, cruel, black savages, by whom some of the crew were murdered, for which reason they could not learn anything of the land or waters as had been desired of them.\n\nThe captain of that ship [also wrote](_URL_5_):\n\n >  \u201c... that vast regions were for the greater part uncultivated, and certain parts inhabited by savage, cruel black barbarians who slew some of our sailors, so that no information was obtained touching the exact situation of the country and regarding the commodities obtainable and in demand there.... \u201c  He found the land to be swampy and infertile, forcing them eventually to give up and return to Bantam due to their lack of \u201c... provisions and other necessaries ....\u201d\n\nIt wasn\u2019t an attractive land!\n\nIt was only much later, when Captain James Cook mapped the *east* coast of Australia, that Europeans learned that this mysterious southern land had fertile areas.\n\nThe first European claim to Australia was made on 7th February 1788, when the officers of the recently arrived First Fleet read out the King\u2019s documents, announcing his claim to the land of \u201cNew South Wales\u201d \u2013 but only as far west as [longitude of 135\u00b0E](_URL_4_) (this was later revised to [longitude 129\u00b0E](_URL_2_), where the current border of Western Australia is). The reason for not claiming the whole southern continent was not because the Dutch had claimed the western portion - they hadn\u2019t - but to prevent offending the Dutch in case they *wanted* to claim that portion. However, in 1829, the British started a settlement on the west coast of Australia with no protest from the Dutch \u2013 obviously they\u2019d worked out by then that the Dutch really didn\u2019t want the place.\n\nThe race to settle and claim the continent of Australia over the next century was not between the British and the Dutch \u2013 the British saw their rivals as the French, who were expanding their holdings in the Pacific.\nIn 1803, Governor King wrote to an official in the office of the British Admiralty that:\n\n >  It was reported to me soon after the French Ships sailed that a principal object of their voyage was to fix on a Place at Van Diemens Land for a Settlement [...] with this Information I considered it my duty to establish His Majesty\u2019s Right to that Island being within the limits of this Territory [New South Wales], I therefore despatched a Colonial Vessel [which made] an accurate Survey of King\u2019s Island and Port Phillip at the West entrance of Basses Straits.\n\n >  Making the French Commodore acquainted with my intentions of Settling Van Dieman\u2019s Land, was all I sought by this Voyage\n\n >  Under all these circumstances I judged it expedient to form a Settlement at Risdon Cove in the River Derwent [modern-day Hobart]\n\n >  My reasons for making this Settlement are :\u2013 the necessity there appears of preventing the French gaining a footing on the East side of these Islands [etc]\n\nAt the time, [Britain was officially at war with France]( _URL_1_).\n\nThe expedition King mentions was led by Captain David Collins of the *Calcutta*. He did start [a settlement in Port Phillip in 1803]( _URL_3_), in order to prevent the French from using the area as a base for military actions. However, he abandoned the settlement after only eight months, due to conflict with the local Aboriginals, and poor outlook for farming. He moved on to the Derwent River, where he founded Hobart Town.\n\nNearly a hundred years later, the French were still seen as a threat by Australians. The threat of French military action in the Pacific in the late 1800s was one of the many motivations for federating the colonies into a single country.\n\nHowever, there was never a war over Australia, nor did it ever change hands from one European power to another. As to why not... that\u2019s a mystery. People didn\u2019t write down their motives for not starting a war which didn\u2019t happen. However, I can speculate:\n\n* The Dutch saw no reason to go to war over a continent which they knew about 150 years before the English, but which they\u2019d never bothered to claim because it was inhospitable. \n\n* France, the other major player, was too busy with revolutions and defensive wars in Europe in the late 1700s and early 1800s to take action in the Pacific arena on the other side of the world. They did posture a lot, and did claim many islands in the Pacific near Australia, but never actually moved on the colonies themselves.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://gutenberg.net.au/ausexplore/ausexpl0-intro1.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars#War_between_Britain_and_France.2C_1803.E2.80.931814", "http://atlas.nsw.gov.au/49224f8044cef2a4b9bfbdd82b1b1b2f/NSW%2b1825_1831_v2.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Victoria#1803_British_settlement", "http://atlas.nsw.gov.au/453f3c8044cee01ab992bdd82b1b1b2f/NSW%2b1787_1825_v2.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janszoon_voyage_of_1606#Turnabout"]]}
{"q_id": "1jgpg7", "title": "What really happened in melee combat?", "selftext": "Sorry if this has been asked before, couldn't find it if so.\n\nWhat is the best evidence we have for what infantry combat before firearms was really like? *Gates of Fire* (historical fiction about Thermopylae) suggests a literal physical press of bodies, with barely room to swing a sword. I've also heard it claimed that this would be unbearably mentally and physically exhausting, and the opposing lines would have drawn up a few metres from each other and taunted eachother, with the occasional hothead dashing up for quick poke before retiring, and the real killing not starting until one side broke. \n\nOr could it be like my limited experience in modern riot-control training, drawing up nearby, a charge and a brief organised clash if the charged held their ground, and then retiring a few metres to recoup for the next wee attack.\n\nI presume it didn't break down into a Hollywood jumble of mingled combatants from all sides with plenty of open space to swing weapons without interference, but what did happen?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1jgpg7/what_really_happened_in_melee_combat/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbeifhn", "cbej42g", "cbejgva", "cbes8kc", "cbf3v7e"], "score": [6, 6, 14, 3, 2], "text": ["I recommend reading the first few chapters of \"Face of Battle\" by Keegan.  It describes, with some detail, hand-to-hand combat in the Hundred Years War.  It doesn't get into the classic hoplite battles you are probably referencing but it does go into things like the types of wounds suffered from blade weapons, maces, battle axes, cavalry charges, arrows, etc. This was a few hundred years before we saw the wide-scale use of firearms and artillery.", "Robert L. O'Connell's *The Ghosts of Cannae* opens with a fairly detailed description of the legendary Roman defeat.\n\nNot sure how much I'm allowed to transcribe into this reply, but the overarching picture is one of chaos and desperation. Men savagely slashing at one another's vitals in the suffocating heat of summer, wounded soldiers crying in agony, and the unimaginable terror and despair experienced by the Romans when they realised retreat had been cut off.", "It really varies wildly based on culture, time, technology, organization, numbers, etc. Despite being from a post-gunpowder era, I feel you might be interested in a clash of pikes.\n\nDrawing from my study, the early 16th century, if serious combat was joined it was likely to be a clash of equally matched pike formations. If one side had a serious advantage due to flanking, supporting gunfire, or other factors then the combat was likely to end quickly in a rout or retreat (or massacre). Otherwise, you'd have the famous \"bad war\" or \"push of pike\".\n\nWhile one side might brace to receive a charge, it was more common for both to charge as soon as they were close enough to try and gain an advantage in the ensuing melee. The two formations would slam together, and pikes would pierce people and throw them to the ground. The armored front ranks might fare surprisingly well, but the pikes would reach back to the greener troops behind the first few ranks who would have less complete suits of plate and slice into their flesh. The formations would push and shove against each other in a horrid mass of pikes, men, and mud as the earth beneath their feet stirred into dust. Soldiers further back would try and drag their wounded friends away from the melee, and humanely dispatch mortally wounded enemies with a quick thrust of a sidearm (dagger or sword), but there was serious risk of being trampled to death if wounded.\n\nAdditional pike formations might join the clash or create others nearby, but eventually enough time would pass that auxiliary infantry would be able to join, or they might have already been attached to the formation. These are dedicated troops that are meant to turn the tide in a push of pike, and whichever formation had included more of them would have a serious advantage. Soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire might bring along two-handed swordsmen, who would try to hack their way into the enemy formation or (maybe) cut the enemy's pikes into pieces. The Swiss would have their halberdiers join their pikemen in pushing, but the halberds could be drawn backwards and forwards to saw through armor and into men's bodies. The Spanish would send fighter in plate armor, steel shields, and nimble swords to slip past/under/to the side of enemy pikes and stab at the men in the formation - even sliding/wriggling over the ground if it was muddy enough.\n\nThis screaming, cursing, struggling mass of men would continue shoving against each other until one side had enough and fled, often dropping their pikes in the process, or disengaged and retreated. This could be caused by flank attacks by cavalry or other infantry, the soldiers suffering too much psychological trauma to go on, or point blank arquebus and/or crossbow fire breaking their cohesion. Officers would seek to prevent this by quickly directing troops to gaps, keeping an eye out for flankers or missile troops, and rallying the troops to keep fighting.\n\nDuring these battles, small units of arquebusiers or crossbowmen would often be intermingled with the formation and fire point blank into the enemy's faces. In the Battle of Ceresole, the French included an entire line of arquebusiers right behind the first rank of Swiss pikemen. They caused a dreadful slaughter among the opposing Landschneckt, but must have not enjoyed it when the lines met. Regardless, bullets and crossbow bolts would be flying into the front ranks and flanks, who would trust to luck and their armor to deflect the worst of the damage.\n\nYou can see how critical morale would be in this kind of warfare - a single man dropping his pike and fleeing could be enough to start a rout. \"Bad war\" was deeply feared by all soldiers, and pike formations tried their best to ensure that the clash was on terms that was very favorable to them - but the realities of combat meant that matched encounters of pikes occurred in most major battles.", "[Here](_URL_0_) is a my favorite article about this.  It's called the Face of Roman Battle (playing off of the Face of Battle) and it seeks to answer the question of what, exactly, occurred in the Roman infantry battle.  \n\nHe uses the times we have for battles (many of which are hours long) to reconstruct what could have happened.  Basically, for battles that long, you can't have that much actual sword fighting going on as it would tire people too quickly.  So he proposes something very similar to a combination of your points: the lines drawn up a few (maybe more like 20) meters apart, taunting and using missile weapons, then a charge b one side or the other.  The charged side would either move back ('driving the enemy back' is a common phrase that gets tossed around by ancient writers) or take the charge, at which point there would be a brief clash with weapons and then one side or the other would withdraw.  It is the job of the Centurions or equivalent NCO types to make sure that your side is the one charging and the one moving forward rather than back.  This is very hard because people don't want to be stabbed (even less than they want to be shot--think about how scary bayonets were/are).\n\nThis, of course, doesn't answer your question for anything non-Roman, especially the raging debate over what happened in hoplite battle (pushing? stabbing?) but I hope it helps at least with that.", "If you're looking for a very detailed description of hoplite warfare, Victor Hanson, _The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece_ has a _lot_ of detail in it. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/300198?uid=3739560&amp;uid=4583032757&amp;uid=2129&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=70&amp;uid=3&amp;uid=3739256&amp;uid=60&amp;sid=21102517809957"], []]}
{"q_id": "37daro", "title": "How much of their forces did germany devote to the eastern front in WWI?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37daro/how_much_of_their_forces_did_germany_devote_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crlsanh"], "score": [3], "text": ["By February 1916 the Germans had c. 50 divisions on the eastern front; by September of that year, the number had risen to c. 70 divisions. When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, there were 1.5 million German troops in the East, of which 500 000 were shifted to the Western Front by the spring of 1918, starting already in late 1917. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2drlxm", "title": "Historically speaking, Ukraine wasn't where it is now. It's in what used to belong to Crimea. What's the logic behind Ukraine's placement after the fall of the USSR?", "selftext": "So today I learned that for most of it's history, Ukraine was in a completely different part of Europe than we think of today (That is to say, more towards central-eastern Europe). On the other hand, the place we now think of as Ukraine was, historically speaking (Before Russian involvement), more Crimean (Specifically the Crimean Horde). Maybe it's touching a bit into current topical events, but why was it decided that Ukraine should occupy the area that's historically Crimea? Also, not to make any comments on current politics, why wasn't Crimea independent from the first place after the dissolution of the USSR?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2drlxm/historically_speaking_ukraine_wasnt_where_it_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjszwct"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm no expert so I don't have any answer, but could you clarify what you're talking about a little? If I look at some easy-to-find sources (wikipedia, etc.) on the history of Ukraine, I'm not seeing anything that looks like this:\n\n > Ukraine was in a completely different part of Europe than we think of today (That is to say, more towards central-eastern Europe)\n\nBorders have changed a bit of course, but everything I saw seemed to be situated around the western/central regions of modern Ukraine. Maybe you have a map illustrating what you mean?\n\nThis might just be me not finding good sources, of course - I've not spent so long looking, and most searches for \"historical Ukraine\" and the like are just full of information about historical sites within Ukraine... "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "240sxx", "title": "I've heard that the Ancient Romans saw large penises as a sign of barbarism. To what extent is this the case?", "selftext": "And if so, why?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/240sxx/ive_heard_that_the_ancient_romans_saw_large/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2l1wh"], "score": [14], "text": ["In general, the surviving sculptures, vases, and writings describing male beauty in the Greco-Roman world depict the ideal of beauty for men (especially young men) as being hairless, thin, athletic, and with a small penis with a tapering foreskin. Large penises are most often found on satyrs, ugly old men, and barbarians, which suggests that they were viewed as grotesque, comical, and outlandish. In his study *Greek Homosexuality*, Kenneth Dover writes:\n\n > In caricature and in the representation of satyrs a penis of great \nsize, even of preposterous size, is very common, and it is a reasonable \nconclusion (though not, I admit, an inescapable conclusion) that if a \nbig penis goes with a hideous face, and a small penis with a handsome \nface, it is the small penis which was admired.\n\nAs for why this would be the case, we can only speculate, but *Greek Homosexuality* does a good job of arguing why and how Greco-Roman conceptions of sexuality were not the same as modern conceptions of sexual orientation. Sexuality was considered more fluid, especially in the case of sexual relationships between older men and adolescent boys, which were not seen to make either of the participants exclusively homosexual. Therefore a standard of male beauty evolved around what these older men desired in younger men, which tended to be a slim, hairless, somewhat feminine physique with a small penis, rather than a more virile or well-endowed standard based around, for example, female sexual pleasure or desire. It was the older men who largely ran Greek and Roman society, and who created and patronized most of the art and literature, so it is their concept of male beauty which we know about.\n\nA PDF of *Greek Homosexuality* is [here](_URL_0_). I pulled that quote from page 126.\n\nEDIT: I realize this answer is mostly about the Greeks when OP asked about the Romans, but from what I've heard the Romans had similar views on penis size as the Greeks, and *Greek Homosexuality* was the best academic source I could find about ancient Mediterranean dick size preferences."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://tajakramberger.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/k-_j-_dover_greek_homosexuality_updated_and_witbookfi-org.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2rlq23", "title": "How did arabic women dress during the abbasid caliphate?", "selftext": "I was watching Aladdin the other day, and I was thinking that a woman in that region of the world could never get away with wearing what they have women wearing in the movie (they're dressed like belly dancers) in public. I'm not indicting disney for their historical accuracy because obviously it's just a light-hearted cartoon, but it did make me wonder: what did women wear around the time of the abbasid caliphate or the caliphates around that time? Did they adhere to the ideas of modesty that we attribute to modern states that follow a very rigid form of islamic law?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2rlq23/how_did_arabic_women_dress_during_the_abbasid/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnh9z3w"], "score": [3], "text": ["The actual cultural dress? No idea. But they were definitely not dressed like belly dancers. The average Muslim woman would have covered the majority of her body other than her face, hands, and feet. Muslim males would have covered the same area except for manual laborers who might have taken their shirt off while working. The actual outfits might have varied from place to place within the Abbassid caliphate but that is what would have been covered by free women in the major cities. \n\nOf course, in distant lands controlled by the Abbassids, you could have any range of dress. I think ibn Battuta mentions in his travels to Africa that he was shocked by how much skin women showed. However, the fact that he was shocked by it shows how rare it would have been in central Abbassid lands."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3am05w", "title": "How would people get phone messages during the 1930's?", "selftext": "Not everyone had access to a personal phone but I assume buildings would have them in the lobby (or at least hotels would). It would be convenient to have a number to give out but private messages would be a bit less private if someone has to write them down. Are my assumptions correct that someone at the \"front desk\" would take your message and give it to you later? \n\nSorry, this may be a silly question. \n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3am05w/how_would_people_get_phone_messages_during_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csdwe98"], "score": [6], "text": ["Not a silly question. There were two types of calls that could be made during this time: person-to-person and station-to-station. If you had a specific person you wanted to talk to you would request a person-to-person call. You wouldn't be billed for the long distance charges until that person came to the phone. This was metered by having the operator on the line with you until the person you wanted came to the phone. Station-to-station calls were made when you didn't really care about who you talked to and one could leave a message with the person who answered if it was intended for a specific person.\n\nInterestingly, person-to-person calls are still available though I don't think anyone uses them anymore. If you look at AT & T's [rates for operator assisted calls](_URL_0_) it shows why one might have hesitated to use this service. The prices were much higher for person-to-person. The upside was you'd likely get billed for fewer minutes.\n\nAn interesting note about billing.. the way that billing worked back in the early days of cross country calling was that it was billed in three-minute increments. I have an advertisement from 1927 from a magazine (unfortunately I don't know what magazine as it was just the single page when it was given to me) that says that a call from San Francisco to New York was $9 per billing segment. If you take inflation into account that would be around $120 or $40 per minute today! Clearly you had to be very well to makes calls of this type for personal reasons.\n\nNow regarding privacy, when working with the telegraph and telephone companies at the time there were often a number of people involved in the loop. With telegraphs there was someone on the sending and receiving end who were privy to your communications. With phone calls it was very easy for the operators along the route to listen in, though it wasn't really standard operating practice to do so. The employees of whatever company was employed were of course supposed to keep everything in confidence but you can imagine this wasn't always the case.\n\nThat's not to say that privacy wasn't a concern. There's a documented case of a tenant trying to break a lease when they discovered their calls were being listened to. A judge in the 10th District Municipal Court of New York City ruled that it was legal for the lease to be broken. (New York Times, Dec. 1, 1907, p. C12) Relatively early on there were concerns from the financial industry about telephone privacy as well. (See a letter published in the New York Times, Apr. 22, 1916, p. 10) It wasn't really until the advent of Direct Distance Dialing in the 1950s and 1960s that one could feel relatively secure in an operator not listening in on their calls."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=13695"]]}
{"q_id": "3oj7sx", "title": "What race was Attila?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3oj7sx/what_race_was_attila/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvxsvlz"], "score": [6], "text": ["Do you mean what race *would* be Attila today? Race as we know it today is an early modern construct that wouldn't have played the same role in his life, akin to saying was he a Christian or a Muslim. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ystwr", "title": "What is the reason for China's relatively modest nuclear arsenal? Why is China the only nuclear weapons state to have given an unqualified security assurance to non-nuclear-weapon states?", "selftext": "An [Economist article](_URL_0_) suggests that China has had about ~200-250 nuclear warheads since the 1980s. What explains why China never wanted to make more?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ystwr/what_is_the_reason_for_chinas_relatively_modest/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpcog56", "cpcv5ui", "cpe23ef"], "score": [17, 97, 4], "text": ["Can you provide a link to the article and a source for the \"unqualified assurance\"?", "Under the theory of nuclear deterrence, most nuclear weapons states have little reason to build beyond that quantity of warheads. It's enough to effectively destroy any country. That's one reason why most nuclear weapons states stop near the 300 mark. The US and Russia are the exception because of their massive arms race during the Cold War.\n\nSource:\nThe Spread of Nuclear Weapons by Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan has a lot on this topic", "First of all, I would like to note that the capability of available delivery systems matters almost as much, and perhaps more, than the total number of warheads. I can't really comment more on this topic in regards to the PLA 2nd Artillery Corps without violating the 20 year rule of this subreddit.\n\nMore importantly though, the PRC simply didn't have the military resources or technology to devote to a large scale nuclear weapons production program or large numbers of advanced delivery systems. \n\nLastly, the PRC didn't have a nuclear policy that relied upon being able to fight what could be a long, large scale nuclear conflict with the USSR or USA. Instead, the PRC appears to have adopted a nuclear policy similar to India or Pakistan: [minimum credible deterrance](_URL_0_) Their nuclear arsenal is meant to make the potential costs of nuclear escalation with the PRC greater than the potential benefits of such a confrontation. The USA may be able to flatten every military base and major city in the PRC. How much are Americans really going to care though if the Chinese are able to hit say: Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago with high yield warheads?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21645729-quarter-century-after-end-cold-war-world-faces-growing-threat-nuclear"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credible_minimum_deterrence"]]}
{"q_id": "19zp74", "title": "I stumbled across an image of the inside of the Hagia Sophia, it appears Christian imagery was not removed by the ottomans, why was this?", "selftext": "[image in question](_URL_0_)\n\nSo this is apparently the inside of the Hagia Sophia, I had believed Muslim empires and the ottomans were strict aniconists that would remove this sort of thing, so why was it not?\n\nRespect for the building's origin?  Was this common practice in converted cathedrals?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19zp74/i_stumbled_across_an_image_of_the_inside_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8sri2o"], "score": [103], "text": ["These mosaics were painted over but not removed when the city was taken by Mehmed II. Minarets, minbar, and mihrab were added and it became a functional mosque. After the fall of the empire and the transformation of the Hagia Sophia from mosque into museum in the 1920s, restorationists removed some of the plaster and whitewash to reveal the mosaics underneath."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/tKXm55i.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1mcoke", "title": "Why do the Indian and Chinese depictions of Buddha differ so much?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mcoke/why_do_the_indian_and_chinese_depictions_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cc7y8ym", "cc85b69"], "score": [46, 7], "text": ["Are you referring to the fat Chinese Buddha? He's just a folklore deity named [Budai](_URL_2_), not a depiction of Siddhartha Gautama. \n\n[This is one of the largest Buddha statue in Sichuan, China](_URL_1_), [here's a Buddha statue in Shaolin Temple](_URL_0_), and [here's a generic mass-produced Buddha statue](_URL_3_) from China, they are not that different from Indian ones. ", "There are multiple reasons for this. One is that- in general- how a particular Buddha is depicted depends highly on which form of Buddhism is doing the depicting. A Theravada temple in Tibet uses different artistic cues from a Zendo in Japan. It is a lot like images of Christ in the west. They differ depending on their time period, aesthetic choice of the artist, and the creator's beliefs. One thing you will find is that the ethnic appearance of the Buddhas changes as you go east. That is, he looks more East Asian than South Asian. Much like Warner Sallman's famous depiction of Jesus as a blue eyed Caucasian. \n\nBeyond simple aesthetics and evolving styles, some materials are more often used in particular cultures. Statues made out of wood are far different than those that are chryselephantine or cast in bronze. Another question that you have to consider when judging a particular depiction is the intended use of the object. Not all Buddhas are intended for veneration. A huge bronze statue in a temple is as different in use as Hong Kong's Big Buddha is from a small desk statue. Use determines style, and detail as well as providing context. Japan is great for physical artifacts because, unlike China, they didn't purge most of their historical temple sites. That combined with a great literary record means that their religious objects are more easily dateable and more reliably sourced.\n\nGetting back to why the depictions are so different, it is entirely possible that the statues are different Buddhas or from different traditions. In Vajray\u0101na you will even see abstract depictions through mandala. The efforts of Buddhist popularizers often identified local deities with important Buddhist figures, thus tying the folk beliefs in to Buddhism. This means that depictions can often be highly local, with Taoist or folk figures depicted with changed roles. Each depiction is also charged with a particular intentional connotations, and what those connotations are shift with time, place, and creator. In that sense, every small difference in statuary (like, for instance, making Gautama look more Chinese) results in huge shifts of connotative and denotative meaning. We can't say that they are \"not that different\" because they are charged with wildly different meaning. In short, people take them differently. \n\nFurther reading on Buddhism:\n\n[Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism by Christian Wedemeyer](_URL_4_)\n\n[Indo-Tibetan Buddhism by David Snellgrove](_URL_0_)\n\nIf you're interested in the intersections of Buddhism and modernity and what that does to beliefs, you can do no better than [The Making of Buddhist Modernism](_URL_5_)\n\nIn terms of semiotics and creating meaning out of symbols you pretty much have to read [Saussure](_URL_2_), [Barthes](_URL_3_), and [Wittgenstein](_URL_1_) as a primer. \n\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.kailv.com/uploads/allimg/110125/1-110125125953.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Leshan_Buddha_Statue_View.JPG", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budai", "http://www.baoguangsi.org/uploads/allimg/c130126/13591C24N0320-35J8.jpg"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Indo-Tibetan-Buddhism-Buddhists-Tibetan-Successors/dp/9745240133/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163613&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=indo+tibetan+buddhism", "http://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/1405159286/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163939&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=philosophical+investigations", "http://www.amazon.com/Course-General-Linguistics-Court-Classics/dp/0812690230/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163860&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=saussure", "http://www.amazon.com/Mythologies-Roland-Barthes/dp/0374521506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163903&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mythologies", "http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Tantric-Buddhism-Transgression/dp/0231162405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163537&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=making+sense+of+tantric+buddhism", "http://www.amazon.com/Making-Buddhist-Modernism-David-McMahan/dp/0195183274/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1379163742&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=The+making+of+buddhist+modernism"]]}
{"q_id": "4g7y7k", "title": "What's the difference between a tribe and an organized government in the medieval period? Why do we talk about the \"Kingdom of Lombardy\" or the \"Duchy of Normandy\", but at the same time we talk about the \"Avars\" or the \"Aboriginal australians\"?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4g7y7k/whats_the_difference_between_a_tribe_and_an/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2fguwk"], "score": [393], "text": ["I'm going to give two very short, simple answers and then one somewhat more complex (but still pretty short) answer. First short answer is that we say \"Kingdom of Lombardy\" and \"Ducky or Normandy\" because that is what they called themselves. Nine times out of ten the best term to use for a particular state or social group is the one they use to refer to themselves. If we use a term like \"Germanic tribe\" it is because we don't actually know that term.\n\nSecond short and simple answer isn't actually short and simple for you but is for me because it is just a [link to some discussion about the term \"tribe\"](_URL_1_) which has a pretty fraught history of usage.\n\nThe third answer relates to an old but still somewhat useful concept in anthropology of sociopolitical typology, which essentially posits that political configurations can, broadly speaking, be categorized into four types: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. I was trying to think of an easy way to explain the difference but to be honest I am a bit at a loss, so I will just link [this handy chart](_URL_0_) (in my defense, this is generally how intro anthro textbooks do it also)[EDIT: changed to an imgur link. The original citation was \"based on the typology in Elman R. Service's (1962) Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective\" but to be perfectly honest I like most people learned the typology from introductory materials,specifically the excellent lecture series \"Peoples and Cultures of the World\" by Edward Fischer]. This typology is somewhat out of favor, for reasons that I think motivated your question: how on earth do you classify the Holy Roman Empire? It also implicitly promotes a linear view of human society in which people progress through different \"stages\" ending in the modern nation-state--actual history is rather more complex. Furthermore, actual political affiliation is often much more complex and multiple, for example one of my favorite groups n history are the Isuarians, who firmly existed within the Roman Empire but also maintained an internal political configuration that can best be described as somewhere between \"tribe\" and \"chiefdom\" on that chart. All the terms have a bit of difficulty coming down to the level of the individual."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/MoF0xYc.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31o2nt/monday_methods_definitions_of_tribe/"]]}
{"q_id": "1ts371", "title": "Map of History", "selftext": "Hey r/askhistorians, is it possible to create a map of the world with territory changes throughout the history of the world? If so has it been done yet?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ts371/map_of_history/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ceay6jm"], "score": [5], "text": ["Is such a thing possible? No, not really. On a smaller scale, such a question has the problem of assuming defined states where there were none or where other arrangements would be more appropriate.  On a larger scale, such a map would necessarily impose synchronous borders on areas that experienced consistent flux. Borders in the past were much more porous and flexible than today's nation-states.\n\nStill, there's a guy named [Thomas Lessman](_URL_0_) who is internet-famous for making rough maps of historical boundaries. They should not be taken as absolute truths, however, but as approximations. They're like Wikipedia (which Lessman draws on heavily): a good place to start, but a terrible place to finish."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldhistorymaps.info/maps.html"]]}
{"q_id": "qvcnl", "title": "Ataturk and the Progressive Dictator", "selftext": "This is a bit of a simplification, but it seems that during the twentieth century there were, broadly speaking, two paths for many decolonized and emerging countries towards modernization (democracy being something of a road less traveled): broadly speaking, one was communism, and one was not. I'm curious about the latter, and the way it was influenced, of not created, by Ataturk.\n\nAs far as I can tell, there are a few key pillars of Ataturk's reforms:\n\n1. Secularism--Ataturk did not tolerate the influence of religion in politics, and his personal religion is a matter of debate.\n\n2. Nationalism--Ataturk, or at least the movement he eventually led, in a sense created the modern Turkish identity. Much of the conflict with the Kurds is a result of his binding of Turk and Turkey.\n\n3. Liberalism--Especially women's rights.\n\n4. A politicized military that defends the modernist movement: Ataturk famously declared that the military should have no place in politics, but he himself came from the military, as did his chosen successor, Inonu. It is unlikely that he was being entirely honest.\n\n5. One party rule--Ataturk did not formally end politics, but he created an environment in which it effectively could not exist.\n\n6. Education and westernization\n\n7. Economic liberalization with heavy government involvement\n\nThere was, of course, more to it than that, but even with just that it is striking how similar he was to many of the progressive dictators who came later--Chiang Kai-Shek, the Shahs of Iran, Nasser, and others. You can even see hints in it in today's China and arguably fascist Italy. Granted, one could argue this goes all the way back to Napoleon, but I wonder how much later and similar leaders were actually inspired by Ataturk, or if they simply followed down a similar path due to that path's inherent effectiveness.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qvcnl/ataturk_and_the_progressive_dictator/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c40t9u8"], "score": [18], "text": ["First off, I highly, highly, highly recommend you read \u015eukru Hanio\u011flu's new book Atat\u00fcrk: An Intellectual Biography if you haven't already.  I think that the principles you've outlined as characteristic of Atat\u00fcrk deserve some modification.  Semi-official Kemalist doctrine has six \"arrows\": Republicanism, Popularism, Secularism (or laicite), Revolution(ism), Nationalism, Statism (etatism).  While I think there is a good deal of wiggle room in those principles, I think they hew closer to what you might call Atat\u00fcrk's philosophy than what you have inferred.  I'll try and walk through your points one by one, then briefly reflect on Atat\u00fcrk's legacy.\n1. Secularism - This is perhaps the most potent aspect of Kemalist policy.  It is the 'arrow' that often appears as sacred above all others to hardline Kemalists -- to the point that today religious suggestions in state affairs can be criminally punished as an 'insult to Atat\u00fcrk' and his memory.  But this legacy of Kemalism elides his viewpoints in earlier parts of his career.  For sure, Mustafa Kemal saw secularist government as a fundamental aspect of modern society.  Equally so, he believed that religion, and religious authority should be an expression of popular will -- something he felt the sultan-caliph was ill-suited for.  During the war for independence, he welcomed the support of religious groups -- particularly the Indian Khalifat movement and the Libyan Sanusi sheikhs.  He recognized an accord between himself and religious groups in a shared sense of anti-imperialism.  He even supported the continuance of the caliphate, so long as it rested outside of Turkey.  So you are right to say that he sought to erase religious influence on politics -- but his primary concern was not really the influence of symbols, headscarves for instance, but the influence of religious institutions who he saw as oppressive and illiberal anachronisms.\n2.  Nationalism -- Turkish nationalism is a much older idea than Atat\u00fcrk, but he did run with the idea to some pretty inventive extremes.  Theories like the Sun Language Theory and the Turkish History thesis represent an almost obsessive level of belief in Turkish greatness.  Perhaps this was an attempt to rescue a populace who had been beaten down by the decay of the Ottoman Empire or nearly a quarter century of warfare, but ultimately, these theories were widely discredited and it is hard to say whether Turks really adopted Atat\u00fcrk's nationalism beyond allegiance to his own cult of personality and shared sentimentalities (like the saying \"How happy to call oneself a Turk\").\n3.  Liberalism - Yes, in the terms you set out about women's rights, Atat\u00fcrk was forward thinking, but one must remember that this was a very paternalistic process.  In Atat\u00fcrk's eyes women didn't win their rights, he granted them.  To credit women's liberation and enhanced role in the public sphere solely to Atat\u00fcrk is a mistake, and in truth he himself was at times very hostile to the leaders of Turkish feminist movements who disagreed with him on other matters (e.g. Halide Edib Adivar, Sabiha Sertel).\n4.  Politicized military -- I think that you're close on this one, but the true development of the \"Deep State\" is really a post-WWII construct.  It is hard to separate the role of the military, political party and government when they are basically run by the same people.  I think he saw the army as a tool of the people, and stayed mostly true to that.  That the army later developed into a force that guided the state, in Atat\u00fcrk's name no less, would probably have disappointed him.\n5. Single Party Rule -- I think the insistance on single-party rule was more of a practical matter than anything else.  The early republic saw a few experimentations with multiparty democracy, but ultimately I think Mustafa Kemal saw that the economic modernization project took precedent had to be unified and driven by the state before multiparty democracy could thrive.\n6.  Education and Westernization -- Education, sure, but you have to be careful when talking about Mustafa Kemal and \"Westernization\".  Mustafa Kemal was an explicitly anti-imperial figure, and this often coded as anti-western.  He also was loathe to appear to explicitly \"import\" western culture or ideas, he would much rather cook up a rational that explained the inherent \"Turkishness\" of a thing like, say, opera than simply tell people to go see Carmen.  This also fueled a somewhat friendly relationship with the Soviet Union in the early years.  \n7.  Economic liberalization -- this isn't correct.  Turkey's economy has only been reliably liberalized in the last 10 or 15 years.  Kemal as a strict statist in terms of the economy, encouraging domestic production and industry guided by the state.  In almost every sense, this was less liberal than the Ottoman economic model.\n\nYou are very right to point out that Atat\u00fcrk's influence was widespread.  Most clearly with the Iranian Shah in terms of cultural reforms.  I would say that yes, later dictators drew some lessons from Atat\u00fcrk, but they failed on other fronts.  For instance Kemal's anti-imperialism manifested in an obsessive focus on homegrown economic production and a wariness of foreign debt (and likewise a staunch non-aligned status in foreign policy).  This lesson was lost on Iran, where the Shah fell prey to the wiles of the British re: oil nationalization.  Mussolini mimicked Mustafa Kemal's deference to religious tradition, but of course was an imperialist.  In most of the cases you mention, the influence is definitely there but for the most part if those dictators were 'practicing Kemalism' it wasn't more than salad-bar Kemalism.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8rf56l", "title": "How did the people of antiquity and medieval era record their music?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rf56l/how_did_the_people_of_antiquity_and_medieval_era/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0r5g98"], "score": [3], "text": ["There's always more to be said on the topic, but while you're waiting check a look at these previous threads:\n\n[*What did Roman music sound like and what form did the written notation take?*](_URL_3_) by u/racecar_ray\n\n[*What do we know about Roman music?*](_URL_2_) by u/casestudyhouse22\n\n[*What is the oldest form of musical notation?*](_URL_0_) and [*How did the modern system of musical notation come into being?*](_URL_1_) by u/erus"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ogi2n/what_is_the_oldest_form_of_musical_notation/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29yalb/how_did_the_modern_system_of_musical_notation/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mnkc7/what_do_we_know_about_roman_music/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/64e3ar/what_did_roman_music_sound_like_and_what_form_did/"]]}
{"q_id": "17786y", "title": "Why was there such a push to annex Texas in the 1840's?", "selftext": "So much to the point that we fought Mexico over the border?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17786y/why_was_there_such_a_push_to_annex_texas_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c82vkxw", "c82vxtp"], "score": [10, 7], "text": ["Let's go back a bit. \n\nThe Western Confederacy was beaten in the 1794 Northwest Indian War, and broken during the War of 1812. The Creeks collapsed into a brutal civil war in 1813, and Andrew Jackson razed the strongholds of the Creek and Seminole diehards during his 1816 invasion of Florida. The destruction of Negro Fort during this incursion shattered the black hope of building a refuge outside the United States. \n\nThese victories and the relentless growth of the American population led to a flood of settlers. The Indian nations gave up their claims, and the U.S. government, starved of specie and dependent on a trickle of tariffs to fund itself, found itself in undisputed possession of millions of acres of land. \n\nThe rich and well-connected grabbed this land at bargain prices and built fortunes parceling it out. The capital this land represented was entered in ledgers and grew into banks. Land was wealth. Land was opportunity. Squatters dragged their families just out of the law's reach, eking out a living on the frontier. Behind them came surveyors, whose chains and stakes laid out new towns. From these raw-timbered towns came a slow, steady stream of mortgage payments, which swelled the coffers of a few satisfied families in New York and Charleston. \n\nThis process had a hard, keen edge in the South. The plantation lords were dependent on the land, but just as they understood how fragile their control over their slaves was, they understood how brittle their fortunes were. Cotton, tobacco, indigo; these crops created fortunes but they depleted the ground. Plantations ran down and produced less every year. \n\nLand was, for the slave-owners, more than a desire. It was a matter of life or death. More important than either: a matter of honor. \n\nThe Creek Confederacy was consumed quickly. The rich bottomlands of the Delta, where spring floods replenished the soil's nutrients as quickly as cotton drained them, were snapped up. To survive, the slave-owners had to move west. \n\nThe grand strategy of the United States in its earliest days involved the constant erosion of European power - and Europe's strategic partners in the Indian confederacies. \n\nThe victories of the War of 1812 - and don't let the draw against Britain distract you, the death of Tecumseh and the fall of the Creek diehards made this war one of the greatest victories in American history - incidentally opened the door to unimaginable wealth. \n\nAnd just as these new lands promised wealth to the slave-owners, they also promised a different kind of security. The Industrial Revolution brought wealth to the North, and a flood of immigrants. The Southerners watched helplessly as the Midwest filled with free states. The writing was on the wall. Only expansion could restore the balance and keep the peace. ", "Hey there your answer I am afraid is long and complicated but I will do my best. Any good answer I feel must begin with President John Tyler's political background. John Tyler had originally been a member of Andrew Jackson's faction, having been opposed to the economic measures of the Adams-Clay National Republican faction. Andrew Jackson however was a powerful President, probably the most powerful in early American history until Lincoln assumed wartime powers. To a states-righter like John Tyler that power threatened his his own belief system in a more states oriented government. Thus in the mid 1830's John Tyler joined the opposition, what would become the Whig party. The States Rights Whigs were a minority in the party, and although Tyler didn't agree with their economic proposals opposition to Jackson was more important in his mind, and besides Tyler would probably never be in a position to be conflicted about his party's ideology. The election of 1840 loomed, Andrew Jackson's Flunkies were ripe for defeat, the country was in the middle of its' worse economic depression until the great one in the 1920's, William Henry Harrison had done well in the 36' election and was chosen to be the Whig's sole running candidate ( having run multiple candidates in 36). Who to pick for VP? Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had both been offered the position initially this would have united the two most powerful wings of the party behind Harrison, but both declined. The choice then fell to former Virginia governor John Tyler who's state rights' platform and unquestionable \"Southerness\" would help in the deep South where democrats tended to be stronger. The rest they say is history Harrison died soon after taking office and the Presidency fell to \"his accidentcy\". As I have previously discussed Tyler largely opposed many of the economic measures of the Whigs, and thus vetoed many of those passed by the Whig dominated Congress. In fury the Whigs cast him from the party and considered impeaching him. Tyler was now a man without a party, his cabinet had also left him and he was forced to nominate fellow Southern Whig State Righter's. How then could Tyler possibly be reelected? He couldn't get any of his own agenda through congress? Ahhh but the Constitution provides the President a very powerful tool, foreign policy.\n\nJohn Tyler hit upon the idea of Texas annexation ( heavily encouraged by the States Rights'- Slave power defender, secretary of State Abel Upsher) as a way that he could win reelection. Of course this wasn't a new problem, Texas had been pushing to be annexed through the Jackson and Van Buren Presidencies, Tyler could furthermore count only on a few senators if it came to annexation. Sam Houston in fact was reluctant to even push for annexation by the 1840's support for it being so weak in congress. At this moment, America's ancient foe played into the Tyler regime hands'. In the 1830's Britain had freed its slaves and had been aggressively trying to stop the Slave trade in the Atlantic. The British minister de affairs in Texas hit off on the idea of Britain freeing Texas's slaves, a local Texan by the name of Pearl Andrews backed this scheme and there seemed to be some support from the Texas people themselves. Andrews hurried off to London, to converse with Lord Palmerston's government. While there the British foreign minister showed some interest in Andrews' scheme, various proposals were discussed about how to free Texas's slaves. When the foreign minister realized that Andrews was not in fact an official representative of the Texas government he ended talks, but left the door open for official negotiations. Word of this meeting reached Washington, and provided Tyler with the great reason to finally achieve annexation. For if one thing was true of Americans in 1844, it is that most hated Britain being American was as much as being Anti-British as being American. Too late did the British foreign ministry realize that its' direct involvement had dangerously threatened any chance of abolition in Texas. Tyler nearly had his majority, and when the issue of slave abolition was thrown in he was able to pull a few Southern Whig senators into his camp along with some vague promises that the next President would pursue annexation not Tyler. One important thing to understand about Jacksonian politics is that slavery, was the abortion of its time. If you wanted to defeat an opponent in a heavily pro-slavery region of the country call him soft on slavery. When the Texas issue came to involve slavery, it forced several whig southern senators in the position that they had to embrace an expansionist pro-slavery model to protect their own political career (a trend that we see throughout Southern Whig political history, and indeed this trend would eventually break the party). Tyler sent off a rider offering annexation in his last days of office, and when Polk was sworn in he decided not to recall the rider. \n\nIt is more complicated then that, you also have Andrew Jackson's embracing of Texas annexation in the 1840's which helped nudge reluctant democrats into the annexation camp and ensured Polk ( a strong annexation backer) would win the nomination over Van Buren (luke warm on annexation). As others have noted there was also support from a less top down perspective for American expansion, but in this case I really do feel that the best explanation is one that is heavy on the political history that finally convinced many to get on board the expansion express. As far as the war against Mexico, another complicated question that has less to do with Texas annexation and more to do with Polk's expansionist drive. I'll come back later and address that point if someone else doesn't cover it.\n\nEdit: and for less of a Political answer /u/Prufrock451  does a good job answering why some Southerners felt that they had to expand into new lands. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "8z2gjo", "title": "In several of his books journalist Mark Kurlansky claims that the Basques might have discovered America before Columbus. Is there any truth to this?", "selftext": "The books I'm talking about are:\n\n* Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World\n\n* The Basque History of the World\n\n* Salt: A World History", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8z2gjo/in_several_of_his_books_journalist_mark_kurlansky/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2fmzk3"], "score": [9], "text": ["I will quote a [post](_URL_0_) I wrote where I touched on Kurlansky's work:\n >  \n >  Mark Kurlansky in his pop-history (non-academic with no citations or references) works Cod and Basque History of the World for some reason strongly proposes the theories of Basque knowledge of North America, himself confesses the following in Basque History of the World:\n >  \n >   > The two leading arguments for placing the Basques in pre- Columbian America are both based on deductive reasoning.\n >  \n >  and\n >  \n >   >  But no physical evidence has been found of the Basques in North America before Cabot. Historians and archeologists who have searched for it and failed insist that the rumors are false. But the search for pre-Columbian Basques in America has yielded ample evidence of a surprisingly large-scale Basque presence in Newfoundland and Labrador soon after Cabot. The remains of extensive Basque whaling stations dating to 1530 have been found.\n >  \n >  As we see, he admits that there is no physical evidence and proceedes to demonstrate his case on deductive reasoning, and honestly, it rests on some really eager jumps to conclusions and some really bad historical premises. For example he says:\n >  \n >   > But the Basques chased whales that traveled to subarctic waters and then dropped down along both the European and American coastlines.\n >  \n >  But to quote an academic work about the Newfoundland fisheries \"The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536-1632 \u2014A Summary\" by Selma Huxley Barkham:\n >  \n >   > Contrary to the spurious claims of writers on the history of whaling who have based their findings on secondary evidence, the Basques never, at any point, chased whales further and further out into the Atlantic until they collided with North America. This ridiculous legend must be laid to rest once and for all.\n >  \n >  Kurlansky book has some other mistakes and misleading statements in that chapter that would warrant a good badhistory post for itself\n\nSo in short, Kurlansky's argument rest on no evidence whatsoever, but mainly \"deducing\" from various other information, and even that is based on some faulty premises and reasoning"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8qsa6c/is_there_evidence_for_the_portuguese_having/"]]}
{"q_id": "37o6as", "title": "Did the Cold War ever end?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37o6as/did_the_cold_war_ever_end/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crom7jz"], "score": [37], "text": ["This is a very interesting question. I'm not sure how helpful we can be, as the only people who'd be able to give you a decent answer don't exist yet. If you anticipate finding the secret to eternal life or passing your consciousness to a robot, and Reddit is still around several hundred years from now, set yourself a [Remind Me](_URL_0_) to come back to /r/AskHistorians and ask the question again.\n\nHowever, it does kinda feel unsatisfying to leave it at that.\n\n**Short answer:** Maybe. Define \"Cold War\" and \"end.\" Shit, define \"ever\" and \"the\" and \"Did,\" because the whole concept is complicated.\n\n**Long answer:** If you'll excuse me for a moment, I really need to get a monocle and a glass of port before attempting to answer this with the degree of pomposity required.\n\nBack.\n\n\nOkay. \n\n\nIf you're very, very lucky as a student, you'll eventually run across a teacher who explains A Very Important Truth about history to you. Namely: We make a lot of stuff up.\n\nWe don't make up names or dates or battles or events or whatever. We're not that dishonest. But we *do* make up a lot of the terms we use to describe things, and then we sort of tacitly lie about how absolute they really are. \n\n**Why?** Because that's how the human brain organizes, understands, and uses information. We slot things into categories and then we give the categories names. Whenever your brain accesses a particular event, it remembers the category and then has some context for why, when, and how something occurred.\n\nLet's try an example:\n\n**The Middle Ages started in 493 with the fall of the western Roman Empire and ended in 1492 with Columbus' voyage to the Americas.** \n\nThis is useful. When we say, \"There's going to be a conference on medieval literature at Kalamazoo this weekend,\" everyone has a rough idea of the time period this conference will cover. We know when it happened. Medieval literature overwhelmingly existed in a time before the printing press, when books were copied and distributed at an agonizingly slow rate, and influential styles or storytelling techniques took a long time to spread. \n\nThe Middle Ages encompasses a discrete, readily-identifiable period in human history.\n\n**Except *most of that is actually bullshit*.**\n\nIt's helpful bullshit that provides context for people who are learning about Europe at a particular point in time when historical events shared a certain consistency, but that's really all it does. Historians disagree on which dates and events are the most relevant as \"start\" and \"end\" markers for the Middle Ages, whether historical eras can be said to \"start\" or \"end\" at all, or even if the \"Middle Ages\" is relevant as a concept. Here's why, taking the statement example from earlier:\n\n - The people, political institutions, roads, cultures, and languages of the western Roman Empire didn't suddenly cease to exist in 493. \n - The \"fall\" of the western Roman Empire was a very lengthy process that happened over several centuries and was certainly not a single event.\n - 493 was not the first year in which the government construct known as the western Roman Empire changed radically.\n - Columbus did indeed sail for the Americas in 1492, but was that really the \"end\" of the Middle Ages? If the economic and cultural resources necessary to support naval expeditions were what most distinguished the Age of Exploration from the Middle Ages, why don't we use the Portuguese naval explorations that started 80 years earlier as an \"end\" marker? \n - If we're determined to keep the \"end\" of the Middle Ages in 1492, was Columbus' voyage really the era-defining event? Or was it the fall of Granada and the end of nearly eight centuries of Muslim control in Spain? But wouldn't the fall of Constantinople (1453) have been more influential than that?\n\nSo you see the problem. The \"Middle Ages,\" and of course, all \"ages\" and \"eras\" described by historians, are artificial constructs. They're useful categories that contextualize information, but they're not absolute, ironclad realities. Humans are not so well-organized as to arrange their affairs in neatly-described periods of time with clear start and end dates around major sociopolitical movements. \n\nThe \"Cold War\" as a concept is no different, and so its start and end points are problematic. And that's not just about current tensions either -- although, yes, that has something to do with it. (We'll get to that in a moment.) We're very close to the events in question, and what looks like a discrete period to us may not actually be all that remarkable when all's said and done.\n\n**The Cold War *as we know it in 2015* is a period that stretches between the end of World War II in 1945 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.** These are pretty commonly-accepted dates among historians. However, if it's really Russian and Western antagonism more generally that we're concerned about, then that's by no means confined to 1945-1991. You could bump the \"start date\" to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 (or much earlier for intra-European squabbling), and then extend it to ?????????, because we don't know enough about the future to place today's events in a reasonable context.\n\nAnd if you want to be really thorough, de Tocqueville saw imperial Russia and the United States on an ideological collision course back when *Democracy in America* was first written and published in the 1830s, even though the two countries had pretty good relations at the time (Russia was about 25 years away from selling Alaska to the U.S.):\n\n - \"There are now two great nations in the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. Both have grown in obscurity, and while the world\u2019s attention was occupied elsewhere, they have suddenly taken their place among the leading nations, making the world take note of their birth and of their greatness almost at the same instant. All other peoples seem to have nearly reached their natural limits and to need nothing but to preserve them; but these two are growing\u2026. The American fights against natural obstacles; the Russian is at grips with men. The former combats the wilderness and barbarism; the latter, civilization with all its arms. America\u2019s conquests are made with the plowshare, Russia\u2019s with the sword. To attain their aims, the former relies on personal interest and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of individuals. The latter in a sense concentrates the whole power of society in one man. One has freedom as the principal means of action; the other has servitude. Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.\"\n\nCreepy, isn't it?\n\n**So imagine you're an historian who's writing a general political history of our \"era\" several hundred years from now.** WE think of the Cold War as being a dangerous and uncertain period of antagonism and proxy conflicts between the Western world and the U.S.S.R. over a period spanning roughly 50 years. We know that there was a brief period of rapprochement during the 1990s and early 2000s. We know that relations deteriorated afterwards. Nevertheless, this isn't the Cold War from our perspective. It's just a period of bad relations.\n\nBut ... what if it isn't? That historian isn't us. **He/she will know whatever happens beyond 2015.** This person will know whether 1992-2003 was a preview of even better relations later, or whether it was a blip that didn't fix the underlying conditions creating and incentivizing a distrustful relationship between Russia and the West. He/she will also know if we're heading for a war, or a massive financial crash, or a Yellowstone caldera eruption, or a San Francisco earthquake, or a major terrorist attack, or any one of a billion things that could alter the trajectory of current events and the incentive structure that guides nations' behavior. What we think of now as the \"Cold War\" might look to someone in 3015 like a period of somewhat heightened tensions during a much longer era of hostility. If that turns out to be the case, the whole concept of the \"Cold War\" loses much of its descriptive power because it won't have been all that unique in the history of Western/Russian relations.\n\nOr not. Maybe it was, is, and remains just the Cold War. We really don't know.\n\nThe indelible lesson I took from spending a few weeks holed up with copies of American and Canadian news magazines from the 1960s-1980s is that humans are really, really, *really* bad at prediction, so I won't venture a guess here.\n\n**TL:DR: The answer is a solid \"Maybe.\"**"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/"]]}
{"q_id": "1mo9ay", "title": "Why was England so late in setting up colonies in the America's? Was it simple bad luck? Or something more political?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mo9ay/why_was_england_so_late_in_setting_up_colonies_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccb2oja", "ccb5izy"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["What do you mean \"so late\"? Englands first colonies were only about 100 years after Colombus. When you consider initial voyages took a year to get here and back, that the value of what was here was in doubt(indeed what was here period was unclear), that who owned it was unclear etc. its understandable the English would delay when it appeared the Spanish had gotten the best stuff. ", "Spanish military power was a big factor in keeping the British from settling the Americas. It's important to remember that before the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), Spain was the principal maritime power in the world, thanks to a combination of its location, its support from the Vatican, its ties to the Habsburgs, etc.\n\nDuring the reign of Elizabeth, the English superseded Spain as the main naval power. However, the Spanish were well ensconced in what is now Latin America by then. The English moved into North America as well as the Caribbean."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1bgnzu", "title": "My grandfather used to tell a story about WWII I always found interesting, does it have a basis in fact?", "selftext": "I've forgotten the exact details, which is partially why I ask, any factual details would be interesting. \n\nAnyway, his favorite WWII story went something like this: He was stationed on some island in the Pacific. At some point the bomber pilots began doing unusual maneuvers, taking off and landing over and over again. It irritated everyone because it caused a lot of distribution. Whatever the bomber pilots were doing took priority over everything else, and speculation was rife, as a result. As it turned out, they were practicing taking off with the extra weight that would come from carrying the atomic bomb. \n\nThat always preceded his feelings about the atomic bomb. He felt it was quite likely that he'd have been a part of and died in an invasion of mainland Japan, had it not been used. The implication being, none of us, his children and grandchildren, would have existed had the bomb not been dropped, since he didn't have kids until after the war.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bgnzu/my_grandfather_used_to_tell_a_story_about_wwii_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c96korf", "c96qyzu", "c96s4wb", "c96uerh"], "score": [7, 11, 2, 2], "text": ["If his story is true about the bombers being involved in the atomic bombings, then he would have been based around Tinian airfield, which was huge.\n\nWhat your grandfather is descirbing is \"bumping\" which is practising take-offs, landings and aborted landings...  I find it extremely unlikely that B-29s, which were renowned for their engines overheating and catching fire, practising take-off runs with the extra weight.  (in addition to increased risk of an aircraft losing an engine on take-off, I am not aware of \"bumping\" being a standard procedure in an active theatre.\n", " >  That always preceded his feelings about the atomic bomb. He felt it was quite likely that he'd have been a part of and died in an invasion of mainland Japan, had it not been used. The implication being, none of us, his children and grandchildren, would have existed had the bomb not been dropped, since he didn't have kids until after the war.\n\nI can't say anything about the former part, but this is an incredibly common sentiment among men of that generation. I've heard it repeated a lot. My maternal grandfather's unit in Europe had received orders to transfer to the Pacific right before the war ended. According to him, he had an overwhelming feeling that those orders would result in his death. He credits the atomic bombs with saving him from that. ", "Regarding your grandfather's sentiments about being killed in a land invasion:\nHere is a link to Truman's presidential documents regarding the A-bomb. It's some of the most fascinating stuff I've read. It's pretty scary how much the top levels of government didn't know about regarding the power of the bomb itself. Just in case you wanted to read some primary sources yourself:\n\n_URL_0_\n", "In short? No, probably not.  Little Boy was only 4,400 kg, and Fat Man a little more at 4,633.  [The B-29 could easily carry that kind of payload](_URL_0_) without any alterations necessary for weight, and regularly did."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index.php"], ["http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/B/-/B-29_Superfortress.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "abseal", "title": "What is the longer-term background to Eritrean-Ethiopian tensions?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/abseal/what_is_the_longerterm_background_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ed84xfl"], "score": [3], "text": ["This is a complex question. Here's an answer to it, as far back as I could go in order to explain the shared heritage between the states and the rivalry that followed. For reference - Habesha is a term used to describe some, not all, of the peoples who inhabit Ethiopia and Eritrea. They speak Afroasiatic languages, write (mostly) in the Ge'ez script, and are unique to the Horn region. The main groups of note in this case are the Amhara and Tigray of Ethiopia, and the Tigre and Tigrinya of Eritrea. \n\n**Aksum to Medri Bahri**\n\nThe Kingdom of Aksum was the first verifiable Habesha state and occupied North Ethiopia and Eritrea, as well as Yemen. This was during the Classical period, with Kingdom a contemporary to Rome. It was during this time that the region, in particular the Highlands, became Christianised. While there aren't many primary sources, we know that Aksumite Kings like Kaleb and Ezana were in contact with the Byzantine Empire, and warred in pre-Islamic Arabia. \n\nThings get especially murky following the rise of Islam. We know that Aksum lost it's holdings in Yemen to the Sassanids and the Sabaeans, but not much else is known apart from that. It fell around 940CE. After this, the Zagwe ruled in Ethiopia, and were succeeded by the Solomonids, while in Eritrea the state of Medri Bahri formed.\n\nMedri Bahri was at times a vassal to Ethiopia but was almost always a distinct political entity. It was ruled by the Bahri Negus, the \"Sea-King,\" and this is where what can be perceived as tensions start. Negusa Nagast (Emperor, lit. King of Kings) Zera Yakob stated in his chronicle that he appointed the Bahri Negus to his office, through his right as the Suzerain of the area. Of course, this was done through coercion in order to make the Imperial ally the strongest of the local polities in the area. Zera Yakob then instituted a military colony in the state, effectively trying to start a military occupation of Medri Bahri. Following this, some 40 years later in the 1520s, Portuguese explorers note that the current Bahri Negus was the uncle of Emperor Lebne Dengel and paid him tribute. However, Medri Bahri also joined with the Ottomans against the Ethiopian Empire in 1572\n\nYou can see the attitude Medieval Ethiopia took to Medri Bahri from this. Ethiopia viewed Medri Bahri as a vassal that was more or less part of their Empire, whereas Medri Bahri was a distinct entity. This continues for several centuries - James Bruce visited Ethiopia in 1770, noting that the state (undergoing a period of civil strife known as the Zemene Mesafint) was frequently at war with it's northern neighbour.\n\n**The Imperial Period**\n\nModern Ethiopia began with Menelik II. His predecessor, Tewodros II, had united country but had died facing off with the British in Magdala during the Abyssinian Expedition of 1868. After Tewodros came a brief resumption of conflict after a man named Tekle Giyorgis proclaimed himself the Negusa Nagast of the restored Zagwe Dynasty, but was overthrown and replaced with Yohannes IV. Yohannes was a complex man but undoubtedly started Ethiopian foreign outreach, cooperating with the British in Sudan against the Mahdi. [He is also pictured here in this montage of world Heads of State, the first from the left.](_URL_0_)\n\nWhen Yohannes died, Menelik succeeded him. While the Empire that Yohannes ruled was a small, but unified, state, Menelik expanded to the borders of Modern Ethiopia. One of the states he sought in his expansion was Medri Bahri. He succeeded in incorporating it by force, but it was taken from him by the Italians after the Congress of Berlin. Ethiopia remained independent, but Eritrea (as the Italians named Medri Bahri) was part of the colonial machine. But the Italians wanted more.\n\nThe first Italian-Ethiopian War ended with the spectacular defeat of the Italians at Adwa and cemented Menelik's already incredible reputation as a leader. Ethiopia did not press on to Eritrea, however. This resulted in Italian cultural influence (though, it must be said, extremely minor influence) beginning in Eritrea. The Italians built a railway and some buildings, but that was about it. **BUT** Eritrea was it's own distinct entity once again, even more distinct now that it wasn't even independent.\n\n**Haile Selassie**\n\nEmperor Haile Selassie is perhaps the most famous of Ethiopia's Emperors. After WW2, he was triumphant, his country liberated, and, eventually, he was the face of Africa's decolonisation movement (next to Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana). Eritrea, meanwhile, was now a possession of Britain. In time, decolonisation came to Eritrea. This was seen as a chance for the people of Eritrea to finally have their own independence - a good thing for all involved. \n\nBritain then gave Eritrea to Ethiopia.\n\nThis, arguably, is the immediate cause. The state had been, in the eyes of the now-large Eritrean Independence Movement, denied it's freedom too many times. Haile Selassie, the great liberator and face of Africa's future, was an Autocrat at heart. Saudi Arabia is, undoubtedly, an absolute monarchy - but not of the sort that Ethiopia was at this time. Ethiopia was more like a feudal kingdom, completely out of time, and the Emperor appointed Viceroy's to Eritrea rather than represent the people there.\n\nAs well as this, local officials would often try to misrepresent how well their region was doing. When the Emperor would visit provinces, Governors would only take him to the best parts, show him how well some parts were doing. The Army was used to crush revolts.\n\nCenturies old tradition meant that the people had to prostrate themselves before the Emperor. Power was measured by how close you were to the Emperor's ear. One powerful figure was the Minister of the Pen, the man in charge of writing down the decrees of the quiet, soft-spoken Emperor.\n\nThen, in 1960, there was a coup attempt by some of the Emperor's circle while he was in Brazil. The Royal Guard proclaimed his son, Amha Selassie, the new Emperor. The coup was crushed, but the writing appeared on the wall. With this in mind, the Eritrean Liberation Front began it's 30 year campaign.\n\nWithin 14 years, the rest of the Empire would devolve into civil war between the Marxist Derg and the coalition of opposition groups that would become the EPRDF.\n\n**Independence and War**\n\nAfter the end of the Civil War, Eritrea was granted independence under Isaias Afeworki. Eritrea and Ethiopia disputed the demarcation of the border from 1991, until May 1998 - when Eritrean officers were killed in the disputed Badme region. Eritrea sent a mechanised force into the region, beginning a brutal war that lasted 2 years.\n\nSince then, the tensions have long been apparent. Luckily, PM Abiy Ahmed has seen a thaw in relations with Eritrea - the border is open again, and a peace treaty has been signed. Things are starting to look up for both the countries relations, though both are still plagued with problems. In Ethiopia, previous Governments since 1991 have largely used force to resolve Ethnic problems, which very well could spiral into another conflict. Eritrea is a one party state, and even with this rapprochement from Ethiopia is still very isolationist.\n\nI hope this answers your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/World_heads_of_state_in_1889.jpg/1920px-World_heads_of_state_in_1889.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "20eud0", "title": "Why did the various revolts of 1840's Europe fail?", "selftext": "I think the title says it well enough. I know the Italian revolt failed because France helped the Pope, but what about all the others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20eud0/why_did_the_various_revolts_of_1840s_europe_fail/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cg2weql"], "score": [2], "text": ["From Jonathan Sperber 'The European Revolutions, 1848-1851'\n\n\n-Revolution was heavily     romanticized, revolutionary leaders often portrayed doing heroic deeds for the people. Lajos Kossuth from Hungary riding out and rallying peasantry or Giribaldi leading militias into battle.\n\n-Some revolutionaries were incompetent and monarchs did not always take them seriously. \n\n-Failed to establish lasting regimes. Old rulers took back power later on. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1nywov", "title": "Has there ever been a government system that the majority of the population, across all economic divides, generally approved of?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nywov/has_there_ever_been_a_government_system_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccngtoh"], "score": [2], "text": ["I don't think your question can be answered because it's not clear what data would allow us to answer it.\n\nPrior to modern times, we don't actually have the information to say whether the \"majority of the population\" \"across all economic divides\" approved of a particular government. We have information about whether particular groups within society approved, and we have information from which we can infer whether other groups *tolerated* it, but there's no way to know, for example, whether a majority of sixteenth century peasants approved of their government. The recorders of the history of the time didn't gather and maintain that information.\n\nEven in modern times, the question breaks because \"across all economic divides\" is vague. What level of specificity are you looking for, and which economic divides do you care about?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "23amfc", "title": "Was the Kansas/Missouri border war the start of the Civil War or just a precursor to it?", "selftext": "I am watching a show about the history of our states. There were one or two historians that stated the events of [Bloody Kansas](_URL_0_) were the first battles of the Civil War. \n\nEverything I've ever read up to this point states that the Battle of Bull Run was the first battle of the Civil War. \n\nIs this a common belief, an official/unofficial thing or were the events just a precursor that lead up to the Civil War?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23amfc/was_the_kansasmissouri_border_war_the_start_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgv9ji0"], "score": [2], "text": ["In 1820 the U.S passed the Missouri compromise that stated that slavery could not extend above the 36' 30\" line. When Kansas and Nebraska were looking to join the union Stephen Douglas proposed a bill that would allow each state to vote on if they were going to be a slave state or a free state. Nebraska was far enough north that there was never really a question over whether or not it was going to be slave or free. However, Kansas was right next to Missouri, which was a slave state. This lead to a massive amount of people entering the state on the side of slavery from the south and anti-slavery from the north. Many of these people were armed leading to a number of conflicts between the two. Bleeding Kansas was not a fight between Union and Confederate troops. Rather it was fighting between pro-slavery individuals and anti-slavery individuals. \n\nAll of this happened in the lead up to the Civil War and not during the war itself. The Confederate States of America were not founded until 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected President and bleeding Kansas took place before them. Whenever I have heard people say that Bleeding Kansas was the first battles of the Civil War they have been referring to this point as the point that Civil War becomes inevitable. This was really the first time the U.S had had large conflicts over the matter of slavery. This was really the point where many in the nation saw that the U.S could not continue to expand and be half free and half slave. I hope this helped answer your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "drnt43", "title": "What was the point of the invasion stripes on planes during D-day?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/drnt43/what_was_the_point_of_the_invasion_stripes_on/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f6k9y8m"], "score": [12], "text": ["They were identification aids for Allied pilots and gunners. Friendly fire was a persistent risk for aircraft, positive recognition being difficult in the heat of battle; the first Fighter Command losses of the war were in the \"Battle of Barking Creek\" during which two Hurricanes were shot down by Spitfires and the introduction of further combatants and types of aircraft only made the situation more confusing. An early use of black and white stripes was on the wings of Hawker Typhoons in 1942 as they were frequently mistaken for the Focke-Wulf 190. Frank Zeigler, intelligence officer of 609 Squadron, wrote in the RAF Flying Review about the results of the confusion: \"Once a gunnery officer, whom I had just 'blitzed' on the phone, actually called back with the request: 'Could you ask your pilots tactfully - very tactfully - did we get anywhere near them?' Sometimes they did. Roy Payne, wading ashore after being hit and crash-landing in shallow water, really lost his temper when the coastguards addressed him in German.\" See also an [Imperial War Museum photograph](_URL_0_): \"A Hawker Typhoon Mk 1B in fighter pen at North West corner of RAF Duxford (...) The black and white stripes painted on the underside of the wings - sometimes referred to as 'Dieppe stripes'- were actually introduced following the failed Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942. Originally only black stripes were painted on but white stripes were added by December 1942 for greater recognition by other RAF aircraft who had mistaken the Typhoon for the German Focke Wulf 190.\"\n\nDuring the 1943 invasion of Sicily C-47 transports suffered particularly badly from friendly anti-aircraft fire, 23 of 144 being shot down on 11th July. As a result during the planning of Operation Overlord a memorandum on \"Distinctive Marking - Aircraft\" was written:\n\n\"1 OBJECT  \nThe object of this memorandum is to prescribe the distinctive markings which will be applied to US and BRITISH aircraft in\norder to make them more easily identified as friendly by ground and naval forces and by other friendly aircraft.\n\n(...)\n\n4 DISTINCTIVE MARKINGS  \n(a) Single engine aircraft. (1) Upper and lower wing surfaces of aircraft listed in paragraph 2g above, will be painted with five\nwhite and black stripes, each eighteen inches wide, parallel to the longitudinal axis of the airplane, arranged in order from center\noutward; white, black, white, black, white. Stripes will end six inches inboard of the national markings. (2) Fuselages will be\npainted with five parallel white and black stripes, each eighteen inches wide, completely around the fuselage, with the outside\nedge of the rearmost band eighteen inches from the leading edge of the tailplane.\"\n\n(etc)\n\nThe order was issued on June 4th, leading to rather frantic painting for the squadrons involved, and can be considered a success, there being no large-scale repeat of the Sicily incident. \n\nFurther reading:  \n*US Army Air Forces Aircraft Markings and Camouflage 1941-1947*, Robert D. Archer  \n\"Fratricide - An Overview of Friendly Fire Incidents in the 20th Century\", *RAF Historical Society Journal No. 34*, Wg Cdr C G 'Jeff' Jefford"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205266399"]]}
{"q_id": "18h33i", "title": "How advanced was Polynesian navigation compared to other civilizations? ", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18h33i/how_advanced_was_polynesian_navigation_compared/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8erjoz", "c8f0pzx"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["They presumably knew a great deal about stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds, and the weather.  However, so did other navigators.  It's still unclear how much of their exploration of *new* islands was dependent upon luck.", "If you like Ted talks, wade Davis talks about it in this _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_the_worldwide_web_of_belief_and_ritual.html"]]}
{"q_id": "549g1i", "title": "How credible is Noam Chomsky on American History/foreign policy", "selftext": "So I'm a big fan of Chomsky for his analysis of us politics and his idea's about pragmatic anarchism but I often hear his critics call him a liar who doesn't know his history. For the most part everything I've checked that he's said has been correct so I was wondering if anyone has checked his sources or general memory of history. I know his views on history can be controversial and don't want to discuss them I'm just wondering if he uses Correct info", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/549g1i/how_credible_is_noam_chomsky_on_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d80127c", "d80ejyj"], "score": [79, 174], "text": ["Questions about Chomsky's politics have been asked several times in both /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskSocialScience\n\nHere's one from /r/AskSocialScience that includes a second link to a post in /r/AskHistorians\n\n_URL_0_", " >  I know his views on history can be controversial and don't want to discuss them, I'm just wondering if he uses correct info\n\nPerhaps the biggest problem I have with Chomsky is that he's an unreliable source of historical information (and because of what he says about the self-brainwashing of US intellectuals, the reader isn't highly motivated to go look at other sources).\n\nIn particular, as a reader, I usually assume that if a writer provides a selective quote from someone else, it should provide a reasonably accurate summary of what the other person said. Chomsky doesn't appear to adhere to this rule.\n\nThis means that it's necessary to check his references very carefully. I assume not everyone who reads Chomsky does this.\n\nOrwell describes the phenomenon of extreme partisan writing in his essay [Notes on Nationalism](_URL_1_): \"Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, **quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning**. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.\"\n\nThere's a [February 26, 1970 letter](_URL_3_) to the New York Review of Books by Samuel Huntington, with a response by Chomsky, which gives an example. (\"After Pinkville\" is reprinted in The Chomsky Reader.)\n\n >  In response to \"After Pinkville\" (January 1, 1970)\n\n >  To the Editors:\n\n >  In the space of three brief paragraphs in your January 1 issue, Noam Chomsky manages to mutilate the truth in a variety of ways with respect to my views and activities on Vietnam.\n\n >  Mr. Chomsky writes as follows:\n\n >  \"Writing in Foreign Affairs, he [Huntington] explains that the Viet Cong is 'a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.' The conclusion is obvious, and he does not shrink from it. We can ensure that the constituency ceases to exist by 'direct application of mechanical and conventional power...on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city....'\"\n\n >  It would be difficult to conceive of a more blatantly dishonest instance of picking words out of context so as to give them a meaning directly opposite to that which the author stated. For the benefit of your readers, here is the \"obvious conclusion\" which I drew from my statement about the Viet Cong:\n\n >  \"...the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation.\"\n\n >  By omitting my next sentence--'Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation'--and linking my statement about the Viet Cong to two other phrases which appear earlier in the article, Mr. Chomsky completely reversed my argument.\n\nChomsky's response includes the following remarkable sophistry:\n\n >  ... I did not say that he \"favored\" this answer but only that he \"outlined\" it, \"explained\" it, and \"does not shrink from it,\" all of which is **literally** true [emphasis added].\n\nStanley Hoffmann, another critic of the Vietnam War, described Chomsky as having a \"tendency to draw from an author\u2019s statements inferences that correspond neither to the author\u2019s intentions nor to the statements\u2019 meaning.\" [Source](_URL_2_).\n\nI've written up a longer [critical review](_URL_0_) of Chomsky's writings on foreign policy, attempting to be as fair-minded as possible."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/ya9jm/im_very_interested_by_the_ideas_of_noam_chomsky/"], ["http://russilwvong.com/future/chomsky.html", "http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33momo/how_accurate_is_noam_chomskys_assessment_of_the/", "http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11044"]]}
{"q_id": "4no1j2", "title": "What sort of cosmetics did the women of royalty/aristocracy wear during Henry VIII's reign?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4no1j2/what_sort_of_cosmetics_did_the_women_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d45jzvh"], "score": [2], "text": ["Fashion, yes!   Queen Catherine of Aragon (the first wife) is believed to have started the trend of wearing a farthingale (hoop skirt).  The farthingale or verdugados in Spanish had been a staple of Spanish fashion for at least 20 years before Catherine came to England.   When she got to England, it took about another 20 years for the trend to catch on there.   However, she is credited with starting it.\n\nAnne Boleyn is believed to have [introduced the French Hood](_URL_1_) to the English court.  Anne had been away at the French court before  coming back to England with the \"continental style\" of hat.\n\nAs for makeup, [there is a great article](_URL_0_) on the various sometimes dangerous items to achieve the beauty ideals of the day.  These included white lead and vinegar to give a pale completion and many other recipes in the article from period sources.  Not all are Henrician but they are all 16th C English.    "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.elizabethancostume.net/makeup.html", "http://www.elizabethancostume.net/headwear/frenchhood.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4061zj", "title": "It seems that the Victorian Era distorted our view of history, especially of women. Is there evidence of this?", "selftext": "It seems that women's role in history was erased by Victoria 'scholars'. Women's role in the medicine and autopsies was suppressed until recently (_URL_1_) (_URL_0_) and women were turned from people into a helpless caricature in literature and society (_URL_2_).\n\nI don't mean to sound biased, but was there an effort by historians in the Victorian era to redraft history to be more socially appealing to their era?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4061zj/it_seems_that_the_victorian_era_distorted_our/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyrrf4i"], "score": [43], "text": ["What we think of as the modern discipline of history was born in the western 19th century. Historians always reflect the mores and concerns of their age. Both before and after Leopold von Ranke and his contemporaries, historians did not so much *actively suppress* women's lives so much as ignore them. This was for two reasons: (1) women were not seen as a worthy subject of study in their own right (2) the areas in which women tend to be historically visible were not considered worthy of study. Both of these things start to change in the 1960s in America, but only with the [long, strenuous, and heroic efforts of scholars](_URL_0_) above all Gerda Lerner.\n\nMedieval *historiae* or chronicles are more like records of events than the type of explanatory narrative we're familiar with today. Nevertheless, they already reflect the pattern of what the first modern historians will see as primarily relevant topics for historical inquiry: kings, thrones, city councils, calamities. These proto-historians, primarily monks and clerks, can't necessarily be accused of actively *erasing* women: they mention rulers' marriages, daughters' births, women prophets or saints who saved/false women saints who ruined a city. Orderic Vitalis even praises Adela of Blois, not even a ruler in her own right, for the care and skill with which she administered her county while her infamous husband was on crusade. It's just that *in general*, medieval women are not (...are systemically excluded from) leading armies and maneuvering to win papal elections and feuding aginst competing noble families.\n\nLate medieval/early modern historians actually introduced a genre of \"eminent women\" texts (*De claris mulieribus* being the Latin form), recounting the stories of individual famous women throughout history. Or rather \"history,\" as they tended to draw freely from mythology, legend, and their imaginations as well as the actual past. These texts could serve as a commentary on the state of *men*/male-dominated society of the time, be a salvo in an intellectual sparring match (the querelle des femmes), and/or represent a genuine interest in the subject matter. Nevertheless, it's still an isolation of women from the idea of a major, world history progression.\n\nEnlightenment-era history and then the rise of modern history make leaps and bounds in narrative and historical method (modern history is marked by rigorous scrutiny of primary sources, above all). It remained dominated by political history, which until very very recently was the study of--yup--rulers and nations. Considering the actions of rulers and seeking to understand the course of events is an area of history in which men are, indeed, much more prominent than women.\n\nModern history is also born in universities and academics like to write about ourselves, so intellectual life--philosophy--also become a prominent area of study (Burckhardt, Haskins). While women certainly wrote philosophy, they are very rarely seen as groundbreaking. So Haskins in his *Renaissance of the Twelfth Century* will mention Herrad of Hohensburg's (although he says Landesburg) *Hortus deliciarum* with no qualms about it being the creation of a women's convent, but when it comes to philosophy power couple Heloise and Abelard, he delves extensively into Abelard's work (with good reason) but Heloise only gets a name-drop as Abelard's lover--not even a mention of her brainpower, because it didn't \"shape history\" like Abelard did.\n\nWhere women did tend to be prominent in medieval and early modern history was religion. Religious history in the 19th and early 20th centuries remained compartmentalized, typically the province of confessional (Catholic and Protestant) historians for the purposes of their own churches and congregations--it tends to be a lot more sentimental and devotional, stories of saints' lives meant to inspire prayer and piety. I don't want to undersell the work of especially turn of the 20th century Germans here. I study, among other things, a couple of *really* obscure medieval women, and literally the only published source devoted to one of them is the modern publication of her hagiography, with a scholarly (not devotional) explanatory article, from a German scholar in IIRC 1888! But religious history was not part of Real History, in general (the Germans sort of make an exception for the Reformation, although this is a *really* contentious piece of history at the time due to Catholic versus Protestant polemic).\n\nIn the 1960s, especially in America, two things were changing. First, historians like Gerda Lerner built on the work of some earlier pioneers like medievalists Lina Eckenstein and Eileen Power who made women a worthwhile subject of study in their own right. They argued and proved that understanding women's roles in society is crucial to understanding the past \"as it really was,\" to quote von Ranke. Again, this development--both Lerner's fight and the ability of her and her comrades to carve a lasting foothold--reflects changing attitudes of time, obviously here second-wave feminism. Second, the rise of cultural history on the back of the social history movement especially after World War II brought enormous scholarly attention to areas of history where women indeed tend to be more visible: religion, literature, family life.\n\nThe situation isn't perfect today. On the academic level, the field of history is about 40% female. Go to a conference or pick up a volume on women, and the represented scholars are 95% female. There is still a strong trend in academia of compartmentalizing women's roles in history as *women's history*, although at least in medieval there are some amazing historians--at the top of the field, even--striving to change that, both male and female. And scholars are *quite* skilled at hunting for women in difficult sources, but sometimes the sources themselves are simply uncooperative. \n\nFar more critically, IMHO, as *teaching* history inevitably means having to squeeze in more and more years each time pre-college textbooks are revised (time refuses to stop. I KNOW, right? Sheesh.), it's more and more tempting to just \"hit the important parts\"--which can so, so easily mean a return to narratives of rulers and nations. We want the story that got us here today, not understanding the texture of the past. (i.e. do the roots of 'human rights' as a concept in medieval political philosophy matter more for understanding the contemporary world than Clare of Assisi's struggle to establish a Franciscan Second Order for women? The problem is that the first roots of human rights in the western tradition are planted in and by a world that Chiara's struggle helps us understand, but how important is *understanding* in light of a looming AP Euro test?).\n\nTo make women visible in the historical narrative is an ongoing struggle. The sources are not always generous, and the work that we want the past to do does not always line up with the constraints that patriarchal societies places on women in the past and to a varying extent today. For centuries, historians did not see any real need to fight that battle--in fact, they weren't even aware there was a battle to be fought. Today, at least we're fighting. (ETA) The fact that threads about the absence of women from the telling of history can get double-digit upvotes on Reddit of all places is a hopeful sign."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/antiqua/women/", "http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/04/debunking-a-myth/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damsel_in_distress"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tpk8j/when_did_historians_first_begin_to_talk_seriously/"]]}
{"q_id": "ecveh3", "title": "Was Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s reputation as a badass exaggerated?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ecveh3/was_teddy_roosevelts_reputation_as_a_badass/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbfk8ie"], "score": [25], "text": ["Well, let's just take your list and see if it happened.  \n\n\n >  Went blind in one eye from a boxing match while he was president. \n\n[Teddy Roosevelt's little-known secret](_URL_2_)\n\n > Of the White House incident in which he was blinded, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography:  \n >   \n > \"I  had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young  captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed  the little blood vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight  has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have  been entirely unable to shoot.  \n >   \n > \"Accordingly I thought it better  to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop  boxing. I then took up jiujitsu for a few years.\"\n\nSo that one is true\n\n > Killed a mountain lion with a knife so it wouldn\u2019t kill any of his hunting dogs.\n\n\n[Teddy Roosevelt's Tiffany Bowie Knife ](_URL_0_)\n\n > Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Letters to His Children:\n\n > Keystone Ranch, Colo., Jan. 14th, 1901 -\n > \"Soon we saw the lion in a treetop, with two of the dogs so high up among the branches that he was striking at them. He was more afraid of us than of the dogs, and as soon as he saw us he took a great flying leap and was off, the pack close behind. In a few hundred yards they had him up another tree. This time, after a couple of hundred yards, the dogs caught him, and a great fight followed. They could have killed him by themselves, but he bit or clawed four of them, and for fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him behind the shoulder, thrusting the knife right into his heart. I have always wished to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.\u201d\n\nTwo are correct, lets see about three\n\nPursued boat thieves down a frozen river on a boat he made from scratch with his hunting buddies, eventually overpowering and arresting the thieves.\n\n\n[Roosevelt Pursues Boat Thieves](_URL_3_)\n\n > \u201cBut we never carried out our intentions, for next morning one of my men, who was out before breakfast, came back to the house with the startling news that our boat was gone \u2013 stolen ... \"Accordingly we at once set to work in our turn to build a flat-bottomed scow wherein to follow them ... For three days, the three men navigated the icy, winding river among the colorful clay buttes hoping to take the thieves captive without a fight. ... [Roosevelt] kept guard over the three prisoners, who were huddled into a sullen group some twenty yards off, just the right distance for the buckshot in the double-barrel\n\nThree for three, going for four\n\n > Delivered an hour-long speech just after being shot.\n\n[When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in 1912, a Speech May Have Saved His Life](_URL_4_)\n\n\n > The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. \u201cIt takes more than that to kill a bull moose,\u201d the wounded candidate assured them. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech. Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. \u201cFortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet\u2014there is where the bullet went through\u2014and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.\u201d\n\n > Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as \u201can electric battery of inexhaustible energy,\u201d and for the next 90 minutes the 53-year-old former president proved it.\n\nFour! What about five?\n\n > Led the Rough Riders\u2019 famous uphill charge.\n\n[The Rough Riders Storm San Juan Hill, 1898](_URL_1_)\n\n > \"Colonel Roosevelt, on horseback, broke from the woods behind the line of the Ninth, and finding its men lying in his way, shouted: 'If you don't wish to go forward, let my men pass, please.' The junior officers of the Ninth, with their Negroes, instantly sprang into line with the Rough Riders, and charged at the blue block-house on the right. I speak of Roosevelt first because, with General Hawkins, who led Kent's division, notably the Sixth and Sixteenth Regulars, he was, without doubt, the most conspicuous figure in the charge.\n\nFive, lets see if we can make it a perfect six.\n\nUnfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything I considered good enough for this one. However, it is very widely considered a fact that he had the Roosevelt crest as a Chest tattoo and perhaps the least of the accomplishments listed.\n\nWas Teddy Roosevelt as badass as the stories say? Based on this list, I think it is very likely that he was."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.knifecollector.net/RooseveltsKnife.html", "http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/roughriders.htm", "https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-07-0210070158-story.html", "https://www.nps.gov/thro/learn/historyculture/roosevelt-pursues-boat-thieves.htm", "https://www.history.com/news/shot-in-the-chest-100-years-ago-teddy-roosevelt-kept-on-talking"]]}
{"q_id": "6sha5y", "title": "What religion did jews and inhabitants of what is today israel and palestine practice before judaism ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6sha5y/what_religion_did_jews_and_inhabitants_of_what_is/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dlcwtdc"], "score": [26], "text": ["There is substantial evidence that the ancestors of those who would call themselves Israelites followed religious practices common in Canaan, and that they themselves were a subgroup of the what would broadly be considered Canaanites.  Canaan itself would have been a sort of area between the great bronze-age empires of the day, encompassing modern Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.\n\nCanaanite religion centered around two main figures El and Asherah.  El is also referred to with other epithets such as Ba'al (who may be identified as the same as El, or as a separate storm god, or as a title given to lesser gods and kings), and was often conflated with, if not considered the same as, Yahweh.  There is often inconsistency in naming and even whether a word refers to a god's personal name, attributes, or is used as a title.  It can be rather confusing to us but I believe the ancients were generally comfortable with this sort of ambiguity.  \n\nEl's consort was Asherah, who seems to have been a fertility/mother goddess often worshiped or honored in the form of a live tree or wooden pole.  She and El were considered to have been the parents of the numerous lesser gods of the Canaanites.\n\nIn the Bible itself, complaints against worship of Asherah and Asherah poles by early Israelites are numerous, as are commands to cut down and burn these poles.\n\nI think its fair to say that identifying Yahweh as a deity distinct from Ba'al or El, and certainly as the only one worth worshipping (\"you shall have no other gods before/besides me\") were an innovation and were key to the early self-identity of the Israelites.  Asherah must have been considered quite a threat to his primacy given the strident admonishments against her worship.\n\nIt's interesting to note that even in the name Israel one finds the appellation \"El\", the term meaning anything from \"El is just\" to \"El strives\" or \"Triumphant with El\" and in Exodus God reveals he had been known as \"El Shaddai\" but now shall be referred to as Yahweh, or Lord.  El and Yahweh may be translated Lord and/or God and El Shaddai as God Almighty - though these names may have been understood differently by different people in their own times.\n\nYou can find more information here:\n_URL_0_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://people.brandonu.ca/nollk/canaanite-religion/"]]}
{"q_id": "40nm5k", "title": "Where did the Imperial Chinese court get its eunuch?", "selftext": "I was reading a book the Ming court that was discussing some of the emperors eunuchs and I was wondering where these men would have come from. I know that castration was a punishment meted out to some famous courtiers like Sima Qian but it wouldn't make much sense to surround the emperor with convicted criminals. So, were these some kind of slaves purchased as children or people punished for their family's actions? Did people become eunuchs voluntarily, and if so why, when their would be conceivably less awful ways of moving up in the world.\n\nFeel free to discuss other Imperial courts besides the Ming, from what I understand eunuchs were more or less a feature of all of the dynasties.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40nm5k/where_did_the_imperial_chinese_court_get_its/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyvmqlg"], "score": [9], "text": ["Ming is the \"golden age\" of Chinese eunuchs, that's the period with the most of them running around, so you have made a solid choice! One of the [few good English texts on Chinese eunuchs](_URL_0_) is just about this period. \n\nEunuchs of this period would have been majority voluntary or semi-voluntary, both adult men who elected to be castrated to join the palace service, and some would be castrated under the auspices of their parents as children for service. \n\nAs to why... I know it's insane to think about now. But (assuming you're male, and that you've had sufficient education to type this post, and sufficient privileges in life to find and use a computer) it's just hard for you to imagine this as a very do-able sacrifice for a better life. You have to think outside of your situation a bit. If you were a poor farmer with many sons, castrating 1 or 2 and sending then to the city to find service in a royal family or (with luck!) inside the palace is a reasonable gamble, considering. And if you're an adult, I mean, wouldn't you be tempted if you could be [super rich and powerful?](_URL_2_) It is a more accessible option to a poor and uneducated man than the Imperial examination, which required extensive education. Consider very high ranking eunuchs would outstrip in rank just about everyone, your \"career\" options are virtually unlimited once you get in the palace, and even if you were just sweeping corridors you would be given food, clothes, money, medicine, and if you were promising, education. If you were an adult man with a wife and children (which did happen) you could send money home. If you were an adult child of poor farmers you could also send money home. Castration is a reasonable choice, which you have few others. \n\nOther than the book I linked above, which is certainly decent but the author doesn't like eunuchs much so I'm not fond if it, there a [very interesting article about Jesuit missionaries observing Chinese eunuchs in the Late Ming period.](_URL_1_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.worldcat.org/title/eunuchs-in-the-ming-dynasty/oclc/32626529&amp;referer=brief_results", "http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02757206.2012.675794", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Jin"]]}
{"q_id": "4930xg", "title": "Did the stereotypical drill sergeant exist before WWII or so?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4930xg/did_the_stereotypical_drill_sergeant_exist_before/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0opuua"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_).\n\nI would very much suggest to narrow this question down to just the US and post it since it's very interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"]]}
{"q_id": "2o14t4", "title": "What kind of defense against invasion did Great Britain have during WW2?", "selftext": "I'm wondering if they had static defences like bunkers and costal artillery or if they planned a mobile defence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2o14t4/what_kind_of_defense_against_invasion_did_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmismh3", "cmj19po", "cmj4xe4"], "score": [7, 5, 2], "text": ["I can't speak to static defenses, but the main deterrent to a cross-Channel invasion were the RAF and the Royal Navy.  The Germans had little chance of a cross-channel invasion after they were unable to win the Battle of Britain.  Making an amphibious landing without air superiority would have been difficult, particularly because it would mean that the potent British Navy would be able to take part in the defense.  Even if the RAF and Navy could be somehow neutralized, the Germans had insufficient landing craft to make the attempt (river barges were considered for transports, but they would have been hideously vulnerable in the Channel).  There were also army units waiting for any potential invasion.\n\nBut my favorite defense was the tiny [Romney Hythe  &  Dymchurch light railway coastal armored defense train](_URL_0_).  The efficacy of a 15 inch gauge armored train is *highly* questionable.  To me, though, it epitomizes the idea of 'British pluck.'  The idea being that, hey, we have a tiny railway here.  Get me a train and some cars, slap some armor on it, we'll grab some guns, and we'll punch Jerry in the mouth if he has the temerity to cross the Channel.  Would a tiny train with a couple machine guns and antitank rifles really have done much?  I don't know.  But I know that it shows the determination of the British military to resist any such invasion.\n\nChristian Wolmar says only a few words about this train in his book *Engines of War*, but the book is a treat if you're into military history and trains.\n\nPerhaps another of our experts can chime in regarding ground defenses--static and mobile.", "As /u/Domini_canes says, Britain's first line of defence against invasion was the Royal Navy and RAF, but there were extensive preparations on land as well.  Sir Edmund Ironside, Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, drew up initial defensive plans as G.H.Q. Operation Instruction Number 3 with three main elements: a \"crust\" along the coast to disrupt initial landings, a line of anti-tank obstacles further inland, and mobile reserves behind the anti-tank line to react to enemy sea or air landings; there are [minutes of the Chiefs of Staff discussing the plan with details and notes from late June 1940] (_URL_2_).  One of the major problems was the ability to form the crucial mobile reserve, as the highly mechanised British Expeditionary Force containing the majority of modern equipment was deployed in France as the possibility of invasion first arose, and lost almost all their transportation (Churchill puts the number at 82,000 vehicles in *Their Finest Hour*) during the evacuation from Dunkirk, so considerable effort was put into the \"stop lines\", fortifications covering natural anti-tank obstacles such as canals and rivers where possible, trenches and obstacles where not, with thousands of pillboxes built across England.  Though the usual Wikipedia caveats apply, the article on [British hardened field defences of World War II] (_URL_0_) is a good starting point with plans of the various types of pillboxes built and photographs of remaining example.  Artillery was also in short supply, Emergency Coastal Batteries scraping together old naval guns to cover the most vulnerable landing points.  Obstacles were erected in open fields to prevent enemy air landing, though they were also a hazard to RAF pilots trying to make a forced landing as related in a couple of instances in *Ten Fighter Boys*. \n\nThe Local Defence Volunteers, soon afterwards renamed The Home Guard, were formed to augment Regular and Territorial units, though at first they lacked even small arms and with regular army units having priority were forced to improvise with petrol-based anti-tank weapons; there was certainly determination, as per the previously mentioned tiny armoured train, if not necessarily wisdom.  [Operation Banquet] (_URL_1_) would have thrown anything that could fly at an invading force, including Tiger Moth biplane trainers with 20lb bombs flown by student pilots, and there were experiments in fitting 20mm cannon to the spats of a Westland Lysander for strafing landing barges.  \n\nOthers in the army like Brooke and Montgomery were highly sceptical of Ironside's focus on static defences, and convinced Churchill, resulting in Ironside being replaced by Brooke in July, and a much greater focus on a mobile defence.  Rather than stop lines that would useless if flanked or penetrated, key points would be be reinforced as \"islands\" with all-round defensive capability to harass and delay the enemy advance until the mobile reserve could be brought up.  As industry geared up to re-equip the army this became a more realistic proposition, and with the Luftwaffe failing to secure air superiority the threat of invasion gradually receded.", "Many of the static defences are still standing and visible today - you can often spot them by railway bridges or bridges over streams and rivers.\n\nIn Surrey, where I live, a line of defences was constructed along the mole valley. I see one pillbox out of the train window every day on the way to work and another on my way back from my trip to the shops.\n\nThe latter is this [one](_URL_0_), if I'm not mistaken, which is variant of the [Type 24](_URL_1_)\n\nI'm not sure where you live, but if you are in the UK or ever visit, its worth keeping your eye out for this type of thing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Romney%2C_Hythe_and_Dymchurch_armoured_train.jpg"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_hardened_field_defences_of_World_War_II", "http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C588239", "http://www.ukwarcabinet.org.uk/documents/701"], ["http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/collections/getrecord/SHHER_6159", "http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/index.php/types-of-pillbox/type-24-pillbox/"]]}
{"q_id": "2la6hh", "title": "Book Recommendation on Class Analysis of Nazi Germany", "selftext": "I'm interested in examining Nazi Germany from a class perspective but a quick look through google has failed to give me any book length works on the topic. Any recommendations? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2la6hh/book_recommendation_on_class_analysis_of_nazi/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clswpwa", "clswzv9", "clsxhw5"], "score": [2, 2, 3], "text": ["If you've already read it, ignore me, but Evans's Third Reich trilogy is a very good, comprehensive work on the political, economic, and ideological state of things during the Nazi period.", "Richard Grunberger's *A Social History of the Third Reich* is pretty comprehensive, with sections on the family, party, civil service etc.", "Part of the problem with your google search might be that \"class\" is often a highly nebulous term and despite its importance to social historians, it is often highly difficult to nail down. \n\nMost of the works using a socioeconomic lens to examine the Third Reich deal primarily with the issue of the Nazi seizure of power and trying to examine what electoral group bears responsibility for voting for the Nazis. older historiography emphasized that Nazism was a largely middle-class movement, but recent scholarship has qualified this assessment. Both Conan Fischer's *The Rise of the Nazis* and *The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933* by Thomas Childers  assert that while the lower middle-class was one of the stablest of the Nazi's constituency, they managed to branch out into other groups. Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann's *Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in 'red' Saxony* largely examines the small but significant inroads the NSDAP made among Saxony's proletariat, which many prior scholars had assumed were immune to the appeal of the NSDAP. *Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933* by Pamela E. Swett is an excellent readable urban study of how violence ensconced itself into Berlin's working class culture and neighborhoods. \n\nFor the period 1933-39, a good survey is Richard Evans's *The Third Reich in Power*, which covers more than just class but is a good grounding for understanding this period. lthough it's both old and a biography, Ronald Smelser's *Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader* is a good window into both the promise and the shortcomings of the German Labor Front, which the Third Reich intended to be the worker's voice in the new order it was creating. Historians are also increasingly turning less to class as a category or statement of identity and instead examining how class was experienced by people, particularly with their consumption of material goods. Two of the books that typifies this new approach to class is  *Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich* by Shelley Baranowski and *Nazi 'Chic'?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich* by Irene Gunther. Both historians examine how the Third Reich tried to have its cake and eat it too; it pursued a consumer strategy that promised the good life for all Germans, but then had to both make the dream possible and define it in such a way that it would distinguish itself from both American-style mass consumption and older middle-class patterns of consumerism. \n\nObviously, this is just scratching the surface of a vast historiography upon the Third Reich and I don't doubt that others on here can weigh in with suggestions.  \n\t\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "4tcf82", "title": "Why didn't sports teams in the US develop like soccer clubs in England?", "selftext": "London alone has 10 clubs in the Premier League and Championship combined. Many of these came about as company teams or extensions of already existing clubs. \n\nYet at roughly the same time in the US, having just two teams per league in a city is rare. \n\nWhy?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tcf82/why_didnt_sports_teams_in_the_us_develop_like/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5g999r"], "score": [3], "text": ["In part we can look to the prevalence of collegiate sports programs across the nation as an alternate form.\n\nNew York City for instance at one time all had Columbia, Fordham, NYU, St. John's, and just up the river, West Point, fielding teams with Yale, Princeton, and Rutgers just outside the City, attracting young men to play, and everyone else to watch. \n\nTo get a sense of just how many schools still today are playing NCAA Football this map shows their location. [And there are a lot across all 3 divisions](_URL_1_)\n\nSo we can say that college sports drew much of the early interest, development, and focus of competitive sports, that other nations saw in club sports. Gridiron football was born and nurtured on the campuses of the Ivy League after all. \n\nThough there are a plethora of more independent professional, and semi professional teams across the North East and Mid West. Many of who either couldnt sustain themselves, closed during the Depression, or were left out in the various mergers and consolidations that ensured the early NFL could make a profit. \n\nIts wiki but take a look at the list of defunct NFL teams and their geographic concentration: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_National_Football_League_franchises", "http://footballscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/allshot.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "196a8j", "title": "Ten years ago, my boyfriend found this buried at the beach. Does anyone know anything about it? ", "selftext": "It definitely looks like a cannonball. It was found buried in the sand in Central California approximately 10 years ago. \n\nIt has a pretty obvious seam. It also has \"6LB\" (I think that's what it says) printed on it. \n\nIt weighs approx 5.15 pounds. \n\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\nI was just wondering where it came from and when... But I'm kinda thinking its not a \"real\" cannonball. It would be kind of cool if it was a real pirates cannonball! (lol) If you have any questions, I'll answer them! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/196a8j/ten_years_ago_my_boyfriend_found_this_buried_at/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8l6x40", "c8l716h"], "score": [8, 11], "text": ["Pretty sure it is a Middle school girls shot put. I believe a 6lb cannon ball would be a good site larger.", "I think it is a small [shot put](_URL_0_), not a cannonball. Sorry, I know that's not as exciting! However, it's a reasonable size for a shot, and while I can't think of a reason why a cannonball would be labeled by weight, a shot should be.\n\nEdit: drat, beaten to the punch while I looked up a link!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/8qa9eU5.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/5k9zwFX.jpg"], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.amazon.com/Champion-Sports-lb-Iron-Shot/dp/B000GBCZ0G"]]}
{"q_id": "1he23m", "title": "My town claims to be the originating place of three nursery rhymes; Twinkle Twinkle, Old King Cole and Humpty Dumpty. Do we know the history of other children's rhymes?", "selftext": "For reference, my town is Colchester in the UK. It claims inspiration for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, written by Jane and Ann Taylor, Humpty Dumpty which possibly originates from the story of a Cavalier cannon being destroyed from the top of a church during the English Civil War, and Ole King Cole. He could possibly have been one of the Coel's who were Lord of Colchester somewhere around 300AD. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1he23m/my_town_claims_to_be_the_originating_place_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["catm5hg"], "score": [2], "text": ["Many nursery rhymes have legendary or unclear history. However, the nursery rhymes you mentioned all originate in England or Britain. The lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle were indeed, as far as we know, written by Jane Taylor. The Wikipedia article shows she was born in London, which is near Colchester. Old King Cole's origins are very obscure and nobody knows who he really was. However, Geoffrey of Monmouth does associate him with Colcester by writing that he may have been King of Britons after the reign of the Romans ~300A.D. -Wikipedia, again. Humpty Dumpty could have been a riddle because the rhyme does not say that he was an egg. Many do believe that 'Humpty Dumpty' was a canon used at St. Mary-at-the-wall by the defending royalists in the Siege of Colchester -1648. \nI hope this all helped."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "7mfsdd", "title": "Confederacy fetishists often point to Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 as the \"principal\" cause of the Civil War, but *why* wasn't he on the ballot in southern states? Did they just refuse to put him on there, or was there some complications w/r/t the newly formed party and the dem split?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mfsdd/confederacy_fetishists_often_point_to_lincoln_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dru0x8l"], "score": [1300], "text": ["It's absurd to say that Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 is the principal cause of the Civil War. The only way that even makes minimal sense as a southern grievance is if southern state governments and a large portion of the white populace in the slave states wanted Lincoln on the ballot. They didn't and *that was the whole point.* The simple threat of an antislavery president was enough to trigger an existential crisis for the section. One actually winning pushed the most enslaving states over the edge because they believed he was coming for their human property, whether directly or indirectly. That's the cause of the Civil War and everything else that gets tossed up either as secondary causes or as a distraction, to the degree they have any historical basis at all, flows from it.\n\nBut you asked about the why and that requires going into how elections worked at the time. Today, we go into the booth and there's a ballot paper printed by the state with all the candidates on it that qualify under whatever eligibility requirements the state has. You go into a little booth or otherwise secure your privacy, mark your ballot however your precinct does that, hand it in and go home.\n\nThis is not how the middle nineteenth century runs elections at all. Ballots are produced by partisan printers. They will have the full ticket filled in correctly: just the names of the people the printer endorses for each spot. If you want to change that, you've got to scratch out their name and write in the one you prefer. Then you have to actually cast the ballot, which is done in public. Printers usually run off ballots on different colors of paper and/or different sizes too, so everybody around can see who you vote for.\n\nVoting for an \"abolitionist\" (which Lincoln is not, but white Southerners rarely care for fine distinctions in these things) is a good way to get yourself mobbed in much of the South. Election violence isn't exactly common (though it is more so the further west one goes) but it's regular enough that everyone knows the score. Furthermore, freelance violence against people not deemed sufficiently proslavery is a regular part of southern political life. Simply debating the merits of slavery can risk violence, let alone voting for an antislavery ticket. Even in Kentucky, which is more permissive than most of the South, antislavery speakers can literally get stabbed for the deed.\n\nBut that assumes you can get your hands on a GOP ballot, if you even want to. (Most of the white South has been all-in on slavery for decades by the time 1860 rolls around.) Most printers are local, so they're part of and subject to the same community pressures as ordinary voters. Given the expense of a steam press and the ease with which a mob can wreck one, as well as their requirement for the goodwill of the community for their business to continue, they're probably more vulnerable than usual.\n\nIt's true that Lincoln isn't on ballots in the South for all those reasons...except that he is in a few slave states. (He loses them.) The thing is that his not being an option for voters is what the South intends from the start. They're not upset that they couldn't vote for him, but rather angry that their proscriptions didn't settle the election in their favor. That suggests to the white South that their regime is unstable to a new degree, particularly as the GOP is keen to expand its reach in the Border South. \n\nThere are small Republican parties operating in Maryland and Missouri already. What happens if Lincoln uses the spoils system, as every president did, to seed the rest of the section with antislavery men? They would be the nucleus of new state GOPs that might build the infrastructure that makes slavery debates unavoidable. The two-party system was only tolerable in the slave states so long as both parties competed over who was the most proslavery, which the GOP will not do. Breaking the appearance of white uniformity can underscore its genuine absence (though the GOP was always too optimistic about having hordes of antislavery whites who just needed a vehicle) and will, in the minds of enslavers, embolden the people they enslave. That will, again their estimation, inevitably bring bloody slave revolts which can easily snowball into a genocidal race war. White southerners expect to win that one, because they're white supremacists, but they know it'll be bloody and probably cost them a lot of lives on top of the tremendous profits at stake.\n\n**Sources**\n\n*Liberty  &  Slavery* by William Cooper\n\n*Road to Disunion* (2 vols) by William Freehling\n\n*The Fiery Trial* by Eric Foner"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2dev4y", "title": "During WWII, how did China (and not Japan) end up getting into the Allies?", "selftext": "I mean, just how did that diplomacy evolve? Did Japan sign the non-aggression pact with Germany because it thought Germany was going to win the European front and decided it was worth risking the deteriorating relations with other western nations?\n\nWhy did Japan feel like it had to take sides at all? Would the western powers care enough during that time to worry about matters going on in Asia?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2dev4y/during_wwii_how_did_china_and_not_japan_end_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjoy8jt", "cjozmr6"], "score": [28, 14], "text": ["From circa 1925, Japanese political/social culture shifted significantly \u2014 away from the democratic experiments of the Taish\u014d era and towards the nationalist, militarist, expansionist and ultimately totalitarian state structure that characterised the Sh\u014dwa period. \n\nSo, for example: the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 massively reduced personal freedoms and squashed political dissent, and under a series of prime ministers Japanese foreign policy evolves in direct opposition to the Western powers (widely seen as having manipulated, strong-armed and Japan since the end of *[Sakoku](_URL_3_)*.) \n\nBy the late 1930s, they had developed the concept of the [Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere](_URL_1_); the idea of a Japanese empire in east Asia as a national right. The idea was that Asia shouldn't be part of a European sphere of influence; they took \"Asia for the Asiatics!\" as their slogan \u2014 and believed that, naturally, Japan should and would be the dominant influence in the region.\n\nThe Japanese regime from the late 1920s until 1945 is commonly described as 'fascist', but that's not strictly true. Japanese politics in the post-Meiji era is a case study in syncretism; it simply doesn't fit the conventional Western left/right paradigm. Japanese imperialism is a similar case: it doesn't fit the colonial model of the Western powers, but was undoubtedly influenced by it \u2014 it's been described as '[mimetic imperialism](_URL_6_)'.\n\nBut fascist or not, Japan identified ideologically more closely with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy because those regimes also saw themselves as natural opponents of and successors to the traditional, liberal-democratic global powers (Britain, France and the United States.) You see that goal explicitly stated in [the text of the Tripartite Pact](_URL_2_) (the 1940 military alliance between Japan, Germany and Italy):\n\n >  The governments of Germany, Italy and Japan, considering it as a condition precedent of any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its own proper place, have decided to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively **wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things** calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned.\n >  \n >  [...]\n >  \n >  Accordingly, the governments of Germany, Italy and Japan have agreed as follows:\n >  \n >  ARTICLE ONE\n >  \n >  Japan recognizes and respects the leadership of Germany and Italy in establishment of a new order in Europe.\n >  \n >  ARTICLE TWO\n >  \n >  Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in greater East Asia.\n\n\nIn the late 1930s, Japan saw opportunities for expansion in east Asia: they invaded China in 1937 (the [Second Sino-Japanese War](_URL_7_)) \u2014 that, incidentally, is in large part why China eventually became one of the Allied powers. Their invasions of Western territories in Asia \u2014 Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, French Indochina, and so on \u2014 had dual motives: to secure strategic resources (oil and rubber, in particular) and to break Western colonial power in the Far East.\n\nJapan came into conflict with the US ultimately as a result of [a US-led oil embargo](_URL_4_) that cut off almost 90% of Japan's oil imports, leaving them with just three years of petroleum reserves. The attack on Pearl Harbor was in large part an effort to knock out America's strategic influence in the Pacific.\n\nA couple of good overview from the historiography on Sh\u014dwa-era Japanese foreign policy and imperialism:\n\n* W. G. Beasley, *[Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945](_URL_5_)* (1987) \n* R. Myers  &  M. Pettie, eds., *[The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945](_URL_0_)* (1984)\n\nThere's plenty more that's worth reading \u2014 the historiography on Japan is huge. But those two are a good starting point.", "Japan and Germany had been aligned since the 1936 Anti-Comintern pact against communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.  Around this time, Japanese militarism was at an all time high.  Their military wanted to expand Japan's borders to gather the resources needed to fuel her empire.  Hence their outright seizure of Manchuria during the Mukden incident of 1933.  This in turn led to severe Sino-Japanese tensions that had several outbursts of violence shortly before the Marco Polo incident.  The Mukden incident itself left a lasting impression on the military: namely, that it could essentially do what it wanted and the civilian government could do nothing about it.  We saw this during the Marco Polo bridge incident, where ironically the man who was virtually single-handedly responsible for the Mukden incident, now promoted to general, tried to stabilize the situation but was essentially ignored by the more militant factions of the military.  The Second Sino-Japanese War started, and it antagonized many of the Western Powers.\n\nHowever, in 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  This infuriated Japan as they believed that Germany had just stabbed them in the back.  It also didn't help that Germany had been on very good terms with China until 1938, including sending military advisers, industrial support, arms dealing, trade, training cadres, and so forth to support China's effort to modernize and fight the Japanese (which is in itself a fascinating topic but for another time).  To try and soothe the Japanese, the Germans and Italians formalized the new Tripartite Pact to show that they were not abandoning Japan, whom Hitler wanted as an ally against the Soviets.  Unfortunately for him, the Japanese ended up signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviets and didn't want to denounce it as it would expose Manchuria to a Soviet attack.  So when Germany invaded in June of 1941, Japan decided to maintain the pact.  Diplomacy is hard, yo.\n\nThe problem with Japan feeling like it needed to take sides was that it had already felt that the West had betrayed them after WWI.  They were denied a large amount of the territory that they had wanted, and they were denied a \"racial equality\" clause in the Charter of the League of Nations, which was intended by Japan to give Japan equal recognition with the other Powers but scared the colonial powers.  There was also considerable angst from the Washington Naval Treaties, where Japan, already smarting from Britain's abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, was given a smaller fleet allocation than the US and the UK.  \n\nThe real kick in the nuts, so to speak, was the US oil and especially scrap metal embargo in 1940 in response to the Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese occupation of French Indochina.  While as k1990 says the Japanese were running out of oil, they were running out of scrap metal even quicker.  To secure these resources quickly, they chose to invade the Dutch East Indies.  The problem with invading the DEI was that Britain had a firm commitment to defend Dutch sovereignty, and that the Philippines was between Japan and the Dutch East Indies, being an existential threat to a hypothetical supply route between the DEI and Japan.  Thus, for Japan to secure the DEI, the only feasible option was to attack the Philippines and by extension the United States.\n\nThen again, the only \"really\" feasible option for Japan by the time the embargo came around was to stop the war and beg for mercy, really.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KqNiaX7b4bgC&amp;dq=the+japanese+colonial+empire+peattie+myers&amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asian_Co-Prosperity_Sphere", "http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/triparti.asp", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku", "http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/united-states-freezes-japanese-assets", "http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Japanese_Imperialism_1894_1945.html?id=Ik4mclWXq7cC&amp;redir_esc=y", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/532291", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War"], []]}
{"q_id": "ecp9mh", "title": "How did knights mount horses in medieval times?", "selftext": "My partner is trying to argue that a knight in full armor did not have enough freedom of movement to successfully mount a horse (from like a mounting block, if not the ground) by himself, and had to utilize a system of hand operated poles with tethers and the help of a squire. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nIS THIS TRUE?!?!?!?! are all my childhood fantasies of knights dashing off on their steeds just impossible?!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ecp9mh/how_did_knights_mount_horses_in_medieval_times/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fbdgbmd"], "score": [6], "text": ["Artistic evidence says that they could mount a horse, armoured, unassisted, foot in stirrup and hands on saddle (basically similarly to mounting a saddled horse unarmoured). Textual evidence suggests that at least some could leap onto horseback - this appears to mean mounting without using the stirrup, presumably with hand on saddle/horse for assistance, like mounting bareback.\n\nThis nice lecture, \"How to Mount a Horse in Armor and Other Chivalric Problems\", courtesy of the Met Museum,\n\n* _URL_1_\n\ndiscusses just this question. The main discussion on mounting horses is from about 23:00 to 34:00, and presents multiple pieces of artwork showing armoured knights mounting horses as described above, and finishes (33:30-34:00) with a film clip showing an armoured curator mounting a horse in this fashion.\n\nModern jousters will often use a mounting block, and old-time knights could have used a stool or a helping hand to make it easier to mount (as discussed in the lecture above).\n\nWell-fitted armour gives sufficient freedom of movement to mount a horse, and to do plenty more. One essential task that requires a certain amount of freedom of movement is fighting, whether with a pollaxe, sword, lance, or wrestling. Equestrian armour need to allow the wearer to ride, and to mount, dismount, etc. Sacrifices in protection are made to achieve this - equestrian armours often leave much of the inside and back of the legs and buttocks exposed, which is a vulnerability if fighting dismounted. Freedom of movement of arms and shoulders means that arm protection has gaps, armpits have gaps (at least in terms of coverage by plate - mail can be used to protect where the plate doesn't).\n\nA couple of video clips showing the kind of motion that is possible in plate armour:\n\n* _URL_0_ (see attempt to jump onto a \"horse\" at 0:40)\n\n* _URL_2_\n\nModern re-enactors are often more encumbered by their armour than knights would have been. Often, they wear off-the-shelf armour that isn't fitted to them (and worse, sometimes poorly designed). Their armour often has heavier arms and legs than historical armours (because historical arms and legs often used thin plates that would be badly dented in re-enactment fighting). Re-enactors are often very part-time, and unfit. It's often a safe assumption that if re-enactors can do something in their modern armour, a Medieval knight would have been able to do the same, more easily."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqC_squo6X4", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzTwBQniLSc"]]}
{"q_id": "7ru2wy", "title": "Females in the military prior to the 20th century?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ru2wy/females_in_the_military_prior_to_the_20th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dszpn4l"], "score": [3], "text": ["Woman have always fought wars of course but normally informally. Female pirates, women fighting in drag, women fighting because their town was attacked and it was fight or die, etc. You do see occassional records of female fighters within the formal military (there's records of female samurai and ninjas, viking burials indicate female vikings, there's female military leaders in a bunch of cultures) but they tend to be exceptions among majority male military forces.\n\nIf you're looking for all female front line military units, there is only one pre 20th century example generally accepted as having happened. And that's the Dahomey Amazons in western Africa during most of the 19th century.\n\n'Amazons of Black Sparta' by Stanley B. Alpern is a very good book about them, if you're interested.\n\nThe gender relations of dahomey are fascinating generally and worth looking into. Check out 'The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa' and some of the articles by Lorella Rouster for more on the general role of woman in west african kingdoms during the 19th century. It was mostly hugely regressive with sex slavery, human sacrifice, ritual servitude and submission of women to their husbands.\n\nBut Dahomey itself essentially created a new culture, government type and economy after the old fon style, of individual towns ran by their own headman under the loose moral rather than real leadership of a capital town, had collapsed due to the slave trade so it did a lot of things that nobody else did. (Again how successful they were at state building is well worth reading further into. I.A. Akinjogbin 'dahomey and it's neighbours' is the most positive view of the dahomion reforms I've seen with Karl Polanyi's 'Dahomey and the slave trade' being the most negative. Though both of those were written in the 1960s so might be well out of date.)\n\nOne of the things they did is bring woman into roles that they hadn't held previously. So because their king was an absolute ruler who ruled by power rather than moral leadership and because the state took direct control of the country in a way that hadn't previously happened in benin (including laws on what crops you could grow and when you could let farm animals run wild etc.) they needed a bureaucracy. And because the dahomey religion believed in duality, the way the bureaucracy worked was each male bureaucrat was assigned a 'mother', a female bureaucrat who would check his work and make sure he wasn't lying to the king about how much tax he was collecting for instance. Which set a precedent of the King relying increasingly on woman to keep the men in check as he could rely on their loyalty as they were outside of the traditional power structure. King Ghezo went a step further and relied mainly on foreign, non fon, women who he had taken by his slavers from nigerian and togoloese families so they'd be twice the outsider (he even gave one of these woman as a gift to queen Victoria where she became a british lady). Anyway women were part of the dahomian bureaucracy from the beginning which led to female palace guards and female elephant hunters. And because dahomey fought a lot of wars, they eventually needed more manpower then they could recruit and the inevitable result was female front line units. Which by the time of the late 19th century they had a decent amount of and again nobody else prior to that did.\n\nHow they managed to arm such a large amount of their woman and also maintain the ritual servitude and submission of women to their husbands is questionable but lots of other societies armed serfs and peasants. Richard Burton, a welsh diplomat who visited dahomey in the 1860s, argued it was because the amazons (the female soldiers) didn't consider themselves women but men, that they'd been given the male gender by their king and so were entitled to male privileges. That's debatable but we do know that they had their own female servants/slaves and sang a war song that went 'we are men, we are not women'. They were also banned from having any sexual relations with men let alone marrying them so whether or not they were actually viewed as men, they were certainly taken out of the usual role for women and treat as a separate case.\n\nA.B. Ellis, who visited dahomey in 1895, claimed the dahomians themselves viewed women as superior to men so that was why there was no push back against the amazons (to some extent, you can trace this back to the religion and the belief in duality. The god mawu-Lisa was sometimes depicted as two siblings, a male lisa and a female mawu, but also sometimes as a dual spirited single entity with male and female parts, you can see how that might lead to a different view of women than a purely male creator god) but he also wrote about the hundreds of woman kept in servitude as wives to the king or the priests so if they did think that, they didn't live up to their ideals. The average non amazon woman doesn't seem to have been well treated at all, beyond anything else we have eye witness reports by the crew of the HMS Bonetta of the bloody execution of female slaves by men at the annual customs.\n\nIn terms of their effectiveness, the military of the dahomey kingdom were more effective than most of their African neighbours with the amazons participating in victories against the mahi, aja, oyo and badagry but suffered brutal defeats against European and American armies. Missionaries from the Southern Baptist Convention wiped out hundreds of the amazons at Abeokuta in 1851 for instance (according to the eye witness report of Thomas Jefferson Bowen). And the French made short work of them in 1890 and 1892. But you could say that for any African army of that time period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3sofvl", "title": "In the 17-1800s, how were dances developed and circulated to the higher classes of European societies?", "selftext": "It always appears that grand parties in European courts were typified by large numbers of the higher classes dancing together, but who invented these dances and how did people from all around the various nations come to learn the same steps?   \n  \n  (I'd also be interested to hear about earlier periods, if anyone knows)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sofvl/in_the_171800s_how_were_dances_developed_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwz28ao"], "score": [7], "text": ["Dances were important social occasions, and people studied to dance well, if they wanted to make an impression. There were dancing masters ( you can see a caricature of one, up on his toes with his typical kit fiddle in [one](_URL_0_) of Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress).  There were also plenty of dance manuals- there's  a good [collection](_URL_1_)  of them at the Library of Congress, available online.  The link is to one by Louis-Julien Clarchies, who led a very popular dance orchestra in France circa 1800, perhaps notable for also being black, born in Curacao.\n\nYou can find dancing masters and manuals going back into the 16th century, and manuals can be good sources for tunes.  Thoinot Arbeau's [Orchesographie]( _URL_2_) was the source for Peter Warlock's Capriole Suite ( and supplied the melody for the carol Ding Dong Merrily On High, found there as Bransle de l'Official) , and many of the dances and tunes in the Playford Dance books (printed 1650 into the 1700's) are still in use."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake's_Progress#/media/File:William_Hogarth_022.jpg", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=musdi&amp;fileName=043//musdi043.db&amp;recNum=0&amp;itemLink=r?ammem/musdibib:@field%28NUMBER+@od1%28musdi+043%29%29&amp;linkText=0&amp;presId=musdibib", "http://www.graner.net/nicolas/arbeau/chapitres.html"]]}
{"q_id": "4eolx8", "title": "Importance of combat experience during world war two.", "selftext": "You often hear of battles where one side has inexperienced or green troops like the D day landings, or involving Eastern front German veterans for example.\n\n In reality did this have much effect on battle outcomes? What actions would experienced soldiers do that green soldiers wouldn't? How much more combat effective were veteran and 'elite' troops?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4eolx8/importance_of_combat_experience_during_world_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d220t66"], "score": [5], "text": ["Obviously more experienced troops will perform better than green troops, but it depends what you really mean as green. True a lot of Allied troops that landed in Normandy were relatively green, but the Allies had been preparing for Overlord for a long time and the troops had large amounts of training. This is massively different to a soldier who has just had a rifle shoved into their hands and told to fight.\n\nI'm not going to say that combat experience made no difference to battle outcomes, but i will say that it is often overstated. In reality soldiers in the war gathered experience relatively quickly, but soon reached a level of diminishing returns after that. For example, a unit with 6 months combat experience performed much better than one with no experience at all, but would not perform much worse than one with say 2 years of experience. Therefore soldiers were able to reach a level of parity with the opposition relatively quickly. So while having experienced troops is a bonus, i would argue that it's less of a factor that manpower, weaponry, technology, tactics and strategy etc. \n\nThe main advantage of experienced troops is a certain coolness under fire which makes them less likely to panic. This works better when the veteran soldiers are mixed into formations made of relatively green troops because having people who know what theyre doing improves the morale and fighting ability of less experienced soldiers dramatically. Germany divisions towards the end of the war were often a mix of veteran soldiers and new conscripts. While a veteran unit fighting together is formidible, the logic went that mixing veterans in with new recruits made a much larger force fight more effectively and was therefore worth it\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vshoj", "title": "Age of Discovery - are there any interesting, but relatively unknown discoveries?", "selftext": "I'm an IT major and I chose one elective about Age of Discovery.\n\nWe went through all the major explorers: Dias, Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, Cortes, Pizarro, Cook, Livingstone and explorers of China/India.\n\nI must write an essay about one explorer. I already know that my lecturer is flooded with work about Magellan and Columbus. Do you have anything on your mind what I can write about? Essay should 4-5 pages long, so sources shouldn't be very hard to find.\n\nThank you! :)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vshoj/age_of_discovery_are_there_any_interesting_but/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cevd50u", "cevfneb"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Try this guy.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n", "If it must be the age of discovery and not run of the mill you can look at the exploration and exploitation of the artic (Spitzbergen, Novaya Zemlya, Greenland).\n\nSome wiki articles;\n\nAn explorer stuck for a winter near Spitzbergen (trying to find a northern route to China);\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nDutch compagnie with the monopoly of whale oil on dutch markets (comparable to the VOC and the WIC, although smaller).\n_URL_2_\n\nStill the scale really wasn't minor (from the history of svalbard Wiki article);\n\n*By the late 17th century there were between 200 and 300 ships and in excess of 10,000 whalers around Spitsbergen. The first overwintering was involuntarily undertaken by an English group in Bellsund in 1630\u201331. The first planned overwintering was done by Noordsche Compagnie in 1633\u201334.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Qian"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Barentsz", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Svalbard", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noordsche_Compagnie"]]}
{"q_id": "2q701g", "title": "I Have Two Chinese Antiques with a Common Theme - Need help with identification and context", "selftext": "Not really mine, but my grandfather's. He has two antiques from China that both have a similar \"theme\" of an old man with his foot on top of a crane. He has has always wondered if there is a connection, but has never known. I was hoping it was possible someone on AskHistorians could help identify the connection (or confirm if there is none). \n\nItems in question: \n\n[Carpet](_URL_2_) - Guy in the middle sitting on the crane\n\n[\"Statue\"](_URL_0_) - This guy has his foot on a crane\n\n\nSame guy? Who is he and is there any connection or story? Are these common themes on items from China?\n\nUnfortunately, I don't know much about the origin of the items. Only that I think the pole/statue is from the Panama Canal zone from the 30s (his dad bought it from some Chinese trader?). The carpet may have been from canal zone as well, or Shanghai in the 40s (can't remember).\n\nEdit: I also cross listed this in /r/ChineseHistory [here](_URL_1_). There are some similar identifications of immortals, particularly Fu Lu Shou. \n\nThis is a great starting place for me, thanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q701g/i_have_two_chinese_antiques_with_a_common_theme/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn3lsel"], "score": [3], "text": ["The old fellow is a *xian*, or immortal sage. Cranes are a symbol of longevity and immortality.\n\nThere are couple specific possibilities.  \n\nIn the carpet, I'm guessing there are two more figures not pictured, and that he's [Zhongli Quan](_URL_3_) or maybe [Zhang Guo](_URL_7_) (is that possibly a phoenix behind him?). Those are the two beardiest of the Eight Immortals, a really common folk art motif. \n\nZhongli Quan is usually showing off his belly, while Zhang Guo is usually older than the rest of the group. \n\nThe statue - and I'm less comfortable here - looks like Shou (or Sau), one of the trio of [Fu Lu Shou](_URL_0_). He's called the \"god of longevity,\" and identified with [the South Pole Star, Canopus](_URL_2_). He's often pictured flying [around with a crane](_URL_1_). \n\nShou in general looks a little like Zhongli Quan to me... and the statue *could* be Zhongli if (as it seems) his robe is open and those are supposed to be his ribs showing. If there's a fan somewhere, that might also clinch it. \n\nThe stick might also lean him closer to another of the Eight Immortals, [Iron-crutch Li](_URL_5_), especially if there's a bottle somewhere on his belt or underfoot. His face doesn't look grouchy enough for that for me, but it's hard without seeing the other seven figures in the same style. \n\nBut really, he looks an awful lot like Shou, and Shou is more commonly seen without cohorts than any of the Eight Immortals. \n\nSo probably Shou on two, Zhongli Quan on one. \n\nThere's an outside chance either of them could be some other immortal or sage ... there are [Seven Taoist Masters](_URL_4_), *Quanzhen qizi*, who are sometimes pictured together (or [written about](_URL_6_)) like the Eight Immortals, and cranes are, as I said, a general symbol of longevity or immortality. \n\nThe fact that the dude in the statue has one leg raised is not a coincidence... he's being crane-like, whoever he is, in a way that seems like the internal arts cultivated by the fellow who taught the Seven Masters. \n\n \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://i.imgur.com/XFcl4g9.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseHistory/comments/2q7cdt/xpost_askhistory_help_identify_the_origin_of_this/", "http://imgur.com/fBlJozZ"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Lu_Shou", "http://yang-sheng.com/?p=9827", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_South_Pole", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongli_Quan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanzhen_School#Branch_and_Sect", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Tieguai", "http://books.google.com/books/about/Seven_Taoist_Masters.html?id=EXrXAAAAMAAJ", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Guolao"]]}
{"q_id": "1ax39f", "title": "Chess is a game that has existed in its current form for hundreds of years, and in different variations for over a thousand. How did people in your area of history view the game? Has it always been associated with smart people, for example? ", "selftext": "Who played it too? Was it upper class only? Something everyone could enjoy? \n\nAre there any chess in ancient pop culture type things? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ax39f/chess_is_a_game_that_has_existed_in_its_current/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c91jbg7", "c920lir"], "score": [41, 4], "text": ["We know that chess was played in 11th c. Scandinavia and the British Isles and the most evocative evidence of its popularity are the beautifully carved [Lewis Chessmen](_URL_0_) which were made of Walrus ivory and Whale's teeth. They are currently held at the [British Museum](_URL_1_) and the Museum of Scotland. The materials and intricacy of carving suggest they were high status items and the figures depicted show that the game had been adapted to reflect local culture. The Knights and Bishops that we know feature, along side Beserkers and characters from Norse saga.  However the set remains enigmatic, we don't know who made them or who owned them.  ", "I would highly recommend reading [The Immortal Game](_URL_0_) it covers the history of chess and how it's influence everything from warfare to psychology"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Lewis-chessmen08.jpg", "http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/t/the_lewis_chessmen.aspx"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=lWf71WaEnLgC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=The+immortal+game&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=aERQUYbYDPOn4APfkYCIDA&amp;ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ"]]}
{"q_id": "1ouupe", "title": "What historical basis is there for pirates being popularly depicted with eyepatches?", "selftext": "I assumed that pirates who wore eyepatches did so because they'd lost their eyes, but somebody told me that it's so when they go below decks, they can flip the eyepatch up and have one eye already adjusted to the darkness. I don't know if this is true, nor do I even really know if historical pirates actually wore eyepatches. If someone could clear this up for me, that'd be great. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ouupe/what_historical_basis_is_there_for_pirates_being/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccvvhnp", "ccvzhc2"], "score": [10, 3], "text": ["You should read the biographical accounts of Admiral Don Blas de Lazo. Whilst the article I will cite is not academic, I found it very entertaining. _URL_0_\n\nAdmiral Don Blas de Lazo lost his eye, leg and hand in the service of the Spanish Navy. He had a peg leg, an eye-patch and a hook hand, pretty much all the stereotypical appurtenances associated with a grizzled mariner, albeit excluding the talking parrot on the shoulder.", "Pirates lived in wooden sailing ships on a rolling sea, an environment where  a misplaced hand or foot could bring sudden injury or death. The loss of binocular vision by covering a good eye with a patch would cause more problems than it would solve."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.badassoftheweek.com/blasdelezo.html"], []]}
{"q_id": "4pjfx0", "title": "Was the Puckle gun used during the American Revolution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pjfx0/was_the_puckle_gun_used_during_the_american/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4mspqi"], "score": [2], "text": ["As cool as that would be, there's no record of the Puckle gun being used by either side. From the [Long 18th Century Blog Series](_URL_0_): \n > \"Although John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690-1749) purchased several pro-type models of the gun in 1722, the British army and Royal Navy never placed a major production order. Consequently, no historical record of the Puckle Gun fired in combat exists.\"\n\nJames Puckle actually demonstrated the weapon to the English Board of Ordinance several times: in 1717, while the design was still being developed, several times between 1719 and 1721, and, famously, at a public trial in 1722. The gun impressed the audience by firing 63 shots in seven minutes in a heavy rain. However, it seems to have been treated as a hyper-specialized novelty by both its audience and its inventor. Puckle advertised its speed and rapid-fire ability, and added in the same breath that it could shoot square bullets at the Turks (while round bullets would be reserved for Christians) (Willbanks 2004). \n\nSources: \n\nMichael Burgan, *Weapons, Gear, and Uniforms of the American Revolution.* Capstone Press, 2012. \nGeorge D. Moller, *American Military Shoulder Arms, Vol. 1: Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms.* University of New Mexico Press, 2011. \n\nGeorge C. Neumann, *Battle Weapons of the American Revolution.* Andrew Mowbray Inc, 2011. \n\nJames H. Willbanks. *Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact.* ABC-CLIO, Weapons  &  Warfare Series, 2004."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://historywriterblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/the-puckle-gun-the-marvel-gun-that-never-was/"]]}
{"q_id": "7g09ns", "title": "During the Middle Ages, why was the suffix \u201c-eth\u201d used, and what purpose did it serve?", "selftext": "I heard a commercial on the radio the other day while driving and the voice over guy used the suffix on a random word and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. I didn\u2019t know the practical use of it so I was wondering if anyone knows. Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g09ns/during_the_middle_ages_why_was_the_suffix_eth/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqft23d", "dqftvo3"], "score": [20, 37], "text": ["This comes from how verbs were conjugated in Middle English. -eth was a common marker of the 3rd person present tense singular. I'm sure you could get a more in depth answer about how this in particular became culturally associated with \"Middle Ages speak\" in general, however.\n\n\nSource: Thomas Pyle's and John Alego's *The Origin and Development of the English Language*", "r/AskHistorians probably isn't the best sub for this question, but the answer is conjugation. Before answering your question in more detail, I would point out that what you heard on the radio was not representative of language during the Middle Ages (moreover the Middle Ages covered a very long period and language was not consistent throughout). What you heard would be more consistent with the 15th or 16th century. One of the most common places people encounter this kind of language would the King James Bible. The explanation below is for that era of language, and although the gist of it applies to the Middle Ages--i.e. \n\"conjugation,\"--the details would be different.\n\n \"-eth,\" and \"-est,\" (and its variations) are suffixes to conjugate verbs. \"-eth\" and \"-th\" for irregular verbs are used for third person: \"She *shareth* her wealth.\" \"He *hath* one goat.\" \"-est\" (also sometimes \"-st\" or \"-t\" for irregular verbs) is used for second person: \"Thou *sharest* thy wealth.\" \"Thou *art* a true friend.\" Conjugation gets more complicated when you introduce tense and plural verbs. If what you heard on the radio put the suffix on anything other than a verb, it was just wrong, and would explain why it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. This has become popular lately as a form humor, kinda like \"DoggoLingo.\""]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "1e47p0", "title": "Were there any truly secular Muslim empires in history other than modern Turkey?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1e47p0/were_there_any_truly_secular_muslim_empires_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9wpnpw"], "score": [3], "text": ["Most Middle Eastern countries have been secular since the end of colonialism, such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.  In the more homogenous countries (basically all of them except Lebanon, Syria and Iraq), the primary political struggle was between secular military dictators and Islamists.  That's changed in the past decade or so as the relatively new university-educated class has demanded liberal democracies, and the old order has been pretty well destroyed by the \"Arab Spring\" that the liberals championed.  Nonetheless, secularists (autocrats that often preached some sort of \"Arab socialism\") have been in power for most of the second half of the 20th century."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4qxzdx", "title": "How did Thomas Jefferson reconcile \"all men are created equal\" and the unalienable rights of \"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\" with the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qxzdx/how_did_thomas_jefferson_reconcile_all_men_are/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4wsl8a", "d4wzng6"], "score": [98, 27], "text": ["I can't comment too much on Jefferson's wider moral and political philosophy because I'm someone who studies slavery in comparative contexts rather than the history of the United States itself, but I wrote an answer to a follow-up in [this thread](_URL_0_) a few months ago that a lot of people seemed to find really helpful in getting their head around how Jefferson could reconcile his slave ownership with his political philosophy emphasising freedom and self-determination. It's a very long answer that runs to the character limit so I can't reproduce it in quote form below, I'm afraid. One key takeaway I would say to be aware of is that Jefferson is by no means unusual of slave owners in his life time, it's just that his particular historical significance as an individual and lasting impact of his political ideas in American political culture that makes him seem somehow uniquely problematic and hypocritical as a figure.", "Hey there.  This is incredibly similar to this question which I answered not long ago: [How could american founding fathers fight for freedom of all men and allow slavery?](_URL_4_)\n\nSo I will copy and paste this answer here.  If you have any follow up questions, please let me know!\n\nThis is a great question, one that has been debated by historians for decades, but I'll try and explain some of the over-arching themes. \n\n**Context** \nSo I like to try and explain a few things right from the very beginning.  In 1776, the year the declaration was penned and endorsed, slavery existed in the north as well as the south. The first state to ban slavery was Vermont, in their 1777 constitution (but this state was so new and so small that hardly any slaves existed and thus were freed).  Next, in 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law saying that the Children of slaves would be free once those children reached 28 -- but this freed no slaves immediately because children born in 1780 would have to wait until 1808 for their freedom.   Massachusetts' Supreme Court ended slavery in 1781 when two slaves sued for their freedom (and won).  And while this appears to be rather radical, it was rather slow.  By 1810, there were still 30,000 slaves in the North because several still allowed slavery past this time period (Slavery was abolished by these states in these years: Maine 1820, NY: 1827, NJ: 1846, CT: 1848).  \n\nSo why bring all this up? Because we often times believe that slavery was a Southern issue that barely, if at all, affected the North and this is a complete fantasy.  It *became* a northern issue, but at the time of the Revolution, many in the north were not keen on freeing slaves. Let me be clear though, unlike the South, the North's economy did not rely on slavery to thrive, so it was a more pressing issue for the South than the North because of this.  \n\nBut also keep in mind, that it was the invention and adoption of the cotton jin in the 1790s that made slavery skyrocket in the south, therefore greatly increasing their need for more slaves.  So just be aware that the way Americans viewed slavery in the 1770s was very different than how they would view it decades later.\n\n**Answer** \nSlave owners, who were mainly the gentry since slaves were expensive to buy and even more costly to pay for their food, clothing etc. over time, saw slavery as a necessary evil. The blatant hatred for African Americans and slaves that we see in pop-culture hits featuring the 1800s or Civil War era hadn't quite hit yet.  This was still a period of the enlightenment, so the Founding Father's claimed that their actions for keeping people enslaved were justified for one reason or another.  What did they say themselves, well, let's look at their words together:\n\n\n[George Mason of Virginia, who owned hundreds of slaves.](_URL_1_): \n\n >  \"Slavery discourages arts and manufacturers. The poor despise labor when preformed by slaves. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country.\"\n\n\n[George Washington:](_URL_3_)\n\n >  **I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of [slavery]**\u2014but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished,  &  that is by Legislative authority: and this, as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.\n\n >  But when slaves who are happy  &  content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with  &  seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawar[e]s by these practices; when a conduct of this sort begets discontent on one side and resentment on the other,  &  when it happens to fall on a man whose purse will not measure with that of the Society,  &  he looses his property for want of means to defend it\u2014it is oppression in the latter case,  &  not humanity in any; because it introduces more evils than it can cure.\"\n\nAs you can see here, both of these men, who owned many hundreds of slaves together, speak very harshly of slavery. Even more noticeable is that Washington says he would be in favor of the abolition of slavery himself if it can work its way through the necessary legal means to do so -- which he knows is nearly impossible.  And this is sort of at the heart of the answer to your question.  There is a paradox here, where slave owners (for the most part) seem to recognize that slavery is a bad thing, yet they seem unwilling to take any steps to fix it. \n\nI would also be remiss if I did not talk about the reasonings of some slave owners who advocated to keep slavery because they believed that it was a benefit to the slaves themselves.  It is likely shocking that Jefferson (who is known as one of the most revolutionary minds of the era) was one of these people.  Again, let's pull up some of his own words.  \n\nFolks like Jefferson will often give multiple reasons why they believe slavery should not be abolished.  First, is their own self preservation.  He believed that if slaves were granted freedom, they would likely revolt and kill the one's who once owned them.  [Here, take a look:](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; will\u2026 produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.\n\n >  But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is tin one scale and self preservation in the other.\n\nThere is a very real sense of fear here, one that, in Jefferson's mind justifies the existence of slavery at at time where white Americans are fighting for their own freedom.\n\nThe other reason is, in my opinion, a much darker one.  It's one where African-Americans who are enslaved are then said that they are north worthy of freedom because they are either unintelligent or somehow inferior to whites. [Again, here are Jefferson's own words:](_URL_2_)\n\n >  But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites. Notwithstanding these considerations which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. -- **The opinion, that [black slaves] are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence**... the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind... I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.\n\nSo what does all this show?  Well, it shows that the very man who penned the Declaration of Independence believed that enslaved people would kill their masters if freed and that they were physically inferior to white people.    There are other reasons I could dive into, but these really are he most pressing ones that he founders typically gave.  This is the real start among southerners to start justifying slavery due to differences in race, and it is something that will escalate throughout the 19th century.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48p4tp/did_the_british_royal_family_ever_own_slaves/d0lw1z4"], ["http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas-hius366a/tj.html", "http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp", "http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch14.html", "http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0019", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o0uu9/how_could_american_founding_fathers_fight_for/d48ticd"]]}
{"q_id": "4wtmbv", "title": "Are any ancient roads or bridges still in use today?", "selftext": "For example, paths, roads, bridges used by ancient empires such as the Greeks, Romans, or Chinese dynasties that are still used today? Like an ancient roman road used to lie but now there is a major highway or railroad? Or bridges that were maintained over the centuries? Was there continued development on these roads even after their empires fell?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wtmbv/are_any_ancient_roads_or_bridges_still_in_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d6a7v6g", "d6b5r7j"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["Sure. [The King's Highway](_URL_0_) in Jordan immediately jumps to mind.\n\n >  Was there continued development on these roads even after their empires fell?\n\nI'm less familiar with whether or not the development would have been \"continuous\" per se (i.e. whether or not the road ever fell into prolonged periods of neglect or disuse. I strongly suspect it would have.) but it has been used and developed by a succession of empires that controlled the region, down to the present Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.\n\nThere are also roads that by virtue of simple geography have remained in use in the same place, like the Khyber Pass in the Hindu Kush between Afghanistan and Pakistan.", "Roman Emperor Trajan put an inscription on a bridge in AD 98:  *Pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula* (I have built a bridge which will last forever).  (Credit to Wikipedia for the inscription and translation).  The question is the same as Theseus's Ship--at what point does a bridge cease to be the same bridge?  This bridge in Alcantara, Spain has been broken and blown up on a number of occasions in the past couple thousand years...but do the repairs make it the same bridge--or is it a different bridge now?\n\nYou decide.  Regardless, I think that it is pretty neat that there's a bridge that was commissioned by a *Roman Emperor* out there.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Highway_\\(ancient\\)"], []]}
{"q_id": "125el3", "title": "Did people really used to talk in such a formal way in the past? Historical novels make it seem like abbreviating words is a new thing...", "selftext": "I feel like there's no logical reason why people in speech wouldn't have shorted phrases like 'there is' to 'there's', but reading speech in historical fiction recently (e.g. stuff set in Stuart England), characters always seem to speak in full sentences. Only the sort of 'lower classes' tend to be represented by shortened phrases.\n\nIs this just an affectation of the genre? Or based on some evidence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/125el3/did_people_really_used_to_talk_in_such_a_formal/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c6scikr", "c6sclhn", "c6scvi9", "c6se94s", "c6sgpwl", "c6sgtxa"], "score": [26, 3, 8, 5, 7, 4], "text": ["It's pretty much just an affectation of the genre (side note: as a writer of historical fiction, I've run up against this frequently, as I refuse to follow it). People of all time periods used various levels of language depending on the situation and, yes, those levels of language did include slang and \"contractions.\" I put contractions in quotes there as the words they used aren't necessarily the words we would recognize as contractions, but nonetheless serve the same linguistic function.\n\nI think (minor speculation based on experience) that the \"no contractions\" rule is used to make the characters more distant from us so the time period feels more real. Honestly, a sixteenth-century man rightly pissed off saying \"Fuck you and fuck yo' momma\" is going to seem REALLY weird, even if it's a translation of the sentiment. \"A pox on both your houses\" is more of what we would *expect* such a character to say. \n\nIn other words, yes, people would have spoken differently but no, our ancestors were not mysteriously lacking in an informal speech register.", "One factor in that was that much of 18th century English literature was originally published in magazine serials which went over 20 issues and paid for stories per issue.\n\n_URL_1_\nTalks about this business model in regards to the Pickwick Papers\n\n_URL_0_\nThis explains how Dickens was paid.  Magazine serials were popular, much in the same way as people having favorite TV series today.  Thus, it would behoove an author to write a longer story to be paid more.\n", "[Here's](_URL_3_) a page full of written accounts from Union veterans of the Civil War. You'll notice that the language is very formal. On the other hand you can read the text of *[Tom Sawyer](_URL_2_)* and find plenty of contractions. [This](_URL_1_) is the text of a former slave to his wife which contains the contraction \"don't\". There was a very popular collection of short stories published in 1835, among which is one called \"[A Sage Conversation](_URL_0_)\".  The narrator of the story avoids the use of contractions, except when it serves to highlight the conversations he's supposedly reporting on. \n\nSo it seems that (at least for 19th century America) the use of contractions was avoided in formal writing, but wasn't necessarily avoided in speech, even among educated people (In \"A Sage Conversation\" the narrator's companion uses contractions in his speech for example)\n", "Have you read Benjamin Franklin's *Autobiography*? He uses all kinds of abbreviations, although this is a manuscript and not a copy that was intended for publishing, so that is probably why. Examples are \"dy'd\" for \"died\", \"asham'd\" for \"ashamed\", \"procur'd\" for \"procured\", \"continu'd\" for \"continued\" and other things like that.", "It's worth noting that even today English is almost always written in a much more formal register than the author's speech.  It's a convention of the language.  Since we have no audio recordings from the 1790's, it sounds odd to imagine George Washington saying the era's equivalent of \"um\" in every second sentence, but he very likely did.\n\nIt's largely an artifact of literary convention, and we do it too.  Even attempts to write authentic colloquial speech for modern movies or television don't generally sound all that much like real speech, with all its sentence fragments and filler words.  There are exceptions of course, but they are much less common than one might think.", "I think what happens is that historical fiction errs on the side of what \"sounds right\" to keep the reader involved in the experience and avoid anything that would draw them out of it. It's sort of the same reason science fiction has sound in space and fantasy lit avoids the anatomical sounding words \"penis\" and \"vagina\" in favor of euphemisms.\n\nSo people read the Gettysburg Address in school, and they watch Ken Burns' _The Civil War_, and end up assuming Abraham Lincoln just talked like that all the time. (The upcoming Lincoln movie promises to be a perfect example of this effect.) Affecting a different style of English from the way we speak helps readers locate themselves in a time and place other than their own. It also helps define the work in a certain way. Fantasy post-Tolkein tends to use prosaic writing, and he himself probably adapted that from real mythical texts. Works about the future cloak themselves in made-up terminology. If characters seemed to speak in a modern way, it would break the illusion, and worse, date the work to the time period it was made in.\n\nSo at some point \"formal\" speech became a marker for \"this work takes place in the past,\" a way of orienting ourselves in a time period before hip hop and weed and when everything was more European. \n\nBut if we could replicate the way people actually talked in any time period, it might not sound right if it isn't what people have learned to expect. Obviously we can't really do that further back than a hundred years or so, but I'd point out that comedic portrayals of how people talked in the 80s or 90s are always more exaggerated than art from that time period, and that's just in living memory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=1X0jihz0qpMC&amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;q=sage%20conversation&amp;f=false", "http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/boston.htm", "http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Twa2Tom.html", "http://www.midtneyewitnesses.com/eyewitness-book-series/fort-donelson/union-soldier"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1k98nb", "title": "In the Middle Ages, most of Western and Northern Europe appeared to use patronymics (Rodrigo D\u00edaz de Vivar, Leif Ericson, Nuno \u00c1lvares Pereira, Harold Godwinson, Maurice FitzGerald). These patronymics eventually became frozen into regular surnames. When and why did this happen?", "selftext": "Rodrigo D\u00edaz de Vivar's father was Diego La\u00ednez, and his son was Diego Rodr\u00edguez--there's a clear line of patronymics. But Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s and Miguel de Cervantes had no such patronymic. What happened in the intervening years culturally?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k98nb/in_the_middle_ages_most_of_western_and_northern/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cbmqah1", "cbmrcs9", "cbms8h5", "cbmsnjs", "cbmsxar", "cbmt2a5"], "score": [83, 28, 10, 3, 5, 25], "text": ["In the Scandinavian countries the partial abolishment of patronymics was mostly to do with rising populations in and around the early 1900's. There are only so many patronymics available before things just get confusing. This is also why patronymics are still in use in Iceland, because the population is so small. Hopefully /u/Vonadler can provide a better answer for you.", "The Russians still use patronymics, but they're the middle name of a person. For example: Ivan Nikolayevich (or John son of Nicholas, in English) Bunin.", "Some Welsh people still use patronymics - as in Rhys ap Morgan - Rhys son of Morgan. Lots of British surnames are essentially contractions of this type of name - eg Price - ap Rhys, Pugh - ap Hugh(Huw)", "Also, why did some people in a culture adopt patronymics as surnames, but others within the same culture did not?", "In Spanish such surnames are very common, either ending in \"dez\" or \"ez\" (meaning \"of\") or the beginning with the possesive \"de\". My angle on the issue has to do with the rumor that many crypto-jews around the 16th century began to drop the prefix \"de\" in favor of the suffix \"dez\" in order to confuse and distract the inquisitors. Don't know if this is true.", "In the Netherlands the change from to patronymics to regular surnames happened formally in 1811 during the French occupation when the Civil Registry was set up. Officially the rules had been around since the start of the French occupation, but it was widely ignored. But with a proper registration of all citizens, this became a lot harder to do. Once the French had left the country, the new government didn't change this rule back (and kept the Civil Registry as well).     \n  \nThe original decree from Napoleon is available online here in [Dutch](_URL_0_), and since Google translate isn't very good with Dutch from 1811, I paraphrase parts of the rules below:  \n  \n* Art 1. Any person who not yet has a fixed family name is supposed to report their choice of family name to the civil authority in their town of residence before the end of the year.  \n  \n* Art 2. The name of cities are not allowed as family names. First names can be adapted to last names as long as they comply with the rules set out in the laws from the 2nd germinal from the 2nd year (2nd year is 2nd year in the new French revolutionary calendar and germinal was the 7th month).  \n  \n* Art 3. The mayors of the towns will report the new names to the central government as well as the people who did not comply with this decree.  \n  \n* Art 4. Citizens who are well known by, and are currently using, the name of the town as their last name are allowed to keep it.  \n  \n* Art 6. (skipping 5 because it's confusing). The last name that the father reports, or in case of absence of such, the name of the grandfather from the father's side, will be the family name for any children and grandchildren. And these should be reported by the father as part of choosing the last name.  \n  \n* Art 7. Anyone who hasn't registered a last name by the end of the year will be punishable by law (I'd have chosen to punish them with a silly name instead :) )."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.republikanisme.nl/naamgeving.html"]]}
{"q_id": "79n59i", "title": "Some people in Hong Kong seem to have very fond memories of its colonial past. How much rights did non-British Hong Konger have in the colonial period? How did these rights evolve over time, and why did the British give or revoke these rights?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79n59i/some_people_in_hong_kong_seem_to_have_very_fond/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp4v15o"], "score": [30], "text": ["This is an excellent question which deserves a nuanced answer. British colonial policy towards HK, as you rightly pointed out, varied in relation to local and cold war politics. I will attempt to answer this question based on four stages of colonial policy, which was chiefly used by legal scholar Benny Tai. \n\nThe First Stage: Rule by law (1840- 1960)\n\nHong Kong was ceded to the British after the Opium Wars chiefly for business and economic interests. The Victoria Harbour in particular was naturally conducive for British trade in China and Southeast Asia. The ideals of imperialism or \u2018enlightening the natives\u2019 were not as strong in Hong Kong as in other British colonies. The British pacified the Chinese by allowing local magistrates to continue to apply Chinese customary law (including traditional land and marriage rights) but subject British citizens (and foreigners) to the Common Law system. This dual legal system was only gradually abolished in the mid-1950s.\n\nIn colonial Hong Kong, the governor dominated the colonial government system. The legislature was considered merely an advisory body; it was chaired by the President, the governor. Members of the legislature were not elected; they were either government officials (usually from the UK) or appointed by the governor. In all fairness, the foreign governor often relied on the local Chinese bureaucracy for advice, but there was effectively no checks and balances on his powers.  \n\nThe Second Stage: Decolonization 1970s\n\nThe 1960s saw two significant developments. First, decolonization movements elsewhere led Britain to realize that Hong Kong would not become a colony forever. Secondly, the rise of Communist Maoist riots 1967 (coupled with the cultural revolution in China) raised questions on whether Hong Kong could even become an independent state. The plan of self- governance was abandoned, and development was mainly limited to social and economic aspects.\n\nThe British colonial legacy during this era is particularly instrumental in Hong Kong\u2019s development. After the Mao Riots, which in part reflected the abysmal conditions of factory labour, the government expanded social welfare: legislation protecting labour (in particular prohibiting child labour), public housing, free education for nine years. The Mass Transit Railways Corporations (MTR) created an efficient system of rail travel that millions in Hong Kong still rely today. An efficient (and importantly, covered) sewage system was developed, which improved public sanitation. Perhaps most importantly, an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was established to tackle rampant corruption in Hong Kong.\n\nAt the same time, political rights were still severely restricted. The new public order ordinance imposed heavy restrictions on public gatherings and protests. The legislature continued to be unelected, and the governor still exercised great power.\n\nAlthough democratic reform was strictly off the table, aspirations from the local entrepreneur and Chinese middle class rapidly gained influence. To address this, hundreds of advisory committees and consultative organisations allowed the Chinese (esp. elites) to participate in policy making. Eventually, more Chinese unofficial members were appointed to LegCo until they exceeded non-Chinese members. This was the policy of building government by \u2018consensus\u2019- building an image of a caring government.  \n\nThe Third Stage \u2013 Representative Government 1980s\n\nReform in the 1980s was prompted by concerns over HK\u2019s future. The Opium War leased Hong Kong (technically the New Territories, the largest part of Hong Kong) for 99 years, which was due to expire in 1997. Concerns began to emerge regarding the status of Crown leases. Initially, the British Government wanted to maintain some sovereignty over Hong Kong. Accordingly, it introduced political reform (elections) in order to develop a representative government. Some argued that this would allow the British to maintain a degree of political influence, or to insulate Hong Kong from Communist China.\n\nFor the first time, some forms of election were introduced to the legislature. However, elections were not based on universal and equal suffrage. Members of specific functional constituencies (ie. the education sector, or the medical sector) may elect their own representatives. This was justified on the grounds that they would provide a measure of specialist knowledge to the Legislature. Members of the general public could only indirectly elect representatives to the Urban Councils and District Boards, who would then vote among themselves to be elected as a legislator.\n\nThese constitutional changes (viewed as radical at the time) were perceived by the Chinese as an attempt to influence post 1997 affairs. Motivated by a desire to maintain relations with China, officials engaged reforms rather half-heartedly. Direct elections to elect the legislature was postponed to 1988, and then delayed until 1991. A 1987 proposal to create a Bill of Rights of Hong Kong was shelved. An ombudsman scheme to handle complaints was weakened because the administration was reluctant to give the position too much power. Increasing judicial reviews sought to challenge the government, but the judges were adopted a deferential and restrictive approach.\n\nThe Fourth Stage \u2013 The Patten Reforms 1990\n\nAfter the infamous Tiananmen Square Incident (the June Fourth incident), the approach of appeasement by the British government was replaced by that of confrontation. The traditional apathy of those in Hong Kong were challenged when 40,000 Chinese protested under a severe typhoon. The British empire wished the world to see that Hong Kong was not only developed economically but also politically. \n\nThe British governor at the time, Chris Patten, expanded the legislature by adding more democratic elements. At the time, proposals were already in place between HK and China to develop Hong Kong\u2019s Constitution (the Basic Law). The proposals were alleged by the Chinese government to contravene the spirit previous agreement on the structuring of the legislature. As a result, negotiations broke down. The legislature passed the electoral reform, but the Chinese government refused to recognize the 1995 election.\n\nUnder the Patten administration, the Bill of Rights Ordinance began to grant those in Hong Kong entrenched human rights. The courts began to take an increasingly active approach toward judicial review, and the Ombudsman began to receive a steady stream of complaints towards the government. Despite this, many officials of the colonial administration remained uncooperative. The government refused to set up a Human Rights Commission to enforce the Bill of Rights Ordinance.\n\nConclusion\n\nTo address your question directly, those in Hong Kong did not really have many political rights until the late 1980s. Elections were nowhere near democratic, universal, or equal, nor were freedom of speech and expression expressly guaranteed until the 1990s. Arguably, they were only given those rights superficially under international pressure and the desire to distance HK from communism. Tai describes this as \u201cwindow dressing behind their glorious retreat.\u201d In terms of economic, public health, education, and infrastructure, however, British policies contributed largely to Hong Kong\u2019s success.\n\nSources:\n\nLo, Stefan H. C. and Chui, Wing Hong Hong Kong Legal System Hong Kong, McGraw-Hill 2012 \n\nTai, Benny Yiu-ting \u2018The Development of Constitutionalism in Hong Kong\u2019 in Wacks, Raymond (ed) The New Legal Order in Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press 1999, Ch 2, p.39-65\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1dciry", "title": "What were some of Benjamin Franklins ideas/inventions that were considered radical during the time he was alive but are now acceptable today?", "selftext": "Thank you please!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dciry/what_were_some_of_benjamin_franklins/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9p0dbj"], "score": [5], "text": ["Not one of his ideas per say - but he was one of the only contemorary suppporters of the [Wave of Light Theory](_URL_0_) - Basically that colors  were made up of diffrent wave lenghts of like (like you would see broken down by a prism or rainbow) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_theory_of_light#Wave_theory"]]}
{"q_id": "35lkn7", "title": "Was Caesar upset about Ptolemy XIII killing Pompey?", "selftext": "I'm currently working on a paper about the uneasiness of Roman-Egypt relations, and I was wondering if there are any historical sources to support the idea that Caesar was angry that Ptolemy XIII betrayed Pompey?  Honestly I got the idea from HBO's Rome (this scene: _URL_0_), so it very well may have just been a dramatization.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35lkn7/was_caesar_upset_about_ptolemy_xiii_killing_pompey/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cr5knq1"], "score": [18], "text": ["Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar notes:\n\n\"Arriving at Alexandria just after Pompey's death, he turned away in horror from Theodotus as he presented the head of Pompey, but he accepted Pompey's seal-ring, and shed tears over it.\"\n\nRemember that Caesar was big on granting clemency to his defeated adversaries as a propaganda move to show both his power (this failed rival of mine could never pose a threat to me again) as well as his own magnanimity. Pardoning the washed-up, geriatric, and totally beaten Pompey the Great into a quiet retirement might defang the threat posed by those still loyal to Pompey (like Pompey's sons, who would bedevil the Caesarians for another 20 years)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Pr1V6_N3c"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "298q5u", "title": "Evolution of Battle Tactics: How did battles change from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II?", "selftext": "Sometimes I get into these history moods and get lost in world history for days.  I've been reading a lot on the US Civil War and World War I recently.  I find it really interesting to see how similar battle tactics were in both wars.  The US Civil War was a sort of stepping stone into more modern warfare, and World War I was was the full on transition out of Napoleonic Tactics.\n\nI'm wondering how exactly battles changed over this span of about 150 years.  I understand World War I started off using 19th century style of battle (wheeling and maneuvering lines of troops, cavalry, etc), but quickly adapted due to more advanced weapon technology and fell into trench warfare.\n\nI guess what I'm asking is to compare / contrast a typical battlefield and battle strategy between the Napoleon Wars, US Civil War, World War I, and World War II.  The differences between World War I and World War II seem huge to me, especially since the wars were only 20 years apart, so I'm trying to understand this better.\n\nThanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/298q5u/evolution_of_battle_tactics_how_did_battles/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciii50m", "ciijtvy", "ciikd1i"], "score": [5, 99, 5], "text": ["Kind of a broad question, seems difficult to answer in an reasonable length of space, even for this subreddit. Maybe focus your question on the changes between two wars that were close chronologically, like the American Civil War and the Crimean War.", "Oh my god you have no clue who enormous of a topic this is. God where do I even begin.\n\nOkay, the Napoleonic Wars! The Napoleonic Wars greatest innovation, something which would paint warfare forever after, is the concept of a citizen army -- to replace the highly trained, specialized mercenary armies employed by crowns around Europe. These mercenary armies would generally be foreign and highly paid, which makes them very efficient at quelling local revolutionary tendencies. With the French Revolution, the combination of the ideas of the Enlightenment and Democracy came the idea that if this is a nation of the people then the army must also be of the people. When basically all of Europe went to war with Revolutionary France to subdue them and restore the monarchy, hundreds of thousands of men would willingly sign up and fight the invaders as a united force. They were not nearly as trained and in fact had egregious casualty ratios but their sheer numbers and force would wreck the balance of power. These Prussian and Austrian and etc. Generals pleaded with their monarch's for armies of equal size to compete lest they be conquered entirely.\n\nHow these battles would actually be fought is too diverse to cover and would be its own major post on its own, so I'll focus on Napoleon. Napoleon's strategy and tactics were that of complete annihilation whether on the attack or defense -- his goal was to obliterate the enemy forces under any circumstance. Absolute victory or bust. So let's talk about an average Napoleonic battle. Napoleon's army would be in [this marching formation](_URL_0_) which allowed for ridiculous flexibility. The cavalry screen allowed much early warning and the dual army allowed him to further spread his power rather than putting his 'eggs in one basket.' So he detects an enemy, his cavalry returns to the communications staff and the army would begin forming.\n\nLight infantry would approach the enemy first and begin harassing the enemy lines. They would operate in teams of two covering each other and operate with 100 in a roughly 100-200 meter region. They tended to have more camouflaged uniform (but not much). They were also the highly intelligent and generally more trained members of the group, many times even hunters and rangers before their military tenure. The Voltigeur also were designated by something that many people would not immediately think, height. Height was actually critical in designation of Napoleon's armies -- you were likely pushed into skirmisher roles if you were 4'11 to 5'1. Small and maneuverable and exceedingly accurate makes a deadly combination.\n\nTheir job was, like I said, harassment -- generally of the enemies weakest links to try and further weaken them. They also had to contest with enemy skirmishers which lead to warfare that could look pretty similar to a modern soldier -- small 'squads' with rifles operating with cover against each other. They were especially useful in urban environments to climb into and through buildings and small places to become a nuisance to the enemy. \n\nAfter that the light artillery near the front would open up as the light infantry began to withdrawal. They would also target weak points in the enemy line as the first wave of infantry began to form...not into lines as you may imagine, but columns! The Napoleonic Wars, especially in the early days, was as I said a citizen army and these men never held a gun in their life and had no dream of joining the military years prior. They were not military men and it would be too time consuming and even irresponsible to try and train them in complex military tactics and maneuvers. Why bother with finesse when you have brute force?\n\nThese infantry would be organized in tight columns with ridiculous depth that rivaled Greek phalanxes centuries prior -- dozens of men deep was not uncommon. A center line would unleash an initial volley and then the two sides, in their column formation, would charge with all their force into the enemy line with bayonets. Many times the threat of hundreds of men charging you with that kind of depth would be enough to cause a break in the enemy lines and a total rout which your cavalry would promptly clean up. However if it wouldn't, you would crash into their weak point and your men would pour out and that much shock and force and men pushed into one small area immediately following artillery and a barrage of muskets would cause a route. This would have so much ridiculous success and would contribute to France winning wars against, again, basically the entirety of Europe at once consistently. \n\nAs the different Coalition Wars (ie: Napoleonic Wars) drew on, Napoleon would get more experienced troops and would fight a more finesse based style. He would utilize Grenadiers -- tall men with huge bearskin caps for intimidation and as elite shock troops. He would love using his inexperienced line infantry and light infantry to hold the enemy in place while his elite troops swung around and crashed into the enemy's flank and \"rolled them up\". \n\nI can't talk about the American Civil War since it's out of my wheelhouse and to my understanding a weird aberration, but I can talk about the Franco-Prussian War. The Franco-Prussian War taught a story to Europe that many would not want to hear, but would harken in an age of new warfare. As opposed to the ACW just five years prior which used muzzle loaded percussion muskets, the French and German forces would both be using breech loaded bolt action rifles using cartridges. The French had the *Chassepot* and the Germans had their infamous \"Needle Gun\" -- both with an effective range over a thousand meters. I'll quote from Michael Howard:^[1]\n\n >  *The German infantry did not, indeed, acquit themselves particularly well. The company columns in which they advanced into action disintegrated under fire into a ragged skirmishing line which quickly went to [the] ground, and which officers and N.C.O.s urged forward in vain. In the woods and close country which lay before the French positions the temptation to 'get lost' was sometimes overwhelming. Only close order could give the infantry confidence, and close order in the face of breech-loading rifles was suicidal. The answer to the problem, as the Germans discovered during hte course of the campaign, was for the infantry, so long as its armament was inferior to that of the enemy, to hold back and leave matters to the guns; and the German field artillery proved quite capable of settling matter sitself. Its range and rate of fire gave it, at the beginning of both battles, such an ascendancy that the French gunners -- including the dreaded *mitrailleuses*--were silenced in a matter of minutes.* \n\nThe Franco-Prussian War was a \"half and half\" war even more than the ACW. The Germans would have rapid mobilization -- over 250,000 men -- and would have staggering casualty rates. They would simply not be capable of assaulting positions without unacceptable casualties because of the deadliness of French riflemen and them not having the tactical flexibility to deal with it. \n\nThe Generals had no idea what to do other than to just sit back and try and flatten the target area with their artillery and send in their infantry to mop up -- something we'll see tried again in a few years with much less success. However it worked then and, unfortunately, both sides didn't get a real picture of the futility of their tactics because of how much of a fluke the war was. The French would be duped by the genius Von Moltke the Elder into being completely surrounded at Sedan and surrendering along with their monarch Napoleon III. Paris would declare herself the Third Republic but would still surrender just a few months later after a prolonged siege. There was a significant amount of casualties (the Prussians suffered 68% casualties at Mars-la-Tour for instance) as holes began to form in 'Napoleonic Tactics' but the war did not drag on long enough and there were not enough battles for any of serious influence to notice. Most of those who did notice were lying somewhere face down in a field somewhere, and they didn't have much of an influence on military doctrine unfortunately.\n", "While broad I can attempt to focus on several aspects that can be spoken to.\n\n1.) The role of ordinance.\n_URL_1_\n\nNapoleon began his military career as an artillery officer in the French military. When napoleon gained the reigns of political power in post-revolutionary France he brought the mind of an artillery officer to the post of commander-in-chief. The primacy of ordinance in the French military became paramount with mobile artillery becoming more common on the battlefield. Napoleon moved artillery, rather than cavalry, to the forefront of his battlefield doctrine often placing his most promising officers in control of entire artillery regiments. \n\nNapoleon's focus on artillery warfare would set the pace for warfare for a century with aggressive use of artillery often dominating the general doctrine. We see in the American Civil War that rifling had created newly more effective artillery that could shell cities and armies from miles away. The accuracy of this artillery, coupled with the advancing science of ballistics, made artillery barrages an essential tactic during this war. With infantry firearms still relatively inaccurate artillery was relied upon for long distance warfare, and remained an essential feature of civil-war battle doctrine.\n\nDuring the WW1 we see an expansion of this theory to a degree never before seen. Artillery pieces become enormous and the range of the artillery is miles. We see weapons like [Big Bertha](_URL_2_) take the stage and effectively nullify the advantage of static fortifications. Infact the perception of the artillery commander as being the most important and effective officer became a major problem as many WW1 armies lacked competent infantry officers.\n\nIn WW2 ordinance still played a major role, but with the domination of air-based ordinance from strategic bombers made large-scale bombardment less necessary. Instead artillery battalions were usually attached to infantry regiments to support them on the field. The switch from artillery to combined-arms tactics really speaks to the change one would see from a napoleonic to WW2 battlefield.\n\n2.) Squad Level Tactics\n_URL_0_\n\nFrom the napoleonic period through to the civil war and the end of the 19th century infantry blocks were the standard mode of organization for infantry. Effectively derived from the much much earlier tactics of the pike-square it allowed relatively inaccurate barrages of muzzle-loaded firearms to create a \"volume of fire\" that could be effective when fired in unison. Up until the invention of the breach loading rifle this was the standard doctrine in infantry tactics.\n\nOnce breach loading rifles became common these extremely accurate rifles made this kind of \"volume of fire\" unneccessary and led, among other things, to the rise of trench warfare during WW1. Weaponry and artillery were so accurate and deadly that tactics had not been developed to advance without the aid of cover. As a transition stage WW1 also focused still upon batallion level warfare with large charges of troops being the normal strategy of movement along the battlefield. Soldiers still received relatively similar weapons and there was little specialization of roles among soldiers.\n\nWith the creation of the Tank and armored cavalry WW2 revolutionized infantry tactics. Now a combined arms approach was used on the battlefield where individual units were trained to work in support of one another where regimental command could easily dictate orders on the fly using portable radios. With the ease of communication tactics became more centered around \"mobile infantry\" units that would work as self-contained fighting units that could be supported by cavalry, artillery and even air based assets. \n\nThe rise of the Mobile Infantry Unit would be the most glaring difference between the Napoleonic and WW2 battlefields. Instead of large scale movements of thousands of troops together the WW2 battlefield would have seemed much more chaotic. Individual fighting units would be tasked with particular objectives that would support the overall goal of the campaign. The army became more specialized and each type of soldier understood their role on the battlefield. Soldiers were even provided individualized training to specialize them in the combined-arms doctrine. Heavy Gunners, Snipers, Radio Operators, Support Gunners, Sappers, Commandos, Marines. Each were trained in a specific aspect of warfare rather than the more generalized training provided to troopers in previous wars.\n\nIn summary. The greatest difference one would see is the diffusion of the battlefield. What in Napoleonic times could have taken up a field 20kmx20km would be diffused along a front hundreds of miles long. Large-scale troop movements were avoided as much as possible, and subterfuge was an essential tactic of war. \n\nAlso very few silly hats. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.napolun.com/mirror/web2.airmail.net/napoleon/care.gif"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_tactics#Mobile_infantry_tactics", "http://www.wtj.com/articles/napart/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_(howitzer)"]]}
{"q_id": "99stlu", "title": "What was the relationship like between the Spanish and their Tlaxcala alllies?", "selftext": "What did the Tlaxcalan's hope to gain from the alliance and how did the Tlaxcala see themselves in the post Aztec order?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/99stlu/what_was_the_relationship_like_between_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4qzzqo"], "score": [5], "text": ["You may be interested in [my earlier answer on a similar topic](_URL_0_): \n\n -   \u200b[In the second part](_URL_0_dwj7dmf/) I look at Tlaxcala's \"special status\", so you can also go straight to this - this focuses more on colonial times and Tlaxcala's rewards for siding with the Spanish\n\n  -  [This answer to a follow up](_URL_0_dwowehk/) also directly deals with Tlaxcala in more detail (esp. on the 2nd question) - here I look more at Tlaxcala's reasons for forming the alliance in the first place\n\nHope that's helpful! In case of questions let me know."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88a0qu/why_did_the_spanish_conquest_of_mexico_end_up/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88a0qu/why_did_the_spanish_conquest_of_mexico_end_up/dwj7dmf/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88a0qu/why_did_the_spanish_conquest_of_mexico_end_up/dwowehk/"]]}
{"q_id": "4q59ex", "title": "What are examples of Prophecies that were very influencial in their time, or culture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4q59ex/what_are_examples_of_prophecies_that_were_very/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4q9jrt", "d4qb8b0"], "score": [2, 5], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [\"trivia seeking\" questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_).", "The [Sybilline Books](_URL_0_) were a series of oracular predictions written in Greek hexameters that were supposedly sold to Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last King of Rome by a sibyl. \n\nBasically, the legend goes that the Hellespontine Sibyl (an Oracle of Apollo) wrote them in the lifetime of Cyrus the Great, and they passed down to the Erythraean Sibyl another Apollonian Oracle in Ionia. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus wanted to purchase them but thought that the price she quoted was too high, so she burned 3 and offered to sell the rest for the same price, he still refused, so she burned another 3, and he relented and bought the last 3 for the price all 9 would have been. Tarquinius then had them carefully preserved in a vault below the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter. \n\nSupposedly they predicted the time and nature of several calamities (plagues, hail, earthquakes etc.) and the necessary rites of expiation to avert total disaster (like burying 2 Gauls and 2 Greeks alive after the legions were defeated by Hannibal at Cannae). They remained housed in the Temple of Jupiter (until 87 BC, when the Temple burned down, and the books were replaced with various similar writings collected from Illium, Erythrae, Samos, Sicily, and Africa together with the writings of Roman oracles)\n\nHaving been collected in Anatolia and being connected to Greek cult practice they were instrumental in integrating Greek deities and belief systems (more than the Etruscan influence already had) and the Keepers of the Sybilline Books had superintendence over the worship of Apollo, Cybele, and Ceres. \n \n\nThey were kept under tight control by the Roman Senate, first entrusted to 2 patricians, changed to 5 patricians and 5 plebeians in 367 BC, and finally to 15 caretakers (around Sulla's time). They held this office for life and were exempted from all other duties due to the importance of that office. Of course, being in Greek hexameter there were always 2 Greek translators to assist in interpretation. They were consulted whenever the Roman Republic, and later Empire, faced a crisis although it was warned that the interpretation of the necessary form of expiation (but not the oracles themselves oddly enough) could potentially be abused by those appointed to read them.\n\n\nThe Sibylline Books were an important part of Roman legendary tradition, and helped to shape Roman policies and religious practices, being consulted in times of uncertainty to help guide political, religious and sometimes military action and were the reason for the construction of eight temples within the city of Rome, the institution of the Lectisternium ceremony, Megalesia Ludi and the Ludi Florales (a springtime fertility festival associated with flowers and growth), among more political actions like extending friendship to King Ptolemy XII of Egypt but refusing military aid (although he eventually did receive aid from Aulus Gabinius). \nHowever at times the oracles were ignored due to practical necessities, and finally were burned on the orders of Roman general Stilcho as they were being used to attack his government.\n\n\nStill, several exerpts from the Syballine Books and their translations have survived, although I do not have any links where you can find them.\n\n\nSources:\n\n\n[Livy's History of Rome (5, 7, 10, 13, 27, 28, 31, 47)](_URL_1_)\n\n[Tacitus' *Annals* (Book 6, VI.12)](_URL_4_)\n\n[Lactantius' Institutiones Divinae (I: 6)](_URL_3_)\n\nAmmianus Marcellinus' *History of Rome, XXIII* (1, 7)\n\n[Hermann Diels' *Sibyllinische Bl\u00e4tter*](_URL_5_)\n\n[Eric M. Orlin's *Temples, Religion, and Politics in the Roman Republic* (chapter 3)] (_URL_2_)\n\nEdit: Didn't realise this question was against sub rules. :-/ Hopefully this still helped."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22trivia_seeking.22_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nub87/rules_change_throughout_history_rule_is_replaced/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibylline_Books", "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19725/19725-h/19725-h.htm", "https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Temples_Religion_and_Politics_in_the_Rom.html?id=QbvYv8UfuwMC", "http://www.britannica.com/topic/Divinae-institutiones", "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/6A*.html", "https://books.google.com.co/books/about/Sibyllinische_Bl%C3%A4tter.html?id=DRuiu49uutMC&amp;redir_esc=y"]]}
{"q_id": "a50lv7", "title": "What happened to King George's copy of the Declaration of Independence?", "selftext": "There seems to be some debate as to whether or not he saw it at all.  Was a copy even sent to him or was it just circulated in the colonies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a50lv7/what_happened_to_king_georges_copy_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ebja1cq"], "score": [122], "text": ["[This](_URL_0_) previous answer by /u/mydearestangelica might answer your question."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9alr1m/what_did_king_george_iii_do_with_the_declaration/"]]}
{"q_id": "8xd2l3", "title": "Has a nation ever existed that did not occupy physical land?", "selftext": "To give some context: This notion was born when thinking about my own culture. My culture, [Circassian](_URL_1_), is currently living in a diaspora ever since the [Russo-Circassian War](_URL_0_) ended in 1864. Some of the population of Circassians do reside in the Caucasus region where we're from, but it's all split apart and still don't account for even 1/4th of all Circassians worldwide.\n\nAfter some thought, I wondered if there would ever be a way for Circassians to once again be a nation, even if we didn't occupy physical land. This breeds the question: Has a nation ever existed that did not occupy physical land?\n\nEDIT 01:\n\nMy definition of a nation is the definition Google gives you:\n\n*\"a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language**~~, inhabiting a particular country or territory~~**.\"*", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8xd2l3/has_a_nation_ever_existed_that_did_not_occupy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e22qen7"], "score": [10], "text": ["The term for what you're describing is a stateless nation; the term coming from Jacques Lereuz's book about Scotland. Though it was originally about the Scottish, the term was quickly adopted by people with far less of a state. \n\nGroups frequently identified with the term, such as your own, include the Kurds, Catalans (sometimes), Sindhs, and Tauregs, to name a few of the most prominent. \n\nSo in other words, yes. By that definition, there are many nations--shared cultural and ancestral bodies of people--that lack states; in fact, you could argue very few nations possess independent states. \n\nBut I think you're asking about a state, in addition to a nation. The term for that is the convenient Nation-State; these are the corporate legal entities that are the primary actors on the globe today. And as it stands, according to the general consensus of political science, a state requires territory. This need not be independent--autonomous ethnic enclaves are found around the world, and these are generally considered states. \n\nToday, international law as recognized by the UN considers territory a requirement for statehood. \n\nBut you asked about history: Historically, the answer is a little smudgy, and it cuts into multiple fields. It even gets a little philosophical: When can we speak about 'nations?' Because depending on how you define some of these nebulous terms, the answers can vary widely. \n\nFor example, not every culture has placed a value, historically, on land ownership, in the legal sense. They might claim hunting rights or have a vague sphere of influence they defend, but for example, Comancheria, the Comanche territories prior to the 1860s or so, had no formal boundaries; it was a largely informal zone that marked where the Comache tribes generally were. \n\nOf course, I'm ignoring the most obvious answer, which are the Jewish people, post diaspora. Despite not possessing a state for most of the last two thousand years, they maintained strong cultural cohesion across dozens of kingdoms and operated networks of mutual aid and commerce that spanned the length of the old world, the most famous being the Radhanites who operated much of the Silk Road during the early middle ages. \n\nWhat is a nation, to you? Google's definition is quite vague, as the term is more personal than people generally admit. Could the Circassian people organize some kind of transnational society? Of course! I'd expect there is one. Could that society have some kind of political clout? Possibly, though I'd suspect only in places where they could flex the power of their members: Again, think of the Zionist movement in the 20th century. Could they form an administrative unit, though? Without land, I'm not sure how that would work. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Circassian_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassians#History"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5xlu37", "title": "Did tattoos exist in medieval Europe?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5xlu37/did_tattoos_exist_in_medieval_europe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dejaoik"], "score": [44], "text": ["Side questions: What kind of ink did they use during this period, or before? Also, was there any known medical risks (infections, etc.) associated with getting tattoos during this period?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dbw3n", "title": "After the Blitz, what happened to people who's homes were bombed or destroyed? Did they rebuild them? Was there a government housing scheme? Etc.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dbw3n/after_the_blitz_what_happened_to_people_whos/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di1lqrt"], "score": [4], "text": ["There's a thread from a few months back that may be of interest: [I am a resident of central London during the Blitz. Am I most likely to own my own home or rent? What happens to me when my home is destroyed by a bomb? Where do I go? Who helps me find a new place to live?] (_URL_0_)\n\nReposting my first answer from it:\n\nHomelessness was a massive problem during the Blitz; something like one person in six in the London region (1,400,000 people) was homeless at some point over 1940-41. Outright destruction of houses was comparatively rare, though, in the first six weeks of attacks around 16,000 houses were destroyed, 60,000 seriously damaged but repairable, and 130,000 slightly damaged. Unexploded bombs also forced many houses to be evacuated, with over 3,000 UXBs by the end of November 1940 awaiting disposal. \n\nLocal authorities were not prepared for the scale of the problem, in part due to pre-war estimates of casualties from bombing raids being far higher than actually transpired. Rest centres had been established for bombing victims, typically in schools, but these were envisaged as a very short term measure, for a matter of hours rather than days, before people made their own arrangements for accommodation. In most cases this was possible; wealthier people could rent a flat in London or a cottage in the home counties, others arranged to stay with family or friends. Some took to 'Trekking', leaving the city entirely at night for camps outside in places such as Epping Forest, or were evacuated to other parts of the country. For some (around one in seven) the rest centres became longer term accommodation; up to 25,000 people were staying in them during the first months. Conditions were extremely poor at first, most rest centres having minimal sanitation facilities and insufficient bedding, but were rapidly improved by both government action and individual volunteers (*Problems of Social Policy* by Richard M. Titmuss includes the account of a \"Mrs B\", a beetroot seller who took charge of an Islington rest centre to organise the feeding of babies, washing, sweeping, breakfast etc.) Responsibility for assisting the victims of bombing was disjointed, with 96 different authorities concerned with billeting and housing in the London region. Some exhibited posters after attacks with information about the rest centres and other services, but the approach was piecemeal until late 1940, air raid victims could spend much time going from office to office trying to get assistance.\n\nOn September 26th 1940 Henry Willink was appointed Special Regional Commissioner for the Homeless. Repair of damaged houses was a priority, as people strongly desired to return to their own homes, or at least neighbourhoods, if at all possible, and by January 1941 80% of the 500,000 damaged houses in London had been repaired, linoleum, cardboard, plasterboard and tarpaulin used for at least temporary repairs if necessary. Local authorities requisitioned empty houses (25,000 by late October 1940), though these still required furniture, bedding and utilities before people could be moved in, and Willink also appointed a permanent staff of social workers for as a Ministry of Health circular put it: \"Experience has shown that the rehousing of homeless people involves more than securing simply that there is accommodation in billets or in requisitioned homes for the number of persons involved. \"Case-work,\" taking into account the needs of the individual persons or families affected is also necessary and becomes more important the greater the distance between the original home and the new accommodation\". By the middle of 1941, then, the situation was greatly improved. More government administrative centres and information centres had been established, along with assistance from voluntary bodies such as the Women's Voluntary Service. Over the course of the London Blitz around 107,000 people were rehoused, 366,000 were billeted, and 181,000 mothers and children were officially evacuated.\n\nSources:\n\n*Problems of Social Policy*, Richard M. Titmuss   \n*The People's War: Britain, 1939-1945*, Angus Calder   \n*The Bombing War: Europe 1939\u20111945*, Richard Overy\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5sc1lc/i_am_a_resident_of_central_london_during_the/"]]}
{"q_id": "4fhgcw", "title": "How were the Maltese actually threated under the rule of the Knights Hospitaller?", "selftext": "I'm Maltese and we do go over this part of our history in school but we do not cover the day to day life and the interaction between us natives and the Order.\n\nI am a bit puzzled in one respect. Despite them occupying the island for 300 years they left little influence on us besides their buildings a few loan words. It does not seem like the liked mingling with us at all. Even today, they carry our name yet they have absolutely no relation to any of us.\n\nIs there any objective accounts of life in Malta under the Order of Saint John?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fhgcw/how_were_the_maltese_actually_threated_under_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d292awm"], "score": [93], "text": ["As you know, Malta was ruled by the Knights of St. John for a very long time, specifically and fully up until 1798, and had been so since the 16th Century. As a religious and military order, the government system of feudalism followed all the way up until they were liberated by Napoleon. While I do not know the specifics, I can attest to the state of Malta by the time Napoleon came, who, by the way, faced no resistance since there was a French schism within the order. \n\nIn the six days that he was there, he expelled all but fourteen of the knights, replaced the island's medieval administration with a governing council, dissolved the monasteries, introduced street lighting and paving, freed all political prisoners, installed fountains and reformed the hospitals, postal service, and university (which up until this point did not teach science and humanities). He also abolished slavery and ordered the allowance of the Jews to build a synagogue and increased the salaries for librarians and lecturers.\n\nAfter this change, the island was given back to the Knights in 1803, and then back to the British after Napoleon's defeat. In any case, in light of these reformations conducted by Napoleon, there is some indication that while the rest of the world was in a state of Enlightenment, there was still some kind of social cling to the Feudal and Medieval periods. \n\nAndrew Roberts, *Napoleon: A Life* (2014)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "33f3n4", "title": "Did the Wright Brothers benefit monetarily from their invention of the airplane?", "selftext": "I've been to Kitty Hawk as well as the Air  &  Space Museums, but I haven't heard anything about how they directly benefitted from it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33f3n4/did_the_wright_brothers_benefit_monetarily_from/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqkdgdp"], "score": [2], "text": ["Yes, they did gain monetary benefit from their invention. The most obvious source is the Wright Company, founded on the 22 November 1909 by the Wright Brothers and with several prominent industrialists from New York and Detroit. Initially Wilbur and Orville received $100,000 and a third of the shares of stock. (Alongside this money they would have received gain from sales from this company, and royalties from others copying their patent.)\n\nIt's also interesting to note that in an interview in 1939, Orville said \"If we had been interested in invention with the idea of profit, we most assuredly would have tried something in which the chances for success were brighter. You see, we did not expect in the beginning to go beyond gliding.\" (Harpers Magazine, \u201cHow the Wright Brothers Began,\u201d Fred C. Kelly, October 1939.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21k1mm", "title": "Is there anyone who can trace their family tree back to a Roman family?", "selftext": "Are all modern western European aristocratic families descended from one or another Germanic tribe? Did any Roman aristocratic family survive the fall of Rome and continue to today? Does this question grossly oversimplify the relationship between the Germanic tribes and Rome?\n\n\nEdit: Thanks for the replies everyone! ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21k1mm/is_there_anyone_who_can_trace_their_family_tree/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgdsrkd", "cgdt0x1", "cgdve0k", "cge27mj"], "score": [13, 8, 2, 5], "text": ["No we can't. \n\nTracing one's family tree, genealogy, needs records to track relations between individual ( X's father, Y's husband, Z's brother,...Etc ). These records are various, the most common and necessary being birth, marriage, death records but others can be available such as wills, military records,...Etc\n\nTHe thing is, records for many countries began to be kept in the late 1500s ( at that date in many countries such as France, priests were asked to keep records about who they baptized, buried,...Etc. The point was to be able to keep en eye on the population so to tax them better ).\n\nSo most people can hope to trace back their genealogy to the late 1500s if they are lucky ( that the country search has such early records, that they survived the centuries,...Etc ) and good enough. Some people can be more lucky to find even older records such as wills or land property records but these are now rare and hard to find and even harder to connect to your actual ancestors with certainty. \n\nSo no, most people can only hope to be able to trace ancestors back to the 1500s ( which takes years ).\n\nNow indeed as you said, aristocratic families had their family trees made and kept in order ( among other things ) to control who is who as well as succession and heritage matters for example. So we have early \" trees \" available, some more reliable than others of course. That said, even for some of the greatest families historians are not always sure on who is who or who is the father/mother of X for people having lived around the 1000 A.D. For example, who really are the first members of the great Salian dynasty ? Well it is not sure so if we had to go back to the time of the Romans it would be nothing but presomptions, full of uncertainties and mistakes ( imagine if you make a mistake early in your genealogy, such as your great grand father for example, then everything is wrong ). \n\nThere is no families existing at the time of the Roman Republic/Empire that we can assume still exists today. \n\nOne thing about genealogy that is funny though :\n\nIf you were able to go back at your generation 30, you have 537 millions ancestors and at the 35th, it's around 17 billions ancestors. \nYou double the number of ancestors at each generation so we all at some point should descend or be related at a famous Roman or a famous tribesmen, we know it with mathematics and statistics but genealogy can't prove it for us. \n\n Anecdote : Mathematicians say that ( you can search the exercise online ) you have 99,999996% chances of having Genghis Khan has an ancestor and only 1 chance on 24 millions of not having Genghis Khan has an ancestor \n\nHope this helps", "Yes, but only because if you go far enough back, everyone's a relative. See /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov's post on the subject [here](_URL_0_).", "You may be interested in this previous thread: \"[Are there any European families that still exist today that can trace their origins to the aristocracy/patrician families of the Roman Empire?](_URL_0_)\"", "No, but it is clear that many Roman families of the early successor states of Rome intermarried with Germanic aristocrats. An important problem for this kind of research is that Roman families, by the 7th century (at least in the north of Gaul, an area that is better documented in term of prosopography) had adopted Germanic names (so, to use my favourite example, a chronicler describe someone called Chramnelen as coming from the \u201crace of the Romans\u201d). There is, however, a series of contenders for the descent from aristocratic families; most importantly, a variety of hypotheses try to connect Charlemagne with important families of Roman Gaul, among which the Syagrii and the Ferreoli; the most likely connection is *via* Arnulf of Metz, Charlemagne's great-great-great-grandfather in agnatic line.\n\nHowever, no-one has managed to establish safely the names of Arnulf's parents. In fact, most hypotheses would link him with the Roman world anyway: if he is the son of Ansbert the Senator, then he is obviously from Roman stock; if he is the son of Bodogisel, his mention in Gregory of Tours' work strongly supports the idea of a Roman descent. If you are interested in more detail, you can look up Christian Settipani's writings (though if I recall correctly, he does not consider Bodogisel to be a \u201cRoman\u201d aristocrat)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20pubn/how_reliable_is_ancestrycom_is_it_based_on/cg5u0wo"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14t6fr/are_there_any_european_families_that_still_exist/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1qjt19", "title": "Did Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great die on the same day?", "selftext": "It seems that according to Diogenes La\u00ebrtius, Diogenes of Sinope died in 323 B.C.E. at Corinth, on the day on which Alexander the Great died at Babylon.\n\nHowever most sources I look through don't give such a precise date for his death - I assume because it is not verified form any other source. Is my reasoning correct? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qjt19/did_diogenes_the_cynic_and_alexander_the_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cddkp2z"], "score": [3], "text": ["In fact that's pretty much the only story of his death that Diogenes Laertius *doesn't* report -- that story actually comes from Plutarch. [Diogenes Laertius reports three alternate death stories as follows (6.76-7):](_URL_0_)\n\n >  Diogenes is said to have been nearly ninety years old when he died. Regarding his death there are several different accounts. One is that he was seized with colic after eating an octopus raw and so met his end. Another is that he died voluntarily by holding his breath. This account was followed by Cercidas of Megalopolis (or of Crete), who in his meliambics writes thus:\n\n >  Not so he who aforetime was a citizen of Sinope,  \nThat famous one who carried a staff, doubled his cloak, and lived in the open air.  \nBut he soared aloft with his lip tightly pressed against his teeth  \nAnd holding his breath withal. For in truth he was rightly named  \nDiogenes, a true-born son of Zeus, a hound of heaven.\n\n >  Another version is that, while trying to divide an octopus amongst the dogs, he was so severely bitten on the sinew of the foot that it caused his death. His friends, however, according to Antisthenes in his Successions of Philosophers, conjectured that it was due to the retention of his breath. For he happened to be living in the Craneum, the gymnasium in front of Corinth. When his friends came according to custom and found him wrapped up in his cloak, they thought that he must be asleep, although he was by no means of a drowsy or somnolent habit. They therefore drew aside his cloak and found that he was dead. This they supposed to have been his deliberate act in order to escape thenceforward from life.\n\nWhen there are this many variants of his death story, there's no way of pinning anything down. Though Plutarch is a tad more discriminating than Diogenes Laertius in his source criticism..."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VI#Diogenes"]]}
{"q_id": "1n6l9h", "title": "How did individuals fund their Hajj?", "selftext": "It seems that individuals who would participate in Hajj would be traveling over large distances such as done by Ibn Battuta at the beginning of his journey. How did individuals fund and gather the resources necessary to complete the journey, what were these resources usually? Also what about christians making the pilgrimage to Rome or other holy places?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n6l9h/how_did_individuals_fund_their_hajj/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccfyk2t", "ccg32f3"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["I can't give any direct information on this topic, however I do want to point out that the stipulations for making the Hajj state that it should be carried out by Muslims who are able-bodied enough to make the journey and wealthy enough to be able to afford it.\n\nBasically, if you *can* afford the journey and are physically able enough to make it, you should, however it wouldn't be held against you if you were not physically or monetarily able to make the journey.", "It's basically the same kind of scenario today.  A lot of Muslim countries are still very rural, poor, or tribal.\n\nSometimes the Empire or city would fund a few people to go.\n\nBut Usually, if one could not afford it, the local mosque would raise money.  It was a community effort.  If members of a mosque could not afford a trip, the mosque could try to get the community to raise funds.  Also, Hajj trips, even to this day, are usually done in a group.  So for a year, 20 people in a local community want to go to Hajj, they travel together, and pool their resources.  The details of this vary from region to region, and how wealthy a place was, and distance from Mecca.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4pnity", "title": "Why do car horns sound like they do and which car was the first to make the sound we hear today??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4pnity/why_do_car_horns_sound_like_they_do_and_which_car/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d4mshr5", "d4my4dw", "d4o6bte"], "score": [5, 54, 6], "text": ["I don't have an answer, but I'd like to say /r/askscience may also provide good answers to this interesting question. ", "Most modern cars use a dual tone car horn that actually produces two different notes.  The interaction of these two frequencies creates harmonics and are easier for humans to distinguish from general noise.  Because of historic manufacturing legacies, most car manufacturers have the same tones in all their cars, and depending on the era, most cars of a single country of origin would have tones in the same key.  These common horn keys (F, G  &  C) are all in the middle octaves, probably because it's easy for humans to hear (we've evolved acoustic and mental sensitivities to noises that are similar in tone to our voice).  Most modern horns use a vibrating plate of metal to generate its tone, but trains and semi-trucks take advantage of their onboard air compressors to make really loud sounds.", "Marketing plays a big role in what a horn sounds like. You can't have a weedy sounding horn on a big luxury car or a bull deep horn on a sub compact.\n\nA classic example of marketing driven sound though is the horns fitted to the 68 Roadrunner. Chrysler paid $50K a year to Warner Brothers for the rights to the image and \"Meep! Meep!\" sound of their Road Runner character.  And then they paid $284 for retooling and a 47 cent cost penalty per unit (a significant investment on a per car basis in 67) to get a manufacturer to build a horn that would emulate the sound.\n\nSource: [Jack Smith, Project Manager for the Road Runner.](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.allpar.com/corporate/bios/jack-smith-roadrunner.html"]]}
{"q_id": "ck7arp", "title": "What are we to make of the story of the Israelites' slavery in Egypt and subsequent Exodus and its reflection on Ancient Israelite society?", "selftext": "Asked this last week, but noticed the theme this week and it seems to fit so trying again!\n\nAnyways, as I understand it, the academic consensus is that the story of Exodus is entirely mythic. There was no Egyptian captivity, or otherwise a time of exile there, and likewise the flight from Egypt is also a creation.\n\nBut certainly there was intended meaning to the story. What do scholars see as the, ahem, genesis of the story of Exodus? What purpose did the crafting and continuation of this narrative serve within Israelite society?\n\nHow does it relate to the actual relationship that existed between Israel and Egypt in the period that it nominally would have happened? I know that this is the first time we even see Israel mentioned, in 1209 BCE, but not much else. I don't want to speculate, but is the myth in any way commentary on the reality of their relationship with a stronger, more powerful neighbor?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ck7arp/what_are_we_to_make_of_the_story_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["evkfie5"], "score": [14], "text": ["As for the consensus, yes. I think this is generally the case that most believe that the Exodus was almost entirely fabricated on the basis of oral tradition.  Personally, I\u2019m disinclined from saying it was made up entirely whole cloth. The reason for this sets up the reasons for why I think it was written in the first place. \n\nAs you\u2019re already aware, the Exodus narrative is central\u2014and has been central\u2014to Israelite and Jewish identity. In the early stages of state formation, hopeful leaders need narratives they can use to rally support as they approach national identity. (E.g., as stupid as it was, \u201cAnd who has a better story than Bran\u201d would have worked at the beginning of rallying public support for the creation of Westeros\u2014similar to how Aegon the Conqueror did, but I guess D & D kind of forgot how such things work. But I digress.)\n\nSo, why was it written? Ultimately it\u2019s a difficult question to answer, as any honest archaeological work will tell you there\u2019s no proof for the event and so reconstructing such history is nearly impossible beyond being conjectural. So, my theory: there were traditional social memories of *some* kind of relationship between Egypt and what would become Israel. This shouldn\u2019t be surprising, because we do have record of Egyptian involvement in the Levant thanks to the Merneptah Stela (usually cited as 1204 BCE) and the Tale of Wenamun. Merneptah is difficult because we don\u2019t quite fully understand the determinative used with the name Israel. It means \u201cpeople group,\u201d but it appears in a larger list of cities destroyed by Pharaoh Merneptah. \u00af\\\\\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af It\u2019s possible there was a very small, Proto-Israelite presence in Egypt at some point that would have served as the source of such memories, but we can\u2019t be too certain. These memories were obviously derivative of multiple sources (hence the presence of what we call doublets\u2014two slightly different accounts of the same story; e.g., did Moses receive the Law at Sinai or Horeb? Was his father in law\u2019s name Jethro, Ruel, or Hobab?). These traditions were eventually put into writing, expanded, edited, and redacted to eventually come into their final form as we have it (read: them, there\u2019s no singular source for us for these texts). These exodus traditions were used as a form of social identity construction\u2014an integral part of state formation and preservation. The use of national literature would become far more important in later periods\u2014especially for the Deuteronomist, who ***loved*** to use the Exodus as a central theme for explaining his perspective throughout the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). \n\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessarily commentary on Israel\u2019s relationship with Egypt as Egypt kind of falls off pretty significantly after the Iron I. I think it\u2019s national literature, intended to construct social identity by constructing a literary Other. The othering process creates an in/out relationship that early Israelites could identify with\u2014especially in light of the nearby Philistine threat during the Iron I\u2013IIA, eventual Assyrian involvement in the southern Levant in the Iron IIB and later, Babylonian incursions and deportations in the 6th c. BCE, etc. \n\nA couple of sources that might help:\n\nI. Finkelstein, *The Bible Unearthed* \u2014 he\u2019s a little over the top with the low chronology, but deals with a lot of important stuff in a very accessible way. \n\nW. Propp\u2019s Exodus commentary is top notch in the Anchor Bible series.\n\nE: fixed a couple of typos."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2zqz3z", "title": "I often hear people say that the Irish Potato Famine was more a genocide than a true famine. How accurate is this claim?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2zqz3z/i_often_hear_people_say_that_the_irish_potato/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cploq1d", "cplorom", "cplvaxl", "cpm0wm6", "cpm3o1e"], "score": [57, 149, 237, 5, 3], "text": ["According to Cecil Woodham-Smith (in her 1962 book The Great Hunger), the English gave minimal aid mainly due to a rigid ideological belief in free markets. It seems that both political parties, but especially the Whigs who were in power during the worst of it, really believed that the market would provide all that was needful regardless of context, and that any aid would make things worse. \n\nTheir evident dislike of the Irish made this an easy belief for them to sustain. ", "Calling the Irish Potato Famine a genocide is fairly contentious, and is almost exclusively a political thought. There were certainly a number of political and socioeconomic factors arising from the British rule of Ireland, including widespread poverty in the aftermath of (and despite) Catholic emancipation in 1829, which led to Irish farmers being unable to effectively produce crops. But there were also a multitude of biological reasons, predominantly lack of genetic diversity among potato crops and the rapid spread of blight, which shared an equal if not greater (and ultimately causative) part in the incipiency of the Potato Famine. This is particularly important, as the 1948 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 26 explicitly defines genocide as an act committed with intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious or national group. The British government maintained a fair deal of discriminatory and anti-Irish policies and laws during that time, but the famine itself did not arise out of intent, nor any explicit action on the British government's part to target the Irish population. Their response to the famine, while arguably weak and to a point ineffective, was ultimately intended to halt the effects of the famine by providing relief to those affected through public works. So by the United Nations' definition, the Irish Potato Famine would not be classified a genocide, but there is room for discussion on to exactly what extent the policies and reactions by the British government either caused or exacerbated the famine.", "I had a chuckle to see another North Korea flair in this topic of all places. Cheers, /u/koliano! \n\nThis isn't my area of expertise, so a really detailed answer is beyond me. However, the Irish famine is a pretty common topic while you're studying periods of mass hunger, and it was something I saw pop up occasionally while reading about the mechanics behind North Korea's famine (1994-1998). There's something that I think might provide some helpful context for your question -- namely, how we study and think about famine has changed a lot over the last 40 years, and the line between \"genocide\" and \"famine\" has gotten blurrier as we recognize that famine is not really an accident.\n\nSo -- was the Irish \"potato famine\" a genocide against the Irish?\n\n**Short answer:** The English didn't commit genocide by the strictest definition of the term, but they did create the circumstances that led to the famine.\n\n**Long answer:** As others have pointed out, there's a troublesome and often politically-charged distinction to be made between genocide and famine:\n\n - **Genocide implies intent.** It's not enough for millions of people to die: Somebody has to *want them dead* and engineer a way to do it, or capitalize on a situation likely to result in mass death. Nobody wants to be told they were responsible for genocide; it's a severe blow to the moral and political authority of the country involved. The Turks resist efforts to characterize [what the Armenians call the \"Great Crime\"](_URL_1_) as genocide. Russia will tell you to fuck off when you raise the issue of the [Holodomor](_URL_3_) and Stalin's being a huge asshole to the Ukrainians. The Chinese government [only recently stopped censoring public discussion of the famine](_URL_6_) related to the Great Leap Forward. Nobody wants to admit to having committed genocide or -- if it's not genocide by the technical definition of the term -- anything that looks like it.\n - By contrast, **famine is seen as a tragedy that nobody could have prevented.** Crops fail. Drought happens. Diseases, predators, and wildfires kill livestock. Earthquakes and floods destroy your ability to move food around. Something bad happens that interferes with your society's ability to grow, store, or transport food, and lots of people die despite your best efforts. Famine is the second horseman of the apocalypse, perennial as the grass, cold and grimly present as its brothers pestilence, war, and death. It is ubiquitous in human history and the immutable lesson is that it can happen to anyone.\n\nExcept it doesn't. Certain human societies have been strangely resistant to famine despite weathering the same shocks that caused mass starvation in similar circumstances elsewhere. \n\nHistorians and economists had a collective \"Eureka!\" moment in the late 20th century when we realized that famine DOESN'T just happen, and that it probably never has. Hunger can happen despite your best efforts to prevent it, but *famine is the result of politics*.\n\n**Before we go any farther, we need to talk about a guy named Amartya Sen.** He's an Indian economist and historian who's written a lot of really famous and influential pieces about a variety of topics, and he was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for his work on welfare economics. In terms of popular reach, he's probably best-known for [a 1990 essay on \"More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,\"](_URL_0_) which addressed the result of sex-selective abortions in Asia. However, in the academic world he's arguably most famous for [his work on famine in human history](_URL_2_), and in particular a theory that sounds bananas when you first hear it, and then more and more frighteningly plausible.\n\nI'll break it into two parts:\n \n - **Sen argued that no famine over the last 1,000 years can be attributed to anything other than primarily man-made causes.** This took a while to get traction; we're used to saying that X famine was caused by a flood, or Y famine happened because of a drought, etc. Sen pointed out that natural disasters and crop failures are actually pretty common, but famines aren't usually the result. Left to their own devices, humans are pretty good at finding and storing food as proof against unpredictable shortages. In order to create a famine, you have to have a bad, unstable, and/or corrupt political/economic system that can't weather a sudden shock and is thrown into crisis. We've gotten used to blaming the shock (e.g., the flood, the drought), when in reality it's just a convenient excuse. The real cause is the shitty and inflexible system that existed before it. \n - **Sen further argued that no famine has occurred in a democracy with a free press.** The basic idea is that government that isn't accountable to its people is notoriously unresponsive to its needs, and a free press is good at noticing and publicizing problems that government needs to address. There have been some quibbles over this, mostly related to pockets of continuing hunger in India, but for the most part this is a pretty uncontroversial theory.\n\nSen published [his first work on famine in 1981](_URL_4_) and has studied the issue on and off since. His work has heavily colored subsequent discussions of hunger and the political systems that create/d it, and it's a big part of the reason we're disposed to evaluate past famines differently these days. Interestingly, the 1981 piece is primarily about [another famine that the British had a hand in](_URL_5_) (the 1943 Bengal famine) due to rice and transport ship confiscations setting off a price panic.\n\n**So let's consider the Irish potato famine :** Again, I have to leave the nitty-gritty details to someone with a better command of this period than I've got, but I can tell you about the commentary that the Irish famine attracts when historians and statisticians are discussing the mechanics of hunger in modern works.\n\nThe potato blight has been commonly cited as the reason that the famine happened, and it's entirely true that it played a role. The lack of genetic diversity among the strain of potatoes being grown in Ireland at the time made the island incredibly susceptible to the blight. However, it was a classic example of a \"shock\" that revealed the underlying corruption in the economic system that surrounded it. The blight may have started the famine, but it didn't actually cause it (if that distinction makes any sense).\n\n**So what did cause it?** Britain's Corn Laws were an aggressively protectionist series of tariffs enacted with the intent to keep grain prices high for the benefit of domestic producers. (TL:DR: Landowners didn't want to compete against cheap grain from abroad and also had to pay their farm laborers a living wage, so Parliament levied high taxes on foreign grain and tweaked them as necessary to try to bump domestic grain to what they considered ideal prices.) The Irish poor (of whom there were many, for a variety of very complicated historical and socioeconomic reasons) were largely unable to afford grain as a result of the Corn Laws, and on the generally-small holdings they farmed (for which they paid punitive rents to largely absentee English landlords) could only grow potatoes in sufficient quantity to feed their families. \n\nThe potato was thus the staple food, and the blight an utter catastrophe. When potatoes were no longer available, the poor burned through their meager savings quickly to buy grain, and when that ran out, they starved en masse. Parliament repealed the Corn Laws two years into the famine, but it was too little and too late, and also didn't address the other systemic issues (principally landlord exploitation) that contributed to the famine.\n\nSo it's pretty apparent why the genocide/famine distinction is a touchy one here: \n\n - **Did the English commit genocide against the Irish?** Not as such. \n - **Did they create the circumstances that led to the famine?** Yes, and most historians judge the government's response to the famine as woefully inadequate, to compound the issue.\n", "I've done a lot of research on this subject and I've recently posted a very detailed answer in a different subreddit. I will copy-paste that answer here, including the sources, and [link the actual discussion](_URL_2_) so you can also check out other -very hostile- replies and my answers to those :\n\nThere is a lot of misconception about the Irish famine in this thread. I have done a lot of research on this very same subject in my capacity as a historian and I can't help but share what I've encountered. It might not be read by many people considering this was posted 7 hours ago, but it's worth a shot. History incoming, skip if you're not interested.\n\nI see that it's still common practice to solely put the Irish famine on the English government. I even see someone saying how it was genocide and that the harvest was more than sufficient to feed all Irish citizens. That's just completely incorrect. Genocide implies a deliberate strategy and malintent. What actually happened was a lot more complex and way less malificent. The potato famine was caused by the phytopthora infestans, a previously unknown type of fungus. It's suspected to have arrived from Southern America and it might have been only moderately succesful for awhile due to various reasons, one of which is meteorological conditions. Before 1700, cultivation of the potato wasn't that widespread. Its leaves are poisenous and the edible part lies underground, so it was actually considered to be a demonic plant and it was only sometimes given to animals as sustenance. However, once people discovered how efficient it was (resilient, high calories, grows anywhere) it quickly blew up and became one of the most important foodstuffs in Europe. When the phytopthora infestans finally struck, it destroyed upto 90% of the harvest in Central Europe. It hit hardest in Ireland, Belgium and northern France, but other regions weren't spared either. The extent of the damage was very regionally specific however, so the isolated position of Ireland already put it at a heavy disadvantage. Regions in both Germany and France could rely on the supply from less central regions to alleviate their needs. The same could be said for Belgium, but both Belgium and Ireland were mostly left to their own devices.\n\nHowever one major difference between Belgium and Ireland was the fact that poor farmers in Ireland mostly relied on the monoculture of the potato to complement their diet while agriculture in Belgium was vastly more diverse. At the same time, the government in Belgium was still very new and it's power was rooted in a long tradition of municipal power. While Ireland was largely dependent on the English government, which was still controlled by 'laissez-faire' entrepeneurs. Communication between Ireland and the English government could also be called sporadic and troublesome at best. Despite this rough communication and the reluctance to abandon their 'laissez-faire' ways, the English government made some attempts to intervene in Ireland. Unfortunatly, most of what they did came either too late, was a grossly incompetent action or it  backfired because of miscommunication - which honestly has been the trend ever since. So in short, it wasn't some malificent ploy by the English government to starve the Irish. It was a famine with far-reaching consequences allover Europe exacerbated by the monocultural tradition of Ireland, horrible infrastructure and it's geographical and political isolation. The incompetence of the English government didn't help either, but they lacked the tools and the mindset to do so. They often reacted just as poorly to regional issues.\n\nAs K.H Connell stated in his article on the potato in Ireland, no government could have prevented the catastrophe that was the Irish Famine. That being said, there were power structures and laws in place that exacerbated the situation to some extent, one could blame the Brittish government for not adressing these in time. However, given the swift occurence of the disease, the general lack of infrastructure to assess or adress the situation and the prevalance of 'laissez-faire' politics, it can hardly be called malintent.\n\nConnell, K. H., \u2018The Potato in Ireland\u2019, in: Past  &  Present, 1962\n\n**EDIT : Because a lot of people are saying that the export of produce shows the malintent of the English government, check out my other comments. The farmers in Ireland were 'forced' to sell in bulk to the market. This was practically the same for every other region in Central Europe struck by famine.**\n\n**EDIT 2 : Two threads on /r/Askhistorians telling the same exact story from a slightly different perspective :**\n\n1. [Would you classify the Irish Potato Famine a genocide? If so, why?](_URL_1_)\n2. [Historians, what's your take on the argument that the Irish Potato Famine was in essence an act of genocide perpetrated by the British government?](_URL_0_).\n\n**EDIT 3 : I can see how many people are still calling bullshit and feel very strongly about this. To prove that this isn't as controversial in historiography as you might think, I'll post a few sources by reputable historians, so you can check it out yourself.**\n\n**Sources : **\n\n- CONNELL, K. H., \u2018The Potato in Ireland\u2019, in: Past  &  Present, 1962\n\n- VANHAUTE, Eric, \u2018\u201dSo worthy an example to Ireland\u201d. The subsistence and industrial crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders\u2019,  in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard  &  \u00d3 Gr\u00e1da, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007\n\n- VIVIER, Nadine, \u2018A memorable crisis but not a potato crisis\u2019, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard  &  \u00d3 Gr\u00e1da, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, 2007\n\n- SCHELLEKENS, Jona, Irish Famines and English Mortality in the Eighteenth Century, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1996\n\n- \u00d3 GR\u00c1DA, Cormac, \u2018Markets and Famines in Pre-industrial Europe\u2019, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2005\n\n- MOKYR, Joel, \u2018Industrialization and Poverty in Ireland and the Netherlands\u2019, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1980\n\n- MAHLERWEIN, Gunther, \u2018The consequences of the potato blight in South Germany\u2019, in: Vanhaute, Eric, Paping, Richard  &  \u00d3 Gr\u00e1da, Cormac, When the Potato failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850, Corn Publication Series. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 9, Turnhout, 2007\n\n- KINEALY, Christine, A death-dealing famine: the great hunger in Ireland, Londen, 1997.\n", "I don't find the debate over the term genocide very useful in regards to the Famine. British attitudes,even at government level were very complex and varied during the crisis. Thrre are some essential points to keep in mind :\n\n1. The crop failure was enormous. Sen and his popularisers do not really address how an early nineteenth century state could have addressed such a deep and prolonged agricultural collapse. Even closing the ports would only have made food cheaper, it would not have given the food to the starving.\n\n2. British policy was initially very radical for the time with a huge intervention in the economy. It changed for a range of political, economic and ideological reasons. This change certainly exacerbated the crisis but it was not primarily designed to increase the casualties. Despicable yes, genocidal no. \n\n3. There were some in the government who believed the Famine was an act of divine providence acting through the laws of economics. I explain this to students as seeing the Famine as a 'downsizing'. I don't think 'genocidal' deals with this attitude in a historical way. One of the reasons for it, for example was a belief that the British State should not bail out the Irish economic elite.\n\nTo summarise the Famine was the outcome of a natural disaster combined with a particular response from state which made things much worse. We should criticise the British government response both in hindsight and in historic terms but I am not convinced that debating genocide accomplishes much.\n\nA couple of useful sources:\n\nPeter Gray, *Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50* (1999)\n\nLiam Kennedy, *The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust* _URL_1_ \n\nCharles Read, *Ireland and the perils of fixed exchange rates*, _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide", "http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-famine.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor", "http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198284632.001.0001/acprof-9780198284635", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943", "http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/after-50-years-of-silence-china-slowly-confronts-the-great-leap-forward/257797/"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w4ifx/historians_whats_your_take_on_the_argument_that/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sko51/would_you_classify_the_irish_potato_famine_a/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2zl01y/til_just_16_years_after_being_forcibly_relocated/cpkaq4d?context=3"], ["http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/ireland-and-the-perils-of-fixed-exchange-rates", "http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/irishhistorylive/IrishHistoryResources/Articlesandlecturesbyourteachingstaff/TheGreatIrishFamineandtheHolocaust/"]]}
{"q_id": "4crrr6", "title": "At what point in history were women knowledgeable enough about their cycles to understand when they might be ovulating?", "selftext": "And what exactly would that knowledge entail? According to the wikipedia article (_URL_0_) most signs were discovered in the 20th century, but it also talks about St. Augustine mentioning periodic abstinence to avoid pregnancy.  Can anyone provide more information? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4crrr6/at_what_point_in_history_were_women_knowledgeable/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1kxs5a"], "score": [9], "text": ["Well, of course many of them would not have known before my collection of all the knowledge in the Empire of our beloved emperor Vespasianus, long may he reign, in my well known encyclopaideia, the history of the natural world. In fact, I have gathered many strange and interesting phenomena about the female menstruation! Did you know that menstrual blood can reportedly have the most peculiar effects? It turns new wine sour, it can make crops barren, fruits fall of the trees when touched by it, and even whole hives of bees have been known to die! (see book VII, 15)\n\nI should probably warn you also, if you didn't know this already, that intercourse with a menstruating woman during a solar or lunar eclipse, or when moon and sun are in conjunction, can and probably will kill you (see book XXVIII, 23). \n\nNow, where was I? Ah, yes, conception! Well, it has long been understood that blood is necessary for the generation of new life. Aristotle informs us how the female blood quickened by the male sperm (which is the highest form of blood, cooked to its very essence - which women can't do, owing to their lower body temperature) will bring forth new life. You can read about this in particular in his *Generation of Animals*. Thus, when menstruation stops in their 40th or 50th year, they are no longer fertile. \n\nIn any case, almost all my contemporaries agree with me^1 in that the chances for conception are the highest shortly after the beginning and towards the end of the menstrual cycle (book VII, 67).\n\n\n\n\n* 1 This was the state of the ancient medical knowledge on the subject - the real reason was unknown, since the mechanics of conception were viewed from a very idiosyncratic point, with blood and it's derivate sperm at the centre. Views differed about the nature of the female part in this, Aristotles view is of course very passive, while Galenos attributed sperm to the woman as well, having an equal part and thus accounting for the transmission of the mother's characteristics in the following generation. In any case, the circular reoccurence of menstruation and it's connection to fertility was well known at least to the educated circles. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_awareness"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2y5xub", "title": "Would people in the middle ages agree that the Barbarians won?", "selftext": "Would people think that it was okay to say that Rome eventually lost, and not try to find some way of saying that the empire survived in some form or another? Or would they try to associate their culture and nation with that of the the Roman empire?\n\nObviously, there is the Holy Roman Empire, but that doesn't speak for what England thought about the Saxons or Huns. Would they be okay with saying that the Barbarians eventually beat the Roman Empire?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y5xub/would_people_in_the_middle_ages_agree_that_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp6qxtr", "cp75za6"], "score": [11, 9], "text": ["While the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, the Eastern Half existed in one form or another until the 15th century. \n\nRegarding the Barbarians defeating the Roman Empire, it would be fair to say that what the Barbarians did and the Franks in particular is adopt and absorb Rome into their political and religious structure and eventually shifted away from the still existing Roman (Byzantine) Empire in Constantinople. The event that best highlights this was the crowing of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans on Christmas  800. What this did was de jure reestablish the Western Empire much to the anger of the Byzantines, who both viewed themselves as the true Roman Empire and that no Barbarian had the right to proclaim themselves as a Roman Emperor.  \n\nOne book I'd recommend looking at regarding late antiquity and the Barbarians' relationship with Rome/Byzantium is Christopher Wickham's Inheritance of Rome. In short, the Byzantine Empire throughout its history called itself the Roman Empire and its people as Romans while the Franks at the least viewed themselves as the continuation of the Western Empire. ", "Their relationship woth Roman history was complicated, but no - they did not say the barbarians won.\n\nIn the Frankish kingdoms, texts like Gregory of Tours' Ten Books say that Clovis, who modern historians consider a barbarian, considered himself to be a Roman consul. Theoderic (king of Ostrogothic Italy) was recognized as a Roman official by the Byzantine government. Anglo-Saxon elites often tried to look Byzantine, and after the conversion to Christianity there was a strong push in england to bring church government and architecture in line with roman models. Visigothic kings in Spain enacted law codes which were based on roman law, and while they distinguished between their roman and gothic subjects, there isn't clear evidence that they saw themselves as breaking from their Roman history.\n\nMost Roman and some Byzantine sources make a big deal about the differences between romans and barbarians, but archaeological evidence, and evidence from the barbarians' descriptions of themselves (when they start to appear, later) isn't clear cut. Some sources make a big deal of the differences between barbarian kings and romans, others stress the roman titles the barbarians held. Some texts play up this tension, as though challenging the audience to decide what qualities really make someone a real Roman (ie, who's more of a 'barbarian' - the barbarians who live in Rome, or Emperor Justinian?).\n\nPeople in the past were comfortable with complexity, and didn't have the simple understanding of the fall of the Roman empire that you get in popular discussions of the subject today. They were comfortable playing up their roman past when it was useful, and playing up other parts of their history when circumstances called for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "56ty1f", "title": "Were the Picts Celtic or non-Indo-European people according to modern historians?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/56ty1f/were_the_picts_celtic_or_nonindoeuropean_people/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8n1pvh"], "score": [7], "text": ["Perhaps an expert will come along and answer this for you, but in the meantime I had a quick look and got what appears to me to be a general consensus towards the Picts being of mainly Celtic origin. Cunliffe summarises the issue as follows:\n\n > \"The Irish, Attocotti, and Picts were probably Celtic peoples, althought some linguists claim to be able to detect a pre-Indo-European element in the Pictish language.\" (263).\n\nOf course, this quote demonstrates (at least in 1997) that nothing is 'known' on this matter, but we do have probability. A few more recent articles I have found seem to support the assertion that the Picts were of Celtic origin (Keys 41, Snow 46), but Teutonic influences later mixed in amongst the population of Scotland and became somewhat dominant, yet the modern 'Scottish' identity betrays a mix of linguistic influences including \"Gaelic,  English, Welsh, Norse, French, Flemish and Latin\" (Hammond 6-8, 26-7). Celtic and non-Indo-European languages could also have co-existed:\n\n > \"Though it is fashionable for scholars to ignore it, a non-Indo-European language does seem to be visible in the inscriptions of Pictland, which have never convincingly been interpreted as Celtic. The presence of such a language is supported by the ancient river names, so long as they are not emended. When Isaac analysed Ptolemy\u2019s river names in Britain, he found between thirty-four and forty-one Celtic ones and six non-Indo-European ones, and five of those six rivers turned out to be in north-east Scotland. This is indeed what one might expect on the far edge of an island on the far edge of Europe\" (Sims-Williams 431-2).\n\nI've only collected some bits and pieces here and I'm a total layman on this matter so I may have horrible embarrased myself. But the summary of Cunliffe seems reasonable on the matter: that is, that the Picts were predominantly Celtic and perhaps had a smaller non-Indo-European aspect.\n\nSources: \n\nCunliffe, Barry, The Ancient Celts, London: Penguin Books, 1999 (1997).\n\nHammond, Matthew H., \"Ethnicity and the Writing of Medieval Scottish History\", *The Scottish Historical Review*, 85, 219, 2006, 1-27.\n\nKeys, David, \"Rethinking the Picts,\" *Archaeology*, 57, 5, 2004, 40-4.\n\nSims-Williams, Dean, \"Bronze and Iron Age Celtic Speakers: What we don't know, what we can't know, and what could we know? Language, Genetics and Archaeology in the 21st Century\", *The Antiquaries Journal*, 92, 2012, 427-49.\n\nSnow, Dean R., \"Scotland's Irish Origins\", *Archaeology*, 54, 4, 2001, 46-51.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2qajhc", "title": "What did the Russians do the German 6th army after they were captured?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qajhc/what_did_the_russians_do_the_german_6th_army/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn4ckdr"], "score": [10], "text": ["The captured members of the German 6th Army were by in large sent to Siberia, or at least to the east of the country to get them as far from the battle lines as possible. They were basically used for forced labor, suffered  from ill clothing and malnutrition and general poor treatment. Out of the roughly 100K+ prisoners of the 6th, only @6,000 survived the war to be repatriated, some were not released until the early 1950s. \n\n(Christina Morina, *Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945*)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "dxiuif", "title": "The Roman Emperor Claudius I is popularly depicted as either a bumbling fool, or a secret genius pretending to be a bumbling fool. What is the historical evidence for either view?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dxiuif/the_roman_emperor_claudius_i_is_popularly/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f7tgaja"], "score": [41], "text": ["Since I've already been talking about Claudius quite a bit this weekend, I might as well field this question too...\n\nOur understanding of Claudius' talents has been shaped by the nature and biases of the literary sources. There are only four that provide (more or less) independent accounts of his reign: Josephus' *Jewish Antiquities*, Tacitus' *Annals*, Suetonius' *Life of Claudius*, and the *Roman History* of Cassius Dio. Each author had a literary and political agenda, and shaped his portrait of Claudius accordingly. \n\nJosephus, a Jewish protege of the Flavians, was motivated to present Claudius in a generally positive light. Claudius, after all, had been poisoned (or so it was assumed) to make room for Nero; and since the Flavians wanted to blacken the memory of Nero, Claudius was ripe for rehabilitation. \n\nTacitus, whose great themes were the rise of imperial tyranny and the decadence of the Senate, found ample material in the reign of Claudius, and presented the emperor as an indecisive man driven to tyranny by the machinations of his wives and freedmen. \n\nSuetonius was a biographer, not an historian. In keeping with ancient ideas on the relative functions of those genres, he emphasized the moral qualities and failings of his subject, and accentuated the paradoxical rise of a court fool to the imperial seat. \n\nCassius Dio, writing in the early third century, presents a basically positive but rather cursory portrait of Claudius, in which the emperor's achievements are his own, and his failings those of this scheming courtiers. \n\nModern \"popular\" conceptions of Claudius tend to be dominated by Robert Graves' *I, Claudius* and *Claudius the God* and the BBC series based on them. Graves drew heavily on Suetonius, who provides a fascinating wealth of detail about the emperor's odd personal mannerisms. The idea that Claudius was a secret genius really grows out of Graves' novels, which show a highly intelligent but awkward man trying to survive in a vicious imperial household. \n\nSo where does the truth lie? It is clear that Claudius was a competent administrator - his recorded measures are reasonable, and occasionally even far-sighted. It is equally clear that he was a bumbling politician, prone to being used and conspired against. \n\nOne of our very few unvarnished views of Claudius comes from the so-called Lyon Tablet, a bronze panel that records verbatim a speech the emperor made in the Senate to advocate citizenship. This is our one real glimpse into how Claudius always spoke - and it is fascinating. The emperor rambles on about historical minutiae, and has to be reminded repeatedly (by senators shouting from the benches) to get to the point. We see, in other words, an obviously intelligent and learned man, but also one awkward in manner and speech. The Lyon Tablet seems to more or less confirm Suetonius' comments on Claudius' behavior as emperor. Claudius was definitely smart - but we should not imagine him as a secret mastermind."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "18sseo", "title": "How does the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust affect modern Germany? ", "selftext": "On a trip to Germany I visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin and became very interested in how Germans now-a-days view their history, particularly Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Around the corner was the Berlinische Galerie which contained some fantastic art that gave an insight into the identity struggle of many German artists, post-war, post-wall, post-EU formation.\n\nJust looking for some insight into how the atrocities of WW2 impacted future generations? \n\n(First post in AskHistorians, hope I'm doing it right)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18sseo/how_does_the_history_of_nazi_germany_and_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hq1hi", "c8hqoeb", "c8hqqtx", "c8hsqo0", "c8htbll", "c8iaixy"], "score": [9, 8, 3, 3, 12, 2], "text": ["This isn't actually a question about *history*, I'm sorry to say. You seem to be asking about how *current-day* Germans view their history, and are influenced by it.\n\nAs such, I would recommend [r/Germany](_URL_1_) or [r/AskACountry](_URL_0_). It's also possible that the sociologists or historians at [r/AskSocialScience](_URL_2_) could help you (we don't discuss the current-day, but they do).\n", "I think the question is suitable for /r/AskHistorians. Where do you wanna draw the line between things that are \"history\" and things happening now? Is my coffee from this morning history because it's past? Besides, if the admins from the \"current-day\" subreddits say that this quesion is about history, it might never get answered.\n\nWWII belongs to the field of contemporary history because, according to its definition, people who lived through this are still alive. Having a living source of history (unlike e.g. archeological sites in the field of antiquity) is a blessing that only historians of contemporary history have. I think the effects of WWII have the greatest impact on the nowadays German situation and can be discussed here.", "_URL_0_\n\natleast a little relevant.", "I can answer this somewhat. I have a History degree and I took a few graduate level classes on Genocide in the context of History and implications such as Memory and Identity. I think in the generation born after World War II their was a lot of anger with their parents for tolerating and in many cases assisting with the Holocaust. Their was a deeper bond between West Germany and Israel than many other nations in Europe, reparation agreements and defense agreements etc. It must also be said that East Germany was a lot different. The Nazis were overnight replaced by the Stazi and under Communist rule, the Holocaust was barely recognized or discussed. Now that the Cold War is over, you see a new youth generation that may not have the connection or sense of guilt for what happened 60-70 years ago. I think it has impacted German political identity to a great degree by eliminating the prussian sense of militaritism and establishing democratic govt as the appropiate one. \n\nGood book:  \n\n_URL_0_", "How the past is interpreted and processed is perhaps the most important question for an historian, so I think the question is very relevant.\n\nGermany has tried to find ways to come to terms with the past. The English language has actually used German terms for struggle, mainly [Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung](_URL_1_) and Geschichtsaufarbeitung. Both concepts refer to the attempt to understand what has happened and to learn from it.\n\nThat's obviously a very generalized answer. What actually happened is, as always, way more complex. \n\nIt starts with the Four Ds of the allied occupation forces. Denazification, Demilitarization, Democratization, Decentralization (sometimes also Deindustrialization and Decartellization). The Allies tried from the beginning to instill a general feeling of guilt and shame to the German people. Visits to the Camps, screenings of videos of war crimes, the whole Nuremberg-thing. On the other hand, there was an obvious continuity of personnel. Germany was a highly industrialized and bureaucratic nation... replacing all officials and elites that had already worked under the NS regime was just impossible.\n\nWhat impact this had on the German people is actually very hard to say. To a certain degree, it just wasn't important. Many people had lost their homes, everybody was mourning over some lost family member, some had lost everything. They were sick of ideology and more occupied with the task of finding a new place to live and enough coal to make it through the winter. The 1950s are usually seen as a very unpolitical time in Germany... there was so much to do, so much to worry about that after the initial shock of losing the war, bigger problems took the scene.\n\nThis changes with the 1960s and especially with movement of the new left. This new generation, who were in their late teens or early twenties in 1967 and couldn't remember Hitler, started to ask questions about the past of their parents and grandparents. This is where deep and hidden conflicts between the generations break open. (See, for example, Heinrich B\u00f6lls novel \"Das Verm\u00e4chtnis\" about a Nazi-officer who manages to easily find his way back in the post-war society. B\u00f6ll wrote it in 1948, but couldn't find a publisher.)\nThis struggle and the inability of the older generations to properly \"answer\" these questions lead to the belief of the radicalized elements of the left that fascism was always lurking behind the boring lives of boring people in a capitalistic society. \n\nAnyway... to wrap this whole thing up a bit:\nOn an academic level, this whole question leads to the [Historikerstreit](_URL_0_)\n\nFor that, I recommend an article by G\u00f6tz Aly: The logic of horror, which tries to summarize the whole dispute:\n > \n > Twenty years ago the \"Historikerstreit\", or \"historians' dispute\", flared up, a decisive conflict on the historical interpretation of the Holocaust and the Germans' understanding of themselves. In the article \"Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will\" (the past that does not want to pass) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6, 1986, historian Ernst Nolte maintained the Holocaust should be viewed in the light of the entirety of 20th century European history. Nolte further explained the murder of the Jews as a reaction to the mechanism of extermination in Soviet Russia: \"Was not the 'Gulag Archipelago' prior to 'Auschwitz'?\" In an answer in Die Zeit, philosopher J\u00fcrgen Habermas accused Nolte of playing down German guilt, and insisted on the singular nature of the Holocaust. The ensuing debate on German guilt and its historical interpretation involved all major German historians.\n\n_URL_2_", "There was similar topic some weeks ago, _URL_0_\n\nI added to a post myself there, but this is mostly based on personal experience as a german and a political scientist, rather than being based on specific historical research. I have, on the other hand read the works of  german historians on the subject, which greatly influenced my perceiption regarding these effects. My basic points on the subject were the following:\n\nGermany lacks a right wing, compared to other states. I am not talking about extrem-right / far-right here, we have those, but we lack a \"normal\" right wing. While some people might argue, that the Christian Democratic Union might be the german \"right wing\", they are actual centre and rarely, very rarely we have some politicians that make rightist statements. It is nothing compared to the right wing in the USA, for example. Our general population and the media react very harsh to rightist statements and rightist statements are often answered by nazi comparisons. This means that our political spectrum is somewhat limited. I am a member of the social democrat party myself so it does not really bother me, but it is an interesting non the less.\n\nMy grandfather was a german soldier, later officer in WW2, never joined the NSDAP (the Nazi Party), after the war became a president for a labour union (I am not sure if this is the right translation) and a politician for the social democrats. Two years ago, I wrote a paper on the 68 movement in germany and talked to him a lot, after reading some sources. After the war, even if americans tried to raise awareness about the holocaust and the collective guilt, it was ignored because other things ( like rebuilding the country) was more important than reflecting on the past. During the 60's, basicly when reconstructing the nation was \"finished\", their children started asking about WW2, the Holocaust and guilt, after learning about it in school and realizing that their own parents might have done something horrible during that time. While this did not really affect my own grandparents, this caused a real conflict between the two generations and (together with other problems) caused huge debates, protests and criticism. To this day, german people that lived during the Nazi-Era mostly accept a collective guilt, but they do not accept a personal / individual guilt. While my grandparents never voted for Hitler and never joined the NSDAP (my grandmother was too young at that time and my grandfather got around it), my grandfather told me that he does not hold any grudge against anyone, who was a normal citizen and voted for the NSDAP. If you look at the circumstances, the weimarer republic was a time of failed democracy and unstable governments. This is not an excuse, but it helps understand what went on in the voters minds. The generation that was born after WW2, in my opinion, always felt more guilt and strangely more responsible to prevent anything like that from happening again, than the generation that actually \"caused\" all that misery.\n\nThe Kosovo War is a very good example for two colliding ideals in Germany, that are still debated today. Germany, by our constitution, is not allowed to participate in a war-of-aggression. They found a way around this, because the first war the bundeswehr took part in, was labeled as a humanitarian intervention. The idea behind it, the responsibility to protect, was well received in germany. Our then-foreign-minister, Joschka Fischer, member of germanys green (and pacifism)political party, actually compared the situation in yugoslawia to the holocaust and said that germany will not let something like the holocaust happen ever again. \u201eIch habe nicht nur gelernt: Nie wieder Krieg. Ich habe auch gelernt: Nie wieder Auschwitz.\u201c\n\n\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/askacountry", "http://www.reddit.com/r/germany", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/i6h3u/german_redditors_how_do_you_feel_every_time/"], ["http://books.google.com/books/about/Divided_Memory.html?id=yahqnBEEbQEC"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergangenheitsbew%C3%A4ltigung", "http://www.signandsight.com/features/800.html"], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yhg4w/how_did_german_society_change_after_the_holocaust/"]]}
{"q_id": "wqotr", "title": "What pieces of medieval/Renaissance garb still exist?", "selftext": "I have a strong interest in medieval/Renaissance history, and I really enjoy looking at actual examples of medieval/Renaissance textiles. Armor is relatively easy to find (the main museum in my nearest major city has several examples), but what's out there for dresses, shoes, etc?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wqotr/what_pieces_of_medievalrenaissance_garb_still/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c5fm717", "c5fnshp", "c5fnvfj", "c5fsiuj"], "score": [2, 6, 2, 3], "text": ["Well, I think that some of the material on the effigy of Elizabeth at Westminster is in fact original (c. 1600) but that's a bit later than you want.  The Black Prince's surcoat, helm, and gauntlets (ca. 1350) survive at Canterbury but they've [lost pretty much all color](_URL_1_) and replicas hang over the tomb.  One very interesting discovery was the cache at Herjolfsnes in Greenland, which gave great insight into the clothing of the era.  [This book may be a place to start.](_URL_0_)  Apparently these have been used as the basis for \"replica fashions\" available for purchase.  I'm not sure what survived further south--scraps certainly, and I recall seeing Merovingian boots (what was left of them) on display somewhere but I don't remember which museum.  ", "A room in an Austrian castle, sealed off in the 15th century, was recently opened. It contained many textiles, including undergarments and shoes.  [Check out this write-up](_URL_0_)--at this point, the publicly available information seems quite scant, but I'm eager for the publication of an article on the finds!", "[The Orkney Hood](_URL_0_) and the [Llan-gors textile](_URL_1_) are two pieces that have \"survived\".", "More than you would expect. Textiles are found in many archaeological investigations. Of course, they only survive in anaerobic (usually waterlogged) conditions, but these aren't as seldom as one might think. Latrines especially are found in many medieval cities and some of them reach the watertable and are therefore waterlogged. Shoes especially, being made of tough leather, survive more often than one would think. Museums in most European cities have medieval leather goods and textile fragments on display. But of course most of these are just that: fragments. Whole articles of clothing survive seldomly for the simple reason that they weren't usually thrown away. \n\nThose that do survive until today are often liturgical clothing that were kept by the church. Some profane clothing of the upper classes may have survived without entering the ground, if so they are found in textile historical collections of major museums. I'm not sure if these go as far back as the renaissance, though. The oldest clothing I have seen in museums is probably 18th century.\n\n\nEdit: [Here's one such collection I visited](_URL_1_) (available in German, French or Italian. The actual objects are [here](_URL_2_).). I wasn't far off, it goes back [to the 17th century](_URL_0_) but most items are from the 18th onward.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books/about/Woven_into_the_earth.html?id=SnzWAAAAMAAJ", "http://mediumaevum.tumblr.com/post/6033316324/the-recreated-surcoat-of-the-black-prince-hanging"], ["http://www.medievalists.net/2012/07/17/medieval-lingerie-discovery-in-austria-reveals-what-really-was-worn-under-those-tunics/"], ["http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/orkneyhood.htm", "http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/rhagor/article/1936/"], ["http://webcollection.nationalmuseum.ch/de/php/detail.php?id=2071&amp;typ=25&amp;highlight=&amp;20jh=&amp;gesamt=305&amp;pos=80&amp;suchtyp=mix", "http://webcollection.nationalmuseum.ch/de/sammlungen/textilien/", "http://webcollection.nationalmuseum.ch/de/php/sammlung.php?typ=25"]]}
{"q_id": "8opgc7", "title": "Why did Charles Cornwallis not face Washington directly after surrendering at Yorktown? Was this an attempt to slight Washington, and, if so, was it seen as dishonorable or childish?", "selftext": "Subsequently, did Washington send his second in command as a slight to Cornwallis?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8opgc7/why_did_charles_cornwallis_not_face_washington/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e05i59n"], "score": [21], "text": [" Gen. Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess and 2nd Earl Cornwallis, [surrendered to American forces on October 19th, 1781](_URL_0_) after two days of a ceasefire.  It came after a week of fighting where British troops failed to advance or make any dent in the American and French forces who had surrounded them and were well\\-fortified.   The loss was quite shocking, with over 8,000 British troops being captured by the Americans.  The negotations for the surrender were held by Cornwallis' subordinates, which was not unsusual for 18th century warefare.  What was unusual is that Gen. Cornwallis did not attend the surrender ceremony, claiming an illness prevented him from coming. \n\nBrigadier General Charles O'Hara was the office in charge and led the British army onto the field.  Reports say that Gen. O'Hara attempted to surrender to French General  Jean\\-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau , who refused to address O'Hara, and and pointed to Washington instead.   O'Hara offered his sword in a ceremonial position of surrender, but Washington refused and had Major Gen. Benjamin Lincoln accept it, thus initiating the formal surrender of the British Army at Yorktown.\n\nWhile it might seem dishonorable to us that Cornwallis did not take to the field, neither his loss of Yorktown nor his refusal to take to the field was largely seen as dishonorable in the eyes of his countrymen.  Having just suffered the arguably most embarrasing defeat in 18th century British history \\(in the eyes of the British\\),  Cornwallis may have very\\-well been ill and unable to attend. As some historians have noted, \"[Although the Yorktown capitulation decided the war in favour of the colonists, Cornwallis remained in high esteem at home.](_URL_1_)\"  Cornwallis went on to become governor of Indian just four years after his defeat at Yorktown.  He went on to have an impressive career, including a promotion to marquess in 1792.  It appears that his loss at Yorktown did not hold back his future successes. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.visitingyorktown.com/surrender.html", "https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Cornwallis-1st-Marquess-and-2nd-Earl-Cornwallis"]]}
{"q_id": "e8t117", "title": "How did Napoleon III's reforms affect the later development of France's economy?", "selftext": "Since we're on the topic of great reformers, his social and infrastructural reforms, as well as their immediate effects, are extremely famous. I want to know what their long-term consequences were, specifically when it comes to economic growth.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8t117/how_did_napoleon_iiis_reforms_affect_the_later/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fafadcq"], "score": [17], "text": ["Napoleon III's probably most lasting economic reforms took place in the education and financial sectors.  While in the short-term the lowering of tariffs across the board spurred productivity growth and encouraged foreign trade, in the long-term the true determinants of economic growth are threefold: population growth, human capital (i.e. education), and increased liquidity of capital.  Modernizing the French agricultural industry helped to mitigate the famines that routinely decimated early-modern France and the new public education system (which competed with the existing Catholic school based system) further served to improve literacy and otherwise prepared children for the \"real world.\"  \n\nThat being said, the legacy of Napoleon III persists mostly in the form of the large number of banks that he encouraged or supported.  BNP Paribas (a combination of Banque Nationale de Paris and Paris Bank), Societe-Generale, Credit Lyonnais (which merged with Credit Agricole), are all banks that were created during the Second French Empire.  They quickly grew to be some of the world's largest banks and persist even to this day as some of the largest and most sophisticated financial institutions.  Without the financial bedrock that they were able to provide (in tandem with a surplus of gold into global markets that increased the currency supply), it is unlikely that Napoleon III could have been able to finance any of the fiscal and infrastructure reforms that he needed to modernize France.  The now-defunct Credit Mobiliere, for instance, was a major contributor to the finance of French railways, French public transit, and even the French intervention into the Crimean War.  The rise of the French banking sector also worked well with the increased savings of French workers, which provided a sufficient capital base for investment and further growth."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "ailmth", "title": "Why was Theodore Roosevelt known as the \"Trust Buster\" when Taft broke up more trusts?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ailmth/why_was_theodore_roosevelt_known_as_the_trust/", "answers": {"a_id": ["eepmr53"], "score": [10], "text": ["I'm confused by this question.  Roosevelt gained his reputation as a trust buster during his presidency.  Taft had not served as president yet.  How would people know not to declare Roosevelt a trust buster because his successor would use the Sherman Act more aggressively?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hieqe", "title": "How is the historical argument of David Graeber's \"Debt: The First 5000 Years\" viewed?", "selftext": "Crossposting from /r/AskSocialScience/ due to popular request. Original thread [here](_URL_1_).\n\nI'm primarily asking about the whole history of money Graeber presents, not the anti-capitalist opinions he promotes in the same book. Although I guess if you want to talk about those too, who am I to stop you?\n\nFor those unaware of the book's argument, it's summarized in some detail [here](_URL_0_). I guess I don't really expect anyone to judge the book's merit on this interview alone; but it was interesting enough to make me buy the book, so I figured someone might enjoy it.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hieqe/how_is_the_historical_argument_of_david_graebers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cauour0", "caurmlf"], "score": [8, 3], "text": ["I always find it hilarious when non-lawyers discuss legal topics (e.g. money and contracts).\n\nSo, without giving this gentleman from Yale too much credit, and taking into account that only so much can be expected from him as long as he is speaking outside of his area of speciality, I present to you the first error:\n\n\"The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it\u2019s the founding myth of economics.\"\n\nRight. If he had even done cursory research he would have discovered that the Roman jurists also regarded \"purchase and sale for cash\" (emptio venditio) as a sub-category of the barter transaction (permutatio). The Romans also referred to the creation of currency as being something which happened temporally later than the barter economy.\n\n\"Now, I\u2019m an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: \u201cI\u2019ll give you twenty chickens for that cow,\u201d we\u2019d have found one or two by now.\"\n\nThere are such places. I often barter with other people, even in my own town. For me, this takes the form of me offering some service in exchange for another service (e.g., my neighbor and I each receive each other's packages free of charge). Every now and then I engage in item-for-item barter as well. However, the point is: barter and trade for money co-exist and are readily observable in many contexts today. (Although perhaps not in Yale classrooms.)\n\n\"[...]how does that broad sense of \u2018I owe you one\u2019 turn into a precise system of measurement[...]\"\n\nMore importantly, when does it become legally necessary to enforce the \"I owe you one\" if the other person refuses to comply. When do social sanctions no longer work? When is an organized system of contract enforcement necessary? All of this goes well beyond anthropology.\n\n\"You say that by the time historical records start to be written in the Mesopotamia around 3200 BC a complex financial architecture is already in place.\"\n\nThis is the narrator, not the author. But the Mesopotamian financial system is not excessively complex. Money lending and credit did exist but no banks or fractional reserve banking existed. Also, to say the least, there were no stocks, bonds or currency fluctuations.\n\n\"This was the great social evil of antiquity \u2013 families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage.\"\n\nDebt-peonage is under-rated. Happy to expand on this if anyone asks.\n\nAnd calling slavery on account of debt a \"social evil\" is the worst presentism.\n\n\"Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly?\"\n\nIt's not, it's a mode of exchange, and that is how it functions. If you generate it endlessly it ceases to be meaningful as a mode of exchange. That stops people from generating it endlessly, as presumably those people have an interest in maintaining the mode of exchange's function.\n\nThe rest of the interview is all present-day bullshitting about the EU debt crisis.\n\nI'll spare everybody my opinions on that kerfuffle.", "So, could you list specific things that you're interested in? The fact of the matter is that Graeber says an enormous number of things, many of which are true, a few of which are not true, some of which are possibly mislreading. To go page by page would be quite hard! :)\n\nThe biggest issue with the book, to my mind, was that Graeber's framing device (the conceptual connection between money and debt) suffers from Graeber's ignorance of economic concepts. Specifically, he thinks that if he shows people didn't go around handing each other gold coins, he's proven that money wasn't important at a certain period in history. Likewise, if people engaged in barter didn't demand their stuff c.i.f., he says the must not have been bartering. But the concept of a money is a liquid medium of exchange and store of value, and either you have some solution to the problem that a lack of money poses, or you don't. (You can also see his confusion in the scorn he heaps on historians of currency for failing to consider the broad socio-economic ramifications of the money system in their work. He has trouble understanding the distinction between the two.)\n\nWhen I read it I remember thinking that the intellectual history of economics and the history of the monetary system since WWI were not solid, in a way that made me a little tentative about Graeber's interesting accounts of lands, cultures, and eras about which I know nothing. If you want specifics I can check my notes. He also has a somewhat unhappy way of using footnotes - often footnotes I checked because I wanted to know what sort of evidence he was using were footnoted to *an entire book* (rather than to a specific page), or added some additional factoid without sourcing the claim in the body of the text.\n\nThat said, i thought it was a fun read and on the whole fascinating."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1hi0g3/how_is_the_historical_argument_of_david_graebers/?sort=confidence"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "300x0u", "title": "How did the US Marines and National Guard come to have their own air arms?", "selftext": "I gather the USMC's air arm goes back at least as far as WW2, so I guess it was to do with combined-ops in the Pacific, but if the USMC is part of the US Navy, wouldn't Navy fliers be doing that anyway?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/300x0u/how_did_the_us_marines_and_national_guard_come_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cpoim20", "cpov6m7"], "score": [15, 2], "text": ["Let me correct a few misconceptions.\n\nThe US Marine Corps is NOT a part of the US Navy. It falls under the Department of the Navy for administrative purposes but is a separate arm in its own right for operational purposes. Furthermore, Marine Aviation did not come about in World War 2. It dates back, for all intents and purposes, to this man: _URL_0_ This is Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Austell Cunningham, and the photo was taken in 1912. As this is not directly related to your question, if you want follow-up on this, go to Wikipedia: _URL_1_ (it's a nice article with references).\n\nMarine Aviation was created Feb 26 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when Cunningham was instructed to organize an Aviation Company for the Advanced Base Force. In 1919, Major Cunningham was assigned to command the new Aviation Section, Headquarters Marine Corps. So, by 1941 the air arm of the USMC was already well established, even if not very powerful (they were flying goddamn Brewster Buffaloes as their main fighter aircraft).\n\nAnd now to answer your question: why did the USMC (I know I'm skipping the National Guard, sorry) get its own air arm? Because it needed one. The USMC utilizes Navy ships, but it's an independent force, and thus has to rely mainly on itself in conducting operations, especially once the marines get further away from the coast. Probably if the USMC brass in 1917 hadn't thought of creating its own air arm, some provisions would have been made eventually for the Navy to provide all types of air support.\n\nSource  &  further reading: *The United States Marine Corps: A Chronology, 1775 to the Present*, by John C. Fredriksen. ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, CA, 2011.", "To add to /u/tlumacz post, the reason the Marine Corps has kept its air arm is because the entire doctrine of the Marine Corps is centered around the Marine Corps Air-Ground Task Force\n\nFor instance, take a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU): it consists of around 2,200 battle-ready Marines (including some tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, etc.) and their air support in the form of a medium lift squadron (MV-22 Ospreys), heavy lift helicopters (CH-53E Super Stallions), and air support aircraft (AH-1/UH-1s Cobras/Hueys, and AV-8B Harriers).\n\nThe MEU also has the equipment (such as bulldozers, forklifts, etc.) to sustain any sort of expeditionary warfare from the sea virtually anywhere in the world. In addition, they have the supplies to engage in full combat for 15 days without resupply. \n\nIn essence, the Marine Corps operates using Navy ships (the MEUs are deployed onboard amphibious assault ship groups) but is otherwise capable of deploying virtually anywhere in the world, hence their reputation as America's 911 force. Their air arm is completely dedicated to these combined air-ground forces with their helicopters/tiltrotors providing logistical support as well as air support and their fixed-wing assets specializing primarily in air-to-ground operations.\n\nThe Navy's own aviation isn't always going to be present, especially since it is centered around carrier aviation, for which a supercarrier won't always be present.\n\nThere is a historical precedence for this as well: the Battle of Guadalcanal, where the Marines on the island were virtually left to fend for themselves after US naval defeats off the island forced the Navy to withdraw for a period of time. The Marines thus had to rely upon their own ground and air assets for a time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/AACunningham_1stMarineAviator.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Cunningham"], []]}
{"q_id": "1blewc", "title": "I'm an innkeeper during the High Middle Ages in Europe. What is my life like?", "selftext": "I've always imagined that this would be a fascinating way to see and understand this period.  I have an image of all different kinds of people coming through my establishment for all kinds of reasons for all kinds of places.  I guess a corollary question would be that considering how politically disunited Medieval Europe was (with some exceptions, notably England), how much travel/communication existed between different fiefdoms?\n\nOr have I played too many fantasy games?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1blewc/im_an_innkeeper_during_the_high_middle_ages_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c982kwv"], "score": [6], "text": ["As far as customers at your inn are concerned, you would most often see the traveling lords and vassals, members of the church, and possibly a small number of the artisan/merchant class. Serfs themselves were forbidden from leaving their fiefs without explicit permission and instruction from their local lord, and in some respects, were thought of as property much like the land itself. The result of this restricting ownership is that the \"riff-raff\" is kept out of your inn (so long as its primarily not a tavern). Merchants and artisans, aside from nobles and clergymen, were the only ones that could potentially have the funds and impetus to travel. \n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2syu0j", "title": "My mom inherited a photo album which once belonged to a WW2 German soldier. Can anyone recognize any of these faces? (imgur link)", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2syu0j/my_mom_inherited_a_photo_album_which_once/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cnu5k7c", "cnu5rnx", "cnu8c5k", "cnu8xgg", "cnufys6"], "score": [7, 4, 2, 11, 2], "text": ["I'd be interested if anyone knows what those stars are on their chests in several photos:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEven though it was my first thought, I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any German soldiers wearing the Jewish Star.\n\nIs it a name tag for a party maybe?  Some sort of coarse anti-semitic humor?", "10th one down looks to be Himmler", "Is there any reason why I might recognise the majority of these pictures? Do you know where-else they have been shown?", "Ok! I think I have something\n\nHitler receives a briefing on the tactical situation in Poland from General List (with glasses). Behind Hitler are General Keitel and General Yodl (with forage cap) both of the Supreme Armed Forces HQ. Sept 1939. \n_URL_0_\n\nList?\n_URL_3_\n_URL_4_\n\nKeitel (back) and List?\n_URL_2_\n\nKeitel 2nd from right?\n_URL_1_\n\n\nEdit:\nKeitel?\n_URL_4_", "#18-Parent \"Les Magasins R\u00e9unis\" and its subsidiary \"Magasin modernes\"\n\nMagasins Modernes, Dijon FR: _URL_0_\nIt now belong to Galeries Lafayette: _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://i.imgur.com/L6Ps3wR.jpg"], [], [], ["http://www.allworldwars.com/image/146/WithHitlerInPoland065.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/k3BvwiV.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/wmJzjI2.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/P7HyplD.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/P0nb5SQ.jpg"], ["http://dijon1900.blogspot.fr/2008/04/la-rue-de-la-libert-les-modernes.html", "http://www.bienpublic.com/edition-dijon-ville/2014/09/27/galeries-lafayette-de-dijon-90-ans-de-grands-magasins"]]}
{"q_id": "5bm74x", "title": "How much social mobility was there in the Late Roman Republic? What could a city dwelling plebeian do to improve his station?", "selftext": "I often read of freedmen and equites in this period who rose to great heights, but what about the poor city dwellers of Rome? What could they do, besides joining the army?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bm74x/how_much_social_mobility_was_there_in_the_late/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9q9t5l"], "score": [18], "text": ["The \"average\" urban inhabitant was an impoverished day laborer who live on the edge of starvation and was semi-homeless. In all likelihood he would die in the same condition he lived, probably relatively early due to the disease rampant in the more crowded parts of the city. He had no education, although he might have some functional literacy. He had next to no connections. If he was lucky enough to know a trade he might be decently well-off, but only a minority of the urban poor were skilled laborers of any kind. He owned no property of his own and he and his family (which might be quite large, given mortality in the city) lived essentially a hand-to-mouth existence daily--in short, it kind of sucked.\n\nThe older view of the urban poor as a parasitic \"idler population\" living on state largess has been thoroughly torn to shreds by this point. The urban plebs had to work to survive, and work quite hard. Day-laborers in the city either found work or did not--a day without work might be a day without food. State-subsidized grain, initially with a reduced price following the Gracchi and then for free following Clodius, maintained limits on the amount that could be collected per family, and though it might have been barely enough to feed an individual it wasn't close to sufficient for a family. The more regulated grain prices of the Augustan Period helped the urban poor to purchase additional grain on the market, but in the late Republic the price of grain was notorious for fluctuation, both by natural famine and artificial manipulation and market speculation. Further, free grain was only available during a brief period between Clodius' tribunate and Pompey's assumption of the *cura annonae*--under Augustus a further requirement, a hereditary token, was added and the state-subsidized grain became the hereditary privilege of a relative few. Besides grain (most day laborers could probably afford little else to eat on a regular basis) and the need to buy clothes, rents in the city were notoriously high. They were often paid daily, which might have been somewhat accommodating given the need to migrate through the city looking for work, but their high cost probably meant that for many laborers a day without work might have been a day without food or shelter. To pay for all this were wages, paid daily according to the ability to find work, at staggeringly low values. Cicero's comment of a denarius a day for even an unskilled slave is almost certainly inflated, but even if we take it for the norm it's depressingly low given what we know about the cost of food and rent--for a family, which might have multiple members unable to work but consuming resources, it might be devastating. \n\nIf this new opinion of the urban poor is rehabilitating in comparison to the \"idler population\" of the past, it also has serious repercussions when speaking of the involvement of the urban poor in politics and their social mobility. There's something of a debate about how \"democratic\" the Republic was, and central to it is how much the urban population, the vast majority of which was horribly poor, actually was involved and kept up. There's a great deal of evidence that suggests that no matter how much the urban poor might have *wanted* to be involved (a question which itself is debatable) a good chunk of it simply could not. A day listening to a *contio* might be a day's work missed, and with it an empty stomach. Those who missed work, we can be sure, might have found themselves able to participate--there are lots of propositions regarding what the work-less did on their off days. But ideally this didn't happen, at least not often or by choice. Besides this the urban poor was a rather impermanent population. Disease swept through the slums of the city, and *insulae* caught fire or collapsed constantly due to shoddy building techniques, more concerned with saving construction money than good workmanship. Seasonal laborers entered the city during the slow part of the agricultural year to make a quick buck or two at the monumental building projects or down at the Tiber warehouses--with them they brought new diseases and caught some that they had never been exposed to before. Even the \"real\" urban population was semi-migratory, since their constant search for work and daily rents probably forced many of them to move around periodically. The case has been plausibly made that those most capable of regular political participation were the so-called *plebs media*, those members of the urban poor who had skilled trades and possibly owned a little shop or business of their own. They were hardly well-off, but they were not so wretchedly poor as to be unable to leave their shop for a day for fear of starvation. We hear of fabulously wealthy freedmen like Trimalchio, mostly people who inherited some wealth from their former masters. Most freedmen were part of this *plebs media*, however--in fact, they may have dominated it. Our epigraphical evidence is problematic, but something like 60% of goldsmiths, to take a common example of city workmen present in inscriptions, are freedmen--of the other 40% nearly all are slaves. There are problems with assuming this is strictly representative, but it is certainly telling--the number of skilled freeborn laborers in our inscriptions is incredibly small, even given the general trend for freedmen to be more prevalent in epigraphic material than poor freeborns. \n\n\"Social mobility,\" no matter how we're defining it, was probably out of reach for most of the urban poor, barring a colonization project or the like. Contrary to what you suggest, military enlistment was rare in the city, most soldiers were country boys. For an unskilled laborer the chances of getting out of abject poverty were slim--with a skilled trade this was more likely. It's probably not *that* surprising that freedmen appear more common in skilled trades, since many freed slaves would have been trained in a trade while slaves, and had close ties with patrons that they could take advantage of to help start businesses--for most freeborn day-laborers, many of whom were coming into the city for the first time, such connections did not exist. Skilled workers, and therefore freedmen, were more likely to rise to minor or local magistracies--a Hadrianic inscription set up by nearly 300 *magistri vici* (the minor elected magistrates who oversaw the *vici*, or neighborhoods--their duties and power in the late Republic are uncertain, but under Augustus they were more or less just there to maintain local cults and little else) lists only 13% of its members as clearly freeborn. In the Augustan Period membership in the *vigiles* or other minor associations might be a good way to start moving up, although this was probably a dead end. More promising might be work as one of the attendants of a magistrate, the *apparitores*. The most famous of these were the lictors--this office was often held by ex-centurions, but *apparitores* included scribes and messengers and so forth, which were frequently freedmen but could also be of course freeborn, usually members of the *plebs media*. A patron's influence was often crucial--one famous inscription set up for a deceased freedman notes that this freedman's son was able to secure a military tribunate thanks to the help of their patron and his former master. Patrons generally had much closer ties to their former slaves, however, than to just any poor shit, and of the poor shits that weren't their slaves familiar faces like the butcher and other skilled laborers were more likely to receive help--who the hell remembers the poor day-laborer, a face in a sea of faces, who might not even be alive a week from now? From there there might be ways forward, although it might take years or generations--your children were more likely to get somewhere than you were"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3kqw7x", "title": "What attempts have there been throughout recent history (most likely during genocides) to specifically erase the culture of a group?", "selftext": "And when I say culture, I don't just mean works that are externally from that culture, but also works that possess the internal ideals and values of the culture? What attempts have there been to completely erase *ideas* from existence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kqw7x/what_attempts_have_there_been_throughout_recent/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv05104"], "score": [2], "text": ["Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term \"genocide\", defined it this way:\n\n > Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.\n\nFrom this perspective, mass killings are an *instrument* of genocide, not the definition of it.\n\nIn any case, a case can be made that the treatment of native american groups by the US government qualifies. For the last several hundred years, one of the prevailing attitudes held by officials towards natives was the \"kill the indian, save the man\" ethos. In other words, initiatives focused on assimilating natives into mainstream US society, usually by abandoning previous cultural traditions. The Dawes Act of 1887, for example, granted the President the authority to divide reservation land into individually owned plots, trying to make native americans private citizens of contemporary US society rather than members of tribal organizations. For some groups, this disrupted traditions of communal living that had wide-ranging impacts on their way of life. This was one of a number of attempts to compel large, semi-sedentary native groups to become sedentary farmers and property owners. \n\nBesides this, the Bureau of Indian Affairs regularly adopted policies to encourage the use of English and conversion to Christianity at the expense of indigenous traditions. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "f0a1z3", "title": "Why was there no invasion by sea of the north of Germany?", "selftext": "You'd think that should have been done, but from my knowledge, it wasn't even a thought.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f0a1z3/why_was_there_no_invasion_by_sea_of_the_north_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fgsvvic"], "score": [2], "text": ["While more can be said, I've previously discussed British plans for amphibious assaults during WWI in the following threads:\n\n* [\nI was listening to the podcast on the Battle of Jutland, and \"..Land a million Russians north of Berlin, and boom..The War's over in a few weeks\" caught my ear.](_URL_2_)\n* [Why didn't the triple entente stage a naval invasion behind the western front in WW1?](_URL_3_)\n* [Had the North Sea theatre been secured by the British, could the Entente have landed in Northern Germany in WW1?](_URL_0_)\n* [Was landing soldiers behind enemy trench lines ever considered by either side on the Western Front during WWI?](_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4i5a6a/had_the_north_sea_theatre_been_secured_by_the/d2v5wbd/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45l3ap/was_landing_soldiers_behind_enemy_trench_lines/czywz8v/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7se8ot/i_was_listening_to_the_podcast_on_the_battle_of/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5i3eog/why_didnt_the_triple_entente_stage_a_naval/db52hdv/"]]}
{"q_id": "40fr66", "title": "Why is veiling a practice done today and in history almost entirely by women? Why isn't veiling done among men?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40fr66/why_is_veiling_a_practice_done_today_and_in/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cytwl6q"], "score": [14], "text": ["I'm not sure the premise of the question here is accurate for two reasons. \n\n1) Veiling suggests a covering of the *face*. There is - to my knowledge anyway - no religion that mandates a full face covering. Even the examples you cite are not veils covering the face, but various forms of hair coverings (so hijab, \"Christian veils\", habits, etc.). While the niqab and the burqa both cover the face in some Islamic traditions, they are not a majority by any means, even among Muslims. But I'm going to assume that this is just an issue with terminology, which brings me to my second point:\n\n2) There are several religions in which men are instructed to cover their heads for religious purposes. Two of the most famous would be Judaism (*Yarmulke* a.k.a. *kippah*) and Sikhism (*Dastar* a.ka. Turban). In both cases the wearing of a head covering is mandated by the religion itself for various reasons, but mostly as a sign of devotion to God. In fact, the term *yarmulke* even means \"reverence to God\" in ~~Hebrew~~ Yiddish, and the requirement is not limited to Jews alone. If you've ever been inside a synagogue - especially a conservative or orthodox one - you were very likely given a paper or simple cloth *kippah* to cover your head while inside the grounds/building. As for Sikhs, I know less about that religion, but as I understand it, baptized Sikhs are forbidden from cutting their hair, again as a sign of devotion to God, and are required to wear the Dastar as a sign of piety and devotion. I should note, as well, that among Catholic and some Orthodox clergy (so among men), a form of skullcap called a *Zucchetto* is also quite common, although whether its mandated or not, I couldn't say.   \n\nedit: words  \nedit 2: thanks for the correction u/alice-in-canada-land"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5o2cwj", "title": "Has anyone in the CIA faced legal consequences for MKUltra, or for covering up MKUltra?", "selftext": "The Wikipedia article glosses over this completely for some reason. I'd assume that drugging American citizens against their will would be highly illegal, and later trying to destroy all records of this would also be illegal, right?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5o2cwj/has_anyone_in_the_cia_faced_legal_consequences/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcgvfet"], "score": [16], "text": ["Project MK-ULTRA was first exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee and Gerald Ford's Rockefeller Commission. It got a lot of bad press, coming on the heels of Watergate at a time when outrage over the executive branch and distrust of gov't officials was already widespread ([you can see the WashPo article for it here.](_URL_1_))\n\nA guy named John Marks read this in the Rockefeller Commission report: \u201cThe drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.\" Marks filed a FOIA request for all the information the CIA had on behavior control but it turned out that post-1963/Watergate, then-CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA evidence to be burned. Marks' FOIA request turned up the only documents that were spared from the purge- some retired records of the Budget and Fiscal Section of the CIA. These documents were overlooked when the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission asked for the documents previously. [Source.](_URL_3_)\n\nSo following Marks' FOIA requests there's [a spate of Congressional hearings](_URL_0_). Senator Edward Kennedy spearheaded these and they weren't more than a slap on the wrist for the CIA. Plus, it had already been over a decade since MK-ULTRA had ended, and most of the employees directly involved in it had either retired or moved on to other jobs. No employees involved with MK-ULTRA ever faced repercussions for the project. Every CIA official testifying before Congress in 1977 emphasized how they were merely there to provide helpful information about the actions of the generation of agency officials before their time. Even the senators conducting the questioning stated \"It should be clear we are focusing on events that happened over 12 or as long as 25 years ago.\" So even in these hearings, there was a distinct sense that the testing had been finished, the agents responsible all shuttled off to different projects or different jobs altogether, and the climate had entirely changed.\n\nSome people who had been unwitting experimentation subjects did sue the U.S. government, including Wayne Ritchie, who had a breakdown after a Christmas party back in 1957. MK-ULTRA agent Ike Feldman, in a sworn deposition, called Ritchie \"a nitwit\" who \"had been given a full head and deserved to suffer\". But even then, the court found [insufficient evidence that Ritchie was an unwitting subject at all](_URL_2_) (this goes to the difficulty of litigating cases in which you were never supposed to have known you were being experimented on in the first place.) It's also important to note that MK-ULTRA researchers specifically targeted vulnerable populations like criminals with drug abuse backgrounds (including people in prison) or johns spending a night with prostitutes (the CIA set up [safe houses](_URL_4_) with two-way mirrors to watch prostitutes engaging with these men, with the full knowledge that the men would already be in too compromising a situation to press charges). \n\nThe only Supreme Court case related to this, CIA v. Sims, grew out of Marks' FOIA requests. The case was about whether or not the CIA should release the names of university/hospital researchers funded through MK-ULTRA outreach-type programs (there were university researchers doing work on sleep deprivation and interrogation methods and isolation's effect on self-image). The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the CIA, saying that it wouldn't be able to uphold national security if it couldn't guarantee confidentiality of intelligence sources. [Or as Chief Justice Burger wrote it](_URL_5_), \"We seriously doubt whether a potential intelligence source will rest assured knowing that judges, who had little or no background in the delicate business of intelligence gathering, will order his identity revealed only after examining the facts of the case.\" So if anything the only major case to grow out of the entire debacle of a project only reinforced the CIA's discretionary powers.\n\nTL;DR: Yes, it was illegal, but it was super hard to hold anyone accountable. Mostly due to a deliberate efforts by the CIA. They failed in the MK-ULTRA experiments to figure out a way to productively induce amnesia in people, but they did a great job erasing their own records and effectively employing institutional amnesia."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf", "http://www.ifeveryoneknew.com/resources/Wash-Post-Jun-11-19752.jpg", "http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Ex-marshal-s-appeal-in-LSD-case-2494040.php", "http://www.wanttoknow.info/mk/search-manchurian-candidate.pdf", "http://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/operation-midnight-climax-how-the-cia-dosed-sf-citizens-with-lsd/Content?oid=2184385", "https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/471/159/"]]}
{"q_id": "2j24il", "title": "What did Eva Per\u00f3n actually do for Argentina?", "selftext": "Many Argentines seem to regard Eva Per\u00f3n as almost a mythical being who championed for the common people's rights (women's suffrage in particular) and welfare. \n\nHowever, reading her biographies and comparing pre- and post-Per\u00f3n makes me wonder if she made any *real* tangible effects on the Argentine social hierarchy and descamisados' general welfare. It seems she has given them a hope and many promises, but only few of them seem to have come true.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j24il/what_did_eva_per\u00f3n_actually_do_for_argentina/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl87ak5"], "score": [13], "text": ["To some extent, I agree with your assessment.  The praise lavished on her, going so far as to call her a saint, goes beyond the scope of her accomplishments.  She didn\u2019t end poverty in Argentina.  She didn\u2019t destroy inequality.  She didn\u2019t create an worker-centered economy that withstood the shocks of modernity.  And she didn\u2019t somehow prevent the period of state terror that rocked Argentina in the coming decades (how could she after all?).  \n\nHowever, I think the accomplishments you mentioned are still worthy of significant praise.  First, one cannot understand Eva without contextualizing her position within the Peronist system.  The recent historiography on the Per\u00f3ns demonstrates that their system offered tangible financial and workplace benefits for the average person.  The working classes were not manipulated by eloquent demagogues saying whatever the people wanted to hear; their followers had a lot more agency in this movement than is often acknowledged.  The working classes adored Juan and Eva because they offered viable change for people that had previously been excluded from Argentine political discourses.  As a central figure of this movement, she gained a massive following who regarded her in many ways as \u201cone of them.\u201d  Her speeches captivated audiences and rocketed her to fame because the message of the Per\u00f3ns was one that people wanted to hear.  She died at the peak of her popularity, which in some ways allowed Juan to use her image as a symbol that transcended her legitimate legacy.\n\nBut when we examine her accomplishments from a historical perspective, Eva contributed some important changes beyond worker involvement that resonated throughout twentieth century Argentine society.  Though not the only woman involved, she played a significant role in the women\u2019s suffrage movement, helping to break down a culture heavily influenced by machismo.  She was also one of the first Argentine women to take center stage in the political arena for which she was initially ridiculed.  She formed the Partido Peronista Femenino, which eventually helped more women serve in Argentina\u2019s congress than at any other time in Argentina\u2019s history.  She championed anti-discrimination laws that guaranteed equality of the sexes before the law and within marriages.  Though women\u2019s rights struggled following Per\u00f3n\u2019s downfall, these changes were adopted by later Argentine governments.  She also worked to protect the rights of the elderly, who had largely been ignored by previous governments; this included writing equality into the Argentine constitution.  \n\nIn terms of welfare, her foundation constructed dozens of hospitals, retirement homes, shelters, and schools around Argentina, distributed millions of charitable items each year to needy families, and found jobs for hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers in the provinces.  Her foundation also provided free medical check-ups for over 300,000 needy children.  According to Tom\u00e1s Eloy Mart\u00ednez in *Santa Evita*, \u201cin the first six months of 1951, Evita gave away twenty-five thousand houses and almost three million packages containing medicine, furniture, clothing, and toys.\u201d  All of this in less than a decade before she passed away.  The effects of this state welfare resonated in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century as the government struggled to strike an appropriate balance between free market economics and the welfare culture that Eva helped establish.  It would be wrong to say that Eva was the sole contributor to this phenomenon, but she certainly contributed to a period whose effects still reverberate both positively and negatively.\n\nIn this light, it is hard to ignore her influence, especially in the area of women\u2019s rights and political culture.  And perhaps this illuminates a little bit the place of women\u2019s history in our imaginations.  How much should we value personal and political accomplishments in the historical narrative?  What is the place of individuals and their complicated legacies when they don\u2019t fit as well in our traditional definitions success and failure? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1rlsts", "title": "In the High Middle Ages, what sort of unarmed combat training did knights receive?", "selftext": "During the High Middle Ages, knights would obviously be trained extensively in armed combat. But how would they have been trained in unarmed combat? Would it basically just be folk wrestling, or was it more codified? Are there are modern martial arts that are similar? Would they train in armour?\n\nThanks for any answers you can give.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rlsts/in_the_high_middle_ages_what_sort_of_unarmed/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdot0tj"], "score": [2], "text": ["I actually do some of this!* It's a lot of grappling and what is best compared to judo. You train mostly out of armor, but most of it translates very well to armored combat too. The only differences between armored and unarmored are the places you can hit and your center gravity. Punching someone in plate isn't going to accomplish much, the most you can hope for is to put them off balance (which very important actually.) That, in armor you need almost squat, since you'll be wearing so much more weight up high. \n\nIt's 2am thanksgiving where I am, but I'll try and edit in some links later.\n\n[Grappling]( _URL_0_ )\n\n[Illustrations from Talhoffer's second treatise]( _URL_1_)\n\n\n\n*not very well, but still."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Grappling", "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ms.Thott.290.2%C2%BA_050r.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "282ang", "title": "After decolonization in Africa why did so many nations keep the native language of their colonizers as their official language rather than returning to their historic, local languages?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/282ang/after_decolonization_in_africa_why_did_so_many/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci6ot92"], "score": [21], "text": ["The borders you see today are not necessarily drawn based off which group of people live where. But more remnants of colonial administrative districts. Two different peoples speaking two different languages will fall back on the common one, regardless of its origins. Therefore the use of ex-colonial languages.\n\n_URL_1_\nNotice the similarities? Ethiopia, Somalia, Cameroon, Angola, The Congo, Sudan and a number of coastal west african nations are basically the same as they were drawn by the colonists. Here specifically the 1914 partitions.\n\n\nHere is a very detailed ethno-linguistic map with which you can zoom in on, compare it with the borders drawn in 1914, and those present on the map, or a modern one. \n_URL_0_\nEven the \"uniform\" Green section denoting Guinean languages is fractured as each colour represents a language group, rather than a language. There is no guarantee of decent intelligibility between two languages. People speak english, French, etc because it the administrative language before independence and it was the only one with which they could seriously communicate between ethnic groups that spoke different languages. \n\nThis is somewhat of a generalization however because recent changes in borders are changing the trend. For example, in this old map, the Sudan is a single country. The country split into two in 2011. As you can see, the southern part of Sudan which split was dominated by a different ethno-linguistic group than the North.\n\nEDIT: Added a map, elaborated a little."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.chaz.org/Arch/Turkana/Namoratunga/Geography/Linguistics_large.jpg", "http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/11/sfc/africa_1914.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "c1dxcb", "title": "Why did soldiers in the Civil War assume aliases?", "selftext": "My ancestor from Philadelphia enlisted in a Connecticut regiment under a completely different name - why would someone do this? I know some Confederate defectors took aliases to avoid being hung for treason, but he was in the Union.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c1dxcb/why_did_soldiers_in_the_civil_war_assume_aliases/", "answers": {"a_id": ["erejdx2"], "score": [3], "text": ["I haven't read much about the use of aliases during the American Civil War, but something called \"bounty jumping\" was indeed a practice people engaged in, and this would likely involve the use of an alias. So during the war, one could earn a bonus for voluntarily enlisting in the army (the idea being that you might get drafted anyway, so you might as well sign up, and earn the bonus you'd miss out on if drafted). Some enterprising individuals took advantage of this practice by enlisting in a unit, collecting their enlistment bounty, then deserting to do it again in a different place with a different unit. And while it wasn't that difficult to do, the penalty if/when caught could be severe. Depending on where the person was, when they did it, and who the C.O. of a unit was (and how strict they were), the penalty for bounty jumping could be anything from fines, imprisonment, to summary execution for desertion. \n\nSo, while I can't answer OP's question directly about why their ancestor used an alias during the American Civil War, it MAY have been because they were collecting enlistment bounties. It may have been something like the ancestor was bounty jumping, but they eventually just settled on a unit that had tighter controls on their soldiers, and monitored movements more closely, or just because they felt like they had a good thing going in that unit and didn't want to risk another jump. It's hard to say with any certainty, but in terms of plausible, possible explanations, this is about the best I could come up with. Using an alias would allow a person to keep enlisting in different units without drawing suspicion on a name that might have started to get flagged if a bounty jumper used it enough times."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4tdi19", "title": "The Emperor of China was believed to be the ruler of all under heaven. If so, what were their opinions of foreign rulers?", "selftext": "Is my understanding correct that the Chinese emperor is believed to be the ruler of the world, or was my understanding too literal?\n\nI've also read here that the Han Dynasty was aware of the Roman Empire and vice versa, but I was also wondering about other neighboring realms (i.e. Japan, Korea, Indochina region, Malayan peninsula). Did they believe them to be pretenders?\n\nAlso, if possible, how would a Chinese peasant react upon hearing that there are other empires beside their own?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tdi19/the_emperor_of_china_was_believed_to_be_the_ruler/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5gm9t8"], "score": [5], "text": ["Your understanding is exactly right. Even until the late 1800s the majority of the Chinese literati felt outraged as the notion that their Emperor is addressed as an equal by foreign entities. I will give you a few examples:\n\n1) The rivalry of China and Japan could be traced to the point where Japanese rulers were proclaimed \"Heavenly Ruler\", an epithet which dwarfed the Chinese \"Son of Heaven\". From this alone you can see how seriously this title was treated with in the East Asian traditional culture. \n\n2) A tutor of Empress Tongzhi of Qing, Woren, wrote, upon hearing that foreigners were to be made language teachers in the Tongwen College, actively believed that it was improper that ANY foreigner should be made a teacher, the most respected career in Chinese tradition.\n\n3) Even until the late 1800s, Western nations were still seen as barbaric by the majority of Chinese literati. Westerners were called \"dirty animals\" because it was believed they had reeking body odours. Most of the Chinese simply did not believe they were \"civilized\", and would rather believe the military technology they demonstrated to be brutal and monstrous (linked with the nomadic empires that frequently defeated China's armies in the past) rather than a thing of intellectual and technological advancement.\n\n4) As it could be seen from above, foreign nations were despised and the Chinese, from the Emperor to the people, believed they must be inferior. HOWEVER, the traditional, Confucian monarchical image that Chinese Emperors strived to become was \"kind and generous\" toward its weaker vassal states. So, if the foreign nation in question was weak and subservient, the attitude of \"they are monstrous barbarians\" became \"they are helpless and our magnanimous selves should offer them assistance\". This attitude was literally overnight for the Da Wan, for example. The hardlined, no mercy approach the Hans went with Da Wan occurred ONLY because they would not offer the Han Emperor a really fine horse. Tens of thousands of Han troops died as a result, and once the Da Wan nobility surrendered the kingdom, the Han attitude instantly changed to clemency and they left with a herd of horses, without even so far as entering the city of Da Wan and imposed nothing more to end the war. Another example would be Yang Guang. Yang Guang, Emperor of Sui, believed so much that he must shower his vassals with kindness to show how perfect of a monarch he was, that whenever he held his annual celebration with foreign diplomats, he would offer thousands and thousands of pounds of gold to his vassals. Upon accepting the allegiance of some Turkic hordes, he even went with Turkic tradition to eat in their Khans' tent, allowing them to crown him as the \"Sky Khan\". Similarly, clemency was pursued whenever China was at war with a foreign power that presented itself as weak. \n\n5\uff09Kublai Khan may not be \"Chinese\", but his pursuit to be the best of the \"Son of Heaven\" and his stubborn belief that the entire East Asian region must submit to China lead to some really stupid decisions, such as declaring war on Southeastern nations as far away as Malaysia just because they would not give their tribute on time. \n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\nSources:\n\nKim, Key-Hiuk  The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order: Korea, Japan, and the Chinese Empire, 1860-1882 \n\nChang, Jung  Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China \n\nSui Shi\n\nYuan Shi"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "vv7uh", "title": "What are some historians' opinions on Jan Gross' book Golden Harvest which is about Polish collaboration with Nazi atrocities against Jews?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vv7uh/what_are_some_historians_opinions_on_jan_gross/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c58106j"], "score": [7], "text": ["I'm not a historian, nor have I read the book, but.. Fear makes otherwise decent people do terrible, terrible things, like collaborating with Nazis. You could point fingers at basically any country that was controlled by the Reich for a period of time and find collaborators, even among the Jews themselves. That's not excusing their actions, of course, but a book like this could be written about any group of people during that time period. \n\nJust my two cents. \n\nEdit: And it seems my view of concentrating blame on one group is shared by at least one reviewer.  \n\n_URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.amazon.com/review/RWQDZ3TYGS8UI/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&amp;ASIN=0199731675&amp;nodeID=&amp;tag=&amp;linkCode=#wasThisHelpful"]]}
{"q_id": "38u5pz", "title": "What happened to people in jail during the Great Depression? If the public could barely afford to live how could prisoners? Did any of them die from starvation or were they all adequately fed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38u5pz/what_happened_to_people_in_jail_during_the_great/", "answers": {"a_id": ["crxydk0", "crxypom", "cry22si", "cry4zkj"], "score": [715, 317, 261, 56], "text": ["I have an add-on question. How true was it that the average person 'could barely afford to live'? I've heard anecdotal stories from older relatives of small southern towns being basically unaffected by the depression.", "I think you are going to need a state by state answer.  Statistically the number imprisoned almost doubled during the great depression.  But congress passed laws to limit the selling of goods produced with prison labor (Notably the Hawes-Cooper Act). But I don't have enough knowledge to address how these twin stresses on the prisons and the prison population were dealt with in any particular locale.\n\nHere are a few sources:\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBTW, this period saw the growth in black men being incarcerated grow three times faster than the general population so a state by state analysis should probably consider the racial differences in how prisoners were treated.", "This question was [asked](_URL_2_) and answered last year. Here is a copy of the top comment. by /u/leisure-lee\n\n\n----------------------------------------------------\n\n\nThe Great Depression's incarceration rates were the highest the nation had seen yet. The incarceration rate for federal and state prisons peaked at 137 per 100,000 in 1939. Rates dropped with the beginning of WWII as jobs and military service set the country back on the economic track.\n\n\nThe prison system, in reaction to the rising incarceration rates, responded with a parole system. Known as the Second Great Experiment, it was believed that putting the prisoners to work and/or teaching them a skill would improve them to make it society as a law-abiding citizen. For example, prisoners might be employed to make burlap sacks or in fields to collect foodstuffs. The income went back into the prison system. Once the inmate had proved his transformation, he could be placed on parole.\n\n\nI should also note that the majority of crimes were actually more violent crimes of passion and those related to prohibition. It would be foolish to think that theft was not a problem, but battling the more serious felonies were given priority. Facilities, such as Alcatraz, held particularly dangerous inmates apart from the lesser offenders.\n\n\nThough I have yet to find an account of some one trying to get into prison, I can't imagine this was the course for many, if any, persons. The environment of prisons were extremely unpleasant, low on supplies, uncomfortable, and brutal. Rape, gangs, and abuse from guards and prisoners alike were rampant.\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)", "Not sure if its the location you were thinking of, but it was a common practice in many smaller Canadian towns for the homeless people who rode the rails to ask to spend the night in the local jail, where the personnel often gave them some amount of food, though that was a choice. This was particularly common in the winter to avoid the potential of freezing to death. \n\nSource: Pierre Berton, *The Great Depression.*"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://law.jrank.org/pages/1782/Prisons-History-Modern-prisons.html", "http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3408900129/hawes-cooper-act.html"], ["http://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/doing-time-depression-everyday-life-texas-and-california-prisons-ethan-blue", "http://monthlyreview.org/2001/07/01/prisons-and-executions-the-u-s-model/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0mqr/did_people_try_and_commit_crimes_during_the_great/"], []]}
{"q_id": "18shle", "title": "Who are some of the better known Chinese artists? ", "selftext": "One can't look at the historical architecture of China without seeing the intricate, detailed, and ornate statues, paintings and other artifacts of a China long gone. \n\nI'm just wondering if we know the names of any of the masters that created these works, what their influences might have been, and whether there were schools in which they taught? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18shle/who_are_some_of_the_better_known_chinese_artists/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8hmi8z", "c8ho3ks"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["The answer is that we know quite a lot about many of the great Chinese masters. However, the history of art in China goes back a deal further than europe. So provenance becomes a major issue. This is particularly the case with the monumental landscape masters of the 10th and 11th centuries. I will mention a few of them below, but first I will mention an exemplary problem - that of Zhang Daqian - a brilliant 20th century painter, scholar and trickster. He was the top chinese scholar in the field, so when he brought out a newly discovered 10th century masterpiece, all had to take note. But he clearly was the *10th century master* behind several of them. He would paint them, then take them to the basement, get them all dusty, stomp on them, burn some edges, forge some imperial seals, etc, then he would unveil them with much fanfare. You seriously have to love this guy! Anyway, on to the original masters:   \nLi Cheng - the true father of monumental landscape, but also the most difficult to attribute. His ink on silk work is well documented in writings, but the authenticity of each of the surviving pictures themselves is doubted by at least some art historians. I remember looking at two different Li Cheng attributions at the Metropolitan museum (grad seminar on Song dynasty art). One was entirely vexing. It just seemed disjunct, as if of two minds. Though some had argued vigorously for its authenticity, it just never settled with me. But the other was spectacular. It was mesmerizing, truly, as much or more so than the Leonardos and Raphaels I had seen in florence and rome in years past. I remember thinking that I didn't care whether it was a Li Cheng, because, in the words of my professor, it was what a Li Cheng \"Ought to look like\". He also said that we should all become comfortable with ambiguity if we were to look at chinese pictures.  \nThe second master worth looking at is Fan Kuan. [this](_URL_1_) is his most famous work. I cannot add much about him. Great painter.  \nThe greatest of all though was Guo Xi. His [Early Spring](_URL_0_) is that rarest of early chinese paintings - signed, dated, almost universally accepted as authentic, and hanging in the Taipei palace museum. This painting is truly the landscape to measure all others both that came before and after.  \nI have seen a handful of song dynasty paintings up close, due to sheer luck in choosing the right course! I count those moments among my very luckiest and most special experiences with visual art. Although these artists are extremely well known in China, Korea, and Japan, they are sadly almost totally unknown in the art loving west. \nBeyond the Song there are many wonderful artists, and luckily we know much more about them. Do some searching for great painters of the Ming and Qing, and you will find more than enough to keep you in a wiki vortex for several days. Enjoy!", "You might want to visit this website: _URL_0_\n\nIt is a UWashington page that gives a nice walk though Chinese art history, with plenty of examples."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Guo_Xi_-_Early_Spring_%28large%29.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Travelers_Among_Mountains_and_Streams.png"], ["http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4ptgintr.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "r9ksv", "title": "What was the average day like for an allied soldier in post WWII Germany before the rise of the Soviet threat?", "selftext": "I stumbled across this interesting video, _URL_0_\nwhich peaked my interest in the matter. I know that there was some organized resistance in the mountains within the country into 1946, but in the cities I am curious as to whether or not there were any similar events.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r9ksv/what_was_the_average_day_like_for_an_allied/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c44cuts"], "score": [3], "text": ["I've not done research in the matter, but my grandfather volunteered to stay on occupation duty with the Canadian Army.  \n\nFrom what he said the days were fairly boring.  He was around Baden, so not a Nazi stronghold like Bavaria.  The people were broken, trying to rebuild some semblance of life after the war.  He was a universal carrier driver, so he ran a lot of errands for his CO, jockeyed engineers around the countryside, went on patrols.  The biggest problem they ran into was crime.  Society was basically ripped apart, so they spent a lot of time making sure there was no looting.  They ran checkpoints looking for war criminals (SS I assume), and basically just went about their days overseeing people trying to get back to normal.  He said it wasn't terribly exciting, though one day his CO and some other bigwigs made an announcement that there was going to be a trial and they wanted there to be guards there from every allied country.  He declined, because, who cares, right?  Turned out it was the Nuremberg Trials.  He kicked himself for that one, even though if he went he probably would just have been manning roadblocks on the Pegnitz instead of in Baden, but still, it would have been neat to be a part of.\n\nFrom what I understand, the German people were quite happy to put the war behind them and try to move on with their lives, and the biggest threats were crime, food shortages, and drunkeness driving/outbursts."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5QCGqDYGo"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "13t3d5", "title": "What sort of tactics did the Muslim armies use during the Crusades? How different were they to the Crusaders?", "selftext": "A lot of information I've come across about the Crusades and the warfare focus on the Crusaders and I'm just curious about what it was like on the other side.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13t3d5/what_sort_of_tactics_did_the_muslim_armies_use/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c76xs1q", "c76yg1r", "c76zn2u", "c76zsut", "c776siq", "c77bz8y", "c77dwkl"], "score": [41, 78, 24, 660, 5, 2, 2], "text": ["The first big difference I can remember from the top of my head is that the western cavalry was heavily armoured knights on heavily armored horses - the stereotype of heavy cavalry, in other words - while the Muslim forces they opposed tended to more lightly armored cavalry, which had significantly greater mobility (and sometimes bows as well). This effectively meant that battles often centred around whether the crusading army could break their opponents through their devastating (but not particularly mobile) cavalry charge, their key military technology, or if the more mobile opponents could flank/avoid them. Otherwise, my memory fails me a bit - but both crusaders and their opponents had significant numbers of foot troops - particularly as the crusaders lost horses to disease, battles, and so on. The Crusade's actually got a wealth of knowledge about military strategy from both sides - search for information on the Siege of Antioch (1098) for more, that's one of the most significant battles of the [first] Crusade, and has information on interesting tactics that the Muslim forces used (most famously the way which they trapped the crusaders inside Antioch and then besieged them in turn). Sorry if that's a bit vague, it's been quite some time since I've studied the Crusades! ", "At work right now, but the book you must read is Amin Malouf's *the crusades through Arab eyes*. Dated, but unsurpassed.", "One thing that I do remember quite vividly from studying this is the use of water.  The Muslims naturally knew were water sources were being locals, and they would position their armies directly in front of it.  The Crusaders, starved of thirst would come across their enemies parked out in front of the only water source for miles.  This lead to either the troops being angry that their leaders were planning/eating well while they struggled with thirst OR in the case of the French ignoring all tactics and plans and charging.  (The French were AWFUL about this, personal honor and what not).  \n\nAnother strategy that was previously mention was the use of light cavalry.  The Crusaders quickly figured out that rocks or other terrain that restrained movement would be amazing for their heavy cavalry charges.   As a result, the Muslim armies were forced into picking open areas that allowed them to pivot and adapt.\n\nLastly, although this is tongue and cheek, their main tactic was actually using tactics...silly French... ", "While moving through Asia Minor the First Crusade was confronted with armies composed almost entirely of cavalry. These Turkic armies consisted largely of light cavalry who fought with bow and arrow from horseback much like their nomadic brethren/ancestors. They used mobility to exhaust and demoralize their opponents in order to break their formation or to separate them. When they had succeeded they would finish the job in a final attack together with the heavy cavalry. While the complete absence of infantry was a typical Turkic thing and not representative for the islamic armies of that era, infantry often played a subordinate role in the eastern armies.\n\n- France, John, \u2018Crusading warfare and its adaptation to Eastern conditions in the twelfth century\u2019, *Medieval Warfare 1000-1300*, ed. John France (Aldershot 2006) p. 55\n\n\n\nThe Franks, confronted with an enemy who kept attacking them but didn't let itself be attacked, were forced to adapt their tactics. The best weapon they had against horse-archers were their own bows and, more importantly, their crossbows. However these archers and the Franks main weapon, the heavy cavalry, needed to be protected against enemy fire even when moving(from fortification to fortification). Furthermore it was essential that the enemy wouldn't be able to separate parts of the army.\n\nThe Franks' answer according to Smail was the 'fighting march'. The goal was to have the infantry shield the cavalry from enemy fire while keeping the enemy at a distance with their own (cross)bows.\n\nThis was hard enough when standing still, but the crusaders needed to be able to do this while moving between castles/strongpoints. Therefore they marched in the fighting march formation instead of the normal column formation. Arabic commentary from  the period describes the formation as \"a moving castle, where the walls and towers are made of infantry\". The cavalry and supply-train would be moving inside that castle.\n\nDiscipline is very important when using this tactic. Not only did the Franks have to hold their formation under heavy fire(comparable to machine-gun fire when concentrated against a small section of the line) while moving. They also needed to open the formation at the right moment in order to allow the heavy cavalry to perform their *charge-en-masse* when the time was right for the counterattack.\n\n- Smail, R.C., *Crusading warfare 1097-1193* (Cambridge 1995) p. 156\n\n\n\nScholars have given many reasons for the crusaders' use of the *charge-en-masse* as it was rarely used in Europe and often involved just a small detachment. France cites the Franks' need for a psychological superiority or dominance as the main reason. They needed to seem powerfull and fearless to maintain their political and military might. They needed to impress. Personally I think the image the muslims had of the 'famous charge' was a consequence rather than a cause.\nThe reason Bennet suggested seems more plausible. A well-timed cavalry charge was the only offensive weapon they had. They couln't hold indefinitely while using their infantry purely for defense. They had to force a decisive battle, timing was crucial.\n\n- Smail, R.C., *Crusading warfare 1097-1193* (Cambridge 1995) p. 203\n- Bennet, Matthew, \u2018The crusaders\u2019 fighting march revisited\u2019, *War in history 8* (2001)\n\n\nDiscipline was kept by assigning soldiers specific places in the formation which they weren't allowed to leave(this wasn't common during this period) unless ordered to. Obviously those who disobeyed were severely punished.\nA second reason was the example set by the members of the military orders. These orders who relied on discipline for their entire way of life were exceptionally good at holding formation when faced with taunts and feigned retreats. For this reason Richard the Lionheart and Louis VII used the military orders as the van- and rearguard of their armies. Templars in the van and Hospitallers in the rear.\n\n- Smail, R.C., *Crusading warfare 1097-1193* (Cambridge 1995) p. 198\n\n\n\nLastly, the crusaders also employed light cavalry of their own. They used locally recruited Turkopoles in essentially the same role as the muslim armies did, though they never had as many of them. \n\n- France, John, \u2018Crusading warfare and its adaptation to Eastern conditions in the twelfth century\u2019, *Medieval Warfare 1000-1300*, ed. John France (Aldershot 2006) p. 58-59\n\n\nFor most of the period warfare in the Levant can be characterised by the modern term of low-intensity-conflict. Achieving the primary war-aims(capturing fortifications=land=wealth) was often difficult or impossible so both parties resorted to harassing the enemy and raiding for loot. While for the muslims the *chevauch\u00e9e* or raid was just part of their strategy in order to weaken the Franks for the eventual siege of a certain castle, for the crusaders raiding became the only way to keep the enemy at bay as the number of crusaders started to dwindle. The Franks were defending an area the size of England and Wales with just 12.000 troops, they were fighting a losing battle.\n", "Check out \"The Muslim Reaction: Ibn al-Athir, The First Crusade (13th cent.)\" from Barbara H Rosenwien, ed., in 'Reading the Middle Ages: sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World'. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 296-300. \n\nPrimary source, but remember, it was written almost two centuries later, so there are elements that are likely 'legend-building'/skewed in nature, or, as my first year history students like to assert on a regular basis: 'this source is biased!'  ", "I dont want to make a separate post, but on this subject:\n\nHow often and successfully did Richard the Lionhearted actually fight in his  crusade (number 3)?", "There's a great book called, \"The Crusades Through Muslim Eyes.\"\n\nIt might be something you would get a lot out of. Good researching!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "426gcc", "title": "During the American Revolutionary War, 42,000 English Redcoats deserted. Where did they go? What happened to such deserters stranded in foreign territory?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/426gcc/during_the_american_revolutionary_war_42000/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cz8a93p"], "score": [11], "text": ["Can you please link this because I can not find that 42,000 English redcoats deserted from an army that averaged about 39,000 soldiers in the colonies during the war?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1pvry3", "title": "What happened to the indo-greek states?", "selftext": "I have just learned about the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, and have some questions related to them:\nHow did they survive so long, isolated?\nHow greek where they really?\nWhy did the Romans never find them?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pvry3/what_happened_to_the_indogreek_states/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cd70up0", "cd728k6"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["There are two possible answers to this:\n\nOne is that local nobility eventually usurped and displaced them.\n\nThe other is that they assimilated into the local culture.\n\nThe evidence for the later is primarily through Greek style coinage that lasted quite a while, and left a legacy for even longer, and the architectural changes that permeated even outside of the Greek areas. We also have examples from other similar situations throughout history. Generally, when similar events happened, the ruling class eventually assimilated rather than was displaced (and we even have one from India: the Mughals).\n\nI think the odds are that the Greeks eventually intermarried with native nobility and eventually lost their 'Greekness'. The Kingdoms themselves eventually fell to other local powers, either before or after this process was completed. The Greeks themselves were unlikely to have been killed or anything as I said though.\n\n", "[/u/Daeres](_URL_1_) posted a great answer to a similar question yesterday on [/r/badhistory](_URL_0_). I've quoted it here for those who haven't read it yet:\n > Some necessary background- Alexander III of Macedon's conquests (or Alexander the Great if you prefer) in what is now Pakistan and Central Asia were not without impact. Whether you're familiar or not with the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC, suffice to say that eventually these possessions deep in Asia came into the possession of one Seleucus. Alexander already had planted, it seems, several forts with garrisons and colonists in this part of the world. Seleucus had additionally flooded these areas with more Greek settlers and began the construction of additional cities. This got interrupted close to 300 BC by the emergence of a big Empire in India- the Mauryan Dynasty under one Chandragupta Maurya. The easternmost possessions of Seleucus became threatened by the emergence of Chandragupta, and a conflict seems to have been ensued. Much is unknown about these incidents, but it seems the 'Indian' possessions of Seleucus along with others in modern Afghanistan were ceded to Chandragupta. Seleucus, and his dynasty the Seleucids, retained control of what is now northern Afghanistan- these include regions at the time that were called Bactria and Sogdiana.\n\n > Despite the fact that these areas had been conquered/ceded to the Mauryans not two decades after Alexander had conquered them, the Greek communities that had been established there seem to have been incredibly vibrant. We say this because even 60 years later, these communities seem to have been intact. One of our biggest indicators is that their Mauryan rulers erected administrative inscriptions in Greek, of all things, at the site of Old Kandahar. It indicates that they were considered important enough that they were worth courting, and vibrant enough that it was considered worthwhile. It's also good, grammatical Greek as well, rather than what many inscriptions tend to do which is pretty ungrammatical nonsense.\n\n > This is what we'd call the Indo-Greeks- the Greek communities in what at the time was controlled by the Mauryan Empire, and were thus subject to the control of an Indian-centred polity. They're differentiated from other Greeks because their cultural environment and day to day experiences were fundamentally different from others.\n\n > Now, I mentioned Bactria and Sogdiana earlier. These areas were also heavily settled by Greeks, with an existing population of Iranian speaking Bactrians+Sogdians, some settlers that were likely from the neighbouring Scythian societies, and probably Persians left over from the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire's control of the region. The Seleucid Empire kept hold of them, but somewhere around the 240-230s BC the satrap (essentially governor but directly royally appointed) of Bactria became independent. Fast forward to the 190s-180s BC; the Mauryan Empire seems to have fragmented, and the Greek-ruled kingdom of Bactria seems to have dogpiled- this is the situation which leads to the map that /u/caesar10022 posted, where there's an Indo-Greek kingdom sitting in India launching expeditions and conquests. The circumstances in which the Indo-Greeks became partially separated from the Greco-Bactrians who conquered/liberated/sponged them are still not fully comprehended, and it is surprisingly difficult to work out who rules what at any given point. However, by about 140-135 BC all of this had come to an end; the Greco-Bactrian kingdom had been invaded by somebody, probably Scythians or similar peoples to their north. Across a century or so, the various remaining Indo-Greek kingdoms got swallowed up.\n\n > But, and this is where I start to get into the meat of the subject, this is not the end of Greek culture or influence in Central Asia or North-West India. The Greek alphabet was adapted to write the language of Bactria itself (Bactrian, natch), with two additional signs for new signs. The Kushan Empire, which emerged in Bactria and surrounding areas sometime after the last Indo-Greek state was conquered, continued to recognise Greek deities on their coinage for centuries afterwards alongside Iranian and Indic deities (this coinage, by the way, looking very similar to Greek-style coins). They also became enormous patrons of Buddhism, complete with representations of Buddha on their coinage and building enormous stupa complexes across their Empire. These stupas incorporated many Greek architectural elements, including Greek style pillars and representations of certain Greek figures like Hercules and Atlas. Indeed, the Greek connection with Buddhism appears to be even older than this; one King Menander, who seems to have controlled a kingdom including bits of Bactria and the city of Taxila, is believed to be the subject of a Buddhist philosophical text called the Milinda Panha. If this identification is correct, and we believe it to be, that makes Menander an incredibly important early patron of Buddhism. We can see from his coins that he issued bilingual coins as well, some of which may have incorporated Buddhist imagery.\n\n > It is clear that a self identifying Greek culture vanished from these regions eventually, probably by about 300 AD or thereabouts (we are having to guess a little). But the period of Greek settlement and its aftermath left a huge impact in these areas- I'm not arguing they 'civilized' them, Bactria had been building cities and irrigation canals for almost 2000 years by the time Greeks ever arrived there, and India is home to some of the earliest urban sites we are aware of anywhere in the world. However, it would be impossible to deny that Greek culture became part of the tapestry of influences and ideas that underlay many cultures in the area. Hellenistic era Greek culture is as much part of the heritage of Central Asia and Pakistan as it is in the Mediterranean, I would argue. So to argue that the Indo-Greek kingdom is not important is, frankly, rather annoying and silly. In fact, anyone who argues that any culture/state is unimportant to history should be treated as a little suspect.\n\n > To close this rather lengthy rant, there are a number of fairly pretty pictures of much of what I have spoken that I can dig up if people want me to. However, I would also like to point out that if King Menander was indeed the 'Milinda' of the Milinda Panha, then that makes him someone respected both in large parts of Asia and what we'd now consider Europe; in addition to the Buddhist philosophical text, Menander and his reputation were also known to chroniclers of Greek and Roman history in the Mediterranean. Regardless of attempting to evaluating importance, or usefullness, or even morality, the Indo-Greeks and Greco-Bactrians still produced figures respected across an enormous swathe of the world's surface. That is not, I feel, a pair of cultures that sunk gently into the night without pride, achievement, or incident."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1pu0mg/doublewammy_in_rworldnews_all_pederasty_can_be/", "http://www.reddit.com/user/Daeres"]]}
{"q_id": "16irez", "title": "Has a childless hereditary ruler ever died while his wife was pregnant?", "selftext": "If not, what would hypothetically happen based on succession laws in medieval europe? Would they wait for the child to be born, and then crown he/she king/queen? Or would the King's brother or uncle be crowned instead? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16irez/has_a_childless_hereditary_ruler_ever_died_while/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7wf2j2", "c7wlzke"], "score": [3, 2], "text": ["Succession laws [were not uniform across medieval Europe](_URL_0_).\n\nDisclaimer: not a historian.", "John I of France (who did not live long) and Alfonso XIII of Spain succeeded posthumously. There are other examples in the earlier middle ages, and a king of Hungary is known as Ladislaus the Posthumous.\n\nJohn earl of Kent was born in 1330, a few weeks after his father, Edmund of Woodstock, had been executed for treason."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primogeniture"], []]}
{"q_id": "75ec4o", "title": "What did Pre-Columbian Native America trade routes look like? Where were they, what goods did they carry, how far were goods traded, and who did the traveling along with the goods?", "selftext": "I realize this is an enormous question, worthy of books; I'd be equally interested in macroscopic views of the whole pair of continents and smaller-scale discussions of regional and local trade.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75ec4o/what_did_precolumbian_native_america_trade_routes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["do5rzkl"], "score": [7], "text": ["While you wait for an answer you might be interested in the [\"Pre-Columbian Trade and Contact\"](_URL_1_) section of our [FAQ on Native American History](_URL_3_). \n\nIn particular, you may be interested in [this answer](_URL_2_) by myself, /u/Mictlantecuhtli and /u/retarredroof, [this answer](_URL_4_) by /u/Cozijo, and [this answer](_URL_0_) by myself. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rm6k1/indigenous_peoples_of_mesa_verde_in_colorado_and/d52hhl9/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_pre-columbian_trade_and_contact", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41stro/before_european_contact_how_far_did_trade_routes/cz4xbo9/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_americas_before_columbus_and_native_american_history", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/31xa0q/nonluxury_trade_goods_in_mesoamerica/"]]}
{"q_id": "f84gn8", "title": "Who was enslaving and who was trading 6th century Anglo-Saxons?", "selftext": "I've come up against the \"Gregory the Great saw the whiteness of the enslaved Angles at a Roman market and judged they must be saved\" conceit a few times and I have to ask: is there be any truth to it or is it a story made up after the fact?\n\nIf it is true who enslaved these men and how were they traded through to Rome? Would they have been Romano-British prisoners of war sold to Frankish merchants or were the Franks taking their own heathen slaves at this time?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f84gn8/who_was_enslaving_and_who_was_trading_6th_century/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fij1l0s"], "score": [7], "text": ["So while the exact veracity of this anecdote is impossible to verify, I can talk a little bit about the slave trade in Northern Europe at this time in history.  \n\nSlavery was an integral part of the Anglo-Saxon world, as well as other cultures and groups in the North Sea world.  Scandinavians, Saxons, Frisians, the Irish, Romans, Franks, and so on all engaged in the slave trade, and would continue it for several centuries.  It was not outlawed in England until 1102.  At this point its likely that most slaves were captured in raids or the small scale wars that were endemic to Europe at this time.  Ireland in particular was a common source for slaves, though England was also the site of depredations by Scandinavians as well.  \n\nThe slave trade also was quite profitable and prevalent in the Mediterranean world as well.  However the Mediterranean economy had undergone a shift, and radical downsizing, in the centuries following the collapse in Roman authority in the west.  Slaves were still commonly found in markets in Italy especially but were often sources from what is today the Balkans.\n\nScholars have identified the shift in western Europe's trade network from the broader Mediterranean world to a North/South Axis from Scandinavia down the Rhine towards the Alps.  So it is unlikely that large numbers of slaves were being moved from England down to Rome for sale.  The supply of slaves in Italy came from elsewhere and the long distance trade of the Roman empire had failed some time in the past.  So the exact truth of this anecdote is somewhat suspect.  \n\nSlaves were taken by many different groups at this time, and we should try to not ethnicize the slave trade in the Medieval world.  Although the white skin of the Angles is played into their need for salvation, slavery, and the slave trade, were not restricted by ethnicity or religion at this time."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3udsf0", "title": "How did the people of England respond to the Declaration of Independence?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3udsf0/how_did_the_people_of_england_respond_to_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cxedk7h"], "score": [7], "text": ["I read a paper a while ago from Stephen Conway that deals with changing perceptions of the relationship between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies during and after the War of Independence. Bear in mind that while his perspective is useful in answering your question, it may not represent the full picture.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nEssentially, Conway argues that the British recognition of \"Americans\" as a distinct people (and not merely British colonials) had little to do with the Declaration of Independence, and that in general, the Declaration did not provoke a lot of response from the British public at the time. He surveys British newspapers in the weeks following the Declaration, and notes that while it was widely printed in Britain, it was rarely given prominence or commentary. The amount of response in the British press, whether in papers or in pamphlets was \"unusually\" small.\n\nConway attributes this general lack of interest to the fact that the actual event of the Declaration was not a surprise, and that in comparison to the treason of armed insurrection, the assertion of national independence seemed relatively minor. Government correspondence also indicates that the war, at this point, was still discussed in the language of rebellion, which is to say that the Declaration did not cause either the British public or the British government to regard colonists as anything but dissident British colonials with treasonous leaders.\n\nOn the other hand, those in favour of a conciliatory approach within Britain do seem to have been worried that the Declaration diminished the strength of their arguments, because it clearly outlined American claims to independence, not just to rights as British subjects. But ultimately, Conway comes back to his argument that while the assertions contained in the Declaration of Independence did attract the attention of the British public, the document itself did not - mostly because the ideas contained therein were already known to the British public. As such, it was not one of the motivating factors behind a British (or American) recognition of Americans as a separate people."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/stable/3491638"]]}
{"q_id": "3d97hd", "title": "I was once watching a TV documentary about Rome with my dad. One of the experts started to talk about the orderly way Romans did combat, my dad turn to me  &  said it reminded him of how the riot police used to operate back when he was one in the 1980s. Is it just a confidence the two are similar?", "selftext": "he meant the way they all had to line up in formation and hold on to each other's backs so you could pull an incapacitated man out of the fray\n\nEDIT: coincidence ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3d97hd/i_was_once_watching_a_tv_documentary_about_rome/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ct3fvi3"], "score": [12], "text": ["I'm not really sure what you are asking. Are you asking if modern riot tactics can be traced back to the idea of a body of infantry moving as a tight group? Or are you asking if modern riot tactics are deliberately modeled after Roman formations, as in someone sat down and said \"let's emulate Roman heavy infantry on purpose\"? \n\nThe vague and broad idea of infantry with shields fighting as a group is hardly revolutionary and clearly predates the Romans. I know a have a book at home dealing with modern law enforcement the and crowd control that focuses on major riots and civil disturbances over the last fifty years or so, I'll see if I can find anything there about the origins of specific tactics used by riot police and see if there's any clear indicator people tried to emulate the Romans. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2y62k8", "title": "How did wrestling become staged?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y62k8/how_did_wrestling_become_staged/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cp6n094", "cp96rfl"], "score": [633, 3], "text": ["Wrestling has a long history in Europe, going back to Ancient Greece where wrestling was a pretty popular sport in the Olympiads and it continued on throughout history Early Modern Era, Modern Era, etc. Although very different wrestling from what we think of when we think \"wrestling\", and I mean in both the staged version \"pro wrestling\" and the real athletic version \"amateur wrestling\". It naturally came to America and really a whole culture of professional sports in American began to take off around the 1800s. Specifically Irish immigrants helped bring a more recognizable form of wrestling known as \"[collar and elbow](_URL_0_)\" This is where the contestants lock up with their hands around each others shoulders, and if you watch pro-wrestling you'll instantly recognize this hold as this is how most pro-wrestling matches begin. \n\nAfter the civil war the popularity of this style of wrestling began to spread, and became sort of a popular sport in Union camps during the actual war, and just in general organized sports began to take off in the post war age and specifically the gilded age when large amounts of lower class to middle class city dwelling people began to have the time and disposable income to actually view organized sports. Wrestling during this time was generally a \"sideshow\" act and wrestlers would often be men with some form of training going with circuses and touring putting on matches. During this time one of the first real wrestlers came about, his name was James McLaughlin and he travelled around Europe and the USA putting on matches and sometimes commanding around 1,000 $ per match. Wrestling during this time was not fake, and was quite brutal with McLaughlin supposedly killing two of his opponents. \n\nAround the late 1800s \"Greco-Roman\" wrestling became more popular, it banned all holds below the waist and was generally closer to actual wrestling as opposed to the older collar and elbow which was more of a bare-knuckle style brawl then an actual wrestling match. The new style generally required more muscular contestants as opposed to the older collar and elbow which requried smaller, more agile fighters. \n\nNext came a wrestler named William Muldoon, he was a Greco-Roman style fighter, his importance is that he created an actual championship belt and actually gave other fighters in the sport something to try and achieve as opposed to just going from fight to fight for a couple bucks. For this he's gained the title \"father of modern  American wrestling\". Around this time a new style called \"[catch wrestling](_URL_1_)\" which is more submission based wrestling. Its funny that around this time wrestling was considered a more real sport than boxing, which had several famous scandals around it that involved fixing fights; obviously the roles would soon change, but for the moment wrestling was seen as the more real sport. \n\nSo the question then becomes how did the sport become a work? \n\nWell wrestling began to fade in popularity as an actual sport, it was still entertaining but the rise of baseball and football decreased wrestling's appeal as an actual sport. So wrestlers began to make less money and thus they had to tour more and fight more matches. So men like Muldoon, hoping to keep their fame and title, would often work behind the scenes to make sure certain wrestlers won and time limits were instituted to keep older wrestlers from losing long matches to younger opponents. Furthermore wrestling in carnivals became popular and what would happen there is a promoter would offer to pay money to anyone who could beat a certain strong wrestler. Obviously in order to make money they would have to present the wrestler as beatable and thus they would have certain \"plants\" in the audience who the wrestler would get beaten by. This carnival style of wrestling would be an important training ground for future wrestlers in the early/middle 20th century. Carnival wrestling is also why wrestlers use the term \"mark\" to refer to wrestling fans, since perspective customers in a carnival are referred to as marks.\n\nThis carnival wrestling became popular and wrestlers and promoters alike saw that they needed to keep the audience interested and in order to do that they needed to keep up the illusion that outcomes were legitimate. So wrestlers began to become secretive and very protective of the business, especially when dealing with outsiders. They adopted a form a slang, mostly derived from pig Latin when dealing with outsiders. From this we get the term \"Kayfabe\". For those who don't know, Kayfabe refers to the staged nature of wrestling, to \"keep Kayfabe\" is to keep the true nature of the wrestling business secret and pretend that what's happening in the ring is actually real. While the Wikipedia page for Kayfabe says that: \n\n >  Though the general public had been aware of the staged nature of professional wrestling for decades,\n\nI would heavily disagree with that, Kayfaybe was generally kept quite strong until the 80s, especially in the southern territories of the USA where wrestling was very popular. In bigger, Northern cities it was a bit harder to keep it secret, but in more rural areas like Tennessee, Florida, the Carolinas, etc. Kayfaybe was quite strong and wrestlers were very protective of the business. For those who are interested look up some older wrestling stories from the 70s and 80s and look at what some older wrestlers did to keep Kayfaybe . Jim Cornette, a relatively well known wrestling figure in the 80s and 90s told a story about how he met two wrestlers in an amusement park. Now in the story lines these wrestlers and Cornette were \"fighting\" so Cornette immediately ran out of the amusement park because they threatened to beat him up in the middle of a huge crowd. The farther you go back the more hilarious it gets. There were some wrestlers in the 30s who nearly got in huge trouble because they refused to testify in court because it would have exposed the business. And the fans took it seriously too, when famous wrestler \"Sgt. Slaughter\" became a bad guy in the 90s he played a character that was an Iraqi sympathizer (I know). And he had to have full times body guards because he was so hated, some people legitimately thought he was an actual Iraqi sympathizer. \n\nFinally kayfabe came to an official end in 1989 when Vince McMahon acknowledged in a court hearing that wrestling was fake in order to get out of paying taxes that other sports like boxing had to pay. Wrestling has since entered a \"reality era\" where its more akin to acting; wrestlers openly break character as soon as they step out of the ring; something that would have been unthinkable nearly 20 years prior.\n\nSo to give a quick recap, it became fixed when carnival style wrestling became far popular than the more sports style wrestling that had been popular before. \n\nThe best source for this is \"Ringside: A History of\nProfessional Wrestling in\nAmerica\" by Scott Beekman \n", "How was the general public generally OK with the gradual revelation that this spectacle presented as a sporting event was completely staged, as compared to other sports-fixing scandals or the game show fixing scandal of the 50s?   Especially considering that until fairly recently, pro wrestling had to do its business through state athletic commissions.   \n\nWhen you watch modern pro wrestling, it's obviously a scripted entertainment spectacle, but when you watch stuff from the 50s, it was absolutely presented as a legitimate competition.  The presentation was similar to how a televised boxing match would be presented (and in fact, many announcers did both boxing and wrestling).   Why was this OK, both legally, and with the general public? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collar-and-elbow", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_wrestling"], []]}
{"q_id": "u4dp0", "title": "What were Nazi Germany's plans post-WWII in the case of an (unlikely) Axis victory?", "selftext": "If this question is too broad I'll segment it into parts;\n\n1. Did the Nazi's have a concrete plan on what to do in the event of an Axis victory or were they just 'winging it' for lack of a better term?\n2. Just how far would their ethnic cleansing policies have gone?\n3. Since Hitler focused his Lebensraum policies on Eastern Europe what would've been the fate of the conquered Western European countries?\n4. For that matter, what *exactly* were his plans for Eastern Europe? \n5. How did their allies fit in with their post-WWII world view?\n6. What about the neutral European countries, would an invasion of Switzerland and Sweden be considered viable options? What about the Iberian Peninsula?\n7. What would be their policy towards the defeated nations? (US, USSR, UK etc)\n\nFeel free to answer any, or all, of these seven questions or just stick with the 'main' question if you think it's not too broad.\n\nThis is not meant as a 'what-if' question. I'm just curious as to the mindset of the Nazi party concerning these questions at that time.\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u4dp0/what_were_nazi_germanys_plans_postwwii_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4s83nx", "c4se0hx"], "score": [356, 30], "text": ["Territories in the east were to be governed as something like German colonial provinces called *Reichkommissariaten*, whose inhabitants would be mostly killed off by an engineered famine called the [Hunger Plan](_URL_0_), with the survivors being used as slave labour on German farms or forcibly relocated. \n\nThe Nazis planed to kill off a certain percentage of the inhabitants in different areas; 80-85% of Poles were to be exterminated, 50-60% of Russians, 50% of Czechs, 65% of Ukrainians etc. The survivors of some of the more \"acceptable\" ethnic groups like Czechs, Balts and Ukrainians would be forcibly \"Germanized\". Around 45 million of surviving Eastern Europeans who were not enslaved or starved to death were to be forcibly relocated into Western Siberia, leaving a \"zone of settlement\" in European Russia and Ukraine. Around 13 million were to remain as slave labour. The Nazis planned to relocate something like 10 million Germans (whether by force or willingly isn't clear) in this new *Lebensraum*, but this number was simply not feasible, hence the \"Germanization\" of some of the other ethnic groups. Some writers believe the sterilization experiments done in concentration camps were meant to be implemented on the general population in occupied areas of the east. They planned this all to happen in a timeframe of around 20 years from the 1940s. For more on this topic, look up \"Generalplan Ost\" - the Nazis kept very meticulous details about their plans.\n\nNothing like this was planned for the West. IIRC, Hitler wanted some sort of European commonwealth, like a Fascist version of the EU, and his occupation of the west was supposed to be temporary - he seemed to have no problem recruiting collaborators from the various reactionaries of western Europe. There were no plans that I am aware of for the extermination of Frenchmen or Britons. He originally wanted to ally with Britain (for ridiculous 'racialist' reasons) against the USSR, and would have allowed them to maintain their colonial empire in exchange for his European empire. Nazi Germany didn't really want to conquer the world; they wanted a huge empire in eastern Europe purged of its Slavic and Jewish inhabitants, to make way for a huge German settler population that didn't really exist.", "To piggyback onto this question, is it true that Hitler planned to use Oxford as his western capital and that is why the historic buildings there were not bombed? This is an oft-repeated fact in Oxford, but I haven't been able to find any sources for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan"], []]}
{"q_id": "18ewl1", "title": "Was the Holocaust rational enlightenment carried out to its most twisted ends?", "selftext": "Although anti-semitism had been prevalent in Europe through the 19th and 20th century, I always felt a little uncomfortable pinning this atrocity on just anti-semitism. I feel as though the Holocaust has its roots in something other than antipathy towards Jewish people. The Enlightenment way of thought and its stress on rationality provided Hitler and the Nazis with the ability to completely change the way German society thought. I can elaborate on this more, but I'd like to know what the historians think about pinning enlightenment thought as one of the main factors that allowed the Holocaust to happen. This is a very perplexing questions, but placing more blame on the enlightenment helps me sleep easier at night. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18ewl1/was_the_holocaust_rational_enlightenment_carried/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8edo70"], "score": [2], "text": [" >  I feel as though the Holocaust has its roots in something other than antipathy towards Jewish people.\n\nWhy do you feel this way? What's your justification for this idea?\n\n >  I can elaborate on this more,\n\nYou should - as it is, it doesn't really follow at all.\n\n >  but placing more blame on the enlightenment helps me sleep easier at night.\n\nUnfortunately, historical analysis doesn't work this way. What makes us more comfortable is really irrelevant.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2edvau", "title": "What's the earliest recorded condemnation of racism anywhere in the world?", "selftext": "Because I have the impression that racial tolerance is a fairly new thing, I wondered how far back it can be dated to.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2edvau/whats_the_earliest_recorded_condemnation_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjyrhro", "cjysrcs", "cjyt833", "cjytlca", "cjywdsc", "cjyx863", "cjyyk7u", "cjz9wvu"], "score": [40, 65, 56, 45, 17, 20, 68, 2], "text": ["Here are some reminders of our rules:\n\n* An in-depth answer is usually more than a sentence or two.\n\n* Suppositions and personal opinions are not a suitable basis for an answer in r/AskHistorians.\n\n* Regardless of the quality of the source you are citing, an answer should not consist only (or primarily) of copy-pasted sections of text from that source. \n\n* A bad answer is not better than no answer at all.", "If you look at the British abolitionist discourse alone, we find, among really obvious sources, William Blake's \"The Little Black Boy\" (1790). Now, admittedly, a lot of abolitionist writing is in fact fairly racist, and Blake's poem seems to participate in *some* of that, but it's fairly more complicated than it seems, and it may actually undercut and ironize the implicit racism in a lot of abolitionist writing (see Alan Richardson, \"Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake's 'The Little Black Boy,'\" *Papers on Language and Literature* 26:2 (1990): 233-248).\n\nBut we shouldn't forget the source from which we would most likely expect such condemnations of racism. How about the slave narratives themselves? Olaudah Equiano published his *Interesting Narrative* in 1789; Ottobah Cugoano published his *Thoughts and Sentiments* in 1787; and the first anti-slavery slave narrative in English, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's *Narrative* is as early as 1772.\n\nAnd from the same period, there's the most famous image of British abolitionism, the token depicting a kneeling man in manacles, with the legend \"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?\" (Google image-search that phrase, you should get a ton of results). I'm not as clear on the origins of that one, but [according to this website,](_URL_0_) it is at least as early as 1787.\n\nThen there's the ideological hash that is Aphra Behn's *Oroonoko,* published way back in 1688. I can't necessarily claim that it's actually anti-slavery, but it certainly suggests that at least some (exceptional) individuals above and beyond the norm deserve special consideration. It's not saying much, but any crack in racial absolutism is a crack in racist ideology in general, as revealing its fissures.\n\nAnd Shakespeare did make a hero of a sympathetic Moor as early as 1603 (?).\n\nI can't go back much further than this (18th-19th century Britain is my area), but, depending on what you define as \"racism,\" I'm willing to bet it has been condemned for as long as it has existed.", "Modern condemnations of racism are inevitably tied to the issue of slavery. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Enlightenment arguments about equality contrasted sharply with the reality of New World African slavery. In addition to this intellectual tradition, certain Christian sects were deeply troubled by their experiences with slavery and found them to conflict with the message of Jesus. The earliest denomination to protest against slavery was the Quakers. \n\nIdeas about race and slavery evolve over time, so it is difficult to pinpoint the very earliest proponent of racial egalitarianism. One choice would be the [1688 Germantown anti-slavery protest](_URL_1_). These particular Quakers' argument stemmed from the Golden Rule: \"Now tho they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty \nto have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones. There is a \nsaying that we shall doe to all men licke as we will be done \nourselves; macking no difference of what generation, descent or \nColour they are.\"\n\nIn 1693 we have a [public letter by Quaker George Keith](_URL_0_), which similarly argues, \"And to buy Souls and Bodies of men for Money, to enslave them and their Posterity to the end of the World, we judge is a great hinderance to the spreading of the Gospel, and is occasion of much War, Violence, Cruelty and Oppression, and Theft  &  Robery of the highest Nature; for commonly the Negroes that are sold to white Men, are either stollen away or robbed from their kindred, and to buy such is the way to continue these evil Practices of Man-stealing, and transgresseth that Golden Rule and Law, *To do to others what we would have others do to us.*\"\n\nAt the time, these were isolated declarations. By the late 18th century, many Quakers opposed the international slave trade, and many freed their slaves. Many Quakers also participated in the abolition movement of the 19th century. However, slavery was always a divisive issue within the Quaker community. At any rate, the earliest condemnations of racism in America were founded on Christian ethics.\n\nSources are two classic works by David Brion Davis, *The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture*, and *The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.*", "Check out this [papal bull](_URL_3_) by Nicholas V in 1455, allowing the Portugese \"to reduce pagans and other enemies of Christ to perpetual servitude.\" This was issued in an anti-Islamic Mediterranean context, but was later used to justify various atrocities in the New World. Some people were speaking out against it as early as 1511:\n\n > \"Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day.\"\n\n--[Antonio de Montesinos](_URL_0_)\n\nGiven that Catholicism is meant to be, well, Catholic, which is to say universal, a debate arose as to whether the natives could be saved, or were inherently sub-human -- the [Valladolid debate](_URL_1_). Some of these questions were settled by [a later papal bull](_URL_2_) from Paul III, which stated emphatically that, so long as they were baptised, the natives were free men and could enter heaven:\n\n > The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.\n\n > We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.\n\nSo that's some arguable anti-racism from the Pope, in 1537.\n", "A very early advocate against the abuse of natives in the New World, and indeed an advocate for the equality (or at least humanity) of all peoples was [Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas.](_URL_0_). Las Casas was one of the first Spanish colonists in the New World, he lived in the New World from 1502, saw the atrocities being committed against the native peoples, and became vehemently opposed. At a time when debate raged over whether the indians had souls or were even human, las Casas looked upon them as fully human, and saw slavery and abuse of them as completely unjustifiable. He wrote books defending the natives and criticizing the abuses committed against them. He saw all peoples as equals - criticizing equally African slavery and abuse.  He gained much influence in his own time but of course we all know the long term humanitarian outcome in the indies.", "Although the bible provides many examples of (and justifications for) racism and violence between communities/cultures/races, there is a very interesting passage found in Galatians 3:23... \"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.\" \n\nFor our purposes, consider Galatians not as religious scripture, but as a historical document. ...That is, as a product of a specific community at a certain time and place. This community was well aware of traditional divisions between people (race, culture, economics, etc.), but attempted to put these divisions aside for a new \"egalitarian social vision.\" As Marcus Borg put it in *Reading the Bible Again for the First Time*, \"The Solidarity in Christ overcomes the primary divisions that Paul knew in his world, including especially (but not only) the sharp social boundary between Jew and Gentile.\" (pg 250)\n\nMost scholars put Galatians original writing sometime around 50, although the earliest known copy is from somewhere around 200.\n\nEdit: Not that the Galatians were good at treating people equally (the letter is calling them out for not doing it), but the community in this case is early Christianity in general and they thought this concept was important enough to keep these passages in their scriptures.", "From Muhammad's final sermon, March 9th 632\n\n**\"Indeed, there is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor of a non-Arab over an Arab, nor of a white over a black, nor a black over a white, except by taqwa (piety). \"**\n\nTirmidhi Hadith, Hadith #159\n\nIt is a fairly concise sermon,  focused on giving advice to the Muslims before Muhammad's passing, but this section pertains to what your question was.", "I know the Kingdom of Poland had the Statute of Kalisz, giving Jews equal rights within the kingdom (and later the Commonwealth). This was in the mid 1200s IIRC. \n\nKing Kazimierz III the Great also gave out several edicts about Jews being \"people of the King\", and anyone discriminating against them would be executed. He reigned in the 1300s. \n\nI apologize for not having a source, but I'm unsure of how I'd source a historical document. Can someone give me a pointer? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://revealinghistories.org.uk/who-resisted-and-campaigned-for-abolition/objects/token-am-i-not-a-man-and-a-brother.html"], ["http://www.qhpress.org/quakerpages/qwhp/gk-as1693.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1688_Germantown_Quaker_Petition_Against_Slavery"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Montesinos", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid_debate", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimis_Deus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanus_Pontifex"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "c9pzai", "title": "What calendar is used for older dates?", "selftext": "(This was originally posted in r/history before I realized that this may be a better place to post this.\n\nWhich calendar is used for older dates (i.e. before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar) as referred to in modern history? For example, if in a history textbook mentions the date 27 January 535 AD, is it using the Julian or Gregorian calendar? What about the traditional date of the founding of Rome, 21 April 753 BC? In that case, does the date use the Julian or Gregorian calendar or some older calendar?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c9pzai/what_calendar_is_used_for_older_dates/", "answers": {"a_id": ["et2ilnm"], "score": [34], "text": [" \n\nPracticing historian here. (Moving a lower level comment up and expanding some) \n\nI work in the period both before and after the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the Spanish Empire (1582). Yes you could adjust dates for events occurring under the Julian calendar but then you would be using different dates than those found in the primary sources. Even though I work on both sides of the calendar reform, I never adjust dates. There is no reason to. The dates in the documents are correct.\n\nRemember the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar ultimately involved skipping a specific number of days to account for drift in seasons since the establishment of the Julian system. The Julian calendar did not precisely account for drift caused by our calendar year of 365 days not mapping on to the actual orbital time of the earth. This means that the switch between the two calendars necessitated a skipping a head of days specific to the time in which the switch occurred. In 1582, the Spanish Empire skipped ahead 10 days in October of 1582. The English didn't switch until the mid 18th century by which point the calendars had drifted to 11 days difference. This also means that calculating a Julian date within the Gregorian system requires variable adjustments. Earlier dates, dates closer to the establishment of the Julian calendar require fewer days difference than modern dates which require more. \n\nThey only time it would make sense to adjust dates in a historical work would be when doing comparative history where one area understudy retained the Julian calendar while the other adopted the Gregorian. In that instance clarity might demand express correlations. A classic example is the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes, great authors of the late 16th century. Both died on April 23, 1616. Yet, they actually died 10 days apart. When Cervantes died the date in the Spanish Empire was Gregorian, and so 10 days before the day in which Shakespeare died in the Julian. \n\nSo to reiterate, historians use the date as recorded in the documents. If necessary adjustments can be made to help clarify in situations when dates between two places come from different calendars. Historians do not as a rule change Julian dates to Gregorian dates. The Battle of Tours occurred on October 10, 732. We do not adjust that a few days forward to be Oct. 14."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3qk7sf", "title": "Where can I find a truly complete history of the British Isles?", "selftext": "I want to learn about the history of the British Isles, in depth and detail: I want a complete history, ideally running from pre-historic times through to the modern day, with as few kings and queens omitted as possible. \n\nWhich book/s would you recommend I read? If you have a selection of different books by different authors that, read together, would provide this kind of overview, that would be more than welcome. Works covering the geography of the British Isles would also be interesting.\n\nI know that a tailored reading list is a lot to ask for but, with all the books out there, I really don't know where to begin. I'm grateful for any help you can offer.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qk7sf/where_can_i_find_a_truly_complete_history_of_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwh73o8"], "score": [2], "text": ["The task is certainly massive. Just one comment, as you say there are many and based on my experience I find myself better off with a good generic history that typically would awake my interest in certain periods worth going deeper.\nTo start with? BBC has a good history program.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nOthers may contribute something more scholarly and the resources/book list in the right menu of this Reddit page may be very helpful"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/sceptred_isle/"]]}
{"q_id": "4tv6nl", "title": "When and why did karate become a popular thing to teach children in the west?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tv6nl/when_and_why_did_karate_become_a_popular_thing_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5kv55o"], "score": [7], "text": ["I hope this is OK, I'm not a professional historian, but I was a karate-ka for about 20 years.  And part of that was reading.  So I hope I can provide an in depth answer that satisfies requirements.  A lot of my reading comes from Randall Hassell's \"Shotokan Karate: Its History and Evolution\" and Gichin Funakoshi's \"Karate-do Nyumon,\" and his \"Karate-do Kyohan,\" as well as what I can recall from his autobiography \"My Way of Life.\"  I don't have the latter in front of me, so it will rely on memory a bit, sorry. \n\nNow, this is told from the perspective a Shotokan Karate, which I understand to be the origin of the name.  The beginnings were in Japan, in the Ryukyu islands, specifically Okinawa.  The stories of Funakoshi learning Karate from Itosu and Azato, who are part of the history of a fighting style without traditional weapons because of the banning of weapons during the Meijii Restoration...I'm not competent to assess.  Hassell says that there are Chinese roots as well for this style.  \n\nIn 1924 Funakoshi was asked to teach a small group of Japanese university students (in addition to the private lessons he had been teaching prior.  College clubs began coming together around this time.  this also led to some splintering of Shotokan, but apparently without rancor. \n\nMasatoshi Nakayama described training with Funakoshi as involving Kata (forms), followed by *Makiwara* practice (a board wrapped in rice rope and setup to practice striking).  Hassell quotes him saying \"When he [Funakoshi] selected a kata for us to practice, we would repeat it 50 or 6t0 times, and this was always followed by intense practice on the makiwara.  We would punch the makiwara until our knuckles were bloody....the training was so grueling that of the 60 or so freshmen who enrolled with me in 1932, only six or seven of us made it through the first six months of training.\"  He notes the around this time Funakoshi began teaching *gohon kumite*, a type of ritualized sparring practice drawn from kata.  This evolved into *kihon-ippon kumite* and then into the free sparring techniques over a period of five years.  These ideas are through out *Kyohan*.  \n\nAnd here is the key crossover moment:\n >  in 1953, the U.S. government prevailed upon Funakoshi to demonstrate karate for members of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at several Far Eastern bases.[From later in the Hassell's book, I think this means Eastern US, I'm not positive on this.]  At the age of 83 , this remarkable man boarded a U.S. government plane and, accompanied by Masatoshi Nakayama of Takushoku University, Toshio Kamata of Waseda University, and Isao Obata of Keio University, toured many U.S. air bases and demonstrated karate for thousands of members of SAC.\n\nIf we fast-forward past Funakoshi's death in 1957, we see the development of the Nihon Karate Kyokai (Japanese Karate Association, JKA) as a group that saw themselves as the overseers of Karate in Japan.  The JKA began a somewhat divisive process of creating sport Karate.  Nakayama talks about the dangers inherent in this creation, saying \"My greatest concern at that time was to ensure that karate, if given a sporting aspect, would not lose it's essence as an art.\" It is around this time (mid 1950's) that the JKA develops it's Instructor Training Program (which, I'm relatively sure continues today, some friends of mine have gone through it in the past few years).\n\nBack to the demonstration at air bases.  According to Hassell, the \"American interest was do great that many airmen began seeking instruction, and soon Karate and Judo clubs were established on the bases.\" Nakayama, apparently a big cheese in these demonstrations, begins to see difficulties in education Americans, in large part due to the huge difference in cultures (if you're interested in this, I can't recommend \"Chrysanthemum and the Sword\" enough.) The question of \"Why?\" Hassell notes as a new one for Nakayama.  \n\nThe first official JKA instructor in the US was Teruyuki Okazaki who started in Philadelphia in 1961.  I'm lucky enough to know a few people who have trained with him and say that he was a remarkable man.  The JKA began starting dojo's in cities across the US at this time.  Kansas City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Denver, Hawaii, Chicago, Florida, New Jersey, Arizona. An organization started by Hidetaka Nishiyama, the All American Karate Federation, applied to the AAU in 1970, listing more than 20,000 members at the time.  And I think there is your flood gate.  \n\nI hope I did justice to the material.  Hassell's work is great, but I don't know if you can find it for a reasonable price (I think it is out of print.  My copy, a second edition (ISBN 0-911921-09-5)  is spiral bound.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "87kgo9", "title": "Popular history YouTuber Feature History claims that \"Hutu\" and \"Tutsi\" were originally class distinctions rather than ethnic ones. How much merit does this claim have?", "selftext": "The claim he makes in [this video](_URL_0_) is that \"Hutu\" just meant \"peasants\" and \"Tutsi\" meant \"nobility,\" with the two groups being similar in culture, language, and religion. Superficial characteristics that German colonizers took as evidence of their being different races were just based on the Tutsi being taller and lighter, which, claims Feature History, were simply the marks of a privileged lifestyle rather than distinct ancestry.\n\nI understand that ethnic and racial classifications are fluid, but would Hutu and Tutsi not have had any real conception of each other as \"different\" beyond wealth and lifestyle prior to European colonization? Or was it more akin to Norman rule in England, where ethnic and class distinctions were intertwined?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/87kgo9/popular_history_youtuber_feature_history_claims/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwdk3en"], "score": [17], "text": ["here's an answer from another thread that answers your question\n\n_URL_0_\n\ncredits to /u/gplnd"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iGxre5G3_k"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kkm29/how_can_the_hate_between_hutus_and_tutsis_be/"]]}
{"q_id": "2wlfs6", "title": "How did the Thirty Year's War and the Paraguay War lead to such a huge loss of life?", "selftext": "The Thirty Year's War led to the loss of a third of Germany's population, the Paraguay War led by some estimates to the complete decimation of Paraguay's population by 90%. How were such large man-made losses of life possible before the invention of weapons of mass destruction?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wlfs6/how_did_the_thirty_years_war_and_the_paraguay_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cos2q4v", "cos7zgv"], "score": [27, 8], "text": ["First: a loss of population from pre-war levels is a very different thing than direct counts of casualties. The Holy Roman Empire's population was roughly two-thirds in 1650 of what it was in 1615 (although some regions suffered much more directly), but much of the population loss were simply refugees, loss of territory, and other forms of expatriation.\n\nOf the many who did die, only a relatively small fraction would have died directly from battlefield causes. In the case of the Thirty Years' War, constant disruption to agriculture and commerce resulted in many deaths from famine and disease. This scenario *also* results in a population much less willing to procreate, and substantially increases infant and childhood mortality rates (and maternal mortality, for that matter).\n\nArmies in the pre-modern world were often effectively swarms of locust: even ostensibly friendly armies, like the Lutheran Swedes in Protestant Brandenburg, would inflict grievous harm on whatever region they passed through. Simply supplying these armies could absorb a large quantity of the available food and essentials, before we even talk about looting and pillaging (or incidents like the Sack of Magdeburg, where a victorious army slaughtered ~20,000 townspeople in a single day).\n\nIn short, battlefield deaths in the Thirty Years' War were only a portion of the overall deaths resulting from the war. I expect something similar for the Paraguayan War.\n\nMy main sources are Peter Wilson's recent *Europe's Tragedy: the Thirty Years War* alongside Geoffrey Parker's significantly older *Thirty Years' War*.", "It's important to note that the Paraguayan population didn't decrease overall by 90%; that was the impact to the population of fighting age males. Franciso Solano Lopez's policies essentially conscripted every possible male in Paraguay over the course of the war as the situation grew more and more desperate. There was also the massive displacement of refugees described by u/Aethelric as men fled  or even joined the Triple Alliance forces to avoid conscription into certain death in Lopez's army (which, by the end of the war, included many young boys and old men)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "3fv9qu", "title": "Would the Lorica Segmentata have been a good choice of armor in medieval times? Could it have retained its effectiveness on the battlefield, let's say, around 1000 AD?\"", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fv9qu/would_the_lorica_segmentata_have_been_a_good/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cts9dlp"], "score": [13], "text": ["The threats on the battlefield of 1,000 AD weren't really much different to those of 100 AD; spears and arrows for the most part, with slingshot, battleaxes and swords also being fairly common. Lorica Segmentata offered adequate protection against all of those, so in that sense it was as good as ever.\n\nHowever, Lorica Segmentata *always* had issues competing with chainmail. Even at the height of it's popularity, many romans seem to have favoured chainmail. It's advantages were that it was well suited to mass-production and might have offered superior protection from blunt trauma (although apparently it did worse than mail against dacian falxes). It's downsides were that it was difficult to maintain, generally fit quite badly, had gaps at the armpits and didn't cover the legs at all. \n\nFor the feudal nobles of the early medieval period it would have been distinctly inferior to mail; they didn't mass-produce their armour and often fought on horseback where protection from spears stabbing up into the armpit or sword slashes to their legs was pretty important."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lfrem", "title": "What happened to pre-Columbian dog breeds? Did they die off from diseases brought by European dogs?", "selftext": "I have read that Native American groups from both North and South America had dogs. What would these dogs have looked like, and were they brought from Siberia or were they domesticated in America? Do they still exist? Were they affected by diseases the same way their owners were? What did the Indians use them for?\n\nI cannot seem to find much information on my own, and I have wondered about this for a while. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lfrem/what_happened_to_precolumbian_dog_breeds_did_they/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv5yrko", "cv5z5zp", "cv62ae9"], "score": [110, 2, 22], "text": ["There are several breeds of domestic dogs that were developed in North America. Some are breeds are still around, while others are extinct.\n\nAmong those that are still popular pets today you can find huskies and Malamute and their relatives, which have Old World counterparts in the Eurasian Arctic as well. Chihuahuas trace their origins to the other end of the continent in Mesoamerica, as does the Xolo (aka the Mexican Hairless Dog, although there are variants with hair).\n\nAnother breed that's still around, but is rarely seen as a pet, is the Carolina Dog. These dogs resemble dingos, as a lot of dogs will after being feral for many generations. They were rediscovered relatively recently in the 1970s and we're not sure how long they've been around. Dogs like them show up in pre-Columbian art, but they were pets back then or if they were already feral is unknown. \n\nMany of the most famous extinct breeds are from the northwestern part of North America. For example, there are the [Hare Indian Dog](_URL_0_), the [Tahltan Bear Dog](_URL_2_), and most famously, the [Salish Wool Dog](_URL_4_). The first two were bred for different styles of hunting, while the wool dogs, as their name suggests, were breed for wool.\n\n**Sources**\n\n* [Pre-Columbian origins of Native American dog breeds, with only limited replacement by European dogs, confirmed by mtDNA analysis](_URL_1_)\n* [Dogs of the American Aborigines](_URL_3_)", "A handful still exist but it's difficult to know for sure if they're  pre-columbian. [The Canadian Eskimo Dog](_URL_0_) is an example. They're a northern working dog that has probably existed with the Inuit as long as the Inuit have been in the north. Lack of written records makes it hard to know if the modern breed is the same as the one that existed 4000 years ago. They're threatened by extinction due to disease and no longer being as useful in the day of the snowmobile.", "The Native Americans of the North did indeed keep dogs, but they were not specifically of any breed as we would understand it. They were what's called a landrace, which means that they all looked similar enough that they could be considered one 'type' of dog, but the common traits that they shared were the result of a more natural selection process than intentional breeding.\n\nTo begin with, since these dogs would likely have been semi-feral camp dogs, fed on scraps and left to roam around near the settlement, traits such as friendliness (friendlier dogs get more food, attention, etc.) would have been useful to them, along with traits that enabled them to better survive in their native environment, since they would likely be spending most, if not all, of their time exposed to the elements.\n\nOne thing to note, which I shall only go into briefly, is that genes for certain character traits can go hand in hand with [physical characteristics](_URL_4_), which explains how a landrace might come about of dogs that all looked pretty similar - since the traits that made them successful among humans could also make them look a specific way.\n\n People subsequently realised that they could use dogs to perform certain tasks and no doubt began to pair two good dogs, who seemed to perform the tasks well, together to create more good dogs. This does not constitute an effort to create a 'breed' as we understand it today, but no doubt helped propagate the beneficial traits through the canine population.\n\nA good example of this is that before the Spanish Conquest, there were no native wild horses in North or South America. Before they had horses, plains tribes utilised dogs to carry their belongings and pull the tipi poles and coverings when they were on the move. (Interestingly, for this reason the introduction of horses meant that the tipi poles could be longer and heavier, which meant the tipi design became bigger). Thus dogs with traits that benefitted them in these areas (strength, endurance, good temper) were preferred and kept around (i.e. not killed), and passed on the beneficial genes.\n\nThis resulted, over a long period of time, in a homogenised 'breed' of dog developing without any real conscious effort to create one.\n\nThese dogs still exist, though have now become a standardised breed - called American Indian Dog or [Carolina dog](_URL_1_).\n\nOriginally you would probably have found that native dogs would have varied depending on locality. All the dogs from one settlement or area would probably have looked very similar, as they were all interbreeding, but the dogs from another tribe or from other parts of the country would have had a slightly different set of traits that better suited their particular climate and the lifestyle of the tribe to which they belonged. A good example of this is dogs bred by the Inuits ([Malamute](_URL_2_), [Canadian Eskimo dog] (_URL_0_)). They had to be able to perform well in cold weather, as well as pull sleds. So they are very strong, energetic, long legged and thick furred) The Canadian Eskimo dog was also used for hunting seals and other arctic game. They were not considered pets, nor as part of the natural world - they were tools to assist survival.\n\nExamples of native dogs from South America are the [Peruvian Hairless Dog](_URL_5_) and the [Xoloitzcuintle](_URL_3_). It is theorised that their hairlessness was a spontaneous mutation of the American Indian dog that allowed them to better cope with the tropical conditions. As well as hunting, these dogs were often raised for meat.\n\nAfter the Europeans arrived, they brought dogs of their own, which would no doubt have interbred with the local dogs and added a bit of variation to the gene pool. But the native dogs, which had over many generations become perfectly adapted to their locality, did not die out. They excelled in the tasks they were put to. The Europeans saw the advantage of malamutes, etc. over european dogs when it came to pulling sleds in the snow and made good use of them. And Native Americans often traded good hunting/sled dogs for other tools. It is possible that european dogs brought european dog diseases, but I can't imagine it would be something that was well documented.\n\nI hope this answers your question. Sorry it's a bit long... brevity does not come naturally to me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Hareindiandog.jpg", "http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1766/20131142.full", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Tahltan_Bear_Dog_sketch2.jpg", "http://books.google.com/books?id=CscyAQAAMAAJ", "http://barkpost-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Salish-Wool-Dog.jpg"], ["http://www.arctic.uoguelph.ca/cpl/Traditional/traditional/qimmiq.htm"], ["http://www.breedia.com/uploads/dogs/canadian-eskimo-dog/photos/canadian-eskimo-dog-a7478830-d84e-4fd1-9953-62aadda8238e.jpg", "http://www.carolinadogs.com/Images/breed_c2.gif", "http://d21vu35cjx7sd4.cloudfront.net/dims3/MMAH/thumbnail/590x420/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fassets.prod.vetstreet.com%2F3c%2F112000bf3611e18fa8005056ad4734%2Ffile%2Falaskan%20malamute%20crop.jpg", "http://xoloaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/img_46521.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Konstantinovich_Belyaev#Belyaev.E2.80.99s_fox_experiment", "http://previews.123rf.com/images/introventure/introventure0708/introventure070800143/1373671-Peruvian-Hairless-Dog-Stock-Photo.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "9tqgr7", "title": "How was Irish culture change by the settling of Vikings?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9tqgr7/how_was_irish_culture_change_by_the_settling_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e8zf2tz"], "score": [15], "text": ["It's well attested to that raiders and settlers from Scandinavia had a substantial impact on Irish society. In some instances we can still be point to this influence in contemporary Ireland.\n\nFirst, a brief history of Viking contact with Ireland. The first recorded reference is from 795, when it was reported that they raided a monastery on Rathlin Island (just three years after the famous raid at Lindisfarne, England). At this time Irish craftwork was among the most prized in Europe, so plundering these largely undefended monastic settlements (centres of wealth in rural Ireland) must have been extremely rewarding for the raiders.\n\nFor the following few decades the Norsemen continued to perform hit-and-run raids on Ireland, until around 840, when it was reported that Viking raiders were wintering in Ireland. Around 900 the Norse warriors were beginning to settle permanently on the island. Throughout the 10th century their influence were constant features of the many Irish kingdoms\u2019 warring, often acting as mercenaries for the Gaelic kings, if not in their own right. Their influence as political actors began to falter from around the end of the 9th century (famously at the Battle of Tara (980) and the Battle of Clontarf (1014)). Like what would happen to later Anglo-Norman settlers, the Norse settlers largely became Gaelicized, becoming integrated into Irish society, likely within just a few generations of settlement.\n\n1. **Urbanisation**\n\nAlthough this is hotly contested in early medieval Irish historiography, the Vikings are largely credited with bringing urban settlement to Ireland. Likely some proto-urban settlement existed, known by historians as the \u201cmonastic town\u201d, but by our own definition of town (or even that of a medieval German or French person) this argument does not hold water, and they were still largely agrarian. From the early 10th century the Vikings established settlements that remain to this today Ireland\u2019s primary urban centres \u2013 Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick all being set up by Norse settlers during this period.\n\n2) **Language**\n\nModern Irish is still littered with words and phrases that can clearly be recognised as coming from Norse. A few examples: Gaelic words for garden (gaird\u00edn), shoe (br\u00f3g), river (abhainn), boat (b\u00e1d), and market (margad) all suggest Norse origin. This also provides another insight into what influence these settlers might have had on Irish society \u2013 likely concepts such as \u2018a garden\u2019 (as in an enclosed area) or \u2018a market\u2019 where not words which were needed by the Gaelic Irish before the Norse brought them.\n\n3) **Place-names**\n\nAnother linguistic insight into Norse influence on Irish society can be drawn from place-names. For many towns or settlements, the only evidence historians have for Norse influence is the name. For example, Leixlip, Co. Kildare is drawn from \u2018lax hlaup\u2019, Old Norse for \u2018salmon leap\u2019. A town such as Wicklow also likely has Viking influence, as the \u2018wick\u2019 comes from the same Norse word that the \u2018vik\u2019 in Viking does, referring to a bay or inlet. It\u2019s the same root that English towns, such as Norwich, come from.\n\n4) **Craftwork**\n\nAlthough I know not so much about this, the archaeological evidence suggests a merging of Norse and Irish styles of craftwork.\n\n5) **Trade network**\n\nThe Vikings established a trading network that extends across an enormous portion of Eurasia, and even into Africa and North America. Viking trade set Ireland among this network and fixed the island into an international commercial world. One of the most incredible examples of this is an 8th century coin from Iraq being found during an excavation of a small Hiberno-Norse settlement in the south-east of Ireland.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis list is by no means exhaustive. If anyone has any questions I will certainly elaborate on the evidence for what I\u2019ve said. Some historians I would recommend for you check out if you would like to find out more would be Howard Clarke, John Bradley, and Colman Etchingham.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) This website should also provide some interesting information if you're interested in the urban aspect of Viking influence."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.ria.ie/towns-viking-origin"]]}
{"q_id": "21fyt0", "title": "As the first European city founded in California, why didn't San Diego become as prominent as San Francisco or Los Angeles?", "selftext": "San Diego has a good natural harbor, it borders Mexico, and was the first city founded in California yet SF/LA seems to have always overshadowed SD in everything from population size to arts and culture to being the economic center of California. What drew people to those two cities? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21fyt0/as_the_first_european_city_founded_in_california/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgcrke4", "cgcu6x1", "cgcyn3s", "cgcyujr", "cgd0h1q"], "score": [33, 19, 5, 8, 4], "text": ["Without answering your question precisely, I'd like to point out that being the first city doesn't always make it important. For example, Jamestown, though the first English colony in America, no longer even exists even though it was the capital for 80 or so years. \n\nTerrain and resources make a larger impact on the success of a colony. Oil was also found in Los Angeles leading a a growth boom in the 19th century. Sand Diego appears to have suffered population-wise as well when it was part of Mexico, not sure if that's because of political reasons, but it happened.\n\nI'll link these two sources which corroborate what I say, but I'm not saying I'm wrong.  I found them after a quick Google search so I hope they're decent.\n\n[Oil in LA,](_URL_1_) and [decline in San Diego.](_URL_0_)", "\"City\" is a very generous term prior to 1849 for San Diego, Los Angeles, Yerba Buena (aka San Francisco) or any other community in what is now California.  They were communities based around Spanish missions, but hardly cities.  Under Spanish and Mexican rule, Alta California was a rural backwater carved into large \"Ranchos\", whose landowners sought to pattern themselves after Spain's landed gentry.\n\nAfter the US won control of California in 1848, there was the famous discovery of gold in Northern California, leading to the Gold Rush and the extremely rapid growth of San Francisco.  Southern California was far away from the gold fields and saw limited growth, while San Francisco, with its massive natural bay and huge influx of immigrants, was the catalyst for California statehood.\n\nIn 1876 the Central Pacific railroad was built to connect Northern California with Southern California.  Los Angeles, as opposed to San Diego, was chosen as the southern terminus of the railroad, and this gave Los Angeles a head start over San Diego in terms of growth.  The discovery of oil in Los Angeles in 1892 led to more financial wealth for the city, and by that time the ball was rolling for Los Angeles to eventually become a major city.\n\nSan Diego, on the other hand, was left out of most of these developments.  Largely agricultural and rural, it wasn't until World War II that San Diego experienced major, sustained growth.  San Diego became a major Naval base for the war against Japan, and is to this day the largest US Navy base in the Pacific.  During the war and in the decades after, it was a major defense manufacturing city, and grew to be the second largest city in California, after Los Angeles.\n\nFor sources, this is basically what every 4th grader in California learns.  For more depth and understanding, I would look to something like Kevin Starr's California: A History", "Los Angeles had the oil boom and then Hollywood and then everything. (In the early 1920s perhaps 1/4 of the world's oil was coming from areas around LA.) San Francisco had the gold rush and shipping (the bay is one of the best natural bays in the world). Both had the central valley agricultural boom as well. Los Angeles additionally benefits from a very large area of fairly flat land which is perfect for development.\n\nSan Diego may have been founded earlier but development requires impetus. For SF and LA there were enormously strong early development cycles in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries which caused the cities to grow large enough to where they could fuel their own growth. San Diego didn't have the same advantages to the same degree so it grew slower.", "I took a seminar on the history of Los Angeles that included an examination of its success relative to San Diego and San Francisco. L.A.'s overshadowing of San Diego rests on a number of factors. First, the fight over the terminus of the intercontinental railroad, and which towns in California received regular service; L.A. won this battle. Next, the two cities battled over becoming the port destination for import and export; L.A. won this battle, as well. Finally, when William Mulholland stole the water rights from Owen Valley and diverted it to L.A., the lushness it brought to the nearby California valleys made the city more attractive than arid San Diego.  \n  \nSources:  \nAvila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight\u202f: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.  \n  \nMacGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors\u202f: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton [u.a.]: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.  \n  \nNicolaides, Becky. My Blue Heaven\u202f: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.  \n  \nScott, Allen. The City\u202f: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California press, 1998.", "San Francisco has a better harbor and was near the Gold Rush. \n\nLos Angeles has oil and was easier to build a railroad to from the East. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/San-Diego-History.html", "http://clui.org/page/urban-crude-oil-fields-los-angeles-basin"], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2etixl", "title": "How accurate is the movie Gandhi (1982)? I read some articles slamming Gandhi (the actual person), and I don't know what to make of them.", "selftext": "Especially the first one seems very exaggerated:\n\n- _URL_2_\n- _URL_0_\n- _URL_1_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2etixl/how_accurate_is_the_movie_gandhi_1982_i_read_some/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ck2t5v2", "ck2vhzf", "ck2vq1k"], "score": [15, 3, 38], "text": ["I recommend you go to his own autobiography to look at how his belief in universal human rights evolved over time, after being raised in two cultures that were perfectly happy with a rigid ethnic hierarchy.  It turns out neither Gandhi, nor any of my own Catholic saints were born fully adult and fully mature.\n\nExamples - He first became politically active and well-known while working as a lawyer in (British) South Africa.  His early campaigns focused on bringing upper caste Indians to something like parity with the English.  He burned little of his scarce political capital on native Africans or lower caste \"coolies,\" at first.  This evolution was only hinted at in the movie.\n\nCritics may also go after his difficult relationship with his son Harilal Gandhi.  It is above my paygrade to speculate on whose fault it was that his life unraveled as it did, but others may not hold back.\n\nHe also spends many pages of his autobiography discussing some medical quackery that he experimented with - not so much a moral failing, but fodder for pundits and cranks on the internet.  He tried many fad diets with varied results.  Any comments related to sex also clearly are coming from someone outside of Victorian British Western culture, so again more fodder for critics and cranks.", "Related question: how come the movie gave such a negative depiction of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, despite relatively positive views from academic historians?", "The problem here is that there is a vast disjuncture between Gandhi the historical figures versus the popular mythology that has built around him. The 1982 biopic is a reflection of this latter aspect of Gandhi's image. The film presents Gandhi and his world in starkly Manichean of light versus dark. Note that Kingsley's performance (almost universally praised among critics) is one that highlights Gandhi's stoic and moral gravitas and thus accentuates this duality.  Many of the other historical characters in the film shrink compared to him.\n\nThe reality is that the historical Gandhi inhabited a highly complex political world in which often belies reducing it to simple terms like good vs. evil or justice vs. injustice. That Gandhi inhabited and operated in such a world is not even an open secret, but the strength of his mythologized public image means that the act of uncovering the historical record carries far more weight to them than less valorized historical figures. For example, there have been recent publications of Nixon audio tapes that highlight his various racial, sexual, and political prejudices, often expressed in language the mods here would require a NSFW tag for, yet these  revelations are somehow not as alarming as Gandhi using a formal greeting of \"dear Friend\" in a letter to Hitler (which the critic in the OP's first link finds appalling). \n\nJewaharlal Nehru actually advised ~~David~~ Richard Attenborough not to deify Gandhi, as \"that is what we have done in India and he was to great a man to be deified.\" Although Attenborough claimed to follow Nehru's advice, *Gandhi* has fallen into the trap of many biopics by oversimplifying its subject and the context of the times. \n\n*Source*\n\nCarnes, Mark C. *Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies*. New York: H. Holt, 1995.   "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.writework.com/essay/accurate-film-gandhi-accounting-mahatma-gandhi-s-life-ragh", "http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/oct/14/gandhi-reel-history", "http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/3/7/the-truth-about-gandhi-pbtbhe-movie/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3zrsm2", "title": "Did Germany pay reparations for World War I during WWII?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zrsm2/did_germany_pay_reparations_for_world_war_i/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyojzc7"], "score": [3], "text": ["Nazi Germany did not pay reparations during WWII. Reparations had been suspended for one year by the Hoover Moratorium in 1930, and were suspended indefinitely at the Lausanne Conference in 1932. When WWII ended, the allies assessed a value equivalent to 16 Billion dollars, that Germany was to pay to complete the reparations payments for WWI, and these were finished being paid in 2012. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "fare76", "title": "Who decided north is up and south is down?", "selftext": "I remember seeing some old European maps (probably from the Middle Ages, but I'm not sure), and East and West where on the vertical axis, so I guess someone at some point just decided that north is up and south is down and everybody just dealt with it?\nI think it's pretty obvious why they were put on the vertical axis, but is there a reason why they aren't inverted? And when did that became the standard?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fare76/who_decided_north_is_up_and_south_is_down/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fj08j5k"], "score": [3], "text": ["u/terminus-trantor and u/qed1 worked on a similar question just a few days ago:\n\n[Was North always on the top of maps?](_URL_0_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7htqh/was_north_always_on_the_top_of_maps/"]]}
{"q_id": "287d42", "title": "What was the technique for harvesting ice on the Great Lakes for iceboxes/traincars, etc...", "selftext": "What tools and methods were used? Who were the laborers? Who organized the process? How dangerous was it? Did the Native Americans harvest ice before the arrival of Europeans as well?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/287d42/what_was_the_technique_for_harvesting_ice_on_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ci8bv5v", "ci8gf6j"], "score": [2, 2], "text": ["I used to work at [Dundurn Castle](_URL_0_) (it's not really a castle).\n\nIn the side hall, where we had visitors wait for the next tour, hung a print depicting a 19th century ice harvest.\n\nIt showed horse teams on the ice and groups of men using long saws (like a traditional lumberjack saw, but with a handle only on one side), cutting large blocks of ice which were then lifted with massive pincers onto the waiting drays.\n\nThe \"Castle\" had an ice pit.  Of course it was no longer in use (the harbour doesn't regularly freeze solid enough anymore even for ice skating much less ice harvest), but we were taught to describe to the visitors how these ice blocks would be lowered into the pit and covered with sawdust.  Apparently they would last throughout the summer.  I can well believe it as it was always very cool in the hallway outside - even without a deep pit filled with ice.                                                              \n\nEdit; I'm very curious about whether First Nations in Canada harvested ice - really hoping someone can answer this question.", "I've never heard of ice harvest taking place on the Great Lakes themselves.  Ice from ponds would be a much better business proposition.  Ponds and small lakes freeze much sooner in the season than the Great Lakes, they are [safer to work on](_URL_0_), and you can access them from all sides.\n\nI suspect that the ice from ponds would be better quality.  Along the shores of the Great Lakes, the waves and wind keep more air to be included.  The still water of a smaller lake would trap less air, and give you a clearer product.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dundurn_Castle"], ["http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/07/Ohio.stuck.on.ice/index.html?eref=ib_us"]]}
{"q_id": "8atcdh", "title": "How were elite divisions in ww2 such as the 101st airborne from Band of Brothers able to have replacements often even though training took 2 years?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8atcdh/how_were_elite_divisions_in_ww2_such_as_the_101st/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dx1g6c3"], "score": [6], "text": ["Men assigned originally to airborne divisions of the U.S. Army trained for a much longer period than those assigned as loss replacements overseas. The first standardized training program for airborne divisions took effect on 4 November 1942. The divisional training program was to take 37 weeks, discounting any additional training that may have been taken to teach concepts learned from overseas, training in special courses such as cooperation with troop carrier groups, or participation in corps or army maneuvers. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, created on 15 August 1942, were scheduled to begin their sixth week of unit training on 9 November 1942 when presented with the new program.\n\nTraining Type|Length\n:--|:--\nIndividual Training|13 weeks\nUnit Training|13 weeks\nCombined Training|11 weeks\n\n**Individual Training**\n\n >  During the 13 weeks of individual training all troops will be hardened physically and mentally to withstand modern combat requirements. All individuals will be conditioned to withstand extreme fatigue, loss of sleep, limited rations, and existence in the field with only the equipment that can be carried by parachute, glider, or transport aircraft. An indication of individual proficiency and a basis of test is considered the ability to make a continuous foot march of twenty-five (25) miles in eight (8) hours, a five (5) mile march in one (1) hour and a nine (9) mile march in two (2) hours, with full equipment.\n\n >  Men will be mentally and physically conditioned for battlefield environment by obstacle courses that overtax endurance as well as muscular and mental reactions, by passage of wire obstacles so situated as to permit overhead fire, by a night fighting course with sound only as an indication of danger, and a street fighting course with booby traps and sudden appearing targets. Live ammunition will be employed in all three tests.\n\n**Unit Training**\n\n >  By the end of the 9th week of unit training infantry battalions will be able to function efficiently, by day or night, independently or reinforced.\n\n >  Field Artillery training will, in general, follow \"Unit Training Program for Field Artillery (Modified for Airborne Field Artillery)\". Stress will be placed on decentralization within batteries to the end that self-contained gun sections will be capable of delivering prompt fire, using both direct and indirect laying with hastily computed firing data in the early stages of any action. Trainlng will also include the operation of batterles, battalions, and division artillery as units in order that the artillery can be capable of massing its fire.\n\n >  The unit training phase of infantry battalions will include tactical exercises in which the battalion is supported by a battery of field artillery.\n\n >  Division engineers will be trained primarily in engineer combat duties. See inclosure a. (Clearance and repair of airdromes or landing strips will be performed by aviation engineers.)\n\n >  Medical units will be trained for normal functions in ground operations and also will be trained in evacuation by air.\n\n >  Quartermaster units will be trained in all phases of ground and aerial supply, to include local defense of supply installations.\n\n >  Ordnance units will be trained to repair standard ordnance and known enemy weapons and vehicles.\n\n >  Antiaircraft elements: (See Inclosure No. 2)\n\n >  Signal units will be trained to operate all communications equipment issued to the division emphasizing the capability of all personnel to operate all equipment.\n\n >  All units will be prepared to either enter combat immediately on landing or to move promptly by marching against an objective.\n\n >  During unit training, combat firing exercises, emphasizing infiltration tactics, rapid advance, and continuous fire support will be planned to conclude each phase.\n\n >  Battalion tactical exercises, whenever possible, will include training in air-ground liaison, proper and prompt requests for air support, and air to ground recognition training for aerial supply.\n\n >  Unit training will be concluded by tactical exercises including separate glider and parachute regiments, artillery and engineer battalions, and divisional special units (company).\n\n**Combined Training**\n\n >  Regimental combat team and divisional tactical exercises will be held during this period. Tactical situations which require the complete staff planning of an airborne attack will be the background of each problem, but the paramount importance of the ground operation will be impressed on staffs and troops. All problems to be solved will envision, or will actually require, the presence of appropriate troop carrier and air support units.\n\nMen could only be assigned to the parachute troops at their own request. On 25 May 1942, the Secretary of War directed that infantry replacement training centers each provide 105 men per week to the Airborne Command who were medically qualified for parachute training. The standards prescribed were very strict;\n\n >  Qualifications set forth were those standardized as a result of innumerable medical reports and examinations. The volunteer must be alert, active, supple, with firm muscles and sound limbs, capable of development into an aggressive individual fighter, with great endurance. Age requirements were: Majors not over forty years of age; captains and lieutenants, not over thirty-two; and enlisted men, eighteen to thirty-two, inclusive. Medium weight was desired, maximum not to exceed 185 pounds; height, not to exceed seventy-two inches; vision, maximum visual acuity of twenty-forty, each eye; blood pressure, persistent systolic pressure of 140MM, or persistent diastolic pressure about 100MM to disqualify. Also on the disqualification list were recent venereal disease, evidence of highly nervous system, lack of normal mobility in every joint, poor or unequally developed musculature, poor coordination, lack of at least average athletic ability, history of painful arches, recurrent knee and ankle injuries, recent fractures, old fractures with deformity, pain or limitation of motion, recurrent dislocations, recent severe illness, operation, or chronic disease.\n\nMen could be accepted at any time from arrival at a replacement training center to the completion of 13 weeks of individual training. On 10 June 1942, the weekly quota for volunteers from each replacement training center was revised upward to 125; this quota could be exceeded each week, under the provision that a replacement training center would provide less than 500 candidates each month. On 15 June 1942, men were only to be accepted after they had completed at least 8 weeks of individual training. In early 1943, the Airborne Command began to gear up to train larger numbers of loss replacements as the first airborne units entered combat. Men thus assigned to the Parachute School at Fort Benning or, after 9 April 1942, Fort Bragg, completed 13 (later 14, and then 17) weeks of individual and specialty training with an emphasis on placement in a parachute unit, and an additional 5-week course ensuring that the recruits had completed the training regimen to the best of their ability, had qualified on their assigned weapon(s), had completed a transition firing and battle indoctrination course, and had completed a squad tactical jump. If recruits were not called for shipment in a prompt manner, an additional 4-week small-unit tactics course was to be taught; when interrupted by a call for shipment, men were to be taken from the training unit farthest along in these activities.\n\n**Source:**\n\nEllis, John T. *The Army Ground Forces: The Airborne Command and Center, Study No. 25*. Washington: Historical Section, Army Ground Forces, 1946."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6dsvle", "title": "Before Israelite conquered it, who ruled Jericho and where is Jericho mentioned outside the bible?", "selftext": "I know some Canaanite group ruled in Jericho but I don't know which one. All people really talk about is the biblical account of Jericho and I cant really find any information from extra-biblical texts", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6dsvle/before_israelite_conquered_it_who_ruled_jericho/", "answers": {"a_id": ["di5ex70"], "score": [31], "text": ["This is a good question, but I want to start by clearing up a couple of things. Firstly, some definitions: 'Canaan' is usually used to refer to the area from the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the hill country that's farther inland, and often comes with an implied sense of 'not Israel and Judah'. I'll use it here to mean everything in between Egypt and the Hittites.^1 The only significant collection of contemporary texts we have for this area are from the city state of Ugarit (now Ras Shamra, in the north-west of modern-day Syria). There are some inscriptions from the various Phoenician cities and a couple from the kingdom of Damascus, but evidence is very, very scarce. \n\nSecondly, the conquest of Canaan as described in the Bible has practically no evidence to support it and is probably a complete invention.^2 Major problems with the biblical account were first raised when the archaeological record from a large number of sites around the area didn't seem to add up to what we had been expecting to find: contemporary destruction layers in the Late Bronze Age (around 1100 BCE or so, when the story is set), and an abrupt change in artefact styles (pottery, architecture, jewellery) and cultural practice (burial style, traces of rituals, diet). None of these were there, and in fact what we did find was continuity between Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. In other words, the native population probably wasn't replaced with two million or so Israelites coming from Egypt.\n\nThirdly, Jericho is actually one of our most important case studies when it comes to understanding the history of Israel in Canaan. The really big excavation of the city (focusing on Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Jericho, but including a broad survey of the entire chronology of the site) conducted by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s found some pretty remarkable things.^3 To summarise, she discovered that the city had had significant fortifications in the Middle Bronze Age (roughly up to 1550 BCE), but that these had been destroyed completely during that time. Of course, this is much too early for anything remotely related to a political entity 'Israel'^4 to be relevant; even the most conservative scholars date the reign of David^5 to the late-11th or early-10th century BCE. Jericho was only a minor settlement during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, and was even mostly abandoned for several centuries during this period. It wasn't until the 9th century BCE that Jericho was properly rebuilt.\n\nNow, to actually get to your question: who ruled Jericho before it was destroyed? Whoever it was, they didn't really leave us much to work with. According Kenyon's interpretation of the evidence, Jericho became a city of some importance - and perhaps with some degree of independence - like many other major Middle Bronze Age sites (including Ugarit) in the first half of the second millennium BCE. Their cemetery was extensive, and the elaborate nature of the burials there suggests that the rulers of the city were relatively well-off. We know from Egyptian scarabs found at the site that they traded with the Egyptians. Kenyon didn't find much in terms of religious worship, but geographically speaking it is likely that they shared the general Canaanite pantheon with the other cities in the region (Ba'al-Hadad, El, Anath, and Astarte being their most important deities). \n\nI am not aware of the city being mentioned in any extra-biblical texts (neither from Egypt nor from Mesopotamia), but I am happy to be corrected if anyone else has an example.\n\nI hope this helps! Please let me know if I can expand on or clarify anything!\n\n-----------\n\n^1 Scholars are usually pretty inaccurate with the term, so depending on preference some will include or exclude the Phoenician city states; some even only use 'Canaan' to refer exclusively to the area that would become the territory of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.\n\n^2 see Davies, *In Search of 'Ancient Israel'*; Finkelstein and Silberman, *The Bible Unearthed*; also Dever, *What did the biblical authors know and when did they know it?* (a little outdated now, but still a good, neutral survey).\n\n^3 See Kenyon, *Excavations at Jericho*, several volumes spanning the periods 1954-1958 and 1960-1983.\n\n^4 The Merneptah Stele, dating to the 13th century BCE, refers to something resembling Israel, but it should be seen as a name for the area rather than a political entity.\n\n^5 David's historicity is a can of worms I really don't want to open here, but even assuming he existed and ruled over a united kingdom he's a good four centuries too late."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1ug9d4", "title": "When Russian troops sacked Berlin near the end of World War II, did they kill civilians? What exactly happened?", "selftext": "I'm not sure if the city had been evacuated or what went on there.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ug9d4/when_russian_troops_sacked_berlin_near_the_end_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cehtusd"], "score": [14], "text": ["The population of Berlin at the end of the war was disproportionately comprised of Women and children,  with most of the men fighting in the army, or being drafted into the Volkssturm at the last minute.  Most of the violence directed to Berliners was looting and rape.  Rape was endemic at the time, with girls as young as 12 up to women in their seventies.  There were instances of women being killed as a consequence of sexual violence.  Some historians argue that the Soviet treatment of Germans in 1945 was a direct retaliation for the Nazis actions in Stalingrad.\n\nAlthough there were murders by the Soviets, they were not common. most deaths at the time were a result of starvation and disease, with Typhus being most prevalent. Males who were proved to have NSDAP associations were more likely to be sent east as prisoners of War than murdered.\n\nSources:\nBerlin - Anthony Beevor\nWoman in Berlin - Anonymous\nGermany 1945 - Richard Bessel"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "9x1ngq", "title": "Is it true that Emporor Hirohito barely spoke normal japanese, and as such a large amount of citizens could not understand when he surrendered on air?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9x1ngq/is_it_true_that_emporor_hirohito_barely_spoke/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e9ow0e6"], "score": [84], "text": ["Not to discourage further responses, but u/aonoreishou answered a similar question [here](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9p31qg/historians_write_that_emperor_hirohitos_jeweled/"]]}
{"q_id": "32fxor", "title": "What were the military advantages that helped Cromwell and the New Model Army win the English Civil Wars?", "selftext": "I know that many officers in the war had gained experience fighting in other European wars, namely in Holland and Germany, but why did the New Model Army seem to \"modernize\" more than the Royalists?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32fxor/what_were_the_military_advantages_that_helped/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqb3gyf", "cqb3k3u"], "score": [7, 13], "text": ["Most of this is taken from Christopher Hill's God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. \n\nAs Hill points out, the New Model Army was a progression of ideas that had started in the Dutch Republic 'fifty or sixty years earlier'. Essential Hill argues that the essence of the revolution in the military was partly due to its reliance on 'the free way as against the formal' or the idea that free men fighting for a cause they believed in 'could get the better of mere professionals simply by superior morale and discipline'. Cromwell had raised troops (later called Ironsides) of 'picked men, well drilled, well equipped, well horsed, well paid'. Instead of using the traditional tactics of the day, displayed with aplomb by his Royalist adversary Prince Rupert of the Rhine, which used horse as a kind of mobile infantry, Cromwell instead used his disciplined troops as a 'battering ram'. \n\nWhile Rupert opted for one devastating mass charge, that would \"lose cohesion in a search for plunder and destroying enemy stragglers: 'a rabble of gentility', Monck called the royalist cavalry. As Clarendon put it...whereas Cromwell's troops, if they prevailed, or thought they were beaten and presently routed, rallied again and stood in good order till they received new orders\".\n\nAt Marston Moor, it was the repeated charges of Cromwell's horse that turned the battle from defeat to victory. So discipline and well drilled troops were an obvious factor in success, not just for the Ironsides, but for the New Model too. Hill goes on to state that the New Model's 'organization, commissariat and ordnance were normally far superior to those of the enemy. Their lieutenants were organization men... In addition to its better discipline and morale, the New Model Army had behind it better business methods, better supplies, better artillery.\n\nIt also should be noted that Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax 'rarely engaged unless they enjoyed superiority in numbers. At Naseby this superiority was nearly two to one'.", "Three main reasons, money, money, and yet more money. There were other reasons as well.\nParliament controlled not only the most prosperous and most populous parts of Britain at the start of the Civil War, which meant that their war chest was far bigger than the king's (more, and more prosperous people who were able to pay taxes), but they also controlled all of the major manufacturing centres, such as Norwich, Hull and London, which also contained nearly all of the armaments manufacturers, and, near London, at Enfield, was the only large scale gunpowder factory. As it was a Royal monopoly, it was very nearly the sole source of gunpowder in Britain. They controlled very nearly all of the big cities, thus being able to tax the trade thereof, the Navy and most of Britain's merchant fleet. Thus international trade was secure, with plenty of profitable trade to tax, and also able to pretty much prevent the king's army from easily getting supplies from abroad, even which Henrietta Maria pawning the Crown Jewels!  \nParliament could, therefore, afford to equip and feed, and often pay their men, whilst the king was forced to rely on promissary notes, loans and forced loans, plunder, and demanding \"protection money\" from towns, called \"levying contributions\", and whose men were often months if not years in arrears of pay."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "vgnw7", "title": "Did the Founding Fathers frame the Constitution solely for their economic self-interest?", "selftext": "Charles Beard argued the Founders were motivated to frame the Constitution purely by economic self-interest in his work *An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution*. (1913) \n\nI'd love to hear the informed judgement of historical practitioners regarding this matter almost a century later.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vgnw7/did_the_founding_fathers_frame_the_constitution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c54def8", "c54i0bp"], "score": [2, 3], "text": ["Probably not.  If the founders like Washington were motivated by self interest, then he would have become king when they offered it to him.", "First off, I don't know of a single historical work written that long ago that still holds up on its own today. The entire profession has been reformed and then reformed again since. Of course books like his can still be influential, but you can't look at single works, let alone works that old, and then proclaim \"Aha! Now I get it!\"\n\nNext, it's a good rule of thumb is that there isn't a single explanation of cause for much of anything in history. We are, after all, talking about the history of humans and humans are complex animals. However, books will often argue, like Beard, for fairly singular causes for events such as the forming of the Constitution. This isn't wholly bad, as convincing others of, say, an economic argument requires a lot of evidence. Beard, like so many historians, needed to hammer home the idea that economics (or whatever) were an important element and that cannot be ignored. Beard probably wasn't trying to write the last word of the Constitution, ceasing all further study into the matter, and you shouldn't take it as such. I doubt very many historians actually believe that they can singularly explain historical events and eras with arguments that conveniently align with their career choices, but arguing forcefully gets the attention of employers, publishers, and grant committees. \n\nI'm sorry this doesn't fully answer your question, and I can only offer sparse insights on the Consitution itself (not my direct expertise). I can say, of course, that economics played a large but not singular role in the framing of the document, and that a number of other factors entered the Founders' mindset. These included but probably aren't limited to foreign policy/internationalism, slavery (economy but not purely so), internal cohesion (keeping the interests of small states aligned with big states), Enlightenment values, and methods of government. Anyone with better knowledge feel free to correct me.\n\nTo get all the details, it'll probably end up being best to head to the library, and the biggest name I can recommend is of course Gordon Wood. But as a bit of an exercise I'd also like to recommend David Hendrickson's *Peace Pact*, which delves very nicely into the internationalism of the Founding and the Constitution. Like Beard, Hendrickson's book is hardly the last word or gives a full understanding of the Founding, but it demonstrates quite nicely how the Founders could be internationally minded in their plans for the country, taking into account far more than the domestic factors people usually think of when describing the writing of the Constitution. It would make for a great read."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "2ojwmi", "title": "Why did \"White Australia\" use a dictation test instead of a criterion openly based on ancestry?", "selftext": "It seems bizarre to me to have a policy called \"White Australia\" (or was it not officially called that?), and then enforce it in such a coy, euphemistic way.\n\nIf they didn't want non-white immigrants, why didn't they just ban non-white immigrants?\n\nIs it because Australia was part of the British Empire at the time, and didn't have full freedom of action?\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ojwmi/why_did_white_australia_use_a_dictation_test/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cmo0xks"], "score": [35], "text": ["Enforcing the policy through a subjective test allowed it to be expanded to exclude politically undesirable people.  \n\nThe Immigration Restriction Act (1901) required immigrants to be able to \"write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer, a passage of 50 words in length in a European language directed by the officer\". Since the language could be chosen by the officer anyone who couldn't speak all European languages could be excluded.\n\nThe most notably example of this is Ego Erwin Kisch who was a multilingual Czech communist. He passed the test in a number of languages until immigration officials managed to find an officer who could speak Sottish Gaelic. Kisch then failed and was convicted of being an illegal immigrant. Although that was overturned on appeal.\n\n[Original text of the act](_URL_0_)\n\nSource: McNamara, T. (2009) \"The spectre of the dictation test: language testing for immigration and citizenship in Australia\". In Extra, Guus, Massimiliano Spotti, and Piet Van Avermaet, eds. *Language testing, migration and citizenship: Cross-national perspectives on integration regimes*. London: Continuum: 224-241."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-16.html"]]}
{"q_id": "28tkv4", "title": "Was New Zealand really forced out of the British Empire?", "selftext": "My professor said that New Zealand was essentially forced out of the Empire despite a lack of support for the idea of complete independence from the population and New Zealand politicians. Is this really the case? Were New Zealanders really forced to become independent, or am I just misinterpreting what he said.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28tkv4/was_new_zealand_really_forced_out_of_the_british/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cieeuaw", "cieiujy", "ciej4no"], "score": [17, 11, 6], "text": ["I think your professor's language is a bit harsh, but he is trying to emphasize a point.\n\nNew Zealand (along with Canada, Australia, and a few other countries) didn't achieve independence in an abrupt manner in the same way India and the USA did.  These countries made a gradual shift towards self-governance.\n\nThe biggest changes occurred after Britain passed the Statute of Westminster in 1931.  Some countries (like Canada) then took responsibility for passing their own laws, and managing their external affairs.  Some countries (like New Zealand) we're required to specifically adopt the statute, which New Zealand did not do until 1947.\n\nSo, it's not like New Zealand got \"kicked out\" in in 1931 (or 1947), but the message from mother England was clear.  The large (even NZ), established dominions were ready to take the next step towards self-governance.  By 1947, colony divestment was in full swing.  As JBC mentions, Queen Elizabeth II is still the head of state.\n", "It was not really forced out, but we did not really elect to leave either. The issue was that, prior to 1950, NZ had two houses of parliament - the Legislative Council (the upper house) and the House of Representatives (lower house). However, the upper house was effectively useless - its members were not elected, but instead were appointed by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the Prime-Minister. Since the GG tried to stay out of politics entirely, the LC evolved into nothing more than a rubber stamp for the PM - he chose it's members and they just signed off on Bills that got through the lower house.\n\nAs this was wasteful, the NZ government decided to abolish the LC. BUT it had been established by the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 - an Act of the *British* Parliament. Since the NZ government could not override an Act of the British Parliament (or, rather, there was uncertainty if it could or not) Parliament took the \"easy\" option of first adopting the Treaty of Westminster, *then* abolishing the LC. \n\nBecoming independent from the UK was a side effect of adopting the ToW - it wasn't that we *wanted* independence, but in order to do what we wanted to we (possibly) needed it.  \n\nSource: *Constitutional and Administrative Law in New Zealand* by P. Joseph", "It wasn't really a situation of being \"forced\" out of the Empire, rather there was no particular drive or desire to take advantage of the Statute of Westminster.\n\nNew Zealand wasn't so much against the idea as that it felt no particular need to adopt the Statute of Westminster. New Zealand's constitutional history is really one of an odd sense of laziness and contentment with the status quo until something doesn't work - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Partially the reason why we still have an unwritten constitution.  \n\nNew Zealand wasn't the only Dominion in the situation - the Statute only automatically applied to Canada, the Irish Free State and South Africa. [The section concerning the other Dominions](_URL_0_)\nAustralia adopted it in 1942 and Newfoundland never did so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/22-23/4/section/10"]]}
{"q_id": "8zn4u9", "title": "How common was wearing masks in renaissance Venice?", "selftext": "I always assumed that masks were only worn for parties, but apparently that wasn't the case and there were whole 'seasons' when wearing them was quite common. Is that true? Would people just go about their normal lives wearing masks or was it still a bit of 'dressing up'? Did everyone wear them or was it only a few people? Were there laws about it? Did people have distinctive masks which identified them, or were they more anonymous? How long did this go on for?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8zn4u9/how_common_was_wearing_masks_in_renaissance_venice/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2rg3di"], "score": [12], "text": ["Venetian masks outside of carnival (which only lasted for the month before Lent) and theater/masquerade were not so much a thing in the Renaissance; according to James Johnson in *Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic*, the practice began among the male and female nobility in the late seventeenth century and soon spread to all ranks of society, lasting until the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797. Foreign visitors to Venice expected the city to be full of masked revelers and assassins, but found a whole lot of ordinary shoppers and bystanders that happened to be wearing a covering on their faces. While carnival masks gave the wearers a freedom to act outside of social norms - women could associate with anyone, since they were unrecognizable, and male crossdressers (*gnaghe*) could walk around freely - everyday masks had a very different context.\n\nAs the wealthy returned from their estates outside the city in October and the theatrical and social season began, masks reappeared in the piazzas of Venice, most people wearing the combination of the *tab\u00e0ro*, a long black cloak; *ba\u00f9ta*, a black hood; and *larva*, a white mask that flared out at the bottom to allow for talking and eating. The *larva* was usually held on by being tucked under a cocked hat that sat low on the head, but while men always wore such headgear, women did not; when the latter were bareheaded or in another sort of hat or a plain cloak, they tended to wear a black *mor\u00e8ta* mask, which was instead held to the face with a tab or button they kept between their lips. After Lent, the theaters closed again and masks were less prevalent, but when they opened again in the late spring for Ascension, the masks reappeared (though worn with the *ba\u00f9ta* pulled down to mitigate the heat and humidity). The church tried to regulate on what days and at what times masks could be worn, but by 1720 they were normalized as a part of everyday dress during the proper season.\n\nSome did, of course, use the natural advantage of the *larva*: hired thugs, prostitutes at the theater, and booksellers with obscene material wore masks on a regular basis to protect their identities while doing illegal things. Others wore masks out of less pressing necessity, but still to remain incognito, like men running private messages and the city's surveillance agents. However, there was another end of the spectrum, where the mask was worn as an indication of formality and respect. Members of the nobility would dress in *larve* when attending the introductions of new ambassadors or greeting foreign royalty traveling incognito in their own masks, when a new doge was elected or the doge's children were married, for particular religious or historical commemorative ceremonies.\n\nThe habit of masking was believed to have led to rising crime rates early in the eighteenth century, and could lead to all kinds of comedies of errors - but it was entrenched in Venetian custom and normally was seen as completely unremarkable.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1erksa", "title": "How did the people of Imperial Japan view their German allies in WW2 and vice versa?", "selftext": "After I saw a post on /r/history ([this one](_URL_0_)) I got thinking. How would an ordinary Japanese citizen interpret their alliance with Germany and vice versa.\n\nThe Japanese-German alliance has always puzzled me but I never thought about it on the public level.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1erksa/how_did_the_people_of_imperial_japan_view_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ca33hyj", "ca34kxb", "ca34tbx", "ca3c668", "ca3dkrt", "ca3ekzn", "ca3jka6"], "score": [185, 32, 175, 6, 2, 2, 8], "text": ["I can't give a full answer but Imperial Japan was very strict on censorship. I'm pretty sure Mein Kampf was banned. Foreign influence, especially western influence was considered a bad thing. And at the same time Nazi Germany was at war with The USSR, Japan maintained a non aggression pact. This hurt Germany because it allowed for the USSR to move troops off the Manchukuo border to the very important Eastern Front against the Nazis. Moreover the allies had dominance over the oceans in the latter parts of the war making supply exchange difficult if not impossible (sometimes submarines were used to move diplomats, although Im not sure how often). And there were information exchanges on weapons, military supplies, although this was also limited. But for the most part it was just a written alliance and not much else (to my knowledge).\n\nSource: BA in history. \n\nEdit: spelling", "From what I remember from my Japanese history course, the Japanese did like Germany for its militaristic stance but viewed their temporary alliance with Russia as a \"betrayal\" due to the previous Russo-Japanese War. \n\nThey also gave asylum to Jews because, as my history teacher put it, they admired their \"Chosen People\" view.\n\nEdit: Ok, just to clarify, I'm a student and these are what I'm remembering from a class I took a semester ago. I'm by no means an expert. Cancercures, during the Meiji Period (1868-1912), they did send people around the world to learn about other cultures and governments (this was after a long period of enforced international isolation). The Iwakura Mission is the most famous of these.", "Allies in a loose sense. There was some limited sharing of technology between Germany and Japan- the J8M was directly based on Germany's ME 163 rocket fighter for example- but really the two were so geographically and logistically isolated from each other that they were only allies in a vague sense. \n\nIt'd probably be a different story if the Germans had managed to seize the Suez Canal and / or cut the Soviets off from the Black Sea, but for the most part it was just lip service because they were fighting the same enemies and had similar systems of government. Culturally the two were nothing alike beyond a vague, \"We're better than everyone else.\" ", "I do believe I've read somewhere here in /r/askhistorians that the japanese had race-classes as well. They viewed themselves and europeans as superior to the rest of Asia, and were very welcoming to eg. jews fleeing from Europe, despite their alliance with Germany.\n\n(Japan doesn't have a history of discrimination against jews, and considering that european/US jews are about the most well educated ethnicity its not a huge surprise that they were welcoming)", "I\"m currently reading [Cry Havoc:How the Arms Race Drove the World to War](_URL_0_).  Two things the book mentions that is relevant to your question are that both countries were felt they got a raw deal from the League of Nations and he other thing was Japan had sent a lot of people to Germany as part of it's effort to modernize.  So a lot of Japans educated middle class or bureaucratic class either had studied in Germany or learned from people who had studied in Germany.\n\nIn the late 20's/ early 30's Japan hoped to make an alliance with Britain to restrain the US's attempts to increase its influence in the Pacific.  Britain wasn't sympathetic but they were worried about the growth of the US navy so it's not that unreasonable of an expectation.  There was even some sympathy on Britain's part b/c the Japanese made a strong defense of Shanghai, which had a large foreign presence that included a lot of Brits.\n\nSo, I'd say it wasn't their first choice, but it made a lot of sense to ally with Germany.  \n\nedit: some grammar crap", "Ian Kershaw mentions that Hitler admired the Japanese and their racial beliefs.  The Japanese were against race mixing which Hitler admired as it meant the Japanese were proud of their race and didn't want to mix with others. Hitler, as we're probably all aware, was against race mixing.", "Although I am loathe to make this a top level answer because it does not directly answer the question at hand, I do believe the following point is necessary to keep in mind whenever we find ourselves discussing Nazi policy, priorities and/or attitudes.\n\nRace was not the only factor in determining where one would have been placed in society according to statements made by many leaders and enacted in some ways into the laws and even the sentencing guidelines after they, quite legally may I remind you, came to power. \n\nThe term I want to bring to light is **Volksgemeinschaft** a rough translation of which is \"people's community\". While Jews were excluded from the community with few exceptions even native Germans possessing the most \"Aryan\" of traits could be excluded as well for a wide variety of reasons ranging from criminal conviction, to disability, to being seen as a profiteer or lazy.  While the term was not invented by or well-defined by the Nazis its complexity and lack of clear definition is something we should keep in mind when discussing the community and society which they sought to build.\n\nIf you are able to access academic journals I would recommend the work of Marynel Ryan on the topic along with the books of Claudia Koonz and Milton Mayer."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1enoa7/a_collection_of_photos_documenting_a_hitler_youth/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], ["http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780465032297-0"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "7wo0gp", "title": "Did the Allies have a plan B in case the invasion of Normandy failed?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wo0gp/did_the_allies_have_a_plan_b_in_case_the_invasion/", "answers": {"a_id": ["du2ucjm"], "score": [12], "text": ["Not to discourage other answers, but you might find these previous posts to be helpful:\n\n* [What was the back up plan if d-day failed?](_URL_1_) feat. /u/KroipyBill\n\n* [Was there a \"Plan B\" if D Day failed? Or was it simply going \"All in\"?](_URL_0_) feat. /u/Rittermeister\n\nThey're both older answers, but the general consensus seems to be that no, there was no real backup plan in place. Hopefully someone can come into the comments and expand on this a bit. Hope that helps!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mxsn5/was_there_a_plan_b_if_d_day_failed_or_was_it/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2em57g/what_was_the_back_up_plan_if_dday_failed/ck131m0/"]]}
{"q_id": "blvkh9", "title": "How do I choose what era to study in Grad School?", "selftext": "Let me preface this by saying I'm not sure if this is the right subreddit to go to, but it seemed like at least a good place to start. TL;DR at bottom.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis December I'm getting my Bachelors in History as well as minors in Latin and Mathematics. I would like to go on and get my masters and doctorate in history as well. My professors have all said that it is crucial as a professional historian to specialize on a time and place. I know I want to study Europe in general and Britain in particular, but I am having trouble deciding on a specific time period. Right now I'm thinking either 19th century or Medieval (but even within Medieval I haven't narrowed it down between early, high, or late). I have taken classes on both eras so I have a gist of what they're like, but nothing has really swayed me one way or the other. I'm really hesitant to just jump in because I don't want to be half way through my thesis and discover I don't actually like the subject as much as I thought.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI enjoy studying architecture/urban developments, politics, and shifts in cultural values, so those could apply to either era. However, I am also interested in studying the history of sex and sexuality and I think there would be more sources on that in the 19th century. Also, while I will graduate with an understanding of Latin, I don't know French, German, or Danish which would be a problem if I wanted to study Britain in the Middle Ages.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo I'm looking for advice on how to choose between one or the other. How did you all choose your field of study? Are there more job prospects in one era or the other? How hampered am I by my limited research languages?\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**TL;DR** \\- I'm stuck trying to decide between studying 19th century or Medieval Britain. I'm asking for help on how should I choose between them.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/blvkh9/how_do_i_choose_what_era_to_study_in_grad_school/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ems081p"], "score": [3], "text": ["A great deal of the process of doing history - or \"doing\" any of the humanities - is the combination of distinct experiences and backgrounds in ways that yield unique perspective. You might find fertile ground by considering nineteenth-century British fixation on everything medieval - architecture, art, etc.This might serve to combine things that attract you, but it may also allow you to wield your experience in ways that yield insights that others might find of interest.\n\nJust a thought. Best of luck to you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5lpzo7", "title": "What are the roots of anti-intellectualism in the United States? What is its history?", "selftext": "I've heard a bit about anti-intellectualism in American culture. I'm not American and I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion. It may be an element of my culture too but I don't understand it enough to notice.\n\nWhat are the roots of this phenomenon? How significant has it been for American culture and politics? I'd welcome answers related to similar Western societies.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lpzo7/what_are_the_roots_of_antiintellectualism_in_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dbxofi6", "dc0ssdy"], "score": [2145, 10], "text": ["Awesome question. The classic answer can be found in Richard Hofstadter's 1963 book, *Anti-Intellectualism in American Life*. Hofstadter, who went on to win the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for the book, wrote:\n\n > \"Anti-intellectualism . . . is founded in the democratic institutions and the egalitarian sentiments of this country.\"\n\nFor Hofstadter, who traces anti-intellectualism to broadsheets levied against some of the first American presidential candidates, the roots go to the classic American debate between who governs best. Is it the mob, the vast majority of Americans who have little interest or knowledge in a topic, or is it a smaller and traditionally less representative group of people who have more experience and education on a topic?\n\nAs Woodrow Wilson said in 1912: \"What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?\"\n\nHofstadter is still quoted frequently on this topic, but there are a lot of things he missed discussing, as Nicholas Lemann points out [in a wonderful 50th anniversary retrospective review](_URL_0_).\n\nHofstadter (and plenty of people today) think of anti-intellectualism as solely the domain of the political right. But Hofstadter missed people like Donald Kagan, Robert Bork, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Allan Bloom, who wrote *The Closing of the American Mind.*\n\nHe also tended to describe business as anti-intellectual, when we know that today, business is one of the most intellectual-friendly branches of American society. America today hosts designers and inventors, innovators and trend-makers, rather than industrialists and manufacturers as it did in 1963, when Hofstadter was writing.\n\nHe also missed the rise of the Civil Rights movement for women and minorities in the United States.\n\nThat's getting a little off track, however. The bottom line is that there is (and has been) a constant push-pull between appeals to the \"mob\" and the \"elite\" in American society.\n\nIn *Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic,* Gordon Wood contends that the first 30 years of the United States resulted in a switch from the desires of the nation's founders \u2500 who were the elite of the nation \u2500 to the will of the middling people, those involved in commerce and enterprise.\n\nThe founders of the United States had envisioned a Congress and President who were already wealthy and thus immune from corruption. The thought went that they would be self-sacrificing and put aside their businesses to serve the national good for a period, then return to their own interests afterward. \n\nJoyce Appleby and Wood contend that the middle classes, who enriched themselves through industry and enterprise, developed a belief that the self-made man was the ideal politician, not someone who had been born wealthy, was educated, and thus theoretically could be trusted to make a decision without being swayed by public opinion.\n\nAnd so we have a push and pull, dating back to the roots of the United States.\n\nHofstadter also makes the case that evangelical Protestantism in the United States, particularly in the South, strongly contributed to anti-intellectualism in the latter half of the 19th century and the 20th century. Mark Noll's *The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind* is a more in-depth analysis of this aspect.\n\nNoll has done some excellent work on American religious history (I highly recommend his *The Civil War as a Theological Crisis*) and he explains that a lot of the American evangelical anti-intellectualism can be traced back to the development of a \"literalist\" interpretation of the Bible as a response to the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century. Before the 19th century, and particularly before the French Revolution, churches and religious organizations tended to be pro-science if they were anything. \n\nIn the United States, this began to change as the arguments about slavery intensified. As Noll points out, the Civil War caused many churches to fission into southern and northern branches, based upon their beliefs in slavery. Northern churches tended to favor an interpretation-based view of the Bible, while Southern churches stuck with a much more literal interpretation of the Bible. Forex, since the Bible refers to slavery and the proper treatment of slaves, it must be appropriate to have slavery in the United States, they argued.\n\nThis literalist philosophy was later applied to things as varied as racial segregation, abortion, and global warming. Because of its reliance upon scripture as the absolute (literally Gospel) truth, anything that took a different viewpoint was seen in a dim light.", "I'm sure this is going to be removed, as it breaks most of the rules of this sub, but the discussion going on here is absolutely, hands down, one of the best that I have seen in over two years of /r/askhistorians. The sheer amount of information being presented gives me hours of reading aside from the present discussion, and seeing this question addressed from so many different points of view is so rare and wonderful at this point in time, I just don't know what to do with myself! THANK YOU ALL for the time and effort you have put into this thread.  I just hope someone sees this besides me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cjr.org/second_read/richard_hofstadter_tea_party.php"], []]}
{"q_id": "4v1mvv", "title": "When classical music was published in the 18th century, how did the music circulate?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v1mvv/when_classical_music_was_published_in_the_18th/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5uv14g"], "score": [12], "text": ["The only media available for the recording of classical music in 18th century was print, of course, and that business is essentially the same now, with a few minor changes. The printing of music parallels the printing of words, with the earliest examples being carved on wooden plates, then engraved on metal plates, which eventually changed to movable music type, and has now moved to digital. Then it would have been printed, arranged into a book, and sold to the public in music shops. The first publishers began to appear in the 18th century in the major German cities, and by the late 18th century they were also in the United States. They would often look for exclusive rights from a composer for European distribution, but Beethoven was known to have sold the \"exclusive\" rights to a single work to several competing publishers. He did the same thing with commissions and world premieres as well, but that's a different story for another time.\n\nEventually an orchestral works would make it around the continent and be performed by the local orchestras, which could be of varying quality. Some people might live too far away to go to a concert, and in any case there might only be a single performance, or at best a handful of performances. In order for more people to learn and enjoy a work, orchestral pieces were often reduced to a piano version, which were the bread-and-butter of publishers, along with solo piano works and chamber works which could be performed at home. Sometimes these reductions were arranged by the composer, but often they were done by someone else. Liszt famously transcribed all of Beethoven's Symphonies, with the Ninth Symphony requiring two pianos. These transcriptions/ reductions are still popular today. \n\nMusic was as popular with people then as it is now, so it was a major industry, and the concept of copyright went hand in hand with the printing of music. The first major copyright law was the Statute of Anne in 1709, which made the printing of music exclusive to the original publisher for 14 years, which was later amended to 21 years. This is important because while a publisher might have the exclusive rights for a while, eventually they would lose exclusivity and any publishing house could then print and sell that music (public domain). As the fame of composers grew throughout the 19th century, this was a huge windfall for publishers who could print the best-selling works of composers like Beethoven and Mozart without having to pay out royalties, making them very profitable. Today the exclusive term of copyrights has been extended greatly, due to heavy lobbying by the Disney corporation and the Gershwin estate. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5dbwas", "title": "What did nomadic horse archers use to make their arrows?", "selftext": "[deleted]", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dbwas/what_did_nomadic_horse_archers_use_to_make_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["da3ea4z"], "score": [3], "text": ["Hi, this is not to discourage other answers but you might be interested in [this post](_URL_0_) by u/krishaperkins"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e74ai/so_where_did_the_mongols_get_their_arrows_from/ctcaauy/"]]}
{"q_id": "3jwwbb", "title": "Are there any historical precedents to a socialist/communist government before the 20th century??", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3jwwbb/are_there_any_historical_precedents_to_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cut0dqc"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions"]]}
{"q_id": "ak8h97", "title": "Gorbachev and Dissolution of USSR", "selftext": "I just watched this video about Russian oligarchy and it got me thinking about how was Gorbachev able to dissolute USSR.  Did he have the authority to do so unilaterally or did the parliament (Politburo it was called?) had to agree to it?\n\nHow was the decision to dissolve USSR reached and who were parties involved.  What obstacles if any and how were those overcome?\n\nAs a side question, is the Communist Party still the party of the government or are they just one of several political parties?\n\nAs for those curious the video I mentioned is:\n_URL_0_ ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ak8h97/gorbachev_and_dissolution_of_ussr/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ef6kzrt"], "score": [2], "text": ["I will point you to this [answer](_URL_3_) I wrote on the role of Gorbachev in the dissolution of the USSR. In essence, Gorbachev, after becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, undertook a series of structural political and economic reforms that unleashed forces that were ultimately outside of his control. Thus while the formal dissolution of the USSR is taken to be the Supreme Soviet voting for its own abolition and the resignation of Gorbachev as Soviet president and the lowering of the Soviet flag over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, this was largely the remnants of the Soviet government recognizing the already-existing state of the Union's dissolution (and it should be noted that some Soviet institutions, notably its [military](_URL_0_), actually persisted after this date).\n\nIn answer to your side-question - the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was stripped of its constitutional legal monopoly in March 1990, and was more or less [dissolved](_URL_1_) and outlawed following the failed August 1991 coup. Lower level elements of the party reconsituted themselves into various political parties across the former USSR, and the largest since 1993 has been the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The CPRF has contested elections since 1993, winning a majority of deputies to the Russian legislature (Duma) in 1995, and its leader Gennady Zyuganov almost won the 1996 presidential [election](_URL_2_) against Boris Yeltsin. Despite all this, and despite being a pro-government party, it hasn't actually controlled any part of the Russian government above the regional level in the post Soviet period."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://youtu.be/w5H56mdsBLI"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9lna01/how_did_yeltsin_gain_control_of_the_armypolice/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9640ua/when_the_soviet_union_collapsed_what_happened_to/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8gzslh/in_russias_1996_presidential_election_the_areas/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9kgjz4/what_is_the_current_view_of_historians_on_whether/"]]}
{"q_id": "5985ok", "title": "Why did European firearms technology become superior to that of other continent's?", "selftext": "As far as I know, countries such as China and Japan made extensive use of matchlocks and cannons and were not extremely far behind the Europeans in the 17th and maybe 18th century.\n\nBut while armies in Europe developed improved versions of these weapons, eventually rifling them and improving metallurgy, armies in other parts of the world did not really match this. At some point they started relying on bringing in foreign technology.\n\n0. Are any of my premises mistaken/oversimplified?\n\n1. If it can be estimated, up to what time period could European firearms technology could be considered \"equal\" to that of other firearm wielding nations on other continents?\n\n2. Why did Europeans eventually develop superior firearms? Was it natural resources, technical know-how, more wars, doctrine, or some combination of this? And why was this effort not matched elsewhere?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5985ok/why_did_european_firearms_technology_become/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d99kg01"], "score": [2], "text": ["For a very good recent book on the subject I highly recommend *The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West* by Tonio Andrade. He sums up a lot of the information and theories available as far as china goes and concludes that the main cause does seem to be a relative lack of major wars. \n\nEssentially, Chinese military technology underwent two different divergences compared to Europe. Prior to the mid 15th century Chinese gunpowder technology was on par with or better than that of the west. Chinese cannon was following European ones in the trend of longer barrels relative to bore size and the Ming army employed a larger proportion of handgunners than European armies would up until around 1500. By 1450 however the Ming had achieved a level of relative stability with no major opponents and military development stopped. Meanwhile in Europe over the next half century the \"classic\" cannon was developed and the matchlock arquebus started becoming widespread. As a result when the Portuguese first arrived in the 1520s both sides agreed that European guns and cannon were far superior.\n\nThis didn't last though, by the end of the 16th century and over the course of the 17th century warfare picked up again in china and European gun technologies were quickly adapted first by the Ming and later by the Qing as well. China developed complex drills and countermarch-style volley fire techniques even earlier than the Dutch did, and by the end of the 17th century they had defeated two Renaissance-style artillery forts. They even had plans to build their own but once the Qing had firmly established their dominance there was no longer any real need. Thus, Andrade argues, China had again reached a level of relative military parity with Europe. It was then over the course of the 18th century that again a lack of warfare combined with the relatively isolationist policies of the Qing dynasty led to a lack of military innovation and serious decline in the quality of the army leading up to a decisive defeat by the British during the Opium Wars."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hf3f9", "title": "Was Philippe P\u00e9tain unjustly criticized by the new French Republic?", "selftext": "So he takes over after Germany has basically won the war and instead of getting more French killed/Half the country bombed he surrenders?\n\nHe is later on given the death penalty but instead serves life in jail...\n\nNow what other choices did they have?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hf3f9/was_philippe_p\u00e9tain_unjustly_criticized_by_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["catq4t5"], "score": [10], "text": ["It wasn't just about the fact that he had surrendered to the Germans that the French were pissed off about. P\u00e9tain and his government, shortly after the surrender, took a vote to reorganise the Third Republic into the French State, an authoritarian (and more importantly an extremely collaborationist) regime which is better known nowadays by the name of Vichy France.\n\nThis government aided in the rounding up of Jews and other \"Undesirables\", and within its colonies it actively resisted Allied forces. Fascist elements within that selfsame government then began attempting to turn France into a much more conservative country than the Third Republic had ever been. They wanted a much less secular and liberal society, preferring instead a more authoritarian catholic society. P\u00e9tain himself supported the movement, but said he didn't like the name it was using, which was \"National Revolution.\"\n\nCensorship was imposed within France, and freedom of speech and thought repressed with the reinstatement of \"Felony of Opinion\". P\u00e9tain himself said that: \"The new France will be a social hierarchy... rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men\".\n\nP\u00e9tain went on to allow the creation of a Vichy organised militia known as the \"Milice\" to suppress the Maquis, in particular its Communist factions.\n\nAfter the occupation of southern France, P\u00e9tain became a mere figurehead for what was no longer even a pretense of an independent government in Vichy. When the liberation of France came about in the September of 1944, the Vichy government was relocated to Germany, where it became a government in exile. By this point however, P\u00e9tain refused to take part in it any longer, and the running of it was taken over by Fernand de Brinon.\n\nOn the 26th of April 1945 P\u00e9tain returned to France via Switzerland to face his accusers. The trial ran from the 23rd of July to the 15th of August 1945, the main charge being treason.\n\n\n\nIn short, while he may not have merited a death sentence (Which was only not carried out due to his age), P\u00e9tain was far from an innocent man. He had run an authoritarian, collaborationist regime that had sought to overturn a lot of the values that the French have held dear since their revolution in 1789. He was not on trial for the surrender, but for everything that came after it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3py7n4", "title": "In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a character mislabels a union army because of dust on their uniform making him believe they are confederates. Did this ever happen in real life?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3py7n4/in_the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly_a_character/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cwalarz"], "score": [3], "text": ["Misidentification wasn't uncommon, especially during the early days of the war when many units had different-colored uniforms. Notably, during the First Battle of Bull Run (July 1861), one of the turning points came when the 33rd Virginia (Confederate) regiment was mistaken for a Union unit. They were able to get close enough to decimate an infantry regiment and capture several artillery pieces, which (along with a charge by Stonewall Jackson and the arrival of some Confederate reserves) started the general Union retreat."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "983llt", "title": "How were WWI era reparation payments handled during the post-WWII separation of Germany?", "selftext": "I was recently reading about when Germany paid off their debt, but I was curious how it was divided between East and West Germany after World War II.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/983llt/how_were_wwi_era_reparation_payments_handled/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e4d3iws"], "score": [9], "text": ["Fortunately for post-war Germany they didn't have to pay any reparations from the First World War as the payment had ceased in 1932. Reparations had always been a thorny political issue in Germany, even from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. In the Treaty itself, Germany was not given a definite figure to repay; rather it simply agreed to pay an indefinite amount that would be decided by a yet-to-be established Reparations Committee. In the meantime, Germany had to pay for the upkeep of the occupying armies with raw materials and food. This is referred to as payment in kind. Eventually the figure was settled as 132bn Marks, or \u00a36.6bn. \n\nGiven the state of the German economy after the war, and the loss of significant coal deposits in Silesia and Alsace-Lorraine, Germany was unable to keep up with her payments either in raw materials or in money. The result of this was that Belgium and France occupied the Ruhr region of Germany and confiscated all production in payment. German workers laid down their tools in a scheme of passive resistance. However, it was during this time that hyperinflation brought on by war debts, a failing economy and decreased production reached its high point. Germany needed serious help, and passive resistance in the Ruhr wasn't really winning them any friends. The practice was ended and the so-called Dawes Plan was drawn up, whereby Germany would recieve foreign investment and loans, the French and Belgians would withdraw from the Ruhr, the schedule of repayments would be redrawn and a new currency, the *Rentenmark*, would be issued to replace the hyperinflated Goldmark. \n\nHowever, many viewed the Dawes Plan as only a stopgap measure and pressured for a new deal, which was drawn up in 1929. The Young Plan, as it was called, set a new schedule and reduced figure for reparations. Crucially, it set a fixed end date for payments (1988), which was the first time that such a thing had happened. It also required the French and British to withdraw from the Rheinland ahead of schedule, and provided additional loans to Germany. While economically sound, the plan drew criticism from the right wing who viewed it as selling out to international financiers and making Germany dependent on foreign aid.\n\nLast but not least, following the deepening financial crisis, a moratorium had been placed on reparation repayments in 1931. In 1932, a conference was held in Lausanne which agreed that Germany should no longer have to make payments given their dire financial situation. By this point Germany had only paid roughly one sixth of what they were originally required to do so.\n\nTherefore, German ended and indeed began the Second World War without any obligation to pay reparations. However, following the end of the Second World War, various debts and repayments mostly fell on West Germany. West Germany voluntarily signed agreements with Israel, Greece and Yugoslavia amongst others to voluntarily pay reparations for the damage done to their citizens and economies. Additionally, West Germany agreed to pay the reparations which had not been previously paid from WWI, in addition to other debts accrued. It was agreed that West Germany should not bear the entire weight of debt, and a portion was only to be repaid upon reunification, which did not occur until 1990. However, reunified Germany continued to pay this debt, with the last payment being made in 2010.\n\nIn summary, Germany ceased to make WWI reparations payments in 1932 but the West German government voluntarily agreed to continue payments in 1953, with the condition that part of the debt only be paid upon reunification. \n\nFor further reading:\n\nLeonard Gomes, *German Reparations, 1919-1932: A Historical Survey* (2010)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5nhilu", "title": "What slang did German soldiers use to describe soldiers from various nations during WWII?", "selftext": "I know a few for British and American and Russian, but what about Belgian or French soldiers? How about Italian, Japanese, Australian, Canadian, Yugoslavian, Czech, Croat, Romanian, Greek? Anything weird or obscure?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5nhilu/what_slang_did_german_soldiers_use_to_describe/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dcbpoam"], "score": [15], "text": ["/u/LBo87 gave a good answer in an [old thread](_URL_0_).\n\nThere is /u/Astrogator's [answer](_URL_1_) as well, which adds one more term. See the last bullet point."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17g4b7/what_derogatory_terms_did_german_and_japanese/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3cxf21/wwii_deragatory_terms_for_soldiers/cszzv74/"]]}
{"q_id": "7dkbju", "title": "What about Amsterdam has made it such a popular refuge for radical, creative thinkers, and how did they contribute to the Dutch golden age of the late 16th and 17th century?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dkbju/what_about_amsterdam_has_made_it_such_a_popular/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqilgn9"], "score": [3], "text": ["During that time The Netherlands was fighting a war of independence, the 80 year war.  While it basically stared as a revolt against the Spanish because of infringements of privileges like protection against unreasonable taxes etc.. It soon became also a religious based war between Protestants (Netherlands) and Catholics (Spanish). Since most Dutchmen were still Catholics themselves but against the Spaniards and their inquisition the common idea was that people should not be prosecuted because of their religion. This was specifically mentioned in the [act of abjuration](_URL_0_) (incomplete dutch english translation) send to the spanish king and publicly published in 1581. Besides a certain level of religious freedom several other privileges and rights were mentioned or implied. Like that the prince is there to protect his citizens as like father does his children or a shepherd his flock and not rule them like they are slaves. Also that there should be a justice system that is impartial en equal to all citizens and that there should be a freedom to trade. \n\nAll this created at situation that you could hardly be prosecuted for expressing yourself if you stayed within certain limits. Also, the merchant class had become the prominent force at the time which means there are a lot of potential supporters for any kind of art and philosophy instead of a singular/limited source of patronage. All the freedoms created in this situation was the main source that Amsterdam specifically and the Netherlands as a whole entered an Golden Age with wealth and creativity. While not a classical history source an easy to read description on how this came about is [Russell Shorto's Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City](  _URL_1_)  \n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://cryptiana.web.fc2.com/docs/abj_dut.htm", "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17288660-amsterdam"]]}
{"q_id": "dmcqkn", "title": "Didn't the Zimmerman telegram serve its purpose?", "selftext": "The main aim of the Zimmerman telegram was to bring neutral US into WW1. But after the interception by the British, the US nevertheless went into war. So didn't the Zimmerman telegram serve its purpose? I feel like I'm missing something here.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dmcqkn/didnt_the_zimmerman_telegram_serve_its_purpose/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f527w1d"], "score": [13], "text": ["No, the main aim of the Zimmerman telegram wasn't to bring the US into WW1. It was intended as insurance against the likelihood that the US would join WW1 anyway over Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.\n\nThis is the full text of the Zimmerman telegram, sent from the German foreign ministry to the German ambassador to Mexico. English translation, obviously, and the emphasis is mine.\n\n > We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. **We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding**, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. **You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain**, and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.  \nSigned, ZIMMERMANN\n\nGermany had decided to resume Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (USW) in 1917 for two reasons, one military and one domestic political. USW means that submarines may sink any merchant ships in the declared exclusion area, regardless of national flag, and without warning. As opposed to the \"Prize Rules\" or \"Cruiser Rules\" traditional international law had applied to commerce raiding, where only enemy-flagged merchant ships were legitimate targets. Ships belonging to neutral countries could be stopped and searched, and seized or sunk if they were found to be carrying contraband to blockaded ports or if they tried to resist the search, but could not be summarily attacked. Any ships to be sunk under cruiser rules must first be given reasonable warning for the passengers crew to abandon ship. These rules were developed with surface warships (particularly frigates and cruisers) in mind, not submarines, and submarines of the era didn't have anywhere near enough crew to search and seize a merchant ship, and submarines relied on stealth to be effective combatants so surfacing and summoning a merchant ship to submit to search or ordering the crew to abandon ship was risky, especially after the British started disguising armed merchantmen as ordinary merchant vessels in order to sink German subs when they surfaced (this was legal under international law as long as the disguised ship revealed its true nature by raising a Navy flag before opening fire).\n\nGermany had previously attempted USW briefly in 1915, only to call it off after the US responded to the sinking of the Lusitania (a British ship sailing from New York and carrying many American and British passengers as well as a cargo that included war materiel being imported by Britain). The sinking was done without warning by a submerged U-Boat, the British denied the presence of war materiel on the ship (and the Germans had no hard evidence to the contrary), and 128 Americans (along with over a thousand British and other nationalities of passengers and crew) died. The US responded with vigorous diplomatic protests, stopping about half a step short of threatening war if USW continued. Germany acquiesced at the time and resumed cruiser rules.\n\nThe military reason was that the German navy had overestimated the effectiveness of USW and underestimated the British and American ability to build new merchant ships to replace those sunk. Based on their mistaken assessments, the Germans believed that they could sink enough merchant ships to prevent Britain from importing the food and raw materials they needed to continue the war, and that this would happen before Americans could mobilize enough to have a significant effect on the war.\n\nThe domestic political reason was as a response to the British blockade of Germany. Britain had been blockading Germany (with surface ships, operating under cruiser rules) since the outbreak of war, and Britain had been taking a very broad basis for what constituted war materiel. Specifically, food and fertilizer were counted as contraband, since food could be sent to the front to feed soldiers, and since fertilizer could be remanufactured into explosives. Germany had imported a large portion of its food pre-war, and German civilians had been on short rations for much of the war. The Winter of 1916-1917 (called the \"Turnip Winter\") was a period of particular hardship for German civilians, as the 1916 potato crop had failed, compounding the food shortage. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare was seen as a way for the German Navy to demonstrate to German civilians that they were Doing Something about the blockade and inflicting the same kinds of hardship on British civilians that the British Navy was inflicting on German civilians.\n\nOnce the decision to resume USW had been made, war with the US was considered inevitable. The idea of the Zimmerman Telegram was to exploit Mexican grievances against the US (not just the lost territory from the 1846-48 US/Mexican War, but also the much more recent US punitive expedition expedition in pursuit of Pancho Villa) to bring another country into the war on the German side as counterweight to the US joining the Entente. Every division the US Army used to fight Mexico was a division that couldn't be sent to France to reinforce the British and French armies, so forcing the US to divide attention between two fronts would further delay substantive American involvement with the war effort in Europe."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "67pg43", "title": "How important have aircraft carriers been to winning superpower-on-superpower warfare?", "selftext": "I recently found out that China and Russia only have one aircraft carrier each. This sounded ridiculous at first, but I do not actually know how pivotal carriers have been/are to a victory. Can someone explain the importance of having carriers in the past and how that would change today?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67pg43/how_important_have_aircraft_carriers_been_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgsmyzo"], "score": [7], "text": ["So limiting this to the 20 year rule, and thus 1997 first off with only brief references to events and trends past it. We can actually though talk a good deal about Soviet carrier efforts, which obviously play a huge part in how Russian and PLAN Naval Aviation evolved. \n\nSimply put, from their origins to today an aircraft carrier is a tool of power projection. It allows you to take a piece of ocean that couldn't be used as an airbase and suddenly you have a fully functional one with up to +75 aircraft ready to go and which can be somewhere 100's of miles away tomorrow. It is a tool to enable expeditionary warfare and a sustained presence beyond the limits of land based aircraft for the power that has one. From Imperial Japan, to the United States and Great Britain, to the French, to other minor carrier nations, it has always been about building the ability to go someplace else and attack there using your big moving runway. \n\nTo avoid too deep an overview we can then suffice to say that they were crucial to Allied victory in WW2, very important in US efforts in SE Asia in the Cold War and elsewhere, and factored heavily into plans for a NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation. And carriers through the years have done numerous different missions, often all at the same time. They can first and foremost attack other naval assets(ships, planes, subs), can attack ground targets and support landings, and can protect sea lanes of communication from enemy forces. All 3 have been key over the years from the drive across the Pacific and Battle of the Atlantic, to supporting fighting in Korea, Vietnam, and in the Middle East, to patrolling the North Atlantic and vital NATO sea lanes. \n\nThis variety of missions, and embracing of robust air power and naval forward presence helped drive the US to embrace the super carrier in the 50's, after temporarily successful efforts by the Air Force in the late 40's to kill earlier designs. While the British were faced with a shrinking empire, up and down economy, and loss of great power status, their navy including carriers slowly transitioned from a broad spectrum force to by the end of the Cold War on focused heavily on leveraging their position to focus on anti submarine warfare on the Greenland-Iceland-UK line. Though the importance of carriers as forward airfields was ably stated in the Falklands when Argentinian aircraft had only a few minutes of fuel to attack while the Brits could maintain a present CAP with their Harriers(though they had short legs too), the Argentines carrier was kept in safe water for fear of attack by RN subs after they bagged the General Belgrano cruiser. Many older US Essex class carriers experienced the same transition, as their usage in operating heavier modern jets waned their usage as anti sub carriers extended their lives by decades sometimes. While the newer super carriers could serve as the attack platforms and the centerpiece of offensive patrols or ground strikes. In a hot Cold War all in the name of ensuring that reinforcements could cross the Atlantic unmolested and fight it out on the plains of Germany.\n\nThe USSR though was in a very different place, they were for the most part already where they expected to fight and didn't need to take a plane or boat to get there. Thus they didn't have long sea lanes to protect or lack of airfields to support expected hot zones, though like all airfields they were stationary and fixed unlike a carrier. And their naval strategy was markedly different. They had 2 main goals, 1 was to protect undersea \"Bastions\" essentially heavily defended safezones where their ballistic missile subs could head to and be safe if the order came to launch. The other being to strike at NATO Sea Lanes. This was then achieved by using numerous fast attack subs, of nuclear and diesel varieties, surface ships firing big heavy and fast anti ship cruise missiles, and crucially long ranged shore based naval bombers and patrol aircraft. By the late Cold War a theoretical attack on a US Carrier Group might involve several soviet attack subs say Victor class nuke boat or a conventional Kilo, maybe a surface group of a Kirov battlecruiser a Kresta cruiser, and a gaggle of destroyers, and most importantly several dozen long ranged bombers. This would be split between the fast jet Backfires and the big ubiquitous turboprop Bears, all with the goal of saturating and overwhelming a battlegroups ability to meat all threats thanks to huge for their job missiles like the P-270, Kh-22, P-500 and P-700. \n\nSo what role for a carrier then? We see it in the limited USSR carrier projects, that aside from the ridiculous Stalin era plans that carriers were meant to simply augment this existing dynamic. To provide additional cover for the Bastions, and to protect surface task forces during the run in to missile launch. We can see this in the few classes of carriers the Soviets actually got completed, ignoring the Moskva's which are really just glorified DDH's and truly dedicated ASW platforms. That leaves us with the Kiev's and Kuznetsov's, both of which have very similar roles and the Kuznetsov's are really just enlarged improved variations on the same theme capable of operating non VSTOL aircraft from the get go. They were meant to simply defend their immediate vicinity to boil it down, and were even equipped with their own anti ship cruise missiles just like the surface combatants(if the trip is likely to be one way why not augment the striking power! this also had the benefit of allowing them to do the legal gymnastics of not calling them carriers and avoiding issues with them passing through the straits into the Black Sea). The Russians did flirt with larger designs over the years but it is a big step, and even the follow on to the Kuznetsov the Ulyanovsk would still have been a ski jump design and carry a large battery of anti surface missiles, though it was scrapped with the end of the Cold War only partly begun. \n\nChina faces many of the same issues, their primary concern is first ensuring the ability to defend their territory, then to meet enemies in the South China Sea and 11 Dash line of the first island chain. While for much of its existence the ability of the PLAN to project power any further towards the second chain of islands like Guam into the Pacific was simply not possible from a numbers or capability standpoint. Thus a reliance on Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy to protect the mainland and again usage of lots of shore based aviation since the foe mostly had to come to them and they were already mostly in range of what they wanted to hit to start a war (SK, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc.). This has changed though as China has sought to assert itself as a rising power.\n\nSo fast forward a few years the post Soviet slump meant no new ships and the Russians were left with what they had, hence the 1 Kuznetsov that was ready, and 4 Kiev's all of which were quickly withdrawn from service (2 sold as museums to China, 1 scrapped, and 1 heavily reconstructed and sold to India and in operation today). While the Kuznetsov has lunged from breakdown to breakdown never getting the care she really needs, her unfinished sister was taken by The Ukraine and eventually sold to China who finished her as the current Liaoning, and a near sister was just launched this week. \n\nAnd in the end we should not dismiss the importance of prestige when it comes to having a carrier. Its just something \"Great Powers\" have and do. If Brazil can operate a carrier so can Russia. If France can make a nuclear carrier work why can't China? If Britain is building a modern 2 carrier fleet why shouldn't the world's largest democracy in India do so?\n\nThat said the future of carriers has often been a hot debate. No more so at any other time than today with rising costs, advancing A2/AD assets, and evolving faces of warfare. Even in the US questions about what shape the force should take remain in the open and sometimes contentious. \n\nFor a better understanding of the shape of the debate I would suggest checking out professional sites and sources, one of which is the US Naval Institute, their magazine is pay for view, but their blog regularly publishes excellent work on relevant topics. For instance this was a selected essay by a Midshipman from Annapolis on the PLAN's carrier outlook nd ambitions, perfect as an introduction: _URL_0_ "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://blog.usni.org/2015/07/20/capstone-essay-blue-waters-for-a-red-state-aircraft-carrier-operations-and-the-peoples-liberation-army-navy"]]}
{"q_id": "7g920y", "title": "Did the Russians really train their troops with broomsticks instead of guns during WW1?", "selftext": "My World History teacher told me this today, but I found it hard to believe. Can I get a historian to confirm this?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7g920y/did_the_russians_really_train_their_troops_with/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqhqvh5", "dqi480m"], "score": [9, 6], "text": ["In 1941 the British troops retreating from Greece to Crete were forced to leave their heavy artillery behind. In an attempt to prevent the Germans from making use of those guns, the British artillerymen took the gun sights with them to Crete. When the Germans invaded Crete those artillerymen were left with sights for non-existant guns \n\nIn the famous Doolittle Raid, the tailguns from the US bombers were removed (in order to keep weight down) and replaced with broomsticks painted black.\n\nDespite both of those, your history teacher is unlikely to tell you the British sent their men into battle with artillery sights but no guns, or that the US sent bombers on missions without giving them weapons to defend themselves. \n\nIn war, there can be times when soldiers have to fight with less than ideal equipment. Just like the British artillerymen, there were times when Soviet infantry were forced - due to circumstances on the ground - to fight without sufficient arms or ammo. But it wasn't standard practice.\n\nThe point is that it's easy (and unfortunately common) to point to examples where the Soviets were forced to fight (or in this case train) without sufficient equipment and act as though that was the norm, while almost certainly not doing the same for the Western Allies.\n\nSo I'm not saying your history teacher was right or wrong (I don't know a reliable source that would confirm their story, and don't know how you could show it never happened) but it's important to remember that context is always important.\n\n", "[I answered a similar question here, and this reply is a slightly modified version of it](_URL_0_).\n\nFirst of all, training and doing drill with wooden guns or broomsticks (or other sticks) have been common in many armies throughout history. Frederick the Great's Prussian soldiers drilled with sticks before being issued muskets. Parts of the US army conscripted in 1917 initially drilled with wooden mock-ups of Springfield M1903 rifles and so on. When learning how to handle a rifle and drilling to commit movements with the weapon to your muscle memory, it does not matter that much if it is a stick or a gun - and guns were often expensive or in shortage.\n\nDid troops train with sticks? Did they go to battle unarmed?\n\nIt is true for the Russian Imperial Army during ww1 and some for the Narodnoe Opolcheniye (people's militia) units of the Soviet army during ww2.\n\nThe Russian Imperial Army was unable to equip all its drafted men with rifles early 1915 - and purchases and deliveries of British and Japanese rifles were made (remaining British and Japanese rifles in Soviet stock were later sold at high prices to the desperate Spanish Republic 1936-38). By December 1914, the Russian Imperial Army had roughly 6,5 million men in uniform, but only 4,5 million rifles to equip them with. At the end of 1915, they had 2 million men at the front, but only about 1,2 million rifles to equip them with. However, by that time the Russian production had picked up, reaching about 1,3 million rifles per year, and there were 2 million rifles in Russian ports or on their way from Britain and Japan.\n\nAll countries fighting in ww1 suffered huge problems trying to supply their forces and equip men raised to replace the extreme casualties suffered by the pre-war armies during the first year of the war. It took time for industry to change to war production, and the lack of nitrates (in the Central Powers due to the blockade, in the Entente due to difficulties in increasing shipment of guano) hampered production of ammunition. The British had to purchase Canadian and US rifles and took rifles from the Indian army as a stop-gap measure. However, the Russian Imperial Army was the only army to send uniformed but unarmed men into combat, expecting them to arm themselves on the battlefield late 1914 to late 1915.\n\nDuring ww2, the Soviets attempted several times to use Narodnoe Opolcheniye, or people's militia units as a desperate stopgap measure when the Germans advanced deep into their territory. These were civilians organised in a sort of a home guard and at times trained decently well and equipped almost like regular troops and at other times thrown into combat barely equipped at all when there was little or no time for training and little equipment available. This was especially problematic during Autumn 1941, when much of the Soviet war industry was being moved from territory that had been or would be over-run to beyond the Ural mountains, causing a temporary slump in supply and new equipment available to the Soviets. For example, the German 6. Panzer-division, when advancing on Stalingrad as part of Fall Blau in summer 1942, encountered a Soviet unit of AA guns and attacked it, noting that the enemy was firing badly, and after running over the unit, discovered that the guns had been manned by female factory workers still in civilian clothing. On the other hand, the Narodnoe Opolcheniye units part of the 62. and 64. Army that defended Stalingrad seem to have performed well during the fighting. \n\nIt is quite possible that Narodnoe Opolcheniye units were at times equipped with a lower number of rifles than it had men and went into battle like that - they often lacked heavier support arms such as artillery, AT guns and mortars. However, I have not seen any records of systematic under-equipment of Soviet units during ww2, neither regular forces or Narodnoe Opolcheniye.\n\nThe bottom line is that many armies throughout the history of gunpowder warfare have used wooden mockups, broomsticks or sticks to drill troops before issuing them weapons, including the US army in 1917. However, the Imperial Russian Army is, as far as I know, the only regular army to send trained and uniformed, but unarmed regular units into battle, expecting them to arm themselves on the battlefield.\n\nHowever\n\nSources:\n\nBrusilov Offensive, by Timothy Dowling.\n\nRace to the Front, by Kevin D Stubbs.\n\nStalingrad, by Anthony Beevor.\n\n2194 days of war, by Cesare Salmaggi and Alfredo Pallavisini.\n\n_URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5icxqr/is_there_any_truth_to_the_stories_of/db80xgt/", "https://www.army.mil/article/185229/world_war_i_building_the_american_military"]]}
{"q_id": "18anbm", "title": "Was it common for non-Abrahamic religions to have a \"bible\" of sorts?", "selftext": "See: title.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18anbm/was_it_common_for_nonabrahamic_religions_to_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8deusb"], "score": [2], "text": ["There are actually several. The thing is, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all emphasize a \"closed canon\". Buddhism, for example, has a canon (though its often more of a library than a single book). But then again, Jews don't have a single book (\"Torah is only understandable with Talmud\") and Islam emphasizes generally emphasizes the importance of Hadiths in addition to the Quran. Several offshoots of these (like Mormonism and Druzism, and to a degree Bahaiism) use the core texts of the parent religion, plus additional texts so there's not just \"one\".\n\n * The Zoroastriansn have not only the Avesta, but several other core texts beyond that like the Gathas and the Yasna. \n * Hindus have the Vedas, and a variety of other holy books of wide acceptance and considerable antiquity (the Vedas are surprisingly unifying--in fact, when discussing India religion it's common to say what became Hinduism was Vedic, and what became Jainism, Buddhism, etc was non-Vedic)\n * Sikhism has the Guru Granth Sahib\n * If you want to count Confucianism as a religion, you have the Analects. \n * If you want to count Daoism as a religion, there's the Dao De Ching of Lao Tse (please pardon my mixing and matching romanizations; I'm on a phone that's cutting in and out of service so I can't look anything up)\n * Buddhism is complicated. Therevada had the Pali Canon, but Mahayana schools continued producing texts for a much much longer time. \n * I believe Jainism has a central set of texts as well. \n\nI'm going to assume you're in the west and from a Christian, likely Protestant, milieu. While these groups all have a canon of holy books agreed on (to various degrees), it should not be mistaken that , should say Zoroastrians disappear, we could recreate Zoroastrianism only from the texts before us in the holy books. Whether or not you could actually \"rederive\" Protestantism (or Salafi Islam) from a given set of holy books is beside the point--the religions think they are performing the authentic textual religion (if its not in the text, it's not in the religion--this is Martin Luther's *sola scriptura*). In almost every other religious tradition, recieved tradition is openly given a much more central role (like Catholicism). These books give one part of the religion and they are understood within a particular tradition. It should not be assumed that they explain all of the religion. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1hfetf", "title": "What kind of tasks would fill the day of someone running a medieval castle for his lord?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hfetf/what_kind_of_tasks_would_fill_the_day_of_someone/", "answers": {"a_id": ["catu260", "catufng", "catuyy7", "cau0136"], "score": [62, 8, 4, 14], "text": ["Are you referring to somebody such as, say, a steward? Somebody who would manage the daily affairs of the estate while the lord was away?\n\nI'm going to base this on the holdings of a knight such a sub fief beneath a baron. A lord with one castle/stronghouse, and some moderate to small land holdings.\n\nThere would have been two different sorts of people to fill this role. In the direct lands controlled by the lord, there would have been the field master, or a title similar. There may have been several depending on the size of the lands. This person would have been in charge of the other field hands, ensuring that they were doing the work that they were supposed to, doing it well, and not slacking.\n\nThe second person would have been the steward. This person was in charge of \"the books\" as it were. Ensuring that the finances were in order. They were the medieval version of an accountant.\n\nOf course, this all assumes that the Lord had the money to pay for these people. Much like later farmers of the Antebellum South period, smaller landowners didn't always have the means to pay these individuals, who were skilled in their own right. If the Lord could read and write, he might well keep his own books, to save money.", "As a related question, would the Life in Medieval Times by Frances and Joseph Gies be considered reliable works for this subject? They're very popular, but do they get it right, or close to right?", "Much of the book 1215 The Year of the Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham has knowledge of the lives of an average peaseant to a lord during that time period.", "It would depend greatly on the time of year. Part of what they would do depened also on how big a place we are dealing with and what you define as a castle (just the main building or manor house? the lands or town with it and so on) a few tasks they might do or get information from workers. The main tasks would be food and maintenance related. Check on what food was needed for that day/week. figure out how much wheat needed to be milled and bolted, How much beer and wine were needed be it brought upstairs, bought, or made, how much of all types of food need to be provided from stores or harvested or slaughtered.\n\nDo the buildings need work, chimney repointed, wall white washed, fences mended, Thatch replaced, rushes for the floor brought in, is the well safe? are any of the horses or dairy cattle sick who and how are they being taken care of. Oversee linnons mended, wash done, candles, soap and medicine made. Is there enough wood, are the tables scrubbed, how is the sewing being done. Horse tack in good shape, anyone caught trying to poach? There are 100s of tasks to be done or seen to, and thats not even dealing with colleting rent, or anything political or religious you have asked a huge question. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "770qka", "title": "What happened to the House of Kal\u0101kaua or the Hawaiian royal family after their overthrow? Were there ever pretenders to that throne or anyone who tried to stir up political trouble afterwards?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/770qka/what_happened_to_the_house_of_kal\u0101kaua_or_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["doj1o3k"], "score": [4], "text": ["Queen Lili\u02bbuokalani continued to resist the overthrow with political, PR and judiciary actions for many years.   \nThe royalist rebellion of 1895 had participants from the Hawaiian Royal Family, most notably Prince Kuhio.  \nAs an interesting side note, Kuhio defeated the leader of the rebellion, Wilcox in an election for the House of Representatives in 1902.\n\n\"The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani's Enduring Battle with the United States 1893-1917\", Neil Thomas Proto\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3n6ayo", "title": "Did the Romans ever used pikes?", "selftext": "One of the most famous units of the ancient world were the macedonian pikes, which the romans met and defeat in their conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean.\n\nMy question is, did the Romans ever deployed armies that used the pike phalanx formation? I reckon emperor Caracalla equiped some of eastern legions with pike as he was a great admirer of Alexander the Great, so this make me believe the formation was not unknown to the Romans, but I don't know if they ever fought like that. And if they would be effective.\n\nIt doesn't need to be the legions, maybe auxiliaries troops? Or the  units of the Late and then only Eastern Empire? Do we know anything about that? \n\nGratitude. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n6ayo/did_the_romans_ever_used_pikes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cvldr1k"], "score": [10], "text": ["Pike phalanxes were not standard infantry, but were adopted numerous times, often when fighting cavalry-heavy armies from the east.\n\nIn preparation for his Parthian campaign Caracalla ordered 16,000 men to be trained in Macedonian drill and fight in a phalanx. Severus Alexander also had elements of six legions formed into phalangiarii, who fought in a phalanx.\n\nArrian of Nicomedia, during his campaign against the Alani, used pike phalanxes to ward off the Alani cavalry. \n\nFrom Arrian's \"Extaxis contra Alanos\" \n\n(Section 15) The infantry should be drawn up eight ranks deep, in a closely packed formation. (Section 16) The first four ranks shall consist of pike-bearers, whose pikes will end in long, slender iron points. The men in the first rank should hold their pikes at the ready, so that if the enemy comes near, they can thrust the iron tip of their pike especially at the breasts of the horses. (Section 17) The men of the second (?), third, and fourth ranks should hold their pikes forward to jab and wound the horses where they can, and kill the riders."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "500dl0", "title": "In the Ku Klux Klan's heyday, did people see it more as a social club with networking opportunities, or truly as an organization that defending white American interests?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/500dl0/in_the_ku_klux_klans_heyday_did_people_see_it/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d706ysr", "d708z6o", "d70f0t6"], "score": [6, 176, 22], "text": ["I can't answer your question, but the Klan had several waves. can you be more specific for those that can? ", "If you're referring to the Second Klan (1915-1930's), it was certainly both. William Joseph Simmons *Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan* was a religious, political, business and fraternal organization. Created during the Golden Age of Fraternal Orders, it was modeled on the multitude of existing fraternal orders like the Freemasons and the Elks, Simmons would often recruit members into the new Klan wearing the badges signifying he was a member of other organizations and Klansmen who recruited new members (Kleagles) specifically sought new members through Fraternal Orders they were already a part of. In addition to this, the Klan meeting was highly ceremonial and even had [assigned room placements](_URL_2_) for each member.\n\nEven in the KKK rule manual, the Kloran, (no, I have no clue why they would have modeled it on the Qur'an) it states firstly, \"We avow the disctinction between the races of mankind...and we shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy\" followed almost immediately by \"We appreciate the intrinsic value of a real practical fraternal relationship.\" Politically speaking, the Second Klan was Nativist, [anti-Catholic](_URL_1_), anti-black, [anti-communist](_URL_0_), anti-Jewish and Prohibitionist. It absolutely was more dedicated to keeping White American hegemony. The Second Klan was almost certainly more a brotherhood and social organization than the First Klan (1868-1871) who were dedicated to restoring white supremacy to the Reconstruction South, and the Third Klan (1950s-1970s) who were dedicated to preventing black progress during the Civil Rights Era.\n", "I can only really speak confidently on the 'First Klan', which was prominent in the US from 1866 to around 1871, but I still found this question really interesting. When the Klan was first founded in Pulaski, Tennesse in 1866, it was by a number of former Confederate soldiers that were frustrated and outraged by the Republican's government hold over the South, and particularly the implications this had for African-American agency post-emancipation. So originally, Klan members were enraged racists that sought to take what they saw as natural law into their own hands, by reinstating the paternalistic system of dominance of white over black. Having lost faith in the US government (which most had fought to resist in the Civil War anyway) these people were attempting to enforce their own vision of justice by intimidating, assaulting and killing those that were insulting to their vision of white supremacy. \nYou can read the Klan's original 'Organization and Principles' here, where they describe themselves as defenders of American values: _URL_0_\n(Not the most reliable looking site I know, but it is an exact copy of a version I found when reading Henry Steele Commager's 'Documents of American History')\nSo to answer your question directly, original Klan members were indeed acting in what they saw as the interests of good, honest (i.e., white) American citizens by reinstating the subjugation of black people. \nBut, the opportunity for networking and socialising was absolutely a contributing factor to the Klan's popularity and widespread prominence; Elaine Parsons' excellent article 'Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan' explains how the more expressive and performance based aspects of the Klan's terroristic acts lent their members an exclusive identity and a certain level of prestige, particularly in Southern communities that had not yet reconciled themselves to the idea of independent black agency, and certainly not to the idea of racial equality.\nTo conclude, there's no doubt that a significant number of Klan members enjoyed having a social outlet for the anger that had been created by Northern 'Yankee' government - but the fact also remains that they were vociferous racists hell bent on holding on to the system that had been the norm in the South for generations, and that this drove the Klan's growth with far more momentum than the idea that they enjoyed being part of a club."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/f2/93/6e/f2936e1560393528510c66e8b2fb6584.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4de4fg/when_was_the_ku_klux_klan_active_in_canada_and/d1q8fe1", "https://ia800700.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/31/items/kloranknightsofk00kukl/kloranknightsofk00kukl_jp2.zip&amp;file=kloranknightsofk00kukl_jp2/kloranknightsofk00kukl_0009.jp2&amp;scale=4&amp;rotate=0"], ["http://www.albany.edu/history/history316/kkk.html"]]}
{"q_id": "5cmkly", "title": "Was it because of a change in technology or a change in tactics, that machine guns no longer need to change barrels or be watercooled?", "selftext": "In World War 1 almost all machine guns I know of were watercooled, and to my knowledge a lot of world war 2 machine guns had interchangeable barrels.  \nI have never seen a modern watercooled gun, and to my limited knowledge, most machine today doesn't depend on interchangeable barrels.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5cmkly/was_it_because_of_a_change_in_technology_or_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d9xt6u8", "d9xysts"], "score": [5, 2], "text": ["All general purpose machine guns (GPMGs) that I am aware of retain the interchangeable barrel function - a GPMG being a roughly 7.62mm belt-fed platoon- or company-level machine gun capable of laying down large volumes of fire. The M240 and MG3, the most common GPMGs in the western world, certainly have changeable barrels, and soldiers are taught to do so when laying down large volumes of suppressing fire. Even the intermediate-caliber M249 Squad Automatic Weapon has a quick change barrel.\n\nNow, there are some lighter automatic weapons that do not have a changeable barrel. But that's nothing new. The Browning Automatic Rifle, Chauchat, and Lewis Gun did not have changeable barrels. It generally doesn't become necessary to change a barrel until you've fired several hundred rounds through the gun, or less if you're firing very rapidly. Weapons that don't have quick-change barrels just aren't intended to produce the same volume of fire as a proper heavy/medium/GP machine gun.", "Interchangable barrels are still very much in use.\n\nThe M2A1 Machine gun in use by the US Army has an interchangable barrel that is considered an improvement over the older screw in barrel changing mechanism as noted by the Army itself. [The barrel extension also makes possible rapid barrel change-outs on the M2A1. With the older M2s, the barrels had to be screwed on. To change the barrel of an M2A1, a Soldier simply needs to slightly retract the charging handle, rotate the barrel by its carrying handle and slide the barrel off the receiver.](_URL_1_)\nThe M249 light machine gun also requires a barrel change after a period of use. [When used as a machine gun, the M249 requires a tripod, a T & E mechanism, and a spare barrel.](_URL_0_)\n\nI have used both of these weapons, it is incredible how quickly they heat up when used even under ideal circumstances on the range. The barrels themselves can and do melt, and can become jammed very easily. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m249.htm", "https://www.army.mil/article/92130/M2A1_Machine_Gun_features_greater_safety__heightened_lethality"]]}
{"q_id": "67441p", "title": "Were soldiers traumatized or \"shell-shocked\" after the Napoleonic Wars or other earlier wars? How were returning soldiers treated by the public? Were they treated for their condition?", "selftext": "We understand that many soldiers after the World Wars were suffering from PTSD after their experiences, and their treatment and public response is pretty well known. But what about in earlier wars? Did the public ignore the soldiers and think they were cowards? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67441p/were_soldiers_traumatized_or_shellshocked_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dgoar7u"], "score": [12], "text": ["Diagnosing mental illness retrospectively is a minefield. With respect to soldiers in history and their relationship with PTSD, I would refer you to the FAQ or past threads like [this](_URL_0_).\n\nPaging /u/Iphikrates to comply with the rules on linking past threads. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/457idw/did_people_in_ancientmedieval_times_suffer_from/"]]}
{"q_id": "486wpd", "title": "What were the relationships of the various intelligence services of the Eastern Bloc with the KGB/Moscow?", "selftext": "I am currently watching Deutschland 83 and the East German intelligence corps seem to have quite a lot of freedom in conducting espionage, but at the same time appear to ultimately take orders from Moscow. Was there a formal system or hierarchy of Communist spy agencies? \nP.S. As a side note, this is a fantastic subreddit and love what you do here, apologies if this has been asked previously.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/486wpd/what_were_the_relationships_of_the_various/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0i2v7o"], "score": [4], "text": ["There wasn't a formal hierarchy, but the KGB loomed large over all of the Warsaw Pact intelligence services, and its primacy was undisputed. Soviet intelligence personnel had a hand in creating all of the Eastern Bloc secret services, and KGB liaison officers were a constant and powerful presence in those agencies' affairs.\n\nThe Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies provided a constant stream of intelligence to the Lubyanka, along with extensive operational and logistical support. The KGB maintained a shared database of contacts and intelligence called SOUD, enabling them to receive and index intelligence from the Warsaw Pact services (and to share intelligence with them in turn \u2014 something they generally did only in the most circumspect manner.)\n\nThe KGB frequently used those services as their proxies, especially when it came to handling sensitive or potentially compromising relationships or operations \u2014 particularly those with terrorist and revolutionary groups. The Czechoslovak StB, for example, was a longstanding liaison between Moscow Centre and the Italian Red Brigades; the Bulgarian DS was a favourite weapon for 'special tasks'.\n\nThe relationship with the Stasi (in particular the foreign intelligence department, HVA), however, was by far the closest and most important to Moscow. Many of the senior figures in the Stasi had longstanding ties to the USSR, as agents or operatives of Soviet intelligence or the Comintern: Wilhelm Zaisser, Ernst Wollweber and Erich Mielke, three of the GDR's four Ministers of State Security; Markus Wolf, the longtime chief of the HVA. \n\nAs with many of the institutions of East Germany, the Soviets were heavily involved in the creation of the Stasi (which was closely patterned on the KGB.) The KGB maintained [a number of facilities](_URL_1_) in the GDR, including highly important *rezidentura* (the largest KGB installation outside the USSR) at Karlshorst. KGB officers regarded East Germany as a safe, even dull posting; as a First Chief Directorate officer in the late 1980s, Vladimir Putin was reportedly disappointed to be assigned to the *rezidentura* at Dresden, rather than a more interesting and adventurous station in the West.\n\nPart of the reason the Stasi were so important to Moscow was their proximity and access to West Germany and the rest of Western Europe, but it was also thanks to a general reputation for competence and ideological reliability, and a willingness to subordinate their foreign policy/intelligence objectives to those of Moscow. They were thus also entrusted with operations further afield. The Stasi worked alongside the KGB in Cuba, training Castro's intelligence service, DGI \u2014 which, in turn, was the preferred Soviet proxy for operations in Latin America. In 1972, when Egyptian strongman Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet (read: KGB/GRU) advisors, the Stasi acted as Soviet surrogates in that crucial Arab state.\n\nThere's a reasonably large body of writing on the history of the Stasi now \u2014 largely thanks to the concerted effort by the post-unification German government to preserve and open up the Stasi archives. There's a lot of interesting information on the website of the [Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records](_URL_0_). In terms of published work: John Schmeidel's monograph *[Stasi: The Sword and the Shield of the Party](_URL_7_)* is a good place to start. Gary Bruce's *[The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi](_URL_2_)* is a good grassroots history. Kristie Macrakis' *[Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World](_URL_4_)* is an interesting specialist history of the Stasi's technical methods and surveillance prowess.\n\nOn Soviet intelligence, I always suggest starting with Christopher Andrew's work on the KGB: *[The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB](_URL_5_)* and *[The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World](_URL_6_)*. Jonathan Haslam's more recent *[Near and Distant Neighbours](_URL_3_)* is a good history of the Soviet intelligence community as a whole."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bstu.bund.de/EN/Home/home_node.html", "https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/on-the-front-lines-of-the-cold-war-documents-on-the-intelligence-war-in-berlin-1946-to-1961/4-2.pdf", "https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Firm_The_Inside_Story_of_the_Stasi.html?id=ktCalJjHr48C", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tLOYCgAAQBAJ", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LLZJk4FrqwwC", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9TWUAQ7Xof8C", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4eSR1rHg5_YC", "https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stasi.html?id=h6RNXrFKLIsC"]]}
{"q_id": "4gp84t", "title": "In general, how accurate do you find the CaspianReport's 'History of Islam' series?", "selftext": "[Link](_URL_0_) (~100 minutes in total, for those interested)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gp84t/in_general_how_accurate_do_you_find_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d2jleah"], "score": [7], "text": [" >  The thing is, Islam emerged in literate times. Historians were writing journals. Scholars were writing diaries and letters. Jurists were writing bureaucratic articles. So from the 7th century onward there was a rich record of documents, and that's why we know so many historical details.\n\n\nNoooooooooooooooooo...\n\nNoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!\n\nOk I'm done having a minor aneurysm. But yeah this is a wildly inaccurate statement. It massively overstates the reliability of the documents he's apparently working from (I.e. Ibn Ishaq via Tabari and Ibn Hisham), is apparently ignorant of how that information got passed down (I.e orally, not written down) and fails to mention how poorly documented the 7th-8th centuries are.\n\n/u/Shlin28 gives a great description of just how poorly documented the rise of Islam is on the Christian side here: _URL_0_\n\nI've written quite a bit on the historiographical controversy over the use of these \"traditional\" sources, for instance here: _URL_1_\n\nI only listened to the first ten minutes or so of this YouTube video, but even accounting for the fact that he's uncritically relying on this dubious traditional sources I heard a good bit of bad history.  A shura council is not \"like a democracy\", for instance.\n\nSome effects of the unreliability of those sources as it pertains to the video:\n\nWe cannot reliably quite Muhammad.\n\nWe cannot reliably say who was or was not present at battles.\n\nWe cannot reliably say how many people attended a speech.\n\nAnd so on. There are people who defend the use of traditional sources, and they are of course a matter of faith to Muslims. Its an incredibly contentious issue. Personally I'm not willing to reject their content entirely but find any specific details to be incredibly dubious.\n\nAs I mentioned in the other post Robert Hoyland's *Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions* is a great essay-length overview of these issues and available as a free PDF if you do a search for it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no5RCHRbknk&amp;list=PLv-SNV2XmnZkJAGWGRKWTWheqEjEejQnf"], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3yencp/how_did_christians_react_to_losing_so_many/cyd28pl", "https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3pm6tg/what_are_the_most_reliable_sources_on_muhammad/"]]}
{"q_id": "240sbj", "title": "How did the American Forces learn to defeat the Japanese during the Guadalcanal Campaign in WWII?", "selftext": "The Ken Burns documentary, \"The War\" claimed that while the initial battles in the Guadalcanal Campaign were marked with significant causalities, American forces we're getting stronger and smarter:\n\n > \"The Americans were beginning to learn how to beat the Japanese not only in the air and on the sea, but in the jungles where, over the next 3 years, the fighting would only get worse.\"\n\n\n > Episode One: \"A Necessary War\" (December 1941 \u2013 December 1942). Quote at 1h 55min.\n\nWhat did they learn? What advances in combat strategy led to an increase in American victories?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/240sbj/how_did_the_american_forces_learn_to_defeat_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ch2kr1e", "ch2prdm", "ch2wka7"], "score": [95, 8, 6], "text": ["In the air, the Cactus Air Force was tying out new tactics to combat the agile Japanese Zero.  \"Cactus Air Force\" is a nickname for the pilots of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal--codenamed Cactus.  These pilots used a mix of aircraft, most notably the Grumman F4F Wildcats (there were some P-39's as well, and some dive bombers too).  The Wildcat was heavily armed, heavily armored, and heavy overall compared to the Zero.  If a Wildcat pilot tried to turn with a Zero in a dogfight, he would quickly end up with the agile Zero behind him.  So, a naval aviator named Thatch came up with a defensive maneuvering scheme that came to be known as the [Thatch Weave](_URL_0_).  This allowed pairs of Wildcats to keep their wingman covered from attack from behind. The linked wikipedia page has a good illustration of the tactic. Offensive tactics revolved around diving attacks or head-on passes, where the armament and armor of the Wildcat would make it the victor in most slugging matches.\n\nAt sea, there was a curious occurrence in warfare.  Control of the area around Guadalcanal generally changed hands every twelve hours.  During the day, the US Navy was able to largely command the waves--especially as Henderson Field became more established.  At night, the Japanese expertise and experience at night fighting meant that they could exert control over the area.  There were so many ships of both sides sunk in the area that it gained the nickname \"Ironbottom Sound.\"  The clashes gave US naval forces valuable but costly lessons that were applied in the later island hopping campaigns.  \n\nOn land, the Japanese committed troops piecemeal to various assaults on the Marines.  Again, the campaign was costly for the Americans and there were several times where the enemy nearly broke through.  However, the Marines gained valuable tactical, logistical, and other lessons that applied to warfare in the theater.  I don't know of any tactical breakthroughs that were made, instead there were refinements to existing ideas.  Coordination between infantry and mortars/artillery was improved.  Close air support was practiced (especially with the aforementioned P-39's and dive bombers).  Officers and men gained experience in how the Japanese liked to fight as well as what was effective against them.  \n\n*Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle* by Richard B. Frank is an outstanding account of the battle.  Robert Leckie's *Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War* is also good if a bit shorter.  However, Leckie was an infantryman in the actual battle, so his insights are incredible.  They are more intimately described in his memior:  *Helmet for my Pillow*.  ", "Not directly related to your question OP, but an excellent book that describes the changes made in the British Army's tactics/strategy etc etc in Burma against the Japanese is: \n\nSlim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare.\n\n(General Bill Slim, IMHO one of the most overlooked commanders of all Military Commanders of WWII)\n\n(replying as this might have, at least some, relevance to your inquiries)", "I wrote my undergrad thesis on a directly related topic. It is more about learning how to fight in the pacific in general, but deals with Guadalcanal.\n\n\n[Here's a link to a sanitized version of it on google docs](_URL_0_), or you can contact me directly for a pdf link to the submitted version.\n\nWhat it boiled down to was reworking significant portions of combat doctrine. Combined arms warfare, which was born in the later stages of WW1 and was on full display by 1939, didn't really work in the dense jungles of the Pacific. Small unit tactics were of increased importance, as large unit maneuvers were difficult to execute. \n\nYou know how you always hear about how armies are constantly training for the last war? That is relatively accurate, but it's not as bad as it would seem because usually there will be a great deal of similarity from war to war. Sure, the technology changed between the Napoleonic Wars and WW1, but they were still fighting over familiar land, and were simply adapting existing tactics to emergent technology.\n\nIn the Pacific, American (and to a far lesser extent British and ANZAC) had to rethink the way they would fight the war. It wasn't simply fighting the same war with new weapons as it was in Europe, it was fighting an entirely different kind of war, fighting it with new weapons, and developing new weapons and tools throughout the war when it became apparent that they didn't have all the tools they needed to win the war.\n\nPlease feel free to ask any questions regarding my work on the topic that you might have."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave"], [], ["https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vhqVUZSg74hp7F7rPRfM39glx4plbp9qRATp1On5xFY/edit?usp=sharing"]]}
{"q_id": "d6lf38", "title": "Why was the Revolutionary War over after the battle of Yorktown? I never understood why the rest of the British forces didn't keep fighting, especially if they still had significant forces based in New York City, and if Cornwallis wasn't even the commander of British forces in the states.", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6lf38/why_was_the_revolutionary_war_over_after_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["f0uxztg", "f0v0vgc", "f0vtjt3"], "score": [749, 179, 16], "text": ["Cornwallis had one of the armies in the South with Alexander Stewart commanding another in South Carolina around Charleston. The lack of a foothold in the states and resilience of the American army helped push the British surrender and evacuation. British forces held New York City, Charleston, Georgia, and other places but could not fully control full regions. Even though the British army held Charleston, they did not have control of the rest of South Carolina. Slowly, the British forces in SC trickled back to the Charleston area after evacuating other posts such as Camden and Ninety-Six, and losing forts such as Fort Motte. The Battle of Eutaw Springs put an end with British forces trying to gain more control of South Carolina as the army would remain there until total evacuation. Even the great victories of Camden and Charleston did not seem to quell the continuing operations of the American armies. In addition, while Henry Clinton commanded the entire British army, he had distanced himself from Cornwallis after May 1780. Clinton had a disagreement with Cornwallis and for a time he would correspond with Cornwallis for updates they became sporadic by mid-1781. Clinton remained the commander in chief until 1782 when Guy Carleton took over, but the war had just about ended by then. \n\nThe British army after Saratoga had diminished substantially. Burgoyne's army became part of the Convention army. Not really prisoners of war but could not fight anymore in the war. That surrender took away 6,000 soldiers from the British army - a huge blow. Cornwallis' army numbered to almost 8,000. Clinton had a small force in New York and Stewart's army in Charleston had about 2,500.  None of these armies had the capability to go against the larger American force. The British army had spread itself thin with the various theatres that popped up in 1778 including Anglo-French, Anglo-Spanish wars that made them fight not only in the Caribbean but the west including Louisiana and Kentucky (at least, what would become them). The surrender of Cornwallis' army spelled the end of the war effort in America. At that point, the American army had become a well disciplined force that showed no sign of shrinking. With the addition of Spanish and French forces, the British army had a lot to contend with and could not with the decreased amount of soldiers. \n\nOften times, army leaders plan on crushing enemy forces and occupy the capital cities to win the war. The colonies remained decentralized and if one city fell, the rest would remain in resistance. The British army also failed to fully crush enemy combatants after a battle. Most militia units in the South had horses for retreating purposes and could swiftly escape the field. American forces also tended to regroup after battles and gain reinforcements, as well as relying on more guerilla tactics. \n\nThe 1781 campaign started with the battle of Cowpens where the British forces lost and began the Race to the Dan. This would in turn force Cornwallis' hand with the need to chase Nathaniel Greene or beat him to the Dan river. The lose of the battle also spelled disaster for the rest of the campaign as the British army had to leave supply wagons behind in order to march at a quick pace through North Carolina. It also halted his plans for controlling the rest of South Carolina. The long chase ended at Guilford Courthouse with Cornwallis battling a renewed American army. After suffering a Pyrrhic victory, Cornwallis decided to head to the coast in order to get reinforcements and supplies at Yorktown. Cornwallis also had some of the most experienced and seasoned regiments with him at the surrender including the 33rd, 71st, 23rd, the Guard infantry, the British Legion, and German battalions. \n\nWith morale crushed, Lord North proclaimed the war to be over and the administration switched from war to peace negotiations (and prisoner exchange). Ironically, the naval campaigns in the Caribbean had been quite successful but not enough to continue the war. \n\nMatthew Spring, With Zeal and Bayonets Only.\n\nJohn Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse.\n\nCharles Ross (ed.), Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis.", "/u/GeneralLeeBlount has covered the tactical military reasons that continued fighting would have been problematic for the British, but you are right, it was conceivable that the British *could* have kept going. In fact, there actually were some smaller engagements after Yorktown, including the Battle of the Saintes, and the Siege of Fort Henry. But even in the best case scenario if the British had kept on fighting, it was not going to be over soon, and the British had their armed forces engaged in more than just the Revolutionary War at the time. \n\nFrom a governmental standpoint, though, the British forces stopped fighting because there was no longer any political will to fight it. The warhawks in Parliament lost support, the majority was being threatened with losing control of the government, so instead of sending orders to engage in further conflicts with the Americans, the  government began looking for a way to end the conflict.\n\nNews of the surrender reached London on November 25, 1781. When Prime Minister Lord North received the news of the defeat at Yorktown, he is reported to have responded with, \"O God, it is all over!\"\n\nThe evening the news was delivered, Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who was in charge of the government's war effort, hosted a dinner party attended by Lord North and King George III to discuss what to do next. Germain and King George wanted to continue the fight, and Lord North \"initially gave no public indication that the government had any intention of withdrawing from America.\" But he privately confided to friends and allies that he no longer saw a way to win it, given the tenuous hold he had in Parliament.\n\nThe King's Speech was delivered to the House of Commons two days later, which admitted to the defeat at Yorktown, but apart from that, was designed to rouse the public to continue the fight. But the opposition smelled blood. Opposition leader Charles James Fox countered that Lord North's government had conducted a disastrous war, the British public were against them, and it was time to end it if they wanted to avoid the public's wrath:\n\n >  \"...[T]he representatives of the people must recall to the ears of his Majesty's Ministers the disgraceful and ruinous measures that had brought us to this state. They must hear of them not only here, but...by the aroused indignation and vengeance of an injured and undone people, the ministers would hear of their ruinous measures at the tribunal of justice, and expiate them at the public scaffold.\"\n\nA Tory ally of Lord North's, Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, would later recollect that Lord North conceded this was true. The war had started with popular support among the British public, but repeated battlefront defeats had changed public opinion:\n\n >  \"True it is that ill success rendering [the war] at length unpopular, the people began to cry out for peace.\"\n\nHistorian Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy gives a pretty concise rundown of what happened next in *The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire*. \"It was a testament to his popularity and his political skills,\" writes O'Shaughnessy, \"that [Lord North] managed to sustain his government for over three more months.\"\n\nLord North attempted to negotiate with American diplomats Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams for a peace that would keep the colonies under British control, but the Americans would accept no deal that did not recognize them as an independent country. Nor would Lord North commit to ending further military action until a deal was agreed to. According to O'Shaughnessy, North \"was ultimately driven from power by his refusal to make a clear commitment to military withdrawal from America.\" North already had a slim majority, by barely a dozen votes, and by the early months of 1782, independent members of Parliament began to defect. \n\nAt the end of February 1782, General Henry Seymour Conway proposed a resolution that the war \"no longer be pursued for the impracticable purpose of reducing the inhabitants of that country to obedience by force\" and the resolution only failed by a single vote.\n\nTwo weeks later, on March 15, an independent MP proposed to censure the government for having \"reduced the country from a state of glory and prosperity to calamity and disgrace.\" It only failed by nine votes.\n\nOn March 25, Charles James Fox called for peace with America and motioned for a vote of no confidence against Lord North because \"our affairs were so circumstanced, that ministers must lose their places, or the country must be undone.\" The vote nearly passed.\n\nWith the prospect of another vote of no confidence that was sure to pass, two days later, on March 27, Lord North resigned. The Whig leader, the Marquess of Rockingham, then formed a government, and sent Richard Oswald to Paris in April 1782 to begin negotiating with the American diplomats. \n\nRockingham actually died a few months later, which sent Parliament into further turmoil, ultimately leading to North returning to power in an uneasy, and short-lived, coalition government in 1783 with his rival and chief war opponent Charles James Fox. But by then, the Treaty of Paris had already been drafted, and the coalition was formed with Fox as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, with North the head of domestic affairs, so peace negotiations continued unabated. \n\n**SOURCES**:\n\n*The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire* by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy\n\n*A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution* by Jonathan R. Dull\n\n*The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox in the House of Commons*, ed. by \"A Barrister\"\n\n*The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 1772-1784* ed. by Henry Benjamin Wheatley", "I only had the opportunity to briefly skim through some of these responses; however, a major point that I think needs clarifying is that while the British *could* have held major American ports, the largest among them being New York, for years, if not decades, after Yorktown, popularity for the war at home in Britain dropped dramatically in the late 1770s. Furthermore, in the eyes of the Empire, maintaining control of the Caribbean Islands, especially the sugar producing islands, was of the utmost concern due to both the tremendous profits generated and the power of \"absentee planters\" in British Parliament.\n\nAs Richard Buel Jr. argues in his book *In Irons: Britain's Naval Superiority and the American Revolutionary Economy,* the sheer size of His Majesty's Navy meant the British would be able to at least hold New York, if not capture a number of other American ports in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies, even after Yorktown and probably hold these for decades. While possible, this avenue made little economic sense as the navy had a more important and lucrative role in protecting the plantation empire of the Caribbean. When you couple this with the idea the war in the colonies had been a disaster for the North administration (see both Mary Beth Norton's, *The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789* and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's, *The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire*) continuing to fight in mainland North America made little sense. Finally, it's important to note that while the British sugar producing islands had remained loyal, their loyalty was tenuous at best. If the British transferred forces from the Caribbean, who were not only fending of the French and Spanish but also suppressing potential slave insurrections where enslaved Africans greatly outnumbered white British colonists, they may have lost the the allegiance of island planters, many of whom held positions in Parliament. For more on this, see Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's, *An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean*.\n\nTL;DR: While the British could have kept fighting in North America and perhaps held important ports on the eastern seaboard, it made little economic sense to do so and they risked losing even more Atlantic possessions if they did so."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "1g02oa", "title": "Did the Greeks and Romans read the \"classics\"", "selftext": "There's a modern list of *the* Greek and Roman classics (e.g., The Odyssey, Republic, and Aeneid).  Do we have the same Greek and Roman canon as the actual Greeks and Romans?            \n\nIf not, what were the best-sellers of the classical G & R world? Esp. those that are extant today.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1g02oa/did_the_greeks_and_romans_read_the_classics/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cafhd4c"], "score": [18], "text": [" >  Did the Greeks and Romans read the \"classics\"?\n\nAbsolutely. I'm much more familiar with the Romans than the Greeks, so I can only speak as to them - though I can't think of any reason that the Greeks would be different - but today's great Latin literature was definitely important back then as well.\n\nFor example, *The Aeneid* was, by the 2nd century A.D., mandatory if one wanted to claim a \"good\" education. In fact, it'd often be memorized.[^(Source, missing one page)](_URL_2_)\n\n*The Aeneid*, like *The Illiad*, was and is regarded as the epitome of literature in its language, and was, consequently, hugely popular. Plus, it certainly didn't hurt its popularity that it painted the ruling  Julio-Claudian dynasty in the best of lights.\n\n > Do we have the same Greek and Roman canon as the actual Greeks and Romans?\n\nNope, and it's a real tragedy. Regrettably, \"we've lost more of Latin literature than we posses.\"[^Source ^\\(Abstract\\)](_URL_0_)^|[Source2](_URL_1_) Entire authors have disappeared from history, and we lack an enormous amount of what the Romans and Greeks wrote. It's the bane of every classicist the world over, but there's not much to be done about it.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/702631?uid=3739560&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21102087172833", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/1075766", "http://books.google.com/books?id=eybIGmuny64C&amp;pg=PA118#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "1n6ude", "title": "Are there any ancient civilizations that did not build stairs?", "selftext": "Stairs seem like such an intuitive tool yet so does the wheel and the Inca lived without that, so I was wondering. Did any ancient civilization not build stairs?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1n6ude/are_there_any_ancient_civilizations_that_did_not/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ccg7hql"], "score": [22], "text": ["The wheel is something that would need to be invented in order to be used, wheras stairs and steps can form naturally, so this question would be incredibly hard to answer whilst sticking to the AskHistorians top answer guidelines. The wheel was an invention. Somebody wanted to find a way to reduce the amount of force necessary to move large objects and invented the wheel and axel design to do so. its much more complicated then it sounds."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16ibxm", "title": "Why didn't the destroyed cities of Europe change their city layouts after World War II?", "selftext": "Inspired by [this post](_URL_0_), where it is said that European cities do not have grid city layouts because they were designed earlier than American cities. However, after World War II, many cities, particularly in Germany and Poland, were essentially completely destroyed. So why did they not take the opportunity to improve the layout of the streets like Chicago did after the Great Chicago Fire, instead mostly keeping to a disorganized layout?\n\nEDIT: Come to think of it, Japan isn't much better either.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16ibxm/why_didnt_the_destroyed_cities_of_europe_change/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7wb9mt", "c7wbyo6", "c7wfp4g"], "score": [2, 5, 5], "text": ["well, London did after 1666, but mainly because they were **Mostly** destroyed, people still knew where their houses used to be, what land they used to own and how everything used to look, they wanted that back so just rebuilt on the existing land and made it how it was before. ", "Some of it has to do with the internal geography (or metageography) that the residents carried.  After a war where the familiar has been smashed, people very often wanted to hold on to some of that familiarity, and spatial arrangements were an important part of social interaction.  Besides, what was *below* the ground wasn't necessarily destroyed, so the infrastructure for rebuilding in the same configurations existed already even if the streets were cratered.  Minor changes were probably rife: slight widening of streets and roads, tearing up of brick pavements and streetcar rails, expansion of certain facilities, the burying of power cables, et cetera.  But I suspect the spatial order was persistent because people *wanted* it to be as much as because it was easier to do.\n\nIf any city would have been prone to a total reconstruction, it would have been Rotterdam after the Blitz.  Although its skyline certainly changed, and the oud-centrum was vastly modified, I am not aware of whether the basic layout shifted (streets, etc).  There's a certain psychologically restorative quality to that continuity in the face of an undeniably external, human-created disaster (as opposed to London 1666 or Chicago 1871, which came \"from within\" and highlighted distinct problems with the prior order), although I'm not sure if anyone's written on it specifically off the top of my head.  It would not surprise me if one or another of the spatial theorists has done so. *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* is a great journal to farm for that, if you're so inclined, as is *Progress in Human Geography*.  I'm not in my office so I don't have access to my indexes.", "Actually a lot of provincial towns and cities in Britain were completely overhauled after the war, not because they were damaged by bombing, but as Victorian slums were cleared and massive new social housing estates were planned as part of the postwar settlement. Sometimes you see essentially the same street layout, sometimes there are alterations, but grids are still rare. I think the issue here is that Europeans (or maybe it's just me) do not share the automatic assumption that grid layouts are an 'improvement'. Like the people tasked with rebuilding postwar cities and the people who were going to move back into them, I grew up with windy streets and so don't have any particularly navigating them. And while I get the rational appeal of a grid layout, it seems to have some significant drawbacks of its own: ignoring the terrain (where I live is all hills; a grid would mean a nightmarish up-down-up-down to get from A to B) and making everything look similar (so I can't orientate myself by that distinctive double bend or the peculiar three-and-a-half-way intersection). Plus, you have to admit there's both an aesthetic appeal and a comforting sense of continuity in retaining old streets with \"character\". People planning new cities in America were essentially dealing with *terra nullius*; I happen to know that at least a half dozen streets in my town follow trackways older than the US itself.\n\nSo my (admittedly largely anecdotal/parochial) answer is that there's a difference in cultural ideals of what a city ought to look like on either side of the Atlantic. Even if you look at [Wren's ambitious plan to rebuild London after the Great Fire](_URL_0_) it isn't completely rational: the underlying grid is contorted to fit Baroque avenues and plazas which were first and foremost meant to impress aesthetically. Modern housing developments in Britain are the same: they're not exactly as chaotic as old medieval streetplans, but they do show a preference for aesthetically pleasing curves and circles over a strictly pragmatic grid."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/16hz9e/chicago/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], ["http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/1744_Wren_Map_of_London%2C_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-wren-1744.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "2c88fb", "title": "How do we know this is really 2014?", "selftext": "What really confuses me is how we actually know it is 2014? If we don't know much about certain periods of time, like in British history between the fall of the Roman empire and the end of the dark ages, how can we be sure we've added up the dates right? I suppose more generally i'm skeptical about how much we actually know about history, and how we can trust very old documents and how much is made up to fill in the gaps. I imagine a scenario where a King/Queens wants to be remembered in a certain way, so pure fiction is produced, which would be indistinguishable from fact. If they wanted to they could even extend their rule (only in the history books), say, by however many years they wanted and no one would know. \n\nI've not really had a massive interest in History precisely because of this reason - and I know that's not good (and want to change that), but I don't know where to start looking to answer it. Whenever I watch a history programme on TV or read a history book, I'm always left thing, \"yeah but how do you actually know that, you sound so certain!\" I hope my question makes sense. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c88fb/how_do_we_know_this_is_really_2014/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjcwsiy", "cjcwzw5", "cjcxmcc", "cjcyesf", "cjcyodo", "cjczisr", "cjd0zb5", "cjd1vcr", "cjd21t9", "cjdjgor"], "score": [386, 13, 60, 9, 2, 13, 5, 3, 3, 3], "text": ["The most definite way is by old astronomical records. We know down to the minute when all the eclipses, periodic comets, etc of history took place, so if there was an eclipse on a certain day of the reign of the emperor Claudius, we know what year that was. Thus we know that there are some years we don't know much about, but there are no missing years. ", "Vaguely related to this question, when did the Western world come to use the current year system? Like, when was it decided that 'this is the year x' that our current date is a continuation of?", "The other way is because historians can correlate between different places. So for example if a English monarch wanted to 'fake' years of his reign then documents in would have different dates for specific mutual events than counterparts in France, Spain, Italy etc. \n\nTwo other issues, while I can see some motivation to lie about ruling longer than one actually has, as a historian I can't imagine a king actually trying to put that into practice. The scale of the lie is just too big even in the medieval period there are still enough scribes-notaries around that you would have to get everyone on board and then the problem of neighboring kingdoms not matching your faked timeline is easily apparent - for example in a treaty or marriage contract.\n\n > I imagine a scenario where a King/Queens wants to be remembered in a certain way, so pure fiction is produced, which would be indistinguishable from fact.\n\nAs a historian this is actually one of the most interesting parts of studying history. First, there is no objective historical document, not one. Every document is produced by a particular author with a particular subjective view and intended for a particular audience. Historians must always consider the bias that exists. The flip side is that when in the past people thought to 'fake' a document, or to lie in a document, they had to do so in a way that retained the verisimilitude of the account. For example, I read a lot of inquisition cases, people lie there all the time, but it is not complete fabrication because that is too easy to spot or check. So, instead, people have to bend the truth and tell an alternative story that is plausible for their circumstances. Yet, the beauty of history is that because they have made the account plausible within their own cultural-historical moment it is a true statement in the sense that it could have happened and that they expected/hoped that it would be construed as fact. Thus, even a forged or fudged document tells us something about the past because the person who produced that document intended that it would appear real.\n\nThat type of analysis is more suited for studying socio-cultural phenomenon. In the case of political or economic history it is usually easy enough to determine if an account is faked/overly-biased by comparing it to many other documents. Again, historical conspiracies are unlikely, largely impossible to achieve, so a preponderance of correlating evidence usually indicates historical reality.\n\n", "In addition to the other well reasoned replies in this thread, you can also bet for sure that the Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Persians, etc were all keeping track of time too! If someone wanted to fudge the date, historical analysis using multiple regional calendars would show who's lying.", "My old archaeology professor used the pace of evolution of Mesopotamian pottery to prove that the established calender of events in the ancient Middle East was a bit too spaciously timed, and a century or two were pruned as a result. So the calendar remains a hypothesis - albeit one with very little wriggle room in times with a lot of sources.", "This would be more a philosophical/epistemological question than a historical one.\n\nHistory, like science, has a certain corpus of agreed upon assumptions that can and are disputed philosophically.  For example, the sciences make an assumption that there is a \"real world\" that exists outside of observation and thought and can be alluded to.  It makes the assumption that induction (the observation of repeatability of phenomena) is a valid means by which to theorize about laws of action.  These can and are disputed philosophically.\n\nBecause if we're being honest here, it's quite easy to take your argument, philosophically, to its logical conclusion toward cartesian solipsism (do any of you or any phenomena exist, or you're just really fancy meat robots or illusions created by demons?)\n\nIt doesn't mean your argument is logically invalid, it's more that your argument isn't socially privileged by the scientific community (because it would paralyze the inductive scientific process).\n\nYou might want to consider trying /r/askphilosophy", "We can also date artifacts radiologically.  Carbon isn't the only thing we can use for this and, as a result, we can get a good macroscopic view of things.  \n\nOne of the handier techniques in this regard is the ability to date construction materials.  For example, we can date the concrete used to construct the Colosseum .  Not surprisingly, the construction of a 50,000 seat mega-stadium in the middle of the capital of Iron Age Europe did not go unnoticed and so we have documents that discuss the Colosseum and other things as well.  \n\nAs we know the age of the Colosseum we can extrapolate the dates of the other events as well.  ", "It's best to look at several different methods of measuring time.  Astronomical records (as mentioned in another comment) are one, and tend to be the most precise.\n\nRadiocarbon dating is another.  It can tell you when a particular dead thing was alive, e.g. when a tree was chopped down.  If we were missing years in our chronology, then we'd end up with artifacts that were found to be younger than history records them to be.\n\nBut, how do we know that radiocarbon dating is correct?  We calibrate it using my favorite method of determining age: dendrochronology (i.e. counting tree rings).  We have records of tree rings spanning [8000 years](_URL_1_).  Carbon dating these types of samples ensures the accuracy of the method, independent from historical records.\n\nThere are [other methods](_URL_0_) as well.  For areas with recorded history, you can correlate reports of regional or global events to establish dates as well.  Generally, multiple methods will converge on a specific year or at least a range of years.  If one method disagrees, say wood in a monument is determined to be much older or younger than the otherwise established date for the monument, there's some explaining to do (was the wood recycled from an older structure or was the monument repaired at some point?).  If we were missing years, dating methods would end up consistently disagreeing with each other.", "I'm sure this has been said before but the study of history is EXACTLY dealing with the problems you've put forth.  Considering ancient letters, documents, ledgers, etc., can be exciting in itself (minus ledgers) it's the real job of the historian to put them into context. \n\n\nAn example of the big questions a historian must consider; who wrote this? Is there any reason for bias or to manipulate information (for instance does it mention a tyrannical king/queen)? Is a first or second source? Why was it written? Is the author pushing an agenda or collecting taxes? \n\n\nTo be clear I'm an extreme amateur and do it more for fun, my opinion on first hand sources could be compared to pure guesswork. Regardless, the process is very engaging. Information has to be taken in the context of the period it was written in. Even subtleties like handwriting (I'm not a student nor am I interested in becoming one) are considered when dissecting a historical document. History could largely be compared to a mystery, where each clue may not be what it seems and large finds might change the entire school of thought on any subject.", "This is a frequently asked question here.  You may want to refer to these similar questions linked from the [FAQ](_URL_4_):\n\n\n* [How certain are we that the year 1 AD was 2012 years ago?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [How do humans really know what year it is? What historical events started us from BCE to CE?](_URL_1_)\n\nSee [this fascinating answer how dendrochronology can date things to the year](_URL_0_c84u1iw).\n\nAnd a related question that may interest you:\n\n* [How did civilizations determine what \"year\" it was before an \"international\" year was established?](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/kevin.greene/wintro/chap4.htm", "http://hurricane.ncdc.noaa.gov/pls/paleox/f?p=519:1:::::P1_STUDY_ID:3376"], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17e1kl/how_certain_are_we_that_the_year_1_ad_was_2012/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vjp3j/how_do_humans_really_know_what_year_it_is_what/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14czyz/how_did_civilizations_determine_what_year_it_was/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17e1kl/how_certain_are_we_that_the_year_1_ad_was_2012/c84u1iw", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_how_did_the_world_agree_on_what_year_it_is.3F"]]}
{"q_id": "2co4cb", "title": "How and when was it discovered the Mayans hadn't used wheels? Are their other questionable decisions that Mayans were 'blind' to?", "selftext": "How do you collect such archaeological evidence of a wheel not being used? Also, why didn't it strike the very first archaeologists, that the Mayans hadn't used wheels? Didn't they have potter's wheels?  \nIs it only a legend or history? Didn't they ever come in contact with traders who had used wheels?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2co4cb/how_and_when_was_it_discovered_the_mayans_hadnt/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjhdkev"], "score": [7], "text": ["The wheeled vehicle is not as intuitive an invention as most people seem to think. In fact, as /u/Daeres explains in [this submission](_URL_0_), it was only ever invented twice and possibly even only once, in the entire history of mankind. The reason the wheeled vehicle did not reach the Americas before Columbus is that they were cut off from the rest of the world where this technology had spread from its original point of origin in the 4th millennium BCE."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2bgqyf/carts_cereals_and_ceramics/"]]}
{"q_id": "2u6yk2", "title": "Why is it that every copy of the Bible that I've ever seen has two columns on each page?", "selftext": "I've read a bit about how chapter/verse are/were decided in the Bible, different proposed versions, etc., but I can't seem to find out when/why this trend of two columns on a page started.\n\nWas the goal simply to make the text more easily readable and navigable? Or is there some significance? And do we have any idea when this may have started?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2u6yk2/why_is_it_that_every_copy_of_the_bible_that_ive/", "answers": {"a_id": ["co5qriv", "co5r1c4", "co5vfu1"], "score": [23, 136, 12], "text": ["While I'd prefer to wait for a much more qualified person than I am to chime in, I believe it all started with the first Gutenberg Bibles, which had indeed forty-two lines of text over two columns; these, in turn, reflected the way prayer books were written before the adoption of the printing press.\n\nSources:\n\nWell... this is going to be a bit awkward, as I'm currently helping out as an apprentice book-binder; but both Pio Colombo's and Piero Trevisani's *Storia della Stampa* ^1 - as well as my employer - agree with the theory. :-)\n\n^1 in *Enciclopedia Poligrafica*, vol. I (Editrice Raggio, Roma 1953).\n\n", "According to the Bible publisher Crossway (publishers of the English Standard Version), the reasons are threefold:\n\nPrinting in a single column increases the page count by 10 to 25%, which increases how expensive it it to produce.\n\nFor the typical font size, the two columns increases readability (9-12 words per line is considered optimal)\n\nTraditionally, the first printed Bibles were printed with two columns,  as were ancient manuscripts handwritten by medieval monks.\n\nHowever, there are some Bible editions written in a single column on the page.  I have used several of them, it just depends on how the publisher is sizing the font and how thick they want to make it, and how big the book will be.\n\n_URL_0_", "When the text was translated the two or multiple columns model was an ideal for having the original text side by side with a translation. \n\nIn 235 CE, Origen (a Christian scholar in Alexandria) completed the [Hexapla](_URL_0_), a comprehensive comparison of the ancient versions and Hebrew text side by side in six columns. In the first column was the Hebrew, in the second column was a Greek transliteration of it, then the newer Greek versions each in their own columns. \n\nThe translation of the Septuagint (Greek version of the Bible), by Sir Brenton, published in 1851, based primarily upon the Codex Vaticanus, (the Codex Vaticanus is itself one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testament) and was written in *three* columns per page, with 40\u201344 lines per page, and 16\u201318 letters per line,) Brenton's model contains the Greek and English texts in two parallel columns. \n\nHence, the two columns model was extremely useful in preserving the original text side by side with the translated text and was done for the most part for the sake of translations, the tradition continued.\n\n*He Palaia Diatheke kata tous Ebdomekonta: the Greek Septuagint Version of the Old Testament according to the Vatican edition, together with the real Septuagint version of Daniel and the Apocrypha including the fourth book of Maccabees and an historical introduction. London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1851*.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.crossway.org/blog/2006/05/two-column-bibles/"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapla"]]}
{"q_id": "40m4yd", "title": "Were the mentally ill revered and allowed to roam freely throughout the middle ages?", "selftext": "So I was studying Michel Foucault's work (Sociology) and there was a tiny bit of information that claimed that in the past the mentally ill were allowed to roam freely, were seen holy or sacred and allowed to live among the 'normal' population. This was because they were seen as showing the limits of human sanity or something.\n\nNow, this was a really small bit of information and Michel Foucault is mainly an Sociologist, not an Historian. I am really curious how much truth there is to this information because, well, I like history.\n\nSo, my question is, how were the mentally ill treated? Specifically in western Europe in the late middle ages up to the Renaissance. Is our current idea of treating and trying to cure the mentally ill really that novel?\n\nThanks in advance!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/40m4yd/were_the_mentally_ill_revered_and_allowed_to_roam/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cyvb7ar", "cyvf7oc", "cyvo0kv"], "score": [8, 33, 4], "text": ["I think you need to define what you mean by \"mentally ill\" more clearly. It is a very broad label. ", "Well you probably don't consider Syria to be western Europe, but I happen to have a source that suggests this was the case in medieval Muslim Syria. The book is a discussion of Medieval Syrian Saints:\n\n\"Certain men outwardly defied the ideals of Muslim piety by living in a state of ritual impurity, wearing filthy garments, and not praying. Yet, the 'marginal holy man' did not represent a distinct class of saints as such. [...] The *muwallah* may be regarded as variously a cross between a borderline mystic, saint, vagabond, charlatan, and healer.\"\n\nMeri translates *muwallah* as 'one who is mad with devotion to God'. It's unclear whether this refers to a person that we would today consider to be mentally ill. Meri quotes from Ibn Taymiyya:\n\n\"It is not possible for anybody to say that this is a friend of God. If this [person] is not insane (*majnun*), then he is a *mutawallih* without possessing insanity, or sometimes he would lose his sense of reasoning while at others regain it, and he does not undertake the religious obligations.\"\n\nMeri relates a few sources regarding one particular *muwallah* called Yusuf al-Qamini, who was apparently a popular healer and miracle worker in Damascus the early 1200s. It seems this was a person who had lost touch with reality but that people saw a power or religious devotion in his ramblings. Meri quotes from a late medieval writer, Ibn al-Hawrani:\n\n\"Yusuf al-Qamini, the *muwallah* whom the common people regard as a *wali* [Saint] Their proof is that he possessed illuminations and spoke words based on intuitions. This is what happens with the soothsayer, the monk, and the madman who has and the madman who has a companion of the *jinn*. This sort of occurrence has increased in our time. God is asked for support. Yusuf used to wallow in his urine, walk barefoot, and repair to the furnace of Nur al-Din's bath. He did not pray.\"\n\nMeri cites a few other examples and goes on to theorize that *muwallah* existed as kind of marginal-charismatic figures. They were on the border between madness and holiness. On the one hand they are recorded as often performing no religious duties (like praying) and doing things that proper religious leader would never do like going outside in soiled or insufficient clothing. Yet on the other hand they associated themselves with religious places and common people thought they might perform miracles and healings. They were beyond the boundaries of normal society, but also involved in it, and in that they possessed a kind of religious charisma. Meri writes:\n\n\"Men and women did not flock to them because they challenged established norms of learning, but rather for their conventional wisdom and because they regarded them as sacred persons who dispensed miracles and possessed a charismatic personality.\"\n\nBut, were these people mentally ill? If somebody today behaved the way these Damascenes did, we would probably regard them as such. However, our modern society doesn't have a category of person that is expected to act in that manner, but the late medieval society of Damascus did, which may have in turn elicited that behavior. So it becomes completely unclear whether a *muwallah* was a person suffering from a medical or psychological condition (schizophrenia, epilepsy?) or rather a highly devoted religious person who felt compelled to act in this manner. Perhaps a combination of both?\n\nYou might find this to be off topic but a relationship between \"marginal\" behavior and holiness is definitely documented in folk variations of Islam, both in the middle ages and into the modern era. \n\nMeri, Josef W. *The Cult of Saints Among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria* Oxford University Press, 2003. The discussion of the *muwallah* can be found in chapter 2, pages 91-100. ", "I'm also really interested in historian's interpretation/ verification of Foucault's claims.  Hopefully direct quote from his book would make the question more specific:\n\n >  the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands center stage as the guardian of truth-playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and the satires. If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton\u2019s language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of life to the young, the middling reality of things to the proud, to the insolent, and to liars. Even the old feasts of fools, so popular in Flanders and northern Europe, were theatrical events, and organized into social and moral criticism, whatever they may have contained of spontaneous religious parody.\n\n >  In learned literature, too, Madness or Folly was at work, at the very heart of reason and truth. It is Folly which embarks all men without distinction on its insane ship and binds them to the vocation of a common odyssey (Van Oestvoren\u2019s Blauwe Schute, Brant\u2019s Narrenschiff); it is Folly whose baleful reign Thomas Murner conjures up in his Narrenbeschw\u00f6rung; it is Folly which gets the best of Love in Corroz\u2019s satire Contre fol amour, or argues with Love as to which of the two comes first, which of the two makes the other possible, and triumphs in Louise Lab\u00e9\u2019s dialogue, D\u00e9bat de folie et d\u2019amour. Folly also has its academic pastimes; it is the object of argument, it contends against itself; it is denounced, and defends itself by claiming that it is closer to happiness and truth than reason, that it is closer to reason than reason itself; Jakob Wimpfeling edits the Monopolium philosophorum, and Judocus Gallus the Monopolium et societas, vulgo des lichtschiffs. Finally, at the center of all these serious games, the great humanist texts: the Moria rediviva of Flayder and Erasmus\u2019s Praise of Folly. And confronting all these discussions, with their tireless dialectic, confronting these discourses constantly reworded and reworked, a long dynasty of images, from Hieronymus Bosch with The Cure of Madness and The Ship of Fools, down to Brueghel and his Dulle Griet; woodcuts and engravings transcribe what the theater, what literature and art have already taken up: the intermingled themes of the Feast and of the Dance of Fools. Indeed, from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western man.\n\n >  A sequence of dates speaks for itself: the Dance of Death in the Cimeti\u00e8re des Innocents doubtless dates from the first years of the fifteenth century, the one in the Chaise-Dieu was probably composed around 1460; and it was in 1485 that Guyot Marchant published his Danse macabre. These sixty years, certainly, were dominated by all this grinning imagery of Death. And it was in 1494 that Brant wrote the Narrenschiff; in 1497 it was translated into Latin. In the very last years of the century Hieronymus Bosch painted his Ship of Fools. The Praise of Folly dates from 1509. The order of succession is clear.\n\n >  In its various forms\u2014plastic or literary\u2014this experience of madness seems extremely coherent. Painting and text constantly refer to one another\u2014commentary here and illustration there. We find the same theme of the Narrentanz over and over in popular festivals, in theatrical performances, in engravings and woodcuts, and the entire last part of the Praise of Folly is constructed on the model of a long dance of madmen in which each profession and each estate parades in turn to form the great round of unreason. It is likely that in Bosch\u2019s Temptation of Saint Anthony in Lisbon, many figures of the fantastic fauna which invade the canvas are borrowed from traditional masks; some perhaps are transferred from the Malleus maleficarum. As for the famous Ship of Fools, is it not a direct translation of Brant\u2019s Narrenschiff, whose title it bears, and of which it seems to illustrate quite precisely canto XXVII, also consecrated to stigmatizing \u201cdrunkards and gluttons\u201d? It has even been suggested that Bosch\u2019s painting was part of a series of pictures illustrating the principal cantos of Brant\u2019s poem.\n\nquote from **Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization**\n\nAre you familiar with these artifacts?  Do you agree with Foucault's interpretation that they indicate a general social attitude which treated madness with inclusion, and in fact, as a significant source of meaning/ truth?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3bpdx7", "title": "Before there was Rock 'n' Roll, what music did the rebellious teens of a decade such as the 1930's (and the surrounding years) listen to?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bpdx7/before_there_was_rock_n_roll_what_music_did_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["csoaer5", "csq9nf0"], "score": [29, 2], "text": ["There was a time when Jazz was not fancy, there was a time when it was considered a corrupting influence.  It was linked to crime, drugs, insanity, promiscuity... \n\nCheck [this article](_URL_0_) published in Ladies Home Journal, August 1921.\n\nRacism was obviously a component in the prejudice against that music (and some others that were put in the same category).\n\n", "Basic popularity eras:\n\n1896-1912 Ragtime Era\n\nThis is when rag was at its peak. They were using it even in London (*The Nightside of London*), though not where High Society gathered.\n\n1912-1919 Tango Era\n\nThis is the time when tango was the new thing (1912 in America debuted the fame of the *Titanic*, Tarzan  &  tango). It was racy and radical. It continued to be danced into the 1920s, but it wasn't rebellious then.\n\n1919-1934 Hot Jazz Era\n\nJazz went from the underground to the inescapable, especially it was promulgated by radio. That eventually sent it into every corner of the land, much to the horror of conservative parents. There were many levels and flavours of jazz. It was majorly popularized by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. Interestingly, in his first autobio Rudy Vall\u00e9e says Whiteman didn't play real jazz, just \"syncopated orchestral music.\" He didn't claim to do real jazz himself, but most of us use \"jazz\" more inclusively. \n\n1934-1944 Swing Era\n\nI date this from when Benny Goodman broke big as a national phenomenon. Musical styles are always in existence before they get out of very small circles of listeners. In swing there was sweet swing and hot swing. Your parents wouldn't object to a sweet swing band like Guy Lombardo.\n\n1944-1954 Cool Jazz Era\n\nIts like WW2 broke down and tired out bands. That and anyone gets bored doing the same thing. Still, Goodman did say later that be-bop was a mistake.\n\n1954-1964 Rock'n'roll Era\n\nI don't have to tell you about this.\n\nNotice that except the Argentine tango, all this sound originated in American black music. Rock'n'roll came out of country swing, but that came out of country , blues  &  swing. But we also need to note that they break big after they begin being taken up by white or mixed bands. It took Elvis to take rock out of \"race music.\" Same thing with forms of jazz, to move it out of small markets.\n\nIn Europe, this is in spades. The jazz is uncultured American, as well as black. This makes it even racier and more rebellious.\n\nIn fascist Europe, kids who took up swing usually did so via its British forms and recordings. It became very serious rebellion, actual resistance, in Nazi Germany and occupied France. Savage' *Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945* has chapters on this.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=sol334hPuRoC&amp;pg=PA152&amp;lpg=PA152&amp;dq=Ladies+Home+Journal+jazz&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=FBNG-CXoAN&amp;sig=XZWKcDrQ2WGfLXrF9CEgc-3yVPU&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=gFKTVcCLM8faoASkk7aABw&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=Ladies%20Home%20Journal%20jazz&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "237fcn", "title": "When were governments first expected to create jobs?", "selftext": "More broadly, when did it become expected that governments attempt to intervene in economics?* ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/237fcn/when_were_governments_first_expected_to_create/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgubaui", "cgul3v2", "cgutzmm"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["I'll take your more specific question. \n\nThe sources I've read about the creation of parks in cities (specifically Central Park, which I'll look through my house to find) shows that during the 19th Century there was some municipally centered demands to create jobs, but this was not to create jobs in and of itself, but for the purpose of creating, as stated, public parks.\n\nThe New Deal was really the time when the idea of \"job creation\" came into its own. Before this time the dominant school of economic thought was the Classical School (Smith, Ricardo, etc) which denied the existence of involuntary unemployment. Basically most people believed that unemployment could only result from people refusing to work below certain wages, not that in economic crises people could be out of work and unable to find it again. \n\nHowever, by 1933, that was proving to be untrue, John Maynard Keynes also helped by basically disproving it completely in \"The General Theory.\" At this point the Roosevelt Administration were looking for some way to alleviate the crisis, and eventually started the programs composing the New Deal in 1933. A whole portion of the basic program was Relief: meaning job creation through public works to decrease unemployment. After that Keynesian thought dominated economic thought, especially the idea of job creation. ", "Could you specify where? Like, Europe? The United States? In Spain, I know of documents as far back as the eighteenth century that use liberal rationalization for governments directly intervening in the economy, and many of those documents also considered a sort of social contract of labor, calling for the government to ensure that people are able to find work and demanding that those who can work be forced to (essentially the type of logic that was the root of subsequent anti-vagrancy laws throughout the nineteenth century in the British and Spanish Americas). ", "I think your question could be better phrased by reversing it: when did it become expected that governments *should not attempt* to intervene in economics? I'd argue that it's only been in the recent liberal era that governments were not expected to intervene.\n\nAs far as I know, as far back as ancient Athens there was some system of welfare. Citizens who attended the assemblies for a full day were remunerated, to ensure that even poor citizens could participate in the democratic process. Additionally, (many) public offices were doled out by lottery to the citizen body. While it did not give everyone a stable or long-term job, it at least provided some citizens with a livelihood.\n\nLet's also not forget that in Feudal times, lords were expected to provide care and residence for their serfs. Of course, it was not the \"state\" per se that took care of the serfs, but certainly the manor system in Europe can be seen as a micro-governmental system, especially given the frailty of feudal states. While serfdom was by no means an ideal labour system, it of course offered a stability that disappeared with the rise of the global capitalist system."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "17nxme", "title": "When and how did child marriage start to be seen as inappropriate in the Western culture?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17nxme/when_and_how_did_child_marriage_start_to_be_seen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c87cw5h", "c87ibl8"], "score": [62, 16], "text": ["Child marriage was never really \"appropriate\" in Western culture; it barely happened. According to parish records, the average age for marriage was between 17 and 25 across much of Europe in the middle ages. The average age for women was 20 to 26 in Elizabethan England, and many writers of the time condemned child marriages.\n\nChild betrothals were performed between aristocratic families to cement dynasties but it was never a common practice, and they usually waited until at least early adulthood before marriages took place (since children often died). There are of course exceptions among the nobility, as with Henry VII's mother [giving birth to him when she was just 13] (_URL_0_).\n\nYou'll find pedophilia apologists trying to argue that marriage and sex between adults and children was \"normal\" in the middle ages, but this doesn't hold up to fact. It didn't make sense for an adult to marry a child, neither socially nor economically, and marrying children to one another before they've had a chance to establish themselves and their skills didn't make much sense either.\n\nThe stuff about average marriage ages in 16th- and 17th- c. England comes from *Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cyle in Tudor and Stuart England*, by David Cressy. *Medieval Households* by David Herlihy has something similar to say about the High Middle Ages.\n\nI'll defer to a good friend of mine who has this to say about early modern Jewish marriages, which sometimes took place between 12-14 year olds for several very important reasons:\n\n > First, unlike Christians, most Jews didn't own land. Their property was more often in the form of businesses and the goods involved in them. That means some of the most important things parents could bequeath their children also took the form of the experience, knowledge, and connections (quite) young couples would need to make their own livings. When couples married young, parents could take an active part in the early years of their marriages, show them how to manage their money and their business affairs, and set them up with houses and in their professions. Perhaps unsurprisingly when you consider how young they were, a lot of young couples spent the first years of their marriage living under the roof of the bride or groom's parents. The short answer is that for many well-off-ish Jewish couples looking to the future of their children, their inheritance required a lot more direct involvement than, say, the inheritance of a farm.\n\nI have limited knowledge and I may be wrong, but I hope this was helpful.", "A bit of a c/p I did last month, but I'm going to go one step further than Wolfalice and say it never happened, but that will depend on what is meant by 'marriage'. From the middle ages to the Early Modern period, the Catholic church tended to leave the age of consent to the area in which it operated.  The majority places put the age of consent at a minimum of 12 to the mid teens, and some 'barbarian' tribes had that in the early 20's.\n\nAround 1150, a jurist named Gratian put together what is known as the [Decretum Gratiani](_URL_0_), which laid down a [couple of rules for marriage](_URL_3_), namely that both parties to the marriage had to be able to consent verbally to what was going on. Previously the mere existence of your presence was enough, but Gratian forced the verbal aspect.  So you could be betrothed at the earliest age of 7, but this was only part of the process, as you then have to be at the age of consent (aetus nubilis) which was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. To be 'properly' married meant consummation, and that was fixed at the age of puberty which coincidentally was about 12 for girls, 14 for boys.  So to wit:\n\n1.  Get arranged with some girl (minimum 7, but often much older)\n2.  Consent to the marriage (12 for girls, 14 for boys)\n3.  Disregard currency, acquire females (puberty) \n\nGratian was really interested in the 'consent' part of the process which is why you had to be old enough to understand what was happening to get married.  The other question is 'what does puberty mean?' \n\nPope Gregory IX decided that there were too many [decretals](_URL_1_) (pontifical letters) floating about and that they needed to be collated - so in the easiest historical date to remember, around 2000 decretals were published in 1234 in what was known as the *Decretales Gregorii IX* or as most people understand know it, *Liber extra*.  This is where puberty is discussed in lots of excruciating detail.  14 letters from various popes discussed what puberty meant.  Archbishop Isodore [said](_URL_3_) (you'll have to search for his name) that:\n > Pubescents are called from \"pubis\" that is, they are named from the pudenda of the body when these places first bring forth soft hair.  Some think puberty depends on age, that is, when a boy has completed fourteen years he is pubescent, even when he becomes pubescent very late. But he certainly is pubescent when he shows puberty from the appearance of his body and is able to procreate. Girls are pubescent who can bear during the years of puberty.\n\nSo there you have one of the many descriptions of what counts as puberty.\n\nCuriously, simply because you were able to have sex and procreate didn't necessarily mean that you should.  Hilderburg of Bingen and Albertus Magnus stated that having children too early would result in weak offspring, so it was often suggested that while you could have children/sex, don't, as your 'seed' would be too weak.\n\n\nTL:DR:  You could be married as a child, but no hanky-panky took place until you hit puberty.\n\nFor more mediaeval marriage mayhem, check out [Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c.1270-c.1540 by Kim M. Philips](_URL_2_) although there are a number of other books floating around."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Beaufort,_Countess_of_Richmond_and_Derby"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decretum_Gratiani", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decretal", "http://www.amazon.co.uk/Medieval-Maidens-England-1270-1540-Manchester/dp/071905964X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354701401&amp;sr=1-3", "http://faculty.cua.edu/Pennington/Canon%20Law/marriagelaw.htm#CASE_THIRTY-ONE_"]]}
{"q_id": "1xpf6z", "title": "What happened to the armies immediately after a battle in Medieval Europe?", "selftext": "Did the victor try and hunt down the remainder of his opponent's army? How did the general or king regroup and what happened to all the defeated soldiers who were displaced within foreign land?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xpf6z/what_happened_to_the_armies_immediately_after_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cfdk9zh"], "score": [60], "text": ["This is a vague question and has many different points that can and should be considered.  But in all, I will do my best to provide an answer to a general battle during the early Medieval period.  First and foremost, open battles happened quite infrequently.  I mean, very rarely did to opposing forces march to an open field, size each other up and then proceed to give them the business.  With that being said...\n\n\nAny armed force that moves about is going to comprise a long chain of soldiers, wagons, tents and various supporters and retainers.  Squires and horses for nobility.  Each noble or knight could have a couple horses.  Blacksmiths.  Fletchers.  Cooks and pages to prepare food.  Some form of surgeon would be present for those of the upper echelon.  And the best part is that almost none of these people would see a battle.  They would be at a camp that was nearby.  Also, we have to remember that a majority of the forces would be levies from the feudal estates of various lords, barons, knights, aka the landed gentry.  The levies typically are only there fighting after the planting season and before the harvest (between spring and fall).  They are more often conscripted to fight for their lord or face punishment.  They don't have retainers or squires to help carry stuff or their equipment.  They carry it themselves.  They end up feeding themselves.  They also typically walked everywhere without the chance to ride a horse.\n\n\nAs for a battle, it depends in large part to location, weather and position.  Battles do and don't last very long.  Some battles are very fast and over quickly due to a complete breakdown in morale if heavy cavalry is involved or if an ambush is sprung.  Battles could last days if there were an open field siege (Hussite Wars where the Bohemians created wagon forts to defend from with spears, crossbows and early gun powder weapons).\n\n\nI digress, so I will list some assumptions - this battle is part of a larger conflict between two European crowns; the armies are comprised of the typical feudal arrangement of relatively few nobles and knights in comparison to the levies that make up a large portion of spear troops that are lightly armed; the armies themselves are being led by a semi-important to important general with some relation to the royal family (blood or political); last, we will assume this was a straightforward battle without much in regard to trickery, flanking or betrayal - good ole fashioned battle between two armies and only a few nearby villages or towns.\n\n\nIn medieval battle, the goal was not to destroy the enemy completely, although that would have been a bonus if you were invading or defending lands.  It was much more important to route or break an enemy army and then take prisoners of worth for ransom.  A member of the royal family or someone important in the aristocracy could be ransomed and pay for an entire campaign or fighting season.  Lesser lords and nobles would obviously bring less in terms of ransom, but their household or the crown would actually pay the ransom.  The peasant levies would still be captured as they pose a potential threat if left behind enemy lines.  The levies carried no real worth for ransom except to their feudal lord - the lord would still need to have people available for harvest after the fighting season.  As a battle ends, one army is broken and retreats.  There will be a time during the evening that people are sent forward to locate anyone important that might have fallen (see articles regarding Charles of Burgundy being located after his last battle and identified because of his scars).  Both sides of the conflict would send out these people, also comprised of monks or priests to provide last rights to the dying.  Each army would have returned to their respective camps after the battle to assess damage, losses, gains, prisoners, potential ransoms, etc.   This would then play into the next parlay between the forces - basically a way to say...\"I have this person and these lords, what will you trade me for them?\"\n\nQuick and dirty version - the armies will withdraw from the field to their own camps, prisoners have been captured and their ransom value assessed.  People will check for others on the battlefield that have fallen but have not yet died.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1scnrk", "title": "How long did slaves in America retain their specific tribal identities/religions/languages?", "selftext": "I know that many musical traditions were preserved, but it seems that the tribal identities, religions, and languages disappeared.  How many generations did this take?  Are there parts of the Americas where the tribal cultures lasted longer than others?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1scnrk/how_long_did_slaves_in_america_retain_their/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdwa6fu"], "score": [11], "text": ["Many of the customs survived.  If you go by John Thornton's Africans and the Making of the Atlantic World, many of the Slaves, though coming from different kingdoms had many language and religious similarities.  So when new Africans arrived in the United States there was little trouble in recreating a society they knew.  The biggest change is that it was in the context under English masters.  The result is something of a creole culture that combines many elements of AFrica and Anglo culture.  Gullah is an example of a language that survives to this day and is a creation of this cultural mix.  To hear it go here _URL_0_ .  Gullah is still spoken today in parts of Charleston South Carolina.\n\nIra Berlin gives a little different view in \"Many Thousands Gone\".  He states that the Middle Passage, the carrying of slaves from Africa to America, was such a harrowing experience that it more or less shattered the slave psyche.  This combined with large language differences made the reconstruction of African culture very difficult, instead entirely new cultures were developed.\n\nOut of the two of them, I would say Thornton was more correct, as he is an African historian and would be more knowledgeable about African cultural differences.\n\nElements of African culture still pervade African American society today, I would doubt that any of it has been truly \"lost\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijl7Sg3ZAd0"]]}
{"q_id": "26hyzz", "title": "If a king was presumed dead and an heir took the throne, what happens when the old king returns?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26hyzz/if_a_king_was_presumed_dead_and_an_heir_took_the/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chrbri0", "chrbwdr", "chrdss5", "chrdtzb"], "score": [8, 101, 3, 2], "text": ["Are you thinking of a specific case or are wondering if this has ever happened?", "A slightly different scene. The Ottoman emperor Murad II abdicated his throne in favour of his son Mehmed II (aged 12). Murad wanted to pursue the beauty of the life, poetry and was fed up with government work. But when his son Mehmed II took over, there was an imminent danger of a crusade (christian coalition) to take over the Balkans. \n\nNow after this point there are two different view points as to what exactly happened. \n\n1. Some scientists claim that Mehmed II wrote a letter to his father stating \"If you are the Sultan, come and lead your armies. If I am the Sultan I hereby order you to come and lead my armies.\"\n\n2. Some write that the prime minister (vezir) at the time convinced Murad to come back and take over the throne because of the imminent danger. And so Murad just came back to capital and continued his rule until his death. The same prime minister (vezir) was executed shortly after Mehmed conquered Constantinople because it is claimed that Mehmed always held a grudge against him. \n\nIn case of Ottomans they just continued their rule. ", "This is also a slightly different scenario, but something like this did take place in Ming Dynasty China. The Zhengtong Emperor (ruled 1435-49 initially) was a young and impressionable ruler who was convinced by his chief eunuch/crony Wang Zhen to launch an expedition against the Oirat Mongols, who had formed a confederation under a leader named Esen. Esen was seen as dangerous because the Mongols were considered the primary threat to the Ming, having ruled all of China until 1368. Although they had been kicked out, the threat of their regaining strength and retaking China loomed greatly Thus the expedition against Esen was seen as a good way to neutralize a growing threat and to enhance Zhengtong's (and Wang Zhen's) personal prestige.\n\nThe campaign, personally led by Zhengtong, was ill-conceived. Many officials begged the emperor not to undertake it, but Wang Zhen overruled them. When it set out in August 1449, it was disorganized and chaotic, and it wasn't long before even Wang Zhen realized that they would be no match for Esen's well-trained forces. The army withdrew, but Esen's pursuing forces ambushed them at Tumu Pass on 1st September.\n\nIt was an unprecedented catastrophe. The entire army was destroyed, Wang Zhen was killed and Zhengtong taken prisoner. \n\nThis was unprecedented. In China's entire history, no ruler of a united China had ever been taken prisoner before. There was panic in Beijing, but the Minister of War, Yu Qian, convinced the court to put Zhengtong's younger brother on the throne to continue the functioning of government. They agreed and the young man became the Jingtai Emperor.\n\nThis was a difficult issue indeed. Chinese ideological orthodoxy maintained that could only be one \"true\" emperor at a time, and this dilemma only increased after Esen rather sheepishly released Zhengtong in 1450, realizing that Jingtai's continuing rule meant his captive was not a strong bargaining chip. Zhengtong returned to Beijing, but was not reinstated, being given a small stipend to live on, assigned a few rooms in the palace and then ignored by everyone.\n\nHowever, as Jingtai lay dying in 1457, a coup by disgruntled officials restored Zhengtong to the throne and Jingtai died soon after, possibly suffocated on someone other than the emperor's orders. Zhengtong became the Tianshun Emperor in his second reign and lived on until 1465.\n\nA final, fairly amusing point: Zhengtong/Tianshun's posthumous title was Yingzong, or \"the Heroic Ancestor\". Given the total failure of his military exploits, I'd like to think it was meant ironically.  \n\nSource: F.W. Mote's *Imperial China: 900 -1800* ", "Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_).  These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for.  If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, you may PM /u/caffarelli to have your question considered for an upcoming [Tuesday Trivia](_URL_1_) thread."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/features/trivia"]]}
{"q_id": "47d3z8", "title": "Were Gun Control Laws in the USA originally motivated by racism/Jim Crow?", "selftext": "Someone I know is making this argument and citing this source.\n\n_URL_0_", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/47d3z8/were_gun_control_laws_in_the_usa_originally/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d0c58b1"], "score": [17], "text": ["The bottom line is, yes, there was definitely a racist root to much of it. One of the concerns of the Supreme Court in the infamous Dredd Scott case was that if blacks were citizens, then it would give, horror of horrors, \"to persons of the negro race ... the full liberty of speech ...; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.\" You can imagine how well the concept of armed blacks went over down South.\n\nFortunately, there were plenty of laws on the books prohibiting certain people from being armed, such as one to \"prohibit any negro or mulatto from having fire-arms.\", as addressed by the deliberation for the Civil Rights Act 1866. For more details on the problems occasioned by the 14th Amendment and the fact that the white government could no longer blatantly say that blacks couldn't have guns, check here. _URL_0_\n\nAs a result, modern gun laws came to be crafted a little more creatively. If it was unconstitutional to blatantly say \"Whites can carry guns, blacks can't\", then they had to find more ethereal ways around it. For example, laws on the carriage of concealed weapons could be...discretionary. California's current one is a case in point. The San Francisco Chronicle article on the matter back in 1923 (available about half-way down this PDF _URL_1_ ) is quite open about how the law was carefully crafted to try to avoid unConstitutionality issues. The target in this case was not blacks, but Asians and Latinos. The still-extant law requires that the Sheriff decide that the applicant for a firearm show 'good cause' and 'be of good moral character', a very subjective assessment which, back in the days, effectively meant 'you're white', but today the application of the law has gone more to a race-neutral position based on whether or not the Sheriff likes the idea of an armed private citizenry.\n\nOf course, not all gun control laws were racist. For example, back in the day, it was considered that carrying a firearm concealed was the act of a scourge and scoundrel, and that honest gentlemen carried them openly, this applied to all regardless of race."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.guncite.com/journals/senhal14.html", "http://www.hoffmang.com/firearms/AB263-Hawes-1923.pdf"]]}
{"q_id": "2eg9cw", "title": "What is the correllation between the name of chinese currency yuan and the dynasty?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eg9cw/what_is_the_correllation_between_the_name_of/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjz8ex8"], "score": [8], "text": ["They use the same character, \u5143. That's it. It's a common character, meaning \"round\" or \"round coin\".\n\nTo elaborate, the Yuan dynasty was a period of Mongol rule over China, from c. 1260 (de facto, 1271 officially) to 1368 (1380 if you count the Northern Yuan dynasty when the Mongols retreated to Mongolia after Kublai Khan's death and subsequently being driven out of China.\n\n***\n\nThe Chinese Yuan, referring to the currency, \u5706 formally but commonly the above character, is the basic unit of Chinese currency, much like the dollar is to many other currencies of the world. It was first minted during the Qing dynasty between 1888 and 1898 in various provinces.\n\nWhile the modern rendering is officially r\u00e9nm\u00ednb\u00ec (\u4eba\u6c11\u5e01) or People's Currency, in daily use \u5143 is far more common, or ku\u00e0i (\u5757) or \"piece\" in certain parts of China.\n\nReferences:  \n_URL_0_  \n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_3_  \n_URL_2_\n\nEdited for formatting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/mongols/china/china.htm", "http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=The_Mongol_Empire", "http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/06/21/yuan-or-renminbi-whats-the-right-word-for-chinas-currency/", "http://www.kenelks.co.uk/chinese/chinesedragon.htm"]]}
{"q_id": "e7b7jc", "title": "Hellenistic Feminist Revolution?", "selftext": "During the 5th century BC women in Athens were restricted in a manner that seems relatively extreme even for patriarchal ancient societies.\n\nBy the time of the Hellenistic period it seems that women had much more freedom and often participated in politics and leadership in significant ways.\n\nDuring the Roman Empire, it seems that the public role of women in the Hellenistic East was more prominent than in the Latin West.\n\nWhat happened in the 4th century BC to turn Greek/Hellenistic society from one of the most patriarchal of contemporary civilized societies to one of the least patriarchal of contemporary civilized societies?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e7b7jc/hellenistic_feminist_revolution/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fa9w83y"], "score": [3], "text": ["Female agency is a complex matter and I cannot even pretend to address all aspects here, nor will I pretend to be an expert on this question. I will focus mainly on money and general mobility as the factors I\u2019d consider most important. I hope this helps.\n\nFirst, it is important to note that our knowledge of Greek law is unfairly dominated by the relative \u201cabundance\u201d of sources for Athenian law. Athenian law treated women harshly, but may not have been representative of \u201cthe Greek world\u201d. The extant law of Gortyn, for instance, treats women quite differently in some respects (for instance in cases of sexual assault) and the normative potential of women in the lower classes to act on their own behalf was probably always greater than that of daughters of wealthy families; agency also always increased with age.\n\nFundamentally, the increased mobility of the Hellenistic world caused stricter, traditional, local norms to soften (as may be familiar in the form of Perikles\u2019 restrictive citizenship law). With mobility and more monetary, less land-based forms of wealth came the need to compromise in marriage contracts and ensure, in the interest of the wife\u2019s family, that her property was protected to a greater extent, allowing her more economic freedom as a result. This mobility was due, among other things, to the kingdoms, the infusion of wealth they caused, the banking systems provided, and the professionalization and \u201cinternationalisation\u201d of soldiers, engineers, doctors, performers, athletes, etc. that they fostered. As the Hellenistic world made the Greek cities wealthier, the number of festivals they held also increased, including night festivals, which allowed women more legitimate opportunities to leave the household. In the late Hellenistic period, women\u2019s associations with not purely cultic functions also began to appear, along with their own financial administration, providing another space, in which women could have their own social circles and financial independence.\n\nAnother factor that contributes to the idea of a revolution is the increase in epigraphic culture in the Greek cities and the proliferation of honorific inscriptions. Elite women who controlled property are more tangible in this medium than before, because they engaged in the giving of benefactions to cities and temples, paying for sacrifices, buildings, games etc. In return, they were granted public honours or left dedicatory inscriptions, allowing us greater insight into their background. Funerary stele of elite women also show a greater emphasis on learning, with book rolls appearing for instance, so the value of educated daughters may generally have increased, though this was surely also a side-effect of increasing wealth.\n\nDue to the revitalisation of monarchy in the Hellenistic world, and potentially the influence of Near Eastern (e.g. Achaemenid) models of female (elite) agency, the role of the Hellenistic queens, such as Stratonike, Apama or Laodike, probably also played a part in this process of relaxing the limits imposed upon female agency, since they were experienced as powerful actors in politics not only among the elite, but also at ground level. The queens appear not only to have used their familial connections to conduct politics, but also to have supported more familial aspects of life through benefactions (such as providing dowries for poor women, supporting cults new couples sacrificed to, marking their own agency by means of gifts to prominent sanctuaries such as Delos, etc.). This in turn granted the familial sphere more prominence in the world and the queens provided models other elite women could follow.\n\nThat said, it is important to remember that not everything changed for the better. There were conservative moves as well, for instance the renewal of institutions for the control of decorum and decency (gynaikonomoi) in some cities, notably Athens, and the insistence on traditional rules especially in cities that had enough citizens and wealth enough to do so. Even in Ptolemaic Egypt women generally held very little land, the true mark of elite independence in Antiquity, and that is where their legal standing was probably best. Even in relation to just land dealings women really occur only occasionally, though there are, as always, exceptional cases, such as Eirene, who acted as an entrepreneur in her own right despite being a married woman. Overall, the level of women\u2019s engagement in the economy on largely their own terms was nevertheless probably higher in the Hellenistic world, especially in Egypt, than in Classical Greece. Since women were still subject to *kyrios* approval for entering into substantial contracts under Greek law (as in Athenian law, though not under Egyptian), widows may have generally enjoyed the most freedom of action. This approval may, however, have become a mere formality at least in some cases.\n\nFinally, a general word of caution may be in order, since the wealth of papyrological evidence from Egypt that attests such female agency in concrete detail may be skewing the general view of how much women\u2019s agency grew in the Hellenistic period, since Egypt had different legal traditions that created a second set of expectations Greek norms had to engage with. Egyptian evidence is thus not necessarily representative of the Hellenistic world, but comparable material does not really exist elsewhere. Our other written material mainly illuminates the world of elite, propertied women, so while it seems that their constraints relaxed on average \u2013 though certainly not everywhere \u2013 it is difficult to say the same for the lower classes; providing an actual statistical assessment of this question is prohibited by the material.\n\nOverall, I would therefore hardly speak of a revolution. The changes also hardly stemmed from any sort of structural awareness of an injustice that deserved to be rectified. The changes were a result of increasing wealth (especially in the form of coined money), greater mobility, and the ideological and political superstructure of the Hellenistic kingdoms.\n\n\n\n*Some reading:*\n\nChaniotis, Angelos, Age of Conquests, London 2018.\n\nPomeroy, Sarah B. Women in Hellenistic Egypt: from Alexander to Cleopatra, Detroit 1990.\n\nThe paper by Gillian Ramsey in Co\u015fkun, Altay; McAuley, Alex (eds.), Seleukid royal women: creation, representation and distortion of Hellenistic queenship in the Seleukid empire, Stuttgart 2016.\n\nJames, Sharon L.; Dillon, Sheila (eds.), A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, Malden, MA 2012, esp. part 3.\n\nThompson, D., \u201cThe Hellenistic Family\u201d, in: G. Bugh (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, Cambridge 2006, 93-112."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1623mm", "title": "Could anybody help me with good but easy written sources for the history of the United States from the end of WWI to present?", "selftext": "I have to make a presentation (45 minutest) about this topic and since I'm german, it'd be great if the sources were not too incomprehensibly.\n\nThanks for your help!\n\nEdit: Online sources would be great!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1623mm/could_anybody_help_me_with_good_but_easy_written/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7s1396"], "score": [2], "text": ["_URL_1_\n\nPDF here: _URL_0_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.america.gov/publications/books/history-outline.html", "http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/history-1994/"]]}
{"q_id": "5602rc", "title": "What do historians specializing in Medieval history think of Peter Wilson's *Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire*?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5602rc/what_do_historians_specializing_in_medieval/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d8fiilz", "d8fv3d7"], "score": [4, 3], "text": ["I haven't read it, but I am inclined to do so. I'm nearly finished his *The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy* and I've been really impressed by it. While one good book doesn't guarantee the quality of the others, especially as *Heart of Europe* ventures a bit beyond his usual comfort zone, I'm willing to trust the quality of his scholarship enough to give it a try. ", "Wilson has tackled a very large and complex subject, and he does so in a unique approach, combining chronological and topical approaches. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and by explaining many things using these two different approaches, I find that Wilson has helped me understand things that would otherwise be difficult to appreciate. \n\nThe downside to this dual approach is that some topics seem to be impenetrable in the first few chapters, and repetitive in the last few chapters. But for such a complex topic, I can't really blame him. Overall I highly recommend this book, I really enjoyed it. \n\nThe TL;DR: The HRE is not the weak, ineffective, corrupt polity that many have made it up to be, but rather a highly adaptive and malleable one. To understand this is an arduous journey, but one that's worth it."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "4tzinf", "title": "why do we praise the Templar Knights?", "selftext": "Aren't they the equivalent of modern day terrorists? Marching to foreign lands to kill the infidels and non-believers?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tzinf/why_do_we_praise_the_templar_knights/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d5ofsdr"], "score": [3], "text": ["I haven't ever heard of someone praising them. I have heard people enthused by the mystery of the order, and the various myths that have sprung up around it. \n\nTo compare them to terrorists is fallacious in the extreme, as well as anachronistic. They were an international organization, authorized by the pope to guard pilgrims on their way top the holy land. That they were a militant group does not equate them to terrorists, as they were not furthering their own goals, but were simply protecting what had already been conquered by the first crusaders (or attempting to reconquer, but that still falls within that job description).\n\nThey also became a sort of \"proto-bank\". Pilgrims would donate their belongings to the order, in exchange for a note of appraisal for what the items/land were worth. they could then exchange the note at any branch of the order. The production from the land they accrued, in addition to the belongings of deceased pilgrims made them incredibly rich. \n\nThey were also very secretive, with secret rituals and draconian rules, they drew suspicion like a magnet. That, and after living with the Muslims (often quite peaceably) for decades, they had picked up some eastern habits, they were eventually disbanded for heresy. \n\nThe charges were brought up by the king of France, Philip IV, who owed huge sums to the templars, and it is believed that his main goal was to destroy his debt while acquiring as much of their own wealth as he could, and the heresy was just a plausible excuse.\n\nAccording to legend, while on his execution pyre, the grand-master of the order cursed the king, his torturer, and the pope, and that they all died within a year. Combine that with the fact that most of the order fled to ground, it's easy to see why there are so many myths and legends about them."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "r9ze3", "title": "I want to learn more about Syria during and just after the French mandate", "selftext": "I am particularly interested in what became today's Syria and Lebanon, though of course the French mandate covered much broader territory.  I am curious about the interaction between the French and what, if any, local leadership they encountered or installed.  What was the impact of the French presence on day-to-day life?  Can anyone recommend some good books or articles?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r9ze3/i_want_to_learn_more_about_syria_during_and_just/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c444txa"], "score": [4], "text": ["Check out the recent book *A Line in the Sand* by James Barr.  He's one of the first English-language writers to look at the British/French power games in the levant, and he also take advantage of recently de-classified French sources which have been ignored to date.  It's also very readable.\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3xu8g4", "title": "Did WWI fighter pilots carry extra magazines for their machine guns? If so, how much did they carry?", "selftext": "I was reading about Werner Voss's last dogfight and found a passage that said that one of the British aces disengaged to change the magazine in his Lewis gun. Did they carry extra magazines? Were these strip or drum magazines (different guns are designed with different magazines, but I assume that either drums or strips were preferred for air combat), and what was their capacity? Where did they store them? \n\nI know that WWII planes often only carried enough ammo for something like 20 seconds of sustained fire, which considering the range of WWII planes isn't very much ammo at all. Given that WWI planes only had a range of around 100-150 miles, carrying extra ammo almost seems like an unnecessary weight for the plane.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xu8g4/did_wwi_fighter_pilots_carry_extra_magazines_for/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cy9ycz7"], "score": [2], "text": ["The [Lewis Gun](_URL_0_) had a 97 round pan magazine attached to the upper wing on a 'Foster Mounting' that allowed the pilot to pull the gun backwards and change the magazine. Bear in mind the rate of fire on the Lewis gun was around 500rpm and that gives the pilot around 12 seconds of firing time.\n\nThe SE.5a carried two spare magazines in the cockpit, and changing them in flight must have been an interesting operation! \n\n >  I know that WWII planes often only carried enough ammo for something like 20 seconds of sustained fire, which considering the range of WWII planes isn't very much ammo at all.\n\nIts less about range and more about the weight of fire. The early models of Spitfire and Hurricane carried eight machine guns, with the SE.5a only carrying two - one of which was basically an infantry squad's light support weapon.\n\nThe British typically equipped their fighters with 300 to 350 rounds per gun, meaning they were carrying around 70kg of ammunition and firing 160 rounds per second with a mix of ball, AP, incendiary and tracer ammunition.\n\nEDIT: The rate of fire of the Lewis guns modified for use on aircraft was actually increased to 700-750 meaning the 97 round magazine would last about 8 seconds, not 12."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Aircraft_Factory_S.E.5#/media/File:SE5HighSeatBall.jpg"]]}
{"q_id": "635p76", "title": "Did the USSR suffer from a reverse \"Baby Boom\", a slump in birth rates after World War II?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/635p76/did_the_ussr_suffer_from_a_reverse_baby_boom_a/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dfrmlo2", "dfs1b4g"], "score": [141, 4], "text": ["So while it isn't 100 percent focused on your question, you may find [this answer](_URL_2_) to be of interest, as it does touch heavily on the pro-natal policies of the Soviet Union during and following the war as they attempted to encourage procreation. Edit: I've gone and reposted it here with some small additions to touch on demographics after quickly checking through to see what my sources noted there, but I would just doubly note that hard numbers are *really* hard to come by for the period, and we only have estimates for some of them!\n\n----------\n\nLooking at natalist policies in the Soviet Union, especially with regards to abortion, we can see a *lot* of policy being driven by concerns about the birthrate, and its rise and fall. Especially at the time of the war, there was very explicit concerns raised about the issue and policies were changed and created with the explicit goal of raising it.\n\nIn the Russian Empire, and the first few years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, abortion was illegal. But, as in most places where the procedure is illegal though, the procedure was nevertheless popular, but insanely dangerous. One observer pre-1920 noted:\n\n > Within the past six months, among 100 to 150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15 to 20 percent of them making abortions without a doctor's help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures.\n\nThe decision to legalize the procedure, and make it simple to obtain, was almost entirely a practical decision. In 1920 they became legal if done by a doctor, essentially in acknowledgement that it would happen no matter what, so the state should do its best to make it safe. They were subsidized by the state, so free to the woman. In 1926, the abortion rate was 42.8 per 1000 working women, and 45.2 per 1000 'housewives' (compare to the US today, at [13.2 per 1000 women](_URL_0_). Modern Russia continues to be very high, at [37.4 per 1000 or so](_URL_1_))\n\nBut this wasn't to remain. As noted, the change was not because abortion was seen as *good*, but that legalizing it was a necessary evil and that the state would work to eliminate the underlying economic reasons driving women to have them. As it turned out, poor women were no more likely to be using this 'service though'. If anything, it was the better off women who were getting more abortions. Even worse, the birthrate in the USSR was falling precipitously, from 42.2 per 1000 in 1928 to 31.0 in 1932, according to a government study released in 1934. Thus the law changed in 1936 when policies started to return to pushing more 'traditional' gender roles for women, and included restricting abortion again - it required a medical reason now. As before though, just because it is illegal doesn't mean women don't seek them. After 1936, \"back-alley\" abortions were on the rise, and they certainly carried additional risks with them, and penalties for obtaining one meant injured women would only be further harmed by not seeking treatment:\n\n > Women who became infected during these procedures or who sought assistance for heavy bleeding were often interrogated at the hospital before they were treated, as the authorities attempted to learn the names of underground abortionists. Abortionists were punished with one or two years\u2019 imprisonment if they were physicians and at least three if they were not. The woman herself received a reprimand for her first offense and a fine if caught again. \n\nAbortion statistics aren't readily available for this period, but my book notes that as the birth rate didn't seem to change much - rising briefly through 1937 when it reached 39.6 per 1000 but again beginning to decline until leveling out at 33.6 per 1000 in 1940, the same rate as 1936 when the law went into effect - as the laws became restrictive again, this would imply women weren't especially deterred by the law and continued to seek them at the same rate as before (see 1926 numbers), if not higher. There was no ready access to, nor education regarding, other means of birth control (Aside from abortion as birth control, by far most common being 'coitus interruptus'), so it was really the only means of family planning available to women. \n\nThe massive population losses that occurred in the early 1940s further increased pro-natal policy planning, but with both carrots and sticks. Laws to assist so called \"war widows\" (referring not simply to women who lost husbands, but women who lost the *potential* for a husband due to the decline in the male population) both in raising their children as single mothers as well as having children in the first place.\n\nSoviet propaganda campaigns to encourage motherhood predated the war even, but the massive calamity of course kicked it into overdrive. During the war, there was a definite decline in the birthrate due to \"general decline in the reproductive health of mothers, as reflected in the high rate of premature births\", as characterized by the People\u2019s Commissar of Public Health G.A. Miterev, and Soviet leadership worked hard to try to turn that around, with their clear awareness that to see further decline would imperil the ability of the USSR to bounce back in the long term.\n\nPrograms and incentives to encourage motherhood existed, such as awards for bearing a certain number of children and various state assistance programs for both married single mothers, while legal penalties were either added or increased, most especially with the Family Law of 1944, which further penalized abortion and increasingly penalized divorce as well. The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even *married* men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship.\n\nNow as to your question, which is basically whether or not the Soviets were successful in reversing the trend during the war years? Well, not terribly. There *was* a definite boost in the fertility rate immediately after the war years, but it was rather short lived, and quickly began to decline again. Here is a table of the fertility rates of the US and USSR, which allows for a comparison of the 'Baby Boom' in America, for the period in question:\n\nYear | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility | - | Year | USA Total Fertility | USSR Total Fertility\n---|---|----|---|---|----|----|\n1926| 2,909| 5,566 | - |1944| 2,567| 1,942\n1927| 2,827| 5,418 | - |1945| 2,491| 1,762\n1928| 2,656| 5,318 | - |1946| 2,942| 2,868\n1929| 2,524| 4,985 | - |1947| 3,273| 3,232\n1930| 2,508| 4,826 | - | 1948| 3,108| 3,079\n1931| 2,376| 4,255 | - | 1949| 3,110| 3,007\n1932| 2,288| 3,573 | - | 1950| 3,090| 2,851\n1933| 2,147| 3,621 | - | 1951| 3,268| 2,914\n1934| 2,204| 2,904 | - | 1952| 3,357| 2,898\n1935| 2,163| 3,263 | - | 1954| 3,541| 2,974\n1936| 2,119| 3,652 | - | 1955| 3,578| 2,909\n1937| 2,147| 4,308 | - | 1956| 3,688| 2,899\n1938| 2,199| 4,351 | - | 1957| 3,767| 2,903\n1939| 2,154| 3,964 | - | 1958| 3,703| 2,940\n1940| 2,301| 3,752 | - | 1959| 3,712| 2,903\n1941| 2,399| 3,742 | - | 1960| 3,653| 2,940\n1942| 2,628| 2,933 | - | 1961| 3,627| 2,879\n1943| 2,718| 2,366 | - | 1962| 3,471| 2,755\n\nSo as you can see, they did bounce, with a sharp - and important - increase in 1946 and 1947, but certainly didn't regain pre-war levels like we see in the US, and even bigger, while they had been far higher than the US before the war, the total fertility rate is now noticeably lower (with a minor exception being, when broken into age cohorts, a higher rate in the USSR for women over 30) and stabilized much quicker within a few years of the war (stabilized being a relative term. there would be later drops). So all in all, yes, there was a brief boom that we can see, and it likely was quite important as far as the stability of Soviet population numbers go, but it wasn't as long lasting as we see in the US, puttering out somewhat quickly.\n\nEdit: Fixed the table to it is easier to see without having to scroll", "Russia's fertility rates were declining [since peaking](_URL_3_) close to 7 children per woman in the 1920s ([English version](_URL_4_) of the graph from that article).\n\nThe number of births fell from above 4 million annually (the famine years excepted) during the 1930s, to not more than 3 million during 1946-1960, and declining to a temporary trough of below 2 million by the mid-1960s before growing again through to the late 1980s (after which they collapsed again).\n\n[Russia Births 1946-2016](_URL_5_)\n\n[Russia Total Fertility Rate 1946-2016](_URL_1_)\n\n(Data sourced from: *Rosstat, the Russian State Statistics service; from the [Human Fertility Database](_URL_6_); and the book [Demographic History of Russia 1927-1959](_URL_7_) by Andreev et al.*)\n\nSo yes, Russia didn't see a baby boom like Western Europe and the US did after WW2, relative to the 1920s/30s, but this was largely a function of its [demographic transition](_URL_0_) - the tendency of countries to transition from high birth/death rates to lower birth/death rates as they develop - than of anything specifically related to the war. In contrast, Western Europe and the US had already undergone their demographic transitions several decades ago.\n\nThis demographic transition seems to have due to typical factors, such as rising industrialization/urbanization rates and the decline in infant mortality rates (here is a graph [from 1900-2015](_URL_2_) compiled from various sources). Abortion was re-legalized in the USSR in 1955, but does not seem to have played a major role in the falling fertility rates."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/", "http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/policy/world-abortion-policies-2013.shtml", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jj4u6/what_were_the_main_differences_and_their/dbgp3wk/"], ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition", "http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/russia-tfr-1946-2016.png", "http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/genby/30544598/789677/789677_original.png", "http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0353/tema01.php", "http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/demohistory1925-2005.jpg", "http://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/russia-births-deaths-1946-2016.png", "http://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/country.php?country=RUS", "http://demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/andr_dars_khar/adk.html"]]}
{"q_id": "79dgn9", "title": "Definition of War vs Conflict", "selftext": "We are having a discussion with a friend who is a History teacher and we are talking about the Vietnam War. Everyone in our group agrees that while it is called the Vietnam War, it was actually only a military conflict since it was never declared a war by Congress. He refuses to cede his position until we show him in academic material it being refered to as a conflict. Until then he holds that it was a full fledged war and not a conflict, that regardless of what Congress says, it is a war as long as 1 side says it is a war. Can anyone provide documentation or evidence to settle this dispute for us. Thanks", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/79dgn9/definition_of_war_vs_conflict/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dp16i5t"], "score": [5], "text": ["I would argue that you're both wrong.\n\n >  it was actually only a military conflict since it was never declared a war by Congress.\n\nThat's a terribly American-centric view of the war and of war in general. Had North Vietnam declared war on the United States would it not have constituted a war if Congress had failed to reciprocate? Revolutionary and civil wars (and the Vietnam war had elements of both) rarely involve formal \"declarations of war.\"\n\n >  Until then he holds that it was a full fledged war and not a conflict\n\nWar is a subset of conflict. The reason why there is a preference for the terminology of \"conflict\" is precisely because \"war\" has legalistic objections surrounding issues like, for example, the treatment of detainees.\n\nIt's for that reason that over the course of the 20th century you've seen a shift from the Third Geneva Convention in 1929, that is, officially, \"Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva July 27, 1929\" to the universal adoption of the terminology of the [Universal Law of Armed Conflict.](_URL_0_) The use of the terminology of \"war\" and \"declarations of war\" (which are a historical rarity over the past two centuries) was too easy for states to abuse, particularly after the experience of WWII where it was almost universally abused by all sides to one extent or another (the incomparable extreme of course being the holocaust.)\n\nIf you want an academic article citing discussion of this, you could start here, as an example: _URL_1_"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/law1_final.pdf", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/1601299?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents"]]}
{"q_id": "9097aw", "title": "What was the French attitude toward the white flag in the 17-19th centuries; wasn't it established by that time to be the flag for negotiation/surrender?", "selftext": "Through my brief research on google, it appears the white flag had been used in Europe to signify intent to surrender or peacefully negotiate by the 17th century. When the French adopted the white flag as their kingdom flag, only to be decorated with fleurs-de-lis for the royals, did this confuse the heck out of the population? Did other kingdoms/nations consider it humorous? Or am I just incorrect in the assumption that 17th century Europe did not widely assume the ubiquity of white flags and surrender?\n\nThanks in advance for your insight!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9097aw/what_was_the_french_attitude_toward_the_white/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e2r7zn0"], "score": [4], "text": ["So the Bourbon kings' use of a white banner as their standard was quite controversial, even unpopular, during the 19th Century. But I can't speak to whether any of this was due to the white flag's association with surrender. In all my sources that discuss the white Bourbon flag, it was unpopular not for what it was, but for what it wasn't: the tricolor.\n\n(Also worth noting: there are several variations on the \"white flag\" that were used, including a pure white version and one containing fleurs-de-lis on the white field.)\n\nThe issues arises on three major occasions in 19th Century French history.\n\nOne is in 1814-15, when King Louis XVIII is restored (twice) to the French throne. On both occasions, he insisted on using the white banner of French kings of old \u2014 white symbolizing purity. But the tricolor had been France's flag for more than two decades, and had been the flag under which the French armies had won victory after victory. \"The white flag of legitimacy, not the tricolor of the Revolution (including the constitutional monarchy of 1789-92) and the Empire, as to be the flag of Louis's reign,\" writes Louis's biographer Philip Mansel (177). \"The first mistakes had already begun.\"\n\nWhile some royalists preferred the white flag, and many other French people doubtless didn't care, significant shares of the population took it as an insult. Joseph Fouch\u00e9, an intelligent if unscrupulous bureaucrat who served both Napoleon and the Bourbons in key roles, warned early on that the tricolor was \"little understood\" by the Bourbons and \"is only apparently a frivolous\" matter. \"The color of the flag,\" Fouch\u00e9 said, \"will decide the color of the reign.\" Louis ordered soldiers to burn their tricolors, as well their regimental eagle standards \u2014 provoking several instances of mutiny (Austin, 51; Jardin and Tudesq, 8). Louis persisted, and on the basis of English and Prussian arms managed to keep his throne despite this. \n\nThe second moment came in 1830, when a popular revolution overthrew Louis's younger brother Charles X and replaced him with the duc d'Orl\u00e9ans, a more liberal Bourbon cousin named Louis-Philippe. In the midst of the \"Three Glorious Days\" that overthrew Charles, a young journalist and activist named Adolphe Thiers grew up a manifesto calling on Louis-Philippe to replace Charles. It was only eight sentences long, so I'll reproduce it in full:\n\n >  Charles X can never again enter Paris; he has caused the blood of the people to be shed.\n > \n >  The republic would expose us to frightful divisions; it would embroil us with Europe.\n > \n >  The duc d'Orl\u00e9ans is a prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution.\n > \n >  The duc d'Orl\u00e9ans has never fought against us.\n > \n >  The duc d'Orl\u00e9ans was at [Jemmapes](_URL_2_). \n > \n >  **The duc d'Orl\u00e9ans has carried the tricolor under fire; the duc d'Orl\u00e9ans alone can carry it again; we want no others.**\n > \n >  The duc d'Orl\u00e9ans has declared himself; he accepts [the Charter](_URL_1_) as we have always wanted it.\n > \n >  It is from the French people that he will hold his crown. (From Price, 163)\n\nThis was a little over-ambitious \u2014 Louis-Philippe was still quite on the fence about becoming king \u2014 but it shows the importance people placed on the tricolor. A few days later, on the verge of assuming power, Louis-Philippe needed to win over the support of the Parisian crowds, so he traveled to the H\u00f4tel de Ville of Paris for a famous scene with the aged Marquis de Lafayette:\n\n >  Louis-Philippe promised to uphold the guarantees of public liberties... This was enough to satisfy Lafayette, who shook his hand. However, through the open windows loud shouts of 'Long live the republic!' and 'Down with the duc d'Orl\u00e9ans!' could be heard from the Place de Gr\u00e8ve. At that moment Lafayette revealed once again his genius for the symbolic populist gesture. He took hold of one end of a large tricolor flag lying in the hall, gave the other end to Louis-Philippe, and the two of them advanced with it on to the balcony. At first the people only cried 'Long live Lafayette!', but when he dramatically embraced Louis-Philippe they gave both men a prolonged ovation. (Price, 175)\n\nIt was the support for the tricolor, and the symbolism it contained, that helped make Louis-Philippe king.\n\nThe tricolor would remain France's flag throughout Louis-Philippe's reign (dubbed the \"July Monarchy,\" after the July revolution that brought him to power), the short-lived Second Republic, and Napoleon III's Second Empire. The white flag enters the picture for a third and final time in the 1870s, after Napoleon III's downfall. A provisional government had been elected, with a dominant majority of monarchists \u2014 though the monarchists were crucially divided between those supporting restoring Louis-Philippe's heirs and those who wanted to bring back the Bourbons in the form of Charle's grandson, the [Comte de Chambord](_URL_0_). The two sides, after much acrimony, struck a deal: the childless Chambord would become king, and Louis-Philippe's grandson would become Chambord's heir.\n\n\"What their plan did not consider,\" writes historian Frederick Brown, \"was the obduracy of Chambord.\" Chambord insisted that the white flag of the Bourbons once again become France's flag. \"'[That flag] has always been for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want it to shade my tomb,' he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the royalist newspaper *L'Union.* '[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace-Lorraine [in 1697]... In the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and victory!'\" (41-2)\n\nChambord's supporters pleaded with him to change his mind, but \"rational heads could not prevail upon him to bend.\" The white flag was so unpopular that even many legitimists refused to contemplate abolishing the tricolor now. There were around 180 \"legitimists\" \u2014 supporters of an old-style monarchy under the Bourbons \u2014 in the Assembly at that point (out of 638 deputies). But after Chambord's ultimatum became known, a majority of them \"dissociated themselves from his manifesto.\" Only around 80 stuck behind Chambord. The rest, Brown writes, \"finding revolution and anachronism almost equally objectionable... pledged allegiance to the Republican tricolor but yearned for a policy of ambiguous complexion \u2014 something neither lily white nor true blue.\" (Brown, 42)\n\nNone of these sources, in their discussions of the white flag, mention anything about people objecting to it because of its association with being a flag of truce or surrender. That's not to say there weren't those objections, and my sources mention the topic in passing while discussing broader political concerns. \n\nIf anyone has sources that discuss the fights over the French flag in the 19th Century, I would very much like to read them!\n\n**Sources**\n\n- Austin, Paul Britten. *1815: The Return of Napoleon*. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2002.\n- Brown, Frederick. *For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.* New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.\n- Jardin, Andr\u00e9, and Andr\u00e9-Jean Tudesq. *Restoration  &  Reaction: 1815-1848.* Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.\n- Mansel, Philip. *Louis XVIII.* Rev. ed. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999.\n- Price, Munro. *The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions.* London: Macmillan, 2007."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri%2C_Count_of_Chambord", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_1814", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jemappes"]]}
{"q_id": "1zhk7n", "title": "What is the historical significance of Kiev to Russia?", "selftext": "I recently came across two interesting statements regarding the city of Kiev and Russia. They are:\n\n\"A Russian nation without Kiev is a sad Russia.\"\nand\n\"Kiev is like the childhood home of the Russian nation.\"\n\nI was curious what exactly these statements meant, so I checked up on Kiev a little bit. It seems it was founded by Vikings. (Or so I'm assuming. The source I read said it was founded by \"Varangians.\" When I hear Varangian, I think of the Byzantine Empire's Varangian Guard, which was mostly Scandinavians.) Since the nation that grew around Kiev was called \"Rus\", I'm assuming it's somehow related to the country of Russia. However, Rus seemed to fall to the Mongols several centuries before Russia the nation existed.\n\nI have a vague understanding of why the Russians may see it as their \"childhood home\", but could someone explain it more thoroughly to me? I'm wondering if it's similar to the way both the French and Germans consider Charlemagne to be the founder of their nations and descended from the Carolingian Empire, despite France and Germany not having technically existed at the time the Empire did.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zhk7n/what_is_the_historical_significance_of_kiev_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cftx6vc"], "score": [3], "text": ["Several nations claim to inheritance to the Kievan Rus.  The Vikings did indeed sail down through Russia's many rivers and settle in several areas, Kievan Rus being the most well known.  Although it is debated whether the founders were Slavs or Varangians (I imagine it was both).  It was perhaps the first powerful state in that part of Eastern Europe.  The Rus kingdom spread beyond modern day Ukraine and into modern Russia, thus both nations can claim successorship from Kievan Rus.  \n\nThe principalities set up by the Kievan Rus were largely left intact by the Mongols.  Muscovy rose to prominence under the Mongols and it is this principality, under the Grand Duke of Moscovy, Ivan (later the Terrible) that united the others and finally defeated the Horde, making way for the Russian Empire.  (_URL_0_) (_URL_1_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://russiapedia.rt.com/russian-history/early-days/", "http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Kievan.html"]]}
{"q_id": "2d0p50", "title": "By the time the last Roman Emperor in the West came to power in 475, the \"Empire\" was really just Italy and some other small parts. But just 100 years previously, the Empire had dominated Europe and North Africa. How did the citizens feel about this decline?", "selftext": "Did they miss [the old days of Empire and glory](_URL_0_)? Their grandparents were part of the greatest Empire in the world (as far as they knew), but in just 100 years [it was all gone](_URL_1_) - and when Romulus Augustulas took the throne, they were mere months away from the final end of Roman power in the West.\n\nAlso, how did people living in areas which were no longer Roman feel? The Gauls, the Spanish, North Africans etc? Did they miss being part of the empire or were they glad to be free of Rome?\n\nRome itself had not been the seat of power for some time at this point: so likewise, did its citizens hark back with nostalgia to the days when their city had been the centre of an Empire which had all spread outwards from those seven hills? Or were they bitter that it had all gone, and now they played second fiddle to a bunch of barbarians?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0p50/by_the_time_the_last_roman_emperor_in_the_west/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjl7m99", "cjlisao"], "score": [41, 4], "text": ["There's parts of your question that I'll leave up to people far more educated than myself on the subject to answer, but I'll try to clear up some misconceptions.\n\nFirstly, you state that \"in 100 years it was all gone.\" That's not quite true: the entire eastern portion of the empire survived on the as the Byzantine Empire for almost another thousand years. However, the Western Empire rolled over and died completely. Also, Roman power returned to Italy during Justinian's reign, albeit briefly and weakly thanks to the plague and the Lombard invasion. \n\nSecondly, the empire of 375, while appearing in terms of territory similar to that of Rome's golden age, was far from the days of Augustus. Plague, famine, and constant war during the Crisis of the Third Century had diminished the population of the West, already less urbanized than the eastern part of the Empire, quite substantially. Furthermore, the empire was suffering from attacks and settlement by Germanic peoples like the Goths around the late 4th century: far before end of the Western empire, these \"barbarians\" came to dominate much of the military and part of the government as well. So, in fact, the final Romans' grandparents wouldn't have been born into the great empire you might be misled by a map into believing still existed. Most of those outer regions soon became extensively settled by \"barbarians\" like the Goths, Franks, and Burgundians, and were semi-autonomous if not independent in all but name anyway.\n\nThat being said, the Western Empire wasn't in an un-salvageable state at the beginning of the fourth century. When the province of Africa, a vital, rich, and mostly undisturbed region fell to the Vandals, everything really started to fall apart. \n\nFinally, I'll give a stab at you asking what people formerly part of the empire would have thought. I'll say, first of all, that it's difficult to determine what the common man would have thought: it's not like he had the ability or the will to express himself. However, the \"barbarian\" rule in certain parts of the empire, such as Italy, really wasn't that bad and not too much of a disruption from Roman rule. Rulers like Theodoric consciously tried to preserve Roman traditions and were respectful of the native culture. In Iberia, the formerly Roman populace had tensions with the Visigoths, who followed Arian Christianity as opposed the the mainstream Chalcedonian beliefs. In Carthage I know that the Vandals had some mildly prosperous trade and that the region was still rich enough to be Justinian's most valuable conquest, indicating the people were probably still doing alright for themselves. \n\nSources:\n\nA History of the Byzantine State and Society, Warren Treadgold\n\nByzantium, The Early Centuries, John Norwich\n\nHistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. (has more than a few issues...)\n\n\nI wish I could answer certain parts of your question more in-depth, but my specialty in is Byzantine history, which often lightly sweeps over the events in the Western Empire during late Antiquity. I think your questions are pretty good ones, though it's difficult for anyone to answer some of them. I'm looking forward to seeing one of our resident Roman experts try to take a crack at doing so! \n", "On the subject of Gothic Italy and Vandal Africa: in both cases these states can look from our perspective as post-Roman, i.e. whatever rose up inside the ruins of a fallen empire. As per your question, we might expect that in both cases there might be at least some nostalgia or regret for the empire that had gone. But in both cases there seems to have been a strong theme of Roman-ness and continuity with the forms Roman rule that gave legitimacy and stability to both regimes. James O'Donnell's Ruin of the Roman Empire, a book I really think quite good, advances this Roman continuity as the key to getting why these two states flourished (and why they proved such trouble for Justinian). Theoderic ruled very much as the emperors before him had done, and in the case of his immediate predecessors, his version of roman rule was much more effective. The Vandal case, although less well sourced than Theoderic, has similar outlines. In both cases when Justinian's armies arrived in the sixth century, ostensibly to bring these \"Roman\" places back into the empire to which they rightly belonged, the local populations treated Justinian's forces more like foreign invaders than fellow-countrymen come to rescue them from the barbarians. In Italy this stark resistance to the empire on the part of the \"Roman\" inhabitants of Italy explains why the Gothic war dragged on so long. In North Africa the Vandal regime fell quite quickly, but low level (guerrilla, to use the wrong term) resistance ensured that Constantinople would not have an easy time holding on to this conquest. I know that O'Donnell's book is controversial on these points, but if he's correct, or close to it, then the implication for your question seems to be that view the empire as something sadly lost, the citizens of the western successor states were much more likely to see Roman-ness as ongoing and the emperor in Constantinople as a dangerous foreign aggressor. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.utexas.edu/courses/ancientfilmCC304/lecture21/images/3.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Roman_Empires_476AD.svg"], "answers_urls": [[], []]}
{"q_id": "es9kd4", "title": "How did the modern Chinese concept of nationhood and race develop?", "selftext": "We know that Han as an ethnicity has its roots in the late Qing, but I have recently heard the idea that race and nationhood developed from the Qianlong Emperor. Can this be elaborated on? Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/es9kd4/how_did_the_modern_chinese_concept_of_nationhood/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ff922de", "ffa95f9"], "score": [12, 10], "text": ["This is quite similar to [a question asked recently](_URL_1_) by /u/michelecaravaggio that I began drafting an answer to, so helpfully I can kill two birds with one stone here! Admittedly, I'm only really capable of taking the narrative up to the early Republic, before the KMT came to power in 1927, so hopefully someone with a much better grasp of the 20th century's dynamics of race and nationhood like /u/drdickles may be available to step in.\n\nThe concept of race is not at all alien to modern China, and there is indeed a character for it (which always makes things easier), \u65cf (Mandarin *zu*, Cantonese *zuk*, Hokkien *chok*, Hakka *chhuk*), often found in contemporary usage in the compound \u7a2e\u65cf (Mandarin *zhongzu*, Cantonese *zong zuk*, Hokkien *cheng chok*, Hakka *chung chhuk*), itself at times compounded into \u7a2e\u65cf\u6b67\u8996, 'racism'.\n\nThe emergence of this concept is a bit murky, and there has been disagreement over when exactly conceptions of ethnicity became common across China. The crucial thing, though, is that there's a relative consensus that the first people to broadly accept the nootion of 'essentialist' ethnic identities were not the majority Han Chinese, but rather the Manchus. Manchu conceptions of ethnicity are again a source of controversy: those influenced by Mark C. Elliott's study of the provincial Banners err on the side of the Manchus having had a concept of ethnicity from at least the early 17th century, which was made a protected identity following the Banner reforms of the Qianlong reign, while those operating under the framework suggested by Pamela Crossley's study of imperial ideology prefer to view ethnicity as the product of the Qianlong Emperor's promotion of a new, essentialist mode of emperorship. Edward J.M. Rhoads, in his study of the development of Manchu and (to a lesser extent) Han identities in the period between the end of the Taiping War and the Northern Expedition, notes that even then, Manchu identity was still a shifting concept until the post-imperial governments equivocated it with Banner enrolment. And that's just for Manchu identity! While Han identity did change alongside Manchu identity, the move towards genuinely accepting a more 'essentialist' view of that identity began very much in the 19th century.\n\nI've recently discussed the shifting basis of Manchu identity [in this answer](_URL_0_). It may seem that discussions of Manchu identity are not directly relevant to the issue of Han identity, but as Crossley and Rhoads both suggest, ethnic policy towards one group almost invariably had bearings on the conception of others. For example, the Banner reforms of the Qianlong period recategorised most of the Hanjun (Han-martial or Military Han) portion of the Banners as either Manchus (if from Liaodong) or Han (if not), and while this liminal group had never been a major part of the population of the empire as a whole, this does point to a policy in which hybrid identities like those of the Hanjun would not be tolerated, and instead the empire's peoples would be increasingly lumped into immutable overarching categories, or as Crossley terms them, 'constituencies'. In her view, as with James Millward in *Beyond the Pass*, the main five constituencies were the Manchus, Han, Mongols, Tibetans and Muslims.\n\nThe exact basis for defining these was still somewhat unclear. To some extent, it was linguistic \u2013 Manchus speaking and reading Manchu, Han Chinese (in all its too-often-forgotten varieties), Mongols Mongolian, Tibetans Tibetan, and Muslims Chaghatai Turkic and sometimes Arabic. To some extent it was religious \u2013 Manchus were mostly shamanists, Han were (supposed to be) Confucians, Mongols and Tibetans practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism, and Muslims were, well, Muslims. However, both of these sorts of idealised identity construction were difficult to reconcile with the realities of identity on the ground. Manchus were increasingly Sinophone, Muslim enclaves in China tended to speak the Chinese variety of their particular locale rather than a Turkic language, and of course there are all the varieties of Chinese that were and are spoken across the vast expanse that is China proper. Shamanism seems to have declined outside the imperial court, Han were often Mahayana Buddhists, some Mongols further west were Muslims, the Red Hat sects of Tibetan Buddhism retained a presence in the Tibetan diaspora in Sichuan, and, Islam being a diverse religion despite modern stereotypes, by the 19th century orthodox Sunnism had to wrestle with growing Sufi sectarianism. The response from the Qing court was partly Procrustean, such as through military campaigns to suppress troublesome religious minorities, be they rebelling secret societies among the Han, the Jahriyya Sufi movement among the Hui, or the B\u00f6n- and Red Hat-practicing Jinchuan, a Tibetan diaspora group in Sichuan.\n\nBut aside from trying to force these groups to conform to certain cultural expectations, there was also a move towards altering the basis of identity itself. As with most Qing ethnic policy, this began with the Manchus but percolated down. In Crossley's analysis, this is first evident with Qianlong-era texts stressing the immutable, bloodline-derived nature of Manchu identity, including the 1743 *Ode to Mukden* (\u1865\u1820\u1828 \u200d\u200d\u1873 \u1820\u1875\u1820\u1865\u1820 \u182e\u1860\u1874\u1869\u185d\u1828 \u200d\u200d\u1873 \u182a\u1873\u1868\u1865\u185d *Han-i araha Mukden-i fu bithe*) and the 1783 *Discourses on Manchu Origins* (\u6eff\u6d32\u6e90\u6d41\u8003 *Manzhou yuanliu kao*), which nonetheless still called on contemporary Manchus to at least perform their ethnic roles through, for example, revival of linguistic practice. My linked answer above goes into a bit more detail on this front, though at the time I wrote it I had overlooked the continued promotion of Manchu despite its gradual diminution as a point of ideological significance.\n\nBut let's turn our attention to China's numerically (and now politically) dominant ethnic group, the Han. During much of the Qing period, the Han conception of ethnicity was in very much a transitional state. The late Ming, when China's frontiers were decidedly closed off thanks to fortifications and embargoes against the steppe peoples, saw the emergence of a degree of ethnic essentialism, with its fiercest proponent being the political philosopher Wang Fuzhi, who lived through the Manchu conquest of China in the 1640s-60s. Under the Ming, he had confidently asserted that 'civilisation' and 'barbarism' were physically separated by cosmic design, and implicitly denied the transformative agenda of Mencian Neo-Confucianism.\n\nAt the same time, though, such essentialism was always a minority position, and under the Qing that sort of belief in cultural transformation remained standard. The Yongzheng Emperor's 1729 *Discourse on Righteousness to Dispel Confusion* (\u5927\u7fa9\u89ba\u8ff7\u9304 *Dayi juemi lu*), aimed at a Han Chinese audience sceptical of Qing acculturation, stressed that by virtue of coming to rule China, the Qing had acculturated to its ways (in the original text, 'Manchu' appears only twice, referring both times to the pre-conquest state). However, just six years later, the Qianlong Emperor proscribed the text and began asserting hard boundaries between the imperial constituencies, as illustrated above. \n\nHowever, despite officially declaring his opposition to his father's programme of *gaitu guiliu* towards the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and southern China, a programme which very much played into the hands of Neo-Confucian transformative ideas, the Qianlong Emperor failed to completely halt attempts to 'civilise' (or perhaps more accurately 'make Han') the indigenous peoples of China's southern liminal zones. As put by William T. Rowe, notions of transformation were still evident from the 1820s (here, he comments on ethnographic interest in indigenous peoples being motivated by a rather Rousseau-like notion of 'noble savage' predecessors):\n\n >  if these savages were indeed the ancestors of Han Chinese, was it not remotely possible that something had been lost as well as gained in the course of the civilizing process? This was suggested by one Chinese observer of Taiwanese aborigines in the 1820s. Deeply affected by the cultural malaise of the troubled Daoguang era, with its economic depression, recurrent natural disasters, and ominous threat of European expansion, he argued that the rampant commercialization of contemporary society had corrupted our [sic] inherent propriety and that we [sic] should \u201cget back to fundamentals, like the ancients,\u201d along the model presented by these noble primitives.\n\nRowe also cites two divergent examples of Sinophone groups who either sought to shed or obtain distinct identities during the close of the Early Modern period: the Tanka and the Hakka. The Tanka 'boat people' of Fujian and Guangdong plied the provinces' coastal waters thanks to a lack of good farmland, but many sought to obtain landed property, a crucial affirmation of Han status, and thereby gain, within a couple of generations, formal recognition as Han by their peers. The Hakka, on the other hand, also faced with economic hardship, though possessing somewhat stronger linguistic unity than the Tanka, gained a much more palpable sense of subgroup identity, distinct from the Yue-speaking Punti of Guangdong and Guangxi and the Min-speakers of Fujian, and maintained this sense of identity in spite of broad migration to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The existence of Tanka and Hakka 'otherness' well into the 1860s does suggest that neither a singular notion of 'Han', nor one based purely on heritage and bloodline, was necessarily dominant at this point.", "/u/EnclavedMicrostate provided an excellent write up on identity development up to roughly the fall of the Qing. I'll add a bit more about the development of identity during the Republican and how minority groups were separated (or included) along the Han during the CCP period.\n\nNationality and race development after the fall of the Qing was greatly exacerbated by the continual education of elite children in foreign nations. The foremost choice for many Chinese intellectuals to send their children would be Japan. Now, someone could write an entire write-up on this question put replace Chinese with Japanese, and you'll get some similarities and some differences. Japanese ideas of nationalism and race are well documented during the late Meiji-Imperial period. But both Japanese and Chinese ideas of nationhood and race were fundamentally altered by Western thought and practice (the influence of minstrel shows on Japanese intellectuals throughout the mid-1800s is notable). As you may know, the late 1800s is when European colonization really kicks off, and ideas like Social Darwinism (1870s) began altering the way people and governments viewed themselves and 'the other;' that exotic, but barbarian group of humans which would come to make up the \"white man's burden.\" \n\nBy the 1920s, Chinese literati picked up on the notions of Social Darwinism and alike ideologies and began applying this to themselves. China had a lot of justifying to do during this time period. In 1800 they were the center of the Confucian order, lead by the *appointee* of Heaven himself, the emperor! Yet in 1842 they were defeated by Britain. Then again in 1860... Then another run in, in 1900... But the worst of it all was they were defeated by the Japanese in 1895! A former fringe member of the Confucian world. And the First Sino-Japanese war came directly after China's misled Self Strengthening Movement, influenced by Confucian ideals that ultimately overruled more ambitious and innovative leaders such as Li Hongzhang.\n\nThe fundamental ideals of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary ideas included ethnic unity (an idea that will later influence the Maoists).  In fact, the flag waved during the 1911 Xinhai Revolution looked like [this](_URL_2_). A lot of this was influenced by Woodrow Wilson's ideas of self-determination which were popular around the world for obvious reasons. It promoted the unity between what was officially recognized as the five major ethnic groups compromising China: The Han, Manchus, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans. The acceptance of more minority groups inside China would evolve as time went on. Today, the CCP recognizes 55 minority groups. In the early years, the communists generally stayed dedicated to ideas of ethnic equality. To this very day the CCP's \"on paper\" theory is dedicated to equality. But under Chiang and beyond, this was very different practically.\n\nChina was, in many ways, like a lost child during the 1920-40s, fighting bullies (Japan) and disease (constant civil war). Throughout it all, China still had no definitive answer as to where they placed in the world. This is an important concept. Many early anthropologists made it a point to categorize humans into three separate sections, you may have seen it before: Civilized (Western), Semi-Civilized (the Far East, perhaps Russia as well), and Barbarian (Africans, SE Asians, etc.). It was unacceptable to Chinese elites that China fell under a category below another ethnic group, though for most this was regretfully acknowledged. By this time, more and more Chinese students were being sent beyond Japan, mainly to America, but also France or Britain, or even Germany (Chinese and Japanese liked Germany for many reasons, as they represented a bulwark against British and French colonialism). Tasking themselves with the objective of justifying China's relevancy in the modern world, a lot of propaganda was produced in various *manhua* and other media that showed that China... well, China didn't have much but at least they weren't India or an African state! The main point among the propaganda was comparisons between Chinese and any subjugated nation culture. [For example](_URL_1_) (view page 8-9), Africa was a heavy target . Extremely backward in Chinese eyes, and broken under European conquest, Chinese artists pointed out that China may have fallen victim to Western imperialism, but held onto its independence. \n\n The formation of China as a nation-state in Western terms is also pervasive by the 1920s. Not every elite was so open to the ideas of Social Darwinism, as more leftist ideas filtered into China from Russia and Europe. Consider the following quotes:\n\n > So long as there are nation-states (*guojia*), we must uphold nationalism (*minzu zhuyi*)... We are concerned not just for our own Han race, but for the other victimized nations, whose lands have been conquered, rights usurped, and people enslaved... A true nationalist is one who extends his sympathy to others who have suffered from the same (national) excruciation - Zhang Taiyan\n\n & #x200B;\n\n > The more I considered \\[China's problems\\], the more I thought, and then the more I grieved: the reason that **our** China is unlike foreign countries \\[*waiguo*\\] and indeed is bullied by these countries must have a good explanation. So I went to investigate \\[the histories of\\] other countries, and guess what? China is not the only country in this world being bullied by foreign countries! Look at Poland, Egypt, the Jews, India, Burma, Vietnam, and so on: they have all already been destroyed and turned into dependencies \\[*miezuo shuguo le*\\] - Chen Duxiu, co-founder of CCP\n\nThere is a lot of sense of nationalism and unity in these quotes. It shows that the new class of intellectuals in China were exploring, searching for a reason as to why China had fallen so low. Ultimately these ideas are the ones that greatly influence modern (contemporary) China's ideologies on race and nationhood.\n\nUpon taking control of the mainland in 1949, the communists expanded on the [importance of ethnic unity](_URL_0_). Under Mao, the various ethnic groups of China would become one big, happy family. Indeed, many researchers and historians have noted that under Mao, Han attitude towards minority groups tended to be more broadminded. Projects like the *Youhui Zengci,* which could be translated as Affirmative Action, began in 1949 and continues to this day. During the Jiangxi Soviet and Yan'an days the CCP was also active in integrating and giving high independence to minorities.\n\nBut things took a turn again in the 1960s. Following a more Soviet-influenced approach to minorities in a nation, the CCP began developing ideas of \"different races united under common tongue, common culture and common economic base.\" I.e., Cantonese children will now learn Mandarin in school rather than Cantonese and so on. This has led to the rapid dismantling of many minority groups within China, and many languages (or dialects) slowly die in China. But still, being a recognized minority has its benefits in Mao and modern China. They are often given special treatment on moral, religious, cultural and other issues that the government does not extend to the Han. Despite this, critics argue that this \"enables selective social control and formal structures for political inclusion or cooptation of groups which otherwise might alienate themselves from the system.\" To this day the status and survival of many minority groups in China is tenuous at best."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eqmiya/the_manchu_ruled_china_for_centuries_well_into/fev4r8o/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/erm13p/did_the_chinese_ever_develop_an_idea_of_race/"], ["https://chineseposters.net/themes/national-minorities.php", "https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/modern_sketch_03/ms_gallery08.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China#/media/File:Flag_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931928).svg"]]}
{"q_id": "38wyk5", "title": "How many times have 'the Jews' been expelled/exiled/ejected/etc?", "selftext": "From places, countries etc.\n\nThe Babylonians removed them, Spain did in the 13th century, a English king in the 16th. Hitler wanted them gone and shipped some out. But how many times in history has it happened. Either from people or power. \n\nApologies for the crude title, but felt it was the best way to get the message across.\n\nThanks.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38wyk5/how_many_times_have_the_jews_been/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cryi6gx", "cryjl9u", "cryux4h"], "score": [6, 17, 2], "text": ["Spain didn't expel the Jews until 1492, and Portugal in 1497. They were among the last western European kingdoms to do so, as England had done so in 1290 and France twice--once in the 13th century and once in the 14th.\n\nI certainly don't have a comprehensive answer to your question, apart from confirming that you're right--it has happened many times.", "Important note, the Babylonians did not expel the Jews from their [the Babylonians'] land as the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English did. The Babylonians conquered Judea (the land of the Jews) and expelled them from there TO Babylonia, although it should be noted that mostly the Judean elite was expelled while the peasantry largely remained.", "Side question. It at least seems as if pogroms were relatively common occurrence in Eastern Europe, but did any of those nations (e.g. Commonwealth, Russia) at any point actively try expel the Jews?"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "5gei1d", "title": "What happened to the Carthaginian people after the fall of Carthage?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gei1d/what_happened_to_the_carthaginian_people_after/", "answers": {"a_id": ["daruc1n"], "score": [101], "text": ["Many of them were killed, many of them were sold into slavery, and many of them undoubtedly lived out there lives scarred by the horror that they witnessed. The city of Carthage itself remained devoid of urban settlement, despite the fact that it is a really good spot for a city, until it was designated as a location for a Roman colony by Julius Caesar. No doubt this colonization itself (and the earlier colonizations of North Africa) caused great hardship to the local people. I'm saying this because I really don't want to sugarcoat the process of empire for Rome, which is quite easy to do given what the next paragraph will be. The description of the sack of Carthage in Appian's *Punica*, particularly section 26, is quite horrifying--one particular detail that sticks out is that one street was so slippery with blood that the Romans could not pursue fleeing enemies down it. That being said.\n\nRome never, or at least never unambiguously, pursued a their policy of conquest on the level of population (what one might call \"genocide\"). There was obviously mass slaughter, but it was always towards a particular end, and not the end itself. So there was never a real attempt to \"de-Punify\" North Africa, as once the area itself was conquered, there wasn't really a point. And so despite the wars the area itself remained overwhelmingly \"native\" in origin, which means that the participants in the enormous prosperity of the province in later times would also have been overwhelmingly native. During the imperial period, North Africa became one of the great lynchpins of the empire and its economy, Carthage became one of the largest cities (perhaps equal to Antioch and Alexandria) and some of the most spectacular remainders of the Roman period are found there. Carthage was also one of the great cultural centers of the empire, and in Late Antiquity was in many ways the heart of the Latin Christian world.\n\nThe wealth of the province has been known about for some time, but the original assumption, bolstered by apocalyptic visions such as Appian's, was that it was a thoroughly Roman sort of place, with the old culture stamped out or at least relegated to the rural and poor. More recently this image has been turned inside out, and many of the indications that were used to show thorough Romanization have been convincingly demonstrated to show the opposite. For example, the Capitolium is a particular temple form modeled off of the Capitoline temple in Rome and basically only appears in Italy and North Africa. It was long thought to be a sign of imperial imposition, but recent scholarship by archaeologists such as Andrew Wilson and Naomi Norman have argued pretty convincingly that, for one, in Africa they were built on local initiative, and for two, they are best interpreted within an *African* cultural context. After all, the Carthaginians had their *own* triad of Tanit, Bel and Eshmun, and there are tons of Tanit related imagery throughout the period.\n\nSo the broad answer to your question is that despite the brutality of conquest, the Carthaginian people were the determinant influence on Roman North Africa, which became one of the most prosperous areas of the empire.\n\nMy big influence here is David Mattingly, particularly his *Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire*. He is mostly interested in the enduring divisions and conflict in post-conquest provincial society, which I am mostly eliding over."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "72xfst", "title": "Why did tank destroyers using the Sherman tank chassis have thinner hull armor.", "selftext": "I was reading about ww2 armor and i saw that the M10 and M36, Which are built on the Sherman chassis had much thinner armor on the chassis. How exactly does that work out, Especially when a lot of the TDs were built out of converted Shermans.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/72xfst/why_did_tank_destroyers_using_the_sherman_tank/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dnm26rk", "dnmboze"], "score": [7, 2], "text": ["The M10 was a unique vehicle, and wasn't converted from anything that was already produced.\n\nThe original prototype of what would become the M10, the [T35](_URL_0_), was just an M4A2 Sherman with a different, open-topped cast turret mounting a 3-inch gun. The armor on the upper hull was later changed to sloped plates, creating the [T35E1](_URL_1_). These two prototypes were delivered at the same time, in April 1942. To reduce the weight of the vehicle, the armor on the upper hull was reduced from 1 1/2 inches to 3/4 inch thick. The T35E1, standardized as the M10, entered production in September 1942 with a different turret, constructed of welded armor plate. Both the head of the Tank Destroyer Force, Major General Andrew Bruce, and the head of the Armored Force, Major General Jacob L. Devers, were not particularly pleased with the M10. It was as heavy as a standard Sherman, no faster, and had only slightly better firepower. Bruce favored his pet project, the T49, which would later become the T70, standardized as the M18, or Hellcat. It was light (with the requisite thin armor), and extremely fast, two of the qualities his Force found paramount\n\nThe armor on the lower hull of the M10 was the same as on a normal Sherman; 2 inches on the front, 1 1/2 inches on the sides and rear, and 1/2 inch on the floor. The M10 lacked the additional 1/2 inch thick belly plate under the driver's and assistant driver's positions that provided them additional protection from antitank mines, presumably to reduce weight. The M36 tank destroyers, as they were converted from existing M10s, featured the same armor protection. Bruce did not favor this vehicle either, as it was heavier and slower than even the M10.", "The American pre-war military doctrine predicted two types of units involved in anti-tank warfare. One was the static towed anti-tank gun, which would in theory work as a defensive tool in the event of an enemy armoured breakthrough. After the anti-tank gun units repelled the attack, Tank Destroyers were designed to mount a counter-attack against the enemy armoured units and rout them - in such a doctrine, sufficient armament and speed are the key elements, and armour protection is secondary. \n\nSource: FM-100-5 Field Service Regulations, G.C. Marshall for US Army, 1941"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://imgur.com/a/rH1Mc", "https://imgur.com/a/UPoji"], []]}
{"q_id": "v8mne", "title": "We have Vampires and Werewolves, what did ancient people get scared by? ", "selftext": "I know vampires and mummy's and werewolves are all prominent in todays culture, how long have these types of monsters been around? Did the other ancient cultures have their own monsters, if so what were they? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v8mne/we_have_vampires_and_werewolves_what_did_ancient/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c52az0m", "c52bm14", "c52bpxr", "c52buhn", "c52dmeq", "c52dt2k", "c52q0bd"], "score": [47, 22, 9, 5, 3, 3, 2], "text": ["Your examples are things that ancient people did get scared by that we do not. Getting killed by wild beasts is a fluke nowadays, and while we are still afraid of twisted aristocrats, they take a different form in our imaginations than vampires and mummies. The monsters we're really afraid of are aliens, robots, serial killers, perverts, cults, conspiracies, and zombies.", "You can find a story of a werewolf in the *Satyricon*, and it's very odd.  Very odd.  The werewolf story contains my favorite ever example of the flexibility of Latin w/r/t prefixes: \"circummixit.\"  The werewolf pees on his clothes in a circle (mixit -- >  he pees, circum-- >  around) after stripping down, in order to turn them to stone, so that they won't be stolen while he's wolfing about.  Much smarter than just ripping through them, if you ask me.\n\n\n*The Golden Ass* has a lot of supernatural stuff in it as well, including witches, harpies, people being turned into animals by salves...it's neat.\n\nThe *Aeneid* has some things which are meant to be terrifying, like demon-queens of Hell, ghostly versions of beasts vanquished by heroes like Hercules, things like that.", "How ancient are we talking about?  The vampire myth has been around for a *long* time.", "Most of the monsters that you talk about have their roots (in our culture at least) in victorian England.  (They show up in other places, but their direct descendants for us are from that time).\n\n*The Mummy!* dates [from 1827](_URL_2_!)\n*Dracula* dates [from 1897](_URL_3_)\nWerewolves were also featured in Dracula.\nI'd add in *Frankenstein*, published in [1823](_URL_0_) as being in the same vein.\n\nGenerally, you can look at each of these allegorically, dramatizing the fears of the era.  Vampires and Werewolves both seem to symbolize fear over the growing force of women in the era, with men feeling emasculated by foreigners and that their sisters, daughters and wives are at risk of being abducted or seduced by the things that a Victorian man was not (romantic or passionate).\n\nMummies and Frankenstein's Monster seem to represent a kind of fear over technology--things that should be left undiscovered.  Mummies had ancient magic and Frankenstein's Monster was powered by electricity, suggested a discomfort with new technology.\n\nBoth discomfort over the increased sexual choice afforded to women and fear of new technology remain relevant topics in today's culture, which probably helps to explain the existing popularity of these characters.  Aliens probably fit in with mummies or Frankenstein's Monster.\n\n > Did the other ancient cultures have their own monsters, if so what were they?\n\nWell, a few examples:  \n[Minotaurs](_URL_4_)--which don't figure in today's literature almost at all, which Wikipedia claims represent a distancing of Greeks from a more religious past.\n[Centaurs](_URL_5_)--which appear in Medieval folk art.  Probably represent fear of conquering outsiders.\n[Y\u016brei](_URL_1_)--Japanese.  These are similar to Ghosts.  Here, they represent fear of losing touch with tradition.\n\n\nGenerally, things were feared that were new or unexplained or terribly dangerous, like certain animals.  In addition, some metaphysical stuff crept in, but was pretty uncommon compared to today.  You spend a lot more time worried about wolves when you're a shepherd than you do about zombies.", "Here's a good example of a ghost story that appears in Plutarch's [Life of Cimon](_URL_0_):\n\n > There was left one orphan of this house, called Damon, surnamed Peripoltas, in beauty and greatness of spirit surpassing all of his age, but rude and undisciplined in temper. A Roman captain of a company that wintered in Chaeronea became passionately fond of this youth, who was now pretty nearly grown a man. And finding all his approaches, his gifts, his entreaties, alike repulsed, he showed violent inclinations to assault Damon. Our native Chaeronea was then in a distressed condition, too small and too poor to meet with anything but neglect. Damon, being sensible of this, and looking upon himself as injured already, resolved to inflict punishment. Accordingly, he and sixteen of his companions conspired against the captain; but that the design might be managed without any danger of being discovered, they all daubed their faces at night with soot. Thus disguised and inflamed with wine, they set upon him by break of day, as he was sacrificing in the market-place; and having killed him, and several others that were with him, they fled out of the city, which was extremely alarmed and troubled at the murder. The council assembled immediately, and pronounced sentence of death against Damon and his accomplices. This they did to justify the city to the Romans. But that evening, as the magistrates were at supper together, according to the custom, Damon and his confederates, breaking into the hall, killed them, and then fled again out of the town. About this time, Lucius Lucullus chanced to be passing that way with a body of troops, upon some expedition, and this disaster having but recently happened, he stayed to examine the matter. Upon inquiry, he found the city was in no wise faulty, but rather that they themselves had suffered; therefore he drew out the soldiers, and carried them away with him. Yet Damon continuing to ravage the country all about, the citizens, by messages and decrees, in appearance favourable, enticed him into the city, and upon his return, made him Gymnasiarch; but afterwards as he was anointing himself in the vapour baths, they set upon him and killed him. For a long while after apparitions continuing to be seen, and groans to be heard in that place, so our fathers have told us, they ordered the gates of the baths to be built up; and even to this day those who live in the neighbourhood believe that they sometimes see spectres and hear alarming sounds. The posterity of Damon, of whom some still remain, mostly in Phocis, near the town of Stiris, are called Asbolomeni, that is, in the Aeolian idiom, men daubed with soot: because Damon was thus besmeared when he committed this murder. \n\nIn ancient Greece the heroes of the bronze age seem to have performed a function quite similar to modern ghosts, as Martin Nilsson explains in his book [Greek Folk Religion](_URL_2_):\n\n > Ghost stories like those current even in our day were current in antiquity also. In literature they do not appear until the Roman age. Their apparent absence in the classical age is deceptive. Ghosts went by the name of heroes, and genuine ghost stories are related of the heroes. I have mentioned the hero of Temesa, to whom the inhabitants were compelled to sacrifice yearly the fairest virgin of their town until a well-known pugilist by the sheer force of his fists drove him into the sea; and Orestes, whom no Athenian liked to meet by night because he was likely to give him a thrashing and to rob him of his clothes.\n\nIf you're looking for more fun examples, I can recommend the book [Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook](_URL_1_).", "The myths surrounding werewolves, vampires, witches, etc, have been around for a very long time. There's multiple accounts of people in the Medieval Era being executed because they were suspected of being werewolves. Everyone knows about witch trials throughout history where suspected witches were burned at the stake. People fear what they do not understand. They didn't understand why their sheep kept getting killed or disappearing, so they feared werewolves were behind it. They didn't understand why people in a village were becoming ill, so they feared witches were the cause. These fears sometimes led to a lot of people getting executed. I am not an expert in this area, though, so maybe an actual expert in this field will pop in here and give you more details. ", "A  lot  of  cultures  had  Lords  of  the  Underworld,  like  the  Greek  Hades  or  the  Aztec  Mictlantecuhtli,  who  could  be  scary  to  small  children.  In  Mesopotamia,  there  were  evil  wind  demons,  like  Pazuzu  from  the  Third  dynasty  of  Ur,  (2112  to  2004  BC)  who  slowly  evolved  into  a  less  frightening  form.  By  the  Late  Assyrian  and  Neo-Babylonian  period,  Pazuzu  amulets  were  often  used  to  protect  women  in  child  birth  from  even  more  malevolant  evil  spirits.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABrei", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur"], ["http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/cimon.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Witchcraft-Ghosts-Greek-Worlds/dp/0195151232/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340066029&amp;sr=8-15&amp;keywords=ancient+classical+ghosts", "http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Folk-Religion-Martin-Nilsson/dp/0812210344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340066169&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=greek+folk+religion"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "3357bv", "title": "I'm looking for reading recommendations on labor history of Nazi Germany (in English)", "selftext": "Hey guys! My question is pretty self-explanatory. I'm interested in how the Nazi government treated the working class, what was the relationship like between labor, capital and the state during the years of nazi reign. Is there any monographs on it in English? If not, I'll be satisfied with anything you have for me. Thank you!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3357bv/im_looking_for_reading_recommendations_on_labor/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cqhrz4b"], "score": [3], "text": ["Although it is long out of print, Robert Smelser's biography *Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Leader* is a good introduction to the *Deutsche Arbeitsfront*, the state body that governed labor affairs and replaced trade unions. The ability of the NSDAP to recruit among certain segments of labor in the Weimar Republic is covered in the anthology *The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany*. Conversely, the anthology *Business and Industry in Nazi Germany* examines the role of capital within the Third Reich. Richard Overy's *The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938* is a good overview of the Third Reich's peacetime economy and the structural strains created by its particular form of recovery. Finally, although it sounds like fodder for the likes of American far right conservatives, *Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945* by Kiran Klaus Patel is a comparative history of the *Reichsarbeitsdienst* (RAD) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) examining issues like masculinity, collective identity, and tacks a transnational approach to the issue of labor's relationship to the state.  "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "25erei", "title": "Why do European place names like \"Southend-on-sea\" or \"Villes-sur-mere\" explain their location but such names are uncommon or nonexistant in the New World?", "selftext": "If there are any examples of place names like this in the Americas, or even other areas colonized by Europeans, feel free to point them out. I always found these odd place names in France and England.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25erei/why_do_european_place_names_like_southendonsea_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["chghpal", "chgnqy1", "chgofa0"], "score": [7, 2, 3], "text": ["Names that describe geographical location? Well in California I can think of many, there's Oceanside, Riverside, Long Beach, Seaside, Quartz Hill. And with the Spanish heritage, California is not limited to English names, there are some in Spanish too: Arroyo Grande (big spring), Morro Bay (bluff), Cerritos (little hills), La Mesa (plateau). In  indigenous languages there's Mojave, which means [beside the water](_URL_0_).\n\nBut I guess they're not common in the Americas because towns in Europe didn't document their founding (I can recall Rome has a myth of being founded); and in the newly discovered territories they colonists tried to leave their personal mark on the towns being founded (family name, crown, religious, or even the new version of were they came).", "Also, keep in mind that there are many towns and cities in the Americas whose names are corruptions of Native American names for the locations and that those names frequently are descriptive of their locations.  For instance, the name of Saco, Maine is derived from an Eastern Abenaki term meaning \"land where the river comes out.\"^1\n\n1.  William Bright, *Native American Placenames of the United States* (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004) [Link to Google Book] (_URL_0_)", "I can only speak for France, but in the early modern era, the central government decided that for ease of administration, no two villages would be allowed to have the same name. Most French towns that are named (Village)-sur-Mer or (Village)-sur-(river) tacked on that suffix in that era to comply with this decree. In the ensuing centuries, towns have been renamed or abandoned, so many of these villages lost their \"twin\" town with the same name, but retain the suffix anyway.\n\nSource: \"The Discovery of France\" by Graham Robb"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.bigorrin.org/mojave_kids.htm"], ["http://books.google.com/books?id=5XfxzCm1qa4C&amp;pg=PA413&amp;lpg=PA413&amp;dq=saco+maine+etymology&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=ZSkDs2fowp&amp;sig=_E_vi0qWVAfPt_IQeebRFdL_ol8&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=ubhxU_zHDdWxyASrv4CgCQ&amp;ved=0CFcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q=saco%20maine%20etymology&amp;f=false"], []]}
{"q_id": "4n49dy", "title": "Why did the US government refuse to support Chiang Kai-Shek after WW2, and was this a major cause of the victory of the Chinese Revolution?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4n49dy/why_did_the_us_government_refuse_to_support/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d40w41t"], "score": [75], "text": ["The US government refused to support CSK after WW2? What? The US sent a whopping $4 billion to him within two years after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The US gave him military hardware and trained his troops. The US airlifted Nationalists forces to liberated areas, including Manchuria, and also stationed US troops in strategic areas. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1c1cnv", "title": "Abolitionists vs Anti-Slavery?", "selftext": "Hello everyone!\n\nI have to write an essay about the differing views in regards to politics, religion, and slavery in the states/territories between the abolitionists and anti-slavery people. My textbook is rather small and does not cover this topic in depth, and I have not been able to find any articles online that may help. It would be great if you could point me in the right direction!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1c1cnv/abolitionists_vs_antislavery/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c9c2o5i"], "score": [3], "text": ["You might start [at the American Memory collection](_URL_1_). The way to think about this is that Abolition=immediate end of slavery because slavery is bad (usually on moral grounds, ie Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison) while Anti-Slavery=ending slavery for the US. An antislavery person might think Africans are inferior and so ending slavery might stop their population growth in the US. They might see it as a policy problem, and be willing to be gradual. There are better examples when you look at the stances of politicians. Even Jefferson can seem like an antislavery person at times (later in life). See Ron Takaki's [A Different Mirror](_URL_0_)."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://books.google.com/books?id=kRuOPwAACAAJ&amp;dq=a+different+mirror&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=59dkUbefB4LoiAKGnYDAAg&amp;ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA", "http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?category=African%20American%20History"]]}
{"q_id": "3zwvlf", "title": "Did Ancient Israelites Write in Egyptian? Was Egyptian (or any form of it) known in Israel during biblical times and was it utilized in writing?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zwvlf/did_ancient_israelites_write_in_egyptian_was/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cypxy64"], "score": [7], "text": ["Am I correct in assuming that by written Egyptian you are referring to Egyptian hieroglyphics in particular? And not to later Egyptian adaptations of other scripts/languages?\n\n[New Kingdom Egypt](_URL_1_) (c.1500-1000 BCE) was a garrison power in the Levant alongside their military rivals, the Hittites. Both Egyptian records and archaeological sites in the Levant (including Modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories) corroborate this, and multiple extant archaeological sites therein contain examples of hieroglyphics.\n\nHowever, most modern [scholarly attempts to date the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures](_URL_0_) - which mostly diverge markedly from the supposed dates of composition the text itself alleges - suggest that written composition (as opposed to the likely earlier oral composition) occurred after this period of Egyptian hegemony from the 8th through 1st Centuries BCE, when Egypt was either weakened, divided, dominated by outside powers, or a combination of the three.\n\nAlthough many of the people living in the Levant at the time certainly had dealings with the Egyptians and probably knew their language at least in terms of speaking ability, writing/reading ability is another matter and if it occurred would certainly have been more limited. Additionally, hieroglyphics were a less efficient script than others present in the Middle East at this time so adopting them may not have made much sense.  It is also important to note that much of the Hebrew Scripture was not written in the Levant at all, but in Babylon.\n\nThe Christian Scriptures emerged long after the end of Egyptian prominence, so it is unnecessary to address them here."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Kingdom_of_Egypt"]]}
{"q_id": "1t4qcr", "title": "Why do some people still believe that the South won the Civil War?", "selftext": "I know that you can look at statistics and actual facts and clearly see that the war was won by the North, just why do some people believe that it was a decisive victory by the South? Is there some sort of reason as to why they believe this or is it just simply ignorance? Thanks!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t4qcr/why_do_some_people_still_believe_that_the_south/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce4gaaw"], "score": [2], "text": ["After reading your question and explanation, I can only come up with one plausible explanation. \n\nThe Civil War was a war fought (essentially) over the equality and humanity of African-Americans. The North argued that blacks shared certain common rights with whites, where the South disagreed (this is a *major* oversimplification, mind you). But then if we examine the final settlement of the Civil War/Reconstruction conflict, we see that blacks have actually gained little. They enjoyed temporary political equality, but things like Grandfather Clauses and Poll Taxes destroyed many black's political representation. Then, Jim Crow reestablished blacks as secondary citizens. Finally, the sharecropping system (and southern culture in general) placed blacks back into virtual slavery and servitude. So what did the North really gain from the War? They ended chattel slavery, and little else (I would argue thats all they really wanted). \n\nBut look, if your friends have these beliefs, just ask them why exactly they say the crazy shit they say. Then youll know, why they say the crazy shit they say. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "b5fe4u", "title": "Did past civilizations have different attitudes to charity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5fe4u/did_past_civilizations_have_different_attitudes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ejda578"], "score": [2], "text": ["Sorry, we don't allow \"throughout history\" questions. It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact.\n\nGood luck!"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2anv7e", "title": "Can historians recommend any good books about medieval warfare and life in France in the early 15th century?", "selftext": "Thank you.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2anv7e/can_historians_recommend_any_good_books_about/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ciy1j3j"], "score": [2], "text": ["Right I was writing this on my phone, cobbling it together from a bibliography for late medieval kingship and nobility, last night so I've rewritten and reposted it. \n\nBefore continuing it should be said that any comprehensive study of warfare and 'life' in early fifteenth-century France requires an examination of England and Burgundy as well. France was in the process of a civil war between two powerful factions (the Burgundians and the Armagnacs) which had led to two high-profile political assassinations (Louis II, duke of Orleans, in 1407 and John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, in 1419), the French king, Charles VI was mentally frail and prone to bouts of madness which had allowed first Louis then John to impose themselves as powerful regents.\n\nIn 1415 Henry V had launched his famous *chevauch\u00e9e* which would culminate in the Battle of Agincourt and the capture of numerous members of the French high nobility (including Charles, duke of Orleans) and the death of many others (including John I, duke of Alen\u00e7on). Henry's campaigns greatly weakened the French control over Normandy but the impasse was not likely to be broken until, in 1419, the future Charles VII, currently known as the Dauphin Charles, was implicated in the murder of John the Fearless. John's son, Philip the Good, concluded an alliance with Henry V which would culminate in the Treaty of Troyes (1420) where Henry V married the daughter of Charles VI and it was agreed that Henry would become Charles's heir and the Dauphin Charles was disinherited (nominally for his involvement in the death of John the Fearless). For the first time the crowns of England and France would be ruled by one man: Henry V. However, on 31 August 1422 Henry V died and three weeks later Charles VI followed him to the grave. Suddenly the situation was complicated. Henry VI of England was only nine months old and the Dauphin Charles had gathered his supporters and established a base in the south. Following a crushing defeat at Verneuil (1424) Charles was driven back and Orleans was besieged by the English commanders.\n\nIn 1429, the French fortunes turned. Joan of Arc appeared at Chinon, was investigated at Poitiers, and dispatched with the French army under Raoul de Gaucourt to relieve the siege of Orleans. Here Joan's mission was apparently vindicated by God and suddenly there were a spate of French victories (Orleans, Jargeau, Beaugency, and Patay). On the political front Charles was crowned king of France at Reims on 17 July 1429, a ceremony in which Joan of Arc was instrumental, and secured the support of Arthur de Richemont who became the Constable of the French army. The English incursions against the duchy of Brittany had persuaded the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, to begin making reconcilatory motions towards Charles VII.\n\n[Joan was captured in 1430 and tried and executed as a heretic and schismatic in 1431](_URL_3_). In 1435 at the Congress of Arras, Charles VII and Philip the Good and the entire balance of the war changed. The conciliatory nature of Henry VI of England did not assist matters, and Charles's innovative military reforms (the *compagnies d\u2019ordonnance*) gave him a martial edge over the English. A combined strategy of siege warfare and bribery led to the rapid fall of English strongholds in Gascony and Normandy and after Battle of Castillon (1453) the French were the victors of the Hundred Years War. Now the matter of internal cohesion arose. In 1440, the dukes of Bourbon and Alen\u00e7on, joined by members of the lower nobility and mercenary companies, had rebelled against Charles (a rebellion known as the Praguerie) and endangered the successes won after 1429. The Praguerie had been brutally put down by Arthur de Richemont, but the tensions were simmering throughout the French nobility. With Gascony and, even worse, Normandy now back under Charles's control. Many of Charles's key supporters had fled Normandy with the English triumph and abandoned immense wealth in lands and goods, while those who had remained were perceived as *collaborateurs*. Matters were exacerbated by the need to deal with Joan of Arc's condemnation and execution as a heretic and schismatic. Joan had been instrumental in Charles's crowning and put the legitimacy of his reign in question, yet Joan had been tried by the Masters of the University of Paris and burned in Rouen, the heart of English power in Normandy. Moreover, Joan was loathed by the Burgundians, the French had actually written her out of their narratives during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Arras (1435). To reopen the trial of Joan would stir up tensions at a key point in Charles's reign, thus the trial was one of Nullification and not Rehabilitation (the trial record itself and the dead were condemned). However, we have now reached the end of my knowledge and interest in French politics and history and should anyone wish to add more then feel free.\n\nThere are some fascinating case studies but if your knowledge of medieval France is only cursory then I would highly recommend heading first and foremost to the *New Cambridge Medieval History* series. I'm not sure what you mean by 'life', if you're interested in warfare I assume high politics but you'll need to tell me if you're interested in anything else.\n\n**General Surveys:**\n\n[New Cambridge Medieval History](_URL_4_), 7 Vol., Cambridge, 1995-2005, vols iv-vii.\n\n\nCowell, A., *The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred*, Cambridge, 2007.\n\nDuby, G., *The Chivalrous Society*, Berkley, 1977. | *France in the Middle Ages 987\u20131460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc*, trans. J. Vale, Oxford, 1991.\n\n(ed.) Duggan, A.J., *Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations*, Woodbridge, 2001.\n\nKaeuper, R., *Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe*, Oxford, 1999. | *Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry*, Philadelphia, 2009.\n\nKeen, M.H., *Chivalry*, London, 1984.\n\n**Pre-Fourteenth-Century Context and Historiography**\n\nBouchard, C.B., *\"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble\": Chivalry and Society in Medieval France*, New York, 1998. | *Those of my Blood: Constructing Noble Families in Medieval Francia*, Philadelphia, 2001.\n\nCaron, M.-T., *Noblesse et pouvoir royal en France (XIIIe\u2013XVIe si\u00e8cle)*, Paris, 1994.\n\nCrouch, D., *The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300*, Harlow, 2005.\n\nFlori, J., *L\u2019Id\u00e9ologie de glaive*, Gen\u00e8ve, 1983. | *L\u2019Essor de la chevalerie*, Gen\u00e8ve, 1986.\n\n**Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century:**\n\nAllmand, C.T., *War, literature and politics in the late middle ages*, Liverpool, 1976. | (ed.) *War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France*, Liverpool, 2000.\n\n(eds) Bates, D. and Curry, A., *England and Normandy in the Middle Ages*, London, 1994.\n\nBlockmans W. and Prevenier, W., *The Promised Lands. The Low Countries under Burgundian rule, 1369\u20131530*, Philadelphia, 1999.\n\nBoulton, d'A., *The Knights of the Crown*, Woodbridge, 1987. | 'The Order of the Golden Fleece and the Creation of Burgundian National Identity', in *The Ideology of Burgundy*.\n\nBrown, A., *The Valois dukes of Burgundy*, Oxford, 2001.\n\nCurry, A. *The Hundred Years War*, London, 1993. | (eds) with Hughes, M., *Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War*, Oxford, 1994. | 'Two Kingdoms One King: The Treaty of Troyes (1420) and the Creation of a Double Monarchy of England and France', in *'The Contending Kingdoms': France and England 1420-1700*, ed. G. Richardson, London, 2008, pp.23-41.\n\nDevries, K., *Joan of Arc: A Military Leader*, Stroud, 1999.\n\nGriffiths, R.A., *The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461*, London, 1981.\n\nHuizinga, J., *The Autumn of the Middle Ages*, Chicago, 1996.\n\n     This is another 'old' text written in the 1920s.\n     It should be read with the 'New Huizinga' article, below.\n\nKeen, M.H., 'The End of the Hundred Years War: Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England', in *England and Her Neighbours 1066-1453*, eds M. Jones and M.G.A. Vale, London, 2003, pp.297-311.\n\nMargolis, N., *An Introduction to Christine de Pizan*, Florida, 2011.\n\nPaviot, J. 'Burgundy and the Crusade', in *Crusading in the Fifteenth-Century: Message and Impact*, ed. N. Housley, Basingstoke, 2004, pp.70-80.\n\nPeters, E. and Simons, W.P., \u2018The new Huizinga and the old Middle Ages\u2019, *Speculum* 74 (1999), pp.587\u2013620.\n\nSolon, P.D., 'Popular Response to Standing Military Forces in Fifteenth-Century France', *Studies in the Renaissance*, Vol. 19 (1972), pp.78-111.\n\nTaylor, C.D., *Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War*, Cambridge, 2013. [Preface available here](_URL_1_) and [introduction available here](_URL_0_).\n\nVale, M.G.A., *Charles VII*, London, 1974. | *War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages*, London, 1981.\n\nVaughn, R., *Charles the Bold*, 2^nd ed., intro. W. Paravicini, Woodbridge, 2002. | *Philip the Good*, 2^nd ed., intro. G. Small, Woodbridge, 2002. | *John the Fearless*, 2 Vol., Woodbridge, 2005.\n\n(eds) Villalon, L.J.A. and Kagay, D.J., *The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus*, Leiden, 2004. | *The Hundred Years War (Part II). Different Vistas*, Leiden, 2008.\n\nWalsh, R.J., 'Charles the Bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda', *Journal of Medieval History* 3 (1977), pp.53-87. | *Charles the Bold and Italy 1467\u20131477: politics and personnel*, Liverpool, 2005.\n\nWood, C.T., *Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages*, Oxford, 1988. \n\n**Primary Sources** (in translation)\n\nBrown, A. and Small, G., *Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420-1530*, Manchester, 2008.\n\nTaylor, C.D., *Joan of Arc: La Pucelle*, Manchester, 2006. [Introduction available here](_URL_2_)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/42216/excerpt/9781107042216_excerpt.pdf", "http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/42216/frontmatter/9781107042216_frontmatter.pdf", "https://www.academia.edu/2565128/Introduction_to_Joan_of_Arc_La_Pucelle", "http://redd.it/238no3", "http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/subject_title_list.jsf?subjectCode=04&amp;seriesCode=NCME&amp;heading=The+New+Cambridge+Medieval+History&amp;tSort=title+closed&amp;aSort=author+default_list&amp;ySort=year+default_list"]]}
{"q_id": "7bk5ka", "title": "Need access to archives, what should I do?", "selftext": "Hi there! I am a freshman history student with no experience in serious historical research. This year I'll be writing a thesis on the history of Taiwan. I have already found relevant literature, but still having troubles with sources. I don't live in Taiwan, and my Mandarin skills are, well, basic. I called several large museums, but the staff don't speak English there, and when I finally found someone who would explain the situation in Mandarin, the staff just replied \"you can find everything on the website\". I found a catalogue at last, only to discover that the most valuable catalogues are not accessible for me cause I'm not a member of their library or something... So I feel kinda lost, don't even know where to start from or who should I contact do get access to archive documents.\n\nAlso, I haven't really decided on the topic yet, since I don't know from which period most documents have survived. However, the period should be before 1895, that's an almost mandatory criterium. So, guys, what would be your advice?\n\nP. S. It was suggested that I should contact the university library. However, our uni is very young and so is its library, and there are very few people who study Taiwanese history in our country, so I'm not sure if that would help", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bk5ka/need_access_to_archives_what_should_i_do/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dpiuftk"], "score": [9], "text": ["I'm a librarian and an archivist. First off: contact your library. If librarians only advised on issues we were personally subject experts on we'd have to shut down right now. You think I answer questions about eunuchs all day? Of course not. Librarians are familiar with how to find anything, that's what we're trained on, not subject expertise. I can just as easily answer your question as help someone find car repair manuals for a 1988 Honda Accord, having no expertise in either, it is the same essential task to us. Also you're almost certainly going to need ILL with this, since it sounds like your school doesn't support a strong East Asian program? And you'll probably need help working with ILL because we don't typically teach it to freshman library instructional classes, usually just grad students. \n\nSecond: this is way too much for a freshman, slow your roll! No one expects a freshman to be churning out original archival research in a language they don't fluently read! There would be way less college graduates if so. I do archives instructionals with freshman and they typically are me presenting a single document (in English) carefully selected to relate to their classroom topics, and a worksheet with questions like \"Who wrote this document? Who did the writers intend to read or use this document?\" etc. [Talking this level](_URL_1_) is what I expect from a freshman, as an archivist working with freshmen. \n\nWhat you can reasonably use at your level (though this is somewhat advanced for a freshman, but not crazy advanced) is translated published primary source collections. [Here is a good guide to what these are and how to find them.](_URL_0_) The main words to use when searching are \"sources\" and \"documents.\" [This example search turns up what you should be looking for.](_URL_2_) "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=489191&amp;p=3344216", "https://www.library.illinois.edu/village/primarysource/mod1/index.htm", "http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=su%3ATaiwan+Sources.&amp;qt=results_page"]]}
{"q_id": "2c8iw2", "title": "How close to the original texts is the New Testament today?", "selftext": "Historically speaking, how sure are we that what is in the texts today was what was originally written down? I know it was translated, but what are the odds there was major content changes?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c8iw2/how_close_to_the_original_texts_is_the_new/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjd98se", "cjd9y97"], "score": [13, 2], "text": ["I guess I'd tackle this question by first addressing what \"in the texts today\" means. Biblical versions in modern languages are translated from what's called *critical editions* of the NT. A critical edition is produced by taking the earliest manuscripts of the NT we have, comparing their texts and--through certain (quite complicated and contentious) processes--determining the common \"archetype\" for these manuscripts, which is thought to be close(r) to the original texts. (Big caveat on the term \"original text\" [here](_URL_0_), if you're looking to get waaay into some hardcore stuff.).\n\nMuch more could be said about this process, but the salient point is that the \"texts today\" are really based on manuscripts (or reconstructed texts) from the 2nd-5th centuries--which doesn't lie *too* far away from the time of their original composition. (Though there are many other texts--for example the Homeric works, etc.--for which the earliest manuscripts are ~1,500+ years after the time of their original composition, and yet are almost certainly very close to the \"original\" texts.)\n\n_____\n\nThe question is then this: if we can reconstruct, with good confidence, what the NT texts looked like in, say, the (mid-to-late) 2nd century, *how do we know that the texts weren't changed in the time between their original composition (in the mid-1st to early 2nd century) and then*? \n\nThere are some general methods for determining this. One of the main ways in that interpolations into the texts are often times *disruptive* to their style/vocabulary/syntax/flow, etc. Perhaps if one were unscrupulous enough to actually attempt to alter these texts, they were at the same time careless enough to not spend a lot of time making sure it wasn't an obvious intrusion into these elements of the text.\n\nBut there are other cases in which there is no consensus as to whether something is a secondary interpolation or not. Some of the most hotly-debated passages here include things like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1. People can be trigger-happy about proposed interpolations, though; and you can find discussion/analysis of tons of proposed interpolations in books like William Walker's *Interpolations in the Pauline Letters*. \n\n____\n\nFinally: there are a few instances in the Hebrew Bible where what we think of today as a single \"book\" was originally a shorter original work, with later redactors then taking another (later) related work and adding it to the original one, so that it's almost like a \"collection\" of books within a single one. For example, in the Wiki article for the book of Isaiah, you can find this:\n\n > The scholarly consensus which held sway through most of the 20th century saw three separate collections of oracles: Proto-Isaiah (chapters 1\u201339), containing the words of Isaiah; Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40\u201355), the work of an anonymous 6th-century author writing during the Exile; and Trito-Isaiah (chapters 56\u201366), composed after the return from exile. While one part of the consensus still holds \u2013 virtually no one maintains that the entire book, or even most of it, was written by one person \u2013 this perception of Isaiah as made up of three rather distinct sections underwent a radical challenge in the last quarter of the 20th century.\n\n(The book of Enoch is another great example of this, with the divisions between the separate works that comprise the \"one\" book even more obvious.)\n\nHowever, proposals of a similar process taking place in the NT have not held large sway. Yes, it's virtually uncontested that, say, the author of the gospel of Matthew copied large sections of the gospel of Mark; but this is merely a *utilization of another source*--it's not like Matthew is just Mark + another autonomous work tacked onto it.\n\nPerhaps the most comparable thing in the NT is in the composite nature of things like the [Second Epistle to the Corinthians](_URL_1_): that this \"single\" epistle was actually several separate letters that were then compiled into one \"collection.\"", "We rely primarily on [Alexandrian Text-type](_URL_8_), as it is the oldest we have.  It is older than [Byzantine Text-type](_URL_9_), which is what was used in Orthodox churches, and for the King James translation.\n\nThe oldest types of texts we have are [papyri](_URL_1_).  The oldest one we have of those is [Papyrus 52](_URL_4_).  However, it is just the corners of a page.\n\nProbably one of the oldest texts you would consider a \"book\" would be the [Codex Sinaiticus](_URL_5_), and the [Codex Vaticanus](_URL_2_).  These are both [uncials](_URL_10_), which are generally more complete than the papyri.  There are also more recent [lectionaries](_URL_11_) and [minuscules](_URL_12_).\n\nMany manuscripts were found in [Oxyrhynchus](_URL_3_) about one hundred years ago.  As koine said, we currently use a critical edition of the New Testament, with the most popular being the [Novum Testamentum Graece](_URL_6_).  You can look more at how the New Testament manuscripts are [categorized here](_URL_7_).  And you can see a list of [textual variants here](_URL_0_).  Some variants will be noted in your Bible translation.  A major one is the ending of Mark.  There are two endings known, both of which are later additions to the text.  The first verse also has some controversy as to whether it contains a later addition.\n\n/u/koine_lingua, if I made any mistakes, please tell me/correct me."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2c8iw2/how_close_to_the_original_texts_is_the_new/cjdeb86", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Epistle_to_the_Corinthians"], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Testament", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands_Library_Papyrus_P52", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_of_New_Testament_manuscripts", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrian_text-type", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_text-type", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_uncials", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_lectionaries", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_minuscules"]]}
{"q_id": "2qc4ny", "title": "Generation War or Our Mothers Our Fathers", "selftext": "What are you're opinions of the accuracy of this mini series. It seems far fetched that two soldiers, one a decorated war hero, would associate with a Jew after the invasion of Poland. Also I've heard the Poles were not antisemitic, but no consensus. In the movie this only serves to alleviate German guilt, but is there legitimacy in this claim?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qc4ny/generation_war_or_our_mothers_our_fathers/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cn5t6y7"], "score": [2], "text": ["Disclaimer: I liked Generation War, for what it was, a piece of entertainment; and fairly decent combat scenes.\n\nNow, with that out of the way, I do agree there needed to be a huge suspension of disbelief. My eyebrows merged with my hairline when the 'Token Jewish Friend' made his first appearance. This was unheard of; the Series begins prior to Barbarossa so you wouldn't risk much more than negative attention from the regime at that time, but association or hiding of Jewish persons later on would be a death sentence. It wasn't just farfetched it was insulting; It *really* did seem like it was an alleviation of German guilt. \n\nOthers have taken issue with this as well. Poland did not take well to the depiction of the RKA. There has been arguments that there was heavy anti-semitism before and after WWII in Poland, but the series depicts them as so *collectively* anti semitic that it accomplishes nothing more but to say \"See look, we weren't the only ones!\" Its intellectually dishonest, and the Polish Newspaper \"The Catholic Weekly\" wrote a [good review](_URL_0_) (Use a good translator there) that echoes these sentiments and has some nuggets of info on the actual RK.\n\nIf I could inject my opinion here; I don't think the producers of Generation War meant to deliberately alleviate German guilt, however, based on how it was recieved abroad and the general touchiness of the subject, it certainly appeared that way. As a piece of entertainment, *of course* you need to be able to sympathize, empathize and relate to the main characters - so they become essentially decent people. The 5 main characters are meant to represent ''the typical Germans'' however, so its one big foggy looking-glass. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://tygodnik.onet.pl/swiat/oprawcy-mimo-woli/xr8st"]]}
{"q_id": "6vux7r", "title": "In the Middle Ages, in times of war, how likely would princes participate with their father?", "selftext": "If so, what would be a possible reason to risk losing an heir--even if you had another son. And at what age would it have been expected for the son to participate? If not, what would a prince do instead? Manage the supply line? Guard a castle?\n\nFor specification, we can aim for High Middle Age in England.\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6vux7r/in_the_middle_ages_in_times_of_war_how_likely/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dm3rl5t"], "score": [2], "text": ["I can specify for Early Medieval rather than necessarily High Medieval, although there is some considerable overlap. In essence, the answer boils down to the fundamental values of medieval kingship. A medieval king has three major responsibilities: to defend his people, to justly uphold the law, and to maintain the faith. In particular when dealing with early medieval kingship, such as in Anglo-Saxon England, it was vitally important for a king to be seen as a brave and competent military leader. This is why, for example, Harold Godwinson fights on foot in the middle of the battle line at Hastings in 1066.\n\nIt may seem dangerous to have your heirs alongside you in a battle, but symbolically, it could almost be *more* dangerous for them to be seen to be avoiding battle, and thus be weak. The *Anglo-Saxon Chronicle* portrays a long tradition of heirs taking part in conflict, either alongside their fathers and brothers, or often leading armies independently. According to Asser's *Vita \u00c6lfredi*, King Alfred, for example, was initially unlikely to be a king, and trained for priesthood, but as his oldest brothers were killed, he begins accompanying his older brothers into battle and learning to be a military leader.\n\nAlfred's own son, Edward, campaigned extensively alongside his father in the 880s and 890s, and according to William of Malmesbury, his grandson and future King of England, \u00c6thelstan, was raised in the Mercian court of his aunt \u00c6thelfl\u00e6d, and accompanied her military campaigns against both the Welsh and the Vikings. During \u00c6thelstan's reign, his brothers and heirs Edmund and Eadred both take part in the Battle of *Brunanburh* alongside the king, and the *Anglo-Saxon Chronicle* describes them leading the charge into the Viking lines.\n\nWhere this tradition is not in effect, it can cause issues. The reign of \u00c6thelred II \"the Unready\" is beset by issues, many of which stem from the fact that he takes the throne as a child and only comes of age to rule independently in the 980s, a decade after his accession. Lavelle (2002) and Roach (2016) both suggest that many of the political problems in \u00c6thelred's reign begin after the deaths of his late father's ministers, who had been largely administering the kingdom. These men were widely respected as experienced leaders, and had fought and campaigned together, and the young \u00c6thelred lacked the experience, symbolism or practiced charisma of leading men into battle."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2ed2xn", "title": "What was the first song with the I-V-vi-IV chord progression?", "selftext": "For the last 50+ years pop songs have used the same [four chords](_URL_0_), but when was that chord progression first used? Who wrote the first four chord song?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ed2xn/what_was_the_first_song_with_the_ivviiv_chord/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cjyurfo"], "score": [5], "text": ["[Andalusian Cadence!](_URL_2_) Also known as the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord--sometimes written as i-bVII-bVI-V (or, in the key of A, the descending sequence A, G, F, E)\n\n [the Dorian tetrachord--](_URL_1_) A popular melodic pattern of Ancient Greece[5] offers a possible starting point for the Andalusian cadence.  A sequence more or less close to the Greek tetrachord structure might have been known to the[ Moors in Southern Spain](_URL_0_) and spread from there through Western Europe. The French troubadours were influenced by the Spanish music."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I"], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalusian_cadence", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descending_tetrachord", "http://www.wnyc.org/story/worlds-most-used-musical-sequence/"]]}
{"q_id": "7na8cu", "title": "Happy New Year, AskHistorians! You may now have historical relations with 1998.", "selftext": "We are SO EXCITED for all your questions about Exxon-Mobil merger and the world's longest suspension bridge and the antitrust case against Microsoft and the International Space Station and how books 2 in both Martin's *A Song of Ice and Fire* and Rowling's *Harry Potter* series were released the same year and...\n\nJust kidding. Ask us about Viagra, N*sync, and what the definition of \"is\" is.\n\nMay 2018 be the best year of your life so far and the worst year of your life to come!", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7na8cu/happy_new_year_askhistorians_you_may_now_have/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ds0n7jg", "ds0oc2w", "ds0oh3q", "ds0pqig", "ds0pul2", "ds0q6v2", "ds0qftv", "ds0qp7u", "ds0qvke", "ds0r43j", "ds0ruob", "ds0rz39", "ds0s3ik", "ds0s63s", "ds0sbfd", "ds0sup3", "ds0w2c4", "ds0w323", "ds0wegq", "ds0xvfy", "ds0y4qn", "ds0z5p7", "ds10cfs", "ds10cr5", "ds10fbv", "ds10qk8", "ds11dsf", "ds11ht2", "ds13p2b", "ds148kb", "ds17x4q", "ds1a06n", "ds1jjme", "ds1ww93", "ds07pw3", "ds084u9", "ds0a5pd", "ds0aoxl", "ds0cw0l", "ds0ehwj", "ds0gbkx", "ds0guz4", "ds0hq5g", "ds0hu9v", "ds0i87a", "ds0igpc", "ds0iyi1", "ds0j8cb", "ds0k7rm", "ds0koob", "ds0kq4d", "ds0l3ll"], "score": [26, 64, 16, 13, 4, 3, 54, 11, 48, 39, 3, 13, 3, 4, 7, 10, 2, 3, 5, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 8, 2, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1468, 88, 66, 72, 1248, 92, 59, 278, 303, 509, 37, 18, 764, 4, 66, 128, 17, 280], "text": ["Awesome! I'm looking forward to many enlightening discussions of the cultural significance of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time!", "Don't forget the year the British formally handed over Hong Kong to China. That should lead to some interesting questions and plenty of good Rush Hour references. ", "Now we can talk about the *Second* Congo war! (or at least year 1 of it)", "1998 actually starts to feel recent(and a year ago I would not have said the same about 97). Probably because I was a teenager.  Yanks win get back to the WS. Ocarina of time is released. Phil Hartman died and that bummed me out since his character on the Simpsons was always so enjoyable. ", "Happy New Year!\n\n^What ^is ^\u201cis\u201d?", "Happy New Year everyone! \n\n(I'm not a contributor but let me say this: big thanks to everyone answering and moderating the sub - keep up the great work, you often make my day! )", "I did not have historical relations with that year.", "I was in the museum of the world longest suspension bridge this summer. \n\ntldr: don't build a bridge there", "If I\u2019m currently on the West Coast, do I have to wait another five hours to post questions about 1998?\n\nEDIT: NEVERMIND, Tubthumping came out in 1997.  It\u2019s been fair game all year and I haven\u2019t asked!", "Finally! I can have a question answered that's been burning in my mind for 20 years!\n\nWhat exactly is the function of a rubber duck?", "Not much people will ask about new about Israel. But that\u2019s no prob. I\u2019ll just be here.", "Did Tennessee's national title in 1998 set the Vols up for the decade plus run of failure they've experienced by giving Cutcliffe a chance at being a head coach and increasing fanbase expectations to an untenable level?", "Aww man I feel old now. I'm history.", "Hey everyone, looks like the mods are all out drinking! Feel free to shitpost away! HNY", "*Say, one thousand nine nine nine, ask those questions, any time*\n\n*We gonna party with historians reprobate, like it's Nineteen Ninety Eight!*", "What is the definition of \"is\"? Did we ever actually find out? Did anyone even really care since we apparently never did find out?", "May 2018 is just a month - it will be impossible for to that to be a year. \n\n/s", "I feel old reading this...", "Thank you for the starting gun.  Drat!  I didn't get the first 1998 question with [Did President Clinton's oral sex change US attitudes towards oral sex?](_URL_0_)!  Beaten by\n\n~~/u/MaesterMagoo on Hong Kong~~ Happened in 1997, so that wasn't a new 2018 question.\n\n/u/jimjay: [Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 - how did someone who had tried to lead a coup and overthrow democracy end up getting elected?](_URL_1_)\n", "I'm officially history!", "Ask me about my first divorce!", "Does Viagra rhyme with Niagara?", "1998, the year I graduated from High School.\n\nI don't feel any older...what happened?", "Woot! I do have a lot of questions about the asian market failure, hoping for good answers!!\n", "So did we ever figure out who exactly wanted to know if that guy was Jimmy Ray?", "Oh good.  Now I can finally get to the bottom of who\u2019s responsible for Smash Mouth", "Pretty excited about the questions of nuclear tests of india and Pakistan in 1998.", "Fun fact: in 1998 I was 20. So I'm about to double my age. ", "Oh man, the year half of this subreddit apparently graduated high school, and I... Ate solid food? *Maybe* started walking?", "It makes me feel old that the year of my birth can now be \u201chistory.\u201d", "Is there a similar subreddit that has similar moderation/perspective for more recent events?", "The true origins of the Attitude Era can start to be fully unraveled. ", "Historians, how many hours did I spend playing Sim City that year? ", "I'll have whatever relations with 1998 that I want, thank you very much.", "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Askhistorians comments. The historical analysis is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of Critical Theory most of the posts will go over a typical reader's head. There's also the mod team's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into their content curation - their personal philosophy draws heavily from Pyrrhonic literature, for instance. The flairs understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these stickied comments, to realize that they're not just warnings against shitposting- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike the Askhistorians mod team truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Automod's existencial catchphrase \"[deleted]\", which itself is a cryptic reference to Abelard's epic *Logica nostrorum petitioni sociorum*. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as /u/sunagainstgold's genius unfolds itself on their computer screens. What fools... how I pity them.  And yes by the way, I DO have a complete Subreddit Rules tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 karma points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.", "\u0421 \u041d\u043e\u0432\u044b\u043c \u0433\u043e\u0434\u043e\u043c! Happy New Year! \u0416\u0430\u04a3\u0430 \u0436\u044b\u043b\u044b\u04a3\u044b\u0437\u0431\u0435\u043d! ", "Happy New Year, everyone at AskHistorians!\n\nDoes this mean I can ask questions about the Good Friday Agreement, then?\n\n:D", "Since you mentioned it.. wasn't N*sync's manager revealed to be a child molester? Did he ever abuse any of the members of the band?", "Excellent, my knowledge of Starcraft can finally come of use", "I actually am pretty interested in the antitrust case against Microsoft and the international space station though. Please people, ask lots of questions about those.", "Yesssss, we can do the East Africa bombings. We're getting closer to the 21 Year Rule. You could say that it's the looming tower before us. [Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.](_URL_0_)", "you're kidding, Martin you lazy piece of..... *grumbles off into the distance*", "I'm now a historical object!", "Only a few more years until the 9/11 questions flood in. I hope you are all ready for that day.", "I have little to contribute in this subreddit but the answers from here are one of the best reads from anywhere as I have general interest in history... erm in general, so I wish everyone great holidays and more good questions and good answers in here for me to read! (selfish but true :) )", "Thank you all for your hard work and being the best subreddit on reddit. ", "Does that mean we can discuss Clinton\u2019s impeachment from December 1998, but NOT the 1999 Senate trial? ;)", "Happy new year everybody! May the new year bring everyone happiness.", "1998?! That isn't history. I mean it was only like 5 years....fuck. I'm old aren't I?  ", "Hi,\n\nWhat is the definition of is?", "Thanks for making me feel old! My fav podcast has a 50 year role, and academic historians generally shy away from topics if the political records haven\u2019t been released yet (we\u2019re in the 70s now). I though my lifetime was free from historical analysis, guess not. ", "What was the cultural impact in 1998 when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer\u2019s table? "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ncz6b/did_president_clintons_oral_sex_change_us/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7nb39r/hugo_chavez_was_elected_in_1998_how_did_someone/"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["https://imgur.com/gallery/Zv4Go4v"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "bu8hf1", "title": "Why did Londoners reject Empress Matilda in 1141?", "selftext": "The most detail I've been able to find mentioned only that she intended to levy a tax on them to refill the regal coffers, which they did not like the sounds of. But I couldn't find any further details about that tax or why else they turned her away.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bu8hf1/why_did_londoners_reject_empress_matilda_in_1141/", "answers": {"a_id": ["epe5rcs"], "score": [7], "text": ["We don't exactly know, unfortunately.\n\nThere were legitimate reasons for English people not to accept her as queen. When William I died in 1087, William Rufus immediately went to London to be crowned at the Tower; when William Rufus died in 1100, Henry I immediately went to London to be crowned at the Tower. When Henry I died in 1135, Matilda ... stayed in France, where, despite her role of heir presumptive to the English throne and former Holy Roman Empress, she was the countess of Anjou. She was pregnant at the time, and since her previous pregnancy had been quite dangerous, it's likely that she didn't want to risk the travel. That's fair, but as her cousin Stephen of Blois *did* cross the Channel and had himself crowned in London just a few weeks after Henry's death without any real reaction from her, it seemed quite natural for people to consider him the rightful king. He persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury that Henry had forced his unwilling barons to swear the oaths acknowledging her as heir, and that he'd repented of it on his deathbed, so the Archbishop performed the coronation and Stephen effectively had God's mandate to rule. There was no opposition at the time.\n\nMatilda's husband had begun fighting for Normandy (which was an English possession at the time; remember, it was William I's home turf) soon after this, but Matilda didn't get involved in presenting herself as the rightful ruler of England until 1139. She appealed to the pope and Stephen counter-appealed and won. Turning to  military means, she enlisted the help of her brother, Robert of Gloucester, and made his county her base. She would basically take over southwestern England - which is not the part with London in it. Once she captured Stephen in early 1141, however, she was broadly allowed to have become queen, with the backing of religious authorities that had previously supported her cousin, and that's when she decided to get herself crowned in London to get the divine stamp of approval. She moved to take the city with soldiers, but was met by Stephen's forces, under his wife's command; when she succeeded, she was at first welcomed, but then, as you know, the Londoners turned on her and she was forced to escape.\n\n*The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History* lists the reasons given by primary sources, chronicles of the period: Henry of Huntington said that God caused the city to rise up; the Worcester chronicler wrote that the citizens asked her to let them live under \"the excellent laws of King Edward\" rather than her father's \"oppressive ones\" and she refused; the author of the *Gesta Stephani*, overall not a fan of hers, demanded a tax they didn't want to pay. The author, Charles Breem, interprets these criticisms as discomfort with a queen taking on masculine hardline authority, instead of acting with forgiving gentleness and compromise. This was not just a simple \"women shouldn't do men things\" - Stephen's wife directed his soldiers in protecting and retaking London, and the chroniclers were clear that this was brave and virtuous of her - but in large part there were people using \"this is not appropriately-gendered behavior\" as a justification for issues they already had. In this case, whatever the specifics, the Londoners didn't really want Matilda in the first place, and they probably wouldn't have been happy if she *had* released Stephen or taken a very publicly gentle stance."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1vwszs", "title": "During World War II on the Pacific Front, how did American fighter planes get on equal footing with superior Japanese A6M2 Zeros?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vwszs/during_world_war_ii_on_the_pacific_front_how_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cewjh54", "cewk7hx", "cewswwy"], "score": [7, 7, 3], "text": ["[By developing this.](_URL_0_)\n\n\nAlso by [capturing one of them,](_URL_2_).\n\nWhat was known was that the thing could turn like a beast and climb like a Valkyrie. It was very maneuverable and fast. Nothing the US had could come close to it. However once the US captured one they found that it could turn great but when forced to roll it performed horrible. Also if you dove and made them chase you the engine of the Zero would stall out. With this knowledge strategies where adopted. Once the F6F came into the picture it was game over.\n\nAlso of note was that like with almost EVERYTHING in military terms the best pilots/soldier wins. The Japanese had pilots that where REALLY good and experienced that flew the Zero's. Once they started losing them they where not able to refill their ranks fast enough and keep the staffed long enough before the US killed them. This led to a feedback loop of great planes being staffed by worse and worse pilots while the US got better and better pilots.\n\nEdit: Also to Add to Backgrinders comment [Joe Foss](_URL_1_) a Marine Pilot ripped 4 Zero's apart in one pass to show you how vulnerable they where. Also I may be incorrect but Zeros did not have resealing gas tanks so one bullet = bad news.", " It should be noted here that superior is a bit of an awkward word choice in your first question. The Zero was a fine aircraft, and provided superior performance in some ways, but it was inferior in others. The Zero was designed with extended range operational capacity first and foremost, so it was a very, very light aircraft. This contributed to making it particularly fast and agile, because speed is determined largely by power to weight, and a lighter mass means you can turn quicker with the same amount of force on the control surfaces. \n\n The lighter weight also meant compromises though, primarily in defensive armor. Zeros were highly maneuverable and trouble one on one, but they were easy to knock down as well. Tough and durable is exceptionally important in combat, the Zero was neither of these things. Think of it like in American Football. It isn't much use being the fastest guy on the field if one hit knocks you out and you can't play the rest of the game.", "**The outbreak of war**\n\n/u/backgrinder gave an excellent look at the compromises in the Zero\u2019s design.  I would like to expand on that portion of the answer, as well as add some other details.  The Zero was indeed designed for excellent range.  The Japanese knew that being able to fly a long distance would be of great importance in any war they ended up in.  As such, the Zero was built with the demand that it be able to fly a very long way.  It was able to fly nearly two thousand miles without refueling.  The Brewster F2F Buffalo and the Grumman F4F Wildcat\u2014the Zero\u2019s main competitors at the beginning of the war\u2014were able to fly only about a third of that distance.  To get this range, the main thing that had to be done was lose weight.  This did indeed lead to excellent maneuverability.  \n\nSo, why did the American planes not have this range and maneuverability?  Design choices led to very different solutions to the same problems of naval aviation.  The US Navy demanded rugged planes that could survive the rigors of hard landings onto pitching flight decks.  To get reliable and rugged aircraft, you add things like more bracing, redundant systems, and heavier landing gear.  Also, with the Wildcat features like pilot armor and self sealing fuel tanks were added.  All of this added weight, which had costs of its own.  As has already been mentioned, range and maneuverability were restricted.  However, there were advantages as well.  Stability and speed in a dive were improved.  Also, the same rugged characteristics that allowed good peacetime reliability meant that more battle damage could be absorbed by a plane before it became crippled or destroyed.\n\n**Thatch weave**\n\nThe ability to absorb damage is a good thing, but if that\u2019s all you can do you\u2019re still going to end up losing a fight.  One on one, the Zero was able to get onto the tail of an American plane and destroy it.  American pilots could not hope to climb or turn with a Zero, and individual brilliance was not enough to turn the tide.  A new approach was needed.\n\nEnter John Thatch of the United States Navy.  He tested out a new system that bears his name, [the Thatch weave.](_URL_0_)  The wikipedia page has some good diagrams of how this innovation works.  Instead of working one on one, American pilots flew as a team.  Pair(s) of planes would weave through the sky.  If enemy pilots attacked one element, the other would soon be on their tail.  Now, the rugged nature of the Wildcat could be used to full effect.  When they came under attack, they could absorb a few moments of fire while their teammate got into position to attack the pursuing plane.  This tactic was employed to good effect at Midway, and it was soon picked up by the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal.  The Thatch weave allowed for much greater success against the Zero.  Since it had no pilot armor or self-sealing fuel tanks, the Japanese planes could not simply absorb battle damage and would quickly be destroyed.  However, if the weave was not executed perfectly US pilots were quite vulnerable.  Any mistake would leave US pilots very much alone in a plane that could not hope to match the acrobatics of their opponent.\n\n**Attrition and training**\n\nOne sometimes overlooked element of the Pacific theater was attrition.  The Japanese entered the war with a cadre of highly experienced pilots.  These men had been in combat for years before Pearl Harbor, and had learned a number of lessons that only combat can teach.  In their incredible Zero fighters, they were able to fly circles around less experienced opponents.  Those same Zeros would catch fire or succumb to damage quite easily, and unless the pilot was over friendlies he had very little chance of rejoining the war.  Further, the lack of pilot armor meant that these highly experienced pilots were vulnerable to a single stray bullet that could end their career\u2014or their life.  There were dramatic losses of experienced pilots such as the Battle of Midway, and there was also slow attrition in the skies surrounding Guadalcanal and New Guinea.  On the other side of the coin, American pilots received relatively lavish training and their more survivable aircraft allowed men to return home when a Zero would not have been able to.\n\n**Planes at the end of the war**\n\nThe development of the Hellcat was detailed by /u/pmaj82.  The development of succeeding waves of fighters is the final part of how the Zero was countered by the US.  The F6F Hellcat could match or beat the Zero in every aspect except range.  It was rugged and survivable like the Wildcat, but with greatly added speed, rate of climb, and agility.  And the Hellcat wasn\u2019t alone.  It was joined by the Chance Vaught F4U Corsair.  (I like just *saying* that phrase.  Chance Vaught F4U Corsair, try it!)  These planes were as iconic to the Pacific theater as the P-51Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt were in the European theater.  In addition, there were Mustangs deployed in the Pacific as well, primarily due to their incredible range and high altitude capability making them ideal escorts for the B-29 Superfortress.  \n\nNow, the technical capabilities of these planes is somewhat obvious.  The less obvious event that went hand in hand with their success was the *production* of these fighters.  American aircraft production dwarfed that of the Japanese.  The American economy was able to produce huge numbers of highly advanced aircraft, and was agile enough to switch production from prewar designs to those designed during the war.  While most of the other combatants in WWII were able to upgrade existing airframes during the war with more powerful engines and improved subsystems, the US was able to field entirely new fighters with seeming ease.  Then, the US was able to make these new planes in the thousands.  Paired with giving their pilots sufficient training, this prodigious rate of production resulted in a highly capable force that was able to island hop all the way to the doorstep of the Japanese home islands.  Along the way, the Zero was first supreme, then contested, and finally driven from the skies by a succession of planes, tactics, and pilots."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F6F_Hellcat", "http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-C-Aces/index.html", "http://www.history.com/news/the-akutan-zero-how-a-captured-japanese-fighter-plane-helped-win-world-war-ii"], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave"]]}
{"q_id": "7i88d0", "title": "Were there any women that left an impact during Renaissance Italy?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7i88d0/were_there_any_women_that_left_an_impact_during/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dqwvb0x"], "score": [5], "text": ["Oh, yes! I have [an earlier answer](_URL_0_) on \"Renaissance women\" bouncing off the idea of Leonardo da Vinci as a \"Renaissance man\" that might interest you. :D\n\nBut that post was narrow in scope to intellectual/polymath types. There were so many more ways that individual women made an impact! Religious leaders claiming gifts of ecstatic prophecy like bitter archrival nuns Domenica dal Paradiso and Dorotea da Lanciuole played active, even leading roles in post-Savonarolan religious politics--their feud spanned a decade and involved the entire city's mendicant community. Catherine of Genoa was a mystic who, more quietly, dictated her teachings to a circle of students.\n\nWomen also involved themselves in the flourishing art scene. Catherine of Bologna is probably the most famous one today. Antonia Pulchi was a playwright, composer, and lyricist of religious dramas and music that were performed in her native city of Florence.\n\nAnd then, of course, there were the aristocrats and politicians. Even though women were barred from holding formal office and in Italy, specifically, were almost never heads of household, as mediators and as proxies for male relatives they wielded a surprising amount of indirect influence and direct power. Alfonsina Orsini ruled Florence from 1517-1519 during yet another period of *male* Medici exile from the city.\n\nThere are two important points to raise here. First, nearly all the standout women from Renaissance Italy we can point to were not married: they were nuns, tertiaries (informal nuns), or widows. With the intellectual/humanist women in particular, the sad pattern is a father providing his daughter the best education possible, she flourishes as a young woman author/philosopher/theologian--and as soon as she marries, ceases public literary activity.\n\nSecond, when we talk about \"Renaissance\" Italy, we are necessarily speaking primarily or exclusively of the upper crust. There are some women among the tertiaries who would have had a more middle class background. But in general, \"the Renaissance\" and its developments were an urban and elite phenomenon. We don't hear about peasant widows making great art or writing religious plays for their village confraternity.\n\nNevertheless, there are some really excellent stories based around phenomenal--for good or ill--women to come out of 15th-16th century Italy. And thanks to the literary grounding of its elite society, we can tell those stories in quite a bit of depth today."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5riw8w/leonardo_da_vinci_is_often_cited_as_an_example_of/dd7za52/"]]}
{"q_id": "7coj1h", "title": "Why did Saudi Arabia back Communist South Yemen against the US backed Republic of Yemen in the 1994 Yemeni Civil War?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7coj1h/why_did_saudi_arabia_back_communist_south_yemen/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dprxow0"], "score": [9], "text": ["The Saudis had long backed and had long-standing connections with traditionalist forces in North Yemen. In the 1962-70 North Yemen Civil War (really a proxy war) they backed the Zaydi Shia Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen against the Egyptian-backed Yemen Arab Republic. The death of Nasser in 1970 helped bring an end to the hottest phase of the Arab Cold War and Saudi Arabia recognized the victorious Yemen Arab Republic and worked in coordination with various factions in North Yemen, preferring it over the Marxist South.\n\nYemen's unification in 1990 came at a precarious time. The overall Cold War was ending with a Soviet collapse and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait threatened to rip apart the Middle East. The president of the newly re-united Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, backed Saddam in sharp contrast to the rest of the Gulf States.\n\nPartly as a result of that the GCC countries split from Saleh, and flirted with the secessionist movement in 1994. As it happened, the 1994 Civil War so brief that I'm not sure you should quite read into it the way the wording of your question suggests.\n\n[Saleh claimed US support](_URL_2_) but it wasn't a major break from the rest of the US' GCC partners. \n\nSaleh won so quickly that the war couldn't become the kind of protracted proxy conflict that characterized the North Yemen Civil war decades prior, or for that matter that characterizes the conflict in Syria today.\n\nThe other motivating issue that remains relevant are accusations that Saudi Arabia is concerned about the potential power of a united Yemen on its southern border. The population of Yemen is at least equal to Saudi Arabia, and that's only if you believe the official Saudi population figures, which are dubious and likely inflated.\n\nYou're not likely to find much in the way of concrete discussion/documentation of any of these factors from Saudi officials, however. Saudi Arabia remains one of the most opaque polities in the world, these Carnegie Endowment articles would be a good overview though:\n\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/62405", "http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/60627", "https://books.google.com/books?id=WCyiAwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA505&amp;dq=us+support+to+yemen+1994&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjkwO6CyrzXAhXBRCYKHeTvCPUQ6AEIQjAF#v=onepage&amp;q=us%20support%20to%20yemen%201994&amp;f=false"]]}
{"q_id": "8py7t9", "title": "Who/what have been the biggest and most interesting gangs in history?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8py7t9/whowhat_have_been_the_biggest_and_most/", "answers": {"a_id": ["e0f07e5"], "score": [2], "text": ["It you'd classify them as a \"gang\" (I would) Blackbeard's pirates are interesting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2jhwf2", "title": "What influence did the Iroquois Confederacy, Pre-Kings Israel, and other non-Hellenstic precedent have on the forming of the U.S. Constitution?", "selftext": "Who influenced who? How did the influence them? And how did that influence come to tangible fruition in the late 18th century colonies turned United States?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jhwf2/what_influence_did_the_iroquois_confederacy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["clc53ui"], "score": [2], "text": ["I'm probably going to offend you in saying this, but this sounds a *lot* like a homework question. If so, we can provide you with good sources, but we can't answer it for you."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2mfkqn", "title": "How was literacy in colonial America leading up to the revolutionary?", "selftext": "They say pamphlets such as *Common Sense* were widely read and very popular, but how did people have time to read it? Not only was it really long, but the language seems a bit abstruse. Was that considered normal language, or did they think it to be very hard to follow?\n\nAdditionally, was literacy emphasized in education? Did people who didn't attend school due to costs learn reading on their own? Could they have followed the wording of *Common Sense*?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mfkqn/how_was_literacy_in_colonial_america_leading_up/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm52b37"], "score": [2], "text": ["So, this really depends on where in colonial America you are talking about.  It's really important to understand that there were deep geographical differences in colonial America.  In New England, during the eighteenth century, the literacy rates were upward of 90%.  This has a lot to do with the Puritan influence in New England, which required that everyone be able to read the Bible.  The literacy rate in the South was lower, being around 80% in South Carolina, for instance.  This does not include slaves, however, so if you are including the entire population, the numbers are lower.  So, most people probably would have been able to read the pamphlets you're talking about. \n\nMany people, however, may not have actually read it.  Colonial America was still very rural and agricultural, which meant that it took a little while for literature to penetrate into the countryside.  And the language may well have been obtuse to most people.  By and large, these pamphlets were directed at what we might think of as the middle and upper classes, which were in the minority then as they are today.  It's a mistake to think that, just because they may not have read it, people weren't familiar with the ideas.  People were talking about these issues at the common level.  \n\nThere is an argument, however, that the ideology of the revolution was not as influential in kicking of the whole thing as the economic problems.  Woody Holton has argued that the elite of Virginia, like Washington and Jefferson, didn't really want a revolution, but were pushed into it by the lower classes.  Essentially, the new taxes and laws that Great Britain passed hit the lower classes disproportionately hard, and that the lower classes were the ones really pushing for revolt, rather than the idealistic upper class.  While I personally find his argument incredibly persuasive, there's little doubt that the revolutionary ideals trickled down to all levels of society.  There's even quite a bit of evidence that the American Revolutionary ideas even got as far as the slaves in Haiti.\n\nSources: F. W. Grubb, \"Growth of Literacy in Colonial America,\" Woody Holton, *Forced Founders*, T. H. Breen, *Marketplace for Revolution*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1938en", "title": "For being one of thegreatest civilizations that this world has ever seen, how did the Indus or Harappan civilzation end?", "selftext": "I have read that it may have boasted up to 5 million people, almost 10 percent of the world's population, spread over a region that encompassed parts of today's India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. But its grand walkways (with sophisticated roadside drainage), metallurgy shops, and massive, multistory, brick hives of houses were abandoned over 3,000 years ago. Why? How much of it remains?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1938en/for_being_one_of_thegreatest_civilizations_that/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c8kenso", "c8kgcbb"], "score": [26, 4], "text": ["I feel like there has been a bubble of references to the Indus Valley/Harappan civilization (just called \"IVC\" from here on) this week. Was there a documentary on it or something? Regardless, I'm glad you brought the question here because there is an enormous amount of disinformation on it. The IVC exists in the center of a Venn diagram of nationalism, orientalism, and lack of good information. That even the greatest experts on the topic have difficulty answering very basic questions means that statements taken out of context, uninformed and incautious speculation, and outright falsities spread very quickly.\n\nI need to qualify this because, generally speaking, when people talk about the IVC they do so divorced from other cultures at the time. Our ignorance of it is not so much greater than that for, say, Minoan Crete, where we face many of the same issues, and we know considerably more about the IVC than about, say, the Sanxingdui Bronze Age culture of Sichuan (in fact, we only know marginally more about pre-Zhou Bronze Age China in general). The reason scholars stress their ignorance of the IVC is because we lack the crucial element of greater cultural context. We may not know much about the Minoans, but we know a great deal about the context of the eastern Mediterranean and can make inferences about that. Our ignorance about pre-Zhou China is profound, but we know a great deal about what came after. The IVC exists in a vacuum. People have made heroic attempts to connect it to later accounts in Iron Age Indian literature, like the Vedas and Upanishads, but to no real avail. Every solution raised by this method contains so many difficulties that most scholars choose to simply avoid it altogether. The IVC exists almost within a vacuum, and the paltry connections found to contemporary Mesopotamian civilizations leave us with frustratingly little.\n\nPeople also often look at its seemingly impressive advances as divorced from other advances at the time. The IVC's city planning and sewage system were quite impressive, but such things were far from unheard of at the time--the Minoan colony at Akrotiri has city planning and sewage as well. The IVC may have had more \"advanced\" in these matters, but such things are rather difficult to prove when looking at 3500 year old brickwork. Oftentimes therefore the statements about the impressive IVC remains come with the implicit suggestion that the rest of the work was just hitting themselves over the head with rocks to pass the time, which I think is [just a](_URL_0_) [trifle](_URL_1_) [unfair](_URL_2_).\n\nThis is not to deny the impressive scale of the IVC. Something very remarkable and very interesting was going on in the Indus Valley during the bronze age. But it is unfair to the civilization to throw unwarranted speculation and hyperbolic figures at it, or to co-opt it either for our political, nationalist, or ideological advantage or our orientalist fantasies.\n\nNow, to answer your question, the IVC is usually said to have collapsed due to a confluence of climatic and other natural factors, which may have exacerbated social stresses caused by, or leading to, internal or external conflict. This is archaeologist speak for \"hell if I know\".", "The most commonly-accepted possibility for the decline of the IVC is due to climate change. Much like India today, the IVC depended on the monsoons for agriculture (seasonal storms that occur around summer due to the warm, moisture-laden air from the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean making their way over the subcontinent). However, by the time of the IVC's decline, the monsoons started weakening as the general climate started getting much cooler and drier. \n\nAnother factor is that the IVC was highly dependent on the river systems in that area, such as the Indus River, and the Ghaggar-Hakra river system (it has been suggested, but not universally accepted, that this river system might be the same as the Vedic Saraswati [cognate with Avestan Harahvati/Haraxvati] river). The Ghaggar-Hakra is still an intermittent river-system that is fed by rains and not by Himalayan glaciers. So a lessening of rainfall could have lead to it drying up or being an unreliable source of water. What is interesting is that maps showing IVC sites show a clear pattern of being along the Ghaggar-Hakra river system. So this leads some credence to the theory that the drying up of the rivers that the IVC relied on, could have led to their decline."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ziggurat_of_Ur", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knossos", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_Dynasty#Bronze_working"], []]}
{"q_id": "46rypp", "title": "Why was the Golden Horde called like this?", "selftext": "Why was this Mongol khanate called the \"Golden Horde\"?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/46rypp/why_was_the_golden_horde_called_like_this/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d07lamn"], "score": [3], "text": ["According to John Man^1 it was called this as Genghis's family was known as the 'Golden Clan', and the Mongolian word ord/orde meant a palace, or for the Mongols a tent. Hence Batu's (initial leader of the khanate) apparent use of a gold coloured tent as his 'palace', and the shift of ord/orde to horde led to the khanate being called the Golden Horde.\n\nWorth noting that initially it was known as the Khanate of Qipchak^2 (named after the nomads who previously inhabited that area) and according to David Morgan the popularization of Golden Horde came about later.\n\n---\n\n^1: The Mongol Empire, John Man\n\n^2: David Morgan, The Mongols"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2focxc", "title": "What did people in the 1800's use as conversational fillers (i.e um, you know, like) ?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2focxc/what_did_people_in_the_1800s_use_as/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ckb6pyr", "ckb9u4f", "ckbaxup", "ckbgn0b"], "score": [789, 199, 2, 20], "text": ["This recording of Thomas Edison from 1906 is full of \"uh\" as conversational filler or \"verbal disfluency\". It doesn't sound much different than speech today. I'll see if I can find an earlier recorded example \n_URL_0_ ", "All of this has only discussed English conversion fillers, which is what I assume is what you're mainly interested but maybe you'd like to know about other languages as well.  In Turkish, among the most common are *\u015fey* (\"thing\") and *yani* (\"that is\").  One can tell that they predate the massive language reform of the 1930's, which attempted to get rid of all words with foreign etymologies--\u015fey and yani were both originally Arabic words.  In fact, yani is still used as a space filler in Arabic, at least as far as I can tell from eavesdropped conversations at airports, and if it was borrowed into Ottoman Turkish a space filler, I can imagine it has been used as one for quite a long time (actually, I looked it up.  The Turkish etymologist Sevan Ni\u015fanyan notes that it was already in use ~1300 with the meaning \"that is to say\", so it is a pre-Ottoman borrowing into Turkic languages, though maybe not in the specific space filler sense).\n\nGeoffery Lewis, in his book *the Turkish Language Reform*, recounts that \u015fey's banning was unlikely because \u015fey is:\n\n > a word without which many Turks would find difficulty in conversing, for it is what comes automatically to their lips when groping for a word or a name, or thinking what to say next.  It is used much like the English 'what-d'you-call-it' or the French *chose* and, as a sentence opening, like 'Well now' or 'I'll you what', or 'Il-y-a une autre chose qui est celle-ci'.  Atat\u00fcrk wanted it abandoned as it was a borrowing from Arabic (Had that happened, an English analogy would be the inhibiting effect of a ban on 'y'know' or 'basically).\n\nEventually, as Lewis recounts, one of the reformers was able to win Atat\u00fcrk over with the argument:\n\n > 'Don't do it, Pasha!' I was saying, 'If a miracle were to occur and all the dead Turks in Anatolia could suddenly be resurrected, the first word to come out of their mouths in unison would be *\u015fey*.  That's how Turkish *\u015fey* is.'\n\nWhich, I think indicates just how ingrained it was in Late Ottoman daily speech.", "Is conversation fillers the right term?", "I'm not seeing any responses to the words such as like, you know? So all I know is 1800's English literature, where the 'extra' words and phrases are such as \"wouldn't you agree\" used rhetorically as our \"isn't it\" or \"y'know\". Also \"verily\", \"are we not\". That's all that spring to mind right now. They also did use ums and ahs then but fiction rarely wrote conversational place holders, preferring very correct grammar. Reading transcripts or affadavits from the time would help answer this because they are word for word. Also I think Hansard was established by the late 1800's. That's a written record of what is spoken in Parliamentary discussions. Hope I've helped a bit."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/upload/EDIS-SRP-0158-06.mp3"], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2ipcbv", "title": "What kind of currency was in mesopotamia?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ipcbv/what_kind_of_currency_was_in_mesopotamia/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cl49h9f"], "score": [3], "text": ["The Mesopotamians didn't really use \"currency\" as such, which we can define as a centrally issued object having the function of store of account, medium of exchange and measure of value. In short, they did not have coins. But they did have standardized systems of weights and measures that, in practice can fulfill one or the other functions of currency. In Sumerian documents for example you will see value expressed in units of silver even if no silver is involved in the transaction. Currency in the form of coinage does not really come into being until the Iron Age in Anatolia, and it was taken up by the Persian Empire."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "4vywvk", "title": "Why do historians reject moral presentism?", "selftext": "I was going through the FAQ, and I came across [this](_URL_0_) post.  I was a little shocked to see this quote:\n\n > As for presentism,, for those who don't know, you need to be aware of it. Quit viewing the past through your modern eyes sometimes. Yes, what Columbus did to the Indians was terrible to us, but to really measure his worth you have to ask, \"Was he a bad person by the standards of his time?\" You can't really apply modern concepts to past events. Slavery in many parts of the world was morally justified in it's era. Yes, it's reprehensible to us now, but in the 16th Century it really wasn't. It's not fair to criticise someone using the morality of John Locke when they lived 200 years before Locke.\n\nThe reason this is shocking to me is coming from a philosophy background with an emphasis on meta-ethics, moral relativism seems to have a fairly bad reputation among moral philosophers.  For example (incoming Godwin), it seems untrue that Nazi Germany was morally right in any sense regardless of historical perspective, culture, or any other attribute to which we'd like to attach moral relativity.  This of course differs from Nazi Germany (or others) *thinking* they were right.  It also differs from the notion that morality is merely a cultural, societal, or historical construct, and so it does not actually exist (a type of moral nihilism).  Also, being philosophically honest, these objections of course don't mean that the Nazis *weren't* right and relativity stands.  Though, it does seem unlikely.\n\nThe reason I think this is worth being mentioned is because this subreddit paints historians as people who try not to speak with authority outside of their areas of expertise (see the FAQ for opinions on Diamond and Zinn).  But to discount \"presentism\" seems to not only embrace moral relativism, but to also take a minority position in an on-going debate in meta-ethics.  That's not to say that either moral realism or moral nihilism are the one true way, but rejecting moral presentism seems to be saying that moral relativism *is* the one true way.\n\nI worry many relativists mistake a type of moral nihilism - there is no morality, and so we judge things by their place in culture or history - for moral relativity - there is such a thing as morality and the US had it in the context of the US in 1942, but so to did Germany in the context of Germany in 1942.\n\nI did a quick search for presentism, and nothing I say here is actually new, but I would love your opinions on it.  I am also concerned that this might not be a great fit for this subreddit since it is much more philosophy than history, but I do think it directly applies to the \"historical method\".\n\nEdited for grammar.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4vywvk/why_do_historians_reject_moral_presentism/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d62l9tp", "d62lmhg", "d62lokd", "d62mzun", "d62p34n", "d62ufrp", "d639nkc", "d63gg4x"], "score": [61, 6, 102, 28, 3, 28, 15, 9], "text": ["Something to keep in mind is that's a bit of an older post, and one that was written when the rules of the subreddit were still being hashed out. But that said, I would offer the simplest explanation that I can: \n\nWhat's the point of passing moral judgment on past societies? And how much time do we have to waste on doing it? To quote a professor of mine from a historiography class, \"if I'm writing a book about the Holocaust, how many pages do I have to spend detailing how awful it was? Don't the facts of the Holocaust speak for themselves?\" \n\nThat's not a morally nihilistic stance, it's a pragmatic one that allows us to present events in their context without getting bogged down in determining the relative moral scale of past tragedies. We have a rueful term for questions that get asked here along the lines of \"was genocide X worse than ethnic cleansing Y,\" -- we call it playing genocide Olympics, because it's an exercise that's fruitless, and to be frank somewhat masturbatory. The point of writing history, after all, is to explain events and ground them in their contemporary context, not pass judgment on how good or bad past events were. ", "Hi Historian in training and longtime lurker here,\n\nFrom what I was taught it is because otherwise we would judge everyone to be bad in some sense of the word. For example, Thomas Jefferson is idolized in the United States,but he also owned slaves. He wrote the American constitution and is considered a great man. Does the fact that we owned slaves factor in if he was a good person or not? In our modern view we say that this is morally reprehensible and that it makes people immoral, but at time it was more than standard, his handling was even considered radical. \n\nTake for example Gay marriage today. It would absolutely not have been allowed one or two hundred years ago, but today we are for it. Are we better than those of a hundred years ago? You cannot judge the people of the past by the ideals of the present. Our ideals and morals are not universal nor are they native to our species. They are a learned experience and if those in the past did not grow up exactly as we did, maybe something we consider obvious would never occur to them. If you are taught all your life that blacks are evil, you will think that. Does that make you intrinsically evil? No it just means you were raised with different morals. \n\nThat is why as historians we cannot judge the past by our morals because it would alter our perception of the past and undermine the deeds of the past. One day something we consider normal may be looked down on as evil. \n\nHopefully I understood your question and answered it well. Apologies if my English is less than stellar, I'm not a native speaker.", "Presentism does not facilitate or encourage an answer to (one of) the main historical question(s): \"Why did these people do what they did?... what led them to that train of thought and chain of actions?\"\n\nHistory seeks understanding and comprehension, and that is best achieved in many cases by viewing the world *not* through the hind-sight of 21st century righteousness, but by trying to view and understand people and events in the contexts of their own times, places, and actions.\n\nSure, it's easy enough to say, \"but Naziism was bad.\"  Pretty low fruit, that.  But what about... other historical questions?  What happens if and when we start breaking off from the Modern Western morality spectrum altogether?\n\nWhat happens when we start asking why Genghis Khan felt justified in doing what he did?  Is a 21st Century \"well, killing is bad and inhumane\" presentist viewpoint going to help or hinder that answer?  Or how about if we ask into An Lushan's justifications for killing 2/3 of the Chinese population in the 8th century?  Or Alexander the Great's justifications for invading half of Asia?\n\nPresentism isn't helpful because it is essentially a moral judgement.  That's not helpful to history because history seeks to understand *how* and*why*, rather than seeking to place arbitrary blame against those who are no longer capable of explaining or defending themselves or their actions, in many cases.  \n\nJudging an ancient battlefield or political tangle from a modern perspective will render judgement, to be sure... but in doing so it will warp what actually happened and *why* it happened beyond any actual comprehension or meaning.", "I don't think that historians in general (or in this sub specifically) actually do embrace moral relativism or nihilism. The OP of that thread, who you're quoting there, is not a flaired user, nor do they seem to be particularly qualified to discuss the subject. For comparison, [here](_URL_0_) is a user flaired in Spanish colonialism discussing Columbus and arguing that his actions are \"absolutely indefensible\" due to his violence, slaving, and genocide. This does not seem relativistic or nihilistic to me. For another example, look at the posts by users who study slavery in this subreddit, who are some of our best and most erudite flairs. People like /u/freedmenspatrol, /u/sowser, /u/dubstripsquads, and others do an excellent job of understanding the ideology, culture, and mentality of antebellum southern slaveowners, but understanding the mindset of American slaveowners does not equate to rationalizing away the abhorrent system of slavery. \n\nAlthough historians are capable of and sometimes do make moral judgements on their subjects, there's also a limit to the utility of doing so. For a much more trite example than slavery or imperialism, the killing of the French prisoners at Agincourt is an infamous episode in medieval history. When discussing this event, does it actually add to our understanding of medieval combat and of the Hundred Years War to insert a footnote saying that stabbing wounded and disarmed prisoners is, in fact, a Bad Thing? The most interesting aspect of that event is that it was specifically not condemned by its contemporaries and was considered an acceptable part of warfare. Is it \"morally nihilistic\" to point out that medieval soldiers in 1415 would sometimes kill their prisoners without it being considered a war crime? I don't think we need an addendum to every book on premodern warfare explicitly stating that the murder, sexual violence, and theft that occurred during the sack of a city were morally bad things. ", "Follow-up question:\n\nI think /u/jschootiger gets to the nub of the issue\n\n > The point of writing history, after all, is to explain events and ground them in their contemporary context, not pass judgement on how good or bad past events were.\n\nI'd largely agree with that, however I wonder if there are uses of history that *do* involve passing this kind of judgement. For example, if we want to hold up a historical figure as an inspiration or an exemplar, does this require some judgement of them by contemporary standards?\n\nIf so, are invocations against presentism also linked to a decline in this sort of history? (If it is declining - \"great man\" history is, but maybe other figures are now exemplars.) Or are the warnings simply about making sure you pay attention to context? ie. it took a much stronger character to condemn slavery in the 18th century US than it does today, so we should make allowances for people.", "Given my specialty, I can share some thoughts on my approach to the subject:\n\nI hope it is pretty obvious from my work in general and my posts here that I absolutely abhor the Nazis and what they did. They were criminals who committed horrible deeds by any moral standard. And they knew it, which is why they went to great lengths to hide it. And yet, on some level they did what they taught was right and necessary. That doesn't mean that it was objectively necessary and right when in fact it was the very opposite of that, but my job as a historian is to explore what factors lead to them thinking they were right and necessary. In my opinion my explaining of these factors does not portray that as right but rather is a contribution to how we can on some level recognize the factors leading to people thinking that doing something obviously wrong by any standard, i.e. committing genocide, in order to prevent similar factors and tendencies growing strong in contemporary society.\n\nTaking one concrete and slightly different example from my line of work, I hope I can also show some problems that are associated with making moral judgement calls: The Judenr\u00e4te. I describe them [here](_URL_0_) but in essence, the Jewish councils were set-up by the Nazis to help them administer the Ghettos. On a regular basis, they had to make-up the lists of people who were to be deported to their deaths. Different Jewish councils approach this in different ways but here the perfidy of the Nazi system becomes obvious: They forced their victims to assist in their own murder. After the war was over, many members of these Jewish Councils, provided they had survived as well as those who didn't, were called traitors and collaborators. As were the Jewish members of the Sonderkommandos in the Camps, i.e. the people who had to clean the gas chambers of bodies and burn them.\n\nThe thing is, in 99.9% of all cases, I am confident in my moral judgement of the Nazi perpetrators. In the case of the Jewish councils however, I am entering a massive grey area morally where I feel confident in describing the moral dilemmas they faced but less confident in making a moral judgement call on their actions. They were people put in a morally impossible situation by genocidal maniacs and making a definitive moral judgment call on them is something that I don't feel I am able to do. I can describe the circumstances, I can analyze the historical factors and describe the dilemma they faced but I don't think that it is my place to morally condemn them. I can emphasize what could have been done differently in certain cases based on what others in the same situation historically did but that also is not the same as making a moral judgement.\n\nI also don't think that qualifies as moral nihilism or relativism. It's merely that sometimes historians need to acknowledge that some historical situations were so impossible or difficult that it is best not to make the definitive judgement on morally correct actions.\n\nPresentism imo is related but something different: Presentism is the projection of current concepts in way that makes historically little sense. To exemplify: When ratheists try to portray certain of their scientific heroes as atheists beacons or reason and rationality but fail to acknowledge that for someone like Galileo a world view without God would simply be unthinkable. Or to pick an example of a discussion recently in the area of studies of Nazi Germany: There was recent discussion whether in an effort to make German language more gender neutral, if it is necessary to write not of Wehrmachtsoldaten but of Wehrmachtsoldat_innen. The _ and female word ending usually used to signifying that peoples' gender identities are open to their own definition. Using both male and female endings to describe them as well as the _ to leave open an empty space for those who either reject male and female as identities or see themselves somewhere in between. While generally a nifty concept if you are into that, in the case of the German Wehrmacht it makes no sense because by its very organizational ethic, it was a very very male organization that instilled its members with values and ethos that was in gender terms codified as male. Thus, leaving room for alternate identities without empirical evidence that they existed and with an organization whose ethos is strongly codified as male makes imo little sense and obscures an important factor in why they did what they did rather than clearing it up.\n\nAdditionally and in connection to some of the examples you mentioned: As historians frequently do in this sub in connection to slavery, we as historians are absolutely entitled to making moral judgement calls. We can also go a step further even: We can show that not only was it wrong what historical actors did at the time but also show that it was understood as wrong at the time. There were actors who justified slavery in many places of the world,but there were also actors who from the very beginning of the system of slavery objected to it on the grounds that owning other people is wrong.\n\nSimilar to the Nazis who were obviously aware that murder was wrong, they too had the perspective of what they did was wrong as we can infer from their arguments and the arguments of their opponents. Why they were not convinced by these arguments is an interesting historical question. I mean, concerning the so-called New World, we have the writings of Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas pretty much right after the Spanish incursions start, who strongly objects \u2013 with different justifications and different system of thinking \u2013 to the system the Spanish established there. As historians, we also have the duty to emphasize these arguments and point at them in order to be able to fully appreciate and portray actors' contingency.", "I draw a line between methodological neutrality / relativism (I prefer the word 'symmetry'), and moral judgement. When I study the past, I must keep an open mind and suppress my modern preconceptions if I hope to understand why people in the past acted the way they did. This is in some ways a hopeless cause - I can never fully escape my own prejudices - but there is value in entering as much as possible into the experiences, perceptions, and values of people in the past to try to see things from something close to their own perspectives.\n\nBut that doesn't mean I leave my moral judgement behind. The ability to judge and learn from events in the past and present is an important part of being human, especially when used alongside openminded credulity. The important skill historians train ourselves to develop is to hold that judgment back until we've given the data / facts / sources a chance to speak, as much as they can, for themselves. Then we insert ourselves, and start making sense of things, and this often includes our own moral prejudices.\n\nI study human burials in the early middle ages, and one grave in particular sticks in my mind. A young girl, maybe 16, was buried face-down, perhaps with her hands and feet tied together. Her thigh bones were scarred from her muscle's tearing, the kind of injury women receive when they try, and fail, to fight off a rapist. And one of her legs had a healed knife wound from where someone had pressed a blade into her thigh to make her cooperate. Her wounds suggest multiple assailants: she was gang raped. And about six months later (judging from the healing of her injuries), she was dead and dumped, face forward, into a grave. There's no evidence she was wear any clothes when she was buried.\n\nPart of my job as a historian is trying to enter into the minds of the people who did this to her: her rapists, the people who buried her, the possible causes of her death. One theory is that she became pregnant, and her community killed her out of shame. Perhaps she was a slave, raped after she was captured, and buried once she was used up. Maybe she killed herself, in response to the trauma. Maybe her community starved after losing a war, and she was one of the casualties. We can keep going, and imagine the kind of mentality that would normalize these behaviors, where rape is a normal part of war, or where women can be enslaved and killed with so little seeming compassion. A society where shame killings are considered good and honorable, something that earned her father or brother respect. And so on.\n\nAll of that can help me, dispassionately, understand her world. And I try my best to leave my modern assumptions about rape, violence, and the value of human life behind me when I do this, because I want to understand what happened in the past on its own terms, and not merely interject my own prejudices into the sixth century.\n\nBut none of that for one minute makes me feel that her rape and death was ok. And I dearly hope that whoever did this to her died with a spear in his belly. My methodological scholarly dispassion helps me understand the past, but it doesn't keep me from judging it.\n\nAnd just as there's value in understanding the past from its own moral perspective, seeing questions of right, wrong, and normalcy through other people's and culture's eyes, there's also value in allowing the past to shape our own understanding of the moral world of the present. This young woman reminds me that rape and violence against women continues to be a horror of the present, that war continues to hurt women and children more than anyone else, that sex slavery is still a great struggle, and I need to open my eyes to these tings and fight against them now, for people who haven't yet become a footnote in an archaeologist's report.\n\nSo methodologically, I try to keep my morals to myself. I need to understand before I can judge. But once I understand the past, I lift that barrier and let it interact with my present values, because if the past cannot help us learn to be better humans in the present, history has very little value.", "Just to tack on small addendum to other responses: relativism can be a _methodology_ even if you don't embrace it as a _philosophy_. That is, one can say, \"you do better _history_ if you adopt a relativist stance in your relationship to the past (with regards to writing history), but you can believe whatever you want with regards to the rest of your life.\" This is a way that historians of science, for example, deal with epistemological relativism \u2014\u00a0we tend to write histories of debates over truth without trying to over-privilege the side that we now believe is correct, because that ends up being a very impoverished account (it becomes the scientific equivalent of \"history written by the victors\"). But in our private lives very few of us as probably truly epistemological relativists \u2014\u00a0I do believe that many scientific claims are to some degree essentially true, and lead my life as such. \n\n(To make it concrete: one might write about the dispute between Boyle and Hobbes over the existence of a vacuum or not without taking the stance that Boyle was \"right\" and Hobbes was \"wrong,\" instead looking at the different ways in which they marshal different types of logic and evidence and rhetorical techniques to make their points. But outside of that specific mode, I do believe vacuums exist.) \n\nPersonally with regards to moral relativism I make a distinction between \"historian mode\" (I am talking about people in the past on their own terms) and \"today mode\" (where I am really trying to engage with something in the present), even if they are muddled. If I was in pure historian mode talking about slavery I wouldn't bother condemning it as evil because it's not really here or there. But if I'm talking to people who believe that the Constitution was a totally perfect document and are using that to justify certain policies over others I might bring up that it had slavery baked into its DNA, and I would happily explain why slavery was an evil thing if I were pressed. (Though to be honest, I'd also mention that its evils were in fact recognized in its time, as well, so to say it is an awful institution is not _merely_ passing a present-day judgment on it. Maybe that is my historian instinct, but I generally find that if you want to find someone condemning something awful in the past, you can usually find that person, even if their opinion isn't the one that was the most dominant.)"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uo4zh/meta_lets_have_a_serious_talk_about_howard_zinn/"], "answers_urls": [[], [], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3iqsbc/what_is_the_truth_about_christopher_columbus_how/cujhgyz"], [], ["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ltzee/is_this_description_about_judenrats_in/d3q8rif"], [], []]}
{"q_id": "u8wn1", "title": "How was Hitler able to build such a massive and powerful army during the great depression? And why didn't France and England stop him?", "selftext": "As I understand it when he came to power Germany was being crushed under the great depression and reparations for WW1. Where did he get the money to build a giant army? Why did France and England tolerate it? Surely someone must have read Mein Kamph and realized that Hitler was bad news.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u8wn1/how_was_hitler_able_to_build_such_a_massive_and/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c4tbl6v", "c4tc99c", "c4tem8c"], "score": [10, 6, 2], "text": ["The post-WW1 Reichswehr did not generally agree with the bounds of the treaty of Versailles, but its commanders (like Hans von Seeckt) did their best to abide by the letter of the law while maintaining the basic structure of a capable army.\n\nFor one thing, the General Staff was officially abolished, but went underground as the Truppenamt (Troop Office) for most of the interwar years.  The army itself was limited to 100,000 men, which von Seeckt organized into 7 divisions.  When the prewar officer corps was severely purged to a significantly smaller number, the army generally chose to retain men born within a certain time period, neither too old nor too young, with an eye toward expansion once the 'unjust' treaty was done away with.  The junior officers and NCOs of the interwar Reichswehr were eventually to serve as an elite cadre around which the later Wehrmacht would form.\n\nAs for the French and British, they had other priorities during the interwar years, and were none too keen on another European war.  Some people within Britain (including, arguably, Edward VIII) did not regard Hitler as a threat in the prewar years.  The German military did expand, secretly at first, but later openly when no protests came.  The Rhineland was reoccupied with only the slightest complaint from France and Britain, so it's no real surprise that the Germans believed they could get away with anything.  Until the French and British made good on their guarantee of Polish independence, those Germans were right.  The Allies did nothing about the Anschluss of Austria, the Czech cessation of the Sudetenland, and eventually Neville Chamberlain came home after the total annexation of Bohemia with a piece of paper bearing Hitler's signature proclaiming \"Peace in our time!\".", "Britain would not have been capable of going to war in say, 1938, because it could not depend on the support of its colonies (Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.)  The most militarily useful colonies were by this time all self-ruled, had all experienced the horrors of WWI, and didn't want to enter another European war.  Only when it became clear how bent on domination of Europe Hitler was, and the reality of the threat to Britain, did this change.", "Just as a side note, and on a point of semantics, but you probably don't mean England: instead use the United Kingdom or the UK or Britain when referring to the country as a whole.\n\nIt's sort of like referring to the US as Texas, or Germany as Bavaria. While a large part of the country, England is only one region of the UK."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], [], []]}
{"q_id": "557o6r", "title": "The Roman Architecture was heavily influenced by the Greeks, but were the Greeks themselves influenced in this area by other civilizations?", "selftext": "And how did we find out about this influence or the lack thereof.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/557o6r/the_roman_architecture_was_heavily_influenced_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d88z1id"], "score": [25], "text": ["As far as Classical Greece goes, much of it was an indigenous development within the confines of that historical period, but it does build upon earlier foundations, which are also Greek, but not considered part of Classical Greece, namely Mycenaean and Kretan architecture. Mycenaen architecture largely seems to have been an indigenous development as well, and appears in such similarity to the very inception of architecture in the neolithic that it is amply clear that it would rather have developed from neolithic precursors than external influence. If I recall correctly, however, there are some theories which trace its origin to the Balkans - I'm not sure about the merit these theories deserve. \nMinoan, that is Kretan, culture was subject to Egyptian influences, which reflected in aesthetics and architecture, although Krete remained very distinct from Egypt in both fields. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "3lckof", "title": "What was the Egyptian military like in World War 2 and after?", "selftext": "Ive done some basic research and after the Anglo Egyptian Treaty it appears that Egypt was responsible for their own defence and not Britain though the United Kingdom would train and supply Egypt's troops.\n\nBecause of this it seems obvious that Egypt would have had British made rifles, vehicles, and planes but does anyone have any actual numbers details on this? What were the Egyptian Army, Air Force, and Navy like at this time? How large was it and what exact equipment? Also, did the Egyptian military participate in World War 2 desert campaigns or was it just a British/French defence?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lckof/what_was_the_egyptian_military_like_in_world_war/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cv55ier"], "score": [2], "text": ["Hate to be needy, but Ill ping some of the relevantly flaired users:\n\n/u/JoelWiklund /u/BeondTheGrave /u/British-Empire"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "2md8cm", "title": "What were the Germanic \"Tribes\" really like? Were they nomads without cities? Or were they more sedentary like Rome?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2md8cm/what_were_the_germanic_tribes_really_like_were/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cm3afik"], "score": [156], "text": ["Romans wrote a lot of BS about 'the Germanic tribes', mostly because they defined 'Germans' as 'those who are not like us and who live outside the borders of the empire'. This definition lumps quite a lot of people together, while still throwing in loads of cultural bias as well.\n\nIt is much more interesting to look at 'people who lived outside the Empire' outside of their classification as 'Germanics'. We then see that settlements change over this time period. In the centuries BC (and up to 200 or so), the regular person would live on his own farmstead, within viewing distance (or walking distance) of his neighbours. A farmstead would have its own fences, wells, and outbuildings and would generally be mostly self-sufficient, though some regional specialisation (some areas focused on cattle raising, some on cereal cultivation etc.) did take place. Some areas that were particularly suitable for resource exploitation (close to forest for suitable timber, or close to iron ores for iron mining, or near the sea for salt extraction, or near a peat bog for peat digging) did have this 'industry' as a household activity 'on the side', but this is secondary to the main function of the household as a farm.\n\nAround the 2nd century or so, the village (collection of farmsteads) becomes more popular. While villages did exist in the earlier period as well (but were not the norm), the village of the late roman period becomes more common and more formalised. We now see a collection of these farmsteads. Archaeologists have tried to make statements about elite dominance within these farms on the basis of the size of the stable (and hence the capacity for cattle, and hence wealth), but this is very difficult. Generally, it seems that farms within a village were 'equal'. This does not mean that everyone within the village was equal, just that everyone lived in the same kind of house. It is also later, in the Migration period, that the size differences between households within a village gets more expression, and the larger farmstead collects also more small outbuildings, including a temple and more craft workshops. The first of these is Gudme in Denmark around the year 200, but by 400 these kind of places exist in many regions.\n\nParallel to this, you should also keep in mind that in the south of 'Germania', in modern Southern Germany and Austria, village organisation had already taken place in much earlier periods, including task differentiation between households.\n\nWe can see no traces of nomadism in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark in this period. They did travel to cattle grazing grounds in the summer, but this type of seasonal movement, called transhumance, is restricted to cattle herders, and not common within society in general. It is also highly regulated and occurs within fixed 'grazing areas', relatively close to the stationary 'home base', and not at all 'migratory'.\n\nFarms (and hamlets) also did move around within a landscape, so a field that in one decade might have been used for grain, might become a building plot a decade later, and grazing lands 30 years after. However, this cycle of rebuilding the farm (related to pest control) also happens within a local area."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "21ddn5", "title": "How has Hitler's \"Mein Kampf\" been used by historians? How has it been misused by others?", "selftext": "I saw something today about *Mein Kampf* going into public domain soon, and concerns that it would be misued. It got me to thinking: it's book is written by one of history's most notorious figures and its most influential leaders. It's an insight into his mind before the Holocaust, before invading Poland, before even he became Chancellor. It talks about the plans he would later put into terrible effect. The book must have been a goldmine for WWII historians, right? What parts were they able to use as a historical document and was anything simply too biased? Also, how have people misused it, and how will that be different when the copyright expires? (If that's not  against the no current events rule.)", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21ddn5/how_has_hitlers_mein_kampf_been_used_by/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cgc0o14"], "score": [5], "text": ["  I'm going to give one, fairly well known to historians, example.  A.J.P. Taylor famously did not read Mein Kampf, and discounted both its importance for understanding Hitler and any correlation between what Hitler wrote and his later actions.  \n\n  I should note that this is an example of misuse by non-use.  Taylor, to make a very hefty book short, argued that Hitler was not really the central cause of the Second World War, and moreover, that his ideology was not \"that\" important.  If I'm remembering correctly, he used an analogy about a car accident to describe the outbreak of war.  \n\n   Taylor not using Mein Kampf was such a big deal that Burk went out of his way to show conclusively that Taylor had not even read it.  The book was and is indeed a gold mine of sorts, but only insofar as one is intent upon examining Hitler.  This is why Taylor was pilloried to the extent he was:  he essentially devoted a book to Hitler's innocence (in starting the war, Taylor in no way denies or diminishes the Holocaust or Hitler's role in it) but could only do so by ignoring key evidence (Mein Kampf) or alternating between claiming Hitler was lying, and not really serious at various points.  If you ignore Mein Kampf, such an approach is indeed feasible, if still incredibly flawed.  However, if you include Mein Kampf, the approach just sort of implodes immediately.  Hitler was quite proud of being a warmonger...it was one of the only consistent and non-contradictory things in Mein Kampf.  So for Taylor to argue that a warmonger who was actively seeking a war in order to overturn the established order and build a race based empire, was actually not really that keen on war, caused no small amount of scoffing in the halls of history faculties.\n\n   As for how it will be different.  I don't really see a \"My Struggle, and Zombies\" or any other light hearted stuff as being viable.  A big part of that is of course, the book is awful.  I don't just mean that in the message, plenty of books have hateful messages.  Hitler was a good performer, and maybe a great deal is lost in translation, but that book reads like a rambling cavalcade of idiocies.  \n\nThe first time I read it, I was so disappointed.  I had steeled myself, reminding over and over that no matter how convincing or brilliantly the argument might be made, racism, anti-Semitism etc. are simply too easy and weakminded approaches to have in life.  When I'd finished I was utterly confused.  How could this book convince any even semi-educated person that Hitler was the star to hitch a wagon upon?  I very suddenly understood how initially, educated Germans, much of the Jewish population, and those outside Germany honestly thought Hitler was some kind of comedian.  Read seriously, the book is childish, riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, and simply bad.  Read as an intentionally paranoid cry for justice, blaming any party but oneself, the book is actually quite funny.\n\n  One use I could see for the book, which I'm claiming right now and will demand royalties for if it should happen to appear on the market, is toilet paper.  Nothing could be more suiting or proper than to read a bit of Mein Kampf, and then do with it exactly what ought to be done."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "1t71qf", "title": "How was \"detective\" work, or any crime-solving endeavor, carried out in the ancient world?", "selftext": "In either ancient Rome or Greece, how were crimes solved? Did they have police forces? Did they even conceive of crime in similar manner as us? ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t71qf/how_was_detective_work_or_any_crimesolving/", "answers": {"a_id": ["ce56nnr"], "score": [3], "text": ["Quoting myself from a previous answer to a similar question:\n\nIt depends on what you mean by police.\n\nIn Ancient Greece, city-states had publicly owned slaves who acted as a police force. They kept order and controlled prisoners, but they didn't investigate crimes. Most crimes were considered a private matter so the citizens dealt with them themselves.\n\nThe city of Rome never had a real police force, though it had a force of men set up for the protection of each ward. These men were responsible more for public order and physical protection and had no role in criminal justice.\n\nMost societies since then have had people who's duty was to \"keep the peace\" so to speak. One thing to keep in mind about criminal justice as a whole is that, for most of history, crimes were considered private matters between individuals. Eventually a new idea took hold in England; violating the King's Peace (through murder, theft, etc.) was not just a crime against an individual, but a crime against the whole kingdom. This brought about the prosecution of criminals even when no private citizen brought a case against them.\n\nIf, by police, you mean people who investigate crimes and arrest criminals, London's Bow Street Runners, founded in 1749, are regarded as the foundation of modern police. They were a formalization of the existing practice of 'thief-takers' - people who solved crimes for a fee. Prior to this, 'police' were basically only for keeping the peace in towns and cities; for example, the duties of Lieutenant General of Police, the foundation of the Paris police, were described as \"ensuring the peace and quiet of the public and of private individuals, purging the city of what may cause disturbances, procuring abundance, and having each and everyone live according to their station and their duties\"."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "5x73f8", "title": "In ancient Rome, what would happen if I needed my appendix out?", "selftext": "Also would I know the serve pain Could be life threatening? I guess what I'm really saying is, about how many people would've died from burst appendix before people realized what was wrong?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5x73f8/in_ancient_rome_what_would_happen_if_i_needed_my/", "answers": {"a_id": ["defttzy"], "score": [15], "text": ["First, it would be important to look at the diet in Rome (understanding that Rome's history lasted a millennium and while many things changed, including medical practices, diet would have remained relatively unchanged). Grain and cereal was a large part of the diet and as a consequence so was fiber. Appendicitis is caused by the blockage of the appendix, often by stool (or in rare cases any inflammation such as cancer). Because of their high-fiber diet it would be very unlikely that many people developed appendicitis.\n\nThat being said, surgery was rarely practiced at all during the time. While medical practices did certainly advance throughout Rome's millennium. For most of the Republican period (~510 - 27 B.C.) the Hippocratic corpus is our most useful source (see the Hippocratic Oath in which it states \"I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work\"). During the Empire Galen tends to be our most useful source. While surgery and dissections became slightly more practiced (albeit more on animals than humans), the practice as a whole was comparatively non-existent.\n\nTL;DR as unlikely as it would have been to develop appendicitis, if the miracle occurred, surgery would not be an option and the disease would likely be a death sentence. "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "88kbr2", "title": "Why did Ned Kelly's armour work against firearms, but medieval steel plate didn't?", "selftext": "I thought that people stopped wearing armour into battle because crossbows and later firearms easily penetrated it, making it obsolete.\n\nBut then, centuries later, Ned Kelly and his gang make themselves makeshift armour and somehow none of the policemen's firearms are able to pierce it? How does that work?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88kbr2/why_did_ned_kellys_armour_work_against_firearms/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dwliwm2"], "score": [10], "text": ["The response to crossbows appears to have been to make better armour. When powerful crossbows were common, the best armour was crossbow-proofed (i.e., successfully tested against crossbows).\n\nThe response to firearms was first, do nothing, since crossbow-proof armour stopped (i.e., had a good chance of stopping) bullets from early/mid 16th century hand-held firearms, with muzzle energies typically below 1000J. See _URL_2_ for some past discussion by /u/WARitter of the penetration of armour by early firearms. For more, see Alan Williams, *The Knight and the Blast Furnace*, Brill, 2003.\n\nSecond, as guns improved, make the armour thicker (which also makes it heavier). Bullet-proof (i.e., successfully tested against bullets - typically pistol bullets) armour varied in thickness. Examples from about 3mm thick to about 9mm thick are found. See A. Williams, D. Edge, T. Atkins, \"Bullet dents - \"Proof marks\" or battle damage\", *Gladius* 26, 175-209 (2006) for examples.\n\nThird, as the increase in thickness made the armour too heavy, get rid of the armour. The infantry was the first to discard armour. Cavalry retained bullet-proof armour for longer, and even when no longer wearing full armour, might still wear a bullet-proof breastplate. Siege engineers and specialist siege assault troops also retained heavy bullet-proof armour, in some case armour that would stop musket balls. These heavy siege armours were too heavy for regular wear on the battlefield, but in very high risk environments, could be useful.\n\nWhere does the Kelly Gang's armour fit into this? The armour was 4.5mm to 6mm thick (sources vary - /u/CChippy gives 3/16\" in _URL_1_ and other sources often give 1/4\"). Note that this is in the thickness range of bullet-proof armours of the 16th and 17th centuries.\n\nBlack powder pistols (see preceding link to past discussion of Kelly armour) of the type used against the armour typically had muzzle energies of about 300J. The rifles in use might have muzzle energies of about 1,500J, which would challenge the armour. Supposedly, the first version of the armour was found to not be strong enough, and thicker armour was made. From Williams, *The Knight and the Blast Furnace*, about 4.5mm of low-carbon steel armour (moderate quality) is required to stop about 1,500J.\n\nThe Kelly Gang were not facing muskets designed to penetrate armour on the battlefield (which could deliver in excess of 3,000J). This helped a lot. Even with this moderation of the threat they faced, their armour (at about the minimum thickness needed to stop bullets from the rifles they faced) was very heavy. Ned Kelly's armour was 44kg (97lb) (the other armours worn by the gang were lighter but less protective - Ned's armour had shoulder protectors and a rear apron, which the others lacked). This would have been rejected in the 17th century as too heavy for other than specialist siege/assault tasks.\n\nIn WW1, armour intended to stop bullets was used. One example, the [German brow plate, or *Stirnpanzer*](_URL_0_) was used to reinforce the German steel helmet to protect against bullets (the helmet, by itself, was *not* bulletproof). The Stirnpanzer was 5mm thick, about the same as the Kelly armours.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.awm.gov.au/index.php/collection/C157311", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62iag9/how_thick_was_ned_kellys_armour/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5udybq/how_effective_was_plate_armor_against_musketballs/"]]}
{"q_id": "fjye83", "title": "How young did Venetians typically join the navy? Was there a difference between merchant and wartime fleets?", "selftext": "My question particularly relates to Patrician families during the Republican era. ", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjye83/how_young_did_venetians_typically_join_the_navy/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fkqqlk3"], "score": [4], "text": ["I am not sure what you mean by \"Republican period\" but I can give an answer for 15th around the \"peak\" of Venetian naval strength.\n\nFirst to briefly describe the Venetian 'navy'. It consisted of state owned galleys (few if any sail ships were such state-owned) of usually two types: the merchant 'great' galleys and war 'light' galleys. The merchant galleys were used in Venetian convoy system for trading valuable goods to/from particular locations (Alexandria, Beirut, Flanders, Constantinople, etc) and in this system the galleys were \"auctioned\" for a particular voyage to a highest bidder. The person - or usually a partnership of several people - who won the auction could select whoever he wanted as a commander - called a *patron* - and he had to be a noble. War galleys - which served either as Guard - patrolling certain seas and locations - or stored on land and deployed when needed fir action, would have the commander - in this case called *sopracomito*  - elected for one season directly by the State. To be eligible for election you had to be a noble, over thirty years old and usually of good standing and in particular good financial status as often they had to pay advances and other costs for crew and provisions from their own pocket (which could maybe be reimbursed later, but definitely financial liquidity was needed. These position was highly coveted and many noblemen did their best to secure a sopracomitoposition for themselves.\n\nNow, this command post (patron / sopracomito) was basically the only officer rank on board that was noble. All the rest of the officer ranks were non-noble, and basically the ship was ran by non-nobles with the patron/sopracomito serving as overseer for trade/war matters. Now, it is not unreasonable to assume that in order to become a commander you had to have relevant experience. But how to get relevant experience, if no other officer posts were available for nobles? Well, one part of the solution was that the commander could bring aboard his retinue, like pages, servants, or just fellow passengers, and this was regularly used for commanders to 'accustom to the sea' their children or relatives or closely connected people of trust. Strictly speaking these people brought as retinue were not \"in the Navy\". They had no authority on the ship nor were they paid by the State. They were solely on the upkeep of the commander who had to pay all their expenses (or whatever other arrangement was made, but definitely not on official rolls).   \nThe other option to serve as a noble on board was to be elected to be a 'bowman of the quarterdeck'. As opposed for ordinary bowmen who were non-noble, who counted 20-30 on board and were positioned on the benches with the rowers, the bowmen of the quarterdeck were noble and were stationed with the commander. There were initially four of them, then six, then eight for each galley. Their salaries and supplies were provided by the State/galley as part of the crew (they were naturally paid more). The secondary literature I am drawing from openly describes these positions as intended by the State to give young, poor, experiencing-hardship nobles a chance to get experience on the seas and opportunity to earn some money trading. They didn't have any offical say in running of the ship and were more intended as soldiers. However if a commander would die on duty, the next commander would come from the nobles on board. Initially the age minimum for bowmen was twenty, but it was lowered to eighteen, and exceptions were frequently granted for younger.\n\nSo how young the Venetians were when they started 'going to the sea'? Hard to say. One commander recorded he started taking his son along with him when the child was only four. Another noble records he went on his first voyage at fourteen under his uncle. But it's unclear if he went as a page/retinue or a paid bowmen. In each case that same noble was recorded to be going as bowmen on voyages at around twenty to twenty-two years old. From this few cases we might paint the picture that Venetians nobles started 'serving' (or being employed) on vessels at ages 14-20, with some frequently experiencing ship life and participating on voyages even younger if their parents/relatives would take them. \n\nAs a final note, I would just reference the non-noble ranks on board. The highest non-noble rank on board was a *comito* - usually translated as master. For all intents and purposes he was the main person in charge of ship for all matters naval. Although sopracomito could always overrule him. Second in charge was a *paron* who was also in charge of the bow (front) of the ship. They were aided by several men called *nochiero* who were lesser officers, and first step above oarsmen (where there would be junior and senior ones). All these officers could (and would) come from the oarsmen ranks and rise through ability. However all the officer positions on a galley were given through elections in Venice (and you needed to be a Venetian citizen, which could be gotten around by marrying a Venetian woman).  \n\nIt was deemed beneficial to know how to read and write for junior officers, and for higher ranks you needed knowledge of mathematics and navigation. How young would you start? Hard to say, but for example Venetian conscription laws for oarsmen in time of war recruited from men aged twenty to sixty. As oarsmen were voluntary and often in short supply, younger men were often excepted. So again we may consider age of start being 16-20 (maybe as low as 14) if you were built well enough for the hard job of rowing."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "8g1jco", "title": "How did indigenous cultures, European colonists, or pre-electricity South Americans understand the power of the Electric Eel? Did they understand it as the same phenomenon as lightning, or something else?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8g1jco/how_did_indigenous_cultures_european_colonists_or/", "answers": {"a_id": ["dy85osj"], "score": [21], "text": ["/u/robinthebum wrote about it at _URL_0_\n\nThis is not to discourage more discussion.  I'd love to see more data, debate, and questions.\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/53mrnh/what_was_the_electric_eel_called_when_electricity/d7uh0ed/"]]}
{"q_id": "4ab3bw", "title": "Where did the Whites and Reds find the manpower and willing soldiers to engage in the Russian Civil War after the losses in World War I?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ab3bw/where_did_the_whites_and_reds_find_the_manpower/", "answers": {"a_id": ["d1en80d"], "score": [2], "text": ["Good question.  There are a couple of factors to take into account. The first thing is that much of the Russian Civil War was fought by fairly small forces.   [According to PBS,](_URL_1_) Russia mobilized 12,000,000 soldiers during the First World War, lost 1,700,000 killed, 2,500,000 captured or MIA, and 4,950,000 wounded, a whopping casualty rate of 76.3%. Even acknowledging that some wounded would recover enough to fight again, that's a devastating count. \n\n\nHowever, Russia's population was 166,000,000, in 1914, [according to Spartacus Educational](_URL_0_), so even given these devastating losses, there were still men of fighting age, including men involved in industry who had not been conscripted into the army.  In fact, feeding Russia's population during the Civil War was a major problem, and more died from famine and disease than combat or political violence. \n\n\nBut you still certainly have a good point, and indeed the initial phase of the Russian Civil War was fought by small bands of soldiers and irregulars.  Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat sent to Moscow, estimated that the Bolshevik Army had 213,000 soldiers in 1918, split between those fighting the Whites in Siberia, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and screening the German Army in the west. \n\nMost of these were ill-disciplined worker's militias, deserters, Chinese laborers, and Austro-Hungarian (mostly Hungarian) POWs who joined out of conviction or to avoid starvation in abandoned prison camps.  The backbone was formed from 23,000 committed Communist Lithuanian riflemen, who were rushed from front to front to deal with crises.  So while there were still troops, the numbers were greatly reduced from the Russian Amy's wartime strength.\n\nThe Whites had even worse problems recruiting soldiers.  General Denikin's Volunteer Army, the main White force in South Russia, set up recruiting offices in the Don, but only had around three thousand soldiers for most of the year, plus several thousands Don Cossacks.  The vast majority of officers preferred not to get involved. The fact that the Volunteers often beat much larger Red forces is attributable to the fact that most of the them, even in the rank-and-file, were officers, and they were much better disciplined than their opponents.  In North Russia, the British-backed government in Archangel never raised considerable numbers of troops (and those they did often deserted en masse), while the backbone of the Siberian Whites in 1918 was the 70,000-strong Czech Legion.  So, we can see that only small numbers of men actually fought during the first phase of the war, on very vast fronts, and that the best fighters were not Russians, but foreign soldiers. \n \nThe war kicked up a notch in 1919, and both sides were forced to conscript soldiers.  The Reds also conscripted former officers into the Red Army and coerced them to fight by holding their families as hostages.  However the majority of the conscript soldiers on both sides were not very interesting in fighting, and tended to desert when it suited them.  White armies converged Red Russia in 1919 from three sides, reaching their high-water mark in 1919, but the Reds possessed Russia's populous, industrial center, while the Whites were confined to the peripheries in the Baltic, Ukraine, and Siberia.  Thus, the Reds could raise far more troops, and with the help of internal lines could focus on one threat at a time.  While the Reds could replace losses, the Whites had a much harder time doing so.  In Siberia, the Reds usually conscripted prisoners that they took, but the Whites shot theirs or stripped them and left them to freeze to death, rather than enlisting them.  By the autumn of 1919 every major White threat had been defeated and the war was as good as over, but it continued for several more years.  \n\nSo, I hope that answers your question.  In short, the major points:\n\n1.) Russia took huge losses in WWI, but still had a massive population.\n\n2.) The war was fought by relatively small numbers of soldiers.\n\n3.) Both sides did have trouble finding soldiers (especially willing ones), and resorted to conscription or enlisting prisoners by force. \n\n\nSources:  \n\nRichard Pipes, *Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime*\n\n\nMr. Lockhart to Mr. Balfour,  \"Memorandum on the Internal Situation in Russia\", *British Documents on Foreign Affairs*, Doc. 5. \n\nJohn Bradley, *The Allied Intervention in Russia*\n\n\nJonathan Smele, *Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak*\n\n"]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWinRussia.htm", "http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.html"]]}
{"q_id": "vnjue", "title": "I want to read 12 history books in one year to know \"all the things\", what should be on the list?", "selftext": "*Thanks to /u/zombie_lenin and /u/HallenbeckJoe here are similar threads to look at:*  \n[AskHistorians Master Book List](_URL_2_)(strongly recommended!), [Learning world history from the beginning](_URL_3_), [A set of books that give a general understanding of Western History](_URL_1_\n), [Books to learn the gist of history, with little history knowledge required](_URL_0_) and [Good books about world history](_URL_3_).\n\n*Edit after 5 month: Read a bit of Modern world, completed Iron Kingdom, Why the West rules for now, the Great Divergence and looked into China A History, as well as Orientalism and the Power Broker. It is much harder to read some works because they are very dense (looking at Pomeranz. However, I have to say that it is quite interesting and changed how I look on the state of affairs. Why the West rules, for now is an excellent introduction piece.*\n\nMy bucket list includes to know a bit about mankind's history, this is how I want to do it.\n\nI would like to cover different fields with the 12 books, I want a few books for Asia, but am satisfied with European / Near-East focus, besides that. I would like to read a bit predating Alexander, but the focus should be the time afterwards. At least 1/3 should cover everything from 1933 to today.  \nWhat would you include in the list? You are welcome to decide what focus could be chosen.\n\nPlease post either one book, so people can upvote it directly, create a list, or give other advise. I also read the [FAQ's booklist](_URL_2_), but don't know how to chose, since you are the experts.\n\n**The List:**  \n 1. A History of the Modern world -- Palmer  \n 2. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 -- Tony Judt  \n 3. Walking Since Daybreak -- Modris Ecksteins  \n 4. A People's Tragedy -- Orlando Figes   \n 5. China A History -- John Keay  \n 6. The Arabs, A History -- Eugene Rogan  \n 7. Orientalism -- Said  \n 8. The First Total War -- David A. Bell  \n 9. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution -- David Brion Davis  \n10. Old World Encounters -- Bentley  \n11. Introduction to Medieval Europe 300-1550 -- Blockmans  \n12. Alexander to Actium  \n\n*+ 13. Why the West rules, for now -- Ian Morris*\n\n**Bonus books**  \n\nThe Age of Extremes - Eric Hobsbawm  \nLenin's Tomb -- Remnick  \nEverything Was Forever, Until It Was No More -- Alexei Yurchak  \n\nThe Power Broker -- Robert Caro   \nThe Great war for Civilization -- Robert Fisk  \nThe Structures of Everyday Life -- Braudel  \n\nThe Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy -- Ken Pomeranz  \nHistory of Christianity: The First 3000 Years -- Diarmaid MacCulloch  \nThe Life and Campaign of the Black Prince   \n\nTraditions and Encounters -- Ziegler  \nWorld Prehistory -- Brian M. Fagan  \nThe Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation -- Hobson  \n\nHistories -- Herodotus  \nThe Oxford History of India -- Vincent Smith  \nThe Copernican Revolution -- Thomas Kuhn   \n\nLies My Teacher Told Me -- Loewen   \nA General History of the Pyrates -- Daniel Defoe  \nAtaturk -- Andrew Mango  \n\nMemory and the Mediterranean -- Braudel  \nThe Problem of Slavery in Western Culture -- David Brison Davis  \nHistory of the Arabs -- P. K. Hitti  \n\nRenaissance of the Twelfth Century -- Charles Homer Hasksins  \nFraming the Early Middle Ages -- Christopher Wickham  \nNazi Germany and the Jews -- Saul Friedl\u00e4nder  \n\nFrom the Gracchi to Nero -- Scullard  \nThe Tragedy of Great Power Politics -- John Mearsheimer  \nAge of ... -- Eric Hobsbawm\n\n**Controverse, ideologic, propagandistic etc**  \nA People's History of the United States -- Howard Zinn  \nThe Decline of the West - Spengler  \nGuns, Germs, and Steel -- Jared Diamond  \nConceived in Liberty, Volume 1 -- Murray Rothbard   \n\n**Thanks a lot AskHistorians!** \n\n*Edit: Protip*  \nWhen you are editing your post make sure to refresh the page beforehand, as you may delete vital parts of it, when updating out dated posts, like I just did.\n\n**French / German**  books  \nIf someone is interested to add books in German or French, s/he is welcome to do so. While I am only a fluent reader in German, my French lacks. If you insist I would also add an additional collection for other languages be it French, Russian, Sumerian...\n\n*French*  \nTrois Ordres ou l'Imaginaire du f\u00e9odalisme -- Georges Duby  \nSaint-Louis -- Jacques Le Goff  \nLes rois thaumaturges -- Marc Bloch \n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vnjue/i_want_to_read_12_history_books_in_one_year_to/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7cde6j", "c560yd5", "c5621hs", "c5621vn", "c5629qe", "c562nm6", "c56349z", "c5634ib", "c563d2b", "c563dp9", "c563jin", "c564115", "c564bku", "c564k60", "c564p3f", "c564p9o", "c564pvu", "c564x80", "c564xj3", "c56588e", "c565yyd", "c565zde", "c5666up", "c56677h", "c5668sz", "c566dox", "c566dw2", "c566rsb", "c566vxl", "c566wiw", "c56706s", "c56715k", "c5671h8", "c5672fh", "c5674he", "c5678lp", "c567dac", "c567drb", "c567duz", "c567h6l", "c567l3z", "c567lxg", "c567o1g", "c567oc0", "c567wrh", "c568251", "c5682cj", "c56873s", "c568gvb", "c568p20", "c569ph1", "c569tx1", "c56bnli", "c56cf19", "c56hysi", "c56i2ex", "c56sf5d", "c5az8cu", "c5f7k9z", "c5hhjlv"], "score": [2, 8, 13, 12, 2, 2, 3, 14, 2, 4, 9, 7, 3, 4, 3, 2, 23, 6, 3, 5, 2, 6, 2, 4, 3, 6, 4, 2, 7, 2, 2, 4, 2, 7, 16, 2, 5, 2, 6, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 12, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2], "text": ["The book that taught me most about the Weimar Republic and the two World Wars was *The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923* by *Chris Harman*. From the publisher:\n\n*Without an understanding of this defeat, the great barbarisms that swept Europe*\n*in the 1930s cannot be understood. The swastika first entered modern history in*\n*the uniforms of the German counterrevolutionary troops of 1918 to 1923\u2014and*\n*because of the defeat in Germany, Russia fell into the isolation that gave Stalin*\n*his road to power.*\n\nAvailable in [English](_URL_0_) and German (*Die verlorene Revolution*).", "Since you suggested the 'near east':\n\n_Ataturk_, Andrew Mango. One of the most important statesmen in the 20th century, and one of the most admirable ones too (I'm not a Turk, but reading about him it is easy to see why he is so inspirational). The story of Ataturk is the story of Turkey in the first half of the 20th century, so it's kind of a 2-in-1 in a sense. Though unfortunately Mango doesn't spend all that many pages about his legacy.\n\n_The Arabs, A History_ by Eugene Rogan. I was tempted to suggest Albert Hourani's _A History of the Arab People_ but Rogan's book is more recent and covers the 90s and 00s as well as everything before them (his book stretches from the 16th century to 2009; Hourani's book was published in the early 90s and so misses the recent events).", "*The First Total War* by David A. Bell is an excellent summation of the state of Europe previous to the Napoleonic Wars, The French Revolution, and Napoleonic Europe. The book's main point is to show the beginning of the concept of what we now call total war. It's an extremely informative and engaging book that covers a lot of ground in an extremely important time/place of history.\n\nUnfortunately, when it comes to Medieval history, you get a lot of books that make too many *certain* claims about what happened in one place or who did what, when in reality there is no way to know. For this reason, I would recommend reading some scholarly articles to actually learn how we (as historians) decide what happened during the Medieval era. Read some primary sources and ask yourself, \"What can I learn from this?\" For instance, read *Beowulf* and a few scholarly articles that focus on what we can learn from it. By doing so, you'll already have a better idea about what Medieval history actually is, than a lot of people that have read a bunch of secondary source material.", "If I was to recommend one book over all the of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. I would recommend A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes. It gives a complete summary of the events leading to the 1917 Revolution and the brief aftermath. It is a great read and gives a detailed formation of the reasons on why the Bolsheviks won over the others and what it meant for Russia. It is an easy read, and reads almost like a novel. \n\n", "Conceived in Liberty, by Murray Rothbard. I am on Book 2 and have never read a more thorough, more American book on the Revolution. Told from a libertarian perspective, but not colored by excessive bias, it gives the reader more than just a chronology. It is a rich cross section of the individual motives that came together in synchronicity to cause the revolution. Additionally, Rothbard pays much needed attention to the oft neglected 17th century.", "Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie. It's a fascinating look into the years leading up to World War One, focusing mostly on Europe. Massie researches everything he writes to an incredible degree, yet still manages to keep it from being dry. He paints vivid pictures of the people involved and doesn't miss anything.", "I'd recommend a 'Big History' try Why The West Rules for Now by Ian Morris.", "For an understanding of how modern cities (especially New York City) got built, or unbuilt, I can't recommend enough \"The Power Broker\" by Robert Caro. Even if you have no knowledge of New York in particular, it's a seminal book about the twin rise of the modern city and the automobile, urban planning, and bureaucratic power in the 20th century. Ostensibly a biography of Robert Moses, it's probably more accurate to call it a biography of New York. \n\nAlso generally considered to be one of the great nonfiction works of our era.", "I'd recommend 'Birth of the Modern: 1815-1830' by Paul Johnson.  I'm re-reading it now and it's both very broad, very detailed, and imminently readable.   Basic thesis is how the matrix for the modern mind was formed during this time period. \n\n\n", "If you don't mind a long book that's a bit focused, you should look into [Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945](_URL_0_), which is pretty much what it says on the tin. It's a good read, if a bit dry at times, and covers pretty much everything in its subject area. ", "A very broad book that I'm reading right now (and it seems really good so far) is [Guns, Germs, and Steel](_URL_0_) by Jared Diamond.\n\nIt deals with patterns of human history, specifically why Eurasian societies conquered and survived others (and not the other way around).  Also, it's a Pulitzer Prize winner.\n\nEdit: You should know I'm not a historian or anything.  Just a regular guy", "Either Tacitus' *Annals* or Livy's *Ab Urbe Condita*. Both are great primary sources on Roman history, which is amazingly interesting. Or, for a modern text, *From the Gracchi to Nero* by Scullard.", "*The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy*. An amazing book, filled with over a thousand years of information about an important monarchy. \n\nEdit: a word", "I would recommend [1491](_URL_0_). It's a great look on what we now know about the Americas before Columbus, and it's an easy read (written by a journalist). ", "**The Development of America:** *Nature's Metropolis* by Cronin is, without a doubt, a classic that analyzes the development of the Chicago area. This is way more than a history of a city. Cronin focuses on how trade, immigration, and a huge number of other phenomena affected society, culture, economy, and environment. His arguments about the Chicago-dominated Midwest can be (loosely) applied to other regions in America to give you a MUCH better understanding of this young nation.\n\n**Pre-1492 World History:** I am by no means an expert, but I read *Old World Encounters* by Bentley in a World History Readings class and thought it was quite good. It doesn't focus on any culture in a vacuum. Instead, Bentley focuses on interactions and cross-cultural influences primarily between Asia and Europe before 1492. \n\nAny others can feel free to improve on my recommendation.", "Andrew Gordon- A Modern History Of Japan. It's incredibly broad, but is a good introduction to changes in Japanese society over the past two hundred years or so.", "Take Rothbard off the list. He was more of a propagandist than a historian.", "[A Short History of Nearly Everything](_URL_0_) by Bill Bryson\n\nThis book is phenomenal. It has science, history, humor. It shows a side of the history you've never seen before. It has been referred to as 'the science book everyone wishes hey had in school'.\n\nDo yourself a favor and pick it up. Promise you won't be disappointed.", "No one has mentioned 'Lies My Teacher Told Me'? A great history of the US.", "I don't know how nobody's posted this, but [Herodotus' *Histories*](_URL_0_) is about as essential as it gets for the classics. It was written in the mid-5th century BC and covers a huge range of topics from politics and geography to cultural clashes and ancient traditions. It's also widely regarded as the genesis of history as a subject of study.\n\nI can't say this next bit any better than Wikipedia can, so here:\n\n > Perhaps most importantly, it stands as one of the first [and only] surviving account of the rise of the Persian Empire, the events of, and causes for, the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Herodotus portrays the conflict as one between the forces of slavery (the Persians) on the one hand, and freedom (the Athenians and the confederacy of Greek city-states which united against the invaders) on the other.", "I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Fisk. In *The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East,* he chronicles his travels over a thirty year career as a correspondent in the Middle East, and provides a borderline absurd amount of historical context to accompany his first hand accounts of the numerous conflicts that he reported on and important figures whom he interviewed. At over 1300 pages, it might displace a book or two off your list, but it is an incredible and enlightening read.", "I'm gonna get downvoted for this but \"A People's History of the United States\" by Howard Zinn. Just some great counter-history to the typical bullshit we learn about in school. But people also think he's a radical asshole, so it might depend more on your personal viewpoints than desires to learn history, but I still recommend it.\n\nBut I would also highly recommend something else. Do you like movies? If you like movies as well as history I strongly recommend reading the literature about historical film. My personal favorites are: \n\n\"History by Hollywood\" by Robert Brent Toplin\n\nOr \"Film Nation\" by Robert Burgoyne.\n\nThey'll definitely change your perspective about how you watch historical/political films, and even make you love some movies that you like even more because some are actually good historical representations\n\n\nAnd I'm gonna add one more here. You should also read some Social History. But I'm not gonna recommend any typical social history books. I'm gonna recommend George Orwell's \"Down and Out in Paris and London\" (NOTE: This is NOT a history book but more of a journalistic approach, but who's to say that just because it isn't a \"history\" book, that it's not good history???) I just think it's fantastic, it's about class in you guessed it... Paris and London, during the earlier parts of the 20th century and it gives you an entirely different perspective", "I'm no expert, but here's a couple that have helped me out as a student. (I'm South Asian, so these books come from a South Asian perspective.)\n\nVincent Smith's *The Oxford History of India*. Gives a completely different perspective on the area than most books by Indian authors, but doesn't really cover the Indian independence movement or the political climate after the first world war. If you're interested, I can recommend some other books that focus on Indian independence.\n\nP. K. Hitti's *History of the Arabs*. Eugene Rogan's book is pretty much a modern history of the area. This book is about the start of Islam and the rise of the great Islamic empires back when Europe was in the middle ages. ", "*Framing the Early Middle Ages* by Christopher Wickham.\n\n*Renaissance of the Twelfth Century* by Charles Homer Hasksins.\n\nThe second book is a tad outdated, yes, but those two books together?  They'll blow your current assumptions about the \"Dark Ages\" to smithereens.", "You're missing a major aspect of early new world history. I would recommend you add *A General History of the Pyrates* by Daniel Defoe. You may know Defoe for his books *Robinson Crusoe* and *Moll Flanders* but this is not a fictional tale. It is considered one of THE primary sources of pirating history. It can get a bit heavy sometimes and it was written in the early 1700s so it reads a little rough but you will come away knowing far more about pirates than you could have known there was to know. ", "I can *really* recommend *China: A History* by John Keay.\n\nIt is among the most readable history books I know of and it's extremely up-to-date and China is definitely worth 'spending a book on'. \n\nIt goes right from the neolithic period up to the present.\n\n[Here](_URL_0_)!", "[Memory and the Mediterranean](_URL_4_) and [The Structures of Everyday Life](_URL_5_). Hell, anything by Braudel. One of the most important historians of the 20th century.\n\n[Alexander to Actium](_URL_6_) by Green. \n\n[Rubicon](_URL_8_) is passable considering the broad audience it was written for. A nice intro to the era for the uninitiated.\n\nI don't think you can look at modern works of history without giving credit to Focault, but good luck, his stuff isn't easy. If you're an academic masochist who likes to [punish](_URL_7_) yourself to the point of [madness](_URL_0_), then try his [Archeology of Knowledge](_URL_2_).\n\n[The Eastern Origin of Western Civilization](_URL_1_) by Hobson is great, highly readable, and pretty balanced for the \"East vs. West\" field.\n\n[Orientalism](_URL_3_) by Said is standard reading for World/Asia historians. Difficult at times, but essential.\n\nAnd despite what other have said, I would recommend Zinn's infamous American history simply for the fact that you shouldn't only read good books. Sometimes it's just as useful to read ones that are controversial, biased, or just plain bad. Or ones that you know you're gonna hate. I probably learned more about historical methods in grad school by reading many mediocre texts than a few fantastic ones. Stuff like Zinn is worth reading and studying no matter what anyone tells you, espeically if you approach it from a historiographic and technical point of view.", "An Intellectual History of Psychology--Daniel Robinson.  It's actually more of a history of philosophy starting from the pre-Socratics, and he's good about covering the general zeitgeist of the periods as well.  It's also all from a hermeneutic perspective, which is important to keep in mind.\n\nThe 100:  A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History--Michael H. Hart.  The guy is rather eurocentric and I don't care for a lot of his political views, but the book itself isn't.  He goes through each person--first giving a very well laid-out biography, explains why he/she was important and then gives a brief argument on why the person is placed where he/she is.  Very well written.  He actually gives a very good argument for Muhammed being number 1.", "1. Age of Revolution 1789-1848\n2. Age of Capital 1848-1875\n3. Age of Empire 1875-1914\n\nThese three books by Eric Hobsbawm form a thematic trilogy about the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century and how it directly led to colonial imperialism. \n\nIf you want to understand just how deeply economic systems can change society, this is your book. Yes, it is dry, but damn it is important to understand this.", "Try \"[The Iron Wall](_URL_0_)\" by Avi Schlaim.  It's the history of the modern Israeli/ Arab conflict that is impeccably written and sourced. ", "Jacques Gernet - A History of Chinese Civilization", "Russell's A History of Western Philosophy isn't a bad way of filling in some gaps.", "The Samurai - A Military History by Stephen Turnbull is a very interesting look at japans history, particularly in reference to the development of their culture. ", "*King Leopold's Ghost* by Adam Hochschild. I warn that it's extremely dry, and it took two readings required by two different classes to appreciate it, but this book opened my eyes to colonialism in Africa, specifically in the Belgian Congo. \n\nBasically, Belgium was able to convince the other European powers to give little ol' Beligium a massive portion of Africa filled with rubber and gems, all between the US Civil War and WW1.", "All of these works are very specific. Especially Kuhn's is simply specialist literature, even if it is an important work in the field. I would avoid the hell out of Rothbard because it's an ideological work. I don't think A People's Tragedy is free of bias either. But finding a neutral work about the Soviet Union is impossible anyhow.\n\nThe only book on your list with a big scope is Arabs A History.\n\nIf you want to know \"all the things\" you need at least some survey works. You still don't even have one for the modern age so I propose 'A History of the Modern world' by R.R. Palmer (10th edition).\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's not perfect. It's not an exciting read like Jared Diamond or Howard Zinn. It's not on the edge of modern research. But it's a comprehensive book and the best of its kind. \n\nFor European Medieval History I found \"Introduction to Medieval Europe 300-1550\" by Blockmans and Hoppenbrouwers (A Belgian and a Dutch Historian) very rewarding.\n\n_URL_2_\n\n\nFor the history of the near East during the last 40-ish years, I would strongly recommend Robert Fisk's The Great war for Civilization. Some of the more conservative stock might see this work as biased. But this book is incredible. It's an enthralling read and completely unique in its kind. It's also an obligatory work for anyone interested in recent Middle East history.\n\n_URL_3_\n\nAlso, check out this thread: _URL_1_", "William L Shirer - the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - Many books to choose from for probably one of the most important events in modern history, exploring the causes of the 2nd world war and the consequences.", "Diarmaid MacCulloch's *History of Christianity: The First 3000 Years*. \n\nIf you have any interest in Religion or the discussion or Religion, or understanding a major part of the spiritual side of the last 2000 years of history, it's essential.", "I'm not a historian but I am a fan of literary fiction that leads into my personal investigation of what is factual history (my mother has a PhD in anthropology and I have read these books on her suggestion...)\n\n* [The Killer Angels](_URL_1_) - about a few days during the most bloody battle of the American Civil War. Much of the book is speculative (read: historical fiction and internal monologues we can never really know about) but really got me interested in the time period.\n\n* [All The Shah's Men](_URL_2_) - A history of the American government's involvement in the Iranian coup in the 50's. My father grew up in Iran and I think this is one of the only books he's read in his whole life. Quite the eye opener.\n\n* [Gates of Fire](_URL_0_) - The \"real\" story of the 300 soldiers of Sparta made famous by the comic book by Frank Miller/the movie directed by Zack Snyder.\n\nAgain, these books aren't factual but they got me to research and learn about their related subjects. They help me remember what was factual and what was fictional because they are all fantastic reads.\n\n", "I think some of the recommendations here are too specific for someone who wants to know \"all the things\". But if the OP is content with them, great! \n\nSome general world history recommendations, in no particular order:\n\n *  A World History (by Ponting)\n *   A History of the Modern World\n *  Human Drama: World History from 500 to 1450\n * The Heritage of World Civilizations\n * Why the West rules for now\n * Guns, Germs and Steel \n * The World That Trade Created\n * Carnage and Culture\n * After Tamerlane\n * Europe: A History (Davies)\n * Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World \n * Ecological Imperialism\n\nI don't want to recommend only one book, as everyone has a different taste when it comes to history books. Look them up, read a few pages on amazon online and decide for yourself if you will like the style and themes. If you want to spend a year with these books, a few minutes of having a look at them are well spent. I also recommend another look at the \"Master Book List\" in the sidebar and going through it. Its exactly what you're looking for!\n\nOxford's \"Short introduction to ...\" series is quite good too:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHere are some earlier posts on r/AskHistorians, with similiar questions asked:\n\n* [What is a good book for learning world history from... the beginning?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [Could you guys give me a recommendation on a set of books that I could use to give myself a sort of general understanding of Western History?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [What is a good collection of books for someone with little history knowledge to learn the gist of history?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [I want to learn about world history, what are some good books or other resources ?](_URL_1_)\n\n", "\"Maps of Time\" by David Christian. Another \"big history\" book... covers the beginning of the Universe to the present day.", "The Age of Revolution, Capital, Empire, And The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawn?", "What about *A History of the Modern World* by Palmer? It's very much a general overview, and I'm not sure that's what the OP wants, but it's incredibly well written. ", "*Traditions and Encounters* by Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler. It's a fully fledged college textbook on world history and a very good one. As unbiased as humanly possible.", "* \"The French Revolution: A History\" by Thomas Carlyle\n* \"Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization\"\n* \"Decline of the West\" by Oswald Spengler (a good book to learn about all of history)", "In my opinion, the most important book in the last 15 years: *The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy*, by Ken Pomeranz, on amazon [here](_URL_0_). \n\nIt challenges and basically obliterates the traditional interpretations of Western ascendancy with a new, ecological interpretation of the industrial revolution.", "*A History of Money* by Glyn Davies... always relevant to everything else.\n\nFor the Persians and the Greeks (always very important), a good one for a popular audience is Tom Holland's *Persian Fire*. A similar one on Rome (up to the end of the Republic at least) is *Rubicon* by the same author.", "Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome. It's a bit older than most of the books mentioned here, but hey, it won a Nobel Prize.\n", "If you want to read one general history book, The People's History of the World by Chris Harman.", "I realise this goes a bit further back than you might have wanted, but I seriously recommend *A history of the Ancient Near East* by Marc van de Mieroop. Whilst being relatively comprehensive, the book's focus is on producing an understandable summary of the ancient Near East and so in terms of gaining some kind of overarching perspective on the development of the ancient Near East it's pretty excellent.", "Put Said into the bottom category. It's not objective history; it's impassioned whining.", "[A Short History of Nearly Everything](_URL_0_) sounds like the right book for you.", "Thanks for making this thread. There are quite a few books on that list I'll be picking up very soon. ", "No love for french historians? I've been reading recently a lot about the Capetian kings, here's some books about that era:\n\n**Jacques Le Goff**, *Saint-Louis* (1996) (But seriously, any book he ever wrote. I never see him or any of his book mentionned here, but me and my collegues agreed that he might be the most famous french historian nowadays)\n\n**Georges Duby**, *Trois Ordres ou l'Imaginaire du f\u00e9odalisme* (1978) (Major book that has been quoted in almost every medieval history book I've been reading since I started University)\n\n**Marc Bloch**, *Les rois thaumaturges* (1924) (Marc Bloch was the \"master\" if I can say of Le Goff, who was the thesis director of Duby)", "With the internet authority my flair bestows upon me, I am recommending you read *Why the West Rules* by Ian Morris first. It basically details the history of the entire world, and does a good job of presenting different historical and archaeological theories. By reading it you will be able to fit the more specific works you have into a nice chronology.", "*A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century* by Barbara W. Tuchman would make a good bonus for you. Guess what its about?", "I just saw that you read German. If you're interested in the subject, some of the best scholarship throughout the past several centuries has on the subject of the Late Roman Republic/Age of Augustus was originally in German. There is an interesting history itself in the magnetic attraction Germans have felt towards Augustus that I don't think has been fully explored (at least in English texts that I've seen).", "A little late to the party here, and this isn't strictly a history book, but I really think a great primer would be *The Tragedy of Great Power Politics* by John Mearsheimer. He's one of the world's premise international relations scholars, and here he tests his theory of 'offensive realism' against the historical record, covering the period from the Frech Revolution to the end of the Cold War. Gives a great and convincing explanation of the strategic decisions and power calculations behind all the great-power wars (and avoided wars) throughout that period. Highly recommended.", " >  Lies My Teacher Told Me -- Loewen\n\nFantastic book, but skip the sequels. \n\n > A People's History of the United States -- Howard Zinn\n\nGreat stuff written by a great guy! Loewen's book references his quiet a bit. I'd encourage you to read up on Zinn's own bio/background, as well.\n\n > A History of the Modern world -- Palmer\n\nThere are far better books than this antiquated piece of shit.\n\n", "Marking this thread", "Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber\n\nA very insightful book on economic history of the world."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r6sag/what_is_a_good_collection_of_books_for_someone/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qg3hq/could_you_guys_give_me_a_recommendation_on_a_set/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/timi4/the_askhistorians_master_book_list/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sq55s/i_want_to_learn_about_world_history_what_are_some/"], "answers_urls": [["http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/The-Lost-Revolution-Germany-1918-to-1923"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postwar:_A_History_of_Europe_Since_1945"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X"], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-Illustrated/dp/0385609612"], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Histories-Revised-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449086/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340771871&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=herodotus"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/China-History-John-Keay/dp/0465025188"], ["http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Civilization-History-Insanity-Reason/dp/067972110X", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Eastern-Origins-Western-Civilisation/dp/0521547245/", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Archaeology-Knowledge-Discourse-Language/dp/0394711068/", "http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X/", "http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Mediterranean-Fernand-Braudel/dp/0375404260", "http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Century-Vol/dp/0520081145", "http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Actium-Historical-Evolution-Hellenistic/dp/0520083490", "http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-The-Birth-Prison/dp/0679752552", "http://www.amazon.com/Rubicon-Last-Years-Roman-Republic/dp/1400078970/"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Iron-Wall-Israel-World/dp/0393321126"], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/History-Modern-World-PowerWeb/dp/0073255009/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340781574&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=history+of+the+modern+world", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/timi4/the_askhistorians_master_book_list/", "http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Medieval-Europe-300-1550-Blockmans/dp/0415346983", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation:_The_Conquest_of_the_Middle_East"], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Fire-Novel-Battle-Thermopylae/dp/055338368X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340785209&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=gates+of+fire", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Killer-Angels-Modern-Library/dp/0679643249/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340784212&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=killer+angels", "http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340784304&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=all+the+shahs+men"], ["http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/nav/p/category/academic/series/general/vsi/R/browse+within+this+series/history/n/4294921811.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend&amp;nType=2", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sq55s/i_want_to_learn_about_world_history_what_are_some/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qucta/what_is_a_good_book_for_learning_world_history/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qg3hq/could_you_guys_give_me_a_recommendation_on_a_set/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r6sag/what_is_a_good_collection_of_books_for_someone/"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Divergence-Europe-Economy/dp/0691090106"], [], [], [], [], [], ["http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-Illustrated/dp/0385609612"], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []]}
{"q_id": "2wocjb", "title": "Why did the Scandinavian Norsemen write runes?", "selftext": "I live in the Swedish area called Roslagen which carries a good amount of viking history. A local runestone says:  \"Inga had a runestone raised for Ragnfast, her husband, who inherited the village after Sigfast, his dad. May God help their spirits.\"\n\nWhy did they write runestones for what appears to be trivial matters? I have understood that there only were a few specialists who could create runestones, what were gained from their spending?\n\nThis requires some generalizations of course, some runes tells about journeys overseas, which I suppose can tell prosperity about the heroic deeds of the person the stone was raised for. And others, like the [Hillersj\u00f6 Stone](_URL_0_), could serves as a legal document.\n\nBut I can't get my head around the reasons for writing down what appears to be trivial happenings, is there some academic theory which could explain this?\n\n", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wocjb/why_did_the_scandinavian_norsemen_write_runes/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cosrpsq"], "score": [11], "text": ["Despite their seemingly mundane and formulaic inscriptions, the raising of runestones in Late Viking-Age Sweden, particularly around Uppland, was a fashionable and calculated effort by (mostly) affluent locals to display their wealth, status and allegiance. The primarily Christian iconography and inscriptions of the stones reveal a changing society, in which it may have been beneficial for an individual or clan to publicly advertise their new-found conversion and have others follow their example.\n\nA few good sources on all things to do with these inscriptions are Michael Barnes' *Runes: A Handbook*, and Judith Jesch' *Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse* "]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillersj%C3%B6_stone"], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "6jkxuy", "title": "Why has Country Music remained so white? What cultural and industry forces kept the genre that so willingly borrowed from blues, gospel, norte\u00f1o, and mariachi so completely dominated by white artists and tied to white identity?", "selftext": "", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jkxuy/why_has_country_music_remained_so_white_what/", "answers": {"a_id": ["djf44k3", "djf5n8p", "djf65wf", "djfyz1d"], "score": [186, 2466, 519, 46], "text": ["Hey y'all, \n\nIf you are a first time visitor, welcome! This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and [it can often take time for a good answer to be written](_URL_4_). The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with **in-depth and comprehensive responses**, and our [rules](_URL_1_) are intended to facilitate that purpose. *We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy*. Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. \n\nSo please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the [rules](_URL_1_), as it would [break our hearts](_URL_6_) to have to ban you.\nIt is very rare that a decent answer doesn't result in due time, so please do come check back on this thread in a few hours. If you think you might forget, send a [Private Message](_URL_3_!) to the [Remind-Me bot](_URL_0_), and it will ensure you don't!\n\nFinally, while we always appreciate feedback, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with META conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to [modmail](_URL_2_), or a [META thread](_URL_5_[META]). \n\nThank you!", "The answer to that goes back to the early days of the recording industry. You're right, country, blues, gospel and southern gospel artists all borrow relentlessly from each other, and that tradition goes back to the 1800's before the genres got clearly separated out (I can't speak to mariachi or norteno as I haven't studied those).  As I understand it, in the early 1900's as the recording industry was coming online, \"race\" records and \"hillbilly\" records were created as niche markets - race records selling to lower class African Americans, hillbilly records selling to lower class white Americans.  The musics sounded very similar at that point, but it was the marketing of the artists that separated them out by race.  Now whites were more than happy to listen to black music, and vice versa, but it was how they were marketed that created the initial distinction between the genres, which became country and blues, respectively, and once distinguished they became statements of identity.  Their religious counterparts, gospel and southern gospel, have a slightly different history, as they both emerged from hymns but southern gospel also was influenced by rural singing conventions.  Each of those genres borrowed from each other, but were more clearly separated even from the beginning because Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in the U.S. - much less opportunity for artists to share music, although once the Pentecostal movement got going in the early 1900's, that allowed for a lot more crossover since it started out inter-racial.\n\nWhy it's remained that way is simply that music is a very powerful means of creating a sense of personal and group identity.  Music, of all kinds, acts physically (resonance of sounds in the body), emotionally (connection of sounds to emotional states), and textually (in the lyrics) to reinforce particular social narratives and ways of being in the world.  Once country music was successfully labeled white by the marketing arm of the recording industry, that took on a life of it's own thanks to the racial dynamics of American culture.  It becomes a self perpetuating cycle where whiteness becomes a significant feature of country music, and vice versa, as a shortcut for distinguishing between and reinforcing the social and racial class structures.  Food, clothing, and other cultural items work much the same way.\n\nSome Sources:\n\n* Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music\n* Michael Harris, The rise of gospel blues: the music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the urban church\n* Cecelia Tiichi, High lonesome: the American culture of country music\n* Sarah Thornton, Club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital\n* Benjamin Filene, Romancing the folk: public memory  &  American roots music\n* James Goff, Close harmony: a history of southern gospel\n* Robert Darden, People Get Ready!: a history of black gospel from Africa through present\n", "To give a short answer: while these early forms were similar, segregation of performers both by music producers and American society in general, contributed to a divergence in genres, though blues continues to be an incredibly important influence on country\n\nEarly on in the history of American music, you're correct that what evolved into country music borrowed heavily from especially blues and gospel, as well as other forms like tejano and cajun music. It is also important to note that these genres also borrowed from each other. Similar themes and songs (trains, the legend of John Hardy, etc.) appear all across what could be termed folk music in the 20's and 30's.\n\nPotentially the biggest industry-produced effect that pushed along these schisms was the distinction between white and \"colored\" artists early on in recording history. Music by black artists and marketed for a black audience was \"race music,\" while music by white artists and marketed for a white audience was \"hillbilly music.\" Other music forms you mentioned that were popular within Hispanic and Latino communities were recorded but, since the bigger artists in those genres sang in Spanish, those styles had little popular appeal until the Latino population grew later in the century. My knowledge of early Latino music is a incomplete so if I am wrong, please correct me.\n\nThe Blues-Country schism was also reinforced by segregation and the institutionalization of both genres. Early in music recording history, it would've been unusual to find an artist of either race who sang only country or only blues. But the broad local appeal of the sounds led to commercial success, and of course there were forces which wanted to capitalize on that success. The WSM Barn Dance started in 1925, but its name soon changed. In 1927, while introducing African American harmonica player DeFord Bailey, announcer George Hay called the program the \"Grand Ole Opry\" for the first time, and it would eventually become the dominant stage in country music and end goal for aspiring country artists. I have no knowledge of the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry's home, being segregated. However, it is likely, though hard to determine, that small-time black country artists had reduced appeal due to the Jim Crow laws of the states they performed in, which contributed to the appearance of country as being white.\n\nThe two genres also developed differently and diverged. Blues gave birth to jazz. A jazz-infused country styled called Western Swing was born in the 40's. The Grand Ole Opry became able to determine what styles would get national exposure. In a way, what the Opry said was country was what became country. By the mid 40's to mid 50's, this was Honky Tonk. This was a sound that was blues-influenced but not similar to blues the way old hillbilly music was. Still, in the Honky Tonk era, Blues had a tremendous impact on country music. Hank Williams, a white country music star (one of the legends of country music), learned guitar from a blues musician. But the blues forms that impacted country no longer had appeal to the urban African American in post-Great Migration Chicago and it would take the electrification of the blues to reintroduce it as a popular form. Later, the country music establishment purposefully changed styles to a mass-appeal Nashville Sound which kept little from the Honky Tonk style immediately preceding and had little visible blues influence, so even the older blues players had little interest in mainstream country anymore.\n\nThere have been black artists who have been influential in country music, but it wasn't until the 60's, with Ray Charles releasing an album of traditional country songs and Charley Pride becoming the first black performer on the Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey's firing in 1941. However, the introduction of Outlaw Country, whose performers sometimes released songs glorifying the South, which was sometimes tied to the Civil War, understandably turned a lot of Black listeners away and towards other sounds like funk, disco, and what would eventually become hip-hop.\n\nBlack country artists exist today, but the location of country's center in the South, the harsh Jim Crow laws in much of country's market, the controversial inclusion of the Confederacy in some styles of country, the early industry-driven distinction between blues, country, and other folk music, and the shifting interest of black audiences away from both country and blues, led to country being a white-dominated genre.\n\nPBS I believe recently did a nice miniseries called [American Epic](_URL_0_) that explores a few different artists of the 20's and 30's across a broad range, including country, blues, tejano, and hawaiian.\n\nThis is also like my second answer on here so let me know if I can do better. It's nice to see American folk musicology get covered.\n\nEDIT: Thought I might add how fitting this question is for the theme, as I generally consider the 1940s to be the time where blues and country significantly diverge stylistically.", "Hi!\n\nI'm actually doing a lot of research about Nashville, Austin, country music, and authenticity right now so I'm in the thick of this question. I think other posters have covered an in-depth history of the genre and the development of the music itself, but you might find some of this interesting.\n\nCountry music, as a genre, was marketed heavily to white Southerners in the first half of the twentieth century as a way to connect to rural roots. It served as a form of cultural validation for self-conscious Southerners in a time where you see a lot of Southern pride movements occurring. The South was attempting to demonstrate to the rest of the country that the region was competitive in education, technology, and industry. There was a distinct urban/rural cultural divide; members of the \"cultural elite\" of large Southern cities wanted to distance themselves from the rural images traditionally associated with the South. In Nashville, the National Life Insurance Company started a high-powered radio station called WSM in 1925. The station played mostly opera and classical music, but began playing a \"barn dance\" style program where \"old-timey\" or \"hillbilly\" musicians would play traditional music and act as hillbilly characters on air. One day, a classical music program out of Chicago was playing on the air. The announcer quipped that there was \"no place in the classics for realism.\" WSM's barn dance program ran directly after, and announcer George Hay gave the Grand Ole Opry its name:\n\n > \u201c\u2026for the last hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera and the classics, and heard Dr. Damrosch tell us there in so no place for realism in that kind of music. In respectful contrast to Dr. Damrosch\u2019s presentation, for the next three hours we are going to present nothing but realism.\u201d\n\nand, later, satirizing the high-brow attitude of the opera program:\n\n > \"From now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.\"\n\nThus begins the *official* association with country music and authenticity. While Hay would often have African American artists on his show (the previous comment was actually made directly after a performance by an African American harmonica player), it's important to understand that this program spoke to the identity of *white* southerners at a time when you see a lot of \"old south\" longing occurring (Gone With the Wind, confederate monuments, even the resurgence of the KKK). White southerners, particularly those in the working class, were tired of feeling like their culture was wrong or undignified. This isn't my area of expertise, but I'd argue that the use of African American sounds in country music was legitimized because white working-class southerners felt like this music was \"authentic\" because of the working-class roots of African Americans. \n\nThe history of the recording industry in Nashville is long and messy, but one of the most interesting things I read today applies here. Historian Jeremy Hill suggests that in the midst of the civil rights movement, the country music industry marketed music to \"ordinary white folks\" without directly claiming any racial preference. He quotes Tandy Rice, who was later president of the Country Music Association. Rice was asked in 1967 about the appeal of country music and how it contrasted with leftist policies:\n\n > \"Right now, country music is stable, like the great backbone of the country. The lyrics are simple, and sincere, not about civil rights and such. These folks don't go for the Bob Dylan, Joan Baez kind of thing. The lyrics are about what concerns everyday folks.\"\n\nNow, country music has changed drastically over the years- I'm particularly interested in the countercultural \"Cosmic Cowboy\" movement that occurred in Austin in the 1970s- but the core of the genre has always been a white search for identity. In short, country music wasn't just marketed as \"southern\" music. It was marketed as *white* southern music.\n\nSources:\n\n* Jeremy Hill, *Country Comes to Town: The Music Industry and the Transformation of Nashville*. This book in particular covers the relationship between race, country music, and Nashville. \n\n* Craig Havighurst, *Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, USA*\n\n* Joli Jensen, *The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music*\n\nAnd if you're interested in the Cosmic Cowboy movement in Austin, I really like Jason Mellard's *Progressive Country*."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules", "http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&amp;subject=Question%20Regarding%20Rules", "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&amp;subject=Reminder&amp;message=%5BLINK%20INSIDE%20SQUARE%20BRACKETS%20else%20default%20to%20FAQs%5D%0A%0ANOTE:%20Don%27t%20forget%20to%20add%20the%20time%20options%20after%20the%20command.%0A%0ARemindMe", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true&amp;title=", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byQIPdHMpjc"], [], ["http://www.pbs.org/wnet/american-epic/"], []]}
{"q_id": "1rc5d4", "title": "During WWII, which Red Army unit was considered \"elite\"? Which was its most successful, and why?", "selftext": "Every army had its best of the best and considered elite by other units in the military and even it's enemies. Which unit was the best the Red Army had to offer? What were the reasons for its effectiveness?", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rc5d4/during_wwii_which_red_army_unit_was_considered/", "answers": {"a_id": ["cdlqzg6", "cdlu52s", "cdm82gy"], "score": [21, 4, 2], "text": ["The Red Army was very vast within the Second World War.  Therefore there was a few different elite units. The major ones of these we're called Guard units. When an army proved itself as a well trained fighting force, they would get a Guard title attached to their title. One of the notable we're the 2nd Guard Army which participated in the Battle of Stalingrad as part of Operation Uranus which led to the circling of the German Sixth army. ", "Red Army engineer shock brigades received metal body armor to protect them. I cannot find details for the life of me, but here's a video about them (English transcript in subtitles):  _URL_0_  ", "Look up:\n\n* Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army\n* Katukov's 1st Tank Army\n* Chuikov's 62nd Army\n \nThey are among the most famous ones."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[], ["http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJtVAmcCBs"], []]}
{"q_id": "f25nlc", "title": "When nations/people moved (e.g. Turks, Anglo-Saxons), did the entire population move or just the leaders/army?", "selftext": "I'm no historian, but I know of a lot of examples when some 'nation' was somewhere and later it was somewhere else. Examples:\n\nTurks: Central Asia - >  present-day Turkey\n\nAnglo-Saxons: Saxony - >  England\n\nArabs: Arabia - >  Iberia (and then back)\n\nCelts: most of western Europe - >  Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Ireland\n\nArmenians: Armenian Highlands - >  Cilicia\n\nBolgars: Volga Bulgaria - >  Bulgaria\n\nVisigoths: Central Europe - >  Iberia\n\nMagyars: somewhere in present-day Russia - >  Hungary\n\nMy question is if in those cases (and others) the common people moved as well or if it was only the leaders, political system, culture and (in the case of conquests) army.\n\nTo me it seems difficult to imagine that e.g. when Arabs conquered Iberia, everyone who lived there before was expelled/killed and there was enough Arabs to resettle those areas.\n\nThanks for answering.", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f25nlc/when_nationspeople_moved_eg_turks_anglosaxons_did/", "answers": {"a_id": ["fhbpsvy"], "score": [10], "text": ["It's a matter of much debate, and historians views have varied greatly over the years. Once, pretty much all historians thought that the migrations in fifth-century Europe were all great movements of people. Now, however, many believe that many of the barbarian groups were primarily military forces. Overall, it varied massively. For instance, the Belgic settlement in late Iron Age southern Britain seems to have only been the movement of the political and cultural elite, but the early migrations of Goths into the Roman Empire definitely included a high proportion of non-combatants (this is attested by written sources and art). Moreover, there also would have been migrations such as the Anglo-Saxon ones, that included a lot of non-combatants even though if was not a case of entire populations on the move. Quite simply, it varied a great deal and there was something of a spectrum; it wasn't just a case of army or nation, sometimes it was a bit of both. The Norman conquest of England might seem like a classic example of just the elite and army migrating, but it led to a lot of traders, craftsmen and even some peasants moving from the continent to Britain."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [[]]}
{"q_id": "16ibw0", "title": "Can a historian please tell me the date when Lincoln said the following quote?", "selftext": "The quote is:  \"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.\"", "document": "", "subreddit": "AskHistorians", "url": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16ibw0/can_a_historian_please_tell_me_the_date_when/", "answers": {"a_id": ["c7wce41"], "score": [4], "text": ["Assuming you do mean \"struggle\" and not \"stubble\" (which is actually pretty funny in itself), a simple google search within quotation marks brings up this:\n\n_URL_0_   \n\nIllinois House of Representatives, December 20th, 1839.  The quotation is in the last paragraph.  I don't know how reputable that is, but it gives you a place and date that you can verify or discount as well as a title (*The Writings of Abraham Lincoln* vol. 1).  Happy hunting."]}, "title_urls": [], "selftext_urls": [], "answers_urls": [["http://www.classicreader.com/book/3237/23/"]]}